Days of Grass
Date: 1985-11-05 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fantasy; Fiction; Post Apocalyptic; Science Fiction Fantasy; Dystopia
Description: The free humans lived underground, secretive, like rats. Above, the world was a fearsome place for them - the open sky a terror, the night so black, and the striding machines from space so laser-flame deadly. Esther dared the open; she saw the sky; she saw the Enemy. And she was taken – captive - to the vast alien empty city. Surrounded by marvels of science not born on earth, Esther did not know what they wanted of her. There was mystery in the city, dread in the heavens, and magic in the handsome alien man who came to her. Tanith Lee, winner of World Fantasy Awards, crown princess of high fa

DAW Books presents classic works of imaginative fiction by multiple award-winning author
TANITH LEE

THE BIRTHGRAVE TRILOGY

THE BIRTHGRAVE

SHADOWFIRE

(originally published as Vazkor, Son of Vazkor)

HUNTING THE WHITE WITCH

(originally published as Quest for the White Witch)

TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH

NIGHT’S MASTER

DEATH’S MASTER

DELUSION’S MASTER

DELIRIUM’S MISTRESS

NIGHT’S SORCERIES

THE WARS OF VIS

THE STORM LORD

ANACKIRE

THE WHITE SERPENT

AND MORE:

COMPANIONS ON THE ROAD

VOLKHAVAAR

ELECTRIC FOREST

SABELLA

KILL THE DEAD

DAY BY NIGHT

LYCANTHIA

DARK CASTLE, WHITE HORSE

CYRION

SUNG IN SHADOW

TAMASTARA

THE GORGON AND OTHER BEASTLY TALES

DAYS OF GRASS

A HEROINE OF THE WORLD

REDDER THAN BLOOD

DAYS OF GRASS

Tanith Lee

DAW BOOKS

New York

Copyright © 1985 by Tanith Lee.

All Rights Reserved.

Cover design by Lila Selle.

Illustration of tree courtesy of Shutterstock.

DAW Book Collectors No. 651.

DAW Books

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www.dawbooks.com

DAW Books and its logo are registered trademarks of Astra Publishing House

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

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Ebook ISBN: 9780698404557

First Paperback Printing, November 1985

First New Electronic Edition, August 2022

DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

—MARCA REGISTRADA

HECHO EN U.S.A.

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Contents

Cover

Also by Tanith Lee

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One: The Underworld (The Dynasty)

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part Two: The Olympians (The Horse’s Skull)

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

About the Author

Dedication

To Betsy Wollheim,
who brought the daylight back to this book.

PART ONE

THE UNDERWORLD

(The Dynasty)

Chapter One

As always, in the spring, the sun rose behind the black spike of the tower.

Most of the intervening buildings had fallen, so that the tower, solitary in its pointing, had assumed importance as a landmark. It was perhaps eight or nine miles away, and somewhere beyond it lay the river.

Esther had never gone as far in that direction as the tower. At least, not when traveling Above Ground. And now the tower had become ominous and significant for her.

Overhead, the birds were swirling in the bright air like dregs in water. Their pre-dawn cacophony had petered out to isolated formless noises, as it always did once the sun had lifted from the horizon. The birds were very strange, and once very fascinating to Esther. They lived, crusted thick as their own droppings, on the ledges of the city. And, unlike men, they hunted and fought and mated and birthed and died under the sky.

There was other life, too. When a couple of dogs gave tongue, southward, Esther touched the pistol lying against her hip bone—but it was a ritual gesture. Two years ago, Standish had given her the pistol, and taught her to use it, but she had never had the need to shoot at anything Above, not even the feral dogs.

The sun was now balanced on the tip of the tower.

Esther turned resolutely and started out from the sheltering portico, toward the tower, and the moss-clotted river beyond.

Four years in her past, after fifteen years of living in the colony underground, she had discovered an open, stinking pipe, and crawled up it into the brackish daylight of the museum. Filtered by black windowpanes, the light was, even so, much more descriptive, much less analgesic, then the constant ocher light Below. She had understood herself at once to be in the presence of a terrifying novelty.

She was fifteen, and what had driven her upward, outward, was unknown to her. A sudden urge, panic-stricken but undeniable. No obstacle had been able to turn her back—not the filth in the pipe, its twists and turns. She had broken forth, frenzied, bloody, rank with sweat, into a place so unlike the regimented, predictable place Below that never in those initial years did she attempt to reconcile the two. Or to find explanations for the one place in the other.

On her first three arrivals in the upper world, she had gone no farther than the museum. She had been confused and intrigued enough by the smashed glass cases, the incomprehensible debris strewn about the mosaic floors and vacant galleries. On her fourth visit she had explored more widely, and emerged into a yard with a stone basin and seats. Here she looked up and saw the sky, and part of her had shriveled like paper in a fire. It was too big, too lofty, and too bright. She scurried back among the shadows of the museum, but they were no longer deep enough to protect her. So she had burrowed down into the darkness of Below, and it was half a year before she came again.

That half-year, spent in the artificially lit dark, was an era of unvoiced and frustrated rebellion. She came late to puberty, and in that time. The irritable doctor, in his grubby white coat, seemed to take pleasure in telling her she was now saddled with her female condition. She felt her quite illusory freedom run out of her, like the blood.

In the uniform underground world there were neither friends nor family. Her parents were long dead, the mother at Esther’s birth, the father two months before it. She had been a remote child, intelligent in an oblique way often mistaken for stupidity. Her own sex disliked her, for she did not blend in with their moods or aspirations. Men were distrustful of her. Even at an early age she had an aura of resentment that was unattractive to them. Besides, there were many prettier girls, and she, with her long, straight, tar-black hair, and eyes and mouth eternally narrowed, was at pains to show herself unwilling, and unavailable, with no hint of a possible softening. So she existed alone, did her chores—monotonous as the abject throb of the generator—and pined for the bright fear Above, without knowing it. Eventually, she went back.

She had lived the terror of the sky so often in her mind, in dreams, that it was easy at last to come to terms with the reality. This time it had been harder to negotiate the pipes—she had broadened a little at breast and hips—her panic then was that she would not get back into the upper air. She skinned her flesh and tore her nails from then on. Each successive journey was harder, and the goal became increasingly imperative. Soon she had seen the dawn, and faced out, on the cold portico of the museum, the advent of night. She had never seen such light, nor such blackness. And she had also discovered the city. She came as often as she could, sometimes every other day, but it was months before she ventured into the city streets.

Even from the portico, however, she witnessed many changes in the landscape of brick, which stretched away on every side, and found its pivot in the black pointing of a tower.

Sunsets she saw, and weather. And seasons. And that the moon altered its shape. Winds scoured and rain flamed silver on the cobbled courtyard of the House of Wonders (the museum). She caught her breath in mingled horror and delight at snow which, when it visited the ruins now, lay undisturbed, making a change that seemed irreparable. Yet she saw the spring melt it, and briers and dark grass taking back the walls. (That first spring, probably undone by extreme cold and thaw, a huge block of glass and concrete to the north suddenly and slowly collapsed before her eyes, leaving only its fading outline in dust on the air.) She saw the birds.

Everything she watched, like a book of pictures, riveted, but unable to enter. But it was only a matter of time.

The summer before she was seventeen, she walked in the city. It was a warm, a luscious, summer.

Below, life went on like a slow underground river. A life cut in slices, and going by the names Day and Night—or Darklight, when the generator automatically dimmed the lights. And these days and Darklights made up dry, seasonless months. She did her work, scrubbing, cleaning, serving the revitalized food from the kitchens. She tidied the refectory, mended clothes. She schooled the unwilling children—simple, inconclusive lessons, since each generation learned less than the preceding one to pass on to the next. And at Darklight she would lie on her back in the dormitory for unmarried women, listening to their snores and mutterings, their comings and goings to the latrines or to their lovers. Yellow-haired Patty, who particularly hated her, and who went exclusively with the soldiers, would now and then lean over to Esther in the gloom and whisper, just loud enough for other insomniacs to hear: “Fancy me then, do you? You’d enjoy it with me, wouldn’t you, Ess?” And laugh. Those who were different in any way were unpopular. Though if Esther had been a homosexual they might have liked her better, if only for giving them an excuse to punish her.

Her body was perpetually patterned by the injuries of her journeys through the pipes. No one took notice. They thought she wandered off through the unmanned warren of tunnels and sewers—dangerous yet lawful routes. They did not care where she went, or if she damaged herself.

While Above, she walked through the city. Through two months of that swelling warmth, scented by brickwork and cement and open air.

Chapter Two

Then, they found her out.

It was a simple, obvious thing that gave her away.

With the summer, she had kept less and less to the buildings, which acquired a fetid smell in the heat. She walked the asphalt, bubbling in the sun and split by flowers and weeds. One whole afternoon she abandoned the shadows and lay on the flank of one of the rusty overturned vehicles, turning herself as if on a grill, taking off her blouse and shoes, the scalding atmosphere rinsing her body. She was entirely at peace and at home in the city that summer, even though she had found human skeletons in it, and other marks of past violence. These things did not trouble her. The city was her private fantasy; she felt no responsibility toward it. It always seemed to have been erected and utilized by a race unconnected with her own.

Returned Below, she showered in the women’s washroom, put on her clothes, and came into the refectory to help dole out the day’s last meal.

Shortly she became aware that people were staring at her. Presently one of the soldiers lifted himself out of his lounging against the wall and came up. He took her by the wrist, roughly, so that she dropped the scoop with which she had been dealing out the gray mashed potato.

“Come with me,” he said.

“Why?” she said sharply. “What for?” She hated the soldiers, their brown uniform, their guns, their sanctioned arrogance.

“What for?” he joked, turning to the crowded tables and grinning. “What for, eh?” The tables made a sympathetic noise.

“I haven’t done anything.”

“No? She hasn’t done anything. Just come with me, miss.”

“I won’t, damn you,” she said. It was a mistake. He jerked her wrist in a way the soldiers knew, which almost but not quite broke it, and then dragged her out through the kitchen, past the freezer units and the room with the great throbbing heart of the generator in it, up an iron ramp, and along the glare-lit, dripping, whitewashed corridors with their smell of rats and slime.

He was taking her to Standish.

She had not been inside that interview room before, though she had heard snatches of talk about it—walls with metal tiles, and one all books, a communication system wired to most of the colony, a great black desk, with a black leather chair behind it. Prior to their going in, the soldier spoke through a rubber tube by the door. Next the door opened by itself, and there was Standish, sitting in the leather chair behind the desk, gazing straight at them.

Esther had never seen much of Standish. Even when she was a little girl, Standish had been an old man. Occasionally he would breach his own legend and appear to them, presiding after a birth, or at the celebration of a wedding, or else to speak a few words above a corpse before it was taken away to be hygienically cremated by the soldiers. Mainly, Esther surmised, Standish did this in order to prove to them that he was still alive. He was their “Leader,” whatever that might mean now, descended from other leaders, who possibly, in their day, had had something significant to lead against, or for. A figure of authority—she supposed he was necessary. He had no children, and had fixed on no man to follow him. Perhaps that was clever. That way they relied on him implicitly, and could envisage no other in his place. Certainly there were benefits in being Standish. He had his own private sleeping room, like the doctors, and a private washroom—though who had ever seen them? And he commanded the soldiers, or at least, when he told them to do something, they left the other things which they were doing for themselves, and obeyed. Also, if there was a theft or a murder, the criminal was taken to Standish first, before the soldiers shot him. Not that such a thing had happened in her lifetime.

Would she be shot? To go Above was prohibited. She had always known. She had realized also, by now, through the waves of sick pain in her arm, why the soldier had arrested her. She was brown, brown in varying degrees from scalp to neck, neck to waist under the shirt, and her bare legs too. No wonder they had stared, the whitewash-colored beings underground.

She looked at Standish, not quite able to look directly at him, holding her head a little sideways, and with her lips thin and tight with nervousness. Yes, he was a very, very old man, so old he looked to her mummified. And when you saw his jewel-bright eyes, or into his healthy mouth when he spoke, the outer skin, by contrast, seemed all the more like an extraordinary mask of wrinkled pleated yellow paper. So much like paper that it was possible to imagine that, if you ran up to him and tore it open, underneath would be the smooth wholesome flesh and jet-black hair of a young man.

“I see,” Standish said.

It was not clear whether he said it to the soldier, or to her, or to himself.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you can leave her with me.”

The soldier clicked his booted heels and went out, and the door shut. Faintly, through the metal, Esther could hear him smugly whistling down the corridor outside. She rubbed her wrist.

“Where did you go,” Standish said, “to get such a fine tan, young lady?”

She faced him defiantly, no longer really afraid. There was no emanation of cruelty in this room.

“Above Ground. Where else?”

His eyes—the young eyes behind the mask—widened a little, hardly with surprise; it was a sort of humor.

“Oh, really. There must have been something of a heat wave, up there.”

Esther stared about the room. Her eyes went to the books, which, like the other rumored objects, were accurately present. There were a few books kept in the refectory, mostly missing portions and without covers. Some concerned mechanical things, such as the building of pumps and engines. Others described sentimental love, or else the sexual act in laborious detail, except where pages had fallen or been torn out. A very few spoke of places and matters so incomprehensible to the intellects Below that they were never read, and rotted quietly in corners. None of these books was like the books of Standish’s collection. If indeed Standish’s books were books at all, for they were unnervingly beautiful—backed with shiny leather in many shades, with titles in gold.

“What is your name?” The old man asked this suddenly.

“Esther,” she said, and looked at him again.

“Esther. The Martineaus’ daughter. The father died of typhoid, the mother of hemorrhage following delivery.”

Esther winced. The minutiae of her loss disgusted rather than pained her.

“You’ve got a good memory,” she said. “For an old man.”

She wanted to see what he would do. She wanted to force his hand, one way or the other. He did nothing, or nothing apparently related to what she had said.

“Esther, did you know that you were prohibited from going Above?”

“Yes.”

“Then why disobey?”

For a moment, she found herself groping to give him a real answer, a true answer. Then she checked herself, and said, “It’s a damn silly rule, isn’t it? I’ve been going Above for nearly two years now, and nothing awful’s happened.”

He studied her attentively. “How would you know?” he asked. “Perhaps there’s some disease Above, insidious but fatal, which you have now introduced below.”

“There couldn’t be. You’d know already. After two years.”

“Then if there isn’t a disease, why do you suppose, Esther, that no one is allowed Above?”

“It’s just a silly rule—to keep us in line, to make us frightened, to stop us thinking for ourselves. All the rules do that. And the soldiers are there in case anyone wakes up.”

She expected any response. But he absurdly said: “You’ll have missed your meal. You must be hungry.”

As he rose, simultaneously one of the metal walls grated open. What lay beyond was obviously Standish’s private suite. Nonplussed, Esther made no move.

“Please,” Standish said politely. He went over to the opening with a stiff elegant gait, and stood waiting for her to enter first.

What did this sudden invitation mean? She was sixteen. She thought, Surely he’s too old to—Then recalled the old man in the hospital who snatched at the girls’ buttocks when they saw to his bedpan.

One of Standish’s brittle white eyebrows rose.

“Young lady,” he said, very dryly, so dryly she could not miss the innuendo, “your virtue, I assure you, is entirely safe with me.”

She crossed the room toward him, but hesitated again, by the wall of books. Partly to see how he would react now, she reached up and laid hold of one of the spines. He did not remonstrate, but neither did the book come free in her hand.

“Dummies,” he said then, gently. “A symbol, nothing more. The real books are in here.”

She went through the opening, treading unconsciously cautiously, catlike, and he followed her, and the opening shut.

•   •   •

The rumors could not have prepared her. Later, she was to realize there were only four rooms, but at first there seemed to be a multiplicity, a labyrinth. They were white. Warm unobtrusive snowy walls, a kind of plastic tile, not whitewash. Furnishings were functional, yet not graceless. In the room with the white wood table, there were three dark varnished paintings with dark gold frames like whorled treacle, and above, a gallery, with shelves of books running behind. There was thick black carpet on the floors.

Once in the Labyrinth, she began to hate him. It was partly the opulence she saw he had been living in, this old man, while she had scrabbled for sixteen years outside, with the rest of the herd, like rats, in the dark and comfortless rat-hole. He must have sensed her hate, must have been prepared for its likelihood, for it was perfectly inevitable.

He had his own freezer and kitchen unit, too. The aroma of food stuck thorns into the ducts of her mouth. When the food came, it was steak and green beans and fried potatoes, with a little carton of blackberries for dessert, and black coffee with cream. The manner in which he brought the food to her was not in any sense servile or even domestic. She was reminded of the way she and other women fed the children in the refectory. Then she began compulsively to eat. He sat in a swivel chair, turned a little away from her, tactful, or indifferent. Poor old bastard. She pitied him. He’s got all this, and he can’t even enjoy it, can’t even eat. He’s too old. Probably his teeth hurt him. But Standish’s teeth, which were his own, were very white, she had already noticed.

Finally, she pushed back the plate and cup. She eyed the room again. She said: “There are paintings Above, but most of the canvases are slashed.”

He did not answer. She saw that he was writing in one of the manuals that soldiers used for their rosters. This boded ill. Was he writing about her? Thrusting from the chair, she stood up.

“It must be good to be a leader,” she said. “Hard to give up. Are you frightened to fix on another man to follow you because of this? Frightened in case he finds out what’s in store for him here, and kills you to get to it more quickly?”

She did not anticipate an answer, but she did anticipate some sort of give-away, for at that time she could still be forgiven for anticipating such things of Standish. When he failed to provide a give-away, she moved quickly around the swivel chair to confront him.

“Why?” she said.

“Why?” he repeated. He did not look up.

“I’ve broken the rules, Standish. So why bring me here, let me see how you live, let me eat the sort of food none of us ever gets from the communal kitchen—if it’s a game, I’m not playing.”

“No, of course you’re not.” He did look up then. She had forgotten how he could look at her. “Above,” he said. “What’s it like up there, now?”

“If you want to know,” she said, “why not go up and see?”

He smiled. Again she saw the other man observing her humorously from behind the papier-mâché mask.

“Don’t you think, Esther, that I’m somewhat derelict to be crawling up pipes?”

She turned away, holding herself very straight. Self-conscious. She had abruptly stopped hating him. She moved toward the carpeted gallery stair, went up it, and stood eyeing the wall of books instead. She pulled at one abruptly. The book was real this time, and slipped into her hand. She held it, running her fingertips over the leather, not seeing the title, and not opening it.

“There’s a building,” she said, “with books like this, and paintings and old clothes behind glass, only it’s broken. Outside the building is a city.”

“And it’s summer in the city?” he asked slowly.

“It’s hot,” she said, “and things grow, like in the hydroponics room down here, but more of them, and different.”

“Different in what way?”

“The plants down here are sickly. Barclay sweats over them, but they die. And the vegetables are always three-quarters rotten. Up there there are flowers, and they’re huge, strong enough to push through the paving. And there are trees—all I’d seen was a picture of a tree in a book.”

“Esther,” he said, “is there anyone alive in the city?”

She heard the change in his voice.

“Me,” she said flippantly. “Foxes and things. Who else should there be?”

“Men,” he said. “Or unmen.”

“I found bones.” Puzzled, she turned then, and came halfway down the stair. She said: “Unmen are what?”

Standish said, “Sit down.”

“Tell me first what’s going to happen to me. The punishment.”

Her eyes were the color of burnished fall leaves, and she had extravagantly widened them, so he could see all their russet color—almost red. He wondered what kind of hidden genealogical pattern had had to evolve in order to establish eyes of that color. Perhaps merely living underground, . . . And she was what? Fifteen? Sixteen? A child. A tough, edgy, dangerous child—

“No punishment, Esther. Please, sit.”

She sat on a stair, and, he noticed, deliberately arranged herself as if relaxed and at ease—though her knuckles showed white on the unopened book she was still holding.

“Do you know how to reckon time?” he said to her.

“There’s the clock in the refectory. It runs on the generator.”

“So it does. Do you know how long the clock has been ticking?”

She sensed, without knowing, that what he was beginning to say mattered.

“One hundred and forty-one years,” he said. “Very approximately nine times your own lifetime. It would seem a long while to you. And like all the fourth generation of tunnel-dwellers, you know nothing of any place your ancestors might have lived before. Not that the third generation know much. The second and first generations are, of course, dead. And existing as we do, it’s been easy to forget.”

“A hundred and—”

“And forty-one years. Below Ground.”

Her hands also relaxed on the book.

“And before?”

“The city Above, where else? And other similar cities.”

She absorbed the idea as if she were blotting paper, very thoroughly and quickly, feeling the texture of her outlook changing as she did so. She’d always known, hadn’t she? Known, but not known.

“If,” she said, “if our—if they were living Above, what pushed them off down here?”

“Can you read, Esther?”

“Yes. I can read. So what?”

“The question was relevant. If you can read, you’ll be able to read this.”

And he held out to her, closed now, the manual in which he had been writing.

Chapter Three

That night, she read in Standish’s apartment. At first she read tensed on the carpeted stair, later in a white leather chair below. When the generator Darklighted the rooms, Standish pressed a button in the wall, and a white globe ignited at her side, Standish himself sat at the table, conjuring with a board of black and white squares and small black or white figurines, which so exactly complemented the room she thought they must have been designed to go with it. The operation was quite soundless (unlike the soldiers’ card games) except for the little click as he picked up and set down a figure—mostly after long intervals.

It was a great strain on her, both mentally and physically, to read for so long. She itched and ached for movement, and rubbed her eyes; besides, she could not make out some of the passages in the manual, though it was all very clearly written. Her reading had always been restricted. Many of the words made no sense to her. And she would not ask him for any help. Here and there the paragraphs were headed by four figures, which were consistent except for the last two digits—it came to her only later that these were dates.

Almost from the beginning the manual frightened her. But it was an elusive fear, with which she could not immediately associate herself.

I’m not entirely sure why I have begun this now, at the eleventh hour of my own life,

were the first words he had written,

though possibly that is reason enough in itself. Perhaps this is only the expression of a vain desire to leave some memorial behind me, however small. Or perhaps it is that I feel some explanation must be made for the mode of life we have accepted here so utterly, for so much has been forgotten. A generation more, and everything may have been erased, and what then? I think too, if I’m honest, that Anna’s death is partly responsible for what I am doing. I’m not certain why. Maybe because I am now completely alone with myself at last, and with my remaining years, which seem rather pointless and empty, just as I have been expecting them to, just as the past was fruitless, which I have known for a long time.

There are two things I have to bear in mind. Firstly, that anyone who reads this, other than myself, will probably have no suspicion of the truth, and no guidelines or parallels in his own experience to help him, so I must try to be very explicit. Secondly, I must be as brief as possible. The luxury of putting pen to paper is already inclining me to wander, which could be a fatal hindrance to those who come to this book in the future.

I myself am at a disadvantage. I did not witness half the things I shall allude to, and got most of them second-hand from a man then older than myself now. I think that the story will read like a myth or fable. Perhaps it is fitting that it should.

To begin is to go back one hundred and thirty-seven years. In those days my grandfather, John Matthew Anderson, was twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, and my mother and father unborn and unthought of. At that time, the race of men lived Above Ground, manifesting itself not only in the cities, but over the whole face of the earth. Children are still taught about the globe in the school room Below, but have some difficulty in understanding what it represents. I, too, find it easier to envisage the earth as a flat plain, though I remember vividly the anger of my grandfather once this not unnatural belief began to take hold of us. Either way, whoever has found this book must accept the idea that Above Ground is land, on the land a city, now ruined, over the city an arc of height and color that is sky, and beyond this sky a kind of void, black as the sky itself appears at night. It is important to accept this idea simply because the black void—Space—is essential to the story. For out of the void came the reason for the life we are now leading, the imprisonment Below. Out of the void came the Invader.

To play this game of chess against himself had always given him a sense of schizophrenia, Edward Standish reflected. Besides, it was never really a pursuit he relished, even when Anna had been alive to partner him. The old man, Anderson, had taught him chess when he was nine years old, taught it with the rigorous, unsmiling discipline that accompanied all his teaching. To Anderson, the soldier, it had been a military game, a brain exercise, executed with the same precision he brought to cleaning a gun or drilling his men. To the boy, Edward, it was a lesson, nothing more, yet the habit of filling solitude with it, persisted. These pieces were, of course, exquisite. This was the onyx chess set, which, with two others, had been taken from a collection at a big house in the city, about the same time that the paintings, books and other items of aesthetic value were brought below. The games with Anderson, he recalled, had involved tiny figures of deal, without faces or proper characteristics of any kind.

Standish found his mind hovering, not over the board, but over the black-haired girl seated behind him, Esther Martineau, reading out of the dog-eared manual he had expected no one to see in his lifetime, possibly never. Would she grasp any of the meaning? He could not be sure. She was quick, but she had no training to absorb the facts, how could she have had? And he had tried to set things down in order that they be understood by men and women less prepared even than Esther, who had gone Above and found the city. He had tried, but could he ever have succeeded? There were too many stumbling blocks, and also, he had to admit, he had never really been able, then, to imagine he was writing for another person, and perhaps he had not tried as hard as he should, nor been as clear as he thought he meant to be. He had simply sat down to indulge himself, when he realized that Anna would not rise from her own cremated ashes. It was very strange, that, a point of logic, for though you rationally understood the physical reality of death, you found, ridiculously, that part of you had failed to understand it at all, and was still waiting, still looking forward.

He had not loved Anna, exactly. But she had become a part of his life, as naturally and reasonably present as air.

She should have outlived him. She had been several years his junior, a pattern that seemed to run among the men of his family. She had wanted to have a child, and late in their relationship had had Finch run tests on her in the hospital. When they proved her inability, she had said stubbornly, “What does he know? He’s made a mistake, the fool,” and unexpectedly laughed. And then, three years later, extraordinarily, it seemed she had conceived. At the time, he had never properly comprehended why it should make her so happy. “I’m too old for it,” she said, but she was smiling. “Still, I always knew we could make it happen sometime.” Then Finch came to him and told him. The budding growth inside her was not a child, but a cancer. They did what they could for her, but techniques had deteriorated, it was little enough. She died very calmly, holding his hand. He had never told her the truth, he had not needed to, it was obvious that she knew. She was fourteen years younger than he, but she had lost five stone by then, so much flesh that she looked far older. His last vivid impression of her had been of that hand, in which he could feel every bone, the spoiled face with its wide-open, unresentful eyes, and the hair, which had paled from the gold of stained maple to the color of a dead fleece.

It was years before the sense of waiting and expectancy faded, before he properly accepted, in that illogical metaphysical corner of himself, that he could never see Anna, never find Anna again. But it had taken eight years for it to occur to him at last why Anna had wanted so much to have a child. She had believed, God knew, not because of him, that the system of leadership was essential, that the Line (like some ancient dynasty) must continue. And after this he began to feel an irrational debt to the future, since he had left no son, as a king should. Thus, he set about writing an account of the invasion, and what followed.

He glanced at the girl. She had moved now to the white leather chair, but she had not got very far otherwise, making heavy weather of the book, and who could blame her?

. . . The Invaders came almost without warning. Their ships landed, as far as I could understand from my grandfather, in every quarter of the globe. The great radar systems then employed had swiftly detected them, and a colossal armament assembled to repel them should they prove unfriendly. As they immediately did. Their own weaponry, which they used without compunction, was devastating. Anderson would outline this weaponry pretty exactly, but could never make me grasp its working principle. In all events, they rained down destruction indiscriminately at first, and were themselves invulnerable to human attack of any kind. Elsewhere—I believe Anderson referred to a landmass dissociate from the one this city occupies—formidable bombardments took place. The aliens appeared to be unharmed by these, though further vast loss of human life resulted. By then organization was falling thick and fast, and communication failing. The city—that is, the city Above—was itself eventually evacuated. Anderson spoke of throngs of frantic people, fighting and screaming in terror in the streets, of the burning buildings, and the murders that took place only in order to secure a vehicle. The sky to the east was already hot with distant fire, and reports were all of an alien advance. Anderson himself, a young man of about twenty-eight years, was stationed eastwards with a military unit, one of hundreds trying both to control the evacuation and defend the city—both tasks, they guessed, would be useless. About two in the morning, when the streets were bright as day from the burning cars and stores, the first Invader appeared like Nemesis on the skyline.

Anderson described a shape armored in metal, a creature some forty feet high, mounted on eight legs, resembling nothing so much as an enormous spider. The body being a shining ovular mass. He could see no organs, no eyes or lips. All around him, men lay frozen on their bellies beside the impotent guns, awaiting the order to fire, which failed to come. Then the ground trembled—an incendiary beam of light shot from the Invader’s very intestines, so it seemed. It hit a group of buildings a mile off, so he assured me, and they burst in flames. The Invader then took to the road with great strides, and went by and over them without any attention. The men, who had not fired a round, presently realized their officers had deserted. By then most of the eastern sector of the city, as far as the river, and farther, had been reduced to rubble. I myself have seen the scars.

I remember that at this point in the story, Anderson would generally take me down to the biological laboratory. I say generally, for he told me the facts of the Invasion many, many times. He was an unbelievably old man—I suppose a ridiculous observation for me to make at my age, but he lived into his early hundreds, and I was barely in my teens at the time. Even then he was amazingly alert, totally in command of his faculties. His shoes and his hair had the same eternal brushed and polished sheen to them, one black, one gray. He used to lean on a carved stick far older than himself, which he said came from a country called India, and also on my shoulder, rather unnecessarily hard, I always thought, as if to grind the past into my flesh even if my mind wandered. In the laboratory, he would show me the mice in their large enclosure of glass. They were always very busy, eating, running about, carrying straw from place to place. When he rapped on the enclosure with his stick, they would teem like sand in an hourglass from one end of their world to the other. He had no need to verbalize the analogy. Though sometimes he did. Mankind against the Invader. Mice and men.

In the chess game, Edward Standish had checkmated himself, which seemed an omen. He leaned back in the chair, and thought of Anderson, his grandfather. That terrible old man; it had been so important to him to pass on these things to the boy Edward. Anderson had married Lydia Howles when she was twenty-three, he fifty-six. The colony had then been Below Ground for twenty-eight years. Their union was not a happy one, but it served to produce legitimate progeny, which had been Anderson’s aim. The two sons, however, Neil-John, and Michael, died in adolescence, both of lung diseases. Anderson never forgave Lydia for passing on a supposed hereditary weakness. Only a daughter remained, Caroline Elizabeth, who proved as tough and willful as the old man himself. There had been a bond of furious hatred between the two of them since her childhood. At sixteen, the age at which poor Lydia was still crystalized in childhood, Caroline Elizabeth declared herself pregnant by David Standish, the bastard son of a lecturer in English. Anderson, as leader, married them himself, and stood through the ceremony a figure of iron, shooting biblical lightnings from his eyes. It was the culmination of all the anger between his daughter and himself. Caroline Elizabeth, though pale with morning sickness under her veil of blue-black hair, looked back at him in smiling triumph. She had worn a tight skirt, to emphasize her round belly.

But that first child died. Also the second and third. It might have been Anderson’s wrath come down on them. By then he was in his eighties, and Lydia, too, was dead. Caroline Elizabeth’s fourth child, born fourteen years after her marriage (securely in wedlock), lived, and was named Edward.

There had been no love, either, between David Standish and Anderson. The two were utterly opposed in character, goal and outlook, as if they viewed the devastated world each through a different pane of colored glass, one knowing everything to be scarlet, while the other asserted that everything was indigo. No doubt Caroline Elizabeth had reveled in their schism. But now, with a son finally born and living, Anderson seemed to see his own belated heir. He recognized the boy for twelve years with a fierce, uncompromising ownership, and then abruptly crumbled, and staring at last up at Edward from the death bed, had called him Neil, while Caroline stood in a corner of the room, regarding the old man with hate, while the inexplicable tears ran unnoticed down her face.

. . . I have already mentioned the network of underground tunnels that coursed below the streets of the city. Anderson, who, as I have said, had become a leader quite naturally among them, was also able to take his group to hide out in the sewers, now no longer functioning, and cleaned thoroughly by a winter’s rains. At first their main aim was to recuperate after the year spent in terrified flight about the suburbs and outlying countryside. But Anderson and his men, because of their military connections, were aware of the great secret war-shelters built even farther down, as a refuge against aerial missile attack. The aliens had never been known to venture Below Ground, and scouting parties had seen less of them about the city. They had already acquired their inevitable nickname—“Spider”—during the year’s terror. It was a name Anderson seldom used. For him they were the Enemy.

During the lull, the three hundred men and women of Anderson’s group set to work underground. They reached the shelters and, using tools and machinery found there, opened fresh tunnels and link-areas, while blocking up most of the overhead entrances against possible discovery. The colossal generator in the shelter complex was made operational, and the great food-freezer units unsealed. Fresh provisions and equipment were appropriated, though it was not until my father’s years of office that paintings and books were brought below in any quantity. My father considered these items as important, and for most of my life I have vehemently agreed with him. It is only in the last few years that I’ve come to question the value of treasuring up beautiful objects for their own sake, when they can no longer mean anything to the generations of moles breeding below the surface. Men no longer have the standards by which to judge and appreciate a Ming vase or a Lutheran Bible. And over the succeeding centuries, surely, such things can only come to mean less and less.

The colony which Anderson established Below was not, he believed, unique, but there was naturally never any hope of contact with others, in the chaos which followed the coming of the spiders. If other colonies did exist, no doubt they were run on similar lines, and were subject to the same biases. Anderson’s group had various but predictable values. That Anderson had become, and remained, their leader, was also foreseeable. He had a certain strength that made it so. The weak had gone to the wall in the catastrophe—that was unavoidable. There were, to be sure, intellectuals in the group, lecturers, doctors, a scientist or two, even an artist who had escaped with his life to the cellar of his cottage on the day the Invasion swept over him. Once the group was firmly based in the shelters, however, it became essentially military in terms of authority, with Anderson as its figurehead, and his soldiers as its police. It was also, of necessity, self-perpetuating. Which has meant that a father passes on his skills, perforce, to his sons. For this reason we still possess a hospital, a laboratory, a system of hydroponics, though for this reason too our doctors are coming to understand only the rudiments of medicine, and the vegetables grown are mostly rotten. It is not, indeed, a perfect society, but I have always considered it, until recently, workable, and there is no alternative. The spiders flourish Above, it is absurd to hold false hopes for anything else. I myself have seen one. I was fifteen years old, and men surfaced on occasion, generally to shoot fresh meat, for in those days there were still deer in the parks. I was with five others, on the embankment near dusk, when I looked up and saw the great striding silhouette against the sky. It was so huge I couldn’t take it in, but instinct made me duck for cover with the rest, and it went past. We survived. Anderson had told me that sometimes the spiders had herded men away with them, instead of merely crushing or burning them to death. He conjectured that the Invaders might have a use for them as slaves, even as food. After the horror was gone we crouched a long while, still scared to move. The river, I recall, was full of an alien moss which had grown in it, and floated, clotted like purple wool. The spores must have been scattered there by the aliens out of malice—that was Anderson’s view. My own is that their ships had carried them. Anderson never saw one of these ships. I cannot at all, therefore, describe them.

