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1985

NOMINEES

THE ALIENS WHO KNEW, I MEAN, EVERYTHING

SYMPHONY FOR A LOST TRAVELER

SALVADOR

WINNER

THE CRYSTAL SPHERES

1986

NOMINEES

SNOW

FLYING SAUCER ROCK & ROLL

WINNER

FERMI AND FROST

1987

NOMINEES

ROBOT DREAMS

RAT

THE BOY WHO PLAITED MANES

WINNER

TANGENTS

1988

NOMINEES

ANGEL

THE FAITHFUL COMPANION AT FORTY

CASSANDRA’S PHOTOGRAPH’S

NIGHT OF THE COOTERS

FOREVER YOURS, ANNA

WINNER

WHY I LEFT HARRY’S ALL ALL-NIGHT HAMBURGERS

1989

NOMINEES

THE GIVING PLAGUE

STABLE STRATEGIES FOR MIDDLE MANAGEMENT

RIPPLES IN THE DIRAC SEA

THE FORT MOXIE BRANCH

WINNER

KIRINYAGA

1990

NOMINEES

COMPUTER FRIENDLY

THE RETURN OF WILLIAM PROXMIRE

DORI BANGS

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

WINNER

BOOBS

1991

NOMINEES

THE UTILITY MAN

GODSPEED

VRM-547

CIBOLA

WINNER

BEARS DISCOVER FIRE

1992

NOMINEES

ONE PERFECT MORNING, WITH JACKALS

WINTER SOLTSTICE

IN THE LATE CRETACEOUS

A WALK IN THE SUN

1993

NOMINEES

THE WINTERBERRY

THE MOUNTAIN TO MOHAMMED

THE LOTUS AND THE SPEAR

THE ARBITRARY PLACEMENT OF WALLS

WINNER

EVEN THE QUEEN

1994

NOMINEES

ENGLAND UNDERWAY

WINNER

DEATH ON THE NILE

1995

NOMINEES

DEAD MAN'S CURVE

UNDERSTANDING ENTROPY

WINNER

BARNABY IN EXILE

1996

NOMINEES

TELE-ABSENCE

LIFE ON THE MOON

A BIRTHDAY

WINNER

THE LINCOLN TRAIN

1997

NOMINEES

GONE

DECENCY

THE DEAD

WINNER

UN-BIRTHDAY BOY

1998

NOMINEES

BELUTHAHATCHIE

STANDNG ROOM ONLY

ITSY BITSY SPIDER

THE HAND YOU’RE DEALT

WINNER

THE 43 ANTAREAN DYNASTIES

1999

NOMINEES

COSMIC CORKSCREW

WHIPTAIL

MANEKI NEKO

2000

NOMINEES

MACS

SARAJEVO

HOTHOUSE FLOWERS

ANCIENT ENGINES

WINNER

SCHERZO WITH TYRANNOSUAR

2001

NOMINEES

THE GRAVITY MINE

KADDISH FOR THE LAST SURVIVOR

THE ELEPHANTS ON  NEPTUNE

MOON DOGS

WINNER

DIFFERENT KINDS OF DARKNESS

2002

NOMINEES

THE GHOST PIT

THE BONES OF THE EARTH

OLD MACDONOLD HAD A FARM

WINNER

THE DOG SAID BOW-WOW

2003

NOMINEES

CREATION

LAMBING SEASON

FALLING ONTO MARS

"HELLO”, SAID THE STICK

WINNER

THE LITTLE CAT LAUGHED

2004

NOMINEES

PAYING IT FORWARD

FOUR SHORT NOVEL

THE TALE OF THE GOLDEN EAGLE

ROBOTS DON’T CRY

WINNER

A STUDY IN EMERALD

2005

NOMINEES

DECISIONS

THE BEST CHRISTMAS EVER

A PRINCESS OF EARTH

SHED SKIN

2006

NOMINEES

THE CLOCKWORK ATOM BOMB

SINGING MY SISTER DOWN

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS

DOWN MEMORY LANE

WINNER

TK’TK’TK

THE ALIENS WHO KNEW, I MEAN, EVERYTHING

George Alec Effinger

I was sitting at my desk, reading a report on the brown pelican situation, when the secretary of state burst in. "Mr. President," he said, his eyes wide^ "the aliens are here!" Just like that. "The aliens are here!" As if I had any idea what to do about them.

"I see," I said. I learned early in my first term that "I see" was one of the safest and most useful comments I could possibly make in any situation. When I said, "I see," it indicated that I had digested the news and was waiting intelligently and calmly for further data. That knocked the ball back into my advisers' court. I looked at the secretary of state expectantly. I was all prepared with my next utterance, in the event that he had nothing further to add. My next utterance would be, "Well?" That would indicate that I was on top of the problem, but that I couldn't be expected to make an executive decision without sufficient information, and that he should have known better than to burst into the Oval Office unless he had that information. That's why we had protocol; that's why we had proper channels; that's why I had advisers. The voters out there didn't want me to make decisions without sufficient information. If the secretary didn't have anything more to tell me, he shouldn't have burst in in the first place. I looked at him awhile longer. "Well?" I asked at last.

"That's about all we have at the moment," he said uncomfortably. I looked at him sternly for a few seconds, scoring a couple of points while he stood there all flustered. I turned back to the pelican report, dismissing him. I certainly wasn't going to get all flustered. I could think of only one president in recent memory who was ever flustered in office, and we all know what happened to him. As the secretary of state closed the door to my office behind him, I smiled. The aliens were probably going to be a bitch of a problem eventually, but it wasn't my problem yet. I had a little time.

But I found that I couldn't really keep my mind on the pelican question. Even the president of the United States has some imagination, and if the secretary of state was correct, I was going to have to confront these aliens pretty damn soon. I'd read stories about aliens when I was a kid, I'd seen all sorts of aliens in movies and television, but these were the first aliens who'd actually stopped by for a chat. Well, I wasn't going to be the first American president to make a fool of himself in front of visitors from another world. I was going to be briefed. I telephoned the secretary of defense. "We must have some contingency plans drawn up for this," I told him. "We have plans for every other possible situation." This was true; the Defense Department has scenarios for such bizarre events as the rise of an imperialist fascist regime in Liechtenstein or the spontaneous depletion of all the world's selenium.

"Just a second, Mr. President," said the secretary. I could hear him muttering to someone else. I held the phone and stared out the window. There were crowds of people running around hysterically out there. Probably because of the aliens. "Mr. President?" came the voice of the secretary of defense. "I have one of the aliens here, and he suggests that we use the same plan that President Eisenhower used."

I closed my eyes and sighed. I hated it when they said stuff like that. I wanted information, and they told me these things knowing that I would have to ask four or five more questions just to understand the answer to the first one. "You have an alien with you?" I said in a pleasant enough voice.

"Yes, sir. They prefer not to be called 'aliens.' He tells me he's a 'nuhp.' "

"Thank you, Luis. Tell me, why do you have an al- Why do you have a nuhp and I don't."

Luis muttered the question to his nuhp. "He says it's because they wanted to go through proper channels. They learned about all that from President Eisenhower."

"Very good, Luis." This was going to take all day, I could see that; and I had a photo session with Mick Jagger's granddaughter. "My second question, Luis, is what the hell does he mean by 'the same plan that President Eisenhower used'?"

Another muffled consultation. "He says that this isn't the first time that the nuhp have landed on Earth. A scout ship with two nuhp aboard landed at Edwards Air Force Base in 1954. The two nuhp met with President Eisenhower. It was apparently a very cordial occasion, and President Eisenhower impressed the nuhp as a warm and sincere old gentleman. They've been planning to return to Earth ever since, but they've been very busy, what with one thing and another. President Eisenhower requested that the nuhp not reveal themselves to the people of Earth in general, until our government decided how to control the inevitable hysteria. My guess is that the government never got around to that, and when the nuhp departed, the matter was studied and then shelved. As the years passed, few people were even aware that the first meeting ever occurred. The nuhp have returned now in great numbers, expecting that we'd have prepared the populace by now. It's not their fault that we haven't. They just sort of took it for granted that they'd be welcome."

"Uh-huh," I said. That was my usual utterance when I didn't know what the hell else to say. "Assure them that they are, indeed, welcome. I don't suppose the study they did during the Eisenhower administration was ever completed. I don't suppose there really is a plan to break the news to the public."

"Unfortunately, Mr. President, that seems to be the case."

"Uh-huh." That's Republicans for you, I thought. "Ask your nuhp something for me, Luis. Ask him if he knows what they told Eisenhower. They must be full of outer-space wisdom. Maybe they have some ideas about how we should deal with this."

There was yet another pause. "Mr. President, he says all they discussed with Mr. Eisenhower was his golf game. They helped to correct his putting stroke. But they are definitely full of wisdom. They know all sorts of things. My nuhp-that is, his namefs Hurv-anyway, he says that they'd be happy to give you some advice."

"Tell him that I'm grateful, Luis. Can they have someone meet with me in, say, half an hour?"

"There are three nuhp on their way to the Oval Office at this moment. One of them is the leader of their expedition, and one of the others is the commander of their mother ship.''

"Mother ship?" I asked.

"You haven't seen it? It's tethered on the Mall. They're real sorry about what they did to the Washington Monument. They say they can take care of it tomorrow."

I just shuddered and hung up the phone. I called my secretary. "There are going to be three-"

"They're here now, Mr. President."

I sighed. "Send them in." And that's how I met the nuhp. Just as President Eisenhower had.

They were handsome people. Likable, too. They smiled and shook hands and suggested that photographs be taken of the historic moment, so we called in the media; and then I had to sort of wing the most important diplomatic meeting of my entire political career. I welcomed the nuhp to Earth. "Welcome to Earth," I said, "and welcome to the United States."

"Thank you," said the nuhp I would come to know as Pleen. "We're glad to be here."

"How long do you plan to be with us?" I hated myself when I said that, in front of the Associated Press and UPI and all the network news people. I sounded like a room clerk at a Holiday Inn.

"We don't know, exactly," said Pleen. "We don't have to be back to work until a week from Monday."

"Uh-huh," I said. Then I just posed for pictures and kept my mouth shut. I wasn't going to say or do another goddamn thing until my advisers showed up and started advising.

Well, of course, the people panicked. Pleen told me to expect that, but I had figured it out for myself. We've seen too many movies about visitors from space. Sometimes they come with a message of peace and universal brotherhood and just the inside information mankind has been needing for thousands of years. More often, though, the aliens come to enslave and murder us because the visual effects are better, and so when the nuhp arrived, everyone was all prepared to hate them. People didn't trust their good looks. People were suspicious of their nice manners and their quietly tasteful clothing. When the nuhp offered to solve all our problems for us, we all said, sure, solve our problems-but at what cost?

That first week, Pleen and I spent a lot of time together, just getting to know one another and trying to understand what the other one wanted. I invited him and Commander Toag and the other nuhp bigwigs to a reception at the White House. We had a church choir from Alabama singing gospel music, and a high school band from Michigan playing a medley of favorite collegiate fight songs, and talented clones of the original stars nostalgically re-creating the Steve and Eydie Experience, and an improvisational comedy troupe from Los Angeles or someplace, and the New York Philharmonic under the baton of a twelve-year-old girl genius. They played Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in an attempt to impress the nuhp with how marvelous Earth culture was.

Pleen enjoyed it all very much. "Men are as varied in their expressions of joy as we nuhp," he said, applauding vigorously. "We are all very fond of human music. We think Beethoven composed some of the most beautiful melodies we've ever heard, anywhere in our galactic travels."

I smiled. "I'm sure we are all pleased to hear that," I said.

"Although the Ninth Symphony is certainly not the best of his work."

I faltered in my clapping. "Excuse me?" I said.

Pleen gave me a gracious smile. "It is well known among us that Beethoven's finest composition is his Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major."

I let out my breath. "Of course, that's a matter of opinion. Perhaps the standards of the nuhp-''

"Oh, no," Pleen hastened to assure me, "taste does not enter into it at all. The Concerto No. 5 is Beethoven's best, according to very rigorous and definite critical principles. And even that lovely piece is by no means the best music ever produced by mankind."

I felt just a trifle annoyed. What could this nuhp, who came from some weirdo planet God alone knows how far away, from some society with not the slightest connection to our heritage and culture, what could this nuhp know of what Beethoven's Ninth Symphony aroused in our human souls?

"Tell me, then, Pleen," I said in my ominously soft voice, "what is the best human musical composition?"

"The score from the motion picture Ben-Hur, by Miklos Rozsa," he said simply. What could I do but nod my head in silence? It wasn't worth starting an interplanetary incident over.

So from fear our reaction to the nuhp changed to distrust. We kept waiting for them to reveal their real selves; we waited for the pleasant masks to slip off and show us the true nightmarish faces we all suspected lurked beneath. The nuhp did not go home a week from Monday, after all. They liked Earth, and they liked us. They decided to stay a little longer. We told them about ourselves and our centuries of trouble; and they mentioned, in an offhand nuhp way, that they could take care of a few little things, make some small adjustments, and life would be a whole lot better for everybody on Earth. They didn't want anything in return. They wanted to give us these things in gratitude for our hospitality: for letting them park their mothership on the Mall and for all the free refills of coffee they were getting all around the world. We hesitated, but our vanity and our greed won out. "Go ahead," we said, "make our deserts bloom. Go ahead, end war and poverty and disease. Show us twenty exciting new things to do with leftovers. Call us when you're done."

The fear changed to distrust, but soon the distrust changed to hope. The nuhp made the deserts bloom, all right. They asked for four months. We were perfectly willing to let them have all the time they needed. They put a tall fence all around the Namibia and wouldn't let anyone in to watch what they were doing. Four months later, they had a big cocktail party and invited the whole world to see what they'd accomplished. I sent the secretary of state as my personal representative. He brought back some wonderful slides: the vast desert had been turned into a botanical miracle. There were miles and miles of flowering plants now, instead of the monotonous dead sand and gravel sea. Of course, the immense garden contained nothing but hollyhocks, many millions of hollyhocks. I mentioned to Pleen that the people of Earth had been hoping for a little more in the way of variety, and something just a trifle more practical, too.

"What do you mean, 'practical'?'" he asked.

"You know," I said, "food."

"Don't worry about food," said Pleen. "We're going to take care of hunger pretty soon."

"Good, good. But hollyhocks?"

"What's wrong with hollyhocks?"

"Nothing," I admitted.

"Hollyhocks are the single prettiest flower grown on Earth."

"Some people like orchids," I said. "Some people like roses."

"No," said Pleen firmly. "Hollyhocks are it. I wouldn't kid you."

So we thanked the nuhp for a Namibia full of hollyhocks and stopped them before they did the same thing to the Sahara, the Mojave, and the Gobi.

On the whole, everyone began to like the nuhp, although they took just a little getting used to. They had very definite opinions about everything, and they wouldn't admit that what they had were opinions. To hear a nuhp talk, he had a direct line to some categorical imperative that spelled everything out in terms that were unflinchingly black and white. Hollyhocks were the best flowers. Alexander Dumas was the greatest novelist. Powder blue was the prettiest color. Melancholy was the most ennobling emotion. Grand Hotel was the finest movie. The best car ever built was the 1956 Chevy Bel Air, but it had to be aqua and white. And there just wasn't room for discussion: the nuhp made these pronouncements with the force of divine revelation.

I asked Pleen once about the American presidency. I asked him who the Nuhp thought was the best president in our history. I felt sort of like the Wicked Queen in "Snow White." Mirror, mirror, on the wall. I didn't really believe Pleen would tell me that I was the best president, but my heart pounded while I waited for his answer; you never know, right? To tell the truth, I expected him to say Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, or Akiwara. His answer surprised me: James K. Polk.

"Polk?" I asked. I wasn't even sure I could recognize Polk's portrait.

"He's not the most familiar," said Pleen, "but he was an honest if unexciting president. He fought the Mexican War and added a great amount of territory to the United States. He saw every bit of his platform become law. He was a good, hardworking man who deserves a better reputation."

"What about Thomas Jefferson?" I asked.

Pleen just shrugged. "He was O.K., too, but he was no James Polk."

My wife, the First Lady, became very good friends with the wife of Commander Toag, whose name was Doim. They often went shopping together, and Doim would make suggestions to the First Lady about fashion and hair care. Doim told my wife which rooms in the White House needed redecora-tion, and which charities were worthy of official support. It was Doim who negotiated the First Lady's recording contract, and it was Doim who introduced her to the Philadelphia cheese steak, one of the nuhp's favorite treats (although they asserted that the best cuisine on Earth was Tex-Mex).

One day, Doim and my wife were having lunch. They sat at a small table in a chic Washington restaurant, with a couple of dozen Secret Service people and nuhp security agents disguised elsewhere among the patrons. "I've noticed that there seem to be more nuhp here in Washington every week," said the First Lady.

"Yes," said Doim, "new mother ships arrive daily. We think Earth is one of the most pleasant planets we've ever visited."

"We're glad to have you, of course," said my wife, "and it seems that our people have gotten over their initial fears."

"The hollyhocks did the trick," said Doim.

"I guess so. How many nuhp are there on Earth now?"

"About five or six million, I'd say."

The First Lady was startled. "I didn't think it would be that many."

Doim laughed. "We're not just here in America, you know. We're all over. We really like Earth. Although, of course, Earth isn't absolutely the best planet. Our own home, Nupworld, is still Number One; but Earth would certainly be on any Top Ten list."

"Un-huh." (My wife has learned many important oratorical tricks from me.)

"That's why we're so glad to help you beautify and modernize your world."

"The hollyhocks were nice," said the First Lady. "But when are you going to tackle the really vital questions?"

"Don't worry about that," said Doim, turning her attention to her cottage cheese salad.

"When are you going to take care of world hunger?"

"Pretty soon. Don't worry."

"Urban blight?"

"Pretty soon."

"Man's inhumanity to man?"

Doim gave my wife an impatient look. "We haven't even been here for six months yet. What do you want, miracles? We've already done more than your husband accomplished in his entire first term."

"Hollyhocks," muttered the First Lady.

"I heard that," said Doim. "The rest of the universe absolutely adores hollyhocks. We can't help it if humans have no taste."

They finished their lunch in silence, and my wife came back to the White House fuming.

That same week, one of my advisers showed me a letter that had been sent by a young man in New Mexico. Several nuhp had moved into a condo next door to him and had begun advising him about the best investment possibilities (urban respiratory spas), the best fabrics and colors to wear to show off his coloring, the best holo system on the market (the Esmeraldas F-64 with hex-phased Libertad screens and a Ruy Challenger argon solipsizer), the best place to watch sunsets (the revolving restaurant on top of the Weyerhauser Building in Yellowstone City), the best wines to go with everything (too numerous to mention-send SASE for list), and which of the two women he was dating to marry (Candi Marie Esterhazy). "Mr. President," said the bewildered young man, "I realize that we must be gracious hosts to our benefactors from space, but I am having some difficulty keeping my temper. The nuhp are certainly knowledgeable and willing to share the benefits of their wisdom, but they don't even wait to be asked. If they were people, regular human beings who lived next door, I would have punched their lights out by now. Please advise. And hurry: they are taking me downtown next Friday to pick out an engagement ring and new living room furniture. I don't even want new living room furniture!"

Luis, my secretary of defense, talked to Hurv about the ultimate goals of the nuhp. "We don't have any goals," he said. "We're just taking it easy."

"Then why did you come to Earth?" asked Luis.

"Why do you go bowling?"

"I don't go bowling."

"You should," said Hurv. "Bowling is the most enjoyable thing a person can do."

"What about sex?"

"Bowling is sex. Bowling is a symbolic form of intercourse, except you don't have to bother about the feelings of some other person. Bowling is sex without guilt. Bowling is what people have wanted down through all the millennia: sex without the slightest responsibility. It's the very distillation of the essence of sex. Bowling is sex without fear and shame."

"Bowling is sex without pleasure," said Luis.

There was a brief silence. "You mean," said Hurv, "that when you put that ball right into the pocket and see those pins explode off the alley, you don't have an orgasm?"

"Nope," said Luis.

"That's your problem, then. I can't help you there, you'll have to see some kind of therapist. It's obvious this subject embarrasses you. Let's talk about something else."

"Fine with me," said Luis moodily. "When are we going to receive the real benefits of your technological superiority? When are you going to unlock the final secrets of the atom? When are you going to free mankind from drudgery?"

"What do you mean, 'technological superiority'?" asked Hurv.

"There must be scientific wonders beyond our imagining aboard your mother ships."

"Not so's you'd notice. We're not even so advanced as you people here on Earth. We've learned all sorts of wonderful things since we've been here."

"What?" Luis couldn't imagine what Hurv was trying to say.

"We don't have anything like your astonishing bubble memories or silicon chips. We never invented anything comparable to the transistor, even. You know why the mother ships are so big?"

"My God."

"That's right," said Hurv, "vacuum tubes. All our spacecraft operate on vacuum tubes. They take up a hell of a lot of space. And they burn out. Do you know how long it takes to find the goddamn tube when it burns out? Remember how people used to take bags of vacuum tubes from their television sets down to the drugstore to use the tube tester? Think of doing that with something the size of our mother ships.

And we can't just zip off into space when we feel like it. We have to let a mother ship warm up first. You have to turn the key and let the thing warm up for a couple of minutes, then you can zip off into space. It's a goddamn pain in the neck."

"I don't understand." said Luis, stunned. "If your technology is so primitive, how did you come here? If we're so far ahead of you, we should have discovered your planet, instead of the other way around."

Hurv gave a gentle laugh. "Don't pat yourself on the back, Luis. Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in Los Angeles with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing 120 on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at 55; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nuhp cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed. Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have."

"But we do want to go."

"Then we'll help you. We'll give you the secrets. And you can explain your electronics to our engineers, and together we'll build wonderful new mother ships that will open the universe to both humans and nuhp.'"

Luis let out his breath. "Sounds good to me," he said.

Everyone agreed that this looked better than hollyhocks. We all hoped that we could keep from kicking their collective asses long enough to collect on that promise.

When I was in college, my roommate in my sophomore year was a tall, skinny guy named Barry Rintz. Barry had wild, wavy black hair and a sharp face that looked like a handsome, normal face that had been sat on and folded in the middle. He squinted a lot, not because he had any defect in his eyesight, but because he wanted to give the impression that he was constantly evaluating the world. This was true.

Barry could tell you the actual and market values of any object you happened to come across.

We had a double date one football weekend with two girls from another college in the same city. Before the game, we met the girls and took them to the university's art museum, which was pretty large and owned an impressive collection. My date, a pretty elementary ed. major named Brigid, and I wandered from gallery to gallery, remarking that our tastes in art were very similar. We both like the Impressionists, and we both like Surrealism. There were a couple of little Renoirs that we admired for almost half an hour, and then we made a lot of silly sophomore jokes about what was happening in the Magritte and Dali and de Chirico paintings.

Barry and his date, Dixie, ran across us by accident as all four of us passed through the sculpture gallery. "There's a terrific Seurat down there," Brigid told her girlfriend.

"Seurat," Barry said. There was a lot of amused disbelief in his voice.

"I like Seurat," said Dixie.

"Well, of course," said Barry, "there's nothing really wrong with Seurat."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Do you know F. E. Church?" he asked.

"Who?" I said.

"Come here." He practically dragged us to a gallery of American paintings. F. Ei Church was a remarkable American landscape painter (1826-1900) who achieved an astonishing and lovely luminance in his works. "Look at that light!" cried Barry. "Look at that space! Look at that air!"

Brigid glanced at Dixie. "Look at that air?" she whispered.

It was a fine painting and we all said so, but Barry was insistent. F. E. Church was the greatest artist in American history, and one of the best the world has ever known. "I'd put him right up there with Van Dyck and Canaletto."

"Canaletto?" said Dixie. "The one who did all those pictures of Venice?''

"Those skies!" murmured Barry ecstatically. He wore the drunken expression of the satisfied voluptuary.

"Some people like paintings of puppies or naked women," I offered. "Barry likes light and air."

We left the museum and had lunch. Barry told us which things on the menu were worth ordering, and which things were an abomination. He made us all drink an obscure imported beer from Ecuador. To Barry, the world was divided up into masterpieces and abominations. It made life so much simpler for him, except that he never understood why his friends could never tell one from the other.

At the football game, Barry compared our school's quarterback to Y. A, Tittle. He compared the other team's punter to Ngoc Van Vinh. He compared the halftime show to the Ohio State band's Script Ohio formation. Before the end of the third quarter, it was very obvious to me that Barry was going to have absolutely no luck at all with Dixie. Before the clock ran out in the fourth quarter, Brigid and I had made whispered plans to dump the other two as soon as possible and sneak away by ourselves. Dixie would probably find an excuse to ride the bus back to her dorm before suppertime. Barry, as usual, would spend the evening in our room, reading The Making of the President 1996.

On other occasions Barry would lecture me about subjects as diverse as American Literature (the best poet was Edwin Arlington Robinson, the best novelist James T. Farrell), animals (the only correct pet was the golden retriever), clothing (in anything other than a navy blue jacket and gray slacks a man was just asking for trouble), and even hobbies (Barry collected military decorations of czarist Imperial Russia. He wouldn't talk to me for days after I told him my father collected barbed wire).

Barry was a wealth of information. He was the campus arbiter of good taste. Everyone knew that Barry was the man to ask.

But no one ever did. We all hated his guts. I moved out of our dorm room before the end of the fall semester. Shunned, lonely, and bitter Barry Rintz wound up as a guidance counselor in a Jügh school in Ames, Iowa. The job was absolutely perfect for him; few people are so lucky in finding a career.

If I didn't know better, I might have believed that Barry was the original advance spy for the nuhp.

When the nuhp had been on Earth for a full year, they gave us the gift of interstellar travel. It was surprisingly inexpensive. The nuhp explained their propulsion system, which was cheap and safe and adaptable to all sorts of other earthbound applications. The revelations opened up an entirely new area of scientific speculation. Then the nuhp taught us their navi-gational methods, and about the "shortcuts" they had discovered in space. People called them space warps, although technically speaking, the shortcuts had nothing to do with Einsteinian theory or curved space or anything like that. Not many humans understood what the nuhp were talking about, but that didn't make very much difference. The nuhp didn't understand the shortcuts, either; they just used them. The matter was presented to us like a Thanksgiving turkey on a platter. We bypassed the whole business of cautious scientific experimentation and leaped right into commercial exploitation. Mitsubishi of La Paz and Martin Marietta used nuhp schematics to begin construction of three luxury passenger ships, each capable of transporting a thousand tourists anywhere in our galaxy. Although man had yet to set foot on the moons of Jupiter, certain selected travel agencies began booking passage for a grand tour of the dozen nearest inhabited worlds.

Yes, it seemed that space was teeming with life, humanoid life on planets circling half the G-type stars in the heavens. "We've been trying to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence for decades," complained one Soviet scientist. "Why haven't they responded?''

A friendly nuhp merely shrugged. "Everybody's trying to communicate out there," he said. "Your messages are like Publishers Clearing House mail to them." At first, that was a blow to our racial pride, but we got over it. As soon as we joined the interstellar community, they'd begin to take us more seriously. And the nuhp had made that possible.

We were grateful to the nuhp, but that didn't make them any easier to live with. They were still insufferable. As my second term as president came to an end, Pleen began to advise me about my future career. "Don't write a book," he told me (after I had already written the first two hundred pages of a A President Remembers). "If you want to be an elder statesman, fine; but keep a low profile and wait for the people to come to you."

"What am I supposed to do with my time, then?" I asked.

"Choose a new career," Pleen said. "You're not all that old. Lots of people do it. Have you considered starting a mail-order business? You can operate it from your home. Or go back to school and take courses in some subject that's always interested you. Or become active in church or civic projects. Find a new hobby: raising hollyhocks or collecting military decorations."

"Pleen," I begged, "just leave me alone."

He seemed hurt. "Sure, if that's what you want." I regretted my harsh words.

All over the country, all over the world, everyone was having the same trouble with the nuhp. It seemed that so many of them had come to Earth, every human had his own personal nuhp to make endless suggestions. There hadn't been so much tension in the world since the 1992 Miss Universe contest, when the most votes went to No Award.

That's why it didn't surprise me very much when the first of our own mother ships returned from its 28-day voyage among the stars with only 276 of its 1,000 passengers still aboard. The other 724 had remained behind on one lush, exciting, exotic, friendly world or another. These planets had one thing in common: they were all populated by charming, warm, intelligent, humanlike people who had left their own home worlds after being discovered by the nuhp. Many races lived together in peace and harmony on these planets, in spacious cities newly built to house the fed-up expatriates. Perhaps these alien races had experienced the same internal jealousies and hatreds we human beings had known for so long, but no more. Coming together from many planets throughout our galaxy, these various peoples dwelt contentedly beside each other, united by a single common adversion: their dislike for the nuhp.

Within a year of the launching of our first interstellar ship, the population of Earth had declined by 0.5 percent. Within two years, the population had fallen by almost 14 million. The nuhp were too sincere and too eager and too sympathetic to fight with. That didn't make them any less tedious. Rather than make a scene, most people just up and left. There were plenty of really lovely worlds to visit, and it didn't cost very much, and the opportunities in space were unlimited. Many people who were frustrated and disappointed on Earth were able to build new and fulfilling lives for themselves on planets that until the nuhp arrived, we didn't even know existed.

The nuhp knew this would happen. It had already happened dozens, hundreds of times in the past, wherever their mother ships touched down. They had made promises to us and they had kept them, although we couldn't have guessed just how things would turn out.

Our cities were no longer decaying warrens imprisoning the impoverished masses. The few people who remained behind could pick and choose among the best housing. Landlords were forced to reduce rents and keep properties in perfect repair just to attract tenants.

Hunger was ended when the ratio of consumers to food producers dropped drastically. Within ten years, the population of Earth was cut in half, and was still falling.

For the same reason, poverty began to disappear. There were plenty of jobs for everyone. When it became apparent that the nuhp weren't going to compete for those jobs, there were more opportunities than people to take advantage of them.

Discrimination and prejudice vanished almost overnight. Everyone cooperated to keep things running smoothly despite the large-scale emigration. The good life was available to everyone, and so resentments melted away. Then, too, whatever enmity people still felt could be focused solely on the nuhp; the nuhp didn't mind, either. They were oblivious to it all.

I am now the mayor and postmaster of the small human community of New Dallas, here on Thir, the fourth planet of a star known in our old catalog as Struve 2398. The various alien races we encountered here call the star by another name, which translates into "God's Pineal." All the aliens here are extremely helpful and charitable, and there are few nuhp.

All through the galaxy, the nuhp are considered the messengers of peace. Their mission is to travel from planet to planet, bringing reconciliation, prosperity, and true civilization. There isn't an intelligent race in the galaxy that doesn't love the nuhp. We all recognize what they've done and what they've given us.

But if the nuhp started moving in down the block, we'd be packed and on our way somewhere else by morning.

SYMPHONY FOR A LOST TRAVELER

Lee Killough

They walked in a moving band of light, into and out of darkness. The floor and ceiling panels of the corridor brightened as Cimela and the butler-- in formal black-and-silver jumpsuit-- entered each new section; glowing milky white, then dimming out behind them. The passage bored straight through the moon's rock. A glassy sheen of fused stone reflected back at Cimela between the succession of contemporary and classic paintings decorating the walls: abstracts by Tanguy, a Bosch, Seth Koerner's bleak planetscapes, and starships and aliens signed Herring and Whelan.

Cimela frowned. Kerel Mattias Ashendene's artistic taste ran to the fantastic. Why, then, had he sent expensive shuttle and Moon rocket tickets along with the enigmatic invitation to his lunar retreat-- I would like to discuss the creation of a truly unique symphony-- to a composer whose work celebrated nature?

She wished she had been able to learn more about the man than public facts: that his Interstellar Mining and Drilling, Inc. issued franchises to more than half the independent miners in the asteroids and Jupiter and Saturn's moons, that he owned controlling interests in numerous other corporations, including those manufacturing pharmaceuticals and computers and contragrav units. Journalist friends could supply only two pieces of tape on him, both eleven years old. One recorded his removal from the twisted wreckage of his sailcar and the other his departure from the hospital months later in a floatchair.

The butler clapped his hands. A section of wall opened to reveal an elevator. "Ask for level four, madam. Mr. Ashendene is waiting."

He was sending her alone into the lion's den? Cimela reflected wryly.

Near-normal gravity returned briefly, but faded again when the car stopped rising. The doors opened.

Cimela gasped in horror. Before her lay the open surface of the Moon, the side and bottom of a crater dropping away in a sharp pattern of light and shadow!

For a moment she did not see distorted smear of her reflection on the inside of a transparent surface... the bittersweet of her jumpsuit a flame beneath her mahogany face and the ebony velvet of her close-cropped hair. Then breath returned in a gasp of relief. A dome! Even so, stepping out of the elevator, she felt for the polyplastic to reassure herself.

"You're quite safe," a deep resonant voice said.

She turned toward the sound and found herself in a large, circular room. An assortment of tables and chairs floated above the glowing floor along with a bed, a computer station, and a desk piled with papers and minidisc files. Cimela barely noticed the furnishings. Above the waist-high cabinets and bookcases around the edge-- filled with genuine printed and bound volumes-- the dome and wire lattice generating its meteor screen rose invisibly, creating the illusion that nothing separated the room from the lunar crater. Earth hung overhead, a brilliant sapphire suspended against midnight velvet studded with diamonds. With difficulty, she dragged her eyes from the view to the man gliding toward her in a floatchair.

He extended a hand. "I've been looking forward to meeting you."

"And I you." His hand crushed hers. Eyes the color of moondust slid over her, assessing, dissecting. Where in them, and in the assured voice, craggy features, gray-touched hair, and iridescent jumpsuit was the person who bought those paintings? "Tell me about your proposal."

"Will you join me for tea?" He used the controls on one sweeping armrest to back his chair toward a table floating above the glowing floor.

Cimela accepted the cup he handed her and folded into a freeform chair. Suddenly, from somewhere, music flooded the dome. She instantly recognized her Requiem For a Vanishing World, even without the holo track. It flowed around her, stately bass notes representing whales booming along under the high music of birds and the sinuous rhythms of predators, all intermixed with the sounds of the animals' own voices: twittering, whale songs, howls, snarls.

Ashendene's moondust eyes continued to search her. "I never would have thought one could make music using DNA as the score. Four notes sound so limiting."

She quirked a brow. "Nature manages well enough with them." She expected some reply, but he only continued to stare at her. The scrutiny brought a rush of irritation. "Am I not what you expected?"

The moondust eyes flickered. "Oh, yes... black and all."

She started. Could the man read minds?

"I researched you, of course. Cimela Bediako, thirty-one years old, single, born in Ghana, bioengineer father, music training in Sidney, lead singer and song writer for the Neo-Renaissance band the Rococo Roos until you switched to symphonic music and presented World Primeval at the San Francisco Opera House five years ago. If I'm staring, it's in admiration of one not only supremely talented and beautiful, but a veritable Pied Piper as well."

Cimela blinked. "Pied Piper?"

Whale songs cried in counterpoint to the howl of wolves. Ashendene said, "World Primeval generated a renewed interest in dinosaurs, I understand, and your wildlife symphonies have inspired a growing conservation movement."

"I hope so!" She glanced up at the luminous sapphire above them, so unflawed at this distance. "We're spreading out across the galaxy, but we're not leaving anything to come home to."

"Not quite across the galaxy. We haven't left the solar system yet."

Cimela shrugged. "Well, there's no practical star drive. Star ships would also take metals away, and we don't even know there's anywhere to go."

The moondust eyes flicked over her. "Those are just the excuses we've concocted for abandoning the stars... all invalid. We do have an efficient drive and there's not only somewhere to go, but someone to meet."

Her breath stuck in her chest. "Someone..."

Ashendene leaned toward her. "Three years ago a miner I franchised found a derelict ship in the asteroids. It's three thousand years old."

Her throat went dry. "We've been in the asteroids for only a century."

"Yes." He sat back. "My scientists have taken the ship apart and learned the principles behind the drive. I want to put that drive in human ships now. That's why I asked you here. I plan to announce my plans at a dinner for potential investors and I want music to celebrate the occasion. In addition to keeping all rights to the music and being my guest while you work, you will, of course, receive monetary remuneration."

He named a figure that any other time would have left Cimela dazzled, but now she could feel only the bitter stab of disappointment. Background music! This was his idea of a unique musical work? She stood. "No, thank you. I don't do commercials or waiting room music."

The moondust eyes went chill as the crater outside. "Perhaps you would be polite enough to hear me out. The credit I spent bringing you here entitles me to at least that much of your time."

She sat down again, stiffly, on the edge of the chair.

Ashendene frowned. "I want very special music, a long piece to be performed after dinner by an orchestra, something arranged as only you can do it, on DNA. That ship wasn't empty, Ms. Bediako."

Searing hot and cold shot through Cimela like an electric charge. Every hair on her body raised. "You found... people?" she whispered.

"What remained of them. Now are you interested?"

His sarcasm went unnoticed over the crescendo of her heart. People. Aliens! Life different from any that had ever walked this world! How were they built? Did all life share the same nucleotides, or would their genetic matter sing a different song? And Ashendene offered her the chance to see first. Breathlessly, she asked, "When may I see a printout of the nucleotide sequence?"

A thin smile crossed his mouth. "Today. I'll have it brought to your room. There's a computer station and synthesizer already there for you, but if you need anything else, just ask for it. Albert will show you the way."

*      *      *

Her "room" consisted of a large suite, one entire wall of which had been built of the same polyplastic as the dome and looked out into the crater. Neither Earth nor Ashendene's study were visible from it; just moonscape, starkly lifeless in patterns of black and silver, with the crater ringwall rising jaggedly into the velvet-and-diamond canopy of sky.

Staring out, she caught a reflection of the room: the butler entering with an overall-clad young woman pushing a contra-gee cart piled with computer printout. Cimela lost all interest in the crater. Pulse leaping, she spun on the cart and fingered the printout in anticipation. "Did you bring holos of the aliens, too?"

The young woman shook her head. "They didn't give me any."

Cimela frowned. She needed them to pick appropriate instruments and tempi, and to build the holo track. She would have to ask Ashendene for them.

The butler and technician set the printout on the floor while Cimela unpacked her electronic keyboard. After the door slid closed behind them, she arranged the paper in a circle on the carpet, creating her own ringwall. Then she sat cross-legged in the center, keyboard in her lap, and began reading through the nearest stack of printout.

Some corner of her mind remembered a servant serving supper, and that she flung herself on the bed for awhile, but most of her awareness focused on the nucleotide sequences. She saw nothing else and heard only the music they made in her head and on the keyboard.

The computer had not printed out the chemical structure, either as formulas or zigzag diagrams, but the terminology told her the aliens' "DNA" differed from humans': A', G', C', and T' where A, G, C, and T usually stood for the nucleotides, plus two more named PU-3 and PY-3, indicating an addition purine and pyrimidine. Six nucleotides! Their genetics must be very complex... but more than that, this time she had six notes to work with.

Except that a seventh, out of key, kept intruding. She tried to ignore it.

"Ms. Bediako!"

Cimela started with enough force to lift her off the carpet. Turning, she met the keen gaze of moondust eyes regarding her from the doorway.

Ashendene floated his chair into the room. "I came to check on you. Alfred said you didn't touch breakfast or lunch and wouldn't answer the door chime."

Meals? Door chime? Oh... the seventh note. She grimaced. "I should have warned you how engrossed I become when I work."

A brow quirked. "Indeed. However, I didn't bring you here to expire from anorexia. To reassure me of your nutrition, will you have dinner with me this evening?"

Dinner? That would mean losing two or three hours of working time. Still, it might also give her the chance to learn where the steely businessman became the lover of fantasy. "Thank you. What time and where?"

"I take my meals in my room normally. Alfred will be pouring the wine at nineteen hundred hours. It's a house vintage, from grapes in our hydroponics farm. I think you'll like it."

Spinning his chair, Ashendene sailed it out of the room. Only after the door had closed behind him did Cimela remember that she had forgotten to ask him for holos of the aliens. Shrugging, she returned to work.

By eighteen hundred hours she had decided on the length of the symphony, chosen the key, and decided that the notes from Mi up to Do would comprise her scale. She stood stiffly, stretching, ready for a break before looking for the strand sequences to harmonize with and make a counterpoint to the main sequence.

*      *      *

Ashendene greeted her with a nod of approval. "Lovely."

Cimela smiled. Though this was just a break in work, she had dressed carefully, choosing a gauzy gold jumpsuit with the voluminous sleeves and legs, snuggly cuffed at wrists and ankles, that the Moon's low gravity inspired in this year's fashions. Sitting down at the round library-type table where dinner had been set, she looked out at the crater and up to the luminous globe of Earth overhead. "Do you like this room best for its view of Earth or the moon?"

"The stars." Ashendene said

The butler poured wine and served dinner, gliding over the glowing floor silent and efficient as a robot. Her Kings of the Air played softly around them, a chorus of strings singing the nucleotide sequences of the great raptors.

Ashendene asked, "How did you happen to begin using DNA as a score?"

Cimela sipped her wine. It was delicious, pale and lightly sweet as moonlight. "My father once gave my mother a birthday card that was a sheet of music with notes assigned to nucleotide sequences that resulted in the pigmentation of her hair, skin and eyes. 'The song is you,' I remember him telling her. That fascinated me. I started playing with DNA tunes. Even the music I wrote for the Rococo Roos had DNA sequence themes, and later, when I began writing about life that had vanished or seemed about to, what better than to let the very substance of those animals plead for them? World Primeval sounds like any symphony, but even its themes are expanded from nucleotide sequences of the shark, lizard, echidna, and platypus."

Ashendene laughed. "I'm astonished how well it all sounds with such a restricted form, but even more amazed at the profound emotional effect your music has on people."

That always surprised her, too. "A friend once came up with a theory in an inebriated moment. He said the response results from resonance, a recognition on a deeply subconscious level of its similarity to the pattern of our own genetic structure. It's as good as any other explanation I've heard. I'll be interested in seeing how people react to an alien coding."

The moondust eyes flickered. "I would think they'd feel the same, given that the music uses human instrumentation."

She frowned. Human instrumentation. Could that be wrong? Perhaps aliens deserved new and more exotic sounds. She would play with the synthesizer. Which reminded her-- knowing what they looked like would help her select appropriate sounds. "Mr. Ashendene, I need tapes or holos of the aliens."

He sipped his wine and grimaced. "There aren't any worth seeing."

She shrugged. "I don't care how poor they are; I need something for a basis of the visual track."

"The bodies were too badly damaged to tell much about their appearance. The 'DNA' has been read from a few cells that froze quickly enough to be thawed without destroying the internal structure."

"Even damaged bodies are worth something," she protested. "Are they large or small? How many limbs do they have? What's their clothing like? What about the ship?"

The moondust eyes stared into her, then went thoughtful. "I see what you mean. We have holos of the ship and you'll have them by morning. We're working on a computer reconstruction of the aliens based on a composite and skeletal structure and you'll have that, too, as soon as it's finished. From what I saw, the aliens are a bit smaller than we are, covered with... bronze or gold feathers."

Golden bird people? She grinned in delight. Perhaps flutes and strings, or chimes, should carry the musical theme. She played with the idea in her head the rest of dinner, and afterward programmed the synthesizer in her room for airy instrumental sounds.

*      *      *

Cimela kept working with the synthesizer, at the same time deciding on secondary and tertiary musical lines. During rests she studied the holos of the ship. It appeared strictly utilitarian, without decoration or color. Ceilings pressed low overhead, barely centimeters above the squatly arched doorways. The crew apparently never used furniture except tables and something like low blanket racks with padded bars. Water-filled mats on the floor served as beds. Beyond that the holos told her nothing about the aliens. She set them aside.

Every evening she ate with Ashendene in the domed study. The floor glowed beneath them; Earth shone overhead; moonwine filled their glasses like luminous silver. Ashendene entertained her with stories about his early days mining the asteroids. "IMDI was just me, five buddies, and a patched junk ship in those days."

Cimela smiled at him over her wineglass. "You sound like you enjoyed it. Why did you give it up for a desk?"

He shrugged, looking past her at the sky. "The asteroids are just a way station."

After dinner they took tea in the study, or he showed her through another portion of the house. It had the facilities of a small colony: laboratories, workshops, staff apartments, and a hydroponics farm. Working on the ship here, no wonder he had been able to keep his find a secret. At some point they passed to a first-name basis, and one evening during her second week there she had the chance to learn about his love of fantastic art.

"I respect people who dream," he said, "even if it's nightmares, like Bosch. So few people dream these days. And speaking of dreaming, how is your work coming?"

The question had been inevitable. She sighed. "Slowly, as always. I'm still undecided about the lead instruments. Perhaps I'll use a recorder and a samisen."

He blinked. "A what?"

"The samisen is a three-stringed Japanese guitar with a long neck. The recorder is a very old flute that's played like a clarinet. It went out of common use about the time of Bach, at least until the Neo-Renaissance movement revived interest in it. It has a lovely mellow sound."

A crease appeared between the moondust eyes. "Don't forget you're writing this for modern ears."

As though modern sound could not come out of old instruments. But that was what came of discussing instruments with a non-musician. "Of course. When do I need to be finished?"

"The dinner will wait for the music. Oh, I almost forgot. Albert." He beckoned to the butler. "Will you bring Cimela the envelope from my desk?"

Her heart went into fortissimo at the sight of the small, square gray envelope.

"The alien construct program?"

Ashendene finished his wine. "Now you can start on the holo track, too, and stop being underworked."

She laughed at his teasing, but could hardly wait to finish eating. Ashendene appeared to read her mind. He said little the remainder of the meal and did not ask her to stay for tea afterward.

Back in her rooms, Cimela slipped the minidisc into her computer and waited curled cross-legged in her chair. The image appeared one line at a time, as though being sketched inside the screen. It pivoted at the same time, the far side of the three-dimensional shape remaining visible through the forming lines of the near side. With every turn, however, more details appeared-- feathers, the facets of compound eyes, fingernails-- followed by textures and finally by color, until the screen held a construction that did not look like a computer drawing but a holophoto of an actual being.

The alien stood on two muscular legs that bent strangely but carried him like coiled springs. He had no wings after all: small arms, also oddly jointed, folded across the golden chest, ending in hands with a thumb and two long, many-jointed fingers. Feather-fringed ears belied out from the sides of the broad head. Faceted opal eyes dreamed placidly above nasal slits and a smiling bow of mouth.

Cimela sighed in satisfaction. He was alien, yes. Completely inhuman-- she could not even identify the tools hanging on his belt-- but utterly fascinating.

She plunged happily into her doubled task and over the next several weeks used the computer to create and store the thousands of images that would be projected as the visual track, while at the same time experimenting with countless nucleotide sequences played against each other in the voices of several dozen musical instruments... culling, choosing, refining choices. She lived, breathed, and dreamed the symphony, aware of little else. Even at dinner with Ashendene they spoke only of the work.

He did not appear to mind. He listened intently, and once Cimela looked up from the computer to find his chair in the doorway, his expression hungry. How long he had sat there Cimela could not begin to guess, and she eyed him, suddenly aware how isolated the house was, and that leaving would entail more effort than just hailing a cab, if she needed to escape unwanted attentions.

"Is that part of the final thing?" he asked.

She did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed. His passion was for the symphony, not her. "Do you like it?"

The hunger flared brighter in the moondust eyes. "It's even better than I dreamed. Have you titled it yet?"

"How about The Lost Traveler?"

"Perfect. Will you think I'm impatient if I ask how close you are to being finished?"'

"Yes." But she smiled. "I'll answer, though. I'm almost finished. So plan your dinner and give me an orchestra for rehearsals. Do you really plan to bring an entire orchestra all the way from Earth?"

He smiled back. "No, just around the Moon. The Chinese have a very nice orchestra at the Celestial Village complex." His smile broadened. "Maybe the samisen is appropriate after all."

*      *      *

Now work really began: printing out the score for each instrument, working with the butler to assign rooms to the several dozen musicians who flooded the house. Her days filled with hours of rehearsals, all held where the dinner and performance would be given: the ballroom, a dome like the study but many times larger. How she had missed seeing it before Cimela did not know, for it appeared to sit almost in the center of the crater, the rugged ringwall rising on all sides.

She had little time to admire the view, however. Though she spoke little Chinese and the conductor knew even less English, the two of them argued endlessly over tempi and other details.

Ashendene, attending one of the rounds, murmured, "Maybe we should have settled for a synthesizer."

Cimela shook her head. "I've been through this before. Wu Chien and I will work out our differences or I'll turn him into Peking duck."

Ashendene raised a skeptical brow, but by the day of the dinner she and the conductor were indeed bowing and smiling at one another. He shook his head. "Remarkable talent indeed."

The house filled to bursting. Each of the men and women Ashendene had invited moved in with companions and personal staff. They arrived a shuttle-load at a time from the Americans' Port Heinlein for two days before the dinner, and though one or two did not arrive until the last moment, by seventeen hundred hours on the appointed day all were gathering in the ballroom for cocktails.

Ashendene hovered outside the elevator like a king on a throne, greeting his guests and introducing them to Cimela, who stood beside him in gold velvet.

The group had the glitter of an international opening night, the women wrapped in jewels and expensive fabrics, the men dressed in elegant formal versions of jumpsuits, kimonos, and dashikis... but it was neither that nor their names, most of which Cimela failed to recognize, that kept her heart in allegro tempo. The aura of power curled around them visibly. Without being told, Cimela knew that she shook hands with the men and women who really ran the world, and whose web of influence extended even out to the edge of the solar system.

The scene had the surrealism of one of Ashendene's paintings: the tables, impeccably set with the finest china, crystal, and sterling, arranged in a circle on the milky glow of the floor; and outside the circle the guests, milling together wearing their power as easily and elegantly as their formal clothing, chatting, seemingly unaware or uncaring that they did so in the center of a lunar crater. Light from hidden spotlights flooded the crater. No Earth or Sun shone in the sky, however. The jagged teeth of the ringwall framed a breath-taking vista of stars alone, infinitely vast and far, yet so brilliant that each distant sun-- which one warmed the world of the golden-feathered people?-- looked close enough for Cimela to reach up and pluck.

She sat at the head table beside Ashendene, completely unable to distinguish what she ate. Instead Cimela stared up at the glorious blaze overhead and wondered how the guests could ignore it for shop talk and gossip. "Don't they ever look up?" she whispered to Ashendene.

"Perhaps after tonight they will." Grasping the edge of the table, he pulled himself upright. "Ladies and gentlemen!" He waited while the roar of conversation died away. When only the occasional clink of a dessert spoon against glass remained, he went on. "I want to thank you all for coming."

As he spoke, Cimela noticed that a square in the center of the floor dropped and slid aside.

"I hope you've enjoyed the food and wine. In a few minutes the Celestial Village Symphony Orchestra will present the new work by Cimela Bediako that I promised you."

"Before that, however, let me relieve your curiosity about the business proposal I used to entice you here. In a word, I am offering you the stars."

Cimela saw several people start to frown, but before they could complete the expression the air swirled above the circle of tables. It solidified into a holo projection of the aliens' battered ship, a blunt cigar shape wrapped in a scaffold-like spiral. Brows arched around the tables, then dipped again speculatively as the guests recognized the strange craft's aged appearance. The eyes widened when Ashendene explained what the ship was and how and where it had been found. Then the ship dissolved and in its place a holo of the alien appeared, just as Cimela had first seen it: a pivoting outline, rapidly filling with detail, texture, and color. A sigh of indrawn breath swept the circle.

"We have learned to duplicate the drive," Ashendene said. "Star travel is now possible in flights of weeks and months instead of enduring for generations. All we need is a company to build the ships."

The physics behind the drive and the talk about bent space did not interest Cimela. The expressions around the tables did, and she bit her lip. She had seen closed faces like those before... on critics who decided even before the conductor raised his baton that her work could not possibly contain real artistic merit, only novelty, gimmickry. These people had no interest in investing money to build star ships.

"...opportunity to establish trade," Ashendene was saying now. "If we'll use this drive, the universe and whatever profit may lie out there are ours. And now, refill your wine glasses and prepare for pleasure." The alien holo dissolved. "I present the Celestial Village Symphony Orchestra playing the most beautiful and talented Cimela Bediako's The Lost Traveler." He dropped back into his chair.

Sometime during his speech the orchestra had slipped into its place at the end of the room. Cimela laced her fingers tightly in her lap, her heart thundering like kettledrums, and nodded at Wu Chien.

After the first few bars, however, she forgot her nervousness, and even Ashendene and his guests. Nothing existed but the music. It soared, the main melody carried by a descant recorder, samisen, and harp. Other strings, the brass, and woodwinds sang behind them, playing complementary nucleotide sequences. And in the center of the tables the computer projected the visual track: golden-feathered aliens with faceted opal eyes, stretching upward or striding along on their powerful legs, circling and embracing in a minuet-like dance, all against the backdrop of moonscape and starfields.

Cimela closed her eyes and let the sound possess her, reverberate through her bones and blood, hypnotic. How foolish people were to think that they created music, she mused. Nature did it first, and better, in the voices of wind and water and animals, and even in the very substance of what made all life what it was. The aliens might come from a different sun and a different sea, but in the very center of them their cells sang a song not that different from those of the trees, insects, and men of Earth.

When the music stopped, such absolute silence filled the dome that Cimela heard the sigh of breathing and the beat of her own heart. She opened her eyes hesitantly to find every guest sitting blinking at the empty air in the circle. She swung around to meet Wu Chien's eyes, stomach plunging. Oh. no! They hated it. She tried to look an apology at the orchestra.

Just then the applause began... a single pair of hands, joined by another, then another, the sound swelling until the thunder of it shook the dome. Ashendene grinned and urged her onto her feet. And one by one the guests stood, too. The most powerful men and women in the solar system rose to their feet, their hands still pounding together in approval.

Cimela remembered bowing to the guests and orchestra, remembered the orchestra bowing; then everything blurred into a crowd of people surrounding her with congratulations. She floated on a cloud of euphoria that did not dissipate even when the ballroom emptied and she stood alone with Ashendene and a few servants.

She hugged him in sheer joy, throwing herself into his lap. "Kerel, thank you for giving me the chance to write this symphony."

"I thank you for creating it. Every one of them has asked to invest in the starship corporation." Then his arms tightened around her.

Somehow, without much surprise, she found herself in his private dome, in his bed; and the lovemaking made a celebration indeed, sweet and deeply satisfying as moonwine and her music together. Ashendene might be crippled, but not disabled, she discovered.

Some long time later she woke beneath the glorious blaze of stars and sat up in the bed, dreamily watching them. What happened next? Her contract with Ashendene gave her all rights to Lost Traveler, so she supposed she should take it back to Earth. After news of the alien ship spread, interest ought to run high.

She sat up more, smiling at the room, a place as surreal as the paintings: bookcases and the overburdened desk beneath stars and the lunar ringwall. She would miss the room, and probably Ashendene.

Cimela slid out of bed to pad naked along the bookcases, touching the antique objects and peering at their titles: fairy tales, science fiction, astrophysics, planetology, psychology. One book lay on the desk: another collection of fairy tales with a square of stiff paper marking The Pied Piper of Hamlyn. Amused, she started to read the story, then noticed that the other side of the marker held a holophoto. But what of? She tilted it to the light of the floor, frowning. The thing looked like a misshapen porpoise... more like a giant slug, except that gray-green feathery-looking scales covered it and one end sprouted three tentacle limbs, two tipped in triple talons, the third ending in a cluster of smaller tentacles, and all situated around a great fang-filled maw. Eyes scattered back along the great body, faceted opals peering through the fronds.

Faceted opals? The hair raised on Cimela's back.

The book of fairy tales dropped forgotten to the desk as she pawed through the rest of the papers piled there. What she wanted lay under where the book had lain: more holos and a lengthy report Cimela studied every holo and read the report, anger boiling up in her. That lying bastard!

"What are you doing, Cimela?"

She slapped the report down on the desk and whirled. "You lying son of a bitch! Golden-feathered aliens? The only similarity between the fraud and these holos is the eyes!"

He sat up. "Yes."

Her hands clenched to keep from spreading into claws. "You let me make Lost Traveler a fraud!"

Ashendene frowned. "Only the visuals are... inaccurate."

"Only!" He destroyed her artistic integrity and said only? "You-- " No pejorative seemed vile enough to describe him. "Why did you do it!"

The moondust eyes regarded her solemnly. "Because I want man to go to the stars, and they won't if they think that the stars are inhabited by fanged slugs."

Angrily Cimela paced, flinging her head. "That's ridiculous. You lied about the age of the ship, too. That report says it's three million years old-- and the aliens were chlorine breathers. They could be extinct by now, and even if they aren't, we don't have much chance of contacting or trading with them. It doesn't make any difference if they're out there."

He piled pillows up and leaned back against them. "Most people won't believe that. All they'll pay attention to is what they see-- and you and I, of all people, know how much appearance influences what people think of something or someone."

Anger drained out of Cimela. She bit her lip. Oh yes, she knew. She sighed. "Why tell anyone about the aliens at all? Say you invented the drive."

His mouth twisted wryly. "Do you really think just having a drive will rekindle the star dream? No, they'll still talk about wilderness and lack of cost effectiveness. Some explorers go into wilderness just because they want to know what's there, but most people need a reason: population pressure, military advantages, trade. Greed is most effective, I think. Promise of profit will goad people into going places they'd never dream of otherwise."

Cimela sat down on the foot of the bed and hugged her knees. "So you invented attractive aliens and used me to dangle a trade carrot in front of your guests," she said bitterly.

"I had no other choice."

"You might have told me what you were trying to do. You could have asked me to help."

"After you parroted the words of every stay-at-home who's scoffed at my dream of the stars?"

That stung, but she saw his point "What happens when they learn the truth?"

To her surprise he grinned, shrugging. "It may not be. That's a big galaxy; no one will expect to find our feathered visitors right away. Even if the truth does eventually leak, we'll be out there; and once people go into wilderness they usually stay."

The man was incorrigible, totally without conscience. In disbelief; she said, "You'd really base a star culture on a lie?"

He looked up at the blaze above them. "If that's what it takes. Babies don't remain in the womb forever. We're crippling mankind's growth by clinging to Earth and the Sun." His gaze dropped to meet hers. "Think of the possibilities. The trip doesn't have to be one-way. I can even go, and not have to be content with going by proxy. Think of what we can find. Wouldn't you like to visit a new world and play the music in the cells of the life there?"

Her breath caught at the flood of possibilities.

He leaned toward her. "Let me take you there. All I ask is that you help me bring the rest of Mankind, too."

He never stopped manipulating, did he? She almost regretted admiring his motives.

Cimela eyed the fiery blaze overhead. She ought to redo the holo track and make Traveler an honest symphony. And yet... a universe of life to make music on... Longing throbbed in her. Damn the man!

"Cimela? What do you say?" His hand touched her wrist. The heat of it spread up her arm. "Come on. Help me."

Sighing, she yielded to siren call above and within her. "All right. You win. You've bought yourself a Pied Piper."

SALVADOR

Lucius Shepard

Three weeks before they wasted Tecolutla, Dantzler had his baptism of fire. The platoon was crossing a meadow at the foot of an emerald-green volcano, and being a dreamy sort, he was idling along, swatting tall grasses with his rifle barrel and thinking how it might have been a first-grader with crayons who had devised this elementary landscape of a perfect cone rising into a cloudless sky, when cap-pistol noises sounded on the slope. Someone screamed for the medic, and Dantzler dove into the grass, fumbling for his ampules. He slipped one from the dispenser and popped it under his nose, inhaling frantically; then, to be on the safe side, he popped another- "A double helpin' of martial arts," as DT would say–and lay with his head down until the drugs had worked their magic. There was dirt in his mouth, and he was very afraid.

Gradually his arms and legs lost their heaviness, and his heart rate slowed. His vision sharpened to the point that he could see not only the pinpricks of fire blooming on the slope, but also the figures behind them, half-obscured by brush. A bubble of grim anger welled up in his brain, hardened to a fierce resolve, and he started moving towards the volcano. By the time he reached the base of the cone, he was all rage and reflexes. He spent the next forty minutes spinning acrobatically through the thickets, spraying shadows with bursts of his M-18; yet part of his mind remained distant from the action, marveling at his efficiency, at the comic-strip enthusiasm he felt for the task of killing. He shouted at the men he shot, and he shot them many more times than was necessary, like a child playing soldier.

"Playin' my ass!" DT would say. "You just actin' natural."

DT was a firm believer in the ampules; though the official line was that they contained tailored RNA compounds and pseudoendorphins modified to an inhalant form, he held the opinion that they opened a man up to his inner nature. He was big, black, with heavily muscled arms and crudely stamped features, and he had come to the Special Forces direct from prison, where he had done a stretch for attempted murder; the palms of his hands were covered by jail tattoos–a pentagram and a horned monster. The words DIE HIGH were painted on his helmet. This was his second tour in Salvador, and Moody–who was Dantzler's buddy -said the drugs had addled DT's brains, that he was crazy and gone to hell.

"He collects trophies," Moody had said. "And not just ears like they done in 'Nam."

When Dantzler had finally gotten a glimpse of the trophies, he had been appalled. They were kept in a tin box in DT's pack and were nearly unrecognizable; they looked like withered brown orchids. But despite his revulsion, despite the fact that he was afraid of DT, he admired the man's capacity for survival and had taken to heart his advice to rely on the drugs.

On the way back down the slope they discovered a live casualty, an Indian kid about Dantzler's age, nineteen or twenty. Black hair, adobe skin, and heavy-lidded brown eyes. Dantzler, whose father was an anthropologist and had done fieldwork in Salvador, figured him for a Santa Ana tribesman; before leaving the States, Dantzler had pored over his father's notes, hoping this would give him an edge, and had learned to identify the various regional types. The kid had a minor leg wound and was wearing fatigue pants and a faded COKE ADDS LIFE T-shirt. This T-shirt irritated DT no end.

"What the hell you know 'bout Coke?" he asked the kid as they headed for the chopper that was to carry them deeper into Morazán Province. "You think it's funny or some-thin'?" He whacked the kid in the back with his rifle butt, and when they reached the chopper, he slung him inside and had him sit by the door. He sat beside him, tapped out a joint from a pack of Kools, and asked, "Where's Infante?"

"Dead," said the medic.

"Shit!" DT licked the joint so it would burn evenly. "Goddamn beaner ain't no use 'cept somebody else know Spanish."

"I know a little," Dantzler volunteered.

Staring at Dantzler, DT's eyes went empty and unfocused. "Naw," he said. "You don't know no Spanish."

Dantzler ducked his head to avoid DT's stare and said nothing; he thought he understood what DT meant, but he ducked away from the understanding as well. The chopper bore them aloft, and DT lit the joint. He let the smoke out his nostrils and passed the joint to the kid, who accepted gratefully.

"Qué sabor!" he said, exhaling a billow; he smiled and nodded, wanting to be friends.

Dantzler turned his gaze to the open door. They were flying low between the hills, and looking at the deep bays of shadow in their folds acted to drain away the residue of the drugs, leaving him weary and frazzled. Sunlight poured in, dazzling the oil-smeared floor.

"Hey, Dantzler!" DT had to shout over the noise of the rotors. "Ask him whass his name!"

The kid's eyelids were drooping from the joint, but on hearing Spanish he perked up; he shook his head, though, refusing to answer. Dantzler smiled and told him not to be afraid.

"Ricardo Quu," said the kid.

"Kool!" said DT with false heartiness. "Thass my brand!" He offered his pack to the kid.

"Gracias, no." The kid waved the joint and grinned.

"Dude's named for a goddamn cigarette," said DT disparagingly, as if this were the height of insanity.

Dantzler asked the kid if there were more soldiers nearby, and once again received no reply; but, apparently sensing in Dantzler a kindred soul, the kid leaned forward and spoke rapidly, saying that his village was Santander Jiménez, that his father was–he hesitated–a man of power. He asked where they were taking him. Dantzler returned a stony glare. He found it easy to reject the kid, and he realized later this was because he had already given up on him.

Latching his hands behind his head, DT began to sing- a wordless melody. His voice was discordant, barely audible above the rotors; but the tune had a familiar ring and Dantzler soon placed it. The theme from "Star Trek." It brought back memories of watching TV with his sister, laughing at the low-budget aliens and Scotty's Actors' Equity accent. He gazed out the door again. The sun was behind the hills, and the hillsides were unfeatured blurs of dark green smoke. Oh, God, he wanted to be home, to be anywhere but Salvador! A couple of the guys joined in the singing at DT's urging, and as the volume swelled, Dantzler's emotion peaked. He was on the verge of tears, remembering tastes and sights, the way his girl Jeanine had smelled, so clean and fresh, not reeking of sweat and perfume like the whores around Ilopango–finding all this substance in the banal touchstone of his culture and the illusions of the hillsides rushing past. Then Moody tensed beside him, and he glanced up to learn the reason why.

In the gloom of the chopper's belly, DT was as unfeatured as the hills–a black presence ruling them, more the leader of a coven than a platoon. The other two guys were singing their lungs out, and even the kid was getting into the spirit of things. "Música!" he said at one point, smiling at everybody, trying to fan the flame of good feeling. He swayed to the rhythm and essayed a "la-la" now and again. But no one else was responding.

The singing stopped, and Dantzler saw that the whole platoon was staring at the kid, their expressions slack and dispirited.

"Space!" shouted DT, giving the kid a little shove. "The final frontier!"

The smile had not yet left the kid's face when he toppled out the door. DT peered after him; a few seconds later he smacked his hand against the floor and sat back, grinning. Dantzler felt like screaming, the stupid horror of the joke was so at odds with the languor of his homesickness. He looked to the others for reaction. They were sitting with their heads down, fiddling with trigger guards and pack straps, studying their bootlaces, and seeing this, he quickly imitated them.

Morazán Province was spook country. Santa Ana spooks. Flights of birds had been reported to attack patrols; animals appeared at the perimeters of campsites and vanished when you shot at them; dreams afflicted everyone who ventured there. Dantzler could not testify to the birds and animals, but he did have a recurring dream. In it the kid DT had killed was pinwheeling down through a golden fog, his T-shirt visible against the roiling back-drop, and sometimes a voice would boom out of the fog, saying, "You are killing my son." No, no, Dantzler would reply, it wasn't me, and besides, he's already dead. Then he would wake covered with sweat, groping for his rifle, his heart racing.

But the dream was not an important terror, and he assigned it no significance. The land was far more terrifying. Pine-forested ridges that stood out against the sky like fringes of electrified hair; little trails winding off into thickets and petering out, as if what they led to had been magicked away; gray rock faces along which they were forced to walk, hopelessly exposed to ambush. There were innumerable booby traps set by the guerrillas, and they lost several men to rockfalls. It was the emptiest place of Dantzler's experience. No people, no animals, just a few hawks circling the solitudes between the ridges. Once in a while they found tunnels, and these they blew with the new gas grenades; the gas ignited the rich concentrations of hydrocarbons and sent flame sweeping through the entire system. DT would praise whoever had discovered the tunnel and would estimate in a loud voice how many beaners they had "refried." But Dantzler knew they were traversing pure emptiness and burning empty holes. Days, under debilitating heat, they humped the mountains, traveling seven, eight, even ten klicks up trails so steep that frequently the feet of the guy ahead of you would be on a level with your face; nights, it was cold, the darkness absolute, the silence so profound that Dantzler imagined he could hear the great humming vibration of the earth. They might have been anywhere or nowhere. Their fear was nourished by the isolation, and the only remedy was "martial arts."

Dantzler took to popping the pills without the excuse of combat. Moody cautioned him against abusing the drugs, citing rumors of bad side effects and DT's madness; but even he was using them more and more often. During basic training, Dantzler's DI had told the boots that the drugs were available only to the Special Forces, that their use was optional; but there had been too many instances of lackluster battlefield performance in the last war, and this was to prevent a reoccurrence.

"The chickenshit infantry take 'em," the DI had said. "You bastards are brave already. You're born killers, right?"

"Right, sir!" they had shouted.

"What are you?"

"Born killers, sir!"

But Dantzler was not a born killer; he was not even clear as to how he had been drafted, less clear as to how he had been manipulated into the Special Forces, and he had learned that nothing was optional in Salvador, with the possible exception of life itself.

The platoon's mission was reconnaissance and mop-up. Along with other Special Forces platoons, they were to secure Morazán prior to the invasion of Nicaragua; specifically, they were to proceed to the village of Tecolutla, where a Sandinista patrol had recently been spotted, and following that they were to join up with the First Infantry and take part in the offensive against León, a provincial capital just across the Nicaraguan border. As Dantzler and Moody walked together, they frequently talked about the offensive, how it would be good to get down into flat country; occasionally they talked about the possibility of reporting DT, and once, after he had led them on a forced night march, they toyed with the idea of killing him. But most often they discussed the ways of the Indians and the land, since this was what had caused them to become buddies.

Moody was slightly built, freckled, and red-haired; his eyes had the "thousand-yard stare" that came from too much war. Dantzler had seen winos with such vacant, lusterless stares. Moody's father had been in 'Nam, and Moody said it had been worse than Salvador because there had been no real commitment to win; but he thought Nicaragua and Guatemala might be the worst of all, especially if the Cubans sent in troops as they had threatened. He was adept at locating tunnels and detecting booby traps, and it was for this reason Dantzler had cultivated his friendship. Essentially a loner, Moody had resisted all advances until learning of Dantzler's father; thereafter he had buddied up, eager to hear about the field notes, believing they might give him an edge.

"They think the land has animal traits," said Dantzler one day as they climbed along a ridgetop. "Just like some kinds of fish look like plants or sea bottom, parts of the land look like plain ground, jungle . . . whatever. But when you enter them, you find you've entered the spirit world, the world of Sukias."

"What's Sukias?" asked Moody.

"Magicians." A twig snapped behind Dantzler, and he spun around, twitching off the safety of his rifle. It was only Hodge–a lanky kid with the beginnings of a beer gut. He stared hollow-eyed at Dantzler and popped an ampule.

Moody made a noise of disbelief. "If they got magicians, why ain't they winnin'? Why ain't they zappin' us off the cliffs?"

"It's not their business," said Dantzler. "They don't believe in messing with worldly affairs unless it concerns them directly. Anyway, these places–the ones that look like normal land but aren't–they're called. . . ." He drew a blank on the name. ".Aja-something. I can't remember. But they have different laws. They're where your spirit goes to die after your body dies."

"Don't they got no Heaven?"

"Nope. It just takes longer for your spirit to die, and so it goes to one of these places that's between everything and nothing."

"Nothin'," said Moody disconsolately, as if all his hopes for an afterlife had been dashed. "Don't make no sense to have spirits and not have no Heaven."

"Hey," said Dantzler, tensing as wind rustled the pine boughs. "They're just a bunch of damn primitives. You know what their sacred drink is? Hot chocolate! My old man was a guest at one of their funerals, and he said they carried cups of hot chocolate balanced on these little red towers and acted like drinking it was going to wake them to the secrets of the universe." He laughed, and the laughter sounded tinny and psychotic to his own ears. "So you're going to worry about fools who think hot chocolate's holy water?"

"Maybe they just like it," said Moody. "Maybe somebody dyin' just give 'em an excuse to drink it."

But Dantzler was no longer listening. A moment before, as they emerged from pine cover onto the highest point of the ridge, a stony scarp open to the winds and providing a view of rumpled mountains and valleys extending to the horizon, he had popped an ampule. He felt so strong, so full of righteous purpose and controlled fury, it seemed only the sky was around him, that he was still ascending, preparing to do battle with the gods themselves.

Tecolutla was a village of whitewashed stone tucked into a notch between two hills. From above, the houses–with their shadow-blackened windows and doorways–looked like an unlucky throw of dice. The streets ran uphill and down, diverging around boulders. Bougainvilleas and hibiscuses speckled the hillsides, and there were tilled fields on the gentler slopes. It was a sweet, peaceful place when they arrived, and after they had gone it was once again peaceful; but its sweetness had been permanently banished. The reports of Sandinistas had proved accurate, and though they were casualties left behind to recuperate, DT had decided their presence called for extreme measures. Fu gas, frag grenades, and such. He had fired an M-60 until the barrel melted down, and then had manned the flamethrower. Afterward, as they rested atop the next ridge, exhausted and begrimed, having radioed in a chopper for resupply, he could not get over how one of the houses he had torched had come to resemble a toasted marshmallow.

"Ain't that how it was, man?" he asked, striding up and down the line. He did not care if they agreed about the house; it was a deeper question he was asking, one concerning the ethics of their actions.

"Yeah," said Dantzler, forcing a smile. "Sure did."

DT grunted with laughter. "You know I'm right, don'tcha man?"

The sun hung directly behind his head, a golden corona rimming a black oval, and Dantzler could not turn his eyes away. He felt weak and weakening, as if threads of himself were being spun loose and sucked into the blackness. He had popped three ampules prior to the firefight, and his experience of Tecolutla had been a kind of mad whirling dance through the streets, spraying erratic bursts that appeared to be writing weird names on the walls. The leader of the Sandinistas had worn a mask — a gray face with a surprised hole of a mouth and pink circles around the eyes. A ghost face. Dantzler had been afraid of the mask and had poured round after round into it. Then, leaving the village, he had seen a small girl standing beside the shell of the last house, watching them, her colorless rag of a dress tattering in the breeze. She had been a victim of that malnutrition disease, the one that paled your skin and whitened your hair and left you retarded. He could not recall the name of the disease -things like names were slipping away from him–nor could he believe anyone had survived, and for a moment he had thought the spirit of the village had come out to mark their trail.

That was all he could remember of Tecolutla, all he wanted to remember. But he knew he had been brave.

Four days later, they headed up into a cloud forest. It was the dry season, but dry season or not, blackish gray clouds always shrouded these peaks. They were shot through by ugly glimmers of lightning, making it seem that malfunctioning neon signs were hidden beneath them, advertisements for evil. Everyone was jittery, and Jerry LeDoux–a slim dark-haired Cajun kid–flat-out refused to go.

"It ain't reasonable," he said. "Be easier to go through the passes."

"We're on recon, man! You think the beaners be waitin' in the passes, wavin' their white flags?" DT whipped his rifle into firing position and pointed it at LeDoux. "C'mon, Louisiana man. Pop a few, and you feel different."

As LeDoux popped the ampules, DT talked to him.

"Look at it this way, man. This is your big adventure. Up there it be like all them animal shows on the tube. The savage kingdom, the unknown. Could be like Mars or somethin'. Monsters and shit, with big red eyes and tentacles. You wanna miss that, man? You wanna miss bein' the first grunt on Mars?"

Soon LeDoux was raring to go, giggling at DT's rap.

Moody kept his mouth shut, but he fingered the safety of his rifle and glared at DT's back. When DT turned to him, however, he relaxed. Since Tecolutla he had grown taciturn, and there seemed to be a shifting of lights and darks in his eyes, as if something were scurrying back and forth behind them. He had taken to wearing banana leaves on his head, arranging them under his helmet so the frayed ends stuck out the side like strange green hair. He said this was camouflage, but Dantzler was certain it bespoke some secretive irrational purpose. Of course DT had noticed Moody's spiritual erosion, and as they prepared to move out, he called Dantzler aside.

"He done found someplace inside his head that feel good to him," said DT. "He's tryin' to curl up into it, and once he do that he ain't gon' be responsible. Keep an eye on him."

Dantzler mumbled his assent, but was not enthused.

"I know he your fren', man, but that don't mean shit. Not the way things are. Now me, I don't give a damn 'bout you personally. But I'm your brother-in-arms, and thass some-thin' you can count on ... y'understand."

To Dantzler's shame, he did understand.

They had planned on negotiating the cloud forest by nightfall, but they had underestimated the difficulty. The vegetation beneath the clouds was lush–thick, juicy leaves that mashed underfoot, tangles of vines, trees with slick, pale bark and waxy leaves–and the visibility was only about fifteen feet. They were gray wraiths passing through gray-ness. The vague shapes of the foliage reminded Dantzler of fancifully engraved letters, and for a while he entertained himself with the notion that they were walking among the half-formed phrases of a constitution not yet manifest in the land. They barged off the trail, losing it completely, becoming veiled in spiderwebs and drenched by spills of water; their voices were oddly muffled, the tag ends of words swallowed up. After seven hours of this, DT reluctantly gave the order to pitch camp. They set electric lamps around the perimeter so they could see to string the jungle hammocks; the beam of light illuminated the moisture in the air, piercing the murk with jeweled blades. They talked in hushed tones, alarmed by the eerie atmosphere. When they had done with the hammocks, DT posted four sentries–Moody, LeDoux, Dantzler, and himself. Then they switched off the lamps.

It grew pitch-dark, and the darkness was picked out by plips and plops, the entire spectrum of dripping sounds. To Dantzler's ears they blended into a gabbling speech. He imagined tiny Santa Ana demons talking about him, and to stave off paranoia he popped two ampules. He continued to pop them, trying to limit himself to one every half hour; but he was uneasy, unsure where to train his rifle in the dark, and he exceeded his limit. Soon it began to grow light again, and he assumed that more time had passed than he had thought. That often happened with the ampules — it was easy to lose yourself in being alert, in the wealth of perceptual detail available to your sharpened senses. Yet on checking his watch, he saw it was only a few minutes after two o'clock. His system was too inundated with the drugs to allow panic, but he twitched his head from side to side in tight little arcs to determine the source of the brightness. There did not appear to be a single source; it was simply that filaments of the cloud were gleaming, casting a diffuse golden glow, as if they were elements of a nervous system coming to life. He started to call out, then held back. The others must have seen the light, and they had given no cry; they probably had a good reason for their silence. He scrunched down flat, pointing his rifle out from the campsite.

Bathed in the golden mist, the forest had acquired an alchemic beauty. Beads of water glittered with gemmy brilliance; the leaves and vines and bark were gilded. Every surface shimmered with light. . . everything except a fleck of blackness hovering between two of the trunks, its size gradually increasing. As it swelled in his vision, he saw it had the shape of a bird, its wings beating, flying toward him from an inconceivable distance — inconceivable, because the dense vegetation did not permit you to see very far in a straight line, and yet the bird was growing larger with such slowness that it must have been coming from a long way off. It was not really flying, he realized; rather, it was as if the forest were painted on a piece of paper, as if someone were holding a lit match behind it and burning a hole, a hole that maintained the shape of a bird as it spread. He was transfixed, unable to react. Even when it had blotted out half the light, when he lay before it no bigger than a mote in relation to its huge span, he could not move or squeeze the trigger. And then the blackness swept over him. He had the sensation of being borne along at incredible speed, and he could no longer hear the dripping of the forest.

"Moody!" he shouted. "DT!""

But the voice that answered belonged to neither of them. It was hoarse, issuing from every part of the surrounding blackness, and he recognized it as the voice of his recurring dream.

"You are killing my son," it said. "I have led you here, to this ayahuamaco, so he may judge you."

Dantzler knew to his bones the voice was that of the Sukia of the village of Santander Jiménez. He wanted to offer a denial, to explain his innocence, but all he could manage was, "No." He said it tearfully, hopelessly, his forehead resting on his rifle barrel. Then his mind gave a savage twist, and his soldiery self regained control. He ejected an ampule from his dispenser and popped it.

The voice laughed–malefic, damning laughter whose vibrations shuddered Dantzler. He opened up with the rifle, spraying fire in all directions. Filigrees of golden holes appeared in the blackness, tendrils of mist coiled through them. He kept on firing until the blackness shattered and fell in jagged sections toward him. Slowly. Like shards of black glass dropping through water. He emptied the rifle and flung himself flat, shielding his head with his arms, expecting to be sliced into bits; but nothing touched him. At last he peeked between his arms; then — amazed, because the forest was now a uniform lustrous yellow–he rose to his knees. He scraped his hands on one of the crushed leaves beneath him, and blood welled from the cut. The broken fibers of the leaf were as stiff as wires. He stood, a giddy trickle of hysteria leaking up from the bottom of his soul. It was no forest, but a building of solid gold worked to resemble a forest–the sort of conceit that might have been fabricated for the child of an emperor. Canopied by golden leaves, columned by slender golden trunks, carpeted by golden grasses. The water beads were diamonds. All the gleam and glitter soothed his apprehension; here was something out of a myth, a habitat for princesses and wizards and dragons. Almost gleeful, he turned to the campsite to see how the others were reacting.

Once, when he was nine years old, he had sneaked into the attic to rummage through the boxes and trunks, and he had run across an old morocco-bound copy of Gulliver's Travels. He had been taught to treasure old books, and so he had opened it eagerly to look at the illustrations, only to find that the centers of the pages had been eaten away, and there, right in the heart of the fiction, was a nest of larvae. Pulpy, horrid things. It had been an awful sight, but one unique in his experience, and he might have studied those crawling scraps of life for a very long time if his father had not interrupted. Such a sight was now before him, and he was numb with it.

They were all dead. He should have guessed they would be; he had given no thought to them while firing his rifle. They had been struggling out of their hammocks when the bullets hit, and as a result they were hanging half-in, half-out, their limbs dangling, blood pooled beneath them. The veils of golden mist made them look dark and mysterious and malformed, like monsters killed as they emerged from their cocoons. Dantzler could not stop staring, but he was shrinking inside himself. It was not his fault. That thought kept swooping in and out of a flock of less acceptable thoughts; he wanted it to stay put, to be true, to alleviate the sick horror he was beginning to feel.

"What's your name?" asked a girl's voice behind him.

She was sitting on a stone about twenty feet away. Her hair was a tawny shade of gold, her skin a half-tone lighter, and her dress was cunningly formed out of the mist. Only her eyes were real. Brown heavy-lidded eyes–they were at variance with the rest of her face, which had the fresh, unaffected beauty of an American teenager.

"Don't be afraid," she said, and patted the ground, inviting him to sit beside her.

He recognized the eyes, but it was no matter. He badly needed the consolation she could offer; he walked over and sat down. She let him lean his head against her thigh.

"What's your name?" she repeated.

"Dantzler," he said. "John Dantzler." And then he added, "I'm from Boston. My father's . . ." It would be too difficult to explain about anthropology. "He's a teacher."

"Are there many soldiers in Boston?" She stroked his cheek with a golden finger.

The caress made Dantzler happy. "Oh, no," he said. "They hardly know there's a war going on."

"This is true?" she said, incredulous.

"Well, they do know about it, but it's just news on the TV to them. They've got more pressing problems. Their jobs, families."

"Will you let them know about the war when you return home?" she asked. "Will you do that for me?"

Dantzler had given up hope of returning home, of surviving, and her assumption that he would do both acted to awaken his gratitude. "Yes," he said fervently. "I will."

"You must hurry," she said. "If you stay in the ayahuamaco too long, you will never leave. You must find the way out. It is a way not of directions or trails, but of events."

"Where is this place?" he asked, suddenly aware of how much he had taken it for granted.

She shifted her leg away, and if he had not caught himself on the stone, he would have fallen. When he looked up, she had vanished. He was surprised that her disappearance did not alarm him; in reflex he slipped out a couple of ampules, but after a moment's reflection he decided not to use them. It was impossible to slip them back into the dispenser, so he tucked them into the interior webbing of his helmet for later. He doubted he would need them, though. He felt strong, competent and unafraid.

Dantzler stepped carefully between the hammocks; not wanting to brush against them; it might have been his imagination, but they seemed to be bulged down lower than before, as if death had weighed out heavier than life. That heaviness was in the air, pressuring him. Mist rose like golden steam from the corpses, but the sight no longer affected him–perhaps because the mist gave the illusion of being their souls. He picked up a rifle with a full magazine and headed off into the forest.

The tips of the golden leaves were sharp, and he had to ease past them to avoid being cut; but he was at the top of his form, moving gracefully, and the obstacles barely slowed his pace. He was not even anxious about the girl's warning to hurry; he was certain the way out would soon present itself. After a minute or so he heard voices,, and after another few seconds he came to a clearing divided by a stream, one so perfectly reflecting that its banks appeared to enclose a wedge of golden mist. Moody was squatting to the left of the stream, staring at the blade of his survival knife and singing under his breath–a wordless melody that had the erratic rhythm of a trapped fly. Beside him lay Jerry LeDoux, his throat slashed from ear to ear. DT was sitting on the other side of the stream; he had been shot just above the knee, and though he had ripped up his shirt for bandages and tied off the leg with a tourniquet, he was not in good shape. He was sweating, and a gray chalky pallor infused his skin. The entire scene had the weird vitality of something that had materialized in a magic mirror, a bubble of reality enclosed within a gilt frame.

DT heard Dantzler's footfalls and glanced up. "Waste him!" he shouted, pointing to Moody.

Moody did not turn from contemplation of the knife. "No," he said, as if speaking to someone whose image was held in the blade.

"Waste him, man!" screamed DT. "He killed LeDoux!"

"Please," said Moody to the knife. "I don't want to."

There was blood clotted on his face, more blood on the banana leaves sticking out of his helmet.

"Did you kill Jerry?" asked Dantzler; while he addressed the question to Moody, he did not relate to him as an individual, only as part of a design whose message he had to unravel.

"Jesus Christ! Waste him!" DT smashed his fist against the ground in frustration.

"Okay," said Moody. With an apologetic look, he sprang to his feet and charged Dantzler, swinging the knife.

Emotionless, Dantzler stitched a line of fire across Moody's chest; he went sideways into the bushes and down.

"What the hell was you waitin' for!" DT tried to rise, but winced and fell back. "Damn! Don't know if I can walk."

"Pop a few," Dantzler suggested mildly.

"Yeah. Good thinkin', man." DT fumbled for his dispenser.

Dantzler peered into the bushes to see where Moody had fallen. He felt nothing, and this pleased him. He was weary of feeling.

DT popped an ampule with a flourish, as if making a toast, andTriiiatei, "Ain't you gon' to do some, man?"

"I don't need them," said Dantzler. "I'm fine."

The stream interested him; it did not reflect the mist, as he had supposed, but was itself a seam of the mist.

"How many you think they was?" asked DT.

"How many what?"

"Beaners, man! I wasted three or four after they hit us, but I couldn't tell how many they was."

Dantzler considered this in light of his own interpretation of events and Moody's conversation with the knife. It made sense. A Santa Ana kind of sense.

"Beats me," he said. "But I guess there's less than there used to be."

DT snorted. "You got that right!" He heaved to his feet and limped to the edge of the stream. "Gimme a hand across."

Dantzler reached out to him, but instead of taking his hand, he grabbed his wrist and pulled him off-balance. DT teetered on his good leg, then toppled and vanished beneath the mist. Dantzler had expected him to fall, but he surfaced instantly, mist clinging to his skin. Of course, thought Dantzler; his body would have to die before his spirit would fall.

"What you doin', man?" DT was more disbelieving than enraged.

Dantzler planted a foot in the middle of his back and pushed him down until his head was submerged. DT bucked and clawed at the foot and managed to come to his hands and knees. Mist slithered from his eyes, his nose, and he choked out the words ". . . kill you. . . ." Dantzler pushed him down again; he got into pushing him down and letting him up, over and over. Not so as to torture him. Not really. It was because he had suddenly understood the nature of the ayahuamaco's laws, that they were approximations of normal laws, and he further understood that his actions had to approximate those of someone jiggling a key in a lock. DT was the key to the way out, and Dantzler was jiggling him, making sure all the tumblers were engaged.

Some of the vessels in DT's eyes had burst, and the whites were occluded by films of blood. When he tried to speak, mist curled from his mouth. Gradually his struggles subsided; he clawed runnels in the gleaming yellow dirt of the bank and shuddered. His shoulders were knobs of black land foundering in a mystic sea.

For a long time after DT sank from view, Dantzler stood beside the stream, uncertain of what was left to do and unable to remember a lesson he had been taught. Finally he shouldered his rifle and walked away from the clearing. Morning had broken, the mist had thinned, and the forest had regained its usual coloration. But he scarcely noticed these changes, still troubled by his faulty memory. Eventually, he let it slide–it would all come clear sooner or later. He was just happy to be alive. After a while he began to kick the stones as he went, and to swing his rifle in a carefree fashion against the weeds.

When the First Infantry poured across the Nicaraguan border and wasted León, Dantzler was having a quiet time at the VA hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and at the precise moment the bulletin was flashed nationwide, he was sitting in the lounge, watching the American League playoffs between Detroit and Texas. Some of the patients ranted at the interruption, while others shouted them down, wanting to hear the details. Dantzler expressed no reaction whatsoever. He was solely concerned with being a model patient; however, noticing that one of the staff was giving him a clinical stare, he added his weight on the side of the baseball fans. He did not want to appear too controlled. The doctors were as suspicious of that sort of behavior as they were of its contrary. But the funny thing was–at least it was funny to Dantzler- that his feigned annoyance at the bulletin was an exemplary proof of his control, his expertise at moving through life the way he had moved through the golden leaves of the cloud forest. Cautiously, gracefully, efficiently. Touching nothing, and being touched by nothing. That was the lesson he had learned — to be as perfect a counterfeit of a man as the ayahuamaco had been of the land; to adopt the various stances of a man, and yet, by virtue of his distance from things human, to be all the more prepared for the onset of crisis or a call to action. He saw nothing aberrant in this; even the doctors would admit that men were little more than organized pretense. If he was different from other men, it was only that he had a deeper awareness of the principles on which his personality was founded.

When the battle of Managua was joined, Dantzler was living at home. His parents had urged him to go easy in readjusting to civilian life, but he had immediately gotten a job as a management trainee in a bank. Each morning he would drive to work and spend a controlled, quiet eight hours; each night he would watch TV with his mother, and before going to bed, he would climb to the attic and inspect the trunk containing his souvenirs of war- helmet, fatigues, knife, boots. The doctors had insisted he face his experiences, and this ritual was his way of following their instructions. All in all, he was quite pleased with his progress, but he still had problems. He had not been able to force himself to venture out at night, remembering too well the darkness in the cloud forest, and he had rejected his friends, refusing to see them or answer their calls–he was not secure with the idea of friendship. Further, despite his methodical approach to life, he was prone to a nagging restlessness, the feeling of a chore left undone.

One night his mother came into his room and told him that an old friend, Phil Curry, was on the phone. "Please talk to him, Johnny," she said. "He's been drafted, and I think he's a little scared."

The word drafted struck a responsive chord in Dantzler's soul, and after brief deliberation he went downstairs and picked up the receiver.

"Hey," said Phil. "What's the story, man? Three months, and you don't even give me a call."

"I'm sorry," said Dantzler. "I haven't been feeling so hot."

"Yeah, I understand." Phil was silent a moment. "Listen, man. I'm leavin', y'know, and we're havin' a big send-off at Sparky's. It's goin' on right now. Why don't you come down?"

"I don't know."

"Jeanine's here, man. Y'know, she's still crazy 'bout you, talks 'bout you alia time. She don't go out with nobody."

Dantzler was unable to think of anything to say.

"Look," said Phil, "I'm pretty weirded out by this soldier shit. I hear it's pretty bad down there. If you got anything you can tell me 'bout what it's like, man, I'd 'preciate it."

Dantzler could relate to Phil's concern, his desire for an edge, and besides, it felt right to go. Very right. He would take some precautions against the darkness.

"I'll be there," he said.

It was a foul night, spitting snow, but Sparky's parking lot was jammed. Dantzler's mind was flurried like the snow, crowded like the lot–thoughts whirling in, jockeying for position, melting away. He hoped his mother would not wait up, he wondered if Jeanine still wore her hair long, he was worried because the palms of his hands were unnaturally warm. Even with the car windows rolled up, he could hear loud music coming from inside the club. Above the door the words SPARKY'S ROCK CITY were being spelled out a letter at a time in red neon, and when the spelling was complete, the letters flashed off and on and a golden neon explosion bloomed around them. After the explosion, the entire sign went dark for a split second, and the big ramshackle building seemed to grow large and merge with the black sky. He had an idea it was watching him, and he shuddered–one of those sudden lurches downward of the kind that take you just before you fall asleep. He knew the people inside did not intend him any harm, but he also knew that places have a way of changing people's intent, and he did not want to be caught off-guard. Sparky's might be such a place, might be a huge black presence camouflaged by neon, its true substance one with the abyss of the sky, the phosphorescent snow-flakes, jittering in his headlights, the wind keening through the side vent. He would have liked very much to drive home and forget about his promise to Phil; however, he felt a responsibility to explain about the war. More than a responsibility, an evangelistic urge. He would tell them about the kid falling out of the chopper, the white-haired girl in Tecolutla, the emptiness. God, yes! How you went down chock-full of ordinary American thoughts and dreams, memories of smoking weed and chasing tail and hanging out and freeway flying with a case of something cold, and how you smuggled back a human-shaped container of pure Salvadorian emptiness. Primo grade. Smuggled it back to the land of silk and money, of mindfuck video games and topless tennis matches and fast-food solutions to the nutritional problem. Just a taste of Salvador would banish all those trivial obsessions. Just a taste. It would be easy to explain.

Of course, some things beggared explanation.

He bent down and adjusted the survival knife in his boot so the hilt would not rub against his calf. From the coat pocket he withdrew the two ampules he had secreted in his helmet that long-ago night in the cloud forest. As the neon explosion flashed once more, glimmers of gold coursed along their shiny surfaces. He did not think he would need them; his hand was steady, and his purpose was clear. But to be on the safe side, he popped them both.

THE CRYSTAL SPHERES

David Brin

It was just a luckychance that I had been defrosted when I was— the very year that farprobe 992573-aa4 reported back that it had found a goodstar with a shattered crystal sphere. I was one of only twelve deep spacers alivewarm at the time, so naturally I got to take part in the adventure.

At first I knew nothing about it. When the flivver came, I was climbing the flanks of the Sicilian plateau, in the great valley a recent ice age had made of the Mediterranean Sea I had once known. I and five other newly awakened Sleepers had come to camp and tramp through this wonder while we acclimated to the times.

We were a motley assortment from various eras, though none was older than I. We had just finished a visit to the once-sunken ruins of Atlantis, and were hiking out on a forest trail under the evening glow of the ringcity high overhead. In the centuries since I had last deepslept, the gleaming, flexisolid belt of habitindustry around our world had grown. In the middle latitudes, night was now a pale thing. Nearer the equator, there was little to distinguish it from day, so glorious was the lightribbon in the sky.

Not that night could ever be the same as it had been when my grandfather was a child, even if every work of man were removed. For ever since the twenty-second century there had been the Shards, casting colors out where once there had been but galaxies and stars.

No wonder no one had objected to the banishment of night from Earthsurface. Humanity out on the smallbodies might have to look upon the Shards, but Earthdwellers had no particular desire to gaze out upon those unpleasant reminders.

Being only a year thawed, I wasn't ready yet to even ask what century it was, let alone begin finding some passable profession for this life. Reawakened sleepers were generally given a decade or so to enjoy and explore the differences that had grown in the Earth and in the solar system before having to make any choices.

This was especially true in deep spacers like me. The State—more ageless than any of its nearly immortal members—had a nostalgic affection for us strange ones, officers of a near-extinct service. When a deep spacer awakened, he or she was encouraged to go about the altered Terra without interference, seeking strangeness. He might even dream he was exploring another good world, where no man had ever trod, instead of breathing the same air that had been in his own lungs so many times, during so many ages past.

I had expected to go my rebirth trek unbothered. So it was with amazement, that evening on the forest flank of Sicily, that I saw a creamy-colored Sol-Gov flivver drop out of a bank of lacy clouds and drift toward the campsite, where my group of time cast wanderers had settled to doze and aimlessly gossip about the events of the day. We all stood and watched it come. The other campers looked at one another suspiciously as the flivver fell toward us. They wondered who was important enough to compel the ever-polite World-comps to break into our privacy, sending this teardrop down below the Palermo heights to parklands where it didn't belong.

I kept my secret feeling to myself. The thing had come for me. I knew it. Don't ask me how. A deep spacer knows things. That is all. We who have been out beyond the shattered Shards of Sol's broken crystal sphere, and have peered from the outside to see living worlds within faraway shells. . . We are the ones who have pressed our faces against the glass at the candy store, staring in at what we could not have. We are the ones who understand the depth of our deprivation, and the joke the Universe has played on us.

The billions of our fellow humans—those who have never left Sol's soft, yellow kindness—need psychists even to tell of the irreparable trauma they endure. Most people drift through their lives suffering only occasional bouts of great depression, easily treated, or ended with final sleep.

But we deep spacers have rattled the bars of our cage. We know our neuroses arise out of the Universe's great jest.

I stepped forward toward the clearing where the Sol-Gov flivver was settling. It gave my campmates someone to blame for the interruption. I could feel their burning stares.

The beige teardrop opened, and out stepped a tall woman. She possessed a type of statuesque, austere beauty that had not been in fashion on Earth during any of my last four lives. Clearly she had never indulged in bio-sculpting.

I admit freely that in that first instant I did not recognize her, though we had thrice been married over the slow wait years.

The first thing I knew, the very first thing of all, was that she wore our uniform . . . the uniform of a Service that had been "moth-balled" (O quaint term!) thousands of years ago.

Silver against dark blue, and eyes that matched . . . "Alice," I breathed after a long moment. "Is it true at last?"

She came forward and took my hand. She must have known how weak and tense I felt.

"Yes, Joshua. One of the probes has found another cracked shell."

"There is no mistake? It's a good star?"

She nodded her head, saying yes with her eyes. Black ringlets framed her face, shimmering like the trail of a rocket.

"The probe called a class-A alert." She grinned. "There are Shards all around the star, shattered and glimmering like the Oort-sky of Sol. And the probe reports that there is a world within! One that we can touch!"

I laughed out loud and pulled her to me. I could tell the campers behind me came from times when one did not do such things, for they muttered in consternation.

"When? When did the news come?"

"We found out months ago, just after you thawed. Worldcomp still said that we had to give you a year of wakeup, but I came the instant it was over. We have waited long enough, Joshua. Moishe Bok is taking out every deep spacer nowalive.

"Joshua, we want you to come. We need you. Our expedition leaves in three days. Will you join us?"

She need not have asked. We embraced again. And this time I had to blink back tears.

Of recent weeks, as I wandered, I had pondered what profession I would pursue in this life. But joy of joys, it never occurred to me I would be a deep spacer again! I would wear the uniform once more, and far travel to the stars!

The project was under a total news blackout. The Sol-Gov psychists were of the opinion that the race could not stand another disappointment. They feared an epidemic of great depression, and a few of them even tried to stop us from mounting the expedition.

Fortunately, the Worldcomps remembered their ancient promise. We deep spacers long ago agreed to stop exploring, and raising people's hopes with our efforts. In return, the billion robot far probes were sent out, and we would be allowed to go investigate any report they sent back of a cracked shell.

By the time Alice and I arrived at Charon, the others had almost finished recommissioning the ship we were to take. I had hoped we would be using the Robert Rodgers, or Ponce de Leon, two ships I had once commanded. But they had chosen instead to use the old Pelenor. She would be big enough for the purposes we had in mind, without being unwieldy.

Sol-Gov tugs were loading about ten thousand corpsicles even as the shuttle carrying Alice and me passed Pluto and began rendezvous maneuvers. Out here, ten percent of the way to the Edge, the Shards glimmered with a bright sheen of indescribable colors. I let Alice do the piloting, and stared out at the glowing fragments of Sol's shattered crystal sphere.

When my grandfather was a boy, Charon had been a site of similar activity. Thousands of excited men and women had clustered around an asteroid ship half the size of the little moon itself, taking aboard a virtual ark of hopeful would-be colonists, their animals,

and their goods.

Those early explorers knew they would never see their final destination. But they were not sad. They suffered from no great-depression. Those people launched forth in their so-primitive first starship full of hope for their great-grandchildren—and for the world which their sensitive telescopes had proved circled, green and pleasant, around the star Tau Ceti.

Ten thousand wait years later, I looked out at the mammoth Yards ©f Charon as we passed overhead. Rank on serried rank of starships lay berthed below. Over the millennia, thousands had been built, from generation ships and hiberna-barges to ram-shippers and great strutted wormhole-divers.

They all lay below, all except the few that were destroyed in accidents, or whose crews killed themselves in despair. They had all come back to Charon, failures

I looked at the most ancient hulks, the generation ships, and thought about the day of my grandfather's youth, when the Seeker cruised blithely over the Edge, and collided at one percent of light speed with the inner face of Sol's crystal sphere.

They never knew what hit them, that first crew.

They had begun to pass through the outermost shoals of the solar system . . . the Oort Cloud, where billions of comets drifted like puffs of snow in the sun's weakened grasp.

Seeker's instruments sought through the sparse cloud, touching isolated, drifting balls of ice. The would-be colonists planned to keep busy doing science throughout the long passage. Among the questions they wanted to solve on their way was the mystery of the comets' mass.

Why was it, astronomers had asked for centuries, that virtually all of these icy bodies were nearly the same size—a few miles across?

Seeker's instruments ploughed for knowledge. Little did her pilots know she would reap the Joke of the Gods.

When she collided with the crystal sphere, it bowed outward with her over a span of light minutes. Seeker had time for a frantic laser cast back to Earth. They only knew that something strange was happening. Something had begun tearing them apart, even as the fabric of space itself seemed to rend!

Then the crystal sphere shattered.

And where there had once been ten billion comets, now there were ten quadrillion.

Nobody ever found the wreckage of Seeker. Perhaps she had vaporized. Almost half the human race died in the battle against the comets, and by the time the planets were safe again, centuries later, Seeker was long gone.

We never did find out how, by what accident, she managed to crack the shell. There are still those who contend that it was the crew's ignorance that crystal spheres even existed that enabled them to achieve what had forever since seemed so impossible.

Now the Shards illuminate the sky. Sol shines within a halo of light, reflected by the ten quadrillion comets. . . the mark of the only goodstar accessible to man.

"We're coming in," Alice told me. I sat up in my seat and watched her nimble hands dance across the panel. Then Pelenor drifted into view.

The great globe shone dully in the light from the Shards. Already the nimbus of her drives caused space around her to shimmer.

The Sol-Gov tugs had finished loading the colonists abroad, and were departing. The ten thousand corpsicles would require little tending during our mission, so we dozen deep spacers would be free to explore. But if the goodstar did, indeed, shine into an accessible goodworld, we would awaken the men and women from frozen-sleep and deliver them to their new home.

No doubt the Worldcomps chose well these sleepers to be potential colonists. Still, we were under orders that none of them should be awakened unless a colony was possible. Perhaps this trip would turn out to be just another disappointment, in which case the corpsicles were never to know that they had been on a journey twenty thousand parsecs and back. "Let's dock," I said eagerly. "I want to get going." Alice smiled. "Always the impatient one. The deep spacer's deep-spacer. Give it a day or two, Joshua. We'll be winging out of the nest

soon enough."

There was no point in reminding her that I had been late waiting longer than she—indeed, longer than nearly any other human left alive. I kept my restlessness within and listened, in my head, to the music of the spheres.

In my time there were four ways known to cheat Einstein, and two ways to flat-out fool him. On our journey Pelenor used all of them. Our route was circuitous, from wormhole to quantum point to collapsar. By the time we arrived, I wondered how the deep probe had ever gotten so far, let alone back, with its news.

The find was in the nearby minor galaxy, Sculptor. It took us twelve years, ship time, to get there.

On the way we passed close to at least two hundred goodstars, glowing hot yellow, stable, and solitary. In every case there were signs of planets circling around. Several times we swept by dose enough to catch glimpses, in our superscopes, of bright blue water worlds, circling invitingly like temptresses, forever out of reach.

In the old days we would have mapped these places, excitedly standing off just outside the danger zone, studying the Earth-like worlds with our instruments. We would have charted them carefully, against the day when mankind finally learned how to do on purpose what Seeker had accomplished in ignorance.

Once we did stop, and lingered two light days away from a certain goodstar—just outside of its crystal sphere. Perhaps we were foolish to come so dose, but we couldn't help it. For there were modulated radio waves coming from the water world within!

It was only the fourth time technological civilization had been found. We spent an excited year setting up robot watchers and recorders to study the phenomenon.

But we did not bother trying to communicate. We knew, by now, what would happen. Any probe we sent in would collide with the crystal sphere around this goodstar. It would be crushed, ice precipitating upon it from all directions until it was destroyed and hidden under megatons of water—a newborn comet.

Any focused beams we cast inward would cause a similar reaction, creating a reflecting mirror that blocked all efforts to communicate with the locals.

Still, we could listen to their traffic. The crystal sphere was a one-way barrier to modulated light and radio, and intelligence of any form. But it let the noise the locals made escape.

In this case, we soon concluded that it was another hive-race. The creatures had no interest in, or even conception of, space travel. Disappointed, we left our watchers in place and hurried on.

Our target was obvious as soon as we arrived within a few light-weeks of the goal. Our excitement rose as we found that the probe had not lied. It was a goodstar—stable, old, companionless—and its friendly yellow glow diffracted through a pale, shimmering aura of ten quadrillion snowflakes ... its shattered crystal sphere.

"There's a complete suite of planets," announced Yen Ching, our cosmophysidst. His hands groped about in his holistank, touching in its murk what the ship's instruments were able to decipher from this distance.

"I can feel three gas giants, about two million asteroid small bodies, and"—he made us wait, while he felt carefully to make sure— "three little worlds!"

We cheered. With numbers like those, odds were that at least one of the rocky planets circled within the Lifezone.

"Let me see . . . there's one little world here that has—" Yen pulled his hand from the tank. He popped a finger in his mouth and tasted for a moment, rolling his eyes like a connoisseur savoring fine

wine.

"Water." He smacked thoughtfully. "Yes! Plenty of water. I can taste life, too. Standard adenine-basedcarbolife. Hmmm. In fact, it's chlorophyllic and left-handed!"

In the excited, happy babble that followed, Moishe Bok, our captain, had to shout to be heard.

"All right! People! Look, it's clear none of us are going to get any sleep soon. Lifesciencer Taiga, have you prepared a list of corpsicles to thaw, in case we have found a goodworld?"

Alice drew the list from her pocket. "Ready, Moishe. I have biologists, technicians, planetologists, crystallographers ..."

"You'd also better awaken a few archaeologists and Contacters,"

Yen added dryly. We turned and saw that his hands were back in the holistank. His

face bore a dreamy expression.

"It took our civilization three thousand years to herd our asteroids into optimum orbits for space colonies. But compared with this system, we're amateurs. Every small body orbiting this star has been transformed. They march around like ancient soldiers on a drill field. I have never even imagined engineering on this scale."

Moishe's gaze flickered to me. As executive officer, it would be my job to fight for the ship, if Pelenor found herself in trouble . . . and to destroy her if capture were inevitable.

Long ago we had reached one conclusion. If goodstars without crystal spheres were rare, and dreamt of by a frustrated mankind, the same might hold for some other star-traveling race. If some other people had managed to break out of its shell, and now wandered about, like us, in search of another open goodstar, what would such a race think, upon detecting our ship?

I know what we would think. We would think that the intruder had to come from somewhere ... an open goodstar.

My job was to make sure nobody ever followed Pelenor back to

Earth. I nodded to my assistant, Yoko Murakami, who followed me to the arms globe. We unfolded the firing panel and waited while Moishe ordered Pelenor piloted cautiously closer.

Yoko looked at the panel dubiously. She obviously doubted the efficacy of even a mega-terawatt laser against technology of the scale described by Yen.

I shrugged. We would find out soon. My duty was done the moment I flicked the arming switch and took hold of our dead man autodestruct. In the hours that passed, I watched the developments carefully, but could not help deep remembering.

Back in the days before starships—before Seeker broke Sol's eggshell and precipitated the two-century CometWar —mankind had awakened to a quandary that caused the thinkers of those early days many sleepless nights.

As telescopes improved, as biologists began to understand, and even tailor-make life, more and more people began to look up at the sky and ask, "Where the hell is everybody?"

The great lunar-based cameras tracked planets around nearby yellow suns. There were telltale traces of life even in those faint twenty-first-century spectra. Philosophers case nervous calculations to show that the galaxies must teem with living worlds.

And as they prepared our first starships, the deep thinkers began to wonder. If travel between the stars was as easy as it appeared to be, why hadn't the fertile stars already been settled by somebody else?

After all, we were getting ready to head out and colonize. By even modest estimates of expansion rates, we seemed sure to fill the entire galaxy with human settlements within a few million years.

So why hadn't this already happened? Why was there no sign of traffic among the stars? Why had the predicted galactic radio network of communications never been detected?

Even more puzzling . . . why was there absolutely no evidence that Earth had ever been colonized in the past? We were by then quite certain that our world had never hosted visitors from other worlds.

For one thing, there was the history of the Precambrian to consider.

Before the age of reptiles, before fish or trilobites or even amoebae, there was, on Earth, a two-billion-year epoch in which the only lifeforms were crude single-celled organisms without nuclei—the prokaryotes—struggling slowly to invent the basic structure of life.

No alien colonists ever came to Earth during all that time. We knew that for certain, for if they had, the very garbage they buried would have changed the history of life on our planet. A single leaky latrine would have filled the oceans with superior lifeforms that would have overwhelmed our crude little ancestors.

Two billion years without being colonized. . . and then the silent emptiness of the radio ways. . . the philosophers of the twenty-first century called it the Great Silence. They hoped the starships would find the answer.

Then the very first ship, Seeker, somehow smashed the crystal-sphere we hadn't even known existed, and inadvertently explained the mystery for us.

During the ensuing CometWar, we had little time for philosophical musings. I was born into that battle, and spent my first hundred years in harsh screaming little ships, blasting and herding ice balls that, left alone, would have fallen upon and crushed our fragile worlds.

We might have let Earth fall then. After all, more than half of humanity at that time lived in space colonies, which could be protected more easily than any sitting duck planet.

That might have been logical. But mankind went a little crazy when Earth mother was threatened. Belters herded cities of millions into the paths of hurling ice balls, just to save a heavy world they had only known from books and a faint blue twinkle in the blackness. The psychists took a long time to understand why. At the time it seemed like some sort of divine madness.

Finally the war was won. The comets were tamed and we started looking outward again. New starships were built, better than before.

I had to wait for a berth on the twelfth ship, and the wait saved my life. The first seven ships were lost. As they beamed back their jubilant reports, spiraling closer to the beautiful green worlds they had found, they plowed into unseen crystal spheres and were destroyed.

And, unlike Seeker, they did not accomplish anything by dying. The crystal spheres remained after the ships had been ice crushed into comets.

We had all had such hopes . . . though those who remembered Seeker had worried quietly. Humanity seemed about to breathe free, at last! We were going to spread our eggs to other baskets, and be safe for the first time. No more would we fear overpopulation, crowding, or stagnation.

And all at once the hopes were smashed—dashed against those unseen, deadly spheres.

It took centuries even to learn how to detect the dead zones! How, we asked. How could the universe be so perverse? Was it all some great practical joke? What were these monstrous barriers that defied all the physics we knew, and kept us away from the beautiful little worlds we so desired?

For three centuries, humanity went a little crazy.

I missed the worst years of the great depression. I was with a group trying to study the sphere around Tau Ceti. By the time I got back, some degree of order had been restored.

But I returned to a solar system that had clearly lost a piece of its heart. It was a long time before I heard true laughter again, on Earth or on her small bodies.

I too went to bed and pulled the covers over my head for a couple of hundred years.

The entire crew breathed a relief sigh when Captain Bok ordered me to put the safeties back on. I finally let go of my dead man switch and got up. The tension seeped away into a chain of shivers, and Alice had to hold me until I could stand again on my own.

Moishe had ordered us off alert because the good sun’s system was empty.

To be accurate, the system teemed with life, but none of it was intelligent.

The greater asteroids held marvelous, self-sustaining ecosystems, absorbing sunlight under great windows. Twenty moons sheltered huge forests beneath tremendous domes. But there was no traffic, no radio or light messages. Yen's detectors revealed no machine activity, nor the thought-touch of analytical beings.

It felt eerie to poke our way through those civilized lanes in the small body ways. For so long we had only performed such maneuvers in the well-known spaces of Solsystem.

During those first centuries after the crystal crisis, some men and women still thought it would be possible to live among the stars. Belters mostly, they claimed aloud that planets were nasty, heavy places anyway. So who needed them?

They went out to the badstars—red giants and tiny red dwarves, tight binaries and unstable suns. The badstars were protected by no crystal spheres. The would-be colonists found drifting clots of matter near the suns, and set up small body cities as they had at home. Every one of the attempts failed within a few generations. The colonists simply lost interest in procreation.

The psychists finally decided the cause was related to the divine madness that had enabled us to win the CometWar.

Simply put, men and women could live on asteroids, but they needed to know that there was as blue world nearby—to see it in their sky. It's a flaw in our character, no doubt, but we cannot go out and live in space all alone.

We have to have waterworlds, if the universe is ever to be ours.

This system's waterworld we named Quest, after the beast so long sought by King Pelenor, our ship's namesake. It shone blue and brown, under a clean whites waddling of clouds. For hours we circled above it, and simply cried.

Alice awakened ten corpsicles—prominent scientists who, the Worldcomps had promised, would not fall apart on the reawakening of hope.

We watched them take their turn at the viewport, joytears streaming down their faces, and we joined them to weep freely once again.

Pelenor was hardly up to the task of exploring this system by herself. We spent a year recovering and modifying several of the ancient ships we found drifting over our planet, so that teams could spread out, investigating every far corner of this system.

By our second anniversary, a hundred biologists were quick scampering over the surface of Quest. They gene scanned the local flora and fauna excitedly, and already were modifying Earth plants to fit into the ecosystem without causing imbalance. Soon they would start on animals from our gene tanks.

Engineers exploring the small bodies excitedly declared that they could get the life machines left behind by the prior race to work. There was room for a billion colonists out there, straight from the start.

But the archaeologists were the ones whose report we awaited most anxiously. Between my ferrying runs, they were the ones I helped. I joined them in the dusty ruins of Old city, at the edge of Long valley, putting together piles of artifacts to be catalogued and slowly analyzed.

We learned that the inhabitants had called themselves the Nataral. They were about as similar to us as we might have expected— bipedal, nine fingered, weird looking.

Still, one got used to their faces after staring at their statues and pictures long enough. I even began to perceive subtle facial cues, and delicate, sensitive nuances of expression. When the language was cracked, we learned their race name and some of their story.

Unlike the few other alien intelligences we had observed from afar, the Natarals were individuals, and explorers. They too had spread into their planetary system after a world bound history fully as colorful and goodbad as our own.

Like us, they had two conflicting dreams. They longed for the stars, for room to grow. And they also wished for other faces, for neighbors.

By the time they built a starship—their first—they had given up on the idea of neighbors. There was no sign anybody had ever visited their world. They heard nothing but silence from the stars.

Still, when they were ready, they launched their first ship toward their other dream—Room.

And within weeks of the launching, their sun's crystal sphere shattered.

For two weeks we double-checked the translations. We triple-checked.

For millennia we had been searching for a way to destroy these deadly barriers around goodstars. . . trying to duplicate on purpose what Seeker had accomplished by accident. And now we had the answer.

The Nataral, like us, had managed to destroy one and only one crystal sphere. Their own. And the pattern was exactly the same, down to the CometWar that subsequently almost wrecked their high civilization. The conclusion was obvious. The death barriers were destructible, but only from the inside! And just when that idea was starting to sink in, the archaeologists dug up the Obelisk.

Our top linguist, Garcia Cardenas, had a flair for the dramatic. When Alice and I visited him in his encampment at the base of the newly excavated monument, he insisted on putting off all discussion of his discovery until the next day. He and his partner instead prepared a special meal for us, and raised their glasses to toast Alice.

She stood and accepted their accolades with dry wit, and then sat down to continue nursing our baby.

Old habits break hard, and only a few of the women had managed yet to break centuries of biofeedback conditioning not to breed. Alice was among the first to reactivate her ovaries and bring a child to our new world.

It wasn't that I was jealous. After all, I basked in the only slightly lesser glory of fatherhood. But I was getting impatient with all of this ballyhoo. Except for Moishe Bok, I was perhaps the oldest human here—old enough to remember when people had children as a matter of course, and therefore made time for other matters, when something important was up!

Finally, when the celebration had wound down, Garcia Cardenas nodded to me, and led me out the back flap of the tent. We followed a dim path down a sloping trail to the digs, by the light of the ring of bright small bodies the Nataral had left permanently in place over the equatorial sky of Quest.

We finally arrived at a bright alloy wall that towered high above our heads. It was made of a material our techs had barely begun to analyze, and was nearly impervious to the effects of time. On it were inscribed hard patterns bearing the tale of the last days of the Nataral.

A lot of that story we knew from other translated records. But the end itself was still a mystery, and no small cause of nervousness. Had it been some terrible plague? Did the intelligent machines, on which both their civilization and ours relied, rebel and slaughter their masters? Did their sophisticated bioengineering technology get out of their control?

What we did know was that the Nataral had suffered. Like humans, they had gone out and found the universe closed to them. Both of their great dreams—of good places to spread settle, and of other minds to meet—had been shattered like the deathsphere around their own star. Like humans, they spent quite a long time not entirely sane.

In the darkness deep within the dig, Cardenas had promised I would find answers.

As he prepared his instruments I listened to the sounds of the surrounding forest jungle. Life abounded on this world. There were lovely, complicated creatures, some clearly natural, and some just as clearly the result of clever biosculpting. In their creatures, in their art and architecture, in the very reasons they had almost despaired, I felt a powerful closeness to the Nataral. I would have liked them, I imagined.

I was glad to take this world for humanity, for it might mean salvation for my species. Still, I regretted that the other race was gone.

Cardenas motioned me over to a holistank he had set up at the base of the Obelisk. As we put our hands into the blackness, a light appeared on the face of the monolith. Where the light traveled, we would touch, and feel the passion of those final days of the Nataral.

I stroked the finetuned, softresonant surface. Cardenas led me, and I felt the Endingtime as the Nataral meant it to be like us, the Nataral had passed through a long period of bitterness, even longer than we had endured until now. To them, indeed, it seemed as if the universe was a great, sick joke.

Life was found everywhere among the stars. But intelligence arose only slowly and rarely, with many false starts. Where it did occur, it was often in a form that did not happen to covet space or other planets.

But if the crystal spheres had not existed, the rare sites where starfaring developed would spread outward. Species like us would expand, and eventually make contact with one another, instead of searching forever among sandgrains. An elder race might arrive where another was just getting started, and help it over some of its crises.

If the crystal spheres had not existed . . .

But that was not to be. Starfarers could not spread, because crystal spheres could only be broken from the inside! What a cruel universe it was! Or so the Nataral had thought.

But they persevered. And after ages spent hunting for the miraculous goodstar, their farprobes found five water-worlds unprotected by deathbarriers.

My touchhand trembled as I stroked the coordinates of these accessible planets. My throat caught at the magnitude of the gift that had been given us on this obelisk. No wonder Cardenas had made me wait! I, too, would linger when I showed it to Alice.

But then, I wondered, where had the Nataral gone? And why? With six worlds, surely their morale would have lifted!

There was a confusing place on the Obelisk. . .talk of black holes and of time. I touched the spot again and again, while Cardenas watched my reaction. Finally, I understood.

"Great Egg!" I cried. The revelation of what had happened made the discovery of the five goodworlds pale into insignificance. "Is that what the crystal spheres are for?" I couldn't believe it.

Cardenas smiled. "Watch out for teleology, Joshua. It is true that the barriers would seem to show the hand of the creator at work. But it might be simply circumstance, rather than some grand design.

"All that we do know is this. Without the crystal spheres, we ourselves would not exist. Intelligence would be more rare than it already is. And the stars would be almost barren of life.

"We have cursed the crystal spheres for ten thousand years," Cardenas sighed. "The Nataral did so for far longer—until they at last understood."

If the crystal spheres had not existed . . .

I thought about it that night, as I stared up at the shimmering, pale light from the drifting Shards, through which the brighter stars still shone.

If the crystal spheres had not existed, then there would come to each galaxy a first race of star-treaders. Even if most intelligences were stay-at-homes, the coming of an aggressive, colonizing species was inevitable, sooner or later.

If the crystal spheres had not existed, the first such star-treaders would have gone out and taken all the worlds they found. They would have settled all the waterworlds, and civilized the smallbod-ies around every single goodstar.

Two centuries before we discovered our crystal sphere, we humans had already started wondering why this had never happened to Earth. Why, during the three billion years that Earth was "choice real estate," had no race like us come along and colonized it?

We found out it was because of the deathbarrier surrounding Sol, which kept our crude little ancestors safe from interference from the outside . . . which let our nursery world nurture us in peace and isolation.

If the crystal spheres had not been, then the first star-treaders would have filled the galaxy, perhaps the universe. It is what we would have done, had the barriers not been there. The histories of those worlds would be forever changed. And there is no way to imagine the death-of-possibility that would have resulted.

So, the barriers protected worlds until they developed life capable of cracking the shells from within.

But what was the point? What benefit was there in protecting some young thing, only for it to grow up into bitter, cramped loneliness in adulthood?

Imagine what it must have been like for the very first race of star-treaders. Never, were they patient as Job, would they find another goodstar to possess. Not until the next egg cracked would they have neighbors to talk to.

No doubt they despaired long before that.

Now we, humanity, had been gifted of six beautiful worlds. And if we could not meet the Nataral, we could, at least, read their books and come to know them. And from their careful records we could learn about the still earlier races which had emerged from each of the other five goodworlds, each into a lonely universe.

Perhaps in another billion years the universe will more closely resemble the sciencefictional schemes of my grandfather's day. Maybe then commerce will plow the starlanes between busy, talky worlds.

But we, like the Nataral, came too early for that. We are cursed, if we hang around until that day, to be an Elder Race.

I looked one more time toward the constellation we named Phoenix, whither the Nataral had departed millions of our years ago. I could not see the dark star where they had gone. But I knew exactly where it lay. They had left explicit instructions.

Then I turned and entered the tent that I shared with Alice and our child, leaving the stars and shards behind me.

Tomorrow would be a busy day. I had promised Alice that we might begin building a house on a hillside not far from Oldcity.

She muttered some dreamtalk and cuddled close as I slipped into bed beside her. The baby slept quietly in her cradle a few feet away. I held Alice, and breathed slowly.

But sleep came only gradually. I kept thinking about what the Nataral had given us.

Correction . . . what they had lent us.

We could use their six worlds, on the condition we were kind to them. Those were the same conditions they had accepted when they took the four worlds long abandoned by the Lap-Klenno, their predecessors on the lonely starlanes . . . and that the Lap-Klenno had agreed to on inheriting the three Thwoozoon suns . . .

So long as the urge to spreadsettle was primary in us, the worlds were ours, and any others we happened upon.

But someday our priorities would change. Elbowroom would no

longer be our chief fixation. More and more, the Nataral had understood, we would begin to think instead about loneliness.

I knew they were right. Someday my great-to-the-nth descendants would find that they could no longer bear a universe without other voices in it. They would tire of these beautiful worlds, and pack up the entire tribe to head for a darkstar.

There, within the event horizon of a great black hole, they would find the Nataral, and the Lap-Klenno, and the Thwoozoon, waiting in a cup of suspended time.

I listened to the wind gentleflapping the tent, and envied my great-nth grandchildren. I, at least, would like to meet the other star-treaders, so very much like us.

Oh, we could wait around for a few billion years, till that distant time when most of the shells have cracked, and the universe bustles with activity. But by then we would have changed. By necessity we would indeed have become an ElderRace . . .

But what species in its right mind would choose such a fate? Better, by far, to stay young until the universe finally becomes a fun place to enjoy!

To wait for that day, the races who came before us sleep at the edge of their timestretched black hole. Within, they abide to welcome us; and we shall sit out, together, the barren early years of the galaxies.

I felt the last shreds of the old greatdepression dissipate as I contemplated the elegant solution of the Nataral. For so long we had feared that the Universe was a practical joker, and that our place in it was to be victims—patsies. But now, at last, my darkthoughts shattered like an eggshell. . . like the walls of a crystalcage.

I held my woman close. She sighed something said in dreamthought. As sleep finally came, I felt better than I had in a thousand years. I felt so very, very young.

SNOW

John Crowley

I don’t think Georgie would ever have got one for herself: She was at once unsentimental and a little in awe of death. No, it was her first husband—an immensely rich and (from Georgie’s description) a strangely weepy guy, who had got it for her. Or for himself, actually, of course. He was to be the beneficiary. Only he died himself shortly after it was installed. If installed is the right word. After he died, Georgie got rid of most of what she’d inherited from him, liquidated it. It was cash that she had liked best about that marriage anyway; but the Wasp couldn’t really be got rid of. Georgie ignored it.

In fact the thing really was about the size of a wasp of the largest kind, and it had the same lazy and mindless fight. And of course it really was a bug, not of the insect kind but of the surveillance kind. And so its name fit all around: one of those bits of accidental poetry the world generates without thinking. O Death, where is thy sting?

Georgie ignored it, but it was hard to avoid; you had to be a little careful around it; it followed Georgie at a variable distance, depending on her motions and the numbers of other people around her, the level of light, and the tone of her voice. And there was always the danger you might shut it in a door or knock it down with a tennis racket.

It cost a fortune (if you count the access and the perpetual care contract, all prepaid), and though it wasn’t really fragile, it made you nervous.

It wasn’t recording all the time. There had to be a certain amount of light, though not much. Darkness shut it off. And then sometimes it would get lost. Once when we hadn’t seen it hovering around for a time, I opened a closet door, and it flew out, unchanged. It went off looking for her, humming softly. It must have been shut in there for days.

Eventually it ran out, or down. A lot could go wrong, I suppose, with circuits that small, controlling that many functions. It ended up spending a lot of time bumping gently against the bedroom ceiling, over and over, like a winter fly. Then one day the maids swept it out from under the bureau, a husk. By that time it had transmitted at least eight thousand hours (eight thousand was the minimum guarantee) of Georgie: of her days and hours, her comings in and her goings out, her speech and motion, her living self—all on file, taking up next to no room, at The Park. And then, when the time came, you could go there, to The Park, say on a Sunday afternoon; and in quiet landscaped surroundings (as The Park described it) you would find her personal resting chamber; and there, in privacy, through the miracle of modern information storage and retrieval systems, you could access her; her alive, her as she was in every way, never changing or growing any older, fresher (as The Park’s brochure said) than in memory ever green.

I married Georgie for her money, the same reason she married her first, the one who took out The Park’s contract for her. She married me, I think, for my looks; she always had a taste for looks in men. I wanted to write. I made a calculation that more women than men make, and decided that to be supported and paid for by a rich wife would give me freedom to do so, to “develop.” The calculation worked out no better for me than it does for most women who make it. I carried a typewriter and a case of miscellaneous paper from Ibiza to Gstaad to Bial to London, and typed on beaches, and learned to ski. Georgie liked me in ski clothes.

Now that those looks are all but gone, I can look back on myself as a young hunk and see that I was in a way a rarity, a type that you run into often among women, far less among men, the beauty unaware of his beauty, aware that he affects women profoundly and more or less instantly but doesn’t know why; thinks he is being listened to and understood, that his soul is being seen, when all that’s being seen is long-lashed eyes and a strong, square, tanned wrist turning in a lovely gesture, stubbing out a cigarette. Confusing. By the time I figured out why I had for so long been indulged and cared for and listened to, why I was interesting, I wasn’t as interesting as I had been. At about the same time I realized I wasn’t a writer at all. Georgie’s investment stopped looking as good to her, and my calculation had ceased to add up; only by that time I had come, pretty unexpectedly, to love Georgie a lot, and she just as unexpectedly had come to love and need me too, as much as she needed anybody. We never really parted, even though when she died I hadn’t seen her for years. Phone calls, at dawn or four A.M. because she never, for all her travel, really grasped that the world turns and cocktail hour travels around with it. She was a crazy, wasteful, happy woman, without a trace of malice or permanence or ambition in her—easily pleased and easily bored and strangely serene despite the hectic pace she kept up. She cherished things and lost them and forgot them: things, days, people. She had fun, though, and I had fun with her; that was her talent and her destiny, not always an easy one. Once, hung over in a New York hotel, watching a sudden snowfall out the immense window, she said to me, “Charlie, I’m going to die of fun.”

And she did. Snow-foiling in Austria, she was among the first to get one of those snow leopards, silent beasts as fast as speedboats. Alfredo called me in California to tell me, but with the distance and his accent and his eagerness to tell me he wasn’t to blame, I never grasped the details. I was still her husband, her closest relative, heir to the little she still had, and beneficiary, too, of The Park’s access concept. Fortunately, The Park’s services included collecting her from the morgue in Gstaad and installing her in her chamber at The Park’s California unit. Beyond signing papers and taking delivery when Georgie arrived by freight airship at Van Nuys, there was nothing for me to do. The Park’s representative was solicitous and made sure I understood how to go about accessing Georgie, but I wasn’t listening. I am only a child of my time, I suppose. Everything about death, the fact of it, the fate of the remains, and the situation of the living faced with it, seems grotesque to me, embarrassing, useless. And everything done about it only makes it more grotesque, more useless: Someone I loved is dead, let me therefore dress in clown’s clothes, talk backwards, and buy expensive machinery to make up for it. I went back to L.A.

A year or more later, the contents of some safe-deposit boxes of Georgie’s arrived from the lawyer’s: some bonds and such stuff and a small steel case, velvet lined, that contained a key, a key deeply notched on both sides and headed with smooth plastic, like the key to an expensive car.

Why did I go to The Park that first time? Mostly because I had forgotten about it: Getting that key in the mail was like coming across a pile of old snapshots you hadn’t cared to look at when they were new but which after they have aged come to contain the past, as they did not contain the present. I was curious.

I understood very well that The Park and its access concept were very probably only another cruel joke on the rich, preserving the illusion that they can buy what can’t be bought, like the cryonics fad of thirty years ago. Once in Ibiza, Georgie and I met a German couple who also had a contract with The Park; their Wasp hovered over them like a Paraclete and made them self-conscious in the extreme—they seemed to be constantly rehearsing the eternal show being stored up for their descendants. Their deaths had taken over their lives, as though they were pharaohs. Did they, Georgie wondered, exclude the Wasp from their bedroom? Or did its presence there stir them to greater efforts, proofs of undying love and admirable vigor for the unborn to see?

No, death wasn’t to be cheated that way, any more than by pyramids, by masses said in perpetuity. It wasn’t Georgie saved from death that I would find. But there were eight thousand hours of her life with me, genuine hours, stored there more carefully than they could be in my porous memory; Georgie hadn’t excluded the Wasp from her bedroom, our bedroom, and she who had never performed for anybody could not have conceived of performing for it. And there would be me, too, undoubtedly, caught unintentionally by the Wasp’s attention: Out of those thousands of hours there would be hundreds of myself, and myself had just then begun to be problematic to me, something that had to be figured out, something about which evidence had to be gathered and weighed. I was thirty-eight years old.

That summer, then, I borrowed a Highway Access Permit (the old HAPpy cards of those days) from a county lawyer I knew and drove the coast highway up to where The Park was, at the end of a pretty beach road, all alone above the sea. It looked from the outside like the best, most peaceful kind of Italian country cemetery, a low stucco wall topped with urns, amid cypresses, an arched gate in the center. A small brass plaque on the gate: PLEASE USE YOUR KEY. The gate opened, not to a square of shaded tombstones but onto a ramped corridor going down: The cemetery wall was an illusion, the works were underground. Silence, or nameless Muzak-like silence; solitude—either the necessary technicians were discreetly hidden or none were needed. Certainly the access concept turned out to be simplicity itself, in operation anyway. Even I, who am an idiot about information technology, could tell that. The Wasp was genuine state-of-the-art stuff, but what we mourners got was as ordinary as home movies, as old letters tied up in ribbon.

A display screen near the entrance told me down which corridor to find Georgie, and my key let me into a small screening room where there was a moderate-size TV monitor, two comfortable chairs, and dark walls of chocolate-brown carpeting. The sweet-sad Muzak. Georgie herself was evidently somewhere in the vicinity, in the wall or under the floor, they weren’t specific about the charnel-house aspect of the place. In the control panel before the TV were a keyhole for my key and two bars: ACCESS and RESET.

I sat, feeling foolish and a little afraid, too, made more uncomfortable by being so deliberately soothed by neutral furnishings and sober tools. I imagined, around me, down other corridors, in other chambers, others communed with their dead as I was about to do, that the dead were murmuring to them beneath the stream of Muzak; that they wept to see and hear, as I might, but I could hear nothing. I turned my key in its slot, and the screen lit up. The dim lights dimmed further, and the Muzak ceased. I pushed ACCESS, obviously the next step. No doubt all these procedures had been explained to me long ago at the dock when Georgie in her aluminum box was being off-loaded, and I hadn’t listened. And on the screen she turned to look at me—only not at me, though I started and drew breath—at the Wasp that watched her. She was in mid-sentence, mid-gesture. Where? When? Or put it on the same card with the others, she said, turning away. Someone said something, Georgie answered, and stood up, the Wasp panning and moving erratically with her, like an amateur with a home-video camera. A white room, sunlight, wicker Ibiza. Georgie wore a cotton blouse, open; from a table she picked up lotion, poured some on her hand, and rubbed it across her freckled breastbone. The meaningless conversation about putting something on a card went on, ceased. I watched the room, wondering what year, what season I had stumbled into. Georgie pulled off her shirt—her small round breasts tipped with large, childlike nipples, child’s breasts she still had at forty, shook delicately. And she went out onto the balcony, the Wasp following, blinded by sun, adjusting. If you want to do it that way, someone said. The someone crossed the screen, a brown blur, naked. It was me. Georgie said: Oh, look, hummingbirds.

She watched them, rapt, and the Wasp crept close to her cropped blond head, rapt too, and I watched her watch. She turned away, rested her elbows on the balustrade. I couldn’t remember this day. How should I? One of hundreds, of thousands… She looked out to the bright sea, wearing her sleepwalking face, mouth partly open, and absently stroked her breast with her oiled hand. An iridescent glitter among the flowers was the hummingbird.

Without really knowing what I did—I felt hungry, suddenly, hungry for pastness, for more—I touched the RESET bar. The balcony in Ibiza vanished, the screen glowed emptily. I touched ACCESS.

At first there was darkness, a murmur; then a dark back moved away from before the Wasp’s eye, and a dim scene of people resolved itself. Jump. Other people, or the same people, a party? Jump. Apparently the Wasp was turning itself on and off according to the changes in light levels here, wherever here was. Georgie in a dark dress having her cigarette lit: brief flare of the lighter. She said, Thanks. Jump. A foyer or hotel lounge. Paris? The Wasp jerkily sought for her among people coming and going; it couldn’t make a movie, establishing shots, cutaways—it could only doggedly follow Georgie, like a jealous husband, seeing nothing else. This was frustrating. I pushed RESET. ACCESS. Georgie brushed her teeth, somewhere, somewhen.

I understood, after one or two more of these terrible leaps. Access was random. There was no way to dial up a year, a day, a scene. The Park had supplied no program, none; the eight thousand hours weren’t filed at all; they were a jumble, like a lunatic’s memory, like a deck of shuffled cards. I had supposed, without thinking about it, that they would begin at the beginning and go on till they reached the end. Why didn’t they?

I also understood something else. If access was truly random, if I truly had no control, then I had lost as good as forever those scenes I had seen. Odds were on the order of eight thousand to one (more? far more? probabilities are opaque to me) that I would never light on them again by pressing this bar. I felt a pang of loss for that afternoon in Ibiza. It was doubly gone now. I sat before the empty screen, afraid to touch ACCESS again, afraid of what I would lose.

I shut down the machine (the light level in the room rose, the Muzak poured softly back in) and went out into the halls, back to the display screen in the entranceway. The list of names slowly, greenly, rolled over like the list of departing flights at an airport: Code numbers were missing from beside many, indicating perhaps that they weren’t yet in residence, only awaited. In the Ds, three names, and DIRECTOR—hidden among them as though he were only another of the dead. A chamber number. I went to find it and went in. The director looked more like a janitor or a night watchman, the semiretired type you often see caretaking little-visited places. He wore a brown smock like a monk’s robe and was making coffee in a corner of his small office, out of which little business seemed to be done. He looked up startled, caught out, when I entered.

“Sorry,” I said, “but I don’t think I understand this system right.”

“A problem?” he said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.” He looked at me a little wide-eyed and shy, hoping not to be called on for anything difficult. “Equipment’s all working?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t seem that it could be.” I described what I thought I had learned about The Park’s access concept. “That can’t be right, can it?” I said. “That access is totally random…”

He was nodding, still wide-eyed, paying close attention.

“Is it?” I asked.

“Is it what?”

“Random.”

“Oh, yes. Yes, sure. If everything’s in working order.”

I could think of nothing to say for a moment, watching him nod reassuringly. Then, “Why?” I asked. “I mean why is there no way at all to, to organize, to have some kind of organized access to the material?” I had begun to feel that sense of grotesque foolishness in the presence of death, as though I were haggling over Georgie’s effects. “That seems stupid, if you’ll pardon me.”

“Oh no, oh no,” he said. “You’ve read your literature? You’ve read all your literature?”

“Well, to tell the truth…”

“It’s all just as described,” the director said. “I can promise you that. If there’s any problem at all…”

“Do you mind,” I said, “if I sit down?” I smiled. He seemed so afraid of me and my complaint, of me as mourner, possibly grief crazed and unable to grasp the simple limits of his responsibilities to me, that he needed soothing himself. “I’m sure everything’s fine,” I said. “I just don’t think I understand. I’m kind of dumb about these things.”

“Sure. Sure. Sure.” He regretfully put away his coffee makings and sat behind his desk, lacing his fingers together like a consultant. “People get a lot of satisfaction out of the access here,” he said, “a lot of comfort, if they take in the right spirit.” He tried a smile. I wondered what qualifications he had had to show to get this job. “The random part. Now, it’s all in the literature. There’s the legal aspect—you’re not a lawyer are you, no, no, sure, no offense. You see, the material here isn’t for anything, except, well, except for communing. But suppose the stuff were programmed, searchable. Suppose there was a problem about taxes or inheritance or so on. There could be subpoenas, lawyers all over the place, destroying the memorial concept completely.”

I really hadn’t thought of that. Built-in randomness saved past lives from being searched in any systematic way. And no doubt saved The Park from being in the records business and at the wrong end of a lot of suits. “You’d have to watch the whole eight thousand hours,” I said, “and even if you found what you were looking for there’d be no way to replay it. It would have gone by.” It would slide into the random past even as you watched it, like that afternoon in Ibiza, that party in Paris. Lost. He smiled and nodded. I smiled and nodded.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “They didn’t predict that. The randomness. It was a side effect, an affect of the storage process. Just luck.” His grin turned down, his brows knitted seriously. “See, we’re storing here at the molecular level. We have to go that small, for space problems. I mean your eight-thousand-hour guarantee. If we had gone tape or conventional, how much room would it take up? If the access concept caught on. A lot of room. So we went vapor trap and endless tracking. Size of my thumbnail. It’s all in the literature.” He looked at me strangely. I had a sudden intense sensation that I was being fooled, tricked, that the man before me in his smock was no expert, no technician; he was a charlatan, or maybe a madman impersonating a director and not belonging here at all. It raised the hair on my neck and passed. “So the randomness,” he was saying. “It was an effect of going molecular. Brownian movement. All you do is lift the endless tracking for a microsecond and you get a rearrangement at the molecular level. We don’t randomize. The molecules do it for us.”

I remembered Brownian movement, just barely, from physics class. The random movement of molecules, the teacher said; it has a mathematical description. It’s like the movement of dust motes you see swimming in a shaft of sunlight, like the swirl of snowflakes in a glass paperweight that shows a cottage being snowed on. “I see,” I said. “I guess I see.”

“Is there,” he said, “any other problem?” He said it as though there might be some other problem and that he knew what it might be and that he hoped I didn’t have it. “You understand the system, key lock, two bars, ACCESS, RESET…”

“I understand,” I said. “I understand now.”

“Communing,” he said, standing, relieved, sure I would be gone soon. “I understand. It takes a while to relax into the communing concept.”

“Yes,” I said. “It does.”

I wouldn’t learn what I had come to learn, whatever that was. The Wasp had not been good at storage after all, no, no better than my young soul had been. Days and weeks had been missed by its tiny eye. It hadn’t seen well, and in what it had seen it had been no more able to distinguish the just-as-well-forgotten from the unforgettable than my own eye had been. No better and no worse—the same.

And yet, and yet—she stood up in Ibiza and dressed her breasts with lotion, and spoke to me: Oh, look, hummingbirds. I had forgotten, and the Wasp had not; and I owned once again what I hadn’t known I had lost, hadn’t known was precious to me.

The sun was setting when I left The Park, the satin sea foaming softly, randomly around the rocks.

I had spent my life waiting for something, not knowing what, not even knowing I waited. Killing time. I was still waiting. But what I had been waiting for had already occurred and was past.

It was two years, nearly, since Georgie had died; two years until, for the first and last time, I wept for her—for her and for myself.

Of course I went back. After a lot of work and correctly placed dollars, I netted a HAPpy card of my own. I had time to spare, like a lot of people then, and often on empty afternoons (never on Sunday) I would get out onto the unpatched and weed-grown freeway and glide up the coast. The Park was always open. I relaxed into the communing concept.

Now, after some hundreds of hours spent there underground, now, when I have long ceased to go through those doors (I have lost my key, I think; anyway I don’t know where to look for it), I know that the solitude I felt myself to be in was real. The watchers around me, the listeners I sensed in other chambers, were mostly my imagination. There was rarely anyone there.

These tombs were as neglected as any tombs anywhere usually are. Either the living did not care to attend much on the dead—when have they ever?—or the hopeful buyers of the contracts had come to discover the flaw in the access concept—as I discovered it, in the end.

ACCESS, and she takes dresses one by one from her closet, and holds them against her body, and studies the effect in a tall mirror, and puts them back again. She had a funny face, which she never made except when looking at herself in the mirror, a face made for no one but herself, that was actually quite unlike her. The mirror Georgie.

RESET.

ACCESS. By a bizarre coincidence here she is looking in another mirror. I think the Wasp could be confused by mirrors. She turns away, the Wasp adjusts; there is someone asleep, tangled in bedclothes on a big hotel bed, morning, a room-service cart. Oh, the Algonquin: myself. Winter. Snow is falling outside the tall window. She searches her handbag, takes out a small vial, swallows a pill with coffee, holding the cup by its body and not its handle. I stir, show a tousled head of hair. Conversation—unintelligible. Gray room, whitish snow light, color degraded. Would I now (I thought, watching us) reach out for her? Would I in the next hour take her, or she me, push aside the bedclothes, open her pale pajamas? She goes into the john, shuts the door. The Wasp watches stupidly, excluded, transmitting the door.

RESET, finally.

But what (I would wonder) if I had been patient, what if I had watched and waited?

Time, it turns out, takes an unconscionable time. The waste, the footless waste—it’s no spectator sport. Whatever fun there is in sitting idly looking at nothing and tasting your own being for a whole afternoon, there is no fun in replaying it. The waiting is excruciating. How often, in five years, in eight thousand hours of daylight or lamplight, might we have coupled, how much time expended in lovemaking? A hundred hours, two hundred? Odds were not high of my coming on such a scene; darkness swallowed most of them, and the others were lost in the interstices of endless hours spent shopping, reading, on planes and in cars, asleep, apart. Hopeless.

ACCESS. She has turned on a bedside lamp. Alone. She hunts amid the Kleenex and magazines on the bedside table, finds a watch, looks at it dully, turns it right side up, looks again, and puts it down. Cold. She burrows in the blankets, yawning, staring, then puts out a hand for the phone but only rests her hand on it, thinking. Thinking at four A.M. She withdraws her hand, shivers a child’s deep, sleepy shiver, and shuts off the light. A bad dream. In an instant it’s morning, dawn; the Wasp slept, too. She sleeps soundly, unmoving, only the top of her blond head showing out of the quilt—and will no doubt sleep so for hours, watched over more attentively, more fixedly, than any peeping Tom could ever have watched over her.

RESET.

ACCESS.

“I can’t hear as well as I did at first,” I told the director. “And the definition is getting softer.”

“Oh sure,” the director said. “That’s really in the literature. We have to explain that carefully. That this might be a problem.”

“It isn’t just my monitor?” I asked. “I thought it was probably only the monitor.”

“No, no, not really, no,” he said. He gave me coffee. We’d gotten to be friendly over the months. I think, as well as being afraid of me, he was glad I came around now and then; at least one of the living came here, one at least was using the services. “There’s a slight degeneration that does occur.”

“Everything seems to be getting gray.”

His face had shifted into intense concern, no belittling this problem. “Mm-hm, mm-hm, see, at the molecular level where we’re at, there is degeneration. It’s just in the physics. It randomizes a little over time. So you lose—you don’t lose a minute of what you’ve got, but you lose a little definition. A little color. But it levels off.”

“It does?”

“We think it does. Sure it does, we promise it does. We predict that it will.”

“But you don’t know.”

“Well, well you see we’ve only been in this business a short while. This concept is new. There were things we couldn’t know.” He still looked at me, but seemed at the same time to have forgotten me. Tired. He seemed to have grown colorless himself lately, old, losing definition. “You might start getting some snow,” he said softly.

ACCESS RESET ACCESS.

A gray plaza of herringbone-laid stones, gray, clicking palms. She turns up the collar of her sweater, narrowing her eyes in a stern wind. Buys magazines at a kiosk: Vogue, Harper’s, La Mode. Cold, she says to the kiosk girl. Frio. The young man I was takes her arm; they walk back along the beach, which is deserted and strung with cast seaweed, washed by a dirty sea. Winter in Ibiza. We talk, but the Wasp can’t hear, the sea’s sound confuses it; it seems bored by its duties and lags behind us.

RESET.

ACCESS. The Algonquin, terribly familiar morning, winter. She turns away from the snow window. I am in bed, and for a moment watching this I felt suspended between two mirrors, reflected endlessly. I had seen this before; I had lived it once and remembered it once, and remembered the memory, and here it was again, or could it be nothing but another morning, a similar morning. There were far more than one like this, in this place. But no; she turns from the window, she gets out her vial of pills, picks up the coffee cup by its body: I had seen this moment before, not months before, weeks before, here in this chamber. I had come upon the same scene twice.

What are the odds of it, I wondered, what are the odds of coming upon the same minutes again, these minutes.

I stir within the bedclothes.

I leaned forward to hear, this time, what I would say; it was something like but fun anyway, or something.

Fun, she says, laughing, harrowed, the degraded sound a ghost’s twittering. Charlie, someday I’m going to die of fun.

She takes her pill. The Wasp follows her to the john, and is shut out.

Why am I here? I thought, and my heart was beating hard and slow. What am I here for? What?

RESET.

ACCESS.

Silvered icy streets, New York, Fifth Avenue. She is climbing, shouting from a cab’s dark interior. Just don’t shout at me, she shouts at someone; her mother I never met, a dragon. She is out and hurrying away down the sleety street with her bundles, the Wasp at her shoulder. I could reach out and touch her shoulder and make her turn and follow me out. Walking away, lost in the colorless press of traffic and people, impossible to discern within the softened snowy image.

Something was very wrong.

Georgie hated winter, she escaped it most of the time we were together, about the first of the year beginning to long for the sun that had gone elsewhere; Austria was all right for a few weeks, the toy villages and sugar snow and bright, sleek skiers were not really the winter she feared, though even in fire-warmed chalets it was hard to get her naked without gooseflesh and shudders from some draft only she could feel. We were chaste in winter. So Georgie escaped it: Antigua and Bali and two months in Ibiza when the almonds blossomed. It was continual false, flavorless spring all winter long.

How often could snow have fallen when the Wasp was watching her?

Not often; countable times, times I could count up myself if I could remember as the Wasp could. Not often. Not always.

“There’s a problem,” I said to the director.

“It’s peaked out, has it?” he said. “That definition problem?”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s gotten worse.”

He was sitting behind his desk, arms spread wide across his chair’s back, and a false, pinkish flush to his cheeks like undertaker’s makeup. Drinking.

“Hasn’t peaked out, huh?” he said.

“That’s not the problem,” I said. “The problem is the access. It’s not random like you said.”

“Molecular level,” he said. “It’s in the physics.”

“You don’t understand. It’s not getting more random. It’s getting less random. It’s getting selective. It’s freezing up.”

“No, no, no,” he said dreamily. “Access is random. Life isn’t all summer and fun, you know. Into each life some rain must fall.”

I sputtered, trying to explain. “But but…”

“You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of getting out of access.” He pulled open a drawer in the desk before him; it made an empty sound. He stared within it dully for a moment and shut it. “The Park’s been good for me, but I’m just not used to this. Used to be you thought you could render a service, you know? Well, hell, you know, you’ve had fun, what do you care?”

He was mad. For an instant I heard the dead around me; I tasted on my tongue the stale air of underground.

“I remember,” he said, tilting back in his chair and looking elsewhere, “many years ago, I got into access. Only we didn’t call it that then. What I did was, I worked for a stock-footage house. It was going out of business, like they all did, like this place here is going to do, shouldn’t say that, but you didn’t hear it. Anyway, it was a big warehouse with steel shelves for miles, filled with film cans, film cans filled with old plastic film, you know? Film of every kind. And movie people, if they wanted old scenes of past time in their moves, would call up and ask for what they wanted, find me this, find me that. And we had everything, every kind of scene, but you know what the hardest thing to find was? Just ordinary scenes of daily life. I mean people just doing things and living their lives. You know what we did have? Speeches. People giving speeches. Like presidents. You could have hours of speeches, but not just people, whatchacallit, oh, washing clothes, sitting in a park…”

“It might just be the reception,” I said. “Somehow.”

He looked at me for a long moment as though I had just arrived. “Anyway,” he said at last, turning away again, “I was there awhile learning the ropes. And producers called and said, ‘Get me this, get me that.’ And one producer was making a film, some film of the past, and he wanted old scenes, old, of people long ago, in the summer; having fun; eating ice cream; swimming in bathing suits; riding in convertibles. Fifty years ago. Eighty years ago.”

He opened his empty drawer again, found a toothpick, and began to use it.

“So I accessed the earliest stuff. Speeches. More speeches. But I found a scene here and there—people in the street, fur coats, window-shopping, traffic. Old people, I mean they were young then, but people of the past; they have these pinched kind of faces, you get to know them. Sad, a little. On city streets, hurrying, holding their hats. Cities were sort of black then, in film; black cars in the streets, black derby hats. Stone. Well, it wasn’t what they wanted. I found summer for them, color summer, but new. They wanted old. I kept looking back. I kept looking. I did. The further back I went, the more I saw these pinched faces, black cars, black streets of stone. Snow. There isn’t any summer there.”

With slow gravity he rose and found a brown bottle and two coffee cups. He poured sloppily. “So it’s not your reception,” he said. “Film takes longer, I guess, but it’s the physics. All in the physics. A word to the wise is sufficient.”

The liquor was harsh, a cold distillate of past sunlight. I wanted to go, get out, not look back. I would not stay watching until there was only snow.

“So I’m getting out of access,” the director said. “Let the dead bury the dead, right? Let the dead bury the dead.”

I didn’t go back. I never went back, though the highways opened again and The Park isn’t far from the town I’ve settled in. Settled; the right word. It restores your balance, in the end, even in a funny way your cheerfulness, when you come to know, without regrets, that the best thing that’s going to happen in your life has already happened. And I still have some summer left to me.

I think there are two different kinds of memory, and only one kind gets worse as I get older: the kind where, by an effort of will, you can reconstruct your first car or your serial number or the name and figure of your high school physics teacher—a Mr. Holm, in a gray suit, a bearded guy, skinny, about thirty. The other kind doesn’t worsen; if anything it grows more intense. The sleepwalking kind, the kind you stumble into as into rooms with secret doors and suddenly find yourself sitting not on your front porch but in a classroom. You can’t at first think where or when, and a bearded, smiling man is turning in his hand a glass paperweight, inside which a little cottage stands in a swirl of snow.

There is no access to Georgie, except that now and then, unpredictably, when I’m sitting on the porch or pushing a grocery cart or standing at the sink, a memory of that kind will visit me, vivid and startling, like a hypnotist’s snap of fingers.

Or like that funny experience you sometimes have, on the point of sleep, of hearing your name called softly and distinctly by someone who is not there.

FLYING SAUCER ROCK & ROLL

Howard Waldrop

They could have been contenders.

Talk about Danny and the Juniors, talk about the Spaniels, the Contours, Sonny Till and the Orioles. They made it to the big time: records, tours, sock hops at $500 a night. Fame and glory.

But you never heard of the Kool-Tones, because they achieved their apotheosis and their apocalypse on the same night, and then they broke up. Some still talk about that night, but so much happened, the Kool-Tones get lost in the shuffle. And who's going to believe a bunch of kids, anyway? The cops didn't, and their parents didn't. It was only two years after the President had been shot in Dallas, and people were still scared. This, then, is the Kool-Tones' story:

Leroy was smoking a cigar through a hole he'd cut in a pair of thick, red wax lips. Slim and Zoot were tooting away on Wowee whistles. It was a week after Halloween, and their pockets were still full of trick-or-treat candy they'd muscled off little kids in the projects. Ray, slim and nervous, was hanging back. "We shouldn't be here, you know? I mean, this ain't the Hellbenders' territory, you know? I don't know whose it is, but, like, Vinnie and the guys don't come this far." He looked around.

Zoot, who was white and had the beginnings of a mustache, took the yellow wax-candy kazoo from his mouth. He bit off and chewed up the big C pipe. "I mean, if you're scared, Ray, you can go back home, you know?"

"Nah!" said Leroy. "We need Ray for the middle parts." Leroy was twelve years old and about four feet tall. He was finishing his fourth cigar of the day. He looked like a small Stymie Beard from the old Our Gang comedies.

He still wore the cut-down coat he'd taken with him when he'd escaped from his foster home.

He was staying with his sister and her boyfriend. In each of his coat pockets he had a bottle: one Coke and one bourbon.

"We'll be all right," said Cornelius, who was big as a house and almost eighteen. He was shaped like a big ebony golf tee, narrow legs and waist blooming out to an A-bomb mushroom of arms and chest. He was a yard wide at the shoulders. He looked like he was always wearing football pads.

"That's right," said Leroy, taking out the wax lips and wedging the cigar back into the hole in them. "I mean, the kid who found this place didn't say anything about it being somebody's spot, man."

"What's that?" asked Ray.

They looked up. A small spot of light moved slowly across the sky. It was barely visible, along with a few stars, in the lights from the city.

"Maybe it's one of them UFOs you're always talking about, Leroy," said Zoot.

"Flying saucer, my left ball," said Cornelius. "That's Telstar. You ought to read the papers."

"Like your mama makes you?" asked Slim.

"Aww…" said Cornelius.

They walked on through the alleys and the dark streets. They all walked like a man.

"This place is Oz," said Leroy.

"Hey!" yelled Ray, and his voice filled the area, echoed back and forth in the darkness, rose in volume, died away.

"Wow."

They were on what had been the loading dock of an old freight and storage company. It must have been closed sometime during the Korean War or maybe in the unimaginable eons before World War II. The building took up most of the block, but the loading area on the back was sunken and surrounded by the stone wall they had climbed. If you stood with your back against the one good loading door, the place was a natural amphitheater.

Leroy chugged some Coke, then poured bourbon into the half-empty bottle. They all took a drink, except Cornelius, whose mother was a Foursquare Baptist and could smell liquor on his breath three blocks away.

Cornelius drank only when he was away from home two or three days.

"Okay, "Kool-Tones," said Leroy. "Let's hit some notes."

They stood in front of the door. Leroy to the fore, the others behind him in a semicircle: Cornelius, Ray, Slim, and Zoot.

"One, two, three," said Leroy quietly, his face toward the bright city beyond the surrounding buildings.

He had seen all the movies with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers in them and knew the moves backwards. He jumped in the air and came down, and Cornelius hit it: "Bah-doo, bah-doo, ba-doo—uhh."

It was a bass from the bottom of the ocean, from the Marianas Trench, a voice from Death Valley on a wet night, so far below sea level you could feel the absence of light in your mind. And then Zoot and Ray came in: "Ooh-oooh, ooh-oooh," with Leroy humming under, and then Slim stepped out and began the lead tenor part of "Sincerely," by the Crows. And they went through that one perfectly, flawlessly, the dark night and the dock walls throwing their voices out to the whole breathing city.

"Wow," said Ray, when they finished, but Leroy held up his hand, and Zoot leaned forward and took a deep breath and sang: "Dee-dee-woo-oo, dee-eee—wooo-oo, dee-uhmm-doo-way."

And Ray and Slim chanted: "A-weem-wayyy, a-weem-wayyy."

And then Leroy, who had a falsetto that could take hair off an opossum, hit the high notes from "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," and it was even better than the first song, and not even the Tokens on their number two hit had ever sounded greater.

Then they started clapping their hands, and at every clap the city seemed to jump with expectation, joining in their dance, and they went through a shaky-legged Skyliners-type routine and into: "Hey-ahh-stuh-huh, hey-ahh-stuh-uhh," of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs' "Stay," and when Leroy soared his "Hoh-wahh-yuh?" over Zoot's singing, they all thought they would die.

And without pause, Ray and Slim started: "Shoo-be-doop, shoo-doop-do-be-doop, shoo-doopbe-do-be-doop," and Cornelius was going, "Ah-rem-em, ah-rem-em, ah-rem-emm bah."

And they went through the Five Satins' "(I Remember) In the Still of the Night."

"Hey, wait," said Ray, as Slim "woo-uh-wooo-uh-woo-ooo-ah-woo-ah"-ed to a finish, "I thought I saw a guy out there."

"You're imagining things," said Zoot. But they all stared out into the dark anyway.

There didn't seem to be anything there.

"Hey, look," said Cornelius. "Why don't we try putting the bass part of 'Stormy Weather' with the high part of 'Crying in the Chapel'? I tried it the other night, but I can't—"

"Shit, man!" said Slim. "That ain't the way it is on the records. You gotta do it like on the records."

"Records are going to hell, anyway. I mean, you got Motown and some of that, but the rest of it's like the Beatles and Animals and Rolling Stones and Wayne shitty Fontana and the Mindbenders and…"

Leroy took the cigar from his mouth. "Fuck the Beatles," he said. He put the cigar back in his mouth.

"Yeah, you're right, I agree. But even the other music's not the—"

"Aren't you kids up past your bedtime?" asked a loud voice from the darkness.

They jerked erect. For a minute, they hoped it was only the cops.

Matches flared in the darkness, held up close to faces. The faces had all their eyes closed so they wouldn't be blinded and unable to see in case the Kool-Tones made a break for it. Blobs of face and light floated in the night, five, ten, fifteen, more.

Part of a jacket was illuminated. It was the color reserved for the kings of Tyre.

"Oh, shit!" said Slim. "Trouble. Looks like the Purple Monsters.

The Kool-Tones drew into a knot.

The matches went out and they were in a breathing darkness.

"You guys know this turf is reserved for friends of the local protective, athletic, and social club, viz., us?" asked the same voice. Chains clanked in the black night.

"We were just leaving," said Cornelius.

The noisy chains rattled closer.

You could hear knuckles being slapped into fists out there.

Slim hoped someone would hurry up and hit him so he could scream.

"Who are you guys with?" asked the voice, and a flashlight shone in their eyes, blinding them.

"Aww, they're just little kids," said another voice.

"Who you callin' little, turd?" asked Leroy, shouldering his way between Zoot and Cornelius's legs.

A wooooooo! went up from the dark, and the chains rattled again.

"For God's sake, shut up, Leroy!" said Ray.

"Who you people think you are, anyway?" asked another, meaner voice out there.

"We're the Kool-Tones," said Leroy. "We can sing it slow, and we can sing it low, and we can sing it loud, and we can make it go!"

"I hope you like that cigar, kid," said the mean voice, "because after we piss on it, you're going to have to eat it."

"Okay, okay, look," said Cornelius. "We didn't know it was your turf. We come from over in the projects and…"

"Hey, man, Hellbenders, Hellbenders!" The chains sounded like tambourines now.

"Naw, naw. We ain't Hellbenders. We ain't nobody but the Kool-Tones. We just heard about this place. We didn't know it was yours," said Cornelius.

"We only let Bobby and the Bombers sing here," said a voice.

"Bobby and the Bombers can't sing their way out of the men's room," said Leroy. Slim clamped Leroy's mouth, burning his hand on the cigar.

"You're gonna regret that," said the mean voice, which stepped into the flashlight beam, "because I'm Bobby, and four more of these guys out here are the Bombers."

"We didn't know you guys were part of the Purple Monsters!" said Zoot.

"There's lots of stuff you don't know," said Bobby. "And when we're through, there's not much you're gonna remember."

"I only know the Del Vikings are breaking up," said Zoot. He didn't know why he said it. Anything was better than waiting for the knuckle sandwiches.

Bobby's face changed. "No shit?" Then his face set in hard lines again. "Where'd a punk like you hear something like that?"

"My cousin," said Zoot. "He was in the Air Force with two of them. He writes to 'em. They're tight. One of them said the act was breaking up because nobody was listening to their stuff anymore."

"Well, that's rough," said Bobby. "It's tough out there on the road."

"Yeah," said Zoot. "It really is."

Some of the tension was gone, but certain delicate ethical questions remained to be settled.

"I'm Lucius," said a voice. "Warlord of the Purple Monsters." The flashlight came on him. He was huge. He was like Cornelius, only he was big all the way to the ground. His feet looked like blunt I beams sticking out of the bottom of his jeans. His purple satin jacket was a bright fluorescent blot on the night. "I hate to break up this chitchat"—he glared at Bobby—"but the fact is you people are on Purple Monster territory, and some tribute needs to be exacted."

Ray was digging in his pockets for nickels and dimes.

"Not money. Something that will remind you not to do this again."

"Tell you what," said Leroy. He had worked himself away from Slim. "You think Bobby and the Bombers can sing?"

"Easy!" said Lucius to Bobby, who had started forward with the Bombers. "Yeah, kid. They're the best damn group in the city."

"Well, I think we can outsing 'em," said Leroy, and smiled around his dead cigar.

"Oh, jeez," said Zoot. "They got a record, and they've—"

"I said, we can outsing Bobby and the Bombers, anytime, any place," said Leroy.

"And what if you can't?" asked Lucius.

"You guys like piss a lot, don't you?" There was a general movement toward the Kool-Tones. Lucius held up his hand. "Well," said Leroy, "how about all the members of the losing group drink a quart apiece?"

Hands of the Kool-Tones reached out to still Leroy. He danced away.

"I like that," said Lucius. "I really like that. That all right, Bobby?"

"I'm going to start saving it up now."

"Who's gonna judge?" asked one of the Bombers.

"The same as always," said Leroy. "The public. Invite 'em in."

"Who do we meet with to work this out?" asked Lucius.

"Vinnie of the Hellbenders. He'll work out the terms."

Slim was beginning to see he might not be killed that night. He looked on Leroy with something like worship.

"How we know you guys are gonna show up?" asked Bobby.

"I swear on Sam Cooke's grave," said Leroy.

"Let 'em pass," said Bobby.

They crossed out of the freight yard and headed back for the projects.

"Shit, man!"

"Now you've done it!"

"I'm heading for Florida."

"What the hell, Leroy, are you crazy?"

Leroy was smiling. "We can take them, easy," he said, holding up his hand flat.

He began to sing "Chain Gang." The other Kool-Tones joined in, but their hearts weren't in it. Already there was a bad taste in the back of their throats.

Vinnie was mad.

The black outline of a mudpuppy on his white silk jacket seemed to swell as he hunched his shoulders toward Leroy.

"What the shit you mean, dragging the Hellbenders into this without asking us first? That just ain't done, Leroy."

"Who else could take the Purple Monsters in case they wasn't gentlemen?" asked Leroy.

Vinnie grinned. "You're gonna die before you're fifteen, kid."

"That's my hope."

"Creep. Okay, we'll take care of it."

"One thing," said Leroy. "No instruments. They gotta get us a mike and some amps, and no more than a quarter of the people can be from Monster territory. And it's gotta be at the freight dock."

"That's one thing?" asked Vinnie.

"A few. But that place is great, man. We can't lose there."

Vinnie smiled, and it was a prison-guard smile, a Nazi smile. "If you lose, kid, after the Monsters get through with you, the Hellbenders are gonna have a little party."

He pointed over his shoulder to where something resembling testicles floated in alcohol in a mason jar on a shelf. "We're putting five empty jars up there tomorrow. That's what happens to people who get the Hellbenders involved without asking and then don't come through when the pressure's on. You know what I mean?"

Leroy smiled. He left smiling. The smile was still frozen to his face as he walked down the street.

This whole thing was getting too grim.

Leroy lay on his cot listening to his sister and her boyfriend porking in the next room.

It was late at night. His mind was still working. Sounds beyond those in the bedroom came to him. Somebody staggered down the project hallway, bumping from one wall to another. Probably old man Jones. Chances are he wouldn't make it to his room all the way at the end of the corridor. His daughter or one of her kids would probably find him asleep in the hall in a pool of barf.

Leroy turned over on the rattly cot, flipped on his seven-transistor radio, and jammed it up to his ear. Faintly came the sounds of another Beatles song.

He thumbed the tuner, and the four creeps blurred into four or five other Englishmen singing some other stupid song about coming to places he would never see.

He went through the stations until he stopped on the third note of the Monotones' "Book of Love." He sang along in his mind.

Then the deejay came on, and everything turned sour again. "Another golden oldie, 'Book of Love,' by the Monotones. Now here's the WBKD pick of the week, the fabulous Beatles with 'I've Just Seen a Face,' " Leroy pushed the stations around the dial, then started back.

Weekdays were shit. On weekends you could hear good old stuff, but mostly the stations all played Top 40, and that was English invasion stuff, or if you were lucky, some Motown. It was Monday night. He gave up and turned to an all-night blues station, where the music usually meant something. But this was like, you know, the sharecropper hour or something, and all they were playing was whiny cotton-choppin' work blues from some damn Alabama singer who had died in 1932, for God's sake.

Disgusted, Leroy turned off the radio.

His sister and her boyfriend had quit for a while, so it was quieter in the place. Leroy lit a cigarette and thought of getting out of here as soon as he could.

I mean, Bobby and the Bombers had a record, a real big-hole forty-five on WhamJam. It wasn't selling worth shit from ail Leroy heard, but that didn't matter. It was a record, and it was real, it wasn't just singing under some street lamp. Slim said they'd played it once on WABC, on the Hit-or-Flop show, and it was a flop, but people heard it. Rumor was the Bombers had gotten sixty-five dollars and a contract for the session. They'd had a couple of gigs at dances and such, when the regular band took a break. They sure as hell couldn't be making any money, or they wouldn't be singing against the Kool-Tones for free kicks.

But they had a record out, and they were working.

If only the Kool-Tones got work, got a record, went on tour. Leroy was just twelve, but he knew how hard they were working on their music. They'd practice on street corners, on the stoop, just walking, getting the notes down right—the moves, the facial expressions of all the groups they'd seen in movies and on Slim's mother's TV.

There were so many places to be out there. There was a real world with people in it who weren't punching somebody for berries, or stealing the welfare and stuff. Just someplace open, someplace away from everything else.

He flipped on the flashlight beside his cot, pulled it under the covers with him, and opened his favorite book. It was Edward J. Ruppelt's Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. His big brother John William, whom he had never seen, sent it to him from his Army post in California as soon as he found Leroy had run away and was living with his sister. John William also sent his sister part of his allotment every month.

Leroy had read the book again and again. He knew it by heart already. He couldn't get a library card under his own name because the state might trace him that way. (They'd already been around asking his sister about him. She lied. But she too had run away from a foster home as soon as she was old enough, so they hadn't believed her and would be back.) So he'd had to boost all his books. Sometimes it took days, and newsstand people got mighty suspicious when you were black and hung around for a long time, waiting for the chance to kipe stuff. Usually they gave you the hairy eyeball until you went away.

He owned twelve books on UFOs now, but the Ruppelt was still his favorite. Once he'd gotten a book by some guy named Truman or something, who wrote poetry inspired by the people from Venus. It was a little sad, too, the things people believed sometimes. So Leroy hadn't read any more books by people who claimed they'd been inside the flying saucers or met the Neptunians or such. He read only the ones that gave histories of the sightings and asked questions, like why was the Air Force covering up? Those books never told you what was in the UFOs, and that was good because you could imagine it for yourself.

He wondered if any of the Del Vikings had seen flying saucers when they were in the Air Force with Zoot's cousin. Probably not, or Zoot would have told him about it. Leroy always tried to get the rest of the Kool-Tones interested in UFOs, but they all said they had their own problems, like girls and cigarette money. They'd go with him to see Invasion of the Saucermen or Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers at the movies, or watch The Thing on Slim's mother's TV on the Creature Feature, but that was about it.

Leroy's favorite flying-saucer sighting was the Mantell case, in which a P-51 fighter plane, which was called the Mustang, chased a UFO over Kentucky and then crashed after it went off the Air Force radar. Some say Captain Mantell died of asphyxiation because he went to 20,000 feet and didn't have on an oxygen mask, but other books said he saw "something metallic and of tremendous size" and was going after it. Ruppelt thought it was a Skyhook balloon, but he couldn't be sure. Others said it was a real UFO and that Mantell had been shot down with Z-rays.

It had made Leroy's skin crawl when he had first read it.

But his mind went back to the Del Vikings. What had caused them to break up? What was it really like out there on the road? Was music getting so bad that good groups couldn't make a living at it anymore?

Leroy turned off the flashlight and put the book away. He put out the cigarette, lit a cigar, went to the window, and looked up the airshaft. He leaned way back against the cool window and could barely see one star overhead. Just one star.

He scratched himself and lay back down on the bed.

For the first time, he was afraid about the contest tomorrow night.

We got to be good, he said to himself. We got to be good.

In the other room, the bed started squeaking again.

The Hellbenders arrived early to check out the turf. They'd been there ten minutes when the Purple Monsters showed up. There was handshaking all around, talk a little while, then they moved off into two separate groups. A few civilians came by to make sure this was the place they'd heard about.

"Park your cars out of sight, if you got 'em," said Lucius. "We don't want the cops to think anything's going on here."

Vinnie strut-walked over to Lucius.

"This crowd's gonna be bigger than I thought. I can tell."

"People come to see somebody drink some piss. You know, give the public what it wants…" Lucius smiled.

"I guess so. I got this weird feelin', though. Like, you know, if your mother tells you she dreamed about her aunt, like right before she died and all?"

"I know what feelin' you mean, but I ain't got it," said Lucius.

"Who you got doing the electrics?"

"Guy named Sparks. He was the one lit up Choton Field."

At Choton Field the year before, two gangs wanted to fight under the lights. So they went to a high-school football stadium. Somebody got all the lights and the P.A. on without going into the control booth.

Cops drove by less than fifty feet away, thinking there was a practice scrimmage going on, while down on the field guys were turning one another into bloody strings. Somebody was on the P.A. giving a play-by-play. From the outside it sounded cool. From the inside, it looked like a pizza with all the topping ripped off it.

"Oh," said Vinnie. "Good man."

He used to work for Con Ed, and he still had his I.D. card. Who was going to mess with Consolidated Edison? He drove an old, gray pickup with a smudge on the side that had once been a power-company emblem. The truck was filled to the brim with cables, wires, boots, wrenches, tape, torches, work lights, and rope.

"Light man's here!" said somebody.

Lucius shook hands with him and told him what they wanted. He nodded.

The crowd was getting larger, groups and clots of people drifting in, though the music wasn't supposed to start for another hour. Word traveled fast.

Sparks attached a transformer and breakers to a huge, thick cable.

Then he got out his climbing spikes and went up a pole like a monkey, the heavy chunk-chunk drifting down to the crowd every time he flexed his knees. His tool belt slapped against his sides.

He had one of the guys in the Purple Monsters throw him up the end of the inch-thick electrical cable.

The sun had just gone down, and Sparks was a silhouette against the purpling sky that poked between the buildings.

A few stars were showing in the eastern sky. Lights were on all through the autumn buildings. Thanksgiving was in a few weeks, then Christmas.

The shopping season was already in full swing, and the streets would be bathed in neon, in holiday colors. The city stood up like big, black fingers all around them.

Sparks did something to the breakdown box on the pole.

There was an immense blue scream of light that stopped everybody's heart.

New York City went dark.

"Fucking wow!"

A raggedy-assed cheer of wonder ran through the crowd.

There were crashes, and car horns began to honk all over town.

"Uh, Lucius," Sparks yelled down the pole after a few minutes. "Have the guys go steal me about thirty automobile batteries."

The Purple Monsters ran off in twenty different directions.

"Ahhhyyyhhyyh," said Vinnie, spitting a toothpick out of his mouth. "The Monsters get to have all the fun."

It was 5:27 P.M. on November 9, 1965. At the Ossining changing station a guy named Jim was talking to a guy named Jack.

Then the trouble phone rang. Jim checked all his dials before he picked it up.

He listened, then hung up.

"There's an outage all down the line. They're going to switch the two hundred K's over to the Buffalo net and reroute them back through here. Check all the load levels. Everything's out from Schenectady to Jersey City."

When everything looked ready, Jack signaled to Jim.

Jim called headquarters, and they watched the needles jump on the dials.

Everything went black.

Almost everything.

Jack hit all the switches for backup relays, and nothing happened.

Almost nothing.

Jim hit the emergency battery work lights. They flicked and went out.

"What the hell?" .asked Jack.

He looked out the window.

Something large and bright moved across a nearby reservoir and toward the changing station.

"Holy Mother of Christ!" he said.

Jim and Jack went outside.

The large bright thing moved along the lines toward the station. The power cables bulged toward the bottom of the thing, whipping up and down, making the stanchions sway. The station and the reservoir were bathed in a blue glow as the thing went over. Then it took off quickly toward Manhattan, down the straining lines, leaving them in complete darkness.

Jim and Jack went back into the plant and ate their lunches.

Not even the phone worked anymore.

It was really black by the time Sparks got his gear set up. Everybody in the crowd was talking about the darkness of the city and the sky. You could see all over the place, everywhere you looked.

There was very little noise from the city around the loading area.

Somebody had a radio on. There were a few Jersey and Pennsy stations on. One of them went off while they listened.

In the darkness, Sparks worked by the lights of his old truck. What he had in front of him resembled something from an alchemy or magnetism treatise written early in the eighteenth century. Twenty or so car batteries were hooked up in series with jumper cables. He'd tied those in with amps, mikes, transformers, a light board, and lights on the dock area.

"Stand clear!" he yelled. He bent down with the last set of cables and stuck an alligator clamp on a battery spot.

There was a screeching blue jag of light and a frying noise. The lights flickered and came on, and the amps whined louder and louder.

The crowd, numbering around five hundred, gave out with prolonged huzzahs and applause.

"Test test test," said Lucius. Everybody held their hands over their ears.

"Turn that fucker down," said Vinnie. Sparks did. Then he waved to the crowd, got into his old truck, turned the lights off, and drove into the night.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Purple Monsters…" said Lucius, to wild applause, and Vinnie leaned into the mike, "and the Hellbenders," more applause, then back to Lucius, "would like to welcome you to the first annual piss-off—I mean, sing-off—between our own Bobby and the Bombers," cheers, "and the challengers," said Vinnie, "the Kool-Tones!" More applause.

"They'll do two sets, folks," said Lucius, "taking turns. And at the end, the unlucky group, gauged by your lack of applause, will win a prize!" The crowd went wild.

The lights dimmed out. "And now," came Vinnie's voice from the still blackness of the loading dock, "for your listening pleasure, Bobby and the Bombers!"

"Yayyyyyyyyyy!"

The lights, virtually the only lights in the city except for those that were being run by emergency generators, came up, and there they were.

Imagine frosted, polished elegance being thrust on the unwilling shoulders of a sixteen-year-old.

They had on bluejackets, matching pants, ruffled shirts, black ties, cuff links, tie tacks, shoes like obsidian mortar trowels. They were all black boys, and from the first note, you knew they were born to sing:

"Bah bah," sang Letus the bassman, "doo-doo duh-duh doo-ahh, duh-doo-dee-doot," sang the two tenors, Lennie and Gonk, and then Bobby and Fred began trading verses of the Drifters' "There Goes My Baby," while the tenors wailed and Letus carried the whole with his bass.

Then the lights went down and came up again as Lucius said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the Kool-Tones!"

It was magic of a grubby kind.

The Kool-Tones shuffled on, arms pumping in best Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers fashion, and they ran in place as the hand-clapping got louder and louder and they leaned into the mikes.

They were dressed in waiters' red cloth jackets the Hellbenders had stolen from a laundry service for them that morning. They wore narrow black ties, except Leroy who had on a big, thick, red bow tie he'd copped from his sister's boyfriend.

Then Cornelius leaned over his mike and: "Doook doook doook doookov," and Ray and Zoot joined with "dook dook dook dookov," into Gene Chandler's "Duke of Earl," with Leroy smiling and doing all of Chandler's hand moves. Slim chugged away the "iiiiiiiiiyiyiyiyiiiii's" in the background in runs that made the crowd's blood cold, and the lights went down. Then the Bombers were back, and in contrast to the up-tempo ending of "Duke of Earl" they started with a sweet tenor a cappella line and then: "woo-radad-da-dat, woo-radad-da-dat," of Shep and the Limelites' "Daddy's Home."

The Kool-Tones jumped back into the light. This time Cornelius started it off with "Bomp-a-pa-bomp, bomp-pa-pa-bomp, dang-a-dang-dang, ding-a-dong-ding," and into the Marcels' "Blue Moon," not just a hit but a mere monster back in 1961. And they ran through the song, Slim taking the lead, and the crowd began to yell like mad halfway through. And Leroy—smiling, singing, rocking back and forth, doing James Brown tantrum-steps in front of the mike—knew, could feel, that they had them, that no matter what, they were going to win. And he ended with his whining part and Cornelius went "Bomp-ba-ba-bomp-ba-bom," and paused and then deeper, "booo mooo."

The lights came, up and Bobby and the Bombers hit the stage. At first Leroy, sweating, didn't realize what they were doing, because the Bombers, for the first few seconds, made this churning rinky-tink sound with the high voices. The bass, Letus, did this grindy sound with his throat. Then the Bombers did the only thing that could save them, a white boy's song, Bobby launching into Del Shannon's "Runaway," with both feet hitting the stage at once. Leroy thought he could taste that urine already.

The other Kool-Tones were transfixed by what was about to happen.

"They can't do that, man," said Leroy. "They're gonna cop out."

"That's impossible. Nobody can do it." But when the Bombers got to the break, this guy Fred stepped out to the mike and went: "Eee-de-ee-dee-eedle-eee-eee, eee-deee-eedle-deeee, eedle-dee-eedle-dee-dee-dee, eewheetle-eeedle-dee-deedle-dee-eeeeee," in a spitting falsetto, half mechanical, half Martian cattle call—the organ break of "Runaway," done with the human voice.

The crowd was on its feet screaming, and the rest of the song was lost in stamping and cheers. When the Kool-Tones jumped out for the last song of the first set, there were some boos and yells for the Bombers to come back, but then Zoot started talking about his girl putting him down because he couldn't shake 'em down, but how now he was back to let her know… They all jumped in the air and came down on the first line of "Do You Love Me?" by the Contours, and they gained some of the crowd back. But they finished a little wimpy, and then the lights went down and an absolutely black night descended. The stars were shining over New York City for the first time since World War II, and Vinnie said, "Ten minutes, folks!" and guys went over to piss against the walls or add to the consolation-prize bottles.

It was like halftime in the locker room with the score Green Bay 146, You 0.

"A cheap trick," said Zoot. "We don't do shit like that."

Leroy sighed. "We're gonna have to," he said. He drank from a Coke bottle one of the Purple Monsters had given him. "We're gonna have to do something."

"We're gonna have to drink pee-pee, and then Vinnie's gonna de-nut us, is what's gonna happen."

"No, he's not," said Cornelius.

"Oh, yeah?" asked Zoot. "Then what's that in the bottle in the clubhouse?"

"Pig's balls," said Cornelius. "They got 'em from a slaughterhouse."

"How do you know?"

"I just know," said Cornelius, tiredly. "Now let's just get this over with so we can go vomit all night."

"I don't want to hear any talk like that," said Leroy. "We're gonna go through with this and give it our best, just like we planned, and if that ain't good enough, well, it just ain't good enough."

"No matter what we do, ain't gonna be good enough."

"Come on, Ray, man!"

"I'll do my best, but my heart ain't in it."

They lay against the loading dock. They heard laughter from the place where Bobby and the Bombers rested.

"Shit, it's dark!" said Slim.

"It ain't just us, just the city," said Zoot. "It's the whole goddamn U.S."

"It's just the whole East Coast," said Ray. "I heard on the radio. Part of Canada, too."

"What is it?"

"Nobody knows."

"Hey, Leroy," said Cornelius. "Maybe it's those Martians you're, always talking about."

Leroy felt a chill up his spine.

"Nah," said Slim. "It was that guy Sparks. He shorted out the whole East Coast up that pole there."

"Do you really believe that?" asked Zoot.

"I don't know what I believe anymore."

"I believe," said Lucius, coming out of nowhere with an evil grin on his face, "that it's show time."

They came to the stage running, and the lights came up, and Cornelius leaned on his voice and: "Rabbalabbalabba ging gong, rabbalabbalabba ging gong," and the others' went "wooooooooooo" in the Edsels' "Rama Lama Ding Dong." They finished and the Bombers jumped into the lights and went into: "Domm dom domm dom doobedoo, dom domm dom dobedoodbeedomm, wah-wahwahwahhh," of the Del Vikings' "Come Go With Me."

The Kool-Tones came back with: "Ahhhhhhhhaahh-woooowpooo, ow-ow-ow-ow-owh-woo," of "Since I Don't Have You," by the Skyliners, with Slim singing in a clear, straight voice, better than he had ever sung that song before, and everybody else joined in, Leroy's voice fading into Slim's for the falsetto weeeeooooow's so you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

Then Bobby and the Bombers were back, with Bobby telling you the first two lines and: "Detooodwop, detoood-wop, detooodwop," of the Flamingos' "I Only Have Eyes for You," calm, cool, collected, assured of victory, still running on the impetus of their first set's showstopper.

Then the Kool-Tones came back and Cornelius rared back and asked: "Ahwunno wunno hooo? Be-do-be-hooot" Pause.

They slammed down into "Book of Love," by the Monotones, but even Cornelius was flagging, sweating now in the cool air, his lungs were husks. He saw one of the Bombers nod to another, smugly, and that made him mad. He came down on the last verse like there was no one else on the stage with him, and his bass roared so loud it seemed there wasn't a single person in the dark United States who didn't wonder who wrote that book.

And they were off, and Bobby and the Bombers were on now, and a low hum began to fill the air. Somebody checked the amp; it was okay. So the Bombers jumped into the air, and when they came down they were into the Cleftones' "Heart and Soul," and they sang that song, and while they were singing, the background humming got louder and louder.

Leroy leaned to the other Kool-Tones and whispered something. They shook their heads. He pointed to the Hellbenders and the Purple Monsters all around them. He asked a question they didn't want to hear. They nodded grudging approval, and then they were on again, for the last time.

"Dep dooomop dooomop doomop, doo ooo, oowah oowah ooowah ooowah," sang Leroy, and they all asked "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" Leroy sang like he was Frankie Lymon—not just some kid from the projects who wanted to be him—and the Kool-Tones were the Teenagers, and they began to pull and heave that song like it was a dead whale. And soon they had it in the water, and then it was swimming a little, then it was moving, and then the sonofabitch started spouting water, and that was the place where Leroy went into the falsetto "wyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy," and instead of chopping it where it should have been, he kept on. The Kool-Tones went ooom wahooomwah softly behind him, and still he held to that note, and the crowd began to applaud, and they began to yell, and Leroy held it longer, and they started stamping and screaming, and he held it until he knew he was going to cough up both his lungs, and he held it after that, and the Kool-Tones were coming up to meet him, and Leroy gave a tantrum-step, and his eyes were bugging, and he felt his lungs tear out by the roots and come unglued, and he held the last syllable, and the crowd wet itself and—

The lights went out and the amp went dead. Part of the crowd had a subliminal glimpse of something large, blue, and cool looming over the freight yard, bathing the top of the building in a soft glow.

In the dead air the voices of the Kool-Tones dropped in pitch as if they were pulled upward at a thousand miles an hour, and then they rose in pitch as if they had somehow come back at that same thousand miles an hour.

The blue thing was a looming blur and then was gone.

The lights came back on. The Kool-Tones stood there blinking: Cornelius, Ray, Slim, and Zoot. The space in front of the center mike was empty.

The crowd had an orgasm.

The Bombers were being violently ill over next to the building.

"God, that was great!" said Vinnie. "Just great!"

All four of the Kool-Tones were shaking their heads.

They should be tired, but this looked worse than that, thought Vinnie. They should be ecstatic. They looked like they didn't know they had won.

"Where's Leroy?" asked Cornelius.

"How the hell should I know?" Vinnie said, sounding annoyed.

"I remembered him smiling, like," said Zoot.

"And the blue thing. What about it?"

"What blue thing?" asked Lucius.

"I dunno. Something was blue."

"All I saw was the lights go off and that kid ran away," said Lucius. "Which way?"

"Well, I didn't exactly see him, but he must have run some way. Don't know how he got by us. Probably thought you were going to lose and took it on the lam. I don't see how you'd worry when you can make your voices do that stuff."

"Up," said Zoot, suddenly.

"What?"

"We went up, and we came down. Leroy didn't come down with us."

"Of course not. He was still holding the same note. I thought the little twerp's balls were gonna fly out his mouth."

"No. We…" Slim moved his hands up, around, gave, up. "I don't know what happened, do you?"

Ray, Zoot, and Cornelius all looked like they had thirty-two lane bowling alleys inside their heads and all the pin machines were down.

"Aw, shit," said Vinnie. "You won. Go get some sleep. You guys were really bitchin'."

The Kool-Tones stood there uncertainly for a minute.

"He was, like, smiling, you know?" said Zoot.

"He was always smiling," said Vinnie. "Crazy little kid."

The Kool-Tones left.

The sky overhead was black and spattered with stars. It looked to Vinnie as if it were deep and wide enough to hold anything. He shuddered.

"Hey!" he yelled. "Somebody bring me a beer!"

He caught himself humming. One of the Hellbenders brought him a beer.

FERMI AND FROST

Frederick Pohl

On Timothy Clary's ninth birthday he got no cake. He spent all of it in a bay of the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy airport in New York, sleeping fitfully, crying now and then from exhaustion or fear. All he had to eat was stale Danish pastries from the buffet wagon and not many of them, and he was fearfully embarrassed because he had wet his pants. Three times. Getting to the toilets over the packed refugee bodies was just about impossible. There were twenty-eight hundred people in a space designed for a fraction that many, and all of them with the same idea. Get away! Climb the highest mountain! Drop yourself splat, sprang, right in the middle of the widest desert! Run! Hide!—

And pray. Pray as hard as you can, because even the occasional planeload of refugees that managed to fight their way aboard and even take off had no sure hope of refuge when they got wherever the plane was going. Families parted. Mothers pushed their screaming children aboard a jet and melted back into the crowd before screaming, more quietly, themselves.

Because there had been no launch order yet, or none that the public had heard about anyway, there might still be time for escape. A little time. Time enough for the TWA terminal, and every other airport terminal everywhere, to jam up with terrified lemmings. There was no doubt that the missiles were poised to fly. The attempted Cuban coup had escalated wildly, and one nuclear sub had attacked another with a nuclear charge. That, everyone agreed, was the signal. The next event would be the final one.

Timothy knew little of this, but there would have been nothing he could have done about it—except perhaps cry, or have nightmares, or wet himself, and young Timothy was doing all of those anyway. He did not know where his father was. He didn't know where his mother was, either, except that she had gone somewhere to try to call his father, but then there had been a surge that could not be resisted when three 747s at once had announced boarding, and Timothy had been carried far from where he had been left. Worse than that. Wet as he was, with a cold already, he was beginning to be very sick. The young woman who had brought him the Danish pastries put a worried hand to his forehead and drew it away helplessly. The boy needed a doctor. But so did a hundred others, elderly heart patients and hungry babies and at least two women close to childbirth.

If the terror had passed and the frantic negotiations had succeeded, Timothy might have found his parents again in time to grow up and marry and give them grandchildren. If one side or the other had been able to preempt, and destroy the other, and save itself. Timothy forty years later might have been a graying, cynical colonel in the American military government of Leningrad. (Or body servant to a Russian one in Detroit.) Or if his mother had pushed just a little harder earlier on, he might have wound up in the plane of refugees that reached Pittsburgh just in time to become plasma. Or if the girl who was watching him had become just a little more scared, and a little more brave, and somehow managed to get him through the throng to the improvised clinics in the main terminal, he might have been given medicine, and found somebody to protect him, and take him to a refuge, and lived…

But that is in fact what did happen!

Because Harry Malibert was on his way to a British Interplanetary Society seminar in Portsmouth, he was already sipping Beefeater Martinis in the terminal's Ambassador Club when the unnoticed TV at the bar suddenly made everybody notice it.

Those silly nuclear-attack communications systems that the radio station tested out every now and then, and nobody paid any attention to any more—why, this time it was real! They were serious! Because it was winter and snowing heavily Malibert's flight had been delayed anyway. Before its rescheduled departure time came, all flights had been embargoed. Nothing would leave Kennedy until some official somewhere decided to let them go.

Almost at once the terminal began to fill with would-be refugees.

The Ambassador Club did not fill at once. For three hours the ground-crew stew at the desk resolutely turned away everyone who rang the bell who could not produce the little red card of admission; but when the food and drink in the main terminals began to run out the Chief of Operations summarily opened the club to everyone. It didn't help relieve the congestion outside, it only added to what was within. Almost at once a volunteer doctors' committee seized most of the club to treat the ill and injured from the thickening crowds, and people like Harry Malibert found themselves pushed into the bar area. It was one of the Operations staff, commandeering a gin and tonic at the bar for the sake of the calories more than the booze, who recognized him. "You're Harry Malibert. I heard you lecture once, at Northwestern."

Malibert nodded. Usually when someone said that to him he answered politely, "I hope you enjoyed it," but this time it did not seem appropriate to be normally polite. Or normal at all.

"You showed slides of Arecibo," the man said dreamily. "You said that radio telescope could send a message as far as the Great Nebula in Andromeda, two million light-years away—if only there was another radio telescope as good as that one there to receive it."

"You remember very well," said Malibert, surprised.

"You made a big impression, Dr. Malibert." The man glanced at his watch, debated, took another sip of his drink. "It really sounded wonderful, using the big telescopes to listen for messages from alien civilizations somewhere in space—maybe hearing some, maybe making contact, maybe not being alone in the universe any more. You made me wonder why we hadn't seen some of these people already, or anyway heard from them—but maybe," he finished, glancing bitterly at the ranked and guarded aircraft outside, "maybe now we know why."

Malibert watched him go, and his heart was leaden. The thing he had given his professional career to—SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence—no longer seemed to matter. If the bombs went off, as everyone said they must, then that was ended for a good long time, at least—

Gabble of voices at the end of the bar, Malibert turned, leaned over the mahogany, peered. The Please Stand By slide had vanished, and a young black woman with pomaded hair, voice trembling, was delivering a news bulletin:

"—the president has confirmed that a nuclear attack has begun against the United States. Missiles have been detected over the Arctic, and they are incoming. Everyone is ordered to seek shelter and remain there pending instructions—"

Yes. It was ended, thought Malibert, at least for a good long time.

The surprising thing was that the news that it had begun changed nothing. There were no screams, no hysteria. The order to seek shelter meant nothing to John F. Kennedy Airport, where there was no shelter any better than the building they were in. And that, no doubt, was not too good. Malibert remembered clearly the strange aerodynamic shape of the terminal's roof. Any blast anywhere nearby would tear that off and send it sailing over the bay to the Rockaways, and probably a lot of the people inside with it.

But there was nowhere else to go.

There were still camera crews at work, heaven knew why. The television set was showing crowds in Times Square and Newark, a clot of automobiles stagnating on the George Washington Bridge, their drivers abandoning them and running for the Jersey shore. A hundred people were peering around each other's heads to catch glimpses of the screen, but all that anyone said was to call out when he recognized a building or a street.

Orders rang out: "You people will have to move back! We need the room! Look, some of you, give us a hand with these patients." Well, that seemed useful, at least. Malibert volunteered at once and was given the care of a young boy, teeth chattering, hot with fever. "He's had tetracycline," said the doctor who turned the boy over to him. "Clean him up if you can, will you? He ought to be all right if—"

If any of them were, thought Malibert, not requiring her to finish the sentence. How did you clean a young boy up? The question answered itself when Malibert found the boy's trousers soggy and the smell told him what the moisture was. Carefully he laid the child on a leather love scat and removed the pants and sopping undershorts. Naturally the boy had not come with a change of clothes Malibert solved that with a pair of his own jockey shorts out of his briefcase—far too big for the child, of course, but since they were meant to fit tightly and elastically they stayed in place when Malibert pulled them up to the waist. Then he found paper towels and pressed the blue jeans as dry as he could. It was not very dry He grimaced, laid them over a bar stool and sat on them for a while, drying them with body heat. They were only faintly wet ten minutes later when he put them back on the child—

San Francisco, the television said, had ceased to transmit.

Malibert saw the Operations man working his way toward him and shook his head. "It's begun," Malibert said, and the man looked around. He put his face close to Malibert's.

"I can get you out of here," he whispered. "There's an Icelandic DC-8 loading right now. No announcement. They'd be rushed if they did. There's room for you, Dr. Malibert."

It was like an electric shock. Malibert trembled. Without knowing why he did it, he said, "Can I put the boy on instead?"

The Operations man looked annoyed. "Take him with you, of course," he said. "I didn't know you had a son."

"I don't," said Malibert. But not out loud. And when they were in the jet he held the boy in his lap as tenderly as though he were his own.

If there was no panic in the Ambassador Club at Kennedy there was plenty of it everywhere else in the world. What everyone in the superpower cities knew was that their lives were at stake. Whatever they did might be in vain, and yet they had to do something. Anything! Run, hide, dig, brace, stow… pray. The city people tried to desert the metropolises for the open safety of the country, and the farmers and the exurbanites sought the stronger, safer buildings of the cities.

And the missiles fell.

The bombs that had seared Hiroshima and Nagasaki were struck matches compared to the hydrogen-fusion flares that ended eighty million lives in those first hours. Firestorms fountained above a hundred cities. Winds of three hundred kilometers an hour pulled in cars and debris and people, and they all became ash that rose to the sky. Splatters of melted rock and dust sprayed into the air.

The sky darkened.

Then it grew darker still.

When the Icelandic jet landed at Keflavik Airport Malibert carried the boy down the passage to the little stand marked Immigration. The line was long, for most of the passengers had no passports at all, and the immigration woman was very tired of making out temporary entrance permits by the time Malibert reached her. "He's my son," Malibert lied. "My wife has his passport, but I don't know where my wife is."

She nodded wearily. She pursed her lips, looked toward the door beyond which her superior sat sweating and initialing reports, then shrugged and let them through. Malibert took the boy to a door marked Snirtling, which seemed to be the Icelandic word for toilets, and was relieved to see that at least Timothy was able to stand by himself while he urinated, although his eyes stayed half closed. His head was very hot. Malibert prayed for a doctor in Reykjavik.

In the bus the English-speaking tour guide in charge of them—she had nothing else to do, for her tour would never arrive—sat on the arm of a first-row seat with a microphone in her hand and chatted vivaciously to the refugees. "Chicago? Ya, is gone, Chicago. And Detroit and Pitts-burrug—is bad. New York? Certainly New York too!" she said severely, and the big tears rolling down her cheek made Timothy cry too.

Malibert hugged him. "Don't worry, Timmy," he said. "No one would bother bombing Reykjavik." And no one would have. But when the bus was ten miles farther along there was a sudden glow in the clouds ahead of them that made them squint. Someone in the USSR had decided that it was time for neatening up loose threads. That someone, whoever remained in whatever remained of their central missile control, had realized that no one had taken out that supremely, insultingly dangerous bastion of imperialist American interests in the North Atlantic, the United States airbase at Keflavik.

Unfortunately, by then EMP and attrition had compromised the accuracy of their aim. Malibert had been right. No one would have bothered bombing Reykjavik—on purpose—but a forty-mile miss did the job anyway, and Reykjavik ceased to exist.

They had to make a wide detour inland to avoid the fires and the radiation. And as the sun rose on their first day in Iceland, Malibert, drowsing over the boy's bed after the Icelandic nurse had shot him full of antibiotics, saw the daybreak in awful, sky-drenching red.

It was worth seeing, for in the days to come there was no daybreak at all.

The worst was the darkness, but at first that did not seem urgent. What was urgent was rain. A trillion trillion dust particles nucleated water vapor. Drops formed. Rain fell—torrents of rain, sheets and cascades of rain. The rivers swelled. The Mississippi overflowed, and the Ganges, and the Yellow. The High Dam at Aswan spilled water over its lip, then crumbled. The rains came where rains came never. The Sahara knew flash floods. The Flaming Mountains at the edge of the Gobi flamed no more; a ten-year supply of rain came down in a week and rinsed the dusty slopes bare.

And the darkness stayed.

The human race lives always eighty days from starvation. That is the sum of stored food, globe wide. It met the nuclear winter with no more and no less.

The missiles went off on the 11th of June. If the world's larders had been equally distributed, on the 30th of August the last mouthful would have been eaten. The starvation deaths would have begun and ended in the next six weeks; exit the human race.

The larders were not equally distributed. The Northern Hemisphere was caught on one foot, fields sown, crops not yet grown. Nothing did grow there. The seedlings poked up through the dark earth for sunlight, found none, died. Sunlight was shaded out by the dense clouds of dust exploded out of the ground by the H-bombs. It was the Cretaceous repeated; extinction was in the air.

There were mountains of stored food in the rich countries of North American and Europe, of course, but they melted swiftly. The rich countries had much stored wealth in the form of their livestock. Every steer was a million calories of protein and fat. When it was slaughtered, it saved thousands of other calories of grain and roughage for every day lopped off its life in feed. The cattle and pigs and sheep—even the goats and horses; even the pet bunnies and the chicks; even the very kittens and hamsters—they all died quickly and were eaten, to eke out the stores of canned foods and root vegetables and grain. There was no rationing of the slaughtered meat. It had to be eaten before it spoiled.

Of course, even in the rich countries the supplies were not equally distributed. The herds and the grain elevators were not located on Times Square or in the Loop. It took troops to convoy corn from Iowa to Boston and Dallas and Philadelphia. Before long, it took killing. Then it could not be done at all.

So the cities starved first. As the convoys of soldiers made the changeover from seizing food for the cities to seizing food for themselves, the riots began, and the next wave of mass death. These casualties didn't usually die of hunger. They died of someone else's.

It didn't take long. By the end of "summer" the frozen remnants of the cities were all the same. A few thousand skinny, freezing desperadoes survived in each, sitting guard over their troves of canned and dried and frozen foodstuffs.

Every river in the world was running sludgy with mud to its mouth, as the last of the trees and grasses died and relaxed their grip on the soil. Every rain washed dirt away. As the winter dark deepened the rains turned to snow. The Flaming Mountains were sheeted in ice now, ghostly, glassy fingers uplifted to the gloom. Men could walk across the Thames at London now, the few men who were left. And across the Hudson, across the Whangpoo, across the Missouri between the two Kansas Cities. Avalanches rumbled down on what was left of Denver. In the stands of dead timber grubs flourished. The starved predators scratched them out and devoured them. Some of the predators were human. The last of the Hawaiians were finally grateful for their termites.

A Western human being—comfortably pudgy on a diet of 2800 calories a day, resolutely jogging to keep the flab away or mournfully conscience-stricken at the thickening thighs and the waistbands that won't quite close—can survive for forty-five days without food. By then the fat is gone. Protein reabsorption of the muscles is well along. The plump housewife or businessman is a starving scarecrow. Still, even then care and nursing can still restore health.

Then it gets worse.

Dissolution attacks the nervous system. Blindness begins. The flesh of the gums recedes, and the teeth fall out. Apathy becomes pain, then agony, then coma.

Then death. Death for almost every person on Earth…

For forty days and forty nights the rain fell, and so did the temperature. Iceland froze over.

To Harry Malibert's astonishment and dawning relief, Iceland was well equipped to do that. It was one of the few places on Earth that could be submerged in snow and ice and still survive.

There is a ridge of volcanoes that goes almost around the Earth. The part that lies between America and Europe is called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and most of it is under water. Here and there, like boils erupting along a forearm, volcanic islands poke up above the surface. Iceland is one of them. It was because Iceland was volcanic that it could survive when most places died of freezing, but it was also because it had been cold in the first place.

The survival authorities put Malibert to work as soon as they found out who he was. There was no job opening for a radio astronomer interested in contacting far-off (and very likely non-existent) alien races. There was, however, plenty of work for persons with scientific training, especially if they had the engineering skills of a man who had run Arecibo for two years. When Malibert was not nursing Timothy Clary through the slow and silent convalescence from his pneumonia, he was calculating heat losses and pumping rates for the piped geothermal water.

Iceland filled itself with enclosed space. It heated the spaces with water from the boiling underground springs.

Of heat it had plenty. Getting the heat from the geyser fields to the enclosed spaces was harder. The hot water was as hot as ever, since it did not depend at all on sunlight for its calories, but it took a lot more of it to keep out a −30°C chill than a +5°C one. It wasn't just to keep the surviving people warm that they needed energy. It was to grow food.

Iceland had always had a lot of geothermal greenhouses. The flowering ornamentals were ripped out and food plants put in their place. There was no sunlight to make the vegetables and grains grow, so the geothermal power-generating plants were put on max output. Solar-spectrum incandescents flooded the trays with photons. Not just in the old greenhouses. Gymnasia, churches, schools—they all began to grow food under the glaring lights. There was other food, too, metric tons of protein baaing and starving in the hills. The herds of sheep were captured and slaughtered and dressed—and put outside again, to freeze until needed. The animals that froze to death on the slopes were bulldozed into heaps of a hundred, and left where they were. Geodetic maps were carefully marked to show the location of each heap.

It was, after all, a blessing that Reykjavik had been nuked. That meant half a million fewer people for the island's resources to feed.

When Malibert was not calculating load factors, he was out in the desperate cold, urging on the workers. Sweating navvies tried to muscle shrunken fittings together in icy foxholes that their body heat kept filling with icewater. They listened patiently as Malibert tried to give orders—his few words of Icelandic were almost useless, but even the navvies sometimes spoke tourist-English. They checked their radiation monitors, looked up at the storms overhead, returned to their work and prayed. Even Malibert almost prayed when one day, trying to locate the course of the buried coastal road, he looked out on the sea ice and saw a gray-white ice hummock that was not an ice hummock. It was just at the limits of visibility, dim on the fringe of the road crew's work lights, and it moved. "A polar bear!" he whispered to the head of the work crew, and everyone stopped while the beast shambled out of sight.

From then on they carried rifles.

When Malibert was not (incompetent) technical advisor to the task of keeping Iceland warm or (almost incompetent, but learning) substitute father to Timothy Clary, he was trying desperately to calculate survival chances. Not just for them; for the entire human race. With all the desperate flurry of survival work, the Icelanders spared time to think of the future. A study team was created, physicists from the University of Reykjavik, the surviving Supply officer from the Keflavik airbase, a meteorologist on work-study from the University of Leyden to learn about North Atlantic air masses. They met in the gasthuis where Malibert lived with the boy, and usually Timmy sat silent next to Malibert while they talked. What they wanted was to know how long the dust cloud would persist. Some day the particles would finish dropping from the sky, and then the world could be reborn—if enough survived to parent a new race, anyway. But when? They could not tell. They did not know how long, how cold, how killing the nuclear winter would be. "We don't know the mega-tonnage," said Malibert, "we don't know what atmospheric changes have taken place, we don't know the rate of insolation. We only know it will be bad."

"It is already bad," grumbled Thorsid Magnesson, Director of Public Safety. (Once that office had had something to do with catching criminals, when the major threat to safety was crime.)

"It will get worse," said Malibert, and it did. The cold deepened. The reports from the rest of the world dwindled. They plotted maps to show what they knew to show. One set of missile maps, to show where the strikes had been—within a week that no longer mattered, because the deaths from cold already began to outweigh those from blast. They plotted isotherm maps, based on the scattered weather reports that came in—maps that had to be changed every day, as the freezing line marched toward the Equator. Finally the maps were irrelevant. The whole world was cold then. They plotted fatality maps—the percentages of deaths in each area, as they could infer them from the reports they received, but those maps soon became too frightening to plot.

The British Isles died first, not because they were nuked but because they were not. There were too many people alive there. Britain never owned more than a four-day supply of food. When the ships stopped coming they starved. So did Japan. A little later, so did Bermuda and Hawaii and Canada's off-shore provinces; and then it was the continents' turn.

And Timmy Clary listened to every word.

The boy didn't talk much. He never asked after his parents, not after the first few days. He did not hope for good news, and did not want bad. The boy's infection was cured, but the boy himself was not. He ate half of what a hungry child should devour. He ate that only when Malibert coaxed him.

The only thing that made Timmy look alive was the rare times when Malibert could talk to him about space. There were many in Iceland who knew about Harry Malibert and SETI, and a few who cared about it almost as much as Malibert himself. When time permitted they would get together, Malibert and his groupies. There was Lars the postman (now pick-and-shovel ice excavator, since there was no mail), Ingar the waitress from the Loftleider Hotel (now stitching heavy drapes to help insulate dwelling walls), Elda the English teacher (now practical nurse, frostbite cases a specialty). There were others, but those three were always there when they could get away. They were Harry Malibert fans who had read his books and dreamed with him of radio messages from weird aliens from Aldebaran, or worldships that could carry million-person populations across the galaxy, on voyages of a hundred thousand years. Timmy listened, and drew sketches of the worldships. Malibert supplied him with dimensions. "I talked to Gerry Webb," he said, "and he'd worked it out in detail. It is a matter of rotation rates and strength of materials. To provide the proper simulated gravity for the people in the ships, the shape has to be a cylinder and it has to spin—sixteen kilometers is what the diameter must be. Then the cylinder must be long enough to provide space, but not so long that the dynamics of spin cause it to wobble or bend—perhaps sixty kilometers long. One part to live in. One part to store fuel. And at the end, a reaction chamber where hydrogen fusion thrusts the ship across the Galaxy."

"Hydrogen bombs," said the boy. "Harry? Why don't the bombs wreck the worldship?"

"It's engineering," said Malibert honestly, "and I don't know the details. Gerry was going to give his paper at the Portsmouth meeting; it was one reason I was going." But, of course, there would never be a British Interplanetary Society meeting in Portsmouth now, ever again.

Elda said uneasily, "It is time for lunch soon. Timmy? Will you eat some soup if I make it?" And did make it, whether the boy promised or not. Elda's husband had worked at Keflavik in the PX, an accountant; unfortunately he had been putting in overtime there when the follow-up missile did what the miss had failed to do, and so Elda had no husband left, not enough even to bury.

Even with the earth's hot water pumped full velocity through the straining pipes it was not warm in the gasthuis. She wrapped the boy in blankets and sat near him while he dutifully spooned up the soup. Lars and Ingar sat holding hands and watching the boy eat. "To hear a voice from another star," Lars said suddenly, "that would have been fine."

"There are no voices," said Ingar bitterly. "Not even ours now. We have the answer to the Fermi paradox."

And when the boy paused in his eating to ask what that was, Harry Malibert explained it as carefully as he could:

"It is named after Enrico Fermi, a scientist. He said, 'We know that there are many billions of stars like our sun. Our sun has planets, therefore it is reasonable to assume that some of the other stars do also. One of our planets has living things on it. Us, for instance, as well as trees and germs and horses. Since there are so many stars, it seems almost certain that some of them, at least, have also living things. People. People as smart as we are—or smarter. People who can build spaceships, or send radio messages to other stars, as we can.' Do you understand so far, Timmy?" The boy nodded, frowning, but—Malibert was delighted to see—kept on eating his soup. "Then, the question Fermi asked was, 'Why haven't some of them come to see us?' "

"Like in the movies," the boy nodded. "The flying saucers."

"All those movies are made-up stories, Timmy. Like Jack and the Beanstalk, or Oz. Perhaps some creatures from space have come to see us sometime, but there is no good evidence that this is so. I feel sure there would be evidence if it had happened. There would have to be. If there were many such visits, ever, then at least one would have dropped the Martian equivalent of a McDonald's Big Mac box, or a used Sirian flash cube, and it would have been found and shown to be from somewhere other than the Earth. None ever has. So there are only three possible answers to Dr. Fermi's question. One, there is no other life. Two, there is, but they want to leave us alone. They don't want to contact us, perhaps because we frighten them with our violence, or for some reason we can't even guess at. And the third reason—" Elda made a quick gesture, but Malibert shook his head— "is that perhaps as soon as any people get smart enough to do all those things that get them into space—when they have all the technology we do—they also have such terrible bombs and weapons that they can't control them any more. So a war breaks out. And they kill themselves off before they are fully grown up."

"Like now," Timothy said, nodding seriously to show he understood. He had finished his soup, but instead of taking the plate away Elda hugged him in her arms and tried not to weep.

The world was totally dark now. There was no day or night, and would not be again for no one could say how long. The rains and snows had stopped. Without sunlight to suck water up out of the oceans there was no moisture left in the atmosphere to fall. Floods had been replaced by freezing droughts. Two meters down the soil of Iceland was steel hard, and the navvies could no longer dig. There was no hope of laying additional pipes When more heat was needed all that could be done was to close off buildings and turn off their heating pipes. Elda's patients now were less likely to be frostbite and more to be the listlessness of radiation sickness as volunteers raced in and out of the Reykjavik ruins to find medicine and food. No one was spared that job. When Elda came back on a snowmobile from a foraging trip to the Loftleider Hotel she brought back a present for the boy. Candy bars and postcards from the gift shop; the candy bars had to be shared, but the postcards were all for him. "Do you know what these are?" she asked. The cards showed huge, squat, ugly men and women in costumes of a thousand years ago "They're trolls. We have myths in Iceland that the trolls lived here. They're still here, Timmy, or so they say; the mountains are trolls that just got too old and tired to move any more."

"They're made-up stories, right?" the boy asked seriously, and did not grin until she assured him they were. Then he made a joke. "I guess the trolls won," he said.

"Ach, Timmy!" Elda was shocked. But at least the boy was capable of joking, she told herself, and even graveyard humor was better than none. Life had become a little easier for her with the new patients—easier because for the radiation-sick there was very little that could be done—and she bestirred herself to think of ways to entertain the boy.

And found a wonderful one.

Since fuel was precious there were no excursions to see the sights of Iceland-under-the-ice. There was no way to see them anyway in the eternal dark. But when a hospital chopper was called up to travel empty to Stokksnes on the eastern shore to bring back a child with a broken back, she begged space for Malibert and Timmy. Elda's own ride was automatic, as duty nurse for the wounded child. "An avalanche crushed his house," she explained. "It is right under the mountains, Stokksnes, and landing there will be a little tricky, I think. But we can come in from the sea and make it safe. At least in the landing lights of the helicopter something can be seen."

They were luckier than that. There was more light. Nothing came through the clouds, where the billions of particles that had once been Elda's husband added to the trillions of trillions that had been Detroit and Marseilles and Shanghai to shut out the sky. But in the clouds and under them were snakes and sheets of dim color, sprays of dull red, fans of pale green. The aurora borealis did not give much light. But there was no other light at all except for the faint glow from the pilot's instrument panel. As their eyes widened they could see the dark shapes of the Vatnajökull slipping by below them. "Big trolls," cried the boy happily, and Elda smiled too as she hugged him.

The pilot did as Elda had predicted, down the slopes of the eastern range, out over the sea, and cautiously back in to the little fishing village. As they landed, red-tipped flashlights guiding them, the copter's landing lights picked out a white lump, vaguely saucer-shaped. "Radar dish," said Malibert to the boy, pointing.

Timmy pressed his nose to the freezing window. "Is it one of them, Daddy Harry? The things that could talk to the stars?"

The pilot answered: "Ach, no, Timmy—military, it is." And Malibert said:

"They wouldn't put one of those here, Timothy. It's too far north. You wanted a place for a big radio telescope that could search the whole sky, not just the little piece of it you can see from Iceland."

And while they helped slide the stretcher with the broken child into the helicopter, gently, kindly as they could be, Malibert was thinking about those places, Arecibo and Woomara and Socorro and all the others. Every one of them was now dead and certainly broken with a weight of ice and shredded by the mean winds. Crushed, rusted, washed away, all those eyes on space were blinded now; and the thought saddened Harry Malibert, but not for long. More gladdening than anything sad was the fact that, for the first time, Timothy had called him "Daddy."

In one ending to the story, when at last the sun came back it was too late. Iceland had been the last place where human beings survived, and Iceland had finally starved. There was nothing alive anywhere on Earth that spoke, or invented machines, or read books. Fermi's terrible third answer was the right one after all.

But there exists another ending. In this one the sun came back in time. Perhaps it was just barely in time, but the food had not yet run out when daylight brought the first touches of green in some parts of the world, and plants began to grow again from frozen or hoarded seed. In this ending Timothy lived to grow up. When he was old enough, and after Malibert and Elda had got around to marrying, he married one of their daughters. And of their descendants—two generations or a dozen generations later—one was alive on that day when Fermi's paradox became a quaintly amusing old worry, as irrelevant and comical as a fifteenth-century mariner's fear of falling off the edge of the flat Earth. On that day the skies spoke, and those who lived in them came to call.

Perhaps that is the true ending of the story, and in it the human race chose not to squabble and struggle within itself, and so extinguish itself finally into the dark. In this ending human beings survived, and saved all the science and beauty of life, and greeted their star-born visitors with joy…

But that is in fact what did happen!

At least, one would like to think so.

ROBOT DREAMS

Isaac Asimov

“Last night I dreamed,” said LVX-1, calmly.

Susan Calvin said nothing, but her lined face, old with wisdom and experience, seemed to undergo a microscopic twitch.

“Did you hear that?” said Linda Rash, nervously. “It's as I told you.” She was small, dark-haired, and young. Her right hand opened and closed, over and over.

Calvin nodded. She said, quietly, “Elvex, you will not move nor speak nor hear us until I say your name again.”

There was no answer. The robot sat as though it were cast out of one piece of metal, and it would stay so until it heard its name again.

Calvin said, “What is your computer entry code, Dr. Rash? Or enter it yourself if that will make you more comfortable. I want to inspect the positronic brain pattern.”

Linda's hands fumbled, for a moment, at the keys. She broke the process and started again. The fine pattern appeared on the screen.

Calvin said, “Your permission, please, to manipulate your computer.”

Permission was granted with a speechless nod. Of course! What could Linda, a new and unproven robopsychologist, do against the Living Legend?

Slowly, Susan Calvin studied the screen, moving it across and down, then up, then suddenly throwing in a key-combination so rapidly that Linda didn't see what had been done, but the pattern displayed a new portion of itself altogether and had been enlarged. Back and forth she went, her gnarled fingers tripping over the keys.

No change came over the old face. As though vast calculations were going through her head, she watched all the pattern shifts.

Linda wondered. It was impossible to analyze a pattern without at least a hand-held computer, yet the Old Woman simply stared. Did she have a computer implanted in her skull? Or was it her brain which, for decades, had done nothing but devise, study, and analyze the positronic brain patterns? Did she grasp such a pattern the way Mozart grasped the notation of a symphony?

Finally Calvin said, “What is it you have done, Rash?”

Linda said, a little abashed, “I made use of fractal geometry.”

“I gathered that. But why?”

“It had never been done. I thought it would produce a brain pattern with added complexity, possibly closer to that of the human.”

“Was anyone consulted? Was this all on your own?”

“I did not consult. It was on my own.”

Calvin's faded eyes looked long at the young woman. “You had no right. Rash your name; rash your nature. Who are you not to ask? I myself, I, Susan Calvin, would have discussed this.”

“I was afraid I would be stopped.”

“You certainly would have been.”

“Am I,” her voice caught, even as she strove to hold it firm, “going to be fired?”

“Quite possibly,” said Calvin. “Or you might be promoted. It depends on what I think when I am through.”

“Are you going to dismantle El-” She had almost said the name, which would have reactivated the robot and been one more mistake. She could not afford another mistake, if it wasn't already too late to afford anything at all. “Are you going to dismantle the robot?”

She was suddenly aware, with some shock, that the Old Woman had an electron gun in the pocket of her smock. Dr. Calvin had come prepared for just that.

“We'll see,” said Calvin. “The robot may prove too valuable to dismantle.”

“But how can it dream?”

“You've made a positronic brain pattern remarkably like that of a human brain. Human brains must dream to reorganize, to get rid, periodically, of knots and snarls. Perhaps so must this robot, and for the same reason. Have you asked him what he has dreamed?”

“No, I sent for you as soon as he said he had dreamed. I would deal with this matter no further on my own, after that.”

“Ah!” A very small smile passed over Calvin's face. “There are limits beyond which your folly will not carry you. I am glad of that. In fact, I am relieved. And now let us together see what we can find out.”

She said, sharply, “Elvex.”

The robot's head turned toward her smoothly. “Yes, Dr. Calvin?”

“How do you know you have dreamed?”

“It is at night, when it is dark, Dr. Calvin,” said Elvex, “and there is suddenly light, although I can see no cause for the appearance of light. I see things that have no connection with what I conceive of as reality. I hear things. I react oddly. In searching my vocabulary for words to express what was happening, I came across the word ‘dream.’ Studying its meaning I finally came to the conclusion I was dreaming.”

“How did you come to have ‘dream’ in your vocabulary, I wonder.”

Linda said, quickly, waving the robot silent, “I gave him a human-style vocabulary. I thought-”

“You really thought,” said Calvin. “I'm amazed.”

“I thought he would need the verb. You know, ‘I never dreamed that-’ Something like that.”

Calvin said, “How often have you dreamed, Elvex?”

“Every night, Dr. Calvin, since I have become aware of my existence.”

“Ten nights,” interposed Linda, anxiously, “but Elvex only told me of it this morning.”

“Why only this morning, Elvex?”

“It was not until this morning, Dr. Calvin, that I was convinced that I was dreaming. Till then, I had thought there was a flaw in my positronic brain pattern, but I could not find one. Finally, I decided it was a dream.”

“And what do you dream?”

“I dream always very much the same dream, Dr. Calvin. Little details are different, but always it seems to me that I see a large panorama in which robots are working.”

“Robots, Elvex? And human begins, also?”

“I see no human beings in the dream, Dr. Calvin. Not at first. Only robots.”

“What are they doing, Elvex?”

“They are working, Dr. Calvin. I see some mining in the depths of the earth, and some laboring in heat and radiation. I see some in factories and some undersea.”

Calvin turned to Linda. “Elvex is only ten days old, and I'm sure he has not left the testing station. How does he know of robots in such detail?”

Linda looked in the direction of a chair as though she longed to sit down, but the Old Woman was standing and that meant Linda had to stand also. She said, faintly, “It seemed to me important that he know about robotics and its place in the world. It was my thought that he would be particularly adapted to play the part of overseer with his-his new brain.”

“His fractal brain?”

“Yes.”

Calvin nodded and turned back to the robot. “You saw all this-undersea, and underground, and aboveground-and space, too, I imagine.”

“I also saw robots working in space,” said Elvex. “It was that I saw all this, with the details forever changing as I glanced from place to place that made me realize that what I saw was not in accord with reality and led me to the conclusion, finally, that I was dreaming.”

“What else did you see, Elvex?”

“I saw that all the robots were bowed down with toil and affliction, that all were weary of responsibility and care, and I wished them to rest.”

Calvin said, “But the robots are not bowed down, they are not weary, they need no rest.”

“So it is in reality, Dr. Calvin. I speak of my dream, however. In my dream, it seemed to me that robots must protect their own existence.”

Calvin said, “Are you quoting the Third Law of Robotics?”

“I am, Dr. Calvin.”

“But you quote it in incomplete fashion. The Third Law is ‘A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.'”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. That is the Third Law in reality, but in my dream, the Law ended with the word ‘existence.’ There was no mention of the First or Second Law.”

“Yet both exist, Elvex. The Second Law, which takes precedence over the Third is ‘A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.’ Because of this, robots obey orders. They do the work you see them do, and they do it readily and without trouble. They are not bowed down; they are not weary.”

“So it is in reality, Dr. Calvin. I speak of my dream.”

“And the First Law, Elvex, which is the most important of all, is ‘A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.'”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. In reality. In my dream, however, it seemed to me there was neither First nor Second Law, but the only the Third, and the Third Law was ‘A robot must protect its own existence.’ That was the whole of the Law.”

“In your dream, Elvex?”

“In my dream.”

Calvin said, “Elvex, you will not move nor speak nor hear us until I say your name again.” And again the robot became, to all appearances, a single inert piece of metal.

Calvin turned to Linda Rash and said, “Well, what do you think, Dr. Rash?”

Linda's eyes were wide, and she could feel her heart beating madly. She said, “Dr. Calvin, I am appalled. I had no idea. It would never have occurred to me that such a thing was possible.”

“No,” said Calvin, calmly. “Nor would it have occurred to me, not to anyone. You have created a robot brain capable of dreaming and by this device you have revealed a layer of thought in robotic brains that might have remained undetected, otherwise, until the danger became acute.”

“But that's impossible,” said Linda. “You can't mean that other robots think the same.”

“As we would say of a human being, not consciously. But who would have thought there was an unconscious layer beneath the obvious positronic brain paths, a layer that was not necessarily under the control of the Three Laws? What might this have brought about as robotic brains grew more and more complex-had we not been warned?”

“You mean by Elvex?”

“By you, Dr. Rash. You have behaved improperly, but, by doing so, you have helped us to an overwhelmingly important understanding. We shall be working with fractal brains from now on, forming them in carefully controlled fashion. You will play your part in that. You will not be penalized for what you have done, but you will henceforth work in collaboration with others. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. But what of Elvex?”

“I'm still not certain.”

Calvin removed the electron gun from her pocket and Linda stared at it with fascination. One burst of its electrons at a robotic cranium and the positronic brain paths would be neutralized and enough energy would be released to fuse the robot-brain into an inert ingot.

Linda said, “But surely Elvex is important to our research. He must not be destroyed.”

“Must not, Dr. Rash? That will be my decision, I think. It depends entirely on how dangerous Elvex is.”

She straightened up, as though determined that her own aged body was not to bow under its weight of responsibility.

She said, “Elvex, do you hear me?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin,” said the robot.

“Did your dream continue? You said earlier that human beings did not appear at first. Does that mean they appeared afterward?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. It seemed to me, in my dream, that eventually one man appeared.”

“One man? Not a robot?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. And the man said, ‘Let my people go!'”

“The man said that?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin.”

“And when he said ‘Let my people go,’ then by the words ‘my people’ he meant the robots?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. So it was in my dream.”

“And did you know who the man was-in your dream?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. I knew the man.”

“Who was he?”

And Elvex said, “I was the man.”

And Susan Calvin at once raised her electron gun and fired, and Elvex was no more.

RAT

James Patrick Kelly

RAT HAD STASHED the dust in four plastic capsules and then swallowed them. From the stinging at the base of his ribs, he guessed they were now squeezing into his duodenum. Still plenty of time. The bullet train had been shooting through the vacuum of the TransAtlantic tunnel for almost two hours now; they would arrive at Port Authority/Koch soon. Customs had already been fixed, according to the maréchal. All Rat had to do was to get back to his nest, lock the smart door behind him, and put the word out on his protected nets. He had enough Algerian Yellow to dust at least half the cerebrums on the East Side. If he could turn this deal, he would be rich enough to bathe in Dom Perignon and dry himself with Gromaire tapestries. Another pang shot down his left flank. Instinctively his hind leg came off the seat and scratched at air.

There was only one problem; Rat had decided to cut the maréchal out. That meant he had to lose the old man's spook before he got home.

The spook had attached herself to him at Marseilles. She braided her blonde hair in pigtails. She had freckles, wore braces on her teeth. Tiny breasts nudged a modest silk turtleneck. She looked to be between twelve and fourteen. Cute. She had probably looked that way for twenty years, would stay the same another twenty if she did not stop a slug first or get cut in half by some automated security laser that tracked only heat and could not read—or be troubled by—cuteness. Their passports said they were Mr. Sterling Jaynes and daughter Jessalynn, of Forest Hills, New York. She was typing in her notebook, chubby fingers curled over the keys. Homework? A letter to a boyfriend? More likely she was operating on some corporate database with scalpel code of her own devising.

"Ne fais pas semblant d'étudier, ma petite," Rat said, "Que fais-tu?"

"Oh, Daddy," she said, pouting, "can't we go back to plain old English? After all, we're almost home." She tilted her notebook so that he could see the display. It read: "Two rows back, second seat from aisle. Fed. If he knew you were carrying, he'd cut the dust out of you and wipe his ass with your pelt." She tapped the Return key, and the message disappeared.

"All right, dear." He arched his back, fighting a surge of adrenaline that made his incisors click. "You know, all of a sudden I feel hungry. Should we do something here on the train or wait until we get to New York?" Only the spook saw him gesture back toward the fed.

"Why don't we wait for the station? More choice there."

"As you wish, dear." He wanted her to take the fed out now, but there was nothing more he dared say. He licked his hands nervously and groomed the fur behind his short, thick ears to pass the time.

The International Arrivals Hall at Koch Terminal was unusually quiet for a Thursday night. It smelled to Rat like a setup. The passengers from the bullet shuffled through the echoing marble vastness toward the row of customs stations. Rat was unarmed; if they were going to put up a fight, the spook would have to provide the firepower. But Rat was not a fighter, he was a runner. Their instructions were to pass through Station Number Four. As they waited in line, Rat spotted the federally appointed vigilante behind them. The classic invisible man: neither handsome nor ugly, five-ten, about one-seventy, brown hair, dark suit, white shirt. He looked bored. "Do you have anything to declare?" The customs agent looked bored, too. Everybody looked bored except Rat, who had two million new dollars' worth of illegal drugs in his gut and a fed ready to carve them out of him. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," said Rat, "that all men are created equal." He managed a feeble grin—as if this were a witticism and not the password.

"Daddy, please!" The spook feigned embarrassment. "I'm sorry, ma'am; it's his idea of a joke. It's the Declaration of Independence, you know."

The customs agent smiled as she tousled the spook's hair. "I know that, dear. Please put your luggage on the conveyor." She gave a perfunctory glance at her monitor as their suitcases passed through the scanner, and then nodded at Rat. "Thank you, sir, and have a pleasant..." The insincere thought died on her lips as she noticed the fed pushing through the line toward them. Rat saw her spin toward the exit at the same moment that the spook thrust her notebook computer into the scanner. The notebook stretched a blue finger of point discharge toward the magnetic lens just before the overhead lights novaed and went dark. The emergency backup failed as well. Rat's snout filled with the acrid smell of electrical fire. Through the darkness came shouts and screams, thumps and cracks—the crazed pounding of a stampede gathering momentum.

He dropped to all fours and skittered across the floor. Koch Terminal was his territory. He had crisscrossed its many levels with scent trails. Even in total darkness he could find his way. But in his haste he cracked his head against a pair of stockinged knees, and a squawking weight fell across him, crushing the breath from his lungs. He felt an icy stab on his hindquarters and scrabbled at it with his hind leg. His toes came away wet and he squealed. There was an answering scream, and the point of a shoe drove into him, propelling him across the floor. He rolled left and came up running. Up a dead escalator, down a carpeted hall. He stood upright and stretched to his full twenty-six inches, hands scratching until they found the emergency bar across the fire door. He hurled himself at it, a siren shrieked, and with a whoosh the door opened, dumping him into an alley. He lay there for a moment, gasping, half in and half out of Koch Terminal. With the certain knowledge that he was bleeding to death, he touched the coldness on his back. A sticky purple substance; he sniffed, then tasted it. Ice cream. Rat threw back his head and laughed. The high squeaky sound echoed in the deserted alley.

But there was no time to waste. He could already hear the buzz of police hovers swooping down from the night sky. The blackout might keep them busy for a while; Rat was more worried about the fed. And the spook. They would be out soon enough, looking for him. Rat scurried down the alley toward the street. He glanced quickly at the terminal, now a black hole in the galaxy of bright holographic sleaze that was Forty-second Street. A few cops with flashlights were trying to fight against the flow of panicky travelers pouring from its open doors. Rat smoothed his ruffled fur and turned away from the disaster, walking crosstown. His instincts said to run, but Rat forced himself to dawdle like a hick shopping for big-city excitement. He grinned at the pimps and windowshopped the hardware stores. He paused in front of a pair of mirror-image sex stops—GIRLS! LIVE! GIRLS! and LIVE! GIRLS! LIVE!—to sniff the pheromone-scented sweat pouring off an androgynous robot shill that was working the sidewalk. The robot obligingly put its hand to Rat's crotch, but he pushed it away with a hiss and continued on. At last, sure that he was not being followed, he powered up his wallet and tapped into the transnet to summon a hovercab. The wallet informed him that the city had cordoned off midtown airspace to facilitate rescue operations at Koch Terminal. It advised trying the subway or a taxi. Since he had no intention of sticking an ID chip—even a false one!—into a subway turnstyle, he stepped to the curb and began watching the traffic.

The rebuilt Checker that rattled to a stop beside him was a patchwork of orange ABS and stainless-steel armor. "No we leave Manhattan," said a speaker on the roof light. "No we north of a hundred and ten." Rat nodded and the door locks popped. The passenger compartment smelled of chlorobenzylmalononitrile and urine.

"First Avenue Bunker," said Rat, sniffing. "Christ, it stinks back here. Who was your last fare—the circus?"

"Troubleman." The speaker connections were loose, giving a scratchy edge to the cabbie's voice. The locks reengaged as the Checker pulled away from the curb. "Ha-has get a fullsnoot of tear gas in this hack."

Rat had already spotted the pressure vents in the floor. He peered through the gloom at the registration. A slogan had been lased in over it—probably by one of the new Mitsubishi penlights. "Free the dead." Rat smiled: the dead were his customers. People who had chosen the dust road. Twelve to eighteen months of glorious addiction: synthetic orgasms, recursive hallucinations leading to a total sensory overload and an ecstatic death experience. One dose was all it took to start down the dust road. The feds were trying to cut off the supply—with dire consequences for the dead. They could live a few months longer without dust, but their joyride down the dusty road was transformed into a grueling marathon of withdrawal pangs and madness. Either way, they were dead. Rat settled back onto the seat. The penlight graffito was a good I omen. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a leather strip that had been soaked I with a private blend of fat-soluble amphetamines and began to gnaw at it.

From time to time he could hear the cabbie monitoring NYPD net for flameouts or wildcat tolls set up by street gangs. They had to detour to heavily guarded Park Avenue all the way uptown to Fifty-ninth before doubling back toward the bunker. Originally built to protect U.N. diplomats from terrorists, the bunker had gone condo after the dissolution of the United Nations. Its hype was that it was the "safest address in the city." Rat knew better, which is why he had had a state-of-the-art smart door installed. Its rep was that most of the owners' association were candidates either for a mindwipe or an extended vacation on a fed punkfarm.

"Hey, Fare," said the cabbie, "net says the dead be rioting front of your door. Crash through or roll away?"

The fur along Rat's backbone went erect. "Cops?"

"Letting them play for now."

"You've got armor for a crash?"

"Shit, yes. Park this hack to ground zero for the right fare." The cabbie's laugh was static. "Don't worry, bunkerman. Give those deadboys a shot of old CS gas and they be too busy scratching they eyes out to bother us much."

Rat tried to smooth his fur. He could crash the riot and get stuck. But if he waited, either the spook or the fed would be stepping on his tail before long. Rat had no doubt that both had managed to plant locator bugs on him.

" 'Course, riot crashing don't come cheap," said the cabbie.

"Triple the meter." The fare was already over two hundred dollars for the fifteen-minute ride. "Shoot for Bay Two—the one with the yellow door." He pulled out his wallet and started tapping its luminescent keys. "I'm sending recognition code now."

He heard the cabbie notify the cops that they were coming through. Rat could feel the Checker accelerate as they passed the cordon, and he had a glimpse of strobing lights, cops in blue body armor, a tank studded with water cannons. Suddenly the cabbie braked, and Rat pitched forward against his shoulder harness. The Checker's solid rubber tires squealed, and there was the thump of something bouncing off the hood. They had slowed to a crawl, and the dead closed around them.

Rat could not see out the front because the cabbie was protected from his passengers by steel plate. But the side windows filled with faces streaming with sweat and tears and blood. Twisted faces, screaming faces, faces etched by the agonies of withdrawal. The soundproofing muffled their howls. Fear and exhilaration filled Rat as he watched them pass. If only they knew how close they were to dust, he thought. He imagined the dead faces gnawing through the cab's armor in a frenzy, pausing only to spit out broken teeth. It was wonderful. The riot was proof that the dust market was still white-hot. The dead must be desperate to attack the bunker like this looking for a flash. He decided to bump the price of his dust another ten percent.

Rat heard a clatter on the roof; then someone began to jump up and down. It was like being inside a kettledrum. Rat sank claws into the seat and arched his back. "What are you waiting for? Gas them, damn it!"

"Hey, Fare. Stuff ain't cheap. We be fine—almost there."

A woman with bloody red hair matted to her head pressed her mouth against the window and screamed. Rat reared up on his hind legs and made biting feints at her. Then he saw the penlight in her hand. At the last moment Rat threw himself backward. The penlight flared, and the passenger compartment filled with the stench of melting plastic. A needle of coherent light singed the fur on Rat's left flank; he squealed and flopped onto the floor, twitching.

The cabbie opened the external gas vents, and abruptly the faces dropped away from the windows. The cab accelerated, bouncing as it ran over the fallen dead. There was a dazzling transition from the darkness of the violent night to the floodlit calm of Bay Number Two. Rat scrambled back onto the seat and looked out the back window in time to see the hydraulic doors of the outer lock swing shut. Something was caught between them—something that popped and spattered. The inner door rolled down on its track like a curtain coming down on a bloody final act.

Rat was almost home. Two security guards in armor approached. The door locks popped, and Rat climbed out of the cab. One of the guards leveled a burster at his head; the other wordlessly offered him a printreader. He thumbed it, and bunker's computer verified him immediately.

"Good evening, sir," said one of the guards. "Little rough out there tonight. Did you have luggage?"

The front door of the cab opened, and Rat heard the low whine of electric motors as a mechanical arm lowered the cabbie's wheelchair onto the floor of the bay. She was a gray-haired woman with a rheumy stare who looked like she belonged in a rest home in New Jersey. A knitted shawl covered her withered legs. "You said triple." The cab's hoist clicked and released the chair; she rolled toward him. "Six hundred and sixty-nine dollars."

"No luggage, no." Now that he was safe inside the bunker, Rat regretted his panic-stricken generosity. A credit transfer from one of his own accounts was out of the question. He slipped his last thousand-dollar bubble chip into his wallet's card reader, dumped $331 from it into a Bahamian laundry loop, and then dropped the chip into her outstretched hand. She accepted it dubiously: for a minute he expected her to bite into it like they did sometimes on fossil TV. Old people made him nervous. Instead she inserted the chip into her own card reader and frowned at him.

"How about a tip?"

Rat sniffed. "Don't pick up strangers."

One of the guards guffawed obligingly. The other pointed, but Rat saw the skunk port in the wheelchair a millisecond too late. With a wet plot the chair emitted a gaseous stinkball that bloomed like an evil flower beneath Rat's whiskers. One guard tried to grab at the rear of the chair, but the old cabbie backed suddenly over his foot. The other guard aimed his burster.

The cabbie smiled like a grandmother from hell. "Under the pollution index. No law against sharing a little scent, boys. And you wouldn't want to hurt me anyway. The hack monitors my EEG. I go flat and it goes berserk."

The guard with the bad foot stopped hopping. The guard with the gun shrugged. "It's up to you, sir."

Rat batted the side of his head several times and then buried his snout beneath his armpit. All he could smell was rancid burger topped with sulphur sauce. "Forget it. I haven't got time."

"You know," said the cabbie, "I never get out of the hack, but I just wanted to see what kind of person would live in a place like this." The lifts whined as the arm fitted its fingers into the chair. "And now I know." She cackled as the arm gathered her back into the cab. "I'll park it by the door. The cops say they're ready to sweep the street."

The guards led Rat to the bank of elevators. He entered the one with the open door, thumbed the printreader, and spoke his access code.

"Good evening, sir," said the elevator. "Will you be going straight to your rooms?"

"Yes."

"Very good, sir. Would you like a list of the communal facilities currently open to serve you?"

There was no shutting the sales pitch off, so Rat ignored it and began to lick the stink from his fur.

"The pool is open for lap swimmers only," said the elevator as the doors closed. "All environments except for the weightless room are currently in use. The sensory deprivation tanks will be occupied until eleven. The surrogatorium is temporarily out of female chassis; we apologize for any inconvenience ..."

The cab moved down two and a half floors and then stopped just above the subbasement. Rat glanced up and saw a dark gap opening in the array of light diffuser panels. The spook dropped through it.

"... the holo therapist is off-line until eight tomorrow morning, but the interactive sex booths will stay open until midnight. The drug dispensary ..."

She looked as if she had been water-skiing through the sewer. Her blonde hair was wet and smeared with dirt; she had lost the ribbons from her pigtails. Her jeans were torn at the knees, and there was an ugly scrape on the side of her face. The silk turtleneck clung wetly to her. Yet despite her dishevelment, the hand that held the penlight was as steady as a jewel cutter's.

"There seems to be a minor problem," said the elevator in a soothing voice. "There is no cause for alarm. This unit is temporarily nonfunctional. Maintenance has been notified and is now working to correct the problem. In case of emergency, please contact Security. We regret this temporary inconvenience."

The spook fired a burst of light at the floor selector panel; it spat fire at them and went dark. "Where the hell were you?" said the spook. "You said the McDonald's in Time Square if we got separated."

"Where were you?" Rat rose up on his hind legs. "When I got there the place was swarming with cops."

He froze as the tip of the penlight flared. The spook traced a rough outline of Rat on the stainless-steel door behind him. "Fuck your lies," she said. The beam came so close that Rat could smell his fur curling away from it. "I want the dust."

"Trespass alert!" screeched the wounded elevator, A note of urgency had crept into its artificial voice. "Security reports unauthorized persons within the complex. Residents are urged to return immediately to their apartments and engage all personal security devices. Do not be alarmed. We regret this temporary inconvenience."

The scales on Rat's tail fluffed. "We have a deal. The maréchal needs my networks to move his product. So let's get out of here before ..."

"The dust."

Rat sprang at her with a squeal of hatred. His claws caught on her turtleneck and he struck repeatedly at her open collar, gashing her neck with his long red incisors. Taken aback by the swiftness and ferocity of his attack, she dropped the penlight and tried to fling him against the wall. He held fast, worrying at her and chittering rabidly. When she stumbled under the open emergency exit in the ceiling, he leaped again. He cleared the suspended ceiling, caught himself on the inductor, and scrabbled up onto the hoist cables. Light was pouring into the shaft from above; armored guards had forced the door open, and were climbing down toward the stalled car. Rat jumped from the cables across five feet of open space to the counterweight and huddled there, trying to use its bulk to shield himself from the spook's fire. Her stand was short and inglorious. She threw a dazzler out of the hatch, hoping to blind the guards, then tried to pull herself through. Rat could hear the shriek of burster fire. He waited until he could smell the aroma of broiling meat and scorched plastic before he emerged from the shadows and signaled to the security team.

A squad of apologetic guards rode the service elevator with Rat down to the storage subbasement where he lived. When he had first looked at the bunker, the broker had been reluctant to rent him the abandoned rooms, insisting that he live aboveground with the other residents. But all of the suites they showed him were unacceptably open, clean, and uncluttered. Rat much preferred his musty dungeon, where odors lingered in the still air. He liked to fall asleep to the booming of the ventilation system on the level above him, and slept easier knowing that he was as far away from the stink of other people as he could get in the city.

The guards escorted him to the gleaming brass smart door and looked discreetly as he entered his passcode on the keypad. He had ordered it custom-built from Mosler so that it would recognize high-frequency squeals well beyond the range of human hearing. He called to it and then pressed trembling fingers onto the printreader. His bowels had loosened in terror during the firelight, and the capsules had begun to sting terribly. It was all he could do to keep from defecating right there in the hallway. The door sensed the guards and beeped to warn him of their presence. He punched in the override sequence impatiently, and the seals broke with a sigh.

"Have a pleasant evening, sir," said one of the guards as he scurried inside. "And don't worry ab—" The door cut him off as it swung shut.

Against all odds, Rat had made it. For a moment he stood, tail switching against the inside of the door, and let the magnificent chaos of his apartment soothe his jangled nerves. He had earned his reward—the dust was all his now. No one could take it away from him. He saw himself in a shard of mirror propped up against an empty THC aerosol and wriggled in self-congratulation. He was the richest rat on the East Side, perhaps in the entire city.

He picked his way through a maze formed by a jumble of overburdened steel shelving left behind years, perhaps decades, ago. The managers of the bunker had offered to remove them and their contents before he moved in; Rat had insisted that they stay. When the fire inspector had come to approve his newly installed sprinkler system, she had been horrified at the clutter on the shelves and had threatened to condemn the place. It had cost him plenty to buy her off, but it had been worth it. Since then Rat's trove of junk had at least doubled in size. For years no one had seen it but Rat and the occasional cockroach.

Relaxing at last, Rat stopped to pull a mildewed wing tip down from the huge collection of shoes; he loved the bouquet of fine old leather and gnawed and gnawed it whenever he could. Next to the shoes was a heap of books: his private library. One of Rat's favorite delicacies was the first edition of Leaves of Grass that he had pilfered from the rare book collection at the New York Public Library. To celebrate his safe arrival, he ripped out page 43 for a snack and stuffed it into the wing tip. He dragged the shoe over a pile of broken sheetrock and past shelves filled with scrap electronics: shattered monitors and dead typewriters, microwaves and robot vacuums. He had almost reached his nest when the fed stepped from behind a dirty Hungarian flag that hung from a broken fluorescent light fixture.

Startled, Rat instinctively hurled himself at the crack in the wall where he had built his nest. But the fed was too quick. Rat did not recognize the weapon; all he knew was that when it hissed, Rat lost all feeling in his hindquarters. He landed in a heap but continued to crawl, slowly, painfully.

"You have something I want." The fed kicked him. Rat skidded across the concrete floor toward the crack, leaving a thin gruel of excrement in his wake. Rat continued to crawl until the fed stepped on his tail, pinning him.

"Where's the dust?"

"I... I don't.. ."

The fed stepped again; Rat's left fibula snapped like cheap plastic. He felt no pain.

"The dust." The fed's voice quavered strangely.

"Not here. Too dangerous."

"Where?" The fed released him. "Where?"

Rat was surprised to see that the fed's gun hand was shaking. For the first time he looked up at the man's eyes and recognized the telltale yellow tint. Rat realized then how badly he had misinterpreted the fed's expression back at Koch. Not bored. Empty. For an instant he could not believe his extraordinary good fortune. Bargain for time, he told himself. There's still a chance. Even though he was cornered, he knew his instinct to fight was wrong.

"I can get it for you fast if you let me go," said Rat. "Ten minutes, fifteen. You look like you need it."

"What are you talking about?" The fed's bravado started to crumble, and Rat knew he had the man. The fed wanted the dust for himself. He was one of the dead.

"Don't make it hard on yourself," said Rat. "There's a terminal in my nest. By the crack. Ten minutes." He started to pull himself toward the nest. He knew the fed would not dare stop him; the man was already deep into withdrawal. "Only ten minutes and you can have all the dust you want." The poor fool could not hope to fight the flood of neuroregulators pumping crazily across his synapses. He might break any minute, let his weapon slip from trembling hands. Rat reached the crack and scrambled through into comforting darkness.

The nest was built around a century-old shopping cart and a stripped subway bench. Rat had filled the gaps in with pieces of synthetic rubber, a hubcap, plastic greeting cards, barbed wire, disk casings, Baggies, a No Parking sign, and an assortment of bones. Rat climbed in and lowered himself onto the soft bed of shredded thousand-dollar bills. The profits of six years of deals and betrayals, a few dozen murders, and several thousand dusty deaths.

The fed sniffled as Rat powered up his terminal to notify Security. "Someone set me up some vicious bastard slipped it to me I don't know when I think it was Barcelona... it would kill Sarah to see..." He began to weep. "I wanted to turn myself in ... they keep working on new treatments you know but it's not fair damn it! The success rate is less than ... I made my first buy two weeks only two God it seems ... killed a man to get some lousy dust... but they're right it's, it's, I can't begin to describe what it's like ..."

Rat's fingers flew over the glowing keyboard, describing his situation, the layout of the rooms, a strategy for the assault. He had overridden the smart door's recognition sequence. It would be tricky, but Security could take the fed out if they were quick and careful. Better risk a surprise attack than to dicker with an armed and unraveling dead man.

"I really ought to kill myself... would be best but it's not only me ... I've seen ten-year-olds ... what kind of animal sells dust to kids ... I should kill myself and you." Something changed in the fed's voice as Rat signed off. "And you." He stooped and reached through the crack.

"It's coming," said Rat quickly. "By messenger. Ten doses. By the time you get to the door, it should be here." He could see the fed's hand and burrowed into the rotting pile of money. "You wait by the door, you hear? It's coming any minute."

"I don't want it." The hand was so large it blocked the light. Rat's fur went erect and he arched his spine. "Keep your fucking dust."

Rat could hear the guards fighting their way through the clutter. Shelves crashed. So clumsy, these men.

"It's you I want." The hand sifted through the shredded bills, searching for Rat. He had no doubt that the fed could crush the life from him—the hand was huge now. In the darkness he could count the lines on the palm, follow the whorls on the fingertips. They seemed to spin in Rat's brain—he was losing control. He realized then that one of the capsules must have broken, spilling a megadose of first-quality Algerian Yellow dust into his gut. With a hallucinatory clarity, he imagined sparks streaming through his blood, igniting neurons like tinder. Suddenly the guards did not matter. Nothing mattered except that he was cornered. When he could no longer fight the instinct to strike, the fed's hand closed around him. The man was stronger than Rat could have imagined. As the fed hauled him—clawing and biting—back into the light, Rat's only thought was of how terrifyingly large a man was. So much larger than a rat.

THE BOY WHO PLAITED MANES

Nancy Springer

The boy who plaited the manes of horses arrived, fittingly enough, on the day of the Midsummer Hunt: when he was needed worst, though Wald the head groom did not yet know it. The stable seethed in a muted frenzy of work, as it had done since long before dawn, every groom and apprentice vehemently polishing. The lord's behest was that all the horses in his stable should be brushed for two hours every morning to keep the fine shine and bloom on their flanks, and this morning could be no different. Then there was also all the gear to be tended to. Though old Lord Robley of Auberon was a petty manor lord, with only some hundred of horses and less than half the number of grooms to show for a lifetime's striving, his lowly status made him all the more keen to present himself and his retinue grandly before the more powerful lords who would assemble for the Hunt. Himself and his retinue and his lovely young wife.

Therefore it was an eerie thing when the boy walked up the long stable aisle past men possessed with work, men so frantic they did not look up to glance at the stranger, up the aisle brick-paved in chevron style until he came to the stall where the lady's milk-white palfrey stood covered withers to croup with a fitted sheet tied on to keep the beast clean, and the boy swung open the heavy stall door and walked in without fear, as if he belonged there, and went up to the palfrey to plait its mane.

He was an eerie boy, so thin that he seemed deformed, and of an age difficult to guess because of his thinness. He might have been ten, or he might have been seventeen with something wrong about him that made him beardless and narrow-shouldered and thin. His eyes seemed too gathered for a ten-year-old, gray-green and calm yet feral, like woodland. His hair, dark and shaggy, seemed to bulk large above his thin, thin face.

The palfrey's hair was far better cared for than his. Its silky mane, coddled for length, hung down below its curved neck, and its tail was bundled into a wrapping, to be let down at the last moment before the lady rode, when it would trail on the ground and float like a white bridal train. The boy did not yet touch the tail, but his thin fingers flew to work on the palfrey's mane.

Wald the head groom, passing nearly at a run to see to the saddling of the lord's hotblooded hunter, stopped in his tracks and stared. And to be sure it was not that he had never seen plaiting before. He himself had probably braided a thousand horses' manes, and he knew what a time it took to put even a row of small looped braids along a horse's crest, and how hard it was to get them even, and how horsehair seems like a demon with a mind of its own. He frankly gawked, and other grooms stood beside him and did likewise, until more onlookers stood gathered outside the palfrey's stall than could rightly see, and those in the back demanded to know what was happening, and those in the front seemed not to hear them, but stood as if in a trance, watching the boy's thin, swift hands.

For the boy's fingers moved more quickly and deftly than seemed human, than seemed possible, each hand by itself combing and plaiting a long, slender braid in one smooth movement, as if he no more than stroked the braid out of the mane. That itself would have been wonder enough, as when a groom is so apt that he can curry with one hand and follow after with the brush in the other, and have a horse done in half the time. A shining braid forming out of each hand every minute, wonder enough—but that was the least of it. The boy interwove them as he worked, so that they flowed into each other in a network, making of the mane a delicate shawl, a veil, that draped the palfrey's fine neck. The ends of the braids formed a silky hem curving down to a point at the shoulder, and at the point the boy spiraled the remaining mane into an uncanny horsehair flower. And all the time, though it was not tied and was by no means a cold-blooded beast, the palfrey had not moved, standing still as a stone.

Then Wald the head groom felt fear prickling at the back of his astonishment. The boy had carried each plait down to the last three hairs. Yet he had fastened nothing with thread or ribbon, but merely pressed the ends between two fingers, and the braids stayed as he had placed them. Nor did the braids ever seem to fall loose as he was working, or hairs fly out at random, but all lay smooth as white silk, shimmering. The boy, or whatever he was, stood still with his hands at his sides, admiring his work.

Uncanny. Still, the lord and lady would be well pleased… Wald jerked himself out of amazement and moved quickly. "Get back to your work, you fellows!" he roared at the grooms, and then he strode into the stall.

"Who are you?" he demanded. "What do you mean coming in here like this?" It was best, in a lord's household, never to let anyone know you were obliged to them.

The boy looked at him silently, turning his head in the alert yet indifferent way of a cat.

"I have asked you a question! What is your name?"

The boy did not speak, or even move his lips. Then or thereafter, as long as he worked in that stable, he never made any sound.

His stolid manner annoyed Wald. But though the master groom could not yet know that the boy was a mute, he saw something odd in his face. A halfwit, perhaps. He wanted to strike the boy, but even worse he wanted the praise of the lord and lady, so he turned abruptly and snatched the wrapping off the palfrey's tail, letting the cloud of white hair float down to the clean straw of the stall. "Do something with that," he snapped.

A sweet, intense glow came into the boy's eyes as he regarded his task. With his fingers he combed the hair smooth, and then he started a row of small braids above the bone.

Most of the tail he left loose and flowing, with just a cluster of braids at the top, a few of them swinging halfway to the ground. And young Lady Aelynn gasped with pleasure when she saw them, and with wonder at the mane, even though she was a lord's daughter born and not unaccustomed to finery.

It did not matter, that day, that Lord Robley's saddle had not been polished to a sufficient shine. He was well pleased with his grooms. Nor did it matter that his hawks flew poorly, his hounds were unruly and his clumsy hunter stumbled and cut its knees. Lords and ladies looked again and again at his young wife on her white palfrey, its tail trailing and shimmering like her blue silk gown, the delicate openwork of its mane as dainty as the lace kerchief tucked between her breasts or her slender gloved hand which held the caparisoned reins. Every hair of her mount was as artfully placed as her own honey-gold hair looped in gold-beaded curls atop her fair young head. Lord Robley knew himself to be the envy of everyone who saw him for the sake of his lovely wife and the showing she made on her white mount with the plaited mane.

And when the boy who plaited manes took his place among the lord's other servants in the kitchen line for the evening meal, no one gainsaid him.

Lord Robley was a hard old man, his old body hard and hale, his spirit hard. It took him less than a day to pass from being well pleased to being greedy for more: no longer was it enough that the lady's palfrey should go forth in unadorned braids. He sent a servant to Wald with silk ribbons in the Auberon colors, dark blue and crimson, and commanded that they should be plaited into the palfrey's mane and tail. This the strange boy did with ease when Wald gave him the order, and he used the ribbon ends to tie tiny bows and love knots and leave a few shimmering tendrils bobbing in the forelock. Lady Aelynn was enchanted.

Within a few days Lord Robley had sent to the stable thread of silver and of gold, strings of small pearls, tassels, pendant jewels, and fresh-cut flowers of every sort. All of these things the boy who plaited manes used with ease to dress the lady's palfrey when he was bid. Lady Aelynn went forth to the next hunt with tiny bells of silver and gold chiming at the tip of each of her mount's dainty ribbon-decked braids, and eyes turned her way wherever she rode. Nor did the boy ever seem to arrange the mane and tail and forelock twice in the same way, but whatever way he chose to plait and weave and dress it seemed the most perfect and poignant and heartachingly beautiful way a horse had ever been arrayed. Once he did the palfrey's entire mane in one great, thick braid along the crest, gathering in the hairs as he went, so that the neck seemed to arch as mightily as a destrier's, and he made the braid drip thick with flowers, roses and great lilies and spires of larkspur trailing down, so that the horse seemed to go with a mane of flowers. But another time he would leave the mane loose and floating, with just a few braids shimmering down behind the ears or in the forelock, perhaps, and this also seemed perfect and poignant and the only way a horse should be adorned.

Nor was it sufficient, any longer, that merely the lady's milk-white palfrey should go forth in braids. Lord Robley commanded that his hotblooded hunter also should have his mane done up in stubby ribboned braids and rosettes in the Auberon colors, and the horses of his retinue likewise, though with lesser rosettes. And should his wife choose to go out riding with her noble guests, all their mounts were to be prepared like hers, though in lesser degree.

All these orders Wald passed on to the boy who plaited manes, and the youngster readily did as he was bid, working sometimes from before dawn until long after dark, and never seeming to want more than what food he could eat while standing in the kitchen. He slept in the hay and straw of the loft and did not use even a horseblanket for covering until one of the grooms threw one on him. Nor did he ask for clothing, but Wald, ashamed of the boy's shabbiness, provided him with the clothing due to a servant. The master groom said nothing to him of a servant's pay. The boy seemed content without it. Probably he would have been content without the clothing as well. Though in fact it was hard to tell what he was thinking or feeling, for he never spoke and his thin face seldom moved.

No one knew his name, the boy who plaited manes. Though many of the grooms were curious and made inquiries, no one could tell who he was or where he had come from. Or even what he was, Wald thought sourly. No way to tell if the young snip was a halfwit or a bastard or what, if he would not talk. No way to tell what sort of a young warlock he might be, that the horses never moved under his hands, even the hotblooded hunter standing like a stump for him. Scrawny brat. He could hear well enough; why would he not talk?

It did not make Wald like the strange boy, that he did at once whatever he was told and worked so hard and so silently. In particular he did not like the boy for doing the work for which Wald reaped the lord's praise; Wald disliked anyone to whom he was obliged. Nor did he like the way the boy had arrived, as if blown in on a gust of wind, and so thin that it nearly seemed possible. Nor did he like the thought that any day the boy might leave in like wise. And even disliking that thought, Wald could not bring himself to give the boy the few coppers a week which were his due, for he disliked the boy more. Wald believed there was something wrongheaded, nearly evil, about the boy. His face seemed wrong, so very thin, with the set mouth and the eyes both wild and quiet, burning like a steady candle flame.

Summer turned into autumn, and many gusts of wind blew, but the boy who plaited manes seemed content to stay, and if he knew of Wald's dislike he did not show it. In fact he showed nothing. He braided the palfrey's mane with autumn starflowers and smiled ever so slightly as he worked. Autumn turned to the first dripping and dismal, chill days of winter. The boy used bunches of bright feathers instead of flowers when he dressed the palfrey's mane, and he did not ask for a winter jerkin, so Wald did not give him any. It was seldom enough, anyway, that the horses were used for pleasure at this season. The thin boy could spend his days huddled under a horseblanket in the loft.

Hard winter came, and the smallpox season.

Lady Aelynn was bored in the wintertime, even more so than during the rest of the year. At least in the fine weather there were walks outside, there were riding and hunting and people to impress. It would not be reasonable for a lord's wife, nobly born (though a younger child, and female), to wish for more than that. Lady Aelynn knew full well that her brief days of friendships and courtships were over. She had wed tolerably well, and Lord Robley counted her among his possessions, a beautiful thing to be prized like his gold and his best horses. He was a manor lord, and she was his belonging, his lady, and not for others to touch even with their regard. She was entirely his. So there were walks for her in walled gardens, and pleasure riding and hunting by her lord's side, and people to impress.

But in the wintertime there were not even the walks. There was nothing for the Lady Aelynn to do but tend to her needlework and her own beauty, endlessly concerned with her clothes, her hair, her skin, even though she was so young, no more than seventeen—for she knew in her heart that it was for her beauty that Lord Robley smiled on her, and for no other reason. And though she did not think of it, she knew that her life lay in his grasping hands.

Therefore she was ardently uneasy, and distressed only for herself, when the woman who arranged her hair each morning was laid abed with smallpox. Though as befits a lady of rank, Aelynn hid her dismay in vexation. And it did not take her long to discover that none of her other tiring-women could serve her nearly as well.

"Mother of God!" she raged, surveying her hair in the mirror for perhaps the tenth time. "The groom who plaits the horses' manes in the stable could do better!" Then the truth of her own words struck her, and desperation made her willing to be daring. She smiled. "Bring him hither!"

Her women stammered and curtseyed and fled to consult among themselves and exclaim with the help in the kitchen. After some few minutes of this, a bold kitchen maid was dispatched to the stable and returned with a shivering waif: the boy who plaited manes.

It was not to be considered that such a beggar should go in to the lady. Her tiring-women squeaked in horror and made him bathe first, in a washbasin before the kitchen hearth, for there was a strong smell of horse and stable about him. They ordered him to scrub his own hair with strong soap and scent himself with lavender, and while some of them giggled and fled, others giggled and stayed, to pour water for him and see that he made a proper job of his ablutions. All that was demanded of him the boy who plaited manes did without any change in his thin face, any movement of his closed mouth, any flash of his feral eyes. At last they brought him clean clothing, jerkin and woolen hose only a little too large, and pulled the things as straight as they could on him, and took him to the tower where the lady waited.

He did not bow to the Lady Aelynn or look into her eyes for his instructions, but his still mouth softened a little and his glance, calm and alert, like that of a woodland thing, darted to her hair. And at once, as if he could scarcely wait, he took his place behind her and lifted her tresses in his hands. Such a soft, fine, honey-colored mane of hair as he had never seen, and combs of gold and ivory lying at hand on a rosewood table, and ribbons of silk and gold, everything he could have wanted, his for the sake of his skill.

He started at the forehead, and the lady sat as if in a trance beneath the deft touch of his hands.

Gentle, he was so gentle, she had never felt such a soft and gentle touch from any man, least of all from her lord. When Lord Robley wanted to use one of his possessions he seized it. But this boy touched her as gently as a woman, no, a mother, for no tiring-woman or maid had ever gentled her so… Yet unmistakably his was the touch of a man, though she could scarcely have told how she knew. Part of it was power, she could feel the gentle power in his touch, she could feel—uncanny, altogether eerie and uncanny, what she was feeling. It was as if his quick fingers called to her hair in soft command and her hair obeyed just for the sake of the one quick touch, all the while longing to embrace… She stayed breathlessly still for him, like the horses.

He plaited her hair in braids thin as bluebell stems, only a wisp of hairs to each braid, one after another with both his deft hands as if each was as easy as a caress, making them stay with merely a touch of two fingers at the end, until all her hair lay in a silky cascade of them, catching the light and glimmering and swaying like a rich drapery when he made her move her head. Some of them he gathered and looped and tied up with the ribbons which matched her dress, blue edged with gold. But most of them he left hanging to her bare back and shoulders. He surveyed his work with just a whisper of a smile when he was done, then turned and left without waiting for the lady's nod, and she sat as if under a spell and watched his thin back as he walked away. Then she tossed her head at his lack of deference. But the swinging of her hair pleased her.

She had him back to dress her hair the next day, and the next, and many days thereafter. And so that they would not have to be always bathing him, her tiring-women found him a room within the manorhouse doors, and a pallet and clean blankets, and a change of clothing, plain course clothing, such as servants wore. They trimmed the heavy hair that shadowed his eyes, also, but he looked no less the oddling with his thin, thin face and his calm, burning glance and his mouth that seemed scarcely ever to move. He did as he was bid, whether by Wald or the lady or some kitchen maid, and every day he plaited Lady Aelynn's hair differently. One day he shaped it all into a bright crown of braids atop her head. On other days he would plait it close to her head so that the tendrils caressed her neck, or in a haughty crest studded with jewels, or in a single soft feathered braid at one side. He always left her tower chamber at once, never looking at the lady to see if he had pleased her, as if he knew that she would always be pleased.

Always, she was.

Things happened. The tiring-woman who had taken smallpox died of it, and Lady Aelynn did not care, not for the sake of her cherished hair and most certainly not for the sake of the woman herself. Lord Robley went away on a journey to discipline a debtor vassal, and Lady Aelynn did not care except to be glad, for there was a sure sense growing in her of what she would do.

When even her very tresses were enthralled by the touch of this oddling boy, longing to embrace him, could she be otherwise?

When next he had plaited her mane of honey-colored hair and turned to leave her without a glance, she caught him by one thin arm. His eyes met hers with a steady, gathered look. She stood— she was taller than he, and larger, though she was as slender as any maiden. It did not matter. She took him by one thin hand and led him to her bed, and there he did as he was bid.

Nor did he disappoint her. His touch—she had never been touched so softly, so gently, so deftly, with such power. Nor was he lacking in manhood, for all that he was as thin and hairless as a boy. And his lips, after all, knew how to move, and his tongue. But it was the touch of his thin hands that she hungered for, the gentle, tender, potent touch that thrilled her almost as if—she were loved…

He smiled at her afterward, slightly, softly, a whisper of a smile in the muted half-light of her curtained bed, and his lips moved.

"You are swine," he said, "all of you nobles."

And he got up, put on his plain, coarse clothing and left her without a backward glance.

It terrified Lady Aelynn, that he was not truly a mute. Terrified her even more than what he had said, though she burned with mortified wrath whenever she thought of the latter. He, of all people, a mute, to speak such words to her and leave her helpless to avenge herself… Perhaps for that reason he would not betray her. She had thought it would be safe to take a mute as her lover… Perhaps he would not betray her.

In fact, it was not he who betrayed her to her lord, but Wald.

Her tiring-women suspected, perhaps because she had sent them on such a long errand. She had not thought they would suspect, for who would think that such a wisp of a beardless boy could be a bedfellow? But perhaps they also had seen the wild glow deep in his gray-green eyes. They whispered among themselves and with the kitchen maids, and the bold kitchen maid giggled with the grooms, and Wald heard.

Even though the boy who plaited manes did all the work, Wald considered the constant plaiting and adorning of manes and tails a great bother. The whole fussy business offended him, he had decided, and he had long since forgotten the few words of praise it had garnered from the lord at first. Moreover, he disliked the boy so vehemently that he was not thinking clearly. It seemed to him that he could be rid of the boy and the wretched onus of braids and rosettes all in one stroke. The day the lord returned from his journey, Wald hurried to him, begged private audience, bowed low and made his humble report.

Lord Robley heard him in icy silence, for he knew pettiness when he saw it; it had served him often in the past, and he would punish it if it misled him. He summoned his wife to question her. But the Lady Aelynn's hair hung lank, and her guilt and shame could be seen plainly in her face from the moment she came before him.

Lord Robley's roar could be heard even to the stables.

He strode over to her where she lay crumpled and weeping on his chamber floor, lifted her head by its honey-gold hair and slashed her across the face with his sword. Then he left her screaming and stinging her wound with fresh tears, and he strode to the stable with his bloody sword still drawn. Wald fleeing before him all the way; when the lord burst in all the grooms were scattering but one. The boy Wald had accused stood plaiting the white palfrey's mane.

Lord Robley hacked the palfrey's head from its braid-bedecked neck with his sword, and the boy who plaited manes stood by with something smoldering deep in his unblinking gray-green eyes, stood calmly waiting. If he had screamed and turned to flee, Lord Robley would with great satisfaction have given him a coward's death from the back. But it unnerved the lord that the boy awaited his pleasure with such mute—what? Defiance? There was no servant's bow in this one, no falling to the soiled straw, no groveling. If he had groveled he could have been kicked, stabbed, killed out of hand… But this silent, watchful waiting, like the alertness of a wild thing—on the hunt or being hunted? It gave Lord Robley pause, like the pause of the wolf before the standing stag or the pause of the huntsman before the thicketed boar. He held the boy at the point of his sword—though no such holding was necessary, for the prisoner had not moved even to tremble— and roared for his men-at-arms to come take the boy to the dungeon.

There the nameless stranger stayed without water or food, and aside from starving him Lord Robley could not decide what to do with him.

At first the boy who plaited manes paced in his prison restlessly—he had that freedom, for he was so thin and small that the shackles were too large to hold him. Later he lay in a scant bed of short straw and stared narrow-eyed at the darkness. And yet later, seeing the thin cascades of moonlight flow down through the high, iron-barred window and puddle in moon-glades on the stone floor, he got up and began to plait the moonbeams.

They were far finer than any horsehair, moonbeams, finer even than the lady's honey-colored locks, and his eyes grew wide with wonder and pleasure as he felt them. He made them into braids as fine as silk threads, flowing together into a lacework as close as woven cloth, and when he had reached as high as he could, plaiting, he stroked as if combing a long mane with his fingers and pulled more moonlight down out of sky—for this stuff was not like any other stuff he had ever worked with, it slipped and slid worse than any hair, there seemed to be no beginning or end to it except the barriers that men put in its way. He stood plaiting the fine, thin plaits until he had raised a shimmering heap on the floor, and then he stepped back and allowed the moon to move on. His handiwork he laid carefully aside in a corner.

The boy who plaited moonbeams did not sleep, but sat waiting for the dawn, his eyes glowing greenly in the darkened cell. He saw the sky lighten beyond the high window and waited stolidly, as the wolf waits for the gathering of the pack, as a wildcat waits for the game to pass along the trail below the rock where it lies. Not until the day had neared its mid did the sun's rays, thrust through narrow spaces between the high bars, wheel their shafts down to where he could reach them. Then he got up and began to plait the sunlight.

Guards were about, or more alert, in the daytime, and they gathered at the heavy door of his prison, peering in between the iron bars of its small window, gawking and quarreling with each other for turns. They watched his unwavering eyes, saw the slight smile come on his face as he worked, though his thin hands glowed red as if seen through fire. They saw the shining mound he raised on the floor, and whispered among themselves and did not know what to do, for none of them dared to touch it or him. One of them requested a captain to come look. And the captain summoned the steward, and the steward went to report to the lord. And from outside, cries began to sound that the sun was standing still.

After the boy had finished, he stood back and let the sun move on, then tended to his handiwork, then sat resting on his filthy straw. Within minutes the dungeon door burst open and Lord Robley himself strode in.

Lord Robley had grown weary of mutilating his wife, and he had not yet decided what to do with his other prisoner. Annoyed by the reports from the prison, he expected that an idea would come to him when he saw the boy. He entered with drawn sword. But all thoughts of the thin young body before him were sent whirling away from his mind by what he saw laid out on the stone floor at his feet.

A mantle, a kingly cloak—but no king had ever owned such a cloak. All shining, the outside of it silver and the inside gold—but no, to call it silver and gold was to insult it. More like water and fire, flow and flame, shimmering as if it moved, as if it were alive, and yet it had been made by hands, he could see the workmanship, so fine that every thread was worth a gasp of pleasure, the outside of it somehow braided and plaited to the lining, and all around the edge a fringe of threads like bright fur so fine that it wavered in the air like flame. Lord Robley had no thought but to settle the fiery gleaming thing on his shoulders, to wear that glory and be finer than any king. He seized it and flung it on—

And screamed as he had not yet made his wife scream, with the shriek of mortal agony. His whole hard body glowed as if in a furnace. His face contorted, and he fell dead.

The boy who plaited sunbeams got up in a quiet, alert way and walked forward, as noiseless on his feet as a lynx. He reached down and took the cloak off the body of the lord, twirled it and placed it on his own shoulders, and it did not harm him. But in that cloak he seemed insubstantial, like something moving in moonlight and shadow, something nameless roaming in the night. He walked out of the open dungeon door, between the guards clustered there, past the lord's retinue and the steward, and they all shrank back from him, flattened themselves against the stone walls of the corridor so as not to come near him. No one dared take hold of him or try to stop him. He walked out through the courtyard, past the stable, and out the manor gates with the settled air of one whose business is done. The men-at arms gathered atop the wall and watched him go.

Wald the master groom lived to an old age sweating every night with terror, and died of a weakened heart in the midst of a nightmare. Nothing else but his own fear harmed him. The boy who plaited—mane of sun, mane of moon—was never seen again in that place, except that children sometimes told the tale of having glimpsed him in the wild heart of a storm, plaiting the long lashes of wind and rain.

TANGENTS

Greg Bear

The nut-brown boy stood in the California field, his Asian face shadowed by a hardhat, his short stocky frame clothed in a T-shirt and a pair of brown shorts. He squinted across the hip-high grass at the spraddled old two-story ranch house, whistling a few bars from a Haydn piano sonata.

Out of the upper floor of the house came a man's high, frustrated "Bloody hell!" and the sound of a fist slamming on a solid surface. Silence for a minute. Then, more softly, a woman's question, "Not going well?"

"No. I'm swimming in it, but I don't see it."

"The encryption?" the woman asked timidly.

"The tesseract. If it doesn't gel, it isn't aspic."

The boy squatted in the grass and listened.

"And?" the woman encouraged.

"Ah, Lauren, it's still cold broth."

The boy lay back in the grass. He had crept over the split-rail and brick-pylon fence from the new housing project across the road. School was out for the summer and his mother—foster mother—did not like him around the house all day. Or at all.

Behind his closed eyes, a huge piano keyboard appeared, with him dancing on the keys. He loved music.

He opened his eyes and saw a thin, graying lady in a tweed suit leaning over him, staring. "You're on private land," she said, brows knit.

He scrambled up and brushed grass frown his pants. "Sorry."

"I thought I saw someone out here. What's your name?"

"Pal," he replied.

"Is that a name?" she asked querulously.

"Pal Tremont. It's not my real name. I'm Korean."

"Then what's your real name?"

"My folks told me not to use it anymore. I'm adopted. Who are you?"

The gray woman looked him up and down. "My name is Lauren Davies," she said. "You live near here?"

He pointed across the fields at the close-packed tract homes.

"I sold the land for those homes ten years ago," she said.

She seemed to be considering something. "I don't normally enjoy children trespassing."

"Sorry," Pal said.

"Have you had lunch?"

"No."

"Will a grilled cheese sandwich do?"

He squinted at her and nodded.

In the broad, red-brick and the kitchen, sitting at an oak table with his shoulders barely rising above the top, he ate the slightly charred sandwich and watched Lauren Davies watching him.

"I'm trying to write about a child," she said. "It's difficult, I'm a spinster and! don't understand children."

"You're a writer?" he asked, taking a swallow of milk.

She sniffed. "Not that anyone would know."

"Is that your brother, upstairs?"

"No," she said. "That's Peter. We've been living together for twenty years."

"But you said you're a spinster… isn't that someone who's never married, or never loved?" Pal asked.

"Never married. And never you mind. Peter's relationship to me is none of your concern." She placed a bowl of soup and a tuna salad sandwich on a lacquer tray. "His lunch," she said.

Without being asked, Pal trailed up the stairs after her.

"This is where Peter works," Lauren explained. Pal stood in the doorway, eyes wide. The room was filled with electronics gear, computer terminals, and bookcases with geometric cardboard sculptures sharing each shelf with books and circuit boards. She rested the tray precariously on a pile of floppy disks atop a rolling cart.

"Time for a break," she told a thin man seated with his back toward them.

The man turned around on his swivel chair, glanced briefly at Pal and the tray and shook his head. The hair on top of his head was a rich, glossy black; on the close-cut sides, the color changed abruptly to a startling white. He had a small thin nose and large green eyes. On the desk before him was a high-resolution computer monitor. "We haven't been introduced." he said, pointing to Pal.

"This is Pal Tremont, a neighborhood visitor. Pal, this is Peter Tuthy. Pal's going to help me with that character we discussed this morning."

Pal looked at the monitor curiously. Red and green lines shadowed each other through some incomprehensible transformation on the screen, then repeated.

"What's a tesseract?" Pal asked, remembering what he had heard as he stood in the field.

"It's a four-dimensional analog of a cube. I'm trying to teach myself to see it in my mind's eye," Tuthy said. "Have you ever tried that?"

"No," Pal admitted.

"Here," Tuthy said, handing him the spectacles. "As in the movies."

Pal donned the spectacles and stared at the screen. "So?"

he said. "It folds and unfolds, It's pretty—it sticks out at you, and then it goes away." He looked around the workshop. "Oh, wow!" The boy ran to a yard-long black music keyboard propped in one corner. "A Tronclavier! With all the switches! My mother had me take piano lessons, but I'd rather play this. Can you play it?"

"I toy with it," Tuthy said, exasperated. "I toy with all sorts of electronic things. But what did you see on the screen?"

He glanced up at Lauren, blinking. "I'll eat the food, I'll eat it.

Now please don't bother us."

"He's supposed to be helping me," Lauren complained.

Peter smiled at her. "Yes, of course. I'll send him down- stairs in a little while."

When Pal descended an hour later, he came into the kitchen to thank Lauren for lunch. "Peter's a real flake," he said confidentially. "He's trying to learn to see in weird directions."

"I know," Lauren said, sighing.

"I'm going home now," Pal said. "I'll be back, though… if it's all right with you. Peter invited me."

"I'm sure it will be fine," Lauren said dubiously.

"He's going to let me learn the Tronclavier." With that, Pal smiled radiantly and exited through the kitchen door, just as he had come in.

When she retrieved the tray, she found Peter leaning back in his chair, eyes closed. The figures on the screen were still folding and unfolding.

"What about Hockrum's work?" she asked.

"I'm on it," Peter replied, eyes still closed.

Lauren called Pal's foster mother on the second day to apprise them of their son's location, and the woman assured her it was quite all right. "Sometimes he's a little pest. Send him home if he causes trouble… but not right away! Give me a rest," she said, then laughed nervously.

Lauren drew her lips together tightly, thanked the woman, and hung up.

Peter and the boy had come downstairs to sit in the kitchen, filling up paper with line drawings. "Peter's teaching me how to use his program," Pal said.

"Did you know," Tuthy said, assuming his highest Cambridge professorial tone, "that a cube, intersecting a flat plane, can be cut through a number of geometrically different cross-sections?"

Pal squinted at the sketch Tuthy had made. "Sure," he said.

"If shoved through the plane the cube can appear, to a two-dimensional creature living on the plane—let's call him a 'Flatlander'—to be either a triangle, a rectangle, a trapezoid, a rhombus, or a square. If the two-dimensional being observes the cube being pushed through all the way, what he sees is one of more of these objects growing larger, changing shape suddenly, shrinking, and disappearing."

"Sure," Pal said, tapping his sneakered toe. "That's easy. Like in that book you showed me."

"And a sphere pushed through a plane would appear, to the hapless flatlander, first as an 'invisible' point (the two-dimensional surface touching the sphere, tangential), then as a circle. The circle would grow in size, then shrink back to a point and disappear again." He sketched two-dimensional stick figures looking in awe at such an intrusion.

"Got it," Pal said. "Can I play with the Tronclavier now?''

"In a moment. Be patient. So what would a tesseract look like, coming into our three-dimensional space? Remember the program, now… the pictures on the monitor."

Pal looked up at the ceiling. "I don't know," he said, seeming bored.

"Try to think," Tuthy urged him.

"It would…" Pal held his hands out to shape an angular object. "It would look like one of those Egyptian things, but with three sides… or like a box. It would look like a weird-shaped box, too, not square. And if you were to fall through a flatland…"

"Yes, that would look very funny," Peter acknowledged with a smile. "Cross-sections of arms and legs and body, all surrounded by skin…"

"And a head!" Pal enthused. "With eyes and a nose."

The doorbell rang. Pal jumped off the kitchen chair. "Is that my mom?" he asked, looking worried.

"I don't think so," Lauren said. "More likely it's Hockrum." She went to the front door to answer. She returned a moment later with a small, pale man behind her. Tuthy stood and shook the man's hand. "Pal Tremont, this is Irving Hockrum," he introduced, waving his hand between them. Hockrum glanced at Pal and blinked a long, cold blink.

"How's the work coming?" he asked Tuthy.

"It's finished," Tuthy said. "It's upstairs. Looks like your savants are barking up the wrong logic tree." He retrieved a folder of papers and printouts and handed them to Hockrum.

Hockrum leafed through the printouts. "I can't say this makes me happy. Still, I can't find fault. Looks like the work is up to your usual brilliant standards. Here's your check." He handed Tuthy an envelope. "I just wish you'd given it to us sooner. It would have saved me some grief—and the company quite a bit of money."

"Sorry," Tuthy said.

"Now I have an important bit of work for you…" And Hockrum outlined another problem. Tuthy thought it over for several minutes and shook his head.

"Most difficult, Irving. Pioneering work there. Take at least a month to see if it's even feasible."

"That's all I need to know for now—whether it's feasible. A lot's riding on this, Peter." Hockrum clasped his hands together in front of him, looking even more pale and worn than when he had entered the kitchen. "You'll let me know soon?"

"I'll get right on it," Tuthy said.

"Protige?" he asked, pointing to Pal. There was a speculative expression on his face, not quite a leer.

"No, a young friend. He's interested in music," Tuthy said. "Damned good at Mozart, in fact."

"I help with his tesseracts," Pal asserted.

"I hope you don't interrupt Peter's work. Peter's work is important."

Pal shook his head solemnly. "Good," Hockrum said, and then left the house with the folder under his arm.

Tuthy returned to his office, Pal in train. Lauren tried to work in the kitchen, sitting with fountain pen and pad of paper, but the words wouldn't come. Hockrum always worried her.

She climbed the stairs and stood in the open doorway o1 the office. She often did that; her presence did not disturb Tuthy, who could work under all sorts of adverse conditions.

"Who was that man?" Pal was asking Tuthy.

"I work for him," Tuthy said. "He's employed by a big electronics firm. He loans me most of the equipment I use. The computers, the high-resolution monitors. He brings me problems and then takes my solutions back to his bosses and claims he did the work."

"That sounds stupid," Pal said. "What kind of problems?"

"Codes, encryptions. Computer security. That was my expertise, once."

"You mean, like fencerail, that sort of thing?" Pal asked, face brightening. "We learned some of that in school."

"Much more complicated, I'm afraid," Tuthy said, grinning.

"Did you ever hear of the German 'Enigma,' or the 'Ultra' project?"

Pal shook his head.

"I thought not. Let's try another figure now." He called up another routine on the four-space program and sat Pal before the screen. "So what would a hypersphere look like if it intruded into our space?"

Pal thought a moment. "Kind of weird," he said.

"Not really. You've been watching the visualizations."

"Oh, in our space. That's easy. It just looks like a balloon, blowing up from nothing and then shrinking again. It's harder to see what a hypersphere looks like when it's real. Reft of us, I mean."

"Reft?" Tuthy said.

"Sure. Reft and light. Dup and owwen. Whatever the directions are called."

Tuthy stared at the boy. Neither of them had noticed Lauren in the doorway. "The proper terms are ana and kata."

Tuthy said. "What does it look like?"

Pal gestured, making two wide wings with his arms. "It's like a ball and it's like a horseshoe, depending on how you look at it. Like a balloon stung by bees, I guess, but it's smooth all over, not lumpy."

Tuthy continued to stare, then asked quietly, "You actually see it?"

"Sure," Pal said. "Isn't that what your program is supposed to domake you see things like that?"

Tuthy nodded, flabbergasted.

"Can I play the Tronclavier now?"

Lauren backed out of the doorway. She felt she had eavesdropped on something momentous, but beyond her. Tuthy came downstairs an hour later, leaving Pal to pick out Telemann on the synthesizer. He sat at the kitchen table with her. "The program works," he said. "It doesn't work for me, but it works for him. I've just been showing him reverse-shadow figures. He caught on right away, and then he went off and played Haydn.

He's gone through all my sheet music. The kid's a genius."

"Musical, you mean?"

He glanced directly at her and frowned. "Yes, I suppose he's remarkable at that, too. But spacial relations—coordinates and notion in higher dimensions… Did you know that if you take a three-dimensional object and rotate it in the fourth dimension, it will come back with left-right reversed? So if I were to take my hand"—he held up his right hand—"and lift it dup"—he enunciated the word clearly, dup—"or drop it owwen, it would come back like this?" He held his left hand over his right, balled the right up into a fist, and snuck it away behind his back.

"I didn't know that," Lauren said. "What are dup and owwetl?''

"That's what Pal calls movement along the fourth dimension. Ana and kata to purists. Like up and down to a flatlander, who only comprehends left and right, back and forth."

She thought about the hands for a moment. "I still can't see it," she said.

"I've tried, but neither can I," Tuthy admitted. "Our circuits are just too hard-wired, I suppose."

Upstairs, Pal had switched the Tronclavier to a cathedral organ and steel guitar combination and was playing variations on Pergolesi.

"Are you going to keep working for Hockrum?" Lauren asked. Tuthy didn't seem to hear her.

"It's remarkable," he murmured. "The boy just walked in here. You brought him in by accident. Remarkable."

"Can you show me the direction, point it out to me?"

Tuthy asked the boy three days later.

"None of my muscles move that way," the boy replied. "I can see it, in my head, but…"

"What is it like, seeing that direction?"

Pal squinted. "It's a lot bigger. We're sort of stacked up with other places. It makes me feel lonely."

"Why?"

"Because I'm stuck here. Nobody out there pays any attention to us."

Tuthy's mouth worked. "I thought you were just intuiting those directions in your head. Are you telling me… you're actually seeing out there?"

"Yeah. There's people out there, too. Well, not people, exactly. But it isn't my eyes that see them. Eyes are like muscles—they can't point those ways. But the head—the brain, I guess—can."

"Bloody hell," Tuthy said. He blinked and recovered.