The absolute prohibition to go Above came in my father’s time. He did it for no particular reason. There had always been danger, but we learned to be careful. However, most of the deer had taken a disease and died by this time, the buildings were very ruined and unsafe, and he had got his haul of most of the sound treasures Below, and stored them in the shelter vaults. There had been another outbreak of typhoid. My father contracted the illness, and although he survived, it left him enfeebled, perhaps rather querulous. He had had trouble with the soldiers, too. They had not liked their job as carters, and he didn’t have Anderson’s flair for being obeyed. He was glad, I think, to give them the treat of a new order they could approve and enforce. He died a year later, and the name of leader devolved on me. I have never repealed his law because to go Above, without express purpose, seems futile while the spiders survive—as I know they do. I last went Above twenty years ago, via the shaft pipe that leads from these rooms. I went from curiosity. It was a fairly rigorous venture for a man of fifty-two, used to living reasonably soft. Regretfully, I am proud of it. Above, nothing seemed to have altered. There were various types of alien vegetation growing now in the streets, lichens, grasses. The broken cars had got a little rustier, and two more buildings of repute had fallen. I did not go as far as the river, but there were no apparent traces of the spiders.

Something a little strange then. I put it down, since it may illustrate the very hopeful error that should be guarded against. It began to be a beautiful evening, and I lingered. Yes, there is true beauty in the sky. How can I begin to explain to you, hypothetical reader, if you never saw it? Imagine, maybe, a wild soft light stretched all above you and touching everything around. A light that goes up and up and up—forever—and yet is close enough to take in the hands. Colored like roses. If you have seen a rose. Better be safe, then, colored like a strawberry, but transparent as water. And then the stars began to come. No, you must take my word for the stars. Diamonds. Drops of light. Each one the sun to some world, but you don’t even know the sun—No, then. It is only this. Standing under the vaults of something which, believe me, to me was very lovely and very rare, it was as if a voice began to speak to me, to kiss words into my ears. They’ve gone away, it said. Or they died. Or it never happened. The Invasion—a bad dream. The world is for man. It is given back to him. Take it.

My God. The oxygen had made me drunk that day, I think, and the sun, and the sun’s setting. I felt the huge stature of a man, and forgot the lesson of the mice.

Then it got dark. Bemused, I was turning back toward the museum, when I heard, through the perfect stillness, about a mile to the south, something never heard before but surely known, the unmistakable metallic cry the spiders make, signaling to each other, which Anderson had so often told me of. It froze my blood. There I had been, dazedly wondering if freedom could have returned to us, if it were possible, and if so what I, and all of them—what we could do with it, if it might not be more terrible than the interment that had gone before—when the trump of doom sounded, and put me back in my mouse’s place, once and for all. My dream was not credible. No premonition, no voice of an angel. Oh God, the romantic idleness of that notion. The Invader is the Possessor. It—they—will be our masters until time stops. We have, no more, any world to call ours.

Probably it is a monument to human conceit that it has actually taken that knowledge twenty further years to germinate in my brain. Eight years after Anna’s death, I have come to see the inanity of this life Below, going only ever more blindly onward in the dark, forgetting more and discovering less, our horizons constricting year by year like a noose around the throat. For what are we preserving ourselves? We can’t reclaim what is Above. They have that for all time, Anderson’s “Enemy.” All that is left to us is the unknowledge and insularity. Perhaps the generator will give out, and spare us all the slow strangulation of our present existence.

I do not anticipate much more life for myself. I have felt no incentive to elect someone to follow me. It seems a pointless exercise. Anna and I produced no children, except that un-child that killed her, and I see this obscurely as a symbol. I am responsible for two other children in the colony, but have experienced no sense of obligation toward them and no desire to claim them, and now the boy has died. The girl is very young, twelve, I think, or eleven. I have seen her consciously only twice, in her infancy. Perhaps under the circumstances I should be more anxious, but I’ve never been sure she was mine. Jane, her mother, certainly never suggested to me that she was, and it was not until five years after Jane’s death that it occurred to me she might be.

I don’t think there is any need to write anything further in this book. I haven’t really accomplished what I set out to do. Neither have I been particularly brief, possibly not even explicit. But I have made the attempt, though without optimism, for anyone who might be there, waiting, bewildered, wanting to trudge on with the guttering torch of motive and reason, into the dark.

Esther looked up. She sensed it was very late. She was unused to reading; her eyes burned and the white light seemed to pulse fluorescently in front of them.

“You write like a very old man,” she said coldly, for the book had knocked her off balance. “Miserable, hopeless.” It suggested itself to her that the way he wrote did not correspond with the way he seemed to be.

“There are three more pages yet,” he said quietly.

She sighed.

“I’m tired, for God’s sake.”

“Please read them,” he said. “Esther.”

I thought I had finished writing in this book. I had not intended making it into any sort of diary. I have to write this down, however. I have heard something in the pipes; something or someone.

At first I thought I had imagined it—a faint scrabbling and sliding. Then there was a definite clang, like a foot striking the iron ribs of the pipe. When I put my ear to the kitchen wall I made out the snakelike noise of a body dragging itself upward. I felt no temptation to open the exit hatch that leads into the pipes from this apartment. I am not sure why I should have been so intrigued to hear the noises, and still not want to see who it was. Maybe I was afraid.

A good while later, about four or five hours, the traveler came back. The journey was repeated two days after, and then a day after that, then again the following week. This fourth time the return was made much more quickly. I could hear breathing also, through the wall, fast and hoarse. It sounded like that of a very young child.

Since that last excursion there have been no movements in the pipe for ten days. Perhaps it was some boy on a dare, or a prank.

A month now since I heard someone in the pipe.

Two months since I heard the noises in the pipe. I’ve concluded I shall not hear them again. And am considering deleting this page.

(There interposed two pages, one blank, one with some notations on it concerning the black and white board game.) Then:

Astounding. I have heard sounds in the pipe again, similar to those I heard half a year ago. This time they sounded far more labored, so I conclude that either this is a different adventurer, or the first one has grown stouter. There was a six-hour interval, then the return journey, announced clearly. I put my ear to the wall and heard a girl’s voice say distinctly: “Damn this bloody stuff.” For some reason this amused me, and apparently her also, for presently I heard her laugh rather angrily in the pipe. She sounds very young indeed, about fourteen. Who is she? To my knowledge, no one had been Above, except myself, for the past forty-five years. I cannot explain why, but irrationally this irresponsible wriggler stirs up hope in me.

My traveler is now persistent if irregular. Sometimes I hear her singing to herself, or cursing, as she struggles up and down. One day I am bound to speak to her through the wall. What stops me mostly is that this would probably be appalling to her, for obviously she thinks herself miles from the inhabited tunnels and completely alone. Altogether a very odd experience. I feel a bizarre fellowship between us, never having seen her. I’ve had little to do with any of the people of my kingdom for so long. I have not felt lonely; relieved, rather, to be solitary. But possibly my feeling for my traveler is due to lack of company.

Who is she? I had occasion to go out; the Levins’ fourth child required christening. There was a self-taught priest in my father’s term, but his son died in one of the typhoid epidemics. Now I do all this instead, and do it very poorly, no doubt. I glanced around, once the squalling brat had been doused. They all looked identical. Featureless. I had half expected her to be there, and that madness or guilt—or some other token—would give her away.

What a strange life she is living, this creature who has inadvertently shared her darkest secret with me. Half a life Above in the city with the sky, half Below Ground. Like Persephone, alternating between the cornfields and Hell, in the myth.

(After this entry, the rest of the page was left bare. Turning it, Esther discovered her own name, which was to her a frightening, uncanny experience, for though she knew how to spell it, she had never seen it written down before.)

So now I know, Esther Martineau, who you are. I had forgotten the likelihood of the sun giving you away.

What comes next?

Chapter Four

It became more difficult to approach the tower than she had realized it would. About six miles east of the museum, the macadam had once boiled and melted, and chasms opened in the ground. Leveled buildings had crashed everywhere. Later, dense vegetation had overgrown the ruins so that nothing was easily judged or negotiated. She had never traveled this way before. Her reasons for coming at last had something to do with Standish, and with the old poem of the Dark Tower, which she had once found in the book vault below his apartment. The Dark Tower was palpable yet unspecified menace, and this was what she had felt hung over her ever since the previous Darklight. And so, angrily, she ran toward the Dragon, to gut it, or be gutted by it; at any rate, to see it as it was and not as it might be.

The sun was high, the shadows thinning on the torn pavements. She could still see the tower, on her right now, and drawing closer. She leaned on a broken wall, and drank water in sips from the little silver whisky flash that once had been John Matthew Anderson’s.

When the noise came, she nearly dropped the flask. Instead, holding it jammed against her hip, she drew the pistol from its sheath with her other hand.

The noise had sprung from a network of briers beyond the wall. It had somehow not sounded quite animal, but more clumsy and unintentional. Presently Esther slipped the flask into her pocket, picked up a stone, and flung it into the briers.

At once, a large black bird burst from the ruined garden and up into the air. It was almost too apt.

Frowning, Esther moved on.

•   •   •

In the two years that followed her first reading of Standish’s manual, the scope of Esther’s world enlarged, her routines of living were altered, and her status changed.

No one questioned her concerning her interview with the leader; she was not interested enough in the people about her to wonder why not. Thereafter, though she continued her existence Below, as before, she now had free access to Standish’s apartment, though how he had conveyed this to her she was never sure; he did not tell her so in words.

At first her comings and goings were furtive, restrained and infrequent. She felt nervous in the presence of the old man, who for his part seemed scarcely aware of her. Yet she was always drawn back. Then, it was the white bathroom she took delight in, and the hours spent lying up to her chin in hot-warm water. Or the special food in Standish’s freezer, out of which she conjured strawberry ices, scarlet tomato segments, and deep-frozen chicken. Standish, when they were cooked, seldom joined in these feasts. She put this down, as once before, to senility and senile lack of appetite. But eventually she too tired of her charade as gourmet and naiad, for basically she had always dismissed food as fuel and water merely as a means of keeping clean. This phase passed, she turned to Standish’s books, commencing casually and with some mistrust, for she had been trying not to see them all this while. A pattern began to establish itself after that, which caused her to slip away at Darklight, like any other girl off for some fun in the corridors. Standish was usually there when she came, he slept very little—another symptom of his antiquity, she supposed. She had only to remember the owl-eyed beds in the geriatric section of the hospital. “Fear,” Finch had said to her, as she came out from her late duty. He was a thickset, ugly man, the elder of the two doctors, brutally efficient, but with no scrap of pity or kindness. He was known to stab with his needles, and extract teeth rather than stop them. Now, he did not lower his voice. “Death-fear, young woman. Keep awake, afraid to let go, in case they can’t back.”

Yet Standish was not afraid, she thought. He was insomniac for other reasons.

It was very hard for her to read, not so much to master the words, but to remain still and oblivious of other things. To begin with she could only achieve her goal by pacing around the rooms with the book in her hand, snarling certain passages aloud, and running her free hand over and over through her long hair. Thoughts would also intrude—how Patty had sniggered: “Off again?” Presumably not knowing her destination, but trying to make it sound somehow perverse and laughable. (In fact none of the women laughed as they had used to do.)

Standish made no comment on Esther’s methods with books, and when, about four in the morning, she would leave them lying in untidy attitudes, they would not be disturbed, until she returned to pick them up. She was very grateful in those weeks for his apparent ability to ignore her.

Somedays he would not be there when she came (he had taught her how to open the door from the outside). Some nights he would be behind the closed partition of his sleeping room. Then she would be aware of his absence, and tread for some reason more cautiously, never staying long.

A few times every month, she would go Above, using the private route which led from his apartment via a concealed hatchway. Coming back, she would tell him what she had seen, and sometimes he would suggest to her that she write about it in the manual, which was still three-quarters empty. Her initial jottings were unhandy, and misspelled, but in an odd way the act of writing helped her to absorb the writing of others. One day when the summer was on the wane, the trees in the streets on fire and crackling with copper leaves, she saw two dogs fighting in a tunnel, and mentioned it to him. He said, “I’d forgotten about the dogs.” That was the day he began to teach her to shoot. He used the guns and silencers from Anderson’s collection, and a moving practice target, similar to the one in the soldiers’ barracks. When she grew more proficient, he gave her the light pistol which a ten-year-old Caroline Elizabeth had once turned on Anderson in the midst of a family argument.

By then Esther had begun to imagine that, for all the learning Standish lavished on her, he never saw her as she was.

I’m like a mouse in Barclay’s lab, she thought, something to experiment with. The fact that Standish seemed able to ignore her presence had ceased to be a relief. She was seventeen, unaware of herself except in fragments, but aware of Standish in a thousand insidious endless ways.

He had by then shown her the vault full of David Standish’s treasures, which lay behind another hidden door and down a spiral stair. David Standish had piled up the colossal metal box with paintings, art objects and books—she would spend whole hours there now, touching, staring—through glass, at labels, or reading, leaning up against the shelves. For it became easier, to read.

She began to carry books out with her—he had not forbidden it—to peer at in free periods in the women’s dormitory. She took huge care of them, and caressed their leather bodies under the sheet at Darklight. For a month she kept away from Standish. It was winter in the city, too cold to roam far, she told herself, and did not go Above. She made herself a dress. The cloth was poor, a kind of patchy oatmeal in color, but it had the quality of a landmark. She had never made a garment for herself before that was not strictly functional. When, after her month of staying away, she went back to Standish’s rooms, she wore the dress. Was she, without being aware of it, in love with Standish? Or more properly with the black-haired man she thought she saw sometimes, just behind his paper skin.

That year she re-read the manual often, and came to comprehend it better. She dwelt particularly on his descriptions of the miraculous city, as it had been, before the coming of the spiders. The descriptions were, at root, Anderson’s, of course. The wide streets and tall blocks, great caravans of transport on the roads and beneath them, and throbbing hollow metal birds crossing and recrossing the sky. While beyond the city lay the open land, the chessboard of cereal fields and the dark-haired woods, and finally the waters of the ocean, which to Esther came to symbolize the boundaries of “Earth.”

Spring came back to the city.

She found a string of stones in the ruins, and wore them now, with the dress, when she came to her mentor’s apartment.

She knew by then, actually, that the Jane to whom Standish had referred in the manual had been her own mother, the suspected child herself, that it was possible she might be his daughter. But neither of them was sure, or could ever be so.

Sometimes she would have a look for him of Caroline Elizabeth, though the highlights in Esther’s eyes and hair inclined to red rather than indigo.

•   •   •

One Darklight, Esther was going back to the dormitory from Standish’s apartment, when she heard three of the soldiers coming toward her up the tunnel. She did not like to meet the soldiers. There was a kind of cave in the wall, an open store full of old rusty equipment and tins of paraffin. She slid back into it, and waited for them to go by.

They had been drinking, for in Anderson’s time a certain quantity of alcohol had been brought down, out of which the soldiers received a weekly whisky ration. Now stocks were lower, yet the soldiers drank more freely, while the civilians of the colony had wine only at christenings, marriages and funerals, and Finch, the teetotaller, kept the key to the wine store.

Two of the soldiers, a little ahead of the third, paused to urinate, and saw Esther.

“You’re out late, miss,” said one, zipping up casually. His name was Fry. “Looking for some excitement?”

“Always happy to oblige,” the other said. His name, she thought, was Steiner, but they both had a similarity, their uniforms, and clean-shaven, whisky-breathed faces, and very short well-brushed hair.

“Get out of my way,” she said. She was not afraid, but in the oatmeal dress and white stone necklace, she was wishing she had the pistol in a pocket.

“Get out of her way,” Fry mimicked her. “Oh now, that’s no way to talk to an honest soldier doing his duty. You shouldn’t be out here, it’s not safe,” he went on, mock-solicitous. “You can get godalmighty effing big rats along here at night, give you a nibble where you weren’t expecting it.”

“Come on,” the other said. “We all know what you young ladies like.”

“You’re drunk and you stink of it,” Esther said.

Fry grabbed her by the arms. “Let’s see how drunk I am, shall we?” He pushed her back against the wall, dislodging several tins that crashed over onto the stone floor, and pulled up her skirt; but she twisted, and struck him in the groin with her clenched fist. Just then the third soldier joined them.

“Leave off, you silly cruds,” he said. “That’s Standish’s friend you’ve got there.”

The two soldiers and Esther stared at him in surprise.

Fry, holding himself in discomfort, grunted: “I thought it was the blonde piece.”

“It’s this one. I’m the feller should know, I introduced them.” And he grinned at Esther in a friendly fashion. She recognized the man who had nearly broken her wrist but-not-quite, over a year ago when she had tanned from summer sun. She became aware that Fry and Steiner had drawn off and were standing straighter.

“Sorry, miss,” Fry said. “You should’ve mentioned you were coming from—where you were going, miss.”

The third soldier still grinned.

“That’s one hell of a grand old man,” he said, and winked at her. “Just like John Matthew. Had his last little bit when he was eighty-three, they tell me.”

Esther felt her cheek-bones throb with heat, but she stared him out and did not enlighten him.

“Perhaps you’ll get out of my way now, then,” she said sharply.

And they obeyed her.

It was a strange thing that the unruly soldiers still upheld the leader, yet perhaps not so strange, for the legend of the Leader in turn upheld their own authority, gave them a purpose and reason for existence. John Matthew Anderson was still a figurehead among them; they were descended from his men, sons of sons as were all the professionals in the colony Below. That Standish, in his late seventies, could—like the figurehead—screw an eighteen-year-old girl, pleased them immensely. It increased their peculiar respect for him, and also, in an odd way, for her, she saw, as the object of his lust.

After the incident in the tunnel, she began to notice all about her a certain difference in the way the colony looked at her, or spoke to her. A kind of indecision, a sort of stilted deference. It had been present, she now realized, for some time, without her having been aware of it. She remembered how none of them had ever questioned her after that first interview. She felt amused, a cover maybe for stimulation. She had not examined her own feelings for Standish. But the jealousy she observed in some women’s faces, recognizing it at last, was a bizarrely satisfying recompense for earlier days. Patty undoubtedly was jealous; she was so supremely conscious of the underground hierarchy, she would never lay a civilian.

Esther found people moving aside for her in the corridors. That, queueing for food in the refectory, somehow she seemed to be served more quickly than in the past, and with firmer vegetables and juicier meat.

About a week after the soldiers had acknowledged her, she deliberately absented herself from the cleaning roster, and no one said a word.

At first she did not speak to Standish about it. Months passed. The day arrived when she woke to find the smooth leather oblong of a book missing from beneath the pillow. There was no need to search. Swinging out from between the sheets, she saw the half-illiterate Patty, seated on her own bunk six distant, her yellow head bent over the leather spine, puzzling out the title. The dormitory was mostly empty. A few other women were filing to and from the washroom, or in various stages of dragging on clothes. Patty herself was not dressed, beyond the slip she wore for bed. Esther, who slept naked, stood naked now, unselfconscious.

“Give it back,” Esther barked.

An immediate silence filled the room. The women paused expectantly.

Patty looked up. She gave an ugly smile.

“Wants its book, does it?”

“That’s right.”

“Well it’s not yours, anyway. It’s the leader’s book. Knows you stole it, does he?”

“He knows I’ve got it, yes. And he won’t want your sticky finger-marks on it, so give it here.”

“Come get it,” sang Patty.

Esther reached her in a couple of long strides. Patty jumped to her feet, clutching the book behind her, her right hand flashing forward, the nails raking across Esther’s left shoulder and breast.

Three or four of the other women in the room shouted, one ran out into the corridor, yelling. Patty herself gave an excited little screech, and sprang up on her bunk.

“Let’s see how he likes you with your tits all raw!”

And she aimed a series of vicious swipes at Esther’s face and chest.

Esther ducked, soundless, and returned with a headthrust straight into Patty’s abdomen, knocking the girl off the bunk and onto the one behind. Patty lay clutching her belly and crowing for breath.

Esther pushed the hair out of her eyes. She bent quickly and picked up the book, which had fallen open on the floor, and a drop of blood from her breast plummeted into the crease between the pages.

Esther’s mouth dried. She laid the book down with tremendous care, went around the bunk to the one on which Patty was now gasping.

“You bloody moronic cow!” Esther shouted at her. She hauled the girl over and slapped her three times, hard-palmed ringing blows across the sides of the head. Patty began to whimper for mercy. Esther left off, and looked up directly at the doorway to the dormitory, and into the eyes of the soldier, Steiner, who for a fortnight had been going with Patty.

Steiner’s gaze went sideways across Esther in a swift, absorbing pan. She was all right, he clearly thought. A streamlined body, very narrow at the waist, for a woman extraordinarily flat at the stomach and buttocks, long, long legs, and, despite the blood, high rounded breasts, the maroon nipples erect with her fury. Steiner turned his eyes away. He looked instead at Patty, her cheeks blotchy and nose running with distress, and said:

“Is she causing you trouble, miss?”

Patty struggled up, wiping her nose on the back of her hand.

“Yes—she hit me, the bitch, she—”

“Shut up,” Steiner said. Patty stared at him, her mouth open. To Esther he said politely, “Do you want me to take some action, miss?”

Esther turned to him. She met his gaze again because he was carefully focusing only on her face.

“No. It’s all right, Steiner, thanks.”

“Yes,” he said. “You seem to have handled it quite well, miss.”

There was the hint of laughter at his mouth as he turned and went out.

Patty lay on the bunk, crying with outrage and confusion.

Esther caught her by the hair and pulled her head up. Patty screamed faintly.

“No next times,” Esther said, and let go.

She spent an hour dabbing at the bloodied book. She was not concerned for its value, or even that the texture and look of it had been spoiled—elements which had appealed to her. It was only a book—but it was his, Standish’s, from the shelves actually in his room. She could not shift the mark. It did not occur to her to hide it from him. She was anguished, and went to the apartment that night still in her glamourless blouse and skirt.

“Someone took this,” she said, holding it out to him. “There was a bit of a fight, and some blood went down between the pages.”

“Whose blood?” he asked. “Hers or yours?”

“It doesn’t matter. There’s such a thing as antiseptic. But I’m sorry.”

He turned the book over and looked at the spine.

“The Pharaohs,” he read out. “Do you understand this, Esther?”

“It’s Earth,” she said. Then: “No, not properly. But I get the general idea.” She hesitated, before adding, “About the rulers and their women.”

He said, “Don’t worry about the book being marked.”

“Do you want to know why it happened?”

“If you want to tell me.”

“A girl took it because she’s jealous. When we’d finished fighting, a soldier came in. She was his girl, but he was offering to rough her up for me. Do you know why? They all think you sleep with me, Standish.”

“Do they?” He smiled.

“Do you realize what power that gives me?”

“Do you realize it, Esther?” he said.

“I’m beginning to. I suppose,” she said harshly, “if you did, if you did and you got me pregnant, I’d be even more powerful. I’d be carrying the new leader.”

“That’s possible, the hypothesis,” he said. “But don’t confuse me with Anderson.”

He’s too old, she thought afterward. He can’t even want me.

But was it only that he could not be bothered to want her? Her feelings were out in the open now, running for cover across the bare wide spaces of her mind. She tried to experience revulsion at his physical age, the shriveled mortar of his flesh rasping against her own. But she could not somehow imagine any sort of union with him in those terms.

She thought of Abishag (Anderson’s Bible), the virgin sent to comfort King David in his declining years. Young smooth Abishag combing out her black hair before King David’s remote gaze that was like two sapphires set in tree-bark. But the king knew her not.

•   •   •

Suddenly she was nineteen years old.

That summer she had been a lot in the city Above. She had taken advantage of her unvoiced privilege, neglecting the chores of the colony Below, but she had resorted once more to the corridor pipes as a means of egress, in order to avoid Standish. She had come to feel, as before, restrained and awkward in his presence. She wandered among the ruins, baked intermittently brown, and the soldiers winked at her, and the women kept out of her way, and she was alone.

Then the season turned. She saw abruptly her own life blowing away down the derelict streets with the bronze leaves. Yearnings filled her—for what? Below, even lazing on her bunk, she felt a constriction, the tunnel walls collapsing on her by degrees.

Almost spitefully, on a rare visit to his rooms, she wrote in the manual:

The others are happy enough. They’re sheep. But I’m being stifled. I’m nineteen. What’s going to become of me? What am I supposed to do with my educated life?

(Her spelling was better now. She noticed this because she re-read certain other entries she had made, and heavily scored out the misspelled words, topping them with angry corrections.)

She left the manual open, lying where he would not fail to see what she had written. She was not sure what she wanted him to say to her. Actually, of course, he said nothing.

That winter the generator failed.

She was in the refectory, helping feed the children. Between one second and the next came a colossal blackness. She blinked her eyes and opened them blind.

Women and children shrieked. There was a sound of terrified blundering flight and things knocked over, and then a shrill voice (unknown):

“Esther! What shall we do?”

“Keep still!” she shouted. “That’s what you do. They’ll fix the lights in a minute.”

And she thought, supposing they can’t. Supposing all the systems fail . . . How can I reach the pipes in this blackness—how can I get out?

She was holding a cloth, holding it now as if she must never let go, and a frightened child was in turn clinging to her knees. Her eyes, pressed against the blindness, had strained so wide they seemed to have engulfed her head.

Then the lights flickered and came on. The room was full of weak laughter and crying. Esther disentangled the child from her legs and went out. She sat in the dormitory.

I must get away. Get Above. The next time may be the last. I must never be trapped down here—

She did not tell Standish what she felt, nor did she write it in the manual. But from then on a steady panic began to grow in her, the fear of being underground. It had ceased to be natural.

Most of the time the phobia was pale, in the back of her thoughts. Sometimes, and in dreams especially, it would come out at her. She fought it off as best she could. She reasoned it was no more likely she would be trapped Below because she had become afraid. But also she tried to teach herself her way about the tunnels and corridors by touch, moving with her eyes shut.

•   •   •

Winter had fled the city. Rats were gnawing on the books and historical clothes in the House of Wonders, seagulls spread like white rags on the wild lawns, and pigeons enthusiastically copulated with a great silver fanning of wings.

She had not seen Standish for over two months. She went seldom to the apartment, and then always very late, to replace books and take fresh ones, avoiding him.

One Darklight, about five in the morning, she came into the rooms and found him seated in the white leather chair beside the white light globe.

She had grown accustomed, or thought she had, to the fact that he seemed quite often to read her mind. But now she was startled, for he looked as if he were waiting for her, knowing to the instant the time of her arrival.

“Hello, Standish,” she said, “you’re up late.”

“So, it seems, are you.”

“I only came to bring this back. I’ll leave it here, and go.”

“Wait a moment,” he said.

For some reason, her stomach turned over. She knew that he was about to tell her something, that she had all the time been waiting for it, unconsciously, that she did not want to hear what it was. She had an impulse to get out and run. She steeled herself. She said, “Yes?”

“Sit down, Esther.”

“I’m all right like this, thank you.”

She wanted to keep a distance between them, had some unformed, primitive instinct that flight would be achieved more easily from an upright start.

But Standish also got to his feet, and came across to her, and put his hands on her shoulders. The white globe was shining behind him; in the unreal planes of shadow which his face had become, she could believe utterly for once that she saw a man precisely half his age.

“Esther,” he said, “you’re very young.”

“And you’re stating the obvious,” she said, twisting under his hands.

“Three years ago, when you first came here, you asked me if I hadn’t fixed on a man to assume the leadership after me because I was afraid of being murdered. Do you remember? Do you remember what I’d written in the manual?”

“You felt no incentive to elect someone. It seemed a pointless exercise.”

“Yes, Esther. Word perfect. At that time it was quite true.”

“Are you telling me,” she said, the sentence sticking in her throat, “that you’ve found someone now?” She was daring him.

“Now I’ve found someone.”

“No,” she said, “you haven’t. Because I won’t do it.”

He did not let go her shoulders. He said, “Examine your reasons for refusing. Then tell me why not.”

“For one thing,” she said contemptuously, “I’m a woman. Do you think they’d accept a woman?”

“Yes. With my official blessing, and if she was descended from John Matthew Anderson.”

“You don’t know I’m your bastard, Standish, you’ll never know. Besides, they imagine you screw me, and incest is somewhat de trop down here.” See, I’ve even learned a French expression or two, to fight you with.

But Standish said, “I anticipated the incest problem. I have some doubts and no proof you’re my daughter, but I can invent for you a logical descent from one of Anderson’s sexual excursions. Your maternal grandmother, say. Anderson could have been responsible for her. He was in his early seventies then, and in fine fettle I’ve heard. That would make Jane, your mother, one quarter an Anderson, and you an eighth.”

“It isn’t true.”

“No, it probably isn’t true. But Jane’s dead. If you claim Blood Royal and I uphold you, nobody else is likely to argue.”

“Why should I?” she said. “Why should I want to lead the colony? There isn’t a single one of them I care about. The qualities of leadership are broad-scale compassion, singleness of purpose, personal magnetism: I know, I read it. I wouldn’t bother if the roof collapsed and buried them all alive so long as I got out. I want to be free of it. I have no altruism, and I don’t attract support.”

“Your position itself would attract support. You’ve seen how much license they allow you simply because they suppose you to be my mistress. It has got them used to the idea of doing what you ask.”

She shook her head violently.

“I don’t want to hear any more. No more. Why did you pick on me?”

“The others are happy enough. They’re sheep,” he said. He was quoting at her from her own words scribbled in the manual, as she had quoted at him. “Esther,” he said, “Esther, when you were fifteen years old, when the prohibition was an accepted, unquestioned part of your life, you went Above. You went Above.”

“So?” she said. “So? I was afraid of being trapped down here. I am now.”

“That, Esther, is why you are so essential to this community. Men lived in the city once; do you think they were meant to scramble about forever underground? Meant to like it down here, to be comfortable and complacent? Sometime, Esther, change will have to come, despite the Invaders, or because of them. Perhaps nothing can alter for another hundred and fifty years, perhaps not for a thousand. Or perhaps the generator will fail permanently in three days’ time. Whatever happens, only men and women whose instincts lie Above, and not Below, can win through and continue to survive, and possibly persuade or coerce others into surviving with them. If only by example.”

“You didn’t think that. You wrote in the precious manual that Below was all that was left to us. We couldn’t reclaim the earth, your spiders had that—”

“Yes,” he said, “I wrote that, because I too had become complacent. The last time I’d been above was twenty years before.”

She had hung her head. Then, not seeing the younger image the lamp had made of him, she felt the old man’s tremor come abruptly into his hands, and so into her shoulders. Suddenly her brain was filled with one question only, one vast question that had negated all the rest. She snatched at him and gripped the lapels of his jacket, and stared up into the silhouette of his face.

“Why are you telling me now, Standish? Why now?”

She thought he was smiling at her.

“I can’t last forever,” he said gently. “I doubt if I’ll come anywhere near Anderson’s record.”

And she knew he was dying. Even as he stood there, dying a little, a little at a time. Holding on to his lapels she felt him seem to flow away out between her hands, like water.

“How do you know?”

“I saw Finch a few days ago.”

“What—is it?”

“Old age,” he said. “That’s all.”

She put her head against him and cried, and he stroked her hair.

Chapter Five

The tower was forlornly innocent; there was no menace, no Dragon. It was not even a Dark Tower, but sunlit gray stone.

The fallen church, to which the tower had once been attached, had become a huge rock-garden, rife with weeds. A magnolia had rooted in the nave. Perhaps there had been people huddled in the church, praying and weeping for help, when the Invader came instead.

Past the church, through a young wood, lay the embankment of the river. Beyond the ornamental stonework, a great depth and width of space gaped over the shallow water course, all the way to the other side, which was a skyline in ruins.

When she looked down into the river itself, she had been thinking of water, but she saw a purple lawn. He had told her how the alien moss had rooted here, but now the river was all moss. There, the snub nose of a boat protruded, but the moss was slowly overcoming it, taking it down. The surface had no movement, it was smooth as velvet. Even directly below her, it looked solid enough to walk on, a magic highway. Esther found she had been holding her breath, and let it go. She saw everything suddenly with a new, distorted, marveling eye—the drama of the ruins, the stone gilded by flowers, the royal carpet tapering to a violet ribbon in the distance. And it was all suddenly acceptable, simply because of its beauty.

Esther lifted her head—to fight. To accept, for such a reason, was idiocy. She turned defiantly, and looked back northward, down the purple highway.

Her challenge was accepted.

She saw, at last, the Dragon.

•   •   •

In her life she had known all manner of fears and insecurities, but never before had she known absolute raw terror of this kind. It seemed to leave her whole body empty, ready for a shift of air to crack or blow away. It was the response to an ultimate threat.

The Thing was about half a mile away down river, still large. She found herself counting the stilts, as if she could determine what it was only by comparison. Eight. Yes. And between, resting on them, the ovoid Anderson had described. Sunlight shattered on it as it slowly rotated, first one way, then the other way, over and over again. Otherwise it was motionless, standing planted in the purple moss, another alien flower.

It occurred to her, only dimly, that she could never really have believed in Anderson’s spiders, not really, for this was so cataclysmic to her. She clung to the stonework, shaking violently, her teeth, even, chattering, wondering should she run now, or stay. It had not seen her, surely. Perhaps it would be best to keep still. And yet her very closeness to it sucked the marrow out of her bones, and every instinct in her was shrieking for headlong flight. Soon she would have to run away. She could not help herself. Now, or now. . . .