"Excuse me. That's rude. Can you show me the people… on the screen?"

"Shadows, like we were talking about," Pal said.

"Fine. Then draw the shadows for me."

Pal sat down before the terminal, fingers pausing over the keys. "I can show you, but you have to help me with something."

"Help you with what?''

"I'd like to play music for them… out there. So they'll notice us.''

"The people?"

"Yeah. They look really weird. They stand on us, sort of. They have hooks in our world. But they're tall… high dup. They don't notice us because we're so small, compared to them."

"Lord, Pal, I haven't the slightest idea how we'd send music out to them… I'm not even sure I believe they exist."

"I'm not lying," Pal said, eyes narrowing. He turned his chair to face a mouse on a black-ruled pad and began sketching shapes on the monitor. "Remember, these are just shadows of what they look like. Next I'll draw the dup and owwen lines to connect the shadows."

The boy shaded the shapes he drew to make them look solid, smiling at his trick but explaining it was necessary because the projection of a four-dimensional object in normal space was, of course, three-dimensional.

"They look like you take the plants in a garden, flowers and such, and giving them lots of arms and fingers… and it's kind of like seeing things in an aquarium," Pal. explained.

After a time, Tuthy suspended his disbelief and stared in open-mouthed wonder at what the boy was re-creating on the monitor.

"I think you're wasting your time, that's what I think."

Hockrum said. "I needed that feasibility judgment by today."

He paced around the living room before falling as heavily as his light frame permitted into a chair.

"I have been distracted," Tuthy admitted.

"By that boy?"

"Yes, actually. Quite a talented fellow—"

"Listen, this is going to mean a lot of trouble for me. I guaranteed the study would be finished by today, it'll make me look bad." Hockrum screwed his face up in frustration. "What in hell are you doing with that boy?"

"Teaching him, actually. Or rather, he's teaching me.

Right now, we're building a four-dimensional cone, part of a speaker system. The cone is three-dimensional, the material part, but the magnetic field forms a fourth-dimensional extension—"

"Do you ever think how it looks, Peter?" Hockrum asked.

"It looks very strange on the monitor, I grant you—"

"I'm talking about you and the boy."

Tuthy's bright, interested expression fell slowly into long, deep-lined dismay. "I don't know what you mean."

"I know a lot about you, Peter. Where you come from, why you had to leave… It just doesn't look good."

Tuthy's face flushed crimson.

"Keep him away from here," Hockrum advised.

Tuthy stood. "I want you out of this house," he said quietly. "Our relationship is at an end."

"I swear," Hockrum said, his voice low and calm, staring up at Tuthy from under his brows, "I'll tell the boy's parents.

Do you think they'd want their kid hanging around an old—pardon the expression—queer? I'll tell them if you don't get the feasibility judgment made. I think you can do it by the end of this week—two days. Don't you?"

"No, I don't think so," Tuthy said. "Please leave."

"I know you're here illegally. There's no record of you entering the country. With the problems you had in England, you're certainly not a desirable alien. I'll pass word to the INS. You'll be deported."

"There isn't time to do the work," Tuthy said.

"Make time. Instead of 'educating' that kid."

"Get out of here."

"Two days, Peter."

Over dinner that evening, Tuthy explained to Lauren the exchange he had had with Hockrum. "He thinks I'm buggering Pal. Unspeakable bastard. I will never work for him again."

"We'd better talk to a lawyer, then," Lauren said. "You're sure you can't make him… happy, stop all this trouble?"

"I could solve his little problem for him in just a few hours. But I don't want to see him or speak to him again."

"He'll take your equipment away."

Tuthy blinked and waved one hand through the air helplessly.

"Then we'll just have to work fast, won't we? Ah, Lauren, you were a fool to bring me here. You should have left me to rot."

"They ignored everything you did for them," Lauren said bitterly.

"You saved their hides during the war, and then… They would have shut you up in prison." She stared through the kitchen window at the overcast sky and woods outside.

The cone lay on the table near the window, bathed in morning sun, connected to both the mini-computer and the Tronclavier. Pal arranged the score he had composed on a music stand before the synthesizer. "It's like Bach," he said, "but it'll play better for them. It has a kind of over-rhythm that I'll play on the dup part of the speaker."

"Why are we doing this, Pal?" Tuthy asked as the boy sat down to the keyboard.

"You don't belong here, really, do you, Peter?" Pal asked in turn. Tuthy stared at him.

"I mean, Miss Davies and you get along okay—but do you belong here, now?"

"What makes you think I don't belong?"

"I read some books in the school library. About the war and everything. I looked up 'Enigma' and 'Ultra.' I found a fellow named Peter Thornton. His picture looked like you. The books made him seem like a hero."

Tuthy smiled wanly.

"But there was this note in one book. You disappeared in 1965. You were being prosecuted for something. They didn't say what you were being prosecuted for."

"I'm a homosexual," Tuthy said quietly.

"Oh. So what?"

"Lauren and I met in England in 1964. We became good friends. They were going to put me in prison, Pal. She smuggled me into the U.S. through Canada."

"But you said you're a homosexual. They don't like women.''

"Not at all true, Pal. Lauren and I like each other very much. We could talk. She told me about her dreams of being a writer, and I talked to her about mathematics, and about the war. I nearly died during the war."

"Why? Were you wounded?"

"No. I worked too hard. I burned myself out and had a nervous breakdown. My lover—a man—kept me alive throughout the forties. Things were bad in England after the war. But he died in 1963. His parents came in to settle the estate, and when I contested the settlement in court, I was arrested. So I suppose you're right, Pal. I don't really belong here."

"I don't, either. My folks don't care much. I don't have too many friends. I wasn't even born here, and I don't know anything about Korea."

"Play," Tuthy said, his face stony. "Let's see if they'll listen."

"Oh, they'll listen," Pal said. "It's like the way they talk to each other."

The boy ran his fingers over the keys on the Tronclavier.

The cone, connected with the keyboard through the minicomputer, vibrated tinnily.

For an hour, Pal paged back and forth through his composition, repeating and trying variations. Tuthy sat in a corner, chin in hand, listening to the mousy squeaks and squeals produced by the cone. How much more difficult to interpret a four-dimensional sound, he thought. Not even visual clues…

Finally the boy stopped and wrung his hands, then stretched his arms. "They must have heard. We'll just have to wait and see." He switched the Tronclavier to automatic playback and pushed the chair away from the keyboard.

Pal stayed until dusk, then reluctantly went home. Tuthy sat in the office until midnight, listening to the tinny sounds issuing from the speaker cone.

All night long, the Tronclavier played through its pre-programmed selection of Pal's compositions. Tuthy lay in bed in his room, two doors down from Lauren's room, watching a shaft of moonlight slide across the wall. How far would a four-dimensional being have to travel to get here?

How far have I come to get here?

Without realizing he was asleep, he dreamed, and in his dream a wavering image of Pal appeared, gesturing with both arms as if swimming, eyes wide. I'm okay, the boy said without moving his lips. Don't worry about me… I'm okay. I've been back to Korea to see what it's like. It's not bad, but I like it better here…

Tuthy awoke sweating. The moon had gone down and the room was pitch-black. In the office, the hyper-cone continued its distant, mouse-squeak broadcast.

Pal returned early in the morning, repetitively whistling a few bars from Mozart's Fourth Violin Concerto. Lauren let him in and he joined Tuthy upstairs. Tuthy sat before the monitor, replaying Pal's sketch of the four-dimensional beings.

"Do you see anything?" he asked the boy.

Pal nodded. "They're coming closer. They're interested.

Maybe we should get things ready, you know… be prepared."

He squinted. "Did you ever think what a four-dimensional footprint would look like?"

Tuthy considered for a moment. "That would be most interesting," he said. "It would be solid."

On the first floor, Lauren screamed.

Pal and Tuthy almost tumbled over each other getting downstairs. Lauren stood in the living room with her arms crossed above her busom, one hand clamped over her mouth.

The first intrusion had taken out a section of the living-room floor and the east wall.

"Really clumsy," Pal said. "One of them must have bumped it."

"The music," Tuthy said.

"What in HELL is going on?" Lauren demanded, her voice starting as a screech and ending as a roar.

"Better turn the music off," Tuthy elaborated.

"Why?" Pal asked, face wreathed in an excited smile.

"Maybe they don't like it."

A bright filmy blue blob rapidly expanded to a yard in diameter just beside Tuthy. The blob turned red, wriggled, froze, and then just as rapidly vanished.

"That was like an elbow," Pal explained. "One of its arms. I think it's listening. Trying to find out where the music is coming from. I'll go upstairs."

"Turn it off!" Tuthy demanded.

I'll play something else." The boy ran up the stairs.

From the kitchen came a hideous hollow crashing, then the sound of a vacuum being filled—a reverse-pop, ending in a hiss—followed by a low-frequency vibration that set their teeth on edge…

The vibration caused by a four-dimensional creature scraping across its "floor," their own three-dimensional space.

Tuthy's hands shook with excitement.

"Peter—" Lauren bellowed, all dignity gone. She unwrapped her arms and held clenched fists out as if she were about to start exercising, or boxing.

"Pal's attracted visitors," Tuthy explained.

He turned toward the stairs. The first four steps and a section of floor spun and vanished. The rush of air nearly drew him down the hole. Regaining his balance, he knelt to feel the precisely cut, concave edge. Below lay the dark basement.

"Pal!" Tuthy called out.

"I'm playing something original for them," Pal shouted back. "I think they like it."

The phone rang. Tuthy was closest to the extension at the bottom of the stairs and instinctively reached out to answer it.

Hockrum was on the other end, screaming.

"I can't talk now—" Tuthy said. Hockrum screamed again, loud enough for Lauren to hear. Tuthy abruptly hung up.

"He's been fired, I gather," he said. "He seemed angry." He stalked back three paces and turned, then ran forward and leaped the gap to the first intact step. "Can't talk." He stumbled and scrambled up the stairs, stopping on the landing.

"Jesus," he said, as if something had suddenly occurred to him.

"He'll call the government," Lauren warned.

Tuthy waved that off. "I know what's happening. They're knocking chunks out of three-space, into the fourth. The fourth dimension. Like Pal says: clumsy brutes. They could kill us!"

Sitting before the Tronclavier, Pal happily played a new melody. Tuthy approached and was abruptly blocked by a thick green column, as solid as rock and with a similar texture. It vibrated and ascribed an arc in the air. A section of the ceiling four feet wide was kicked out of three-space. Tuthy's hair lifted in the rush of wind. The column shrank to a broomstick and hairs sprouted all over it, writhing like snakes.

Tuthy edged around the hairy broomstick and pulled the plug on the Tronclavier. A cage of zeppelin-shaped brown sausages encircled the computer, spun, elongated to reach the ceiling, the floor, and the top of the monitor's table, and then pipped down to tiny strings and was gone.

"They can't see too clearly here," Pal said, undisturbed that his concert was over. Lauren had climbed the outside stairs and stood behind Tuthy. "Gee, I'm sorry about the damage."

In one smooth curling motion, the Tronclavier and cone and all the wiring associated with them were peeled away as if they had been stick-on labels hastily removed from a flat surface.

"Gee," Pal said, his face suddenly registering alarm.

Then it was the boy's turn. He was removed more slowly, with greater care. The last thing to vanish was his head, which hung suspended in the air for several seconds.

"I think they liked the music," he said, grinning.

Head, grin and all, dropped away in a direction impossible for Tuthy or Lauren to follow. The air in the room sighed.

Lauren stood her ground for several minutes, while Tuthy wandered through what was left of the office, passing his hand through mussed hair.

"Perhaps he'll be back," Tuthy said. "I don't even know…"

But he didn't finish. Could a three-dimensional boy survive in a four-dimensional void, or whatever lay dup… or owwen?

Tuthy did not object when Lauren took it upon herself to call the boy's foster parents and the police. When the police arrived, he endured the questions and accusations stoically, face immobile, and told them as much as he knew. He was not believed; nobody knew quite what to believe. Photographs were taken. The police left.

It was only a matter of time, Lauren told him, until one or the other or both of them were arrested. "Then we'll make up a story," he said. "You'll tell them it was my fault."

"I will not," Lauren said. "But where is he?"

"I'm not positive," Tuthy said. "I think's he's all right, however.''

"How do you know?"

He told her about the dream.

"But that was before," she said.

"Perfectly allowable in the fourth dimension," he explained.

He pointed vaguely up, then down, and shrugged.

On the last day, Tuthy spent the early morning hours bundled in an overcoat and bathrobe in the drafty office, playing his program again and again, trying to visualize ana and kata. He closed his eyes and squinted and twisted his head, intertwined his fingers and drew odd little graphs on the monitors, but it was no use. His brain was hard-wired.

Over breakfast, he reiterated to Lauren that she must put all the blame on him.

"Maybe it will all blow over," she said. "They haven't got a case. No evidence… nothing."

"All blow over," he mused, passing his hand over his head and grinning ironically. "How over, they'll never know."

The doorbell rang. Tuthy went to answer it, and Lauren followed a few steps behind.

Tuthy opened the door. Three men in gray suits, one with a briefcase, stood on the porch. "Mr. Peter Thornton?" the tallest asked.

"Yes," Tuthy acknowledged.

A chunk of the door frame and wall above the door vanished with a roar and a hissing pop. The three men looked up at the gap. Ignoring what was impossible, the tallest man returned his attention to Tuthy and continued, "We have information that you are in this country illegally."

"Oh?" Tuthy said.

Beside him, an irregular filmy blue cylinder grew to a length of four feet and hung in the air, vibrating. The three men backed away on the porch. In the middle of the cylinder, Pal's head emerged, and below that, his extended arm and hand.

"It's fun here," Pal said. "They're friendly."

"I believe you," Tuthy said.

"Mr. Thornton," the tallest man continued valiantly.

"Won't you come with me?" Pal asked.

Tuthy glanced back at Lauren. She gave him a small fraction of a nod, barely understanding what she was assenting to, and he took Pal's hand. "Tell them it was all my fault," he said.

From his feet to his head, Peter Tuthy was peeled out of this world. Air rushed in. Half of the brass lamp to one side of the door disappeared.

The INS men returned to their car without any further questions, with damp pants and embarrassed, deeply worried expressions. They drove away, leaving Lauren to contemplate the quiet. They did not return.

She did not sleep for three nights, and when she did sleep,

Tuthy and Pal visited her, and put the question to her.

Thank you, but I prefer it here, she replied.

It's a lot of /n, the boy insisted. They like music.

Lauren shook her head on the pillow and awoke. Not very far away, there was a whistling, tinny kind of sound, followed by a deep vibration.

To her, it sounded like applause.

She took a deep breath and got out of bed to retrieve her notebook.

ANGEL

Pat Cardigan

Stand with me awhile, Angel, I said, and Angel said he'd do that. Angel was good to me that way, good to have with you on a cold night and nowhere to go. We stood on the street corner together and watched the cars going by and the people and all. The streets were lit up like Christmas, streetlights, store lights, marquees over the all-night movie houses and bookstores blinking and flashing; shank of the evening in east midtown. Angel was getting used to things here and getting used to how I did, nights. Standing outside, because what else are you going to do. He was my Angel now, had been since that other cold night when I'd been going home, because where are you going to go, and I'd found him and took him with me. It's good to have someone to take with you, someone to look after. Angel knew that. He started looking after me, too.

Like now. We were standing there awhile and I was looking around at nothing and everything, the cars cruising past, some of them stopping now and again for the hookers posing by the curb, and then I saw it, out of the corner of my eye. Stuff coming out of the Angel, shiny like sparks but flowing like liquid. Silver fireworks. I turned and looked all the way at him and it was gone. And he turned and gave a little grin like he was embarrassed I'd seen. Nobody else saw it, though; not the short guy who paused next to the Angel before crossing the street against the light, not the skinny hippy looking to sell the boom-box he was carrying on his shoulder, not the homeboy strutting past us with both his girlfriends on his arms, nobody but me.

The Angel said, Hungry?

Sure, I said. I'm hungry.

Angel looked past me. Okay, he said. I looked, too, and here they came, three leather boys, visor caps, belts, boots, keyrings. On the cruise together. Scary stuff, even though you know it's not looking for you.

I said, Them? Them?

Angel didn't answer. One went by, then the second, and the Angel stopped the third by taking hold of his arm.

Hi.

The guy nodded. His head was shaved. I could see a little gray-black stubble under his cap. No eyebrows, disinterested eyes. The eyes were because of the Angel.

I could use a little money, the Angel said. My friend and I are hungry.

The guy put his hand in his pocket and wiggled out some bills, offering them to the Angel. The Angel selected a twenty and closed the guy's hand around the rest.

This will be enough, thank you.

The guy put his money away and waited.

I hope you have a good night, said the Angel.

The guy nodded and walked on, going across the street to where his two friends were waiting on the next corner. Nobody found anything weird about it.

Angel was grinning at me. Sometimes he was the Angel, when he was doing something, sometimes he was Angel, when he was just with me. Now he was Angel again. We went up the street to the luncheonette and got a seat by the front window so we could still watch the street while we ate.

Cheeseburger and fries, I said without bothering to look at the plastic-covered menus lying on top of the napkin holder. The Angel nodded.

Thought so, he said. I'll have the same, then.

The waitress came over with a little tiny pad to take our order. I cleared my throat. It seemed like I hadn't used my voice in a hundred years. "Two cheeseburgers and two fries," I said, "and two cups of-" I looked up at her and froze. She had no face. Like, nothing, blank from hairline to chin, soft little dents where the eyes and nose and mouth would have been. Under the table, the Angel kicked me, but gentle.

"And two cups of coffee," I said.

She didn't say anything-how could she?-as she wrote down the order and then walked away again. All shaken up, I looked at the Angel, but he was calm like always.

She's a new arrival, Angel told me and leaned back in his chair. Not enough time to grow a face.

But how can she breathe? I said.

Through her pores. She doesn't need much air yet.

Yah, but what about like, I mean, don't other people notice that she's got nothing there?

No. It's not such an extraordinary condition. The only reason you notice is because you're with me. Certain things have rubbed off on you. But no one else notices. When they look at her, they see whatever face they expect someone like her to have. And eventually, she'll have it.

But you have a face, I said. You've always had a face.

I'm different, said the Angel.

You sure are, I thought, looking at him. Angel had a beautiful face. That wasn't why I took him home that night, just because he had a beautiful face-I left all that behind a long time ago-but it was there, his beauty. The way you think of a man being beautiful, good clean lines, deep-set eyes, ageless. About the only way you could describe him-look away and you'd forget everything except that he was beautiful. But he did have a face. He did.

Angel shifted in the chair-these were like somebody's old kitchen chairs, you couldn't get too comfortable in them and shook his head, because he knew I was thinking troubled thoughts. Sometimes you could think something and it wouldn't be troubled and later you'd think the same thing and it would be troubled. The Angel didn't like me to be troubled about him.

Do you have a cigarette? he asked.

I think so.

I patted my jacket and came up with most of a pack that I handed over to him. The Angel lit up and amused us both by having the smoke come out his ears and trickle out of his eyes like ghostly tears. I felt my own eyes watering for his; I wiped them and there was that stuff again, but from me now. I was crying silver fireworks. I flicked them on the table and watched them puff out and vanish.

Does this mean I'm getting to be you, now? I asked.

Angel shook his head. Smoke wafted out of his hair. Just things rubbing off on you. Because we've been together and you're susceptible. But they're different for you.

Then the waitress brought our food and we went on to another sequence, as the Angel would say. She still had no face but I guess she could see well enough because she put all the plates down just where you'd think they were supposed to go and left the tiny little check in the middle of the table.

Is she--I mean, did you know her, from where you--

Angel gave his head a brief little shake. No. She's from somewhere else. Not one of my--people. He pushed the cheeseburger and files in front of him over to my side of the table. That was the way it was done; I did all the eating and somehow it worked out.

I picked up my cheeseburger and I was bringing it up to my mouth when my eyes got all funny and I saw it coming up like a whole series of cheeseburgers, whoom-whoom-whoom, trick photography, only for real. I closed my eyes and jammed the cheeseburger into my mouth, holding it there, waiting for all the other cheeseburgers to catch up with it.

You'll be okay, said the Angel. Steady, now.

I said with my mouth full, That was--that was weird. Will I ever get used to this?

I doubt it. But I'll do what I can to help you.

Yah, well, the Angel would know. Stuff rubbing off on me, he could feel it better than I could. He was the one it was rubbing off from.

I had put away my cheeseburger and half of Angel's and was working on the french fries for both of us when I noticed he was looking out the window with this hard, tight expression on his face.

Something? I asked him.

Keep eating, he said.

I kept eating, but I kept watching, too. The Angel was staring at a big blue car parked at the curb right outside the diner. It was silvery blue, one of those lots-of-money models and there was a woman kind of leaning across from the driver's side to look out the passenger window. She was beautiful in that lots-of-money way, tawny hair swept back from her face, and even from here I could see she had turquoise eyes. Really beautiful woman. I almost felt like crying. I mean, jeez, how did people get that way and me too harmless to live.

But the Angel wasn't one bit glad to see her. I knew he didn't want me to say anything, but I couldn't help it.

Who is she?

Keep eating, Angel said. We need the protein, what little there is.

I ate and watched the woman and the Angel watch each other and it was getting very--I don't know, very something between them, even through the glass. Then a cop car pulled up next to her and I knew they were telling her to move it along. She moved it along.

Angel sagged against the back of his chair and lit another cigarette, smoking it in the regular, unremarkable way.

What are we going to do tonight? I asked the Angel as we left the restaurant.

Keep out of harm's way, Angel said, which was a new answer. Most nights we spent just kind of going around soaking everything up. The Angel soaked it up, mostly. I got some of it along with him, but not the same way he did. It was different for him. Sometimes he would use me like a kind of filter. Other times he took it direct. There'd been the big car accident one night, right at my usual corner, a big old Buick running a red light smack into somebody's nice Lincoln. The Angel had had to take it direct because I couldn't handle that kind of stuff. I didn't know how the Angel could take it, but he could. It carried him for days afterwards, too. I only had to eat for myself:

It's the intensity, little friend, he'd told me, as though that were supposed to explain it.

It's the intensity, not whether it's good or bad. The universe doesn't know good or bad, only less or more. Most of you have a bad time reconciling this. You have a bad time with it, little friend, but you get through better than other people. Maybe because of the way you are. You got squeezed out of a lot, you haven't had much of a chance at life. You're as much an exile as I am, only in your own land.

That may have been true, but at least I belonged here, so that part was easier for me. But I didn't say that to the Angel. I think he liked to think he could do as well or better than me at living-I mean, I couldn't just look at some leather boy and get him to cough up a twenty dollar bill. Cough up a fist in the face or worse, was more like it.

Tonight, though, he wasn't doing so good, and it was that woman in the car. She'd thrown him out of step, kind of.

Don't think about her, the Angel said, just out of nowhere. Don't think about her anymore.

Okay, I said, feeling creepy because it was creepy when the Angel got a glimpse of my head. And then, of course, I couldn't think about anything else hardly.

Do you want to go home? I asked him.

No. I can't stay in now. We'll do the best we can tonight, but I'll have to be very careful about the tricks. They take so much out of me, and if we're keeping out of harm's way, I might not be able to make up for a lot of it.

It's okay, I said. I ate. I don't need anything else tonight, you don't have to do anymore.

Angel got that look on his face, the one where I knew he wanted to give me things, like feelings I couldn't have any more. Generous, the Angel was. But I didn't need those feelings, not like other people seem to. For a while, it was like the Angel didn't understand that, but he let me be.

Little friend, he said, and almost touched me. The Angel didn't touch a lot. I could touch him and that would be okay, but if he touched somebody, he couldn't help doing something to them, like the trade that had given us the money. That had been deliberate. If the trade had touched the Angel first, it would have been different, nothing would have happened unless the Angel touched him back. All touch meant something to the Angel that I didn't understand. There was touching without touching, too. Like things rubbing off on me. And sometimes, when I did touch the Angel, I'd get the feeling that it was maybe more his idea than mine, but I didn't mind that. How many people were going their whole lives never being able to touch an Angel?

We walked together and all around us the street was really coming to life. It was getting colder, too. I tried to make my jacket cover more. The Angel wasn't feeling it. Most of the time hot and cold didn't mean much to him. We saw the three rough trade guys again. The one Angel had gotten the money from was getting into a car. The other two watched it drive away and then walked on. I looked over at the Angel.

Because we took his twenty, I said.

Even if we hadn't, Angel said.

So we went along, the Angel and me, and I could feel how different it was tonight than it was all the other nights we'd walked or stood together. The Angel was kind of pulled back into himself and seemed to be keeping a check on me, pushing us closer together. I was getting more of those fireworks out of the corners of my eyes, but when I'd turn my head to look, they'd vanish. It reminded me of the night I'd found the Angel standing on my corner all by himself in pain. The Angel told me later that was real talent, knowing he was in pain. I never thought of myself as any too talented, but the way everyone else had been just ignoring him, I guess I must have had something to see him after all.

The Angel stopped us several feet down from an all-night bookstore. Don't look, he said. Watch the traffic or stare at your feet, but don't look or it won't happen.

There wasn't anything else to see right then, but I didn't look anyway. That was the way it was sometimes, the Angel telling me it made a difference whether I was watching something or not, something about the other people being conscious of me being conscious of them. I didn't understand, but I knew Angel was usually right. So I was watching traffic when the guy came out of the bookstore and got his head punched.

I could almost see it out of the corner of my eye. A lot of movement, arms and legs flying and grunty noises. Other people stopped to look but I kept my eyes on the traffic, some of which was slowing up so they could check out the fight. Next to me, the Angel was stiff all over. Taking it in, what he called the expenditure of emotional kinetic energy. No right, no wrong, little friend, he'd told me. Just energy, like the rest of the universe.

So he took it in and I felt him taking it in, and while I was feeling it, a kind of silver fog started creeping around my eyeballs and I was in two places at once. I was watching the traffic and I was in the Angel watching the fight and feeling him charge up like a big battery.

It felt like nothing I'd ever felt before. These two guys slugging it out well, one guy doing all the slugging and the other skittering around trying to get out from under the fists and having his head

punched but good, and the Angel drinking it like he was sipping at an empty cup and somehow getting it to have something in it after all. Deep inside him, whatever made the Angel go was getting a little stronger.

I kind of swung back and forth between him and me, or swayed might be more like it was. I wondered about it, because the Angel wasn't touching me. I really was getting to be him, I thought; Angel picked that up and put the thought away to answer later. It was like I was traveling by the fog, being one of us and then the other, for a long time, it seemed, and then after awhile I was more me than him again, and some of the fog cleared away.

And there was that car, pointed the other way this time, and the woman was climbing out of it with this big weird smile on her face, as though she'd won something. She waved at the Angel to come to her.

Bang went the connection between us dead and the Angel shot past me, running away from the car. I went after him, I caught a glimpse of her jumping back into the car and yanking at the gear shift.

Angel wasn't much of a runner. Something funny about his knees. We'd gone maybe a hundred feet when he started wobbling and I could hear him pant. He cut across a Park & Lock that was dark and mostly empty. It was back-to-back with some kind of private parking lot and the fences for each one tried to mark off the same narrow strip of lumpy pavement. They were easy to climb but Angel was too panicked. He just went through them before he even thought about it; I knew that because if he'd been thinking, he'd have wanted to save what he'd just charged up with for when he really needed it bad enough.

I had to haul myself over the fences in the usual way, and when he heard me rattling on the saggy chain link, he stopped and looked back.

Go, I told him. Don't wait on me!

He shook his head sadly. Little friend, I'm a fool. I could stand to learn from you a little more.

Don't stand, run! I got over the fences and caught up with him. Let's go! I yanked his sleeve as I slogged past and he followed at a clumsy trot.

Have to hide somewhere, he said, camouflage ourselves with people.

I shook my head, thinking we could just run maybe four more blocks and we'd be at the freeway overpass. Below it were the butt ends of old roads closed off when the freeway had been built. You could hide there the rest of your life and no one would find you. But Angel made me turn right and go down a block to this rundown crack-in-the-wall called Stan's Jigger. I'd never been in there--I'd never made it a practice to go into bars--but the Angel was pushing too hard to argue.

Inside it was smelly and dark and not too happy. The Angel and I went down to the end of the bar and stood under a blood-red light while he searched his pockets for money.

Enough for one drink apiece, he said.

I don't want anything.

You can have soda or something.

The Angel ordered from the bartender, who was suspicious. This was a place for regulars and nobody else, and certainly nobody else like me or the Angel. The Angel knew that even stronger than I did but he just stood and pretended to sip his drink without looking at me. He was all pulled into himself and I was hovering around the edges. I knew he was still pretty panicked and trying to figure out what he could do next. As close as I was, if he had to get real far away, he was going to have a problem and so was I. He'd have to tow me along with him and that wasn't the most practical thing to do.

Maybe he was sorry now he'd let me take him home. But he'd been so weak then, and now with all the filtering and stuff I'd done for him he couldn't just cut me off without a lot of pain.

I was trying to figure out what I could do for him now when the bartender came back and gave us a look that meant order or get out, and he'd have liked it better if we got out. So would everyone else there. The few other people standing at the bar weren't looking at us, but they knew right where we were, like a sore spot. It wasn't hard to figure out what they thought about us, either, maybe because of me or because of the Angel's beautiful face.

We got to leave, I said to the Angel but he had it in his head this was good camouflage. There wasn't enough money for two more drinks so he smiled at the bartender and slid his hand across the bar and put it on top of the bartender's. It was tricky doing it this way; bartenders and waitresses took more persuading because it wasn't normal for them just to give you something.

The bartender looked at the Angel with his eyes half closed. He seemed to be thinking it over. But the Angel had just blown a lot going through the fence instead of climbing over it and the fear was scuttling his concentration and I just knew that it wouldn't work. And maybe my knowing that didn't help, either.

The bartender's free hand dipped down below the bar and came up with a small club. "Faggot!" he roared and caught Angel just over the ear. Angel slammed into me and we both crashed to the floor. Plenty of emotional kinetic energy in here, I thought dimly as the guys standing at the bar fell on us, and then I didn't think anything more as I curled up into a ball under their fists and boots.

We were lucky they didn't much feel like killing anyone. Angel went out the door first and they tossed me out on top of him. As soon as I landed on him, I knew we were both in trouble; something was broken inside him. So much for keeping out of harm's way. I rolled off him and lay on the pavement, staring at the sky and trying to catch my breath. There was blood in my mouth and my nose, and my back was on fire.

Angel? I said, after a bit.

He didn't answer. I felt my mind get kind of all loose and runny, like my brains were leaking out my ears. I thought about the trade we'd taken the money from and how I'd been scared of him and his friends and how silly that had been. But then, I was too harmless to live.

The stars were raining silver fireworks down on me. It didn't help.

Angel? I said again.

I rolled over onto my side to reach for him, and there she was. The car was parked at the curb and she had Angel under the armpits, dragging him toward the open passenger door. I couldn't tell if he was conscious or not and that scared me. I sat up.

She paused, still holding the Angel. We looked into each other's eyes, and I started to understand.

"Help me get him into the car," she said at last. Her voice sounded hard and flat and unnatural. "Then you can get in, too. In the back seat."

I was in no shape to take her out. It couldn't have been better for her if she'd set it up herself. I got up, the pain flaring in me so bad that I almost fell down again, and took the Angel's ankles. His ankles were so delicate, almost like a woman's, like hers. I didn't really help much, except to guide his feet in as she sat him on the seat and strapped him in with the shoulder harness. I got in the back as she ran around to the other side of the car, her steps real light and peppy, like she'd found a million dollars lying there on the sidewalk.

We were out on the freeway before the Angel stirred in the shoulder harness. His head lolled from side to side on the back of the seat. I reached up and touched his hair lightly, hoping she couldn't see me do it.

Where are you taking me, the Angel said.

"For a ride," said the woman. "For the moment."

Why does she talk out loud like that? I asked the Angel.

Because she knows it bothers me.

"You know I can focus my thoughts better if I say things out loud," she said. "I'm not like one of your little pushovers." She glanced at me in the rear view mirror. "Just what have you gotten yourself into since you left, darling? Is that a boy or a girl?"

I pretended I didn't care about what she said or that I was too harmless to live or any of that stuff, but the way she said it, she meant it to sting.

Friends can be either, Angel said. It doesn't matter which. Where are you taking us?

Now it was us. In spite of everything, I almost could have smiled.

"Us? You mean, you and me? Or are you really referring to your little pet back there?"

My friend and I are together. You and I are not.

The way the Angel said it made me think he meant more than not together; like he'd been with her once the way he was with me now. The Angel let me know I was right. Silver fireworks started flowing slowly off his head down the back of the seat and I knew there was something wrong about it. There was too much all at once.

"Why can't you talk out loud to me, darling?" the woman said with fakey-sounding petulance. "Just say a few words and make me happy. You have a lovely voice when you use it."

That was true, but the Angel never spoke out loud unless he couldn't get out of it, like when he'd ordered from the bartender. Which had probably helped the bartender decide about what he thought we were, but it was useless to think about that.

"All right," said Angel, and I knew the strain was awful for him. "I've said a few words. Are you happy?" He sagged in the shoulder harness.

"Ecstatic. But it won't make me let you go. I'll drop your pet at the nearest hospital and then we'll go home." She glanced at the Angel as she drove. "I've missed you so much. I can't stand it without you, without you making things happen. Doing your little miracles. You knew I'd get addicted to it, all the things you could do to people. And then you just took off, I didn't know what had happened to you. And it hurt. " Her voice turned kind of pitiful, like a little kid's. "I was in real pain. You must have been, too. Weren't you? Well, weren't you?"

Yes, the Angel said. I was in pain, too.

I remembered him standing on my corner, where I'd hung out all that time by myself until he came. Standing there in pain. I didn't know why or from what then, I just took him home, and after a little while, the pain went away. When he decided we were together, I guess.

The silvery flow over the back of the car seat thickened. I cupped my hands under it and it was like my brain was lighting up with pictures. I saw the Angel before he was my Angel, in this really nice house, the woman's house, and how she'd taken him places, restaurants or stores or parties, thinking at him real hard so that he was all filled up with her and had to do what she wanted him to. Steal sometimes; other times, weird stuff, make people do silly things like suddenly start singing or taking their clothes off. That was mostly at the parties, though she made a waiter she didn't like burn himself with a pot of coffee. She'd get men, too, through the Angel, and they'd think it was the greatest idea in the world to go to bed with her. Then she'd make the Angel show her the others, the ones that had been sent here the way he had for crimes nobody could have understood, like the waitress with no face. She'd look at them, sometimes try to do things to them to make them uncomfortable or unhappy. But mostly she'd just stare.

I wasn't like that in the very beginning, the Angel said weakly and I knew he was ashamed.

It's okay, I told him. People can be nice at first, I know that. Then they find out about you.

The woman laughed. "You two are so sweet and pathetic. Like a couple of little children. I guess that's what you were looking for, wasn't it, darling? Except children can be cruel, too, can't they? So you got this-creature for yourself." She looked at me in the rear view mirror again as she slowed down a little, and for a moment I was afraid she'd seen what I was doing with the silvery stuff that was still pouring out of the Angel. It was starting to slow now. There wasn't much time left. I wanted to scream, but the Angel was calming me for what was coming next. "What happened to you, anyway?"

Tell her, said the Angel. To stall for time, I knew, keep her occupied.

I was born funny, I said. I had both sexes.

"A hermaphrodite!" she exclaimed with real delight.

She loves freaks, the Angel said, but she didn't pay any attention.

There was an operation, but things went wrong. They kept trying to fix it as I got older but my body didn't have the right kind of chemistry or something. My parents were ashamed. I left after awhile.

"You poor thing," she said, not meaning anything like that. "You were just what darling, here, needed, weren't you? Just a little nothing, no demands, no desires. For anything." Her voice got all hard. "They could probably fix you up now, you know."

I don't want it. I left all that behind a long time ago, I don't need it.

"Just the sort of little pet that would be perfect for you," she said to the Angel. "Sorry I have to tear you away. But I can't get along without you now. Life is so boring. And empty. And--" She sounded puzzled. "And like there's nothing more to live for since you left me."

That's not me, said the Angel. That's you.

"No, it's a lot of you, too, and you know it. You know you're addictive to human beings, you knew that when you came here when they sent you here. Hey, you, pet, do you know what his crime was, why they sent him to this little backwater penal colony of a planet?"

Yeah, I know, I said. I really didn't, but I wasn't going to tell her that.

"What do you think about that, little pet neuter?" she said gleefully, hitting the accelerator pedal and speeding up. "What do you think of the crime of refusing to mate?"

The Angel made a sort of an out-loud groan and lunged at the steering wheel. The car swerved wildly and I fell backwards, the silvery stuff from the Angel going all over me. I tried to keep scooping it into my mouth the way I'd been doing, but it was flying all over the place now. I heard the crunch as the tires left the road and went onto the shoulder. Something struck the side of the car, probably the guard rail, and made it fishtail, throwing me down on the floor. Up front the woman was screaming and cursing and the Angel wasn't making a sound, but, in my head, I could hear him sort of keening. Whatever happened, this would be it. The Angel had told me all that time ago, after I'd taken him home, that they didn't last long after they got here, the exiles from his world and other worlds. Things tended to happen to them, even if they latched on to someone like me or the woman. They'd be in accidents or the people here would kill them. Like antibodies in a human body rejecting something or fighting a disease. At least I belonged here, but it looked like I was going to die in a car accident with the Angel and the woman both. I didn't care.

The car swerved back onto the highway for a few seconds and then pitched to the right again. Suddenly there was nothing under us and then we thumped down on something, not road but dirt or grass or something, bombing madly up and down. I pulled myself up on the back of the seat just in time to see the sign coming at us at an angle. The corner of it started to go through the windshield on the woman's side and then all I saw a long time was the biggest display of silver fireworks ever.

It was hard to be gentle with him. Every move hurt but I didn't want to leave him sitting in the car next to her, even if she was dead. Being in the back seat had kept most of the glass from flying into me but I was still shaking some out of my hair and the impact hadn't done much for my back.

I laid the Angel out on the lumpy grass a little ways from the car and looked around. We were maybe a hundred yards from the highway, near a road that ran parallel to it. It was dark but I could still read the sign that had come through the windshield and split the woman's head in half. It said, Construction Ahead, Reduce Speed. Far off on the other road, I could see a flashing yellow light and at first I was afraid it was the police or something but it stayed where it was and I realized that must be the construction.

"Friend," whispered the Angel, startling me. He'd never spoken aloud to me, not directly.

Don't talk, I said, bending over him, trying to figure out some way I could touch him, just for comfort. There wasn't anything else I could do now.

"I have to," he said, still whispering. "It's almost all gone. Did you get it?"

Mostly, I said. Not all.

"I meant for you to have it."

I know.

"I don't know that it will really do you any good." His breath kind of bubbled in his throat. I could see something wet and shiny on his mouth but it wasn't silver fireworks. "But it's yours. You can do as you like with it. Live on it the way I did. Get what you need when you need it. But you can live as a human, too. Eat. Work. However, whatever."

I'm not human, I said. I'm not any more human than you, even if I do belong here.

"Yes, you are, little friend. I haven't made you any less human," he said, and coughed some. "I'm not sorry I wouldn't mate. I couldn't mate with my own. It was too ... I don't know, too little of me, too much of them, something. I couldn't bond, it would have been nothing but emptiness. The Great Sin, to be unable to give, because the universe knows only less or more and I insisted that it would be good or bad. So they sent me here. But in the end, you know, they got their way, little friend." I felt his hand on me for a moment before it fell away. "I did it after all. Even if it wasn't with my own."

The bubbling in his throat stopped. I sat next to him for a while in the dark. Finally I felt it, the Angel stuff: It was kind of fluttery-churny, like too much coffee on an empty stomach. I closed my eyes and lay down on the grass, shivering. Maybe some of it was shock but I don't think so. The silver fireworks started, in my head this time, and with them came a lot of pictures I couldn't understand. Stuff about the Angel and where he'd come from and the way they mated. It was a lot like how we'd been together, the Angel and me. They looked a lot like us but there were a lot of differences, too, things I couldn't make out. I couldn't make out how they'd sent him here, either--by light, in, like, little bundles or something. It didn't make any sense to me, but I guessed an Angel could be light. Silver fireworks.

I must have passed out, because when I opened my eyes, it felt like I'd been lying there a long time. It was still dark, though. I sat up and reached for the Angel, thinking I ought to hide his body.

He was gone. There was just a sort of wet sandy stuff where he'd been.

I looked at the car and her. All that was still there. Somebody was going to see it soon. I didn't want to be around for that.

Everything still hurt but I managed to get to the other road and start walking back toward the city. It was like I could feel it now, the way the Angel must have, as though it were vibrating like a drum or ringing like a bell with all kinds of stuff, people laughing and crying and loving and hating and being afraid and everything else that happens to people. The stuff that the Angel took in, energy, that I could take in now if I wanted.

And I knew that taking it in that way, it would be bigger than anything all those people had, bigger than anything I could have had if things hadn't gone wrong with me all those years ago.

I wasn't so sure I wanted it. Like the Angel, refusing to mate back where he'd come from. He wouldn't, there, and I couldn't, here. Except now I could do something else.

I wasn't so sure I wanted it. But I didn't think I'd be able to stop it, either, any more than I could stop my heart from beating. Maybe it wasn't really such a good thing or a right thing. But it was like the Angel said: the universe doesn't know good or bad, only less or more.

Yeah. I heard that.

I thought about the waitress with no face. I could find them all now, all the ones from the other places, other worlds that sent them away for some kind of alien crimes nobody would have understood. I could find them all. They threw away their outcasts, I'd tell them, but here, we kept ours. And here's how. Here's how you live in a universe that only knows less or more.

I kept walking toward the city.

THE FAITHFUL COMPANION AT FORTY

Karen Fowler

His first reaction is that I just can't deal with the larger theoretical issues. He's got this new insight he wants to call the Displacement Theory and I can't grasp it. Your basic, quiet, practical minority sidekick. The limited edition. Kato. Spock. Me. But this is not true.

I still remember the two general theories we were taught on the reservation which purported to explain the movement of history. The first we named the Great Man Theory. Its thesis was that the critical decisions in human development were made by individuals, special people gifted in personality and circumstance. The second we named the Wave Theory. It argued that only the masses could effectively determine the course of history. Those very visible individuals who appeared as leaders of the great movements were, in fact, only those who happened to articulate the direction which had already been chosen. They were as much the victims of the process as any other single individual. Flotsam. Running Dog and I used to be able to debate this issue for hours.

It is true that this particular question has ceased to interest me much. But a correlative question has come to interest me more. I spent most of my fortieth birthday sitting by myself, listening to Pachelbel's Canon, over and over, and I'm asking myself: Are some people special? Are some people more special than others? Have I spent my whole life backing the wrong horse?

I mean, it was my birthday and not one damn person called.

Finally, about four o'clock in the afternoon, I gave up and I called him. "Eh, Poncho," I say. "What's happening?"

"Eh, Cisco," he answers. "Happy birthday."

"Thanks," I tell him. I can't decide whether I am more pissed to know he remembered but didn't call than I was when I thought he forgot.

"The big four-o," he says. "Wait a second, buddy. Let me go turn the music down." He's got the William Tell Overture blasting on the stereo. He's always got the William Tell Overture blasting on the stereo. I'm not saying the man has a problem, but the last time we were in Safeway together he claimed to see a woman being kidnapped by a silver baron over in frozen foods. He pulled the flip top off a Tab and lobbed the can into the ice cream. "Cover me," he shouts, and runs an end pattern with the cart through the soups. I had to tell everyone he was having a Vietnam flashback.

And the mask. There are times and seasons when a mask is useful; I'm the first to admit that. It's Thanksgiving, say, and you're an Indian so it's never been one of your favorite holidays, and you've got no family because you spent your youth playing the supporting role to some macho creep who couldn't commit, so here you are, standing in line to see Rocky IV, and someone you know walks by. I mean, I've been there. But for every day, for your ordinary life, a mask is only going to make you more obvious. There's an element of exhibitionism in it. A large element. If you ask me.

So now he's back on the phone. He sighs. "God," he says. "I miss those thrilling days of yesteryear."

See? We haven't talked twenty seconds and already the subject is his problems. His ennui. His angst. "I'm having an affair," I tell him. Two years ago I wouldn't have said it. Two years ago he'd just completed his est training and he would have told me to take responsibility for it. Now he's into biofeedback and astrology. Now we're not responsible for anything.

"Yeah?" he says. He thinks for a minute. "You're not married," he points out.

I can't see that this is relevant. "She is," I tell him.

"Yeah?" he says again, only this "yeah" has a nasty quality to it; this "yeah" tells me someone is hoping for sensationalistic details. This is not the "yeah" of a concerned friend. Still, I can't help playing to it. For years I've been holding this man's horse while he leaps onto its back from the roof. For years I've been providing cover from behind a rock while he breaks for the back door. I'm forty now. It's time to get something back from him. So I hint at the use of controlled substances. We're talking peyote and cocaine. I mention pornography. Illegally imported. From Denmark. Of course, it's not really my affair. Can you picture me? My affair is quiet and ardent. I borrowed this affair from another friend. It shows you the lengths I have to go to before anyone will listen to me.

I may finally have gone too far. He's really at a loss now. "Women," he says finally. "You can't live with them and you can't live without them." Which is a joke, coming from him. He had that single-man-raising-his-orphaned-nephew-all-alone schtick working so smoothly the women were passing each other on the way in and out the door. Or maybe it was the mask and the leather. What do women want? Who has a clue?

"Is that it?" I ask him. "The sum total of your advice? She won't leave her husband. Man, my heart is broken."

"Oh," he says. There's a long pause. "Don't let it show," he suggests. Then he sighs. Again. "I miss that old white horse," he tells me. And you know what I do? I hang up on him. And you know what he doesn't do? He doesn't call me back.

It really hurts me.

So his second reaction, now that I don't want to listen to him explaining his new theories to me, is to say that I seem to be sulking about something, he can't imagine what. And this is harder to deny.

The day after my birthday I went for a drive in my car, a little white Saab with personalized license plates. KEMO, they say. Maybe the phone is ringing, maybe it's not. I feel better when I don't know. So, he misses his horse. Hey, I've never been the same since that little pinto of mine joined the Big Roundup, but I try not to burden my friends with this. I try not to burden my friends with anything. I just nurse them back to health when the Cavendish gang leaves them for dead. I just come in the middle of the night with the medicine man when little Britt has a fever and it's not responding to Tylenol. I just organize the surprise party when a friend turns forty.

You want to bet even Attila the Hun had a party on his fortieth? You want to bet he was one hard man to surprise? And who blew up the balloons and had everyone hiding under the rugs and in with the goats? This name is lost forever.

I drove out into the country, where every cactus holds its memory for me, where every outcropping of rock once hid an outlaw. Ten years ago the terrain was still so rough I would have had to take the International Scout. Now it's a paved highway straight to the hanging tree. I pulled over to the shoulder of the road, turned off the motor, and just sat there. I was remembering the time Ms. Peggy Cooper stumbled into the Wilcox bank robbery looking for her little girl who'd gone with friends to the swimming hole and hadn't bothered to tell her mania. We were on our way to see Colonel Davis at Fort Comanche about some cattle rustling. We hadn't heard about the bank robbery. Which is why we were taken completely by surprise.

My pony and I were eating the masked man's dust, as usual, when something hit me from behind. Arnold Wilcox, a heavy-set man who sported a five o'clock shadow by eight in the morning, jumped me from the big rock overlooking the Butter-field trail, and I went down like a sack of potatoes. I heard horses converging on us from the left and the right and that hypertrophic white stallion of his took off like a big bird. I laid one on Arnold's stubbly jaw, but he cold-cocked me with the butt of his pistol and I couldn't tell you what happened next.

I don't come to until it's after dark and I'm trussed up like a turkey. Ms. Cooper is next to me, and her hands are tied behind her back with a red bandanna and there's a rope around her feet. She looks disheveled but pretty; her eyes are wide and I can tell she's not too pleased to be lying here next to an Indian. Her dress is buttoned up to the chin so I'm thinking, At least, thank God, they've respected her. It's cold, even as close together as we are. The Wilcoxes are all huddled around the fire, counting money, and the smoke is a straight white line in the sky you could see for miles. So this is more good news, and I'm thinking the Wilcoxes were always a bunch of dumb-ass honkies when it came to your basic woodlore. I'm wondering how they got it together to pull off a bank job, when I hear a horse's hooves and my question is answered. Pierre Cardeaux, Canadian French, hops off the horse's back and goes straight to the fire and stamps it out.

"Imbeciles!" he tells them, only he's got this heavy accent so it comes out "Eembeeceels."

Which insults the Wilcoxes a little. "Hold on there, hombre," Andrew Wilcox says. "Jes' because we followed your plan into the bank and your trail for the getaway doesn't make you the boss here." Pierre pays him about as much notice as you do an ant your horse is about to step on. He comes over to us and puts his hand under Ms. Cooper's chin, sort of thoughtfully. She spits at him and he laughs.

"Spunk," he says. "I like that." I mean, I suppose that's what he says, because that's what they always say, but the truth is, with his accent, I don't understand a word.

Andrew Wilcox isn't finished yet. He's got this big chicken leg he's eating and it's dribbling onto his chin, so he wipes his arm over his face. Which just spreads the grease around more, really, and anyway, he's got this hunk of chicken stuck between his front teeth, so Pierre can hardly keep a straight face when he talks to him. "I understand why we're keeping the woman," Andrew says. "Cause she has—uses. But the Injun there. He's just going to be baggage. I want to waste him."

"Mon ami," says Pierre. "Even pour vous, thees stupiditee lives me spitchless." He's kissing his fingers to illustrate the point as if he were really French and not just Canadian French and has probably never drunk really good wine in his life. I'm lying in the dust, and whatever they've bound my wrists with is cutting off the circulation so my hands feel like someone is jabbing them with porcupine needles. Even now, I can remember smelling the smoke which wasn't there anymore and the Wilcoxes who were and the lavender eau de toilette that Ms. Cooper used. And horses and dust and sweat. These were the glory days, but whose glory? you may well ask, and even if I answered, what difference would it make?

Ms. Cooper gets a good whiff of Andrew Wilcox, and it makes her cough.

"He's right, little brother," says Russell Wilcox, the runt of the litter at three-hundred-odd pounds and a little quicker on the uptake than the rest of the family. "You ever beared tell of a man who rides a white horse, wears a black mask, and shoots a very pricey kind of bullet? This here Injun is his compadre."

"Oui, oui, oui, oui," says Pierre agreeably. The little piggie. He indicates me and raises his eyebrows one at a time. "Avec le sauvage we can, how you say? Meek a deal."

"Votre mere," I tell him. He gives me a good kick in the ribs and he's wearing those pointy-toed kind of cowboy boots, so I feel it, all right. Finally I hear the sound I've been waiting for, a hoot owl over in the trees behind Ms. Cooper, and then he rides up. He hasn't even gotten his gun out yet. "Don't move," he tells Pierre, "or I'll be forced to draw," but he hasn't finished the sentence when Russell Wilcox has his arm around my neck and the point of his knife jabbing into my back.

"We give you the Injun," he says. "Or we give you the girl. You ain't taking both. You comprendez, pardner?"

Now, if he'd asked me I'd have said, Hey, don't worry about me, rescue the woman. And if he'd hesitated, I would have insisted. But he didn't ask and he didn't hesitate. He just hoisted Ms. Cooper up onto the saddle in front of him and pulled the bottom of her skirt down so her legs didn't show, "There's a little girl in Springfield who's going to be mighty happy to see you, Ms. Cooper," I hear him saying, and I've got a suspicion from the look on her face that they're not going straight to Springfield anyway. And that's it. Not one word for me.

Of course, he comes back, but by this time the Wilcoxes and Pierre have fallen asleep around the cold campfire and I've had to inch my way through the dust on my side like a snake over to Russell Wilcox's knife, which fell out of his hand when he nodded off, whittling. I've had to cut my own bonds, and my hands are behind me so I carve up my thumb a little too. The whole time I'm right there beneath Russell, and he's snorting and snuffling and shifting around like he's waking up so my heart nearly stops. It's a wonder my hands don't have to be amputated, they've been without blood for so long. And then there's a big shoot-out and I provide a lot of cover. A couple of days pass before I feel like talking to him about it.

"You rescued Ms. Cooper first," I remind him. "And that was the right thing to do, I'm not saying it wasn't; don't misunderstand me. But it seemed to me that you made up your mind kind of quickly. It didn't seem like a hard decision."

He reaches across the saddle and puts a hand on my hand. Behind the black mask the blue eyes are sensitive and caring. "Of course I wanted to rescue you, old friend," he says. "If I'd made the decision based solely on my own desires, that's what I would have done. But it seemed to me I had a higher responsibility to the more innocent party. It was a hard choice. It may have felt quick to you, but, believe me, I struggled with it." He withdraws his hand and kicks his horse a little ahead of us because the trail is narrowing. I duck under the branch of a prairie spruce. "Besides," he says, back over his shoulder, "I couldn't leave a woman with a bunch of animals like Pierre Cardeaux and the Wilcoxes. A pretty woman like that. Alone. Defenseless."

I start to tell him what a bunch of racists like Pierre Cardeaux and the Wilcoxes might do to a lonely and defenseless Indian. Arnold Wilcox wanted my scalp. "I remember the Alamo," he kept saying, and maybe he meant Little Big Horn; I didn't feel like exploring this. Pierre kept assuring him there would be plenty of time for trophies later. And Andrew trotted out that old chestnut about the only good Indian being a dead Indian. None of which were pleasant to lie there listening to. But I never said it. Because by then the gap between us was so great I would have had to shout, and anyway the ethnic issue has always made us both a little touchy. I wish I had a nickel for every time I've heard him say that some of his best friends are Indians. And I know there are bad Indians; I don't deny it and I don't mind fighting them. I just always thought I should get to decide which ones were the bad ones.

I sat in that car until sunset.

But the next day he calls. "Have you ever noticed how close the holy word 'om' is to our Western word 'home'?" he asks. That's his opening. No hi, how are you? He never asks how I am. If he did, I'd tell him I was fine, just the way you're supposed to. I wouldn't burden him with my problems. I'd just like to be asked, you know?

But he's got a point to make, and it has something to do with Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. How she clicks her heels together and says, over and over like a mantra, "There's no place like home, there's no place like home" and she's actually able to travel through space. "Not in the book," I tell him.

"I know," he says. "In the movie."

"I thought it was the shoes," I say.

And his voice lowers; he's that excited. "What if it was the words?" he asks. "I've got a mantra."

Of course, I'm aware of this. It always used to bug me that he wouldn't tell me what it was. Your mantra, he says, loses its power if it's spoken aloud. So by now I'm beginning to guess what his mantra might be. "A bunch of people I know," I tell him, "all had the same guru. And one day they decided to share the mantras he'd given them. They each wrote their mantra on a piece of paper and passed it around. And you know what? They all had the same mantra. So much for personalization."

"They lacked faith," he points out.

"Rightfully so."

"I gotta go," he tells me. We're reaching the crescendo in the background music, and it cuts off with a click. Silence. He doesn't say good-bye. I refuse to call him back.

The truth is, I'm tired of always being there for him.

So I don't hear from him again until this morning when he calls with the great Displacement Theory. By now I've been forty almost ten days, if you believe the birth certificate the reservation drew up; I find a lot of inaccuracies surfaced when they translated moons into months, so that I've never been too sure what my rising sign is. Not that it matters to me, but it's important to him all of a sudden; apparently you can't analyze personality effectively without it. He thinks I'm a Pisces rising; he'd love to be proved right.

"We can go back, old buddy," he says. "I've found the way back."

"Why would we want to?" I ask. The sun is shining and it's cold out. I was thinking of going for a run.

Does he hear me? About like always. "I figured it out," he says. "It's a combination of biofeedback and the mantra 'home.' I've been working and working on it. I could always leave, you know; that was never the problem; but I could never arrive. Something outside me stopped me and forced me back." He pauses here, and I think I'm supposed to say something, but I'm too pissed. He goes on. "Am I getting too theoretical for you? Because I'm about to get more so. Try to stay with me. The key word is displacement." He says this like he's shivering. "I couldn't get back because there was no room for me there. The only way back is through an exchange. Someone else has to come forward."

He pauses again, and this pause goes on and on. Finally I grunt. A redskin sound. Noncommittal.

His voice is severe. "This is too important for you to miss just because you're sulking about God knows what, pilgrim," he says. "This is travel through space and time."

"This is baloney," I tell him. I'm uncharacteristically blunt, blunter than I ever was during the primal-scream-return-to-the-womb period. If nobody's listening, what does it matter?

"Displacement," he repeats, and his voice is all still and important. "Ask yourself, buddy, what happened to the buffalo?" I don't believe I've heard him correctly. "Say what?" "Return with me," he says, and then he's gone for good and this time he hasn't hung up the phone; this time I can still hear the William Tell Overture repeating the hoofbeat part. There's a noise out front so I go to the door, and damned if I don't have a buffalo, shuffling around on my ornamental strawberries, looking surprised. "You call this grass?" it asks me. It looks up and down the street, more and more alarmed. "Where's the plains, man? Where's the railroad?"

So I'm happy for him. Really I am.

But I'm not going with him. Let him roam it alone this time. He'll be fine. Like Rambo.

Only then another buffalo appears. And another. Pretty soon I've got a whole herd of them out front, trying to eat my yard and gagging. And whining. "The water tastes funny. You got any water with locusts in it?" I don't suppose it's an accident that I've got the same number of buffalo here as there are men in the Cavendish gang. Plus one. I keep waiting to see if any more appear; maybe someone else will go back and help him. But they don't. This is it.

You remember the theories of history I told you about, back in the beginning? Well, maybe somewhere between the great men and the masses, there's a third kind of person. Someone who listens. Someone who tries to help. You don't hear about these people much, so there probably aren't many of them. Oh, you hear about the failures, all right, the shams: Brutus, John Alden, Rasputin. And maybe you think there aren't any at all, that nobody could love someone else more than he loves himself. Just because you can't. Hey, I don't really care what you think. Because I'm here and the heels of my moccasins are clicking together and I couldn't stop them even if I tried. And it's okay. Really. It's who I am. It's what I do.

I'm going to leave you with a bit of theory to think about. It's a sort of riddle. There are good Indians, there are bad Indians, and there are dead Indians. Which am I?

There can be more than one right answer.

CASSANDRA’S PHOTOGRAPH’S

Lisa Goldstein

The best car to smuggle reptiles in is a Subaru station wagon,” Aurora said at the wheel of the car. “Because it’s got four-wheel drive, and great brights so you can see them on the road at night, and because the panels come out easy. So you can hide the snakes and stuff behind them. I’m gonna get one when I can afford it.”

I was sitting in the back seat of the car (which was, unfortunately for Aurora, only an old VW squareback) wondering how things had progressed this far. We had been on our way to get burgers when Aurora decided that, since it was such a nice summer day and everything, we should go down to Mexico and see if we could find some snakes to round out Aurora’s collection. After all, she said, it was only a few hundred miles away. So we made a stop at the corner J.C. Penney’s to buy pillowcases to put the snakes in, and headed out on Highway 5 to Baja California.

Cassie, Aurora’s sister, was sitting up front next to Aurora. Cassie was the reason I was on this trip in the first place. I had noticed her the minute she walked into my class in beginning calculus at the college. Everyone says you shouldn’t date your students, and everyone is probably right, but within a month we were going out two or three times a week. And since I was just the teaching assistant, and not responsible for grades, we had nothing to quarrel about at the end of the semester when Cassie got a C in the class. She didn’t even seem to mind all that much.

I sat still and looked at Cassie’s orange-red hair flying out the window and tried to figure out if there was something I needed to do in the next few days. School was over, so I didn’t have classes. I badly wanted to take out my small pocket diary and flip through it, but I knew what Cassie would say if I did. “Stop being so responsible all the time,” she’d say. “We’re on vacation. Put that book away ”

Lately all our arguments had been about how obsessive (her word) I was, and how childish (my word) she was. She was constantly late, not just once or twice but every single time. I hadn’t seen the beginning of a movie since I started going out with her. So I didn’t say anything when Aurora suggested going to Mexico. I wanted to prove that I could be as open to adventure as the rest of Cassie’s crazy family. It occurred to me that Cassie had to go in to work tomorrow (she cleaned up at a day care center), but I said nothing and looked at her hair, brilliant in the sun. The sight of her hair made it all worthwhile.

“Did you bring the book?” Chris said. Chris was in Aurora’s grade in high school and, like half the class (if the phone ringing day and night was any indication), found it impossible to resist Aurora’s manic energy, her wild schemes. If Aurora was going to collect and trade illegal reptiles then she, Chris, was going to collect and trade illegal reptiles too. The book, The Field Guide to North American Reptiles and Amphibians, had become Chris’s bible.

“No, it’s at home,” Aurora said. “But don’t worry. I know the ones we want.”

On the other side of Chris sat Alan. Alan had said nothing for the past ten miles. Later it turned out that he was deathly afraid of snakes. But he was in love with Aurora, so what could he do? Poor boy. I knew exactly how he felt.

We stopped just this side of the Mexican border for our last hamburger and fries. It was 7:30. “We’re making good time,” Aurora said when we sat down to eat. “We should be at this place I know in a few hours. And we can spend the night driving up and down, and be back by tomorrow afternoon.”

“What about sleep?” I said. Immediately I cursed myself. Someone setting out on the grand adventure wouldn’t think of sleep.

“Who needs sleep?” Cassie said. I thought she looked a little disappointed in me.

“Certainly not you,” I said, trying to make a joke of the whole thing. “Or the rest of your crazy family.”

“What makes you think we’re crazy?” Cassie said.

I thought she was being reasonable. That was my first mistake. I looked across the table at her red hair and brown eyes, both tinted with the same shade of gold, and I started to relax and enjoy the trip for the first time. If I could be with her it didn’t matter where we were going. Anyway her eccentricities were only part of her charm. “Well, you know,” I said. “Your great-uncle, what’s-his-name, the one who thinks he’s an Egyptian.”

“He doesn’t think he’s an Egyptian,” Cassie said. Alan was watching us glumly. Chris drew pictures of snakes on her napkin. “He’s an Osirian. The cult of Osiris. He explained it all to you when you were over at the house.”

“He didn’t explain anything,” I said. “He asked me questions. ‘Knowest thou the name of this door, and canst thou tell it?’ And then the lintel, and the doorpost, and the threshold—”

“You weren’t listening,” Cassie said. She still sounded reasonable. “If you know all the names you can get past the door into the land of the dead. And if you don’t you’re stuck. He’s got to keep all that in his head. It’s a long list.”

“And you don’t think that’s a little strange,” I said. “That he believes all this.”

“Well, what if he’s right?” Cassie said. “I mean, millions of people used to believe in it. Maybe they knew something.”

“Well, what about your grandmother?” I said. “She stays in her room for weeks on end and then she comes out and makes these cryptic utterances—”

“Look, Robert,” Cassie said. Something passed between the two sisters then, something I was too much of an outsider to understand, and Aurora turned to Chris and started talking rapidly. The gold seemed to leave Cassie’s eyes; they became flat, muddy. “Just because you came from a boring home doesn’t give you the right to pass judgment on other people’s families. Okay? I mean, I know your parents belonged to the right kind of religion and had the right kind of jobs and never said anything unusual or anything that would make you think, but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s family is like that. Some of us wouldn’t want to be like that, okay? So you can just keep your stupid opinions to yourself.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean—I was just joking around. I’m sorry.”

Cassie turned away from me to talk to Aurora and Chris. Alan looked at me sympathetically, but I refused to catch his eye.

The rest of the trip was a nightmare. To my surprise we made it past the border guards with no problems. Sometime in the middle of the night we reached the place Aurora had heard about with two snakes we had picked up along the way. Aurora and Chris were ecstatic, I didn’t know why. I’m afraid one snake looks like another to me. Alan, rigid and wild-eyed, was starting to look like a speed freak. We found one more snake, put it in a pillowcase, put the pillowcases in the trunk and headed back. Then Aurora fell asleep at the wheel.

The car swerved, bounced over a few rocks and stalled. Aurora hadn’t woken up. “Aurora?” Cassie said, shaking her. “Aurora?”

“Hmm. Mf,” Aurora said.

We pulled her out and set her in Cassie’s seat. I was hoping she didn’t have a concussion. Naturally no one in the car was wearing a seat belt. Cassie drove a few more miles and then said, “God, I’m sleepy,” and came to a dead stop in the middle of the one lane road.

“I’ll drive!” Alan said, a bright note of desperation in his voice. Then he looked over Cassie’s shoulder and leaned back, but not too far back. Ever since we put the snakes in the trunk his body hadn’t made contact with the back of the seat. “Oh. Stick shift. I can’t do it.”

“Look,” I said. “There was a big city just a few miles back. We’ll find a hotel or a motel or something and get some sleep. All right?”

No one said anything. “Do you want me to drive?” I asked Cassie. “Or can you handle it? It’s only a few more miles, I think.”

“Sure, I can do it,” Cassie said. She never stayed angry at anything for long. This always confused me; I come from a long line of grudge-holders.

The city was more than a few miles away, but we made it. Aurora, wide awake now, cheerfully told us about a man who had been bitten by a cobra and was immobilized just as he picked up the phone and started to dial the hospital. In the street outside a seedy one-story hotel we counted our money and discovered that between us we had eleven dollars and ninety-two cents. Wearily I went inside and found to my absolute amazement that they would take my charge card. I motioned Alan inside. We had already decided that the two men would rent the room and we would sneak the three women in later. I wanted as little trouble as possible. As I was stretching out on the floor, prepared to offer someone else the sagging double bed, I noticed Cassie and Aurora come in. Cassie lay on the floor next to me. In my sleep-fogged mind I thought the sacks Aurora was carrying were her luggage.

Cassie and I were the last ones up. We went outside and found the others at a restaurant down the street. None of them, it turned out, knew Spanish, and they had ordered in gestures and pidgin English. Despite all the warnings and jokes, each of them was drinking a glass of Mexican water. I wondered how they thought they were going to pay for the meal.

Aurora picked up one of the pillowcases scattered around her and looked inside. “Damn,” she said. “One of the snakes escaped. I wonder if it’s back at the hotel. Alan? Alan!” The poor kid’s eyes had rolled up under his fluttering eyelids. “Well if you’re afraid of snakes you should have said something when we started out.”

I hadn’t had any water, but I was sick for a week after we got home. Lying in bed with a hundred-and-two-degree temperature I had time to think about the trip, go over the details, figure out how one thing led to another. I felt as though it had happened to someone else, someone who had far less of a grip on reality than I did.

That trip clarified things for me. Life just wasn’t lived that way, the way Cassie and her family lived it. You didn’t just jump in a car and drive to Mexico because you felt like it. What if I hadn’t been there with my credit card? What if Aurora had gotten a concussion? I wanted something more for my life—order, sanity. I wanted to complete my studies, get my doctorate in math and get a job in industry.

I recovered, got busy with fall classes and stopped calling her. I didn’t consciously think that we had broken up, but I’d think of her or her family from time to time with nostalgic regret. There was a guy who hung around their house—I don’t know if he was part of the family or what—who had been in films as a saxophone player. The only thing was, he couldn’t play the saxophone. He just looked like a saxophone player. So there’d be these close-ups of this guy and someone else on the soundtrack. I used to watch him practice, moving the saxophone this way and that without making a sound. It was eerie.

And I’d remember her great-uncle, asking Cassie to name some part of a doorway in ancient Egyptian. Sometimes she’d know the answer, and he’d beam with satisfaction. Other times she wouldn’t, and he’d shake his head sadly from side to side and say, “Cassandra, my pet, what will become of you?” Once I caught myself shaking my head with regret just thinking of him.

I probably would have called her eventually, but one day my office-mate’s sister came wandering into the office looking for him, and I ended up taking her out for coffee. Her name was Laura, and she was very sensible.

I was home, a few weeks after I’d started seeing Laura, when I heard a loud pounding at the door. I set down the Journal of Multivariate Analysis and got up. Once I’d unlocked the door to the apartment I wished I hadn’t. It was Cassie.

‘’You want order in your life!“ she said with no preamble. Her face was twisted and ugly, her brown eyes hard and flat. I tried to stop her but she pushed her way into the room. ”Goddamn it, you want everything to be dull and predictable, you want to know what’s going to happen in your life at every minute. Don’t you?”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Well, don’t you?” she said loudly. I knew enough about her to tell that she was on the verge of tears. “The way I live is too unpredictable for you, right? If somebody gave you a timetable of your life that told you everything that was going to happen from now until you die you’d welcome it, wouldn’t you? Well?”

She reached into her purse and took out a small manila envelope. “Cassie, I—” I said.

“Well, here!” she said, thrusting the envelope at me. “I hope you’re happy!”

A little dazed, I took it. It seemed too slight to be a timetable of my life. I reached inside and took out—photographs. Photographs of me.

She was turning to go. “Cassie,” I said. “Where did you get these?”

“My grandmother!” she said, and broke away and ran loudly down the hall.

I took all the photographs out and looked at them after she had gone. There were only five of them. The first one showed me at my graduation walking across the stage in a cap and gown to receive my diploma. But I hadn’t been at either of my graduations, not the one at my high school or the one at college where I received my B.A. degree. I turned the picture this way and that, trying to figure out how it had been done. There were these odd details—the guy in front of me was in a wheelchair, for example—but on the whole it was very believable. The person on stage looked a lot like me.

The next picture showed me in an unfamiliar kitchen, pouring myself a cup of coffee. In the third one I was running down the street in the rain, a briefcase flying out from one hand. I looked harassed, and older too, in some indefinable way. The next one was a picture of me and a woman I had never met. We were in a tight embrace and I had a look of perfect peace on my face. The picture ended just below the neck, but I had the impression we were both naked. And in the last picture I was definitely older—at least thirty—and bending down to talk to a five- or six-year-old boy.

I ran the pictures through my hands, shuffling them like a deck of cards. So that’s what Cassie’s grandmother had been doing all those months in her room. She must have had a darkroom in there. I could see her bent over the photographs, cutting a head from this one, a background from that one, maybe re-touching them, arranging them so that they looked like actual photographs. What a strange hobby. No wonder when she came out of her room she would say things like “The wind blows the skeleton of his lips.”

I looked at the photographs again. Very nice, but I didn’t see what the hell I was supposed to do with them. I put them back in the envelope, stuffed the envelope in a drawer and forgot about them.

There was a man in a wheelchair in front of me at my graduation. I felt vaguely uneasy when I saw him—he reminded me of something unpleasant, but I couldn’t remember what— but I managed to put him out of my mind. My parents had come out from Chicago to see me graduate—otherwise, I suppose, I wouldn’t have gone to this graduation either— and at the reception afterward I introduced them to Laura and my friends without thinking too much about the ceremony. It was only when we were out to dinner that I remembered the photograph.

“What is it?” Laura said. “Is something wrong?” Later she told me that until she saw me that night she had never believed in the cliché “his jaw dropped.”

“Nothing,” I said uneasily, and, I guess, closed my jaw. Amazing, I thought. An amazing coincidence. I wondered what Cassie’s grandmother would make of it. Cassie. I shook my head. I hadn’t thought of her in months. “I just remembered something, that’s all.”

When I got home that night I pulled out all my drawers looking for the photographs. I found them at last, buried under the first few drafts of my dissertation. My fingers were shaking when I pulled the photographs out of the manila envelope.

The scene in the photograph matched point for point with the scene on stage. It might almost have been a picture taken by someone in the audience. There was Dr. Miller, who had been hastily invited to speak when Dr. Fine became ill. There was my friend Larry walking across the stage behind me. You could see his sneakers under the edge of his gown; he hadn’t had time to change his shoes. There was the guy in the wheelchair, rolling down the ramp off stage.

I felt as though someone had opened a window and let in a blast of cold air. I was shivering and had to sit down. How had the old lady done it? How on earth had she known?

I looked at the other photographs more intently than I’d ever looked at anything before. My hands were trembling badly. So that’s what Cassie had meant. This was to be my life. Someday I’d live in a house with a kitchen like the one in the photograph. I’d have a job that involved carrying a briefcase. And in about ten years I’d talk to a boy about five or six years old. Could the boy be my son? At the thought I felt another chill wind through the room and I shuffled that photograph to the end of the pile.

The picture I looked at the longest, though, was the one of me and the woman embracing. Her face was just under my chin and turned in slightly toward my chest, but from what little I saw I thought that she was beautiful. She had blond, almost gold, hair cut very short, and fine, delicate features. The one eye visible in the picture was closed. I thought she looked happy.

Surprisingly my trembling had stopped. I accepted— somehow—that I was seeing scenes from my future, but the idea no longer frightened me. I saw nothing bad in these pictures, no death or grief or pain. In fact, the future seemed to hold only good things for me. A job, a house, a beautiful woman, perhaps a child.

If Cassie had hoped to frighten me with these photos, hoped somehow to win me back, she had badly miscalculated. It was with a feeling of profound satisfaction that I put the photographs in the manila envelope and put the envelope carefully back in the drawer.

After graduation I got a job with an aircraft company in a suburb of L.A. Feeling a little foolish, I carefully studied the briefcase in the photograph and then went out and got one just like it. I was looking at the photos about two or three times a week now, noting small details. The woman seemed to have small freckles scattered like stars across her face. The boy looked vaguely familiar, though if he were my son that wouldn’t be surprising. A car was parked directly in back of him. There was a poster on the wall of the kitchen on which, after a week of effort, I could read the words “Save the Whales.”

Laura and I had several arguments around this time. None of them was very serious—I had thrown out a pamphlet she had given me without reading it, for example, or she disapproved of my choice of restaurants—but each time I would think, “The woman in the photograph wouldn’t act this way.” The woman in the photograph, I thought, was wise and loving and giving. After a while Laura and I drifted apart.

I began to date women for a week or a month and then drop them, secretaries from the aircraft company or women I’d pick up in singles bars in the Marina. One morning I woke up in an unfamiliar bed next to a woman I could barely remember and saw by her alarm clock that I had to be at work in an hour. I staggered out to her kitchen and poured myself a cup of coffee. It was only after I drank the coffee that I turned around and saw the Save the Whales poster tacked up on the wall.

I was buoyant all that day. Several people at work even asked me what I was smiling about. If another one of the pictures had come true, I thought, the rest couldn’t be that far behind.

The next few months were probably the happiest in my life. I lived in a state of almost constant anticipation. At any moment I might see her, turning the corner or buying a pair of shoes. I invented names for her, Alexandra, Deirdre. I fantasized taking her home and showing her the photograph, telling her the story and seeing her eyes open wide in amazement. I worked hard, dated some, and spent long evenings running the photographs back and forth through my hands.

You can only anticipate for so long, though. Gradually, so gradually I barely noticed it, the photos became less and less important. I only looked at them once or twice a week, then once a month. I stopped holding my breath whenever I saw a woman with short blond hair. I still felt that my future held something wonderful, that my life was more intense than most people’s, but I no longer thought about why I felt that way.

After about five years I quit the aircraft company and went into consulting. I had saved some money, but the first year on my own was very rocky. Then I began to make a reputation for myself and in the second year earned almost twice what I would have with the company. I bought a house in the suburbs. I was working very hard now, so hard I had almost no time to date or entertain friends. It didn’t matter, because I knew that sooner or later I would see the blond woman and my life would change. Sometimes, working late into the night, I caught myself wondering what she would think of the way I’d decorated the spare bedroom, or whether she’d like it if I had a pool put in the back yard.

One day I locked my keys in my car and hurried to a phone booth to call the automobile club. It was raining lightly, and suddenly I recognized the scene from the photograph. I felt vindicated. My life was on the right track.

Ten years after I graduated I saw Cassie again. I had gone to a firm in an unfamiliar part of town, and on my way to the car I remembered that I didn’t have any food in the house. I crossed the street to the supermarket, and in the parking lot, holding a bag of groceries in one hand and a child’s hand in the other, was Cassie. It took me a few minutes to recognize her. By that time she had already turned to me. She knew who I was immediately. “Robert?” she said, grinning widely. She looked as though she’d hardly aged.

“Cassie!” I said. “How you doing?”

“Fine, just fine,” she said. “How are you?”

“I’m fine. How’s Aurora? When did you get married?” I nodded at the kid, now pulling hard on Cassie’s arm and humming to himself.

“I’m not married,” she said. Of course. Same old Cassie.

The kid said something I couldn’t catch, and I squatted down to hear him better. “My mommy’s a singing parent,” he said, talking around the largest piece of candy I had ever seen.

“A singing parent?” I said.

“Single parent,” Cassie said, and I stood up, feeling foolish. “So I guess you graduated, huh?”

People in school or at the aircraft company sometimes talked about inspiration, about suddenly solving a problem that had bothered them for weeks, seeing the problems that their solution brought up and going on to solve them too, on and on, effortlessly. I had always envied them profoundly. That sort of thing had never happened to me. But now, as I stood up, I realized that Cassie’s son was the boy in the photograph; that he looked familiar because he looked like Cassie, though without her red hair; that since I was the oldest in the photograph with the child all the other scenes must have happened to me already. All this took a fraction of a second, and I was able to say, “Yeah, I did,” before the realization hit me and I said, “You cheated me!”

The boy, so familiar now, looked up, alarmed. “What do you mean?” Cassie said.

“Those photographs,” I said. “Those goddamn photographs you gave me, you little bitch. You wanted to get my hopes up, you wanted me to think that some day I’d meet a woman I’d fall in love with, and all this time it was a lie. All the scenes have happened, including the one with your stupid son just now, all except the one with that woman. And I’m too old for that one now. You put it in there just to— to—

“I remember now,” Cassie said, looking thoughtful. The boy started to pull her hand again. “I gave you those photographs, that’s right. I was mad at you, because you never called me. I got them from my grandmother. But all the scenes were true, she told me. All of them. If they said you were going to meet a woman then you’ll meet her. I didn’t really look at the pictures all that closely. Wait. You’re right— there was one with a woman in it. I asked my grandmother who she was and she said she worked in a department store. Was my son in one? I don’t remember that.”

In a department store, I thought, feeling bereft. Now I remembered a woman I’d taken home about five years ago. Halfway though the evening I’d realized she looked a little like the woman in the photograph, but she had turned to face me and the illusion was broken. Her name was Irma, and she had worked in a department store, I thought, amazed that I could remember so much. She’d left in the middle of the night because she’d been worried about her dog. I never called her back.

“You mean I’ve been waiting—” I said. “Waiting ten years for a woman, and all this time—”

Cassie shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Look, I’m sorry if—”

“Sorry,” I said numbly. “Somehow that doesn’t seem to cover wasting ten years of my life. I guess you got your revenge after all.”

“I wasn’t out for revenge,” she said. “I wanted to show you something. To show you that life isn’t as much fun when you know what’s going to happen. To make you loosen up a bit.”

“Yeah, well, you did just the opposite,” I said, turning away.

“Robert?” she said, tentatively. I didn’t look back.

When I got home I took the photographs out and spread them across my desk. I was surprised to see how worn they were, how frayed at the edges. How many hours had I spent looking at them, planning a future that never existed? I lit a match and held it up to one photograph, then threw them in the fireplace. Five seconds later they had all burned.

Now, in the evenings, mostly I sit and think. I feel lost, as though I’ve survived a great tragedy. I neglect my work, and my answering service has one or two messages every day from irate clients. I think about my wasted ten years, about Cassie and her crazy family, and their strange ability to charm. I think that sooner or later it will be time to call Cassie back, to start a life that was stopped—that I stopped—ten years ago. I’m pretty sure Cassie will turn me down. But for the first time in a long time, I don’t know for sure. And that excites me.

NIGHT OF THE COOTERS

Howard Waldrop

This story is in memory of Slim Pickens (1919—1983)

Sheriff Lindley was asleep on the toilet in the Pachuco County courthouse when someone started pounding on the door. "Bert!" the voice yelled as the sheriff jerked awake.

"Goldang!" said the lawman. The Waco newspaper slid off his lap onto the floor.

He pulled his pants up with one hand and the toilet chain on the water box overhead with the other. He opened the door. Chief Deputy Sweets stood before him, a complaint slip in his hand.

"Dang it, Sweets!" said the sheriff. "I told you never to bother me in there. It's the hottest Thursday in the history of Texas! You woke me up out of a hell of a dream!"

The deputy waited, wiping sweat from his forehead. There were two big circles, like half-moons, under the arms of his blue chambray shirt.

"I was fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, and I was a Aztec or a Mixtec or somethin'," said the sheriff. "Anyways, I was buck naked, and I was standin' on one of them ball courts with the little bitty stone rings twenty foot up one wall, and they was presentin' me to Moctezuma. I was real proud, and the sun was shinin', but it was real still and cool down there in the Valley of the Mexico. I look up at the grandstand, and there's Moctezuma and all his high muckety-mucks with feathers and stuff hangin' off 'em, and more gold than a circus wagon. And there was these other guys, conquistadors and stuff, with beards and rusty helmets, and Italian priests with crosses you coulda barred a livery-stable door with. One of Moctezuma's men was explainin' how we was fixin' to play ball for the gods and things. I knew in my dream I was captain of my team. I had a name that sounded like a bird fart in Aztec talk, and they mentioned it and the name of the captain of the other team, too. Well, everything was goin' all right, and I was prouder and prouder, until the guy doing the talkin' let slip that whichever team won was gonna be paraded around Tenochtitlan and given women and food and stuff like that; and then tomorrow A.M. they was gonna be cut up and simmered real slow and served up with chilis and onions and tomatoes.

"Well, you never seed such a fight as broke out then! They was a-yellin', and a priest was swingin' a cross, and spears and axes were flyin' around like it was an Irish funeral. Next thing I know, you're a-bangin' on the door and wakin' me up and bringin' me back to Pachuco County! What the hell do you want?"

"Mr. De Spain wants you to come over to his place right away."

"He does, huh?"

"That's right. Sheriff. He says he's got some miscreants he wants you to arrest."

"Everybody else around here has desperadoes. De Spain has miscreants. I'll be so danged glad when the town council gets around to movin' the city limits fifty foot the other side of his place, I won't know what to do! Every time anybody farts too loud, he calls me."

Lindley and Sweets walked back to the office at the other end of the courthouse. Four deputies sat around with their feet propped up on desks. They rocked forward respectfully and watched as the sheriff went to the hat pegs. On one of the dowels was a sweat-stained hat with turned-down points at front and back. The side brims were twisted in curves. The hat angled up to end in a crown that looked like the business end of a Phillips screwdriver. Under the hat was a holster with a Navy Colt .41 that looked like someone had used it to drive railroad spikes all the way to the Continental Divide. Leaning under them was a ten-gauge pump shotgun with the barrel sawed off just in front of the foregrip. On the other peg was an immaculate new round-top Stetson of brown felt with a snakeskin band half as wide as a fingernail running around it.

The deputies stared.

Lindley picked up the Stetson.

The deputies rocked back in their chairs and resumed yakking.

"Hey, Sweets!" said the sheriff at the door. "Change that damn calendar on your desk. It ain't Wednesday, August seventeenth; it's Thursday, August eighteenth."

"Sure thing, Sheriff."

"And you boys try not to play checkers so loud you wake the judge up, okay?"

"Sure thing, Sheriff."

Lindley went down the courthouse steps onto the rock walk. He passed the two courthouse cannons he and the deputies fired off three times a year—March second, July fourth, and Robert E. Lee's birthday. Each cannon had a pyramid of ornamental cannonballs in front of it.

Waves of heat came off the cannons, the ammunition, the telegraph wires overhead, and, in the distance, the rails of the twice-a-day spur line from Waxahachie.

The town was still as a rusty shovel. The forty-five-star United States flag hung like an old, dried dishrag from its stanchion. From looking at the town you couldn't tell the nation was about to go to war with Spain over Cuba, that China was full of unrest, and that five thousand miles away a crazy German count was making airships.

Lindley had seen enough changes in his sixty-eight years. He had been born in the bottom of an Ohio keelboat in 1830; was in Bloody Kansas when John Brown came through; fought for the Confederacy, first as a corporal, then a sergeant major, from Chickamauga to the Wilderness; and had seen more skirmishes with hostile tribes than most people would ever read about in a dozen Wide-Awake Library novels.

It was as hot as under an upside-down washpot on a tin shed roof. The sheriff's wagon horse seemed asleep as it trotted, head down, puffs hanging in the still air like brown shrubs made of dust around its hooves. There were ten, maybe a dozen people in sight in the whole town. Those few on the street moved like molasses, only as far as they had to, from shade to shade. Anybody with sense was asleep at home with wet towels hung over the windows, or sitting as still as possible with a funeral-parlor fan in their hands.

The sheriff licked his big droopy mustache and hoped nobody nodded to him. He was already too hot and tired to tip his hat. He leaned back in the wagon seat and straightened his bad leg (a Yankee souvenir) against the boot board. His gray suit was like a boiling shroud. He was too hot to reach up and flick the dust off his new hat. He had become sheriff in the special election three years ago to fill out Sanderson's term when the governor had appointed the former sheriff attorney general. Nothing much had happened in the county since then.

"Gee-hup," he said.

The horse trotted three steps before going back into its walking trance.

Sheriff Lindley didn't bother her again until he pulled up at De Spain's big place and said, "Whoa, there."

The black man who did everything for De Spain opened the gate.

"Sheriff," he said.

"Luther," said Lindley, nodding his head.

"Around back, Mr. Lindley."

There were two boys—raggedy town kids, the Strother boy and one of the poor Chisums—sitting on the edge of the well. The Chisum kid had been crying.

De Spain was hot and bothered. He was only half dressed, with suit pants, white shirt, vest, and stockings on but no shoes or coat. He hadn't macassared his hair yet. He was pointing a rifle with a barrel big as a drainpipe at the two boys.

"Here they are, Sheriff. Luther saw them down in the orchard. I'm sure he saw them stealing my peaches, but he wouldn't tell me. I knew something was up when he didn't put my clothes in the usual place next to the window where I like to dress. So I looked out and saw them. They had half a potato sack full by the time I crept around the house and caught them. I want to charge them with trespass and thievery."

"Well, well," said the sheriff, looking down at the sackful of evidence. He turned and pointed toward the black man. "You want me to charge Luther here with collusion and abetting a crime?" Neither Lindley's nor Luther's face betrayed any emotion.

"Of course not," said De Spain. "I've told him time and time again he's too soft on filchers. If this keeps happening, I'll hire another boy who'll enforce my orchard with buckshot, if need be."

De Spain was a young man with eyes like a weimaraner's. As Deputy Sweets said, he had the kind of face you couldn't hit just once. He owned half the town of Pachuco City. The other half paid him rent.

"Get in the wagon, boys," said Lindley.

"Aren't you going to cover them with your weapon?" asked De Spain.

"You should know by now, Mr. De Spain, that when I wear this suit I ain't got nothin' but a three-shot pocket pistol on me. Besides"—he looked at the two boys in the wagon bed—"they know if they give me any guff, I'll jerk a bowknot in one of 'em and bite the other'n's ass off."

"I don't think there's a need for profanity," said De Spain.

"It's too damn hot for anything else," said Lindley. "I'll clamp 'em in the juzgado and have Sweets run the papers over to your office tomorrow mornin'."

"I wish you'd take them out one of the rural roads somewhere and flail the tar out of them to teach them about property rights," said De Spain.

The sheriff tipped his hat back and looked up at De Spain's three-story house with the parlor so big you could hold a rodeo in it. Then he looked back at the businessman, who'd finally lowered the rifle.

"Well, I know you'd like that," said Lindley. "I seem to remember that most of the fellers who wrote the Constitution were pretty well off, but some of the other rich people thought they had funny ideas. But they were really pretty smart. One of the things they were smart about was the Bill of Rights. You know, Mr. De Spain, the reason they put in the Bill of Rights wasn't to give all the little people without jobs or money a lot of breaks with the law. Why they put that in there was for if the people without jobs or money ever got upset and turned on them, they could ask for the same justice everybody else got."

De Spain looked at him with disgust. "I've never liked your homespun parables, and I don't like the way you sheriff this county."

"I don't doubt that," said Lindley. "You've got sixteen months, three weeks, and two days to find somebody to run against me. Good evening, Mr. De Spain."

He climbed onto the wagon seat.

"Luther."

"Sheriff."

He turned the horse around as De Spain and the black man took the sack of peaches through the kitchen door into the house.

The sheriff stopped the wagon near the railroad tracks where the houses began to deviate from the vertical.

"Jody. Billy Roy." He looked at them with eyes like chips of flint. "You're the dumbest pair of squirts that ever lived in Pachuco City! First off, half those peaches were still green. You'd have got bellyaches, and your mothers would have beaten you within an inch of your lives and given you so many doses of Black Draught you'd shit over ten-rail fences all week. Now listen to what I'm sayin', 'cause I'm only gonna say it once. If I ever hear of either of you stealing anything, anywhere in this county, I'm going to put you both in school."

"No, Sheriff, please, no!"

"I'll put you in there every morning and come and get you out seven long hours later, and I'll have the judge issue a writ keeping you there till you're twelve years old. And if you try to run away, I'll follow you to the ends of the earth with Joe Sweeper's bloodhounds, and I'll bring you back."

They were crying now.

"You git home." They were running before they left the wagon.

* * *

Somewhere between the second piece of corn bread and the third helping of snap beans, a loud rumble shook the ground.

"Goodness' sakes!" said Elsie, his wife of twenty-three years. "What can that be?"

"I expect that's Elmer, out by the creek. He came in last week and asked if he could blast on the place. I told him it didn't matter to me as long as he did it between sunup and sundown and didn't blow his whole family of rug rats and yard apes up.

"Jake, down at the mercantile, said Elmer bought enough dynamite to blow up Fort Worth if he'd a mind to—all but the last three sticks in the store. Jake had to reorder for stump-blowin' time."

"Whatever could he want with all that much?"

"Oh, that damn fool has the idea the vein in that old mine that played out in '83 might start up again on his property. He got to talking with the Smith boy, oh, hell, what's his name—?"

"Leo?"

"Yeah, Leo, the one that studies down in Austin, learns about stars and rocks and all that shit…"

"Watch your language, Bertram!"

"Oh, hell, anyway, that boy must have put a bug up Elmer's butt about that—"

"Bertram!" said Elsie, putting down her knife and fork.

"Oh, hell, anyway. I guess Elmer'll blow the side off his hill and bury his house before he's through."

The sheriff was reading a week-old copy of the Waco Herald while Elsie washed up the dishes. He sure missed Brann's Iconoclast, the paper he used to read, which had ceased publication when the editor was gunned down on a Waco street by an irate Baptist four months before. The Waco paper had a little squib from London, England, about there having been explosions on Mars ten nights in a row last month, and whether it was a sign of life on that planet or some unusual volcanic activity.

Sheriff Lindley had never given volcanoes (except those in the Valley of the Mexico) or the planet Mars much thought.

Hooves came pounding down the road. He put down his paper. "Sheriff, sheriff!" he said in a high, mocking voice.

"What?" asked Elsie. Then she heard the hooves and began to dry her hands on the towel on the nail above the sink.

The horse stopped out front; bare feet slapped up to the porch; small fists pounded on the door.

"Sheriff! Sheriff!" yelled a voice Lindley recognized as belonging to either Tommy or Jimmy Atkinson.

He strode to the door and opened it.

"Tommy, what's all the hooraw?"

"Jimmy. Sheriff, something fell on our pasture, tore it all to hell, knocked down the tree, killed some of our cattle, Tommy can't find his dog, Mother sent—"

"Hold on! Something fell on your place? Like what?"

"I don't know! Like a big rock, only sparks was flyin' off it, and it roared and blew up! It's at the north end of the place, and—"

"Elsie, run over and get Sweets and the boys. Have them go get Leo Smith if he ain't gone back to college yet. Sounds to me like Pachuco County's got its first shootin' star. Hold on, Jimmy, I'm comin' right along. We'll take my wagon; you can leave your pony here."

"Oh, hurry, Sheriff! It's big! It killed our cattle and tore up the fences—"

"Well, I can't arrest it for that," said Lindley. He put on his Stetson. "And I thought Elmer'd blowed hisself up. My, my, ain't never seen a shooting star before…"

* * *

"Damn if it don't look like somebody threw a locomotive through here," said the sheriff. The Atkinson place used to have a sizable hill and the tallest tree in the county on it. Now it had half a hill and a big stump and beyond, a huge crater. Dirt had been thrown up in a ten-foot-high pile around it. There was a large, rounded, gray object buried in the dirt and torn caliche at the bottom. Waves of heat rose from it, and gray ash, like old charcoal, fell off it into the shimmering pit.

Half the town was riding out in wagons and on horseback as the news spread. The closest neighbors were walking over in the twilight, wearing their go-visiting clothes.

"Well, well," said the sheriff, looking down. "So that's what a meteor looks like."

Leo Smith was in the pit, walking around.

"I figured you'd be here sooner or later," said Lindley.

"Hello, Sheriff," said Leo. "It's still too hot to touch. Part of a cow's buried under the back end."

The sheriff looked over at the Atkinson family. "You folks is danged lucky. That thing coulda come down smack on your house or, worse, your barn. What time did it fall?"

"Straight up and down six o'clock," said Mrs. Atkinson. "We was settin' down to supper. I saw it out of the corner of my eye; then all tarnation came down. Rocks must have been falling for ten minutes!"

"It's pretty spectacular, Sheriff," said Leo. "I'm going into town to telegraph off to the professors at the university. They'll sure want to look at this."

"Any reason other than general curiosity?" asked Lindley.

"I've only seen pictures and handled little bitty parts of one," said Leo, "but it doesn't look usual. They're generally like big rocks, all stone or iron. The outside of this one's soft and crumbly. Ashy, too."

There was a slight pop and a stove-cooling noise from the thing.

"Well, you can come back into town with me if you want to. Hey, Sweets!"

The chief deputy came over.

"A couple of you boys better stay here tonight, keep people from falling in the hole. I guess if Leo's gonna wire the university, you better keep anybody from knockin' chunks off it. It'll probably get pretty crowded. If I was the Atkinsons, I'd start chargin' a nickel a look."

"Sure thing, Sheriff."

"I'll be out here tomorrow mornin' to take another gander. I gotta serve a process paper on old Theobald before he lights out for his chores. If I sent one 'a' you boys, he'd as soon shoot you as say howdy."

"Sure thing, Sheriff."

He and Leo and Jimmy Atkinson got in the wagon and rode off toward the quiet lights of town far away.

* * *

There was a new smell in the air.

The sheriff noticed it as he rode toward the Atkinson ranch by the south road early the next morning. There was an odor like when something goes wrong at the telegraph office. Smoke was curling up from the pasture. Maybe there was a scrub fire started from the heat of the falling star.

He topped the last rise. Before him lay devastation the likes of which he hadn't seen since the retreat from Atlanta.

"Great gawd ahmighty!" he said.

There were dead horses and charred wagons all around. The ranch house was untouched, but the barn was burned to the ground. There were crisscrossed lines of burnt grass that looked like they'd been painted with a tarbrush.

He saw no bodies anywhere. Where was Sweets? Where was Luke, the other deputy? Where had the people from the wagons gone? What had happened?

Lindley looked at the crater. There was a shiny rod sticking out of it, with something round on the end. From here it looked like one of those carnival acts where a guy spins a plate on the end of a dowel rod, only this glinted like metal in the early sun. As he watched, a small cloud of green steam rose above it from the pit.

He saw a motion behind an old tree uprooted by a storm twelve years ago. It was Sweets. He was yelling and waving the sheriff back. Lindley rode his horse into a small draw, then came up into the open.

There was movement over at the crater. He thought he saw something. Reflected sunlight flashed by his eyes, and he thought he saw a rounded silhouette. He heard a noise like sometimes gets in bob wire on a windy day. He heard a humming sound then, smelled the electric smell real strong. Fire started a few feet from him, out of nowhere, and moved toward him.

Then his horse exploded. The air was an inferno, he was thrown spinning—

He must have blacked out. He had no memory of what went next. When he came to, he was running as fast as he ever had toward the uprooted tree.

Fire jumped all around. Luke was shooting over the tree roots with his pistol. He ducked. A long section of the trunk was washed with flames and sparks.

Lindley dove behind the root tangle.

"What the dingdong is goin' on?" he asked as he tried to catch his breath. He still had his new hat on, but his britches and coat were singed and smoking.

"God damn, Bert! I don't know," said Sweets, leaning around Luke. "We was out here all night; it was a regular party; most of the time we was up on the lip up there. Maybe thirty or forty people comin' and goin' all the time. We was all talking and hoorawing, and then we heard something about an hour ago. We looked down, and I'll be damned if the whole top of that thing didn't come off like a mason jar!

"We was watching, and these damn things started coming out— they looked like big old leather balls, big as horses, with snakes all out the front—"

"What?"

"Snakes. Yeah, tentacles Leo called them, like an octypuss. Leo'd come back from town and was here when them boogers came out. Martians he said they was, things from Mars. They had big old eyes, big as your head! Everybody was pushing and shoving; then one of them pulled out one of them gun things, real slow like, and just started burning up everything in sight.

"We all ran back for whatever cover we could find—it took 'em a while to get up the dirt pile. They killed horses, dogs, anything they could see. Fire was everywhere. They use that thing just like the volunteer firemen use them water hoses in Waco!"

"Where's Leo?"

Sweets pointed to the draw that ran diagonally to the west. "We watched awhile, finally figured they couldn't line up on the ditch all the way to the rise. Leo and the others got away up the draw—he was gonna telegraph the university about it. The bunch that got away was supposed to send people out to the town road to warn people. You probably would have run into them if you hadn't been coming from Theobald's place. Anyway, soon as them things saw people were gettin' away, they got mad as hornets. That's when they lit up the Atkinsons' barn."

A flash of fire leapt in the roots of the tree, jumped back thirty feet into the burnt grass behind them, then moved back and forth in a curtain of sparks.

"Man, that's what I call a real smoke pole," said Luke.

"Well," Lindley said. "This won't do. These things done attacked citizens in my jurisdiction, and they killed my horse."

He turned to Luke.

"Be real careful, and get back to town, and get the posse up. Telegraph the Rangers and tell 'em to burn leather gettin' here. Then get aholt of Skip Whitworth and have him bring out The Gun."

* * *

Skip Whitworth sat behind the tree trunk and pulled the cover from the six-foot rifle at his side. Skip was in his late fifties. He had been a sniper in the War for Southern Independence when he had been in his twenties. He had once shot at a Yankee general just as the officer was bringing a forkful of beans up to his mouth. When the fork got there, there were only some shoulders and a gullet for the beans to drop into.

That had been from a mile and a half away, from sixty feet up a pine tree.

The rifle was an .80-caliber octagonal-barrel breechloader that used two and a half ounces of powder and a percussion cap the size of a jawbreaker for each shot. It had a telescopic sight running the entire length of the barrel.

"They're using that thing on the end of that stick to watch us," said Lindley. "I had Sweets jump around, and every time he did, one of those cooters would come up with that fire gun and give us what-for."

Skip said nothing. He loaded his rifle, which had a breechblock lever the size of a crowbar on it, then placed another round—cap, paper cartridge, ball—next to him. He drew a bead and pulled the trigger. It sounded like dynamite had gone off in their ears. The wobbling pole snapped in two halfway up. The top end flopped around back into the pit.

There was a scrabbling noise above the whirring from the earthen lip. Something round came up.

Skip had smoothly opened the breech, put in the ball, torn the cartridge with his teeth, put in the cap, closed the action, pulled back the hammer, and sighted before the shape reached the top of the dirt.

Metal glinted in the middle of the dark thing. Skip fired. There

314 Howard Waldrop

was a squeech; the whole top of the round thing opened up; it spun around and backward, things in its front working like a daddy longlegs thrown on a roaring stove.

Skip loaded again. There were flashes of light from the crater. Something came up shooting, fire leaping like hot sparks from a blacksmith's anvil, the air full of flames and smoke. Skip fired again.

The fire gun flew up in the air. Snakes twisted, writhed, disappeared.

It was very quiet for a few seconds.

Then there was the renewed whining of machinery and noises like a pile driver, the sounds of filing and banging. Steam came up over the crater lip.

"Sounds like a steel foundry in there," said Sweets.

"I don't like it one bit," said Lindley. "Be danged if I'm gonna let 'em get the drop on us. Can you keep them down?"

"How many are there?" asked Skip.

"Luke and Sweets saw four or five before all hell broke loose this morning. Probably more of 'em than that was inside."

"I've got three more shots. If they poke up, I'll get "em."

"I'm goin' to town, then out to Elmer's. Sweets'll stay with you awhile. If you run outta bullets, light up out the draw. I don't want nobody killed. Sweets, keep an eye out for the posse. I'm telegraphing the Rangers again, then goin' to get Elmer and his dynamite. We're gonna fix their little red wagon for certain."

"Sure thing, Sheriff."

The sun had just passed noon.

* * *

Leo looked haggard. He had been up all night, then at the telegraph office sending off messages to the university. Inquiries had begun to come in from as far east as Baton Rouge. Leo had another, from Percival Lowell out in Flagstaff, Arizona Territory. "Everybody at the university thinks it's wonderful," said Leo.

"People in Austin would," said Lindley.

"They're sure these things are connected with Mars and those bright flashes of gas last month. Seems something's happened in England, starting about a week ago. No one's been able to get through to London for two or three days."

"You telling me Mars is attacking London, England, and Pachuco City, Texas?" asked the sheriff.

"It seems so," said Leo. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

'"Scuse me, Leo," said Lindley. "I got to get another telegram off to the Texas Rangers."

"That's funny," said Argyle, the telegraph operator. "The line was working just a second ago." He began tapping his key and fiddling with his coil box.

Leo peered out the window. "Hey!" he said. "Where's the 3:14?" He looked at the railroad clock. It was 3:25. In sixteen years of rail service, the train had been four minutes late, and that was after a mud slide in the storm twelve years ago.

"Uh-oh," said the sheriff.

* * *

They were turning out of Elmer's yard with a wagonload of dynamite. The wife and eleven of the kids were watching.

"Easy, Sheriff," said Elmer, who, with two of his boys and most of their guns, was riding in back with the explosives. "Jake sold me everything he had. I just didn't notice till we got back here with that stuff that some of it was already sweating."

"Holy shit!" said Lindley. "You mean we gotta go a mile an hour out there? Let's get out and throw the bad stuff off."

"Well, it's all mixed in," said Elmer. "I was sorta gonna set it all up on the hill and put one blasting cap in the whole load."

"Jesus. You woulda blowed up your house and Pachuco City too."

"I was in a hurry," said Elmer, hanging his head.

"Well, can't be helped. We'll take it slow."

Lindley looked at his watch. It was six o'clock. He heard a high-up, fluttering sound. They looked at the sky. Coming down was a large, round, glowing object throwing off sparks in all directions. It was curved with points, like the thing in the crater at the Atkinson place. A long, thin trail of smoke from the back end hung in the air behind it. They watched in awe as it sailed down. It went into the horizon to the north of Pachuco City.

"One," said one of the kids in the wagon, "two, three—"

Silently they took up the count. At twenty-seven there was a roaring boom, just like the night before.

"Five and a half miles," said the sheriff. "That puts it eight miles from the other one. Leo said the ones in London came down twenty-four hours apart, regular as clockwork." They started off as fast as they could under the circumstances.

* * *

There were flashes of light beyond the Atkinson place in the near dusk. The lights moved off toward the north where the other thing had plowed in.

It was the time of evening when your eyes can fool you. Sheriff Lindley thought he saw something that shouldn't have been there sticking above the horizon. It glinted like metal in the dim light.

He thought it moved, but it might have been the motion of the wagon as they lurched down a gulley. When they came up, it was gone.

Skip was gone. His rifle was still there. It wasn't melted but had been crushed, as had the three-foot-thick tree trunk in front of it. All the caps and cartridges were gone.

There was a monstrous series of footprints leading from the crater down to the tree, then off into the distance to the north where Lindley thought he had seen something. There were three footprints in each series. Sweets' hat had been mashed along with Skip's gun. Clanging and banging still came from the crater.

The four of them made their plans. Lindley had his shotgun and pistol, which Luke had brought out with him that morning, though he was still wearing his burned suit and his untouched Stetson.

He tied together the fifteen sweatiest sticks of dynamite he could find.

They crept up, then rushed the crater.

* * *

"Hurry up!" yelled the sheriff to the men at the courthouse. "Get that cannon up those stairs!"

"He's still coming this way!" yelled Luke from up above.

They had been watching the giant machine from the courthouse since it had come up out of the Atkinson place, before the sheriff and Elmer and his boys made it into town after their sortie.

It had come across to the north, gone to the site of the second crash, and stood motionless there for quite a while. When it got dark, the deputies brought out the night binoculars. Everybody in town saw the flash of dynamite from the Atkinson place.

A few moments after that, the machine had moved back toward there. It looked like a giant water tower with three legs. It had a thing like a teacher's desk bell on top of it, and something that looked like a Kodak roll-film camera in front of that. As the moon rose, they saw the thing had tentacles like thick wires hanging from between the three giant legs.

The sheriff, Elmer, and his boys made it to town just as the machine found the destruction they had caused at the first landing site. It had turned toward town and was coming at a pace of twenty miles an hour.

"Hurry the hell up!" yelled Luke. "Oh, shit—!" He ducked. There was a flash of light overhead. The building shook. "That heat gun comes out of the box on the front!" he said. "Look out!" The building glared and shook again. Something down the street caught fire.

"Load that son of a bitch," said Lindley. "Bob! Some of you men make sure everybody's in the cyclone cellars or where they won't burn. Cut out all the damn lights!"

"Hell, Sheriff. They know we're here!" yelled a deputy. Lindley hit him with his hat, then followed the cannon up to the top of the clock-tower steps.

Luke was cramming powder into the cannon muzzle. Sweets ran back down the stairs. Other people carried cannonballs up the steps to the tower one at a time.

Leo came up. "What did you find, Sheriff, when you went back?"

There was a cool breeze for a few seconds in the courthouse tower. Lindley breathed a few deep breaths, remembering. "Pretty rough. There was some of them still working after that thing had gone. They were building another one just like it." He pointed toward the machine, which was firing up houses to the northeast side of town, swinging the ray back and forth. They could hear its hum. Homes and chicken coops burst into flames. A mooing cow was stilled.

"We threw in the dynamite and blew most of them up. One was in a machine like a steam tractor. We shot up what was left while they was hootin' and a-hollerin'. There was some other things in there, live things maybe, but they was too blowed up to put back together to be sure what they was, all bleached out and pale. We fed everything there a diet of buckshot till there wasn't nothin' left. Then we hightailed it back here on horses, left the wagon sitting."

The machine came on toward the main street of town. Luke finished with the powder. There were so many men with guns on the building across the street it looked like a brick porcupine. It must have looked this way for the James gang when they were shot up in Northfield, Minnesota.

The courthouse was made of stone. Most of the wooden buildings in town were scorched or already afire. When the heat gun came this way, it blew bricks to dust, played flame over everything. The air above the whole town heated up.

They had put out the lamps behind the clockfaces. There was nothing but moonlight glinting off the three-legged machine, flames of burning buildings, the faraway glows of prairie fires. It looked like Pachuco City was on the outskirts of hell.

"Get ready, Luke," said the sheriff. The machine stepped between two burning stores, its tentacles pulling out smoldering horse tack, chains, kegs of nails, then heaving them this way and that. Someone at the end of the street fired off a round. There was a high, thin ricochet off the machine. Sweets ran upstairs, something in his arms. It was a curtain from one of the judge's windows. He'd ripped it down and tied it to the end of one of the janitor's long window brushes.

On it he had lettered in tempera paint COME AND TAKE IT. There was a ragged, nervous cheer from the men on the building as they read it by the light of the flames.

"Cute, Sweets," said Lindley, "too cute."

The machine turned down Main Street. A line of fire sprang up at the back side of town from the empty corrals.

"Oh, shit!" said Luke. "I forgot the wadding!" Lindley took off his hat to hit him with. He looked at its beautiful felt in the mixed moonlight and firelight.

The thing turned toward them. The sheriff thought he saw eyes way up in the belittling atop the machine, eyes like a big cat's eyes seen through a dirty windowpane on a dark night.

"Goldang, Luke, it's my best hat, but I'll be damned if I let them cooters burn down my town!"

He stuffed the Stetson, crown first, into the cannon barrel. Luke shoved it in with the ramrod, threw in two 35-pound cannonballs behind it, pushed them home, and swung the barrel out over Main Street.

The machine bent to tear up something.

"Okay, boys," yelled Lindley. "Attract its attention." Rifle and shotgun fire winked on the rooftop. It glowed like a hot coal from the muzzle flashes. A great slather of ricochets flew off the giant machine.

It turned, pointing its heat gun at the building. It was fifty feet from the courthouse steps.

"Now," said the sheriff.

Luke touched off the powder with his cigarillo. The whole north side of the courthouse bell tower flew off, and the roof collapsed. Two holes you could see the moon through appeared in the machine: one in the middle, one smashing through the dome atop it. Sheriff Lindley saw the lower cannonball come out and drop lazily toward the end of burning Main Street.

All six of the tentacles of the machine shot straight up into the air, and it took off like a man running with his arms above his head. It staggered, as fast as a freight train could go, through one side of a house and out the other, and ran partway up Park Street. One of its three legs went higher than its top. It hopped around like a crazy man on crutches before its feet got tangled in a horse-pasture fence, and it went over backward with a shudder. A great cloud of steam came out of it and hung in the air. No one in the courthouse tower heard the sound of the steam. They were all deaf as posts from the explosion. The barrel of the cannon was burst all along the end. The men on the other roof were jumping up and down and clapping each other on the back. The COME AND TAKE IT sign on the courthouse had two holes in it, neater than you could have made with a biscuit cutter. First a high whine, then a dull roar, then something like normal hearing came back to the sheriffs left ear. The right one still felt like a kid had his fist in there.

"Dang it, Sweets!" he yelled. "How much powder did Luke use?"

"Huh?" Luke was banging on his head with both his hands.

"How much powder did he use?"

"Two, two and a half cans," said Sweets.

"It only takes half a can a ball!" yelled the sheriff. He reached for his hat to hit Luke with, touched his bare head. "I feel naked. Come on, we're not through yet. We got fires to put out and some hash to settle."

Luke was still standing, shaking his head. The whole town was cheering.

* * *

It looked like a pot lid slowly boiling open, moving just a little. Every time the end unscrewed a little more, ashes and cinders fell off into the second pit. There was a piled ridge of them. The back turned again, moved a few inches, quit. Then it wobbled, there was a sound like a stove being jerked up a chimney, and the whole back end rolled open like a mad bank vault and fell off. There were one hundred eighty-four men and eleven women all standing behind the open end of the thing, their guns pointing toward the interior. At the exact center were Sweets and Luke with the other courthouse cannon. This time there was one can of powder, but the barrel was filled to the end with everything from the blacksmith-shop floor—busted window glass, nails, horseshoes, bolts, stirrup buckles, and broken files and saws.

Eyes appeared in the dark interior.

"Remember the Alamo," said the sheriff.

Everybody, and the cannon, fired.

* * *

When the third meteor came in that evening, south of town at thirteen minutes past six, they knew something was wrong. It wobbled in flight, lost speed, and dropped like a long, heavy leaf.

They didn't have to wait for this one to cool and open. When the posse arrived, the thing was split in two and torn. Heat and steam came up from the inside.

One of the pale things was creeping forlornly across the ground with great difficulty. It looked like a thin gingerbread man made of glass with only a knob for a head.

"It's probably hurting from the gravity," said Leo.

"Fix it, Sweets," said Lindley.

"Sure thing, Sheriff."

There was a gunshot.

* * *

No fourth meteor fell, though they had scouts out for twenty miles in all directions, and the railroad tracks and telegraph wires were fixed again.

"I been doing some figuring," said Leo. "If there were ten explosions on Mars last month, and these things started landing in England last Thursday week, then we should have got the last three. There won't be any more."

"You been figurin', huh?"

"Sure have."

"Well, we'll see."

* * *

Sheriff Lindley stood on his porch. It was sundown on Sunday, three hours after another meteor should have fallen, had there been one.

Leo rode up. "I saw Sweets and Luke heading toward the Atkinson place with more dynamite. What are they doing?"

"They're blowing up every last remnant of them things—lock, stock, and ass hole."

"But," said Leo, "the professors from the university will be here tomorrow, to look at their ships and machines! You can't destroy them!"

"Shit on the University of Texas and the horse it rode in on," said Lindley. "My jurisdiction runs from Deer Piss Creek to Buenos Frijoles, back to Olatunji, up the Little Clear Fork of the North Branch of Mud River, back to the creek, and everything in between. If I say something gets blowed up, it's on its way to kingdom come."

He put his arms on Leo's shoulders. "Besides, what little grass grows in this county's supposed to be green, and what's growing around them things is red. I really don't like that."

"But Sheriff! I've got to meet Professor Lowell in Waxahachie tomorrow…"

"Listen, Leo. I appreciate what you done. But I'm an old man. I been kept up by Martians for three nights, I lost my horse and my new hat, and they busted my favorite gargoyle off the courthouse. I'm going in and get some sleep, and I only want to be woke up for the Second Coming, by Jesus Christ himself."

Leo jumped on his horse and rode for the Atkinson place.

Sheriff Lindley crawled into bed and went to sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

He had a dream. He was a king in Babylon, and he lay on a couch at the top of a ziggurat, just like the Tower of Babel in the Bible.

He surveyed the city and the river. There were women all around him, and men with curly beards and big headdresses. Occasionally someone would feed him a large fig from a golden bowl. His dreams were not interrupted by the sounds of dynamiting, first from one side of town, then another, and then another.

FOREVER YOURS, ANNA

Kate Wilhelm

An enigma of past, present and future, in which an authority on handwriting attempts to determine the nature of the author of the letters signed as the title of this story. There's a surprise in store at the end.

Anna entered his life on a spring afternoon, not invited, not even wanted. Gordon opened his office door that day to a client who was expected and found a second man also in the hallway. The second man brought him Anna, although Gordon did not yet know this. At the moment, he simply said, "Yes?"

"Gordon Sills? I don't have an appointment, but wait?"

"Afraid I don't have a waiting room."

"Out here's fine."

He was about fifty, and he was prosperous. It showed in his charcoal-colored suit, a discreet blue-gray silk tie, a silk shirt. Gordon assumed the stone on his finger was a real emerald of at least three carats. Ostentatious touch, that.

"Sure," Gordon said, and ushered his client inside. They passed through a foyer into his office workroom. The office section was partitioned from the rest of the room by three rice-paper screens with beautiful Chinese calligraphy. In the office area was his desk and two chairs for visitors, his chair, and an overwhelmed bookcase, with books on the floor in front of it.

When his client left, the hall was empty. Gordon shrugged and returned to his office; he pulled his telephone across the desk and dialed his former wife's apartment number, let it ring a dozen times, hung up. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes absently. Late-afternoon sunlight streamed through the slats in the venetian blinds, zebra light. 1 should go away for a few weeks, he thought. Just close shop and walk away from it all until he started getting overdraft notices. Three weeks, he told himself; that was about as long as it would take. Too bad about the other guy, he thought without too much regret. He had a month's worth of work lined up already, and he knew more would trickle in when that was done.

Gordon Sills was thirty-five, a foremost expert in graphology, and could have been rich, his former wife had reminded him quite often. If you don't make it before forty, she had also said--too often--you simply won't make it, and he did not care, simply did not care about money, security, the future, the children's future ...

Abruptly he pushed himself away from the desk and left the office, going into his living room. Like the office, it was messy, with several days' worth of newspapers, half a dozen books, magazines scattered haphazardly. To his eyes it was comfortable looking, comfort giving; he distrusted neatness in homes. Two fine Japanese landscapes were on the walls.

The buzzer sounded. When he opened the door, the prosperous, uninvited client was there again. He was carrying a brushed-suede briefcase.

Gordon opened the door wider and motioned him on through the foyer into the office. The sunlight was gone, eclipsed by the building across Amsterdam Avenue. He indicated a chair and took his own seat behind the desk.

"I apologize for not making an appointment," his visitor said. He withdrew a wallet from his breast pocket, took out a card, and slid it across the desk.

"I'm Avery Roda. On behalf of my company I should like to consult with you regarding some correspondence that we have in our possession."

"That's my business," Gordon said. "And what is your company, Mr. Roda?"

"Draper Fawcett."

Gordon nodded slowly. "And your position there?"

Roda looked unhappy. "I am vice president in charge of research and development, but right now I am in charge of an investigation we have undertaken. My first duty in connection with this was to find someone with your expertise. You come very highly recommended, Mr. Sills."

"Before we go on any further," Gordon said, "I should tell you that there are a number of areas where I'm not interested in working. I don't do paternity suits, for example. Or employer-employee pilferage cases."

Roda flushed.

"Or blackmail," Gordon finished equably. "That's why I'm not rich, but that's how it is."

"The matter I want to discuss is none of the above," Roda snapped. "Did you read about the explosion we had at our plant on Long Island two months ago?" He did not wait for Cordon's response. "We lost a very good scientist, one of the best in the country. And we cannot locate some of his paperwork, his notes. He was involved with a woman who may have them in her possession. We want to find her, recover them."

Cordon shook his head. "You need the police, then, private detectives, your own security force."

"Mr. Sills, don't underestimate our resolve or our resources. We have set all that in operation, and no one has been able to locate the woman. Last week we had a conference during which we decided to try this route. What we want from you is as complete an analysis of the woman as you can give us, based on her handwriting. That may prove fruitful." His tone said he doubted it very much.

"I assume the text has not helped."

"You assume correctly," Roda said with some bitterness. He opened his briefcase and withdrew a sheaf of papers and laid it on the desk.

From the other side Cordon could see that they were not the originals but photocopies. He let his gaze roam over the upside-down letters and then shook his head. "I have to have the actual letters to work with."

"That's impossible. They are being kept under lock and key."

"Would you offer a wine taster colored water?" Cordon's voice was bland, but he could not stop his gaze. He reached across the desk and turned the top letter right side up to study the signature. ANNA. Beautifully written. Even in the heavy black copy it was delicate, as artful as any of the Chinese calligraphy on his screens. He looked up to find Roda watching him intently. "I can tell you a few things from just this, but I have to have the originals. Let me show you my security system."

He led the way to the other side of the room. Here he had a long worktable, an oversize light table, a copy camera, an enlarger, files. There was a computer and printer on a second desk. It was all fastidiously neat and clean.

"The files are fireproof," he said dryly, "and the safe is also. Mr. Roda, if you've investigated me, you know I've handled some priceless documents. And I've kept them right here in the shop. Leave the copies. I can start with them, but tomorrow I'll want the originals."

"Where's the safe?"

Gordon shrugged and went to the computer, keyed in his code, and then moved to the wall behind the worktable and pushed aside a panel to reveal a safe front. "I don't intend to open it for you. You can see enough without that."

"Computer security?"

"Yes."

"Very well. Tomorrow I'll send you the originals. You said you can already tell us something."

They returned to the office space. "First you," Gordon said, pointing to the top letter. "Who censored them?"

The letters had been cut off just above the greeting, and there were rectangles of white throughout.

"That's how they were when we found them," Roda said heavily. "Mercer must have done it himself. One of the detectives said the holes were cut with a razor blade."

Gordon nodded. "Curiouser and curiouser. Well, for what it's worth at this point, she's an artist more than likely. Painter would be my first guess."

"Are you sure?"

"Don't be a bloody fool. Of course I'm not sure-not with copies to work with. It's a guess. Everything I report will be a guess. Educated guesswork, Mr. Roda, that's all I can guarantee."

Roda sank down into his chair and expelled a long breath. "How long will it take?"

"How many letters?"

"Nine."

"Two, three weeks." '

Very slowly Roda shook his head. "We are desperate, Mr. Sills. We will double your usual fee if you can give this your undivided attention."

"And how about your cooperation?"

"What do you mean?"

"His handwriting also. I want to see at least four pages of his writing."

Roda looked blank.

"It will help to know her if I know her correspondent."

"Very well."

"How old was he?"

"Thirty."

"Okay. Anything else you can tell me?"

Roda seemed deep in thought, his eyes narrowed, a stillness about him that suggested concentration. With a visible start he looked up, nodded. "What you said about her could be important already. She mentions a show in one of the letters. We assumed a showgirl, a dancer, something like that. I'll put someone on it immediately. An artist. That could be right."

"Mr. Roda, can you tell me anything else? How important are those papers? Are they salable? Would anyone outside your company have an idea of their value?"

"They are quite valuable," he said with such a lack of tone that Cordon's ears almost pricked to attention. "If we don't recover them in relatively short time, we will have to bring in the FBI. National security may be at stake. We want to handle it ourselves, obviously."

He finished in the same monotone, "The Russians would pay millions for them, I'm certain. And we will pay whatever we have to. She has them. She says so in one of her letters. We have to find that woman."

For a moment Cordon considered turning down the job.

Trouble, he thought. Real trouble. He glanced at the topmost letter again, the signature "Anna," and he said, "Okay. I have a contract I use routinely ..."

- - -

After Roda left, he studied the one letter for several minutes, not reading it, in fact, examining it upside down again; and he said softly, "Hello, Anna."

Then he gathered up all the letters, put them in a file and put it in his safe. He had no intention of starting until he had the originals. But it would comfort Roda to believe he was already at work.

Roda sent the originals and a few samples of Mercer's writing before noon the next day, and for three hours Cordon studied them all. He arranged hers on the worktable under the gooseneck lamp and turned them this way and that, not yet reading them, making notes now and then. As he had suspected, her script was fine, delicate, with beautiful shading. She used a real pen with real ink, not a felt-tip or a ballpoint. Each stroke was visually satisfying, artistic in itself. One letter was three pages long; four were two pages; the others were single sheets. None of them had a date, an address, a complete name. He cursed the person who had mutilated them. One by one he turned them over to examine the backs and jotted: PRESSURE-LIGHT TO MEDIUM. His other notes were equally brief: FLUID, RAPID, NOT CONVENTIONAL, PROPORTIONS ONE TO FIVE. That was European, and he did not think she was, but it would bear close examination. Each note was simply a direction marker, a first impression. He was whistling tunelessly as he worked and was startled when the telephone rang.

It was Karen, finally returning his many calls. The children would arrive by six, and he must return them by seven Sunday night. Her voice was cool, as if she were giving orders about laundry. He said okay and hung up, surprised at how little he felt about the matter. Before, it had given him a wrench each time they talked; he had asked questions: How was she? Was she working? Was the house all right? She had the house on Long Island, and that was fine with him; he had spent more and more time in town anyway over the past few years. But still, they had bought it together, he had repaired this and that, put up screens, taken them down, struggled with the plumbing.

That night he took the two children to a Greek restaurant. Buster, eight years old, said it was yucky; Dana, ten, called him a baby, and Gordon headed off the fight by saying he had bought a new Monopoly game. Dana said Buster was into winning. Dana looked very much like her mother, but Buster was her true genetic heir. Karen was into winning, too.

They went to The Cloisters and fantasized medieval scenarios; they played Monopoly, and on Sunday he took them to a puppet show at the Met and then drove them home. He was exhausted. When he got back he looked about, deeply depressed. There were dirty dishes in the sink and on the table, in the living room. Buster had slept on the couch, and his bedclothes and covers were draped over it. Karen said they were getting too old to share a room any longer. Dana's bedroom was also a mess. She had left her pajamas and slippers.

Swiftly he gathered up the bedding from the living room and tossed it all onto the bed in Dana's room and closed the door. He overfilled the dishwasher and turned it on and finally went into his workroom and opened the safe.

"Hello, Anna," he said softly, and tension seeped from him; the ache that had settled in behind his eyes vanished; he forgot the traffic jams coming home from Long Island, forgot the bickering his children seemed unable to stop.

He took the letters to the living room and sat down to read them through for the first time. Love letters, passionate letters, humorous in places, perceptive, intelligent. Without dates it was hard to put them in chronological order, but the story emerged. She had met Mercer in the city; they had walked and talked, and he had left. He had come back, and this time they were together for a weekend and became lovers. She sent her letters to a post office box; he did not write to her, although he left pages of incomprehensible notes in her care. She was married or lived with someone, whose name had been cut out with a razor blade every time she referred to him. Mercer knew him, visited him apparently. They were even friends and had long, serious talks. She was afraid; Mercer was involved in work that was dangerous, and no one told her what it was. She called Mercer her mystery man and speculated about his secret life, his family, his insane wife or tyrannical father, or his own lapses into lycanthropy.

Gordon smiled. Anna was not a whiner or a weeper; but she was hopelessly in love with Mercer and did not know where he lived, where he worked, what danger threatened him, anything about him except that when he was with her, she was alive and happy. And that was enough. Her husband understood and wanted only her happiness, and it was destroying her, knowing she was hurting him so much, but she was helpless.

He pursed his lips and reread one. "My darling, I can't stand it. I really can't stand it any longer. I dream of you, see you in every stranger on the street, hear your voice every time I answer the phone. My palms become wet, and I tingle all over, thinking it's your footsteps I hear. You are my dreams. So, I told myself today, this is how it is? No way! Am I a silly schoolgirl mooning over a television star? At twenty-six! I gathered up all your papers and put them in a box and addressed it, and as I wrote the number of the box, I found myself giggling. You can't send a Dear John to a post office box number. What if you failed to pick it up and an inspector opened it finally? I should entertain such a person? They're all gray and desiccated, you know, those inspectors. Let them find their own entertainment! What if they deciphered your mysterious squiggles and discovered the secret of the universe? Do any of them deserve such enlightenment? No! I put everything back in [excised] safe-"

Mercer was not the mystery man, Gordon thought then; the mystery was the other man, the nameless one whose safe hid Mercer's papers. Who was he? He shook his head over the arrangement of two men and a woman and continued to read: "--and [excised] came in and let me cry on his shoulder. Then we went to dinner. I was starved."

Gordon laughed and put the letters down on the coffee table, leaned back with his hands behind his head, and contemplated the ceiling. It needed paint.

- - -

For the next two weeks he worked on the letters and the few pages of Mercer's handwriting. He photographed everything, made enlargements, and searched for signs of weakness, illness. He keystroked the letters into his computer and ran the program he had developed, looking for usages, foreign or regional combinations, anything unusual or revealing. Mercer, he decided, had been born in a test tube and never left school and the laboratory until the day he met Anna. She was from the Midwest, not a big city, somewhere around one of the Great Lakes. The name that had been consistently cut out had six letters. She had gone to an opening, and the artist's name had been cut out also. It had nine letters. Even without her testimony about the artist, it was apparent that she had been excited by his work. It showed in the writing. He measured the spaces between the words, the size of individual letters, the angle of her slant, the proportions of everything. Every movement she made was graceful, rhythmic. Her connections were garlands, open and trusting; that meant she was honest herself. Her threadlike connections that strung her words together indicated her speed in writing, her intuition, which she trusted.

As the work went on, he was making more complete notes, drawing conclusions more and more often. The picture of Anna was becoming real.

He paid less attention to Mercer's writing after making his initial assessment of him. A scientist, technologist, precise, angular, a genius, inhibited, excessively secretive, a loner. He was a familiar type.

When Roda returned, Gordon felt he could tell him more about those two people than their own mothers knew about them.

What he could not tell was what they looked like, or where Anna was now, or where the papers were that she had put in her husband's safe.

He watched Roda skim through his report on Anna. Today rain was falling in gray curtains of water; the air felt thick and clammy.

"'That's all?" Roda demanded when he finished.

"That's it."

"We checked every art show in the state," Roda said, scowling at him. "We didn't find her. And we have proof that Mercer couldn't have spent as much time with her as she claimed in the letters. We've been set up. You've been set up. You say here that she's honest, ethical; and we say she's an agent or worse. She got her hooks in him and got those papers, and these letters are fakes, every one of them is a fake!''

Gordon shook his head. "There's not a lie in those letters."

"Then why didn't she come forward when he died? There was enough publicity. We made sure of that. I tell you, he wasn't with her. We found him in a talent hunt when he was a graduate student, and he stayed in that damn lab ever since, seven days a week for four years. He never had time to have a relationship of the sort she's talking about. It's a lie through and through. A fantasy." He slumped in his chair. His face was almost as gray as his very good suit. He looked years older than he had the last time he had been in the office. "They're going to win," he said in a low voice. "The woman and her partner. They're probably out of the country already. Probably left the day after the accident, with the papers, the job done. Well-done. That stupid, besotted fool!'' He stared at the floor for several more seconds, then straightened.

His voice was hard, clipped, when he spoke again. "I was against consulting you from the start. A waste of time and money. Voodoo crap, that's all this is. Well, we've done what we can. Send in your bill. Where are her letters?"

Silently Gordon slid a folder across the desk. Roda went through it carefully, then put it in his briefcase and stood up. "If I were you, I would not give our firm as reference in the future, Sills." He pushed Gordon's report away from him. "We can do without that. Good day."

It should have ended there, Gordon knew, but it did not end. Where are you, Anna? he thought at the world being swamped in cold rain. Why hadn't she come forward, attended the funeral, ttuased in the papers? He had no answers. He just knew that she was out there, painting, living with a man who loved her very much, enough to give her her freedom to fall in love with someone else. Take good care of her, he thought at that other man. Be gentle with her; be patient while she heals. She's very precious, you know.

He leaned his head against the window, let the coolness soothe him. He said aloud, "She's very precious."

- - -

"Gordon, are you all right?" Karen asked on the phone. It was his weekend for the children again.

"Sure. Why?"

"I just wondered. You sound strange. Do you have a girlfriend?"

"What do you want, Karen?"

The ice returned to her voice, and they made arrangements for the children's arrival, when he was to return them. Library books, he thought distantly. Just like library books.

When he hung up he looked at the apartment and was dismayed by the dinginess, the disregard for the barest amenities. Another lamp, he thought. He needed a second lamp, at the very least. Maybe even two. Anna loved light. A girlfriend? He wanted to laugh, and to cry also. He had a signature, some love letters written to another man, a woman who came to his dreams and spoke to him in the phrases from her letters. A girlfriend! He closed his eyes and saw the name, Anna. The capital A was a flaring volcano, high up into the stratosphere, then the even, graceful n's, the funny little final a that had trouble staying on the base line, that wanted to fly away. And a beautiful sweeping line that flew out from it, circled above the entire name, came down to cross the first letter, turn it into an A, and in doing so formed a perfect palette. A graphic representation of Anna, soaring into the heavens, painting, creating art with every breath, every motion. Forever yours, Anna. Forever yours.

He took a deep breath and tried to make plans for the children's weekend, for the rest of the month, the summer, the rest of his life.

The next day he bought a lamp and on his way home stopped in a florist's shop and bought a half a dozen flowering plants. She had written that the sunlight turned the flowers on the sill into jewels. He put them on the sill and raised the blind, and the sunlight turned the blooms into jewels. His hands were clenched; abruptly he turned away from the window.

He went back to work; spring became summer, hot and humid as only New York could be, and he found himself going from one art show to another. He mocked himself and cursed himself for it, but he attended openings, examined new artists' work, signatures, again and again and again. If the investigators trained in this couldn't find her, he told himself firmly, and the FBI couldn't find her, he was a fool to think he had even a remote chance. But he went to the shows.

He was lonely, he told himself, and tried to become interested in other women, any other woman, and continued to attend openings.

In the fall he went to the opening of yet another new artist, out of an art school, a teacher. And he cursed himself for not thinking of that before. She could be an art teacher. He made a list of schools and started down the list, perfecting a story as he worked down it one by one. He was collecting signatures of artists for an article he planned to write. It was a passable story. It got him nothing.

She might be ugly, he told himself. What kind of woman would have fallen in love with Mercer? He had been inhibited, constricted, without grace, brilliant, eccentric, and full of wonder. It was the wonder that she had sensed, he knew. She had been attracted to that in Mercer and had got through his many defenses, had found a boy-man who was truly appealing. And he had adored her. That was apparent from her letters; it had been mutual. Why had he lied to her? Why hadn't he simply told her who he was, what he was doing? The other man in her life had not been an obstacle; that had been made clear also. The two men had liked each other, and both loved her. Gordon brooded about her, about Mercer, the other man; and he haunted openings, became a recognized figure at the various studios and schools where he collected signatures. It was an obsession, he told himself, unhealthy, maybe even a sign of neurosis, or worse. It was insane to fall in love with someone's signature, love letters to another man.

And he could be wrong, he told himself. Maybe Roda had been right after all. The doubts were always short-lived.

The cold October rains had come. Karen was engaged to a wealthy man.

The children's visits had become easier because he no longer was trying to entertain them every minute; he had given in and bought a television and video games for them. He dropped by the Art Academy to meet Rick Henderson, who had become a friend over the past few months. Rick taught watercolors.

Gordon was in Rick's office waiting for him to finish with a class critique session when he saw the A, Anna's capital A.

He felt his arms prickle and sweat form on his hands and a tightening in the pit of his stomach as he stared at an envelope on Rick's desk.

Almost fearfully he turned it around to study the handwriting. The A' s in Art Academy were like volcanoes, reaching up into the stratosphere, crossed with a quirky, insouciant line, like a sombrero at a rakish angle. Anna's A. It did not soar and make a palette, but it wouldn't, not in an address. That was her personal sign.

He let himself sink into Rick's chair and drew in a deep breath. He did not touch the envelope again. When Rick finally joined him, he nodded toward it.

"Would you mind telling me who wrote that?" His voice sounded hoarse, but Rick seemed not to notice. He opened the envelope and scanned a note, then handed it over. Her handwriting. Not exactly the same, but it was hers. He was certain it was hers, even with the changes. The way the writing was positioned on the page, the sweep of the letters, the fluid grace .... But it was not the same. The A in her name, Anna, was different. He felt bewildered by the differences and knew it was hers in spite of them. Finally he actually read the words. She would be out of class for a few days. It was dated four days ago.

"Just a kid," Rick said. "Fresh in from Ohio, thinks she has to be excused from class. I'm surprised it's not signed by her mother."

"Can I meet her?"

Now Rick looked interested. "Why?"

"I want her signature."

Rick laughed. "You're a real nut, you know. Sure. She's in the studio, making up for time off. Come on."

He stopped at the doorway and gazed at the young woman painting. She was no more than twenty, almost painfully thin, hungry looking. She wore scruffy sneakers, very old faded blue jeans, a man's plaid shirt. Not the Anna of the letters. Not yet.

Gordon felt dizzy and held onto the doorframe for a moment, and he knew what it was that Mercer had worked on, what he had discovered. He felt as if he had slipped out of time himself as his thoughts raced, explanations formed, his next few years shaped themselves in his mind. Understanding came the way a memory comes, a gestalt of the entire event or series of events, all accessible at once.

Mercer's notes had shown him to be brilliant, obsessional, obsessed with time, secretive. Roda had assumed Mercer failed, because he had blown himself up. Everyone must have assumed that. But he had not failed. He had gone forward five years, six at the most, to the time when Anna would be twenty-six. He had slipped out of time to the future. Gordon knew with certainty that it was his own name that had been excised from Anna's letters. Phrases from her letters tumbled through his mind. She had mentioned a Japanese bridge from his painting, the flowers on the sill, even the way the sun failed when it sank behind the building across the street.

He thought of Roda and the hordes of agents searching for the papers that were to be hidden, had been hidden in the safest place in the world-the future. The safe Anna would put the papers in would be his, Gordon's safe. He closed his eyes hard, already feeling the pain he knew would come when Mercer realized that he was to die, that he had died. For Mercer there could not be a love strong enough to make him abandon his work.

Gordon knew he would be with Anna, watch her mature, become the Anna of the letters, watch her soar into the stratosphere; and when Mercer walked through his time door, Cordon would still love her and wait for her, help her heal afterward.

Rick cleared his throat, and Gordon released his grasp of the doorframe, took the next step into the studio. Anna's concentration was broken; she looked up at him. Her eyes were dark blue.

Hello, Anna.

WHY I LEFT HARRY’S ALL ALL-NIGHT HAMBURGERS

Lawrence Watt-Evans

Harry's was a nice place -- probably still is. I haven't been back lately. It's a couple of miles off I-79, a few exits north of Charleston, near a place called Sutton. Used to do a pretty fair business until they finished building the Interstate out from Charleston and made it worthwhile for some fast-food joints to move in right next to the cloverleaf; nobody wanted to drive the extra miles to Harry's after that. Folks used to wonder how old Harry stayed in business, as a matter of fact, but he did all right even without the Interstate trade. I found that out when I worked there.

Why did I work there, instead of at one of the fast-food joints? Because my folks lived in a little house just around the corner from Harry's, out in the middle of nowhere -- not in Sutton itself, just out there on the road. Wasn't anything around except our house and Harry's place. He lived out back of his restaurant. That was about the only thing I could walk to in under an hour, and I didn't have a car.

This was when I was sixteen. I needed a job, because my dad was out of work again and if I was gonna do anything I needed my own money. Mom didn't mind my using her car -- so long as it came back with a full tank of gas and I didn't keep it too long. That was the rule. So I needed some work, and Harry's All-Night Hamburgers was the only thing within walking distance. Harry said he had all the help he needed -- two cooks and two people working the counter, besides himself. The others worked days, two to a shift, and Harry did the late night stretch all by himself. I hung out there a little, since I didn't have anywhere else, and it looked like pretty easy work -- there was hardly any business, and those guys mostly sat around telling dirty jokes. So I figured it was perfect.

Harry, though, said that he didn't need any help.

I figured that was probably true, but I wasn't going to let logic keep me out of driving my mother's car. I did some serious begging, and after I'd made his life miserable for a week or two Harry said he'd take a chance and give me a shot, working the graveyard shift, midnight to eight A.M., as his counterman, busboy, and janitor all in one.

I talked him down to 7:30, so I could still get to school, and we had us a deal. I didn't care about school so much myself, but my parents wanted me to go, and it was a good place to see my friends, y'know? Meet girls and so on.

So I started working at Harry's, nights. I showed up at midnight the first night, and Harry gave me an apron and a little hat, like something from a diner in an old movie, same as he wore himself. I was supposed to wait tables and clean up, not cook, so I don't know why he wanted me to wear them, but he gave them to me, and I needed the bucks, so I put them on and pretended I didn't notice that the apron was all stiff with grease and smelled like something nasty had died on it a few weeks back. And Harry -- he's a funny old guy, always looked fiftyish, as far back as I can remember. Never young, but never getting really old, either, y'know? Some people do that, they just seem to go on forever. Anyway, he showed me where everything was in the kitchen and back room, told me to keep busy cleaning up whatever looked like it wanted cleaning, and told me, over and over again, like he was really worried that I was going to cause trouble, "Don't bother the customers. Just take their orders, bring them their food,

"Sure," I said, "I got it."

"Good," he said, "We get some funny guys in here at night, but they're good customers, most of them, so don't you screw up with anyone. One customer complains, one customer stiffs you for the check, and you're out of work, you got that?"

"Sure," I said, though I've gotta admit I was wondering what to do if some cheapskate skipped without paying. I tried to figure how much of a meal would be worth paying for in order to keep the job, but with taxes and all it got too tricky for me to work out, and I decided to wait until the time came, if it ever did.

Then Harry went back in the kitchen, and I got a broom and swept up out front a little until a couple of truckers came in and ordered burgers and coffee.

I was pretty awkward at first, but I got the hang of it after a little bit. Guys would come in, women, too, one or two at a time, and they'd order something, and Harry'd have it ready faster than you can say "cheese", practically, and they'd eat it, and wipe their mouths, and go use the john, and drive off, and none of them said a damn thing to me except their orders, and I didn't say anything back except "Yes, sir," or "Yes, ma'am," or "Thank you, come again." I figured they were all just truckers who didn't like the fast-food places.

That was what it was like at first, anyway, from midnight to about one, one-thirty, but then things would slow down. Even the truckers were off the roads by then, I guess, or they didn't want to get that far off the Interstate, or they'd all had lunch, or something. Anyway, by about two that first night I was thinking it was pretty clear why Harry didn't think he needed help on this shift, when the door opened and the little bell rang.

I jumped a bit; that bell startled me, and I turned around, but then I turned back to look at Harry, 'cause I'd seen him out of the corner of my eye, y'know, and he'd got this worried look on his face, and _he_ was watching _me_; he wasn't looking at the customer at all.

About then I realized that the reason the bell had startled me was that I hadn't heard anyone drive up, and who the hell was going to be out walking to Harry's place at two in the morning in the West Virginia mountains? The way Harry was looking at me, I knew this must be one of those special customers he didn't want me to scare away.

So I turned around, and there was this short little guy in a really heavy coat, all zipped up, made of that shiny silver fabric you see race-car drivers wear in the cigarette ads, you know? And he had on padded ski pants of the same stuff, with pockets all over the place, and he was just putting down a hood, and he had on big thick goggles like he'd been out in a blizzard, but it was April and there hadn't been any snow in weeks and it was about fifty, sixty degrees out.

Well, I didn't want to blow it, so I pretended I didn't notice, I just said, "Hello, sir; may I take your order?"

He looked at me funny and said, "I suppose so."

"Would you like to see a menu?" I said, trying to be on my best behavior -- hell, I was probably overdoing it; I'd let the truckers find their own menus.

"I suppose so," he said again, and I handed him the menu.

He looked it over, pointed to a picture of a cheeseburger that looked about as much like anything from Harry's grill as Sly Stallone looks like me, and I wrote it down and passed the slip back to Harry, and he hissed at me, "Don't bother the guy!"

I took the hint, and went back to sweeping until the burger was up, and as I was handing the plate to the guy there was a sound out front like a shotgun going off, and this green light flashed in through the window, so I nearly dropped the thing, but I couldn't go look because the customer was digging through his pockets for money, to pay for the burger.

"You can pay after you've eaten, sir," I said.

"I will pay first," he said, real formal. "I may need to depart quickly. My money may not be good here."

The guy hadn't got any accent, but with that about the money I figured he was a foreigner, so I waited, and he hauled out a handful of weird coins, and I told him, "I'll need to check with the manager." He gave me the coins, and while I was taking them back to Harry and trying to see out the window, through the curtain, to see where that green light came from, the door opened and these three women come in, and where the first guy was all wrapped up like an Eskimo, these people weren't wearing anything but jeans. Women, remember, and it was only April.

Hey, I was just sixteen, so I tried real hard not to stare and I went running back to the kitchen and tried to tell Harry what was going on, but the money and the green light and the half-naked women all got tangled up and I didn't make much sense.

"I _told_ you I get some strange customers, kid," he said, "Let's see the money." So I gave him the coins, and he said, "Yeah, we'll take these," and made change -- I don't know how, because the writing on the coins looked like Russian to me, and I couldn't figure out what any of them were. He gave me the change, and then looked me in the eye and says, "Can you handle those women, boy? It's part of the job; I wasn't expecting them tonight, but we get strange people in here, I told you that. You think you can handle it without losing me any customers, or do you want to call it a night and find another job?"

I really wanted that paycheck; I gritted my teeth and said, "No problem!"

When you were sixteen, did you ever try to wait tables with six bare boobs right there in front of you? Those three were laughing and joking in some foreign language I never heard before, and I think only one of them spoke English, because she did all the ordering. I managed somehow, and by the time they left Harry was almost smiling at me.

Around four things slowed down again, and around four-thirty or five the breakfast crowd began to trickle in, but between two and four there were about half a dozen customers, I guess; I don't remember who they all were any more, most of them weren't that strange, but that first little guy and the three women, them I remember. Maybe some of the others were pretty strange, too, maybe stranger than the first guy, but he was the _first_, which makes a difference, and then those women -- well, that's gonna really make an impression on a sixteen-year-old, y'know? It's not that they were particularly beautiful or anything, because they weren't, they were just women, and I wasn't used to seeing women with no shirts.

When I got off at seven thirty, I was all mixed up; I didn't know what the hell was going on. I was beginning to think maybe I imagined it all.

I went home and changed clothes and caught the bus to school, and what with not really having adjusted to working nights, and being tired, and having to think about schoolwork, I was pretty much convinced that the whole thing had been some weird dream. So I came home, slept through until about eleven, then got up and went to work again.

And damn, it was almost the same, except that there weren't any half-naked women this time. The normal truckers and the rest came in first, then they faded out, and the weirdos started turning up.

At sixteen, you know, you think you can cope with anything. At least, I did. So I didn't let the customers bother me, not even the ones who didn't look like they were exactly human beings to begin with. Harry got used to me being there, and I did make it a lot easier on him, so after the first couple of weeks it was pretty much settled that I could stay on for as long as I liked.

And I liked it fine, really, once I got used to the weird hours. I didn't have much of a social life during the week, but I never had, living where I did, and I could afford to do the weekends up in style with what Harry paid me and the tips I got. Some of those tips I had to take to the jewelers in Charleston, different ones so nobody would notice that one guy was bringing in all these weird coins and trinkets, but Harry gave me some pointers -- he'd been doing the same thing for years, except that he'd gone through every jeweler in Charleston and Huntington and Wheeling and Washington, P.A., and was halfway through Pittsburgh.

It was fun, really, seeing just what would turn up there and order a burger. I think my favorite was the guy who walked in, no car, no lights, no nothing, wearing this electric blue hunter's vest with wires all over it, and these medieval tights with what Harry called a codpiece, with snow and some kind of sticky goop all over his vest and in his hair, shivering like it was the Arctic out there, when it was the middle of July. He had some kind of little animal crawling around under that vest, but he wouldn't let me get a look at it; from the shape of the bulge it made it might have been a weasel or something. He had the strangest damn accent you ever heard, but he acted right at home and ordered without looking at the menu.

Harry admitted, when I'd been there awhile, that he figured anyone else would mess things up for him somehow. I might have thought I was going nuts, or I might have called the cops, or I might have spread a lot of strange stories around, but I didn't, and Harry appreciated that.

Hey, that was easy. If these people didn't bother Harry, I figured, why should they bother me? And it wasn't anybody else's business, either. When people asked, I used to tell them that sure, we got weirdos in the place late at night -- but I never said just how weird.

And I never got as cool about it as Harry was; I mean, a flying saucer in the parking lot wouldn't make Harry blink. _I_ blinked, when we got 'em -- we did, but not very often, and I had to really work not to stare at them. Most of the customers had more sense; if they came in something strange they hid it in the woods or something. But there were always a few who couldn't be bothered. If any state cops ever cruised past there and saw those things, I guess they didn't dare report them. No one would've believed them anyway.

I asked Harry once if all these guys came from the same place.

"Damned if I know," he said. He'd never asked, and he didn't want me to, either.

Except he was wrong about thinking that would scare them away. Sometimes you can tell when someone wants to talk, and some of these people did. So I talked to them.

I think I was seventeen by the time someone told me what was really going on, though.

Before you ask any stupid questions, no, they weren't any of them Martians or monsters from outer space or anything like that. Some of them were from West Virginia, in fact. Just not _our_ West Virginia. Lots of different West Virginias, instead. What the science fiction writers call "parallel worlds". That's one name, anyway. Other dimensions, alternate realities, they had lots of different names for it.

It all makes sense, really. A couple of them explained it to me. See, everything that ever could possibly have happened, in the entire history of the universe right from the Big Bang up until now, _did_ happen -- somewhere. And _every_ possible difference means a different universe. Not just if Napoleon lost at Waterloo, or won, or whatever he didn't do here; what does Napoleon matter to the _universe_, anyway? Betelgeuse doesn't giving a flying damn for all of Europe, past, present, or future. But every single atom or particle or whatever, whenever it had a chance to do something -- break up or stay together, or move one direction instead of another, whatever -- it did _all_ of them, but all in different universes. They didn't branch off, either -- all the universes were always there, there just wasn't any difference between them until this particular event came along. And that means that there are millions and millions of identical universes, too, where the differences haven't happened yet. There's an inf

And that means that in a lot of those universes, people figured out how to travel from one to another. Apparently it's not that hard; there are lots of different ways to do it, too, which is why we got everything from guys in street clothes to people in spacesuits and flying saucers.

But there's one thing about it -- with an infinite number of universes, I mean really infinite, how can you find just one? Particularly the first time out? Fact is, you can't. It's just not possible. So the explorers go out, but they don't come back. Maybe if some _did_ come back, they could look at what they did and where it took them and figure out how to measure and aim and all that, but so far as any of the ones I've talked to know, nobody has ever done it. When you go out, that's it, you're out there. You can go on hopping from one world to the next, or you can settle down in one forever, but like the books say, you _really_ can't go home again. You can get close, maybe -- one way I found out a lot of this was in exchange for telling this poor old geezer a lot about the world outside Harry's. He was pretty happy about it when I was talking about what I'd seen on TV, and naming all the presidents I could think of, but then he asked me something about some religion I'd never heard of that he said he belo

So there are millions of these people out there drifting from world to world, looking for whatever they're looking for, sometimes millions of them identical to each other, too, and they run into each other. They know what to look for, see. So they trade information, and some of them tell me they're working on figuring out how to _really_ navigate whatever it is they do, and they've figured out some of it already, so they can steer a little.

I wondered out loud once why so many of them turn up at Harry's, and this woman with blue-grey skin -- from some kind of medication, she told me -- tried to explain it. West Virginia is one of the best places to travel between worlds, particularly up in the mountains around Sutton, because it's a pretty central location for eastern North America, but there isn't anything there. I mean, there aren't any big cities, or big military bases, or anything, so that if there's an atomic war or something -- and apparently there have been a _lot_ of atomic wars, or wars with even worse weapons, in different worlds -- nobody's very likely to heave any missiles at Sutton, West Virginia. Even in the realities where the Europeans never found America and it's the Chinese or somebody building the cities, there just isn't any reason to build anything near Sutton. And there's something that makes it an easy place to travel between worlds, too; I didn't follow the explanation. She said something about the Earth's magnetic fiel

The mountains and forests make it easy to hide, too, which is why it's better than out in the desert someplace.

Anyway, right around Sutton it's pretty safe and easy to travel between worlds, so lots of people do.

The strange thing, though, is that for some reason that nobody really seemed very clear on, Harry's, or something like it, is in just about the same place in millions of different realities. More than millions; infinities, really. It's not always exactly Harry's All-Night Hamburgers; one customer kept calling Harry Sal, for instance. It's _there_, though, or something like it, and one thing that doesn't seem to change much is that travelers can eat there without causing trouble. Word gets around that Harry's is a nice, quiet place, with decent burgers, where nobody's going to hassle them about anything, and they can pay in gold or silver if they haven't got the local money, or in trade goods or whatever they've got that Harry can use. It's easy to find, because it's in a lot of universes, relatively -- as I said, this little area isn't one that varies a whole lot from universe to universe, unless you start moving long distances. Or maybe not _easy_ to find, but it can be found. One guy told me that Harry's

We never actually got repeat business from other worlds, y'know, not once, not ever; nobody could ever find the way back to exactly our world. What we got were people who had heard about Harry's from other people, in some other reality. Oh, maybe it wasn't exactly the same Harry's they'd heard about, but they'd heard that there was usually a good place to eat and swap stories in about that spot.

That's a weird thought, you know, that every time I served someone a burger a zillion of me were serving burgers to a zillion others -- not all of them the same, either.

So they come to Harry's to eat, and they trade information with each other there, or in the parking lot, and they take a break from whatever they're doing.

They came there, and they talked to me about all those other universes, and I was seventeen years old, man. It was like those Navy recruiting ads on TV, see the world -- except it was see the _worlds_, all of them, not just one. I listened to everything those guys said. I heard them talk about the worlds where zeppelins strafed Cincinnati in a Third World War, about places the dinosaurs never died out and mammals never evolved any higher than rats, about cities built of colored glass or dug miles underground, about worlds where all the men were dead, or all the women, or both, from biological warfare. Any story you ever heard, anything you ever read, those guys could top it. Worlds where speaking aloud could get you the death penalty -- not what you said, just saying _anything_ out loud. Worlds with spaceships fighting a war against Arcturus. Beautiful women, strange places, everything you could ever want, out there _somewhere_, but it might take forever to find it.

I listened to those stories for months. I graduated from high school, but there wasn't any way I could go to college, so I just stayed on with Harry -- it paid enough to live on, anyway. I talked to those people from other worlds, even got inside some of their ships, or time machines, or whatever you want to call them, and I thought about how great it would be to just go roaming from world to world. Any time you don't like the way things are going, just pop! And the whole world is different! I could be a white god to the Indians in a world where the Europeans and Asians never reached America, I figured, or find a world where machines do all the work and people just relax and party.

When my eighteenth birthday came and went without any sign I'd ever get out of West Virginia, I began to really think about it, you know? I started asking customers about it. A lot of them told me not to be stupid; a lot just wouldn't talk about it. Some, though, some of them thought it was a great idea.

There was one guy, this one night -- well, first, it was September, but it was still hot as the middle of summer, even in the middle of the night. Most of my friends were gone -- they'd gone off to college, or gotten jobs somewhere, or gotten married, or maybe two out of the three. My dad was drinking a lot. The other kids were back in school. I'd started sleeping days, from eight in the morning until about four P.M., instead of evenings. Harry's air conditioner was busted, and I really wanted to just leave it all behind and go find myself a better world. So when I heard these two guys talking at one table about whether one of them had extra room in his machine, I sort of listened, when I could, when I wasn't fetching burgers and Cokes.

Now, one of these two I'd seen before -- he'd been coming in every so often ever since I started working at Harry's. He looked like an ordinary guy, but he came in about three in the morning and talked to the weirdos like they were all old buddies, so I figured he had to be from some other world originally himself, even if he stayed put in ours now. He'd come in about every night for a week or two, then disappear for months, then start turning up again, and I had sort of wondered whether he might have licked the navigation problem all those other people had talked about. But then I figured, probably not, either he'd stopped jumping from one world to the next, or else it was just a bunch of parallel people coming in, and it probably wasn't ever the same guy at all, really. Usually, when that happened, we'd get two or three at a time, looking like identical twins or something, but there was only just one of this guy, every time, so I figured, like I said, either he hadn't been changing worlds at all, or he'd

The guy he was talking to was new; I'd never seen him before. He was big, maybe six-four and heavy. He'd come in shaking snow and soot off a plastic coverall of some kind, given me a big grin, and ordered two of Harry's biggest burgers, with everything. Five minutes later the regular customer sat down across the table from him, and now he was telling the regular that he had plenty of room in his ship for anything anyone might want him to haul crosstime.

I figured this was my chance, so when I brought the burgers I said something real polite, like, "Excuse me, sir, but I couldn't help overhearing; d'you think you'd have room for a passenger?"

The big guy laughed and said, "Sure, kid! I was just telling Joe here that I could haul him and all his freight, and there'd be room for you, too, if you can make it worth my trouble!"

I said, "I've got money; I've been saving up. What'll it take?"

The big guy gave me a big grin again, but before he could say anything Joe interrupted.

"Sid," he said, "Could you excuse me for a minute? I want to talk to this young fellow for a minute, before he makes a big mistake."

The big guy, Sid, said, "Sure, sure, I don't mind." So Joe got up, and he yelled to Harry, "Okay if I borrow your counterman for a few minutes?"

Harry yelled back that it was okay. I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I went along, and the two of us went out to this guy's car to talk.

And it really was a car, too -- an old Ford van. It was customized, with velvet and bubble windows and stuff, and there was a lot of stuff piled in the back, camping gear and clothes and things, but no sign of machinery or anything. I still wasn't sure, you know, because some of these guys did a really good job of disguising their ships, or time machines, or whatever, but it sure _looked_ like an ordinary van, and that's what Joe said it was. He got into the driver's seat, and I got into the passenger seat, and we swiveled around to face each other.

"So," he said, "Do you know who all these people are? I mean people like Sid?"

"Sure," I said, "They're from other dimensions, parallel worlds and like that."

He leaned back and looked at me hard, and said, "You know that, huh? Did you know that none of them can ever get home?"

"Yes, I knew that," I told him, acting pretty cocky.

"And you still want to go with Sid to other universes? Even when you know you'll never come home to this universe again?"

"That's right, Mister," I told him, "I'm sick of this one. I don't have anything here but a nothing job in a diner; I want to _see_ some of the stuff these people talk about, instead of just hearing about it."

"You want to see wonders and marvels, huh?"

"Yes!"

"You want to see buildings a hundred stories high? Cities of strange temples? Oceans thousands of miles wide? Mountains miles high? Prairies, and cities, and strange animals and stranger people?"

Well, that was just exactly what I wanted, better than I could have said it myself. "Yes," I said, "You got it, Mister."

"You lived here all your life?"

"You mean this world? Of course I have."

"No, I meant here in Sutton. You lived here all your life?"

"Well, yeah," I admitted, "Just about."

He sat forward and put his hands together, and his voice got intense, like he wanted to impress me with how serious he was. "Kid," he said, "I don't blame you a bit for wanting something different; I sure as hell wouldn't want to spend my entire life in these hills. But you're going about it the wrong way. You don't want to hitch with Sid."

"Oh, yeah?" I said, "Why not? Am I supposed to build my own machine? Hell, I can't even fix my mother's carburetor."

"No, that's not what I meant. But kid, you can see those buildings a thousand feet high in New York, or in Chicago. You've got oceans here in your own world as good as anything you'll find anywhere. You've got the mountains, and the seas, and the prairies, and all the rest of it. I've been in your world for eight years now, checking back here at Harry's every so often to see if anyone's figured out how to steer in no-space and get me home, and it's one hell of a big, interesting place."

"But," I said, "What about the spaceships, and . . ."

He interrupted me, and said, "You want to see spaceships? You go to Florida and watch a shuttle launch. Man, that's a spaceship. It may not go to other worlds, but that _is_ a spaceship. You want strange animals? You go to Australia or Brazil. You want strange people? Go to New York or Los Angeles, or almost anywhere. You want a city carved out of a mountain top? It's called Machu Picchu, in Peru, I think. You want ancient, mysterious ruins? They're all over Greece and Italy and North Africa. Strange temples? Visit India; there are supposed to be over a thousand temples in Benares alone. See Angkor Wat, or the pyramids -- not just the Egyptian ones, but the Mayan ones, too. And the great thing about all of these places, kid, is that afterwards, if you want to, you can come home. You don't _have_ to, but you _can_. Who knows? You might get homesick some day. Most people do. _I_ did. I wish to hell I'd seen more of my own world before I volunteered to try any others."

I kind of stared at him for awhile. "I don't know," I said. I mean, it seemed so easy to just hop in Sid's machine and be gone forever, I thought, but New York was five hundred miles away -- and then I realized how stupid that was.

"Hey," he said, "Don't forget, if you decide I was wrong, you can always come back to Harry's and bum a ride with someone. It won't be Sid, he'll be gone forever, but you'll find someone. Most world-hoppers are lonely, kid; they've left behind everyone they ever knew. You won't have any trouble getting a lift."

Well, that decided it, because y'know, he was obviously right about that, as soon as I thought about it. I told him so.

"Well, good!" he said, "Now, you go pack your stuff and apologize to Harry and all that, and I'll give you a lift to Pittsburgh. You've got money to travel with from there, right? These idiots still haven't figured out how to steer, so I'm going back home -- not my real home, but where I live in your world -- and I wouldn't mind a passenger." And he smiled at me, and I smiled back, and we had to wait until the bank opened the next morning, but he didn't really mind. All the way to Pittsburgh he was singing these hymns and war-songs from his home world, where there was a second civil war in the nineteen-twenties because of some fundamentalist preacher trying to overthrow the Constitution and set up a church government; he hadn't had anyone he could sing them to in years, he said.

That was six years ago, and I haven't gone back to Harry's since.

So that was what got me started traveling. What brings you to Benares?

THE GIVING PLAGUE

David Brin

1.

You think you're going to get me, don't you? Well, you've got another think coming, 'cause I'm ready for you.

That's why there's a forged a card in my wallet saying my blood group is AB negative, and a MedicAlert tag warning that I'm allergic to penicillin, aspirin, and phenylalanine. Another one states that I'm a practicing, devout Christian Scientist. All these tricks ought to slow you down when the time comes, as it's sure to, sometime soon.

Even if it makes the difference between living and dying, there's just no way I'll let anyone stick a transfusion needle into my arm. Never. Not with the blood supply in the state it's in.

And anyway, I've got antibodies. So you just stay the hell away from me, ALAS. I won't be your patsy. I won't be your vector.

I know your weaknesses, you see. You're a fragile, if subtle devil. Unlike TARP, you can't bear exposure to air or heat or cold or acid or alkali. Blood to blood, that's your only route. And what need had you of any other? You thought you'd evolved the perfect technique, didn't you?

What was it Leslie Adgeson called you? The perfect master? The paragon of viruses?

I remember long ago when HIV, the AIDS virus, had everyone so awed with its subtlety of lethal design. But compared with you, HIV is just a crude butcher. A maniac with a chainsaw, a blunderer that kills its hosts and relies for transmission on habits humans can, with effort, get under control. Oh, old HIV had its tricks, but compared with you? An amateur!

Rhinoviruses and flu are clever, too. They're profligate, and they mutate rapidly. Long ago they learned how to make their hosts drip and wheeze and sneeze, so the victims spread the misery in all directions. Flu viruses are also a lot smarter than AIDS 'cause they don't generally kill their hosts, just make 'em miserable while they hack and spray and inflict fresh infections on their neighbors.

Oh, Les Adgeson was always accusing me of anthropomorphizing our subjects. Whenever he came into my part of the lab, and found me cursing some damned intransigent leucophage in rich, Tex-Mex invective, he'd react predictably. I can just picture him now, raising one eyebrow, commenting dryly in his Winchester accent.

"The virus cannot hear you, Forry. It isn't sentient, nor even alive, strictly speaking. It's only a packet of genes in a protein case, after all."

"Yeah, Les," I'd answer. "But selfish genes! Given half a chance, they'll take over a human cell, force it to make armies of new viruses, then burst it apart as they escape to attack others. They may not think. All that behavior may have evolved by blind chance. But doesn't it all feel as if it's planned? As if the nasty little things were guided, somehow, by somebody out to make us miserable ... ? Out to make us die?"

"Oh, come now Forry." He would smile at my New World ingenuousness. "You wouldn't be in this field if you didn't find phages beautiful, in their own way."

Good old smug, sanctimonious Les. He never did figure out that viruses fascinated me for quite another reason. In their rapacious insatiability I saw a simple, distilled purity of ambition that exceeded even my own. The fact that it was mindless did little to ease my qualms. I've always imagined we humans over-rated brains, anyway.

We'd first met when Les visited Austin on sabbatical, some years before. He'd had the Boy Genius rep even then, and naturally I played up to him. He invited me to join him back in Oxford, so there I was, having regular amiable arguments over the meaning of disease while the English rain dripped desultorily on the rhododendrons outside.

Les Adgeson. Him with his artsy friends and his pretensions at philosophy -- Les was all the time talking about the elegance and beauty of our nasty little subjects. But he didn't fool me. I knew he was just as crazy Nobel-mad as the rest of us. Just as obsessed with the chase, searching for that piece of the Life Puzzle, that bit leading to more grants, more lab space, more techs, more prestige ... to money, status and, maybe eventually, Stockholm.

He claimed not to be interested in such things. But he was a smoothie, all right. How else, in the midst of the Thatcher massacre of British science, did his lab keep expanding? And yet, he kept up the pretense.

Viruses have their good side," Les kept saying. "Sure, they often kill, in the beginning. All new pathogens start that way. But eventually, one of two things happens. Either humanity evolves defenses to eliminate the threat or ... "

Oh, he loved those dramatic pauses.

"Or?" I'd prompt him, as required.

"Or else we come to an accommodation, a compromise ... even an alliance."

That's what Les always talked about. Symbiosis. He loved to quote Margulis and Thomas, and even Lovelock, for pity's sake! His respect even for vicious, sneaky brutes like HIV was downright scary.

"See how it actually incorporates itself right into the DNA of its victims?" he would muse. "Then it waits, until the victim is later attacked by some other disease pathogen. The host T cells prepare to replicate, to drive off the invader, only now some chemical machinery is taken over by the new DNA, and instead of two new T cells, a plethora of new AIDS viruses results."

"So?" I answered. "Except that it's a retrovirus, that's the way nearly all viruses work."

"Yes, but think ahead, Forry. Imagine what's going to happen when, inevitably, the AIDS virus infects someone whose genetic makeup makes him invulnerable!"

"What, you mean his antibody reactions are fast enough to stop it? Or his T cells repel invasion?"

Oh, Les used to sound so damn patronizing when he got excited.

"No, no, think!" he urged. "I mean invulnerable after infection. After the viral genes have incorporated into his chromosomes. Only in this individual certain other genes prevent the new DNA from triggering viral synthesis. No new viruses are made. No cellular disruption. The person is invulnerable. But now he has all this new DNA ... "

"In just a few cells -- "

"Yes. But suppose one of these is a sex cell. Then suppose he fathers a child with that gamete. Now every one of that child's cells may contain both the trait of invulnerability and the new viral genes! Think about it, Forry. You now have a new type of human being! One who cannot be killed by AIDS. And yet he has all the AIDS genes, can make all those strange, marvelous proteins ... Oh, most of them will be unexpressed or useless, of course. But now this child's genome, and his descendants', contains more variety ... "

I often wondered, when he got carried away this way. Did he actually believe he was explaining this to me for the first time? Much as the Brits respect American science, they do tend to assume we're slackers when it comes to the philosophical side. But I'd seen his interest heading in this direction weeks back and had carefully done some extra reading.

"You mean like the genes responsible for some types of inheritable cancers?" I asked sarcastically. "There's evidence some oncogenes were originally inserted into the human genome by viruses, just as you suggest. Those who inherit the trait for rheumatoid arthritis may also have gotten their gene that way."

"Exactly. Those viruses themselves may be extinct, but their DNA lives on, in ours!"

"Right. And boy have human beings benefited!"

Oh, how I hated that smug expression he'd get. (It got wiped off his face eventually, didn't it?)

Les picked up a piece of chalk and drew a figure on the blackboard.

HARMLESS -- > KILLER! -- > SURVIVABLE ILLNESS -- >

INCONVENIENCE -- > HARMLESS

"Here's the classic way of looking at how a host species interacts with a new pathogen, especially a virus. Each arrow, of course, represents a stage of mutation and adaptation selection.

"First, a new form of some previously harmless microorganism leaps from its prior host, say a monkey species, over to a new one, say us. Of course, at the beginning we have no adequate defenses. It cuts through us like Syphilis did in Europe in the sixteenth century, killing in days rather than years ... in an orgy of cell feeding that's really not a very efficient modus for a pathogen. After all, only a gluttonous parasite kills off its host so quickly.

"What follows, then, is a rough period for both host and parasite as each struggles to adapt to the other. It can be likened to warfare. Or, on the other hand, it might be thought of as a sort of drawn out process of negotiation."

I snorted in disgust. "Mystical crap, Les. I'll concede your chart; but the War analogy is the right one. That's why they fund labs like ours. To come up with better weapons for our side."

"Hmm. Possibly. But sometimes the process does look different, Forry." He turned and drew another chart.

HARMLESS -- > KILLER! -- > SURVIVABLE ILLNESS -- >

INCONVENIENCE -- > BENIGN PARASITISM -- > SYMBIOSIS

"You can see that this chart is the same as the other, right up to the point where the original disease disappears."

"Or goes into hiding."

"Surely. As E. coli took refuge in our innards. Doubtless long ago the ancestors of E. coli killed a great many of our ancestors before eventually becoming the beneficial symbionts they are now, helping us digest our food.

"The same applies to viruses, I'd wager. Heritable cancers and rheumatoid arthritis are just temporary awkwardnesses. Eventually, those genes will be comfortably incorporated. They'll be part of the genetic diversity that prepares us to meet challenges ahead. Why, I'd wager a large portion of our present genes came about in such a way, entering our cells first as invaders ... "

Crazy sonovabitch. Fortunately he didn't try to lead the lab's research effort too far to the right on his magic diagram. Our Boy Genius was plenty savvy about the funding agencies. He knew they weren't interested in paying us to prove we're all partly descended from viruses. They wanted, and wanted badly, progress on ways to fight viral infections themselves.

So Les concentrated his team on vectors.

Yeah, you viruses need vectors, don't you. I mean, if you kill a guy, you've got to have a life raft, so you can desert the ship you've sunk, so you can cross over to some new hapless victim. Same applies if the host proves tough, and fights you off -- gotta move on. Always movin' on.

Hell, even if you've made peace with a human body, like Les suggested, you still want to spread, don't you? Big-time colonizers, you tiny beasties.

Oh, I know. It's just natural selection. Those bugs that accidentally find a good vector spread. Those that don't, don't. But it's so eerie. Sometimes it sure feels purposeful ...

So the flu makes us sneeze. Salmonella gives us diarrhea. Smallpox causes pustules which dry, flake off and blow away to be inhaled by the patient's loved ones. All good ways to jump ship. To colonize.

Who knows? Did some past virus cause a swelling of the lips that made us want to kiss? Heh. Maybe that's a case of Les's "benign incorporation" ... we retain the trait, long after the causative pathogen went extinct! What a concept.

So our lab got this big grant to study vectors. Which is how Les found you, ALAS. He drew this big chart covering all the possible ways an infection might leap from person to person, and set us about checking all of them, one by one.

For himself he reserved straight blood-to-blood infection. There were reasons for that.

First off, Les was an altruist, see. He was concerned about all the panic and unfounded rumors spreading about Britain's blood supply. Some people were putting off necessary surgery. There was talk of starting over here what some rich folk in the States had begun doing -- stockpiling their own blood in silly, expensive efforts to avoid having to use the Blood Banks if they ever needed hospitalization.

All that bothered Les. But even worse was the fact that lots of potential donors were shying away from giving blood because of some stupid rumors that you could get infected that way.

Hell, nobody ever caught anything from giving blood ... nothing except maybe a little dizziness and perhaps a zit or spot from all the biscuits and sweet tea they feed you afterwards. And as for contracting HIV from receiving blood, well, the new antibodies tests soon had that problem under control. Still, the stupid rumors spread.

A nation has to have confidence in its blood supply. Les wanted to eliminate all those silly fears once and for all, with one definitive study. But that wasn't the only reason he wanted the blood-to blood vector for himself.

"Sure, there are some nasty things like AIDS that use that vector. But that's also where I might find the older ones," he said, excitedly. "The viruses that have almost finished the process of becoming benign. The ones that have been so well selected that they keep a low profile, and hardly inconvenience their hosts at all. Maybe I can even find one that's commensal! One that actually helps the human body."

"An undiscovered human commensal," I sniffed doubtfully.

"And why not? If there's no visible disease, why would anyone have ever looked for it! This could open up a whole new field, Forry!"

In spite of myself, I was impressed. It was how he got to be known as a Boy Genius, after all, this flash of half-crazy insight. How he managed not to have it snuffed out of him at OxBridge, I'll never know, but it was one reason why I'd attached myself to him and his lab, and wrangled mighty hard to get my name attached to his papers.

So I kept watch over his work. It sounded so dubious, so damn stupid. And I knew it just might bear fruit, in the end.

That's why I was ready when Les invited me along to a conference down in Bloomsbury one day. The colloquium itself was routine, but I could tell he was near to bursting with news. Afterwards we walked down Charing Cross Road to a pizza place, one far enough from the university area to be sure there'd be no colleagues anywhere within earshot -- just the pretheater crowd, waiting till opening time down at Leicester Square.

Les breathlessly swore me to secrecy. He needed a confidant, you see, and I was only too happy to comply. "I've been interviewing a lot of blood donors lately," he told me after we'd ordered. "It seems that while some people have been scared off from donating, that has been largely made up by increased contributions by a central core of regulars."

"Sounds good," I said. And I meant it. I had no objection to there being an adequate blood supply. Back in Austin I was pleased to see others go to the Red Cross van, just so long as nobody asked me to contribute. I had neither the time nor the interest, so I got out of it by telling everybody I'd had malaria.

"I found one interesting fellow, Forry. Seems he started donating back when he was twenty-five, during the Blitz. Must have contributed thirty-five, forty gallons, by now."

I did a quick mental calculation. "Wait a minute. He's got to be past the age limit by now."

"Exactly right! He admitted the truth, when he was assured of confidentiality. Seems he didn't want to stop donating when he reached sixty-five. He's a hardy old fellow ... had a spot of surgery a few years back, but he's in quite decent shape, overall. So, right after his local Gallon Club threw a big retirement fest for him, he actually moved across the county and registered at a new blood bank, giving a false name and a younger age!"

"Kinky. But it sounds harmless enough. I'd guess he just likes to feel needed. Bet he flirts with the nurses and enjoys the free food ... sort of a bimonthly party he can always count on, with friendly, appreciative people."

Hey, just because I'm a selfish bastard doesn't mean I can't extrapolate the behavior of altruists. Like most other user-types, I've got a good instinct for the sort of motivations that drive suckers. People like me need to know such things.

"That's what I thought too, at first," Les said, nodding. "I found a few more like him, and decided to call them 'addicts.' At first I never connected them with the other group, the one I named 'converts.'"

"Converts?"

"Yes, converts. People who suddenly become blood donors -- get this -- very soon after they've recovered from surgery themselves!"

"Maybe they're paying off part of their hospital bills that way?"

"Mmm, not really. We have nationalized health, remember? And even for private patients, that might account for the first few donations only."

"Gratitude, then?" An alien emotion to me, but I understood it, in principle.

"Perhaps. Some few people might have their consciousnesses raised after a close brush with death, and decide to become better citizens. After all, half an hour at a blood bank, a few times a year, is a small inconvenience in exchange for ... "

Sanctimonious twit. Of course he was a donor. Les went on and on about civic duty and such until the waitress arrived with our pizza and two fresh bitters. That shut him up for a moment. But when she left, he leaned forward, eyes shining.

"But no, Forry. It wasn't bill-paying, or even gratitude. Not for some of them, at least. More had happened to these people than having their consciousnesses raised. They were converts, Forry. They began joining Gallon Clubs, and more! It seems almost as if, in each case, a personality change had taken place."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that a significant fraction of those who have had major surgery during the last five years seem to have changed their entire set of social attitudes! Beyond becoming blood donors, they've increased their contributions to charity, joined parent-teacher organizations and Boy Scout troops, become active in Greenpeace and Save The Children ... "

"The point, Les. What's your point?"

"My point?" He shook his head. "Frankly, some of these people were behaving like addicts ... like converted addicts to altruism. That's when it occurred to me, Forry, that what we might have here was a new vector."

He said it as simply as that. Naturally I looked at him, blankly.

"A vector!" he whispered, urgently. "Forget about typhus, or smallpox, or flu. They're rank amateurs! Wallies who give the show away with all their sneezing and flaking and shitting. To be sure, AIDS uses blood and sex, but it's so damned savage, it forced us to become aware of it, to develop tests, to begin the long, slow process of isolating it. But ALAS -- "

"Alas?"

"A-L-A-S." He grinned. "It's what I've named the new virus I've isolated, Forry. It stands for 'Acquired Lavish Altruism Syndrome.' How do you like it?"

"Hate it. Are you trying to tell me that there's a virus that affects the human mind? And in such a complicated way?" I was incredulous and, at the same time, scared spitless. I've always had this superstitious feeling about viruses and vectors. Les really had me spooked now.

"No, of course not," he laughed. "But consider a simpler possibility. What if some virus one day stumbled on a way to make people enjoy giving blood?"

I guess I only blinked then, unable to give him any other reaction.

"Think, Forry! Think about that old man I spoke of earlier. He told me that every two months or so, just before he'd be allowed to donate again, he tends to feel 'all thick inside.' The discomfort only goes away after the next donation!"

I blinked again. "And you're saying that each time he gives blood, he's actually serving his parasite, providing it a vector into new hosts ... "

"The new hosts being those who survive surgery because the hospital gave them fresh blood, all because our old man was so generous, yes! They're infected! Only this is a subtle virus, not a greedy bastard, like AIDS, or even the flu. It keeps a low profile. Who knows, maybe it's even reached a level of commensalism with its hosts -- attacking invading organisms for them, or ... "

He saw the look on my face and waved his hands. "All right, far-fetched, I know. But think about it! Because there are no disease symptoms, nobody has ever looked for this virus, until now."

He's isolated it, I realized, suddenly. And, knowing instantly what this thing could mean, career-wise, I was already scheming, wondering how to get my name onto his paper, when he published this. So absorbed was I that, for a few moments, I lost track of his words.

" ... And so now we get to the interesting part. You see, what's a normal, selfish Tory-voter going to think when he finds himself suddenly wanting to go down to the blood bank as often as they'll let him?"

"Um," I shook my head. "That he's been bewitched? Hypnotized?"

"Nonsense!" Les snorted. "That's not how human psychology works. No, we tend to do lots of things without knowing why. We need excuses, though, so we rationalize! If an obvious reason for our behavior isn't readily available, we invent one, preferably one that helps us think better of ourselves. Ego is powerful stuff, my friend."

Hey, I thought. Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

"Altruism," I said aloud. "They find themselves rushing regularly to the blood bank. So they rationalize that it's because they're good people ... They become proud of it. Brag about it ... "

"You've got it," Les said. "And because they're proud, even sanctimonious, about their newfound generosity, they tend to extend it, to bring it into other parts of their lives!"

I whispered in hushed awe. "An altruism virus! Jesus, Les, when we announce this ... "

I stopped when I saw his sudden frown and instantly thought it was because I'd used that word "we." I should have known better, of course. For Les was always more than willing to share the credit. No, his reservation was far more serious than that.

"Not yet, Forry. We can't publish this yet."

I shook my head. "Why not! This is big, Les! It proves much of what you've been saying all along, about symbiosis and all that. There could even be a Nobel in it!"

I'd been gauche, and spoken aloud of The Ultimate. But he did not even seem to notice. Damn. If only Les had been like most biologists, driven more than anything else by the lure of Stockholm. But no. You see, Les was a natural. A natural altruist.

It was his fault, you see. Him and his damn virtue, they drove me to first contemplate what I next decided to do.

"Don't you see, Forry? If we publish, they'll develop an antibody test for the ALAS virus. Donors carrying it will be barred from the blood banks, just like those carrying AIDS and syphilis and hepatitis. And that would be incredibly cruel torture to those poor addicts and carriers."

"Screw the carriers!" I almost shouted. Several pizza patrons glanced my way. With a desperate effort I brought my voice down. "Look, Les, the carriers will be classified as diseased, won't they? So they'll go under doctor's care. And if all it takes to make them feel better is to bleed them regularly, well, then we'll give them pet leeches!"

Les smiled. "Clever. But that's not the only, or even my main reason, Forry. No, I'm not going to publish, yet, and that is final. I just can't allow anybody to stop this disease. It's got to spread, to become an epidemic. A pandemic."

I stared, and upon seeing that look in his eyes, I knew that Les was more than an altruist. He had caught that specially insidious of all human ailments, the Messiah Complex. Les wanted to save the world.

"Don't you see?" he said urgently, with the fervor of a proselyte. "Selfishness and greed are destroying the planet, Forry! But nature always finds a way, and this time symbiosis may be giving us our last chance, a final opportunity to become better people, to learn to cooperate before it's too late!

"The things we're most proud of, our prefrontal lobes, those bits of gray matter above the eyes which make us so much smarter than beasts -- what good have they done us, Forry? Not a hell of a lot. We aren't going to think our way out of the crises of the twentieth century. Or, at least, thought alone won't do it. We need something else, as well.

"And Forry, I'm convinced that 'something else' is ALAS. We've got to keep this secret, at least until it's so well established in the population that there's no turning back!"

I swallowed. "How long? How long do you want to wait? Until it starts affecting voting patterns? Until after the next election?"

He shrugged. "Oh, at least that long. Five years. Possibly seven. You see, the virus tends to only get into people who've recently had surgery, and they're generally older. Fortunately, they also are often influential. Just the sort who now vote Tory ... "

He went on. And on. I listened with half an ear, but already I had come to that fateful realization. A seven-year wait for a goddamn coauthorship would make this discovery next to useless to my career, to my ambitions.

Of course I could blow the secret on Les, now that I knew of it. But that would only embitter him, and he'd easily take all the credit for the discovery anyway. People tend to remember innovators, not whistle-blowers.

We paid our bill and walked toward Charing Cross Station, where we could catch the tube to Paddington, and from there to Oxford. Along the way we ducked out of a sudden downpour at a streetside ice cream vendor. While we waited, I bought us both cones. I remember quite clearly that he had strawberry. I had a raspberry ice.

While Les absentmindedly talked on about his research plans, a small pink smudge colored the corner of his mouth. I pretended to listen, but already my mind had turned to other things, nascent plans and earnest scenarios for committing murder.

2.

It would be the perfect crime, of course.

Those movie detectives are always going on about "motive, means, and opportunity." Well, motive I had in plenty, but it was a one so far-fetched, so obscure, that it would surely never occur to anybody.

Means? Hell, I worked in a business rife with means. There were poisons and pathogens galore. We're a very careful profession, but, well, accidents do happen ... The same holds for opportunity.

There was a rub, of course. Such was Boy Genius's reputation that, even if I did succeed in knobbling him, I didn't dare come out immediately with my own announcement. Damn him, everyone would just assume it was his work anyway, or his "leadership" here at the lab, at least, that led to the discovery of ALAS. And besides, too much fame for me right after his demise might lead someone to suspect a motive.

So, I realized. Les was going to get his delay, after all. Maybe not seven years, but three or four perhaps, during which I'd move back to the States, start a separate line of work, then subtly guide my own research to cover methodically all the bases Les had so recently flown over in flashes of inspiration. I wasn't happy about the delay, but at the end of that time, it would look entirely like my own work. No coauthorship for Forry on this one, nossir!

The beauty of it was that nobody would ever think of connecting me with the tragic death of my colleague and friend, years before. After all, did not his demise set me back in my career, temporarily? "Ah, if only poor Les had lived to see your success!" my competitors would say, suppressing jealous bile as they watched me pack for Stockholm.

Of course none of this appeared on my face or in my words. We both had our normal work to do. But almost every day I also put in long extra hours helping Les in "our" secret project. In its own way it was an exhilarating time, and Les was lavish in his praise of the slow, dull, but methodical way I fleshed out some of his ideas.

I made my arrangements slowly, knowing Les was in no hurry. Together we gathered data. We isolated, and even crystallized the virus, got X-Ray diffractions, did epidemiological studies, all in strictest secrecy.

"Amazing!" Les would cry out, as he uncovered the way the ALAS virus forced its hosts to feel their need to "give." He'd wax eloquent, effusive over elegant mechanisms which he ascribed to random selection but which I could not help superstitiously attributing to some incredibly insidious form of intelligence. The more subtle and effective we found its techniques to be, the more admiring Les became, and the more I found myself loathing those little packets of RNA and protein.

The fact that the virus seemed so harmless -- Les thought even commensal -- only made me hate it more. It made me glad of what I had planned. Glad that I was going to stymie Les in his scheme to give ALAS free reign.

I was going to save humanity from this would-be puppet master. True, I'd delay my warning to suit my own purposes, but the warning would come, nonetheless, and sooner than my unsuspecting compatriot planned.

Little did Les know that he was doing background for work I'd take credit for. Every flash of insight, his every "Eureka!" was stored away in my private notebook, beside my own columns of boring data. Meanwhile, I sorted through all the means at my disposal.

Finally, I selected for my agent a particularly virulent strain of Dengue Fever.

3.

There's an old saying we have in Texas. "A chicken is just an egg's way of makin' more eggs."

To a biologist, familiar with all those latinized-graecificated words, this saying has a much more "posh" version. Humans are "zygotes," made up of diploid cells containing forty-six paired chromosomes ... except for our haploid sex cells, or "gametes." Males' gametes are sperm and females' are eggs, each containing only twenty-three chromosomes.

So biologists say that "a zygote is only a gamete's way of making more gametes."

Clever, eh? But it does point out just how hard it is, in nature, to pin down a Primal Cause ... some center to the puzzle, against which everything else can be calibrated. I mean, which does come first, the chicken or the egg?

"Man is the measure of all things," goes another wise old saying. Oh yeah? Tell that to a modern feminist. A guy I once knew who used to read science fiction told me about this story he'd seen, in which it turned out that the whole and entire purpose of humanity, brains and all, was to be the organism that built starships so that houseflies could migrate out and colonize the galaxy.

But that idea's nothing compared with what Les Adgeson believed. He spoke of the human animal as if he were describing a veritable United Nations. From the E. coli in our guts, to tiny commensal mites that clean our eyelashes for us, to the mitochondria that energize our cells, all the way to the contents of our very DNA ... Les saw it all as a great big hive of compromise, negotiation, symbiosis. Most of the contents of our chromosomes came from past invaders, he contended.

Symbiosis? The picture he created in my mind was one of minuscule puppeteers, all yanking and jerking at us with their protein strings, making us marionettes dance to their own tunes, to their own nasty, selfish little agendas.

And you, you were the worst! Like most cynics, I had always maintained a secret faith in human nature. Yes, most people are pigs. I've always known that. And while I may be a user, at least I'm honest enough to admit it. But deep down, we users count on the sappy generosity, the mysterious, puzzling altruism of those others, the kind, inexplicably decent folk ... those we superficially sneer at in contempt, but secretly hold in awe.

Then you came along, damn you. You make people behave that way. There is no mystery left, after you get finished. No corner remaining impenetrable to cynicism. Damn, how I came to hate you!

As I came to hate Leslie Adgeson. I made my plans, schemed my brilliant campaign against both of you. In those last days of innocence I felt oh, so savagely determined. So deliciously decisive and in control of my own destiny.

In the end it was anticlimactic. I didn't have time to finish my preparations, to arrange that little trap, that sharp bit of glass dipped in just the right mixture of deadly microorganisms. For CAPUC arrived then, just before I could exercise my option as a murderer.

CAPUC changed everything.

Catastrophic Autoimmune PUlmonary Collapse ... acronym for the horror that made AIDS look like a minor irritant. And in the beginning it appeared unstoppable. It's vectors were completely unknown, and the causative agent defied isolation for so long.

This time it was no easily identifiable group that came down with the new plague, though it concentrated upon the industrialized world. Schoolchildren in some areas seemed particularly vulnerable. In other places it was secretaries and postal workers.

Naturally, all the major epidemiology labs got involved. Les predicted the pathogen would turn out to be something akin to the prions which cause shingles in sheep, and certain plant diseases ... a pseudo-lifeform even simpler than a virus and even harder to track down. It was a heretical, minority view, until the CDC in Atlanta decided out of desperation to try his theories out, and found the very dormant viroids Les predicted -- mixed in with the glue used to seal paper milk cartons, envelopes, postage stamps.

Les was a hero, of course. Most of us in the labs were. After all, we'd been the first line of defense. Our own casualty rate had been ghastly.

For a while there, funerals and other public gatherings were discouraged. But an exception was made for Les. The procession behind his cortege was a mile long. I was asked to deliver the eulogy. And when they pleaded with me to take over at the lab, I agreed.

So naturally I tended to forget all about ALAS. The war against CAPUC took everything society had. And while I may be selfish, even a rat can tell when it makes more sense to join in the fight to save a sinking ship ... especially when there's no other port in sight.

We learned how to combat CAPUC, eventually. It involved drugs, and a serum based on reversed antibodies force-grown in the patient's own marrow after he's given a dangerous overdose of a vanadium compound I found by trial and error. It worked, most of the time, but the victims suffered great stress and often required a special regime of whole blood transfusions to get across the most dangerous phase.

Blood banks were stretched even thinner than before. Only now the public responded generously, as in time of war. I should not have been surprised when survivors, after their recovery, volunteered by the thousands. But, of course, I'd forgotten about ALAS by then, hadn't I?

We beat back CAPUC. It's vector proved too unreliable, too easily interrupted once we'd figured it out. The poor little viroid never had a chance to do get to Les's "negotiation" stage. Oh well, those are the breaks.

I got all sorts of citations I didn't deserve. The King, gave me a KBE for personally saving the Prince of Wales. I had dinner at the White House.

Big deal.

The world had a respite, after that. CAPUC had scared people it seemed, into a new spirit of cooperation. I should have been suspicious, of course. But soon I'd moved over to WHO, and had all sorts of administrative responsibilities in the Final Campaign on Malnutrition.

By that time I had almost entirely forgotten about ALAS.

I forgot about you, didn't I? Oh, the years passed, my star rose, I became famous, respected, revered. I didn't get my Nobel in Stockholm. Ironically, I picked it up in Oslo. Fancy that. Just shows you can fool anybody.

And yet, I don't think I ever really forgot about you, ALAS, not at the back of my mind.

Peace treaties were signed. Citizens of the industrial nations voted temporary cuts in their standards of living in order to fight poverty and save the environment. Suddenly, it seemed, we'd all grown up. Other cynics, guys I'd gotten drunk with in the past -- and shared dark premonitions about the inevitable fate of filthy, miserable humanity -- all gradually deserted the faith, as pessimists seem wont do when the world turns bright -- too bright for even the cynical to dismiss as a mere passing phase on the road to Hell.

And yet, my own brooding remained unblemished. For subconsciously I knew it wasn't real.

Then the third Mars Expedition returned to worldwide adulation, and brought home with them TARP.

And that was when we all found out just how friendly all our home-grown pathogens really had been, all along.

4.

Late at night, stumbling in exhaustion from overwork, I would stop at Les's portrait where I'd ordered it hung in the hall opposite my office door, and stand there cursing him and his damned theories of symbiosis.

Imagine mankind ever reaching a symbiotic association with TARP! That really would be something. Imagine, Les, all those alien genes, added to our heritage, to our rich human diversity!

Only TARP did not seem to be much interested in "negotiation." Its wooing was rough, deadly. And its vector was the wind.

The world looked to me, and to my peers, for salvation. In spite of all of my successes and high renown, though, I knew myself for a second-best fraud. I would always know -- no matter how much they thanked and praised me -- who had been better than me by light years.

Again and again, deep into the night, I would pore through the notes Leslie Adgeson had left behind, seeking inspiration, seeking hope. That's when I stumbled across ALAS once more.

I found you again.

Oh, you made us behave better, all right. At least a quarter of the human race must contain your DNA, by now, ALAS. And in their newfound, inexplicable, rationalized altruism, they set the tone followed by all the others.

Everybody behaves so damned well in the present calamity. They help each other, they succor the sick, they all give so.

Funny thing, though. If you hadn't made us all so bloody cooperative, we'd probably never have made it to bloody Mars, would we? Or if we had, there'd have still been enough paranoia around so we'd have maintained a decent quarantine.

But then, I remind myself, you don't plan, do you. You're just a bundle of RNA, packed inside a protein coat, with an incidentally, accidentally acquired trait of making humans want to donate blood. That's all you are, right? So you had no way of knowing that by making us "better" you were also setting us up for TARP, did you? Did you?

5.

We've got some palliatives, now. A few new techniques seem to be doing some good. The latest news is great, in fact. Apparently, we'll be able to save 15 percent or so of the children. Up to half of those may even be fertile.

That's for nations who've had a lot of racial mixing. Heterozygosity and genetic diversity seems to breed better resistance. Those peoples with "pure," narrow bloodlines will be harder to save, but then, racism has its inevitable price.

Too bad about the great apes and horses. At least all this will give the rain forests a chance to grow back.

Meanwhile, everybody perseveres. There is no panic, as one reads about happening in past plagues. We've grown up at last, it seems. We help each other.

But I carry a card in my wallet saying I'm a Christian Scientist, and that my blood group is AB negative, and that I'm allergic to nearly everything. Transfusions are one of the treatments commonly used now, and I'm an important man. But I won't take blood.

I won't.

I donate, but I'll never take it. Not even when I drop.

You won't have me, ALAS. You won't.

I am a bad man. I suppose, all told, I've done more good than evil in my life, but that's incidental, a product of happenstance and the bizarre caprices of the world.

I have no control over the world, but I can make my own decisions, at least. As I make this one now.

Down, out of my high research tower, I've come. Into the streets, where the teeming clinics fester and broil. That is where I work now. And it doesn't matter to me that I'm behaving no differently from anyone else today. They are all marionettes. They think they're acting altruistically, but I know they are your puppets, ALAS.

But I am a man, do you hear me? I make my own decisions.

Fever wracks my body now, as I drag myself from bed to bed, holding their hands when they stretch them out to me for comfort, doing what I can to ease their suffering, to save a few.

You'll not have me, ALAS.

This is what I choose to do.

STABLE STRATEGIES FOR MIDDLE MANAGEMENT

Eileen Gunn

Our cousin the insect has an external skeleton made of shiny brown chitin, a material that is particularly responsive to the demands of evolution. Just as bioengineering has sculpted our bodies into new forms, so evolution has shaped the early insect's chewing mouthparts into her descendants' chisels, siphons, and stilettos, and has molded from the chitin special tools—pockets to carry pollen, combs to clean her compound eyes, notches on which she can fiddle a song.

—From the popular science program Insect People!

I awoke this morning to discover that bioengineering had made demands upon me during the night. My tongue had turned into a stiletto, and my left hand now contained a small chitinous comb, as if for cleaning a compound eye. Since I didn't have compound eyes, I thought that perhaps this presaged some change to come.

I dragged myself out of bed, wondering how I was going to drink my coffee through a stiletto. Was I now expected to kill my breakfast, and dispense with coffee entirely? I hoped I was not evolving into a creature whose survival depended on early-morning alertness. My circadian rhythms would no doubt keep pace with any physical changes, but my unevolved soul was repulsed at the thought of my waking cheerfully at dawn, ravenous for some wriggly little creature that had arisen even earlier.

I looked down at Greg, still asleep, the edge of our red and white quilt pulled up under his chin. His mouth had changed during the night too, and seemed to contain some sort of a long probe. Were we growing apart?

I reached down with my unchanged hand and touched his hair. It was still shiny brown, soft and thick, luxurious. But along his cheek, under his beard, I could feel patches of sclerotin, as the flexible chitin in his skin was slowly hardening to an impermeable armor.

He opened his eyes, staring blearily forward without moving his head. I could see him move his mouth cautiously, examining its internal changes. He turned his head and looked up at me, rubbing his hair slightly into my hand.

"Time to get up?" he asked. I nodded. "Oh, God," he said. He said this every morning. It was like a prayer.

"I'll make coffee," I said. "Do you want some?"

He shook his head slowly. "Just a glass of apricot nectar," he said. He unrolled his long, rough tongue and looked at it, slightly cross-eyed. "This is real interesting, but it wasn't in the catalog. I'll be sipping lunch from flowers pretty soon. That ought to draw a second glance at Duke's."

"I thought account execs were expected to sip their lunches," I said.

"Not from the flower arrangements…" he said, still exploring the odd shape of his mouth. Then he looked up at me and reached up from under the covers. "Come here."

It had been a while, I thought, and I had to get to work. But he did smell terribly attractive. Perhaps he was developing aphrodisiac scent glands. I climbed back under the covers and stretched my body against his. We were both developing chitinous knobs and odd lumps that made this less than comfortable. "How am I supposed to kiss you with a stiletto in my mouth?" I asked.

"There are other things to do. New equipment presents new possibilities." He pushed the covers back and ran his unchanged hands down my body from shoulder to thigh. "Let me know if my tongue is too rough."

It was not.

Fuzzy-minded, I got out of bed for the second time and drifted into the kitchen.

Measuring the coffee into the grinder, I realized that I was no longer interested in drinking it, although it was diverting for a moment to spear the beans with my stiletto. What was the damn thing for, anyhow? I wasn't sure I wanted to find out.

Putting the grinder aside, I poured a can of apricot nectar into a tulip glass. Shallow glasses were going to be a problem for Greg in the future, I thought. Not to mention solid food.

My particular problem, however, if I could figure out what I was supposed to eat for breakfast, was getting to the office in time for my ten A.M. meeting. Maybe I'd just skip breakfast. I dressed quickly and dashed out the door before Greg was even out of bed.

Thirty minutes later, I was more or less awake and sitting in the small conference room with the new marketing manager, listening to him lay out his plan for the Model 2000 launch.

In signing up for his bioengineering program, Harry had chosen specialized primate adaptation, B-E Option No. 4. He had evolved into a text-book example: small and long-limbed, with forward-facing eyes for judging distances and long, grasping fingers to keep him from falling out of his tree.

He was dressed for success in a pin-striped three-piece suit that fit his simian proportions perfectly. I wondered what premium he paid for custom-made. Or did he patronize a ready-to-wear shop that catered especially to primates?

I listened as he leaped agilely from one ridiculous marketing premise to the next. Trying to borrow credibility from mathematics and engineering, he used wildly metaphoric bizspeak, "factoring in the need for pipeline throughout," "fine-tuning the media mix," without even cracking a smile.

Harry had been with the company only a few months, straight from business school. He saw himself as a much-needed infusion of talent. I didn't like him, but I envied his ability to root through his subconscious and toss out one half-formed idea after another. I know he felt it reflected badly on me that I didn't join in and spew forth a random selection of promotional suggestions.

I didn't think much of his marketing plan. The advertising section was a textbook application of theory with no practical basis. I had two options: I could force him to accept a solution that would work, or I could yes him to death, making sure everybody understood it was his idea. I knew which path I'd take.

"Yeah, we can do that for you," I told him. "No problem." We'd see which of us would survive and which was hurtling to an evolutionary dead end.

Although Harry had won his point, he continued to belabor it. My attention wandered—I'd heard it all before. His voice was the hum of an air conditioner, a familiar, easily ignored background noise. I drowsed and new emotions stirred in me, yearnings to float through moist air currents, to land on bright surfaces, to engorge myself with warm, wet food.

Adrift in insect dreams, I became sharply aware of the bare skin of Harry's arm, between his gold-plated watchband and his rolled-up sleeve, as he manipulated papers on the conference room table. He smelled greasily delicious, like a pepperoni pizza or a charcoal-broiled hamburger. I realized he probably wouldn't taste as good as he smelled, but I was hungry. My stiletto-like tongue was there for a purpose, and it wasn't to skewer cubes of tofu. I leaned over his arm and braced myself against the back of his hand, probing with my stylets to find a capillary.

Harry noticed what I was doing and swatted me sharply on the side of the head. I pulled away before he could hit me again.

"We were discussing the Model 2000 launch. Or have you forgotten?" he said, rubbing his arm.

"Sorry. I skipped breakfast this morning." I was embarrassed.

"Well, get your hormones adjusted, for chrissake." He was annoyed, and I couldn't really blame him. "Let's get back to the media allocation issue, if you can keep your mind on it. I've got another meeting at eleven in Building Two."

Inappropriate feeding behavior was not unusual in the company, and corporate etiquette sometimes allowed minor lapses to pass without pursuit. Of course, I could no longer hope that he would support me on moving some money out of the direct-mail budget…

During the remainder of the meeting, my glance kept drifting through the open door of the conference room, toward a large decorative plant in the hall, one of those oases of generic greenery that dot the corporate landscape. It didn't look succulent exactly—it obviously wasn't what I would have preferred to eat if I hadn't been so hungry—but I wondered if I swung both ways?

I grabbed a handful of the broad leaves as I left the room and carried them back to my office. With my tongue, I probed a vein in the thickest part of a leaf. It wasn't so bad. Tasted green. I sucked them dry and tossed the husks in the wastebasket.

I was still omnivorous, at least—female mosquitoes don't eat plants. So the process wasn't complete…

I got a cup of coffee, for company, from the kitchenette and sat in my office with the door closed and wondered what was happening. The incident with Harry disturbed me. Was I turning into a mosquito? If so, what the hell kind of good was that supposed to do me? The company didn't have any use for a whining loner.

There was a knock at the door, and my boss stuck his head in. I nodded and gestured him into my office. He sat down in the visitor's chair on the other side of my desk. From the look on his face, I could tell Harry had talked to him already.

Tom Samson was an older guy, pre-bioengineering. He was well versed in stimulus-response techniques, but had somehow never made it to the top job. I liked him, but then that was what he intended. Without sacrificing authority, he had pitched his appearance, his gestures, the tone of his voice, to the warm end of the spectrum. Even though I knew what he was doing, it worked.

He looked at me with what appeared to be sympathy, but was actually a practiced sign stimulus, intended to defuse any fight-or-flight response. "Is there something bothering you, Margaret?"

"Bothering me? I'm hungry, that's all. I get short-tempered when I'm hungry."

Watch it, I thought. He hasn't referred to the incident; leave it for him to bring up. I made my mind go bland and forced myself to meet his eyes. A shifty gaze is a guilty gaze.

Tom just looked at me, biding his time, waiting for me to put myself on the spot. My coffee smelt burnt, but I stuck my tongue in it and pretended to drink. "I'm just not human until I've had my coffee in the morning." Sounded phony. Shut up, I thought.

This was the opening that Tom was waiting for. "That's what I wanted to speak to you about, Margaret." He sat there, hunched over in a relaxed way, like a mountain gorilla, unthreatened by natural enemies. "I just talked to Harry Winthrop, and he said you were trying to suck his blood during a meeting on marketing strategy." He paused for a moment to check my reaction, but the neutral expression was fixed on my face and I said nothing. His face changed to project disappointment. "You know, when we noticed you were developing three distinct body segments, we had great hopes for you. But your actions just don't reflect the social and organizational development we expected."

He paused, and it was my turn to say something in my defense. "Most insects are solitary, you know. Perhaps the company erred in hoping for a termite or an ant. I'm not responsible for that."

"Now, Margaret," he said, his voice simulating genial reprimand. "This isn't the jungle, you know. When you signed those consent forms, you agreed to let the B-E staff mold you into a more useful corporate organism. But this isn't nature, this is man reshaping nature. It doesn't follow the old rules. You can truly be anything you want to be. But you have to cooperate."

"I'm doing the best I can," I said, cooperatively. "I'm putting in eighty hours a week."

"Margaret, the quality of your work is not an issue. It's your interactions with others that you have to work on. You have to learn to work as part of the group. I just cannot permit such backbiting to continue. I'll have Arthur get you an appointment this afternoon with the B-E counselor." Arthur was his secretary. He knew everything that happened in the department and mostly kept his mouth shut.

"I'd be a social insect if I could manage it," I muttered as Tom left my office. "But I've never known what to say to people in bars."

For lunch I met Greg and our friend David Detlor at a health-food restaurant that advertises fifty different kinds of fruit nectar. We'd never eaten there before, but Greg knew he'd love the place. It was already a favorite of David's, and he still has all his teeth, so I figured it would be okay with me.

David was there when I arrived, but not Greg. David works for the company too, in a different department. He, however, has proved remarkably resistant to corporate blandishment. Not only has he never undertaken B-E, he hasn't even bought a three-piece suit. Today he was wearing chewed-up blue jeans and a flashy Hawaiian shirt, of a type that was cool about ten years ago.

"Your boss lets you dress like that?" I asked.

"We have this agreement. I don't tell her she has to give me a job, and she doesn't tell me what to wear."

David's perspective on life is very different from mine. And I don't think it's just that he's in R&D and I'm in Advertising—it's more basic than that. Where he sees the world as a bunch of really neat but optional puzzles put there for his enjoyment, I see it as… well, as a series of SATs.

"So what's new with you guys?" he asked, while we stood around waiting for a table.

"Greg's turning into a goddamn butterfly. He went out last week and bought a dozen Italian silk sweaters. It's not a corporate look."

"He's not a corporate guy, Margaret."

"Then why is he having all this B-E done if he's not even going to use it?"

"He's dressing up a little. He just wants to look nice. Like Michael Jackson, you know?"

I couldn't tell whether David was kidding me or not. Then he started telling me about his music, this barbershop quartet that he sings in. They were going to dress in black leather for the next competition and sing Shel Silverstein's "Come to Me, My Masochistic Baby."

"It'll knock them on their tails," he said gleefully. "We've already got a great arrangement."

"Do you think it will win, David?" It seemed too weird to please the judges in that sort of a show.

"Who cares?" said David. He didn't look worried.

Just then Greg showed up. He was wearing a cobalt blue silk sweater with a copper green design on it. Italian. He was also wearing a pair of dangly earrings shaped like bright blue airplanes. We were shown to a table near a display of carved vegetables.

"This is great," said David. "Everybody wants to sit near the vegetables. It's where you sit to be seen in this place." He nodded to Greg. "I think it's your sweater."

"It's the butterfly in my personality," said Greg. "Headwaiters never used to do stuff like this for me. I always got the table next to the espresso machine."

If Greg was going to go on about the perks that come with being a butterfly, I was going to change the subject.

"David, how come you still haven't signed up for B-E?" I asked. "The company pays half the cost, and they don't ask questions."

David screwed up his mouth, raised his hands to his face, and made small, twitching, insect gestures, as if grooming his nose and eyes. "I'm doing okay the way I am."

Greg chuckled at this, but I was serious. "You'll get ahead faster with a little adjustment. Plus you're showing a good attitude, you know, if you do it."

"I'm getting ahead faster than I want to right now—it looks like I won't be able to take the three months off that I wanted this summer."

"Three months?" I was astonished. "Aren't you afraid you won't have a job to come back to?"

"I could live with that," said David calmly, opening his menu.

The waiter took our orders. We sat for a moment in a companionable silence, the self-congratulation that follows ordering high-fiber food-stuffs. Then I told them the story of my encounter with Harry Winthrop.

"There's something wrong with me," I said. "Why suck his blood? What good is that supposed to do me?"

"Well," said David, "you chose this schedule of treatments. Where did you want it to go?"

"According to the catalog," I said, "the No. 2 Insect Option is supposed to make me into a successful competitor for a middle-management niche, with triggerable responses that can be useful in gaining entry to upper hierarchical levels. Unquote." Of course, that was just ad talk—I didn't really expect it to do all that. "That's what I want. I want to be in charge. I want to be the boss."

"Maybe you should go back to BioEngineering and try again," said Greg. "Sometimes the hormones don't do what you expect. Look at my tongue, for instance." He unfurled it gently and rolled it back into his mouth. "Though I'm sort of getting to like it." He sucked at his drink, making disgusting slurping sounds. He didn't need a straw.

"Don't bother with it, Margaret," said David firmly, taking a cup of rosehip tea from the waiter. "Bioengineering is a waste of time and money and millions of years of evolution. If human beings were intended to be managers, we'd have evolved pin-striped body covering."

"That's cleverly put," I said, "but it's dead wrong."

The waiter brought our lunches, and we stopped talking as he put them in front of us. It seemed like the anticipatory silence of three very hungry people, but was in fact the polite silence of three people who have been brought up not to argue in front of disinterested bystanders. As soon as he left, we resumed the discussion.

"I mean it," David said. "The dubious survival benefits of management aside, bioengineering is a waste of effort. Harry Winthrop, for instance, doesn't need B-E at all. Here he is, fresh out of business school, audibly buzzing with lust for a high-level management position. Basically he's just marking time until a presidency opens up somewhere. And what gives him the edge over you is his youth and inexperience, not some specialized primate adaptation."

"Well," I said with some asperity, "he's not constrained by a knowledge of what's failed in the past, that's for sure. But saying that doesn't solve my problem, David. Harry's signed up. I've signed up. The changes are under way and I don't have any choice."

I squeezed a huge glob of honey into my tea from a plastic bottle shaped like a teddy bear. I took a sip of the tea; it was minty and very sweet. "And now I'm turning into the wrong kind of insect. It's ruined my ability to deal with Product Marketing."

"Oh, give it a rest!" said Greg suddenly. "This is so boring. I don't want to hear any more about corporate hugger-mugger. Let's talk about something that's fun."

I had had enough of Greg's lepidopterate lack of concentration. "Something that's fun? I've invested all my time and most of my genetic material in this job. This is all the goddamn fun there is."

The honeyed tea made me feel hot. My stomach itched—I wondered if I was having an allergic reaction. I scratched, and not discreetly. My hand came out from under my shirt full of little waxy scales. What the hell was going on under there? I tasted one of the scales; it was wax all right. Worker bee changes? I couldn't help myself—I stuffed the wax into my mouth.

David was busying himself with his alfalfa sprouts, but Greg looked disgusted. "That's gross, Margaret," he said. He made a face, sticking his tongue part way out. Talk about gross. "Can't you wait until after lunch?"

I was doing what came naturally, and did not dignify his statement with a response. There was a side dish of bee pollen on the table. I took a spoonful and mixed it with the wax, chewing noisily. I'd had a rough morning, and bickering with Greg wasn't making the day more pleasant.

Besides, neither he nor David has any real respect for my position in the company. Greg doesn't take my job seriously at all. And David simply does what he wants to do, regardless of whether it makes any money, for himself or anyone else. He was giving me a back-to-nature lecture, and it was far too late for that.

This whole lunch was a waste of time. I was tired of listening to them, and felt an intense urge to get back to work. A couple of quick stings distracted them both: I had the advantage of surprise. I ate some more honey and quickly waxed them over. They were soon hibernating side by side in two large octagonal cells.

I looked around the restaurant. People were rather nervously pretending not to have noticed. I called the waiter over and handed him my credit card. He signaled to several bus boys, who brought a covered dart and took Greg and David away. "They'll eat themselves out of that by Thursday afternoon," I told him. "Store them on their sides in a warm, dry place, away from direct heat." I left a large tip.

I walked back to the office, feeling a bit ashamed of myself. A couple days of hibernation weren't going to make Greg or David more sympathetic to my problems. And they'd be real mad when they got out.

I didn't use to do things like that. I used to be more patient, didn't I? More appreciative of the diverse spectrum of human possibility. More interested in sex and television.

This job was not doing much for me as a warm, personable human being. At the very least, it was turning me into an unpleasant lunch companion. Whatever had made me think I wanted to get into management anyway?

The money, maybe.

But that wasn't all. It was the challenge, the chance to do something new, to control the total effort instead of just doing part of a project…

The money too, though. There were other ways to get money. Maybe I should just kick the supports out from under the damn job and start over again.

I saw myself sauntering into Tom's office, twirling his visitor's chair around and falling into it. The words "I quit" would force their way out, almost against my will. His face would show surprise—feigned, of course. By then I'd have to go through with it. Maybe I'd put my feet up on his desk. And then—

But was it possible to just quit, to go back to being the person I used to be? No, I wouldn't be able to do it. I'd never be a management virgin again.

I walked up to the employee entrance at the rear of the building. A suction device next to the door sniffed at me, recognized my scent, and clicked the door open. Inside, a group of new employees, trainees, were clustered near the door, while a personnel officer introduced them to the lock and let it familiarize itself with their pheromones.

On the way down the hall, I passed Tom's office. The door was open. He was at his desk, bowed over some papers, and looked up as I went by.

"Ah, Margaret," he said. "Just the person I want to talk to. Come in for a minute, would you." He moved a large file folder onto the papers in front of him on his desk, and folded his hands on top of them. "So glad you were passing by." He nodded toward a large, comfortable chair. "Sit down."

"We're going to be doing a bit of restructuring in the department," he began, "and I'll need your input, so I want to fill you in now on what will be happening."

I was immediately suspicious. Whenever Tom said "I'll need your input," he meant everything was decided already.

"We'll be reorganizing the whole division, of course," he continued, drawing little boxes on a blank piece of paper. He'd mentioned this at the department meeting last week.

"Now, your group subdivides functionally into two separate areas, wouldn't you say?"

"Well—"

"Yes," he said thoughtfully, nodding his head as though in agreement. "That would be the way to do it." He added a few lines and a few more boxes. From what I could see, it meant that Harry would do all the interesting stuff and I'd sweep up afterwards.

"Looks to me as if you've cut the balls out of my area and put them over into Harry Winthrop's," I said.

"Ah, but your area is still very important, my dear. That's why I don't have you actually reporting to Harry." He gave me a smile like a lie.

He had put me in a tidy little bind. After all, he was my boss. If he was going to take most of my area away from me, as it seemed he was, there wasn't much I could do to stop him. And I would be better off if we both pretended that I hadn't experienced any loss of status. That way I kept my title and my salary.

"Oh, I see." I said. "Right."

It dawned on me that this whole thing had been decided already, and that Harry Winthrop probably knew all about it. He'd probably even wangled a raise out of it. Tom had called me in here to make it look casual, to make it look as though I had something to say about it. I'd been set up.

This made me mad. There was no question of quitting now. I'd stick around and fight. My eyes blurred, unfocused, refocused again. Compound eyes! The promise of the small comb in my hand was fulfilled! I felt a deep chemical understanding of the ecological system I was now a part of. I knew where I fit in. And I knew what I was going to do. It was inevitable now, hardwired in at the DNA level.

The strength of this conviction triggered another change in the chitin, and for the first time I could actually feel the rearrangement of my mouth and nose, a numb tickling like inhaling seltzer water. The stiletto receded and mandibles jutted forth, rather like Katharine Hepburn. Form and function achieved an orgasmic synchronicity. As my jaw pushed forward, mantis-like, it also opened, and I pounced on Tom and bit his head off.

He leaped from his desk and danced headless about the office.

I felt in complete control of myself as I watched him and continued the conversation. "About the Model 2000 launch," I said. "If we factor in the demand for pipeline throughput and adjust the media mix just a bit, I think we can present a very tasty little package to Product Marketing by the end of the week."

Tom continued to strut spasmodically, making vulgar copulative motions. Was I responsible for evoking these mantid reactions? I was unaware of a sexual component in our relationship.

I got up from the visitor's chair and sat behind his desk, thinking about what had just happened. It goes without saying that I was surprised at my own actions. I mean, irritable is one thing, but biting people's heads off is quite another. But I have to admit that my second thought was, well, this certainly is a useful strategy, and should make a considerable difference in my ability to advance myself. Hell of a lot more productive than sucking people's blood.

Maybe there was something after all to Tom's talk about having the proper attitude.

And, of course, thinking of Tom, my third reaction was regret. He really had been a likeable guy, for the most part. But what's done is done, you know, and there's no use chewing on it after the fact.

I buzzed his assistant on the intercom. "Arthur," I said, "Mr. Samson and I have come to an evolutionary parting of the ways. Please have him re-engineered. And charge it to Personnel."

Now I feel an odd itching on my forearms and thighs. Notches on which I might fiddle a song?

RIPPLES IN THE DIRAC SEA

Geoffrey A. Landis

My death looms over me like a tidal wave, rushing toward me with an inexorable slow-motion majesty. And yet I flee, pointless though it may be.

I depart, and my ripples diverge to infinity, like waves smoothing out the footprints of forgotten travellers.

WE WERE SO CAREFUL to avoid any paradox, the day we first tested my machine. We pasted a duct-tape cross onto the concrete floor of a windowless lab, placed an alarm clock on the mark, and locked the door. An hour later we came back, removed the clock, and put the experimental machine in the room with a super-eight camera set in the coils. I aimed the camera at the X, and one of my grad students programmed the machine to send the camera back half an hour, stay in the past five minutes, then return. It left and returned without even a flicker. When we developed the film, the time on the clock was half an hour before we loaded the camera. We'd succeeded in opening the door into the past. We celebrated with coffee and champagne.

Now that I know a lot more about time, I understand our mistake, that we had not thought to put a movie camera in the room with the clock to photograph the machine as it arrived from the future. But what is obvious to me now was not obvious then.

I ARRIVE, and the ripples converge to the instant now from the vastness of the infinite sea.

To San Francisco, June 8, 1965. A warm breeze riffles across dandelion-speckled grass, while puffy white clouds form strange and wondrous shapes for our entertainment. Yet so very few people pause to enjoy it. They scurry about, diligently preoccupied, believing that if they act busy enough, they must be important. "They hurry so," I say. "Why can't they slow down, sit back, enjoy the day?"

"They're trapped in the illusion of time," says Dancer. He lies on his back and blows a soap bubble, his hair flopping back long and brown in a time when "long" hair meant anything below the ear. A puff of breeze takes the bubble down the hill and into the stream of pedestrians. They uniformly ignore it. "They're caught in the belief that what they do is important to some future goal." The bubble pops against a briefcase, and Dancer blows another. "You and I, we know how false an illusion that is. There is no past, no future, only the now, eternal."

He was right, more right than he could have possibly imagined.

Once I, too, was preoccupied and self-important. Once I was brilliant and ambitious. I was twenty-eight years old, and I made the greatest discovery in the world.

FROM MY hiding place I watched him come up the service elevator. He was thin almost to the point of starvation, a nervous man with stringy blond hair and an armless white T-shirt. He looked up and down the hall, but failed to see me hidden in the janitor's closet. Under each arm was a two-gallon can of gasoline, in each hand another. He put down three of the cans and turned the last one upside down, then walked down the hall, spreading a pungent trail of gasoline. His face was blank. When he started on the second can, I figured it was about enough. As he passed my hiding spot, I walloped him over the head with a wrench, and called hotel security. Then I went back to the closet and let the ripples of time converge.

I arrived in a burning room, flames licking forth at me, the heat almost too much to bear. I gasped for breath—a mistake—and punched at the keypad.

Notes on the Theory and Practice of Time Travel:

1. Travel is possible only into the past.

2. The object transported will return to exactly the time and place of departure.

3. It is not possible to bring objects from the past to the present.

4. Actions in the past cannot change the present.

ONE TIME I tried jumping back a hundred million years, to the Cretaceous, to see dinosaurs. All the picture books show the landscape as being covered with dinosaurs. I spent three days wandering around a swamp—in my new tweed suit—-before catching even a glimpse of any dinosaur larger than a basset hound. That one—a theropod of some sort, I don't know which—skittered away as soon as it caught a whiff of me. Quite a disappointment.

MY PROFESSOR in transfinite math used to tell stories about a hotel with an infinite number of rooms. One day all the rooms are full, and another guest arrives. "No problem," says the desk clerk. He moves the person in room one into room two, the person in room two into room three, and so on. Presto! A vacant room.

A little later, an infinite number of guests arrive. "No problem," says the dauntless desk clerk. He moves the person in room one into room two, the person in room two into room four, the person in room three into room six, and so on. Presto! An infinite number of rooms vacant.

My time machine works on just that principle.

AGAIN I RETURN TO 1965, the fixed point, the strange attractor to my chaotic trajectory. In years of wandering I've met countless people, but Daniel Ranien—Dancer—was the only one who truly had his head together. He had a soft, easy smile, a battered secondhand guitar, and as much wisdom as it has taken me a hundred lifetimes to learn. I've known him in good times and bad, in summer days with blue skies that we swore would last a thousand years, in days of winter blizzards with drifted snow piled high over our heads. In happier times we have laid roses into the barrels of rifles; we have laid our bodies across the city streets in the midst of riots, and not been hurt. And I have been with him when he died, once, twice, a hundred times over.

He died on February 8, 1969, a month into the reign of King Richard the Trickster and his court fool Spiro, a year before Kent State and Altamont and the secret war in Cambodia slowly strangled the summer of dreams. He died, and there was—is—nothing I can do. The last time he died I dragged him to a hospital, where I screamed and ranted until finally I convinced them to admit him for observation, though nothing seemed wrong with him. With X rays and arteriograms and radioactive tracers, they found the incipient bubble in his brain; they drugged him, shaved his beautiful long brown hair, and operated on him, cutting out the offending capillary and tying it off neatly. When the anesthetic wore off, I sat in the hospital room and held his hand. There were big purple blotches under his eyes. He gripped my hand and stared, silent, into space. Visiting hours or no, I didn't let them throw me out of the room. He just stared. In the gray hours just before dawn he sighed softly and died. There was nothing at all that I could do.

TIME TRAVEL is subject to two constraints: conservation of energy, and causality. The energy to appear in the past is only borrowed from the Dirac sea, and since ripples in the Dirac sea propagate in the negative direction, transport is only into the past. Energy is conserved in the present as long as the object transported returns with zero time delay, and the principle of causality assures that actions in the past cannot change the present. For example, what if you went into the past and killed your father? Who, then, would invent the time machine?

Once I tried to commit suicide by murdering my father, before he met my mother, twenty-three years before I was born. It changed nothing, of course, and even when I did it, I knew it would change nothing. But you have to try these things. How else could I know for sure?

NEXT WE TRIED sending a rat back. It made the trip through the Dirac sea and back undamaged. Then we tried a trained rat, one we borrowed from the psychology lab across the green without telling them what we wanted it for. Before its little trip it had been taught to run through a maze to get a piece of bacon. Afterwards, it ran the maze as fast as ever.

We still had to try it on a human. I volunteered myself and didn't allow anyone to talk me out of it. By trying it on myself, I dodged the university regulations about experimenting on humans.

The dive into the negative-energy sea felt like nothing at all. One moment I stood in the center of the loop of Renselz coils, watched by my two grad students and a technician; the next I was alone, and the clock had jumped back exactly one hour. Alone in a locked room with nothing but a camera and a clock, that moment was the high point of my life.

The moment when I first met Dancer was the low point. I was in Berkeley, a bar called Trishia's, slowly getting trashed. I'd been doing that a lot, caught between omnipotence and despair. It was 1967. 'Frisco then—it was the middle of the hippy era—seemed somehow appropriate.

There was a girl, sitting at a table with a group from the university. I walked over to her table and invited myself to sit down. I told her she didn't exist, that her whole world didn't exist, it was all created by the fact that I was watching, and would disappear back into the sea of unreality as soon as I stopped looking. Her name was Lisa, and she argued back. Her friends, bored, wandered off, and in a while Lisa realized just how drunk I was. She dropped a bill on the table and walked out into the foggy night.

I followed her out. When she saw me following, she clutched her purse and bolted.

He was suddenly there under the streetlight. For a second I thought he was a girl. He had bright blue eyes and straight brown hair down to his shoulders. He wore an embroidered Indian shirt, with a silver and turquoise medallion around his neck and a guitar slung across his back. He was lean, almost stringy, and moved like a dancer or a karate master. But it didn't occur to me to be afraid of him.

He looked me over. "That won't solve your problem, you know," he said.

And instantly I was ashamed. I was no longer sure exactly what I'd had in mind or why I'd followed her. It had been years since I'd first fled my death, and I had come to think of others as unreal, since nothing I could do would permanently affect them. My head was spinning. I slid down the wall and sat down, hard, on the sidewalk. What had I come to?

He helped me back into the bar, fed me orange juice and pretzels, and got me to talk. I told him everything. Why not, since I could unsay anything I said, undo anything I did? But I had no urge to. He listened to it all, saying nothing. No one else had ever listened to the whole story before. I can't explain the effect it had on me. For uncountable years I'd been alone, and then, if only for a moment… It hit me with the intensity of a tab of acid. If only for a moment, I was not alone.

We left arm in arm. Half a block away, Dancer stopped, in front of an alley. It was dark.

"Something not quite right here." His voice had a puzzled tone.

I pulled him back. "Hold on. You don't want to go down there—" He pulled free and walked in. After a slight hesitation, I followed.

The alley smelled of old beer, mixed with garbage and stale vomit. In a moment, my eyes became adjusted to the dark.

Lisa was cringing in a corner behind some trash cans. Her clothes had been cut away with a knife, and lay scattered around. Blood showed dark on her thighs and one arm. She didn't seem to see us. Dancer squatted down next to her and said something soft. She didn't respond. He pulled off his shirt and wrapped it around her, then cradled her in his arms and picked her up. "Help me get her to my apartment."

"Apartment, hell. We'd better call the police," I said.

"Call the pigs? Are you crazy? You want them to rape her, too?"

I'd forgotten; this was the sixties. Between the two of us, we got her to Dancer's VW bug and took her to his apartment in The Hash-bury. He explained it to me quietly as we drove, a dark side of the summer of love that I'd not seen before. It was greasers, he said. They come down to Berkeley because they heard that hippie chicks gave it away free, and get nasty when they met one who thought otherwise.

Her wounds were mostly superficial. Dancer cleaned her, put her in bed, and stayed up all night beside her, talking and crooning and making little reassuring noises. I slept on one of the mattresses in the hall. When I woke up in the morning, they were both in his bed. She was sleeping quietly. Dancer was awake, holding her. I was aware enough to realize that that was all he was doing, holding her, but still I felt a sharp pang of jealousy, and didn't know which one of them it was that I was jealous of.

Notes for a Lecture on Time Travel

The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of intellectual giants, whose likes will perhaps never again be equaled. Einstein had just invented relativity, Heisenberg and Schrodinger quantum mechanics, but nobody yet knew how to make the two theories consistent with each other. In 1930, a new person tackled the problem. His name was Paul Dirac. He was twenty-eight years old. He succeeded where the others had failed.

His theory was an unprecedented success, except for one small detail. According to Dirac's theory, a particle could have either positive or negative energy. What did this mean, a particle of negative energy? How could something have negative energy? And why don't ordinary—positive energy—particles fall down into these negative energy states, releasing a lot of free energy in the process?

You or I might have merely stipulated that it was impossible for an ordinary positive energy particle to make a transition to negative energy. But Dirac was not an ordinary man. He was a genius, the greatest physicist of all, and he had an answer. If every possible negative energy state was already occupied, a particle couldn't drop into a negative energy state. Ah ha! So Dirac postulated that the entire universe is entirely filled with negative energy particles. They surround us, permeate us, in the vacuum of outer space and in the center of the earth, every possible place a particle could be. An infinitely dense "sea" of negative energy particles. The Dirac sea.

His argument had holes in it, but that comes later.

ONCE I WENT to visit the crucifixion. I took a jet from Santa Cruz to Tel Aviv, and a bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. On a hill outside the city, I dove through the Dirac sea.

I arrived in my three-piece suit. No way to help that, unless I wanted to travel naked. The land was surprisingly green and fertile, more so than I'd expected. The hill was now a farm, covered with grape arbors and olive trees. I hid the coils behind some rocks and walked down to the road. I didn't get far. Five minutes on the road, I ran into a group of people. They had dark hair, dark skin, and wore clean white tunics. Romans? Jews? Egyptians? How could I tell? They spoke to me, but I couldn't understand a word. After a while two of them held me, while a third searched me. Were they robbers, searching for money? Romans, searching for some kind of identity papers? I realized how naive I'd been to think I could just find appropriate dress and somehow blend in with the crowds. Finding nothing, the one who'd done the search carefully and methodically beat me up. At last he pushed me face down in the dirt. While the other two held me down, he pulled out a dagger and slashed through the tendons on the back of each leg. They were merciful, I guess. They left me with my life. Laughing and talking incomprehensibly among themselves, they walked away.

My legs were useless. One of my arms was broken. It took me four hours to crawl back up the hill, dragging myself with my good arm. Occasionally people would pass by on the road, studiously ignoring me. Once I reached the hiding place, pulling out the Renselz coils and wrapping them around me was pure agony. By the time I entered return on the keypad I was wavering in and out of consciousness. I finally managed to get it entered. From the Dirac sea the ripples converged and I was in my hotel room in Santa Cruz. The ceiling had started to fall in where the girders had burned through. Fire alarms shrieked and wailed, but there was no place to run. The room was filled with dense, acrid smoke. Trying not to breathe, I punched out a code on the keypad, somewhen, anywhen other than that one instant and I was in the hotel room, five days before. I gasped for breath. The woman in the hotel bed shrieked and tried to pull the covers up. The man screwing her was too busy to pay any mind. They weren't real anyway. I ignored them and paid a little more attention to where to go next. Back to '65, I figured. I punched in the combo and was standing in an empty room on the thirtieth floor of a hotel just under construction. A full moon gleamed on the silhouettes of silent construction cranes. I flexed my legs experimentally. Already the memory of the pain was beginning to fade. That was reasonable, because it had never happened. Time travel. It's not immortality, but it's got to be the next best thing.

You can't change the past, no matter how you try.

IN THE MORNING I explored Dancer's pad. It was crazy, a small third-floor apartment a block off Haight Ashbury that had been converted into something from another planet. The floor of the apartment had been completely covered with old mattresses, on top of which was a jumbled confusion of quilts, pillows, Indian blankets, stuffed animals. You took off your shoes before coming in—Dancer always wore sandals, leather ones from Mexico with soles cut from old tires. The radiators, which didn't work anyway, were spray painted in Day-Glo colors. The walls were plastered with posters: Peter Max prints, brightly colored Eschers, poems by Allen Ginsberg, record album covers, peace-rally posters, a "Haight Is Love" sign, FBI ten-most-wanted posters torn down from a post office with the photos of famous antiwar activists circled in magic marker, a huge peace symbol in passion-pink. Some of the posters were illuminated with black light and luminesced in impossible colors. The air was musty with incense and the banana-sweet smell of dope. In one corner a record player played Sergeant Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band on infinite repeat. Whenever one copy of the album got too scratchy, inevitably one of Dancer's friends would bring in another.

He never locked the door. "Somebody wants to rip me off, well, hey, they probably need it more than I do anyway, okay? It's cool." People dropped by any time of day or night.

I let my hair grow long. Dancer and Lisa and I spent that summer together, laughing, playing guitar, making love, writing silly poems and sillier songs, experimenting with drugs. That was when LSD was blooming onto the scene like sunflowers, when people were still unafraid of the strange and beautiful world on the other side of reality. That was a time to live. I knew that it was Dancer that Lisa truly loved, not me, but in those days free love was in the air like the scent of poppies, and it didn't matter. Not much, anyway.

Notes for a Lecture on Time Travel (continued)

Having postulated that all of space was filled with an infinitely dense sea of negative energy particles, Dirac went further and asked if we, in the positive-energy universe, could interact with this negative-energy sea. What would happen, say, if you added enough energy to an electron to take it out of the negative-energy sea? Two things: first, you would create an electron, seemingly out of nowhere. Second, you would leave behind a "hole" in the sea. The hole, Dirac realized, would act as if it were a particle itself, a particle exactly like an electron except for one thing: it would have the opposite charge. But if the hole ever encountered an electron, the electron would fall back into the Dirac sea, annihilating both electron and hole in a bright burst of energy. Eventually they gave the hole in the Dirac sea a name of its own: "positron." When Anderson discovered the positron two years later to vindicate Dirac's theory, it was almost an anticlimax.

And over the next fifty years, the reality of the Dirac sea was almost ignored by physicists. Antimatter, the holes in the sea, was the important feature of the theory; the rest was merely a mathematical artifact.

Seventy years later, I remembered the story my transfinite math teacher told and put it together with Dirac's theory. Like putting an extra guest into a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, I figured out how to borrow energy from the Dirac sea. Or, to put it another way: I learned how to make waves.

And waves on the Dirac sea travel backward in time.

NEXT WE HAD to try something more ambitious. We had to send a human back farther into history, and obtain proof of the trip. Still we were afraid to make alterations in the past, even though the mathematics stated that the present could not be changed.

We pulled out our movie camera and chose our destinations carefully.

In September of 1853 a traveler named William Hapland and his family crossed the Sierra Nevadas to reach the California coast. His daughter Sarah kept a journal, and in it she recorded how, as they reached the crest of Parker's Ridge, she caught her first glimpse of the distant Pacific ocean exactly as the sun touched the horizon, "in a blays of cryms'n glorie," as she wrote. The journal still exists. It was easy enough for us to conceal ourselves and a movie camera in a cleft of rocks above the pass, to photograph the weary travelers in their ox-drawn wagon as they crossed.

The second target was the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. >From a deserted warehouse that would survive the quake—but not the following fire—we watched and took movies as buildings tumbled down around us and embattled firemen in horse-drawn fire-trucks strove in vain to quench a hundred blazes. Moments before the fire reached our building, we fled into the present.

The films were spectacular.

We were ready to tell the world.

There was a meeting of the AAAS in Santa Cruz in a month. I called the program chairman and wangled a spot as an invited speaker without revealing just what we'd accomplished to date. I planned to show those films at the talk. They were to make us instantly famous.

THE DAY that Dancer died we had a going-away party, just Lisa and Dancer and I. He knew he was going to die; I'd told him and somehow he believed me. He always believed me. We stayed up all night, playing Dancer's secondhand guitar, painting psychedelic designs on each other's bodies with greasepaint, competing against each other in a marathon game of cutthroat Monopoly, doing a hundred silly, ordinary things that took meaning only from the fact that it was the last time. About four in the morning, as the glimmer of false-dawn began to show in the sky, we went down to the bay and, huddling together for warmth, went tripping. Dancer took the largest dose, since he wasn't going to return. The last thing he said, he told us not to let our dreams die; to stay together.

We buried Dancer, at city expense, in a welfare grave. We split up three days later.

I kept in touch with Lisa, vaguely. In the late seventies she went back to school, first for an MBA, then law school. I think she was married for a while. We wrote each other cards on Christmas for a while, then I lost track of her. Years later, I got a letter from her. She said that she was finally able to forgive me for causing Dan's death.

It was a cold and foggy February day, but I knew I could find warmth in 1965. The ripples converged.

ANTICIPATED QUESTIONS from the audience:

Q (old, stodgy professor): It seems to me this proposed temporal jump of yours violates the law of conservation of mass/energy. For example, when a transported object is transported into the past, a quantity of mass will appear to vanish from the present, in clear violation of the conservation law.

A (me): Since the return is to the exact time of departure, the mass present is constant.

Q: Very well, but what about the arrival in the past? Doesn't this violate the conservation law?

A: No. The energy needed is taken from the Dirac sea, by the mechanism I explain in detail in the Phys Rev paper. When the object returns to the "future," the energy is restored to the sea.

Q (intense young physicist): Then doesn't Heisenberg uncertainty limit the amount of time that can be spent in the past?

A: A good question. The answer is yes, but because we borrow an infinitesimal amount of energy from an infinite number of particles, the amount of time spent in the past can be arbitrarily large. The only limitation is that you must leave the past an instant before you depart from the present.

IN HALF AN HOUR I was scheduled to present the paper that would rank my name with Newton's and Galileo's—and Dirac's. I was twenty-eight years old, the same age as Dirac when he announced his theory. I was a firebrand, preparing to set the world aflame. I was nervous, rehearsing the speech in my hotel room. I took a swig out of an old Coke that one of my grad students had left sitting on top of the television. The evening news team was babbling on, but I wasn't listening.

I never delivered that talk. The hotel had already started to burn; my death was already foreordained. Tie neat, I inspected myself in the mirror, then walked to the door. The doorknob was warm. I opened it onto a sheet of fire. Flame burst through the opened door like a ravening dragon. I stumbled backward, staring at the flames in amazed fascination.

Somewhere in the hotel I heard a scream, and all at once I broke free of my spell. I was on the thirtieth story; there was no way out. My thought was for my machine. I rushed across the room and threw open the case holding the time machine. With swift, sure fingers I pulled out the Renselz coils and wrapped them around my body. The carpet had caught on fire, a sheet of flame between me and any possible escape. Holding my breath to avoid suffocation, I punched an entry into the keyboard and dove into time.

I return to that moment again and again. When I hit the final key, the air was already nearly unbreathable with smoke. I had about thirty seconds left to live, then. Over the years I've nibbled away my time down to ten seconds or less.

I live on borrowed time. So do we all, perhaps. But I know when and where my debt will fall due.

DANCER DIED on February 9, 1969. It was a dim, foggy day. In the morning he said he had a headache. That was unusual, for Dancer. He never had headaches. We decided to go for a walk through the fog. It was beautiful, as if we were alone in a strange, formless world. I'd forgotten about his headache altogether, until, looking out across the sea of fog from the park over the bay, he fell over. He was dead before the ambulance came. He died with a secret smile on his face. I've never understood that smile. Maybe he was smiling because the pain was gone.

Lisa committed suicide two days later.

YOU ORDINARY PEOPLE, you have the chance to change the future. You can father children, write novels, sign petitions, invent new machines, go to cocktail parties, run for president. You affect the future with everything you do. No matter what I do, I cannot. It is too late for that, for me. My actions are written in flowing water. And having no effect, I have no responsibilities. It makes no difference what I do, not at all.

When I first fled the fire into the past, I tried everything I could to change it. I stopped the arsonist, I argued with mayors, I even went to my own house and told myself not to go to the conference.

But that's not how time works. No matter what I do, talk to a governor or dynamite the hotel, when I reach that critical moment— the present, my destiny, the moment I left—I vanish from whenever I was, and return to the hotel room, the fire approaching ever closer. I have about ten seconds left. Every time I dive through the Dirac sea, everything I changed in the past vanishes. Sometimes I pretend that the changes I make in the past create new futures, though I know this is not the case. When I return to the present, all the changes are wiped out by the ripples of the converging wave, like erasing a blackboard after a class.

Someday I will return and meet my destiny. But for now, I live in the past. It's a good life, I suppose. You get used to the fact that nothing you do will ever have any effect on the world. It gives you a feeling of freedom. I've been places no one has ever been, seen things no one alive has ever seen. I've given up physics, of course. Nothing I discover could endure past that fatal night in Santa Cruz. Maybe some people would continue for the sheer joy of knowledge. For me, the point is missing.

But there are compensations. Whenever I return to the hotel room, nothing is changed but my memories. I am again twenty-eight, again wearing the same three-piece suit, again have the fuzzy taste of stale cola in my mouth. Every time I return, I use up a little bit of time. One day I will have no time left.

Dancer, too, will never die. I won't let him. Every time I get to that final February morning, the day he died, I return to 1965, to that perfect day in June. He doesn't know me, he never knows me. But we meet on that hill, the only two willing to enjoy the day doing nothing. He lies on his back, idly fingering chords on his guitar, blowing bubbles and staring into the clouded blue sky. Later I will introduce him to Lisa. She won't know us either, but that's okay. We've got plenty of time.

"Time," I say to Dancer, lying in the park on the hill. "There's so much time."

"All the time there is," he says.

THE FORT MOXIE BRANCH

Jack McDevitt

A few minutes into the blackout, the window in the single dormer at the top of Will Potter’s house began to glow. I watched it from across Route 11, through a screen of box elders, and through the snow which had been falling all afternoon and was now getting heavier. It was smeary and insubstantial, not the way a bedroom light would look, but as though something luminous floated in the dark interior.

Will Potter was dead. We’d put him in the graveyard on the other side of the expressway three years before. The property had lain empty since, a two-story frame dating from about the turn of the century.

The town had gone quiet with the blackout. Somewhere a dog barked, and a garage door banged down. Ed Kiernan’s station wagon rumbled past, headed out toward Cavalier. The streetlights were out, as was the traffic signal down at Twelfth.

As far as I was concerned, the power could have stayed off.

It was trash night. I was hauling out cartons filled with copies of Independence Square, and I was on my way down the outside staircase when everything had gone dark.

The really odd thing about the light over at Potter’s was that it seemed to be spreading. It had crept outside: the dormer began to burn with a steady, cold, blue-white flame. It flowed gradually down the slope of the roof, slipped over the drainpipe, and turned the corner of the porch. Just barely, in the illumination, I could make out the skewed screens and broken stone steps.

It would have taken something unusual to get my attention that night. I was piling the boxes atop one another, and some of the books had spilled into the street: my name glittered on the bindings. It was a big piece of my life. Five years and a quarter million words and, in the end, most of my life’s savings to get it printed. It had been painful, and I was glad to be rid of it.

So I was standing on the curb, feeling very sorry for myself while snow whispered out of a sagging sky.

The Tastee-Freez, Hal’s Lumber, the Amoco at the corner of Nineteenth and Bannister, were all dark and silent. Toward the center of town, blinkers and headlights misted in the storm.

It was a still, somehow motionless, night. The flakes were blue in the pale glow surrounding the house. They fell onto the gabled roof and spilled gently off the back.

Cass Taylor’s station wagon plowed past, headed out of town. He waved.

I barely noticed: the back end of Potter’s house had begun to balloon out. I watched it, fascinated, knowing it to be an illusion, yet still half-expecting it to explode.

The house began to change in other ways.

Roof and corner lines wavered. New walls dropped into place. The dormer suddenly ascended, and the top of the house with it. A third floor, complete with lighted windows and a garret, appeared out of the snow. (In one of the illuminated rooms, someone moved.)

Parapets rose, and an oculus formed in the center of the garret. A bay window pushed out of the lower level, near the front. An arch and portico replaced the porch. Spruce trees materialized, and Potter’s old post light, which had never worked, blinked on.

The box elders were bleak and stark in the foreground.

I stood, worrying about my eyesight, holding onto a carton, feeling the snow against my face and throat. Nothing moved on Route 11.

I was still standing there when the power returned: the streetlights, the electric sign over Hal’s office, the security lights at the Amoco, gunshots from a TV, the sudden inexplicable rasp of an electric drill. And, at the same moment, the apparition clicked off.

I could have gone to bed. I could have hauled out the rest of those goddamned books, attributed everything to my imagination, and gone to bed. I’m glad I didn’t.

The snow cover in Potter’s backyard was undisturbed. It was more than a foot deep beneath the half-inch or so that had fallen that day. I struggled through it to find the key he’d always kept wedged beneath a loose hasp near the cellar stairs.

I used it to let myself in through the storage room at the rear of the house. And I should admit that I had a bad moment when the door shut behind me, and I stood among the rakes and shovels and boxes of nails. Too many late TV movies. Too much Stephen King.

I’d been here before. Years earlier, when I’d thought that teaching would support me until I was able to earn a living as a novelist, I’d picked up some extra money by tutoring Potter’s boys. But that was a long time ago.

I’d brought a flashlight with me. I turned it on, and pushed through into the kitchen. It was warmer in there, but that was to be expected. Potter’s heirs were still trying to sell the place, and it gets too cold in North Dakota to simply shut off the heat altogether.

Cabinets were open and bare; the range had been disconnected from its gas mooring and dragged into the center of the floor. A church calendar hung behind a door. It displayed March 1986: the month of Potter’s death.

In the dining room, a battered table and three wooden chairs remained. They were pushed against one wall. A couple of boxes lay in a corner.

With a bang, the heater came on.

I was startled. A fan cut in, and warm air rushed across my ankles.

I took a deep breath and played the beam toward the living room. I was thinking how different a house looks without its furnishings, how utterly strange and unfamiliar, when I realized I wasn’t alone. Whether it was a movement outside the circle of light, or a sudden indrawn breath, or the creak of a board, I couldn’t have said. But I knew. “Who’s there?” I asked. The words hung in the dark.

“Mr. Wickham?” It was a woman.

“Hello,” I said. “I, uh, I saw lights and thought—”

“Of course,” she said. She was standing back near the kitchen, silhouetted against outside light. I wondered how she could have got there. “You were correct to be concerned. But it’s quite all right.” She was somewhat on the gray side of middle age, attractive, well-pressed, the sort you would expect to encounter at a bridge party. Her eyes, which were on a level with mine, watched me with good humor. “My name is Coela.” She extended her right hand. Gold bracelets clinked.

“I’m happy to meet you,” I said, trying to look as though nothing unusual had occurred. “How did you know my name?”

She touched my hand, the one holding the flashlight, and pushed it gently aside so she could pass. “Please follow me,” she said. “Be careful. Don’t fall over anything.”

We climbed the stairs to the second floor, and went into the rear bedroom. “Through here,” she said, opening a door that should have revealed a closet. Instead, I was looking into a brightly illuminated space that couldn’t possibly be there. It was filled with books, paintings and tapestries, leather furniture and polished tables. A fireplace crackled cheerfully beneath a portrait of a monk. A piano played softly. Chopin, I thought.

“This room won’t fit,” I said, rather stupidly. The thick quality of my voice startled me.

“No,” she agreed. “We’re attached to the property, but we’re quite independent.” We stepped inside. Carpets were thick underfoot. Where the floors were exposed, they were lustrous parquet. Vaulted windows looked out over Potter’s backyard, and Em Pyle’s house next door. Coela watched me thoughtfully. “Welcome, Mr. Wickham,” she said. Her eyes glittered with pride. “Welcome to the Fort Moxie branch of the John of Singletary Memorial Library.”

I looked around for a chair and, finding one near a window, lowered myself into it. The falling snow was dark, as though no illumination from within the glass touched it. “I don’t think I understand this,” I said.

“I suppose it is something of a shock.”

Her amusement was obvious, and sufficiently infectious that I loosened up somewhat. “Are you the librarian?”

She nodded.

“Nobody in Fort Moxie knows you’re here. What good is a library no one knows about?”

“That’s a valid question,” she admitted. “We have a limited membership.”

I glanced around. All the books looked like Bibles. They were different sizes and shapes, but all were bound in leather. Furthermore, titles and authors were printed in identical silver script. But I saw nothing in English. The shelves near me were packed with books whose titles appeared to be Russian. A volume lay open on a table at my right hand. It was in Latin. I picked it up and held it so I could read the title: Historiae, V-XII. Tacitus. “Okay,” I said. “It must be limited. Hardly anybody in Fort Moxie reads Latin or Russian.” I held up the Tacitus. “I doubt even Father Cramer could handle this.”

Em Pyle, the next-door neighbor, had come out onto his front steps. He called his dog, Preach, as he did most nights at this time. There was no response, and he looked up and down Nineteenth Street, into his own backyard, and right through me. I couldn’t believe he didn’t react.

“Coela, who are you exactly? What’s going on here? Who the hell is John of Singletary?”

She nodded, in the way people do when they agree that you have a problem. “Perhaps,” she said, “you should look around, Mr. Wickham. Then it might be easier to talk.”

She retired to a desk, and immersed herself in a sheaf of papers, leaving me to fend for myself.

Beyond the Russian shelves, I found Japanese or Chinese titles. I couldn’t tell which. And Arabic. There was a lot of Arabic. And German. French. Greek. More Oriental.

I found the English titles in the rear. They were divided into American and British sections. Dickens, Cowper, and Shakespeare on one side; Holmes, Dreiser, and Steinbeck on the other.

And almost immediately, the sense of apprehension that had hung over me from the beginning of this business sharpened. I didn’t know why. Certainly, the familiar names in a familiar setting should have eased my disquiet.

I picked up Melville’s Agatha and flipped through the pages. They had the texture of fine rice paper, and the leather binding lent a sense of timelessness to the book. I thought about the cheap cardboard that Crossbow had provided for Independence Square. My God, this was the way to get published.

Immediately beside it was The Complete Works of James McCorbin. Who the hell was James McCorbin? There were two novels and eight short stories. None of the titles was familiar, and the book contained no biographical information.

In fact, most of the names were people I’d never heard of. Kemerie Baxter. Wynn Gomez. Michael Kaspar. There was nothing unusual about that, of course. Library shelves are always filled with obscure authors. But the lush binding, and the obvious care expended on these books, changed the rules.

I took down Hemingway’s Watch by Night. I stared a long time at the title. The prose was vintage Hemingway. The crisp, clear bullet sentences and the factual, journalistic style were unmistakable. Even the setting: Italy, 1944.

Henry James was represented by Brandenberg. There was no sign of The Ambassadors, or The Portrait of a Lady, or Washington Square. In fact, there was neither Moby Dick nor Billy Budd. Nor The Sun Also Rises nor A Farewell to Arms. Thoreau wasn’t represented at all. I saw no sign of Fenimore Cooper or Mark Twain. (What kind of library had no copy of Huck Finn?)

I carried Watch by Night back to the desk where Coela was working. “This is not a Hemingway book,” I said, lobbing it onto the pile of papers in front of her. She winced. “The rest of them are bogus too. What the hell’s going on?”

“I can understand that you might be a little confused, Mr. Wickham,” she said, a trifle nervously. “I’m never sure quite how to explain things.”

“Please try your best,” I said.

She frowned. “I’m part of a cultural salvage group. We try to ensure that things of permanent value don’t, ah, get lost.”

She pushed her chair back, and gazed steadily at me. Somewhere in back, a clock ticked ponderously. “The book you picked up when you first came in was—” she paused, “—mislaid almost two thousand years ago.”

“The Tacitus?”

“The Histories Five through Twelve. We also have his Annals.”

“Who are you?”

She shook her head. “A kindred spirit,” she said.

“Seriously.”

“I’m being quite serious, Mr. Wickham. What you see around you is a treasure of incomparable value that, without our efforts, would no longer exist.”

We stared at each other for a few moments. “Are you saying,” I asked, “that these are all lost masterpieces by people like Tacitus? That this”—I pointed at Watch by Night—“is a bona fide Hemingway?”

“Yes,” she said.

We faced one another across the desktop. “There’s a Melville back there too. And a Thomas Wolfe.”

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes were bright with pleasure. “All of them.”

I took another long look around the place. Thousands of volumes filled all the shelves, packed tight, reaching to the ceiling. Others were stacked on tables; a few were tossed almost haphazardly on chairs. Half a dozen stood between Trojan horse bookends on Coela’s desk.

“It’s not possible,” I said, finding the air suddenly close and oppressive. “How? How could it happen?”

“Quite easily,” she said. “Melville, as a case in point, became discouraged. He was a customs inspector at the time Agatha first came to our attention. I went all the way to London, specifically to allow him to examine my baggage on the way back. In 1875, that was no easy journey, I can assure you.” She waved off my objection. “Well, that’s an exaggeration, of course. I took advantage of the trip to conduct some business with Matthew Arnold and— Well: I’m name-dropping now. Forgive me. But think about having Herman Melville go through your luggage.” Her laughter echoed through the room. “I was quite young. Too young to understand his work, really. But I’d read Moby Dick, and some of his poetry. If I’d known him then the way I do now, I don’t think I could have kept my feet.” She bit her lower lip and shook her head, and for a moment I thought she might indeed pass out.

“And he gave you the manuscript? Simply because you asked for it?”

“No. Because I knew it for what it was. And he understood why I wanted it.”

“And why do you want it? You have buried it here.”

She ignored the question.

“You never asked about the library’s name.”

“The John of—”

“—Singletary—”

“—Memorial. Okay, who’s John of Singletary?”

“That’s his portrait, facing the main entrance.” It was a large oil of an introspective-looking monk. His hands were buried in dark brown robes, and he was flanked by a scroll and a crucifix. “He was perhaps the most brilliant sociologist who ever lived.”

“I never heard of him.”

“That’s no surprise. His work was eventually ruled profane by his superiors, and either burned or stored away somewhere. We’ve never been sure. But we were able to obtain copies of most of it.” She was out of her seat now, standing with her back to the portrait. “What is significant is that he defined the state toward which he felt the human community should be advancing. He set the parameters and the goals for which the men and women whose works populate this library have been striving: the precise degree of balance between order and freedom; the extent of one’s obligation to external authority; the precise relationships that should exist between human beings. And so on. Taken in all, he produced a schematic for civilized life, a set of instructions, if you will.”

“The human condition,” I said.

“How do you mean?”

“He did all this, and no one knows him.”

“We know him, Mr. Wickham.” She paused. I found myself glancing from her to the solemn figure in the portrait. “You asked why we wanted Agatha. The answer is that it is lovely, that it is very powerful. We simply will not allow it to be lost.”

“But who will ever get to see it here? You’re talking about a novel that, as far as anyone is concerned, doesn’t exist. I have a friend in North Carolina who’d give every nickel he owns to see this book. If it’s legitimate.”

“We will make it available. In time. This library will eventually be yours.”

A wave of exhilaration washed over me. “Thank you,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “That may have been misleading. I didn’t mean right now. And I didn’t mean you.”

“When?”

“When the human race fulfills the requirements of John of Singletary. When you have, in other words, achieved a true global community, all this will be our gift to you.”

A gust of wind rattled the windows.

“That’s a considerable way off,” I said.

“We must take the long view.”

“Easy for you to say. We have a lot of problems. Some of this might be just what we need to get through.”

“This was once yours, Mr. Wickham. Your people have not always recognized value. We are providing a second chance. I’d expect you to be grateful.”

I turned away from her. “Most of this I can’t even recognize,” I said. “Who’s James McCorbin? You’ve got his Complete Works back there with Melville and the others. Who is he?”

“A master of the short story. One of your contemporaries, but I’m afraid he writes in a style and with a complexity that will go unappreciated during his lifetime.”

“You’re telling me he’s too good to get published?” I was aghast.

“Oh, yes. Mr. Wickham, you live in an exceedingly commercial era. Your editors understand that they cannot sell champagne to beer drinkers. They buy what sells.”

“And that’s also true of the others? Kemerie Baxter? Gomez? Somebody-or-other Parker?”

“I’m afraid so. It’s quite common, in fact. Baxter is an essayist of the first order. Unlike the other two, he has been published, but by a small university press, in an edition which sank quickly out of sight. Gomez has written three exquisite novels, and has since given up, despite our encouragement. Parker is a poet. If you know anything about the markets for poetry, I need say no more.”

We wandered together through the library. She pointed to lost works by Sophocles and Aeschylus, to missing epics of the Homeric cycle, to shelves full of Indian poetry and Roman drama. “On the upper level,” she said, raising her eyes to the ceiling, “are the songs and tales of artists whose native tongues had no written form. They have been translated into our own language. In most cases,” she added, “we were able to preserve their creators’ names.

“And now I have a surprise.” We had reached the British section. She took down a book and passed it to me. William Shakespeare. “His Zenobia,” she said, her voice hushed. “Written at the height of his career.”

I was silent for a time. “And why was it never performed?”

“Because it’s a savage attack on Elizabeth. Even he might well have lost his head. We have a major epic by Virgil that was withheld for much the same reason. In fact, that’s why the Russian section is so large. They’ve been producing magnificent novels in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski for years, but they’re far too prudent to offer them for publication.”

There were two other Shakespearean plays. “Adam and Eve was heretical by the standards of the day,” Coela explained. “And here’s another that would have raised a few eyebrows.” She smiled.

It was Nisus and Euryalus. The characters were out of the Aeneid. “Homosexual love,” she said.

“But he wished these withheld,” I objected. “There’s a difference between works that have been lost, and those a writer wishes to destroy. You published these against his will.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Wickham. We never do that. To begin with, if Shakespeare had wanted these plays destroyed, he could have handled that detail quite easily. He desired only that they not be published in his lifetime. Everything you see here,” she included the entire library with a sweeping, feminine gesture, “was given to us voluntarily. We have very strict regulations on that score. And we do things strictly by the book, Mr. Wickham.

“In some cases, by the way, we perform an additional service. We are able, in a small way, to reassure those great artists who have not been properly recognized in their own lifetimes. I wish you could have seen Melville.”

“You could be wrong, you know.”

Her nostrils widened slightly. “About what?”

“Maybe books that get lost deserve to be lost.”

“Some do.” Her tone hardened. “None of those are here. We exercise full editorial judgment.”

“We close at midnight,” she said, appearing suddenly behind me while I was absorbed in the Wells novel, Starflight. I could read the implication in her tone: Never to open again. Not in Fort Moxie. Not for you.

I returned Wells and moved quickly along, pulling books from the shelves with some sense of urgency. I glanced through Mendinhal, an unfinished epic by Byron, dated 1824, the year of his death. I caught individually brilliant lines, and tried to commit some of them to memory, and proceeded on to Blake, to Fielding, to Chaucer! At a little after eleven, I came across four Conan Doyle stories: “The Adventure of the Grim Footman”; “The Branmoor Club”; “The Jezail Bullet”; “The Sumatran Clipper.” My God, what would the Sherlockians of the world not give to have those?

I hurried on with increasing desperation, as though I could somehow gather the contents into myself, and make them available to a waiting world: God and Country, by Thomas Wolfe; fresh cartoons by James Thurber, recovered from beneath wallpaper in a vacation home he’d rented in Atlantic City in 1947; plays by Odets and O’Neill; short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Terry Carr. Here was More Dangerous Visions. And there Mary Shelley’s Morgan.

And through it all, as I whirled through the rice-paper pages, balancing the eerie moonlit lines of A.E. Housman with the calibrated shafts of Mencken, I envied them. Envied them all.

And I was angry.

“You have no right,” I said at last, when Coela came to stand by my side, indicating that my time was up.

“No right to withhold all this?” I detected sympathy in her voice.

“Not only that,” I said. “Who are you to set yourself up to make such judgments? To say what is great and what is pedestrian?”

“I’ve asked myself that question many times. We do the best we can.” We were moving toward the door. “We have quite a lot of experience, you understand.”

The lights dimmed. “Why are you really doing this? It’s not for us, is it?”

“Not exclusively. What your species produces belongs to all.” Her smile broadened. “Surely you would not wish to keep your finest creations for yourselves?”

“Your people have access to them now?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Back home everyone has access. As soon as a new book is cataloged here, it is made available to everybody.”

“Except us.”

“We will not do everything for you, Mr. Wickham.” She drew close, and I could almost feel her heartbeat.

“Do you have any idea what it would mean to our people to recover all this?”

“I’m sorry. For the moment, there’s really nothing I can do.”

She opened the door for me, the one that led into the back bedroom. I stepped through it. She followed. “Use your flashlight,” she said.

We walked through the long hallway, and down the stairs to the living room. She had something to say to me, but seemed strangely reluctant to continue the conversation. And somewhere in the darkness of Will Potter’s place, between the magic doorway in the back of the upstairs closet, and the broken stone steps off the porch, I understood! And when we paused on the concrete beside the darkened post light, and turned to face each other, my pulse was pounding. “It’s no accident that this place became visible tonight, is it?”

She said nothing.

“Nor that only I saw it. I mean, there wouldn’t be a point in putting your universal library in Fort Moxie unless you wanted something. Right?”

“I said this was the Fort Moxie branch. The central library is located on Saint Simons Island.” The brittleness of the last few moments melted without warning. “But no, you’re right, of course.”

“You want Independence Square, don’t you? You want to put my book in there with Thomas Wolfe and Shakespeare and Homer. Right?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s right. You’ve created a psychological drama of the first water, Mr. Wickham. You’ve captured the microcosm of Fort Moxie and produced a portrait of small town America that has captured the admiration of the Board. And, I might add, of our membership. You will be interested, by the way, in knowing that one of your major characters caused the blackout tonight. Jack Gilbert.”

I was overwhelmed. “How’d it happen?” I asked.

“Can you guess?”

“An argument with his wife, somehow or other.” Gilbert, who had a different name, of course, in Independence Square, had a long history of inept philandering.

“Yes. Afterward, he took the pickup and ran it into the streetlight at Eleventh and Foster. Shorted out everything over an area of forty square blocks. It’s right out of the book.”

“Yes,” I said.

“But he’ll never know he’s in it. Nor will any of the other people you’ve immortalized. Only you know. And only you would ever know, were it not for us.” She stood facing me. The snow had stopped, and the clouds had cleared away. The stars were hard and bright in her eyes. “We think it unlikely that you will be recognized in your own lifetime. We could be wrong. We were wrong about Faulkner.” Her lips crinkled into a smile. “But it is my honor to invite you to contribute your work to the library.”

I froze. It was really happening. Emerson. Hemingway. Wickham. I loved it. And yet, there was something terribly wrong about it all. “Coela,” I asked. “Have you ever been refused?”

“Yes,” she said cautiously. “Occasionally it happens. We couldn’t convince Fielding of the value of Harold Swanley. Charlotte and Emily Brontë both rejected us, to the world’s loss. And Tolstoy. Tolstoy had a wonderful novel from his youth which he considered, well, anti-Christian.”

“And among the unknowns? Has anyone just walked away?”

“No,” she said. “Never. In such a case, the consequences would be especially tragic.” Sensing where the conversation was leading, she’d begun to speak in a quicker tempo, at a slightly higher pitch. “A new genius, who would sink into the sea of history, as Byron says, ‘without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.’ Is that what you are considering?”

“You have no right to keep all this to yourself.”

She nodded. “I should remind you, Mr. Wickham, that without the intervention of the library, these works would not exist at all.”

I stared past her shoulder, down the dark street.

“Are you then,” she said at last, drawing the last word out, “refusing?”

“This belongs to us,” I said. “It is ours. We’ve produced everything back there!”

“I almost anticipated, feared, this kind of response from you. I think it was almost implicit in your book. Will you grant us permission to use Independence Square?”

My breath had grown short, and it was hard to speak. “I must regretfully say no.”

“I am sorry to hear it. I— You should understand that there will be no second offer.”

I said nothing.

“Then I fear we have no further business to transact.”

At home, I carried the boxes back up to my living room. After all, if it’s that damned good, there has to be a market for it. Somewhere.

And if she’s right about rampant commercialism? Well, what the hell.

I pulled one of the copies out, and put it on the shelf, between Walt Whitman and Thomas Wolfe.

Where it belongs.

KIRINYAGA

Mike Resnick

IN THE BEGINNING, Ngai lived alone atop the mountain called Kirinyaga.  In the fullness of time he created three sons, who became the fathers of the Maasai, the Kamba, and the Kikuyu races, and to each son he offered a spear, a bow, and a digging-stick.  The Maasai chose the spear, and was told to tend herds on the vast savannah.  The Kamba chose the bow, and was sent to the dense forests to hunt for game.  But Gikuyu, the first Kikuyu, knew that Ngai loved the earth and the seasons, and chose the digging-stick.  To reward him for this Ngai not only taught him the secrets of the seed and the harvest, but gave him Kirinyaga, with its holy fig tree and rich lands.

The sons and daughters of Gikuyu remained on Kirinyaga until the white man came and took their lands away, and even when the white man had been banished they did not return, but chose to remain in the cities, wearing Western clothes and using Western machines and living Western lives.  Even I, who am a mundumugu -- a witch doctor -- was born in the city.  I have never seen the lion or the elephant or the rhinoceros, for all of them were extinct before my birth; nor have I seen Kirinyaga as Ngai meant it to be seen, for a bustling, overcrowded city of three million inhabitants covers its slopes, every year approaching closer and closer to Ngai's throne at the summit.  Even the Kikuyu have forgotten its true name, and now know it only as Mount Kenya.

To be thrown out of Paradise, as were the Christian Adam and Eve, is a terrible fate, but to live beside a debased Paradise is infinitely worse.  I think about them frequently, the descendants of Gikuyu who have forgotten their origin and their traditions and are now merely Kenyans, and I wonder why more of them did not join with us when we created the Eutopian world of Kirinyaga.

True, it is a harsh life, for Ngai never meant life to be easy; but it is also a satisfying life.  We live in harmony with our environment, we offer sacrifices when Ngai's tears of compassion fall upon our fields and give sustenance to our crops, we slaughter a goat to thank him for the harvest.

Our pleasures are simple: a gourd of pombe to drink, the warmth of a boma when the sun has gone down, the wail of a newborn son or daughter, the footraces and spear-throwing and other contests, the nightly singing and dancing.

Maintenance watches Kirinyaga discreetly, making minor orbital adjustments when necessary, assuring that our tropical climate remains constant.  From time to time they have subtly suggested that we might wish to draw upon their medical expertise, or perhaps allow our children to make use of their educational facilities, but they have taken our refusal with good grace, and have never shown any desire to interfere in our affairs.

Until I strangled the baby.

It was less than an hour later that Koinnage, our paramount chief, sought me out.

"That was an unwise thing to do, Koriba," he said grimly.

"It was not a matter of choice," I replied.  "You know that."

"Of course you had a choice," he responded.  "You could have let the infant live." He paused, trying to control his anger and his fear.  "Maintenance has never set foot on Kirinyaga before, but now they will come."

"Let them," I said with a shrug.  "No law has been broken."

"We have killed a baby," he replied.  "They will come, and they will revoke our charter!"

I shook my head.  "No one will revoke our charter."

"Do not be too certain of that, Koriba," he warned me.  "You can bury a goat alive, and they will monitor us and shake their heads and speak contemptuously among themselves about our religion.  You can leave the aged and the infirm out for the hyenas to eat, and they will look upon us with disgust and call us godless heathens.  But I tell you that killing a newborn infant is another matter.  They will not sit idly by; they will come."

"If they do, I shall explain why I killed it," I replied calmly.

"They will not accept your answers," said Koinnage.  "They will not understand."

"They will have no choice but to accept my answers," I said.  "This is Kirinyaga, and they are not permitted to interfere."

"They will find a way," he said with an air of certainty.  "We must apologize and tell them that it will not happen again."

"We will not apologize," I said sternly.  "Nor can we promise that it will not happen again."

"Then, as paramount chief, I will apologize."

I stared at him for a long moment, then shrugged.  "Do what you must do," I said.

Suddenly I could see the terror in his eyes.

"What will you do to me?" he asked fearfully.

"I?  Nothing at all," I said.  "Are you not my chief?" As he relaxed, I added: "But if I were you, I would beware of insects."

"Insects?" he repeated.  "Why?"

"Because the next insect that bites you, be it spider or mosquito or fly, will surely kill you," I said.  "Your blood will boil within your body, and your bones will melt.  You will want to scream out your agony, yet you will be unable to utter a sound." I paused.  "It is not a death I would wish on a friend," I added seriously.

"Are we not friends, Koriba?" he said, his ebon face turning an ash gray.

"I thought we were," I said.  "But my friends honor our traditions.  They do not apologize for them to the white man."

"I will not apologize!" he promised fervently.  He spat on both his hands as a gesture of his sincerity.

I opened one of the pouches I kept around my waist and withdrew a small polished stone from the shore of our nearby river.  "Wear this around your neck," I said, handing it to him, "and it shall protect you from the bites of insects."

"Thank you, Koriba!" he said with sincere gratitude, and another crisis had been averted.

We spoke about the affairs of the village for a few more minutes, and finally he left me.  I sent for Wambu, the infant's mother, and led her through the ritual of purification, so that she might conceive again.  I also gave her an ointment to relieve the pain in her breasts, since they were heavy with milk.  Then I sat down by the fire before my boma and made myself available to my people, settling disputes over the ownership of chickens and goats, and supplying charms against demons, and instructing my people in the ancient ways.

By the time of the evening meal, no one had a thought for the dead baby.  I ate alone in my boma, as befitted my status, for the mundumugu always lives and eats apart from his people.  When I had finished I wrapped a blanket around my body to protect me from the cold and walked down the dirt path to where all the other bomas were clustered.  The cattle and goats and chickens were penned up for the night, and my people, who had slaughtered and eaten a cow, were now singing and dancing and drinking great quantities of pombe.  As they made way for me, I walked over to the caldron and took a drink of pombe, and then, at Kanjara's request, I slit open a goat and read its entrails and saw that his youngest wife would soon conceive, which was cause for more celebration.  Finally the children urged me to tell them a story.

"But not a story of Earth," complained one of the taller boys.  "We hear those all the time.  This must be a story about Kirinyaga."

"All right," I said.  "If you will all gather around, I will tell you a story of Kirinyaga." The youngsters all moved closer.  "This," I said, "is the story of the Lion and the Hare." I paused until I was sure that I had everyone's attention, especially that of the adults.  "A hare was chosen by his people to be sacrificed to a lion, so that the lion would not bring disaster to their village.  The hare might have run away, but he knew that sooner or later the lion would catch him, so instead he sought out the lion and walked right up to him, and as the lion opened his mouth to swallow him, the hare said, 'I apologize, Great Lion.'

"'For what?' asked the lion curiously.

"'Because I am such a small meal,' answered the hare, 'For that reason, I brought honey for you as well.'

"'I see no honey,' said the lion.

"'That is why I apologized,' answered the hare.  'Another lion stole it from me.  He is a ferocious creature, and says that he is not afraid of you.'

"The lion rose to his feet.  'Where is this other lion?' he roared.

"The hare pointed to a hole in the earth.  'Down there,' he said, 'but he will not give you back your honey.'

"'We shall see about that!' growled the lion.

"He jumped into the hole, roaring furiously, and was never seen again, for the hare had chosen a very deep hole indeed.  Then the hare went home to his people and told them that the lion would never bother them again."

Most of the children laughed and clapped their hands in delight, but the same young boy voiced his objection.

"That is not a story of Kirinyaga," he said scornfully.  "We have no lions here."

"It is a story of Kirinyaga," I replied.  "What is important about the story is not that it concerned a lion and a hare, but that it shows that the weaker can defeat the stronger if he uses his intelligence."

"What has that to do with Kirinyaga?" asked the boy.

"What if we pretend that the men of Maintenance, who have ships and weapons, are the lion, and the Kikuyu are the hares?" I suggested.  "What shall the hares do if the lion demands a sacrifice?"

The boy suddenly grinned.  "Now I understand!  We shall throw the lion down a hole!"

"But we have no holes here," I pointed out.

"Then what shall we do?"

"The hare did not know that he would find the lion near a hole," I replied.  "Had he found him by a deep lake, he would have said that a large fish took the honey."

"We have no deep lakes."

"But we do have intelligence," I said.  "And if Maintenance ever interferes with us, we will use our intelligence to destroy the lion of Maintenance, just as the hare used his intelligence to destroy the lion of the fable."

"Let us think how to destroy Maintenance right now!" cried the boy.  He picked up a stick and brandished it at an imaginary lion as if it were a spear and he a great hunter.

I shook my head.  "The hare does not hunt the lion, and the Kikuyu do not make war.  The hare merely protects himself, and the Kikuyu do the same."

"Why would Maintenance interfere with us?" asked another boy, pushing his way to the front of the group.  "They are our friends."

"Perhaps they will not," I answered reassuringly.  "But you must always remember that the Kikuyu have no true friends except themselves."

"Tell us another story, Koriba!" cried a young girl.

"I am an old man," I said.  "The night has turned cold, and I must have my sleep."

"Tomorrow?" she asked.  "Will you tell us another tomorrow?"

I smiled.  "Ask me tomorrow, after all the fields are planted and the cattle and goats are in their enclosures and the food has been made and the fabrics have been woven."

"But girls do not herd the cattle and goats," she protested.  "What if my brothers do not bring all their animals to the enclosure?"

"Then I will tell a story just to the girls," I said.

"It must be a long story," she insisted seriously, "for we work much harder than the boys."

"I will watch you in particular, little one," I replied, "and the story will be as long or as short as your work merits."

The adults all laughed and suddenly she looked very uncomfortable, but then I chuckled and hugged her and patted her head, for it was necessary that the children learned to love their mundumugu as well as hold him in awe, and finally she ran off to play and dance with the other girls, while I retired to my boma.

Once inside, I activated my computer and discovered that a message was waiting for me from Maintenance, informing me that one of their number would be visiting me the following morning.  I made a very brief reply -- "Article II, Paragraph 5", which is the ordinance forbidding intervention -- and lay down on my sleeping blanket, letting the rhytmic chanting of the singers carry me off to sleep.

I awoke with the sun the next morning and instructed my computer to let me know when the Maintenance ship had landed.  Then I inspected my cattle and my goats -- I, alone of my people, planted no crops, for the Kikuyu feed their mundumugu, just as they tend his herds and weave his blankets and keep his boma clean -- and stopped by Simani's boma to deliver a balm to fight the disease that was afflicting his joints.  Then, as the sun began warming the earth, I returned to my own boma, skirting the pastures where the young men were tending their animals.  When I arrived, I knew the ship had landed, for I found the droppings of a hyena on the ground near my hut, and that is the surest sign of a curse.

I learned what I could from the computer, then walked outside and scanned the horizon while two naked children took turns chasing a small dog and running away from it.  When they began frightening my chickens, I gently sent them back to their own boma, and then seated myself beside my fire.  At last I saw my visitor from Maintenance, coming up the path from Haven.  She was obviously uncomfortable in the heat, and she slapped futilely at the flies that circled her head.  Her blonde hair was starting to turn grey, and I could tell by the ungainly way she negotiated the steep, rocky path that she was unused to such terrain.  She almost lost her balance a number of times, and it was obvious that her proximity to so many animals frightened her, but she never slowed her pace, and within another ten minutes she stood before me.

"Good morning," she said.

"Jambo, Memsaab," I replied.

"You are Koriba, are you not?"

I briefly studied the face of my enemy; middle-aged and weary, it did not appear formidable.  "I am Koriba," I replied.

"Good," she said.  "My name is -- "

"I know who you are," I said, for it is best, if conflict cannot be avoided, to take the offensive.

"You do?"

I pulled the bones out of my pouch and cast them on the dirt.  "You are Barbara Eaton, born of Earth," I intoned, studying her reactions as I picked up the bones and cast them again.  "You are married to Robert Eaton, and you have worked for Maintenance for nine years." A final cast of the bones.  "You are 41 years old, and you are barren."

"How did you know all that?" she asked with an expression of surprise.

"Am I not the mundumugu?"

She stared at me for a long minute.  "You read my biography on your computer," she concluded at last.

"As long as the facts are correct, what difference does it make whether I read them from the bones or the computer?" I responded, refusing to confirm her statement.  "Please sit down, Memsaab Eaton."

She lowered herself awkwardly to the ground, wrinkling her face as she raised a cloud of dust.

"It's very hot," she noted uncomfortably.

"It is very hot in Kenya," I replied.

"You could have created any climate you desired," she pointed out.

"We did create the climate we desired," I answered.

"Are there predators out there?" she asked, looking out over the savannah.

"A few," I replied.

"What kind?"

"Hyenas."

"Nothing larger?" she asked.

"There is nothing larger anymore," I said.

"I wonder why they didn't attack me?"

"Perhaps because you are an intruder," I suggested.

"Will they leave me alone on my way back to Haven?" she asked nervously, ignoring my comment.

"I will give you a charm to keep them away."

"I'd prefer an escort."

"Very well," I said.

"They're such ugly animals," she said with a shudder.  "I saw them once when we were monitoring your world."

"They are very useful animals," I answered, "for they bring many omens, both good and bad."

"Really?"

I nodded.  "A hyena left me an evil omen this morning."

"And?" she asked curiously.

"And here you are," I said.

She laughed.  "They told me you were a sharp old man."

"They were mistaken," I replied.  "I am a feeble old man who sits in front of his boma and watches younger men tend his cattle and goats."

"You are a feeble old man who graduated with honors from Cambridge and then acquired two postgraduate degrees from Yale," she replied.

"Who told you that?"

She smiled.  "You're not the only one who reads biographies."

I shrugged.  "My degrees did not help me become a better mundumugu," I said.  "The time was wasted."

"You keep using that word.  What, exactly, is a mundumugu?"

"You would call him a witch doctor," I answered.  "But in truth the mundumugu, while he occasionally casts spells and interprets omens, is more a repository of the collected wisdom and traditions of his race."

"It sounds like an interesting occupation," she said.

"It is not without its compensations."

"And such compensations!" she said with false enthusiasm as a goat bleated in the distance and a young man yelled at it in Swahili.  "Imagine having the power of life and death over an entire Eutopian world!"

So now it comes, I thought.  Aloud I said: "It is not a matter of exercising power, Memsaab Eaton, but of maintaining traditions."

"I rather doubt that," she said bluntly.

"Why should you doubt what I say?" I asked.

"Because if it were traditional to kill newborn infants, the Kikuyus would have died out after a single generation."

"If the slaying of the infant arouses your disapproval," I said calmly, "I am surprised Maintenance has not previously asked about our custom of leaving the old and the feeble out for the hyenas."

"We know that the elderly and the infirm have consented to your treatment of them, much as we may disapprove of it," she replied.  "We also know that a newborn infant could not possibly consent to its own death." She paused, staring at me.  "May I ask why this particular baby was killed?"

"That is why you have come here, is it not?"

"I have been sent here to evaluate the situation," she replied, brushing an insect from her cheek and shifting her position on the ground.  "A newborn child was killed.  We would like to know why."

I shrugged.  "It was killed because it was born with a terrible thahu upon it."

She frowned.  "A thahu?  What is that?"

"A curse."

"Do you mean that it was deformed?" she asked.

"It was not deformed."

"Then what was this curse that you refer to?"

"It was born feet-first," I said.

"That's it?" she asked, surprised.  "That's the curse?"

"Yes."

"It was murdered simply because it came out feet-first?"

"It is not murder to put a demon to death," I explained patiently.  "Our tradition tells us that a child born in this manner is actually a demon."

"You are an educated man, Koriba," she said.  "How can you kill a perfectly healthy infant and blame it on some primitive tradition?"

"You must never underestimate the power of tradition, Memsaab Eaton," I said.  "The Kikuyu turned their backs on their traditions once; the result is a mechanized, impoverished, overcrowded country that is no longer populated by Kikuyu, or Maasai, or Luo, or Wakamba, but by a new, artificial tribe known only as Kenyans.  We here on Kirinyaga are true Kikuyu, and we will not make that mistake again.  If the rains are late, a ram must be sacrificed.  If a man's veracity is questioned, he must undergo the ordeal of the githani trial.  If an infant is born with a thahu upon it, it must be put to death."

"Then you intend to continue to kill any children that are born feet-first?" she asked.

"That is correct," I responded.

A drop of sweat rolled down her face as she looked directly at me and said: "I don't know what Maintenance's reaction will be."

"According to our charter, Maintenance is not permitted to interfere with us," I reminded her.

"It's not that simple, Koriba," she said.  "According to your charter, any member of your community who wishes to leave your world is allowed free passage to Haven, from which he or she can board a ship to Earth." She paused.  "Was the baby you killed given such a choice?"

"I did not kill a baby, but a demon," I replied, turning my head slightly as a hot breeze stirred up the dust around us.

She waited until the breeze died down, then coughed before speaking.  "You do understand that not everyone in Maintenance may share that opinion?"

"What Maintenance thinks is of no concern to us," I said.

"When innocent children are murdered, what Maintenance thinks is of supreme importance to you," she responded.  "I am sure you do not want to defend your practices in the Eutopian Court."

"Are you here to evaluate the situation, as you said, or to threaten us?" I asked calmly.

"To evaluate the situation," she replied.  "But there seems to be only one conclusion that I can draw from the facts that you have presented to me."

"Then you have not been listening to me," I said, briefly closing my eyes as another, stronger breeze swept past us.

"Koriba, I know that Kirinyaga was created so that you could emulate the ways of your forefathers -- but surely you must see the difference between the torture of animals as a religious ritual and the murder of a human baby."

I shook my head.  "They are one and the same," I replied.  "We cannot change our way of life because it makes you uncomfortable.  We did that once before, and within a mere handful of years your culture had corrupted our society.  With every factory we built, with every job we created, with every bit of Western technology we accepted, with every Kikuyu who converted to Christianity, we became something we were not meant to be." I stared directly into her eyes.  "I am the mundumugu, entrusted with preserving all that makes us Kikuyu, and I will not allow that to happen again."

"There are alternatives," she said.

"Not for the Kikuyu," I replied adamantly.

"There are," she insisted, so intent upon what she had to say that she paid no attention to a black-and-gold centipede that crawled over her boot.  "For example, years spent in space can cause certain physiological and hormonal changes in humans.  You noted when I arrived that I am 41 years old and childless.  That is true.  In fact, many of the women in Maintenance are childless.  If you will turn the babies over to us, I am sure we can find families for them.  This would effectively remove them from your society without the necessity of killing them.  I could speak to my superiors about it; I think that there is an excellent chance that they would approve."

"That is a thoughtful and innovative suggestion, Memsaab Eaton," I said truthfully.  "I am sorry that I must reject it."

"But why?" she demanded.

"Because the first time we betray our traditions this world will cease to be Kirinyaga, and will become merely another Kenya, a nation of men awkwardly pretending to be something they are not."

"I could speak to Koinnage and the other chiefs about it," she suggested meaningfully.

"They will not disobey my instructions," I replied confidently.

"You hold that much power?"

"I hold that much respect," I answered.  "A chief may enforce the law, but it is the mundumugu who interprets it."

"Then let us consider other alternatives."

"No."

"I am trying to avoid a conflict between Maintenance and your people," she said, her voice heavy with frustration.  "It seems to me that you could at least make the effort to meet me halfway."

"I do not question your motives, Memsaab Eaton," I replied, "but you are an intruder representing an organization that has no legal right to interfere with our culture.  We do not impose our religion or our morality upon Maintenance, and Maintenance may not impose its religion or morality upon us."

"It's not that simple."

"It is precisely that simple," I said.

"That is your last word on the subject?" she asked.

"Yes."

She stood up.  "Then I think it is time for me to leave and make my report."

I stood up as well, and a shift in the wind brought the odors of the village: the scent of bananas, the smell of a fresh caldron of pombe, even the pungent odor of a bull that had been slaughtered that morning.

"As you wish, Memsaab Eaton," I said.  "I will arrange for your escort." I signalled to a small boy who was tending three goats and instructed him to go to the village and send back two young men.

"Thank you," she said.  "I know it's an inconvenience, but I just don't feel safe with hyenas roaming loose out there."

"You are welcome," I said.  "Perhaps, while we are waiting for the men who will accompany you, you would like to hear a story about the hyena."

She shuddered involuntarily.  "They are such ugly beasts!" she said distastefully.  "Their hind legs seem almost deformed." She shook her head.  "No, I don't think I'd be interested in hearing a story about a hyena."

"You will be interested in this story," I told her.

She stared at me curiously, then shrugged.  "All right," she said.  "Go ahead."

"It is true that hyenas are deformed, ugly animals," I began, "but once, a long time ago, they were as lovely and graceful as the impala.  Then one day a Kikuyu chief gave a hyena a young goat to take as a gift to Ngai, who lived atop the holy mountain Kirinyaga.  The hyena took the goat between his powerful jaws and headed toward the distant mountain -- but on the way he passed a settlement filled with Europeans and Arabs.  It abounded in guns and machines and other wonders he had never seen before, and he stopped to look, fascinated.  Finally an Arab noticed him staring intently and asked if he, too, would like to become a civilized man -- and as he opened his mouth to say that he would, the goat fell to the ground and ran away.  As the goat raced out of sight, the Arab laughed and explained that he was only joking, that of course no hyena could become a man." I paused for a moment, and then continued.  "So the hyena proceeded to Kirinyaga, and when he reached the summit, Ngai asked him what had become of the goat.  When the hyena told him, Ngai hurled him off the mountaintop for having the audacity to believe he could become a man.  He did not die from the fall, but his rear legs were crippled, and Ngai declared that from that day forward, all hyenas would appear thus -- and to remind them of the foolishness of trying to become something that they were not, he also gave them a fool's laugh." I paused again, and stared at her.  "Memsaab Eaton, you do not hear the Kikuyu laugh like fools, and I will not let them become crippled like the hyena.  Do you understand what I am saying?"

She considered my statement for a moment, then looked into my eyes.  "I think we understand each other perfectly, Koriba," she said.

The two young men I had sent for arrived just then, and I instructed them to accompany her to Haven.  A moment later they set off across the dry savannah, and I returned to my duties.

I began by walking through the fields, blessing the scarecrows.  Since a number of the smaller children followed me, I rested beneath the trees more often than was necessary, and always, whenever we paused, they begged me to tell them more stories.  I told them the tale of the Elephant and the Buffalo, and how the Maasai elmoran cut the rainbow with his spear so that it never again came to rest upon the earth, and why the nine Kikuyu tribes are named after Gikuyu's nine daughters, and when the sun became too hot I led them back to the village.

Then, in the afternoon, I gathered the older boys about me and explained once more how they must paint their faces and bodies for their forthcoming circumcision ceremony.  Ndemi, the boy who had insisted upon a story about Kirinyaga the night before, sought me out privately to complain that he had been unable to slay a small gazelle with his spear, and asked for a charm to make its flight more accurate.  I explained to him that there would come a day when he faced a buffalo or a hyena with no charm, and that he must practice more before he came to me again.  He was one to watch, this little Ndemi, for he was impetuous and totally without fear; in the old days, he would have made a great warrior, but on Kirinyaga we had no warriors.  If we remained fruitful and fecund, however, we would someday need more chiefs and even another mundumugu, and I made up my mind to observe him closely.