Then it screamed.

The scream shocked through the stone beneath her, through her own vitals and chattering teeth, a grating, raucous vibration felt long after it had ceased to be heard. Esther squeezed her eyes shut and let go the stone. She landed on the pavement below, and lay there as the humming died in the ground.

Her head rang, she sweated and wanted to be sick, but she pulled herself up and forced herself to run, keeping low, actually needing to crawl on her belly. She ran through the trees, by the church, back into the ruins.

She did not remember much about her flight afterward. She ran over rotten places, through brambles, across unstable bridges of planks and crumbling bricks, too high up, with the city spread out below, reeling. But she reached shelter—it looked like shelter to her—a group of buildings on the fringe of debris and black pastures.

Chapter Six

Night began to come about an hour after noon, with great drifts of overcast, and rain descended through the building with a sound of claws.

Esther was cold. Her skin was streaked with coagulated blood. She could not be sure where she had got any of the cuts and scratches, but there was a tender place on her back; she recollected slipping and some hard edge catching her. She rinsed her bloody hands in the pillars of the rain.

It was very dark. She was glad. It made her feel safe.

When she had been crouched there in the building for about three hours, her brain began again slowly to function. Thoughts ticked rustily. She began to question herself. Why was she here? Why not run to the House of Wonders, and down the pipes, to the sanctuary of Below?

At first it made no sense to her, that she had not.

Some of these cuts are bad, could turn septic. I need to get Finch to look at my back, and need to lie to him, too, possibly. And Standish—I have to tell Standish what I saw. . . .

But she did not move.

Get up, you fool, get up and go out. It didn’t follow you, didn’t even see you. And if it did decide to saunter this way, you wouldn’t stand a chance of making the pipes.

She got as far as the opening in the wall she had entered by. She found she could not get herself to go out, onto the vast broken concourse.

All right, she thought, you silly bitch. Wait for dusk, if it’s any blacker than this. But then you’ve got to make it.

She sat again, painfully. Irrational, she checked the pistol.

Dogs. It wouldn’t be much use against anything else.

There were no sounds, eastwards. Apart from the slackening patter of the rain, it was very quiet.

Where was it? What was it doing? Had it gone away?

•   •   •

The moon rose. It was too bright, picking out the edges of the ruins like a silver radiation, laying great white paving stones in the open spaces that must be run across.

Esther stood in shadow, waiting for herself to be able to run. She had never traversed the nighttime city, only observed it from the museum. The night was still. She made herself gaze around the skyline, and eastward, back toward the river. Sky and land seemed empty of any moving thing. Not even a bird or fox.

Come on—come on—

She started out, discovered herself suddenly under the microscope-slide of the moonlight. Panic hit her. Then, she ran.

It was a long way back, a long way. Sometimes she had to stop. She tumbled into the chasms and caves of ruins to rest. She sipped from the flask to ease her burning throat.

Everything was striped or latticed with shadow and light, white on black, black on white, white on black on white. Running, the thud of her feet striking the ground burst in her breast like two extra beating hearts. Later, when she could no longer run, she hurried in frantic drunken lurches, from one blackness to another.

Near midnight, she stood in the dark, facing across the wide, blanched, spotlighted road, the House of Wonders.

Spikes in her side, she showed her teeth at it.

Well, you made it.

There was no shade on the street, but this time she did not attempt to run. Without analysis, it seemed to her she had won her battle with the Dark Tower Dragon, and the moon.

When she was halfway across, the sound came, behind her.

Reflex took over her body. It flung her around and down and brought the pistol into her hand. As she hunched there on the milk-white cement, a figure emerged from a house doorway, and came walking toward her.

Esther stood.

The figure was human. A man. (Yes, at first, her eyes had run all the way up into the sky, staring after the silvery ovoid and stilts of the spider.) She raised the pistol to cover the man.

“Stay where you are,” she said. “Keep your hands out from your sides. You see, don’t you, the gun?”

“I see it.”

He had stopped obediently, on the margin of the shadow and the light. She could not see him properly. What was he doing out in the city, Above? A looter? The manual: Looters had lurked like ghouls about the broken stores for years after the catastrophe, eating the canned food, hoarding up stolen gems, watches, furs, until at last it was borne in on them that all these things were now useless, since the world had come to an end. Jackals, Anderson had called such men and women, and on his scouting parties Above had indiscriminately shot them on sight.

“What are you doing here?” Esther said. Her voice was crisp, she felt composed. She had shelved the other matter.

“Doing here?” The man’s hands flicked in a spasmodic gesture. “Sweet God—getting by. That’s what I’m doing. Christ, the first living human thing I’ve seen in half a year, she says to me, What are you doing.”

His voice was light, and he was not very tall, though so thin as to make him seem taller. His hands, she had noticed, were well-shaped, nervous and expressive, and he used them a lot. She moved around him a little, keeping the pistol level, to get the light on his face. He did not turn his head, letting her look at him; only his eyes followed her. His hair was long and very fine, light brown in color. She could not be certain of his eyes, they looked glassy, reflective. A wiry sparse beard was growing on his narrow jaw. His skin, even in the photographic moon-glare, had the roughened vital look of having been much in the open air. His clothes were unkempt and dirty, as was to be expected, and there was a rent in his shirt. Shorter than she, he seemed not much older, though there were deep horizontal lines scored in his forehead. Suddenly he smiled at her. His teeth were good, and very long, like the teeth of a wolf.

“Well, well,” he said, “what an inspection. Decided to buy me, yet?”

Esther stepped back.

“How long have you been here?”

“Where, exactly?”

There was something dangerous about him, no denying it. She could smell it, like burning.

“Do you have any water?” he asked politely.

“Answer my questions, then we’ll get to yours. I can still shoot you.”

“That would be very unwise. It would make a lot of noise, and they have excellent hearing. Or didn’t you know?”

Esther felt the hair stiffen on her neck and arms.

“You’ve seen it too?”

“Oh yes. Rather hard to miss, don’t you think?”

“Where?”

“River. Same place you saw it, I imagine. They’ve been patrolling there a couple of days. Not come this way yet. Won’t, probably, unless some fool fires a gun or something.”

Esther looked at him carefully. He returned the look. He was casual now, almost urbane. She reversed the gun, holding it by the nose, and motioned him toward her.

“All right. We’ll get under cover. In there. Walk in front and don’t try anything.”

He began to do as she said, and with his back to her, remarked, “I’m not armed and, if you think about it, there wouldn’t be any point in trying anything. You’re not carrying any food that might be worth stealing. The pistol could be a fake for all I know. Or it could go off and hurt me. And as for you, I’m sure you don’t imagine I’d want to rape you.”

They went up the steps of the House of Wonders, through the wide doors and into the echoing vestibule with its marble columns and mosaic floors. The darkness here was watered down by moonlight through the crusted windows. Nevertheless she could not see him very well. She stepped in front of him, and waved him sideways a couple of yards.

“If you didn’t want anything,” she said, “why come after me?”

“Oh God, woman. I told you. You’re the first human being I’ve seen in half a year, the first female I’ve seen for God knows how long—no, no, don’t take that the way you’re bound to. It’s just a change. Get me? Mind you, trust me to pick a bloody Amazon. But you’ve got nice legs.”

“That’s your problem, all of that.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Then I’ll tell you something you’ll have to bet on. I reckon, if I have to, I can put a bullet between your eyes and be safe away before anything else can get here.”

“How far do you think you’d get? Once they’re looking they can spot you easy as breathe.”

“Not where I’m going.”

His head went up. He cursed softly.

“Then you’d have to be going—down? My God, I’ve heard of groups—I thought that was a story. Do you mean you have a hide underground?”

Esther kept silent a moment, her hand on the gun was tense. Then she said: “Either I do or I don’t. It doesn’t matter to you.”

He started forward. She brought up the gun—and he fell back. His eyes, catching moonlight, flashed bright as if he wept.

“You’re not going to shut me out, leave me here, are you? And with those things about—Listen, girl, do you know what it’s like, the way I’ve been living—had to live—”

“No,” she said. “You tell me.”

“Tell you!” His voice rose. “You’d have had to be there. Ditches mostly, stinking ditches, old barns in winter, five or six of us, once. So cold. Luxury is a handful of burning sticks. You get sick in the cold. You cough your guts up, your fingers rot off—oh, I’ve seen it. Sometimes a house, sharing the muck with the rats, and if you’re lucky rat to eat, and a few black windfalls for dessert. And all the time looking out for them, and then running, hiding, digging holes in the ground, lying in the filth, praying. Ever seen a friend of yours trapped in the snow with three breaks in his leg, screaming, and you have to club him to shut him up, in case they hear him and come? Ever seen a man, or a woman, for that matter, after they’ve finished with them? You know about that, don’t you, the way they suck the blood out, leave just a rind.” His eyes flashed. “And then, by some quirk of fate you find there’s just you left. So for half a year you run, you hide, you pray, you freeze—all alone, and there’s no reason to keep living, but you do. And late at night you bite on your hands with terror because you think you’re the last human thing alive—”

Esther’s head was swimming slightly. But not through his monologue. She felt remote and impartial.

“So,” she said, “you’ve worked it out that I come from a colony Below, and you want me to take you there.”

“Yes. You bet I do. Yes.”

“One thing you seemed to have learned,” she said. “That’s the importance of the whole unit, rather than its parts. What could you bring to this hypothetical colony, if it let you in?”

She thought, I’m talking like a leader.

He laughed. He sounded drunk. He came weaving toward her suddenly, not looking at the pistol, but into her face. His eyes were wet, but he was grinning.

“Oh, iron maiden. Listen, I’ll do anything to get in—anything. I can read, and I’m tough physically—work it out for yourself, I must be. I’ve survived out here. I won’t be a drag on your resources. Look, just take me there, let me speak to someone.”

“Don’t plead with me,” she said. She did not think that truly he was pleading. He seemed, under all, very sure he could get around her, and around whoever was necessary. “How long have you been in the city?”

“Three days, four days—what does it matter—” He put his hands on her shoulders, ignoring the gun completely. “Listen—what are you called?”

“Esther.”

“Listen, Esther, take me with you. Please, Esther. Make them let me stay.”

“Stop it,” she said, and thrust off his hands. “It won’t be my decision.”

But it will be, she thought. Won’t it?

Leader. Is that important to me then?

Yes, suddenly it was important, because it was a part of Standish. And—her destiny, all she could come to. And, she had seen the Dragon.

She wanted to find Standish quickly, tell him.

The man was staring at her. Was he afraid of her? He looked afraid, or was it only fear she would evade him and leave him behind, outcast. She thought of what he had said—how they sucked a corpse dry—vampires—Anderson had often mooted that. So humanity must stick together, mustn’t it, against such an Enemy?

“All right,” she said abruptly. The man’s head went up, as before. “I’ll take you Below.”

He went on grinning, and gave a sort of writhe, as if to rub against her, the way dogs had done in the days when dogs had masters.

She unstoppered John Matthew’s silver flask and held it out to him.

“There’s your water. What’s your name?”

Somehow his attitude altered slightly. It did not interest her particularly.

“Cury,” he said. “Just, Cury.” And now something about the announcement of his name seemed to amuse or please him. And he said it again, drawing out that long ‘U’: Cuoory.

She said, “Drink the water, Cury. You’ll need it. It’s a rough journey down.”

•   •   •

She had never traveled the pipes in company before. The experience was unpleasant to her. They crawled, scrabbled and slid on their bellies, and clawed for purchase in the corrosion and slime. The sounds and movements of his body behind hers, the smell of his sweat and the sense of his fear, added to her own claustrophobia. He was terribly afraid in the dark. Once or twice he swore to himself in a shaking moan. Once he whispered, “Is it far now?”

“Yes,” she snapped. “Don’t think about it.” She was not sure he would last out. Her own body throbbed and stabbed with pains.

Finally she reached ahead, and her fingers found the hatchway that led into the apartment. She had already decided this would be their entry point. She wanted Standish to see what she was doing. But she would have to go in first and warn him about the man.

Cury.

“Yes?”

“I’m going through ahead. You’ll have to wait.”

He gave a shaky little laugh. “What? You want me to stay here?”

“I’ll let you through as soon as I can.”

“You won’t forget? All right. You’re the boss, Esther.”

She wormed her way the extra inches, and thrust at the mechanical door. As she lifted herself into the aperture and swung through, the bruise on her back seemed to burst into flame. She must have cried out, for Cury answered her frantically. “It’s okay,” she said. And she pushed the hatch door back on him and shut him into the dark.

It was dark in the rooms, too, Darklight. It was so long since she had come in this way, and very late—would Standish be sleeping? She could hear no sounds. She went by the kitchen area, and the white-tiled bathroom, and into the pale space where the gallery leaned and the books and paintings poised in their shadowy knots of gilt.

The globe lamp was burning. She saw him at once, seated in the white leather armchair.

“Standish?”

There was a book lying beside him, closed. Something about the closed book disturbed her. She went near to him, but he was asleep.

There was no way now behind the paper skin into the young eyes, the healthy cavern of the mouth, for both were shut. And the single light was strong in the gloom. He looked very old, dried and bleached by the light to an inanimate shell. Suddenly she knew that he was dead.

“Standish,” she said again, but she reached and methodically felt for the absent pulse, and the absent heartbeat, lifted the eyelid, shook him. And let him go.

There was no feeling in her; her whole body seemed to have gone to sleep. She was empty. She had forgotten who she was or why she was here. She sat down at Standish’s feet, leaning against the chair, and stared blindly ahead of her into nothing.

Chapter Seven

After Cury had lain in the foul passage for nearly half an hour, he began to rattle and thrust at the hatch as the girl had done.

At first it would not budge. Sweat streamed down his face and panic strangled him. The journey down had almost finished his reserves and lying here, waiting, had been far worse. The dark constriction of the pipe, the stench and narrowness, these threatened to overpower him. A choking screaming terror began to creep up on him like gas. No new ideas came to him, no clever instructions. Had he been abandoned? That bitch—had she tricked him? Was the door jammed?

Then the hatch came free.

He pushed himself level and fell through, gasping, then slammed the hatch door closed. Once closed, he noticed, it was invisible—unless you knew exactly where to search; he did not and had already lost it. It was dusk here, too, but airy, smelling clean in an antiseptic sort of way. He seemed to be in a kitchen, with a ponderous unit for freezing and heating food. Somewhere, far off, he could detect the faint steady pumping of a generator.

He wiped the sweat off his face and started forward cautiously. There might be anything waiting for him; she might have got some toughs from somewhere. He crossed a functional bathroom leading off the kitchen area. Gradually the dark was giving way to a white glow ahead. He came to the threshold of a big living space, laid out not ungracefully for human comfort, and lamplit. There was an old man sitting in a white leather chair under the lamp.

At his feet was the girl.

“Hey, Esther,” Cury said softly, placatingly. “Do you mind? I couldn’t stand it. It got bad in there.”

She did not answer. She did not react to his voice.

He was aware then how still they were, the pair of them, like a couple of waxworks in tableau.

Cury went forward again, step by step. She did not look at him. He crouched by her, reached out and tapped her cheek, lightly, with a finger. It was a peculiar action, doglike, if a dog had ever possessed hands or fingers.

Her eyes did not change, but she said: “Don’t touch me.”

“What is it?” he said. “Esther?” She did not speak, and Cury glanced up at the carved mask above them. “Is the old man dead?”

Still she said nothing, so Cury straightened and observed the mask meticulously.

“Yes, he’s dead all right. Was he something to you?”

Esther . . . said nothing.

Cury turned and went out.

The girl was still sitting as before when he came back into the black and white room three quarters of an hour later, shaggy-wet, wrapped in one of the toweling robes that had hung in the closet, eating strawberries from a carton.

“You’ll get cramp,” he said to her.

Esther’s eyes slowly slid back into focus and settled on him. He was reclining on the gallery stairs, eating his strawberries one by one, savoring them, his hair dark and thin from water, in Standish’s robe that was too big for him.

“You’ve made yourself at home,” she said, tonelessly. Her eyes were dry, and very black.

“Well, I was dirty and the bath was there,” he said with ease. “Hungry, too. There’s a steak cooking. Want some?”

She got up stiffly, continuing to stare at him. Quite unmistakably he flinched.

She walked over to him. She pointed at the white robe.

“That’s his.”

“I don’t think he needs it now.”

He was nervous, uneasy, smiling at her with his snarling wolf teeth.

She said, “Where are your clothes?”

“In the bath.”

“You thought I’d provide you with fresh ones.”

“Something like that.” Ingratiatingly, he said, “Look, if you don’t want me to wear this, I can take it off.”

A wheedling invitation was implicit in his manner now. She laughed, surprising herself.

“Do what you want. I have to think.”

She went to the table at which she and Standish had played chess, and sat there, her back to the dead man in the chair, and to the strange live creature on the stairs. She could smell the steak grilling now. She recalled how she had first smelled steak in this room, the first time she had come here. She began to go over it all, all of the three years, the frustrations, angers. The failures, successes and joys. Presently she cried, but not for very long. The other presence inhibited her, and made her conscious that Standish could no longer help her.

She became conscious too of Cury circling at her elbow. Why did Cury remind her so much of an animal?

“The old man,” Cury asked. “What was he?”

“Leader of the colony.” She looked at nothing and chose the romantic archaic word with care: “My lover.”

“What? He slept with you, that old man?”

Her brain was suddenly crystal clear.

She turned her head and looked at Cury, and said with exactness, “Sometimes he slept with me, but I meant he fucked me. Competently. I’m pregnant with his child.”

•   •   •

Finch woke because the tiny buzzer, rigged above his bunk, was drilling a narrow hole through his eardrum.

“Damn Standish,” Finch said thickly.

He swung his legs over the edge of the bunk, and became aware of a gritty sourness in his mouth and of the blocks of a recurring nocturnal indigestion building in his stomach. He took a couple of chalky tablets from the shelf and chewed them morosely as he pulled on trousers and shirt. Damn the old man, what did he want in the middle of the night that couldn’t wait? Why hadn’t he sent for Philips? It occurred to Finch that Standish would not have used the personal buzzer on a mere whim. He could remember the last time; that had been with Anna, all of fifteen years ago. He had been what? Thirty-two or three, and Standish in his early sixties, still a slim, powerful, handsome man. Finch paused, his fingers on the shirt buttons, seeing it again. The bed with the little shriveled old woman on it, the mummy-case which was all that was left of Anna, lovely, golden-haired Anna. Standish in the doorway, apologizing politely for calling him. “I can’t give her any more, not without killing her,” Finch had whispered, as if they were boys playing a game together in a tomb. “She’s dying anyway, Finch. How long has she got? A few days. And she’s in agony.” And Finch crossing the room, taking out the hypodermic syringe, smilingly reassuringly into the bloodless skull of her face, which, incredibly, smiled reassurance back at him. And then waiting, while the remaining slight vestiges of life went out of her, Standish holding her hand, continuing to hold it when there was no longer any need. Finch clenched his teeth. Why hadn’t there been something he could do?

The buzzer sounded again. Finch jumped, one of the buttons snapping in half between his fingers. He grabbed the permanently grubby white jacket with its pouches of tricks, and moved out of the door.

Often there was no one in the passage leading to Standish’s apartment, but this Darklight there were two soldiers playing cards. On duty. They did not come to their feet. One said insolently, “What’s the rush, Doc?”

“I’m sorry, no time for a chat,” Finch said briskly.

“Okay, so what’s wrong?”

There was unease in their faces. His own guts ached with it. These men did not like him, but they would let him past. He said, “Nothing, I should think. Once I get in there, I’ll know, won’t I?”

At the door, he hesitated, the soldiers watching him. Christ—if the old man was sick—that last check-up had been bad. Nothing definite, but the whole system showing signs of wear so markedly. Anything could do it. A virus. A fall. And if it was serious, could Standish get the door open, and if Standish could not, could he, Finch, manage it? There was a way of doing it, from outside, of course, but Finch had no notion how. His palms were wet as he unhooked the rubber speaking-tube.

“Standish—I’m here. Let me in.”

To his intense relief, the door moved at once. Not pausing now, he stepped through, and the door shut behind him.

Then he saw it was not Standish in the black chair behind the black desk. It was that Martineau girl, supposed to be the old man’s fancy.

“Well, young woman. Was it you called me? Where is he?”

“Through there.”

Somehow, her coolness, her mastery of the desk-controls, irritated him. Standish should never have told her how to use them. But then, just as well he had. Finch watched the metal walls glide apart.

“How bad is he?”

“You’d better see for yourself.”

He went through into the apartment, and the girl followed him. There was only Darklight there, the lamp was unlit. He found Standish in the chair, and knew, before he tried for pulse or heartbeat, that Standish was dead. Nevertheless, his examination was thorough, and very grim.

Finally he raised a grim forbidding face to the girl.

“When did it happen?”

“I don’t know. I found him about two hours ago. You were expecting this, weren’t you?”

“Two hours. Why didn’t you call for me sooner?”

“It was too late already.”

Going about, stealing from Standish’s stuff, before letting anyone in. . . . “And you weren’t with him when he died?”

“No.”

No, you bloody little hussy. But you could still have been the cause. Yes, that too, the way things had looked in the medical. But when he really needed you—not here. No, not you. He rasped out, “You should have called me sooner.”

Her eyes were black and she stared him out with them. Something about her unnerved him. He wanted to be angry with her, with someone. (Yes, he had anticipated Standish’s death. He had anticipated Anna’s. Anticipation didn’t prepare you, it only underlined your helplessness, your uselessness; you stood by and watched the slow avalanche sweep everything away. And this girl, who had let Standish struggle over that last threshold alone, this parasite, profiting from the leader’s privileges, an old man’s tart—

“Please sit down, Finch,” she said to him.

That unnerved him, too. She sounded like Standish.

“I’m going to be too busy, young woman, to sit.”

“Sit, I said.”

Nothing had changed, except there was a pistol in her hand.

“Put that away, you stupid cow.” It came to him she might after all be shocked, but there was a silencer on the gun, and her hand was steady. He sweated more. He went to a chair, and lapsed into it.

“That’s better. I’d rather not shoot you.”

“You’re crazy,” he said. “You need a sedative.”

“Tablets or syringe? Do you have a hypodermic with you?”

Surprised, actually frightened, still he thought of Anna, and could not speak. He nodded.

The girl said, “Show me.”

And words returned. “What in God’s name—”

She lifted the pistol and fired deliberately past his right shoulder. The bullet thunked into the wall with a deadly deaf concussion.

Silence.

“All right,” he said. “Give me a chance.”

He reached into the left-hand pouch. He removed the syringe from its polythene. She was irrational; he had to be careful. “There you are. Now what?”

“Throw it on the carpet, low, by my foot.”

He did as she said, and noticed for the first time in the dim light that her legs and feet, her whole body, seemed daubed with dried blood. Not a fight. Something had happened—up there. They said she went Above. Obviously she did, he had seen her tan from time to time. . . . She was a nightmare. She was something new and unique and inimical. The gun was only a small part of it. When she put out her foot and crushed the glass syringe under her shoe-heel, it seemed almost natural.

“Listen, girl,” he said quite softly, “do you know you’re in pretty poor shape? Let me see to you.”

“Later,” she said. “First you’ll do something else. There are soldiers outside, aren’t there? I heard you talk to them.”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll bring them into the interview room. You’ll say that Standish has just died, and that before he died he spoke to you. He told you that I am to take his place as leader. He named me. My name, by the way, is Esther, I doubt if you knew. My leadership is valid because of the bloodline—my grandmother was Anderson’s bastard, I doubt if you knew that either—but also because I’m carrying Standish’s child. And you will verify that, because, Finch, you examined me three days ago, and determined I was six weeks pregnant.”

Despite his fear, Finch’s face darkened.

“And you’ll be surreptitiously holding your gun to my head while I’m saying all this?”

“Oh, no, Finch. You’ll say it whether I’m there or not, and with great conviction.”

“You can forget it.”

She said calmly, “I’ll tell you what will happen if you don’t. There’s an exit out of here none of you know about. It’s well concealed. I doubt very much if any of you could find it unaided. When you speak to the soldiers outside, I’ll be waiting by this exit, listening to every word—you know there’s a speaker I can listen in on? If you say something I don’t like I shall be out and gone before you can open the main door again. The exit leads into the colony at another point. I’ll run to the nearest soldiers. I shall tell them I’ve just been to see you and you’re not in your bunk, and that I’m scared because Standish found out about you and you threatened him. I’ll bring them here. They’ll find Standish dead and the pieces of a smashed syringe in the carpet, to which I’ll draw their attention. I shall tell them you must have killed Standish. It’s something I read about, injecting air into a vein.”

Finch said: “Do you think anyone’s going to believe all this? Do you think I won’t have told the soldiers in the corridor your damn fool plan? They’ll be expecting you.”

“You’re sweating a lot,” she remarked. “It’s a give-away. You know this will work. Nobody likes you, you’re a doctor—in a position to act God to us, and you’re a cruel god, aren’t you? You hurt us physically and you rub our noses in our sickness. The soldiers like you even less—their authority is rivaled by yours. And then there’s another doctor, to take your place. Nice gentle Philips. He isn’t as clever as you, but he’s got a fine bedside manner. Oh no, we don’t like you, Finch, we won’t miss you. As for me, I’m respected, I’m the leader’s bedfellow. The symbol of his virility. The soldiers approve of me too. Just like John Matthew, they say. So here you are alone, Standish dead, the smashed syringe indicating a struggle, the problematical sealed gateway none of you can discover. And there am I, the leader’s girl, in another part of the colony, weeping on the shoulders of the leader’s brave men-at-arms. Who do you think they’ll believe? Eh, Finch? You or me?”

“All right, all right,” he said hoarsely. “And what’s my motive for the killing?”

“Standish found out,” she said, “that you’d been cheating the colony, using your position as holder of the key to open the wine store and skim the milk. A nasty mean niggling little crime.”

“I don’t drink!” he shouted.

“In public you don’t. Perhaps you don’t have to, in public. But alone, you knock it back. You need it. And you’re a thief and they might lynch you, even if the leader doesn’t want you shot. So you come here with your needle full of air—he’s just an old man. And you want to hang on to those bottles.”

The pain in Finch’s stomach was a row of knives.

“Damn you,” he said, “you foul-minded cat. You must want this very much.”

“No,” she said. “Standish wanted me to have it. He thought it was important.”

“Then he was senile. Do you think you can even hold on to the leadership? A girl? And what happens when you fail to produce this nonexistent child?”

“Anyone can give me a child.”

Finch stared and saw she was crying, silently and stonily, though her hand on the pistol was still firm as a rock. A bizarre stab of pity went through his vitals, along with all the other knives. So, she too had loved Standish. She too preposterously wanted his baby in her womb.

“Look, girl, you’re battered and bleeding, and shocked. Forget all this rubbish and let me have a look at you.”

“Later,” she said again. “First, the rest of it.”

“And if I won’t play? If I’m ready to take my chance, like you?”

She looked at him in contempt, through the tears; she despised him. Her woman’s weeping eyes said plain: You? Why waste my time with your nonsense?

But she said, “Then I’ll shoot you. I caught you in the murderous act. Risky. But no worry to you with a bullet in your chest.” She directed him with the gun-hand to get up. Up he got. “When you’ve seen the soldiers, don’t go out with them, wait here for me. You’ll have things to do about Standish. Or you can try picking up all the bits from the syringe—they’ll have noticed it by then, or if they haven’t, I’m sure you’ll miss a few, if you go back on your story later.”

Finch turned toward the outer room. It was easier to do as he was told. Besides, Goddamn them all, who cared?

•   •   •

After she had spoken to Finch she seemed to be dreaming. The metal door closed, shutting him in the outer room. He had looked sludgy pale, sick as Cury had looked outlined-in the black-dank pipe, when she had left him there. (She had locked Cury in David’s treasure vault. Was he waiting quiet in there, as instructed? Or had Cury ceased to exist?)

Then Finch was opening the door and the soldiers were running in. She listened through the speaker, and heard Finch do and say everything as she had directed. How could that be? He should have bluffed her, snatched the gun. . . . No, it wasn’t in him.

The time came for her to turn and walk to the hidden hatch, open it, and crawl a way down the pipe into the corridors of the colony. But she moved slowly and the hatch was difficult.

In the pipe, the cuts on her body unsewed themselves, and the pain cleared her head. She reached the Darklight tunnels, and got to the women’s washroom without meeting anyone.

The soldiers came while she was under the shower. She saw their dim shadows thrown up on the partition. One cleared his throat.

“Is that you, Miss Martineau?”

She nearly laughed. You come most carefully upon your hour.

She told them it was Miss Martineau.

“Will you turn off the shower, please, miss? That’s better. Have you been to the leader’s quarters tonight?”

“No. Why? Is anything wrong?”

Who is this speaking, so cool and clear?

“Better come out, miss.”

She wrapped herself in a coarse robe from the rack, and went out to them. A sergeant and three soldiers in their military stance, their shoulders and buttocks thrust back, their heads high, faces blank.

“The leader is dead, Miss Martineau,” the sergeant said.

She could not cry for them. But probably that was good. They must not think her weak. She kept her features wooden, like theirs.

Now, they told her about Doctor Finch. And what he had said. And how the doctor had told them how it was with her.

“That I’m pregnant.”

The briefest hesitation.

“Yes, miss.”

She looked up into the soldiers’ faces, one by one.

“Standish wished me to take over as leader. At least until his son is old enough to replace me. Was he able to convey this to Doctor Finch?”

The sergeant’s eyes were cautiously glazed.

“Yes, miss.”

“Do you accept this?”

A longer hesitation.

The sergeant said, “If it’s what he wanted.”

“You’re damn right it was what he wanted,” she said.

“Yes, miss.”

“First then,” she said, a cold emotionless command, “stop calling me ‘miss.’ I don’t want the same pseudo-politeness you accord every slut you take out in the tunnels at Darklight.” They were disturbed, but no one argued yet. “If you’re prepared to uphold Standish’s last wish, and take me as leader of this colony, you’ll show your courtesy in deeds, not words. From now on you’ll call me Esther. Just Esther. The way you’ve called your previous leaders by name.”

The longest pause.

“Well?” she said.

“Yes, Esther,” said the sergeant.

“The rest of you,” she said.

And they said, raggedly, “Yes, Esther.”

They escorted her back to the apartment, and none of them mentioned, by snigger or grin, that she was naked under the skimpy toweling.

She left them to mount a death-watch in the corridor.

She shut the inner door of the apartment, and had come full circle.

The black and white room was thick with silence, and contained two seated figures, one of which got to its feet.

Finch did not talk to her as he saw to her cuts and bruises, swathing her in gauze bandages like a mummy. (She thought of Standish, who had not come to its feet, buried like a pharaoh in an enameled cask, gold leaf on his flesh, his segregated viscera in alabaster jars.)

“They’ll burn him in the morning,” she said. She had not expected to say this to Finch.

“You know the rules. Disease starts fast and spreads quicker.”

She had not expected him to reply.

When he was finished, she dismissed him, and as he went, maybe they both caught the wink of broken glass in the carpeting.

She found herself then alone with a white dry stick, propped in a chair for the light to gnaw on.

“I did what you wanted,” she said aloud to him. “You made it hard for me, didn’t you? I think you did it on purpose, you knew you were drying, but you left no testament. All it needed—a few written phrases, and your signature, just that, to make me leader with no bluff, no violence, no pretend pregnancy. But you wanted me to fight for it, didn’t you. Wanted me to know I had to be king of the mouse-cage. And you gambled I’d think out some way to do it. But it may not work. Do you see?” She did not know why she was compelled to talk to him now. He could not hear her, or care. But old habits died hard. She had grown used to an alive Standish. “And I don’t even know, after all, if any of it does matter to me.”

She came to see, at this moment, that there was a shadow out of place beyond the lamp. And turning she beheld Cury. He was dressed still, as she was, in a toweling robe. His hair had dried, fine as froth in the colorless light. He smiled at her slyly.

“Come to lighten my darkness?”

She said, matter-of-factly, “I locked you in, how did you get out?”

“It’s an old lock. I picked it, with a handy implement found amongst the goodies in the mighty vault. Sometimes,” he made a wild graceful gesture, “I hear voices in my head. They say, Oh Cury, dear, just do this and this, and something lovely will happen. And my voices said unto me, arise ye and do thus and thus with the lock, and go thou to bring joy unto the woman in the room of the dead.”

“So you’ve read a Bible, too,” she said. “How long were you out? Did Finch see you?”

“No. Want me to keep the little secret, do you. The darling little bastard you haven’t got after all tucked up in your apple. I thought it was a bit much. Him so old, and you so—pristine.”

His hearing must be phenomenal if he had caught that from inside the gallery cupboard that gave on the vault door. He walked very light too. Dog. A dog that heard voices like—who was that? Some saint. And who picked locks.

“Your clothes will be dry now,” she said. “Get them and put them on.”

“I’m comfortable as I am.”

She went across to him, as before, not hurrying, and again saw him cringe. He’s waiting for anger, provoking it; wanting it? And responsively, her anger was there. She swung back her arm and hit him, a furious but premeditated blow on the side of the head, with some weight behind it. He staggered and fell—more to escape her—or to revel in it—she thought—than from the force of her hand.

“Do as I tell you, Cury. Get dressed. Then come back and I’ll tell you what to do next.”

“All right,” he said.

She heard him in the bathroom dressing quickly. When he returned in the damp garments, they were too clean. Never mind. The pipe would see to that.

“Cury,” she said, “if the colony knew you’d been here, sharing these rooms with me, they’d kill you. Do you understand? They get very jealous. So what you have to do is this. You have to get back in the pipe, and continue along it, to where it opens in the tunnels. It’s very simple. There are no turns, no side pipes. Just straight on, and out.”

“Don’t,” he said, “make me go back in there.” And there was real fear on his face, different from the other, fear of the dark stinking unreason of the pipe, which would not respond to any fawning.

“Shut up,” she said. “You’ll do as you’re told. Or I’ll shoot you or call the soldiers in to do it. An intruder. You don’t have to be a problem. You prefer the pipe? Very well. When you come out, you’ll be filthy and exhausted. If you take all the turnings on the right, you’ll find someone, or they’ll find you. You say you happened on the entrance by accident and followed it down. They know by now one exists, since I’ve been using it. But don’t mention me, or meeting me, or anything you overheard. I don’t have to go all through that same reasoning with you, do I? You heard it with Finch. If it comes to a trial of strength between you and me, with them, they’ll back me, and you’ll lose. Then they’ll cripple or kill you. You see? Then come on.”