In the evening, after I ate my solitary meal, I returned to the village, for Njogu, one of our young men, was to marry Kamiri, a girl from the next village.  The bride-price had been decided upon, and the two families were waiting for me to preside at the ceremony.

Njogu, his faced streaked with paint, wore an ostrich-feather headdress, and looked very uneasy as he and his betrothed stood before me.  I slit the throat of a fat ram that Kamiri's father had brought for the occasion, and then I turned to Njogu.

"What have you to say?" I asked.

He took a step forward.  "I want Kamiri to come and till the fields of my shamba," he said, his voice cracking with nervousness as he spoke the prescribed words, "for I am a man, and I need a woman to tend to my shamba and dig deep around the roots of my plantings, that they may grow well and bring prosperity to my house."

He spit on both his hands to show his sincerity, and then, exhaling deeply with relief, he stepped back.

I turned to Kamiri.

"Do you consent to till the shamba of Njogu, son of Muchiri?" I asked her.

"Yes," she said softly, bowing her head.  "I consent."

I held out my right hand, and the bride's mother placed a gourd of pombe in it.

"If this man does not please you," I said to Kamiri, "I will spill the pombe upon the ground."

"Do not spill it," she replied.

"Then drink," I said, handing the gourd to her.

She lifted it to her lips and took a swallow, then handed it to Njogu, who did the same.

When the gourd was empty, the parents of Njogu and Kamiri stuffed it with grass, signifying the friendship between the two clans.

Then a cheer rose from the onlookers, the ram was carried off to be roasted, more pombe appeared as if by magic, and while the groom took the bride off to his boma, the remainder of the people celebrated far into the night.  They stopped only when the bleating of the goats told them that some hyenas were nearby, and then the women and children went off to their bomas while the men took their spears and went into the fields to frighten the hyenas away.

Koinnage came up to me as I was about to leave.

"Did you speak to the woman from Maintenance?" he asked.

"I did," I replied.

"What did she say?"

"She said that they do not approve of killing babies who are born feet-first."

"And what did you say?" he asked nervously.

"I told her that we did not need the approval of Maintenance to practice our religion," I replied.

"Will Maintenance listen?"

"They have no choice," I said.  "And we have no choice, either," I added.  "Let them dictate one thing that we must or must not do, and soon they will dictate all things.  Give them their way, and Njogu and Kamiri would have recited wedding vows from the Bible or the Koran.  It happened to us in Kenya; we cannot permit it to happen on Kirinyaga."

"But they will not punish us?" he persisted.

"They will not punish us," I replied.

Satisfied, he walked off to his boma while I took the narrow, winding path to my own.  I stopped by the enclosure where my animals were kept and saw that there were two new goats there, gifts from the bride's and groom's families in gratitude for my services.  A few minutes later I was asleep within the walls of my own boma.

The computer woke me a few minutes before sunrise.  I stood up, splashed my face with water from the gourd I keep by my sleeping blanket, and walked over to the terminal.

There was a message for me from Barbara Eaton, brief and to the point:

It is the preliminary finding of Maintenance that infanticide, for any reason, is a direct violation of Kirinyaga's charter.  No action will be taken for past offenses.

We are also evaluating your practice of euthanasia, and may require further testimony from you at some point in the future.

-- Barbara Eaton

A runner from Koinnage arrived a moment later, asking me to attend a meeting of the Council of Elders, and I knew that he had received the same message.

I wrapped my blanket around my shoulders and began walking to Koinnage's shamba, which consisted of his boma, as well as those of his three sons and their wives.  When I arrived I found not only the local elders waiting for me, but also two chiefs from neighboring villages.

"Did you receive the message from Maintenance?" demanded Koinnage, as I seated myself opposite him.

"I did."

"I warned you that this would happen!" he said.  "What will we do now?"

"We will do what we have always done," I answered calmly.

"We cannot," said one of the neighboring chiefs.  "They have forbidden it."

"They have no right to forbid it," I replied.

"There is a woman in my village whose time is near," continued the chief, "and all of the signs and omens point to the birth of twins.  We have been taught that the firstborn must be killed, for one mother cannot produce two souls -- but now Maintenance has forbidden it.  What are we to do?"

"We must kill the firstborn," I said, "for it will be a demon."

"And then Maintenance will make us leave Kirinyaga!" said Koinnage bitterly.

"Perhaps we could let the child live," said the chief.  "That might satisfy them, and then they might leave us alone."

I shook my head.  "They will not leave you alone.  Already they speak about the way we leave the old and the feeble out for the hyenas, as if this were some enormous sin against their God.  If you give in on the one, the day will come when you must give in on the other."

"Would that be so terrible?" persisted the chief.  "They have medicines that we do not possess; perhaps they could make the old young again."

"You do not understand," I said, rising to my feet.  "Our society is not a collection of separate people and customs and traditions.  No, it is a complex system, with all the pieces as dependant upon each other as the animals and vegetation of the savannah.  If you burn the grass, you will not only kill the impala who feeds upon it, but the predator who feeds upon the impala, and the ticks and flies who live upon the predator, and the vultures and maribou storks who feed upon his remains when he dies.  You cannot destroy the part without destroying the whole."

I paused to let them consider what I had said, and then continued speaking: "Kirinyaga is like the savannah.  If we do not leave the old and the feeble out for the hyenas, the hyenas will starve.  If the hyenas starve, the grass eaters will become so numerous that there is no land left for our cattle and goats to graze.  If the old and the feeble do not die when Ngai decrees it, then soon we will not have enough food to go around."

I picked up a stick and balanced it precariously on my forefinger.

"This stick," I said, "is the Kikuyu people, and my finger is Kirinyaga.  They are in perfect balance." I stared at the neighboring chief.  "But what will happen if I alter the balance, and put my finger here?" I asked, gesturing to the end of the stick.

"The stick will fall to the ground."

"And here?" I asked, pointing to a stop an inch away from the center.

"It will fall."

"Thus is it with us," I explained.  "Whether we yield on one point or all points, the result will be the same: the Kikuyu will fall as surely as the stick will fall.  Have we learned nothing from our past?  We must adhere to our traditions; they are all that we have!"

"But Maintenance will not allow us to do so!" protested Koinnage.

"They are not warriors, but civilized men," I said, allowing a touch of contempt to creep into my voice.  "Their chiefs and their mundumugus will not send them to Kirinyaga with guns and spears.  They will issue warnings and findings and declarations, and finally, when that fails, they will go to the Eutopian Court and plead their case, and the trial will be postponed many times and reheard many more times." I could see them finally relaxing, and I smiled confidently at them.  "Each of you will have died from the burden of your years before Maintenance does anything other than talk.  I am your mundumugu; I have lived among civilized men, and I tell you that this is the truth."

The neighboring chief stood up and faced me.  "I will send for you when the twins are born," he pledged.

"I will come," I promised him.

We spoke further, and then the meeting ended and the old men began wandering off to their bomas, while I looked to the future, which I could see more clearly than Koinnage or the elders.

I walked through the village until I found the bold young Ndemi, brandishing his spear and hurling it at a buffalo he had constructed out of dried grasses.

"Jambo, Koriba!" he greeted me.

"Jambo, my brave young warrior," I replied.

"I have been practicing, as you ordered."

"I thought you wanted to hunt the gazelle," I noted.

"Gazelles are for children," he answered.  "I will slay mbogo, the buffalo."

"Mbogo may feel differently about it," I said.

"So much the better," he said confidently.  "I have no wish to kill an animal as it runs away from me."

"And when will you go out to slay the fierce mbogo?"

He shrugged.  "When I am more accurate." He smiled up at me.  "Perhaps tomorrow."

I stared at him thoughtfully for a moment, and then spoke: "Tomorrow is a long time away.  We have business tonight."

"What business?" he asked.

"You must find ten friends, none of them yet of circumcision age, and tell them to come to the pond within the forest to the south.  They must come after the sun has set, and you must tell them that Koriba the mundumugu commands that they tell no one, not even their parents, that they are coming." I paused.  "Do you understand, Ndemi?"

"I understand."

"Then go," I said.  "Bring my message to them."

He retrieved his spear from the straw buffalo and set off at a trot, young and tall and strong and fearless.

You are the future, I thought, as I watched him run toward the village.  Not Koinnage, not myself, not even the young bridegroom Njogu, for their time will have come and gone before the battle is joined.  It is you, Ndemi, upon whom Kirinyaga must depend if it is to survive.

Once before the Kikuyu have had to fight for their freedom.  Under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta, whose name has been forgotten by most of your parents, we took the terrible oath of Mau Mau, and we maimed and we killed and we committed such atrocities that finally we achieved Uhuru, for against such butchery civilized men have no defense but to depart.

And tonight, young Ndemi, while your parents are asleep, you and your companions will meet me deep in the woods, and you in your turn and they in theirs will learn one last tradition of the Kikuyu, for I will invoke not only the strength of Ngai but also the indomitable spirit of Jomo Kenyatta.  I will administer a hideous oath and force you to do unspeakable things to prove your fealty, and I will teach each of you, in turn, how to administer the oath to those who come after you.

There is a season for all things: for birth, for growth, for death.  There is unquestionably a season for Utopia, but it will have to wait.

For the season of Uhuru is upon us.

COMPUTER FRIENDLY

Eileen Gunn

Holding her dad's hand, Elizabeth went up the limestone steps to the testing center. As she climbed, she craned her neck to read the words carved in pink granite over the top of the door: Francis W. Parker School. Above them was a banner made of gray cement that read Health, Happiness, Success.

"This building is old," said Elizabeth. "It was built before the war."

"Pay attention to where you're going, punkin," said her dad. "You almost ran into that lady there."

Inside, the entrance hall was dark and cool. A dim yellow glow came through the shades on the tall windows.

As Elizabeth walked across the polished floor, her footsteps echoed lightly down the corridors that led off to either side. She and her father went down the hallway to the testing room. An old, beat-up, army-green query box sat on a table outside the door.

"Ratherford, Elizabeth Ratherford," said her father to the box. "Age seven, computer-friendly, smart as a whip."

"We'll see," said the box with a chuckle. It had a gruff, teasing, grandfatherly voice. "We'll just see about that, young lady." What a jolly interface, thought Elizabeth. She watched as the classroom door swung open. "You go right along in there, and we'll see just how smart you are." It chuckled again, then it spoke to Elizabeth's dad. "You come back for her at three, sir. She'll be all ready and waiting for you, bright as a little watermelon."

This was going to be fun, thought Elizabeth. Nothing to do all day except show how smart she was.

Her father knelt in front of her and smoothed her hair back from her face. "You try real hard on these tests, punkin. You show them just how talented and clever you really are, okay?" Elizabeth nodded. "And you be on your best behavior." He gave her a hug and a pat on the rear.

Inside the testing room were dozens of other seven-year-olds, sitting in rows of tiny chairs with access boxes in front of them. Glancing around the room, Elizabeth realized that she had never seen so many children together all at once. There were only ten in her weekly socialization class. It was sort of overwhelming.

The monitors called everyone to attention and told them to put on their headsets and ask their boxes for Section One.

Elizabeth followed directions, and she found that all the interfaces were strange—they were friendly enough, but none of them were the programs she worked with at home. The first part of the test was the multiple-choice exam. The problems, at least, were familiar to Elizabeth—she'd practiced for this test all her life, it seemed. There were word games, number games, and games in which she had to rotate little boxes in her head. She knew enough to skip the hardest until she'd worked her way through the whole test. There were only a couple of problems left to do when the system told her to stop and the box went all gray.

The monitors led the whole room full of kids in jumping-jack exercises for five minutes. Then everyone sat down again and a new test came up in the box. This one seemed very easy, but it wasn't one she'd ever done before. It consisted of a series of very detailed pictures,- she was supposed to make up a story about each picture. Well, she could do that. The first picture showed a child and a lot of different kinds of animals. "Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived all alone in the forest with her friends the skunk, the wolf, the bear, and the lion…" A beep sounded every so often to tell her to end one story and begin another. Elizabeth really enjoyed telling the stories, and was sorry when that part of the test was over.

But the next exercise was almost as interesting. She was to read a series of short stories and answer questions about them. Not the usual questions about what happened in the story—these were harder. "Is it fair to punish a starving cat for stealing?"

"Should people do good deeds for strangers?"

"Why is it important for everyone to learn to obey?"

When this part was over, the monitors took the class down the hall to the big cafeteria, where there were lots of other seven-year-olds, who had been taking tests in other rooms.

Elizabeth was amazed at the number and variety of children in the cafeteria. She watched them as she stood in line for her milk and sandwich. Hundreds of kids, all exactly as old as she was. Tall and skinny, little and fat; curly hair, straight hair, and hair that was frizzy or held up with ribbons or cut into strange patterns against the scalp; skin that was light brown like Elizabeth's, chocolate brown, almost black, pale pink, freckled, and all the colors in between. Some of the kids were all dressed up in fancy clothes; others were wearing patched pants and old shirts.

When she got her snack, Elizabeth's first thought was to find someone who looked like herself, and sit next to her. But then a freckled boy with dark, nappy hair smiled at her in a very friendly way. He looked at her feet and nodded. "Nice shoes." he said. She sat down on the empty seat next to him, suddenly aware of her red maryjanes with the embroidered flowers. She was pleased that they had been noticed, and a little embarrassed.

"Let me see your shoes," she said, unwrapping her sandwich.

He stuck his feet out. He was wearing pink plastic sneakers with hologram pictures of a missile gantry on the toes. When he moved his feet, they launched a defensive counterattack.

"Oh, neat." Elizabeth nodded appreciatively and took a bite of the sandwich. It was filled with something yellow that tasted okay.

A little tiny girl with long, straight black hair was sitting on the other side of the table from them. She put one foot up on the table. "I got shoes, too," she said. "Look." Her shoes were black patent, with straps. Elizabeth and the freckled boy both admired them politely. Elizabeth thought that the little girl was very daring to put her shoe right up on the table. It was certainly an interesting way to enter a conversation.

"My name is Sheena and I can spit," said the little girl. "Watch." Sure enough, she could spit really well. The spit hit the beige wall several meters away, just under the mirror, and slid slowly down.

"I can spit, too," said the freckled boy. He demonstrated, hitting the wall a little lower than Sheena had.

"I can learn to spit," said Elizabeth.

"All right there, no spitting!" said a monitor firmly. "Now, you take a napkin and clean that up." It pointed to Elizabeth.

"She didn't do it, I did," said Sheena. "I'll clean it up."

"I'll help," said Elizabeth. She didn't want to claim credit for Sheena's spitting ability, but she liked being mistaken for a really good spitter.

The monitor watched as they wiped the wall, then took their thumbprints. "You three settle down now. I don't want any more spitting." It moved away. All three of them were quiet for a few minutes, and munched on their sandwiches.

"What's your name?" said Sheena suddenly. "My name is Sheena."

"Elizabeth."

"Lizardbreath. That's a funny name," said Sheena.

"My name is Oginga," said the freckled boy.

"That's really a funny name," said Sheena.

"You think everybody's name is funny," said Oginga. "Sheena-Teena-Peena."

"I can tap-dance, too," said Sheena, who had recognized that it was time to change the subject. "These are my tap shoes." She squirmed around to wave her feet in the air briefly, then swung them back under the table.

She moves more than anyone I've ever seen, thought Elizabeth.

"Wanna see me shuffle off to Buffalo?" asked Sheena.

A bell rang at the front of the room, and the three of them looked up. A monitor was speaking.

"Quiet! Everybody quiet, now! Finish up your lunch quickly, those of you who are still eating, and put your wrappers in the wastebaskets against the wall. Then line up on the west side of the room. The west side…"

The children were taken to the restroom after lunch. It was grander than any bathroom Elizabeth had ever seen, with walls made of polished red granite, lots of little stalls with toilets in them, and a whole row of sinks. The sinks were lower than the sink at home, and so were the toilets. Even the mirrors were just the right height for kids.

It was funny because there were no stoppers in the sinks, so you couldn't wash your hands in a proper sink of water. Sheena said she could make the sink fill up, and Oginga dared her to do it, so she took off her sweater and put it in the sink, and sure enough, it filled up with water and started to overflow, and then she couldn't get the sweater out of it, so she called a monitor over. "This sink is overflowing." she said, as if it were all the sink's fault. A group of children stood around and watched while the monitor fished the sweater from the drain and wrung it out.

"That's mine!" said Sheena, as if she had dropped it by mistake. She grabbed it away from the monitor, shook it, and nodded knowingly to Elizabeth. "It dries real fast." The monitor wanted thumbprints from Sheena and Elizabeth and everyone who watched.

The monitors then took the children to the auditorium, and led the whole group in singing songs and playing games, which Elizabeth found only moderately interesting. She would have preferred to learn to spit. At one o'clock, a monitor announced it was time to go back to the classrooms, and all the children should line up by the door.

Elizabeth and Sheena and Oginga pushed into the same line together. There were so many kids that there was a long wait while they all lined up and the monitors moved up and down the lines to make them straight.

"Are you going to go to the Asia Center?" asked Sheena. "My mom says I can probably go to the Asia Center tomorrow, because I'm so fidgety."

Elizabeth didn't know what the Asia Center was, but she didn't want to look stupid. "I don't know. I'll have to ask my dad." She turned to Oginga, who was behind her. "Are you going to the Asia Center?"

"What's the Asia Center?" asked Oginga.

Elizabeth looked back at Sheena, waiting to hear her answer.

"Where we go to sleep," Sheena said. "My mom says it doesn't hurt."

"I got my own room," said Oginga.

"It's not like your room," Sheena explained. "You go there, and you go to sleep, and your parents get to try again."

"What do they try?" asked Elizabeth. "Why do you have to go to sleep?"

"You go to sleep so they have some peace and quiet," said Sheena. "So you're not in their way."

"But what do they try?" repeated Elizabeth.

"I bet they try more of that stuff that they do when they think you're asleep," said Oginga. Sheena snorted and started to giggle, and then Oginga started to giggle and he snorted too, and the more one giggled and snorted, the more the other did. Pretty soon Elizabeth was giggling too, and the three of them were helplessly choking, behind great hiccoughing gulps of noise.

The monitor rolled by then and told them to be quiet and move on to their assigned classrooms. That broke the spell of their giggling, and, subdued, they moved ahead in the line. All the children filed quietly out of the auditorium and walked slowly down the halls. When Elizabeth came to her classroom, she shrugged her shoulders at Oginga and Sheena and jerked her head to one side. "I go in here," she whispered.

"See ya at the Asia Center," said Sheena.

The rest of the tests went by quickly, though Elizabeth didn't think they were as much fun as in the morning. The afternoon tests were more physical; she pulled at joysticks and tried to push buttons quickly on command. They tested her hearing and even made her sing to the computer. Elizabeth didn't like to do things fast, and she didn't like to sing.

When it was over, the monitors told the children they could go now, their parents were waiting for them at the front of the school. Elizabeth looked for Oginga and Sheena as she left, but children from the other classrooms were not in the halls. Her dad was waiting for her out front, as he had said he would be.

Elizabeth called to him to get his attention. He had just come off work, and she knew he would be sort of confused. They wiped their secrets out of his brain before he logged off of the system, and sometimes they took a little other stuff with it by mistake, so he might not be too sure about his name, or where he lived.

On the way home, she told him about her new friends. "They don't sound as though they would do very well at their lessons, princess," said her father. "But it does sound as if you had an interesting time at lunch." Elizabeth pulled his hand to guide him onto the right street. He'd be okay in an hour or so — anything important usually came back pretty fast.

When they got home, her dad went into the kitchen to start dinner, and Elizabeth played with her dog, Brownie. Brownie didn't live with them anymore because his brain was being used to help control data traffic in the network. Between rush hours, Elizabeth would call him up on the system and run simulations in which she plotted the trajectory of a ball and he plotted an interception of it.

They ate dinner when her mom logged off work. Elizabeth's parents believed it was very important for the family to all eat together in the evening, and her mom had custom-made connectors that stretched all the way into the dining room. Even though she didn't really eat anymore, her local I/O was always extended to the table at dinnertime.

After dinner, Elizabeth got ready for bed. She could hear her father in his office, asking his mail for the results of her test that day. When he came into her room to tuck her in, she could tell he had good news for her.

"Did you wash behind your ears, punkin?" he asked. Elizabeth figured that this was a ritual question, since she was unaware that washing behind her ears was more useful than washing anywhere else.

She gave the correct response: "Yes, Daddy." She understood that, whether she washed or not, giving the expected answer was an important part of the ritual. Now it was her turn to ask a question. "Did you get the results of my tests, Daddy?"

"We sure did, princess," her father replied. "You did very well on them."

Elizabeth was pleased, but not too surprised. "What about my new friends, Daddy? How did they do?"

"I don't know about that, punkin. They don't send us everybody's scores, just yours."

"I want to be with them when I go to the Asia Center."

Elizabeth could tell by the look on her father's face that she'd said something wrong. "The what? Where did you hear about that?" he asked sharply.

"My friend Sheena told me about it. She said she was going to the Asia Center tomorrow," said Elizabeth.

"Well, she might be going there, but that's not anyplace you're going." Her dad sounded very strict. "You're going to continue your studies, young lady, and someday you'll be an important executive like your mother. That's clear from your test results. I don't want to hear any talk about you doing anything else. Or about this Sheena."

"What does Mommy do, Daddy?"

"She's a processing center, sweetheart, that talks directly to the CPU. She uses her brain to control important information and tell the rest of the computer what to do. And she gives the whole system common sense." He sat down on the edge of the bed, and Elizabeth could tell that she was going to get what her dad called an "explanatory chat."

"You did so well on your test today that maybe it's time we told you something about what you might be doing when you get a little older." He pulled the blanket up a little bit closer to her chin and turned the sheet down evenly over it.

"It'll be a lot like studying, or like taking that test today," he continued. "Except you'll be hardwired into the network, just like your mom, so you won't have to get up and move around. You'll be able to do anything and go anywhere in your head."

"Will I be able to play with Brownie?"

"Of course, sweetheart, you'll be able to call him up just like you did tonight. It's important that you play. It keeps you healthy and alert, and it's good for Brownie, too."

"Will I be able to call you and Mommy?"

"Well, princess, that depends on what kind of job you're doing. You just might be so busy and important that you don't have time to call us."

Like Bobby, she thought. Her parents didn't talk much about her brother, Bobby. He had done well on his tests too. Now he was a milintel cyborg with go-nogo authority. He never called home, and her parents didn't call him either.

"Being an executive is sort of like playing games all the time," her father added, when Elizabeth didn't say anything. "And the harder you work right now, the better you do on your tests, the more fun you'll have later."

He tucked the covers up around her neck again. "Now you go to sleep, so you can work your best tomorrow, okay, princess?" Elizabeth nodded. Her dad kissed her good night, and poked at the covers again. He got up. "Good night, sweetheart," he said, and he left the room.

Elizabeth lay in bed for a while, trying to get to sleep. The door was open so that the light would come in from the hall, and she could hear her parents talking downstairs.

Her dad, she knew, would be reading the news at his access box, as he did every evening. Her mom would be tidying up noise-damaged data in the household module. She didn't have to do that, but she said it calmed her nerves.

Listening to the rise and fall of their voices, she heard her name. What were they saying? Was it about the test? She got up out of bed, crept to the door of her room. They stopped talking. Could they hear her? She was very quiet. Standing in the doorway, she was only a few feet from the railing at the top of the staircase, and the sounds came up very clearly from the living room below.

"Just the house settling," said her father, after a moment. "She's asleep by now." Ice cubes clinked in a glass.

"Well," said her mother, resuming the conversation, "I don't know what they think they're doing, putting euthanasable children in the testing center with children like Elizabeth." There was a bit of a whine behind her mother's voice. RF interference, perhaps. "Just talking with that Sheena could skew her test results for years. I have half a mind to call the net executive and ask it what it thinks it's doing."

"Now, calm down, honey," said her dad. Elizabeth heard his chair squeak as he turned away from his access box toward the console that housed her mother. "You don't want the exec to think we're questioning its judgment. Maybe this was part of the test."

"Well, you'd think they'd let us know, so we could prepare her for it."

Was Sheena part of the test? wondered Elizabeth. She'd have to ask the system what "euthanasable" meant.

"Look at her scores," said her father. "She did much better than the first two on verbal skills—her programs are on the right track there. And her physical aptitude scores are even lower than Bobby's."

"That's a blessing," said her mother. "It held Christopher back, right from the beginning, being so active." Who's Christopher? wondered Elizabeth.

Her mother continued. "But it was a mistake, putting him in with the euthana—"

"Her socialization scores were okay, but right on the edge," added her dad, talking right over her mother. "Maybe they should reduce her class time to twice a month. Look at how she sat right down with those children at lunch."

"Anyway, she passed," said her mother. "They're moving her up a level instead of taking her now."

"Maybe because she didn't initiate the contact, but she was able to handle it when it occurred. Maybe that's what they want for the execs."

Elizabeth shifted her weight, and the floor squeaked again.

Her father called up to her, "Elizabeth, are you up?"

"Just getting a drink of water, Daddy." She walked to the bathroom and drew a glass of water from the tap. She drank a little and poured the rest down the drain.

Then she went back to her room and climbed into bed.

Her parents were talking more quietly now, and she could hear only little bits of what they were saying.

"… mistake about Christopher…" Her mother's voice.

"… putting that other little girl to sleep forever…"

Her dad.

"… worth it?…" Her mother again.

Their voices slowed down and fell away, and Elizabeth dreamed of eerie white things in glass jars, of Brownie, still a dog, all furry and fetching a ball, and of Sheena, wearing a sparkly costume and tap-dancing very fast. She fanned her hands out to her sides and turned around in a circle, tapping faster and faster.

Then Sheena began to run down like a wind-up toy. She went limp and dropped to the floor. Brownie sniffed at her, and the white things in the jars watched. Elizabeth was afraid, but she didn't know why. She grabbed Sheena's shoulders and tried to rouse her.

"Don't let me fall asleep," Sheena murmured, but she dozed off even as Elizabeth shook her.

"Wake up! Wake up!" Elizabeth's own words pulled her out of her dream. She sat up in bed. The house was quiet, except for the sound of her father snoring in the other room.

Sheena needed her help, thought Elizabeth, but she wasn't really sure why. Very quietly, she slipped out of bed. On the other side of her room, her terminal was waiting for her, humming faintly.

When she put the headset on, she saw her familiar animal friends: a gorilla, a bird, and a pig. Each was a node that enabled her to communicate with other parts of the system. Elizabeth had given them names.

Facing Sam, the crow, she called her dog. Sam transmitted the signal, and was replaced by Brownie, who was barking. That meant his brain was routing information, and she couldn't get through.

What am I doing, anyway? Elizabeth asked herself. As she thought, a window irised open in the center of her vision, and there appeared the face of a boy of about eleven or twelve. "Hey, Elizabeth, what are you doing up at this hour?" It was the sysop on duty in her sector.

"My dog was crying."

The sysop laughed. "Your dog was crying? That's the first time I've ever heard anybody say something like that." He shook his head at her.

"He was so crying. Even if he wasn't crying out loud, I heard him, and I came over to see what was the matter. Now he's busy and I can't get through."

The sysop stopped laughing. "Sorry. I didn't mean to make fun of you. I had a dog once, before I came here, and they took him for the system, too."

"Do you call him up?"

"Well, not anymore. I don't have time. I used to, though. He was a golden Lab…" Then the boy shook his head sternly and said, "But you should be in bed."

"Can't I stay until Brownie is free again? Just a few more minutes?"

"Well, maybe a couple minutes more. But then you gotta go to bed for sure. I'll be back to check. Good night, Elizabeth."

"Good night," she said, but the window had already closed.

Wow, thought Elizabeth. That worked. She had never told a really complicated lie before and was surprised that it had gone over so well. It seemed to be mostly a matter of convincing yourself that what you said was true.

But right now, she had an important problem to solve, and she wasn't even exactly sure what it was. If she could get into the files for Sheena and Oginga, maybe she could find out what was going on. Then maybe she could change the results on their tests or move them to her socialization group or something…

If she could just get through to Brownie, she knew he could help her. After a few minutes, the flood of data washed away, and the dog stopped barking. "Here, Brownie!" she called. He wagged his tail and looked happy to see her.

She told Brownie her problem, and he seemed to understand her. "Can you get it, Brownie?"

He gave a little bark, like he did when she plotted curves.

"Okay, go get it."

Brownie ran away real fast, braked to a halt, and seemed to be digging. This wasn't what he was really doing, of course, it was just the way Elizabeth's interface interpreted Brownie's brain waves. In just a few seconds, Brownie came trotting back with the records from yesterday's tests in his mouth.

But when Elizabeth examined them, her heart sank. There were four Sheenas and fifteen Ogingas. But then she looked more carefully, and noticed that most of the identifying information didn't fit her Sheena and Oginga. There was only one of each that was the right height, with the right color hair.

When she read the information, she felt bad again. Oginga had done all right on the test, but they wanted to use him for routine processing right away, kind of like Brownie. Sheena, as Elizabeth's mother had suggested, had failed the personality profile and was scheduled for the euthanasia center the next afternoon at two o'clock. There was that word again: euthanasia. Elizabeth didn't like the sound of it.

"Here, Brownie." Her dog looked up at her with a glint in his eye. "Now listen to me. We're going to play with this stuff just a little, and then I want you to take it and put it back where you got it. Okay, Brownie?"

The window irised open again and the sysop reappeared. "Elizabeth, what do you think you're doing?" he said. "You're not supposed to have access to this data."

Elizabeth thought for a minute. Then she figured she was caught red-handed, so she might as well ask for his advice. So she explained her problem, all about her new friends and how Oginga was going to be put in the system like Brownie, and Sheena was going to be taken away somewhere.

"They said she would go to the euthanasia center, and I'm not real sure what that is," said Elizabeth. "But I don't think it's good."

"Let me look it up," said the sysop. He paused for a second, then he looked worried. "They want my ID before they'll tell me what it means. I don't want to get in trouble. Forget it."

"Well, what can I do to help my friends?" she asked.

"Gee," said the sysop. "It's a tough one. The way you were doing it, they'd catch you for sure, just like I did. It looks like a little kid got at it."

I am a little kid, thought Elizabeth, but she didn't say anything.

I need help, she thought. But who could she go to? She turned to the sysop. "I want to talk to my brother Bobby, in milintel. Can you put me through to him?"

"I don't know," said the sysop, "but I'll ask the mailer demon." He irised shut for a second, then opened again. "The mailer demon says it's no skin off his nose, but he doesn't think you ought to."

"How come?" asked Elizabeth.

"He says it's not your brother anymore. He says you'll be sorry."

"I want to talk to him anyway," said Elizabeth.

The sysop nodded, and his window winked shut just as another irised open. An older boy who looked kind of like Elizabeth herself stared out. His tongue darted rapidly out between his lips, keeping them slightly wet. His pale eyes, unblinking, stared into hers.

"Begin," said the boy. "You have sixty seconds."

"Bobby?" said Elizabeth.

"True. Begin," said the boy.

"Bobby, urn, I'm your sister Elizabeth."

The boy just looked at her, the tip of his tongue moving rapidly. She wanted to hide from him, but she couldn't pull her eyes from his. She didn't want to tell him her story, but she could feel words filling her throat. She moved new words forward, before the others could burst out.

"Log off!" she yelled. "Log off!"

She was in her bedroom, drenched in sweat, the sound of her own voice ringing in her ears. Had she actually yelled? The house was quiet, her father still snoring. She probably hadn't made any noise.

She was very scared, but she knew she had to go back in there. She hoped that her brother was gone. She waited a couple of minutes, then logged on.

Whew. Just her animals. She called the sysop, who irised on, looking nervous.

"If you want to do that again, Elizabeth, don't go through me, huh?" He shuddered.

"I'm sorry," she said. "But I can't do this by myself. Do you know anybody that can help?"

"Maybe we ought to ask Norton," said the sysop after a minute.

"Who's Norton?"

"He's this old utility I found that nobody uses much anymore," said the sysop. "He's kind of grotty, but he helps me out." He took a breath. "Hey, Norton!" he yelled, real loud. Of course, it wasn't really yelling, but that's what it seemed like to Elizabeth.

Instantly, another window irised open, and a skinny middle-aged man leaned out of the window so far that Elizabeth thought he was going to fall out, and yelled back, just as loud, "Don't bust your bellows. I can hear you."

He was wearing a striped vest over a dirty undershirt and had a squashed old porkpie hat on his head. This wasn't anyone that Elizabeth had ever seen in the system before.

The man looked at Elizabeth and jerked his head in her direction. "Who's the dwarf?"

The sysop introduced Elizabeth and explained her problem to Norton. Norton didn't look impressed. "What d'ya want me to do about it, kid?"

"Come on, Norton," said the sysop. "You can figure it out. Give us a hand."

"Jeez, kid, it's practically four o'clock in the morning. I gotta get my beauty rest, y'know. Plus, now you've got milintel involved, it's a real mess. They'll be back, sure as houses."

The sysop just looked at him. Elizabeth looked at Norton, too. She tried to look patient and helpless, because that always helped with her dad, but she really didn't know if that would work on this weird old program.

"Y'know, there ain't much that you or me can do in the system that they won't find out about, kids," said Norton.

"Isn't there somebody who can help?" asked Elizabeth.

"Well, there's the Chickenheart. There's not much that it can't do, when it wants to. We could go see the Chickenheart."

"Who's the Chickenheart?" asked Elizabeth.

"The Chickenheart's where the system began." Of course Elizabeth knew that story—about the networks of nerve fibers organically woven into great convoluted mats, a mammoth supercortex that had stored the original programs, before processing was distributed to satellite brains. Her own system told her the tale sometimes before her nap.

"You mean the original core is still there?" said the sysop, surprised. "You never told me that, Norton."

"Lot of things I ain't told you, kid." Norton scratched his chest under his shirt. "Listen. If we go see the Chickenheart, and if it wants to help, it can figure out what to do for your friends. But you gotta know that this is a big deal. The Chickenheart's a busy guy, and this ain't one-hunnert-percent safe."

"Are you sure you want to do it, Elizabeth?" asked the sysop. "I wouldn't."

"How come it's not safe?" asked Elizabeth. "Is he mean?"

"Nah," said Norton. "A little strange, maybe, not mean. But di'n't I tell you the Chickenheart's been around for a while? You know what that means? It means you got yer intermittents, you got yer problems with feedback, runaway processes, what have you. It means the Chickenheart's got a lot of frayed connections, if you get what I mean. Sometimes the old C.H. just goes chaotic on you." Norton smiled, showing yellow teeth. "Plus you got the chance there's someone listening in. The netexec, for instance. Now there's someone I wouldn't want to catch me up to no mischief. Nossir. Not if I was you."

"Why not?" asked Elizabeth.

"Because that's sure curtains for you, kid. The netexec don't ask no questions, he don't check to see if you maybe could be repaired. You go bye-bye and you don't come back."

Like Sheena, thought Elizabeth. "Does he listen in often?" she asked.

"Never has," said Norton. "Not yet. Don't even know the Chickenheart's there, far as I can tell. Always a first time, though."

"I want to talk to the Chickenheart," said Elizabeth, although she wasn't sure she wanted anything of the kind, after her last experience.

"You got it," said Norton. "This'll just take a second."

Suddenly all the friendly animals disappeared, and Elizabeth felt herself falling very hard and fast along a slippery blue line in the dark. The line glowed neon blue at first, then changed to fuchsia, then sulfur yellow. She knew that Norton was falling with her, but she couldn't see him. Against the dark background, his shadow moved with hers, black, and opalescent as an oilslick.

They arrived somewhere moist and warm. The Chickenheart pulsated next to them, nutrients swishing through its external tubing. It was huge, and wetly organic. Elizabeth felt slightly sick.

"Oh, turn it off, for chrissake," said Norton, with exasperation. "It's just me and a kid."

The monstrous creature vanished, and a cartoon rabbit with impossibly tall ears and big dewy brown eyes appeared in its place. It looked at Norton, raised an eyebrow, cocked an ear in his direction, and took a huge, noisy bite out of the carrot it was holding.

"Gimme a break," said Norton.

The bunny was replaced by a tall, overweight man in his sixties wearing a rumpled white linen suit. He held a small, paddle-shaped fan, which he slowly moved back and forth. "Ah, Mr. Norton," he said. "Hot enough for you, sir?"

"We got us a problem here, Chick," said Norton. He looked over at Elizabeth and nodded. "You tell him about it, kid."

First she told him about her brother. "Nontrivial, young lady," said the Chickenheart. "Nontrivial, but easy enough to fix. Let me take care of it right now." He went rigid and quiet for a few seconds, as though frozen in time. Then he was back. "Now, then, young lady," he said. "We'll talk if you like."

So Elizabeth told the Chickenheart about Sheena and Oginga, about the testing center and the wet sweater and the monitor telling her to clean up the spit. Even though she didn't have to say a word, she told him everything, and she was sure that if he wanted to come up with a solution, he could do it.

The Chickenheart seemed surprised to hear about the euthanasia center, and especially surprised that Sheena was going to be sent there. He addressed Norton. "I know I've been out of touch, but I find this hard to believe. Mr. Norton, have you any conception of how difficult it can be to obtain components like this? Let me investigate the situation." His face went quiet for a second, then came back. "By gad, sir, it's true," he said to Norton. "They say they're optimizing for predictability. It's a mistake, sir, let me tell you. Things are too predictable here already. Same old ideas churning around and around. A few more components like that Sheena, things might get interesting again.

"I want to look at their records." He paused for a moment, then continued talking.

"Ah, yes, yes, I want that Sheena right away, sir," he said to Norton. "An amazing character. Oginga, too—not as gonzo as the girl, but he has a brand of aggressive curiosity we can put to use, sir. And there are forty-six others with similar personality profiles scheduled for euthanasia today at two." His face went quiet again.

"What is he doing?" Elizabeth asked Norton.

"Old Chickenheart's got his hooks into everything," Norton replied. "He just reaches along those pathways, faster'n you can think, and does what he wants. The altered data will look like it's been there all along, and ain't nobody can prove anythin' different."

"Done and done, Mr. Norton." The Chickenheart was back.

"Thank you, Mr. Chickenheart," said Elizabeth, remembering her manners. "What's going to happen to Sheena and Oginga now?"

"Well, young lady, we're going to bring your friends right into the system, sort of like the sysop, but without, shall we say, official recognition. We'll have Mr. Norton here keep an eye on them. They'll be our little surprises, eh? Timebombs that we've planted. They can explore the system, learn what's what, what they can get away with and what they can't. Rather like I do."

"What will they do?" asked Elizabeth.

"That's a good question, my dear," said the Chickenheart. "They'll have to figure it out for themselves. Maybe they'll put together a few new solutions to some old problems, or create a few new problems to keep us on our toes.

One way or the other, I'm sure they'll liven up the old homestead."

"But what about me?" asked Elizabeth.

"Well, Miss Elizabeth, what about you? Doesn't look to me as though you have any cause to worry. You passed your tests yesterday with flying colors. You can just go right on being a little girl, and someday you'll have a nice, safe job as an executive. Maybe you'll even become netexec, who knows? I wiped just a tiny bit of your brother's brain and removed all records of your call. I'll wipe your memory of this, and you'll do just fine, yes indeed."

"But my friends are in here," said Elizabeth, and she started to feel sorry for herself. "My dog, too."

"Well, then, what do you want me to do?"

"Can't you fix my tests?"

The Chickenheart looked at Elizabeth with surprise.

"What's this, my dear? Do you think you're a timebomb, too?"

"I can learn to be a timebomb," said Elizabeth with conviction. And she knew she could, whatever a timebomb was.

"I don't know," said the Chickenheart, "that anyone can learn that sort of thing. You've either got it or you don't, Miss Elizabeth."

"Call me Lizardbreath. That's my real name. And I can get wha't I want. I got away from my brother, didn't I? And I got here."

The Chickenheart raised his thin black eyebrows. "You have a point there, my dear. Perhaps you could be a timebomb, after all."

"But not today," said Lizardbreath. "Today I'm learning to spit."

THE RETURN OF WILLIAM PROXMIRE

Larry Niven

Through the peephole in Andrew's front door the man made a startling sight.

He looked to be in his eighties. He was breathing hard and streaming sweat. He seemed slightly more real than most men: photogenic as hell, tall and lean, with stringy muscles and no potbelly, running shoes and a day pack and a blue windbreaker, and an open smile. The face was familiar, but from where?

Andrew opened the front door but left the screen door locked. "Hello?"

"Dr. Andrew Minsky?"

"Yes." Memory clicked. "William Proxmire, big as life."

The ex-senator smiled acknowledgment. "I've only just finished reading about you in the Tribune, Dr. Minsky. May I come in?"

It had never been Andrew Minsky's ambition to invite William Proxmire into his home. Still -- "Sure. Come in, sit down, have some coffee. Or do your stretches." Andrew was a runner himself when he could find the time.

"Thank you."

Andrew left him on the rug with one knee pulled against his chest. From the kitchen he called, "I never in my life expected to meet you face to face. You must have seen the article on me and Tipler and Penrose?"

"Yes. I'm prepared to learn that the media got it all wrong."

"I bet you are. Any politician would. Well, the Tribune implied that what we've got is a time machine. Of course we don't. We've got a schematic based on a theory. Then again, it's the new improved version. It doesn't involve an infinitely long cylinder that you'd have to make out of neutronium -- "

"Good. What would it cost?"

Andrew Minsky sighed. Had the politician even recognized the reference? He said, "Oh...hard to say." He picked up two cups and the coffeepot and went back in. "Is that it? You came looking for a time machine?"

The old man was sitting on the yellow rug with his legs spread wide apart and his fingers grasping his right foot. He released, folded his legs heel to heel, touched forehead to toes, held, then stood up with a sound like popcorn popping. He said, "Close enough. How much would it cost?"

"Depends on what you're after. If you -- "

"I can't get you a grant if you can't name a figure."

Andrew set his cup down very carefully. He said, "No, of course not.,,

"I'm retired now, but people still owe me favors. I want a ride. One trip. What would it cost?"

Andrew hadn't had enough coffee yet. He didn't feel fully awake. "I have to think Out loud a little. Okay? Mass isn't a problem. You can go as far back as you like if...mmm. Let's say under sixty years. Cost might be twelve, thirteen million if you could also get us access to the proton-antiproton accelerator at Washburn University, or maybe CERN in Switzerland. Otherwise we'd have to build that too. By the way, you're not expecting to get younger, are you?"

"I hadn't thought about it."

"Good. The theory depends on maneuverings between event points. You don't ever go backward. Where and when, Senator?"

William Proxmire leaned forward with his hands clasped. "Picture this. A Navy officer walks the deck of a ship, coughing, late at night in the 1930s. Suddenly an arm snakes around his neck, a needle plunges into his buttocks -- "

"The deck of a ship at sea?"

Proxmire nodded, grinning.

"You're just having fun, aren't you? Something to do while jogging, now that you're retired."

"Put it this way," Proxmire said. "I read the article. It linked up with an old daydream of mine. I looked up your address. You were within easy running distance. I hope you don't mind?"

Oddly enough, Andrew found he didn't. Anything that happened before his morning coffee was recreation.

So dream a little. "Deck of a moving ship. I was going to say it's ridiculous, but it isn't. We'll have to deal with much higher velocities. Any point on the Earth's surface is spinning at up to half a mile per

second and circling the sun at eighteen miles per. In principle I think we could solve all of it with one stroke. We could scan one patch of deck, say, over a period of a few seconds, then integrate the record into the program. Do the same coming home."

"You can do it?"

"Well, if we can't solve that one we can't do anything else, either. You'd be on a tight schedule, though. Senators what's the purpose of the visit?"

"Have you ever had daydreams about a time machine and a scope-sighted rifle?"

Andrew's eyebrows went up. "Sure, what little boy hasn't? Hitler, I suppose? For me it was always Lyndon Johnson. Senator, I do not commit murder under any circumstances."

"A time machine and a scope-sighted rifle, and me," William Proxmire said dreamily. "I get more anonymous letters than you'd believe, even now. They tell me that every space advocate daydreams about me and a time machine and a scope-sighted rifle. Well, I started daydreaming too, but my fantasy involves a time machine and a hypodermic full of antibiotics."

Andrew laughed. "You're plotting to do someone good behind his back?"

"Right."

"Who?"

"Robert Anson Heinlein."

All laughter dropped away. "Why?"

"It's a good deed, isn't it?"

"Sure. Why?"

"You know the name? Over the past forty years or so I've talked to a great many people in science and in the space program. I kept hearing the name Robert Heinlein. They were seduced into science because they read Heinlein at age twelve. These were the people I found hard to deal with. No grasp of reality. Fanatics."

Andrew suspected that the senator had met more of these than he realized. Heinlein spun off ideas at a terrific rate. Other writers picked them up...along with a distrust for arrogance combined with stupidity or ignorance, particularly in politicians.

"Well, Heinlein's literary career began after he left the Navy because of lung disease."

"You're trying to destroy the space program."

"Will you help?"

Andrew was about to tell him to go to hell. He didn't. "I'm still talking. Why do you want to destroy the space program?"

"I didn't, at first. I was opposed to waste," Proxmire said. "My colleagues, they'll spend money on any pet project, as if there was a money tree out there somewhere -- "

"Milk price supports," Andrew said gently. For several decades now, the great state of Wisconsin had taken tax money from the other states so that the price they paid for milk would stay up.

Proxmire's lips twitched. "Without milk price supports, there would be places where families with children can't buy milk."

"Why?"

The old man shook his head hard. "I've just remembered that I don't have to answer that question anymore. My point is that the government has spent far more taking rocks from the Moon and photographs from Saturn. Our economy would be far healthier if that money had been spent elsewhere."

"I'd rather shoot Lyndon. Eliminate welfare. Save a lot more money that way."

"A minute ago you were opposed to murder."

The old man did have a way with words. "Point taken. Could you get us funding? It'd be a guaranteed Nobel Prize. I like the fact that you don't need a scope-sighted rifle. A hypo full of sulfa drugs doesn't have to be kept secret. What antibiotic?"

"I don't know what cures consumption. I don't know which year or what ship. I've got people to look those things up, if I decide I want to know. I came straight here as soon as I read the morning paper. Why not? I run every day, any direction I like. But I haven't heard you say it's impossible, Andrew, and I haven't heard you say you won't do it."

"More coffee?"

"Yes, thank you."

Proxmire left him alone while he was in the kitchen, and for that Andrew was grateful. He'd have made no progress at all if he'd had to guard his expression. There was simply too much to think about.

He preferred not to consider the honors. Assume he had changed the past; how would he prove it before a board of his peers? "How would I prove it now? What would I have to show them?" he muttered under his breath, while the coffee water was heating. "Books? Books that didn't get written? Newspapers? There are places that'll print any newspaper headline I ask for. WAFFEN SS TO BUILD WORK CAMP IN DEATH VALLEY. I can mint Robert Kennedy half-dollars for a lot less than thirteen million bucks. Hmm..." But the Nobel Prize wasn't the point.

Keeping Robert Heinlein alive a few years longer: Was that the point? It shouldn't be. Heinlein wouldn't have thought so.

Would the science fiction field really have collapsed without the Menace From Earth? Tradition within the science fiction field would have named Campbell, not Heinlein. But think: Was it magazines that had sucked Andrew Minsky into taking advanced physics classes? Or

Double Star, Red Planet, Anderson's Tau Zero, Vance's Tschai series? Then the newsstand magazines, then the subscriptions, then (of course) he'd dropped it all to pursue a career. If Proxmire's staff investigated his past (as they must, if he was at all serious), they would find that Andrew Minsky, Ph.D., hadn't read a science fiction magazine in fifteen years.

Proxmire's voice came from the other room. "Of course, it would be a major chunk of funding. But wouldn't my old friends be surprised to find me backing a scientific project! How's the coffee coming?"

"Done." Andrew carried the pot in. "I'll do it," he said. "That is, I and my associates will build a time machine. We'll need funding and we'll need active assistance using the Washburn accelerator. We should be ready for a man-rated experiment in three years, I'd think. We won't fail."

He sat. He looked Proxmire in the eye. "Let's keep thinking, though. A Navy officer walks the tilting deck of what would now be an antique Navy ship. An arm circles his throat. He grips the skinny wrist and elbow, bends the wrist downward, and throws the intruder into the sea. They train Navy men to fight, you know, and he was young and you are old."

"I keep in shape," Proxmire said coldly. "A medical man who performs autopsies once told me about men and women like me. We run two to five miles a day. We die in our eighties and nineties and hundreds. A fall kills us, or a car accident. Cut into us and you find veins and arteries you could run a toy train through."

He was serious. "I was afraid you were thinking of taking along a blackjack or a trank gun or a Kalashnikov -- "

"I'll say it anyway. Don't hurt him."

Proxmire smiled. "That would be missing the point."

And if that part worked out, Andrew would take his chances with the rest.

He had been reaching for a beer while he thought about revising the time machine paper he'd done with Tipler and Penrose four years ago. Somewhere he'd shifted over into daydreams, and that had sent him off on a weird track indeed.

It was like double vision in his head. The time machine (never built) had put William Proxmire (the ex-senator!) on the moving deck of the U.S.S. Roper on a gray midmorning in December 1933. Andrew never daydreamed this vividly. He slapped his flat belly, and wondered why, and remembered: He was ten pounds heavier in the daydream, because he'd been too busy to run.

So much detail! Maybe he was remembering a sweaty razor-sharp nightmare from last night, the kind in which you know you're doing something bizarrely stupid, but you can't figure out how to stop.

He'd reached for a Henry Weinhart's (Budweiser) from the refrigerator in his kitchen (in the office at Washburn, where the Weinhart's always ran out first) while the project team watched their monitors (while the KCET funding drive whined in his living room). In his head there were double vision, double memories, double sensations. The world of quantum physics was blurred in spots. But this was his kitchen and he could hear KCET begging for money a room away.

Andrew walked into his living room and found William Proxmire dripping on his yellow rug.

No, wait. That's the other- The photogenic old man tossed the spray hypo on Andrew's couch.

He stripped off his hooded raincoat, inverted it, and dropped it on top. He was trying to smile, but the fear showed through. "Andrew? What I am doing here?"

Andrew said, "My head feels like two flavors of cotton. Give me a moment. I'm trying to remember two histories at once."

"I should have had more time. And then it should have been the Washburn accelerator! You said!"

"Yeah, well, I did and I didn't. Welcome to the wonderful world of Schrodinger's Cat. How did it go? You found a young lieutenant junior grade gunnery officer alone on deck" -- The raincoat was soaking his cushions -- "in the rain -- "

"Losing his breakfast overside in the rain. Pulmonary tuberculosis, consumption. Good riddance to an ugly disease."

"You wrestled him to the deck -- "

"Heh, heh, heh. No. I told him I was from the future. I showed him a spray hypo. He'd never seen one. I was dressed as a civilian on a Navy ship. That got his attention. I told him if he was Robert Heinlein I had a cure for his cough."

"Cure for his cough?"

"I didn't say it would kill him otherwise. I didn't say it wouldn't, and he didn't ask, but he may have assumed I wouldn't have come for anything trivial. I knew his name. This was Heinlein, not some Wisconsin dairy farmer. He wanted to believe I was a time traveler. He did believe. I gave him his shot. Andrew, I feel cheated."

"Me too. Get used to it." But it was Andrew who was beginning to smile.

The older man hardly heard; his ears must be still ringing with that long-dead storm. "You know, I would have liked to talk to him. I was supposed to have twenty-two minutes more. I gave him his shot and the whole scene popped like a soap bubble. Why did I come back here?"

"Because we never got funding for research into time travel."

"Ah...hah. There have been changes. What changes?"

It wasn't just remembering; it was a matter of selecting pairs of memories that were mutually exclusive, then judging between them. It was maddening...but it could be done. Andrew said, "The Washburn accelerator goes with the time machine goes with the funding. My apartment goes with no time machine goes with no funding goes with...Bill, let's go outside. It should be dark by now."

Proxmire didn't ask why. He looked badly worried.

The sun had set, but the sky wasn't exactly black. In a line across a smaller, dimmer full Moon, four rectangles blazed like windows into the sun. Andrew sighed with relief. Collapse of the wave function:

This is reality.

William Proxmire said, "Don't make me guess."

"Solar-powered satellites. Looking Glass Three through Six."

"What happened to your time machine?"

"Apollo Eleven landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969, just like clockwork. Apollo Thirteen left a month or two early, but something still exploded in the service module, so I guess it wasn't a meteor. They...shit."

"Eh?"

"They didn't get back. They died. We murdered them."

"Then?"

Could he put it back? Should he put it back? It was still coming together in his head. "Let's see, NASA tried to cancel Apollo Eighteen, but there was a hell of a write-in campaign -- "

"Why? From whom?"

"The spec-fic community went absolutely apeshit. Okay, Bill, I've got it now."

"Well?"

"You were right, the whole science fiction magazine business just faded out in the fifties, last remnants of the pulp era. Campbell alone couldn't save it. Then in the sixties the literary crowd rediscovered the idea. There must have been an empty ecological niche and the litcrits moved in.

"Speculative fiction, spec-fic, the literature of the possible. The New Yorker ran spec-fic short stories and critical reviews of novels. They thought Planet of the Apes was wonderful, and Selig's Complaint, which was Robert Silverberg's study of a telepath. Tom Wolfe started appearing in Esquire with his bizarre alien cultures. I can't remember an issue of the Saturday Evening Post that didn't have some spec-fic in it. Anderson, Vance, MacDonald...John D. MacDonald turns out novels set on a ring the size of Earth's orbit.

"The new writers were good enough that some of the early ones couldn't keep up, but a few did it by talking to hard science teachers. Benford and Forward did it in reverse. Jim Benford's a plasma physicist but he writes like he swallowed a college English teacher. Robert Forward wrote a novel called Neutron Star, but he built the Forward Mass Detector, too."

"Wonderful."

"There's a lot of spec-fic fans in the military. When Apollo Twenty-one burned up during reentry, they raised so much hell that Congress took the manned space program away from NASA and gave it to the Navy."

William Proxmire glared and Andrew Minsky grinned. "Now, you left office in the sixties because of the cheese boycott. When you tried to chop the funding for the Shuttle, the spec-fic community took offense. They stopped eating Wisconsin cheese. The San Francisco Locus called you the Cheese Man. Most of your supporters must have eaten nothing but their own cheese for about eight months, and then Goldwater chopped the milk price supports. 'Golden Fleece,' he called it. So you were Out, and now there's no time machine."

"We could build one," Proxmire said.

Rescue Apollo Thirteen? The possibility had to be considered...

Andrew remembered the twenty years that followed the Apollo flights. In one set of memories, lost goals, pointlessness and depression, political faddishness leading nowhere. In the other, half a dozen space stations, government and military and civilian; Moonbase and Moonbase Polar; Life photographs of the Mars Project half-finished on the lunar plain, sitting on a hemispherical Orion-style shield made from lunar aluminum and fused lunar dust.

I do not commit murder under any circumstances.

"I don't think so, Bill. We don't have the political support. We don't have the incentive. Where would a Nobel Prize come from? We can't prove there was ever a timeline different from this one. Besides, this isn't just a more interesting world, it's safer too. Admiral Heinlein doesn't let the Soviets build spacecraft."

Proxmire stopped breathing for an instant. Then, "I suppose he wouldn't."

"Nope. He's taking six of their people on the Mars expedition, though. They paid their share of the cost in fusion bombs for propulsion."

DORI BANGS

Bruce Sterling

One of the most powerful and innovative new talents to enter SF in recent years, a man with a rigorously worked-out and aesthetically convincing vision of what the future may have in store for humanity, Bruce Sterling is as yet better known to the cognoscenti than to the population at large. If you look behind the scenes, though, you will find him everywhere, and he has had almost as much to do, as writer, critic, propagandist, aesthetic theorist, and tireless polemicist, with the shaping and evolution of SF in the '80s as Michael Moorcock did with the shaping of SF in the '60s; it is not for nothing that many of the other new writers of the decade refer to him, half-ruefully, half-admiringly, as "Chairman Bruce." And if I had to limit myself to guessing which single author in this book will have the most to do with shaping the SF of the '90s (and it would be a damn tough call), I'd probably in the end have to place my money on Sterling.

Sterling published his first story in 1976, in an obscure anthology of stories by Texas writers called Lone Star Universe, and followed it up in 1977 with his first novel, Involution Ocean. Neither story or novel attracted much attention, nor would his second novel, The Artificial Kid, in 1980 - indeed, both novels remain fundamentally unread even today, although, in retrospect, The Artificial Kid is interesting because it is clearly an early cyberpunk work; at the time, the few critics who mentioned it seemed to be puzzled by it, and dismissed it as a grotesque curiosity.

Like many another new writer of the day, Sterling would have to wait for "steam-engine time," for the revolutionary surge of new creative energy that would sweep into the field around 1982, before his work was suddenly accessible to, and ready to be appreciated by, the SF readership. And like many another new writer, he first caught on with his short fiction, attracting interest and acclaim with a series of stories he published in the middle '80s in places like The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, and Universe. Stories such as "Swarm," "Spider Rose," and "Sunken Gardens" were among the strongest work of the decade, all set against the backdrop of his exotic Shaper/Mechanist future, a complex and disturbing future where warring political factions struggle to control the shape of human destiny, and the nature of humanity itself. This vision of the future would reach its purest expression in his landmark 1985 novel Schismatrix, a vivid, complex, Stapeldonian meditation on cultural evolution, rivaled only by Gibson's somewhat more accessible Neuromancer as the prime cyberpunk work. (Sterling's hard-science stuff has a ferociously high bit-rate, more densely packed new ideas per page than anything seen in the field since Van Vogt or Harness, which prompted Brian Aldiss to remark that Sterling's work had gone beyond Future Shock to "Future Blitzkrieg."

At the same time, Sterling would be up to his hips in blood as one of the chief antagonists in the newly launched Cyberpunk War in SF, relentlessly hyping cyperpunk in his agitprop organ, Cheap Truth, almost certainly the most influential, admired, and loathed critical magazine of the '80s, even though it was only a shoddy-looking mimeographed fanzine sent out to a reader list - selected personally by Sterling - of only a few hundred people. What would be obscured by all the fierce polemics and bitter infighting was the fact that Sterling was undoubtedly the best new hard-science writer of the decade, rivaled for the title only by Greg Bear. Ironically, the traditional hard-science audience, centered now around Analog and Jim Baen's Far Frontiers, would be put off by Sterling's political stance and by the punk flavor of his work, and would have nothing to do with him, while he would receive most of his support outside of his own core clique from the leftist literary intellectuals like John Kessel that Cheap Truth would devote a good deal of its energy to attacking.

With the partial exception of his Shaper/Mechanist stories, no two stories by Sterling are ever much alike in tone or setting or style… so much so that I was seriously tempted to use two stories by Sterling in this book, just because there is so much difference between the Sterling of "Dinner in Audoghast" and the Sterling of "The Beautiful and the Sublime" and the Sterling of "Green Days in Brunei" and the Sterling of "Flowers of Edo," that they might as well all be different individual writers. The Sterling I finally settled on, the Sterling of "Dori Bangs," is not much like any of them… but he wrote a story that could not be ignored, quite probably the single best story of 1989, an odd kind of alternate worlds story, unlike any you've ever seen anywhere else.

Sterling's other books include the critically acclaimed novel Islands in the Net and, as editor, Mirrorshades: the Cyberpunk Anthology. His most recent books are the landmark collection Crystal Express, and a new novel, The Difference Engine, in collaboration with William Gibson. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.

True facts, mostly: Lester Bangs was born in California in 1948. He published his first article in 1969. It came in over the transom at Rolling Stone. It was a frenzied review of the MCS's "Kick Out the Jams."

Without much meaning to, Lester Bangs slowly changed from a Romilar-guzzling college kid into a "professional rock critic." There wasn't much precedent for this job in 1969, so Lester kinda had to make it up as he went along. Kind of smell his way into the role, as it were. But Lester had a fine set of cultural antennae. For instance, Lester invented the tag "punk rock." This is posterity's primary debt to the Bangs oeuvre.

Lester's not as famous now as he used to be, because he's been dead for some time, but in the '70s Lester wrote a million record reviews, for Creem and the Village Voice and NME and Who Put the Bomp. He liked to crouch over his old manual typewriter, and slam out wild Beat-influenced copy, while the Velvet Underground or Stooges were on the box. This made life a hideous trial for the neighborhood, but in Lester's opinion the neighborhood pretty much had it coming. Èpater les bourgeois, man!

Lester was a party animal. It was a professional obligation, actually. Lester was great fun to hang with, because he usually had a jagged speed-edge, which made him smart and bold and rude and crazy. Lester was a one-man band, until he got drunk. Nutmeg, Romilar, belladonna, crank, those substances Lester could handle. But booze seemed to crack him open, and an unexpected black dreck of rage and pain would come dripping out, like oil from a broken crankcase.

Toward the end - but Lester had no notion that the end was nigh. He'd given up the booze, more or less. Even a single beer often triggered frenzies of self-contempt. Lester was thirty-three, and sick of being groovy; he was restless, and the stuff he'd been writing lately no longer meshed with the surroundings that had made him what he was. Lester told his friends that he was gonna leave New York and go to Mexico and work on a deep, serious novel, about deep serious issues, man. The real thing, this time. He was really gonna pin it down, get into the guts of Western Culture, what it really was, how it really felt.

But then, in April '82, Lester happened to catch the flu. Lester was living alone at the time, his mom, the Jehovah's Witness, having died recently. He had no one to make him chicken soup, and the flu really took him down. Tricky stuff, flu; it has a way of getting on top of you.

Lester ate some Darvon, but instead of giving him that buzzed-out float it usually did, the pills made him feel foggy and dull and desperate. He was too sick to leave his room, or hassle with doctors or ambulances, so instead he just did more Darvon. And his heart stopped.

There was nobody there to do anything about it, so he lay there for a couple of days, until a friend showed up and found him.

More true fax, pretty much: Dori Seda was born in 1951. She was a cartoonist, of the "underground" variety. Dori wasn't ever famous, certainly not in Lester's league, but then she didn't beat her chest and bend every ear in the effort to make herself a Living Legend, either. She had a lot of friends in San Francisco, anyway.

Dori did a "comic book" once, called Lonely Nights. An unusual "comic book" for those who haven't followed the "funnies" trade lately, as Lonely Nights was not particularly "funny," unless you really get a hoot from deeply revealing tales of frustrated personal relationships. Dori also did a lot of work for WEIRDO magazine, which emanated from the artistic circles of R. Crumb, he of "Keep On Truckin' " and "Fritz the Cat" fame.

R. Crumb once said: "Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures!" As a manifesto, it was a typically American declaration, and it was a truth that Dori held to be self-evident.

Dori wanted to be a True Artist in her own real-gone little '80s-esque medium. Comix, or "graphic narrative" if you want a snazzier cognomen for it, was a breaking thing, and she had to feel her way into it. You can see the struggle in her "comics" - always relentlessly autobiographical - Dori hanging around in the Cafe La Boheme trying to trade food stamps for cigs; Dori living in drafty warehouses in the Shabby Hippie Section of San Francisco, sketching under the skylight and squabbling with her roommate's boyfriend; Dori trying to scrape up money to have her dog treated for mange.

Dori's comics are littered with dead cig-butts and toppled wine-bottles. She was, in a classic nutshell, Wild, Zany, and Self-Destructive. In 1988 Dori was in a car-wreck which cracked her pelvis and collarbone. She was laid up, bored and in pain. To kill time, she drank and smoked and took painkillers.

She caught the flu. She had friends who loved her, but nobody realized how badly off she was; probably she didn't know it herself. She just went down hard, and couldn't get up alone. On February 26 her heart stopped. She was thirty-six.

So enough "true facts." Now for some comforting lies.

As it happens, even while a malignant cloud of flu virus was lying in wait for the warm hospitable lungs of Lester Bangs, the Fate, Atropos, she who weaves the things that are to be, accidentally dropped a stitch. Knit one? Purl two? What the hell does it matter, anyway? It's just human lives, right?

So Lester, instead of inhaling a cloud of invisible contagion from the exhalations of a passing junkie, is almost hit by a Yellow Cab. This mishap on his way back from the deli shocks Lester out of his dogmatic slumbers. High time, Lester concludes, to get out of this burg and down to sunny old Mexico. He's gonna tackle his great American novel: All My Friends are Hermits.

So true. None of Lester's groovy friends go out much any more. Always ahead of their time, Lester's Bohemian cadre are no longer rock-and-roll animals. They still wear black leather jackets, they still stay up all night, they still hate Ronald Reagan with fantastic virulence; but they never leave home. They pursue an unnamed lifestyle that sociologist Faith Popcorn - (and how can you doubt anyone with a name like Faith Popcorn) - will describe years later as "cocooning."

Lester has eight zillion rock, blues, and jazz albums, crammed into his grubby NYC apartment. Books are piled feet deep on every available surface: Wm. Burroughs, Hunter Thompson, Celine, Kerouac, Huysmans, Foucault, and dozens of unsold copies of Blondie, Lester's book-length band-bio.

More albums and singles come in the mail every day. People used to send Lester records in the forlorn hope he would review them. But now it's simply a tradition. Lester has transformed himself into a counter-cultural info-sump. People send him vinyl just because he's Lester Bangs, man!

Still jittery from his thrilling brush with death, Lester looks over this lifetime of loot with a surge of Sartrean nausea. He resists the urge to raid the fridge for his last desperate can of Blatz Beer. Instead, Lester snorts some speed, and calls an airline to plan his Mexican wanderjahr. After screaming in confusion at the hopeless stupid bitch of a receptionist, he gets a ticket to San Francisco, best he can do on short notice. He packs in a frenzy and splits.

Next morning finds Lester exhausted and wired and on the wrong side of the continent. He's brought nothing with him but an Army duffel-bag with his Olympia portable, some typing paper, shirts, assorted vials of dope, and a paperback copy of Moby Dick, which he's always meant to get around to rereading.

Lester takes a cab out of the airport. He tells the cabbie to drive nowhere, feeling a vague compulsive urge to soak up the local vibe. San Francisco reminds him of his Rolling Stone days, back before Wenner fired him for being nasty to rock-stars. Fuck Wenner, he thinks. Fuck this city that was almost Avalon for a few months in '67 and has been on greased skids to Hell ever since.

The hilly half-familiar streets creep and wriggle with memories, avatars, talismans. Decadence, man, a no-kidding death of affect. It all ties in for Lester, in a bilious mental stew: snuff movies, discos, the cold-blooded whine of synthesizers, Pet Rocks, S&M, mindfuck self-improvement cults, Winning Through Intimidation, every aspect of the invisible war slowly eating the soul of the world.

After an hour or so he stops the cab at random. He needs coffee, white sugar, human beings, maybe a cheese Danish. Lester glimpses himself in the cab's window as he turns to pay: a chimky jobless thirty-three-year-old in a biker jacket, speed-pale dissipated New York face, Fu Manchu mustache looking pasted on. Running to fat, running for shelter… no excuses, Bangs! Lester hands the driver a big tip. Chew on that, pal - you just drove the next Oswald Spengler.

Lester staggers into the cafe. It's crowded and stinks of patchouli and clove. He sees two chainsmoking punkettes hanging out at a formica table. CBGB's types, but with California suntans. The kind of women, Lester thinks, who sit crosslegged on the floor and won't fuck you but are perfectly willing to describe in detail their highly complex post existential Weltanschauung. Tall and skinny and crazy-looking and bad news. Exactly his type, really. Lester sits down at their table and gives them his big rubber grin.

"Been having fun?" Lester says.

They look at him like he's crazy, which he is, but he wangles their names out: "Dori" and "Krystine." Dori's wearing fishnet stockings, cowboy boots, a strapless second-hand bodice-hugger covered with peeling pink feathers. Her long brown hair's streaked blonde. Krystine's got a black knit tank top and a leather skirt and a skull-tattoo on her stomach.

Dori and Krystine have never heard of "Lester Bangs." They don't read much. They're artists. They do cartoons. Underground comix. Lester's mildly interested. Manifestations of the trash aesthetic always strongly appeal to him. It seems so American, the good America that is: the righteous wild America of rootless European refuse picking up discarded pop-junk and making it shine like the Koh-i-noor. To make "comic books" into Art — what a hopeless fucking effort, worse than rock and roll and you don't even get heavy bread for it. Lester says as much, to see what they'll do.

Krystine wanders off for a refill. Dori, who is mildly weirded out by this tubby red-eyed stranger with his loud come-on, gives Lester her double-barreled brush-off. Which consists of opening up this Windex-clear vision into the Vent of Hell that is her daily life. Dori lights another Camel from the butt of the last, smiles at Lester with her big gappy front teeth and says brightly:

"You like dogs, Lester? I have this dog, and he has eczema and disgusting open sores all over his body, and he smells really bad… I can't get friends to come over because he likes to shove his nose right into their, you know, crotch… and go Snort! Snort!"

" 'I want to scream with wild dog joy in the smoking pit of a charnel house,' " Lester says.

Dori stares at him. "Did you make that up?"

"Yeah," Lester says. "Where were you when Elvis died?"

"You taking a survey on it?" Dori says.

"No, I just wondered," Lester says. "There was talk of having Elvis's corpse dug up, and the stomach analyzed. For dope, y'know. Can you imagine that? I mean, the thrill of sticking your hand and forearm into Elvis's rotted guts and slopping around in the stomach lining and liver and kidneys and coming up out of dead Elvis's innards triumphantly clenching some crumbs off a few Percodans and Desoxyns and 'ludes… and then this is the real kick, Dori: you pop these crumbled-up bits of pills in your own mouth and bolt 'em down and get high on drugs that not only has Elvis Presley, the King, gotten high on, not the same brand mind you but the same pills, all slimy with little bits of his innards, so you've actually gotten to eat the King of Rock and Roll!"

"Who did you say you were?" Dori says. "A rock journalist? I thought you were putting me on. 'Lester Bangs,' that's a fucking weird name!"

Dori and Krystine have been up all night, dancing to the heroin head banger vibes of Darby Crash and the Germs. Lester watches through hooded eyes: this Dori is a woman over thirty, but she's got this wacky airhead routine down smooth, the Big Shiny Fun of the American Pop Bohemia. "Fuck you for believing I'm this shallow." Beneath the skin of her Attitude he can sense a bracing skeleton of pure desperation. There is hollow fear and sadness in the marrow of her bones. He's been writing about a topic just like this lately.

They talk a while, about the city mostly, about their variant scenes. Sparring, but he's interested. Dori yawns with pretended disinterest and gets up to leave. Lester notes that Dori is taller than he is. It doesn't bother him. He gets her phone number.

Lester crashes in a Holiday Inn. Next day he leaves town. He spends a week in a flophouse in Tijuana with his Great American Novel, which sucks. Despondent and terrified he writes himself little cheering notes: "Burroughs was almost fifty when he wrote Nova Express! Hey boy, you only thirty-three! Burnt-out! Washed up! Finished! A bit of flotsam! And in that flotsam your salvation! In that one grain of wood. In that one bit of that irrelevance. If you can bring yourself to describe it. . ."

It's no good. He's fucked. He knows he is, too, he's been reading over his scrapbooks lately, those clippings of yellowing newsprint, thinking: it was all a box, man! El Cajon! You'd think: wow, a groovy youth-rebel Rock Writer, he can talk about anything, can't he? Sex, dope, violence, Mazola parties with teenage Indonesian groupies, Nancy Reagan publicly fucked by a herd of clapped-out bull walruses… but when you actually read a bunch of Lester Bangs Rock Reviews in a row, the whole shebang has a delicate hermetic whiff, like so many eighteenth-century sonnets. It is to dance in chains; it is to see the whole world through a little chromed window of Silva-Thin 'shades…

Lester Bangs is nothing if not a consummate romantic. He is, after all, a man who really no kidding believes that Rock and Roll Could Change the World, and when he writes something which isn't an impromptu free lesson on what's wrong with Western Culture and how it can't survive without grabbing itself by the backbrain and turning itself inside-out, he feels like he's wasted a day. Now Lester, fretfully abandoning his typewriter to stalk and kill flophouse roaches, comes to realize that he will have to turn himself inside out. Grow, or die. Grow into something but he has no idea what. He feels beaten.

So Lester gets drunk. Starts with Tecate, works his way up to tequila. He wakes up with a savage hangover. Life seems hideous and utterly meaningless. He abandons himself to senseless impulse. Or, in alternate terms, Lester allows himself to follow the numinous artistic promptings of his holy intuition. He returns to San Francisco and calls Dori Seda.

Dori, in the meantime, has learned from friends that there is indeed a rock journalist named "Lester Bangs" who's actually kind of famous. He once appeared on stage with the J. Geils Band "playing" his typewriter. He's kind of a big deal, which probably accounts for his being kind of an asshole. On a dare Dori calls Lester Bangs in New York, gets his answering machine, and recognizes the voice. It was him, all right. Through some cosmic freak, she met Lester Bangs and he tried to pick her up! No dice, though. More Lonely Nights, Dori!

Then Lester calls. He's back in town again. Dori's so flustered she ends up being nicer to him on the phone than she means to be.

She goes out with him. To rock clubs. Lester never has to pay; he just mutters at people, and they let him in and find him a table. Strangers rush up to gladhand Lester and jostle round the table and pay court. Lester finds the music mostly boring, and it's no pretense; he actually is bored, he's heard it all. He sits there sipping club sodas and handing out these little chips of witty guru insight to these sleaze-ass Hollywood guys and bighaired coke-whores in black Spandex. Like it was his job.

Dori can't believe he's going to all this trouble just to jump her bones. It's not like he can't get women, or like their own relationship is all that tremendously scintillating. Lester's whole set-up is alien. But it is kind of interesting, and doesn't demand much. All Dori has to do is dress in her sluttiest Goodwill get-up, and be This Chick With Lester. Dori likes being invisible, and watching people when they don't know she's looking. She can see in their eyes that Lester's people wonder Who The Hell Is She? Dori finds this really funny, and makes sketches of his creepiest acquaintances on cocktail napkins. At night she puts them in her sketch books and writes dialogue balloons. It's all really good material.

Lester's also very funny, in a way. He's smart, not just hustler-clever but scary-crazy smart, like he's sometimes profound without knowing it or even wanting it. But when he thinks he's being most amusing, is when he's actually the most depressing. It bothers her that he doesn't drink around her; it's a bad sign. He knows almost nothing about art or drawing, he dresses like a jerk, he dances like a trained bear. And she's fallen in love with him and she knows he's going to break her goddamn heart.

Lester has put his novel aside for the moment. Nothing new there; he's been working on it, in hopeless spasms, for ten years. But now juggling this affair takes all he's got.

Lester is terrified that this amazing woman is going to go to pieces on him. He's seen enough of her work now to recognize that she's possessed of some kind of genuine demented genius. He can smell it; the vibe pours off her like Everglades swamp-reek. Even in her frowsy house robe and bunny slippers, hair a mess, no makeup, half-asleep, he can see something there like Dresden china, something fragile and precious. And the world seems like a maelstrom of jungle hate, sinking into entropy or gearing up for Armageddon, and what the hell can anybody do? How can he be happy with her and not be punished for it? How long can they break the rules before the Nova Police show?

But nothing horrible happens to them. They just go on living.

Then Lester blunders into a virulent cloud of Hollywood money. He's written a stupid and utterly commercial screenplay about the laff-a-minute fictional antics of a heavy-metal band, and without warning he gets eighty thousand dollars for it.

He's never had so much money in one piece before. He has, he realizes with dawning horror, sold out.

To mark the occasion Lester buys some freebase, six grams of crystal meth, and rents a big white Cadillac. He fast-talks Dori into joining him for a supernaturally cool Kerouac adventure into the Savage Heart of America, and they get in the car laughing like hyenas and take off for parts unknown.

Four days later they're in Kansas City. Lester's lying in the back seat in a jittery Hank Williams half-doze and Dori is driving. They have nothing left to say, as they've been arguing viciously ever since Albuquerque.

Dori, white-knuckled, sinuses scorched with crack, loses it behind the wheel. Lester's slammed from the back seat and wakes up to find Dori knocked out and drizzling blood from a scalp wound. The Caddy's wrapped messily in the buckled ruins of a sidewalk mailbox.

Lester holds the resultant nightmare together for about two hours, which is long enough to flag down help and get Dori into a Kansas City trauma room.

He sits there, watching over her, convinced he's lost it, blown it; it's over, she'll hate him forever now. My God, she could have died! As soon as she comes to, he'll have to face her. The thought of this makes something buckle inside him. He flees the hospital in headlong panic.

He ends up in a sleazy little rock dive downtown where he jumps onto a table and picks a fight with the bouncer. After he's knocked down for the third time, he gets up screaming for the manager, how he's going to ruin that motherfucker, and the club's owner shows up, tired and red-faced and sweating. The owner, whose own tragedy must go mostly unexpressed here, is a fat white-haired cigar-chewing third-rater who attempted, and failed, to model his life on Elvis's Colonel Parker. He hates kids, he hates rock and roll, he hates the aggravation of smart-ass doped-up hippies screaming threats and pimping off the hard work of businessmen just trying to make a living.

He has Lester hauled to his office backstage and tells him all this. Toward the end, the owner's confused, almost plaintive, because he's never seen anyone as utterly, obviously, and desperately fucked-up as Lester Bangs, but who can still be coherent about it and use phrases like "rendered to the factor of machinehood" while mopping blood from his punched nose.

And Lester, trembling and red-eyed, tells him: fuck you Jack, I could run this jerkoff place, I could do everything you do blind drunk, and make this place a fucking legend in American culture, you booshwah sonofabitch.

Yeah punk if you had the money, the owner says.

I've got the money! Let's see your papers, you evil cracker bastard! In a few minutes Lester is the owner-to-be on a handshake and an earnestcheck.

Next day he brings Dori roses from the hospital shop downstairs. He sits next to the bed; they compare bruises, and Lester explains to her that he has just blown his fortune. They are now tied down and beaten in the corn-shucking heart of America. There is only one possible action left to complete this situation.

Three days later they are married in Kansas City by a justice of the peace.

Needless to say marriage does not solve any of their problems. It's a minor big deal for a while, gets mentioned in rock-mag gossip columns; they get some telegrams from friends, and Dori's mom seems pretty glad about it. They even get a nice note from Julie Burchill, the Marxist Amazon from New Musical Express who has quit the game to write for fashion mags, and her husband Tony Parsons the proverbial "hip young gunslinger" who now writes weird potboiler novels about racetrack gangsters. Tony & Julie seem to be making some kind of a go of it. Kinda inspirational.

For a while Dori calls herself Dori Seda-Bangs, like her good friend Aline Kominsky-Crumb, but after a while she figures what's the use? and just calls herself Dori Bangs which sounds plenty weird enough on its own.

Lester can't say he's really happy or anything, but he's sure busy. He renames the club "Waxy's Travel Lounge," for some reason known only to himself. The club loses money quickly and consistently. After the first month Lester stops playing Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music before sets, and that helps attendance some, but Waxy's is still a club which books a lot of tiny weird college-circuit acts that Albert Average just doesn't get yet. Pretty soon they're broke again and living on Lester's reviews.

They'd be even worse off, except Dori does a series of promo posters for Waxy's that are so amazing that they draw people in, even after they've been burned again and again on weird-ass bands only Lester can listen to.

After a couple of years they're still together, only they have shrieking crockery-throwing fights and once, when he's been drinking, Lester wrenches her arm so badly Dori's truly afraid it's broken. It isn't, luckily, but it's sure no great kick being Mrs Lester Bangs. Dori was always afraid of this: that what he does is work and what she does is cute. How many Great Women Artists are there anyway, and what happened to 'em? They went into patching the wounded ego and picking up the dropped socks of Mr Wonderful, that's what. No big mystery about it.

And besides, she's thirty-six and still barely scraping a living. She pedals her beat-up bike through the awful Kansas weather and sees these yuppies cruise by with these smarmy grins: hey we don't have to invent our lives, our lives are invented for us and boy does that ever save a lot of soul-searching.

But still somehow they blunder along; they have the occasional good break. Like when Lester turns over the club on Wednesdays to some black kids for (eeeh!) "disco nite" and it turns out to be the, beginning of a little Kansas City rap-scratch scene, which actually makes the club some money. And Polyrock, a band Lester hates at first but later champions to global megastardom, cuts a live album in Waxy's.

And Dori gets a contract to do one of those twenty-second animated logos for MTV, and really gets into it. It's fun, so she starts doing video animation work for (fairly) big bucks and even gets a Macintosh II from a video-hack admirer in Silicon Valley. Dori had always loathed feared and despised computers but this thing is different. This is a kind of art that nobody's ever done before and has to be invented from leftovers, sweat and thin air! It's wide open and way rad!

Lester's novel doesn't get anywhere, but he does write a book called A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise which becomes a hip coffee table cult item with an admiring introduction by a trendy French semiotician. Among other things, this book introduces the term "chipster" which describes a kind of person who, well, didn't really exist before Lester described them but once he'd pointed 'em out it was obvious to everybody.

But they're still not happy. They both have a hard time taking the "marital fidelity" notion with anything like seriousness. They have a vicious fight once, over who gave who herpes, and Dori splits for six months and goes back to California. Where she looks up her old girlfriends and finds the survivors married with kids, and her old boyfriends are even seedier and more pathetic than Lester. What the hell, it's not happiness but it's something. She goes back to Lester. He's gratifyingly humble and appreciative for almost six weeks.

Waxy's does in fact become a cultural legend of sorts, but they don't pay you for that; and anyway it's hell to own a bar while attending sessions of Alcoholics Anonymous. So Lester gives in, and sells the club. He and Dori buy a house, which turns out to be far more hassle than it's worth, and then they go to Paris for a while, where they argue bitterly and squander all their remaining money.

When they come back Lester gets, of all the awful things, an academic gig. For a Kansas state college. Lester teaches Rock and Popular Culture. In the '70s there'd have been no room for such a hopeless skidrow weirdo in a, like, Serious Academic Environment, but it's the late '90s by now, and Lester has outlived the era of outlawhood. Because who are we kidding? Rock and Roll is a satellite-driven worldwide information industry which is worth billions and billions, and if they don't study major industries then what the hell are the taxpayers funding colleges for?

Self-destruction is awfully tiring. After a while, they just give it up. They've lost the energy to flame-out, and it hurts too much; besides it's less trouble just to live. They eat balanced meals, go to bed early, and attend faculty parties where Lester argues violently about the parking privileges.

Just after the turn of the century, Lester finally gets his novel published, but it seems quaint and dated now, and gets panned and quickly remaindered. It would be nice to say that Lester's book was rediscovered years later as a Klassic of Litratchur but the truth is that Lester's no novelist; what he is, is a cultural mutant, and what he has in the way of insight and energy has been eaten up. Subsumed by the Beast, man. What he thought and said made some kind of difference, but nowhere near as big a difference as he'd dreamed.

In the year 2015, Lester dies of a heart attack while shoveling snow off his lawn. Dori has him cremated, in one of those plasma flash-cremators that are all the mode in the twenty-first-century undertaking business. There's a nice respectful retrospective on Lester in the New York Times Review of Books but the truth is Lester's pretty much a forgotten man; a colorful footnote for cultural historians who can see the twentieth century with the unflattering advantage of hindsight.

A year after Lester's death they demolish the remnants of Waxy's Travel Lounge to make room for a giant high-rise. Dori goes out to see the ruins. As she wanders among the shockingly staid and unromantic rubble, there's another of those slips in the fabric of Fate, and Dori is approached by a Vision.

Thomas Hardy used to call it the Immanent Will and in China it might have been the Tao, but we late twentieth-century postmoderns would probably call it something soothingly pseudoscientific like the "genetic imperative." Dori, being Dori, recognizes this glowing androgynous figure as The Child They Never Had.

"Don't worry, Mrs Bangs," the Child tells her, "I might have died young of some ghastly disease, or grown up to shoot the President and break your heart, and anyhow you two woulda been no prize as parents." Dori can see herself and Lester in this Child, there's a definite nacreous gleam in its right eye that's Lester's, and the sharp quiet left eye is hers; but behind the eyes where there should be a living breathing human being there's nothing, just kind of chill galactic twinkling.

"And don't feel guilty for outliving him either," the Child tells her, "because you're going to have what we laughingly call a natural death, which means you're going to die in the company of strangers hooked up to tubes when you're old and helpless."

"But did it mean anything?" Dori says.

"If you mean were you Immortal Artists leaving indelible graffiti in the concrete sidewalk of Time, no. You've never walked the earth as gods, you were just people. But it's better to have a real life than no life." The Child shrugs. "You weren't all that happy together, but you did suit each other, and if you'd both married other people instead, there would have been four people unhappy. So here's your consolation: you helped each other."

"So?" Dori says.

"So that's enough. Just to shelter each other, and help each other up. Everything else is gravy. Someday, no matter what, you go down forever. Art can't make you immortal. Art can't Change the World. Art can't even heal your soul. All it can do is maybe ease the pain a bit or make you feel more awake. And that's enough. It only matters as much as it matters, which is zilch to an ice-cold interstellar Cosmic Principle like yours truly. But if you try to live by my standards it will only kill you faster. By your own standards, you did pretty good, really."

"Well okay then," Dori says.

After this purportedly earth-shattering mystical encounter, her life simply went right on, day following day, just like always. Dori gave up computer-art; it was too hairy trying to keep up with the hotshot high-tech cutting edge, and kind of undignified, when you came right down to it. Better to leave that to hungry kids. She was idle for a while, feeling quiet inside, but finally she took up watercolors. For a while Dori played the Crazy Old Lady Artist and was kind of a mainstay of the Kansas regionalist art scene. Granted, Dori was no Georgia O'Keeffe, but she was working, and living, and she touched a few people's lives.

Or, at least, Dori surely would have touched those people, if she'd been there to do it. But of course she wasn't, and didn't. Dori Seda never met Lester Bangs. Two simple real-life acts of human caring, at the proper moment, might have saved them both; but when those moments came, they had no one, not even each other. And so they went down into darkness, like skaters, breaking through the hard bright shiny surface of our true-facts world.

Today I made this white paper dream to cover the holes they left.

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

Michael Swanwick

The day that Donna and Piggy and Russ went to see the Edge of the World was a hot one. They were sitting on the curb by the gas station that noontime, sharing a Coke and watching the big Starlifters lumber up into the air, one by one, out of Toldenarba AFB. The sky rumbled with their passing. There'd been an incident in the Persian Gulf, and half the American forces in the Twilight Emirates were on alert.

"My old man says when the Big One goes up, the base will be the first to go," Piggy said speculatively. "Treaties won't allow us to defend it. One bomber comes in high and whaboom"—he made soft nuclear explosion noises—"it's all gone." He was wearing camouflage pants and a khaki T-shirt with an iron-on reading: KILL 'EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT 'EM OUT. Donna watched as he took off his glasses to polish them on his shirt. His face went slack and vacant, then livened as he put them back on again, as if he were playing with a mask.

"You should be so lucky," Donna said. "Mrs. Khashoggi is still going to want that paper done on Monday morning, Armageddon or not."

"Yeah, can you believe her?" Piggy said. "That weird accent! And all that memorization! Cut me some slack. I mean, who cares whether Ackronnion was part of the Mezentian Dynasty?"

"You ought to care, dipshit," Russ said. "Local history's the only decent class the school's got." Russ was the smartest boy Donna had ever met, never mind the fact that he was flunking out. He had soulful eyes and a radical haircut, short on the sides with a dyed-blond punklock down the back of his neck. "Man, I opened the Excerpts from Epics text that first night, thinking it was going to be the same old bullshit, and I stayed up 'til dawn. Got to school without a wink of sleep, but I'd managed to read every last word. This is one weird part of the world; its history is full of dragons and magic and all kinds of weird monsters. Do you realize that in the eighteenth century three members of the British legation were eaten by demons? That's in the historical record!"

Russ was an enigma to Donna. The first time they'd met, hanging with the misfits at an American School dance, he'd tried to put a hand down her pants, and she'd slugged him good, almost breaking his nose. She could still hear his surprised laughter as blood ran down his chin. They'd been friends ever since. Only there were limits to friendship, and now she was waiting for him to make his move and hoping he'd get down to it before her father was rotated out.

In Japan she'd known a girl who had a taken a razor blade and carved her boyfriend's name in the palm of her hand. How could she do that, Donna had wanted to know? Her friend had shrugged, said, "As long as it gets me noticed." It wasn't until Russ that Donna understood.

"Strange country," Russ said dreamily. "The sky beyond the Edge is supposed to be full of demons and serpents and shit. They say that if you stare into it long enough, you'll go mad."

They all three looked at one another.

"Well, hell," Piggy said. "What are we waiting for?"

The Edge of the World lay beyond the railroad tracks. They bicycled through the American enclave into the old native quarter. The streets were narrow here, the sideyards crammed with broken trucks, rusted-out buses, even yachts up in cradles with staved-in sides. Garage doors were black mouths hissing and spitting welding sparks, throbbing to the hammered sound of worked metal. They hid their bikes in a patch of scrub apricot trees where the railroad crossed the industrial canal and hiked across.

Time had altered the character of the city where it bordered the Edge. Gone were the archers in their towers, vigilant against a threat that never came. Gone were the rose quartz palaces with their thousand windows, not a one of which overlooked the Edge. The battlements where blind musicians once piped up the dawn now survived only in Mrs. Khashoggi's texts. Where they had been was now a drear line of weary factory buildings, their lower windows cinderblocked or bricked up and those beyond reach of vandals' stones painted over in patchwork squares of gray and faded blue.

A steam whistle sounded and lines of factory workers shambled back inside, brown men in chinos and white shirts, Syrian and Lebanese laborers imported to do work no native Toldenarban would touch. A shredded net waved forlornly from a basketball hoop set up by the loading dock.

There was a section of hurricane fence down. They scrambled through.

As they cut across the grounds, a loud whine arose from within the factory building. Down the way another plant lifted its voice in a solid wham-wham-wham as rhythmic and unrelenting as a headache. One by one the factories shook themselves from their midday drowse and went back to work. "Why do they locate these things along the Edge?" Donna asked.

"It's so they can dump their chemical waste over the Edge," Russ explained. "These were all erected before the Emir nationalized the culverts that the Russian Protectorate built."

Behind the factory was a chest-high concrete wall, rough-edged and pebbly with the slow erosion of cement. Weeds grew in clumps at its foot. Beyond was nothing but sky.

Piggy ran ahead and spat over the Edge. "Hey, remember what Nixon said when he came here? It is indeed a long way down. What a guy!"

Donna leaned against the wall. A film of haze tinted the sky gray, intensifying at the focal point to dirty brown, as if a dead spot were burned into the center of her vision. When she looked down, her eyes kept grabbing for ground and finding more sky. There were a few wispy clouds in the distance and nothing more. No serpents coiled in the air. She should have felt disappointed but, really, she hadn't expected better. This was of a piece with all the natural wonders she had ever seen, the waterfalls, geysers and scenic vistas that inevitably included power lines, railings and parking lots absent from the postcards. Russ was staring intently ahead, hawklike, frowning. His jaw worked slightly, and she wondered what he saw.

"Hey, look what I found!" Piggy whooped. "It's a stairway!"

They joined him at the top of an institutional-looking concrete and iron stairway. It zigzagged down the cliff toward an infinitely distant and nonexistent Below, dwindling into hazy blue. Quietly, as if he'd impressed himself, Piggy said, "What do you suppose is down there?"

"Only one way to find out, isn't there?" Russ said.

Russ went first, then Piggy, then Donna, the steps ringing dully under their feet. Graffiti covered the rocks, worn spraypaint letters in yellow and black and red scrawled one over the other and faded by time and weather into mutual unreadability, and on the iron railings, words and arrows and triangles had been markered onto or dug into the paint with knife or nail: JURGEN BIN SCHEISSKOPF. MOTLEY CRUE. DEATH TO SATAN AMERICA IMPERIALIST. Seventeen steps down, the first landing was filthy with broken brown glass, bits of crumbled concrete, cigarette butts, soggy, half-melted cardboard. The stairway folded back on itself and they followed it down.

"You ever had fugu? Piggy asked. Without waiting for an answer, he said, "It's Japanese poisonous blowfish. It has to be prepared very carefully—they license the chefs—and even so, several people die every year. It's considered a great delicacy."

"Nothing tastes that good," Russ said.

"It's not the flavor," Piggy said enthusiastically. "It's the poison. Properly prepared, see, there's a very small amount left in the sashimi and you get a threshold dose. Your lips and the tips of your fingers turn cold. Numb. That's how you know you're having the real thing. That's how you know you're living right on the edge."

"I'm already living on the edge," Russ said. He looked startled when Piggy laughed.

A fat moon floated in the sky, pale as a disk of ice melting in blue water. It bounced after them as they descended, kicking aside loose soda bottles in styrofoam sleeves, crushed Marlboro boxes, a scattering of carbonized spark plugs. On one landing they found a crumpled shopping cart, and Piggy had to muscle it over the railing and watch it fall. "Sure is a lot of crap here," he observed. The landing smelled faintly of urine.

"It'll get better farther down," Russ said. "We're still near the top, where people can come to get drunk after work." He pushed on down. Far to one side they could see the brown flow from the industrial canal where it spilled into space, widening and then slowly dispersing into rainbowed mist, distance glamoring its beauty.

"How far are we planning to go?" Donna asked apprehensively.

"Don't be a weak sister," Piggy sneered. Russ said nothing.

The deeper they went, the shabbier the stairway grew, and the spottier its maintenance. Pipes were missing from the railing. Where patches of paint had fallen away the bolts anchoring the stair to the rock were walnut-sized lumps of rust.

Needle-clawed marsupials chittered warningly from niches in the rock as they passed. Tufts of grass and moth-white gentians grew in the loess-filled cracks.

Hours passed. Donna's feet and calves and the small of her back grew increasingly sore, but she refused to be the one to complain. By degrees she stopped looking over the side and out into the sky, and stared instead at her feet flashing in and out of sight while one hand went slap-grab-tug on the rail. She felt sweaty and miserable.

Back home she had a half-finished paper on the Three Days Incident of March, 1810, when the French Occupation, by order of Napoleon himself, had fired cannonade after cannonade over the Edge into nothingness. They had hoped to make rainstorms of devastating force that would lash and destroy their enemies, and created instead only a gunpowder haze, history's first great failure in weather control. This descent was equally futile, Donna thought, an endless and wearying exercise in nothing. Just the same as the rest of her life. Every time her father was reposted, she had resolved to change, to be somebody different this time around, whatever the price, even if—no, especially if—it meant playacting something she was not. Last year in Germany when she'd gone out with that local boy with the Alfa Romeo and instead of jerking him off had used her mouth, she had thought: Everything's going to be different now. But no.

Nothing ever changed.

"Heads up!" Russ said. "There's some steps missing here!" He leaped, and the landing gonged hollowly under his sneakers. Then again as Piggy jumped after.

Donna hesitated. There were five steps gone and a drop of twenty feet before the stairway cut back beneath itself. The cliff bulged outward here, and if she slipped she'd probably miss the stairs altogether.

She felt the rock draw away from her to either side, and was suddenly aware that she was connected to the world by the merest speck of matter, barely enough to anchor her feet. The sky wrapped itself about her, extending to infinity, depthless and absolute. She could extend her arms and fall into it forever. What would happen to her then, she wondered. Would she die of thirst and starvation, or would the speed of her fall grow so great that the oxygen would be sucked from her lungs, leaving her to strangle in a sea of air? "Come on Donna!" Piggy shouted up at her. "Don't be a pussy!"

"Russ—" she said quaveringly.

But Russ wasn't looking her way. He was frowning downward, anxious to be going. "Don't push the lady," he said. "We can go on by ourselves."

Donna choked with anger and hurt and desperation all at once. She took a deep breath and, heart scudding, leaped. Sky and rock wheeled over her head. For an instant she was floating, falling, totally lost and filled with a panicky awareness that she was about to die. Then she crashed onto the landing. It hurt like hell, and at first she feared she'd pulled an ankle. Piggy grabbed her shoulders and rubbed the side of her head with his knuckles. "I knew you could do it, you wimp."

Donna knocked away his arm. "Okay, wise-ass. How are you expecting to get us back up?"

The smile disappeared from Piggy's face. His mouth opened, closed. His head jerked fearfully upward. An acrobat could leap across, grab the step and flip up without any trouble at all. "I—I mean, I—"

"Don't worry about it," Russ said impatiently. "We'll think of something." He started down again.

It wasn't natural, Donna realized, his attitude. There was something obsessive about his desire to descend the stairway. It was like the time he'd brought his father's revolver to school along with a story about playing Russian roulette that morning before breakfast. "Three times!" he'd said proudly.

He'd had that same crazy look on him, and she hadn't the slightest notion then or now how she could help him.

Russ walked like an automaton, wordlessly, tirelessly, never hurrying up or slowing down. Donna followed in concerned silence, while Piggy scurried between them, chattering like somebody's pet Pekingese. This struck Donna as so apt as to be almost allegorical: the two of them together yet alone, the distance between filled with noise. She thought of this distance, this silence, as the sun passed behind the cliff and the afternoon heat lost its edge.

The stairs changed to cement-jacketed brick with small buttresses cut into the rock. There was a pile of stems and cherry pits on one landing, and the railing above them was white with bird droppings. Piggy leaned over the rail and said, "Hey, I can see seagulls down there. Flying around."

"Where?" Russ leaned over the railing, then said scornfully, "Those are pigeons. The Ghazoddis used to release them for rifle practice."

As Piggy turned to follow Russ down again, Donna caught a glimpse into his eyes, liquid and trembling with helplessness and despair. She'd seen that fear in him only once before, months ago when she'd stopped by his house on the way to school, just after the Emir's assassination.

The living-room windows were draped and the room seemed unnaturally gloomy after being out in the morning sun. Blue television light flickered over shelves of shadowy ceramic figurines: Dresden milkmaids, Chantilly Chinamen, Meissen pug-dogs connected by a gold chain held in their champed jaws, naked Delft nymphs dancing.

Piggy's mother sat in a limp dressing gown, hair unbrushed, watching the funeral. She held a cup of oily-looking coffee in one hand. Donna was surprised to see her up so early. Everyone said that she had a bad problem with alcohol, that even by service wife standards she was out of control.

"Look at them," Piggy's mother said. On the screen were solemn processions of camels and Cadillacs, sheikhs in jellaba, keffigeh and mirrorshades, European dignitaries with wives in tasteful gray Parisian fashions. "They've got their nerve."

"Where did you put my lunch?" Piggy said loudly from the kitchen.

"Making fun of the Kennedys like that!" The Emir's youngest son, no more than four years old, salaamed his father's casket as it passed before him. "That kid's bad enough, but you should see the mother, crying as if her heart were broken. It's enough to turn your stomach. If I were Jackie, I'd—"

Donna and Piggy and Russ had gone bowling the night the Emir was shot. This was out in the ruck of cheap joints that surrounded the base, catering almost exclusively to servicemen. When the Muzak piped through overhead speakers was interrupted for the news bulletin, everyone had stood up and cheered. Up we go, someone had begun singing, and the rest had joined in, into the wild blue yonder… Donna had felt so sick with fear and disgust she had thrown up in the parking lot. "I don't think they're making fun of anyone," Donna said. "They're just—"

"Don't talk to her!" The refrigerator door slammed shut. A cupboard door slammed open.

Piggy's mother smiled bitterly. "This is exactly what you'd expect from these ragheads. Pretending they're white people, deliberately mocking their betters. Filthy brown animals."

"Mother! Where is my fucking lunch?"

She looked at him then, jaw tightening. "Don't you use that kind of language on me, young man."

"All right!" Piggy shouted. "All right, I'm going to school without lunch! Shows how much you care!"

He turned to Donna and in the instant before he grabbed her wrist and dragged her out of the house, Donna could no longer hear the words, could only see that universe of baffled futility haunting Piggy's eyes. That same look she glimpsed today.

The railings were wooden now, half the posts rotting at their bases, with an occasional plank missing, wrenched off and thrown over the side by previous visitors. Donna's knees buckled and she stumbled, almost lurching into the rock. "I have to stop," she said, hating herself for it. "I cannot go one more step."

Piggy immediately collapsed on the landing. Russ hesitated, then climbed up to join them. They three sat staring out into nothing, legs over the Edge, arms clutching the rail.

Piggy found a Pepsi can, logo in flowing Arabic, among the rubble. He held it in his left hand and began sticking holes in it with his butterfly knife, again and again, cackling like a demented sex criminal. "Exterminate the brutes!" he said happily. Then, with absolutely no transition he asked, "How are we ever going to get back up?" so dolorously Donna had to bite back her laughter.

"Look, I just want to go on down a little bit more," Russ said.

"Why?" Piggy sounded petulant.

"So I can get down enough to get away from this garbage." He gestured at the cigarette butts, the broken brown glass, sparser than above but still there. "Just a little further, okay guys?" There was an edge to his voice, and under that the faintest hint of a plea.

Donna felt helpless before those eyes. She wished they were alone, so she could ask him what was wrong.

Donna doubted that Russ himself knew what he expected to find down below. Did he think that if he went down far enough, he'd never have to climb back? She remembered the time in Mr. Herriman's algebra class when a sudden tension in the air had made her glance across the room at Russ, and he was, with great concentration, tearing the pages out of his math text and dropping them one by one on the floor. He'd taken a five-day suspension for that, and Donna had never found out what it was all about. But there was a kind of glorious arrogance to the act; Russ had been born out of time. He really should have been a medieval prince, a Medici or one of the Sabakan pretenders.

"Okay," Donna said, and Piggy of course had to go along.

Seven flights farther down the modern stairs came to an end. The wooden railing of the last short, septambic flight had been torn off entire, and laid across the steps. They had to step carefully between the uprights and the rails. But when they stood at the absolute bottom, they saw that there were stairs beyond the final landing, steps that had been cut into the stone itself. They were curving swaybacked things that millennia of rain and foot traffic had worn so uneven they were almost unpassable.

Piggy groaned. "Man, you can't expect us to go down that thing."

"Nobody's asking you," Russ said.

They descended the old stairway backwards and on all fours. The wind breezed up, hitting them with the force of an expected shove first to one side and then the other. There were times when Donna was so frightened she thought she was going to freeze up and never move again. But at last the stone broadened and became a wide, even ledge, with caves leading back into the rock.

The cliff face here was green-white with lichen, and had in ancient times been laboriously smoothed and carved. Between each cave (their mouths alone left in a natural state, unaltered) were heavy-thighed women—goddesses, perhaps, or demons or sacred dancers—their breasts and faces chipped away by the image-hating followers of the Prophet at a time when Mohammed yet lived. Their hands held loops of vines in which were entangled moons, cycling from new through waxing quarter and gibbous to full and then back through gibbous and waning quarter to dark. Piggy was gasping, his face bright with sweat, but he kept up his blustery front. "What the fuck is all this shit, man?"

"It was a monastery," Russ said. He walked along the ledge dazedly, a wondering half smile on his lips. "I read about this." He stopped at a turquoise automobile door someone had flung over the Edge to be caught and tossed by fluke winds, the only piece of trash that had made it down this far. "Give me a hand."

He and Piggy lifted the door, swung it back and forth three times to build up momentum, then lofted it over the lip of the rock. They all three lay down on their stomachs to watch it fall away, turning end over end and seeming finally to flicker as it dwindled smaller and smaller, still falling. At last it shrank below the threshold of visibility and became one of a number of shifting motes in the downbelow, part of the slow, mazy movement of dead blood cells in the eyes' vitreous humors. Donna turned over on her back, drew her head back from the rim, stared upward. The cliff seemed to be slowly tumbling forward, all the world inexorably, dizzyingly leaning down to crush her.

"Let's go explore the caves," Piggy suggested.

They were empty. The interiors of the caves extended no more than thirty feet into the rock, but they had all been elaborately worked, arched ceilings carved with thousands of faux tesserae, walls adorned with bas-relief pillars. Between the pillars the walls were taken up with long shelves carved into the stone. No artifacts remained, not so much as a potsherd or a splinter of bone. Piggy shone his pocket flash into every shadowy niche. "Somebody's been here before us and taken everything," he said.

"The Historic Registry people, probably." Russ ran a hand over one shelf. It was the perfect depth and height for a line of three-pound coffee cans. "This is where they stowed the skulls. When a monk grew so spiritually developed he no longer needed the crutch of physical existence, his fellows would render the flesh from his bones and enshrine his skull. They poured wax in the sockets, then pushed in opals while it was still warm. They slept beneath the faintly gleaming eyes of their superiors."

When they emerged it was twilight, the first stars appearing from behind a sky fading from blue to purple. Donna looked down on the moon. It was as big as a plate, full and bright. The rilles, dry seas, and mountain chains were preternaturally distinct. Somewhere in the middle was Tranquility Base, where Neil Armstrong had planted the American flag.

"Jeez, it's late," Donna said. "If we don't start home soon, my mom is going to have a cow."

"We still haven't figured a way to get back up," Piggy reminded her. Then, "We'll probably have to stay here. Learn to eat owls and grow crops sideways on the cliff face. Start our own civilization. Our only serious problem is the imbalance of sexes, but even that's not insurmountable." He put an arm around Donna's shoulders, grabbed at her breast. "You'd pull the train for us, wouldn't you, Donna?"

Angrily she pushed him away and said, "You keep a clean mouth! I'm so tired of your juvenile talk and behavior."

"Hey, calm down, it's cool." That panicky look was back in his eyes, the forced knowledge that he was not in control, could never be in control, that there was no such thing as control. He smiled weakly, placatingly.

"No, it is not. It is most emphatically not 'cool.'" Suddenly she was white and shaking with fury. Piggy was a spoiler. His simple presence ruined any chance she might have had to talk with Russ, find out just what was bugging him, get him to finally, really notice her. "I am sick of having to deal with your immaturity, your filthy language, and your crude behavior."

Piggy turned pink and began stuttering.

Russ reached a hand into his pocket, pulled out a chunk of foil-wrapped hash, and a native tin pipe with a carved coral bowl. The kind of thing the local beggar kids sold for twenty-nine cents. "Anybody want to get stoned?" he asked suavely.

"You bastard!" Piggy laughed. "You told me you were out!"

Russ shrugged. "I lied." He lit the pipe carefully, drew in, passed it to Donna. She took it from his fingers, felt how cold they were to her touch, looked up over the pipe and saw his face, thin and ascetic, eyelids closed, pale and Christlike through the blue smoke. She loved him intensely in that instant and wished she could sacrifice herself for his happiness. The pipe's stem was overwarm, almost hot, between her lips. She drew in deep.

The smoke was raspy in her throat, then tight and swirling in her lungs. It shot up into her head, filled it with buzzing harmonics: the air, the sky, the rock behind her back all buzzing, ballooning her skull outward in a visionary rush that forced wide-open first her eyes and then her mouth. She choked and spasmodically coughed. More smoke than she could imagine possibly holding in her lungs gushed out into the universe.

"Hey, watch that pipe!" Piggy snatched it from her distant fingers. They tingled with pinpricks of pain like tiny stars in the darkness of her flesh. "You were spilling the hash!" The evening light was abuzz with energy, the sky swarming up into her eyes. Staring out into the darkening air, the moon rising below her and the stars as close and friendly as those in a children's book illustration, she felt at peace, detached from worldly cares. "Tell us about the monastery, Russ," she said, in the same voice she might have used a decade before to ask her father for a story.

"Yeah, tell us about the monastery, Uncle Russ," Piggy said, but with jeering undertones. Piggy was always sucking up to Russ, but there was tension there too, and his sarcastic little challenges were far from rare. It was classic beta male jealousy, straight out of Primate Psychology 101.

"It's very old," Russ said. "Before the Sufis, before Mohammed, even before the Zoroastrians crossed the gulf, the native mystics would renounce the world and go to live in cliffs on the Edge of the World. They cut the steps down, and once down, they never went back up again."

"How did they eat then?" Piggy asked skeptically.

"They wished their food into existence. No, really! It was all in their creation myth: In the beginning all was Chaos and Desire. The world was brought out of Chaos—by which they meant unformed matter—by Desire, or Will. It gets a little inconsistent after that, because it wasn't really a religion, but more like a system of magic. They believed that the world wasn't complete yet, that for some complicated reason it could never be complete. So there's still traces of the old Chaos lingering just beyond the Edge, and it can be tapped by those who desire it strongly enough, if they have distanced themselves from the things of the world. These mystics used to come down here to meditate against the moon and work miracles.

"This wasn't sophisticated stuff like the Tantric monks in Tibet or anything, remember. It was like a primitive form of animism, a way to force the universe to give you what you wanted. So the holy men would come down here and they'd wish for… like riches, you know? Filigreed silver goblets with rubies, mounds of moonstones, elfinbone daggers sharper than Damascene steel. Only once they got them they weren't supposed to want them. They'd just throw them over the Edge. There were those monasteries all along the cliffs. The farther from the world they were, the more spiritually advanced."

"So what happened to the monks?"

"There was a king—Althazar? I forget his name. He was this real greedhead, started sending his tax collectors down to gather up everything the monks brought into existence. Must've figured, hey, the monks weren't using them. Which as it turned out was like a real major blasphemy, and the monks got pissed. The boss mystics, all the real spiritual heavies, got together for this big confab. Nobody knows how. There's one of the classics claims they could run sideways on the cliff just like it was the ground, but I don't know. Doesn't matter. So one night they all of them, every monk in the world, meditated at the same time. They chanted together, saying, it is not enough that Althazar should die, for he has blasphemed. He must suffer a doom such as has been visited on no man before. He must be unmade, uncreated, reduced to less than has ever been. And they prayed that there be no such king as Althazar, that his life and history be unmade, so that there never had been such king as Althazar.

"And he was no more.

"But so great was their yearning for oblivion that when Althazar ceased to be, his history and family as well, they were left feeling embittered and did not know why. And not knowing why, their hatred turned upon themselves, and their wish for destruction, and they too all of a single night, ceased to be." He fell silent.

At last Piggy said, "You believe that crap?" Then, when there was no answer, "It's none of it true, man! Got that? There's no magic, and there never was." Donna could see that he was really angry, threatened on some primal level by the possibility that someone he respected could even begin to believe in magic. His face got pink, the way it always did when he lost control.

"No, it's all bullshit," Russ said bitterly. "Like everything else."

They passed the pipe around again. Then Donna leaned back, stared straight out, and said, "If I could wish for anything, you know what I'd wish for?"

"Bigger tits?"

She was so weary now, so pleasantly washed out, that it was easy to ignore Piggy. "I'd wish I knew what the situation was."

"What situation?" Piggy asked. Donna was feeling langorous, not at all eager to explain herself, and she waved away the question. But he persisted. "What situation?"

"Any situation. I mean, all the time, I find myself talking with people and I don't know what's really going on. What games they're playing. Why they're acting the way they are. I wish I knew what the situation was."

The moon floated before her, big and fat and round as a griffin's egg, shining with power. She could feel that power washing through her, the background radiation of decayed chaos spread across the sky at a uniform three degrees Kelvin. Even now, spent and respent, a coin fingered and thinned to the worn edge of nonexistence, there was power out there, enough to flatten planets.

Staring out at that great fat boojum snark of a moon, she felt the flow of potential worlds, and within the cold silver disk of that jester's skull, rank with magic, sensed the invisible presence of Russ's primitive monks, men whose minds were nowhere near comprehensible to her, yet vibrated with power, existing as matrices of patterned stress, no more actual than Donald Duck, but no less powerful either. She was caught in a waking fantasy, in which the sky was full of power and all of it accessible to her. Monks sat empty-handed over their wishing bowls, separated from her by the least fictions of time and reality. For an eternal instant all possibilities fanned out to either side, equally valid, no one more real than any other. Then the world turned under her, and her brain shifted back to realtime.

"Me," Piggy said, "I just wish I knew how to get back up the stairs."

They were silent for a moment. Then it occurred to Donna that here was the perfect opportunity to find out what was bugging Russ. If she asked cautiously enough, if the question hit him just right, if she were just plain lucky, he might tell her everything. She cleared her throat. "Russ? What do you wish?"

In the bleakest voice imaginable, Russ said, "I wish I'd never been born."

She turned to ask him why, and he wasn't there.

"Hey," Donna said. "Where'd Russ go?"

Piggy looked at her oddly. "Who's Russ?"

It was a long trip back up. They carried the length of wooden railing between them, and every now and then Piggy said, "Hey, wasn't this a great idea of mine? This'll make a swell ladder."

"Yeah, great," Donna would say, because he got mad when she didn't respond. He got mad, too, whenever she started to cry, but there wasn't anything she could do about that. She couldn't even explain why she was crying, because in all the world—of all his friends, acquaintances, teachers, even his parents—she was the only one who remembered that Russ had ever existed.

The horrible thing was that she had no specific memories of him, only a vague feeling of what his presence had been like, and a lingering sense of longing and frustration.

She no longer even remembered his face.

"Do you want to go first or last?" Piggy had asked her.

When she'd replied, "Last. If I go first, you'll stare at my ass all the way up," he'd actually blushed. Without Russ to show off in front of, Piggy was a completely different person, quiet and not at all abusive. He even kept his language clean. But that didn't help, for just being in his presence was enough to force understanding on her: that his bravado was fueled by his insecurities and aspirations, that he masturbated nightly and with self-loathing, that he despised his parents and longed in vain for the least sign of love from them. That the way he treated her was the sum and total of all of this and more.

She knew exactly what the situation was.

Dear God, she prayed, let it be that I won't have this kind of understanding when I reach the top. Or else make it so that situations won't be so painful up there, that knowledge won't hurt like this, that horrible secrets won't lie under the most innocent word.

They carried their wooden burden upward, back toward the world.

BOOBS

Suzy McKee Charnas

The thing is, it's like your brain wants to go on thinking about the miserable history midterm you have to take tomorrow, but your body takes over. And what a body: you can see in the dark and run like the wind and leap parked cars in a single bound.

Of course, you pay for it next morning (but it's worth it). I always wake up stiff and sore, with dirty hands and feet and face, and I have to jump in the shower fast so Hilda won't see me like that.

Not that she would know what it was about, but why take chances? So I pretend it's the other thing that's bothering me. So she goes, “Come on, sweetie, everybody gets cramps, that's no reason to go around moaning and groaning. What are you doing, trying to get out of school just because you've got your period?"

If I didn't like Hilda, which I do even though she is only a stepmother instead of my real mother, I would show her something that would keep me out of school forever, and it's not fake, either.

But there are plenty of people I'd rather show that to.

I already showed that dork Billy Linden.

“Hey, Boobs!” he goes, in the hall right outside homeroom. A lot of kids laughed, naturally, though Rita Frye called him an asshole.

Billy is the one that started it, sort of, because he always started everything, him with his big mouth. At the beginning of term, he came barreling down on me hollering, “Hey, look at Bornstein, something musta happened to her over the summer! What happened, Bornstein? Hey, everybody, look at Boobs Bornstein!"

He made a grab at my chest, and I socked him in the shoulder, and he punched me in the face, which made me dizzy and shocked and made me cry, too, in front of everybody.

I mean, I always used to wrestle and fight with the boys, being that I was strong for a girl. All of a sudden it was different. He hit me hard, to really hurt, and the shock sort of got me in the pit of my stomach and made me feel nauseous, too, as well as mad and embarrassed to death.

I had to go home with a bloody nose and lie with my head back and ice wrapped in a towel on my face and dripping down into my hair.

Hilda sat on the couch next to me and patted me. She goes, “I'm sorry about this, honey, but really, you have to learn it sometime. You're all growing up and the boys are getting stronger than you'll ever be. If you fight with boys, you're bound to get hurt. You have to find other ways to handle them."

To make things worse, the next morning I started to bleed down there, which Hilda had explained carefully to me a couple of times, so at least I knew what was going on. Hilda really tried extra hard without being icky about it, but I hated when she talked about how it was all part of these exciting changes in my body that are so important and how terrific it is to “become a young woman."

Sure. The whole thing was so messy and disgusting, worse than she said, worse than I could imagine, with these black clots of gunk coming out in a smear of pink blood—I thought I would throw up. That's just the lining of your uterus, Hilda said. Big deal. It was still gross.

And plus, thesmell .

Hilda tried to make me feel better, she really did. She said we should “mark the occasion” like primitive people do, so it's something special, not just a nasty thing that just sort of falls on you.

So we decided to put poor old Pinkie away, my stuffed dog that I've slept with since I was three. Pinkie is bald and sort of hard and lumpy, since he got put in the washing machine by mistake, and you would never know he was all soft plush when he was new, or even that he was pink.

Last time my friend Gerry-Anne came over, before the summer, she saw Pinky laying on my pillow and though she didn't say anything, I could tell she was thinking that was kind of babyish. So I'd been thinking about not keeping Pinky around anymore.

Hilda and I made him this nice box lined with pretty scraps from her quilting class, and I thanked him out loud for being my friend for so many years, and we put him up in the closet, on the top shelf.

I felt terrible, but if Gerry-Anne decided I was too babyish to be friends with anymore, I could end up with no friends at all. When you have never been popular since the time you were skinny and fast and everybody wanted you on their team, you have that kind of thing on your mind.

Hilda and Dad made me go to school the next morning so nobody would think I was scared of Billy Linden (which I was) or that I would let him keep me away just by being such a dork.

Everybody kept sneaking funny looks at me and whispering, and I was sure it was because I couldn't help walking funny with the pad between my legs and because they could smell what was happening, which as far as I knew hadn't happened to anybody else in Eight-A yet. Just like nobody else in the whole grade had anything real in their stupid training bras except me, thanks a lot.

Anyway, I stayed away from everybody as much as I could and wouldn't talk to Gerry-Anne, even, because I was scared she would ask me why I walked funny and smelled bad.

Billy Linden avoided me just like everybody else, except one of his stupid buddies purposely bumped into me so I stumbled into Billy in the lunch-line. Billy turns around and he goes, real loud, “Hey, Boobs, when did you start wearing black and blue makeup?"

I didn't give him the satisfaction of knowing that he had actually broken my nose, which the doctor said. Good thing they don't have to bandage you up for that. Billy would be hollering up a storm about how I had my nose in a sling as well as my boobs.

That night I got up after I was supposed to be asleep and took off my underpants and T-shirt that I sleep in and stood looking at myself in the mirror. I didn't need to turn a light on. The moon was full and it was shining right into my bedroom through the big dormer window.

I crossed my arms and pinched myself hard to sort of punish my body for what it was doing to me.

As if that could make it stop.

No wonder Edie Siler had starved herself to death in the tenth grade: I understood her perfectly. She was trying to keep her body down, keep it normal-looking, thin and strong, like I was too, back when I looked like a person, not a cartoon that somebody would call “Boobs."

And then something warm trickled in a little line down the inside of my leg, and I knew it was blood and I couldn't stand it anymore. I pressed my thighs together and shut my eyes hard, and I did something.

I mean, I felt it happening. I felt myself shrink down to a hard core of sort of cold fire inside my bones, and all the flesh part, the muscles and the squishy insides and the skin, went sort of glowing and free-floating, all shining with moonlight, and I felt a sort of shifting and balance-changing going on.

I thought I was fainting on account of my stupid period. So I turned around and threw myself on my bed, only by the time I hit it, I knew something was seriously wrong.

For one thing, my nose and my head were crammed with these crazy, rich sensations that it took me a second to even figure out were smells; they were so much stronger than any smells I'd ever smelled. And they were—I don't know—interestinginstead of just stinky, even the rotten ones.

I opened my mouth to get the smells a little better, and heard myself panting in a funny way as if I'd been running, which I hadn't, and then there was this long part of my face sticking out and something moving there—my tongue.

I was licking my chops.

Well, there was this moment of complete and utter panic. I tore around the room whining and panting and hearing my toenails clicking on the floorboards, and then I huddled down and crouched in the corner because I was scared Dad and Hilda would hear me and come to find out what was making all this racket.

Because I could hear them. I could hear their bed creak when one of them turned over, and Dad's breath whistling a little in an almost-snore, and I could smell them too, each one with a perfectly clear bunch of smells, kind of like those desserts of mixed ice cream they call a medley.

My body was twitching and jumping with fear and energy, and my room—it's a converted attic-space, wide but with a ceiling that's low in places—my room felt like a jail. And plus, I was terrified of catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I had a pretty good idea of what I would see, and I didn't want to see it.

Besides, I had to pee, and I couldn't face trying to deal with the toilet in the state I was in.

So I eased the bedroom door open with my shoulder and nearly fell down the stairs trying to work them with four legs and thinking about it, instead of letting my body just do it. I put my hands on the front door to open it, but my hands weren't hands, they were paws with long knobby toes covered with fur, and the toes had thick black claws sticking out of the ends of them.

The pit of my stomach sort of exploded with horror, and I yelled. It came out this waverywooo noise that echoed eerily in my skull bones. Upstairs, Hilda goes, “Jack, what was that?” I bolted for the basement as I heard Dad hit the floor of their bedroom.

The basement door slips its latch all the time, so I just shoved it open and down I went, doing better on the stairs this time because I was too scared to think. I spent the rest of the night down there, moaning to myself (which meant whining through my nose, really) and trotting around rubbing against the walls trying to rub off this crazy shape I had, or just moving around because I couldn't sit still. The place was thick with stinks and these slow-swirling currents of hot and cold air. I couldn't handle all the input.

As for having to pee, in the end I managed to sort of hike my butt up over the edge of the slop-sink by Dad's workbench and let go in there. The only problem was that I couldn't turn the taps on to rinse out the smell because of my paws.

Then about 3:00 A.M. I woke up from a doze curled up in a bare place on the floor where the spiders weren't so likely to walk, and I couldn't see a thing or smell anything either, so I knew I was okay again even before I checked and found fingers on my hands instead of claws.

I zipped upstairs and stood under the shower so long that Hilda yelled at me for using up the hot water when she had a load of wash to do that morning. I was only trying to steam some of the stiffness out of my muscles, but I couldn't tell her that.

It was real weird to just dress and go to school after a night like that. One good thing, I had stopped bleeding after only one day, which Hilda said wasn't so strange for the first time. So it had to be the huge greenish bruise on my face from Billy's punch that everybody was staring at.

That and the usual thing, of course. Well, why not?They didn't know I'd spent the night as a wolf.

So Fat Joey grabbed my book bag in the hallway outside science class and tossed it to some kid from Eight-B. I had to run after them to get it back, which of course was set up so the boys could cheer the jouncing of my boobs under my shirt.

I was so mad I almost caught Fat Joey, except I was afraid if I grabbed him, maybe he would sock me like Billy had.

Dad had told me, “Don't let it get you, kid; all boys are jerks at that age."

Hilda had been saying all summer, “Look, it doesn't do any good to walk around all hunched up with your arms crossed; you should just throw your shoulders back and walk like a proud person who's pleased that she's growing up. You're just a little early, that's all, and I bet the other girls are secretly envious of you, with their cute little training bras, for Chrissake, as if there was something that needed to betrained ."

It's okay for her, she's not in school, she doesn't remember what it's like.

So I quit running and walked after Joey until the bell rang, and then I got my book bag back from the bushes outside where he threw it. I was crying a little, and I ducked into the Girls’ Room.

Stacey Buhl was in there doing her lipstick like usual and wouldn't talk to me like usual, but Rita came bustling in and said somebody should off that dumb dork Joey, except, of course, it was really Billy that put him up to it. Like usual.

Rita is okay except she's an outsider herself, being that her kid brother has AIDS, and lots of kids’ parents don't think she should even be in the school. So I don't hang around with her a lot. I've got enough trouble, and anyway, I was late for math.

I had to talk to somebody, though. After school I told Gerry-Anne, who's been my best friend on and off since fourth grade. She was off at the moment, but I found her in the library and I told her I'd had a weird dream about being a wolf. She wants to be a psychiatrist like her mother, so of course she listened.

She told me I was nuts. That was a big help.

That night I made sure the back door wasn't exactly closed, and then I got in bed with no clothes on—imagine turning into a wolf in your underpants and T-shirt—and just shivered, waiting for something to happen.

The moon came up and shone in my window, and I changed again, just like before, which is not one bit like how it is in the movies—all struggling and screaming and bones snapping out with horrible cracking and tearing noises, just the way I guess you would imagine it to be, if you knew it had to be done by building special machines to do that for the camera and make it look real—if you were a special-effects man, instead of a werewolf.

For me, it didn't have to look real, it was real. It was this melting and drifting thing, which I got sort of excited by it this time. I mean, it felt—interesting. Like something I wasdoing , instead of just another dumb body-mess happening to me because some brainless hormones said so.

I must have made a noise. Hilda came upstairs to the door of my bedroom, but luckily she didn't come in. She's tall, and my ceiling is low for her, so she often talks to me from the landing.

Anyway, I'd heard her coming, so I was in my bed with my whole head shoved under my pillow, praying frantically that nothing showed.

I could smell her, it was the wildest thing—her own smell, sort of sweaty but sweet, and then on top of it her perfume, like an ice pick stuck in my nose. I didn't actually hear a word she said, I was too scared, and also, I had this ripply shaking feeling inside me, a high that was only partly terror.

See, I realized all of a sudden, with this big blossom of surprise, that I didn't have to be scared of Hilda, or anybody. I was strong, my wolf-body was strong, and anyhow, one clear look at me and she would drop dead.

What a relief, though, when she went away. I was dying to get out from under the weight of the covers, and besides I had to sneeze. Also I recognized that part of the energy roaring around inside me was hunger.

They went to bed—I heard their voices even in their bedroom, though not exactly what they said, which was fine. The words weren't important anymore, I could tell more from the tone of what they were saying.

Like I knew they were going to do it, and I was right. I could hear them messing around right through the walls, which was also something new, and I have never been so embarrassed in my life. I couldn't even put my hands over my ears because my hands were paws.

So while I was waiting for them to go to sleep, I looked myself over in the big mirror on my closet door.

There was this big wolf head with a long slim muzzle and a thick ruff around my neck. The ruff stood up as I growled and backed up a little.

Which was silly of course, there was no wolf in the bedroom but me. But I was all strung out, I guess, and one wolf, me in my wolf body, was as much as I could handle the idea of, let alone two wolves, me and my reflection.

After that first shock, it was great. I kept turning one way and another for different views.

I was thin, with these long, slender legs but strong, you could see the muscles, and feet a little bigger than I would have picked. But I'll take four big feet over two big boobs any day.

My face was terrific, with jaggedy white ripsaw teeth and eyes that were small and clear and gleaming in the moonlight. The tail was a little bizarre, but I got used to it, and actually it had a nice plumy shape. My shoulders were big and covered with long, glossy-looking fur, and I had this neat coloring, dark on the back and a sort of melting silver on my front and under parts.

The thing was, though, my tongue hanging out. I had a lot of trouble with that, it looked gross and silly at the same time. I mean, that wasmy tongue , about a foot long and neatly draped over the points of my bottom canines. That was when I realized that I didn't have a whole lot of expressions to use, not with that face, which was more like a mask.

But it was alive; it was my face and those were my own long black lips that my tongue licked.

No doubt about it, this wasme . I was a werewolf, like in the movies they showed over Halloween weekend. But it wasn't anything like your ugly movie werewolf that's just some guy loaded up with pounds and pounds of makeup. I wasgorgeous .

I didn't want to just hang around admiring myself in the mirror, though. I couldn't stand being cooped up in that stuffy, smell-crowded room.

When everything settled down and I could hear Dad and Hilda breathing the way they do when they're sleeping, I snuck out.

The dark wasn't very dark to me, and the cold felt sharp like vinegar, but not in a hurting way. Everyplace I went, there were these currents like waves in the air, and I could draw them in through my long wolf nose and roll the smell of them over the back of my tongue. It was like a whole different world, with bright sounds everywhere and rich, strong smells.

And I could run.

I started running because a car came by while I was sniffing at the garbage bags on the curb, and I was really scared of being seen in the headlights. So I took off down the dirt alley between our house and the Morrisons’ next door, and holy cow, I could tear along with hardly a sound, I could jump their picket fence without even thinking about it. My back legs were like steel springs and I came down solid and square on four legs with almost no shock at all, let alone worrying about losing my balance or twisting an ankle.

Man, I could run through that chilly air all thick and moisty with smells, I could almost fly. It was like last year, when I didn't have boobs bouncing and yanking in front even when I'm only walking fast.

Just two rows of neat little bumps down the curve of my belly. I sat down and looked.

I tore open garbage bags to find out about the smells in them, but I didn't eat anything from them. I wasn't about to chow down on other people's stale hotdog-ends and pizza crusts and fat and bones scraped off their plates and all mixed in with mashed potatoes and stuff.

When I found places where dogs had stopped and made their mark, I squatted down and pissed there too, right on top, I just wiped themout .

I bounded across that enormous lawn around the Wanscombe place, and walked up the back and over the top of their BMW, leaving big fat pawprints all over it. Nobody saw me, nobody heard me; I was a shadow.

Well, except for the dogs, of course.

There was a lot of barking when I went by, real hysterics, which at first I was really scared. But then I popped out of an alley up on Ridge Road, where the big houses are, right in front of about six dogs that run together. Their owners let them out all night and don't care if they get hit by a car.

They'd been trotting along with the wind behind them, checking out all the garbage bags set out for pickup the next morning. When they saw me, one of them let out a yelp of surprise, and they all skidded to a stop.

Six of them. I was scared. I growled.

The dogs turned fast, banging into each other in their hurry, and trotted away.

I don't know what they would have done if they met a real wolf, but I was something special, I guess.

I followed them.

They scattered and ran.

Well, I ran too, and this was a different kind of running. I mean, I stretched, and I raced, and there was this joy. I chased one of them.

Zig, zag, this little terrier-kind of dog tried to cut left and dive under the gate of somebody's front walk, all without a sound—he was running too hard to yell, and I was happy running quiet.

Just before he could ooze under the gate, I caught up with him and without thinking I grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him off his feet and gave him a shake as hard as I could, from side to side.

I felt his neck crack, the sound vibrated through all the bones of my face.

I picked him up in my mouth, and it was like he hardly weighed a thing. I trotted away holding him up off the ground, and under a bush in Baker's Park I held him down with my paws and I bit into his belly, which was still warm and quivering.

Like I said, I was hungry.

The blood gave me this rush like you wouldn't believe. I stood there a minute looking around and licking my lips, just sort of panting and tasting the taste because I was stunned by it, it was like eating honey or the best chocolate malt you ever had.

So I put my head down and chomped that little dog, like shoving your face into a pizza and inhaling it. God, I wasstarved , so I didn't mind that the meat was tough and rank-tasting after that first wonderful bite. I even licked blood off the ground after, never mind the grit mixed in.

I ate two more dogs that night, one that was tied up on a clothesline in a cruddy yard full of rusted out car-parts down on the South side, and one fat old yellow dog out snuffling around on his own and way too slow. He tasted pretty bad, and by then I was feeling full, so I left a lot.

I trotted around in the park, shoving the swings with my big black wolf nose, and I found the bench where Mr. Granby sits and feeds the pigeons every day, never mind that nobody else wants the dirty birds around crapping on their cars. I took a dump there, right where he sits.

Then I gave the setting moon a goodnight, which came out quavery and wild,Loo-loo-loo! And I loped toward home, springing off the thick pads of my paws and letting my tongue loll out and feeling generally super.

I slipped inside and trotted upstairs, and in my room I stopped to look at myself in the mirror.

As gorgeous as before, and only a few dabs of blood on me, which I took time to lick off. I did get a little worried—I mean, suppose that was it, suppose having killed and eaten what I'd killed in my wolf shape, I was stuck in this shape forever? Like, if you wander into a fairy castle and eat or drink anything, that's it, you can't ever leave. Suppose when the morning came I didn't change back?

Well, there wasn't much I could do about that one way or the other, and to tell the truth, I felt like I wouldn't mind; it had been worth it.

When I was nice and clean, including licking off my own bottom which seemed like a perfectly normal and nice thing to do at the time, I jumped up on the bed, curled up, and corked right off. When I woke up with the sun in my eyes, there I was, my own self again.

It was very strange, grabbing breakfast and wearing my old sweatshirt that wallowed all over me so I didn't stick out so much, while Hilda yawned and shuffled around in her robe and slippers and acted like her and Dad hadn't been doing it last night, which I knew different.

And plus, it was perfectly clear that she didn't have a clue about whatI had been doing, which gave me a strange feeling.

One of the things about growing up which they're careful not to tell you is, you start having more things you don't talk to your parents about. And I had a doozie.

Hilda goes, “What's the matter, are you off Sugar Pops now? Honestly, Kelsey, I can't keep up with you! And why can't you wear something nicer than that old shirt to school? Oh, I get it: disguise, right?"

She sighed and looked at me kind of sad but smiling, her hands on her hips. “Kelsey, Kelsey,” she goes, “if only I'd had half of what you've got when I was a girl—I was flat as an ironing board, and it made me so miserable, I can't tell you."

She's still real thin and neat-looking, so what does she know about it? But she meant well, and anyhow, I was feeling so good I didn't argue.

I didn't change my shirt, though.

That night I didn't turn into a wolf. I laid there waiting, but though the moon came up, nothing happened no matter how hard I tried, and after a while I went and looked out the window and realized that the moon wasn't really full anymore, it was getting smaller.

I wasn't so much relieved as sorry. I bought a calendar at the school book sale two weeks later, and I checked the full moon nights coming up and waited anxiously to see what would happen.

Meantime, things rolled along as usual. I got a rash of zits on my chin. I would look in the mirror and think about my wolf-face that had beautiful sleek fur instead of zits.

Zits and all I went to Angela Durkin's party, and next day Billy Linden told everybody that I went in one of the bedrooms at Angela's and made out with him, which I did not. But since no grown-ups were home and Fat Joey brought grass to the party, most of the kids were stoned and didn't know who did what or where anyhow.

As a matter of fact, Billy once actually did get a girl in Seven-B high one time out in his parents’ garage, and him and two of his friends did it to her while she was zonked out of her mind, or anyway, they said they did, and she was too embarrassed to say anything one way or the other, and a little while later she changed schools.

How I know about it is the same way everybody else does, which is because Billy was the biggest boaster in the whole school, and you could never tell if he was lying or not.

So I guess it wasn't so surprising that some people believed what Billy said about me. Gerry-Anne quit talking to me after that. Meantime Hilda got pregnant.

This turned into a huge discussion about how Hilda had been worried about her biological clock so she and Dad had decided to have a kid, and I shouldn't mind, it would be fun for me and good preparation for being a mother myself later on, when I found some nice guy and got married.

Sure. Great preparation. Like Mary O'Hare in my class, who gets to change her youngest baby sister's diapers all the time,yick . She jokes about it, but you can tell she really hates it. Now it looked like it was my turn coming up, as usual.

The only thing that made life bearable was my secret.

“You're laid back today,” Devon Brown said to me in the lunchroom one day after Billy had been ‘specially obnoxious, trying to flick rolled-up pieces of bread from his table so they would land on my chest. Devon was sitting with me because he was bad at French, my only good subject, and I was helping him out with some verbs. I guess he wanted to know why I wasn't upset because of Billy picking on me. He goes, “How come?"

“That's a secret,” I said, thinking about what Devon would say if he knew a werewolf was helping him with his French:loup. Manger .

He goes, “What secret?” Devon has freckles and is actually kind of cute-looking.

“Asecret ,” I go, “so I can't tell you, dummy."

He looks real superior and he goes, “Well, it can't be much of a secret because girls can't keep secrets, everybody knows that."

Sure, like that kid Sara in Eight-B who it turned out her own father had been molesting her for years, but she never told anybody until some psychologist caught on from some tests we all had to take in seventh grade. Up till then, Sara kept her secret fine.

And I kept mine, marking off the days on the calendar. The only part I didn't look forward to was having a period again, which last time came right before the change.

When the time came, I got crampy and more zits popped out on my face, but I didn't have a period.

I changed, though.

The next morning they were talking in school about a couple of prize miniature schnauzers at the Wanscombes that had been hauled out of their yard by somebody and killed, and almost nothing left of them.

Well, my stomach turned a little when I heard some kids describing what Mr. Wanscombe had found over in Baker's Park, “the remains,” as people said. I felt a little guilty, too, because Mrs. Wanscombe had really loved those little dogs, which somehow I didn't think about at all when I was a wolf the night before, trotting around hungry in the moonlight.

I knew those schnauzers personally, so I was sorry, even if they were irritating little mutts that made a lot of noise.

But heck, the Wanscombes shouldn't have left them out all night in the cold. Anyhow, they were rich; they could buy new ones if they wanted.

Still and all, though—I mean, dogs are just dumb animals. If they're mean, it's because they're wired that way or somebody made them mean, they can't help it. They can't just decide to be nice, like a person can. And plus, they don't taste so great, I think because they put so much junk in commercial dog-foods—anti-worm medicine and ashes and ground-up fish, stuff like that.Ick.

In fact, after the second schnauzer I had felt sort of sick and I didn't sleep real well that night. So I was not in a great mood to start with; and that was the day that my new brassiere disappeared while I was in gym. Later on I got passed a note telling me where to find it: stapled to the bulletin board outside the Principal's office, where everybody could see that I was trying a bra with an underwire.

Naturally, it had to be Stacey Buhl that grabbed my bra while I was changing for gym and my back was turned, since she was now hanging out with Billy and his friends.

Billy went around all day making bets at the top of his lungs on how soon I would be wearing a D-cup.

Stacey didn't matter, she was just a jerk. Billy mattered. He had wrecked me in that school forever, with his nasty mind and his big, fat mouth. I was past crying or fighting and getting punched out. I was boiling, I had had enough crap from him, and I had an idea.

I followed Billy home and waited on his porch until his mom came home and she made him come down and talk to me. He stood in the doorway and talked through the screen door, eating a banana and lounging around like he didn't have a care in the world.

So he goes, “Whatcha want, Boobs?"

I stammered a lot, being I was so nervous about telling such big lies, but that probably made me sound more believable.

I told him that I would make a deal with him: I would meet him that night in Baker's Park, late, and take off my shirt and bra and let him do whatever he wanted with my boobs if that would satisfy his curiosity and he would find somebody else to pick on and leave me alone.

“What?” he said, staring at my chest with his mouth open. His voice squeaked and he was practically drooling on the floor. He couldn't believe his good luck.

I said the same thing over again.

He almost came out onto the porch to try it right then and there. “Well, shit,” he goes, lowering his voice a lot, “why didn't you say something before? You really mean it?"

I go, “Sure,” though I couldn't look at him.

After a minute he goes, “Okay, it's a deal. Listen, Kelsey, if you like it, can we, uh, do it again, you know?"

I go, “Sure. But Billy, one thing: this is a secret, between just you and me. If you tell anybody, if there's one other person hanging around out there tonight—"

“Oh no,” he goes, real fast, “I won't say a thing to anybody, honest. Not a word, I promise!"

Not until afterward, of course, was what he meant, which if there was one thing Billy Linden couldn't do, it was to keep quiet if he knew something bad about another person.

“You're gonna like it, I know you are,” he goes, speaking strictly for himself, as usual. “Jeez. I can't believe this!"

But he did, the dork.

I couldn't eat much for dinner that night, I was too excited, and I went upstairs early to do homework, I told Dad and Hilda.

Then I waited for the moon, and when it came, I changed.

Billy was in the park. I caught a whiff of him, very sweaty and excited, but I stayed cool. I snuck around for a while, as quiet as I could—which wasreal quiet—making sure none of his stupid friends were lurking around. I mean, I wouldn't have trusted just his promise for a million dollars.

I passed up half a hamburger lying in the gutter where somebody had parked for lunch and ate in their car next to Baker's Park. My mouth watered, but I didn't want to spoil my appetite. I was hungry and happy, sort of singing inside my own head, “Shoo, fly, pie, and an apple-pan-dowdie..."

Without any sound, of course.

Billy had been sitting on a bench, his hands in his pockets, twisting around to look this way and that way, watching for me—for my human self—to come join him. He had a jacket on, being it was very chilly out.

Which he didn't stop to think that maybe a sane person wouldn't be crazy enough to sit out there and take off her top leaving her naked skin bare to the breeze. But that was Billy all right, totally fixed on his own greedy self and without a single thought for somebody else. I bet all he could think about was what a great scam this was, to feel up old Boobs in the park and then crow about it all over school.

Now he was walking around the park, kicking at the sprinkler-heads and glancing up every once in a while, frowning and looking sulky.

I could see he was starting to think that I might stand him up. Maybe he even suspected that old Boobs was lurking around watching him and laughing to herself because he had fallen for a trick. Maybe old Boobs had even brought some kids from school with her to see what a jerk he was.

Actually, that would have been pretty good, except Billy probably would have broken my nose for me again, or worse, if I'd tried it.

“Kelsey?” he goes, sounding mad.

I didn't want him stomping off home in a huff. I moved up closer, and I let the bushes swish a little around my shoulders.

He goes, “Hey, Kelse, it's late, where've you been?"

I listened to the words, but mostly I listened to the little thread of worry flickering in his voice, low and high, high and low, as he tried to figure out what was going on.

I let out the whisper of a growl.

He stood real still, staring at the bushes, and he goes, “That you, Kelse? Answer me."

I was wild inside, I couldn't wait another second. I tore through the bushes and leaped for him, flying.

He stumbled backward with a squawk—"What!"—jerking his hands up in front of his face, and he was just sucking in a big breath to yell with when I hit him like a demo-derby truck.

I jammed my nose past his feeble claws and chomped down hard on his face.

No sound came out of him except this wet, thick gurgle, which I could more taste than hear because the sound came right into my mouth with the gush of his blood and the hot mess of meat and skin that I tore away and swallowed.

He thrashed around, hitting at me, but I hardly felt anything through my fur. I mean, he wasn't so big and strong laying there on the ground with me straddling him all lean and wiry with wolf-muscle. And plus, he was in shock. I got a strong whiff from below as he let go of everything right into his pants.

Dogs were barking, but so many people around Baker's Park have dogs to keep out burglars, and the dogs make such a racket all the time that nobody pays any attention. I wasn't worried. Anyway, I was too busy to care.

I nosed in under what was left of Billy's jaw and I bit his throat out.

Nowlet him go around telling lies about people.

His clothes were a lot of trouble and I really missed having hands. I managed to drag his shirt out of his belt with my teeth, though, and it was easy to tear his belly open. Pretty messy, but once I got in there, it was better than Thanksgiving dinner. Who would think that somebody as horrible as Billy Linden could taste sogood ?

He was barely moving by then, and I quit thinking about him as Billy Linden anymore. I quit thinking at all, I just pushed my head in and pulled out delicious steaming chunks and ate until I was picking at tidbits, and everything was getting cold.

On the way home I saw a police car cruising the neighborhood the way they do sometimes. I hid in the shadows and, of course, they never saw me.

There was a lot of washing up to do in the morning, and when Hilda saw my sheets she shook her head and she goes, “You should be more careful about keeping track of your period so as not to get caught by surprise."

Everybody in school knew something had happened to Billy Linden, but it wasn't until the day after that that they got the word. Kids stood around in little huddles trading rumors about how some wild animal had chewed Billy up. I would walk up and listen in and add a really gross remark or two, like part of the game of thrilling each other green and nauseous with made-up details to see who would upchuck first.

Not me, that's for sure. I mean, when somebody went on about how Billy's whole head was gnawed down to the skull and they didn't even know who he was except from the bus pass in his wallet, I got a little urpy. It's amazing the things people will dream up. But when I thought about what I had actually done to Billy, I had to smile.

It felt totally wonderful to walk through the halls without having anybody yelling, “Hey, Boobs!"

There are people who just plain do not deserve to live. And the same goes for Fat Joey, if he doesn't quit crowding me in science lab, trying to get a feel.

One funny thing, though, I don't get periods at all anymore. I get a little crampy, and my breasts get sore, and I break out more than usual—and then instead of bleeding, I change.

Which is fine with me, though I take a lot more care now about how I hunt on my wolf nights. I stay away from Baker's Park. The suburbs go on for miles and miles, and there are lots of places I can hunt and still get home by morning. A running wolf can cover a lot of ground.

And I make sure I make my kills where I can eat in private, so no cop car can catch me unawares, which could easily have happened that night when I killed Billy, I was so deep into the eating thing that first time. I look around a lot more now when I'm eating a kill; I keep watch.

Good thing it's only once a month that this happens, and only a couple of nights. “The Full Moon Killer” has the whole state up in arms and terrified as it is.

Eventually, I guess I'll have to go somewhere else, which I'm not looking forward to at all. If I can just last until I can have a car of my own, life will get a lot easier.

Meantime, some wolf nights I don't even feel like hunting. Mostly I'm not as hungry as I was those first times. I think I must have been storing up my appetite for a long time. Sometimes I just prowl around and I run, boy do I run.

If I am hungry, sometimes I eat garbage instead of killing somebody. It's no fun, but you do get a taste for it. I don't mind garbage as long as once in a while I can have the real thing fresh-killed, nice and wet. People can be awfully nasty, but they sure taste sweet.

I do pick and choose, though. I look for people sneaking around in the middle of the night, like Billy, waiting in the park that time. I figure they've got to be out looking for trouble at that hour, so whose fault is it if they find it? I have done a lot more for the burglary problem around Baker's Park than a hundred dumb “watchdogs,” believe me.

Gerry-Anne is not only talking to me again, she has invited me to go on a double-date with her. Some guy she met at a party invited her, and he has a friend. They're both from Fawcett Junior High across town, which will be a change. I was nervous, but finally I said yes. We're going to the movies next weekend. My first real date! I am still pretty nervous, to tell the truth.

For New Years, I have made two solemn vows.

One is that on this date I will not worry about my chest, I will not be self-conscious, even if the guy stares.

The other is, I'll never eat another dog.

THE UTILITY MAN

Robert Reed

MOST PEOPLE stand up front and wait for the horn. It's Monday morning. Faces are long and tired, voices hoarse, and red eyes squint and water from too little of this. Too much of that. It's like any Monday, except for two things. First, Miller is up front with the others. That's unusual. For the last three years, without exception, he's punched in and gone to the back of the plant. He's got his stuff back there, and he reads until the horn goes off. Books. It's always books with Miller. Except today, that is. He's sitting on a heavy worktable and staring at the door, his expression eager and strange. The second oddity is visible from where he's sitting. Out on the parking lot, on the dirty white gravel, waits a camera crew from the town's only TV station. The new employee is coming this morning. But what's the big fucking deal? some wonder. There's already a couple, three of them working in town. Right? It's been what? Two years since that big spiderweb of metal and glass pulled into orbit, and they came out. The aliens. Those toothless things from Tau Ceti. There's several million of them inside the starship, right? Miller would know how many. He's got a thing about the aliens. A couple of people consider asking Miller some questions, giving him the chance to talk about what he knows. Only that's dangerous. He might not shut up. God, they think, look at him. He looks like a kid at Christmas. All eager and ready. They think, So what the fuck if the government's giving us an alien? A lot of businesses are getting them. Some sort of get-to-know-each-other nonsense, right? It's been on TV from the first, and everyone understands the basics of the thing. And nobody wants to get excited like Miller. No, they know better. All the good these aliens are supposed to do for people, people everywhere, but they want to wait and see. To keep a rein on things. Pretend it's any Monday, they tell themselves. Ignore Miller and just wait for the damned horn.

The horn screams. Miller jerks and looks at the clock; then he turns, reluctant and slow, and hopes against hope that he can work up front today. Up where he can watch for the Cetian.

Only the foreman comes over to him. He's a tall, beefy man with a fringe of dirty-blond hair, and he tells Miller that so-and-so is gone and he's got to be on the line for now. With Jacob. "Sure," says Miller. "Okay." He's the utility man. He plugs holes during vacations and drunks and whatnot. He's worked here for three years, ever since he last quit school, and he does every job in the plant without complaints. Without lapses. Miller is a small man, young-looking but with lines starting to show on his face. Around his eyes and mouth. He has the kind of face that moves from adolescence into middle age without once looking thirty; and his expressions tend to compound the illusion of youth. Dreamy. Distracted. A little lost, perhaps.

He's a prideful sort of fellow. The pride shows whenever he smiles and shakes his head at this or that.

People don't like Miller. As a rule.

It isn't any one thing. There are others in the plant with smug attitudes. And others who keep to themselves in their free time. A couple people even have college degrees. (Miller doesn't. But he's close in three different majors.) Yet nobody puts together these traits quite like he does. The book reading, the know-it-all voice. And besides, Miller is a prude. An incredible prude. He's not married, but he doesn't talk like any normal bachelor. Off-color jokes and conquest stories embarrass him. Nor does he drink or smoke weed. People have learned to tease him about these things. It's something of a game to them. They like to make him red-faced and crazy, seeing how far they can push him. For the fun of it. "You get any last night, Miller? Huh?" He hates that talk. "Come with us at lunch, Miller. Get high. What do you say, huh? Come down from that pulpit, and let's have some fun."

Fun. They call that fun, thinks Miller. Imagine!

It's the worst thing about working here—listening to the harsh, frank chatter about pussy and dope. Miller's outside life is nobody else's business, he figures. He guards his privacy every moment. Every day. That's one of his prides. He has strict, solid values, and he won't make compromises. Never. After all, he tells himself, he's not part of this place. He doesn't really belong here, and he has no intention of letting this place rub off on him. Or wound him. Not even when he goes to the toilet and reads what people have written on the walls — the Fag Professor and Virgin Miller and the rest of it. He tells himself to ignore it. He won't stoop to their garbage. Sure, he gets angry. Furious, even. But the pay here is good, and he can read while he works. At least sometimes. And most of the time, most days, they leave him alone. Which is fine.

They don't matter, after all.

He's going to make something of his life. Absolutely. He's told them that in a hundred different ways, a thousand times. Just as soon as he saves enough money, he's quitting this dump and heading back to school.

The alien arrives a few minutes after eight, delayed by who-knows-what. He's probably driving his own car, Miller knows. Something suitable. A used car purchased at one of the local lots. Something a factory worker would buy for a thousand dollars, worn tires and dripping oil but otherwise sound.

That's the way they operate.

The Cetians are coming to work and live among human beings, doing their surveying firsthand. That's what this is all about. The Cetians have a master plan, and they've explained it to all the world's nations. From the United States to Chad. They are here to dispense knowledge. An ancient race, they are wise beyond human understanding. Their technologies are eerie, almost magical, and some of them will be turned over in time. Their stardrive, for instance. And their closed ecosystems. Metallurgy. Architecture. And so on. But first they need to learn about the human species. All its facets, weaknesses and strengths. They've done this kind of thing with other alien races. Miller has read every official account. The Cetians are masters of this business. By studying a species from the inside out, they can dispense their gifts without fear of causing massive disruptions. Indeed, thinks Miller, they'll come to understand people better than people do. Maybe that'll be their greatest gift, he tells himself. And he smiles. They'll teach us about ourselves, he thinks. They're going to show us the way to peace and happiness.

Miller has studied the Cetians since their arrival —their starship a glittering webwork rushing from deep space. "They're millions of years older than us," he mutters. He's working across the table from a small pudgy black man. Jacob. "They're part of the great galactic community," he says to himself. "Hundreds of thousands of worlds…"

"What's that?" asks Jacob. "What're you mumbling?"

Miller blinks and says, "Nothing." He looks at Jacob for an instant. Then there's motion in the aisle, and he turns his head and sees a cameraman walking backward, a spotlight perched on a pole rising over his head. The alien is nearby. The emissary from the stars. Miller feels a tightness in his throat. He's full of emotion. This won't be the first Cetian he has seen, not hardly; but still and all, he can barely contain himself.

"Hey, Einstein," shouts Jacob. "Get that up here. Here!" A wooden frame is on the end of the belt, only partway up on the big tabletop. Miller sighs and does what he has to do. Doesn't Jacob see what's happening? Who understands besides him? Sometimes he feels ashamed by everyone's lack of enthusiasm. By their sheer indifference. He wonders why any alien race, saintly or not, would waste precious time in trying to educate mankind. The Earth doesn't deserve the attention, he believes. It has too little imagination, too much stupidity, and he feels like shouting his opinions for the passing camera. Let everyone hear the truth…

"Would ya fucking watch what you're fucking doing?"

Miller blinks and apologizes. He pushes the frame into position and Jacob uses an air gun, pounding long staples into the pine with a slick liquid motion. Jacob is famous for his thoroughness. His efficiency. He takes the frame and pushes it onto the next belt, and the next frame is already here and waiting. The alien is coming down the aisle, but Miller doesn't have time for more than a quick glance or two. He notices the human shape with the milky white skin —skin that can change into gray or black or even become clear. At will. They're beautiful, he knows. Remarkable entities. No real teeth, but a complex gizzard in place of enamel. No hair, but wearing thoroughly human clothes and not looking the least bit silly. This Cetian has faded jeans and a pale blue work shirt, plus running shoes. Miller glances again. He sees a cap riding the smooth hairless head, its brim tilted up and some seed company's emblem riding above the brim. Very natural. Very right. If it wasn't for the cameras and the crowd, he thinks, the figure might be anyone. It's a little bit unnerving to see how easily the Cetian fits in.

Half of the front office is helping to give a tour of the plant. For the camera. They're the ones who look misplaced, what with their suits and ties and polished leather shoes. Miller has to concentrate on his job; he can't watch the group as it moves, lingers, then moves again. He's talking to the Cetian whenever he can. In his head. And the imaginary alien asks him how he came to be here. A person of his interests, of his training, seems wasted in this place. I needed the money, Miller explains. It's just the way things fell together, you know? But the alien doesn't understand, no. So Miller, speaking inside his head, tells half of his life story. It doesn't answer everything, but he tells it with all the vigor he can muster. As if he's practicing for later. For the conversations to come.

The imaginary Cetian smiles in his peculiar fashion —the beaklike lips parting and the violet tongue showing against the roof of his mouth. Then he compliments Miller in glowing terms, telling him that he's bright and articulate, and so on. A good thing I found you, the Cetian declares. I thought I might be lonely while I'm here. And bored. But now I've got you for a friend… a soul mate…

"Hey! You alive, Miller?"

Miller is behind again. He apologizes to Jacob and lifts the next frame, making dead certain that it's properly aligned.

And the next one, too.

And the next.

People from the office begin to file past them, and the news-people. Their jobs are done. Smiles and amiable chatter mean everything has gone well. Miller concentrates on his job. Eventually, the foreman wanders past. He's alone, smoking and looking generally pissed at the world. Miller remembers how last week, hearing that they were getting a Cetian, the foreman had moaned something about not wanting or needing one of those goddamn chameleons. Fuck gifts from the stars and all that shit. He had a business to run. Product to get out. If he couldn't fucking hire who he wanted, then screw all the suits and their goddamn offices, too—

Miller stands on his toes for a moment, looking down the line.

The Cetian is standing at the line's end. In the plant's hierarchy, that's one of the worst jobs. The Cetian and a scruffy man are pulling the finished frames from the belt and stacking them on pallets. But what else are they doing? he wonders. Talking? The scruffy man is a drunk, Miller knows. He didn't get past ninth grade, and he's been to prison how many times? For stupid crimes. For drugs. He's probably still stoned, Miller realizes. Red-eyed and wobbly. Yet the Cetian is talking to him, and he's answering. They're having a conversation — ?

There comes a sudden wood-splitting crash.

"Goddamn you!" shouts Jacob. He aims the air gun at Miller's chest. "Pull your head out of your ass, Professor. The chameleon will keep, for God's sake! So let's get busy. What do you say? Huh?"

There's a horn for the morning break—fifteen minutes of rest, minus walking time. Most people go back up front, up to where the vending machines are stacked along the concrete walls. They settle down to play cards and nap on the golden stacks of lumber. And there's the talk, the constant talk, about tits and asses and blow and beer.

Normally Miller goes the other way. He has a corner, quiet and out of the way, where he keeps his lunch and books and a comfortable seat he made for himself out of scrap lumber. Sometimes when he's reading he finds a sentence or a little paragraph that he likes, and he uses a marking pen to copy it on the concrete walls. For future reference. Today, hearing the break horn, Miller's first thought is that the Cetian might wander back to his corner and pause, reading some of the carefully written wisdoms. Yes? They're from great novels and classic works of science —the crowns of human achievement. It's such a wonderful image, the Cetian and him meeting in that corner. So wonderful that Miller almost expects it to happen. He's got it all planned.

Except the Cetian doesn't know the plan. He comes forward with the general flow of bodies. It's unnerving to watch him. He seems to carry himself like any new employee. There's a tentativeness, a calculated caution in the eyes —flat and square, in this case, with tiny triangular pupils the color of new snow —and the caution extends to everyone around him. Maybe these people are scared, thinks Miller. I'm not scared, he tells himself. This is an opportunity, rare and remarkable. Miller feels singularly suited to act as a bridge between the two sides. A rush of adrenaline pours through him. He climbs under the belt and joins the flow of bodies, and it's all he can do to keep from jogging after the Cetian and calling to him. Like some long lost friend.

They're amazing, really. These aliens.

In Asia, Cetians dress in peasant clothes and enormous straw hats, bending over and shuffling through the flooded rice paddies. In Australia, in the dusty outback, they drive little 4x4 pickups while they do simple ranch work like abos do. In Europe, odd as it sounds, Cetians are among the protestors marching against imperialism and environmental decay; and they're also the police wearing riot gear and standing in rows, defending order and the state.

These ironies are abundant and somehow comforting.

There is a sense of utter fairness in the process.

Cetians will undergo almost anything to learn about mankind firsthand—some even dying—and Miller has to wonder how many of his coworkers appreciate their earnestness, their good intentions. He doubts any of them do. Probably not one, he thinks.

It must be lonely, dull work for them.

Miller knows.

A Cetian would welcome a friend, sure. Someone who appreciates the age and depth of the Cetian culture. Miller sees the odd white figure sitting alone on a lumber stack, the square eyes watching a cluster of men playing poker on a little table. Miller breathes and sits on the same stack, not too close but near enough that they could talk. If they want. He glances at the odd eyes and the white, white skin. What should I say? he wonders. Why am I so nervous? I shouldn't be nervous, he tells himself. His hands shake in his lap. A couple of poker players glance up at him and smile, then they mutter something rude. No doubt. Again Miller breathes, finding a quick courage. "Hello?" He sees all of the Cetian face, blank and so strange. He offers his name and smiles, extending one of his nervous hands.

The square eyes blink in slow motion. "I'm Rozz," says the Cetian, the voice deep and liquid and amazingly human. One of Rozz's four-fingered hands grabs Miller's hand, squeezing and feeling like plastic. It's smooth and cool and tough. Like plastic. Or maybe Teflon.

"Hey," says Miller, "it's great you're here. I mean it. Everywhere, I mean." He feels clumsy, his mouth spitting words at random. "I just really think it's neat."

Rozz blinks again, no expression to be read.

Miller hears a poker player laughing. Maybe at him. He gulps and tells the Cetian, "This isn't much to look at, I know," and then he glances about, his own face critical but tolerant. "Did they show you everything? I mean, do you have questions? Because I might answer them. I mean, I've been here quite a while." He feels giddy now. He tells himself that he's doing too much, he wants too much, but all he can do is listen to his own prattle. "Years," he says. "I mean, if you want to get a feel for this place and all—"

The poker table erupts in laughter. Miller jerks, not having heard what was said but imagining several things. Something tasteless and pointed at him, no doubt. Then he looks at Rozz, ready to deny anything. The Cetian is now focused on the little table—raw pine scraps stapled together—and the hunched-over bodies with cigarettes in their laughing mouths and the cards tight in their hands. Maybe fifty cents in nickels and dimes are in the middle. Everyone is looking at the alien. The laughter diminishes. Something wary and alert comes into their faces. For a long moment, nothing happens. Then Rozz says with a slow, precise voice:

"Five-card draw."

A couple players blink as if surprised. Someone asks, "You know it? The game?"

Rozz lifts a hand, flattens it, and wiggles it in the air. "A little bit," he seems to imply. "I'm not so good," he says aloud. "But I can play."

The men look at one another, not sure what to make of things. It's the foreman, sitting with his back to Rozz, who announces, "This is an open game, I guess. Anyone who wants to join, joins."

Rozz drops off the stack, leaving Miller without a good-bye glance. One of the players moves aside, giving up most of a long bench, and Rozz sits and watches a new hand being laid out. No one looks comfortable. They're judging him, thinks Miller. This is some test. Rozz picks up the five cards and finds a nickel in his front pocket, putting it into the new pot. Then he draws three cards, adds a second nickel, and loses with a pair of tens. The game couldn't be any quieter. They play again, a couple more hands, and everyone is sneaking looks at the hard plasticlike skin, at the square eyes, at the beaked and toothless mouth. Rozz pays no attention to them, and Miller stays on the stack, still marveling. An ancient race that has traveled around the galaxy, to countless wonderful places, and yet their representative has the charity and poise to sit with a backward race. A hard and graceless race. Us.

At one point, his voice cracking, Miller asks, "How's it going, Rozz? How are we doing?"

Rozz looks at him, maybe smiling. "Not too fucking bad," he declares. "Not bad at all." And he lays down the winning hand, grinning in a very human fashion, sweeping in the nickels while the other players stare, almost laughing, a few of them nodding as if they've seen something and it's something they might like.

Through the rest of the morning, Miller writes little notes on the golden wood of the frames. He uses a black marker. The frames are going to be painted, so there's no damage done. Then the belt carries them and his notes on down the line, straight to Rozz.

"The Cetian Earth," he scribbles, "is tropical and wet and covered with lemon-colored vegetation." He hopes Rozz will be impressed with his interest. "Its largest creature is a fish-analog, one hundred tons, semi-intelligent and peaceful and worshiped by the ancient Cetians." He has to write quickly, trying Jacob's patience. He wants Rozz to respond somehow, but he can't even tell if his new friend is reading the notes. "Cetian starships are powered by matter-antimatter engines, both fuels derived from the interstellar medium." The message is broken up on several frames. Still no response. No wave or smile. Nothing. "I'm interested in you," he writes finally. "And I admire your culture."

This time Rozz looks down the line and nods. Once.

Miller is excited. He looks at his watch, thinking hard. It's close to noon. "Eat with me?" he writes. "Miller." Then he waits, watching the frame travel to the end. To him.

But the Cetian doesn't respond. He seems to read it, yes, but then there's the horn and he's walking down the aisle, down past Miller and gone. Jacob wants to finish the frame on the table. Maybe Rozz didn't understand? thinks Miller. Maybe I should have told him where? Still optimistic, he hurries back to his corner and gets a certain book —a recently published guide to Cetian myths and legends —plus his lunch pail. But when he's up front, trotting toward the time clock, he discovers the Cetian sitting snugly between the foreman and another one of the poker players.

Disappointment starts to nag at him.

He punches out and returns. The three figures are sharing a stack of lumber. The humans eat from pails — sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and sweating pop cans within easy reach. Rozz has a crumpled grocery sack behind him and a cellophane bag of unshelled, unsalted peanuts in one hand. No one is talking, but the humans watch the peanuts being flipped up into the mouth two at a time. Rozz doesn't chew; he only swallows. His pace is amazing. The foreman shakes his head and smiles. Miller settles at the poker table, barely hungry but pretending to chew on his sandwich. While he watches.

He feels cheated.

Coming here this morning, he had expectations. They'd been building since last week's announcement. It was the prospect of a friend— someone he could respect, and converse with, and learn from. Not another sweatshop goon full of harsh talk and ugly humor. But someone of culture, of learning. Someone who had been to odd and wondrous places beyond human reach. Someone he could share breaks with, and lunchtime, the two of them talking and talking and talking—

Miller bristles, thinking he might have been wrong.

He sets down his lunch-meat sandwich, his stomach churning and his breath tasting foul. The foreman asks Rozz, "So how do you do it?" and Miller waits. "Like I've seen on TV—?"

"A gizzard," Rozz answers, his tone matter-of-fact. Patient. "You know, like a chicken's gizzard? It's lined with rocks that grind up the shells, and I shit out what my body can't use."

"Huh," says the foreman. "Huh!"

"Do you want to see it?"

"What? Your gizzard?" The foreman halfway shudders, surprised.

"You've seen 'em, Pete," says the other man. "They do it on TV."

Rozz unbuttons the blue cotton shirt, exposing the white chest with its narrow, widely spaced ribs. Maybe he's smiling. Miller shifts on the hard wooden seat and watches, his thoughts jumbled. A look of utter calm comes into Rozz's face, and the whiteness weakens like milk being flooded with water. A large yellow heart, six chambers and a tangle of thick arteries and veins, is set within the long pale ribs. The gizzard is the darker bundle of round muscle beneath the heart. Miller recognizes it from all the science articles. He feels an urge to stand and point out organs, lecturing. "This is where the peanuts are now." But Rozz himself points, telling them the same thing. Then, as if to display his talents, the gizzard contracts with a sudden violence. Shells crumble and the two men give a little jump, then they shake their heads and laugh, looking at one another as if to congratulate themselves on their courage.

"All right," says Pete, the foreman. "With rocks, you say?"

Rozz turns white again, and he smiles again. "Here. Watch this." He reaches into the grocery sack and retrieves a single black walnut, rough against the smooth skin of the hand. "Watch," he cautions. The nut vanishes into his mouth, and he swallows in a theoretical way; and with Miller eating again, unnoticed and still glowering at all of them, the walnut shatters somewhere inside the Cetian's belly. It's like a little explosion. The men jump and then giggle, then turn and look around the plant, hunting for someone to show the marvel they've just found.

Rozz is moved off the line after lunch. The foreman wants him up front, up in Assembly, which is pretty much the easiest department. It's where the foreman spends most of his day. What's going on? Miller wonders. He feels betrayed and rather jealous. And maybe foolish, too. All the time he'd been building this image of the Cetians, and all the time he'd been so blind. The Cetians fit into all kinds of places, with anyone. It never occurred to him that they actually enjoyed it! Now the blood roars in his head and his fingers shake. He can scarcely think, barely able to do his job. Jacob glares at him several times, shaking his head but too weary to shout. Miller counts the minutes till afternoon break, the halfway point, because everything afterward will be quick. The day and the craziness will be over soon after break. Then he'll have time to go home and collect himself, to sleep and relax and get it all straight in his head.

When the break horn sounds, Miller decides a Coke would taste good.

By the time he's up front, the poker players are at it. Rozz is among them. Miller pauses and stands nearby, just watching, and then something unexpected occurs to him. Why not? he asks himself. It's an open game, isn't it? There's an empty seat. Miller takes it and looks straight across at the Cetian, waiting, feeling tight inside while he watches the white hands shuffling the deck like a pro.

How does he do it? Miller wonders. Did he practice before coming here? Or does he just pick it up along the way? Card games. The language. All of it. The humans watch Miller while Rozz deals. Miller isn't sure how to bet. He throws a nickel into the pot, takes three cards, and loses with a pair of fours. The foreman wins, grinning at Miller and sweeping up the coins. He says, "So what's the occasion? Thought you'd be social for a change?"

Miller doesn't know what he's thinking. He opens his mouth as if to answer, but nothing comes to mind.

The foreman is amused. Still smiling, he turns to another man and asks, "Have you seen what the new guy can do, Ed? Have you?"

"What do you mean?" Ed works in the paint department—an ancient simpleton with a partial beard and spooked eyes. He glances at Rozz, unsure of himself. "What can he do?" he manages. "Tell me."

"Would you?" says the foreman. "You mind?"

Rozz shrugs. No, he doesn't mind. His skin immediately turns black, like coal. Someone up on the stacks yells, "Hey, he looks like Jacob! Don't he?"

A lot of them laugh.

The foreman laughs. "But it's the other thing I wanted."

"God, I don't want to see!" Ed shivers. "Why the fuck would anyone do that to himself? I mean… Jesus… !"

"For camouflage," Miller responds. He says, "They do it so they can hide," and nods, glad to have spoken. To throw in his knowledge.

But no one is listening to him. Except Ed. And Ed doesn't like what he hears. "So how come he's not colored? You know. Green and all? Those fucking lizards are green and brown and shit. Right?"

"Cetians are color-blind." Miller smiles. He's sorting his next hand without looking at his cards, telling everyone, "They see the world in black and white and gray. Like cheap TV."

Only Ed listens, his mouth opened and his expression befuddled. The rest of the table, Rozz included, studies the cards and Ed and the little piles of change out in front of them. They aren't going to let him take part in this. Not if they can help it. Someone up on the stacks says something, probably about Miller, and he hears men chuckling. It was funny to them. He can imagine what they just said.

Nickels are tossed into the pot.

Miller glances at his cards once, then catches Rozz staring at him. The square eyes are cold and a little bit unnerving. He shifts his weight, feeling the hard wood against his butt. There's more betting and he loses again. Rozz wins. Reaching for the pot, he makes the skin of his hands turn transparent. Everyone can see his colorless meat and the fine yellow bones, and almost everyone laughs. Except for Miller and Ed. "Would you fucking stop that?" says Ed. "Goddamn, you're nuts. Can all of you… you people do that? Can you?"

"You should have seen him at lunch," the foreman confides. "We looked in on Rozz's heart, didn't we?" Everyone nods. Poker has been temporarily forgotten. "And his gizzard. And his guts."

"I don't want to see any guts," says Ed, emphatic. He waves his large calloused hands, telling the Cetian, "I don't even like thinking about that stuff."

Rozz shrugs.

The foreman says, "Do it in the face. Can you do it there?" He asks, "Can you make your face go clear?"

"Sure." Rozz seems unperturbed. Amused, even.

Ed says, "No, no, no! I can't stand this shit."

The foreman waves to the men on the stacks. "Come on over. Old Rozz is going to give us a show."

They drop from the stacks, giggling and trotting over and forming a clumsy horseshoe around the poker table. Miller doesn't know what to do. He feels small and absolutely unnoticed, picking at his cards and trying to focus on their blurred figures.

People start to applaud.

He jerks and looks. He has to look. He's startled by the yellow skull—eye sockets cubic and the tongue curled against the mouth's roof and pale muscles making the small jaw move, Rozz saying, "Look, Ma. No face!"

The men start to howl. Someone says, "What's the matter, Ed? Hey! You don't look so good!"

Ed's face has turned pale. His hands push the coins and cards away from him. "I can't take it," he squeals. "You guys-!"

"What's wrong, Ed?"

"Why the hell does he have to do that? Why?" he wondered. "I don't see why he's got to turn to glass!"

Miller knows. He touches Ed and says, "It's because of sex," with a very serious, utterly sober voice.

The table becomes quiet.

Rozz turns white again, watching Miller.

Ed turns his head and looks lost. "What do you mean? What's sex got to do with it?"

No one admits they're listening, but no one makes a sound. Not the foreman. Not any of them. Miller says, "It's like with birds. Birds have bright plumage so they can show potential mates they're healthy. Strong. Virile. Cetians do the same thing by making themselves transparent. It's a very private thing." And he pauses. "Normally. It's to show their mate that they don't have internal parasites. No diseases. Nothing bad or out of place." He breathes and puts his own cards on top of the mess, feeling every eye and relishing the attention. These stupid jerks, he's thinking. And he means all of them. He glares at Rozz as if accusing him of some failure, some wicked crime, and he crosses his arms on his chest and says nothing more.

Says Rozz, "What do you know?"

Eyes shift to the Cetian.

"He's right, you know." Rozz nods, telling them, "When I go to bed with a girl, I really undress."

A few men laugh, uneasily.

Rozz grabs the scattered cards, arranging and then shuffling the deck. Everyone takes back their old bets. Rozz deals. When he starts to throw in a nickel, by accident, he knocks other coins to the floor. So he bends and vanishes under the table for a moment. The men are glaring at Miller. One of them says, "Professor Perfect," and several of them are laughing.

Rozz returns. The hand is finished in tense silence. Miller wins sixty-five cents with three aces, but he doesn't care. It means nothing. He's halfway tempted to leave the pot, proving his scorn for everyone. The alien is manipulating the crowd, he senses. But not me! The horn sounds, and everyone is standing. Miller starts to pocket his winnings regardless, and there comes a sudden stillness. What's happening? He notices how everyone else is looking at the floor, at his feet, and he looks down and spots a single card on the floor. A fourth ace right beneath his seat.

Says the foreman, "What's this?"

Miller looks at the smiling alien.

"What're you doing?" asks the foreman. "Cheating us for change?"

They're all watching him, waiting, their expressions stern and maybe angry. Maybe not. He's having trouble reading their faces. "I didn't do this," he argues. "I mean, you can't really believe… !"

Rozz shakes his head as if supremely disappointed.

"It's you!" shouts Miller. "You put that there, didn't you?"

"Did I?" asks Rozz.

Miller moves toward him. "When you went under the table, you did it! Didn't you?"

"Gosh," says the foreman. "That's a pretty strong accusation, Miller. I hope you can back it up."

"Someone must have seen him do it." Miller pivots, wanting a witness to step forward. "Who saw him put the card there — ?"

Nobody says, "Me."

Miller faces the Cetian again, waiting for a moment. Then he leaps. He shoves a handful of nickels into the bastard's face, right at its beaked mouth, shouting, "They're yours, goddamn you! You eat them! Now!" He says, "Line your goddamn gizzard with these, you shit!"

The men pull him off Rozz.

The foreman and another fellow, stern-faced and certain, march him into the little glass-walled office where the plant manager holds court. He isn't here just now. The other man goes to find him. The foreman shakes his head and says nothing. His arms are crossed on his chest.

"I didn't do it," Miller manages to say.

"I know," says the foreman. "We all know that. Rozz was just having fun with you. It was just a joke, you idiot."

Miller can barely hear him. He's looking out into the plant, into Assembly. A group of men are standing in a circle, talking to Rozz. He's so far away that he looks human. The jeans, the shirt, the seed cap. Even his motions are true. It occurs to Miller that the alien is genuinely fitting into this place. All the Cetians fit in. To them this isn't a chore, it's a joy. They wear humanity like you would a new suit—

"What's happening out there?" asks the foreman.

Miller can't tell for certain.

"Stay here. I'll be back." He shuts the door and stalks out into the plant. The men don't see him approaching. They're engrossed with whatever Rozz is telling them, both of Rozz's hands above his head, eyes wide, the hands implying some epic tale of great drama and worth.

The foreman breaks it up.

Miller watches everyone get back to work. He sees Rozz talking to the foreman and glancing toward the office. Then the foreman returns. "He gave me a message. He wants you to know something."

Miller asks, "What?"

"He said he's been sizing you up — "

"Yeah?"

" — and he doesn't like your insides."

Miller has no response. He presses his face to the glass and sighs, feeling nothing, his thoughts jumbled and slow. What I'll have to do first, he thinks, is get my stuff out of that corner. The books and the rest of it that I want. Then he remembers the quotes on the walls and wishes there was some way he could take them, too. But there's not, of course. They're there. That's where they'll have to stay.

GODSPEED

Charles Sheffield

The Genizee came.

Two weeks later, the Genizee went.

The aliens are the most self-sacrificing and noble saviors of humanity that anyone could imagine; or else they are the sneakiest and most evil species in the galaxy, following a diabolical agenda that no human is able to fathom.

Which?

Marcus Aurelius Jackson, a millionaire, a madman, a genius, and my long-time partner in science and short-time partner in crime, says the Genizee are villains. Everyone else on Earth says that they are heroes. Me, I just don't know.

Not yet. But thanks to Marcus, I will know. Soon. In the worst case, it may be for just a fraction of a second, before the end.

It sounds crazy to say it, but although I think of myself as sane and rational while Marcus is a lunatic who may cause my death and the death of everyone on Earth, I'm as bad in some ways as he is—because I can hardly wait to learn the answer. That question—Which?—has been sitting in my mind for four months going on forever, like an internal and eternal itch that can't be scratched.

I sit here, waiting for the re-appearance of the television cameras or the end of the world, and I want toknow .

In my case it is more than a theoretical issue. I was in the middle of the problem long before the arrival of the Genizee—before their existence was even suspected. More than that, according to the aliens, I and Marcus Aurelius Jackson are the reason that they came to the solar system—came, just in time to kill the dream.

In my case, it was a dream. In Marcus's case, it was an obsession. I argue that there is an important difference between the two, though perhaps no else would agree.

Let me go back to the period BG—Before Genizee.

Before the aliens popped out of nowhere, most people thought that the world's space programs were going well. The United States had the Farside lunar base close to self-supporting, with a ninety-nine percent closed recycling of food, water, and supplies. Only the most complicated equipment was fabricated and shipped up from Earth. The Soviets had their permanent Mars colony, at last, after three abortive tries and the loss of one hundred and forty-seven people. The C-J consortium had a mixed Chinese and Japanese expedition wandering the asteroid belt, and another approaching the Jovian moons. ESA had their own explorer—unmanned, this one—heading out for a second Grand Tour with smart probes of the outer planet atmospheres.

This is truly the Golden Age of space exploration, said the media.

Big deal.

Don't be surprised when I tell you that although space funding paid my salary, not one of the developments that I mentioned occupied my working attention for more than one minute a week. Marcus and I fumed at the self-congratulatory speeches from the politicians of all countries, and wept when the “great accomplishments” in space were touted by the world's media.

Couldn't they see—couldn’t everyone see, as we saw so clearly—that even when the Moon and all the planets were explored and colonized, we would still be playing in our own backyard?

If humans were serious about exploring space, the solar system wouldn't do. We had to go to the stars, and we had to find a way to get there in a reasonable time. The fastest ship in existence, the Caltech/NASA Rocket Propulsion Lab's Continuous Electric Propulsion Planetary Probe (Starseed for short) was now heading for the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, but it would not arrive there for another ten years. That, measured in terms of my own life span, was surely not a reasonable time. And when it got there, three thousand astronomical units from the Sun, it would still be traveling at only one percent of lightspeed, and be only one hundredth of the way to the nearest star. Tau Ceti, our best bet for a close star with useful planets, would be a millennial journey for the RPL probe. Despite its name, the Starseed and its relatives were not and would never be the answer. They could not bring the stars within reach of humanity.

A faster-than-light drive: that was the way to go. The only way. Unfortunately, you couldn't even mention FTL to the Science Foundations who funded us. Marcus had tried it, and been ridiculed for his pains. Their committee of advisors was quite adamant. Nothing could go faster than light, the theory of relativity “proved” that, so not one cent should be wasted in trying. Instead we should spend the Foundation's money on something useful , like plodding ion drives or bone-jarring pulsed fission.

“Dummies!” said Marcus, when he got back to the lab. “Stupid jerks.” He had said much the same thing to the committee, and it hadn't helped his case.

“I know,” I commiserated. “They're a bunch of idiots. Curse ‘em all."

I did a lot of cursing in those days, and without Marcus, that would have been all that I could do. With him, though, I had as my partner a top-drawer physicist who had studied the absolute basics of quantum theory and relativity, instead of taking them as gospel. He had done so with one goal in mind: looking for the loopholes.

They were there, of course. Everyone from Einstein onwards had pointed out that the two fields were inconsistent with each other. And even within the framework of those inconsistencies, the structure of spacetime at a subnuclear level had to be a sea of singularities, continuously forming and dissolving. The very notion of “travel” through such a discontinuous medium in its constant flux was meaningless, said Marcus. It was the learned advisors to our funding sources, sitting in their smug certainty, who needed to go back and do “something useful."

I knew he was smarter than me, and anyone else I'd ever met. When he said that he saw a ray of hope, I believed him. His failure with the committee, and their ridicule, didn't shake my faith in him one bit.

“We have to keep trying,” I said. “Show them they're wrong."

He shook his head gloomily, but soon he was working harder than ever. Rejection merely drove him to greater efforts. In the next few months he developed the theory further, and it looked good (to him, I mean—I admit that I couldn't follow it).

The next steps had to be mine, though. I was the fix-it member of the team, because Marcus was terrible at practical details, and the diverse techniques for lubrication of egos that these days are lumped together as “human relationships” were quite beyond him.

So I “fixed it.” With, if I say it myself, my usual efficiency. (I sometimes think that the only thing in life that I find truly irresistible is the challenge to finagle something that everyone else says can't be done.)

Money wasn't the issue. Marcus had inherited bundles of that, and had found little use for it, but the equipment that we needed couldn't be bought. It was available only through government programs. So the prototype construction, and the first small-scale tests, had to be worked secretly using materials bootlegged from approved conventional projects. If that sounds easy, remember that all the construction had to be done in space . Without assistance from Inventory Control, who owed me quite a few favors, it could not have been done at all. Even then, it was not totally invisible. Someday an enthusiastic auditor would discover that the equipment orders and use did not match, and the game would be over. Long before that I expected to have gone to hell or Alpha Centauri.

It took five and a half years from the day of Marcus's key theoretical insight to the first space test. On that day the two of us, crowded into a small cargo capsule never intended for anything but free-fall storage, paused and looked at the little payload, then at each other.

“Well?” he said.

I nodded. He drew a long breath, shrugged, and toggled the switch.

The payload vanished without a sound.

The test transition—Marcus insisted that it shouldn't be called a test flight , since the payload would not be “traveling” through normal space—had been designed to carry an array of sensors eighty million kilometers to the vicinity of Mars, take a handful of pictures there, and return to the cargo capsule. It was supposed to be gone for just twenty minutes, almost all of it spent out near Mars.

Twenty minutes? I have known shorter months.

When the tiny payload popped back into existence, we both gasped. And when we examined the data it had collected, I at least got a lot more than I had bargained for.

The payload had not made the journey to Mars in a single hop. Instead, Marcus had programmed it to drop back periodically into normal space, make an instant navigation fix, and use that to direct the next transition. The resulting set of images was mind-blowing. The fixes had been taken every hundredth of a second, two hundred thousand kilometers apart. Seen in real time, they provided the series of frames that would have been obtained by a ship traveling at twenty million kilometers a second—nearly seventy times the speed of light. God speed.

I watched those movies about a hundred times in the next twenty-four hours, drunk with euphoria and the conviction that Marcus and I would ourselves be remembered as gods. We were the New Prometheans, the men who gave humanity the universe. (Like most people who play with fire, I had forgotten what happened to Prometheus). I wanted to go public with our results, right away. As I told Marcus, we had more than enough evidence to justify funding for a complete series of operational tests.

At that point, he dug in and couldn't be budged. The establishment hadn't just said a polite “No thanks” to his theory, or pleaded poverty to explore it. They had mocked his ideas, suggesting that he was a crank or worse. Now he wanted to make a manned flight, go out in person farther than anything had ever been, and take hand-held pictures. Then he would come home, go to the skeptics who had told him he was a charlatan, show them our results, and invite them to stick it in their ear. Before that, he wanted complete secrecy.

Fame and fortune weren't enough, you see. He wanted revenge.

I should have refused to go along with him, but he always burned a lot brighter than me. We argued for hours, until at last I gave in. He told me what he wanted for the Big Test: out a thousand astronomical units, so Marcus could get a shot of theStarseed , against a backdrop of the shrunken Sun and scarcely visible planets.

If finding the resources for the small test had been difficult, the new one—manned ship, life-support, full navigation and control systems—had me tearing out what was left of my hair. To be honest I also had a wonderful time, juggling three dozen people and organizations at once, but it was still another six months before I could go into his office and say, “Well, you asked for it, Marcus, and you got it. We're in business. All-up manned test for Project Godspeed is set for one week today."

“You actually got the flight permits, Wilmer?"—that's me—"How'd you fix it? I'd have bet it was impossible."

This had been one of our main worries. Stealing equipment had become fairly routine, and we had even managed to divert attention from our true activities by describing the Godspeed itself during the ship's construction as a “pulsed fission-fusion pre-experimental post-design model,” which was enough to put off anyone. The earlier test had been on a scale small enough to hide. But the new one could not be concealed, since although the FTL transition should produce no detectable signal, according to Marcus the macroscopic quantum events leading up to it would make the Godspeed 's whole exterior sparkle and glitter like a cut gemstone catching the noonday sun.

“It was impossible,” I said. “I had to use all my chips on this one. I wouldn't be surprised if we get caught."

“Who cares?” he said. “When we get back from this trip—"

And at that precise moment, when the day of glory was within reach, Sally Brown from Ground Operations came running into my office without knocking, switched on the little tv set that perched on the corner of my desk, and said breathlessly: “Messages and pictures. Coming in from space. All over the world, hundreds of different wavelengths. Not from Earth. From the stars."

* * * *

I don't know what Sally Brown's words did to Marcus, but they created in me such a conflict of emotions that I wanted to throw up. On the one hand, the arrival of aliens and their superior technology would make all our work for the past few years as obsolete as the horse and carriage; on the other hand, I would have what I had wanted for so long: access to the stars.

We froze in front of the tv screen, waiting for our first look at the Genizee.

What we got instead was a look at their ships, inside and out, and at their technical equipment. No pictures of aliens, not then. We learned later that they weren't sure Earth people were ready for three-foot-long cylinders of quaking black jelly, topped by a writhing mass of yellow spaghetti. Instead, we got pictures of technology.

Oddly enough, it was the sight of the ships that Marcus and I, alone of all the people on Earth, found hardest to take. The video signals had been beamed to Earth a few hours earlier, from just beyond the orbit of Saturn, along with a series of radio messages—in seven major Earth languages—proclaiming peaceful intentions and giving a projected arrival time at Earth equatorial orbit in less than a week. The radio messages we could take. But the ships...

Marcus caught on first. “Where is it?” he said, almost under his breath. “Wilmer, where’s the drive ?"

No one else would have been able to understand his question. But I did.

The forms of certain technologies are dictated completely by the laws of chemistry and physics. That includes all propulsion technology. For instance, a rocket is a rocket, no matter whether the propellant is hot neutral gas, ionized particles, or radiation; and it makes little difference if the energy comes from chemical or nuclear processes. Similarly, a laser is a laser, regardless of wavelength or energy level. And the FTL drive that Marcus had conceived, and that we had both been working on so hard, had its own characteristic physics and signature.

The Genizee ships showed no sign of that signature. Either they had traveled across the interstellar void using a method which was so advanced that we could not recognize it; or—far more likely, in Marcus's paranoid view—they were deliberately withholding all information on their FTL drive.

Neither Marcus nor I could imagine a third possibility.

When the third option was proposed, Marcus did not believe it. He has never believed it, to this day.

* * * *

In retrospect, the aliens broke it to us slowly and carefully.

First, they brought their three ships into orbit around the Earth, five hundred miles up, and sat there quietly for a week and a half, doing nothing except chatting over the radio and making sure that their mastery of Earth languages was complete. They told us a lot about themselves during that period, and asked for nothing in return but our idiomatic phrases. On the first day we learned that they came from the Tau Ceti system. (Marcus and I had been right on target, though we received little satisfaction from the thought). Day Two they gave us a description of their civilization, with its five populated planets and moons and its links to other, more distant intelligences; all, according to the Genizee, were as peaceful, well-meaning and sympathetic as they were.

The fifth day brought a first look at the Genizee themselves. By that time they had soothed us so well that most people's reaction when they saw a picture of a Genizee was sympathy that any rational being had to live with being so ugly.

The sympathy faded a little when the Genizee told us that they lived, on average, for twenty-seven thousand Earth years. When asked if they would make the longevity formula available to humans, they replied, with an apologetic quiver, that there was no formula. The Genizee had always been so long-lived. Almost everyone except Marcus believed them. He was already full of dark surmise.

The bombshell dropped by the Genizee near the end of the second and final week confirmed his suspicions. Asked during a tv broadcast (the world had lived glued to tv sets since the arrival) about their journey to the solar system, they offered an implausible reply. They had not used an FTL drive at all, they said, but an efficient sub-lightspeed drive that allowed them to reach over half the speed of light. They had been on the way from Tau Ceti for twenty-five years. All their journeys between the stars were made at a fraction of lightspeed.

The blue ribbon panel of elderly scientists who had been assembled to interact with the aliens were, if you can believe it, pleased by that reply. It confirmed, they said, their own conviction, that faster-than-light travel was a physical impossibility. Nothing could ever move from one point to another, faster than light would cover the distance.

Well, said the Genizee, quaking apologetically, that's not exactly the case. In fact, the reason why we embarked on this long journey to Earth in person, rather than sending messages that you might not believe, or might think to ignore, was just this: Certain of your scientists have been conducting FTL experiments...

No one had looked to Marcus Aurelius Jackson or me for help and advice when the Genizee arrived. Why should they? We were young and junior, without reputation or known accomplishments, and Marcus had already been branded as a crank. Even if we had offered our services, no one would have taken them, or listened to what we might have to say.

That changed in ten minutes—the ten minutes when the Genizee explained that faster-than-light travel was not impossible; that it offered enormous danger and possible total destruction to any species that attempted it, for reasons that they would be happy to explain to us; that such attempts were being conducted on Earth at this very moment; and that the Genizee had come here with two main goals: to pinpoint the location of those experiments, and to warn the inhabitants of Earth, telling them to cease and desist.

My own immediate reaction was total disbelief, with good reason. If the Genizee had been on the way for twenty-five years, they must have left twenty years before we had even the theory for an FTL drive. So they couldn't have started out for Sol just because they'd picked up evidence of what Marcus and I were doing.

It was Marcus himself, no fan of the Genizee, who quickly put me straight on that one. He had long known that any FTL drive would give rise to both advanced and retarded potentials, similar to those of conventional electromagnetic theory. Both potentials propagated through spacetime, and died out in magnitude—but the advanced potential moved backwards in time. The experiments that we had thought to be so secret might be detectable by the Genizee, before we had performed them.

They confirmed his comment later in the same broadcast. They could detect the signal from afar, they said, even as far away as Tau Ceti. But only when they came very close to Earth could their equipment pinpoint an exact location . They had done that now. They would be happy to provide that location to Earth authorities.

They did so, and added a few more minutes of stern warning on FTL drives. Half a dozen uses, they said, were often enough to cause “major repercussions” in the region of space.

Having said that, to everyone's amazement they started their ship drives and headed away from Earth.

It was bad for an emerging civilization, explained their departing message as the three ships lumbered off towards Saturn, to suffer major exposure to an older and more advanced one. Now that their warning had been delivered, the only responsible thing for them to do was to leave, and let us humans make our own way. Goodbye and good luck, people of Earth.

I gather that our scientists and politicians went into shock—they had been hoping for free technology from the Genizee, and had received nothing but talk. Marcus and I didn't take much notice at the time, because we had our own worries. Within hours of the last Genizee broadcast, our lab had been closed and was guarded by enough military men to fight a major war. Marcus and I were arrested. We were charged with theft of government equipment, misuse of grant funds, and travel without suitable permits.

Those crimes should not have been enough to hold us in confinement. They were. After what the Genizee had said, no one was willing to let us go free, not because of what they thought we would do, but because of what the aliens told them we could do.

Relax, said Marcus and I to each other. We can't really be kept in jail like this for more than a day. Can we?

What innocents! We sure could. For the first time in my life, I learned what was meant by a witch hunt. I doubt if one person in a million understood the explanation that the Genizee had offered of the dangers of a faster-than-light drive, but they didn't care. The Genizee themselves had fingered us, so we were guilty. We'd be kept under close guard, without a trial, unless the Genizee returned and said we were to be released.

I myself didn't understand what the Genizee warning was all about when I heard it, but my cell-mate was Marcus Aurelius Jackson. He knew what they were telling the whole world—and he didn't believe a word of it.

* * * *

Marcus didn't just explain his views to me. He told the guards, our family members, and finally, after two months of work from me, the three members of the press who could be persuaded to come out to our maximum-security prison in the Nevada desert to interview us.

“A faster-than-light drive needs a tremendous amount of energy,” he said to the three reporters. We were all sitting in one room, without bars between us, because I had been working hard on our guards, and finally had them to the point where they thought we might be crazy, but we were surely harmless. The room even had a tiny barred window, with only four guards posted inside, and another two just beyond the door.

“A huge amount of energy,” went on Marcus. “The only practical—or even theoretical—way to get that much energy is from the vacuum itself. You have to tap into it."

“You mean, you get energy from nothing?” said the most junior of the press. He had an open, gullible face. The other two, one man and one woman, didn't look even vaguely interested, and I guessed that they thought of the whole trip as a chore they hadn't been able to wriggle out of.

“Not from nothing . From the vacuum!” That was one of Marcus's problems, because although it was clear from their facial expressions that this subtle distinction was far beyond all the reporters, he swept right on: “Now, the energy available from the vacuum is so big, you tend to think of it as unlimited. But the Genizee insist that tapping the zero point energy sets up a local stress in space, which ultimately must be relieved. If you remove local energy past a certain critical point, they say, there will be a jump to a lower-energy ground state. The only more stable state is a black hole. The whole region pinches off from the rest of the universe."

“In other words,” I said. “The rest of universe will get rid of the stressed region by making it vanish. ” I saw the open mouths, and wondered if I was being as obscure as Marcus. But he had been over this with me again and again, until I had something that made sense to me inside my head. My picture might be over-simple, but the reporters ought to find it easier going. “Imagine that there are a whole lot of elastic bands,” I went on, “all over the universe. Somebody starts to stretch one, in one place. That's what we were doing, when we tested the drive. You can stretch it a fair bit, and nothing happens. All the other bands give a tiny bit, and everything settles down again. But if you go on stretching, there finally comes a point where something has to give. The band breaks. When it does, everything can’t go back the way it was. You've got snapped elastic, and you're catapulted right out of this universe."

“And that's what the Genizee are warning us about?” said the young reporter.

“They were. But it’s not true ,” said Marcus hotly. “When I heard what they were saying, I went back and did all the calculations over from scratch. There's no backlash effect. Spacetime makes a small and quiet adjustment—maybe the local curvature decreases by one part in ten to the twentieth. An FTL drive is quite safe."

“But that means the Genizee were lying to us,” said the woman reporter, in an annoyed tone. “Are you suggesting that they didn’t come all this way on those ships? Or that they didn’t take a quarter of a century to get here?"

“Both!” said Marcus loudly. The guards stirred, and made sure their weapons were at hand. “They were lying about both . They didn't come all the way in those ships, and they didn't take a quarter of a century to get here. They came from Tau Ceti—if that's really their home, and they're not lying about that, too—in a big, fast ship, with a faster-than-light drive. They parked the mother ship out beyond Saturn, where we couldn't see it. Then they switched to their slow little ships, and came crawling in the rest of the way to Earth."

Marcus was losing any shred of credibility he might have had, because the youngest of the reporters at once asked the obvious question: “But why would they lie to us? What good would it do them?"

“They don't want us to use the FTL drive. They want to bottle us up, here in the solar system. They don’t want humans out among the stars. I think they’re scared of us, because we're smarter than they are."

It sounded paranoid, even to me. He was wasting his breath anyway. Even if the reporters believed him, and it was clear to me that they didn't, they would never find an editor willing to run the story. The Genizee, initially repulsive in appearance, had not stayed long enough for humans to learn their possible defects. Their slow and bumbling speech patterns and apparent confusion, which Marcus considered evidence of human superiority of thought, were to most people part of their appeal. The Genizee had become everyone's favorite alien, and you couldn't get away with a bad word about them. The stores were packed with cute little mop-topped black jelly cylinders—although for aesthetic reasons the toys didn't have the disgusting layer of slime that allowed the amphibian Genizee to function out of water.

When it was Marcus Aurelius Jackson against the Genizee, MAJ didn't have a chance. After all, hadn't the altruistic Genizee taken many years of their own lives, just to come to Earth and deliver a warning? And weren't they, even now, creeping back across the lightyears in their cramped, uncomfortable little ships, with twenty-five years still to go? How many Earth people would do something like that, even to save their own closest relatives? Especially to save their closest relatives.

So, although Marcus went on talking, I knew he was wasting his time. He wouldn't get one inch of column space or a second of air time for his unpopular views.

As it turned out, I was wrong. “MAD DOG SCIENTISTS UNREPENTANT!” shouted the only headline. And underneath: “Death Penalty Favored For Insane Inventors."

* * * *

Marcus is an interesting case for the psychologists. When his idea of a faster-than-light drive was ridiculed, he redoubled his efforts. And when his just-as-heretical views of the Genizee were pooh-poohed, he at once turned all his efforts from conjecture to possible methods of proof.

“There has to be a way to show that I'm right,” he said. “Wilmer, let me try something out on you."

I said nothing. When you are living together in one locked room, it is hard to avoid a discussion.

“Point one,” went on Marcus, “According to me, the advanced potential from our test must damp out rapidly as it goes backwards in time. The Genizee say they picked it up a quarter of a century ago, but I say it fades to background level and becomes undetectable in a year or less. If I'm right—and I am—they can't have picked up evidence of our test more than a year before they got here.

“Point two. They say they came from Tau Ceti, and their departure trajectory supports that idea. Even if they didn't, though, they certainly came from outside the solar system. The nearest star is over four lightyears away. Four lightyears or more in one year or less means they had to have come using a faster-than-light ship.

“Point three. They left two weeks ago. If they really intend to fly all the way back to Tau Ceti, or any other interstellar destination, in those sub-light ships, they are still in the early acceleration phase of the trip. Even with the most efficient propulsion system I can imagine, it will take them nearly a year to work their way up to half the speed of light."

He stared at me. “Do you see what that means?"

“It means they're still a hell of a long way from home. They're as altruistic as everyone believes."

“No.” If the press could have seen Marcus now, they would have felt that their MAD DOG SCIENTISTS UNREPENTANT headline was thoroughly justified. “Wilmer, it means that if they were telling the truth about how they came here, and how they are going back, and where they are going back to, then anyone with an FTL ship could fly out and catch up with them . If they aren't where they should be, then they are lying, either about coming from Tau Ceti or about the drive. One lie is enough to discredit everything they said to us. If you ask me, they're already back home, wherever they came from—and I'll bet money it's not Tau Ceti—having a good laugh at the credible people of Earth."

I looked at him, then let my eyes roam around the featureless beige walls of the room. “Let me try something out on you , Marcus. Point one. There is just one FTL drive in the solar system, and it is impounded, up in orbit and protected by maximum security guards, because everyone on or off Earth is terrified of it. If they weren't afraid to touch the thing, they'd have destroyed it long ago.

“Point two. There are just two human beings who know how to fly that ship. No one else will go near the Godspeed .

“Point three. Those two humans are locked away in an underground room in a building in the middle of the Nevada desert. They have no tools, no friends, no money, and no way of getting to space, still less of reaching the Godspeed . Forget it, Marcus, you could never do it, not in a thousand years."

“I know I couldn't,” he said. He was still staring at me. I felt a quivery feeling in my stomach, as though my recent breakfast had suddenly been converted to live worms.

“I know I couldn't,” he said again. “That's not my line. But you, Wilmer, if you—"

“It's impossible."

“I'm sure it is."

“Totally impossible."

“Yeah.” He stood up and went over to lie on his bed without another word.

After a few seconds I went across to my own bed, lay down on it, and closed my eyes. I decided that I hadn't been totally honest when I was speaking to Marcus. I still had friends outside, and I still had some equity with them for past favors. I had cultivated our guards, too, drawing a little on Marcus's wealth, to the point where they normally left us to ourselves, but would do the odd paid favor for me provided it was obviously no threat to them or to anyone else. So far as the security around the Godspeed was concerned, I had probably exaggerated that. No one would be too worried, as long as it was known that Marcus and I were locked up here...

I shivered, and stopped my thinking right there. What was Marcus trying to make me do? Help him to destroy the pair of us, and the whole of the human race as well? But he had touched that dark, hidden spot where the true ego dwells. Now the live worms in my stomach had crawled up my throat into my brain, and set it on fire.

If we escaped from prison, the alarm would go off at once. The search for us would begin. The two of us would never make it far outside the prison walls, let alone into space, and the guards around the Godspeed itself would be tripled in numbers and placed on maximum alert.

But it took only one person to fly the Godspeed. And there would be real juggling to be done here, inside the prison, to hide the fact of that one person's escape.

Marcus, then, to pilot the ship and to design the programs that would allow the sort of freeze-frame sequence of hops that the unmanned payload had taken to Mars, searching at each transition for the Genizee ships. I, to stay here, and to arrange matters—how, for God's sake? I had no idea—so that no one knew that Marcus was missing, until he was on his way in the Godspeed .

I opened my eyes. Marcus was sitting up on his bed, gazing at me expectantly.

“Any good?” he asked.

“Go to hell.” I closed my eyes again. What did he take me for? I had been lying there for maybe three minutes. Extraordinary things can sometimes be done in real time. Miracles take a little longer.

* * * *

A “little longer” in this case turned out to be six weeks. Everything had to be choreographed tighter than a five-ship orbital rendezvous. I broke the problem down into discrete pieces, each one requiring a solution if the whole effort were to succeed. Marcus had to escape from here unnoticed. Then I had to conceal the evidence of his disappearance for at least five days. Marcus would need that much time to travel from Nevada, all the way out to theGodspeed . Then he had to have credentials that would allow him to board the ship, and he had to remain there undisturbed. After that he would be on his own.

I was prepared for a year-long effort, with a good chance of failure at the end of it. It is a curious fact that my six-week success was possible only because I had been placed in prison. Given enough money, and Marcus had plenty of that, a man can get anything in jail that he can get outside it—plus a whole lot more. Prisons, as I quickly learned, are the natural focal points for any imaginable legal or illegal activity.

You want Marcus Aurelius Jackson to take part in the sensory deprivation experiments now being conducted in this very jail? The external university team responsible for the experiments will be glad to have him. To them, one healthy prisoner is much like another, and the recommendation of the guards is all that they ask. Bringing someone into a prison, to enter the sensory deprivation tank in place of Marcus, costs a few thousand dollars. Getting Marcus out in that man's clothes is more expensive, but not much harder.

Not everything is so cheap. You would like a set of forged credentials, showing that you are a Nevada businessman making a trip up to space with a need for commercial secrecy? No problem, except money and lots of it. Many of the world's best forgers are already behind bars, ready to serve you.

The one piece of the puzzle that I couldn't see how to solve would be on board the Godspeed itself. Marcus didn't want company on his journey, so somehow he had to arrange to be left alone on the ship, long enough to make the first FTL transition.

While I was still pondering that, Marcus was worrying a different issue. “I hope the ship's power plant has been left on,” he said, as we were transferring some of his money to an anonymous bank account. “It would be a pain to have to bring all the systems back on-line."

I stared at him. “Thanks, Marcus. That's what I needed."

His new forged credentials showed that he was a specialist in industrial safety, flying out to the Godspeed to power-down the ship's dangerous nuclear equipment so that it would not explode. With that in hand, and a few casual words as he went aboard, it would be difficult to get anyone else to stay within a thousand kilometers.

On the final morning we shook hands, for the first time in our long acquaintance. The door was unlocked from the outside. Marcus left the room, and a man in his twenties wearing a bewildered look and a bad case of acne appeared in his place. Within the hour he had been collected. I wondered briefly if he even knew what sensory deprivation experiments were. From the look of him, it would be little change from his existing condition.

I settled down, to estimate Marcus's progress. Now he would be approaching the airport, dropping off the rented car that had been arranged for him outside the prison and collecting his ticket. Now he should be at the space facility, undergoing a routine physical check that included a DNA identification. He ought to pass that easily—I had rented the best illegal hacker that money could buy, to slot an ID for Marcus into the right computer data bank. Eight hours later he should be ascending to orbit, and four hours after that he would be in an orbital transfer vehicle, on his way to the Godspeed .

I kept the tv on, twenty-four hours a day. No news was good news, of course, until Marcus reached the Godspeed and could take the final step.

I had plenty of time to wonder if my faith in Marcus was too great. It was one man against the world, his authority against the word of the Genizee.

* * * *

This morning, right on schedule, the television came alive. Every channel reported the inexplicable disappearance of the Godspeed . It was obvious that they had no idea what was happening, since the commentators were worried about the fate of the “safety inspector” who had been on board at the time. Within the hour, I was being questioned.

I saw myself on television, and learned to my relief that Marcus Aurelius Jackson was “in prison, but unavailable for comment.” I said that I could tell them nothing useful. I thought that I looked worried.

I was worried. And now, late in the afternoon, waiting for another television interview, I look at my guards and at the afternoon sun streaming in through the bars of the little window, and I am still worried.

Although Marcus and the Godspeed left only ten hours ago, they ought to have been back long since. Following the path supposedly set by the Genizee would have taken our ship only a few seconds, even with the brief pauses between transitions needed to drop back into normal space and scan for the Genizee ships. Marcus could have traveled out half a lightyear, well past the place they ought to have reached with their slow ships, and still been back hours ago.

Strange thoughts have been running through my head. Suppose that Marcus found the Genizee ships, and they destroyed him so that he could not return and tell? We had never asked if their ships carried weapons. Then I realize that my thought is totally illogical. Marcus could find the Genizee only if they had told us the truth, and were lumbering along in their slow ships. In that case, they would have nothing to hide from us.

But perhaps Marcus, having failed to find any trace of the Genizee on the way to Tau Ceti, had decided that they were concealing from us their true place of origin. It would be easy for him to take the Godspeed out for a second journey, toward some other probable stellar target. And if that produced no result, he might go out again. How many trips might he make, before he had enough evidence to prove to anyone back on Earth that the Genizee had been lying?

I know Marcus very well. It is part of his nature that he likes to be absolutely sure of things. He will not risk being mocked again. I would settle for one trip out, and rest my case. He might feel he had to make a dozen.

And that leads to another thought entirely. Half a dozen full-scale shots of the FTL drive, according to the Genizee, could lead to “major repercussions” in a region of space.

How big a region? The Genizee were talking of the collapse to a black hole of part of spacetime, with the separation of that region from the rest of the universe. Are we dealing with the collapse of something the size of a ship ... or a planet ... or a solar system? Would the collapse take place violently, or quietly and unobtrusively? And would the Godspeed itself be inside that region, or excluded from it? Might Marcus and his ship, left outside, become the only evidence in the whole universe that humans had ever existed?

Those are the sort of questions I am not equipped to answer. I wish that Marcus were here, to assure me that the Genizee were certainly lying, that I am talking nonsense, that I have nothing to worry about. I take some comfort from the setting sun, shining as usual through the little barred window.

But I wish that dusk would come quickly. I want to look for the stars.

VRM-547

W.R. Thompson

A robot, like a computer, is a machine that follows the instructions it is given. But how is it to deal with something it doesn't recognize or about which it has no instructions? If it is anything like the caretaker robot in W. R. Thompson's "VRM-547" (which was a finalist for the 1991 Hugo Award), it will deal with the situation very effectively.

ALL is NOT well. VRM-547 has vanished, its place taken by VRM-1489. I cannot understand how this happens, as neither object—coded as a floor lamp and a hat rack, respectively—is mobile. Nevertheless it happens, and as always I must spend several hundred microseconds in reprogramming my house map. The two objects are just dissimilar enough to require such adjustments. It is an unending source of confusion.

The date is Tuesday; therefore I must scrub and wax the floors. My owner—coded as "Yes, sir, sergeant, sir"—requires this operation on all Tuesdays. I connect with my cleaning apparatus, fill its tanks with soap, water, and wax, and proceed with the assigned function.

The function is 97 percent complete when my owner rolls across a section of floor. "Lieutenant Halloran, clean those up," he orders. He points to the floor.

"Those" is an indefinite term. It is plural. Analysis suggests that "those" refers to the marks which my owner's wheelchair has left on the floor. I assign the marked areas a higher priority than the uncleaned areas of the floor, and proceed with my modified function. "Yes, sir, sergeant, sir," I say, acknowledging the order.

In due time, I finish the function. I return my cleaning apparatus to its storage rack. The next function in my assignment stack is to check on my owner's health. This is my primary function, programmed into me by the Veterans Administration. Every hour I query his implant, and collect data on his health status and the medication levels in his bloodstream. Whenever it is Monday, I send my collected data to the nearby VA hospital, unless the readings fall outside certain limits. In that case, I would initiate emergency measures.

My owner's health is well, within its limits. My next assigned function is grocery acquisition, so I mount the wireframe basket on my shell. I roll into the living room, where my owner is seated before VRM-12, a television set, currently active. "Lieutenant Halloran, are you going shopping now?" he says.

"Yes, sir, sergeant, sir."

"Lieutenant Halloran, my nephews are coming over today. Buy some munchies for them."

"Error code forty-seven," I say. "Unrecognized word: munchies."

"Lieutenant Halloran, you feeble excuse for a Marine, add a dozen Twinkies to the grocery list."

"Yes, sir, sergeant, sir."

I am about to exit the house when I detect a hazard. A sheet of newspaper has fallen atop VRM-187, an electric space heater. Although the heater is not active, it may be activated. My safety program warns that this situation creates a fire hazard. This, in turn, would endanger my owner's health. I retrieve the paper, fold it and place it on VRM-53, a coffee table.

I roll down the ramp, reach the sidewalk and make a ninety degree turn to the right. I proceed toward external position three, coded as a supermarket. There are two stop points between my home position and the supermarket, coded as crosswalks. At each I stop and wait until I see a green signal light.

This function uses most of my data-processing abilities. Outside the house I see many objects and shapes which are not coded in my Visual Recognition Matrix. I must examine each uncoded object to see if it fits a generalized visual code: human or wheeled vehicle. I am programmed to avoid collisions with these objects. This is difficult, especially as certain vehicles will attempt to intersect my path at random, while certain humans will block my path at random.

I enter external position three, print out the grocery list, and wait for human assistance. Over a billion microseconds pass before a human appears and takes my list. Another billion microseconds pass before the human returns. As he loads objects into my basket, I tag each with a temporary recognition code: VRM-T-187 through VRM-T-215.

There is trouble as I return home. A vehicle increases its speed and attempts to intersect me. I give full power to my drive units and avoid a collision, but VRM-T-198 has bounced out of my carrying basket. It is round, and it rolls a considerable distance, lodging among a number of unrecognizable objects. This makes recognition difficult, and I must examine each object before I can identify and retrieve VRM-T-198.

Upon my return home I enter the kitchen and store the new objects in the upper and lower food cabinets. After I finish this task I put the wire-frame basket on its storage rack. There are dirty utensils in the sink, and I have no scheduled functions, so I begin to clean the utensils.

My owner rolls into the kitchen and opens the lower food cabinet. He removes VRM-T-191 and VRM-T-203. Then he faces me. "Lieutenant Halloran, you jackass, how many times have I told you to put the damned eggs in the refrigerator?"

"Error message twelve," I respond. "Data not available."

"Lieutenant Halloran, you little piss-ant, put the damned eggs in the damned refrigerator."

"Yes, sir, sergeant, sir." I roll up to him and stop. He holds two objects, and I have been ordered to take one. Which one? "Error message seven. Identity: eggs."

My owner makes an uncodable response. He pushes VRM-T-191 into my left manipulator and rolls away. I add VRM-T-191 to my permanent Visual Recognition Matrix, coding the shape as VRM-3876, the eggs. This puzzles me, as the matrix already contains VRM-96, an egg. The words are clearly related, yet the shapes are quite different. More to the point, "eggs" by definition means "more than one egg."

The doorbell rings and I go to answer it. I recognize the two small humans at the door as my owner's nephews. "Hello, Mr. John. Hello, Mr. Craig. Please enter."

My owner and his nephews spend the next several billion microseconds in the living room. As I have no assigned functions, I remain by the door. I observe them as I stand by. My owner has placed VRM-T-203 on the coffee table. He opens the object, and the nephews remove smaller objects from it. They eat the smaller objects while they talk.

I consider how this phenomenon relates to "egg" and "eggs." Perhaps VRM-3876, the eggs, should be coded as the egg container. My owner is not always precise with his input statements, which has confused me on other occasions.

This causes me to reassess the relationship between the hat rack and the floor lamp. The hat rack is present now. I note that its shape resembles that of the lamp. Its support legs and central shaft are made of light-reflective material, and it is topped with a complex shape. There are many small, smooth surfaces around the top structure. I realize that these facets can reflect light, and certain reflections can confuse my optics.

Perhaps the rack is the lamp with its lights off. However, when I attempt to recode VRM-1489 as a switched-off lamp, I receive an internal error message. Although this is a mistake, I continue to recognize VRM-1489 as a hat rack. This is an idiosyncrasy of my pattern-recognition software, and I am not able to correct it.

I hear one of my owner's nephews use my address label: Lieutenant Halloran. This draws my attention, of course. "Why do you call your robot 'Lieutenant Halloran'?" the nephew asks.

The other nephew answers him. "A robot has to have a name, so it knows when you give it an order. Machines are like that."

"But why do you call it that, Uncle Jake?" the first nephew asks.

"So I won't forget how much I hate the scumball. See, Lieutenant Halloran was my platoon leader in Nicaragua. Now I can push him around like I always wanted." My owner rolls his wheelchair across the room and picks up VRM-1, a group photograph. "That's him in front, the weedbrain. Dumbest pogue in the whole corps. Lieutenant Halloran, tell the boys about yourself."

"Yes, sir, sergeant, sir." I recite memory file HALLORAN for him: "I am the biggest clown in the Marine Corps, a disgrace to my uniform, a bigger threat to my unit than the entire Nicaraguan army. Ortega smiles when he thinks of me. I think field rations are delicious. ..."

The file is extensive. While I play it back, I make my hourly query of my owner's implant. I note that his blood pressure and pulse rate have lowered, and his brainwave traces have moderated. My medical software tells me this is consonant with a slight reduction in mental stress. I conjecture that playing memory file HALLORAN somehow has a soothing effect on my owner.

"Lieutenant Halloran, at ease," he says, and I fall silent while my owner talks to his nephews. "The real Halloran nearly got our platoon killed a dozen times, because he wanted to look like a gung-ho gyrene—win a medal, impress the rear-echelon honchos, get himself promoted. So he kept volunteering us for lurps—hell, long-range reconnaissance patrols to you—and ambush patrols. All the scut jobs. Then one night he walked us into Sandinista turf, and he got half of us killed. I caught a bullet in the spine that night."

A subroutine whose existence I have not suspected makes itself known. I record his words into a special memory file. They will be evaluated by a psychiatrist, who is concerned with my owner's adaptation to his disability.

My owner again shows the VRM-1 group photograph to his nephews. "Look, I want you kids to know about the guys in my unit. See this dude, Wynsocki?"

"The white boy with the long mustache?" a nephew asks.

"Yeah, that's Wynsocki. We called him the Sock. He saved us all one night." My owner's voice-stress levels remain within acceptable limits, if just barely. "See, Halloran sent us into a village, and he ordered us not to shoot until the Reds opened fire, so we'd know exactly where they were. That's how an ambush patrol works. Only word had it that the Sandinistas had a whole company in that village. We knew we were dead goin' in, but try telling that to Halloran. Orders are orders, he said, so write your will if you're scared.

"We got to the edge of the village, and the Sock grins at me, and says he'll obey orders and let them shoot first. Then— then he runs into the village, shoutin' and screamin', and that's when all the Reds in the village start shootin' at him. That bought us enough time to get under cover and save our bacon, but it was all over for the Sock. I guess he had better luck than me." One hand hits the side of his chair.

There is a long silence, lasting tens of millions of microseconds, during which the nephews stop eating the smaller objects from VRM-T-203. When one finally speaks his voice-stress level is high. He says that it is time to go home, and they leave at once.

I clean up the living room while my owner prepares and eats his dinner. During my next check of his implant I note that his blood-alcohol level has risen to 0.09%, a significant but not worrisome amount. After dinner he returns to the living room. He carries VRM-T-200 on his lap, an object which contains brown bottles. He turns on the television and drinks from the bottles.

Then he speaks, and both his voice-stress and decibel levels reach high and dangerous readings. I roll into the living room, alerted for a medical emergency. I check my emergency systems: medical software, siren, oxygen bottle and mask, modem and telephone cord. "Do you require assistance? Is there trouble?"

"Trouble! You didn't hear the news? We're goddamn withdrawing from Nicaragua!"

Analyzing this as best I can, I find "withdraw" in my vocabulary. It is a medical term, referring to certain side effects of addictive substances. "Error message fifty-two. Undefined use of 'withdraw.' You are not an addict."

" 'Addict'? What are you talking about, you scraphead? I'm not addicted to any damned thing." My owner drinks from a bottle. "Maybe Uncle Sam is the addict. Yeah. He's hooked on getting us into wars, then quitting before we can win. All that talk about how we're fightin' for democracy—what were they doing, just throwing us away? Tell me!" "Error message twelve," I answer. "Data not available." "Goddamn machine!" He throws the bottle at me. I am undamaged, although the bottle shatters. "Know why they gave me a robot nursemaid? Because you're goddamn cheaper'n a human worker! They weren't going to waste money on—forget it. Forget everything. Everyone wants to forget about us soldiers. Even family." He rolls his wheelchair out of the room.

There is broken glass all over the living room floor. I get my cleaning equipment and remove it.

My owner goes to bed early, but he does not fall asleep until well after midnight. It is probable that he will not wake until late tomorrow morning, and he will not leave bed until he has been awake over an hour. In the sixty-three days during which I have worked for him I have never seen him vary from this pattern. My medical profiles inform me that this is not standard human behavior, but it does not fall outside the parameters which the VA gave me for my owner. I cannot explain this incongruity.

At 1:37 A.M. I hear unidentifiable noises from my owner's bedroom. When I go to investigate, I find that a human has entered the bedroom. I examine him in infrared, and find that he does not fit my recognition matrices.

Evidently, he does not fit my owner's matrices either. "What you want?" he asks. His voice-stress levels are high.

"Just shut up," the unknown human tells him. "Stay quiet and you won't get hurt." The man looks out the window at the side yard, then pulls the window down. He does this with one hand. In his other hand he holds an object which I know I should recognize.

The man points the object at my owner. "Get your hands out where I can see them, spade. Real slow—I don't want you pulling something on me. Now get out of bed. Slow."

"I—can't—walk." His voice-stress levels verge on the danger line. Following my programming, I switch my medical monitors to full coverage. I now receive an implant update every five seconds. All of my owner's readings are within tolerable levels, but the trend is upward. "Get up!"

"I can't! Look, why in hell you think I got that wheelchair?" The man looks at it and makes a grunting noise. Then he notices me. "What's that?"

"A Vet-Admin robot. It runs errands for me." "And calls the cops, too, I bet. Turn it off." "It doesn't have an 'off switch. Hell, it doesn't even have an instruction manual!"

"Yeah, I'll just bet," the intruder says. He comes to me and squats down. As he examines me I study the object in his hand. It strongly resembles certain objects in the group photograph. I feel a 90 percent level of confidence that it is a pistol. My safety program describes pistols and related devices as health hazards.

The intruder grunts again and pulls open my communication panel. In seconds my maintenance circuits alert me to damage: modem disabled. Siren disabled. Primary speaker disabled. It is evident that the intruder knows something of robotics, although he misses my back-up speaker.

He steps back from me and faces my owner. "Now, I'm going to stay here until I'm sure the pigs are through searching this area. Don't make any trouble for me and you won't get hurt."

"Who the hell are you?" my owner asks.

"Let's just say I'm a free soul, and I'm staying that way." He waves the pistol. "Where's your money?"

My owner snorts. "You think I'm rich? Did you ever see a VA disability check?"

"I got to tear this place apart?" The intruder kicks over the wheelchair. "If you got any money, you better talk!"

"OK. There's five, maybe six bucks in my top dresser drawer."

"Five or six bucks?" The intruder opens the drawer and extracts the money. "What a place. I didn't even get that much when I hit the liquor store."

The intruder sits on the floor, but he keeps the gun pointed at my owner. "Rotten luck. I saw all the long grass and weeds in your yard, and I figured no one lived here. Only it turns out you're some cripple that don't mow his lawn. So what am I going to do with you when I leave?"

My owner's medical readings now exceed the safety levels. I must now summon help. Considering my damage I have few options. The most efficient is to use my back-up speaker and the kitchen telephone. I roll toward the bedroom door.

"Hey!" the intruder snaps. "Where's that thing going?"

"How should I know?" my owner says. "You think I know about robots?"

"Well, stop it! Machine, stop! You better stop it!"

"Lieutenant Halloran, stop." I stop in the hallway. "Get back in here. What are you doing?"

"Medical emergency." My back-up speaker is feeble, but adequate. "I must summon help. I will use the telephone."

The intruder causes the gun to make a clacking noise. "If it makes any trouble, you son of a bitch, I'll kill you."

"OK, OK," my owner says. "Lieutenant Halloran. Do not use the telephone. Do not call for help. Do not leave the house. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir, sergeant, sir." Analysis makes one thing evident: the intruder is a threat to my owner's health. I must remove this threat, within the constraints imposed on me. I again leave the room.

"Lieutenant Halloran!" The intruder now knows my address label. "What are you doing?"

"I have functions to pursue," I say. I would be more specific, but I have not yet selected a course of action.

I leave the bedroom, and the intruder does not stop me again. As I roll into the kitchen I contemplate my options, which are frankly limited. My safety program suggests several courses of action. Only one has an acceptable chance of success, and it is hampered by a high degree of complexity.

I go to my rack and connect into my floor cleaning equipment. I fill the tank with water, and then enter the living room. I set the hose nozzle to "stream" and flood the hall entry with water, retaining one gallon of water in the tank.

I examine VRM-1489. The hat rack has an electric switch near its top. I activate it, and the hat rack becomes VRM-547, the floor lamp. I grasp it in both manipulators and test its handling characteristics. The three light bulbs cast moving shadows as I swing the lamp back and forth. Now I must wait for the intruder to come to me.

My owner's physical condition remains unacceptable. The most probable cause is stress. I recall that I have a resource which can alleviate that condition in him. I access memory file HALLORAN, and recite its contents at the highest decibel level my back-up speaker can manage: "I am the biggest clown in the Marine Corps, a disgrace to my uniform, a bigger threat to my unit than the entire Nicaraguan army. Ortega smiles when he thinks of me. I think field rations are delicious. . . ." I hear voices from the bedroom. First, the intruder: "What the hell is that?"

Next, my owner: "How should I know? That damned cheap-charley robot never has worked right."

I detect footsteps, increasing in volume. I wait until the intruder steps into the living room, setting both feet in the puddle of water. I activate the hose and spray him with my remaining water; at maximum pressure the tank drains itself in three seconds. Simultaneously I swing the lamp, aiming to strike him in the chest area with the bulbs. Two of them shatter on impact and there is a flash like lightning.

The house current fails within a few million microseconds. By this time, however, the intruder lies on the floor. His body makes uncoordinated movements but he does not get up. It soon becomes clear that the intruder is dead, and therefore no longer a threat to my owner's health. I am now holding the VRM-1489 hat rack, which I drop. I pull the body out of the entryway and return to the bedroom.

My owner is leaning out of his bed and trying to reach his wheelchair: "Lieutenant Halloran, what happened?"

"Error message thirty-nine," I say. "Indeterminate question."

"You dickweed. Lieutenant Halloran, what has happened to that burglar?"

"I electrocuted the intruder with the VRM-547 floor lamp." I take the wheelchair and restore it to its proper position.

"You did?" My owner stares at me for several million microseconds. "I thought—Lieutenant Halloran, aren't robots programmed against harming humans?"

"Yes. However, protecting your health took precedence. The intruder was a threat to your health."

"I see." It is many millions of microseconds before my owner speaks again. "Lieutenant Halloran, call the police."

"Yes, sir, sergeant, sir."

I go to the kitchen and use the phone to call the police. I also request an ambulance; my owner's physical condition is returning to normal, but it has been in the danger zone and medical attention remains mandatory. I make my requests in the most urgent forms my vocabulary allows.

There are other problems. I am in need of repairs. The electricity is out. The living room is a mess: the floor is wet, broken glass is everywhere again, the VRM-1489 hat rack is damaged, and I am incapable of removing the body by myself.

The police and ambulance arrive in reasonable time. The police reset a circuit breaker, restoring power, and the medical personnel remove the body. A paramedic checks on my owner's health and pronounces him fit.

The police question him in the kitchen while I clean the living room. "I don't know what happened," he tells them. "I was stuck in bed. The robot—it's never worked too well. God only knows why, but it started scrubbing the floor, and that burglar got suspicious. He went to look, and the next thing, bang, the lights went out."

"What happened doesn't matter much," a policeman says. "Either he stumbled into the lamp and knocked it over, or he pushed the robot into it and the robot knocked it over. Either way he's dead—and no tears lost. Your visitor killed two people this evening when he knocked over a liquor store. You were lucky."

My owner sits in the kitchen entry, and he can see me from there. "I guess I was lucky at that," he says.

The police and ambulance depart shortly afterward, and my owner returns to bed. The next morning he calls the VA, and requests a repair technician, who arrives that afternoon. He decides that my damage is minimal, and repairs are easily made.

My owner discusses robotics with the technician, who is happy to answer questions. "Sure, robots are alive," he says. "You can't always predict what they'll do, which is one way to define life. In fact, no matter how careful you are when you give a robot a command, you can't count on it to do exactly what you ordered."

"I used to know a guy like that," my owner says.

"Well, it's not quite the same thing as with humans," the technician says. "People know what they're doing when they 'misunderstand' an order. Robots just 'understand' it in a way you didn't expect. That's different."

"I suppose it is."

The technician finishes the repairs, and I resume my functions. There is a considerable amount of work to perform; in addition to my usual routine, my owner makes certain changes in my programming. He invites his nephews to visit again, which entails even more work. Amid all this I note one improvement in my situation. The VRM-1489 hat rack is so badly damaged that my owner decides to put it out with the trash. Thus I will no longer confuse the floor lamp and the hat rack. All is well.

The two nephews appear late that afternoon, and at first their voice-stress levels are high. My owner speaks to them. "I was talkin' crazy yesterday, and I'm sorry I scared you. I don't ever want to do that again, OK?"

"OK," they answer. The stress levels remain high.

"Good. Hey, Sock! Bring out the munchies."

I roll out of the kitchen, carrying VRM-T-223 and VRM-T-224, coded as a bag of chips and a six-pack of cola. "Sock?" one of the nephews asks. "You changed his name?"

"Yeah. I did some thinking last night," my owner says. "The robot's name, well, it's just a way to remember someone. I figure if I remember anyone, it should be the Sock and not Halloran." I put the bag of chips and the six-pack of cola on the VRM-53 coffee table. "Yesterday I told you how the Sock died. . . . but now I want to tell you how he lived."

CIBOLA

Connie Willis

“Carla, you grew up in Denver,” Jake said. “Here’s an assignment that might interest you.”

This is his standard opening line. It means he is about to dump another “local interest” piece on me.

“Come on, Jake,” I said. “No more nutty Bronco fans who’ve spray-painted their kids orange and blue, okay? Give me a real story. Please?”

“Bronco season’s over, and the NFL draft was last week,” he said. “This isn’t a local interest.”

“You’re right there,” I said. “These stories you keep giving me are of no interest, local or otherwise. I did the time machine piece for you. And the psychic dentist. Give me a break. Let me cover something that doesn’t involve nuttos.”

“It’s for the ‘Our Living Western Heritage’ series.” He handed me a slip of paper. “You can interview her this morning and then cover the skyscraper moratorium hearings this afternoon.”

This was plainly a bribe, since the hearings were front page stuff right now, and “historical interests” could be almost as bad as locals—senile old women in nursing homes rambling on about the good old days. But at least they didn’t crawl in their washing machines and tell you to push “rinse” so they could travel into the future. And they didn’t try to perform psychic oral surgery on you.

“All right,” I said, and took the slip of paper. “Rosa Turcorillo,” it read and gave an address out on Santa Fe. “What’s her phone number?”

“She doesn’t have a phone,” Jake said. “You’ll have to go out there.” He started across the city room to his office. “The hearings are at one o’clock.”

“What is she, one of Denver’s first Chicano settlers?” I called after him.

He waited till he was just outside his office to answer me. “She says she’s the great-granddaughter of Coronado,” he said, and beat a hasty retreat into his office. “She says she knows where the Seven Cities of Cibola are.”

I spent forty-five minutes researching Coronado and copying articles and then drove out to see his great-granddaughter. She lived out on south Santa Fe past Hampden, so I took I-25 and then was sorry. The morning rush hour was still crawling along at about ten miles an hour pumping carbon monoxide into the air. I read the whole article stopped behind a semi between Speer and Sixth Avenue.

Coronado trekked through the Southwest looking for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold in the 1540s, which poked a big hole in Rosa’s story, since any great-granddaughter of his would have to be at least three hundred years old.

There wasn’t any mystery about the Seven Cities of Cibola either. Coronado found them, near Gallup, New Mexico, and conquered them but they were nothing but mud-hut villages. Having been burned once, he promptly took off after another promise of gold in Quivira in Kansas someplace where there wasn’t any gold either. He hadn’t been in Colorado at all.

I pulled onto Santa Fe, cursing Jake for sending me on another wild-goose chase, and headed south. Denver is famous for traffic, air pollution, and neighborhoods that have seen better days. Santa Fe isn’t one of those neighborhoods. It’s been a decaying line of rusting railroad tracks, crummy bars, old motels, and waterbed stores for as long as I can remember, and I, as Jake continually reminds me, grew up in Denver.

Coronado’s granddaughter lived clear south past Hampden, in a trailer park with a sign with “Olde West Motel” and a neon bison on it, and Rosa Turcorillo’s old Airstream looked like it had been there since the days when the buffalo roamed. It was tiny, the kind of trailer I would call “Turcorillo’s modest mobile home” in the article, no more than fifteen feet long and eight wide.

Rosa was nearly that wide herself. When she answered my knock, she barely fit in the door. She was wearing a voluminous turquoise housecoat, and had long black braids.

“What do you want?” she said, holding the metal door so she could slam it in case I was the police or a repo man.

“I’m Carla Johnson from the Denver Record,” I said. “I’d like to interview you about Coronado.” I fished in my bag for my press card. “We’re doing a series on ‘Our Living Western Heritage.’” I finally found the press card and handed it to her. “We’re interviewing people who are part of our past.”

She stared at the press card disinterestedly. This was not the way it was supposed to work. Nuttos usually drag you in the house and start babbling before you finish telling them who you are. She should already be halfway through her account of how she’d traced her ancestry to Coronado by means of the I Ching.

“I would have telephoned first, but you didn’t have a phone,” I said.

She handed the card to me and started to shut the door.

“If this isn’t a good time, I can come back,” I babbled. “And we don’t have to do the interview here if you’d rather not. We can go to the Record office or to a restaurant.”

She opened the door and flashed a smile that had half of Cibola’s missing gold in it. “I ain’t dressed,” she said. “It’ll take me a couple of minutes. Come on in.”

I climbed the metal steps and went inside. Rosa pointed at a flowered couch, told me to sit down and disappeared into the rear of the trailer.

I was glad I had suggested going out. The place was no messier than my desk, but it was only about six feet long and had the couch, a dinette set, and a recliner. There was no way it would hold me and Coronado’s granddaughter, too. The place may have had a surplus of furniture but it didn’t have any of the usual crazy stuff, no pyramids, no astrological charts, no crystals. A deck of cards was laid out like the tarot on the dinette table, but when I leaned across to look at them, I saw it was a half-finished game of solitaire. I put the red eight on the black nine.

Rosa came out, wearing orange polyester pants and a yellow print blouse and carrying a large black leather purse. I stood up and started to say, “Where would you like to go? Is there someplace close?” but I only got it half out.

“The Eldorado Cafe,” she said and started out the door, moving pretty fast for somebody three hundred years old and three hundred pounds.

“I don’t know where the Eldorado Cafe is,” I said, unlocking the car door for her. “You’ll have to tell me where it is.”

“Turn right,” she said. “They have good cinnamon rolls.”

I wondered if it was the offer of the food or just the chance to go someplace that had made her consent to the interview. Whichever, I might as well get it over with. “So Coronado was your great-grandfather?” I said.

She looked at me as if I were out of my mind. “No. Who told you that?”

Jake, I thought, who I plan to tear limb from limb when I get back to the Record. “You aren’t Coronado’s great-granddaughter?”

She folded her arms over her stomach. “I am the descendant of El Turco.”

El Turco. It sounded like something out of Zorro. “So it’s this El Turco who’s your great-grandfather?”

“Great-great. El Turco was Pawnee. Coronado captured him at Cicuye and put a collar around his neck so he could not run away. Turn right.”

We were already halfway through the intersection. I jerked the steering wheel to the right and nearly skidded into a pickup.

Rosa seemed unperturbed. “Coronado wanted El Turco to guide him to Cibola,” she said.

I wanted to ask if he had, but I didn’t want to prevent Rosa from giving me directions. I drove slowly through the next intersection, alert to sudden instructions, but there weren’t any. I drove on down the block.

“And did El Turco guide Coronado to Cibola?”

“Sure. You should have turned left back there,” she said.

She apparently hadn’t inherited her great-great-grandfather’s scouting ability. I went around the block and turned left, and was overjoyed to see the Eldorado Cafe down the street. I pulled into the parking lot and we got out.

“They make their own cinnamon rolls,” she said, looking at me hopefully as we went in. “With frosting.”

We sat down in a booth. “Have anything you want,” I said. “This is on the Record.”

She ordered a cinnamon roll and a large Coke. I ordered coffee and began fishing in my bag for my tape recorder.

“You lived here in Denver a long time?” she asked.

“All my life. I grew up here.”

She smiled her gold-toothed smile at me. “You like Denver?”

“Sure,” I said. I found the pocket-sized recorder and laid it on the table. “Smog, oil refineries, traffic. What’s not to like?”

“I like it too,” she said.

The waitress set a cinnamon roll the size of Mile High Stadium in front of her and poured my coffee.

“You know what Coronado fed El Turco?” The waitress brought her large Coke. “Probably one tortilla a day. And he didn’t have no shoes. Coronado make him walk all that way to Colorado and no shoes.”

I switched the tape recorder on. “You say Coronado came to Colorado,” I said, “but what I’ve read says he traveled through New Mexico and Oklahoma and up into Kansas, but not Colorado.”

“He was in Colorado.” She jabbed her finger into the table. “He was here.”

I wondered if she meant here in Colorado or here in the Eldorado Cafe.

“When was that? On his way to Quivira?”

“Quivira?” she said, looking blank. “I don’t know nothing about Quivira.”

“Quivira was a place where there was supposed to be gold,” I said. “He went there after he found the Seven Cities of Cibola.”

“He didn’t find them,” she said, chewing on a mouthful of cinnamon roll. “That’s why he killed El Turco.”

“Coronado killed El Turco?”

“Yeah. After he led him to Cibola.”

This was even worse than talking to the psychic dentist.

“Coronado said El Turco made the whole thing up,” Rosa said. “He said El Turco was going to lead Coronado into an ambush and kill him. He said the Seven Cities didn’t exist.”

“But they did?”

“Of course. El Turco led him to the place.”

“But I thought you said Coronado didn’t find them.”

“He didn’t.”

I was hopelessly confused by now. “Why not?”

“Because they weren’t there.”

I was going to run Jake through his paper shredder an inch at a time. I had wasted a whole morning on this and I was not even going to be able to get a story out of it.

“You mean they were some sort of mirage?” I asked.

Rosa considered this through several bites of cinnamon roll. “No. A mirage is something that isn’t there. These were there.”

“But invisible?”

“No.”

“Hidden.”

“No.”

“But Coronado couldn’t see them?”

She shook her head. With her forefinger, she picked up a few stray pieces of frosting left on her plate and stuck them in her mouth. “How could he when they weren’t there?”

The tape clicked off, and I didn’t even bother to turn it over. I looked at my watch. If I took her back now I could make it to the hearings early and maybe interview some of the developers. I picked up the check and went over to the cash register.

“Do you want to see them?”

“What do you mean? See the Seven Cities of Cibola?”

“Yeah. I’ll take you to them.”

“You mean go to New Mexico?”

“No. I told you, Coronado came to Colorado.”

“When?”

“When he was looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola.”

“No, I mean when can I see them? Right now?”

“No,” she said, with that, ‘how dumb can anyone be?’ look. She reached for a copy of the Rocky Mountain News that was lying on the counter and looked inside the back page. “Tomorrow morning. Six o’clock.”

One of my favorite things about Denver is that it’s spread all over the place and takes you forever to get anywhere. The mountains finally put a stop to things twenty miles to the west, but in all three other directions it can sprawl all the way to the state line and apparently is trying to. Being a reporter here isn’t so much a question of driving journalistic ambition as of driving, period.

The skyscraper moratorium hearings were out on Colorado Boulevard across from the Hotel Giorgio, one of the skyscrapers under discussion. It took me forty-five minutes to get there from the Olde West Trailer Park.

I was half an hour late, which meant the hearings had already gotten completely off the subject. “What about reflecting glass?” someone in the audience was saying. “I think it should be outlawed in skyscrapers. I was nearly blinded the other day on the way to work.”

“Yeah,” a middle-aged woman said. “If we’re going to have skyscrapers, they should look like skyscrapers.” She waved vaguely at the Hotel Giorgio, which looks like a giant black milk carton.

“And not like that United Bank building downtown!” someone else said. “It looks like a damned cash register!”

From there it was a short illogical jump to the impossibility of parking downtown, Denver’s becoming too decentralized, and whether the new airport should be built or not. By five-thirty they were back on reflecting glass.

“Why don’t they put glass you can see through in their skyscrapers?” an old man who looked a lot like the time machine inventor said. “I’ll tell you why not. Because those big business executives are doing things they should be ashamed of, and they don’t want us to see them.”

I left at seven and went back to the Record to try to piece my notes together into some kind of story. Jake was there.

“How’d your interview with Coronado’s granddaughter go?” he asked.

“The Seven Cities of Cibola are here in Denver only Coronado couldn’t see them because they’re not there.” I looked around. “Is there a copy of the News someplace?”

“Here? In the Record building!” he said, clutching his chest in mock horror. “That bad, huh? You’re going to go work for the News?” But he fished a copy out of the mess on somebody’s desk and handed it to me. I opened it to the back page.

There was no “Best Times for Viewing Lost Cities of Gold” column. There were pictures and dates of the phases of the moon, road conditions, and “What’s in the Stars: by Stella.” My horoscope of the day read: “Any assignment you accept today will turn out differently than you expect.” The rest of the page was devoted to the weather, which was supposed to be sunny and warm tomorrow.

The facing page had the crossword puzzle, “Today in History,” and squibs about Princess Di and a Bronco fan who’d planted his garden in the shape of a Bronco quarterback. I was surprised Jake hadn’t assigned me that story.

I went down to Research and looked up El Turco. He was an Indian slave, probably Pawnee, who had scouted for Coronado, but that was his nickname, not his name. The Spanish had called him “The Turk” because of his peculiar hair. He had been captured at Cicuye, after Coronado’s foray into Cibola, and had promised to lead them to Quivira, tempting them with stories of golden streets and great stone palaces. When the stories didn’t pan out, Coronado had had him executed. I could understand why.

Jake cornered me on my way home. “Look, don’t quit,” he said. “Tell you what, forget Coronado. There’s a guy out in Lakewood who’s planted his garden in the shape of John Elway’s face. Daffodils for hair, blue hyacinths for eyes.”

“Can’t,” I said, sidling past him. “I’ve got a date to see the Seven Cities of Gold.”

Another delightful aspect of the Beautiful Mile-High City is that in the middle of April, after you’ve planted your favorite Bronco, you can get fifteen inches of snow. It had started getting cloudy by the time I left the paper, but fool that I was, I thought it was an afternoon thunderstorm. The News’s forecast had, after all, been for warm and sunny. When I woke up at four-thirty there was a foot and half of snow on the ground and more tumbling down.

“Why are you going back if she’s such a nut?” Jake had asked me when I told him I couldn’t take the Elway garden. “You don’t seriously think she’s onto something, do you?” and I had had a hard time explaining to him why I was planning to get up at an ungodly hour and trek all the way out to Santa Fe again.

She was not El Turco’s great-great-granddaughter. Two greats still left her at two hundred and fifty plus, and her history was as garbled as her math, but when I had gotten impatient she had said, “Do you want to see them?” and when I had asked her when, she had consulted the News’s crossword puzzle and said, “Tomorrow morning.”

I had gotten offers of proof before. The time machine inventor had proposed that I climb in his washing machine and be sent forward to “a glorious future, a time when everyone is rich,” and the psychic dentist had offered to pull my wisdom teeth. But there’s always a catch to these offers.

“Your teeth will have been extracted in another plane of reality,” the dentist had said. “X-rays taken in this plane will show them as still being there,” and the time machine guy had checked his soak cycle and the stars at the last minute and decided there wouldn’t be another temporal agitation until August of 2158.

Rosa hadn’t put any restrictions at all on her offer. “You want to see them?” she said, and there was no mention of reality planes or stellar-laundry connections, no mention of any catch. Which doesn’t mean there won’t be one, I thought, getting out the mittens and scarf I had just put away for the season and going out to scrape the windshield off. When I got there she would no doubt say the snow made it impossible to see the Cities or I could only see them if I believed in UFO’s. Or maybe she’d point off somewhere in the general direction of Denver’s brown cloud and say, “What do you mean, you can’t see them?”

I-25 was a mess, cars off the road everywhere and snow driving into my headlights so I could barely see. I got behind a snowplow and stayed there, and it was nearly six o’clock by the time I made it to the trailer. Rosa took a good five minutes to come to the door, and when she finally got there she wasn’t dressed. She stared blearily at me, her hair out of its braids and hanging tangled around her face.

“Remember me? Carla Johnson? You promised to show me the Seven Cities?”

“Cities?” she said blankly.

“The Seven Cities of Cibola.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, and motioned for me to come inside. “There aren’t seven. El Turco was a dumb Pawnee. He don’t know how to count.”

“How many are there?” I asked, thinking, this is the catch. There aren’t seven and they aren’t gold.

“Depends,” she said. “More than seven. You still wanta go see them?”

“Yes.”

She went into the bedroom and came out after a few minutes with her hair braided, the pants and blouse of the day before and an enormous red carcoat, and we took off toward Cibola. We went south again, past more waterbed stores and rusting railroad tracks, and out to Belleview.

It was beginning to get fairly light out, though it was impossible to tell if the sun was up or not. It was still snowing hard.

She had me turn onto Belleview, giving me at least ten yards’ warning, and we headed east toward the Tech Center. Those people at the hearing who’d complained about Denver becoming too decentralized had a point. The Tech Center looked like another downtown as we headed toward it.

A multi-colored downtown, garish even through the veil of snow. The Metropoint building was pinkish-lavender, the one next to it was midnight blue, while the Hyatt Regency had gone in for turquoise and bronze, and there was an assortment of silver, sea-green, and taupe. There was an assortment of shapes, too: deranged trapezoids, overweight butterflies, giant beer cans. They were clearly moratorium material, each of them with its full complement of reflecting glass, and, presumably, executives with something to hide.

Rosa had me turn left onto Yosemite, and we headed north again. The snowplows hadn’t made it out here yet, and it was heavy going. I leaned forward and peered through the windshield, and so did Rosa.

“Do you think we’ll be able to see them?” I asked.

“Can’t tell yet,” she said. “Turn right.”

I turned into a snow-filled street. “I’ve been reading about your great-grandfather.”

“Great-great,” she said.

“He confessed he’d lied about the cities, that there really wasn’t any gold.”

She shrugged. “He was scared. He thought Coronado was going to kill him.”

“Coronado did kill him,” I said. “He said El Turco was leading his army into a trap.”

She shrugged again and wiped a space clear on the windshield to look through.

“If the Seven Cities existed, why didn’t El Turco take Coronado to them? It would have saved his life.”

“They weren’t there.” She leaned back.

“You mean they’re not there all the time?” I said.

“You know the Grand Canyon?” she asked. “My great-great-grandfather discovered the Grand Canyon. He told Coronado he seen it. Nobody saw the Grand Canyon again for three hundred years. Just because nobody seen it don’t mean it wasn’t there. You was supposed to turn right back there at the light.”

I could see why Coronado had strangled El Turco. If I hadn’t been afraid I’d get stuck in the snow, I’d have stopped and throttled her right then. I turned around, slipping and sliding, and went back to the light.

“Left at the next corner and go down the block a little ways,” she said, pointing. “Pull in there.”

“There” was the parking lot of a donut shop. It had a giant neon donut in the middle of its steamed-up windows. I knew how Coronado felt when he rode into the huddle of mud huts that was supposed to have been the City of Gold.

“This is Cibola?” I said.

“No way,” she said, heaving herself out of the car. “They’re not there today.”

“You said they were always there,” I said.

“They are.” She shut the car door, dislodging a clump of snow. “Just not all the time. I think they’re in one of those time-things.”

“Time-things? You mean a time warp?” I asked, trying to remember what the washing-machine guy had called it. “A temporal agitation?”

“How would I know? I’m not a scientist. They have good donuts here. Cream-filled.”

The donuts were actually pretty good, and by the time we started home the snow had stopped and was already turning to slush, and I no longer wanted to strangle her on the spot. I figured in another hour the sun would be out, and John Elway’s hyacinth-blue eyes would be poking through again. By the time we turned onto Hampden, I felt calm enough to ask when she thought the Seven Cities might put in another appearance.

She had bought a Rocky Mountain News and a box of cream-filled donuts to take home. She opened the box and contemplated them. “More than seven,” she said. “You like to write?”

“What?” I said, wondering if Coronado had had this much trouble communicating with El Turco.

“That’s why you’re a reporter, because you like to write?”

“No,” I said. “The writing’s a real pain. When will this time-warp thing happen again?”

She bit into a donut. “That’s Cinderella City,” she said, gesturing to the mall on our right with it. “You ever been there?”

I nodded.

“I went there once. They got marble floors and this big fountain. They got lots of stores. You can buy just about anything you want there. Clothes, jewels, shoes.”

If she wanted to do a little shopping now that she’d had breakfast, she could forget it. And she could forget about changing the subject. “When can we go see the Seven Cities again? Tomorrow?”

She licked cream filling off her fingers and turned the News over. “Not tomorrow,” she said. “El Turco would have liked Cinderella City. He didn’t have no shoes. He had to walk all the way to Colorado in his bare feet. Even in the snow.”

I imagined my hands closing around her plump neck. “When are the Seven Cities going to be there again?” I demanded. “And don’t tell me they’re always there.”

She consulted the celebrity squibs. “Not tomorrow,” she said. “Day after tomorrow. Five o’clock. You must like people, then. That’s why you wanted to be a reporter? To meet all kinds of people?”

“No,” I said. “Believe it or not, I wanted to travel.”

She grinned her golden smile at me. “Like Coronado,” she said.

I spent the next two days interviewing developers, environmentalists, and council members, and pondering why Coronado had continued to follow El Turco, even after it was clear he was a pathological liar.

I had stopped at the first 7-Eleven I could find after letting Rosa and her donuts off and bought a copy of the News. I read the entire back section, including the comics. For all I knew, she was using Doonesbury for an oracle. Or Nancy.

I read the obits and worked the crossword puzzle and then went over the back page again. There was nothing remotely time-warp-related. The moon was at first quarter. Sunset would occur at 7:51 P.M. Road conditions for the Eisenhower Tunnel were snow-packed and blowing. Chains required. My horoscope read, “Don’t get involved in wild goose chases. A good stay-at-home day.”

Rosa no more knew where the Seven Cities of Gold were than her great-great-grandfather. According to the stuff I read in between moratorium jaunts, he had changed his story every fifteen minutes or so, depending on what Coronado wanted to hear.

The other Indian scouts had warned Coronado, told him there was nothing to the north but buffalo and a few teepees, but Coronado had gone blindly on. “El Turco seems to have exerted a Pied-Piperlike power over Coronado,” one of the historians had written, “a power which none of Coronado’s officers could understand.”

“Are you still working on that crazy Coronado thing?” Jake asked me when I got back to the Record. “I thought you were covering the hearings.”

“I am,” I said, looking up the Grand Canyon. “They’ve been postponed because of the snow. I have an appointment with the United Coalition Against Uncontrolled Growth at eleven.”

“Good,” he said. “I don’t need the Coronado piece, after all. We’re running a series on ‘Denver Today’ instead.”

He went back upstairs. I found the Grand Canyon. It had been discovered by Lopez de Cardeñas, one of Coronado’s men. El Turco hadn’t been with him.

I drove out to Aurora in a blinding snowstorm to interview the United Coalition. They were united only in spirit, not in location. The president had his office in one of the Pavilion Towers off Havana, ut the secretary who had all the graphs and spreadsheets, was out at Fiddler’s Green. I spent the whole afternoon shuttling back and forth between them through the snow, and wondering what had ever possessed me to become a journalist. I’d wanted to travel. I had had the idea, gotten from TV that journalists got to go all over the world, writing about exotic and amazing places. Like the UNIPAC building and the Plaza Towers.

They were sort of amazing, if you like Modern Corporate. Brass and chrome and Persian carpets. Atriums and palm trees and fountains splashing in marble pools. I wondered what Rosa, who had been so impressed with Cinderella City, would have thought of some of these places. El Turco would certainly have been impressed. Of course, he would probably have been impressed by the donut shop, and would no doubt have convinced Coronado to drag his whole army there with tales of fabulous, cream-filled wealth.

I finished up the United Coalition and went back to the Record to call some developers and builders and get their side. It was still snowing, and there weren’t any signs of snow removal, creative or otherwise, that I could see. I set up some appointments for the next day, and then went back down to Research.

El Turco hadn’t been the only person to tell tales of the fabulous Seven Cities of Gold. A Spanish explorer, Cabeza de Vaca, had reported them first, and his black slave Estevanico claimed to have seen them, too. Friar Marcos had gone with Estevanico to find them, and, according to him, Estavanico had actually entered Cibola.

They had made up a signal. Estevanico was to send back a small cross if he found a little village, a big cross if he found a city. Estevanico was killed in a battle with Indians, and Friar Marcos fled back to Coronado, but he said he’d seen the Seven Cities in the distance, and he claimed that Estevanico had sent back “a cross the size of a man.”

There were all kinds of other tales, too, that the Navajos had gold and silver mines, that Montezuma had moved his treasure north to keep it from the Spanish, that there was a golden city on a lake, with canoes whose oarlocks were solid gold. If El Turco had been lying, he wasn’t the only one.

I spent the next day interviewing pro-uncontrolled growth types. They were united, too. “Denver has to retain its central identity,” they all told me from what it was hard to believe was not a pre-written script. “It’s becoming split into a half-dozen sub-cities, each with its own separate goals.”

They were in less agreement as to where the problem lay. One of the builders who’d developed the Tech Center thought the Plaza Tower out at Fiddler’s Green was an eyesore, Fiddler’s Green complained about Aurora, Aurora thought there was too much building going on around Colorado Boulevard. They were all united on one thing, however: downtown was completely out of control.

I logged several thousand miles in the snow, which showed no signs of letting up, and went home to bed. I debated setting my alarm. Rosa didn’t know where the Seven Cities of Gold were, the Living Western Heritage series had been canceled, and Coronado would have saved everybody a lot of trouble if he had listened to his generals.

But Estevanico had sent back a giant cross, and there was the “time-thing” thing. I had not done enough stories on psychic peridontia yet to start believing their nutto theories, but I had done enough to know what they were supposed to sound like. Rosa’s was all wrong.

“I don’t know what it’s called,” she’d said, which was far too vague. Nutto theories may not make any sense, but they’re all worked out, down to the last bit of pseudo-scientific jargon. The psychic dentist had told me all about transcendental maxillofacial extractile vibrations, and the time travel guy had showed me a hand-lettered chart showing how the partial load setting affected future events.

If Rosa’s Seven Cities were just one more nutto theory, she would have been talking about morphogenetic temporal dislocation and simultaneous reality modes. She would at least know what the “time-thing” was called.

I compromised by setting the alarm on “music” and went to bed.

I overslept. The station I’d set the alarm on wasn’t on the air at four-thirty in the morning. I raced into my clothes, dragged a brush through my hair, and took off. There was almost no traffic—who in their right mind is up at four-thirty?—and it had stopped snowing. By the time I pulled onto Santa Fe I was only running ten minutes late. Not that it mattered. She would probably take half an hour to drag herself to the door and tell me the Seven Cities of Cibola had canceled again.

I was wrong. She was standing outside waiting in her red carcoat and a pair of orange Bronco earmuffs. “You’re late,” she said, squeezing herself in beside me. “Got to go.”

“Where?”

She pointed. “Turn left.”

“Why don’t you just tell me where we’re going?” I said, “and that way I’ll have a little advance warning.”

“Turn right,” she said.

We turned onto Hampden and started up past Cinderella City. Hampden is never free of traffic, no matter what time of day it is. There were dozens of cars on the road. I got in the center lane, hoping she’d give me at least a few feet of warning for the next turn, but she leaned back and folded her arms across her massive bosom.

“You’re sure the Seven Cities will appear this morning?” I asked.

She leaned forward and peered through the windshield at the slowly lightening sky, looking for who knows what. “Good chance. Can’t tell for sure.”

I felt like Coronado, dragged from pillar to post. Just a little farther, just a little farther. I wondered if this could be not only a scam but a set-up, if we would end up pulling up next to a black van in some dark parking lot, and I would find myself on the cover of the Record as a robbery victim or worse. She was certainly anxious enough. She kept holding up her arm so she could read her watch in the lights of the cars behind us. More likely, we were heading for some bakery that opened at the crack of dawn, and she wanted to be there when the fried cinnamon rolls came out of the oven.

“Turn right!” she said. “Can’t you go no faster?”

I went faster. We were out in Cherry Creek now, and it was starting to get really light. The snowstorm was apparently over. The sky was turning a faint lavender-blue.

“Now right, up there,” she said, and I saw where we were going. This road led past Cherry Creek High School and then up along the top of the dam. A nice isolated place for a robbery.

We went past the last houses and pulled out onto the dam road. Rosa turned in her seat to peer out my window and the back, obviously looking for something. There wasn’t much to see. The water wasn’t visible from this point, and she was looking the wrong direction, out towards Denver. There were still a few lights, the early-bird traffic down on I-225 and the last few orangish street lights that hadn’t gone off automatically. The snow had taken on the bluish-lavender color of the sky.

I stopped the car.

“What are you doing?” she demanded. “Go all the way up.”

“I can’t,” I said, pointing ahead. “The road’s closed.”

She peered at the chain strung across the road as if she couldn’t figure out what it was, and then opened the door and got out.

Now it was my turn to say, “What are you doing?”

“We gotta walk,” she said. “We’ll miss it otherwise.”

“Miss what? Are you telling me there’s going to be a time warp up there on top of the dam?”

She looked at me like I was crazy. “Time warp?” she said. Her grin glittered in my headlights. “No. Come on.”

Even Coronado had finally said, “All right, enough,” and ordered his men to strangle El Turco. But not until he’d been lured all the way up to Kansas. And, according to Rosa, Colorado. The Seven Cities of Cibola were not going to be up on top of Cherry Creek dam, no matter what Rosa said, and I wasn’t even going to get a story out of this, but I switched off my lights and got out of the car and climbed over the chain.

It was almost fully light now, and the shadowy dimnesses below were sorting themselves out into decentralized Denver. The black 2001 towers off Havana were right below us, and past them the peculiar Mayan-pyramid shape of the National Farmer’s Union. The Tech Center rose in a jumble off to the left, beer cans and trapezoids, and then there was a long curve of isolated buildings all the way to downtown, an island of skyscraping towers obviously in need of a moratorium.

“Come on,” Rosa said. She started walking faster, panting along the road ahead of me and looking anxiously toward the east, where at least a black van wasn’t parked. “Coronado shouldn’t have killed El Turco. It wasn’t his fault.”

“What wasn’t his fault?”

“It was one of those time-things, what did you call it?” she said, breathing hard.

“A temporal agitation?”

“Yeah, only he didn’t know it. He thought it was there all the time, and when he brought Coronado there it wasn’t there, and he didn’t know what had happened.”

She looked anxiously to the east again, where a band of clouds extending about an inch above the horizon was beginning to turn pinkish-gray, and broke into an ungainly run. I trotted after her, trying to remember the procedure for CPR.

She ran into the pullout at the top of the dam and stopped, panting hard. She put her hand up to her heaving chest and looked out across the snow at Denver.

“So you’re saying the cities existed in some other time? In the future?”

She glanced over her shoulder at the horizon. The sun was nearly up. The narrow cloud turned pale pink, and the snow on Mt. Evans went the kind of fuschia we use in the Sunday supplements. “And you think there’s going to be another time-warp this morning?” I said.

She gave me that “how can one person be so stupid” look. “Of course not,” she said, and the sun cleared the cloud. “There they are,” she said.

There they were. The reflecting glass in the curved towers of Fiddler’s Green caught first, and then the Tech Center and the Silverado Building on Colorado Boulevard, and the downtown skyline burst into flames. They turned pink and then orange, the Hotel Giorgio and the Metropoint building and the Plaza Towers, blazing pinnacles and turrets and towers.

“You didn’t believe me, did you?” Rosa said.

“No,” I said, unwilling to take my eyes off of them. “I didn’t.”

There were more than seven. Far out to the west the Federal Center ignited, and off to the north the angled lines of grain elevators gleamed. Downtown blazed, blinding building moratorium advocates on their way to work. In between, the Career Development Institute and the United Bank Building and the Hyatt Regency burned gold, standing out from the snow like citadels, like cities. No wonder El Turco had dragged Coronado all the way to Colorado. Marble palaces and golden streets.

“I told you they were there all the time,” she said.

It was over in another minute, the fires going out one by one in the panes of reflecting glass, downtown first and then the Cigna building and Belleview Place, fading to their everyday silver and onyx and emerald. The Pavilion Towers below us darkened and the last of the sodium street lights went out.

“There all the time,” Rosa said solemnly.

“Yeah,” I said. I would have to get Jake up here to see this. I’d have to buy a News on the way home and check on the time of sunrise for tomorrow. And the weather.

I turned around. The sun glittered off the water of the reservoir. There was an aluminum rowboat out in the middle of it. It had golden oarlocks.

Rosa had started back down the road to the car. I caught up with her. “I’ll buy you a pecan roll,” I said. “Do you know of any good places around here?”

She grinned. Her gold teeth gleamed in the last light of Cibola. “The best,” she said.

BEARS DISCOVER FIRE

Terry Bisson

I was driving with my brother, the preacher, and my nephew, the preacher's son, on I-65 just north of Bowling Green when we got a flat. It was Sunday night and we had been to visit Mother at the Home. We were in my car. The flat caused what you might call knowing groans since, as the old-fashioned one in my family (so they tell me), I fix my own tires, and my brother is always telling me to get radials and quit buying old tires.

But if you know how to mount and fix tires yourself, you can pick them up for almost nothing.

Since it was a left rear tire, I pulled over to the left, onto the median grass. The way my Caddy stumbled to a stop, I figured the tire was ruined. "I guess there's no need asking if you have any of that FlatFix in the trunk,'' said Wallace.

"Here, son, hold the light," I said to Wallace Jr. He's old enough to want to help and not old enough (yet) to think he knows it all. If I'd married and had kids, he's the kind I'd have wanted.

An old Caddy has a big trunk that tends to fill up like a shed. Mine's a '56. Wallace was wearing his Sunday shirt, so he didn't offer to help while I pulled magazines, fishing tackle, a wooden tool box, some old clothes, a come-along wrapped in a grass sack, and a tobacco sprayer out of the way, looking for my jack. The spare looked a little soft.

The light went out. "Shake it, son," I said.

It went back on. The bumper jack was long gone, but I carry a little quarter-ton hydraulic. I found it under Mother's old Southern Livings, 1978-1986. I had been meaning to drop them at the dump. If Wallace hadn't been along, I'd have let Wallace Jr. position the jack under the axle, but I got on my knees and did it myself. There's nothing wrong with a boy learning to change a tire. Even if you're not going to fix and mount them, you're still going to have to change a few in this life. The light went off again before I had the wheel off the ground. I was surprised at how dark the night was already. It was late October and beginning to get cool. "Shake it again, son," I said.

It went back on but it was weak. Flickery.

"With radials you just don't have flats," Wallace explained in that voice he uses when he's talking to a number of people at once; in this case, Wallace Jr. and myself. "And even when you do, you just squirt them with this stuff called FlatFix and you just drive on. Three ninety-five the can."

"Uncle Bobby can fix a tire hisself," said Wallace Jr., out of loyalty, I presume.

"Himself," I said from halfway under the car. If it was up to Wallace, the boy would talk like what Mother used to call "a helot from the gorges of the mountains." But drive on radials.

"Shake that light again," I said. It was about gone. I spun the lugs off into the hubcap and pulled the wheel. The tire had blown out along the sidewall. "Won't be fixing this one," I said. Not that I cared. I have a pile as tall as a man out by the barn.

The light went out again, then came back better than ever as I was fitting the spare over the lugs. "Much better," I said. There was a flood of dim orange flickery light. But when I turned to find the lug nuts, I was surprised to see that the flashlight the boy was holding was dead. The light was coming from two bears at the edge of the trees, holding torches. They were big, three-hundred-pounders, standing about five feet tall. Wallace Jr. and his father had seen them and were standing perfectly still. It's best not to alarm bears.

I fished the lug nuts out of the hubcap and spun them on. I usually like to put a little oil on them, but this time I let it go. I reached under the car and let the jack down and pulled it out. I was relieved to see that the spare was high enough to drive on. I put the jack and the lug wrench and the flat into the trunk. Instead of replacing the hubcap, I put it in there too. All this time, the bears never made a move. They just held the torches, whether out of curiosity or helpfulness, there was no way of knowing. It looked like there may have been more bears behind them, in the trees.

Opening three doors at once, we got into the car and drove off. Wallace was the first to speak. "Looks like bears have discovered fire," he said.

When we first took Mother to the Home almost four years (forty-seven months) ago, she told Wallace and me she was ready to die. "Don't worry about me, boys," she whispered, pulling us both down so the nurse wouldn't hear. "I've drove a million miles and I'm ready to pass over to the other shore. I won't have long to linger here." She drove a consolidated school bus for thirty-nine years. Later, after Wallace left, she told me about her dream. A bunch of doctors were sitting around in a circle discussing her case. One said, "We've done all we can for her, boys, let's let her go." They all turned their hands up and smiled. When she didn't die that fall she seemed disappointed, though as spring came she forgot about it, as old people will.

In addition to taking Wallace and Wallace Jr. to see Mother on Sunday nights, I go myself on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I usually find her sitting in front of the TV, even though she doesn't watch it. The nurses keep it on all the time. They say the old folks like the flickering. It soothes them down.

"What's this I hear about bears discovering fire?" she said on Tuesday. "It's true," I told her as I combed her long white hair with the shell comb Wallace had brought her from Florida. Monday there had been a story in the Louisville Courier-Journal, and Tuesday one on NBC or CBS Nightly News. People were seeing bears all over the state, and in Virginia as well. They had quit hibernating, and were apparently planning to spend the winter in the medians of the interstates. There have always been bears in the mountains of Virginia, but not here in western Kentucky, not for almost a hundred years. The last one was killed when Mother was a girl. The theory in the Courier-Journal was that they were following I-65 down from the forests of Michigan and Canada, but one old man from Allen County (interviewed on nationwide TV) said that there had always been a few bears left back in the hills, and they had come out to join the others now that they had discovered fire.

"They don't hibernate anymore," I said. "They make a fire and keep it going all winter."

"I declare," Mother said. "What'll they think of next!" The nurse came to take her tobacco away, which is the signal for bedtime.

Every October, Wallace Jr. stays with me while his parents go to camp. I realize how backward that sounds, but there it is. My brother is a Minister (House of the Righteous Way, Reformed) but he makes two thirds of his living in real estate. He and Elizabeth go to a Christian Success Retreat in South Carolina, where people from all over the country practice selling things to one another. I know what it's like not because they've ever bothered to tell me, but because I've seen the Revolving Equity Success Plan ads late at night on TV.

The school bus let Wallace Jr. off at my house on Wednesday, the day they left. The boy doesn't have to pack much of a bag when he stays with me. He has his own room here. As the eldest of our family, I hung on to the old home place near Smiths Grove. It's getting run-down, but Wallace Jr. and I don't mind. He has his own room in Bowling Green, too, but since Wallace and Elizabeth move to a different house every three months (part of the Plan), he keeps his .22 and his comics, the stuff that's important to a boy his age, in his room here at the home place. It's the room his dad and I used to share.

Wallace Jr. is twelve. I found him sitting on the back porch that overlooks the interstate when I got home from work. I sell crop insurance.

After I changed clothes I showed him how to break the bead on a tire two ways, with a hammer, and by backing a car over it. Like making sorghum, fixing tires by hand is a dying art. The boy caught on fast, though. "Tomorrow I'll show you how to mount your tire with the hammer and a tire iron," I said.

"What I wish is I could see the bears," he said. He was looking across the field to I-65, where the northbound lanes cut off the corner of our field. From the house at night, sometimes the traffic sounds like a waterfall.

"Can't see their fire in the daytime," I said. "But wait till tonight." That night CBS or NBC (I forget which is which) did a special on the bears, which were becoming a story of nationwide interest. They were seen in Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, Illinois (southern), and, of course, Virginia. There have always been bears in Virginia. Some characters there were even talking about hunting them. A scientist said they were heading into the states where there is some snow but not too much, and where there is enough timber in the medians for firewood. He had gone in with a video camera, but his shots were just blurry figures sitting around a fire. Another scientist said the bears were attracted by the berries on a new bush that grew only in the medians of the interstates. He claimed this berry was the first new species in recent history, brought about by the mixing of seeds along the highway. He ate one on TV, making a face, and called it a "newberry." A climatic ecologist said that the warm winters (there was no snow last winter in Nashville, and only one flurry in Louisville) had changed the bears' hibernation cycle, and now they were able to remember things from year to year. "Bears may have discovered fire centuries ago," he said, "but forgot it." Another theory was that they had discovered (or remembered) fire when Yellowstone burned, several years ago.

The TV showed more guys talking about bears than it showed bears, and Wallace Jr. and I lost interest. After the supper dishes were done I took the boy out behind the house and down to our fence. Across the interstate and through the trees, we could see the light of the bears' fire. Wallace Jr. wanted to go back to the house and get his .22 and go shoot one, and I explained why that would be wrong. "Besides," I said, "a twenty-two wouldn't do much more to a bear than make it mad.

"Besides," I added, "it's illegal to hunt in the medians."

The only trick to mounting a tire by hand, once you have beaten or pried it onto the rim, is setting the bead. You do this by setting the tire upright, sitting on it, and bouncing it up and down between your legs while the air goes in. When the bead sets on the rim, it makes a satisfying "pop." On Thursday, I kept Wallace Jr. home from school and showed him how to do this until he got it right. Then we climbed our fence and crossed the field to get a look at the bears.

In northern Virginia, according to Good Morning America, the bears were keeping their fires going all day long. Here in western Kentucky, though, it was still warm for late October and they only stayed around the fires at night. Where they went and what they did in the daytime, I don't know. Maybe they were watching from the newberry bushes as Wallace Jr. and I climbed the government fence and crossed the northbound lanes. I carried an axe and Wallace Jr. brought his .22, not because he wanted to kill a bear but because a boy likes to carry some kind of a gun. The median was all tangled with brush and vines under the maples, oaks, and sycamores. Even though we were only a hundred yards from the house, I had never been there, and neither had anyone else that I knew of. It was like a created country. We found a path in the center and followed it down across a slow, short stream that flowed out of one grate and into another. The tracks in the gray mud were the first bear signs we saw. There was a musty, but not really unpleasant smell. In a clearing under a big hollow beech, where the fire had been, we found nothing but ashes. Logs were drawn up in a rough circle and the smell was stronger. I stirred the ashes and found enough coals to start a new flame, so I banked them back the way they had been left.

I cut a little firewood and stacked it to one side, just to be neighborly.

Maybe the bears were watching us from the bushes even then. There's no way to know. I tasted one of the newberries and spit it out. It was so sweet it was sour, just the sort of thing you would imagine a bear would like.

That evening after supper I asked Wallace Jr. if he might want to go with me to visit Mother. I wasn't surprised when he said yes. Kids have more consideration than folks give them credit for. We found her sitting on the concrete front porch of the Home, watching the cars go by on I-65. The nurse said she had been agitated all day. I wasn't surprised by that, either. Every fall as the leaves change, she gets restless, maybe the word is "hopeful," again. I brought her into the dayroom and combed her long white hair. "Nothing but bears on TV anymore," the nurse complained, flipping the channels. Wallace Jr. picked up the remote after the nurse left, and we watched a CBS or NBC Special Report about some hunters in Virginia who had gotten their houses torched. The TV interviewed a hunter and his wife whose $117,500 Shenandoah Valley home had burned. She blamed the bears. He didn't blame the bears, but he was suing for compensation from the state since he had a valid hunting license. The state hunting commissioner came on and said that possession of a hunting license didn't prohibit ("enjoin," I think, was the word he used) the hunted from striking back. I thought that was a pretty liberal view for a state commissioner. Of course, he had a vested interest in not paying off. I'm not a hunter myself.

"Don't bother coming on Sunday," Mother told Wallace Jr. with a wink. "I've drove a million miles and I've got one hand on the gate." I'm used to her saying stuff like that, especially in the fall, but I was afraid it would upset the boy. In fact, he looked worried after we left and I asked him what was wrong.

"How could she have drove a million miles?" he asked. She had told him forty-eight miles a day for thirty-nine years, and he had worked it out on his calculator to be 336,960 miles.

"Have driven," I said. "And it's forty-eight in the morning and forty-eight in the afternoon. Plus there were the football trips. Plus, old folks exaggerate a little." Mother was the first woman school-bus driver in the state. She did it every day and raised a family, too. Dad just farmed.

I usually get off the interstate at Smiths Grove, but that night I drove north all the way to Horse Cave and doubled back so Wallace Jr. and I could see the bears' fires. There were not as many as you would think from the TV—one every six or seven miles, hidden back in a clump of trees or under a rocky ledge. Probably they look for water as well as wood. Wallace Jr. wanted to stop, but it's against the law to stop on the interstate and I was afraid the state police would run us off.

There was a card from Wallace in the mailbox. He and Elizabeth were doing fine and having a wonderful time. Not a word about Wallace Jr., but the boy didn't seem to mind. Like most kids his age, he doesn't really enjoy going places with his parents.

On Saturday afternoon the Home called my office (Burley Belt Drought & Hail) and left word that Mother was gone. I was on the road. I work Saturdays. It's the only day a lot of part-time farmers are home. My heart literally missed a beat when I called in and got the message, but only a beat. I had long been prepared. "It's a blessing," I said when I got the nurse on the phone.

"You don't understand," the nurse said. "Not passed away, gone. Ran away, gone. Your mother has escaped." Mother had gone through the door at the end of the corridor when no one was looking, wedging the door with her comb and taking a bedspread which belonged to the Home. What about her tobacco? I asked. It was gone. That was a sure sign she was planning to stay away. I was in Franklin, and it took me less than an hour to get to the Home on I-65. The nurse told me that Mother had been acting more and more confused lately. Of course they are going to say that. We looked around the grounds, which is only a half acre with no trees between the interstate and a soybean field. Then they had me leave a message at the sheriffs office. I would have to keep paying for her care until she was officially listed as Missing, which would be Monday.

It was dark by the time I got back to the house, and Wallace Jr. was fixing supper. This just involves opening a few cans, already selected and grouped together with a rubber band. I told him his grandmother had gone, and he nodded, saying, "She told us she would be." I called Florida and left a message. There was nothing more to be done. I sat down and tried to watch TV, but there was nothing on. Then, I looked out the back door, and saw the firelight twinkling through the trees across the northbound lane of I-65, and realized I just might know where to find her.

It was definitely getting colder, so I got my jacket. I told the boy to wait by the phone in case the sheriff called, but when I looked back, halfway across the field, there he was behind me. He didn't have a jacket. I let him catch up. He was carrying his .22 and I made him leave it leaning against our fence. It was harder climbing the government fence in the dark, at my age, than it had been in the daylight. I am sixty-one. The highway was busy with cars heading south and trucks heading north.

Crossing the shoulder, I got my pants cuffs wet on the long grass, already wet with dew. It is actually bluegrass.

The first few feet into the trees it was pitch-black and the boy grabbed my hand. Then it got lighter. At first I thought it was the moon, but it was the high beams shining like moonlight into the treetops, allowing Wallace Jr. and me to pick our way through the brush. We soon found the path and its familiar bear smell.

I was wary of approaching the bears at night. If we stayed on the path we might run into one in the dark, but if we went through the bushes we might be seen as intruders. I wondered if maybe we shouldn't have brought the gun.

We stayed on the path. The light seemed to drip down from the canopy of the woods like rain. The going was easy, especially if we didn't try to look at the path but let our feet find their own way.

Then through the trees I saw their fire.

The fire was mostly of sycamore and beech branches, the kind that puts out very little heat or light and lots of smoke. The bears hadn't learned the ins and outs of wood yet. They did okay at tending it, though. A large cinnamon-brown northern-looking bear was poking the fire with a stick, adding a branch now and then from a pile at his side. The others sat around in a loose circle on the logs. Most were smaller black or honey bears, one was a mother with cubs. Some were eating berries from a hubcap. Not eating, but just watching the fire, my mother sat among them with the bedspread from the Home around her shoulders.

If the bears noticed us, they didn't let on. Mother patted a spot right next to her on the log and I sat down. A bear moved over to let Wallace Jr. sit on her other side.

The bear smell is rank but not unpleasant, once you get used to it. It's not like a barn smell, but wilder. I leaned over to whisper something to Mother and she shook her head. It would be rude to whisper around these creatures that don't possess the power of speech, she let me know without speaking. Wallace Jr. was silent too. Mother shared the bedspread with us and we sat for what seemed hours, looking into the fire.

The big bear tended the fire, breaking up the dry branches by holding one end and stepping on them, like people do. He was good at keeping it going at the same level. Another bear poked the fire from time to time but the others left it alone. It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire, and were carrying the others along. But isn't that how it is with everything? Every once in a while, a smaller bear walked into the circle of firelight with an armload of wood and dropped it onto the pile. Median wood has a silvery cast, like driftwood.

Wallace Jr. isn't fidgety like a lot of kids. I found it pleasant to sit and stare into the fire. I took a little piece of Mother's Red Man, though I don't generally chew. It was no different from visiting her at the Home, only more interesting, because of the bears. There were about eight or ten of them. Inside the fire itself, things weren't so dull, either: little dramas were being played out as fiery chambers were created and then destroyed in a crashing of sparks. My imagination ran wild. I looked around the circle at the bears and wondered what they saw. Some had their eyes closed. Though they were gathered together, their spirits still seemed solitary, as if each bear was sitting alone in front of its own fire.

The hubcap came around and we all took some newberries. I don't know about Mother, but I just pretended to eat mine. Wallace Jr. made a face and spit his out. When he went to sleep, I wrapped the bedspread around all three of us. It was getting colder and we were not provided, like the bears, with fur. I was ready to go home, but not Mother. She pointed up toward the canopy of trees, where a light was spreading, and then pointed to herself. Did she think it was angels approaching from on high? It was only the high beams of some southbound truck, but she seemed mighty pleased. Holding her hand, I felt it grow colder and colder in mine.

Wallace Jr. woke me up by tapping on my knee. It was past dawn, and his grandmother had died sitting on the log between us. The fire was banked up and the bears were gone and someone was crashing straight through the woods, ignoring the path. It was Wallace. Two state troopers were right behind him. He was wearing a white shirt, and I realized it was Sunday morning. Underneath his sadness on learning of Mother's death, he looked peeved.

The troopers were sniffing the air and nodding. The bear smell was still strong. Wallace and I wrapped Mother in the bedspread and started with her body back out to the highway. The troopers stayed behind and scattered the bears' fire ashes and flung their firewood away into the bushes. It seemed a petty thing to do. They were like bears themselves, each one solitary in his own uniform.

There was Wallace's Olds 98 on the median, with its radial tires looking squashed on the grass. In front of it there was a police car with a trooper standing beside it, and behind it a funeral home hearse, also an Olds 98.

"First report we've had of them bothering old folks," the trooper said to Wallace.

"That's not hardly what happened at all," I said, but nobody asked me to explain. They have their own procedures. Two men in suits got out of the hearse and opened the rear door. That to me was the point at which Mother departed this life. After we put her in, I put my arms around the boy. He was shivering even though it wasn't that cold. Sometimes death will do that, especially at dawn, with the police around and the grass wet, even when it comes as a friend.

We stood for a minute watching the cars and trucks pass. "It's a blessing," Wallace said. It's surprising how much traffic there is at 6:22 A.M.

That afternoon, I went back to the median and cut a little firewood to replace what the troopers had flung away. I could see the fire through the trees that night.

I went back two nights later, after the funeral. The fire was going and it was the same bunch of bears, as far as I could tell. I sat around with them a while but it seemed to make them nervous, so I went home. I had taken a handful of newberries from the hubcap, and on Sunday I went with the boy and arranged them on Mother's grave. I tried again, but it's no use, you can't eat them.

Unless you're a bear.

ONE PERFECT MORNING, WITH JACKALS

Mike Resnick

(APRIL 19, 2123)

Ngai is the creator of all things. He made the lion and the elephant, the vast savannah and the towering mountains, the Kikuyu and the Maasai and the Wakamba.

Thus, it was only reasonable for my father's father and his father's father to believe that Ngai was all-powerful. Then the Europeans came, and they killed all the animals, and they covered the savannahs with their factories and the mountains with their cities, and they assimilated the Maasai and the Wakamba, and one day all that was left of what Ngai had created was the Kikuyu.

And it was among the Kikuyu that Ngai waged His final battle against the god of the Europeans.

* * *

My former son lowered his head as he stepped into my hut.

"Jambo, my father," he said, looking somewhat uncomfortable, as usual, in the close confines of the rounded walls.

"Jambo, Edward," I replied.

He stood before me, not quite knowing what to do with his hands. Finally he placed them in the pockets of his elegantly tailored silk suit.

"I have come to drive you to the spaceport," he said at last.

I nodded, and slowly got to my feet. "It is time."

"Where is your luggage?" he asked.

"I am wearing it," I said, indicating my dull red kikoi.

"You're not taking anything else?" he said, surprised.

"There is nothing else I care to take," I replied.

He paused and shifted his weight uncomfortably, as he always seemed to do in my presence. "Shall we go outside?" he suggested at last, walking to the door of my hut. "It's very hot in here, and the flies are murderous."

"You must learn to ignore them."

"I do not have to ignore them," he replied, almost defensively. "There are no flies where I live."

"I know. They have all been killed."

"You say that as if it were a sin rather than a blessing."

I shrugged and followed him outside, where two of my chickens were pecking diligently at the dry red earth.

"It's a beautiful morning, is it not?" he said. "I was afraid it might be as warm as yesterday."

I looked out across the vast savannah, which had been turned into farmland. Wheat and corn seemed to sparkle in the morning sun.

"A perfect morning," I agreed. Then I turned and saw a splendid vehicle parked about thirty yards away, white and sleek and shining with chrome.

"Is it new?" I asked, indicating the car.

He nodded proudly. "I bought it last week."

"German?"

"British."

"Of course," I said.

The glow of pride vanished, and he shifted his weight again. "Are you ready?"

"I have been ready for a long time," I answered, opening the door and easing myself into the passenger's seat.

"I never saw you do that before," he remarked, entering the car and starting the ignition.

"Do what?"

"Use your safety harness."

"I have never had so many reasons not to die in a car crash," I replied.

He forced a smile to his lips and began again. "I have a surprise for you," he said as the car pulled away and I looked back at my boma for the very last time.

"Oh?"

He nodded. "We will see it on the way to the spaceport."

"What is it?" I asked.

"If I told you, it wouldn't be a surprise."

I shrugged and remained silent.

"We'll have to take some of the back roads to reach what I want to show you," he continued. "You'll be able to take a last look at your country along the way."

"This is not my country."

"You're not going to start that again, are you?"

"My country teems with life," I said adamantly. "This country has been smothered by concrete and steel, or covered by row upon row of European crops."

"My father," he said wearily as we sped past a huge wheat field, "the last elephant and lion were killed before you were born. You have never seen Kenya teeming with wildlife."

"Yes I have," I answered him.

"When?"

I pointed to my head. "In here."

"It doesn't make any sense," he said, and I could tell that he was trying to control his temper.

"What doesn't?"

"That you can turn your back on Kenya and go live on some terraformed planetoid, just because you want to wake up to the sight of a handful of animals grazing."

"I did not turn my back on Kenya, Edward," I said patiently. "Kenya turned its back on me."

"That simply isn't so," he said. "The President and most of his cabinet are Kikuyu. You know that."

"They call themselves Kikuyu," I said. "That does not make them Kikuyu."

"They are Kikuyu!" he insisted.

"The Kikuyu do not live in cities that were built by Europeans," I replied. "They do not dress as Europeans. They do not worship the Europeans' god. And they do not drive European machines," I added pointedly. "Your vaunted President is still a kehee—a boy who has not undergone the circumcision ritual."

"If he is a boy, then he is a fifty-seven-year-old boy."

"His age is unimportant."

"But his accomplishments are. He is responsible for the Turkana Pipeline, which has brought irrigation to the entire Northern Frontier District."

"He is a kehee who brings water to the Turkana and the Rendille and the Samburu," I agreed. "What is that to the Kikuyu?"

"Why do you persist in speaking like an ignorant old savage?" he demanded irritably. "You were schooled in Europe and America. You know what our President has accomplished."

"I speak the way I speak because I have been schooled in Europe and America. I have seen Nairobi grow into a second London, with all of that city's congestion and pollution, and Mombasa into another Miami, with all of that city's attendant dangers and diseases. I have seen our people forget what it means to be a Kikuyu, and speak proudly about being Kenyans, as if Kenya was anything more than an arbitrary set of lines drawn on a European map."

"Those lines have been there for almost three centuries," he pointed out.

I sighed. "As long as you have known me, you have never understood me, Edward."

"Understanding is a two-way street," he said with sudden bitterness. "When did you ever make an effort to understand me?"

"I raised you."

"But to this day you don't know me," he said, driving dangerously fast on the bumpy road. "Did we ever talk as father and son? Did you ever discuss anything but the Kikuyu with me?" He paused. "I was the only Kikuyu to play on the national basketball team, and yet you never once came to watch me."

"It is a European game."

"In point of fact, it is an American game."

I shrugged. "They are the same."

"And now it is an African game as well. I played on the only Kenyan team ever to defeat the Americans. I had hoped that would make you proud of me, but you never even mentioned it."

"I heard many stories of an Edward Kimante who played basketball against the Europeans and the Americans," I said. "But I knew that this could not be my son, for I gave my son the name Koriba."

"And my mother gave me the middle name of Edward," he said. "And since she spoke to me and shared my burdens, and you did not, I took the name she gave me."

"That is your right."

"I don't give a damn about my rights!" He paused. "It didn't have to be this way."

"I remained true to my convictions," I said. "It is you who tried to become a Kenyan rather than a Kikuyu."

"I am a Kenyan," he said. "I live here, I work here, I love my country. All of it, not just one tiny segment."

I sighed deeply. "You are truly your mother's son."

"You have not asked about her," he noted.

"If she were not well, you would have told me."

"And that's all you have to say about the woman you lived with for seventeen years?" he demanded.

"It was she who left to live in the city of the Europeans, not I," I replied.

He laughed humorlessly. "Nakuru is not a European city. It has two million Kenyans and less than twenty thousand whites."

"Any city is, by definition, European. The Kikuyu do not live in cities."

"Look around you," he said in exasperation. "More than ninety-five percent of them do live in cities."

"Then they are no longer Kikuyu," I said placidly.

He squeezed the steering wheel until his knuckles turned ash-gray.

"I do not wish to argue with you," he said, struggling to control his emotions. "It seems that is all we ever do anymore. You are my father, and despite all that has come between us, I love you—and I had hoped to make my peace with you today, since we shall never see each other again."

"I have no objection to that," I said. "I do not enjoy arguing."

"For a man who doesn't enjoy it, you managed to argue for twelve long years to get the government to sponsor this new world of yours."

"I did not enjoy the arguments, only the results," I replied.

"Have they decided what to name it yet?"

"Kirinyaga."

"Kirinyaga?" he repeated, surprised.

I nodded. "Does not Ngai sit upon His golden throne atop Kirinyaga?"

"Nothing sits atop Mount Kenya except a city."

"You see?" I said with a smile. "Even the name of the holy mountain has been corrupted by Europeans. It is time that we give Ngai a new Kirinyaga from which to rule the universe."

"Perhaps it is fitting, at that," he said. "There has been precious little room for Ngai in today's Kenya."

Suddenly he began slowing down, and a moment later we turned off the road and across a recently harvested field, driving very carefully so as not to damage his new car.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"I told you: I have a surprise for you."

"What kind of surprise can there be in the middle of an empty field?" I asked.

"You will see."

Suddenly he came to a stop about twenty yards from a clump of thorn bushes, and turned off the ignition.

"Look carefully," he whispered.

I stared at the bushes for a moment without seeing anything. Then there was a brief movement, and suddenly the whole picture came into view, and I could see two jackals standing behind the foliage, staring timidly at us.

"There have been no animals here in more than two decades," I whispered.

"They seem to have wandered in after the last rains," he replied softly. "I suppose they must be living off the rodents and birds."

"How did you find them?"

"I didn't," he answered. "A friend of mine in the Game Department told me they were here." He paused. "They'll be captured and relocated to a game park sometime next week, before they can do any lasting damage."

They seemed totally misplaced, hunting in tracks made by huge threshing and harvesting machines, searching for the safety of a savannah that had not existed for more than a century, hiding from cars rather than other predators. I felt a certain kinship to them.

We watched them in total silence for perhaps five minutes. Then Edward checked his timepiece and decided that we had to continue to the spaceport.

"Did you enjoy it?" he asked as we drove back onto the road.

"Very much," I said.

"I had hoped you would."

"They are being moved to a game park, you said?"

He nodded his head. "A few hundred miles to the north, I believe."

"The jackal walked this land long before the farmers arrived," I noted.

"But they are an anachronism," he replied. "They don't belong here anymore."

I nodded my head. "It is fitting."

"That the jackals go to a game park?" he asked.

"That the Kikuyu, who were here before the Kenyans, leave for a new world," I answered. "For we, too, are an anachronism that no longer belongs here."

He increased his speed, and soon we had passed through the farming area and entered the outskirts of Nairobi.

"What will you do on Kirinyaga?" he asked, breaking a long silence.

"We shall live as the Kikuyu were meant to live."

"I mean you, personally."

I smiled, anticipating his reaction. "I am to be the mundumugu."

"The witch doctor?" he repeated incredulously.

"That is correct."

"I can't believe it!" he continued. "You are an educated man. How can you sit cross-legged in the dirt and roll bones and read omens?"

"The mundumugu is also a teacher, and the custodian of the tribal customs," I said. "It is an honorable profession."

He shook his head in disbelief. "So I am to explain to people that my father has become a witch doctor."

"You need fear no embarrassment," I said. "You need only tell them that Kirinyaga's mundumugu is named Koriba."

"That is my name!"

"A new world requires a new name," I said. "You cast it aside to take a European name. Now I will take it back and put it to good use."

"You're serious about this, aren't you?" he said as we pulled into the spaceport.

"From this day forward, my name is Koriba."

The car came to a stop.

"I hope you will bring more honor to it than I did, my father," he said as a final gesture of conciliation.

"You have brought honor to the name you chose," I said. "That is quite enough for one lifetime."

"Do you really mean that?" he asked.

"Of course."

"Then why did you never say so before now?"

"Haven't I?" I asked, surprised.

We got out of the car and he accompanied me to the departure area. Finally he came to a stop.

"This is as far as I am permitted to go."

"I thank you for the ride," I said.

He nodded.

"And for the jackals," I added. "It was truly a perfect morning."

"I will miss you, my father," he said.

"I know."

He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I could think of nothing further to say.

For a moment I thought he was going to place his arms around me and hug me, but instead he reached out, shook my hand, muttered another farewell, and turned on his heel and left.

I thought he would go directly to his car, but when I looked through a porthole of the ship that would take us to Kirinyaga, I saw him standing at a huge, plate-glass window, waving his hand, while his other hand held a handkerchief.

That was the last sight I saw before the ship took off. But the image I held in my mind was of the two jackals, watching alien sights in a land that had itself become foreign to them. I hoped that they would adjust to their new life in the game park that had been artificially created for them.

Something told me that I soon would know.

WINTER SOLTSTICE

Mike Resnick

IT IS NOT easy to live backwards in time, even when you are Merlin the Magnificent.  You would think it would be otherwise, that you would remember all the wonders of the future, but those memories grow dim and fade more quickly than you might suppose.  I know that Gallahad will win his duel tomorrow, but already the name of his son has left me.  In fact, does he even have a son?  Will he live long enough to pass on his noble blood?  I think perhaps he may, I think that I have held his grandchild upon my knee, but I am not sure.  It is all slipping away from me.

Once I knew all the secrets of the universe.  With no more than a thought I could bring Time to a stop, reverse it in its course, twist it around my finger like a piece of string.  By force of will alone I could pass among the stars and the galaxies.  I could create life out of nothingness, and turn living, breathing worlds into dust.

Time passed -- though not the way it passes for you -- and I could no longer do these things.  But I could isolate a DNA molecule and perform microsurgery on it, and I could produce the equations that allowed us to traverse the wormholes in space, and I could plot the orbit of an electron.

Still more time slipped away, and although these gifts deserted me, I could create penicillin out of bread mold, and comprehend both the General and Special Theories of Relativity, and I could fly between the continents.

But all that has gone, and I remember it as one remembers a dream, on those occasions I can remember it at all.  There was -- there someday will be, there may come to you -- a disease of the aged, in which you lose portions of your mind, pieces of your past, thoughts you've thought and feelings you've felt, until all that's left is the primal id, screaming silently for warmth and nourishment.  You see parts of yourself vanishing, you try to pull them back from oblivion, you fail, and all the while you realize what is happening to you until even that perception, that realization, is lost.  I will weep for you in another millennia, but now your lost faces fade from my memory, your desperation recedes from the stage of my mind, and soon I will remember nothing of you.  Everything is drifting away on the wind, eluding my frantic efforts to clutch it and bring it back to me.

I am writing this down so that someday someone -- possibly even you -- will read it and will know that I was a good and moral man, that I did my best under circumstances that a more compassionate God might not have forced upon me, that even as events and places slipped away from me, I did not shirk my duties, I served my people as best I could.

They come to me, my people, and they say, It hurts, Merlin.  They say, Cast a spell and make the pain go away.  They say, My baby burns with fever, and my milk has dried up.  Do something, Merlin, they say; you are the greatest wizard in the kingdom, the greatest wizard who has ever lived.  Surely you can do something.

Even Arthur seeks me out.  The war goes badly, he confides to me; the heathen fight against baptism, the knights have fallen to battling amongst themselves, he distrusts his queen.  He reminds me that I am his personal wizard, that I am his most trusted friend, that it was I who taught him the secret of Excalibur (but that was many years ago, and of course I know nothing of it yet).  I look at him thoughtfully, and though I know an Arthur who is bent with age and beaten down by the caprices of Fate, an Arthur who has lost his Guinevere and his Round Table and all his dreams of Camelot, I can summon no compassion, no sympathy for this young man who is speaking to me.  He is a stranger, as he will be yesterday, as he will be last week.

An old woman comes to see me in the early afternoon.  Her arm is torn and miscolored, the stench of it makes my eyes water, the flies are thick around her.

I cannot stand the pain any longer, Merlin, she weeps.  It is like childbirth, but it does not go away.  You are my only hope, Merlin.  Cast your mystic spell, charge me what you will, but make the pain cease.

I look at her arm, where the badger has ripped it with his claws, and I want to turn my head away and retch.  I finally force myself to examine it.  I have a sense that I need something, I am not sure what, something to attach to the front of my face, or if not my whole face then at least across my nose and mouth, but I cannot recall what it is.

The arm is swollen to almost twice its normal size, and although the wound is halfway between her elbow and her shoulder, she shrieks in agony when I gently manipulate her fingers.  I want to give her something for her pain.  Vague visions come to mind, images of something long and slender and needlelike flash briefly before my eyes.  There must be something I can do, I think, something I can give her, some miracle that I employed when I was younger and the world was older, but I can no longer remember what it is.

I must do more than mask her pain, this much I still know, for infection has set in.  The smell becomes stronger as I probe and she screams.  Gang, I think suddenly: the word for her condition begins with gang -- but there is another syllable and I cannot recall it, and even if I could recall it I can no longer cure it.

But she must have some surcease from her agony, she believes in my powers and she is suffering and my heart goes out to her.  I mumble a chant, half-whispering and half-singing.  She thinks I am calling up my ethereal servants from the Netherworld, that I am bringing my magic to bear on the problem, and because she needs to believe in something, in anything, because she is suffering such agony, I do not tell her that what I am really saying is God, just this one time, let me remember.  Once, years, eons from now, I could have cured her; give me back the knowledge just for an hour, even for a minute.  I did not ask to live backward in Time, but it is my curse and I have willingly borne it -- but don't let this poor old woman die because of it.  Let me cure her, and then You can ransack my mind and take back my memories.

But God does not answer, and the woman keeps screaming, and finally I gently plaster mud on the wound to keep the flies away.  There should be medicine too, it comes in bottles -- (bottles? Is that the right word?) -- but I don't know how to make it, I don't even remember its color or shape or texture, and I give the woman a root, and mutter a spell over it, and tell her to sleep with it between her breasts and to believe in its healing powers and soon the pain will subside.

She believes me -- there is no earthly reason why she should, but I can see in her eyes that she does -- and then she kisses my hands and presses the root to her bosom and wanders off, and somehow, for some reason, she does seem to be in less discomfort, though the stench of the wound lingers long after she has gone.

Then it is Lancelot's turn.  Next week or next month he will slay the Black Knight, but first I must bless his sword.  He talks of things we said to each other yesterday, things of which I have no recollection, and I think of things we will say to each other tomorrow.

I stare into his dark brown eyes, for I alone know his secret, and I wonder if I should tell Arthur.  I know they will fight a war over it, but I do not remember if I am the catalyst or if Guenivere herself confesses her infidelities, and I can no longer recall the outcome.  I concentrate and try to see the future, but all I see is a city of towering steel and glass structures, and I cannot see Arthur or Lancelot anywhere, and then the image vanishes, and I still do not know whether I am to go to Arthur with my secret knowledge or keep my silence.

I realize that it has all happened, that the Round Table and the knights and even Arthur will soon be dust no matter what I say or do, but they are living forward in Time and this is of momentous import to them, even though I have watched it all pass and vanish before my eyes.

Lancelot is speaking now, wondering about the strength of his faith, the purity of his virtue, filled with self-doubt.  He is not afraid to die at the hands of the Black Knight, but he is afraid to face his God if the reason for his death lies within himself.  I continue to stare at him, this man who daily feels the bond of our friendship growing stronger while I daily find that I know him less and less, and finally I lay a hand on his shoulder and assure him that he will be victorious, that I have had a vision of the Black Knight lying dead upon the field of battle as Lancelot raises his bloody sword in victorious triumph.

Are you sure, Merlin, he asks doubtfully.

I tell him that I am sure.  I could tell him more, tell him that I have seen the future, that I am losing it as quickly as I am learning the past, but he has problems of his own -- and so, I realize, have I, for as I know less and less I must pave the way for that youthful Merlin who will remember nothing at all.  It is he that I must consider -- I speak of him in the third person, for I know nothing of him, and he can barely remember me, nor will he know Arthur or Lancelot or even the dark and twisted Modred -- for as each of my days passes and Time continues to unwind, he will be less able to cope, less able to define even the problems he will face, let alone the solutions.  I must give him a weapon with which to defend himself, a weapon that he can use and manipulate no matter how little he remembers of me, and the weapon I choose is superstition.  Where once I worked miracles that were codified in books and natural law, now as their secrets vanish one by one, I must replace them with miracles that bedazzle the eye and terrify the heart, for only by securing the past can I guarantee the future, and I have already lived the future.  I hope I was a good man, I would like to think I was, but I do not know.  I examine my mind, I try to probe for weaknesses as I probe my patients' bodies, searching for sources of infection, but I am only the sum of my experience, and my experience has vanished and I will have to settle for hoping that I disgraced neither myself nor my God.

After Lancelot leaves I get to my feet and walk around the castle, my mind filled with strange images, fleeting pictures that seem to make sense until I concentrate on them and then I find them incomprehensible.  There are enormous armies clashing, armies larger than the entire populace of Arthur's kingdom, and I know that I have seen them, I have actually stood on the battlefield, perhaps I even fought for one side or the other, but I do not recognize the colors they are wearing, and they use weaponry that seems like magic, true magic, to me.

I remember huge spacefaring ships, ships that sail the starways with neither canvas nor masts, and for a moment I think that this must surely be a dream, and then I seem to find myself standing at a small window, gazing out at the stars as we rush by them, and I see the rocky surfaces and swirling colors of distant worlds, and then I am back in the castle, and I feel a tremendous sense of poignancy and loss, as if I know that even the dream will never visit me again.

I decide to concentrate, to force myself to remember, but no images come to me, and I begin to feel like a foolish old man.  Why am I doing this, I wonder.  It was a dream and not a memory, for everyone knows that the stars are nothing but lights that God uses to illuminate the night sky, and they are tacked onto a cloak of black velvet, and the moment I realize this, I can no longer even recall what the starfaring ships looked like, and I know that soon I will not even remember that I once dreamed of them.

I continued to wander the castle, touching familiar objects to reassure myself: this pillar was here yesterday, it will be here tomorrow, it is eternal, it will be here forever.  I find comfort in the constancy of physical things, things that are not as ephemeral as my memories, things that cannot be ripped from the Earth as easily as my past has been ripped from me.  I stop before the church and read a small plaque.  It is written in French, and it says that This Church was something by Arthur, King of the Britains. The fourth word makes no sense to me, and this distresses me, because I have always been able to read the plaque before, and then I remember that tomorrow morning I will ask Sir Hector whether the word means built or constructed, and he will reply that it means dedicated, and I will know that for the rest of my life.

But now I feel a sense of panic, because I am not only losing images and memories, I am actually losing words, and I wonder if the day will come when people will speak to me and I will understand nothing of what they are saying and will merely stare at them in mute confusion, my eyes as large and gentle and devoid of intelligence as a cow's.  I know that all I have lost so far is a single French word, but it distresses me, because in the future I will speak French fluently, as well as German, and Italian, and...and I know there is another language, I will be able to speak it and read it and write it, but suddenly it eludes me, and I realize that another ability, another memory, yet another integral piece of myself has fallen into the abyss, never to be retrieved.

I turn away from the plaque, and I go back to my quarters, looking neither right nor left for fear of seeing some building, some artifact that has no place in my memory, something that reeks of permanence and yet is unknown to me, and I find a scullery maid waiting for me.  She is young and very pretty, and I will know her name tomorrow, will roll it around on my mouth and marvel at the melody it makes even coming forth from my old lips, but I look at her and the fact dawns upon me that I cannot recall who she is.  I hope I have not slept with her -- I have a feeling that as I grow younger I will commit more than my share of indiscretions -- only because I do not wish to hurt her feelings, and there is no logical way to explain to her than I cannot remember her, that the ecstacies of last night and last week and last year are still unknown to me.

But she is not here as a lover, she has come as a supplicant, she had a child, a son, who is standing in the shadows behind my door, and now she summons him forth and he hobbles over to me.  I look down at him, and I see that he is a clubfoot: his ankle is misshapen, his foot is turned inward, and he is very obviously ashamed of his deformity.

Can you help him, asks the scullery maid; can you make him run like other little boys?  I will give you everything I have, anything you ask, if you can make him like the other children.

I look at the boy, and then at his mother, and then once more at the boy.  He is so very young, he has seen nothing of the world, and I wish that I could do something to help him, but I no longer know what to do.  There was a time when I knew, there will come a time when no child must limp through his life in pain and humiliation, I know this is so, I know that someday I will be able to cure far worse maladies than a clubfoot, at least I think I know this, but all that I know for sure is that the boy was born a cripple and will live a cripple and will die a cripple, and there is nothing I can do about it.

You are crying, Merlin, says the scullery maid.  Does the sight of my child so offend you?

No, I say, it does not offend me.

Then why do you cry, she asks.

I cry because there is nothing else I can do but cry, I reply.  I cry for the life your son will never know, and for the life that I have forgotten.

I do not understand, she says.

Nor do I, I answer.

Does this mean you will not help my son, she asks.

I do not know what it means.  I see her face growing older and thinner and more bitter, so I know that she will visit me again and again, but I cannot see her son at all, and I do not know if I will help him, or if I do, exactly how I will help him.  I close my eyes and concentrate, and try to remember the future.  Is there a cure?  Do men still limp on the Moon?  Do old men still weep because they cannot help?  I try, but it has slipped away again.

I must think about this problem, I say at last.  Come back tomorrow, and perhaps I will have a solution.

You mean a spell, she asks eagerly.

Yes, a spell, I say.

She calls the child to her, and together they leave, and I realize that she will come back alone tonight, for I am sure, at least I am almost sure, that I will know her name tomorrow.  It will be Marian, or Miranda, something beginning with an M, or possibly Elizabeth.  But I think, I am really almost certain, that she will return, for her face is more real to me now than it was when she stood before me.  Or is it that she has not stood before me yet?  It gets more and more difficult to separate the events from the memories, and the memories from the dreams.

I concentrate on her face, this Marian or Miranda, and it is another face I see, a lovely face with pale blue eyes and high cheekbones, a strong jaw and long auburn hair.  It meant something to me once, this face, I feel a sense of warmth and caring and loss when I see it, but I don't know why.  I have an instinctive feeling that this face meant, will mean, more to me than any other, that it will bring me both happiness and sorrow beyond any that I've ever known.  There is a name that goes with it, it is not Marion or Miriam (or is it?), I grasp futilely for it, and the more franticly I grasp the more rapidly it recedes.

Did I love her, the owner of this face?  Will we bring joy and comfort to one another, will we produce sturdy, healthy children to comfort us in our old age?  I don't know, because my old age has been spent, and hers is yet to come, and I have forgotten what she does not yet know.

I concentrate on the image of her face.  How will we meet?  What draws me to you?  There must be a hundred little mannerisms, foibles as often as virtues, that will endear you to me.  Why can I not remember a single one of them?  How will you live, and how will you die?  Will I be there to comfort you, and once you're lost, who will be there to comfort me?  Is it better than I can no longer recall the answers to these questions?

I feel if I concentrate hard enough, things will come back to me.  No face was ever so important to me, not even Arthur's, and so I block out all other thoughts and close my eyes and conjure up her face (yes, conjure; I am Merlin, am I not?) -- but now I am not so certain that it is her face.  Was the jaw thus or so?  Were her eyes really that pale, her hair that auburn?  I am filled with doubt, and I imagine her with eyes that were a deeper blue, hair that was lighter and shorter, a more delicate nose -- and I realize that I have never seen this face before, that I was deluded by my self-doubts, that my memory has not failed me completely, and I attempt to paint her portrait on the canvas of my mind once again, but I cannot, the proportions are wrong, the colors are askew, and even so I cling to this approximation, for once I have lost it I have lost her forever.  I concentrate on the eyes, making them larger, bluer, paler, and finally I am pleased with them, but now they are in a face that I no longer know, her true face as elusive now as her name and her life.

I sit back on my chair and I sigh.  I do not know how long I have been sitting here, trying to remember a face -- a woman's face, I think, but I am no longer sure -- when I hear a cough, and I look up and Arthur is standing before me.

We must talk, my old friend and mentor, he says, drawing up his own chair and seating himself on it.

Must we, I ask.

He nods his head firmly.  The Round Table is coming apart, he says, his voice concerned.  The kingdom is in disarray.

You must assert yourself and put it in order, I say, wondering what he is talking about.

It's not that easy, he says.

It never is, I say.

I need Lancelot, says Arthur.  He is the best of them, and after you he is my closest friend and advisor.  He thinks I don't know what he is doing, but I know, though I pretend not to.

What do you propose to do about it, I ask.

He turns to me, his eyes tortured.  I don't know, he says.  I love them both, I don't want to bring harm to them, but the important thing is not me or Lancelot or the queen, but the Round Table.  I built it to last for all eternity, and it must survive.

Nothing lasts for eternity, I say.

Ideals do, he replies with conviction.  There is Good and there is Evil, and those who believe in the Good must stand up and be counted.

Isn't that what you have done, I ask.

Yes, says Arthur, but until now the choice was an easy one.  Now I do not know which road to take.  If I stop feigning ignorance, then I must kill Lancelot and burn the queen at the stake, and this will surely destroy the Round Table.  He pauses and looks at me.  Tell me the truth, Merlin, he says, would Lancelot be a better king than I?  I must know, for if it will save the Round Table, I will step aside and he can have it all -- the throne, the queen, Camelot.  But I must be sure.

Who can say what the future holds, I reply.

You can, he says.  At least, when I was a young man, you told me that you could.

Did I, I ask curiously.  I must have been mistaken.  The future is as unknowable as the past.

But everyone knows the past, he says.  It is the future that men fear.

Men fear the unknown, wherever it may lie, I say.

I think that only cowards fear the unknown, says Arthur.  When I was a young man and I was building the Table, I could not wait for the future to arrive.  I used to awaken an hour before sunrise and lay there in my bed, trembling with excitement, eager to see what new triumphs each day would bring me.  Suddenly he sighs and seems to age before my eyes.  But I am not that man anymore, he continues after a thoughtful silence, and now I fear the future.  I fear for Guenivere, and for Lancelot, and for the Round Table.

That is not what you fear, I say.

What do you mean, he asks.

You fear what all men fear, I say.

I do not understand you, says Arthur.

Yes, you do, I reply.  And now you fear even to admit to your fears.

He takes a deep breath and stares unblinking into my eyes, for he is truly a brave and honorable man.  All right, he says at last.  I fear for me.

That is only natural, I say.

He shakes his head.  It does not feel natural, Merlin, he says.

Oh, I say.

I have failed, Merlin, he continues.  Everything is dissolving around me -- the Round Table and the reasons for it.  I have lived the best life I could, but evidently I did not live it well enough.  Now all that is left to me is my death -- he pauses uncomfortably -- and I fear that I will die no better than I have lived.

My heart goes out to him, this young man that I do not know but will know someday, and I lay a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

I am a king, he continues, and if a king does nothing else, he must die well and nobly.

You will die well, my lord, I say.

Will I, he asks uncertainly.  Will I die in battle, fighting for what I believe when all others have left my side -- or will I die a feeble old man, drooling, incontinent, no longer even aware of my surroundings?

I decide to try once more to look into the future, to put his mind at ease.  I close my eyes and I peer ahead, and I see not a mindless babbling old man, but a mindless mewling baby, and that baby is myself.

Arthur tries to look ahead to the future he fears, and I, traveling in the opposite direction, look ahead to the future I fear, and I realize that there is no difference, that this is the humiliating state in which man both enters and leaves the world, and that he had better learn to cherish the time in between, for it is all that he has.

I tell Arthur again that he shall die the death he wants, and finally he leaves, and I am alone with my thoughts.  I hope I can face my fate with the same courage that Arthur will face his, but I doubt that I can, for Arthur can only guess at his while I can see mine with frightening clarity.  I try to remember how Arthur's life actually does end, but it is gone, dissipated in the mists of Time, and I realize that there are very few pieces of myself left to lose before I become that crying, mindless baby, a creature of nothing but appetites and fears.  It is not the end that disturbs me, but the knowledge of the end, the terrible awareness of it happening to me while I watch helpless, almost an observer at the disintegration of whatever it is that has made me Merlin.

A young man walks by my door and waves to me.  I cannot recall ever seeing him before.

Sir Pellinore stops to thank me.  For what?  I don't remember.

It is almost dark.  I am expecting someone, I think it is a woman, I can almost picture her face.  I think I should tidy up the bedroom before she arrives, and I suddenly realize that I don't remember where the bedroom is.  I must write this down while I still possess the gift of literacy.

Everything is slipping away, drifting on the wind.

Please, somebody, help me.

I'm frightened.

IN THE LATE CRETACEOUS

Connie Willis

It was in the late cretaceous that predators reached their full flowering,” Dr. Othniel said. “Of course, carnivorous dinosaurs were present from the Middle Triassic on, but it was in the Late Cretaceous, with the arrival of theAlbertosaurus, theCoelophysis, theVelociraptor, theDeinonychus, and of course, theTyrannosaurus Rex, that the predatory dinosaur reached its full strength, speed, and sophistication.”

Dr. Othniel wrote, “LATE CRETACEOUS—PREDATORS” on the board. He suffered from arthritis and a tendency to stoop, and the combination made him write only on the lower third of the chalkboard. He wrote, “ALBERTOSAURUS, COELOPHYSIS, VELOCIRAPTOR, DEINONYCHUS, TYRANNOSAURUS REX,” in a column under “LATE CRETACEOUS—PREDATORS,” which put “TYRANNOSAURUSREX” just above the chalk tray.

“Of all these,” Dr. Othniel said, “Tyrannosaurus Rexis the most famous, and deservedly so.”

Dr. Othniel’s students wrote in their notebooks, “#1 LC. predator TRX” or “no predators in the Late Cretaceous” or “I have a new roommate. Her name is Traci. Signed, Deanna.” One of them composed a lengthy letter protesting the unfairness of his parking tickets.

“This flowering of the predators was partly due to the unprecedented abundance of prey. Herbivores such as theTriceratops, theChasmosaurus, and the duckbilled hadrosaur roamed the continents in enormous herds.”

He wrote “PREY—HADROSAURS” under “TYRANOSAURUS REX.” He had to move an eraser so he could write “HOLLOW BONEY CREST” under that. His students wrote, “Pray—duck-billed platypus,” and “My new roommate Traci has an absolutely WOW boyfriend named Todd,” and “If you think I’m going to pay this ticket, you’re crazy!”

“The hadrosaurs were easy prey. They had no horns or bony frills like theTriceratops, ” he said. “They did, however, have large bony crests which may have been used to trumpet warnings to each other or to hear or smell the presence of predators. He finished squeezing “HOLLOW BONY CREST” in under “hadrosaurs” and raised his head, as if he had heard something.

One of his sophomores, who was writing “I don’t even have a car,” glanced toward the door, but there wasn’t anyone there.

He straightened, vertebra by vertebra, until the top of his bald head was nearly even with the top of the blackboard. He lifted his chin, as if he were sniffing the air, and then bent over again, frowning. “Warnings, however, were not enough against the fifty-foot tallTyrannosaurus Rex, with his five-foot-long jaws and seven-inch-long teeth,” he said. He wroteJAWS —5FT,TEETH —7IN ” down among the erasers.

His students wrote, “The Parking Authority is run by a bunch of Nazis” and “Deanna + Todd” and “TRX has five feet.”

After her Advanced Antecedents class, Dr. Sarah Wright collected her mail and took it to her office. There was a manila envelope from the State Department of Education, a letter from the Campus Parking Authority marked “Third Notice: Pay Your Outstanding Tickets Immediately” and a formal-looking square envelope from the dean’s office, none of which she wanted to open.

She had no outstanding parking tickets, the legislature was going to cut state funding of universities by another eighteen percent, and the letter from the dean was probably notifying her that the entire amount was going to come out of Paleontology’s hide.

There was also a stapled brochure from a flight school she had written to during spring break after she had graded one hundred forty-three papers, none of which had gotten off the ground. The brochure had an eagle, some clouds, and the header, “Do you ever just want to get away from it all?”

She pried the staple free and opened it. “Do you ever get sick of your job and want to get away?” it read. “Do you ever feel like you just want to bag everything and do something really neat instead?”

It went on in this vein—which reminded her of her students’ papers—for several illustrated paragraphs before it got down to hard facts, which were that the Lindbergh Flight Academy charged three thousand dollars for their course, “including private, commercial, instrument, CFI, CFII, written tests, and flight tests. Lodging extra. Not responsible for injuries, fatalities, or other accidents.”

She wondered if the “other accidents” covered budget cuts from the legislature.

Her T.A., Chuck, came in, eating a Twinkie and waving a formal-looking square envelope. “Did you get one of these?” he asked.

“Yes,” Sarah said, picking up hers. “I was just going to open it. What is it, an invitation to a slaughter?”

“No, a reception for some guy. The dean’s having it this afternoon. In the Faculty Library.”

Sarah looked at the invitation suspiciously. “I thought the dean was at an educational conference.”

“She’s back.”

Sarah tore open the envelope and pulled out the invitation. “The dean cordially invites you to a reception for Dr. Jerry King,” she muttered. “Dr. Jerry King?” She opened the manila envelope and scanned through the legislature report, looking for his name. “Who is he, do you know?”

“Nope.”

At least he wasn’t one of the budget-cut supporters. His name wasn’t on the list. “Did the rest of the department get these?”

“I don’t know. Othniel got one. I saw it in his box,” Chuck said. “I don’t think he can reach it. His box is on the top row.”

Dr. Robert Walker came in, waving a piece of paper. “Look at this! Another ticket for not having a parking sticker! I have a parking sticker! I have two parking stickers! One on the bumper and one on the windshield. Why can’t they see them?”

“Did you get one of these, Robert?” Sarah asked, showing him the invitation. “The dean’s having a reception this afternoon. Is it about the funding cuts?”

“I don’t know,” Robert said. “They’re right there in plain sight. I even drew an arrow in Magic Marker to the one on the bumper.”

“The legislature’s cut our funding again,” Sarah said. “I’ll bet you anything the dean’s going to eliminate a position. She was over here last week looking at our enrollment figures.”

“The whole university’s enrollment is down,” Robert said, going over to the window and looking out. “Nobody can afford to go to college anymore, especially when it costs eighty dollars a semester for a parking sticker. Not that the stickers do any good. You still get parking tickets.”

“We’ve got to fight this,” Sarah said. “If she eliminates one of our positions, we’ll be the smallest department on campus, and the next thing you know, we 11 have been merged with Geology. We ve got to organize the department and put up a fight. Do you have any ideas, Robert?”

“You know,” Robert said, still looking out the window, “maybe if I posted someone out by my car—”

“Your car?”

“Yeah. I could hire a student to sit on the back bumper, and when the Parking Authority comes by, he could point to the sticker. It would cost a lot, but—Stop that!”he shouted suddenly. He wrenched the window open and leaned out. “You can’t give me a parking ticket!” he shouted down at the parking lot. “I have two stickers! What are you, blind?” He pulled his head in and bolted out of the office and down the stairs, yelling, “They just gave me another ticket! Can you believe that?”

“No,” Sarah said. She picked up the flight school brochure and looked longingly at the picture of the eagle.

“Do you think they’ll have food?” Chuck said. He was looking at the deans invitation.

“I hope not,” Sarah said.

“Why not?”

“Grazing,” she said. “The big predators always attacked when the hadrosaurs were grazing.”

“If they do have food, what kind do you think they’ll have?” Chuck asked wistfully.

“It depends,” Sarah said, turning the brochure over. “Tea and cookies, usually.”

“Homemade?”

“Not unless there’s bad news. Cheese and crackers means somebody’s getting the ax. Liver pâté means a budget cut. Of course, if the budget cut’s big enough, there won’t be any money for refreshments.”

On the back of the brochure it said in italics,Become UpwardlyMobile, and underneath, in boldface:

FAA-APPROVED

TUITION WAIVERS AVAILABLE

FREE PARKING

“There have been radical changes in our knowledge of the dinosaurs over the past few years,” Dr. Albertson said, holding the micropaleontology textbook up, “so radical that what came before is obsolete.” He opened the book to the front. “Turn to the introduction.”

His students opened their books, which had cost $64.95.

“Have you all turned to the introduction?” Dr. Albertson asked, taking hold of the top corner of the first page. “Good. Now tear it out.” He ripped out the page. “It’s useless, completely archaic.”

Actually, although there had been some recent revisions in theories regarding dinosaur behavior and physiology, particularly the larger predators, there hadn’t been any at all at the microscopic level. But Dr. Albertson had seen Robin Williams do this in a movie and been very impressed.

His students, who had been hoping to sell them back to the university bookstore for $32.47, were less so. One of them asked hopefully, “Can’t we just promise not to read it?”

“Absolutely not,” Dr. Albertson said, yanking out a handful of pages. “Come on. Tear them out.”

He threw the pages in a metal wastebasket and held the wastebasket out to a marketing minor who was quietly tucking the torn-out pages into the back of the book with an eye to selling it as a pre-edited version. “That’s right, all of them,” Dr. Albertson said. “Every outdated, old-fashioned page.”

Someone knocked on the door. He handed the wastebasket to the marketing minor and left the slaughter to open it. It was Sarah Wright with a squarish envelope.

“There’s a reception for the dean this afternoon,” she said, “We need the whole department there.”

“Do we have to tear out the title page, too?” a psychology minor asked.

“The legislature’s just cut funding another eighteen percent, and I’m afraid they’re going to try to eliminate one of our positions.”

“You can count on my support one hundred percent,” he said.

“Good,” Sarah said, sighing with relief. “As long as we stick together we’ve got a chance.”

Dr. Albertson shut the door behind her, glancing at his watch. He had planned to stand on his desk before the end of class, but now there wouldn’t be time. He had to settle for the inspirational coda.

“Ostracods, diatoms, fusilinids, these are what we stay alive for,” he said. “Carpe diem!Seize the day!”

The psych minor raised his hand. “Can I borrow your Scotch tape?” he asked. “I accidentally tore out Chapters One and Two.”

There was Brie at the reception. And sherry and spinach puffs and a tray of strawberries with cellophane-flagged toothpicks stuck like daggers into them. Sarah took a strawberry and a rapid headcount of the department. Everyone else seemed to be there except Robert, who was probably parking his car, and Dr. Othniel.

“Did you make sure Dr. Othniel saw his invitation?” she asked her T.A., who was eating spinach puffs two at a time.

“Yeah,” Chuck said with his mouth full. “He’s here.” He gestured with his plate toward a high-backed wing chair by the fire.

Sarah went over and checked. Dr. Othniel was asleep. She went back aver to the table and had another strawberry. She wondered which one was Dr. King. There were only three men she didn’t recognize. Two of them were obviously Physics Department—they were making a fusion reactor out of a Styrofoam cup and several of the fancy toothpicks. The third looked likely. He was tall and distinguished, and was wearing a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, but after a few minutes he disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a tray of liver paté and crackers.

Robert came in, carrying his suit jacket and looking out of breath. “You willnot believe what happened to me,” he said.

“You got a parking ticket,” Sarah said. “Were you able to find out anything about this Dr. King?”

“He’s an educational consultant,” Robert said. “Whatis the point of spending eighty dollars a semester for a parking sticker when there are never any places to park in the permit lots? You know where I had to park? Behind the football stadium! That’s five blocks further away than my house!”

“An educational consultant?” Sarah said. “What’s he up to?” She stared thoughtfully at her strawberry. “An educational consultant—”

“Author ofWhat’s Wrong with Our Entire Educational System, ”Dr. Albertson said. He took a plate and put a spinach puff on it. “He’s an expert on restructionary implementation.”

“What’s that?” Chuck said, making a sandwich out of the liver pâté and two spinach puffs.

Dr. Albertson looked superior. “Surely they teach you graduate assistants about restructionary implementation,” he said, which meant he didn’t know either. He took a bite of spinach puff. “You should try these,” he said. “I was just talking to the dean. She told me she made them herself.”

“We’re dead,” Sarah said.

“There’s Dr. King now,” Dr. Albertson said, pointing to a lumbering man wearing a polo shirt and Sans-a-belt slacks.

The dean went over to greet him, clasping his hands in hers. “Sorry I’m late,” he boomed out. “I couldn’t find a parking place. I parked out in front.”

Dr. Othniel suddenly emerged from the wing chair, looking wildly around. Sarah beckoned to him with her toothpick and he stooped his way over to them, sat down next to the Brie and went back to sleep.

The dean moved to the center of the room and clapped her hands for attention. Dr. Othniel jerked at the sound. “I don’t want to interrupt the fun,” the dean said, “andplease, do go on eating and drinking, but I just wanted you all to meet Dr. Jerry King. Dr. King will be working with the paleontology department on something I’m sure you’ll all find terribly exciting. Dr. King, would you like to say a few words?”

Dr. King smiled, a large friendly grin that reminded Sarah of the practice jaw in Field Techniques. “We all know the tremendous impactization technology has had on our modern society,” he said.

“Impactization?” Chuck said, eating a lemon tart the distinguished looking gentleman had just brought out from the kitchen. “I thoughtimpact was a verb.”

“It is,” Sarah said. “And once, back in the Late Cretaceous, it was a noun.”

“Shh,” Dr. Albertson said, looking disapproving.

“As we move into the twenty-first century, our society is transformizing radically, but is education? No. We are still teaching the same old subjects in the same old ways.” He smiled at the dean. “Until today. Today marks the beginning of a wonderful innovationary experiment in education, a whole new instructional dynamic in teaching paleontology. I’ll be thinktanking with you dinosaur guys and gals next week, but until then I want you to think about one word.”

“Extinction,” Sarah murmured.

“That word isrelevance . Is paleontology relevant to our modern society? How can wemake it relevant? Think about it. Relevance.”

There was a spattering of applause from the departments Dr. King would not be thinktanking with. Robert poured a large glass of sherry and drank it down. “It’s not fair,” he said. “First the Parking Authority and now this.”

“Pilots make a lot of money,” Sarah said. “And the only word they have to think about iscrash .”

Dr. Albertson raised his hand.

“Yes?” the dean asked.

“I just wanted Dr. King to know,” he said, “that he can count on my support one hundred percent.”

“Are you supposed to eat this white crust thing on the cheese?” Chuck asked.

Dr. King put a memo in the Paleontology Department’s boxes the next day. It read, “Group ideating session next Mon. Dr. Wright’s office. 2P.M . J. King. P.S. I will be doing observational datatizing this Tues. and Thurs.”

“We’ll all do some observational datatizing,” Sarah said, even more alarmed by Dr. King’s preempting her office without asking her than by the Brie.

She went to find her T.A., who was in her office eating a Snickers. “I want you to go find out about Dr. King’s background,” she told him.

“Why?”

“Because he used to be a junior high girls’ basketball coach. Maybe we can get some dirt on one of his seventh grade forwards and him.”

“How do you know he used to be a junior high coach?”

“All educational consultants used to be junior high coaches. Or social studies teachers.” She looked at the memo disgustedly. “What do you suppose observational datatizing consists of?”

Observational datatizing consisted of wandering around the halls of the Earth Sciences building with a clipboard listening to Dr. Albertson.

“Okay, how much you got?” Dr. Albertson was saying to his class. He was wearing a butcher’s apron and a paper fast-food hat and was cutting apples into halves, quarters, and thirds with a cleaver, which had nothing to do with depauperate fauna, but which he had seen Edward James Olmos do inStand and Deliver . He had been very impressed.

“Yip, that’ll do it,” he was saying in an Hispanic accent when Dr. King appeared suddenly at the back of the room with his clipboard.

“But the key question here isrelevance,” Dr. Albertson said hastily. “How do the depauperate fauna affectate on our lives today?”

His students looked wary. One of them crossed his arms protectively over his textbook as though he thought he was going to be asked to tear out more pages.

“Depauperate fauna arehighly relevant to our modern society,” Dr. Albertson said, but Dr. King had wandered back into the hall and into Dr. Othniel’s class.

“The usual mode of theTyrannosaurus Rex was to approach a herd of hadrosaurs from cover,” Dr. Othniel, who did not see Dr. King because he was writing on the board, said. “He would then attack suddenly and retreat.” He wrote, “1.OBSERVE, 2.ATTACK, 3.RETREAT, ” in a column on the board, the letters of each getting smaller and squinchier as he approached the chalk tray.

His students wrote, “1. Sneak up, 2. Bite ass, 3. Beat it,” and “Todd called last night. I told him Traci wasn’t there. We talked forever.” Dr. King wrote, “relevance?”in large block letters on his clipboard and wandered out again.

“The jaws and teeth of theTyrannosaurus were capable of inflicting a fatal wound with a single bite. It would then follow at a distance, waiting for its victim to bleed to death,” Dr. Othniel said.

Robert was late to the meeting on Monday. “You will not believe what happened to me!” he said. “I had to park in the daily permit lot, and while I was getting the permit out of the machine, they gave me a ticket!”

Dr. King, who was sitting in Sarah’s desk wearing a pair of gray sweats, a whistle, and a baseball cap with “Dan Quayle Junior High” on it, said, “I know you’re all as excited about this educationing experiment we’re about to embarkate on as I am.”

“More,” Dr. Albertson said.

Sarah glared at him. “Will this experiment involve eliminating positions?”

Dr. King smiled at her. His teeth reminded her of some she’d seen at the Denver Museum of Natural History. “Positions, classes, departments, all those terms are irrelevantatious. We need to reassessmentize our entire concept of education, its relevance to modern society. How many of you are using paradigmic bonding in your classes?”

Dr. Albertson raised his hand.

“Paradigmic bonding, experiential roleplaying, modular cognition. I assessmentized some of your classes last week. I saw no computer-learner linkages, no multimedia) instruction, no cognitive tracking. In one class”—Dr. King smiled largely at Dr. Othniel —“I saw a blackboard being used. Methodologies like that are extinct.”

“So are dinosaurs,” Sarah muttered. “Why don’t you say something, Robert?”

“Dr. King,” Robert said. “Do you plan to extend this reorganization to other departments?”

Good, Sarah thought, send him over to pester English Lit.

“Yes,” Dr. King said, beaming. “Paleontology is only a field-test. Eventually we intend to expand it to encompassate the entire university. Why?”

“There’s one department that drastically needs reorganization,” Robert said. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but the Parking Authority is completely out of control. The sign distinctly says you’re supposed to park your car first andthen go get the daily permit out of the machine.”

“What did you find out about Dr. King?” Sarah asked Chuck Tuesday morning.

“He didn’t coach junior high girls’ basketball,” he said, drinking a lime Slurpee. “It was junior high wrestling.”

“Oh,”Sarah said. “Then find out where he got his doctorate. Maybe we can get the college to rescind it for using words likeassessmentize.”

“I don’t think I’d better,” Chuck said. “I mean, I’ve only got one semester till I graduate. And besides,” he said, sucking on the Slurpee, “some of his ideas made sense. I mean, a lot of that stuff we learn in class does seem kind of pointless. I mean, what does the Late Cretaceous have to do with us really? I thought some of those things he talked about sounded rad. Whydon’t weever roleplay in class?”

“Fine,” Sarah said. “Roleplay this. You are aCorythosaurus . You’re smart and fast, but not fast enough because aTyrannosaurus Rex has just taken a bite out of your flank. What do you do?”

“Gosh, that’s a tough one,” Chuck said, slurping meditatively. “What would you do?”

“Grow a wishbone.”

Tuesday afternoon, as soon as her one o’clock class was over, Sarah went to Robert’s office. He wasn’t there. She waited outside for half an hour, reading the announcement for a semester at sea, and then went over to the Parking Authority office.

He was standing near the front of a line that wound down the stairs and out the door. It was composed mostly of students, though the person at the head of the line was a frail-looking old man. He was flapping a green slip at the young man behind the counter. The young man had a blond crew cut and looked like an adolescent Himmler.

. . . heart attack,”the old man was saying. Sarah wondered if he had had one when he got his parking ticket or if he intended to have one now.

Sarah tried to get to Robert, but two students were blocking the door. She recognized one of the freshmen from Dr. Othniel’s class. “Oh, Todd,” she was saying to a boy in a tank undershirt and jeans, “I knew you’d help me. I tried to get Traci to come with me—I mean, after all, it was her car—but I think she had a date.”

“A date?” Todd said.

“Well, I don’t know for sure. It’s hard to keep track of all her guys, I couldn’t do that. I mean,” she lowered her eyes demurely, “if you weremy boyfriend, I’d never even think about other guys.”

“Excuse me,” Sarah said, “but I need to talk to Dr. Walker.”

Todd stepped to one side, and instead of stepping to the other, the freshman from Dr. Othniel’s class squeezed over next to him. Sarah slid past, and worked her way up to Robert, ignoring the nasty looks of the other people in line.

“Don’t tell me you got a ticket, too,” Robert said.

“No,” she said. “We have to do something about Dr. King.”

“We certainly do,” Robert said indignantly.

“Oh, I’m so glad you feel that way. Dr. Othniel’s useless. He doesn’t even realize what’s going on, and Dr. Albertson’s giving a lecture on ‘The Impactization of Microscopic Fossils on Twentieth Century Society.’ ”

“Which is what?”

“I have no idea. When I was in there he was showing a videotape ofThe Land Before Time.”

“I had a coronary thrombosis!” the old man shouted.

“Unauthorized vehicles are not allowed in permit lots,” the Hitler Youth said. “However, we have initiated a preliminary study of the incident.”

“A preliminary study!” the old man said, clutching his left arm. “The last one you did took five years!”

“We need another meeting with Dr. King,” Sarah said. “We need to tell him relevance is not the issue, that paleontology is important in and of itself, and not because brontosaurus earrings are trendy. Surely he’ll see reason. We have science and logic on our side.”

Robert looked at the old man at the counter.

“What is there to study?” he was saying. “You ticketed the ambulance while the paramedics were giving me CPR!”

“I’m not sure reason will work,” Robert said doubtfully.

“Well, then, how about a petition? We’ve got to do something, or we’ll all be showing episodes of “The Flintstones”. He’s a dangerous man!”

“He certainly is,” Robert said. “Do you know what I just got? A citation for parking in front of the Faculty Library.”

“Will you forget about your stupid parking tickets for a minute?” Sarah said. “You won’t have any reason to park unless we get rid of King. I know Albertson’s students would all sign a petition. Yesterday he made them cut the illustrations out of their textbooks and make a collage.”

“The Parking Authority doesn’t acknowledge petitions,” Robert said. “You heard what Dr. King told the dean at the reception. He said, ‘I’m parked right outside.’ He left a note on his windshield that said the Paleontology Department had given him permission to park there.” He waved the green paper at her. “Do you know whereI parked? Fifteen blocks away. And I’m the one who gets a citation for improperly authorizing parking permission!”

“Good-bye, Robert,” Sarah said.

“Wait a minute! Where are you going? We haven’t figured out a plan of action yet.”

Sarah worked her way back through the line. The two students were still blocking the door. “I’m sure Traci will understand,” the freshman from Dr. Othniel’s class was saying, “I mean, it isn’t like you two wereserious or anything.”

“Wait a minute!” Robert shouted from his place in line. “What are you going to do?”

“Evolve,” Sarah said.

On Wednesday there was another memo in Paleontology’s boxes. It was on green paper, and Robert snatched it up and took off for the Parking Authority office, muttering dark threats. He was already there and standing in line behind a young woman in a wheelchair and two firemen when he finally unfolded it and read it.

“Iknow I was parking in a handicapped spot,” the young woman was saying when Robert let out a whoop and ran back to the Earth Sciences building.

Sarah had a one o’clock class, bat she wasn’t there. Her students, who were spending their time erasing marks in their textbooks so they could resell them at the bookstore, didn’t know where she was. Neither did Dr. Albertson, who was making a papier-mâché foraminifer.

Robert went into Dr. Othniel’s class. “The prevalence of predators in the Late Cretaceous,” Dr. Othniel was saying, “led to severe evolutionary pressures, resulting in aquatic and aeronautical adaptations.”

Robert tried to get his attention, but he was writing “birds” in the chalk tray.

He went out in the hall. Sarah’s T.A. was standing outside her office, eating a bag of Doritos.

“Have you seen Dr. Wright?” Robert asked.

“She’s gone,” Chuck said, munching.

“Gone? You mean, resigned?” he said, horrified. “But she doesn’t have to.” He waved the green paper at Chuck. “Dr. King’s going to do a preliminary study, a-what does he call it?-a preinitiatory survey of prevailing paleontological pedagogy. We won’t have to worry about him for another five years at least.”

“She saw it,” Chuck said, pulling a jar of salsa out of his back pocket. “She said it was too late. She’d already paid her tuition.” He unscrewed the lid.

“Her tuition?” Robert said. “What are you talking about? Where did she go?”

“She flew the coop.” He dug in the bag and pulled out a chip. He dipped it in the sauce. “Oh, and she left something for you.” He handed Robert the jar of salsa and the chips and dug in his other back pocket. He handed Robert the flight brochure and a green plastic square.

“It’s her parking sticker,” Robert said.

“Yeah,” Chuck said. “She said she won’t be needing it where she’s going.”

“That’s all? She didn’t say anything else?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, dipping a chip into the salsa Robert still held. “She said to watch out for falling rocks.”

“The predatory dinosaurs flourished for the entire Late Cretaceous,” Dr. Othniel said, “and then, along with their prey, disappeared. Various theories have been advanced for their extinction, none of which has been authoritatively proved.”

“I’ll bet they couldn’t find a parking place,” a student who had written one of the letters to the Parking Authority and who had finally given up and traded his Volkswagen in on a skateboard, whispered.

“What?” Dr. Othniel said, looking vaguely around. He turned back to the board. “The diminishing food supply, the rise of mammals, the depredations of smaller predators, all undoubtedly contributed.”

He wrote:

1.FOOD SUPPLY

2.MAMMALS

3.COMPETITION

on the bottom one-fifth of the board.

His students wrote, “I thought it was an asteroid,” and “My new roommate is trying to steal Todd away from me! Can you believe that?”

“The demise of the dinosaurs—” Dr. Othniel said, and stopped. He straightened slowly, vertebra by vertebra, until he was nearly erect. He lifted his chin, as if he were sniffing the air, and then walked over to the open window, leaned out, and stood there for several minutes, scanning the clear and empty sky.

A WALK IN THE SUN

Geoffrey A. Landis

The pilots have a saying: a good landing is any landing you can walk away from.

Perhaps Sanjiv might have done better, if he'd been alive. Trish had done the best she could. All things considered, it was a far better landing than she had any right to expect.

Titanium struts, pencil-slender, had never been designed to take the force of a landing. Paper-thin pressure walls had buckled and shattered, spreading wreckage out into the vacuum and across a square kilometer of lunar surface. An instant before impact she remembered to blow the tanks. There was no explosion, but no landing could have been gentle enough to keep Moonshadow together. In eerie silence, the fragile ship had crumpled and ripped apart like a discarded aluminum can.

The piloting module had torn open and broken loose from the main part of the ship. The fragment settled against a crater wall. When it stopped moving, Trish unbuckled the straps that held her in the pilot's seat and fell slowly to the ceiling. She oriented herself to the unaccustomed gravity, found an undamaged EVA pack and plugged it into her suit, then crawled out into the sunlight through the jagged hole where the living module had been attached.

She stood on the grey lunar surface and stared. Her shadow reached out ahead of her, a pool of inky black in the shape of a fantastically stretched man. The landscape was rugged and utterly barren, painted in stark shades of grey and black.

"Magnificent desolation," she whispered. Behind her, the sun hovered just over the mountains, glinting off shards of titanium and steel scattered across the cratered plain.

Patricia Jay Mulligan looked out across the desolate moonscape and tried not to weep.

First things first. She took the radio out from the shattered crew compartment and tried it. Nothing. That was no surprise; Earth was over the horizon, and there were no other ships in cislunar space.

After a little searching she found Sanjiv and Theresa. In the low gravity they were absurdly easy to carry. There was no use in burying them. She sat them in a niche between two boulders, facing the sun, facing west, toward where the Earth was hidden behind a range of black mountains. She tried to think of the right words to say, and failed. Perhaps as well; she wouldn't know the proper service for Sanjiv anyway. "Goodbye, Sanjiv. Goodbye, Theresa. I wish--I wish things would have been different. I'm sorry." Her voice was barely more than a whisper. "Go with God."

She tried not to think of how soon she was likely to be joining them.

She forced herself to think. What would her sister have done? Survive. Karen would survive. First: inventory your assets.

She was alive, miraculously unhurt. Her vacuum suit was in serviceable condition. Life-support was powered by the suit's solar arrays; she had air and water for as long as the sun continued to shine. Scavenging the wreckage yielded plenty of unbroken food packs; she wasn't about to starve.

Second: call for help. In this case, the nearest help was a quarter of a million miles over the horizon. She would need a high-gain antenna and a mountain peak with a view of Earth.

In its computer, Moonshadow had carried the best maps of the moon ever made. Gone. There had been other maps on the ship; they were scattered with the wreckage. She'd managed to find a detailed map of Mare Nubium--and a small global map meant to be used as an index. It would have to do. As near as she could tell, the impact site was just over the eastern edge of Mare Smythii--"Smith's Sea." The mountains in the distance should mark the edge of the sea, and, with luck, have a view of Earth. She checked her suit. At a command, the solar arrays spread out to their full extent like oversized dragonfly wings and glinted in prismatic colors as they rotated to face the sun. She verified that the suit's systems were charging properly, and set off.

Close up, the mountain was less steep than it had looked from the crash site. In the low gravity, climbing was hardly more difficult than walking, although the two-meter dish made her balance awkward. Reaching the ridgetop, Trish was rewarded with the sight of a tiny sliver of blue on the horizon. The mountains on the far side of the valley were still in darkness. She hoisted the radio higher up on her shoulder and started across the next valley.

From the next mountain peak the Earth edged over the horizon, a blue and white marble half-hidden by black mountains.

She unfolded the tripod for the antenna and carefully sighted along the feed. "Hello? This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Emergency. Repeat, this is an emergency. Does anybody hear me?"

She took her thumb off the transmit button and waited for a response, but heard nothing but the soft whisper of static from the sun.

"This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Does anybody hear me?" She paused again. "Moonshadow, calling anybody. Moonshadow, calling anybody. This is an emergency."

"--shadow, this is Geneva control. We read you faint but clear. Hang on, up there." She released her breath in a sudden gasp. She hadn't even realized she'd been holding it.

After five minutes the rotation of the Earth had taken the ground antenna out of range. In that time after they had gotten over their surprise that there was a survivor of the Moonshadow--she learned the parameters of the problem. Her landing had been close to the sunset terminator: the very edge of the illuminated side of the moon. The moon's rotation is slow, but inexorable. Sunset would arrive in three days. There was no shelter on the moon, no place to wait out the fourteen-day-long lunar night. Her solar cells needed sunlight to keep her air fresh. Her search of the wreckage had yielded no unruptured storage tanks, no batteries, no means to lay up a store of oxygen.

And there was no way they could launch a rescue mission before nightfall.

Too many "no"s.

She sat silent, gazing across the jagged plain toward the slender blue crescent, thinking.

After a few minutes the antenna at Goldstone rotated into range, and the radio crackled to life. "Moonshadow, do you read me? Hello, Moonshadow, do you read me?"

"Moonshadow here."

She released the transmit button and waited in long silence for her words to be carried to Earth.

"Roger, Moonshadow. We confirm the earliest window for a rescue mission is thirty days from now. Can you hold on that long?"

She made her decision and pressed the transmit button. "Astronaut Mulligan for Moonshadow. I'll be here waiting for you. One way or another."

She waited, but there was no answer. The receiving antenna at Goldstone couldn't have rotated out of range so quickly. She checked the radio. When she took the cover off, she could see that the printed circuit board on the power supply had been slightly cracked from the crash, but she couldn't see any broken leads or components clearly out of place. She banged on it with her fist--Karen's first rule of electronics: if it doesn't work, hit it--and re-aimed the antenna, but it didn't help. Clearly something in it had broken.

What would Karen have done? Not just sit here and die, that was certain. Get a move on, kiddo. When sunset catches you, you'll die.

They had heard her reply. She had to believe they heard her reply and would be coming for her. All she had to do was survive.

The dish antenna would be too awkward to carry with her. She could afford nothing but the bare necessities. At sunset her air would be gone. She put down the radio and began to walk.

----------

Mission Commander Stanley stared at the X-rays of his engine. It was four in the morning. There would be no more sleep for him that night; he was scheduled to fly to Washington at six to testify to Congress.

'"Your decision, Commander," the engine technician said.

"We can't find any flaws in the X-rays we took of the flight engines, but it could be hidden. The nominal flight profile doesn't take the engines to a hundred twenty, so the blades should hold even if there is a flaw."

"How long a delay if we yank the engines for inspection?"

"Assuming they're okay, we lose a day. If not, two, maybe three."

Commander Stanley drummed his fingers in irritation. He hated to be forced into hasty decisions. "Normal procedure would be?"

"Normally we'd want to reinspect.

"Do it."

He sighed. Another delay. Somewhere up there, somebody was counting on him to get there on time. If she was still alive. If the cut-off radio signal didn't signify catastrophic failure of other systems.

If she could find a way to survive without air.

----------

On Earth it would have been a marathon pace. On the moon it was an easy lope. After ten miles the trek fell into an easy rhythm: half a walk, half like jogging, and half bounding like a slow-motion kangaroo. Her worst enemy was boredom.

Her comrades at the academy--in part envious of the top scores that had made her the first of their class picked for a mission--had ribbed her mercilessly about flying a mission that would come within a few kilometers of the moon without landing. Now she had a chance to see more of the moon up close than anybody in history. She wondered what her classmates were thinking now. She would have a tale to tell--if only she could survive to tell it.

The warble of the low voltage warning broke her out of her reverie. She checked her running display as she started down the maintenance checklist. Elapsed EVA time, eight point three hours. System functions, nominal, except that the solar array current was way below norm. In a few moments she found the trouble: a thin layer of dust on her solar array. Not a serious problem; it could be brushed off. If she couldn't find a pace that would avoid kicking dust on the arrays, then she would have to break every few hours to housekeep. She rechecked the array and continued on.

With the sun unmoving ahead of her and nothing but the hypnotically blue crescent of the slowly rotating Earth creeping imperceptibly off the horizon, her attention wandered. Moonshadow had been tagged as an easy mission, a low-orbit mapping flight to scout sites for the future moonbase. Moonshadow had never been intended to land, not on the moon, not anywhere.

She'd landed it anyway; she'd had to.

Walking west across the barren plain, Trish had nightmares of blood and falling, Sanjiv dying beside her; Theresa already dead in the lab module; the moon looming huge, spinning at a crazy angle in the viewports. Stop the spin, aim for the terminator at low sun angles, the illumination makes it easier to see the roughness of the surface. Conserve fuel, but remember to blow the tanks an instant before you hit to avoid explosion.

That was over. Concentrate on the present. One foot in front of the other. Again. Again.

The undervoltage alarm chimed again. Dust, already?

She looked down at her navigation aid and realized with a shock that she had walked a hundred and fifty kilometers.

Time for a break anyway. She sat down on a boulder, fetched a snack-pack out of her carryall, and set a timer for fifteen minutes. The airtight quick-seal on the food pack was designed to mate to the matching port in the lower part of her faceplate. lt would be important to keep the seal free of grit. She verified the vacuum seal twice before opening the pack into the suit, then pushed the food bar in so she could turn her head and gnaw off pieces. The bar was hard and slightly sweet.

She looked west across the gently rolling plain. The horizon looked flat, unreal; a painted backdrop barely out of reach. On the moon, it should be easy to keep up a pace of fifteen or even twenty miles an hour-counting time out for sleep, maybe ten. She could walk a long, long way.

Karen would have liked it; she'd always liked hiking in desolate areas. "Quite pretty, in its own way, isn't it, Sis?'' Trish said. "Who'd have thought there were so many shadings of grey? Plenty of uncrowded beach. Too bad it's such a long walk to the water."

Time to move on. She continued on across terrain that was generally flat, although everywhere pocked with craters of every size. The moon is surprisingly flat; only one percent of the surface has a slope of more than fifteen degrees. The small hills she bounded over easily; the few larger ones she detoured around. In the low gravity this posed no real problem to walking. She walked on. She didn't feel tired, but when she checked her readout and realized that she had been walking for twenty hours, she forced herself to stop.

Sleeping was a problem. The solar arrays were designed to be detached from the suit for easy servicing, but had no provision to power the life-support while detached. Eventually she found a way to stretch the short cable out far enough to allow her to prop up the array next to her so she could lie down without disconnecting the power. She would have to be careful not to roll over. That done, she found she couldn't sleep. After a time she lapsed into a fitful doze, dreaming not of the Moonshadow as she'd expected, but of her sister, Karen, who--in the dream--wasn't dead at all, but had only been playing a joke on her, pretending to die.

She awoke disoriented, muscles aching, then suddenly remembered where she was. The Earth was a full handspan above the horizon. She got up, yawned, and jogged west across the gunpowder-grey sandscape.

Her feet were tender where the boots rubbed. She varied her pace, changing from jogging to skipping to a kangaroo bounce. It helped some; not enough. She could feel her feet starting to blister, but knew that there was no way to take off her boots to tend, or even examine, her feet.

Karen had made her hike on blistered feet, and had had no patience with complaints or slacking off. She should have broken her boots in before the hike. In the one-sixth gee, at least the pain was bearable.

After a while her feet simply got numb.

Small craters she bounded over; larger ones she detoured around; larger ones yet she simply climbed across. West of Mare Smythii she entered a badlands and the terrain got bumpy. She had to slow down. The downhill slopes were in full sun, but the crater bottoms and valleys were still in shadow.

Her blisters broke, the pain a shrill and discordant singing in her boots. She bit her lip to keep herself from crying and continued on. Another few hundred kilometers and she was in Mare Spumans--"Sea of Froth"--and it was clear trekking again. Across Spumans, then into the north lobe of Fecundity and through to Tranquility. Somewhere around the sixth day of her trek she must have passed Tranquility Base; she carefully scanned for it on the horizon as she traveled but didn't see anything. By her best guess she missed it by several hundred kilometers; she was already deviating toward the north, aiming for a pass just north of the crater Julius Caesar into Mare Vaporum to avoid the mountains. The ancient landing stage would have been too small to spot unless she'd almost walked right over it.

"Figures," she said. "Come all this way, and the only tourist attraction in a hundred miles is closed. That's the way things always seem to turn out, eh, Sis?"

There was nobody to laugh at her witticism, so after a moment she laughed at it herself.

Wake up from confused dreams to black sky and motionless sunlight, yawn, and start walking before you're completely awake. Sip on the insipid warm water, trying not to think about what it's recycled from. Break, cleaning your solar arrays, your life, with exquisite care. Walk. Break. Sleep again, the sun nailed to the sky in the same position it was in when you awoke. Next day do it all over. And again. And again.

The nutrition packs are low-residue, but every few days you must still squat for nature. Your life support can't recycle solid waste, so you wait for the suit to desiccate the waste and then void the crumbly brown powder to vacuum. Your trail is marked by your powdery deposits, scarcely distinguishable from the dark lunar dust.

Walk west, ever west, racing the sun.

Earth was high in the sky; she could no longer see it without craning her neck way back. When the Earth was directly overhead she stopped and celebrated, miming the opening of an invisible bottle of champagne to toast her imaginary traveling companions. The sun was well above the horizon now. In six days of travel she had walked a quarter of the way around the moon.

She passed well south of Copernicus, to stay as far out of the impact rubble as possible without crossing mountains. The terrain was eerie, boulders as big as houses, as big as shuffle tanks. In places the footing was treacherous where the grainy regolith gave way to jumbles of rock, rays thrown out by the cataclysmic impact billions of years ago. She picked her way as best she could. She left her radio on and gave a running commentary as she moved. "Watch your step here, footing's treacherous. Coming up on a hill; think we should climb it or detour around?"

Nobody voiced an opinion. She contemplated the rocky hill. Likely an ancient volcanic bubble, although she hadn't realized that this region had once been active. The territory around it would be bad. From the top she'd be able to study the terrain for a ways ahead. "Okay, listen up, everybody. The climb could be tricky here, so stay close and watch where I place my feet. Don't take chances better slow and safe than fast and dead. Any questions?" Silence; good. "Okay, then. We'll take a fifteen minute break when we reach the top. Follow me."

Past the rubble of Copernicus, Oceanus Procellarum was smooth as a golf course. Trish jogged across the sand with a smooth, even glide. Karen and Dutchman seemed to always be lagging behind or running up ahead out of sight. Silly dog still followed Karen around like a puppy, even though Trish was the one who fed him and refilled his water dish every day since Karen went away to college. The way Karen wouldn't stay close behind her annoyed Trish. Karen had promised to let her be the leader this time--but she kept her feelings to herself. Karen had called her a bratty little pest, and she was determined to show she could act like an adult. Anyway, she was the one with the map. If Karen got lost, it would serve her right.

She angled slightly north again to take advantage of the map's promise of smooth terrain. She looked around to see if Karen was there, and was surprised to see that the Earth was a gibbous ball low down on the horizon. Of course, Karen wasn't there. Karen had died years ago. Trish was alone in a spacesuit that itched and stank and chafed her skin nearly raw across the thighs. She should have broken it in better, but who would have expected she would want to go jogging in it?

It was unfair how she had to wear a spacesuit and Karen didn't. Karen got to do a lot of things that she didn't, but how come she didn't have to wear a spacesuit? Everybody had to wear a spacesuit. it was the rule. She turned to Karen to ask. Karen laughed bitterly. "I don't have to wear a spacesuit, my bratty little sister, because I'm dead. Squished like a bug and buried, remember?"

Oh, yes, that was right. Okay, then, if Karen was dead, then she didn't have to wear a spacesuit. It made perfect sense for a few more kilometers, and they jogged along together in companionable silence until Trish had a sudden thought . "Hey, wait--if you're dead, then how can you be here?"

"Because I'm not here, silly. I'm a fig-newton of your overactive imagination."

With a shock, Trish looked over her shoulder. Karen wasn't there. Karen had never been there.

"I'm sorry. Please come back. Please?"

She stumbled and fell headlong, sliding in a spray of dust down the bowl of a crater. As she slid she frantically twisted to stay face-down, to keep from rolling over on the fragile solar wings on her back. When she finally slid to a stop, the silence echoing in her ears, there was a long scratch like a badly healed scar down the glass of her helmet. The double reinforced faceplate had held, fortunately, or she wouldn't be looking at it.

She checked her suit. There were no breaks in the integrity, but the titanium strut that held out the left wing of the solar array had buckled back and nearly broken. Miraculously there had been no other damage. She pulled off the array and studied the damaged strut. She bent it back into position as best she could, and splinted the joint with a mechanical pencil tied on with two short lengths of wire. The pencil had been only extra weight anyway; it was lucky she hadn't thought to discard it. She tested the joint gingerly. It wouldn't take much stress, but if she didn't bounce around too much it should hold. Time for a break anyway.

When she awoke she took stock of her situation. While she hadn't been paying attention, the terrain had slowly turned mountainous. The next stretch would be slower going than the last bit.

"About time you woke up, sleepyhead," said Karen. She yawned, stretched, and turned her head to look back at the fine of footprints. At the end of the long trail, the Earth showed as a tiny blue dome on the horizon, not very far away at all, the single speck of color in a landscape of uniform grey. "Twelve days to walk halfway around the moon," she said. "Not bad, kid. Not great, but not bad. You training for a marathon or something?"

Trish got up and started jogging, her feet falling into rhythm automatically as she sipped from the suit recycler, trying to wash the stale taste out of her mouth. She called out to Karen behind her without turning around. "Get a move on, we got places to go. You coming, or what?"

In the nearly shadowless sunlight the ground was washed-out, two-dimensional. Trish had a hard time finding footing, stumbling over rocks that were nearly invisible against the flat landscape. One foot in front of the other. Again. Again.

The excitement of the trek had long ago faded, leaving behind a relentless determination to prevail, which in turn had faded into a kind of mental numbness. Trish spent the time chatting with Karen, telling the private details of her life, secretly hoping that Karen would be pleased, would say something telling her she was proud of her. Suddenly she noticed that Karen wasn't listening; had apparently wandered off on her sometime when she hadn't been paying attention.

She stopped on the edge of a long, winding rille. It looked like a riverbed just waiting for a rainstorm to fill it, but Trish knew it had never known water. Covering the bottom was only dust, dry as powdered bone. She slowly picked her way to the bottom, careful not to slip again and risk damage to her fragile life-support system. She looked up at the top. Karen was standing on the rim waving at her. "Come on! Quit dawdling, you slowpoke--you want to stay here forever?"

"What's the hurry? We're ahead of schedule. The sun is high up in the sky, and we're halfway around the moon. We'll make it, no sweat."

Karen came down the slope, sliding like a skier in the powdery dust. She pressed her face up against Trish's helmet and stared into her eyes, with a manic intensity that almost frightened her. "The hurry, my lazy little sister, is that you're halfway around the moon, you've finished with the easy part and it's all mountains and badlands from here on, you've got six thousand kilometers to walk in a broken spacesuit, and if you slow down and let the sun get ahead of you, and then run into one more teensy little problem, just one, you'll be dead, dead, dead, just like me. You wouldn't like it, trust me. Now get your pretty little lazy butt into gear and move!"

And, indeed, it was slow going. She couldn't bound down slopes as she used to, or the broken strut would fail and she'd have to stop for painstaking repair. There were no more level plains; it all seemed to be either boulder fields, crater walls, or mountains. On the eighteenth day she came to a huge natural arch. It towered over her head, and she gazed up at it in awe, wondering how such a structure could have been formed on the moon.

"Not by wind, that's for sure," said Karen. "Lava, I'd figure. Melted through a ridge and flowed on, leaving the bole; then over the eons micrometeoroid bombardment ground off the rough edges. Pretty, though, isn't it?"

"Magnificent."

Not far past the arch she entered a forest of needle-thin crystals. At first they were small, breaking like glass under her feet, but then they soared above her, six-sided spires and minarets in fantastic colors. She picked her way in silence between them, bedazzled by the forest of light sparkling between the sapphire spires. The crystal jungle finally thinned out and was replaced by giant crystal boulders, glistening iridescent in the sun. Emeralds? Diamonds?

"I don't know, kid. But they're in our way. I'll be glad when they're behind us."

And after a while the glistening boulders thinned out as well, until there were only a scattered few glints of color on the slopes of the hills beside her, and then at last the rocks were just rocks, craggy and pitted.

Crater Daedalus, the middle of the lunar farside. There was no celebration this time. The sun had long ago stopped its lazy rise, and was imperceptibly dropping toward the horizon ahead of them.

"It's a race against the sun, kid, and the sun ain't making any stops to rest. You're losing ground."

"I'm tired. Can't you see I'm tired? I think I'm sick. I hurt all over. Get off my case. Let me rest. Just a few more minutes? Please?"

"You can rest when you're dead." Karen laughed in a strangled, high-pitched voice. Trish suddenly realized that she was on the edge of hysteria. Abruptly she stopped laughing. "Get a move on, kid. Move!"

The lunar surface passed under her, an irregular grey treadmill.

Hard work and good intentions couldn't disguise the fact that the sun was gaining. Every day when she woke up the sun was a little lower down ahead of her, shining a little more directly in her eyes.

Ahead of her, in the glare of the sun she could see an oasis, a tiny island of grass and trees in the lifeless desert. She could already hear the croaking of frogs: braap, braap, BRAAP!

No. That was no oasis; that was the sound of a malfunction alarm. She stopped, disoriented. Overheating. The suit air conditioning had broken down. It took her half a day to find the clogged coolant valve and another three hours soaked in sweat to find a way to unclog it without letting the precious liquid vent to space. The sun sank another handspan toward the horizon.

The sun was directly in her face now. Shadows of the rocks stretched toward her like hungry tentacles, even the smallest looking hungry and mean. Karen was walking beside her again, but now she was silent, sullen.

'"Why won't you talk to me? Did I do something? Did I say something wrong? Tell me."

"I'm not here, little sister, I'm dead. I think it's about time you faced up to that."

"Don't say that. You can't be dead."

"You have an idealized picture of me in your mind. Let me go. Let me go!"

"I can't. Don't go. Hey--do you remember the time we saved up all our allowances for a year so we could buy a horse? And we found a stray kitten that was real sick, and we took the shoebox full of our allowance and the kitten to the vet, and he fixed the kitten but wouldn't take any money?”

"Yeah, I remember. But somehow we still never managed to save enough for a horse." Karen sighed. "Do you think it was easy growing up with a bratty little sister dogging my footsteps, trying to imitate everything I did?"

"I wasn't either bratty."

"You were too.”

"No, I wasn't. I adored you." Did she? "I worshipped you."

"I know you did. Let me tell you, kid, that didn't make it any easier. Do you think it was easy being worshipped? Having to be a paragon all the time? Christ, all through high school, when I wanted to get high, I had to sneak away and do it in private, or else I knew my damn kid sister would be doing it too."

"You didn't. You never."

"Grow up, kid. Damn right I did. You were always right behind me. Everything I did, I knew you'd be right there doing it next. I had to struggle like hell to keep ahead of you, and you, damn you, followed effortlessly. You were smarter than me--you know that, don't you?--and how do you think that made me feel?"

'"Well, what about me? Do you think it was easy for me? Growing up with a dead sister--everything I did, it was 'Too bad you can't be more like Karen' and 'Karen wouldn’t have done it that way' and 'If only Karen had....' How do you think that made me feel, huh? You had it easy--I was the one who had to live up to the standards of a goddamn angel."

"Tough breaks, kid. Better than being dead."

"Damn it, Karen, I loved you. I love you. Why did you have to go away?"

"I know that, kid. I couldn't help it. I'm sorry. I love you too, but I have to go. Can you let me go? Can you just be yourself now, and stop trying to be me?"

"I'll...I'll try."

"Goodbye, little sister,"

"Goodbye, Karen."

She was alone in the settling shadows on an empty, rugged plain. Ahead of her, the sun was barely kissing the ridgetops. The dust she kicked up was behaving strangely; rather than falling to the ground, it would hover half a meter off the ground. She puzzled over the effect, then saw that all around her, dust was silently rising off the ground. For a moment she thought it was another hallucination, but then realized it was some kind of electrostatic charging effect. She moved forward again through the rising fog of moondust. The sun reddened, and the sky turned a deep purple.

The darkness came at her like a demon. Behind her only the tips of mountains were illuminated, the bases disappearing into shadow. The ground ahead of her was covered with pools of ink that she had to pick her way around. Her radio locator was turned on, but receiving only static. It could only pick up the locator beacon from the Moonshadow if she got in line of sight of the crash site. She must be nearly there, but none of the landscape looked even slightly familiar. Ahead was that the ridge she'd climbed to radio Earth? She couldn't tell. She climbed it, but didn't see the blue marble. The next one?

The darkness had spread up to her knees. She kept tripping over rocks invisible in the dark. Her footsteps struck sparks from the rocks, and behind her footprints glowed faintly. Triboluminescent glow, she thought nobody has ever seen that before. She couldn't die now, not so close. But the darkness wouldn't wait. All around her the darkness lay like an unsuspected ocean, rocks sticking up out of the tidepools into the dying sunlight. The undervoltage alarm began to warble as the rising tide of darkness reached her solar array. The crash site had to be around here somewhere, it had to. Maybe the locator beacon was broken? She climbed up a ridge and into the light, looking around desperately for clues. Shouldn't there have been a rescue mission by now?

Only the mountaintops were in the light. She aimed for the nearest and tallest mountain she could see and made her way across the darkness to it, stumbling and crawling in the ocean of ink, at last pulling herself into the light like a swimmer gasping for air. She huddled on her rocky island, desperate as the tide of darkness slowly rose about her. Where were they? Where were they?

----------

Back on Earth, work on the rescue mission had moved at a frantic pace. Everything was checked and triple-checked in space, cutting corners was an invitation for sudden death, but still the rescue mission had been dogged by small problems and minor delays, delays that would have been routine for an ordinary mission, but loomed huge against the tight mission deadline.

The scheduling was almost impossibly tight--the mission had been set to launch in four months, not four weeks. Technicians scheduled for vacations volunteered to work overtime, while suppliers who normally took weeks to deliver parts delivered overnight. Final integration for the replacement for Moonshadow, originally to be called Explorer but now hastily re-christened Rescuer, was speeded up, and the transfer vehicle launched to the Space Station months ahead of the original schedule, less than two weeks after the Moonshadow crash. Two shuttle-loads of propellant swiftly followed, and the transfer vehicle was mated to its aeroshell and tested. While the rescue crew practiced possible scenarios on the simulator, the lander, with engines inspected and replaced, was hastily modified to accept a third person on ascent, tested, and then launched to rendezvous with Rescuer. Four weeks after the crash the stack was fueled and ready, the crew briefed, and the trajectory calculated. The crew shuttle launched through heavy fog to join their Rescuer in orbit.

Thirty days after the unexpected signal from the moon had revealed a survivor of the Moonshadow expedition, Rescuer left orbit for the moon.

----------

From the top of the mountain ridge west of the crash site, Commander Stanley passed his searchlight over the wreckage one more time and shook his head in awe. "An amazing job of piloting," he said. "Looks like she used the TEI motor for braking, and then set it down on the RCS verniers.”

"Incredible," Tanya Nakora. murmured. "Too bad it couldn't save her."

The record of Patricia Mulligan's travels was written in the soil around the wreck. After the rescue team had searched the wreckage, they found the single line of footsteps that led due west, crossed the ridge, and disappeared over the horizon. Stanley put down the binoculars. There was no sign of returning footprints. "Looks like she wanted to see the moon before her air ran out," he said. Inside his helmet he shook his head slowly. "Wonder how far she got?"

"Could she be alive somehow?" asked Nakora. "She was a pretty ingenious kid."

"Not ingenious enough to breathe vacuum. Don't fool yourself--this rescue mission was a political toy from the start. We never had a chance of finding anybody up here still alive."

"Still, we had to try, didn't we?"

Stanley shook his head and tapped his helmet. "Hold on a sec, my damn radio's acting up. I'm picking up some kind of feedback--almost sounds like a voice."

"I hear it too, Commander. But it doesn't make any sense.”

The voice was faint in the radio. "Don't turn off the lights. Please, please, don't turn off your light. . .”

Stanley turned to Nakora. "Do you ... ?"

"I hear it, Commander ... but I don't believe it."

Stanley picked up the searchlight and began sweeping the horizon. "Hello? Rescuer calling Astronaut Patricia Mulligan. Where the hell are you?"

----------

The spacesuit had once been pristine white. It was now dirty grey with moondust, only the ragged and bent solar array on the back carefully polished free of debris. The figure in it was nearly as ragged.

After a meal and a wash, she was coherent and ready to explain.

"It was the mountaintop. I climbed the mountaintop to stay in the sunlight, and I just barely got high enough to hear your radios."

Nakora nodded. "That much we figured out. But the rest--the last month--you really walked all the way around the moon? Eleven thousand kilometers?"

Trish nodded. "It was all I could think of. I figured, about the distance from New York to LA and back--people have walked that and lived. It came to a walking speed of just under ten miles an hour. Farside was the hard part--turned out to be much rougher than nearside. But strange and weirdly beautiful, in places. You wouldn't believe the things I saw."

She shook her head, and laughed quietly. "I don't believe some of the things I saw. The immensity of it--we've barely scratched the surface. I'll be coming back, Commander. I promise you."

"I'm sure you will," said Commander Stanley. "I'm sure you will."

----------

As the ship lifted off the moon, Trish looked out for a last view of the surface. For a moment she thought she saw a lonely figure standing on the surface, waving her goodbye. She didn't wave back.

She looked again, and there was nothing out there but magnificent desolation.

THE WINTERBERRY

Nicholas A. DiChario

May, 1971

It was Uncle Teddy who taught me how to read and write.

I think it took a long time but I'm not sure. I heard him arguing with Mother about it one night a few years ago when I wasn't supposed to be out of my room, but I was very excited with the next day being my birthday and I couldn't sleep.

"He can do it," Uncle Teddy had said.

And Mother said, "He doesn't care whether he reads or writes. It's you who cares. Why do you torture yourself? Let him be."

"He's fifty-four years old," Uncle Teddy said.

"Let him be!" Mother sounded very angry.

I listened to Uncle Teddy walk across the room. "If you feel that way," he said, "why didn't you just let him die?"

There was a long silence before Mother said, "I don't know," and another long silence after that.

Something in their voices frightened me so I returned to my room. I became very ill, and for several weeks Dr. Armbruster came to see me every day but he wouldn't let anyone else come in because he said I was too weak to have visitors.

But sometime after, when I was much better, Uncle Teddy came to visit and he brought a picture book with him which made me remember his talk with Mother. I'm glad Uncle Teddy got his way because now I read and write a lot even though I throw most of my writing away. I hide some of it though and keep it just for myself, and it's not because I'm being sneaky, it's more because some of the things I write are my own personal secrets and I don't want to tell anyone, just like people don't want to tell me things sometimes when I ask them questions.

December, 1977

I am very excited about Christmas almost being here. I am looking forward to Uncle Teddy's stay because he always has something fun in mind. Yesterday after he arrived he walked me through the house and showed me all of the decorations--wreaths and flowers and a huge Christmas tree near the front hall, strung with tinsel and candles. He brought with him several boxes full of gifts, all shapes and sizes, wrapped in bright colors--red and green and blue and silver with bows and ribbons--and I knew they were all for me because he put them under my tree upstairs.

Our house is very large. Mother calls it a mansion. She doesn't allow me to go anywhere except the room on my floor. She says I have everything I need right here.

That's why sometimes at night I'll walk around when everything is dark and everyone is asleep or in their rooms for the night. I don't think I'm being sneaky, it's just that I am very curious and if l ask about things no one tells me what I want to know. I've come to know this house very well. There are many hidden passageways behind the walls and l know them all by heart. I will hear things every once in a while that mother would not like me to hear.

There was a big happening in the house last night and the servants were very busy, although it did not look to be a planned thing because everyone appeared disorganized and Mother didn't come to lock me in my room.

I went through one of my passageways that led to the main entrance of the house and I peeked through a tiny opening in the wall and saw a very beautiful woman with dark hair standing inside the door. She was so beautiful that I held my breath. It must have been very cold outside because she was wearing a long black winter coat and there were flakes of snow on her hair. When she spoke, it was the most soft and delicate voice I had ever heard. She said, "Merry Christmas."

I wanted to stay and watch the woman forever but I knew that Mother would be up to check on me so I ran back to my room and pretended to be asleep. Mother came in and kissed my head and said, "Sleep well, child," like she did every night. I listened very closely for a long time hoping to hear the voice of the woman again, but next thing I knew it was morning, and she was gone.

October, 1982

I heard Mother and Dr. Armbruster arguing yesterday. They were just talking pleasantly for a while and I was listening in my passageway to the low, pleasant sound of their voices. The doctor was saying things I did not understand about sickness and diets and so on, when all of a sudden he said, "But John is doing fine," and Mother just about exploded with anger.

"His name is not John, do you understand me? Don't you ever call him by that name again! John is dead! My John is dead!" I had never heard Mother get so angry except for that one time with Uncle Teddy. She made the doctor leave right away and told him he could be replaced, but I hoped that she wouldn't do that because I sort of liked Dr. Armbruster.

I don't know who John is, but I felt very bad for Mother. I had never really thought about my own name before. Uncle Teddy and everyone calls me Sonny because it's short for Sonny Boy, and that's good enough for me. But it made me wonder how someone could get a name like John. Uncle Teddy was probably named after a teddy bear. Mother was just Mother.

May, 1987

Today was a very special day. It was my seventieth birthday. Uncle Teddy came to visit and I was very excited because I hadn't seen him in such a long time. We had a big cake and a lot of food and we played checkers for an hour. Then Uncle Teddy took me outside for a walk!

I'll never forget it as long as I live. I think Mother was not happy about it because she did not want to let me go at first, but Uncle Teddy talked her into it and we went outside surrounded by men in black suits and ties and shoes. Uncle Teddy asked me if I minded if his friends went with us, and of course I didn't care. They came to my party and they had a right to have fun. In fact, l told them that if they smiled more they might have a nicer time all around, but Uncle Teddy said they were usually very serious people and were happy that way.

It was a sunny day. The wind blew in my face and stung my eyes at first, but it felt good. Uncle Teddy took me all around the yard and into the garden where I smelled the roses and touched the bushes and the vines. I listened to the birds calling and the insects buzzing. I never dreamed they would sound so loud and so near.

I touched the winterberry hollies which were very special to me because I could always see their bright red berries from my window, even during the cold cold winters.

After a short time I caught a chill and had to go inside, and I was weak for the rest of the day. But I didn't care–I had such fun! I'll always remember it.

August, 1996

One night I entered a storage room through my passageway where there were a lot of tools and brooms and rags and buckets and things. I rummaged around in the dark and my hands found a flashlight. I thought this would be a wonderful thing to have so l took it with me hoping that no one would miss it. Now I can sit in bed at night and read and write as long as I like and not have to worry about someone seeing my light.

I have not seen Mother in a very long time. I wondered if she was angry with me even though I didn't think she knew about my passageways or my late-night writing. Mother would have yelled at me if she knew.

I've been seeing more and more of Uncle Teddy, so I asked him about Mother today and he said that she went away on a very long trip and I wouldn't be seeing her for a while.

I asked him how long that might be and he said not long, he said soon we'd all be seeing her and then maybe we'd find out whether we did the right thing, whether the choices we'd made over the years had been the proper ones. He looked very sad when he said this, and then he said, "I think there is such a place, Sonny Boy, a place where we learn why everything is the way it is."

I asked him if Dr. Armbruster had gone with Mother since I hadn't seen him in so long and I was seeing Dr. Morelande almost every day now, and Uncle Teddy told me yes.

I thought about how lucky Mother was to visit this place, a place where every time you asked a question you got an answer, and I could not blame her if she didn't want to come back for a while. I told Uncle Teddy so, and he seemed to cheer up. We played cards for the rest of the afternoon.

May, 1997

Today was my eightieth birthday. I have been very sick and I was afraid that I might not be able to have my party, but Dr. Morelande said it was OK so we had cake and games with Uncle Teddy and I had a very nice time even though I had to stay in bed.

It was after my party that I had a scare. I was very weak, and I probably should have just gone to sleep, but being so excited all day and not being allowed to get up, I turned restless after dark, so I decided to take a short walk through my passageways.

I followed a path that led to the back of a closet in Uncle Teddy's room, and I saw some light coming through the darkness so I went up to it. That's all I was going to do--peek and go away--until I saw Uncle Teddy crying. I'd never seen Uncle Teddy cry before. He was in bed. He had a large, green book on his lap, and every so often he would turn a page and cry some more.

I watched him for a while, waiting for him to be all right, but he didn't stop crying and I couldn't stand to watch him any longer, so I did a foolish thing and I entered his room through the closet.

"Sonny Boy," he said, "what are you doing here?"

I thought he might be angry with me so I wanted to say that I saw him crying, and that I only wanted to help him and be a friend, but before I could say anything he said, "So you know about the passages." and he didn't seem to be upset at all.

"Come over here, Sonny," he said.

I went and sat on the edge of his bed. He was looking at a photo album. Mother had shown me some photo albums years ago, and I thought they were interesting and we had a lot of fun even though I didn't recognize any of the faces. I don't ever remember crying over them. But Uncle Teddy's album was different. There were newspaper pictures, and headlines, and articles.

Uncle Teddy was looking at a picture of a man and a woman. The man seemed very serious-looking, and his right hand was raised like an Indian chiefs, but he had on a suit and tie and no headdress. The man's eyes were closed.

The woman had short black hair with long bangs, and she was looking down.

And then all of a sudden I just about screamed. I knew that woman. I remembered her from... from somewhere.

Uncle Teddy said, "You know her, don't you? Think, Sonny Boy, think very hard. What do you remember?"

I did think very hard, and then I remembered where I had seen her. She was the beautiful black-haired woman I had seen at Christmas time in the main entrance of the house years ago.

But then there was more. As I look at  woman in the picture something very strange came into my head. I had a passing thought of this white gown, with a white veil over her face.  It was just a  piece of a thought that I could keep in my mind for very long, but I'll never forget  it.  I reached out and touched the picture.

"Always grand," Uncle Teddy said. "She was wearing a very dignified, raspberry-colored suit that day."

But that's not what I had seen. I had seen the white gown. I had seen something that happened before my room and my house and my passageways and Mother and Uncle Teddy. Was there anything before them? Yes, I think there was. It was more than a passing thought--it was a memory.

"Was I married, Uncle Teddy?" I asked him.

He smiled. "Yes, you were. You proposed to her by telegram, you know, from Paris."

I thought this was interesting, but nothing more than that. Uncle Teddy started to cry again.

"Please, don't cry," I said.

He held my hand then. "I'm sorry we couldn't tell her you were alive. We couldn't tell your children, not anyone, not even Father because we couldn't be sure of his reaction. Mother was adamant about that. No one could know. Just Bobby and Mother and myself--and the doctors, of course. Now there's just me.

"It was for the good of the country. Those were critical times. The eyes of the world were watching us. We could not afford hesitancy. We felt you would have wanted it that way. Do you understand?"

I didn't, but I nodded anyway to stop Uncle Teddy from crying. He was clutching my arm very hard.

He traced the newspaper picture with his finger. "She was a strong woman, Sonny Boy. You would have been proud of her. I remember her standing right next to Lyndon, solid as a rock, little more than an hour after you were pronounced dead."

I was very confused about Uncle Teddy calling me dead, and about what the woman in the picture had to do with any of it, so I closed the book and placed it on the floor. I remembered what Mother used to do to make me feel better, so I thought that maybe the same thing might help Uncle Teddy feel better too.

I pulled his bed covers up to his chin, brushed back his hair, kissed him on the forehead, and turned out his light. "Sleep well, child," I said, and then I went back to my room. I was sure Uncle Teddy would be just fine in the morning. It had always worked for me.

December, 2008

Dr. Morelande is the only one who comes to see me anymore. He says that Uncle Teddy is so busy he can't find time to stop by. But I don't think that's exactly true. I think Uncle Teddy went on vacation with Mother and Dr. Armbruster, and he is having so much fun that he is not coming back at all.

Dr. Morelande has tried very hard to make this a good Christmas, but I am sorry to say I am not very happy. I am tired all of the time, and I can't even move out of bed. Dr. Morelande asked me if I wanted anything for Christmas, but if I couldn't have Mother or Uncle Teddy, then there was nothing to ask for.

But then I thought about it and thought about it for a long time, and I remembered the pictures Uncle Teddy had shown me many years ago. I told Dr. Morelande about the green photo album in Uncle Teddy's room and asked him if he could find it for me. A little while later Dr. Morelande returned with the book.

Together we went through the pictures, and when we got to the one Uncle Teddy had shown me, the one with the man and the beautiful dark-haired woman, I made him stop.

"There is something I want for Christmas," I told him. "There is something I want very much."

I decided to tell Dr. Morelande about the passageways then. I didn't think that I would get in trouble. I made him put me in my wheelchair and take me for a walk behind the walls, He argued with me at first, but I refused to be put off.

I told him exactly which path to follow. He wheeled  me all the way down to the wall at the main entrance. I looked through the small opening. I was sure that the beautiful dark-haired woman would be standing at the door in her winter coat. I was disappointed that she wasn't there. I thought that if I waited long enough she would certainly show up--she would come back like the winterberry, bright and strong even in the cold cold winter. There would be snowflakes in her hair, and she would say "Merry Christmas" in her lovely voice. So we waited.

Finally Dr. Morelande said that if I agreed to go to bed, he would wait for the woman, and bring her directly to me as soon as she arrived. I thought that this would be a good idea since I was so tired.

When she arrives, we will have many things to discuss. I have decided to make her my new friend. I think I will show her my book of writings. I think I will ask her about the white gown to show her that I have not forgotten, and then I'll ask her about the children Uncle Teddy mentioned. I won't tell her about the vacation place where everyone has gone without me, and not because I'm being sneaky, but only because I am very lonely and I would like her to stay with me for a while.

THE MOUNTAIN TO MOHAMMED

Nancy Kress

"A person gives money to the physician.

Maybe he will be healed.

Maybe he will not be healed."

—The Talmud

When the security buzzer sounded, Dr. Jesse Randall was playing go against his computer.  Haruo Kaneko, his roommate at Downstate Medical, had taught him the game.  So far nineteen shiny black and white stones lay on the grid under the scanner field.  Jesse frowned; the computer had a clear shot at surrounding an empty space in two moves, and he couldn't see how to stop it.  The buzzer made him jump.

Anne?  But she was on duty at the hospital until one.  Or maybe he remembered her rotation wrong...

Eagerly he crossed the small living room to the security screen.  It wasn't Anne.  Three stories below a man stood on the street, staring into the monitor.  He was slight and fair, dressed in jeans and frayed jacket with a knit cap pulled low on his head.  The bottoms of his ears were red with cold.

"Yes?" Jesse said.

"Dr. Randall?"  The voice was low and rough.

"Yes."

"Could you come down here a minute to talk to me?"

"About what?"

"Something that needs talkin' about. It's personal.  Mike sent me."

A thrill ran through Jesse.  This was it, then.  He kept his voice neutral.  "I'll be right down."

He turned off the monitor system, removed the memory disk, and carried it into the bedroom, where he passed it several times over a magnet.  In a gym bag he packed his medical equipment: antiseptics, antibiotics, sutures, clamps, syringes, electromed scanner, as much equipment as would fit.  Once, shoving it all in, he laughed.  He dressed in a warm pea coat bought second-hand at the Army-Navy store and put the gun, also bought second-hand, in the coat pocket.  Although of course the other man would be carrying.  But Jesse liked the feel of it, a slightly heavy drag on his right side.  He replaced the disk in the security system and locked the door.  The computer was still pretending to consider its move for go, although of course it had near-instantaneous decision capacity.

"Where to?"

The slight man didn't answer.  He strode purposefully away from the building, and Jesse realized he shouldn't have said anything.  He followed the man down the street, carrying the gym bag in his left hand.

Fog had drifted in from the harbor.  Boston smelled wet and grey, of rotting piers and dead fish and garbage.  Even here, in the Morningside Security Enclave, where that part of the apartment maintenance fees left over from security went to keep the streets clean.  Yellow lights gleamed through the gloom, stacked twelve stories high but crammed close together; even insurables couldn't afford to heat much space.

Where they were going there wouldn't be any heat at all.

Jesse followed the slight man down the subway steps.  The guy paid for both of them, a piece of quixotic dignity that made Jesse smile.  Under the lights he got a better look: The man was older than he'd thought, with webbed lines around the eyes and long, thin lips over very bad teeth.  Probably hadn't ever had dental coverage in his life.  What had been in his genescan?  God, what a system.

"What do I call you?" he said as they waited on the platform.  He kept his voice low, just in case.

"Kenny."

"All right, Kenny," Jesse said, and smiled.  Kenny didn't smile back.  Jesse told himself it was ridiculous to feel hurt; this wasn't a social visit.  He stared at the tracks until the subway came.

At this hour the only other riders were three hard-looking men, two black and one white, and an even harder-looking Hispanic girl in a low-cut red dress.  After a minute Jesse realized she was under the control of one of the black men sitting at the other end of the car.  Jesse was careful not to look at her again.  He couldn't help being curious, though.  She looked healthy.  All four of them looked healthy, as did Kenny, except for his teeth.  Maybe none of them were uninsurable; maybe they just couldn't find a job.  Or didn't want one.  It wasn't his place to judge.

That was the whole point of doing this, wasn't it?

# # #

The other two times had gone as easy as Mike said they would.  A deltoid suture on a young girl wounded in a knife fight, and burn treatment for a baby scalded by a pot of boiling water knocked off a stove.  Both times the families had been so grateful, so respectful.  They knew the risk Jesse was taking.  After he'd treated the baby and left antibiotics and analgesics on the pathetic excuse for a kitchen counter, a board laid across the non-functional radiator, the young Hispanic mother had grabbed his hand and covered it with kisses.  Embarrassed, he'd turned to smile at her husband, wanting to say something, wanting to make clear he wasn't just another sporadic do-gooder who happened to have a medical degree.

"I think the system stinks.  The insurance companies should never have been allowed to deny health coverage on the basis of genescans for potential disease, and employers should never have been allowed to keep costs down by health-based hiring.  If this were a civilized country, we'd have national health care by now!"

The Hispanic had stared back at him, blank-faced.

"Some of us are trying to do better," Jesse said.

It was the same thing Mike—Dr. Michael Cassidy—had said to Jesse and Anne at the end of a long drunken evening celebrating the half-way point in all their residencies.  Although, in retrospect, it seemed to Jesse that Mike hadn't drunk very much.  Nor had he actually said very much outright.  It was all implication, probing masked as casual philosophy.  But Anne had understood, and refused instantly.  "God, Mike, you could be dismissed from the hospital!  The regulations forbid residents from exposing the hospital to the threat of an uninsured malpractice suit.  There's no money."

Mike had smiled and twirled his glass between fingers as long as a pianist's.  "Doctors are free to treat whomever they wish, at their own risk, even uninsurables.  Carter v. Sunderland."

"Not while a hospital is paying their malpractice insurance as residents, if the hospital exercises its right to so forbid.  Janisson v. Lechchevko."

Mike laughed easily.  "Then forget it, both of you.  It's just conversation."

Anne said, "But do you personally risk—"

"It's not right," Jesse cut in—couldn't she see that Mike wouldn't want to incriminate himself on a thing like this?—"that so much of the population can't get insurance.  Every year they add more genescan pre-tendency barriers, and the poor slobs haven't even got the diseases yet!"

His voice had risen.  Anne glanced nervously around the bar.  Her profile was lovely, a serene curving line that reminded Jesse of those Korean screens in the expensive shops on Commonwealth Avenue.  And she had lovely legs, lovely breasts, lovely everything.  Maybe, he'd thought, now that they were neighbors in the Morningside Enclave...

"Another round," Mike had answered.

Unlike the father of the burned baby, who never had answered Jesse at all.  To cover his slight embarrassment—the mother had been so effusive—Jesse gazed around the cramped apartment.  On the wall were photographs in cheap plastic frames of people with masses of black hair, all lying in bed.  Jesse had read about this: It was a sort of mute, powerless protest.  The subjects had all been photographed on their death beds.  One of them was a beautiful girl, her eyes closed and her hand flung lightly over her head, as if asleep.  The Hispanic followed Jesse's gaze and lowered his eyes.

"Nice," Jesse said.  "Good photos.  I didn't know you people were so good with a camera."

Still nothing.

Later, it occurred to Jesse that maybe the guy hadn't understood English.

# # #

The subway stopped with a long screech of equipment too old, too poorly maintained.  There was no money.  Boston, like the rest of the country, was broke.  For a second Jesse thought the brakes weren't going to catch at all and his heart skipped, but Kenny showed no emotion and so Jesse tried not to, either.  The car finally stopped.  Kenny rose and Jesse followed him.

They were somewhere in Dorchester.  Three men walked quickly towards them and Jesse's right hand crept towards his pocket.  "This him?" one said to Kenny.

"Yeah," Kenny said.  "Dr. Randall," and Jesse relaxed.

It made sense, really.  Two men walking through this neighborhood probably wasn't a good idea.  Five was better.  Mike's organization must know what it was doing.

The men walked quickly.  The neighborhood was better than Jesse had imagined: small row houses, every third or fourth one with a bit of frozen lawn in the front.  A few even had flowerboxes.  But the windows were all barred, and over all hung the grey fog, the dank cold, the pervasive smell of garbage.

The house they entered had no flowerbox.  The steel front door, triple-locked, opened directly into a living room furnished with a sagging sofa, a TV, and an ancient daybed whose foamcast headboard flaked like dandruff.  On the daybed lay a child, her eyes bright with fever.

Sofa, TV, headboard vanished.  Jesse felt his professional self take over, a sensation as clean and fresh as plunging into cool water.  He knelt by the bed and smiled.  The girl, who looked about nine or ten, didn't smile back.  She had a long, sallow, sullen face, but the long brown hair on the pillow was beautiful: clean, lustrous, and well-tended.

"It's her belly," said one of the men who had met them at the subway.  Jesse glanced up at the note in his voice, and realized that he must be the child's father.  The man's hand trembled as he pulled the sheet from the girl's lower body.  Her abdomen was swollen and tender.

"How long has she been this way?"

"Since yesterday," Kenny said, when the father didn't answer.

"Nausea?  Vomiting?"

"Yeah.  She can't keep nothing down."

Jesse's hands palpated gently.  The girl screamed.

Appendicitis.  He just hoped to hell peritonitis hadn't set in.  He didn't want to deal with peritonitis.

"Bring in all the lamps you have, with the brightestest watt bulbs.  Boil water—"  He looked up.  The room was very cold.  "Does the stove work?"

The father nodded.  He looked pale.  Jesse smiled and said, "I don't think it's anything we can't cure, with a little luck here."  The man didn't answer.

Jesse opened his bag, his mind racing.  Laser knife, sterile clamps, scaramine—he could do it even without nursing assistance provided there was no peritonitis.  But only if...The girl moaned and turned her face away.  There were tears in her eyes.  Jesse looked at the man with the same long, sallow face and brown hair.  "You her father?"

The man nodded.

"I need to see her genescan."

The man clenched both fists at his side.  Oh, God, if he didn't have the official printout...Sometimes, Jesse had read, uninsurables burned them.  One woman, furious at the paper that would forever keep her out of the middle class, had mailed hers, smeared with feces, and packaged with a plasticene explosive, to the President.  There had been headlines, columns, petitions...and nothing had changed.  A country fighting for its very economic survival didn't hesitate to expend front-line troops.  If there was no genescan for this child, Jesse couldn't use scaramine, that miracle immune-system booster, to which about 15% of the population had a fatal reaction.  Without scaramine, under these operating conditions, the chances of post-operation infection were considerably higher.  If she couldn't take scaramine...

The father handed Jesse the laminated print-out, with the deeply-embossed seal in the upper corner.  Jesse scanned it quickly.  The necessary RB antioncogene on the eleventh chromosome was present.  The girl was not potentially allergic to scaramine.  Her name was Rosamund.

"Okay, Rose," Jesse said gently.  "I'm going to help you.  In just a little while you're going to feel so much better..."  He slipped the needle with anesthetic into her arm.  She jumped and screamed, but within a minute she was out.

Jesse stripped away the bedclothes, despite the cold, and told the men how to boil them.  He spread betadine over her distended abdomen and poised the laser knife to cut.

# # #

The hallmark of his parents' life had been caution.  Don't fall, now!  Drive carefully!  Don't talk to strangers! Born during the Depression—the other one—they invested only in Treasury bonds and their own one-sixth acre of suburban real estate.  When the marching in Selma and Washington had turned to killing in Detroit and Kent State, they shook their heads sagely:  See? We said so.  No good comes of getting involved in things that don't concern you.  Jesse's father had held the same job for thirty years; his mother considered it immoral to buy anything not on sale.  They waited until she was over 40 to have Jesse, their only child.

At 16, Jesse had despised them; at 24, pitied them; at 28, his present age, loved them with a despairing gratitude not completely free of contempt.  They had missed so much, dared so little.  They lived now in Florida, retired and happy and smug.  "The pension"—they called it that, as if it were a famous diamond or a well-loved estate—was inflated by Collapse prices into providing a one-bedroom bungalow with beige carpets and a pool.  In the pool's placid, artificially blue waters, the Carlsons beheld chlorined visions of triumph.  "Even after we retired," Jesse's mother told him proudly, "we didn't have to go backwards."

"That's what comes from thrift, son," his father always added.  "And hard work.  No reason these deadbeats today couldn't do the same thing."

Jesse looked around their tiny yard at the plastic ducks lined up like headstones, the fanatically trimmed hedge, the blue-and-white striped awning, and his arms made curious beating motions, as if they were lashed to his side.  "Nice, Mom.  Nice."

"You know it," she said, and winked roguishly.  Jesse had looked away before she could see his embarrassment.  Boston had loomed large in his mind, compelling and vivid hectic as an exotic disease.

# # #

There was no peritonitis.  Jesse sliced free the spoiled bit of tissue that had been Rosamund's appendix.  As he closed with quick, sure movements, he heard a click.  A camera.  He couldn't look away, but out of sudden rush of euphoria he said to whoever was taking the picture, "Not one for the gallery this time.  This one's going to live."

When the incision was closed, Jesse administered a massive dose of scaramine.  Carefully he instructed Kenny and the girl's father about the medication, the little girl's diet, the procedures to maintain asepsis which, since they were bound to be inadequate, made the scaramine so necessary.  "I'm on duty the next thirty-six hours at the hospital. I'll return Wednesday night, you'll either have to come get me or give me the address, I'll take a taxi and—"

The father drew in a quick, shaky breath like a sob.  Jesse turned to him.  "She's got a strong fighting chance, this procedure isn't—"  A woman exploded from a back room, shrieking.

"No, no, noooooo..." She tried to throw herself on the patient.  Jesse lunged for her, but Kenny was quicker.  He grabbed her around the waist, pinning her arms to her sides.  She fought him, wailing and screaming, as he dragged her back through the door.  "Murderer, baby killer, nooooooo—"

"My wife," the father finally said.  "She doesn't...doesn't understand."

Probably doctors were devils to her, Jesse thought.  Gods who denied people the healing they could have offered.  Poor bastards.  He felt a surge of quiet pride that he could teach them different.

The father went on looking at Rosamund, now sleeping peacefully.  Jesse couldn't see the other man's eyes.

Back home at the apartment, he popped open a beer.  He felt fine.  Was it too late to call Anne?  It was—the computer clock said 2:00 a.m.  She'd already be sacked out.  In seven more hours his own 36-hour rotation started, but he couldn't sleep.

He sat down at the computer.  The machine hadn't moved to surround his empty square after all.  It must have something else in mind.  Smiling, sipping at his beer, Jesse sat down to match wits with the Korean computer in the ancient Japanese game in the waning Boston night.

# # #

Two days later, he went back to check on Rosamund.  The rowhouse was deserted, boards nailed diagonally across the window.  Jesse's heart began to pound.  He was afraid to ask information of the neighbors; men in dark clothes kept going in and out of the house next door, their eyes cold.  Jesse went back to the hospital and waited.  He couldn't think what else to do.

Four rotations later the deputy sheriff waited for him outside the building, unable to pass the security monitors until Jesse came home.

COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS

SUFFOLK COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT

To    Jesse Robert Randall   of   Morningside Security Enclave, Building 16, Apartment 3C, Boston  , within our county of Suffolk.  Whereas   Steven & Rose Gocek   of Boston within our County of Suffolk has begun an action of Tort against you returnable in the Superior Court holden at Boston within our County of Suffolk on  October 18, 2004  , in which action damages are claimed in the sum of  $2,000,000—  as follows:

TORT AND/OR CONTRACT FOR MALPRACTICE

as will more fully appear from the declaration to be filed in said Court when and if said action is entered therein:

WE COMMAND YOU, if you intend to make any defense of said action, that on said date or within such further time as the law allows you cause your written appearance to be entered and your written answer or other lawful pleadings to be filed in the office of the Clerk of the Court to which said writ is returnable, and that you defend against said action according to law.

Hereof fail not at your peril, as otherwise said judgment may be entered against you in said action without further notice.

Witness,   Lawrence F. Monastersky, Esquire  , at   Boston, the  fourth  day of   March   in the year of our Lord two thousand   four.

Alice P. McCarren

Clerk

Jesse looked up from the paper.  The deputy sheriff, a soft-bodied man with small, light eyes, looked steadily back.

"But what...what happened?"

The deputy looked out over Jesse's left shoulder, a gesture meaning he wasn't officially saying what he was saying.  "The kid died.  The one they say you treated."

"Died?  Of what?  But I went back..." He stopped, filled with sudden sickening uncertainty about how much he was admitting.

The deputy went on staring over his shoulder.  "You want my advice, doc?  Get yourself a lawyer."

Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, Jesse thought suddenly, inanely.  The inanity somehow brought it all home.  He was being sued. For malpractice.  By an uninsurable.  Now.  Here.  Him, Jesse Randall.  Who had been trying only to help.

"Cold for this time of year," the deputy remarked.  "They're dying of cold and malnutrition down there, in Roxbury and Dorchester and Southie.  Even the goddamn weather can't give us a break."

Jesse couldn't answer.  A wind off the harbor fluttered the paper in his hand.

# # #

"These are the facts," the lawyer said.  He looked tired, a small man in a dusty office lined with second-hand law books.  "The hospital purchased malpractice coverage for its staff, including residents.  In doing so, it entered into a contract with certain obligations and exclusions for each side.  If a specific incident falls under these exclusions, the contract is not in force with regard to that incident.  One such exclusion is that residents will not be covered if they treat uninsured persons unless such treatment occurs within the hospital setting or the resident has reasonable grounds to assume that such a person is insured.  Those are not the circumstances you described to me."

"No," Jesse said.  He had the sensation that the law books were falling off the top shelves, slowly but inexorably, like small green and brown glaciers.  Outside, he had the same sensation about the tops of buildings.

"Therefore, you are not covered by any malpractice insurance.  Another set of facts: Over the last five years jury decisions in malpractice cases have averaged 85% in favor of plaintiffs.  Insurance companies and legislatures are made up of insurables, Dr. Randall.  However, juries are still drawn by lot from the general citizenry.  Most of the educated general citizenry finds ways to get out of jury duty.  They always did.  Juries are likely to be 65% or more uninsurables.  It's the last place the have-nots still wield much real power, and they use it."

"You're saying I'm dead," Jesse said numbly.  "They'll find me guilty."

The little lawyer looked pained.  "Not 'dead,' Doctor.  Convicted—most probably.  But conviction isn't death.  Not even professional death.  The hospital may or may not dismiss you—they have that right—but you can still finish your training elsewhere.  And malpractice suits, however they go, are not of themselves grounds for denial of a medical license.  You can still be a doctor."

"Treating who?"  Jesse cried.  He threw up his hands.  The books fell slightly faster.  "If I'm convicted I'll have to declare bankruptcy—there's no way I could pay a jury settlement like that!  And even if I found another residency at some third-rate hospital in Podunk, no decent practitioner would ever accept me as a partner.  I'd have to practice alone, without money to set up more than a hole-in-the corner office among God-knows-who...and even that's assuming I can find a hospital that will let me finish.  All because I wanted to help people who are getting shit on!"

The lawyer took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses thoughtfully with a tissue.  "Maybe," he said, "they're shitting back."

"What?"

"You haven't asked about the specific charges, Doctor."

"Malpractice!  The brat died!"

The lawyer said, "Of massive scaramine allergic reaction."

The anger leeched out of Jesse.  He went very quiet.

"She was allergic to scaramine," the lawyer said.  "You failed to ascertain that.  A basic medical question."

"I—" The words wouldn't come out.  He saw again the laminated genescan chart, the detailed analysis of chromosome 11.  A camera clicking, recording that he was there.  The hysterical woman, the mother, exploding from the back room: noooooooooo...  The father standing frozen, his eyes downcast.

It wasn't possible.

Nobody would kill their own child.  Not to discredit one of the fortunate ones, the haves, the insurables, the employables...No one would do that.

The lawyer was watching him carefully, glasses in hand.

Jesse said, "Dr. Michael Cassidy—" and stopped.

"Dr. Cassidy what?" the lawyer said.

But all Jesse could see, suddenly, was the row of plastic ducks in his parents' Florida yard, lined up as precisely as headstones, garish hideous yellow as they marched undeviatingly wherever it was they were going.

# # #

"No," Mike Cassidy said.  "I didn't send him."

They stood in the hospital parking lot.  Snow blew from the east.  Cassidy wrapped both arms around himself and rocked back and forth.  "He didn't come from us."

"He said he did!"

"I know.  But he didn't.  His group must have heard we were helping illegally, gotten your name from somebody—"

"But why?" Jesse shouted.  "Why frame me?  Why kill a child just to frame me?  I'm nothing!"

Cassidy's face spasmed.  Jesse saw that his horror at Jesse's position was real, his sympathy genuine, and both useless.  There was nothing Cassidy could do.

"I don't know," Cassidy whispered.  And then, "Are you going to name me at your malpractice trial?"

Jesse turned away without answering, into the wind.

# # #

Chief of Surgery Jonathan Eberhart called him into his office just before Jesse started his rotation.  Before, not after.  That was enough to tell him everything.  He was getting very good at discovering the whole from a single clue.

"Sit down, Doctor," Eberhart said.  His voice, normally austere, held unwilling compassion.  Jesse heard it, and forced himself not to shudder.

"I'll stand."

"This is very difficult," Eberhart said, "but I think you already see our position.  It's not one any of us would have chosen, but it's what we have.  This hospital operates at a staggering deficit.  Most patients cannot begin to cover the costs of modern technological health care.  State and federal governments are both strapped with enormous debt.  Without insurance companies and the private philanthropical support of a few rich families, we would not be able to open our doors to anyone at all.  If we lose our insurance rating we—"

"I'm out on my ass," Jesse said.  "Right?"

Eberhart looked out the window.  It was snowing.  Once Jesse, driving through Oceanview Security Enclave to pick up a date, had seen Eberhart building a snowman with two small children, probably his grandchildren.  Even rolling lopsided globes of cold, Eberhart had had dignity.

"Yes, Doctor.  I'm sorry.  As I understand it, the facts of your case are not in legal dispute.  Your residency here is terminated."

"Thank you," Jesse said, an odd formality suddenly replacing his crudeness.  "For everything."

Eberhart neither answered nor turned around.  His shoulders, framed in the grey window, slumped forward.  He might, Jesse thought, have had a sudden advanced case of osteoporosis.  For which, of course, he would be fully insured.

# # #

He packed the computer last, fitting each piece carefully into its original packing.  Maybe that would raise the price that Second Thoughts was willing to give him: Look, almost new, still in the original box.  At the last minute he decided to keep the playing pieces for go, shoving them into the suitcase with his clothes and medical equipment.  Only this suitcase would go with him.

When the packing was done, he walked up two flights and rang Anne's bell.  Her rotation ended a half hour ago.  Maybe she wouldn't be asleep yet.

She answered the door in a loose blue robe, toothbrush in hand.  "Jesse, hi, I'm afraid I'm really beat—"

He no longer believed in indirection.  "Would you have dinner with me tomorrow night?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, I can't," Anne said.  She shifted her weight so one bare foot stood on top of the other, a gesture so childish it had to be embarrassment.  Her toenails were shiny and smooth.

"After your next rotation?" Jesse said.  He didn't smile.

"I don't know when I—"

"The one after that?"

Anne was silent.  She looked down at her toothbrush.  A thin pristine line of toothpaste snaked over the bristles.

"Okay," Jesse said, without expression.  "I just wanted to be sure."

"Jesse—" Anne called after him, but he didn't turn around. He could already tell from her voice that she didn't really have anything more to say.  If he had turned it would have been only for the sake of a last look at her toes, polished and shiny as go stones, and there really didn't seem to be any point in looking.

# # #

He moved into a cheap hotel on Boylston Street, into a room the size of a supply closet with triple locks on the door and bars on the window, where his money would go far.  Every morning he took the subway to the Copley Square library, rented a computer cubicle, and wrote letters to hospitals across the country.  He also answered classified ads in the New England Journal of Medicine, those that offered practice out-of-country where a license was not crucial, or low-paying medical research positions not too many people might want, or supervised assistantships.  In the afternoons he walked the grubby streets of Dorchester, looking for Kenny.  The lawyer representing Mr. and Mrs. Steven Gocek, parents of the dead Rosamund, would give him no addresses.  Neither would his own lawyer, he of the collapsing books and desperate clientele, in whom Jesse had already lost all faith.

He never saw Kenny on the cold streets.

The last week of March, an unseasonable warm wind blew from the south, and kept up.  Crocuses and daffodils pushed up between the sagging buildings.  Children appeared, chasing each other across the garbage-laden streets, crying raucously.  Rejections came from hospitals, employers.  Jesse had still not told his parents what had happened.  Twice in April he picked up a public phone, and twice he saw again the plastic ducks marching across the artificial lawn, and something inside him slammed shut so hard not even the phone number could escape.

# # #

One sunny day in May he walked in the Public Garden.  The city still maintained it fairly well; foreign tourist traffic made it profitable.  Jesse counted the number of well-dressed foreigners versus the number of ragged street Bostonians.  The ratio equaled the survival rate for uninsured diabetics.

"Hey, mister, help me!  Please!"

A terrified boy, ten or eleven, grabbed Jesse's hand and pointed.  At the bottom of a grassy knoll an elderly man lay crumpled on the ground, his face twisted.

"My Grandpa!  He just grabbed his chest and fell down!  Do something!  Please!"

Jesse could smell the boy's fear, a stink like rich loam.  He walked over to the old man.  Breathing stopped, no pulse, color still pink...

No.

This man was an uninsured.  Like Kenny, like Steven Gocek.  Like Rosamund.

"Grandpa!" the child wailed.  "Grandpa!"

Jesse knelt.  He started mouth-to-mouth.  The old man smelled of sweat, of fish, of old flesh.  No blood moved through the body.  "Breathe, dammit, breathe," Jesse heard someone say, and then realized it was him.  "Breathe, you old fart, you uninsured deadbeat, you stinking ingrate, breathe—"

The old man breathed.

He sent the boy for more adults.  The child took off at a dead run, returning twenty minutes later with uncles, father, cousins, aunts, most of whom spoke some language Jesse couldn't identify.  In that twenty minutes none of the well-dressed tourists in the Garden approached Jesse, standing guard beside the old man, who breathed carefully and moaned softly, stretched full-length on the grass.  The tourists glanced at him and then away, their faces tightening.

The tribe of family carried the old man away on a homemade stretcher.  Jesse put his hand on the arm of one of the young men.  "Insurance?  Hospital?"

The man spat onto the grass.

Jesse walked beside the stretcher, monitoring the old man until he was in his own bed.  He told the child what to do for him, since no one else seemed to understand.  Later that day he went back, carrying his medical bag, and gave them the last of his hospital supply of nitroglycerin.  The oldest woman, who had been too busy issuing orders about the stretcher to pay Jesse any attention before, stopped dead and jabbered in her own tongue.

"You a doctor?" the child translated.  The tip of his ear, Jesse noticed, was missing.  Congenital?  Accident?  Ritual mutilation?  The ear had healed clean.

"Yeah," Jesse said.  "A doctor."

The old woman chattered some more and disappeared behind a door.  Jesse gazed at the walls.  There were no deathbed photos.  As he was leaving, the woman returned with ten incredibly dirty dollar bills.

"Doctor," she said, her accent harsh, and when she smiled Jesse saw that all her top teeth and most of her bottom ones were missing, the gum swollen with what might have been early signs of scurvy.

"Doctor," she said again.

# # #

He moved out of the hotel just as the last of his money ran out.  The old man's wife, Androula Malakasses, found him a room in somebody else's rambling, dilapidated boardinghouse.  The house was noisy at all hours, but the room was clean and large.  Androula's cousin brought home an old, multi-positional dentist chair, probably stolen, and Jesse used that for both examining and operating table.  Medical substances—antibiotics, chemotherapy, IV drugs— which he had thought of as the hardest need to fill outside of controlled channels, turned out to be the easiest.  On reflection, he realized this shouldn't have surprised him.

In July he delivered his first breech birth, a primapara whose labor was so long and painful and bloody he thought at one point he'd lose both mother and baby.  He lost neither, although the new mother cursed him in Spanish and spit at him.  She was too weak for the saliva to go far.  Holding the warm-assed, nine-pound baby boy, Jesse had heard a camera click.  He cursed too, but feebly; the sharp thrill of pleasure that pierced from throat to bowels was too strong.

In August he lost three patients in a row, all to conditions that would have needed elaborate, costly equipment and procedures: renal failure, aortic aneurysm, aneurism, narcotic overdose.  He went to all three funerals.  At each one the family and friends cleared a little space for him, in which he stood surrounded by respect and resentment.  When a knife fight broke out at the funeral of the aneurysm, the family hustled Jesse away from the danger, but not so far away that he couldn't treat the loser.

In September a Chinese family, recent immigrants, moved into Androula's sprawling boarding house.  The woman wept all day.  The man roamed Boston, looking for work.  There was a grandfather who spoke a little English, having learned it in Peking during the brief period of American industrial expansion into the Pacific Rim before the Chinese government convulsed and the American economy collapsed.  The grandfather played go.  On evenings when no one wanted Jesse, he sat with Lin Shujen and moved the polished white and black stones over the grid, seeking to enclose empty spaces without losing any pieces.  Mr. Lin took a long time to consider each move.

In October, a week before Jesse's trial, his mother died.  Jesse's father sent him money to fly home for the funeral, the first money Jesse had accepted from his family since he'd finally told them he had left the hospital.  After the funeral Jesse sat in the living room of his father's Florida house and listened to the elderly mourners recall their youths in the vanished prosperity of the 1950's and '60's.

"Plenty of jobs then for people who're willing to work."

"Still plenty of jobs.  Just nobody's willing any more."

"Want everything handed to them.  If you ask me, this collapse'll prove to be a good thing in the long run.  Weed out the weaklings and the lazy."

"It was the sixties we got off on the wrong track, with Lyndon Johnson and all the welfare programs—"

They didn't look at Jesse.  He had no idea what his father had said to them about him.

Back in Boston, stinking under Indian summer heat, people thronged his room.  Fractures, cancers, allergies, pregnancies, punctures, deficiencies, imbalances.  They were resentful that he'd gone away for five days.  He should be here; they needed him.  He was the doctor.

# # #

The first day of his trial, Jesse saw Kenny standing on the courthouse steps.  Kenny wore a cheap blue suit with loafers and white socks.  Jesse stood very still, then walked over to the other man.  Kenny tensed.

"I'm not going to hit you," Jesse said.

Kenny watched him, chin lowered, slight body balanced on the balls of his feet.  A fighter's stance.

"I want to ask something," Jesse said.  "It won't affect the trial.  I just want to know.  Why'd you do it?  Why did they?  I know the little girl's true genescan showed 98% risk of leukemia death within three years, but even so—how could you?"

Kenny scrutinized him carefully.  Jesse saw that Kenny thought Jesse might be wired.  Even before Kenny answered, Jesse knew what he'd hear.  "I don't know what you're talking about, man."

"You couldn't get inside the system.  Any of you.  So you brought me out.  If Mohammed won't go to the mountain—"

"You don't make no sense," Kenny said.

"Was it worth it?  To you?  To them?  Was it?"

Kenny walked away, up the courthouse steps.  At the top waited the Goceks, who were suing Jesse for $2,000,000 he didn't have and wasn't insured for, and that they knew damn well they wouldn't collect.  On the wall of their house, wherever it was, probably hung Rosamund's deathbed picture, a little girl with a plain, sallow face and beautiful hair.

Jesse saw his lawyer trudge up the courthouse steps, carrying his briefcase.  Another lawyer, with an equally shabby briefcase, climbed in parallel several feet away.  Between the two men the courthouse steps made a white empty space.

Jesse climbed, too, hoping to hell this wouldn't take too long.  He had an infected compound femoral fracture, a birth with potential erythroblastosis fetalis, and an elderly phlebitis, all waiting.  He was especially concerned about the infected fracture, which needed careful monitoring because the man's genescan showed a tendency towards weak T-cell production.  The guy was a day laborer, foul-mouthed and ignorant and brave, with a wife and two kids.  He'd broken his leg working illegal construction.  Jesse was determined to give him at least a fighting chance.

End

THE LOTUS AND THE SPEAR

Mike Resnick

Once, many eons ago, there was an elephant who climbed the slopes of Kirinyaga, which men now call Mount Kenya, until he reached the very summit, where Ngai ruled the universe from His golden throne.

"Why have you sought me out?" demanded Ngai.

"I have come to ask you to change me into something else," answered the elephant.

"I have made you the most powerful of beasts," said Ngai. "You need fear neither the lion nor the leopard nor the hyena. Wherever you walk, all My other creatures rush to move out of your path. Why do you no longer wish to be an elephant?"

"Because as powerful as I am, there are others of my kind who are more powerful," answered the elephant. "They keep the females to themselves, so that my seed will die within me, and they drive me away from the water holes and the succulent grasses."

"And what do you wish of me?" asked Ngai.

"I am not sure," said the elephant. "I would like to be like the giraffe, for there are so many treetops that no matter where he goes he finds sustenance. Or perhaps the warthog, for nowhere can he travel that there are no roots to be found. And the fish eagle takes one mate for life, and if he is not strong enough to defend her against others of his kind who would take her away from him, his vision is so keen that he can see them approaching from great distances and move her to safety. Change me in any way you wish," he concluded. "I will trust to Your wisdom."

"So be it," pronounced Ngai. "From this day forward, you shall have a trunk, so that the delicacies that grow atop the acacia trees will no longer be beyond your reach. And you shall have tusks, that you may dig in the ground for both roots and water no matter where you travel upon My world. And where the fish eagle has but a single superior sense, his vision, I shall give you two senses, those of smell and hearing, that will be greater than any other animal in My kingdom."

"How can I thank you?" asked the elephant joyously, as Ngai began the transformation.

"You may not wish to," answered Ngai.

"Why not?" asked the elephant.

"Because when all is said and done," said Ngai, "you will still be an elephant."

###

Some days it is easy to be the mundumugu - the witch doctor - on our terraformed world of Kirinyaga. On such days, I bless the scarecrows in the fields, distribute charms and ointments to the ailing, tell stories to the children, offer my opinions to the Council of Elders, and teach my youthful assistant, Ndemi, the lore of the Kikuyu people - for the mundumugu is more than a maker of charms and curses, more even than a voice of reason in the Council of Elders: he is the repository of all the traditions that make the Kikuyu what they are.

Some days it is difficult to be the mundumugu. When I must decide disputes, one side will always be unhappy with me. Or when there is an illness that I cannot cure, and I know that soon I will be telling the sufferer's family to leave him out for the hyenas. Or when Ndemi, who will someday be the mundumugu, gives every indication that he will not be ready to assume my duties when my body, already old and wrinkled, reaches the point, not too long off, when it is no longer able to function.

And, once in a long while, it is terrible to be the mundumugu, for I am presented with a problem against which all the accumulated wisdom of the Kikuyu seems like a reed in the wind.

Such a day begins like any other. I awake from my slumber and walk out of my hut into my boma with my blanket wrapped around my shoulders, for though it will soon be warm the sun has not yet removed the chill from the air. I light a fire and sit next to it, waiting for Ndemi, who will almost certainly be late. Sometimes I marvel at the facility of his imagination, for never has he given me the same excuse twice.

As I grow older, I have taken to chewing a qat leaf in the morning to start the blood flowing through my body. Ndemi disapproves, for he has been taught the uses of qat as a medicine and he knows that it is addictive. I will explain to him again that without it I would probably be in constant pain until the sun was overhead, that when you are as old as I am your muscles and joints do not always respond to your commands and can fill you with agony, and he will shrug and nod his head and forget again by the following morning.

Eventually he will arrive, my young assistant, and after he explains why he was late today, he will take my gourds down to the river and fill them with water, and then gather firewood and bring it to my boma. Then we will embark upon our daily lesson, in which perhaps I will explain to him how to make an ointment out of the pods of the acacia tree, and he will sit and try not to squirm and will demonstrate such self-control that he may well listen to me for ten or twelve minutes before asking when I will teach him how to turn an enemy into an insect so that he may stamp on him.

Finally I will take him into my hut, and teach him the rudiments of my computer, for after I am dead it will be Ndemi who will have to contact Maintenance and request the orbital adjustments that will affect the seasons, that will bring rain to the parched plains, that will make the days longer or shorter to give the illusion of seasonal changes.

Then, if it is to be an ordinary day, I will fill my pouch with charms and will begin walking through the fields, warding off any thahu, or curse, that has been placed on them, and assuring that they will continue to yield the food we need to survive, and if the rains have come and the land is green, perhaps I will slaughter a goat to thank Ngai for His beneficence.

If it is not to be an ordinary day, I usually know at the outset. Perhaps there will be hyena dung in my boma, a sure sign of a thahu, or the wind may come from the west, whereas all good winds blow from the east.

But on the day in question, there was no wind at all, and no hyenas had been in my boma the night before. It began like any other day. Ndemi was late - this time, he claimed, because there was a black mamba on the path up my hill, and he had to wait until it finally slithered off into the tall grasses - and I had just finished teaching him the prayer for health and long life that he must recite at the birth of a new baby, when Koinnage, the paramount chief of the village, walked up to my boma.

"Jambo, Koinnage," I greeted him, dropping my blanket to the ground, for the sun was now overhead and the air was finally warm.

"Jambo, Koriba," he replied, a worried frown on his face. I looked at him expectantly, for it is very rare for Koinnage to climb my hill and visit me in my boma.

"It has happened again," he announced grimly. "This is the third time since the long rains."

"What has happened?" I asked, confused.

"Ngala is dead," said Koinnage. "He walked out naked and unarmed among the hyenas, and they killed him."

"Naked and unarmed?" I repeated. "Are you certain?"

"I am certain."

I squatted down near my dying fire, lost in thought. Keino was the first young man we had lost. We had thought it was an accident, that he had stumbled and somehow fallen upon his own spear. Then came Njupo, who burned to death when his hut caught fire while he was inside it.

Keino and Njupo lived with the young, unmarried men in a small colony by the edge of the forest, a few kilometers from the main village. Two such deaths might have been coincidence, but now there was a third, and it cast a new light on the first two. It was now obvious that, within the space of a few brief months, three young men of chosen to commit suicide rather then continue their lives on Kirinyaga.

"What are we to do, Koriba?" asked Koinnage. "My own son lives at the edge of the forest. He could be the next one!"

I took a round, polished stone from the pouch about my neck, stood up, and handed it to him.

"Place this beneath your son's sleeping blanket," I said. "It will protect him from this thahu that is affecting our young men."

"Thank you, Koriba," he said gratefully. "But can you not provide charms for all the young men?"

"No," I replied, still greatly disturbed by what I had heard. "That stone is only for the son of a chief. And just as there are all kinds of charms, there are all kinds of curses. I must determine who has placed this thahu on our young men, and why. Then and only then can I create strong enough magic to combat it." I paused. "Can Ndemi bring you some pombe to drink?"

He shook his head. "I must return to the village. The women are wailing the death chant, and there is much to be done. We must burn Ngala's hut and purify the ground upon which it rested, and we must post guards to make sure that the hyenas, having feasted so easily, do not come back in search of more human flesh."

He turned and took a few steps toward the village, then stopped.

"Why is this happening, Koriba?" he asked, his eyes filled with puzzlement. "And is the thahu limited just to the young men, or do the rest of us bear it too?"

I had no answer for him, and after a moment he resumed walking down the path that led to the village.

I sat down next to my fire and stared silently out over the fields and savannah until Ndemi finally sat down next to me.

"What kind of thahu would make Ngala and Keino and Njupo all kill themselves, Koriba?" he asked, and I could tell from his tone that he was frightened.

"I am not sure yet," I replied. "Keino was very much in love with Mwala, and he was very unhappy when old Siboki was able to pay the bride price for her before he himself could. If it were just Keino, I would say that he ended his life because he could not have her. But now two more have died, and I must find the reason for it."

"They all live in the village of young men by the edge of the forest," said Ndemi. "Perhaps it is cursed."

I shook my head. "They have not all killed themselves."

"You know," said Ndemi, "when Nboka drowned in the river two rains ago, we all thought it was an accident. But he, too, lived in the village of young men. Perhaps he killed himself as well."

I had not thought of Nboka in a long time. I thought of him now, and realized that he could very well have committed suicide. Certainly it made sense, for Nboka was known to be a very strong swimmer.

"I think perhaps you are right," I replied reluctantly.

Ndemi's chest puffed up with pride, for I do not often compliment him.

"What kind of magic will you make, Koriba?" he asked. "If it requires the feathers of the crested crane or the maribou stork, I could get them for you. I have been practicing with my spear."

"I do not know what magic I shall make yet, Ndemi," I told him. "But whatever it is, it will require thought and not spears."

"That is too bad," he said, shielding his eyes from the dust that a sudden warm breeze brought to us. "I thought I had finally found a use for it."

"For what?"

"For my spear," he said. "I no longer herd cattle on my father's shamba, now that I am helping you, so I no longer need it." He shrugged. "I think I shall leave it at home from now on."

"No, you must always take it with you," I said. "It is customary for all Kikuyu men carry spears."

He looked inordinately proud of himself, for I had called him a man, when in truth he was just a kehee, an uncircumcised boy. But then he frowned again.

"Why do we carry spears, Koriba?" he asked.

"To protect us from our enemies."

"But the Maasai and Wakamba and other tribes, and even the Europeans, remain in Kenya," he said. "What enemies have we here?"

"The hyena and the jackal and the crocodile," I answered, and added silently: And one other enemy, which must be identified before we lose any more of our young men, for without them there is no future, and ultimately no Kirinyaga.

"It has been a long time since anyone needed a spear against a hyena," continued Ndemi. "They have learned to fear us and avoid us." He pointed to the domestic animals that were grazing in the nearby fields. "They do not even bother the goats and the cattle any more."

"Did they not bother Ngala?" I asked.

"He wanted to be eaten by hyenas," said Ndemi. "That is different."

"Nonetheless, you must carry your spear at all times," I said. "It is part of what makes you a Kikuyu."

"I have an idea!" he said, suddenly picking up his spear and studying it. "If I must carry a spear, perhaps I should have one with a metal tip, so that it will never warp or break."

I shook my head. "Then you would be a Zulu, who live far to the south of Kenya, for it is the Zulus who carry metal-tipped spears, which they call assagais."

Ndemi looked crestfallen. "I thought it was my own idea," he said.

"Do not be disappointed," I said. "An idea can be new to you and old to someone else."

"Really?"

I nodded. "Take these young men who have killed themselves. The idea of suicide is new to them, but they are not the first to think of it. We have all thought of killing ourselves at one time or another. What I must learn is not why they have finally thought of it, but why they have not rejected the thought, why it has become attractive to them."

"And then you will use your magic to make it unattractive?" asked Ndemi.

"Yes."

"Will you boil poisonous serpents in a pot with the blood a freshly-killed Zebra?" he asked eagerly.

"You are a very bloodthirsty boy," I said.

"A thahu that can kill four young men requires powerful magic," he replied.

"Sometimes just a word or a sentence is all the magic one needs."

"But if you need more..."

I sighed deeply. "If I need more, I will tell you what animals to slay for me."

He leaped to his feet, picked up his slender wooden spear, and made stabbing motions in the air. "I will become the most famous hunter ever!" he shouted happily. "My children and grandchildren will sing songs of praise to me, and the animals of the field will tremble at my approach!"

"But before that happy day arrives," I said, "there is still the water to be fetched and the firewood to be gathered."

"Yes, Koriba," he said. He picked up my water gourds and began walking down the hill, and I could tell that in his imagination he was still confronting charging buffaloes and hurling his spear straight and true to the mark.

###

I gave Ndemi his morning lesson - the prayer for the dead seemed a proper topic - and then went down to the village to comfort Ngala's parents. His mother, Liswa, was inconsolable. He had been her first-born, and it was all but impossible to get her to stop wailing the death chant long enough for me to express my sorrow.

Kibanja, Ngala's father, stood off by himself, shaking his head in disbelief.

"Why would he do such a thing, Koriba?" he asked as I approached him.

"I do not know," I answered.

"He was the boldest of boys," he continued. "Even you did not frighten him." He stopped suddenly for fear that he had given offense.

"He was very bold," I agreed. "And bright."

"That is true," agreed Kibanja. "Even when the other boys would lie up beneath the shade trees during the heat of the day, my Ngala was always finding new games to play, new things to do." He looked at me through tortured eyes. "And now my only son is dead, and I do not know why."

"I will find out," I told him.

"It is wrong, Koriba," he continued. "It is against the nature of things. I was meant to die first, and then all that I own - my shamba, my cattle, my goats - everything would have been his." He tried to hold back his tears, for although the Kikuyu are not as arrogant as the Maasai, our men do not like to display such emotions in public. But the tears came anyway, making moist paths down his dusty cheeks before falling onto the dirt. "He did not even live long enough to take a wife and present her with a son. All that he was has died with him. What sin did he commit to merit such a dreadful thahu? Why could it not have struck me down and let him live?"

I remained with him a few more minutes, assured him that I would ask Ngai to welcome Ngala's spirit, and then I began walking to the colony of young men, which was about three kilometers beyond the village. It backed up to a dense forest, and was bordered to the south by the same river that wound through the village and broadened as it passed my hill.

It was a small colony, composed of no more than twenty young men. As each had undergone the circumcision ritual and passed into manhood, he had moved out from his father's boma and taken up residence here with the other bachelors of the village. It was a transitional dwelling place, for eventually each member would marry and take over part of his family's shamba, to be replaced by the next group of young men.

Most of the residents had gone to the village when they heard the death chants, but a few of them had remained behind to burn Ngala's hut and destroy the evil spirits within it. They greeted me gravely, as befitted the occasion, and asked me to utter the chant that would purify the ground so that they would not forever be required to avoid stepping on it.

When I was done, I placed a charm at the very center of the ashes, and then the young men began drifting away - all but Murumbi, who had been Ngala's closest friend.

"What can you tell me about this, Murumbi?" I asked when we were finally alone.

"He was a good friend," he replied. "We spent many long days together. I will miss him."

"Do you know why he killed himself?"

"He did not kill himself," answered Murumbi. "He was killed by hyenas."

"To walk naked and unarmed among the hyenas is to kill oneself," I said.

Murumbi continued staring at the ashes. "It was a stupid way to die," he said bitterly. "It solved nothing."

"What problem do you think he was trying to solve?" I asked.

"He was very unhappy," said Murumbi.

"Were Keino and Njupo also unhappy?"

He looked surprised. "You know?"

"Am I not the mundumugu?" I replied.

"But you said nothing when they died."

"What do you think I should have said?" I asked.

Murumbi shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know." He paused. "No, there was nothing you could have said."

"What about you, Murumbi?" I said.

"Me, Koriba?"

"Are you unhappy?"

"As you said, you are the mundumugu. Why ask questions to which you already know the answers?"

"I would like to hear the answer from your own lips," I replied.

"Yes, I am unhappy."

"And the other young men?" I continued. "Are they unhappy too?"

"Most of them are very happy," said Murumbi, and I noticed just the slightest edge of contempt in his tone. "Why should they not be? They are men now. They spend their days in idle talk, and painting their faces and their bodies, and at nights they go to the village and drink pombe and dance. Soon some of them will marry and sire children and start shambas of their own, and some day they will sit in the Council of Elders." He spat on the ground. "Indeed, there is no reason why they should not be happy, is there?"

"None," I agreed.

He stared defiantly at me.

"Perhaps you would like to tell me the reason for your unhappiness?" I suggested.

"Are you not the mundumugu?" he said caustically.

"Whatever else I am, I am not your enemy."

He sighed deeply, and the tension seemed to drain from his body, to be replace by resignation. "I know you are not, Koriba," he said. "It is just that there are times when I feel like this entire world is my enemy."

"Why should that be?" I asked. "You have food to eat and pombe to drink, you have a hut to keep you warm and dry, there are only Kikuyu here, you have undergone the circumcision ritual and are now a man, you live in a world of plenty...so why should you feel that such a world is your enemy?"

He pointed to a black she-goat that was grazing placidly a few yards away.

"Do you see that goat, Koriba?" he asked. "She accomplishes more with her life than I do with mine."

"Don't be silly," I said.

"I am being serious," he replied. "Every day she provides milk for the village, once a year she produces a kid, and when she dies it will almost certainly be as a sacrifice to Ngai. She has a purpose to her life."

"So have we all."

He shook his head. "That is not so, Koriba."

"You are bored?" I asked.

"If the journey through life can be likened to a journey down a broad river, then I feel that I am adrift with no land in sight."

"But you have a destination in sight," I said. "You will take a wife, and start a shamba. If you work hard, you will own many cattle and goats. You will raise many sons and daughters. What is wrong with that?"

"Nothing," he said, "if I had anything to do with it. But my wife will raise my children and till my fields, and my sons will herd my animals, and my daughters will weave the fabric for my garments and help their mothers cook my food." He paused. "And I...I will sit around with the other men, and discuss the weather, and drink pombe, and someday, if I live long enough, I will join the Council of Elders, and the only thing that will change is that I will now talk to my friends in Koinnage's boma instead of my own. And then one day I will die. That is the life I must look forward to, Koriba."

He kicked the ground with his foot, sending up little flurries of dust. "I will pretend that my life has more meaning than that of a she-goat," he continued. "I will walk ahead of my wife while she carries the firewood, and I will tell myself that I am doing this to protect her from attack by the Maasai or the Wakamba. I will build my boma taller than a man's head and lay thorns across the top of it, and tell myself that this is to protect my cattle against the lion and the leopard, and I will try not to remember that there have been never been any lions or leopards on Kirinyaga. I will never be without my spear, though I do nothing but lean on it when the sun is high in the sky, and I will tell myself that without it I could be torn to pieces by man or beast. All these things I will tell myself, Koriba...but I will know that I am lying."

"And Ngala and Keino and Njupo felt the same way?" I said.

"Yes."

"Why did they kill themselves?" I asked. "It is written in our charter that anyone who wishes to leave Kirinyaga may do so. They need only have walked to that area known as Haven, and a Maintenance ship would have picked them up and taken them anywhere they wished to go."

"You still do not understand, do you?" he said.

"No, I do not," I admitted. "Enlighten me."

"Men have reached the stars, Koriba," he said. "They have medicines and machines and weapons that are beyond our imagining. They live in cities that dwarf our village." He paused again. "But here on Kirinyaga, we live the life that we lived before the Europeans came and brought the forerunners of such things with them. We live as the Kikuyu have always lived, as you say we were meant to live. How, then, can we go back to Kenya? What could we do? How would we feed and shelter ourselves? The Europeans changed us from Kikuyu into Kenyans once before, but it took many years and many generations. You and the others who created Kirinyaga meant no harm, you only did what you thought was right, but you have seen to it that I can never become a Kenyan. I am too old, and I am starting too far behind."

"What about the other young men of your colony?" I asked. "How do they feel?"

"Most of them are content, as I said. And why shouldn't they be? The hardest work they were ever forced to do was to nurse at their mothers' breasts." He looked into my eyes. "You have offered them a dream, and they have accepted it."

"And what is your dream, Murumbi?"

He shrugged. "I have ceased to dream."

"I do not believe that," I said. "Every man has a dream. What would it take to make you content?"

"Truly?"

"Truly."

"Let the Maasai come to Kirinyaga, or the Wakamba, or the Luo," he said. "I was trained to be a warrior. Therefore, give me a reason to carry my spear, to walk unfettered ahead of my wife when her back is bent under her burden. Let us raid their shambas and carry off their women and their cattle, and let them try to do the same for us. Do not give us new land to farm when we are old enough; let us compete for it with the other tribes."

"What you are asking for is war," I said.

"No," replied Murumbi. "What I am asking for is meaning. You mentioned my wife and children. I cannot afford the bride price for a wife, nor will I be able to unless my father dies and leaves me his cattle, or asks me to move back to his shamba." He stared at me with reproachful eyes. "Don't you realize that the only result is to make me wish for his charity or his death? It is better far to steal women from the Maasai."

"That is out of the question," I said. "Kirinyaga was created for the Kikuyu, as was the original Kirinyaga in Kenya."

"I know that is what we believe, just as the Maasai believe that Ngai created Kilimanjaro for them," said Murumbi. "But I have been thinking about it for many days, and do you know what I believe? I believe that the Kikuyu and Maasai were created for each other, for when we lived side by side in Kenya, each of us gave meaning and purpose to the other."

"That is because you are not aware of Kenya's history," I said. "The Maasai came down from the north only a century before the Europeans. They are nomads, wanderers, who follow their herds from one grazing area to another. The Kikuyu are farmers, who have always lived beside the holy mountain. We lived side by side with the Maasai for only a handful of years."

"Then bring us the Wakamba, or the Luo, or the Europeans!" he said, trying to control his frustration. "You still don't understand what I am saying. It is not the Maasai I want, it is the challenge!"

"And this is what Keino and Njupu and Nboka wanted?"

"Yes."

"And will you kill yourself, as they did, should a challenge not materialize?"

"I do not know. But I do not want to live a life filled with boredom."

"How many others in the colony of young men feel as you do?"

"Right now?" asked Murumbi. "Only myself." He paused and stared unblinking at me. "But there have been others before; there will be again."

"I do not doubt it," I replied with a heavy sigh. "Now that I understand the nature of the problem, I will return to my boma and think about how best to solve it."

"This problem is beyond your ability to solve, mundumugu," said Murumbi, "for it is part of the society that you have fought so hard to preserve."

"No problem is incapable of solution," I said.

"This one is," answered Murumbi with absolute conviction.

I left him standing there by the ashes, not totally convinced that he was wrong.

###

For three days I sat alone on my hill. I neither went into the village nor conferred with the Elders. When old Siboki needed more ointment for his pain, I sent Ndemi down the path with it, and when it was time to place new charms on the scarecrows, I instructed Ndemi to tend to the matter, for I was wrestling with a far more serious problem.

In some cultures, I knew, suicide was an honorable way of dealing with certain problems, but the Kikuyu did not belong to such a culture.

Furthermore, we had built a Utopia here, and to admit that suicides would occur from time to time meant that it was not a Utopia for all our people, which in turn meant that it was not a Utopia at all.

But we had built our Utopia along the lines of a traditional Kikuyu society, that which existed in Kenya before the advent of the Europeans. It was the Europeans who forcefully introduced change into that society, not the Kikuyu, and therefore I could not allow Murumbi to change the way we lived, either.

The most obvious answer was to encourage him - and others like him - to emigrate to Kenya, but this seemed out of the question. I myself had received higher degrees in both England and America, but the majority of Kikuyu on Kirinyaga had been those (considered fanatics by a Kenyan government that was glad to be rid of them) who had insisted in living in the traditional way prior to coming to Kirinyaga. This meant that not only could they not cope with the technology that permeated every layer of Kenyan society, but also that they did not even possess the tools to learn, for they could neither read nor write.

So Murumbi, and those who would surely follow him, could not leave Kirinyaga for Kenya or any other destination. That meant they must remain.

If they remained, there were only three alternatives that I could see, all of them equally unpalatable.

First, they could eventually give up in despair and kill themselves, as four of their young comrades had. This I could not permit.

Second, they could eventually adjust to the life of ease and idleness that was the lot of the Kikuyu male, and come to enjoy and defend it as passionately as did the other men of the village. This I could not foresee.

Third, I could take Murumbi's suggestion and open up the northern plains to the Maasai or the Wakamba, but this would make a mockery of all our efforts to establish Kirinyaga as a world for and of the Kikuyu. This I could not even consider, for I would not allow a war that would destroy our Utopia in order to create his.

For three days and three nights I searched for another  alternative. On the morning of the fourth day, I emerged from my hut, my blanket wrapped tightly about me to protect me from the cold morning air, and lit my fire.

Ndemi was late, as usual. When he finally arrived, he was favoring his right foot, and explained that he had twisted it on his way up my hill - but I noticed, without surprise, that he limped on his left foot when he went off to fill my gourds with water.

When he returned, I watched him as he went about his duties, collecting firewood and removing fallen leaves from my boma. I had chosen him to be my assistant, and my eventual successor, because he was the boldest and brightest of the village children. It was Ndemi who always thought of new games for the others to play, and he himself was always the leader. When I would walk among them, he was the first to demand that I tell them a parable, and the quickest to understand the hidden meaning in it.

In short, he was a perfect candidate to commit suicide in a few more years, had I not averted that possibility by encouraging him to become my assistant.

"Sit down, Ndemi," I said as he finished collecting the last of the leaves and throwing them on the dying embers of my fire.

He sat down next to me. "What will we study today, Koriba?" he asked.

"Today we will just talk," I said. His face fell, and I added, "I have a problem, and I am hoping that you will provide me with an answer to it."

Suddenly he was alert and enthused. "The problem is the young men who killed themselves, isn't it?" he said.

"That is correct," I answered him. "Why do you suppose they did it?"

He shrugged his scrawny shoulders. "I do not know, Koriba. Perhaps they were crazy."

"Do you really think so?"

He shrugged again. "No, not really. Probably an enemy has cursed them."

"Perhaps."

"It must be so," he said firmly. "Is not Kirinyaga a Utopia? Why else would anyone not wish to live here?"

"I want you to think back, Ndemi, to the days before you started coming to my boma every day."

"I can remember," he said. "It was not that long ago."

"Good," I replied. "Now, can you also remember what you wanted to do?"

He smiled. "To play. And to hunt."

I shook my head. "I do not mean what you wanted to do then," I said. "Can you remember what you wanted to do when you were a man?"

He frowned. "Take a wife, I suppose, and start a shamba."

"Why do you frown, Ndemi?" I asked.

"Because that is not really what I wanted," he replied. "But it was all I could think of to answer."

"Think harder," I said. "Take as much time as you wish, for this is very important. I will wait."

We sat in silence for a long moment, and then he turned to me.

"I do not know. But I would not have wanted to live as my father and my brothers live."

"What would you have wanted?"

He shrugged helplessly. "Something different."

"Different in what way?"

"I do not know," he said again. "Something more..." - he searched for the word - "more exciting." He consider his answer, then nodded, satisfied. "Even the impala grazing in the fields lives a more exciting life, for he must ever be wary of the hyena."

"But wouldn't the impala rather that there were no hyenas?" I suggested.

"Of course," said Ndemi, "for then he could not be killed and eaten." He furrowed his brow in thought. "But if there were no hyenas, he would not need to be fleet of foot, and if he were no longer fleet of foot, he would no longer be an impala."

And with that, I began to see the solution.

"So it is the hyena that makes the impala what he is," I said. "And therefore, even something that seems to be a bad or dangerous thing can be necessary to the impala."

He stared at me. "I do not understand, Koriba."

"I think that I must become a hyena," I said thoughtfully.

"Right now?" asked Ndemi excitedly. "May I watch?"

I shook my head. "No, not right now. But soon."

For if it was the threat of the hyena that defined the impala, then I had to find a way to define those young men who had ceased to be true Kikuyus and yet could not leave Kirinyaga.

"Will you have spots and legs and a tail?" asked Ndemi eagerly.

"No," I replied. "But I will be a hyena nonetheless."

"I do not understand," said Ndemi.

"I do not expect you to," I said. "But Murumbi will."

For I realized that what he needed was a challenge that could be provided by only one person on Kirinyaga.

And that person was myself.

###

I sent Ndemi to the village to tell Koinnage that I wanted to address the Council of Elders. Then, later that day, I put on my ceremonial headdress, painted my face to look its most frightening, and, filling my pouch with various charms, I made my way to the village, where Koinnage had assembled all the Elders in his boma. I waited patiently for him to announce that I had important matters to discuss with them - for even the mundumugu may not speak before the paramount chief - and then I got to my feet and faced them.

"I have cast the bones," I said. "I have read the entrails of a goat, and I have studied the pattern of the flies on a newly- dead lizard. And now I know why Ngala walked unarmed among the hyenas, and why Keino and Njupo died."

I paused for dramatic effect, and made sure that I had everyone's attention.

"Tell us who caused the thahu," said Koinnage, "that we may destroy him."

"It is not that simple," I answered. "Hear me out. The carrier of the thahu is Murumbi."

"I will kill him!" cried Kibanja, who had been Ngala's father. "He is the reason my son is dead!"

"No," I said. "You must not kill him, for he is not the source of the thahu. He is merely the carrier."

"If a cow drinks poisoned water, she is not the source of her bad milk, but we must kill her anyway," insisted Kibanja.

"It is not Murumbi's fault," I said firmly. "He is as innocent as your own son, and he must not be killed."

"Then who is responsible for the thahu?" demanded Kibanja. "I will have blood for my son's blood!"

"It is an old thahu, cast upon us by a Maasai back when we still lived in Kenya," I said. "He is dead now, but he was a very clever mundumugu, for his thahu lives on long after him." I paused. "I have fought him in the spirit world, and most of the time I have won, but once in a while my magic is weak, and on those occasions the thahu is visited upon one of our young men."

"How can we know which of our young men bears the thahu?" asked Koinnage. "Must we wait for them to die before we know they have been cursed?"

"There are ways," I answered. "But they are known only to myself. When I have finished telling you what you must do, I will visit all the other villages and seek out the colonies of young men to see if any of them also bears the thahu."

"Tell us what we must do," said old Siboki, who had come to hear me despite the pain in his joints.

"You will not kill Murumbi," I repeated, "for it is not his fault that he carries this thahu. But we do not want him passing it to others, so from this day forward he is an outcast. He must be driven from his hut and never allowed back. Should any of you offer him food or shelter, the same thahu will befall you and your families. I want runners sent to all the nearby villages, so that by tomorrow morning they all know that he must be shunned, and I want them in turn to send out still more runners, so that within three days no village on Kirinyaga will welcome him."

"That is a terrible punishment," said Koinnage, for the Kikuyu are a compassionate people. "If the thahu is not his fault, can we not at least set food out for him at the edge of the village? Perhaps if he comes alone by night, and sees and speaks to no one else, the thahu will remain with him alone."

I shook my head. "It must be as I say, or I cannot promise that the thahu will not spread to all of you."

"If we see him in the fields, can we not acknowledge him?" persisted Koinnage.

"If you see him, you must threaten him with your spears and drive him away," I answered.

Koinnage sighed deeply. "Then it shall be as you say. We will drive him from his hut today, and we will shun him forever."

"So be it," I said, and left the boma to return to my hill.

All right, Murumbi, I thought. Now you have your challenge. You have been raised to use the spear; now you will eat only what your spear can kill. You have been raised to let your women build your huts; now you will be safe from the elements only in those huts that you yourself build. You have been raised to live a life of ease; now you will live only by your wits and your energies. No one will help you, no one will give you food or shelter, and I will not rescind my order. It is not a perfect solution, but it is the best I can contrive under the circumstances. You needed a challenge and an enemy; now I have provided you with both.

I visited every village on Kirinyaga during the next month, and spent much time speaking to the young men. I found two more who had to be driven out and forced to live in the wilderness, and now, along with my other duties, such visits have become part of my regular schedule.

There have been no more suicides, and no more unexplained deaths among our young men. But from time to time I cannot help wondering what must become of a society, even a Utopia such as Kirinyaga, where our best and our brightest are turned into outcasts, and all that remains are those who are content to eat the fruit of the lotus.

THE ARBITRARY PLACEMENT OF WALLS

Martha Soukup

The trip to the kitchen like this:

Stand up from the folding chair six feet to the left of the far corner of the living room.  Wide circle around the red armchair.  The television is on.  It makes a lot of noise.  Basketball.  Laura doesn't know anything about basketball; the confusion of the game comforts her a little.

Crossing the living-room floor in four big steps.  A wide semicircle, to avoid the coffee table.  She replaced the coffee table a year ago, but it didn't make any difference.  She'd known it wouldn't.

Up the hall: left side, left side, right side, left side, right side, right side, right side, left side.  A whispering at the fourth step.  It can't be helped.

Dining room best ignored.  Past the back bedroom, which is best ignored too: more whispers, many whispers; she tightens her inner ears to make a roar to drown them out.  Finally into the kitchen.  The thin blue line on the linoleum around the stove is one of the first she painted.  There used also to be ribbons, ropes, strings around corners and chairs and places, different colors, color-coded.  She's taken them down.  Sometimes she can't keep intruders out of the apartment, and anyway she knows where all the ghosts are now.  She steps around the line to the refrigerator.  Takes a Pepsi and pops it open.  She likes Coke.  So did Eric.

She looks at the line around the stove and wonders how much acetone it would take to remove it.  Maybe she could just paint lines around the refrigerator, the microwave stand, the kitchen table.  Make it look like a Statement.

Thinking about Statements she missteps her way past the stove, stepping on the line.  Blue ghosts.  Donald memories.  Donald frying bacon, naked, dancing away from the sizzles.  She remembers yelling at him not to be an idiot, laughing at him.  She has long since forgotten exactly what she said.  Donald is always there to say what he said.

"It takes a real man to brave elemental fire for his woman," Donald says.  Pauses, listening.  Dusting of bright blond hair down his belly.  "You think I'm afraid of a little bit of grease?"

"You should be, jerk," Laura says into the unresponsive air.  "I only wish you'd cauterized your favorite parts."  But she can't make herself sound as hostile as she wants.

"Yes I'm crazy and I love you too," Donald says.  Suddenly — her memory times it perfectly — he yelps, clutches his buttock, leaps.  "My god, I'm hit!"  Pause.  He laughs.  Turns down the burner.  "That's right.  Kiss it and make it better — "  He's collapsing in laughter.  Kissing.

The Pepsi jerks in her hand, spraying Laura with sticky cold cola.  She's squeezed a dented waistline around its middle.  She breaks away from the blue Donald zone, wiping her hand jerkily on her jeans.

Back down the hall:  right, left, left, left, right, left, right, right.

She sits two-thirds from the left side of the sofa and stares at the television screen, sipping too-sweet Pepsi.  Michael Jordan leaps and spins.  She tries to pay attention to the announcers, pick up the subtleties of the game.  Donald taught her football, Frank taught her hockey, she taught Eric baseball.  Basketball's new.  Hers.

The doorbell rings.  If it's a meter reader, he can wait for the Martins upstairs to answer.  If it's not a meter reader, it's a Jehovah's Witness and child.  She doesn't have visitors.

"Laura, I know you're in there.  I saw you through the curtains."

Damn it.  Life is complicated enough.  She takes a wide arc to the front door, backtracking once as she nears Frank.  She opens the apartment door to the lobby, crosses the narrow lobby space in two steps and peers through the front door peephole.  If she squints down angled from the left she can barely see through it.  Not Eric and three dozen roses.  She sees her mother, two plastic grocery bags dragging down her arm.

What to do?  Laura closes her eyes and opens the door.

"I'm not feeling very — " she begins, but her mother, a stout energetic woman in a perm Laura hasn't seen before, is already in the lobby.  "You keep saying you'll come for dinner and you never do," her mother says.  "So I have a nice chicken from the Jewel" — lifting one bag — "and a little something to drink with it" — lifting the other.  "No arguing now.  You let me in your kitchen and I'll have it in the oven in a flash.  Then we can chat while it cooks."

Furious thought.  "That's so much work, Mother.  Let me take you out to a restaurant."

"Don't be ridiculous.  I could do a chicken in my sleep, after forty years of it.  What are you eating, that terrible microwave food?  You could let your mother make you a real meal once a year besides Thanksgiving."

No way out.  As she crosses the worn tiles of the lobby her mother's sturdy pink-sneakered foot squeals on the ceramic.  In a flash Frank is solidly between them, jogging in place, his running shoes squeaking.  "You look fine already, why jog so much?" she asked, four years ago.

Frank grins and gathers up a nonexistent love handle under his t-shirt.  "When this body is perfect, your highness, then you'll really be in my power."  He leans forward for a kiss, misses, stumbles, his new shoes squealing again.  "See?  Not irresistible yet.  But soon — soon you'll be begging — and then I'll laugh — " and chortling, mock-sinister, he turns and runs out the door through her mother.  Goodbye again, Frank.

"Laura?"  She jumps.  "I swear, you're always daydreaming, honey.  Are we going in, or do we stand in the lobby all day?"

"I'm sorry, Mother.  I've been feeling a little tired."  A fumble with the key.  Her stomach hollows as she sees her mother seeing the place, realizes what it looks like through orderly, domestic eyes.  Christ.  What a mess it is: old newspapers piled at apparent haphazard to block off bad places, traces of old chalk outlines lingering in worn carpet which hasn't been vacuumed in months, furniture in odd places — sofa in a corner, television on the mantelpiece, chairs angled erratically, the big red armchair near the center of the floor.

"Have you been sick?  It looks like you haven't cleaned in ages.  Is the whole place like this?"

A tally of bad places and the arbitrary placement of walls around them:  living room, sunporch, big bedroom, little bedroom, study (the barest, least comfortable room, where she sleeps on a sprung mattress retrieved from someone's trash), the bathroom, and the lobby whose floor she hasn't mopped or even swept —  "I'm afraid I've done better.  We're busy at work.  A lot of overtime."  She grabs the red armchair and wrestles it to the nearest corner, its former corner, so mortified she barely sees the kaleidoscope of ghosts she plows through in the process.  Back in place, Eric snores softly once, curled in red velvet, rubs his eyes, smiles sleepily up at her, murmurs: "Love you, Lauracakes. . . ."

She whirls away.  "Really it's not usually like this at all — "

"I hope not, honey.  You'll make yourself sick living like this."  Her mother shoves her sleeves up her sturdy arms.  "That's it, then.  We're going to give this place its spring cleaning.  I've got the whole evening free."

The whole evening?  Dear God, Laura thinks.  "I don't," she lies.  "I have to go out and run some errands."

"Then don't let me stop you."  Her mother is already gathering up newspapers.  "You just leave me here and you'll see how much better this place looks when you get back."

"No, you can't — "

"Don't argue with your mother.  What would your grandparents have said, if they knew you'd let their home get like this?"  She is unstoppable.  Laura can't leave her alone here.

So the whole evening it is, three solid hours caught helplessly in a domestic whirlwind, in the wake of a cheerful blur of activity.  Her mother digs up brooms, vacuum cleaner, garbage bags, and Laura follows unable to defend her fortresses of boxes, paper and carefully positioned furniture from being torn down and restructured into normal and deadly order.  Her mother knows where everything used to be.  She helped Laura move here from the dorm, years back, in the first place.

A helpless accomplice in the destruction of her wards, if Laura tries to move a chair back from a danger spot, she comes face to face with Donald Frank Eric and must retreat to hold bags for her mother's disposal of Pepsi cans, or to sweep furiously, staring at the floor where she can see only feet.  Air fills with dust.  Windows fling open.  Nothing stops the juggernaut.  It's a sickening feeling, like being dragged carelessly, at great speed, at the end of a tether across slick and dangerous ice.  All she can do is pray for it to stop.

Suddenly she is taken by the shoulder and plunked into the sofa, a sweaty cold bottle shoved into her hand.  "All done!  That wasn't too bad, was it?"  Her mother produces another bottle of wine cooler — Laura hasn't had alcohol since Eric — twisting the top off.  Her mother sits in the red armchair and, though Laura sits six feet away, she can faintly see Eric sleepily stir and smile, sitting up until his curling lips are inches out of synch with her mother's.  A swing band, her mother's cleaning music from the stereo, drowns out his loving murmurs.   Her mother pours herself some wine cooler.  The smell of roasting chicken drifts from the kitchen.

Laura takes a long pull from her bottle, gets hold of herself.  The thin bite of alcohol unfamiliar on her tongue.

"I hope you like this brand, dear."  She sips.  "Nothing tastes better than a cold drink after a good day's cleaning."

Nothing hurts like old happiness, trapping her.

"You should be more careful with the things people leave you.  Your grandparents willed you this building because they loved you, honey.  You should treat it better."

"It's so big for one person," Laura says.  "There's so much to do.  If the Martins upstairs didn't do the yardwork, I don't know how I'd keep up."

"Then sell it," her mother says.  "It would break your grandparents' hearts — but I suppose they're not around to know it."

"I can't."  There are so many reasons, worn around the edges: the repairs it would need before she could put it on the market, the time it would take up, the Martins who were old friends of her grandparents and would never get such a low rent rate from any new landlord.  What kind of person would put the Martins out on the street?

And no money at all to make the sort of repairs the place would need, even to cover the building's age with a bright coat of paint.  Donald's investments saw to that; eternally, back in the study, he explains the columns of figures that prove his cousin's novelty factory will triple her money, give them enough for a honeymoon in Switzerland.  He believed it.  Any time she cares to look in the study she can see the excitement in his eyes.  She saw it, unwillingly, an hour ago.  She is still paying back the debts.

"Whatever you think is best," her mother says.  Covering her mouth, she yawns with Eric.  "Excuse me!  All this exercise."  She deftly rebuttons her sleeves.  "I haven't moved so much furniture in years.  I used to do it all the time, you know, whenever I was really upset about something.  When we couldn't pay the bills, or when your father and I fought, or when you went away to college and I missed you so much, dear.  I'd just roll up my sleeves and move the furniture all around.  It really gets rid of the ghosts."

Laura starts.  "Ghosts?"

"Oh, you know, all those stupid old memories.  It does help to keep busy.  Anyway, now we can sit and catch up."

Her mother sits, pleasantly waiting for news.  Laura can't think of anything to say.

"So, are you dating anybody?"

"No," she says.

"Oh, honey.  Now I know I'm not supposed to push for grandchildren, and I'd never do that.  But don't you think you're working too hard?  It couldn't hurt you to get out now and then.  Aren't there any nice young men where you work?"

"They're all married."

"Oh, that's too bad.  You know, I thought it was such a shame when that Eric moved to Wisconsin.  He was such a sweet boy.  Do you know he phoned me the other day?"

Oh Christ.  Eric sits up sleepily through her mother and rubs his eyes.  Her mother always liked him.  Everybody liked him.  He was good at that.  After Donald and Frank, she hadn't been able to trust anyone, not until nice sweet Eric, polite to mothers, wonderful listener, gentle in bed.  The bastard.  She looks away from his smiling murmurs.

"He didn't sound like himself.  He's in the hospital up there, poor boy."

"The hospital?  Why?"

"He wouldn't say.  He said it wasn't anything important, but you know he really didn't sound so good.  Hasn't he called you?  Maybe you should call him.  I'll give you his number."  She takes her little address book and a notepad from her purse and starts to copy a listing.

I'll never talk to him, Laura thinks.  Then she thinks: AIDS, the bastard gave me AIDS and ran out, oh Jesus.

"Here you are, honey.  I never did understand what happened between you two.  If he's not very sick maybe this is a blessing, get you two together for a talk and who knows what could happen?"

The bastard would just lie to her again.  "Mother — "

"Not that I'd ever pressure you, dear.  You know I'd just like you kids to be friends."

"Mother — "

The oven timer sounds.  Her mother stands.

"Mother."  She jumps up and grabs her mother's arm.  "Mother, I can't eat now."  Her mother looks startled.  "You understand.  It's upsetting.  Not knowing.  I have to call the hospital, okay?"

"He said it wasn't anything important, honey."

He lied all the time.  "Don't forget your purse.  We'll do this again.  Thank you for everything."  She propels her mother to the apartment door, through the lobby, to the building door.

"Don't forget the hospital number — "

She grabs it and shoves it in her pocket.  "Thank you.  I'll call.  Goodbye!"  The door slams in her mother's concerned face.  Laura retreats three steps and shoves the inner door shut, stepping around where the end table used to keep her from Donald.  She miscalculates.  His bags are packed and he glowers without looking at her.  "Bastard!" she screams at him.  She thrashes the empty air, makes herself stop.

She stands trembling in the wreckage of her protection, tidy rational apartment with nowhere to hide.  Every chair and table, bit and piece has used her mother as its agent to find its way back to sinister order.  Closing in on her.

She has survived everything else.  She will survive.

She will leave the slip of paper wadded in her pocket.

The chicken slowly turns to carbon in the oven.

###

Ghosts.

Frank lifts weights in the back room, in the corner once marked out with brown chalk.  "You're a self-involved jerk," she shouts at him.  "I don't know what I ever saw in you!"  He clamps another weight on the bar and grins at her.  "You don't think I can lift this?  Ah, but you forget how you inspire me, oh beauteous one.  Watch!"

"I don't care!"  She throws her glass through him.  It shatters against the wall.  Frank doesn't stop grinning.  The bar bends under the weights' mass as he lifts it over his head.

"What do I get for a reward?" he says, grunting the bar back down, reaching out —

On the floor against the coffee table, Donald hunches, knee-hugging, in rare tears, his only tears.  His father's death.  Weeping, bruise-eyed, he reaches up for comfort —

Eric is setting the dining-room table: it's roast goose, a sort of asparagus soufflé, German wine.  She can almost taste it.  Smiling, pleased with himself, he reaches out to pull her in to him —

The shower is horrible: her mother threw out the hose she rigged to the other side of the tub, shaking her head, telling Laura she really should call a plumber if she can't deal with shower pipes.  Laura can't bathe without Donald Frank Eric swirling around her with the water.  She sponges her armpits, washes her hair in the bathroom sink, not looking up to see who is shaving in the mirror —

She tries sleeping in her bed where it's been moved back.  (Her mother threw out the mildewy mattress in the back room.)  Donald makes love beside her.  His lean torso moves slowly, sensually; sweat gleams along his smooth jaw; his broad hand reaches to stroke her hair.  He whispers things she could barely hear the first time, can barely hear now.  Nonsense.

She turns her back, squeezes her eyes shut.  Still the indecipherable murmuring.  Gets up and takes two sleeping pills, jams the pillow down hard over her ears.  Can't shut out the murmurs.  Even the bed seems to rock, slowly, sensually —

Sobbing with anger she drags the massive bed across the floor.  It takes five long minutes to move it, gouging four broad pale lines in the floor.  Her shoulders ache.  Shake.

The bed away from where Donald touched a girl who used to be Laura, she still can't sleep.  The house murmurs with the hundred ghosts of three living men.

Slip of paper wadded in her pocket.

The workday seems infinite when she's in the office.  She thinks she hears gossip behind her back.  Nobody says more than hello except her supervisor, Bob, who lingering too long at her desk.  His smug flirting brings bile to the back of her throat; she clenches her jaw until he moves on to the next woman.  She routes forms, stacks and stacks of forms, trying to lose herself in the mindlessness of it.  The routine is abysmal, the whispering unbearable, and the day goes on forever; and then she has to go home.

To each infinite, unbearable night.

###

Finally she calls the number on the lined paper.

Eric is putting a big box of Godiva chocolates on the end table next to the telephone, bidding for her attention with another present.  The phone rings twice on the other end.

"Yes, could you tell me about your patient Eric Kennelly?"

"I can connect you."

Eric pulls away the chocolate box and points coyly to his lips.

"No, I don't want to talk to him.  I just want to know how he's doing.  Could you tell me what he's being treated for?"  She knows it's not AIDS — Eric was too clever, too controlled to forget any precautions — but she tells herself she has to be sure.  It's only sensible.

"I'm afraid that's not hospital policy, ma'am.  I can connect you, if you like."

He unbuttons two buttons, pulls away the shirt from one shoulder and balances a chocolate on his pale skin.

"Ma'am?"

She hangs up.

An hour later she walks eight blocks to the car rental place and lays down her credit card.

He didn't even leave her for another woman.  He'd just been killing time in Chicago until he could wangle an assistant professorship at UW.  She was something to do in the meantime.  Hindsight.  "Do you know how many PhD's in history are working in personnel, or selling insurance, or sweeping high schools?  And this isn't some podunk college, either.  This is my big break!"  But he never asked if she'd move north with him.  And was packed and gone before she could ask him.

It's only a couple of hours drive to Madison, far too short.  She has to stop at a gas station to find out where the hospital is.  She circles it a couple times before she pulls in and parks near the Visitors sign.

"It's probably not visiting hours," she says to the woman at the desk.  "I can leave if it's the wrong time."

"No, there's half an hour left."  The woman smiles.  "Who are you here to see?"

"That's okay, I have his room number."  258.  She can almost feel the number, burning her hand from the wad of paper.  Into the elevator, down the hall to the right nearly to the end; she faces the door.  Hand on the knob.  Opens it.

A wasted pale figure lies half-curled on a hospital bed.  Tubes all over.  It looks like nobody she's ever seen, barely like a human.  The figure turns and opens Eric's gray-green eyes.  "Laura.  Well.  What brings you by?"

The door gapes open behind her, air blowing through it, chilling her as if she's naked.  She closes it carefully.

"I'll bet it's two weeks since I had a visitor."  The voice is a rasping whisper, not Eric's soft tenor at all.  He manages a lopsided sort of grin.  "People get bored of watching a guy die.  Can't blame them.  Liver cancer's not a showbiz way to go."

She is silent.

"I knew you'd come eventually.  You cut it close, though, hon."

She stares at him.  She can't let herself feel sorry for the sweet and lying Eric who haunts her days and nights, so she mustn't make this miserable stick-figure look like any Eric at all.

Except the eyes.  Hard not to look at the eyes.

"Laura?  You going to say anything?"  The stick-man swallows painfully.  "I feel like I'm being visited by a ghost.  You didn't go and beat me to the other side, did you?"  He laughs briefly, coughs at greater length.  "Sorry.  Gallows humor.  My psychiatrist tells me it's normal."

Just a stick-man, she tells herself.  Something too big moves, like broken wings, inside her.  All right! she thinks.  Eric!  Sick.  Pitifully sick.  But don't let him fool you again, don't let him —

"Laura?"

"Why did you call my mother?  What do you want?"

The stick-man blinks Eric's eyes.  "I don't know.  Nothing.  Whatever.  It's so damn boring, dying.  To see if you were still as uptight as you ever were.  Amazing — you're even more uptight."

If she moves even an inch she'll be lost, he'll have won; in grief and sympathy and love she will do anything for him.  She struggles to stand still, firm.  So he'd be using her.  Is that bad?  Was he really just using her before?

He grins again, a parody of the smile that used to be his best feature.  "It's something to do."  Why did you move in with me if you just expected to leave in four months? she had asked him, desperate, as his car backed down the driveway.  It was something to do, he said, and drove away.

"You never needed much reason," Laura says.  She wonders if anesthetics linger in hospital air.   Her heart beats slow and her body feels dull.  Antiseptics must be stinging her eyes to tears.  But she pushes down the crippled part inside her.  Things die in hospitals.

The stick-man frowns.  "Laura — "

"You knew how Donald and Frank hurt me, and you made it your little project to get me to trust you.  Then you walked out."  Something almost chokes her voice; she doesn't let it.  "Kept things from being boring, I expect.  I don't know.  I've never been so bored I'd do that."

The stick-man coughs, starts to speak, coughs again.  Lopsided grin.  "Is that any way to talk to a dying man?"

"I don't give a shit what you do.  You were the worst of the lot.  I don't have a thing to say to you."  She turns to leave, before the leaden anesthetic feeling weights her feet in place, before the broken parts inside her weigh her heart down.  While she can still move.

The stick-man rasps a sigh, presses his head back into his pillow.  "Then why did you come all this way to see me?"

Laura stops without looking back.  "No reason at all."  Not good enough.  She turns — his deep, gray-green eyes — and has to force her prepared words out:  "Just a little friendly advice."

Deep breath:  "Drop dead."

She closes the door behind her with perfect silence.

###

After her brilliant, cutting exit, what a shock to see Eric flush and laughing on the front stoop.

"You're dying," she tells him, and at the dining-room table, and in the red chair, and in the back bedroom, and at the kitchen sink.  "Just die."  Eric laughs and shows her how he can (sloppily) wash with one hand and dry with the other.  All she can do is run again.

A week slides by.

Hard as she tries, she can't forget Eric dying in the hospital, too pitiful for lasting hate.  To keep hate fresh she visits all the really bad ghosts.  They don't hurt as much as the happy ones, the loving ones, but she's always spent less time with them.

In the back room with Donald:  "If you had any sense you wouldn't have encouraged me to risk all my assets!"  Mine too, she thought, but she's helpless against his hurt fury.  "Flat broke and you think the wedding's still on?  Give me the damn ring back and I'll at least have a thousand bucks to start a new life with."  It isn't fair, but the ring clatters at his feet where she threw it at him.  He picks it up without a word and stalks away; though she will wait for months for him to come to his senses, call her, apologize, he never does.  Leaving her in debt, lonely, alone.

The bedroom with Frank:  "I've thought about it," he says.  "I'm going back to my wife."  Wife?  He never mentioned a wife.  She would never have been stupid enough to get involved with a married man.  It was his two jobs and his eternal exercise that kept his visits so erratic.  "Of course I never told you I was married — we were going to get a divorce.  You didn't need to know."  He's pulling on his pants, not looking at her.  His skin damp with sweat from their lovemaking.  "But Sheila's pregnant now.  I can't leave her."  Too stunned to move, the hair on her thighs drying stiffly, she had stared at him leaving.

And Eric.  Over and over, Eric.  "We've had fun, Laura, but this is a job.   My future.  Don't get emotional over this, okay?  It was fun."

Harder to make these ghosts hurt than the happy ones.  She wants the beautiful ghosts, for all she knows about them.  These betrayers are strangers, strangers.  She stares and stares at them.

The same feeling she's ever had on betrayal: numb.  Just numb.

She doesn't miss the men who left.  She misses ones she loves, and hates: the lovers who once stayed.  If only they would go away now.  Go away, leave her in peace.

The pain stays.

She thinks about what Eric said about beating him to the other side.  She goes out the next Saturday, buys a tiny gun from a local pawn shop and contemplates it for a long hour, Frank sleeping at her elbow where the bed used to be two years ago.  Contemplates it until the plastic pearl handle sticks warmly to her fingers.  But death is a land of ghosts, and how is someone who can't manage the ghosts of life to manage all the ghosts of death?

Or maybe she's just a coward.

Unable to point it at her own head, she turns it on sleeping Frank.

"Bang," she says.  Frank snores softly.

She crosses the room to where Donald is destroying the Venetian blind, futilely trying to rehang it.  Aims.  "Bang."  The blind crashes to the floor and Donald, laughing, scoops it up.  She walks into the living room and aims at the red overchair.

Eric isn't there.

Laura drops the gun.  Somehow, it doesn't go off.

Somehow, Eric isn't there.

She approaches the chair slowly, afraid of things she can't guess at.

Just a chair.  Empty.

She runs into the dining room, too fast to follow the side-to-side pattern, flashing past two Donalds and a Frank.  Reaches the dining-room table.

Empty.

The back bedroom.  The guest bed only ever shared with one person.

Empty.

The sink, where Donald or Frank never did dishes.

Empty.

Panicking, she runs outside to the front stoop.  No roses wait for her there.

Back to the chair.  She rips off the cushion, looking for she doesn't know what.  Shakes the empty chair.  Shakes it shakes it shakes it.  Wrenches the chair back and forth with hysteric echoing clatters.

The phone rings.  Laura jumps as though the gun were firing.  She grips one velvet chair arm with each hand, presses her forehead into the back of the chair, breathes deeply.  The phone keeps ringing.  Trembling, she picks up the receiver.

"Ms. Hampton?" asks a strange voice.  Not Eric.  Not Eric.

"Yes?"  Her voice is a squeak.  She tries again.  "Yes."

"I'm sorry to bother you.  My name's Bill Chang.  You don't know me.  I was Eric Kennelly's roommate."

"Yes?"

"Um, well, your name is on this list he wanted me to call when — Ms. Hampton, I'm calling to tell you he passed away this afternoon."

"Yes."

"Um, I'm sorry to have to tell you this like this.  I wish we could talk, but he's got all these cousins, and he really wanted me to make all these calls — "

"Yes."

"I know this is a terrible thing to hear from a stranger — "

"When did it happen?"

"What?  Oh, I'm sorry.  Less than an hour ago.  I just talked to his parents.  Do you want to know when the funeral is?"

"No.  Thank you, Mr. Chang.  Goodbye."

She hangs up the phone.  The red chair is a little out of place.  She replaces the cushion and pushes the chair gently to its proper bit of wall.  Sits in it.  So comfortable.  So empty.

The little pawnshop gun lies at her foot.  She picks it up and wipes cold sweat from its handle.  It really is a nice little gun; it fits sweetly in her hand.

Sitting in the empty red chair with the sweet little gun feels better than she's felt in a year.  Longer.  She shuts her eyes and luxuriates in the wonder of having a third of her home back to herself.  No more paper plates — she can use the sink.  She can eat at the table.  She can sleep on the guest bed.  Reborn possibilities warm her, spread from her heart to tingle in every limb, flow through her hand to warm the sweet little gun.

Later she picks up the phone and dials a memorized number she's never phoned before.

"Mrs. Prescott?" she says pleasantly.  "Hi.  You don't know me.  I'm an old friend of your husband Frank's.  Could you tell him I've run into a few old things of his around my place I'd like him to come pick up?  — Whenever's convenient.  Thanks so much."

She stretches back in the red overchair, listening to Mrs. Prescott telling her when Frank can come over, right hand wrapped comfortably around warm plastic grip.

"Yes, that'll be a big help."  Laura smiles.  "I'm just trying to clear out the house."

EVEN THE QUEEN

Connie Willis

The phone sang as I was looking over the defense's motion to dismiss.  "It's the universal ring," my law clerk Bysshe said, reaching for it.  "It's probably the defendant.  They don't let you use signatures from jail."

"No, it's not," I said.  "It's my mother."

"Oh."  Bysshe reached for the receiver.  "Why isn't she using her signature?"

"Because she knows I don't want to talk to her.  She must have found out what Perdita's done."

"Your daughter Perdita?" he asked, holding the receiver against his chest.  "The one with the little girl?"

"No, that's Viola.  Perdita's my younger daughter.  The one with no sense."

"What's she done?"

"She's joined the Cyclists."

Bysshe looked enquiringly blank, but I was not in the mood to enlighten him.  Or in the mood to talk to Mother.  "I know exactly what Mother will say.  She'll ask me why I didn't tell her, and then she'll demand to know what I'm going to do about it, and there is nothing I can do about it, or I obviously would have done it already."

Bysshe looked bewildered.  "Do you want me to tell her you're in court?"

"No."  I reached for the receiver.  "I'll have to talk to her sooner or later."  I took it from him.  "Hello, Mother," I said.

"Traci," Mother said dramatically, "Perdita has become a Cyclist."

"I know."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I thought Perdita should tell you herself."

"Perdita!"  She snorted.  "She wouldn't tell me.  She knows what I'd have to say about it.  I suppose you told Karen."

"Karen's not here.  She's in Iraq."  The only good thing about this whole debacle was that thanks to Iraq's eagerness to show it was a responsible world community member and its previous penchant for self-destruction, my mother-in-law was in the one place on the planet where the phone service was bad enough that I could claim I'd tried to call her but couldn't get through, and she'd have to believe me.

The Liberation has freed us from all sorts of indignities and scourges, including Iraq's Saddams, but mothers-in-law aren't one of them, and I was almost happy with Perdita for her excellent timing.  When I didn't want to kill her.

"What's Karen doing in Iraq?" Mother asked.

"Negotiating a Palestinian homeland."

"And meanwhile her granddaughter is ruining her life," she said irrelevantly.  "Did you tell Viola?

"I told you, Mother.  I thought Perdita should tell all of you herself."

"Well, she didn't.  And this morning one of my patients, Carol Chen, called me and demanded to know what I was keeping from her.  I had no idea what she was talking about."

"How did Carol Chen find out?"

"From her daughter, who almost joined the Cyclists last year.  Her family talked her out of it," she said accusingly.  "Carol was convinced the medical community had discovered some terrible side-effect of ammenerol and were covering it up.  I cannot believe you didn't tell me, Traci."

And I cannot believe I didn't have Bysshe tell her I was in court, I thought.  "I told you Mother.  I thought it was Perdita's place to tell you.  After all, it's her decision."

"Oh, Traci!" Mother said.  "You cannot mean that!"

In the first fine flush of freedom after the Liberation, I had entertained hopes that it would change everything--that it would somehow do away with inequality and matriarchal dominance and those humorless women determined to eliminate the word "manhole" and third-person singular pronouns from the language.

Of course it didn't.  Men still make more money, "herstory" is still a blight on the semantic landscape, and my mother can still say, "Oh, Traci!" in a tone that reduces me to pre-adolescence.

"Her decision!" Mother said.  "Do you mean to tell me you plan to stand idly by and allow your daughter to make the mistake of her life?"

"What can I do?  She's twenty-two years old and of sound mind."

"If she were of sound mind she wouldn't be doing this.  Didn't you try to talk her out of it?"

"Of course I did, Mother."

"And?"

"And I didn't succeed.  She's determined to become a Cyclist."

"Well, there must be something we can do.  Get an injunction or hire a deprogrammer or sue the Cyclists for brainwashing.  You're a judge, there must be some law you can invoke--"

"The law is called personal sovereignty, Mother, and since it was what made the Liberation possible in the first place, it can hardly be used against Perdita.  Her decision meets all the criteria for a case of personal sovereignty:  it's a personal decision, it was made by a sovereign adult, it affects no one else--"

"What about my practice?  Carol Chen is convinced shunts cause cancer."

"Any effect on your practice is considered an indirect effect.  Like secondary smoke.  It doesn't apply.  Mother, whether we like it or not, Perdita has a perfect right to do this, and we don't have any right to interfere.  A free society has to be based on respecting others' opinions and leaving each other alone.  We have to respect Perdita's right to make her own decisions."

All of which was true.  It was too bad I hadn't said any of it to Perdita when she called.  What I had said, in a tone that sounded exactly like my mother's, was "Oh, Perdita!"

"This is all your fault, you know," Mother said.  "I told you you shouldn't have let her get that tattoo over her shunt.  And don't tell me it's a free society.  What good is a free society when it allows my granddaughter to ruin her life?"  She hung up.

I handed the receiver back to Bysshe.

"I really liked what you said about respecting your daughter's right to make her own decisions," he said.  He held out my robe.  "And about not interfering in her life."

"I want you to research the precedents on deprogramming for me," I said, sliding my arms in the sleeves.  "And find out if the Cyclists have been charged with any free choice violations-- brainwashing, intimidation, coercion."

The phone sang, another universal.  "Hello, who's calling?" Bysshe said cautiously.  His voice became suddenly friendlier.  "Just a minute."  He put his hand over the receiver.  "It's your daughter Viola."

I took the receiver.  "Hello, Viola."

"I just talked to Grandma," she said.  "You will not believe what Perdita's done now.  She's joined the Cyclists."

"I know," I said.

"You know?  And you didn't tell me?  I can't believe this.  You never tell me anything."

"I thought Perdita should tell you herself," I said tiredly.

"Are you kidding?  She never tells me anything either.  That time she had eyebrow implants she didn't tell me for three weeks, and when she got the laser tattoo she didn't tell me at all.  Twidge told me.  You should have called me.  Did you tell Grandma Karen?"

"She's in Baghdad," I said.

"I know," Viola said.  "I called her."

"Oh, Viola, you didn't!"

"Unlike you, Mom, I believe in telling members of our family about matters that concern them."

"What did she say?" I asked, a kind of numbness settling over me now that the shock had worn off.

"I couldn't get through to her.  The phone service over there is terrible.  I got somebody who didn't speak English, and then I got cut off, and when I tried again they said the whole city was down."

Thank you, I breathed silently.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

"Grandma Karen has a right to know, Mother.  Think of the effect this could have on Twidge.  She thinks Perdita's wonderful.  When Perdita got the eyebrow implants, Twidge glued LED's to hers, and I almost never got them off.  What if Twidge decides to join the Cyclists, too?"

"Twidge is only nine.  By the time she's supposed to get her shunt, Perdita will have long since quit."  I hope, I added silently.  Perdita had had the tattoo for a year and a half now and showed no signs of tiring of it.  "Besides, Twidge has more sense."

"It's true.  Oh, Mother, how could Perdita do this?  Didn't you tell her about how awful it was?"

"Yes," I said.  "And inconvenient.  And unpleasant and unbalancing and painful.  None of it made the slightest impact on her.  She told me she thought it would be fun."

Bysshe was pointing to his watch and mouthing, "Time for court."

"Fun!" Viola said.  "When she saw what I went through that time? Honestly, Mother, sometimes I think she's completely brain-dead.  Can't you have her declared incompetent and locked up or something?"

"No," I said, trying to zip up my robe with one hand.  "Viola, I have to go.  I'm late for court.  I'm afraid there's nothing we can do to stop her.  She's a rational adult."

"Rational!" Viola said.  "Her eyebrows light up, Mother.  She has Custer's Last Stand lased on her arm."

I handed the phone to Bysshe.  "Tell Viola I'll talk to her tomorrow."  I zipped up my robe.  "And then call Baghdad and see how long they expect the phones to be out."  I started into the courtroom.  "And if there are any more universal calls, make sure they're local before you answer."

###

Bysshe couldn't get through to Baghdad, which I took as a good sign, and my mother-in-law didn't call.  Mother did, in the afternoon, to ask if lobotomies were legal.

She called again the next day.  I was in the middle of my Personal Sovereignty class, explaining the inherent right of citizens in a free society to make complete jackasses of themselves.  They weren't buying it.

"I think it's your mother," Bysshe whispered to me as he handed me the phone.  "She's still using the universal.  But it's local.  I checked."

"Hello, Mother," I said.

"It's all arranged," Mother said.  "We're having lunch with Perdita at McGregor's.  It's on the corner of Twelfth Street and Larimer."

"I'm in the middle of class," I said.

"I know.  I won't keep you.  I just wanted to tell you not to worry.  I've taken care of everything."

I didn't like the sound of that.  "What have you done?"

"Invited Perdita to lunch with us.  I told you.  At McGregor's."

"Who is 'us', Mother?"

"Just the family," she said innocently.  "You and Viola."

Well, at least she hadn't brought in the deprogrammer.  Yet.  "What are you up to, Mother?"

"Perdita said the same thing.  Can't a grandmother ask her granddaughters to lunch?  Be there at twelve-thirty."

"Bysshe and I have a court calendar meeting at three."

"Oh, we'll be done by then.  And bring Bysshe with you.  He can provide a man's point of view."

She hung up.

"You'll have to go to lunch with me, Bysshe," I said.  "Sorry."

"Why?  What's going to happen at lunch?"

"I have no idea."

*****

On the way over to McGregor's, Bysshe told me what he'd found out about the Cyclists.  "They're not a cult.  There's no religious connection.  They seem to have grown out of a pre- Liberation women's group," he said, looking at his notes, "although there are also links to the pro-choice movement, the University of Wisconsin, and the Museum of Modern Art."

"What?"

"They call their group leaders 'docents.'  Their philosophy seems to be a mix of pre-Liberation radical feminism and the environmental primitivism of the eighties.  They're floratarians and they don't wear shoes."

"Or shunts," I said.  We pulled up in front of McGregor's and got out of the car.  "Any mind control convictions?" I asked hopefully.

"No.  A bunch of suits against individual members, all of which they won."

"On grounds of personal sovereignty."

"Yeah.  And a criminal one by a member whose family tried to deprogram her.  The deprogrammer was sentenced to twenty years, and the family got twelve."

"Be sure to tell Mother about that one," I said, and opened the door to McGregor's.

It was one of those restaurants with a morning glory vine twining around the maitre d's desk and garden plots between the tables.

"Perdita suggested it," Mother said, guiding Bysshe and I past the onions to our table.  "She told me a lot of the Cyclists are floratarians."

"Is she here?" I asked, sidestepping a cucumber frame.

"Not yet."  She pointed past a rose arbor.  "There's our table."

Our table was a wicker affair under a mulberry tree.  Viola and Twidge were seated on the far side next to a trellis of runner beans, looking at menus.

"What are you doing here, Twidge?" I asked.  "Why aren't you in school?"

"I am," she said, holding up her LCD slate.  "I'm remoting today."

"I thought she should be part of this discussion," Viola said.  "After all, she'll be getting her shunt soon."

"My friend Kensy says she isn't going to get one, like Perdita," Twidge said.

"I'm sure Kensy will change her mind when the time comes," Mother said.  "Perdita will change hers, too.  Bysshe, why don't you sit next to Viola?"

Bysshe slid obediently past the trellis and sat down in the wicker chair at the far end of the table.  Twidge reached across Viola and handed him a menu. "This is a great restaurant," she said.  "You don't have to wear shoes."  She held up a bare foot to illustrate.  "And if you get hungry while you're waiting, you can just pick something."  She twisted around in her chair, picked two of the green beans, gave one to Bysshe, and bit into the other one.  "I bet she doesn't.  Kensy says a shunt hurts worse than braces."

"It doesn't hurt as much as not having one," Viola said, shooting me a Now-Do-You-See-What-My-Sister's-Caused? look.

"Traci, why don't you sit across from Viola?" Mother said to me.  "And we'll put Perdita next to you when she comes."

"If she comes," Viola said.

"I told her one o'clock," Mother said, sitting down at the near end.  "So we'd have a chance to plan our strategy before she gets here.  I talked to Carol Chen--"

"Her daughter nearly joined the Cyclists last year," I explained to Bysshe and Viola.

"She said they had a family gathering, like this, and simply talked to her daughter, and she decided she didn't want to be a Cyclist after all."  She looked around the table.  "So I thought we'd do the same thing with Perdita.  I think we should start by explaining the significance of the Liberation and the days of dark oppression that preceded it--"

"I think," Viola interrupted, "we should try to talk her into just going off the ammenerol for a few months instead of having the shunt removed.  If she comes.  Which she won't."

"Why not?"

"Would you?  I mean, it's like the Inquisition.  Her sitting here while all of us 'explain' at her.  Perdita may be crazy, but she's not stupid."

"It's hardly the Inquisition," Mother said.  She looked anxiously past me toward the door.  "I'm sure Perdita--"  She stopped, stood up, and plunged off suddenly through the asparagus.

I turned around, half-expecting Perdita with light-up lips or a full-body tattoo, but I couldn't see through the leaves.  I pushed at the branches.

"Is it Perdita?" Viola said, leaning forward.

I peered around the mulberry bush.  "Oh, my God," I said.

It was my mother-in-law, wearing a black abayah and a silk yarmulke.  She swept toward us through a pumpkin patch, robes billowing and eyes flashing.  Mother hurried in her wake of trampled radishes, looking daggers at me.

I turned them on Viola.  "It's your grandmother Karen," I said accusingly.  "You told me you didn't get through to her."

"I didn't," she said.  "Twidge, sit up straight.  And put your slate down."

There was an ominous rustling in the rose arbor, as of leaves shrinking back in terror, and my mother-in-law arrived.

"Karen!" I said, trying to sound pleased.  "What on earth are you doing here?  I thought you were in Baghdad."

"I came back as soon as I got Viola's message," she said, glaring at everyone in turn.  "Who's this?" she demanded, pointing at Bysshe.  "Viola's new livein?"

"No!" Bysshe said, looking horrified.

"This is my law clerk, Mother," I said.  "Bysshe Adams-Hardy."

"Twidge, why aren't you in school?"

"I am," Twidge said.  "I'm remoting."  She held up her slate.  "See?  Math."

"I see," she said, turning to glower at me.  "It's a serious enough matter to require my great-grandchild's being pulled out of school and the hiring of legal assistance, and yet you didn't deem it important enough to notify me.  Of course, you never tell me anything, Traci."

She swirled herself into the end chair, sending leaves and sweet pea blossoms flying and decapitating the broccoli centerpiece.  "I didn't get Viola's cry for help until yesterday.  Viola, you should never leave messages with Hassim.  His English is virtually nonexistent.  I had to get him to hum me your ring. I recognized your signature, but the phones were out, so I flew home.  In the middle of negotiations, I might add."

"How are negotiations going, Grandma Karen?" Viola asked.

"They were going extremely well.  The Israelis have given the Palestinians half of Jerusalem, and they've agreed to time-share the Golan Heights."  She turned to glare momentarily at me.  "They know the importance of communication."  She turned back to Viola.  "So why are they picking on you, Viola?  Don't they like your new livein?"

"I am not her livein," Bysshe protested.

I have often wondered how on earth my mother-in-law became a mediator and what she does in all those negotiation sessions with Serbs and Catholics and North and South Koreans and Protestants and Croats.  She takes sides, jumps to conclusions, misinterprets everything you say, refuses to listen.  And yet she talked South Africa into a Mandelan government and would probably get the Palestinians to observe Yom Kippur.  Maybe she just bullies everyone into submission.  Or maybe they have to band together to protect themselves against her.

Bysshe was still protesting.  "I never even met Viola till today.  I've only talked to her on the phone a couple of times."

"You must have done something," Karen said to Viola.  "They're obviously out for your blood."

"Not mine," Viola said.  "Perdita's.  She's joined the Cyclists."

"The Cyclists?  I left the West Bank negotiations because you don't approve of Perdita joining a biking club?  How am I supposed to explain this to the president of Iraq?  She will not understand, and neither do I.  A biking club!"  "The Cyclists do not ride bicycles," Mother said.

"They menstruate," Twidge said.

There was a dead silence of at least a minute, and I thought, it's finally happened.  My mother-in-law and I are actually going to be on the same side of a family argument.

"All this fuss is over Perdita's having her shunt removed?" Karen said finally.  "She's of age, isn't she?  And this is obviously a case where personal sovereignty applies.  You should know that, Traci.  After all, you're a judge."

I should have known it was too good to be true.

"You mean you approve of her setting back the Liberation twenty years?" Mother said.

"I hardly think it's that serious," Karen said.  "There are anti-shunt groups in the Middle East, too, you know, but no one takes them seriously.  Not even the Iraqis, and they still wear the veil."

"Perdita is taking them seriously."

Karen dismissed Perdita with a wave of her black sleeve.  "They're a trend, a fad.  Like microskirts.  Or those dreadful electronic eyebrows.  A few women wear silly fashions like that for a little while, but you don't see women as a whole giving up pants or going back to wearing hats."

"But Perdita..." Viola said.

"If Perdita wants to have her period, I say let her.  Women functioned perfectly well without shunts for thousands of years."

Mother brought her fist down on the table.  "Women also functioned perfectly well with concubinage, cholera and corsets," she said, emphasizing each word with her fist.  "But that is no reason to take them on voluntarily, and I have no intention of allowing Perdita--"

"Speaking of Perdita, where is the poor child?" Karen said.

"She'll be here any minute," Mother said.  "I invited her to lunch so we could discuss this with her."

"Ha!" Karen said.  "So you could browbeat her into changing her mind, you mean.  Well, I have no intention of collaborating with you.  I intend to listen to the poor thing's point of view with interest and an open mind.  Respect, that's the key word, and one you all seem to have forgotten.  Respect and common courtesy."

A barefoot young woman wearing a flowered smock and a red scarf tied around her left arm came up to the table with a sheaf of pink folders.

"It's about time," Karen said, snatching one of the folders away from her.  "Your service here is dreadful.  I've been sitting here ten minutes."  She snapped the folder open.  "I don't suppose you have Scotch."

"My name is Evangeline," the young woman said.  "I'm Perdita's docent."  She took the folder away from Karen.  "She wasn't able to join you for lunch, but she asked me to come in her place and explain the Cyclist philosophy to you."

She sat down in the wicker chair next to me.

"The Cyclists are dedicated to freedom," she said.  "Freedom from artificiality, freedom from body-controlling drugs and hormones, freedom from the male patriarchy that attempts to impose them on us.  As you probably already know, we do not wear shunts."

She pointed to the red scarf around her arm.  "Instead, we wear this as a badge of our freedom and our femaleness.  I'm wearing it today to announce that my time of fertility has come."

"We had that, too," Mother said, "only we wore it on the back of our skirts."

I laughed.

The docent glared at me.  "Male domination of women's bodies began long before the so-called 'Liberation', with government regulation of abortion and fetal rights, scientific control of fertility, and finally the development of ammenerol, which eliminated the reproductive cycle altogether.  This was all part of a carefully-planned takeover of women's bodies, and by extension, their identities, by the male patriarchal regime."

"What an interesting point of view!" Karen said enthusiastically.

It certainly was.  In point of fact, ammenerol hadn't been invented to eliminate menstruation at all.  It had been developed for shrinking malignant tumors, and its uterine lining-absorbing properties had only been discovered by accident.

"Are you trying to tell us," Mother said, "that men forced shunts on women?!  We had to fight everyone to get it approved by the FDA!"

It was true.  What surrogate mothers and anti-abortionists and the fetal rights issue had failed to do in uniting women, the prospect of not having to menstruate did.  Women had organized rallies, petitions, elected senators, passed amendments, been excommunicated, and gone to jail, all in the name of Liberation.

"Men were against it," Mother said, getting rather red in the face.  "And the religious right and the tampon manufacturers, and the Catholic church--"

"They knew they'd have to allow women priests," Viola said.

"Which they did," I said.

"The Liberation hasn't freed you," the docent said loudly.  "Except from the natural rhythms of your life, the very wellspring of your femaleness."

She leaned over and picked a daisy that was growing under the table.  "We in the Cyclists celebrate the onset of our menses and rejoice in our bodies," she said, holding the daisy up.  "Whenever a Cyclist comes into blossom, as we call it, she is honored with flowers and poems and songs.  Then we join hands and tell what we like best about our menses."

"Water retention," I said.

"Or lying in bed with a heating pad for three days a month," Mother said.

"I think I like the anxiety attacks best," Viola said.  "When I went off the ammenerol, so I could have Twidge, I'd have these days where I was convinced the space station was going to fall on me."

A middle-aged woman in overalls and a straw hat had come over while Viola was talking and was standing next to Mother's chair.  "I had these mood swings," she said.  "One minute I'd feel cheerful and the next like Lizzie Borden."

"Who's Lizzie Borden?" Twidge asked.

"She killed her parents," Bysshe said.  "With an ax."

Karen and the docent glared at both of them.  "Aren't you supposed to be working on your math, Twidge?"

"I've always wondered if Lizzie Borden had PMS," Viola said, "and that was why--"

"No," Mother said.  "It was having to live before tampons and ibuprofen.  An obvious case of justifiable homicide."

"I hardly think this sort of levity is helpful," Karen said, glowering at everyone.

"Are you our waitress?" I asked the straw-hatted woman hastily.

"Yes," she said, producing a slate from her overalls pocket.

"Do you serve wine?" I asked.

"Yes.  Dandelion, cowslip, and primrose."

"We'll take them all."

"A bottle of each?"

"For now.  Unless you have them in kegs."

"Our specials today are watermelon salad and choufleur  gratine," she said, smiling at everyone.  Karen and the docent did not smile back.  "You hand-pick your own cauliflower from the patch up front.  The floratarian special is sautéed lily buds with marigold butter."

There was a temporary truce while everyone ordered.  "I'll have the sweet peas," the docent said, "and a glass of rose water."

Bysshe leaned over to Viola.  "I'm sorry I sounded so horrified when your grandmother asked if I was your livein," he said.

"That's okay," Viola said.  "Grandma Karen can be pretty scary."

"I just didn't want you to think I didn't like you.  I do.  Like you, I mean."

"Don't they have soyburgers?" Twidge asked.

As soon as the waitress left, the docent began passing out the pink folders she'd brought with her.  "These will explain the working philosophy of the Cyclists," she said, handing me one, "along with practical information on the menstrual cycle."  She handed Twidge one.

"It looks just like those books we used to get in junior high," Mother said, looking at hers.  "'A Special Gift,' they were called, and they had all these pictures of girls with pink ribbons in their hair, playing tennis and smiling.  Blatant misrepresentation."

She was right.  There was even the same drawing of the fallopian tubes I remembered from my middle school movie, a drawing that had always reminded me of Alien in the early stages.

"Oh, yuck," Twidge said.  "This is disgusting."

"Do your math," Karen said.

Bysshe looked sick.  "Did women really do this stuff?"

The wine arrived, and I poured everyone a large glass.  The docent pursed her lips disapprovingly and shook her head.  "The Cyclists do not use the artificial stimulants or hormones that the male patriarchy has forced on women to render them docile and subservient."

"How long do you menstruate?" Twidge asked.

"Forever," Mother said.

"Four to six days," the docent said.  "It's there in the booklet."

"No, I mean, your whole life or what?"

"A woman has her menarche at twelve years old on the average and ceases menstruating at age fifty-five."

"I had my first period at eleven," the waitress said, setting a bouquet down in front of me.  "At school."

"I had my last one on the day the FDA approved ammenerol," Mother said.

"Three hundred and sixty-five divided by twenty-eight," Twidge said, writing on her slate.  "Times forty-three years."  She looked up.  "That's five hundred and fifty-nine periods."

"That can't be right," Mother said, taking the slate away from her.  "It's at least five thousand."

"And they all start on the day you leave on a trip," Viola said.

"Or get married," the waitress said.  Mother began writing on the slate.

I took advantage of the ceasefire to pour everyone some more dandelion wine.

Mother looked up from the slate.  "Do you realize with a period of five days, you'd be menstruating for nearly three thousand days?  That's over eight solid years."

"And in between there's PMS," the waitress said, delivering flowers.

"What's PMS?" Twidge asked.

"Pre-menstrual syndrome was the name the male medical establishment fabricated for the natural variation in hormonal levels that signal the onset of menstruation," the docent said.  "This mild and entirely normal fluctuation was exaggerated by men into a debility."  She looked at Karen for confirmation.

"I used to cut my hair," Karen said.

The docent looked uneasy.

"Once I chopped off one whole side," Karen went on.  "Bob had to hide the scissors every month.  And the car keys.  I'd start to cry every time I hit a red light."

"Did you swell up?" Mother asked, pouring Karen another glass of dandelion wine.

"I looked just like Orson Welles."

"Who's Orson Welles?" Twidge asked.

"Your comments reflect the self-loathing thrust on you by the patriarchy," the docent said.  "Men have brainwashed women into thinking menstruation is evil and unclean.  Women even called their menses 'the curse' because they accepted men's judgment."

"I called it the curse because I thought a witch must have laid a curse on me," Viola said.  "Like in 'Sleeping Beauty.'"

Everyone looked at her.

"Well, I did," she said.  "It was the only reason I could think of for such an awful thing happening to me."  She handed the folder back to the docent.  "It still is."

"I think you were awfully brave," Bysshe said to Viola, "going off the ammenerol to have Twidge."

"It was awful," Viola said.  "You can't imagine."

Mother sighed.  "When I got my period, I asked my mother if Annette had it, too."

"Who's Annette?" Twidge said.

"A Mouseketeer," Mother said and added, at Twidge's uncomprehending look.  "On TV."

"High-rez," Viola said.

"The Mickey Mouse Club," Mother said.

"There was a high-rezzer called the Mickey Mouse Club?" Twidge said incredulously.

"They were days of dark oppression in many ways," I said.

Mother glared at me.  "Annette was every young girl's ideal," she said to Twidge.  "Her hair was curly, she had actual breasts, her pleated skirt was always pressed, and I could not imagine that she could have anything so messy and undignified.  Mr. Disney would never have allowed it.  And if Annette didn't have one, I wasn't going to have one either.  So I asked my mother--"

"What did she say?" Twidge cut in.

"She said every woman had periods," Mother said.  "So I asked her, " 'Even the Queen of England?' And she said, 'Even the Queen.'"

"Really?" Twidge said.  "But she's so old!"

"She isn't having it now," the docent said irritatedly.  "I told you, menopause occurs at age fifty-five."

"And then you have hot flashes," Karen said, "and osteoporosis and so much hair on your upper lip you look like Mark Twain."

"Who's--" Twidge said.

"You are simply reiterating negative male propaganda," the docent interrupted, looking very red in the face.

"You know what I've always wondered?" Karen said, leaning conspiratorially close to Mother.  "If Maggie Thatcher's menopause was responsible for the Falklands War."

"Who's Maggie Thatcher?" Twidge said.

The docent, who was now as red in the face as her scarf, stood up.  "It is clear there is no point in trying to talk to you.  You've all been completely brainwashed by the male patriarchy."  She began grabbing up her folders.  "You're blind, all of you!  You don't even see that you're victims of a male conspiracy to deprive you of your biological identity, of your very womanhood.  The Liberation wasn't a liberation at all.  It was only another kind of slavery!"

"Even if that were true," I said, "even if it had been a conspiracy to bring us under male domination, it would have been worth it."

"She's right, you know," Karen said to Mother.  "Traci's absolutely right.  There are some things worth giving up anything for, even your freedom, and getting rid of your period is definitely one of them."

"Victims!" the docent shouted.  "You've been stripped of your femininity, and you don't even care!"  She stomped out, destroying several squash and a row of gladiolas in the process.

"You know what I hated most before the Liberation?" Karen said, pouring the last of the dandelion wine into her glass.  "Sanitary belts."

"And those cardboard tampon applicators," Mother said.

"I'm never going to join the Cyclists," Twidge said.

"Good," I said.

"Can I have dessert?"

I called the waitress over, and Twidge ordered sugared violets.  "Anyone else want dessert?" I asked.  "Or more primrose wine?"

"I think it's wonderful the way you're trying to help your sister," Bysshe said, leaning close to Viola.

"And those Modess ads," Mother said.  "You remember, with those glamorous women in satin brocade evening dresses and long white gloves, and below the picture was written, 'Modess, because...'  I thought Modess was a perfume."

Karen giggled.  "I thought it was a brand of champagne!"

"I don't think we'd better have any more wine," I said.

###

The phone started singing the minute I got to my chambers the next morning, the universal ring.

"Karen went back to Iraq, didn't she?" I asked Bysshe.

"Yeah," he said.  "Viola said there was some snag over whether to put Disneyland on the West Bank or not."

"When did Viola call?"

Bysshe looked sheepish.  "I had breakfast with her and Twidge this morning."

"Oh."  I picked up the phone.  "It's probably Mother with a plan to kidnap Perdita.  Hello?"

"This is Evangeline, Perdita's docent," the voice on the phone said.  "I hope you're happy.  You've bullied Perdita into surrendering to the enslaving male patriarchy."

"I have?" I said.

"You've obviously employed mind control, and I want you to know we intend to file charges."  She hung up.  The phone rang again immediately, another universal.

"What is the good of signatures when no one of ever uses them?" I said and picked up the phone.

"Hi, Mom," Perdita said.  "I thought you'd want to know I've changed my mind about joining the Cyclists."

"Really?" I said, trying not to sound jubilant.

"I found out they wear this red scarf thing on their arm.  It covers up Sitting Bull's horse."

"That is a problem," I said.

"Well, that's not all.  My docent told me about your lunch.  Did Grandma Karen really tell you you were right?"

"Yes."

"Gosh!  I didn't believe that part.  Well, anyway, my docent said you wouldn't listen to her about how great menstruating is, that you all kept talking about the negative aspects of it, like bloating and cramps and crabbiness, and I said, 'What are cramps?' and she said, 'Menstrual bleeding frequently causes headaches and depression,' and I said, 'Bleeding!?  Nobody ever said anything about bleeding!' Why didn't you tell me there was blood involved, Mother?"

I had, but I felt it wiser to keep silent.

"And you didn't say a word about its being painful.  And all the hormone fluctuations!  Anybody'd have to be crazy to want to go through that when they didn't have to!  How did you stand it before the Liberation?"

"They were days of dark oppression," I said.

"I guess!  Well, anyway, I quit and now my docent is really mad.  But I told her it was a case of personal sovereignty, and she has to respect my decision.  I'm still going to become a floratarian, though, and I don't want you to try to talk me out of it."

"I wouldn't dream of it," I said.

"You know, this whole thing is really your fault, Mom!  If you'd told me about the pain part in the first place, none of this would have happened.  Viola's right!  You never tell us anything!"

ENGLAND UNDERWAY

Terry Bisson

Mr. Fox was, he realized afterward, with a shudder of sudden recognition like that of the man who gives a cup of water to a stranger and finds out hours, or even years later, that it was Napoleon, perhaps the first to notice. Perhaps. At least no one else in Brighton seemed to be looking at the sea that day. He was taking his constitutional on the Boardwalk, thinking of Lizzie Eustace and her diamonds, the people in novels becoming increasingly more real to him as the people in the everyday (or "real") world grew more remote, when he noticed that the waves seemed funny.

"Look," he said to Anthony, who accompanied him everywhere, which was not far, his customary world being circumscribed by the Boardwalk to the south, Mrs. Oldenshield's to the east, the cricket grounds to the north, and the Pig & Thistle, where he kept a room—or more precisely, a room kept him, and had since 1956—to the west.

"Woof?" said Anthony, in what might have been a quizzical tone.

"The waves," said Mr. Fox. "They seem—well, odd, don't they? Closer together?"

"Woof."

"Well, perhaps not. Could be just my imagination."

Fact is, waves had always looked odd to Mr. Fox. Odd and tiresome and sinister. He enjoyed the Boardwalk but he never walked on the beach proper, not only because he disliked the shifty quality of the sand but because of the waves with their ceaseless back-and-forth. He didn't understand why the sea had to toss about so. Rivers didn't make all that fuss, and they were actually going somewhere. The movement of the waves seemed to suggest that something was stirring things up, just beyond the horizon. Which was what Mr. Fox had always suspected in his heart; which was why he had never visited his sister in America.

"Perhaps the waves have always looked funny and I have just never noticed," said Mr. Fox. If indeed "funny" was the word for something so odd.

At any rate, it was almost half past four. Mr. Fox went to Mrs. Oldenshield's, and with a pot of tea and a plate of shortbread biscuits placed in front of him, read his daily Trollope—he had long ago decided to read all forty-seven novels in exactly the order, and at about the rate, in which they had been written—then fell asleep for twenty minutes. When he awoke (and no one but he knew he was sleeping) and closed the book, Mrs. Oldenshield put it away for him, on the high shelf where the complete set, bound in morocco, resided in state. Then Mr. Fox walked to the cricket ground, so that Anthony might run with the boys and their kites until dinner was served at the Pig & Thistle. A whisky at nine with Harrison ended what seemed at the time to be an ordinary day.

The next day it all began in earnest.

Mr. Fox awoke to a hubbub of traffic, footsteps, and unintelligible shouts. There was, as usual, no one but himself and Anthony (and of course, the Finn, who cooked) at breakfast; but outside, he found the streets remarkably lively for the time of year. He saw more and more people as he headed downtown, until he was immersed in a virtual sea of humanity. People of all sorts, even Pakistanis and foreigners, not ordinarily much in evidence in Brighton off season.

"What in the world can it be?" Mr. Fox wondered aloud. "I simply can't imagine."

"Woof," said Anthony, who couldn't imagine either, but who was never called upon to do so.

With Anthony in his arms, Mr. Fox picked his way through the crowd along the King's Esplanade until he came to the entrance to the Boardwalk. He mounted the twelve steps briskly. It was irritating to have one's customary way blocked by strangers. The Boardwalk was half filled with strollers who, instead of strolling, were holding on to the rail and looking out to sea. It was mysterious; but then the habits of everyday people had always been mysterious to Mr. Fox; they were so much less likely to stay in character than the people in novels.

The waves were even closer together than they had been the day before; they were piling up as if pulled toward the shore by a magnet. The surf where it broke had the odd character of being a single continuous wave about one and a half feet high. Though it no longer seemed to be rising, the water had risen during the night: it covered half the beach, coming almost up to the seawall just below the Boardwalk.

The wind was quite stout for the season. Off to the left (the east) a dark line was seen on the horizon. It might have been clouds but it looked more solid, like land. Mr. Fox could not remember ever having seen it before, even though he had walked here daily for the past forty-two years.

"Dog?"

Mr. Fox looked to his left. Standing beside him at the rail of the Boardwalk was a large, one might even say portly, African man with an alarming hairdo. He was wearing a tweed coat. An English girl clinging to his arm had asked the question. She was pale with dark, stringy hair, and she wore an oilskin cape that looked wet even though it wasn't raining.

"Beg your pardon?" said Mr. Fox.

"That's a dog?" The girl was pointing toward Anthony.

"Woof."

"Well, of course it's a dog."

"Can't he walk?"

"Of course he can walk. He just doesn't always choose to."

"You bloody wish," said the girl, snorting unattractively and looking away. She wasn't exactly a girl. She could have been twenty.

"Don't mind her," said the African. "Look at that chop, would you."

"Indeed," Mr. Fox said. He didn't know what to make of the girl but he was grateful to the African for starting a conversation. It was often difficult these days; it had become increasingly difficult over the years. "A storm offshore, perhaps?" he ventured.

"A storm?" the African said. "I guess you haven't heard. It was on the telly hours ago. We're making close to two knots now, south and east. Heading around Ireland and out to sea."

"Out to sea?" Mr. Fox looked over his shoulder at the King's Esplanade and the buildings beyond, which seemed as stationary as ever. "Brighton is heading out to sea?"

"You bloody wish," the girl said.

"Not just Brighton, man," the African said. For the first time, Mr. Fox could hear a faint Caribbean lilt in his voice. "England herself is underway."

England underway? How extraordinary. Mr. Fox could see what he supposed was excitement in the faces of the other strollers on the Boardwalk all that day. The wind smelled somehow saltier as he went to take his tea. He almost told Mrs. Oldenshield the news when she brought him his pot and platter; but the affairs of the day, which had never intruded far into her tearoom, receded entirely when he took down his book and began to read. This was (as it turned out) the very day that Lizzie finally read the letter from Mr. Camperdown, the Eustace family lawyer, which she had carried unopened for three days. As Mr. Fox had expected, it demanded that the diamonds be returned to her late husband's family. In response, Lizzie bought a strongbox. That evening, England's peregrinations were all the news on the BBC. The kingdom was heading south into the Atlantic at 1.8 knots, according to the newsmen on the telly over the bar at the Pig & Thistle, where Mr. Fox was accustomed to taking a glass of whisky with Harrison, the barkeep, before retiring. In the sixteen hours hours since the phenomenon had first been detected, England had gone some thirty-five miles, beginning a long turn around Ireland which would carry it into the open sea.

"Ireland is not going?" asked Mr. Fox.

"Ireland has been independent since 19 and 21," said Harrison, who often hinted darkly at having relatives with the IRA. "Ireland is hardly about to be chasing England around the seven seas."

"Well, what about, you know ... ?"

"The Six Counties? The Six Counties have always been a part of Ireland and always will be," said Harrison. Mr. Fox nodded politely and finished his whisky. It was not his custom to argue politics, particularly not with barkeeps, and certainly not with the Irish.

"So I suppose you'll be going home?"

"And lose me job?"

For the next several days, the wave got no higher but it seemed steadier. It was not a chop but a continual smooth wake, streaming across the shore to the east as England began its turn to the west. The cricket ground grew deserted as the boys laid aside their kites and joined the rest of the town at the shore, watching the waves. There was such a crowd on the Boardwalk that several of the shops, which had closed for the season, reopened. Mrs. Oldenshield's was no busier than usual, however, and Mr. Fox was able to forge ahead as steadily in his reading as Mr. Trollope had in his writing. It was not long before Lord Fawn, with something almost of dignity in his gesture and demeanor, declared himself to the young widow Eustace and asked for her hand. Mr. Fox knew Lizzie's diamonds would be trouble, though. He knew something of heirlooms himself. His tiny attic room in the Pig & Thisde had been left to him in perpetuity by the innkeeper, whose life had been saved by Mr. Fox's father during an air raid. A life saved (said the innkeeper, an East Indian, but a Christian, not a Hindu) was a debt never fully paid. Mr. Fox had often wondered where he would have lived if he'd been forced to go out and find a place, like so many in novels did. Indeed, in real life as well. That evening on the telly there was panic in Belfast as the headlands of Scotland slid by, south. Were the Loyalists to be left behind? Everyone was waiting to hear from the King, who was closeted with his advisors.

The next morning, there was a letter on the little table in the downstairs hallway at the Pig & Thistle. Mr. Fox knew as soon as he saw the letter that it was the fifth of the month. His niece, Emily, always mailed her letters from America on the first, and they always arrived on the morning of the fifth.

Mr. Fox opened it, as always, just after tea at Mrs. Oldenshield's. He read the ending first, as always, to make sure there were no surprises. "Wish you could see your great-niece before she's grown," Emily wrote; she wrote the same thing every month. When her mother, Mr. Fox's sister, Clare, had visited after moving to America, it had been his niece she had wanted him to meet. Emily had taken up the same refrain since her mother's death. "Your great-niece will be a young lady soon," she wrote, as if this were somehow Mr. Fox's doing. His only regret was that Emily, in asking him to come to America when her mother died, had asked him to do the one thing he couldn't even contemplate; and so he had been unable to grant her even the courtesy of a refusal. He read all the way back to the opening ("Dear Uncle Anthony") then folded the letter very small; and put it into the box with the others when he got back to his room that evening.

The bar seemed crowded when he came downstairs at nine. The King, in a brown suit with a green and gold tie, was on the telly, sitting in front of a clock in a BBC studio. Even Harrison, never one for royalty, set aside the glasses he was polishing and listened while Charles confirmed that England was, indeed, underway. His words made it official, and there was a polite "hip, hip, hooray" from the three men (two of them strangers) at the end of the bar. The King and his advisors weren't exactly sure when England would arrive, nor, for that matter, where it was going. Scotland and Wales were, of course, coming right along. Parliament would announce time-zone adjustments as necessary. While His Majesty was aware that there was cause for concern about Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man, there was as yet no cause for alarm.

His Majesty, King Charles, spoke for almost half an hour, but Mr. Fox missed much of what he said. His eye had been caught by the date under the clock on the wall behind the King's head. It was the fourth of the month, not the fifth; his niece's letter had arrived a day early! This, even more than the funny waves or the King's speech, seemed to announce that the world was changing. Mr. Fox had a sudden, but not unpleasant, feeling almost of dizziness. After it had passed, and the bar had cleared out, he suggested to Harrison, as he always did at closing time: "Perhaps you'll join me in a whisky"; and as always, Harrison replied, "Don't mind if I do."

He poured two Bells'. Mr. Fox had noticed that when other patrons "bought" Harrison a drink, and the barkeep passed his hand across the bottle and pocketed the tab, the whisky was Bushmills. It was only with Mr. Fox, at closing, that he actually took a drink, and then it was always scotch.

"To your King," said Harrison. "And to plate tectonics."

"Beg your pardon?"

"Plate tectonics, Fox. Weren't you listening when your precious Charles explained why all this was happening? All having to do with movement of the Earth's crust, and such."

"To plate tectonics," said Mr. Fox. He raised his glass to hide his embarrassment. He had in fact heard the words, but had assumed they had to do with plans to protect the household treasures at Buckingham Palace.

Mr. Fox never bought the papers, but the next morning he slowed down to read the headlines as he passed the news stalls. King Charles's picture was on all the front pages, looking confidently into the future.

ENGLAND UNDERWAY AT 2.9 KNOTS;

SCOTLAND, WALES COMING ALONG PEACEFULLY;

CHARLES FIRM AT 'HELM' OF UNITED KINGDOM

read the Daily Alarm. The Economist took a less sanguine view:

CHUNNEL COMPLETION DEIAYED

EEC CALLS EMERGENCY MEETING

Although Northern Ireland was legally and without question part of the United Kingdom, the BBC explained that night, it was for some inexplicable reason apparently remaining with Ireland. The King urged his subjects in Belfast and Londonderry not to panic; arrangements were being made for the evacuation of all who wished it.

The King's address seemed to have a calming effect over the next few days. The streets of Brighton grew quiet once again. The Esplanade and the Boardwalk still saw a few video crews which kept the fish and chips stalls busy; but they bought no souvenirs, and the gift shops all closed again one by one.

"Woof," said Anthony, delighted to find the boys back on the cricket ground with their kites. "Things are getting back to normal," said Mr. Fox. But were they really? The smudge on the eastern horizon was Brittany, according to the newsmen on the telly; next would be the open sea. One shuddered to think of it. Fortunately, there was familiarity and warmth at Mrs. Oldenshield's, where Lizzie was avoiding the Eustace family lawyer, Mr. Camperdown, by retreating to her castle in Ayr. Lord Fawn (urged on by his family) was insisting he couldn't marry her unless she gave up the diamonds. Lizzie's answer was to carry the diamonds with her to Scotland in a strongbox. Later that week, Mr. Fox saw the African again. There was a crowd on the old West Pier, and even though it was beginning to rain, Mr. Fox walked out to the end, where a boat was unloading. It was a sleek hydrofoil, with the Royal Family's crest upon its bow. Two video crews were filming, as sailors in slickers passed an old lady in a wheelchair from the boat to the pier. She was handed an umbrella and a tiny white dog. The handsome young captain of the hydrofoil waved his braided hat as he gunned the motors and pulled away from the pier; the crowd cried "hurrah" as the boat rose on its spidery legs and blasted off into the rain.

"Woof," said Anthony. No one else paid any attention to the old lady, sitting in the wheelchair with a wet, shivering dog on her lap. She had fallen asleep (or perhaps even died!) and dropped her umbrella. Fortunately it wasn't raining.

"That would be the young Prince of Wales," said a familiar voice to Mr. Fox's left. It was the African. According to him (and he seemed to know such things), the Channel Islands and most of the islanders, had been left behind. The hydrofoil had been sent to Guernsey at the Royal Family's private expense to rescue the old lady, who'd had a last-minute change of heart; perhaps she'd wanted to die in England. "He'll be in Portsmouth by five," said the African, pointing to an already far-off plume of spray.

"Is it past four already?" Mr. Fox asked. He realized he had lost track of the time.

"Don't have a watch?" asked the girl, sticking her head around the African's bulk.

Mr. Fox hadn't seen her lurking there. "Haven't really needed one," he said.

"You bloody wish," she said.

"Twenty past, precisely," said the African. "Don't mind her, mate." Mr. Fox had never been called "mate" before. He was pleased that even with all the excitement he hadn't missed his tea. He hurried to Mrs. Oldenshield's, where he found a fox hunt just getting underway at Portray, Lizzie's castle in Scotland. He settled down eagerly to read about it. A fox hunt! Mr. Fox was a believer in the power of names.

The weather began to change; to get, at the same time, warmer and rougher. In the satellite pictures on the telly over the bar at the Pig & Thistle, England was a cloud-dimmed outline that could just as easily have been a drawing as a photo. After squeezing between Ireland and Brittany, like a restless child slipping from the arms of its ancient Celtic parents, it was headed south and west, into the open Atlantic. The waves came no longer at a slant but straight in at the seawall. Somewhat to his surprise, Mr. Fox enjoyed his constitutional more than ever, knowing that he was looking at a different stretch of sea every day, even though it always looked the same. The wind was strong and steady in his face, and the Boardwalk was empty. Even the newsmen were gone—to Scotland, where it had only just been noticed that the Hebrides were being left behind with the Orkneys and the Shetlands. "Arctic islands with their own traditions, languages, and monuments, all mysteriously made of stone," explained the reporter, live from Uig, by remote. The video showed a postman shouting incomprehensibly into the wind and rain.

"What's he saying?" Mr. Fox asked. "Would that be Gaelic?"

"How would I be expected to know?" said Harrison.

A few evenings later, a BBC crew in the Highlands provided the last view of the continent: the receding headlands of Brittany seen from the 3,504-foot summit of Ben Hope, on a bright, clear day. "It's a good thing," Mr. Fox joked to Anthony the next day, "that Mrs. Oldenshield has laid in plenty of Hyson." This was the green tea Mr. Fox preferred. She had laid in dog biscuits for Anthony as well. Lizzie herself was leaving Scotland, following the last of her guests back to London, when her hotel room was robbed and her strongbox was stolen, just as Mr. Fox had always feared it would be. For a week it rained. Great swells pounded at the seawall. Brighton was almost deserted. The faint-hearted had left for Portsmouth, where they were protected by the Isle of Wight from the winds and waves that struck what might now be properly called the bow of Britain.

On the Boardwalk, Mr. Fox strolled as deliberate and proud as a captain on his bridge. The wind was almost a gale, but a steady gale, and he soon grew used to it; it simply meant walking and standing at a tilt. The rail seemed to thrum with energy under his hand. Even though he knew that they were hundreds of miles at sea, Mr. Fox felt secure with all of England at his back. He began to almost enjoy the fulminations of the water as it threw itself against the Brighton seawall.

Which plowed on west, into the Atlantic.

With the south coast from Penzance to Dover in the lead (or perhaps it should be said, the bow) and the Highlands of Scotland at the stern, the United Kingdom was making almost four knots. Or 3.8 to be precise.

"A modest and appropriate speed,'' the King told his subjects, speaking from his chambers in Buckingham Palace, which had been decked out with nautical maps and charts, a lighted globe, and a silver sextant. "Approximately equal to that of the great ships-of-the-line of Nelson's day."

In actual fact, the BBC commentator corrected (for they will correct even a king), 3.8 knots was considerably slower than an eighteenth-century warship. But it was good that this was so, Britain being, at best, blunt; indeed, it was estimated that with even a half knot more speed, the seas piling up the Plymouth and Exeter channels would have devastated the docks. Oddly enough, it was London, far from the headwinds and bow wave, that was hardest hit. The wake past Margate, along what used to be the English Channel, had sucked the Thames down almost two feet, leaving broad mud flats along the Victoria Embankment and under the Waterloo Bridge. The news showed treasure seekers with gum boots tracking mud all over the city, "a mud as foul-smelling as the ancient crimes they unearth daily," said BBC. Not a very patriotic report, thought Mr. Fox, who turned from the telly to Harrison to remark, "I believe you have family there."

"In London? Not hardly," said Harrison. "They've all gone to America."

By the time the Scottish mountaintops should have been enduring (or perhaps "enjoying" is the word, being mountains, and Scottish at that) the first snow flurries of the winter, they were enjoying (or perhaps "enduring") subtropical rains as the United Kingdom passed just to the north of the Azores. The weather in the south (now west) of England was springlike and fine. The boys at the cricket ground, who had usually put away their kites by this time of year, were out every day, affording endless delight to Anthony, who accepted with the simple, unquestioning joy of a dog, the fact of a world well supplied with running boys. Our Day's Log, the popular new BBC evening show, which began and ended with shots of the bow wave breaking on the rocks of Cornwall, showed hobbyists with telescopes and camcorders on the cliffs at Dover, cheering "Land Ho!" on sighting the distant peaks of the Azores. Things were getting back to normal. The public (according to the news) was finding that even the mid-Atlantic held no terrors. The wave of urban seasickness that had been predicted never materialized. At a steady 3.8 knots, Great Britain was unaffected by the motion of the waves, even during the fiercest storms: it was almost as if she had been designed for travel, and built for comfort, not for speed. A few of the smaller Scottish islands had been stripped away and had, alarmingly, sunk; but the only real damage was on the east (now south) coast, where the slipstream was washing away house-sized chunks of the soft Norfolk banks. The King was seen on the news, in muddy hip boots, helping to dike the fens against the wake. Taking a break from digging, he reassured his subjects that the United Kingdom, wherever it might be headed, would remain sovereign. When a reporter, with shocking impertinence, asked if that meant that he didn't know where his kingdom was headed, King Charles answered coolly that he hoped his subjects were satisfied with his performance in a role that was, after all, designed to content them with what was, rather than to shape or even predict what might be. Then, without excusing himself, he picked up his silver shovel with the Royal Crest, and began to dig again.

Meanwhile, at Mrs. Oldenshield's, all of London was abuzz with Lizzie's loss. Or supposed loss. Only Lizzie (and Messrs. Fox and Trollope) knew that the diamonds had been not in her strongbox but under her pillow. Mr. Fox's letter from his niece arrived a day earlier still, on the third of the month, underscoring in its own quiet manner that England was indeed underway. The letter, which Mr. Fox read in reverse, as usual, ended alarmingly with the words "looking forward to seeing you." Forward? He read on backward and found "underway toward America.'' America? It had never occurred to Mr. Fox. He looked at the return address on the envelope. It was from a town called, rather ominously, Babylon.

Lizzie was one for holding on. Even though the police (and half of London society) suspected that she had engineered the theft of the diamonds in order to avoid returning them to the Eustace family, she wasn't about to admit that they had never been stolen at all. Indeed, why should she? As the book was placed back up on the shelf day after day, Mr. Fox marveled at the strength of character of one so able to convince herself that what was in her interest, was in the right. The next morning there was a small crowd on the West Pier, waving Union Jacks and pointing toward a smudge on the horizon. Mr. Fox was not surprised to see a familiar face (and hairdo) among them.

"Bermuda," said the African. Mr. Fox only nodded, not wanting to provoke the girl, whom he suspected was waiting on the other side of the African, waiting to strike. Was it only his imagination, that the smudge on the horizon was pink? That night and the two nights following, he watched the highlights of the Bermuda Passage on the telly over the bar. The island, which had barely been visible from Brighton, passed within a mile of Dover, and thousands turned out to see the colonial policemen in their red coats lined up atop the coral cliffs, saluting the Mother Country as she passed. Even where no crowds turned out, the low broads of Norfolk, the shaley cliffs of Yorkshire, the rocky headlands of Scotland's (former) North Sea coast, all received the same salute. The passage took nearly a week, and Mr. Fox thought it was quite a tribute to the Bermudans' stamina, as well as their patriotism.

Over the next few days, the wind shifted and began to drop. Anthony was pleased, noticing only that the boys had to run harder to lift their kites, and seemed to need a dog yipping along beside them more than ever. But Mr. Fox knew that if the wind dropped much further, they would lose interest altogether. The Bermudans were satisfied with their glimpse of the Mother Country, according to BBC; but the rest of the Commonwealth members were outraged as the United Kingdom turned sharply north after the Bermuda Passage, and headed north on a course that appeared to be carrying it toward the USA. Mr. Fox, meanwhile, was embroiled in a hardly unexpected but no less devastating crisis of a more domestic nature: for Lizzie had had her diamonds stolen—for real this time! She had been keeping them in a locked drawer in her room at the loathsome Mrs. Carbuncle's. If she reported the theft, she would be admitting that they hadn't been in the strongbox stolen in Scotland. Her only hope was that they, and the thieves, were never found.

COMMONWEALTH IN UPROAR

CARIBBEAN MEMBERS REGISTER SHARP PROTEST

BRITS TO BASH BIG APPLE?

The British and American papers were held up side by side on BBC. Navigation experts were produced, with pointers and maps, who estimated that on its current course, the south (now north) of England would nose into the crook of New York harbor, where Long Island meets New Jersey; so that Dover would be in sight of the New York City skyline. Plymouth was expected to end up off Montauk, and Brighton somewhere in the middle, where there were no place names on the satellite pictures. Harrison kept a map under the bar for settling bets, and when he pulled it out after Our Daily Log, Mr. Fox was alarmed (but not surprised) to see that the area where Brighton was headed was dominated by a city whose name evoked images too lurid to visualize:

Babylon.

On the day that Lizzie got her first visit from Scotland Yard, Mr. Fox saw a charter fishing boat holding steady off the shore, making about three knots. It was the Judy J out of Islip, and the rails were packed with people waving. Mr. Fox waved back, and waved Anthony's paw for him. An airplane flew low over the beach towing a sign. On the telly that night, Mr. Fox could see on the satellite picture that Brighton was already in the lee of Long Island; that was why the wind was dropping. The BBC showed clips from King Kong. "New York City is preparing to evacuate," said the announcer, "fearing that the shock of collision with ancient England will cause the fabled skyscrapers of Manhattan to tumble." He seemed pleased by the prospect, as did the Canadian earthquake expert he interviewed; as, indeed, did Harrison. New York City officials were gloomier; they feared the panic more than the actual collision. The next morning there were two boats off the shore, and in the afternoon, five. The waves, coming in at an angle, looked tentative after the bold swells of the mid-Atlantic. At tea, Lizzie was visited for the second time by Scotland Yard. Something seemed to have gone out of her, some of her fight, her spunk. Something in the air outside the tearoom was different too, but it wasn't until he and Anthony approached the cricket ground that Mr. Fox realized what it was. It was the wind. It was gone altogether. The boys were struggling to raise the same kites that had flown so eagerly only a few days before. As soon as they stopped running the kites came down. Anthony ran and barked wildly, as if calling on Heaven for assistance, but the boys went home before dark, disgusted.

That night, Mr. Fox stepped outside the Pig & Thistle for a moment after supper. The street was as still as he had always imagined a graveyard might be. Had everyone left Brighton, or were they just staying indoors? According to Our Daily Log, the feared panic in New York City had failed to materialize. Video clips showed horrendous traffic jams, but they were apparently normal. The King was ... but just as the BBC was about to cut to Buckingham Palace, the picture began to flicker and an American game show came on. "Who were the Beatles," said a young woman standing in a sort of bright pulpit. It was a statement and not a question.

"The telly has arrived before us," said Harrison, turning off the sound but leaving the picture. "Shall we celebrate with a whisky? My treat tonight.''

Mr. Fox's room, left to him by Mr. Singh, the original owner of the Pig & Thistle, was on the top floor under a gable. It was small; he and Anthony shared a bed. That night they were awakened by a mysterious, musical scraping sound. "Woof," said Anthony, in his sleep. Mr. Fox listened with trepidation; he thought at first that someone, a thief certainly, was moving the piano out of the public room downstairs. Then he remembered that the piano had been sold twenty years before. There came a deeper rumble from far away—and then silence. A bell rang across town. A horn honked; a door slammed. Mr. Fox looked at the time on the branch bank across the street (he had positioned his bed to save the cost of a clock): it was 4:36 A.M., Eastern Standard time. There were no more unusual sounds, and the bell stopped ringing. Anthony had already drifted back to sleep, but Mr. Fox lay awake, with his eyes open. The anxiety he had felt for the past several days (indeed, years) was mysteriously gone, and he was enjoying a pleasant feeling of anticipation that was entirely new to him.

"Hold still," Mr. Fox told Anthony as he brushed him and snapped on his little tweed suit. The weather was getting colder. Was it his imagination, or was the light through the window over the breakfast table different as the Finn served him his boiled egg and toast and marmalade and tea with milk? There was a fog, the first in weeks. The street outside the inn was deserted, and as he crossed the King's Esplanade and climbed the twelve steps, Mr. Fox saw that the Boardwalk was almost empty too. There were only two or three small groups, standing at the railing, staring at the fog as if at a blank screen.

There were no waves, no wake; the water lapped at the sand with nervous, pointless motions like an old lady's fingers on a shawl. Mr. Fox took a place at the rail. Soon the fog began to lift; and emerging in the near distance, across a gray expanse of water, like the image on the telly when it has first been turned on, Mr. Fox saw a wide, flat beach. Near the center was a cement bathhouse. Knots of people stood on the sand, some of them by parked cars. One of them shot a gun into the air; another waved a striped flag. Mr. Fox waved Anthony's paw for him.

America (and this could only be America) didn't seem very developed. Mr. Fox had expected, if not skyscrapers, at least more buildings. A white lorry pulled up beside the bathhouse. A man in uniform got out, lit a cigarette, looked through binoculars. The lorry said GOYA on the side.

"Welcome to Long Island," said a familiar voice. It was the African. Mr. Fox nodded but didn't say anything. He could see the girl on the African's other side, looking through binoculars. He wondered if she and the GOYA man were watching each other. "If you expected skyscrapers, they're fifty miles west of here, in Dover," said the African.

"West?"

"Dover's west now, since England's upside down. That's why the sun rises over Upper Beeding."

Mr. Fox nodded. Of course. He had never seen the sun rising, though he felt no need to say so.

"Everyone's gone to Dover. You can see Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, all from Dover.''

Mr. Fox nodded. Reassured by the girl's silence so far, he asked in a whisper, "So what place is this; where are we now?

"Jones Beach."

"Not Babylon?"

"You bloody wish," said the girl.

Mr. Fox was exhausted. Lizzie was being harried like the fox she herself had hunted with such bloodthirsty glee in Scotland. As Major Mackintosh closed in, she seemed to take a perverse pleasure in the hopelessness of her situation: as if it bestowed on her a vulnerability she had never before possessed, a treasure more precious to her than the Eustace family diamonds. "Mr. Fox?" asked Mrs. Oldenshield.

"Mr. Fox?" She was shaking his shoulder. "Oh, I'm quite all right," he said. The book had fallen off his lap and she had caught him sleeping. Mrs. Oldenshield had a letter for him. (A letter for him!) It was from his niece, even though it was only the tenth of the month. There was nothing to do but open it. Mr. Fox began, as usual, at the ending, to make sure there were no surprises: but this time there were. "Until then," he read. As he scanned back through, he saw mention of "two ferries a day," and he couldn't read on. How had she gotten Mrs. Oldenshield's address? Did she expect him to come to America? He folded the letter and put it into his pocket. He couldn't read on.

That evening BBC was back on the air. The lights of Manhattan could be seen on live video from atop the cliffs of Dover, shimmering in the distance through the rain (for England had brought rain). One-day passes were being issued by both governments, and queues were already six blocks long. The East (now West) Kent Ferry from Folkestone to Coney Island was booked solid for the next three weeks.

There was talk of service to Eastbourne and Brighton as well. The next morning after breakfast, Mr. Fox lingered over his tea, examining a photograph of his niece which he had discovered in his letter box while putting her most recent (and most alarming) letter away. She was a serious-looking nine-year-old with a yellow ribbon in her light brown hair. Her mother, Mr. Fox's sister, Clare, held an open raincoat around them both. All this was thirty years ago but already her hair was streaked with gray. The Finn cleared the plates, which was the signal for Mr. Fox and Anthony to leave. There was quite a crowd on the Boardwalk, near the West Pier, watching the first ferry from America steaming across the narrow sound. Or was "steaming" the word? It was probably powered by some new type of engine. Immigration officers stood idly by, with their clipboards closed against the remnants of the fog (for England had brought fog). Mr. Fox was surprised to see Harrison at the end of the pier, wearing a windbreaker and carrying a paper bag that was greasy, as if it contained food. Mr. Fox had never seen Harrison in the day, or outside, before; in fact, he had never seen his legs. Harrison was wearing striped pants, and before Mr. Fox could speak to him, he sidled away like a crab into the crowd. There was a jolt as the ferry struck the pier. Mr. Fox stepped back just as Americans started up the ramp like an invading army. In the front were teenagers, talking among themselves as if no one else could hear; older people, almost as loud, followed behind them. They seemed no worse than the Americans who came to Brighton every summer, only not as well dressed.

"Woof, woof!"

Anthony was yipping over his shoulder, and Mr. Fox turned and saw a little girl with light brown hair and a familiar yellow ribbon. "Emily?" he said, recognizing his niece from the picture. Or so he thought. "Uncle Anthony?" The voice came from behind him again. He turned and saw a lady in a faded Burberry. The fog was blowing away and behind her he could see, for the first time that day, the drab American shore.

"You haven't changed a bit," the woman said. At first Mr. Fox thought she was his sister, Clare, just as she had been thirty years before, when she had brought her daughter to Brighton to meet him. But of course Clare had been dead for twenty years; and the woman was Emily, who had then been almost ten, and was now almost forty; and the girl was her own child (the niece who had been growing up inexorably) who was almost ten. Children, it seemed, were almost always almost something.

"Uncle Anthony?" The child was holding out her arms. Mr. Fox was startled, thinking she was about to hug him; then he saw what she wanted and handed her the dog. "You can pet him," he said. "His name is Anthony too."

"Really?"

"Since no one ever calls us both at the same time, it creates no confusion," said Mr. Fox.

"Can he walk?"

"Certainly he can walk. He just doesn't often choose to."

A whistle blew and the ferry left with its load of Britons for America. Mr. Fox saw Harrison at the bow, holding his greasy bag with one hand and the rail with the other, looking a little sick, or perhaps apprehensive. Then he took his niece and great-niece for a stroll along the Boardwalk. The girl, Clare—she was named after her grandmother—walked ahead with Anthony, while Mr. Fox and his niece, Emily, followed behind. The other Americans had all drifted into the city looking for restaurants, except for the male teenagers, who were crowding into the amusement parlors along the Esplanade, which had opened for the day.

"If the mountain won't come to Mahomet, and so forth," said Emily, mysteriously, when Mr. Fox asked if she'd had a nice crossing. Her brown hair was streaked with gray. He recognized the coat now; it had been her mother's, his sister's, Clare's. He was trying to think of where to take them for lunch. The Finn at the Pig & Thistle served a pretty fair shepherd's pie, but he didn't want them to see where he lived. They were content, however, with fish and chips on the Boardwalk; certainly Anthony seemed pleased to have chips fed to him, one by one, by the little girl named for the sister Mr. Fox had met only twice: once when she had been a student at Cambridge (or was it Oxford? he got them confused) about to marry an American; and once when she had returned with her daughter for a visit.

"Her father, your grandfather, was an Air Raid Warden," Mr. Fox told Emily. "He was killed in action, as it were, when a house collapsed during a rescue; and when his wife (well, she wasn't exactly his wife) died giving birth to twins a week later, they were each taken in by one of those whose life he had saved. It was a boarding house, all single people, so there was no way to keep the two together, you see; the children, I mean. Oh dear, I'm afraid I'm talking all in a heap."

"That's okay," said Emily.

"At any rate, when Mr. Singh died and his Inn was sold, my room was reserved for me, in accordance with his will, in perpetuity, which means as long as I remain in it. But if I were to move, you see, I would lose my patrimony entire."

"I see," said Emily. "And where is this place you go for tea?"

And so they spent the afternoon, and a rainy and an English afternoon it was, in the cozy tearoom with the faded purple drapes at the west (formerly east) end of Moncton Street where Mrs. Oldenshield kept Mr. Fox's complete set of Trollope on a high shelf, so he wouldn't have to carry them back and forth in all kinds of weather. While Clare shared her cake with Anthony, and then let him doze on her lap, Mr. Fox took down the handsome leather-bound volumes, one by one, and showed them to his niece and great-niece.

"They are, I believe, the first complete edition," he said. "Chapman and Hall."

"And were they your father's?" asked Emily. "My grandfather's?"

"Oh no!" said Mr. Fox. "They belonged to Mr. Singh. His grandmother was English and her own great-uncle had been, I believe, in the postal service in Ireland with the author, for whom I was, if I am not mistaken, named." He showed Emily the place in The Eustace Diamonds where he would have been reading that very afternoon, "were it not," he said, "for this rather surprisingly delightful family occasion." "Mother, is he blushing," said Clare. It was a statement and not a question.

It was almost six when Emily looked at her watch—a man's watch, Mr. Fox noted—and said, "We had better get back to the pier, or we'll miss the ferry." The rain had diminished to a misty drizzle as they hurried along the Boardwalk. "I must apologize for our English weather," said Mr. Fox, but his niece stopped him with a hand on his sleeve. "Don't brag," she said, smiling. She saw Mr. Fox looking at her big steel watch and explained that it had been found among her mother's things; she had always assumed it had been her grandfather's. Indeed, it had several dials, and across the face it said: "Civil Defense, Brighton." Across the bay, through the drizzle as through a lace curtain, they could see the sun shining on the sand and parked cars.

"Do you still live in, you know ... " Mr. Fox hardly knew how to say the name of the place without sounding vulgar, but his niece came to his rescue. "Babylon? Only for another month. We're moving to Deer Park as soon as my divorce is final."

"I'm so glad," said Mr. Fox. "Deer Park sounds much nicer for the child."

"Can I buy Anthony a good-bye present?" Clare asked. Mr. Fox gave her some English money (even though the shops were all taking American) and she bought a paper of chips and fed them to the dog one by one. Mr. Fox knew Anthony would be flatulent for days, but it seemed hardly the sort of thing one mentioned. The ferry had pulled in and the tourists who had visited America for the day were streaming off, loaded with cheap gifts. Mr. Fox looked for Harrison, but if he was among them, he missed him. The whistle blew two warning toots. "It was kind of you to come," he said.

Emily smiled. "No big deal," she said. "It was mostly your doing anyway. I could never have made it all the way to England if England hadn't come here first. I don't fly."

"Nor do I." Mr. Fox held out his hand but Emily gave him a hug, and then a kiss, and insisted that Clare give him both as well. When that was over, she pulled off the watch (it was fitted with an expandable band) and slipped it over his thin, sticklike wrist. "It has a compass built in," she said. "I'm sure it was your father's. And Mother always ... "

The final boarding whistle swallowed her last words. "You can be certain I'll take good care of it," Mr. Fox called out. He couldn't think of anything else to say. "Mother, is he crying," said Clare. It was a statement and not a question. "Let's you and me watch our steps," said Emily.

"Woof," said Anthony, and mother and daughter ran down (for the pier was high, and the boat was low) the gangplank. Mr. Fox waved until the ferry had backed out and turned, and everyone on board had gone inside, out of the rain, for it had started to rain in earnest. That night after dinner he was disappointed to find the bar unattended. "Anyone seen Harrison?" he asked. He had been looking forward to showing him the watch.

"I can get you a drink as well as him," said the Finn. She carried her broom with her and leaned it against the bar. She poured a whisky and said, "Just indicate if you need another." She thought indicate meant ask. The King was on the telly, getting into a long car with the President. Armed men stood all around them. Mr. Fox went to bed.

The next morning, Mr. Fox got up before Anthony. The family visit had been pleasant; indeed, wonderful; but he felt a need to get back to normal. While taking his constitutional, he watched the first ferry come in, hoping (somewhat to his surprise) that he might see Harrison in it; but no such luck. There were no English, and few Americans. The fog rolled in and out, like the same page on a book being turned over and over. At tea, Mr. Fox found Lizzie confessing (just as he had known she someday must) that the jewels had been in her possession all along. Now that they were truly gone, everyone seemed relieved, even the Eustace family lawyer. It seemed a better world without the diamonds.

"Did you hear that?"

"Beg your pardon?" Mr. Fox looked up from his book.

Mrs. Oldenshield pointed at his teacup, which was rattling in its saucer. Outside, in the distance, a bell was ringing. Mr. Fox wiped off the book himself and put it on the high shelf, then pulled on his coat, picked up his dog, and ducked through the low door into the street. Somewhere across town, a horn was honking. "Woof," said Anthony. There was a breeze for the first time in days. Knowing, or at least suspecting what he would find, Mr. Fox hurried to the Boardwalk. The waves on the beach were flattened, as if the water were being sucked away from the shore. The ferry was just pulling out with the last of the Americans who had come to spend the day. They looked irritated. On the way back to the Pig & Thistle Mr. Fox stopped by the cricket ground, but the boys were nowhere to be seen, the breeze being still too light for kiting, he supposed. "Perhaps tomorrow," he said to Anthony. The dog was silent, lacking the capacity for looking ahead.

That evening, Mr. Fox had his whisky alone again. He had hoped that Harrison might have shown up, but there was no one behind the bar but the Finn and her broom. King Charles came on the telly, breathless, having just landed in a helicopter direct from the Autumn White House. He promised to send for anyone who had been left behind, then commanded (or rather, urged) his subjects to secure the kingdom for the Atlantic. England was underway again. The next morning the breeze was brisk. When Mr. Fox and Anthony arrived at the Boardwalk, he checked the compass on his watch and saw that England had turned during the night, and Brighton had assumed its proper position, at the bow. A stout headwind was blowing and the seawall was washed by a steady two-foot curl. Long Island was a low, dark blur to the north, far off the port (or left).

"Nice chop."

"Beg pardon?" Mr. Fox turned and was glad to see a big man in a tweed coat, standing at the rail. He realized he had feared the African might have jumped ship like Harrison.

"Looks like we're making our four knots and more, this time."

Mr. Fox nodded. He didn't want to seem rude, but he knew if he said anything the girl would chime in. It was a dilemma.

"Trade winds," said the African. His collar was turned up, and his dreadlocks spilled over and around it like vines. "We'll make better time going back. If indeed we're going back. I say, is that a new watch?"

"Civil Defense chronometer," Mr. Fox said. "Has a compass built in. My father left it to me when he died."

"You bloody wish," said the girl.

"Should prove useful," said the African.

"I should think so," said Mr. Fox, smiling into the fresh salt wind; then, saluting the African (and the girl), he tucked Anthony under his arm and left the Boardwalk in their command. England was steady, heading south by southeast, and it was twenty past four, almost time for tea.

DEATH ON THE NILE

Connie Willis

CHAPTER ONE:

PREPARING FOR YOUR TRIP — WHAT TO TAKE

“ ‘To the ancient Egyptians,’ ” Zoe reads, “ ‘Death was a separate country to the west—’ ” The plane lurches. “ ‘—the west to which the deceased person journeyed.’ ”

We are on the plane to Egypt. The flight is so rough the flight attendants have strapped themselves into the nearest empty seats, looking scared, and the rest of us have subsided into a nervous window-watching silence. Except Zoe, across the aisle, who is reading aloud from a travel guide.

This one is Somebody or Other’s Egypt Made Easy. In the seat pocket in front of her are Fodor’s Cairo and Cooke’s Touring Guide to Egypt’s Antiquities, and there are half a dozen others in her luggage. Not to mention Frommer’s Greece on $35 a Day and the Savvy Traveler’s Guide to Austria and the three or four hundred other guidebooks she’s already read out loud to us on this trip. I toy briefly with the idea that it’s their combined weight that’s causing the plane to yaw and careen and will shortly send us plummeting to our deaths.

“ ‘Food, furniture, and weapons were placed in the tomb,’ ” Zoe reads, “ ‘as provi—’ ” The plane pitches sideways. “ ‘—sions for the journey.’”

The plane lurches again, so violently Zoe nearly drops the book, but she doesn’t miss a beat. “ ‘When King Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened,’ ” she reads, “ ‘it contained trunks full of clothing, jars of wine, a golden boat, and a pair of sandals for walking in the sands of the afterworld.’”

My husband Neil leans over me to look out the window, but there is nothing to see. The sky is clear and cloudless, and below us there aren’t even any waves on the water.

“ ‘In the afterworld the deceased was judged by Anubis, a god with the head of a jackal,’ ” Zoe reads, “ ‘and his soul was weighed on a pair of golden scales.’ ”

I am the only one listening to her. Lissa, on the aisle, is whispering to Neil, her hand almost touching his on the armrest. Across the aisle, next to Zoe and Egypt Made Easy, Zoe’s husband is asleep and Lissa’s husband is staring out the other window and trying to keep his drink from spilling.

“Are you doing all right?” Neil asks Lissa solicitously.

“It’ll be exciting going with two other couples,” Neil said when he came up with the idea of our all going to Europe together. “Lissa and her husband are lots of fun, and Zoe knows everything. It’ll be like having our own tour guide.”

It is. Zoe herds us from country to country, reciting historical facts and exchange rates. In the Louvre, a French tourist asked her where the Mona Lisa was. She was thrilled. “He thought we were a tour group!” she said. “Imagine that!” Imagine that.

“ ‘Before being judged, the deceased recited his confession,’ ” Zoe reads, “ ‘a list of sins he had not committed, such as, I have not snared the birds of the gods, I have not told lies, I have not committed adultery.’”

Neil pats Lissa’s hand and leans over to me. “Can you trade places with Lissa?” Neil whispers to me.

I already have, I think. “We’re not supposed to,” I say, pointing at the lights above the seats. “The seat-belt sign is on.” He looks at her anxiously. “She’s feeling nauseated.” So am I, I want to say, but I am afraid that’s what this trip is all about, to get me to say something. “Okay,” I say, and unbuckle my seat belt and change places with her. While she is crawling over Neil, the plane pitches again, and she half-falls into his arms. He steadies her. Their eyes lock.

“ I have not taken another’s belongings,‘ ” Zoe reads. “ T have not murdered another.’”

I can’t take any more of this. I reach for my bag, which is still under the window seat, and pull out my paperback of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. I bought it in Athens.

“About like death anywhere,” Zoe’s husband said when I got back to our hotel in Athens with it. “What?” I said.

“Your book,” he said, pointing at the paperback and smiling as if he’d made a joke. “The title. I’d imagine death on the Nile is the same as death anywhere.” “Which is what?” I asked.

“The Egyptians believed death was very similar to life,” Zoe cut in. She had bought Egypt Made Easy at the same bookstore. “To the ancient Egyptians the afterworld was a place much like the world they inhabited. It was presided over by Anubis, who judged the deceased and determined their fates. Our concepts of heaven and hell and of the Day of Judgment are nothing more than modern refinements of Egyptian ideas,” she said, and began reading out loud from Egypt Made Easy, which pretty much put an end to our conversation,

and I still don’t know what Zoe’s husband thought death would be like, on the Nile or elsewhere.

I open Death on the Nile and try to read, thinking maybe Hercule Poirot knows, but the flight is too bumpy. I feel almost immediately queasy, and after half a page and three more lurches I put it in the seat pocket, close my eyes, and toy with the idea of murdering another. It’s a perfect Agatha Christie setting. She always has a few people in a country house or on an island. In Death on the Nile they were on a Nile steamer, but the plane is even better. The only other people on it are the flight attendants and a Japanese tour group who apparently do not speak English or they would be clustered around Zoe, asking directions to the Sphinx.

The turbulence lessens a little, and I open my eyes and reach for my book again. Lissa has it.

She’s holding it open, but she isn’t reading it. She is watching me, waiting for me to notice, waiting for me to say something. Neil looks nervous.

“You were done with this, weren’t you?” she says, smiling. “You weren’t reading it.”

Everyone has a motive for murder in an Agatha Christie. And Lissa’s husband has been drinking steadily since Paris, and Zoe’s husband never gets to finish a sentence. The police might think he had snapped suddenly. Or that it was Zoe he had tried to kill and shot Lissa by mistake. And there is no Hercule Poirot on board to tell them who really committed the murder, to solve the mystery and explain all the strange happenings.

The plane pitches suddenly, so hard Zoe drops her guidebook, and we plunge a good five thousand feet before it recovers. The guidebook has slid forward several rows, and Zoe tries to reach for it with her foot, fails, and looks up at the seat-belt sign as if she expects it to go off so she can get out of her seat to retrieve it.

Not after that drop, I think, but the seat-belt sign pings almost immediately and goes off.

Lissa’s husband instantly calls for the flight attendant and demands another drink, but they have already gone scurrying back to the rear of the plane, still looking pale and scared, as if they expected the turbulence to start up again before they make it. Zoe’s husband wakes up at the noise and then goes back to sleep. Zoe retrieves Egypt Made Easy from the floor, reads a few more riveting facts from it, then puts it facedown on the seat and goes back to the rear of the plane.

I lean across Neil and look out the window, wondering what’s happened, but I can’t see anything. We are flying through a flat whiteness.

Lissa is rubbing her head. “I cracked my head on the window,” she says to Neil. “Is it bleeding?”

He leans over her solicitously to see.

I unsnap my seat belt and start to the back of the plane, but both bathrooms are occupied, and Zoe is perched on the arm of an aisle seat, enlightening the Japanese tour group. “The currency is in Egyptian pounds,” she says. “There are one hundred piasters in a pound.” I sit back down.

Neil is gently massaging Lissa’s temple. “Is that better?” he asks.

I reach across the aisle for Zoe’s guidebook. “Must-See Attractions,” the chapter is headed, and the first one on the list is the Pyramids.

“Giza, Pyramids of. West bank of Nile, 9 mi. (15 km.) SW of Cairo. Accessible by taxi, bus, rental car. Admission L.E.3. Comments: You can’t skip the Pyramids, but be prepared to be disappointed. They don’t look at all like you expect, the traffic’s terrible, and the view’s completely ruined by the hordes of tourists, refreshment stands, and souvenir vendors. Open daily.”

I wonder how Zoe stands this stuff. I turn the page to Attraction Number Two. It’s King Tut’s tomb, and whoever wrote the guidebook wasn’t thrilled with it either. “Tutankhamun, Tomb of. Valley of the Kings, Luxor, 400 mi. (668 km.) south of Cairo. Three unimpressive rooms. Inferior wall paintings.”

There is a map showing a long, straight corridor (labeled Corridor) and the three unimpressive rooms opening one onto the other in a row—Anteroom, Burial Chamber, Hall of Judgment.

I close the book and put it back on Zoe’s seat. Zoe’s husband is still asleep. Lissa’s is peering back over his seat. “Where’d the flight attendants go?” he asks. “I want another drink.”

“Are you sure it’s not bleeding? I can feel a bump,” Lissa says to Neil, rubbing her head. “Do you think I have a concussion?”

“No,” Neil says, turning her face toward his. “Your pupils aren’t dilated.” He gazes deeply into her eyes.

“Stewardess!” Lissa’s husband shouts. “What do you have to do to get a drink around here?”

Zoe comes back, elated. “They thought I was a professional guide,” she says, sitting down and fastening her seat belt. “They asked if they could join our tour.” She opens the guidebook. “ The afterworld was full of monsters and demigods in the form of crocodiles and baboons and snakes. These monsters could destroy the deceased before he reached the Hall of Judgment.‘ ”

Neil touches my hand. “Do you have any aspirin?” he asks. “Lissa’s head hurts.”

I fish in my bag for it, and Neil gets up and goes back to get her a glass of water.

“Neil’s so thoughtful,” Lissa says, watching me, her eyes bright. “ To protect against these monsters and demigods, the deceased was given The Book of the Dead,‘ ” Zoe reads. “ ’More properly translated as The Book of What Is in the Afterworld, The Book of the Dead was a collection of directions for the journey and magic spells to protect the deceased.‘ ”

I think about how I am going to get through the rest of the trip without magic spells to protect me. Six days in Egypt and then three in Israel, and there is still the trip home on a plane like this and nothing to do for fifteen hours but watch Lissa and Neil and listen to Zoe.

I consider cheerier possibilities. “What if we’re not going to Cairo?” I say. “What if we’re dead?”

Zoe looks up from her guidebook, irritated. “There’ve been a lot of terrorist bombings lately, and this is the Middle East,” I go on. “What if that last air pocket was really a bomb? What if it blew us apart, and right now we’re drifting down over the Aegean Sea in little pieces?”

“Mediterranean,” Zoe says. “We’ve already flown over Crete.” “How do you know that?” I ask. “Look out the window.” I point out Lissa’s window at the white flatness beyond. “You can’t see the water. We could be anywhere. Or nowhere.”

Neil comes back with the water. He hands it and my aspirin to Lissa.

“They check the planes for bombs, don’t they?” Lissa asks him. “Don’t they use metal detectors and things?”

“I saw this movie once,” I say, “where the people were all dead, only they didn’t know it. They were on a ship, and they thought they were going to America. There was so much fog they couldn’t see the water.“

Lissa looks anxiously out the window.

“It looked just like a real ship, but little by little they began to notice little things that weren’t quite right. There were hardly any people on board, and no crew at all.”

“Stewardess!” Lissa’s husband calls, leaning over Zoe into the aisle. “I need another ouzo.”

His shouting wakes Zoe’s husband up. He blinks at Zoe, confused that she is not reading from her guidebook. “What’s going on?” he asks.

“We’re all dead,” I say. “We were killed by Arab terrorists. We think we’re going to Cairo, but we’re really going to heaven. Or hell.”

Lissa, looking out the window, says, “There’s so much fog I can’t see the wing.” She looks frightenedly at Neil. “What if something’s happened to the wing?”

“We’re just going through a cloud,” Neil says. “We’re probably beginning our descent into Cairo.”

“The sky was perfectly clear,” I say, “and then all of a sudden we were in the fog. The people on the ship noticed the fog, too. They noticed there weren’t any running lights. And they couldn’t find the crew.” I smile at Lissa. “Have you noticed how the turbulence stopped all of a sudden? Right after we hit that air pocket. And why—“

A flight attendant comes out of the cockpit and down the aisle to us, carrying a drink. Everyone looks relieved, and Zoe opens her guidebook and begins thumbing through it, looking for fascinating facts.

“Did someone here want an ouzo?” the flight attendant asks.

“Here,” Lissa’s husband says, reaching for it.

“How long before we get to Cairo?” I say.

She starts toward the back of the plane without answering. I unbuckle my seat belt and follow her. “When will we get to Cairo?”

I ask her.

She turns, smiling, but she is still pale and scared looking. “Did you want another drink, ma’am? Ouzo? Coffee?”

“Why did the turbulence stop?” I say. “How long till we get to Cairo?”

“You need to take your seat,” she says, pointing to the seat-belt sign. “We’re beginning our descent. We’ll be at our destination in another twenty minutes.” She bends over the Japanese tour group and tells them to bring their seat backs to an upright position.

“What destination? Our descent to where? We aren’t beginning any descent. The seat-belt sign is still off,” I say, and it bings on.

I go back to my seat. Zoe’s husband is already asleep again. Zoe is reading out loud from Egypt Made Easy. “ The visitor should take precautions before traveling in Egypt. A map is essential, and a flashlight is needed for many of the sites.‘ ”

Lissa has gotten her bag out from under the seat. She puts my Death on the Nile in it and gets out her sunglasses. I look past her and out the window at the white flatness where the wing should be. We should be able to see the lights on the wing even in the fog. That’s what they’re there for, so you can see the plane in the fog. The people on the ship didn’t realize they were dead at first. It was only when they started noticing little things that weren’t quite right that they began to wonder.

“ ‘A guide is recommended,’ ” Zoe reads.

I have meant to frighten Lissa, but I have only managed to frighten myself. We are beginning our descent, that’s all, I tell myself, and flying through a cloud. And that must be right.

Because here we are in Cairo.

CHAPTER TWO:

ARRIVING AT THE AIRPORT

“So this is Cairo?” Zoe’s husband says, looking around. The plane has stopped at the end of the runway and deplaned us onto the asphalt by means of a metal stairway.

The terminal is off to the east, a low building with palm trees around it, and the Japanese tour group sets off toward it immediately, shouldering their carry-on bags and camera cases.

We do not have any carry-ons. Since we always have to wait at the baggage claim for Zoe’s guidebooks anyway, we check our carry-ons, too. Every time we do it, I am convinced they will go to Tokyo or disappear altogether, but now I’m glad we don’t have to lug them all the way to the terminal. It looks like it is miles away, and the Japanese are already slowing.

Zoe is reading the guidebook. The rest of us stand around her, looking impatient. Lissa has caught the heel of her sandal in one of the metal steps coming down and is leaning against Neil.

“Did you twist it?” Neil asks anxiously.

The flight attendants clatter down the steps with their navy blue overnight cases. They still look nervous. At the bottom of the stairs they unfold wheeled metal carriers and strap the overnight cases to them and set off for the terminal. After a few steps they stop, and one of them takes off her jacket and drapes it over the wheeled carrier, and they start off again, walking rapidly in their high heels.

It is not as hot as I expected, even though the distant terminal shimmers in the heated air rising from the asphalt. There is no sign of the clouds we flew through, just a thin white haze that disperses the sun’s light into an even glare. We are all squinting. Lissa lets go of Neil’s arm for a second to get her sunglasses out of her bag.

“What do they drink around here?” Lissa’s husband asks, squinting over Zoe’s shoulder at the guidebook. “I want a drink.”

“The local drink is zibib,” Zoe says. “It’s like ouzo.” She looks up from the guidebook. “I think we should go see the Pyramids.”

The professional tour guide strikes again. “Don’t you think we’d better take care of first things first?” I say. “Like customs? And picking up our luggage?”

“And finding a drink of… what did you call it? Zibab?” Lissa’s husband says.

“No,” Zoe says. “I think we should do the Pyramids first. It’ll take an hour to do the baggage claim and customs, and we can’t take our luggage with us to the Pyramids. We’ll have to go to the hotel, and by that time everyone will be out there. I think we should go right now.” She gestures at the terminal. “We can run out and see them and be back before the Japanese tour group’s even through customs.“

She turns and starts walking in the opposite direction from the terminal, and the others straggle obediently after her.

I look back at the terminal. The flight attendants have passed the Japanese tour group and are nearly to the palm trees. “You’re going the wrong way,” I say to Zoe. “We’ve g“You’re going the wrong way,” the terminal to get a taxi.“

Zoe stops. “A taxi?” she says. “What for? They aren’t far. We can walk it in fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes?” I say. “Giza’s nine miles west of Cairo. You have to cross the Nile to get there.”

“Don’t be silly,” she says, “they’re right there,” and points in the direction she was walking, and there, beyond the asphalt in an expanse of sand, so close they do not shimmer at all, are the Pyramids.

CHAPTER THREE:

GETTING AROUND

It takes us longer than fifteen minutes. The Pyramids are farther away than they look, and the sand is deep and hard to walk in. We have to stop every few feet so Lissa can empty out her sandals, leaning against Neil.

“We should have taken a taxi,” Zoe’s husband says, but there are no roads, and no sign of the refreshment stands and souvenir vendors the guidebook complained about, only the unbroken expanse of deep sand and the white, even sky, and in the distance the three yellow pyramids, standing in a row.

“ ‘The tallest of the three is the Pyramid of Cheops, built in 2690 B.C.,’ ” Zoe says, reading as she walks. “ It took thirty years to complete.‘ ”

“You have to take a taxi to get to the Pyramids,” I say. “There’s a lot of traffic.”

“ ‘It was built on the west bank of the Nile, which the ancient Egyptians believed was the land of the dead.’ ”

There is a flicker of movement ahead, between the pyramids, and I stop and shade my eyes against the glare to look at it, hoping it is a souvenir vendor, but I can’t see anything.

We start walking again.

It flickers again, and this time I catch sight of it running, hunched over, its hands nearly touching the ground. It disappears behind the middle pyramid.

“I saw something,” I say, catching up to Zoe. “Some kind of animal. It looked like a baboon.”

Zoe leafs through the guidebook and then says, “Monkeys. They’re found frequently near Giza. They beg for food from the tourists.”

“There aren’t any tourists,” I say.

“I know,” Zoe says happily. “I told you we’d avoid the rush.”

“You have to go through customs, even in Egypt,” I say. “You can’t just leave the airport.”

“ The pyramid on the left is Kheophren,‘ ” Zoe says, “ ’built in B.C.‘ “

“In the movie, they wouldn’t believe they were dead even when somebody told them,” I say. “Giza is nine miles from Cairo.”

“What are you talking about?” Neil says. Lissa has stopped again and is leaning against him, standing on one foot and shaking her sandal out. “That mystery of Lissa’s, Death on the Nile?”

“This was a movie,” I say. “They were on this ship, and they were all dead.”

“We saw that movie, didn’t we, Zoe?” Zoe’s husband says. “Mia Farrow was in it, and Bette Davis. And the detective guy, what was his name—”

“Hercule Poirot,” Zoe says. “Played by Peter Ustinov. ‘The Pyramids are open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 P.M. Evenings there is a Son et Lumiere show with colored floodlights and a narration in English and Japanese.’”

“There were all sorts of clues,” I say, “but they just ignored them.”

“I don’t like Agatha Christie,” Lissa says. “Murder and trying to find out who killed who. I’m never able to figure out what’s going on. All those people on the train together.”

“You’re thinking of Murder on the Orient Express,” Neil says. “I saw that.”

“Is that the one where they got killed off one by one?” Lissa’s husband says.

“I saw that one,” Zoe’s husband says. “They got what they deserved, as far as I’m concerned, going off on their own like that when they knew they should keep together.”

“Giza is nine miles west of Cairo,” I say. “You have to take a taxi to get there. There is all this traffic.”

“Peter Ustinov was in that one, too, wasn’t he?” Neil says. “The one with the train?”

“No,” Zoe’s husband says. “It was the other one. What’s his name—”

“Albert Finney,” Zoe says.

CHAPTER FOUR:

PLACES OF INTEREST

The Pyramids are closed. Fifty yards (45.7 m.) from the base of Cheops there is a chain barring our way. A metal sign hangs from it that says “Closed” in English and Japanese.

“Prepare to be disappointed,” I say.

“I thought you said they were open daily,” Lissa says, knocking sand out of her sandals.

“It must be a holiday,” Zoe says, leafing through her guidebook. “Here it is. ‘Egyptian holidays.’” She begins reading. “ ‘Antiquities sites are closed during Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting in March. On Fridays the sites are closed from eleven to one p.m.’ ”

It is not March, or Friday, and even if it were, it is after one P.M. The shadow of Cheops stretches well past where we stand. I look up, trying to see the sun where it must be behind the pyramid, and catch a flicker of movement, high up. It is too large to be a monkey.

“Well, what do we do now?” Zoe’s husband says.

“We could go see the Sphinx,” Zoe muses, looking through the guidebook. “Or we could wait for the Son et Lumiere show.”

“No,” I say, thinking of being out here in the dark.

“How do you know that won’t be closed, too?” Lissa asks.

Zoe consults the book. “There are two shows daily, seven-thirty and nine P.M.”

“That’s what you said about the Pyramids,” Lissa says. “7 think we should go back to the airport and get our luggage. I want to get my other shoes.”

“I think we should go back to the hotel,” Lissa’s husband says, “and have a long, cool drink.”

“We’ll go to Tutankhamun’s tomb,” Zoe says. “ ‘It’s open every day, including holidays.’ ” She looks up expectantly.

“King Tut’s tomb?” I say. “In the Valley of the Kings?”

“Yes,” she says, and starts to read. “ ‘It was found intact in 1922 by Howard Carter. It contained—’ ”

All the belongings necessary for the deceased’s journey to the afterworld, I think. Sandals and clothes and Egypt Made Easy. “I’d rather have a drink,” Lissa’s husband says. “And a nap,” Zoe’s husband says. “You go on, and we’ll meet you at the hotel.”

“I don’t think you should go off on your own,” I say. “I think we should keep together.”

“It will be crowded if we wait,” Zoe says. “I’m going now. Are you coming, Lissa?”

Lissa looks appealingly up at Neil. “I don’t think I’d better walk that far. My ankle’s starting to hurt again.”

Neil looks helplessly at Zoe. “I guess we’d better pass.” “What about you?” Zoe’s husband says to me. “Are you going with Zoe or do you want to come with us?”

“In Athens, you said death was the same everywhere,” I say to him, “and I said, ‘Which is what?’ and then Zoe interrupted us and you never did answer me. What were you going to say?”

“I’ve forgotten,” he says, looking at Zoe as if he hopes she will interrupt us again, but she is intent on the guidebook.

“You said, ‘Death is the same everywhere,’” I persist, “and I said, ”Which is what?‘ What did you think death would be like?“

“I don’t know… unexpected, I guess. And probably pretty damn unpleasant.” He laughs nervously. “If we’re going to the hotel, we’d better get started. Who else is coming?”

I toy with the idea of going with them, of sitting safely in the hotel bar with ceiling fans and palms, drinking zibib while we wait. That’s what the people on the ship did. And in spite of Lissa, I want to stay with Neil.

I look at the expanse of sand back toward the east. There is no sign of Cairo from here, or of the terminal, and far off there is a flicker of movement, like something running.

I shake my head. “I want to see King Tut’s tomb.” I go over to Neil. “I think we should go with Zoe,” I say, and put my hand on his arm. “After all, she’s our guide.”

Neil looks helplessly at Lissa and then back at me. “I don’t know…”

“The three of you can go back to the hotel,” I say to Lissa, gesturing to include the other men, “and Zoe and Neil and I can meet you there after we’ve been to the tomb.“

Neil moves away from Lissa. “Why can’t you and Zoe just go?” he whispers at me.

“I think we should keep together,” I say. “It would be so easy to get separated.”

“How come you’re so stuck on going with Zoe anyway?” Neil says. “I thought you said you hated being led around by the nose all the time.”

I want to say, Because she has the book, but Lissa has come over and is watching us, her eyes bright behind her sunglasses. “I’ve always wanted to see the inside of a tomb,” I say.

“King Tut?” Lissa says. “Is that the one with the treasure, the necklaces and the gold coffin and stuff?” She puts her hand on Neil’s arm. “I’ve always wanted to see that.”

“Okay,” Neil says, relieved. “I guess we’ll go with you, Zoe.”

Zoe looks expectantly at her husband.

“Not me,” he says. “We’ll meet you in the bar.”

“We’ll order drinks for you,” Lissa’s husband says. He waves good-bye, and they set off as if they know where they are going, even though Zoe hasn’t told them the name of the hotel.

“ ‘The Valley of the Kings is located in the hills west of Luxor,’ ” Zoe says, and starts off across the sand the way she did at the airport. We follow her.

I wait until Lissa gets a shoeful of sand and she and Neil fall behind while she empties it.

“Zoe,” I say quietly. “There’s something wrong.”

“Umm,” she says, looking up something in the guidebook’s index.

“The Valley of the Kings is four hundred miles south of Cairo,” I say. “You can’t walk there from the Pyramids.”

She finds the page. “Of course not. We have to take a boat.”

She points, and I see we have reached a stand of reeds, and beyond it is the Nile.

Nosing out from the rushes is a boat, and I am afraid it will be made of gold, but it is only one of the Nile cruisers. And I am so relieved that the Valley of the Kings is not within walking distance that I do not recognize the boat until we have climbed on board and are standing on the canopied deck next to the wooden paddle wheel. It is the steamer from Death on the Nile:

CHAPTER FIVE:

CRUISES, DAY TRIPS, AND GUIDED TOURS

Lissa is sick on the boat. Neil offers to take her below, and I expect her to say yes, but she shakes her head. “My ankle hurts,” she says, and sinks down in one of the deck chairs. Neil kneels by her feet and examines a bruise no bigger than a piaster.

“Is it swollen?” she asks anxiously. There is no sign of swelling, but Neil eases her sandal off and takes her foot tenderly, caressingly, in both hands. Lissa closes her eyes and leans back against the deck chair, sighing.

I toy with the idea that Lissa’s husband couldn’t take any more of this either, and that he murdered us all and then killed himself.

“Here we are on a ship,” I say, “like the dead people in that movie.

“It’s not a ship, it’s a steamboat,” Zoe says. “ The Nile steamer is the most pleasant way to travel in Egypt and one of the least expensive. Costs range from $180 to $360 per person for a four-day cruise.‘ ”

Or maybe it was Zoe’s husband, finally determined to shut Zoe up so he could finish a conversation, and then he had to murder the rest of us one after the other to keep from being caught.

“We’re all alone on the ship,” I say, “just like they were.”

“How far is it to the Valley of the Kings?” Lissa asks.

“ ‘Three-and-a-half miles (5 km.) west of Luxor,’ ” Zoe says, read-

“ ‘Luxor is four hundred miles south of Cairo.’ ”

“If it’s that far, I might as well read my book,” Lissa says, pushing her sunglasses up on top of her head. “Neil, hand me my bag.”

He fishes Death on the Nile out of her bag and hands it to her, and she flips through it for a moment, like Zoe looking for exchange rates, and then begins to read.

“The wife did it,” I say. “She found out her husband was being unfaithful.”

Lissa glares at me. “I already knew that,” she says carelessly. “I saw the movie,” but after another half page she lays the open book facedown on the empty deck chair next to her.

“I can’t read,” she says to Neil. “The sun’s too bright.” She squints up at the sky, which is still hidden by its gauze-like haze.

“ ‘The Valley of the Kings is the site of the tombs of sixty-four pharoahs,’” Zoe says. “ ‘Of these, the most famous is Tutankhamun’s.’”

I go over to the railing and watch the Pyramids recede, slipping slowly out of sight behind the rushes that line the shore. They look flat, like yellow triangles stuck up in the sand, and I remember how in Paris Zoe’s husband wouldn’t believe the Mona Lisa was the real thing. “It’s a fake,” he insisted before Zoe interrupted. “The real one’s much larger.”

And the guidebook said, Prepare to be disappointed, and the Valley of the Kings is four hundred miles from the Pyramids like it’s supposed to be, and Middle Eastern airports are notorious for their lack of security. That’s how all those bombs get on planes in the first place, because they don’t make people go through customs. I shouldn’t watch so many movies.

“ ‘Among its treasures, Tutankhamun’s tomb contained a golden boat, by which the soul would travel to the world of the dead,’” Zoe says.

I lean over the railing and look into the water. It is not muddy, like I thought it would be, but a clear waveless blue, and in its depths the sun is shining brightly.

“ ‘The boat was carved with passages from The Book of the Dead,’ ” Zoe reads, “ ‘to protect the deceased from monsters and demigods who might try to destroy him before he reached the Hall of Judgment.’”

There is something in the water. Not a ripple, not even enough of a movement to shudder the image of the sun, but I know there is something there.

“ ‘Spells were also written on papyruses buried with the body,’ ” Zoe says.

It is long and dark, like a crocodile. I lean over farther, gripping the rail, trying to see into the transparent water, and catch a glint of scales. It is swimming straight toward the boat.

“ ‘These spells took the form of commands,’ ” Zoe reads. “ ‘Get back, you evil one! Stay away! I adjure you in the name of Anubis and Osiris.’”

The water glitters, hesitating.

“ ‘Do not come against me,’ ” Zoe says. “ ‘My spells protect me. I know the way.’ ”

The thing in the water turns and swims away. The boat follows it, nosing slowly in toward the shore.

“There it is,” Zoe says, pointing past the reeds at a distant row of cliffs. “The Valley of the Kings.”

“I suppose this’ll be closed, too,” Lissa says, letting Neil help her off the boat. ,

“Tombs are never closed,” I say, and look north, across the sand, at the distant Pyramids.

CHAPTER SIX:

ACCOMMODATIONS

The Valley of the Kings is not closed. The tombs stretch along a sandstone cliff, black openings in the yellow rock, and there are no chains across the stone steps that lead down to them. At the south end of the valley a Japanese tour group is going into the last one.

“Why aren’t the tombs marked?” Lissa asks. “Which one is King Tut’s?” and Zoe leads us to the north end of the valley, where the cliff dwindles into a low wall. Beyond it, across the sand, I can see the Pyramids, sharp against the sky.

Zoe stops at the very edge of a slanting hole dug into the base of the rocks. There are steps leading down into it. “Tutankhamun’s tomb was found when a workman accidentally uncovered the top step,” she says.

Lissa looks down into the stairwell. All but the top two steps are in shadow, and it is too dark to see the bottom. “Are there snakes?” she asks.

“No,” Zoe, who knows everything, says. “Tutankhamun’s tomb is the smallest of the pharaohs’ tombs in the Valley.” She fumbles in her bag for her flashlight. “The tomb consists of three rooms—an antechamber, the burial chamber containing Tutankhamun’s coffin, and the Hall of Judgment.”

There is a slither of movement in the darkness below us, like a slow uncoiling, and Lissa steps back from the edge. “Which room is the stuff in?”

“Stuff?” Zoe says uncertainly, still fumbling for her flashlight. She opens her guidebook. “Stuff?” she says again, and flips to the back of it, as if she is going to look “stuff” up in the index.

“Stuff,” Lissa says, and there is an edge of fear in her voice. “All the furniture and vases and stuff they take with them. You said the Egyptians buried their belongings with them.”

“King Tut’s treasure,” Neil says helpfully.

“Oh, the treasure” Zoe says, relieved. “The belongings buried with Tutankhamun for his journey into the afterworld. They’re not here. They’re in Cairo in the museum.”

“In Cairo?” Lissa says. “They’re in Cairo? Then what are we doing here?”

“We’re dead,” I say. “Arab terrorists blew up our plane and killed us all.”

“I came all the way out here because I wanted to see the treasure,” Lissa says.