She went through and unsealed the invisible hatch. Cury followed her, stood staring.

“Like a mouth, waiting to swallow me.” He gave a little high laugh. “No other way—is there? I’m not used to that. I like the open, up there—”

“Don’t waste time. The sooner you start the sooner you’ll be out.”

He levered himself into the opening, and then gazed back at her, as if petrified.

“Remember,” she said, “you never saw me. You know nothing.”

She slammed the door on him, but remained by the wall until she heard the sluggish shuffling of his movements start up, and then die away through the pipe.

She pictured him, a white human serpent crawling in the belly of another serpent made of black metal, slime and night, his blind eyes, and his mouth wide on a frozen scream. Time might stop for him in the pipe. He might congeal there, die and rot. She should not have let him live. Yet, she had no right to his life.

She checked the book vault, and found no evidence of Cury’s presence. Even the lock was not damaged, and the tool of egress had been neatly replaced. Up on the floor of the gallery, however, she found Standish’s manual. How much had he read? She wiped the cover on her robe. Then she picked up the toweling Cury had worn and took it to the kitchen area, where she burned it in the incinerator. Perhaps he would die and rot in the pipe.

Esther opened the partition to Standish’s sleeping room, and the bed was much wider than a bunk, covered with a white wool blanket. She had never really looked at it before, never slept in it. She took off the robe, and pulled back the covers, and got into Standish’s bed, and lay down.

I have slept here often. With Standish. I conceived his child in this bed.

What will it be, she thought, a son, or a girl?

She laughed softly. She had said a boy, to the soldiers, to comply with the spirit of the thing, the dynasty.

She had forgotten to turn out the white light in the other room; in her dream it became a great white moon. She wore the scarlet and white crown, and the moon shone on her gold-plated body, and on the gold-plated box at her feet. She was Hatshepsut-Nefer-Kleopatra, queen of Egypt, and they had walled her up alive in the pyramid with the dead pharaoh, and she thought she was glad. Then Anubis came, a small thin man with a jackal’s head. He fawned on her, licking her eyelids with his dog’s tongue, looking at her sideways with his glass-colored eyes.

“Osiris is now king of the dead,” said Anubis.

“Why is the moon in the tomb?” she asked him, oddly reminiscent of the phonetic dialogue of Alice. . . . Bats and cats, moons and tombs.

“The moon is a dead satellite,” said Anubis. He said, “I’ve been reading the manual. If we were in Greece, not Egypt, you would be eating pomegranate seeds. If we were in Rome you’d know already that I am the messenger of the gods, come to fetch you from the underworld, at their request.”

“Anderson would have shot you on sight, you jackal,” she said.

But Anubis only barked at her.

Chapter Eight

Cury had emerged from the pipe and vomited until he was empty. Then he crawled, groaning, along the right-hand branch of the tunnel, then along the right-hand branch which led from the branch. A piece of rusty metal had gashed his forehead somewhere in the pipe. The blood ran in his eyes. He had forgotten he could now stand upright. Presently he fainted.

After a moment, blonde Patty came up the tunnel from the other direction, with Steiner, kissing, and drinking from a small plastic container of whisky. Patty saw Cury first.

“Look! There’s a man lying there. He’s dead!”

“Don’t jump to conclusions, you daft whore.”

Steiner went to the man, crouched by him and rolled him over.

“Is he?”

“Nah. Just out cold.” Steiner dragged Cury against the wall and into a sitting position, then thrust his head down between his knees. “Here. Give us the whisky.”

Patty ran over and crouched down, too. She was struck by the weird gleamy silkiness of the unconscious man’s long hair, shining under the Darklight. She had never seen hair quite like that before on anyone, except perhaps a child. In an odd way, it attracted her. She wanted to touch it.

The man made a sound in his throat.

“Take it easy, mate. Here. Drink this. That’s more like it.”

“He’s not one of us,” Patty suddenly hissed. Her voice held abject fear and unspeakable menace.

“I already noticed that, woman. Let him get his breath. Then he can tell us who he is, and what he’s doing here. Can’t you, mate? But watch it, you’ve had your fair share of that booze.”

Steiner reached and took the whisky out of Cury’s hand.

“Sorry,” Cury said. “I needed that. Christ.”

He turned and looked at Patty. There was something familiar here, at last, a piece of jigsaw that could be fitted into place. She reacted at once, as they did, as he had known she would. Her eyes and nostrils widened like a rabbit snuffing snake, and she did not move. Would this be all right? Allowed? It seemed it might. He smiled at her, using only the right side of his mouth, which was turned away from the soldier. Like a mirror, she smiled back at him. The girl with the black hair had not smiled.

“Well,” the soldier said, “you going to clear up the mystery now?”

“Mystery? Oh, yes.” Cury shut his eyes. The gash was hardening to a crust on his forehead. It worried him. It might be poisoned, and would need antiseptic, and other things they probably wouldn’t have here. . . . “There’s an entrance up top. I—found it. Came down some sort of pipe.”

“You mean you came in from Above.” Steiner’s face had a guarded look. Though there was surely no other place Cury could have come from, he might have lapsed into gibberish.

“Yes, up there—Above.”

“Why?” Steiner said. “Why’d you come Below?”

“I’d heard rumors. There are others like me, up there, hiding. They talked about groups living in the old shelters, the train tunnels. The suburbs are thick with—aliens. I just took a chance.”

“Less talk about that,” said Steiner.

Cury was startled. It occurred to him the “aliens” down here were a military secret. Everyone hid, but no longer questioned from what. He’d said a bad naughty word. He tried to show Steiner how sorry he was.

“Okay,” Steiner said. “You’d better come and see my Sergeant. And then the leader, in the morning.”

“Morning?” What morning could there be down here?

Steiner ignored this. He said, “On your feet.”

Cury got up, wavering a little. The blonde girl caught hold of him to steady him.

“Esther,” Patty said abruptly. “He must’ve come the same way she did, the slag, do you remember?”

“Don’t call her names,” Steiner said without inflection, taking the rifle from his shoulder. He glanced at Cury over the rifle. “Nothing personal. Just in case.”

“Just because she sleeps with Standish—” said Patty.

“Can it, I said,” said Steiner. “Sew it up.”

She fell silent.

They all began to walk.

“Well, what’s your name?” she asked Cury, taking his arm.

He informed her.

“Why do you say it that way?”

“Which way?”

“You say it—” she giggled—“like it’s a sort of a joke.”

“Well, I am a sort of a joke, don’t you think?”

“Oh, go on.”

Steiner had fallen a little behind them. He watched them, the way Patty swung her hip ever so slightly so that sometimes it touched the stranger’s. Silly tart. Probably trying to get him, Steiner, at it. But hard luck. There were plenty of other fish and all that. If she wanted a change that was fine by him. Anyhow, he’d been thinking of the Martineau girl, the last time he made it with Patty. Funny, that. It was a year since the day he’d seen her, wasn’t it? Seen her stripped. Perhaps laying Patty again had reminded him. Still, if you happened to come thinking about the leader’s girl’s tits, there wasn’t any rule they could pass. Pity Standish—but no. Give him credit where it’s due. Maybe sometime in the future, eh? The old man couldn’t last forever.

Patty and the stranger went around the corner slightly ahead and, following, Steiner almost fell over them as they pulled up short. Four soldiers and a corporal blocked the way.

“Steiner. Report back to the barracks immediately.”

“Yes, sir. What’s up?”

“The leader’s dead,” said the corporal.

“Shit,” Steiner answered. “Sir.”

•   •   •

Esther woke in the crisp warm sheets of the bed, some hours after the generators flooded the rooms with “day”-light. It had not been a long sleep, yet she felt refreshed, her mind for a moment wiped clean and empty: innocent. Then she heard a voice coming tinnily through the speaker from the outer room and remembered everything.

The white light was still burning, the dead man sitting by it. Entering that room, she stared at him. The seams of age in his face had now calcified. He seemed made of stone.

“No,” she said aloud. “I won’t look at you anymore.”

His eyelids seemed to flicker. In a second, the eyes would open, young, and the stone crack and crumble, and out of the chrysalis he would step, thirty-eight or forty years of age, released from prison at last.

She turned from him, and her fantasy, in disgust.

The disembodied voice started calling again, from the corridor.

She turned off the lamp, then went through to the outer room. She switched on the microphone.

“Miss Martineau,” a man was still saying. “Miss Martineau.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Ah. Miss Martineau.” The voice changed now to the brisk tone of military authority. “We should like to speak to you.”

“You’ve come for Standish,” she said flatly. The soldier had mis-titled her. Either her instruction had not been generally relayed, or he had chosen to ignore it.

“No, miss. This is something else. Let us in, please.”

“If you want to speak to me, you must wait. I’ll signal you in half an hour.” She flipped off the switches of both microphone and speaker, before he could reply.

They had found Cury. Was that it? She knew it was not. Nor did she think Finch had rescinded. She knew what it was. Standish’s fancy bit was still in his suite, throwing her weight about, trying to stay put. And it was time to ask her to leave.

The first victory had been for nothing.

She used the shower, ice-cold, and drank orange juice with ice still splintered in it. She stripped off Finch’s bandaging. The bruises were black, but healing. Damn, damn, she had no clothes, had come here with nothing but the robe. Fool. On impulse she threw open Standish’s closet.

His few immaculate garments hung there. They bothered her, these flayed skins, and she slid them aside hurriedly. What could she be looking for? Nothing here could be of any use. At the back of the closet hung a woman’s dress, dyed the color of blue smoke. She took it out, bemused. It was well-made, the sleeves neatly finished at the elbows, and the pockets and hem, and the slender collar lying flat. It would reach to her ankles. She had never seen such a dress before.

Esther licked her lips, mouth dry. What was this ghost doing here, at the back of his things, waiting for her? It had not been made for her, certainly, for as it rustled down experimentally over her body, testing her, she found it was a little too large. It exuded a delicate musty perfume. Esther’s skin suddenly recoiled, but she tied the belt at her waist, and went to the glass. She had no time for hallucinations. The belt tidied the looseness of the fabric, and now the dress might have been hers. She mastered it, and stayed herself. She combed out her hair, and took the pistol from the table drawer. Soon, the wall closed at her back, she was seated in the black chair at the black desk. She laid the pistol before her, between her hands. Then switched on the intercom.

There was an immediate response, rather garbled.

“Come through,” she said, and opened the door for them.

•   •   •

Three division sergeants, each with a corporal, and six soldiers. Their rifles hung like sharp polished sticks of licorice across their backs, and their shabby uniforms were like a symbol of some dull and incorruptible resolution.

“Good morning,” she said. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting. What did you want?” She was being polite; Standish would have been.

“Miss,” said the sergeant to her right, “last night there seems to have been a misunderstanding—” He paused, allowing her to fill in the gap with nervousness or anger. She did nothing, only looked straight at him. The sergeant cleared his throat. “Someone got the idea,” he said, “that Standish had elected you the new leader. Miss.”

“Someone,” she said, “got the right idea.”

There was a little silence. The sergeant smiled at his feet, then tilted back his head to smile down on her.

“Now, miss. Do you think you can take over a responsibility like this, even assuming you, or Doctor Finch, understood the leader correctly? We all know that the leader was very—fond of you, miss. . . . We’ll see you’re taken good care of. And the child, of course.”

“Standish and I were related. My blood-line runs direct from John Matthew Anderson,” Esther said flatly.

“Oh, miss. Half my soldiers say the same thing, and half of the half could be right.”

“Are you proposing, then, sergeant, to make one of your soldiers the next leader?”

She saw she had him. He looked pained.

“Beg your pardon, miss?”

“I took you to mean you were rejecting my claim, my legitimate claim, to which Doctor Finch is a witness. That being so, I’m interested to discover who you intend to replace me with?” There was another silence, unlike the first. “Yourself, perhaps, sergeant?”

“That would have to be decided.”

“I see.” She felt exhilarated suddenly. “Sergeant,” she said, “what do you suppose is the purpose of a leader?” His face lost its pained stiffness. She had surprised him. He was not here to answer questions, but to ask them. She thought of all the books Standish had given her access to, thought of the yellowing magazines and the gun manuals that lay about the barracks. The sergeant opened his mouth, and shut it again. She said, “Perhaps you think the leadership is just a traditional office, sergeant, a niche for a figurehead that doesn’t mean very much. So it will be quite all right for this colony to go without one while the military presence argues over the bone. Supposing, sergeant, there is an emergency during that time. Who decides, who coordinates, and who shoulders the blame if anything goes wrong? You spoke earlier about responsibility. But I don’t think you know the meaning of the word. I have been with the leader for almost four years. Do you imagine he taught me nothing?”

One of the soldiers chuckled, softly, dirtily.

She turned to him, and smiled.

“Yes. Standish taught me many excellent things in his bed. But he was also able to train me mentally, since his brain was not located in his groin. As yours, soldier, evidently is.”

A couple of the other soldiers laughed loudly at that.

She noticed one of them was Fry. I must learn all their names. And later, I’ll have to placate them, tell them how I need them. But not yet.

She stood up. She was an inch shorter than the sergeant. Apparently that was not going to matter.

“Why are we here?” she demanded of him.

“Why are we—?”

“Yes. Don’t you know? Do any of you?” She stared about at their disrupted faces. “We are here, gentlemen, because the Enemy occupy the planet Above. And who is the Enemy?” Janet Simpson, she thought, bawling out the class in school.

Her eyes came to Fry.

“The sp—” He glanced at the sergeant, then shrugged and finished, “spiders, miss. That’s what they got called.”

“Fry, you don’t call me ‘miss.’ You call me ‘Esther.’ ”

“Spiders, Esther,” said Fry. He grinned. He liked the pasting she was giving the sergeant.

She looked back at the pasted sergeant. “Who brought the colony Below?”

“John Matthew Anderson, 2001,” he said. His shoulders went back automatically at the name and date.

“Why?” she said again. But this time she had touched the great psychological barrier apparent in all of them, except herself and Standish, once. “Anderson,” she said, “brought men and women Below to escape the Invaders of earth. He did it so that we could remain human, retain our freedom, and so that we could fight. Fight them, gentlemen. Something we don’t seem to be doing much about.”

“Fighting them—that’s impossible,” one of the corporals said.

She turned to him.

“Have you ever been Above?”

“No, miss—Es—no.”

“Any of you?” she said.

“There’s a prohibition,” began the sergeant.

She cut across him: “To hell with the prohibition. If none of you has ever been Above, if none of you has ever seen a spider, how dare you assume you can’t fight them?” Absurdist argument, but it’s working. “Standish went Above,” she said. “You may recall that in David’s time, whole parties did so. And I, as you know, have been Above often. And I’ve seen them, one of them, these spiders on eight metal legs standing up as high as a building. I’ve seen it, as John Matthew saw it, my great-grandfather. And I believe, as Standish believed, and as Anderson believed, that we didn’t come Below to skulk around until the last of our race dies out. Anderson intended that we should have this as a sanctuary, but should continue to go Above, to observe the Enemy, to learn to outwit them, to gauge their weaknesses, to attempt ultimately to destroy them, even if it takes twenty lifetimes to do it. Living underground with the rats is a stop-gap, not a goal. From now on, you will think of it as such. Look at you, fine men, wasted. But not for much longer. You’ll remember we are at war. Next week, I shall guide the first party of men Above.”

“Miss,” the sergeant began.

Esther took up the pistol. She aimed it, the catch off, at his head.

“Standish also taught me to use a gun. I’m the only woman in the colony who can. Don’t think I won’t blow your brains out unless you call me as I’ve asked to be called. It’s a small matter, but it signifies your general attitude, and as you know, a soldier who disobeys his officer in time of war is court-martialed and shot. Who am I?”

“Esther,” said the sergeant.

She put down the pistol. There was unrestrained delight on the faces of the six non-ranking soldiers. They’ll remember this, she thought, and the challenge. The young ones, sick of kicking about in the half light, taking orders from dummies. The bulk of the men are the ones who’ll count. The top-brass can be changed around. They may think it’s a lark, being led by a woman. Then they’ll get used to it. Or, she thought, they may come back some night, and somehow open the door, and strangle me in bed.

“Now, gentlemen,” she said, “I think that’s all, for the moment. In another half hour I shall signal Doctor Finch and Doctor Philips, and the customary guard of honor to escort Standish to the crematorium. I shall say the prayer. I expect every member of the colony to be present. Afterwards, I’ll want to address the soldiers in the barracks. I want no more of these—misunderstandings. Is there anything else anyone wishes to say?”

The tallest of the three non-rankers clicked his heels.

“Yes, Esther.”

“Well?”

“A man was found in one of the tunnels last Darklight. An outsider, claiming to come from a Pipe.”

“There is a way down,” she said. “I’ve used it myself. Good. He may be useful, when we start going Above ourselves. Keep an eye on him, but don’t make a big thing of it. We’ll have to get accustomed to meeting the occasional stranger.”

But she was not thinking of Cury, could barely recollect him as the soldiers filed out.

When she had shut the door on them, she went back into the suite and took up the manual. She began to write in it.

I know who I am now. Standish must have been my father. Anderson’s there in me, Caroline Elizabeth, too. I think I may even be wearing her dress for the affair.

I know what I have to do. And I have more purpose than any of them, which Standish was always telling me, one way or another.

I remember that thing standing in the purple river, owning the world. And I want to topple it, smash it, tear up the moss, the weed, the colored grass—their color—and build on the ruins. Wild dream. But even a dream’s better than Darklight. There’s so much—and I’m not even twenty. I have the time.

Chapter Nine

The soldiers had been teaching Cury poker, at which they staked their whisky rations. They were tolerant of him, boastful, made him the butt of certain in-jokes, but did not dislike him. For he seemed well-alert, would sometimes submit a quick remark to let them know it, while at the same time, the jibes slid off him. They got the infallibly winning impression he admired them, but did not fear them. Neither of these impressions was correct.

Doctor Philips, the urbane, had also taken a shine to Cury. Cury responded to his attentions as if here was one who could bestow lifelong immunity to all disease. Another mistake.

Cury was dressed now in new clothes from the stores, and sported them as if he had never had such finery or comfort in all his days. Error three. But Patty had brought the clothes, and that might have loaned them some gloss.

“I stitched up that shirt myself. I actually made it for Steiner, but he’s got plenty.” The shirt was of course too large for Cury. “Aren’t you thin. Have to take it in a bit. Have to fatten you up.”

“Kind Patty,” he said.

“No trouble.”

Standish was buried an hour after the midday meal, rather later than planned. By then they had told Cury he was free to go where he pleased.

Esther spoke the religious words over the old man’s body. Patty looked aside at Cury and saw him staring at Esther, his eyes bright and wide. Once, he seemed to be panting, he was breathing so quickly. Then Standish was taken up by the soldiers, on the white stretcher, and carried away.

“She won’t last long,” said Patty, “that Esther. They’re crazy. How can a girl be leader? She makes me sick. And she’s spiteful as a cat. She attacked me once. She did. But Steiner stopped her. She was hitting me and punching me.” She glanced aside at Cury to see the effect of her revelation. His eyes were glistening and remote, and he licked his mouth. “Yes,” he said.

“Well, I got to be going.”

He pulled himself together then and recalled she was kind Patty, and hoped she’d stay to help him find his way about.

“Well. . . . It’s only the washing rota. My hands could do with a rest. It’ll mean double-shift in ten days, but never mind.”

To her surprise she discovered he did indeed want to discover the lay-out of the underground complex. He seemed to be trying to memorize everything. She should have been bored.

“I’m used to the open, you see. It scares me, down here, a bit.”

“Just like a little boy. Need looking after.”

“You’ll look after me, won’t you, Patty?”

“We’ll see. Depends what you mean.”

They went to eat the evening meal together, and Cury talked to their neighbors at all the tables, and got on well with everybody. He asked about all the things that were done Below, interested, anxious to learn. He was essentially compatible. Like a chameleon.

The soldiers made fresh jokes, because they had never, they said, known Patty to go after a civ before. “She’ll take him the long way round tonight.”

But the girls in the refectory wanted to know about the life Above, the rough life he had survived and that they were sheltered from.

“Bad?” said Cury. “Oh yes. You’d have to be there to know. You lie up in ditches, old barns in winter. Nowhere to get warm—you get a cough with the cold weather that never lets up. It can kill you. I’ve seen it happen. Luxury is persuading a handful of sticks to burn. Sometimes there’s a house, but you share it with the rats. If you’re lucky, rotten vegetables in the garden you can eat. But all the time, running, keeping low—” (He omitted to say running from what, the forbidden topic.) “I lost all of my group in the snow. There wasn’t much reason to keep living after that. But somehow you do. And late at night—it’s really dark, the night up there—you sit and wonder if you’re the last human thing alive.”

One of the girls began to be very sympathetic, but Patty caught her eye, and the girl remembered she had to be somewhere else.

“You don’t want to look at that bitch,” said Patty. “Some of the soldiers reckon she’s a bit weird.”

Cury smiled. “I can hear a generator all the time. Is it through there?”

“Yes, it’s back through the kitchens.”

“Tell me,” he said, “with electricity, why are there unlit lamps on the tables?”

“To use when we recharge the generator. Once there was a blackout—”

“Oil-lamps,” said Cury. “And paraffin—do you have that as well?”

“Don’t you want to know a lot. Yes, we’ve got everything here. Now ask something about me.”

“How did you get to have such beautiful eyes?”

“Go on. I’ll tell you something you didn’t ask. I know where some of the soldiers keep their whisky ration in the stores. Let’s go and get a drink. They won’t miss it.”

“Clever Patty,” Cury said.

When Cury looked at her, Patty experienced the most peculiar feeling. The more time she spent with him, the more intense the feeling became. When he was not looking at her he seemed quite ordinary, and she would half wonder what she was doing with him. Then he would turn and his eyes, strange and gray-pale, would meet with hers, and the feeling would start up all over her again. It made her imagine that whatever he told her to do or say or even think, she would do it, say it, think it, no matter what. She had never felt such a sensation before. It scared her, and her fear excited her. It was like being in the dark of the tunnels just beyond the last lights, and the man you were with was too shadowy to see anymore, and he might be . . . anything, there in the dark, and you couldn’t be certain. Those times were always the best.

She took Cury’s arm, and swung her hips. The soldiers at the wall nudged each other.

Where the passages gave way to tunnels, she led him into a side store, where the light was very dim and flickering, and cans of paraffin were stacked one on top of the other, and rope lay coiled like sleeping snakes. Something in all this seemed to thrill Cury. Perhaps being alone with Patty?

“Here it is,” said Patty, “behind this old stove. All this whisky. See? They don’t reckon I know about it.” She tipped a little alcohol into a tin mug and gave it to him. “Cheers.”

Cury drank. “It’s dark here,” he said. He passed the mug back to her.

“Dark bother you? What, after all those black nights Above you keep on about? I like the dark. Drink up.”

“Does Esther drink?” asked Cury.

“No, she doesn’t. She’s a cold-blooded piece of work.”

“I didn’t think she would.”

“Come on,” Patty murmured, “you don’t want to think about her. She’s no good to you.”

The liquor had risen to her head almost at once, combined with the acrid fumes of the paraffin. She walked close to Cury and slid her hands round his thin body and put her mouth on his.

“My, you are a shy one, aren’t you. Don’t you know any better than that?”

“It’s been a long time,” he said. Which was another lie.

He began to explore her mouth with his tongue, slowly, almost inquisitively. She stirred, impatient, opening her eyes, and saw his eyes were also open, and that he was examining her face, watching her reaction. This excited her extraordinarily. She unbuttoned her blouse and clutched his hands on to her breasts, and he began to stroke them in the same careful, thorough, analytical way, as if trying to find out what she was made of. She rubbed herself urgently against his groin.

“Oh, no,” he said softly into her mouth. “No, Patty, that’s not what I want.”

“What then?” she asked breathlessly.

•   •   •

The young soldier came whistling down the tunnel in the muddy Darklight, and swung aside into the store. The sour after-taste of the old man’s funeral had coupled with the sour physical after-taste of the evening meal, and he needed a drink. He had lost his whisky ration the previous night, in the poker game, but someone had let fall that Gibbs and Naylor sometimes left their liquor behind the old stove, for when they brought women here.

The lights were not good so near the fringe of the complex. It was a sound that first checked him, the sound of a rat, chittering. The soldier did not like rats. He took out and switched on his battery torch, and flashed it across the store. He noticed the tins of paraffin were disturbed, then the beam caught five large rats on the floor near his feet. Two looked up, their eyes scintillating, then returned busily to their interrupted activity. All five were lapping, like picture-book kittens from a stream of spilled canned milk. Only the milk was red.

The soldier did not properly understand, as yet. He moved around the rats, behind the tins. Another pair of eyes lit up in the torch beam, not rat eyes, this time. They belonged to a yellow-haired girl with a bright scarlet scarf that trailed down over her naked breasts in shiny unraveled strands.

“Patty?” the soldier asked. “Come on, Patty—”

Patty continued to stare at him, not blinking.

The soldier ran outside. He dragged off his rifle and fired twice into the silence of the tunnel.

Chapter Ten

When I spoke to the soldiers, Esther wrote in the manual, I realized precisely what I was up against. The realization almost threw me, in fact. Because I was up against nothing. Nothing at all. I’ve been writing all day, putting down everything I could remember, trivial or important, that ever happened between Standish and myself. It seemed the only way I could make sense of anything—past, present, future, and the way I feel, the hanging back and reluctance before, and now this surge of wanting to do, to achieve—Is it just that before, I had no means, no power? When I was helpless, I couldn’t even begin to see it?

When Finch came back, with Philips, and the men, to take Standish, I almost couldn’t let them. I thought I was past all that. But we constantly surprise ourselves. I kept thinking, Christ, Christ, this is the last time I shall ever see him, the last time I’ll be able to touch him, or talk to him. But it wasn’t him at all, only the leftovers. Finch looked white. He didn’t look at me once. He checked the body so doggedly, I knew he was moved. But he’s a bastard. Philips chattily told me some more about the stranger—Cury. How he’d seemed so fit, despite the cut on his forehead, that he must have known how to look after himself pretty well out in the wilds. Philips likes him because Cury sucked up to him and made him feel charming and a genius. Cury worries me. I had a sort of dream about him which I can’t remember. But I’m not Anderson, I couldn’t just shoot another human thing in cold blood, however alien it seemed. Alien. I suppose no human is ever that. Only They are that.

They were all there at Standish’s “funeral,” the sheep of the colony, baaing to each other. Nobody looked distressed, or even concerned, nobody else challenged me. Then I gave my speech to the soldiers. They didn’t seem to mind. They took it. Something has atrophied Below, down here in the dark. Oh yes, why care about Standish, he never cared about them, not really. Except maybe as a sort of exercise of the mind, like chess. And that’s why he didn’t make provision, was it? Not to spur me on, but he just never got around to it. So he, too, fell prey to the malaise. He’d lost the sense of purpose they’ve all lost, yet which I, somehow, have acquired.

The soldiers in the barracks responded to the idea of putting up a fight against the Invaders. The same reaction as I saw with the younger ones before. As for a girl leader, they seem already to have accepted that. Leaders are only window-dressing after all, aren’t they? They never really interfere. By the time they grasp I am constantly interfering, I’ll be inadvertently accepted. Maybe then, after a suitable interval, I can miscarry. Or maybe I do have to let someone else in on the secret, and let them give me the heir. If I’m even fertile. . . .

And Standish is only cinders now, black ash on the bottom of the red-hot tubes, Standish my father, who in ancient Egypt could have married me. The dead pharaoh, led to the underworld by Anubis the Jackal, conductor of souls. Which keeps reminding me of Cury—

I keep thinking of how he asked me for water on that street above, but it had rained all afternoon. Rained. And he was a fugitive, living for months in the wilds. So why didn’t he find a rain-pool and drink? Why did he want water from a flask?

Esther put down the pen and rose. She looked about the black and white room, and her eyes fastened inevitably on the emptiness of the white chair.

“So,” she said, “a chair.”

She went across and sat in it, and at once she heard the sound of violence.

It seemed to come straight through the wall beyond the kitchen unit, conducted by metal, where the pipe ran, but in fact presumably it came from some way off, in the tunnels beyond.

One shot.

Then another.

Esther left the chair slowly, her eyes unfocused, still listening. Was it a fight?

No further shots followed.

It was very late; Esther checked the clock. Almost without thinking, she took the pistol from the drawer and slipped it into the deep pocket of the blue dress. She went into the outer room, shutting the inner door, and signaled the corridor. Sometimes there would be soldiers there, not always—

A man’s voice: “Yes, Esther?”

“I heard shots, Steiner. What’s happening?”

“We heard them too, Esther. Royce and Parrish have gone to see. It sounds like it’s near the paraffin store. There’s some liquor there, might be trouble over that.”

“Signal me when you know, Steiner.”

“Yes,” he said, “Esther.”

Going back into the apartment, she took the manual and wrote:

Someone shooting. This has never happened before in my lifetime.

She was not certain why she did this.

Then she waited. And as she waited she saw the previous sentences written, and she thought Cury.

Then there came a noise outside, confused, and the buzzer sounded. She went out and opened the corridor entry at once.

Steiner stepped through, and saluted her, which was more than she had ever asked for. Parish and Royce, not saluting, stepped after. Outside, someone was moaning, and someone else said, “Snap out of it. Pull yourself together.”

“Esther, there’s a girl been killed, in the store. Patty.”

Esther’s stomach gave a little lurch. Stupid, pretty, lively, evil Patty. Dead.

“How?”

“We don’t know, m—Esther,” said Parrish. “We think a big rat might’ve done it.”

“Or a dog,” said Royce. “Got down the entrance, like that feller.”

“Something tore out her throat,” Steiner clarified.

•   •   •

Fry and his girl were in one of the narrower darker corridors leading to the refectory, too far to the east of the complex to have heard the shots.

Fry had not been with this particular girl before. She was very young, and nervous, and it was probably her first time. But he wasn’t doing too badly with her till, abruptly, her pliant quivering body went rigid under his hands.

He pushed back and looked at her. Her face was scared and she was staring over his shoulder with her eyes bulging, like the girl on one of the tattered covers of Real Murder.

Fry’s spine tingled unpleasantly. Very slowly, he turned himself round, and looked. First behind him, then up and down the corridor, which was empty.

“You trying some game?” Fry demanded.

The girl jabbered, then began to cry.

“I saw something. It was there.”

“Saw what? Or just thought it’d be fun to frighten the shit out of me?”

“Something—in the shadow, standing there looking at us. Smiling—”

“What was?”

“A—man—a sort of man—”

“Either it’s a man, or it’s not. Shall I show you the difference?”

“No—you’ve got to listen—there was blood all round his mouth, and down his shirt—and I thought, he’s hurt himself—but he was smiling and smiling and there was blood on his teeth—”

Fry glared in her face.

“Okay, you’ve changed your mind. Well, I haven’t. So you can have it nice, or you can have it rough. But you’re going to sticking get it. So which is it to be?”

“If you don’t believe me,” sobbed the girl, “look on the wall.”

Fry spun round again, cursing. And made out, on the surface of the pitted whitewash, the print of four red fingers.

The girl, released from his physical and mental hold, wept more vigorously.

“Shut up, you fool,” Fry hissed. He took his gun from where he had leaned it.

When the girl fell silent, hugging herself with terror, there was no sound at all, just their breathing, the vague pulse of the generator. Fry pivoted, eyes wide.

“Can you—” Fry said, “can you smell something—something burning? Jesus God—stay there—No, wait, go and get someone, quick—” Fry set off at a run up the gloomy passage, leaving the girl behind, his rifle ready in both hands. “Christ,” he kept saying, “Christ.” He rounded the turning of the corridor and made leftward, toward the refectory. The odor was stronger now, the charred wet-fur stink of scorched rope, and the sweet vinegar fumes of petrol or paraffin-mix. The light was brighter, too, but flickering bright.

Fry came suddenly to the refectory entrance, burst through the double doors, and stopped.

Fire had got there first. Fire not boxed in by the bars of an incinerator or a stove or the glass shell of a lamp, but fire that was raw, twitching, alive, and growing like quick gold leaves on a great plant. A vast festival of fire nibbling up the smoking snakes of rope as they lay coiled over the tables and among the chairs, or swung from the low ceiling, chains of fire, with birds of fire perching in them, fluttering their wings. And behind all this, the ultimate orange carnival of the blazing kitchens, snapping and roaring a cracking—

Fry coughed in the smoke. He angled his rifle wildly, blind with tears and fumes. Part of him wanted to shoot at the fire.

There came the softest crooning laugh behind him.

Fry reversed himself.

“You bastard!” cried Fry’s gagging hating mouth, “Where are you, you bastard?”

But he could see nothing. Sparks whirled, and his clothing smoldered. Fry choked, and the rifle went off between his hands.

And then the world went off all around him.

•   •   •

The first explosion was very loud, a sharp rending blast. Immediately after, the Darklight flashed once, and went out, leaving a great hole of blackness. In the blackness, the second explosion manifested, more gentle, dull and concussive, a long way off from the first.

Then the screaming started, in the distance, like something in a dream. Something that, if ignored, might cease to be.

Esther shook her head, trying irrationally to clear her eyes of the black ink which filled them.

Then she got hold of herself.

“Steiner,” she said. Her voice hung beads of ice on the black. “Royce. Parrish.”

They answered her in voices of stone. Far off, the screaming, here the nucleus of calm. For how long?

“The generator,” she said.

“Must be. That bang. The generator.”

She said, “Any lamps?”

“The refectory, but that’s gone too, from the row. The stores in the west end would have them. But how do we get there?”

She recaptured the winter when the generator failed, the pitch-black, and all the lamps around, which no one had lit though they waited only inches away. How she attempted to familiarize herself afterward with the winding of the complex, her eyes clamped shut. Then she had only wanted to know her way to the pipes, and that way lay just behind her, now. All she had to do was open the wall, and go through (the well-known rooms easy to negotiate), climb into the hatch—and she would be there, would need merely to crawl and push herself, as so many times before, up toward the light of the moon and the open air.