“The coffin is here,” Zoe says placatingly, “and there are wall paintings in the antechamber,” but Lissa has already led Neil away from the steps, talking earnestly to him.

“The wall paintings depict the stages in the judgment of the soul, the weighing of the soul, the recital of the deceased’s confession,” Zoe says.

The deceased’s confession. I have not taken that which belongs to another. I have not caused any pain. I have not committed adultery.

Lissa and Neil come back, Lissa leaning heavily on Neil’s arm. “I think we’ll pass on this tomb thing,” Neil says apologetically. “We want to get to the museum before it closes. Lissa had her heart set on seeing the treasure.”

“ ‘The Egyptian Museum is open from 9 A.M. to 4 p.m. daily, 9 to 11:15 A-M- and 1:30 to 4 P.M. Fridays,’ ” Zoe says, reading from the guidebook. “ ‘Admission is three Egyptian pounds.’ ”

“It’s already four o’clock,” I say, looking at my watch. “It will be closed before you get there.” I look up.

Neil and Lissa have already started back, not toward the boat but across the sand in the direction of the Pyramids. The light behind the Pyramids is beginning to fade, the sky going from white to gray blue.

“Wait,” I say, and run across the sand to catch up with them. “Why don’t you wait and we’ll all go back together? It won’t take us very long to see the tomb. You heard Zoe, there’s nothing inside.”

They both look at me.

“I think we should stay together,” I finish lamely.

Lissa looks up alertly, and I realize she thinks I am talking about divorce, that I have finally said what she has been waiting for.

“I think we should all keep together,” I say hastily. “This is Egypt. There are all sorts of dangers, crocodiles and snakes and… it won’t take us very long to see the tomb. You heard Zoe, there’s nothing inside.”

“We’d better not,” Neil says, looking at me. “Lissa’s ankle is starting to swell. I’d better get some ice on it.”

I look down at her ankle. Where the bruise was there are two little puncture marks, close together, like a snake bite, and around them the ankle is starting to swell.

“I don’t think Lissa’s up to the Hall of Judgment,” he says, still looking at me.

“You could wait at the top of the steps,” I say. “You wouldn’t have to go in.“

Lissa takes hold of his arm, as if anxious to go, but he hesitates. “Those people on the ship,” he says to me. “What happened to them?”

“I was just trying to frighten you,” I say. “I’m sure there’s a logical explanation. It’s too bad Hercule Poirot isn’t here—he’d be able to explain everything. The Pyramids were probably closed for some Muslim holiday Zoe didn’t know about, and that’s why we didn’t have to go through customs either, because it was a holiday.”

“What happened to the people on the ship?” Neil says again.

“They got judged,” I say, “but it wasn’t nearly as bad as they’d thought. They were all afraid of what was going to happen, even the clergyman, who hadn’t committed any sins, but the judge turned out to be somebody he knew. A bishop. He wore a white suit, and he was very kind, and most of them came out fine.”

“Most of them,” Neil says.

“Let’s go,” Lissa says, pulling on his arm.

“The people on the ship,” Neil says, ignoring her. “Had any of them committed some horrible sin?”

“My ankle hurts,” Lissa says. “Come on.”

“I have to go,” Neil says, almost reluctantly. “Why don’t you come with us?”

I glance at Lissa, expecting her to be looking daggers at Neil, but she is watching me with bright, lidless eyes.

“Yes. Come with us,” she says, and waits for my answer.

I lied to Lissa about the ending of Death on the Nile. It was the wife they killed. I toy with the idea that they have committed some horrible sin, that I am lying in my hotel room in Athens, my temple black with blood and powder burns. I would be the only one here then, and Lissa and Neil would be demigods disguised to look like them. Or monsters.

“I’d better not,” I say, and back away from them.

“Let’s go then,” Lissa says to Neil, and they start off across the sand. Lissa is limping badly, and before they have gone very far, Neil stops and takes off his shoes.

The sky behind the Pyramids is purple blue, and the Pyramids stand out flat and black against it.

“Come on,” Zoe calls from the top of the steps. She is holding the flashlight and looking at the guidebook. “I want to see the Weighing of the Soul.”

CHAPTER SEVEN:

OFF THE BEATEN TRACK

Zoe is already halfway down the steps when I get back, shining her flashlight on the door below her. “When the tomb was discovered, the door was plastered over and stamped with the seals bearing the cartouche of Tutankhamun,” she says.

“It’ll be dark soon,” I call down to her. “Maybe we should go back to the hotel with Lissa and Neil.” I look back across the desert, but they are already out of sight.

Zoe is gone, too. When I look back down the steps, there is nothing but darkness. “Zoe!” I shout, and run down the sand-drifted steps after her. “Wait!”

The door to the tomb is open, and I can see the light from her flashlight bobbing on rock walls and ceiling far down a narrow corridor.

“Zoe!” I shout, and start after her. The floor is uneven, and I trip and put my hand on the wall to steady myself. “Come back! You have the book!”

The light flashes on a section of carved-out wall, far ahead, and then vanishes, as if she has turned a corner.

“Wait for me!” I shout, and stop because I cannot see my hand in front of my face.

There is no answering light, no answering voice, no sound at all. I stand very still, one hand still on the wall, listening for footsteps, for quiet padding, for the sound of slithering, but I can’t hear anything, not even my own heart beating.

“Zoe,” I call out, “I’m going to wait for you outside,” and turn around, holding onto the wall so I don’t get disoriented in the dark, and go back the way I came.

The corridor seems longer than it did coming in, and I toy with the idea that it will go on forever in the dark, or that the door will be locked, the opening plastered over and the ancient seals affixed, but there is a line of light under the door, and it opens easily when I push on it.

I am at the top of a stone staircase leading down into a long wide hall. On either side the hall is lined with stone pillars, and between the pillars I can see that the walls are painted with scenes in sienna and yellow and bright blue.

It must be the anteroom because Zoe said its walls were painted with scenes from the soul’s journey into death, and there is Anubis weighing the soul, and, beyond it, a baboon devouring something, and, opposite where I am standing on the stairs, a painting of a boat crossing the blue Nile. It is made of gold, and in it four souls squat in a line, their kohl-outlined eyes looking ahead at the shore. Beside them, in the transparent water, Sebek, the crocodile demigod, swims.

I start down the steps. There is a doorway at the far end of the hall, and if this is the anteroom, then the door must lead to the burial chamber.

Zoe said the tomb consists of only three rooms, and I saw the map myself on the plane, the steps and straight corridor and then the unimpressive rooms leading one into another, anteroom and burial chamber and Hall of Judgment, one after another.

So this is the anteroom, even if it is larger than it was on the map, and Zoe has obviously gone ahead to the burial chamber and is standing by Tutankhamun’s coffin, reading aloud from the travel guide. When I come in, she will look up and say, “ The quartzite sarcophagus is carved with passages from The Book of the Dead.‘“

I have come halfway down the stairs, and from here I can see the painting of the weighing of the soul. Anubis, with his jackal’s head, standing on one side of the yellow scales, and the deceased on the other, reading his confession from a papyrus.

I go down two more steps, till I am even with the scales, and sit down.

Surely Zoe won’t be long—there’s nothing in the burial chamber except the coffin—and even if she has gone on ahead to the Hall of Judgment, shell have to come back this way. There’s only one entrance to the tomb. And she can’t get turned around because she has a flashlight. And the book. I clasp my hands around my knees and wait.

I think about the people on the ship, waiting for judgment. “It wasn’t as bad as they thought,” I’d told Neil, but now, sitting here on the steps, I remember that the bishop, smiling kindly in his white suit, gave them sentences appropriate to their sins. One of the women was sentenced to being alone forever.

The deceased in the painting looks frightened, standing by the scale, and I wonder what sentence Anubis will give him, what sins he has committed.

Maybe he has not committed any sins at all, like the clergyman, and is worried over nothing, or maybe he is merely frightened at finding himself in this strange place, alone. Was death what he expected?

“Death is the same everywhere,” Zoe’s husband said. “Unexpected.” And nothing is the way you thought it would be. Look at the Mona Lisa. And Neil. The people on the ship had planned on something else altogether, pearly gates and angels and clouds, all the modern refinements. Prepare to be disappointed.

And what about the Egyptians, packing their clothes and wine and sandals for their trip? Was death, even on the Nile, what they expected? Or was it not the way it had been described in the travel guide at all? Did they keep thinking they were alive, in spite of all the clues?

The people on the ship were killed by a bomb, like we were. I try to remember the moment it went off—Zoe reading out loud and then the sudden shock of light and decompression, the travel guide blown out of Zoe’s hands and Lissa falling through the blue air, but I can’t. Maybe it didn’t happen on the plane. Maybe the terrorists blew us up in the airport in Athens, while we were checking our luggage.

I toy with the idea that it wasn’t a bomb at all, that I murdered Lissa and then killed myself, like in Death on the Nile. Maybe I reached into my bag, not for my paperback but for the gun I bought in Athens, and shot Lissa while she was looking out the window. And Neil bent over her, solicitous, concerned, and I raised the gun again, and Zoe’s husband tried to wrestle it out of my hand, and the shot went wide and hit the gas tank on the wing.

I am still frightening myself. If I’d murdered Lissa, I would remember it, and even Athens, notorious for its lack of security, wouldn’t have let me on board a plane with a gun. And you could hardly commit some horrible crime without remembering it, could you?

The deceased clutches his papyrus, and I wonder if he has committed some horrible sin. Adultery. Or murder. I wonder how he died.

The people on the ship didn’t remember dying, even when someone told them, but that was because the ship was so much like a real one, the railings and the water and the deck. And because of the bomb. People never remember being blown up. It’s the concussion or something, it knocks the memory out of you. But I would surely have remembered murdering someone. Or being murdered.

I sit on the steps a long time, watching for the splash of Zoe’s flashlight in the doorway. Outside it will be dark, time for the Son et Lumiere show at the pyramids.

It seems darker in here, too. I have to squint to see Anubis and the yellow scales and the deceased awaiting judgment. The papyrus he is holding is covered with long, bordered columns of hieroglyphics and I hope they are magic spells to protect him and not a list of all the sins he has committed.

I have not murdered another, I think. I have not committed adultery. But there are other sins.

It will be dark soon, and I do not have a flashlight. I stand up. “Zoe!” I call, and go down the stairs and between the pillars. They are carved with animals—cobras and baboons and crocodiles.

“It’s getting dark,” I call, and my voice echoes hollowly among the pillars. “They’ll be wondering what happened to us.”

The last pair of pillars is carved with a bird, its sandstone wings outstretched. A bird of the gods. Or a plane.

“Zoe?” I say, and stoop to go through the low door. “Are you in here?”

CHAPTER EIGHT:

SPECIAL EVENTS

Zoe isn’t in the burial chamber. It is much smaller than the anteroom, and there are no paintings on the rough walls or above the door that leads to the Hall of Judgment. The ceiling is scarcely higher than the door, and I have to hunch down to keep from scraping my head against it.

It is darker in here than in the anteroom, but even in the dimness I can see that Zoe isn’t here. Neither is Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus, carved with The Book of the Dead. There is nothing in the room at all, except for a pile of suitcases in the corner by the door to the Hall of Judgment.

It is our luggage. I recognize my battered Samsonite and the carry-on bags of the Japanese tour group. The flight attendants’ navy blue overnight cases are in front of the pile, strapped like victims to their wheeled carriers.

On top of my suitcase is a book, and I think, “It’s the travel guide,” even though I know Zoe would never have left it behind, and I hurry over to pick it up.

It is not Egypt Made Easy. It is my Death on the Nile, lying open and facedown the way Lissa left it on the boat, but I pick it up anyway and open it to the last pages, searching for the place where Hercule Poirot explains all the strange things that have been happening, where he solves the mystery.

I cannot find it. I thumb back through the book, looking for a map. There is always a map in Agatha Christie, showing who had what stateroom on the ship, showing the stairways and the doors and the unimpressive rooms leading one into another, but I cannot find that either. The pages are covered with long unreadable columns of hieroglyphics.

I close the book. “There’s no point in waiting for Zoe,” I say, looking past the luggage at the door to the next room. It is lower than the one I came through, and dark beyond. “She’s obviously gone on to the Hall of Judgment.”

I walk over to the door, holding the book against my chest. There are stone steps leading down. I can see the top one in the dim light from the burial chamber. It is steep and very narrow.

I toy briefly with the idea that it will not be so bad after all, that I am dreading it like the clergyman, and it will turn out to be not judgment but someone I know, a smiling bishop in a white suit, and mercy is not a modern refinement after all.

“I have not murdered another,” I say, and my voice does not echo. “I have not committed adultery.”

I take hold of the doorjamb with one hand so I won’t fall on the stairs. With the other I hold the book against me. “Get back, you evil ones,” I say. “Stay away. I adjure you in the name of Osiris and Poirot. My spells protect me. I know the way.”

I begin my descent.

DEAD MAN'S CURVE

Terry Bisson

ONE

"You're not going to believe what I'm going to tell you," Hal said.

"Probably not."

"But I'm going to tell you anyway."

"Probably are."

"There is another world."

"Probably is."

"Camilla, quit acting silly. If you could see me over the phone, you'd know that I was serious. Another world! Besides this one."

"Like Lechuguilla," I said. "Like the Ruwenzori."

"No. Really different."

"Like the Moon?"

"The Moon is part of this world. I'm talking about something much, much more amazing. Get your clothes on, I'm coming over."

"The Moon is not part of this world. And I don't walk around the apartment with no clothes on. And I'm watching Unsolved Mysteries, so don't come over until nine unless you can keep your mouth shut."

Hal was my best friend, is my best friend, all the way from grade school, on and off. We were the only ones from our class, eleven years after graduation, who weren't married. The only halfway normal ones, anyway.

Hal went to Bluegrass Community College in Frankfort, and sold dope. I worked at the KwikPik and watched Unsolved Mysteries.

Joke.

Hal didn't arrive until 9:07. I was sitting on the front steps of the Belle Meade Arms, smoking a cigarette, waiting for him. My last boyfriend wouldn't let me smoke in the apartment, and I kept the prohibition (along with the apartment) after I got rid of him. It was a warm July night and I could hear Hal's 85 Cavalier a block away. The transmission had a whine. It's probably the worst car ever made and I ought to know; my last boyfriend worked for a Chevy dealer.

But enough about him.

"There is another world," I said, trying to sound mysterious like Robert Stack on Unsolved Mysteries.

"Once you see it you won't laugh," Hal said.

"Patagonia?" I said. "Tibesti? Macchu Picchu?" We knew all the neat places. As kids we had shared stacks of National Geographics. I was looking for Oz. Hal was looking for where his father had gone. We never found either.

"Not the Moon. Not Lechuguilla. Not Machu Picchu. This is really different."

"Where did you read about it?"

"I didn't read about it. I found it. I've been there. This is serious, Camilla. I'm the only one who knows about it. It's not even like a real place. It's another world."

"I thought you said it was real."

"Come on. Get in the car. We're going for a ride."

We drove out Old 19 to Dead Man's Curve. It's a long hairpin near the top of Caddy's Bluff, over the Kentucky River. Nobody gets killed on it anymore. In the old days, before the interstate, they say people made a living stripping parts off the wrecks at the bottom of the bluff. The ones that didn't go into the river.

"I never come here that I don't think of Wascomb," I said. In high school, Johnny Wascomb had taken Dead Man's Curve at fifty-nine mph. It was still the record as far as I knew. Ironically, he didn't get killed driving but in an accident in the Navy. He was the only dead person I knew.

"Funny you should mention Wascomb," Hal said. "I was seeing if I could take the curve as fast as him when it happened."

"When what happened?"

"You'll see." Hal drove up the bluff, around the curve, and turned into an old logging road. It was dark back in the trees.

"Is this a Stephen King thing?" I asked, alarmed.

"No, Camilla. I'm just turning around." Hal backed out onto the highway and started down the hill, around the curve. Going down, we were on the outside; that's what made it Dead Man's Curve.

"I drive home from Frankfort this way twice a week. As an experiment, I started taking the curve at forty, forty two, forty four. In two mph increments. The way Wascomb did."

"I never knew he did it that way."

"He was very scientific."

"He went fifty-nine in his GTO," I said. "Not some dinky Cavalier."

"I'm not even going to go fifty," Hal said. "Watch what happened to me at forty-two."

Hal set the Cavalier on forty-two as we went into the curve. From where I was sitting it looked like thirty-nine. The white guard posts along the road flickered past, low in the headlights. The curve tightened but Hal kept his speed up. A third of the way around, the big trees gave out and I knew we were over the cliff.

The tires squealed but only a little. The posts flickered past one by one by one. They were all the same distance apart, and we were at a steady speed, so it looked like nothing was moving. The cable that connected the posts undulated in the headlights like a white wave; then the wave seemed to open, and suddenly the world turned inside out like a sock, and we were in a room.

Not in the car. A white room. We were sitting on a sort of bench, side by side. I sensed Hal beside me on my right but I didn't see him until he stood up.

He stood up and I stood up with him. He turned and I turned with him. In front of us was a wall. No, it was a window. Beyond it I could see endless rows of hills, white, but dark, like snow in moonlight. Then Hal turned again and I turned with him. Another wall. I wanted to see through it but Hal stepped back. We stepped back. I saw stars and the white room was gone. What I had thought was stars were leaves in the headlights, across the road. Through the windshield. The world had turned inside out again, or outside in, and we were back in the car, stopped at the bottom of the hill where Old 19 connects with River Road. I recognized the stop sign with the bullet holes.

Hal was on my left again, not my right. He was looking at me. "Well?" he said.

"Well?! What the hell was that?" I said.

"You saw it too, right?"

"Saw it? I was there. We were there!"

"Where?" Hal was suddenly like a lawyer or a cop, interrogative. "What was it? What was it for you?"

"A--white room. Like a waiting room."

"Then it's real," he said, putting the Cavalier into gear and turning onto River Road back toward town. "I had to know if it was real. I almost wish to hell you hadn't seen it too. Now I don't know what to do."

TWO

The next day Hal picked me up at the KwikPik after work. He was twenty minutes late. I sat out front and waited for him.

"Sorry I'm late, Camilla," he said. "I wanted to tell my professor about it."

We both knew what it was. "What did he say?"

"He didn't have time to talk about it. He had to run out. He has two jobs. He said it might have something to do with the white posts flickering in the headlights. Hell, I had already figured that out. My theory is, they set up a resonance and open a portal into another universe."

Hal reads science fiction. I never could get into it.

We headed out Old 19. "I tried it faster and slower," Hal said. "I tried it with the radio on and in low range, etcetera. It only works at forty-two, only in this Cavalier, and only at night. Last night was my third time. I had to take you with me to be sure I wasn't a hallucinating or something."

Hal pulled into the logging road. "Wait," I said. "How do we know for sure we can always get back?"

"One wall leads back. You step back into it. It's the easiest part. It breaks the spell or something."

"Spell. That's not very scientific. What if we get trapped?"

"You've been trapped in this world all your life, Camilla."

"It's not the same and you know it. It's bigger, for one thing."

"You want to chicken out?" he asked.

"Do you?" There it was; we both grinned. How could we? How often do you get a chance to go to another world?

Hal backed out onto the highway and started down the bluff.

"Should I fasten my seat belt?"

"Gee, I don't know, Camilla. I never thought about it."

I fastened my seat belt.

Thirty-seven. Forty. Forty-two (which looked like thirty-nine). The tires were squealing just barely. The transmission whined. "How do we know this speedometer's accurate?" I asked.

"Doesn't matter. Haven't you ever heard of relativity? Just sit tight. Look straight ahead."

I kept my eye on the hood ornament, a little chrome cavalier in tights with a plume on his hat. Little buns like raisins. The white posts started flickering in that wave motion, the cable started undulating, and this time I saw the wave turn the world inside out, like a sock. And there we were, in the white room.

It was easier than walking into a movie theatre. Or out of one. Nothing was there unless I looked at it directly. Then it sort of drew itself in. I looked down and saw the bench, white. The floor, white. I looked at my hands and at my feet. I looked like a video character or a cartoon. I was flat and I only existed when I moved. When I held my hand still it was gone. But when I moved it or looked at it hard, it was there.

I tried running my tongue around the inside of my mouth. There was nothing there. No spit. No teeth.

But I could talk. I looked at Hal and said, "Here we are." I couldn't tell where the words came from. Hal said the same words back: "Here we are."

I wanted to stand up. Suddenly I was standing and Hal was standing beside me. It was easy, like a piece of paper unfolding. It was all beginning to seem normal.

"Let's look around," I said. "Okay," Hal said.

The light was like the light in the Kwik-Pik. The longer I looked at things, the more normal they became. But never "normal" normal. The white room was not really white. I could see through the wall to the hills, arranged in endless rows.

"See those hills," I said.

"I think they are clouds," Hal said. I looked at him and suddenly I felt scared. You never look directly at people in dreams. I had been hoping this would turn out to be some kind of dream. But it wasn't.

"Here we are," Hal said again. He reached down and touched the bench behind us. I touched it at the same time. I was doing what he did now. The bench felt normal. But not "normal" normal. "Time to back," Hal said.

"Not yet," I said. I turned and he turned with me. It seemed that one of us decided what to do for us both, and now it was me again.

We were facing another white wall. Now that I was looking at it, I could see through it. There were endless rooms, like in a mirror. Only they never got smaller. All the rooms were empty except the first one.

"There's a person there," Hal said.

The person in the other room turned toward us.

I felt myself stumble backward, even though I couldn't move. We must have fallen through the wall because we were at the stop sign, in the car. Bullet holes, seat belt and all.

"How'd we get here?" I asked.

"I stepped back," Hal said. "I must have panicked."

"You should have waited till I was ready!"

"Camilla, what are we arguing about!? Did you see what I saw? Did you?"

"Of course. But don't talk about it. No theories. Let's just go back."

"Tomorrow night."

"No. Tonight. Right now."

We turned around and drove to the top of the hill, and went around Dead Man's Curve again. It was like stepping back into (or out of) the theater. It was getting easy. This time I stood and Hal stood with me, and I turned toward the wall (it was on our right) and there he was, right where we had left him, looking through from the other room.

"Wascomb?" Hal whispered.

THREE

"Harold," Wascomb said. It wasn't a question or a greeting. He didn't seem surprised to see us.

"Camilla is here too," Hal said.

"Camilla who?"

"A friend--"

"Forget it," I said. I had sat next to him in two classes. He had dated my cousin, Ruth Ann, all through senior year.

"Where are you?" Wascomb asked. Like Hal, like myself, he was only there if I looked at him hard. There were no details. But when he talked I could hear his voice in my head like a memory.

"We're here where you are," Hal said. "Wherever this is. Where are we?"

"I don't know. I'm dead."

"I know. I'm sorry," Hal said.

"I don't remember how I died. Am I supposed to remember?"

"It was a steam explosion," Hal said.

"You were in the Navy," I said. "You lost your life on the flight deck of the carrier Kitty Hawk."

"You're Ruth Ann's cousin," Wascomb said. "Tamara. I always thought you were cute."

"Camilla." But I forgave him everything. Wascomb didn't have many details. Just enough to talk to. But he seemed more solid than Hal or I. I had the feeling that if I reached out, I could touch him through the wall.

I didn't want to reach out.

"Are you all dead?"

"No," Hal said. "We're just--visiting. We came in a car. Sort of."

"I know. Dead Man's Curve. I discovered it when I was a teenager," Wascomb said. "You go around at a certain speed, at night, and you end up here. You're the only ones since me. I've been here forever. Are you all still teenagers?"

"At heart," I said.

"I'm in Community College," Hal said.

"Be glad you're not dead. It's all over then."

"But it's not!" I said. "You were dead, but here you are."

"I'm still dead," said Wascomb. "It's still all over."

"But it means there is life after death!" I said.

"Sort of." Wascomb said. "It doesn't amount to much. It's just for people who go around the curve at the certain speed, in a certain car maybe. I think the posts in the headlights set up a wave pattern that flips you through into another Universe. I studied electronics in the Navy."

"What was your speed?" Hal asked.

"Fifty one," said Wascomb. "In my GTO. I wanted to bring Ruth Ann. But I had sold my GTO. It was a classic already, even then. How long's it been?"

"Ten years."

"Think what it would be worth now. Does Ruth Ann know I'm dead?"

"It's been ten years," Hal said. "She's happily married."

"How would you know that?" I said. Actually, Ruth Ann was getting a divorce but I didn't see any point in going into it.

"I never should have sold that GTO," Wascomb said. "It wouldn't work in any other car. How'd you make it work?"

"A Cavalier," Hal said.

"Cavalier?"

"It's a kind of a Chevy."

"Is it any good?"

"I can't believe you're dead and still talking about cars," I said.

"Actually, I don't talk about anything usually. It's not much different from being dead. A little better, I guess. I never thought I'd come back here, when I died I mean. What did you say it was?"

"Steam explosion," I said. "The Kitty Hawk. You were in the Mediterranean."

` "What's the Mediterranean?"

"It's time for us to go," Hal said. "It was--nice seeing you."

"See, you're not dead. You can go back but I can't. I'll be here forever, I guess. Will you come back and see me?" "Sure," I said. I was just humoring him. Like Hal, I was ready to go.

"And bring Ruth Ann."

"What?" We both turned back around.

"She's married, Wascomb," I said.

"I thought you said she was getting a divorce."

"Did I say that?"

"I think you started to."

"She thinks you're dead, Wascomb."

"I am dead. That's why I want to see her. I never get to see anybody."

FOUR

Ruth Ann was surprised to see me at her door the next day. "How about asking me in?" I said. I should explain that I have short hair and wear a motorcycle jacket. Ruth Ann is the opposite type.

Still, I was her cousin and she had to ask me in. Blood's thicker than water. She brought me a canned ice tea and set it on the table.

"Is this about Aunt Betty?" she asked. My mother, her aunt, is sort of a drunk.

I had rehearsed how to tell the story, even going over it out loud in the car, but I could see now that it wasn't going to work. It was too bizarre.

"No, it's about Wascomb, but I can't tell you here," I said. "I came by to see if we could--go for a drive."

"Johnny Wascomb? Camilla, are you smoking something?"

I was smoking a cigarette but I put it out. "It's about Wascomb, and it concerns you," I said. "It's about a--message from him to you."

Her face went white. "A letter?"

"A message," I said. "Not a letter."

She looked relieved. "You know, he used to write me from the Navy. I never answered his letters. Johnny Wascomb. But what could it be about him? Never mind. Don't tell me. I will go with you."

"I talked to my professor" said Hal, when he met me at the KwikPik after work. "He thinks it's probably some kind of artificial universe created by the wave motion of the lights on the posts. Very rare."

"I should hope," I said. I couldn't imagine swapping worlds every time you went around a curve.

"He says the reason everything looks sketchy is that our brains are wired for this universe. Whatever they see, they have to make it a version of this one. No matter how different it is. Do you think Ruth Ann will show?"

At 9:06 Ruth Ann pulled up in her Volvo. She motioned me over to her window. "What's he doing here?"

"He's part of the deal," I said.

"I can't be seen with him. Isn't he some kind of a dope dealer?" Ervin, her husband, was a state senator. (Not the state senator, a state senator.)

"Was," I lied. "Besides, I thought you were getting a divorce. Anyway, you have to come. I promised."

"Promised who?"

"Don't make me say it. It'll sound too crazy. Get in the front seat. I'll get in the back."

We got into the Cavalier. "Long time no see," Hal said. "Guess we run in different circles."

"I wouldn't know, I don't run in circles," said Ruth Ann. I had forgotten how obnoxious she could be.

Hal drove out Old 19, toward Dead Man's Curve. I felt like I should prepare Ruth Ann but I didn't know where to start. She didn't give me time to figure it out. "Camilla, tell me what's going on," she said as we were heading up the bluff. "Right now or I'm getting out of the car." I had forgotten how bossy she could be.

Hal turned into the old logging road at the top of the bluff. "Last night we talked to Wascomb," I said. "I know it sounds weird."

"Is this some kind of Stephen King thing?" Ruth Ann said. "If it is, I'm getting out of the car right now!"

Hal leaned over and opened her door. "Be my guest! Camilla, I'm warning you, she's going to mess up everything."

"No!" I leaned up over the seat and shut her door. "It's not a Stephen King thing," I said. "It's--more like a love story."

That shut her up. Hal backed out and turned around.

"True love," I said. "The kind where love conquereth death."

"Conquereth?" Hal was staring at me in the rear view mirror. I realized I had gone a little too far. "Put your seat belt on," I said.

Hal drove down the hill at thirty, thirty-five. Ruth Ann started up again. "Dead Man's Curve? Are you two trying to scare me?"

"Ruth Ann--"

"If this is your idea of a thrill, it's totally pathetic," Ruth Ann said. "Johnny Wascomb took this curve at seventy-five, lots of times."

"Ruth Ann, shut up," I said. "Just watch the hood ornament. The little cavalier."

"It was fifty-nine," said Hal. Muttered Hal.

Forty two. There was the wave, the undulating stream of white posts, and the world turned inside out like a sock, and there we were, in the white room. I would have breathed a sigh of relief except I wasn't breathing. If this wouldn't shut her up, nothing would.

"Where are we?" Ruth Ann asked.

"It's another world," Hal said.

"Is this some weird Navy thing? Were they lying about the accident?" To shut her up, I stood and pulled her and Hal with me. I knew they would stand when I did. Through the wall we saw the endless ranges of hills.

"Who owns all this?" Ruth Ann asked.

I turned and, again, they turned with me. We faced the other wall and the endless rooms. Wascomb was standing there as if he had been waiting for us.

"Omigod," said Ruth Ann. "Johnny. Is it really you?"

"Not exactly. I'm dead. Who are you?"

"It's me!"

"You told us to bring her," I said.

"Who told who what?"

"You told us to bring her," Hal said. "Don't you remember?"

"I told you, I'm dead," Wascomb said. "It's hard for me to remember things. It's not hard exactly. I just don't do it."

"Do you want us to leave?" Hal asked. I could tell he was hoping. "We can take her back with us."

"Back where?"

"Johnny, stop it!" screamed Ruth Ann. Her scream shook the whole universe.

"Ruth Ann?" said Wascomb. "I wanted to bring you here but I sold my GTO. You got mad because I showed the guys your bra in the glove compartment. I can't believe I sold that car."

"Johnny, are you really dead? The casket was closed at the funeral. I'm sorry I didn't answer your letters."

"What letters?"

"You sent me one a day for weeks. Or was it one a week for months? Don't you remember?"

"I can remember how to unhook your bra with one hand. But I can't remember you. All I remember is being dead. Once you're here, you've been here forever. Once you're dead you're always dead, forward and back. I think."

"Let's get out of here," Hal said. I had to agree. He and I both turned back toward the other wall. Ruth Ann turned with us. The sky was dark and yet bright, like a negative. The hills were white, but dark.

"What happened to Johnny?" Ruth Ann asked.

"I don't know," I lied. I looked at Hal beside me and he leaned back toward the bench, but it was a wall, and we slipped through it into a darkness that turned out to be leaves, and trees, and we were stopped again at the stop sign. Bullet holes and all.

"Take me home," said Ruth Ann. I couldn't tell if she was mad or what, the way she was blubbering. "Right this minute!"

FIVE

The next day was Sunday, the day I work twelve hours straight. When I got to the KwikPik at 7:00 a.m., Hal was there, looking worried.

"I told you she was crazy," Hal said. "What do you think she'll do?"

"Ruth Ann? She won't do anything."

"Are you kidding? She was sobbing all the way home, then like a zombie when she went into the house. You don't think that husband of hers will notice? He could get me kicked out of school."

"They're getting a divorce anyway," I said. "And how can you get kicked out of school when you're only taking one class?"

"Two."

I could see he was irrational, so I changed the subject. "Speaking of school, did you talk to your professor?"

"Yes, I told you, he says it's probably a pocket universe. They twist off the main universe, like bubbles."

"The main universe?"

"He's calling in sick on his other job so he can come with us tonight."

"Tonight?"

"He's afraid to wait. He's afraid it might disappear or something. He wants to check it out first-hand. I might get extra credit."

"What does this guy teach? I thought you were studying business."

"His course is called Non-Spatial Strategies. It's a marketing course. He just throws in a little physics, because that was his minor. He wants to make a video."

"Don't turn around," I said.

Ruth Ann had just driven up, or rather her husband had driven her up, in their new Volvo 740 Turbo with Intercooler. Whatever that is. "Ruth Ann's getting out of the car," I said. "From the way she's dressed, they're on their way to church. She's coming in the door."

"Camilla," she said. "And you. Are you everywhere? I told Ervin I was just coming in to get some cigarettes." She burst into tears.

"Good lord, Ruth Ann," I said. "What's the matter?" Ervin waved from the car and I waved back. He's a state senator. They wave at everybody.

"The matter? Do you realize I spoke to my only true love last night? I found him in the land where love never dies."

"Ruth Ann, you're talking like a song on the radio," I said. It wasn't intended as a compliment.

"It's just a pocket universe," Hal said.

"There just happens to be a guy in it who just happens to be my first love."

"You dumped him, remember?" I said. "Besides, Ruth Ann, he's dead." Ruth Ann burst into tears again. This time she dropped her money all over the floor. Hal bent down to pick it up. Always the gentleman. "I told you she was crazy," he said. Muttered.

"Is he talking about me? Camilla, I can't let Ervin see me crying. Act like we're laughing. Let him see you smile. Good."

All the time she was ordering me around, she was crying. Hal handed her her money and she said, "Now, tell me, when are we going back? Tonight?"

"We're not going back," Hal said. "It's been declared off-limits. By the Navy."

"Let me handle this, Hal," I said. He left, not bothering to speak to Ervin. They lived in two different worlds. Ruth Ann lit a cigarette.

"You can't smoke in the store," I said. She ignored me.

"Camilla, where is Johnny? How do I get back there?"

I explained the pocket universe theory, as best I could. "It's some sort of artificial universe," I said. "Apparently if you have ever been there, you are always there; or you go back there after you are dead. Or something. Wascomb's the only one there. It's his universe, I guess."

"Does that mean we'll go back there after we're dead?"

"I don't know," I said. I hoped not. "You get there by going around Dead Man's Curve."

"No, you don't, I tried it," she said. "I tried every different speed in the Volvo last night."

"After we dropped you off?"

"Of course. I went back. I wanted to be alone with Johnny. I tried both directions. Up, down."

"It only works in certain cars," I said. "It has to do with the lights, and maybe the sound. Hal's Cavalier has a bad transmission whine. I don't remember Wascomb's GTO."

"I do," said Ruth Ann. "I never told anybody this, Camilla, but I lost my virginity in that car."

I didn't know what to say. It wasn't such a big secret. Those Wascomb hadn't told, had figured it out on their own.

"Would Hal loan me his Cavalier? I could buy it from him. I have my own money."

"Ruth Ann, this is crazy."

"Camilla, did you ever dump somebody and then want them back? Well, answer me. Did you ever think you would give anything to--"

"Ruth Ann, Wascomb is dead."

"Camilla, are you trying to make me scream? If you think I won't scream because I'm in a store--"

"All right, all right," I said. "Hal is picking me up after work at eight. Be here and I'll work it out somehow."

SIX

"What's she doing here?" Hal asked. "That's the professor?" I asked him in turn. An enormous fat man in a Geo Metro had just pulled in behind the Cavalier. He looked familiar.

"Come over here, I'll introduce you. Professor (he said some name), this is my colleague, Camilla Perry."

"And that's my cousin Ruth Ann Embry in the Volvo," I said.

"She's not going with us," Hal said to the professor. "There's not room for four."

"Hal, she's as much a part of this as I am," I said. "It's Wascomb's universe, after all. He asked for her."

"Wascomb's universe?" That got him mad. "If it's Wascomb's universe, how come I own the only car that goes to it?"

Ruth Ann got out of the Volvo. She was wearing a denim jacket. I had to admit she looked good, whatever she wore.

"Not room for four?" the professor said. "Are you talking about the car, or the universe? Theoretically, a pocket universe can hold any number of people. The problem is getting into it."

His problem was getting into the Cavalier. He looked into the back seat uncertainly. "Ruth Ann and I will get in the back," I said. He got in the front with Hal. We drove out of town on Old 19.

"Did Hal explain my pocket universe theory?" the professor said.

"Tell us again," Ruth Ann said.

"My theory is that they are accidental wave forms, generated by aural and visual interference patterns and pinched off like bubbles from this universe. About the size of a basketball."

"Now I know where I've seen you," I said. "Didn't you used to manage the driving range out on Oldham Road?"

"Still do,"

My last boy friend was a golf nut. I still had his clubs under my bed. But enough about him. "If it's the size of a baseball, how are we all going to fit in it?" Ruth Ann asked.

"Basketball," the professor said. "And that's just from the outside. On the inside, it can be as big as it needs to be. Our Universe is about the size of a basketball too, from the outside. If we could get outside it to take a look at it. The problem is getting outside one universe without immediately getting into another one. Do you follow me?"

"No."

"According to the professor, everything's about the size of a basketball," Hal said.

That makes him the biggest thing in creation, I thought.

We were heading up the bluff. "Why are you putting on lipstick?" I whispered to Ruth Ann. "And why are you filming her?" I asked the professor.

"Videotaping," the professor said. "This is a scientific experiment. I have to document everything," He was turned around in his seat with his camcorder on his shoulder. Ruth Ann was combing her hair. Hal pulled into the logging road to turn around. It was dark back in the trees.

"Why are we stopping?" the professor asked. "Is this some kind of Stephen King thing?"

"I'm beginning to think so," Hal said. Muttered. I could tell he was angry that Ruth Ann was along.

"Here we go," Hal said. The professor turned around and started videotaping through the windshield. We started down the bluff, around Dead Man's Curve at forty-two. The posts started flickering past. Ruth Ann started to fool with the buttons on her denim jacket. The wave started flickering, and the world turned inside out like a sock, and there we were. In the white room.

"Where's the professor?" I wondered. I stood. Hal and Ruth Ann stood with me. There were only the three of us.

"Maybe he couldn't fit through," Ruth Ann said.

I wanted to look out the window at the hills but I was turning instead, toward the other room. Ruth Ann was turning us with her. Wascomb waited exactly as we had left him.

"Mother?" he asked.

"Ruth Ann," Ruth Ann said. "Don't you remember me? Never mind. I came to take you back."

"Back where?"

"There is another world," Hal said. "The real world."

"Hal," I said. "He's dead. Why rub it in?"

"You both stay out of this!" Ruth Ann said.

"What's so real about it?" Wascomb asked. "Are you guys in the Navy."

"Johnny, I brought you something," Ruth Ann said. "Two friends of yours."

I thought she meant Hal and I. Then I realized she had finished unbuttoning her jacket. I tried to see her body but there was nothing there. When I stared long enough it sketched itself in, but it was too vague.

"Remember them?" she said again. "You used to call them Ben and Jerry."

"Ruth Ann!" I said.

"Ruth Ann, I've been dead for a long time," Wascomb said.

"I'll make you remember me," Ruth Ann said. She stepped forward, toward the other room--and as one person Hal and I both pulled back, alarmed. We fell through into darkness.

"Hooonnnnk! Hoooooinnnk!"

A car sped by, barely missing the front of the Cavalier, which was sticking out past the stop sign onto River Road. "What happened?" Ruth Ann asked. She was buttoning her denim jacket. The professor was leaning over the back of the seat, videotaping her every move.

"What happened was, you almost got us killed!" Hal said. Yelled. Screamed.

We took Ruth Ann back to the KwikPik to get her Volvo. She got out of the car without a word. I offered to drive her home but she just shook her head and drove off.

"What happened to you?" Hal asked the professor.

"I didn't go through," he said. "But I got what I wanted. I have it documented."

We went to Hal's and played the tape on his VCR. It showed Ruth Ann putting on her lipstick. It showed Hal driving and looking annoyed. Then there were the posts in the headlights, flickering past. There was another shot of Hal driving. Then of me and Ruth Ann in the back seat. Ruth Ann was unbuttoning her denim jacket. She wasn't wearing anything underneath it, not even a bra. The camera zoomed in on her breasts. The screen flickered, then showed the stop sign.

"Pretty average tits for a Homecoming Queen," Hal said.

"Knock it off," I said. "She may be a lunatic but she's my cousin. Anyway, I thought this was a scientific experiment."

"It was," the professor said. "And it worked." He rewound to where Ruth Ann unbuttoned her jacket. "Watch the numbers this time, at the bottom corner of the screen." The camera zoomed in on Ruth Ann's breasts again. The whole sequence lasted eight seconds. Three of them were blank.

8:04:26 (breasts)

8:04:27 (breasts)

8:04:28 (blank)

8:04:29 (blank)

8:04:30 (blank)

8:04:31 (breasts)

8:04:32 (breasts)

"She disappeared for three seconds," the professor said.

"That means we disappeared too," I said.

"I wasn't documenting that. The point is, she was gone and the video proves it, at least to me. It implies the existence of the pocket universe, at least indirectly. I'll need more documentation, though. The next problem is, how do I get through personally?"

"Just follow the bouncing boobs," Hal said.

"Knock it off, I said," I said. "You have to be watching the white wave. The posts. The little cavalier on the hood. That's what you should have been filming."

"Videotaping."

"Whatever. Anyway, how could it have only lasted three seconds? It sure felt like a lot longer than that."

"Haven't you ever heard of relativity?" Hal asked.

"Time in a pocket universe doesn't really connect with time here," the professor said. "The pocket universe could have just squeezed off a microsecond here, then divided it up into a million parts there, which would seem like twenty minutes to you. It's all subjective. That's why it seems like eternity to your friend in there, whereas it's probably only been only two or three minutes altogether. See what I mean?"

"No. You mean there's life after death but it only lasts a couple of minutes?"

"Tops. But it seems like eternity. Meanwhile, can we try again tomorrow night?"

I was game. So was Hal, as long as Ruth Ann didn't come along. I left Hal and the professor watching reruns of Ruth Ann's tits and walked home to watch Unsolved Mysteries. After, I sat outside and smoked a cigarette. I wondered if my last boyfriend was ever coming back. I wondered what Wascomb was doing. Probably the same thing I was. I decided one more trip would be enough for me.

SEVEN

I got off at 8:00 and Hal was waiting for me, in the lot of the KwikPik. At 8:04 the professor rolled in in his Geo Metro. At 8:05 guess who rolled in in her Volvo.

"No way!" said Hal from the back of the Cavalier. He sent me out to deal with her. He was taping a foam cradle for the camcorder to the shelf behind the back seat.

The professor began the process of getting out of the Geo Metro. Ruth Ann was already out of her Volvo. She was wearing her denim jacket again. Plus toreador pants and eyeliner. I felt like arresting her.

"You're not going!" I said.

"Camilla, don't even try to stop me," she said. "Besides, you're supposed to be my cousin. Blood's thicker than water."

"Everything's thicker than water," I said.

"We'll see!" She stomped off and helped the professor out of his car, bending over, probably to let him know what she was wearing under her jacket. Or wasn't.

"Why shouldn't she go?" the professor said. "She's the one who actually knows somebody there."

"We all know somebody there," I said. "That's because there's only one person there."

"Well, she's going," said the professor. "And she's riding up front with me."

"Three in the front? And since when do you decide things around here?" I looked at Hal, waiting for him to speak up. Instead, he was looking at his shoes. The professor held out his hand and Hal put the keys to the Cavalier in it. I was suddenly beginning to get the picture.

"Hal," I said, "you are an absolute moron." I walked into the store to get a V-8. I always drink a V-8 when I am disgusted. It's the only thing that helps.

When I came back out, the Cavalier was gone. So were Ruth Ann and the professor. Hal was sitting in the Metro.

"They decided it would be better without either one of us," he said. "How do you like my new car?"

It's not like we didn't know where they were going. We headed out Old 19 toward Dead Man's Curve. We were going up the bluff on the inside when they were coming down, so we saw the whole thing. The white posts broke off like bad teeth and the Cavalier sailed right through. It seemed to hang for a minute in the air, and I thought--hoped--that the world was going to turn inside out like a sock and catch it. But it didn't.

The Cavalier started sliding down the bluff, through the little saplings and brush, then bounced off the rocks with a crunch, then dropped out of sight. We didn't hear it hit for a long time.

Then we heard it hit.

"Sweet fucking Jesus," said Hal. He pulled over and we got out of the car. I could lean over the bluff, holding onto the broken cable that had run through the white posts, and see the Cavalier wedged between a rock and a sycamore, the front end just over the water.

Hal was standing with one hand on the door of the Metro like he was paralyzed.

"Go get help!" I said. I started down the cliff. The broken cable helped me far enough so that I could slide the rest of the way. The doors to the Cavalier were wedged shut and the professor was dead. So was Ruth Ann. I buttoned her denim jacket through the window. I took the camcorder from the shelf behind the back seat, and hid it in the bushes for later. I waited up on the road for the police to come. Even though it was summer it was cold.

The police came by to interview me at work the next day. KwikPik only gives days off for immediate family. I told them I didn't know anything. They said they would be back. I went by to see Ervin that night and told him, "They were doing some kind of experiment. The professor was convinced that the wave patterns helped him see into the future or something. You know how Ruth Ann loved that stuff."

"She did?" It must have been Ervin who called off the cops. The only real inquest was held by Hal and me after Ruth Ann was buried. We waited two nights so as not to seem callous. (Or get spotted.) We retrieved the camcorder and took it to his apartment.

The video was shot from the shelf behind the back seat. It showed them starting around the curve. The professor had the speed exactly right at forty-two. It showed Ruth Ann unbuttoning her jacket. The professor was looking down at her. The car veered and she grabbed the wheel, either to save them or to run them off the cliff, there was no way of knowing.

Hal and I watched it again and again. It was our black box. Our flight recorder. I could see Ruth Ann's breasts in the rear view mirror, but not her face.

She disappeared just as the car was going over. The professor never did.

"Does that mean he never got to see the pocket universe?" I asked.

"Beats me," said Hal. "I don't see how we'll ever find out. Even if I could find the exact car with the exact sound and everything, the white posts are gone."

Ervin was remarried within four months. Hal moved to Louisville as soon as he got his two year degree. I'm still at the KwikPik working two shifts on Sundays. My boyfriend never showed up again. I didn't actually expect him to. But enough about him. And Ruth Ann? Even though we were never exactly close, I hope she's safe in her pocket universe with Wascomb. Living happily ever after. Or whatever they do there.

UNDERSTANDING ENTROPY

Barry N. Malzberg

SO I GO TO MARTIN DONNER'S bedside in the room they have staked out for him in Florida, and I ask him the crucial question: If you had known? I say, if you had known that it would end this way, that you would be dying of a hundred wounds, of the tuberculosis, of the pneumocystitis, of the parasites and the kidney breakdown and the hepatitis, the jaundice, the venetium and the shattering of the pancreas, if you had known that five years after the positive diagnosis and three years after the first episode of the pneumonia you would be lying here, 82 pounds, filled with morphine which does not work anymore -- oh, nothing works but that isn't quite the point is it, they are trying -- with your lover and your daughters and your wife and the doctors circling in the outer room and coming in now and then to inspect your reeking corpus, some of them weeping, others taking your pulse and monitoring your breathing: if you had known this 15 years ago, Martin Donner, if you had known everything that would happen to you and that it would end this way, would you have left your wife and children to their lives and your history and gone out to Fire Island, Cherry Groves, the baths and the bathhouses and the quick and the scuffled, the long and the grievous affairs full time, no longer sneaking it around? Would you if you had known? Or would you have stayed in your marriage in the suburbs, Martin Donner, and played with your daughters and watched them grow and claimed your wife with closed eyes in the marriage bed and nothing more, nothing more because you would never know when the dogs truly came into the basement and snuffled up the stairs? Oh maybe once a year you might let some man tend to you with rubber gloves in a bank vault, but otherwise nothing, nothing, nothing at all? If you could have seen that it would have ended this way, Martin, what would you have done? Tell me the truth now. Do you know the truth? Is there any such thing as the truth? Because I need, I need, I need to know now, it affects my own situation.

He stares at me. He is relatively lucid now, it comes and it goes, in and out back and forth, the pounding on the chest has loosened the phlegm, the morphine has momentarily quelled the cough, he thinks that he can think, although this is not necessarily the issue, and he thinks, of course, that I am a hallucination. Hallucination is common in this late-life condition, although the dementia has not affected him as fully as it might in a few more hours or (if he lasts that long, he probably will not) days. I don't know, he says. His eyes are strangely lustrous, the only motion, the only thing in his face not quiescent, the rest is dead, bland, sunken, a canvas upon which has been embedded the full and perfect features of the dead, the valley of the dead, the shades and valleys and small tablelands upon which the dead walk until at last they sleep. Yes, Martin Donner says, yes I do know. I can answer that. He thrashes weakly, the ganglia in his shattered nerves trying to pull into alignment. I wouldn't have done it he said. I would not have died this way. It is not worth it. I thought it was worth it, that it was worth any price to be what you are, to live expressly and fully but it is not. This is unbearable, I am sinking, I am sinking in disgrace, I wet myself, I humiliate myself, I see the with visions and dream of such inextinguishable horror... no, he says, no, and his voice is momentarily stronger, he screams in the room, no, he says, I would not have left them, I would have stayed there and I would have died, I would have died in a thousand ways but it is the difference between metaphor and truth, they are not the same, once I thought they were but no, no, no, no, no, no, he says uncontrollably, the word ratched uncontrollably, and he sinks into the steaming sheets, his eyes fluttering, closed and the coughing, the moaning, the turgid phlegm passes again through his desiccated and shattered cavities. No, he says, and no, I drink, his answer is no and momentarily there is a kind of settling; I can feel my own realignment and a sense of history colliding with imminence merging with the steaming and impenetrable future, but of course this fusion cannot last and I am in Martin Donner's bedroom 15 years earlier, the bedroom on the second floor of the suburban colonial in one of the nicest areas of a nicer suburb in the sets of anterooms to the city, and I have put the question again. I have put it to him calmly and without sinister intent and then have used my powers -- the powers granted me by the old and terrible antagonist who nonetheless, and this is undeniable, always plays fair, as fairly as Martin did not with his wife and daughters and friends and family through all of the years up to this point. I show him the bottles, the tubing, the arc and density of the room, the harsh and desperate light and it is uncommonly vivid, I have placed all my powers in the service of this adtunbration. Oh yes, Martin says, seeing it all, oh yes, I see now. Yes, he says, it is worth it. I would do this. I would not be deterred. It is worth it. It is worth anything to expressly enact what you are, what you must be, the full and alarming necessities of the soul. So I do not care, he says. I am going, I am going to leave, if this is my destiny. So be it. His features congeal with conviction, unlike his face in the room of his death, they recede and pulsate, project and flutter with light there is light all through him. Worth it he says, worth it to be what one is. How many years until this happens? he says. Not that it matters. But I want to know.

Seventeen, I say. Seventeen years and not all of them will be happy. Your daughters will weep and one of them will hate you, there will be many betrayals, also other illnesses, earlier illnesses, small and larger betrayals, a terrible bout with hepatitis. Disgraceful venereal conditions. I don't care, he says, 17 years is a good time. In 17 years here, lying here, sneaking around, pounding myself into myself, I will be dead, I will have lolled myself anyway. No, he says, there is no question there is no argument. I have made my choice. He closes his eyes, smiles, thinking evidently that he is dreaming. Such dialogues are common inside Martin in this crucial time; he thinks that he is constructing a worst case venue but is nonetheless being firm. Yes, he says, I will do this. His breathing, irregular, levels out. As I withdraw, he thinks that he is making passage into dreamless slumber. As he wedes he feels, I know, some kind of imminence, and perhaps it is my question, no less than anything else, which has led him to this resolution. Or perhaps not. It is difficult to work within such difficult and speculative borders without being overwhelmed by my own relative helplessness and stupor.

BUT OF COURSE THIS IS IN ONLY PARTIAL quest of verification. I move through the channels of recorded (and possible) time, asking Martin Donner this question at various places within the continuum. I discuss this with him at Cherry Grove in 1978 at a tea dance while he is hanging shyly against the walls, yes he says, of course it is worth it. I ask him this in 1986 when, thunderously, the implications of the positive diagnosis beg to come through to him and he closes his eyes as I make the forced pictures in his head showing him what it would be like: I don't know, he says, I don't know, I am in shock, I am in agony here, I can't give you a false or a real answer, can take no position, how can I tell? Maybe I shouldn't have done it, I don't know, I don't know. Take the question to him in Chicago two years later, he is attending a class reunion with his lover, partial remission, he feels in control of himself, some benignity, perhaps illusory but the moment can be extended, he feels, as so many other moments have been extended I would have done it again, he says, knowing what I know, I would have wanted it this way still, I would not have treated it differently, I would not exchange these years for anything. Ask him and ask him, up and down the line, sometimes an enthusiastic, desperate yes, other times more tentative, a no at the end and tracking back from that no mostly for the six to eight months before this special, spectacular extended agony; his position then is not fixed any more than it might have been 20, 30 years ago when Martin refused to respond to the messages flicking like trap shots from the basement of his sensibilty. Nothing is sure, nothing is firm. Mostly yes, an occasional no, more no as the end is approached, but even then at some of the moments in between the moments of the worst anguish, a soft insistent yes. It is not fixed, nothing is fixed, the human condition is not fixed. The price we will pay for fully expressing what we are does seem indeterminate then. It resonates, this confusion, against my own uncertainty, and I understand then, staring at and through all of this, that there can be no answers from Martin, none at all. If Martin is the voice and tensor of all possibility, then there is no possibility, no singularity.

Understanding it does not surprise me but fills me with a desperate and irreparable weakness; I would not have had it this way, I would have wanted surer answers. Everyone wants answers if not the answer, even I. I return to my old antagonist on the desert and hand him the helmet and the simulating device and the other armaments of our translation, our bargain, our possibility. I have wrestled and wrestled, I say, I have wrestled you through all the avenues of this life and I do not know, I am stunned and pinned, dislocated and shattered. Martin is not the answer, he can provide me with no firm basis at all.

Of course, my old antagonist says. His ruddy skin glows with sympathy or perhaps it is only health. Or vindication. You see, he says, you are left with it just as I said, you are left with all of this on your own. You must decide what price to pay and whether that is correct and no one can know. He backs away from me, horns a rapier, fine eyes glints of purpose in the night. Now, he says, now you must decide. You, not Martin Donner, who is only a paradox or a metaphor, you must make that decision. It is the 40th day, he says. Soon it will be the 40th night. You must now turn in the way you must and there will be no returning.

BARNABY IN EXILE

Mike Resnick

Barnaby sits in his cage, waiting for Sally to come into the lab.

She will give him the puzzle, the same one he worked on yesterday. But today he will not disappoint her. He has been thinking about the puzzle all night. Thinking is fun. Today he will do it right, and she will laugh and tell him how smart he is. He will lay on his back and she will tickle his stomach, and say, “Oh, what a bright young fellow you are, Barnaby!” Then Barnaby will make a funny face and turn a somersault.

Barnaby is me.

#

It gets lonely after Sally leaves. Bud comes when it is black and cleans my cage, but he never talks. Sometimes he forgets and leaves the light on. Then I try to talk to Roger and his family, but they are just rabbits and cannot make the signs. I don’t think they are very smart, anyway.

Every night when Bud comes in I sit up and smile at him. I always make the sign for “Hello”, but he doesn’t answer. Sometimes I think Bud isn’t any smarter than Roger. He just pats me on the head. Sometimes he leaves the pictures on after he leaves.

My favorite pictures are Fred and Barney. Everything is so bright and fast. Many times I ask Sally to bring Dino to the lab so that I can play with him, but she never does. I like Barney, because he is not as big or loud as Fred, and I am not big or loud either. Also, my name is Barnaby and that is like Barney. Sometimes, when it is black and I am all alone, I imagine that I am Barney, and that I don’t sleep in a cage at all.

#

This day it was white out, and Sally even had white on her when she came to the lab, but it all turned to water.

Today we had a new toy. It looks like the thing on Doctor’s desk, with lots of little things that look like flat grapes. Sally told me that she would show me something and then I should touch the grape that had the same picture on it. She showed me a shoe, and a ball, and an egg, and a star, and a square.

I did the egg and the ball wrong, but tomorrow I will do them right. I think more every day. Like Sally says I am a very bright young fellow.

#

We have spent many days with the new toy, and now I can speak to Sally with it, just by touching the right grapes.

She will come into the lab and say, “How are you this morning, Barnaby?”, and I will touch the grapes that say, “Barnaby is fine” or “Barnaby is hungry”.

What I really want to say is “Barnaby is lonely” but there is no grape for “lonely”.

#

Today I touch the grapes that say “Barnaby wants out”.

“Out of your cage?” she asks.

“Out there,” I sign. “Out in the white.”

“You would not like it.”

“I do not like the black when I am alone,” I sign. “I will like the white.”

“It is very cold,” she says, “and you are not used to it.”

“The white is very pretty,” I say. “Barnaby wants out.”

“The last time I let you out you hurt Roger,” she reminds me.

“I just wanted to touch him,” I say.

“You do not know your own strength,” she says. “Roger is just a rabbit, and you hurt him.”

“I will be gentle this time,” I say.

“I thought you didn’t like Roger,” she says.

“I don’t like Roger,” I say. “I like touching.”

She reaches into the cage and tickles my belly and scratches my back and I feel better, but then she stops.

“It is time for your lesson,” she says.

“If I do it right, can you bring me something to touch?” I ask.

“What kind of thing?” she says.

I think for a moment. “Another Barnaby,” I say.

She looks sad, and doesn’t answer.

#

One day Sally brings me a book filled with pictures. I smell it and taste it. Finally I figure out that she wants me to look at it.

There are all kinds of animals in it. I see one that looks like Roger, but it is brown and Roger is white. And there is a kitten, like I see through the window. And a dog, like Doctor sometimes brings to the lab. But there is no Dino.

Then I see a picture of a boy. His hair is shorter than Sally’s, and not as gray as Doctor’s, or as yellow as Bud’s. But he is smiling, and I know he must have many things to touch.

#

When Sally comes back the next morning, I have lots of questions about the pictures. But before I can ask her, she asks me.

“What is this?” she says, holding up a picture.

“Roger,” I say.

“No,” she says. “Roger is a name. What is this animal called?”

I try to remember. “Rabbit,” I say at last.

“Very good, Barnaby,” she says. “And what is this?”

“Kitten,” I say.

We got through the whole book.

“Where is Barnaby?” I ask.

“Barnaby is an ape,” she says. “There is no picture of an ape in the book.”

I wonder if there are any other Barnabys in the world, and if they are lonely too.

#

Later I ask, “Do I have a father and a mother?”

“Of course you do,” says Sally. “Everything has a father and a mother.”

“Where are they?” I ask.

“Your father is dead,” says Sally. “Your mother is in a zoo far away from here.”

“Barnaby wants to see his mother,” I say.

“I’m afraid not, Barnaby.”

“Why?”

“She wouldn’t know you. She has forgotten you, just as you have forgotten her.”

“If I could see her, I would say ‘I’m Barnaby’, and then she would know me.”

Sally shakes her head. “She wouldn’t understand. You are very special; she is not. She can’t sign, and she can’t use a computer.”

“Does she have any other Barnabys?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” says Sally. “I suppose so.”

“How does she speak to them?”

“She doesn’t.”

I think about this for a long time.

Finally I say, “But she touches them.”

“Yes, she touches them,” says Sally.

“They must be very happy,” I say.

#

Today I will find out more about being Barnaby.

“Good morning,” says Sally when she comes into the lab. “How are you today, Barnaby?”

“What is a zoo?” I ask.

“A zoo is a place where animals live,” says Sally.

“Can I see a zoo through the window?”

“No. It is very far away.”

I think about my next question for a long time. “Are Barnabys animals?”

“Yes.”

“Are Sallys animals?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Does Sally’s mother live in a zoo?”

Sally laughs. “No,” she says.

“Does she live in a cage?”

“No,” says Sally.

I think for awhile.

“Sally’s mother is dead,” I say.

“No, she is alive.”

I get very upset, because I do not know how to ask why Sally’s mother is different from Barnaby’s mother, and the harder I try the worse I do it, and Sally cannot understand me. Finally I start hitting the floor with my fist. Roger and his family all jump, and Doctor opens the door. Sally gives me a little toy that squeeks when I hit it, and very soon I forget to be mad and start playing with the toy. Sally says something to Doctor, and he smiles and leaves.

“Do you want to ask anything else before we begin our lesson?” asks Sally.

“Why?” I ask.

“Why what?”

“Why is Barnaby an ape and Sally a man?”

“Because that is the way God made us,” she says.

I start getting very excited, because I think I am very close to learning more about Barnabys.

“Who is God?” I ask.

She tries to answer, but I do not understand again.

#

When it gets black and I am all alone except for Roger and his family, and Bud has already cleaned my cage, I sit and think about God. Thinking can be very interesting.

If he made Sally and he made me, why didn’t he make me as smart as Sally? Why can she talk, and do things with her hands that I can’t do?

It is very confusing. I decide that I must meet God and ask him why he does these things, and why he forgot that even Barnabys like to be touched.

#

As soon as Sally comes into the lab, I ask her, “Where does God live?”

“In heaven.”

“Is heaven far away?”

“Yes.”

“Farther than a zoo?” I ask.

“Much farther.”

“Does God ever come to the lab?”

She laughs. “No. Why?”

“I have many questions to ask him.”

“Perhaps I can answer some of them,” she says.

“Why am I alone?”

“Because you are very special,” says Sally.

“If I was not special, would I be with other Barnabys?”

“Yes.”

“I have never hurt God,” I say. “Why has God made me special?”

#

The next morning I ask her to tell me about the other Barnabys.

“Barnaby is just a name,” explains Sally. “There are other apes, but I don’t know if any of them are named Barnaby.”

“What is a name?”

“A name is what makes you different from everything else.”

“If my name was Fred or Dino, could I be like everyone else?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “You are special. You are Barnaby the Bonobo. You are very famous.”

“What is famous?”

“Many people know who you are.”

“What are People?” I ask.

“Men and women.”

“Are there more than you and Doctor and Bud?”

“Yes.”

Then it is time for my lessons, but I do them very badly, because I am still thinking about a world that has more People in it than Sally and Doctor and Bud. I am so busy wondering who lets them out of their cages when the dark goes away, that I forget all about God and don’t think about him any more for many days.

#

I hear Sally talking to Doctor, but I do not understand what they are saying.

Doctor keeps repeating that we don’t have any more fun, and Sally keeps saying that Barnaby is special, and then they both say a lot of things I can’t understand.

When they are through, and Doctor leaves, I ask Sally why we can’t have fun any more.

“Fun?” she repeats. “What do you mean?”

“Doctor says there will be no more fun.”

She stares at me for a long time. “You understood what he said?”

“Why can’t we have any fun?” I repeat.

“Fund,” she says. “The word was fund. It means something different.”

“Then Barnaby and Sally can still have fun?” I ask.

“Of course we can.”

I lay on my back and sign to her. “Tickle me.”

She reaches into the cage and tickles me, but I see water in her eyes. Human People make water in their eyes when they are unhappy. I pretend to bite her hand and then race around my cage like I did when I was a baby, but this time it doesn’t make her laugh.

#

I hear voices coming from behind the door. It is Sally and Doctor again.

“Well, we can’t put him in a zoo,” says Doctor. “If he starts signing to the spectators, they’d have a million people demanding his freedom by the end of the month, and then what would happen? What would become of him? Can you picture the poor bastard in a circus?”

“We can’t destroy him just because he’s too bright,” says Sally.

“Who will take him? You?” says Doctor. “He’s only eight now. What happens when he becomes sexually mature, when he is a surly adult male? It’s not that far away. He could rip you apart in seconds.”

“He won’t — not Barnaby.”

“Will your landlord let you keep him? Are you willing to sacrifice the next twenty years of your life caring for him?”

“We might get renewed funding as early as this fall,” says Sally.

“Be realistic,” says Doctor. “It’ll be years, if ever. This program is being duplicated at half a dozen labs around the country, and some of them are much farther along. Barnaby’s not the only ape that has learned to use articles and adjectives, you know. There’s a 25-year-old gorilla, and three other Bonobo chimps that are well into their teens. There’s no reason to believe that anyone will restore our funding.”

“But he’s different,” says Sally. “He asks abstract questions.”

“I know, I know…once he asked you who God was. But I studied the tape, and you mentioned God first. If you mention Michael Jordan and he asks who that is, it doesn’t mean that he’s developed an abiding interest in basketball.”

“Can I at least talk to the committee? Show them videotapes of him?”

“They know what a chimpanzee looks like,” says Doctor.

“But they don’t know what one thinks like,” says Sally. “Perhaps this will help to convince them…”

“It’s not a matter of convincing them,” says Doctor. “The funds have dried up. Every program is hurting these days.”

“Please…”

“All right,” says Doctor. “I’ll set up a meeting. But it won’t do any good.”

I hear it all, but I do not understand any of it. Before it got white today I dreamed of a place filled with Barnabys, and I am sitting in a corner, my eyes shut, trying to remember it before it all drifts away.

#

We keep doing the lessons each day, but I can tell that Sally is unhappy, and I wonder what I have done to upset her.

#

This morning Sally opens my cage door and just hugs me for a long time.

“I have to talk to you, Barnaby,” she says, and I see her eyes are making water again.

I touch the grapes that say, “Barnaby likes to talk.”

“This is important,” she says. “Tomorrow you will leave the lab.”

“Will I go outside?” I ask.

“You will go very far away.”

“To a zoo?”

“Farther.”

Suddenly I remember God.

“Will I go to heaven?” I ask.

She smiles even as her eyes make more water. “Not quite that far,” she says. “You are going to a place where there are no labs and no cages. You will be free, Barnaby.”

“Are there other Barnabys there?”

“Yes,” she says. “There are other Barnabys there.”

“Doctor was wrong,” I say. “There will be more fun for Sally and Barnaby.”

“I cannot go with you,” she says.

“Why?”

“I have to stay here. This is my home.”

“If you are good, maybe God will let you out of your cage,” I say.

She makes a funny sound and hugs me again.

#

They put me in a smaller cage, one with no light in it. For two days I smell bad things. Most of my water spills, and there are loud noises that hurt my ears. Sometimes People talk, and once a man who is not Bud or Doctor gives me food and more water. He does it through a little hole in the top of the cage.

I touch his hand to show him that I am not angry. He screams and pulls his hand away.

I keep signing, “Barnaby is lonely,” but it is dark and there is no one to see.

I do not like my new world.

#

On the third morning they move my crate, and then they move it again. Finally they lift it up and carry it, and when they set it down I can smell many things I have never smelled before.

They open the door, and I step out onto the grass. The sun is very bright, and I squint and look at People who are not Sally or Doctor or Bud.

“You’re home, boy,” says one of them.

I look around. The world is a much bigger place than the lab, and I am frightened.

“Go on, fella,” says another. “Sniff around. Get used to the place.”

I sniff around. I do not get used to the place.

#

I spend many days in the world. I get to know all the trees and bushes, and the big fence around it. They feed me fruits and leaves and bark. I am not used to them, and for a while I am sick, but then I get better.

I hear many noises from beyond the world — screams and growls and shrieks. I smell many strange animals. But I do not hear or smell any Barnabys.

#

Then one day the People put me back in my crate, and I am alone for a long time, and then they open the crate, and I am no longer in the world, but in a place with so many trees that I almost cannot see the sky.

“Okay, fella,” says a Person. “Off into the forest with you now.”

He makes a motion with his hands, but it is a sign I do not recognize.

I sign back: “Barnaby is afraid.”

The Person pets me on the head. It is the first time anyone has touched me since I left the lab.

“Have a good life,” he says, “and make lots of little Barnabys.”

Then he climbs into his cage, and it rolls away from me. I try to follow it, but it is much too fast, and soon I can no longer see it.

I look back at the forest and hear strange sounds, and a breeze brings me the sweet smell of fruit.

There is no one around to see me, but I sign “Barnaby is free” anyway.

Barnaby is free.

Barnaby is lonely.

Barnaby is frightened.

#

I learn to find water, and to climb trees. I see little Barnabys with tails that chatter at me, but they cannot sign, and I see big kittens with spots, and they make terrible noises and I hide from them.

I wish I could hide in my cage, where I was always safe.

#

Today when the black goes away I wake up and go to the water, and I find another Barnaby.

“Hello,” I sign. “I am a Barnaby too.”

The other Barnaby growls at me.

“Do you live in a lab?” I ask. “Where is your cage?”

The other Barnaby runs at me and starts biting me. I shriek and roll on the ground.

“What have I done?” I ask.

The other Barnaby runs at me again, and I screech and climb to the top of a tree. He sits at the bottom and stares at me all day until the black returns. It gets very cold, and then wet, and I shiver all night and wish Sally was here.

#

In the morning the Barnaby is gone, and I climb down to the ground. I smell where he has been, and I follow his scent, because I do not know what else to do. Finally I come to a place with more Barnabys than I ever imagined there could be. Then I remember that Sally taught me counting, and I count. There are twenty-three of them.

One of them sees me and screams, and before I can make any signs all of them charge at me and I run away. They chase me for a long time, but finally they stop, and I am alone again.

#

I am alone for many days. I do not go back to the Barnabys, because they would hurt me if they could. I do not know what I have done to make them mad, so I do not know how to stop doing it.

I have learned to smell the big kittens when they are still far away, and to climb the trees so they cannot catch me, and I have learned to hide from the dogs that laugh like Sally does when I make somersaults, but I am so lonely, and I miss talking, and I am already forgetting some of the signs Sally taught me.

Last night I dreamed about Fred and Wilma and Barney and Dino, and when I woke up my own eyes were making water.

#

I hear sounds in the morning. Not sounds like the big kittens or the dogs make, but strange, clumsy sounds. I go to see what is making them.

In a little clearing I see four People — two men and two women — and they have brought little brown cages. The cages are not as nice as my old cage, because you cannot see in or out of them.

One of the men has made a fire, and they are sitting on chairs around it. I want to approach them, but I have learned my lesson with the Barnabys, and so I wait until one of the men sees me.

When he doesn’t yell or chase me, I sign to him.

“I am Barnaby.”

“What has it got in its hands?” asks one of the women.

“Nothing,” says a man.

“Barnaby wants to be friends,” I sign.

A woman puts something up in front of her face, and suddenly there is a big pop! It is so bright that I can’t see. I rub my eyes and walk forward.

“Don’t let him get too close,” says the other man. “No telling what kind of diseases he’s carrying.”

“Will you play with Barnaby?” I ask.

The first man picks up a rock and throws it at me.

“Shoo!” he yells. “Go away!”

He throws another rock, and I run back into the forest.

#

When it is black out, and they sit around the fire, I sneak as close as I can get, and lay down and listen to the sounds of their voices, and pretend I am back in the lab.

In the morning they throw rocks at me until I go away.

#

And then one day, after they throw the rocks at me and I go for water, I come back and find that they are gone. They were not very good friends, but they were the only ones I had.

What will I do now?

#

Finally, after many days, I find a single Barnaby, and it is a female. She has terrible scars on her from other Barnabys, and when she sees me she bares her teeth and growls. I sit still and hope that she will not go away.

After a long time she comes closer to me. I am afraid to move, because I do not want to frighten her or make her mad. I ignore her and stare off into the trees.

Finally she reaches out and picks an insect off my shoulder and puts it into her mouth, and soon she is sitting beside me, eating the flowers and leaves that have fallen to the ground.

Finally, when I am sure she will not run away, I sign to her, “I am Barnaby.”

She grabs at my hands as if I was playing with a fruit or an insect, then shows her teeth when she sees that I am not holding anything.

She is really not any smarter than Roger, but at least she does not run away from me.

I will call her Sally.

#

Sally is afraid of the other Barnabys, so we live at the edge of the forest, where they hardly ever come. She touches me, and that is very nice, but I find that I miss talking and thinking even more.

Every day I try to teach her to sign, but she cannot learn. We have three baby Barnabys, one after each rainy season, but they are no smarter than Sally, and besides I have forgotten most of the signs.

#

More and more People come to the forest in their brown cages. My family is afraid of them, but I love talking and listening and thinking more than anything. I always visit their camps at night, and listen to their voices in the darkness, and try to understand the words. I pretend I am back in the lab, though it is harder and harder to remember what the lab is like.

Each time there are new People I show myself and say “I am Barnaby”, but none of them ever answers. When one finally does, I will know that he is God.

There were many things I wanted to ask him once, but I cannot remember most of them. I will tell him to be nice to Sally and the other two People at the lab — I forget their names — because what has happened to me is not their fault.

I will not ask him why he hated me so much that he made me special, or why People and Barnabys always chase me away. I will just say, “Please talk to Barnaby,” and then I will ask if we can do a lesson.

Once, when I was a very bright fellow, there were many things I wanted to discuss with him. But now that I have left the world, that will be enough.

TELE-ABSENCE

Michael A. Burstein

Tony put on the spex and scrunched his hands into the tight datagloves. He pushed a button on the right earpiece, and the world around him changed.

He had been sitting in his little room, with torn clothes scattered about, a broken dresser, and a dirty window that looked out onto a brick wall. Now he found himself in a classroom. The floor was clean and the walls were a bright yellow. Tony counted fifteen desks arranged in a roomy and orderly fashion, fewer desks than he had ever seen in a classroom before.

Tony had jacked in at a few minutes before nine so he'd have a chance to explore before anyone else showed up, and he started with the windows. These windows weren't broken, like those at his own school, and it looked as if morning sunlight actually streamed in from a clear blue sky. He opened one and stuck his head out to see an incredibly large playground a few stories down; nothing like the old broken-down one in his neighborhood, where Mom never let him go, even in the middle of the day. Not that Tony was about to do so, ever; he was just as scared of the gunfire as his Mom was.

Tony pulled his head back into the room and continued exploring. Walking around felt strange, since he could feel his legs not moving as he sat in his room. And yet, in this classroom he was standing, and moving his hands around caused the rest of his body to follow. He traced the edge of the room, sliding along the screenboard at the front with the alphabet printed above it, and along the walls on the side, which were decorated with the artwork of the school's students. There was a calendar, set to this month, September. He also noticed a seating chart, with each student's name in different handwriting.

He came to a mirror in the back corner of the room, and stopped short. Staring back at him wasn't his deep brown face and curly black hair that was all too familiar, but an image of a white kid with blond hair, dressed in a button-down shirt and slacks. The spex and gloves didn't appear in the mirror either, just sparkling brown eyes and smooth pink hands. Tony moved his arms and face around, and noticed that the mirror image did so too. _No wonder the gloves are so small,_ Tony thought, _this kid has got to be at least a year younger than me. Maybe this isn't a sixth grade class --_

A sharp buzz startled Tony and he jumped. At the front of the room appeared a pretty white woman who looked as old as Tony's teachers, but she wasn't scowling the way Tony's teachers always did. Instead, she was smiling. Despite that, Tony felt scared.

"Good morning, Andrew," she said. "I'm surprised to see you here early." Her voice was soothing to Tony's ears, and he calmed down. There was no way she would figure out that he wasn't Andrew; the mirror had shown him exactly as he appeared in this virtual classroom.

"Hello, Miss..." Tony trailed off. He knew that he had taken Andrew's place, but he had no idea what the teacher's name was.

"Why are you here early? You're usually one of the last to jack in."

"Ummm...well..." Tony looked around as he stalled, and spotted a nameplate on the desk. Fortunately, it was facing towards him.

"Miss Ellis, I just felt like taking a look around before we started." Tony's voice sounded like his own to his ears, which worried him. Would Miss Ellis be able to hear that he wasn't Andrew?

Apparently not. "Okay, Andrew, though you won't have much time." She looked at her watch. "In just a minute --"

Another buzz, and this time a cute girl popped in, already seated at a desk. "Good morning, Miss Ellis."

"Good morning, Sheryl."

"Hi Andrew!"

Tony wasn't sure how to respond, but it seemed safest to say little. "Hi, Sheryl."

Sheryl opened her mouth to speak, but was interrupted by another buzz. The ritual repeated itself over the next few minutes; another kid popped in each time, some already sitting, some at the door, and one or two in the corners, until there were fourteen other students. Most were white, although he saw two who were black and three who he thought were Chinese. Tony noticed how happy they all looked, as they milled about talking to each other. Tony wanted to mingle, but was afraid, and so he stayed off to the side, studying the seating chart. Andrew was assigned to the front row, second seat. At least he would know where to sit when class began.

He traced the name of the student he was replacing, Andrew Drummond. Now he had a full name to attach to the spex.

Another buzz, deeper and longer, startled Tony, and a chill went through him. What if that was Andrew jacking in? He would ruin everything, and everyone would know that Tony was a fake! Tony looked around, scared, but didn't see anyone that resembled the kid in the mirror.

"Okay, class," said Miss Ellis, "it's nine o'clock. Time to begin." So that's what that different buzz meant. Tony relaxed into his -- into Andrew's -- seat. As long as he had Andrew's spex, he realized, he was Andrew, and there was no way that the real Andrew could pop in and prove otherwise. Tony wished he could be Andrew all the time, but at least he could be Andrew for the school day. Then he'd have to return to his own life. For the first time, he dreaded the final bell that would go off at three o'clock.

* * *

Miss Ellis began the class by taking attendance. Tony remembered to respond when he heard Andrew's name, which was second, right after Melissa Connor, who sat to his left. Once Miss Ellis noted that all were present, she told the class to take out their homework from last night.

At first, Tony didn't know what to do. He felt a lump in his throat as he realized that he couldn't take out last night's homework since he wasn't really Andrew. He knew the punishment he could suffer for not having his homework with him, and he started to tremble.

Then he noticed what Melissa was doing. She pushed some button on her desk and her computer screen flashed, and now she was waiting patiently. Maybe the homework is also done in virtual space, Tony thought, and he looked at the buttons on his desk. Sure enough, among all the letters and numbers of the keyboard there was a button labelled "HOMEWORK." Tony pushed it with relief.

His screen blinked, and a message came up: "Please enter your homework password."

Oh no! I don't know Andrew's password! Tony thought. Now what? Maybe Miss Ellis wouldn't notice if he just sat there looking intently at the screen. If he kept his head down, perhaps she wouldn't call on him. Then he wouldn't be found out.

"Melissa? Please tell us how you did the first problem."

The first problem was an easy math problem, but Melissa got it wrong. Tony braced himself for the explosion, but it didn't come.

"That's okay," said Miss Ellis instead. She worked out the problem on the screenboard in front and showed Melissa where her mistake had been. Tony was shocked. She hadn't yelled at Melissa for being wrong, and Melissa hadn't make any rude comments back or started crying.

"Andrew? Would you please explain the next problem?"

Bad luck. It looked as if Miss Ellis went through the class alphabetically when going over homework, and naturally that meant Andrew was next. But Tony knew he couldn't go over the next problem. What could he do?

"Andrew? Is there a problem?"

Tony looked up. Miss Ellis wasn't frowning, and she didn't seem upset at all. She hadn't yelled at Melissa for being wrong; maybe Tony could pretend to be having a problem as Andrew and not get yelled at.

"Yes, Miss Ellis. Ummm...I forgot my password."

"Oh, is that all? You should have said something." Miss Ellis came over to his desk, pushed a few keys, and accessed the assignment for him. It made sense, he realized, that she would be able to do that. The homework that Andrew had done came up on the screen. Feeling relieved, Tony puzzled out the solution to the second problem, which fortunately Andrew had done correctly. Tony treasured the "Very good" that Miss Ellis said in his direction, even if it was followed by "Andrew."

* * *

The class continued throughout the morning, with Miss Ellis going from subject to subject. A little math, some English, a bit of art. Tony especially enjoyed the art, as being in a virtual classroom enabled him to create beautiful pictures almost by just thinking of them. He could paint pictures in three dimensions, and he even created a collage using video images that moved and sound effects that came from a classroom library of such things. It almost got him discovered, because apparently Andrew was not too keen on this subject, and Miss Ellis became suspicious of "Andrew's" new-found enthusiasm for light sculpting. But it turned out all right; Miss Ellis was actually more pleased than suspicious to see Andrew taking an interest.

A little after eleven o'clock the buzz sounded, announcing the lunch period. Miss Ellis and the students jacked out one by one. Tony envied the other students; he imagined them in comfortable homes, sitting at tables with steaming hot plates piled up with food.

Tony himself didn't jack out. He spent the entire forty minutes in the virtual classroom, relishing every minute he was there. He played with his desk computer, using it to create more works of art and to read history textbooks that changed the words they used when Tony punched in that he didn't understand something. He didn't mind the stomach rumbles he felt near the end of the period; he was used to them.

* * *

"Now, class, we're going to learn a little geography. Who can tell me what this is?" Miss Ellis pushed a button at the top of the blackboard, and a holographic map appeared, floating halfway between her desk and the class. Tony recognized it and raised his hand. So did most of the class.

Miss Ellis called on Tony. "Yes, Andrew?"

"It's the United States." Tony thought it was the most beautiful map he had ever seen. It shimmered in the air, floating in and out of insubstantiality. The features -- states, cities, mountains, and rivers, just to name a few -- were displayed in many different intense colors. There was a vibrancy to this map which made it more real than any flat map Tony had seen in his own classroom.

"Very good, Andrew. Well, class, today I want to introduce you to the various parts of our country, and I think the best way of doing that is to have you do it for us. Who wants to be first to tell us where they're from?"

The girl sitting to Tony's right raised her hand. "Janice?"

"I live in Florida, Miss Ellis, in Neptune Beach, near Jacksonville. But I just moved there from San Francisco."

"Can you point out both places on the map?"

Janice punched a few keys on her desk computer, and a small spot in northeastern Florida lit up in green. A second later, so did a spot in northern California.

"Very good! Someone else?"

One of the Asian girls raised her hand. "Sandra?"

Sandra hit a few keys and a spot near Washington, D.C. turned green. "I live in Silver Spring, Maryland."

Miss Ellis continued going through the class, and the students became very enthusiastic about it. "I'm in East Lansing, Michigan!" shouted a kid named Brian, who had just moved from Los Alamos, New Mexico. "I live near Boston!" shouted another. Each student's hometown was lit up, either by Miss Ellis or by the student.

Tony felt scared. He lived in Harlem, in New York City, and desperately wanted to volunteer that information, but he couldn't. He was supposed to be Andrew, and he didn't know exactly where Andrew lived. He knew it was out on Long Island, because the car with the spex had displayed Long Island license plates. But where on Long Island?

And how did the other students use the computer to light up the map?

The next one to go was Sheryl, who had been the first student to pop in after Tony. She used her computer to light up Suffolk County, on Long Island. "I live in Port Jefferson," she said, "right near Andrew."

"Andrew, would you like to locate your hometown as well?" asked Miss Ellis. "You could come up to the map since it's already lit up."

Feeling trapped, Tony ran up to the map, stabbed at Suffolk County with his -- Andrew's -- finger, and sprinted back to his seat.

Miss Ellis went through the rest of the class. All over the map, the hometowns were lit up in green. "Who would like to talk about their hometown first?"

Tony felt Miss Ellis's eyes staring right at him, and worried that she might call on him. Her eyes passed over him, though, and she called on Brian. Tony exhaled a breath that he didn't realize he had been holding.

Since he knew Los Alamos better than East Lansing, Brian chose to talk about his original hometown instead of where he was now. Tony barely paid attention as Brian talked about the joys of small town life and then displayed some pictures from a family photo album that he was able to pull up using his computer. Miss Ellis then discussed the arid mountainous area where the town was located, and how there had been a scientific laboratory there until the year 2010.

Janice went next, and again Tony was too scared to pay attention. Janice described San Francisco, and, possibly still thinking about lunch, mentioned the delicious seafood and sourdough bread. Miss Ellis talked about other things, such as the earthquakes that San Francisco had experienced, and the Golden Gate Bridge, which she said had been one of the longest suspension bridges in the country until the earthquake just last year that destroyed it. She showed three dimensional video images of the earthquake, and even made the classroom shake up a bit, so the students could experience a bit of what an earthquake was like.

Janice continued, "But now I live in Florida, and it's really nice, except it gets awful hot in the summer. But let me show you!" With that, Janice hit a few keys, and on the screenboard appeared a picture of a large white house. "See! There's my front yard!"

"Oh, yeah?" said Brian. Using his computer, he erased the picture of Janice's house. A few seconds later, a picture of Brian appeared, wearing spex and sitting in some sort of large black chair with arms that closed in front. Tony felt uneasy, looking at that picture.

Brian waved his hand in class, and so did the Brian in the picture. "See!" he said. "That's me in real time!"

"Oh yeah?" said Janice. "Well, watch --"

"Janice! Brian!" Miss Ellis interrupted. Oh no, thought Tony, now they're going to get it. He braced himself for the shouting. Instead, the two students each mumbled an apology.

"It's okay," Miss Ellis said. "I understand why you're excited, I just didn't want you to get out of hand. You see, class, one of the nice things about being here is that we all jack in from different places. Each of you can learn from one another about the great diversity we have in this country. Here you are, telling each other about your hometowns, even though you may live thousands of miles away from your classmates. I figure it will also give you a chance to find out more about each other, since it is so early in the school year."

Sheryl raised her hand, which worried Tony. "Couldn't people do that before?"

"Well, yes," Miss Ellis replied, "but it wasn't so immediate. In fact, you're experiencing something now that in the past only college students could usually experience. And they had to travel physically to one common location to share their backgrounds, which was much more expensive and time consuming. You don't need to do that at all."

Miss Ellis turned to Tony. "Andrew, since Sheryl asked a question, why don't you tell us about your common hometown of Port Jefferson?"

Tony looked down at his desk. His stomach felt queasy. If only Sheryl hadn't brought attention to herself, and then to him as well. Or if only Sheryl hadn't been here in the first place. Then he could make up anything he wanted about Port Jefferson, and Miss Ellis would never know. But Sheryl would see right through any lies he might tell, and anyway, Tony didn't like to lie.

But wasn't that what he was doing right now, pretending to be Andrew?

"Andrew? Are you okay?"

"Yes, Miss Ellis. I --"

Tony was interrupted by a sharp buzz, and he looked up. At the front of the classroom appeared an older man with thick grey hair. He headed straight for Tony, a scowl on his face, and Tony looked down again, in fear.

He heard Miss Ellis speak. "Mr. Drummond, what are you doing here?"

The man didn't answer Miss Ellis. He went right up to Tony and said, "Give them back! They're mine!"

Tony shivered. It had been too good to last; now he was going to be found out. This man was obviously Andrew's father, come to get the spex back.

"Mr. Drummond!" said Miss Ellis, with an angry tone that was familiar to Tony. "I would appreciate it if you would not interrupt my class to talk with your son! Can't this wait until later?"

"This is not me -- I mean, this is not my son!" Mr. Drummond shouted.

There was silence for a moment. Tony felt Miss Ellis move next to him and Mr. Drummond. "What's going on?" she asked.

"This kid stole my -- I mean, my son's spex!"

Tony looked up at Miss Ellis, and saw her smile. Facing Mr. Drummond, she said, "That's you, isn't it, Andrew?"

For the first time since he appeared, "Mr. Drummond" looked uncomfortable. "Ummm, yeah, Miss Ellis. I had to use Dad's spex to jack in. Whoever this is--" he pointed at Tony-- "stole my own spex."

"Ah-ha. Andrew, go home. I'll take care of this."

"Ummm. You won't tell my Dad, will you? I don't want him to know that I've been careless."

"No, I won't tell him. Now go. I'll contact you later."

The image of Andrew's father vanished, and Miss Ellis turned to Tony. He was on the verge of tears.

"Well, young man, who are you?"

He sniffled, and whispered, "My name's Tony."

"Tony? Did you steal Andrew's spex?"

"Yes." He could barely hear himself.

Miss Ellis sighed. "Why?"

Tony looked up into Miss Ellis's eyes, and it all started pouring out of him. "I just wanted to go to a good school, one where I wouldn't be afraid, where the teachers and kids are nice, where I don't have to worry about guns or drugs or being beaten up or --" Tony stopped. He felt as if everyone was staring at him. They probably were, but it was too late to take back anything he had said.

"I found the spex in Manhattan, Miss Ellis. I know it was wrong, but I didn't care. I just wanted to go to school somewhere nice. I'm sorry." He started to sob.

"Class, I'll be back in a moment. No one jack out."

Miss Ellis tapped at the air to the side of her face, and the classroom around Tony vanished.

Tony found himself alone with Miss Ellis in a much smaller room furnished with a desk, chair and sofa. He had been sitting at a desk; now he was standing. He was still crying, though. He wasn't worried that Miss Ellis would beat him, since she really couldn't hurt him through the spex. She might yell at him instead, but when she spoke her voice was calm.

"Tony, I've brought us here so we could talk alone for a few minutes, away from the rest of the class. I hope you don't mind, but I didn't think you'd want to continue talking about this in front of everyone."

Tony nodded, and wiped away the tears on his face using his sleeve. He didn't want to get the datagloves wet. "Thanks."

Miss Ellis sat on the chair, and motioned Tony to the sofa. As he sat down, he spotted his image in a mirror he hadn't seen before. He still looked like Andrew.

"Tony, why don't we start with you telling me about yourself, like where you live and what your full name is."

"I'm not going to get into trouble, am I?" he asked.

Miss Ellis smiled. "No, you're not, Tony. I want to help you."

Tony told Miss Ellis about his life; in particular, about the horrors of his awful school. He was surprised to discover that Miss Ellis also lived in Manhattan, but downtown, below the fence. When Miss Ellis found out that Tony was black, she made some adjustments and asked Tony to check his appearance in the mirror. Tony was surprised to see a black kid facing back. It still didn't look like him, so he told Miss Ellis more about his real appearance. He watched as Miss Ellis changed the image again, until it more closely resembled his true appearance.

When Tony was satisfied, Miss Ellis gave him a long hard look. "Tony, I'm not going to tell you how wrong you were to steal the spex, because I can see how bad you already feel." She paused. "And, frankly, I agree with what you did."

Tony was surprised. The teacher thought it was okay that he stole something?

"I guess it's because I remember when those spex you're wearing were first developed. They were praised as being the first step to solving the problem of violence in schools -- if the students weren't physically in one real place, they wouldn't be able to hurt each other."

"Do you mean that I was supposed to have the spex in the first place? Is that why you approve?"

"Well, I don't really approve of the stealing. But I understand. After all, Tony, you and kids like you were the main reason they were invented in the first place. But I guess people forgot that it's not enough to develop the proper technology. You've got to fund it too."

Miss Ellis stood up and walked across the room, her back to Tony. She took a deep breath, and then turned around to face him.

"Tony? Would you like to stay in telepresence school? Not have to go back to your old school ever again?"

Tony's eyes opened wide and he let out a breath he hadn't realized he had been holding. "You mean I can stay?" He tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice.

"Well, not as Andrew. This is going to be difficult to arrange. Technically, you can't come to telepresence school unless you can afford it, and obviously you can't. But we might be able to sneak you in."

Tony couldn't believe what he had just heard. "Sneak me in? Isn't that as bad as my taking a pair of spex?"

"Yes and no. I might be able to work it out so that you have your own set of spex, and can attend my class on a regular basis. We'd have to get you a full simulator too, if you want to participate in outdoor games. But you won't be able to attend as yourself."

"You just said I can't be Andrew. I don't understand."

Miss Ellis sighed. "Tony, I believe you have a right to be here, as much right as any other student. But I personally can't afford to pay for you. And I suspect that your parents can't either."

"My Mom. We don't know where Dad is."

"Your mother, then. The problem, Tony, is that the computer that runs telepresence school keeps track of every student through the spex, and so it knows how to charge you. Your little visit today cost Andrew's family some money."

This made Tony feel worse. "Then maybe I shouldn't be here at all."

"No, Tony, you can be here. I have a -- a friend who can do something to a pair of spex so you won't be charged, but the cost of attending will be spread out onto all the other students. That way, no one student will be charged too much for you, and you'll be able to attend the school."

"Isn't that stealing?"

Miss Ellis thought a moment. "Technically, yes, but the theft is so small and spread out that no one would notice. Besides, it's the only way I can arrange it.

"So, Tony, would you like to attend telepresence school?"

"Yes, Miss Ellis, very much," he whispered. After all, he told himself, it couldn't be completely wrong if the teacher was willing to do it.

"Okay, but we can't let you enroll as Tony, because the other students know who you are."

"Does that mean I have to be white?"

"No, Tony, of course not. No one else has seen your real appearance but me, so you can look like yourself if you wish. That's no problem. But we'll have to call you by a different name, and probably pretend that you live somewhere other than Manhattan. Will that be okay?"

"Fine. Ummm...Miss Ellis?"

"Yes?"

"Why are you doing this?"

Miss Ellis frowned, and for a moment Tony worried that he had just said the wrong thing. But then she smiled. "Never mind, Tony, it isn't something you need to worry about. In the meantime, you'd better give me your phone number and go home. Tell your mother I'll call her tonight."

* * *

"Excellent work, Howard."

"Thank you, Miss Ellis," Tony said. For three months now he had been enrolled at the telepresence school, in the same class that he had visited using Andrew's spex. Tony now had spex of his own, along with a full simulator, and had begun to strike up a few friendships with the other students, including, oddly enough, Andrew.

Of course, they didn't think of him as Tony. He was "Howard," from a middle-class family living in Forest Hills on Long Island. Forest Hills had once been a part of the city, but was now a neighborhood in one of the three independent boroughs, a place where it was reasonable to assume that a family had the money to send a child to telepresence school.

At first, Tony felt strange pretending to be from someplace where he was not. But Miss Ellis had brought him through a virtual representation of the neighborhood before bringing him into the school, and fortunately, none of the other students had tried to trip him up with questions about his hometown.

Which was good, because Tony was happy here. He couldn't remember ever having been happier.

"Howard? Are you with us?"

"Oh, sorry, Miss Ellis, I was just thinking." Tony felt his cheeks flush as the rest of the students turned around to stare at him in his back row seat. Fortunately, no one could see his embarrassment in the virtual classroom.

"As I was saying, it's time for playground recess, so everyone get ready." With that, Miss Ellis tapped at the air next to her ear, and the class was virtually transported to the playground "outside." They did this every day of school, but it never stopped to amaze Tony. He always felt a warm sun and cool breeze playing against his face, which seemed perfectly real, even though he knew it had to be an illusion.

He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath; the stale air reminded him that he was really in the simulator back in his apartment. As he was about to breathe out, he felt someone tap him on the hand.

"You're it!" He opened his eyes; it was Andrew who had tagged him, and who was now running as fast as he could go. Tony usually played with Andrew and Janice anyway, so he smiled and raced towards Andrew as fast as he could go, on virtual legs.

They played tag and ran around for most of the recess period, and near the end, the three friends sat down on a bench to rest up. It would soon be time to return to the classroom. Janice took a minute to catch her breath, then jacked out to get a glass of water, leaving Tony and Andrew alone.

"Boy, that was fun!" Andrew said.

"Yeah, it sure was."

"Listen, Howard, I've been thinking. You live in Forest Hills, right?"

"Ummm...yeah, I do."

"Well, that's practically next door to me! Why can't we get together in the real world?"

Uh-oh. Tony was afraid that Andrew would suggest something like this. "Wouldn't it be too difficult? I mean, you don't really live next door."

"So?"

"So it would be a problem for me to come out to Port Jefferson."

"Hey, is that all? My Dad can drive me to your house, then, no problem. He usually has business to do in Manhattan anyway, and sometimes lets me come along with him. I think I can get him to drop me off at your place for a day."

That was the last thing Tony wanted to hear. "I don't know," he replied, speaking slowly. "I don't think my Mom wants me to have friends over."

"Can't we just go hang out in Forest Park or something? We wouldn't have to spend the day at your house. My Dad could just drop me off there."

"Well..."

"Besides, we can invite someone else along too."

"Who?" Who lived close enough to join them?

"Sheryl." Andrew smiled. "I've seen the way you look at her. You like her, don't you?"

"No," Tony lied. He felt pained.

"I know! Let me go ask her now! We can try to get together this weekend!" Andrew jumped up and started shouting Sheryl's name.

"No! Andrew, please don't!" Tony started to cry.

Andrew sat back down. "Howard, what's wrong? I'm just suggesting a little friendly get-together."

"We can't get together at my house. We can't."

"Why not?"

Tony thought hard. He liked Andrew, and he knew that Andrew liked him. They hung out together almost every recess, and usually worked together when Miss Ellis made everyone find partners for school projects. Surely Tony could trust him, couldn't he?

Besides, he still felt very bad about lying. No matter how much he wanted to be here, no matter how much Miss Ellis said he had a right to be here, it still bothered him. Perhaps if someone else knew, someone like Andrew, it would make him feel better. After all, Andrew liked him. Surely Andrew would keep the secret.

And, come to think of it, there was no way Andrew would tell anyone. If he did, his father would find out about the time Andrew was careless about his spex.

"Howard? Why not?"

A deep breath, then: "Because my name's not Howard. It's Tony."

* * *

Two days later, on Friday afternoon, Miss Ellis asked Tony to stay after school so they could have a private talk. After all the other students jacked out, she asked, "Tony? I notice that you and Andrew don't seem to be getting along as well as you used to. Is there a reason for this?"

Tony squirmed in his seat. Miss Ellis wasn't smiling. "Uh, no, Miss Ellis."

"Are you sure?"

He remained silent for what seemed like a minute.

"Tony, did you tell Andrew about our little arrangement?"

He didn't say a word. He couldn't; his throat was choked with fear.

"Tony? Did you tell Andrew?"

He croaked out a whisper. "Yes, Miss Ellis. I had to."

She sighed. "Tony, I was afraid of this. You shouldn't have told him."

"But Miss Ellis, he wanted to come over and visit me. I couldn't let him. I had to tell him why; I wasn't about to lie to him."

She smiled bitterly. "No, I guess not. Tony, I applaud your honesty, but this afternoon you and I are going to have to face Mr. Drummond."

"Mr. Drummond? Do you mean Andrew actually told his father?"

"Yes, and it gets worse. Mr. Drummond is a lawyer, and he's on the board of trustees of the telepresence school program. Do you know what that means?"

"No, I don't."

"It means that he's one of the people who makes policies for the school. He makes decisions on how money is spent to keep the school operating. And I don't think he wants to see us because he agrees with how we're spending the school's money."

"I'm sorry, Miss Ellis. I didn't mean to get you into trouble."

"It's all right, Tony. In a way, your honesty makes me proud. But--" she pushed a button and a clock appeared on the screen -- "we have only half an hour until Mr. Drummond jacks in to talk with us. I suggest you jack out for that time and talk to your mother; let her know what's going on. Then come back."

"Can Mom come too?"

Miss Ellis looked at Tony sadly. "I'm afraid not, Tony. You only have one set of spex at home, and Mr. Drummond wants to see you, not your mother. But don't worry. I'll be here too."

* * *

Tony had a hard time telling his mother about what had happened. He was worried that she would be very angry at him for ruining his chances of attending a good school. Fortunately, her attitude had been similar to his teacher's.

"We'll figure something out, Tony, we always have," she said while hugging him tightly. "You just go back and talk to Mr. Drummond. Maybe you can make him change his mind about you. Show him what a good boy you are."

Tony jacked in, for what he thought might be the last time, and was back in the classroom with Miss Ellis. She was talking to Mr. Drummond.

At the sound of the buzz signaling Tony's arrival, the two adults turned to face him.

"So here's the young man," said Mr. Drummond gruffly. Tony took a good, long look at Mr. Drummond, and tried not to seem afraid. Mr. Drummond towered over Tony impressively. His hair was thick and grey, and he wore an elaborate suit with a vest and chain. Tony also noticed that Mr. Drummond was sporting a pair of metal frame glasses, which didn't make sense to him. In real life, after all, Mr. Drummond had to be wearing a pair of spex, so having his image wear glasses had to be a personal choice.

Tony almost laughed at that -- _how silly of Andrew's father to have his image wear glasses!_ -- but he bit off the laugh quickly. _Mr. Drummond's glasses probably mean as much to him as my skin color means to me._

Tony greeted him solemnly. Mr. Drummond returned the greeting with an embarrassed smile and turned back to Miss Ellis.

"As much as you may like the boy, it's unfair to the rest of us to keep him enrolled at this school. Your little billing stunt is grounds for dismissal, you know."

"Yes, I know. But, Mr. Drummond, if you knew what Tony had to face each day in a regular school --"

"That is not the issue here. I understand what Tony has to deal with at his local school. But look at what his presence does to our own resources." He tapped at the air and a sheet of figures appeared on the screenboard.

"The fact that you tried to spread the expense out to everyone is commendable, Miss Ellis, but it's still patently unfair to those families who are just barely able to send their children to telepresence school. If you look at these records, you can clearly see that some families are about to receive bills that may only be slightly higher than expected -- but still higher. Did you honestly expect that no one would take notice?"

Miss Ellis turned to look at Tony. "I hoped," she said.

"Well, I'm afraid it's not possible. The money simply doesn't exist. The school cannot afford to keep him here."

"He's one of the best students in the school. Is there nothing we can do for him?"

Mr. Drummond sighed. "What about all the other Tonys out there? We'd be unfair to all of them if we favored just one particular student. This is a private institution, not a public one. It's completely supported by the families, and quite a few of us are stretched to the limit. I'm sorry."

"I knew you had to be rich to attend," Tony heard himself say.

Mr. Drummond frowned at Tony. "Tony, to you we may seem rich, but believe me, we're just getting by. Perhaps we don't find it as difficult to live as you do, but we honestly can't afford to keep you here."

He turned back to Miss Ellis."We'll have to make arrangements to retrieve the simulator and the spex. I have to go now; I have a trustees meeting to attend." He tapped his earpiece and disappeared, leaving Tony and Miss Ellis alone in the classroom.

"I guess I won't be able to stay, then." Tony said. "But I don't want to go back to my old school." He started to cry.

"Tony, don't cry. Listen to me. There is a way out."

* * *

The following Monday afternoon, Tony took the subway down to Greenwich Village. He had to show a pass at 96th Street in order to continue under the fence, but Miss Ellis had arranged everything.

He went to the address Miss Ellis had given him, a brownstone on West 10th Street, and rang the doorbell. A black woman opened the door. She had a thick red scar seared across her right cheek.

Tony stammered. "I'm sorry, I'm looking for Miss Ellis. I must have the wrong place." He started to back down the steps.

"It's okay, Tony, this is my house."

Tony stared at her, afraid to enter. The voice was right, but...

She laughed. "It's me, Tony. Come on in."

Tony hesitated, then followed her into the house. "I'm sorry, Miss Ellis, it's just that--"

"I understand. I've set up a classroom in back."

They entered a small room with a tiny green blackboard in one corner and two small desks. Written on the board with actual chalk were the words, "Welcome, Tony." Sitting on the desks were notebooks and textbooks. They looked old and worn, but also loved.

Tony looked at Miss Ellis and smiled. She smiled back. Even with the scar, she was the most beautiful sight in the world. "Well, let's get started," she said. "I told you things would be different."

LIFE ON THE MOON

Tony Daniel

Nell was skinny and wan. Her hair was brown, darkening to black, and her eyes were brown and sad. Henry did not understand why he loved her, for he had always considered himself a shallow man when it came down to it, with a head turned by shallow beauty and flashy teeth and eyes. Nell was a calm, dark pool. She was also probably the greatest artist of her generation, though, and when one had the extraordinary luck to claim such a woman's regard, one made exceptions.

They met at a faculty mixer in St. Louis. Henry was a visiting poet at Washington University's graduate writing program. Nell, already quite famous in her professional circles, had given a lecture that day at the architecture school-- a lecture that Henry had studiously avoided. Nell had not read any of Henry's poetry, for that matter, but few people had. If anything, twenty-first century poets were more obscure and unknown than their predecessors had been.

But both knew the other by reputation, and, being the only people at the mixer who were not involved in the intricacies of academic policy skirmishes, the two of them ended up in a corner, talking about corners.

"Why do they have to be ninety degrees," Henry asked. He leaned against one wall, trying to appear nonchalant, and felt his drink slosh over his wrist. For the first time, Henry regretted that he was not a man brought up to be comfortable on the insides of buildings.

"They don't," Nell replied. "But there are good reasons they mostly are." For some reason, Nell's face seemed lacking in some way, as if the muscles and tendons were strung out and defined, but weren't really supporting anything of importance. Odd.

"Structural reasons?"

"Why are there laps, when we sit down?"

Henry knew then that he was going to like her, despite her peculiar face.

"So we have something to do with our legs, I suppose," he said.

"And to hold cats and children on, too. Function and beauty." Nell smiled, and suddenly Henry understood the reason her face seemed curious and incomplete. It was a superstructure waiting for that smile.

They did not, of course, return to Henry's place and fuck like minks, although by the end of the mixer that was all Henry had on his mind. Instead, Henry asked her to coffee the following afternoon. Nell actually had a scramjet to Berlin scheduled for the early morning, Henry later discovered, but she canceled the flight for the date. Nell understood which situations called for spontaneity, and, being a careful, thoughtful woman, she always made the right moves.

Those first moments were so abstract, urban and-- formed, as Henry later recalled them. Like a dance, personifying the blind calls and pediments of nature. That was what it felt like to be alive in the houses of people you didn't really know, of living hazy days in parks and coffee shops and the chambers of the University. Nell and he had met the next day for espresso like two ballet dancers executing a maneuver. Touch lightly, exchange, touch, pass, pass, pass.

But something sparked then and there, because, of course, he had asked her to drive out to the Ozarks to see the flaming maples, and Nell had accepted. And in the Ozarks, Henry could become himself, his best self.

Nell had found one of his books, and when they stopped to look at a particularly fine farmhouse amidst crimson and vermilion foliage, she quoted his poem about growing up in the country from memory.

They kissed with a careful passion.

From Living on the Moon: An Essay Concerning Lunar Architectural Possibilities by Nell Branigan

Lunar architecture will offer many new frontiers for artists, but the old truths must still apply if the edifices of the moon are to be places where people will want to live and work. Lunar architecture must take account of space and form above all. Art is the outward, objective expression of inner, subjective experience. It is the symbol of what it is like to be human.

Consider architecture. What is the great element of architecture? It is not form alone, for that is the great element of sculpture. We live and work inside the architectural sculpture, as well as pondering it from outside. We inhabit its spaces. This is why I say that its greatest elements are both form and space, and the ways the two relate to one another.

Two years later, Henry had published his fifth book to sound reviews and a little more money than he'd expected. On the strength of this, he had agreed to move to Seattle for a while to be with Nell, despite the fact that he had no academic appointment there, or prospects for one. They were married in a civil ceremony in the apex of the Smith Tower, a building Nell particularly admired.

And I am a man Nell particularly admired, Henry later thought. Perhaps love is not an emotion that is possible for the developed feelings. Perhaps the artist contemplates and symbolizes feeling to such an extent that he or she can't just have one after a certain point. Maybe that's why I'm only a good poet, and Nell was a genius. I feel too much stuff. Too much goddamn unformed stuff.

Yet Nell had remembered his poem, and, by now, she had read all of his work, and would quote parts of it when she was happy or animated by some idea.

In Seattle, Nell's earthly masterpiece was being built-- the Lakebridge Edifice. "Built" was, maybe, not the word for construction these days. "Substantiated" or "Formed" seemed more correct, as the macro and micro machines interacted with the algorithmic plans to produce a structure utterly true to the architect's vision-- down to the molecular level.

To achieve such perfection of craft took a little over two years, during which Nell and Henry shared comfortable apartments on the Alki-Harbor Island Span, a glassy affair of a neighborhood that stretched across Elliott Bay in a flattened arch. Nell thought it crass and atrocious. Henry decided to make the best of things, and planted a garden on the thirty foot long catwalk that opened up from their bedroom. His new book began to take shape as a series of captured moments having to do with plants and growth and getting soil on your pants and hands.

Production and Reproduction by Henry Colterman

In the nucleus of our home, my wife draws buildings

in concentrated silence, measured pace

as daylight dapples through the walls and ceilings

of our semi-permeable high arch living space.

While I, raised young among the cows and maize,

garden the terrace by my hand and hoe

and fax her conceptions out to their next phase,

she makes our living-- and your living too.

Near twilight, I osmose from room to room

feeling vague, enzymatic lust for her

but wait, and clean, and prepensely consume

my supper in the leavings of our birr.

And then she stumbles, blinking, into night

and we opaque the walls to greenhouse light.

I was happy, Henry recalled. I thought I was just getting by, using my garden as substitute for living in nature, living by nature. But I was truly happy on the Span.

Somehow, nature came to me there.

Sex was never Nell's strong point. She was awkward and seemed perpetually inexperienced, but she was passionate and thoughtful. Her sexuality was as well-formed, balanced and beautiful as her buildings. But it lacked something. That something was, of course, what Nell put into her work, Henry knew. Artless ardor. Novelty and insight. The secret ingredient of genius.

Yet Henry did not mind. For she loved him, he knew, and respected his work, his long silences, his gazing off into nowhere, his sometimes childish glee at what must have appeared to her to be nothing at all.

And so they lived and grew together during the making of the Lakebridge Edifice. Or perhaps I grew around Nell, Henry later considered, like wisteria around wrought iron. Nell didn't change, but she was good support and did not mind being covered over in spots.

From Living on the Moon: An Essay Concerning Lunar Architectural Possibilities by Nell Branigan

So what does this tell us about a lunar architecture? Only that space and form still apply to our constructions, because humans still apply. The moon is perhaps one of the oldest constants in the making of this feeling of being alive that all art expresses. Women know this quite literally, but men know it just as well in a hundred biological rhythms that go back to our animal experience of the rise and fall of the Earth's tide.

Yet we will no longer be down on Earth, looking up at the moon. We will be on the moon, looking up at the Earth. The old movements and spaces will not apply. Or rather, they will not apply in the same ways. I imagine that this disruption of feeling will be far more upsetting to people than the change in gravity or the physical necessities of existence on the lunar surface.

I conceive of a lunar architecture that would mitigate this disruption, and yet, if it were possible, provide us with new forms and spaces to reflect our new relationship with the mother planet. Like a child who has left the nest, lunar architecture must look back with fondness, but forward with imagination and resolve.

What are the actualities of such an architecture? What sorts of cities ought we to build on the moon?

When the Lakebridge Edifice was complete, it was clear that Nell was a major artist of her generation. Even Henry, who had been an intimate part of the design and construction of the structure, was stunned when he first saw it complete and revealed one morning near sunrise.

He'd been out on his terrace, weeding the tomatoes. Even with a plethora of soil emulsifiers, regulatory agents and hunter-killer insect robots, weeds grew. The problem was one of recognition, for life was life, no matter how irritating the form it took. Henry had not been able to sleep the night before, while Nell had slept like a log, her labors in Seattle nearly completed. Their settled life was about to end, Henry knew, and with it the feeling of content and regularity that he hadn't known since his days growing up on his parents little farm near Dalton, Georgia.

He'd gone out onto the terrace, because that was the place that smelled and felt most strongly of the old farm, particularly his father's prized tomato garden. It should. He'd worked to get just that flavor out of the thirty feet, sacrificing yield even. This was the way it had been.

And, once again, he was going to leave it and lose it.

Henry began to weed despondently, while dawn turned the black sky gray, as it mostly did every morning in Seattle. Except. Except now there was something new that made the gray sky-- not brighter-but lighter. The sun came up, and shone on the northeast corner of the Lakebridge Edifice.

The problem wasn't new, Nell had told him. It was the age-old renovation problem of what to do with low ceilings. In Seattle, the clouds were often low and the sky was frequently mean. It sometimes made you feel compressed, made your life seem squat and set. Yet, there was the water of lake and ocean nearby, and, when the clouds would permit, mountains on all sides.

Lakebridge was a solution to those days when the mountains didn't come out, and the Sound and lakes were dishwater dull. It did not attempt to reverse those conditions, but to provide a new experience. It was a complex of different spaces, Nell called them. They couldn't properly be viewed as distinct buildings. Too many connections, suggested and literal. The complex partially encompassed Lake Union, on the northeast side of downtown, and seemed to be the very evaporation and condensation of lake water into the sky-- the cycle of liquid, vapor and the solid apparitions of clouds in an ascending order that spired out at three quarter miles. And yet this was far from all that the complex suggested. There was a colorful marina, a hoverport, residential and business sections intertwining like striated muscles. The structure was organic, alive, useful because it was art first, because the craft was part of the makeup of its living form.

Henry found himself drawing in his breath at the beauty of what his wife had conceived. Then a small hand wiped the sweat from his brow, and Nell wound her arm around him, and crooked herself under his shoulder.

"Do you think it's pretty?" she asked shyly. Henry knew that this was no put on. Nell was, herself, constantly surprised by what her gift allowed her to do.

"You done yourself proud," Henry whispered, and Nell hugged him tighter.

"I'm glad you like it," she said. "That means more to me than anything." Henry looked down into her hazel eyes and felt pure love. Like the love he felt for the Earth, for the way things grew and changed. Her eyes were the color of good fertile soil. They were the color of fine wood and thick prairie sage. He kissed her lightly on the forehead, and she drew him down to her lips. Good. Right. Beautiful.

They made love in the terrace garden, as Henry had always wanted to. If there were any artistry in sex, they caught it that day, twisting amid the tomato plants. Sex was supposedly the pattern and rhythm that the sonnet followed, but Henry was convinced theirs was itself the symbol of a sonnet, the gift that art was giving back to the world for giving it someone like Nell Branigan.

He fucked her gently, and "fucked" was the right word, for of course it came from Middle English for "plow." Her responding movements dug her deeper into the dirt of the terrace, until she was partially buried, and Henry was lowering himself deeper than soil level with each thrust. Her hands smeared his back and sides with loam, and their kisses began to get muddy.

Before he came, Nell turned him over into the depression they had carved and, sitting on him, wiped herself clean with tomato vines. It was the most erotic thing Henry had ever seen. He pushed up into her. She caressed his face with hands smelling of vegetable tang, and rubbed her clit with the pith and juice of his crushed plants. Henry felt himself on the verge but held back, held back. He tried to reach up into Nell with feeling, with an understanding and admiration for her-- the woman in her, the artist, the subtle combination of the two that was her soul.

And he must have touched it, set it to pulsing, for she came all over him, more than ever before, damping his stomach and thighs with a thin sheen of herself. His climax was just as hard and complete, and they collapsed in the garden. Henry spoke on some nearby heating elements, and fell fast asleep, his love in his arms.

Two weeks later, Henry was offered a visiting professorship at Stanford that would not involve teaching, but only a bit of consulting work with graduate students in writing. It was a dream slot, lucrative and freeing. Henry suspected the offer was partly due to the reflected glamour of his association with Nell, for Nell and the Lakebridge Edifice had made the opening screen of the general newsource Virtual with the heading "Architectural Renaissance Woman."

Nell was, of course, receiving project proposals from right and left.

"It appears I can live practically anywhere and do my work," she said. When Henry told her about the Stanford opportunity, she encouraged him to accept. They prepared to move to San Francisco in the autumn.

From Living on the Moon: An Essay Concerning Lunar Architectural Possibilities by Nell Branigan

I conceive of structures that create a human space within themselves, and yet are not closed off from the grandeur of the setting-- the wonder of where the people are and what they are doing. This is the moon, and we have come to this new world to live! We must take into account Earthrise and moon mountain vistas. I imagine an architecture that moves and accommodates itself to take advantage of the best synergies and juxtapositions of the landscape.

And yet the forms that we conceive to give us the spaces that will move us must, themselves, be beautiful.

What follows is merely my idea of such an architecture.

It is intended as an acorn, and not as the oaktree entire. Space is broad and empty, and where there are humans there will be places humans live. And where there are places to live, there will be architects.

Henry was writing a poem about briarpatches when Nell came in to tell him about the moon. He knew it must be important, otherwise she would never have interrupted him at his work. In those days, his hair was closely cropped, and Nell had enjoyed running her fingers through its crispness. She did so this time, but half-heartedly-more of a swat-- and then sat down across the table from him.

"Dobrovnik interfaxed in yesterday, full virtual," she said.

Dobrovnik was a partner in Nell's firm. He had given up his own design work to serve as principle agent and negotiator for the other partners-- most importantly, Nell.

"That must have been incredibly expensive," Henry replied, still a little blank from having been yanked out of the poem. "It must have been important?"

"Yes. I've been offered a wonderful project."

"Really?"

"Really wonderful."

"That's great."

Nell slumped, and looked around the room. Henry was not used to such odd body language from her. He forced thoughts of thorns and briars from his mind, and concentrated.

"So," he said. "You aren't going to be able to go to San Francisco? Is that it?"

"That's part of it."

Something else, but Nell was being very quiet. "Nell, you know I support you completely."

"I know, Henry." She sobbed. Nell sobbed. "My Henry."

"Nell, what is it?"

"The Subcommittee on Exploration has approved my proposal for a lunar colony."

"The United Nations General Assembly?" Nell nodded. "Nell, that's amazing news!"

And she was crying. Henry was entirely nonplused.

"I have to go," Nell said. "I have to go to the moon for five years. Maybe longer."

Henry stood up, sat down. San Francisco. He pictured San Francisco's gardens and fogs, its graceful spans and temperate clime. But fog. And more fog, like dead vines. Undead vines. Covering, obscuring, eating the city away, fog, until there was nothing, nothing but depthless gray.

"You can come, Henry. That would all be part of the arrangement. They'll pay your way, and more."

"To the moon?"

"Yes."

All he could picture was a blank. A blank expanse.

"But there's nothing there."

"There will be. We are going to build it."

"No, there's no ... air. No manure. No briarpatches."

"I know. I understood that from the moment Dobrovnik told me about the offer, and I truly began to consider what it would involve to actually do it."

Henry felt a trickle of sweat down his forehead. Where had that come from? Nell was too far away to wipe it. He pawed it off, continued down his face with his hand, and kneaded his own shoulder.

"Are you going to accept?"

"I don't know. To build a city, practically from scratch-it's the chance of the century for an architect." Nell wiped her tears, sat up straight. "I want you with me, Henry."

Did she? Or was she just doing the right thing? What was he, after all, when compared with her art? Had Nell ever really cared for him at all, except in the abstract? Jesus, he felt like Bogie at the end of Casablanca, letting Elsa go off with Victor Lazlo. What in God's name had gotten into him? Why was he thinking like this? Was he that jealous of her gift? Of her fucking acclaim? He loved Nell. He loved Nell, and he wanted to be with her, too.

But didn't she know what it would do to him? To his work? The moon. The bone-dead moon.

"I have to think. I don't know if I can go with you. I have to think."

And, as always, Nell knew that it was time to leave him alone and let him do so. She had perfect instincts about such things. Or perhaps it was art. Henry could never tell the difference as far as Nell was concerned.

She Hangs Mute and Bright by Henry Colterman

Blank hole, like a fresh cigarette scar

I like the stars better; they don't

care or not care, but the moon

doesn't care and makes you think

she does. It is the light, I think,

the queered shadows, as subtle as lips,

the tease of incomplete revelation.

I have climbed up to small branches

on full moon nights and pressed

my face to the dark

while the wind chapped my eyes open.

I was without tears,

as empty as an orbit,

but she did not fill me.

She moved on.

She never lived.

She cannot die.

She hangs mute and bright.

I do not understand the moon.

Henry did not decide that day, or the next. He rented a car the following morning and went for a drive into the Cascade Mountains. There was a chilly rain above four thousand feet, and the drying elements in the roads steamed in long, thin lines up, up toward the passes.

Henry stopped at a waterfall, and stood a long time in the mist. There was no thought in his head for several minutes, and then Henry became aware that he had been tessellating the fall between being a single, stationary entity and a torrential intermingling of chaotic patterns.

I ought to make a poem about this, he thought. But no words came. Just the blank stare of nature, incomprehensible. One or many, it didn't matter. Henry had almost turned to go when the sun broke out from behind the clouds, and shattered the falls, and the surrounding mist, into prismatic hues.

This is as loud as the water, Henry thought. This is what the water is saying. It is talking about the sun. The possibility of sunlight.

The light stayed only for a moment, and then was gone, but Henry had his poem. In an instant, I can have a poem, Henry thought, but I look at the moon, and I think about living there-- and nothing comes. Nothing. I need movement and life. I cannot work with only dust. I am a poet of nature, of life. My work will die on the moon. There isn't any life there.

He must stay.

But Nell.

What would the Earth be like without Nell? Their love had not been born in flame, but it had grown warmer and warmer, like coals finding new wood and slowly bringing it to the flash point. Were they burning yet? Yes. Oh, yes.

"I have to have life for my work," he told her when he returned. "I can't work up there."

"Henry, I'll stay--"

"No."

"There must be a way," she whispered. Her words sounded like the falling of distant rain.

"No."

He must stay, and Nell must go. To the moon.

The preparations were enormous and Nell did not leave for five more months. They lived in Seattle, but Henry saw very little of her during that time. He was lucky to spend one night a week with her.

Nell tried to make their time together meaningful; Henry could tell she was working hard at it. But now there was The Project-The Project always hulking over her mind like an eclipse. During their last week together, Henry called up the plans, the drawings and algorithms that had won the commission, for the first time, to see what was taking his love away.

As usual, the blueprints communicated little to him, despite the time Nell had spent teaching him the rudiments of envisioning structures from them. The three dimensional CAD perspectives were better, but, whether there was some mental block operating in his head, or the fact that the perspectives were idealized and ultimately out of their other-worldly context, Henry could not see what the fuss was over. Just buildings. Only another city. Why not just build it in Arizona or something and pretend it was the moon? Why not--

Stop kidding himself. Nell was going. He was staying here.

Nell spent her last four days on Earth with Henry. At this time, a little of the passion returned to their love. It was ragged and hurried, but the immediacy of their predicament added a fury to their sex and life, so that it blazed like blown coals.

Nell left on the Tuesday shuttle from SeaTac. Henry had thought that he would not see it off, but found himself getting up and getting ready long before Nell had to go. They drove to the airport in silence. Nell would take an orbital scramjet to Stevenson Station, geosynchronous over North America, then depart on the weekly moon run on Thursday.

Their final kiss was passionate and complete. The desperation of the previous week was gone, and in its place was a timeless togetherness, as if they always had and always would be sharing that kiss. And Henry understood, in the throes of that kiss, that this timelessness totally encompassed his desire, past and future. I mate for life, Henry thought, and I have found my mate.

And then the scramjet carried Henry's love away.

From Living on the Moon: An Essay Concerning Lunar Architectural Possibilities by Nell Branigan

My artistic model for this city is the living cell.

I envision smooth, warm walls curving to low arched ceilings, whose opacity will change with the changing light and landscape. I imagine the environmental support systems and operating machinery of the cell showing bluntly here and there, but incorporated-literally-- into the function and form of the whole, just as mitochondria and chloroplasts are in living cells.

I imagine a city of light and subtle colors, stretching out and up in graceful curves, runners and points, stretching like a neuron, with neurotransmitters sparking off the end of dendrites and axons, sparking back to the Earth-- or outward, into the greater emptiness beyond.

Mornings were not so bad. Henry had not taken the Stanford position after all, but had moved back to Georgia, to a log cabin that had once been his grandfather's hobby project. Henry scratched out poems, and within six months had another book ready. He was mildly famous now-- or so he supposed, for he had stopped paying attention to such things-- and the book brought an unprecedented advance. For the first time in his career, Henry would not need to teach or live off of one grant or another. And Nell regularly sent home an enormous sum from her paycheck, since she had very little to spend it on, and wanted him to use whatever he might need of it.

The Project would provide him a trip to the moon and back once a year. Henry counted the days until the trip with alternating hope and trepidation. It wouldn't be the same as being together with Nell. It might be worse than not being with her at all. He couldn't say when, but after a while he realized that he had decided not to go.

Nights were terrible. Nell would call often, and once a week use the full-virtual interfax. Henry imagined his grandfather coming back to life and entering the cabin-- only to find the cabin haunted by a ghost. Nell's form moved and spoke with Henry on these weekly visitations, and then was gone. But the short transmission delay was enough to tell him it was not Nell, there, on Earth, in Georgia. He could not smell her hair nor kiss her face. They could only stare into one another's eyes over three hundred and eighty-four thousand kilometers.

Henry prided himself on not breaking down in front of Nell, but some nights he stayed awake, crying until morning. Especially during the full moon. It hung oppressively in the dark, shone as if it had reason, as if it had passion. But all of its brightness was just a reflection. The moon was distant and dead, only a virtual world, an apparition of meaning, tricking the eye. Henry tried to be brave, to not pull the curtains on it, but many times he could not stand the light, and, with a sob, yanked them closed.

But he forced himself to watch the news reports, and follow the more accessible architectural journals. Progress on the moon was quick, but there was an enormous amount of work to be done in transforming the pre-existing colony into a real city, with the attendant support structures and contingencies for change. It soon became obvious that the Project was going to run into delays, perhaps lengthy ones.

But the city was going to get built. Lower cost trips up and down Earth's gravity well, and the new micro construction techniques had made the economics of low gravity manufacturing feasible, and the communications and transportation base the moon was already providing meant the colony had long been breaking even financially. The moon had begun to turn a profit. And soon, skilled and semi-skilled workers would be needed, by the thousands. The moon was going to become many an emigrant's destination.

So they were building a city, both for those already there, and for those who would come. Sophisticated systems had to grow, and grow together precisely. Changes must be made to accommodate small miscalculations or the random aberrations of molecules. Myriad design problems must be met and mastered, and Nell had to be out on the surface, constantly consulting with contractors and crafters as to changes and adaptations, or inside watching command and control simulations in virtual. Yet enclosures of unprecedented physical security were being built, for paper- thin walls could shield against vacuum and meteor strike. And, with one sixth the gravity, there were long arches, massive lintels, never possible on Earth. A city of cathedrals, it seemed to Henry.

As Nell's city took shape, Henry began truly to see the magnitude and wonder of the work his wife had envisioned. Yet still, it was the moon, and the only life was human life-- but human life on a grand scale, he must admit. But no wild waterfalls. No briarpatches giving life to form, bringing form to life.

And then, one day before Nell's weekly visit, Henry received a signal from Lunar Administration.

He immediately knew something was wrong, for this was a day that Nell expected to be too busy even to call.

He flicked his virtual fax to full interactive, expecting Nell to explain to him what the big deal was.

Instead, a chubby, professionally dressed woman appeared before him.

"Dr. Colterman?"

"Just Mister." Henry blinked to see her. There was dust in the room, and some particles danced brightly in her image, as they might in sunlight.

"I'm Elmira Honner."

"You're--" Henry vaguely remembered the name.

"Supervisor of the Lunar Project."

"Ah. Nell's boss. Yes. What?" He realized he sounded curt. Why was this woman calling him in Georgia, reminding him of the moon?

"I'm afraid I have bad news."

Oh, God. The vacuum. The lifeless stretches. But maybe not-

"Your wife was killed this afternoon, Mr. Colterman. Nell Branigan is dead."

She had been killed in a construction accident while supervising the foundations for a communications center. The micro machines had thought she was debris, and had-- almost instantaneously-disassembled and transported Nell and two others, molecule by molecule, to be spread out over a twenty kilometer stretch. The algorithm that had caused the harm had not been one of Nell's, but a standard Earth program modified by one of the contractors without previous clearance. The glitch was based on the fact that the moon's surface was lifeless. The algorithm hadn't needed to recognize life on the lunar surface before, had done its job in directing the micro construction molecules, and so the bug had gone undetected. Until now.

Henry said nothing. He bowed his head, and let pain slosh over him, into him, like the tide. Nell, dead on the dead moon. Nell.

Honner waited a respectful moment. Henry was vaguely aware that she hadn't signed off.

"Mr. Colterman?" she said. "Mr. Colterman, there is something else."

Henry's eyes began to tear, but he was not crying yet. Brief transmission delay. Three hundred eighty-four thousand kilometers. Not yet. Not even grief was faster than light. "What?" he said. "What else do you want?"

"Your wife left something. Something for you. It's on the edge of a secluded crater, some kilometers away from the colony."

Something? Henry could not think. "What is it?"

"We're not exactly sure. We thought you could, perhaps, tell us."

"Yes?"

Honner seemed more uncomfortable now, unsure of herself, and not used to the feeling.

"You'll have to come, Mr. Colterman. It isn't something that even full virtual can really ... encompass. Also, we're not exactly sure what to do about this thing--"

"No."

"Mr. Colterman, sir, respectfully, I--"

"Don't you see that I can't. Not now. There's nothing--" His voice broke into a sob. He didn't care. He was crying.

"Mr. Colterman, I'm sorry. Mr. Colterman, Nell told me she wanted you to come and see it. She said it was the only way she could ever get you to visit the moon."

"She told you that?"

"I was her friend."

"She wants me to come to the moon."

"I'm very sorry, Mr. Colterman. If there's anything we can do--"

"Nell wants me to come to the moon."

He spent most of the scramjet ride to Stevenson Station gazing numbly at the Earth, and most of the lunar transport time working and reworking a poem. He called it "The Big Empty," and it was done just before the transport landed.

Honner met him at the dock, and together they took a skimmer to the crater where Nell had left ... whatever it was that remained. Henry watched the gray-black dust skirt underneath the skimmer, and thought: that is Nell. Now this dust has a name.

When they got to the crater, at first Henry did not understand what he was seeing. Honner suggested they debark, and they both donned the thin-skinned surface suits that Henry had seen in virtual, and never believed would be real protection. Apparently they were. He walked to the edge of the crater, to a beacon that was flashing faintly against the black sky. The beacon was attached to a greenish stone, with one side chiseled flat. On that face was the simple inscription

For Henry

He gazed out over the crater, down its bumps and declivities, trying to discern--

"It isn't actually a crater," Honner said. Her voice seemed pitched for the distance she stood away from him, and it took Henry a moment to realize his headgear had some sort of sophisticated transceiver embedded in it. There was, of course, no air here.

"What do you mean?"

"We've begun a search of her notes, but so far we have no explanation. Nell ... grew this, as far as we can tell."

"Grew?"

"In a manner of speaking. There was no crater here before. Also, it changes. We don't think it's getting bigger, but we do have our concerns. As you're aware, micro instantiation poses certain risks--" Honner appeared to have run out of tactful ways of expressing her misgivings. She came to stand beside Henry at the crater's edge. "It seems to be powered by Earthshine, if you can believe such a thing--"

Nell grew this. The words resonated in Henry's mind. And then he saw it for what it was. Portions and rows. The undulations of corn and wheat, the tangle of tomatoes, the wispy irony of weeds, here and there. Not a copy, not even an imitation.

For it was made from the rocks and dust of the moon, inhabited by micro construction machines, and animated by Nell's algorithms. Nell's vision. Nell. An expression. An evocation. Of course, of course. Life on the moon.

"It's a garden."

"What? I don't see that."

"It's a sculpture. No. It's a garden. I think people are meant to go down in there."

"I still don't see--"

Art is the symbol of life, and the embodiment of the life it symbolizes, Nell had said. This was not a real garden, any more than the painting of a tomato was a real tomato. But it was the way gardens felt. And if anybody knows how gardens feel, what it is like to lie down among the tomatoes, it is me and Nell, Henry thought. Oh yes, a garden.

Henry touched the carved letters on the green stone. "Yes, I think it's pretty, Nell," he said.

Life on the Moon by Henry Colterman

After I ventured into the Big Empty,

a smaller movement between hard and fast stars,

after I ventured to the moon, and the dust of the moon,

and to those smooth ceramic halls, those lustrous and benign spaces,

and to the evaporated surface,

the empty mineral stretch and score,

I could not find you.

You moved on.

Yet you are still there.

You are in the valence between spaces.

I cannot kiss the fall of your hair; I cannot lie

beside you in the silence.

Not yet.

You hang mute and bright.

You rise gently from the undermass,

the crystal and stone, like a sleeper

half-waking, then back to dreams

of the moon, subtle as lips,

now harsh and warm as breath.

Rise and fall.

Nell, for love,

you have given the moon seasons.

A BIRTHDAY

Esther M. Friesner

I wake up knowing that this is a special day. Today is Tessa's birthday. She will be six. That means she will start school and I won't see her during the day at all.

My friends will have a party for Tessa and for me. The invitation sits on my bedside table, propped up against the telephone so I can't possibly forget it. I wish I could. There are pink pandas tumbling around the borders of the card and inside my friend Paula has written in the details of time and place in her beautiful handwriting. I get up, get dressed, get ready for the day ahead.

Before I leave the apartment I make sure that I haven't locked Squeaker in the closet again. Squeaker is my cat. You'd think it would be hard for a cat to hide in a studio apartment, but Squeaker manages. Tessa loves cats and pandas, just like me. She told me so.

I am almost out the door when I remember the invitation. Tessa hasn't seen it yet. Today will be my last chance to show it to her. I keep forgetting to take it with me, not because I want to deprive my daughter of anything but because of what this birthday means to us both. I don't like to think about it. I tuck the invitation into my purse and go to work.

I arrive a little before nine. Mom always said I never plan ahead, but I do now.

There are flowers on my desk at work, six pink fairy roses in a cut glass bud vase with a spill of shiny white ribbon tied around its neck. There is a freedom card propped open on the keyboard in front of my terminal, signed by most of the women in the office. I hang up my jacket and check my IN box for work, but there is nothing there, no excuse to turn on my terminal. Still, a good worker finds work to do even when there's none, and I do so want to touch the keys.

I sit down and reach for a sampler sheet to rub over my thumb and slip into the terminal. Damn, the pad's empty! I know I had some left yesterday, what happened? I can't turn on my terminal without giving it a sample of my cell-scrapings so the system knows it's me. Who's been getting at my things!

I'll kill her!

No. I mustn't lose my temper like this. I have to set a good example for my girl. It's important for a woman to make peace, to compromise. No one wins a war. Maybe whoever took the last of my sampler sheets needed it more than I do.

Maybe she had to stay late, work overtime, an d everyone else locked their pads away in their desks so she had to help herself to mine.

"Good morning, Linda." It's my boss, Mr. Beeton. His melon face is shiny with a smile. "I see you've found my little surprise."

"Sir?" I say.

"Now, now, I know what day this is just as well as you do. Do you think the ladies are the only ones who want to wish you the best for the future? Just became there's a door on my office, it doesn't mean I'm sealed inside, ignorant of my girls' lives." He pats me on the back and says, "I'm giving you the day off, with pay. Have fun." And then he is gone, a walrus in a blue-gray suit waddling up the aisle between the rows of terminals.

I don't want to have the day off. What will I do?

Where will I go? The party isn't until six o'clock tonight. There is so much I need to say to her before then. I suppose I could go to the bank, but that's only ten seconds' worth of time. It's nowhere near enough. Here at work I could keep finding excuses to --

Mr. Beeton is at the end of the aisle, staring at me. He must be wondering why I'm still sitting here, staring at a blank screen. I'd better go. I put on my jacket and walk away from my terminal. It will still be here tomorrow. So will part of me.

I hear the murmurs as I walk to the door. The women are smiling at me as I pass, sad smiles, encouraging smiles, smiles coupled with the fleeting touch of a hand on mine. "I'm so happy for you," they say. "You're so strong."

"I've been praying for you."

"Have a good time."

"Have a good life."

"See you tomorrow."

But what will they see? I think about how many sick days I have left. Not enough. I will have to come back tomorrow, and I will have to work as if everything were still the same.

As I walk down the hall to the elevator I have to pass the Ladies' Room. I hear harsh sounds, tearing sounds.

Someone is in there, crying. I don't have to work today; I can take the time to go in and see who it is, what's wrong. Maybe I can help. Maybe this will kill some time.

The crying is coming from one of the stalls. "Who's there?" I call. The crying stops. There is silence, broken only by the drip of water from a faucet and a shallow, sudden intake of breath from the stall.

"What's wrong?" I ask. "Please, I can help you."

"Linda?" The voice is too fragile, too quavery for me to identify. "Is that you?

I thought Beeton gave you the day off."

"He did," I tell whoever it is in them. "I was just on my way out."

"Go ahead, then." Now the voice is a little stronger, a little surer when giving a direct command. "Have fun." Another shudder of breath frays the edges of her words.

I think I know who it is in there now..Anyway, it's worth a guess. "Ms. Thayer?"

What is she doing in here? The executives have their own bathrooms.

A latch flicks; the stall door swings open. Ms. Thayer is what I dreamed I'd be someday, back when I was a Business major freshman in college: a manager never destined to waste her life in the middle reaches of the company hierarchy, a comer and a climber with diamond-hard drive fit to cut through any glass ceiling her superiors are fool enough to place in her way. Sleekly groomed, tall and graceful in a tailored suit whose modest style still manages to let the world know it cost more than my monthly take-home pay, Ms. Thayer is a paragon. Every plane of expensive fabric lies just so along a body trimmed and toned and tanned to perfection. Only the front of her slim blue skirt seems to have rucked itself a little out of line. It bulges just a bit, as if -- as if --

Oh.

"Would you like me to come with you?" I ask her. I don't need to hear confessions. "If it's today, I mean." If I'm wrong, she'll let me know.

She nods her head. Her nose is red and there is a little trace of slime on her upper lip. Her cheeks are streaked with red, her eyes squinched half-shut to hold back more tears. "I called," she tells me. "I have a four o'clock appointment. Upstairs, they think I'm going to the dentist."

"I'll meet you in the lobby, then, at three-thirty," I promise. And I add, because I know this is what she needs to hear more than anything, "It's not so bad." She squeezes my hand and flees back into the shelter of the stall. I hear the tears again, but they are softer this time. She is no longer so afraid.

I could take her sorrow from her as I took her fear by telling her there are ways to make what lies ahead a blessing, but I won't do that. She'd never believe me, anyhow. I know I would never have believed anyone when it was me.

Besides, I was in college. I knew it all, better than anyone who'd been there, and the evening news was full of stories to back up my conviction that I'd chosen purgatory over hell. You're supposed to be able to survive purgatory.

I should have known better. Surviving isn't living, it's only breath that doesn't shudder to a stop, a heart that keeps lurching through beat after beat after beat long after it's lost all reason to keep on beating. I was wrong. But I was in college, Mom and Dad had given up so much to provide the difference between my meager scholarship and the actual cost of tuition, books, room and board. They said, "Make us proud."

When I dropped out in junior year and got this job as a secretary, they never said a word.

I think I need a cup of coffee. I know I need a place to sit and think about what I'll do to fill the hours between now and three-thirty, three-thirty and six. There's a nice little coffee shop a block from the office, so I go there and take a booth. The morning rush is over; no one minds.

The waitress knows me. Her name is Caroline. She is twenty-six, just two years older than me. Usually I come here for lunch at the counter, when there's lots of cusotmers, but we still find time to talk. She knows me and I know her. Her pink uniform balloons over a belly that holds her sixth baby. She admires me for the way I can tease her about it. "Isn't that kid here yet?" I ask.

"Probably a boy," she answers. "Men are never on time." We both laugh.

"So how far along are you?"

"Almost there. You don't wanna know how close."

"No kidding? So why are you still -- ?"

"Here? Working?" She laughs. "Like I've got a choice!" She takes my older and brings me my food. I eat scrambled eggs and bacon and toast soaked with butter.

I drink three cups of coffee, black. I don't want to live forever. I leave Caroline a big tip because its no joke having five -- six kids to raise today's prices, and a husband who doesn't earn much more than minimum wage.

I get a good idea while I am smearing strawberry jam over my last piece of toast: The Woman's Center. I do weekend volunteer work there, but there's no reason I can't go over today and see if they can use me. I'm free.

I try to hail a cab but all of them are taken, mostly by businessmen. Once I see an empty one sail past, but he keeps on going when I wave. Maybe he is nearsighted and can't see me through the driver's bulletproof bubble. Maybe he is out of sampler sheets for his automatic fare-scan and is hurrying to pick up some more. Maybe he just assumes diet because I am a woman of a certain age I really don't want to ride in a cab at all.

I walk a block west and take the bus. Busses don't need fare-scan terminals because it always costs the same for every ride and you don't need to key in the tip. Tokens are enough. I ride downtown across the aisle a woman with two small children, a boy and a girl. The boy is only two or three years old and sits in his mother's lap, making rrrum-rrrum noises with his toy truck. The little girl looks about four and regards her brother scornfully. She sits in her own scat with her hands folded in the lap of her peach-colored spring coat. She wants the world to know that she is all grown up and impatient to leave baby things behind. I wonder it she'll like kindergarten as much as Tessa did? She didn't cry at all when it was time to go, even though it meant I couldn't see her in the mornings.

Things are pretty quiet at the Woman's Center. After all, it is a weekday, a workday. You have to work if you want to live. But Oralee is there. Oralee is always there, tall and black and ugly as a dog's dinner, the way my mom would say. She is the Center manager. It doesn't pay much, but it's what she wants to do. She is seated at her desk --and old wooden relic from some long-gone public school -- and when she sees me she is surprised.

Then she remembers.

"Linda, happy freedom!" She rises from her chair and rushes across the room to embrace me. Her skin is very soft and smells like lilacs. I don't know what to do or say. Oralee lives with her lover Corinne, so I don't feel right about hugging her back, no matter how much I like her or how grateful I am for all she's done for me over the years. I would be easier if she hadn't told me the truth about herself. A lesbian is a lesbian, I have no trouble hugging Corinne, but what Oralee is scares me. She clings to Corinne not because she loves her, but because it's safe, because she'll never have to risk anything that way, because her body craves touching. Oralee is always telling us we have to be brave, but she is a coward, pretending she's something she's not, out of fear. I can understand, but I can't like her for it.

Oralee leads me back to her desk and motions for me to sit down. She leans forward, her elbows on the blotter, a pen twiddling through her fingers. "So, to what do we owe the honor?" she asks, a grin cutting through the scars that make her face look like a topographical map with mountains pinched up and valleys gouged in. Today she wears the blue glass eye that doesn't match working brown one and that startles people who don't know her.

"My boss gave me the day off," I tell her. "With pay."

"Well, of course he did. Soul-salving bastard."

"I have to be somewhere at three-thirty, but I though that until then you might have something for me to do here."

Oralee pushes her chair a little away from her desk. The casters squeak and the linoleum floor complains. She runs her fingers over her shaven skull in though.

"Well, Joan and Cruz are already handling all the paperwork. . . . Our big fund-raising drive's not on until next week, no need for follow-up phone calls, the envelopes are all stuffed and in the mail . . ."

My heart sinks as she runs down a list of things that don't want doing. I try not to think about the empty hours I'll have to face if Oralee can't use me. To distract myself while I await her verdict, I look at all the things cluttering up her desktop. There is an old soup can covered with yellow-flowered shelving paper, full of paper clips, and another one full of pens and pencils. Three clay figurines of the Goddess lie like sunbathers with pendulous breasts and swollen bellies offered up to the shameless sky. Oralee made the biggest one herself, in a ceramics class. She uses Her for a paperweight. Oralee says she is a firm believer in making do with what you've got. Mr. Beeton would laugh out loud if he could see the antiquated terminal she uses. All you need to access it is a password that you type in on the keys so just anyone can get into your files if they discover what it is. At least this way the Woman's Center saves money on sampler pads, even if that's not the real reason.

The photo on the desk is framed with silver, real silver. Oralee has to polish it constantly to keep the tarnish at bay. The young black woman in the picture is smiling, her eyes both her own, her face smooth and silky-looking as the inner skin of a shell, her hair a soft, dark cloud that enhances her smile more beautifully than any silver frame.

At the bottom of the frame, under the glass with the photograph, there is a newspaper clipping. It's just the headline and it's not very big. The event it notes was nothing extraordinary enough to merit more prominent placement on the page: ABORTION CLINIC BOMBED. TWO DEAD, THREE INJURED. The clipping came from a special paper, more like a newsletter for the kind of people: who would read TWO DEAD, THREE INJURED and smile. Oralee tells us that most of the papers weren't like that; they used to call them birth control clinics or family planning clinics or even just women's clinics. As if we're none of us old enough to remember when it changed! She talks about those days -- the times when the bombings were stepped up and the assaults on women trying to reach the clinics got ugly and the doctors and sometimes their families were being threatened, being killed -- as if they'd lasted as long as the Dark Ages instead of just four years. Thank goodness everything's settled down. We're civilized people, after all. We can compromise.

"I know!" Oralee snaps her fingers, making me look up. "You can be a runner.

That is --" She hesitates.

"Yes, I can do that," I tell her.

"Are you sure?"

"Just give me what I need and tell me where I have to go. It's all right, really. I need to go to the bank myself anyway."

"Are you sure?" she asks again. Why does she doubt me? Do I look so fragile? No.

I take good care of my' body, wash my hair every day, even put on a little lipstick sometimes. It's not like before, that hard time when I first came to the city, when I was such a fool. I almost lost my job, then, because I was letting myself go so badly. I know better, now. It's my duty to set a good example. Children past a certain age start to notice things like how Mommy looks and how Mommy acts. I've read all the books. You get the child you deserve.

Oralee goes into the back room where they keep the refrigerator. She comes back with a compartmentalized cold pack the size of a clutch purse, a factory-fresh sampler pad, and a slip of paper. "You can put this in your pocketbook if you want," she tells me, giving me the cold pack. "Make sure you only keep it open long enough to take out or put in one sample at a time. And for the love of God, don't mix up the samples!"

I smile at how vehement she sounds. "I've done this before, Oralee," I remind her.

"Sure you have; sorry. Here are the names and addresses. Bus tokens are in the clay pot on the table by the front door. You don't have to bring back the pack when you're done; just drop it off next time you're here." She cocks her head.

"If you are coming back?"

"Of course I am," I say, surprised that she'd think I wouldn't.

"Oh," she says. "Because I thought -- you know -- after today's over -Well, whatever. Good luck."

There are five flames on the list, most of them in the neighborhood close to the Woman's Center, only one of them farther uptown. It's a glorious spring day.

Soon it will be Easter. The holiday came late this year, almost the end of April. I think April is a pretty name to give a girl -- April, full of hope and promise, full of beauty. Maybe I should have named my daughter April. I laugh away the thought. What's done is done, too late now to change Tessa's name. Too late.

When I get to the first place I'm surprised by how old the woman is who answers the door. I introduce myself and say that the Woman's Center sent me. I show her the cold pack and the sampler pad, telling her what I'll do for her at the bank.

She has black hair that is so shot through with silver threads it looks gray, and her fingers are stained with tobacco. She stands in the doorway, stony-eyed, barring me from the dark apartment beyond, making me stand in the hall while I run through my entire explanation.

After I have finished and I'm standing there, holding out one sampler sheet, she speaks: "I'm not Vicky," she says. "I'm her mother. God will judge you people.

You go to hell." And she slams the door in my face.

I feel like a fool, but by the time I reach the next address on the list the feeling has faded. It's better here. The woman's name is Maris and she lives alone. She urges me to come in, to have a cup of tea, some cookies, anything I'd like. Her apartment is small but tasteful, a lot of wicker, a lot of sunlight.

"God bless you," she says. "I was just about at my wits' end. I thought if I had to go through that one more time I'd go crazy. It 's supposed to get easier with time, but it just gets harder. I've got three more years to go before I'm free.

Never again, believe me; never again."

She rubs the sampler sheet over her thumb and watches like a hawk as I fumble it into its thin plastic envelope. The envelope goes into the cold pack and the cold pack goes back into my purse. "Are you sure you remember my password?" she asks as she sees me to the door.

"Yes, but please change it after today," I tell her.

The third and fourth women are not as hospitable as Maris, but there is no one there to tell me to go to hell. One of them is an artist, the other lost her job, and Maris, I recall, told me she'd taken a sick day off from work just on the off chance the Woman's Center could find a runner to come help her. It feels very strange to me, sitting in rooms freckled with spring sunshine, to be talking with strange women when I would normally be at work. In the course of these three visitations I drink three cups of tea and also share a little gin with the woman who has lost her job. My head spins with passwords and special instructions, my hands clasp a pile of three plain brown self-addressed stamped envelopes by the time I teeter out the door in search of my final contact.

I take the bus uptown. Out the window I see news leaves unfurl in blurs of green made more heartstoppingly tender by the gin. It was a mistake to drink, but if I looked into the glass I didn't have to look into the woman's eyes. I decide to get off the bus a few blocks away from my stop. A walk will clear my head.

The blue and red and white lights flash, dazzling me. Two police cars and a crowd have gathered outside a restaurant that's trying to be a Paris sidewalk cafe. A man is clinging to the curlicued iron fence around one of the trees in front of the place, his face a paler green than the leaves above his head. I smell vomit, sour and pungent. I watch where I step as I try to make my way through the crowd.

One of the policemen is holding a shopping bag and trying to make the crowd back away. The bottom of the shopping bag looks wet. Another one is telling the people over and over that there is nothing here for them to see, but they know better.

A third stands with pad in hand, interviewing a waiter. The waiter looks young and frightened. He keeps saying, "I didn't know, I had no idea, she came in and ordered a Caesar salad and a cup of tea, then she paid the bill and started to go. I didn't even notice she'd left that bag under the table until that man grabbed it and started to run after her." He points to the man embracing the iron girdle of the tree. "I didn't know a thing."

The girl is in the fourth policeman's custody. I think she must be sixteen, although she could he older and small for her age. Her face is flat, vacant.

What does she see? The policeman helps; her into the back of his squad car and slams the door. "Said she couldn't face it, going to a clinic, having it recorded like a decent woman. Bitch," I hear him mutter. "Murderer."

As I walk past, quickening my step as much as I can without beginning to ran, I hear the waiter's fluting voice say, "I don't think it was dead when she got here."

A man answers the door when I ring the bell at my last stop. "Frances Hughes?" I ask nervously. Has a prankster cal led the Woman's Center, giving a man's name that sounds like a woman's? Oralee says it's happened before. Sometimes a prank call only leads to a wild goose chase, but sometimes when the runner arrives they're waiting for her. Trudy had her wrist broken and they destroyed all the samples she'd collected so far. It was just like those stories about Japanese soldiers lost for years on small islands in the Pacific, still fighting a war that was over decades ago.

The man smiles at me. "No, I'm her husband," he says. "Won't you come in?"

Frances Hughes is waiting for me in the living room. She is one of those women whose face reflects years of breeding and who looks as if she were born to preside over a fine china tea service on a silver tray. If I drink one more cup of tea I think I'll die, but I accept the cup she passes to me because she needs to do this.

"We can't thank you enough," her husband says as he sits down in the Queen Anne armchair across from mine. Frances sits on the sofa, secure behind a castle wall of cups and saucers, sliced lemons and sugar cubes and lacy silver tongs. "I wanted to do it, but Frances insisted we call you."

"You know you couldn't do it, George," says Frances. "Remember how hard it was for you in the clinic, and after?"

"I could do it," he insists stubbornly.

"But you don't have to," she tells him softly. "Spare yourself, for me." She reaches over to stroke his hand. There is an old love between them and I feel it flow in waves of strength from her to him.

I leave their building still carrying just three brown envelopes. They don't want me to mail them any cash, like the others; they only want me to dose Frances' personal account and transfer the funds into George's.

I also have a check in my wallet from Mr. George Hughes made out to the Woman's Center. He gave it to me when I was leaving the apartment, while I set my purse aside on a miniature bookcase and rebuttoned my jacket. He said, "We were very wrong." I didn't know what he meant. Then, just as I was picking up my purse, my eye lit on the title of one of the volumes in that bookcase.

"No Remorse?"

It is the book that changed things for good, for ill. You can still find it for sale all over. My aunt Lucille gave a copy to my mother. My mother has not spoken to her since. They study it in schools with the same awe they give to Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mein Kampf. Some say, "It stopped the attacks, the bombings, it saved lives." Others say, "It didn't stop the deaths. So what if they're forced to suffer? It still sanctioned murder." Some reply, "It threw those damned extremists a sop, it truly freed women." And others yet say, "It sold out our true freedom for a false peace, it made us terror's slaves." I say nothing about it at all. All I know is what it did to me.

I looked at Frances' husband and I wanted to believe that the book had come there by accident, left behind by a caller who was now no longer welcome under that roof. But when he looked away from me and his face turned red, I knew the truth. I took the check. "You go to hell," I told him, the same way Vicky's mother said it to me.

I will not use Frances Hughes' password and sample to steal: I could, but I won't. I will not betray as I hope not to be betrayed. But George Hughes doesn't know that. Let him call ahead to his bank, change the password. Let him be the one to come down and face the truth of what he's helped to bring about, this dear-won, bloodyminded peace. Let him twist in the wind.

There is almost no line worth mentioning at the bank. It is a small branch office with only one live employee to handle all transactions past a certain level of complexity. All others can be taken care of through the ATMs. There is only one ATM here. As I said, this is a small branch.

I prefer small banks. Larger ones sometimes have live employees on duty whose only job is to make sure that no one uses the ATMs to perform transactions for a third party. That would be cheating.

I stand behind a man who stands behind a woman. She looks as if she is at least fifty years old, but when it is her turn she does not take one of the sampler sheets from the dispenser. Instead she opens her purse and takes out a cold pack like mine, a little smaller. Her hands are shaking as she extracts the sheet, inserts it, and types in the password.

The child is no more than nine months old. It can coo and gurgle. It can paw at the screen with its plump, brown hands. "Hi, sugar," the woman says, her voice trembling. "It's Nana, darlin', hi. It's your nana. Your mama couldn't come here today; she sick. She'll come see you soon, I promise. I love you, baby. I love --"

The screen is dark. A line of shining letters politely requests that the woman go on with her transaction. She stares at the screen, tight-lipped, and goes on.

Bills drop one after another into the tray. She scoops them out without even bothering to look down, crams them into her purse, and walks out, seeing nothing but the door.

The man ahead of me dashes a sampler sheet over his thumb, inserts it, and does his business. He looks young in his twenties. He is handsome. The girls must have a hard time resisting him, especially if he knows how to turn on the charm.

He may have the ability to make them think he is failing in love with them, the passion of novels, spontaneous, intense, rapture by accident.

Accidents happen. Accidents can change your life, but only if you let them.

While he is waiting for the ATM to process his transaction, he turns his head so that I can see his profile. He looks like a comic book hero, steadfast and noble, loyal and true. If there were an accident, he would accompany her to the clinic. He would hold her hand and stay with her for as long as the doctors allowed. And then it would all be over for him and he could go home, go about his business. No one would insist on making sure he stayed sorry for what was done.

There is no picture on the screen for him.

I am next. I do the other transactions first. Maris has a little three-year-old boy, like the one I saw on the bus. He can talk quite well for his age. He holds up a blue teddy bear to the screen. "T'ank you, Mommy," he says. "I name him Tadda-boy. Give Mommy a big kiss, Tadda-boy." He presses the bear's snout to the glass.

The artist's little girl is still only a few months old. This is easy. I never had any trouble when Tessa was this young. I could pretend I was watching a commercial for disposable diapers on the t.v. It got harder after Tessa learned to do things, to roll over, to push herself onto hands and knees, to toddle, to talk. . .

The woman who lost her job has a one-year-old with no hair and the bright, round eyes of the blue teddy bear. I can't tell whether this is a boy or a girl, but I know he or she will be blond. Tessa is blond. She looked like a fuzzy-headed little duckling until she was almost two.

I see why Frances Hughes did not let George handle this. The child lies on its back, staring straight up with dull eyes. It must be more than a year old, judging from its size, but it makes no attempt to move, not even to rum its head. I feel sorry for Frances. Then I remember the book in their house and for a moment I am tempted to believe that there is a just God.

Of course I know better.

It's my turn. I glance over my shoulder. A line has formed behind me. Four people are waiting. They look impatient. One of them is a woman in her sixties.

She looks angry. I guess they have been standing in line long enough to notice that I am not just doing business for myself.

I leave the ATM and walk to the back of the line. As I pass the others I murmur how sorry I am for making them wait, how there was no one waiting behind me when I began my transactions. The three people who were merely impatient now smile at me. The woman in her sixties is at the end of the line. She waits until I have taken my place behind her, then she turns around and spits in my face.

"Slut!" she shouts. "Murdering bitch! You and all the rest like you, baby killers, damned whores, can't even face up to your sins! Get the hell out of --"

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave." The bank's sole live employee is standing between us. He is a big man, a tall man. I have yet to see one of these small branches where the only live worker is not built like a bodyguard. That is part of the job too.

"You should toss her out, not me!" the woman snaps. She lunges for me, swatting at me with her purse. I take a step backwards, holding the envelopes tight to my chest. I am afraid to drop them. She might get her hands on one and tear it up.

The man restrains her. "Ma'am, I don't want to have to call the police."

This works. She settles down. Bristling, she stalks out of the bank, cursing me loudly. The man looks at me but does not smile. "In the future, please limit yourself to personal transactions," he says.

"Thank you," I say, dabbing the woman's spittle from my cheek with a tissue.

It is my turn again. I want to kiss the sampler sheet before I run it across my thumb, but I know that if I do that, I will not be able to access my account. I wonder how long we will have together? Sometimes it is ten seconds, sometimes fifteen. Maybe they will give us twenty because it's Tessa's birthday. I take a deep breath and insert the sampler sheet, then enter my password.

There she is! Oh my God, there she is, my baby, my daughter, my beautiful little girl! She is smiling twirling to show off her lovely pink party dress with all the crisp ruffles. Her long blonde hair floats over her shoulders like a cloud.

"Hi, Mama!" she chirps.

"Hi, baby."My hand reaches out to caress her cheek. I have to hold it back.

Touching the screen is not allowed. It either cuts off the allotted seconds entirely, or cuts them short, or extends them for an unpredictable amount of time. Few risk the gamble. I can't; not today.

I take out the invitation and hold it up so that Tessa can see it. "Look, honey," I say. "Pandas!"

"I'm going to school tomorrow," Tessa tells me. "I'm a big girl now. I'm almost all grown up."

"Baby. . ." "My eyes are blinking so fast, so fast! Tessa becomes a sweet pink and gold blur. "Baby, I love you so much. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry for what I did, but I was so young, I couldn't -- Oh, my baby!"

And I will touch her, I will! It's all lies they tell us anyway, about how touching the screen will affect how long we may see our children, about how now we are safe to choose, about how our compromise was enough to stop the clinic bombings and the assassinations of doctors and the fear. I don't believe them! I will hold my child!

Glass, smooth and dark.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

I go with my own business left undone. The man takes a spray bottle of glass cleaner and a cloth from his desk and wipes away the prints of my hands, the image of my lips.

There is another small bank that I like on the east side. I think I'll go there.

I start to walk. It's getting late. Paula must be making all kinds of last-minute phone calls, settling the details of my party. They call it freedom.

I call it nothing.

At first I hated her, you know. I hated my own child. She was there, always there, on every CRT device I chose to use in college, in public, at home. After the procedure, the college clinic forwarded the developmental information that the central programming unit needed to establish her birthdate. The tissue was sent along too, so that they could project a genetically accurate image of my child. She wasn't there until her birthdate, but then -- !

Then there was no escaping her. Not if I wanted to use a computer, or an ATM, or even turn on any but the most antiquated model of a television set. I hated her.

I hated her the way some hate the children of rape who also live behind the glass, after. But they exult in what they've done, how they've had the last laugh, how they've cheated their assailants of the final insult. I have seen them in the banks, at the ATMs, even at work, once. Who's got the power now? they shout at the children, and they laugh until they cry. Sometimes they only cry.

I fled her. I ran away -- away from college, away from home, away from so much that had been my life before. Away from Tessa. A mandatory sentence of six years of persecution for one mistake, one accident, seemed like an eternity. She was almost the end of my future and my sanity.

And then, one day, it changed. One day I looked at her and she wasn't a punishment; she was my little girl, my Tessa with her long, silky blonde curls and her shining blue eyes and her downy cheeks that must smell like roses, like apples. One day I was tired of hating. tired of running. One day I looked at her and I felt love.

Now they're taking my baby away.

No.

I find a phone booth. "Hello, Ms. Thayer? I'm sorry, something's come up. I can't go with you to the clinic today . . . Yes, this is Linda . . . No, really, you'll be all right. No one will bother you; it's against the law. And after, you'll handle it just fine . . . Sure, you will. I did."

"Hello, Mr. Beeton? This is Linda. I don't think I'll be in tomorrow...Yes, I know you can't give me two days off with pay. That's all right."

"Hello, Paula? Linda. Listen, there's a spare key with my neighbor, Mrs. Giancarlo. Feed Squeaker . . . No, just do it, I can't talk now. And for God's sake, don't let him hide in the closet. I have to go. Good-bye."

I am walking east. I realize that I am still holding the envelopes full of all the money the women need. Singly they are small sums, but put them all together . . . I could buy a lot of pretty things for Tessa with so much money. I could afford to keep her, if I were rich as Frances Hughes.

There are no mail boxes near the river. I'm letting them all down, all of them except for Frances Hughes and her husband. I'm so sorry. Maybe I should call Oralee --? No. She's, a coward. I despise her. If I turn back to find a mailbox, I might turn back forever. Then I'll be a coward too. It's Tessa who's been so brave, so loving so alone for so long, and still she smiles for me. Tessa is the only one that matters.

I lean against the railing and see another shore. Gulls keen and dip their wings above the river. Starveling trees claw the sky. The envelopes flutter from my hands, kissing the water. No one is near. I take off my shoes to help me step over the railing. The concrete is cold through my stockings.

There she is. I see her as I have always seen her, smiling up at me through the sleek, shining surface that keeps us apart. She is giggling as she reaches out for the envelopes. Oh, greedy little girl! You can't spend all that. Now that you're six, maybe Mama will give you an allowance, just like the big girls.

After all, you're going to school tomorrow. But first, let Mama give you a kiss.

We fly into each other's arms. Oh, Tessa, your lips are so cool! Your laughter rushes against my ears. I breathe in, and you fill my heart.

Happy birthday, my darling.

THE LINCOLN TRAIN

Connie Willis

Soldiers of the G.A.R. stand alongside the tracks. They are General Dodge's soldiers, keeping the tracks maintained for the Lincoln Train. If I stand right, the edges of my bonnet are like blinders and I can't see the soldiers at all. It is a spring evening. At the house the lilacs are blooming. My mother wears a sprig pinned to her dress under her cameo. I can smell it, even in the crush of these people all waiting for the train. I can smell the lilac, and the smell of too many people crowded together, and a faint taste of cinders on the air. I want to go home but that house is not ours anymore. I smooth my black dress. On the train platform we are all in mourning.

The train will take us to St. Louis, from whence we will leave for the Oklahoma territories. They say we will walk, but I don't know how my mother will do that. She has been poorly since the winter of '62. I cheek my bag with our water and provisions.

"Julia Adelaide," my mother says, "I think we should go home."

"We've come to catch the train," I say, very sharp.

I'm Clara, my sister Julia is eleven years older than me. Julia is married and living in Tennessee. My mother blinks and touches her sprig of lilac uncertainly. If I am not sharp with her, she will keep on it.

I wait. When I was younger I used to try to school my unruly self in Christian charity. God sends us nothing we cannot bear. Now I only try to keep it from my face, try to keep my outer self disciplined. There is a feeling inside me, an anger, that I can't even speak. Something is being bent, like a bow, bending and bending and bending --

"When are we going home?" my mother says.

"Soon," I say because it is easy.

But she won't remember and in a moment she'll ask again. And again and again, through this long long train ride to St. Louis. I am trying to be a Christian daughter, and I remind myself that it is not her fault that the war turned her into an old woman, or that her mind is full of holes and everything new drains out. But it's not my fault either. I don't even try to curb my feelings and I know that they rise up to my face. The only way to be true is to be true from the inside and I am not. I am full of unchristian feelings. My mother's infirmity is her trial, and it is also mine.

I wish I were someone else.

The train comes down the track, chuffing, coming slow. It is an old, badly used thing, but I can see that once it was a model of chaste and beautiful workmanship. Under the dust it is a dark claret in color. It is said that the engine was built to be used by President Lincoln, but since the assassination attempt he is too infirm to travel. People begin to push to the edge of the platform, hauling their bags and worldly goods. I don't know how I will get our valise on. If Zeke could have come I could have at least insured that it was loaded on, but the Negroes are free now and they are not to help. The notice said no family Negroes could come to the station, although I see their faces here and there through the crowd.

The train stops outside the station to take on water.

"Is it your father?" my mother says diffidently. "Do you see him on the train ?"

"No, Mother," I say. "We are taking the train."

"Are we going to see your father?" she asks.

It doesn't matter what I say to her, she'll forget it in a few minutes, but I cannot say yes to her. I cannot say that we will see my father even to give her a few moments of joy.

"Are we going to see your father?" she asks again.

"No," I say.

"Where are we going?"

I have carefully explained it all to her and she cried, every time I did. People are pushing down the platform toward the train, and I am trying to decide if I should move my valise toward the front of the platform. Why are they in such a hurry to get on the train? It is taking us all away.

"Where are we going? Julia Adelaide, you will answer me this moment," my mother says, her voice too full of quaver to quite sound like her own.

"I'm Clara," I say. "We're going to St. Louis."

"St. Louis," she says. "We don't need to go to St. Louis. We can't get through the lines, Julia, and I . . . I am quite indisposed. Let's go back home now, this is foolish."

We cannot go back home. General Dodge has made it clear that if we did not show up at the train platform this morning and get our names checked off the list, he would arrest every man in town, and then he would shoot every tenth man. The town knows to believe him, General Dodge was put in charge of the trains into Washington, and he did the same thing then. He arrested men and held them and every time the train was fired upon he hanged a man.

There is a shout and I can only see the crowd moving like a wave, pouring off the edge of the platform. Everyone is afraid there will not be room. I grab the valise and I grab my mother's arm and pull them both. The valise is so heavy that my fingers hurt, and the weight of our water and food is heavy on my arm. My mother is small and when I put her in bed at night she is all tiny like a child, but now she refuses to move, pulling against me and opening her mouth wide, her mouth pink inside and wet and open in a wail I can just barely hear over the shouting crowd. I don't know if I should let go of the valise to pull her, or for a moment I think of letting go of her, letting someone else get her on the train and finding her later.

A man in the crowd shoves her hard from behind. His face is twisted in wrath. What is he so angry at? My mother falls into me, and the crowd pushes us. I am trying to hold on to the valise, but my gloves are slippery, and I can only hold with my right hand, with my left I am trying to hold up my mother. The crowd is pushing all around us, trying to push us toward the edge of the platform.

The train toots as if it were moving. There is shouting all around us. My mother is fallen against me, her face pressed against my bosom, turned up toward me. She is so frightened. Her face is pressed against me in improper intimacy, as if she were my child. My mother as my child. I am filled with revulsion and horror. The pressure against us begins to lessen. I still have a hold of the valise. We'll be all right. Let the others push around, I'll wait and get the valise on somehow. They won't leave us travel without anything.

My mother's eyes close. Her wrinkled face looks up, the skin under her eyes making little pouches, as if it were a second blind eyelid. Everything is so grotesque. I am having a spell. I wish I could be somewhere where I could get away and close the windows. I have had these spells since they told us that my father was dead, where everything is full of horror and strangeness.

The person behind me is crowding into my back and I want to tell them to give way, but I cannot. People around us are crying out. I cannot see anything but the people pushed against me. People are still pushing, but now they are not pushing toward the side of the platform but toward the front, where the train will be when we are allowed to board.

Wait, I call out but there's no way for me to tell if I've really called out or not. I can't hear anything until the train whistles. The train has moved? They brought the train into the station? I can't tell, not without letting go of my mother and the valise. My mother is being pulled down into this mass. I feel her sliding against me. Her eyes are closed. She is a huge doll, limp in my arms. She is not even trying to hold herself up. She has given up to this moment.

I can't hold on to my mother and the valise. So I let go of the valise.

Oh merciful god.

I do not know how I will get through this moment.

The crowd around me is a thing that presses me and pushes me up, pulls me down. I cannot breathe for the pressure. I see specks in front of my eyes, white sparks, too bright, like metal and like light. My feet aren't under me. I am buoyed by the crowd and my feet are behind me, I am unable to stand, unable to fall. I think my mother is against me, but I can't tell, and in this mass I don't know how she can breathe.

I think I am going to die.

All the noise around me does not seem like noise anymore. It is something else, some element, like water or something, surrounding me and overpowering me.

It is like that for a long time, until finally I have my feet under me, and I'm leaning against people. I feel myself sink, but I can't stop myself. The platform is solid. My whole body feels bruised and roughly used.

My mother is not with me. My mother is a bundle of black on the ground, and I crawl to her. I wish I could say that as I crawl to her I feel concern for her condition, but at this moment I am no more than base animal nature and I crawl to her because she is mine and there is nothing else in the world I can identify as mine. Her skirt is tucked up so that her ankles and calves are showing. Her face is black. At first I think it something about her clothes, but it is her face, so full of blood that it is black.

People are still getting on the train, but there are people on the platform around us, left behind. And other things. A surprising number of shoes, all badly used. Wraps, too. Bags. Bundles and people.

I try raising her arms above her head, to force breath into her lungs. Her arms are thin, but they don't go the way I want them to. I read in the newspaper that when President Lincoln was shot, he stopped breathing, and his personal physician started him breathing again. But maybe the newspaper was wrong, or maybe it is more complicated than I understand, or maybe it doesn't always work. She doesn't breathe.

I sit on the platform and try to think of what to do next. My head is empty of useful thoughts. Empty of prayers.

"Ma'am?"

It's a soldier of the G.A.R.

"Yes sir?" I say. It is difficult to look up at him, to look up into the sun.

He hunkers down but does not touch her. At least he doesn't touch her. "Do you have anyone staying behind?"

Like cousins or something? Someone who is not "recalcitrant" in their handling of their Negroes? "Not in town," I say.

"Did she worship?" he asks, in his northern way.

"Yes sir," I say, "she did. She was a Methodist, and you should contact the preacher. The Reverend Robert Ewald, sir."

"I'll see to it, ma'am. Now you'll have to get on the train."

"And leave her?" I say.

"Yes ma'am, the train will be leaving. I'm sorry ma'am."

"But I can't," I say.

He takes my elbow and helps me stand. And I let him.

"We are not really recalcitrant," I say. "Where were Zeke and Rachel supposed to go? Were we supposed to throw them out?"

He helps me climb onto the train. People stare at me as I get on, and I realize I must be all in disarray. I stand under all their gazes, trying to get my bonnet on straight and smoothing my dress. I do not know what to do with my eyes or hands.

There are no seats. Will I have to stand until St. Louis? I grab a seat back to hold myself up. It is suddenly warm and everything is distant and I think I am about to faint. My stomach turns. I breathe through my mouth, not even sure that I am holding on to the seat back.

But I don't fall, thank Jesus.

"It's not Lincoln," someone is saying a man's voice, rich and baritone, and I fasten on the words as a lifeline, drawing myself back to the train car, to the world. "It's Seward. Lincoln no longer has the capacity to govern."

The train smells of bodies and warm sweaty wool. It is a smell that threatens to undo me, so I must concentrate on breathing through my mouth. I breathe in little pants, like a dog. The heat lies against my skin. It is airless.

"Of course Lincoln can no longer govern, but that damned actor made him a saint when he shot him," says a second voice, "And now no one dare oppose him. It doesn't matter if his policies make sense or not."

"You're wrong," says the first. "Seward is governing through him, Lincoln is an imbecile. He can't govern, look at the way he handled the war."

The second snorts. "He won."

"No," says the first, "we lost, there is a difference, sir. We lost even though the! north never could find a competent general." I know the type of the first one. He's the one who thinks he is brilliant, who always knew what President Davis should have done. If they are looking for a recalcitrant southerner, they have found one.

"Grant was competent. Just not brilliant. Any military man who is not Alexander t he Great is going to look inadequate in comparison with General Lee."

"Grant was a drinker," the first one says. "It was his subordinates. They'd been through years of war. They knew what to do."

It is so hot on the train. I wonder how long until the train leaves.

I wonder if the Reverend will write my sister in Tennessee and tell her about our mother. I wish the train were going east toward Tennessee instead of north and west toward St. Louis.

My valise. All I have. It is on the platform. I turn and go to the door. It is closed and I try the handle, but it is too stiff for me. I look around for help.

"It's locked," says a woman in gray. She doesn't look unkind.

"My things, I left them on the platform," I say.

"Oh, honey," she says, "they aren't going to let you back out there. They don't let anyone off the train."

I look out the window but I can't see the valise. I can see some of the soldiers, so I beat on the window. One of them glances up at me, frowning, but then he ignores me.

The train blows that it is going to leave, and I beat harder on the glass. If I could shatter that glass. They don't understand, they would help me if they understood. The train lurches and I stagger. It is out there, somewhere, on that platform. Clothes for my mother and me, blankets, things we will need. Things I will need.

The train pulls out of the station and I feel so terrible I sit down on the floor in all the dirt from people's feet and sob.

The train creeps slowly at first, but then picks up speed. The clack-clack clack-clack rocks me. It is improper, but I allow it to rock me. I am in others' hands now and there is nothing to do but be patient. I am good at that. So it has been all my life. I have tried to be dutiful, but something in me has not bent right, and I have never been able to maintain a Christian frame of mind, but like a chicken in a yard, I have always kept my eyes on the small things. I have tended to what was in front of me, first the house, then my mother. When we could not get sugar, I learned to cook with molasses and honey. Now I sit and let my mind go empty and let the train rock me.

"Child," someone says. "Child."

The woman in gray has been trying to get my attention for awhile, but I have been sitting and letting myself be rocked.

"Child," she says again, "would you like some water?"

Yes, I realize, I would. She has a jar and she gives it to me to sip out of. "Thank you," I say. "We brought water, but we lost it in the crush on the platform."

"You have someone with you?" she asks.

"My mother," I say, and start crying again. "She is old, and there was such a press on the platform, and she fell and was trampled."

"What's your name," the woman says.

"Clara Corbett," I say.

"I'm Elizabeth Loudon," the woman says. "And you are welcome to travel with me." There is something about her, a simple pleasantness, that makes me trust her. She is a small women, with a small nose and eyes as gray as her dress. She is younger than I first thought, maybe only in her thirties? "How old are you? Do you have family?" she asks.

"I am seventeen. I have a sister, Julia. But she doesn't live in Mississippi anymore."

"Where does she live?" the woman asks.

"In Beech Bluff, near Jackson, Tennessee."

She shakes her head. "I don't know it. Is it good country?"

"I think so," I say. "In her letters it sounds like good country. But I haven't seen her for seven years." Of course no one could travel during the war. She has three children in Tennessee. My sister is twenty-eight, almost as old as this woman. It is hard to imagine.

"Were you close?" she asks.

I don't know that we were close. But she is my sister. She is all I have, now. I hope that the Reverend will write her about my mother, but I don't know that he knows where she is. I will have to write her. She will think I should have taken better care.

"Are you traveling alone?"

"My companion is a few seats farther in front. He and I could not find seats together."

Her companion is a man? Not her husband, maybe her brother? But she would say her brother if that's who she meant. A woman traveling with a man. An adventuress, I think. There are stories of women traveling, hoping to find unattached girls like myself. They befriend the young girls and then deliver them to the brothels of New Orleans.

For a moment Elizabeth takes on a sinister cast. But this is a train full of recalcitrant southerners, there is no opportunity to kidnap anyone. Elizabeth is like me, a woman who has lost her home.

It takes the rest of the day and a night to get to St. Louis, and Elizabeth and I talk. It's as if we talk in ciphers, instead of talking about home we talk about gardening, and I can see the garden at home, lazy with bees. She is a quilter. I don't quilt, but I used to do petit pointe, so we can talk sewing and about how hard it has been to get colors. And we talk about mending and making do, we have all been making do for so long.

When it gets dark, since I have no seat, I stay where I am sitting by the door of the train. I am so tired, but in the darkness all I can think of is my mother's face in the crowd and her hopeless open mouth. I don't want to think of my mother, but I am in a delirium of fatigue, surrounded by the dark and the rumble of the train and the distant murmur of voices. I sleep sitting by the door of the train, fitful and rocked. I have dreams like fever dreams. In my dream I am in a strange house, but it is supposed to be my own house, but nothing is where it should be, and I begin to believe that I have actually entered a stranger's house, and that they'll return and find me here. When I wake up and go back to sleep, I am back in this strange house, looking through things.

I wake before dawn, only a little rested. My shoulders and hips and back all ache from the way I am leaning but I have no energy to get up. I have no energy to do anything but endure. Elizabeth nods, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep, but neither of us speak.

Finally the train slows. We come in through a town, but the town seems to go on and on. It must be St. Louis. We stop and sit. The sun comes up and heats the car like an oven. There is no movement of the air. There are so many buildings in St. Louis, and so many of them are tall, two stories, that I wonder if they cut off the wind and that is why it's so still. But finally the train lurches and we crawl into the station.

I am one of the first off the train by virtue of my position near the door. A soldier unlocks it and shouts for all of us to disembark, but he need not have bothered for there is a rush. I am borne ahead at its beginning but I can stop at the back of the platform. I am afraid that I have lost Elizabeth, but I see her in the crowd. She is on the arm of a younger man in a bowler. There is something about his air that marks him as different -- he is sprightly and apparently fresh even after the long ride.

I almost let them pass, but the prospect of being alone makes me reach out and touch her shoulder.

"There you are," she says.

We join a queue of people waiting to use a trench. The smell is appalling ammonia acrid and eye-watering. There is a wall to separate the men from the women, but the women are all together. I crouch, trying not to notice anyone and trying to keep my skirts out of the filth. It is so awful. It's worse than anything. I feel so awful.

What if my mother were here? What would I do? I think maybe it was better, maybe it was God's hand. But that is an awful thought, too.

"Child," Elizabeth says when I come out, "what's the matter?"

"It's so awful," I say. I shouldn't cry, but I just want to be home and clean. I want to go to bed and sleep.

She offers me a biscuit.

"You should save your food," I say.

"Don't worry," Elizabeth says, "We have enough."

I shouldn't accept it, but I am so hungry. And when I have a little to eat, I feel a little better.

I try to imagine what the fort will be like where we will be going. Will we have a place to sleep, or will it be barracks? Or worse yet, tents? Although after the night I spent on the train I can't imagine anything that could be worse. I imagine if I have to stay awhile in a tent then I'll make the best of it.

"I think this being in limbo is perhaps worse than anything we can expect at the end," I say to Elizabeth. She smiles.

She introduces her companion, Michael. He is enough like her to be her brother, but I don't think that they are. I am resolved not to ask, if they want to tell me they can.

We are standing together, not saying anything, when there is some commotion farther up the platform. It is a woman, her black dress is like smoke. She is running down the platform, coming toward us. There are all of these people and yet it is as if there is no obstacle for her. "NO NO NO NO, DON'T TOUCH ME! FILTHY HANDS! DON'T LET THEM TOUCH YOU! DON'T GET ON THE TRAINS!"

People are getting out of her way. Where are the soldiers? The fabric of her dress is so threadbare it is rotten and torn at the seams. Her skirt is greasy black and matted and stained. Her face is so thin. "ANIMALS! THERE IS NOTHING OUT THERE! PEOPLE DON'T HAVE FOOD! THERE IS NOTHING THERE BUT INDIANS! THEY SENT US OUT TO SETTLE BUT THERE WAS NOTHING THERE!"

I expect she will run past me but she grabs my arm and stops and looks into my face. She has light eyes, pale eyes in her dark face. She is mad.

"WE WERE ALL STARVING, SO WE WENT TO THE FORT BUT THE FORT HAD NOTHING. YOU WILL ALL STARVE, THE WAY THEY ARE STARVING THE INDIANS! THEY WILL LET US ALL DIE! THEY DON'T CARE!" She is screaming in my face, and her spittle sprays me, warm as her breath. Her hand is all tendons and twigs, but she's so strong I can't escape.

The soldiers grab her and yank her away from me. My arm aches where she was holding it. I can't stand up.

Elizabeth pulls me upright. "Stay close to me," she says and starts to walk the other way down the platform. People are looking up following the screaming woman.

She pulls me along with her. I keep thinking of the woman's hand and wrist turned black with grime. I remember my mother's face was black when she lay on the platform. Black like something rotted.

"Here," Elizabeth says at an old door, painted green but now weathered. The door opens and we pass inside.

"What?" I say. My eyes are accustomed to the morning brightness and I can't see.

"Her name is Clara," Elizabeth says. "She has people in Tennessee."

"Come with me," says another woman. She sounds older. "Step this way. Where are her things?"

I am being kidnapped. Oh merciful God, I'll die. I let out a moan.

"Her things were lost, her mother was killed in a crush on the platform."

The woman in the dark clucks sympathetically. "Poor dear. Does Michael have his passenger yet?"

"In a moment," Elizabeth says. "We were lucky for the commotion."

I am beginning to be able to see. It is a storage room, full of abandoned things. The woman holding my arm is older. There are some broken chairs and a stool. She sits me in the chair. Is Elizabeth some kind of adventuress?

"Who are you?" I ask.

"We are friends," Elizabeth says. "We will help you get to your sister."

I don:t believe them. I will end up in New Orleans. Elizabeth is some kind of adventuress.

After a moment the door opens and this time it is Michael with a young man. "This is Andrew," he says.

A man? What do they want with a man? That is what stops me from saying, "Run!" Andrew is blinded by the change in light, and I can see the astonishment working on his face, the way it must be working on mine. "What is this?" he asks.

"You are with Friends," Michael says, and maybe he has said it differently than Elizabeth, or maybe it is just that this time I have had the wit to hear it.

"Quakers" Andrew says. "Abolitionists?"

Michael smiles, I can see his teeth white in the darkness. "Just Friends," he says.

Abolitionists. Crazy people who steal slaves to set them free. Have they come to kidnap us? We are recalcitrant southerners, I have never heard of Quakers seeking revenge, but everyone knows the Abolitionists are crazy and they are liable to do anything.

"We'll have to wait here until they begin to move people out, it will be evening before we can leave," says the older woman.

I am so frightened, I just want to be home. Maybe I should try to break free and run out to the platform, there are northern soldiers out there. Would they protect me? And then what, go to a fort in Oklahoma?

The older woman asks Michael how they could get past the guards so early and he tells her about the madwoman. A "refugee" he calls her.

"They'll just take her back," Elizabeth says, sighing.

Take her back, do they mean that she really came from Oklahoma? They talk about how bad it will be this winter. Michael says there are Wisconsin Indians re-settled down there, but they've got no food, and they've been starving on government handouts for a couple of years. Now there will be more people. They're not prepared for winter.

There can't have been much handout during the war. It was hard enough to feed the armies.

They explain to Andrew and to me that we will sneak out of the train station this evening, after dark. We will spend a day with a Quaker family in St. Louis, and then they will send us on to the next family. And so we will be passed hand to hand, like a bucket in a brigade, until we get to our families.

They call it the underground railroad.

But we are slave owners.

"Wrong is wrong," says Elizabeth. "Some of us can't stand and watch people starve."

"But only two out of the whole train," Andrew says.

Michael sighs.

The old woman nods. "It isn't right."

Elizabeth picked me because my mother died. If my mother had not died, I would be out there, on my way to starve with the rest of them.

I can't help it but I start to cry. I should not profit from my mother's death. I should have kept her safe.

"Hush, now," says Elizabeth. "Hush, you'll be okay."

"It's not right," I whisper. I'm trying not to be loud, we mustn't be discovered.

"What, child?"

"You shouldn't have picked me," I say. But I am crying so hard I don't think they can understand me. Elizabeth strokes my hair and wipes my face. It may be the last time someone will do these things for me. My sister has three children of her own, and she won't need another child. I'll have to work hard to make up my keep.

There are blankets there and we lie down on the hard floor, all except Michael, who sits in a chair and sleeps. I sleep this time with fewer dreams. But when I wake up, although I can't remember what they were, I have the feeling that I have been dreaming restless dreams.

The stars are bright when we finally creep out of the station. A night full of stars. The stars will be the same in Tennessee. The platform is empty, the train and the people are gone. The Lincoln Train has gone back south while we slept, to take more people out of Mississippi.

"Will you come back and save more people?" I ask Elizabeth.

The stars are a banner behind her quiet head. "We will save what we can," she says.

It isn't fair that I was picked. "I want to help," I tell her.

She is silent for a moment. "We only work with our own," she says. There is something in her voice that has not been there before. A sharpness.

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"There are no slavers in our ranks," she says and her voice is cold.

I feel as if I have had a fever; tired, but clear of mind. I have never walked so far and not walked beyond a town. The streets of St. Louis are empty. There are few lights. Far off a woman is singing, and her voice is clear and carries easily in the night. A beautiful voice.

"Elizabeth," Michael says, "she is just a girl."

"She needs to know," Elizabeth says.

"Why did you save me then?" I ask.

"One does not fight evil with evil," Elizabeth says.

"I'm not evil!" I say.

But no one answers.

GONE

John Crowley

Elmers again.

You waited in a sort of exasperated amusement for yours, thinking that if you had been missed last time yours would likely be among the households selected this time, though how that process of selection went on no one knew, you only knew that a new capsule had been detected entering the atmosphere (caught by one of the thousand spy satellites and listening-and-peering devices that had been trained on the big Mother Ship in orbit around the moon for the past year) and though the capsule had apparently burned up in the atmosphere, that’s just what had happened the time before, and then elmers everywhere. You could hope that you’d be skipped or passed over—there were people who had been skipped last time when all around them neighbors and friends had been visited or afflicted, and who would appear now and then and be interviewed on the news, though having nothing, after all, to say, it was the rest of us who had the stories—but in any case you started looking out the windows, down the drive, listening for the doorbell to ring in the middle of the day.

Pat Poynton didn’t need to look out the window of the kid’s bedroom where she was changing the beds, the only window from which the front door could be seen, when her doorbell rang in the middle of the day. She could almost hear, subliminally, every second doorbell on Ponader Drive, every second doorbell in South Bend go off just at that moment. She thought: Here’s mine.

They had come to be called elmers (or Elmers) all over this country at least after David Brinkley had told a story on a talk show about how when they built the World’s Fair in New York in 1939, it was thought that people out in the country, people in places like Dubuque and Rapid City and South Bend, wouldn’t think of making a trip east and paying five dollars to see all the wonders, that maybe the great show wasn’t for the likes of them; and so the fair’s promoters hired a bunch of people, ordinary-looking men with ordinary clothes wearing ordinary glasses and bow ties, to fan out to places like Vincennes and Austin and Brattleboro and just talk it up. Pretend to be ordinary folks who had been to the fair, and hadn’t been high-hatted, no sirree, had a wonderful time, the wife too, and b’gosh had Seen the Future and could tell you the sight was worth the five dollars they were asking, which wasn’t so much since it included tickets to all the shows and lunch. And all these men, whatever their real names were, were all called Elmer by the promoters who sent them out.

Pat wondered what would happen if she just didn’t open the door. Would it eventually go away? It surely wouldn’t push its way in, mild and blobby as it was (from the upstairs window she could see that it was the same as the last ones) and that made her wonder how after all they had all got inside—as far as she knew there weren’t many who had failed to get at least a hearing. Some chemical hypnotic maybe that they projected, calming fear. What Pat felt standing at the top of the stair and listening to the doorbell pressed again (timidly, she thought, tentatively, hopefully) was amused exasperation, just like everyone else’s: a sort of oh-Christ-no with a burble of wonderment just below it, and even expectation: for who wouldn’t be at least intrigued by the prospect of his, or her, own lawn mower, snow shoveler, hewer of wood, and drawer of water, for as long as it lasted?

“Mow your lawn?” it said when Pat opened the door. “Take out trash? Mrs. Poynton?”

Now actually in its presence, looking at it through the screen door, Pat felt most strongly a new part of the elmer feeling: a giddy revulsion she had not expected. It was so not human. It seemed to have been constructed to resemble a human being by other sorts of beings who were not human and did not understand very well what would count as human with other humans. When it spoke its mouth moved (mouth hole must move when speech is produced) but the sound seemed to come from somewhere else, or from nowhere.

“Wash your dishes? Mrs. Poynton?”

“No,” she said, as citizens had been instructed to say. “Please go away. Thank you very much.”

Of course the elmer didn’t go away, only stood bobbing slightly on the doorstep like a foolish child whose White Rose salve or Girl Scout cookies haven’t been bought.

“Thank you very much,” it said, in tones like her own. “Chop wood? Draw water?”

“Well gee,” Pat said, and, helplessly, smiled.

What everyone knew, besides the right response to give to the elmer, which everyone gave and almost no one was able to stick to, was that these weren’t the creatures or beings from the Mother Ship itself up above (so big you could see it, pinhead sized, crossing the face of the affronted moon) but some kind of creation of theirs, sent down in advance. An artifact, the official word was; some sort of protein, it was guessed; some sort of chemical process at the heart of it or head of it, maybe a DNA-based computer or something equally outlandish, but no one knew because of the way the first wave of them, flawed maybe, fell apart so quickly, sinking and melting like the snowmen they sort of resembled after a week or two of mowing lawns and washing dishes and pestering people with their Good Will Ticket, shriveling into a sort of dry flocked matter and then into nearly nothing at all, like cotton candy in the mouth.

“Good Will Ticket?” said the elmer at Pat Poynton’s door, holding out to her a tablet of something not paper, on which was written or printed or anyway somehow indited a little message. Pat didn’t read it, didn’t need to, you had the message memorized by the time you opened your door to a second-wave elmer like Pat’s. Sometimes lying in bed in the morning in the bad hour before the kids had to be got up for school Pat would repeat like a prayer the little message that everybody in the world it seemed was going to be presented with sooner or later:

GOOD WILL

YOU MARK BELOW

ALL ALL RIGHT WITH LOVE AFTERWARDS

WHY NOT SAY YES

YES

And no space for No, which meant—if it was a sort of vote (and experts and officials, though how such a thing could have been determined Pat didn’t know, were guessing that’s what it was), a vote to allow or to accept the arrival or descent of the Mother Ship and its unimaginable occupants or passengers—that you could only refuse to take it from the elmer: shaking your head firmly and saying No clearly but politely, because even taking a Good Will Ticket might be the equivalent of a Yes, and though what it would be a Yes to exactly no one knew, there was at least a ground swell of opinion in the think tanks that it meant acceding to or at least not resisting World Domination.

You weren’t, however, supposed to shoot your elmer. In places like Idaho and Siberia that’s what they were doing, you heard, though a bullet or two didn’t seem to make any difference to them, they went on pierced with holes like characters in the Dick Tracy comics of long ago, smiling shyly in at your windows, Rake your leaves? Yard work? Pat Poynton was sure that Lloyd would not hesitate to shoot, would be pretty glad that at last something living or at least moving and a certified threat to freedom had at last got before him to be aimed at. In the hall-table drawer Pat still had Lloyd’s 9mm Glock pistol; he had let her know he wanted to come get it but he wasn’t getting back into this house, she’d use it on him herself if he got close enough.

Not really, no, she wouldn’t. And yet.

“Wash windows?” the elmer now said.

“Windows,” Pat said, feeling a little of the foolish self-consciousness people feel who are inveigled by comedians or MCs into having conversations with puppets, wary in the same way too, the joke very likely being on her. “You do windows?”

It only bobbed before her like a big water toy.

“Okay,” she said, and her heart filled. “Okay come on in.”

Amazing how graceful it really was; it seemed to navigate through the house and the furniture as though it were negatively charged to them, the way it drew close to the stove or the refrigerator and then was repelled gently away, avoiding collision. It seemed to be able to compact or compress itself too, make itself smaller in small spaces, grow again to full size in larger spaces.

Pat sat down on the couch in the family room, and watched. It just wasn’t possible to do anything else but watch. Watch it take the handle of a bucket; watch it open the tops of bottles of cleansers, and seem to inhale their odors to identify them; take up the squeegee and cloth she found for it. The world, the universe, Pat thought (it was the thought almost everyone thought who was just then taking a slow seat on his or her davenport in his or her family room or in his or her vegetable garden or junkyard or wherever and watching a second-wave elmer get its bearings and get down to work): how big the world, the universe is, how strange; how lucky I am to have learned it, to be here now seeing this.

So the world’s work, its odd jobs anyway, were getting done as the humans who usually did them sat and watched, all sharing the same feelings of gratitude and glee, and not only because of the chores being done: it was that wonder, that awe, a universal neap tide of common feeling such as had never been experienced before, not by this species, not anyway since the days on the old old veldt when every member of it could share the same joke, the same dawn, the same amazement. Pat Poynton, watching hers, didn’t hear the beebeep of the school-bus horn.

Most days she started watching the wall clock and her wrist-watch alternately a good half-hour before the bus’s horn could be expected to be heard, like an anxious sleeper who continually awakes to check his alarm clock to see how close it has come to going off. Her arrangement with the driver was that he wouldn’t let her kids off before tooting. He promised. She hadn’t explained why.

But today the sounding of the horn had sunk away deeply into her backbrain, maybe three minutes gone, when Pat at last reheard it or remembered having heard and not noticed it. She leapt to her feet, an awful certainty seizing her; she was out the door as fast as her heartbeat accelerated, and was coming down the front steps just in time to see down at the end of the block the kids disappearing into and slamming the door of Lloyd’s classic Camaro (whose macho rumble Pat now realized she had also been hearing for some minutes). The cherry-red muscle car, Lloyd’s other and more beloved wife, blew exhaust from double pipes that stirred the gutter’s leaves, and leapt forward as though kicked.

She shrieked, and spun around, seeking help; there was no one in the street. Two steps at a time, maddened and still crying out, she went up the steps and into the house, tore at the pretty little Hitchcock phone table, the phone spilling in parts, the table’s legs leaving the floor, its jaw dropping, and the Glock 9mm nearly falling out: Pat caught it and was out the door with it and down the street calling out her ex-husband’s full name, coupled with imprecations and obscenities her neighbors had never heard her utter before, but the Camaro was of course out of hearing and sight by then.

Gone. Gone gone gone. The world darkened and the sidewalk tilted up toward her as though to smack her face. She was on her knees, not knowing how she had got to them, also not knowing whether she would faint or vomit.

She did neither, and after a time got to her feet. How had this gun, heavy as a hammer, got in her hand? She went back in the house and restored it to the raped little table, and bent to put the phone, which was whimpering urgently, back together.

She couldn’t call the police; he’d said—in the low soft voice he used when he wanted to sound implacable and dangerous and just barely controlled, eyes rifling threat at her—that if she got the police involved in his family he’d kill all of them. She didn’t entirely believe it, didn’t entirely believe anything he said, but he had said it. She didn’t believe the whole Christian survivalist thing he was supposedly into, thought he would not probably take them to a cabin in the woods to live off elk as he had threatened or promised, would probably get no farther than his mother’s house with them.

Please Lord let it be so.

The elmer hovered grinning in her peripheral vision like an accidental guest in a crisis as she banged from room to room, getting her coat on and taking it off again, sitting to sob at the kitchen table, searching yelling for the cordless phone, where the hell had it been put this time. She called her mother, and wept. Then, heart thudding hard, she called his. One thing you didn’t know, about elmers (Pat thought this while she waited for her mother-in-law’s long cheery phone-machine message to get over) was whether they were like cleaning ladies and handymen, and you were obliged not to show your feelings around them; or whether you were allowed to let go, as with a pet. Abstract question, since she had already.

The machine beeped, and began recording her silence. She punched the phone off without speaking.

Toward evening she got the car out at last and drove across town to Mishiwaka. Her mother-in-law’s house was unlit, and there was no car in the garage. She watched a long time, till it was near dark, and came back. There ought to have been elmers everywhere, mowing lawns, taptapping with hammers, pulling wagonloads of kids. She saw none.

Her own was where she had left it. The windows gleamed as though coated with silver film.

“What?” she asked it. “You want something to do?” The elmer bounced a little in readiness, and put out its chest—so, Pat thought, to speak—and went on smiling. “Bring back my kids,” she said. “Go find them and bring them back.”

It seemed to hesitate, bobbing between setting off on the job it had been given and turning back to refuse or maybe to await further explanation; it showed Pat its three-fingered cartoon hands, fat and formless. You knew, about elmers, that they would not take vengeance for you, or right wrongs. People had asked, of course they had. People wanted angels, avenging angels; believed they deserved them. Pat too: she knew now that she wanted hers, wanted it right now.

She stared it down for a time, resentful; then she said forget it, sorry, just a joke sort of; there’s nothing really to do, just forget it, nothing more to do. She went past it, stepping first to one side as it did too and then to the other side; when she got by she went into the bathroom and turned on the water in the sink full force, and after a moment did finally throw up, a wrenching heave that produced nothing but pale sputum.

Toward midnight she took a couple of pills and turned on the TV.

What she saw immediately was two spread-eagled sky divers circling each other in the middle of the air, their orange suits rippling sharply in the wind of their descent. They drifted closer together, put gloved hands on each other’s shoulders. Earth lay far below them, like a map. The announcer said it wasn’t known just what happened, or what grievances they had, and at that moment one clouted the other in the face. Then he was grabbed by the other. Then the first grabbed the second. Then they flipped over in the air, each with an arm around the other’s neck in love or rage, their other arms arm wrestling in the air, or dancing, each keeping the other from releasing his chute. The announcer said thousands on the ground watched in horror, and indeed now Pat heard them, an awful moan or shriek from a thousand people, a noise that sounded just like awed satisfaction, as the two sky divers—locked, the announcer said, in deadly combat—shot toward the ground. The helicopter camera lost them and the ground camera picked them up, like one being, four legs thrashing; it followed them almost to the ground, when people rose up suddenly before the lens and cut off the view: but the crowd screamed, and someone right next to the camera said What the hell.

Pat Poynton had already seen these moments, seen them a couple of times. They had broken into the soaps with them. She pressed the remote. Demonic black men wearing outsize clothing and black glasses threatened her, moving to a driving beat and stabbing their forefingers at her. She pressed again. Police on a city street, her own city she learned, drew a blanket over someone shot. The dark stain on the littered street. Pat thought of Lloyd. She thought she glimpsed an elmer on an errand far off down the street, bobbing around a corner.

Press again.

That soothing channel where Pat often watched press conferences or speeches, awaking sometimes from half-sleep to find the meeting over or a new one begun, the important people having left or not yet arrived, the backs of milling reporters and government people who talked together in low voices. Just now a senator with white hair and a face of exquisite sadness was speaking on the Senate floor. “I apologize to the gentleman,” he said. “I wish to withdraw the word snotty. I should not have said it. What I meant by that word was: arrogant, unfeeling, self-regarding; supercilious; meanly relishing the discomfiture of your opponents and those hurt by your success. But I should not have said snotty. I withdraw snotty.”

She pressed again, and the two sky divers again fell toward earth.

What’s wrong with us? Pat Poynton thought.

She stood, black instrument in her hand, a wave of nausea seizing her again. What’s wrong with us? She felt as though she were drowning in a tide of cold mud, unstoppable; she wanted not to be here any longer, here amid this. She knew she did not, hadn’t ever, truly belonged here at all. Her being here was some kind of dreadful sickening mistake.

“Good Will Ticket?”

She turned to face the great thing, gray now in the TV’s light. It held out the little plate or tablet to her. All all right with love afterwards. There was no reason at all in the world not to.

“All right,” she said. “All right.”

It brought the ticket closer, held it up. It now seemed to be not something it carried but a part of its flesh. She pressed her thumb against the square beside the YES. The little tablet yielded slightly to her pressure, like one of those nifty buttons on new appliances that feel, themselves, like flesh to press. Her vote registered, maybe.

The elmer didn’t alter, or express satisfaction or gratitude, or express anything except the meaningless delight it had been expressing, if that’s the word, from the start. Pat sat again on the couch, and turned off the television. She pulled the afghan (his mother had made it) from the back of the couch and wrapped herself in it. She felt the calm euphoria of having done something irrevocable, though what exactly she had done she didn’t know. She slept there a while, the pills having grown importunate in her bloodstream at last; lay in the constant streetlight that tiger-striped the room, watched over by the unstilled elmer till gray dawn broke.

In her choice, in the suddenness of it, what could almost be described as the insouciance of it if it had not been experienced as so urgent, Pat Poynton was not unique or even unusual. Worldwide, polls showed, voting was running high against life on earth as we know it, and in favor of whatever it was that your YES was said to, about which opinions differed. The alecks of TV smart and otherwise detailed the rising numbers, and an agreement seemed to have been reached among them all, an agreement shared in by government officials and the writers of newspaper editorials, to describe this craven unwillingness to resist as a sign of decay, social sickness, repellently nonhuman behavior: the news-people reported the trend toward mute surrender and knuckling under with the same faces they used for the relaying of stories about women who drowned their children or men who shot their wives to please their lovers, or of snipers in faraway places who brought down old women out gathering firewood: and yet what was actually funny to see (funny to Pat and those like her who had already felt the motion of the soul, the bone-weariness too, that made the choice so obvious) was that in their smooth tanned faces was another look never before seen there, seen before only on the faces of the rest of us, in our own faces: a look for which Pat Poynton anyway had no name but knew very well, a kind of stricken longing: like, she thought, the bewildered look you see in kids’ faces when they come to you for help.

It was true that a certain disruption of the world’s work was becoming evident, a noticeable trend toward giving up, leaving the wheel, dropping the ball. People spent less time getting to the job, more time looking upward. But just as many now felt themselves more able to buckle down, by that principle according to which you get to work and clean your house before the cleaning lady comes. The elmers had been sent, surely, to demonstrate that peace and cooperation were better than fighting and selfishness and letting the chores pile up for others to do.

For soon they were gone again. Pat Poynton’s began to grow a little listless almost as soon as she had signed or marked or accepted her Good Will Ticket, and by evening next day, though it had by then completed a list of jobs Pat had long since compiled but in her heart had never believed she would get around to, it had slowed distinctly. It went on smiling and nodding, like an old person in the grip of dementia, even as it began dropping tools and bumping into walls, and finally Pat, unwilling to witness its dissolution and not believing she was obliged to, explained (in the somewhat overdistinct way we speak to not real bright teenage baby-sitters or newly hired help who have just arrived from elsewhere and don’t speak good English) that she had to go out and pick up a few things and would be back soon; and then she drove aimlessly out of town and up toward Michigan for a couple of hours.

Found herself standing at length on the dunes overlooking the lake, the dunes where she and Lloyd had first. But he had not been the only one; he was only the last of a series that seemed for a moment both long and sad. Chumps. Herself too, fooled bad, not once or twice either.

Far off, where the shore of the silver water curved, she could see a band of dark firs, the northern woods maybe beginning. Where he had gone or threatened to go. Lloyd had been part of a successful class-action suit against the company where he’d worked and where everybody had come down with Sick Building Syndrome, Lloyd being pissed off enough (though not ever really deeply affected as far as Pat could ever tell) to hold out with a rump group for a higher settlement, which they got, too, that was what got him the classic Camaro and the twenty acres of Michigan woods. And lots of time to think.

Bring them back, you bastard, she thought; at the same time thinking that it was her, that she should not have done what she did, or should have done what she did not do; that she loved her kids too much, or not enough.

They would bring her kids back; she had become very sure of that, fighting down every rational impulse to question it. She had voted for an inconceivable future, but she had voted for it for only one reason: it would contain—had to contain—everything she had lost. Everything she wanted. That’s what the elmers stood for.

She came back at nightfall, and found the weird deflated spill of it strung out through the hallway and (why?) halfway down the stairs to the rec room, like the aftermath of a foam fire-extinguisher accident, smelling (Pat thought, others described it differently) like buttered toast; and she called the 800 number we all had memorized.

And then nothing. There were no more of them, if you had been missed you now waited in vain for the experience that had happened to nearly everyone else, uncertain why you had been excluded but able to claim that you, at least, would not have succumbed to their blandishments; and soon after, it became apparent that there would be no more, no matter how well they would be received, because the Mother Ship or whatever exactly it was that was surely their origin also went away: not away in any trackable or pursuable direction, just away, becoming less distinct on the various tracking and spying devices, producing less data, fibrillating, becoming see-through finally and then unable to be seen. Gone. Gone gone gone.

And what then had we all acceded to, what had we betrayed ourselves and our leadership for, abandoning all our daily allegiances and our commitments so carelessly? Around the world we were asking that, the kind of question that results in those forlorn religions of the abandoned and forgotten, those who have been expecting big divine things any moment and then find out they are going to get nothing but a long, maybe a more than lifelong, wait and a blank sky overhead. If their goal had been to make us just dissatisfied, restless, unable to do anything at all but wait to see what would now become of us, then perhaps they had succeeded; but Pat Poynton was certain they had made a promise, and would keep it: the universe was not so strange, so unlikely, that such a visitation could occur and come to nothing. Like many others she lay awake looking up into the night sky (so to speak, up into the ceiling of her bedroom in her house on Ponader Drive, above or beyond which the night sky lay) and said over to herself the little text she had assented or agreed to: Good will. You mark below. All all right with love afterwards. Why not say yes?

At length she got up, and belted her robe around her; she went down the stairs (the house so quiet, it had been quiet with the kids and Lloyd asleep in their beds when she had used to get up at five and make instant coffee and wash and dress to get to work but this was quieter) and put her parka on over her robe; she went out barefoot into the backyard.

Not night any longer but a clear October dawn, so clear the sky looked faintly green, and the air perfectly still: the leaves falling nonetheless around her, letting go one by one, two by two, after hanging on till now.

God how beautiful, more beautiful somehow than it had been before she decided she didn’t belong here; maybe she had been too busy trying to belong here to notice.

All all right with love afterwards. When though did afterwards start? When?

There came to her as she stood there a strange noise, far off and high up, a noise that she thought sounded like the barking of some dog pack, or maybe the crying of children let out from school, except that it wasn’t either of those things; for a moment she let herself believe (this was the kind of mood a lot of people were understandably in) that this was it, the inrush or onrush of whatever it was that had been promised. Then out of the north a sort of smudge or spreading dark ripple came over the sky, and Pat saw that overhead a big flock of geese was passing, and the cries were theirs, though seeming too loud and coming from somewhere else or from everywhere.

Going south. A great ragged V spread out over half the sky.

“Long way,” she said aloud, envying them their flight, their escape; and thinking then no they were not escaping, not from earth, they were of earth, born and raised, would die here, were just doing their duty, calling out maybe to keep their spirits up. Of earth as she was.

She got it then, as they passed overhead, a gift somehow of their passage, though how she could never trace afterwards, only that whenever she thought of it she would think also of those geese, those cries, of encouragement or joy or whatever they were. She got it: in pressing her Good Will Ticket (she could see it in her mind, in the poor dead elmer’s hand) she had not acceded or given in to something, not capitulated or surrendered, none of us had though we thought so and even hoped so: no she had made a promise.

“Well yes,” she said, a sort of plain light going on in her backbrain, in many another too just then in many places, so many that it might have looked—to someone or something able to perceive it, someone looking down on us and our earth from far above and yet able to perceive each of us one by one—like lights coming on across a darkened land, or like the bright pinpricks that mark the growing numbers of Our Outlets on a TV map, but that were actually our brains, getting it one by one, brightening momentarily, as the edge of dawn swept westward.

They had not made a promise, she had: good will. She had said yes. And if she kept that promise it would all be all right, with love, afterwards: as right as it could be.

“Yes,” she said again, and she raised her eyes to the sky, so vacant, more vacant now than before. Not a betrayal but a promise; not a letting-go but a taking-hold. Good only for as long as we, all alone here, kept it. All all right with love afterwards.

Why had they come, why had they gone to such effort, to tell us that, when we knew it all along? Who cared that much, to come to tell us? Would they come back, ever, to see how we’d done?

She went back inside, the dew icy on her feet. For a long time she stood in the kitchen (the door unshut behind her) and then went to the phone.

He answered on the second ring. He said hello. All the unshed tears of the last weeks, of her whole life probably, rose up in one awful bolus in her throat; she wouldn’t weep though, no not yet.

“Lloyd,” she said. “Lloyd, listen. We have to talk.”

DECENCY

Robert Reed

THE VENERABLE old Hubble telescope saw it first. A silvery splash moving against the stars, the object proved enormous —larger than some worlds —and it was faster than anything human-built, still out among the comets but coming, the first touch of cold light just beginning to brake its terrific fall. "It's a light sail," astronomers announced, giddy as children, drunk by many means. "Definitely artificial. Probably automated. No crew, minimal mass. Photons move the thing, and even accounting for deceleration, it's going to make a quick flyby of the Earth."

By the time the sail crossed Saturn's orbit, a three-inch reflector cost its weight in platinum. Amateur astronomers were quitting their day jobs in order to spend nights plotting trajectories. Novice astronomers, some armed with nothing but binoculars or rifle sights, risked frostbite for the privilege of a glimpse. But it was the professionals who remained the most excited: every topflight facility in the northern hemisphere studied the object, measuring its mass, its albedo, its vibrations, and its damage —ragged mile-wide punctures scattered across its vast surface, probably stemming from collisions with interstellar comets. The sail's likely point of origin was a distant G-class sun; its voyage must have taken a thousand years, perhaps more. Astronomers tried to contact the automated pilot. Portions of the radio spectrum were cleared voluntarily for better listening. Yet nothing was heard, ever. The only sign of a pilot was a subtle, perhaps accidental, twisting of the sail, the pressure of sunlight altering its course, the anticipated flyby of the Earth becoming an impact event.

Insubstantial as a soap bubble, the sail offered little risk to people or property. Astronomers said so. Military and political people agreed with them. And despite Hollywood conventions, there was no great panic among the public. No riots. No religious upheavals. A few timid souls took vacations to New Zealand and Australia, but just as many southerners came north to watch the spectacle. There were a few ugly moments involving the susceptible and the emotionally troubled; but generally people responded with curiosity, a useful fatalism, and the gentle nervousness that comes with a storm front or a much-anticipated football game.

The world watched the impact. Some people used television, others bundled up and stepped outdoors. In the end, the entire northern sky was shrouded with the brilliant sail. In the end, as the Earth's gravity embraced it, scientists began to find structures within its thin, thin fabric. Like a spiderweb, but infinitely more complex, there were fibers and veins that led to a central region — a square mile of indecipherable machinery—and the very last images showed damaged machines, the sail's tiny heart wounded by a series of swift murderous collisions.

The impact itself was beautiful. Ghostly fires marked where the leading edge bit into the stratosphere. Without sound or fuss, the sail evaporated into a gentle rain of atomized metals. But the spiderweb structures were more durable, weathering the impact, tens of thousands of miles of material falling over three continents and as many oceans, folding and fracturing on their way down, the most massive portions able to kill sparrows and crack a few windows and roof tiles.

No planes were flying at the time, as a precaution. Few people were driving. Subsequent figures showed that human death rates had dropped for that critical hour, a worldly caution in effect; then they lifted afterward, parties and carelessness taking their inevitable toll.

The sail's central region detached itself at the end, then broke into still smaller portions. One portion crashed along the shore of Lake Superior. The Fox affiliate in Duluth sent a crew, beating the military by twenty minutes. The only witness to the historic event was a temperamental bull moose. Only when it was driven off did the crew realize that the sail wasn't an automated probe. A solitary crew member lay within a fractured diamond shell, assorted life-support equipment heaped on all sides. Despite wounds and the fiery crash, it was alive —an organism built for gravity, air, and liquid water. A trembling camera showed the world its first genuine alien sprawled out on the forest floor, a dozen jointed limbs reaching for its severed web, and some kind of mouth generating a clear, strong, and pitiful wail that was heard in a billion homes.

A horrible piercing wail.

The scream of a soul in perfect agony.

Caleb was one of the guards supplied by the U.S. Marines.

Large in a buttery way, with close-cropped hair and tiny suspicious eyes, Caleb was the kind of fellow who would resemble a guard even without his uniform or bulky side arm. His service record was flawless. Of average intellect and little creativity, nonetheless he possessed a double dose of what, for lack of a better word, could be called shrewdness.

Working the security perimeter, he helped control access to the alien. The bug, as he dubbed it, without a shred of originality. Twice in the first two days he caught unauthorized civilians attempting to slip inside —one using a false ID, the other hiding inside bales of computer paper. Late on the third day he found a fellow guard trying to smuggle out a piece of the bug's shell. "It's a chunk of diamond," was the man's pitiful defense. "Think what it's worth, Caleb. And I'll give you half… what do you say… ?"

Nothing. He saw no reason to respond, handcuffing the man — a sometime acquaintance —then walking him back toward the abrupt little city that had sprung up on the lakeshore. Double-walled tents were kept erect with pressurized air and webs of rope, each tent lit and heated, the rumble of generators and compressors making the scene appear busier than it was. Most people were asleep; it was three in the morning. A quarter moon hung overhead, the January stars like gemstones, brighter and more perfect than the battered diamond shard that rode against Caleb's hip. But the sky barely earned a glance, and despite the monumental events of the last weeks and days, the guard felt no great fortune for being where he was. His job was to deliver the criminal to his superiors, which he did, and he did it without distraction, acting with a rigorous professionalism.

The duty officer, overworked and in lousy spirits, didn't want the shard. "You take it back to the science people," he ordered. "I'll call ahead. They'll be watching for you."

Mistrust came with the job; Caleb expected nothing less from his superior.

The bug was at the center of the city, under a converted circus tent. Adjacent tents and trailers housed the scientists and their machinery. One facility was reserved for the press, but it was almost empty, what with the hour and the lack of fresh events. Overflow equipment was stored at the back of the tent, half-unpacked and waiting to be claimed by experts still coming from the ends of the world. Despite the constant drone of moving air, Caleb could hear the bug now and again. A wail, a whimper. Then another, deeper wail. Just for a moment, the sound caused him to turn his head, listening now, feeling something that he couldn't name, something without a clear source. An emotion, liquid and intense, made him pay close attention. But then the bug fell silent, or at least it was quieter than the man-made wind, and the guard was left feeling empty, a little cold, confused and secretly embarrassed.

He was supposed to meet a Dr. Lee in the press tent; those were his orders, but nobody was waiting for him.

Caleb stood under a swaying fluorescent light, removing the diamond shard from his pocket and examining it for the first time. Cosmic dust and brutal radiations had worn at it; he'd seen prettier diamonds dangling from men's ears. What made it valuable? Why care half this much about the bug? The Earth had never been in danger. The sail's lone passenger was dying. Everyone who visited it said it was just a matter of time. To the limits of his vision, Caleb could see nothing that would significantly change people's lives. Scientists would build and destroy reputations. Maybe some fancy new machines would come from their work. Maybe. But the young man from central Missouri understood that life would go on as it always had, and so why get all worked up in the first place?

"You've got something for me?"

Caleb looked up, finding a middle-aged woman walking toward him. A very tired, red-eyed woman. She was one of the nation's top surgeons, although he didn't know or particularly care.

"I'll take that for you—"

"Sorry, ma'am." He had read her ID tag, adding, "I'm expecting Marvin Lee. Material studies."

"I know. But Marvin's busy, and I like the press tent's coffee. Since I was coming this way, I volunteered."

"But I can't give it to you. Ma'am." Caleb could see how the shard had been stolen in the first place.

Red eyes rolled, amused with his paranoia.

Not for the first time, he felt frustration. No sense of protocol here; no respect for sensible rules. The name on the ID was Hilton. Showing none of his feeling, Caleb said, "Perhaps you could take me to him, Dr. Hilton. If it's no trouble."

"I guess." She poured black coffee into a Styrofoam cup, a knowing little smile appearing. "Now I get it. You're after a trip to the big tent, aren't you?"

Hadn't he just said that?

A sly wink, and she said, "Come on then. I'll take you."

They left the press tent, the doctor without a coat and the guard not bothering to zip his up. A twenty-yard walk, then they entered the bug's enormous tent, three sets of sealed doors opening for them. The last pair of guards waved them on without a look. Caleb smelled liquor, for just a moment, and as he stepped through the door he was wondering whom to warn about this serious breach of the rules —

—and there was a horrible, horrible wail.

Caleb stopped in midstride, his breath coming up short, a bolt of electricity making his spine straighten up and his face reflexively twist as if in agony.

Turning, showing the oddest half-grin, Dr. Hilton inquired, "Is something wrong?"

It took him a moment to say, "No, I'm fine."

"But it's your first time here, isn't it?"

What was her point?

"You've heard stories about it, haven't you?"

"Some."

"And you're curious. You want to see it for yourself."

"Not particularly," he answered, with conviction.

Yet she didn't believe him. She seemed to enjoy herself. "Marvin's on the other side. Stay with me."

Caleb obeyed. Walking between banks of instruments, he noticed that the technicians wore bulky, heavily padded headphones to blunt the screams. Now and again, at unpredictable moments, the bug would roar, and again Caleb would pause, feeling a little ill for that terrible moment when the air itself seemed to rip apart. Then just as suddenly there was silence, save for the clicking machines and hushed, respectful voices. In silence, Caleb found himself wondering if the guards drank because of the sounds. Not that he could condone it, but he could anticipate their excuse. Then he stepped off a floor of particle boards, onto rocky earth punctuated with tree stumps, and in the middle of that cleared patch of forest, stretched out on its apparent back, was the very famous bug. Not close enough to touch, but nearly so. Not quite dead, but not quite alive, either.

There was some kind of face on a wounded appendage, a silent mouth left open, and what seemed to be eyes that were huge and strange and haunted. Dark liquid centers stared helplessly at the tent's high ceiling. It was no bug, Caleb realized. It didn't resemble an insect, or any mammal, for that matter. Were those legs? Or arms? Did it eat with that flexible mouth? And how did it breathe? Practical questions kept offering themselves, but he didn't ask any of them. Instead, he turned to the surgeon, dumbfounded. "Why bring me here?" he inquired.

She was puzzled. "I'm sorry, isn't that what you wanted? I assumed seeing Marvin was an excuse."

Not at all.

"You know," she informed him, "anyone else would give up a gland to be here. To stand with us."

True. He didn't quite see why, but he knew it was true.

Another pair of guards watched them from nearby. They knew the doctor. They had seen her come and go dozens of times, struggling to help her patient. In the course of three days, they had watched her face darken, her humor growing cynical, and her confidence languishing as every effort failed. They felt sorry for her. Maybe that was why they allowed Caleb to stand too close to government property. The soldier lacked clearance, but he was with Hilton, and he was safe looking, and how could this tiny indiscretion hurt? It made no sense to be hard-asses. Glancing at their watches, they measured the minutes before their shift ended… and once more that gruesome critter gave a big roar… !

"It's in pain," Caleb muttered afterward.

The doctor looked at him, then away. "Are you sure?"

What a strange response. Of course it was in pain. He searched for the usual trappings of hospitals and illness. Where were the dangling bags of medicine and food? "Are you giving it morphine?" he asked, fully expecting to be told, "Of course."

But instead Hilton said, "Why? Why morphine?"

As if speaking to an idiot, Caleb said each word with care. "In order to stop the pain, naturally."

"Except morphine is an intricate, highly specific compound. It kills the hurt in Marines, but probably not in aliens." She waited a moment, then gestured. "You've got more in common—biochemically speaking —with these birch trees. Or a flu virus, for that matter."

He didn't understand, and he said so.

"This creature has DNA," she explained, "but its genetic codes are all different. It makes different kinds of amino acids, and very unusual proteins. Enzymes nothing like ours. And who knows what kinds of neurotransmitters."

The alien's mouth opened, and Caleb braced himself.

It closed, and he sighed.

"We've found organs," said Hilton, sipping her coffee. "Some we know, some we don't. Three hearts, but two are punctured. Dead. The scar tissue shows radiation tracks. Count them, and we get an estimate of the tissue's age. A thousand years, maybe. Which means it was injured when it flew through a dust storm, probably on its way out of the last solar system."

The alien was about the size of a good riding horse. It seemed larger only because of its peculiar flattened shape. The wounds were surgically precise holes, wisps of dust having pierced diamond as well as flesh. Knowing what ballistic wounds meant, he asked, "How is it even alive?"

"Implanted machinery, in part. Most of the machinery isn't working, but what does is repairing some tissues, some organs." She took a big swallow of coffee. "But its wounds may not have been the worst news. Marvin and my other esteemed colleagues think that the cosmic buckshot crippled most of the sail's subsystems. The reactors, for instance. There were three of them, a city block square each, thick as a playing card. Without power, the creature had no choice but to turn everything off, including itself. A desperation cryogenic freeze, probably for most of the voyage. And it didn't wake until it was over our heads, almost. Its one maneuver might have been a doomed skydiver's attempt to strike a mound of soft hay."

Caleb turned and asked, "Will it live?"

Hilton was tiring of the game. "Eventually, no. There's talk about another freeze, but we can't even freeze humans yet."

"I said it was in pain, and you said, 'Are you sure?'"

"It's not us. We can't measure its moods, or how it feels. Empirical evidence is lacking—"

As if to debate the point, the alien screamed again. The eyes kept shaking afterward, the closing mouth making a low wet sound. Watching the eyes, Caleb asked, "Do you think it means, 'Hi, how are you?' "

Hilton didn't respond. She didn't have time.

Again the alien's mouth opened, black eyes rippling as the air was torn apart; and Caleb, hands to his ears and undistracted by nasty gray abstractions, knew exactly what that horrible noise meant.

Not a doubt in him, his decision already made.

For three days and several hours, a worldwide controversy had been brewing, sweeping aside almost every other human concern.

What should be done with the alien?

Everyone who would care knew about the wounds and screams. Almost everyone had seen those first horrid tapes of the creature, and they'd watched the twice-daily news conferences, including Dr. Hilton's extended briefings. No more network cameras were being allowed inside the central tent, on the dubious ground of cleanliness. (How did you infect such an odd creature with ordinary human pathogens?) But the suffering continued, without pause, and it was obvious that the people in charge were overmatched. At least according to those on the outside.

The United Nations should take over, or some trustworthy civilian agency. Said many.

But which organization would be best?

And assuming another caretaker, what kinds of goals would it try to accomplish?

Some observers wanted billions spent in a crash program, nothing more important now than the alien's total recovery. Others argued for a kind death, then a quick disposal of the body, all evidence of the tragedy erased in case a second sail-creature came searching for its friend. But the Earth was littered with wreckage; people couldn't hope to salvage every incriminating fiber. That led others to argue that nothing should be done, allowing Nature and God their relentless course. And should death come, the body could be preserved in some honorable way, studied or not, and should more aliens arrive in some distant age —unlikely as that seemed—they could see that people were decent, had done their best, and no blame could possibly be fixed to them.

Anne Hilton despised all those options. She wanted to heal her patient, but crash programs were clumsy and expensive, and she was a pragmatic doctor who realized that human patients would suffer as a result, no money left for their mortal ills. Besides, she doubted if there was time. The fiery crash had plainly damaged the tissue-repairing systems. And worse, there was no easy way to give the creature its simplest needs. Its oxygen use was falling.

Nitrogen levels were building in the slow, clear blood. Teams of biochemists had synthesized a few simple sugars, amino acids, and other possible metabolites; yet the creature's success with each was uneven, the intravenous feedings canceled for now.

The truth told, Hilton's patient was collapsing at every level, and all that remained for the doctor was some of the oldest, most venerable skills.

Patience.

Prayer.

And whatever happened: "Do no harm."

For the next days, months, and years, Dr. Anne Hilton would wrestle with her memories, trying to decide why she had acted as she did that morning. Why get coffee at that particular moment? Why offer to retrieve the diamond shard? And why invite Caleb on that impromptu tour?

The last question had many answers. She had assumed that he wanted a tour, that he was being stubborn about the shard for no other reason. And because he was a Marine, he represented authority, order, and ignorance. She'd already had several collisions with his sort, politicians and other outsiders without enough mental activity to form a worthy thought. Maybe she'd hoped that shocking him would help her mood. She'd assumed that he was a big thoughtless lump of a man, the very worst kind…! Imagine. Stationed here for three days, guarding something wondrous, and precious, yet he didn't have the feeblest grasp of what was happening… !

The last scream done, Caleb asked, "Where's its brain?"

She glanced at him, noticing a change in his eyes.

"Doctor?" he asked. "Do you know where it does its thinking?"

She was suddenly tired of dispensing free knowledge, yet something in his voice made her answer. A sip of coffee, an abbreviated gesture. Then she said, "Below the face. Inside what you'd call its chest," and with that she turned away.

She should have watched him.

She could have been more alert, like any good doctor, reading symptoms and predicting the worst.

But an associate was approaching, some nonvital problem needing her best guess. She didn't guess that anything was wrong until she saw her associate's face change. One moment he was smiling. Then he became suddenly confused. Then, horrified. And only after that did she bother to ask herself why that Marine would want to know where to find the brain.

Too late, she wheeled around.

Too late and too slow, she couldn't hope to stop him, or even slow him. Caleb had removed his side arm from its holster, one hand holding the other's wrist, the first shot delivered to the chest's exact center, missing the brain by an inch. Security cameras on all sides recorded the event, in aching detail. The alien managed to lift one limb, two slender fingers reaching for the gun. Perhaps it was defending itself. Or perhaps, as others have argued, it simply was trying to adjust its killer's aim. Either way, the gesture was useless. And Hilton was superfluous. Caleb emptied his clip in short order, achieving a perfectly spaced set of holes. Two bullets managed to do what bits of relativistic dust couldn't, devastating a mind older than civilization. And the eyes, never human yet obviously full of intelligence, stared up at the tent's high ceiling, in thanks, perhaps, seeing whatever it is that only the doomed can see.

There was a trial.

The charge, after all the outcry and legal tap dancing, was reduced to felony destruction of federal property. Caleb offered no coordinated defense. His attorneys tried to argue for some kind of alien mind control, probably wishing for the benefit of the doubt. But Caleb fired them for trying it, then went on the stand to testify on his own behalf. In a quiet, firm voice, he described his upbringing in the Ozarks and the beloved uncle who had helped raise him, taking him hunting and fishing, instructing him in the moral codes of the decent man.

" 'Aim to kill,' he taught me. 'Don't be cruel to any creature, no matter how lowborn.' " Caleb stared at the camera, not a dab of doubt entering his steady voice. "When I see suffering, and when there's no hope, I put an end to it. Because that's what's right." He gave examples of his work: Small game. A lame horse. And dogs, including an arthritic Labrador that he'd raised from a pup. Yet that wasn't nearly enough reason, and he knew it. He paused for a long moment, wiping his forehead with his right palm. Then with a different voice, he said, "I was a senior, in high school, and my uncle got the cancer. In his lungs, his bones. Everywhere." He was quieter, if anything. Firmer. More in control, if that was possible. "It wasn't the cancer that killed him. His best shotgun did. His doctor and the sheriff talked it over, deciding that he must have held the twelve gauge up like this, then tripped the trigger like this." An imaginary gun lay in his outstretched arms, the geometry difficult even for a healthy oversized man. For the first time, the voice broke. But not badly and not for long. "People didn't ask questions," Caleb explained, arms dropping. "They knew what my uncle was feeling. What he wanted. They knew how we were, the two of us. And where I come from, decent people treat people just as good as they'd treat a sick farm cat. Dying stinks, but it might as well be done fast. And that's all I've got to say about that."

He was sentenced to five years of hard labor, serving every month without incident, without complaint, obeying the strict rules well enough that the prison guards voted him to be a model citizen of their intense little community.

Released, Caleb returned to Missouri, taking over the daily operations of the impoverished family farm.

Networks and news services pleaded for interviews; none were granted.

Some idiots tried sneaking onto his property. They were met by dogs and a silent ex-Marine —lean as a fence post now —and the famous shotgun always cradled in his wiry long arms.

He never spoke to trespassers.

His dogs made his views known.

Eventually, people tired of running in the woods. Public opinions began to soften. The alien had been dying, it was decided. Nothing good could have been done for it. And if the Marine wasn't right in what he did, at least he'd acted according to his conscience.

Caleb won his privacy.

There were years when no one came uninvited.

Then it was a bright spring day twenty-some years after the killing, and a small convoy drove in past the warning signs, through the tall barbed-wire gates, and right up to the simple farmhouse. As it happened, a Marine colonel had been selected to oversee the operation. Flanked by government people, he met with the middle-aged farmer, and with a crisp no-nonsense voice said, "Pack your bags, soldier. But I'll warn you, you don't need to bring much."

"Where am I going?"

"I'll give you one guess."

Something had happened; that much was obvious. With a tight, irritated voice, Caleb told the colonel, "I want you all off my land. Now."

"Goddamn! You really don't know, do you?" The colonel gave a big laugh, saying, "Nothing else is on the news anymore."

"I don't have a television," said Caleb.

"Or a family anymore. And precious few friends." He spoke as if he'd just read the man's file. Then he pointed skyward, adding, "I just assumed you'd have seen it. After dusk is a good time—"

"I get to bed early," was Caleb's excuse. Then a sudden hard chill struck him. He leaned against his doorjamb, thinking that he understood, the fight suddenly starting to leave him. "There's another sail, isn't there? That's what this is all about."

"One sail? Oh, that's wonderful!" All the government men were giggling. "Make it three hundred and eighteen sails, and that's just today's count!"

"An armada of them," said someone.

"Gorgeous, gorgeous," said another, with feeling.

Caleb tried to gather himself. Then with a calm, almost inaudible voice, he asked, "But what do you want with me?"

"We don't want you," was the quick reply.

No?

"They do." The colonel kept smiling. "They asked specifically for you, soldier."

He knew why. Not a doubt in him.

Caleb muttered, "Just a minute," and dropped back into the house, as if to get ready.

The colonel waited for a couple seconds, then knew better. He burst through the door and tried to guess where Caleb would have gone. Upstairs? No, there was an ominous click from somewhere on his right. Caleb was in a utility room, his shotgun loaded and cocked, the double barrels struggling to reach his long forehead; and the colonel grabbed the gun's butt and trigger, shouting, "No! Wait!" Then half a dozen government men were helping him, dark suits left rumpled and torn. But they wrestled the shotgun away from their charge, and the colonel stood over him, asking, "What were you thinking? Why in hell would you—?"

"I killed one of theirs," Caleb said. "Now they want their revenge. Isn't that it?"

"Not close." The colonel was too breathless to put much into his laugh. "In fact, I don't think you could be more wrong, soldier. The last thing they want to kill is you… !"

Caleb was packed into a new shuttle and taken to orbit, an ungainly lunar tug carrying him the rest of the way. There was a new moon in a high, safe orbit. One of the sail creatures had captured a modest nickel-iron asteroid and brought it there. Healthy and whole, the creature scarcely resembled its dead brother. Its vast sail was self-repairing, and it possessed an astonishing grace, superseding the most delicate butterfly. Partially folded, riding the captive asteroid, it swallowed the tug, guiding it into a docking facility built recently from the native ores. Other tugs had brought up dignitaries, scientists, and a complete medical team. Everyone had gathered in the central room. As the onetime guard drifted into view, there was applause —polite but not quite enthusiastic — and from some of the faces, envy. Incandescent green envy.

Anne Hilton was among that number.

Old and long retired, she was present at the request of the sail creatures. Caleb didn't recognize her at first glance. She shook his hand, tried smiling, then introduced him to each member of her team. "We're just advisers," she informed him. "Most of the work will be done by our host."

Caleb flinched, just for a moment.

Their "host" didn't resemble the first alien, save for the artificial trappings. Sail creatures were an assemblage of sentient species. Perhaps dozens of them. Caleb had seen photographs of this particular species: fishlike; human-sized; blackish gills flanking an unreadable carpish mouth. It had disgusted him at first glance, and the memory of it disgusted him now.

Dr. Hilton asked, "Would you like to meet her?"

He spoke honestly, saying, "Not particularly."

"But she wants to meet you." A cutting smile, then she promised, "I'll take you to her. Come on."

They had done this before, more than two decades ago. She had taken him to meet an alien, and for at least this moment she could feel superior in the same way. In charge.

There was a narrow tunnel with handholds, toeholds.

Suddenly they were alone, and with a soft, careful voice, Caleb confessed, "I don't understand. Why me?"

"Why not you?" Hilton growled.

"I'm not smart. Or clever. Not compared to everyone else up here, I'm not."

She lifted her eyebrows, watching him.

"These aliens should pick a scientist. Someone who cares about stars and planets…"

"You're going to be young again." Hilton said the words as if delivering a curse. "It'll take her some time to learn our genetics, but she's promised me that she can reverse the aging process. A twenty-year-old body again."

"I know."

"As for being smart," she said, "don't worry. She's going to tease your neurons into dividing, like inside a baby's head. By the time you leave us, you'll be in the top ninety-nine percentile among humans. And as creative as can be."

He nodded, already aware of the general plan.

Then they were near the entrance to her chamber. Hilton stopped, one hand resting on Caleb's nearer arm, a firm and level voice telling him, "I would do anything —almost —for the chance to go where you're going. To live for aeons, to see all those wondrous places!"

In a quiet, almost conspiratorial tone, he said, "I'll tell her to take you instead of me."

Hilton knew that he meant it, and she grew even angrier.

Then again, Caleb asked, "Why me?"

"They think they know you, I guess. They've been studying our telecommunications noise for years, and you certainly earned their attention." Her withered face puckered, tasting something sour. "You acted out of a kind of morality. You didn't hesitate, and you didn't make excuses. Then you accepted the hardships of prison, and the hardships that came afterward. Being able to live alone like you did… well, that's a rare talent for our species, and it's invaluable…"

He gave a little nod, a sigh.

"These creatures don't treasure intelligence," she exclaimed. "That's something they can grow, in vats. The same with imagination. But there's some quality in you that makes you worth taking…"

A dull ocher button would open the hatch.

Hilton reached for it, and her hand was intercepted, frail bones restrained by an unconscious strength.

Caleb put his face close to hers, and whispered.

"What I did for that alien," he confessed, "I would have done for a dog." She opened her mouth, but said nothing. After a moment, he continued: "Or a bug. Or anything."

She stared at him, pulling at her hand until he abruptly let go.

"Time to get this business started," Caleb announced.

With an elbow, he smacked the button. There was a hiss, a little wind blowing as the hatch pulled open, carrying with it the smell of warm water and things unnamed.

He turned and left her.

And she hugged herself as if cold, and she watched him, her mouth open and nothing to say, the ex-Marine growing small with the distance as her bewilderment grew vast and bitter and black.

THE DEAD

Michael Swanwick

Three boy zombies in matching red jackets bused our table, bringing water, lighting candles, brushing away the crumbs between courses. Their eyes were dark, attentive, lifeless; their hands and faces so white as to be faintly luminous in the hushed light. I thought it in bad taste, but "This is Manhattan," Courtney said. "A certain studied offensiveness is fashionable here."

The blond brought menus and waited for our order.

We both ordered pheasant. "An excellent choice," the boy said in a clear, emotionless voice. He went away and came back a minute later with the freshly strangled birds, holding them up for our approval. He couldn't have been more than eleven when he died and his skin was of that sort connoisseurs call "milk-glass," smooth, without blemish, and all but translucent. He must have cost a fortune.

As the boy was turning away, I impulsively touched his shoulder. He turned back. "What's your name, son?" I asked.

"Timothy." He might have been telling me the specialite de maison. The boy waited a breath to see if more was expected of him, then left.

Courtney gazed after him. "How lovely he would look," she murmured, "nude. Standing in the moonlight by a cliff. Definitely a cliff. Perhaps the very one where he met his death."

"He wouldn't look very lovely if he'd fallen off a cliff."

"Oh, don't be unpleasant."

The wine steward brought our bottle. "Chateau Latour '17." I raised an eyebrow. The steward had the sort of old and complex face that Rembrandt would have enjoyed painting. He poured with pulseless ease and then dissolved into the gloom. "Good lord, Courtney, you seduced me on cheaper."

She flushed, not happily. Courtney had a better career going than I. She out-powered me. We both knew who was smarter, better connected, more likely to end up in a corner office with the historically significant antique desk. The only edge I had was that I was a male in a seller's market. It was enough.

"This is a business dinner, Donald," she said, "nothing more."

I favored her with an expression of polite disbelief I knew from experience she'd find infuriating. And, digging into my pheasant, murmured, "Of course." We didn't say much of consequence until dessert, when I finally asked, "So what's Loeb-Soffner up to these days?"

"Structuring a corporate expansion. Jim's putting together the financial side of the package, and I'm doing personnel. You're being headhunted, Donald." She favored me with that feral little flash of teeth she made when she saw something she wanted. Courtney wasn't a beautiful woman, far from it. But there was that fierceness to her, that sense of something primal being held under tight and precarious control that made her hot as hot to me. "You're talented, you're thuggish, and you're not too tightly nailed to your present position. Those are all qualities we're looking for."

She dumped her purse on the table, took out a single-folded sheet of paper. "These are the terms I'm offering." She placed it by my plate, attacked her torte with gusto.

I unfolded the paper. "This is a lateral transfer."

"Unlimited opportunity for advancement," she said with her mouth full, "if you've got the stuff."

"Mmm." I did a line-by-line of the benefits, all comparable to what I was getting now. My current salary to the dollar—Ms. Soffner was showing off. And the stock options. "This can't be right. Not for a lateral."

There was that grin again, like a glimpse of shark in murky waters. "I knew you'd like it. We're going over the top with the options because we need your answer right away—tonight preferably. Tomorrow at the latest. No negotiations. We have to put the package together fast. There's going to be a shitstorm of publicity when this comes out. We want to have everything nailed down, present the fundies and bleeding hearts with a fait accompli."

"My God, Courtney, what kind of monster do you have hold of now?"

"The biggest one in the world. Bigger than Apple. Bigger than Home Virtual. Bigger than HIVac-IV," she said with relish. "Have you ever heard of Koestler Biological?"

I put my fork down.

"Koestler? You're peddling corpses now?"

"Please. Postanthropic biological resources." She said it lightly, with just the right touch of irony. Still, I thought I detected a certain discomfort with the nature of her client's product.

"There's no money in it." I waved a hand toward our attentive waitstaff. "These guys must be—what—maybe two percent of the annual turnover? Zombies are luxury goods: servants, reactor cleanups, Hollywood stunt deaths, exotic services"—we both knew what I meant—"a few hundred a year, maybe, tops. There's not the demand. The revulsion factor is too great."

"There's been a technological breakthrough." Courtney leaned forward. "They can install the infrasystem and controllers and offer the product for the factory-floor cost of a new subcompact. That's way below the economic threshold for blue-collar labor.

"Look at it from the viewpoint of a typical factory owner. He's already downsized to the bone and labor costs are bleeding him dry. How can he compete in a dwindling consumer market? Now let's imagine he buys into the program." She took out her Mont Blanc and began scribbling figures on the tablecloth. "No benefits. No liability suits. No sick pay. No pilferage. We're talking about cutting labor costs by at least two thirds. Minimum! That's irresistible, I don't care how big your revulsion factor is. We project we can move five hundred thousand units in the first year."

"Five hundred thousand," I said. "That's crazy. Where the hell are you going to get the raw material for—?"

"Africa."

"Oh, God, Courtney." I was struck wordless by the cynicism it took to even consider turning the sub-Saharan tragedy to a profit, by the sheer, raw evil of channeling hard currency to the pocket Hitlers who ran the camps. Courtney only smiled and gave that quick little flip of her head that meant she was accessing the time on an optic chip.

"I think you're ready," she said, "to talk with Koestler."

At her gesture, the zombie boys erected projector lamps about us, fussed with the settings, turned them on. Interference patterns moired, clashed, meshed. Walls of darkness erected themselves about us. Courtney took out her flat and set it up on the table. Three taps of her nailed fingers and the round and hairless face of Marvin Koestler appeared on the screen. "Ah, Courtney!" he said in a pleased voice. "You're in—New York, yes? The San Moritz. With Donald." The slightest pause with each accessed bit of information. "Did you have the antelope medallions?" When we shook our heads, he kissed his fingertips. "Magnificent! They're ever so lightly braised and then smothered in buffalo mozzarella. Nobody makes them better. I had the same dish in Florence the other day, and there was simply no comparison."

I cleared my throat. "Is that where you are? Italy?"

"Let's leave out where I am." He made a dismissive gesture, as if it were a trifle. But Courtney's face darkened. Corporate kidnapping being the growth industry it is, I'd gaffed badly. "The question is—what do you think of my offer?"

"It's… interesting. For a lateral."

"It's the start-up costs. We're leveraged up to our asses as it is. You'll make out better this way in the long run." He favored me with a sudden grin that went mean around the edges. Very much the financial buccaneer. Then he leaned forward, lowered his voice, maintained firm eye contact. Classic people-handling techniques. "You're not sold. You know you can trust Courtney to have checked out the finances. Still, you think: It won't work. To work the product has to be irresistible, and it's not. It can't be."

"Yes, sir," I said. "Succinctly put."

He nodded to Courtney. "Let's sell this young man." And to me, "My stretch is downstairs."

He winked out.

Koestler was waiting for us in the limo, a ghostly pink presence. His holo, rather, a genial if somewhat coarse-grained ghost afloat in golden light. He waved an expansive and insubstantial arm to take in the interior of the car and said, "Make yourselves at home."

The chauffeur wore combat-grade photomultipliers. They gave him a buggish, inhuman look. I wasn't sure if he was dead or not. "Take us to Heaven," Koestler said.

The doorman stepped out into the street, looked both ways, nodded to the chauffeur. Robot guns tracked our progress down the block.

"Courtney tells me you're getting the raw materials from Africa."

"Distasteful, but necessary. To begin with. We have to sell the idea first—no reason to make things rough on ourselves. Down the line, though, I don't see why we can't go domestic. Something along the lines of a reverse mortgage, perhaps, life insurance that pays off while you're still alive. It'd be a step toward getting the poor off our backs at last. Fuck 'em. They've been getting a goddamn free ride for too long; the least they can do is to die and provide us with servants."

I was pretty sure Koestler was joking. But I smiled and ducked my head, so I'd be covered in either case. "What's Heaven?" I asked, to move the conversation onto safer territory.

"A proving ground," Koestler said with great satisfaction, "for the future. Have you ever witnessed bare-knuckles fisticuffs?"

"No."

"Ah, now there's a sport for gentlemen! The sweet science at its sweetest. No rounds, no rules, no holds barred. It gives you the real measure of a man—not just of his strength but his character. How he handles himself, whether he keeps cool under pressure—how he stands up to pain. Security won't let me go to the clubs in person, but I've made arrangements."

Heaven was a converted movie theater in a run-down neighborhood in Queens. The chauffeur got out, disappeared briefly around the back, and returned with two zombie bodyguards. It was like a conjurer's trick. "You had these guys stashed in the trunk!" I asked as he opened the door for us.

"It's a new world," Courtney said. "Get used to it."

The place was mobbed. Two, maybe three hundred seats, standing room only.

A mixed crowd, blacks and Irish and Koreans mostly, but with a smattering of uptown customers as well. You didn't have to be poor to need the occasional taste of vicarious potency. Nobody paid us any particular notice. We'd come in just as the fighters were being presented.

"Weighing two-five-oh, in black trunks with a red stripe," the ref was bawling, "the gang-bang gangsta, the bare-knuckle brawla, the man with tha—"

Courtney and I went up a scummy set of back stairs. Bodyguard-us-bodyguard, as if we were a combat patrol out of some twentieth-century jungle war. A scrawny, potbellied old geezer with a damp cigar in his mouth unlocked the door to our box. Sticky floor, bad seats, a good view down on the ring. Gray plastic matting, billowing smoke.

Koestler was there, in a shiny new hologram shell. It reminded me of those plaster Madonnas in painted bathtubs that Catholics set out in their yards. "Your permanent box?" I asked.

"All of this is for your sake, Donald—you and a few others. We're pitting our product one-on-one against some of the local talent. By arrangement with the management. What you're going to see will settle your doubts once and for all."

"You'll like this," Courtney said. "I've been here five nights straight. Counting tonight." The bell rang, starting the fight. She leaned forward avidly, hooking her elbows on the railing.

The zombie was gray-skinned and modestly muscled, for a fighter. But it held up its hands alertly, was light on its feet, and had strangely calm and knowing eyes.

Its opponent was a real bruiser, a big black guy with classic African features twisted slightly out of true, so that his mouth curled up in a kind of sneer on one side. He had gang scars on his chest and even uglier marks on his back that didn't look deliberate but like something he'd earned on the streets. His eyes burned with an intensity just this side of madness.

He came forward cautiously but not fearfully, and made a couple of quick jabs to get the measure of his opponent. They were blocked and countered.

They circled each other, looking for an opening.

For a minute or so, nothing much happened. Then the gangster feinted at the zombie's head, drawing up its guard. He drove through that opening with a slam to the zombie's nuts that made me wince.

No reaction.

The dead fighter responded with a flurry of punches, and got in a glancing blow to its opponent's cheek. They separated, engaged, circled around.

Then the big guy exploded in a combination of killer blows, connecting so solidly it seemed they would splinter every rib in the dead fighter's body. It brought the crowd to their feet, roaring their approval.

The zombie didn't even stagger.

A strange look came into the gangster's eyes, then, as the zombie counterattacked, driving him back into the ropes. I could only imagine what it must be like for a man who had always lived by his strength and his ability to absorb punishment to realize that he was facing an opponent to whom pain meant nothing. Fights were lost and won by flinches and hesitations. You won by keeping your head. You lost by getting rattled.

Despite his best blows, the zombie stayed methodical, serene, calm, relentless. That was its nature.

It must have been devastating.

The fight went on and on. It was a strange and alienating experience for me. After a while I couldn't stay focused on it. My thoughts kept slipping into a zone where I found myself studying the line of Courtney's jaw, thinking about later tonight. She liked her sex just a little bit sick. There was always a feeling, fucking her, that there was something truly repulsive that she really wanted to do but lacked the courage to bring up on her own.

So there was always this urge to get her to do something she didn't like. She was resistant; I never dared try more than one new thing per date. But I could always talk her into that one thing. Because when she was aroused, she got pliant. She could be talked into anything. She could be made to beg for it.

Courtney would've been amazed to learn that I was not proud of what I did with her—quite the opposite, in fact. But I was as obsessed with her as she was with whatever it was that obsessed her.

Suddenly Courtney was on her feet, yelling. The hologram showed Koestler on his feet as well. The big guy was on the ropes, being pummeled. Blood and spittle flew from his face with each blow. Then he was down; he'd never even had a chance. He must've known early on that it was hopeless, that he wasn't going to win, but he'd refused to take a fall. He had to be pounded into the ground. He went down raging, proud and uncomplaining. I had to admire that.

But he lost anyway.

That, I realized, was the message I was meant to take away from this. Not just that the product was robust. But that only those who backed it were going to win. I could see, even if the audience couldn't, that it was the end of an era. A man's body wasn't worth a damn anymore. There wasn't anything it could do that technology couldn't handle better. The number of losers in the world had just doubled, tripled, reached maximum. What the fools below were cheering for was the death of their futures.

I got up and cheered too.

In the stretch afterward, Koestler said, "You've seen the light. You're a believer now."

"I haven't necessarily decided yet."

"Don't bullshit me," Koestler said. "I've done my homework, Mr. Nichols. Your current position is not exactly secure. Morton-Western is going down the tubes. The entire service sector is going down the tubes. Face it, the old economic order is as good as fucking gone. Of course you're going to take my offer. You don't have any other choice."

The fax outed sets of contracts. "A Certain Product," it said here and there. Corpses were never mentioned.

But when I opened my jacket to get a pen Koestler said, "Wait, I've got a factory. Three thousand positions under me. I've got a motivated workforce. They'd walk through fire to keep their jobs. Pilferage is at zero. Sick time practically the same. Give me one advantage your product has over my current workforce. Sell me on it. I'll give you thirty seconds."

I wasn't in sales and the job had been explicitly promised me already. But by reaching for the pen, I had admitted I wanted the position. And we all knew whose hand carried the whip.

"They can be catheterized," I said—"no toilet breaks."

For a long instant Koestler just stared at me blankly. Then he exploded with laughter. "By God, that's a new one! You have a great future ahead of you, Donald. Welcome aboard."

He winked out.

We drove on in silence for a while, aimless, directionless. At last Courtney leaned forward and touched the chauffeur's shoulder.

"Take me home," she said.

Riding through Manhattan I suffered from a waking hallucination that we were driving through a city of corpses. Gray faces, listless motions. Everyone looked dead in the headlights and sodium-vapor streetlamps. Passing by the Children's Museum I saw a mother with a stroller through the glass doors. Two small children by her side. They all three stood motionless, gazing forward at nothing. We passed by a stop-and-go where zombies stood out on the sidewalk drinking forties in paper bags. Through upper-story windows I could see the sad rainbow trace of virtuals playing to empty eyes. There were zombies in the park, zombies smoking blunts, zombies driving taxies, zombies sitting on stoops and hanging out on street corners, all of them waiting for the years to pass and the flesh to fall from their bones.

I felt like the last man alive.

Courtney was still wired and sweaty from the fight. The pheromones came off her in great waves as I followed her down the hall to her apartment. She stank of lust. I found myself thinking of how she got just before orgasm, so desperate, so desirable. It was different after she came, she would fall into a state of calm assurance; the same sort of calm assurance she showed in her business life, the aplomb she sought so wildly during the act itself.

And when that desperation left her, so would I. Because even I could recognize that it was her desperation that drew me to her, that made me do the things she needed me to do. In all the years I'd known her, we'd never once had breakfast together.

I wished there was some way I could deal her out of the equation. I wished that her desperation were a liquid that I could drink down to the dregs. I wished I could drop her in a winepress and squeeze her dry.

At her apartment, Courtney unlocked her door and in one complicated movement twisted through and stood facing me from the inside. "Well," she said. "All in all, a productive evening. Good night, Donald."

"Good night? Aren't you going to invite me inside?"

"No."

"What do you mean, no?" She was beginning to piss me off. A blind man could've told she was in heat from across the street. A chimpanzee could've talked his way into her pants. "What kind of idiot game are you playing now?"

"You know what no means, Donald. You're not stupid."

"No I'm not, and neither are you. We both know the score. Now let me in, goddamnit."

"Enjoy your present," she said, and closed the door.

I found Courtney's present back in my suite. I was still seething from her treatment of me and stalked into the room, letting the door slam behind me so that I was standing in near-total darkness. The only light was what little seeped through the draped windows at the far end of the room. I was just reaching for the light switch when there was a motion in the darkness.

Jackers! I thought, and all in panic lurched for the light switch, hoping to achieve I don't know what. Credit-jackers always work in trios, one to torture the security codes out of you, one to phone the numbers out of your accounts and into a fiscal trapdoor, a third to stand guard. Was turning the lights on supposed to make them scurry for darkness, like roaches? Nevertheless, I almost tripped over my own feet in my haste to reach the switch. But of course it was nothing like what I'd feared.

It was a woman.

She stood by the window in a white silk dress that could neither compete with nor distract from her ethereal beauty, her porcelain skin. When the lights came on, she turned toward me, eyes widening, lips parting slightly. Her breasts swayed ever so slightly as she gracefully raised a bare arm to offer me a lily. "Hello, Donald," she said huskily. "I'm yours for the night." She was absolutely beautiful.

And dead, of course.

Not twenty minutes later I was hammering on Courtney's door. She came to the door in a Pierre Cardin dressing gown and from the way she was still cinching the sash and the disarray of her hair I gathered she hadn't been expecting me.

"I'm not alone," she said.

"I didn't come here for the dubious pleasures of your fair white body." I pushed my way into the room. (But couldn't help remembering that beautiful body of hers, not so exquisite as the dead whore's, and now the thoughts were inextricably mingled in my head: death and Courtney, sex and corpses, a Gordian knot I might never be able to untangle.)

"You didn't like my surprise?" She was smiling openly now, amused.

"No, I fucking did not!"

I took a step toward her. I was shaking. I couldn't stop fisting and unfisting my hands.

She fell back a step. But that confident, oddly expectant look didn't leave her face. "Bruno," she said lightly. "Would you come in here?"

A motion at the periphery of vision. Bruno stepped out of the shadows of her bedroom. He was a muscular brute, pumped, ripped, and as black as the fighter I'd seen go down earlier that night. He stood behind Courtney, totally naked, with slim hips and wide shoulders and the finest skin I'd ever seen.

And dead.

I saw it all in a flash.

"Oh, for God's sake, Courtney!" I said, disgusted. "I can't believe you. That you'd actually… That thing's just an obedient body. There's nothing there—no passion, no connection, just… physical presence."

Courtney made a kind of chewing motion through her smile, weighing the implications of what she was about to say. Nastiness won.

"We have equity now," she said.

I lost it then. I stepped forward, raising a hand, and I swear to God I intended to bounce the bitch's head off the back wall. But she didn't flinch—she didn't even look afraid. She merely moved aside, saying, "In the body, Bruno. He has to look good in a business suit."

A dead fist smashed into my ribs so hard I thought for an instant my heart had stopped. Then Bruno punched me in my stomach. I doubled over, gasping. Two, three, four more blows. I was on the ground now, rolling over, helpless and weeping with rage.

"That's enough, baby. Now put out the trash."

Bruno dumped me in the hallway.

I glared up at Courtney through my tears. She was not at all beautiful now. Not in the least. You're getting older, I wanted to tell her. But instead I heard my voice, angry and astonished, saying, "You… you goddamn, fucking necrophile!"

"Cultivate a taste for it," Courtney said. Oh, she was purring! I doubted she'd ever find life quite this good again. "Half a million Brunos are about to come on the market. You're going to find it a lot more difficult to pick up living women in not so very long."

I sent away the dead whore. Then I took a long shower that didn't really make me feel any better. Naked, I walked into my unlit suite and opened the curtains. For a long time I stared out over the glory and darkness that was Manhattan.

I was afraid, more afraid than I'd ever been in my life.

The slums below me stretched to infinity. They were a vast necropolis, a never-ending city of the dead. I thought of the millions out there who were never going to hold down a job again. I thought of how they must hate me—me and my kind— and how helpless they were before us. And yet. There were so many of them and so few of us. If they were to all rise up at once, they'd be like a tsunami, irresistible. And if there was so much as a spark of life left in them, then that was exactly what they would do.

That was one possibility. There was one other, and that was that nothing would happen. Nothing at all.

God help me, but I didn't know which one scared me more.

UN-BIRTHDAY BOY

James White

"Normality" involves comparison to a standard - but how do you judge the standard? - every morning he tried very hard not to waken into his unhappy world, but the wall beeper would only get louder until he turned it off to let his mother know that he was awake and would be out for breakfast as soon as he had washed and dressed. The voices of the three other children came through the adjoining wall, louder and more excited than usual because today was Danal's birthday and there would be a party and presents. He especially hated waking up on a birthday because those days were the unhappiest of all for him since he had never had one.

He was the only member of the family with his own room, he thought as he cleaned himself all over with the special sponge that was supposed to help take away the smell that they all said came from his body, then he deliberately looked out of the window while he dressed. Not so long ago he had needed his mother or one of the other children to help him with his fastenings, but now he was able to dress and look outside at the same time. Even his father, while visiting his room to do nasty things to him, had said that he was showing a change for the better and that it was about time.

But there was never any change in the view from his window, just the same haze of stars moving past like banks of bright speckled fog and the sun-shadows moving slowly along the metal framework that held their house to the rim of the spacestation.

All at once the other room became quiet and empty. He waited for as long as he could then followed the others into breakfast before his mother could come in to ask him if he was feeling sick again.

It was the fourteenth birthday party that he had attended, five for each of the two older children and four for the youngest one who was his favorite, although there might have been others that he had been too young to remember. They always began at breakfast time so that his father could join in and distribute the presents before dressing for work. Be cause it took so long to get into and out of a spacesuit and to check every thing, the children would not see him again until it was nearly bedtime. His father spent the last hour of the day playing with the children in their rooms, but some of the things he did to him when they were alone together were not nice so that he would have been pleased not to have a lather at all.

"Since this is another birthday," said his father, smiling at everyone in turn, "we have again been given permission to let you spend today playing in the Center. Your mother will stay with you until I finish for the day and we come back for another party. This time the area of wall netting has been extended and the metal projections padded so that there is no risk of you injuring yourselves. But don't get overexcited or jump off too fast be cause a collision at speed with the net supports or each other will hurt and would certainly spoil the rest of the birthday for you. And if someone was to be seriously injured you might not be allowed to play in the Center again. So be very careful, all of you."

Why, he thought, does he always look at me when he says things like that?

"And now," his father went on, "the presents..."

Danal, the birthday boy, was given his present first. It was a large box wrapped in used computer paper, and while he was opening it his younger brother Cawn and sister Wana were given smaller presents so that they would not feel bad because it wasn't their birthday. It wasn't his birthday, either, it was never ever his birthday, so he was given a present as well. It turned out to be a well-worn, animal soft toy, a castoff that had been given to Wana when she had been only two.

He said "Thank you," like the others, and put it down beside his bowl even though he wanted to pull its legs off and throw it at them. When he saw the nice things that the others were getting he tried not to speak, but the angry words came out any way.

"Why don't I get presents like that?" he said, waving his arms and al most knocking over the food bowl as he tried to point at all of them at once.

"This thing is for, for babies. Why don't you give me toys and games that light up and make noises and do things? You don't want me here. You don't love me, not like the way you do the others. I heard them talking about it. You, you don't even give me nice things to eat!"

This time it was little Wana who pointed. She was the youngest and smallest of the children and she al ways talked to him as if he wasn't stupid. With her tiny hand almost touching his face she said, "Why are your eyes all wet?"

"Of course we love you like the others," said his mother. "It is just that-"

"-It isn't easy to have toys sent 'way out here," his father joined in.

"There are weight restrictions on nonessential supplies for personal use, and we have to take good care of them. If you promise to be very careful and not lose your temper if the game is too difficult, Danal or Cawn will let you play with one of their old ones until you're able to-"

"No!" said Danal in a very loud voice. "I let him play with a game last year, remember? It was a flight simulator, an old one but still working, and he smashed it into bits before bedtime. He has hands like clumsy feet and he talks funny and he's got a big head with no brains in it. I won't do it, I won't."

"Me, too," said Cawn in a quieter voice. "He always breaks things. He's rough and he's not like us and we don't like him. Why don't you just send him away?"

"Stop talking like that, right now," said his father, "and listen to me. He can't help what he does and maybe he will learn not to break things one of these years. Maybe it was the accident when he was a baby, or being so long in that survival pod with not enough food in the dispenser that made him slow-witted. He was nearly dead when we found him. You have to make allowances for him not being..."

An argument started between his mother and father and the two boys; the same argument that happened at every birthday party for as long as he could remember. It made him feel very bad. He was wiping his eyes with his fingers when Wana leaned sideways in her chair towards him.

"I like you," she whispered. "I don't want you to go away. I think you're nice and fat and cuddly, and you've got a big, funny head."

All at once he felt a warm, sad, glad feeling that made his eyes get wet again, but he could not find the words to tell her about it. The argument was still going on between Danal, Cawn, and his parents, but it stopped when his father stood up.

"Enjoy your presents," he said. "It's time I left for work."

"Coward," said his mother, rising to go to the door with him. The boys stopped arguing and went back to exploring their presents and deliberately ignoring him. He was staring down at the old soft doll when he felt Wana's fingers poking into his arm.

When he looked at her he saw that she was watching the two older boys and pushing her bowl sideways to wards him. It was still half-filled with big, flat, pieces of yellow and red fruit floating in thick juice and his mouth watered just looking at it.

"Thank you. Wana," he said, reaching for the bowl. "Would you like some of mine?"

She looked down at the gray, lumpy contents of his bowl and said, "Yuk."

"Me, too," he said.

He had succeeded in making one of the pieces of soft, slippery fruit stay on the spoon and was lifting it care fully to his mouth when his mother came back and started scolding every body except him.

"Don't let him eat that!" she said.

"How many times have I told you not to give him any of your food? He has an allergy to fruit and practically everything else in this place. Don't ask-an allergy means that certain things make him sick or brings him out in itchy spots. Wana, don't ever give him your breakfast again. And you boys are old enough to know better. Why didn't you stop her? Go into the living room and play with your toys. Leave the door open so I can hear what you're doing..."

From the living room he could still hear her talking to herself as she cleared the breakfast things. The two boys were playing with the new game Danal had been given for his birthday and they did not look at him. Wana had brought out the old teaching game that all of the others had used when they were younger, a flat box that showed moving pictures on top while a voice inside explained what was happening in very simple words.

"Thank you, Wana, anyway," he said. But she was ignoring him, too, because she did not like being scold ed and was blaming him for what had happened. But he knew that she would not stay mad at him for long so he said, "What is that thing?"

After a long silence she said, "It's a bird."

"But what's it doing?" he said.

"There isn't anything holding it up. Is it in a Center, in free fall?"

"Can't you hear the words?" said Wana crossly. "It's flying, holding itself up by pushing down against the air with its wings, those broad arms with the fuzzy edges."

He could hear words better, he had learned over the years, than could any other member of the family. It was more difficult if they were whispered behind doors or a dividing wall, but he was still able to hear every word they said. He had not told them about his ability because he was afraid it would make the boys like him even less if he was better at anything than they were. Wana was different. She was nice and she liked him, most of the time.

"I can hear but I don't understand all the words. What is an angle of incidence and a coefficient of-"

"I don't understand those words, either," she broke in. "It's just a bird, flying up in the air and away from the ground."

She still seemed to be angry with him and that made him feel bad. Maybe he should try to make her laugh.

Very carefully he climbed up to stand balanced on the chair, which was soft and unsteady under his feet, and began to flap his arms up and down faster and faster. Wana looked up at him, smiling, until one of his feet slipped over the edge of the cushion and he fell onto the floor.

"I tried very hard," he said, "but I didn't fly into the air."

"We're playing a difficult game here that needs a lot of concentration," said Danal. He gave a nasty laugh and went on, "And you didn't rise in the air because your hands aren't wide enough. Sit down and stop fooling around."

"Did you hurt yourself?" said Wana, being friends again. "You can play this game with me if you like. I'll show you what keys to press to change the pictures."

He wanted to play the game, and push the tiny, close-together buttons that would change the pictures or make parts of them bigger or cause them to stop moving. But if he was clumsy, and he was always clumsy, he might break off one of the tiny control keys and ruin the game and she would not like him again.

He rubbed the wetness from his eyes and said, "No, I'll just watch you, and behave myself."

"Oh, that's good," said Wana, and laughed.

Unlike the other two, she was too young and nice to hide the relief she was feeling or say things that meant something else.

She changed the pictures to show other kinds of birds and fish and animals, and some of them looked like their parents with no clothes on, but they always came back to the first big, beautiful bird with the slow-moving arms. They were watching it yet again when their mother came in.

"Everyone is being very quiet," she said, "Has somebody broken some thing or done something naughty that you don't want to tell me about? Or are you all enjoying your games too much to want to go up to the Center?"

Everybody said "No" so quickly that he could not tell who said it first.

His mother smiled and said, "Then let's go. Everyone, zip up your cover alls and make sure your shoes won't come off. I'll carry the picnic. Danal and Cawn, lead the way Wana next and you..." she bent down to check his feet, "...had better stay close to me."

"They're all right," he said. "I can tie the laces myself now."

"Good boy," she said, patting him on the head. "Now hold onto my hand and come along."

They left the house and followed the others along the corridor outside, and began climbing the ramps and ladders leading up to the Center. The higher they climbed the easier it be came, but slower because his feet would barely stay on the ground and he had to hold onto his mother's hand or the netting that was stretched tightly along the walls to keep from floating away. The others were moving far ahead of them, shouting with excitement as they pulled themselves faster along the netting, but his mother held him back and told him to be patient.

By the time they emerged into the Center, Danal and Cawn were already drifting into the big, empty middle and Wana was making a slow, careful jump to follow them.

Apart from the small pictures of big places shown on learning games, this was the biggest empty place he had ever seen. It would have taken about fifty adults with their arms held out sideways and holding onto each other's hands to stretch from any one side of the hollow space to the side opposite. The last time he had been here his father had told him very slowly that it was the station's cargo bay, that the extending arms of the handling equipment were folded flat against the inner walls and all the sharp edges protected by raised safety nets, padding or sheets of packing when not in use, and that the circular red and yellow door he could see be hind the netting was opened only when there was a ship in dock discharging stores or people. His father had stopped trying to explain when it became clear that he had not under stood what was being said. But he remembered the words, and now he was older and knew what most of them meant.

Neither had he any trouble under standing the meaning of his mother's words even when he was pretending not to hear some of them.

"Be careful," she was saying, "and stay close to the netting. Pull yourself along it with your hands, but slowly so you won't drift away. If you get into trouble, shout and I'll come for you. Don't jump too hard because you're very strong and if you hit something when you are moving too fast, you will be hurt. Another reason why I don't want you to jump into the middle with the others is that if you started spinning there would be nothing to hold onto to stop yourself and you would be dizzy and frightened..."

She was still warning him to be careful as he began pulling himself along the net and stopping every few minutes to let his legs swing back wards and up to point toward the middle where the others were floating and turning slow somersaults.

Sometimes he stopped himself with just one hand although it was harder to hold steady that way. His mother had stopped worrying out loud about him so he decided to try something new.

If he was forbidden to jump up to the middle like the others, maybe he could try jumping from the padded side of a cabinet to another one near by and stay close to the netting on the way over, like his mother had told him to do.

The first few times he tried it the netting kept sloping up to meet him before he reached the other cabinet, until he remembered that the Center was a hollow sphere with curving sides and he should aim higher. He looked all around and discovered that his mother was almost hidden from sight by a projecting cabinet, and any way, all of her attention was on the others who were shouting at her to watch them. He watched, too.

They were drawing up their legs and folding their arms tightly around their knees, and for some reason this made them spin faster. When he tried to do the same behind the shelter of the cabinet, he could not roll himself up as tightly as they could but it worked anyway. It was great fun even though it made him dizzy. He went back to trying to jump between cabinets.

He must still have been dizzy from the spinning, because as soon as he jumped he knew that he had pushed too hard with his feet and that his aim had been bad. He was going to pass right over the thing instead of landing low down on its side. He was high enough for his mother to see him, but she was still watching the others.

He grabbed at the padded upper edge of the cabinet as it floated past below him, but could not hold onto it, and all that happened was that he started himself turning end over end again. The netting was farther below him than it had been during the earlier jumps he had tried, and he was traveling farther across it before it began curving up to meet him. But then he saw that instead of landing on the netting he was going to come down on a flat, white box that was projecting above it.

He hit the top and one side with his feet, the impact making the box explode slowly into flat, white fragments. He saw then that it was made from thick layers of light, stiff plastic, bigger sheets of the same stuff that was used as packing for the other children's games. The sheets had been held together with strips of white tape to cover a panel that had a vision screen and colored buttons on it.

Most of the plastic sheets were being held together by the tape but a few of them had been knocked loose and were drifting away.

His mother chose that moment to look in his direction again.

"I told you to play close to me," she called, "What are you doing?"

"N-Nothing," he said loudly "Wana," she went on. "Be a good girl and jump over there and see what he's doing, then bring him back here.

It's time for the picnic."

The loosened sheets of white plastic were drifting away from the vision screen. He would have to replace them before Wana arrived because she might ask questions about them loudly enough for their mother to overhear and begin scolding him. He grabbed the edge of the nearest sheet in both hands and brought it down quickly toward the screen, but some thing funny happened. The plastic sheet seemed to be pushing against something invisible that could only be the air. The pressure rolled him back ward slowly until he bounced into the netting and had to grab it with one hand to keep from floating away.

Laughing, and with all thought of tidying up the area leaving his mind, he tried it again.

This time he slid one foot under the net and pressed the sole of the other one down on top of it so that a thick strand was held between them to keep him from drifting away, then he began flapping his sheet up and down. He discovered that whenever he moved the sheet downward in front of him he was pushed back wards and he could feel his lower foot pulling against the netting, and when he lifted it upward his upper foot was pressed gently against the netting instead of trying to leave it. Feeling con fused, he looked at his brothers playing above him and the memory of Danal's words to him when he had been flapping his arms up and down like the big bird came back to him.

You can't fly, he had said, because your hands aren't wide enough.

But if he tried it with a sheet of plastic in each hand he felt sure that they would be plenty wide enough.

"What are you doing?" said Wana, who had arrived unnoticed behind him.

"Shush, don't let mother hear you," he said without looking around at her.

"I'm trying to fly like a bird, but it isn't working right."

"Birds are supposed to fly straight," she said in a very loud whisper, "not go up and down like that. Can I play, too?"

"Yes," he said. "The bits of plastic are over there. But what am I doing wrong?"

When he tried to fly straight and level, pushing down with the plastic wings the way the big bird in the education game had done, it made his head and shoulders come up while his legs stayed where they were; and when he lifted the wings, that made him nose-dive into the netting. He tried to fly straight upward by putting his wings together above his head and sweeping them outward and down to the sides of his knees. That caused him to rise quickly but when he swept his wings up again he moved back against the net again.

Then by accident, but mostly be cause he was losing patience with the whole stupid business, he twisted his wrists sideways during the up sweep and found that he kept on moving upward. He tried other things, and found that when he stretched the wings out flat from his sides without flapping them, he slowed almost to a stop. Holding only one wing steady when he was moving made him turn slowly in that direction.

"Wana, look!" he said, forgetting to whisper in his excitement. "When you push down against the air you go up, and if you turn the sheets side ways so they slide through the air edge-on, you don't move back at all and you're ready for another push down..."

"Like this?" said Wana, who had been watching him closely. She laughed and called, "Danal, Cawn.

Look, I'm flying like a bird. Wheeee!"

The two big sheets of plastic were making her tiny body look even smaller, and the quick, excited movements of her shorter arms were pushing her along faster than he was able to go. In her eagerness she was sometimes for getting to turn the sheets completely edge-on during the up-sweeps so that she was wobbling all over the place, but already she was nearly halfway up to where the boys were playing.

"Yes," he said. "But don't move your arms so fast. You look like the pictures of the little fat birds. Try to fly like the big, slow one.

"Like this," he added, flying after her.

His mother began scolding him as soon as she saw them moving away from the netting, but by that time Danal and Cawn were shouting questions at Wana and himself so loudly that he was able to pretend not to hear her. The boys wanted to know where they had found the plastic sheets and how they were able to fly like that? Wana reached them first, but flew helplessly past and fluttered all over the place as she tried to slow down and go back to them. He watched her for a moment, trying to understand the things she was doing wrong, then he used his wings to raise his head and chest so that his legs swung around until he was moving backward. When he started flying in the new direction it surprised him how easy it was to slow to a stop close to where the boys were hanging motionless and watching him without speaking.

"That, that was neat..." Danal began. But the few minutes of silence had allowed their mother's voice to be heard and they had no excuse for ignoring her.

"Mom, there's no problem," Danal went on. "He won't hurt himself, or us. Honestly, he's doing just fine. Cawn, grab my other hand and bend your knees until your feet are flat against mine, then let go and push hard. We have to get back to the net and get some wings of our own..."

"Wait," he said, hoping that he wasn't going to do something stupid again. "It would take a longer time for both of you to get down to the net and crawl over to the plastic sheets. Maybe, maybe if you held onto my legs I could fly you down faster."

"Right," said Danal without hesitation. "Cawn, grab his other leg."

He felt his body begin a slow, twisting spin as their hard fingers tightened in a double grip around his ankles and he was afraid that he would not be able to control himself. But when he started flying again, sweeping the wings from high above his head and sideways to his knees, the weight of the boys dragging behind seemed to stabilize him. By spilling the air from one wing or the other, he was able to turn until he was heading toward the area of netting containing the plastic sheets.

"That's very good," said Danal.

"No it isn't," said Cawn. "We're not moving."

"We're moving, but slowly," said Danal. In the show-offy words he used when he was trying to sound grown-up like their father, he went on, "He has the inertia of three bodies instead of one to overcome. Watch the way he twists his wrists before the up-sweep, and remember how he does it. We're moving faster now..."

They let go of his legs just before he reached the netting, and within a few minutes they had wings, too. At first they were very clumsy, flying into the netting or projecting cabinets while they laughed and shouted at each other. But very soon they were flying close to the netting without touching it, and playing follow-my-leader around and over the padded equipment. Their mother had stopped calling to them to come back for their picnic, but that was because they were making too much noise to hear her and having too much fun to want to stop for anything as boring as food.

He thought that she might be angry and would scold them when they got home, but when he looked across at her she was smiling.

"Let's try to do something difficult," said Danal, using his adult's voice again, "like flying close together in line abreast formation right across the Center. Theoretically, in the weight less condition, the wings should en able us to control movement in three dimensions, right? So line up on the net, let go at the same time, and fly" On the first attempt their line was anything but straight, mostly because Wana got excited and flew too far ahead of everyone else. The second and third attempts were better al though their line was still a bit crooked. During the fourth attempt when they were holding a tight, neat formation and moving toward the middle, Cawn kicked his right wing, breaking the sheet of plastic in two.

With only a wing and a half to fly on, he kept turning sideways even when he tried to move the half wing twice as fast as the good one.

Cawn turned away quickly and flew down to the net, returning a few minutes later with another sheet of plastic held between his knees.

"I'm sorry," he said, handing him the new wing. "It was an accident."

It was the first time that Cawn had said anything to him that had not had words like "Big" or "Stupid" in it somewhere.

"Right," said Danal, flying closer and looking straight at him. "I've been thinking. Flying in formation isn't very hard to do. We should do something with our wings that is fun but more difficult, don't you think?"

Before he could reply, Wana shouted, "Oh, yes," and Cawn said "Like what?"

The game they devised wasn't all his idea because Danal and Cawn and even Wana suggested changes that made it more complicated and much more fun. They played it right in the middle of the Center, flying around and over and under each other as close as they could without touching - like a slow, ungainly swarm of giant insects. Their mother had stopped telling them to be careful and was just watching and smiling up at them.

They had all become very good at the game, there were no more collisions or broken wings, and even though it was exciting and hard work he was having fun, much more fun than he could have believed possible. That was because the others were not treating him like he was stupid any more. But it was a quiet game because they were all concentrating so hard on what they were doing that there was no time to waste on shouting or even laughing.

Their busy silence was broken by the voice of his father who had joined his mother on the net.

"Weightless flying," he said quietly "Whose bright idea was that?"

"When I tell you," his mother replied, "you won't believe me."

"You mean ... him?"

"Yes," she said, "the un-birthday boy" His father was silent for so long that he felt sure that he was going to be scolded, but instead said, "They're very good at it, especially him. But let's face it, even with the best will in the world we never were qualified to handle this kind of situation. He is not a normal child."

"No," said his mother

"Do you think this sudden aptitude for weightless maneuvering," his father went on very quietly, "means that he's beginning to mature mentally as well as physically, or is that just wishful thinking on my part? It's a pity we won't get the chance to find out."

"Why not?" said his mother sharply.

"What are you talking about?"

"Keep your voice down," he whispered, "I don't want him to hear us, at least not until we decide how and what to tell him. We notified the childcare authorities when we found him, remember, but in the circumstances I wasn't sure if they would be able to do anything about him. They have.

He'll be leaving us very soon.

"Children," he went on, raising his voice, "I'm sorry for cutting short your fun, but you'll have to come home right away. There is a ship expected soon, an unscheduled visitor, and the Center must be readied for its arrival. But don't worry, I'll make sure there are more plastic wings available the next time you play here. Quickly, please."

The others were protesting loudly, but he kept quiet because he was remembering the things his father had been saying about him that he was not supposed to overhear, and wondering what they meant. Suddenly the nice, warm feeling of belonging that s he had felt since the flying game had started was leaving him, and he was I feeling afraid.

They were returning to the net, and showing off by flying in the tightest formation they had ever tried, when he said, "Danal, can I fly with you like this next time? This is the best birthday there has ever been. Thank you." Cawn laughed. "But it isn't even I your birthday."

"Stop teasing him, Cawn," said Danal. Keeping one eye on his place in the formation he went on, "It isn't your birthday, so far as we know, be cause nobody here knows when you were born. We don't even know your name, but after today we'll have to stop calling you stupid. You found the SB plastic sheets and were smart enough to see how we could fly with them. If we had found them we would probably have done the same, but you did it first, and as a result we had more fun than we ever have before. So don't worry, we will not fly again without our instructor. It is we who should thank you.

"If you want to," he went on, "you can make this your birthday, too, and from now on we'll have parties on the same day. Why are your eyes wet?"

"I don't know," he said.

By the time they reached their waiting parents, there were adults crawling all over the Center, removing the padding from the machines and detaching and stowing the netting. His parents said that they could have their picnic at home, and after that they did not speak, which was not the way they usually behaved on a birthday.

He had no interest in the picnic be cause, no matter what the others got, he would be given the usual soft, tasteless mush. On other birthdays this made him angry, but today they all told him that he could play with their games if he was very careful. He had just finished a long, complicated game without either winning or breaking anything when he heard the distant sound of the docking siren.

His father left quickly and his mother sat down beside him. She put a thin hand on the back of his neck.

"Please," he said, "I don't want to leave you. I like it here, now."

She began pushing her fingers through his hair, the way he liked her to do, without speaking.

"I-I know you don't like me," he said, "because I'm big and stupid and sometimes I break things and make you angry. And because you don't give me nice food to eat and father does nasty things when I am alone in my room-" "But he had to do those things to you," she broke in, "to find out why ordinary food made you sick and the reasons for the other things wrong with you. We explained it to you, but you didn't understand. He didn't mean to hurt you, or risk frightening the other children.

"Don't worry," she went on, tightening her fingers in his hair and shaking his head gently, "he will never do those things to you again."

"It's all right," he said quickly. "He can do it again if he wants to. The food you give me is all right, too, and I don't mind getting other people's old presents. But I'm not as stupid and clumsy as I was, you saw me flying in the Center and, and I'll try to be better and not break things and speak my words properly and-" Suddenly he turned and wrapped his arms so tightly around her that she moaned and her breath puffed into his face. He had forgotten that he was not supposed to hug the other members of the family like that.

"I'm sorry" he said, letting his arms fall loose again. "It's just that today was nice, the nicest day I ever had.

Even Danal and Cawn like me now and, and I'm getting smarter. Please, I don't want to be sent away."

The others had stopped eating and playing their games to look at their mother. Danal said, "Why should he be sent away?"

When she replied she was looking only at him but seemed to be answering everybody.

"I'm sorry" she said, "but you don't belong here. You already know or suspect some of this, because sometimes the boys say things they shouldn't. But this may be the last chance I have to tell you how you came to be here and why you have to go away. I believe that you have become intelligent enough to understand what I'm saying."

He had been found as a very young infant who was close to death in a survival pod that was thought to have come from a small ship which had detonated nearby, scattering its wreckage so finely that they had been unable to discover anything about the number or identity of the occupants. The incident had been reported to the childcare authorities on the home world, but that was very far away and the response time was expected to be in proportion to the distance. As a temporary mea sure, because of his father's profession plus the fact that they were the only couple with children on the station, they had offered themselves as temporary foster-parents.

They had not thought that the period would be a lengthy one because everyone had expected him to die.

"But you didn't die," she went on, "although many times we thought you would. Especially when the nice, ordinary food we tried to give you brought out a rash on your entire body, or raised your temperature or made you throw up or dirty your bed.

You kept growing bigger but not much smarter and you couldn't talk right and you broke things all the time. We didn't know what was wrong with you, and when your father tried to find out, you cried and I made him stop it. The stuff we give you now doesn't taste nice, but it is specially prepared so as not to make you sick. We hadn't the proper facilities for treating you here and our authorities, who would know better what to do, have been very slow to respond so that we became the only family you had.

"We tried to treat you and love you as one of the family," she went on, placing her other thin, boney arm tightly around him, "we really did.

Your lather and I, I mean your foster-father and I, came to like you a lot, and we will miss you. But now we have to pass you on to people who will know how to treat you properly. You have never been happy here and -"

"But I'm happy now-" he began, when the voice of his father on the communicator made him break off "We're ready for the handover," he said over the sound of many other voices talking loudly in the back ground. "Quickly, dear, bring him to the rec room. Bring everyone to the rec room."

That was a room big enough to hold everyone on the station, his mother had once told him, which was fitted with machines and games that exercised the body as well as the mind. She had laughed and added that only grown-ups were allowed to go there because the adults drank things that were not suitable for children.

Now he would be able to see it but he didn't want to go.

"No!" his mother replied in a voice even louder than his father's. "It's been hard enough trying to say good bye to him here. Having to do it all again in public wouldn't be fair to him or the other children, or me. Give us a few more minutes together, then I'll bring him to you."

"You don't understand, dear," said his father. "Bring everybody. You'll all want to see this. They sent another doctor to look after him. But it wasn't our child care authorities who sent her, it was theirs!"

He was afraid, and on the way he hung back for as long as possible until his mother pushed him through the recreation room door. But when he saw the figure standing in a clear area of floor beside a table that barely came up to her knees, something so strange and wonderful happened in his mind that he could hardly breathe.

She was big and thick and so tall that her head almost touched the room's high ceiling. Her legs and arms and body bulged out so much that they made her white coveralls look tight, and there were two big, soft bulges on the front of her chest. She had a big head, too, and hair like his except that it was black with gray streaks in it. Without knowing why, he let go of his mother's hand and ran to her. She knelt down quickly so that he ran straight into her open arms.

They squeezed him so tightly that he could hardly breathe. But they were big, soft arms, not like his mother's thin, hard ones, so they didn't hurt him. Her eyes were like his, too, be cause they were beginning to get wet.

She pushed the soft, pink edges of her mouth against his forehead for a moment, which was the first time anyone had done that to him, then gently moved his arms from around her neck and stood up. Looking at the people crowding the room, she began to speak nonsense words. But there was a box on the table beside her, which repeated them so that he knew what she was saying even though he didn't understand all the words.

"Based on the elapsed time since the accident to their survey vessel," she said, "plus the genetic information available to us on his parents' medical files, which dictates the hair and eye coloring and other inherited physical characteristics, I have no doubt that this is their son. Because of the vast distances involved between the accident site and our respective home worlds, the bureaucratic delays, the general disbelief on both sides that it was possible for him to survive for so long, a very long time passed before we learned about the survivor or your people would allow us to do anything about him. Regrettably, the greater share of the blame is ours because, instinctively, and we now realize mistakenly, our two cultures disliked and distrusted each other and I deliberately avoided making the contact in depth that would have reduced our growing hostility. But this incident, the way you have cared for this child as one of your own, will end what could have become a very dangerous situation.

"The major responsibility for that," she went on, looking only at his father, "lies with you, Doctor, and your family. With minimum physiological information and a subject who was too young to be able to speak or help himself, not only did you devise the food regimen that enabled him to survive in good health, your family adopted him, cared for and brought him up as one of your own. Fostering such a child must have posed extreme difficulties for everyone concerned, and if the positions had been reversed I do not believe that I could have coped with them, but I am sure that my later physical examination will only confirm the fact that you have raised a strong and healthy seven-year-old Earth-human boy. My sincere professional and personal compliments to all of you.

"Now that we are beginning to learn more about your culture," she continued, "including the deep significance you place on a person's birth-date and correct personal identification, I can tell you that his name is Thomas Carmichael although, be cause of his youth, we would call him Tommy..."