She said, “Somehow we have to get to the generator, assess the damage. Do any of you have battery torches?”

“No, Esther,” Steiner said; she thought it had been Steiner who answered all the questions before. “There aren’t enough to go round. Only tunnel patrols are supposed to carry them.”

“That will mean a few men have them.”

“Should do. If they keep their heads enough to remember to use them.”

“Where will they go, these men? Back to barracks?”

“Should do.”

She moved her hand over the desk controls and found out the signal that would communicate with the barracks. But there was no answer. Who would be listening for a buzzer? She found her other hand was caressing the wall-switch that would let her back into the apartment where the pipe was waiting.

“Steiner,” she said. “How do you reach the barracks from here?”

He started to tell her, then faltered.

“No,” she said. “Not visually. How many turns left and right?”

“Straight left, then right, about forty paces, left—”

“Right,” Parrish cut in, “right, you stupid bugger, do you want to get us lost?”

“It’s left,” said Steiner solidly. Then he swore. “No, it isn’t. I’m not certain, Esther. You get used to seeing your way.”

“I know,” she said.

Royce began cursing. She felt his panic and anger electric on the dark. She could feel all of them there, etched red and white on her blind pupils; she could hear every breath they took, and her own heart, and the fluids gliding in her veins and guts. Senses compensating for each other, she thought dogmatically. The button that would let her into the apartment seemed melting under her hand. Go on, she thought, open the wall and run. Take these three with you if you want to act savior, if you want company, up there. But go—get out—get out!

“Listen,” she said, “I think I can find the way to the women’s dormitory, and there’s a lamp there—just one. They may have got it alight, or they may have tried and broken it. But it’s a chance.”

“The lights might come on,” Parrish said hoarsely. “If we wait. We know where we are here. But if we go out, get ourselves lost—”

“The lights won’t repair themselves this time,” she said. “The emergency would have taken over by now if it were possible. The generator’s blown. As for getting lost, we all know our way about perfectly well, if we give ourselves a chance.”

It won’t work, she thought, but it sounds good. Come on then, get your hand off the bloody switch. She drew back her hand, and the button clung like toffee to her finger. What am I doing? She reached the doorway, not colliding with them, guided by the body heat of their fear. She said aloud, “Keep close to me, to each other, and to the right-hand wall.”

They were out. The wall was dank and cold. They kept close. It’s a game. Follow the leader. Blind man’s buff. I can’t stand it. She wanted to press her hands over her eyes to keep the blackness out. As she moved, fireworks burst on her pupils, making her almost jerk back to avoid them. She wanted to shake her head and scream and beat her fists on the wall and tear the darkness down the middle like thick cloth, with all her strength. But she kept on moving quietly, and shut the images away in her mind.

In a while, someone came blundering at them, panting, shrieking, stumbling. Esther caught the tang of female sweat, and long hair lashed her face—and then Steiner had snatched at the girl and she screeched more terribly.

“Keep still, you’re okay. Keep with us—”

Then Stainer cursed and the struggle ended and the girl fled on into the fathomless nothing all around.

“Silly bloody nit—she bit me. Gone crazy—”

Yes, the instinct should have been to cling to them, fellow creatures in the abyss. But instincts had gone rotten here. To the fleeing girl, what phantom of terror had they become as the world fell apart? Left, here.

It occurred to her she would be passing by the store where Patty—she had forgotten Patty.

Left again. Right. Move steady, no thought required. Just give yourself a chance.

“Esther—where the hell are we?”

Parrish’s voice, frightened, behind her.

She sniffed, her nostrils full of the tar and old-rain smell she associated with the branching tunnels east of Standish’s apartment.

“We’re all right. In the tunnels. Royce? Steiner?”

“Yes, we’re still with you,” Steiner said. He too, was keeping calm. Did it cost him the same effort? “Seems quieter, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t we be moving closer to all that noise?”

She noticed the screaming sound had fallen off. Wrong direction? No, no, she was sure. Twists of the tunnels then, oh God, snakes’ tails, left, right, these divided the noise off from them.

“Might try a signaling shot,” said Steiner casually.

“Yes, you could,” Esther said. Thank God, he’s like a rock. She heard him lift the rifle, not fumbling much. Steiner, the rock on whom my church is builded—the shot, though she had braced herself, jarred her, spilling adrenalin through her body.

After a moment, they went on again, not speaking.

She could smell paraffin now. The stores, probably, to the left. No, someone would have moved Patty, taken her to the hospital, before the explosion—Esther halted, all the other thoughts, sensations, fears, odors, driven back. The new aroma was acrid, and it had a color, somehow. Gray-blue, the color of the dress—smoke.

“Esther,” Steiner said behind her.

“Yes,” she said. “Stupid not to think of it. Something’s on fire.”

Parrish whimpered oaths.

“Shut up,” Steiner said to him, and Parrish was silent.

Esther said, “Someone may have it in hand already. But let’s put some speed on.”

She broke into a trot; they followed.

But she thought, Sheep don’t put out fires. They’ll just panic and mill about—I want to run straight the other way. But I’m programmed now, mechanical. On, on, into the breach—Turn right. Right again.

And now there began to be a noise after all, a new noise, an undercurrent of rustlings and murmurings, here or there pierced by some louder note, a wail, a groan. To this the screaming had sunk, but it was equally mindless and unhelpful. There was no reason in it. Worse, unlike the shrieks that had gone before, this had a hint of consent to it. Despair. Resignation.

“Damn them, the fools,” she said aloud. And Steiner said, “Need Livening up,” almost jovially.

Somewhere far away there came then a brief livening, a wash of shouts, and a shot—it might have been a signal, but she guessed it was nothing like that. Steiner made no comment on the shot, and did not attempt to answer it.

“Nearly at the dormitory,” she said. “Go carefully. There are terrified people here and we’re nearly in the middle of them.”

And the sound of mindless fear was suddenly very close as they angled left, very close and very intense, and soft, compliant. Fresh noises, too. Shower water running unheeded, and a woman calling a name, maybe that of a child. Deep buried in the interminable folds of jet-black velvet.

“We’re there, Steiner. The doorway here—here? Yes. Put out your hand? Got it? Now careful.”

“Sue!” Parrish yelled, “Sue are you in there?”

Royce made a lunge, vividly audible in the blindness. “Shut up!”

“Sue!” Parrish went on yelling.

Steiner turned. Esther heard the violent open-palmed slap. The target must have been located by touch.

Silence again, but for the moaning sound in the dormitory. There had been no particular response to Parrish’s howls.

Esther did not want to walk forward, tripping and blundering on soft bodies. The notion repelled her, the contact with their surrender. But Parrish had gone past her, a gust of heat, and she could hear him floundering there, and the little lost squeaks that scudded up from the tumbled mouse-city as his boots went in their faces, and he whimpered for his girl, Sue.

“Steiner,” Esther said, “that lamp. I think—”

But the lamp was magic, if lethal, and at her words, ignited.

The blackness opened in a great red fan. Esther put out her hands and fell forward as the earth turned over. The edge of a bunk caught the side of her head. She could not tell if the roar of sound came from inside her skull or out of it.

Screaming again, all about. Waves of warmth, buffets, impact, which were living, rushing flesh. It pushed by her, and over her. A bare foot, passing, kicked her in the side. She scarcely felt it. Somewhere a bunk toppled down. Then came a crack, and a whisper, from overhead. The roof is going, does that matter? Yes. She felt herself slipping under water. No, she thought. She scrabbled with her hands, trying to raise herself. She leaned on a bunk, her head hanging, and someone crashed into her, knocked her back on to the floor. It had been so difficult to raise herself, and now she must do it again. She managed a little, then crawled. She was in the pipe, and all the mice were with her, striving to overcome each other and get out. Someone trod on her back, not heavily, was gone. Someone trod on her hand. Four bolts of pain went off in her fingers and died there, leaving them numb. Left hand. Don’t mind it. Sword hand, gun hand, safe . . . Steiner, she said, or thought she did. Why don’t you help me? Standish, Standish. Plaster and loose stones clattered on the floor from overhead.

Suddenly the space about her cleared. She opened her eyes.

Vision. Dim reddish firelight. She could see.

“Everything’s on fire. I have to get up before the ceiling falls in.”

She was on her knees, on her feet. She put her left hand on the wall to steady herself, and screamed. Two fingers were broken, she was not sure which, it seemed to change. She moved, without the support of the wall, to the doorway.

There was a black river in flood in the corridor, calling and shouting. Behind, the passage was dancing red.

She leaned by the new wall, careful, and presently the flood had gone by. Where had they gone to? The pipes? Not even a quarter of them could escape that way in time. She went out into the corridor. A child’s sock lay on the floor. That was all. Except for the irregular marks on the walls of bloody hands.

No one left. No Steiner. No Standish.

They need not have cremated Standish after all. Only waited a little.

Esther began to walk slowly, away from the fire. Her head rang. Her left side was full of a white gnawing animal, its teeth sank in her fingers, its claws in her joints, its tail lashing in her breast.

“Joan of Arc was burned—oh, yes, she was the one, the one who heard the voices. And Faust burned in Hell.” Her legs gave way. She sat against the wall. There was a cold black air blowing into her face from the right end of the passage; it was refreshing. Move, you cow, she thought.

She did not move.

•   •   •

There was a dog licking her face.

She struck at it and it sprang back.

“Esther,” someone said.

Esther looked up and saw one last shadow squatting facing her across the corridor.

“Come on, Esther. I’ll help you. Didn’t I come back for you, when I saw you weren’t with the others?”

“Cury. Cuoory.”

“I know your fingers are broken. Did you? We’ll get someone to fix it.”

Esther smiled.

“Scared to go back in the pipe alone, Cury? Don’t worry, you won’t have to. Most of us are going to have to stay and roast.”

“No. Anyway, the fire’s been put out. And we don’t need the pipe. Come on and I’ll show you.”

Smoke blew along the corridor, but it came from the right now, it smelled spent. There was hardly any light, none of it red.

Cury came at her, and caught her sound hand. He tried to pull her to her feet.

“Go to Hell,” she said.

“That’s where we are, isn’t it?” He grinned. He was excited. “Hell, just like your Standish said in his manual. The Underworld. And Persephone, having eaten the pomegranate seeds, doesn’t want to leave.”

Something shifted in her brain. She let him haul at her, and helped herself, and stood up.

“What?” she asked.

“That’s fresh air blowing in your face. Can’t you tell? Part of the tunnel’s collapsed farther on, there’s a way out. A way up.”

Holding her right hand, he began to run. She found herself running with him.

They turned a corner, down a tunnel. Behind them came a soft gushing sound of falling powder. Running made her feel sick. She closed her eyes.

Suddenly she was very cold. Her nostrils widened on a smell of frost and growing things, of wind and cool stone and sap: The scents of the springtime city.

Cury patted her eyelids gently. “Look, Esther.”

She looked.

A great staircase, real steps woven in the rubble, twisted ironwork and torn brick. At the top, a circle of sky, graying in the hour before dawn.

She stared at the circle. It was perfect. How could it be so perfect?

Cury pulled at her. They started to climb. It was hard, with only one hand. She thought she would fall. Pebbles and bits of broken stuff, dislodged by their passage, rattled away around them. Scraps of clothing fluttered, memorial to the earliest ascent of the multitude. A man lay, trampled, between two shards of metal like stiff grieving arms.

“I can’t,” said Esther. She lay with her face on the steps.

“Oh, you must,” said Cury. In the watered starlight, she saw there was blood on his shirt, and on his cheek. “Do you want me to break another of your fingers?”

She got up, and began to move again.

“That’s better,” he said.

“Shut up,” she spat at him, dirt in her mouth.

The circle of the light came wavering nearer and nearer. She passed two more bodies, and recognized one with bemused surprise as a dead Doctor Philips.

She could see the moon now, a spring moon like a crystal. She had to try to use her other hand at the lip of the circle. Cury helped her. She got through the last part of their journey in a daze of agony and disgust, and silence.

She was lying on the paving of the city, and sensed many others near her, stirring and sobbing and muttering or breathing. Cury kneeled by her, stroking her hair.

“We’re here now, Esther.”

She sat up and hit him in the face, spontaneously.

And a great shrilling went over the sky above her, and through the paving beneath. She had heard it only once before.

Esther climbed again to her feet.

All around her, in among the rubble of fallen buildings, men and women were lying or sitting huddled, and children cried softly. A few groups of the soldiers sat motionless, their guns on the cement. Across a highway and in the fringe of a park there, lay a bundle of bodies in uniform, and parts of the ground about them were burned to a sort of black lava, and the trees twisted like wire. A glancing shot it must have been. Anderson had said that a full hit left everything in ashes, trees, ground, men. But there was still a smell of cooked meat on the morning wind.

Esther realized she was the only thing on its feet, apart from the three sentinels who stood in triangular formation, one south, one east, and one west against the sinking moon. Spiders.

They did not move, except for one, which was mildly rotating its dome. They gleamed in the moonlight. Real.

Esther looked down at Cury.

“Smoked out,” she said. “Sniffed out first, by a dog. You. Betrayer. You started the fire.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Why? What do they want from us? What are you? You’re human, like us.”

“Physically. Not otherwise. I’m not like you.”

“And they are—”

“Gods,” said Cury. “Omnipotent. I happen to have the honor of serving them. Don’t be afraid. I think I can look after you. They might find you useful, too.”

“Count me out, you little turd. I’m human. And they are vomit from the black space over the sky.”

“They can hear every word,” Cury said, “and understand it, in case you’re wondering.”

“Well, let them kill me then,” Esther said, “and show how clever they are.”

“They wouldn’t waste their energy.” Such pride in his voice. Hubris by proxy.

“You,” she said. “Jackal, fawning lap-dog. You’re supposed to be Mercury, aren’t you, the gods’ messenger.”

Cury tilted back his head, and the moon sailed in his mirror eyes.

Another spider wailed, farther away beyond the line of the ruins. One of the silver triangle answered it.

“Better rest,” said Cury. “We’ll be on the road at dawn.”

What now? Do I run, or do I raise the pistol and fire at them, invite them to kill me? Do I kill myself, or the jackal?

But she did not touch the pistol, and she only walked a few yards, dissociating herself from the hapless junkyard of the crowd. Her footsteps echoed. She sat down on the old highway alone, to face the bleak sunrise.

PART TWO

THE OLYMPIANS

(The Horse’s Skull)

Chapter One

He never made love to her. He sent her a surrogate for that. One of her own kind. This other now lay along her side, strongly formed and very male, and gave to her his body warmth and his tanned golden skin. Like food when she was hungry.

“You know, I always liked you, Ess. Always fancied you. I did. That night he died, Standish, I remember I was just thinking about you, that maybe we’d get together sometime when he—after he went. And when I heard he was dead, I nearly bit my tongue out of my head. But you’re great, Ess, you know that? You make me think of one of those racing dogs they used to have—I had a picture of one, once, greyhounds. Come on, kiss me again, the way you do. I like that. Where’d you learn? Off the old man? I bet you did, even if he never—well, who cares if he never did. Nicer for me, wasn’t it, all of you, all new and sweet. You’ve got lovely tits. Christ, you have. Go on, Esther. Kiss me again.”

So she kissed him again, and when it was over again, and he lay temporarily helpless on the pillows and her flesh, his long eyelashes stuck down on his cheeks, a wave of sorrow filled her like pain. For him.

Then the not-unmelodious thin piping sounded in the wall nearby.

“Balls,” he said. “Got to be going.” And he dragged himself away, and took his clothes, which were different from the uniform he had always worn before, and put them on. “See you,” he said at the door. “Soon? Keep it neat for me.”

“See you soon,” she said. “Very soon, Steiner.”

She had never called him by his first name, did not even think she knew it. Was that wrong, that she did this with him, and did not know his given name? Probably it was the name of his father, or grandfather. That would have been quite usual, in the colony. Her body still pulsed from his dual visitation—sometimes he could manage to possess her three times during the afternoon—and when she rose, the life of his semen, pure and burning hot, would slip from her loins. She had not experienced any climax today; that was often the case. But there was always pleasure in the act with him, his need, his mere proximity. She enjoyed the sheer drive of his sexuality, in which there was nothing hesitant. At the beginning, once the discomfort of virginity had abated, she had exploded into ecstasy on every occasion. But that faded. She knew enough by then to pretend. The fault, if so it must be termed, was in her. She did not really want the distraction of orgasm, she wanted the proof of strength and the urge toward life which he represented. Even if both were futile. And because of this, these afternoons, she would keep him alive. Just as Cury had kept her alive, for his own wants. And Finch the doctor was kept alive for his medical skill. Probably he would outlast all of them. Meanwhile, of the old order, the people from the Underworld Below, only they three could truly be said to have survived, prospects being what they were.

Shortly Esther got up from the bed. It required no tidying; although constructed in the normal way, the materials were alien. The pillows, left alone, gradually swelled up and smoothed themselves by some form of internal air pressure, also the mattress and under-sheet of the bed, once the human body quitted them, lost all impress and every crease. There was no covering. The rooms were always of an even temperature, like that of a fine young summer. While to the notion of concealment inherent in even a single sheet, the makers of the bed had been impervious.

Presently Esther went out of the window-doors, which opened as she approached and closed again behind her, on to the high terrace which overlooked the city. This city.

There was a slight haze, as there frequently was in the early morning, or the late part of the afternoon. Out of the haze, the shapes of the city rose. They were pale oblongs, pale spirals and ovals and pyramids, some very tall, and each completely featureless, just as the sheets became, creaseless, as if they had never been touched. There were no apparent windows in the city, and entrances and exits only came visible as they now and then opened to admit or dismiss various traffic. They were like round mouths saying, ‘O,’ and next swallowing shut. Streets ran between the buildings, and a type of bridge up in the air to link some of the frontages together. These too were of a pale textureless material. Literally they had no texture, for Esther had sometimes walked in the city: The pavements, if so they could be described, were like a close-pored milky metal-foil. As for the traffic itself, which used the streets, the bridges, and frequently the spaces of sky, coming down to land nearly silently on the high roofs, it had a diversity of forms, like the buildings; so many in fact that the novelty itself caused a kind of indifference. One did not know what any of the traffic signified. She had asked Cury, at the start, but he had said, beaming at her, “Vessels of the gods. I don’t know. Forget it. You wouldn’t understand if I could tell you.” She had constantly fought against him at that time, since at that time she had constantly fought against everything, in spurts. Apparently uselessly. And so the fight stopped.

Save for the whispers of alighting or lifting mobiles, it was very quiet in the city. Only rarely did that sound grate over the thoroughfares—that signaling shriek of a spider. She had learned by now, a matter of perception and common sense born of familiarity, that the spiders were not, of course, the aliens themselves. They were merely another type of transport, designed incidentally to terrify by seeming sentience, and a resemblance to a non-human life-form. That was why Anderson had missed the truth, presumably. They had fooled him. But he had never been as near the facts, or for as long, as she had.

Sometimes too, in the almost utter quiet of the city, it was possible to hear the sea half a mile away. Southwards, the city went to the sea’s edge and stretched out there long arms of milky foil across the water, to the horizon, and maybe beyond. There were sea craft, too, naturally, in that section. When it grew dark, eyes winked from the water, up in the air, on the bridges and the streets, and she could remember how the cities of men had been supposed to look in Anderson’s youth, lit up and moving fast with peculiar vehicles. She had seen the remnants of those, or of some, but never seen any of them whole—and so she found them impossible to visualize properly. While these alien things she looked at constantly were now a mundane, day-to-day item of her life.

By day, the sky over the city was not really blue. It was not a shade of earth. The plants and trees and creepers that thrived in the streets, and which sporadically obtained a purchase on the buildings themselves, finding unseen footholds, were all of the range of a purple palette, like the moss in the river, passing through mauve and lilac to magenta, and through lavender to a purplish indigo almost black. And they had tinted the atmosphere with some curious exhalation, which in turn altered the sky. Was it poison? Would it eventually kill them all, the earthlings in the city? Very likely. For it was not even earth, anymore, this place on earth. It had been changed as, in the end, perhaps all earth’s surface would be charged, becoming like that other world, theirs.

Under the terrace was a small walled court with a lawn of purple velvet grass. Three of the walls had creeper growing on them. In the fourth, where the creeper never grew, was a panel. Sometimes it would light up, and incomprehensible patterns go over it, and go out. Its function, for obviously it had one, was unknown to Esther. Cury, if he knew, would not explain.

He was in the court now, having just come up out of the city. He stood looking at her, then hurried over the ramp on to the terrace.

“Did you have a nice time, Persephone?”

“I always do,” Esther said, “when you’re not here.”

She turned and walked back into the room.

This oblong building where Esther lived, sometimes with Cury, and sometimes alone, was like the others, though set a little apart from them in an open avenue, which in turn led to the compound. Most of the other humans lived in the compound, thousands of them it would seem, she did not know how many. There were no windows in her building to look out at the square or the avenue. Only the terrace gave a partial view of them. Several times, in the past months, Esther had seen, from the terrace, long processions of people filing up the avenue into the square, going on into the city. But these sightings were distant, some twenty stories down, and so it was difficult to be sure of details. A spider transport would always be in attendance, these easier to see, being so much larger. She never saw anyone coming back.

“Wasn’t he any good, then,” said Cury, “this afternoon? Your soldier boy? We’ll have to get rid of him. Find you another one that can do it.”

“He can do it,” said Esther. “You’re the one that can’t do anything.”

“Dear Persephone. Always so gracious. I can do everything, just in a different way.”

“You’re a perverted little creep, a traitor, rubbish.” She told him this only mildly, having done so often before. She found the word traitor outmoded; it did not properly fit what Cury was. She needed some new, dirtier word, and could not think of one.

“Anderson would have shot me,” said Cury. “Where is he? And where’s your wonderful old man, your Standish?”

“Be quiet.”

“Make me.”

His eyes were bright. He panted at her.

She had no choice. She had tried refusals, but given up. They, like the inner fighting, were hopeless, wasted energy. She was his allowed pet, as she too was allowed a pet—Steiner. Cury was the pet-in-chief, the hunting dog of their overall masters.

She struck Cury across the head, and soon he lay under her feet and she kicked him, and leaned over to punch him. Sometimes he would bite her, to increase her rage, or to make her rage. At first she had reveled in striking him, but since his sexual pleasure depended on the blows, her satisfaction swiftly diminished in proportion to his joy. She loathed these sessions, not for any more reason than that they were tiresome and she hated him. She had wondered if she was strong enough to murder him during one of them. But then, she would have no value. The gods would kill her, or put her back into the herd. She was not ready for that. So she only beat Cury sufficiently, until a few short violent spasms finished the procedure. Luckily, it excited him so much he never took long.

“You like it,” he said to her in a moment. “You like it, don’t you? Doing me over. Go on, admit it. Confess. You love it. Better than Steiner. You’re amazing.”

“And you are repulsive.”

“I’d do anything for you,” he said. “You’re my favorite. You know, you don’t have to worry while you’re with me. You can have anything you want.”

She nearly spat in his face, but why waste it? Save it for next time.

He had the other way, too, of getting pleasure. But that way, which he had performed on Patty underground, and on another woman during the march to the sea, was not what he chose with Esther, but with the weaklings among the herds, the leavings his gods threw him as a reward.

“Pretty Persephone,” he said now, “I think you cracked one of my ribs.” And he laughed, there on the clean poreless expanse of alien floor.

•   •   •

Afterwards, she estimated the forced march to reach the sea city had taken about two and a half weeks.

When the sun rose that first morning, there had been some sort of assembling, and a kind of rumor of an order to move—and so the shattered remains of humanity got to its feet, and plodded in the prescribed direction. Some were weeping and moaning, a veritable wailing and gnashing of teeth, to be sure. But all in docile amenable terror, and a physical huddling to the earth from which they had been torn. Even the soldiers, those still alive, had made no further protest that Esther could recall. But then she had been very muddled in her perceptions. She was in pain, and though she seemed acutely aware, doubtless could not have been. She looked at her fellow captives, and felt neither sympathy nor empathy. Daylight, and dark, frightened them. The derelict city of men frightened them, as the city of the Invader would frighten them. In this nightmare state which had overwhelmed them, horror and fear of the spiders were only two small fragments.

So the column of slaves sprawled on, Esther in its midst (somewhere she had lost her forward position, not noticing). The torture of her broken fingers became a burden, indisputably hers, yet far off. She bore it, and gradually lost track of all else, till soon there were intimations of a blessed nothingness. And then the nothing came. She did not feel herself touch the ground, though one last scream of agony went through her hand, arm, breast and side, but by then she knew it did not concern her anymore.

Finch set her fingers, and injected her with something he had retained, some medicine. She remembered later only one emotion and only two scenes—each recurrent, as if they happened many times, but maybe that was because she deliriously relived them again and again. The worst of it was that the pain came back and was her responsibility once more, and this was Finch’s fault since he had insisted on setting the fingers, and she wanted to hurt him in return, but she said to him in mad panic: “Don’t tell them. Don’t tell them.” And then, knowing she was babbling, “What have I said? Stop me from telling them about the baby.” And Finch said, “Do you think any of that matters now, girl?” Or she thought that he did. The other image was of Cury, who had let her suffer, untended, some while, prancing along beside her (two of the soldiers had been carrying her on an improvised stretcher at this point), and he was saying, “That’s it, Esther. You’ll be fine, Esther.” And he told the soldiers to be careful with her, or something bad would happen to them. She recollected high city blocks dancing behind his shoulders at the motion of the stretcher, but did not see, finally, when they left the city behind.

Lucidity returned in the middle of a night, out in open country. She lay on her back and the stars were in the sky over her head, clear as the brand-new clarity within her brain. Her broken setting fingers ached and gnawed, but the pain was limited to her hand and the rest of her felt free and light, as if, to be comfortable, she had only to unscrew her hand at the wrist and put it aside.

She turned her head and saw the soldier Steiner sitting about a yard away, looking at her.

“Hallo, Esther.”

She tried to sit up, and he waited to see if she could manage, which she did. She was dizzy a moment, then no longer dizzy at all. Beyond Steiner, under the stars, a couple of fires were burning in the fields (she knew them for “fields” at once, the standing rogue cereal she had seen in books, the bald areas where nothing grew anymore. The land smelled like the city parks, she was surprised to find it so familiar). People lay sleeping everywhere, anonymous. She knew they were no longer anything to do with her. All responsibility gone. And there, against the sky, a spider rose, so much higher than the random grain, with the stars all round its shell. There had been three in the beginning, but one was enough.

“I’m glad you made it, Steiner,” Esther said. Then smiled, since it was a foolish congratulation. They were captives. They were lost.

But Steiner nodded. He was still uniformed, and had a gun at his belt. He might have been one of the men who carried her. He had not really changed, only “adapted,” which was actually stupid, though probably, by the Anderson military code, correct.

She said, she believed simply to please him, “Any chance of anything?”

“Not a hope,” he said. “We’ve been keeping an eye out. A handful of them tried to make a break on the first day. Got caught and herded back. And disciplined. Cury does the stuff. He’s in charge, for them. But we’ve been detailed, some of us, to distribute the food and water. When they caught the run-offs, we weren’t allowed to give the poor bleeders any rations—nearly two days. Next day they got full whack, but no one’s tried running since.”

“Where are they taking us?”

“There’s a place by the sea. You reckon the sea? Right. There.”

“Cury told you?”

“Cury told everyone. Real big boss-man, Cury is.”

“Why the sea? For what?”

“Search me. Could be anything, couldn’t it?”

“Informative Cury didn’t say.”

“No.”

It was after all easy enough to continue the fake scenario of purpose. “Thanks, Steiner. Find me some food, will you, and something to drink.” Still leader? Still to be cared for? “And where’s Cury now?”

“Here’s Cury,” said Cury, and she realized he had been sitting behind her all this while, only about ten feet away, and that Steiner had known but seen no point in warning her, which was itself indicative of the sort of pervasive power Cury had now acquired.

“Go on,” Cury said, nicely, to Steiner, “go and get your leader some food, the way she told you.” Steiner glanced at Esther.

Esther said, “If he says do it, forget it.”

Steiner said, “That’s all right. It’s for you.” He stood up and moved off a way toward one of the fires. He looked big, muscular and strong, seen alone against the starry sky, but against the glimmer of the motionless spider sentinel he looked like a matchstick.

At this moment, almost inadvertently, she had searched her person for her own, Standish’s, pistol. It was gone, confiscated presumably during her long black-outs.

“How are you, Esther?” asked Cury. “Feeling a lot better? Aren’t you going to say thank you? I kept you alive. They’d have ditched you, or used you up, if it hadn’t been for me. You see, I help them, I’ve been trained. I helped them get you all up out of the colony, didn’t I? And you didn’t guess. Say it, I fooled you. Even you.”

There was a vague shimmer up in the air. The carapace on the sentinel was moving slightly.

Cury grinned his wolf teeth.

“That isn’t them. Still think it is? That’s just an amazing machine, a vehicle made by the gods for the gods to travel in. A spider. A machine.”

She said, “Then the thing is up there inside it, directing it?”

“That makes sense, doesn’t it? The thing. Sometimes I go up, in there, in the carapace, and sit and talk to the thing. A ladder comes down, or something like a ladder, and lifts me up. Very impressive for your fellow troglodytes to watch.”

She did not want to think, and all this was making her think. Opening her eyes there had only been the wonderful clarity, as if she need never think again. Quite consciously she knew meanwhile, that though she believed Cury’s statement on the nature of the spider—it was a contraption—its way of moving, and the myth Anderson had begun, would prevent her from seeing it as merely machine for some time.

In the grain-stubble, Esther’s working hand closed on nothing, as if on a knife.

“Go away, Cury,” she said. “You filthy little rat.”

At the fire now, Steiner had turned, and seemed to be looking back at them.

“Oh, but you need me, Persephone. I’ve brought you up from Hell, and we’re on our way to Olympus, where the gods are. And you’ll have to thank me, sooner or later.”

She did nothing, and soon he leaned and mouthed her ear, trembling at her greedily. She shook him off as Steiner started to come back.

But the spider which was a machine went on standing against the stars, and its carapace did not move again all night.

Chapter Two

The weather had become hot, and the wild countryside was very green, green and yellow, and splashed with bright flowers. Now and then would come a stretch of alien vegetation from the purple palette, the daubs of which she had formerly witnessed in the city of men. Alien weeds and mosses, and alien grass. It was beautiful, like the jewelry ribbon of the river, and she hated it, of course.

Finch had bound her hand in a fist over a pad of wadding. The bound clenched fist said it all. She need make no other gesture.

The column of slaves struggled along the overgrown country lanes, across the mindlessly sun-ripened ever-harvestless and rotting fields, herded always by the striding thing that seemed alive and was not. Once they had to go over a pasture where another herd, of feral cows, was grazing with its calves, and five or six bulls. The people of the underworld were frantic with new-edged fear, and the bulls, which Esther recognized from books, as she seemed to recognize each novel thing, pawed the tufted earth. Then there came a lightning flash, out of the sky where the spider towered. It hit the ground and blackened it and the herd of cattle bolted, roaring and releasing steaming droppings, so the entire landscape shook at their hoofs and grew pungent.

Cury walked constantly at Esther’s side. She had not yet seen him converse with the aliens, but he was always smug. She never asked about the pistol. The others moved out of his way and he ignored them, except sometimes for some slight malicious act—a pinch, a sneer—he was like the official bully in a group of children. But Cury talked to Esther. He showed her things, types of tree, kinds of animal or bird. He spoke about the alien city, how impressive it was. He told her always she would be under his protection in the city, and that as the gods (he generally called them only that) valued him, she would be safe. He gave her food, and since his rations were more generous than those given out elsewhere, she took it. The soldiers, staunchly adhering to old training, had quickly “adapted,” kept the march in order, handed out water and food, and sometimes shot various creatures for meat, which was then cooked up at the evening fire.

Steiner also stayed near to Esther. Sometimes he caught her eye and nodded at Cury. Steiner’s look said, Sorry, not much I can do. But if you want me to try to do something about that little sod, it’s a promise.

Cury had already explained at large that it was he who had ripped out the throat of Patty. He did not say why, but through the idea that the aliens absorbed human blood—either as nourishment, or as a delicacy—the connection was not difficult. Cury was imitative. It was the basis of his whole success. He was bred stock of the aliens—he had boasted of it, and it was in any event quite obvious. Though a man, he was not truly human.

Perhaps on the tenth, twelfth or thirteenth day of the forced march, illness began to break out. A feverish weakness, some vomiting and loosening of the bowels, a blotchy skin. Those who contracted the illness managed the first day or two to keep up. Then they fell down and were put on stretchers—planks, branches, and clothing tied between, like that which had taken Esther.

Esther watched Finch coming and going through the column. She had noted him about before, but in her furious indifference not sought him out, and only spoken to him once when he told her he would look at her fingers in another week, if they were still alive by them. Now she walked over to him. He was bending above a sick child, tossing and whimpering on its bier, which two women were carrying with some awkwardness. He looked harassed, irritated by the child, the sickness, the women. She wondered how Philips would have coped with this, still charming? Still slightly incompetent? But Philips was dead in the tunnel and miles behind, rat-eaten by now, no doubt.

“It’s typhoid?” said Esther.

“No. Not that that’s of much importance, here. If you catch it, it’ll probably kill you.”

He was just the same as he had always been. He did not, despite the threat, seem to register change at all, except as a further proof of the damnable inanity of everything.

Soon after this, when Cury fell unwantedly but inevitably into step with her, Esther said: “What are they going to do about this?”

“The illness? Nothing.”

“They could lose the whole flock,” she said. “Surely they don’t want that?”

“What do you care?” said Cury. “These people are nothing to you. You can stop playing leader now. They’re the leaders. You’re just mine.”

She had shouted at him then, viciously and long, astonishing herself, and even some of the apathetic zombies in the column, who gawped at her and muttered. The shouts were about injustice, about waste—about anything and nothing. It sprang from her guilt, maybe. She felt guilty that he was right, that she did not and had never cared, had only wanted the power of the leadership Standish had foisted on her because he had never cared either. She had meant to do great things, hadn’t she? But the kind tactful aliens had removed any hope of that and let her off the hook.