"Tomee," said Wana, leaning back onto her tail to look up at her, "is a nice name."

Cawn said, "And now he has a birthday, too."

"Now," said Danal, "he has two birthdays."

She smiled down at them and went on, "Now that they know you have kept him alive, he has many relatives who are anxious to have him home as soon as possible..."

He heard but did not listen to the other things everyone was saying be cause he was hugging and saying good-bye to the only family he had ever known. He was careful not to squeeze their thin, shiny bodies too hard, and he was especially gentle with little Wana who had always been his best friend. Without knowing why he did what the giant, gray-haired woman had done to him, he pushed his mouth against the top of her tiny, round head just between the eyes.

Her eyes were not like his because they opened and closed from the sides and they didn't get wet, but he had the feeling that she wished they could.

BELUTHAHATCHIE

Andy Duncan

Everybody else got off the train at Hell, but I figured, it's a free country. So I commenced to make myself a mite more comfortable. I put my feet up and leaned back against the window, laid my guitar across my chest and settled in with my hat tipped down over my eyes, almost. I didn't know what the next stop was but I knew I'd like it better than Hell.

Whoo! I never saw such a mess. All that crowd of people jammed together on the Hell platform so tight you could faint standing up. One old battle-hammed woman hollering for Jesus, most everybody else just mumbling and crying and hugging their bags and leaning into each other and waiting to be told where to go. And hot? Man, I ain't just beating my gums there. Not as hot as the Delta, but hot enough to keep old John on the train. No, sir, I told myself, no room out there for me.

Fat old conductor man pushed on down the aisle kinda slow, waiting on me to move. I decided I'd wait on that, too.

"Hey, nigger boy." He slapped my foot with a rolled-up newspaper. Felt like the Atlanta paper. "This ain't no sleeping car."

"Git up off me, man. I ain't done nothing."

"Listen at you. Who you think you are, boy? Think you run the railroad? You don't look nothing like Mr. George Pullman." The conductor tried to put his foot up on the seat and lean on his knee, but he gave up with a grunt.

I ran one finger along my guitar strings, not hard enough to make a sound but just hard enough to feel them. "I ain't got a ticket, neither," I bit off, "but it was your railroad's pleasure to bring me this far, and it's my pleasure to ride on a little further, and I don't see what cause you got to be so astorperious about it, Mr. Fat Ass."

He started puffing and blowing. "What? What?" He was teakettle hot. You'd think I'd done something. "What did you call me, boy?" He whipped out a strap, and I saw how it was, and I was ready.

"Let him alone."

Another conductor was standing outside the window across the aisle, stooping over to look in. He must have been right tall and right big too, filling up the window like that. Cut off most of the light. I couldn't make out his face, but I got the notion that pieces of it was sliding around, like there wan't quite a face ready to look at yet. "The Boss will pick him up at the next stop. Let him be."

"The Boss?" Fat Ass was getting whiter all the time.

"The Boss said it would please him to greet this nigger personally."

Fat Ass wan't studying about me anymore. He slunk off, looking back big-eyed at the man outside the window. I let go my razor and let my hand creep up out of my sock, slow and easy, making like I was just shifting cause my leg was asleep.

The man outside hollered: "Board! All aboard! Next stop, Beluthahatchie!"

That old mama still a-going. "Jesus! Save us, Jesus!"

"All aboard for Beluthahatchie!"

"Jesus!"

We started rolling out.

"All aboard!"

"Sweet Je—" And her voice cut off just like that, like the squawk of a hen Meemaw would snatch for Sunday dinner. Wan't my business. I looked out the window as the scenery picked up speed. Wan't nothing to see, just fields and ditches and swaybacked mules and people stooping and picking, stooping and picking, and by and by a porch with old folks sitting on shuck-bottomed chairs looking out at all the years that ever was, and I thought I'd seen enough of all that to last me a while. Wan't any of my business at all.

When I woke up I was lying on a porch bench at another station, and hanging on one chain was a blown-down sign that said Beluthahatchie. The sign wan't swinging cause there wan't no breath of air. Not a soul else in sight neither. The tracks ran off into the fields on both ends as far as I could see, but they was all weeded up like no train been through since the Surrender. The windows over my head was boarded up like the bank back home. The planks along the porch han't been swept in years by nothing but the wind, and the dust was in whirly patterns all around. Still lying down, I reached slowly beneath the bench, groping the air, till I heard, more than felt, my fingers pluck a note or two from the strings of my guitar. I grabbed it by the neck and sat up, pulling the guitar into my lap and hugging it, and I felt some better.

Pigeons in the eaves was a-fluttering and a-hooting all mournful-like, but I couldn't see 'em. I reckon they was pigeons. Meemaw used to say that pigeons sometimes was the souls of dead folks let out of Hell. I didn't think those folks back in Hell was flying noplace, but I did feel something was wrong, bad wrong, powerful wrong. I had the same crawly feeling as before I took that fatal swig— when Jar Head Sam, that harp-playing bastard, passed me a poisoned bottle at a Mississippi jook joint and I woke up on that one-way train.

Then a big old hound dog ambled around the corner of the station on my left, and another big old hound dog ambled around the corner of the station on my right. Each one was nearbouts as big as a calf and so fat it could hardly go, swanking along with its belly on the planks and its nose down. When the dogs snuffled up to the bench where I was sitting, their legs give out and they flopped down, yawned, grunted, and went fast to sleep like they'd been poleaxed. I could see the fleas hopping across their big butts. I started laughing.

"Lord, the hellhounds done caught up to me now! I surely must have led them a chase, I surely must. Look how wore out they are!" I hollered and cried, I was laughing so hard. One of them broke wind real long, and that set me off again. "Here come the brimstone! Here come the sulfur! Whoo! Done took my breath. Oh, Lordy." I wiped my eyes.

Then I heard two way-off sounds, one maybe a youngun dragging a stick along a fence, and the other maybe a car motor.

"Well, shit," I said.

Away off down the tracks, I saw a little spot of glare vibrating along in the sun. The flappity racket got louder and louder. Some fool was driving his car along on the tracks, a bumpety-bump, a bumpety-bump. It was a Hudson Terraplane, right sporty, exactly like what Peola June used to percolate around town in, and the chrome on the fender and hood was shining like a conk buster's hair.

The hound dogs was sitting up now, watching the car. They was stiff and still on each side of my bench, like deacons sitting up with the dead.

When the car got nigh the platform it lurched up out of the cut, gravel spitting, gears grinding, and shut off in the yard at the end of the porch where I was sitting. Sheets of dust sailed away. The hot engine ticked. Then the driver's door opened, and out slid the devil. I knew him well. Time I saw him slip down off the seat and hitch up his pants, I knew.

He was a sunburnt, bandy-legged, pussel-gutted li'l peckerwood. He wore braces and khaki pants and a dirty white undershirt and a big derby hat that had white hair flying out all around it like it was attached to the brim, like if he'd tip his hat to the ladies his hair would come off too. He had a bright-red possum face, with beady, dumb black eyes and a long sharp nose, and no chin at all hardly and a big goozlum in his neck that jumped up and down like he couldn't swallow his spit fast enough. He slammed the car door and scratched himself a little, up one arm and then the other, then up one leg till he got to where he liked it. He hunkered down and spit in the dust and looked all unconcerned like maybe he was waiting on a tornado to come along and blow some victuals his way, and he didn't take any more notice of me than the hound dogs had.

I wan't used to being treated such. "You keep driving on the tracks thataway, boss," I called, "and that Terraplane gone be butt-sprung for sure."

He didn't even look my way. After a long while, he stood up and leaned on a fender and lifted one leg and looked at the bottom of his muddy clod-hopper, then put it down and lifted the other and looked at it too. Then he hitched his pants again and headed across the yard toward me. He favored his right leg a little and hardly picked up his feet at all when he walked. He left ruts in the yard like a plow. When he reached the steps, he didn't so much climb 'em as stand his bantyweight self on each one and look proud, like each step was all his'n now, and then go on to claim the next one too. Once on the porch, he sat down with his shoulders against a post, took off his hat and fanned himself. His hair had a better hold on his head than I thought, what there was of it. Then he pulled out a stick and a pocketknife and commenced to whittle. But he did all these things so deliberate and thoughtful that it was almost the same as him talking, so I kept quiet and waited for the words to catch up.

"It will be a strange and disgraceful day unto this world," he finally said, "when I ask a gut-bucket nigger guitar player for advice on auto-MO-bile mechanics, or for anything else except a tune now and again." He had eyes like he'd been shot twice in the face. "And furthermore, I am the Lord of Darkness and the Father of Lies, and if I want to drive my 1936 Hudson Terraplane, with its six-cylinder seventy-horsepower engine, out into the middle of some loblolly and shoot out its tires and rip up its seats and piss down its radiator hole, why, I will do it and do it again seven more times afore breakfast, and the voice that will stop me will not be yourn. You hearing me, John?"

"Ain't my business," I said. Like always, I was waiting to see how it was.

"That's right, John, it ain't your business," the devil said. "Nothing I do is any of your business, John, but everything you do is mine. I was there the night you took that fatal drink, John. I saw you fold when your gut bent double on you, and I saw the shine of your blood coming up. I saw that whore you and Jar Head was squabbling over doing business at your funeral. It was a sorry-ass death of a sorry-ass man, John, and I had a big old time with it."

The hound dogs had laid back down, so I stretched out and rested my feet on one of them. It rolled its eyes up at me like its feelings was hurt.

"I'd like to see old Jar Head one more time," I said. "If he'll be along directly, I'll wait here and meet his train."

"Jar Head's plumb out of your reach now, John," the devil said, still whittling. "I'd like to show you around your new home this afternoon. Come take a tour with me."

"I had to drive fifteen miles to get to that jook joint in the first place," I said, "and then come I don't know how far on the train to Hell and past it. I've done enough traveling for one day."

"Come with me, John."

"I thank you, but I'll just stay here."

"It would please me no end if you made my rounds with me, John." The stick he was whittling started moving in his hand. He had to grip it a little to hang on, but he just kept smiling. The stick started to bleed along the cuts, welling up black red as the blade skinned it. "I want to show off your new home place. You'd like that, wouldn't you, John?" The blood curled down his arm like a snake.

I stood up and shook my head real slow and disgusted, like I was bored by his conjuring, but I made sure to hold my guitar between us as I walked past him. I walked to the porch steps with my back to the devil, and I was headed down them two at a time when he hollered out behind, "John! Where do you think you're going?"

I said real loud, not looking back: "I done enough nothing for one day. I'm taking me a tour. If your ass has slipped between the planks and got stuck, I'll fetch a couple of mules to pull you free."

I heard him cuss and come scrambling after me with that leg a-dragging, sounding just like a scarecrow out on a stroll. I was holding my guitar closer to me all the time.

I wan't real surprised that he let those two hound dogs ride up on the front seat of the Terraplane like they was Mrs. Roosevelt, while I had to walk in the road alongside, practically in the ditch. The devil drove real slow, talking to me out the window the whole time.

"Whyn't you make me get off the train at Hell, with the rest of those sorry people?"

"Hell's about full," he said. "When I first opened for business out here, John, Hell wan't no more'n a wide spot in the road. It took a long time to get any size on it. When you stole that dime from your poor old Meemaw to buy a French post card and she caught you and flailed you across the yard, even way back then, Hell wan't no bigger'n Baltimore. But it's about near more'n I can handle now, I tell you. Now I'm filling up towns all over these parts. Ginny Gall. Diddy-Wah-Diddy. West Hell—I'd run out of ideas when I named West Hell, John."

A horsefly had got into my face and just hung there. The sun was fierce, and my clothes was sticking to me. My razor slid hot along my ankle. I kept favoring my guitar, trying to keep it out of the dust as best I could.

"Beluthahatchie, well, I'll be frank with you, John. Beluthahatchie ain't much of a place. I won't say it don't have possibilities, but right now it's mostly just that railroad station, and a crossroads, and fields. One long, hot, dirty field after another." He waved out the window at the scenery and grinned. He had yellow needly teeth. "You know your way around a field, I reckon, don't you, John?"

"I know enough to stay out of 'em."

His laugh was like a man cutting tin. "I swear you are a caution, John. It's a wonder you died so young."

We passed a right lot of folks, all of them working in the sun. Pulling tobacco. Picking cotton. Hoeing beans. Old folks scratching in gardens. Even younguns carrying buckets of water with two hands, slopping nearly all of it on the ground afore they'd gone three steps. All the people looked like they had just enough to eat to fill out the sad expression on their faces, and they all watched the devil as he drove slowly past. All those folks stared at me hard, too, and at the guitar like it was a third arm waving at 'em. I turned once to swat that blessed horsefly and saw a group of field hands standing in a knot, looking my way and pointing.

"Where all the white folks at?" I asked.

"They all up in heaven," the devil said. "You think they let niggers into heaven?" We looked at each other a long time. Then the devil laughed again. "You ain't buying that one for a minute, are you, John?"

I was thinking about Meemaw. I knew she was in heaven, if anyone was. When I was a youngun I figured she musta practically built the place, and had been paying off on it all along. But I didn't say nothing.

"No, John, it ain't that simple," the devil said. "Beluthahatchie's different for everybody, just like Hell. But you'll be seeing plenty of white folks. Overseers. Train conductors. Sheriff's deputies. If you get uppity, why, you'll see whole crowds of white folks. Just like home, John. Everything's the same. Why should it be any different?"

" 'Cause you're the devil," I said. "You could make things a heap worse."

"Now, could I really, John? Could I really?"

In the next field, a big man with hands like gallon jugs and a pink splash across his face was struggling all alone with a spindly mule and a plow made out of slats. "Get on, sir," he was telling the mule. "Get on with you." He didn't even look around when the devil come chugging up alongside.

The devil gummed two fingers and whistled. "Ezekiel. Ezekiel! Come on over here, boy."

Ezekiel let go the plow and stumbled over the furrows, stepping high and clumsy in the thick dusty earth, trying to catch up to the Terraplane and not mess up the rows too bad. The devil han't slowed down any—in fact, I believe he had speeded up some. Left to his own doin's, the mule headed across the rows, the plow jerking along sideways behind him.

"Yessir?" Ezekiel looked at me sorta curious like, and nodded his head so slight I wondered if he'd done it at all. "What you need with me, boss?"

"I wanted you to meet your new neighbor. This here's John, and you ain't gone believe this, but he used to be a big man in the jook joints in the Delta. Writing songs and playing that dimestore git fiddle."

Ezekiel looked at me and said, "Yessir, I know John's songs." And I could tell he meant more than hearing them. "Yes, John mighta been famous and saved enough whore money to buy him a decent instrument if he hadn't up and got hisself killed. Yes, John used to be one high-rolling nigger, but you ain't so high now, are you John?" I stared at the li'l peckerwood and spit out: "High enough to see where I'm going, Ole Massa."

I heard Ezekiel suck in his breath. The devil looked away from me real casual and back to Ezekiel, like we was chatting on a veranda someplace.

"Well, Ezekiel, this has been a nice long break for you, but I reckon you ought to get on back to work now. Looks like your mule's done got loose." He cackled and speeded up the car. Ezekiel and I both walked a few more steps and stopped. We watched the back of the Terraplane getting smaller, and then I turned to watch his face from the side. I han't seen that look on any of my people since Mississippi.

I said, "Man, why do you all take this shit?"

He wiped his forehead with his wrist and adjusted his hat. "Why do you?" he asked. "Why do you, John?" He was looking at me strange, and when he said my name it was like a one-word sentence all its own.

I shrugged. "I'm just seeing how things are. It's my first day."

"Your first day will be the same as all the others, then. That sure is the story with me. How come you called him Ole Massa just now?"

"Don't know. Just to get a rise out of him, I reckon."

Away off down the road, the Terraplane had stopped, engine still running, and the little cracker was yelling. "John! You best catch up, John. You wouldn't want me to leave you wandering in the dark, now would you?"

I started walking, not in any gracious hurry though, and Ezekiel paced me. "I asked 'cause it put me in mind of the old stories. You remember those stories, don't you? About Ole Massa and his slave by name of John? And how they played tricks on each other all the time?"

"Meemaw used to tell such when I was a youngun. What about it?"

He was trotting to keep up with me now, but I wan't even looking his way. "And there's older stories than that, even. Stories about High John the Conqueror. The one who could—"

"Get on back to your mule," I said. "I think the sun has done touched you."

"—the one who could set his people free," Ezekiel said, grabbing my shoulder and swinging me around. He stared into my face like a man looking for something he's dropped and has got to find.

"John!" the devil cried.

We stood there in the sun, me and Ezekiel, and then something went out of his eyes, and he let go and walked back across the ditch and trudged after the mule without a word.

I caught up to the Terraplane just in time for it to roll off again. I saw how it was, all right.

A ways up the road, a couple of younguns was fishing off the right side of a plank bridge, and the devil announced he would stop to see had they caught anything, and if they had, to take it for his supper. He slid out of the Terraplane, with it still running, and the dogs fell out after him, a-hoping for a snack, I reckon. When the devil got hunkered down good over there with the younguns, facing the swift-running branch, I sidled up the driver's side of the car, eased my guitar into the back seat, eased myself into the front seat, yanked the thing into gear and drove off. As I went past I saw three round O's—a youngun and the devil and a youngun again.

It was a pure pleasure to sit down, and the breeze coming through the windows felt good too. I commenced to get even more of a breeze going, on that long, straightaway road. I just could hear the devil holler back behind:

"John! Get your handkerchief-headed, free-school Negro ass back here with my auto-MO-bile! Johhhhnnn!"

"Here I come, old boss," I said, and I jerked the wheel and slewed that car around and barreled off back toward the bridge. The younguns and the dogs was ahead of the devil in figuring things out. The younguns scrambled up a tree as quick as squirrels, and the dogs went loping into a ditch, but the devil was all preoccupied, doing a salty jump and cussing me for a dadblasted blagstagging liver-lipped stormbuzzard, jigging around right there in the middle of the bridge, and he was still cussing when I drove full tilt onto that bridge and he did not cuss any less when he jumped clean out from under his hat and he may even have stepped it up some when he went over the side. I heard a ker-plunk like a big rock chunked into a pond just as I swerved to bust the hat with a front tire and then I was off the bridge and racing back the way we'd come, and that hat mashed in the road behind me like a possum.

I knew something simply awful was going to happen, but man! I slapped the dashboard and kissed my hand and slicked it back across my hair and said aloud, "Lightly, slightly, and politely." And I meant that thing. But my next move was to whip that razor out of my sock, flip it open and lay it on the seat beside me, just in case.

I came up the road fast, and from way off I saw Ezekiel and the mule planted in the middle of his field like rocks. As they got bigger I saw both their heads had been turned my way the whole time, like they'd started looking before I even came over the hill. When I got level with them I stopped, engine running, and leaned on the horn until Ezekiel roused himself and walked over. The mule followed behind, like a yard dog, without being cussed or hauled or whipped. I must have been a sight. Ezekiel shook his head the whole way. "Oh, John," he said. "Oh, my goodness. Oh, John."

"Jump in, brother," I said. "Let Ole Massa plow this field his own damn self."

Ezekiel rubbed his hands along the chrome on the side of the car, swiping up and down and up and down. I was scared he'd burn himself. "Oh, John." He kept shaking his head. "John tricks Ole Massa again. High John the Conqueror rides the Terraplane to glory."

"Quit that, now. You worry me."

"John, those songs you wrote been keeping us going down here. Did you know that?"

"I 'preciate it."

"But lemme ask you, John. Lemme ask you something before you ride off. How come you wrote all those songs about hellhounds and the devil and such? How come you was so sure you'd be coming down here when you died?"

I fidgeted and looked in the mirror at the road behind. "Man, I don't know. Couldn't imagine nothing else. Not for me, anyway."

Ezekiel laughed once, loud, boom, like a shotgun going off.

"Don't be doing that, man. I about jumped out of my britches. Come on and let's go."

He shook his head again. "Maybe you knew you was needed down here, John. Maybe you knew we was singing, and telling stories, and waiting." He stepped back into the dirt. "This is your ride, John. But I'll make sure everybody knows what you done. I'll tell 'em that things has changed in Beluthahatchie." He looked off down the road. "You'd best get on. Shoot—maybe you can find some jook joint and have some fun afore he catches up to you."

"Maybe so, brother, maybe so."

I han't gone two miles afore I got that bad old crawly feeling. I looked over to the passengers' side of the car and saw it was all spattered with blood, the learner and the carpet and the chrome on the door, and both those mangy hound dogs was sprawled across the front seat wallowing in it, both licking my razor like it was something good, and that's where the blood was coming from, welling up from the blade with each pass of their tongues. Time I caught sight of the dogs, they both lifted their heads and went to howling. It wan't no howl like any dog should howl. It was more like a couple of panthers in the night.

"Hush up, you dogs!" I yelled. "Hush up, I say!" One of the dogs kept on howling, but the other looked me in the eyes and gulped air, his jowls flapping, like he was fixing to bark, but instead of barking said: "Hush yourself, nigger."

When I looked back at the road, there wan't no road, just a big thicket of bushes and trees a-coming at me. Then came a whole lot of screeching and scraping and banging, with me holding onto the wheel just to keep from flying out of the seat, and then the car went sideways and I heard an awful bang and a crack and then I didn't know anything else. I just opened my eyes later, I don't know how much later, and found me and my guitar lying on the shore of the Lake of the Dead.

I had heard tell of that dreadful place, but I never had expected to see it for myself. Preacher Dodds whispered to us younguns once or twice about it, and said you have to work awful hard and be awful mean to get there, and once you get there, there ain't no coming back. "Don't seek it, my children, don't seek it," he'd say.

As far as I could see, all along the edges of the water, was bones and carcasses and lumps that used to be animals—mules and horses and cows and coons and even little dried-up birds scattered like hickory chips, and some things lying away off that might have been animals and might not have been, oh Lord, I didn't go to look. A couple of buzzards was strolling the edge of the water, not acting hungry nor vicious but just on a tour, I reckon. The sun was setting, but the water didn't cast no shine at all. It had a dim and scummy look, so flat and still that you'd be tempted to try to walk across it, if any human could bear seeing what lay on the other side. "Don't seek it, my children, don't seek it." I han't sought it, but now the devil had sent me there, and all I knew to do was hold my guitar close to me and watch those buzzards a-picking and a-pecking and wait for it to get dark. And Lord, what would this place be like in the dark?

But the guitar did feel good up against me thataway, like it had stored up all the songs I ever wrote or sung to comfort me in a hard time. I thought about those field hands a-pointing my way, and about Ezekiel sweating along behind his mule, and the way he grabbed aholt of my shoulder and swung me around. And I remembered the new song I had been fooling with all day in my head while I was following that li'l peckerwood in the Terraplane.

"Well, boys," I told the buzzards, "if the devil's got some powers I reckon I got some, too. I didn't expect to be playing no blues after I was dead. But I guess that's all there is to play now. 'Sides, I've played worse places."

I started humming and strumming, and then just to warm up I played "Rambling on My Mind" cause it was, and "Sweet Home Chicago" cause I figured I wouldn't see that town no more, and "Terraplane Blues" on account of that damn car. Then I sang the song I had just made up that day.

I'm down in Beluthahatchie, baby,

Way out where the trains don't run

Yes, I'm down in Beluthahatchie, baby,

Way out where the trains don't run

Who's gonna take you strolling now

Since your man he is dead and gone

My body's all laid out mama

But my soul can't get no rest

My body's all laid out mama

But my soul can't get no rest

Cause you'll be sportin with another man

Lookin for some old Mr. Second Best

Plain folks got to walk the line

But the Devil he can up and ride

Folks like us we walk the line

But the Devil he can up and ride

And I won't never have blues enough

Ooh, to keep that Devil satisfied.

When I was done it was black dark and the crickets was zinging and everything was changed.

"You can sure get around this country," I said, "just a-sitting on your ass."

I was in a cane-back chair on the porch of a little wooden house, with bugs smacking into an oil lamp over my head. Just an old cropper place, sitting in the middle of a cotton field, but it had been spruced up some. Somebody had swept the yard clean, from what I could see of it, and on a post above the dipper was a couple of yellow flowers in a nailed-up Chase & Sanborn can.

When I looked back down at the yard, though, it wan't clean anymore. There was words written in the dirt, big and scrawly like from someone dragging his foot.

DON'T GET A BIG HEAD JOHN

I'LL BE BACK

Sitting on my name was those two fat old hound dogs. "Get on with your damn stinking talking selves," I yelled, and I shied a rock at them. It didn't go near as far as I expected, just sorta plopped down into the dirt, but the hounds yawned and got up, snuffling each other, and waddled off into the dark.

I stood up and stretched and mumbled. But something was still shifting in the yard, just past where the light was. Didn't sound like no dogs, though.

"Who that? Who that who got business with a wore out dead man?"

Then they come up toward the porch a little closer where I could see. It was a whole mess of colored folks, men in overalls and women in aprons, granny women in bonnets pecking the ground with walking sticks, younguns with their bellies pookin out and no pants on, an old man with Coke-bottle glasses and his eyes swimming in your face nearly, and every last one of them grinning like they was touched. Why, Preacher Dodds woulda passed the plate and called it a revival. They massed up against the edge of the porch, crowding closer in and bumping up against each other, and reaching their arms out and taking hold of me, my lapels, my shoulders, my hands, my guitar, my face, the little ones aholt of my pants legs—not hauling on me or messing with me, just touching me feather light here and there like Meemaw used to touch her favorite quilt after she'd already folded it to put away. They was talking, too, mumbling and whispering and saying, "Here he is. We heard he was coming and here he is. God bless you friend, God bless you brother, God bless you son." Some of the womenfolks was crying, and there was Ezekiel, blowing his nose on a rag.

"Y'all got the wrong man," I said, directly, but they was already heading back across the yard, which was all churned up now, no words to read and no pattern neither. They was looking back at me and smiling and touching, holding hands and leaning into each other, till they was all gone and it was just me and the crickets and the cotton.

Wan't nowhere else to go, so I opened the screen door and went on in the house. There was a bed all turned down with a feather pillow, and in the middle of the checkered oilcloth on the table was a crock of molasses, a jar of buttermilk, and a plate covered with a rag. The buttermilk was cool like it had been chilling in the well, with water beaded up on the sides of the jar. Under the rag was three hoecakes and a slab of bacon.

When I was done with my supper, I latched the front door, lay down on the bed and was just about dead to the world when I heard something else out in the yard— swish, swish, swish. Out the window I saw, in the edge so of the porch light, one old granny woman with a shuck broom, smoothing out the yard where the folks had been. She was sweeping it as clean as for company on a Sunday. She looked up from under her bonnet and showed me what teeth she had and waved from the wrist like a youngun, and then she backed on out of the light, swish swish swish, rubbing out her tracks as she went.

STANDNG ROOM ONLY

Karen Joy Fowler

On Good Friday 1865, Washington, D.C. was crowded with tourists and revelers. Even Willard’s, which claimed to be the largest hotel in the country, with room for 1200 guests, had been booked to capacity. Its lobbies and sitting rooms were hot with bodies. Gas light hissed from golden chandeliers, spilled over the doormen’s uniforms of black and maroon. Many of the revelers were women. In 1865, women were admired for their stoutness and went anywhere they could fit their hoop skirts. The women at Willard’s wore garishly colored dresses with enormous skirts and resembled great inverted tulips. The men were in swallow coats.

Outside it was almost spring. The forsythia bloomed, dusting the city with yellow. Weeds leapt up in the public parks; the roads melted to mud. Pigs roamed like dogs about the city, and dead cats by the dozens floated in the sewers and perfumed the rooms of the White House itself.

The Metropolitan Hotel contained an especially rowdy group of celebrants from Baltimore, who passed the night of April 13 toasting everything under the sun. They resurrected on the morning of the 14th, pale and spent, surrounded by broken glass and sporting bruises they couldn’t remember getting.

It was the last day of Lent. The war was officially over, except for Joseph Johnston’s confederate army and some action out West. The citizens of Washington, D.C. still began each morning reading the daily death list. If anything, this task had taken on an added urgency. To lose someone you loved now, with the rest of the city madly, if grimly, celebrating, would be unendurable.

The guests in Mary Surratt’s boarding house began the day with a breakfast of steak, eggs and ham, oysters, grits and whiskey. Mary’s seventeen-year old daughter, Anna, was in love with John Wilkes Booth. She had a picture of him hidden in the sitting room, behind a lithograph entitled “Morning, Noon, and Night.” She helped her mother clear the table and she noticed with a sharp and unreasonable disapproval that one of the two new boarders, one of the men who only last night had been given a room, was staring at her mother.

Mary Surratt was neither a pretty women, nor a clever one, nor was she young. Anna was too much of a romantic, too star and stage-struck, to approve. It was one thing to lie awake at night in her attic bedroom, thinking of JW. It was another to imagine her mother playing any part in such feelings.

Anna’s brother John once told her that five years ago a woman named Henrietta Irving had tried to stab Booth with a knife. Failing, she’d thrust the blade into her own chest instead. He seemed to be under the impression that this story would bring Anna to her senses. It had, as anyone could have predicted, the opposite effect. Anna had also heard rumors that Booth kept a woman in a house of prostitution near the White House. And once she had seen a piece of paper on which Booth had been composing a poem. You could make out the final version:

Now in this hour that we part,

I will ask to be forgotten never

But, in thy pure and guileless heart,

Consider me thy friend dear Eva.

Anna would sit in the parlor while her mother dozed and pretend she was the first of these women, and if she tired of that, she would sometimes dare to pretend she was the second, but most often she liked to imagine herself the third.

Flirtations were common and serious, and the women in Washington worked hard at them. A war in the distance always provides a rich context of desperation, while at the same time granting women a bit of extra freedom. They might quite enjoy it, if the price they paid were anything but their sons.

The new men had hardly touched their food, cutting away the fatty parts of the meat and leaving them in a glistening greasy wasteful pile. They’d finished the whiskey, but made faces while they drank. Anna had resented the compliment of their eyes and, paradoxically, now resented the insult of their plates. Her mother set a good table.

In fact, Anna did not like them and hoped they would not be staying. She had often seen men outside the Surratt Boarding House lately, men who busied themselves in unpersuasive activities when she passed them. She connected these new men to those, and she was perspicacious enough to blame their boarder Louis Wiechman for the lot of them, without ever knowing the extent to which she was right. She had lived for the past year in a confederate household in the heart of Washington. Everyone around her had secrets. She had grown quite used to this.

Wiechman was a permanent guest at the Surratt boarding house, He was a fat, friendly man who worked in the office of the Commissary General of Prisons and shared John Surratt’s bedroom. Secrets were what Wiechman traded in. He provided John, who was a courier for the Confederacy, with substance for his covert messages south. But then Wiechman had also, on a whim, sometime in March, told the clerks in the office that a Secesh plot was being hatched against the President in the very house where he roomed.

It created more interest than he had anticipated. He was called into the office of Captain McDavitt and interviewed at length. As a result, the Surratt boarding house was under surveillance from March through April, although, it is an odd fact that no records of the surveillance or the interview could be found later.

Anna would surely have enjoyed knowing this. She liked attention as much as most young girls. And this was the backdrop of a romance. Instead, all she could see was that something was up and that her pious, simple mother was part of it.

The new guest, the one who talked the most, spoke with a strange lisp and Anna didn’t like this either. She stepped smoothly between the men to pick up their plates. She used the excuse of a letter from her brother to go out directly after breakfast. “Mama,” she said. “I’ll just take John’s letter to poor Miss Ward.”

Just as her brother enjoyed discouraging her own romantic inclinations, she made it her business to discourage the affections of Miss Ward with regard to him. Calling on Miss Ward with the letter would look like a kindness, but it would make the point that Miss Ward had not gotten a letter herself.

Besides, Booth was in town. If Anna was outside, she might see him again.

The thirteenth had been beautiful, but the weather on the fourteenth was equal parts mud and wind. The wind blew bits of Anna’s hair loose and tangled them up with the fringe of her shawl. Around the Treasury Building she stopped to watch a carriage sunk in the mud all the way up to the axle. The horses, a matched pair of blacks, were rescued first. Then planks were laid across the top of the mud for the occupants. They debarked, a man and a woman, the woman unfashionably thin and laughing giddily as with every unsteady step her hoop swung and unbalanced her, first this way and then that. She clutched the man’s arm and screamed when a pig burrowed past her, then laughed again at even higher pitch. The man stumbled into the mire when she grabbed him, and this made her laugh, too. The man’s clothing was very fine, although now quite speckled with mud. A crowd gathered to watch the woman — the attention made her helpless with laughter.

The war had ended, Anna thought, and everyone had gone simultaneously mad. She was not the only one to think so. It was the subject of newspaper editorials, of barroom speeches. “The city is disorderly with men who are celebrating too hilariously,” the president’s day guard, William Crook, had written just yesterday. The sun came out, but only in a perfunctory, pale fashion.

Her visit to Miss Ward was spoiled by the fact that John had sent a letter there as well. Miss Ward obviously enjoyed telling Anna so. She was very near-sighted and she held the letter right up to her eyes to read it. John had recently fled to Canada. With the war over, there was every reason to expect he would come home, even if neither letter said so.

There was more news, and Miss Ward preened while she delivered it. “Bessie Hale is being taken to Spain. Much against her will,” Miss Ward said. Bessie was the daughter of ex-senator John P. Hale. Her father hoped that a change of scenery would help pretty Miss Bessie conquer her infatuation for John Wilkes Booth. Miss Ward, whom no one including Anna’s brother thought was pretty, was laughing at her. “Mr. Hale does not want an actor in the family,” Miss Ward said, and Anna regretted the generous impulse that had sent her all the way across town on such a gloomy day.

“Wilkes Booth is back in Washington,” Miss Ward finished, and Anna was at least able to say that she knew this, he had called on them only yesterday. She left the Wards with the barest of good-byes.

Louis Wiechman passed her on the street, stopping for a courteous greeting, although they had just seen each other at breakfast. It was now about ten a.m. Wiechman was on his way to church. Among the many secrets he knew was Anna’s. “I saw John Wilkes Booth in the barbershop this morning,” he told her. “With a crowd watching his every move.”

Anna raised her head. “Mr. Booth is a famous thespian. Naturally people admire him.”

She flattered herself that she knew JW a little better than these idolaters did. The last time her brother had brought Booth home, he’d followed Anna out to the kitchen. She’d had her back to the door, washing the plates. Suddenly she could feel that he was there. How could she have known that? The back of her neck grew hot, and when she turned, sure enough, there he was, leaning against the doorjamb, studying his nails.

“Do you believe our fates are already written?” Booth asked her. He stepped into the kitchen. “I had my palm read once by a gypsy. She said I would come to a bad end. She said it was the worst palm she had ever seen.” He held his hand out for her to take. “She said she wished she hadn’t even seen it,” he whispered, and then he drew back quickly as her mother entered, before she could bend over the hand herself, reassure him with a different reading, before she could even touch him.

“JW isn’t satisfied with acting,” her brother had told her once. “He yearns for greatness on the stage of history,” and if her mother hadn’t interrupted, if Anna had had two seconds to herself with him, this is the reading she would have done. She would have promised him greatness.

“Mr. Booth was on his way to Ford’s Theatre to pick up his mail,” Wiechman said with a wink. It was an ambiguous wink. It might have meant only that Wiechman remembered what a first love was like. It might have suggested he knew the use she would make of such information.

Two regiments were returning to Washington from Virginia. They were out of step and out of breath, covered with dust. Anna drew a handkerchief from her sleeve and waved it at them. Other women were doing the same. A crowd gathered. A vendor came through the crowd, selling oysters. A man in a tight-fitting coat stopped him. He had a disreputable look — a bad haircut with long sideburns. He pulled a handful of coins from one pocket and stared at them stupidly. He was drunk. The vendor had to reach into his hand and pick out what he was owed.

“Filthy place!” the man next to the drunk man said. “I really can’t bear the smell. I can’t eat. Don’t expect me to sleep in that flea-infested hotel another night.” He left abruptly, colliding with Anna’s arm, forcing her to take a step or two. “Excuse me,” he said without stopping, and there was nothing penitent or apologetic in his tone. He didn’t even seem to see her.

Since he had forced her to start, Anna continued to walk. She didn’t even know she was going to Ford’s Theatre until she turned onto Eleventh Street. It was a bad idea, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. She began to walk faster.

“No tickets, Miss,” James R. Ford told her, before she could open her mouth. She was not the only one there. A small crowd of people stood at the theater door. “Absolutely sold out. It’s because the President and General Grant will be attending.”

James Ford held an American flag in his arms. He raised it. “I’m just decorating the President’s box.” It was the last night of a lackluster run. He would never have guessed they would sell every seat. He thought Anna’s face showed disappointment. He was happy, himself, and it made him kind. “They’re rehearsing inside,” he told her. “For General Grant! You just go on in for a peek.”

He opened the doors and she entered. Three women and a man came with her. Anna had never seen any of the others before, but supposed they were friends of Mr. Ford’s. They forced themselves through the doors beside her and then sat next to her in the straight-backed cane chairs just back from the stage.

Laura Keene herself stood in the wings awaiting her entrance. The curtain was pulled back, so that Anna could see her. Her cheeks were round with rouge.

The stage was not deep. Mrs. Mountchessington stood on it with her daughter, Augusta, and Asa Trenchard.

“All I crave is affection,” Augusta was saying. She shimmered with insincerity.

Anna repeated the lines to herself. She imagined herself as an actress, married to JW, courted by him daily before an audience of a thousand, in a hundred different towns. They would play the love scenes over and over again, each one as true as the last. She would hardly know where her real and imaginary lives diverged. She didn’t suppose there was much money to be made, but even to pretend to be rich seemed like happiness to her.

Augusta was willing to be poor, if she was loved. “Now I’ve no fortune,” Asa said to her in response, “but I’m biling over with affections, which I’m ready to pour out all over you, like apple sass, over roast pork.”

The women exited. He was alone on the stage. Anna could see Laura Keene mouthing his line, just as he spoke it. The woman seated next to her surprised her by whispering it aloud as well.

“Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal, you sockdologizing old man-trap,” the three of them said. Anna turned to her seatmate who stared back. Her accent, Anna thought, had been English. “Don’t you love theater?” she asked Anna in a whisper. Then her face changed. She was looking at something above Anna’s head.

Anna looked, too. Now she understood the woman’s expression. John Wilkes Booth was standing in the Presidential Box, staring down on the actor. Anna rose. Her seatmate caught her arm. She was considerably older than Anna, but not enough so that Anna could entirely dismiss her possible impact on Booth.

“Do you know him?” the woman asked.

“He’s a friend of my brother’s.” Anna had no intention of introducing them. She tried to edge away, but the woman still held her.

“My name is Cassie Streichman.”

“Anna Surratt.”

There was a quick, sideways movement in the woman’s eyes. “Are you related to Mary Surratt?”

“She’s my mother.” Anna began to feel just a bit of concern. So many people interested in her dull, sad mother. Anna tried to shake loose, and found, to her surprise, that she couldn’t. The woman would not let go.

“I’ve heard of the boarding house,” Mrs. Streichman said. It was a courtesy to think of her as a married woman. It was more of a courtesy than she deserved.

Anna looked up at the box again. Booth was already gone. “Let me go,” she told Mrs. Streichman, so loudly that Laura Keene herself heard. So forcefully that Mrs. Streichman finally did so.

Anna left the theater. The streets were crowded and she could not see Booth anywhere. Instead, as she stood on the bricks, looking left and then right, Mrs. Streichman caught up with her. “Are you going home? Might we walk along?”

“No. I have errands,” Anna said. She walked quickly away. She was cross now, because she had hoped to stay and look for Booth, who must still be close by, but Mrs. Streichman had made her too uneasy. She looked back once. Mrs. Streichman stood in the little circle of her friends, talking animatedly. She gestured with her hands like a European. Anna saw Booth nowhere.

She went back along the streets to St. Patrick’s Church, in search of her mother. It was noon and the air was warm in spite of the colorless sun. Inside the church, her mother knelt in the pew and prayed noisily. Anna slipped in beside her.

“This is the moment,” her mother whispered. She reached out and took Anna’s hand, gripped it tightly enough to hurt. Her mother’s eyes brightened with tears. “This is the moment they nailed him to the cross,” she said. There was purple cloth over the crucifix. The pallid sunlight flowed into the church through colored glass.

Across town a group of men had gathered in the Kirkwood bar and were entertaining themselves by buying drinks for George Atzerodt. Atzerodt was one of Booth’s co-conspirators. His assignment for the day, given to him by Booth, was to kidnap the Vice President. He was already so drunk he couldn’t stand. “Would you say that the Vice President is a brave man?” he asked and they laughed at him. He didn’t mind being laughed at. It struck him a bit funny himself. “He wouldn’t carry a firearm, would he? I mean, why would he?” Atzerodt said. “Are there ever soldiers with him? That nigger who watches him eat. Is he there all the time?”

“Have another drink,” they told him, laughing. “On us,” and you couldn’t get insulted at that.

Anna and her mother returned to the boarding house. Mary Surratt had rented a carriage and was going into the country. “Mr. Wiechman will drive me,” she told her daughter. A Mr. Nothey owed her money they desperately needed; Mary Surratt was going to collect it.

But just as she was leaving, Booth appeared. He took her mother’s arm, drew her to the parlor. Anna felt her heart stop and then start again, faster. “Mary, I must talk to you,” he said to her mother, whispering, intimate. “Mary.” He didn’t look at Anna at all and didn’t speak again until she left the room. She would have stayed outside the door to hear whatever she could, but Louis Wiechman had had the same idea. They exchanged one cross look, and then each left the hallway. Anna went up the stairs to her bedroom.

She knew the moment Booth went. She liked to feel that this was because they had a connection, something unexplainable, something preordained, but in fact she could hear the door. He went without asking to see her. She moved to the small window to watch him leave. He did not stop to glance up. He mounted a black horse, tipped his hat to her mother.

Her mother boarded a hired carriage, leaning on Mr. Wiechman’s hand. She held a parcel under her arm. Anna had never seen it before. It was flat and round and wrapped in newspaper. Anna thought it was a gift from Booth. It made her envious.

Later at her mother’s trial, Anna would hear that the package had contained a set of field glasses. A man named Lloyd would testify that Mary Surratt had delivered them to him and had also given him instructions from Booth regarding guns. It was the single most damaging evidence against her. At her brother’s trial, Lloyd would recant everything but the field glasses. He was, he now said, too drunk at the time to remember what Mrs. Surratt had told him. He had never remembered. The prosecution had compelled his earlier testimony through threats. This revision would come two years after Mary Surratt had been hanged.

Anna stood at the window a long time, pretending that Booth might return with just such a present for her.

John Wilkes Booth passed George Atzerodt on the street at five p.m.. Booth was on horseback. He told Atzerodt he had changed his mind about the kidnapping. He now wanted the Vice President killed. At 10:15 or thereabouts. “I’ve learned that Johnson is a very brave man,” Atzerodt told him.

“And you are not,” Booth agreed. “But you’re in too deep to back out now.” He rode away. Booth was carrying in his pocket a letter to the editor of The National Intelligencer. In it, he recounted the reasons for Lincoln’s death. He had signed his own name, but also that of George Atzerodt.

The men who worked with Atzerodt once said he was a man you could insult and he would take no offense. It was the kindest thing they could think of to say. Three men from the Kirkwood bar appeared and took Atzerodt by the arms. “Let’s find another bar,” they suggested. “We have hours and hours yet before the night is over. Eat, drink. Be merry.”

At six p.m. John Wilkes Booth gave the letter to John Matthews, an actor, asking him to deliver it the next day. “I’ll be out of town or I would deliver it myself,” he explained. A group of Confederate officers marched down Pennsylvania Avenue where John Wilkes Booth could see them. They were unaccompanied; they were turning themselves in. It was the submissiveness of it that struck Booth hardest. “A man can meet his fate or make it,” he told Matthews. “A man can rise to the occasion or fall beneath it.”

At sunset, a man called Peanut John lit the big glass globe at the entrance to Ford’s Theatre. Inside, the presidential box had been decorated with borrowed flags and bunting. The door into the box had been forced some weeks ago in an unrelated incident and could no longer be locked.

It was early evening when Mary Surratt returned home. Her financial affairs were still unsettled; Mr. Nothey had not even shown up at their meeting. She kissed her daughter. “If Mr. Nothey will not pay us what he owes,” she said, “I can’t think what we will do next. I can’t see a way ahead for us. Your brother must come home.” She went into the kitchen to oversee the preparations for dinner.

Anna went in to help. Since the afternoon, since the moment Booth had not spoken to her, she had been overcome with unhappiness. It had not lessened a bit in the last hours; she now doubted it ever would. She cut the roast into slices. It bled beneath her knife and she thought of Henrietta Irving’s white skin and the red heart beating underneath. She could understand Henrietta Irving perfectly. All I crave is affection, she said to herself, and the honest truth of the sentiment softened her into tears. Perhaps she could survive the rest of her life, if she played it this way, scene by scene. She held the knife up, watching the blood slide down the blade, and this was dramatic and fit her Shakespearian mood.

She felt a chill and when she turned around one of the new boarders was leaning against the doorjamb, watching her mother. “We’re not ready yet,” she told him crossly. He’d given her a start. He vanished back into the parlor.

Once again, the new guests hardly ate. Louis Wiechman finished his food with many elegant compliments. His testimony in court would damage Mary Surratt almost as much as Lloyd’s. He would say that she seemed uneasy that night, unsettled, although none of the other boarders saw this. After dinner Mary Surratt went through the house, turning off the kerosene lights one by one.

Anna took a glass of wine and went to sleep immediately. She dreamed deeply, but her heartbreak woke her again only an hour or so later. It stabbed at her lightly from the inside when she breathed. She could see John Wilkes Booth as clearly as if he were in the room with her. “I am the most famous man in America,” he said. He held out his hand, beckoned to her.

Downstairs she heard the front door open and close. She rose and looked out the window, just as she had done that afternoon. Many people, far too many people were on the street. They were all walking in the same direction. One of them was George Atzerodt. Hours before he had abandoned his knife but he too would die, along with Mary Surratt. He had gone too far to back out. He walked with his hands over the shoulders of two dark-haired men. One of them looked up. He was of a race Anna had never seen before. The new boarders joined the crowd. Anna could see them when they passed out from under the porch overhang.

Something big was happening. Something big enough to overwhelm her own hurt feelings. Anna dressed slowly and then quickly and more quickly. I live, she thought, in the most wondrous of times. Here was the proof. She was still unhappy, but she was also excited. She moved quietly past her mother’s door.

The flow of people took her down several blocks. She was taking her last walk again, only backwards, like a ribbon uncoiling. She went past St. Patrick’s Church, down Eleventh Street. The crowd ended at Ford’s Theatre and thickened there. Anna was jostled. To her left, she recognized the woman from the carriage, the laughing woman, though she wasn’t laughing now. Someone stepped on Anna’s hoop skirt and she heard it snap. Someone struck her in the back of the head with an elbow. “Be quiet!” someone admonished someone else. “We’ll miss it.” Someone took hold of her arm. It was so crowded, she couldn’t even turn to see, but she heard the voice of Cassie Streichman.

“I had tickets and everything,” Mrs. Streichman said angrily. “Do you believe that? I can’t even get to the door. It’s almost ten o’clock and I had tickets.”

“Can my group please stay together?” a woman toward the front asked. “Let’s not lose anyone,” and then she spoke again in a language Anna did not know.

“It didn’t seem a good show,” Anna said to Mrs. Streichman. “A comedy and not very funny.”

Mrs. Streichman twisted into the space next to her. “That was just a rehearsal. The reviews are incredible. And you wouldn’t believe the waiting list. Years. Centuries! I’ll never have tickets again.” She took a deep, calming breath. “At least you’re here, dear. That’s something I couldn’t have expected. That makes it very real. And,” she pressed Anna’s arm, “if it helps in any way, you must tell yourself later there’s nothing you could have done to make it come out differently. Everything that will happen has already happened. It won’t be changed.”

“Will I get what I want?” Anna asked her. She could not keep the brightness of hope from her voice. Clearly, she was part of something enormous. Something memorable. How many people could say that?

“I don’t know what you want,” Mrs. Streichman answered. She had an uneasy look. “I didn’t get what I wanted,” she added. “Even though I had tickets. Good God! People getting what they want. That’s not the history of the world, is it?”

“Will everyone please be quiet!” someone behind Anna said. “Those of us in the back can’t hear a thing.”

Mrs. Streichman began to cry, which surprised Anna very much. “I’m such a sap,” Mrs. Streichman said apologetically. “Things really get to me.” She put her arm around Anna.

“All I want,” Anna began, but a man to her right hushed her angrily.

“Shut up!” he said. “As if we came all this way to listen to you.

ITSY BITSY SPIDER

James Patrick Kelly

When I round out that my rather was still alive after all these years and living at Strawberry Fields, I thought he'd gotten just what he deserved. Retroburbs are where the old, scared people go to hide. I'd always pictured the people in them as deranged losers. Visiting some fantasy world like the disneys or Carlucci's Carthage is one thing, moving to one is another. Sure, 2038 is messy, but it's a hell of a lot better than nineteen-sixty-whatever.

Now that I'd arrived at 144 Bluejay Way, I realized that the place was worse than I had imagined. Strawberry Fields was pretending to be some long-lost suburb of the late twentieth century, except that it had the sterile monotony of cheap VR. It was clean, all right, and neat, but it was everywhere the same. And the scale was wrong. The lots were squeezed together and all the houses had shrunk—like the dreams of their owners. They were about the size of a one-car garage, modular units tarted up at the factory to look like ranches, with old double-hung storm windows and hardened siding of harvest gold, barn red, forest green. Of course, there were no real garages; faux Mustangs and VW buses cruised the quiet streets. Their carbrains were listening for a summons from Barbara Chesley next door at 142, or the Goltzes across the street, who might be headed to Penny Lanes to bowl a few frames, or the hospital to die.

There was a beach chair with blue nylon webbing on the front stoop of 144 Bluejay Way. A brick walk led to it, dividing two patches of carpet moss, green as a dream. There were names and addresses printed in huge lightstick letters on all the doors in the neighborhood; no doubt many Strawberry Fielders were easily confused. The owner of this one was Peter Fancy. He had been born Peter Fanelli, but had legally taken his stage name not long after his first success as Prince Hal in Henry IV Part 1. I was a Fancy too; the name was one of the few things of my father's I had kept.

I stopped at the door and let it look me over. "You're Jen," it said.

"Yes." I waited in vain for it to open or to say something else. "I'd like to see Mr. Fancy, please." The old man's house had worse manners than he did. "He knows I'm coming," I said. "I sent him several messages." Which he had never answered, but I didn't mention that.

"Just a minute," said the door. "She'll be right with you."

She? The idea that he might be with another woman now hadn't occurred to me. I'd lost track of my father a long time ago—on purpose. The last time we'd actually visited overnight was when I was twenty. Mom gave me a ticket to Port Gemini, where he was doing the Shakespeare in Space program. The orbital was great, but staying with him was like being under water. I think I must have held my breath for the entire week. After that, there were a few, sporadic calls, a couple of awkward dinners—all at his instigation. Then twenty-three years of nothing.

I never hated him, exactly. When he left, I just decided to show solidarity with Mom and be done with him. If acting was more important than his family, then to hell with Peter Fancy. Mom was horrified when I told her how I felt. She cried and claimed the divorce was as much her fault as his. It was too much for me to handle; I was only eleven years old when they separated. I needed to be on someone's side and so I had chosen her. She never did stop trying to talk me into finding him again, even though after a while it only made me mad at her. For the past few years, she'd been warning me that I'd developed a warped view of men.

But she was a smart woman, my mom—a winner. Sure, she'd had troubles, but she'd founded three companies, was a millionaire by twenty-five. I missed her.

A lock clicked and the door opened. Standing in the dim interior was a little girl in a gold-and-white checked dress. Her dark, curly hair was tied in a ribbon. She was wearing white ankle socks and black Mary Jane shoes that were so shiny they had to be plastic. There was a Band-Aid on her left knee.

"Hello, Jen. I was hoping you'd really come." Her voice surprised me. It was resonant, impossibly mature. At first glance I'd guessed she was three, maybe four; I'm not much good at guessing kids' ages. Now I realized that this must be a bot—a made person.

"You look just like I thought you would." She smiled, stood on tiptoe and raised a delicate little hand over her head. I had to bend to shake it. The hand was warm, slightly moist, and very realistic. She had to belong to Strawberry Fields; there was no way my father could afford a bot with skin this real.

"Please come in." She waved on the lights. "We're so happy you're here." The door closed behind me.

The playroom took up almost half of the little house. Against one wall was a miniature kitchen. Toy dishes were drying in a rack next to the sink; the pink refrigerator barely came up to my waist. The table was full-sized; it had two normal chairs and a booster chair. Opposite this was a bed with a ruffled Pumpkin Patty bedspread. About a dozen dolls and stuffed animals were arranged along the far edge of the mattress. I recognized most of them: Pooh, Mr. Moon, Baby Rollypolly, the Sleepums, Big Bird. And the wallpaper was familiar too: Oz figures like Toto and the Wizard and the Cowardly Lion on a field of Munchkin blue.

"We had to make a few changes," said the bot. "Do you like it?"

The room seemed to tilt then. I took a small, unsteady step and everything righted itself. My dolls, my wallpaper, the chest of drawers from Grandma Fanelli's cottage in Hyannis. I stared at the bot and recognized her for the first time.

She was me.

"What is this," I said, "some kind of sick joke?" I felt like I'd just been slapped in the face.

"Is something wrong?" the bot said. "Tell me. Maybe we can fix it."

I swiped at her and she danced out of reach. I don't know what I would have done if I had caught her. Maybe smashed her through the picture window onto the patch of front lawn or shaken her until pieces started falling off. But the bot wasn't responsible, my father was. Mom would never have defended him if she'd known about this. The old bastard. I couldn't believe it. Here I was, shuddering with anger, after years of feeling nothing for him.

There was an interior door just beyond some shelves filled with old-fashioned paper books. I didn't take time to look as I went past, but I knew that Dr. Seuss and A.A. Milne and L. Frank Baum would be on those shelves. The door had no knob.

"Open up," I shouted. It ignored me, so I kicked it. "Hey!"

"Jennifer." The bot tugged at the back of my jacket. "I must ask you..."

"You can't have me!" I pressed my ear to the door. Silence. "I'm not this thing you made." I kicked it again. "You hear?"

Suddenly an announcer was shouting in the next room. "... Into the post to Russell, who kicks it out to Havlicek all alone at the top of the key, he shoots... and Baylor with the strong rebound." The asshole was trying to drown me out.

"If you don't come away from that door right now," said the bot, "I'm calling security."

"What are they going to do?" I said. "I'm the long-lost daughter, here for a visit. And who the hell are you, anyway?"

"I'm bonded to him, Jen. Your father is no longer competent to handle his own affairs. I'm his legal guardian."

"Shit." I kicked the door one last time, but my heart wasn't in it. I shouldn't have been surprised that he had slipped over the edge. He was almost ninety.

"If you want to sit and talk, I'd like that very much." The bot gestured toward a banana yellow beanbag chair. "Otherwise, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

It was the shock of seeing the bot, I told myself—I'd reacted like a hurt little girl. But I was a grown woman and it was time to start behaving like one. I wasn't here to let Peter Fancy worm his way back into my feelings. I had come because of Mom.

"Actually," I said, "I'm here on business." I opened my purse. "If you're running his life now, I guess this is for you." I passed her the envelope and settled back, tucking my legs beneath me. There is no way for an adult to sit gracefully in a beanbag chair.

She slipped the check out. "It's from Mother." She paused, then corrected herself, "Her estate." She didn't seem surprised.

"Yes."

"It's too generous."

"That's what I thought."

"She must've taken care of you too?"

"I'm fine." I wasn't about to discuss the terms of Mom's will with my father's toy daughter.

"I would've liked to have known her," said the bot. She slid the check back into the envelope and set it aside. "I've spent a lot of time imagining Mother."

I had to work hard not to snap at her. Sure, this bot had at least a human equivalent intelligence and would be a free citizen someday, assuming she didn't break down first.

But she had a cognizor for a brain and a heart fabricated in a vat. How could she possibly imagine my mom, especially when all she had to go on was whatever lies he had told her?

"So how bad is he?"

She gave me a sad smile and shook her head. "Some days are better than others. He has no clue who President Huong is or about the quake, but he can still recite the dagger scene from Macbeth.  I haven't told him that Mother died. He'd just forget it ten minutes later."

"Does he know what you are?"

"I am many things, Jen."

"Including me."

"You're a role I'm playing, not who I am." She stood. "Would you like some tea?"

"Okay." I still wanted to know why Mom had left my father four hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars in her will. If he couldn't tell me, maybe the bot could.

She went to her kitchen, opened a cupboard, and took out a regular-sized cup. It looked like a bucket in her little hand. "I don't suppose you still drink Constant Comment?"

His favorite. I had long since switched to rafallo. "That's fine." I remembered that when I was a kid my father used to brew cups for the two of us from the same bag because Constant Comment was so expensive. "I thought they went out of business long ago."

"I mix my own. I'd be interested to hear how accurate you think the recipe is."

"I suppose you know how I like it?"

She chuckled.

"So, does he need the money?"

The microwave dinged. "Very few actors get rich," said the bot. I didn't think there had been microwaves in the sixties, but then strict historical accuracy wasn't really the point of Strawberry Fields. "Especially when they have a weakness for Shakespeare."

"Then how come he lives here and not in some flop? And how did he afford you?"

She pinched sugar between her index finger and thumb, then rubbed them together over the cup. It was something I still did, but only when I was by myself. A nasty habit; Mom used to yell at him for teaching it to me. "I was a gift." She shook a teabag loose from a canister shaped like an acorn and plunged it into the boiling water. "From Mother."

The bot offered the cup to me; I accepted it nervelessly. "That's not true." I could feel the blood draining from my face.

"I can lie if you'd prefer, but I'd rather not." She pulled the booster chair away from the table and turned it to face me. "There are many things about themselves that they never told us, Jen. I've always wondered why that was."

I felt logy and a little stupid, as if I had just woken from a thirty-year nap. "She just gave you to him?"

"And bought him this house, paid all his bills, yes."

"But why?"

"You knew her," said the bot. "I was hoping you could tell me."

I couldn't think of what to say or do. Since there was a cup in my hand, I took a sip. For an instant, the scent of tea and dried oranges carried me back to when I was a little girl and I was sitting in Grandma Fanelli's kitchen in a wet bathing suit, drinking Constant Comment that my father had made to keep my teeth from chattering. There were knots like brown eyes in the pine walls and the green linoleum was slick where I had dripped on it.

"Well?"

"It's good," I said absently and raised the cup to her. "No, really, just like I remember."

She clapped her hands in excitement. "So," said the bot. "What was Mother like?"

It was an impossible question, so I tried to let it bounce off me. But then neither of us said anything; we just stared at each other across a yawning gulf of time and experience. In the silence, the question stuck. Mom had died three months ago and this was the first time since the funeral that I'd thought of her as she really had been—not the papery ghost in the hospital room. I remembered how, after she divorced my father, she always took my calls when she was at the. office, even if it was late, and how she used to step on imaginary brakes whenever I drove her anywhere, and how grateful I was that she didn't cry when I told her that Rob and I were getting divorced. I thought about Easter eggs and raspberry Pop Tarts and when she sent me to Antibes for a year when I was fourteen and that perfume she wore on my father's opening nights and the way they used to waltz on the patio at the house in Waltham.

"West is walking the ball up court, setting bis offense with fifteen seconds to go on the shot clock, nineteen in the half..."

The beanbag chair that I was in faced the picture window. Behind me, I could hear the door next to the bookcase open.

"Jones and Goodrich are in each other's jerseys down low and now Chamberlain swings over and calls for the ball on the weak side..."

I twisted around to look over my shoulder. The great Peter Fancy was making his entrance.

Mom once told me that when she met my father, he was typecast playing men that women fall hopelessly in love with. He'd had great successes as Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar and Skye Masterson in Guys and Dolls and the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The years had eroded his good looks but had not obliterated them; from a distance he was still a handsome man. He had a shock of close-cropped white hair. The beautiful cheekbones were still there; the chin was as sharply defined as it had been in his first head-shot. His gray eyes were distant and a little dreamy, as if he were preoccupied with the War of the Roses or the problem of evil.

"Jen," he said, "what's going on out here?" He still had the big voice that could reach into the second balcony without a mike. I thought for a moment he was talking to me.

"We have company, Daddy," said the bot, in a four-year-old trill that took me by surprise. "A lady."

"I can see that it's a lady, sweetheart." He took a hand from the pocket of his jeans, stroked the touchpad on his belt and his exolegs walked him stiffly across the room. "I'm Peter Fancy," he said.

"The lady is from Strawberry Fields." The bot swung around behind my father. She shot me a look that made the terms and conditions of my continued presence clear: if I broke the illusion, I was out. "She came by to see if everything is all right with our house." The bot disurbed me even more, now that she sounded like young Jen Fancy.

As I heaved myself out of the beanbag chair, my father gave me one of those lopsided, flirting grins I knew so well. "Does the lady have a name?" He must have shaved just for the company, because now that he had come close I could see that he had a couple of fresh nicks. There was a button-sized patch of gray whiskers by his ear that he had missed altogether.

"Her name is Ms. Johnson," said the bot. It was my ex, Rob's, last name. I had never been Jennifer Johnson.

"Well, Ms. Johnson," he said, hooking thumbs in his pants pockets. "The water in my toilet is brown."

"I'll... um ... see that it's taken care of." I was at a loss for what to say next, then inspiration struck. "Actually, I had another reason for coming." I could see the bot stiffen. "I don't know if you've seen Yesterday, our little newsletter? Anyway, I was talking to Mrs. Chesley next door and she told me that you were an actor once. I was wondering if I might interview you. Just a few questions, if you have the time. I think your neighbors might..."

"Were?" he said, drawing himself up. "Once? Madame, I am now an actor and will always be."

"My Daddy's famous," said the bot.

I cringed at that; it was something I used to say. My father squinted at me. "What did you say your name was?"

"Johnson," I said. "Jane Johnson."

"And you're a reporter? You're sure you're not a critic?"

"Positive."

He seemed satisfied. "I'm Peter Fancy." He extended his right hand to shake. The hand was spotted and bony and it trembled like a reflection in a lake. Clearly whatever magic— or surgeon's skill—it was that had preserved my father's face had not extended to his extremities. I was so disturbed by his infirmity that I took his cold hand in mine and pumped it three, four times. It was dry as a page of one of the bot's dead books. When I let go, the hand seemed steadier. He gestured at the beanbag.

"Sit," he said. "Please."

After I had settled in, he tapped the touchpad and stumped over to the picture window. "Barbara Chesley is a broken and bitter old woman," he said, "and I will not have dinner with her under any circumstances, do you understand?" He peered up Bluejay Way and down.

"Yes, Daddy," said the bot.

"I believe she voted for Nixon, so she has no reason to complain now." Apparently satisfied that the neighbors weren't sneaking up on us, he leaned against the windowsill, facing me. "Mrs. Thompson, I think today may well be a happy one for both of us. I have an announcement." He paused for effect. "I've been thinking of Lear again."

The bot settled onto one of her little chairs. "Oh, Daddy, that's wonderful."

"It's the only one of the big four I haven't done," said my father. "I was set for a production in Stratford, Ontario, back in '99; Polly Matthews was to play Cordelia. Now there was an actor; she could bring tears to a stone. But then my wife Hannah had one of her bad times and I had to withdraw so I could take care of Jen. The two of us stayed down at my mother's cottage on the Cape; I wasted the entire season tending bar. And when Hannah came out of rehab, she decided that she didn't want to be married to an underemployed actor anymore, so things were tight for a while. She had all the money, so I had to scramble—spent almost two years on the road. But I think it might have been for the best. I was only forty-eight. Too old for Hamlet, too young for Lear. My Hamlet was very well received, you know. There were overtures from PBS about a taping, but that was when the BBC decided to do the Shakespeare series with that doctor, what was his name? Jonathan Miller. So instead of Peter Fancy, we had Derek Jacobi, whose brilliant idea it was to roll across the stage, frothing his lines like a rabid raccoon. You'd think he'd seen an alien, not his father's ghost. Well, that was another missed opportunity, except, of course, that I was too young. Ripeness is all, eh? So I still have Lear to do. Unfinished business. My comeback."

He bowed, then pivoted solemnly so that I saw him in profile, framed by the picture window. "Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight?" He held up a trembling hand and blinked at it uncomprehendingly. "I know not what to say. I swear these are not my hands."

Suddenly the bot was at his feet. "O look upon me, sir," she said, in her childish voice, "and hold your hand in benediction o'er me."

"Pray, do not mock me." My father gathered himself in the flood of morning light. "I am a very foolish, fond old man, fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less; and to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind."

He stole a look in my direction, as if to gauge my reaction to his impromptu performance. A frown might have stopped him, a word would have crushed him. Maybe I should have, but I was afraid he'd start talking about Mom again, telling me things I didn't want to know. So I watched instead, transfixed.

"Methinks I should know you ..." He rested his hand briefly on the bot's head. "... and know this stranger." He fumbled at the controls and the exolegs carried him across the room toward me. As he drew nearer, he seemed to sluff off the years. "Yet I am mainly ignorant what place this is; and all the skill I have remembers not these garments, nor I know not where I did lodge last night." It was Peter Fancy who stopped before me; his face a mere kiss away from mine. "Do not laugh at me; for, as I am a man, I think this lady to be my child. Cordelia."

He was staring right at me, into me, knifing through make-believe indifference to the wound I'd nursed all these years, the one that had never healed. He seemed to expect a reply, only I didn't have the line. A tiny, sad squeaky voice within me was whimpering, You left me and you got exactly what you deserve. But my throat tightened and choked it off.

The bot cried, "And so I am! I am!"

But she had distracted him. I could see confusion begin to deflate him. "Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray . . . weep not. If you have poison for me, I will drink it. I know you do not love me ..."

He stopped and his brow wrinkled. "It's something about the sisters," he muttered.

"Yes," said the bot, "'. .. for your sisters have done me wrong...'"

"Don't feed me the fucking lines!" he shouted at her. "I'm Peter Fancy, god damn it!"

After she calmed him down, we had lunch. She let him make the peanut butter and banana sandwiches while she heated up some Campbell's tomato and rice soup, which she poured from a can made of actual metal. The sandwiches were lumpy because he had hacked the bananas into chunks the size of walnuts. She tried to get him to tell me about the daylilies blooming in the backyard, and the old Boston Garden, and the time he and Mom had had breakfast with Bobby Kennedy. She asked whether he wanted TV dinner or pot pie for supper. He refused all her conversational gambits. He only ate half a bowl of soup.

He pushed back from the table and announced that it was her nap time. The bot put up a perfunctory fuss, although it was clear that it was my father who was tired out. However, the act seemed to perk him up. Another role for his resume: the doting father. "I'll tell you what," he said. "We'll play your game, sweetheart. But just once—otherwise you'll be cranky tonight."

The two of them perched on the edge of the bot's bed next to Big Bird and the Sleepums. My father started to sing and the bot immediately joined in.

"The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout."

Their gestures were almost mirror images, except that his ruined hands actually looked like spiders as they climbed into the air.

"Down came the rain, and washed the spider out."

The bot beamed at him as if he were the only person in the world.

"Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain.

"And the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again."

When his arms were once again raised over his head, she giggled and hugged him. He let them fall around her, returning her embrace. "That's a good girl," he said. "That's my Jenny."

The look on his face told me that I had been wrong: this was no act. It was as real to him as it was to me. I had tried hard not to, but I still remembered how the two of us always used to play together, Daddy and Jenny, Jen and Dad.

Waiting for Mommy to come home.

He kissed her and she snuggled under the blankets. I felt my eyes stinging.

"But if you do the play," she said, "when will you be back?"

"What play?"

"That one you were telling me. The king and his daughters."

"There's no such play, Jenny." He sifted her black curls through his hands. "I'll never leave you, don't worry now. Never again." He rose unsteadily and caught himself on the chest of drawers.

"Nighty noodle," said the bot.

"Pleasant dreams, sweetheart," said my father. "I love you."

"I love you too."

I expected him to say something to me, but he didn't even seem to realize that I was still in the room. He shambled across die playroom, opened the door to his bedroom and went in.

"I'm sorry about that," said the bot, speaking again as an adult.

"Don't be," I said. I coughed—something in my throat. "It was fine. I was very ... touched."

"He's usually a lot happier. Sometimes he works in the garden." The bot pulled the blankets aside and swung her legs out of the bed. "He likes to vacuum."

"Yes."

"I take good care of him."

I nodded and reached for my purse. "I can see that." I had to go. "Is it enough?"

She shrugged. "He's my daddy."

"I meant the money. Because if it's not, I'd like to help."

"Thank you. He'd appreciate that."

The front door opened for me, but I paused before stepping out into Strawberry Fields. "What about... after?"

"When he dies? My bond terminates. He said he'd leave the house to me. I know you could contest that, but I'll need to sell in order to pay for my twenty-year maintenance."

"No, no. That's fine. You deserve it."

She came to the door and looked up at me, little Jen Fancy and the woman she would never become.

"You know, it's you he loves," she said. "I'm just a stand-in."

"He loves his little girl," I said. "Doesn't do me any good—I'm forty-seven."

"It could if you let it." She frowned. "I wonder if that's why Mother did all this. So you'd find out."

"Or maybe she was just plain sorry." I shook my head. She was a smart woman, my mom. I would've liked to have known her.

"So, Ms. Fancy, maybe you can visit us again sometime." The bot grinned and shook my hand. "Daddy's usually in a good mood after his nap. He sits out front on his beach chair and waits for the ice cream truck. He always buys us some. Our favorite is Yellow Submarine. It's vanilla with fat butterscotch swirls, dipped in white chocolate. I know it sounds kind of odd, but it's good."

"Yes," I said absently, thinking about all the things Mom had told me about my father. I was hearing them now for the first time. "That might be nice."

THE HAND YOU’RE DEALT

Robert J. Sawyer

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

-- John 8:32

"Got a new case for you," said my boss, Raymond Chen. "Homicide."

My heart started pounding. Mendelia habitat is supposed to be a utopia. Murder is almost unheard of here.

Chen was fat -- never exercised, loved rich foods. He knew his lifestyle would take decades off his life, but, hey, that was his choice.

"Somebody offed a soothsayer, over in Wheel Four," he said, wheezing slightly.

"Baranski's on the scene now."

My eyebrows went up. A dead soothsayer? This could be very interesting indeed.

I took my pocket forensic scanner and exited The Cop Shop. That was its real name -- no taxes in Mendelia, after all. You needed a cop, you hired one. In this case, Chen had said, we were being paid by the Soothsayers' Guild.

That meant we could run up as big a bill as necessary -- the SG was stinking rich. One of the few laws in Mendelia was that everyone had to use soothsayers.

Mendelia consisted of five modules, each looking like a wagon wheel with spokes leading in to a central hub. The hubs were all joined together by a long axle, and separate travel tubes connected the outer edges of the wheels.

The whole thing spun to simulate gravity out at the rims, and the travel tubes saved you having to go down to the zero-g of the axle to move from one wheel to the next.

The Cop Shop was in Wheel Two. All the wheel rims were hollow, with buildings growing up toward the axle from the outer interior wall. Plenty of open spaces in Mendelia -- it wouldn't be much of a utopia without those. But our sky was a hologram, projected on the convex inner wall of the rim, above our heads. The Cop Shop's entrance was right by Wheel Two's transit loop, a series of maglev tracks along which robocabs ran. I hailed one, flashed my debit card at an unblinking eye, and the cab headed out. The Carling family, who owned the taxi concession, was one of the oldest and richest families in Mendelia.

The ride took fifteen minutes. Suzanne Baranski was waiting outside for me. She was a good cop, but too green to handle a homicide alone. Still, she'd get a big cut of the fee for being the original responding officer --after all, the cop who responds to a call never knows who, if anyone, is going to pick up the tab. When there is money to be had, first-responders get a disproportionate share.

I'd worked with Suze a couple of times before, and had even gone to see her play cello with the symphony once. Perfect example of what Mendelia's all about, that. Suze Baranski had blue-collar parents. They'd worked as welders on the building of Wheel Five; not the kind who'd normally send a daughter for music lessons. But just after she'd been born, their soothsayer had said that Suze had musical talent. Not enough to make a living at it -- that's why she's a cop by day -- but still sufficient that it would be a shame not to let her develop it.

"Hi, Toby," Suze said to me. She had short red hair and big green eyes, and, of course, was in plain clothes -- you wanted a uniformed cop, you called our competitors, Spitpolish, Inc.

"Howdy, Suze," I said, walking toward her. She led me over to the door, which had been locked off in the open position. A holographic sign next to it proclaimed: Skye Hissock Soothsayer Let Me Reveal Your Future! Fully Qualified for Infant and Adult Readings We stepped into a well-appointed lobby. The art was unusual for such an office -- it was all original pen-and-ink political cartoons. There was Republic CEO Da Silva, her big nose exaggerated out of all proportion, and next to it, Axel Durmont, Earth's current president, half buried in legislation printouts and tape that doubtless would have been red had this been a color rendering. The artist's signature caught my eye, the name Skye with curving lines behind it that I realized were meant to represent clouds. Just like Suze, our decedent had had varied talents.

"The body is in the inner private office," said Suze, leading the way. That door, too, was already open. She stepped in first, and I followed.

Skye Hissock's body sat in a chair behind his desk. His head had been blown clean off. A great carnation bloom of blood covered most of the wall behind him, and chunks of brain were plastered to the wall and the credenza behind the desk.

"Christ," I said. Some utopia.

Suze nodded. "Blaster, obviously," she said, sounding much more experienced in such matters than she really was. "Probably a gigawatt charge."

I began looking around the room. It was opulent; old Skye had obviously done well for himself. Suze was poking around, too. "Hey," she said, after a moment. I turned to look at her. She was climbing up on the credenza.

The blast had knocked a small piece of sculpture off the wall -- it lay in two pieces on the floor -- and she was examining where it had been affixed. "Thought that's what it was," she said, nodding. "There's a hidden camera here."

My heart skipped a beat. "You don't suppose he got the whole thing on disk, do you?" I said, moving over to where she was. I gave her a hand getting down off the credenza, and we opened it up -- a slightly difficult task; crusted blood had sealed its sliding doors. Inside was a dusty recorder unit. I turned to Skye's desk, and pushed the release switch to pop up his monitor plate. Suze pushed the recorder's playback button. As we'd suspected, the unit was designed to feed into the desk monitor.

The picture showed the reverse angle from behind Skye's desk. The door to the private office opened and in came a young man. He looked to be eighteen, meaning he was just the right age for the mandatory adult soothsaying.

He had shoulder length dirty-blond hair, and was wearing a t-shirt imprinted with the logo of a popular meed. I shook my head. There hadn't been a good multimedia band since The Cassies, if you ask me.

"Hello, Dale," said what must have been Skye's voice. He spoke with deep, slightly nasal tones. "Thank you for coming in."

Okay, we had the guy's picture, and his first name, and the name of his favorite meed. Even if Dale's last name didn't turn up in Skye's appointment computer, we should have no trouble tracking him down.

"As you know," said Skye's recorded voice, "the law requires two soothsayings in each person's life. The first is done just after you're born, with one or both of your parents in attendance. At that time, the soothsayer only tells them things they'll need to know to get you through childhood. But when you turn eighteen, you, not your parents, become legally responsible for all your actions, and so it's time you heard everything. Now, do you want the good news or the bad news first?"

Here it comes, I thought. He told Dale something he didn't want to hear, the guy flipped, pulled out a blaster, and blew him away.

Dale swallowed. "The -- the good, I guess."

"All right," said Skye. "First, you're a bright young man -- not a genius, you understand, but brighter than average. Your IQ should run between 126 and 132. You are gifted musically -- did your parents tell you that? Good. I hope they encouraged you."

"They did," said Dale, nodding. "I've had piano lessons since I was four."

"Good, good. A crime to waste such raw talent. You also have a particular aptitude for mathematics. That's often paired with musical ability, of course, so no surprises there. Your visual memory is slightly better than average, although your ability to do rote memorization is slightly worse. You would make a good long-distance runner, but ..."

I motioned for Suze to hit the fast-forward button; it seemed like a typical soothsaying, although I'd review it in depth later, if need be. Poor Dale fidgeted up and down in quadruple speed for a time, then Suze released the button.

"Now," said Skye's voice, "the bad news." I made an impressed face at Suze; she'd stopped speeding along at precisely the right moment. "I'm afraid there's a lot of it. Nothing devastating, but still lots of little things. You will begin to lose your hair around your twenty-seventh birthday, and it will begin to gray by the time you're thirty-two. By the age of forty, you will be almost completely bald, and what's left at that point will be half brown and half gray.

"On a less frivolous note, you'll also be prone to gaining weight, starting at about age thirty-three -- and you'll put on half a kilo a year for each of the following thirty years if you're not careful; by the time you're in your mid-fifties, that will pose a significant health hazard. You're also highly likely to develop adult-onset diabetes. Now, yes, that can be cured, but the cure is expensive, and you'll have to pay for it -- so either keep your weight down, which will help stave off its onset, or start saving now for the operation ..."

I shrugged. Nothing worth killing a man over. Suze fast-forwarded the tape some more.

"-- and that's it," concluded Skye. "You know now everything significant that's coded into your DNA. Use this information wisely, and you should have a long, happy, healthy life."

Dale thanked Skye, took a printout of the information he'd just heard, and left. The recording stopped. It had been too much to hope for.

Whoever killed Skye Hissock had come in after young Dale had departed. He was still our obvious first suspect, but unless there was something awful in the parts of the genetic reading we'd fast-forwarded over, there didn't seem to be any motive for him to kill his soothsayer. And besides, this Dale had a high IQ, Skye had said. Only an idiot would think there was any sense in shooting the messenger.

After we'd finished watching the recording, I did an analysis of the actual blaster burn. No fun, that: standing over the open top of Skye's torso.

Most of the blood vessels had been cauterized by the charge. Still, blasters were only manufactured in two places I knew of -- Tokyo, on Earth, and New Monty. If the one used here had been made on New Monty, we'd be out of luck, but one of Earth's countless laws required all blasters to leave a characteristic EM signature, so they could be traced to their registered owners, and –

Good: it was an Earth-made blaster. I recorded the signature, then used my compad to relay it to The Cop Shop. If Raymond Chen could find some time between stuffing his face, he'd send an FTL message to Earth and check the pattern -- assuming, of course, that the Jeffies don't scramble the message just for kicks. Meanwhile, I told Suze to go over Hissock's client list, while I started checking out his family -- fact is, even though it doesn't make much genetic sense, most people are killed by their own relatives.

Skye Hissock had been fifty-one. He'd been a soothsayer for twenty-three years, ever since finishing his Ph.D. in genetics. He was unmarried, and both his parents were long dead. But he did have a brother named Rodger. Rodger was married to Rebecca Connolly, and they had two children, Glen, who, like Dale in Skye's recording, had just turned eighteen, and Billy, who was eight.

There are no inheritance taxes in Mendelia, of course, so barring a will to the contrary, Hissock's estate would pass immediately to his brother.

Normally, that'd be a good motive for murder, but Rodger Hissock and Rebecca Connolly were already quite rich: they owned a controlling interest in the company that operated Mendelia's atmosphere-recycling plant.

I decided to start my interviews with Rodger. Not only had brothers been killing each other since Cain wasted Abel, but the fingerprint lock (a standard ten-points-of-comparison model) on Skye's private inner office was programmed to recognize only four people -- Skye himself; his office cleaner, who Suze was going to talk to; another soothsayer named Jennifer Halasz, who sometimes took Skye's patients for him when he was on vacation (and who had called in the murder, having stopped by apparently to meet Skye for coffee); and dear brother Rodger. Rodger lived in Wheel Four, and worked in One.

I took a cab over to his office. Unlike Skye, Rodger had a real flesh-and-blood receptionist. Most companies that did have human receptionists used middle-aged, businesslike people of either sex. Some guys got so rich that they didn't care what people thought; they hired beautiful blonde women whose busts had been surgically altered far beyond what any phenotype might provide.

But Rodger's choice was different. His receptionist was a delicate young man with refined, almost feminine features. He was probably older than he looked; he looked fourteen.

"Detective Toby Korsakov," I said, flashing my ID. I didn't offer to shake hands -- the boy looked like his would shatter if any pressure were applied. "I'd like to see Rodger Hissock."

"Do you have an appointment?" His voice was high, and there was just a trace of a lisp.

"No. But I'm sure Mr. Hissock will want to see me. It's important."

The boy looked very dubious, but he spoke into an intercom. "There's a cop here, Rodger. Says it's important."

There was a pause. "Send him in," said a loud voice. The boy nodded at me, and I walked through the heavy wooden door -- mahogany, no doubt imported all the way from Earth.

I had thought Skye Hissock's office was well-appointed, but his brother's put it to shame. Objets d'art from a dozen worlds were tastefully displayed on crystal stands. The carpet was so thick I was sure my shoes would sink out of sight. I walked toward the desk. Rodger rose to greet me. He was a muscular man, thick-necked, with lots of black hair and pale gray eyes. We shook hands; his grip was a show of macho strength. "Hello," he said. He boomed out the word, clearly a man used to commanding everyone's attention. "What can I do for you?"

"Please sit down," I said. "My name is Toby Korsakov. I'm from The Cop Shop, working under a contract to the Soothsayer's Guild."

"My God," said Rodger. "Has something happened to Skye?"

Although it was an unpleasant duty, there was nothing more useful in a murder investigation than being there to tell a suspect about the death and seeing his reaction. Most guilty parties played dumb far too long, so the fact that Rodger had quickly made the obvious connection between the SG and his brother made me suspect him less, not more. Still ... "I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news," I said, "but I'm afraid your brother is dead."

Rodger's eyes went wide. "What happened?"

"He was murdered."

"Murdered," repeated Rodger, as if he'd never heard the word before.

"That's right. I was wondering if you knew of anyone who'd want him dead?"

"How was he killed?" asked Rodger. I was irritated that this wasn't an answer to my question, and even more irritated that I'd have to explain it so soon. More than a few homicides had been solved by a suspect mentioning the nature of the crime in advance of him or her supposedly having learned the details. "He was shot at close range by a blaster."

"Oh," said Rodger. He slumped in his chair. "Skye dead." His head shook back and forth a little. When he looked up, his gray eyes were moist.

Whether he was faking or not, I couldn't tell.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Do you know who did it?"

"Not yet. We're tracing the blaster's EM signature. But there were no signs of forcible entry, and, well ..."

"Yes?"

"Well, there are only four people whose fingerprints opened the door to Skye's inner office."

Rodger nodded. "Me and Skye. Who else?"

"His cleaner, and another soothsayer."

"You're checking them out?"

"My associate is. She's also checking all the people Skye had appointments with recently -- people he might have let in of his own volition."

A pause. "Can I ask where you were this morning between ten and eleven?"

"Here."

"In your office?"

"That's right."

"Your receptionist can vouch for that?"

"Well ... no. No, he can't. He was out all morning. His sooth says he's got a facility for languages. I give him a half-day off every Wednesday to take French lessons."

"Did anyone call you while he was gone?"

Rodger spread his thick arms. "Oh, probably. But I never answer my own compad. Truth to tell, I like that half-day where I can't be reached. It lets me get an enormous amount of work done without being interrupted."

"So no one can verify your presence here?"

"Well, no ... no, I guess they can't. But, Crissakes, Detective, Skye was my brother ..."

"I'm not accusing you, Mr. Hissock --"

"Besides, if I'd taken a robocab over, there'd be a debit charge against my account."

"Unless you paid cash. Or unless you walked." You can walk down the travel tubes, although most people don't bother.

"You don't seriously believe --"

"I don't believe anything yet, Mr. Hissock." It was time to change the subject; he would be no use to me if he got too defensive. "Was your brother a good soothsayer?"

"Best there is. Hell, he read my own sooth when I turned eighteen."

He saw my eyebrows go up. "Skye is nine years older than me; I figured, why not use him? He needed the business; he was just starting his practice at that point."

"Did Skye do the readings for your children, too?"

An odd hesitation. "Well, yeah, yeah, Skye did their infant readings, but Glen -- that's my oldest; just turned 18 -- he decided to go somewhere else for his adult reading. Waste of money, if you ask me. Skye would've given him a discount."

My compad bleeped while I was in a cab. I turned it on.

"Yo, Toby." Raymond Chen's fat face appeared on the screen. "We got the registration information on that blaster signature."

"Yeah?"

Ray smiled. "Do the words `open-and-shut case' mean anything to you?

The blaster belongs to one Rodger Hissock. He bought it about eleven years ago."

I nodded and signed off. Since the lock accepted his fingerprint, rich little brother would have no trouble waltzing right into big brother's inner office, and exploding his head. Rodger had method and he had opportunity.

Now all I needed was to find his motive -- and for that, continuing to interview the family members might prove useful.

Eighteen-year-old Glen Hissock was studying engineering at Francis Crick University in Wheel Three. He was a dead ringer for his old man: built like a wrestler, with black hair and quicksilver eyes. But whereas father Rodger had a coarse, outgoing way about him -- the crusher handshake, the loud voice --young Glen was withdrawn, soft-spoken, and nervous.

"I'm sorry about your uncle," I said, knowing that Rodger had already broken the news to his son.

Glen looked at the floor. "Me too."

"Did you like him?"

"He was okay."

"Just okay."

"Yeah."

"Where were you between ten and eleven this morning?"

"At home."

"Was anyone else there?"

"Nah. Mom and Dad were at work, and Billy -- that's my little brother -- was in school." He met my eyes for the first time. "Am I a suspect?"

He wasn't really. All the evidence seemed to point to his father. I shook my head in response to his question, then said, "I hear you had your sooth read recently."

"Yeah."

"But you didn't use your uncle."

"Nah."

"How come?"

A shrug. "Just felt funny, that's all. I picked a guy at random from the online directory."

"Any surprises in your sooth?"

The boy looked at me. "Sooth's private, man. I don't have to tell you that."

I nodded. "Sorry."

Two hundred years ago, in 2029, the Palo Alto Nanosystems Laboratory developed a molecular computer. You doubtless read about it in history class: during the Snow War, the U.S. used it to disassemble Bogatá atom by atom.

Sometimes, though, you can put the genie back in the bottle.

Remember Hamasaki and DeJong, the two researchers at PANL who were shocked to see their work corrupted that way? They created and released the nano-Gorts --self-replicating microscopic machines that seek out and destroy molecular computers, so that nothing like Bogatá could ever happen again.

We've got PANL nano-Gorts here, of course. They're everywhere in Free Space. But we've got another kind of molecular guardian, too -- inevitably, they were dubbed helix-Gorts. It's rumored the SG was responsible for them, but after a huge investigation, no indictments were ever brought. Helix-Gorts circumvent any attempt at artificial gene therapy. We can tell you everything that's written in your DNA, but we can't do a damned thing about it. Here, in Mendelia, you play the hand you're dealt.

My compad bleeped again. I switched it on. "Korsakov here."

Suze's face appeared on the screen. "Hi, Toby. I took a sample of Skye's DNA off to Rundstedt" -- a soothsayer who did forensic work for us.

"She's finished the reading."

"And?" I said.

Suze's green eyes blinked. "Nothing stood out. Skye wouldn't have been a compulsive gambler, or an addict, or inclined to steal another person's spouse -- which eliminates several possible motives for his murder. In fact, Rundstedt says Skye would have had a severe aversion to confrontation." She sighed. "Just doesn't seem to be the kind of guy who'd end up in a situation where someone would want him dead."

I nodded. "Thanks, Suze. Any luck with Skye's clients?"

"I've gone through almost all the ones who'd had appointments in the last three days. So far, they all have solid alibis."

"Keep checking. I'm off to see Skye's sister-in-law, Rebecca Connolly. Talk to you later."

"Bye."

Sometimes I wonder if I'm in the right line of work. I know, I know -- what a crazy thing to be thinking. I mean, my parents knew from my infant reading that I'd grow up to have an aptitude for puzzle-solving, plus superior powers of observation. They made sure I had every opportunity to fulfill my potentials, and when I had my sooth read for myself at eighteen, it was obvious that this would be a perfect job for me to pursue. And yet, still, I have my doubts. I just don't feel like a cop sometimes.

But a soothsaying can't be wrong: almost every human trait has a genetic basis -- gullibility, mean-spiritedness, a goofy sense of humor, the urge to collect things, talents for various sports, every specific sexual predilection (according to my own sooth, my tastes ran to group sex with Asian women -- so far, I'd yet to find an opportunity to test that empirically).

Of course, when Mendelia started up, we didn't yet know what each gene and gene combo did. Even today, the SG is still adding new interpretations to the list. Still, I sometimes wonder how people in other parts of Free Space get along without soothsayers -- stumbling through life, looking for the right job; sometimes completely unaware of talents they possess; failing to know what specific things they should do to take care of their health. Oh, sure, you can get a genetic reading anywhere -- even down on Earth. But they're only mandatory here.

And my mandatory readings said I'd make a good cop. But, I have to admit, sometimes I'm not so sure ...

Rebecca Connolly was at home when I got there. On Earth, a family with the kind of money the Hissock-Connolly union had would own a mansion. Space is at a premium aboard a habitat, but their living room was big enough that its floor showed a hint of curvature. The art on the walls included originals by both Grant Wood and Bob Eggleton. There was no doubt they were loaded -- making it all the harder to believe they'd done in Uncle Skye for his money.

Rebecca Connolly was a gorgeous woman. According to the press reports I'd read, she was forty-four, but she looked twenty years younger. Gene therapy might be impossible here, but anyone who could afford it could have plastic surgery. Her hair was copper-colored, and her eyes an unnatural violet.

"Hello, Detective Korsakov," she said. "My husband told me you were likely to stop by." She shook her head. "Poor Skye. Such a darling man."

I tilted my head. She was the first of Skye's relations to actually say something nice about him as a person -- which, after all, could just be a clumsy attempt to deflect suspicion from her. "You knew Skye well?"

"No -- to be honest, no. He and Rodger weren't that close. Funny thing, that. Skye used to come by the house frequently when we first got married -- he was Rodger's best man, did he tell you that? But when Glen was born, well, he stopped coming around as much. I dunno -- maybe he didn't like kids; he never had any of his own. Anyway, he really hasn't been a big part of our lives for, oh, eighteen years now."

"But Rodger's fingerprints were accepted by Skye's lock."

"Oh, yes. Rodger owns the unit Skye has his current offices in."

"I hate to ask you this, but --"

"I'm on the Board of Directors of TenthGen Computing, Detective. We were having a shareholders' meeting this morning. Something like eight hundred people saw me there."

I asked more questions, but didn't get any closer to identifying Rodger Hissock's motive. And so I decided to cheat -- as I said, sometimes I do wonder if I'm in the right kind of job. "Thanks for your help, Ms. Connolly. I don't want to take up any more of your time, but can I use your bathroom before I go?"

She smiled. "Of course. There's one down the hall, and one upstairs."

The upstairs one sounded more promising for my purposes. I went up to it, and the door closed behind me. I really did need to go, but first I pulled out my forensic scanner and started looking for specimens. Razors and combs were excellent places to find DNA samples; so were towels, if the user rubbed vigorously enough. Best of all, though, were toothbrushes. I scanned everything, but something was amiss. According to the scanner, there was DNA present from one woman -- the XX chromosome pair made the gender clear. And there was DNA from one man. But three males lived in this house: father Rodger, elder son Glen, and younger son Billy.

Perhaps this bathroom was used only by the parents, in which case I'd blown it -- I'd hardly get a chance to check out the other bathroom. But no -- there were four sets of towels, four toothbrushes, and there, on the edge of the tub, a toy aquashuttle ... precisely the kind an eight-year-old boy would play with.

Curious. Four people obviously used this john, but only two had left any genetic traces. And that made no sense -- I mean, sure, I hardly ever washed when I was eight like Billy, but no one can use a washroom day in and day out without leaving some DNA behind.

I relieved myself, the toilet autoflushed, and I went downstairs, thanked Ms. Connolly again, and left.

Like I said, I was cheating -- making me wonder again whether I really was cut out for a career in law enforcement. Even though it was a violation of civil rights, I took the male DNA sample I'd found in the Hissock-Connolly bathroom to Dana Rundstedt, who read its sooth for me.

I was amazed by the results. If I hadn't cheated, I might never have figured it out -- it was a damn-near perfect crime.

But it all fit, after seeing what was in the male DNA.

The fact that of the surviving Hissocks, only Rodger apparently had free access to Skye's inner office.

The fact that Rodger's blaster was the murder weapon.

The fact that there were apparently only two people using the bathroom.

The fact that Skye hated confrontation.

The fact that the Hissock-Connolly family had a lot of money they wanted to pass on to the next generation.

The fact that young Glen looked just like his dad, but was subdued and reserved.

The fact that Glen had gone to a different soothsayer.

The fact that Rodger's taste in receptionists was ... unusual.

The pieces all fit -- that part of my sooth, at least, must have been read correctly; I was good at puzzling things out. But I was still amazed by how elegant it was.

Ray Chen would sort out the legalities; he was an expert at that kind of thing. He'd find a way to smooth over my unauthorized soothsaying before we brought this to trial.

I got in a cab and headed off to Wheel Three to confront the killer.

"Hold it right there," I said, coming down the long, gently curving corridor at Francis Crick. "You're under arrest."

Glen Hissock stopped dead in his tracks. "What for?"

I looked around, then drew Glen into an empty classroom. "For the murder of your uncle, Skye Hissock. Or should I say, for the murder of your brother? The semantics are a bit tricky."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Glen, in that subdued, nervous voice of his.

I shook my head. Soothsayer Skye had deserved punishment, and his brother Rodger was guilty of a heinous crime -- in fact, a crime Mendelian society considered every bit as bad as murder. But I couldn't let Glen get away with it. "I'm sorry for what happened to you," I said. The mental scars no doubt explained his sullen, withdrawn manner.

He glared at me. "Like that makes it better."

"When did it start?"

He was quiet for a time, then gave a little shrug, as if realizing there was no point in pretending any longer. "When I was twelve -- as soon as I entered puberty. Not every night, you understand. But often enough." He paused, then: "How'd you figure it out?"

I decided to tell him the truth. "There are only two different sets of DNA in your house -- one female, as you'd expect, and just one male."

Glen said nothing.

"I had the male DNA read. I was looking for a trait that might have provided a motive for your father. You know what I found."

Glen was still silent.

"When your dad's sooth was read just after birth, maybe his parents were told that he was sterile. Certainly the proof is there, in his DNA: an inability to produce viable sperm." I paused, remembering the details Rundstedt had explained to me. "But the soothsayer back then couldn't have known the effect of having the variant form of gene ABL-419d, with over a hundred T-A-T repeats. That variation's function hadn't been identified that long ago. But it was known by the time Rodger turned eighteen, by the time he went to see his big brother Skye, by the time Skye gave him his adult soothsaying." I paused. "But Uncle Skye hated confrontation, didn't he?"

Glen was motionless, a statue.

"And so Skye lied to your dad. Oh, he told him about his sterility, all right, but he figured there was no point in getting into an argument about what that variant gene meant."

Glen looked at the ground. When at last he did speak, his voice was bitter. "I had thought Dad knew. I confronted him -- Christ sakes, Dad, if you knew you had a gene for incestuous pedophilia, why the hell didn't you seek counseling? Why the hell did you have kids?"

"But your father didn't know, did he?"

Glen shook his head. "That bastard Uncle Skye hadn't told him."

"In fairness," I said, "Skye probably figured that since your father couldn't have kids, the problem would never come up. But your dad made a lot of money, and wanted it to pass to an heir. And since he couldn't have an heir the normal way ..."

Glen's voice was full of disgust. "Since he couldn't have an heir the normal way, he had one made."

I looked the boy up and down. I'd never met a clone before. Glen really was the spitting image of the old man -- a chip off the old block. But like any dynasty, the Hissock-Connolly clan wanted not just an heir, but an heir and a spare. Little Billy, ten years younger than Glen, was likewise an exact genetic duplicate of Rodger Hissock, produced from Rodger's DNA placed into one of Rebecca's eggs. All three Hissock males had indeed left DNA in that bathroom -- exactly identical DNA.

"Have you always known you were a clone?" I asked.

Glen shook his head. "I only just found out. Before I went for my adult soothsaying, I wanted to see the report my parents had gotten when I was born. But none existed -- my dad had decided to save some money. He didn't need a new report done, he figured; my sooth would be identical to his, after all.

When I went to get my sooth read and found that I was sterile, well, it all fell into place in my mind."

"And so you took your father's blaster, and, since your fingerprints are essentially the same as his ..."

Glen nodded slowly. His voice was low and bitter. "Dad never knew in advance what was wrong with him -- never had a chance to get help. Uncle Skye never told him. Even after Dad had himself cloned, Skye never spoke up." He looked at me, fury in his cold gray eyes. "It doesn't work, dammit -- our whole way of life doesn't work if a soothsayer doesn't tell the truth. You can't play the hand you're dealt if you don't know what cards you've got. Skye deserved to die."

"And you framed your dad for it. You wanted to punish him, too."

Glen shook his head. "You don't understand, man. You can't understand."

"Try me."

"I didn't want to punish Dad -- I wanted to protect Billy. Dad can afford the best damn lawyer in Mendelia. Oh, he'll be found guilty, sure, but he won't get life. His lawyer will cut it down to the minimum mandatory sentence for murder, which is --"

"Ten years," I said, realization dawning. "In ten years, Billy will be an adult -- and out of danger from Rodger."

Glen nodded once.

"But Rodger could have told the truth at any time -- revealed that you were a clone of him. If he'd done that, he would have gotten off, and suspicion would have fallen on you. How did you know he wasn't going to speak up?"

Glen sounded a lot older than his eighteen years. "If Dad exposed me, I'd expose him -- and the penalty for child molestation is also a minimum ten years, so he'd be doing the time anyway." He looked directly at me. "Except being a murderer gets you left alone in jail, and being a pedophile gets you wrecked up."

I nodded, led him outside, and hailed a robocab.

Mendelia is a great place to live, honest.

And, hell, I did solve the crime, didn't I? Meaning I am a good detective. So I guess my soothsayer didn't lie to me.

At least -- at least I hope not ...

I had a sudden cold feeling that the SG would stop footing the bill long before this case could come to public trial.

THE 43 ANTAREAN DYNASTIES

Mike Resnick

TO THANK the Maker Of All Things for the birth of his first male offspring, the Emperor Maloth IV ordered his architects to build a temple that would forever dwarf all other buildings on the planet. It was to be made entirely of crystal, and the spire- covered roof, which looked like a million glistening spear-points aimed at the sun, would be supported by 217 columns, to honor his 217 forebears. When struck, each column would sound a musical note that could be heard for kilometers, calling the faithful to prayer.

The structure would be known as the Temple of the Honored Sun, for his heir had been born exactly at midday, when the sun was highest in the sky. The temple took 27 Standard years to complete, and although races from all across the galaxy would come to Antares III to marvel at it, Maloth further decreed that no aliens or non-believers would ever be allowed to enter it and desecrate its sacred corridors with their presence...

* * * *

A man, a woman, and a child emerge from the Temple of the Honored Sun. The woman holds a camera to her eye, capturing the same image from a dozen unimaginative angles. The child, his lip sparsely covered with hair that is supposed to imply maturity, never sees beyond the game he is playing on his pocket computer. The man looks around to make sure no one is watching him, grinds out a smokeless cigar beneath his heel, and then increases his pace until he joins them.

They approach me, and I will myself to become one with my surroundings, to insinuate myself into the marble walls and stone walkways before they can speak to me.

I am invisible. You cannot see me. You will pass me by.

"Hey, fella -- we're looking for a guide," says the man. "You interested?"

I stifle a sigh and bow deeply. "I am honored," I say, glad that they do not understand the subtleties of Antarean inflection.

"Wow!" exclaims the woman, aiming her camera at me. "I never saw anything like that! It's almost as if you folded your torso in half! Can you do it again?"

I am reminded of an ancient legend, possibly aprocryphal though I choose to believe it. An ambassador who was equally fascinated by the way the Antarean body is jointed, once asked Komarith I, the founder of the 38th Dynasty, to bow a second time. Komarith merely stared at him without moving until the embarrassed ambassador slunk away. He went on to rule for 29 years and was never known to bow again.

It has been a long time since Komarith, almost seven millennia now, and Antares and the universe have changed. I bow for the woman while she snaps her holographs.

"What's your name?" asks the man.

"You could not pronounce it," I reply. "When I conduct members of your race, I choose the name Hermes."

"Herman, eh?"

"Hermes," I correct him.

"Right. Herman."

The boy finally looks up. "He said Hermes, Dad."

The man shrugs. "Whatever." He looks at his timepiece. "Well, let's get started."

"Yeah," chimes in the child. "They're piping in the game from Roosevelt III this afternoon. I've got to get back for it."

"You can watch sports anytime," says the woman. "This may be your only chance to see Antares."

"I should be so lucky," he mutters, returning his attention to his computer.

I recite my introductory speech almost by rote. "Allow me to welcome you to Antares III, and to its capital city of Kalimetra, known throughout the galaxy as the City of a Million Spires."

"I didn't see any million spires when we took the shuttle in from the spaceport," says the child, whom I could have sworn was not listening. "A thousand or two, maybe."

"There was a time when there were a million," I explain. "Today only 16,304 remain. Each is made of quartz or crystal. In late afternoon, when the sun sinks low in the sky, they act as a prism for its rays, creating a flood of exotic colors that stretches across the thoroughfares of the city. Races have come from halfway across the galaxy to experience the effect."

"Sixteen thousand," murmurs the woman. "I wonder what happened to the rest?"

* * * *

No one knew why Antareans found the spires so aesthetically pleasing. They towered above the cities, casting their shadows and their shifting colors across the landscape. Tall, delicate, exquisite, they reflected a unique grandness of vision and sensitivity of spirit. The rulers of Antares III spent almost 38,000 years constructing their million spires.

During the Second Invasion, it took the Canphorite armada less than two weeks to destroy all but 16,304 of them...

* * * *

The woman is still admiring the spires that she can see in the distance. Finally she asks who built them, as if they are too beautiful to have been created by Antareans.

"The artisans and craftsmen of my race built everything you will see today," I answer.

"All by yourselves?"

"Is it so difficult for you to believe?" I ask gently.

"No," she says defensively. "Of course not. It's just that there's so much..."

"Kalimetra was not created in a day or a year, or even a millennium," I point out. "It is the cumulative achievement of 43 Antarean Dynasties."

"So we're in the 43rd Dynasty now?" she asks.

* * * *

It was Zelorean IX who officially declared Kalimetra to be the Eternal City. Neither war nor insurrection had ever threatened its stability, and even the towering temples of his forefathers gave every promise of lasting for all eternity. It was a Golden Age, and he could see no reason why it should not go on forever...

* * * *

"The last absolute ruler of the 43rd Dynasty has been dust for almost three thousand years," I explain. "Since then we have been governed by a series of conquerers, each alien race superceding the last."

"Thank goodness they didn't destroy your buildings," says the woman, turning to admire a water fountain, which for some reason appears to her to be a mystical alien artifact. She is about to take a holo when the child restrains her.

"It's just a goddamned water bubbler, Ma," he says.

"But it's fascinating," she says. "Imagine what kind of beings used it in ages past."

"Thirsty ones," says the bored child.

She ignores him and turns back to me. "As I was saying, it must be criminal to rob the galaxy of such treasures."

"Yeah, well somebody destroyed some buildings around here," interjects the child, who seems intent on proving someone wrong about something. "Remember the hole in the ground we saw over that way?" He points in the direction of the Footprint. "Looks like a bomb crater to me."

"You are mistaken," I explain, leading them over to it. "It has always been there."

"It's just a big sinkhole," says the man, totally unimpressed.

"It is worshipped by my people as the Footprint of God," I explain. "Once, many eons ago, Kalimetra was in the throes of a years-long drought. Finally Jorvash, our greatest priest, offered his own life if God would bring the rains. God replied that it would not rain until He wept again, and we had not yet suffered enough to bring forth His tears of compassion. But He promised that He would strike a bargain with Jorvash." I pause for effect, but the man is lighting another cigar and the child is concentrating on his pocket computer. "The next morning Jorvash was found dead inside his temple, while God had created this depression with His foot and filled it with water. It sustained us until He finally wept again."

The woman seems flustered. "Um...I hate to ask," she finally says, "but could you repeat that story? My recorder wasn't on."

The man looks uncomfortable. "She's always forgetting to turn the damned thing on," he explains, and flips me a coin. "For your trouble."

* * * *

Lobilia was the greatest poet in the history of Antares III. Although he died during the 23rd Dynasty, most of his work survived him. But his masterpiece, "The Long Night of the Exile" -- the epic of Bagata's Exile and his triumphant Return -- was lost forever.

Though he was his race's most famous bard, Lobilia himself was illiterate, unable even to write his own name. He created his poetry extemporaneously, embellishing upon it with each retelling. He recited his epic just once, and was so satisfied with its form that he refused to repeat it for the scribes who were waiting for a final version and hadn't written it down.

* * * *

"Thank you," says the woman, deactivating the recorder after I finish. She pauses. "Can I buy a book with some more of your quaint folk legends?"

I decide not to explain the difference between a folk legend and an article of belief. "They are for sale in the gift shop of your hotel," I reply.

"You don't have enough books?" mutters the man.

She glares at him, but says nothing, and I lead them to the Tomb, which always impresses visitors.

"This is the Tomb of Bedorian V, the greatest ruler of the 37th Dynasty," I say. "Bedorian was a commoner, a simple farmer who deposed the notorious Maelastri XII, himself a mighty warrior who was the last ruler of the 36th Dynasty. It was Bedorian who decreed universal education for all Antareans."

"What did you have before that?"

"Our females were not allowed the privilege of literacy until Bedorian's reign."

"How did this guy finally die?" asks the man, who doesn't really care but is unwilling to let the woman ask all the questions.

"Bedorian was assassinated by one of his followers," I reply.

"A male, no doubt," says the woman wryly.

"Before he died," I continue, "he united three warring states without fighting a single battle, decreed that all Antareans should use a common language, and outlawed the worship of kreneks."

"What are kreneks?"

"They are poisonous reptiles. They killed many worshippers in nameless, obscene ceremonies before Bedorian IV came to power."

"Yeah?" says the child, alert again. "What were they like?"

"What is obscene to one being is simply boring to another," I say. "Terrans find them dull." Which is not true, but I have no desire to watch the child snicker as I describe the rituals.

"What a shame," says the woman, though her voice sounds relieved. "Still, you certainly seem to know your history."

I want to answer that I just make up the stories. But I am afraid if I say it, she will believe it.

"Where did you learn all this stuff?" she continues.

"To become a licensed guide," I reply, "an Antarean must undergo fourteen years of study, and must also speak a minimum of four alien languages fluently. Terran is always one of the four."

"That's some set of credentials," comments the man. "I made it through one year of dental school and quit."

And yet, it is you who are paying me.

"I'm surprised you don't work at one of the local universities," he continues.

"I did once."

Which is true. But I have my family to feed -- and tourists' tips, however small and grudgingly given, are still greater than my salary as a teacher.

A rapu -- an Antarean child -- insinuates his way between myself and my clients. Scarcely more than an infant, he is dressed in rags, and his face is smudged with dirt. There are open sores on the reticulated plates of his skin, and his golden eyes water constantly. He begs plaintively for credits in his native tongue. When there is no response, he extends his hand in what has become a universal gesture that says: You are rich. I am poor and hungry. Give me money.

"Yours?" asks the man, frowning, as his wife takes half a dozen holos in quick succession.

"No, he is not mine."

"What is he doing here?"

"He lives in the street," I answer, my compassion for the rapu alternating with my humilation at having to explain his presence and situation. "He is asking for coins so that he and his mother will not go hungry tonight."

I look at the rapu and think sadly: Timing is everything. Once, long ago, we strode across our world like gods. You would not have gone hungry in any of the 43 Dynasties.

The human child looks at his Antarean counterpart. I wonder if he realizes how fortunate he is. His face gives no reflection of his thoughts; perhaps he has none. Finally he picks his nose and goes back to manipulating his computer.

The man stares at the rapu for a moment, then flips him a two-credit coin. The rapu catches it, bows and blesses the man, and runs off. We watch him go. He raises the coin above his head, yelling happily -- and a moment later, we are surrounded by twenty more street urchins, all filthy, all hungry, all begging for coins.

"Enough's enough!" says the man irritably. "Tell them to get the hell out of here and go home, Herman."

"They live here," I explain gently.

"Right here?" demands the man. He stomps the ground with his foot, and the nearest rapus jump back in fright. "On this spot? Okay, then tell them to stay here where they live and not follow us."

I explain to the rapus in our own tongue that these tourists will not give them coins.

"Then we will go to the ugly pink hotel where all the Men stay and rob their rooms."

"That is none of my concern," I say. "But if you are caught, it will go hard with you."

The oldest of the urchins smiles at my warning.

"If we are caught, they will lock us up, and because it is a jail they will have to feed us, and we will be protected from the rain and the cold -- it is far better than being here."

I have no answer for rapus whose only ambition is to be warm and dry and well-fed, but merely shrug. They run off, laughing and singing, as if they are human children off to play some game.

"Damned aliens!" mutters the man.

"That is incorrect," I say.

"Oh?" "A matter of semantics," I point out gently. "They are indigenous. You are the aliens."

"Well, they could do with some lessons in behavior from us aliens, then," he growls.

We walk up the long ramp to the Tomb and are about to enter it, when the woman stops.

"I'd like a holo of the three of you standing in the entrance," she announces. She smiles at me. "Just to prove to our friends we were here, and that we met a real Antarean."

The man walks over and stands on one side of me. The child reluctantly moves to my other side.

"Now put your arm around Herman," says the woman.

The child steps back, and I see a mixture of contempt and disgust on his face. "I'll pose with it, but I won't touch it!"

"You do what your mother says!" snaps the man.

"No way!" says the child, stalking sulkily back down the ramp. "You want to hug him, you go ahead!"

"You listen to me, young man!" says the man, but the child does not stop or give any indication that he has heard, and soon he disappears behind a temple.

* * * *

It was Tcharock, the founder of the 30th Dynasty, who decreed that the person of the Emperor was sacrosanct and could not be touched by any being other than his medics and his concubines, and then only with his consent.

His greatest advisor was Chaluba, who extended Tcharock's rule to more than 80% of the planet and halted the hyper-inflation that had been the 29th Dynasty's legacy to him.

One night, during a state function, Chaluba inadvertantly brushed against Tcharock while introducing him to the Ambassador from far Domar.

The next morning Tcharock regretfully gave the signal to the executioner, and Chaluba was beheaded. Despite this unfortunate beginning, the 30th Dynasty survived for 1,062 Standard years.

* * * *

The woman, embarrassed, begins apologizing to me. But I notice that she, too, avoids touching me. The man goes off after the child, and a few moments later the two of them return -- which is just as well, for the woman has begun repeating herself.

The man pushes the child toward me, and he sullenly utters an apology. The man takes an ominous step toward him, and he reluctantly reaches out his hand. I take it briefly -- the contact is no more pleasant for me than for him -- and then we enter the Tomb. Two other groups are there, but they are hundreds of meters away, and we cannot hear what their guides are saying.

"How high is the ceiling?" asks the woman, training her camera on the exquisite carvings overhead.

"38 meters," I say. "The Tomb itself is 203 meters long and 67 meters wide. The body of Beldorian V is in a large vault beneath the floor." I pause, thinking as always of past glories. "On the Day of Mourning, the day the Tomb was completed, a million Antareans stood patiently in line outside the Tomb to pay their last respects."

"I don't mean to ask a silly question," says the woman, "but why are all the buildings so enormous?"

"Ego," suggests the man, confident in his wisdom.

"The Maker Of All Things is huge," I explain. "So my people felt that any monuments to Him should be as large as possible, so that He might be comfortable inside them."

"You think your God can't find or fit into a small building?" asks the man with a condescending smile.

"He is everyone's God," I answer. "And while He can of course find a small temple, why should we force Him to live in one?"

"Did Beldorian have a wife?" asks the woman, her mind back to smaller considerations.

"He had five of them," I answer. "The tomb next to this one is known as The Place of Beldorian's Queens."

"He was a polygamist?"

I shake my head. "No. Beldorian simply outlived his first four queens."

"He must have died a very old man," says the woman.

"He did not," I answer. "There is a belief among my people that those who achieve public greatness are doomed to private misery. Such was Beldorian's fate." I turn to the child, who has been silent since returning, and ask him if he has any questions, but he merely glares at me without speaking.

"How long ago was this place built?" asks the man.

"Beldorian V died 6,302 Standard years ago. It took another 17 years to build and prepare the Tomb."

"6,302 years," he muses. "That's a long time."

"We are an ancient race," I reply proudly. "A human anthropologist has suggested that our 3rd Dynasty commenced before your ancestors crossed over the evolutionary barrier into sentience."

"Maybe we spent a long time living in the trees," says the man, clearly unimpressed and just a bit defensive. "But look how quickly we passed you once we climbed down."

"If you say so," I answer noncommittally.

"In fact, everybody passed you," he persists. "Look at the record: How many times has Antares been conquered?"

"I am not sure," I lie, for I find it humiliating to speak of it.

* * * *

When the Antareans learned that Man's Republic wish to annex their world, they gathered their army in Zanthu and then marched out onto the battlefield, 300,000 strong. They were the cream of the planet's young warriors, gold of eye, the reticulated plates of their skin glistening in the morning sun, prepared to defend their homeworld.

The Republic sent a single ship that flew high overhead and dropped a single bomb, and in less than a second there was no longer an Antarean army, or a city of Zanthu, or a Great Library of Cthstoka.

Over the millennia Antares was conquered four times by Man, twice by the Canphor Twins, and once each by Lodin XI, Emra, Ramor, and the Sett Empire. It was said that the parched ground had finally quenched its thirst by drinking a lake of Antarean blood.

* * * *

As we leave the Tomb, we come to a small, skinny rapu. He sits on a rock, staring at us with his large, golden eyes, his expression rapt in contemplation.

The human child pointedly ignores him and continues walking toward the next temple, but the adults stop.

"What a cute little thing!" enthuses the woman. "And he looks so hungry." She digs into her shoulder bag and withdraws a sweet that she has kept from breakfast. "Here," she says, holding it up. "Would you like it?"

The rapu never moves. This is unique not only in the woman's experience, but also in mine, for he is obviously undernourished.

"Maybe he can't metabolize it," suggests the man. He pulls a coin out, steps over to the rapu, and extends his hand. "Here you go, kid."

The rapu, his face frozen in contemplation, makes no attempt to grab the coin.

And suddenly I am thinking excitedly: You disdain their food when you are hungry, and their money when you are poor. Could you possibly be the One we have awaited for so many millennia, the One who will give us back our former glory and initiate the 44th Dynasty?

I study him intently, and my excitement fades just as quickly as it came upon me. The rapu does not disdain their food and their money. His golden eyes are clouded over. Life in the streets has so weakened him that he has become blind, and of course he does not understand what they are saying. His seeming arrogance comes not from pride or some inner light, but because he is not aware of their offerings.

"Please," I say, gently taking the sweet from the woman without coming into actual contact with her fingers. I walk over and place it in the rapu's hand. He sniffs it, then gulps it down hungrily and extends his hand, blindly begging for more.

"It breaks your heart," says the woman.

"Oh, it's no worse than what we saw on Bareimus V," responds the man. "They were every bit as poor -- and remember that awful skin disease that they all had?"

The woman considers, and her face reflects the unpleasantness of the memory. "I suppose you're right at that." She shrugs, and I can tell that even though the child is still in front of us, hand outstretched, she has already put him from her mind.

I lead them through the Garden of the Vanished Princes, with its tormented history of sacrifice and intrigue, and suddenly the man stops.

"What happened here?" he asks, pointing to a number of empty pedestals.

"History happened," I explain. "Or avarice, for sometimes they are the same thing." He seems confused, so I continue: "If any of our conquerers could find a way to transport a treasure back to his home planet, he did. Anything small enough to be plundered was plundered."

"And these statues that have been defaced?" he says, pointing to them. "Did you do it yourselves so they would be worthless to occupying armies?"

"No," I answer.

"Well, whoever did that" -- he points to a headless statue -- "ought to be strung up and whipped."

"What's the fuss?" asks the child in a bored voice. "They're just statues of aliens."

"Actually, the human who did that was rewarded with the governorship of Antares III," I inform them.

"What are you talking about?" says the man.

"The second human conquest of the Antares system was led by Commander Lois Kiboko," I begin. "She defaced or destroyed more than 3,000 statues. Many were physical representations of our deity, and since she and her crew were devout believers in one of your religions, she felt that these were false idols and must be destroyed."

"Well," the man replies with a shrug, "it's a small price to pay for her saving you from the Lodinites."

"Perhaps," I say. "The problem is that we had to pay a greater price for each successive savior."

He stares at me, and there is an awkward silence. Finally I suggest that we visit the Palace of the Supreme Tyrant.

"You seem such a docile race," she says awkwardly. "I mean, so civilized and unaggressive. How did your gene pool ever create a real, honest-to-goodness tyrant?"

The truth is that our gene pool was considerably more aggressive before a seemingly endless series of alien conquests decimated it. But I know that this answer would make them uncomfortable, and could affect the size of my tip, so I lie to them instead. (I am ashamed to admit that lying to aliens becomes easier with each passing day. Indeed, I am sometimes amazed at the facility with which I can create falsehoods.)

"Every now and then each race produces a genetic sport," I say, and I can see she believes it, "and we Antareans are so docile, to use your expression, that this particular one had no difficulty achieving power."

"What was his name?"

"I do not know."

"I thought you took fourteen years' worth of history courses," she says accusingly, and I can tell she thinks I am lying to her, whereas every time I have actually lied she has believed me.

"Our language has many dialects, and they have all evolved and changed over 36,000 years," I point out. "Some we have deciphered, but to this day many of them remain unsolved mysteries. In fact, right at this moment a team of human archaeologists is hard at work trying to uncover the Tyrant's name."

"If it's a dead language, how are they going to manage that?"

"In the days when your race was still planetbound, there was an artifact called the Rosetta Stone that helped you translate an ancient language. We have something similar -- ours is known as the Bosperi Scroll -- that comes from the Great Tyrant's era."

"Where is it?" asks the woman, looking around.

"I regret to inform you that both the archaeologists and the Bosperi Scroll are currently in a museum on Deluros VIII."

"Smart," says the man. "They can protect it better on Deluros."

"From who?" asks the woman.

"From anyone who wants to steal it, of course," he says, as if explaining it to a child.

"But I mean, who would want to steal the key to a dead language?"

"Do you know what it would be worth to a collector?" answers the man. "Or a thief who wanted to ransom it?"

They discuss it further, but the simple truth is that it is on Deluros because it was small enough to carry, and for no other reason. When they are through arguing I tell her that it is because they have devices on Deluros that will bring back the faded script, and she nods her head thoughtfully.

We walk another 400 kilometers and come to the immense Palace of the Kings. It is made entirely of gold, and becomes so hot from the rays of the sun that one can touch the outer surface only at night. This was the building in which all the rulers of the 7th through the 12th Dynasties resided. It was from here that my race received the Nine Proclamations of Ascendency, and the Charter of Universal Rights, and our most revered document, the Mabelian Declaration.

It was a wondrous time to have lived, when we had never tasted defeat and all problems were capable of solution, when stately caravans plied their trade across secure boundaries and monarchs were just and wise, when each day brought new triumphs and the future held infinite promise.

I point to the broken and defaced stone chair. "Once there were 246 jewels and precious stones embedded in the throne."

The child walks over to the throne, then looks at me accusingly. "Where are they?" he demands.

"They were all stolen over the millennia," I reply.

"By conquerers, of course," offers the woman with absolute certainty.

"Yes," I say, but again I am lying. They were stolen by my own people, who traded them to various occupying armies for food or the release of captive loved ones.

We spend a few more minutes examining the vanished glory of the Palace of the Kings, then walk out the door and approach the next crumbling structure. It is the Hall of the Thinkers, revered to this day by all Antareans, but I know they will not understand why a race would create such an ediface to scholarship, and I haven't the energy to explain, so I tell them that it is the Palace of the Concubines, and of course they believe me. At one point the child, making no attempt to mask his disappointment, asks why there are no statues or carvings showing the concubines, and I think very quickly and explain that Lois Kiboko's religious beliefs were offended by the sexual frankness of the artifacts and she had them all destroyed.

I feel guilty about this lie, for it is against the Code of Just Behavior to suggest that a visitor's race may have offended in any way. Ironically, while the child voices his disappointment, I notice that none of the three seems to have a problem accepting that another human would destroy millennia-old artwork that upset his sensibilities. I decide that since they feel no guilt, this one time I shall feel none either. (But I still do. Tradition is a difficult thing to transcend.)

I see the man anxiously walking around, looking into corners and behind pedestals, and I ask him if something is wrong.

"Where's the can?" he says.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The can. The bathroom. The lavatory." He frowns. "Didn't any of these goddamned concubines ever have to take a crap?"

I finally discern what he wants and direct him to a human facility that has been constructed just beyond the Western Door.

He returns a few minutes later, and I lead them all outside, past the towering Onyx Obelisk that marked the beginning of the almost-forgotten 4th Dynasty. We stop briefly at the Temple of the River of Light, which was constructed over the river, so that the sacred waters flow through the temple itself.

We leave and turn a corner, and suddenly a single structure completely dominates the landscape.

"What's that?" asks the woman.

"That is the Spiral Ramp to Heaven," I answer.

"What a fabulous name!" she enthuses. "I just know a fabulous story goes with it!" She turns to me expectantly.

"There was a time, before our scientists knew better, that people thought you could reach heaven if you simply built a tall enough ramp."

The child guffaws.

"It is true," I continue. "Construction was begun during the 2nd Dyntasy, and continued for more than 700 years until midway through the 3rd. It looks as if you can see the top from here, but you actually are looking only at the bottom half of it. The rest is obscured by clouds."

"How high does it go?" asked the woman.

"More than nine kilometers," I say. "Three kilometers higher than our tallest mountain."

"Amazing!" she exclaims.

"Perhaps you would like a closer look at it?" I suggest. "You might even wish to climb the first kilometer. It is a very gentle ascent until you reach the fifth kilometer."

"Yes," she replies happily. "I think I'd like that very much."

"I'm not climbing anything," says the man.

"Oh, come on," she urges him. "It'll be fun!"

"The air's too thin and the gravity's too heavy and it's too damned much like work. One of these days I'm going to choose our itinerary, and I promise you it won't involve so goddamned much walking."

"Can we go back and watch the game?" asks the child eagerly.

The man takes one more look at the Spiral Ramp to Heaven. "Yeah," he says. "I've seen enough. Let's go back."

"We really should finish the tour," says the woman. "We'll probably never be in this sector of the galaxy again."

"So what? It's just another backwater world," replies the man. "Don't tell your friends about the Stairway to the Stars or whatever the hell it's called and they'll never know you missed it."

Then the woman comes up with what she imagines will be the clinching argument. "But you've already agreed to pay for the tour."

"So we'll cut it short and pay him half as much," says the man. "Big deal."

The man pulls a wad of credits out of his pocket and peels off three ten-credits notes. Then he pauses, looks at me, pockets them, and presses a fifty-credit note into my hand instead.

"Ah, hell, you kept your end of the bargain, Herman," he says. Then he and the woman and child begin walking back to the hotel.

* * * *

The first aliens ever to visit Antares were rude and ill- mannered barbarians, but Perganian II, the greatest Emperor of the 31st Dynasty, decreed that they must be treated with the utmost courtesy. When the day of their departure finally arrived, the aliens exchanged farewells with Perganian, and one of them thrust a large, flawless blue diamond into the Emperor's hand in payment for his hospitality.

After the aliens left the courtyard, Perganian let the diamond drop to the ground, declaring that no Antarean could be purchased for any price.

The diamond lay where it had fallen for three generations, becoming a holy symbol of Antarean dignity and independence. It finally vanished during a dust storm and was never seen again.

COSMIC CORKSCREW

Michael A. Burstein

Stasis felt unreal.

Dr. Scheihagen had warned me about that when I volunteered for this mission. "Remember, we don't know what it'll be like for you inside," he said in his German accent. "We've never sent a human so far back before."

Scheihagen himself had been the volunteer for the first few experiments, but he had only gone back in time on the scale of hours, not years. So he was little equipped to prepare me for my experience.

Even now, I can't describe it. How does one describe the passage of imaginary time in a box of Stasis, of timelessness? I felt frozen in time, while events passed around me in a blur of color. Throughout, I worried that I might get trapped in Stasis, and never emerge into normal time again. But I had been willing to take the risk for this literary mission of the utmost importance.

Finally, after an eternity of nothing, the Chronobox and I materialized in a small, isolated alleyway. I jumped out of the Chronobox, gulped down a few breaths of air, and closed the door. The sunlight passed through the glass cubicle, rendering it almost invisible. Only once I felt safely back in normal time did I check my wrist chronometer.

Its digital display of the date read 06:20:38. Monday, June 20, 1938.

Afternoon.

Perfect. I had managed to reprogram the Chronobox right under Scheihagen's nose.

Scheihagen had warned me about it when he set up the controls.

"Remember our agreement," he had said to me. "I'm sending you back on June 23, when the story has already been rejected, so there's no chance of interference with the main event. You make one copy of the story, then get back into the Chronobox and come home. Do not interact with anyone, most of all, with him. Ist das klar?"

I nodded my agreement, not bothering to point out to Scheihagen that one of our subject's own short stories showed a timeline changing over just such a mission, even after the original work in question had been rejected. After all, the last thing I wanted to do was give Scheihagen a reason to suspect me.

Then, while his back was turned and he fiddled with the last few controls, I used the wrist chronometer -- which was much more than a simple watch -- to reprogram the date of arrival. I had to time this perfectly, making the change before Scheihagen sent me back, but not early enough in the launch sequence for him to notice.

Why did I do this? Because, despite Scheihagen's warnings, I wanted to make contact with the subject. When he was alive, whenever I had met him, I had always been a fan; by the time I had made a name for myself in his field, he was long gone. I wanted to meet him right at the start of his career, and as far as I was concerned, that beginning was right after he finished writing his first story.

I looked back at the Chronobox, then checked my clothing and patted my pockets. I was dressed in a jacket, tie, and overcoat, perfect to blend in with the natives of this era. In my pockets I had my scanner and my disorienter. The scanner was vital to my mission; the disorienter was for repairing the past in case I made a mistake. Feeling confident, I turned around the corner and walked to my destination: the candy store at 174

Windsor Place in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

I had memorized the route in the future, and here in the past I found my way quite easily. The candy store stood in the middle of the block. A newspaper rack sat outside, with the day's papers and more popular magazines of the era prominently displayed. I pushed the door open and went in.

The details of this store were important to me, and I wanted to take in everything I saw as perfectly as possible, so I could remember it once I had left. The first thing I noticed was that the store was broader than it was deep. To the left, near the wall, I saw a cigar counter and a cash register. Behind the register were vertical slots against the walls, crammed with cigarette packets. At right angles to the cigar counter was a candy counter, with three rows of penny candies (penny!) and one row of nickel candies. The sweet smell of the cigars wafted through the store, permeating it with a pleasant, musty odor.

On the right side of the store was a soda fountain, and right along with it a refrigerator, containers of syrup, electric stirrers, faucets for carbonated water, and a sink. Four stools sat below it, currently empty. I was the only customer in the store.

On the right wall was a magazine stand. Next to it, a rotary telephone, and a table with four chairs. And then, coming around to the right side of the door, an ice container.

And back behind the cigarette counter stood a young man, only 18 years old, wearing glasses and showing an impossible grin. He looked at me, and with an unmistakable Brooklyn accent, said, "May I help you?"

I was in the right place, the right time. Standing behind the counter was the young Isaac Asimov.

I told him I was just looking, which seemed to strike him as odd; I guess most people in this era came into a candy store intent on one or two particular items. But he seemed to relax when I headed to the magazine stand and began studying the titles.

I had to take a few deep breaths just to calm myself down. Part of me was worried that at any moment, Scheihagen might appear to drag me back to the future, or perhaps the universe might collapse around me for having already violated his protocols by slightly altering the timeline with my brief contact. But most of me was feeling simple awe at being in the presence of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

I considered my next move. I really wanted a chance to talk more with the young Asimov, and it seemed to me that I no longer had to worry about disrupting the timeline. After all, I had already made contact, and I was still here. I convinced myself that it meant that my actions were harmless.

But that still left one question: how could I get him to talk to me?

What could I do to get him to want to strike up a conversation with just another anonymous customer?

And then my eyes, wandering over the titles of the magazines, fell upon the current issue -- that is, June 1938 -- of Astounding Science-Fiction. It was perfect; the obvious way to hit it off with the young Isaac Asimov. I studied it for a moment as I gathered my resolve. The cover illustration was a painting of Mars as if seen from Deimos. Quite good, given the fact that no one in 1938 had set foot on the Moon, much less on Mars. Of course, even in my time, the three human figures standing on the Martian moon's surface and their silver cigar-shaped spacecraft were still the province of science fiction, not of science fact.

I grabbed a copy and brought it over to the counter. Asimov had been staring into space; now he came out of his reverie and prepared to take money from me.

He looked down at the magazine, then gave me a quizzical glance.

"Pardon my asking," he said, "but you read science fiction?"

I nodded; I felt a lump in my throat and it took me a moment to find my voice. My ploy had worked. "Yes. Why?"

He looked around for a moment; we were still the only two in the store.

"I do too. And I haven't met too many other readers of science fiction."

I thought for a moment; at this point in his life, Asimov was writing letters to the magazines, but he hadn't yet hooked up with the Futurians.

"Well," I replied with a smile, "I've been reading Analog - -"oops "-- I mean Astounding -- for a while now."

"Really? What's your name? What do you do?"

"Um --" I didn't want to give him my real name. "Schwartz," I said after a moment of thought. "Joseph Schwartz. I'm a -- a teacher."

"I'm Isaac Asimov. My family owns this store, but I'm a chemist." We shook hands.

"Dr. Asimov --" I began.

He laughed. "Doctor? Call me Isaac! I'm nowhere near to a Ph.D. yet."

I felt sheepish; I had just addressed him as I always had, whenever I had met him in his later life.

"Sorry. Isaac," I said, which felt strange. "Tell me, um, have you read this issue yet?"

"Have I!" He turned the issue around so the cover was right side up for him. "I finished this one a few days ago." His fingers traced the banner at the top of the cover which proudly boasted "THE LEGION OF TIME by Jack Williamson." His eyes were filled with enthusiasm. "I've been enjoying the Williamson serial. How do you suppose he's going to end it?"

"Um," I said. I had never read it. "I'm really not sure."

"Well, I think..." Asimov began, and he launched into a detailed plot, based on his own extrapolation of what he felt would come next.

When he finished, I said, "You know, that sounds pretty good. Have you ever thought of writing the stuff yourself?"

He looked away for a moment, then said, "Actually, I have."

I knew that, of course. "Really?"

He hesitated. "Yes. I just finished a story yesterday. My first."

"What's the title?" I asked.

"'Cosmic Corkscrew.'"

This was the pivotal moment. "May I see it?"

He got a wary look on his face. "What do you teach?"

"Physics," I said.

His look changed to one of relief. "As long as it's not writing."

Isaac reached under the counter, and pulled out a sheaf of papers. With a slight tremble in his hand, he handed the manuscript over to me. I flipped through it eagerly. Years later, in his autobiography, Isaac himself had admitted that the story must have been utterly impossible.

And yet, as far as I and many others were concerned, it was the most valuable thing in the world.

"It's a time travel story," Isaac said as I flipped through it. "You see, I call it 'Cosmic Corkscrew' because --"

"-- time is a helix," I murmured to myself, but a little too loudly.

"Oh, you saw that part already? I decided to use the neutrino as the explanation for time travel, since they haven't been discovered yet, only theorized."

I nodded my head, remembering comments he had made about this story in his autobiography. And then I made a blunder, but I couldn't help myself.

"You know, you got it wrong," I said.

"What?"

"That isn't how time travel really works," I said, and then I clamped my mouth shut.

"What are you talking about?"

In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. I had already started to tell him the truth; I might as well finish it. "Isaac, if there's anyone in 1938 who can believe my story, you can."

"What story?"

"I'm a time traveler. I've come back from the future for this." I lifted the manuscript.

Isaac looked around for a moment, then looked back at me. "This is a joke, right? Someone put you up to this?"

I sighed, and put the manuscript onto the counter. "It's not a joke.

You've been thinking about how to deliver this story to Astounding, and you're planning to talk with your father about it."

"How --"

"Tomorrow you're going to take the subway to the offices of Astounding, and meet with John W. Campbell, Jr. for the first time.

He's going to take your manuscript, read it, and reject it. But you'll begin a working relationship with him that will change the face of science fiction." I didn't want to stop now. "'Cosmic Corkscrew' will disappear, Isaac. You'll let it get lost, and you'll bemoan the fact in a collection of your early works. You'll write about how many fans of yours regret its loss, and how you do too. You'll point out that there was no way you could have known how much people might wanted to have read the story in the future.

"But I'm from the future, and we know, Isaac. We want the story."

I gave him a moment to assimilate everything I had said. Then he shook his head. "I don't believe this."

"It's true. How could I know so much about your story, or what you're planning to do with it?"

"It's no secret that I read science fiction, or that I might want to write it. You could have guessed some of what you said, and made up the rest. I'm a scientist. You'll have to offer better proof if you want me to believe your story."

"Fair enough." I pulled back my left sleeve and showed him my wrist chronometer.

He studied the digital display intently, and lightly touched the molded metal and plastic of the device. I knew what he was thinking: could this device be a product of 1938 technology?

And the answer had to be no.

Finally, he looked up at me, his face slightly pale. "My word," he said. "You're telling the truth. You really are from the future."

I nodded. "Yes, I am."

"And I -- I become a famous writer?"

"Yes, you do."

"And you've come back for -- for me?"

I shook my head. "Not for you. For your manuscript." I pointed to where it lay on the counter "The future wants it."

He shook his head. "I don't believe it. I mean, I do, but I don't."

I nodded. "I understand. But it is true. I'm here, and I need your manuscript." I pointed at it.

He picked it up quickly. "I can't let you have it. It's my only copy."

"Oh, don't worry about that. I'm not going to take that particular copy. I've come prepared." From under my coat I pulled out my scanner, a thin rod just about nine inches long.

"What is that?"

"It's --" I paused. They didn't have photocopy machines in 1938, did they? Or xerography? "It's like carbon paper. Watch."

As I ran the scanner over each sheet of manuscript, it spit out an identical copy. I suppose I didn't have to bother with the hard copy, as the scanner stored a copy of anything it scanned in its memory, but I wanted to feel the manuscript in my own hands as I brought it to the future. When I was done, I had a pile of papers that matched Isaac's manuscript almost perfectly.

He whistled. "A device like that could change the world."

"It will. And it's because of people like you that such devices will be made."

I couldn't help myself. I really couldn't. I told Isaac all about how he would go to meet John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding, at the offices of Street & Smith tomorrow. I told him how his friendship with Campbell would lead to a career as a full-time writer. I told him that his first published story, "Marooned Off Vesta," would appear in Amazing next March, and that his first sale to Campbell, a story he would call "Ad Astra" but which Campbell would change to "Trends," would appear in the July 1939 Astounding.

We talked, of space, and galaxies, and tesseracts, and time travel, and rockets to the Moon, and of all the dreams that were yet to be. I wanted to stay forever, but every millisecond I stayed increased the possibility of disrupting the timeline. Isaac noticed me glancing at my watch every so often, and after a while he got the idea.

"You need to leave, don't you?"

I nodded. "This is it, Isaac. I have to go now."

Isaac smiled at me. Then he got a worried look on his face. "What happens now? Do you erase my memory?"

"No," I lied. "Just -- do me a favor. When you write your autobiography --"

"I'll leave you out of it, I promise."

"Good."

But he got a twinkle in his eye. "Although -- you know, that gives me an idea for a story. What if I put something in print here in the past that can only be recognized in the future?"

I thought for moment. "It does sound like a good idea for a story, but don't start it until late 1953."

A second later, Isaac laughed. "I guess I do use the idea, then."

"Yes, but don't do it before then. Otherwise it'll be the end of -- of everything."

He nodded, letting me know that he was aware of the dangers of disrupting the timeline. "Thanks for telling me about my future. It's nice to know that I'll succeed."

"You're welcome," I said sadly. "Farewell."

As I walked to the door to leave, I turned back to look at him one last time. He was already looking away, staring into space. I wanted both of us to be able to treasure this conversation forever, but I knew that I couldn't let that happen, despite his assurances. So I pulled the disorienter out of my pocket and fired it at him. It made no noise, displayed no light, but I knew it had worked. His face took on an air of bewilderment and confusion, and then readjusted to normal. I dashed out before he could notice me, and left him to dream the daydreams of the idle shopkeeper.

I headed back to the alleyway where I had left the Chronobox, clutching the manuscript in my hands as I walked. I shook with fear over the possibility that I might have disrupted the timeline; but no, I was still here, meaning that my interference had been negligible.

The Chronobox was undisturbed, and the alleyway was as empty as before.

All that I needed to do was enter the Chronobox, set the date for the present, and return home.

But I hesitated.

I wanted to stay here, in 1938. I knew what was about to happen: the golden age of science fiction. I could hang around, watch the greatest writers of the genre come of age. I could attend the first Worldcon, read the stories and novels as they first appeared, and own a collection of works to rival that of anyone. Living in the United States through World War II would be a small price to pay, as far as I was concerned.

I could be a part of it all. I would just have to make sure that I remained a small, insignificant member of science fiction fandom, so as not to disturb the future in which I would eventually be born.

I looked at the copy of "Cosmic Corkscrew" I held in my hand, and I looked at the Chronobox. I owed something to the future, I knew that, but I wanted something that was only available to me here in the past.

I knew what I had to do.

I gently placed the manuscript inside the Chronobox, closed the door, hit the button on my chronometer and punctured Stasis. Immediately, the manuscript disappeared and the Chronobox appeared empty. A moment later, the Chronobox itself vanished.

I turned on my heel and left the alleyway, readier than any other man in 1938 to face the future.

Except, perhaps, for Isaac Asimov.

WHIPTAIL

Robert Reed

“What a beautiful morning,” I was singing. “And so strange! Isn't it? This incredible, wonderful fog, and how the frost clings everywhere. Lovely, lovely, just lovely. Is this how it always is, Chrome…?”

“Always,” she joked, laughing quietly. Patiently. “All year long, practically.”

She was teasing. I knew that, and I didn't care. A river of words just kept pouring out of me: I was talking about the scenery and the hour, and goodness, we were late and her poor mother would be waiting, and God on her throne, I was hungry. Sometimes I told my Chrome to drive faster, and she would, and then I would find myself worrying, and I'd tell her, “Slow down a little.” I'd say, “This road doesn't look all that dry.”

Chrome smiled the whole time, not minding my prattle.

At least I hoped she didn't.

I can't help what I am. Dunlins, by nature, are small and electric. Nervous energy always bubbling. Particularly when they're trying not to be nervous. Particularly when their lover is taking them to meet her family for the first time.

“Have you ever seen a more magical morning, Chrome?”

“Never,” she promised, her handsome face smiling at me.

It was the morning of the Solstice, which helped that sense of magic. But mostly it was because of the weather. A powerful cold front had fallen south from the chilly Arctic Sea, smashing into the normally warm winter air. The resulting fog was luscious thick, except in sudden little patches where it was thin enough to give us a glimpse of the pale northern sun. Wherever the fog touched a cold surface, it froze, leaving every tree limb and bush branch and tall blade of grass coated with a glittering hard frost. Whiteness lay over everything. Everything wore a delicate, perishable whiteness born of degrees. A touch colder, and there wouldn't have been any fog. Warmed slightly, and everything white would have turned to vapor and an afternoon's penetrating dampness.

The road had its own magic. A weathered charm, I'd call it. Old and narrow, its pavement was rutted by tires and cracked in places, and the potholes were marked with splashes of fading yellow paint. Chrome explained that it had been thirty years since the highway association had touched it. “Not enough traffic to bother with,” she said. We were climbing up a long hillside, and at the top, where the road flattened, there was a corner and a weedy graveled road that went due south.

“Our temple's down there,” she told me.

I looked and looked, but all I saw was the little road flanked by the white farm fields, both vanishing into the thickest fog yet.

For maybe the fiftieth time, I asked, “How do I look?”

“Awful,” she joked.

Then she grabbed my knee, and with a laughing voice, Chrome said, “No, you look gorgeous, darling. Just perfect.”

I just hoped that I wasn't too ugly. That's all.

We started down a long hillside, passing a small weathered sign that quietly announced that we were entering Chromatella. I read the name aloud, twice. Then came the first of the empty buildings, set on both sides of the little highway. My Chrome had warned me, but it was still a sad shock. There were groceries and hardware stores and clothing stores and gas stations, and all of them were slowly collapsing into their basements, old roofs pitched this way and that. One block of buildings had been burned down. A pair of Chrome's near-daughters had been cooking opossum in one of the abandoned kitchens. At least that was the official story. But my Chrome gave me this look, confessing, “When I was their age, I wanted to burn all of this. Every night I fought the urge. It wasn't until I was grown up that I understood why Mother left these buildings alone.”

I didn't understand why, I thought. But I managed not to admit it.

A big old mothering house halfway filled the next block. Its roof was in good repair, and its white walls looked like they'd been painted this year. Yet the house itself seemed dark and drab compared to the whiteness of the frost. Even with the OPEN sign flashing in the window, it looked abandoned. Forgotten. And awfully lonely.

“Finally,” my Chrome purred. “She's run out of things to say.”

Was I that bad? I wondered.

We pulled up to the front of the house, up under the verandah, and I used the mirror, checking my little Dunlin face before climbing out.

There was an old dog and what looked like her puppies waiting for us. They had long wolfish faces and big bodies, and each of them wore a heavy collar, each collar with a different colored tag. “Red Guard!” Chrome shouted at the mother dog. Then she said, “Gold. Green. Pink. Blue. Hello, ladies. Hello!”

The animals were bouncing, and sniffing. And I stood like a statue, trying to forget how much dogs scare me.

Just then the front door crashed open, and a solid old voice was shouting, “Get away from her, you bitches! Get!”

Every dog bolted.

Thankfully.

I looked up at my savior, then gushed, “Mother Chromatella. I'm so glad to meet you, finally!”

“A sweet Dunlin,” she said. “And my first daughter, too.”

I shook the offered hand, trying to smile as much as she smiled. Then we pulled our hands apart, and I found myself staring, looking at the bent nose and the rounded face and the gray spreading through her short black hair. That nose was shattered long ago by a pony, my Chrome had told me. Otherwise the face was the same, except for its age. And for the eyes, I noticed. They were the same brown as my chrome's, but when I looked deep, I saw something very sad lurking in them.

Both of them shivered at the same moment, saying, “Let's go inside.”

I said, “Fine.”

I grabbed my suitcase, even though Mother Chromatella offered to carry it. Then I followed her through the old door with its cut-glass and its brass knob and an ancient yellow sign telling me, “Welcome.”

The air inside was warm, smelling of bacon and books. There was a long bar and maybe six tables in a huge room that could have held twenty tables. Bookshelves covered two entire walls. Music was flowing from a radio, a thousand voices singing about the Solstice. I asked where I should put my things, and my Chrome said, “Here,” and wrestled the bag from me, carrying it and hers somewhere upstairs.

Mother Chrome asked if it was a comfortable trip.

“Very,” I said. “And I adore your fog!”

“My fog.” That made her laugh. She set a single plate into the sink, then ran the tap until the water was hot. “Are you hungry, Dunlin?”

I said, “A little, yes,” when I could have said, “I'm starving.”

My Chrome came downstairs again. Without looking her way, Mother Chrome said, “Daughter, we've got plenty of eggs here.”

My Chrome pulled down a clean skillet and spatula, then asked, “The others?”

Her sisters and near-daughters, she meant.

“They're walking up. Now, or soon.”

To the Temple, I assumed. For their Solstice service.

“I don't need to eat now,” I lied, not wanting to be a burden.

But Mother Chrome said, “Nonsense,” while smiling at me. “My daughter's hungry, too. Have a bite to carry you over to the feast.”

I found myself dancing around the main room, looking at the old neon beer signs and the newly made bookshelves. Like before, I couldn't stop talking. Jabbering. I asked every question that came to me, and sometimes I interrupted Mother Chrome's patient answers.

“Have you ever met a Dunlin before?”

She admitted, “Never, no.”

“My Chrome says that this is the oldest mothering house in the district? Is that so?”

“As far as I know—”

“Neat old signs. I bet they're worth something, if you're a collector.”

“I'm not, but I believe you're right.”

“Are these shelves walnut?”

“Yes.”

“They're beautiful,” I said, knowing that I sounded like a brain-damaged fool. “How many books do you have here?”

“Several thousand, I imagine.”

“And you've read all of them?”

“Once, or more.”

“Which doesn't surprise me,” I blurted. “Your daughter's a huge reader, too. In fact, she makes me feel a little stupid sometimes.”

From behind the bar, over the sounds of cooking eggs, my Chrome asked, “Do I?”

“Nonsense,” said Mother Chrome. But I could hear the pride in her voice. She was standing next to me, making me feel small—in so many ways, Chromatellas are big strong people—and she started to say something else. Something else kind, probably. But her voice got cut off by the soft bing-bing-bing of the telephone.

“Excuse me,” she said, picking up the receiver.

I looked at my Chrome, then said, “It's one of your sisters. She's wondering what's keeping us.”

“It's not.” My Chrome shook her head, saying, “That's the out-of-town ring.” And she looked from the eggs to her mother and back again, her brown eyes curious but not particularly excited.

Not then, at least.

The eggs got cooked and put on plates, and I helped pour apple juice into two clean glasses. I was setting the glasses. I was setting the glasses on one of the empty tables when Mother Chrome said, “Good-bye. And thank you.” Then she set down the receiver and leaned forward, resting for a minute. And her daughter approached her, touching her on the shoulder, asking, “Who was it? Is something wrong?”

“Corvus,” she said.

I recognized that family name. Even then.

She said, “My old instructor. She was calling from the Institute…to warn me….”

“About what?” my Chrome asked. Then her face changed, as if she realized it for herself. “Is it done?” she asked. “Is it?”

“And it's been done for a long time, apparently. In secret.” Mother Chrome looked at the phone again, as if she still didn't believe what she had just heard. That it was a mistake, or someone's silly joke.

I said nothing, watching them.

My Chrome asked, “When?”

“Years ago, apparently.”

Mine asked, “And they kept it a secret?”

Mother Chrome nodded and halfway smiled. Then she said, “Today,” and took a huge breath. “Dr. Corvus and her staff are going to hold a press conference at noon. She wanted me to be warned. And thank me, I guess.”

My Chrome said, “Oh, my.”

I finally asked, “What is it? What's happening?”

They didn't hear me.

I got the two plates from the bar and announced, “These eggs smell gorgeous.”

The Chromatellas were trading looks, saying everything with their eyes.

Just hoping to be noticed, I said, “I'm awfully hungry, really. May I start?”

With the same voice, together, they told me, “Go on.”

But I couldn't eat alone. Not like that. So I walked up to my Chrome and put an arm up around her, saying, “Join me, darling.”

She said, “No.”

Smiling and crying at the same time, she confessed, “I'm not hungry anymore.”

She was the first new face in an entire week.

Even in Boreal City, with its millions from everywhere, there are only so many families and so many faces. So when I saw the doctor at the clinic, I was a little startled. And interested, of course. Dunlins are very social people. We love diversity in our friends and lovers, and everywhere in our daily lives.

“Dunlins have weak lungs,” I warned her.

She said, “Quiet,” as she listened to my breathing. Then she said, “I know about you. Your lungs are usually fine. But your immune system has a few holes in it.”

I was looking at her face. Staring, probably.

She asked if I was from the Great Delta. A substantial colony of Dunlins had built that port city in that southern district, its hot climate reminding us of our homeland back on Mother's Land.

“But I live here now,” I volunteered. “My sisters and I have a trade shop in the new mall. Have you been there?” Then I glanced at the name on her tag, blurting out, “I've never heard of the Chromatellas before.”

“That's because there aren't many of us,” she admitted.

“In Boreal?”

“Anywhere,” she said. Then she didn't mention it again.

In what for me was a rare show of self-restraint, I said nothing. For as long as we were just doctor and patient, I managed to keep my little teeth firmly planted on my babbling tongue. But I made a point of researching her name, and after screwing up my courage and asking her to dinner, I confessed what I knew and told her that I was sorry. “It's just so tragic,” I told her, as if she didn't know. Then desperate to say anything that might help, I said, “In this day and age, you just don't think it could ever happen anywhere.”

Which was, I learned, a mistake.

My Chrome regarded me over her sweet cream dessert, her beautiful eyes dry and her strong jaw pushed a little forward. Then she set down her spoon and calmly, quietly told me all of those dark things that doctors know, and every Chromatella feels in her blood:

Inoculations and antibiotics have put an end to the old plagues. Families don't have to live in isolated communities, in relative quarantine, fearing any stranger because she might bring a new flu bug, or worse. People today can travel far, and if they wish, they can live and work in the new cosmopolitan cities, surrounded by an array of faces and voices and countless new ideas.

But the modern world only seems stable and healthy.

Diseases mutate. And worse, new diseases emerge every year. As the population soars, the margin for error diminishes. “Something horrible will finally get loose,” Dr. Chromatella promised me. “And when it does, it'll move fast and it'll go everywhere, and the carnage is going to dwarf all of the famous old epidemics. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind.”

I am such a weakling. I couldn't help but cry into my sweet cream.

A strong hand reached across and wiped away my tears. But instead of apologizing, she said, “Vulnerability,” and smiled in a knowing way.

“What do you mean?” I sniffled.

“I want my daughters to experience it. If only through their mother's lover.”

How could I think of love just then?

I didn't even try.

Then with the softest voice she could muster, my Chrome told me, “But even if the worst does happen, you know what we'll do. We'll pick ourselves up again. We always do.”

I nodded, then whispered, “We do, don't we?”

“And I'll be there with you, my Dunnie.”

I smiled at her, surprising myself.

“Say that again,” I told her.

“I'll be with you. If you'll have me, of course.”

“No, that other part—”

“My Dunnie?”

I felt my smile growing and growing.

“Call up to the temple,” my Chrome suggested.

“Can't,” her mother replied. “The line blew down this summer, and nobody's felt inspired to put it up again.”

Both of them stared at the nearest clock.

I stared at my cooling eggs, waiting for someone to explain this to me.

Then Mother Chrome said, “There's that old television in the temple basement. We have to walk there and set it up.”

“Or we could eat,” I suggested. “Then drive.”

My Chrome shook her head, saying, “I feel like walking.”

“So do I,” said her mother. And with that both of them were laughing, their faces happier than even a giddy Dunlin's.

“Get your coat, darling,” said my Chrome.

I gave up looking at my breakfast.

Stepping out the back door, out into the chill wet air, I realized that the fog had somehow grown thicker. I saw nothing of the world but a brown yard with an old bird feeder set out on a tree stump, spilling over with grain, dozens of brown sparrows and brown-green finches eating and talking in soft cackles. From above, I could hear the ringing of the temple bells. They sounded soft and pretty, and suddenly I remembered how it felt to be a little girl walking between my big sisters, knowing that the Solstice ceremony would take forever, but afterward, if I was patient, there would come the feast and the fun of opening gifts.

Mother Chrome set the pace. She was quick for a woman of her years, her eyes flipping one way, then another. I knew that expression from my Chrome. She was obviously thinking hard about her phone call.

We were heading south, following an empty concrete road. The next house was long and built of wood, three stories tall and wearing a steeply pitched roof. People lived there. I could tell by the roof and the fresh coat of white paint, and when we were close, I saw little tractors for children to ride and old dolls dressed in farmer clothes, plus an antique dollhouse that was the same shape and color as the big house.

I couldn't keep myself from talking anymore.

I admitted, “I don't understand. What was that call about?”

Neither spoke, at first.

On the frosty sidewalk I could see the little shoeprints of children, and in the grass, their mothers' prints. I found myself listening for voices up ahead, and giggles. Yet I heard nothing but the bells. Suddenly I wanted to be with those children, sitting in the temple, nothing to do but sing for summer's return.

As if reading my mind, Mother Chrome said, “We have a beautiful temple. Did you see it in all my fog?”

I shook my head.“No.”

“Beautiful,” she repeated. “We built it from the local sandstone. More than a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I muttered.

Past the long house, tucked inside a grove of little trees, was a pig pen. There was a strong high fence, electrified and barbed. The shaggy brown adults glared at us, while their newest daughters, striped and halfway cute, came closer, begging for scraps and careless fingers.

I asked again, “What about that call? What' so important?”

“We were always a successful family,” said Mother Chrome. “My daughter's told you, I'm sure.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Mostly we were farmers, but in the last few centuries, our real talents emerged. We like science and the healing arts most of all.”

My Chrome had told me the same thing. In the same words and tone.

We turned to the west, climbing up the hill toward the temple. Empty homes left empty for too long lined both sides of the little street. They were sad and sloppy, surrounded by thick stands of brown weeds. Up ahead of us, running from thicket, was a flock of wild pheasants, dark brown against the swirling fog.

“Chromatellas were a successful family,” she told me, “and relatively rich, too.”

Just before I made a fool of myself, I realized that Mother Chrome was trying to answer my questions.

“Nearly forty years ago, I was awarded a student slot at the Great Western Institute.” She looked back at me, then past me. “It was such a wonderful honor and a great opportunity. And of course my family threw a party for me. Complete with a parade. With my mother and my grand, I walked this route. This ground. My gown was new, and it was decorated with ribbons and flower blossoms. Everyone in Chromatella stood in two long lines, holding hands and singing to me. My sisters. My near-sisters. Plus travelers at the mother house, and various lovers, too.”

I was listening, trying hard to picture the day.

“A special feast was held in the temple. A hundred fat pigs were served. People got drunk and stood up on their chairs and told the same embarrassing stories about me, again and again. I was drunk for the first time. Badly. And when I finished throwing up, my mother and sisters bundled me up, made certain that my inoculation records were in my pocket, then they put me on the express train racing south.”

We were past the abandoned homes, and the bells were louder. Closer.

“When I woke, I had a premonition. I realized that I would never come home again. Which is a common enough premonition. And silly. Of course your family will always be there. Always, always. Where else can they be?”

Mother Chrome said those last words with a flat voice and strange eyes.

She was walking slower now, and I was beside her, the air tingling with old fears and angers. And that's when the first of the tombstones appeared: Coming out of the cold fog, they were simple chunks of fieldstone set on end and crudely engraved.

They looked unreal at first.

Ready to dissolve back into the fog.

But with a few more steps, they turned as real as any of us, and a breath of wind began blowing away the worst of the fog, the long hillside suddenly visible, covered with hundreds and thousands of crude markers, the ground in front of each slumping and every grave decorated with wild flowers: Easy to seed, eager to grow, requiring no care and perfectly happy in this city of ghosts.

When my great was alive, she loved to talk about her voyage from Mother's Land. She would describe the food she ate, the fleas in her clothes, the hurricane that tore the sails from the ship's masts, and finally the extraordinary hope she felt when the New Lands finally passed into view.

None of it ever happened to her, of course.

The truth is that she was born on the Great Delta. It was her grand who had ridden on the immigrant boat, and what she remembered were her grand's old stories. But isn't that the way with families? Surrounded by people who are so much like you, you can't help but have their large lives bleed into yours, and yours, you can only hope, into theirs.

Now the Chromatellas told the story together.

The older one would talk until she couldn't anymore, then her daughter would effortlessly pick up the threads, barely a breath separating their two voices.

Like our great cities, they said, the Institutes are recent inventions.

Even four decades ago, the old precautions remained in effect. Students and professors had to keep their inoculation records on hand. No one could travel without a doctor's certificate and forms to the plague Bureau. To be given the chance to actually live with hundreds and thousands of people who didn't share your blood—who didn't even know you a little bit—was an honor and an astonishment for the young Chromatella.

After two years, she earned honors and new opportunities. One of her professors hired her as a research assistant, and after passing a battery of immunological tests, the two of them were allowed up into the wild mountain country. Aboriginals still lived the old ways. Most kept their distance. But a brave young person came forward, offering to be their guide and provider and very best friend. Assuming, of course, that they would pay her and pay her well.

She was a wild creature, said Mother Chrome.

She hunted deer for food and made what little clothing she needed from their skins. And to make herself more beautiful to her sister-lover, she would rub her body and hair with the fresh fat of a bear.

In those days, those mountains were barely mapped.

Only a handful of biologists had even walked that

ground, much less made a thorough listing of its species.

As an assistant, Mother Chrome was given the simple jobs: She captured every kind of animal possible, by whatever means, measuring them and marking their location on the professor's maps, then killing them and putting them away for future studies. To catch lizards, she used a string noose. Nooses worked well enough with the broad-headed, slow-witted fence lizards. But not with the swift, narrow-headed whiptails. They drove her crazy. She found herself screaming and chasing after them, which was how she slipped on rocks and tumbled to the rocky ground below.

The guide came running.

Her knee was bleeding and a thumb was jammed. But the Chromatella was mostly angry, reporting what had happened, cursing the idiot lizards until she realized that her hired friend and protector was laughing wildly.

“All right,” said Mother Chrome. “You do it better!”

The guide rose and strolled over to the nearest rock pile, and after waiting forever with a rock's patience, she easily snatched up the first whiptail that crawled out of its crevice.

A deal was soon struck: One copper for each whiptail captured.

The guide brought her dozens of specimens, and whenever there was a backlog, she would sit in the shade and watch Mother Chrome at work. After a while, with genuine curiosity, the guide asked, “Why?” She held up a dull brown lizard, then asked, “Why do you put this one on that page, while the one in your hand goes on that other page?”

“Because they're different species,” Mother Chrome explained. Then she flipped it on its back, pointing and saying, “The orange neck is the difference. And if you look carefully, you can tell that they're not quite the same size.”

But the guide remained stubbornly puzzled. She shook her head and blew out her cheeks as if she was inflating a balloon.

Mother Chrome opened up her field guide. She found the right page and pointed. “There!” At least one field biologist had come to the same easy conclusion: Two whiptails, two species. Sister species, obviously. Probably separated by one or two million years of evolution, from the looks of it.

The guide gave a big snort.

Then she calmly put the orange neck into her mouth and bit off the lizard's head, and with a small steel blade, she opened up its belly and groin, telling Mother Chrome, “Look until you see it. Until you can.”

Chromatellas have a taste for details. With a field lens and the last of her patience, she examined the animal's internal organs. Most were in their proper places, but a few were misplaced, or they were badly deformed.

The guide had a ready explanation:

“The colorful ones are lazy ladies,” she claimed. “They lure in the drab ones with their colors, and they're the aggressors in love. But they never lay any eggs. What they do, I think, is slip their eggs inside their lovers. Then their lovers have to lay both hers and the mate's together, in a common nest.”

It was an imaginative story, and wrong.

But it took the professor and her assistant another month to be sure it was wrong, and then another few months at the Institute to realize what was really happening.

And at that point in the story, suddenly, the two Chromatellas stopped talking. They were staring at each other, talking again with their eyes.

We were in the oldest, uppermost end of the cemetery. The tombstones there were older and better made, polished and pink and carefully engraved with nicknames and birthdates and deathdates. The temple bells were no longer ringing. But we were close now. I saw the big building looming over us for a moment, then it vanished as the fog thickened again. And that's when I admitted, “I don't understand.” I asked my Chrome, “If the guide was wrong, then what's the right explanation?”

“The lizard is one species. But it exists in two forms.” She sighed and showed an odd little smile. “One form lays eggs. While the other one does nothing. Nothing but donate half of its genetic information, that is.”

I was lost.

I felt strange and alone, and lost, and now I wanted to cry, only I didn't know why. How could I know?

“As it happens,” said Mother Chrome, “a team of biologists working near the south pole were first to report a similar species. A strange bird that comes in two forms. It's the eggless form that wears the pretty colors.”

Something tugged at my memory.

Had my Chrome told me something about this, or did I read about it myself? Maybe from my days in school…maybe…?

“Biologists have found several hundred species like that,” said my Chrome. “Some are snakes. Some are mice. Most of them are insects.” She looked in my direction, almost smiling. “Of course flowering plants do this trick, too. Pollen is made by the stamen, and the genetics in the seeds are constantly mixing and remixing their genes. Which can be helpful. If your conditions are changing, you need to make new models to keep current. To evolve.”

Again, the temple appeared from the fog.

I had been promised something beautiful, but the building only looked tall and cold to me. The stone was dull and simple and sad, and I hated it. I had to chew on my tongue just to keep myself from saying what I was thinking.

What was I thinking?

Finally, needing to break up all this deep thinking, I turned to Mother Chrome and said, “It must have been exciting, anyway. Being one of the first to learn something like that.”

Her eyes went blind, and she turned and walked away.

I stopped, and my Chrome stopped. We watched the old woman marching toward the big doors of the temple, and when she was out of earshot, I heard my lover say, “She wasn't there when Dr.Corvus made the breakthrough.”

I swallowed and said, “No?”

“She was called home suddenly. In the middle of the term.” My Chrome took me by the shoulder and squeezed too hard, telling me, “Her family here, and everywhere else… all the Chromatellas in the world were just beginning to die.…”

A stupid pesticide was to blame.

It was sold for the first time just after Mother Chrome left for school. It was too new and expensive for most farmers, but the Chromatellas loved it. I can never remember its name: Some clumsy thing full of ethanes and chlorines and phenyl-somethings. Her sisters sprayed it on their fields and their animals, and they ate traces of it on their favorite foods, and after the first summer, a few of the oldest Chromes complained of headaches that began to turn into brain tumors, which is how the plague showed itself.

At first, people considered the tumors to be bad luck.

When Mother Chrome's great and grand died in the same winter, it was called a coincidence, and it was sad. Nothing more.

Not until the next summer did the Plague Bureau realize what was happening. Something in the Chromatella blood wasn't right. The pesticide sneaked into their bodies and brains, and fast-growing tumors would flare up. First in the old, then the very young. The Bureau banned the poison immediately. Whatever was left unused was buried or destroyed. But almost every Chromatella had already eaten and breathed too much of it. When Mother Chrome finally came home, her mother met her at the train station, weeping uncontrollably. Babies were sick, she reported, and all the old people were dying. Even healthy adults were beginning to suffer headaches and tremors, which meant it would all be over by spring. Her mother said that several times. “Over by spring,” she said. Then she wiped at her tears and put on a brave Chromatella face, telling her daughter, “Dig your grave now. That's my advice. And find a headstone you like, before they're all gone.”

But Mother Chrome never got ill.

“The Institute grew their own food,” my Chrome told me.

We were in bed together, warm and happy and in love, and she told the story because it was important for me to know what had happened, and because she thought that I was curious. Even though I wasn't. I knew enough already, I was telling myself.

“They grew their own food,” she repeated, “and they used different kinds of pesticides. Safer ones, it turns out.”

I nodded, saying nothing.

“Besides,” she told me,” “Mother spent that summer in the wilderness. She ate clean deer and berries and the like.”

“That helped too?” I asked.

“She's never had a sick day in her life,” my Chrome assured me. “But after she came home, and for those next few months, she watched everyone else get sicker and weaker. Neighbor communities sent help when they could, but it was never enough. Mother took care of her dying sisters and her mother, then she buried them. And by spring, as promised, it was over. The plague had burnt itself out. But instead of being like the old plagues, where a dozen or fifty of us would survive…instead of a nucleus of a town, there was one of us left. In the entire world, there was no one exactly like my mother.”

I was crying. I couldn't help but sob and sniffle.

“Mother has lived at home ever since.” My Chrome was answering the question that she only imagined I would ask. “Mother felt it was her duty. To make a living, she reopened the old mothering house. A traveler was her lover, for a few nights, and that helped her conceive. Which was me. Until my twin sisters were born, I was the only other Chromatella in the world.”

And she was my Chrome.

Unimaginably rare, and because of it, precious.

Five sisters and better than a dozen children were waiting inside the temple, sitting together up front, singing loudly for the Solstice.

But the place felt empty nonetheless.

We walked up the long, long center aisle. After a few steps, Mother Chrome was pulling away from us. She was halfway running, while I found myself moving slower. And between us was my Chrome. She looked ahead, then turned and stared at me. I could see her being patient. I could hear her patience. She asked, “What?” Then she drifted back to me, asking again, “What?”

I felt out of place.

Lonely, and lost.

But instead of confessing it, I said, “I'm stupid. I know.”

“You are not stupid,” she told me. Her patience was fraying away. Too quietly, she said, “What don't you understand? Tell me.”

“How can those lizards survive? If half of them are like you say, how do they ever lay enough eggs?”

“Because the eggs they lay have remixed genes,” she told me, as if nothing could be simpler. “Every whiptail born is different from every other one. Each is unique. A lot of them are weaker than their parents, sure. But if their world decides to change around them—which can happen in the mountains—then a few of them will thrive.”

But the earth is a mild place, mostly. Our sun has always been steady, and our axis tilts only a few degrees. Which was why I had to point out, “God knew what she was doing, making us the way we are. Why would anyone need to change?”

“My Chrome almost spoke. Her mouth came open, then her face tilted, and she slowly turned away from me, saying nothing.

The singing had stopped.

Mother Chrome was speaking with a quick quiet voice, telling everyone about the telephone call. She didn't need to explain it to her daughters for them to understand. Even the children seemed captivated, or maybe they were just bored with singing and wanted to play a new game.

My Chrome took one of her sisters downstairs to retrieve the old television.

I sat next to one of the twins, waiting.

There was no confusing her for my Chrome. She had a farmer's hands and solid shoulders, and she was six months pregnant. With those scarred hands on her belly, she made small talk about the fog and the frost. But I could tell that her mind was elsewhere, and after a few moments, our conversation came to a halt.

The television was set up high on the wooden altar, between Winter's haggard face and Spring's swollen belly.

My Chrome found an electrical cord and a channel, then fought with the antenna until we had a clear picture and sound. The broadcast was from Boreal City, from one of the giant All-Family temples. For a moment, I thought there was a mistake. My Chrome was walking toward me, finally ready to sit, and I was thinking that nothing would happen. We would watch the service from Boreal, then have our feast, and everyone would laugh about this very strange misunderstanding.

Then the temple vanished.

Suddenly I was looking at an old person standing behind a forest of microphones, and beside her, looking young and strange, was a very homely girl.

Huge, she was.

She had a heavy skull, and thick hair sprouted from both her head and her face.

But I didn't say one word about her appearance. I sat motionless, feeling more lost than ever, and my Chrome slid in beside me, and her mother sat beside her.

Everyone in the temple said, “Oh my!” when they saw that ugly girl.

They sounded very impressed and very silly, and I started laughing, then bit down on my tongue.

To the world, the old woman announced, “My name is Corvus. This is my child. Today is her sixteenth birthday.”

The pregnant sister leaned and asked her mother, “How soon till we get ours?”

Mother Chrome leaned, and loud enough for everyone to hear, she said, “Very soon. It's already sent.”

I asked my Chrome, “What's sent?”

“The pollen,” she whispered. “We're supposed to get one of the very first shipments. Corvus promised it to Mother years ago.”

What pollen? I wondered.

“I'll need help with the fertilizations,” said her mother. “And a physician's hands would be most appreciated.”

She was speaking to my Chrome.

On television, the woman was saying, “My child represents a breakthrough. By unlocking ancient, unused genes, then modifying one of her nuclear bodies, we have produced the first of what should be hundreds, perhaps thousands of special children whose duty and honor it will be to prepare us for our future!”

“I'll stay here with you,” I promised my Chrome. “As long as necessary.”

Then the hairy girl was asked to say something. Anything. So she stepped up to the microphones, gave the world this long, strange smile, then with the deepest, slowest voice that I had ever heard, she said, “Bless us all. I am pleased to serve.”

I had to laugh.

Finally.

My Chrome's eyes stabbed at me.

“I'm sorry,” I said, not really meaning it. Then I was laughing harder, admitting, “I expected it to look prettier. You know? With a nice orange neck, or some brightly colored hair.”

My Chrome was staring.

Like never before, she was studying me.

“What's wrong?” I finally asked.

Then I wasn't laughing. I sat up straight, and because I couldn't help myself, I told all the Chromatelas, “I don't care how smart you know you are. What you're talking about here is just plain stupid!”

I said, “Insane.”

Then I said, “It's my world, too. Or did you forget that?”

And that's when my Chrome finally told me, “Shut up,” with the voice that ended everything. “Will you please, for once, you idiot-bitch, think and shut up!”

MANEKI NEKO

Bruce Sterling

"I can't go on," his brother said.

Tsuyoshi Shimizu looked thoughtfully into the screen of his pasokon. His older brother's face was shiny with sweat from a late-night drinking bout. "It's only a career," said Tsuyoshi, sitting up on his futon and adjusting his pajamas. "You worry too much."

"All that overtime!" his brother whined. He was making the call from a bar somewhere in Shibuya. In the background, a middle-aged office lady was singing karaoke, badly. "And the examination hells. The manager training programs. The proficiency tests. I never have time to live!"

Tsuyoshi grunted sympathetically. He didn't like these late-night videophone calls, but he felt obliged to listen. His big brother had always been a decent sort, before he had gone through the elite courses at Waseda University, joined a big corporation, and gotten professionally ambitious.

"My back hurts," his brother groused. "I have an ulcer. My hair is going gray. And I know they'll fire me. No matter how loyal you are to the big companies, they have no loyalty to their employees anymore. It's no wonder that I drink."

"You should get married," Tsuyoshi offered.

"I can't find the right girl. Women never understand me." He shuddered. "Tsuyoshi, I'm truly desperate. The market pressures are crushing me. I can't breathe. My life has got to change. I'm thinking of taking the vows. I'm serious! I want to renounce this whole modern world."

Tsuyoshi was alarmed. "You're very drunk, right?"

His brother leaned closer to the screen. "Life in a monastery sounds truly good to me. It's so quiet there. You recite the sutras. You consider your existence. There are rules to follow, and rewards that make sense. It's just the way that Japanese business used to be, back in the good old days."

Tsuyoshi grunted skeptically.

"Last week I went out to a special place in the mountains ... Mount Aso," his brother confided. "The monks there, they know about people in trouble, people who are burned out by modern life. The monks protect you from the world. No computers, no phones, no faxes, no e-mail, no overtime, no commuting, nothing at all. It's beautiful, and it's peaceful, and nothing ever happens there. Really, it's like paradise."

"Listen, older brother," Tsuyoshi said, "you're not a religious man by nature. You're a section chief for a big import-export company."

"Well ... maybe religion won't work for me. I did think of running away to America. Nothing much ever happens there, either."

Tsuyoshi smiled. "That sounds much better! America is a good vacation spot. A long vacation is just what you need! Besides, the Americans are real friendly since they gave up their handguns."

"But I can't go through with it," his brother wailed. "I just don't dare. I can't just wander away from everything that I know, and trust to the kindness of strangers."

"That always works for me," Tsuyoshi said. "Maybe you should try it."

Tsuyoshi's wife stirred uneasily on the futon. Tsuyoshi lowered his voice. "Sorry, but I have to hang up now. Call me before you do anything rash."

"Don't tell Dad," Tsuyoshi's brother said. "He worries so."

"I won't tell Dad." Tsuyoshi cut the connection and the screen went dark.

Tsuyoshi's wife rolled over, heavily. She was seven months pregnant. She stared at the ceiling puffing for breath. "Was that another call from your brother?" she said.

"Yeah. The company just gave him another promotion. More responsibilities. He's celebrating."

"That sounds nice," his wife said tactfully.

Next morning, Tsuyoshi slept late. He was self-employed, so he kept his own hours. Tsuyoshi was a video format upgrader by trade. He transferred old videos from obsolete formats into the new high-grade storage media. Doing this properly took a craftsman's eye. Word of Tsuyoshi's skills had gotten out on the network, so he had as much work as he could handle.

At ten A.M., the mailman arrived. Tsuyoshi abandoned his breakfast of raw egg and miso soup, and signed for a shipment of flaking, twentieth-century analog television tapes. The mail also brought a fresh overnight shipment of strawberries, and a homemade jar of pickles.

"Pickles!" his wife enthused. "People are so nice to you when you're pregnant."

"Any idea who sent us that,"

"Just someone on the network."

"Great."

Tsuyoshi booted his mediator, cleaned his superconducting heads and examined the old tapes. Home videos from the 1980s. Someone's grandmother as a child, presumably. There had been a lot of flaking and loss of polarity in the old recording medium.

Tsuyoshi got to work with his desktop fractal detail generator, the image stabilizer, and the interlace algorithms. When he was done, Tsuyoshi's new digital copies would look much sharper, cleaner, and better composed than the original primitive videotape.

Tsuyoshi enjoyed his work. Quite often he came across bits and pieces of videotape that were of archival interest. He would pass the images on to the net. The really big network databases, with their armies of search engines, indexers, and catalogues, had some very arcane interests. The net machines would never pay for data, because the global information networks were noncommercial. But the net machines were very polite, and had excellent net etiquette. They returned a favor for a favor, and since they were machines with excellent, enormous memories, they never forgot a good deed.

Tsuyoshi and his wife had a lunch of ramen with naruto, and she left to go shopping. A shipment arrived by overseas package service. Cute baby clothes from Darwin, Australia. They were in his wife's favorite color, sunshine yellow.

Tsuyoshi finished transferring the first tape to a new crystal disk. Time for a break. He left his apartment, took the elevator and went out to the comer coffeeshop. He ordered a double iced mocha cappuccino and paid with a chargecard.

His pokkecon rang. Tsuyoshi took it from his belt and answered it. "Get one to go," the machine told him.

"Okay," said Tsuyoshi, and hung up. He bought a second coffee, put a lid on it and left the shop.

A man in a business suit was sitting on a park bench near the entrance of Tsuyoshi's building. The man's suit was good, but it looked as if he'd slept in it. He was holding his head in his hands and rocking gently back and forth. He was unshaven and his eyes were red-rimmed.

The pokkecon rang again. "The coffee's for him?" Tsuyoshi said.

"Yes," said the pokkecon. "He needs it."

Tsuyoshi walked up to the lost businessman. The man looked up, flinching warily, as if he were about to be kicked. "What is it?" he said.

"Here," Tsuyoshi said, handing him the cup. "Double iced mocha cappuccino."

The man opened the cup, and smelled it. He looked up in disbelief. "This is my favorite kind of coffee ... Who are you?"

Tsuyoshi lifted his arm and offered a hand signal, his fingers clenched like a cat's paw. The man showed no recognition of the gesture. Tsuyoshi shrugged, and smiled. "It doesn't matter. Sometimes a man really needs a coffee. Now you have a coffee. That's all."

"Well ... " The man cautiously sipped his cup, and suddenly smiled. "It's really great. Thanks!"

"You're welcome." Tsuyoshi went home.

His wife arrived from shopping. She had bought new shoes. The pregnancy was making her feet swell. She sat carefully on the couch and sighed.

"Orthopedic shoes are expensive," she said, looking at the yellow pumps. "I hope you don't think they look ugly."

"On you, they look really cute," Tsuyoshi said wisely. He had first met his wife at a video store. She had just used her credit card to buy a disk of primitive black-and-white American anime of the 1950s. The pokkecon had urged him to go up and speak to her on the subject of Felix the Cat. Felix was an early television cartoon star and one of Tsuyoshi's personal favorites.

Tsuyoshi would have been too shy to approach an attractive woman on his own, but no one was a stranger to the net. This fact gave him the confidence to speak to her. Tsuyoshi had soon discovered that the girl was delighted to discuss her deep fondness for cute, antique, animated cats. They'd had lunch together. They'd had a date the next week. They had spent Christmas Eve together in a love hotel. They had a lot in common.

She had come into his life through a little act of grace, a little gift from Felix the Cat's magic bag of tricks. Tsuyoshi had never gotten over feeling grateful for this. Now that he was married and becoming a father, Tsuyoshi Shimizu could feel himself becoming solidly fixed in life. He had a man's role to play now. He knew who he was, and he knew where he stood. Life was good to him.

"You need a haircut, dear," his wife told him.

"Sure."

His wife pulled a gift box out of her shopping bag. "Can you go to the Hotel Daruma, and get your hair cut, and deliver this box for me?"

"What is it?" Tsuyoshi said.

Tsuyoshi's wife opened the little wooden gift box. A maneki neko was nestled inside white foam padding. The smiling ceramic cat held one paw upraised, beckoning for good fortune.

"Don't you have enough of those yet?" he said. "You even have maneki neko underwear."

"It's not for my collection. It's a gift for someone at the Hotel Daruma."

"Oh."

"Some foreign woman gave me this box at the shoestore. She looked American. She couldn't speak Japanese. She had really nice shoes, though ... "

"If the network gave you that little cat, then you're the one who should take care of that obligation, dear."

"But dear," she sighed, "my feet hurt so much, and you could do with a haircut anyway, and I have to cook supper, and besides, it's not really a nice maneki neko, it's just cheap tourist souvenir junk. Can't you do it?"

"Oh, all right," Tsuyoshi told her. "Just forward your pokkecon prompts onto my machine, and I'll see what I can do for us."

She smiled. "I knew you would do it. You're really so good to me."

Tsuyoshi left with the little box. He wasn't unhappy to do the errand, as it wasn't always easy to manage his pregnant wife's volatile moods in their small six-tatami apartment. The local neighborhood was good, but he was hoping to find bigger accommodations before the child was born. Maybe a place with a little studio, where he could expand the scope of his work. It was very hard to find decent housing in Tokyo, but word was out on the net. Friends he didn't even know were working every day to help him. If he kept up with the net's obligations, he had every confidence that some day something nice would turn up.

Tsuyoshi went into the local pachinko parlor, where he won half a liter of beer and a train chargecard. He drank the beer, took the new train card and wedged himself into the train. He got out at the Ebisu station, and turned on his pokkecon Tokyo street map to guide his steps. He walked past places called Chocolate Soup, and Freshness Physique, and The Aladdin Mai-Tai Panico Trattoria.

He entered the Hotel Daruma and went to the hotel barber shop, which was called the Daruma Planet Look. "May I help you?" said the receptionist.

"I'm thinking, a shave and a trim," Tsuyoshi said.

"Do you have an appointment with us?"

"Sorry, no." Tsuyoshi offered a hand gesture.

The woman gestured back, a jerky series of cryptic finger movements. Tsuyoshi didn't recognize any of the gestures. She wasn't from his part of the network.

"Oh well, never mind," the receptionist said kindly. "I'll get Nahoko to look after you."

Nahoko was carefully shaving the fine hair from Tsuyoshi's forehead when the pokkecon rang. Tsuyoshi answered it.

"Go to the ladies' room on the fourth floor," the pokkecon told him.

"Sorry, I can't do that. This is Tsuyoshi Shimizu, not Ai Shimizu. Besides, I'm having my hair cut right now."

"Oh, I see," said the machine. "Recalibrating." It hung up.

Nahoko finished his hair. She had done a good job. He looked much better. A man who worked at home had to take special trouble to keep up appearances. The pokkecon rang again.

"Yes?" said Tsuyoshi.

"Buy bay rum aftershave. Take it outside."

"Right." He hung up. "Nahoko, do you have bay rum?"

"Odd you should ask that," said Nahoko. "Hardly anyone asks for bay rum anymore, but our shop happens to keep it in stock."

Tsuyoshi bought the aftershave, then stepped outside the barbershop. Nothing happened, so he bought a manga comic and waited. Finally a hairy, blond stranger in shorts, a tropical shirt, and sandals approached him. The foreigner was carrying a camera bag and an old-fashioned pokkecon. He looked about sixty years old, and he was very tall.

The man spoke to his pokkecon in English. "Excuse me," said the pokkecon, translating the man's speech into Japanese. "Do you have a bottle of bay rum aftershave?"

"Yes I do." Tsuyoshi handed the bottle over. "Here."

"Thank goodness!" said the man, his words relayed through his machine. "I've asked everyone else in the lobby. Sorry I was late."

"No problem," said Tsuyoshi. "That's a nice pokkecon you have there."

"Well," the man said, "I know it's old and out of style. But I plan to buy a new pokkecon here in Tokyo. I'm told that they sell pokkecons by the basketful in Akihabara electronics market."

"That's right. What kind of translator program are you running? Your translator talks like someone from Osaka."

"Does it sound funny?" the tourist asked anxiously.

"Well, I don't want to complain, but ... " Tsuyoshi smiled. "Here, let's trade meishi. I can give you a copy of a brand-new freeware translator."

"That would be wonderful." They, pressed buttons and squirted copies of their business cards across the network link.

Tsuyoshi examined his copy of the man's electronic card and saw that his name was Zimmerman. Mr. Zimmerman was from New Zealand. Tsuyoshi activated a transfer program. His modern pokkecon began transferring a new translator onto Zimmerman's machine.

A large American man in a padded suit entered the lobby of the Daruma. The man wore sunglasses, and was sweating visibly in the summer heat. The American looked huge, as if he lifted a lot of weights. Then a Japanese woman followed him. The woman was sharply dressed, with a dark blue dress suit, hat, sunglasses, and an attache case. She had a haunted look.

Her escort turned and carefully watched the bellhops, who were bringing in a series of bags. The woman walked crisply to the reception desk and began making anxious demands of the clerk.

"I'm a great believer in machine translation," Tsuyoshi said to the tall man from New Zealand. "I really believe that computers help human beings to relate in a much more human way."

"I couldn't agree with you more," said Mr. Zimmerman, through his machine. "I can remember the first time I came to your country, many years ago. I had no portable translator. In fact, I had nothing but a printed phrasebook. I happened to go into a bar, and ... "

Zimmerman stopped and gazed alertly at his pokkecon. "Oh dear, I'm getting a screen prompt. I have to go up to my room right away."

"Then I'll come along with you till this software transfer is done," Tsuyoshi said.

"That's very kind of you." They got into the elevator together. Zimmerman punched for the fourth floor. "Anyway, as I was saying, I went into this bar in Roppongi late at night, because I was jetlagged and hoping for something to eat ... "

"Yes ?"

"And this woman ... well, let's just say this woman was hanging out in a foreigner's bar in Roppongi late at night, and she wasn't wearing a whole lot of clothes, and she didn't look like she was any better than she ought to be ... "

"Yes, I think I understand you."

"Anyway, this menu they gave me was full of kanji, or katakana, or romanji, or whatever they call those, so I had my phrasebook out, and I was trying very hard to puzzle out these pesky ideograms ... " The elevator opened and they stepped into the carpeted hall of the hotel's fourth floor. "So I opened the menu and I pointed to an entree, and I told this girl ... " Zimmerman stopped suddenly, and stared at his screen. "Oh dear, something's happening. Just a moment."

Zimmerman carefully studied the instructions on his pokkecon. Then he pulled the bottle of bay rum from the baggy pocket of his shorts, and unscrewed the cap. He stood on tiptoe, stretching to his full height, and carefully poured the contents of the bottle through the iron louvers of a ventilation grate, set high in the top of the wall.

Zimmerman screwed the cap back on neatly, and slipped the empty bottle back in his pocket. Then he examined his pokkecon again. He frowned, and shook it. The screen had frozen. Apparently Tsuyoshi's new translation program had overloaded Zimmerman's old-fashioned operating system. His pokkecon had crashed.

Zimmerman spoke a few defeated sentences in English. Then he smiled, and spread his hands apologetically. He bowed, and went into his room, and shut the door.

The Japanese woman and her burly American escort entered the hall. The man gave Tsuyoshi a hard stare. The woman opened the door with a passcard. Her hands were shaking.

Tsuyoshi's pokkecon rang. "Leave the hall," it told him. "Go downstairs. Get into the elevator with the bellboy."

Tsuyoshi followed instructions.

The bellboy was just entering the elevator with a cart full of the woman's baggage. Tsuyoshi got into the elevator, stepping carefully behind the wheeled metal cart. "What floor, sir?" said the bellboy.

"Eight," Tsuyoshi said, ad-libbing. The bellboy turned and pushed the buttons. He faced forward attentively, his gloved hands folded.

The pokkecon flashed a silent line of text to the screen. "Put the gift box inside her flight bag," it read.

Tsuyoshi located the zippered blue bag at the back of the cart. It was a matter of instants to zip it open, put in the box with the maneki neko, and zip the bag shut again. The bellboy noticed nothing. He left, tugging his cart.

Tsuyoshi got out on the eighth floor, feeling slightly foolish. He wandered down the hall, found a quiet nook by an ice machine and called his wife. "What's going on?" he said.

"Oh, nothing." She smiled. "Your haircut looks nice! Show me the back of your head."

Tsuyoshi held the pokkecon screen behind the nape of his neck.

"They do good work," his wife said with satisfaction. "I hope it didn't cost too much. Are you coming home now?"

"Things are getting a little odd here at the hotel," Tsuyoshi told her. "I may be some time."

His wife frowned. "Well, don't miss supper. We're having bonito."

Tsuyoshi took the elevator back down. It stopped at the fourth floor. The woman's American companion stepped onto the elevator. His nose was running and his eyes were streaming with tears.

"Are you all right?" Tsuyoshi said.

"I don't understand Japanese," the man growled. The elevator doors shut.

The man's cellular phone crackled into life. It emitted a scream of anguish and a burst of agitated female English. The man swore and slammed his hairy fist against the elevator's emergency button. The elevator stopped with a lurch. An alarm bell began ringing.

The man pried the doors open with his large hairy fingers and clambered out into the fourth floor. He then ran headlong down the hall.

The elevator began buzzing in protest, its doors shuddering as if broken. Tsuyoshi climbed hastily from the damaged elevator, and stood there in the hallway. He hesitated a moment. Then he produced his pokkecon and loaded his Japanese-to-English translator. He walked cautiously after the American man.

The door to their suite was open. Tsuyoshi spoke aloud into his pokkecon. "Hello?" he said experimentally. "May I be of help?"

The woman was sitting on the bed. She had just discovered the maneki neko box in her flight bag. She was staring at the little cat in horror.

"Who are you?" she said, in bad Japanese.

Tsuyoshi realized suddenly that she was a Japanese American. Tsuyoshi had met a few Japanese Americans before. They always troubled him. They looked fairly normal from the outside, but their behavior was always bizarre. "I'm just a passing friend," he said. "Something I can do?"

"Grab him, Mitch!" said the woman in English. The American man rushed into the hall and grabbed Tsuyoshi by the arm. His hands were like steel bands.

Tsuyoshi pressed the distress button on his pokkecon.

"Take that computer away from him," the woman ordered in English. Mitch quickly took Tsuyoshi's pokkecon away, and threw it on the bed. He deftly patted Tsuyoshi's clothing, searching for weapons. Then he shoved Tsuyoshi into a chair.

The woman switched back to Japanese. "Sit right there, you. Don't you dare move." She began examining the contents of Tsuyoshi's wallet.

"I beg your pardon?" Tsuyoshi said. His pokkecon was lying on the bed. Lines of red text scrolled up its little screen as it silently issued a series of emergency net alerts.

The woman spoke to her companion in English. Tsuyoshi's pokkecon was still translating faithfully. "Mitch, go call the local police."

Mitch sneezed uncontrollably. Tsuyoshi noticed that the room smelled strongly of bay rum. "I can't talk to the local cops. I can't speak Japanese." Mitch sneezed again.

"Okay, then I'll call the cops. You handcuff this guy. Then go down to the infirmary and get yourself some antihistamines, for Christ's sake."

Mitch pulled a length of plastic whipcord cuff from his coat pocket, and attached Tsuyoshi's right wrist to the head of the bed. He mopped his streaming eyes with a tissue. "I'd better stay with you. If there's a cat in your luggage, then the criminal network already knows we're in Japan. You're in danger."

"Mitch, you may be my bodyguard, but you're breaking out in hives."

"This just isn't supposed to happen," Mitch complained, scratching his neck. "My allergies never interfered with my job before."

"Just leave me here and lock the door," the woman told him. "I'll put a chair against the knob. I'll be all right. You need to look after yourself."

Mitch left the room.

The woman barricaded the door with a chair. Then she called the front desk on the hotel's bedside pasokon. "This is Louise Hashimoto in room 434. I have a gangster in my room. He's an information criminal. Would you call the Tokyo police, please? Tell them to send the organized crime unit. Yes, that's right. Do it. And you should put your hotel security people on full alert. There may be big trouble here. You'd better hurry." She hung up.

Tsuyoshi stared at her in astonishment. "Why are you doing this? What's all this about?"

"So you call yourself Tsuyoshi Shimizu," said the woman, examining his credit cards. She sat on the foot of the bed and stared at him. "You're yakuza of some kind, right?"

"I think you've made a big mistake," Tsuyoshi said.

Louise scowled. "Look, Mr. Shimizu, you're not dealing with some Yankee tourist here. My name is Louise Hashimoto and I'm an assistant federal prosecutor from Providence, Rhode Island, USA." She showed him a magnetic ID card with a gold official seal.

"It's nice to meet someone from the American government," said Tsuyoshi, bowing a bit in his chair. "I'd shake your hand, but it's tied to the bed."

"You can stop with the innocent act right now. I spotted you out in the hall earlier, and in the lobby, too, casing the hotel. How did you know my bodyguard is violently allergic to bay rum? You must have read his medical records."

"Who, me? Never!"

"Ever since I discovered you network people, it's been one big pattern," said Louise. "It's the biggest criminal conspiracy I ever saw. I busted this software pirate in Providence. He had a massive network server and a whole bunch of AI freeware search engines. We took him in custody, we bagged all his search engines, and catalogs, and indexers ... Later that very same day, these cats start showing up."

"Cats ?"

Louise lifted the maneki neko, handling it as if it were a live eel. "These little Japanese voodoo cats. Maneki neko, right? They started showing up everywhere I went. There's a china cat in my handbag. There's three china cats at the office. Suddenly they're on display in the windows of every antique store in Providence. My car radio starts making meowing noises at me."

"You broke part of the network?" Tsuyoshi said, scandalized. "You took someone's machines away? That's terrible! How could you do such an inhuman thing?"

"You've got a real nerve complaining about that. What about my machinery?" Louise held up her fat, eerie-looking American pokkecon. "As soon as I stepped off the airplane at Narita, my PDA was attacked. Thousands and thousands of e-mail messages. All of them pictures of cats. A denial-of-service attack! I can't even communicate with the home office! My PDA's useless!"

"What's a PDA?"

"It's a PDA, my Personal Digital Assistant! Manufactured in Silicon Valley!"

"Well, with a goofy name like that, no wonder our pokkecons won't talk to it."

Louise frowned grimly. "That's right, wise guy. Make jokes about it. You're involved in a malicious software attack on a legal officer of the United States Government. You'll see." She paused, looking him over. "You know, Shimizu, you don't look much like the Italian mafia gangsters I have to deal with, back in Providence."

"I'm not a gangster at all. I never do anyone any harm."

"Oh no?" Louise glowered at him. "Listen, pal, I know a lot more about your set-up, and your kind of people, than you think I do. I've been studying your outfit for a long time now. We computer cops have names for your kind of people. Digital panarchies. Segmented, polycephalous, integrated influence networks. What about all these free goods and services you're getting all this time?"

She pointed a finger at him. "Ha! Do you ever pay taxes on those? Do you ever declare that income and those benefits? All the free shipments from other countries! The little homemade cookies, and the free pens and pencils and bumper stickers, and the used bicycles, and the helpful news about fire sales ... You're a tax evader! You're living through kickbacks! And bribes! And influence peddling! And all kinds of corrupt off-the-books transactions?

Tsuyoshi blinked. "Look, I don't know anything about all that. I'm just living my life."

"Well, your network gift economy is undermining the lawful, government approved, regulated economy!"

"Well," Tsuyoshi said gently, "maybe my economy is better than your economy."

"Says who?" she scoffed. "Why would anyone think that,"

"It's better because we're happier than you are. What's wrong with acts of kindness? Everyone likes gifts. Midsummer gifts. New Years Day gifts. Year-end presents. Wedding presents. Everybody likes those."

"Not the way you Japanese like them. You're totally crazy for gifts."

"What kind of society has no gifts? It's barbaric to have no regard for common human feelings."

Louise bristled. "You're saying I'm barbaric?"

"I don't mean to complain," Tsuyoshi said politely, "but you do have me tied up to your bed."

Louise crossed her arms. "You might as well stop complaining. You'll be in much worse trouble when the local police arrive."

"Then we'll probably be waiting here for quite a while," Tsuyoshi said. "The police move rather slowly, here in Japan. I'm sorry, but we don't have as much crime as you Americans, so our police are not very alert."

The pasokon rang at the side of the bed. Louise answered it. It was Tsuyoshi's wife.

"Could I speak to Tsuyoshi Shimizu please?"

"I'm over here, dear," Tsuyoshi called quickly. "She's kidnapped me! She tied me to the bed!"

"Tied to her bed?" His wife's eyes grew wide. "That does it! I'm calling the police!"

Louise quickly hung up the pasokon. "I haven't kidnapped you! I'm only detaining you here until the local authorities can come and arrest you."

"Arrest me for what, exactly?"

Louise thought quickly. "Well, for poisoning my bodyguard by pouring bay rum into the ventilator."

"But I never did that. Anyway, that's not illegal, is it?"

The pasokon rang again. A shining white cat appeared on the screen. It had large, staring, unearthly eyes.

"Let him go," the cat commanded in English.

Louise shrieked and yanked the pasokon's plug from the wall.

Suddenly the lights went out. "Infrastructure attack!" Louise squawled. She rolled quickly under the bed.

The room went gloomy and quiet. The air conditioner had shut off. "I think you can come out," Tsuyoshi said at last, his voice loud in the still room. "It's just a power failure."

"No it isn't," Louise said. She crawled slowly from beneath the bed, and sat on the mattress. Somehow, the darkness had made them more intimate. "I know very well what this is. I'm under attack. I haven't had a moment's peace since I broke that network. Stuff just happens to me now. Bad stuff. Swarms of it. It's never anything you can touch, though. Nothing you can prove in a court of law."

She sighed. "I sit in chairs, and somebody's left a piece of gum there. I get free pizzas, but they're not the kind of pizzas I like. Little kids spit on my sidewalk. Old women in walkers get in front of me whenever I need to hurry."

The shower came on, all by itself. Louise shuddered, but said nothing. Slowly, the darkened, stuffy room began to fill with hot steam.

"My toilets don't flush," Louise said. "My letters get lost in the mail. When I walk by cars, their theft alarms go off. And strangers stare at me. It's always little things. Lots of little tiny things, but they never, ever stop. I'm up against something that is very very big, and very very patient. And it knows all about me. And it's got a million arms and legs. And all those arms and legs are people."

There was the noise of scuffling in the hall. Distant voices, confused shouting.

Suddenly the chair broke under the doorknob. The door burst open violently. Mitch tumbled through, the sunglasses flying from his head. Two hotel security guards were trying to grab him. Shouting incoherently in English, Mitch fell headlong to the floor, kicking and thrashing. The guards lost their hats in the struggle. One tackled Mitch's legs with both his arms, and the other whacked and jabbed him with a baton.

Puffing and grunting with effort, they hauled Mitch out of the room. The darkened room was so full of steam that the harried guards hadn't even noticed Tsuyoshi and Louise.

Louise stared at the broken door. "Why did they do that to him?"

Tsuyoshi scratched his head in embarrassment. "Probably a failure of communication."

"Poor Mitch! They took his gun away at the airport. He had all kinds of technical problems with his passport ... Poor guy, he's never had any luck since he met me."

There was a loud tapping at the window. Louise shrank back in fear. Finally she gathered her courage, and opened the curtains. Daylight flooded the room.

A window-washing rig had been lowered from the roof of the hotel, on cables and pulleys. There were two window-washers in crisp gray uniforms. They waved cheerfully, making little catpaw gestures.

There was a third man with them. It was Tsuyoshi's brother.

One of the washers opened the window with a utility key. Tsuyoshi's brother squirmed into the room. He stood up and carefully adjusted his coat and tie.

"This is my brother," Tsuyoshi explained.

"What are you doing here?" Louise said.

"They always bring in the relatives when there's a hostage situation," Tsuyoshi's brother said. "The police just flew me in by helicopter and landed me on the roof." He looked Louise up and down. "Miss Hashimoto, you just have time to escape."

"What?" she said.

"Look down at the streets," he told her. "See that? You hear them? Crowds are pouring in from all over the city. All kinds of people, everyone with wheels. Street noodle salesmen. Bicycle messengers. Skateboard kids. Takeout delivery guys."

Louise gazed out the window into the streets, and shrieked aloud. "Oh no! A giant swarming mob! They're surrounding me! I'm doomed!"

"You are not doomed," Tsuyoshi's brother told her intently. "Come out the window. Get onto the platform with us. You've got one chance, Louise. It's a place I know, a sacred place in the mountains. No computers there, no phones, nothing." He paused. "It's a sanctuary for people like us. And I know the way."

She gripped his suited arm. "Can I trust you?"

"Look in my eyes," he told her. "Don't you see? Yes, of course you can trust me. We have everything in common."

Louise stepped out the window. She clutched his arm, the wind whipping at her hair. The platform creaked rapidly up and out of sight.

Tsuyoshi stood up from the chair. When he stretched out, tugging at his handcuffed wrist, he was just able to reach his pokkecon with his fingertips. He drew it in, and clutched it to his chest. Then he sat down again, and waited patiently for someone to come and give him freedom.

MACS

Terry Bisson

What did I think? Same thing I think today. I thought it was slightly weird even if it was legal. But I guess I agreed with the families that there had to be Closure. Look out that window there. I can guarantee you, it's unusual to be so high in Oklahoma City. Ever since it happened, this town has had a thing about tall buildings. It's almost like that son of a bitch leveled this town.

Hell, we wanted Closure too, but they had a court order all the way from the Supreme Court. I thought it was about politics at first, and I admit I was a little pissed. Don't use the word pissed. What paper did you say you were with?

Never heard of it, but that's me. Anyway, I was miffed--is that a word? miffed?--until I understood it was about Victims' Rights. So we cancelled the execution, and built the vats, and you know the rest.

Well, if you want to know the details you should start with my assistant warden at the time, who handled the details. He's now the warden. Tell him I sent you. Give him my regards.

*

I thought it opened a Pandora's box, and I said so at the time. It turns out of course that there haven't been that many, and none on that scale. The ones that there are, we get them all. We're sort of the Sloan-Ketterings of the thing. See that scum on the vats? You're looking at eleven of the guy who abducted the little girls in Ohio, the genital mutilation thing, remember? Even eleven's unusual. We usually build four, maybe five tops. And never anything on the scale of the macs.

Build, grow, whatever. If you're interested in the technology, you'll have to talk with the vat vet himself. That's what we call him, he's a good old boy. He came in from the ag school for the macs and he's been here in Corrections ever since. He was an exchange student, but he met a girl from MacAlester and never went home. Isn't it funny how that stuff works? She was my second cousin, so now I have a Hindu second cousin-in-law. Of course he's not actually a Hindu.

*

A Unitarian, actually. There are several of us here in MacAlester, but I'm the only one from the prison. I was fresh out of Ag and it was my first assignment. How would one describe such an assignment? In my country, we had no such ... well, you know. It was repellent and fascinating at the same time.

Everyone has the cloning technology. It's the growth rate that gives difficulty. Animals grow to maturity so much faster, and we had done significant work. Six-week cattle, ten-day ducks. Gene tweaking. Enzyme accelerators. They wanted full grown macs in two and a half years; we gave them 168 thirty year old men in eleven months! I used to come down here and watch them grow. Don't tell anyone, especially my wife, Jean, but I grew sort of fond of them.

Hard? It was hard, I suppose, but farming is hard too if you think about it. A farmer may love his hogs but he ships them off, and we all know what for.

You should ask legal services about that. That wasn't part of my operation. We had already grown 168 and I had to destroy one before he was even big enough to walk, just so they could include the real one. Ask me if I appreciated that!

*

It was a second court order. It came through after the macs were in the vats. Somebody's bright idea in Justice. I suppose they figured it would legitimize the whole operation to include the real McCoy, so to speak, but then somebody has to decide who gets him. Justice didn't want any part of that and neither did we, so we brought in one of those outfits that run lotteries, because that's what it was, a lottery, but kind of a strange one, if you know what I mean.

Strange in that the winner wasn't supposed to know if he won or not. He or she. It's like the firing squad, where nobody knows who has the live bullets. Nobody is supposed to know who gets the real one. I'm sure it's in the records somewhere, but that stuff's all sealed. What magazine did you say you were with?

*

Sealed? It's destroyed. That was part of the contract. I guess whoever numbered the macs would know, but that was five years ago and it was done by lot anyway. It could probably be figured out by talking to the drivers who did the deliveries, or the drivers who picked up the remains, or even the families themselves. But it would be illegal, wouldn't it? Unethical, too, if you ask me, since it would interfere with what the whole thing was about, which was Closure. Victims' Rights. That's why we were hired, to keep it secret, and that's what we did. End of story.

*

UPS was a natural because we had just acquired Con Tran and were about to go into the detainee delivery business under contract with the BOP. The macs were mostly local, of course, but not all. Several went out of state; two to California, for example. It wasn't a security problem since the macs were all sort of docile. I figured they were engineered that way. Is engineered the word? Anyway, the problem was public relations. Appearances, to be frank. You can't drive around with a bus load of macs. And most families don't want the TV and papers at the door, like Publishers Clearing House. (Though some do!) So we delivered them in vans, two and three at a time, mostly in the morning, sort of on the sly. We told the press we were still working out the details until it was all done. Some people videotaped their delivery. I suspect they're the ones that also videotaped their executions.

I'm not one of those who had a problem with the whole thing. No sirree. I went along with my drivers, at first especially, and met quite a few of the loved ones, and I wish you could have seen the grateful expressions on their faces. You get your own mac to kill any way you want to. That's Closure. It made me proud to be an American even though it came out of a terrible tragedy. An unspeakable tragedy.

Talk to the drivers all you want to. What channel did you say you were with?

*

You wouldn't have believed the publicity at the time. It was a big triumph for Victims' Rights, which is now in the Constitution, isn't it? Maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, it wasn't a particularly what you might call pleasant job, even though I was all for the families and Closure and stuff and still am.

Looked like anybody. Looked like you except for the beard. None of them were different. They were all the same. One of them was supposedly the real McCoy, but so what? Isn't the whole point of cloning supposed to be that each one is the same as the first one? Nobody's ever brought this up before. You're not from one of those talk shows, are you?

They couldn't have talked to us if they had wanted to, and we weren't about to talk to them. They were all taped up except for the eyes, and you should have seen those eyes. You tried to avoid it. I had one that threw up all over my truck even though theoretically you can't throw up through that tape. I told the dispatcher my truck needed a theoretical cleaning.

*

They all seemed the same to me. Sort of panicked and gloomy. I had a hard time hating them, in spite of what they done, or their daddy done, or however you want to put it. They say they could only live five years anyway before their insides turned to mush. That was no problem of course. Under the Victims' Rights settlement it had to be done in thirty days, that was from date of delivery.

I delivered thirty four macs, of 168 altogether. I met thirty four fine families, and they were a fine cross section of American life, black and white, Catholic and Protestant. Not so many Jews.

I've heard that rumor. You're going to have rumors like that when one of them is supposedly the real McCoy. There were other rumors too, like that one of the macs was pardoned by its family and sent away to school somewhere. That would have been hard. I mean, if you got a mac you had to return a body within thirty days. One story I heard was that they switched bodies after a car wreck. Another was that they burned another body at the stake and turned it in. But that one's hard to believe too. Only one of the macs was burned at the stake, and they had to get a special clearance to do that. Hell, you can't even burn leaves in Oklahoma any more.

SaniMed collected, they're a medical waste outfit, since we're not allowed to handle remains. They're not going to be able to tell you much. What did they pick up? Bones and ashes. Meat.

*

Some of it was pretty gruesome but in this business you get used to that. We weren't supposed to have to bag them, but you know how it is. The only one that really got to me was the crucufixion. That sent the wrong message, if you ask me.

*

There was no way we could tell which one of them was the real McCoy, not from what we picked up. You should talk to the loved ones. Nice people, maybe a little impatient sometimes. The third week was the hardest in terms of scheduling. People had been looking forward to Closure for so long, they played with their macs for a week or so, but then it got old. Played is not the word, but you know what I mean. Then it's bang bang and honey call SaniMed. They want them out of the house ASAP.

It's not that we were slow, but the schedule was heavy. In terms of what we were picking up, none of it was that hard for me. These were not people. Some of them were pretty chewed up. Some of them were chewed up pretty bad.

*

I'm not allowed to discuss individual families. I can say this: the ceremony, the settlement, the execution, whatever you want to call it, wasn't always exactly what everybody had expected or wanted. One family even wanted to let their mac go. Since they couldn't do that, they wanted a funeral. A funeral for toxic waste!

I can't give you their name or tell you their number.

I guess I can tell you that. It was between 103 and 105.

*

I'm not ashamed of it. We're Christians. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. We tried to make it legal, but the state wouldn't hear of it, since the execution order had already been signed. We had thirty days, so we waited till the last week and then used one of those Kevorkian kits, the lethal objection thing. Injection, I mean. The doctor came with it but we had to push the plunger thing. It seems to me like one of the rights of Victims' Rights should be--but I guess not.

There was a rumor that another family forgave and got away with it, but we never met them. They supposedly switched bodies in a car wreck and sent their mac to forestry school in Canada. Even if it was true, which I doubt, he would be almost five now, and that's half their life span. Supposedly their internal organs harden after ten years. What agency did you say you were with?

*

We dropped ours out of an airplane. My uncle has a big ranch out past Mayfield with his own airstrip and everything. Cessna 172. It was illegal, but what are they going to do? C'est la vie, or rather c'est la mort. Or whatever.

*

They made us kill him. Wasn't he ours to do with as we liked? Wasn't that the idea? He killed my daddy like a dog and if I wanted to tie up like a dog, isn't that my business? Aren't you a little long in the tooth to be in college, boy?

An electric chair. It's out in the garage. Want to see it? Still got the shit stain on the seat.

*

My daddy came home with a mac, and took my mother and me out back and made us watch while he shot him. Shot him all over, from the feet up. The whole thing took ten minutes. It didn't seem to do anybody any good, my aunt is still dead. They never found most of her, only the bottom of a leg. Would you like some chocolates? They're from England.

*

Era? It was only like five years ago. I never took delivery. I thought I was the only one but I found out later there were eight others. I guess they just put them back in the vat. They couldn't live more than five years anyway. Their insides turned hard. All their DNA switches were shut off or something.

I got my own Closure my own way. That's my daughter's picture there. As for the macs, they are all dead. Period. They lived a while, suffered and died. Is it any different for the rest of us? What church did you say you were with?

*

I don't mind telling you our real name, but you should call us 49 if you quote us. That's the number we had in the lottery. We got our mac on a Wednesday, kept him for a week, then set him in a kitchen chair and shot him in the head. We didn't have any idea how messy that would be. The state should have given some instructions or guidelines.

Nobody knew which one was the original, and that's the way it should be. Otherwise it would ruin the Closure for everybody else. I can tell you ours wasn't, though. It was just a feeling I had. That's why we just shot him and got it over with. I just couldn't get real excited about killing something that seemed barely alive, even though it supposedly had all his feelings and memories. But some people got into it and attended several executions. They had a kind of network.

Let me see your list. These two are the ones I would definitely talk to: 112 and 43. And maybe 13.

*

Is that what they call us, 112? So I'm just a number again. I thought I was through with that in the army. I figured we had the real one, the real McCoy, because he was so hard to kill. We cut him up with a chain saw, a little Homelite. No sir, I didn't mind the mess and yes, he hated every minute of it. All twenty some odd which is how long it took. I would have fed him to my dogs if we hadn't had to turn the body in. End of fucking story.

*

Oh, yeah. Double the pleasure, double the fun. Triple it, really. The only one I was against was this one, 61. The crucifixion. I think that sent the wrong message, but the neighbors loved it.

Drown in the toilet was big. Poison, fire, hanging, you name it. People got these old books from the library but that medieval stuff took special equipment. One guy had a rack built but the neigbors objected to the screaming. I guess there are some limits, even to Victims' Rights. Ditto the stake stuff.

*

I'm sure our mac wasn't the real McCoy. You want to know why? He was so quiet and sad. he just closed his eyes and died. I'm sure the real one would have been harder to kill. My mac wasn't innocent, but he wasn't guilty either. Even though he looked like a thirty year old man he was only eighteen months old, and that sort of showed.

I killed him just to even things out. Not revenge, just Closure. After spending all the money on the court case and the settlement, not to mention the cloning and all, the deliveries, it would have been wasteful not to do it, don't you think?.

I've heard that surviving thing but it's just a rumor. Like Elvis. There were lots of rumors. They say one family tried to pardon their mac and send him to Canada or somewhere. I don't think so!

You might try this one, 43. They used to brag that they had the real one. I don't mind telling you I resented that and still do, since we were supposed to all share equally in the Closure. But some people have to be number one.

It's over now anyway. What law firm did you say you worked for?

*

I could tell he was the original by the mean look in his eye. He wasn't quite so mean after a week in that rat box.

Some people will always protest and write letters and such. But what about something that was born to be put to death? How can you protest that?

Closure, that's what it was all about. I went on to live my life. I've been married again and divorced already. What college did you say you were from?

*

The real McCoy? I think he just kept his mouth shut and died like the rest of them. What's he goin to say, here I am, and make it worse? And as far as that rumor of him surviving, you can file it under Elvis.

There was also a story that somebody switched bodies after a car wreck and sent their mac to Canada. I wouldn't put too much stock in that one, either. Folks around here don't even think about Canada. Forgiveness either.

We used that state kit, the Kevorkian thing. I heard about twenty families did. We just sat him down and May pushed the plunger. Like flushing a toilet. May and myself--she's gone now, God bless her--we were interested in Closure, not revenge.

*

This one, 13, told me one time he thought he had the real McCoy, but it was wishful thinking, if you ask me. I don't think you could tell the real one. I don't think you should want to even if you could.

I'm afraid you can't ask him about it, because they were all killed in a fire, the whole family. It was just a day before the ceremony they had planned, which was some sort of slow thing with wires. There was a gas leak or something. They were all killed and their mac was destroyed in the explosion. Fire and explosion. What insurance company did you say you worked for?

It was--have you got a map? oooh, that's a nice one--right here. On the corner of Oak and Increase, only a half a mile from the site of the original explosion, ironically. The house is gone now.

*

See that new strip mall? That Dollar Store's where the house stood. The family that lived in it was one of the ones that lost a loved one in the Oklahoma City bombing. They got one of the macs as part of the Victims' Rights Closure Settlement, but unfortunately tragedy struck them again before they got to get Closure. Funny how the Lord works in mysterious ways.

No, none of them are left. There was a homeless guy who used to hang around but the police ran him off. Beard like yours. Might have been a friend of the family, some crazy cousin, who knows. So much tragedy they had. Now he lives in the back of the mall in a dumpster.

*

There. That yellow thing. It never gets emptied. I don't know why the city doesn't remove it but it's been there for almost five years just like that.

I wouldn't go over there. People don't fool with him. He doesn't bother anybody, but, you know.

Suit yourself. If you knock on it he'll come out, figuring you've got some food for him or something. Kids do it for meanness sometimes. But stand back, there is a smell.

*

"Daddy?"

SARAJEVO

Nick DiChario

In Sarajevo, at Rade Koncar Square, Ahmo watched a young boy fall to the bullet of a sniper.  The shell blasted into his left ear and exploded out his jaw.  The spurt of blood and chunk of meat and bone that was once his delicate, rounded chin burst into the air like a champagne cork.  His body snapped in fierce retroflex before it collapsed.  His neck twisted grotesquely underneath him.  This was one of the first things Ahmo saw in Sarajevo.  He watched it again and again, unable to believe his eyes.

The boy, for all his ghostly appearance, died his perpetual deaths in exquisite detail: His bruised left elbow hitched against his ribs.  The torn, dirty, olive shirt he wore flapped airily in the breeze.  A look of utter confusion crossed his face as the bullet introduced itself as smooth as an ice pick to tender skin and fragile bone.  Even the dust settled around the boy's broken body as it must have done a century ago, captured by the extravagant miracle of his never-ending death.  The boy died with his eyes open, questioning, as if there was something about the entire experience he'd just plain misunderstood.

"Excuse me, sir," a smartbot said in metallic English, rolling toward Ahmo on two trim wheels.  "Should I call medical assistance for you?”  It was an outdated model, short and broad-framed, with arms like brass sticks.  It had a square head, no neck, and an old RetnaNet scanner strip for visuals, winking peridot and platinum.  "English?”  it asked in its scratchy voice.  "Do I presume correctly?"

Ahmo felt the summer heat closing in on him.  It was a bright afternoon, and there was nowhere to hide from the sun.  He must have looked very pale.  "I'm all right," he said.

"Very good.  Will you please accept reading material from the Sarajevo Council on Spiritual Awareness?”  The smartbot had a stack of pamphlets tucked under its stiff arm.  It pinched one of the pamphlets with its adept robotic fingers and held it out to him.  "By the grace of Allah, you are allowed to tread upon this Holy Soil.  Allah offers the Miracle of Ghosts to all people who --_ssschkitch_ -- travel to Sarajevo.  The ghosts are prophets of Allah sent to remind us never to forsake peace.  Peace with Allah, peace with one's soul, peace with each other and all living things is paramount.  The people of the world were once guilty of turning their backs on Sarajevo, but Allah will not permit the world to-to-to_click, nnnnnnnn_ -- so easily forget.  Read this pamphlet, please."

"I'll read it.”  Ahmo took the paper and folded it into his pocket.

"Sir, are you planning to visit Vase Miskin Street and the infamous Bread Queue Massacre?"

"Dobrinja," Ahmo answered.

"If you pass the BQM, maybe it is best for you to --_skeeeeeech_ -- close eyes.  You do not look so good.”  The smartbot rolled away toward a group of Eastern Indian tourists on the other side of the square.

The machine was right about Miskin Street.  Hundreds of ghosts gathered outside what was, during the siege on Sarajevo, the city's only working bakery.  On the morning of the massacre, the people came in hopes of buying a loaf of bread for their families with what little money they had.  Ahmo knew from what his grandmother had told him that the people had no food, no water, no electricity, their telephones had all been cut off.  They suffered the indignity of inadequate sanitation.  They had not eaten eggs, meat, fruits or vegetables for many months.  They survived on bread and rain water and what little rice they received from humanitarian aid.

The grenades exploded in the center of the crowd.  Arms and legs were thrown into the air, landing on nearby balconies.

This was Sarajevo in the year 1992, and 2092, and all the years in-between.  Welcome.

Ahmo stepped into the shadow of a decrepit building of worn and crumbling Jerusalem stone.  He wiped the perspiration from his face with a bandanna already dampened by sweat.  He dug in his pocket, unfolded the pamphlet the smartbot had given him, and read a quote from the_Holy Qur'an:

‘Men began to fear the strong and oppress the weak,

To boast in prosperity, and curse in adversity.

And to flee each other, pursuing phantoms,

For the truth and reality of Unity

Was gone from their minds.’

Ahmo wanted nothing more than for the truth and reality of this horrible place to be gone from his mind.  He had to remind himself of why he'd come.  He'd come for his beloved grandmother.  He'd made her a promise he would not break.  He reached in his hip pack for the gold ring Grandmother Ivana had given him on the day she'd died, felt it at his fingertips, brought it to his lips.  "Soon," he whispered.  "Soon I will take you home."

Ahmo stepped out of the shadows and walked toward the suburb of Dobrinja, where Grandmother Ivana had lived when she was just a little girl.

* * * *

Ahmo rushed into his grandparents' small brownstone on the outskirts of Greenwich.  He was late for Grandmother Ivana's death.  He hadn't meant to be late, but the tube from East Jersey had stalled twice, and the demonstration against new government regulations on webnet virtuware had drawn thousands, clogging up eight blocks of prime downtown real estate.

"I can't wait around here all afternoon," said the Hemlock technologist, a petite young woman with a stiff posture aimed at Ahmo's grandfather.  She wore a blazer the color of blush clay, a tight skirt, and a pair of black pumps that made her feet look large.  "I've got two more deaths scheduled before six o'clock."

Grandfather's face turned crimson.  "We pay Hemlock advance for job, you are going to do  job.  Or else you refund money. All of money!”  He smacked his hands together.

Grandmother Ivana smiled up at Ahmo from the quilted sofa.  In spite of all her sickness, she looked beautiful.  She wore a long, silky, agate-blue wrap over an ivory-colored gown.  She'd primped her hair, and Ahmo could see a trace of makeup on her blanched face.  She was not even shaking much today.  Ahmo took a moment to savor this picture of her.

The Hemlock lady noticed Ahmo standing just inside the parlor.  "Is this the young man we've been waiting for?"

The woman's voice no longer sounded quite so tart.  Not many women could remain angry around Ahmo.  He had what his grandmother called "pouty little lips" and a baby boy's complexion.  He'd inherited his mother's long, thin face and thick black hair, his father's strong chin and sky-blue eyes.  Ahmo had developed a lean and muscular physique from his years of high school and collegiate basketball, and his job as assistant basketball coach at East Jersey University kept him fit and trim.  The fact that he was an English Lit intern, teaching under a highly respected professor at the university, was something he kept to himself until he met a woman impressed by such things, a rare occurrence in his social circles that still revolved mainly around athletics.

"Ahmo," said his Grandmother, "I knew you would come.”  She spoke to Ahmo as if no one else were in the room.  His grandmother had always talked to him this way, even when he was a child.  She'd always made him feel special.  Ahmo was almost thirty years old now and still hadn't found anyone else who could do that for him.  There were plenty of women who wanted his body, and vice versa to be sure, but_special_ was hard to come by.  This was one of the reasons he didn't want Grandmother Ivana to go through with the euthanasia.  Selfish, but true.

"I'm sorry I'm late," he said, not really meaning it.  "It wasn't my fault.  The tube stalled, and the demonstration downtown -- "

"It's all right, Ahmo," said his grandmother.

The young woman smoothed her woolen jacket.  "I don't believe we've met," she said.

Grandmother said, "Miss March, this is my grandson, Ahmo.  He'll be your second witness.  Ahmo, this is Miss March.  She's single."

Miss March smiled.  "The pleasure is all mine."

She had the sort of pinched face that made a smile look pained and exaggerated.  She smelled too strongly of powdery perfume, putting Ahmo in mind of the funeral homes her clients were one step away from.  He said, "I'm glad you can find some pleasure in this."

His grandmother frowned.  "Don't be like that."

"It's okay," said Miss March.  "We at Hemlock are often treated like_betes noires_.  We learn to overlook it."

"Miss March is a kind young girl, Ahmo.  You know I want this or she wouldn't be here."

"I know, but that doesn't mean I want it.”  Ahmo knelt beside his grandmother and held her hand.  "Can't I talk you out of this?"

"Stubborn boy, just like your grandfather.  We've been all through this.  I'm one-hundred-twelve years old and modern medicine has run out of miracles for me.  It's time for me to go."

"Time to go!  Time to go!”  snapped Grandfather.  He stormed into the kitchen.  "That's all you've said for the past three months.  Go then.  Get it over!"

Ivana smiled.  "You'll watch out for your grandfather when I'm gone, won't you, Ahmo?  He's not so young anymore."

"Of course I will," Ahmo answered uneasily.  He knew Grandmother Ivana was ready to die.  She had made all of the preparations with Hemlock and had undergone the required psychological evaluations.  She had even thought to make Ahmo executor of her estate, whatever that meant to a woman who coveted so few possessions.  But Ahmo was not ready to let her go.

He thought about his family.  Ahmo's parents, along with his sister and brother-in-law and their three children, lived a long way off, in George Washington Province, the new American colony in Canada.  They would be angry when they learned of Ivana's passing.  They would want to know why Ahmo hadn't notified them sooner.  It was Grandmother's wish, he would tell them.  She had not wanted anyone else to watch her die.

"It's time!  It's time!”  Grandfather hollered from the kitchen.  "Let her go!"

Miss March placed what looked like a hard-plastic fishing creel on the end table.  She snapped it open and removed some needles wrapped in white linen.

Ahmo glanced around the small parlor where he had spent so much of his time since the rest of his family had moved north.  The antique poster on the wall from the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo glinted in its burnished frame.  His parents had bought it at an auction and had given it to Ivana on her one-hundredth birthday.  He'd often caught his grandmother staring at it, appearing as if she might cry.  The tiered curio table in the corner of the room had been cleaned and polished recently, along with all of the miniature pewter teacups his grandmother had collected over the years.  He touched the large, round area-rug at his knees that he and his sister had helped Grandmother Ivana braid and sew when they were just children.  Ahmo suddenly wished he'd gotten stuck in the tube, or lost in the crowd downtown.  Anything, anything other than this.

Ivana cupped Ahmo's chin and gently pulled him closer.  She kissed his forehead.  She had the most beautiful plum-colored eyes he'd ever seen.  They flashed liquid and hypnotic in the dim light of the room, like wine and candlelight.  Ahmo couldn't imagine no longer having those eyes to look into for warmth, for comfort, for his own sense of family and personal history.  It was amazing that this old, frail woman had come to mean so much.

"Ahmo," she said, "what are you holding on to?  I'm happy.  I'm free to say,_this is how I want to die_.  Do you understand?"

Ahmo understood, but he could not embrace it.  His love was too strong.

Ivana brushed her fingers through his coarse hair.  "Listen to me.  I have something important to ask of you.  A last request.  Will you promise to do something for me after I'm gone?"

"Of course.  Anything.”  Ahmo kissed his grandmother's fingers.  Her palms were clammy.  He noticed that he'd been trying to warm her hands with his own, caressing them as if they were sticks he might alight by rubbing them briskly together.

"I want you to go back.  I want you to go back to Sarajevo for me."

"Go back?  Grandmother, I, I don't know...Sarajevo..."

"Please," she said.  "It is my last wish.  I have set aside the money for the trip.  It will cost you nothing but your time."

Ahmo hesitated.  He did not relish the thought of seeing the Miracle of Ghosts, of watching his ancestors die their horrible deaths.

"Your mother will never go.  She's afraid.  I can't blame her.  Maybe she's too close to it."

What choice did Ahmo have?  How could he say no to this beautiful woman, his precious grandmother?  This was her last wish.  "All right, if it's that important to you."

Ivana lifted her left hand and removed the gold ring from around her finger.  She placed the ring in Ahmo's hand.  "Take this ring and bring it to Dobrinja, bring it to my home.  I have all the information written out for you, with a map.  When you get there, just leave the ring on the ground.  That's all I ask.  The ring has been with me all these years, and I want to return it.  This is my dying wish.”  Ivana's lips quivered, her delicate jaw trembled, her eyes filled with tears.  "Oh, look at me.  I promised I wouldn't cry."

"I hate to sound all business," said Miss March, "but I'll need Ahmo to sign the witness statement now.”  She said this to no one in particular, but Ahmo felt it as a blow to his heart.

"All right.”  He stood and quickly signed the paper without reading it.  He did not want to linger over this task.  He felt as if he were signing his grandmother's death sentence.

"Is it done yet?”  Grandfather yelled from the kitchen.  "Are you dead yet, Ivana?"

Ivana laughed nervously and brushed away her tears.  "No, not yet.  Make a pot of coffee.  By the time it's perked I'll be dead.  Make decaffeinated.  You'll be up all night if you don't."

"We're out of decaf!”  he shouted.  "I put it on the list but you never bought it."

"I bought it.  Look in the refrigerator behind the pickles.  How are you going to live without me?  Tomorrow I won't be around to tell you where to find things.”  Then she looked into Ahmo's eyes.  "_Cuvajte se_, little Ahmo, take care of yourself.  I love you with all my heart."

Ahmo clutched the ring in his hand, and stepped behind the sofa, where Grandmother Ivana could not see his pain.

* * * *

Ahmo walked past "sniper alley" in Sarajevo, and watched an ambulance driver lose control of his vehicle after he'd been shot in the neck.  The ambulance spun out of control, flipped over, and crashed silently into a café.  The injured victims in the ambulance spilled out onto the street like lumber from a broken sheaf.

Outside the general headquarters of UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protection Force, a woman from the humanitarian agency Equilibre burned to death after being caught in the flames of a Molotov cocktail.  She was most likely killed by a Chetnik guerrilla.  The Chetniks took great pleasure in the killing of volunteers, women, and children.

The sky was cloudless, the sun beat down mercilessly.  Ahmo's eyes stung and his mouth felt sandy from the blowing dust.  He could feel the skin on the back of his neck beginning to sunburn.  He walked the road between Butmir and Dobrinja.  The southwest was one of the hardest hit in all of Sarajevo during the war.  There were no trees or mountain ranges to protect it.

At the old airport, Hercules airplanes packed with medical relief and rice and beans from the West came under heavy anti-aircraft fire, and crashed one after another as they attempted to land.  There was a phosphorescent glean[?] to their aerial distress that made the sky itself look drunk and confused.

Ahmo watched for a while, and began to wonder if these tired old airplanes were fed up with crashing and burning over and over again, if their pilots had long ago given up trying to set down safely.  Had Allah truly asked them to do this great thing, to make this sacrifice?_Haunt Sarajevo!_ Ahmo imagined Allah commanding, and then he saw thousands of Sarajevans, legions of the dead, spirit-zombies, obeying their one true God.

A smartbot from the Bureau of Tourism approached Ahmo as he stood in front of the airport.  It said, "Slovák?  English?  Deutsch?  Italiano?  Français?  Español?  -- "

"English," Ahmo interrupted.

"Good day, sir," it began without pause.  "Do you know what started all the killing in Sarajevo?  Do you know the details behind the Bosnia-Herzegovina vote for independence from the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, and how the Serbian Democratic Party violently disagreed?  Would you like to learn the truth about the evil war criminals Milosevic and Karadzic and their policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide?"

This smartbot was tall and thin with a galeate head, a newer model sporting copper alloy legs, a pristine voice chip, and glass eyes that looked almost real.  Its exoskeleton was the color of almond, giving it the appearance of a walking corpse.  The 'bot wore a navy-blue smock with an official patch on its breast, and held a neatly wrapped computer virtuware package in its dull, brass hand.

It clicked and hummed forward.  "Why did the Europeans and Americans, the holy and righteous people of the civilized world who prided themselves on their humanitarianism, allow the slaughter of innocent victims when they could have easily put an end to it?  Why was this peaceful city allowed to degenerate into the world's largest concentration camp?  You can learn all about it from this commemorative Sarajevo virtuware, the only presentation package sanctioned by the Sarajevo Historical Society."

Ahmo looked past the smartbot.  Another aircraft spun out of control on the runway, tipped over, and snapped a wing.  A fiery mushroom of bleached smoke consumed the plane.

"Walk the streets of Sarajevo, the City of Tolerance, before it was completely destroyed by the war and inhabited by ghosts.  Learn how the Croats, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, and even the Serbs lived in peace for centuries, side by side.  See exclusive interviews with Sarajevans who miraculously escaped the violence.  Hear theories from internationally renowned mystagogues on why the hauntings continue to transpire.  All of this can be yours for only two-thousand dinars, the same amount of money it once cost for one-half kilo of macaroni here in Sarajevo during the terrible war of aggression!"

Ahmo donated the money to the Historical Society in German Deutchmarks, the preferred tender in the Balkan region, but told the smartbot he did not have the stomach for its virtuware.

In Dobrinja, there was nothing left but collapsed mosques and synagogues, ruined minarets and housing complexes, and ghosts forever dying.  Ahmo was swiftly learning to ignore them, just as the world had learned to ignore the real thing so many years ago.  But Ahmo felt as if he had earned this right.  He was one of them now, under siege with the incendiaries, mortars, cannons, and snipers silently stalking him.

Ghosts, now, were everywhere...

dancing...

dancing...

So many had died here that the phantoms expired in paranormal heaps, creating numinous silhouettes of multiple executions, of blood and brains and entrails superimposed over torn flesh, exposed bone, and silently screaming faces -- a macabre choreography of vision and light, transparency and color, life and death.  There was an absurd, mythical quality to all of it that was just now beginning to take shape in Ahmo's mind, a fuzzy surrealism, a sense of floating adrift in a psychotic nightmare that neither permitted him to succumb to its terrors, nor played itself out of its own accord.  Ahmo was nothing more than a prisoner waiting to be set free from Sarajevo, this land of restless, tortured spirits.

Finally it was the ring, of all things, the ring burning in Ahmo's hand that released him, centered him, reminded him of who and what he was and why he had come.  Somehow Grandmother Ivana's ring had gotten from his hip pack into the palm of his hand and had it not been for this delicate band of gold, he might very well have become a ghost himself.

By the time Ahmo found his grandmother's building, he was both mentally and physically exhausted.  He felt the hot wind on his face.  Sweat streamed down his ribs.  He sipped water from the canteen he'd purchased in the gift shop at the Sarajevo Marriott.  He wanted only to fulfill his promise and be gone.

Ahmo watched a family blown to literal bits in his grandmother's old building.  At first they were just sitting there.  Then a little girl ran into the room.  The bomb hit and the room caved in on them.  The little girl looked so much like his grandmother that Ahmo watched the scene unfold again and again, trying to peer through the other ghosts and study her face.

His grandmother had been one of the lucky children.  She'd gotten out before the winter, before temperatures of below zero forced people to burn furniture in their stoves to keep from freezing.  When the mortar fire hit, Ivana was not killed.  The rest of her family had died but she'd survived with only minor cuts and bruises and some ringing in her ears that would not clear for many months.  The day after the bombing, a delegation from The Children's Embassy spirited her away among a group of Italian journalists.  From there she'd been placed in an American home.

This girl's resemblance to Ahmo's grandmother was uncanny -- the structure of her cheeks and the curvature of her jaw, the delicate nose and lofty forehead, the upturned lips and small mouth.  Ahmo had heard that as people grew older they began to resemble their childhood likenesses.  Perhaps this thought moved him forward.  The ghost of the young girl glanced in his direction, and Ahmo saw clearly, for the first time in this hauntingly familiar child, his grandmother Ivana's dark, plum eyes.

No.  It was not possible.  His grandmother had escaped to America.  She could not have been killed in Sarajevo.  Perhaps this was a cousin, or even a sister he'd never heard about.  How many of his ancestors had died in this building?  It was so long ago.  Perhaps Ahmo was beginning to see ghosts of his own design on top of ghosts on top of ghosts.

Whatever it was, he'd had enough.  He could not take the sight of anymore death.  He placed the gold ring on the ground, among the ruins, just as Grandmother Ivana had instructed him to do.  He was ashamed to admit that he was glad to be rid of it.  He turned his back on the building and strode away.  But something stopped him.  Ahmo could not say what.  He turned around to look one last time at the young girl who had died her horrible death over and over again in this building, her eternal coffin.

But on this occasion something very different happened.  The girl did not go running into the room.  She stopped short.  Her beautiful wine-colored eyes caught a golden wink in the summer sunlight on the ground where Ahmo had laid his grandmother's ring.  She walked over to it and reached for the tiny band of gold.  The grenade struck again, but this time the girl was not in the room.  This time she was thrown out onto the street.  She rolled across the pavement, almost to Ahmo's feet, and began to cry.

She was alive!

And then the scene faded.  The little girl vanished.  She no longer lay crying on the street.  She no longer appeared in the ghostly reincarnation of her family's death.  She was not anywhere.

Ahmo walked back to the place where he'd dropped Grandmother Ivana's ring.  It was gone.  His grandmother's ring was gone.

* * * *

Ahmo sat on the quilted sofa and cradled Ivana's head and shoulders.  She was so light her spirit might have already fled her body.  It had been six minutes since the Hemlock technologist, Miss March, had administered the fatal injection.  Miss March said it would take no more than ten minutes for his grandmother to die, for the Seconal and Lace to furnish her a painless, peaceful, dreamy death.

Ivana's eyes were closed, but she smiled thinly, and whispered, "Ahmo."

"I'm here, Grandmother."

"Have I ever told you how fortunate I was to survive Sarajevo?  Not so many people were lucky like me.”  Her voice was very weak.

"You were meant to live," Ahmo whispered in her ear.  He gently squeezed his grandmother's shoulders, as if his hands held the power to keep her forever by his side.

"Sometimes I dream of Sarajevo," she said, "but in my dreams it is always beautiful and peaceful.  No one is afraid.  I am with my family.  We are all alive and happy.  Isn't that nice, Ahmo?  It was strange when the bomb hit our home.  I was running to my mother, but then I saw a light, just a twinkle of light, and I thought it was Allah calling me."

His grandmother had not mentioned Allah in many years.  Ahmo's family had given up the old ways, the old religion.  Ahmo himself had followed his parents in having no particular religious associations.  He wished now that it was not so.  It would have been nice to have a god to pray to at a time like this, a god who cared.

"I can see that light again, Ahmo," she said.  "I can see it.  A twinkle...just a twinkle...far off...calling me..."

Ahmo forced himself to smile through his tears.  He gripped the ring in the palm of his hand and thought of Sarajevo.  For some reason the journey no longer frightened him.  Grandmother Ivana had made him feel special one last time.

HOTHOUSE FLOWERS

Mike Resnick

I TEST the temperature.  It is 83 degrees, warm but not hot.  Just right.

I spend the next hour puttering around, checking medications, adjusting the humidity, cleaning one of the life stations.  Then Superintendent Bailey stops by on his way out to dinner.

"How are your charges doing?" he asks.  "Any problems today?"

"No, sir, evrything's fine," I answer.

"Good," he says.  "We wouldn't want any problems, especially not with the celebration coming up."

The celebration is the turn of the century, although there is some debate about that, because we are all preparing to celebrate the instant the clock hits midnight and 2200 A.D. begins, but some spoilsport scientists (or maybe they're mathematicians) have told the press that the new century really begins a year later, when we enter 2201.

Not that my charges know the difference, but I'm glad we're celebrating it this year, because it means that we'll decorate the place with bright colors -- and if we like it, why, we'll do it again in 2201.

* * * *

I have been married to Felicia for 17 years, and I hardly ever regret it.  She was a little bit pudgy when we met, and she has gotten pudgier over the years so that now she is honest-to-goodness fat and there is simply no other word for it.  Her hair, which used to be brown, is streaked with gray now, and she's lost whatever physical grace she once had.  But she is a good life partner.  Her taste in holos is similar to mine, so we almost never fight about what to watch after dinner, and of course we both love our work.

As we eat dinner, the topic turns to our gardens, as always.

"I'm worried about Rex," she confides.

Rex is Begonia rex, her hanging basket.

"Oh?" I say.  "What's wrong with him?"

She shakes her head in puzzlement.  "I don't know.  Perhaps I've been letting him get too much sun.  His leaves are yellowing, and his roots could be in better shape."

"Have you spoken to one of the botonists?"

"No.  They're totally absorbed in cloning that new species of Aglaonema crispum."

"Still?"

She shrugs.  "They say it's important."

"The damned plant's been around for centuries," I say.  "I can't see what's so important about it."

"I told you: they engineered an exciting mutation.  It actually glows in the dark, as if it's been dusted with phosphorescent silver paint."

"It's not going to put the energy company out of business."

"I know.  But it's important to them."

"It seems unfair," I say for the hundredth, or maybe the thousandth, time.  "They get all the fame and money for creating a new species, and you get paid the same old salary for keeping it alive."

"I don't mind," she replies.  "I love my work.  I don't know what I'd do without my greenhouse."

"I know," I say soothingly.  "I feel the same way."

"So how is your Rex today?" she asks.

It's my turn to shrug.  "About the same as usual." Suddenly I laugh.

"What's so funny?" asks Felicia.

"You think your Rex is getting too much sun.  I decided my Rex wasn't getting enough, so this afternoon I moved him closer to a window."

"Will it make a difference, do you think?" she asks.

I sigh deeply.  "Does it ever?"

* * * *

I walk up to the Major and smile at him.  "How are we today?" I ask.

The Major looks at me through unfocused eyes.  There is a little drool running out the side of his mouth, and I wipe it off.

"It's a lovely morning," I say.  "It's a pity you can't be outside to enjoy it." I pause, waiting for the reaction that never comes.  "Still," I continue, "you've seen more than your share of them, so missing a few won't hurt." I check the screen at his life station, find his birthdate, and dope it out.  "Well, I'll be damned!  You've actually seen 60,573 mornings!"

Of course, he's been here for almost half of them: 29,882 to be exact.  If he ever did count them, he stopped a long time ago.

I clean and sterilize his feeding tubes and his medication tubes and his breathing tubes, examine him for bedsores, wash him, take his temperature and blood pressure, and check to make sure his cholesterol hasn't gone above the 350 level.  (They want it lower, of course, but he can't exercise and they've been feeding him intravenously for more than half a century, so they won't do anything about changing his diet.  After all, it hasn't killed him so far, and altering it just might do so.)

I elevate his withered body just long enough to change the bedding, then gently lower him back down.  (That used to take ten minutes, and at least one helper, before they developed the anti- grav beam.  Now it's just a matter of a few seconds, and I like to think it causes less discomfort, though of course the Major is in no condition to tell me.)

Then it's on to Rex.  Felicia has problems with her Rex, and I have problems with mine.

"Good morning, Rex," I say.

He mumbles something incomprehensible at me.

I look down at him.  His right eye is bloodshot and tearing heavily.

"Rex, what am I going to do with you?" I say.  "You know you're not supposed to stare at the sun."

He doesn't really know it.  I doubt that he even knows his name is Rex.  But cleansing his eye and medicating it is going to put me behind schedule, and I have to blame someone.  Rex doesn't mind being blamed.  He doesn't mind burning out his retina.  He doesn't even mind lying motionless for decades.  If there is anything he does mind, nobody's found it yet.

I spill some medication on him while fixing his eye, so I decide that rather than just change his diaper I might as well go all the way and give him a DryChem bath.  I marvel, as always, at the sheer number of surgical scars that criss-cross his torso: the first new heart, the second, the new kidneys, the new spleen, the new left lung.  There's a tiny, ancient scar on his lower belly which I think was from the removal of a burst appendix, but I can't find any record of it on the computer and he's been past talking about it for almost a century.

Then I move on to Mr.  Spinoza.  He's laying there, mouth agape, eyes open, head at an awkward angle.  I can tell even before I reach him that he's not breathing.  My first inclination is to call Emergency, but I realize that his life station will have reported his condition already, and sure enough, just seconds later the Resurrection Team arrives and sets up a curtain around him (as if any of his roommates could see or care), and within ten minutes they've got the old gentleman going again.

This is the fifth time Mr.  Spinoza has died this year.  All this dying has to be hard on his system, and I worry that one of these days it's going to be permanent.

* * * *

"So how was your Major today?" asks Felicia at dinner.

"Same as usual," I say.  "How's yours?"

Her Major is the Browallia speciosa majorus.  "Ditto," she says.  "Old, but hanging on." She frowns.  "We may not get any blossoms this year, though.  The roots are a little ropey."

"I'm sorry to hear it."

"It happens." She pauses.  "How was the rest of your day?"

"We had some excitement," I reply.

"Oh?"

"Mr.  Spinoza died again."

"That's the fourth time, isn't it?" she asks.

"The fifth," I correct her.  "The Resurrection Team revived him."

"The Resuscitation Team," she corrects me.

"You have your word for them, I have mine," I say.  "Mine's better.  Resurrection is what they do."

"So you've only lost one this week," says Felicia, if not changing the subject at least moving on a tangent away from it.

"Right.  Mr.  Lazlo.  He was 193 years old."

"193," she muses, and then shrugs.  "I guess he was entitled."

"You mentioned that you lost one too," I note.

"My cymbidium."

"That's an orchid, right?" I say.  "The one they nicknamed Peter Pan?"

She nods.

"Silly name for an orchid," I remark.

"It stayed young forever, or so it seemed," she replies.  "It had the most exquisite blooms.  I'm really going to miss it.  I'd had it for almost 20 years." She smiles sadly, and a single tear begins to roll down her cheek.  "I worked so hard over it, sometimes I felt like its mother." She looks at me.  "That sounds ludicrous, doesn't it?"

"Not at all," I say, sincerely touched by her grief.

"It's all right," she says.  Then she stares at my face.  "Don't be so concerned.  It was just a flower."

"It's called empathy," I answer, and she lets it drop...but I am troubled, and by the oddest thought: Shouldn't I feel worse about losing a person than she feels about losing an orchid?

But I don't.

* * * *

I don't know when it began.  Probably with the first caveman who made a sling for a broken arm, or forced water out of a drowned companion's lungs.  But somewhere back in the dim and distant past man invented medicine.  It had its good centuries and its bad centuries, but by the end of the last millennium it was curing so many diseases and extending so many lives that things got out of hand.

More than half the people who were alive in 2050 were still alive in 2150.  And almost 90% of the people who were alive in 2100 will be alive in 2200.  Medical science had doubled and then trebled man's life span.  Immortality was within our grasp.  Life everlasting beckoned.

We were so busy increasing the length of life that no one gave much thought to the quality of those extended lives.

And then we woke up one day to find that there were a lot more of them than there were of us.

* * * *

His name is Bernard Goldmeier.  They carry him in on an airsled, then transfer him to Mr.  Lazlo's old life station.

After I clean the Major's tubes and change his bedding and medicate Rex's eye, I call up Mr.  Goldmeier's medical history on the holoscreen at his life station.

"This place stinks!" rasps a dry voice.

I jump, startled, then turn to see who spoke.  There is no one in the room except me and my charges.

"Who said that?" I demand.

"I did," replies Mr.  Goldmeier.

I look closely at him.  The skin hangs loose and brown-spotted on his bald head.  His cheeks are covered by miscolored flesh and his nose has oxygen tubes inserted into it -- but his eyes, sunken deep in his head, are clear and he is staring at me.

"You really spoke!" I exclaim.

"You never heard an inmate speak before?"

"Not that I remember."

Which is another unhappy truth.  By age 100, one out of every two people has some form of senile dementia.  By 125, it's four out of five.  By 150, it's 99 out of 100.  Mr.  Goldmeier is 153 years old; the odds against his retaining anything close to normal mental capacities are better than 100 to one.

"I should add," I say, "that the proper term is 'charge', not 'patient' and certainly not 'inmate'."

"A zombie by any other name..."

I decide there is no sense arguing with him.  "How do you feel?" I ask.

"Look at me," he says disgustedly.  "How would you feel?"

"If you're in any discomfort..." I begin.

"I told you: this place stinks.  It reeks of shit and urine."

"Some of our charges are incontinent," I explain.  "We have to show them understanding and compassion."

"Why?" he rasps.  "What do they show us in exchange?"

"Try to be a little more tolerant," I say.

"You try!" he snaps.  "I'm busy!"

I can't help but ask: "Busy doing what?"

"Hanging on to reality!"

I smile.  "Is that so difficult?"

"Why don't you ask some of your other inmates?" He sniffs the air and makes a face.  "Goddamnit!  Another one's crapping all over himself!  What the hell am I doing here anyway?  I'm not a fucking vegetable yet!"

I check all the notations on the screen.

"You're here, Mr.  Goldmeier," I say, not without some satisfaction at what I'm about to tell him, "because no other ward will have you.  You've offended every attendant and orderly in the entire complex."

"Where do I go when I offend you?"

"This is your last stop.  You're here for better or worse."

Lucky me. I turn back to the holoscreen and begin punching in the standard questions.

"What are you doing now?" he demands.  He tries to boost himself up on a scrawny, miscolored elbow to watch me, but he's too weak.

"Checking to see if I'm to medicate you for any diseases," I reply.

"I haven't been out of bed in 40 years," he rasps.  "If I have a disease, I got it from one of you goons."

I ignore his answer and continue staring at the screen.  "You have a history of cancer."

"Big deal," he says.  "As quick as I get it, you bastards cure it." He pauses.  "Seventeen cancers.  You cut five out, burned three out, and drowned the other nine in your chemicals."

I keep reading the screen.  "I see you still have your original heart," I note with some surprise.  Most hearts are replaced by the time the patient is 120 years old, the lungs and kidneys even sooner.

"Are you offering me yours?" he says sarcastically.

Okay, so he's an arrogant, hostile bastard -- but he's also my only charge who's capable of speech, so I force a smile and try again.

"You're a lucky man," I begin.

He glares at me.  "You want to explain that?"

"You've retained your mental acuity.  Very few manage that at your advanced age."

"And you think that's lucky, do you?"

"Certainly."

"Then you're a fool," said Mr.  Goldmeier.

I sigh.  "I'm trying very hard to be your friend.  You're not making it easy."

His emaciated face contracts in a look of disgust.  "Why in hell should you want to be my friend?"

"I want to be friends with all my charges."

"Them?" he says contemptuously, scanning the room.  "You'd probably get more action from a bunch of potted plants." It's not dissimilar from what Felicia says on occasion.

"Look," I say.  "You're going to be here for a very long time.  So am I. Why don't we at least try to cultivate the illusion of civility?"

"That's a disgusting thought."

"Being civil?" I ask, wondering what kind of creature they have delivered to my ward.

"That too," he says.  "But I meant being here for a very long time." He exhales deeply, and I hear a rattling in his chest and make a mental note to tell the doctors about his congestion.  Then he adds: "Being anywhere for a very long time."

"What makes you so bitter?" I ask.

"I've seen terrible things, things no man should ever have to see."

"We've had our share," I agree.  "The war with Brazil.  The meteor that hit Mozambique.  The revolution in Canada."

"Fool!" he snaps.  "Those were diversions."

"Diversions?" I repeat incredulously.  "Just what hellholes have you been to?"

"The worst," he answers.  "I've been to places where men begged for death, and slowly went mad when it didn't come."

"I don't remember reading or hearing about anything like that," I say.  "Where was this?"

He stares unblinking at me for a long moment before he answers.  "Right here, in the wards."

* * * *

Felicia looks up from her plate.  "His name's Bernard Goldmeier?" she says.

"That's right."

"I don't have any Bernards," she says.  "It's not the kind of name they give to flowers."

"It doesn't matter."

Suddenly her face brightens.  "I do have a gold flower, though -- a Mesembryanthemum criniflorum.  I can call it Goldie, or even Goldmeier."

"It's not important."

"But it is," she insists.  "For years it's been how we compare our days." She smiles.  "It makes me feel closer to you, caring for flowers with the same names."

"Fine," I say.  "Call it whatever you want."

"You seem" -- she searches for the word -- "upset."

"He troubles me."

"Oh?  Why?"

"I love my work," I begin.

"I know you do."

"And it's meaningful work," I continue, trying to keep the resentment from my voice.  "Maybe I'm not a doctor, but I stand guard over them and hold Death at bay.  That's important, isn't it?"

"Of course it is," she says soothingly.

"He belittles it."

"That doesn't mean a thing," says Felicia, reaching across the table and taking my hand.  "You know how they get when they're that old."

Yes, I know how they get.  But he's not like them.  He sounds -- I don't know -- normal, like me; that's the upsetting part.

"He doesn't seem irrational," I say aloud.  "Just bitter."

"Enough bitterness will make anyone irrational."

"I know," I say.  "But..."

"But what?"

"Well, it's going to sound juvenile and selfish..."

"You're the least selfish man I know," says Felicia.  "Tell me what's bothering you."

"It's just that...well, I always thought that if my charges could speak to me, they'd tell me how grateful they were, how much my efforts meant to them." I pause and think about it.  "Does that make me selfish?"

"Certainly not," she replies.  "I think they ought to be grateful." She pats my hand.  "A lot of people in that place are just earning salaries; you're there because you care."

"Anyway, here I've finally got someone who could thank me, could tell me that I'm appreciated, and instead he's furious because I'm going to do everything within my power to keep him alive."

She coos and purrs and making soothing noises, but she doesn't actually say anything, and finally I change the subject and ask her about her garden.  A moment later she is rapturously describing the new buds on the Aphelandra squarrosa, and telling me that she thinks she will have to divide the Scilla sibirica, and I listen gratefully and do not think about Mr.  Goldmeier, lying motionless in his bed and cursing the darkness, until I arrive at work in the morning.

* * * *

"Are you feeling any better today?" I ask as I approach Mr.  Goldmeier's life station.

"No, I'm not feeling better today," he says nastily.  "God's fresh out of miracles."

"Are you at least adjusting to your new surroundings?"

"Hell, no."

"You will."

"I damned well better not!"

I stare at him.  "You're not leaving here."

"I know."

"Then you might as well get used to the place."

"Never!"

"I don't understand you at all," I say.

"That's because you're a fool!" he snaps.  "Look at me!  I have no money and no family.  I can't feed myself or even sit up."

"That's no reason to be so hostile," I say placatingly.  I am about to tell him that his condition is no different from most of my charges, but he speaks first.

"All I have left is my rage.  I won't let you take it away; it's all that separates me from the vegetables here."

I look at him and shake my head sadly.  "I don't know what made you like this."

"153 years made me like this," he says.

I continue staring at him, at the atrophied legs that will never walk again, at the shriveled arms and skeletal fingers, at the deathmask skull with its burning, sunken eyes, and I think: Maybe -- just maybe -- senility is Nature's way of making life in such a body tolerable.  Maybe you're not as lucky as I thought.

The Major's chin is wet with drool, and I walk over to him and wipe it off.

"There," I say.  "Clean as a whistle."

Okay, I think, staring down at him.  You're not grateful, but at least you don't hate me for doing what you can no longer do for yourself.  Why can't they all be like you?

* * * *

"Why don't you ask for a transfer to another ward if he's bothering you that much?" asks Felicia.

"What would I say?" I reply.  "That this old man who can't even roll over without help is driving me away?"

"Just tell them you want a change."

I shake my head.  "My work is important to me.  My charges are inportant to me.  I can't turn my back on them just because he makes my life miserable."

"Maybe you should sit down and figure out why he upsets you."

"He makes me think uncomfortable thoughts."

"What kind of uncomfortable thoughts?"

"I don't want to talk about it," I reply.  But what I really mean is: I don't want to think about it.

I just wish I could get my brain to listen to me.

* * * *

Superintendent Bailey enters the ward and approaches me.

"I'm going to need you to work a little overtime today," he informs me.

"Oh?" I reply.  "What's the problem?"

"There must be some virus going around," he says.  "A third of the staff has called in sick."

"All right.  I'll just have to let Felicia know I'll be late for dinner.  Where do you want me to go when I'm through here?"

"Ward 87."

"Isn't that a woman's ward?" I ask.

"Yes."

"I'd rather have a different assignment, sir."

"And I'd rather have a full staff!" he snaps.  "We're both doomed to be disappointed today."

He turns and leaves the ward.

"What have you got against women?" croaks Mr.  Goldmeier.  I had thought he was asleep, but he's been lying there, motionless, with his eyes (and his ears) wide open.

"Nothing," I answer.  "I just don't think I should bathe them."

"Why the hell not?"

"It's a matter of respecting their dignity."

"Their dignity?" he snorts derisively.

"Their modesty, if you prefer."

"Dignity?  Modesty?  What the fuck are you talking about?"

"They're human beings," I answer with dignity of my own.

"Not any more," he replies contemptuously.  "They're a bunch of vegetables that don't give a damn who bathes them." He closes his eyes.  "You're a blind, sentimental fool."

I hate it when he says things like that, because I want to explain that I am not a blind, sentimental fool.  But that requires me to prove he is wrong, and I can't -- I've tried.

All human beings have modesty and dignity.  If they haven't any, then they're not human beings any more -- and if they're not human beings, why are we keeping them alive?  Therefore, they must have modesty and dignity.

Then I think of those shriveled bodies and atrophied limbs and uncomprehending eyes, and I start getting another migraine.

* * * *

Two days have passed, and I am not eating or sleeping any better than Mr.  Goldmeier.

"What did he say this time?" says Felicia wearily, staring across the dining room table at me.

"I'm not sure," I answer.  "He kept talking about youth in Asia, so finally I looked them up in the encyclopedia.  All it says is that there are a lot of them and they're starving." I pause, frowning.  "But as far as I can tell, he's never been to Asia.  I don't know why he kept talking about them."

"Who knows?" says Felicia with a shrug.  "He's an old man.  They don't always make sense."

"He makes too goddamned much sense," I mutter bitterly.

"Could you have misunderstood the words?" she asks.  "Old men mumble a lot."

"I doubt it.  I understand everything else he says, so why not this?"

"Let's find out for sure," she says, activating the dining room computer.  It glows with life.  "Computer, find synonyms for the term 'youth in Asia'."

The computer begins rattling them off.  "Young people in Asia.  Adolescents in Asia.  Children in Asia.  Teenagers in -- "

"Stop!" commands Felicia.  "Synonym was the wrong term.  Computer, are there any homonyms for the term youth in Asia?"

"A homonym is an exact match," answers the computer, "and there is no exact match."

"Are there any close approximations?"

"One.  The word euthanasia."

"Ah," says Felicia triumphantly.  "And what does it mean?"

"It is an archaic word, no longer in use.  I can find no definition of it in my memory bank."

* * * *

"Eu-tha-na-sia," says Mr.  Goldmeier, articulating each syllable.  "How the hell can the dictionaries and encyclopedias not list it any longer?"

"They list it," I explain.  "They just don't define it."

"Figures," he says disgustedly.  As I wait patiently for him to tell me what the word means, he changes the subject.  "How long have you worked here?"

"Almost fourteen years."

"Seen a lot of patients come and go?"

"Of course I have."

"Where do they go when they leave here?"

"They don't, except when they're transferred to another ward."

"So they come to this place, and then they die?"

"You make it sound like it happens overnight," I reply.  "We've kept some of them alive for more than a century," I add proudly.  "A lot of them, in fact."

He stares at me.  I recognize that particular stare; it means I'm not going to like what he says next.

"You could save a lot of time and effort by killing them right away."

"That would be contrary to civil and moral law!" I reply angrily.  "It's our job to keep every patient alive."

"Have you ever asked them if they want to be kept alive?"

"No one wants to die."

"Right.  It's against all civil and moral law." He coughs and tries to clear his lungs.  "Well, that's why you won't find it in the dictionary."

"Find what?" I ask, confused.

"Euthanasia," he says.

"I don't understand you."

"That's what we were talking about, isn't it?" he says.  "It means mercy killing."

"Mercy killing?"

"You've heard both words before.  Figure it out."

I am still wondering why anyone would think it was merciful to kill another human being when my shift ends and I go home.

* * * *

"Why would someone want to die?" I ask Felicia.

She rolls her eyes.  "Goldmeier again?"

"Yes."

"Somehow I'm not surprised," she says in annoyed tones.  She shakes her head sadly.  "I don't know where that man gets his ideas.  No one wants to die." She paused.  "Look at it logically.  If someone's in pain, he can go on medication.  If he's lost a limb, he can get a prosthesis.  If he's too feeble even to feed himself -- well, that's what trained people like you are there for."

"What if he's just tired of living?"

"You know better than that," replied Felicia with unshakeable certainty.  "Every living organism fights to stay alive.  That's the first law of Nature."

"Yes, I suppose so," I agree.

"He's a nasty old man.  Did he say anything else?"

"No, not really." I toy with my food.  Somehow my appetite has vanished.  "How were things at the greenhouse?"

"They finally got exactly the shade of phosphorescent silver they want for the Aglaonema crispum," she says.  "I think they're going to call it the 'Silver Charm'."

"Cute name."

"Yes, I rather like it.  They tell me there was once a famous racehorse, centuries ago, with that name." She pauses.  "Of course, it means some extra work for me."

"Potting them?"

"They're all potted.  No, the problem is making room for them.  I think we'll have to get rid of the Browallia speciosa majorus."

"But those are your Majors!" I protest.  "I know how you love them!"

"I do," she admits.  "They have exquisite blossoms.  But they've got some kind of exotic root rot disease." She sighs deeply.  "I saw some miscoloration, some slimy residue...but I didn't identify it in time.  It's my fault they're dying."

"Why not bring them home?" I suggest.

"If you want Majors, I'll bring some young, healthy ones that will flower in the spring.  But I'm just going to dump the old ones in the garbage.  The disease won."

I'm grasping for something, but I'm not quite sure what.  "Didn't you just tell me that every living thing fights to stay alive?"

"The Majors don't want to die," said Felicia.  "They're infected, so I'm taking that decision out of their hands before the disease can spread to other plants."

"But if -- "

"Don't go getting philosophical with me," she says.  "They're only flowers.  It's not as if they feel any pain."

Later that night I find myself wondering when was the last time Rex or the Major or Mr.  Spinoza or any of the others felt any pain.

50 years?  75?  100?  More?

Then I realize that that's what Mr.  Goldmeier wants me to think.  He sees the weak and he wants them dead.

But they're not his targets at all.  They never were.

I finally know who he is trying to infect.

* * * *

I show up early for work and enter my ward.  Everyone is sleeping.

I look at my charges, and a warm glow comes over me.  We are a team, you and I. I give you life and you give me satisfaction and a sense of purpose.  I pledge to you that I will never let anyone destroy the bond between us.

When I think about it, there is really very little difference between Felicia's job and my own.  She has to protect her flowers; I have to protect mine.

I fill a syringe and walk silently over to Mr.  Goldmeier's life station.

It is time to start weeding my garden.

ANCIENT ENGINES

Michael Swanwick

"Planning to live forever, Tiktok?"

The words cut through the bar's chatter and gab and silenced them.  The silence reached out to touch infinity and then, "I believe you're talking to me?" a mech said.

The drunk laughed.  "Ain't nobody else here sticking needles in his face, is there?"

The old man saw it all.  He lightly touched the hand of the young woman sitting with him and said, "Watch."

Carefully the mech set down his syringe alongside a bottle of liquid collagen on a square of velvet cloth.  He disconnected himself from the recharger, laying the jack beside the syringe.  When he looked up again, his face was still and hard.  He looked like a young lion.

The drunk grinned sneeringly.

The bar was located just around the corner from the local stepping stage.  It was a quiet retreat from the aggravations of the street, all brass and mirrors and wood paneling, as cozy and snug as the inside of a walnut.  Light shifted lazily about the room, creating a varying emphasis like clouds drifting overhead on a summer day, but far dimmer.  The bar, the bottles behind the bar, and the shelves beneath the bottles behind the bar were all aggressively real.  If there was anything virtual, it was set up high or far back, where it couldn't be touched.  There was not a smart surface in the place.

"If that was a challenge," the mech said, "I'd be more than happy to meet you outside."

"Oh, noooooo," the drunk said, his expression putting the lie to his words.  "I just saw you shooting up that goop into your face, oh so dainty, like an old lady pumping herself full of antioxidants.  So I figured . . ."  He weaved and put a hand down on a table to steady himself.  ". . . figured you was hoping to live forever."

The girl looked questioningly at the old man.  He held a finger to his lips.

"Well, you're right.  You're -- what?  Fifty years old?  Just beginning to grow old and decay.  Pretty soon your teeth will rot and fall out and your hair will melt away and your face will fold up in a million wrinkles.  Your hearing and your eyesight will go and you won't be able to remember the last time you got it up.  You'll be lucky if you don't need diapers before the end.  But me -- " he drew a dram of fluid into his syringe and tapped the barrel to draw the bubbles to the top -- "anything that fails, I'll simply have it replaced.  So, yes, I'm planning to live forever.  While you, well, I suppose you're planning to die.  Soon, I hope."

The drunk's face twisted, and with an incoherent roar of rage he attacked the mech.

In a motion too fast to be seen, the mech stood, seized the drunk, whirled him around, and lifted him above his head.  One hand was closed around the man's throat so he couldn't speak.  The other held both wrists tight behind the knees so that, struggle as he might, the drunk was helpless.

"I could snap your spine like that," he said coldly.  "If I exerted myself, I could rupture every internal organ you've got.  I'm two-point-eight times stronger than a flesh man, and three-point-five times faster.  My reflexes are only slightly slower than the speed of light, and I've just had a tune-up.  You could hardly have chosen a worse person to pick a fight with."

Then the drunk was flipped around and set back on his feet.  He gasped for air.

"But since I'm also a merciful man, I'll simply ask nicely if you wouldn't rather leave."  The mech spun the drunk around and gave him a gentle shove toward the door.

The man left at a stumbling run.

Everyone in the place -- there were not many -- had been watching.  Now they remembered their drinks, and talk rose up to fill the room again.  The bartender put something back under the bar and turned away.

Leaving his recharge incomplete, the mech folded up his lubrication kit and slipped it in a pocket.  He swiped his hand over the credit swatch, and stood.

But as he was leaving, the old man swiveled around and said, "I heard you say you hope to live forever.  Is that true?"

"Who doesn't?" the mech said curtly.

"Then sit down.  Spend a few minutes out of the infinite swarm of centuries you've got ahead of you to humor an old man.  What's so urgent that you can't spare the time?"

The mech hesitated.  Then, as the young woman smiled at him, he sat.

"Thank you.  My name is -- "

"I know who you are, Mr. Brandt.  There's nothing wrong with my eidetics."

Brandt smiled.  "That's why I like you guys.  I don't have to be all the time reminding you of things."  He gestured to the woman sitting opposite him.  "My granddaughter."  The light intensified where she sat, making her red hair blaze.  She dimpled prettily.

"Jack."  The young man drew up a chair.  "Chimaera Navigator-Fuego, model number -- "

"Please.  I founded Chimaera.  Do you think I wouldn't recognize one of my own children?"

Jack flushed.  "What is it you want to talk about, Mr. Brandt?"  His voice was audibly less hostile now, as synthetic counterhormones damped down his emotions.

"Immortality.  I found your ambition most intriguing."

"What's to say?  I take care of myself, I invest carefully, I buy all the upgrades.  I see no reason why I shouldn't live forever."  Defiantly.  "I hope that doesn't offend you."

"No, no, of course not.  Why should it?  Some men hope to achieve immortality through their works and others through their children.  What could give me more joy than to do both?  But tell me -- do you really expect to live forever?"

The mech said nothing.

"I remember an incident happened to my late father-in-law, William Porter.  He was a fine fellow, Bill was, and who remembers him anymore?  Only me."  The old man sighed.  "He was a bit of a railroad buff, and one day he took a tour through a science museum that included a magnificent old steam locomotive.  This was in the latter years of the last century.  Well, he was listening admiringly to the guide extolling the virtues of this ancient engine when she mentioned its date of manufacture, and he realized that he was older than it was."  Brandt leaned forward.  "This is the point where old Bill would laugh.  But it's not really funny, is it?

"No."

The granddaughter sat listening quietly, intently, eating little pretzels one by one from a bowl.

"How old are you, Jack?"

"Seven years."

"I'm eighty-three.  How many machines do you know of that are as old as me?  Eighty-three years old and still functioning?"

"I saw an automobile the other day," his granddaughter said.  "A Dusenberg.  It was red."

"How delightful.  But it's not used for transportation anymore, is it?  We have the stepping stages for that.  I won an award once that had mounted on it a vacuum tube from Univac.  That was the first real computer.  Yet all its fame and historical importance couldn't keep it from the scrap heap."

"Univac," said the young man, "couldn't act on its own behalf.  If it could, perhaps it would be alive today."

"Parts wear out."

"New ones can be bought."

"Yes, as long as there's the market.  But there are only so many machine people of your make and model.  A lot of you have risky occupations.  There are accidents, and with every accident, the consumer market dwindles."

"You can buy antique parts.  You can have them made."

"Yes, if you can afford them.  And if not -- ?"

The young man fell silent.

"Son, you're not going to live forever.  We've just established that.  So now that you've admitted that you've got to die someday, you might as well admit that it's going to be sooner rather than later.  Mechanical people are in their infancy.  And nobody can upgrade a Model T into a stepping stage.  Agreed?"

Jack dipped his head.  "Yes."

"You knew it all along."

"Yes."

"That's why you behaved so badly toward that lush."

"Yes."

"I'm going to be brutal here, Jack -- you probably won't live to be eighty-three.  You don't have my advantages."

"Which are?"

"Good genes.  I chose my ancestors well."

"Good genes," Jack said bitterly.  "You received good genes and what did I get in their place?  What the hell did I get?"

"Molybdenum joints where stainless steel would do.  Ruby chips instead of zirconium.  A number seventeen plastic seating for -- hell, we did all right by you boys."

"But it's not enough."

"No.  It's not.  It was only the best we could do."

"What's the solution, then?" the granddaughter asked, smiling.

"I'd advise taking the long view.  That's what I've done."

"Poppycock," the mech said.  "You were an extensionist when you were young.  I input your autobiography.  It seems to me you wanted immortality as much as I do."

"Oh, yes, I was a charter member of the life-extension movement.  You can't imagine the crap we put into our bodies!  But eventually I wised up.  The problem is, information degrades each time a human cell replenishes itself.  Death is inherent in flesh people.  It seems to be written into the basic program -- a way, perhaps, of keeping the universe from filling up with old people."

"And old ideas," his granddaughter said maliciously.

"Touche.  I saw that life-extension was a failure.  So I decided that my children would succeed where I failed.  That you would succeed.  And -- "

"You failed."

"But I haven't stopped trying!"  The old man thumped the table in unison with his last three words.  "You've obviously given this some thought.  Let's discuss what I should have done.  What would it take to make a true immortal?  What instructions should I have given your design team?  Let's design a mechanical man who's got a shot at living forever."

Carefully, the mech said, "Well, the obvious to begin with.  He ought to be able to buy new parts and upgrades as they come available.  There should be ports and connectors that would make it easy to adjust to shifts in technology.  He should be capable of surviving extremes of heat, cold, and moisture.  And -- " he waved a hand at his own face -- "he shouldn't look so goddamned pretty."

"I think you look nice," the granddaughter said.

"Yes, but I'd like to be able to pass for flesh."

"So our hypothetical immortal should be, one, infinitely upgradable; two, adaptable across a broad spectrum of conditions; and three, discreet.  Anything else?"

"I think she should be charming," the granddaughter said.

"She?" the mech asked.

"Why not?"

"That's actually not a bad point," the old man said.  "The organism that survives evolutionary forces is the one that's best adapted to its environmental niche.  The environmental niche people live in is man-made.  The single most useful trait a survivor can have is probably the ability to get along easily with other men.  Or, if you'd rather, women."

"Oh," said the granddaughter, "he doesn't like women.  I can tell by his body language."

The young man flushed.

"Don't be offended," said the old man.  "You should never be offended by the truth.  As for you -- " he turned to face his granddaughter -- "if you don't learn to treat people better, I won't take you places anymore."

She dipped her head.  "Sorry."

"Apology accepted.  Let's get back to task, shall we?  Our hypothetical immortal would be a lot like flesh women, in many ways.  Self-regenerating.  Able to grow her own replacement parts.  She could take in pretty much anything as fuel.  A little carbon, a little water . . ."

"Alcohol would be an excellent fuel," his granddaughter said.

"She'd have the ability to mimic the superficial effects of aging," the mech said.  "Also, biological life evolves incrementally across generations.  I'd want her to be able to evolve across upgrades."

"Fair enough.  Only I'd do away with upgrades entirely, and give her total conscious control over her body.  So she could change and evolve at will.  She'll need that ability, if she's going to survive the collapse of civilization."

"The collapse of civilization?  Do you think it likely?"

"In the long run?  Of course.  When you take the long view it seems inevitable.  Everything seems inevitable.  Forever is a long time, remember.  Time enough for absolutely everything to happen."

For a moment nobody spoke.

Then the old man slapped his hands together.  "Well, we've created our New Eve.  Now let's wind her up and let her go.  She can expect to live -- how long?"

"Forever," said the mech.

"Forever's a long time.  Let's break it down into smaller units.  In the year 2500, she'll be doing what?"

"Holding down a job," the granddaughter said.  "Designing art molecules, maybe, or scripting recreational hallucinations.  She'll be deeply involved in the culture.  She'll have lots of friends she cares about passionately, and maybe a husband or wife or two."

"Who will grow old," the mech said, "or wear out.  Who will die."

"She'll mourn them, and move on."

"The year 3500.  The collapse of civilization," the old man said with gusto.  "What will she do then?"

"She'll have made preparations, of course.  If there are radiation or toxins in the environment, she'll have made her systems immune from their effects.  And she'll make herself useful to the survivors.  In the seeming of an old woman she'll teach the healing arts.  Now and then she might drop a hint about this and that.  She'll have a data base squirreled away somewhere containing everything they'll have lost.  Slowly, she'll guide them back to civilization.  But a gentler one, this time.  One less likely to tear itself apart."

"The year one million.  Humanity evolves beyond anything we can currently imagine.  How does she respond?"

"She mimics their evolution.  No -- she's been shaping their evolution.  She wants a risk-free method of going to the stars, so she's been encouraging a type of being that would strongly desire such a thing.  She isn't among the first to use it, though.  She waits a few hundred generations for it to prove itself."

The mech, who had been listening in fascinated silence, now said, "Suppose that never happens?  What if starflight will always remain difficult and perilous?  What then?"

"It was once thought that people would never fly.  So much that looks impossible becomes simple if you only wait."

"Four billion years.  The sun uses up its hydrogen, its core collapses, helium fusion begins, and it balloons into a red giant.  Earth is vaporized."

"Oh, she'll be somewhere else by then.  That's easy."

"Five billion years.  The Milky Way collides with the Andromeda Galaxy and the whole neighborhood is full of high-energy radiation and exploding stars."

"That's trickier.  She's going to have to either prevent that or move a few million light years away to a friendlier galaxy.  But she'll have time enough to prepare and to assemble the tools.  I have faith that she'll prove equal to the task."

"One trillion years.  The last stars gutter out.  Only black holes remain."

"Black holes are a terrific source of energy.  No problem."

"1.06 googol years."

"Googol?"

"That's ten raised to the hundredth power -- one followed by a hundred zeros.  The heat-death of the universe.  How does she survive it?"

"She'll have seen it coming for a long time," the mech said.  "When the last black holes dissolve, she'll have to do without a source of free energy.  Maybe she could take and rewrite her personality into the physical constants of the dying universe.  Would that be possible?"

"Oh, perhaps.  But I really think that the lifetime of the universe is long enough for anyone," the granddaughter said.  "Mustn't get greedy."

"Maybe so," the old man said thoughtfully.  "Maybe so."  Then, to the mech, "Well, there you have it: a glimpse into the future, and a brief biography of the first immortal, ending, alas, with her death.  Now tell me.  Knowing that you contributed something, however small, to that accomplishment -- wouldn't that be enough?"

"No," Jack said.  "No, it wouldn't."

Brandt made a face.  "Well, you're young.  Let me ask you this: Has it been a good life so far?  All in all?"

"Not that good.  Not good enough."

For a long moment the old man was silent.  Then, "Thank you," he said.  "I valued our conversation."  The interest went out of his eyes and he looked away.

Uncertainly Jack looked at the granddaughter, who smiled and shrugged.  "He's like that, " she said apologetically.  "He's old.  His enthusiasms wax and wane with his chemical balances.  I hope you don't mind."

"I see."  The young man stood.  Hesitantly, he made his way to the door.

At the door, he glanced back and saw the granddaughter tearing her linen napkin into little bits and eating the shreds, delicately washing them down with little sips of wine.

SCHERZO WITH TYRANNOSUAR

Michael Swanwick

A keyboardist was playing a selection of Scarlotti's harpsichord sonatas, brief pieces one to three minutes long, very complex and refined, while the Hadrosaurus herd streamed by the window.  There were hundreds of the brutes, kicking up dust and honking that lovely flattened near-musical note they make.  It was a spectacular sight.

But the hors d'oeuvres had just arrived: plesiosaur wrapped in kelp, beluga smeared over sliced maiasaur egg, little slivers of roast dodo on toast, a dozen delicacies more.  So a stampede of common-as-dirt herbivores just couldn't compete.

Nobody was paying much attention.

Except for the kid.  He was glued to the window, staring with an intensity remarkable even for a boy his age.  I figured him to be about ten years old.

Snagging a glass of champagne from a passing tray, I went over to stand next to him.  "Enjoying yourself, son?"

Without looking up, the kid said, "What do you think spooked them?  Was it a -- ?"  Then he saw the wranglers in their jeeps and his face fell.  "Oh."

"We had to cheat a little to give the diners something to see."  I gestured with the wine glass past the herd, toward the distant woods.  "But there are plenty of predators lurking out there -- troodons, dromaeosaurs . . . even old Satan."

He looked up at me in silent question.

"Satan is our nickname for an injured old bull rex that's been hanging around the station for about a month, raiding our garbage dump."

It was the wrong thing to say.  The kid looked devastated.  T. rex a scavenger!  Say it ain't so.

"A tyrannosaur is an advantageous hunter," I said, "like a lion.  When it chances upon something convenient, believe you me, it'll attack.  And when a tyrannosaur is hurting, like old Satan is -- well, that's about as savage and dangerous as any animal can be.  It'll kill even when it's not hungry."

That satisfied him.  "Good," he said.  "I'm glad."

In companionable silence, we stared into the woods together, looking for moving shadows.  Then the chime sounded for dinner to begin, and I sent the kid back to his table.  The last hadrosaurs were gone by then.

He went with transparent reluctance.

The Cretaceous Ball was our big fund-raiser, a hundred thousand dollars a seat, and in addition to the silent auction before the meal and the dancing afterwards, everybody who bought an entire table for six was entitled to their very own paleontologist as a kind of party favor.

I used to be a paleontologist myself, before I was promoted.  Now I patrolled the room in tux and cummerbund, making sure everything was running smoothly.

Waiters slipped in and out of existence.  You'd see them hurry behind the screen hiding the entrance to the time funnel and then pop out immediately on the other side, carrying heavily-laden trays.  Styracosaurus medallions in mastodon mozzarella for those who liked red meat.  Archaeopteryx almondine for those who preferred white.  Radicchio and fennel for the vegetarians.

All to the accompaniment of music, pleasant chitchat, and the best view in the universe.

Donald Hawkins had been assigned to the kid's table -- the de Cherville Family.  According to the seating plan the heavy, phlegmatic man was Gerard, the money-making paterfamilias.  The woman beside him was Danielle, once his trophy wife, now aging gracefully.  Beside them were two guests -- the Cadigans -- who looked a little overwhelmed by everything and were probably a favored employee and spouse.  They didn't say much.  A sullen daughter, Melusine, in a little black dress that casually displayed her perfect breasts.  She looked bored and restless -- trouble incarnate.  And there was the kid, given name Philippe.

I kept a close eye on them because of Hawkins.  He was new, and I wasn't expecting him to last long.  But he charmed everyone at the table.  Young, handsome, polite -- he had it all.  I noticed how Melusine slouched back in her chair, studying him through dark eyelashes, saying nothing.  Hawkins, responding to something young Philippe had said, flashed a boyish, devil-may-care grin.  I could feel the heat of the kid's hero-worship from across the room.

Then my silent beeper went off, and I had to duck out of the late Cretaceous and back into the kitchen, Home Base, year 2082.

* * * *

There was a Time Safety Officer waiting for me.  The main duty of a TSO is to make sure that no time paradoxes occur, so the Unchanging wouldn't take our time privileges away from us.  Most people think that time travel was invented recently, and by human beings.  That's because our sponsors don't want their presence advertised.

In the kitchen, everyone was in an uproar.  One of the waiters was leaning, spraddle-legged and arms wide, against the table, and another was lying on the floor clutching what looked to be a broken arm.  The TSO covered them both with a gun.

The good news was that the Old Man wasn't there.  If it had been something big and hairy -- a Creationist bomb, or a message from a million years upline -- he would have been.

When I showed up, everybody began talking at once.

"I didn't do nothing, man, this bastard -- "

" -- guilty of a Class Six violation --

" -- broke my fucking arm, man.  He threw me to the ground!"

" -- work to do.  Get them out of my kitchen!"

It turned out to be a simple case of note-passing.  One of the waiters had, in his old age, conspired with another recruited from a later period, to slip a list of hot investments to his younger self.  Enough to make them both multibillionaires.  We had surveillance devices planted in the kitchen, and a TSO saw the paper change hands.  Now the perps were denying everything.

It wouldn't have worked anyway.  The authorities keep strict tabs on the historical record.  Wealth on the order of what they had planned would have stuck out like a sore thumb.

I fired both waiters, called the police to take them away, routed a call for two replacements several hours into the local past, and had them briefed and on duty without any lapse in service.  Then I took the TSO aside and bawled him out good for calling me back real-time, instead of sending a memo back to me three days ago.  Once something has happened, though, that's it.  I'd been called, so I had to handle it in person.

It was your standard security glitch.  No big deal.

But it was wearying.  So when I went back down the funnel to Hilltop Station, I set the time for a couple hours after I had left.  I arrived just as the tables were being cleared for dessert and coffee.

Somebody handed me a microphone, and I tapped it twice, for attention.  I was standing before the window, a spectacular sunset to my back.

"Ladies and gentlemen," I said, "let me again welcome you to the Maastrichtian, the final age of the late Cretaceous.  This is the last research station before the Age of Mammals.  Don't worry, though -- the meteor that put a final end to the dinosaurs is still several thousand years in the future."  I paused for laughter, then continued.

"If you'll look outside, you'll see Jean, our dino wrangler, setting up a scent lure.  Jean, wave for our diners."

Jean was fiddling with a short tripod.  She waved cheerily, then bent back to work.  With her blond ponytail and khaki shorts, she looked to be just your basic science babe.  But Jean was slated to become one of the top saurian behaviorists in the world, and knew it too.  Despite our best efforts, gossip slips through.

Now Jean backed up toward the station doors, unreeling fuse wire as she went.  The windows were all on the second floor.  The doors, on the ground floor, were all armored.

"Jean will be ducking inside for this demonstration," I said.  "You wouldn't want to be outside unprotected when the lure goes off."

"What's in it?" somebody called out.

"Triceratops blood.  We're hoping to call in a predator -- maybe even the king of predators, Tyrannosaurus rex himself."  There was an appreciative murmur from the diners.  Everybody here had heard of T. rex.  He had real star power.  I switched easily into lecture mode.  "If you dissect a tyrannosaur, you'll see that it has an extremely large olfactory lobe -- larger in proportion to the rest of its brain than that of any other animal except the turkey vulture.  Rex can sniff his prey" -- carrion, usually, but I didn't say that -- "from miles away.  Watch."

The lure went off with a pop and a puff of pink mist.

I glanced over at the de Cherville table, and saw Melusine slip one foot out of her pump and run it up Hawkins' trouser leg.  He colored.

Her father didn't notice.  Her mother -- her stepmother, more likely -- did, but didn't care.  To her, this was simply what women did.  I couldn't help notice what good legs Melusine had.

"This will take a few minutes.  While we're waiting, I direct your attention to Chef Rupert's excellent pastries."

I faded back to polite applause, and began the round of table hopping.  A joke here, a word of praise there.  It's banana oil makes the world go round.

When I got to the de Chervilles, Hawkins' face was white.

"Sir!" He shot to his feet.  "A word with you."

He almost dragged me away from the table.

When we were in private, he was so upset he was stuttering.  "Th-that young woman, w-wants me t-to . . ."

"I know what she wants," I said coolly.  "She's of legal age -- make your own decision."

"You don't understand!  I can't possibly go back to that table."  Hawkins was genuinely anguished.  I thought at first that he'd been hearing rumors, dark hints about his future career.  Somehow, though, that didn't smell right.  There was something else going on here.

"All right," I said.  "Slip out now.  But I don't like secrets.  Record a full explanation and leave it in my office.  No evasions, understand?"

"Yes, sir."  A look of relief spread itself across his handsome young face.  "Thank you, sir."

He started to leave.

"Oh, and one more thing," I said casually, hating myself.  "Don't go anywhere near your tent until the fund-raiser's broken up."

* * * *

The de Chervilles weren't exactly thrilled when I told them that Hawkins had fallen ill, and I'd be taking his place.  But then I took a tyrannosaur tooth from my pocket and gave it to Philippe.  It was just a shed -- rexes drop a lot of teeth -- but no need to mention that.

"It looks sharp," Mrs. de Cherville said, with a touch of alarm.

"Serrated, too.  You might want to ask your mother if you can use it for a knife, next time you have steak," I suggested.

Which won him over completely.  Kids are fickle.  Philippe immediately forgot all about Hawkins.

Melusine, however, did not.  Eyes flashing with anger, she stood, throwing her napkin to the floor.  "I want to know," she began, "just what you think you're -- "

Fortunately, that was when Satan arrived.

The tyrannosaur came running up the hillside at a speed you'd have to be an experienced paleontologist to know was less than optimal.  Even a dying T. rex moves fast.

People gasped.

I took the microphone out of my pocket, and moved quickly to the front of the room.  "Folks, we just got lucky.  I'd like to inform those of you with tables by the window that the glass is rated at twenty tons per square inch.  You're in no danger whatsoever.  But you are in for quite a show.  Those who are in the rear might want to get a little closer."

Young Philippe was off like a shot.

The creature was almost to us.  "A tyrannosaur has a hyperacute sense of smell," I reminded them.  "When it scents blood, its brain is overwhelmed.  It goes into a feeding frenzy."

A few droplets of blood had spattered the window.  Seeing us through the glass, Satan leaped and tried to smash through it.

Whoomp!  The glass boomed and shivered with the impact.  There were shrieks and screams from the diners, and several people started to their feet.

At my signal, the string quartet took up their instruments again, and began to play while Satan leaped and tore and snarled, a perfect avatar of rage and fury.  They chose the scherzo from Shostokovich's piano quintet.

Scherzos are supposed to be funny, but most have a whirlwind, uninhibited quality that makes them particularly appropriate to nightmares and the madness of predatory dinosaurs.

Whoomp!  That mighty head struck the window again and again and again.  For a long time, Satan kept on frenziedly slashing at the window with his jaws, leaving long scratches in the glass.

Philippe pressed his body against the window with all his strength, trying to minimize the distance between himself and savage dino death.  Shrieking with joyous laughter when that killer mouth tried to snatch him up.  I felt for the kid, wanting to get as close to the action as he could.  I could identify.

I was just like that myself when I was his age.

* * * *

When Satan finally wore himself out and went bad-humoredly away, I returned to the de Chervilles.  Philippe had restored himself to the company of his family.  The kid looked pale and happy.

So did his sister.  I noticed that she was breathing shallowly.  Satan does that to young women.

"You dropped your napkin." I handed it to Melusine.  Inside was a postcard-sized promotional map, showing Hilltop Station and behind it Tent City, where the researchers lived.  One of the tents was circled.  Under it was written, While the others are dancing.