When they bivouacked for the night, some of the sick had died, and five more went during the hours of darkness. Cury explained the corpses must be left, no need to bury them, be charitable and feed the birds of the air. Three of the soldiers who had formed a burial detail, surrounded by sobbing women, went on with their digging. Cury stood on the raw earth and said, “Didn’t I tell you? You’re to leave it.”

“They said so?” asked one of the soldiers. “Well fuck ’em,” and he chucked out another handful of soil—they were digging perforce with their hands, and with flints off the fields—over Cury’s feet, which still sported the shoes given him in the colony.

Cury jumped back. He turned toward the great glinting silver thing on the sky, and slowly raised one arm.

The vocal soldier still scrabbled at the earth, both the other two slowly stopped, got up and looked at the spider machine. The carapace rotated. That was all—prelude, ultimatum, uninterest—it might have been anything.

“Leave it,” said one of the standing soldiers urgently to the digging comrade. “Come on, stop it, Tim. Leave off.” None of the officers had survived the blow-up or the abortive fight by the highway. No one could give a proper order. But it was Steiner who appeared suddenly and hauled the digging soldier to his feet. “That’s it, just leave it,” and the soldier gave in, the sniveling women scattered. “We’ve got to look out for ourselves,” Steiner said, as if there were some chance of survival.

It was his limitation, not any breadth of vision, which enabled him to think and to speak in this way. Yet Esther half admired it, and certainly envied it.

She wanted to cry all that day, tearing sobs like those of the women who had lost children or husbands. She turned her depression back into rage, and fought Cury hard with words, finally driving him off, satisfied, or intimidated, or bored.

During the next week, the column of slaves, the herd, the flock, dwindled. Some, dying, were tipped off their litters at Cury’s order, and those who would have lingered with them were driven back into line.

Then the illness let go, and was gone.

•   •   •

She dreamed about Standish. He sat looking at her intently, in the interview room, behind the black desk.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked him. “What can I do?”

She was still wearing Caroline Elizabeth’s dress, the bottom of which, as in her waking life, she had unevenly cut away to mid-calf, and which was besides torn and stained with mud, blood and smoke. Standish seemed to be staring at the dress, reproachful at her misuse of it.

“They have everything under control,” she said. “Like the moss in the river and the purple grass growing through the cracks in the cement, and in between the corn in the fields. There’s nothing anyone can do but attempt to get by. And they’ve got us now. We can’t even do that.”

She woke up, speaking aloud. She slept far apart from the herd, disdaining it though she was a part of it. The evening fires had all gone out. She clenched her sound fist like the healing fist on the pad. She rose, and went off through tall grasses, along the side of the hill under which they had made their camp. The moon was high, and lit her path.

There was a piece of railway track over the hill, down in a valley, a quarter of a mile off. Esther sat on the hill, showing the sentinel, if it observed, that she was not a runaway. She looked out at the railway track, and tried to imagine a train moving along it, a faceless box of train, or one with a funnel blowing steam, from a museum. But the ghostly conjuration would not fit on the track. There would be no more trains. No more of anything that had been. Eventually, no more men. Unless they were like Cury, dogs.

She never questioned what the aliens were like. They were the spiders, or if not, then something that she would be less able to visualize than a phantom train. But her eyes still turned again and again to the spider, rising up there, the moon blazing on its shell.

She heard a noise through the grass, and Steiner appeared.

“We really were honored tonight,” said Steiner. “Cury came and played poker with us at the fire. Cury likes poker. He never knew about it, that we could play card games. He says we’re the first group he’s come across that do. He said, the effing little bugger, he said we’ll get there sometime tomorrow. Seems he knows the country.”

Esther said, “Their city.”

“Yeah,” said Steiner. He sat down by her in silence. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it.”

They sat on in the silence then quite a while. Occasionally the grasses sighed and rustled. Once something small darted over the hill, a young rabbit or a big rat.

In the end, Steiner reached out and quietly put his hand on her knee. When she did not dislodge the hand, or protest, he began to stroke her flesh, unhurriedly, very nearly absently. As if they could both of them pretend it was not happening at all.

But he had said, tomorrow they would get there, to the city.

Esther said, “Steiner,” and his hand became immobile. “Steiner, I lied about Standish when I said he had me. And I’m not pregnant.”

“Didn’t he?” said Steiner softly. “Aren’t you?”

“No,” she said.

He took his hand from her leg and began instead to stroke her hair, and then her neck and next her breast. Her body responded uneasily, in sudden rushes of feeling that just as suddenly were deadened, but when he leaned over her and kissed her, she put her arms around him and gave herself without hesitation to his mouth, and his body. It seemed the only thing to do, since tomorrow they would reach the city. Perhaps his strength reassured her, or perhaps she only responded to some utterly primitive drive that told her life must continue and that, faced with such odds, her womb cried out for its purpose. He was skillful and thorough. Her virginity was rent, a meaningless hindrance of skin, of no particular physical or spiritual worth. He filled her, became part of her briefly, and came, shuddering, burning, gasping. When he lay still, she was glad they had done this. When he said to her, “You’ll like it better next time,” she was glad too, that having her had made him think in terms of life, of next times, of going on. An augmentation of his previous purblind bravado. But the next time occurred not so long after, and indeed she did like it better, and there was the foretaste of a savage sweetness which she was not quite able to accept. She did not like to be helpless, to let go, and her body had not yet got the upper hand. But Steiner was pleased with her. He was almost happy. He helped her across the hill, over the rough grasses, playfully. “You’re all right,” he said. “A real bit of all right.”

Under the earth moon, on the purple alien grass, a bit of all right.

They almost fell over Cury.

He was beneath a tree on the slope above the camp, like Steiner lying over a woman. She was one of the girls who had taught school with Esther, always fair-haired and thin; now she was also dead. Busy at the dark gape in her throat, lapping, Cury did not hear them or did not bother with them. As he busily drank, he busily masturbated, choking and wriggling.

Esther and Steiner stood and looked at this.

“That’s what he did to Patty,” Steiner murmured.

There was the gun in his belt. The night was wide.

Cury choked and lapped and writhed.

On the skyline the machine stood, the moon sinking behind it, round and white.

Steiner and Esther turned away from Cury and left him there to his business, and walked back down into the camp.

Chapter Three

Cury spoke with the gods that morning.

The metallic ladder descended the spider’s side and he touched it, and it held him; he was borne upward, and returned twenty minutes later, fresh and beaming.

But actually, he had spoken to the gods the previous evening, or they to him, without his needing to go up into the carapace at all. There was a tiny capsule embedded at the base of his skull. Cury had had it since a few days after birth. It did not trouble him. In humorous flaunting moments, when he informed the humans in the herds of its existence, he compared it to a leash the master would use on his dog. As he was, though, a clever, well-trained, loyal and loving dog, the leash was not really necessary. Mostly the gods used the capsule to give Cury fragments of swift data, to keep track of him when he was far afield (as in an underground complex), and to instruct him how to proceed, having picked up all relevant evidence from his ordinarily functioning brain. Last night, noting his wants, the gods had awarded Cury a bone. They had mentioned he might select a woman out of the herd for his pleasure. In the matter of Esther, they had, however, been more ambivalent. He was unsure, in his heart, that they were going to allow him to keep Esther. Was it that they were jealous that he seemed to have found an earth beast in whom were the qualities of power, even of intellectual cruelty, that hitherto he had only discovered in them?

The thought made Cury grin. (He was more wolflike, more doggy than ever, nearing home-ground.) He knew they could interpret a thought, too. So he mentally grinned all the harder, panting, wagging his tail, to demonstrate he recognized the thought as absurd.

Most of what he had told Esther when he first ingratiated his way into Anderson’s sewers was untrue. Cury had never lived rough, but soft, in fact. He did not know his mother or father, who had created him between them. He had no memory of the human dug which had provided initial sustenance, though he did have a dim recollection of a feeding-tube which later replaced the female breast.

He was one of a group. They were select, kept apart from the herds. From the beginning of consciousness, awareness of self and surroundings, Cury and his peers had known they were chosen and unique.

They saw their masters often, and were never afraid of them. The only reason for fear would have been if they, the selected hounds of the gods, had tried to cheat, or failed to please. The first premise was ridiculous. The second, if it ever happened, was more the cause of abject sorrow than alarm. As for Cury, he was bright, Mercury bright, and quicksilver mercury quick. He had never let his masters down.

Today, they would get to the city. Cury liked the city very much. It was an emblem of all they were, and permeated by their presence. Shining and clean and unshakable. Unlike the decaying cities of humanity, it was a perfect place. That summed up the difference, frankly, between gods and men. One race was perfect, the other messily flawed.

Cury’s own race, obviously unavoidably flawed too, had yet a special burnish from its tutelage by and value to the Omniscient.

Because he was so bright, Cury had been educated, and had read a great amount, if only from the works of men. (The gods collected such memorabilia.) The works of the gods would be, naturally, beyond him. From his reading, Cury had devised his own name. And, for himself only, he named the city Olympus, and he named some of the gods, too, from the Greek and Roman pantheons, which he seemed to think they seemed to think was amusing—Athene, Diana, Demeter, Ares, Apollo, and Zeus-Jupiter. This was a game. Cury liked games.

Now, he squatted by Esther as she slept. The soldier, the one called Steiner, lay some way off, also asleep.

What was it about Esther? This way she looked only very young, a girl with long black hair and a torn dress.

“Shall I pick you some flowers, Esther?” Cury said. “Red flowers, for when we get to the city. You’ll like it. You’ll be comfortable. And you can have Steiner, if you like. He’ll have to work, of course, do things they like done. But he needn’t really be part of the herd. That’s all the rest of them are any good for. But Steiner will be all right. You and Steiner. In the city.”

And he hoped the gods noted his good faith.

•   •   •

They had been here, on earth, for almost a century and a half, going by the dates in Standish’s manual and the time scale he had afterward intimated. So there had been time to make the city. “Build,” in relation to the city, was not the right verb. It seemed not to have been built. It seemed always to have been there. As if only the temporary superiority of men had obscured it, like a film of gauze.

It was nearly too much for the new herd. Always, Esther supposed, it would be too much for the herds, especially the under-dwellers. Air and sky, sun and night and moon—these things were devastating in their strangeness—as bad as the alien capture. Then they were subjected to the alien city, and beyond it, the moving distance which was sea.

She tried not to be fascinated by the sea, since to be fascinated by anything was idiotic, now.

“Like it?” Cury yapped, glad as if he had invented it.

They were herded down from the uplands, over a flattish plain, and on to a wide road of alien material which went toward the city.

It drew closer and closer under the hot afternoon sky, already changing color above, to Indian violet—a shade of paint in Esther’s memory.

They walked, before the spider, the straggly slave-chain, all burned red or brown from the sun, as once only Esther had been burned.

About a mile from the outskirts of the city, there was a kind of tunnel built—made—across the road. There were lights in the tunnel, and panels which flickered and flared. She asked Cury, flitting about everywhere, constantly coming back to her, what the panels meant or did, and he said, “Just for the gods,” delighted by the obliquity of it all.

Beyond the tunnel was wasteland, where something the aliens had done, or tried to do, had seared the ground, though not the road, and nothing grew, not even the alien vegetation. It seemed to her Cury looked askance at this place; it must have happened when he was out of town, away on the chase.

Cury told the soldiers to stop the herd, he was going to say something to them. The soldiers obeyed Cury with careful, nervous contempt. Cury apparently relished their attitude. When they had had to play poker with him, he had evinced great enjoyment, and when he lost, he honorably gave them small dockets, perhaps of plastic, which he assured them they would be able to exchange for alcohol in the compound.

He spoke of the compound now. Standing on a hillock, he expounded their fate to his listeners, or such segments of it as it was deemed reasonable they should hear.

They were going to a shelter where they would be comfortable. They would be looked after and told what to do there, both by the machines, and by other people who had been put in charge. It was the animal pen. As if they sensed its doom, some of the human beings started to cry, or shout. But Cury just waited, and the noise died down. Then Cury waved them on.

They walked again, and passed under a tall featureless obelisk of milky metal-foil, some hundred feet high, and then the buildings spread around them, and the roads and bridges, and out of the sky three slender air-craft fell with the faintest purr toward a wall which mouthed “O” and sucked them gently in. It was all a swallowing. Like being absorbed by one of the amoeba creatures she had seen in enlargement, in Barclay’s lab. (Barclay—she had not noticed him on the march. He must have perished underground.)

When the procession reached a wide avenue, Cury took Esther’s arm and led her aside. “You’re not with them.” The others moved on, going another way, along the avenue, the spider following. A few looked at Esther. They did not seem surprised. No one objected anymore, or entreated. Only Steiner persisted in looking back; he gave her a frowning grin, and saluted her jauntily.

She did not want to say to Cury anything about Steiner, but, almost to her shock, she found the parting brought on a feeling of extra fear, the threat of agoraphobia. She pushed away from it.

“What’s going to happen to them,” she asked Cury, “that you’ve excluded me from?”

“Nice things,” said Cury. “They’ll be happy. Some of them live for years that way. And they organize it all how they want. They even have drills and sports events, and drunken parties, when it’s allowed. There’s quite a social whirl goes on in the compound.”

It was so very surreal, she turned her head away. But after all, the flocks and herds of men had spent their days quite merrily, till the butchering. Hopeless, anyway. Stop fighting. You’ve already stopped, haven’t you?

They went up, the two of them, inside a building that stood over the avenue. There were no stairs, but a mechanical lift. Cury worked the buttons, but explained them to her, how they operated the cage, and how she could select the floor required. By that she grasped she would be able, if only intermittently, to make free with the lift. This would be a fact.

When it halted, they stepped out into an annex with a symbol on its blank walls. The symbol was an alien numeral. “It means ten. This is floor ten.”

“I can count,” said Esther.

Cury crossed to a piece of the blank wall on the left. A light flashed in the floor and the wall opened, not in an “0,” but in sliding-door fashion. The door slid closed again when they were through and into the space beyond.

“I’ll fix it,” said Cury, “so it’ll know you too, let you in.”

“You’d better fix it to let in Steiner,” she said, to see what Cury would do. Cury said, “No. You can open the wall for him from inside. You just touch that button, there.”

The room was quite large. The floor and walls and ceiling were all the same, like the annex and lift, of a pale cool nothing, textureless, resembling the stuff of the building itself, and the road. What was recognizable as a bed stood by one wall. It had pillows and undersheet, frozen virgin. There were no chairs, no carpeting, no drapes. There was a panel in the wall beside the bed. On another wall was what seemed to be a tiny cooking unit, complete with tiny freezer, both too small to contain or prepare anything.

She would ask nothing else.

“There’s a bathroom with a big tub, and a shower—and a civilized lavatory that would have made your Standish blink, if he could even use it at his age. When it gets dark, you’ll see the light come up. The darker it gets, the brighter. You can get a highlight, or you can dim the light, by using that panel. I’ll show you how. It’s easy. And look—” He ran childlike over the room, and more doors slid open to reveal a terrace with a vista of the city in the air—a window.

There were no books. No chess. No pictures.

“You live here,” he said.

“Do you?”

“I’ve been here sometimes. But I may be here more, now. With you. I’ll bring you a mirror,” he said. “Would you like that? A mirror, and some clothes. And anything you want. Books,” he said slyly, as if he read her mind, but he had only read her eyes. He waltzed about her. “Some cute feminine things with lace and bows, yum-yum.”

“Stupid little turd,” she said to him. “Tell me how to secure the door and keep you out.”

He only showed her a closet, which opened like the doors. It was empty and waiting; despite his words, everything looked unused. He showed her the cooking unit. The freezer could not be opened, there was only a dial selector. The incredible miniature thing affronted her by producing aromatic pancakes in five minutes out of air, and strong earth-black coffee—if these actually could be pancakes and coffee. In the pale-nothing bathroom, he demonstrated the faucets, and then, by urinating into it, how the lavatory worked.

While Cury ate pancakes and drank coffee, she went out and looked at the expressionless city floating in Indian violet atmosphere. Removed from the trudging and moaning of the slaves, she heard the murmur of the sea for the first time in her life.

•   •   •

Walking up the avenue from the compound, Finch chewed a chalky indigestion tablet. He had always been revolted by their taste, associating it with the condition they did not, anyway, properly alleviate. He had been in the city a month, along with the rest, and something in the prepared diet of the compound had got to grips with Finch’s system. He no longer had indigestion. Coming to in the night, or at the waking time when a tuning-fork signal went off through the huts and alleys, he searched about for those sour rocks of pain. But his guts were at peace, empty. In a way, the indigestion had been his friend, at least his familiar. It had given his frustrations a focus and often a name. So he found, physically or psychologically, he was addicted to the tablets. He chewed them and felt better for their revolting presence in his mouth and untroubled belly. But he had to ration them now. He was running out.

Not so with anything else. In the first week, though he had been asked nothing, told nothing, he was given a separate hut, with a tidy cubicle to sleep in, and a big outer area equipped as a model doctor’s office. Through a partition there lay another area that might become an emergency theater after the slightest of preliminaries. (Both of these accommodations put the colony hospital to shame.) Everywhere under the hygienic cabinets, stood boxes of supplies, books, surgical tools, antibiotics in dark crystal and safe anaesthetics in bright plastic decanters. Brought from the world’s four corners, probably, but everything pristine, and its seals unbroken. Waiting for him, like a medicinal Christmas stocking.

Among the thousands here, he was one of a handful of medics—all kitted out, presumably, as he now was. He saw his purpose, padding between the rows of miracles. What he would have given for that in the colony. Or for that, when Anna lay dying. There was even equipment he did not know how to use, but everything came with a manual. He was expected to learn. Or he could consult his brother doctors. (He knew he would shun them.)

Earth panacea for earthmen. None of the far-flung science of the Invader. And the animals themselves to take care of the animals, keep them fit for whatever reason the aliens had. The plan to eat them or torture them or merely to watch them. But while Finch ministered and got it right, he would be exempt and safe. No one had to tell him this. Not even the pale-eyed fellow who was in charge of these hundred or so blocks, the north sector of the compound. The living accommodation comprised identical one-story huts, windowless and poreless, colored cream and machine-clean, each with its orderly bunks and perfect washroom, and a tiny kitchen unit which adequately provided thirty to fifty persons with a set menu, every meal ample and good. And totally digestible. The pale-eyed fellow had been here years, he said, but he could or would not say how many. He had had a wife, once, and a daughter. Mysteriously he seemed to have mislaid them, but showed no concern. He scarcely mentioned them; when he did, it seemed quite natural to him that these people who had been with him now were not. He was as dull about the place he had come from—some other city, or town, the wreck of a shelter, somewhere. Finch had never probed, but he had heard others, mostly the soldiers from Anderson’s colony, trying to get information out of the man, or some other in the sprawling camp. But they were all the same. Evasive by default. They were looked after now. What did the rest matter, earlier lives, lost relatives? Finch thought there might be something in the food, and eventually they would all succumb to it. He felt no anger, or fear. Hurry it up. Let’s all be morons. Hope for the worst. What else, ever, did life come to?

Now he walked along the avenue. He was going to the separate block where a few of the humans lived apart, the favored ones like Cury, or the special ones, like Esther Martineau. Finch was always amused when he thought of Esther and the vast struggle she had put up to be a female Standish, and how it had ended in this. The amusement filled him, hard, knotted and vile, like the indigestion. He disliked and distrusted Esther. Her hand was healing well, but he was always pessimistic about it. The fingers would be crooked. Just wait a year or two, till the arthritis set in. But she seemed not to care. She wasn’t feminine, not Esther, she didn’t bother about what she looked like, or apparently what the future held in store. She was like a boy—like bloody old Anderson, actually, if you considered it, or Anderson’s son, maybe, if one of them had lived.

Then again, the future was a dream. It had never been certain, and here, though he or she might be able to cement a partially enduring present for themselves, he with hypodermic and drill and brand new pills, she with her legs wide open under the little runt Cury, even so, a future seemed less believable than ever. Nothing being believable, perhaps. This building-block ensemble, where one could walk unchecked, because a panel had instructed you to do so, and unseen eyes that were not eyes oversaw every action, the intelligent study of books and chemical reactions, and, too, the sitting on the toilet bowl. And up there, ahead, the misty disturbance of a mauve sea, a truth less believable than all else.

He reached the building and stepped into the lift. On the tenth floor he stepped out and stood on the flashing light signal in the floor, till her apartment door was opened.

In a month, quite a change had been effected.

There was not much scope in the compound, but some of the women did their best. They put flowers from the fields in glass bottles that had held gin or beer. They sewed cushions and bed-covers from the materials intended for clothing, a large quantity of which lay ready in closets between the bunks. Sometimes there would be paintings slapped on the walls, inside and out, the colors got from coffee grounds, fruit juice and boiled plants. In some of the long huts, usually where there were children, there might be rag dolls and similar toys, and even a pet—a rabbit or a duet of brown mice caught from the land westwards, where the field parties worked, tilling and reaping crops for the compound. Sometimes agriculture went on inside the compound, too, a kind of vegetable and herb garden by a hut, purple tomatoes, a bed of cabbage, some chives. . . . Especially those who had never before known the open above ground, and its potential, made these gardens or tried to, with filched seeds. Such husbandry was never prevented. Nothing, it seemed, ever was. (Escape being beyond hope, or beyond desire.)

In the big room where Esther Martineau mostly spent her time, ten floors up, there was no evidence of any of these blind aspirations. And, of course, nothing feminine at all, except for some mirrors of an ornate vogue. Two chairs had been added early on, big chairs covered in velvety stuff, one blue and one dark green. And there was a table of once well-polished wood, now dusty and shining only in streaks. On the table lay various things. Always books, of all types, poetry, novels, algebra, and some tablets of paper, and pens, the cartridge sort, in a blue jar with a pattern. There was a skull that seemed to have belonged to a large dog, or perhaps a deer, and many sea-shells—more today, so Cury must have taken her to the beach again. There was a ceramic bowl full of fresh fruit, and a long chain of tinted beads, a figurine of a naked man, demurely draped at the crotch, a stuffed owl in a glass case, too big for the table and standing beside it. Cury brought things in to show her, from the aliens’ store of quaint human artifacts. The objects mostly came and went, though a few were constant—the skull, the beads, and shells, and always the dish had fruit, and sometimes there was wine in an open bottle, two thirds full and going flat. And she offered him the wine, and he refused the wine. Then he would inspect her hand, and take care to hurt her, partly to be sure of the healing in the nerves, it was true, but she ignored what he did.

Today, the last dressing was to come off. There was no wine, so no jeering preliminary. He unwound the bandage, and flexed her fingers. The index finger had in fact set a fraction crookedly, but both were whole.

He told her how to nurture them. He sounded bored; she looked it. Finished, he turned back toward the door.

“Don’t go so fast,” she said.

“What else do you want? If you’re frightened of getting pregnant, there’s a drug in the food, I gather, that stops it. When women are supposed to breed, they’re given an anti-inhibitant. But I forgot. You’re already pregnant, aren’t you.”

“Yes, Finch,” she said, “that’s right.”

He had almost reached the door, but slowed down. Why hurry to the compound? Why hurry anywhere? And why stay?

“Finch,” she said crisply, “have you ever seen them, yet?”

“Oh, who?”

“The aliens. You knew what I meant.”

“Nobody sees them. Except probably at the end, whatever the end is supposed to be.”

“Cury sees them.”

“Then ask Cury.”

“If I ask anything, he won’t tell me. I pretend to be indifferent, to try to make him tell me.”

“Amateur psychology. Very nice.”

Her clothes were functional, just like the things she had worn in the colony. He had not seen her wear anything spectacular here, though conceivably she could have. Her hair was clean and brushed, her skin seemed the same, burnished by weather; she went out regularly walking in the city, to the beach. She had even waded, so she said, in the mauve sea. (Why the hell tell him?) He had taken Standish’s pistol from her on the march here, when she was feverish. He had it now, in his private hut, concealed in a box of active penicillin. The aliens were doubtless aware, they would be aware of everything, but the possession was safely kept from fellow members of the herd. The soldiers, for example, might have been envious, their weapons were subtracted from them the first day, at the compound gate. The overseers took them and laid them outside the wall, near the spider. It was altogether funny, then, that the pistol, stuck only in Finch’s jacket, was overlooked. He had never told Esther of his theft. It gave him a silly childish glee to think she did not know. Although none of it meant anything. She could not use the gun, or if she had wanted another as a plaything, her filthy little lover would bring it, in his mouth, like the fruit and wine and stuffed owl.

“How is it in the compound?” she said.

What did she want? Still acting “Leader”?

“Splendid.”

“No protest? No one running away?”

“How and where to? Use your head.”

“They were always sheep,” she said. “It’s the way we had to live. Obey the rules, do as you’re told, be brainlessly content and question nothing. So there’s no fight in any of them. Just the misfits, the ones who hate, like you, and the ones who kick, like me.”

“Still kicking?” he said.

“As you point out, what for, and how, and where’s the alternative.”

“Do the exercises with your fingers, as I showed you.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“Or don’t, and they’ll stiffen up. Don’t come whining to me later.”

“When did I ever whine to you? And what makes you think I’ll be around, later?”

“You’re a survivor,” Finch said. “You sink your teeth into it and you hold on.”

“Till my teeth get pulled out at the roots.”

She opened the door for him. He looked at the lifeless annex.

He felt a sudden groundless compunction. Standish, and Anna, and all the hosts of the lost. But he shook it off, and moved toward the lift, as her door closed.

He had taken a deliberate hour over wandering here, and would be as long in returning. Ten minutes with her. The last visit, too, unless she broke another bone, or got blood-poisoning. Now there would only be the soldier—Steiner, he thought—to visit her. Some of the colony’s military who, because of their training, were in better condition, were a solid part of the field-working detachments, which lived in among a sort of barracks of huts west of the compound, near the wall. The story went that one or two of the soldiers (the colony’s, but from other set-ups elsewhere, too, several of which had been policed in the same way before being captured), came out to call regularly on humans in the separate apartment block. The little dog wasn’t enough then. No, he wouldn’t be. The little dog would like little dog games—At once Finch had a sense that it was all endlessly duplicated, the herds, the odd ones out, the hating doctors and kicking misfits, and the strong soldier-gigolos, and the Cury’s who served the gods.

Finch was in the middle of the avenue when, with no warning, his eyes flooded by painful blazing tears. He staggered on, his face in his hands, weeping and cursing himself, as overhead the whispering alien planes dropped downward from heaven to earth.

•   •   •

At the start she had held out for eleven days, not giving in to Cury’s demands for punishment. She had been a stone, and he had bounced around her yipping, and she had driven him mad and he had driven her mad. That was her fight—not to.

Then she gave in. For it meant nothing. One morning he even brought her a soft slick whip, and she lashed him brutally, and he loved it.

That was the day he took her to the beach and she paddled in the water. He fetched her shells, and she could not help liking the shells, being intensely interested in them. And so, inadvertently at the beach, Cury and she sometimes had conversations, as if they were normal people in an adjusted world.

He brought glamorous articles—his description—to the room, aside from the chairs and books she had said she wanted. He brought mirrors framed in metal leaves and bright jewelry from long-collapsed shops, and cosmetics from decayed basements and wind-looped towers. Then he brought her Steiner.

When she was alone with the young soldier who had had her virginity she was at first restrained, then momentarily tearful, like any girl finding her man again—which was false and afterward embarrassed her. Then they fell upon each other in appetite, and the experience of orgasm exploded for her, so that again there had been a kind of conversation of a fake world no longer tenable, for what the hell was the purpose of it, though it was so very good?

In the interludes, always short, she always questioned Steiner about the compound, the fields and the work in the fields, as if trying to excuse their meetings, or give them some credentials.

That first afternoon they had coupled four times in less than two hours. When he had left her, finished but quickly summoned out of her very body by the piping of the panel in the wall, and still slightly erect (joking, packing himself tidily into his pants), after this she lay and slept, and waked in the dark that came at night when she relinquished consciousness, and dispersed only if she sat up on her bed. So she had sat up, the lights revived, and she took up a pad of paper already asked for, and its companion pen, and she scribbled a paragraph, about the sea, and the compound, about the city, about all the things that surrounded her and left her no choices. She did not mention Steiner, though she referred to Cury, as Dog.

Chapter Four

When I started writing a form of manual again, a journal, I did it illogically, simply needing to express inexpressible feelings. Standish’s factual account, of course, was left behind. And this reads very primly. How much new ground Steiner said was turned for the plantings, how the apple trees were fruiting over there, where I’ve never been—and as if it represented a human autonomy, which it does not. The aliens arrange it, don’t they? Or today, I would state, Esther went strolling through the city and counted twenty-three air-vehicles. Or today, “Dog took Esther to the brim of the sea, where the frothy liquid spills over on the gray sand and glowing pebbles. The sky is bigger there, like a great lung breathing in and in.” Most descriptive. Five stars. But useless, all of that.

But today, something is about to happen.

Today—

“Aren’t you ready?” said Cury, coming in at the door.

Esther was seated cross-legged on the floor by the terrace, this pressure on the flooring keeping the doors open, so a copper sunset flooded everywhere, drowned everything, even the page she had been writing on.

“Yes, I’m ready,” she said. She set the pen and paper aside. “Did you expect to find me in the bathroom spewing with fright?”

“Oh, not you. Me, if it had been me. Not the wonderful Persephone.”

She got up. Her legs and arms and throat were bare and very brown. Her brown face, bordered by the darkness of her hair and then set on the fired sky, was dramatic but contained. She wore one of the summer dresses he had brought for her, nothing planned, she had had it on all day, save for the three-hour session with her soldier.

“Why don’t you,” said Cury smarmily, “put on those beads you like?”

“Why don’t you,” said Esther, “shut up and just take me there, as you were told?”

“Come on, then,” he said. “Come on, then.”

She followed him out, into the annex and the lift. In the whole time she had been installed here, coming and going fairly freely, she had met no other, either of her kind or of his. It seemed to her he did meet with his own, that they had doggy reunions somewhere else in the city, the place he stayed when not with her, nearer to their masters.

Where they would be going now, perhaps.

The lift sank, and presently they were out on the street. The sky of red copper turned Esther to the same metal. Cury stared at her admiringly. He had never been sure it would be all right, but now he imagined it might be. He had heard of this. They liked to have a closer view? Maybe they would want to employ Esther, too, but would they be able to coerce or persuade her? They must be intrigued by the problem of that, which should be a good sign . . . ? But they seemed pleased with him, since he had picked her, found her difference, starting not only deer for them, but lion.

Esther walked beside Cury, oblivious. She moved straight, unwavering. She felt deeply afraid, her stomach cold and her head light. The angry sun hurt her eyes, burned the moisture from her mouth—and yet she wanted it. Despite all her thoughts in the laziness of defeat.

They’re not going to kill me. I don’t suppose so, not yet. No. But why now? Why this? Why a half-hour’s walk with this dog when vehicles pass us by dozens on the roads? But then, hounds and slaves don’t get to ride like gods.

What do you want? Fuck that. What do I want? Yes, to see them. I have to. At last. For Anderson, and Caroline, for Standish, for Esther. Most of all for Esther.

The flaming sky met the sea, and began to go out there with a hallucinatory hiss. The sun was already down inland, under the hills.

Against the shore-line, lavender and pink-amber, three silver spiders dull-shone, motionless, and beyond, isolated, one of the pyramid shapes of the city, really white by day, black now—Dark Tower. Cury and she had never come so far in this direction before.

It was after he had said she broke his ribs, about five minutes after, that he remarked, still on the floor, “The gods sent me. I’m going to take you to meet them. When it gets dusk. Want to go?”

Hot nausea choking her, she said, coldly, “Do I have any option?”

“You know,” he said, “up in the machines—your spiders—they’re not there. Just pictures on screens. It’s all automatic. They never leave the city anymore. They do it all from here.”

She had held her breath, afraid to let it leave her in case she flew apart. “Fine,” she said.

Later she accepted he must know she was afraid, and her deceit was quite mindless. When he left her, she bent over, retching in fear. She guessed he guessed as much, and anticipated he would come back to see. But Cury did not come back until the proper hour.

She cleaned her teeth and showered and washed her hair, and put on the same dress. At first she had to keep going to the bathroom, but by the time she was able to write in the manual-journal, she had grown used to her horrified screaming terror, and had it in hand.

Now, the pyramid of the most real of all dark towers rose before her, ringed by spiders, ruled behind by dissolving lines of sea and sky. She thought clearly, Standish! Standish! A witless and silent cry. But she moved on, even a pace ahead of Cury, eagerly, her eyes wide.

Chapter Five

The pyramid had opened for them in the ubiquitous “O.” There had been a vault in quarter-light, another lift, which ascended, a walkway traversed up in the air. At last, under a panel that flashed white, an entry whose doors melted sideways.

Before Esther now was a vista of polished floor and the polished banks of screens and mechanical apparatus which gleamed and pulsed, and sometimes twinkled sportively with little lights. The vaguest murmur ran through everything, caused by these machines and their activity, like the soul of a beehive. The air was sweet and pure, a synthetic freshness reminiscent of springtime gardens in the old city.

Cury marched forward spryly, and she walked at his side. Away across the floor there was a desk and console, a smooth sweep of orderly power, and held in the curve of it a version of a chair. The chair was filled.

There it is, she thought.

She tried hard to see and to avoid seeing. She lowered her head and looked sideways, her eyes and lips narrowed. She was already disbelieving, already considering alternatives—then a slow colossal wave of shock hit her, so she almost stopped still, so she almost fell down. It was an affronted shock. All nausea condensed in this, for it was more terrible than anything she could have visualized. It was unacceptable. But seemingly true.

“Good, Cury,” said the voice. And Cury bristled with satisfaction. “Now you can leave her with me.” And dejectedly fawning, Cury retreated. He plucked her sleeveless flesh as he passed, to remind her of him. She only remembered it after. Then Cury was gone. The doors sighed shut.

And she was left alone with the alien, the Invader, the Enemy.

“We are interested,” he said, “by you. Perhaps the same may be concluded of you, in respect to us.”

•   •   •

He spoke to her in the language she had always known, the tongue of men. He had no accent. There was nothing in the voice to give it any idiomatic flavor.