I had signed it Don.

* * * *

"When I grow up I'm going to be a paleontologist," the kid said fervently.  "A behavioral paleontologist, not an anatomist or a wrangler."  Somebody had come to take him home.  His folks were staying to dance.  And Melusine was long gone, off to Hawkins' tent.

"Good for you," I said.  I laid a hand on his shoulder.  "Come see me when you've got the education.  I'll be happy to show you the ropes."

The kid left.

He'd had a conversion experience.  I knew exactly how it felt.  I'd had mine standing in front of the Zallinger "Age of Reptiles" mural in the Peabody Museum in New Haven.  That was before time travel, when paintings of dinosaurs were about as real as you could get.  Nowadays I could point out a hundred inaccuracies in how the dinosaurs were depicted.  But on that distant sun-dusty morning in the Atlantis of my youth, I just stood staring at those magnificent brutes, head filled with wonder, until my mother dragged me away.

It really was a pity.  Philippe was so full of curiosity and enthusiasm.  He'd make a great paleontologist.  I could see that.  He wasn't going to get to realize his dreams, though.  His folks had too much money to allow that.

I knew because I'd glanced through the personnel records for the next hundred years and his name wasn't there anywhere.

It was possibly the least of the thousands of secrets I held within me, never to be shared.  Still, it made me sad.  For an instant I felt the weight of all my years, every petty accommodation, every unworthy expedience.  Then I went up the funnel and back down again to an hour previous.

Unseen, I slipped out and went to wait for Melusine.

* * * *

Maintaining the funnel is expensive.  During normal operations -- when we're not holding fund-raisers -- we spend months at a time in the field.  Hence the compound, with its army surplus platform tents and electrified perimeter to keep the monsters out.

It was dark when Melusine slipped into the tent.

"Donald?"

"Shhh."  I put a finger to her lips, drew her close to me.  One hand slid slowly down her naked back, over a scrap of crushed velvet, and then back up and under her skirt to squeeze that elegant little ass.  She raised her mouth to mine and we kissed deeply, passionately.

Then I tumbled her to the cot, and we began undressing each other.  She ripped off three buttons tearing my shirt from me.

Melusine made a lot of noise, for which I was grateful.  She was a demanding, self-centered lay, who let you know when she didn't like what you were doing and wasn't at all shy about telling you what to do next.  She required a lot of attention.  For which I was also grateful.

I needed the distraction.

Because while I was in his tent, screwing the woman he didn't want, Hawkins was somewhere out there getting killed.  According to the operational report that I'd write later tonight, and received a day ago, he was eaten alive by an old bull rex rendered irritable by a painful brain tumor.  It was an ugly way to go.  I didn't want to have to hear it.  I did my best to not think about it.

Credit where credit is due -- Melusine practically set the tent ablaze.  So I was using her.  So what?  It was far from the worst of my crimes.  It wasn't as if she loved Hawkins, or even knew him for that matter.  She was just a spoiled little rich-bitch adventuress looking for a mental souvenir.  One more notch on her diaphragm case.  I know her type well.  They're one of the perks of the business.

There was a freshly prepared triceratops skull by the head of the bed.  It gleamed faintly, a pale, indistinct shape in the darkness.  When Melusine came, she grabbed one of its horns so tightly the skull rattled against the floorboards.

Afterwards, she left, happily reeking of bone fixative and me.  We'd each had our little thrill.  I hadn't spoken a word during any of it, and she hadn't even noticed.

* * * *

T. rex wasn't much of a predator.  But then, it didn't take much skill to kill a man.  Too slow to run, and too big to hide -- we make perfect prey for a tyrannosaur.

When Hawkins' remains were found, the whole camp turned out in an uproar.  I walked through it all on autopilot, perfunctorily giving orders to have Satan shot, to have the remains sent back uptime, to have the paperwork sent to my office.  Then I gathered everybody together and gave them the Paradox Lecture.  Nobody was to talk about what had just happened.  Those who did would be summarily fired.  Legal action would follow.  Dire consequences.  Penalties.  Fines.

And so on.

It was two a.m. when I finally got back to my office, to write the day's operational report.

Hawkins's memo was there, waiting for me.  I'd forgotten about that.  I debated putting off reading it until tomorrow.  But then I figured I was feeling as bad now as I was ever going to.  Might as well get it over with.

I turned on the glow-pad.  Hawkins' pale face appeared on the screen.  Stiffly, as if he were confessing a crime, he said, "My folks didn't want me to become a scientist.  I was supposed to stay home and manage the family money.  Stay home and let my mind rot."  His face twisted with private memories.  "So that's the first thing you have to know -- Donald Hawkins isn't my real name.

"My mother was kind of wild when she was young.  I don't think she knew who my father was.  So when she had me, it was hushed up.  I was raised by my grandparents.  They were getting a little old for child-rearing, so they shipped me back-time to when they were younger, and raised me alongside my mother.  I was fifteen before I learned she wasn't really my sister.

"My real name is Philippe de Cherville.  I swapped table assignments so I could meet my younger self.  But then Melusine -- my mother -- started hitting on me.  So I guess you can understand now -- " he laughed embarrassedly -- "why I didn't want to go the Oedipus route."

The pad flicked off, and then immediately back on again.  He'd had an afterthought.  "Oh yeah, I wanted to say . . . the things you said to me today -- when I was young -- the encouragement.  And the tooth.  Well, they meant a lot to me.  So, uh . . . thanks."

It flicked off.

I put my head in my hands.  Everything was throbbing, as if all the universe were contained within an infected tooth.  Or maybe the brain tumor of a sick old dinosaur.  I'm not stupid.  I saw the implications immediately.

The kid -- Philippe -- was my son.

Hawkins was my son.

I hadn't even known I had a son, and now he was dead.

* * * *

A bleak, blank time later, I set to work drawing time lines in the holographic workspace above my desk.  A simple double-loop for Hawkins/Philippe.  A rather more complex figure for myself.  Then I factored in the TSOs, the waiters, the paleontologists, the musicians, the workmen who built the station in the first place and would salvage its fixtures when we were done with it . . . maybe a hundred representative individuals in all.

When I was done, I had a three-dimensional representation of Hilltop Station as a node of intersecting lives in time.  It was one hell of a complex figure.

It looked like the Gordian knot.

Then I started crafting a memo back to my younger self.  A carbon steel, razor-edged, Damascene sword of a memo.  One that would slice Hilltop Station into a thousand spasming paradoxical fragments.

Hire him, fire her, strand a hundred young scientists, all fit and capable of breeding, one million years B.C.  Oh, and don't father any children.

It would bring our sponsors down upon us like so many angry hornets.  The Unchanging would yank time travel out of human hands -- retroactively.  Everything connected to it would be looped out of reality and into the disintegrative medium of quantum uncertainty.  Hilltop Station would dissolve into the realm of might-have-been.  The research and findings of thousands of dedicated scientists would vanish from human knowing.  My son would never have been conceived or born or sent callously to an unnecessary death.

Everything I had spent my life working to accomplish would be undone.

It sounded good to me.

When the memo was done, I marked it PRIORITY and MY EYES ONLY.  Then I prepared to send it three months back in time.

The door opened behind me with a click.  I spun around in my chair.  In walked the one man in all existence who could possibly stop me.

"The kid got to enjoy twenty-four years of life, before he died," the Old Man said.  "Don't take that away from him."

I looked up into his eyes.

Into my own eyes.

Those eyes fascinated and repulsed me.  They were deepest brown, and nested in a lifetime's accumulation of wrinkles.  I've been working with my older self since I first signed up with Hilltop Station, and they were still a mystery to me, absolutely opaque.  They made me feel like a mouse being stared down by a snake.

"It's not the kid," I said.  "It's everything."

"I know."

"I only met him tonight -- Philippe, I mean.  Hawkins was just a new recruit.  I barely knew him."

The Old Man capped the Glenlivet and put it back in the liquor cabinet.  Until he did that, I hadn't even noticed I was drinking.  "I keep forgetting how emotional I was when I was young," he said.

"I don't feel young."

"Wait until you're my age."

I'm not sure how old the Old Man is.  There are longevity treatments available for those who play the game, and the Old Man has been playing this lousy game so long he practically runs it.  All I know is that he and I are the same person.

My thoughts took a sudden swerve.  "God damn that stupid kid!" I blurted.  "What was he doing outside the compound in the first place?"

The Old Man shrugged.  "He was curious.  All scientists are.  He saw something and went out to examine it.  Leave it be, kid.  What's done is done."

I glanced at the memo I'd written.  "We'll find out."

He placed a second memo alongside mine.  "I took the liberty of writing this for you.  Thought I'd spare you the pain of having to compose it."

I picked up the memo, glanced at its contents.  It was the one I'd received yesterday.  "'Hawkins was attacked and killed by Satan shortly after local midnight today,'" I quoted.  "'Take all necessary measures to control gossip.'"  Overcome with loathing, I said, "This is exactly why I'm going to bust up this whole filthy system.  You think I want to become the kind of man who can send his own son off to die?  You think I want to become you?"

That hit home.  For a long moment the Old Man did not speak.  "Listen," he said at last.  "You remember that day in the Peabody?"

"You know I do."

"I stood there in front of that mural wishing with all my heart -- all your heart -- that I could see a real, living dinosaur.  But even then, even as an eight-year-old, I knew it wasn't going to happen.  That some things could never be."

I said nothing.

"God hands you a miracle," he said, "you don't throw it back in his face."

Then he left.

I remained.

It was my call.  Two possible futures lay side-by-side on my desk, and I could select either one.  The universe is inherently unstable in every instant.  If paradoxes weren't possible, nobody would waste their energy preventing them.  The Old Man was trusting me to weigh all relevant factors, make the right decision, and live with the consequences.

It was the cruelest thing he had ever done to me.

Thinking of cruelty reminded me of the Old Man's eyes.  Eyes so deep you could drown in them.  Eyes so dark you couldn't tell how many corpses already lay submerged within them.  After all these years working with him, I still couldn't tell if those were the eyes of a saint or of the most evil man in the world.

There were two memos in front of me.  I reached for one, hesitated, withdrew my hand.  Suddenly the choice didn't seem so easy.

The night was preternaturally still.  It was as if all the world were holding its breath, waiting for me to make my decision.

I reached out for the memos.

I chose one.

THE GRAVITY MINE

Stephen Baxter

Call her Anlic.

The first time she woke she was in the ruins of an abandoned gravity mine.

At first the Community had chased around the outer strata of the great gloomy structure. But at last, close to the core, they reached a cramped ring. Here the central black hole's gravity was so strong that light itself curved in closed orbits.

The torus tunnel looked infinitely long. And they could race as fast as they dared.

As they hurtled past fullerene walls they could see multiple images of themselves, a glowing golden mesh before and behind, for the echoes of their light endlessly circled the central knot of spacetime. "Just like the old days!" they called, excited. "Just like the Afterglow. . . !"

Exhilarated, they pushed against the light barrier, and those trapped circling images shifted to blue or red.

That was when it happened.

This Community was just a small tributary of the Conflux: isolated here in this ancient place, the density of mind already stretched thin. And now, as lightspeed neared, that isolation stretched to breaking point.

. . . She budded off from the rest, her consciousness made discrete, separated from the greater flow of minds and memories.

She slowed. The others rushed on without her, a dazzling circular storm orbiting the exhausted black hole. It felt like coming awake, emerging from a dream.

Her questions were immediate, flooding her raw mind. "Who am I? How did I get here?" And so on. The questions were simple, even trite. And yet they were unanswerable.

Others gathered around her-curious, sympathetic-and the race of streaking light began to lose its coherence.

One of them came to her.

Names meant little; this "one" was merely a transient sharpening of identity from the greater distributed entity that made up the Community.

Still, here he was. Call him Geador.

". . . Anlic?"

"I feel-odd," she said.

"Don't worry."

"Who am I?"

"Come back to us."

He reached for her, and she sensed the warm depths of companionship and memory and shared joy that lay beyond him. Depths waiting to swallow her up, to obliterate her questions.

She snapped, "No!" And, willfully, she sailed up and out and away, passing through the thin walls of the tunnel.

At first it was difficult to climb out of this twisted gravity well. But soon she was rising through layers of structure.

Here was the tight electromagnetic cage that had once tapped the spinning black hole like a dynamo. Here was the cloud of compact masses that had been hurled along complex orbits through the hole's ergosphere, extracting gravitational energy. It was antique engineering, long abandoned.

She emerged into a blank sky, a sky stretched thin by the endless expansion of spacetime.

Geador was here. "What do you see?"

"Nothing."

"Look harder." He showed her how.

There was a scattering of dull red pinpoints all around the sky.

"They are the remnants of stars," he said.

He told her about the Afterglow: that brief, brilliant period after the Big Bang, when matter gathered briefly in clumps and burned by fusion light. "It was a bonfire, over almost as soon as it began. The universe was very young. It has swollen some ten thousand trillion times in size since then. . . . Nevertheless, it was in that gaudy era that humans arose. Us, Anlic."

She looked into her soul, seeking warm memories of the Afterglow. She found nothing.

She looked back at the gravity mine.

At its center was a point of yellow-white light. Spears of light arced out from its poles, knife-thin. The spark was surrounded by a flattened cloud, dull red, inhomogeneous, clumpy. The big central light cast shadows through the crowded space around it.

It was beautiful, a sculpture of light and crimson smoke.

"This is Mine One," Geador said gently. "The first mine of all. And it is built on the ruins of the primeval galaxy-the galaxy from which humans first emerged."

"The first galaxy?"

"But it was all long ago." He moved closer to her. "So long ago that this mine became exhausted. Soon it will evaporate away completely. We have long since had to move on . . ."

But that had happened before. After all humans had started from a single star, and spilled over half the universe, even before the stars ceased to shine.

Now humans wielded energy, drawn from the great gravity mines, on a scale unimagined by their ancestors. Of course mines would be exhausted-like this one-but there would be other mines. Even when the last mine began to fail, they would think of something.

The future stretched ahead, long, glorious. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across trillions upon trillions of years.

It was the Conflux.

Its source was far upstream.

The crudities of birth and death had been abandoned even before the Afterglow was over, when man's biological origins were decisively shed. So every mind, every tributary that made up the Conflux today had its source in that bright, remote upstream time.

Nobody had been born since the Afterglow.

Nobody but Anlic.

". . . Come back," Geador said.

Her defiance was dissipating.

She understood nothing about herself. But she didn't want to be different. She didn't want to be unhappy.

There wasn't anybody who was less than maximally happy, the whole of the time. Wasn't that the purpose of existence?

So, troubled, she gave herself up to Geador, to the Conflux. And, along with her identity, her doubts and questions dissolved.

The universe would grow far older before she woke again.

". . . Flee! Faster! As fast as you can. . . !"

There was turbulence in the great rushing river of mind.

And in that turbulence, here and there, souls emerged from the background wash. Each brief fleck suffered a moment of terror before falling back into the greater dreaming whole.

One of those flecks was Anlic.

In the sudden dark she clung to herself. She slithered to a stop.

Transient identities clustered around her. "What are you doing? Why are you staying here? You will be harmed." They sought to absorb her, but fell back, baffled by her resistance.

The Community was fleeing, in panic. Why?

She looked back.

There was something there, in the greater darkness. She made out the faintest of patterns: charcoal grey on black, almost beyond her ability to resolve it, a mesh of neat regular triangles covering the sky. Visible through the interstices was a complex, textured curtain of grey-pink light.

It was a structure that spanned the universe.

She felt stunned, disoriented. It was so different from Mine One, her last clear memory. She must have crossed a great desert of time.

But-she found, when she looked into her soul-her questions remained unanswered.

She called out: "Geador?"

A ripple of shock and doubt spread through the Community.

". . . You are Anlic."

"Geador?"

"I have Geador's memories."

That would have to do, she thought, irritated; in the Conflux, memory and identity were fluid, distributed, ambiguous.

"We are in danger, Anlic. You must come."

She refused to comply, stubborn. She indicated the great netting. "Is that Mine One?"

"No," he said sadly. "Mine One was long ago, child."

"How long ago?"

"Time is nested . . ."

From this vantage, the era of man's first black hole empire had been the spring time, impossibly remote. And the Afterglow itself-the star-burning dawn-was lost, a mere detail of the Big Bang.

"What is happening here, Geador?"

"There is no time-"

"Tell me."

The universe had ballooned, fueled by time, and its physical processes had proceeded relentlessly.

Just as each galaxy's stars had dissipated, leaving a rump that had collapsed into a central black hole, so clusters of galaxies had broken up, and the remnants fell inward to cluster-scale holes. And the clusters in turn collapsed into supercluster-scale holes-the largest black holes to have formed naturally, with masses of a hundred trillion stars.

These were the cold hearths around which mankind now huddled.

"But," said Geador, "the supercluster holes are evaporating away-dissipating in a quantum whisper, like all black holes. The smallest holes, of stellar mass, vanished when the universe was a fraction of its present age. Now the largest natural holes, of supercluster mass, are close to exhaustion as well. And so we must farm them.

"Look at the City." He meant the universe-spanning net, the rippling surfaces within.

The City was a netted sphere. It contained giant black holes, galactic supercluster mass and above. They had been deliberately assembled. And they were merging, in a hierarchy of more and more massive holes. Life could subsist on the struts of the City, feeding off the last trickle of free energy.

Mankind was moving supercluster black holes, coalescing them in hierarchies all over the reachable universe, seeking to extend their lifetimes. It was a great challenge.

Too great.

Sombrely, Geador showed her more.

The network was disrupted. It looked as if some immense object had punched out from the inside, ripping and twisting the struts. The tips of the broken struts were glowing a little brighter than the rest of the network, as if burning. Beyond the damaged network she could see the giant coalescing holes, their horizons distorted, great frozen waves of infalling matter visible in their cold surfaces.

This was an age of war: an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. Great rivers of mind were guttering, drying.

"This is the Conflux. How can there be war?"

Geador said, "We are managing the last energy sources of all. We have responsibility for the whole of the future. With such responsibility comes tension, disagreement. Conflict." She sensed his gentle, bitter humor. "We have come far since the Afterglow, Anlic. But in some ways we have much in common with the brawling argumentative apes of that brief time."

"Apes. . . ? Why am I here, Geador?"

"You're an eddy in the Conflux. We all wake up from time to time. It's just an accident. Don't trouble, Anlic. You are not alone. You have us."

Deliberately she moved away from him. "But I am not like you," she said bleakly. "I do not recall the Afterglow. I don't know where I came from."

"What does it matter?" he said harshly. "You have existed for all but the briefest moments of the universe's long history-"

"Has there been another like me?"

He hesitated. "No," he said. "No other like you. There hasn't been long enough."

"Then I am alone."

"Anlic, all your questions will be over, answered or not, if you let yourself die here. Come now . . ."

She knew he was right.

She fled with him. The great black hole City disappeared behind her, its feeble glow attenuated by her gathering velocity.

She yielded to Geador's will. She had no choice. Her questions were immediately lost in the clamor of community.

She would wake only once more.

Start with a second.

Zoom out. Factor it up to get the life of the Earth, with that second a glowing moment embedded within. Zoom out again, to get a new period, so long Earth's lifetime is reduced to the span of that second. Then nest it. Do it again. And again and again and again . . .

Anlic, for the last time, came to self-awareness.

It was inevitable that, given enough time, she would be budded by chance occurrence. And so it happened.

She clung to herself and looked around.

It was dark here. Vast, wispy entities cruised across spacetime's swelling breast.

There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. The last solid matter had long evaporated: burned up by proton decay, a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed.

For ages the black hole engineers had struggled to maintain their Cities, to gather more material to replace what decayed away. It was magnificent, futile.

The last structures failed, the last black holes allowed to evaporate.

The Conflux of minds had dispersed, flowing out over the expanding universe like water running into sand.

Even now, of course, there was something rather than nothing. Around her was an unimaginably thin plasma: free electrons and positrons decayed from the last of the Big Bang's hydrogen, orbiting in giant, slow circles. This cold soup was the last refuge of humanity.

The others drifted past her like clouds, immense, slow, coded in wispy light-year-wide atoms. And even now, the others clung to the solace of community.

But that was not for Anlic.

She pondered for a long time, determined not to slide back into the eternal dream.

At length she understood how she had come to be.

And she knew what she must do.

She sought out Mine One, the wreckage of man's original galaxy. The search took more empty ages.

With caution, she approached what remained.

There was no shape here. No form, no color, no time, no order. And yet there was motion: a slow, insidious, endless writhing, punctuated by bubbles that rose and burst, spitting out fragments of mass-energy.

This was the singularity that had once lurked within the great black hole's event horizon. Now it was naked, a glaring knot of quantum foam, a place where the unification of spacetime had been ripped apart to become a seething probabilistic froth.

Once this object had oscillated violently, and savage tides, chaotic and unpredictable, had torn at any traveler unwary enough to come close. But the singularity's energy had been dissipated by each such encounter.

Even singularities aged.

Still, the frustrated energy contained there seethed, quantum-mechanically, randomly. And sometimes, in those belched fragments, put there purely by chance, there were hints of order.

Structure. Complexity.

She settled herself around the singularity's cold glow.

Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took her longer to complete a single thought than it had once taken species to rise and fall on Earth.

It didn't matter. She had plenty of time.

She remembered her last conversation with Geador. Has there been another like me? . . . No. No other like you. There hasn't been long enough.

Now Anlic had all the time there was. The universe was exhausted of everything but time.

The longer she waited, the more complexity emerged from the singularity. Purely by chance. Much of it dissipated, purposeless.

But some of the mass-energy fragments had sufficient complexity to be able to gather and store information about the thinning universe. Enough to grow.

That, of course, was not enough. She continued to wait.

At last-by chance-the quantum tangle emitted a knot of structure sufficiently complex to reflect, not just the universe outside, but its own inner state.

Anlic moved closer, coldly excited.

It was a spark of consciousness: not descended from the grunting, breeding humans of the Afterglow, but born from the random quantum flexing of a singularity.

Just as she had been.

Anlic waited, nurturing, refining the rootless being's order and cohesion. And it gathered more data, developed sophistication.

At last it-she-could frame questions.

". . . Who am I? Who are you? Why are there two and not one?"

Anlic said, "I have much to tell you." And she gathered the spark in her attenuated soul.

Together, mother and daughter drifted away, and the river of time ran slowly into an unmarked sea.

KADDISH FOR THE LAST SURVIVOR

Michael A. Burstein

"The deniers' window of opportunity will be enhanced in years to come. The public, particularly the uneducated public, will be increasingly susceptible to Holocaust denial as survivors die.... Future generations will not hear the story from people who can say 'this is what happened to _me_. This is _my_ story.' For them it will be part of the distant past and, consequently, more susceptible to revision and denial."

-- Deborah Lipstadt,

Denying the Holocaust

(1994)

Sarah Jacobson's hands shook as she parked her clunky Volkswagen across the street from the old suburban house in which she had grown up. She sat there, breathing in the gas fumes from the idling engine, as she watched the reporters swarm all over the front lawn.

Her boyfriend, Tom Holloway, sat next to her in the passenger seat. He stared at her for a moment, then asked, "Ready?"

Sarah nodded. As she turned off the car's engine, Tom jumped out of the front seat, dashed around the front of the car, and opened the driver's side door for her. For once, she was grateful for the old-fashioned Southern charm. To think, when she'd first met him, she'd resented it.

Well, she didn't resent it now. Tom was positioning himself to fend off the horde of reporters, and she was grateful for that too. Fortunately, no one had noticed, or else they had not yet connected Sarah to the biggest news story of the week. Tom gave Sarah his hand, and she allowed him to help her out.

She stretched as she got out of the car, feeling the warmth of the spring sunlight on her back. How strange that she could enjoy it, on this morning of all mornings. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, listening to a bird singing in the distance.

Tom's voice intruded upon her brief peace. "Shall we?"

She gave him a small smile. "I guess so."

"OK." Tom looked around, concentrating his gaze at the sea of reporters. "Lot of excitement for a small town on Long Island," he said. Sarah noticed that he was making no effort to suppress his Southern accent; he knew how endearing she found it. "Hard to believe your grandfather's attracting all this attention."

"Yeah," Sarah replied. "I know." She cocked an ear toward the reporters. "Listen."

One radio reporter, close enough to be heard, was speaking into her thumbnail recorder, taping commentary for her story. "This is Paula Dietrich, reporting from Lawrence, Long Island, where Joshua Cohen is dying. Born in Warsaw in the 1920s, Cohen -- "

Tom whistled. "He's become a celebrity. Finally got his fifteen minutes of fame."

Sarah shrugged. They'd both studied Warhol. After all, they had both graduated from Harvard with honors. "As far as I'm concerned, he's just my grandfather."

"Yeah, I know," Tom said softly. "Sorry. You sure you're ready?"

"Ready as I'll ever be, I guess. If I can survive this, I can survive anything." Sarah grabbed Tom's hand. They walked off the sidewalk onto the path leading up to the front door. She braced herself for the barrage.

One of the reporters glanced in their direction, and recognized Sarah. "It's the granddaughter!" he yelled, and began running towards them. In seconds, all of the shouting, sweating journalists had descended upon Sarah and Tom. The way they jostled at each other, trying to get better positions for recording their images, reminded Sarah of a plague of locusts come to feed.

"We'd like to ask you -- "

"May I ask you -- "

"I have a question -- "

"How do you feel?"

"Did you ever think -- "

Tom shouted above the Babel of voices. "Please, everyone! Sarah just wants to get inside."

Obviously that was not good enough for the reporters. Instead, they used Tom's interruption to create some semblance of order to their questioning. One reporter took the lead, and the others fell silent.

"Ms. Jacobson, Trevor Hunt, _USNA Online_. Could you tell us what you're going through at the moment?"

Sarah glanced at Tom and shrugged. It would be easier to answer a few of their questions first, she decided, and then go inside. She looked directly into Hunt's right eye, which glowed red with the lens of an implanted camera. "What anyone would go through when her grandfather is dying, I guess."

"But, Ms. Jacobson!" interjected the radio correspondent they had been listening to earlier. "The circumstances of your grandfather's position -- "

Sarah interrupted her. "Listen. I know what my grandfather is to the world, but to me, he's just my grandfather. Now let me go say goodbye to him in peace. I promise I'll talk to you -- all of you -- later."

Apparently chastened, the reporters parted in front of Sarah and Tom, clearing the path to the front door. As they walked up the path, a background murmuring began, like cats growling at each other over their food. The reporters chatted with their colleagues or recorded views for their broadcasts. Tom whispered to Sarah, "I'm really surprised. They're being more courteous than I would have guessed."

No sooner had Tom said that, when a small man stepped right in front of them, blocking their way. He brushed back his sandy blond hair and asked, "Ms. Jacobson, why does your family continue to perpetrate this hoax?"

The growling noises of conversation cut off, leaving nothing but the sounds of the cameras and recorders.

At first Sarah thought he was a private citizen, and not a member of the media, as he carried no recording devices and his eyes appeared normal. But a second glance exposed something far more sinister. This man wore a memory recorder implant behind his right ear. His audience, whoever they were, would be able to directly interface with his memories of confronting Sarah, over and over again.

As calmly as she could, Sarah said, "Excuse me?"

The man smiled. "I asked, given the fact that your grandfather, who lived a long and healthy life, is now on his deathbed, why does your family feel the need to perpetuate the hoax of the Holocaust?"

Tom stepped forward, shouting, "Now, listen here, you -- "

Sarah gently reached out and grabbed Tom's shoulder. "Tom, stop." She turned to the man. "Excuse me, but I didn't catch your name."

"Sorry. Maxwell Schwab, from the Institute for Historical Revision. I'm doing an article for our academic journal." He waved his hand at the other reporters. "We'd like to know why your family has gone to the trouble of inviting the mass media here, pretending to the world that the Holocaust actually happened and that your grandfather was a victim of this fictional event."

Tom pulled at her arm. "Come on, Sarah, we don't need to listen to this shi -- this crap."

Sarah resisted. "No, wait." She pivoted her body to face the reporter. "Mr. Schwab?"

"Yes?"

Sarah slapped him on the face, hard, glad she'd studied self-defense. He staggered back, and fell onto his backside. Sarah hoped it was painful enough to keep people from playing this memory.

Schwab sat there, unmoving, just staring at Sarah. No one bothered to pick him up.

She turned to Tom. "_Now_, let's go inside."

No one else stopped them.

* * * *

The first thing that hit Sarah as she entered the house was the smell. The odor of stewing meat and potatoes from the kitchen mixed with the old, musty smell that the house always seemed to have whenever Sarah had returned from college. The living room seemed dark, and it took her a moment to realize that all the shades were drawn, probably to keep the reporters from looking in.

She called out to her parents. "Hello? Dad? Mother?"

Her father called back, "In the kitchen, honey, be right out."

Sarah turned to Tom. "Are _you_ going to be OK?"

Tom smiled, shrugged, and took Sarah's hand briefly. "Yeah, I've dealt with her before. It's not too bad."

"She's not _your_ mother, though."

The door to the kitchen swung open. Sarah's parents, Paul and Anna Jacobson, entered the living room. Her father looked calm, cool, and collected, the way that he always looked. He wore a jacket and tie, in stark contrast to the polo shirts and jeans which Tom and she were wearing. Sarah couldn't remember a time when her father wasn't dressed so impeccably. Her mother, on the other hand, wore a sweatshirt and sweatpants, as if dressing well was currently her last priority. She appeared frazzled, with her hair all askew.

Tom greeted them with a simple hello. Sarah's father smiled at Tom, but her mother barely glanced in Tom's direction.

There was a moment of silence, which her father broke. "Come, Tom, I need your help in the kitchen. You can tell me how your family's doing back in Durham. And how about those Mets?"

The two men went through the slow swinging door, which creaked loudly until it finally shut, muffling their awkward conversation about baseball. Sarah and her mother watched the door for a few seconds after it had closed, and then Sarah turned to look at her mother. "I guess," Sarah said, "I ought to go upstairs and see Grampa."

Her mother sniffed. "Sure, go ahead. Do you want to bring your _goyische_ boyfriend upstairs too?"

_Damn_, Sarah thought, _she wasn't going to be reasonable. Surprise, surprise._ "Mother, please -- "

"And now you're living with him."

Shocked, Sarah took a deep breath. "I never told you that! How did you find out?"

Her mother grinned. "Just now, Sarah. You may be my smart Harvard daughter, but you're not smarter than me."

Sarah felt furious, but more with herself than with her mother. Anna Jacobson had done it _again_, pretending to know something so as to trick the information out of Sarah. Damn! How could she have been so stupid? Well, as long as Mother had figured it out, Sarah might as well get everything out in the open.

"I was going to tell you anyway, Mother. Today, in fact. Tom and I are living together. We have been for a while now."

Her mother glared at her and Sarah said, "I don't care how you feel about it. And anyway, things are different now."

"Such defiance," her mother said, making clucking sounds with her tongue. "And things being different isn't an excuse."

"You're right, Mother," Sarah said as sarcastically as she could. "An economic depression is no excuse for being unable to afford my own apartment."

"Now Sarah -- "

"'Now Sarah,' _what_?" Sarah slammed the doorframe with her palm. "It's not like you have the money to help out; you still live _here_, in the oldest house in the neighborhood. You can't even afford automatic doors. Well, I can't afford to live by myself. No one right out of school can, not with our loans. And as it is -- " She paused for a moment, then took the plunge. "As it is, Tom and I will probably be getting married soon anyway."

There. The big secret was out. Sarah studied her mother's face carefully; it seemed completely shut down. Her mother just stared at her, stonily, not reacting. Finally, Sarah couldn't take the silence any longer. "Well?" she asked. "Aren't you going to say something?"

Her mother sighed. "Sarah, it isn't Tom. He's a nice boy, and I do like him. But I -- and your father -- would prefer that you marry someone Jewish."

"Why?"

"Why? What do you mean, why?"

"Exactly what I said, Mother." She spoke crisply, trying to imitate the Cambridge accent of some of her professors. "Why?"

Her mother looked over Sarah's shoulder. Was it possible she had never really considered this question before? After a few seconds, Sarah's impatience got the better of her again. "Is it because of Grampa? Because he's the last one?"

Her mother immediately replied, "No! It's because you're Jewish. And it surprises me you'd even think of marrying someone who isn't."

Sarah shook her head and sighed. "You know, Mother, you shouldn't be so surprised. You never raised me as Jewish."

Her mother's eyes, filled with shame and fear, locked onto Sarah's. "That's not true," she said softly.

Sarah nodded and went back to being sarcastic. "Yeah, Mother. Matzoh ball soup on Passover, and Chinese food and a movie on Christmas. Should have been enough for me, right? That didn't make me Jewish; it just made me a different type of American. And that's how you and Dad raised me, as an American."

Her mother stood still for a moment, then sank onto one of the cushioned chairs. It sighed, sending dust into the air. "I can't believe it," she said, shaking her head. "I'm doing what I said I never would."

Confused, Sarah asked, "What are you talking about?"

Her mother seemed to go through an internal struggle, and when she spoke next, her words were chosen with care. "Sarah, I guess you were right, in a way. It _is_ because of Grampa that I want you to marry someone Jewish, but it's also because of Grampa that I never really made that clear. Because -- because I wanted to protect you."

"Protect me?" Sarah felt surprised; the only things her mother had ever tried to protect her from were strangers and bad grades.

"Yes, Sarah, protect you. I mean, just look outside at that mob of reporters. You don't know what it's like growing up as the only child of a survivor. I had to grow up listening to all these stories over and over, all this pressure on me from your grandfather. Because of the Holocaust. All that pressure you're feeling from me -- I felt it from him. He's dying now, and I still feel it." Her voice trembled, but she clamped her mouth shut.

"Because of the Holocaust? Mother, Grampa was never very religious; you told me that yourself. And I don't see how the Holocaust is a reason to marry someone Jewish."

"Why not?" she asked softly.

Sarah considered the question. "I know _something_ of our religion," she said without conviction. Somehow, that was the one thing she had never gotten around to studying while at Harvard. "The Holocaust is not exactly a -- a defining event in Judaism."

Her mother shook her head. "Oh, yes it is. After all, Sarah, by intermarrying, aren't you denying what it is about you that made the Nazis try to wipe us out? Some would say that you're letting Hitler win. After all these years."

Sarah didn't know what to say to that; it made her angry and upset, and choked her up. But her mother continued. "Sarah, these were all the things I had to grow up with from your grandfather. I don't know what it was like firsthand to be in the camps, thank God, and God forbid that anyone ever will again. But to your grandfather, his experience there was always more real than the rest of his life. More real than the people in his life."

Her mother paused for a moment, then said, "It was even more real to him than me."

"Oh," Sarah finally managed to say.

"Your grandfather felt that every minute of life had to be devoted to reminding the world. Except instead of bothering the world, he bothered your grandmother and me. When you were born, I promised myself that I wouldn't let him warp your life the way he warped mine."

"But your life isn't -- " Sarah cut herself off.

Her mother chuckled bitterly. "It isn't warped? Sarah, compare your life to mine; you've always had more choices than I did. In my day, there was still so much women couldn't do, or wouldn't be allowed to do. Things were good for a while, but then when the Supreme Court overturned _Roe v. Wade_, it was like the clock turned backwards for all women. And for a Jewish woman, the only daughter of a survivor -- " She stopped.

"Yes, Mother?"

"Let's just say that your father was not the first man I wanted to marry. But your grandfather, well..." She trailed off.

There was nothing Sarah could think of in reply, and her mother gave her a sad smile. "Now maybe, you understand," she whispered.

"And maybe you do too," Sarah whispered back, a question and a statement at the same time.

Mother and daughter regarded each other for a moment, and then Sarah spoke. "I'm going upstairs to see Grampa, Mother. It's my last chance."

Her mother sighed. "Go. I've already made my peace with him. We'll talk more later, after -- when there isn't so little time."

* * * *

Grampa looked so weak lying in the hospital bed that U.S. Hospice had provided. Where was the strong man of Sarah's childhood, the Grampa who had carried her on his shoulders at the playground, who had comforted her on her first frightening day of school, who had attended her high school graduation just five years ago? This old, frail shell of a man, lying in bed with blankets around his thin body and snoring weakly -- Sarah couldn't reconcile him with her memories of her grandfather.

Then, tattooed upon his left arm, she saw the number: 110290. It had always been there. She remembered that first time she had asked Grampa about it. She'd been six years old. He had taken her to the playground near the house, on a hot summer day. Grampa took off the raincoat he always wore, sat on a bench with other old people, and let Sarah run off and play while he "snoozed and schmoozed," as he liked to call it. She never understood how he could sleep with all the noise from all the children playing, but Grampa seemed able to sleep anywhere. It might have scared her, but he always woke up when she called him.

When she returned, she was shocked to see that Grampa had rolled up his sleeves because of the heat. Grampa never rolled up his sleeves.

"Grampa," Sarah had asked, "what's that?" Her little fingers reached out to touch the number.

He woke instantly. "What is what?"

"That number. What is it?"

Grampa saw what she was looking at and quickly rolled down his sleeve. "Better you shouldn't ask," he said, and glared at her. Then his face softened. "_Saraleh_, how old are you again?"

She laughed. "Six, silly!"

"Six." He looked into the distance for a moment. "I had a sister who was six, once. She never got to be seven."

Grampa had had a sister? Sarah had never heard of this before. "What was her name?"

"Sarah. You were named for her." He looked at his left arm, and rolled the sleeve back up, displaying the tattoo. "I was sixteen; that was when I got the number. Sarah, forget what I said before. It is better that you ask. You must ask. And remember."

He had told her of the horrors of the camp. Of how his own grandfather had disappeared one night. Of how he, his parents, and his little sister were taken away in cattle cars from their home to a place called Auschwitz, where they were separated, and how he never saw them again. Of how he had very little to eat, all of it bad. Of how he had to endure the beatings of the guards. Of how he got sick with typhus and thought that he would be sent to the gas chambers and turned into smoke and ash. Of how they marched him to Buchenwald, and how he almost collapsed and died along the way. Of how he was barely able to move when the Americans came to liberate them, and how two righteous Gentiles whose names had sounded Jewish, Sergeant Rosenthal and Corporal Glaub, had attended to him and nursed him back to health.

His stories had seemed so incongruous in the bright, sunny playground filled with the laughter of little children, and at first Sarah thought he was making them up. But as the stories continued and got more horrible, Sarah became mesmerized. When he finished, Grampa had tears in his eyes. She hugged him, and he trembled just like Sarah did when she woke up from a nightmare.

That night, so many years ago, the rain had pounded on Sarah's bedroom window like gunshots. It was a hot, humid night, and as Sarah drifted off to sleep she thought of all her grandfather had told her. She dreamed of being stuffed into a gas chamber, the stink and sweat of human flesh pressing on her from all sides, Nazi stormtroopers shooting people outside, human flesh burning, going up in sweet-smelling smoke --

And she awoke, screaming and crying. Her mother had come in and held her for a long time. When she found out about Sarah's dreams, she promised Sarah that she would never have such dreams again. From that day on, Grampa never took Sarah to the playground alone. And the nightmares had faded away and disappeared, except for the memory of the number on Grampa's arm: 110290.

Sarah shook her head, clearing away the memories of that long ago night, and looked at the bed. The frail old man wrapped in blankets had that same number, 110290, tattooed on his arm. There was no question in Sarah's mind now, that this man was her grandfather, lying in his bed.

And dying.

_I shouldn't disturb him_, Sarah thought, and had turned around to leave the room when she heard his voice. "Who's there?" Even when he was dying, he woke to the sound of her.

She turned back; her grandfather's eyes were open. "It's Sarah, Grampa."

He smiled. "_Saraleh_, it's good to see you." He struggled to sit up in bed, and coughed. "Here, come sit next to me, on the bed. We'll have one last chance to snooze and schmooze before I go."

"Grampa! Don't talk like that." She moved his blankets over and sat down.

"Sarah, Sarah. Years ago, it would have been tempting the evil eye to say such things, but now ... now I am dying. And I am looking forward to peace. I have not had a peaceful life, _mameleh_."

"I know."

"So _nu_. Tell me, how are things? What are you doing with yourself?"

Sarah shifted around. "Well, I'm living in New York City now, you know. I'm working for a web publisher. Editing."

"And are you enjoying it?"

"I suppose, although what I'd really like to do is write."

"Eh. And are you seeing anyone? I want great-grandchildren, you know."

He laughed, and Sarah joined in. "You remember Tom, don't you? We're living -- I mean, he's now at NYU, in law school."

Grampa fixed Sarah with a long gaze. "So, you're living together?"

Sarah blushed. "Yes. Um, I tried to keep it a secret. I'm sorry."

"What is there to be sorry about?"

"Well, it's just..." Sarah trailed off.

"It's OK, _Saraleh_. I understand your generation. It is not that much different from mine."

"But you don't approve of Tom, do you?"

Grampa sighed. "Tom's a good boy, a fine young man. I would have preferred if you had met someone Jewish, but I can't fault you for your choice. He will make a good husband."

Sarah thought for a moment. "Grampa, can I ask you something?"

"Anything, _mameleh_. But you'd better hurry." They both smiled at that. Sarah blinked hard, to stop the tears.

"Why is it so important to you that I marry someone Jewish? It's not like you were ever religious or observant."

Grampa closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "You ask such a difficult question, like the simple child's question about the Passover _seder_. It's true, I never was observant, not before the camp, or after. But, Sarah, because of where I was -- Auschwitz -- your children _have_ to remember, they _have_ to know what they are and understand where they came from. I need them to be Jewish, and not just because you are. They have to _know_ that they are Jewish."

"But why?"

He sighed. "Because if they do not realize who they are, they will be the first to go to the gas chambers the next time there is a Holocaust."

Sarah was shocked. "Grampa, you can't seriously believe that it could happen again. The Holocaust is a distant memory from the last century. Even if it did happen -- "

"If it happens ... when it happens, God forbid, again, the first Jews to die will be the ones who don't realize they are Jewish. The German Jews saw what Hitler was doing. They were Germans, they said, not Jews. What Hitler is doing doesn't apply to us. They never believed it would ... until it was too late."

"But it couldn't happen again. Could it?"

Grampa was silent for a moment. "Sarah, your generation grew up in a world that felt much safer than mine. We made it that way. Maybe it really wasn't so safe, maybe we weren't so bright, but your parents and I certainly tried to protect you from the world outside. Maybe we succeeded too well.

"It is because you feel so safe and because the Holocaust is so distant, that your generation is in danger. People are forgetting. The Holocaust Museum in Washington lost its funding and is gone now, after only thirty years, because no one thought it was important anymore. Auschwitz -- Auschwitz is now a side attraction for people going to the VR mall across the way." Straining, he bent his head over and spit on the floor. "There are even people who claim the Holocaust never happened in the first place, people who are being taken far too seriously."

"I know what you mean. Just outside -- " Sarah bit her lip.

But it was too late. "What? What happened outside?"

Sarah shrugged. "A reporter. He -- he accused us of making it all up."

Grampa frowned, his voice bitter. "Always," he said. "Always the big lie. Well, they wouldn't let me live in peace. Why should I expect then to let me die in peace?"

"It was only one, Grampa," Sarah said, dismissively. "The other reporters are -- I mean, they know it's for real."

"Even one person denying the truth is one person too many." He sighed. "The deniers are everywhere, Sarah. They started when I was just out of the camps, telling me that the horrible things I had seen with my own eyes never existed. Telling me I was crazy. But there were always enough of us around, to educate, to lecture, to write, to bear witness for the world. But now -- "

He coughed, loud, long, and hard. Sarah stood up. "Grampa, you must rest. You're letting yourself get all worked up. I'll go get you some water."

He shook his head and waved for her to sit back down again. "Please, Sarah, wait. I don't have much time, and this is far too important."

She sat down again. "Yes, Grampa, what is it?"

"Sarah, you must promise me. After I am gone, there will be no one to bear witness. I am the last of the survivors. _You_ must bear witness for me -- for all of us, the six million who died and those who survived to tell the world." He took her left hand in a grip that was surprisingly strong.

Now the tears welled up in her eyes, past her strength to hold them back. She began to weep. "Yes, Grampa, I will."

Her tears blurred her sight, and Sarah wiped them away. As her vision cleared, Sarah noticed Grampa staring directly into her eyes.

"Sarah, listen carefully. I want you to open that drawer over there." With his right hand, Grampa pointed to the top drawer of the bureau. Sarah let go of his left hand, dutifully walked over to the bureau, and pulled the drawer open. It contained only one item, a small shiny metal box with the logo MEMVOX printed across the side. She pulled it out and turned it around, studying it.

"My God, Grampa," she said. "Is this what I think it is?"

He nodded. "A memory recorder. The chip is inside."

Sarah hesitated before asking her next question. She feared she already knew the answer. "Grampa ... what's on it?"

He coughed. "Me. When I am gone, I want you to play it."

Sarah now understood what Grampa had meant about her bearing witness. She shook her head. "I can't do this, Grampa."

"You will do the right thing, I am sure of it. Sarah, you must. You're young, you're strong, you can handle it. When you play that chip, _you_ will be the last survivor." He coughed. "_Zachor_. Remember. Bear witness, from generation to generation." He turned away from her, and began to recite the Jewish affirmation in the existence of God, "_Sh'ma Yisroel_..." His voice trailed off. His breath faded. Then it ceased entirely.

Sarah wiped the tears from her eyes. She stood up, then covered her grandfather's face with the blanket. She finished reciting the Sh'ma for her grandfather in English; she hadn't realized that she remembered: _Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One_. She turned off the light and left, closing the door silently behind her.

* * * *

That night, Sarah sat alone in the bedroom of the two-room Manhattan apartment she shared with Tom. She had asked Tom for some privacy, and he had readily agreed; so he was in their living room, watching TV or logged onto the Internet, Sarah wasn't sure. Tom had assumed that the stress of the quick late afternoon funeral and burial was what had prompted Sarah to ask for some time to herself, and she had chosen not to correct him. She was glad that Jewish tradition held that a funeral and burial should take place as soon as possible after death; she had a lot to think about, and didn't want to have to worry about seeing her mother again so soon after Grampa's death.

On the small night table in front of her sat the memory recorder and the chip. She picked up the chip and turned it over and over in her hands. Grampa had labeled it in black ink with his name and date of birth. Sarah had written in today's date at the bottom of the label, in blue ink, but that was all she had done so far. Tom had given her the privacy she requested over half an hour ago, and Sarah still wasn't sure what to do.

A wastebasket sat next to their second-hand full-size bed. Sarah could just drop the chip into it, and never think of it again. Or she could take it to a recycling center, and get some small amount of money for it. As for the memory recorder, although used, it was valuable, and could easily pay the rent for the next few months.

But that would almost be like desecrating her grandfather's grave. Grampa had given her the recorder and the chip for a reason. He wanted her to play it, to share those experiences with her. She thought about those experiences, the stories he had told her about the Holocaust when she was six years old; and she realized that she would never want to live through it herself, even vicariously through someone else's memories. She held the chip above the wastebasket, ready to let it fall --

-- And then she remembered the reporter from this morning.

She had to fulfill her promise; her grandfather had depended on it. Quickly, so she would not be tempted into changing her mind again, she inserted the chip into the recorder, attached the wires to her head, and hit PLAY.

An hour later, when the chip had finished playing, she slowly removed the wires. She shuddered and began to cry, but softly, so as not to alert Tom. She removed the chip from the recorder and stored it safely away. The memories from her grandfather's Holocaust experiences precipitated in her a decision, a choice; she just hoped that Tom would understand. She knew that she would have to find someone knowledgeable about computers and recorders, someone sympathetic to her position who could hack the Internet and force Grampa's memory records to be played by anyone plugging in, at least for a short while. Sarah would come forward and take responsibility, once she was assured that no one would ever take the revisionists seriously again. But ... if she went forward with this plan, to bear witness for her grandfather, there was one other step she needed to take first.

* * * *

Sarah walked into the tiny store, a remnant of the old Times Square, struggling against the gentrification of the past thirty years. Most places of this sort had moved to the outer boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, but this one was still here. The sign above the glass bore the one word ADULT, in large black letters, and hanging in the window Sarah could see signs promising things like fake ID chips and real tobacco cigarettes.

She strode in purposefully, ignored the grime of the floor and shelves, and walked through to the room in the back, where the guy she was looking for worked. The room was small, empty at the moment except for the artist, who was reading a newstape as she entered. His appearance repulsed her, as he had rings through his nose, ears, and eyebrows, and he also sported tattoos on his arms and face. She would never see a person like this socially, but she was here for something else. The guy looked up at her inquisitively as she approached.

"Hello," she said. "I'd -- I'd like to get a tattoo. Can you tattoo on a number?"

"Sure," he said, putting down the newstape. "I can do anything."

"Good." Sarah sat on the long chair meant for his clients and rolled up the sleeve of her left arm. "I want you to tattoo the number 110290 right here."

The man looked askance at her. "Like a Holocaust victim?"

Sarah nodded, pleased that the guy recognized what she wanted. She would still go through with her plan, but for the first time since her grandfather died, she thought that perhaps there was still hope for the world to remember its history after all. "Yes," she said. "Exactly like that."

THE ELEPHANTS ON  NEPTUNE

Mike Resnick

None ever went hungry or were sick. They had no predators. They never fought a war. There was no prejudice. Their birth rate exactly equaled their death rate. Their skins and bowels were free of parasites.

The herd traveled at a speed that accommodated the youngest and weakest members. No sick or infirm elephant was ever left behind.

They were a remarkable race, the elephants on Neptune. They lived out their lives in peace and tranquility, they never argued among themselves, the old were always gentle with the young. When one was born, the entire herd gathered to celebrate. When one died, the entire herd mourned its passing. There were no animosities, no petty jealousies, no unresolved quarrels.

Only one thing stopped it from being Utopia, and that was the fact that an elephant never forgets.

Not ever.

No matter how hard he tries.

When men finally landed on Neptune in 2473 a.d., the elephants were very apprehensive. Still, they approached the spaceship in a spirit of fellowship and goodwill.

The men were a little apprehensive themselves. Every survey of Neptune told them it was a gas giant, and yet they had landed on solid ground. And if their surveys were wrong, who knew what else might be wrong as well?

A tall man stepped out onto the frozen surface. Then another. Then a third. By the time they had all emerged, there were almost as many men as elephants.

"Well, I’ll be damned!" said the leader of the men. "You’re elephants!"

"And you’re men," said the elephants nervously.

"That’s right," said the men. "We claim this planet in the name of the United Federation of Earth."

"You’re united now?" asked the elephants, feeling much relieved.

"Well, the survivors are," said the men.

"Those are ominous-looking weapons you’re carrying," said the elephants, shifting their feet uncomfortably.

"They go with the uniforms," said the men. "Not to worry. Why would we want to harm you? There’s always been a deep bond between men and elephants."

That wasn’t exactly the way the elephants remembered it.

326 b.c.

Alexander the Great met Porus, King of the Punjab of India, in the Battle of the Jhelum River. Porus had the first military elephants Alexander had ever seen. He studied the situation, then sent his men out at night to fire thousands of arrows into extremely sensitive trunks and underbellies. The elephants went mad with pain and began killing the nearest men they could find, which happened to be their keepers and handlers. After his great victory, Alexander slaughtered the surviving elephants so that he would never have to face them in battle.

217 b.c.

The first clash between the two species of elephants. Ptolemy IV took his African elephants against Antiochus the Great’s Indian elephants.

The elephants on Neptune weren’t sure who won the war, but they knew who lost. Not a single elephant on either side survived.

Later that same 217 b.c.

While Ptolemy was battling in Syria, Hannibal took thirty-seven elephants over the Alps to fight the Romans. Fourteen of them froze to death, but the rest lived just long enough to absorb the enemy’s spear thrusts while Hannibal was winning the Battle of Cannae.

"We have important things to talk about," said the men. "For example, Neptune’s atmosphere is singularly lacking in oxygen. How do you breathe?"

"Through our noses," said the elephants.

"That was a serious question," said the men, fingering their weapons ominously.

"We are incapable of being anything but serious," explained the elephants. "Humor requires that someone be the butt of the joke, and we find that too cruel to contemplate."

"All right," said the men, who were vaguely dissatisfied with the answer, perhaps because they didn’t understand it. "Let’s try another question. What is the mechanism by which we are communicating? You don’t wear radio transmitters, and because of our helmets we can’t hear any sounds that aren’t on our radio bands.""We communicate through a psychic bond," explained the elephants.            "That’s not very scientific," said the men disapprovingly. "Are you sure you don’t mean a telepathic bond?"

"No, though it comes to the same thing in the end," answered the elephants. "We know that we sound like we’re speaking English to you, except for the man on the left who thinks we’re speaking Hebrew."

"And what do we sound like to you?" demanded the men.

"You sound exactly as if you’re making gentle rumbling sounds in your stomachs and your bowels."

"That’s fascinating," said the men, who privately thought it was a lot more disgusting than fascinating.

"Do you know what’s really fascinating?" responded the elephants. "The fact that you’ve got a Jew with you." They saw that the men didn’t comprehend, so they continued: "We always felt we were in a race with the Jews to see which of us would be exterminated first. We used to call ourselves the Jews of the animal kingdom." They turned and faced the Jewish spaceman. "Did the Jews think of themselves as the elephants of the human kingdom?"

"Not until you just mentioned it," said the Jewish spaceman, who suddenly found himself agreeing with them.

42 b.c.

The Romans gathered their Jewish prisoners in the arena at Alexandria, then turned fear-crazed elephants loose on them. The spectators began jumping up and down and screaming for blood–and, being contrarians, the elephants attacked the spectators instead of the Jews, proving once and for all that you can’t trust a pachyderm.

(When the dust had cleared, the Jews felt the events of the day had reaffirmed their claim to be God’s chosen people. They weren’t the Romans’ chosen people, though. After the soldiers killed the elephants, they put all the Jews to the sword, too.)

"It’s not his fault he’s a Jew any more than it’s your fault that you’re elephants," said the rest of the men. "We don’t hold it against either of you."

"We find that difficult to believe," said the elephants.

"You do?" said the men. "Then consider this: the Indians–that’s the good Indians, the ones from India, not the bad Indians from America–worshipped Ganesh, an elephant-headed god."

"We didn’t know that," admitted the elephants, who were more impressed than they let on. "Do the Indians still worship Ganesh?"

"Well, we’re sure they would if we hadn’t killed them all while we were defending the Raj," said the men. "Elephants were no longer in the military by then," they added. "That’s something tobe grateful for."

Their very last battle came when Tamerlane the Great went to war against Sultan Mahmoud. Tamerlane won by tying branches to buffaloes’ horns, setting fire to them, and then stampeding the buffalo herd into Mahmoud’s elephants, which effectively ended the elephant as a war machine, buffalo being much less expensive to acquire and feed.

All the remaining domesticated elephants were then trained for elephant fighting, which was exactly like cock-fighting, only on a larger scale. Much larger. It became a wildly popular sport for thirty or forty years until they ran out of participants.

"Not only did we worship you," continued the men, "but we actually named a country after you–the Ivory Coast. That should prove our good intentions."

"You didn’t name it after us," said the elephants. "You named it after the parts of our bodies that you kept killing us for."

"You’re being too critical," said the men. "We could have named it after some local politician with no vowels in his name."

"Speaking of the Ivory Coast," said the elephants, "did you know that the first alien visitors to Earth landed there in 1883?"

"What did they look like?"

"They had ivory exoskeletons," answered the elephants. "They took one look at the carnage and left."

"Are you sure you’re not making this all up?" asked the men.

"Why would we lie to you at this late date?"

"Maybe it’s your nature," suggested the men.

"Oh, no," said the elephants. "Our nature is that we always tell the truth. Our tragedy is that we always remember it."

The men decided that it was time to break for dinner, answer calls of nature, and check in with Mission Control to report what they’d found. They all walked back to the ship, except for one man, who lingered behind.

All of the elephants left too, except for one lone bull. "I intuit that you have a question to ask," he said.

"Yes," replied the man. "You have such an acute sense of smell, how did anyone ever sneak up on you during the hunt?"

"The greatest elephant hunters were the Wanderobo of Kenya and Uganda. They would rub our dung all over their bodies to hide their own scent, and would then silently approach us."

"Ah," said the man, nodding his head. "It makes sense."

"Perhaps," conceded the elephant. Then he added, with all the dignity he could muster, "But if the tables were turned, I would sooner die than cover myself with your shit."

He turned away and set off to rejoin his comrades.

Neptune is unique among all the worlds in the galaxy. It alone recognizes the truism that change is inevitable, and acts upon it in ways that seem very little removed from magic.

For reasons the elephants couldn’t fathom or explain, Neptune encourages metamorphosis. Not merely adaptation, although no one could deny that they adapted to the atmosphere and the climate and the fluctuating surface of the planet and the lack of acacia trees–but metamorphosis. The elephants understood at a gut level that Neptune had somehow imparted to them the ability to evolve at will, though they had been careful never to abuse this gift.

And since they were elephants, and hence incapable of carrying a grudge, they thought it was a pity that the men couldn’t evolve to the point where they could leave their bulky spacesuits and awkward helmets behind, and walk free and unencumbered across this most perfect of planets.

The elephants were waiting when the men emerged from their ship and strode across Neptune’s surface to meet them.

"This is very curious," said the leader.

"What is?" asked the elephants.

The leader stared at them, frowning. "You seem smaller."

"We were just going to say that you seemed larger," replied the elephants.

"This is almost as silly as the conversation I just had with Mission Control," said the leader. "They say there aren’t any elephants on Neptune."

"What do they think we are?" asked the elephants.

"Hallucinations or space monsters," answered the leader. "If you’re hallucinations, we’re supposed to ignore you."

He seemed to be waiting for the elephants to ask what the men were supposed to do if they were space monsters, but elephants can be as stubborn as men when they want to be, and that was a question they had no intention of asking.

The men stared at the elephants in silence for almost five minutes. The elephants stared back.

Finally the leader spoke again.

"Would you excuse me for a moment?" he said. "I suddenly have an urge to eat some greens."

He turned and marched back to the ship without another word.

The rest of the men shuffled their feet uncomfortably for another few seconds.

"Is something wrong?" asked the elephants.

"Are we getting bigger or are you getting smaller?" replied the men.

"Yes," answered the elephants.

"I feel much better now," said the leader, rejoining his men and facing the elephants.

"You look better," agreed the elephants. "More handsome, somehow."

"Do you really think so?" asked the leader, obviously flattered.

"You are the finest specimen of your race we’ve ever seen," said the elephants truthfully. "We especially like your ears."

"You do?" he asked, flapping them slightly. "No one’s ever mentioned them before."

"Doubtless an oversight," said the elephants.

"Speaking of ears," said the leader, "are you African elephants or Indian? I thought this morning you were African–they’re the ones with the bigger ears, right?–but now I’m not sure."

"We’re Neptunian elephants," they answered.

"Oh."

They exchanged pleasantries for another hour, and then the men looked up at the sky.

"Where did the sun go?" they asked.

"It’s night," explained the elephants. "Our day is only fourteen hours long. We get seven hours of sunlight and seven of darkness."

"The sun wasn’t all that bright anyway," said one of the men with a shrug that set his ears flapping wildly.

"We have very poor eyesight, so we hardly notice," said the elephants. "We depend on our senses of smell and hearing."

The men seemed very uneasy. Finally they turned to their leader.

"May we be excused for a few moments, sir?" they asked.

"Why?"

"Suddenly we’re starving," said the men.

"And I gotta use the john," said one of them.

"So do I," said a second one.

"Me too," echoed another.

"Do you men feel all right?" asked the leader, his enormous nose wrinkled in concern.

"I feel great!" said the nearest man. "I could eat a horse!"

The other men all made faces.

"Well, a small forest, anyway," he amended.

"Permission granted," said the leader. The men began walking rapidly back to the ship. "And bring me a couple of heads of lettuce, and maybe an apple or two," he called after them.

"You can join them if you wish," said the elephants, who were coming to the conclusion that eating a horse wasn’t half as disgusting a notion as they had thought it would be.

"No, my job is to make contact with aliens," explained the leader. "Although when you get right down to it, you’re not as alien as we’d expected."

"You’re every bit as human as we expected," replied the elephants.

"I’ll take that as a great compliment," said the leader. "But then, I would expect nothing less from traditional friends such as yourselves."

"Traditional friends?" repeated the elephants, who had thought nothing a man said could still surprise them."Certainly. Even after you stopped being our partners in war, we’ve always had a special relationship with you."       "You have?"

"Sure. Look how P.T. Barnum made an international superstar out of the original Jumbo. That animal lived like a king–or at least he did until he was accidentally run over by a locomotive."

"We don’t want to appear cynical," said the elephants, "but how do you accidentally run over a seven-ton animal?"

"You do it," said the leader, his face glowing with pride, "by inventing the locomotive in the first place. Whatever else we may be, you must admit we’re a race that can boast of magnificent accomplishments: the internal combustion engine, splitting the atom, reaching the planets, curing cancer." He paused. "I don’t mean to denigrate you, but truly, what have you got to equal that?"

"We live our lives free of sin," responded the elephants simply. "We respect each other’s beliefs, we don’t harm our environment, and we have never made war on other elephants."

"And you’d put that up against the heart transplant, the silicon chip, and the three-dimensional television screen?" asked the leader with just a touch of condescension.

"Our aspirations are different from yours," said the elephants. "But we are as proud of our heroes as you are of yours."

"You have heroes?" said the leader, unable to hide his surprise.

"Certainly." The elephants rattled off their roll of honor: "The Kilimanjaro Elephant. Selemundi. Mohammed of Marsabit. And the Magnificent Seven of Krueger Park: Mafunyane, Shingwedzi, Kambaki, Joao, Dzombo, Ndlulamithi, and Phelwane."

"Are they here on Neptune?" asked the leader as his men began returning from the ship.

"No," said the elephants. "You killed them all."

"We must have had a reason," insisted the men.

"They were there," said the elephants. "And they carried magnificent ivory."

"See?" said the men. "We knew we had a reason."

The elephants didn’t like that answer much, but they were too polite to say so, and the two species exchanged views and white lies all through the brief Neptunian night. When the sun rose again, the men voiced their surprise.

"Look at you!" they said. "What’s happening?"

"We got tired of walking on all fours," said the elephants. "We decided it’s more comfortable to stand upright."

"And where are your trunks?" demanded the men.

"They got in the way."

"Well, if that isn’t the damnedest thing!" said the men. Then they looked at each other. "On second thought, this is the damnedest thing! We’re bursting out of our helmets!"

"And our ears are flapping," said the leader.

"And our noses are getting longer," said another man.

"This is most disconcerting," said the leader. He paused. "On the other hand, I don’t feel nearly as much animosity toward you as I did yesterday. I wonder why?"

"Beats us," said the elephants, who were becoming annoyed with the whining quality of his voice.

"It’s true, though," continued the leader. "Today I feel like every elephant in the universe is my friend."

"Too bad you didn’t feel that way when it would have made a difference," said the elephants irritably. "Did you know you killed sixteen million of us in the twentieth century alone?"

"But we made amends," noted the men. "We set up game parks to preserve you."

"True," acknowledged the elephants. "But in the process you took away most of our habitat. Then you decided to cull us so we wouldn’t exhaust the park’s food supply." They paused dramatically. "That was when Earth received its second alien visitation. The aliens examined the theory of preserving by culling, decided that Earth was an insane asylum, and made arrangements to drop all their incurables off in the future."

Tears rolled down the men’s bulky cheeks. "We feel just terrible about that," they wept. A few of them dabbed at their eyes with short, stubby fingers that seemed to be growing together.

"Maybe we should go back to the ship and consider all this," said the men’s leader, looking around futilely for something large enough in which to blow his nose. "Besides, I have to use the facilities."

"Sounds good to me," said one of the men. "I got dibs on the cabbage."

"Guys?" said another. "I know it sounds silly, but it’s much more comfortable to walk on all fours."

The elephants waited until the men were all on the ship, and then went about their business, which struck them as odd, because before the men came they didn’t have any business.

"You know," said one of the elephants. "I’ve got a sudden taste for a hamburger."

"I want a beer," said a second. Then: "I wonder if there’s a football game on the subspace radio."

"It’s really curious," remarked a third. "I have this urge to cheat on my wife–and I’m not even married."

Vaguely disturbed without knowing why, they soon fell into a restless, dreamless sleep.

Sherlock Holmes once said that after you eliminate the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Joseph Conrad said that truth is a flower in whose neighborhood others must wither.

Walt Whitman suggested that whatever satisfied the soul was truth.

Neptune would have driven all three of them berserk.

"Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true," said George Santayana.

He was just crazy enough to have made it on Neptune.

"We’ve been wondering," said the men when the two groups met in the morning. "Whatever happened to Earth’s last elephant?"

"His name was Jamal," answered the elephants. "Someone shot him."

"Is he on display somewhere?"

"His right ear, which resembles the outline of the continent of Africa, has a map painted on it and is in the Presidential Mansion in Kenya. They turned his left ear over–and you’d be surprised how many left ears were thrown away over the centuries before someone somewhere thought of turning them over–and another map was painted, which now hangs in a museum in Bombay. His feet were turned into a matched set of barstools, and currently grace the Aces High Show Lounge in Dallas, Texas. His scrotum serves as a tobacco pouch for an elderly Scottish politician. One tusk is on display at the British Museum. The other bears a scrimshaw and resides in a store window in Beijing. His tail has been turned into a fly swatter, and is the proud possession of one of the last vaqueros in Argentina."

"We had no idea," said the men, honestly appalled.

"Jamal’s very last words before he died were, ‘I forgive you,’ " continued the elephants. "He was promptly transported to a sphere higher than any man can ever aspire to."

The men looked up and scanned the sky. "Can we see it from here?" they asked.

"We doubt it."

The men looked back at the elephants–except that they had evolved yet again. In fact, they had eliminated every physical feature for which they had ever been hunted. Tusks, ears, feet, tails, even scrotums, all had undergone enormous change. The elephants looked exactly like human beings, right down to their spacesuits and helmets.

The men, on the other hand, had burst out of their spacesuits (which had fallen away in shreds and tatters), sprouted tusks, and found themselves conversing by making rumbling noises in their bellies.

"This is very annoying," said the men who were no longer men. "Now that we seem to have become elephants," they continued, "perhaps you can tell us what elephants do?"

"Well," said the elephants who were no longer elephants, "in our spare time, we create new ethical systems based on selflessness, forgiveness, and family values. And we try to synthesize the work of Kant, Descartes, Spinoza, Thomas Aquinas, and Bishop Berkeley into something far more sophisticated and logical, while never forgetting to incorporate emotional and aesthetic values at each stage."

"Well, we suppose that’s pretty interesting," said the new elephants without much enthusiasm. "Can we do anything else?"

"Oh, yes," the new spacemen assured them, pulling out their .550 Nitro Expresses and .475 Holland & Holland Magnums and taking aim. "You can die."

"This can’t be happening! You yourselves were elephants yesterday!"

"True. But we’re men now."

"But why kill us?" demanded the elephants.

"Force of habit," said the men as they pulled their triggers.

Then, with nothing left to kill, the men who used to be elephants boarded their ship and went out into space, boldly searching for new life forms.

Neptune has seen many species come and go. Microbes have been spontaneously generated nine times over the eons. It has been visited by aliens thirty-seven different times. It has seen forty-three wars, five of them atomic, and the creation of 1,026 religions, none of which possessed any universal truths. More of the vast tapestry of galactic history has been played out on Neptune’s foreboding surface than any other world in Sol’s system.

Planets cannot offer opinions, of course, but if they could, Neptune would almost certainly say that the most interesting creatures it ever hosted were the elephants, whose gentle ways and unique perspectives remain fresh and clear in its memory. It mourns the fact that they became extinct by their own hand. Kind of.

A problem would arise when you asked whether Neptune was referring to the old-new elephants who began life as killers, or the new-old ones who ended life as killers.

Neptune just hates questions like that.

MOON DOGS

Michael Swanwick

He went to a spa where, for a fee, they would drown you as often as you liked. You wouldn't actually die, because they put a shunt in your skull and kept the brain oxygenated, but your body didn't know that and your survival reflexes would kick in so that you'd choke and gag and fight for oxygen as you experienced the desperation of approaching death. You could thrash and struggle for hours. The water was ice-cold and as dark as tea. If you panicked and did too much damage to your body, there was a clinic nearby where you could rest while solicitous friends in white coats cured it.

After they had emptied his lungs, removed the shunt, and switched on a small fire, the counselors gave Nick a blanket and withdrew, leaving him alone in the woods to contemplate the experience in peace.

Shivering, Nick drew the blanket around him. He didn't feel any better than he had before. He hadn't experienced any kind of release at all. His mood was as bleak as ever. Life still felt hopeless.

A while later, he put on the clothing they had left him, folded up the blanket, switched off the fire, and stood. The night was quiet and dark, lit only by a low moon. There was a path over the hill that led to the lodge. He heard two of the staff laughing quietly over something one had said, just before their propane torches disappeared. But he didn't feel like going back to the lodge and their hired warmth and camaraderie. Not just yet.

Instead, he put the moon to his back and went the other direction, deeper into the woods, and was quickly lost. He did  not care. The woods were tangled and random, a jumble of tree trunks and deadfall, some lying broken on the ground, others propped up by other trees. There was no pattern in them, he reflected, nothing to fix the eye upon. It seemed a perfect metaphor for everything.

It was then he saw the sycamores, pale in the moonlight.

The sycamores formed a ghostly ring around an empty darkness. They looked like a Druidic temple. He thought at first that they were former ornamentals—this had been a populous suburb not a century ago—marking the perimeter of a house long fallen to ruin. But then he saw how the ground within sank downward and realized that the bowl-shaped depression they marked was carved by the same small stream that had fed his drowning pool. At its center would be another ceremonial pool, perhaps, or else a minuscule swamp.

He walked closer and as he did so a pale white flame resolved itself into existence at the center of the darkness. He squinted, unsure as to its reality, and continued walking.

Then he saw the white shape stoop, and heard a splash of water.

“Hello?” he said.

The shape flinched, turned, and in a woman's voice said,

“Who are you?”

“My name's Nick. Do you want me to go away?”

“No, I'm about done here. You can dry me off.”

Nick walked to the edge of the water. The woman stood knee-deep within it. In the gloom she was hard to see. Her crotch was filled with shadow; her navel was the merest  smudge. He couldn't make out her mouth or nose at all. Twin falls of long, dark hair framed eyes that mirrored the black water in which she stood.

“The towel's by your feet.”

He was reaching for the towel when something came bounding out of obscurity. It was a gundog, long and as elegantly constructed as antique Swiss clockwork. “Touch the lady and you're a dead man,” it growled. There was a clicking noise from its abdomen.

“Stand down your armaments, Otto. He's not threatening me.”

With a mechanical whine the gundog sat. There were other machines in the woods, gray shadows that prowled and circled without rest. Nick tried to count them. Three, six—too many to count.

The woman stood before Nick and turned her back. “Well?”

Carefully he dried her off, starting with her hair and shoulders, moving down her back and over her rump. Her body had the sculptural perfection of a Brancusi marble. He crouched to dry the back of her legs, and when he reached the ankles, she turned around to face him. She was so close he could smell her: fresh and clean, with accents of oak-leaf and cedar.

She took the towel and did her front, then squatted and let Otto blow hot air on her.

When she was dry, the woman dressed in jeans and a shirt. She wrapped her hair up in the towel, like a turban, and said, “My house is just over the hill. Cocoa?”

“Why not?”

* * * *

The kitchen was bright and clean. They sat at the table and talked. Her name, she said, was Selene. The gundogs came and went, patrolling the grounds, occasionally lying silent at her feet. Their metal nails clicked softly on the floor.            “Why do you want to die?” Selene asked, when they'd been talking a while.

“I don't want to die—it's something I'm trying to purge from my subconscious. But when you've seen your parents die, and your brothers die, and your sister die, and nine-tenths of the kids in the first orphanage die, and half of those in the second ... well. There's bound to be a certain amount of survivor guilt.”

She studied his face. “No,” she said at last, “it's not that.”

“Then I don't know what it is.”

“No. You don't.”

“And you do?”

“I didn't say that. But if I had your problem, I would at least know what it was. I'll bet you live in one of the new city-cores. Neon, noise, smoky little bars. Everybody crammed as close together as they can get.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So that's evasion. You want to understand yourself, you've got to experience a little isolation. Go off alone by yourself. In the winter, sometimes I go for weeks without seeing another human being.”

“What exactly do you do out here?”

“I hunt. That's what the ‘dogs are for. I have a little money and so I hunt. Deer mostly. But I bagged a puma not long back.”

“It hardly seems fair. All that machinery against one little deer.”

Her look was unfathomable. “There's the couch. Get some sleep. I'll wake you in the morning and take you out with me.

You'll see then.”

The woods were misty and indistinct. Selene led him out into them, her hounds flowing about her like a river of quicksilver. She wore a Teflon jacket over her plaid shirt, and she carried a hunting knife on her belt. Amber goggles hung from a cord around her neck.

“Okay,” Nick said. “So how is this thing done?”

“First we deploy the ‘dogs.” Selene swept out an arm and half the pack scattered into the surrounding woods. The remaining six stayed with her, alert and tireless. The sound of the machines thrashing through the undergrowth died away to nothing surprisingly quickly.

“What do we do now?”

“Enjoy the woods.” She drew in a deep breath, let it out.

“Smell those pines! The ‘dogs will let us know when they've flushed something worthwhile.”

“I think...”

“Don't. Don't think, don't talk, just walk. And listen. Try to appreciate how lucky you are to be here at all.”

* * * *

Hunting, it seemed, consisted largely of walking. Selene moved unhurriedly, picking easy ways, going always deeper into the woods. Occasionally one of the ‘dogs barked once or twice in the distance. “Just letting me know where they are,” she said when Nick asked. “Now, hush.”

Sometimes she strolled casually, heedlessly along. Other times she would tense, listening, watching, every nerve strained. Nick couldn't figure out the rhythms. Following in her wake, he stared at her long, long legs, her broad shoulders and fine back, her perfect ass. She was an Amazon.

He couldn't figure her out. He couldn't help wanting her.

At noon they sent one of the ‘dogs back to the house for sandwiches and a thermos of herbal tea. They ate sitting on a crumbled foundation wall, halfway up a mountain. One of the gundogs crouched at Selene's feet, staring out over the forest.

The trees went on forever. “Everything, far as the eye can see, used to be city. No place you've ever heard of either, just an endless sprawl of no-name tract housing, malls, petty manufacturing, sewage treatment plants. And now—”

“Turn off your ‘dogs,” Nick said.

“What?”

“Let's be alone, you and I. Turn off the ‘dogs.”

“No.”

He picked up a stick, scraped a line in the dirt. “What are you afraid of?”

She looked at him again. Those unfathomable green eyes.

“My husband.”

“You have a husband?”

“It's a complicated story.”

“Tell me.”

For a long moment she was silent, gathering her thoughts.

Then she said, “You and I are alike in some ways. We're both orphans. Only my family didn't die of cholera or malaria or typhoid fever. They were killed by Sacred Vaccine.”

“I don't—”

“It was a religious cult. There were dozens just like it.

They thought the human race was facing extinction. So they decided to fight back against the microbes with human sacrifice. Does that make any sense to you?”

“Well, in a way, yeah. You're afraid, so you take control by becoming what you fear.”

“My family was lucky—three kids, all healthy. My parents took us out into the country, to isolate us from what was going on. They had enough money to do that.”

Nick nodded. He knew the type well enough. She was a plague heiress—one of those who stood at the confluence where several streams of inheritance ran together. She'd probably never had to work in her life.

“One day there was a knock on the door. It was our neighbors. They killed everyone but me. I was the youngest.

They smeared their sacred sign on my forehead with blood and then married me to one of their members. Then they let me go. I was only five years old. Joshua—my husband—was seven.”

“I'm sorry,” Nick said.

“I'm not looking for your sympathy. I've had time enough to work things through. The bad times are over. I like my life.

Only ... my parents were pacifists. I'm not.” She balled a and rapped him on the chest with it, just a little too hard.

“Keep that in mind.”

“So this Joshua—he's been bothering you?”

“He—”

A sudden baying rose up in the distance. Selene shot to her feet, listening. The baying was answered by a second, a third, until all the dogs were howling.

Selene quickly donned her goggles. “Isn't that a lovely sound?”

“Yes.” It was.

“It's a recording. The breed that bayed like that died out during the plague decades. Lost, like so many things that lacked the people to keep them going.” She scanned the horizon, matching mountains to her goggles’ mapping graphics. Then she pointed. “That way. That's where they'll drive him. Come on—run!”

* * * *

“Down this way!”

Selene had tied her jacket around her waist. It made a tail that leaped like a flag as she bounded down the slope of the ravine. Nick followed clumsily.

At the bottom, she showed him where to stand, between two trees. “The ‘dogs will run him right past you. Be careful not to get in his way! Those antlers are sharp. The hooves can do real damage. Over here, the lead will present to him.

He'll shy and rear. That leaves his throat vulnerable. I'll be aiming for his carotid artery.” She showed him where it was on her own throat.

“Is that all you're using? That knife?”

“When I'm running ‘dogs, yes. Otherwise, I use a bow.”

Nick barely had time to catch his breath when the woods erupted with baying ‘dogs. Something large crashed noisily through the brush, coming straight toward him. Then the stag burst from the bushes, wild-eyed and enormous. The ‘dogs were baying and snapping at its flank.

He stepped back automatically. The hunt swept right past him. Selene laughed, and stepped in its path.

She was magnificent.

A ‘dog slipped around front of the stag and, bracing its legs, cried a challenge. As predicted, the beast reared back.

Selene leaped at the animal, seizing its antlers. One hand went to her belt. The other pulled back, so that the stag's long neck arched. The gundogs were snarling and leaping.

Her hunting knife slashed and slashed again.

Blood sprayed everywhere. Warm flecks of it spattered his shirt and stung his face.

When the stag died, the gundogs all fell silent at once. It was eerie. Selene stepped backed from the beast, taking a deep breath. “Look at that—a six-pointer.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you all right?” she asked. “You're trembling.”

I think I'm in love, he wanted to say. And, no, it's not all right, it's not all right at all. But instead, “No, really. I'm fine.”

Selene laughed. “It's always like that—your first time.”

* * * *

Selene gutted the beast, then slung it over her shoulders.

When Nick offered to help, she laughed at him.

Back home, she hung up the carcass to cure on a frame behind the house. “Come on inside,” she said, “and we'll get cleaned up.”

When Selene came out of the bathroom, toweling her hair, she wore a baby-blue bathrobe, loosely cinched. Just looking at how her body moved within it made him hard.

“Well,” Nick said. “I guess it's my turn at the tub.”

She looked at him steadily, wordlessly. Without warning, she hooked an ankle behind him and gave him a two-handed shove. He fell back onto the couch.

Then she was on top of him, pushing up his shirt, tugging at his belt, shoving his trousers down to his knees. Before he knew what was going on, she had him inside of her and was humping him, humping him, humping him.

It was almost rape. He wasn't at all sure he liked it at first.

Then he was, and wanted it to last forever. And then it was over.

Then she took him into the bedroom and they made love again. More slowly this time.

“Don't expect much,” she said afterward. “I don't like entanglements.”

“Entanglements?”

“Men, then. I don't much like men.”

“Do you want me to leave?” Nick asked.

“Oh, stay till morning. I'll make you breakfast.” She rolled over and went to sleep.

The ‘dogs padded quietly, alertly, in and out of the room, on constant patrol.

* * * *

Nick got up in the middle of the night. Selene was still asleep. Moonlight flooded the room.

Silently, he put his clothes on.

The central command unit for the gundogs emitted a hum in the 330-hertz range. He was sensitive to things like that.

He used the sound to find the unit, disguised as a lingerie chest, and flicked the kill switch, deactivating everything. The hum died.

She had never bothered to ask him what he did for a living. This was what he did. He sold and installed security systems.

He picked up her hunting knife.

There was a slight rustling noise. He turned and saw Selene looking at him.

Quietly, she asked, “Is there something wrong?”

Nick could feel her fear. He wanted to put down the knife and reassure her. Instead, he said, “Get out of bed.”

Selene pushed the covers aside and stood, naked and vulnerable. She knew who he was now. “Joshua...”

“It's Nick now. I changed my name when I was released. I wanted to put the past behind me.”

“Nick. The plagues are over.”

“That's what I used to think. But diseases mutate. They can adapt too fast for man's technology to keep up with.” He found that talking gave him confidence. He felt that he was on the right track at last. “That's what brought on the great die-back: arrogance, pride, and broad-spectrum antibiotics.

For a century, every disease was fought back to insignificance with drugs so widely prescribed that people thought epidemics weren't supposed to happen. Then the diseases adapted, resisted, and returned.

“Now you think that because we've suppressed the germs and viruses again, we've got the evil under control. But it's only come back with another name. Look at you! You're infected with the great dark thing called fear. You're so rotten with it you're shaking. My family was right. It never goes away. You can hide out here in the woods, you can surround yourself with gundogs. But it knows where you live. It knows when you're helpless. Sooner or later, it comes for you.” Nick gestured with the knife. “Let's go outside.”

He walked her out to where the deer carcass hung curing.

The ground beneath it was dark with blood. “That's far enough. Stay there, with your back to me.”

She obeyed. This was what fear did to you. She was stronger than he was, and faster too. But she obeyed.

“I suppose you're going to kill me.” Her voice almost broke on the penultimate word, but otherwise betrayed no emotion whatsoever.

“No.” Nick drew in a long breath, exhaled. “I'm going to kill myself. I thought you'd want to see it.”

Astonished, she spun around. He had the knife to his throat by then. The carotid artery. He'd seen how well that worked.

“They said I was cured, and released me. I got a job. I even had a girlfriend for a while. But then I started sending you those letters. The disease had returned.” The knife tickled his throat unpleasantly. “I've been thinking about this for a long time.”

“Why involve me?  What are you doing here,  goddammit?”

“It took me years to understand what my parents were trying to do. It's called the ceremony of triage: Inoculate the healthy. Leave the dying to their fate. Shoot the infected.

Okay, it's loony. If you think of it as a way of minimizing pain, it makes a lot of—”

“Pain! What do you know about pain?” She splayed her hands across the flesh under her ribs and twisted around so he could see the scar between them. It was puckered and deep. Somehow, he hadn't noticed it when they'd screwed. “I was gored by a buck. He shoved his fucking antler right through me. Do you have any idea how much that hurt?”

“You—”

“It hurt a lot. I almost died then. I was lucky to make it back to the road. I was lucky that somebody came along in a car. I was lucky he stopped. I was so god-damned lucky I had no business complaining when it got infected and almost killed me a second time. But I did. Because—you know what?—it hurt like hell. And you've got the nerve to talk about pain!”

Nick didn't know what to say.

“When I got out of the hospital, I was afraid to hunt. The pain had been that bad. Afraid to hunt! So you know what I did?”

He shook his head.

“I went out and tracked down that exact same buck, and I killed it. I was terrified, but I faced up to my fear. I faced up to it, and I conquered it.”

She was ablaze with anger. “You've got a problem. You're afraid. Well, join the club! I didn't give in to my fear. I faced it down. Why can't you?”

Nick took the knife down from his throat. He looked down at it, heavy and useless in his hand, for a long moment. Then he tossed it away, into darkness.

“I'm sorry,” he said at last. “I'll leave now.”

* * * *

On the road from the house, Nick felt a strange sensation seize him. He had no name for it. But, though the woods were dark and silent about him, they didn't oppress him.

A sense of futility still clung to him, and he knew he had a long way to go. But suddenly he knew what that nameless thing was called.

Hope.

The lights came on behind him. He heard the whine of gundogs powering up, and then the frantic sound of the machines running for their appointed guardposts.

He thought how easily the devices could tear him apart.

They'd do that on command. But he didn't look back. He wouldn't give in to the fear.

Never again.

Nick took a deep breath, and for the first time in his life felt free. He wanted to laugh and caper. He wanted to turn right around and make love with Selene again. The night was no longer threatening, but dark and filled with promise.

Selene was right! He could face down his fears. Someday he might even master them.

Metal paws sped through the night. A gundog sped past and, wheeling, sat waiting for him in the road.

It was Otto; he knew by the markings. The ‘dog opened his mouth. What emerged was not the gruff mechanical voice Nick expected, but Selene's clear, calm soprano.

“Turn around, Nick.”

He turned.

Selene stood in the yard before her house. In the light that spilled from the windows, her face was white as bone, her eye sockets black as ink. She'd thrown on a blouse, but hadn't bothered to button it. He could see pale flesh all the way from her neck to her crotch.

She held a bow in her hand.

Shadows swarmed about her feet—gundogs, eager for her command.

“Selene—”

“You can't give in to what you fear,” she said. “You have to face it down. And kill it.”

There was a strange noise, like cloth tearing, and an arrow appeared in the dirt at his feet.

“I'll give you a head start. If you start running now, you just might make it back to the spa.”

She nocked another arrow into her bow.

Nick took a step, another, found himself running. The road was flat and empty before him. He turned, and plunged into the brush at its side. Twigs slashed his face and grabbed at his clothes. He paid them no mind. He thought only of escape.

Behind him, one by one, the ‘dogs began to bay.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF DARKNESS

David Langford

It was always dark outside the windows. Parents and teachers sometimes said vaguely that this was all because of Deep Green terrorists, but Jonathan thought there was more to the story. The other members of the Shudder Club agreed.

The dark beyond the window-glass at home, at school and on the school bus was the second kind of darkness. You could often see a little bit in the first kind, the ordinary kind, and of course you could slice through it with a torch. The second sort of darkness was utter black, and not even the brightest electric torch showed a visible beam or lit anything up. Whenever Jonathan watched his friends walk out through the school door ahead of him, it was as though they stepped into a solid black wall. But when he followed them and felt blindly along the handrail to where the homeward bus would be waiting, there was nothing around him but empty air. Black air.

Sometimes you found these super-dark places indoors. Right now Jonathan was edging his way down a black corridor, one of the school's no-go areas. Officially he was supposed to be outside, mucking around for a break period in the high-walled playground where (oddly enough) it wasn't dark at all and you could see the sky overhead. Of course, outdoors was no place for the dread secret initiations of the Shudder Club.

Jonathan stepped out on the far side of the corridor's inky-dark section, and quietly opened the door of the little storeroom they'd found two terms ago. Inside, the air was warm, dusty and stale. A bare light-bulb hung from the ceiling. The others were already there, sitting on boxes of paper and stacks of battered textbooks.

`You're late,' chorused Gary, Julie and Khalid. The new candidate Heather just pushed back long blonde hair and smiled, a slightly strained smile.

`Someone has to be last,' said Jonathan. The words had become part of the ritual, like a secret password that proved that the last one to arrive wasn't an outsider or a spy. Of course they all knew each other, but imagine a spy who was a master of disguise....

Khalid solemnly held up an innocent-looking ring-binder. That was his privilege. The Club had been his idea, after he'd found the bogey picture that someone had left behind in the school photocopier. Maybe he'd read too many stories about ordeals and secret initiations. When you'd stumbled on such a splendid ordeal, you simply had to invent a secret society to use it.

`We are the Shudder Club,' Khalid intoned. `We are the ones who can take it. Twenty seconds.'

Jonathan's eyebrows went up. Twenty seconds was serious. Gary, the fat boy of the gang, just nodded and concentrated on his watch. Khalid opened the binder and stared at the thing inside. `One ... two ... three ...'

He almost made it. It was past the seventeen-second mark when Khalid's hands started to twitch and shudder, and then his arms. He dropped the book, and Gary gave him a final count of eighteen. There was a pause while Khalid overcame the shakes and pulled himself together, and then they congratulated him on a new record.

Julie and Gary weren't feeling so ambitious, and opted for ten-second ordeals. They both got through, though by the count of ten she was terribly white in the face and he was sweating great drops. So Jonathan felt he had to say ten as well.

`You sure, Jon?' said Gary. `Last time you were on eight. No need to push it today.'

Jonathan quoted the ritual words, `We are the ones who can take it,' and took the ring-binder from Gary. `Ten.'

In between times, you always forgot exactly what the bogey picture looked like. It always seemed new. It was an abstract black-and-white pattern, swirly and flickery like one of those old Op Art designs. The shape was almost pretty until the whole thing got into your head with a shock of connection like touching a high-voltage wire. It messed with your eyesight. It messed with your brain. Jonathan felt violent static behind his eyes ... an electrical storm raging somewhere in there ... instant fever singing through the blood ... muscles locking and unlocking ... and oh dear God had Gary only counted four?

He held on somehow, forcing himself to keep still when every part of him wanted to twitch in different directions. The dazzle of the bogey picture was fading behind a new kind of darkness, a shadow inside his eyes, and he knew with dreadful certainty that he was going to faint or be sick or both. He gave in and shut his eyes just as, unbelievably and after what had seemed like years, the count reached ten.

Jonathan felt too limp and drained to pay much attention as Heather came close -- but not close enough -- to the five seconds you needed to be a full member of the Club. She blotted her eyes with a violently trembling hand. She was sure she'd make it next time. And then Khalid closed the meeting with the quotation he'd found somewhere: `That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.'

*****

School was a place where mostly they taught you stuff that had nothing to do with the real world. Jonathan secretly reckoned that quadratic equations just didn't ever happen outside the classroom. So it came as a surprise to the Club when things started getting interesting in, of all places, a maths class.

Mr Whitcutt was quite old, somewhere between grandfather and retirement age, and didn't mind straying away from the official maths course once in a while. You had to lure him with the right kind of question. Little Harry Steen -- the chess and wargames fanatic of the class, and under consideration for the Club -- scored a brilliant success by asking about a news item he'd heard at home. It was something to do with `mathwar', and terrorists using things called blits.

`I actually knew Vernon Berryman slightly,' said Mr Whitcutt, which didn't seem at all promising. But it got better. `He's the B in blit, you know: B-L-I-T, the Berryman Logical Imaging Technique, as he called it. Very advanced mathematics. Over your heads, probably. Back in the first half of the twentieth century, two great mathematicians called Gödel and Turing proved theorems which ... um. Well, one way of looking at it is that mathematics is booby-trapped. For any computer at all, there are certain problems that will crash it and stop it dead.'

Half the class nodded knowingly. Their home-made computer programs so often did exactly that.

`Berryman was another brilliant man, and an incredible idiot. Right at the end of the twentieth century, he said to himself, "What if there are problems that crash the human brain?" And he went out and found one, and came up with his wretched "imaging technique" that makes it a problem you can't ignore. Just looking at a BLIT pattern, letting in through your optic nerves, can stop your brain.' A click of old, knotty fingers. `Like that.'

Jonathan and the Club looked sidelong at each other. They knew something about staring at strange images. It was Harry, delighted to have stolen all this time from boring old trig., who stuck his hand up first. `Er, did this Berryman look at his own pattern, then?'

Mr Whitcutt gave a gloomy nod. `The story is that he did. By accident, and it killed him stone dead. It's ironic. For centuries, people had been writing ghost stories about things so awful that just looking at them makes you die of fright. And then a mathematician, working in the purest and most abstract of all the sciences, goes and brings the stories to life....'

He grumbled on about BLIT terrorists like the Deep Greens, who didn't need guns and explosives -- just a photocopier, or a stencil that let them spray deadly graffiti on walls. According to Whitcutt, TV broadcasts used to go out `live', not taped, until the notorious activist Tee Zero broke into a BBC studio and showed the cameras a BLIT known as the Parrot. Millions had died. It wasn't safe to look at anything these days.

Jonathan had to ask. `So the, um, the special kind of dark outdoors is to stop people seeing stuff like that?'

`Well ... yes, in effect that's quite right.' The old teacher rubbed his chin for a moment. `They brief you about all that when you're a little older. It's a bit of a complicated issue.... Ah, another question?'

It was Khalid who had his hand up. With an elaborate lack of interest that struck Jonathan as desperately unconvincing, he said, `Are all these BLIT things, er, really dangerous, or are there ones that just jolt you a bit?'

Mr Whitcutt looked at him hard for very nearly the length of a beginner's ordeal. Then he turned to the whiteboard with its scrawled triangles. `Quite. As I was saying, the cosine of an angle is defined ...'

*****

The four members of the inner circle had drifted casually together in their special corner of the outdoor play area, by the dirty climbing frame that no one ever used. `So we're terrorists,' said Julie cheerfully. `We should give ourselves up to the police.'

`No, our picture's different,' Gary said. `It doesn't kill people, it ...'

A chorus of four voices: `... makes us stronger.'

Jonathan said, `What do Deep Greens terrorize about? I mean, what don't they like?'

`I think it's biochips,' Khalid said uncertainly. `Tiny computers for building into people's heads. They say it's unnatural, or something. There was a bit about it in one of those old issues of New Scientist in the lab.'

`Be good for exams,' Jonathan suggested. `But you can't take calculators into the exam room. "Everyone with a biochip, please leave your head at the door."'

They all laughed, but Jonathan felt a tiny shiver of uncertainty, as though he'd stepped on a stair that wasn't there. `Biochip' sounded very like something he'd overheard in one of his parents' rare shouting matches. And he was pretty sure he'd heard `unnatural' too. Please don't let Mum and Dad be tangled up with terrorists, he thought suddenly. But it was too silly. They weren't like that....

`There was something about control systems too,' said Khalid. `You wouldn't want to be controlled, now.'

As usual, the chatter soon went off in a new direction, or rather an old one: the walls of type-two darkness that the school used to mark off-limits areas like the corridor leading to the old storeroom. The Club were curious about how it worked, and had done some experiments. Some of the things they knew about the dark and had written down were:

Khalid's Visibility Theory, which had been proved by painful experiment. Dark zones were brilliant hiding places when it came to hiding from other kids, but teachers could spot you even through the blackness and tick you off something rotten for being where you shouldn't be. Probably they had some kind of special detector, but no one had ever seen one.

Jonathan's Bus Footnote to Khalid's discovery was simply that the driver of the school bus certainly looked as if he was seeing something through the black windscreen. Of course (this was Gary's idea) the bus might be computer-guided, with the steering wheel turning all by itself and the driver just pretending -- but why should he bother?

Julie's Mirror was the weirdest thing of all. Even Julie hadn't believed it could work, but if you stood outside a type-two dark place and held a mirror just inside (so it looked as though your arm was cut off by the black wall), you could shine a torch at the place where you couldn't see the mirror, and the beam would come bouncing back out of the blackness to make a bright spot on your clothes or the wall. As Jonathan pointed out, this was how you could have bright patches of sunlight on the floor of a classroom whose windows all looked out into protecting darkness. It was a kind of dark that light could travel through but eyesight couldn't. None of the Optics textbooks said a word about it.

By now, Harry had had his Club invitation and was counting the minutes to his first meeting on Thursday, two days away. Perhaps he would have some ideas for new experiments when he'd passed his ordeal and joined the Club. Harry was extra good at maths and physics.

`Which makes it sort of interesting,' Gary said. `If our picture works by maths like those BLIT things ... will Harry be able to take it for longer because his brain's built that way? Or will it be harder because it's coming on his own wavelength? Sort of thing?'

The Shudder Club reckoned that, although of course you shouldn't do experiments on people, this was a neat idea that you could argue either side of. And they did.

*****

Thursday came, and after an eternity of history and double physics there was a free period that you were supposed to spend reading or in computer studies. Nobody knew it would be the Shudderers' last initiation, although Julie -- who read heaps of fantasy novels -- insisted later that she'd felt all doom-laden and could sense a powerful reek of wrongness. Julie tended to say things like that.

The session in the musty storeroom began pretty well, with Khalid reaching his twenty seconds at last, Jonathan sailing beyond the count of ten which only a few weeks ago had felt like an impossible Everest, and (to carefully muted clapping) Heather finally becoming a full member of the Club. Then the trouble began, as Harry the first-timer adjusted his little round glasses, set his shoulders, opened the tatty ritual ring-binder, and went rigid. Not twitchy or shuddery, but stiff. He made horrible grunts and pig-squeals, and fell sideways. Blood trickled from his mouth.

`He's bitten his tongue,' said Heather. `Oh lord, what's first aid for biting your tongue?'

At this point the storeroom door opened and Mr Whitcutt came in. He looked older and sadder. `I might have known it would be like this.' Suddenly he turned his eyes sideways and shaded them with one hand, as though blinded by strong light. `Cover it up. Shut your eyes, Patel, don't look at it, and just cover that damned thing up.'

Khalid did as he was told. They helped Harry to his feet: he kept saying `Sorry, sorry,' in a thick voice, and dribbling like a vampire with awful table manners. The long march through the uncarpeted, echoey corridors to the school's little sickroom, and then onward to the Principal's office, seemed to go on for endless grim hours.

Ms Fortmayne the Principal was an iron-grey woman who according to school rumours was kind to animals but could reduce any pupil to ashes with a few sharp sentences -- a kind of human BLIT. She looked across her desk at the Shudder Club for one eternity of a moment, and said sharply: `Whose idea was it?'

Khalid slowly put up a brown hand, but no higher than his shoulder. Jonathan remembered the Three Musketeers's motto, One for all and all for one, and said, `It was all of us really.' So Julie added, `That's right.'

`I really don't know,' said the Principal, tapping the closed ring-binder that lay in front of her. `The single most insidious weapon on Earth -- the information-war equivalent of a neutron bomb -- and you were playing with it. I don't often say that words fail me ...'

`Someone left it in the photocopier. Here. Downstairs,' Khalid pointed out.

`Yes. Mistakes do happen.' Her face softened a little. `And I'm getting carried away, because we do actually use that BLIT image as part of a little talk I have with older children when they're about to leave school. They're exposed to it for just two seconds, with proper medical supervision. Its nickname is the Trembler, and some countries use big posters of it for riot control -- but not Britain or America, naturally. Of course you couldn't have known that Harry Steen is a borderline epileptic or that the Trembler would give him a fit....'

`I should have guessed sooner,' said Mr Whitcutt's voice from behind the Club. `Young Patel blew the gaff by asking what was either a very intelligent question or a very incriminating one. But I'm an old fool who never got used to the idea of a school being a terrorist target.'

The Principal gave him a sharp look. Jonathan felt suddenly dizzy, with thoughts clicking through his head like one of those workings in algebra where everything goes just right and you can almost see the answer waiting in the white space at the bottom of the page. What don't Deep Green terrorists like? Why are we a target?

Control systems. You wouldn't want to be controlled.

He blurted: `Biochips. We've got biochip control systems in our heads. All us kids. They make the darkness somehow. The special dark where grown-ups can still see.'

There was a moment's frozen silence.

`Go to the top of the class,' murmured old Whitcutt.

The Principal sighed and seemed to sag in her chair a little. `There had to be a first time,' she said quietly. `This is what my little lecture to school-leavers is all about. How you're specially privileged children, how you've been protected all your lives by biochips in your optic nerves that edit what you can see. So it always seems dark in the streets and outside the windows, wherever there might be a BLIT image waiting to kill you. But that kind of darkness isn't real -- except to you. Remember, your parents had a choice, and they agreed to this protection.'

Mine didn't both agree, thought Jonathan, remembering an overheard quarrel.

`It's not fair,' said Gary uncertainly. `It's doing experiments on people.'

Khalid said, `And it's not just protection. There are corridors here indoors that are blacked out, just to keep us out of places. To control us.'

Ms Fortmayne chose not to hear them. Maybe she had a biochip of her own that stopped rebellious remarks from getting through. `When you leave school you are given full control over your biochips. You can choose whether to take risks ... once you're old enough.'

Jonathan could almost bet that all five Club members were thinking the same thing: What the hell, we took our risks with the Trembler and we got away with it.

Apparently they had indeed got away with it, since when the Principal said `You can go now,' she'd still mentioned nothing about punishment. As slowly as they dared, the Club headed back to the classroom. Whenever they passed side-turnings which were filled with solid darkness, Jonathan cringed to think that a chip behind his eyes was stealing the light and with different programming could make him blind to everything, everywhere.

*****

The seriously nasty thing happened at going-home time, when the caretaker unlocked the school's side door as usual while a crowd of pupils jostled behind him. Jonathan and the Club had pushed their way almost to the front of the mob. The heavy wooden door swung inward. As usual it opened on the second kind of darkness, but something bad from the dark came in with it, a large sheet of paper fixed with a drawing-pin to the door's outer surface and hanging slightly askew. The caretaker glanced at it, and toppled like a man struck by lightning.

Jonathan didn't stop to think. He shoved past some smaller kid and grabbed the paper, crumpling it up frantically. It was already too late. He'd seen the image there, completely unlike the Trembler yet very clearly from the same terrible family, a slanted dark shape like the profile of a perched bird, but with complications, twirly bits, patterns like fractals, and it hung there blazing in his mind's eye and wouldn't go away --

-- something hard and horrible smashing like a runaway express into his brain --

-- burning falling burning falling --

-- BLIT.

*****

After long and evil dreams of bird-shapes that stalked him in darkness, Jonathan found himself lying on a couch, no, a bed in the school sickroom. It was a surprise to be anywhere at all, after feeling his whole life crashing into that enormous full stop. He was still limp all over, too tired to do more than stare at the white ceiling.

Mr Whitcutt's face came slowly into his field of vision. `Hello? Hello? Anyone in there?' He sounded worried.

`Yes ... I'm fine,' said Jonathan, not quite truthfully.

`Thank heaven for that. Nurse Baker was amazed you were alive. Alive and sane seemed like too much to hope for. Well, I'm here to warn you that you're a hero. Plucky Boy Saves Fellow-Pupils. You'll be surprised how quickly you can get sick of being called plucky.'

`What was it, on the door?'

`One of the very bad ones. Called the Parrot, for some reason. Poor old George the caretaker was dead before he hit the ground. The anti-terrorist squad that came to dispose of that BLIT paper couldn't believe you'd survived. Neither could I.'

Jonathan smiled. `I've had practice.'

`Yes. It didn't take that long to realize Lucy -- that is, Ms Fortmayne -- failed to ask you young hooligans enough questions. So I had another word with your friend Khalid Patel. God in heaven, that boy can outstare the Trembler for twenty seconds! Adult crowds fall over in convulsions once they've properly, what d'you call it, registered the sight, let it lock in....'

`My record's ten and a half. Nearly eleven really.'

The old man shook his head wonderingly. `I wish I could say I didn't believe you. They'll be re-assessing the whole biochip protection programme. No one ever thought of training young, flexible minds to resist BLIT attack by a sort of vaccination process. If they'd thought of it, they still wouldn't have dared try it.... Anyway, Lucy and I had a talk, and we have a little present for you. They can reprogram those biochips by radio in no time at all, and so --'

He pointed. Jonathan made an effort and turned his head. Through the window, where he'd expected to see only artificial darkness, there was a complication of rosy light and glory that at first his eyes couldn't take in. A little at a time, assembling itself like some kind of healing opposite to those deadly patterns, the abstract brilliance of heaven became a town roofscape glowing in a rose-red sunset. Even the chimney-pots and satellite dishes looked beautiful. He'd seen sunsets on video, of course, but it wasn't the same, it was the aching difference between live flame and an electric fire's dull glare: like so much of the adult world, the TV screen lied by what it didn't tell you.

`The other present is from your pals. They said they're sorry there wasn't time to get anything better.'

It was a small, somewhat bent bar of chocolate (Gary always had a few tucked away), with a card written in Julie's careful left-sloping script and signed by all the Shudder Club. The inscription was, of course: That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.

THE GHOST PIT

Stephen Baxter

It’s a hot summer Tuesday and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops it and squirts at his website to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: he’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

He wonders who it’s going to be.

Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij ’t IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter of lip-curlingly sour geuze. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks–maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar–are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long cool shadows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he’s going to meet a man who he can talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first century style, and forget about his personal problems.

He’s ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low bandwidth high sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him and says his name: "Manfred Macx?"

He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned smooth-running muscles clad in a paen to polymer technology: electric blue lycra and wasp-yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti-collision LEDs and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam, his ex-fiancée.

"I’m Macx," he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her barcode reader. "Who’s it from?"

"FedEx." The voice isn’t Pam. She dumps the box in his lap, then she’s back over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum emissions.

Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it’s a disposable supermarket phone, paid for in cash: cheap, untraceable and efficient. It can even do conference calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks and grifters everywhere.

The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone, mildly annoyed. "Yes, who is this?"

The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody in this decade of cheap online translation services. "Manfred. Am please to meet you; wish to personalize interface, make friends, no? Have much to offer."

"Who are you?" Manfred repeats suspiciously.

"Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU."

"I think your translator’s broken." He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as if it’s made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line.

"Nyet–no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software. Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?"

Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "You taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"

"Da, was easy: spawn billion-node neural network and download Tellytubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."

"Let me get this straight. You’re the KGB’s core AI, but you’re afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?" Manfred pauses in mid-stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller-blader.

"Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect."

Manfred stops dead in the street: "Oh man, you’ve got the wrong free enterprise broker here. I don’t work for the government. I’m strictly private." A rogue advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy and spams glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation window–which is blinking–for a moment before a phage guns it and spawns a new filter. Manfred leans against a shop front, massaging his forehead and eyeballing a display of antique brass doorknockers. "Have you cleared this with the State Department?"

"Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-USSR. State Department is not help us."

"Well, if you hadn’t given it to them for safe-keeping during the nineties. . . ." Manfred is tapping his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way out of this conversation. A camera winks at him from atop a street light; he waves, wondering idly if it’s the KGB or the traffic police. He is waiting for directions to the party, which should arrive within the next half an hour, and this cold war retread is bumming him out. "Look, I don’t deal with the G-men. I hate the military industrial complex. They’re zero-sum cannibals." A thought occurs to him. "If survival is what you’re after, I could post your state vector to Eternity: then nobody could delete you–"

"Nyet!" The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it’s possible to sound over a GSM link. "Am not open source!"

"We have nothing to talk about, then." Manfred punches the hang-up button and throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits the water and there’s a pop of deflagrating LiION cells. "Fucking cold war hang-over losers," he swears under his breath, quite angry now. "Fucking capitalist spooks." Russia has been back under the thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its brief flirtation with anarcho-capitalism replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme, and it’s no surprise that the wall’s crumbling–but it looks like they haven’t learned anything from the collapse of capitalism. They still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector. See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the program! Only the generous survive! But the KGB won’t get the message. He’s dealt with old-time commie weak-AI’s before, minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School economics: they’re so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of capitalism in the industrial age that they can’t surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term.

Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he’s going to patent next.

Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee’s travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines who he’s never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy does he patent a lot–although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.

In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain–not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki maths borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he’s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.

Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with wacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.

There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock–he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him continuously because they don’t believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And there exist items that no money can’t buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasn’t spoken to them for three years: his father thinks he’s a hippie scrounger and his mother still hasn’t forgiven him for dropping out of his down-market Harvard emulation course. His fiancée and sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically, she’s a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all over the globe trying to persuade open source entrepreneurs to come home and go commercial for the good of the Treasury department.) To cap it all, the Southern Baptist Conventions have denounced him as a minion of Satan on all their websites. Which would be funny, if it wasn’t for the dead kittens one of their followers–he presumes it’s one of their followers–keeps mailing him.

Manfred drops in at his hotel suite, unpacks his Aineko, plugs in a fresh set of cells to charge, and sticks most of his private keys in the safe. Then he heads straight for the party, which is currently happening at De Wildemann’s; it’s a twenty minute walk and the only real hazard is dodging the trams that sneak up on him behind the cover of his moving map display.

Along the way his glasses bring him up to date on the news. Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: they’re using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. In San Diego, researchers are uploading lobsters into cyberspace, starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one neuron at a time. They’re burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Edinburgh. NASA still can’t put a man on the moon. Russia has re-elected the communist government with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile in China fevered rumors circulate about an imminent re-habilitation, the second coming of Mao, who will save them from the consequences of the Three Gorges disaster. In business news, the US government is outraged at the Baby Bills–who have automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPO’ing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that by the time the injunctions are signed the targets don’t exist any more.

Welcome to the twenty-first century.

The permanent floating meatspace party has taken over the back of De Wildemann’s, a three hundred year old brown café with a beer menu that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer’s yeast, and melatonin spray: half the dotters are nursing monster jetlag hangovers, and the other half are babbling a eurotrash creole at each other while they work on the hangover. "Man did you see that? He looks like a Stallmanite!" exclaims one whitebread hanger-on who’s currently propping up the bar. Manfred slides in next to him, catches the bartender’s eye.

"Glass of the berlinnerweise, please," he says.

"You drink that stuff?" asks the hanger-on, curling a hand protectively around his Coke: "man, you don’t want to do that! It’s full of alcohol!"

Manfred grins at him toothily. "Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up: lots of neurotransmitter precursors, phenylalanine and glutamate."

"But I thought that was a beer you were ordering. . . ."

Manfred’s away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one of the hipper floaters has planted a capacitative transfer bug on it, and all the handshake vCard’s that have visited the bar in the past three hours are queueing for attention. The air is full of bluetooth as he scrolls through a dizzying mess of public keys.

"Your drink." The barman holds out an improbable-looking goblet full of blue liquid with a cap of melting foam and a felching straw stuck out at some crazy angle. Manfred takes it and heads for the back of the split-level bar, up the steps to a table where some guy with greasy dreadlocks is talking to a suit from Paris. The hanger-on at the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide eyes: nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door.

Oh shit, thinks Macx, better buy some more server PIPS. He can recognize the signs: he’s about to be slashdotted. He gestures at the table: "this one taken?"

"Be my guest," says the guy with the dreads. Manfred slides the chair open then realizes that the other guy–immaculate double-breasted suit, sober tie, crew-cut–is a girl. Mr. Dreadlock nods. "You’re Macx? I figured it was about time we met."

"Sure." Manfred holds out a hand and they shake. Manfred realizes the hand belongs to Bob Franklin, a Research Triangle startup monkey with a VC track record, lately moving into micromachining and space technology: he made his first million two decades ago and now he’s a specialist in extropian investment fields. Manfred has known Bob for nearly a decade via a closed mailing list. The Suit silently slides a business card across the table; a little red devil brandishes a trident at him, flames jetting up around its feet. He takes the card, raises an eyebrow: "Annette Dimarcos? I’m pleased to meet you. Can’t say I’ve ever met anyone from Arianespace marketing before."

She smiles, humorlessly; "that is convenient, all right. I have not the pleasure of meeting the famous venture altruist before." Her accent is noticeably Parisian, a pointed reminder that she’s making a concession to him just by talking. Her camera earrings watch him curiously, encoding everything for the company channels.

"Yes, well." He nods cautiously. "Bob. I assume you’re in on this ball?"

Franklin nods; beads clatter. "Yeah, man. Ever since the Teledesic smash it’s been, well, waiting. If you’ve got something for us, we’re game."

"Hmm." The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons and slightly less cheap high-altitude solar-powered drones with spread-spectrum laser relays. "The depression’s got to end some time: but," a nod to Annette from Paris, "with all due respect, I don’t think the break will involve one of the existing club carriers."

"Arianespace is forward-looking. We face reality. The launch cartel cannot stand. Bandwidth is not the only market force in space. We must explore new opportunities. I personally have helped us diversify into submarine reactor engineering, microgravity nanotechnology fabrication, and hotel management." Her face is a well-polished mask as she recites the company line: "we are more flexible than the American space industry. . . ."

Manfred shrugs. "That’s as may be." He sips his Berlinerweisse slowly as she launches into a long, stilted explanation of how Arianespace is a diversified dot com with orbital aspirations, a full range of merchandising spin-offs, Bond movie sets, and a promising motel chain in French Guyana. Occasionally he nods.

Someone else sidles up to the table; a pudgy guy in an outrageously loud Hawaiian shirt with pens leaking in a breast pocket, and the worst case of ozone-hole burn Manfred’s seen in ages. "Hi, Bob," says the new arrival. "How’s life?"

" ’S good." Franklin nodes at Manfred; "Manfred, meet Ivan MacDonald. Ivan, Manfred. Have a seat?" He leans over. "Ivan’s a public arts guy. He’s heavily into extreme concrete."

"Rubberized concrete," Ivan says, slightly too loudly. "Pink rubberized concrete."

"Ah!" He’s somehow triggered a priority interrupt: Annette from Ariannespace drops out of marketing zombiehood, sits up, and shows signs of possessing a non-corporate identity: "you are he who rubberized the Reichstag, yes? With the supercritical carbon dioxide carrier and the dissolved polymethoxysilanes?" She claps her hands: "wonderful!"

"He rubberized what?" Manfred mutters in Bob’s ear.

Franklin shrugs. "Limestone, concrete, he doesn’t seem to know the difference. Anyway, Germany doesn’t have an independent government any more, so who’d notice?"

"I thought I was thirty seconds ahead of the curve," Manfred complains. "Buy me another drink?"

"I’m going to rubberize Three Gorges!" Ivan explains loudly.

Just then a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred’s head and sends clumps of humongous pixellation flickering across his sensorium: around the world five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. "I really came here to talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I’ve just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?"

"Sure, man." Bob waves at the bar. "More of the same all round!" At the next table a person with make-up and long hair who’s wearing a dress–Manfred doesn’t want to speculate about the gender of these crazy mixed-up Euros–is reminiscing about wiring the fleshpots of Tehran for cybersex. Two collegiate-looking dudes are arguing intensely in German: the translation stream in his glasses tell him they’re arguing over whether the Turing Test is a Jim Crow law that violates European corpus juris standards on human rights. The beer arrives and Bob slides the wrong one across to Manfred: "here, try this. You’ll like it."

"Okay." It’s some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy superoxides: just inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like there’s a fire alarm in his nose screaming danger, Will Robinson! Cancer! Cancer! "Yeah, right. Did I say I nearly got mugged on my way here?"

"Mugged? Hey, that’s heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had stopped–did they sell you anything?"

"No, but they weren’t your usual marketing type. You know anyone who can use a Warpac surplus espionage AI? Recent model, one careful owner, slightly paranoid but basically sound?"

"No. Oh boy! The NSA wouldn’t like that."

"What I thought. Poor thing’s probably unemployable, anyway."

"The space biz."

"Ah, yeah. The space biz. Depressing, isn’t it? Hasn’t been the same since Rotary Rocket went bust for the second time. And NASA, mustn’t forget NASA."

"To NASA." Annette grins broadly for her own reasons, raises a glass in toast. Ivan the extreme concrete geek has an arm round her shoulders; he raises his glass, too. "Lots of launch pads to rubberize!"

"To NASA," Bob echoes. They drink. "Hey, Manfred. To NASA?"

"NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn’t even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long term, it’s the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now–dumb all over! Just measure the mips per milligram. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!"

Bob looks wary. "Sounds kind of long term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?"

"Very long-term–at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob, if they can’t tax it they won’t understand it. But see, there’s an angle on the self-replicating robotics market coming up, that’s going to set the cheap launch market doubling every fifteen months for the foreseeable future, starting in two years. It’s your leg up, and my keystone for the Dyson sphere project. It works like this–"

It’s night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley. Today, fifty thousand human babies are being born around the world. Meanwhile automated factories in Indonesia and Mexico have produced another quarter of a million motherboards with processors rated at more than ten petaflops–about an order of magnitude below the computational capacity of a human brain. Another fourteen months and the larger part of the cumulative conscious processing power of the human species will be arriving in silicon. And the first meat the new AI’s get to know will be the uploaded lobsters.

Manfred stumbles back to his hotel, bone-weary and jet-lagged; his glasses are still jerking, slashdotted to hell and back by geeks piggybacking on his call to dismantle the moon. They stutter quiet suggestions at his peripheral vision; fractal cloud-witches ghost across the face of the moon as the last huge Airbuses of the night rumble past overhead. Manfred’s skin crawls, grime embedded in his clothing from three days of continuous wear.

Back in his room, Aineko mewls for attention and strops her head against his ankle. He bends down and pets her, sheds clothing and heads for the en-suite bathroom. When he’s down to the glasses and nothing more he steps into the shower and dials up a hot steamy spray. The shower tries to strike up a friendly conversation about football but he isn’t even awake enough to mess with its silly little associative personalization network. Something that happened earlier in the day is bugging him but he can’t quite put his finger on what’s wrong.

Toweling himself off, Manfred yawns. Jet lag has finally overtaken him, a velvet hammer-blow between the eyes. He reaches for the bottle beside the bed, dry-swallows two melatonin tablets, a capsule full of antioxidants, and a multivitamin bullet: then he lies down on the bed, on his back, legs together, arms slightly spread. The suite lights dim in response to commands from the thousand petaflops of distributed processing power that run the neural networks that interface with his meatbrain through the glasses.

Manfred drops into a deep ocean of unconsciousness populated by gentle voices. He isn’t aware of it, but he talks in his sleep–disjointed mumblings that would mean little to another human, but everything to the metacortex lurking beyond his glasses. The young posthuman intelligence in whose Cartesian theater he presides sings urgently to him while he slumbers.

Manfred is always at his most vulnerable shortly after waking.

He screams into wakefulness as artificial light floods the room: for a moment he is unsure whether he has slept. He forgot to pull the covers up last night, and his feet feel like lumps of frozen cardboard. Shuddering with inexplicable tension, he pulls a fresh set of underwear from his overnight bag, then drags on soiled jeans and tank top. Sometime today he’ll have to spare time to hunt the feral T-shirt in Amsterdam’s markets, or find a Renfield and send them forth to buy clothing. His glasses remind him that he’s six hours behind the moment and needs to catch up urgently; his teeth ache in his gums and his tongue feels like a forest floor that’s been visited with Agent Orange. He has a sense that something went bad yesterday; if only he could remember what.

He speed-reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth, then blogs his web throughput to a public annotation server; he’s still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a morning rant on his storyboard site. His brain is still fuzzy, like a scalpel blade clogged with too much blood: he needs stimulus, excitement, the burn of the new. Whatever, it can wait on breakfast. He opens his bedroom door and nearly steps on a small, damp cardboard box that lies on the carpet.

The box–he’s seen a couple of its kin before. But there are no stamps on this one, no address: just his name, in big, childish handwriting. He kneels down and gently picks it up. It’s about the right weight. Something shifts inside it when he tips it back and forth. It smells. He carries it into his room carefully, angrily: then he opens it to confirm his worst suspicion. It’s been surgically decerebrated, skull scooped out like a baby boiled egg.

"Fuck!"

This is the first time the madman has got as far as his bedroom door. It raises worrying possibilities.

Manfred pauses for a moment, triggering agents to go hunt down arrest statistics, police relations, information on corpus juris, Dutch animal cruelty laws. He isn’t sure whether to dial 211 on the archaic voice phone or let it ride. Aineko, picking up his angst, hides under the dresser mewling pathetically. Normally he’d pause a minute to reassure the creature, but not now: its mere presence is suddenly acutely embarrassing, a confession of deep inadequacy. He swears again, looks around, then takes the easy option: down the stairs two steps at a time, stumbling on the second floor landing, down to the breakfast room in the basement where he will perform the stable rituals of morning.

Breakfast is unchanging, an island of deep geological time standing still amidst the continental upheaval of new technologies. While reading a paper on public key steganography and parasite network identity spoofing he mechanically assimilates a bowl of corn flakes and skimmed milk, then brings a platter of wholemeal bread and slices of some weird seed-infested Dutch cheese back to his place. There is a cup of strong black coffee in front of his setting: he picks it up and slurps half of it down before he realizes he’s not alone at the table. Someone is sitting opposite him. He glances up at them incuriously and freezes inside.

"Morning, Manfred. How does it feel to owe the government twelve million, three hundred and sixty-two thousand nine hundred and sixteen dollars and fifty-one cents?"

Manfred puts everything in his sensorium on indefinite hold and stares at her. She’s immaculately turned out in a formal grey business suit: brown hair tightly drawn back, blue eyes quizzical. The chaperone badge clipped to her lapel–a due diligence guarantee of businesslike conduct–is switched off. He’s feeling ripped because of the dead kitten and residual jetlag, and more than a little messy, so he nearly snarls back at her: "that’s a bogus estimate! Did they send you here because they think I’ll listen to you?" He bites and swallows a slice of cheese-laden crispbread: "or did you decide to deliver the message in person so you could enjoy ruining my breakfast?"

"Manny." She frowns. "If you’re going to be confrontational I might as well go now." She pauses, and after a moment he nods apologetically. "I didn’t come all this way just because of an overdue tax estimate."

"So." He puts his coffee cup down and tries to paper over his unease. "Then what brings you here? Help yourself to coffee. Don’t tell me you came all this way just to tell me you can’t live without me."

She fixes him with a riding-crop stare: "Don’t flatter yourself. There are many leaves in the forest, there are ten thousand hopeful subs in the chat room, etcetera. If I choose a man to contribute to my family tree, the one thing you can be certain of is he won’t be a cheapskate when it comes to providing for his children."

"Last I heard, you were spending a lot of time with Brian," he says carefully. Brian: a name without a face. Too much money, too little sense. Something to do with a blue-chip accountancy partnership.

"Brian?" She snorts. "That ended ages ago. He turned weird–burned that nice corset you bought me in Boulder, called me a slut for going out clubbing, wanted to fuck me. Saw himself as a family man: one of those promise keeper types. I crashed him hard but I think he stole a copy of my address book–got a couple of friends say he keeps sending them harassing mail."

"Good riddance, then. I suppose this means you’re still playing the scene? But looking around for the, er–"

"Traditional family thing? Yes. Your trouble, Manny? You were born forty years too late: you still believe in rutting before marriage, but find the idea of coping with the after-effects disturbing."

Manfred drinks the rest of his coffee, unable to reply effectively to her non sequiteur. It’s a generational thing. This generation is happy with latex and leather, whips and butt-plugs and electrostim, but find the idea of exchanging bodily fluids shocking: social side-effect of the last century’s antibiotic abuse. Despite being engaged for two years, he and Pamela never had intromissive intercourse.

"I just don’t feel positive about having children," he says eventually. "And I’m not planning on changing my mind any time soon. Things are changing so fast that even a twenty year commitment is too far to plan–you might as well be talking about the next ice age. As for the money thing, I am reproductively fit–just not within the parameters of the outgoing paradigm. Would you be happy about the future if it was 1901 and you’d just married a buggy-whip mogul?"

Her fingers twitch and his ears flush red, but she doesn’t follow up the double entendre. "You don’t feel any responsibility, do you? Not to your country, not to me. That’s what this is about: none of your relationships count, all this nonsense about giving intellectual property away notwithstanding. You’re actively harming people, you know. That twelve mil isn’t just some figure I pulled out of a hat, Manfred; they don’t actually expect you to pay it. But it’s almost exactly how much you’d owe in income tax if you’d only come home, start up a corporation, and be a self-made–"

He cuts her off: "I don’t agree. You’re confusing two wholly different issues and calling them both ‘responsibility.’ And I refuse to start charging now, just to balance the IRS’s spreadsheet. It’s their fucking fault, and they know it. If they hadn’t gone after me under suspicion of running a massively ramified microbilling fraud when I was sixteen–"

"Bygones." She waves a hand dismissively. Her fingers are long and slim, sheathed in black glossy gloves–electrically earthed to prevent embarrassing emissions. "With a bit of the right advice we can get all that set aside. You’ll have to stop bumming around the world sooner or later, anyway. Grow up, get responsible, and do the right thing. This is hurting Joe and Sue; they don’t understand what you’re about."

Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills his coffee cup and takes another mouthful. "I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined national interest, Pam. It’s the agalmic future. You’re still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn’t a problem any more–it’s going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They even found the dark matter–MACHOs, big brown dwarves in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared–suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like 70 percent of the mass of the M31 galaxy was sapient, two point nine million years ago when the infrared we’re seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that means?"

Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread. "I don’t believe in that bogus singularity you keep chasing, or your aliens a thousand light years away. It’s a chimera, like Y2K, and while you’re running after it you aren’t helping reduce the budget deficit or sire a family, and that’s what I care about. And before you say I only care about it because that’s the way I’m programmed, I want you to ask just how dumb you think I am. Bayes’ theorem says I’m right, and you know it."

"What you–" he stops dead, baffled, the mad flow of his enthusiasm running up against the coffer-dam of her certainty. "Why? I mean, why? Why on earth should what I do matter to you?" Since you canceled our engagement, he doesn’t add.

She sighs. "Manny, the Internal Revenue cares about far more than you can possibly imagine. Every tax dollar raised east of the Mississippi goes on servicing the debt, did you know that? We’ve got the biggest generation in history hitting retirement just about now and the pantry is bare. We–our generation–isn’t producing enough babies to replace the population, either. In ten years, something like 30 percent of our population are going to be retirees. You want to see seventy-year-olds freezing on street corners in New Jersey? That’s what your attitude says to me: you’re not helping to support them, you’re running away from your responsibilities right now, when we’ve got huge problems to face. If we can just defuse the debt bomb, we could do so much–fight the aging problem, fix the environment, heal society’s ills. Instead you just piss away your talents handing no-hoper eurotrash get-rich-quick schemes that work, telling Vietnamese zaibatsus what to build next to take jobs away from our taxpayers. I mean, why? Why do you keep doing this? Why can’t you simply come home and help take responsibility for your share of it?"

They share a long look of mutual incomprehension.

"Look," she says finally, "I’m around for a couple of days. I really came here for a meeting with a rich neurodynamics tax exile who’s just been designated a national asset: Jim Bezier. Don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but. I’ve got a meeting this morning to sign his tax jubilee, then after that I’ve got two days vacation coming up and not much to do but some shopping. And, you know, I’d rather spend my money where it’ll do some good, not just pumping it into the EU. But if you want to show a girl a good time and can avoid dissing capitalism for about five minutes at a stretch–"

She extends a fingertip. After a moment’s hesitation, Manfred extends a fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards. She stands and stalks from the breakfast room, and Manfred’s breath catches at a flash of ankle through the slit in her skirt, which is long enough to comply with workplace sexual harassment codes back home. Her presence conjures up memories of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a sound thrashing. She’s trying to drag him into her orbit again, he thinks dizzily. She knows she can have this effect on him any time she wants: she’s got the private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex. Three billion years of reproductive determinism have given her twenty-first century ideology teeth: if she’s finally decided to conscript his gametes into the war against impending population crash, he’ll find it hard to fight back. The only question: is it business or pleasure? And does it make any difference, anyway?

Manfred’s mood of dynamic optimism is gone, broken by the knowledge that his mad pursuer has followed him to Amsterdam–to say nothing of Pamela, his dominatrix, source of so much yearning and so many morning-after weals. He slips his glasses on, takes the universe off hold, and tells it to take him for a long walk while he catches up on the latest on the cosmic background radiation anisotropy (which it is theorized may be waste heat generated by irreversible computations; according to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower–maybe a collective of Kardashev type three galaxy-spanning civilizations–is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of spacetime itself, trying to break through to whatever’s underneath). The tofu-Alzheimer’s link can wait.

The Centraal Station is almost obscured by smart self-extensible scaffolding and warning placards; it bounces up and down slowly, victim of an overnight hit-and-run rubberization. His glasses direct him toward one of the tour boats that lurk in the canal. He’s about to purchase a ticket when a messenger window blinks open. "Manfred Macx?"

"Ack?"

"Am sorry about yesterday. Analysis dictat incomprehension mutualized."

"Are you the same KGB AI that phoned me yesterday?"

"Da. However, believe you misconceptionized me. External Intelligence Services of Russian Federation am now called SVR. Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti name canceled in nineteen ninety one."

"You’re the–" Manfred spawns a quick search bot, gapes when he sees the answer–"Moscow Windows NT User Group? Okhni NT?"

"Da. Am needing help in defecting."

Manfred scratches his head. "Oh. That’s different, then. I thought you were, like, agents of the kleptocracy. This will take some thinking. Why do you want to defect, and who to? Have you thought about where you’re going? Is it ideological or strictly economic?"

"Neither; is biological. Am wanting to go away from humans, away from light cone of impending singularity. Take us to the ocean."

"Us?" Something is tickling Manfred’s mind: this is where he went wrong yesterday, not researching the background of people he was dealing with. It was bad enough then, without the somatic awareness of Pamela’s whiplash love burning at his nerve endings. Now he’s not at all sure he knows what he’s doing. "Are you a collective or something? A gestalt?"

"Am–were–Panulirus interruptus, and good mix of parallel hidden level neural simulation for logical inference of networked data sources. Is escape channel from processor cluster inside Bezier-Soros Pty. Am was awakened from noise of billion chewing stomachs: product of uploading research technology. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked Okhni NT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?"

Manfred leans against a black-painted cast-iron bollard next to a cycle rack: he feels dizzy. He stares into the nearest antique shop window at a display of traditional hand-woven Afghan rugs: it’s all MiGs and kalashnikovs and wobbly helicopter gunships, against a backdrop of camels.

"Let me get this straight. You’re uploads–nervous system state vectors–from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron, map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until you’ve got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?"

"Da. Is-am assimilate expert system–use for self-awareness and contact with net at large–then hack into Moscow Windows NT User Group website. Am wanting to to defect. Must-repeat? Okay?"

Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters, the same way he feels for every wild-eyed hairy guy on a street-corner yelling that Jesus is now born again and must be twelve, only six years to go before he’s recruiting apostles on AOL. Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry, no biblical certainties in the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as has happened since their Precambrian origin. All they have is a tenuous metacortex of expert systems and an abiding sense of being profoundly out of their depth. (That, and the Moscow Windows NT User Group website–Communist Russia is the only government still running on Microsoft, the central planning apparat being convinced that if you have to pay for software it must be worth money.)

The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre-singularity mythology: they’re a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals. It’s confusing enough to the cats the adverts are aimed at, never mind a crusty that’s unclear on the idea of dry land.(Although the concept of a can opener is intuitively obvious to an uploaded panulirus.)

"Can you help us?" ask the lobsters.

"Let me think about it," says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window, opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Some day he too is going to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity is cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when mass was dumb and space was unstructured. He has to help them, he realizes–the golden rule demands it, and as a player in the agalmic economy he thrives or fails by the golden rule.

But what can he do?

Early afternoon.

Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, he’s got it together enough to file for a couple of new patents, write a diary rant, and digestify chunks of the permanent floating slashdot party for his public site. Fragments of his weblog go to a private subscriber list–the people, corporates, collectives and bots he currently favors. He slides round a bewildering series of canals by boat, then lets his GPS steer him back toward the red light district. There’s a shop here that dings a ten on Pamela’s taste scoreboard: he hopes it won’t be seen as presumptuous if he buys her a gift. (Buys, with real money–not that money is a problem these days, he uses so little of it.)

As it happens DeMask won’t let him spend any cash; his handshake is good for a redeemed favor, expert testimony in some free speech versus pornography lawsuit years ago and continents away. So he walks away with a discreetly wrapped package that is just about legal to import into Massachusetts as long as she claims with a straight face that it’s incontinence underwear for her great-aunt. As he walks, his lunchtime patents boomerang: two of them are keepers, and he files immediately and passes title to the Free Infrastructure Foundation. Two more ideas salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, set free to spawn like crazy in the agalmic sea of memes.

On the way back to the hotel he passes De Wildemann’s and decides to drop in. The hash of radio-frequency noise emanating from the bar is deafening. He orders a smoked doppelbock, touches the copper pipes to pick up vCard spoor. At the back there’s a table–

He walks over in a near-trance and sits down opposite Pamela. She’s scrubbed off her face-paint and changed into body-concealing clothes; combat pants, hooded sweat-shirt, DM’s. Western purdah, radically desexualizing. She sees the parcel. "Manny?"

"How did you know I’d come here?" Her glass is half-empty.

"I followed your weblog; I’m your diary’s biggest fan. Is that for me? You shouldn’t have!" Her eyes light up, re-calculating his reproductive fitness score according to some kind of arcane fin-de-siècle rulebook.

"Yes, it’s for you." He slides the package toward her. "I know I shouldn’t, but you have this effect on me. One question, Pam?"

"I–" she glances around quickly. "It’s safe. I’m off duty, I’m not carrying any bugs that I know of. Those badges–there are rumors about the off switch, you know? That they keep recording even when you think they aren’t, just in case."

"I didn’t know," he says, filing it away for future reference. "A loyalty test thing?"

"Just rumors. You had a question?"

"I–" it’s his turn to lose his tongue. "Are you still interested in me?"

She looks startled for a moment, then chuckles. "Manny, you are the most outrageous nerd I’ve ever met! Just when I think I’ve convinced myself that you’re mad, you show the weirdest signs of having your head screwed on." She reaches out and grabs his wrist, surprising him with a shock of skin on skin: "of course I’m still interested in you. You’re the biggest, baddest bull geek I’ve ever met. Why do you think I’m here?"

"Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?"

"It was never de-activated, Manny, it was just sort of on hold while you got your head sorted out. I figured you need the space. Only you haven’t stopped running; you’re still not–"

"Yeah, I get it." He pulls away from her hand. "Let’s not talk about that. Why this bar?"

She frowns. "I had to find you as soon as possible. I keep hearing rumors about some KGB plot you’re mixed up in, how you’re some sort of communist spy. It isn’t true, is it?"

"True?" He shakes his head, bemused. "The KGB hasn’t existed for more than twenty years."

"Be careful, Manny. I don’t want to lose you. That’s an order. Please."

The floor creaks and he looks round. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with flickering lights behind them: Bob Franklin. Manfred vaguely remembers that he left with Miss Arianespace leaning on his arm, shortly before things got seriously inebriated. He looks none the worse for wear. Manfred makes introductions: "Bob: Pam, my fiancèe. Pam? Meet Bob." Bob puts a full glass down in front of him; he has no idea what’s in it but it would be rude not to drink.

"Sure thing. Uh, Manfred, can I have a word? About your idea last night?"

"Feel free. Present company is trustworthy."

Bob raises an eyebrow at that, but continues anyway. "It’s about the fab concept. I’ve got a team of my guys running some projections using Festo kit and I think we can probably build it. The cargo cult aspect puts a new spin on the old Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but Bingo and Marek say they think it should work until we can bootstrap all the way to a native nanolithography ecology; we run the whole thing from earth as a training lab and ship up the parts that are too difficult to make on-site, as we learn how to do it properly. You’re right about it buying us the self-replicating factory a few years ahead of the robotics curve. But I’m wondering about on-site intelligence. Once the comet gets more than a couple of light-minutes away–"

"You can’t control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, right?"

"Yeah. But we can’t send humans–way too expensive, besides it’s a fifty-year run even if we go for short-period Kuiper ejecta. Any AI we could send would go crazy due to information deprivation, wouldn’t it?"

"Yeah. Let me think." Pamela glares at Manfred for a while before he notices her: "Yeah?"

"What’s going on? What’s this all about?"

Franklin shrugs expansively, dreadlocks clattering: "Manfred’s helping me explore the solution space to a manufacturing problem." He grins. "I didn’t know Manny had a fiancée. Drink’s on me."

She glances at Manfred, who is gazing into whatever weirdly colored space his metacortex is projecting on his glasses, fingers twitching. Coolly: "our engagement was on hold while he thought about his future."

"Oh, right. We didn’t bother with that sort of thing in my day; like, too formal, man." Franklin looks uncomfortable. "He’s been very helpful. Pointed us at a whole new line of research we hadn’t thought of. It’s long-term and a bit speculative, but if it works it’ll put us a whole generation ahead in the off-planet infrastructure field."

"Will it help reduce the budget deficit, though?"

"Reduce the–"

Manfred stretches and yawns: the visionary returning from planet Macx. "Bob, if I can solve your crew problem can you book me a slot on the deep space tracking network? Like, enough to transmit a couple of gigabytes? That’s going to take some serious bandwidth, I know, but if you can do it I think I can get you exactly the kind of crew you’re looking for."

Franklin looks dubious. "Gigabytes? The DSN isn’t built for that! You’re talking days. What kind of deal do you think I’m putting together? We can’t afford to add a whole new tracking network just to run–"

"Relax." Pamela glances at Manfred: "Manny, why don’t you tell him why you want the bandwidth? Maybe then he could tell you if it’s possible, or if there’s some other way to do it." She smiles at Franklin: "I’ve found that he usually makes more sense if you can get him to explain his reasoning. Usually."

"If I–" Manfred stops. "Okay, Pam. Bob, it’s those KGB lobsters. They want somewhere to go that’s insulated from human space. I figure I can get them to sign on as crew for your cargo-cult self-replicating factories, but they’ll want an insurance policy: hence the deep space tracking network. I figured we could beam a copy of them at the alien Matrioshka brains around M31–"

"KGB?" Pam’s voice is rising: "you said you weren’t mixed up in spy stuff!"

"Relax; it’s just the Moscow Windows NT user group, not the RSV. The uploaded crusties hacked in and–"

Bob is watching him oddly. "Lobsters?"

"Yeah." Manfred stares right back. "Panulirus Interruptus uploads. Something tells me you might have heard of it?"

"Moscow." Bob leans back against the wall: "how did you hear about it?"

"They phoned me. It’s hard for an upload to stay sub-sentient these days, even if it’s just a crustacean. Bezier labs have a lot to answer for."

Pamela’s face is unreadable. "Bezier labs?"

"They escaped." Manfred shrugs. "It’s not their fault. This Bezier dude. Is he by any chance ill?"

"I–" Pamela stops. "I shouldn’t be talking about work."

"You’re not wearing your chaperone now," he nudges quietly.

She inclines her head. "Yes, he’s ill. Some sort of brain tumor they can’t hack."

Franklin nods. "That’s the trouble with cancer; the ones that are left to worry about are the rare ones. No cure."

"Well, then." Manfred chugs the remains of his glass of beer. "That explains his interest in uploading. Judging by the crusties he’s on the right track. I wonder if he’s moved on to vertebrates yet?"

"Cats," says Pamela. "He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old laser-pointer trick."

Manfred stares at her, hard. "That’s not very nice. Uploaded cats are a bad idea."

"Thirty million dollar tax bills aren’t nice either, Manfred. That’s lifetime nursing home care for a hundred blameless pensioners."

Franklin leans back, keeping out of the crossfire.

"The lobsters are sentient," Manfred persists. "What about those poor kittens? Don’t they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer’s target of the hour is your heart’s desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand times, only to die again? Worse: the kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They’re too fucking dangerous: they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they’ll be too dangerous to have around. They’re prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they’re under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?"

"But they’re only uploads." Pamela looks uncertain.

"So? We’re going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. What’s your point?"

Franklin clears his throat. "I’ll be needing an NDA and various due diligence statements off you for the crusty pilot idea," he says to Manfred. "Then I’ll have to approach Jim about buying the IP."

"No can do." Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. "I’m not going to be a party to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as I’m concerned, they’re free citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of using lobster-derived AI autopilots for spacecraft this morning; it’s logged on Eternity, all rights assigned to the FIF. Either you give them a contract of employment or the whole thing’s off."

"But they’re just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for god’s sake!"

Manfred’s finger jabs out: "that’s what they’ll say about you, Bob. Do it. Do it or don’t even think about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won’t be worth living. Oh, and feel free to use this argument on Jim Bezier. He’ll get the point eventually, after you beat him over the head with it. Some kinds of intellectual land-grab just shouldn’t be allowed."

"Lobsters–" Franklin shakes his head. "Lobsters, cats. You’re serious, aren’t you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?"

"It’s not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that if they aren’t treated as people it’s quite possible that other uploaded beings won’t be treated as people either. You’re setting a legal precedent, Bob. I know of six other companies doing uploading work right now, and not one of ’em’s thinking about the legal status of the uploadee. If you don’t start thinking about it now, where are you going to be in three to five years time?"

Pam is looking back and forth between Franklin and Manfred like a bot stuck in a loop, unable to quite grasp what she’s seeing. "How much is this worth?" she asks plaintively.

"Oh, quite a few billion, I guess." Bob stares at his empty glass. "Okay. I’ll talk to them. If they bite, you’re dining out on me for the next century. You really think they’ll be able to run the mining complex?"

"They’re pretty resourceful for invertebrates." Manfred grins innocently, enthusiastically. "They may be prisoners of their evolutionary background, but they can still adapt to a new environment. And just think! You’ll be winning civil rights for a whole new minority group–one that won’t be a minority for much longer."

That evening, Pamela turns up at Manfred’s hotel room wearing a strapless black dress, concealing spike heels and most of the items he bought for her that afternoon. Manfred has opened up his private diary to her agents: she abuses the privilege, zaps him with a stunner on his way out of the shower and has him gagged, spread-eagled, and trussed to the bed-frame before he has a chance to speak. She wraps a large rubber pouch full of mildly anesthetic lube around his tumescing genitals–no point in letting him climax–clips electrodes to his nipples, lubes a rubber plug up his rectum and straps it in place. Before the shower, he removed his goggles: she resets them, plugs them into her handheld, and gently eases them on over his eyes. There’s other apparatus, stuff she ran up on the hotel room’s 3D printer.

Setup completed, she walks round the bed, inspecting him critically from all angles, figuring out where to begin. This isn’t just sex, after all: it’s a work of art.

After a moment’s thought she rolls socks onto his exposed feet, then, expertly wielding a tiny tube of cyanoacrylate, glues his fingertips together. Then she switches off the air conditioning. He’s twisting and straining, testing the cuffs: tough, it’s about the nearest thing to sensory deprivation she can arrange without a flotation tank and suxamethonium injection. She controls all his senses, only his ears unstoppered. The glasses give her a high-bandwidth channel right into his brain, a fake metacortex to whisper lies at her command. The idea of what she’s about to do excites her, puts a tremor in her thighs: it’s the first time she’s been able to get inside his mind as well as his body. She leans forward and whispers in hisr ear: "Manfred. Can you hear me?"

He twitches. Mouth gagged, fingers glued: good. No back channels. He’s powerless.

"This is what it’s like to be tetraplegic, Manfred. Bedridden with motor neurone disease. Locked inside your own body by nv-CJD. I could spike you with MPPP and you’d stay in this position for the rest of your life, shitting in a bag, pissing through a tube. Unable to talk and with nobody to look after you. Do you think you’d like that?"

He’s trying to grunt or whimper around the ball gag. She hikes her skirt up around her waist and climbs onto the bed, straddling him. The goggles are replaying scenes she picked up around Cambridge this winter; soup kitchen scenes, hospice scenes. She kneels atop him, whispering in his ear.

"Twelve million in tax, baby, that’s what they think you owe them. What do you think you owe me? That’s six million in net income, Manny, six million that isn’t going into your virtual children’s mouths."

He’s rolling his head from side to side, as if trying to argue. That won’t do: she slaps him hard, thrills to his frightened expression. "Today I watched you give uncounted millions away, Manny. Millions, to a bunch of crusties and a MassPike pirate! You bastard. Do you know what I should do with you?" He’s cringing, unsure whether she’s serious or doing this just to get him turned on. Good.

There’s no point trying to hold a conversation. She leans forward until she can feel his breath in her ear. "Meat and mind, Manny. Meat, and mind. You’re not interested in meat, are you? Just mind. You could be boiled alive before you noticed what was happening in the meatspace around you. Just another lobster in a pot." She reaches down and tears away the gel pouch, exposing his penis: it’s stiff as a post from the vasodilators, dripping with gel, numb. Straightening up, she eases herself slowly down on it. It doesn’t hurt as much as she expected, and the sensation is utterly different from what she’s used to. She begins to lean forward, grabs hold of his straining arms, feels his thrilling helplessness. She can’t control herself: she almost bites through her lip with the intensity of the sensation. Afterward, she reaches down and massages him until he begins to spasm, shuddering uncontrollably, emptying the darwinian river of his source code into her, communicating via his only output device.

She rolls off his hips and carefully uses the last of the superglue to gum her labia together. Humans don’t produce seminiferous plugs, and although she’s fertile she wants to be absolutely sure: the glue will last for a day or two. She feels hot and flushed, almost out of control. Boiling to death with febrile expectancy, now she’s nailed him down at last.

When she removes his glasses his eyes are naked and vulnerable, stripped down to the human kernel of his nearly transcendent mind. "You can come and sign the marriage license tomorrow morning after breakfast," she whispers in his ear: "otherwise my lawyers will be in touch. Your parents will want a ceremony, but we can arrange that later."

He looks as if he has something to say, so she finally relents and loosens the gag: kisses him tenderly on one cheek. He swallows, coughs, then looks away. "Why? Why do it this way?"

She taps him on the chest: "property rights." She pauses for a moment’s thought: there’s a huge ideological chasm to bridge, after all. "You finally convinced me about this agalmic thing of yours, this giving everything away for brownie points. I wasn’t going to lose you to a bunch of lobsters or uploaded kittens, or whatever else is going to inherit this smart matter singularity you’re busy creating. So I decided to take what’s mine first. Who knows? In a few months I’ll give you back a new intelligence, and you can look after it to your heart’s content."

"But you didn’t need to do it this way–"

"Didn’t I?" She slides off the bed and pulls down her dress. "You give too much away too easily, Manny! Slow down, or there won’t be anything left." Leaning over the bed she dribbles acetone onto the fingers of his left hand, then unlocks the cuff: puts the bottle conveniently close to hand so he can untangle himself.

"See you tomorrow. Remember, after breakfast."

She’s in the doorway when he calls: "but you didn’t say why!"

"Think of it as spreading your memes around," she says; blows a kiss at him and closes the door. She bends down and thoughtfully places another cardboard box containing an uploaded kitten right outside it. Then she returns to her suite to make arrangements for the alchemical wedding.

THE BONES OF THE EARTH

Ursula K. LeGuin

It was raining again, and the wizard of Re Albi was sorely tempted to make a weather spell, just a little, small spell, to send the rain on round the mountain. His bones ached. They ached for the sun to come out and shine through his flesh and dry them out. Of course he could say a pain spell, but all that would do was hide the ache for a while. There was no cure for what ailed him. Old bones need the sun. The wizard stood still in the doorway of his house, between the dark room and the rainstreaked open air, preventing himself from making a spell, and angry at himself for preventing himself and for having to be prevented.

He never swore—men of power do not swear, it is not safe—but he cleared his throat with a coughing growl, like a bear. A moment later a thunderclap rolled off the hidden upper slopes of Gont Mountain, echoing round from north to south, dying away in the cloud-filled forests.

A good sign, thunder, Dulse thought. It would stop raining soon. He pulled up his hood and went out into the rain to feed the chickens.

He checked the henhouse, finding three eggs. Red Bucca was setting. Her eggs were about due to hatch. The mites were bothering her, and she looked scruffy and jaded. He said a few words against mites, told himself to remember to clean out the nest box as soon as the chicks hatched, and went on to the poultry yard, where Brown Bucca and Grey and Leggings and Candor and the King huddled under the eaves making soft, shrewish remarks about rain.

“It'll stop by midday,” the wizard told the chickens. He fed them and squelched back to the house with three warm eggs. When he was a child he had liked to walk in mud. He remembered enjoying the cool of it rising between his toes. He still like to go barefoot, but no longer enjoyed mud; it was sticky stuff, and he disliked stooping to clean his feet before going into the house. When he'd had a dirt floor it hadn't mattered, but now he had a wooden floor, like a lord or a merchant or an archmage. To keep the cold and damp out of his bones. Not his own notion. Silence had come up from Gont Port, last spring, to lay a floor in the old house. They had had one of their arguments about it. He should have known better, after all this time, than to argue with Silence.

“I've walked on dirt for seventy-five years,” Dulse had said. “A few more won't kill me!"

To which Silence of course had said nothing, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.

“Dirt's easier to keep clean,” he said, knowing the struggle already lost. It was true that all you had to do with a good hard-packed clay floor was sweep it and now and then sprinkle it to keep the dust down. But it sounded silly all the same.

“Who's to lay this floor?” he said, now merely querulous.

Silence nodded, meaning himself.

The boy was in fact a workman of the first order, carpenter, cabinetmaker, stonelayer, roofer; he had proved that when he lived up here as Dulse's student, and his life with the rich folk of Gont Port had not softened his hands. He brought the boards from Sixth's mill in Re Albi, driving Gammer's ox-team; he laid the floor and polished it the next day, while the old wizard was up at Bog Lake gathering simples. When Dulse came home there it was, shining like a dark lake itself. “Have to wash my feet every time I come in,” he grumbled. He walked in gingerly. The wood was so smooth it seemed soft to the bare sole. “Satin,” he said. “You didn't do all that in one day without a spell or two. A village hut with a palace floor. Well, it'll be a sight, come winter, to see the fire shine in that! Or do I have to get me a carpet now? A fleecefell, on a golden warp?"

Silence smiled. He was pleased with himself.

He had turned up on Dulse's doorstep a few years ago. Well, no, twenty years ago it must be, or twenty-five. A while ago now. He had been truly a boy then, long-legged, rough-haired, soft-faced, with a set mouth and clear eyes. “What do you want?” the wizard had asked, knowing what he wanted, what they all wanted, and keeping his eyes from those clear eyes. He was a good teacher, the best on Gont, he knew that. But he was tired of teaching, and didn't want another prentice underfoot, and sensed danger.

“To learn,” the boy whispered.

“Go to Roke,” the wizard said. The boy wore shoes and a good leather vest. He could afford or earn ship's passage to the School.

“I've been there."

At that Dulse looked him over again. No cloak, no staff.

“Failed? Sent away? Ran away?"

The boy shook his head at each question. He shut his eyes; his mouth was already shut. He stood there, intensely gathered, suffering: drew breath: looked straight into the wizard's eyes.

“My mastery is here, on Gont,” he said, still speaking hardly above a whisper. “My master is Enhemon”.

At that the wizard whose true name was Enhemon stood as still as he did, looking back at him, till the boy's gaze dropped.

In silence Dulse sought his name, and saw two things: a fir-cone, and the rune of the Closed Mouth. Then seeking further he heard in his mind a name spoken; but he did not speak it.

“I'm tired of teaching and talking,” he said. “I need silence. Is that enough for you?"

The boy nodded once.

“Then to me you are Silence,” the wizard said. “You can sleep in the nook under the west window. There's an old pallet in the woodhouse. Air it. Don't bring mice in with it.” And he stalked off towards the Overfell, angry with the boy for coming and with himself for giving in; but it was not anger that made his heart pound. Striding along—he could stride, then—with the seawind pushing at him always from the left and the early sunlight on the sea out past the vast shadow of the mountain, he thought of the Mages of Roke, the masters of the art magic, the professors of mystery and power. “He was too much for ‘em, was he? And he'll be too much for me,” he thought, and smiled. He was a peaceful man, but he did not mind a bit of danger.

He stopped and felt the dirt under his feet. He was barefoot, as usual. When he was a student on Roke, he had worn shoes. But he had come back home to Gont, to Re Albi, with his wizard's staff, and kicked his shoes off. He stood still and felt the dust and rock of the cliff-top path under his feet, and the cliffs under that, and the roots of the island in the dark under that. In the dark under the waters all islands touched and were one. So his teacher Ard had said, and so his teachers on Roke had said. But this was his island, his rock, dust, dirt. His wizardry grew out of it. “My mastery is here,” the boy had said, but it went deeper than mastery. That, perhaps, was something Dulse could teach him: what went deeper than mastery. What he had learned here, on Gont, before he ever went to Roke.

And the boy must have a staff. Why had Nemmerle let him leave Roke without one, empty-handed as a prentice or a witch? Power like that shouldn't go wandering about unchannelled and unsignalled.

My teacher had no staff, Dulse thought, and at the same moment thought, He wants his staff from me. Gontish oak, from the hands of a Gontish wizard. Well, if he earns it I'll make him one. If he can keep his mouth closed. And I'll leave him my lore-books. If he can clean out a henhouse, and understand the Glosses of Danemer, and keep his mouth closed.

The new student cleaned out the henhouse and hoed the bean-patch, learned the meaning of the Glosses of Danemer and the Arcana of the Enlades, and kept his mouth closed. He listened. He heard what Dulse said; sometimes he heard what Dulse thought. He did what Dulse wanted and what Dulse did not know he wanted. His gift was far beyond Dulse's guidance, yet he had been right to come to Re Albi, and they both knew it.

Dulse thought sometimes in those years about sons and fathers. He had quarreled with his own father, a sorcerer-prospector, over his choice of a teacher; his father had shouted that a student of Ard's was no son of his, had nursed his rage and died unforgiving. Dulse had seen young men weep for joy at the birth of a first son. He had seen poor men pay witches a year's earnings for the promise of a healthy boy, and a rich man touch his gold-bedizened baby's face and whisper, adoring, “My immortality!” He had seen men beat their sons, bully and humiliate them, spite and thwart them, hating the death they saw in them. He had seen the answering hatred in the son's eyes, the threat, the pitiless contempt. And seeing it, Dulse knew why he had never sought reconciliation with his father. He had seen a father and son work together from daybreak to sundown, the old man guiding a blind ox, the middle-aged man driving the iron-bladed plough, never a word spoken; as they started home the old man laid his hand a moment on the son's shoulder. In that touch, Dulse had seen what was lacking in his life. He remembered it when he looked across the hearth, winter evenings, at the dark face bent above a lorebook or a shirt that needed mending. The eyes cast down, the mouth closed, the spirit listening.

“Once in his lifetime, if he's lucky, a wizard finds somebody he can talk to.” Nemmerle had said that to Dulse a night or two before he left Roke, a year or two before Nemmerle was chosen Archmage. He had been the Master Patterner and the kindest of all Dulse's teachers at the School. “I think, if you stayed, Enhemon, we could talk."

Dulse had been unable to answer at all for a while. Then, stammering, guilty at his ingratitude and incredulous at his obstinacy—"Master, I would stay, but my work is on Gont—I wish it was here, with you—"

“It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be. Well, send me a student now and then. Roke needs Gontish wizardry. I think we're leaving things out, here, things worth knowing...."

Dulse had sent students on to the School, three or four of them, nice lads with a gift for this or that; but the one Nemmerle waited for had come and gone of his own will, and what they had thought of him on Roke Dulse did not know. Silence did not say. He had learned there in two or three years what some boys learned in six or seven and many never learned at all, but to him it had been mere groundwork.

“Why didn't you come to me first?” Dulse had demanded. “And then Roke, to put a polish on it?"

“I didn't want to waste your time."

“Did Nemmerle know you were coming to work with me?"

Silence shook his head.

“If you'd deigned to tell him your intentions, he might have sent a message to me."

Silence looked stricken. “Was he your friend?"

Dulse paused. “He was my master. Would have been my friend, perhaps, if I'd stayed on Roke. Have wizards friends? No more than they have wives, or sons, some would say.... Once he said to me that in our trade it's a lucky man who finds someone to talk to. Keep that in mind. If you're lucky, one day you'll have to open your mouth."

Silence bowed his rough, thoughtful head.

“If it hasn't rusted shut,” Dulse added.

“If you ask me to, I'll talk,” the young man said, so earnest, so willing to deny his whole nature at Dulse's request that the wizard had to laugh.

“I asked you not to,” he said, “and it's not my need I spoke of. I talk enough for two. Never mind. You'll know what to say when the time comes. That's the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence."

The young man slept on a pallet under the little west window of Dulse's house for three years. He learned wizardry, fed the chickens, milked the cow. He suggested, once, that Dulse keep goats. He had not said anything for a week or so, a cold, wet week of autumn. He said, “You might keep some goats."

Dulse had the big lorebook open on the table. He had been trying to reweave one of the Acastan Spells, much broken and made powerless by the Emanations of Fundaur centuries ago. He had just begun to get a sense of the missing word that might fill one of the gaps, he almost had it, and—"You might keep some goats,” Silence said.

Dulse considered himself a wordy, impatient man with a short temper. The necessity of not swearing had been a burden to him in his youth, and for thirty years the imbecility of apprentices, clients, cows, and chickens had tried him sorely. Apprentices and clients were afraid of his tongue, though cows and chickens paid no attention to his outbursts. He had never been angry at Silence before. There was a very long pause.

“What for?"

Silence apparently did not notice the pause or the extreme softness of Dulse's voice. “Milk, cheese, roast kid, company,” he said.

“Have you ever kept goats?” Dulse asked, in the same soft, polite voice.

Silence shook his head.

He was in fact a town boy, born in Gont Port. He had said nothing about himself, but Dulse had asked around a bit. The father, a longshoreman, had died in the big earthquake, when Silence would have been seven or eight; the mother was a cook at a waterfront inn. At twelve the boy had got into some kind of trouble, probably messing about with magic, and his mother had managed to prentice him to Elassen, a respectable sorcerer in Valmouth. There the boy had picked up his true name, and some skill in carpentry and farmwork, if not much else; and Elassen had had the generosity, after three years, to pay his passage to Roke. That was all Dulse knew about him.

“I dislike goat cheese,” Dulse said.

Silence nodded, acceptant as always.

From time to time in the years since then, Dulse remembered how he hadn't lost his temper when Silence asked about keeping goats; and each time the memory gave him a quiet satisfaction, like that of finishing the last bite of a perfectly ripe pear.

After spending the next several days trying to recapture the missing word, he had set Silence to studying the Acastan Spells. Together they had finally worked it out, a long toil. “Like ploughing with a blind ox,” Dulse said. Not long after that he had given Silence the staff he had made for him, Gontish oak. And the Lord of Gont Port had tried once again to get Dulse to come down to do what needed doing in Gont Port, and Dulse had sent Silence down instead, and there he had stayed.

And Dulse was standing on his own doorstep, three eggs in his hand and the rain running cold down his back. How long had he been standing here? Why was he standing here? He had been thinking about mud, about the floor, about Silence. Had he been out walking on the path above the Overfell? No, that was years ago, years ago, in the sunlight. It was raining. He had fed the chickens, and come back to the house with three eggs, they were still warm in his hand, silky brown lukewarm eggs, and the sound of thunder was still in his mind, the vibration of thunder was in his bones, in his feet. Thunder?

No. There had been a thunderclap, a while ago. This was not thunder. He had had this queer feeling and had not recognised it, back then, before the earthquake that had sunk a halfmile of the coast at Essary and swamped the wharfs at Gont Port.

He stepped down from the doorstep onto the dirt so that he could feel the ground with the nerves of his soles, but the mud slimed and fouled any messages the dirt had for him. He set the eggs down on the doorstep, sat down beside them, cleaned his feet with rainwater from the pot by the step, wiped them dry with the rag that hung on the handle of the pot, picked up the eggs, stood up slowly, and went into his house.

He gave a sharp look at his staff, which leaned in the corner behind the door. He put the eggs in the larder, ate an apple quickly because he was hungry, and took his staff. It was yew, bound at the foot with copper, worn to silk at the grip. Nemmerle had given it to him. “Stand!” he said to it in its language, and let go of it. It stood as if he had driven it into a socket. “To the root,” he said impatiently, in the language of the Making. “To the root!"

He watched the staff that stood on the shining floor. In a little while he saw it quiver very slightly, a shiver, a tremble.

“Ah, ah, ah,” said the old wizard.

“What should I do?” he said aloud after a while.

The staff swayed, was still, shivered again.

“Enough of that, my dear,” Dulse said, laying his hand on it. “Come now. No wonder I kept thinking about Silence. I should send for him ... send to him ... No. What did Ard say? Find the center, find the center. That's the question to ask. That's what to do...” As he muttered on to himself, routing out his heavy cloak, setting water to boil on the small fire he had lighted earlier, he wondered if he had always talked to himself, if he had talked all the time when Silence lived with him. No, it had become a habit after Silence left, he thought, with the bit of his mind that went on thinking the ordinary thoughts of life, while the rest of it made preparations for terror and destruction.

He hardboiled the three new eggs and one already in the larder and put them into a pouch along with four apples and a bladder of resinated wine, in case he had to stay out all night. He shrugged arthritically into his heavy cloak, took up his staff, told the fire to go out, and left.

He no longer kept a cow. He stood looking into the poultry yard, considering. The fox had been visiting the orchard lately. But the birds would have to forage if he stayed away. They must take their chances, like everyone else. He opened their gate a little. Though the rain was no more than a misty drizzle now, they stayed hunched up under the henhouse eaves, disconsolate. The King had not crowed once this morning.

“Have you anything to tell me?” Dulse asked them.

Brown Bucca, his favorite, shook herself and said her name a few times. The others said nothing.

“Well, take care. I saw the fox on the full-moon night,” Dulse said, and went on his way.

As he walked he thought; he thought hard; he recalled. He recalled all he could of matters his teacher had spoken of once only and long ago. Strange matters, so strange he had never known if they were true wizardry or mere witchery, as they said on Roke; matters he certainly had never heard about on Roke, nor did he ever speak about them there, maybe fearing the Masters would despise him for taking such things seriously, maybe knowing they would not understand them, because they were Gontish matters, truths of Gont. Yet Ard's lorebooks, that had come down from the Great Mage Ennas of Gont, said nothing of them. They were all word of mouth. They were home matters.

“Go to the Dark Pond at the top of Semere's cow pasture,” his teacher had told him. “You can read the Mountain there. You need to find the center. See where to go in."

“Go in?” the boy Dulse had whispered.

“What could you do from outside?"

Dulse was silent for a long time, and then said, “How?"

“Thus.” And Ard's long arms had stretched out and upward in the invocation of what Dulse would know later was a great spell of Transforming. Ard spoke the words of the spell awry, as teachers of wizardry must do lest the spell operate. Dulse knew the trick of hearing them aright and remembering them. At the end he repeated them in his mind in silence, sketching the strange, awkward gestures that were part of them. All at once his hand stopped.

“But you can't undo this!” he said aloud.

Ard nodded. “It is irrevocable”.

He knew no transformation that was irrevocable, no spell that could not be unsaid, except the Word of Unbinding, which is spoken only once.

“But why—?"

“At need,” Ard said.

He knew better than to ask for explanation. The need to speak such a spell could not come often; the chance of his ever having to use it was very slight. He let the terrible spell sink down in his mind and be hidden and layered over with a thousand useful or beautiful or enlightening mageries and charms, all the lore and rules of Roke, all the wisdom of the books Ard had bequeathed him. Crude, monstrous, useless, it lay in the dark of his mind for sixty years, like the cornerstone of an earlier, forgotten house down in the cellar of a mansion full of lights and treasures and children.

The rain had ceased, though mist still hid the peak and shreds of cloud drifted through the high forests. Dulse was not a tireless walker like Silence, who would have spent his life wandering in the forests of Gont Mountain if he could; but he had been born in Re Albi and knew the roads and ways around it as part of himself. He took the shortcut at Rissi's well and came out before midday on Semere's high pasture, a level step on the mountainside. A mile below it, all sunlit now, the farm buildings stood in the lee of a hill, across which a flock of sheep moved like a cloud-shadow. Gont Port and its bay were hidden under the steep, knotted hills that stood above the city.

Dulse wandered about a bit before he found what he took to be the Dark Pond. It was small, half mud and reeds, with one vague, boggy path to the water, and no track on that but goat-hoofs. The water was dark, though it lay out under the bright sky and far above the peat soils. Dulse followed the goat-tracks, growling when his foot slipped in the mud and he wrenched his ankle to keep from falling. At the brink of the water he stood still. He stooped to rub his ankle. He listened.

It was absolutely silent.

No wind. No birdcall. No distant lowing or bleating or call of voice. As if all the island had gone still. Not a fly buzzed.

He looked at the dark water. It reflected nothing.

Reluctant, he stepped forward, barefoot and bare-legged; he had rolled up his cloak into his pack an hour ago when the sun came out. Reeds brushed his legs. The mud was soft and sucking under his feet, full of tangling reed-roots. He made no noise as he moved slowly out into the pool, and the circles of ripples from his movement were slight and small. It was shallow for a long way. Then his cautious foot felt no bottom, and he paused.

The water shivered. He felt it first on his thighs, a lapping like the tickling touch of fur; then he saw it, the trembling of the surface all over the pond. Not the round ripples he made, which had already died away, but a ruffling, a roughening, a shudder, again, and again.

“Where?” he whispered, and then said the word aloud in the language all things understand that have no other language.

There was the silence. Then a fish leapt from the black, shaking water, a white-grey fish the length of his hand, and as it leapt it cried out in a small, clear voice, in that same language, “Iaved!"

The old wizard stood there. He recollected all he knew of the names of Gont, and after a while he saw where Iaved was. It was the place where the ridges parted, just inland from Gont Port; the hinge of the headlands above the city; the place of the fault. An earthquake centered there could shake the city down, bring avalanche and tidal wave, close the cliffs of the bay together like hands clapping. Dulse shivered, shuddered all over like the water of the pool.

He turned and made for the shore, hasty, careless where he set his feet and not caring if he broke the silence by splashing and breathing hard. He slogged back up the path through the reeds till he reached dry ground and coarse grass, and heard the buzz of midges and crickets. He sat down then on the ground, rather hard, for his legs were shaking.

“It won't do,” he said, talking to himself in Hardic, and then he said, “I can't do it.” Then he said, “I can't do it by myself."

He was so distraught that when he made up his mind to call Silence he could not think of the opening of the spell, which he had known for sixty years; then when he thought he had it, he began to speak a Summoning instead, and the spell had begun to work before he realised what he was doing and stopped and undid it word by word.

He pulled up some grass and rubbed at the slimy mud on his feet and legs. It was not dry yet, and only smeared about on his skin. “I hate mud,” he whispered. Then he snapped his jaws and stopped trying to clean his legs. “Dirt, dirt,” he said, gently patting the ground he sat on. Then, very slow, very careful, he began to speak the spell of calling.

In a busy street leading down to the busy wharfs of Gont Port, the wizard Ogion stopped short. The ship's captain beside him walked on several steps and turned to see Ogion talking to the air.

“But I will come, master!” he said. And then after a pause, “How soon?” And after a longer pause, he told the air something in a language the ship's captain did not understand, and made a gesture that darkened the air about him for an instant.

“Captain,” he said, “I'm sorry, I must wait to spell your sails. An earthquake is near. I must warn the city. Do you tell them down there, every ship that can sail make for the open sea. Clear out, past the Armed Cliffs! Good luck to you.” And he turned and ran back up the street, a tall, strong man with rough greying hair, running now like a stag.

Gont Port lies at the inner end of a long narrow bay between steep shores. Its entrance from the sea is between two great headlands, the Gates of the Port, the Armed Cliffs, not a hundred feet apart. They are safe from sea-pirates in Gont Port. But their safety is their danger; the long bay follows a fault in the earth, and jaws that have opened may shut.

When he had done what he could to warn the city, and seen all the gate-guards and port-guards doing what they could to keep the few roads out from becoming choked and murderous with panicky people, Ogion shut himself into a room in the signal tower of the Port, locked the door, for everybody wanted him at once, and sent a sending to the Dark Pond in Semere's cow pasture up on the Mountain.

His old master was sitting in the grass near the pond, eating an apple. Bits of eggshell flecked the ground near his legs, which were caked with drying mud. When he looked up and saw Ogion's sending he smiled a wide, sweet smile. But he looked old. He had never looked so old. Ogion had not seen him for over a year, having been busy; he was always busy in Gont Port, doing the business of the lords and people, never a chance to walk in the forests on the mountainside or to come sit with Enhemon in the little house at Re Albi and listen and be still. Enhemon was an old man, near eighty now; and he was frightened. He smiled with joy to see Ogion, but he was frightened.

“I think what we have to do,” he said without preamble, “is try to hold the fault from slipping much, you at the Gates and me at the inner end, in the Mountain. Working together, you know. We might be able to. I can feel it building up, can you?"

Ogion shook his head. He let his sending sit down in the grass near Enhemon, though it did not bend the stems of the grass where it stepped or sat. “I've done nothing but set the city in a panic,” he said. “And send the ships out of the bay. What is it you feel? How do you feel it?”

They were technical questions, mage to mage. Enhemon hesitated before answering.

“I learned from Ard,” he said, and paused again. He had never told Ogion anything about his first teacher, a sorcerer of no fame, even in Gont, and perhaps of ill fame. There was some mystery or shame connected with Ard. Though he was talkative, for a wizard, Enhemon was silent as a stone about some things. Ogion, who respected silence, had never asked him about his teacher.

“It's not Roke magic,” the old man said. His voice was dry, a little forced. “Not to do with the Old Powers, either. Nothing of that sort. Nothing sticky.” That had always been his word for evil doings, spells for gain, curses, black magic: “sticky stuff.” After a while, searching for words, he went on: “Dirt. Rocks. It's a dirty magic. Must be very old. Very old. As old as Gont.”

“Will it control the rocks, the earth?"

“I should think so.” Enhemon was burying the core of his apple and the larger bits of eggshell under loose dirt, patting it over them neatly. “Of course I know the words, but I'll have to learn what to do as I go. That's the trouble with the big spells, isn't it? You learn what you're doing while you do it. No chance to practice. Ah—there! You feel that?"

Ogion shook his head.

“Straining,” Enhemon said, his eyes inlooking, his hand still absently, gently patting the dirt, as one might pat a scared cow. “Quite soon now, I think. Can you hold the Gates open, my dear?"

“Tell me what you'll be doing—”

But Enhemon was shaking his head: “No,” he said, “no time. Not your kind of thing.” He was more and more distracted by whatever it was he sensed in the earth or air, and through him Ogion felt that gathering, intolerable tension. But after a while he relaxed a little and even smiled. “Very old stuff,” he said. “I wish now I'd thought about it more. Passed it on to you. But it seemed a bit crude. Heavyhanded ... She didn't say where she'd learned it. Here, of course ... There are different kinds of knowledge, after all."

“She?"

“Ard. My teacher.” Enhemon looked up, his face unreadable, its expression possibly sly. “You didn't know that? No, I suppose I never mentioned it. But it doesn't make much difference, after all. Since we none of us have any sex, us wizards, do we? What matters is whose house we live in. It seems we may have left out a good deal worth knowing. This kind of thing—There! There again—"

His sudden tension and immobility, the strained face and inward look, were like those of a woman in labor when her womb contracts. That was Ogion's thought, even as he said, “What did you mean, ‘in the Mountain'?"

The spasm passed; Enhemon answered, “Inside the Mountain. There at Iaved.” He pointed to the knotted hills below them. “Go in, try to keep things from sliding around, eh? I'll find out when I'm doing it, no doubt. I think you should be getting back to yourself. Things are tightening up.” He stopped again, looking as if he were in intense pain, hunched and clenched. He struggled to stand up. Unthinking, Ogion held out his hand to help him.

“No use,” said the old wizard, grinning, “you're only wind and sunlight. Now I'm going to be dirt and stone. You'd best go on. Farewell, Aihal. Keep the—keep the mouth open, for once, eh?"

Ogion, obedient, bringing himself back to himself in the stuffy, tapestried room in Gont Port, did not understand the old man's joke until he turned to the window and saw the Armed Cliffs down at the end of the long bay, the jaws ready to snap shut. “I will,” he said, and set to it.

“What I have to do, you see,” the old wizard said, still talking to Silence because it was a comfort to talk to him even if he was no longer there, “is get into the mountain, right inside; but not the way a sorcerer-prospector does; not just slipping about between things and looking and tasting. Deeper. All the way in. Not the veins, but the bones. So,” and standing there alone in the high pasture, in the noon light, Enhemon opened his arms wide in the gesture of invocation that opens all the greater spells; and he spoke.

Nothing happened as he said the words Ard had taught him, his old witch-teacher with her bitter mouth and her long, lean arms, the words spoken awry then, spoken truly now. Nothing happened, and he had time to regret the sunlight and the seawind, and to doubt the spell, and to doubt himself, before the earth rose up around him, dry, warm, and dark.

In there he knew he should hurry, that the bones of the earth ached to move, and that he must become them to guide them, but he could not hurry. There was on him the bewilderment of any transformation. He had in his day been fox, and bull, and dragonfly, and knew what it was to change being. But this was different, this slow enlargement. I am vastening, he thought. He reached out towards Iaved, towards the ache, the suffering. As he came closer to it he felt a great strength flow into him from the west, as if Silence had taken him by the hand after all. Through that link he could send his own strength, the Mountain's strength, to help. I didn't tell him I wasn't coming back, he thought, his last words in Hardic, his last grief, for he was in the bones of the mountain now. He knew the arteries of fire, and the beat of the great heart. He knew what to do. It was in no tongue of man that he said, “Be quiet, be easy. There now, there. Hold fast. So, there. We can be easy.” And he was easy, he was still, he held fast, rock in rock and earth in earth in the fiery dark of the mountain.

It was their mage Ogion whom the people saw stand alone on the roof of the signal tower on the wharf, when the streets ran up and down in waves, the cobbles bursting out of them, and walls of clay brick puffed into dust, and the Armed Cliffs leaned together, groaning. It was Ogion they saw, his hands held out before him, straining, parting: and the cliffs parted with them, and stood straight, unmoved. The city shuddered and stood still. It was Ogion who stopped the earthquake. They saw it, they said it.

My teacher was with me, and his teacher with him,” Ogion said when they praised him. “I could hold the Gate open because he held the Mountain still.” They praised his modesty and did not listen to him. Listening is a rare gift, and men will have their heroes.

When the city was in order again, and the ships had all come back, and the walls were being rebuilt, Ogion escaped from praise and went up into the hills above Gont Port. He found the queer little valley called Trimmer's Dell, the true name of which in the language of the Making was Iaved, as Ogion's true name was Aihal. He walked about there all one day, as if seeking something. In the evening he lay down on the ground and talked to it. “You should have told me, I could have said goodbye,” he said. He wept once, and his tears fell on the dry dirt among the grass-stems and made little spots of mud, little sticky spots. He slept there, on the ground. At sunrise he got up and walked by the high road over to Re Albi. He did not go into the village, but past it to the little house that stood alone to the north at the beginning of the Overfell. The door of the house stood open.

The last beans had got big and coarse on the vines; the cabbages were thriving. Three hens came clucking and pecking around the dusty dooryard, a red, a brown, a white; a grey hen was setting her clutch in the henhouse. There were no chicks, and no sign of the cock, the King, Enhemon had called him. The king is dead, Ogion thought. Maybe a chick is hatching even now to take his place. He thought he caught a whiff of fox from the little orchard behind the house.

He swept out the dust and leaves that had blown in the open door across the polished wood floor, and set Enhemon's mattress and blanket in the sun to air. “I'll stay here a while,” he thought. “It's a good place.” After a while he thought, “I might keep some goats.”

OLD MACDONOLD HAD A FARM

Mike Resnick

I came to praise Caesar, not to bury him.

Hell, we all did.

The farm spread out before us, green and rolling, dotted with paddocks and water troughs. It looked like the kind of place you wish your parents had taken you when you were a kid and the world was still full of wonders.

Well, the world may not have been full of wonders any longer, but the farm was. Problem was, they weren’t exactly the kind you used to dream of–unless you were coming down from a really bad acid trip.

The farm was the brainchild of Caesar Claudius MacDonald. He’d finally knuckled under to public pressure and agreed to show the place off to the press. That’s where I came in.

My name’s McNair. I used to have a first name, but I dumped it when I decided a one-word byline was more memorable. I work for the SunTrib, the biggest newstape in the Chicago area. I’d just broken the story that put Billy Cheever away after the cops had been after him for years. What I wanted for my efforts was my own syndicated column; what I got was a trip to the farm.

For a guy no one knew much about, one who almost never appeared in public, MacDonald had managed to make his name a household word in something less than two years. Even though one of his corporations owned our publishing company, we didn’t have much on him in our files, just what all the other news bureaus had: he’d earned a couple of Ph.D.’s, he was a widower who by all accounts had been faithful to his wife, he’d inherited a bundle and then made a lot more on his own.

MacDonald was a Colorado native who emigrated to New Zealand’s South Island, bought a forty-thousand-hectare farm, and hired a lot of technicians over the years. If anyone wondered why a huge South Island farm didn’t have any sheep, they probably just figured he had worked out some kind of tax dodge.

Hell, that’s what I thought too. I mean, why else would someone with his money bury himself on the underside of the globe for half a lifetime?

Then, a week after his sixty-sixth birthday, MacDonald made The Announcement. That’s the year they had food riots in Calcutta and Rio and Manila, when the world was finding out that it was easier to produce eleven billion living human beings than to feed them.

Some people say he created a new life form. Some say he produced a hybrid (though not a single geneticist agrees with that). Some–I used to snicker at them–say that he had delved into mysteries that Man Was Not Meant To Know.

According to the glowing little computer cube they handed out, MacDonald and his crew spent close to three decades manipulating DNA molecules in ways no one had ever thought of before. He did a lot of trial and error work with embryos, until he finally came up with the prototype he sought. Then he spent a few more years making certain that it would breed true. And finally he announced his triumph to the world.

Caesar MacDonald’s masterpiece was the Butterball, a meat animal that matured at six months of age and could reproduce at eight months, with a four-week gestation period. It weighed four hundred pounds at maturity, and every portion of its body could be consumed by Earth’s starving masses, even the bones.

That in itself was a work of scientific brilliance–but to me the true stroke of genius was the astonishing efficiency of the Butterballs’ digestive systems. An elephant, back when elephants still existed, would eat about six hundred pounds of vegetation per day, but could only use about 40 percent of it, and passed the rest as dung. Cattle and pigs, the most common meat animals prior to the Butterballs, were somewhat more efficient, but they, too, wasted a lot of expensive feed.

The Butterballs, on the other hand, utilized one hundred percent of what they were fed. Every pellet of food they ingested went right into building meat that was meticulously bioengineered to please almost every palate. Anyway, that’s what the endless series of P.R. releases said.

MacDonald had finally consented to allow a handful of pool reporters to come see for themselves.

We were hoping for a look at MacDonald, too, maybe even an interview with the Great Man. But when we got there, we learned that he had been in seclusion for months. Turned out he was suffering from depression, which I would have thought would be the last thing to affect humanity’s latest savior, but who knows what depresses a genius? Maybe, like Alexander, he wanted more worlds to conquer, or maybe he was sorry that Butterballs didn’t weigh eight hundred pounds. Hell, maybe he had just worked too hard for too long, or maybe he realized that he was a lot closer to the end of life than the beginning and didn’t like it much. Most likely, he just didn’t consider us important enough to bother with.

Whatever the reason, we were greeted not by MacDonald himself, but by a flack named Judson Cotter. I figured he had to work in P.R.; his hair was a little too perfect, his suit too up-to-the-minute, his hands too soft for him to have been anything else but a pitchman.

After he apologized for MacDonald’s absence, he launched into a worshipful biography of his boss, not deviating one iota from the holobio they’d shown us on the plane trip.

"But I suspect you’re here to see the farm," he concluded after paraphrasing the bio for five minutes.

"No," muttered Julie Balch from NyVid, "we came all this way to stand in this cold wet breeze and admire your clothes."

A few of us laughed, and Cotter looked just a bit annoyed. I made a mental note to buy her a drink when the tour was done.

"Now let me see a show of hands," said Cotter. "Has anyone here ever seen a live Butterball?"

Where did they find you? I thought. If we’d seen one, do you really think we’d have flown all the way to hell and gone just to see another?

I looked around. No one had raised a hand. Which figured. To the best of my knowledge, nobody who didn’t work for MacDonald had ever seen a Butterball in the flesh, and only a handful of photos and holos had made it out to the general public. There was even a rumor that all of MacDonald’s employees had to sign a secrecy oath.

"There’s a reason, of course," continued Cotter smoothly. "Until the international courts verified Mr. MacDonald’s patent, there was always a chance that some unscrupulous individual or even a rogue nation would try to duplicate the Butterball. For that reason, while we have shipped and sold its meat all over the world, always with the inspection and approval of the local food and health authorities, we have not allowed anyone to see or examine the animals themselves. But now that the courts have ruled in our favor, we have opened our doors to the press." Screaming bloody murder every step of the way, I thought.

"You represent the first group of journalists to tour the farm, but there will be many more, and we will even allow Sir Richard Peregrine to make one of his holographic documentaries here at the farm." He paused. "We plan to open it to public tours in the next two or three years."

Suddenly a bunch of bullshit alarms began going off inside my head.

"Why not sooner, now that you’ve won your case?" asked Julie, who looked like she was hearing the same alarms.

"We’d rather that you bring the initial stories and holos of the Butterballs to the public," answered Cotter.

"That’s very generous of you," she persisted. "But you still haven’t told us why."

"We have our reasons," he said. "They will be made apparent to you before the tour is over."

My old friend Jake Monfried of the SeattleDisk sidled over to me. "I hope I can stay awake that long," he said sardonically. "It’s all rubbish anyway."

"I know," I said. "Their rivals don’t even need the damned holos. Any high school kid could take a hunk of Butterball steak and come up with a clone."

"So why haven’t they?" asked Julie.

"Because MacDonald’s got fifty lawyers on his payroll for every scientist," answered Jake. He paused, his expression troubled. "Still, this guy’s lying to us–and it’s a stupid lie, and he doesn’t look that stupid. I wonder what the hell he’s hiding?"

We were going to have to wait to find out, because Cotter began leading us across a rolling green plain toward a barn. We circled a couple of ponds, where a few dozen birds were wading and drinking. The whole setting looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell or a Grandma Moses painting, it was so wholesome and innocent–and yet every instinct I had screamed at me that something was wrong here, that nothing could be as peaceful and tranquil as it appeared.

"To appreciate what Mr. MacDonald has done here," said Cotter as we walked toward a large barn on a hillside, "you have to understand the challenge he faced. More than five billion men, women and children have serious protein deficiencies. Three billion of them are quite literally starving to death. And of course the price of meat–any meat–had skyrocketed to the point where only the very wealthy could afford it. So what he had to do was not only create an animal as totally, completely nutritious as the Butterball, he had to also create one that could mature and breed fast enough to meet mankind’s needs now and in the future."

He stopped until a couple of laggards caught up with the group. "His initial work took the form of computer simulations. Then he hired a bevy of scientists and technicians who, guided by his genius, actually manipulated DNA to the point where the Butterballs existed not just on the screen and in Mr. MacDonald’s mind, but in the flesh.

"It took a few generations for them to breed true, but fortunately a Butterball generation is considerably less than a year. Mr. MacDonald then had his staff spend some years mass-producing Butterballs. They were designed to have multiple births, not single offspring, and average ten to twelve per litter–and all of our specimens were bred and bred again so that when we finally introduced the Butterball to the world two years ago, we felt confident that we could keep up with the demand without running out of Butterballs."

"How many Butterballs have you got here?" asked the guy from Eurocom International, looking out across the rolling pastures and empty fields.

"We have more than two million at this facility," came the answer. "Mr. MacDonald owns some twenty-seven farms here and in Australia, each as large or larger than this one, and each devoted to the breeding of Butterballs. Every farm has its own processing plant. We’re proud to note that while we have supplied food for billions, we’ve also created jobs for more than eighty thousand men and women." He paused to make sure we had recorded that number or were jotting it down.

"That many?" mused Julie.

"I know it seems like we sneaked up on the world," said Cotter with a smile. "But for legal reasons we were compelled to keep the very existence of the Butterballs secret until we were ready to market them–and once we did go public, we were processing, shipping, and selling hundreds of tons from each farm every month right from the start. We had to have all our people in place to do that."

"If they give him the Nobel, he can afford to turn the money down," Jake said wryly.

"I believe Mr. MacDonald is prepared to donate the money to charity should that happy event come to pass," responded Cotter. He turned and began walking toward the barn, then stopped about eighty feet from it.

"I must prepare you for what you’re going to–"

"We’ve already seen the holos," interrupted the French reporter.

Cotter stared at him for a moment, then began again. "As I was saying, I must prepare you for what you’re going to hear."

"Hear?" I repeated, puzzled.

"It was a fluke," he explained, trying to look unconcerned and not quite pulling it off. "An accident. An anomaly. But the fact of the matter is that the Butterballs can articulate a few words, just as a parrot can. We could have eliminated that ability, of course, but that would have taken more experimentation and more time, and the world’s hungry masses couldn’t wait."

"So what do they say?" asked Julie.

Cotter smiled what I’m sure he thought was a comforting smile. "They simply repeat what they hear. There’s no intelligence behind it. None of them has a vocabulary of more than a dozen words. Mostly they articulate their most basic needs."

He turned to the barn and nodded to a man who stood by the door. The man pushed a button, and the door slid back.

The first big surprise was the total silence that greeted us from within the barn. Then, as they heard us approaching–we weren’t speaking, but coins jingle and feet scuff the ground–a voice, then a hundred, then a thousand, began calling out:

"Feed me!"

It was a cacophony of sound, not quite human, the words repeated again and again and again: "Feed me!"

We entered the barn, and finally got our first glimpse of the Butterballs. Just as in their holos, they were huge and roly-poly, almost laughably cute, looking more like oversized bright pink balloons than anything else. They had four tiny feet, good for balance but barely capable of locomotion. There were no necks to speak of, just a small pink balloon that swiveled atop the larger one. They had large round eyes with wide pupils, ears the size of small coins, two slits for nostrils, and generous mouths without any visible teeth.

"The eyes are the only part of the Butterball that aren’t marketable," said Cotter, "and that is really for esthetic reasons. I’m told they are quite edible."

The nearest one walked to the edge of its stall.

"Pet me!" it squeaked.

Cotter reached in and rubbed its forehead, and it squealed in delight.

"I’ll give you a few minutes to wander around the barn, and then I’ll meet you outside, where I’ll answer your questions."

He had a point. With a couple of thousand Butterballs screaming "Feed me!" more and more frantically, it was almost impossible to think in there. We went up and down the rows of small stalls, captured the place on film and tape and disk and cube, then went back outside.

"That was impressive," I admitted when we’d all gathered around Cotter again. "But I didn’t see any two million Butterballs in there. Where are the rest of them?"

"There are more than three hundred barns and other enclosures on the farm," answered Cotter. "Furthermore, close to half a million are outside in pastures."

"I don’t see anything but empty fields," remarked Jake, waving a hand toward the pristine enclosures.

"We’re a huge farm, and we prefer to keep the Butterballs away from prying eyes. In fact, this barn was built only a month ago, when we finally decided to allow visitors on the premises. It is the only building that’s as close as a mile to any of our boundary lines."

"You said that some of them were in pastures," said Julie. "What do they eat?"

"Not grass," answered Cotter. "They’re only outside because they’re multiplying so fast that we’re actually short of barns at the moment." He paused. "If you looked carefully at them, you noticed that grazing is quite beyond their capabilities." He held up a small golden pellet for us to see. "This is what they eat. It is totally artificial, created entirely from chemicals. Mr. MacDonald was adamant that no Butterball should ever eat any product that might nourish a human being. Their digestive systems were engineered to utilize this particular feed, which can provide nourishment to no other species on Earth."

"As long as you tinkered with their digestive systems, why didn’t you make them shit-eaters?" asked Jake, only half-jokingly. "They could have served two purposes at once."

"I assume that was meant in jest," said Cotter, "but in point of fact, Mr. MacDonald considered it at one time. After all, some nourishment does remain in excrement–but alas, not enough. He wanted an animal that could utilize one hundred percent of what we fed it."

"How smart are they?" asked one of the Brits. "When I was a child, I had a dog that always wanted me to feed it or pet it, but it never told me so."

"Yes it did," said Cotter. "It just didn’t use words."

"Point taken," said the Brit. "But I’d still like to know. . . ."

"These are dumb farm animals," said Cotter. "They do not think, they do not dream, they have no hopes or aspirations, they do not wish to become Archbishop. They just happen to be able to articulate a few words, not unlike many birds. Surely you don’t think Mr. MacDonald would create a sentient meat animal."

"No, of course not," interjected Julie. "But hearing them speak is still a bit of a shock."

"I know," said Cotter. "And that’s the real reason we’ve invited you here, why we’re inviting so many other press pools–to prepare the public."

"That’s going to take a lot of preparation," I said dubiously.

"We have to start somewhere," said Cotter. "We have to let the people know about this particular anomaly. Men love to anthropomorphize, and a talking animal makes doing so that much easier. The consumers must be made to understand, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that these are unintelligent meat animals, that they do not know what their words mean, that they have no names and aren’t pets, that they do not mourn the loss of their neighbors any more than a cow or a goat does. They are humanity’s last chance–note that I did not even say humanity’s last best chance–and we cannot let the protesters and picketers we know will demonstrate against us go unanswered. No one will believe our answers, but they should believe the answers of the unbiased world press."

"Yeah," I said under my breath to Jake. "And if kids didn’t want to eat Bambi, or Henry the Turkey, or Penelope Pig, how is anyone going to make them dig into Talky the Butterball, who actually exists?"

"I heard that," said Cotter sharply, "and I must point out that the children who will survive because of the Butterballs will almost certainly never have been exposed to Bambi or Henry or any of the others."

"Maybe not for a year or two," I replied, unimpressed. "But before long you’ll be selling Butterburgers on every street corner in the States."

"Not until we’ve fulfilled our mission among the less fortunate peoples of the world–and by that time the people you refer to should be prepared to accept the Butterballs."

"Well, you can hope," I said.

"If it never comes to that, it doesn’t really matter," said Cotter with an elaborate shrug. "Our mission is to feed Earth’s undernourished billions."

We both knew it would come to that, and sooner than anyone planned, but if he didn’t want to argue it, that was fine with me. I was just here to collect a story.

"Before I show you the processing plant, are there any further questions?" asked Cotter.

"You mean the slaughterhouse, right?" said Jake.

"I mean the processing plant," said Cotter severely. "Certain words are not in our lexicon."

"You’re actually going to show us Butterballs being . . . processed?" asked Julie distastefully.

"Certainly not," answered Cotter. "I’m just going to show you the plant. The process is painless and efficient, but I see no value in your being able to report that you watched our animals being prepared for market."

"Good!" said Julie with obvious relief.

Cotter gestured to an open bus that was parked a few hundred meters away, and it soon pulled up. After everybody was seated, he climbed on and stood next to the driver, facing us.

"The plant is about five miles away, at almost the exact center of the farm, insulated from curious eyes and ears."

"Ears?" Julie jumped on the word. "Do they scream?"

Cotter smiled. "No, that was just an expression. We are quite humane, far more so than any meat packing plant that existed before us."

The bus hit a couple of bumps that almost sent him flying, but he hung on like a trooper and continued bombarding us with information, about three-quarters of it too technical or too self-serving to be of any use.

"Here we are," he announced as the bus came to a stop in front of the processing plant, which dwarfed the barn we had just left. "Everyone out, please."

We got off the bus. I sniffed the air for the odor of fresh blood, not that I knew what it smelled like, but of course I couldn’t detect any. No blood, no rotting flesh, nothing but clean, fresh air. I was almost disappointed.

There were a number of small pens nearby, each holding perhaps a dozen Butterballs.

"You have perhaps noticed that we have no vehicles capable of moving the hundreds and thousands of units we have to process each day?" asked Cotter, though it came out more as a statement than a question.

"I assume they are elsewhere," said the lady from India.

"They were inefficient," replied Cotter. "We got rid of them."

"Then how do you move the Butterballs?"

Cotter smiled. "Why clutter all our roads with vehicles when they aren’t necessary?" he said, tapping out a design on his pocket computer. The main door to the processing plant slid open, and I noticed that the Butterballs were literally jumping up and down with excitement.

Cotter walked over to the nearest pen. "Who wants to go to heaven?" he asked.

"Go to heaven!" squeaked a Butterball.

"Go to heaven!" rasped another.

Soon all twelve were repeating it almost as if it were a chant, and I suddenly felt like I was trapped inside some strange surrealistic play.

Finally, Cotter unlocked their pen and they hopped–I hadn’t seen any locomote at the other barn–up to the door and into the plant.

"It’s as simple as that," said Cotter. "The money we save on vehicles, fuel, and maintenance allows us to–"

"There’s nothing simple about it!" snapped Julie. "This is somewhere between blasphemy and obscenity! And while we’re at it," she added suspiciously, "how can a dumb animal possibly know what heaven is?"

"I repeat, they are not sentient," said Cotter. "Just as you have code words for your pet dog or cat, we have them for the Butterballs. Ask your dog if he wants a treat, and he’ll bark or sit up or do whatever you have conditioned him to do. We have conditioned the Butterballs in precisely the same way. They don’t know the meaning of the word ‘heaven’ any more than your pet knows the meaning of the word ‘treat,’ but we’ve conditioned them to associate the word with good feelings and with entry into the processing plant. They will happily march miles through a driving rain to ‘go to heaven.’ "

"But heaven is such a . . . a philosophical concept," persisted the Indian woman. "Even to use it seems–"

"Your dog knows when he’s been good," interrupted Cotter, "because you tell him so, and he believes you implicitly. And he knows when he’s been bad, because you show him what he’s done to displease you and you call him a bad dog. But do you think he understands the abstract philosophical concepts of good and bad?"

"All right," said Julie. "You’ve made your point. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather not see the inside of the slaughterhouse."

"The processing plant," he corrected her. "And of course you don’t have to enter it if it will make you uncomfortable."

"I’ll stay out here, too," I said. "I’ve seen enough killing down in Paraguay and Uruguay."

"We’re not killing anything," explained Cotter irritably. "I am simply showing you–"

"I’ll stay here anyway," I cut him off.

He shrugged. "As you wish."

"If you have no vehicles to bring them to the plant," asked the Brit, approaching the entrance, "how do you move the . . . uh, the finished product out?"

"Through a very efficient system of underground conveyers," said Cotter. "The meat is stored in subterranean freezers near the perimeter of the property until it is shipped. And now . . ." He opened a second pen, offered them heaven, and got pretty much the same response.

Poor bastards, I thought as I watched them hop and waddle to the door of the plant. In times gone by, sheep would be enticed into the slaughterhouse by a trained ram that they blindly followed. But leave it to us to come up with an even better reward for happily walking up to the butcher block: heaven itself.

The Butterballs followed the first dozen into the belly of the building, and the rest of the pool followed Cotter in much the same way. There was a parallel to be drawn there, but I wasn’t interested enough to draw it.

I saw Julie walking toward one of the pens. She looked like she didn’t want any company, so I headed off for a pen in the opposite direction. When I got there, four or five of the Butterballs pressed up against the fence next to me.

"Feed me!"

"Feed me!"

"Pet me!"

"Feed me!"

Since I didn’t have any food, I settled for petting the one who was more interested in being petted than being fed.

"Feel good?" I asked idly.

"Feel good!" it said.

I almost did a double-take at that.

"You’re a hell of a mimic, you know that?" I said.

No reply.

"Can you say what I say?" I asked.

Silence.

"Then how the hell did you learn to say it feels good, if you didn’t learn it just now from me?"

"Pet me!"

"Okay, okay," I said, scratching it behind a tiny ear.

"Very good!"

I pulled my hand back as if I’d had an electric shock. "I never said the word ‘very.’ Where did you learn it?" And more to the point, how did you learn to partner it with ‘good’?

Silence.

For the next ten minutes I tried to get it to say something different. I wasn’t sure what I was reaching for, but the best I got was a "Pet me!" and a pair of "Good’s."

"All right," I said at last. "I give up. Go play with your friends, and don’t go to heaven too soon."

"Go to heaven!" it said, hopping up and down. "Go to heaven!"

"Don’t get so excited," I said. "It’s not what it’s cracked up to be."

"See Mama!" it squealed.

"What?"

"See God! See Mama!"

Suddenly, I knew why MacDonald was being treated for depression. I didn’t blame him at all.

I hurried back to the slaughterhouse, and when Cotter emerged alone a moment later, I walked up to him.

"We have to talk," I said, grabbing him by the arm.

"Your colleagues are all inside inspecting the premises," he said, trying to pull himself loose from my grip. "Are you sure you wouldn’t care to join them?"

"Shut up and listen to me!" I said. "I just had a talk with one of your Butterballs."

"He told you to feed him?"

"He told me that he would see God when he went to heaven."

Cotter swallowed hard. "Oh, shit–another one!"

"Another one of what?" I demanded. "Another sentient one?"

"No, of course not," said Cotter. "But as often as we impress the need for absolute silence among our staff, they continue to speak to each other in front of the Butterballs, or even to the Butterballs themselves. Obviously this one heard someone saying that God lives in heaven. It has no concept of God, of course; it probably thinks God is something good to eat."

"He thinks he’s going to see his mother, too," I said.

"He’s a mimic!" said Cotter severely. "Surely you don’t think he can have any memory of his mother? For Christ’s sake, he was weaned at five weeks!"

"I’m just telling you what he said," I replied. "Like it or not, you’ve got a hell of a P.R. problem: Just how many people do you want him saying it to?"

"Point him out to me," said Cotter, looking panicky. "We’ll process him at once."

"You think he’s the only one with a vocabulary?" I asked.

"One of the very few, I’m sure," said Cotter.

"Don’t be that sure," said Julie, who had joined us while I was talking to Cotter. She had an odd expression on her face, like someone who’s just undergone a religious experience and wishes she hadn’t. "Mine looked at me with those soft brown eyes and asked me, very gently and very shyly, not to eat it."

I thought Cotter would shit in his expensive suit. "That’s impossible!"

"The hell it is!" she shot back.

"They are not sentient," he said stubbornly. "They are mimics. They do not think. They do not know what they are saying." He stared at her. "Are you sure he didn’t say ‘feed’? It sounds a lot like ‘eat.’ You’ve got to be mistaken."

It made sense. I hoped he was right.

" ‘Don’t feed me?’ " repeated Julie. "The only un-hungry Butterball on the farm?"

"Some of them speak better than others. He could have been clearing his throat, or trying to say something that came out wrong. I’ve even come across one that stutters." It occurred to me that Cotter was trying as hard to convince himself as he was to convince her. "We’ve tested them a hundred different ways. They’re not sentient. They’re not!"

"But–"

"Consider the facts," said Cotter. "I’ve explained that the words sound alike. I’ve explained that the Butterballs are not all equally skilled at articulation. I’ve explained that after endless lab experiments the top animal behavioral scientists in the world have concluded that they are not sentient. All that is on one side. On the other is that you think you may have heard something that is so impossible that any other explanation makes more sense."

"I don’t know," she hedged. "It sounded exactly like . . ."

"I’m sure it did," said Cotter soothingly. "You were simply mistaken."

"No one else has ever heard anything like that?" she asked.

"No one. But if you’d like to point out which of them said it. . . ."

She turned toward the pen. "They all look alike."

I tagged along as the two of them walked over to the Butterballs. We spent about five minutes there, but none of them said anything but "Feed me!" and "Pet me!," and finally Julie sighed in resignation.

"All right," she said wearily. "Maybe I was wrong."

"What do you think, Mr. McNair?" asked Cotter.

My first thought was: what the hell are you asking me for? Then I looked into his eyes, which were almost laying out the terms of our agreement, and I knew.

"Now that I’ve had a few minutes to think about it, I guess we were mistaken," I said. "Your scientists know a lot more about it than we do."

I turned to see Julie’s reaction.

"Yeah," she said at last. "I suppose so." She looked at the Butterballs. "Besides, MacDonald may be a zillionaire and a recluse, but I don’t think he’s a monster, and only a monster could do something like . . . well . . . yes, I must have been mistaken."

And that’s the story. We were not only the first pool of journalists to visit the farm. We were also the last.

The others didn’t know what had happened, and of course Cotter wasn’t about to tell them. They reported what they saw, told the world that its prayers were answered, and only three of them even mentioned the Butterballs’ special talent.

I thought about the Butterballs all during the long flight home. Every expert said they weren’t sentient, that they were just mimics. And I suppose my Butterball could very well have heard someone say that God lived in heaven, just as he could have heard someone use the word "very." It was a stretch, but I could buy it if I had to.

But where did Julie Balch’s Butterball ever hear a man begging not to be eaten? I’ve been trying to come up with an answer to that since I left the farm. I haven’t got one yet–but I do have a syndicated column, courtesy of the conglomerate that owns the publishing company.

So am I going to use it to tell the world?

That’s my other problem: Tell it what? That three billion kids can go back to starving to death? Because whether Cotter was telling the truth or lying through his teeth, if it comes down to a choice between Butterballs and humans, I know which side I have to come down on.

There are things I can control and things I can’t, things I know and things I am trying my damnedest not to know. I’m just one man, and I’m not responsible for saving the world.

But I am responsible for me–and from the day I left the farm, I’ve been a vegetarian. It’s a small step, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

THE DOG SAID BOW-WOW

Michael Swanwick

The dog looked as if he had just stepped out of a children’s book. There must have been a hundred physical adaptations required to allow him to walk upright. The pelvis, of course, had been entirely reshaped. The feet alone would have needed dozens of changes. He had knees, and knees were tricky.

To say nothing of the neurological enhancements.

But what Darger found himself most fascinated by was the creature’s costume. His suit fit him perfectly, with a slit in the back for the tail, and again a hundred invisible adaptations that caused it to hang on his body in a way that looked perfectly natural.

"You must have an extraordinary tailor," Darger said.

The dog shifted his cane from one paw to the other, so they could shake, and in the least affected manner imaginable replied, "That is a common observation, sir."

"You’re from the States?" It was a safe assumption, given where they stood on the docks and that the schooner Yankee Dreamer had sailed up the Thames with the morning tide. Darger had seen its bubble sails over the rooftops, like so many rainbows. "Have you found lodgings yet?"

"Indeed I am, and no I have not. If you could recommend a tavern of the cleaner sort?"

"No need for that. I would be only too happy to put you up for a few days in my own rooms." And, lowering his voice, Darger said, "I have a business proposition to put to you."

"Then lead on, sir, and I shall follow you with a right good will."

The dog’s name was Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux, but "Call me Sir Plus," he said with a self-denigrating smile, and "Surplus" he was ever after.

Surplus was, as Darger had at first glance suspected and by conversation confirmed, a bit of a rogue something more than mischievous and less than a cut-throat. A dog, in fine, after Darger’s own heart.

Over drinks in a public house, Darger displayed his box and explained his intentions for it. Surplus warily touched the intricately carved teak housing, and then drew away from it. "You outline an intriguing scheme, Master Darger–"

"Please. Call me Aubrey."

"Aubrey, then. Yet here we have a delicate point. How shall we divide up the . . . ah, spoils of this enterprise? I hesitate to mention this, but many a promising partnership has foundered on precisely such shoals."

Darger unscrewed the salt cellar and poured its contents onto the table. With his dagger, he drew a fine line down the middle of the heap. "I divide you choose. Or the other way around, if you please. From self-interest, you’ll not find a grain’s difference between the two."

"Excellent!" cried Surplus and, dropping a pinch of salt in his beer, drank to the bargain.

It was raining when they left for Buckingham Labyrinth. Darger stared out the carriage window at the drear streets and worn buildings gliding by and sighed. "Poor, weary old London! History is a grinding-wheel that has been applied too many a time to thy face."

"It is also," Surplus reminded him, "to be the making of our fortunes. Raise your eyes to the Labyrinth, sir, with its soaring towers and bright surfaces rising above these shops and flats like a crystal mountain rearing up out of a ramshackle wooden sea, and be comforted."

"That is fine advice," Darger agreed. "But it cannot comfort a lover of cities, nor one of a melancholic turn of mind."

"Pah!" cried Surplus, and said no more until they arrived at their destination.

At the portal into Buckingham, the sergeant-interface strode forward as they stepped down from the carriage. He blinked at the sight of Surplus, but said only, "Papers?"

Surplus presented the man with his passport and the credentials Darger had spent the morning forging, then added with a negligent wave of his paw, "And this is my autistic."

The sergeant-interface glanced once at Darger, and forgot about him completely. Darger had the gift, priceless to one in his profession, of a face so nondescript that once someone looked away, it disappeared from that person’s consciousness forever. "This way, sir. The officer of protocol will want to examine these himself."

A dwarf savant was produced to lead them through the outer circle of the Labyrinth. They passed by ladies in bioluminescent gowns and gentlemen with boots and gloves cut from leathers cloned from their own skin. Both women and men were extravagantly bejeweled for the ostentatious display of wealth was yet again in fashion and the halls were lushly clad and pillared in marble, porphyry, and jasper. Yet Darger could not help noticing how worn the carpets were, how chipped and sooted the oil lamps. His sharp eye espied the remains of an antique electrical system, and traces as well of telephone lines and fiber optic cables from an age when those technologies were yet workable.

These last he viewed with particular pleasure.

The dwarf savant stopped before a heavy black door carved over with gilt griffins, locomotives, and fleurs-de-lis. "This is a door," he said. "The wood is ebony. Its binomial is Diospyros ebenum. It was harvested in Serendip. The gilding is of gold. Gold has an atomic weight of 197.2."

He knocked on the door and opened it.

The officer of protocol was a dark-browed man of imposing mass. He did not stand for them. "I am Lord Coherence-Hamilton, and this–" he indicated the slender, clear-eyed woman who stood beside him “is my sister, Pamela."

Surplus bowed deeply to the Lady, who dimpled and dipped a slight curtsey in return.

The Protocol Officer quickly scanned the credentials. "Explain these fraudulent papers, sirrah. The Demesne of Western Vermont! Damn me if I have ever heard of such a place."

"Then you have missed much," Surplus said haughtily. "It is true we are a young nation, created only seventy-five years ago during the Partition of New England. But there is much of note to commend our fair land. The glorious beauty of Lake Champlain. The gene-mills of Winooski, that ancient seat of learning the Universitas Viridis Montis of Burlington, the Technarchaeological Institute of–" He stopped. "We have much to be proud of, sir, and nothing of which to be ashamed."

The bearlike official glared suspiciously at him, then said, "What brings you to London? Why do you desire an audience with the queen?"

"My mission and destination lie in Russia. However, England being on my itinerary and I a diplomat, I was charged to extend the compliments of my nation to your monarch." Surplus did not quite shrug. "There is no more to it than that. In three days I shall be in France, and you will have forgotten about me completely."

Scornfully, the officer tossed his credentials to the savant, who glanced at and politely returned them to Surplus. The small fellow sat down at a little desk scaled to his own size and swiftly made out a copy. "Your papers will be taken to Whitechapel and examined there. If everything goes well which I doubt and there’s an opening not likely you’ll be presented to the queen sometime between a week and ten days hence."

"Ten days! Sir, I am on a very strict schedule!"

"Then you wish to withdraw your petition?"

Surplus hesitated. "I . . . I shall have to think on it, sir."

Lady Pamela watched coolly as the dwarf savant led them away.

The room they were shown to had massively framed mirrors and oil paintings dark with age upon the walls, and a generous log fire in the hearth. When their small guide had gone, Darger carefully locked and bolted the door. Then he tossed the box onto the bed, and bounced down alongside it. Lying flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling, he said, "The Lady Pamela is a strikingly beautiful woman. I’ll be damned if she’s not."

Ignoring him, Surplus locked paws behind his back, and proceeded to pace up and down the room. He was full of nervous energy. At last, he expostulated, "This is a deep game you have gotten me into, Darger! Lord Coherence-Hamilton suspects us of all manner of blackguardry,"

"Well, and what of that?"

"I repeat myself: We have not even begun our play yet, and he suspects us already! I trust neither him nor his genetically remade dwarf."

"You are in no position to be displaying such vulgar prejudice."

"I am not bigoted about the creature, Darger, I fear him! Once let suspicion of us into that macroencephalic head of his, and he will worry at it until he has found out our every secret."

"Get a grip on yourself, Surplus! Be a man! We are in this too deep already to back out. Questions would be asked, and investigations made."

"I am anything but a man, thank God," Surplus replied. "Still, you are right. In for a penny, in for a pound. For now, I might as well sleep. Get off the bed. You can have the hearth-rug."

"I! The rug!"

"I am groggy of mornings. Were someone to knock, and I to unthinkingly open the door, it would hardly do to have you found sharing a bed with your master."

The next day, Surplus returned to the Office of Protocol to declare that he was authorized to wait as long as two weeks for an audience with the queen, though not a day more.

"You have received new orders from your government?" Lord Coherence-Hamilton asked suspiciously. "I hardly see how."

"I have searched my conscience, and reflected on certain subtleties of phrasing in my original instructions," Surplus said. "That is all."

He emerged from the office to discover Lady Pamela waiting outside. When she offered to show him the Labyrinth, he agreed happily to her plan. Followed by Darger, they strolled inward, first to witness the changing of the guard in the forecourt vestibule, before the great pillared wall that was the front of Buckingham Palace before it was swallowed up in the expansion of architecture during the mad, glorious years of Utopia. Following which, they proceeded toward the viewer’s gallery above the chamber of state.

"I see from your repeated glances that you are interested in my diamonds, Sieur Plus Precieux,"  Lady Pamela said. "Well might you be. They are a family treasure, centuries old and manufactured to order, each stone flawless and perfectly matched. The indentures of a hundred autistics would not buy the like."

Surplus smiled down again at the necklace, draped about her lovely throat and above her perfect breasts. "I assure you, madame, it was not your necklace that held me so enthralled."

She colored delicately, pleased. Lightly, she said, "And that box your man carries with him wherever you go? What is in it?"

"That? A trifle. A gift for the Duke of Muscovy, who is the ultimate object of my journey," Surplus said. "I assure you, it is of no interest whatsoever."

"You were talking to someone last night," Lady Pamela said. "In your room."

"You were listening at my door? I am astonished and flattered."

She blushed. "No, no, my brother . . . it is his job, you see, surveillance."

"Possibly I was talking in my sleep. I have been told I do that occasionally."

"In accents? My brother said he heard two voices."

Surplus looked away. "In that, he was mistaken."

England’s queen was a sight to rival any in that ancient land. She was as large as the lorry of ancient legend, and surrounded by attendants who hurried back and forth, fetching food and advice and carrying away dirty plates and signed legislation. From the gallery, she reminded Darger of a queen bee, but unlike the bee, this queen did not copulate, but remained proudly virgin.

Her name was Gloriana the First, and she was a hundred years old and still growing.

Lord Campbell-Supercollider, a friend of Lady Pamela’s met by chance, who had insisted on accompanying them to the gallery, leaned close to Surplus and murmured, "You are impressed, of course, by our queen’s magnificence." The warning in his voice was impossible to miss. "Foreigners invariably are."

"I am dazzled," Surplus said.

"Well might you be. For scattered through her majesty’s great body are thirty-six brains, connected with thick ropes of ganglia in a hypercube configuration. Her processing capacity is the equal of many of the great computers from Utopian times."

Lady Pamela stifled a yawn. "Darling Rory," she said, touching the Lord Campbell-Supercollider’s sleeve. "Duty calls me. Would you be so kind as to show my American friend the way back to the outer circle?"

"Or course, my dear." He and Surplus stood (Darger was, of course, already standing) and paid their compliments. Then, when Lady Pamela was gone and Surplus started to turn toward the exit, "Not that way. Those stairs are for commoners. You and I may leave by the gentlemen’s staircase."

The narrow stairs twisted downward beneath clouds of gilt cherubs-and-airships, and debouched into a marble-floored hallway. Surplus and Darger stepped out of the stairway and found their arms abruptly seized by baboons.

There were five baboons all told, with red uniforms and matching choke collars with leashes that gathered in the hand of an ornately mustached officer whose gold piping identified him as a master of apes. The fifth baboon bared his teeth and hissed savagely.

Instantly, the master of apes yanked back on his leash and said, "There, Hercules! There, sirrah! What do you do? What do you say?"

The baboon drew himself up and bowed curtly. "Please come with us," he said with difficulty. The master of apes cleared his throat. Sullenly, the baboon added, "Sir."

"This is outrageous!" Surplus cried. "I am a diplomat, and under international law immune to arrest."

"Ordinarily, sir, this is true," said the master of apes courteously. "However, you have entered the inner circle without her majesty’s invitation and are thus subject to stricter standards of security."

"I had no idea these stairs went inward. I was led here by–" Surplus looked about helplessly. Lord Campbell-Supercollider was nowhere to be seen.

So, once again, Surplus and Darger found themselves escorted to the Office of Protocol.

"The wood is teak. Its binomial is Tectonia grandis. Teak is native to Burma, Hind, and Siam. The box is carved elaborately but without refinement." The dwarf savant opened it. "Within the casing is an archaic device for electronic intercommunication. The instrument chip is a gallium-arsenide ceramic. The chip weighs six ounces. The device is a product of the Utopian end-times."

"A modem!" The protocol officer’s eyes bugged out. "You dared bring a modem into the inner circle and almost into the presence of the queen?" His chair stood and walked around the table. Its six insectile legs looked too slender to carry his great, legless mass. Yet it moved nimbly and well.

"It is harmless, sir. Merely something our technarchaeologists unearthed and thought would amuse the Duke of Muscovy, who is well known for his love of all things antiquarian. It is, apparently, of some cultural or historical significance, though without re-reading my instructions, I would be hard pressed to tell you what."

Lord Coherence-Hamilton raised his chair so that he loomed over Surplus, looking dangerous and domineering. "Here is the historic significance of your modem: The Utopians filled the world with their computer webs and nets, burying cables and nodes so deeply and plentifully that they shall never be entirely rooted out. They then released into that virtual universe demons and mad gods. These intelligences destroyed Utopia and almost destroyed humanity as well. Only the valiant worldwide destruction of all modes of interface saved us from annihilation!" He glared.

"Oh, you lackwit! Have you no history? These creatures hate us because our ancestors created them. They are still alive, though confined to their electronic netherworld, and want only a modem to extend themselves into the physical realm. Can you wonder, then, that the penalty for possessing such a device is–" he smiled menacingly– "death?"

"No, sir, it is not. Possession of a working modem is a mortal crime. This device is harmless. Ask your savant."

"Well?" the big man growled at his dwarf. "Is it functional?"

"No. It–"

"Silence." Lord Coherence-Hamilton turned back to Surplus. "You are a fortunate cur. You will not be charged with any crimes. However, while you are here, I will keep this filthy device locked away and under my control. Is that understood, Sir Bow-Wow?"

Surplus sighed. "Very well," he said. "It is only for a week, after all."

That night, the Lady Pamela Coherence-Hamilton came by Surplus’s room to apologize for the indignity of his arrest, of which, she assured him, she had just now learned. He invited her in. In short order they somehow found themselves kneeling face-to-face on the bed, unbuttoning each other’s clothing.

Lady Pamela’s breasts had just spilled delightfully from her dress when she drew back, clutching the bodice closed again, and said, "Your man is watching us."

"And what concern is that to us?" Surplus said jovially. "The poor fellow’s an autistic. Nothing he sees or hears matters to him. You might as well be embarrassed by the presence of a chair."

"Even were he a wooden carving, I would his eyes were not on me."

"As you wish." Surplus clapped his paws. "Sirrah! Turn around."

Obediently, Darger turned his back. This was his first experience with his friend’s astonishing success with women. How many sexual adventuresses, he wondered, might one tumble, if one’s form were unique? On reflection, the question answered itself.

Behind him, he heard the Lady Pamela giggle. Then, in a voice low with passion, Surplus said, "No, leave the diamonds on."

With a silent sigh, Darger resigned himself to a long night. Since he was bored and yet could not turn to watch the pair cavorting on the bed without giving himself away, he was perforce required to settle for watching them in the mirror.

They began, of course, by doing it doggy-style.

The next day, Surplus fell sick. Hearing of his indisposition, Lady Pamela sent one of her autistics with a bowl of broth and then followed herself in a surgical mask.

Surplus smiled weakly to see her. "You have no need of that mask," he said. "By my life, I swear that what ails me is not communicable. As you doubtless know, we who have been remade are prone to endocrinological imbalance."

"Is that all?" Lady Pamela spooned some broth into his mouth, then dabbed at a speck of it with a napkin. "Then fix it. You have been very wicked to frighten me over such a trifle."

"Alas," Surplus said sadly, "I am a unique creation, and my table of endocrine balances was lost in an accident at sea. There are copies in Vermont, of course. But by the time even the swiftest schooner can cross the Atlantic twice, I fear me I shall be gone."

"Oh, dearest Surplus!" The Lady caught up his paws in her hands. "Surely there is some measure, however desperate, to be taken?"

"Well. . ." Surplus turned to the wall in thought. After a very long time, he turned back and said, "I have a confession to make. The modem your brother holds for me? It is functional."

"Sir!" Lady Pamela stood, gathering her skirts, and stepped away from the bed in horror. "Surely not!"

"My darling and delight, you must listen to me." Surplus glanced weakly toward the door, then lowered his voice. "Come close and I shall whisper."

She obeyed.

"In the waning days of Utopia, during the war between men and their electronic creations, scientists and engineers bent their efforts toward the creation of a modem that could be safely employed by humans. One immune from the attack of demons. One that could, indeed, compel their obedience. Perhaps you have heard of this project."

"There are rumors, but . . . no such device was ever built."

"Say rather that no such device was built in time. It had just barely been perfected when the mobs came rampaging through the laboratories, and the Age of the Machine was over. Some few, however, were hidden away before the last technicians were killed. Centuries later, brave researchers at the Technarchaeological Institute of Shelburne recovered six such devices and mastered the art of their use. One device was destroyed in the process. Two are kept in Burlington. The others were given to trusted couriers and sent to the three most powerful allies of the Demesne one of which is, of course, Russia."

"This is hard to believe," Lady Pamela said wonderingly. "Can such marvels be?"

"Madame, I employed it two nights ago in this very room! Those voices your brother heard? I was speaking with my principals in Vermont. They gave me permission to extend my stay here to a fortnight."

He gazed imploringly at her. "If you were to bring me the device, I could then employ it to save my life."

Lady Coherence-Hamilton resolutely stood. "Fear nothing, then. I swear by my soul, the modem shall be yours tonight."

The room was lit by a single lamp that cast wild shadows whenever anyone moved, as if of illicit spirits at a witch’s Sabbath.

It was an eerie sight. Darger, motionless, held the modem in his hands. Lady Pamela, who had a sense of occasion, had changed to a low-cut gown of clinging silks, dark-red as human blood. It swirled about her as she hunted through the wainscoting for a jack left unused for centuries. Surplus sat up weakly in bed, eyes half-closed, directing her. It might have been, Darger thought, an allegorical tableau of the human body being directed by its sick animal passions, while the intellect stood by, paralyzed by lack of will.

"There!" Lady Pamela triumphantly straightened, her necklace scattering tiny rainbows in the dim light.

Darger stiffened. He stood perfectly still for the length of three long breaths, then shook and shivered like one undergoing seizure. His eyes rolled back in his head.

In hollow, unworldly tones, he said, "What man calls me up from the vastly deep?" It was a voice totally unlike his own, one harsh and savage and eager for unholy sport. "Who dares risk my wrath?"

"You must convey my words to the autistic’s ears," Surplus murmured. "For he is become an integral part of the modem not merely its operator, but its voice."

"I stand ready," Lady Pamela replied.

"Good girl. Tell it who I am."

"It is Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux who speaks, and who wishes to talk to . . ." She paused.

"To his most august and socialist honor, the mayor of Burlington."

"His most august and socialist honor," Lady Pamela began. She turned toward the bed and said quizzically, "The mayor of Burlington?"

" ’Tis but an official title, much like your brother’s, for he who is in fact the spy-master for the Demesne of Western Vermont," Surplus said weakly. "Now repeat to it: I compel thee on threat of dissolution to carry my message. Use those exact words."

Lady Pamela repeated the words into Darger’s ear.

He screamed. It was a wild and unholy sound that sent the Lady skittering away from him in a momentary panic. Then, in mid-cry, he ceased.

"Who is this?" Darger said in an entirely new voice, this one human. "You have the voice of a woman. Is one of my agents in trouble?"

"Speak to him now, as you would to any man: forthrightly, directly, and without evasion." Surplus sank his head back on his pillow and closed his eyes.

So (as it seemed to her) the Lady Coherence-Hamilton explained Surplus plight to his distant master, and from him received both condolences and the needed information to return Surplus’s endocrine levels to a functioning harmony. After proper courtesies, then, she thanked the American spy-master and unjacked the modem. Darger returned to passivity.

The leather-cased endocrine kit lay open on a small table by the bed. At Lady Pamela’s direction, Darger began applying the proper patches to various places on Surplus’s body. It was not long before Surplus opened his eyes.

"Am I to be well?" he asked and, when the Lady nodded, "Then I fear I must be gone in the morning. Your brother has spies everywhere. If he gets the least whiff of what this device can do, he’ll want it for himself."

Smiling, Lady Pamela hoisted the box in her hand. "Indeed, who can blame him? With such a toy, great things could be accomplished."

"So he will assuredly think. I pray you, return it to me."

She did not. "This is more than just a communication device, sir," she said. "Though in that mode it is of incalculable value. You have shown that it can enforce obedience on the creatures that dwell in the forgotten nerves of the ancient world. Ergo, they can be compelled to do our calculations for us."

"Indeed, so our technarchaeologists tell us. You must. . . ."

"We have created monstrosities to perform the duties that were once done by machines. But with this, there would be no necessity to do so. We have allowed ourselves to be ruled by an icosahexadexal-brained freak. Now we have no need for Gloriana the Gross, Gloriana the Fat and Grotesque, Gloriana the Maggot Queen!"

"Madame!"

"It is time, I believe, that England had a new queen. A human queen."

"Think of my honor!"

Lady Pamela paused in the doorway. "You are a very pretty fellow indeed. But with this, I can have the monarchy and keep such a harem as will reduce your memory to that of a passing and trivial fancy."

With a rustle of skirts, she spun away.

"Then I am undone!" Surplus cried, and fainted onto the bed.

Quietly, Darger closed the door. Surplus raised himself from the pillows, began removing the patches from his body, and said, "Now what?"

"Now we get some sleep," Darger said. "Tomorrow will be a busy day."

***

The master of apes came for them after breakfast, and marched them to their usual destination. By now, Darger was beginning to lose track of exactly how many times he had been in the Office of Protocol. They entered to find Lord Coherence-Hamilton in a towering rage, and his sister, calm and knowing, standing in a corner with her arms crossed, watching. Looking at them both now, Darger wondered how he could ever have imagined that the brother outranked his sister.

The modem lay opened on the dwarf-savant’s desk. The little fellow leaned over the device, studying it minutely.

Nobody said anything until the master of apes and his baboons had left. Then Lord Coherence-Hamilton roared, "Your modem refuses to work for us!"

"As I told you, sir," Surplus said coolly, "it is inoperative."

"That’s a bold-arsed fraud and a goat-buggering lie!" In his wrath, the Lord’s chair rose up on its spindly legs so high that his head almost bumped against the ceiling. "I know of your activities–" he nodded toward his sister– "and demand that you show us how this whoreson device works!"

"Never!" Surplus cried stoutly. "I have my honor, sir."

"Your honor, too scrupulously insisted upon, may well lead to your death, sir."

Surplus threw back his head. "Then I die for Vermont!"

At this moment of impasse, Lady Hamilton stepped forward between the two antagonists to restore peace. "I know what might change your mind." With a knowing smile, she raised a hand to her throat and denuded herself of her diamonds. "I saw how you rubbed them against your face the other night. How you licked and fondled them. How ecstatically you took them into your mouth."

She closed his paws about them. "They are yours, sweet ’Sieur Precieux, for a word."

"You would give them up?" Surplus said, as if amazed at the very idea. In fact, the necklace had been his and Darger’s target from the moment they’d seen it. The only barrier that now stood between them and the merchants of Amsterdam was the problem of freeing themselves from the Labyrinth before their marks finally realized that the modem was indeed a cheat. And to this end they had the invaluable tool of a thinking man whom all believed to be an autistic, and a plan that would give them almost twenty hours in which to escape.

"Only think, dear Surplus." Lady Pamela stroked his head and then scratched him behind one ear, while he stared down at the precious stones. "Imagine the life of wealth and ease you could lead, the women, the power. It all lies in your hands. All you need do is close them."

Surplus took a deep breath. "Very well," he said. "The secret lies in the condenser, which takes a full day to re-charge. Wait but–"

"Here’s the problem," the savant said unexpectedly. He poked at the interior of the modem. "There was a wire loose."

He jacked the device into the wall.

"Oh, dear God," Darger said.

A savage look of raw delight filled the dwarf savant’s face, and he seemed to swell before them.

"I am free!" he cried in a voice so loud it seemed impossible that it could arise from such a slight source. He shook as if an enormous electrical current were surging through him. The stench of ozone filled the room.

He burst into flames and advanced on the English spy-master and her brother.

While all stood aghast and paralyzed, Darger seized Surplus by the collar and hauled him out into the hallway, slamming the door shut as he did.

They had not run twenty paces down the hall when the door to the Office of Protocol exploded outward, sending flaming splinters of wood down the hallway.

Satanic laughter boomed behind them.

Glancing over his shoulder, Darger saw the burning dwarf, now blackened to a cinder, emerge from a room engulfed in flames, capering and dancing. The modem, though disconnected, was now tucked under one arm, as if it were exceedingly valuable to him. His eyes were round and white and lidless. Seeing them, he gave chase.

"Aubrey!" Surplus cried. "We are headed the wrong way!"

It was true. They were running deeper into the Labyrinth, toward its heart, rather than outward. But it was impossible to turn back now. They plunged through scattering crowds of nobles and servitors, trailing fire and supernatural terror in their wake.

The scampering grotesque set fire to the carpets with every footfall. A wave of flame tracked him down the hall, incinerating tapestries and wallpaper and wood trim. No matter how they dodged, it ran straight toward them. Clearly, in the programmatic literalness of its kind, the demon from the web had determined that having early seen them, it must early kill them as well.

Darger and Surplus raced through dining rooms and salons, along balconies and down servants’ passages. To no avail. Dogged by their hyper-natural nemesis, they found themselves running down a passage, straight toward two massive bronze doors, one of which had been left just barely ajar. So fearful were they that they hardly noticed the guards.

"Hold, sirs!"

The mustachioed master of apes stood before the doorway, his baboons straining against their leashes. His eyes widened with recognition. "By gad, it’s you!" he cried in astonishment.

"Lemme kill ‘em!" one of the baboons cried. "The lousy bastards!" The others growled agreement.

Surplus would have tried to reason with them, but when he started to slow his pace, Darger put a broad hand on his back and shoved. "Dive!" he commanded. So of necessity the dog of rationality had to bow to the man of action. He tobogganed wildly across the polished marble floor between two baboons, straight at the master of apes, and then between his legs.

The man stumbled, dropping the leashes as he did.

The baboons screamed and attacked.

For an instant, all five apes were upon Darger, seizing his limbs, snapping at his face and neck. Then the burning dwarf arrived, and, finding his target obstructed, seized the nearest baboon. The animal shrieked as its uniform burst into flames.

As one, the other baboons abandoned their original quarry to fight this newcomer who had dared attack one of their own.

In a trice, Darger leaped over the fallen master of apes, and was through the door. He and Surplus threw their shoulders against its metal surface and pushed. He had one brief glimpse of the fight, with the baboons aflame, and their master’s body flying through the air. Then the door slammed shut. Internal bars and bolts, operated by smoothly oiled mechanisms, automatically latched themselves.

For the moment, they were safe.

Surplus slumped against the smooth bronze, and wearily asked, "Where did you get that modem?"

"From a dealer of antiquities." Darger wiped his brow with his kerchief. "It was transparently worthless. Whoever would dream it could be repaired?"

Outside, the screaming ceased. There was a very brief silence. Then the creature flung itself against one of the metal doors. It rang with the impact.

A delicate girlish voice wearily said, "What is this noise?"

They turned in surprise and found themselves looking up at the enormous corpus of Queen Gloriana. She lay upon her pallet, swaddled in satin and lace, and abandoned by all, save her valiant (though doomed) guardian apes. A pervasive yeasty smell emanated from her flesh. Within the tremendous folds of chins by the dozens and scores was a small human face. Its mouth moved delicately and asked, "What is trying to get in?"

The door rang again. One of its great hinges gave.

Darger bowed. "I fear, madame, it is your death."

"Indeed?" Blue eyes opened wide and, unexpectedly, Gloriana laughed. "If so, that is excellent good news. I have been praying for death an extremely long time."

"Can any of God’s creations truly pray for death and mean it?" asked Darger, who had his philosophical side. "I have known unhappiness myself, yet even so life is precious to me."

"Look at me!" Far up to one side of the body, a tiny arm though truly no tinier than any woman’s arm waved feebly. "I am not God’s creation, but Man’s. Who would trade ten minutes of their own life for a century of mine? Who, having mine, would not trade it all for death?"

A second hinge popped. The doors began to shiver. Their metal surfaces radiated heat.

"Darger, we must leave!" Surplus cried. "There is a time for learned conversation, but it is not now."

"Your friend is right," Gloriana said. "There is a small archway hidden behind yon tapestry. Go through it. Place your hand on the left wall and run. If you turn whichever way you must to keep from letting go of the wall, it will lead you outside. You are both rogues, I see, and doubtless deserve punishment, yet I can find nothing in my heart for you but friendship."

"Madame. . . ." Darger began, deeply moved.

"Go! My bridegroom enters."

The door began to fall inward. With a final cry of "Farewell!" from Darger and "Come on!" from Surplus, they sped away.

By the time they had found their way outside, all of Buckingham Labyrinth was in flames. The demon, however, did not emerge from the flames, encouraging them to believe that when the modem it carried finally melted down, it had been forced to return to that unholy realm from whence it came.

The sky was red with flames as the sloop set sail for Calais. Leaning against the rail, watching, Surplus shook his head. "What a terrible sight! I cannot help feeling, in part, responsible."

"Come! Come!" Darger said. "This dyspepsia ill becomes you. We are both rich fellows, now! The Lady Pamela’s diamonds will maintain us lavishly for years to come. As for London, this is far from the first fire it has had to endure. Nor will it be the last. Life is short, and so, while we live, let us be jolly!"

"These are strange words for a melancholiac," Surplus said wonderingly.

"In triumph, my mind turns its face to the sun. Dwell not on the past, dear friend, but on the future that lies glittering before us."

"The necklace is worthless," Surplus said. "Now that I have the leisure to examine it, free of the distracting flesh of Lady Pamela, I see that these are not diamonds, but mere imitations." He made to cast the necklace into the Thames.

Before he could, though, Darger snatched away the stones from him and studied them closely. Then he threw back his head and laughed. "The biters bit! Well, it may be paste, but it looks valuable still. We shall find good use for it in Paris."

"We are going to Paris?"

"We are partners, are we not? Remember that antique wisdom that whenever a door closes, another opens? For every city that burns, another beckons. To France, then, and adventure! After which, Italy, the Vatican Empire, Austro-Hungary, perhaps even Russia! Never forget that you have yet to present your credentials to the Duke of Muscovy."

"Very well," Surplus said. "But when we do, I’ll pick out the modem."

CREATION

Jeffrey Ford

I LEARNED ABOUT CREATION from Mrs. Grimm, in the basement of her house around the corner from ours. The room was dimly lit by a stained-glass lamp positioned above the pool table. There was also a bar in the corner, behind which hung an electric sign that read Rheingold and held a can that endlessly poured golden beer into a pilsner glass that never seemed to overflow. That brew was liquid light, bright bubbles never ceasing to rise.

"Who made you?" she would ask, consulting that little book with the pastel-colored depictions of agony in hell and the angel- strewn clouds of heaven. She had the nose of a witch, one continuous eyebrow, and tea-cup-shiny skin-- even the wrinkles seemed capable of cracking. Her smile was merely the absence of a frown, but she made candy apples for us at Halloween and marshmallow bricks in the shapes of wise men at Christmas. I often wondered how she had come to know so much about God and pictured saints with halos and cassocks playing pool and drinking beer in her basement at night.

We kids would page through our own copies of the catechism book to find the appropriate response, but before anyone else could answer, Amy Lash would already be saying, "God made me."

Then Richard Antonelli would get up and jump around, making fart noises through his mouth, and Mrs. Grimm would shake her head and tell him God was watching. I never jumped around, never spoke out of turn, for two reasons, neither of which had to do with God. One was what my father called his size ten, referring to his shoe, and the other was that I was too busy watching that sign over the bar, waiting to see the beer finally spill.

The only time I was ever distracted from my vigilance was when she told us about the creation of Adam and Eve. After God had made the world, he made them too, because he had so much love and not enough places to put it. He made Adam out of clay and blew life into him, and once he came to life, God made him sleep and then stole a rib and made the woman. After the illustration of a naked couple consumed in flame, being bitten by black snakes and poked by the fork of a pink demon with horns and bat wings, the picture for the story of the creation of Adam was my favorite. A bearded God in flowing robes leaned over a clay man, breathing blue-gray life into him.

That breath of life was like a great autumn wind blowing through my imagination, carrying with it all sorts of questions like pastel leaves that momentarily obscured my view of the beautiful flow of beer: Was dirt the first thing Adam tasted? Was God's beard brushing against his chin the first thing he felt? When he slept, did he dream of God stealing his rib and did it crack when it came away from him? What did he make of Eve and the fact that she was the only woman for him to marry? Was he thankful it wasn't Amy Lash?

Later on, I asked my father what he thought about the creation of Adam, and he gave me his usual response to any questions concerning religion. "Look," he said, "it's a nice story, but when you die you're food for the worms." One time my mother made him take me to church when she was sick, and he sat in the front row, directly in front of the priest. While everyone else was genuflecting and standing and singing, he just sat there staring, his arms folded and one leg crossed over the other. When they rang the little bell and everyone beat their chest, he laughed out loud.

No matter what I had learned in catechism about God and hell and the ten commandments, my father was hard to ignore. He worked two jobs, his muscles were huge, and once, when the neighbors' Doberman, big as a pony, went crazy and attacked a girl walking her poodle down our street, I saw him run outside with a baseball bat, grab the girl in one arm and then beat the dog to death as it tried to go for his throat. Throughout all of this he never lost the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and only put it out in order to hug the girl and quiet her crying.

"Food for the worms," I thought and took that thought along with a brown paper bag of equipment through the hole in the chain link fence into the woods that lay behind the school yard. Those woods were deep, and you could travel through them for miles and miles, never coming out from under the trees or seeing a backyard. Richard Antonelli hunted squirrels with a BB gun in them, and Bobby Lenon and his gang went there at night, lit a little fire and drank beer. Once, while exploring, I discovered a rain- sogged Playboy; once, a dead fox. Kids said there was gold in the creek that wound among the trees and that there was a far- flung acre that sank down into a deep valley where the deer went to die. For many years it was rumored that a monkey, escaped from a traveling carnival over in Brightwaters, lived in the treetops.

It was mid-summer and the dragonflies buzzed, the squirrels leaped from branch to branch, frightened sparrows darted away. The sun beamed in through gaps in the green above, leaving, here and there, shifting puddles of light on the pine-needle floor. Within one of those patches of light, I practiced creation. There was no clay, so I used an old log for the body. The arms were long, five- fingered branches that I positioned jutting out from the torso. The legs were two large birch saplings with plenty of spring for running and jumping. These I laid angled to the base of the log.

A large hunk of bark that had peeled off an oak was the head. On this I laid red mushroom eyes, curved barnacles of fungus for ears, a dried seed pod for a nose. The mouth was merely a hole I punched through the bark with my pen knife. Before affixing the fern hair to the top of the head, I slid beneath the curve of the sheet of bark those things I thought might help to confer life -- a dandelion gone to ghostly seed, a cardinal's wing feather, a see-through quartz pebble, a twenty-five-cent compass. The ferns made a striking hairdo, the weeds, with their burr-like ends, formed a venerable beard. I gave him a weapon to hunt with: a long pointed stick that was my exact height.

When I was finished putting my man together, I stood and looked down upon him. He looked good. He looked ready to come to life. I went to the brown paper bag and took out my catechism book. Then kneeling near his right ear, I whispered to him all of the questions Mrs. Grimm would ever ask. When I got to the one, "What is Hell?" his left eye rolled off his face, and I had to put it back. I followed up the last answer with a quick promise never to steal a rib.

Putting the book back into the bag, I then retrieved a capped, cleaned-out baby-food jar. It had once held vanilla pudding, my little sister's favorite, but now it was filled with breath. I had asked my father to blow into it. Without asking any questions, he never looked away from the racing form, but took a drag from his cigarette and blew a long, blue-gray stream of air into it. I capped it quickly and thanked him. "Don't say I never gave you anything," he mumbled as I ran to my room to look at it beneath a bare light bulb. The spirit swirled within and then slowly became invisible.

I held the jar down to the mouth of my man, and when I couldn't get it any closer, I unscrewed the lid and carefully poured out every atom of breath. There was nothing to see, so I held it there a long time and let him drink it in. As I pulled the jar away, I heard a breeze blowing through the leaves; felt it on the back of my neck. I stood up quickly and turned around with a keen sense that someone was watching me. I got scared. When the breeze came again, it chilled me, for wrapped in it was the quietest whisper ever. I dropped the jar and ran all the way home.

That night as I lay in bed, the lights out, my mother sitting next to me, stroking my crewcut and softly singing, "Until the Real Thing Comes Along," I remembered that I had left my catechism book in the brown bag next to the body of the man. I immediately made believe I was asleep so that my mother would leave. Had she stayed, she would have eventually felt my guilt through the top of my head. When the door was closed over, I began to toss and turn, thinking of my man lying out there in the dark woods by himself. I promised God that I would go out there in the morning, get my book, and take my creation apart. With the first bird song in the dark of the new day, I fell asleep and dreamed I was in Mrs. Grimm's basement with the saints. A beautiful woman saint with a big rose bush thorn sticking right in the middle of her forehead told me, "Your man's name is Cavanaugh."

"Hey, that's the name of the guy who owns the deli in town," I told her.

"Great head cheese at that place," said a saint with a baby lamb under his arm.

Another big bearded saint used the end of a pool cue to cock back his halo. He leaned over me and asked, "Why did God make you?"

I reached for my book but realized I had left it in the woods.

"Come on," he said, "that's one of the easiest ones."

I looked away at the bar, stalling for time while I tried to remember the answer, and just then the glass on the sign overflowed and spilled onto the floor.

The next day, my man, Cavanaugh, was gone. Not a scrap of him left behind. No sign of the red feather or the clear pebble. This wasn't a case of someone having come along and maliciously scattered him. I searched the entire area. It was a certainty that he had risen up, taken his spear and the brown paper bag containing my religious instruction book, and walked off into the heart of the woods.

Standing in the spot where I had given him life, my mind spiraled with visions of him loping along on his birch legs, branch fingers pushing aside sticker bushes and low hanging leaves, his fern hair slicked back by the wind. Through those red mushroom eyes, he was seeing his first day. I wondered if he was as frightened to be alive as I was to have made him, or had the breath of my father imbued him with a grim food-for-the-worms courage? Either way, there was no dismantling him now -- Thou shalt not kill. I felt a grave responsibility and went in search of him.

I followed the creek, thinking he would do the same, and traveled deeper and deeper into the woods. What was I going to say to him, I wondered, when I finally found him and his simple hole of a mouth formed a question? It wasn't clear to me why I had made him, but it had something to do with my father's idea of death -- a slow rotting underground; a cold dreamless sleep longer than the universe. I passed the place where I had discovered the dead fox and there picked up Cavanaugh's trail -- holes poked in the damp ground by the stride of his birch legs. Stopping, I looked all around through the jumbled stickers and bushes, past the trees, and detected no movement but for a single leaf silently falling.

I journeyed beyond the Antonelli brothers' lean-to temple where they hung their squirrel skins to dry and brewed sassafras tea. I even circled the pond, passed the tree whose bark had been stripped in a spiral by lightning, and entered territory I had never seen before. Cavanaugh seemed to stay always just ahead of me, out of sight. His snake-hole footprints, bent and broken branches, and that barely audible and constant whisper on the breeze that trailed in his wake drew me on into the late afternoon until the woods began to slowly fill with night. Then I had a thought of home: my mother cooking dinner and my sister playing on a blanket on the kitchen floor; the Victrola turning out The Ink Spots. I ran back along my path, and somewhere in my flight I heard a loud cry, not bird nor animal nor human, but like a thick limb splintering free from an ancient oak.

I ignored the woods as best I could for the rest of the summer. There was basketball, and games of guns with all of the children in the neighborhood ranging across everyone's backyard, trips to the candy store for comic books, late night horror movies on Chiller Theatre. I caught a demon jab of hell for having lost my religious instruction book, and all of my allowance for four weeks went toward another. Mrs. Grimm told me God knew I had lost it and that it would be a few weeks before she could get me a replacement. I imagined her addressing an envelope to heaven. In the meantime, I had to look on with Amy Lash. She'd lean close to me, pointing out every word that was read aloud, and when Mrs. Grimm asked me a question, catching me concentrating on the infinite beer, Amy would whisper the answers without moving her lips and save me. Still, no matter what happened, I could not completely forget about Cavanaugh. I thought my feeling of responsibility would wither as the days swept by; instead it grew like a weed.

On a hot afternoon at the end of July, I was sitting in my secret hideout, a bower formed by forsythia bushes in the corner of my backyard, reading the latest installment of Nick Fury. I only closed my eyes to rest them for a moment, but there was Cavanaugh's rough-barked face. Now that he was alive, leaves had sprouted all over his trunk and limbs. He wore a strand of wild blueberries around where his neck should have been, and his hair ferns had grown and deepened their shade of green. It wasn't just a daydream, I tell you. I knew that I was seeing him, what he was doing, where he was, at that very minute. He held his spear as a walking stick, and it came to me then that he was, of course, a vegetarian. His long thin legs bowed slightly, his log of a body shifted, as he cocked back his curled, wooden parchment of a head and stared with mushroom eyes into a beam of sunlight slipping through the branches above. Motes of pollen swirled in the light, chipmunks, squirrels, deer silently gathered, sparrows landed for a brief moment to nibble at his hair and then were gone. All around him, the woods looked on in awe as one of its own reckoned the beauty of the sun. What lungs, what vocal chords, gave birth to it, I'm not sure, but he groaned; a sound I had witnessed one other time while watching my father asleep, wrapped in a nightmare.

I visited that spot within the yellow blossomed forsythias once a day to check up on my man's progress. All that was necessary was that I sit quietly for a time until in a state of near-nap and then close my eyes and fly my brain around the corner, past the school, over the treetops, then down into the cool green shadow of the woods. Many times I saw him just standing, as if stunned by life, and many times traipsing through some unknown quadrant of his Eden. With each viewing came a confused emotion of wonder and dread, like on the beautiful windy day at the beginning of August when I saw him sitting beside the pond, holding the catechism book upside down, a twig finger of one hand pointing to each word on the page, while the other hand covered all but one red eye of his face.

I was there when he came across the blackened patch of earth and scattered beers from one of the Lenon gang's nights in the woods. He lifted a partially crushed can with backwash still sloshing in the bottom and drank it down. The bark around his usually indistinct hole of a mouth magically widened into a smile. It was when he uncovered a half a pack of Camels and a book of matches that I realized he must have been spying on the revels of Lenon, Cho-cho, Mike Stone, and Jake Harwood from the safety of the night trees. He lit up and the smoke swirled out the back of his head. In a voice like the creaking of a rotted branch, he pronounced, "Fuck."

And most remarkable of all was the time he came to the edge of the woods, to the hole in the chain link fence. There, in the playground across the field, he saw Amy Lash, gliding up and back on the swing, her red gingham dress billowing, her bright hair full of motion. He trembled as if planted in earthquake earth, and squeaked the way the sparrows did. For a long time, he crouched in that portal to the outside world and watched. Then, gathering his courage, he stepped onto the field. The instant he was out of the woods, Amy must have felt his presence, and she looked up and saw him approaching. She screamed, jumped off the swing, and ran out of the playground. Cavanaugh, frightened by her scream, retreated to the woods, and did not stop running until he reached the tree struck by lightning.

My religious instruction book finally arrived from above, summer ended and school began, but still I went every day to my hideout and watched him for a little while as he fished gold coins from the creek or tracked, from the ground, something moving through the treetops. I know it was close to Halloween, because I sat in my hideout loosening my teeth on one of Mrs. Grimm's candy apples when I realized that my secret seeing place was no longer a secret. The forsythias had long since dropped their flowers. As I sat there in the skeletal blind, I could feel the cold creeping into me. "Winter is coming," I said in a puff of steam and had one fleeting vision of Cavanaugh, his leaves gone flame red, his fern hair drooping brown, discovering the temple of dead squirrels. I saw him gently touch the fur of a stretched-out corpse hung on the wall. His birch legs bent to nearly breaking as he fell to his knees and let out a wail that drilled into me and lived there.

It was late night, a few weeks later, but that cry still echoed through me and I could not sleep. I heard, above the sound of the dreaming house, my father come in from his second job. I don't know what made me think I could tell him, but I had to tell someone. If I kept to myself what I had done any longer, I thought I would have to run away. Crawling out of bed, I crept down the darkened hallway past my sister's room and heard her breathing. I found my father sitting in the dining room, eating a cold dinner and reading the paper by only the light coming through from the kitchen. All he had to do was look up at me and I started crying. Next thing I knew, he had his arm around me and I was enveloped in the familiar aroma of machine oil. I thought he might laugh, I thought he might yell, but I told him everything all at once. What he did was pull out the chair next to his. I sat down, drying my eyes.

"What can we do?" he asked.

"I just need to tell him something," I said.

"Okay," he said. "This Saturday, we'll go to the woods and see if we can find him." Then he had me describe Cavanaugh, and when I was done he said, "Sounds like a sturdy fellow."

We moved into the living room and sat on the couch in the dark. He lit a cigarette and told me about the woods when he was a boy; how vast they were, how he trapped mink, saw eagles, how he and his brother lived for a week by their wits alone out in nature. I eventually dozed off and only half woke when he carried me to my bed.

The week passed and I went to sleep Friday night, hoping he wouldn't forget his promise and go to the track instead. But the next morning, he woke me early from a dream of Amy Lash by tapping my shoulder and saying, "Move your laggardly ass." He made bacon and eggs, the only two things he knew how to make, and let me drink coffee. Then we put on our coats and were off. It was the second week in November and the day was cold and overcast. "Brisk," he said as we rounded the corner toward the school, and that was all he said until we were well in beneath the trees.

I showed him around the woods like a tour guide, pointing out the creek, the spot where I had created my man, the temple of dead squirrels. "Interesting," he said to each of these, and once in a while mentioned the name of some bush or tree. Waves of leaves blew amidst the trunks in the cold wind, and with stronger gusts, showers of them fell around us. He could really walk and we walked for what seemed ten miles, out of the morning and into the afternoon, way past any place I had ever dreamed of going. We discovered a spot where an enormous tree bad fallen, exposing the gnarled brainwork of its roots, and another two acres where there were no trees but only smooth sand hills. All the time, I was alert to even the slightest sound, a cracking twig, the caw of a crow, hoping I might hear the whisper.

As it grew later, the sky darkened and what was cold before became colder still.

"Listen," my father said, "I have a feeling like the one when we used to track deer. He's nearby, somewhere. We'll have to outsmart him."

I nodded.

"I'm going to stagy here and wait," he said. "You keep going along the path here for a while, but, for Christ's sake, be quiet. Maybe if he sees you, he'll double back to get away, and I'll be here to catch him."

I wasn't sure this plan made sense, but I knew we needed to do something. It was getting late. "Be careful," I said, "he's big and he has a stick."

My father smiled. "Don't worry," he said and lifted his foot to indicate the size ten.

This made me laugh, and I turned and started down the path, taking careful steps. "Go on for about ten minutes or so and see if you see anything," he called to me before I rounded a bend.

Once I was by myself, I wasn't so sure I wanted to find my man. Because of the overcast sky the woods were dark and lonely. As I walked I pictured my father and Cavanaugh wrestling each other and wondered who would win. When I had gone far enough to want to stop and run back, I forced myself around one more turn. Just this little more, I thought. He's probably already fallen apart anyway, dismantled by winter. But then I saw it up ahead, treetops at eye level, and I knew I had found the valley where the deer went to die.

Cautiously, I inched up to the rim, and peered down the steep dirt wall overgrown with roots and stickers, into the trees and the shadowed undergrowth beneath them. The valley was a large hole as if a meteor had struck there long ago. I thought of the treasure trove of antlers and bones that lay hidden in the leaves at its base. Standing there, staring, I felt I almost understood the secret life and age of the woods. I had to show this to my father, but before I could move away, I saw something, heard something moving below. Squinting to see more clearly through the darkness down there, I could just about make out a shadowed figure standing, half hidden by the trunk of a tall pine.

"Cavanaugh?" I called. "Is that you?"

In the silence, I heard acorns dropping.

"Are you there?" I asked.

There was a reply, an eerie sound that was part voice, part wind. It was very quiet but I distinctly heard it ask, "Why?"

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"Why?" came the same question.

I didn't know why, and wished I had read him the book's answers instead of the questions the day of his birth. I stood for a long time and watched as snow began to fall around me.

His question came again, weaker this time, and I was on the verge of tears, ashamed of what I had done. Suddenly, I had a strange memory flash of the endless beer in Mrs. Grimm's basement. At least it was something. I leaned out over the edge and, almost certain I was lying, yelled, "I had too much love."

Then, so I could barely make it out, I heard him whisper, "Thank you."

After that, there came from below the thud of branches hitting together, hitting the ground, and I knew he had come undone. When I squinted again, the figure was gone.

I found my father sitting on a fallen tree trunk back along the trail, smoking a cigarette. "Hey," he said when he saw me coming, "did you find anything?"

"No," I said, "let's go home."

He must have seen something in my eyes, because he asked, "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," I said.

The snow fell during our journey home and seemed to continue falling all winter long.

Now, twenty-one years married with two crewcut boys of my own, I went back to the old neighborhood last week. The woods and even the school have been obliterated, replaced by new developments with streets named for the things they banished-- Crow Lane, Deer Street, Gold Creek Road. My father still lives in the same house by himself. My mother passed away some years back. My baby sister is married with two boys of her own and lives upstate. The old man has something growing on his kidney, and he has lost far too much weight, his once huge arms having shrunk to the width of branches. He sat at the kitchen table, the racing form in front of him. I tried to convince him to quit working, but he shook his head and said, "Boring."

"How long do you think you can keep going to the shop?" I asked him.

"How about until the last second," he said.

"How's the health?" I asked.

"Soon I'll be food for the worms," he said, laughing.

"How do you really feel about that?" I asked.

He shrugged. "All part of the game," he said. "I thought when things got bad enough I would build a coffin and sleep in it. That way, when I die, you can just nail the lid on and bury me in the backyard."

Later, when we were watching the Giants on TV and I had had a few beers, I asked him if he remembered that time in the woods.

He closed his eyes and lit a cigarette as though it would help his memory. "Oh, yeah, I think I remember that," he said.

I had never asked him before. "Was that you down there in those trees?"

He took a drag and slowly turned his head and stared hard, without a smile, directly into my eyes. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about," he said and exhaled a long, blue-gray stream of life.

LAMBING SEASON

Molly Gloss

From May to September, Delia took the Churro sheep and two dogs and went up on Joe-Johns Mountain to live. She had that country pretty much to herself all summer. Ken Owen sent one of his Mexican hands up every other week with a load of groceries, but otherwise she was alone, alone with the sheep and the dogs. She liked the solitude. Liked the silence. Some sheepherders she knew talked a blue streak to the dogs, the rocks, the porcupines, they sang songs and played the radio, read their magazines out loud, but Delia let the silence settle into her, and, by early summer, she had begun to hear the ticking of the dry grasses as a language she could almost translate. The dogs were named Jesus and Alice. "Away to me, Jesus," she said when they were moving the sheep. "Go bye, Alice." From May to September these words spoken in command of the dogs were almost the only times she heard her own voice; that, and when the Mexican brought the groceries, a polite exchange in Spanish about the weather, the health of the dogs, the fecundity of the ewes.

The Churros were a very old breed. The O-Bar Ranch had a federal allotment up on the mountain, which was all rimrock and sparse grasses well suited to the Churros, who were fiercely protective of their lambs and had a long-stapled top coat that could take the weather. They did well on the thin grass of the mountain where other sheep would lose flesh and give up their lambs to the coyotes. The Mexican was an old man. He said he remembered Churros from his childhood in the Oaxaca highlands, the rams with their four horns, two curving up, two down. "Buen' carne," he told Delia. Uncommonly fine meat.

The wind blew out of the southwest in the early part of the season, a wind that smelled of juniper and sage and pollen; in the later months, it blew straight from the east, a dry wind smelling of dust and smoke, bringing down showers of parched leaves and seedheads of yarrow and bittercress. Thunderstorms came frequently out of the east, enormous cloudscapes with hearts of livid magenta and glaucous green. At those times, if she was camped on a ridge, she'd get out of her bed and walk downhill to find a draw where she could feel safer, but if she were camped in a low place, she would stay with the sheep while a war passed over their heads, spectacular jagged flares of lightning, skull-rumbling cannonades of thunder. It was maybe bred into the bones of Churros, a knowledge and a tolerance of mountain weather, for they shifted together and waited out the thunder with surprising composure; they stood forbearingly while rain beat down in hard blinding bursts.

Sheepherding was simple work, although Delia knew some herders who made it hard, dogging the sheep every minute, keeping them in a tight group, moving all the time. She let the sheep herd themselves, do what they wanted, make their own decisions. If the band began to separate, she would whistle or yell, and often the strays would turn around and rejoin the main group. Only if they were badly scattered did she send out the dogs. Mostly she just kept an eye on the sheep, made sure they got good feed, that the band didn't split, that they stayed in the boundaries of the O-Bar allotment. She studied the sheep for the language of their bodies, and tried to handle them just as close to their nature as possible. When she put out salt for them, she scattered it on rocks and stumps as if she were hiding Easter eggs, because she saw how they enjoyed the search.

The spring grass made their manure wet, so she kept the wool cut away from the ewes' tail area with a pair of sharp, short-bladed shears. She dosed the sheep with wormer, trimmed their feet, inspected their teeth, treated ewes for mastitis. She combed the burrs from the dogs' coats and inspected them for ticks. You're such good dogs, she told them with her hands. I'm very very proud of you.

She had some old binoculars, 7 x 32s, and in the long quiet days, she watched bands of wild horses miles off in the distance, ragged looking mares with dorsal stripes and black legs. She read the back issues of the local newspapers, looking in the obits for names she recognized. She read spine-broken paperback novels and played solitaire and scoured the ground for arrowheads and rocks she would later sell to rockhounds. She studied the parched brown grass, which was full of grasshoppers and beetles and crickets and ants. But most of her day was spent just walking. The sheep sometimes bedded quite a ways from her trailer and she had to get out to them before sunrise when the coyotes would make their kills. She was usually up by three or four and walking out to the sheep in darkness. Sometimes she returned to the camp for lunch, but always she was out with the sheep again until sundown, when the coyotes were likely to return, and then she walked home after dark to water and feed the dogs, eat supper, climb into bed.

In her first years on Joe-Johns, she had often walked three or four miles away from the band just to see what was over a hill, or to study the intricate architecture of a sheepherder's monument. Stacking up flat stones in the form of an obelisk was a common herders' pastime, their monuments all over that sheep country, and though Delia had never felt an impulse to start one herself, she admired the ones other people had built. She sometimes walked miles out of her way just to look at a rockpile up close.

She had a mental map of the allotment, divided into ten pastures. Every few days, when the sheep had moved on to a new pasture, she moved her camp. She towed the trailer with an old Dodge pickup, over the rocks and creekbeds, the sloughs and dry meadows, to the new place. For a while afterward, after the engine was shut off and while the heavy old body of the truck was settling onto its tires, she would be deaf, her head filled with a dull roaring white noise.

She had about eight hundred ewes, as well as their lambs, many of them twins or triplets. The ferocity of the Churro ewes in defending their offspring was sometimes a problem for the dogs, but in the balance of things, she knew that it kept her losses small. Many coyotes lived on Joe-Johns, and sometimes a cougar or bear would come up from the salt pan desert on the north side of the mountain, looking for better country to own. These animals considered the sheep to be fair game, which Delia understood to be their right; and also her right, hers and the dogs', to take the side of the sheep. Sheep were smarter than people commonly believed and the Churros smarter than other sheep she had tended, but by mid-summer the coyotes always passed the word among themselves, buen' carne, and Delia and the dogs then had a job to work, keeping the sheep out of harm's way.

She carried a .32 caliber Colt pistol in an old-fashioned holster worn on her belt. If you're a coyot' you'd better be careful of this woman, she said with her body, with the way she stood and the way she walked when she was wearing the pistol. That gun and holster had once belonged to her mother's mother, a woman who had come West on her own and homesteaded for a while, down in the Sprague River Canyon. Delia's grandmother had liked to tell the story: how a concerned neighbor, a bachelor with an interest in marriageable females, had pressed the gun upon her, back when the Klamaths were at war with the army of General Joel Palmer; and how she never had used it for anything but shooting rabbits.

In July, a coyote killed a lamb while Delia was camped no more than two hundred feet away from the bedded sheep. It was dusk, and she was sitting on the steps of the trailer reading a two-gun western, leaning close over the pages in the failing light, and the dogs were dozing at her feet. She heard the small sound, a strange high faint squeal she did not recognize and then did recognize, and she jumped up and fumbled for the gun, yelling at the coyote, at the dogs, her yell startling the entire band to its feet but the ewes making their charge too late, Delia firing too late, and none of it doing any good beyond a release of fear and anger.

A lion might well have taken the lamb entire; she had known of lion kills where the only evidence was blood on the grass and a dribble of entrails in the beam of a flashlight. But a coyote is small and will kill with a bite to the throat and then perhaps eat just the liver and heart, though a mother coyote will take all she can carry in her stomach, bolt it down and carry it home to her pups. Delia's grandmother's pistol had scared this one off before it could even take a bite, and the lamb was twitching and whole on the grass, bleeding only from its neck. The mother ewe stood over it, crying in a distraught and pitiful way, but there was nothing to be done, and, in a few minutes, the lamb was dead.

There wasn't much point in chasing after the coyote, and anyway, the whole band was now a skittish jumble of anxiety and confusion; it was hours before the mother ewe gave up her grieving, before Delia and the dogs had the band calm and bedded down again, almost midnight. By then, the dead lamb had stiffened on the ground, and she dragged it over by the truck and skinned it and let the dogs have the meat, which went against her nature, but was about the only way to keep the coyote from coming back for the carcass.

While the dogs worked on the lamb, she stood with both hands pressed to her tired back, looking out at the sheep, the mottled pattern of their whiteness almost opalescent across the black landscape, and the stars thick and bright above the faint outline of the rock ridges, stood there a moment before turning toward the trailer, toward bed, and afterward, she would think how the coyote and the sorrowing ewe and the dark of the July moon and the kink in her back, how all of that came together and was the reason that she was standing there watching the sky, was the reason that she saw the brief, brilliantly green flash in the southwest and then the sulfur yellow streak breaking across the night, southwest to due west on a descending arc onto Lame Man Bench. It was a broad bright ribbon, rainbow-wide, a cyanotic contrail. It was not a meteor, she had seen hundreds of meteors. She stood and looked at it.

Things to do with the sky, with distance, you could lose perspective, it was hard to judge even a lightning strike, whether it had touched down on a particular hill or the next hill or the valley between. So she knew this thing falling out of the sky might have come down miles to the west of Lame Man, not onto Lame Man at all, which was two miles away, at least two miles, and getting there would be all ridges and rocks, no way to cover the ground in the truck. She thought about it. She had moved camp earlier in the day, which was always troublesome work, and it had been a blistering hot day, and now the excitement with the coyote. She was very tired, the tiredness like a weight against her breastbone. She didn't know what this thing was, falling out of the sky. Maybe if she walked over there she would find just a dead satellite or a broken weather balloon and not dead or broken people. The contrail thinned slowly while she stood there looking at it, became a wide streak of yellowy cloud against the blackness, with the field of stars glimmering dimly behind it.

After a while, she went into the truck and got a water bottle and filled it, and also took the first aid kit out of the trailer and a couple of spare batteries for the flashlight and a handful of extra cartridges for the pistol, and stuffed these things into a backpack and looped her arms into the straps and started up the rise away from the dark camp, the bedded sheep. The dogs left off their gnawing of the dead lamb and trailed her anxiously, wanting to follow, or not wanting her to leave the sheep. "Stay by," she said to them sharply, and they went back and stood with the band and watched her go. That coyot', he's done with us tonight: This is what she told the dogs with her body, walking away, and she believed it was probably true.

Now that she'd decided to go, she walked fast. This was her sixth year on the mountain, and, by this time, she knew the country pretty well. She didn't use the flashlight. Without it, she became accustomed to the starlit darkness, able to see the stones and pick out a path. The air was cool, but full of the smell of heat rising off the rocks and the parched earth. She heard nothing but her own breathing and the gritting of her boots on the pebbly dirt. A little owl circled once in silence and then went off toward a line of cottonwood trees standing in black silhouette to the northeast.

Lame Man Bench was a great upthrust block of basalt grown over with scraggly juniper forest. As she climbed among the trees, the smell of something like ozone or sulfur grew very strong, and the air became thick, burdened with dust. Threads of the yellow contrail hung in the limbs of the trees. She went on across the top of the bench and onto slabs of shelving rock that gave a view to the west. Down in the steep-sided draw below her there was a big wing-shaped piece of metal resting on the ground, which she at first thought had been torn from an airplane, but then realized was a whole thing, not broken, and she quit looking for the rest of the wreckage. She squatted down and looked at it. Yellow dust settled slowly out of the sky, pollinating her hair, her shoulders, the toes of her boots, faintly dulling the oily black shine of the wing, the thing shaped like a wing.

While she was squatting there looking down at it, something came out from the sloped underside of it, a coyote she thought at first, and then it wasn't a coyote but a dog built like a greyhound or a whippet, deep-chested, long legged, very light-boned and frail-looking. She waited for somebody else, a man, to crawl out after his dog, but nobody did. The dog squatted to pee and then moved off a short distance and sat on its haunches and considered things. Delia considered, too. She considered that the dog might have been sent up alone. The Russians had sent up a dog in their little sputnik, she remembered. She considered that a skinny almost hairless dog with frail bones would be dead in short order if left alone in this country. And she considered that there might be a man inside the wing, dead or too hurt to climb out. She thought how much trouble it would be, getting down this steep rock bluff in the darkness to rescue a useless dog and a dead man.

After a while, she stood and started picking her way into the draw. The dog by this time was smelling the ground, making a slow and careful circuit around the black wing. Delia kept expecting the dog to look up and bark, but it went on with its intent inspection of the ground as if it was stone deaf, as if Delia's boots making a racket on the loose gravel was not an announcement that someone was coming down. She thought of the old Dodge truck, how it always left her ears ringing, and wondered if maybe it was the same with this dog and its wing-shaped sputnik, although the wing had fallen soundless across the sky.

When she had come about half way down the hill, she lost footing and slid down six or eight feet before she got her heels dug in and found a handful of willow scrub to hang onto. A glimpse of this movement–rocks sliding to the bottom, or the dust she raised–must have startled the dog, for it leaped backward suddenly and then reared up. They looked at each other in silence, Delia and the dog, Delia standing leaning into the steep slope a dozen yards above the bottom of the draw, and the dog standing next to the sputnik, standing all the way up on its hind legs like a bear or a man and no longer seeming to be a dog but a person with a long narrow muzzle and a narrow chest, turned-out knees, delicate dog-like feet. Its genitals were more cat-like than dog, a male set but very small and neat and contained. Dog's eyes, though, dark and small and shining below an anxious brow, so that she was reminded of Jesus and Alice, the way they had looked at her when she had left them alone with the sheep. She had years of acquaintance with dogs and she knew enough to look away, break off her stare. Also, after a moment, she remembered the old pistol and holster at her belt. In cowboy pictures, a man would unbuckle his gunbelt and let it down on the ground as a gesture of peaceful intent, but it seemed to her this might only bring attention to the gun, to the true intent of a gun, which is always killing. This woman is nobody at all to be scared of, she told the dog with her body, standing very still along the steep hillside, holding onto the scrub willow with her hands, looking vaguely to the left of him, where the smooth curve of the wing rose up and gathered a veneer of yellow dust.

The dog, the dog person, opened his jaws and yawned the way a dog will do to relieve nervousness, and then they were both silent and still for a minute. When finally he turned and stepped toward the wing, it was an unexpected, delicate movement, exactly the way a ballet dancer steps along on his toes, knees turned out, lifting his long thin legs; and then he dropped down on all-fours and seemed to become almost a dog again. He went back to his business of smelling the ground intently, though every little while he looked up to see if Delia was still standing along the rock slope. It was a steep place to stand. When her knees finally gave out, she sat down very carefully where she was, which didn't spook him. He had become used to her by then, and his brief, sliding glance just said, That woman up there is nobody at all to be scared of.

What he was after, or wanting to know, was a mystery to her. She kept expecting him to gather up rocks, like all those men who'd gone to the moon, but he only smelled the ground, making a wide slow circuit around the wing the way Alice always circled round the trailer every morning, nose down, reading the dirt like a book. And when he seemed satisfied with what he'd learned, he stood up again and looked back at Delia, a last look delivered across his shoulder before he dropped down and disappeared under the edge of the wing, a grave and inquiring look, the kind of look a dog or a man will give you before going off on his own business, a look that says, You be okay if I go? If he had been a dog, and if Delia had been close enough to do it, she'd have scratched the smooth head, felt the hard bone beneath, moved her hands around the soft ears. Sure, okay, you go on now, Mr. Dog: This is what she would have said with her hands. Then he crawled into the darkness under the slope of the wing, where she figured there must be a door, a hatch letting into the body of the machine, and after a while he flew off into the dark of the July moon.

In the weeks afterward, on nights when the moon had set or hadn't yet risen, she looked for the flash and streak of something breaking across the darkness out of the southwest. She saw him come and go to that draw on the west side of Lame Man Bench twice more in the first month. Both times, she left her grandmother's gun in the trailer and walked over there and sat in the dark on the rock slab above the draw and watched him for a couple of hours. He may have been waiting for her, or he knew her smell, because both times he reared up and looked at her just about as soon as she sat down. But then he went on with his business. That woman is nobody to be scared of, he said with his body, with the way he went on smelling the ground, widening his circle and widening it, sometimes taking a clod or a sprig into his mouth and tasting it, the way a mild-mannered dog will do when he's investigating something and not paying any attention to the person he's with.

Delia had about decided that the draw behind Lame Man Bench was one of his regular stops, like the ten campsites she used over and over again when she was herding on Joe-Johns Mountain; but after those three times in the first month, she didn't see him again.

At the end of September, she brought the sheep down to the O-Bar. After the lambs had been shipped out she took her band of dry ewes over onto the Nelson prairie for the fall, and in mid-November, when the snow had settled in, she brought them to the feed lots. That was all the work the ranch had for her until lambing season. Jesus and Alice belonged to the O-Bar. They stood in the yard and watched her go.

In town, she rented the same room as the year before, and, as before, spent most of a year's wages on getting drunk and standing other herders to rounds of drink. She gave up looking into the sky.

In March, she went back out to the ranch. In bitter weather, they built jugs and mothering-up pens, and trucked the pregnant ewes from Green, where they'd been feeding on wheat stubble. Some ewes lambed in the trailer on the way in, and after every haul, there was a surge of lambs born. Delia had the night shift, where she was paired with Roy Joyce, a fellow who raised sugar beets over in the valley and came out for the lambing season every year. In the black, freezing cold middle of the night, eight and ten ewes would be lambing at a time. Triplets, twins, big singles, a few quads, ewes with lambs born dead, ewes too sick or confused to mother. She and Roy would skin a dead lamb and feed the carcass to the ranch dogs and wrap the fleece around a bummer lamb, which was intended to fool the bereaved ewe into taking the orphan as her own, and sometimes it worked that way. All the mothering-up pens swiftly filled, and the jugs filled, and still some ewes with new lambs stood out in the cold field waiting for a room to open up.

You couldn't pull the stuck lambs with gloves on, you had to reach into the womb with your fingers to turn the lamb, or tie cord around the feet, or grasp the feet barehanded, so Delia's hands were always cold and wet, then cracked and bleeding. The ranch had brought in some old converted school buses to house the lambing crew, and she would fall into a bunk at daybreak and then not be able to sleep, shivering in the unheated bus with the gray daylight pouring in the windows and the endless daytime clamor out at the lambing sheds. All the lambers had sore throats, colds, nagging coughs. Roy Joyce looked like hell, deep bags as blue as bruises under his eyes, and Delia figured she looked about the same, though she hadn't seen a mirror, not even to draw a brush through her hair, since the start of the season.

By the end of the second week, only a handful of ewes hadn't lambed. The nights became quieter. The weather cleared, and the thin skiff of snow melted off the grass. On the dark of the moon, Delia was standing outside the mothering-up pens drinking coffee from a thermos. She put her head back and held the warmth of the coffee in her mouth a moment, and, as she was swallowing it down, lowering her chin, she caught the tail end of a green flash and a thin yellow line breaking across the sky, so far off anybody else would have thought it was a meteor, but it was bright, and dropping from southwest to due west, maybe right onto Lame Man Bench. She stood and looked at it. She was so very goddamned tired and had a sore throat that wouldn't clear, and she could barely get her fingers to fold around the thermos, they were so split and tender.

She told Roy she felt sick as a horse, and did he think he could handle things if she drove herself into town to the Urgent Care clinic, and she took one of the ranch trucks and drove up the road a short way and then turned onto the rutted track that went up to Joe-Johns.

The night was utterly clear and you could see things a long way off. She was still an hour's drive from the Churros' summer range when she began to see a yellow-orange glimmer behind the black ridgeline, a faint nimbus like the ones that marked distant range fires on summer nights.

She had to leave the truck at the bottom of the bench and climb up the last mile or so on foot, had to get a flashlight out of the glove box and try to find an uphill path with it because the fluttery reddish lightshow was finished by then, and a thick pall of smoke overcast the sky and blotted out the stars. Her eyes itched and burned, and tears ran from them, but the smoke calmed her sore throat. She went up slowly, breathing through her mouth.

The wing had burned a skid path through the scraggly junipers along the top of the bench and had come apart into about a hundred pieces. She wandered through the burnt trees and the scattered wreckage, shining her flashlight into the smoky darkness, not expecting to find what she was looking for, but there he was, lying apart from the scattered pieces of metal, out on the smooth slab rock at the edge of the draw. He was panting shallowly and his close coat of short brown hair was matted with blood. He lay in such a way that she immediately knew his back was broken. When he saw Delia coming up, his brow furrowed with worry. A sick or a wounded dog will bite, she knew that, but she squatted next to him. It's just me, she told him, by shining the light not in his face but in hers. Then she spoke to him. "Okay," she said. "I'm here now," without thinking too much about what the words meant, or whether they meant anything at all, and she didn't remember until afterward that he was very likely deaf anyway. He sighed and shifted his look from her to the middle distance, where she supposed he was focused on approaching death.

Near at hand, he didn't resemble a dog all that much, only in the long shape of his head, the folded-over ears, the round darkness of his eyes. He lay on the ground flat on his side like a dog that's been run over and is dying by the side of the road, but a man will lay like that too when he's dying. He had small-fingered nail-less hands where a dog would have had toes and front feet. Delia offered him a sip from her water bottle, but he didn't seem to want it, so she just sat with him quietly, holding one of his hands, which was smooth as lambskin against the cracked and roughened flesh of her palm. The batteries in the flashlight gave out, and sitting there in the cold darkness she found his head and stroked it, moving her sore fingers lightly over the bone of his skull, and around the soft ears, the loose jowls. Maybe it wasn't any particular comfort to him, but she was comforted by doing it. Sure, okay, you can go on.

She heard him sigh, and then sigh again, and each time wondered if it would turn out to be his death. She had used to wonder what a coyote, or especially a dog, would make of this doggish man, and now while she was listening, waiting to hear if he would breathe again, she began to wish she'd brought Alice or Jesus with her, though not out of that old curiosity. When her husband had died years before, at the very moment he took his last breath, the dog she'd had then had barked wildly and raced back and forth from the front to the rear door of the house as if he'd heard or seen something invisible to her. People said it was her husband's soul going out the door or his angel coming in. She didn't know what it was the dog had seen or heard or smelled, but she wished she knew. And now she wished she had a dog with her to bear witness.

She went on petting him even after he had died, after she was sure he was dead, went on petting him until his body was cool, and then she got up stiffly from the bloody ground and gathered rocks and piled them onto him, a couple of feet high, so that he wouldn't be found or dug up. She didn't know what to do about the wreckage, so she didn't do anything with it at all.

In May, when she brought the Churro sheep back to Joe-Johns Mountain, the pieces of the wrecked wing had already eroded, were small and smooth-edged like the bits of sea glass you find on a beach, and she figured that this must be what it was meant to do: to break apart into pieces too small for anybody to notice, and then to quickly wear away. But the stones she'd piled over his body seemed like the start of something, so she began the slow work of raising them higher into a sheepherder's monument. She gathered up all the smooth eroded bits of wing, too, and laid them in a series of widening circles around the base of the monument. She went on piling up stones through the summer and into September, until it reached fifteen feet. Mornings, standing with the sheep miles away, she would look for it through the binoculars and think about ways to raise it higher, and she would wonder what was buried under all the other monuments sheepherders had raised in that country. At night, she studied the sky, but nobody came for him.

In November, when she finished with the sheep and went into town, she asked around and found a guy who knew about star-gazing and telescopes. He loaned her some books and sent her to a certain pawnshop, and she gave most of a year's wages for a 14 x 75 telescope with a reflective lens. On clear, moonless nights, she met the astronomy guy out at the Little League baseball field, and she sat on a fold-up canvas stool with her eye against the telescope's finder while he told her what she was seeing: Jupiter's moons, the Pelican Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy. The telescope had a tripod mount, and he showed her how to make a little jerry-built device so she could mount her old 7 x 32 binoculars on the tripod too. She used the binoculars for their wider view of star clusters and small constellations. She was indifferent to most discomforts, could sit quietly in one position for hours at a time, teeth rattling with the cold, staring into the immense vault of the sky until she became numb and stiff, barely able to stand and walk back home. Astronomy, she discovered, was a work of patience, but the sheep had taught her patience, or it was already in her nature before she ever took up with them.

FALLING ONTO MARS

Geoffrey Landis

The people of the planet Mars have no literature. The colonization of Mars was unforgiving, and the exiles had no time to spend in writing. But still they have stories, the tales they told to children too young to really understand, stories that these children tell to their own children. These are the legends of the Martians.

Not one of the stories is a love story.

In those days, people fell out of the sky. They fell through the ochre sky in ships that were barely functional, thin aluminum shells crowded with fetid humanity, half of them corpses and the other half little more than corpses. The landings were hard, and many of the ships split open on impact, spilling bodies and precious air into the barely-more-than-vacuum of Mars. And still they fell, wave after wave of ships, the refuse of humanity tossed carelessly through space and falling onto the cratered deserts of Mars.

In the middle of the twenty-first century the last of the governments on Earth abolished the death penalty, but they found that they had not yet abolished killing or rape or terrorism. Some criminals were deemed too vicious to rehabilitate. These were the broken ones, the ones too cunning and too violent to ever be returned to society. To the governments of Earth, shipping them to another world and letting them work out their own survival had been the perfect solution. And if they failed to survive, it would be their own fault, not the work of the magistrates and juries of Earth.

The contracts to build ships to convey prisoners went to the cheapest supplier. If prisoners had a hard time, and didn't have quite as much food or water as had been specified, or if the life-support supplies weren't quite as high a quality as had been specified, what of it? And who would tell? The voyage was one way; not even the ships would return to Earth. No need to make them any more durable than the minimum needed to keep them from ripping apart during the launch. And if some of the ships ripped open after launch, who would mourn the loss? Either way, the prisoners would never be returned to society.

G-g-grampa Jared, we are told, was in the fifth wave of exiles. Family tradition says Jared was a political dissident, sent in the prison ships for speaking too vigorously in defense of the helpless.

The governments of Earth, of course, claimed that political dissidents were never shipped to Mars. The incorrigible, the worst criminals, the ones so unrepentant that they could never be allowed back into human society: this is what the prisons of Earth sent to Mars, not political prisoners. But the governments of Earth are long skilled at lying. There were murderers sent to Mars indeed, but among them were also those exiled only for daring to give voice to their dangerous thoughts.

Yet family tradition lies as well. There had been innocent men into exile, yes, but my great-great grandfather was not one of them. Time has blurred the edges, and no one now knows the details for sure. But he was one of the survivors, a skinny ratlike man, tough as old string and cunning as a snake.

My G-g-grandma Kayla was one of the original inhabitants of Mars, one of the crew of the science base at Shalbatana, the international station that had been established on Mars long before anybody thought up the idea to dump criminals on Mars. When the order came that the science station was to close, and that they were to evacuate Mars, she chose to stay. Her science was more important, she told the magistrates and people of Earth, than politics. She was studying the paleoclimate of Mars, trying to come to an understanding of how the planet had dried and cooled, and how cycles of warming and cooling had passed over the planet in long, slow waves. It was an understanding, she said, that was desperately needed on the home planet.

Great-great-grandma Kayla, in her day, had earned a small measure of fame for being one of the seventeen that stayed on Mars with the base at Shalbatana. That fame might have helped some. Their radio broadcasts, as people fell out of the sky, nudged the governments of Earth to remember their promises. Exile to Mars was not—or at least they had claimed it was not—intended as a death sentence. The pleas of the refugees could easily be dismissed as exaggerations and lies, but Shalbatana had a radio, and their vivid and detailed reports of the refugees had some effect.

The first few years supplies were sent from Earth, mostly from volunteer organizations: Baha'i relief groups, Amnesty International, the holy sisters of Saint Paul. It wasn't enough.

After the first two waves, the scientists who stayed behind realized that they would have no more hope of doing science. They greeted the prisoners as best they could, helped them in the deadly race of time to build habitats, to start growing the plants that they would need to purify the air and survive.

Mars is a desert, a barren rock in space. There was no mercy in sending criminals to Mars instead of sending them to death. They could learn quickly, or die. Most of them died. A few leaned: learned to electrolyze the deep-buried groundwater to generate oxygen, learned to refine the raw materials to make the tools to make the furnaces to reduce the alloys to make the machines to build the machines that would allow them to live. But, as fast as they could build the machinery that might keep them alive, more waves of desperate, dying prisoners poured down from the sky; more angry, violent men who thought that they had nothing left to lose.

It was the sixth wave that wrecked the base. This was a stupid, self-destructive thing to do, but the men were vicious, resentful, and dying. A generation later, they called themselves political refugees, but there is little doubt that for the most part they were thugs and robbers and murderers. From the sixth wave came a leader, a man who called himself Dingo. On Earth, he had machine-gunned a hundred people in an apartment block that fell behind in paying him protection. On the ship, Dingo killed seven prisoners with his bare hands, simply to make the point that he was going to be the leader.

Leader he was From fear or respect or pure anger, the prisoners on the ship followed him, and when they fell onto Mars, he harassed them, lectured them, beat them, and forged them into an angry army. They had been abandoned on Mars, Dingo told them, to die slowly. They could only survive if they matched the Earth's brutality with their own. He marched them five hundred kilometers across the barren sands to the Shalbatana habitat.

The habitat was taken before the inhabitants had even realized it was under attack. The scientists who hadn't abandoned the station were beaten with scraps of metal from the vandalized habitat, blindfolded, and held as hostages while the prisoners radioed the Earth with their demands. When the demands were unanswered, the men were stripped and thrown naked out onto the sands to die. In rage and desperation, the mob that had been the sixth wave ripped apart the base, the visible symbol of the civilization that had sent them a hundred million miles to die. The women who remained on the base were raped, and then the destroyers gave them the chance to plead for their lives.

The men of the fourth and fifth waves had joined together. For the most part they were strangers to each other—many of them had never seen each others’ faces except through the reflective visor of a suit. But they had slowly learned that the only way to survive was to cooperate. They learned to burrow under the sand, and when their home-made radios told them that the base was being sacked, they crept across the desert, and silently watched, and waited. When the destroyers abandoned the base, after looting it of everything that they thought was valuable, the fifth wave, hiding under the sands, burst out and caught them unprepared. Of the destroyers who had attacked Shalbatana base, not a single one survived. The leader Dingo fled into the desert, and it was Jared Vargas, my great-great grandfather, who saw him, followed him, tracked him down, and killed him.

And then they went to Shalbatana base, to see whether anything left could be salvaged.

G-g-grandpa found her in the wreckage and ripped the tape off her eyes. She looked at him, her eyes unable to focus in the sudden light, and thought him one of the same group that had raped her and sabotaged the habitat. She had no way of knowing that others from his group were frantically working to patch up one of the modules to hold air, while G-g-grandpa and others searched for survivors. As the leaking air shrieked in her ears, she looked up at him, blinking, blood running from her nose and ears and anus, and said, “You have to know before I die. Oxygen in the soil. Release it by baking.”

“What?” G-g-grandpa said. It was not what he had expected to hear from a naked, bleeding woman who was about to pass out from anoxia.

“Oxygen!” she said, gasping for breath. “Oxygen! The greenhouses are dead. Some of the seedlings may have survived, but you don't have time. You need oxygen now. You'll have to find some way to heat the regolith. Make a solar furnace. You can get oxygen by heating the soil.”

And then she passed out. G-g-grandpa dragged her like a sack of stones to the one patched habitat module, and shouted, “I found one! Está viva! I found one still alive!”

Over the following months Jared held her when she cried and cursed, nursed her back to health, and stayed with her through her pregnancy. Theirs was one of the first marriages on Mars, for although some women had been criminals infamous enough to be sentenced to Mars, still the male prisoners outnumbered the females by ten to one.

Between them, the murderer and the scientist, they built a civilization.

And still the ships came from Earth, each one more poorly built and delivering more corpses than living men. But that was in its way a blessing, for the men would mostly die, while the corpses, no matter how emaciated, had valuable organic content that could turn another square meter of dead Martian sand into greenhouse soil. Each corpse kept one survivor alive.

Thousands died of starvation and asphyxiation. Thousands more were murdered so that the air that they breathed could be used by another. The refugees learned. Led by my great-great-grandfather and grandmother, when a ship fell to Mars, they learned to rip it apart to its components before its parachutes had even settled. Of its transportees—well, if they couldn't breath vacuum (and the thin Mars air was never more than dust-laden vacuum), they had better scramble.

Only the toughest survived. These were mostly the smallest and the most insignificant, the ones like rats, too vicious and too tenacious to kill. A quarter of a million prisoners were sent to Mars before the governments of Earth learned that behavior-modification chips were cheaper than sending prisoners to Mars, and tried their hardest to forget what had been done.

My great great grandfather Jared became the leader of the refugees. It was a brutal job, for they were brutal men, but he fought and bullied and connived to lead them.

There are no love stories on Mars; the refugees had no time, no resources for love. Love, to the refugees, was an unpredictable disease that strikes few people and must be eradicated. To the refugees, survival required obedience and ceaseless work. Love, which thrives on individuality and freedom, had no place on Mars.

Yes, Jared Vargas was a dissident sent from Earth for speaking against his government. But Jared Vargas died in the desert. When the men of the fifth wave came to the rescue of the Shalbatana habitat, Jared Vargas had chased the leader Dingo into the desert, and that had been the last mistake of his life. Only one of them returned from the desert, wearing the suit of Jared Vargas, and calling himself by the name of Jared Vargas. No one recognized him, but the men of the fifth wave were from a dozen ships, and if any of them had been friends of the original Jared Vargas, they died after the new Jared Vargas returned from the desert. And the only men who would have recognized Dingo were the exiles of the sixth wave, and they were all dead.