Esther said nothing. And she recalled posing sullenly before Edward Standish in just this way, years before. Also, this representation was rather like Standish, not as Esther had ever seen him, but as she had occasionally conjured him from his own past.

“Well,” he said, “ask me your question.”

“You know I have a question?” she said.

“You’re not quite the first,” he said. “Generally there is a question or a statement.”

“Then I needn’t make it.”

He smiled. A facial gesture of Earth, common, too, it would seem, with his kind.

“After all,” he said, “when you think about it, the gravity, the atmosphere, the aesthetics, even, how could we hope to inhabit your world, and to exist here with reasonable success, if we were not, physically, rather like you?”

“Like us,” she repeated.

“Like but superior. Obviously, better. Yours is a flawed race, primitive and ignorant. You suffer from deformities of the body and the mind. You are born randomly, your physical condition thereafter is random. You don’t live long. But long enough, maybe, to celebrate such a series of accidents. To us, you must understand, you are simply a sort of intelligent lower animal. Naturally, you do not see yourselves in this manner. But you must accept we have subdued you. We’ve no reason to harm you now, providing you don’t inconvenience us.”

She stared at him. Eventually she aimed for the one target she could see. “If I’m only an intelligent lower animal, why bother to explain? You’re speaking jargon. It’s a format.”

He waited, then he said, “That’s perceptive of you. Perhaps we like to vaunt ourselves to our inferiors. Which you are, it is a fact. For example, how old do you think me to be?”

“You could be anywhere between thirty and forty. Perhaps you are. But you imply you live a lot longer than we do, by which you mean longevity. And so next you’ll tell me you’re seventy or eighty years old.”

His eyes were intent. He seemed indeed very interested by her reactions.

“Actually, I’m over a hundred years of age, by the reckoning of your colony. Of course, we don’t reckon time in the same way. But in two hundred further years, I shall look scarcely any different. Our longevity, incidentally, and our immunity to most disease were two of the major causes of our being driven out to the stars. Home is filling up. It was essential to move to other houses. Other worlds. We are a prolific race, and a greedy race—like your own, in that.”

The conversation was so unreal. She visualized the mighty ships—like similarly apocryphal whales—swimming across the black tides of space—space as Standish had taught her to see it. Though it was undoubtedly exact, even a verifiable statement, she did not accept it. And she thought, as she had thought in the beginning, He may only be another form of Cury. A front man, a higher officer in their human guard. No alien, this one. Some clever, trained man. But why would it be necessary, such a trick?

She made herself stare at him again for some moments. He returned her scrutiny, with no aggression, no evasion, no communication. So the man looks at the starving dog he does not fear. In the end, the dog glances away. Or else, the dog flies at his throat. And the man then takes some weapon, a knife or gun the dog would never know to make, and the dog drops dead at his feet. That being the case, I don’t glance away, and I don’t attack. I wait. I resist and I wait. And though there is no earthly (ha, earthly, I like that selection of a word) no earthly use to it, I will do nothing else. I am not a bitch-dog. And he is not a man.

Although, in appearance. . . .

(What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty—how express and admirable—how like an angel—how like a god! The beauty of the world—)

And how like Standish, the Standish she had never known, Anna’s Standish, Caroline’s son.

His skin was either very dark or very tanned. There was not a mark or a line incised there, he could have been twenty, or sixteen, except the face had none of that softness, either, and was irrevocably mature. Not young—it might have been fifty, or one hundred, as he had said. Blue-eyed, as Standish was, the eyes clean and clear, and human. The hair was black and very thick, combed back from the wide low forehead in the way she had often seen a man’s hair combed. He wore shirt and pants, nothing novel—either they had always dressed as humanity had dressed, or taken it up on arrival. When in Rome—Yes, they would have to be like men, without, and within. As he told her, gravity and air, biology, climate, the very method of the earth’s rotation, its distance from the sun, the moon by night, the seas, the trees, the dews, the dreams of Earth—must be like that of their own world. It was not illogical. Why should one world be unique, or one people? As the ape, the lemur, to a man, so men to these men. And to their women, for Cury had sometimes mentioned Athenes, Dianas, Junos, along with his cast of the male pantheon.

Which one of the masculine gods of Olympus, then, was this one?

“He calls me Zeus, or Jupiter,” said the man.

And so did prove to her he was also alien, Invader, Enemy. He had read her mind.

She was too frightened and too disgusted to feel anything. She stepped back, ritually. She said, “It’s hopeless then.”

“Quite hopeless.”

“No resistance is possible.”

“None.”

“And no—privacy.”

“Not a great deal. Though none of you is observed continuously. There are other things to do.”

“We’re your hobby.”

“You know that word? Considering your former environment, it seems out of place.”

“It was. And in yours.”

“You are not a hobby. A study would be the better word.”

“Why,” she said, “are you speaking to me? You can read me.”

“But you can’t read any one of us. Therefore I must phrase my comments verbally.”

“Tiresome for you.”

She turned (the dog glanced away), and walked some yards from him. She glimpsed in her mind one of the processions of people she had seen from the terrace, heading into the city, not coming back. He would see it too, in her mind. And answer?

“Not for food,” he said. “The man Cury misinterprets our program there, and has made it his fetish, but it is his, not ours. There are tests we have made, on blood and tissue, such things. We need to learn what we can of your kind, to see what we ourselves will be up against here. The life rhythms, the viruses and microbes of your planet, which is now in our possession.”

She said, to the tall bank of bright flying lights she stood before, “You said you vaunt. But why are you boasting to an ape in a cage?”

He said, “To see what you will do.”

“I’d better keep still. I’d better do nothing.”

“Even that, you will agree, is doing something. Negativity is also a decision.”

She thought abruptly, Could they read us in the colony? Were they only playing, that century and a half they left us down there in the dark? Or must you have proximity to read? And is the telepathy, like all of it, dependent on all this fabulous science? Well, am I correct?

“To a certain extent.”

“Lord of the machine,” she said. “Deus de machina.”

She sat down on the polished floor, economically, her legs stretched before her and crossed at the ankles, her hands in the lap of the cotton frock Cury had brought her. She shut her eyes. She thought Void. She tried to hold vacuum in her mind, she fought to hold it, and when stray visions came, she nipped them in the bud with a black shears. How long she did this she was unsure. She dared not try to monitor time either.

But at some point he said to her, “Go away then, Esther. You can leave by retracing the route of your entry, the gantry and the lift. The stars are out over the sea.”

She got to her feet and let vacuum pour away. She said, “My stars, not yours.”

But when she looked for him boldly, he was already gone. He must have left silently even as she made her stubborn protest. The voice issued through a speaker on the desk-console. The speaker now spoke to her again. It said: “You may return when you wish. You will sometimes find me here, which need not deter you.”

Standish—no. Standish had never positively invited her, in words.

She left the room. Her legs were momentarily full of pins and needles. That was excellent. It meant she had been utterly stationary, so void, for quite some while.

•   •   •

That night, that hot fervent night, which in the room was the same moderate temperature as always, Esther woke in fear and did not know why; then remembered why. She lay flat on the bed, wanting to keep the lights at bay. Can he read me now? Yes. If he wants to. Even her dreams, even the dream which must have woken her, that she herself could not recall, he would know it, or one of them, all of them, would know.

Zeus, Jupiter. The son of Cronus, the Titan god-king who devoured his off-spring. But Jupiter had tricked papa. In his place, a thunder-stone was given the old man, who gulped it down. Later the hero, determined the old order must fall, fed his father emetics, and the great gods of Greece and Rome were sicked forth from the Titan’s belly. Jupiter, Amun-Ra to the Egyptians, a ram of black marble, forehooves tucked under, human supplicant crouched at his breast—Blue eyes, in Egypt, were a sign of evil, the Devil, or demons.

Can you hear me, still?

It was superfluous to object, to fight, even to despair. They were the gods, and the gods could always listen.

Esther turned on her stomach. Her eyes fast closed, she stared into a long black empty tunnel, and slept.

•   •   •

Days and nights passed, and Cury did not come to the apartment. Before, he had sometimes left her alone two or three days at a stretch, never longer. But now seven days, seven nights, and no Cury.

Could it be she no longer belonged to Cury? But there was also no Steiner. And no Finch, of course. And no movement in the city but for the whispering aircraft and hurrying vehicles on the lifeless roads. Which began to fool her into thinking them pre-programmed and aimless. And not a human in sight.

This was a strange uneasy freedom. Esther walked through the city, unhindered and alone. It might have been her previous era, adolescent in the ruinous city of men. Except that there, even desolate and dying, the city had a living quality, the very shambles provided brilliance and personality. The alien city, poreless, flawless, was soulless too.

She walked by the sea, the great water, in the baking afternoons.

The waves seemed to catch fire from the sun. All that glistens is not gold. She moved carefully in the opposite direction to the pyramid. She sought for shells, and found them, and bizarre creatures in the wet sand and among the rocks. She searched out their identity, in turn, in the host of books Cury had brought her. She learned, and forgot what she had learned, impatiently. These little beings under stones, they were Esther, and she was God. And she was impatient, too, with such metaphysics.

The seven days gone, two more went by. She walked along the avenue toward the compound, or where she judged it must be, and came to a huge wall, sky-high, with no visible gate or means of entering. She could hear no human sounds over the wall. She might have imagined them, the colony, the past, her fellow men, everything. But she had not.

She thought of trying to find a way out toward the fields, but the wall went on running, parallel to the city. She could glimpse the distant uplands, miles off. That was all. Eventually, and with the sense of fulfilling a purpose, she gave up. She was aware the fields opened out somewhere, and the wall stopped—Steiner had told her. She had not tried very hard, had she, to locate that place?

In the apartment block she took the lift to all floors, and tried to gain access via other doors, but not even a give-away panel would ignite in the flooring. Once, it seemed to her she caught a flicker of clandestine movement above, as the lift came into the fourteenth floor. She sprang out, but no one was there. Still she could detect no entry in the walls, but lay in wait a long while, and occasionally called, her name, her human origin, and her wish to converse with another like herself. But the wish was not really exact, and as if they knew it, no one would respond. Finally she began to propose a theory, that the building was currently deserted, saving herself. If humans had ever roomed there, now they were gone. (It had been a ghost on the fourteenth floor, or some play of her eyes.)

Yet she did find a way out on to the roof of the building, twenty-seven stories up. It was flat, with no parapet, and commanding a view of the city and the sea to its horizon. Here she could sit, letting the birds feed on the last of the fruit Cury had given her, which was not rotting. The birds did not seem to distrust her. They had altogether forgotten that mankind had been a dubious friend. Her own kind maybe would at last forget the world before the aliens, and be confused by the notion of managing without them. . . . without the rotten fruit.

There came a wonderful dusk, free of haze, unearthlike in the tinted air, the sky a translucent bowl of gentian glass in which blue stars leapt to flame like struck matches.

It was theirs, the earth. Stupid to deny. Theirs, and they ruled over it, and it changed to please them. Men? But these were the quintessence of Man. Better, superior. The Truth.

In that wild afterglow, Esther left the roof and went back toward the shore and the dark pyramid and the Man.

Chapter Six

In the three months that followed her first meeting with the alien (cipher-named Jupiter), the scope of Esther’s world enlarged, her routines of living were altered, and her status changed.

But it seemed they were alone in the city. In the entire triad of months, she met with no other living anthropoid creature, neither man-beast nor man-god.

She saw “Jupiter”; she saw herself in mirrors. And now and then, she did see more of the aliens, his peers, in the screens which showed, she supposed, less accessible parts of the city. They were like him, inasmuch as they were like humans but better. Better made and more fair to look upon, and thus totally unlike, resembling marvelous statues that had woken up, statues with amazing crystalline brains. Of the men, and women, of his race, some were dark, some blond, some lighter of skin or swarthier. They varied, the way mankind had varied, but they were not mankind. They did motivated things, passing briskly and gracefully to and fro, or static intent things, seated before their consoles. Then she heard them conduct conversation over the tubes and mechanisms, with “Jupiter,” in another language. She realized they could be speaking in French, or Russian, or Latin, the tongues of man’s own vanquished civilizations. How could she properly know?

When she first returned, that savage dusk, he had not been in the room of machines, but in an inner chamber, whose door had opened for her at once. It was packed with high shelves of books, with cases and stands—she soon discovered the place went on for miles, climbing up and down through the pyramid, via stairs, escalators and lifts. But it was David’s store Below all over again. And the aliens had made a finer job, naturally, of rescuing the artifacts of men. But she said to him nearly immediately, “I’m not concerned with this. I want to know about the others from my colony. I want to know about Doctor Finch, and the soldiers. About Janet Simpson. Margery, Ellen, Sue. About the compound.”

To which he replied, “If you ever really want to see the compound, I will take you there. But you don’t.” Then he added, “No, I can’t read your mind away from the console, but I’m starting to register some of your patterns. Your obligations, as you have frequently been told, are finished.”

“Steiner,” she said. “I had some use for him, you’ll agree.”

“He is in good health,” he said. “He works on the land. He had ancestors, two hundred years before, who did that. It’s good for him. He is quite happy.”

“Thinking every hour he may be butchered to feed you blood.”

“This error was explained to them, by their own kind.”

“Was it? Do they credit the explanation? Probably, if they were also assured that instead they’ll be the subject of experiment—lab animals. Yes, that’s bloody awful enough they could believe it.”

“They grasp something of their function, yes.”

It was unreasonable to argue any further against such a precept. She did argue. She heard herself and thought, Shut up. While he presented her with replies, standing partly in shadow under the craning stacks of books, beside white figurines of lions and angels, and looking like Standish.

“Only I would see it. It is my fantasy.”

Later he took her through some of the labyrinth of the alien store-chambers—earth museum, House of Wonders: Omega. Its miles, rising and falling, housed in every inch something of value, or importance. From here had come Cury’s nonedible gifts, the horse’s skull, the gilded volumes of fables and maths, the owl, the beads.

After two hours, she was exhausted. She made to leave. He, “Jupiter,” told her she might return as and when she wanted. And she did return, as she returned to the sea, or to walking in the blind soulless city, and as, by and by, she returned to him.

He studied her, he and all his companions did so. But, on her side, she could study him.

She learned nothing. Bland. City-soulless. Like his habitat. The marble god, the plastic statue. He said always the same things, or different things in the same way. He was a machine.

That was the first month.

In the second, from her terrace, she thought she saw a small group of people in the streets below, about a quarter of a mile away—she was not sure, but she left the apartment and rushed down, and ran through the city, trying to find them. She did not know why exactly. Nor did she catch them.

“Jupiter” had by then told her that, aside from the experiments, very few of which were now fatal or even slightly injurious, the human ghetto was mostly a means of gathering mankind together for its own protection. Where it dwelled independently, it did so, just as Anderson’s group had done, in insecurity and abysmal conditions, inevitably stagnant and ultimately functionless. Not merely an arrest, then, but a rescue of humanity had taken place over the last fifty earth years. This city was not the only pool of men, there were other compounds, elsewhere. Men were becoming helpful, under guidance, not only to the aliens, but to themselves. There was no longer any quarrel with them. The Vae Victis of the conqueror had sounded once and for all, and was finished with. The plan of rehabilitation advanced. This was not an excuse he gave her. It was a social contract.

But what am I?

Esther began to wish to see Cury again. She would question him thoroughly, and this time she would gain answers. But there was no Cury. The city held only two persons, aside from the ghosts and mirages—now, quite often, Esther began to glimpse, on the other floors of her building, shadows that had no substance. And in the dark she would hear tappings outside the closed window-doors, or the door from the annex, and, springing to open the way, confront nothing, and begin to be nervous. The apartment block was haunted by her fancies of loneliness.

She spent more and more time among the alien store of objects. There was even music, and machines to transmit it, which he had shown her how to operate. The dances and the songs, the concertos, symphonies, and tribal chants of two centuries ago, filled up the spaces, and set the bronzes and marbles and the glass to gentle vibration. Her ears, too, filled with the water of sound. She sometimes ran away and left the music sounding to itself. It was a stimulus, not always pleasant. Angers came over her, and terrible griefs, and mindless happiness and pain. So that one night she stood on the roof-top twenty-seven floors up and looked down, and thought, Yes. But she did not jump forward to die.

The next morning when she went into the room of machines he was there, though for some days she had not seen him. Some small metal thing was crawling up and down among the lights and panels, making a repair or adjustment. But “Jupiter”—she had never inquired his real name, and he had never offered it—turned to her and said, “Do you think you meant to kill yourself? You did not, I assure you. The impulse to suicide is a sort of reflex. It means nothing.”

“You were at your console? I thought so. I begin to feel that when you’re in my head, watching. I didn’t say I liked it. I could block you out, couldn’t I, if I really tried?”

“Perhaps, for a short while.”

“I really must try then, mustn’t I.”

“It could be a worthwhile exercise.”

She thought of Finch, and flexed her healed fingers. They were rather stiff, as Finch had promised. Exercise, then. Fingers, brain.

“Today,” he said, “we shall travel outside, in one of the vehicles you’ve seen.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Even in one of the air vehicles. They are of course safe, and needn’t alarm you.”

“Who cares if I’m alarmed? You don’t. And why should I be worried? My life’s hanging by a thread. That’s why I didn’t jump off the roof. I worked out it would be better to wait until one of you decides to push me.”

“Our methods of termination are more compact. There’s no reason for you to die, unless, say, you contract some incurable illness.”

(Anna.) “But you could cure me, if you wanted.”

“No, I’m afraid not. Our pharmacopoeia is tailored solely to ourselves. Because of this, we safeguard for you your own medical men. Remember, I did tell you we’ve come across, as yet, no disease to which we are not naturally resistant. Even the diseases and germs of your planet have revealed nothing inimical to us. Only to you.”

“So even Earth hates us and loves you.”

He took her out of the building, on to a silent road by the beach, where presently, softly murmuring, one of the transports came, and at an invisible instruction from him, opened its side. They got in, and were spun about the city.

The passenger area of the vehicle was a featureless capsule of dull blue. There was a mild sense of motion. Windows, invisible from the outside, showed the buildings flowing by. Sometimes the sea appeared, looking alive and sparkling bright. Everything else was perfect and dead.

You are like this. Can you hear me? No? Maybe? The featureless cruelty of sheer unhuman inhumanity.

No controls or means of making the car move were to be seen in the capsule. Just the views, and the man.

He sat with unslovenly ease, close enough to her she might have touched him, yet they never did touch, and the ride was so exquisitely level on the ironed roadways, no jolt threw them together as had sometimes happened to characters in antique books she had read. With Standish, her sexuality had been constantly and confusingly alert. Standish was old, but she yearned out to the youth, the essence behind the gnarled bark of his age. With this creature, who was straight and convincingly young, and fashioned statue-like, black-haired, skin like one more unknown material from that other world—nothing. Not a glimmer of sensation stirred in her, but for the same kind of slight nausea she felt, looking down twenty-seven floors at the ground below.

Nothing. Yet, she had made the comparison. She had had to say to herself, He is like a man, a man more profoundly evident than any man. But he is also like the long gray slimy worm that slithers through mud, or the disease-carrying dog with bared fangs. Could I kill him? Is it possible? Immune to all sickness—but could a bullet do it? All that armoring—spiders, air-cars—is that fighting behind a shield? Not invulnerable, then, maybe. But Finch stole my pistol. I could see that in Finch’s eyes, sometimes. Anyway, if this one doesn’t read me right now, some other one does, at his—her—console.

After an hour, the vehicle stopped. They got out, and he took her into one of the faceless blocks, lift-ascended, and on a platform they waited, until an air-car came. Then they got into that.

Being in the sky—was not alarming. It seemed a delusion, only that. She stared at cloud, and down at the tops of the city, the mass of vague forms which the clouds interrupted. Once he said, “That is the compound.” She looked and saw an enormous geographical diagram, coloured in different tones, some schoolwork performed by a particularly attentive child. Neither did the compound, seen from the air, convince her of its actuality. Nor was the view any help in gauging its perimeters on the ground.

When the air vehicle came down again, they got out.

They were on another of the soaring roofs. Quite abruptly, heaven turned over and the roof whirled. Esther flung out her arm and caught a pillar of sky, and fell to her knees. Her ears rang, her heart pounded. She vomited suddenly and blindingly.

When she stopped, she found he had knelt beside her and was holding her head. She spat. She felt shame and burning fury. Why shouldn’t he aid her? Like a sick puppy, a horse with a stone in its hoof—and violently she thrust him away. It was the first time she had had physical contact with him. There was nothing unusual in it.

She got up and went across the roof, and kneeled again at another place, and wept. The tears were like the vomiting, wrenching and scalding and necessary and unavoidable, with no prior warning. She let them come, having no escape from them, or her position. But the shame burned on raw and glaring in her. She imagined him watching. All of them watching.

Behind her, the air-car sank into the building with a sigh. So clean and spotless, all of it. But she had vomited thereon. Like the bloody old Titan, spewing, but not gods, only human bile. Over their perfection. And the tears ended. She laughed briefly and stood up, wiping her eyes and turning to look at him.

“Well,” she said. “Vae Victis. Woe to the vanquished. Enjoy it, great lord of machines? I am the symbol of this entire planet you’ve trampled. Puking and shivering, on its knees, weeping to the unlistening air.”

“More jargon?” he asked her softly. He stood quite near to her, relaxed, and with no definite expression. “But a superior jargon, for all that. You might have been a poet, Esther, perhaps a writer or an actress, if your own society had persisted.”

“Shut up, God. Kill me or go away. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want you in my brain, but you’re there, so try to keep quiet because it annoys me. I’m writhing on the pin. Isn’t that enough?”

“I can’t pity you,” he said, “that isn’t in me, was never in any of us. We never pitied ourselves, we have no compassion for anything at all.”

“Pity and compassion. Who wants them? Stuff them, if you can even do it. No apertures? No dirty human-type holes? I don’t know what you’re like under your clothes. Scales? Metal? And if you’re gods, why do you need so many machines? Why don’t you have wings to fly with and eyes that can cut us down with light-rays. A man, a human, on that roof over there, aiming a rifle at your head, could blow out your superior godly brain, or aim a bit lower and blast your abhuman viscera all over this nice white guk. Couldn’t he?”

“Your anger is also only a reflex,” he said. “The agony was genuine.”

“How would you know? You don’t have feelings. No emotion in your kind.”

“I didn’t tell you that.”

“And you’ve told me so much. My teacher. Leave me alone.”

A minute went by. During this time, they stood and looked at each other. His non-expressive expression did not alter. The passion of hers did, abating and dying, leaving her also almost expressionless.

He said at last, “If you prefer, there is the compound. No, I’m not threatening you. You could be completely at liberty to come and go. But able to reside with your own species.”

“I hate my own species,” she said, slowly, finding it out. “They let themselves be mown down by yours.”

“Then you must accept it. There’s no other course.”

“Accept what? Defeat and slavery? I have. That’s why—the agony—not it’s futile—” The passion came to her again, and the pain and the humiliation that he saw it, saw her mind, and had held her in her vulnerable illness. Then again, the passion went away. “I accept it,” she said. “I’m a beast of the field. You noticed me because I prance and toss my head at the bit, and paw the ground, while the others just stand there apathetically grunting and chewing. You’ll be kind to me. You’ll see I have a good working life. You’ll pet me, reward me. And when I get old and toothless, or I have cancer, you’ll let me have a quick hygienic death. Or am I only kidding myself? You want me for some special experiment, only you can’t use an anaesthetic, so I need spirit to survive a sufficient time—or the breeding pen. Or to go in a—what were they?—a circus, and make you all roll about with my intelligent gambols. For Christ’s sake. Get it over with.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The manner of your thinking, the paths your thought takes, all are very curious, and very wrong. There’s nothing being devised for you in the way that you suggest and perhaps fear. No scheme. No destiny. But you are interesting. You were told this at once, Esther.”

She flinched. She said, “I presume, as my owner, you don’t need to reveal your own name.”

“You wouldn’t be able to pronounce it. It would be meaningless to you.”

“Like your superior language.”

“Yes.”

“No attempt to teach me that? The odd word of command—Fetch. Sit. Giddy-up.”

“One day you could attempt the language, if you wanted. But you don’t want to learn it. Or at least, only in order to possess some sort of equivalent footing with us, or some trump card to hold over us; neither plot is feasible. Give up, Esther.”

“Does it bother you a lot, my resistance?”

“You are the one who suffers from it.”

“I’d be far happier if domesticated.”

“This dialogue becomes a circle, always.”

She went to the edge of the roof and looked over. Seemingly thirty stories. Even better.

She did not throw herself off, but stood examining the violet weed that grew along the wall below—they never cleared it away—then blinking out toward the shiny sea.

When he called her, however, she followed him. They left the building. In the street, he walked toward the pyramid by the ocean. Esther dawdled; she turned back in the direction of the apartment block. She hesitated. Then she cursed him, and followed him again, keeping some way behind. She felt an intimation of quietness in doing this. It was peaceful. She wondered how long it would last.

•   •   •

She bivouacked in the museum, playing the music, poring over the books, exploring the long corridors of things. If she lived to be a hundred, perhaps she would never see all of it. Lower sections went down deep into the earth, and some ran out under the beach into the sea. She found by accident a passage which ended in a submarine window. The water was blue-gray, pierced by lamps on the exterior of the observatory. Fish winged by on filmy fins. It absorbed her one whole afternoon.

She began to sleep in the museum, on certain of its broad padded benches. She saw Jupiter rarely. She brought the tablets of paper and the pens and kept her journal regularly, putting into it all the nothings that happened to her. She returned to her apartment only to shower or to eat. (There were washrooms in the museum, and drinking water from taps. Who had used them before her? Other rogue humans?) Then, conversely, she would spend a stretch of days in the apartment, not going out, not looking from the terrace. Being a prisoner.

The feeling of peacefulness persisted, but became abhorrent to her. She began to wonder if something was being put into the food her unit dispensed. She stopped eating, and only drank the water, but even the water might have been tampered with.

“Can’t you hear me?” she said aloud to the apartment walls. “I want Steiner. I want a man. I want sex. I’m an animal, and I ought to be serviced.”

This was mostly a lie. In any case, Steiner did not come to the apartment. No one visited. Not even Finch.

Her stomach growled with hunger; she grew weak. She started to eat again. (She had starved two days—a century; her healthy fast-burning body would not put up with it.) Then she went to the sea and sat all day watching the tide inhale and exhale under the big sky.

It was not after all anything in the food, for peace left her.

She rose in the sunset and ran screaming up and down the hem of the sand. She strode into the ocean, embracing the amethyst spray, wanting to drown. But her body again, young and vital, drove her out, refusing death. Night came. She wandered beneath the stars. I could get away, just keep walking. Then if they found me, they might do it for me. Kill me. But why walk, the world was no longer hers. What terms could she make with it?

Standish, Standish, what would you say to me? You cynical damned old man. But this one’s older. Nearly Anderson’s age.

She slept on the sand, and woke to sunlight, hungry again. The translated words of a French poet came to her: “My spirit is at war with nature within me.” Damned bloody right.

She was eating hot waffles with syrup and drinking orange juice on the terrace, when a small air-car swept lightly as a bird to settle a yard or so away. The door opened. A machine spoke to her. It told her to indicate anything she wished to bring with her from the apartment.

Fear tossed in her stomach, but she was not certain she was afraid. “So I’m being sent to the compound.”

After a moment, his voice came out of the machine instead.

“No, Esther. You’ll live here, by the sea.”

To this she could summon no reply, no query. No thought for him to read.

•   •   •

She was shown the way by a machine which also carried her clothes, toiletries, and other items she had reckoned needful. The rest would be returned to the museum, no doubt. She did not properly recognize what she had picked out, except for the skull. The skull meant something to her. She had not named that thing.

The pyramid lift went up and up, past the usual stopping point. At an unknown gantry she alighted, and walked on through an opening door. There was an unfurnished oval space, and another door. Which also opened.

Beyond the door, the new apartment.

She had never before, except in ancient things, or natural things—that which might not positively be utilized—seen beauty. But here it was, at last.

They were a set of rooms, which gave on each other effortlessly, as if they had evolved, as landscapes and rivers do. They followed a curve, rather than the harsh squared shapes of man, a matter that might sometimes have been noted elsewhere in the alien architecture. There were intermittent angles in some of the walls, even in varying heights of floors and ceilings, but again, all in melodic union. At first sight one accepted it as a single entity, a composite; whole. The color was universally blue, paling or deepening, here and there shot with faint amber or glassy green. There was, across and through and resting on everything, light like bloom on grapes. It filled the spaces of the rooms by means of windows, which also curved a little, and gazed all one way—out from the city (and blinkered from it), to the ocean and the sky. So the eyes of beauty looked only into beauty, the distorted ripening loveliness of the alien earth which had begun to be.

“No,” Esther said to the apartment, and she clenched her hands. Yet she followed the machine inside the rooms and when, having deposited her chattels, it went away—she remained.

You aren’t even able, from here, to see those platforms stretching out at the south end into the water. Everything made is subtly but completely hidden. Which is peculiar, isn’t it? Why should a vantage of their own enterprise offend them? Obviously, surely, this suite was made for one of them. Either there is a surplus of such apartments, or else the alien resident is off someplace. He implies most of them are in other parts of the city, or inland, not here at all. He chats to them through those screens—Christ knows what they say, I’ve tried to put a pattern to the sounds, but it’s gibberish. Besides, they do most of the talking, he only slips in a word now and then, and there is a slight interference that makes it harder to hear the others. Never mind that.

What a gorgeous palace among the cloud-topped towers.

There was a low table like a black mirror (it collected no dust; nothing did) with a small panel like a faceted tawny topaz. The mechanical voice, which generally answered her now when she required information aloud, instructed her in the panel’s use. It was very simple. You touched it once, and catalogued any form of food. Next the table opened and served this food. It took between five and eight minutes—she timed it by counting out seconds. The plates, which came out of the table, were like the bluest eggshell, with the most ghostly chiaroscuro design swirling beneath the surface. When she had drunk the transparent wine from the slender goblet, she tried smashing the cup, a plate, but both were impervious, which did not surprise her.

At night, or if the sun should be too cordial (there was scarcely ever any haze now, even in the evenings), one touched the windows and they misted, as if sweetly breathed upon. When touched for, lights rose up in lamps which were like amber eggs, held in the coils of carved foliage, or abstractions. There were cages of pearly metal filled by blue ferns and flowers that shut their silver eyes by night and opened other eyes of darkest gold, and these flowers, by some expansion to and ejection of the air—the mechanical voice told her—made soft occasional trillings, like birds. Between the windows, a slender green earth tree was growing from a vase: Some aspects of earth were acceptable to them. The tree sent up its crown of leaves high into the highest part of the platformed ceiling. Beneath, the bed was a mere twelve inches off the reflective cushioned floor. There were many pillows, dimly scented like plants which lean to streams in stories, and covers came at another certain touch, when they wove together, warm air currents like water, to give a bath of sleep.

The bathroom fountained out a shower, which fell down into a deep basin between the climbing purple creepers and the somber green ivies of earth. Esther realized it would have been possible to swim in the bath, for relaxation or exercise. At the shallow end, by the shower, sponges emerged from the touched mosaic walls, to soap and to sluice. One need do nothing, simply lie there and be tended. Afterward there could be unctions, oils and powders. Before a fan of mirrors in the dressing room which led from the bathroom, this process could be developed upon with cosmetics, salves, hennas and rouges. Since these dream-games of makeup seemed to come with the room, Esther assumed the apartment had been created for a female. Of course, certain societies gave rise to the use of cosmetics by men. The alien did not seem to use them. But then, neither had Esther. And after playing with these, she lost rapport with them, and left them alone.

There was a music-player. There was a musical instrument of pipes and curling bands which (at a touch—always everything at a touch) made music of another sort, the alien kind, tempered perhaps to her ear, for it had a sound that she responded to, and so shut off the instrument.

There were books in cases—alien—and there was a book-screen, through which alien literature might be viewed—its hieroglyphs suggesting nothing human, not even the scripts of India, Egypt, those last lands. Human reading must be fetched from the museum.

So high up—it has to be sixty floors at least—the stars by night look close enough to dab out with a finger. I can open the windows, and see gulls, once in a way, circling below. For some reason, I never noticed any gulls when I first reached this city. Something may have scared them off. I could be anywhere. On some mountain.

I count on the fact that they’re watching my reactions, mildly titillated. Touching this, touching that, all the toys—A touch, I do confess. But why put me, their clever individual dancing mare, into this plush stable?

In the midst of the beauty she had placed, with some attention to its site, the bleached skull of the horse. It had its own magnificence, but that was not why she did it. The skull was to remind her.

Memento morì. If I’m not a hunting hound or a monkey, I’m a prize horse, The Spirited Mare. Where will they try to ride me to? At which fences? What races do they expect I’ll win?

Don’t bet on me.

But the blue apartment, the green tree, the fountain-showers, the music, the sky and sea and gulls below, checked her.

I’ve never seen anything like this before. I’ve only been here in it two days, two nights.

I wonder if Dog-Cury has a kennel as good as my stall?

•   •   •

She inhabited the blue and green apartment the rest of that month, the third, seeing no one. There was the last of her responsibilities gone. If she did not have to meet with him, she did not feel obliged to hate him. She played with the apartment and read books brought from the museum—where she never seemed to come on him, nor in the room of machines—and walked by the sea.

There was no sign of haze, now, over the city, in the morning or evening. She wondered why not, and inscribed the fact in her journal.

It seemed to her she saw less of the cars, on the streets or in the air. And no spiders. She loathed these eight-legged giants, symbol of silly misunderstanding, and of capture. Her instincts, though she knew them to be mechanical, were also continually outraged by them. She was glad of the omission. But it did occur to her that the robot vehicles of the aliens might have been withdrawn on some mission—to tear up some other, larger, community from its shelter. Such a campaign would account, too, for Cury’s disappearance. The hound would be out, sniffing and wriggling in under some other gate.

Nevertheless, one noon, standing to her thighs in a great beach-pool the incoming sea had made, she looked up from the anemones, half involuntarily, to inspect the city—hazeless, penciled and stark, so motionless and so vacant. It was like a premonition. Suppose, long after the overthrow of mankind, the aliens, too, should vanish from the earth, leaving only their shells behind, like the dead sea life of the shore.

But then a solitary plane, beetle-shaped, dropped carelessly between the buildings, and prophecy left her. She went back to the anemones.

•   •   •

On the second day of the fourth month, the sapphire panel among the caged ferns spoke to her, in the voice of Jupiter. There was no preliminary.

“Have you deciphered the clock in the apartment?”

“Yes,” she said. She was startled and defensive. His voice came in and recalled she was the Spirited Mare, for the skull of the horse had not been totally effective. As for the clock, she had thought its rays and daily chimings, which did not seem to correspond with any notion of time-keeping as she knew it, were a sort of light-picture—artwork. Then a recurrence of the themes put her wise.

“At the violet stroke—about seven in the evening, but I expect you know that—I will arrive at your apartment, which will open to admit me.”

Esther said nothing. All her body said it.

Read me, she thought, and flung away from her the alien board-game she had been trying to fathom, so its fragile unbreakable pieces scattered the floor and rolled behind the furnishings.

“I should prefer you to be there,” he said.

“It would be stupid to leave. You can always find me. I don’t know how, but you could.”

“I can always find you.”

“What shall I wear for you? Shall I get the machine to put up my hair? Where shall I be, to greet you?”

But the voice had ceased.

Why do I think that? She paced about the rooms. The master doesn’t fornicate with the horse. No. No. Yet conquerors, bored with their own kind, took to themselves native women, inferiors they despised as animals, to see what it would be like, to indulge the twist of bestiality—

He had done everything else. Curiosity. It was the culminating analysis.

He had set her up in splendor, in surroundings that would be inspiring and restful also for him.

Why did she think this? He must be revolted by the idea of her, as she herself was revolted.

And I am thinking all this, and no contradiction from the machine. “Is it the compound?” I asked. No, Esther. “Is it an experimental rape?” I ask now. No answer.

Get out then. Though he could track her, make it awkward for him, give him trouble. And when caught, fight. If he can be hurt, do it. And when nothing else is to be done, be a stone, spread and dry, and not a whimper.

And then she thought, with a dreadful astonishment, But do I want it to happen? I’m wanting it and him, am I? I say dryness and stone, but is it warmth and moisture? I want him? Steiner taught me, opened me up, virgin territory, broken by the bold pioneer, now ready for the plow. Jesus. Then he won’t. He can’t. If I do that with him, it’s over, yes truly over, in a way it never was before.

She tried to drive the poetic images and the analogies away. But she had been book-taught, too. There were visions of ships landing upon the earth and piercing through the earth’s surface, the spilling fire, the shudder. Esther, the earth, invaded. Finish. For God’s sake, who said they even did it that way?

Irrelevant. It had to be that way, approximately, or where was the stimulus. They were like humans. They would screw like humans.

She had been dwelling like a child in a poison forest. She had abetted the venom, and had eaten—what had Cury said?—the pomegranate seeds of death—Too late.

When the violet chime struck on the alien clock, the door moved and the alien entered.

She stood in the first room, at the door. “Am I correct?” she said.

“Quite correct.”

“Why?”

“You have already gone through all the whys. And now know all the answers.”

“Mine. Yours?”

“Bored with my own kind,” he said, “or my own kind being unavailable. The old colonial myth of your earth, and of everywhere.”

“Coupling with horses. Laying dogs. Monkeys, lemurs.”

“It seems you prefer to see yourself as something utterly unlike, a true animal, rather than admit that, to my kind, yours is a similar race greatly inferior in all ways.”

She threw off her clothes, because she did not want to seem to be distressed by her humanity and possible difference. He would already have seen her, anyway, via the console. She met his eyes, and his flesh.

She supposed he made love to her. It seemed not so unlike the other times, but how could she be sure? There had only been Cury and Steiner to judge by. Neither did there seem to be any physical aberration—though she strove not to see (while not looking away) nor to touch. The male body, perfectly proportioned, with no scar, no mark, no fault, held and caressed hers, penetrated hers, and rocked her in the rhythm of that unholy ride, as she had been held and caressed, penetrated, rocked, and ridden before.

She disliked all of it. If any contact or any token might have seduced her or carried her, she could not guess anymore, for it was not to be. There was nothing abhorrent to him, so this made him abhorrent. No taste, no odor—he was like the cleanest, sentient . . . dust. Soon, the act became infinitely horrible to her, and as he looked into her face, as any man might have done, she turned her head, wanting to see everything in the room but the creature which had, in all other forms, engaged her awareness. It was now out of the question to meet his eyes.

Still fast lodged within her, as a man would have been, and in a man’s voice, he said her name.

“What now?” she said.

“It is you,” he said, “who desired this. Your thought, read by me. Your dreams.”

“Liar,” she said. “You see how I want it. Maybe I did, then. But not from you.”

“The hypothetical man on the roof who could blow out my brain,” he said to her, “that isn’t possible, Esther. I carry the key to the city, and for this reason I’m armored at all times. A kind of shield you might or might not understand, invisible, and contra-destructive. A bullet hitting the shield would explode, harmless to me. The device which controls the shield is located in my spinal column. Inaccessible. To get at it, you would have to breach the shield—one cancels the other. You can do nothing about it. Only I can switch off the armor, and why should I?”

“What a lot of talk. Get on with the other thing. Get it over with.”

“I think,” he said, “that’s enough.”

He withdrew from her, with an unnerving tact of movement. He had entered in the same way. When she looked again, he was donning the ordinary human garb of the aliens.

“Tomorrow, at the amber stroke on your clock, you will do something obediently, Esther. You’ll touch the clothing machine in the dressing room, and it will bring you certain garments and accessories. Clothe yourself, and then go down to the beach. On the beach the one you call the Dog will be hanging about, since he’s been told to do so. None of this makes any sense to you, but it will, unless I am much mistaken.”

Esther rolled across the floor—he had not come to her on the bed. She felt the start of a sour elation, perhaps false. “Oh, I spoiled it for you. I disappointed you. That’ll teach you to go after the mares. Go back and lay one of your own kind. Your superior women who don’t bleed every month or sweat or have pores in their skin.”

Dressing, he had not moved as Steiner did, or as Cury did. The uniqueness of him was inexplicable but solid.

When he was gone, she recollected the instruction for tomorrow. I can already make a guess at that. But why not do it for you? In a way, she was almost cheerful at the prospect of seeing Cury again. He came, though recently, from the past.

She stood at the window, testing the sour elation in sips. She was giddy. She felt soothingly bruised inside, as she did after Steiner. She had not been dry.

She thought, Empty victory.

She thought: But I won.

•   •   •

In the morning she asked herself if anything had happened. But at the amber stroke she carried out his instructions, let the machines dress her, and do things to her face and hair.

The dress was the blue of dark-blue glass, and shone hard in just that way. The butterfly that pinned her hair was no insect of earth; it resembled blue glass also, but was something more precious. In the mirror, another face, another woman. Cinderella, clad for the ball.

On her glass slippers, she walked along the beach, knowing. The uneven surface of the sand, the pebbles and subsidences did not inconvenience the alien shoes. Everything of theirs was too good to be true. She saw Cury at a distance, with another man and woman. It was so long since she had seen humans—but these were not humans, of course, these were more hounds, his class. They were reasonably dressed themselves, and capering about, trying to fish, she thought, in the too-shallow restive sea.

Then Cury spotted her. He leapt high with a spurt of sand, and began to run to her, and brought up short. All this told a story. She grasped what it was; she had expected it. Now he looked appalled. Blasphemy, no doubt. His tinselly hair blew round his face. He would lose his hair soon, it was so fine, not strong like his jackal teeth. His eyes were blank as the mirror in which she had already seen herself. He did nothing more, only glared, and the other two stared. She passed them by without a word, or even a cry, exchanged.

He knows me, he knows me not. He thought I was a Diana, an Aphrodite. And then he saw I was an Esther after all, but a brand new model. No more whippings, little dog. The lord God has lifted me up unto the High Table. He has made me like unto an angel. In his own image, inferior, but close. My cup runneth over the green pasture. An alien. I am by proxy, that.

One of the Enemy, all in blue, and altering to fit the fake, beside the altering sea.

Chapter Seven

Outside the long hut, his back against its wall, Steiner was sitting, polishing the buttons and the belt-buckle of his old uniform. Up there, the stars shone brighter than anything Anderson’s lick-and-polish could get out of the metal. Steiner had small use for the stars. Supposed to be worlds, or the pivots of worlds, they had inaugurated all the mess; yet he could not get accustomed to seeing them as anything but chips of brilliance pinned up there on a kind of canvas top that overhung the land. He could never get attuned to the sounds, either. The fiddling of nocturnal crickets in the fields, just audible so near the compound wall, the shrieks of owls scudding over like kites. Nearer, there was a human noise he knew better, someone having his end away with one of the girls, a couple of huts distant. Could be Parrish, his bit always made a row over it. Esther was almost silent, but that didn’t mean she didn’t like it just as much. The old man had missed something there, he truly had.

It was thinking of Esther that had prevented Steiner from sleeping. As a rule, he had no problem. After the day’s work, the beer and tasty food, unless committed to other business, he stretched out on the bunk and was off. Not tonight. It was a hell of a time since he had seen her. They kept a sort of calendar here, but muddled, and he had not paid much attention. How long ago had he been with her, that afternoon—More than three months, it seemed to him. Maybe she’d just got tired of him. Well, if she was daft—but if so, who would she take up with in his place? None of the others, that he knew of, had outside appointments—and if anyone did, it was common knowledge all across this huge ramble of humanity. Even if it had been a name, some gink he’d never even met—But nobody was going out, nowadays. There was the story that plenty had had girls, or men, in the special tower block up the avenue, once. But not for years. He, Steiner, had been a celebrity, because he had . . . Only Steiner. And now not Steiner.

He didn’t like it. It got under his hide. Something had happened to her, something those aliens had dreamed up. And Steiner wanted to know what that was.

She’d put up a fight, of course. Christ, he’d never forget her in the colony when the lights blew. She and he were the only two who kept their heads. Esther—she was pure iron when she’d had to be. But that might have got her in deeper here.

He unclosed his fist, let go the buckle out of it, and stood up. The sex-duet had ended, and he walked over to the hut of its inception, going in silently at the door, passing along the bunks till he found the right one. He tapped Parrish on his shoulder, and Parrish sprang in his skin.

“All right, mate, calm down. It’s me. Want a word. In the lane.”

“You effing moron,” said Parrish, but in a minute or so had come out after him, into the gap between the huts. Zipping up his pants, Parrish said, “What is it?”

They shared a cigarette (the ration of these was not generous) and despite the prologue, did not speak to each other for some while. Then Steiner said, “I want to skip off tonight. I may be back, may not. Reckoned I’d let you know.”

“Not yet.”

“Yeah. Tonight.”

“Why? You’ll blow the whole deal, you will.”

“Esther.”

“You randy so-and-so. Can’t you make do in here? There’s enough of them gasping for it now they can’t get in the club.”

Steiner gave him a sharp, partly comradely push.

“She’s more than just that. You forget quickly, don’t you?”

“All that stuff back in—then. Anderson and Standish. You believe it?”

“You can stake your dear little balls I do. So did you. Most of us did. She bloody proved it, too. That scene in the tunnels in the blackout. Only you were so busy doing it in your knickers you never noticed.”

“All right, you bastard.”

“She’s Anderson’s manufacture, through to the bone. That meant something. It still means something, so far as I’m concerned. Want to argue with me?”

“Some other time. I’m worn out. That Lyn’s a goer. You want to try her.”

Steiner accepted the act of the “proffered throat,” and loosened momentarily. “Maybe. If I get back. You see I worked it out something’s up with Esther. Something they’ve cooked up. I’m for seeing what. So I’m off tonight. I’ve said it, and that’s that.”

“Oh bloody hell,” said Parrish. Both had kept their voices low, even on the fringe of outright aggression. Now the spark of the cigarette died and left them in the dark with the stars.

For practically two months, their group had been digging a tunnel out, under the compound wall. It began in one of the men’s washrooms exclusive to the field-workers. They had prized at the flooring unhopefully, with the farming equipment they had been given, then in excitement, since the impervious floor had turned out not impervious and under it was soil. They labored hard and slyly, sloping off in twos and threes, by day and night, if there was some other noise to mask them, one of the allowed parties, or some repairs to something. They feigned gastric necessity, or the wish for some other relief. Alien supervision was lax by then, or nonexistent. The spiders, which had assiduously patrolled the fields in large numbers through the first month, had dwindled to one or two, and then to one—which was often miles off, up on some hill, or over toward the sea, northward. Some days they did not even seen it. They just dutifully traipsed in and out at the signal of the compound machines, which woke them, announced meals, working times, and lights-out. Good little children, they were. Except for the tunnel.

There was the compound-wide legend, of course, that the aliens had the means of watching all things at all times, but the soldiers of Anderson’s troop had risked it, and now barely one of them believed the theory. If there was a watch, then it must be limited. “They’re so sure they’ve got us tucked under their thumb, they don’t bother with it anymore.”

A day ago, the tunnel had broken ground about six yards outside the west wall, in a copse of bushy trees. That meant it was well-clear of the city, too. Now they were packing in the tunnel sides to secure them, and fixing the modus operandi. Not every civ was going to be able to make it, or want to. Some of them, you’d think they grew here like little flowers. So that had to be sorted through as well. Steiner knew that by snapping free before anyone else was properly ready, he jeopardized the whole job. God almighty, he hadn’t even told Esther about this, in its initial stages, nor had he meant to at any time. Not because he didn’t trust her, oh no. Because she would hold out if they tried to question her, and if she did know something—and he wasn’t about to put her through that.

Now, things had altered. He’d take his chance. It would be all right, so long as he wasn’t caught.

“Listen,” he said to Parrish, “if they get me, I’ll say I hid in the fields—didn’t come back in today. The hooter went and you all piled in bleating like you’re meant to, but I stayed out. Naughty boy. But there was no spider to see, was there?”

“Something may have.”

“Like it sees the tunnel in the washroom?”

“I’ve been thinking,” said Parrish, biting his lip gloomily, “why can’t they know, and just be giving us rope? Cat and mouse. Let us do it, and then blast us to crap. Eh? They could be doing that.”

“And I could be wasting my time talking to you. I’ll rig something, make it look like I went over the wall.”

“Too high, it’s too high.”

“Okay. Then I hid in the field. But I’m going. Only first—” Steiner turned to glance across the endless lines of huts, the paths between, the open spaces where shade trees had been grown, to make it home-sweet-home for them. He saw none of that, or he saw and dismissed it. “Someone else,” continued Steiner, “I want to call on.”

He patted Parrish on the cheek, the back. “Go in and give it her again. Take your mind off things. If Esther says she’s fine, I’ll be back. In my little bunk before sunrise. No one the wiser.”

Parrish caught at Steiner’s arm, but Steiner moved away, and crossed between the huts in the star-dark, going the wrong direction for the washroom and the tunnel.

•   •   •

Finch lay on his right side, snoring sotto voce as he slept, in his comfy cubicle. A small night-light burned on above his desk, in the outer room. Everything was neat and orderly, the bottles, canisters and syringes put to bed in their casks and cabinets, the books upright in their rows. He had not been such a natty housekeeper in the colony, but doubtless one of the machines that cleaned the compound huts came in here, too.

Steiner leaned down over Finch, and spoke softly but decisively in his ear.

“Doc? Wake up. Need you for something.”

Finch stirred. His eyes opened, sightlessly.

“Can’t you let me. . . . What is it?”

“Nothing much, nothing wrong. Nothing’s going to be wrong. You just help me out, and everything’ll be grand.” And Steiner’s friendly pressure upon the doctor’s inert body altered. Suddenly Finch’s left arm was wrenched back and upward, the bone straining in the socket. He gave a shout of pain. Steiner said: “Ssh. One more of those, and I’ll break it anyway.”

“What in God’s name do you want?”

Steiner said, “Her gun.”

“What gun? What are you—?”

“Esther’s pistol, that Standish gave her. I know you took it. Thought they’d have it off you here, like they had all the rest. But somehow they didn’t. Now I want it. Where?”

Finch relaxed; even under the torture of Steiner’s hold, relaxed, and made a little laughing groaning sound. “I need that, Steiner.”

“No you don’t, but I do.”

“Why’s that? You don’t ever see her anymore.”

“Listen, Finchy, I’m not here to answer your questions. Other way round. Now,” and Steiner jolted the arm and Finch whined, “tell me, or I’ll pull this out at the joint. Be in a bit of a state then, won’t you.”

Finch shut his eyes, carefully. “Over there, with the penicillin. Under the shavings.”

“No bad fibs now, Finchy, okay?”

Steiner gave the arm a twist so Finch choked back a yell. Leaving Finch writhing, his right arm wrapped around to comfort the left, Steiner took the penicillin jars respectfully out of the box, and sifted the packing and found the pistol. Steiner removed the gun, and checked it. It was full of bullets. Spick and span. All ready for action. What use it could be against anything alien was debatable, but then, if they had to run, there might be men, and animals; it could bring them food for a time. In any case, a pistol was a pistol. That Finch should have it was a kind of sacrilege.

“Thanks so much, Doc.”

Finch grimaced at him and said nothing, sitting now on the edge of his bunk, massaging his wounded shoulder. His feet met the floor in an odd splayed fashion, looking deformed.

“Going to rush off and tell anyone?” asked Steiner. “Know what I’m planning?”

“Why should I care what you do? You’ll get yourself killed, probably, but that isn’t going to matter. Some kind of heroic John Matthew type escape? They’ll knock you out with that light ray of theirs. They’ll nail you on a post like a dead crow, to warn the rest of us, who’d never be such cretins.”

“Can it,” said Steiner, not properly involved, moving back toward the door.

“You don’t know the world you’re living in. You never did, any of you. And Anderson, that monumental bloody maniac, starting it all—not letting it stop when it was supposed to. We should have been finished, forgotten, hundreds of years ago. But he wanted to go empire building in the sewers, keep the human race alive. Why? Why? Why keep the blinking human race alive? What’s so bloody wonderful about it?”

“Some of them wouldn’t like to hear you talk about Anderson that way.” Steiner was at the door. “But I’ll pretend I’ve gone deaf. For now. Since you’ve been so kind.”

When he was gone, Finch continued to sit, massaging his arm, glaring at the doorway unseeingly. He saw other things. Very many of them. In their midst there was the Martineau girl presiding over Standish’s cremation, wearing the long blue dress Anna had once worn.

Now the pistol was gone, Finch realized why he had taken and kept it, and why it had been dear to him. But that was the height of idiocy. Why a pistol? Some last unquenched ethic? Everywhere around lay the means. And in fact the surest means of all, the very one by which Esther had threatened him before, over Standish’s body, waited only there, on the shelf, in its case.

Tomorrow there were teeth to drill and fill, a tetanus jab to deliver, some stitches to get out and a splint or two to take off. But any one of the other tame monkey-medics, tweeting with sympathy, could do it more charmingly than he. He was sick and tired of patching them up, putting them together again, while all about their shipwrecked boat went down.

So, just stand on your feet in a little while, when the shoulder hurts a fraction less, three steps to the right, through the door, and extract the maiden syringe from its wrapping, full of nothing but air, and make the injection, and then lie back and visualize the tiny silver bubbles hurrying to their task. Embolism, my friend. He could take a sedative, too, let it happen as he slept. He had never properly trusted the gun to react efficiently. It was made to impart death and so would prove contrary. The life-giving hypodermic, also contrary, would be sure to kill him.

•   •   •

“What will you do in the winter, Esther, when it gets cold?”

“Make some kind of shelter, Cury. Or freeze.”

“In another month, two at the most, the weather starts changing.”

“I know. I used to go Above a lot, remember?”

“You could move back to the old place,” he said, “the block on the avenue.”

“No.”

“You are the most bizarre of women, Persephone.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Make me stop, Persephone.”

“No. Do what you like.”

The sea ran forward in a vast glittering blackness, then ran away again. High on the sands, where the tide did not reach, and in the lee of some scabrous rocks, Esther’s fire had been burning two or three nights. Her moods no longer puzzled Cury, they only stimulated him. But he was inquisitive and resentful. She had been taken away from him, though it was he who had discovered her.

Other than his own kind, and the humans in the compound, there was little life in the city currently. The gods were away, or secreted, all of them but Zeus-Jupiter. And Cury missed their presence, the golden rush of their wings and sandaled feet over Olympus.

When he had seen Esther that morning, in the alien clothes, he had thought for an instant she was one of the goddesses. He moved to greet her as a goddess, but then it came to him he had been misled. The duality of the image scared him, and it offended him. It was not conceivable she could be an Olympian, even for five seconds. She was human: Rubbish.

Spotting the fire, he went at once to investigate—only such as she could be the author of such a naked fire. He spied on her for some while, and when she washed herself in the sea, naked as the fire, he had masturbated as a matter of course. Later, he presented himself to her. She had food, brought from the unit in the other apartment he had never seen, but of which he was vaguely aware, in the alien pyramid. She shared nothing with him. The food was now rationed, since she was not going back.

“I’ll bring you food,” he said, winningly.

“They may not like that,” she said. “I’ve refused all their glorious hospitality.”

“You couldn’t be one of the gods,” he said. “It’s only sensible you should accept that.”

“Oh, I do,” she said. “Tell them.”

He did not like, where there was a choice, sleeping in the open, and left her, returning to the large communal rooms of his own kind. A lot of his fellows were away, also; this occurred now and then. No one queried the absences, they were at their masters’ bidding. But Cury found himself increasingly restless, and in the morning he went to the beach again. She was, naturally, still there, under the rocks, reading, with salty damp freckling the pages. In the assortment of books he noted one on the making of fishing lines, another about the edibility of seaweeds. This tickled Cury, proving to him it was only a display on her part. She could not be serious.

He circled her camp, being elusive, sometimes approaching, wanting to be called.

He observed her other possessions, or what she had designated possessions and brought with her. Not much. Aside from the preoccupation with books, no human need had really been catered for. Though she never let the fire go out. She had brought the skull of the horse. It sat on a stone, like a totem, the fire shadow flickering in its eye-holes.

He wanted to get on her good side. He wanted the gods to perceive she should be with him. Finally he stayed, and curled up to sleep across the fire from her. He did not ask for favors. Thereafter, despite her comment, he brought her food, and fruit again, from the fields. Coming here tonight, at dusk, there was only one spider to be seen, up on a hilly rise, small as his hand—against which he absently measured it. The machine seemed to have been there several days, not moving. Something agitated Cury. The city echoed like a lonely shell—he looked to see if any planes were descending, but only bats flitted over the meadows, westward.

When he got to the beach, he spoke of winter. He foresaw an icy pall on the buildings and the streets, and a white silence that dismayed him. He tried to press the inner sight onto her. She would have to come indoors again in winter. To him.

“You shouldn’t judge me,” he said. “You don’t know me. I have qualities. I’m erudite. If I tap my learning, I’ll amaze you. Ah, lady. Oh mistress mine—” He paraded up and down before the glowing red fire, but she looked beyond him, into the night at the edge of the sea.

Then Cury turned and saw Jupiter was there, tall and blacker yet on the sheened blackness of the water, the sky of stars. Cury dropped to his haunches, glad and not glad, to be upstaged by a god.

“You can go now,” said Jupiter to Cury, as he walked up the beach.

Cury had never refused the will of the gods, so he went. He did not even stay to eavesdrop, as with a human he feared he might have done—although, since there had been no messages relayed to him inside his head for quite some time, he suspected he was not being monitored at all. That peeved him, more than anything.

Chafing but will-less, Cury took himself off, far off, along the shore, then up into the city, trying to invent the conversation he had left behind.

His invention was incorrect.

•   •   •

Though he did not know that, more coherent anxieties soon made Cury their prey. For he liked even less the stillness of the city tonight. Nothing moved. By the sea, too, southerly, there had been no wink of light as the water craft went about their computerized courses. He had seen no light in the ocean for a month, not even close in where the piers started.

Cury paused. He stood among the high phantasmal towers that were his earliest notion of home. But they were different. They seemed to have no substance.

Only the stars were in the sky. No whisper in the air. There was no murmur either on the roads, just the sea rhythm, the rhythm of his own blood. Cury looked round him. Perhaps some barely distinguished note, caught after all from the currents of the atmosphere, had primed him. Or it was coincidence. Turning, he saw a thing that filled him with great terror. Contained in the form of a tall, slim oblong, stars were appearing where there had been no stars. He peered, in horrified wonderment. It was true. Stars, and more stars, flowing down.

A building of the gods’ city was crumbling there, not four streets away, dissolving like biscuit in dark fluid, gushing into the earth, and as it did so, smoking off—vanishing altogether.

There came the most gentle resonance, scarcely audible. Braced for a grinding crash, thunder like earthquake through the paving, he felt the slightest ripple underfoot, and a sudden warm breeze blew fragrantly in his face, all the death-rattle there was to be. Nothing else marked this catastrophe. Only the gap, where the block had risen eighty stories, and the stars—where for eighty stories no stars had shown.

Cury’s panic was nameless. He came together in an urge to run—somewhere, anywhere.

He ran then all of twenty feet, through the cool transparent shadows, after which a hot and solid shadow fell on him, and brought him down.

It was a man, this shadow. It was Steiner, dirty and very strong, and with a pistol in his belt.

Chapter Eight

The man did not come as far as the fire. He stood a few feet away, where the flames hit him and left him, and came for him again.

Esther fed in more driftwood. These sticks had not dried sufficiently and azure and green streamers foamed in the red. The nights were already losing their fever, the fire was welcome, and the pillows, which she used to bed and barricade herself in with. But when winter came, there would be difficulties. Did the sea turn to ice? What of the snow and storm and gale?

“Oh, Esther,” said Esther, “give up, give in. Come and live in the gorgeous palace. But I have pores in my skin. I scar and blemish. I’ll get old. Quickly. Then you won’t want me anymore, and it’ll be the compound, or the garbage tip.”

The man sat down on the sand, with his back to the sea, his face toward her. “Now you will listen,” he said. That was all. But her hands sank, she stopped digging for things to say to hold him off, his presence and his intent, and the power of him, for which she had no wish at all, or if a wish, buried deep enough she need never consider it again. Food was fuel. Food, sex, beauty, books. Fuel for the engines of flesh and thought. No more. And where they could not feed, only gorge her, make her sick, she sloughed them. She was a being born for a derelict world. If the world was theirs and she superfluous in it, nevertheless she was cast in the mold, and would not alter. Here, under the alien towers, she tended her cave-woman’s fire amid the rocks, and faced out the night with two rubies burning in her eyes.

But now he told her she would listen, and there came to be a change, like the tidal fluctuation of the sea, felt, not yet visible.

“Yes. You’ve consolidated your point,” he said. “Standish set you tests, did he not? One after the other, to gauge your mettle for his sub-terrestrial dynasty. I don’t have his reasons, but I’ve done the same. And, inadvertently, you pass all the tests—his and mine. You tear through the paper snares. If any of it was an act, this defiance, you’d better admit as much, swiftly. No? Quite authentic, then?”

Fear in her belly, briefly, not knowing why it roused.

“It’s your planet,” she said. “You do what you want on it.”

“Standish gave you a manual to read, the history, and the explanation. I shall only tell you.”

“Another lesson.”

He said, “How many of us, how many aliens, do you think are in the city?”

“It swarms with you, I suppose.”

“It has done so.”

“Then some are away. Hunting again? I noticed there were no vehicles today. And only one spider, miles off.”

“In your first week here, you were aware of a morning and evening haze over the city. There is never a haze now. It wasn’t a natural phenomenon, but outpourings of electricity and minute debris, the result of many elaborate mechanisms clearing their circuits and closing down. It no longer occurs because the clearance and the shutdown are to date complete. Why do this? Because their service is no longer required. There is now only one alien in this city, myself. The others you have seen on screens are old recordings, which I played over to you, and with which I pretended to communicate. You were convinced. There are fifteen similar cities on your Earth. They were deactivated long ago, and have by now probably entirely disappeared. Once the maintenance systems are switched off, the materials of our world decompose rapidly. A tidy process your race never discovered, and perhaps would have scorned if it had.

“The mathematics may be obvious to you, or becoming so. This world, aside from myself, is also empty of any of my people. I am the last of your enemies. Only a few machines otherwise remain, and will soon cease to function. Thereafter vanishing. Meanwhile, the former programs have been continued, to a limited extent, to facilitate my own ambitions. The hunting has gone on, more sluggishly, but quite thoroughly, unearthing you—if you countenance the pun, or even grasp the usage—bringing you into the light out of your quags and burrows, shepherding you into the compounds, here, elsewhere. Once in these ghettoes, you were subtly encouraged to revolt, to abscond, or else, if there were any dominant human leaders available, turned over to those. The processions of men and women you saw go through the streets and never return, were being given their freedom, after suitable nourishment, medical care, and psychological incitement. Some, despite that, did not want to have freedom, hence the escort of those robots you term the spider’s.”

The light dropped and bloodied. The jewels in the girl’s eyes turned also to blood. The eyes of the man turned only black. His voice filled the quietness between the fire and the sea.

“About the season of your birth, some twenty of your years past, I began to go about this world and to exterminate my own kind. I was, in our manner, also an elevated leader. Genocide turned out to be simple to accomplish, given my authority and my knowledge. The details are repetitive, and mine to keep. They don’t concern you. The people in this community, here, I disposed of, mostly, a year ago. Just after the hunting packs went out to each of the cities and ruins one final time. I killed the last one of my people, a woman who had once meant something to me, seven months before you came to live in the rooms she and I formerly shared. There’s no compassion in us, I told you this, no pity. But then, you have no pity in you, either. When I say to you that my own race has filled me with contempt and loathing, you will understand me very well. I’m an outcast, a misfit. That they ever mistook me for their fellow was due solely to my quaint disguises, my trained mind, and to their own unforgivable egoism. What they have done—what we have done—reaping the stars for a feast, despoiling worlds the way a child smashes its toys—these are the deeds for which I condemned them, and condemned myself. And because of which I elected myself judge and executioner—two concepts that, in my world’s language, have no words. And it’s almost over now.”

The sea clung to the land, but slipped away. The sea was drawing out, losing all the hard-won ground.

“The mother world,” he said, “when it fails to retain contact with some new drop of the macrocosm my kind is building, some other world we have colonized, has recourse to nothing. They have no interest, Esther, in the fate of their colonists. They simply erase that place from the great scheme and forget that it exists. For the net is so wide, we have more earths in it than you could ever imagine. One or two lost—that’s the shedding of a single hair. And we have no compassion. You’ll see by this that, when we are all gone, no one will disturb you. No vengeance will fall from the skies. The Earth will be yours. I’m giving you back your planet. Take it. I’ve tried and tested you. It’s all you want. And if you dislike humanity, you might manage it better. It will need that, in the chaos ahead. Anderson’s blood and genes, the narrow piercing vision, the whip, the steel heart. And the livid, vivid fire. I almost envy you, Esther, your abbreviated and feral life. Your humanity. But instead, there’s a service I ask for. You’ll want to do it, I think.”

She said nothing, could not speak. She longed to scream and hit the top of the sky with her voice. She did not believe, and she believed. She wanted none of it, all of it.

“The soldier,” he said, “Steiner, is coming down through the city. They’ve been preparing an escape tunnel, which he used tonight. He has Standish’s gun. In a few minutes, he’ll be on the road up there. Certain external signals have guided him in the right direction, unconsciously received, of course. When he is on the road, I want you to meet him, and to take the pistol. I mentioned before the armoring I had been given. It’s now inoperative, as with every other mechanism here. But, as I also told you once, the impulse to suicide sometimes degenerates into a reflex. It is against what we are. One day, you may find it so, one day when it would be better otherwise. Then you may have to do what I’m doing.

“I would prefer not to see you again, after you leave. But the fire gives a good light. And Standish saw to it you’re a fair shot. From over there, perhaps.”

Esther did not move. She gazed into the flames until they darkened and went black.

At last she said, “I don’t know anymore.”

“You know nothing,” he said. “That’s your whole advantage. In the beginning.”

In the beginning. . . .

It was written like that in the ancient bible (Anderson’s), heavy as a huge chunk of wood, sonorous as bread with the smell of its yellowed papers. It had been written then, perhaps still was, or at the last, as the holocaust from the generator ate it: “And the earth was without form—God said. Let there be light—and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day—” She thought: As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth, for the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more—

And she raised her head to say, “You’re lying. It’s another test—” when the splintering roar of a gun went off in the city.

Esther jumped to her feet, the words of Anderson’s bible fragmenting in her brain forever. She was savagely afraid, but he, the alien, said, “That’s the soldier. He met Cury, and told him, ‘I owe you, for Patty.’ And Cury is dying now up there, and Steiner is kicking him and stepping over him, and coming on. He knows it was unwise to fire that shot, yet he too senses there’s no real opposition anymore. And yes, Esther I can read thoughts, sometimes, without the console. What then are your thoughts? Under the confusion, they say to me, I will go to meet the soldier. I will take the gun. I will kill the Enemy. Yes, Esther. And what you do with your kingdom afterward is up to you.”

She looked again at him, head still tilted toward the city.

“You want to die a lot.”

“Do I? It’s the only workable conclusion. I’ve killed perhaps ten thousand of my kind, here, and quite a number of yours, too, at the start. Justice.”

Esther put her hand to her mouth. She held it there to keep in some wordless crying, and she succeeded. Then she turned and ran up the beach toward the city, and opened her mouth to gulp instead at silence, so she could say to Steiner instantly: The pistol. Give it me.

The alien remained beside the fire. He did not move, as the flames or the sea moved. Across the fire, only the skull of the horse stared back at him, making pretend with flickerings, that it had sight.

His thoughts were coming and going, the flicker of his own, existing, eyes revealed it, yet more and more slowly. At length, the optical spasm finished. Yet when the fire dropped again, he reached out and took up a handful of the driftwood. He regarded them for a moment, the twigs and shards, as if to be certain of some unfamiliar quality, something alien, then he threw them down on the blaze, to save the light for her return.

About the Author

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) was a legend in science fiction and fantasy writing. She wrote more than 90 novels and 300 short stories, and was the winner of multiple World Fantasy Awards, a British Fantasy Society Derleth Award, the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Horror.