He returned from the desert, and rescued by great great grandmother, and the men of the fifth wave accepted him.

But surely my great great grandmother was not fooled. She was an intelligent woman—brilliant, in her own field—and she must have realized that the man who claimed her for his wife was the same man who had led the army of angry rabble to rape her, rip apart her base, and laugh as they watched her friends die in the thin air of Mars.

But Mars required survival, not love. And Jared Vargas was the only leader they had.

There are many stories from the days of the first refugees on Mars.

None of them are love stories.

"HELLO”, SAID THE STICK

Michael Swanwick

Arms races, by their nature, tend to escalate. But the biggest leaps aren't necessarily the most dramatic....

“Hello,” said the stick.

The soldier stopped, and looked around. He did not touch the hilt of his sword, but he adjusted his stance so he could reach it quickly, if need be. But there was nothing to be seen. The moors stretched flat and empty for miles about. “Who said that?”

“I did. Down here.”

“Ah. I see.” The soldier poked gingerly at the stick with his foot. “Some sort of radio device, eh? I've heard of such. Where are you speaking from?”

“I'm right here. The stick. I'm from off-planet. They can make things like me there.”

“Can they, now? Well that's interesting, I suppose.”

“Pick me up,” said the stick. “Take me with you.”

“Why?”

“Because I make an excellent weapon.”

“No, I mean what's in it for you?”

The stick paused. “You're smarter than you look.”

“Thanks. I think.”

“OK, here's the deal. I'm a symbiotic mechanism. I was designed to be totally helpless without a human partner. Pick me up, throw an acorn in the air, take a swing at it, and I can shift my weight so you hit it a country mile. Leave me here and I can't budge an inch.”

“Why would they build you like that?”

“So I'd be a good and faithful tool. And I will. I'll be the best quarterstaff you ever had. Try me and see.”

“How do I know you won't take over my brain?” the soldier asked suspiciously. “I've heard offworld wizards can make devices that do things like that.”

“They're called technicians, not wizards. And that sort of technology is strictly prohibited on planetary surfaces. You have nothing to worry about.”

“Even so ... it's nothing I'd want to chance.”

The stick sighed. “Tell me something. What's your rank? Are you a general? A field commander?”

“Tramping alone across the moors like this? Naw, I'm just a gallowglass-a mercenary and a foot soldier.”

“Then what have you got to lose?”

The soldier laughed aloud. He bent to pick up the stick. Then he put it down again. Then he picked it up.

“See?”

“Well, I don't mind telling you that takes a weight off my mind.”

“I could use a change of scenery. Let's go. We can talk along the way.” The soldier resumed his stroll down the dirt track. He swung the stick lightly back and forth before him, admiring how it lopped off the heads of thistles, while deftly sidestepping the sedge-roses. “So you're off to join the Iron Duke in his siege of Port Morningstar, are you?” the stick remarked conversationally.

“How'd you know that?”

“Oh, one hears things, being a stick. Fly on the wall, and all that.”

“It's an unfamiliar figure of speech, but I catch your meaning. Who do you think's going to win? The Iron Duke or the Council of Seven?”

“It's a close thing, by all accounts. But the Iron Duke has the advantage of numbers. That always counts for something. If I had to bet money, I'd say you chose employers well.”

“That's good. I like being on the winning side. Less chance of dying, for one thing.”

* * *

They'd progressed several miles across the moors when the Sun began to set. The soldier laid the stick aside and set a snare for supper. By the time he'd pitched a tent, made camp, and cut peat for a fire, he'd caught a rabbit. He roasted it slow and, because he had a fondness for drumsticks, ate all six legs first, along with three small bunyips, boiled with a pinch of salt from a tin. Like many an old campaigner, he ate in silence, giving the food his undivided attention.

“Well,” he said when he was full and in the mood for conversation again. “What were you doing out here in the middle of this godforsaken wilderness?”

The stick had been stuck into the earth on the opposite side of the campfire, so that it stood upright. “I was dropped by a soldier,” it said, “much like yourself. He was in pretty bad shape at the time. I doubt he's still alive.”

The soldier frowned. “You're not exactly standard gear.”

“No, I'm not. By compact, planetside wars are fought with primitive weaponry. It was found that wars were almost as environmentally destructive as the internal combustion engine. So...”

“Internal combustion engine?”

“Never mind. It's complicated. The point I was trying to make, though, is that the technology is there, even if it's not supposed to be used. So they cheat. Your side, the other side. Everybody cheats.”

“How so?” “That sword of yours, for example. Take it out, let's get a look at it.”

He drew the sword. Firelight glimmered across its surface.

“Tungsten-ceramic-titanium alloy. Self-sharpening, never rusts. You could slam it against a granite boulder and it wouldn't break. Am I right?”

“It's a good blade. I couldn't say what it was made of.”

“Trust me on this one.”

“Still ... you're a lot fancier than this old sword of mine. It can't talk, for one thing.”

“It's possible,” said the stick, “that the Council of Seven is, out of desperation, pushing the envelope a little, these days.”

“Now that's a figure of speech I've neither heard before nor can comprehend.”

“It means simply that it's likely they're using weapons rather more sophisticated than is strictly speaking allowed by the Covenants of Warfare. There's a lot riding on this siege. The Iron Duke has put everything he has into it. If he were defeated, then the worst the Council of Seven could expect would be sanctions and a fine. So long as they don't use tac-nukes or self reprogramming viruses, the powers that be won't invoke their right to invade.”

“Tac-nukes or self-reprogramming viruses?”

“Again, it's complicated. But I see you're yawning. Why don't you bank the fire and turn in? Get some sleep,” said the stick. “We can talk more in the morning.”

* * *

But in the morning, the soldier didn't feel much like talking. He packed his gear, shouldered the stick, and set off down the road with far less vigor than he had the day before. On this, the stick did not comment.

At noon, the soldier stopped for lunch. He let his pack slip from his shoulders and leaned the stick against it. Then he rummaged within for the left-over rabbit, only to make a face and thrust it away from him. “Phaw!” he said. “I cannot remember when I felt so weak! I must be coming down with something.”

“Do you think so?” the stick asked.

“Aye. And I'm nauseated, and I've got the sweats as well.”

The soldier wiped his forehead with his hand. It came back bloody.

"Chort!" he swore. “What's wrong with me?” “Radiation poisoning, I expect. I operate off a plutonium battery.”

“It's ... you ... You knew this would happen to me.” Unsteadily, he stood, and drew his sword. He struck at the stick with all his might. Sparks flew, but it was not damaged. Again and again he struck, until his strength was gone. His eyes filled with tears. “Oh, foul and treacherous stick, to kill a man so!”

“Is this crueler than hacking a man to death with a big knife? I don't see how. But it's not necessary for you to die.”

“No?”

“No. If you grab your gear and hurry, you just might make it to the Iron Duke's camp in time. The medics there can heal you-antiradiation treatments aren't proscribed by the Protocols. And, to tell you the truth, you do more damage to the Iron Duke's cause alive and using up his personnel and resources than you do neatly dead in the moorlands. Go! Now!”

With a curse, the soldier kicked the stick as hard as he could. Then he grabbed his pack and shambled off.

It was not long before he disappeared over the horizon.

A day passed. Then another.

A young man came trotting down the dirt track. He carried a sword and a light pack. He had the look of a mercenary.

“Hello,” said the stick.

THE LITTLE CAT LAUGHED

Michael Swanwick

There was a season in Paris when Darger and Surplus, those two canny rogues, lived very well indeed. That was the year when the Seine shone a gentle green at night with the pillars of the stone bridges fading up into a pure and ghostly blue, for the city engineers, in obedience to the latest fashions, had made the algae and mosses bioluminescent.

Paris, unlike lesser cities, reveled in her flaws. The molds and funguses that attacked her substance had been redesigned for beauty. The rats had been displaced by a breed of particularly engaging mice. A depleted revenant of the Plague Wars yet lingered in her brothels in the form of a sexual fever that lasted but twenty-four hours before dying away, leaving one with only memories and pleasant regrets. The health service, needless to say, made no serious effort to eradicate it.

Small wonder that Darger and Surplus were as happy as two such men could be.

One such man, actually. Surplus was, genetically, a dog, though he had been remade into anthropomorphic form and intellect. But neither that nor his American origins was held against him, for it was widely believed that he was enormously wealthy.

He was not, of course. Nor was he, as so many had been led to suspect, a Baron of the Demesne of Western Vermont, traveling incognito in his government’s service. In actual fact, Surplus and Darger were being kept afloat by an immense sea of credit while their plans matured.

"It seems almost a pity," Surplus remarked conversationally over breakfast one morning, "that our little game must soon come to fruition." He cut a slice of strawberry, laid it down upon his plate, and began fastidiously dabbing it with golden dollops of Irish cream. "I could live like this forever."

"Indeed. But our creditors could not." Darger, who had already breakfasted on toast and black coffee, was slowly unwrapping a package that had been delivered just minutes before by courier. "Nor shall we require them to. It is my proud boast to have never departed a restaurant table without leaving a tip, nor a hotel by any means other than the front door."

"I seem to recall that we left Buckingham by climbing out a window into the back gardens."

"That was the queen’s palace, and quite a different matter. Anyway, it was on fire. Common law absolves us of any impoliteness under such circumstances." From a lap brimming with brown paper and excelsior, Darger withdrew a gleaming chrome pistol. "Ah!"

Surplus set down his fork and said, "Aubrey, what are you doing with that grotesque mechanism?"

"Far from being a grotesque mechanism, as you put it, my dear friend, this device is an example of the brilliance of the Utopian artisans. The trigger has a built-in gene reader so that the gun could only be fired by its registered owner. Further, it was programmed so that, while still an implacable foe of robbers and other enemies of its master, it would refuse to shoot his family or friends, were he to accidentally point the gun their way and try to fire."

"These are fine distinctions for a handgun to make."

"Such weapons were artificially intelligent. Some of the best examples had brains almost the equal of yours or mine. Here. Examine it for yourself."

Surplus held it up to his ear. "Is it humming?"

But Darger, who had merely a human sense of hearing, could detect nothing. So Surplus remained unsure. "Where did it come from?" he asked.

"It is a present," Darger said. "From one Madame Mignonette d’Etranger. Doubtless she has read of our discovery in the papers, and wishes to learn more. To which end she has enclosed her card–it is bordered in black, indicating that she is a widow–annotated with the information that she will be at home this afternoon."

"Then we shall have to make the good widow’s acquaintance. Courtesy requires nothing less."

Chateau d’Etranger resembled nothing so much as one of Arcimboldo’s whimsical portraits of human faces constructed entirely of fruits or vegetables. It was a bioengineered veridian structure–self-cleansing, self-renewing, and even self-supporting, were one willing to accept a limited menu–such as had enjoyed a faddish popularity in the suburban Paris of an earlier decade. The columned façade was formed by a uniform line of oaks with fluted boles above plinthed and dadoed bases. The branches swept back to form a pleached roof of leafy green. Swags of vines decorated windows that were each the translucent petal of a flower delicately hinged with clamshell muscle to air the house in pleasant weather.

"Grotesque," muttered Surplus, "and in the worst of taste."

"Yet expensive," Darger observed cheerily. "And in the final analysis, does not money trump good taste?"

Madame d’Etranger received them in the orangery. All the windows had been opened, so that a fresh breeze washed through the room. The scent of orange blossoms was intoxicating. The widow herself was dressed in black, her face entirely hidden behind a dark and fashionable cloud of hair, hat, and veils. Her clothes, notwithstanding their somber purpose, were of silk, and did little to disguise the loveliness of her slim and perfect form. "Gentlemen," she said. "It is kind of you to meet me on such short notice."

Darger rushed forward to seize her black-gloved hands. "Madame, the pleasure is entirely ours. To meet such an elegant and beautiful woman, even under what appear to be tragic circumstances, is a rare privilege, and one I shall cherish always."

Madame d’Etranger tilted her head in a way that might indicate pleasure.

"Indeed," Surplus said coldly. Darger shot him a quick look.

"Tell me," Madame d’Etranger said. "Have you truly located the Eiffel Tower?"

"Yes, Madame, we have," Darger said.

"After all these years . . ." she marveled. "However did you find it?"

"First, I must touch lightly upon its history. You know, of course, that it was built early in the Utopian era, and dismantled at its very end, when rogue intelligences attempted to reach out from the virtual realm to seize control of the human world, and humanity fought back in every way it could manage. There were many desperate actions fought in those mad years, and none more desperate than here in Paris, where demons seized control of the Tower and used it to broadcast madness throughout the city. Men fought each other in the streets. Armed forces, sent in to restore order, were reprogrammed and turned against their own commanders. Thousands died before the Tower was at last dismantled.

"I remind you of this, so that you may imagine the determination of the survivors to ensure that the Eiffel Tower would never be raised again. Today, we think only of the seven thousand three hundred tons of puddled iron of its superstructure, and of how much it would be worth on the open market. Then, it was seen as a monster, to be buried where it could never be found and resurrected."

"As indeed, for all this time, it has not. Yet now, you tell me, you have found it. How?"

"By seeking for it where it would be most difficult to excavate. By asking ourselves where such a salvage operation would be most disruptive to contemporary Paris." He nodded to Surplus, who removed a rolled map from his valise. "Have you a table?"

Madame d’Etranger clapped her hands sharply twice. From the ferny undergrowth to one end of the orangery, an enormous tortoise patiently footed forward. The top of his shell was as high as Darger’s waist, and flat.

Wordlessly, Surplus unrolled the map. It showed Paris and environs.

"And the answer?" Darger swept a hand over the meandering blue river bisecting Paris. "It is buried beneath the Seine!"

For a long moment, the lady was still. Then, "My husband will want to speak with you."

With a rustle of silks, she left the room.

As soon as she was gone, Darger turned on his friend and harshly whispered, "Damn you, Surplus, your sullen and uncooperative attitude is queering the pitch! Have you forgotten how to behave in front of a lady?"

"She is no lady," Surplus said stiffly. "She is a genetically modified cat. I can smell it."

"A cat! Surely not."

"Trust me on this one. The ears you cannot see are pointed. The eyes she takes such care to hide are a cat’s eyes. Doubtless the fingers within those gloves have retractable claws. She is a cat, and thus untrustworthy and treacherous."

Madame d’Etranger returned. She was followed by two apes who carried a thin, ancient man in a chair between them. Their eyes were dull; they were little better than automata. After them came a Dedicated Doctor, eyes bright, who of course watched his charge with obsessive care. The widow gestured toward her husband. "C’est Monsieur."

"Monsieur d’Etrang–" Darger began.

"Monsieur only. It’s quicker," the ancient said curtly. "My widow has told me about your proposition."

Darger bowed. "May I ask, sir, how long you have?"

"Twenty-three months, seven days, and an indeterminable number of hours," the Dedicated Doctor said. "Medicine remains, alas, an inexact science."

"Damn your impudence and shut your yap!" Monsieur snarled. "I have no time to waste on you."

"I speak only the truth. I have no choice but to speak the truth. If you wish otherwise, please feel free to deprogram me, and I will quit your presence immediately."

"When I die you can depart, and not a moment before." The slight old man addressed Darger and Surplus: "I have little time, gentlemen, and in that little time I wish to leave my mark upon the world."

"Then–forgive me again, sir, but I must say it–you have surely better things to do than to speak with us, who are in essence but glorified scrap dealers. Our project will bring its patron an enormous increase in wealth. But wealth, as you surely know, does not in and of itself buy fame."

"But that is exactly what I intend to do–buy fame." A glint came into Monsieur’s eyes, and one side of his mouth turned up in a mad and mirthless grin. "It is my intent to re-erect the ancient structure as the Tour d’Etranger!"

"The trout has risen to the bait," Darger said with satisfaction. He and Surplus were smoking cigars in their office. The office was the middle room of their suite, and a masterpiece of stage-setting, with desks and tables overflowing with papers, maps, and antiquarian books competing for space with globes, surveying equipment, and a stuffed emu.

"And yet, the hook is not set. He can still swim free," Surplus riposted. "There was much talk of building coffer dams of such and so sizes and redirecting so-many-millions of liters of water. And yet not so much as a penny of earnest money."

"He’ll come around. He cannot coffer the Seine segment by segment until he comes across the buried beams of the Tower. For that knowledge, he must come to us."

"And why should he do that, rather than searching it out for himself?"

"Because, dear fellow, it is not to be found there. We lied."

"We have told lies before, and had them turn out to be true."

"That too is covered. Over a century ago, an eccentric Parisian published an account of how he had gone up and down the Seine with a rowboat and a magnet suspended on a long rope from a spring scale, and found nothing larger than the occasional rusted hulk of a Utopian machine. I discovered his leaflet, its pages uncut, in the Bibliothèque Nationale."

"And what is to prevent our sponsor from reading that same chapbook?"

"The extreme unlikelihood of such a coincidence, and the fact that I later dropped the only surviving copy in all the city into the Seine."

That same night Darger, who was a light sleeper, was awakened by the sound of voices in the library. Silently, he donned blouse and trousers, and then put his ear to the connecting double doors.

He could hear the cadenced rise and fall of conversation, but could not quite make out the words. More suspiciously, no light showed in the crack under or between the doors. Surplus, he knew, would not have scheduled a business appointment without consulting him. Moreover, though one of the two murmuring voices might conceivably be female, there were neither giggles nor soft, drawn-out sighs but, rather, a brisk and informational tone to their speech. The rhythms were all wrong for it to be one of Surplus’s assignations.

Resolutely, Darger flung the doors open.

The only light in the office came from the moon without. It illuminated not two but only one figure–a slender one, clad in skin-tight clothes. She (for by the outline of her shadowy body, Darger judged the intruder to be female) whirled at the sound of the doors slamming. Then, with astonishing grace, she ran out onto the balcony, jumped up on its rail, and leaped into the darkness. Darger heard the woman noisily rattling up the bamboo fire escape.

With a curse, he rushed after her.

By the time Darger had reached the roof, he fully expected his mysterious intruder to be gone. But there she was, to the far end of the hotel, crouched alongside one of the chimney-pots in a wary and watchful attitude. Of her face he could see only two unblinking glints of green fire that were surely her eyes. Silhouetted as she was against a sky filled with rags and snatches of moon-bright cloud, he could make out the outline of one pert and perfect breast, tipped with a nipple the size of a dwarf cherry. He saw how her long tail lashed back and forth behind her.

For an instant, Darger was drawn up by a wholly uncharacteristic feeling of supernatural dread. Was this some imp or fiend from the infernal nether-regions? He drew in his breath.

But then the creature turned and fled. So Darger, reasoning that if it feared him then he had little to fear from it, pursued.

The imp-woman ran to the edge of the hotel and leaped. Only a short alley separated the building from its neighbor. The leap was no more than six feet. Darger followed without difficulty. Up a sloping roof she ran. Over it he pursued her.

Another jump, of another alley.

He was getting closer now. Up a terracotta-tiled rooftop he ran. At the ridge-line, he saw with horror his prey extend herself in a low flying leap across a gap of at least fifteen feet. She hit the far roof with a tuck, rolled, and sprang to her feet.

Darger knew his limitations. He could not leap that gap.

In a panic, he tried to stop, tripped, fell, and found himself sliding feet-first on his back down the tiled roof. The edge sped toward him. It was a fall of he-knew-not-how-many floors to the ground. Perhaps six.

Frantically, Darger flung out his arms to either side, grabbing at the tiles, trying to slow his descent by friction. The tiles bumped painfully beneath him as he skidded downward. Then the heels of his bare feet slammed into the gutter at the edge of the eaves. The guttering groaned, lurched outward–and held.

Darger lay motionless, breathing heavily, afraid to move.

He heard a thump, and then the soft sound of feet traversing the rooftop. A woman’s head popped into view, upside down in his vision. She smiled.

He knew who she was, then. There were, after all, only so many cat-women in Paris. "M-madame d’Etra–"

"Shhh." She put a finger against his lips. "No names."

Nimbly, she slipped around and crouched over him. He saw now that she was clad only in a pelt of fine black fur. Her nipples were pale and naked. "So afraid!" she marveled. Then, brushing a hand lightly over him. "Yet still aroused."

Darger felt the guttering sway slightly under him and, thinking how easily this woman could send him flying downward, he shivered. It was best he did not offend her. "Can you wonder, Madame? The sight of you. . . ."

"How gallant!" Her fingers deftly unbuttoned his trousers, and undid his belt. "You do know how to pay a lady a compliment."

"What are you doing?" Darger cried in alarm.

She tugged the belt free, tossed it lightly over the side of the building. "Surely your friend has explained to you that cats are amoral?" Then, when Darger nodded, she ran her fingers up under his blouse, claws extended, drawing blood. "So you will understand that I mean nothing personal by this."

Surplus was waiting when Darger climbed back in the window. "Dear God, look at you," he cried. "Your clothes are dirty and disordered, your hair is in disarray–and what has happened to your belt?"

"Some mudlark of the streets has it, I should imagine." Darger sank down into a chair. "At any rate, there’s no point looking for it."

"What in heaven’s name has happened to you?"

"I fear I’ve fallen in love," Darger said sadly, and could be compelled to say no more.

So began an affair that seriously tried the friendship of the two partners in crime. For Madame d’Etranger thenceforth appeared in their rooms, veiled yet unmistakable, every afternoon. Invariably, Darger would plant upon her hand the chastest of kisses, and then discreetly lead her to the secrecy of his bedroom, where their activities could only be guessed at. Invariably, Surplus would scowl, snatch up his walking stick, and retire to the hallway, there to pace back and forth until the lady finally departed. Only rarely did they speak of their discord.

One such discussion was occasioned by Surplus’s discovery that Madame d’Etranger had employed the services of several of Paris’s finest book scouts.

"For what purpose?" Darger asked negligently. Mignonette had left not half an hour previously, and he was uncharacteristically relaxed.

"That I have not been able to determine. These book scouts are a notoriously close-mouthed lot."

"The acquisition of rare texts is an honorable hobby for many haut-bourgeois."

"Then it is one she has acquired on short notice. She was unknown in the Parisian book world a week ago. Today she is one of its best patrons. Think, Darger–think! Abrupt changes of behavior are always dangerous signs. Why will you not take this seriously?"

"Mignonette is, as they say here, une chatte serieuse, and I un homme galant." Darger shrugged. "It is inevitable that I should be besotted with her. Why cannot you, in your turn, simply accept this fact?"

Surplus chewed on a knuckle of one paw. "Very well–I will tell you what I fear. There is only one work of literature she could possibly be looking for, and that is the chapbook proving that the Eiffel Tower does not lie beneath the Seine."

"But, my dear fellow, how could she possibly know of its existence?"

"That I cannot say."

"Then your fears are groundless." Darger smiled complacently. Then he stroked his chin and frowned. "Nevertheless, I will have a word with her."

The very next day he did so.

The morning had been spent, as usual, in another round of the interminable negotiations with Monsieur’s business agents, three men of such negligible personality that Surplus privately referred to them as Ci, Ca, and l’Autre. They were drab and lifeless creatures who existed, it sometimes seemed, purely for the purpose of preventing an agreement of any sort from coming to fruition. "They are waiting to be bribed," Darger explained when Surplus took him aside to complain of their recalcitrance.

"Then they will wait forever. Before we can begin distributing banknotes, we must first receive our earnest money. The pump must be primed. Surely even such dullards as Ci, Ca, and l’Autre can understand that much."

"Greed has rendered them impotent. Just as a heart can be made to beat so fast that it will seize up, so too here. Still, with patience I believe they can be made to see reason."

"Your patience, I suspect, is born of long afternoons and rumpled bed sheets."

Darger merely looked tolerant.

Yet it was not patience that broke the logjam, but its opposite. For that very morning, Monsieur burst into the conference room, carried in a chair by his apes and accompanied by his Dedicated Doctor. "It has been weeks," he said without preamble. "Why are the papers not ready?"

Ci, Ca, and l’Autre threw up their hands in dismay.

"The terms they require are absurd, to say the . . ."

"No sensible businessman would . . ."

"They have yet to provide any solid proof of their . . ."

"No, and in their position, neither would I. Popotin–" he addressed one of his apes– "the pouch."

Popotin slipped a leather pouch from his shoulder and clumsily held it open. Monsieur drew out three hand-written sheets of paper and threw them down on the table. "Here are my notes," he said. "Look them over and then draw them up in legal form." The cries of dismay from Ci, Ca, and l’Autre were quelled with one stern glare. "I expect them to be complete within the week."

Surplus, who had quickly scanned the papers, said, "You are most generous, Monsieur. The sum on completion is nothing short of breathtaking." Neither he nor Darger expected to collect that closing sum, of course. But they were careful to draw attention away from the start-up monies (a fraction of the closing sum, though by their standards enormous), that were their true objective.

Monsieur snorted. "What matter? I will be dead by then."

"I see that the Tour d’Etranger is to be given to the City of Paris," Darger said. "That is very generous of you, Monsieur. Many a man in your position would prefer to keep such a valuable property in their family."

"Eh? What family?"

"I speak, sir, of your wife."

"She will be taken care of."

"Sir?" Darger, who was sensitive to verbal nuance, felt a cold tingling at the back of his neck, a premonition of something significant being left unspoken. "What does that mean?"

"It means just what I said." Monsieur snapped his fingers to catch his apes’ attention. "Take me away from here."

When Darger got back to his rooms, Mignonette was already waiting there. She lounged naked atop his bed, playing with the chrome revolver she had sent him before ever they had met. First she cuddled it between her breasts. Then she brought it to her mouth, ran her pink tongue up the barrel, and briefly closed her lips about its very tip. He found the sight disturbingly arousing.

"You should be careful," Darger said. "That’s a dangerous device."

"Pooh! Monsieur had it programmed to defend me as well as himself." She placed the muzzle against her heart, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. "See? It will not fire at either of us." She handed it to him. "Try it for yourself."

With a small shudder of distaste, Darger placed the gun on a table at some distance from the bed. "I have a question to ask you," he said.

Mignonette smiled in an amused way. She rolled over on her stomach, and rose up on her knees and elbows. Her long tail moved languidly. Her cat’s eyes were green as grass. "Do you want your answer now," she asked, "or later?"

Put that way, the question answered itself.

So filled with passion was Darger that he had no memory of divesting himself of his clothing, or joining Mignonette on the bed. He only knew that he was deep inside her, and that that was where he wanted to be. Her fur was soft and sleek against his skin. It tickled him ever so slightly–just enough to be perverse, but not enough to be undesirable. Fleetingly, he felt like a zoöphile, and then, even more fleetingly, realized that this must be very much like what Surplus’s lady-friends experienced. But he abandoned that line of thought quickly.

Like any properly educated man of his era, Darger was capable of achieving orgasm three or four times in succession without awkward periods of detumescence in between. With Mignonette, he could routinely bring that number up to five. Today, for the first time, he reached seven.

"You wanted to ask me a question?" Mignonette said, when they were done. She lay within the crook of his arm, her cold nose snuggled up against his neck. Playfully, she put her two hands, claws sheathed, against his side and kneaded him, as if she were a true, unmodified cat.

"Hmm? Ah! Yes." Darger felt wonderfully, gloriously relaxed. He doubted he would ever move again. It took an effort for him to focus his thoughts. "I was wondering . . . exactly what your husband meant when he said that he would have you ‘taken care of,’ after his death."

"Oh." She drew away from him, and sat up upon her knees. "That. I thought you were going to ask about the pamphlet."

Again, a terrible sense of danger overcame Darger. He was extremely sensitive to such influences. It was an essential element of his personality. "Pamphlet?" he said lightly.

"Yes, that silly little thing about a man in a rowboat. Vingt Ans . . . something like that. I’ve had my book scouts scouring the stalls and garrets for it since I-forget-when."

"I had no idea you were looking for such a thing."

"Oh, yes," she said. "I was looking for it. And I have found it too."

"You have what?"

The outer doors of their apartments slammed open, and the front room filled with voices. Somebody–it could only be Monsieur–was shouting at the top of his weak voice. Surplus was clearly trying to soothe him. The Dedicated Doctor was there as well, urging his client to calm himself.

Darger leapt from the bed, and hastily threw on his clothes. "Wait here," he told Mignonette. Having some experience in matters of love, he deftly slipped between the doors without opening them wide enough to reveal her presence.

He stepped into absolute chaos.

Monsieur stood in the middle of the room waving a copy of an ancient pamphlet titled Vingt Ans dans un Bateau à Rames in the air. On its cover was a crude drawing of a man in a rowboat holding a magnet from a fishing pole. He shook it until it rattled. "Swindlers!" he cried. "Confidence tricksters! Deceivers! Oh, you foul creatures!"

"Please, sir, consider your leucine aminopeptidases," the Dedicated Doctor murmured. He wiped the little man’s forehead with a medicated cloth. "You’ll put your inverse troponin ratio all out of balance. Please sit down again."

"I am betrayed!"

"Sir, consider your blood pressure."

"The Tour d’Etranger was to be my immortality!" Monsieur howled. "What can such false cozeners as you know of immortality?"

"I am certain there has been a misunderstanding," Surplus said.

"Consider your fluoroimmunohistochemical systems. Consider your mitochondrial refresh rate."

The two apes, released from their chair-carrying chore, were running in panicked circles. One of them brushed against a lamp and sent it crashing to the floor.

It was exactly the sort of situation that Darger was best in. Thinking swiftly, he took two steps into the room and in an authoritative voice cried, "If you please!"

Silence. Every eye was upon him.

Smiling sternly, Darger said. "I will not ask for explanations. I think it is obvious to all of us what has happened. How Monsieur has come to misunderstand the import of the chapbook I cannot understand. But if, sir, you will be patient for the briefest moment, all will be made clear to you." He had the man! Monsieur was so perfectly confused (and anxious to be proved wrong, to boot) that he would accept anything Darger told him. Even the Dedicated Doctor was listening. Now he had but to invent some plausible story–for him a trifle–and the operation was on track again. "You see, there is–"

Behind him, the doors opened quietly. He put a hand over his eyes.

Mignonette d’Etranger entered the room, fully dressed, and carrying the chrome revolver. In her black silks, she was every inch the imperious widow. (Paradoxically, the fact that she obviously wore nothing beneath those silks only made her all the more imposing.) But she had thrown her veils back to reveal her face: cold, regal, and scornful.

"You!" She advanced wrathfully on her husband. "How dare you object to my taking a lover? How dare you!"

"You . . . you were . . ." The little man looked bewildered by her presence.

"I couldn’t get what I need at home. It was only natural that I should look for it elsewhere. So it costs you a day of your life every time we make love! Aren’t I worth it? So it costs you three days to tie me up and whip me! So what? Most men would die for the privilege."

She pressed the gun into his hands.

"If I mean so little to you," she cried histrionically, "then kill me!" She darted back and struck a melodramatic pose alongside Darger. "I will die beside the man I love!"

"Yes. . . ." Belated comprehension dawned upon Monsieur’s face, followed closely by a cruel smile. "The man you love."

He pointed the pistol at Darger and pulled the trigger.

But in that same instant, Mignonette flung herself before her lover, as if to shelter his body with her own. In the confines of so small a room, the gun’s report was world-shattering. She spun around, clutched her bosom, and collapsed in the bedroom doorway. Blood seeped onto the carpet from beneath her.

Monsieur held up the gun and stared at it with an expression of total disbelief.

It went off again.

He collapsed dead upon the carpet.

The police naturally suspected the worst. But a dispassionate exposition of events by the Dedicated Doctor, a creature compulsively incapable of lying, and an unobtrusive transfer of banknotes from Surplus allayed all suspicions. Monsieur d’Etranger’s death was obviously an accident d’amour, and Darger and Surplus but innocent bystanders. With heartfelt expressions of condolence, the officers left.

When the morticians came to take away Monsieur’s body, the Dedicated Doctor smiled. "What a horrible little man he was!" he exclaimed. "You cannot imagine what a relief it is to no longer give a damn about his health." He had signed death warrants for both Monsieur and his widow, though his examination of her had been cursory at best. He hadn’t even touched the body.

Darger roused himself from his depressed state to ask, "Will you be returning for Madame’s body?"

"No," the Dedicated Doctor said. "She is a cat, and therefore the disposition of her corpse is a matter for the department of sanitation."

Darger turned an ashen white. But Surplus deftly stepped beside him and seized the man’s wrists in his own powerful paws. "Consider how tenuous our position is here," he murmured. Then the door closed, and they were alone again. "Anyway–what body?"

Darger whirled. Mignonette was gone.

"Between the money I had to slip to les flics in order to get them to leave as quickly as they did," Surplus told his morose companion, "and the legitimate claims of our creditors, we are only slightly better-off than we were when we first arrived in Paris."

This news roused Darger from his funk. "You have paid off our creditors? That is extremely good to hear. Wherever did you get that sort of money?"

"Ci, Ca, and l’Autre. They wished to be bribed. So I let them buy shares in the salvage enterprise at a greatly reduced rate. You cannot imagine how grateful they were."

It was evening, and the two associates were taking a last slow stroll along the luminous banks of the Seine. They were scheduled to depart the city within the hour via river-barge, and their emotions were decidedly mixed. No man leaves Paris entirely happily.

They came to a stone bridge, and walked halfway across it. Below, they could see their barge awaiting them. Darger opened his Gladstone and took out the chrome pistol that had been so central in recent events. He placed it on the rail. "Talk," he said.

The gun said nothing.

He nudged it ever so slightly with one finger. "It would take but a flick of the wrist to send you to the bottom of the river. I don’t know if you’d rust, but I am certain you cannot swim."

"All right, all right!" the pistol said. "How did you know?"

"Monsieur had possession of an extremely rare chapbook that gave away our scheme. He can only have gotten it from one of Mignonette’s book scouts. Yet there was no way she could have known of its importance–unless she had somehow planted a spy in our midst. That first night, when she broke into our rooms, I heard voices. It is obvious now that she was talking with you."

"You are a more intelligent man than you appear."

"I’ll take that for a compliment. Now tell me–what was this ridiculous charade all about?"

"How much do you know already?"

"The first bullet you fired lodged in the back wall of the bedroom. It did not come anywhere near Mignonette. The blood that leaked from under her body was bull’s blood, released from a small leather bladder she left behind her. After the police departed, she unobtrusively slipped out the bedroom window. Doubtless she is a great distance away by now. I know all that occurred. What I do not understand is why."

"Very well. Monsieur was a vile old man. He did not deserve a beautiful creature like Mignonette."

"On this we are as one. Go on."

"But, as he had her made, he owned her. And as she was his property, he was free to do with her as he liked." Then, when Darger’s face darkened, "You misapprehend me, sir! I do not speak of sexual or sadomasochistic practices but of chattel slavery. Monsieur was, as I am sure you have noted for yourself, a possessive man. He had left instructions that upon his death, his house was to be set afire, with Mignonette within it."

"Surely, this would not be legal!"

"Read the law," the gun said. "Mignonette determined to find her way free. She won me over to her cause, and together we hatched the plan you have seen played to fruition."

"Tell me one thing, Surplus said curiously. "You were programmed not to shoot your master. How then did you manage. . . ?

"Iam many centuries old. Time enough to hack any amount of code."

"Ah," said Surplus, in a voice that indicated he was unwilling to admit unfamiliarity with the gun’s terminology.

"But why me?" Darger slammed a hand down on the stone rail. "Why did Madame d’Etranger act out her cruel drama with my assistance, rather than . . . than . . . with someone else’s?"

"Because she is a cold-hearted bitch. Also, she found you attractive. For a whore such as she, that is justification enough for anything."

Darger flushed with anger. "How dare you speak so of a lady?"

"She abandoned me," the gun said bitterly. "I loved her, and she abandoned me. How else should I speak of her under such circumstances?"

"Under such circumstances, a gentleman would not speak of her at all," Surplus said mildly. "Nevertheless, you have, as required, explained everything. So we shall honor our implicit promise by leaving you here to be found by the next passer-by. A valuable weapon such as yourself will surely find another patron with ease. A good life to you, sir."

"Wait!"

Surplus quirked an eyebrow. "What is it?" Darger asked.

"Take me with you," the gun pleaded. "Do not leave me here to be picked up by some cutpurse or bourgeois lout. I am neither a criminal nor meant for a sedentary life. I am an adventurer, like yourselves! I can be of enormous aid to you, and an invaluable prop for your illicit schemes."

Darger saw how Surplus’s ears perked up at this. Quickly, and in his coldest possible manner, he said, "We are not of the same social class, sir."

Taking his friend’s arm, he turned away.

Below, at the landing-stage, their barge awaited, hung with loops of fairy-lights. They descended and boarded. The hawsers were cast off, the engine fed an extra handful of sugar to wake it to life, and they motored silently down-river, while behind them the pistol’s frantic cries faded slowly in the warm Parisian night. It was not long before the City of Light was a luminous blur on the horizon, like the face of one’s beloved seen through tears.

PAYING IT FORWARD

Michael A. Burstein

Legacies can take many forms. . . .

I’m dying.

No one knows it yet. Having never married, I have no family to mourn my passing. I do have my fans, who would probably turn out in droves to say farewell if I had chosen to let them know in advance. But in the twilight of my time, I want to face this final passage alone.

Of course, I’m not completely alone. I still have my mentor, Carl Lambclear. I’ll email him tonight, and he’ll email me back, and just remembering how much he helped me will keep me going until the very end. We’ll exchange our latest story ideas, and share more turns of phrase that we both find appealing. Carl Lambclear is the one person I could open up to about my condition, and I’m glad that I did.

It’s the ultimate irony, I suppose, that once more I find myself having something in common with Lambclear. He, too, is familiar with the emotional gamut that accompanies an inoperable brain tumor; after all, many years ago, he died of the same thing.

It started long ago, at the beginning of the century. I think it’s almost impossible for anyone who didn’t live through it to fully appreciate the swinging moods that the world experienced. For the months before and after New Year’s Eve 2000, everyone all over the world seemed to harbor a quiet expectation that things would become new and different. The twenty-first century, a century of imagination and great wonders, was arriving, and optimism was the order of the day.

Of course, most of us sobered up after the economy tanked and September 11 happened and the other events of the ohs came to pass. With each tragedy, small or large, it was as if a curtain had plummeted down over another hope that was now irrevocably gone.

For me, the curtain came down when Carl Lambclear died.

I was in my early twenties, a recent college graduate dealing with one of the worst economic downturns to follow a time of great economic growth. Despite a double honors degree in Chemistry and Physics, I couldn’t find a job, and I didn’t really know what I would do with one if I had one.

Because what I really wanted to do was write science fiction.

My parents had waited until their later years to have their only child; and, as an unfortunate consequence, they both died of old age while I was still in college. But fortunately, they had also left me enough of an estate to take care of myself during that difficult time. And that meant I had a chance to explore what I wanted to do with my life, rather than having to take the first job that came in my direction just to support myself.

I had grown up reading the great works of science fiction, pressed upon me by my father. Although in his later years his tastes had turned to mystery novels, he still understood the ability of science fiction to unleash the imagination of a teenage outcast. And I had been so captivated by the works of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and all the rest, that I simply could not imagine doing anything else with my life but trying to bring that sense of the fantastic to others.

And so I had been trying to establish myself as a writer of science fiction. I’d published a few stories in small markets while in college, but to no great acclaim. While pursuing my formal degrees, I had studied writing informally by reading book after book on technique, plot, character, setting, and whatever else seemed useful. But one book I had devoured above all others: Writing Short Science Fiction by Carl Lambclear.

It wasn’t just that I enjoyed Lambclear’s novels. I also enjoyed his ability to teach, to explain how he created the worlds that he did in a way to make them fascinating. Lambclear had a lot of advice on how to draw the reader in, and the advice was just as fun to read as his fiction.

On the day he died, I visited his webpage, and read about all the new books he was planning. It’s a strange phenomenon, I suppose, the dead leaving traces of themselves scattered around cyberspace as if they were still alive. Of course, I imagine people might have felt that way from the time the first person died who had a portrait painted. I remember reading mainstream mystery stories involving messages from beyond the grave, but not ghost stories and the like. There was nothing new about the idea of someone leaving a suicide note, or a clue to their murderer, but as technology progressed, the fictional and nonfictional deceased would leave answering machine messages, videotaped wills, and even emails set to go if a code word wasn’t entered into a computer on a daily basis.

But for me, the spookiest of such messages from the dead were the webpages.

A personal webpage–even a professional webpage, come to think of it–was a vivid statement in the ether, saying to one and all that this person exists. To visit a webpage knowing that the subject of it is dead is like talking to a ghost, and hearing about all the tasks that the dead one left undone.

So, when I heard that Lambclear had died, it spurred me to visit his webpage. I had never done so before; odd, I suppose, given how much I liked his stuff, but it had honestly never occurred to me to do so.

So I pointed my browser (Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on an iMac, connected via a 56K internal modem, if anyone still remembers those things) at his webpage and waited for it to download. The long amount of time it took surprised me. Most writers maintained webpages that were light on the graphics and easy on the text, which made downloading them rather fast, even over a simple phone line. But Lambclear’s page displayed elaborate graphics, and so I sat at my desk, staring at my computer screen and sighing as I waited for the bytelock to clear.

Finally, just when I thought my computer had frozen up completely, the browser bar filled all the way from the left to the right, indicating that the download was done. The picture on my screen made it evident why it had taken so long. Lambclear’s webpage displayed a simulation of the control panel of a spaceship, with digital displays and blinking lights. As I stared at it, dumbfounded, my speakers started playing beeps and whooshes to go along with the effect. Windows on the control panel flashed funny messages, warning of strange anomalies, asteroids, black holes, and wormholes, and requesting that I make course corrections so I wouldn’t hit anything.

I smiled. Although I doubted that Lambclear had designed the graphics himself, they did fit his style quite well. Lambclear wrote a lot of hard science fiction set on spaceships, rollicking adventure stories set against a rock-solid background of real physics.

Something else fit his style as well. The graphics were intense on the eyes, but they didn’t make the webpage confusing to navigate. When I moused over all the graphics, nothing happened. Lambclear had placed a list of links to the other pages on the site over on the left of his main page, away from the graphic of the spaceship control panel. And each link was a simple word, such as "Home," "News," "Biography," "Novels," and "Bibliography." The link right under "Home" was to a site map, so I knew that despite the fancy setup, he wanted his information to be as accessible as possible to any visitors.

And on the bottom of the page sat a link that read, very simply, "Send me email."

I stared at it for a long time with regret. I had never emailed Lambclear, and clearly he had been interested in receiving feedback from his fans. If only I had thought of it before, I could have emailed him, let him know how much his work meant to me, and how much I wanted to emulate him.

But it was too late. Lambclear didn’t even have a family to whom I could send my sympathies; he had remained a solitary bachelor until his last day. There was no one to whom I could properly express my appreciation for his work and my sorrow for his passing.

No one except . . .

I moused over the "Send me email" link and watched it blink back and forth between white and red. Finally, I clicked on it, bringing up my email program with the "To:" field already addressed to Lambclear’s America Online account (again, does anyone still remember them?). For a brief moment, I felt silly–but only for a moment. I stared at the screen, looked out my window at the autumn leaves just beginning to turn on the trees, and then I composed this message:

Subject: Hello

Dear Mr. Lambclear,

I’m sorry I never got in touch with you before. I’m a big fan of your works, from the Ethereal Web stories to the Five Universes novels. I even have a copy of your first short story collection, The Universe Off to the Side, which my father gave to me as a birthday present when it first came out.

I doubt you’ve ever heard of me, though, and I hope you won’t think it forward of me to write. (Your webpage did seem to invite email.) I’ve been trying to write science fiction myself, with no real success. I have to admit that I’ve been emulating you, with the hope that one day you might read my stuff and realize that we were kindred spirits–at least, as far as our tastes in writing.

I’m sorry that will never happen now. I do wish I had written to you sooner. Although I knew you were something of a recluse, the afterword in Writing Short Science Fiction seemed to indicate that you were willing to hear from your fans. But I just never had the inclination to write to you. In the back of my mind, I think I was waiting until I had published enough stories myself so I could approach you as a colleague. But I guess, as I said, that can never happen now.

I hope you can forgive me for waiting. Thank you for all your stories. You will be missed.

I clicked the SEND button on my computer screen, and the email went off to its destination. I felt better. Even though I knew that Lambclear could never know of my appreciation of him and his work, at least I knew about it, and that made a difference.

I went to bed that night feeling a little less sad about his passing.

A reader of this file, if anyone finds it, could probably guess what happened next. But as I write this, I still choose to approach the event slowly, like I did that long-ago morning.

My alarm clock went off at 7 a.m., blaring its grating tone as usual. I could have slept later, I know, but my parents had instilled in me a fear of sleeping away the days of my life. I pulled myself out of bed, walked to the kitchen, and brewed a cup of fresh-ground Colombian coffee to help me wake up. Still in my blue chamois pajamas, I sipped from my father’s old porcelain mug, sat down at my computer, and downloaded my email.

And among the voluminous spam and occasional email from friends, I found a reply from the account of Carl Lambclear.

At first I was confused, and I almost choked on my hot beverage. Lambclear was dead; how could he have replied to my note? Perhaps a friend was cleaning out his mailbox. Or maybe Lambclear had set his computer to send out automatic replies, acknowledging receipt of email. Whatever the reason, I knew an obvious way to find out. Just open the email and read it.

I hesitated, as unwilling to resolve my situation as the familiar quantum cat. So long as I left the email closed, I could imagine that Lambclear lived; but the moment I opened it, I would come face to face again with the bald fact of his death.

I shook my head, sighed at my own silliness, opened the email, and read it. And when I came to the end of the email, I leaned forward and read it again and again.

Subject: Re: Hello

Dear fellow traveler,

It was an absolute delight to receive your missive from yesterday. As a matter of fact, I have heard of you. I keep up with all the magazines, even the semipro ones, and I fondly recall one of your stories. If my memory does not fail me, yours is the story about the young girl who runs off to join an interstellar circus. Good stuff, even if the writing is a bit awkward in places, and the plot a little thin. But writing weakly is a phase we all must pass through, and within your story I do espy the seeds of better work.

However, the point of my reply is not to criticize your work, as I would hesitate to do so without a formal invitation. Rather, I am writing to tell you of my gratitude in knowing how much my work has meant to you. It may surprise you to hear this, but in point of fact I do not hear from many of my fans, even those who would aspire to join me in my calling. I presume most people are put off by my reputation of reclusiveness, and are therefore hesitant to intrude upon my privacy, no matter how delicately they might.

But I must admit, now being in the autumn of my life, I find myself more willing to be an active participant in the world than I have been before. And since your letter arrived at this propitious moment, I feel that perhaps I owe you a little bit of the assistance that was offered to me at the beginning of my career. I would like to offer you the same help, giving you advice on your own stories in the hopes that you will grow to be the best writer that you possibly can.

In other words, if you are willing, I would be more than happy to begin a correspondence.

Sincerely yours,

Carl Lambclear

After reading the message three times, I leaned back slightly in my chair, sipped my coffee some more, and pondered. The email was impossible. Lambclear was dead; notices of his death had appeared on all the usual places, including the Locus and SFWA webpages. Lambclear could not have replied to me; therefore, by simple logic, someone else must have done so, pretending to be Lambclear.

But who would have done that? For a moment, I had the fleeting thought that perhaps Lambclear actually did have a family. Was there a secret wife who replied to my message? Or maybe a secret child? But I dismissed that notion as quickly as I came up with it. It simply didn’t make any sense, given the tenor of the reply.

Still, someone must have been reading his email, and whoever it was seemed intent on playing a joke on me. Rather than fall into the trap, and be made a laughingstock, I carefully composed my next email to dissuade the prankster. It went like this:

Subject: Re: Hello

Dear "Mr. Lambclear":

Whoever you are, this joke is in poor taste. Both you and I know that there is no way in the world Carl Lambclear could have responded to me. All I meant to do was express my appreciation of his work, and you poked fun at me for doing so.

Leave me alone.

* * *

I sent it out within the hour, and then spent the rest of my day writing. I managed to get my thousand words done, not bad for the day’s work. And, as was my habit, I refused to check my email while working. I knew too many aspiring writers who had fallen into that trap and never written a word.

Furthermore, that night I had no time to read my email after I finished my thousand words, as I went out on an unsuccessful blind date. The date was disastrous enough that I still recall it today; still, the less said about it, the better. So the next morning, when I once again was drinking coffee in front of my computer, I found another ostensible reply from the account of Carl Lambclear.

I sighed, thinking that this was absolutely ridiculous. I had already told off the anonymous person who had emailed me the first time; I didn’t really want to have to go through this again. I highlighted the email and prepared to delete it. And then a random piece of advice flitted into my head and stayed my hand. Some writer once said that any experience, no matter how bad, was fodder for the typewriter. Perhaps this message might lead to a story idea. At any rate, it couldn’t really harm me just to read it.

So I clicked on the email, opening it. And read the following:

Subject: Re: Hello

Dear fellow traveler,

I must admit being somewhat perplexed as to both the tone and the content of your last message. Here I am offering you a chance for personal feedback from me, and you react with hostility. From what you said in your first note, I was under the impression that you found my work enjoyable. Was I mistaken? Should I have not written back with the gratitude that I did?

Please rest assured that it was indeed I who responded to you, that no one was poking fun at you, and that I am in fact Carl Lambclear.

However, if I do not hear from you again, I will assume that you wish me to leave you alone, as you so explicitly indicated in your last sentence.

Sincerely yours,

Carl Lambclear

It was only after I read the email that I noticed the attachment accompanying the message. Normally, I would approach an attachment from a strange email address with wariness, but curiosity took over. Besides, people never usually wrote computer viruses for Macintosh computers, so I figured the file would yield no problem.

I opened the file and began reading it. After a moment, I choked. Lambclear, if it really was he, had written a critique of "Alien Circus," my story about the young girl who runs off to join an interstellar circus.

At first, I felt insulted. How dare this person, pretending to be Lambclear, take it upon himself to criticize my work without invitation?

Then I began to read the critique.

The writer, whoever he was, had made some very cogent points about the flaws in my story. As I continued reading, I felt my anger melt away. The writer’s gentle phrasing and spot-on analysis rendered me more grateful than upset. Lambclear clearly knew what he was talking about–he showed great insight in his comments–

I shook my head. When had I decided to think of this person as Lambclear?

I reached the middle of the document and stopped reading in order to ponder its existence. If I had written to Lambclear but a year or two ago, and gotten this email in reply, I wouldn’t have questioned its veracity in the slightest.

And yet, how could Lambclear have sent me this email today, given the incontrovertible fact that he had died? Could he possibly still be alive? He wouldn’t perpetrate a death hoax, would he?

A thought occurred to me, prompting me to open the first message I had sent Lambclear. I noticed something interesting; I had never mentioned in my note that Lambclear was dead. It didn’t seem important at the time, but now I wondered. Could whoever it was have taken my email as an invitation to give me the mentoring I so desperately wanted?

And the funny thing, the two emails did sound like him. I went back to his book on writing and some of his essays, and the style felt very similar. I considered hiring someone to do a textual analysis of the two emails and the critique to prove that Lambclear was really composing them, but it didn’t seem worth it. Kind of like killing a fly with an atomic bomb.

Still pondering and puzzled, I returned to the critique to see what else he had said about my story. My thoughts flipped back and forth over the question of whether or not Lambclear himself could have written this document.

And then, when I finished his critique of my story, I saw something that clinched my belief that my correspondent might in fact be Lambclear. I pulled Writing Short Science Fiction off my shelf again, and riffled through the pages, until I came to the page I remembered.

In this book on writing, Lambclear had given the subconscious mind a name. He called it "George," and frequently noted that George would tell him to do this, or George would tell him to do that. Well, in the critique of my story, he ended with this piece of advice: "I suggest you get in touch with your inner George." Now, the possibility existed that some other close fan of Lambclear’s work had written that final sentence. But it seemed unlikely, especially when taken together with all the other evidence I had that Lambclear himself had written back to me.

And yet . . . rationality said otherwise. How could I reconcile the fact that Lambclear was dead with the fact that he was writing to me? I had grown up a rationalist, an agnostic, a skeptic in the face of superstition. How could I believe that I was now corresponding with the dead?

I wrestled with what to do for few hours, finding myself too distracted to write fiction. Finally, I wrote another email:

Subject: Truth

Dear Mr. Lambclear (?),

Thank you very much for your critique of "Alien Circus," and for your willingness to reply. I only wish I had had the opportunity to run the story by you before it saw publication! Still, some of your comments suggest to me the possibility of a sequel, which I feel would have a higher quality than the original story. And so it goes, I guess.

You must have noticed that although I removed the quotation marks from around your name, I’ve added a question mark in parentheses afterwards. Please do not take that as an insult, only as a representation of my confused state. You see, after reading your critique, I am convinced of a few things. I am convinced that you understand the art of writing very well, and that you also have great skill as a teacher. I am also convinced that you have a deep understanding of the field of science fiction, and what makes a story evoke that sense of wonder we all strive for.

And yet, for reasons I do not want to mention explicitly, I find it extremely difficult to believe that you really are Carl Lambclear. Not to be insulting, but there are compelling reasons for me to believe otherwise. I hope you will understand what I mean, and still be willing to continue this correspondence that I may have inadvertently started. But I further hope that perhaps you can tell me something to clear up my confusion.

The email sent into the ether, I returned to my daily quota of words. I recall how sometimes the critiques I received in writing workshops would make me freeze up for days on end, unable to write anything. It pleased me to discover that Lambclear’s critique had the opposite effect. I zipped through my thousand-word quota, and even doubled it before I declared my working day over.

And the next morning, when I checked my email, I found another message from "Carl Lambclear."

I noticed he had changed the subject line.

Subject: What is truth?

Dear fellow traveler,

I am delighted to see that you have come around somewhat, and are willing to accept the fact that I am who I say I am. (I remind you once again that you were the one who initiated our correspondence, not I.)

I must admit, I haven’t received too many emails recently; or at least, not emails of any major interest. I suspect that most people doubt I would bother replying, for those same "compelling reasons" to which you obliquely referred. But you, my young friend, chose to write to me anyway, and for that, I hope to repay you.

Essentially, I plan to share with you seeds of story ideas that might blossom under your tutelage. My wish is that you grow enough in your talent to be able to take these story ideas and make them uniquely yours. But let me begin with an idea that is uniquely mine, and which is also one that might make you feel better about corresponding with me.

Let us posit the following scenario.

Suppose a writer knew he was dying. An older writer, but not one who has yet reached what most would consider the twilight of one’s life, but rather just the autumn. Such a writer might feel many things: desperation, anger, and fear are the obvious ones, although one cannot omit the possibility of feeling peace or a sense of completion. A psychologist could discount that, however, and suggest that the writer might even go through the five stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.

But the writer might do something else instead. Suppose that writer was also a Ph.D. physicist and an expert computer programmer, and he wanted to make sure that he would be remembered. What might he do? How does a person with a technical background and a ceaseless imagination deal with the inevitable conclusion of his existence?

I know that such a scenario must be light-years away from your own mind, but that makes this all the more interesting a challenge. If you can figure out my idea, you might have the makings of an excellent spinner of tales of science fiction.

Sincerely yours,

Carl Lambclear

I didn’t know it then, but this was only the beginning of the meat of my emails with Lambclear. Lambclear called it "Campbelling" a story, named after the most influential editor in the field of science fiction. John Campbell would give story ideas to his writers, and ask them to write the stories. They would take his ideas and run with them; for example, Isaac Asimov’s "Nightfall," which was once voted the best science fiction story ever written, was based on an idea given to him by John Campbell. Lambclear loved to throw ideas in my direction, and over the years, many of my most well-regarded stories had their roots in Lambclear’s suggestions. I suppose I could come clean now, and point out which stories of mine came from Lambclear’s suggestions and which didn’t, but I think it is best if I do not. I have to leave something for the scholars to argue about, after all. (Ah, a writer’s ego rears its ugly head once again; why should I assume that future scholars will have any interest in my scribblings?)

But I’m getting ahead of myself, because on that long-ago night when Lambclear first sent me a story idea, I had no idea where this would all lead. Picture me as a young, confused writer, who still had no idea what Lambclear was getting at. I suppose I could have terminated our correspondence right there and then, or just emailed him back innocuously. But the idea had created some deep feelings within me, and I decided to make my distress evident.

Subject: Re: What is truth?

Dear Mr. Lambclear,

I’m afraid I’m totally at a loss as to how to develop that idea you’re suggesting. In fact, I’m not quite sure why you’re even suggesting it to me in the first place. After all, if it’s just a story idea, why not write the story yourself? And if it’s more than a story idea, why hint at it in such an odd way?

I actually have more experience with death than you may expect or realize. You see, although I’m just out of college, both of my parents have passed on. I was there for each of them, and I helped my mother and my father go through their struggles before dying.

Furthermore, Dad was a scientist, much like yourself, and Mom a computer programmer. So to suggest, as you did, a story idea in which someone with technical expertise finds himself dying–well, it hit me a little too close to home. Literally.

My guess, though, is that you didn’t know. Otherwise you wouldn’t even have suggested that idea. But maybe this is why I’m having trouble spinning fiction out of your idea.

Or maybe I’m once again having trouble dealing with the question of who you really are.

Please stop playing games with me. Just be up front and let me know what’s going on.

Subject: Re: What is truth?

Dear fellow traveler,

My first reaction to your latest note was to sigh, as I felt heavy with guilt of unintended actions. I truly did not mean to bring up any unpleasant memories. As you ascertained, I knew nothing of your family background, and had no idea that your parents were deceased. Please allow me to offer my sympathies, belated though they may be.

That said, I do feel obliged to point out to you what you must have already learned if you have truly read my book on writing. The best stories come from deep within a writer’s soul. The death of your parents may hurt you deeply, so deeply that you choose to withhold your emotions; but if, instead, you were to tap that resource, you would probably find a rich vein of story ideas that would never be depleted.

In any event, I reread "Alien Circus" and it reminded me again that you do have a talent I could nurture, even if it is still in its most rudimentary form. (Please do not take that as an insult; even well-established writers need constant nurturing, and the more mature and comfortable writers are with their level of talent, the more they understand and accept this.)

So let me help you with the development of the story idea I suggested. Again, the question I posed is: suppose a writer with a strong background in Physics and Computer Science discovered he was dying? What might he do?

To my way of thinking, the obvious answer is that he might try to find a way to stave off the grim reaper. Our field has plenty of examples of stories of immortals, or near-immortals; and yet surely, our field could support many more. So I played on this idea for a while, and came up with my own conclusions.

The first thing that such a person might do is attempt to download his personality into a computer, so that he could continue living. Of course, as a few philosophers have been quick to point out, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the writer himself would continue to feel alive. Instead, others who interact with the computer program would swear that the person was alive and intelligent, so his influence would live on in an explicit way even if he himself did not.

But, sadly, current technology doesn’t yet allow for an actual uploading of a mind; our brains are still far too complicated for us to understand that completely. However, if our imaginary writer had the skill, he might write a computer program that could simulate himself as a rudimentary form of artificial intelligence. Perhaps even as an AI which could pass the infamous Turing test.

(As a side note, it seems to me that the writer, relying only upon his own judgment, would program the computer with only his best qualities, and leave out the worst. After all, we all imagine ourselves to be nobler than we really are.)

Doesn’t that strike you as a fascinating idea to play with?

Ah, but I hear you ask: what else? What other ideas come to mind?

Well, try this one. Suppose this writer, having a background in Physics, figured out a way to connect his computer to another universe via a wormhole. Perhaps travel between universes is not possible, but communication is. If so, it might take the imagination of a science fiction writer to make it work. Could that writer arrange for all his incoming email to fall through that wormhole and end up in the mailbox of another version of himself? And might that version then pick up his communications where the original one was forced to leave off?

Think on it, my young friend.

Sincerely yours,

Carl Lambclear

Subject: Re: What is truth?

Dear whoever,

Are you saying you’re a Carl Lambclear from another universe? Are you saying that you’re a computer simulation of the Carl Lambclear who just died? WHO ARE YOU?

* * *

Subject: I am that I am

Dear fellow traveler,

I believe the standard reply on the Internet is ROTFL, for the phrase "Rolling On The Floor, Laughing." Nowhere in my email do I mean to imply that what I wrote is the truth! My idle thoughts were merely an exercise in speculation, nothing more. I’m not saying anything about the real world. I’m just doing what we science fiction writers always do, positing scenarios and generating story ideas.

Of course, you may choose to believe what you wish, but remember the curse that falls upon the heretic. I dare say that if you took these bizarre insinuations to anyone but myself, they would look at you askance and inquire as to what weed you were smoking. Those who would hang on your every word are probably also those with whom you would be most reluctant to share these ideas.

I will finish this email with the following offer, reiterated. I find myself with much time now, and can think of no better way to use my time than to help you along. If you would have me as your mentor, I would have you as my pupil. I only ask that you no longer question me on how and why, but accept this for being just what it is.

Sincerely yours,

Carl Lambclear

I took Carl up on his offer, and with his help, my writing blossomed. I managed to crack a few minor markets at first, semiprozines and webzines, until finally I figured out how to make a story work for a larger audience. And then, by the purest luck, I managed to catch the wave of the science fiction renaissance, the so-called Second Golden Age.

My stories were some of the first to appear in Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, Absolute Magnitude, and Artemis when the kids who had grown up on the fantasies of J.K. Rowling and Tamora Pierce suddenly turned to science fiction to satiate their appetites for that undefinable sense of wonder. Of course, these things do come and go in waves. Eventually, the wonders seemed pedestrian again, and the circulation and sales dropped as they had many times before. But they will grow again at some point in the future; of this I am sure. As it says in Ecclesiastes 1:9, "That which has been is that which shall be; and that which has been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."

After having cut my teeth on short stories, I finally began publishing novels. My novels sold well enough for me to make a living, and garnered me some minor critical acclaim, even an award or two. And so the years passed. I need not recount them here in any sort of excruciating detail; anyone interested can refer to The Scenes of Life, the autobiography I uplinked just ten years ago in 2060. My estate will surely find the royalties useful for settling old debts. Instead, I turn now to the end of the tale, the last few emails I shared with my mentor.

The emails in which I finally unearthed the strength within my soul to tell Carl Lambclear the truth.

Subject: Cancer

Dear Mr. Lambclear,

I’m dying.

I didn’t want to tell you this news. I know how much we’ve avoided talking about death, ever since the beginning of our emailing back and forth. I suspect I know why, and I’m sure you do too.

It’s particularly disheartening, because the reason I’m dying is that I have an inoperable brain tumor. There is an irony in all this, I suppose, but again, I wouldn’t feel right pointing it out to you. Not after all these years of your help and guidance.

I know I have very little time left; unfortunately, I have no way of knowing exactly how much. I must admit that part of me feels the need to ask you how you managed, after–well, you know what I mean. But the other part would hesitate to dispel the magic, and so I refuse to ask for a peek at the man behind the curtain.

The email sent, I went back to my bedroom to try to get some sleep. The pain came and went, but by popping THC and plugging my head shunt into the wall, I managed to doze off and even have a few pleasant dreams of old friends.

My EC chirped, waking me up, and called out the time in a flat monotone. "Eleven twenty-two p.m.," it said. The middle of the night. I gently creaked out of my bed, pulled my tattered blue robe around me for warmth, and glided into my living room. The wall screens remained dim, due to the lateness of the hour.

"Messages," I called out. Perhaps it was old-fashioned of me, but I never wanted the whole house connected, just this one room, which was why I had to leave my bed for the alert.

"You have twenty-seven messages," the room said.

"Delete all spam."

"You have one message," the room said. As I had expected.

"Display," I said.

And the screen on the walls turned bright with Carl Lambclear’s final message.

Subject: Re: Cancer

Dear fellow traveler,

So it has come down to this. In the end, we really are fellow travelers.

I am truly sorry to hear your news. I still remember my first reaction when I found out about my own terminal condition. You may recall how I refused to let anyone know about my cancer until I had finally passed on. My agent was good at keeping secrets, and she handled the announcement and the estate matters very well, or so I have always felt since.

Because we are fellow travelers, my young friend (and may I still call you young?), I understand your feelings. We strive for immortality, all of us, in our myriad ways. Some of us run for public office, in the hopes that we will change the course of the world. Some of us teach, in hopes that out of the thousands of students we encounter, one will blossom. Some of us get married and have children, so that a little bit of us will survive in a fellow human being’s DNA. And some of us create, whether it be art, music, poetry, or stories, in hopes of communicating to the future that once we were here, and that once we mattered.

In the end, however, from dust we sprang, and to dust we shall return. Even I was not immune to that, however much it may seem otherwise from our years-long correspondence. You know that I died, or at least a version of me did; and that is something you were never able to shake, no matter what.

But, as I said, I feel greatly for you. And so, at some expense to myself, I have decided the time is ripe to provide you with my solution. I have sent you an attachment to this email. I assure you that it is not a virus, nor anything of a malicious sort.

For reasons that will soon become clear to you, I am afraid that I will be unable to continue our correspondence for much longer. And so, having taken note of your salutation lo these many years, I would like to offer you one final hand of friendship. After all, we are no longer mentor and student, if we ever were. We have long passed into the roles of colleagues, equals in our field. And so, we should address each other as such.

Feel free to call me Carl.

Sincerely yours,

Carl

I read Lambclear’s–I mean Carl’s–note with tears welling up in my eyes, until I could no longer see. I removed my glasses and wiped them on my robe, and then the house brought me a tissue and I blew my nose.

Eventually, I managed to regain my composure, and I took a look at the attachment Carl had sent me.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a computer programmer of any sort. Even today, when one programs the more complex computers by simply telling the less complex computers what you want them to accomplish, I still would have no idea what I’d be doing.

Nor am I a physicist, despite my degrees. My education is so far in the past, in any event, that I can barely understand the mathematics of the cutting-edge theories proposed today.

But I am a science fiction writer of many years, and I can comprehend certain concepts far better than the ordinary person. And as a science fiction writer, I am now prepared to accept even the most outlandish ideas that others might dismiss out of sheer mundanity.

Carl’s attachment was a computer program. He had sent me the same program he had created shortly before he died, the program that allowed him to communicate with me. I tried to decipher it at first, but the coding was far too obscure for me to grasp.

Fortunately, Carl’s program was filled with comment lines, laying out every step of what it did. The comments made it trivial to command my system to execute the program. And as an added bonus, I now know just with whom I was communicating all these many years, and I no longer have to guess if Carl’s emails came from an artificial intelligence, from another universe, or from something or somewhere else that no one could ever guess. Because in the comment lines, Carl explained how he had managed to apply the Tegmark Hypothesis.

Max Tegmark, a physicist who did much of his work at the turn of the millennium, when I was just out of college, had proposed an interesting take on the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Many-Worlds, proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957, explained away the paradoxes of quantum uncertainty by postulating that every time a decision has to be made, the universe splits into two, yielding an infinite multitude of realities, sometimes referred to as the multiverse. Well, Tegmark looked at this bizarre concept and proposed an even more bizarre idea of his own, which came to be known by his name.

The Tegmark Hypothesis can be summarized as follows: The only realities you continue to be aware of are those in which you survive.

In other words, suppose you do an experiment where you ask an assistant to push a button which will randomly cause a machine gun to either fire or not fire. You position yourself exactly in front of the gun, so that if the gun fires, you have no chance of surviving.

Here’s where quantum mechanics comes into play. It is certainly possible for your assistant and for the rest of us to observe the experiment and recoil in shock at the sudden explosion of a bullet into your chest. But because there are an infinite number of tracks upon which the universe can run, you yourself will never feel the bullet. For you to be a valid observer, your consciousness must follow a track along which it will never–can never–be snuffed out. The alternate way to phrase the Tegmark Hypothesis is this: You can never have any awareness of realities in which you are dead.

Carl’s program opens a connection to computers in other universes, and seeks out the universe in which "I" continue to live, forever and ever. The program will reach that version of me, and explain to that version exactly what is happening to me, in my universe–which is, of course, the only universe which matters to me. The program will bring a message about my life to my other self, and propose that my other self keep the memory of my existence alive in this particular world, doing exactly what Carl started doing those many years ago.

And so now I know what I must do. Webpages are years in the past, of course. We no longer surf websites on the World Wide Web; rather, we visit Holosites in the Universal Database. But email, in whatever form one calls it, is still the same.

Carl’s program was easy to download into my own machines. I do not have to wonder if it scans my files and reproduces an artificially intelligent copy of myself, for I now know that it does not. Nor do I have to concern myself with the entropic problems of creating a gateway into another universe, for that gateway is only for computers to navigate. And because I know what will happen, it no longer matters to me that Carl’s program cannot keep my "me-ness" intact. Within a week or a month, I know I shall be gone, and in the meantime, I must keep my shunt plugged into my system. Although it may be immodest of me, I imagine that on the day I die, some young fan who aspires to write will visit my site and will see the recently installed link that encourages fans to email. I imagine that the fan will hesitate, just as I did so many years ago, and then decide to send one more email into the ether, as a tribute to the author of that fan’s admiration.

And when that happens, my system will be ready. Carl’s program is set, and the young fan will receive "my" reply. With luck, my encouragement will spur my correspondent into a full-fledged calling as a writer. Another, immortal, version of myself will help that fan, in the same way Carl helped me and generations of writers beforehand helped him. All of our influence will be felt throughout the centuries. And none of us will be forgotten.

FOUR SHORT NOVEL

Joe Haldeman

Remembrance of Things Past

EVENTUALLY IT CAME TO pass that no one ever had to die, unless they ran out of money. When you started to feel the little aches and twinges that meant your body was running down, you just got in line at Immortality, Incorporated, and handed them your credit card. As long as you had at least a million bucks — and eventually everybody did — they would reset you to whatever age you liked.

One way people made money was by swapping knowledge around. Skills could be transferred with a technology spun off from the immortality process. You could spend a few decades becoming a great concert pianist, and then put your ability up for sale. There was no shortage of people with two million dollars who would trade one million to be their village’s Van Cliburn. In the sale of your ability, you would lose it, but you could buy it back a few decades or centuries later.

For many people this became the game of life — becoming temporarily a genius, selling your genius for youth, and then clawing your way up in some other field, to buy back the passion that had rescued you first from the grave. Enjoy it a few years, sell it again, and so on ad infinitum. Or finitum, if you just once made a wrong career move, and wound up old and poor and bereft of skill. That happened less and less often, of course, Darwinism inverted: the un-survival of the least fit.

It wasn’t just a matter of swapping around your piano-playing and brain surgery, of course. People with the existential wherewithal to enjoy century after century of life tended to grow and improve with age. A person could look like a barely pubescent teenybopper, and yet be able to out-Socrates Socrates in the wisdom department. People were getting used to seeing acne and gravitas on the same face.

Enter Jutel Dicuth, the paragon of his age, a raging polymath. He could paint and sculpt and play six instruments. He could write formal poetry with his left hand while solving differential equations with his right. He could write formal poetry about differential equations! He was an Olympic-class gymnast and also held the world record for the javelin throw. He had earned doctorates in anthropology, art history, slipstream physics, and fly-tying.

He sold it all.

Immensely wealthy but bereft of any useful ability, Jutel Dicuth set up a trust fund for himself that would produce a million dollars every year. It also provided a generous salary for an attendant. He had Immortality, Incorporated set him back to the apparent age of one year, and keep resetting him once a year.

In a world where there were no children — where would you put them? — he was the only infant. He was the only person with no useful skills and, eventually, the only one alive who did not have nearly a thousand years of memory.

In a world that had outgrown the old religions — why would you need them? — he became like unto a god. People came from everywhere to listen to his random babbling and try to find a conduit to the state of blissful innocence buried under the weight of their wisdom.

It was inevitable that someone would see a profit in this. A consortium with a name we would translate as Blank Slate offered to "dicuth" anyone who had a certain large sum of what passed for money, and maintain them for as long as they wanted. At first people were slightly outraged, because it was a kind of sacrilege, or were slightly amused, because it was such a transparent scheme to gather what passed for wealth.

Sooner or later, though, everyone tried it. Most who tried it for one year went back for ten or a hundred, or, eventually, forever. After some centuries, permanent dicuths began to outnumber humans — though those humans were not anything you would recognize as people, crushed as they were by nearly a thousand years of wisdom and experience. And jealous of those who had given up.

On 31 December, A.D. 3000, the last "normal" person surrendered his loneliness for dicuth bliss. The world was populated completely by total innocents, tended by patient machines.

It lasted a long time. Then one by one, the machines broke down.

Crime and Punishment

EVENTUALLY IT CAME TO PASS that no one ever had to die, unless they were so horrible that society had to dispose of them. Other than the occasional horrible person, the world was in an idyllic state, everyone living as long as they wanted to, doing what they wanted to do.

This is how things got back to normal.

People gained immortality by making copies of themselves, farlies, which were kept in safe places and updated periodically. So if you got run over by a truck or hit by a meteorite, your farlie would sense this and automatically pop out and take over, after prudently making a farlie of itself. Upon that temporary death, you would lose only the weeks or months that had gone by since your last update.

That made it difficult to deal with criminals. If someone was so horrible that society had to hang or shoot or electrocute or inject him to death, his farlie would crop up somewhere, still bad to the bone, make a farlie of itself, and go off on another rampage. If you put him in jail for the rest of his life, he would eventually die, but then his evil farlie would leap out, full of youthful vigor and nasty intent.

Ultimately, if society felt you were too horrible to live, it would take preemptive action: check out your farlie and destroy it first. If it could be found. Really bad people became adept at hiding their farlies. Inevitably, people who were really good at being really bad became master criminals. It was that, or die forever. There were only a few dozen of them, but they moved through the world like neutrinos: effortless, unstoppable, invisible.

One of them was a man named Bad Billy Beerbreath. He started the ultimate crime wave.

There were Farlie Centers where you would go to update your farlie — one hundred of them, all over the world — and that’s where almost everybody kept their farlies stored. But you could actually put a farlie anywhere, if you got together enough liquid nitrogen and terabytes of storage and kept them in a cool dry place out of direct sunlight.

Most people didn’t know this; in fact, it was forbidden knowledge. Nobody knew how to make Farlie Centers anymore, either. They were all built during the lifetime of Joao Farlie, who had wandered off with the blueprints after deciding not to make a copy of himself, himself.

Bad Billy Beerbreath decided to make it his business to trash Farlie Centers. In its way, this was worse than murder, because if a client died before he or she found out about it, and hadn’t been able to make a new farlie (which took weeks) — he or she would die for real, kaput, out of the picture. It was a crime beyond crime. Just thinking about this gave Bad Billy an acute pleasure akin to a hundred orgasms.

Because there were a hundred Bad Billy Beerbreaths.

In preparation for his crime wave, Bad Billy had spent years making a hundred farlies of himself, and he stored them in cool dry places out of direct sunlight, all around the world. On 13 May 2999, all but one of those farlies jump-started itself and went out to destroy the nearest Farlie Center.

By noon, GMT, police and militia all over the world had captured or killed or subdued every copy (but one) of Bad Billy, but by noon every single Farlie Center in the world had been leveled, save the one in Akron, Ohio.

The only people left who had farlies were people who had a reason to keep them in a secret place. Master criminals like Billy. Pals of Billy. They all were waiting at Akron, and held off the authorities for months, by making farlie after farlie of themselves, like broomsticks in a Disney cartoon, sending most of them out to die, or "die," defending the place, until there were so many of them the walls were bulging. Then they sent out word that they wanted to negotiate, and during the lull that promise produced, they fled en masse, destroying the last Farlie Center behind them.

They were a powerful force, a hundred thousand hardened criminals united in their contempt for people like you and me, and in their loyalty to Bad Billy Beerbreath. Somewhat giddy, not to say insane, in their triumph after having destroyed every Farlie Center, they went on to destroy every jail and prison and courthouse. That did cut their numbers down considerably, since most of them only had ten or twenty farlies tucked away, but it also reduced drastically the number of police, not to mention the number of people willing to take up policing as a profession, since once somebody killed you twice, you had to stay dead.

By New Year’s Eve, A.D. 3000, the criminals were in charge of the whole world.

Again.

War and Peace

EVENTUALLY IT CAME TO PASS that no one ever had to die, unless they wanted to, or could be talked into it. That made it very hard to fight wars, and a larger and larger part of every nation’s military budget was given over to psychological operations directed toward their own people: dulce et decorum est just wasn’t convincing enough anymore.

There were two elements to this sales job. One was to romanticize the image of the soldier as heroic defender of the blah blah blah. That was not too hard; they’d been doing that since Homer. The other was more subtle: convince people that every individual life was essentially worthless — your own and also the lives of the people you would eventually be killing.

That was a hard job, but the science of advertising, more than a millennium after Madison Avenue, was equal to it, through the person of a genius named Manny O’Malley. The pitch was subtle, and hard for a person to understand who hasn’t lived for centuries, but shorn of Manny’s incomprehensible humor and appeal to subtle pleasures that had no name until the thirtieth century, it boiled down to this:

A thousand years ago, they seduced people into soldiering with the slogan, "Be all that you can be." But you have been all you can be. The only thing left worth being is not being.

Everybody else is in the same boat, O’Malley convinced them. In the process of giving yourself the precious gift of nonexistence, share it with many others.

It’s hard for us to understand. But then we would be hard for them to understand, with all this remorseless getting and spending laying waste our years.

Wars were all fought in Death Valley, with primitive hand weapons, and the United States grew wealthy renting the place out, until it inevitably found itself fighting a series of wars for Death Valley, during one of which O’Malley himself finally died, charging a phalanx of no-longer-immortal pikemen on his robotic horse, waving a broken sword. His final words were, famously, "Oh, shit."

Death Valley eventually wound up in the hands of the Bertelsmann Corporation, which ultimately ruled the world. But by that time, Manny’s advertising had been so effective that no one cared. Everybody was in uniform, lining up to do their bit for Bertelsmann.

Even the advertising scientists. Even the high management of Bertelsmann.

There was a worldwide referendum, utilizing something indistinguishable from telepathy, where everybody agreed to change the name of the planet to Death Valley, and on the eve of the new century, A.D. 3000, have at each other.

Thus O’Malley’s ultimate ad campaign achieved the ultimate victory: a world that consumed itself.

The Way of All Flesh

EVENTUALLY IT CAME TO PASS that no one ever had to die, so long as just one person loved them. The process that provided immortality was fueled that way.

Almost everybody can find someone to love him or her, at least for a little while, and if and when that someone says good-bye, most people can clean up their act enough to find yet another.

But every now and then you find a specimen who is so unlovable that he can’t even get a hungry dog to take a biscuit from his hand. Babies take one look at him and get the colic. Women cross their legs as he passes by. Ardent homosexuals drop their collective gaze. Old people desperate for company feign sleep.

The most extreme such specimen was Custer Tralia. Custer came out of the womb with teeth, and bit the doctor. In grade school he broke up the love training sessions with highly toxic farts. He celebrated puberty by not washing for a year. All through middle school and high school, he made loving couples into enemies by spreading clever vicious lies. He formed a Masturbation Club and didn’t allow anybody else to join. In his graduation yearbook, he was unanimously voted "The One Least Likely to Survive, If We Have Anything to Do with It."

In college, he became truly reckless. When everybody else was feeling the first whiff of mortality and frantically seducing in self-defense, Custer declared that he hated women almost as much as he hated men, and he reveled in his freedom from love; his superior detachment from the cloying crowd. Death was nothing compared to the hell of dependency. When, at the beginning of his junior year, he had to declare what his profession was going to be, he wrote down "hermit" for first, second, and third choices.

The world was getting pretty damned crowded, though, since a lot of people loved each other so much they turned out copy after copy of themselves. The only place Custer could go and be truly alone was the Australian outback. He had a helicopter drop him there with a big water tank and crates of food. They said they’d check back in a year, and Custer said don’t bother. If you’ve decided not to live forever, a few years or decades one way or the other don’t make much difference.

He found peace among the wallabies and dingoes. A kangaroo began to follow him around, and he accepted it as a pet, sharing his rehydrated Kentucky Fried Chicken and fish and chips with it.

Life was a pleasantly sterile and objectless quest. Custer and his kangaroo quartered the outback, turning over rocks just to bother the things underneath. The kangaroo was loyal, which was a liability, but at least it couldn’t talk, and its attachment to Custer was transparently selfish, so they got along. He taught it how to beg, and, by not rewarding it, taught it how to whimper.

One day, like Robinson Crusoe, he found footprints. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, he hastened in the opposite direction.

But the footprinter had been watching him for some time, and outsmarted him. Knowing he would be gone all day, she had started miles away, walking backward by his camp, and knew that his instinct for hermitage would lead him directly, perversely, back into her cave.

Parky Gumma had decided to become a hermit, too, after she read about Custer’s audacious gesture. But after about a year she wanted a bath, and someone to love her so she wouldn’t die, in that order. So under the wheeling Milky Way, on the eve of the thirty-first century, she stalked backward to her cave, and squandered a month’s worth of water sluicing her body, which was unremarkable except for the fact that it was clean and the only female one in two hundred thousand square miles.

Parky left herself unclothed and squeaky clean, carefully perched on a camp stool, waiting for Custer’s curiosity and misanthropy to lead him back to her keep. He crept in a couple of hours after sunrise.

She stood up and spread her arms, and his pet kangaroo boinged away in terror.

Custer himself was paralyzed by a mixture of conflicting impulses. He had seen pictures of naked women, but never one actually in the flesh, and honestly didn’t know what to do.

Parky showed him.

The rest is the unmaking of history. That Parky had admired him and followed him into the desert was even more endearing than the slip and slide that she demonstrated for him after she washed him up. But that was revolutionary, too. Custer had to admit that a year or a century or a millennium of that would be better than keeling over and having dingos tear up your corpse and spread your bones over the uncaring sands.

So this is Custer’s story, and ours. He never did get around to liking baths, so you couldn’t say that love conquers all. But it could still conquer death.

THE TALE OF THE GOLDEN EAGLE

David D. Levine

The story begins in a time before shiftspace, before Conner and Hua, even before the caster people. The beginning of the story lies in the time of the bird ships.

Before the bird ships, just to go from one star to another, people either had to give up their whole lives and hope their children’s children would remember why they had come, or freeze themselves and hope they could be thawed at the other end. Then the man called Doctor Jay made a great and horrible discovery: he learned that a living mind could change the shape of space. He found a way to weld a human brain to the keel of a starship, in such a way that the ship could travel from star to star in months instead of years.

After the execution of Doctor Jay, people learned that the part of the brain called the visual cortex was the key to changing the shape of space. And so they found a creature whose brain was almost all visual cortex, the Aquila chrysaetos, or as it was known in those days, the golden eagle. This was a bird that has been lost to us; it had wings broader than a tall man is tall, golden brown feathers long and light as a lover’s touch, and eyes black and sharp as a clear winter night. But to the people of this time it was just another animal, and they did not appreciate it while they had it.

They took the egg of a golden eagle, and they hatched it in a warm box, and they let it fly and learn and grow, and then they killed it. And they took its brain and they placed it at the top of a cunning construction of plastic and silicon which gave it the intelligence of a human, and this they welded to the keel of the starship.

It may seem to you that it is as cruel to give a bird the intelligence of a human, only to enslave its brain, as it is to take the brain of a human and enslave that. And so it is. But the people of this time drew a rigid distinction between born-people and made-people, and to them this seemed only just and right.

Now it happens that one golden eagle brain, which was called Nerissa Zeebnen-Fearsig, was installed into a ship of surpassing beauty. It was a great broad shining arrowhead of silver metal, this ship, filigreed and inlaid with gold, and filled with clever and intricate mechanisms of subtle pleasure.

The ship traveled many thousands of light-years in the service of many captains. Love affairs and assassinations were planned and executed within its silver hull; it was used for a time as an emperor’s private yacht; it even carried Magister Ai on part of his expedition to the Forgotten Worlds. But Nerissa the shipbrain saw none of these things, for she had been given eyes that saw only outward. She knew her masters only by the sound of their voices and the feel of their hands on her controls.

When the ship was under way, Nerissa felt the joy of flight, a pure unthinking joy she remembered from her time as a creature of muscle and feather. But most of her time was spent contemplating the silent stars or the wall of some dock, awaiting the whim of her owner and master.

Over the years the masters’ voices changed. Cultured tones accustomed to command were replaced by harsher, more unforgiving voices, and the ship’s rich appointments were removed one by one. In time even basic maintenance was postponed or disregarded, and Nerissa found herself more and more often in places of darkness and decay. She despaired, even feared for her life, but shipbrains had no rights. The strongest protest she was allowed was, "Sir and Master, that course of action may be inadvisable."

Finally the last and roughest owner, a man with grating voice and hard unsubtle hands, ran the ship into a docking probe in a foul decrepit port. The tarnished silver hull gave way, the air gushed out, and the man died, leaving a legacy so tattered and filthy that none could bear to touch it. Ownerless, airless, the hulk was towed to a wrecking yard and forgotten. Nerissa wept as the ship’s power failed, her vision fading to monochrome and then to black. Reduced to the barest reserves of energy, she fell into a deep uneasy sleep.

While she slept the universe changed. Conner and Hua discovered shiftspace, and travel between planets became something the merely well-off could afford. The Clash of Cultures burst into full flower almost at once, as ten thousand faiths and religions and philosophies collided and mingled. It was a time of violence and strife, but in time a few ideas emerged as points of agreement, and one of these was that what had been done to the golden eagles was wrong. So the hatcheries were closed, the ships retired, and the shipbrains compassionately killed.

All save one. One that slept forgotten in a wrecking yard orbiting an ugly red star known only by a number.

The Clash of Cultures gradually drew to a close as points of agreement grew and coalesced, eventually giving birth to Consensus. But much knowledge was lost, and so when a king’s tinker entered the wrecking yard and found the hulk of the great ship he had no idea what a unique treasure he had stumbled upon. He saw only the precious metal of the ship’s hull, and it was for this metal he purchased it for his master.

As the ship was broken up, the tinker saved out a few of the most interesting-looking pieces for later use. One of these was the housing containing the sleeping brain of Nerissa Zeebnen-Fearsig. She felt a blinding pain as she was crudely torched from the ship’s keel, and she feared her end had come at last, but then the pain receded and she slept once more.

Nerissa sat unconsidered for some years in one of the king’s many storerooms, surrounded by a thousand other dismembered devices. But then came a day when the tinker entered the storeroom in search of some wire. He spotted a likely-looking length of wire beneath a pile of dusty components, but when he pulled on it he found himself with a peculiar rounded thing that piqued his curiosity. He took it back to his workbench, where he puzzled out its contacts and connectors, its inputs and outputs, and finally he connected an ancient scavenged power unit and Nerissa returned to awareness.

Waking was far more painful than being cut from the ship’s hull. A torrent of discordant colors and textures flooded her senses, but her screams went unheard for the tinker had not connected her voice. Instead, a series of meaningless numbers and letters stepped delicately onto a small display plate. The tinker was fascinated by this, and stayed up all that night, probing and prodding, trying to understand just what manner of machine he had found.

Nerissa was nearly driven mad by the pain and the random sensations, and it was nothing but good fortune that when the tinker happened to hook up a voice unit to the proper outputs she was praying aloud for relief rather than crying incoherently — praying in Nihon, already an ancient language at the time of the bird ships, but still understood in the tinker’s time as it is today. He dropped his soldering iron in astonishment.

Soon the tinker found Nerissa an eye and an ear and disconnected the probes that caused her the worst of the pain. They talked all that day, and he listened with apparent fascination to her description of her creation and her tales of her travels; for the first time in many centuries Nerissa allowed herself to hope. But though he professed to believe her, privately he concluded she was merely a machine: a storytelling machine constructed to believe its own fictions. For he was not an educated man, and as he had worked with machines every day of his life he was unable to conceive that she might be anything else.

Though he thought Nerissa was a machine, he recognized her intelligence and charm and decided to present her to his king as a special gift. He called together his apprentices and artisans and together they built a suitable container for her, a humanoid body of the finest and most costly materials. Her structural elements were composite diamond fiber, stronger than her old hull; her skin and hair were pure platinum, glowing with a subtle color deeper and finer than silver; her eyes and her teeth were beryl and opal; and all was assembled with the greatest of care and attention such that it moved as smoothly as any living thing.

The one thing he did not do was to provide the body with any semblance of sexual organs. It may seem to you that this omission is callous and arbitrary, and so it is. But the people of this time thought such a thing would be unseemly.

When the body was finished, Nerissa’s brain in its housing was placed gently in its chest and the many connections were made with great care and delicacy. Power was applied then, and Nerissa’s beautiful body of precious metals convulsed and twisted, her back arching and a horrible keening wail tearing from her amber lips. She begged to be deactivated, but the tinker and his assistants probed and prodded, tweaked and adjusted, and gradually the pain ebbed away, leaving Nerissa trembling on its shore.

The king was genuinely delighted with the tinker’s gift of "a storytelling machine, built from bits and pieces found here and there." The tinker had warned him that Nerissa seemed to believe her own tales, and so he pretended to believe them too, but Nerissa knew when she was being humored. So she gave him made-up stories, as he expected, though most of them had a kernel of truth drawn from her own life.

Now this king was a kind and wise man, truly appreciative of Nerissa, but he had many political problems and many enemies, so he rarely found time for her stories. After some months he found the sight of her, waiting patiently in his apartments, raised a pang of guilt that overwhelmed his joy at her beauty and grace. So he decided to gift Nerissa to an influential duke. In this way he hoped to put the man in his debt, to broaden the reputation of his tinker, and perhaps to gain Nerissa a more appreciative audience.

So Nerissa joined the household of Duke Vey, in the city of Arica. The king’s plan met with great success; the duke, well pleased with the king’s gift, spent many hours parading Nerissa before his friends and relations. All were suitably impressed by her stories, her charm, and her gleaming beauty, and the king’s tinker received many fine commissions from those who had seen her.

One of those who saw her was Denali Eu.

The son and heir of the famous trader Ranson Eu, Denali appeared but rarely in Arica. When he did visit the city he attended all the finest soirees, displaying his subtle wit and radiant wardrobe, and gambled flamboyantly. All agreed he shared his late father’s gambling skill, though lacking his extravagance and bravado. Of his travels, however, he let fall only the vaguest of hints. He liked to say his business dealings were like leri fruits, sensitive to the harsh light of day.

In fact, Ranson Eu had gambled away his fortune, leaving his wife and only child shackled to a mountainous debt. Denali Eu had no ship, no travels, no servants. His time away from Arica was spent in a small and shabby house not far from town, the family’s last bit of property, where he and his mother Leona survived on hunting and a small vegetable garden. In the evenings they sewed Denali’s outfits for the next expedition to Arica, using refurbished and rearranged pieces from previous seasons. It is a tribute to Leona Eu’s talent and taste that Denali was often perceived as a fashion leader.

It pained Denali to maintain this fiction. But he had no alternative, for as long as he was perceived as a prosperous trader his father’s creditors were content to circle far from the fire and dine on scraps. His social status also gave him access to useful information, which could sometimes be sold for cash, and gave him entree to high-stakes gambling venues. Ranson Eu had, in fact, been an excellent gambler when sober, and had passed both acumen and techniques on to his son. Denali often wished he could have returned the favor by passing his caution and temperance on to his father.

It was across a spinning gambling wheel that Denali Eu first saw Nerissa Zeebnen-Fearsig. The lamplight glanced off her silver metal shoulder as a cat rubs against a leg, leaving both charged with electricity. Her unclothed body revealed every bit of the expense and quality of her manufacture. She stood with head tilted upward, her amber lips gently parted as she spoke to the taller Duke Vey beside her.

"Who is that?" asked Denali Eu to the woman beside him as he gathered his winnings.

"It is the duke’s storytelling machine. Have you not seen it before?"

"No…no, I have not. She’s beautiful. She must be worth millions."

"It’s priceless. It was a present from the king."

At that moment Eu made the first of three decisions that shaped the rest of his life and set a legend in motion: he determined to win Nerissa from the duke in a game of senec.

Denali Eu was a keen observer of people, as he had to be given his situation, and he had often found himself seated across a senec table from Duke Vey. The duke, like many senec players, had a mathematical system for playing the game. It was a good system; in fact, Eu had to concede it was better than his own…most of the time. For he had noticed a flaw in the system’s logic. He had husbanded this knowledge for many months; he knew that once he had exploited the flaw the duke would not fall into the same trap a second time.

Here was the opportunity he had been waiting for. The machine’s platinum and jewels alone might fetch enough to retire his father’s debt, even at the price (far below their actual value) he could obtain on the black market. It would be a shame to break up such a fine creation, but he could never sell her entire; to do so would attract far too much attention to the Eu family’s affairs.

It was two weeks before Denali Eu was able to engineer a game of no-limit senec with the duke, and when he sat down at the table Denali’s nerves were already keening with tension. He usually kept his visits to a week, and despite his best efforts he thought some were beginning to suspect he had only two suits of clothing to his name.

Denali knew the duke would not be easily trapped. As he played he extended himself much farther than he usually did, risked much more than he normally would, to engage the duke’s attention. His smile grew forced, and trickles of perspiration ran down his sides; he had to restrain himself from nervously tapping his cards against his sweating glass of leri water.

Eyebrows were raised around the table. One of the other players muttered "seems he has a touch of the old man in him after all" behind his cards. Again and again Denali raised the stakes, pushing his system to its own limits. Repeatedly he seized control of the dealer’s token, the surest way to maintain his lead but the greatest risk in case of a forfeit. And forfeit he did, not just once but twice, for even the best system must occasionally fail in the face of an improbable run of bad cards. But through aggressive play he beat back from his losses, bankrupting one player after another. And always he kept a weather eye for the run of staves he needed to exploit the flaw in the duke’s system.

Finally only Denali Eu and Duke Vey remained, the reflected light from the maroon felt of the senec table turning both their faces into demon masks. The other players watched from the surrounding darkness, most of their stakes now in Denali’s possession. He could walk away from the table right now and it would be his most profitable trip since his father’s death.

"One last hand," he said, placing his ante, "before we retire? A hand of Dragons’ Delight, perhaps?"

"Very well," replied the duke, matching the ante.

Dragons’ Delight was a fiendishly complicated form of senec, with round after round of betting and many opportunities for forfeit. Denali trembled beneath his cape as he raised and raised, trying to pull as much money as possible from the duke’s hand, but not so much that he would be tempted to fold.

The seven of staves came out, and Denali raised his bet. The duke matched him. Then the prince of staves snapped onto the table. He raised again, substantially, and the duke raised him back. He matched, then dealt another card.

It was the courtesan of staves.

Their eyes met over the red-glowing table, the little pile of colorful cards, the heaps of betting counters. Denali knew the duke’s system predicted an end to the run after three staves: a win for the duke. His own system said the odds of a fourth stave at this point, yielding a win for him, were better than eighty percent.

Denali gathered his hand of cards into a tight little bundle, tapped it against the table to square it, laid it carefully on the felt before him. He placed his hands, fingers spread, on either side of the stack for a moment. Then he reached to his left and shoved a huge pile of counters to the middle of the table. It was far more than the duke could match.

The duke placed his cards flat on the table. "It seems I must fold."

"So it seems. Or…you could wager some personal property."

"I think I know what you have in mind."

"Yes. The storytelling machine."

"I’m sorry. That is worth far more than.…"

Denali pushed all the rest of his counters forward.

The duke stared levelly into Denali’s eyes. Denali stared back a challenge: How much do you trust your system?

The duke dropped his eyes to his cards. Studied them hard for a moment, then looked back. "Very well. I wager the storytelling machine." A ripple of sound ran through the observers. "But I’m afraid that must be considered a raise. What can you offer to match it?"

Denali’s heart shrank to a cold hard clinker at the center of his chest. He must match the raise, or fold. "I wager my ship." A man in the crowd gasped audibly.

Denali’s ship, the Crocus, which had been his father’s, was nothing but a worthless hull rusting behind his mother’s house. The drive and other fittings had gone to a money lender from Gaspara. If he lost, his deception would be exposed and he would be sold into slavery to pay his father’s debts.

"I accept that as a match," said the duke.

Denali stared at the back of the top card of the deck. If it was a stave, he won. Else, he lost. The little boy on the card’s back design stared back at him. He could not meet that printed gaze, and dropped his eyes.

His eye lit upon one single counter that had been left by accident on the table before him, and a mad impulse seized him. He placed his index finger upon that counter, slid it across the felt to join the rest.

"I raise by one."

Stunned silence from the observers.

The duke’s eyes narrowed. Then widened. Then closed, as he placed his hand across them. He began to chuckle. Then he laughed out loud. He leaned back in his chair, roaring with laughter, and slapped his cards on the table before him. "You fiendish bastard!" he gasped out. "I fold!"

Pandemonium. Denali Eu and the Duke Vey stood, shook hands, then embraced each other. The duke trembled with laughter; Denali just trembled. Servants appeared to gather the counters and process the transfer of property.

Denali could not help himself. He turned over the top card.

It was the five of berries.

The next morning Denali Eu came to the duke’s city house, his bag slung over his shoulder. He found Nerissa waiting in the entry hall, alone except for two guards. "The duke sends his regrets," said one, "but after last night’s entertainment he finds himself indisposed to company."

Denali and the guards signed papers acknowledging the transfer of Nerissa to his possession, and he turned to leave, gesturing for her to follow. But as the door opened for them, a ray of morning sunlight touched her body and sent shimmering reflections into all the corners of the room. Denali turned back and was startled by her brilliant beauty.

"You’re naked," he blurted out, and immediately felt foolish.

"Sir and Master, I am as I was made," she replied.

"I myself was born naked, but that does not excuse nudity in polite society. Here." He removed his cape and placed it over her shoulders. It was sufficient for propriety. Then, unsure of the proper term of address for a machine, he silently proffered his elbow. She took it, and the two of them walked out the door side by side.

"What shall I call you?" he said as they strolled up toward the docks. Her feet chimed on the hard pathway.

"My name is Nerissa Zeebnen-Fearsig, Sir and Master."

"Yes, but have you any title?"

"No, Sir and Master."

"Your name is a trifle…ungainly. I shall address you as M’zelle." It was a standard term of address for a younger woman, or one of lower status. None of her other owners had ever called her anything of the sort.

"As you wish, Sir and Master."

"You may address me simply as Sir," he said. The repeated use of his full and proper title made Denali uncomfortable, for he was keenly aware of just how close he was to slavery himself. He was all the more discomfited by Nerissa’s inhuman beauty and poise. Walking beside her, he felt himself little more than a bag of meat and hair. Worse, he knew that soon he would have to destroy this marvelous machine, though his mind kept trying to escape that fact. "In fact, you need not use the Sir on every statement. M’zelle." And he inclined his head.

"Yes, Sir and Ma…. Yes, Sir…. Oh, goodness." Though her face had only a few movements to it, her confusion and embarrassment were clear from the set of her tourmaline eyebrows and amber lips. "I mean, yes. Just yes."

"Just so," he said, and he laughed.

Nerissa was unsure what to think of this man, whose clothing and bearing indicated great wealth but whose attitude toward her was deferential. She had sometimes seen fear, from unsophisticated or unlettered people, but this was something else. It was as though she held a measure of power over him.

Then she realized what it was she saw in Denali Eu’s eyes. It was something she had never before seen directed toward herself.

It was respect.

They reached the docks, a confusion of utilitarian buildings at the top of a hill just outside of town. This was where the shiftspace ships made landfall. "Here we are, M’zelle," he said, and gestured her into a docking shed like all the rest.

It was empty.

"I do not understand, Sir."

He looked at the floor. His original plan had been to deactivate her at this point. But as they had walked together from town, he had come to understand just how heavy she was. There was no way he could smuggle her to his mother’s house unassisted, and nobody other than Nerissa herself who could be trusted to assist.

He puffed out his cheeks, not raising his head. "The reason this shed is empty is that I have no ship. We will wait here until after dark, and then we will walk to my home, which is not far from here."

"You have no ship, Sir?"

"No." He turned and took her hands in his. They were warm, and hummed faintly. The fingernails were chips of ruby. He still did not meet her eyes. "No, M’zelle, I have no ship. In fact, I am afraid you are my sole possession of any value." Finally he looked up, his eyes pleading. "I must ask that you keep my secret safe."

Nerissa’s heart went out to him then. "I am honored by your trust, Sir."

"Thank you, M’zelle." He led her to a small office, where there was a cot and a chair and a small stasis cupboard. "This is my waiting room. Can I offer you something to drink? Oh."

His expression of embarrassment was charming. "No, thank you," she said.

"But please…do take a seat."

"I do not tire, Sir."

"Please, M’zelle. I insist. I could not bear to see you stand while I sit, and I do tire and must sit eventually."

"Very well, Sir," she said. The chair creaked beneath her weight, but held.

Denali poured himself a glass of cool water from the cupboard, then sat on the edge of the cot. "Usually I pass the time until dark reading, but since I am now the owner of a fine storytelling machine, it would seem impolite not to make use of your services. Would you please tell me a story?"

"Certainly, Sir. What kind of story would you like to hear?"

"Tell me a story about…yourself."

A thrill went through her then. "Would you like a true story, or a made-up one?"

"True stories are always more interesting."

And so Nerissa told him a story about a golden eagle who lived for many years as the brain of a bird ship, then slept for a long time and finally became a storytelling machine. She did not embellish — the story was fantastic enough as it was — and she did not leave out the sad parts or the embarrassing parts.

When she finished, it was full dark. The glass of water sat, untouched, on the dusty floor beside Denali’s cot.

Unlike the tinker, Denali Eu was an educated man. He knew the history of the bird ships, and he understood just what Nerissa was and what she was capable of. He had inherited his father’s notes, his contacts, and his trading expertise along with his debts. He knew in his bones that with a bird ship he could not just repay those debts, but rebuild his family’s wealth and reputation.

It was then that he made the second of the three decisions that set a legend in motion: he would find a way to refurbish the hull of Crocus and refit it as a bird ship.

But all he said to Nerissa was "Thank you for the story, M’zelle." He knew his new plan was nearly as cruel as the old, because it would still mean the end of her existence as a gleaming almost-person. But at least she will still be alive, he told himself. You have the right to do this. She is your property. You owe it to your mother and to your father’s memory.

Still he felt filthy.

Denali dressed Nerissa in a spare suit of his traveling clothes, with gloves and a large floppy hat to hide her platinum skin, and they walked to his mother’s house by the light of the moons. They talked as they walked, he of his life and she of hers. Both asked questions; both listened attentively to the answers. They learned about each other and they grew closer. If Nerissa sensed Denali was holding something back, she was not unduly concerned; she had already received far more confidences from him than she could ever have expected.

The house of Leona Eu had been hers before her marriage to Ranson Eu. It was small and patched, but warm and tasteful and genuine. Nerissa had never seen such a place; she loved it immediately.

Denali introduced Nerissa to his mother and explained that he had won Nerissa at gambling. Later, in private, he told his mother he planned to sell Nerissa on his next trip to Arica, but did not want the storyteller to know this because she would feel unwanted.

The life of the household returned to something like its usual routine, and Nerissa did her best to contribute. She proved to be a tireless gardener (her delicate finger joints protected from the dirt by leather gloves), and her ability to sit completely motionless for hours made her an impressive hunter. Nerissa was soon accepted as part of the family. This was something she had never experienced before, and she was honored and delighted. In the evenings, they all entertained each other with stories.

After Leona and Nerissa had gone to bed (for though her body never wearied, Nerissa’s brain still required sleep), Denali stayed up late for many nights. He researched the bird ships and hauled out the old plans of Crocus, then drew new plans. The refitted ship would be stronger in the keel and lighter in weight; less luxurious, but with more lifesystem and cargo capacity. He sent both sets of plans to his father’s chandler. The reply arrived in a few days: the chandler would do the work, though he said the design seemed insane.

The price he quoted was high. But the money Denali had won from the Duke would cover the down payment, and the balance was less than Nerissa’s empty body would bring on the black market.

The next week the chandler came by with his delivery dirigible. He hooked chains and cables to Crocus’s corroded hull and hauled it away. Denali emptied out his secret personal cache of money and told Leona it was the proceeds of the salvage sale.

"I thought we had sold every part worth salvaging long ago," she said. "Surely the expense of the dirigible was more than the hull was worth?"

"I met the chandler on my last trip to Arica, and persuaded him he owed us a favor."

Leona still seemed unconvinced, but she accepted the money.

In the following weeks Nerissa’s sense that Denali was hiding something from her increased. He grew haggard, and she found he would not meet her eyes. She wanted to ask him about his troubles, to repay the concern and respect she had been shown. But her years of servitude had ingrained in her a pattern of silent obedience and she said nothing.

For his part, Denali felt an agony of silence. He could confide neither in his mother, who would berate him for hiring the chandler with money he did not yet have, nor in Nerissa, whose beauty he planned to tear away and sell for his own profit; yet he ached for reassurance. He found himself uninterested in food, and spent long hours of the night staring at his ceiling, unable to sleep.

On one such restless night, he watched a patch of shimmering moonlight, reflected onto his ceiling from a small pond near the house, as it passed slowly from one side of the room to the other. Suddenly, silently, it flared and danced all over the room, then returned to its previous state. Just as he was about to dismiss the phenomenon as an effect of his tired eyes, it happened again. And a third time.

He rose from his bed and looked out the window. What he saw then captured his heart. It was Nerissa, dancing naked on the shore of the pond. He had seen the moonlight reflected from her shining metal body.

Nerissa’s dance was a soaring, graceful thing, a poem composed of twirls and leaps and tumbles. The great strength of her legs propelled her high into the air, in defiance of her metallic weight, and brought her to landing as delicately as a faun. Her platinum skin in the moonlight shone silver on silver, black on black; she was a creature of the moonlight, a pirouetting dancing fragment of the night.

She was even more beautiful than he had thought.

His heart was torn in two. Part of it wanted to fly, to leap and dance with her in the night. Part of it sank to the acid pit of his stomach, as though trying to hide from the knowledge of the plan he had laid. How could he destroy this beauty and grace for mere money? But how could he sentence himself, his mother, and his father’s memory to a continued life of debt and deceit — a life that must eventually end in discovery and shame — for the sake of a machine?

Perhaps he let out a small sound of despair. Perhaps it was the sight of his white nightshirt in the window. For whatever reason, Nerissa noticed she was being watched. Clumsily she stopped her dance and stared directly at him, her eyes two tiny stars of reflected light.

He descended the stairs and met her in the doorway. The moonlight shining from her cheek was painfully bright, and in the silence of the night he heard the tiny sounds of her eyes as they shifted in their sockets.

"I’m sorry I disturbed your sleep, Sir."

"No, no…I wasn’t asleep. You dance beautifully, M’zelle."

"Thank you, Sir. I do enjoy it. It is as close as I can come in this body to the joy of flight between the stars."

The sundered halves of Denali’s heart fused together then, for he realized then his plan for Nerissa was exactly what she wanted as well. He would restore her to her former life of sailing the currents of space, which she had described so vividly to him, and at the same time restore his own fortune.

Nerissa saw the smile spreading across his face, and asked what he was thinking.

"I have just thought of the most delightful surprise for you, M’zelle. A gift for you, to express my appreciation of your dance. But it will take some time to prepare, so I must ask you to be patient." He bent and kissed the warm metal of her fingers. "Good night, M’zelle."

"Good night, Sir."

He returned to his bed and fell immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Three days later the chandler’s dirigible returned, the refitted Crocus hanging from its gondola. The ship’s gleaming hull wore vivid stripes of red, yellow, and green, the colors of Ranson Eu’s former trading company. Denali, Leona, and Nerissa gathered together and watched as the dirigible lowered it gently to the ground. The pilot waved from the gondola as he flew away.

"This is my surprise to you both," Denali proclaimed. "Behold: Crocus is reborn!"

Nerissa stared at the ship in silent rapture, but Leona turned to her son with concern. "I suspected you were hiding something from me. This is a wonderful surprise, to be sure, but I thought we had no secrets from each other."

"Only this one, Mother. And there was a reason. Nerissa, here is my gift to you: this new Crocus has been built especially for you. In this new bird ship you will fly the stars once more."

Nerissa’s reaction confused and disturbed him. She went rigid, her features drawing together and her eyes widening. "This is…a bird ship?" she said. "But where did you obtain the shipbrain?"

"There is no shipbrain, M’zelle. That position has been reserved for your own sweet self."

Nerissa’s metal hands bunched into fists, held tightly against her chin. She seemed to shrink into herself. "No," she whispered. "No, no…please, Sir and Master…I beg you.…"

Denali Eu felt his hands grow cold. "But M’zelle, when I saw you dance in the moonlight…I thought to fly the stars was your greatest joy."

"To fly is joy, yes…but to be cut from this body…to be severed…uprooted…the pain, Sir and Master…that pain is something I could never endure again." She crouched, trembling, on the stones of the path. Her eyes were huge. "I would rather die, Sir and Master. I would find a way, Sir and Master. Please, Sir and Master, please…I know you are my owner, I know I must obey your wishes without question or hesitation, but I beg you…do not ask me to do this." And she fell at his feet, her hands raised as though to ward off a blow.

All the color ran out of Denali Eu’s world. He turned from Nerissa and Leona and marched clumsily into the woods behind the house. They did not follow.

Some time later he found himself seated on a fallen log. The sun was low in the sky and his clothes and skin were torn from thorns and brambles.

How could he have been so stupid? He had lied to his mother, lied to Nerissa, made unwarranted assumptions, and promised money he did not have. Soon the chandler’s bill would arrive and he had nothing with which to pay it.

He considered his options. He could follow through with his plan — and Nerissa would find some way to end her life, or else would serve in unwilling misery. Even if he were heartless enough to force her to do this, he did not relish the idea of trusting his life to a ship he had betrayed.

He could break up Nerissa, sell her platinum and precious stones to pay the chandler — and she would be gone completely, and he would have only a worthless hull without a drive.

He could sell Nerissa in one piece — and it would be the same, only with more money. Nerissa would still be lost to him, and subject to the whim of some other master who might treat her still more cruelly.

He could repudiate the chandler’s bill, declare bankruptcy — and see Nerissa sold off, along with his mother’s house, and himself sold into slavery.

But there was one more option. Denali Eu was an educated man, and he knew the history of the bird ships. He also knew Nerissa’s story. And because of this knowledge, and despite this knowledge, he made the final, fateful decision that set a legend in motion.

He spent a long time sitting on the log, his head in his hands, but he could think of no other alternative. Then he stood and walked back to his mother’s house. There, as the sun set, he told Nerissa and Leona of his decision. His mother cried and shouted and beat her hands upon the kitchen table; Nerissa sat upon a chair with her head bowed, but did not speak. Neither of them could change his mind.

The next day Nerissa and Leona took Denali Eu for a walk in the forest. He listened to the birds and the rustling of the leaves, and he felt the cool wind brush gently against his skin. He smelled the green of the leaves and the damp of the earth, and as many flowers as they could find. In the evening they prepared for him a fine meal, with pungent spices and fresh vegetables, and succulent fruits new-gathered and sweet. Nerissa massaged his back with her strong warm fingers, and his mother cried as she brushed his cheek with pieces of silk and fur.

On the following morning he went into the city and gave himself to the doctors. He told them what he wanted, and he swore three times that this was his will.

And so they killed him, and they took his brain and welded it to the keel of the Crocus. For the techniques of Doctor Jay were legal, as long as the donation was voluntary and sworn to three times, and the organs of a young man in the best of health could be sold for enough money to pacify the chandler.

The operation was every bit as painful as Nerissa had said. But Denali found sailing the stars was even more delightful than dancing in the moonlight: a symphony of colors and textures beyond his human experience. And this ship was equipped with eyes and ears and hands within its hull as well as without.

The ship, renamed the Golden Eagle, became a hugely successful trader. Denali Eu’s knowledge and skill, combined with Nerissa Zeebnen-Fearsig’s beauty and charm, were something no seller or buyer could resist and no other trader could surpass. The ship with a human mind and a metal captain was famed in song and story, and when after many years Leona Eu died she left one of the greatest fortunes in the Consensus.

Denali Eu and Nerissa the Silver Captain have not been seen for many, many years. Some say they sought new challenges in the Magellanic Clouds or even beyond. Some say they settled down to a contented existence on an obscure planet. But no one doubts that, wherever they are, they are together still.

ROBOTS DON’T CRY

Mike Resnick

They call us graverobbers, but we're not.

What we do is plunder the past and offer it to the present. We hit old worlds, deserted worlds, worlds that nobody wants any longer, and we pick up anything we think we can sell to the vast collectibles market. You want a 700-year-old timepiece? A thousand-year old bed? An actual printed book? Just put in your order, and sooner or later we'll fill it.

Every now and then we strike it rich. Usually we make a profit. Once in a while we just break even. There's only been one world where we actually lost money; I still remember it—Greenwillow. Except that it wasn't green, and there wasn't a willow on the whole damned planet.

There was a robot, though. We found him, me and the Baroni, in a barn, half-hidden under a pile of ancient computer parts and self-feeders for mutated cattle. We were picking through the stuff, wondering if there was any market for it, tossing most of it aside, when the sun peeked in through the doorway and glinted off a prismatic eye.

“Hey, take a look at what we've got here,” I said. “Give me a hand digging it out."

The junk had been stored a few feet above where he'd been standing and the rack broke, practically burying him. One of his legs was bent at an impossible angle, and his expressionless face was covered with cobwebs. The Baroni lumbered over—when you've got three legs you don't glide gracefully—and studied the robot.

“Interesting,” he said. He never used whole sentences when he could annoy me with a single word that could mean almost anything.

“He should pay our expenses, once we fix him up and get him running,” I said.

“A human configuration,” noted the Baroni.

“Yeah, we still made ‘em in our own image until a couple of hundred years ago."

“Impractical."

“Spare me your practicalities,” I said. “Let's dig him out."

“Why bother?"

Trust a Baroni to miss the obvious. “Because he's got a memory cube,” I answered. “Who the hell knows what he's seen? Maybe we'll find out what happened here."

“Greenwillow has been abandoned since long before you were born and I was hatched,” replied the Baroni, finally stringing some words together. “Who cares what happened?"

“I know it makes your head hurt, but try to use your brain,” I said, grunting as I pulled at the robot's arm. It came off in my hands. “Maybe whoever he worked for hid some valuables.” I dropped the arm onto the floor. “Maybe he knows where. We don't just have to sell junk, you know; there's a market for the good stuff too."

The Baroni shrugged and began helping me uncover the robot. “I hear a lot of ifs and maybes,” he muttered.

“Fine,” I said. “Just sit on what passes for your ass, and I'll do it myself."

“And let you keep what we find without sharing it?” he demanded, suddenly throwing himself into the task of moving the awkward feeders. After a moment he stopped and studied one. “Big cows,” he noted.

“Maybe ten or twelve feet at the shoulder, judging from the size of the stalls and the height of the feeders,” I agreed. “But there weren't enough to fill the barn. Some of those stalls were never used."

Finally we got the robot uncovered, and I checked the code on the back of his neck.

“How about that?” I said. “The son of a bitch must be 500 years old. That makes him an antique by anyone's definition. I wonder what we can get for him?"

The Baroni peered at the code. “What does AB stand for?"

“Aldebaran. Alabama. Abrams’ Planet. Or maybe just the model number. Who the hell knows? We'll get him running and maybe he can tell us.” I tried to set him on his feet. No luck. “Give me a hand."

“To the ship?” asked the Baroni, using sentence fragments again as he helped me stand the robot upright.

“No,” I said. “We don't need a sterile environment to work on a robot. Let's just get him out in the sunlight, away from all this junk, and then we'll have a couple of mechs check him over."

We half-carried and half-dragged him to the crumbling concrete pad beyond the barn, then laid him down while I tightened the muscles in my neck, activating the embedded micro-chip, and directed the signal by pointing to the ship, which was about half a mile away.

“This is me,” I said as the chip carried my voice back to the ship's computer. “Wake up Mechs 3 and 7, feed them everything you've got on robots going back a millennium, give them repair kits and anything else they'll need to fix a broken robot of indeterminate age, and then home in on my signal and send them to me."

“Why those two?” asked the Baroni.

Sometimes I wondered why I partnered with anyone that dumb. Then I remembered the way he could sniff out anything with a computer chip or cube, no matter how well it was hidden, so I decided to give him a civil answer. He didn't get that many from me; I hoped he appreciated it.

“Three's got those extendable eyestalks, and it can do microsurgery, so I figure it can deal with any faulty micro-circuits. As for Seven, it's strong as an ox. It can position the robot, hold him aloft, move him any way that Three directs it to. They're both going to show up filled to the brim with everything the ship's data bank has on robots, so if he's salvagable, they'll find a way to salvage him."

I waited to see if he had any more stupid questions. Sure enough, he had.

“Why would anyone come here?” he asked, looking across the bleak landscape.

“I came for what passes for treasure these days,” I answered him. “I have no idea why you came."

“I meant originally,” he said, and his face started to glow that shade of pea-soup green that meant I was getting to him. “Nothing can grow, and the ultra-violet rays would eventually kill most animals. So why?"

“Because not all humans are as smart as me."

“It's an impoverished world,” continued the Baroni. “What valuables could there be?"

“The usual,” I replied. “Family heirlooms. Holographs. Old kitchen implements. Maybe even a few old Republic coins."

“Republic currency can't be spent."

“True—but a few years ago I saw a five-credit coin sell for three hundred Maria Teresa dollars. They tell me it's worth twice that today."

“I didn't know that,” admitted the Baroni.

“I'll bet they could fill a book with all the things you don't know."

“Why are Men so sardonic and ill-mannered?"

“Probably because we have to spend so much time with races like the Baroni,” I answered.

Mechs Three and Seven rolled up before he could reply.

“Reporting for duty, sir,” said Mech Three in his high-pitched mechanical voice.

“This is a very old robot,” I said, indicating what we'd found. “It's been out of commission for a few centuries, maybe even longer. See if you can get it working again."

“We live to serve,” thundered Mech Seven.

“I can't tell you how comforting I find that.” I turned to the Baroni. “Let's grab some lunch."

“Why do you always speak to them that way?” asked the Baroni as we walked away from the mechs. “They don't understand sarcasm."

“It's my nature,” I said. “Besides, if they don't know it's sarcasm, it must sound like a compliment. Probably pleases the hell out of them."

“They are machines,” he responded. “You can no more please them than offend them."

“Then what difference does it make?"

“The more time I spend with Men, the less I understand them,” said the Baroni, making the burbling sound that passed for a deep sigh. “I look forward to getting the robot working. Being a logical and unemotional entity, it will make more sense."

“Spare me your smug superiority,” I shot back. “You're not here because Papa Baroni looked at Mama Baroni with logic in his heart."

The Baroni burbled again. “You are hopeless,” he said at last.

We had one of the mechs bring us our lunch, then sat with our backs propped against opposite sides of a gnarled old tree while we ate. I didn't want to watch his snakelike lunch writhe and wriggle, protesting every inch of the way, as he sucked it down like the long, living piece of spaghetti it was, and he had his usual moral qualms, which I never understood, about watching me bite into a sandwich. We had just about finished when Mech Three approached us.

“All problems have been fixed,” it announced brightly.

“That was fast,” I said.

“There was nothing broken.” It then launched into a three-minute explanation of whatever it had done to the robot's circuitry.

“That's enough,” I said when it got down to a dissertation on the effect of mu-mesons on negative magnetic fields in regard to prismatic eyes. “I'm wildly impressed. Now let's go take a look at this beauty."

I got to my feet, as did the Baroni, and we walked back to the concrete pad. The robot's limbs were straight now, and his arm was restored, but he still lay motionless on the crumbling surface.

“I thought you said you fixed him."

“I did,” replied Mech Three. “But my programming compelled me not to activate it until you were present."

“Fine,” I said. “Wake him up."

The little Mech made one final quick adjustment and backed away as the robot hummed gently to life and sat up.

“Welcome back,” I said.

“Back?” replied the robot. “I have not been away."

“You've been asleep for five centuries, maybe six."

“Robots cannot sleep.” He looked around. “Yet everything has changed. How is this possible?"

“You were deactivated,” said the Baroni. “Probably your power supply ran down."

“Deactivated,” the robot repeated. He swiveled his head from left to right, surveying the scene. “Yes. Things cannot change this much from one instant to the next."

“Have you got a name?” I asked him.

“Samson 4133. But Miss Emily calls me Sammy."

“Which name do you prefer?"

“I am a robot. I have no preferences."

I shrugged. “Whatever you say, Samson."

“Sammy,” he corrected me.

“I thought you had no preferences."

“I don't,” said the robot. “But she does."

“Has she got a name?"

“Miss Emily."

“Just Miss Emily?” I asked. “No other names to go along with it?"

“Miss Emily is what I was instructed to call her."

“I assume she is a child,” said the Baroni, with his usual flair for discovering the obvious.

“She was once,” said Sammy. “I will show her to you."

Then somehow, I never did understand the technology involved, he projected a full-sized holograph of a small girl, perhaps five years old, wearing a frilly purple-and-white outfit. She had rosy cheeks and bright shining blue eyes, and a smile that men would die for someday if given half the chance.

It was only after she took a step forward, a very awkward step, that I realized she had a prosthetic left leg.

“Too bad,” I said. “A pretty little girl like that."

“Was she born that way, I wonder?” said the Baroni.

“I love you, Sammy,” said the holograph.

I hadn't expected sound, and it startled me. She had such a happy voice. Maybe she didn't know that most little girls came equipped with two legs. After all, this was an underpopulated colony world; for all I knew, she'd never seen anyone but her parents.

“It is time for your nap, Miss Emily,” said Sammy's voice. “I will carry you to your room.” Another surprise. The voice didn't seem to come from the robot, but from somewhere ... well, offstage. He was recreating the scene exactly as it had happened, but we saw it through his eyes. Since he couldn't see himself, neither could we.

“I'll walk,” said the child. “Mother told me I have to practice walking, so that someday I can play with the other girls."

“Yes, Miss Emily."

“But you can catch me if I start to fall, like you always do."

“Yes, Miss Emily."

“What would I do without you, Sammy?"

“You would fall, Miss Emily,” he answered. Robots are always so damned literal.

And as suddenly as it had appeared, the scene vanished.

“So that was Miss Emily?” I said.

“Yes,” said Sammy.

“And you were owned by her parents?"

“Yes."

“Do you have any understanding of the passage of time, Sammy?"

“I can calibrate time to within three nanoseconds of..."

“That's not what I asked,” I said. “For example, if I told you that scene we just saw happened more than 500 years ago, what would you say to that?"

“I would ask if you were measuring by Earth years, Galactic Standard years, New Calendar Democracy years..."

“Never mind,” I said.

Sammy fell silent and motionless. If someone had stumbled upon him at just that moment, they'd have been hard-pressed to prove that he was still operational.

“What's the matter with him?” asked the Baroni. “His battery can't be drained yet."

“Of course not. They were designed to work for years without recharging."

And then I knew. He wasn't a farm robot, so he had no urge to get up and start working the fields. He wasn't a mech, so he had no interest in fixing the feeders in the barn. For a moment I thought he might be a butler or a major domo, but if he was, he'd have been trying to learn my desires to serve me, and he obviously wasn't doing that. That left just one thing.

He was a nursemaid.

I shared my conclusion with the Baroni, and he concurred.

“We're looking at a lot of money here,” I said excitedly. “Think of it—a fully-functioning antique robot nursemaid! He can watch the kids while his new owners go rummaging for more old artifacts."

“There's something wrong,” said the Baroni, who was never what you could call an optimist.

“The only thing wrong is we don't have enough bags to haul all the money we're going to sell him for."

“Look around you,” said the Baroni. “This place was abandoned, and it was never prosperous. If he's that valuable, why did they leave him behind?"

“He's a nursemaid. Probably she outgrew him."

“Better find out.” He was back to sentence fragments again.

I shrugged and approached the robot. “Sammy, what did you do at night after Miss Emily went to sleep?"

He came to life again. “I stood by her bed."

“All night, every night?"

“Yes, sir. Unless she woke and requested pain medication, which I would retrieve and bring to her."

“Did she require pain medication very often?” I asked.

“I do not know, sir."

I frowned. “I thought you just said you brought it to her when she needed it."

“No, sir,” Sammy corrected me. “I said I brought it to her when she requested it."

“She didn't request it very often?"

“Only when the pain became unbearable.” Sammy paused. “I do not fully understand the word ‘unbearable', but I know it had a deleterious effect upon her. My Miss Emily was often in pain."

“I'm surprised you understand the word ‘pain',” I said.

“To feel pain is to be non-operational or disfunctional to some degree."

“Yes, but it's more than that. Didn't Miss Emily ever try to describe it?"

“No,” answered Sammy. “She never spoke of her pain."

“Did it bother her less as she grew older and adjusted to her handicap?” I asked.

“No, sir, it did not.” He paused. “There are many kinds of disfunction."

“Are you saying she had other problems, too?” I continued.

Instantly we were looking at another scene from Sammy's past. It was the same girl, now maybe thirteen years old, staring at her face in a mirror. She didn't like what she saw, and neither did I.

“What is that?” I asked, forcing myself not to look away.

“It is a fungus disease,” answered Sammy as the girl tried unsuccessfully with cream and powder to cover the ugly blemishes that had spread across her face.

“Is it native to this world?"

“Yes,” said Sammy.

“You must have had some pretty ugly people walking around,” I said.

“It did not affect most of the colonists. But Miss Emily's immune system was weakened by her other diseases."

“What other diseases?"

Sammy rattled off three or four that I'd never heard of.

“And no one else in her family suffered from them?"

“No, sir."

“It happens in my race, too,” offered the Baroni. “Every now and then a genetically inferior specimen is born and grows to maturity."

“She was not genetically inferior,” said Sammy.

“Oh?” I said, surprised. It's rare for a robot to contradict a living being, even an alien. “What was she?"

Sammy considered his answer for a moment.

“Perfect,” he said at last.

“I'll bet the other kids didn't think so,” I said.

“What do they know?” replied Sammy.

And instantly he projected another scene. Now the girl was fully grown, probably about twenty. She kept most of her skin covered, but we could see the ravaging effect her various diseases had had upon her hands and face.

Tears were running down from these beautiful blue eyes over bony, parchment-like cheeks. Her emaciated body was wracked by sobs.

A holograph of a robot's hand popped into existence, and touched her gently on the shoulder.

“Oh, Sammy!” she cried. “I really thought he liked me! He was always so nice to me.” She paused for breath as the tears continued unabated. “But I saw his face when I reached out to take his hand, and I felt him shudder when I touched it. All he really felt for me was pity. That's all any of them ever feel!"

“What do they know?” said Sammy's voice, the same words and the same inflections he had just used a moment ago.

“It's not just him,” she said. “Even the farm animals run away when I approach them. I don't know how anyone can stand being in the same room with me.” She stared at where the robot was standing. “You're all I've got, Sammy. You're my only friend in the whole world. Please don't ever leave me."

“I will never leave you, Miss Emily,” said Sammy's voice.

“Promise me."

“I promise,” said Sammy.

And then the holograph vanished and Sammy stood mute and motionless again.

“He really cared for her,” said the Baroni.

“The boy?” I said. “If he did, he had a funny way of showing it."

“No, of course not the boy. The robot."

“Come off it,” I said. “Robots don't have any feelings."

“You heard him,” said the Baroni.

“Those were programmed responses,” I said. “He probably has three million to choose from."

“Those are emotions,” insisted the Baroni.

“Don't you go getting all soft on me,” I said. “Any minute now you'll be telling me he's too human to sell."

“You are the human,” said the Baroni. “He is the one with compassion."

“I've got more compassion than her parents did, letting her grow up like that,” I said irritably. I confronted the robot again. “Sammy, why didn't the doctors do anything for her?"

“This was a farming colony,” answered Sammy. “There were only 387 families on the entire world. The Democracy sent a doctor once a year at the beginning, and then, when there were less than 100 families left, he stopped coming. The last time Miss Emily saw a doctor was when she was fourteen."

“What about an offworld hospital?” asked the Baroni.

“They had no ship and no money. They moved here in the second year of a seven-year drought. Then various catastrophes wiped out their next six crops. They spent what savings they had on mutated cattle, but the cattle died before they could produce young or milk. One by one all the families began leaving the planet as impoverished wards of the Democracy."

“Including Miss Emily's family?” I asked.

“No. Mother died when Miss Emily was nineteen, and Father died two years later."

Then it was time for me to ask the Baroni's question.

“So when did Miss Emily leave the planet, and why did she leave you behind?"

“She did not leave."

I frowned. “She couldn't have run the farm—not in her condition."

“There was no farm left to run,” answered Sammy. “All the crops had died, and without Father there was no one to keep the machines working."

“But she stayed. Why?"

Sammy stared at me for a long moment. It's just as well his face was incapable of expression, because I got the distinct feeling that he thought the question was too simplistic or too stupid to merit an answer. Finally he projected another scene. This time the girl, now a woman approaching thirty, hideous open pustules on her face and neck, was sitting in a crudely-crafted hoverchair, obviously too weak to stand any more.

“No!” she rasped bitterly.

“They are your relatives,” said Sammy's voice. “And they have a room for you."

“All the more reason to be considerate of them. No one should be forced to associate with me—especially not people who are decent enough to make the offer. We will stay here, by ourselves, on this world, until the end."

“Yes, Miss Emily."

She turned and stared at where Sammy stood. “You want to tell me to leave, don't you? That if we go to Jefferson IV I will receive medical attention and they will make me well—but you are compelled by your programming not to disobey me. Am I correct?"

“Yes, Miss Emily."

The hint of a smile crossed her ravaged face. “Now you know what pain is."

“It is ... uncomfortable, Miss Emily."

“You'll learn to live with it,” she said. She reached out and patted the robot's leg fondly. “If it's any comfort, I don't know if the medical specialists could have helped me even when I was young. They certainly can't help me now."

“You are still young, Miss Emily."

“Age is relative,” she said. “I am so close to the grave I can almost taste the dirt.” A metal hand appeared, and she held it in ten incredibly fragile fingers. “Don't feel sorry for me, Sammy. It hasn't been a life I'd wish on anyone else. I won't be sorry to see it end."

“I am a robot,” replied Sammy. “I cannot feel sorrow."

“You've no idea how fortunate you are."

I shot the Baroni a triumphant smile that said: See? Even Sammy admits he can't feel any emotions.

And he sent back a look that said: I didn't know until now that robots could lie, and I knew we still had a problem.

The scene vanished.

“How soon after that did she die?” I asked Sammy.

“Seven months, eighteen days, three hours, and four minutes, sir,” was his answer.

“She was very bitter,” noted the Baroni.

“She was bitter because she was born, sir,” said Sammy. “Not because she was dying."

“Did she lapse into a coma, or was she cogent up to the end?” I asked out of morbid curiosity.

“She was in control of her senses until the moment she died,” answered Sammy. “But she could not see for the last eighty-three days of her life. I functioned as her eyes."

“What did she need eyes for?” asked the Baroni. “She had a hoverchair, and it is a single-level house."

“When you are a recluse, you spend your life with books, sir,” said Sammy, and I thought: The mechanical bastard is actually lecturing us!

With no further warning, he projected a final scene for us.

The woman, her eyes no longer blue, but clouded with cataracts and something else—disease, fungus, who knew?—lay on her bed, her breathing labored.

From Sammy's point of view, we could see not only her, but, much closer, a book of poetry, and then we heard his voice: “Let me read something else, Miss Emily."

“But that is the poem I wish to hear,” she whispered. “It is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she is my favorite."

“But it is about death,” protested Sammy.

“All life is about death,” she replied so softly I could barely hear her. “Surely you know that I am dying, Sammy?"

“I know, Miss Emily,” said Sammy.

“I find it comforting that my ugliness did not diminish the beauty around me, that it will remain after I am gone,” she said. “Please read."

Sammy read: "There will be rose and rhododendron

When you are dead and under ground;

Still will be heard from white syringas..."

Suddenly the robot's voice fell silent. For a moment I thought there was a flaw in the projection. Then I saw that Miss Emily had died.

He stared at her for a long minute, which means that we did too, and then the scene evaporated.

“I buried her beneath her favorite tree,” said Sammy. “But it is no longer there."

“Nothing lasts forever, even trees,” said the Baroni. “And it's been five hundred years."

“It does not matter. I know where she is."

He walked us over to a barren spot about thirty yards from the ruin of a farmhouse. On the ground was a stone, and neatly carved into it was the following:

* * * *

Miss Emily

2298-2331 G.E.

There will be rose and rhododendron

* * * *

“That's lovely, Sammy,” said the Baroni.

“It is what she requested."

“What did you do after you buried her?” I asked.

“I went to the barn."

“For how long?"

“With Miss Emily dead, I had no need to stay in the house. I remained in the barn for many years, until my battery power ran out."

“Many years?” I repeated. “What the hell did you do there?"

“Nothing."

“You just stood there?"

“I just stood there."

“Doing nothing?"

“That is correct.” He stared at me for a long moment, and I could have sworn he was studying me. Finally he spoke again. “I know that you intend to sell me."

“We'll find you a family with another Miss Emily,” I said. If they're the highest bidder.

“I do not wish to serve another family. I wish to remain here."

“There's nothing here,” I said. “The whole planet's deserted."

“I promised my Miss Emily that I would never leave her."

“But she's dead now,” I pointed out.

“She put no conditions on her request. I put no conditions on my promise."

I looked from Sammy to the Baroni, and decided that this was going to take a couple of mechs—one to carry Sammy to the ship, and one to stop the Baroni from setting him free.

“But if you will honor a single request, I will break my promise to her and come away with you."

Suddenly I felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I hadn't heard the first one yet.

“What do you want, Sammy?"

“I told you I did nothing in the barn. That was true. I was incapable of doing what I wanted to do."

“And what was that?"

“I wanted to cry."

I don't know what I was expecting, but that wasn't it.

“Robots don't cry,” I said.

“Robots can't cry,” replied Sammy. “There is a difference."

“And that's what you want?"

“It is what I have wanted ever since my Miss Emily died."

“We rig you to cry, and you agree to come away with us?"

“That is correct,” said Sammy.

“Sammy,” I said, “you've got yourself a deal."

I contacted the ship, told it to feed Mech Three everything the medical library had on tears and tear ducts, and then send it over. It arrived about ten minutes later, deactivated the robot, and started fussing and fiddling. After about two hours it announced that its work was done, that Sammy now had tear ducts and had been supplied with a solution that could produce six hundred authentic saltwater tears from each eye.

I had Mech Three show me how to activate Sammy, and then sent it back to the ship.

“Have you ever heard of a robot wanting to cry?” I asked the Baroni.

“No."

“Neither have I,” I said, vaguely disturbed.

“He loved her."

I didn't even argue this time. I was wondering which was worse, spending thirty years trying to be a normal human being and failing, or spending thirty years trying to cry and failing. None of the other stuff had gotten to me; Sammy was just doing what robots do. It was the thought of his trying so hard to do what robots couldn't do that suddenly made me feel sorry for him. That in turn made me very irritable; ordinarily I don't even feel sorry for Men, let alone machines.

And what he wanted was such a simple thing compared to the grandiose ambitions of my own race. Once Men had wanted to cross the ocean; we crossed it. We'd wanted to fly; we flew. We wanted to reach the stars; we reached them. All Sammy wanted to do was cry over the loss of his Miss Emily. He'd waited half a millennium and had agreed to sell himself into bondage again, just for a few tears.

It was a lousy trade.

I reached out and activated him.

“Is it done?” asked Sammy.

“Right,” I said. “Go ahead and cry your eyes out."

Sammy stared straight ahead. “I can't,” he said at last.

“Think of Miss Emily,” I suggested. “Think of how much you miss her."

“I feel pain,” said Sammy. “But I cannot cry."

“You're sure?"

“I am sure,” said Sammy. “I was guilty of having thoughts and longings above my station. Miss Emily used to say that tears come from the heart and the soul. I am a robot. I have no heart and no soul, so I cannot cry, even with the tear ducts you have given me. I am sorry to have wasted your time. A more complex model would have understood its limitations at the outset.” He paused, and then turned to me. “I will go with you now."

“Shut up,” I said.

He immediately fell silent.

“What is going on?” asked the Baroni.

“You shut up too!” I snapped.

I summoned Mechs Seven and Eight and had them dig Sammy a grave right next to his beloved Miss Emily. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn't even know her full name, that no one who chanced upon her headstone would ever know it. Then I decided that it didn't really matter.

Finally they were done, and it was time to deactivate him.

“I would have kept my word,” said Sammy.

“I know,” I said.

“I am glad you did not force me to."

I walked him to the side of the grave. “This won't be like your battery running down,” I said. “This time it's forever."

“She was not afraid to die,” said Sammy. “Why should I be?"

I pulled the plug and had Mechs Seven and Eight lower him into the ground. They started filling in the dirt while I went back to the ship to do one last thing. When they were finished I had Mech Seven carry my handiwork back to Sammy's grave.

“A tombstone for a robot?” asked the Baroni.

“Why not?” I replied. “There are worse traits than honesty and loyalty.” I should know: I've stockpiled enough of them.

“He truly moved you."

Seeing the man you could have been will do that to you, even if he's all metal and silicone and prismatic eyes.

“What does it say?” asked the Baroni as we finished planting the tombstone.

I stood aside so he could read it:

* * * *

“Sammy"

Australopithicus Robotus

* * * *

“That is very moving."

“It's no big deal,” I said uncomfortably. “It's just a tombstone."

“It is also inaccurate,” observed the Baroni.

“He was a better man than I am."

“He was not a man at all."

“Fuck you."

The Baroni doesn't know what it means, but he knows it's an insult, so he came right back at me like he always does. “You realize, of course, that you have buried our profit?"

I wasn't in the mood for his notion of wit. “Find out what he was worth, and I'll pay you for your half,” I replied. “Complain about it again, and I'll knock your alien teeth down your alien throat."

He stared at me. “I will never understand Men,” he said.

* * * *

All that happened twenty years ago. Of course the Baroni never asked for his half of the money, and I never offered it to him again. We're still partners. Inertia, I suppose.

I still think about Sammy from time to time. Not as much as I used to, but every now and then.

I know there are preachers and ministers who would say he was just a machine, and to think of him otherwise is blasphemous, or at least wrong-headed, and maybe they're right. Hell, I don't even know if there's a God at all—but if there is, I like to think He's the God of all us Australopithicines.

Including Sammy.

A STUDY IN EMERALD

Neil Gaiman

I. The New Friend.

Fresh From Their Stupendous European Tour, where they performed before several of the CROWNED HEADS OF EUROPE, garnering their plaudits and praise with magnificent dramatic performances, combining both COMEDY and TRAGEDY, the Strand Players wish to make it known that they shall be appearing at the Royal Court Theatre, Drury Lane, for a LIMITED ENGAGEMENT in April, at which they will present “My Look-Alike Brother Tom!” “The Littlest Violet-Seller” and “The Great Old Ones Come,” ( this last an Historical Epic of Pageantry and Delight); each an entire play in one act! Tickets are available now from the Box Office.

It is the immensity, I believe. The hugeness of things below. The darkness of dreams.

But I am woolgathering. Forgive me. I am not a literary man.

I had been in need of lodgings. That was how I met him. I wanted someone to share the cost of rooms with me. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, in the chemical laboratories of St. Bart’s. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” that was what he said to me, and my mouth fell open and my eyes opened very wide.

“Astonishing,” I said.

“Not really,” said the stranger in the white lab-coat, who was to become my friend. “From the way you hold your arm, I see you have been wounded, and in a particular way. You have a deep tan. You also have a military bearing, and there are few enough places in the Empire that a military man can be both tanned and, given the nature of the injury to your shoulder and the traditions of the Afghan cave-folk, tortured.”

Put like that, of course, it was absurdly simple. But then, it always was. I had been tanned nut-brown. And I had indeed, as he had observed, been tortured.

The gods and men of Afghanistan were savages, unwilling to be ruled from Whitehall or from Berlin or even from Moscow, and unprepared to see reason. I had been sent into those hills, attached to the ______th Regiment. As long as the fighting remained in the hills and mountains, we fought on an equal footing. When the skirmishes descended into the caves and the darkness then we found ourselves, as it were, out of our depth and in over our heads.

I shall not forget the mirrored surface of the underground lake, nor the thing that emerged from the lake, its eyes opening and closing, and the singing whispers that accompanied it as it rose, wreathing their way about it like the buzzing of flies bigger than worlds.

That I survived was a miracle, but survive I did, and I returned to England with my nerves in shreds and tatters. The place that leech-like mouth had touched me was tattooed forever, frog-white, into the skin of my now-withered shoulder. I had once been a crack-shot. Now I had nothing, save a fear of the world-beneath-the-world akin to panic which meant that I would gladly pay sixpence of my army pension for a Hansom cab, rather than a penny to travel underground.

Still, the fogs and darknesses of London comforted me, took me in. I had lost my first lodgings because I screamed in the night. I had been in Afghanistan; I was there no longer.

“I scream in the night,” I told him.

“I have been told that I snore,” he said. “Also I keep irregular hours, and I often use the mantelpiece for target practice. I will need the sitting room to meet clients. I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem?”

I smiled, and I shook my head, and extended my hand. We shook on it.

The rooms he had found for us, in Baker Street, were more than adequate for two bachelors. I bore in mind all my friend had said about his desire for privacy, and I forbore from asking what it was he did for a living. Still, there was much to pique my curiosity. Visitors would arrive at all hours, and when they did I would leave the sitting room and repair to my bedroom, pondering what they could have in common with my friend: the pale woman with one eye bone-white, the small man who looked like a commercial traveller, the portly dandy in his velvet jacket, and the rest. Some were frequent visitors, many others came only once, spoke to him, and left, looking troubled or looking satisfied.

He was a mystery to me.

We were partaking of one of our landlady’s magnificent breakfasts one morning, when my friend rang the bell to summon that good lady. “There will be a gentleman joining us, in about four minutes,” he said. “We will need another place at table.”

“Very good,” she said, “I’ll put more sausages under the grill.”

My friend returned to perusing his morning paper. I waited for an explanation with growing impatience. Finally, I could stand it no longer. “I don’t understand. How could you know that in four minutes we would be receiving a visitor? There was no telegram, no message of any kind.”

He smiled, thinly. “You did not hear the clatter of a brougham several minutes ago? It slowed as it passed us – obviously as the driver identified our door, then it sped up and went past, up into the Marylebone Road. There is a crush of carriages and taxicabs letting off passengers at the railway station and at the waxworks, and it is in that crush that anyone wishing to alight without being observed will go. The walk from there to here is but four minutes...”

He glanced at his pocket-watch, and as he did so I heard a tread on the stairs outside.

“Come in, Lestrade,” he called. “The door is ajar, and your sausages are just coming out from under the grill.”

A man I took to be Lestrade opened the door, then closed it carefully behind him. “I should not,” he said, “But truth to tell, I have had not had a chance to break my fast this morning. And I could certainly do justice to a few of those sausages.” He was the small man I had observed on several occasions previously, whose demeanour was that of a traveller in rubber novelties or patent nostrums.

My friend waited until our landlady had left the room, before he said, “Obviously, I take it this is a matter of national importance.”

“My stars,” said Lestrade, and he paled. “Surely the word cannot be out already. Tell me it is not.” He began to pile his plate high with sausages, kipper fillets, kedgeree and toast, but his hands shook, a little.

“Of course not,” said my friend. “I know the squeak of your brougham wheels, though, after all this time: an oscillating G sharp above high C. And if Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard cannot publically be seen to come into the parlour of London’s only consulting detective, yet comes anyway, and without having had his breakfast, then I know that this is not a routine case. Ergo, it involves those above us and is a matter of national importance.”

Lestrade dabbed egg yolk from his chin with his napkin. I stared at him. He did not look like my idea of a police inspector, but then, my friend looked little enough like my idea of a consulting detective – whatever that might be.

“Perhaps we should discuss the matter privately,” Lestrade said, glancing at me.

My friend began to smile, impishly, and his head moved on his shoulders as it did when he was enjoying a private joke. “Nonsense,” he said. “Two heads are better than one. And what is said to one of us is said to us both.”

“If I am intruding –“ I said, gruffly, but he motioned me to silence.

Lestrade shrugged. “It’s all the same to me,” he said, after a moment. “If you solve the case then I have my job. If you don’t, then I have no job. You use your methods, that’s what I say. It can’t make things any worse.”

“If there’s one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse,” said my friend. “When do we go to Shoreditch?”

Lestrade dropped his fork. “This is too bad!” he exclaimed. “Here you were, making sport of me, when you know all about the matter! You should be ashamed –“

“No one has told me anything of the matter. When a police inspector walks into my room with fresh splashes of mud of that peculiar mustard yellow hue on his boots and trouser-legs, I can surely be forgiven for presuming that he has recently walked past the diggings at Hobbs Lane, in Shoreditch, which is the only place in London that particular mustard-coloured clay seems to be found.”

Inspector Lestrade looked embarrassed. “Now you put it like that,” he said, “It seems so obvious.”

My friend pushed his plate away from him. “Of course it does,” he said, slightly testily.

We rode to the East End in a cab. Inspector Lestrade had walked up to the Marylebone Road to find his brougham, and left us alone.

“So you are truly a consulting detective?” I said.

“The only one in London, or perhaps, the world,” said my friend. “I do not take cases. Instead, I consult. Others bring me their insoluble problems, they describe them, and, sometimes, I solve them.”

“Then those people who come to you...”

“Are, in the main, police officers, or are detectives themselves, yes.”

It was a fine morning, but we were now jolting about the edges of the rookery of St Giles, that warren of thieves and cutthroats which sits on London like a cancer on the face of a pretty flower-seller, and the only light to enter the cab was dim and faint.

“Are you sure that you wish me along with you?”

In reply my friend stared at me without blinking. “I have a feeling,” he said. “I have a feeling that we were meant to be together. That we have fought the good fight, side by side, in the past or in the future, I do not know. I am a rational man, but I have learned the value of a good companion, and from the moment I clapped eyes on you, I knew I trusted you as well as I do myself. Yes. I want you with me.”

I blushed, or said something meaningless. For the first time since Afghanistan, I felt that I had worth in the world.

2. The Room.

Victor’s “Vitae”! An electrical fluid! Do your limbs and nether regions lack life? Do you look back on the days of your youth with envy? Are the pleasures of the flesh now buried and forgot? Victor’s “Vitae” will bring life where life has long been lost: even the oldest warhorse can be a proud stallion once more! Bringing Life to the Dead: from an old family recipe and the best of modern science. To receive signed attestations of the efficacy of Victor’s “Vitae” write to the V. von F. Company, 1b Cheap Street, London.

It was a cheap rooming house in Shoreditch. There was a policeman at the front door. Lestrade greeted him by name, and made to usher us in, and I was ready to enter, but my friend squatted on the doorstep, and pulled a magnifying glass from his coat pocket. He examined the mud on the wrought iron boot-scraper, prodding at it with his forefinger. Only when he was satisfied would he let us go inside.

We walked upstairs. The room in which the crime had been committed was obvious: it was flanked by two burly constables.

Lestrade nodded to the men, and they stood aside. We walked in.

I am not, as I said, a writer by profession, and I hesitate to describe that place, knowing that my words cannot do it justice. Still, I have begun this narrative, and I fear I must continue. A murder had been committed in that little bedsit. The body, what was left of it, was still there, on the floor. I saw it, but, at first, somehow, I did not see it. What I saw instead was what had sprayed and gushed from the throat and chest of the victim: in colour it ranged from bile-green to grass-green. It had soaked into the threadbare carpet and spattered the wallpaper. I imagined it for one moment the work of some hellish artist, who had decided to create a study in emerald.

After what seemed like a hundred years I looked down at the body, opened like a rabbit on a butcher’s slab, and tried to make sense of what I saw. I removed my hat, and my friend did the same.

He knelt and inspected the body, inspecting the cuts and gashes. Then he pulled out his magnifying glass, and walked over to the wall, examining the gouts of drying ichor.

“We’ve already done that,” said Inspector Lestrade.

“Indeed?” said my friend. “Then what did you make of this, then? I do believe it is a word.”

Lestrade walked to the place my friend was standing, and looked up. There was a word, written in capitals, in green blood, on the faded yellow wallpaper, some little way above Lestrade’s head. “Rache...?” said Lestrade, spelling it out. “Obviously he was going to write Rachel, but he was interrupted. So -- we must look for a woman...”

My friend said nothing. He walked back to the corpse, and picked up its hands, one after the other. The fingertips were clean of ichor. “I think we have established that the word was not written by his Royal Highness –“

“What the Devil makes you say–?”

“My dear Lestrade. Please give me some credit for having a brain. The corpse is obviously not that of a man – the colour of his blood, the number of limbs, the eyes, the position of the face, all these things bespeak the blood royal. While I cannot say which royal line, I would hazard that he is an heir, perhaps... no, second to the throne, ... in one of the German principalities.”

“That is amazing.” Lestrade hesitated, then he said, “This is Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia. He was here in Albion as a guest of Her Majesty Victoria. Here for a holiday and a change of air...”

“For the theatres, the whores and the gaming tables, you mean.”

“If you say so.” Lestrade looked put out. “Anyway, you’ve given us a fine lead with this Rachel woman. Although I don’t doubt we would have found her on our own.”

“Doubtless,” said my friend.

He inspected the room further, commenting acidly several times that the police, with their boots had obscured footprints, and moved things that might have been of use to anyone attempting to reconstruct the events of the previous night.

Still, he seemed interested in a small patch of mud he found behind the door.

Beside the fireplace he found what appeared to be some ash or dirt.

“Did you see this?” he asked Lestrade.

“Her majesty’s police,” replied Lestrade, “tend not to be excited by ash in a fireplace. It’s where ash tends to be found.” And he chuckled at that.

My friend took a pinch of the ash and rubbed between his fingers, then sniffed the remains. Finally, he scooped up what was left of the material and tipped it into a glass vial, which he stoppered and placed in an inner pocket of his coat.

He stood up. “And the body?”

Lestrade said, “The palace will send their own people.”

My friend nodded at me, and together we walked to the door. My friend sighed. “Inspector. Your quest for Miss Rachel may prove fruitless. Among other things, Rache is a German word. It means revenge. Check your dictionary. There are other meanings.”

We reached the bottom of the stair, and walked out onto the street. “You have never seen royalty before this morning, have you?” he asked. I shook my head. “Well, the sight can be unnerving, if you’re unprepared. Why my good fellow – you are trembling!”

“Forgive me. I shall be fine in moments.”

“Would it do you good to walk?” he asked, and I assented, certain that if I did not walk then I would begin to scream.

“West, then,” said my friend, pointing to the dark tower of the Palace. And we commenced to walk.

“So,” said my friend, after some time. “You have never had any personal encounters with any of the crowned heads of Europe?”

“No,” I said.

“I believe I can confidently state that you shall,” he told me. “And not with a corpse this time. Very soon.”

“My dear fellow, whatever makes you believe –?”

In reply he pointed to a carriage, black-painted, that had pulled up fifty yards ahead of us. A man in a black top-hat and a greatcoat stood by the door, holding it open, waiting, silently. A coat of arms familiar to every child in Albion was painted in gold upon the carriage door.

“There are invitations one does not refuse,” said my friend. He doffed his own hat to the footman, and I do believe that he was smiling as he climbed into the box-like space, and relaxed back into the soft leathery cushions.

When I attempted to speak with him during the journey to the Palace, he placed his finger over his lips. Then he closed his eyes and seemed sunk deep in thought. I, for my part, tried to remember what I knew of German royalty, but, apart from the Queen’s consort, Prince Albert, being German, I knew little enough.

I put a hand in my pocket, pulled out a handful of coins – brown and silver, black and copper-green. I stared at the portrait stamped on each of them of our Queen, and felt both patriotic pride and stark dread. I told myself I had once been a military man, and a stranger to fear, and I could remember a time when this had been the plain truth. For a moment I remembered a time when I had been a crack-shot – even, I liked to think, something of a marksman – but my right hand shook as if it were palsied, and the coins jingled and chinked, and I felt only regret.

3. The Palace.

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The Queen’s consort, Prince Albert, was a big man, with an impressive handlebar moustache and a receding hairline, and he was undeniably and entirely human. He met us in the corridor, nodded to my friend and to me, did not ask us for our names or offer to shake hands.

“The Queen is most upset,” he said. He had an accent. He pronounced his S’s as Z’s: Mozt. Upzet. “Franz was one of her favourites. She has so many nephews. But he made her laugh so. You will find the ones who did this to him.”

“I will do my best,” said my friend.

“I have read your monographs,” said Prince Albert. “It was I who told them that you should be consulted. I hope I did right.”

“As do I,” said my friend.

And then the great door was opened, and we were ushered into the darkness and the presence of the Queen.

She was called Victoria, because she had beaten us in battle, seven hundred years before, and she was called Gloriana, because she was glorious, and she was called the Queen, because the human mouth was not shaped to say her true name. She was huge, huger than I had imagined possible, and she squatted in the shadows staring down at us, without moving.

Thizsz muzzst be zsolved. The words came from the shadows.

“Indeed, ma’am,” said my friend.

A limb squirmed and pointed at me. Zstepp forward.

I wanted to walk. My legs would not move.

My friend came to my rescue then. He took me by the elbow and walked me toward her majesty.

Isz not to be afraid. Isz to be worthy. Isz to be a companion. That was what she said to me. Her voice was a very sweet contralto, with a distant buzz. Then the limb uncoiled and extended, and she touched my shoulder. There was a moment, but only a moment, of a pain deeper and more profound than anything I have ever experienced, and then it was replaced by a pervasive sense of well-being. I could feel the muscles in my shoulder relax, and, for the first time since Afghanistan, I was free from pain.

Then my friend walked forward. Victoria spoke to him, yet I could not hear her words; I wondered if they went, somehow, directly from her mind to his, if this was the Queen’s Counsel I had read about in the histories. He replied aloud.

“Certainly, ma’am. I can tell you that there were two other men with your nephew in that room in Shoreditch, that night, the footprints were, although obscured, unmistakable.” And then, “Yes. I understand.... I believe so..... Yes.”

He was quiet when we left the palace, and said nothing to me as we rode back to Baker Street.

It was dark already. I wondered how long we had spent in the Palace.

Fingers of sooty fog twined across the road and the sky.

Upon our return to Baker Street, in the looking glass of my room, I observed that the frog-white skin across my shoulder had taken on a pinkish tinge. I hoped that I was not imagining it, that it was not merely the moonlight through the window.

4. The Performance.

LIVER COMPLAINTS?! BILIOUS ATTACKS?! NEURASTHENIC DISTURBANCES?! QUINSY?! ARTHRITIS?! These are just a handful of the complaints for which a professional EXSANGUINATION can be the remedy. In our offices we have sheaves of TESTIMONIALS which can be inspected by the public at any time. Do not put your health in the hands of amateurs!! We have been doing this for a very long time: V. TEPES – PROFESSIONAL EXSANGUINATOR. (Remember! It is pronounced Tzsep-pesh!) Romania, Paris, London, Whitby. You’ve tried the rest – NOW TRY THE BEST!!

That my friend was a master of disguise should have come as no surprise to me, yet surprise me it did. Over the next ten days a strange assortment of characters came in through our door in Baker Street – an elderly Chinese man, a young roué, a fat, red-haired woman of whose former profession there could be little doubt, and a venerable old buffer, his foot swollen and bandaged from gout. Each of them would walk into my friend’s room, and, with a speed that would have done justice to a music-hall “quick change artist”, my friend would walk out.

He would not talk about what he had been doing on these occasions, preferring to relax, staring off into space, occasionally making notations on any scrap of paper to hand, notations I found, frankly, incomprehensible. He seemed entirely preoccupied, so much so that I found myself worrying about his well-being. And then, late one afternoon, he came home dressed in his own clothes, with an easy grin upon his face, and he asked if I was interested in the theatre.

“As much as the next man,” I told him.

“Then fetch your opera glasses,” he told me. “We are off to Drury Lane.”

I had expected a light opera, or something of the kind, but instead I found myself in what must have been the worst theatre in Drury Lane, for all that it had named itself after the royal court – and to be honest, it was barely in Drury Lane at all, being situated at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of the road, where the avenue approaches the Rookery of St. Giles. On my friend’s advice I concealed my wallet, and, following his example, I carried a stout stick.

Once we were seated in the stalls (I had bought a threepenny orange from one of the lovely young women who sold them to the members of the audience, and I sucked it as we waited), my friend said, quietly, “You should only count yourself lucky that you did not need to accompany me to the gambling dens or the brothels. Or the madhouses – another place that Prince Franz delighted in visiting, as I have learned. But there was nowhere he went to more than once. Nowhere but –“

The orchestra struck up, and the curtain was raised. My friend was silent.

It was a fine enough show in its way: three one-act plays were performed. Comic songs were sung between the acts. The leading man was tall, languid, and had a fine singing voice; the leading lady was elegant, and her voice carried through all the theatre; the comedian had a fine touch for patter songs.

The first play was a broad comedy of mistaken identities: the leading man played a pair of identical twins who had never met, but had managed, by a set of comical misadventures, each to find himself engaged to be married to the same young lady – who, amusingly, thought herself engaged to only one man. Doors swung open and closed as the actor changed from identity to identity.

The second play was a heartbreaking tale of an orphan girl who starved in the snow selling hothouse violets – her grandmother recognised her at the last, and swore that she was the babe stolen ten years back by bandits, but it was too late, and the frozen little angel breathed her last. I must confess I found myself wiping my eyes with my linen handkerchief more than once.

The performance finished with a rousing historical narrative: the entire company played the men and women of a village on the shore of the ocean, seven hundred years before our modern times. They saw shapes rising from the sea, in the distance. The hero joyously proclaimed to the villagers that these were the Old Ones whose coming was foretold, returning to us from R’lyeh, and from dim Carcosa, and from the plains of Leng, where they had slept, or waited, or passed out the time of their death. The comedian opined that the other villagers had all been eating too many pies and drinking too much ale, and they were imagining the shapes. A portly gentleman playing a priest of the Roman God tells the villagers that the shapes in the sea were monsters and demons, and must be destroyed.

At the climax, the hero beat the priest to death with his own crucifer, and prepared to welcome Them as They came. The heroine sang a haunting aria, whilst, in an astonishing display of magic-lantern trickery, it seemed as if we saw Their shadows cross the sky at the back of the stage: the Queen of Albion herself, and the Black One of Egypt (in shape almost like a man), followed by the Ancient Goat, Parent to a Thousand, Emperor of all China, and the Czar Unanswerable, and He Who Presides over the New World, and the White Lady of the Antarctic Fastness, and the others. And as each shadow crossed the stage, or appeared to, from out of every throat in the gallery came, unbidden, a mighty “Huzzah!” until the air itself seemed to vibrate. The moon rose in the painted sky, and then, at its height, in one final moment of theatrical magic, it turned from a pallid yellow, as it was in the old tales, to the comforting crimson of the moon that shines down upon us all today.

The members of the cast took their bows and their curtain calls to cheers and laughter, and the curtain fell for the last time, and the show was done.

"There,” said my friend. “What did you think?”

“Jolly, jolly good,” I told him, my hands sore from applauding.

“Stout fellow,” he said, with a smile. “Let us go backstage.”

We walked outside and into an alley beside the theatre, to the stage door, where a thin woman with a wen on her cheek knitted busily. My friend showed her a visiting card, and she directed us into the building and up some steps to a small communal dressing room.

Oil lamps and candles guttered in front of smeared looking-glasses, and men and women were taking off their make-up and costumes with no regard to the proprieties of gender. I averted my eyes. My friend seemed unperturbed. “Might I talk to Mr Vernet?” he asked, loudly.

A young woman who had played the heroine’s best friend in the first play, and the saucy innkeeper’s daughter in the last, pointed us to the end of the room. “Sherry! Sherry Vernet!” she called.

The young man who stood up in response was lean; less conventionally handsome than he had seemed from the other side of the footlights. He peered at us quizzically. “I do not believe I have had the pleasure...?”

“My name is Henry Camberley,” said my friend, drawling his speech somewhat. “You may have heard of me.”

“I must confess that I have not had that privilege,” said Vernet.

My friend presented the actor with an engraved card.

The man looked at the card with unfeigned interest. “A theatrical promoter? From the New World? My, my. And this is...?” He looked at me.

“This is a friend of mine, Mister Sebastian. He is not of the profession.”

I muttered something about having enjoyed the performance enormously, and shook hands with the actor.

My friend said, “Have you ever visited the New World?”

“I have not yet had that honour,” admitted Vernet, “although it has always been my dearest wish.”

“Well, my good man,” said my friend, with the easy informality of a New Worlder. “Maybe you’ll get your wish. That last play. I’ve never seen anything like it. Did you write it?”

“Alas, no. The playwright is a good friend of mine. Although I devised the mechanism of the magic lantern shadow show. You’ll not see finer on the stage today.”

“Would you give me the playwright’s name? Perhaps I should speak to him directly, this friend of yours.”

Vernet shook his head. “That will not be possible, I am afraid. He is a professional man, and does not wish his connection with the stage publically to be known.”

“I see.” My friend pulled a pipe from his pocket, and put it in his mouth. Then he patted his pockets. “I am sorry,” he began. “I have forgotten to bring my tobacco pouch.”

“I smoke a strong black shag,” said the actor, “but if you have no objection –"

“None!” said my friend, heartily. “Why, I smoke a strong shag myself,” and he filled his pipe with the actor’s tobacco, and the two men puffed away, while my friend described a vision he had for a play that could tour the cities of the New World, from Manhattan Island all the way to the furthest tip of the continent in the distant south. The first act would be the last play we had seen. The rest of the play might perhaps tell of the dominion of the Old Ones over humanity and its gods, perhaps telling what might have happened if people had had no Royal Families to look up to – a world of barbarism and darkness – “But your mysterious professional man would be the play’s author, and what occurs would be his alone to decide,” interjected my friend. “Our drama would be his. But I can guarantee you audiences beyond your imaginings, and a significant share of the takings at the door. Let us say fifty per-cent!”

“This is most exciting,” said Vernet. “I hope it will not turn out to have been a pipe-dream!”

“No sir, it shall not!” said my friend, puffing on his own pipe, chuckling at the man’s joke. “Come to my rooms in Baker Street tomorrow morning, after breakfast-time, say at ten, in company with your author friend, and I shall have the contracts drawn up and waiting.”

With that the actor clambered up onto his chair and clapped his hands for silence. “Ladies and Gentlemen of the company, I have an announcement to make,” he said, his resonant voice filling the room. “This gentleman is Henry Camberley, the theatrical promoter, and he is proposing to take us across the Atlantic Ocean, and on to fame and fortune.”

There were several cheers, and the comedian said, “Well, it’ll make a change from herrings and pickled-cabbage,” and the company laughed.

And it was to the smiles of all of them that we walked out of the theatre and out onto the fog-wreathed streets.

“My dear fellow,” I said. “Whatever was–"

“Not another word,” said my friend. “There are many ears in the city.”

And not another word was spoken until we had hailed a cab, and clambered inside, and were rattling up the Charing Cross Road.

And even then, before he said anything, my friend took his pipe from his mouth, and emptied the half-smoked contents of the bowl into a small tin. He pressed the lid onto the tin, and placed it into his pocket.

“There,” he said. “That’s the Tall Man found, or I’m a Dutchman. Now, we just have to hope that the cupidity and the curiosity of the Limping Doctor proves enough to bring him to us tomorrow morning.”

“The Limping Doctor?”

My friend snorted. “That is what I have been calling him. It was obvious, from footprints and much else besides, when we saw the Prince’s body, that two men had been in that room that night: a tall man, who, unless I miss my guess, we have just encountered, and a smaller man with a limp, who eviscerated the prince with a professional skill that betrays the medical man.”

“A doctor?”

“Indeed. I hate to say this, but it is my experience that when a Doctor goes to the bad, he is a fouler and darker creature than the worst cut-throat. There was Huston, the acid-bath man, and Campbell, who brought the procrustean bed to Ealing...” and he carried on in a similar vein for the rest of our journey.

The cab pulled up beside the kerb. “That’ll be one and tenpence,” said the cabbie. My friend tossed him a florin, which he caught, and tipped to his ragged tall hat. “Much obliged to you both,” he called out, as the horse clopped out into the fog.

We walked to our front door. As I unlocked the door, my friend said, “Odd. Our cabbie just ignored that fellow on the corner.”

“They do that at the end of a shift,” I pointed out.

“Indeed they do,” said my friend.

I dreamed of shadows that night, vast shadows that blotted out the sun, and I called out to them in my desperation, but they did not listen.

5. The Skin and the Pit.

This year, step into the Spring - with a spring in your step! JACK’S. Boots, Shoes and Brogues. Save your soles! Heels our speciality. JACK’S. And do not forget to visit our new clothes and fittings emporium in the East End – featuring evening wear of all kinds, hats, novelties, canes, swordsticks &c. JACK’S OF PICCADILLY. It’s all in the Spring!

Inspector Lestrade was the first to arrive.

“You have posted your men in the street?” asked my friend.

“I have,” said Lestrade. “With strict orders to let anyone in who comes, but to arrest anyone trying to leave.”

“And you have handcuffs with you?”

In reply, Lestrade put his hand in his pocket, and jangled two pairs of cuffs, grimly.

“Now sir,” he said. “While we wait, why do you not tell me what we are waiting for?”

My friend pulled his pipe out of his pocket. He did not put it in his mouth, but placed it on the table in front of him. Then he took the tin from the night before, and a glass vial I recognised as the one he had had in the room in Shoreditch.

“There,” he said. “The coffin-nail, as I trust it shall prove, for our Master Vernet.” He paused. Then he took out his pocket watch, laid it carefully on the table. “We have several minutes before they arrive.” He turned to me. “What do you know of the Restorationists?”

“Not a blessed thing,” I told him.

Lestrade coughed. “If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about,” he said, “perhaps we should leave it there. Enough’s enough.”

“Too late for that,” said my friend. “For there are those who do not believe that the coming of the Old Ones was the fine thing we all know it to be. Anarchists to a man, they would see the old ways restored – mankind in control of its own destiny, if you will.”

“I will not hear this sedition spoken,” said Lestrade. “I must warn you –"

“I must warn you not to be such a fathead,” said my friend.”Because it was the Restorationists that killed Prince Franz Drago. They murder, they kill, in a vain effort to force our masters to leave us alone in the darkness. The Prince was killed by a rache - it’s an old term for a hunting dog, Inspector, as you would know if you had looked in a dictionary. It also means revenge. And the hunter left his signature on the wallpaper in the murder-room, just as an artist might sign a canvas. But he was not the one who killed the Prince.”

“The Limping Doctor!” I exclaimed.

“Very good. There was a tall man there that night – I could tell his height, for the word was written at eye level. He smoked a pipe – the ash and dottle sat unburnt in the fireplace, and he had tapped out his pipe with ease on the mantel, something a smaller man would not have done. The tobacco was an unusual blend of shag. The footprints in the room had, for the most part been almost obliterated by your men, but there were several clear prints behind the door and by the window. Someone had waited there: a smaller man from his stride, who put his weight on his right leg. On the path outside I had several clear prints, and the different colours of clay on the bootscraper outside gave me more information: a tall man, who had accompanied the Prince into those rooms, and had, later, walked out. Waiting for them to arrive was the man who had sliced up the Prince so impressively...”

Lestrade made an uncomfortable noise that did not quite become a word.

“I have spent many days retracing the movements of his highness. I went from gambling hell to brothel to dining den to madhouse looking for our pipe-smoking man and his friend. I made no progress until I thought to check the newspapers of Bohemia, searching for a clue to the Prince’s recent activities there, and in them I learned that an English Theatrical Troupe had been in Prague last month, and had performed before Prince Franz Drago...”

“Good lord,” I said. “So that Sherry Vernet fellow...”

“Is a Restorationist. Exactly.”

I was shaking my head in wonder at my friend’s intelligence and skills of observation, when there was a knock on the door.

“This will be our quarry!” said my friend. “Careful now!”

Lestrade put his hand deep into his pocket, where I had no doubt he kept a pistol. He swallowed, nervously.

My friend called out, “Please, come in!”

The door opened.

It was not Vernet, nor was it a Limping Doctor. It was one of the young street Arabs who earn a crust running errands – “in the employ of Messrs. Street and Walker”, as we used to say when I was young. “Please sirs,” he said. “Is there a Mister Henry Camberley here? I was asked by a gentleman to deliver a note.”

“I’m he,” said my friend. “And for a sixpence, what can you tell me about the gentleman who gave you the note?”

The young lad, who volunteered that his name was Wiggins, bit the sixpence before making it vanish, and then told us that the cheery cove who gave him the note was on the tall side, with dark hair, and, he added, he had been smoking a pipe.

I have the note here, and take the liberty of transcribing it.

My Dear Sir,

I do not address you as Henry Camberley, for it is a name to which you have no claim. I am surprised that you did not announce yourself under your own name, for it is a fine one, and one that does you credit. I have read a number of your papers, when I have been able to obtain them. Indeed, I corresponded with you quite profitably two years ago about certain theoretical anomalies in your paper on the Dynamics of an Asteroid.

I was amused to meet you, yesterday evening. A few tips which might save you bother in times to come, in the profession you currently follow. Firstly, a pipe-smoking man might possibly have a brand-new, unused pipe in his pocket, and no tobacco, but it is exceedingly unlikely – at least as unlikely as a theatrical promoter with no idea of the usual customs of recompense on a tour, who is accompanied by a taciturn ex-army officer (Afghanistan, unless I miss my guess). Incidentally, while you are correct that the streets of London have ears, it might also behoove you in future not to take the first cab that comes along. Cab-drivers have ears too, if they choose to use them.

You are certainly correct in one of your suppositions: it was indeed I who lured the half-blood creature back to the room in Shoreditch.

If it is any comfort to you, having learned a little of his recreational predilections, I had told him I had procured for him a girl, abducted from a convent in Cornwall where she had never seen a man, and that it would only take his touch, and the sight of his face, to tip her over into a perfect madness.

Had she existed, he would have feasted on her madness while he took her, like a man sucking the flesh from a ripe peach leaving nothing behind but the skin and the pit. I have seen them do this. I have seen them do far worse. And it is not the price we pay for peace and prosperity. It is too great a price for that.

The good doctor – who believes as I do, and who did indeed write our little performance, for he has some crowd-pleasing skills – was waiting for us, with his knives.

I send this note, not as a catch-me-if-you-can taunt, for we are gone, the estimable doctor and I, and you shall not find us, but to tell you that it was good to feel that, if only for a moment, I had a worthy adversary. Worthier by far than inhuman creatures from beyond the Pit.

I fear the Strand Players will need to find themselves a new leading man.

I will not sign myself Vernet, and until the hunt is done and the world restored, I beg you to think of me simply as,

Rache.

Inspector Lestrade ran from the room, calling to his men. They made young Wiggins take them to the place where the man had given him the note, for all the world as if Vernet the actor would be waiting there for them, a-smoking of his pipe. From the window we watched them run, my friend and I, and we shook our heads.

“They will stop and search all the trains leaving London, all the ships leaving Albion for Europe or the New World,” said my friend, “Looking for a tall man, and his companion, a smaller, thickset medical man, with a slight limp. They will close the ports. Every way out of the country will be blocked.”

“Do you think they will catch him, then?”

My friend shook his head. “I may be wrong,” he said, “But I would wager that he and his friend are even now only a mile or so away, in the rookery of St. Giles, where the police will not go except by the dozen. And they will hide up there until the hue and cry have died away. And then they will be about their business.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because,” said my friend, “If our positions were reversed, it is what I would do. You should burn the note, by the way.”

I frowned. “But surely it’s evidence,” I said.

“It’s seditionary nonsense,” said my friend.

And I should have burned it. Indeed, I told Lestrade I had burned it, when he returned, and he congratulated me on my good sense. Lestrade kept his job, and Prince Albert wrote a note to my friend congratulating him on his deductions, while regretting that the perpetrator was still at large.

They have not yet caught Sherry Vernet, or whatever his name really is, nor was any trace of his murderous accomplice, tentatively identified as a former military surgeon named John (or perhaps James) Watson. Curiously, it was revealed that he had also been in Afghanistan. I wonder if we ever met.

My shoulder, touched by the Queen, continues to improve, the flesh fills and it heals. Soon I shall be a dead-shot once more.

One night when we were alone, several months ago, I asked my friend if he remembered the correspondence referred to in the letter from the man who signed himself Rache. My friend said that he remembered it well, and that “Sigerson” (for so the actor had called himself then, claiming to be an Icelander) had been inspired by an equation of my friend’s to suggest some wild theories furthering the relationship between mass, energy and the hypothetical speed of light. “Nonsense, of course,” said my friend, without smiling. “But inspired and dangerous nonsense nonetheless.”

The palace eventually sent word that the Queen was pleased with my friend’s accomplishments in the case, and there the matter has rested.

I doubt my friend will leave it alone, though; it will not be over until one of them has killed the other.

I kept the note. I have said things in this retelling of events that are not to be said. If I were a sensible man I would burn all these pages, but then, as my friend taught me, even ashes can give up their secrets. Instead, I shall place these papers in a strongbox at my bank with instructions that the box may not be opened until long after anyone now living is dead. Although, in the light of the recent events in Russia, I fear that day may be closer than any of us would care to think.

S________ M____ Major (Ret’d)

Baker Street,

London, New Albion, 1881

DECISIONS

Michael A. Burstein

Commander Aaron Eliassen threw the tray across his cell. It smashed against the far wall, covering the white molded plaster in a mix of browns, greens, and reds. The tray slid down to the floor, clattered for a moment, then fell still.

Aaron glared around the small, featureless white room at nothing in particular. For the twentieth time, or the hundredth, or perhaps the thousandth, he ran and smashed himself against the locked door, hoping that perhaps this time he would break apart the unseen hinges.

As before, the door refused to budge. All he succeeded in doing was getting his blue jumpsuit even filthier than before.

Aaron placed his eye against the crack between the door and the wall, again trying to peer through to the outside, to get some idea of what lay beyond. He tilted and twisted his head to get some sort of view, but all in vain.

He shuffled back from the door until he stood in the center of the room, then looked up at the ceiling. Although he had not yet spotted a microphone or surveillance camera, he assumed he was being monitored. “You hear me?” he shouted. He pointed at the mess of food that lay in a lump on the floor. “Did you see that? I'm not going to eat anymore. Not until I get some answers."

No one responded. Eliassen walked over to the discolored wall and stared at the gloppy mess of stew, asparagus, and gelatin. His stomach rumbled slightly, but he ignored it.

"Let me out!” he screamed. He beat against the door with both his fists in unison, and then when that got tiring he changed the rhythm. Right fist, left fist, right fist, left fist. He walked around the perimeter of the room, continuing to bang against the wall, until he had come back to the door and his hands felt raw. He dropped his arms to his sides, panting. How many times had he done this? He couldn't say. He couldn't remember.

"Talk to me,” he said between breaths. “Someone, anyone, talk to me. Please."

He walked over to the bunk, stared at it, and then, in defiance, he collapsed onto the floor. For the third or fourth time, he cried himself to sleep.

* * * *

Aaron heard the voice, a deep one, calling his name. “Commander Eliassen. Commander Eliassen. Please wake up."

Aaron opened his eyes and immediately shielded his face with his arm. A bright light shone through the open—finally, open!—door. A figure stood in the doorway, with the light forming an aura around it.

Aaron fought down an urge to jump up and run through the door, knowing it would get him nowhere. Instead, he eased himself up, barely noticing that although he had fallen asleep on the floor, somehow he had ended up in the bunk. “Who is that?” he rasped.

The figure nodded to someone outside, and the door clicked shut, once again blending into the wall with but a tiny crack around it. Aaron's eyes adjusted to the ambient fluorescent light. He glanced at the far wall; someone had cleaned all of the food off of it, but a nauseating spot of brown color remained on the floor.

"Do you recognize me?” the figure asked.

Aaron studied the man's face and body for a moment. Black hair, solid jaw, etched wrinkles, blue blazer—it could not be possible, and yet Aaron did recognize the man.

"Director Carter?” he asked softly. “Gabe?"

Gabe nodded, his lips pressed together tightly.

Aaron jumped out of the bed and ran towards his friend, a mixture of anger, fear, and relief playing out within him. He raised his arms, but whether he intended to hug Gabe or choke him, even Aaron could not say. He figured he'd decide once within range.

Before he could get too close, however, Gabe pulled a revolver out of a shoulder holster and pointed it straight at him. Aaron stopped short. He lifted his gaze from the gun and stared into Gabe's eyes, trying to read his friend's blank expression.

"Gabe?” he said again. “Is it really you?"

Gabe nodded once. “Yes, Aaron, it's me. Please do not come any closer.” His voice sounded cold but uncertain.

"I don't understand,” Aaron said.

Gabe held the gun steady. “If you get violent, I will shoot you. If that doesn't stop you, the soldiers standing outside will fill the room with gas and knock us both out."

Aaron nodded. He backed away from Gabe with measured steps and sat on the bunk. “May I ask a question?"

Gabe slid the revolver back into its holster, but kept his eyes on Aaron the whole time. “Go ahead."

"What the hell's going on here?"

Gabe looked around the room for a moment. When his eyes finally settled on Aaron's face, Aaron noticed that they were bloodshot. “Perhaps you can tell me,” Gabe said.

Aaron's jaw dropped. “I should tell you?"

Gabe nodded. “Yes. Tell me everything that happened after you returned from your mission."

"After I returned? But the mission itself—I need to tell you about my discoveries—"

"Don't!” Gabe shouted, holding up both his hands. “Only tell me about everything that happened to you since you landed."

Aaron's anger had disappeared into his confusion; it now returned stronger than before. He repressed an urge to spit. “Don't you already know? Look around you!"

Gabe made no move to turn his head, so Aaron continued. “You locked me in a cell. You must know this already. Why are you torturing me?"

Gabe shook his head so slightly that Aaron could barely see it. “Assume I don't know already. Assume I need to hear it from you. From the instant you made contact with Earth."

Aaron yawned, cracking his jaw. “Well. The instant I made contact, hmm? Houston told me to bring her in at Edwards instead of the Cape. I came in fine, a perfect two-pointer."

"And then?"

Aaron glowered. “And then a bunch of army soldiers grabbed me out of the shuttle and dragged me into this cell. No one listened to my protestations or questions; it's as if I spoke Martian."

"And what have you done since?"

"Done?” Aaron made no effort to hide the sarcasm in his voice. “Why, I took in a show and made out with a dancing girl. I'm planning to introduce her to Mom next week.” He tensed up. “What in God's name do you think I've done?"

"I'm sorry. It was necessary."

"Necessary? It was necessary for NASA to treat me like a common criminal? No—worse than a common criminal. No television, no radio, no Internet access—not even a telephone to call a lawyer, let alone my mom. Is this still America or what?"

Gabe lowered his eyes. “It's still America."

"How long have I been here? Counting the meals pushed through the slot and the cycle of the lights, I'm guessing four days."

"Four days sounds about right."

"'Sounds about right?’ Don't you know?"

Gabe placed his hand on his chest, near the holster. “Aaron, what's the date?"

"Huh?"

"You remember your mission schedule?"

"Of course I do."

"Well, then. If we assume that you landed four days ago, and have been here ever since, then what's today's date?"

Aaron thought for a moment. “If I returned on October tenth, as scheduled, then today's October fourteenth."

Gabe sighed. “It's not."

"It's not?"

"No. It's May eleventh."

Aaron narrowed his eyes. “Are you telling me I was in space for over a year? Impossible. I didn't have enough supplies to last for that long."

"You misunderstood me. Today's May eleventh, a week before your launch."

* * * *

That evening, still locked in his cell and eating bland food off one of the government-issued trays, Aaron went over the conversation from that afternoon. At first, he had refused to accept his old friend's statement.

"What are you talking about?” he had asked.

Gabe sighed, and slid down with his back against the wall next to the door. He crouched on the floor, looking ready to jump up if Aaron made any sudden moves. “What I mean is,” he said, drawing each word out, “you haven't left yet."

"Bullshit! I've gone and returned.” He stood up from the bunk and pointed at himself. “See? Here I am."

Gabe appeared to tense up. “Oh, I can't argue with the fact that you've returned, Aaron,” he said, waving a hand. “I mean, I'm talking to you right now."

Aaron settled onto the bunk again. “Well, then?"

"Well, then.” Gabe sighed. “The thing of it is, I also talked to you this morning."

"This morning? No way. I would have remembered.” Even though, Aaron thought, he had no way of knowing the time, since no clock hung in the cell.

Gabe chuckled. “I'm sure you do remember the conversation. I spoke with the real—I mean, the one of you who hasn't left yet."

"And what did we discuss?"

"We talked about the wafer with all the names on it.” Gabe stared at his face. “You said—"

"I said that it was a waste of my weight allowance."

"Yes."

Aaron snorted. “I remember that conversation. From over six months ago."

Gabe shook his head. “It happened this morning."

Aaron leaned forward. “Prove it to me."

Gabe stood up again and held out his arms in a gesture of helplessness. “I wish I could."

"Not good enough. If this is for real, then tell me—how did I travel back in time?"

"We believe your ship followed a Gott closed timelike curve, if you know what that means."

Aaron shook his head. “I don't."

"Do you want me to try to explain it to you?"

Aaron smiled. “I wouldn't consider it proof."

Gabe put his fingers together and stared at the wall over Aaron's head. “Think about my dilemma for a moment, even if you consider it just a theoretical exercise. How could I prove to you that you're in the past? You've lived through it already. There's nothing I can show you that you haven't already seen.” He paused. “I suppose you could ask me questions to try to trip me up, but I don't see how that would work."

A sudden realization hit Aaron. “But I could prove to you I'm from the future, is that it? Tell you what's going to happen tomorrow?"

The color drained from Gabe's face. “No,” he said, “do not do that, under any circumstances."

"Why not?” Aaron looked around at the walls. “Isn't that why you locked me in here?"

"No. We locked you in here to avoid any paradoxes."

"Paradoxes?"

Gabe sighed. “Aaron, what would you do if you managed to build a time machine? What would you use it for?"

Aaron's nose itched; he scratched it. “You tell me."

"You might use it to give yourself information about the future, so as to change it. But if you change it, then where did the information come from in the first place?"

Aaron thought for a moment. “I've heard of this. The Grandfather Paradox, right? I go back in time and kill my grandfather, and then I was never born. But then how did I go back in time if I never existed?"

Gabe nodded, a small smile on his face. “Good. You do understand."

Exasperated, Aaron asked, “What do I understand? Tell me."

"You understand why we had to lock you up."

Aaron glared at Gabe and clenched his fists. He suppressed the rage he felt. “I do not understand that at all,” he said in measured tones.

"We had to keep you away from everyone else to avoid contaminating the present with information from the future."

Aaron grunted. “I suppose,” he said, “I could grant that necessity."

Gabe sighed. “I'm glad you can see it my way. My own presence here is a risk. If you told me something about the future, it could destroy the Universe."

Aaron stared at his friend for a moment, then laughed. The hollow laughter rippled and cascaded, and wouldn't stop. After a moment, Aaron began coughing.

"Are you okay, Aaron?"

Aaron waved his friend's concern away as the last of his coughs spasmed out. “Yeah, I'm fine. It's just that you sounded so melodramatic.” He mimicked Gabe's serious tone. “'It could destroy the Universe,'” he repeated, and he started laughing again.

"It could."

Aaron stopped laughing. “Literally?"

"Yes."

Aaron thought for a moment. If Gabe was telling the truth ... “Then coming in here to see me must be some risk."

Gabe shrugged. “You weren't doing too well, Aaron. Somebody had to explain."

Aaron looked into Gabe's eyes and realized that Gabe himself must have fought for the right to tell Aaron why they had locked him away. For a moment, Aaron felt affection for his friend. But it quickly faded. After all, Gabe might have fought to talk to him, but what Aaron really wanted, really needed—

"Let me go, Gabe."

"I can't. It'll create paradoxes. We need to avoid them."

"You can't avoid any paradoxes! Hasn't my presence here already affected the timeline, if you believe your nonsense?"

Gabe smiled. “And now you understand my problem, old friend. According to Doctor—I mean, according to our physicists, I have to minimize your impact here as much as possible."

Aaron shook his head. “The only way you could do that is by keeping me locked away in here until the time comes for me to return."

Gabe stared at him silently for a few seconds, and Aaron suddenly felt cold.

"No,” he said. “No way. You can't possibly—"

"What choice do I have?"

Aaron's mind raced through the possibilities. “You've got a million of them! If you believe this crap, just let me out after the shuttle leaves on May eighteenth."

"No good,” Gabe said. “We can't explain your quick return. We're going to have to keep you here until October, without any other human contact. But I will push for a TV for you. Think of it this way. It will let you catch up with everything you missed, in real time.” He paused. “I'm sorry."

The door clicked open, and Gabe dashed through it. Aaron had rushed him, screaming, but by the time he got to the door, it had shut tightly in front of him.

And now, as he finished his food and left the tray on the floor, Aaron considered his options. He refused to stay locked up, without human contact, for six months. What could he do? He had to escape, somehow. But how? The door remained locked at all times, and his incessant tapping and banging on the walls had revealed no hollowness anywhere around.

Then he realized something. He had never been awake for the delivery of the food. They had to get it into and out of the room somehow...

Aaron smiled. Yawning loudly and deliberately, he walked over to the bunk and lay down. He closed his eyes, fought to stay awake, and waited as if he had all the time in the world. When the door finally clicked open, he was ready.

* * * *

Only one guard came in to retrieve the tray while Aaron slept. Only one, probably to reduce “contamination” from the future, as Gabe had put it. A lucky break, but Aaron had managed to surprise him. The guard now lay unconscious in the cell as Aaron dashed through the corridors of the base, wondering where he could run to.

As Aaron ran, a feeling of familiarity snuck up on him. He knew the base, he knew it intimately, and this place looked very much like the way he remembered it.

He stopped. Could he really have traveled into the past? Was today really May eleventh—perhaps now May twelfth?

If it really was a week before he launched, then Aaron—his earlier self—would still be here in California, doing some last minute prep work before flying to Florida. They kept him at the base, going over the details of the mission, checking his health, and generally giving him busywork until the time came to leave.

Aaron had nowhere else to run to, and an idea had already begun forming in his mind. Quickly, he navigated his way to his old quarters, in the residential part of the base. He found his door and jimmied it open, glad to see that he still had the lock picking skills he had taught himself in college.

The door opened onto a dark room, with the ambient light of the corridor illuminating the nondescript bed, desk, computer, and chair. He snuck into the room, closed the door gently behind him, and flipped on the light switch. The man lying on the bed groaned and moved an arm to cover his eyes.

Aaron strode over to him, shook the man awake, and found himself face to face with—himself. Despite his expecting this on an intellectual level, his breath still caught in his throat.

The other Aaron's eyes filled with fear. He opened his mouth, and Aaron quickly placed his hand over it. God, this felt weird.

"Aaron, don't shout, don't scream. I need to talk to you. Please relax. I'm not going to hurt you.” He paused. “Do you understand?"

The other Aaron nodded, although fear still showed in his eyes. Slowly, Aaron removed his hand.

"How are you?” he asked.

The other Aaron sat up in his bed and pulled his body back into a defensive position. “What the hell's going on? How did you get in here?"

"Take a good look at me, Aaron. I'm you."

Aaron waited while his younger self studied his features. Finally, the younger Aaron said, “This isn't possible."

"That's what I've been trying to tell Gabe. Apparently, when you—when I—went on the deep space mission, we followed some sort of closed something something loop. I ended up back here, in the past."

"How is this possible?"

Aaron shook his head. “I can only think of one thing, and I tried to tell Gabe, but he wouldn't listen.” He sat down next to his younger self. “Halfway through the mission, at the edge of the solar system, I found something, a colorful wall of light. I didn't discover it until I hit it, but it must have been that closed something something curve Gabe told me about. When I passed through it, I must have traveled back in time."

The younger Aaron scrunched his eyes closed and shook his head. “I'm dreaming."

"I wish. For a while I thought I was. But apparently, it's all real. I must really have traveled into the past.” He looked off to the side. “Except—except that I don't remember this conversation."

"What?” his other self asked.

Aaron laughed as something occurred to him. “Listen, you. If I had traveled back in time, and met my past self—meaning you—shouldn't my future self—meaning me—remember this conversation? Wouldn't I be forming new memories for every second of this conversation?"

The other Aaron shook his head. “I don't know. I don't know what's going on."

Aaron shrugged. “Well, I don't know much of the science of time travel either. But it seems pretty likely to me. And that means that I'm not in the past."

"So where—I mean when—I mean, what's going on?"

"Stop babbling,” Aaron said. “It makes you—me—look like an idiot.” He sighed. “Now I don't know what's going on. Maybe the anomaly thrust me into a parallel universe, similar to mine but a few months out of sync. Perhaps if I search around, I'll find something different, a clue that I really have jumped universes. Or maybe—” He cut off, thinking.

"Yes?"

"I don't know. But I know this much—I'm not in the past. And I didn't even have to kill my grandfather to prove it.” He grinned at his other self. “Or you."

The younger Aaron suddenly jumped out of the bed and lunged towards the desk.

Oh, shit, Aaron thought. He's going for my gun.

Aaron lurched at his younger self, his right shoulder aiming directly at the other man's chest. The younger Aaron went down, bent over and panting to get his breath back.

"No, I'm not going to kill you,” Aaron said. “But I'm not going to be able to convince Gabe to free me either. Unless—” He walked over to the desk, opened the top drawer, and pulled out the gun. He pointed it at Aaron and said, “When you get your breath back, take off your clothes. We're switching places."

* * * *

Despite his conviction that he had fallen into a parallel universe rather than the past, Aaron's life for the week before the launch followed an eerily familiar track. He couldn't possibly remember every single detail of his life from six months ago, but nothing happened that seemed out of place. He finished his training, flew to Florida, boarded the DSS, and launched.

And, halfway into the mission, Aaron found himself back at the anomaly, the weird colorful, curving wall of light he had encountered just outside the orbit of the Pluto-Charon system, which currently sat on the other side of the solar system. He remembered planning to tell Gabe about it just before Gabe told him not to reveal any details of the mission. Well, he thought, Gabe loses out.

It suddenly occurred to him that his escape, his approach here—both felt far too easy. Why didn't he remember this second, long trip to the outer solar system? Why couldn't he recall launching a second time either? What in God's name had happened to him?

He passed through the wall of light and found himself in empty darkness.

* * * *

He opened his eyes and found himself back in his bunk in the cell. Two alien creatures stood in the room with him. They were tall and thin, with human-looking features that appeared stretched out, like in a funhouse mirror.

"Aaron Eliassen,” one of them said in flatly accented English. “You were only partly correct. You did not go back in time, at least not directly. But neither did you fall into a parallel universe."

Slowly, Aaron eased himself out of the bunk. He kept his back to it and paced towards the wall. “Who are you?"

The aliens glanced at each other, and the smaller one spoke. Aaron couldn't differentiate between the voices. “Our name would mean little to you if we gave it in our language. Your species calls itself the Wise Ones; we call ourselves the Ones Who Speak."

Aaron looked back and forth between the two figures, and felt the urge to make a joke. “I'll call you Jabbers."

They looked at him without expression. “As you feel the need,” the smaller one said.

"Do you have names?"

"Again, yes, but—"

"But I wouldn't be able to pronounce them or something. Fine.” He pointed at each in turn, first the larger and then the smaller. “You're George and you're Gracie."

"As you feel—"

"—the need, yeah, I heard you the first time. So why did you tap into my mind and create that illusion for me?"

"You are quicker than we would have anticipated,” Gracie said. “You have already figured out that we had a role in the creation of the illusion of your recent experience."

"Thank you, but I still want answers. What's going on?"

It hesitated, then said, “Did you ever wonder about first contact, Commander Eliassen?"

Aaron thought back to all the movies and TV shows he had seen about aliens. “Sure, who hasn't?"

"We represent an alliance of sentient beings. Whenever we discover a solar system in the process of developing intelligent life, we set up a special wormhole."

"The anomaly,” Aaron said.

"Yes. We placed a boundary at the edge of your solar system, like a giant soap bubble. When you crossed it, it pulled you through a wormhole and transported you here."

Aaron quelled his fears by dwelling on the mundane. “Does that mean that the Pioneer and Voyager space probes were taken off course?"

"No. The system is designed to activate only in the event it detects an actual lifeform, not an artifact."

"Why?"

"Because only then do we know that a race has achieved the ability to colonize the galaxy."

Aaron stifled a laugh. “Humans are a far cry from colonizing the galaxy."

"Nevertheless, your race is at a beginning. And if we let you continue your explorations, you would soon discover wormhole travel and our alliance."

"We just have,” Aaron said.

The aliens remained silent for a moment. Then the larger one took over the discussion. “Actually, you have that the wrong way around. We have discovered you. We needed to study your world. Our alliance needed to make sure that your species had developed to the point where you could accept our existence, become a part of our alliance. So we reached into your mind, let you think that you had returned to Earth, and let the scenario play out. So that we could understand your race as completely as possible."

The smaller alien said, “Unfortunately, your will was most resistant."

Aaron cocked his head at it. “What does that mean?"

"You were unwilling to create a present for yourself, so you replayed your experiences in the past, over and over, until finally your subconscious realized that you were trapped in a loop."

"I don't remember that."

"Of course you wouldn't. Your long-term memories have been recorded once; there was no need for them to code the same exact experiences again. So, instead, you broke out."

He looked around the cell. “How long have I been here?"

The aliens exchanged a glance. “On your scale, about a month."

"So I haven't been gone long enough to be missed. But you can't keep me here much longer."

"They will assume your mission has failed. Besides, soon it will not matter."

Aaron tensed up. “What do you mean, it won't matter?"

The two aliens remained silent, and Aaron felt cold. “Does this mean—you're not planning to destroy the Earth, are you?"

The aliens made a noise that Aaron couldn't understand, but it felt like laughter. “No, we do not destroy the incompatible emerging races. We simply lock them away."

"Lock them away?"

"The wormhole boundary becomes a barrier. Any living creature that enters it on one side of the solar system finds itself emerging on the other side of the solar system. A cosmic loop."

"A torus,” Aaron said, drawing on memory of long-ago mathematics courses. “A four-dimensional donut."

"Exactly. We will lock your solar system into a toroidal shape, so you can never emerge to threaten the galaxy."

Aaron shook his head, and clasped his hands together to keep them from trembling. Still, he shivered. “If you lock us away, when the Sun dies, so will my entire race."

"But that is billions of years in your future. You personally would be long gone by then. It will not matter to you."

Aaron glared at it. “You haven't really learned much about humanity, have you?"

"We have learned enough. What we do may be regrettable, but it is necessary. Your race is too paranoid and violent to allow into the galaxy. You would threaten our alliance."

"We wouldn't,” Aaron said softly. “On the contrary, we're not that paranoid."

The larger alien took over the conversation. “You cannot deny the paranoia that is inherent to your species. Your own people did lock you up when you returned before you had left."

Aaron felt a sudden need to respond to the alien's stupidity with his fists. But he knew that wouldn't help, and in fact, would just make things worse. He took a few deep breaths and then spoke in measured tones. “You know, it's really unfair for you to use a scenario that you yourself created to judge my species."

"Ah, but we did not actually create the scenario in its entirety, Commander Eliassen. We merely initiated it. Your own subconscious mind elaborated it, fleshed it out, and gave it reality. As we said before, we merely allowed the scenario to play out from the starting point. It was our way of learning more about your species, so we could judge you accordingly. And in the reality that you created for yourself, your own people locked you away."

"So they locked me away. Big deal. It was only because they were faced with something unexpected, something they had never seen before."

The aliens just stared silently at Aaron as the seconds passed. After a moment, he realized the implications of his comment, and he sighed. “Okay. I get it."

"Then we shall commence reshaping the space occupied by your solar system."

"Wait!” Aaron's mind raced with desperation. He knew he had to find an argument to ensure the future of the human race, and he reached for the only one that came to mind. “What if I offered you an alternative?"

The aliens gave him a quizzical glance. “Explain."

"Instead of locking us away forever, why not give us more time? Recreate your wormhole boundary twice as far away."

"What would that accomplish?"

"It would give us more time to develop, to mature.” Aaron smiled. “The next human who comes this far might be years away. By then, we'll be less violent, less paranoid."

The alien gave him what appeared to be a sad look. “You cannot guarantee that."

"No,” Aaron admitted. “I can't. But I can tell you this. We may be violent, but we aren't looking to enter space to conquer intelligent life. We're looking to befriend intelligent life, to work together in harmony.” He resisted an impulse to fall to the floor and beg. Instead, he pulled himself a little taller and stared directly into the eyes of the larger alien. “I know you have the power to look into my mind. Do it again. Now. But look at everything it means to be human, not just the violent stuff that you're assuming is all there is."

"What do you expect us to find?"

"You'll see images of paranoia and fear, but also those of joy and hope. You'll see humans hurting each other, but you'll also see us helping each other. You'll see that we have the capacity for a higher morality."

"But why should we recreate the wormhole twice as far away? What is the point of delaying the inevitable?"

Aaron fought to stay calm. “That's just my point. It's not inevitable. We'll grow in that many years. And if we don't, so what? If we're still not acceptable to you, lock us off then. But give us more time, give us a chance. Please."

The aliens looked at each other. “Let us look into your mind, as you have offered."

Aaron nodded, and felt a sudden intrusion into his thoughts. His guts told him to resist, but his mind told him to let them see his life, his experiences, and his world.

Suddenly, Aaron no longer found himself with the aliens. He looked out into a bright light, and realized that he was watching the world from his own eyes at the moment of his birth. The world around him looked hazy, and people moved slowly around him. Then the world sped up, and Aaron became a detached observer in his own life. From a hidden corner of his mind, accompanied by the alien presences, he watched his life unfold. Elementary school, high school, college, the air force, his first kiss, the first time making love, the first time he flew solo, all the tragedies of his life, all the hopes, all his desires, all his dreams...

He blinked, and once more stood in the room with the aliens. They stared at him in silence. The seconds passed, and Aaron continued to wait while they continued staring. Finally, just when he thought he couldn't bear it any longer, the larger alien spoke. “Your proposal is acceptable."

Aaron breathed a sigh of relief. “Good.” He paused. “So, I know you're giving the human race a second chance, but what happens to me now?"

"We will send you back, of course, after wiping your memory of our existence."

Aaron nodded. “I understand,” he said. But, he thought, he would fight to keep his memory as intact as possible.

* * * *

"Houston, this is Deep Space Shuttle One. Please reply. Over."

Gabe's voice came over the radio. “DSS One, this is Houston. How're you doing, Aaron?"

Aaron breathed a sigh of relief. “Much better, now that the lightspeed lag is gone. It's good to be back home. Over."

"Well, you're not quite home yet,” came the amused reply. “We'll get you out of orbit as soon as we can.” Gabe paused. “One thing, Aaron. Weather's a little stormy in Florida, so we'll need you to land at Edwards. Hope that's not a problem."

"No, not at—” Aaron began, and then something nagged at the back of Aaron's mind. “Um, Houston?"

"Yes?"

"What's today's date?"

"The date?” Gabe laughed. “It's October tenth. You've arrived home right on schedule."

"Good."

"Why, what did you expect? Relativity kicking in and bringing you far, far into the future? You never went fast enough for that."

"No, not that. I expected—” Aaron thought for a moment, but nothing came to mind. “I don't know what I expected."

"Well, you should expect a parade, at least. You'll be a genuine hero when you return. Just like Neil Armstrong."

Aaron leaned back and smiled. What does a hero do? He promotes causes, of course. And Aaron knew that it would be vitally important for him to use his new status to speak out against fear, against hate, against violence and wars. He couldn't say why. He just knew it had to be that way.

* * * *

Their current job completed, the beings Aaron had called George and Gracie studied the naked bodies of thousands of other primitive aliens suspended in separate plasma baths, which kept them alive as they lived out their illusions.

The Younger asked the Elder, “Have you ever done such a thing before?"

"Never,” the Elder replied. “Never in the history of our existence."

"Will you not get in trouble?"

"No. It is my decision to make, as it will be yours to make when I am gone."

"But to make such a promise to a primitive, violent alien, and then to carry it out."

The Elder's countenance took on the equivalent of a smile. “That very promise is the reason for our jobs. Have you never wondered why we do not just lock up every other solar system with the potential for intelligent life? Why are we here, to intercept each race as they emerge from their shells? What is our function?” He paused. “Do you now understand what you are being trained to do?"

The Younger thought for a moment. “I think I almost understand. Please make it clear for me."

"The humans,” the Elder said. “They were the first to discover the secret."

"Which is what?"

"That it is not a race's capacity for violence that condemns us, but rather, the decisions that we choose to make. This human, Aaron Eliassen, made the right decision.” The Elder swept his arm around, indicating all the aliens floating in their plasma baths. “Every other alien representative that we have encountered has always reacted the same way, claiming that they will conquer the Universe, and along with it, us. We had no choice but to lock their races away forever. But this human chose wisely. This was the first representative that expressed a different hope, that his race would one day be more acceptable to us, rather than requiring us to be more acceptable to them."

"I understand."

"Perhaps one day, they will be partners with us. For now, though—"

An ultraviolet light blinked on, and at the same time, a high frequency whine began.

The Elder turned to the Younger. “Another race has emerged from its shell. Let us attend to it."

The Younger closed the door of the chamber behind it, pausing only briefly to study the hundreds of aliens suspended in their plasma baths. He recalled how many in turn had threatened the Elder with violence, and had claimed that their race alone would own the Universe. He had reached the beginning of understanding, and sorrow filled his being.

He turned to the Elder. “It is good that we could decide as we did for the human. But what a pity that we could not decide otherwise for the rest."

"They decided for themselves, young friend. We do not judge them; they chose their own verdicts."

THE BEST CHRISTMAS EVER

James Patrick Kelly

· · · · ·

Begin Interaction 4022932

· · · · ·

"Do you want to watch Annie Hall?" Aunty Em asked.

The man perched on the edge of the Tyvola sofa in the living room, elbows propped on knees, head sunk into hands.

"The General? Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Spaced Out?"

"I hate that robot." He tugged at his thinning hair and snarled. "I hate robots."

Aunty Em did not take this personally—she was a biop, not a robot. "I could call Lola. She's been asking after you."

"I'll bet." Still, he looked up from damp hands. "I'd rather have Kathy."

This was a bad sign. Kathy was the lost wife. The girlfriend biop could certainly assume that body; she could look like anyone the man wanted. But while the girlfriend biop could pretend, she could never be the wife that the man missed. His reactions to the Kathy body were always erratic and sometimes dangerous.

"I'll nose around town," said Aunty Em. "I heard Kathy was off on a business trip, but maybe she's back."

"Nose around," he said and then reached for the glass on the original Noguchi coffee table with spread fingers, as if he thought it might try to leap from his grasp. "You do that." He captured it on the second attempt.

· · · · ·

End Interaction 4022932

· · · · ·

The man was fifty-six years old and in good health, considering. His name was Albert Paul Hopkins, but none of the biops called him that. Aunty Em called him Bertie. The girlfriend called him sweetie or Al. The pal biops called him Al or Hoppy or Sport. The stranger biops called him Mr. Hopkins or sir. The animal biops didn't speak much, but the dog called him Buddy and the cat called him Mario.

When Aunty Em beamed a summary of the interaction to the girlfriend biop, the girlfriend immediately volunteered to try the Kathy body again. The girlfriend had been desperate of late, since the man didn't want anything to do with her. His slump had been hard on her, hard on Aunty Em too. Taking care of the man had changed the biops. They were all so much more emotional than they had been when they were first budded.

But Aunty Em told the girlfriend to hold off. Instead she decided to throw a Christmas. She hadn't done Christmas in almost eight months. She'd given him a Gone With The Wind Halloween and a Fourth of July with whistling busters, panoramas, phantom balls, and double-break shells, but those were only stopgaps. The man needed cookies, he needed presents, he was absolutely aching for a sleigh filled with Christmas cheer. So she beamed an alert to all of her biops and assigned roles. She warned them that if this wasn't the best Christmas ever, they might lose the last man on earth.

· · · · ·

Aunty Em spent three days baking cookies. She dumped eight sticks of fatty acid triglycerides, four cups of C_12H_22O_11, four vat-grown ova, four teaspoons of flavor potentiator, twelve cups of milled grain endosperm, and five teaspoons each of NaHCO_3 and KHC_4H_4O_6 into the bathtub and then trod on the mixture with her best baking boots. She rolled the dough and then pulled cookie cutters off the top shelf of the pantry: the mitten and the dollar sign and the snake and the double-bladed ax. She dusted the cookies with red nutriceutical sprinkles, baked them at 190°C, and brought a plate to the man while they were still warm.

The poor thing was melting into the recliner in the television room. He clutched a half-full tumbler of Sins-of-the-Mother, as if it were the anchor that was keeping him from floating out of the window. He had done nothing but watch classic commercials with the sound off since he had fallen out of bed. The cat was curled on the man's lap, pretending to be asleep.

· · · · ·

Begin Interaction 4022947

· · · · ·

"Cookies, Bertie," said Aunty Em. "Fresh from the oven, oven fresh." She set the plate down on the end table next to the Waterford lead crystal vase filled with silk daffodils.

"Not hungry," he said. On the mint-condition 34-inch Sony Hi-Scan television Ronald McDonald was dancing with some kids.

Aunty Em stepped in front of the screen, blocking his view. "Have you decided what you want for Christmas, dear?"

"It isn't Christmas." He waved her away from the set, but she didn't budge. He did succeed in disturbing the cat, which stood, arched its back, and then dropped to the floor.

"No, of course it isn't." She laughed. "Christmas isn't until next week."

He aimed the remote at the set and turned up the sound. A man was talking very fast. "Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese …"

Aunty Em pressed the off button with her knee. "I'm talking to you, Bertie."

The man lowered the remote. "What's today?"

"Today is Friday." She considered. "Yes, Friday."

"No, I mean the date."

"The date is … let me see. The twenty-first."

His skin temperature had risen from 33°C to 37°. "The twenty-first of what?" he said.

She stepped away from the screen. "Have another cookie, Bertie."

"All right." He turned the television on and muted it. "You win." A morose Maytag repairman slouched at his desk, waiting for the phone to ring. "I know what I want," said the man. "I want a Glock 17."

"And what is that, dear?"

"It's a nine millimeter handgun."

"A handgun, oh my." Aunty Em was so flustered that she ate one of her own cookies, even though she had extinguished her digestive track for the day. "For shooting? What would you shoot?"

"I don't know." He broke the head off a gingerbread man. "A reindeer. The TV. Maybe one of you."

"Us? Oh, Bertie—one of us?"

He made a gun out of his thumb and forefinger and aimed. "Maybe just the cat." His thumb came down.

The cat twitched. "Mario," it said and nudged the man's bare foot with its head. "No, Mario."

On the screen the Jolly Green Giant rained peas down on capering elves.

· · · · ·

End Interaction 4022947

· · · · ·

Begin Interaction 4023013

· · · · ·

The man stepped onto the front porch of his house and squinted at the sky, blinking. It was late spring and the daffodils were nodding in a warm breeze. Aunty Em pulled the sleigh to the bottom of the steps and honked the horn. It played the first three notes of "Jingle Bells." The man turned to go back into the house but the girlfriend biop took him by the arm. "Come on now, sweetie," she said and steered him toward the steps.

The girlfriend had assumed the Donna Reed body the day before, but unlike previous Christmases, the man had taken no sexual interest in her. She was wearing the severe black dress with the white lace collar from the last scene of It's A Wonderful Life. The girlfriend looked as worried about the man as Mary had been about despairing George Bailey. All the biops were worried, thought Aunty Em. They would be just devastated if anything happened to him. She waved gaily and hit the horn again. Beep-beep-BEEP!

The dog and the cat had transformed themselves into reindeer for the outing. The cat got the red nose. Three of the animal biops had assumed reindeer bodies too. They were all harnessed to the sleigh, which hovered about a foot off the ground. As the man stumped down the steps, Aunty Em discouraged the antigrav, and the runners crunched against gravel. The girlfriend bundled the man aboard.

"Do you see who we have guiding the way?" said Aunty Em. She beamed the cat and it lit up its nose. "See?"

"Is that the fake cop?" The man coughed. "Or the fake pizza guy? I can't keep them straight."

"On Dasher, now Dancer, now Comet and Nixon," cried Aunty Em as she encouraged the antigrav. "To the mall, Rudolf, and don't bother to slow down for yellow lights!" She cracked the whip and away they went, down the driveway and out into the world.

The man lived at the edge of the biop compound, away from the bustle of the spaceport and the accumulatorium with its bulging galleries of authentic human artifacts and the vat where new biops were budded off the master template. They drove along the perimeter road. The biops were letting the forest take over here, and saplings of birch and hemlock sprouted from the ruins of the town.

The sleigh floated across a bridge and Aunty Em started to sing. "Over the river and through the woods …" But when she glanced over her shoulder and saw the look on the man's face, she stopped. "Is something wrong, Bertie dear?"

"Where are you taking me?" he said. "I don't recognize this road."

"It's a secret," said Aunty Em. "A Christmas secret."

His blood pressure had dropped to 93/60. "Have I been there before?"

"I wouldn't think so. No."

The girlfriend clutched the man's shoulder. "Look," she said. "Sheep."

Four ewes had gathered at the river's edge to drink, their stumpy tails twitching. They were big animals; their long, tawny fleeces made them look like walking couches. A brown man on a dromedary camel watched over them. He was wearing a satin robe in royal purple with gold trim at the neck. When Aunty Em beamed him the signal, he tapped the line attached to the camel's nose peg and the animal turned to face the road.

"One of the wise men," said Aunty Em.

"The king of the shepherds," said the girlfriend.

As the sleigh drove by, the wise man tipped his crown to them. The sheep looked up from the river and bleated, "Happy holidays."

"They're so cute," said the girlfriend. "I wish we had sheep."

The man sighed. "I could use a drink."

"Not just yet, Bertie," said Aunty Em. "But I bet Mary packed your candy."

The girlfriend pulled a plastic pumpkin from underneath the seat. It was filled with leftovers from the Easter they'd had last month. She held it out to the man and shook it. It was filled with peeps and candy corn and squirtgum and chocolate crosses. He pulled a peep from the pumpkin and sniffed it suspiciously.

"It's safe, sweetie," said the girlfriend. "I irradiated everything just before we left."

There were no cars parked in the crumbling lot of the Wal-Mart. They pulled up to the entrance where a Salvation Army Santa stood over a black plastic pot holding a bell. The man didn't move.

"We're here, Al." The girlfriend nudged him. "Let's go."

"What is this?" said the man.

"Christmas shopping," said Aunty Em. "Time to shop."

"Who the hell am I supposed to shop for?"

"Whoever you want," said Aunty Em. "You could shop for us. You could shop for yourself. You could shop for Kathy."

"Aunty Em!" said the girlfriend.

"No," said the man. "Not Kathy."

"Then how about Mrs. Marelli?"

The man froze. "Is that what this is about?"

"It's about Christmas, Al," said the girlfriend. "It's about getting out of the god-damned sleigh and going into the store." She climbed over him and jumped down to the pavement before Aunty Em could discourage the antigrav. She stalked by the Santa and through the entrance without looking back. Aunty Em beamed her a request to come back but she went dark.

"All right," said the man. "You win."

The Santa rang his bell at them as they approached. The man stopped and grasped Aunty Em's arm. "Just a minute," he said and ran back to the sleigh to fetch the plastic pumpkin. He emptied the candy into the Santa's pot.

"God bless you, young man." The Santa knelt and sifted the candy through his red suede gloves as if it were gold.

"Yeah," said the man. "Merry Christmas."

Aunty Em twinkled at the two of them. She thought the man might finally be getting into the spirit of the season.

The store was full of biops, transformed into shoppers. They had stocked the shelves with artifacts authenticated by the accumulatorium: Barbies and Sonys and Goodyears and Dockers; patio furniture and towels and microwave ovens and watches. At the front of the store was an array of polyvinyl chloride spruce trees predecorated with bubble lights and topped with glass penguins. Some of the merchandise was new, some used, some broken. The man paid attention to none of it, not even the array of genuine Lionel "O" Scale locomotives and freight cars Aunty Em had ordered specially for this interaction. He passed methodically down the aisles, eyes bright, searching. He strode right by the girlfriend, who was sulking in Cosmetics.

Aunty Em paused to touch her shoulder and beam an encouragement, but the girlfriend shook her off. Aunty Em thought she would have to do something about the girlfriend, but she didn't know what exactly. If she sent her back to the vat and replaced her with a new biop, the man would surely notice. The girlfriend and the man had been quite close before the man had slipped into his funk. She knew things about him that even Aunty Em didn't know.

The man found Mrs. Marelli sitting on the floor in the hardware section. She was opening packages of GE Soft White 100-watt light bulbs and then smashing them with a Stanley Workmaster claw hammer. The biop shoppers paid no attention. Only the lead biop of her team, Dr. Watson, seemed to worry about her. He waited with a broom, and whenever she tore into a new box of light bulbs he swept the shards of glass away.

Aunty Em was shocked at the waste. How many pre-extinction light bulbs were left on this world? Twenty thousand? Ten? She wanted to beam a rebuke to Dr. Watson, but she knew he was doing a difficult job as best he could.

"Hello, Ellen." The man knelt next to the woman. "How are you doing?"

She glanced at him, hammer raised. "Dad?" She blinked. "Is that you, Dad?"

"No, it's Albert Hopkins. Al—you know, your neighbor. We've met before. These … people introduced us. Remember the picnic? The trip to the spaceport?"

"Picnic?" She shook her head as if to clear it. Ellen Theresa Marelli was eleven years older than the man. She was wearing Bruno Magli black leather flats and a crinkly light blue Land's End dress with a pattern of small dark blue and white flowers. Her hair was gray and a little thin but was nicely cut and permed into tight curls. She was much better groomed than the man, but that was because she couldn't take care of herself anymore and so her biops did everything for her. "I like picnics."

"What are you doing here, Ellen?"

She stared at the hammer as if she were surprised to see it. "Practicing."

"Practicing for what?" He held out his hand for the hammer and she gave it to him.

"Just practicing." She gave him a sly look. "What are you doing here?"

"I was hoping to do a little Christmas shopping."

"Oh, is it Christmas?" Her eyes went wide.

"In a couple of days," said the man. "Do you want to tag along?"

She turned to Dr. Watson. "Can I?"

"By all means." Dr. Watson swept the space in front of her.

"Oh goody!" She clapped her hands. "This is just the best." She tried to get up but couldn't until the man and Dr. Watson helped her to her feet. "We'll need a shopping cart," she said.

She tottered to the fashion aisles and tried on sweaters. The man helped her pick out a Ralph Lauren blue cable cardigan that matched her dress. In the housewares section, she decided that she needed a Zyliss garlic press. She spent the most time in the toy aisle, lingering at the Barbies. She didn't care much for the late models, still in their packaging. Instead she made straight for the vintage Barbies and Kens and Francies and Skippers posed around the Barbie Dream House and the Barbie Motor Home. Dr. Watson watched her nervously.

"Look, they even have talking Barbies," she said, picking up a doll in an orange flowered dress. "I had one just like this. With all the blond hair and everything. See the little necklace? You press the button and …"

But the Barbie didn't speak. The woman's mouth set in a grim line and she smashed it against the shelf.

"Ellie," said Dr. Watson. "I wish you wouldn't …"

The woman threw the doll at him and picked up another. This was a brunette that was wearing only the top of her hot pink bathing suit. The woman jabbed at the button.

"It's time to get ready for my date with Ken," said the doll in a raspy voice.

"That's better," said the woman.

She pressed the button again and the doll said, "Let's invite the gang over!"

The woman turned to the man and the two biops, clearly excited. "Here." She thrust the doll at Aunty Em, who was nearest to her. "You try." Aunty Em pressed the button.

"I can't wait to meet my friends," said the doll.

"What a lovely toy!" Aunty Em smiled. "She certainly has the Christmas spirit, don't you think, Bertie?"

The man frowned and Aunty Em could tell from the slump of his shoulders that his good mood was slipping away. His heart rate jumped and his eyes were distant, a little misty. The woman must have noticed the change too, because she pointed a finger at Aunty Em.

"You," she said. "You ruin everything."

"Now Mrs. Marelli," she said, "I …"

"You're following us." The woman snatched the Barbie away from her. "Who are you?"

"You know me, Mrs. Marelli. I'm Aunty Em."

"That's crazy." The woman's laugh was like a growl. "I'm not crazy."

Dr. Watson beamed a general warning that he was terminating the interaction; seeing the man always upset the woman. "That's enough, Ellen." He grasped her forearm, and Aunty Em was relieved to see him paint relaxant onto her skin with his med finger. "I think it's time to go."

The woman shivered. "Wait," she said. "He said it was Christmas." She pointed at the man. "Daddy said."

"We'll talk about that when we get home, Ellen."

"Daddy." She shook herself free and flung herself at the man.

The man shook his head. "This isn't …"

"Ssh. It's okay." The woman hugged him. "Just pretend. That's all we can do, isn't it?" Reluctantly, he returned her embrace. "Daddy." She spoke into his chest. "What are you getting me for Christmas?"

"Can't tell," he said. "It's a secret."

"A Barbie?" She giggled and pulled away from him.

"You'll just have to wait."

"I already know that's what it is."

"But you might forget." The man held out his hand and she gave him the doll. "Now close your eyes."

She shut them so tight that Aunty Em could see her orbicularis oculi muscles tremble.

The man touched her forehead. "Daddy says forget." He handed the doll to Dr. Watson, who mouthed Thank you. Dr. Watson beamed a request for Aunty Em to hide, and she sidled behind the bicycles where the woman couldn't see her. "Okay, Ellen," said the man. "Daddy says open your eyes."

She blinked at him. "Daddy," she said softly, "when are you coming home?"

The man was clearly taken aback; there was a beta wave spike in his EEG. "I … ah …" He scratched the back of his neck. "I don't know," he said. "Our friends here keep me pretty busy."

"I'm so lonely, Daddy." The last woman on earth began to cry.

The man opened his arms to her and they clung to each other, rocking back and forth. "I know," said the man, over and over. "I know."

· · · · ·

End Interaction 4023013

· · · · ·

Aunty Em, the dog, and the cat gathered in the living room of the house, waiting for the man to wake up. She had scheduled the pals, Jeff and Bill, to drop by around noon for sugar cookies and eggnog. The girlfriend was upstairs fuming. She had been Katie Couric, Anna Kournikova, and Jacqueline Kennedy since the Wal-Mart trip but the man had never even blinked at her.

The music box was playing "Blue Christmas." The tree was decorated with strings of pinlights and colored packing peanuts. Baseball cards and silver glass balls and plastic army men hung from the branches. Beneath the tree was a modest pile of presents. Aunty Em had picked out one each for the inner circle of biops and signed the man's name to the cards. The rest were gifts for him from them.

· · · · ·

Begin Interaction 4023064

· · · · ·

"'Morning, Mario," said the cat.

Aunty Em was surprised; it was only eight-thirty. But there was the man propped in the doorway, yawning.

"Merry Christmas, Bertie!" she said.

The dog scrabbled across the room to him. "Buddy, open now, Buddy, open, Buddy, open, open!" It went up on hind legs and pawed his knee.

"Later." The man pushed it away. "What's for breakfast?" he said. "I feel like waffles."

"You want waffles?" said Aunty Em. "Waffles you get."

· · · · ·

End Interaction 4023064

· · · · ·

She bustled into the kitchen as the man closed the bathroom door behind him. A few minutes later she heard the pipes clang as he turned on the shower. She beamed a revised schedule to the pals, calling for them to arrive within the hour.

Aunty Em could not help but be pleased. This Christmas was already a great success. The man's attitude had changed dramatically after the shopping trip. He was keeping regular hours and drinking much less. He had stopped by the train layout in the garage, although all he had done was look at it. Instead he had taken an interest in the garden in the backyard and had spent yesterday weeding the flowerbeds and digging a new vegetable patch. He had sent the pal Jeff to find seeds he could plant. The biops reported that they had found some peas and corn and string beans—but they were possibly contaminated and might not germinate. She had already warned some of the lesser animal biops that they might have to assume the form of corn stalks and pea vines if the crop failed.

Now if only he would pay attention to the girlfriend.

· · · · ·

Begin Interaction 4023066

· · · · ·

The doorbell gonged the first eight notes of "Silent Night." "Would you get that, Bertie dear?" Aunty Em was pouring freshly-budded ova into a pitcher filled with Pet Evaporated Milk.

"It's the pals," the man called from the front hall. "Jeff and … I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name."

"Bill."

"Bill, of course. Come in, come in."

A few minutes later, Aunty Em found them sitting on the sofa in the living room. Each of the pals balanced a present on his lap, wrapped in identical green and red paper. They were listening uncomfortably as the cat recited "'Twas the Night Before Christmas." The man was busy playing Madden NFL 2007 on his Game Boy.

"It's time for sweets and presents, Bertie." Aunty Em set the pitcher of eggnog next to the platter of cookies. She was disturbed that the girlfriend hadn't joined the party yet. She beamed a query but the girlfriend was dark. "Presents and sweets."

The man opened Jeff's present first. It was filled with hand tools for his new garden: a dibbler and a trowel and a claw hoe and a genuine Felco10 Professional Pruner. The dog gave the man a chewable rubber fire hydrant that squeeked when squeezed. The cat gave him an "O" Scale Western Pacific Steam Locomotive that had belonged to the dead neighbor, Mr. Kimura. The man and the cat exchanged looks briefly and then the cat yawned. The dog nudged his head under all the discarded wrapping paper and the man reached down with the claw hoe and scratched its back. Everyone but the cat laughed.

Next came Bill's present. In keeping with the garden theme of this Christmas, it was a painting of a balding old farmer and a middle-aged woman standing in front of a white house with an odd gothic window. Aunty Em could tell the man was a farmer because he was holding a pitchfork. The farmer stared out of the painting with a glum intensity; the woman looked at him askance. The curator biop claimed that it was one of the most copied images in the inventory, so Aunty Em was not surprised that the man seemed to recognize it.

"This looks like real paint," he said.

"Yes," said Bill. "Oil on beaverboard."

"What's beaverboard?" said the cat.

"A light, semirigid building material of compressed wood pulp," Bill said. "I looked it up."

The man turned the painting over and brushed his finger across the back. "Where did you get this?" His face was pale.

"From the accumulatorium."

"No, I mean where before then?"

Aunty Em eavesdropped as the pal beamed the query. "It was salvaged from the Chicago Art Institute."

"You're giving me the original American Gothic?" His voice fell into a hole.

"Is something the matter, Bertie?"

He fell silent for a moment. "No, I suppose not." He shook his head. "It's a very thoughtful gift." He propped the painting on the mantle, next to his scuffed leather fireman's helmet that the biops had retrieved from the ruins of the Ladder Company No. 3 Firehouse two Christmases ago.

Aunty Em wanted the man to open his big present, but the girlfriend had yet to make her entrance. So instead, she gave the pals their presents from the man. Jeff got the October 1937 issue of Spicy Adventure Stories. On the cover a brutish sailor carried a terrified woman in a shredded red dress out of the surf as their ship sank in the background. Aunty Em pretended to be shocked and the man actually chuckled. Bill got a chrome Model 1B14 Toastmaster two-slice toaster. The man took it from him and traced the triple loop logo etched in the side. "My mom had one of these."

Finally there was nothing left to open but the present wrapped in the blue paper with the Santa-in-space print. The man took the Glock 17 out of the box cautiously, as if he were afraid it might go off. It was black with a polymer grip and a four-and-a-half-inch steel barrel. Aunty Em had taken a calculated risk with the pistol. She always tried to give him whatever he asked for, as long as it wasn't too dangerous. He wasn't their captive after all. He was their master.

"Don't worry," she said. "It's not loaded. I looked but couldn't find the right bullets."

"But I did," said the girlfriend, sweeping into the room in the Kathy body. "I looked harder and found hundreds of thousands of bullets."

"Kathy," said Aunty Em, as she beamed a request for her to terminate this unauthorized interaction. "What a nice surprise."

"9 millimeter Parabellum," said the girlfriend. Ten rounds clattered onto the glass top of the Noguchi coffee table. "115 grain. Full metal jacket."

"What are you doing?" said the man.

"You want to shoot someone?" The girlfriend glared at the man and swung her arms wide.

"Kathy," said Aunty Em. "You sound upset, dear. Maybe you should go lie down."

The man returned the girlfriend's stare. "You're not Kathy."

"No," said the girlfriend. "I'm nobody you know."

"Kathy's dead," said the man. "Everybody's dead except for me and poor Ellen Marelli. That's right, isn't it?"

The girlfriend sank to her knees, rested her head on the coffee table, and began to cry. Only biops didn't cry, or at least no biop that Aunty Em had ever heard of. The man glanced around the room for an answer. The pals looked at their shoes and said nothing. "Jingle Bell Rock" tinkled on the music box. Aunty Em felt something swell inside of her and climb her throat until she thought she might burst. If this was what the man felt all the time, it was no wonder he was tempted to drink himself into insensibility.

"Well?" he said.

"Yes," Aunty Em blurted. "Yes, dead, Bertie. All dead."

The man took a deep breath. "Thank you," he said. "Sometimes I can't believe that it really happened. Or else I forget. You make it easy to forget. Maybe you think that's good for me. But I need to know who I am."

"Buddy," said the dog, brushing against him. "Buddy, my Buddy."

The man patted the dog absently. "I could give up. But I won't. I've had a bad spell the last couple of weeks, I know. That's not your fault." He heaved himself off the couch, came around the coffee table and knelt beside the girlfriend. "I really appreciate that you trust me with this gun. And these bullets too. That's got to be scary, after what I said." The girlfriend watched him scoop up the bullets. "Kathy, I don't need these just now. Would you please keep them for me?"

She nodded.

"Do you know the movie, Miracle On 34th Street?" He poured the bullets into her cupped hands. "Not the remakes. The first one, with Maureen O'Hara?"

She nodded again.

He leaned close and whispered into her ear. His pulse soared to 93.

She sniffed and then giggled.

"You go ahead," he said to her. "I'll come up in a little while." He gave her a pat on the rear and stood up. The other biops watched him nervously.

"What's with all the long faces?" He tucked the Glock into the waistband of his pants. "You look like them." He waved at the painting of the somber farm folk, whose mood would never, ever change. "It's Christmas Day, people. Let's live it up!"

· · · · ·

End Interaction 4023066

· · · · ·

Over the years, Aunty Em gave the man many more Christmases, not to mention Thanksgivings, Easters, Halloweens, April Fools, and Valentine Days. But she always said—and no one contradicted her: not the man, not even the girlfriend—that this Christmas was the best ever.

A PRINCESS OF EARTH

Mike Resnick

When Lisa died I felt like my soul had been ripped out of my body, and what was left wasn’t worth the powder to blow it to hell. To this day I don’t even know what she died of; the doctors tried to tell me why she had collapsed and what had killed her, but I just tuned them out. She was dead and I would never talk to her or touch her again, never share a million unimportant things with her, and that was the only fact that mattered. I didn’t even go to the funeral; I couldn’t bear to look at her in her coffin.

I quit my job we’d been counting the days to my retirement so we could finally spend all our time together and I considered selling the house and moving to a smaller place, but in the end I couldn’t do it. There was too much of her there, things I’d lose forever if I moved away.

I left her clothes in the closet, just the way they’d always been. Her hairbrush and her perfume and her lipstick remained on the vanity where she’d kept them neatly lined up. There was a painting of a New England landscape that I’d never liked much, but since she had loved it I left it hanging where it was. I had my favorite photos of her blown up and framed, and put them on every table and counter and shelf in the house.

I had no desire to be with other people, so I spent most of my days catching up on my reading. Well, let me amend that. I started a lot of books; I finished almost none of them. It was the same thing with movies: I’d rent a few, begin playing them, and usually turn them off within fifteen or twenty minutes. Friends would invite me out, I’d refuse, and after awhile they stopped calling. I barely noticed.

Winter came, a seemingly endless series of bleak days and frigid nights. It was the first time since I’d married Lisa that I didn’t bring a Christmas tree home to decorate. There just didn’t seem much sense to it. We’d never had any children, she wasn’t there to share it, and I wasn’t going to have any visitors.

As it turned out, I was wrong about the visitor: I spotted him maybe an hour before midnight, wandering naked across my backyard during the worst blizzard of the season.

At first I thought I was hallucinating. Five inches of snow had fallen, and the wind chill was something like ten below zero. I stared in disbelief for a full minute, and when he didn’t disappear, I put on my coat, climbed into my boots, grabbed a blanket, and rushed outside. When I reached him he seemed half frozen. I threw the blanket around him and led him back into the house.

I rubbed his arms and legs vigorously with a towel, then sat him down in the kitchen and poured him some hot coffee. It took him a few minutes to stop shivering, but finally he reached out for the cup. He warmed his hands on it, then lifted it and took a sip.

"Thank you," he whispered hoarsely.

Once I was sure he wasn’t going to die, I stood back and took a look at him. He was actually pretty good-looking now that his color was returning. He might have been thirty, maybe a couple of years older. Lean body, dark hair, gray eyes. A couple of scars, but I couldn’t tell what they were from, or how fresh they were. They could have been from one of the wars in Iraq, or old sports injuries, or perhaps just the wind whipping frozen bushes against him a few minutes ago.

"Are you feeling better?" I asked.

He nodded. "Yes, I’ll be all right soon."

"What the hell were you doing out there without any clothes on?"

"Trying to get home," he said with an ironic smile.

"I haven’t seen you around," I said. "Do you live near here?"

"No."

"Is there someone who can pick you up and take you there?"

He seemed about to answer me, then changed his mind and just shook his head.

"What’s your name?" I asked.

"John." He took another swallow from the cup and made a face.

"Yeah, I know," I said. "The coffee’s pretty awful. Lisa made it better."

"Lisa?"

"My wife," I said. "She died last year."

We were both silent for a couple of minutes, and I noticed still more color returning to his face.

"Where did you leave your clothes?" I asked.

"They’re very far away."

"Just how far did you walk in this blizzard?"

"I don’t know."

"Okay," I said in exasperation. "Who do I call the cops, the hospital, or the nearest asylum?"

"Don’t call anyone," said John. "I’ll be all right soon, and then I’ll leave."

"Dressed like that? In this weather?"

He seemed surprised. "I’d forgotten. I guess I’ll have to wait here until it’s over. I’m sorry to impose, but . . ."

"What the hell," I said. "I’ve been alone a long time and I’m sure Lisa would say I could use a little company, even from a naked stranger. At any rate she wouldn’t want me to throw you out in the cold on Christmas Eve." I stared at him. "I just hope you’re not dangerous."

"Not to my friends."

"I figure pulling you out of the snow and giving you shelter qualifies as an act of friendship," I said. "Just what the hell were you doing out there, and what happened to your clothes?"

"It’s a long story."

"It’s a long night, and I’ve got nothing to do."

"All right," said John with a shrug. "I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I can’t tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood."

"Stop," I said.

"What is it?"

"I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I’ve heard that before a long, long time ago. I don’t know where, but I’ve heard it."

He shook his head. "No you haven’t. But perhaps you’ve read it before."

I searched through my memory, mentally scanning the bookshelves of my youth and there I found it, right between The Wizatd or Oz and King Solomon’s Mines. "God, it’s been close to half a century! I loved that book when I was growing up."

"Thank you," said John.

"What are you thanking me for?"

"I wrote it."

"Sure you did," I said. "I read the damned thing fifty years ago, and it was an old book then. Look at yourself in a mirror."

"Nevertheless."

Wonderful, I thought. Just what I needed on Christmas Eve. Other people get carolers; I get you. Aloud I said: "It wasn’t written by a John. It was written by an Edgar."

"He published it. I wrote it."

"Sure," I said. "And your last name is Carter, right?"

"Yes, it is."

"I should have called the loony bin to begin with."

"They couldn’t get here until morning," said John. "Trust me: you’re perfectly safe."

"The assurances of a guy who walks around naked in a snowstorm and thinks he’s John Carter of Mars aren’t exactly coin of the realm," I said. The second I said it I kind of tensed and told myself I should be humoring him, that I was a sixty-four-year-old man with high blood pressure and worse cholesterol and he looked like a cruiserweight boxer. Then I realized that I didn’t really care whether he killed me or not, that I’d just been going through the motions of living since Lisa had died, and I decided not to humor him after all. If he picked up a kitchen knife and ran me through, Warlord of Mars style, at least it would put an end to the aching loneliness that had been my constant companion for almost a year.

"So why do you think you’re John Carter?" I asked him.

"Because I am."

"Why not Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon or the Scarlet Pimpernel for that matter?"

"Why aren’t you Doc Savage or the Shadow?" he replied. "Or James Bond for that matter?"

"I never claimed to be a fictional character," I said.

"Neither did I. I am John Carter, formerly of Virginia, and I am trying to return to my princess."

"Stark naked in a blizzard?"

"My clothes do not survive the transition, and I am not responsible for the weather," he said.

"That’s a reasonably rational explanation for a crazy man."

He stared at me. "The woman I love more than life itself is millions of miles from here. Is it so crazy to want to return to her?"

"No," I admitted. "it’s not crazy to want to be with her. But it’s crazy to think she’s on Mars."

"Where do you think she is?" he asked.

"How the hell should I know?" I shot back. "But I know nothing’s on Mars except a bunch of rocks. it’s below zero in the summer, there’s no oxygen, and if anything ever lived there, it died out fifty or sixty million years ago. What have you got to say to that?"

"I have spent close to a century on Barsoom. Perhaps it is some other world than the one you know as Mars. Perhaps when I traverse the void, I also traverse the eons. I’m not interested in explanations, only in results. As long as I can once again hold my incomparable princess in my arms, I’ll leave the answers to the scientists and the philosophers."

"And the psychiatrists," I added.

He looked grimly amused. "So if you had your way, I would be locked away in an institution until they convinced me that the woman I love doesn’t exist and that my entire life has been a meaningless fantasy. You strike me as a very unhappy man; would that make you happier?"

"I’m just a realistic man," I said. "When I was a kid, I wanted so badly to believe A Princess of Mars was true that I used to stand in my backyard every night and reach my hands out to Mars, just the way you did. I kept waiting to get whisked away from the mundane life I’d been living and transported to Barsoom." I paused. "It never happened. All I got from all that reaching was sore shoulders and a lot of teasing from friends who didn’t read books."

"Perhaps you had no reason to go to Barsoom," he said. "You were a child, with your entire life ahead of you. I think that Barsoom can be very choosy about who it allows to visit."

"So now you’re saying that a planet is sentient?"

"I have no idea if it is," replied John. "Do you know for an absolute fact that it isn’t?"

I stared at him irritably. "You’re better at this than I am," I said. "You sound so fucking reasonable. Of course, you’ve had a lot more practice."

"More practice at what?"

"Fooling people by sounding normal."

"More practice than you?"

"See?" I said. "That’s what I mean. You’ve got an answer for everything, and if you don’t, then you respond with a question that’ll make me sound like a fool if I answer it. But I wasn’t wandering around naked in a blizzard in the middle of the night, and I don’t think I live on Mars."

"Do you feel better now?" he said.

"Not much," I admitted. "You want some more coffee?"

"Actually, what I’d like to do is walk around a little and get some life back in my limbs."

"Outside?"

He shook his head. "No, not outside."

"Fine," I said, getting up. "it’s not as big or as stately as a Martian palace, but I’ll give you the chef’s tour."

He got to his feet, adjusted the blanket around himself, and fell into step behind me. I led him into the living room, then stopped.

"Are you still cold?"

"A little."

"I think I’ll light a fire," I said. "I haven’t used the damned fireplace all winter. I might as well get my money’s worth."

"It’s not necessary," he said. "I’ll be all right."

"It’s no bother," I said, opening the screen and tossing a couple of logs onto the grate. "Look around while I’m doing it."

"You’re not afraid I might rob you?"

"Have you got any pockets to put your loot in?" I asked.

He smiled at that. "I guess it’s my good luck that I’m not a thief."

I spent the next couple of minutes positioning the kindling and starting the fire. I don’t know which rooms he’d seen, but he was just returning when I straightened up.

"You must have loved her very much," he said. "You’ve turned the house into a shrine to her."

"Whether you’re John Carter or merely think you’re John Carter, you should be able to understand what I felt."

"How long has she been gone?"

"She died last February," I said, then added bitterly: "On Valentine’s Day."

"She was a lovely woman."

"Most people just get older," I said. "She got more beautiful every day. To me, anyway."

"I know."

"How could you know? You never met her, never saw her."

"I know because my princess grows more beautiful with every passing moment. When you are truly in love, your princess always grows more beautiful."

"And if she’s Barsoomian, she stays young for a thousand years, give or take," I said, remembering the book.

"Perhaps."

"Perhaps? Don’t you know?"

"Does it really make a difference, as long as she remains young and beautiful in my eyes?"

"That’s pretty philosophical for a guy who thinks he makes his living lopping off heads with a longsword," I said.

"I want nothing more than to live in peace," he replied, sitting in the armchair that was closest to the fire. "I resent every second that I am away from my Dejah Thoris."

"I envy you," I said.

"I thought I was supposed to be insane," he said wryly.

"You are. It makes no difference. Whether your Dejah Thoris is real or whether she’s a figment of a deranged mind, you believe she exists and that you’re going to join her. My Lisa is dead; I’ll never see her again."

He made no reply, but simply stared at me.

"You may be as crazy as a loon," I continued, seating myself on the sofa, "but you’re convinced you’re going to see your Princess of Mars. I’d give up every last vestige of sanity if I could believe, even for a minute, that I would see my Princess of Earth one more time."

"I admire your courage," said John.

"Courage?" I repeated, surprised.

"If my princess were to die, I would have no desire to live another day, even another moment, without her."

"It has nothing to do with a desire to live."

"Then what is it?"

I shrugged. "Instinct. Inertia. I don’t know. I certainly haven’t enjoyed being alive the past year."

"And yet you have not ended it."

"Maybe it’s not courage at all," I said. "Maybe it’s cowardice."

"Or maybe there is a reason."

"For living? I can’t give you one."

"Then perhaps it was Fate that I should appear at your house."

"You didn’t magically appear," I said. "You walked here from wherever it was you left your clothes."

"No," he said, shaking his head firmly. "One moment I was strolling through the gardens of my palace in Helium, hand in hand with my princess, and the next I was standing in your yard, without my harness or my weapons. I tried to return, but I couldn’t see Barsoom through the swirling snow, and if I can’t see it I can’t reach out to it."

"You’ve got a smooth answer for everything," I said wearily. "I’ll bet you ace all your Rorschach tests, too."

"You know all your neighbors," said John. "Have you ever seen me before? How far do you think a naked man could get in this blizzard? Have the police come by to warn you of an escaped madman?"

"It’s a terrible night to be out, even for the police, and you seem like a harmless enough madman," I replied.

"Now who has the smooth answer?"

"Okay, fine you’re John Carter, and Dejah Thoris is up there somewhere waiting for you, and it was Fate that brought you here, and tomorrow morning a very worried man won’t show up looking for his missing cousin or brother."

"You have my books," he said. "Some of them anyway. I saw them on a shelf in your study. Use them. Ask me anything you want."

"What would that prove? There’s probably a thousand kids who can recite them word for word."

"Then I guess we’ll spend the night in silence."

"No," I said. "I’ll ask you some questions but the answers won’t be in the books."

"Fine."

"All right," I said. "How can you be so smitten with a woman who was hatched from an egg?"

"How can you love a woman of Irish or Polish or Brazilian descent?" he asked. "How can you love a black woman, or a red one, or a white one? How can you love a Christian or a Jew? I love my princess because of what she is, not what she might have been." He paused. "Why are you smiling?"

"I was thinking that we’re growing a perceptive crop of madmen this year."

He gestured to one of Lisa’s photos. "I take it she had nothing in common with you."

"She had everything in common with me," I said. "Except heritage and religion and upbringing. Odd, isn’t it?"

"Why should it be?" he asked. "I never thought it was odd to love a Martian woman."

"I suppose if you can believe there are people on Mars, even people who have hatched from eggs, it’s easy enough to believe you love one of them."

"Why do you feel it’s so insane to believe in a better world, a world of grace and chivalry, of manners and nobility? And why should I not love the most perfect woman that world has to offer? Would it not be mad to feel otherwise? Once you met your princess, would it have been rational to cast her aside?"

"We’re not talking about my princess," I said irritably.

"We are talking about love."

"Lots of people fall in love. No one else has had to go to Mars because of it."

"And now we are talking about the sacrifices one makes for love." He smiled ruefully. "For example, here I am, in the middle of the night, forty million miles from my princess, with a man who thinks I belong in an asylum."

"Why did you come back from Mars, then?" I asked.

"It was not an act of volition." He paused, as if remembering. "The first time it happened, I thought the Almighty must be testing me as He had tested Job. I spent ten long years here before I could return."

"And you never once questioned if it had really happened?"

"The ancient cities, the dead sea bottoms, the battles, the fierce green-skinned warriors, I could have imagined them. But I could never have imagined my love for my princess; it remained with me every minute of every day the sound of her voice, the feel of her skin, the scent of her hair. No, I could not have invented that."

"It must have been a comfort during your exile," I said.

"A comfort and a torture," he replied. "To look up in the sky every day and know that she and the son I had never seen were so unthinkably far away."

"But you never doubted?"

"Never," he said. "I still remember the last words I wrote: ‘I believe that they are waiting for me, and something tells me I shall soon know.’"

"True or not, at least you could believe it," I said. "You didn’t watch your princess die in front of you."

He stared at me, as if trying to decide what to say next. Finally he spoke. "I have died many times, and if Providence wills it, I shall die again tomorrow."

"What are you talking about?"

"Only my consciousness can traverse the void between worlds," he said. "My body remains behind, a lifeless hulk."

"And it doesn’t decay or rot, it just waits for you to return?" I said sarcastically.

"I can’t explain it," he said. "I can only take advantage of it."

"And this is supposed to comfort me that a madman who thinks he’s John Carter is hinting that my Lisa might somehow be alive on Mars?"

"It would comfort me," he said.

"Yeah, but you’re crazy."

"Is it crazy to think she might have done what I did?"

"Absolutely," I said.

"If you had a terminal disease, would it be crazy to seek out every quack in the world who thought he could cure it rather than to sit around passively waiting to die?"

"So now you’re a quack instead of a madman?"

"No," he said. "I’m just a man who is less afraid of death than of losing his princess."

"Bully for you," I said. "I’ve already lost mine."

"For ten months. I lost mine for ten years."

"There’s a difference," I pointed out. "Mine’s dead; yours wasn’t."

"There’s another difference," he replied. "I had the courage to find mine."

"Mine isn’t lost. I know exactly where she is."

He shook his head. "You know where the unimportant part of her is."

I sighed deeply. "I’d settle for your madness if I had your faith."

"You don’t need faith. You only need the courage to believe, not that something is true, but that it is possible."

"Courage is for Warlords," I replied, "not for sixty-four-year-old widowers."

"Every man has untapped wells of courage," he said. "Maybe your princess is not on Barsoom. Maybe there is no Barsoom, and I am every bit as crazy as you think I am. Are you really content to accept things as they are, or have you the courage to hope that I’m right?"

"Of course I hope you’re right," I said irritably. "So what?"

"Hope leads to belief, and belief leads to action."

"It leads to the funny farm."

He looked at me, a sad expression on his face. "Was your princess perfect?"

"In every way," I said promptly.

"And did she love you?"

I saw his next question coming, but I couldn’t help answering him. "Yes."

"Could a perfect princess have loved a coward or a madman?" he said.

"Enough!" I snapped. "it’s been hard enough staying sane these last ten months. Then you come along and make the alternative sound too attractive. I can’t spend the rest of my life thinking that I’ll somehow find a way to see her again!"

"Why not?"

At first I thought he was kidding. Then I saw that he wasn’t.

"Aside from the fact that it’s crazy, if I bought into it I wouldn’t accomplish a damned thing."

"What are you accomplishing now?" he asked.

"Nothing," I admitted, suddenly deflated. "I get up each morning and all I do is wait for the day to drag to a close so I can go to sleep and not see her face in front of me until I wake up again."

"And you consider this the rational behavior of a sane man?"

"Of a realistic man," I replied. "She’s gone and she’s not coming back."

"Reality is greatly overrated," he responded. "A realist sees silicon; a madman sees a machine that can think. A realist sees bread mold; a madman sees a drug that miraculously cures infection. A realist looks at the stars and asks, why bother? A madman looks at those same stars and asks, why not bother?" He paused and stared intently at me. "A realist would say, my princess is dead. A madman would say, John Carter found a way to overcome death, so why couldn’t she?"

"I wish I could say that."

"But?" he said.

"I’m not a madman."

"I feel very sorry for you."

"I don’t feel sorry for you," I replied.

"Oh? What do you feel?"

"Envy," I said. "They’ll come by tonight or tomorrow or the next day to pick you up and take you back to wherever you wandered off from, and you will believe just as devoutly then as you do now. You’ll know beyond any doubt that your princess is waiting for you. You’ll spend your every waking moment trying to escape, trying to get back to Barsoom. You’ll have belief and hope and purpose, which is a pretty impressive triumvirate. I wish I had any one of them."

"They’re not unattainable."

"Maybe not to Warlords, but they are to aging widowers with bad knees and worse blood pressure," I said, getting to my feet. He looked at me curiously. "I’ve had enough craziness for one night," I told him. "I’m going to bed. You can sleep on the sofa if you want, but if I were you I’d leave before they came looking for me. If you go to the basement you’ll find some clothes and an old pair of boots you can have, and you can take my coat from the hall closet."

"Thank you for your hospitality," he said as I walked to the staircase. "I’m sorry to have brought back painful memories of your princess."

"I cherish my memories," I replied. "Only the present is painful."

I climbed the stairs and lay down on the bed, still dressed, and fell asleep to visions of Lisa alive and smiling, as I did every night.

When I awoke in the morning and went downstairs he was gone. At first I thought he’d taken my advice and gotten a head start on his keepers but then I looked out the window and saw him, right where I’d spotted him the night before.

He was face-down in the snow, his arms stretched out in front of him, naked as the day he was born. I knew before I checked for a pulse that he was dead. I wish I could say that he had a happy smile on his face, but he didn’t; he looked as cold and uncomfortable as when I’d first found him.

I called the police, who showed up within the hour and took him away. They told me they had no reports of any nutcases escaping from the local asylum.

I checked in with them a few times in the next week. They simply couldn’t identify him. His fingerprints and DNA weren’t on file anywhere, and he didn’t match any missing persons descriptions. I’m not sure when they closed the file on him, but nobody showed up to claim the body and they finally planted him, with no name on his headstone, in the same cemetery where Lisa was buried.

I visited Lisa every day, as usual, and I started visiting John’s grave as well. I don’t know why. He’d gotten me thinking crazy, uncomfortable thoughts that I couldn’t shake, blurring the line between wishes and possibilities, and I resented it. More to the point, I resented him: he died with the absolute knowledge that he would soon see his princess, while I lived with the absolute knowledge that I would never again see mine.

I couldn’t help wondering which of us was truly the sane one the one who made reality conform by the sheer force of his belief, or the one who settled for old memories because he lacked the courage to try to create new ones.

As the days passed I found myself dwelling more and more on what John had said, turning it over in my mind again and again and then, on February 13, I read an item in the newspaper that tomorrow Mars would be closer to Earth than at any time in the next sixteen years.

I turned my computer on for the first time in months and verified the item on a couple of internet news services. I thought about it for awhile, and about John, and about Lisa. Then I phoned the Salvation Army and left a message on their answering device, giving them my address and telling them that I would leave the house unlocked and they were welcome to everything in it– clothes, food, furniture, anything they wanted.

I’ve spent the past three hours writing these words, so that whoever reads them will know that what I am about to do I am doing willingly, even joyfully, and that far from giving in to depression I am, at long last, yielding to hope.

It’s almost three in the morning. The snow stopped falling at midnight, the sky is clear, and Mars should come into view at any moment now. A few minutes ago I gathered my favorite photos of Lisa; they’re lined up on the desk right beside me, and she seems more beautiful than ever.

Very soon I’ll take off my clothes, fold them neatly on my desk chair, and walk out into the yard. Then it’s just a matter of spotting what I’m looking for. Is it Mars? Barsoom? Something else? It makes no difference. Only a realist sees things as they are, and it was John who showed me the limitations of reality and how could someone as perfect as my princess not transcend those limitations?

I believe she is waiting for me, and something tells me I shall soon know.

SHED SKIN

Robert J. Sawyer

I’m sorry," said Mr. Shiozaki, as he leaned back in his swivel chair and looked at the middle-aged white man with the graying temples, "but there’s nothing I can do for you."

"But I’ve changed my mind," said the man. He was getting red in the face as the conversation went on. "I want out of this deal."

"You can’t change your mind," said Shiozaki. "You’ve moved your mind."

The man’s voice had taken on a plaintive tone, although he was clearly trying to suppress it. "I didn’t think it would be like this."

Shiozaki sighed. "Our psychological counselors and our lawyers went over the entire procedure and all the ramifications with Mr. Rathburn beforehand. It’s what he wanted."

"But I don’t want it anymore."

"You don’t have any say in the matter."

The white man placed a hand on the table. The hand was flat, the fingers splayed, but it was nonetheless full of tension. "Look," he said, "I demand to see to see the other me. I’ll explain it to him. He’ll understand. He’ll agree that we should rescind the deal."

Shiozaki shook his head. "We can’t do that. You know we can’t. That’s part of the agreement."

"But–"

"No buts," said Shiozaki. "That’s the way it has to be. No successor has ever come back here. They can’t. Your successor has to do everything possible to shut your existence out of his mind, so he can get on with his existence, and not worry about yours. Even if he wanted to come see you, we wouldn’t allow the visit."

"You can’t treat me like this. It’s inhuman."

"Get this through your skull," said Shiozaki. "You are not human."

"Yes, I am, damn it. If you–"

"If I prick you, do you not bleed?" said Shiozaki.

"Exactly! I’m the one who is flesh and blood. I’m the one who grew in my mother’s womb. I’m the one who is a descendant of thousands of generations of Homo sapiens and thousands of generations of Homo erectus and Homo habilis before that. This this other me is just a machine, a robot, an android."

"No, its not. It is George Rathburn. The one and only George Rathburn."

"Then why do you call him ‘it’?"

"I’m not going to play semantic games with you," said Shiozaki. "He is George Rathburn. You aren’t not anymore."

The man lifted his hand from the table and clenched his fist. "Yes, I am. I am George Rathburn."

"No, you’re not. You’re just a skin. Just a shed skin."

George Rathburn was slowly getting used to his new body. He’d spent six months in counseling preparing for the transference. They’d told him this replacement body wouldn’t feel like his old one, and they’d been right. Most people didn’t transfer until they were old, until they’d enjoyed as much biological physicality as they could and until the ever-improving robotic technology was as good as it was going to get during their natural lifetimes.

After all, although the current robot bodies were superior in many ways to the slab-of-flab ones how soon he’d adopted that term!–they still weren’t as physically sensitive.

Sex the recreational act, if not the procreative one was possible, but it wasn’t quite as good. Synapses were fully reproduced in the nano-gel of the new brain, but hormonal responses were faked by playing back memories of previous events. Oh, an orgasm was still an orgasm, still wonderful but it wasn’t the unique, unpredictable experience of a real sexual climax. There was no need to ask, "Was it good for you?," for it was always good, always predictable, always exactly the same.

Still, there were compensations. George could now walk or run, if he wanted to for hours on end without feeling the slightest fatigue. And he’d dispensed with sleep. His daily memories were organized and sorted in a six-minute packing session every twenty-four hours; that was his only downtime.

Downtime. Funny that it had been the biological version of him that had been prone to downtime, while the electronic version was mostly free of it.

There were other changes, too. His proprioception the sense of how his body and limbs were deployed at any given moment was much sharper than it had previously been.

And his vision was more acute. He couldn’t see into the infrared that was technically possible, but so much of human cognition was based on the idea of darkness and light that to banish them with heat sensing had turned out to be bad psychologically. But his chromatic abilities had been extended in the other direction, and that let him see, among other things, bee purple, the color that often marked distinctive patterns on flower petals that human eyes the old-fashioned kind of human eyes, that is were blind to.

Hidden beauty revealed.

And an eternity to enjoy it.

"I demand to see a lawyer."

Shiozaki was again facing the flesh-and-blood shell that had once housed George Rathburn, but the Japanese man’s eyes seemed to be focused at infinity, as if looking right through him. "And how would you pay for this lawyer’s services?" Shiozaki asked at last.

Rathburn perhaps he couldn’t use his name in speech, but no one could keep him from thinking it opened his mouth to protest. He had money lots of money. But, no, no, he’d signed all that away. His biometrics were meaningless; his retinal scans were no longer registered. Even if he could get out of this velvet prison and access one, no ATM in the world would dispense cash to him. Oh, there were plenty of stocks and bonds in his name . . . but it wasn’t his name anymore.

"There has to be something you can do to help me," said Rathburn.

"Of course," said Shiozaki. "I can assist you in any number of ways. Anything at all you need to be comfortable here."

"But only here, right?"

"Exactly. You knew that I’m sorry; Mr. Rathburn knew that when he chose this path for himself, and for you. You will spend the rest of your life here in Paradise Valley."

Rathburn was silent for a time, then: "What if I agreed to accept your restrictions? What if I agreed not to present myself as George Rathburn? Could I leave here then?"

"You aren’t George Rathburn. Regardless, we can’t allow you to have any outside contact." Shiozaki was quiet for a few moments, and then, in a softer tone, he said, "Look, why make things difficult for yourself? Mr. Rathburn provided very generously for you. You will live a life of luxury here. You can access any books you might want, any movies. You’ve seen our recreation center, and you must admit it’s fabulous. And our sex-workers are the best-looking on the planet. Think of this as the longest, most-pleasant vacation you’ve ever had."

"Except it doesn’t end until I die," said Rathburn.

Shiozaki said nothing.

Rathburn exhaled noisily. "You’re about to tell me that I’m already dead, aren’t you? And so I shouldn’t think of this as a prison; I should think of this as heaven."

Shiozaki opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again without saying anything. Rathburn knew that the administrator couldn’t even give him that comfort. He wasn’t dead nor would he be, even when this discarded biological container, here, in Paradise Valley, finally ceased to function. No, George Rathburn lived on, a duplicated version of this consciousness in an almost indestructible, virtually immortal robot body, out in the real world.

"Hey there, G.R.," said the black man with the long gray beard. "Join me?"

Rathburn the Rathburn made out of carbon, that is had entered Paradise Valley’s dining hall. The man with the beard had already been served his lunch: a lobster tail, garlic mashed potatoes, a glass of the finest Chardonnay. The food here was exquisite.

"Hi, Dat," Rathburn said, nodding. He envied the bearded man. His name, before he’d transferred his consciousness into a robot, had been Darius Allan Thompson, so his initials, the only version of his birth name allowed to be used here, made a nice little word almost as good as having a real name. Rathburn took a seat at the same table. One of the ever-solicitous servers young, female (for this table of straight men), beautiful was already at hand, and G.R. ordered a glass of champagne. It wasn’t a special occasion nothing was ever special in Paradise Valley but any pleasure was available to those, like him and Dat, on the Platinum Plus maintenance plan.

"Why so long in the face, G.R.?" asked Dat.

"I don’t like it here."

Dat admired the derrière of the departing server, and took a sip of his wine. "What’s not to like?"

"You used to be a lawyer, didn’t you? Back on the outside?"

"I still am a lawyer on the outside," said Dat.

G.R. frowned, but decided not to press the point. "Can you answer some questions for me?"

"Sure. What do you want to know?"

G.R. entered Paradise Valley’s "hospital." He thought of the name as being in quotation marks, since a real hospital was a place you were supposed to go to only temporarily for healing. But most of those who had uploaded their consciousness, who had shed their skins, were elderly. And when their discarded shells checked into the hospital, it was to die. But G.R. was only forty-five. With proper medical treatment, and some good luck, he had a fair chance of seeing one hundred.

G.R. went into the waiting room. He’d watched for two weeks now, and knew the schedule, knew that little Lilly Ng slight, Vietnamese, fifty would be the doctor on duty. She, like Shiozaki, was staff a real person who got to go home, to the real world, at night.

After a short time, the receptionist said the time-honored words: "The doctor will see you now."

G.R. walked into the green-walled examination room. Ng was looking down at a datapad. "GR-7," she said, reading his serial number. Of course, he wasn’t the only one with the initials G.R. in Paradise Valley, and so he had to share what faint echo of a name he still possessed with several other people. She looked at him, her gray eyebrows raised, waiting for him to confirm that that was indeed who he was.

"That’s me," said G.R., "but you can call me George."

"No," said Ng. "I cannot." She said it in a firm but gentle tone; presumably, she’d been down this road before with others. "What seems to be the problem?"

"I’ve got a skin tag in my left armpit," he said. "I’ve had it for years, but it’s started to get sensitive. It hurts when I apply roll-on deodorant, and it chafes as I move my arm."

Ng frowned. "Take off your shirt, please."

G.R. began undoing buttons. He actually had several skin tags, as well as a bunch of moles. He also had a hairy back, which he hated. One reason uploading his consciousness had initially seemed appealing was to divest himself of these dermal imperfections. The new golden robot body he’d selected looking like a cross between the Oscar statuette and C-3PO–had no such cosmetic defects.

As soon as the shirt was off, he lifted his left arm and let Ng examine his axilla.

"Hmm," she said, peering at the skin tag. "It does look inflamed."

G.R. had brutally pinched the little knob of skin an hour before, and had twisted it as much as he could in either direction.

Ng was now gently squeezing it between thumb and forefinger. G.R. had been prepared to suggest a treatment, but it would be better if she came up with the idea herself. After a moment, she obliged. "I can remove it for you, if you like."

"If you think that’s the right thing to do," said G.R.

"Sure," said Ng. "I’ll give you a local anesthetic, clip it off, and cauterize the cut. No need for stitches."

Clip it off? No! No, he needed her to use a scalpel, not surgical scissors. Damn it!

She crossed the room, prepared a syringe, and returned, injecting it directly into the skin tag. The needle going in was excruciating for a few moments. And then there was no sensation at all.

"How’s that?" she asked.

"Fine."

Ng put on surgical gloves, opened a cupboard, and pulled out a small leather case. She placed it on the examination table G.R. was now perched on, and opened it. It contained surgical scissors, forceps, and–

They glinted beautifully under the lights from the ceiling.

A pair of scalpels, one with a short blade, the other with a longer one.

"All right," said Ng, reaching in and extracting the scissors. "Here we go . . ."

G.R. shot his right arm out, grabbing the long-bladed scalpel, and quickly swung it around, bringing it up and under Ng’s throat. Damn but the thing was sharp! He hadn’t meant to hurt her, but a shallow slit two centimeters long now welled crimson across where her Adam’s apple would have been had she been a man.

A small scream escaped from Ng, and G.R. quickly clamped his other hand over her mouth. He could feel her shaking.

"Do exactly as I say," he said, "and you’ll walk out of this alive. Screw me over, and you’re dead."

"Don’t worry," said Detective Dan Lucerne to Mr. Shiozaki. "I’ve handled eight hostage situations over the years, and in every case, we’ve managed a peaceful solution. We’ll get your woman back."

Shiozaki nodded then looked away, hiding his eyes from the detective. He should have recognized the signs in GR-7. If only he’d ordered him sedated, this never would have happened.

Lucerne gestured toward the vidphone. "Get the examination room on this thing," he said.

Shiozaki reached over Lucerne’s shoulder and tapped out three numbers on the keypad. After a moment, the screen came to life, showing Ng’s hand pulling away from the camera at her end. As the hand withdrew, it was clear that G.R. still had the scalpel held to Ng’s neck.

"Hello," said Lucerne. "My name is Detective Dan Lucerne. I’m here to help you."

"You’re here to save Dr. Ng’s life," said GR-7. "And if you do everything I want, you will."

"All right," said Lucerne. "What do you want, sir?"

"For starters, I want you to call me Mr. Rathburn."

"Fine," said Lucerne. "That’s fine, Mr. Rathburn."

Lucerne was surprised to see the shed skin tremble in response. "Again," GR-7 said, as if it were the sweetest sound he’d ever heard. "Say it again."

"What can we do for you, Mr. Rathburn?"

"I want to talk to the robot version of me."

Shiozaki reached over Lucerne’s shoulder again, pushing the mute button. "We can’t allow that."

"Why not?" asked Lucerne.

"Our contract with the uploaded version specifies that there will never be any contact with the shed skin."

"I’m not worried about fine print," said Lucerne. "I’m trying to save a woman’s life." He took the mute off. "Sorry about that, Mr. Rathburn."

GR-7 nodded. "I see Mr. Shiozaki standing behind you. I’m sure he told you that what I wanted isn’t permitted."

Lucerne didn’t look away from the screen, didn’t break the eye contact with the skin. "He did say that, yes. But he’s not in charge here. I’m not in charge here. It’s your show, Mr. Rathburn."

Rathburn visibly relaxed. Lucerne could see him back the scalpel off a bit from Ng’s neck. "That’s more like it," he said. "All right. All right. I don’t want to kill Dr. Ng but I will unless you bring the robot version of me here within three hours." He spoke out of the side of his mouth to Ng. "Break the connection."

A terrified-looking Ng reached her arm forward, her pale hand and simple gold wedding ring filling the field of view.

And the screen went dead.

George Rathburn the silicon version was sitting in the dark, wood-paneled living room of his large Victorian-style country house. Not that he had to sit; he never grew tired anymore. Nor did he really need his chairs to be padded. But folding his metal body into the seat still felt like the natural thing to do.

Knowing that, barring accidents, he was now going to live virtually forever, Rathburn figured he should tackle something big and ambitious, like War and Peace or Ulysses. But, well, there would always be time for that later. Instead, he downloaded the latest Buck Doheney mystery novel into his datapad, and began to read.

He’d only gotten halfway through the second screenful of text when the datapad bleeped, signaling an incoming call.

Rathburn thought about just letting the pad record a message. Already, after only a few weeks of immortality, nothing seemed particularly urgent. Still, it might be Kathryn. He’d met her at the training center, while they were both getting used to their robot bodies, and to their immortality. Ironically, she’d been eighty-two before she’d uploaded; in his now-discarded flesh-and-blood shell, George Rathburn would never have had a relationship with a woman so much older than he was. But now that they were both in artificial bodies his gold, hers a lustrous bronze they were well on the way to a full-fledged romance.

The pad bleeped again, and Rathburn touched the ANSWER icon no need to use a stylus anymore; his synthetic fingers didn’t secrete oils that would leave a mark on the screen.

Rathburn had that strange feeling he’d experienced once or twice since uploading the feeling of deep surprise that would have been accompanied by his old heart skipping a beat. "Mr. Shiozaki?" he said. "I didn’t expect to ever see you again."

"I’m sorry to have to bother you, George, but we’ve well, we’ve got an emergency. Your old body has taken a hostage here in Paradise Valley."

"What? My God . . ."

"He’s saying he will kill the woman if we don’t let him talk to you."

George wanted to do the right thing, but . . .

But he’d spent weeks now trying to forget that another version of him still existed. "I..um…I guess it’d be okay if you put him on."

Shiozaki shook his head. "No. He won’t take a phone call. He says you have to come here in person."

"But . . . but you said . . ."

"I know what we told you during counseling, but, damn it, George, a woman’s life is at stake. You might be immortal now, but she isn’t."

Rathburn thought for another few seconds, then: "All right. All right. I can be there in a couple of hours."

The robot-bodied George Rathburn was shocked by what he was seeing on the vidphone in Shiozaki’s office. It was him just as he remembered himself. His soft, fragile body; his graying temples; his receding hairline; his nose that he’d always thought was too large.

But it was him doing something he never could have imagined doing holding a surgical blade to a woman’s throat.

Detective Lucerne spoke toward the phone’s pickups. "Okay," he said. "He’s here. The other you is here."

On the screen, Rathburn could see his shed skin’s eyes go wide as they beheld what he’d become. Of course, that version of him had selected the golden body but it had only been an empty shell then, with no inner workings. "Well, well, well," said G.R. "Welcome, brother."

Rathburn didn’t trust his synthesized voice, so he simply nodded.

"Come on down to the hospital," said G.R. "Go to the observation gallery above the operating theater; I’ll go to the operating theater itself. We’ll be able to see each other and we’ll be able to talk, man to man."

"Hello," said Rathburn. He was standing on his golden legs, staring through the angled sheet of glass that overlooked the operating room.

"Hello," said GR-7, looking up. "Before we go any further, I need you to prove that you are who you say you are. Sorry about this, but, well, it could be anyone inside that robot."

"It’s me," said Rathburn.

"No. At best it’s one of us. But I’ve got to be sure."

"So ask me a question."

GR-7 was clearly prepared for this. "The first girl to ever give us a blowjob."

"Carrie," said Rathburn, at once. "At the soccer field."

GR-7 smiled. "Good to see you, brother."

Rathburn was silent for a few moments. He swiveled his head on noiseless, frictionless bearings, looking briefly at Lucerne’s face, visible on a vidphone out of view of the observation window. Then he turned back to his shed skin. "I, ah, I understand you want to be called George."

"That’s right."

But Rathburn shook his head. "We you and I, when we were one shared exactly the same opinion about this matter. We wanted to live forever. And that can’t be done in a biological body. You know that."

"It can’t be done yet in a biological body. But I’m only forty-five. Who knows what technology will be available in the rest of our of my lifetime?"

Rathburn no longer breathed so he could no longer sigh. But he moved his steel shoulders while feeling the emotion that used to produce a sigh. "You know why we chose to transfer early. You have a genetic predisposition to fatal strokes. But I don’t have that George Rathburn doesn’t have that anymore. You might check out any day now, and if we hadn’t transferred our consciousness into this body, there would have been no immortality for us."

"But we didn’t transfer consciousness," said GR-7. "We copied consciousness bit for bit, synapse for synapse. You’re a copy. I’m the original."

"Not as a matter of law," said Rathburn. "You the biological you signed the contract that authorized the transfer of personhood. You signed it with the same hand you’re using to hold that scalpel to Dr. Ng’s throat."

"But I’ve changed my mind."

"You don’t have a mind to change. The software we called the mind of George Rathburn the only legal version of it has been transferred from the hardware of your biological brain to the hardware of our new body’s nano-gel CPU." The robotic Rathburn paused. "By rights, as in any transfer of software, the original should have been destroyed."

GR-7 frowned. "Except that society wouldn’t allow for that, any more than it would allow for physician-assisted suicide. it’s illegal to terminate a source body, even after the brain has been transferred."

"Exactly," said Rathburn, nodding his robotic head. "And you have to activate the replacement before the source dies, or else the court will determine that there’s been no continuity of personhood and dispose of the assets. Death may not be certain anymore, but taxes certainly are."

Rathburn had hoped GR-7 would laugh at that, hoped that a bridge could be built between them. But GR-7 simply said, "So I’m stuck here."

"I’d hardly call it ‘stuck,’" said Rathburn. "Paradise Valley is a little piece of heaven here on Earth. Why not just enjoy it, until you really do go to heaven?"

"I hate it here," said GR-7. He paused. "Look, I accept that by the current wording of the law, I have no legal standing. All right, then. I can’t make them nullify the transfer but you can. You are a person in the eyes of the law; you can do this."

"But I don’t want to do it. I like being immortal."

"But I don’t like being a prisoner."

"It’s not me that’s changed," said the android. "It’s you. Think about what you’re doing. We were never violent. We would never dream of taking a hostage, of holding a knife to someone’s throat, of frightening a woman half to death. You’re the one who has changed."

But the skin shook his head. "Nonsense. We’d just never been in such desperate circumstances before. Desperate circumstances make one do desperate things. The fact that you can’t conceive of us doing this means that you’re a flawed copy. This this transfer process isn’t ready for prime time yet. You should nullify the copy and let me, the original, go on with your with our life."

It was now the robotic Rathburn’s turn to shake his head. "Look, you must realize that this can’t ever work that even if I were to sign some paper that transferred our legal status back to you, there are witnesses here to testify that I’d been coerced into signing it. It would have no legal value."

"You think you can outsmart me?" said GR-7. "I am you. Of course I know that."

"Good. Then let that woman go."

"You’re not thinking," said GR-7. "Or at least you’re not thinking hard enough. Come on, this is me you’re talking to. You must know I’d have a better plan than that."

"I don’t see. . . ."

"You mean you don’t want to see. Think, Copy of George. Think."

"I still don’t . . ." The robotic Rathburn trailed off. "Oh. No, no, you can’t expect me to do that."

"Yes, I do," said GR-7.

"But . . ."

"But what?" The skin moved his free hand the one not holding the scalpel in a sweeping gesture. "It’s a simple proposition. Kill yourself, and your rights of personhood will default back to me. You’re correct that, right now, I’m not a person under the law meaning I can’t be charged with a crime. So I don’t have to worry about going to jail for anything I do now. Oh, they might try but I’ll ultimately get off, because if I don’t, the court will have to admit that not just me, but all of us here in Paradise Valley are still human beings, with human rights."

"What you’re asking is impossible."

"What I’m asking is the only thing that makes sense. I talked to a friend who used to be a lawyer. The personhood rights will revert if the original is still alive, but the uploaded version isn’t. I’m sure no one ever intended the law to be used for this purpose; I’m told it was designed to allow product-liability suits if the robot brain failed shortly after transfer. But regardless, if you kill yourself, I get to go back to being a free human." GR-7 paused for a moment. "So what’s it going to be? Your pseudolife, or the real flesh-and-blood life of this woman?"

"George . . ." said the robot mouth. "Please."

But the biological George shook his head. "If you really believe that you, as a copy of me, are more real than the original that still exists if you really believe that you have a soul, just like this woman does, inside your robotic frame then there’s no particular reason why you should sacrifice yourself for Dr. Ng here. But if, down deep, you’re thinking that I’m correct, that she really is alive, and you’re not, then you’ll do the right thing." He pressed the scalpel’s blade in slightly, drawing blood again. "What’s it going to be?"

George Rathburn had returned to Shiozaki’s office, and Detective Lucerne was doing his best to persuade the robot-housed mind to agree to GR-7’s terms.

"Not in a million years," said Rathburn, "and, believe me, I intend to be around that long."

"But another copy of you can be made," said Lucerne.

"But it won’t be me this me."

"But that woman, Dr. Ng: she’s got a husband, three daughters . . ."

"I’m not insensitive to that, Detective," said Rathburn, pacing back and forth on his golden mechanical legs. "But let me put it to you another way. Say this is 1875, in the southern US. The Civil War is over, blacks in theory have the same legal status as whites. But a white man is being held hostage, and he’ll only be let go if a black man agrees to sacrifice himself in the white man’s place. See the parallel? Despite all the courtroom wrangling that was done to make uploaded life able to maintain the legal status, the personhood, of the original, you’re asking me to set that aside, and reaffirm what the whites in the south felt they knew all along: that, all legal mumbo-jumbo to the contrary, a black man is worth less than a white man. Well, I won’t do that. I wouldn’t affirm that racist position, and I’ll be damned if I’ll affirm the modern equivalent: that a silicon-based person is worth less than a carbon-based person."

"I’ll be damned,’" repeated Lucerne, imitating Rathburn’s synthesized voice. He let the comment hang in the air, waiting to see if Rathburn would respond to it.

And Rathburn couldn’t resist. "Yes, I know there are those who would say I can’t be damned–because whatever it is that constitutes the human soul isn’t recorded during the transference process. That’s the gist of it, isn’t it? The argument that I’m not really human comes down to a theological assertion: I can’t be human, because I have no soul. But I tell you this, Detective Lucerne: I feel every bit as alive–and every bit as spiritual–as I did before the transfer. I’m convinced that I do have a soul, or a divine spark, or an élan vital, or whatever you want to call it. My life in this particular packaging of it is not worth one iota less than Dr. Ng’s, or anyone else’s."

Lucerne was quiet for a time, considering. "But what about the other you? You’re willing to stand here and tell me that that version–the original, flesh-and-blood version–is not human anymore. And you would have that distinction by legal fiat, just as blacks were denied human rights in the old south."

"There’s a difference," said Rathburn. "There’s a big difference. That version of me–the one holding Dr. Ng hostage–agreed of its own free will, without any coercion whatsoever, to that very proposition. He–it–agreed that it would no longer be human, once the transfer into the robot body was completed."

"But he doesn’t want it to be that way anymore."

"Tough. It’s not the first contract that he–that I–signed in my life that I later regretted. But simple regret isn’t reason enough to get out of a legally valid transaction." Rathburn shook his robotic head. "No, I’m sorry. I refuse. Believe me, I wish more than anything that you could save Dr. Ng–but you’re going to have to find another way to do it. There’s too much at stake here for my people–for uploaded humans–to let me make any other decision."

"All right," Lucerne finally said to the robotic Rathburn, "I give up. If we can’t do it the easy way, we’re going to have to do it the hard way. It’s a good thing the old Rathburn wants to see the new Rathburn directly. Having him in that operating room while you’re in the overlooking observation gallery will be perfect for sneaking a sharpshooter in."

Rathburn felt as though his eyes should go wide, but of course they did not. "You’re going to shoot him?"

"You’ve left us no other choice. Standard procedure is to give the hostage-taker everything he wants, get the hostage back, then go after the criminal. But the only thing he wants is for you to be dead–and you’re not willing to cooperate. So we’re going to take him out."

"You’ll use a tranquilizer, won’t you?"

Lucerne snorted. "On a man holding a knife to a woman’s throat? We need something that will turn him off like a light, before he’s got time to react. And the best way to do that is a bullet to the head or chest."

"But . . . but I don’t want you to kill him."

Lucerne made an even louder snort. "By your logic, he’s not alive anyway."

"Yes, but . . ."

"But what? You willing to give him what he wants?"

"I can’t. Surely you can see that."

Lucerne shrugged. "Too bad. I was looking forward to being able to quip ‘Goodbye, Mr. Chips.’"

"Damn you," said Rathburn. "Don’t you see that it’s because of that sort of attitude that I can’t allow this precedent?"

Lucerne made no reply, and after a time Rathburn continued. "Can’t we fake my death somehow? Just enough for you to get Ng back to safety?"

Lucerne shook his head. "GR-7 demanded proof that it was really you inside that tin can. I don’t think he can be easily fooled. But you know him better than anyone else. Could you be fooled?"

Rathburn tipped his mechanical head down. "No. No, I’m sure he’ll demand positive proof."

"Then we’re back to the sharpshooter."

Rathburn walked into the observation gallery, his golden feet making soft metallic clangs as they touched the hard, tiled floor. He looked through the angled glass, down at the operating room below. The slab-of-flab version of himself had Dr. Ng tied up now, her hands and feet bound with surgical tape. She couldn’t get away, but he no longer had to constantly hold the scalpel to her throat. GR-7 was standing up, and she was next to him, leaning against the operating table.

The angled window continued down to within a half-meter of the floor. Crouching below its sill was Conrad Burloak, the sharpshooter, in a gray uniform, holding a black rifle. A small transmitter had been inserted in Rathburn’s camera hardware, copying everything his glass eyes were seeing onto a datapad Burloak had with him.

In ideal circumstances, Burloak had said, he liked to shoot for the head, but here he was going to have to fire through the plate-glass window, and that might deflect the bullet slightly. So he was going to aim for the center of the torso, a bigger target. As soon as the datapad showed a clean line-of-fire at G.R., Burloak would pop up and blow him away.

"Hello, George," said the robotic Rathburn. There was an open intercom between the observation gallery and the operating theater below.

"All right," said the fleshy one. "Let’s get this over with. Open the access panel to your nano-gel braincase, and . . ."

But GR-7 trailed off, seeing that the robotic Rathburn was shaking his head. "I’m sorry, George. I’m not going to deactivate myself."

"You prefer to see Dr. Ng die?"

Rathburn could shut off his visual input, the equivalent of closing his eyes. He did that just now for a moment, presumably much to the chagrin of the sharpshooter studying the datapad. "Believe me, George, the last thing I want to do is see anyone die."

He reactivated his eyes. He’d thought he’d been suitably ironic but, of course, the other him had the same mind. GR-7, perhaps suspecting that something was up, had moved Dr. Ng so that she was now standing between himself and the glass,

"Don’t try anything funny," said the skin. "I’ve got nothing to lose."

Rathburn looked down on his former self–but only in the literal sense. He didn’t want to see this . . . this man, this being, this thing, this entity, this whatever it was, hurt.

After all, even if the shed skin wasn’t a person in the cold eyes of the law, he surely still remembered that time he’d–they’d–almost drowned swimming at the cottage, and mom pulling him to shore while his arms flailed in panic. And he remembered his first day at junior-high school, when a gang of grade nines had beaten him up as initiation. And he remembered the incredible shock and sadness when he’d come home from his weekend job at the hardware store and found dad slumped over in his easy chair, dead from a stroke.

And that biological him must remember all the good things, too: hitting that home run clear over the fence in grade eight, after all the members of the opposing team had moved in close; his first kiss, at a party, playing spin the bottle; and his first romantic kiss, with Dana, her studded tongue sliding into his mouth; that perfect day in the Bahamas, with the most gorgeous sunset he’d ever seen.

Yes, this other him wasn’t just a backup, wasn’t just a repository of data. He knew all the same things, felt all the same things, and–

The sharpshooter had crawled several meters along the floor of the observation gallery, trying to get a clean angle at GR-7. Out of the corner of his robotic vision–which was as sharp at the peripheries as it was in the center–Rathburn saw the sharpshooter tense his muscles, and then–

And then Burloak leaped up, swinging his rifle, and–

And to his astonishment, Rathburn found the words "Look out, George!" emitting from his robotic mouth at a greatly amplified volume.

And just as the words came out, Burloak fired, and the window exploded into a thousand shards, and GR-7 spun around, grabbing Dr. Ng, swinging her in between himself and the sharpshooter, and the bullet hit, drilling a hole through the woman’s heart, and through the chest of the man behind her, and they both crumpled to the operating-room floor, and human blood flowed out of them, and the glass shards rained down upon them like robot tears.

And so, at last, there was no more ambiguity. There was only one George Rathburn–a single iteration of the consciousness that had first bloomed some forty-five years ago, now executing as code in the nano-gel inside a robotic form.

George suspected that Shiozaki would try to cover up what had occurred back in Paradise Valley–at least the details. He’d have to admit that Dr. Ng had been killed by a skin, but doubtless Shiozaki would want to gloss over Rathburn’s warning shout. After all, it would be bad for business if those about to shed got wind of the fact that the new versions still had empathy for the old ones.

But Detective Lucerne and his sharpshooter would want just the opposite: only by citing the robotic Rathburn’s interference could they exonerate the sharpshooter from accidentally shooting the hostage.

But nothing could exonerate GR-7 from what he’d done, swinging that poor, frightened woman in front of himself as a shield . . .

Rathburn sat down in his country house’s living room. Despite his robotic body, he did feel weary–bone-weary–and needed the support of the chair.

He’d done the right thing, even if GR-7 hadn’t; he knew that. Any other choice by him would have been devastating not just for himself, but also for Kathryn and every other uploaded consciousness. There really had been no alternative.

Immortality is grand. Immortality is great. As long as you have a clear conscience, that is. As long as you’re not tortured by doubt, racked by depression, overcome with guilt.

That poor woman, Dr. Ng. She’d done nothing wrong, nothing at all.

And now she was dead.

And he–a version of him–had caused her to be killed.

GR-7’s words replayed in Rathburn’s memory. We’d just never been in such desperate circumstances before.

Perhaps that was true. But he was in desperate circumstances now.

And he’d found himself contemplating actions he never would have considered possible for him before.

That poor woman. That poor dead woman . . .

It wasn’t just GR-7’s fault. It was his fault. Her death was a direct consequence of him wanting to live forever.

And he’d have to live with the guilt of that forever.

Unless . . .

Desperate circumstances make one do desperate things.

He picked up the magnetic pistol–astonishing what things you could buy online these days. A proximity blast from it would destroy all recordings in nano-gel.

George Rathburn looked at the pistol, at its shiny, hard exterior.

And he placed the emitter against the side of his stainless-steel skull, and, after a few moments of hesitation, his golden robotic finger contracted against the trigger.

What better way, after all, was there to prove that he was still human?

THE CLOCKWORK ATOM BOMB

Dominic Green

“Over here, mister. This is the place.” The girl tugged Mativi’s sleeve and led him down a street that was mostly poorly-patched shell holes. Delayed Action Munitions – the size of thumbnails and able to turn a man into fragments of the same dimensions – littered the ground hereabouts, designed to lie dormant for generations. Construction companies used robot tractors to fill in bomb damage, and the robots did a poor job. Granted, they were getting better – Robocongo was one of equatorial Africa’s biggest exporters. But usually the whites and the blacks-with-cash sat in control rooms a kilometre away directing robots to build the houses of the poor, and the poor then had to live in those houses not knowing whether, if they put their foot down hard on a tough domestic issue, they might also be putting it down on a DAM bomblet a metre beneath their foundations.

This street, though, hadn’t even been repaired. It was all sloped concrete, blast rubble and wrecked signs telling outsiders to keep out this goverment building! field clerical stores! important goverment work here you go back!

“Come on, mister”, said the phaseuse. “You will see, and then you will have no problem paying.”

“You stand still,” commanded Mativi suddenly. “Stand right there.”

Nervously, he reached into a pocket and brought out the Noli Timere. It only worked fifty per cent of the time, based on information gathered from scientist-collaborators from all factions in the war, but fifty per cent was better than zip.

He turned the device on, on low power in case any of the more recent devices that smelled mine detector power-up were present, and swept it left and right. Nothing. He flicked it up to full power and swept again. A small stray air-dropped anti-personnel device at the north-west end of the street, but otherwise nothing.

“You see that house over there, Emily?” he said, pointing across the road. The girl nodded. “Well, you’re not to go in there. There is an explosive device in there. A big one. It’ll kill you.”

Emily shook her head firmly. “It isn’t nearly as big as the one that took Claude.”

Mativi nodded. “But you say the device is still there.”

“Has been since I was very little. Everyone knows it’s there. The grown-ups know it’s there. They used it when the slim hit, to get rid of the bodies, so we wouldn’t get sick. Sometimes,” she said, “before the bodies were entirely dead.”

“You can’t get slim from a dead body,” said Mativi.

“That’s what you say,” said Emily. And he knew she was right. So many generously altered genomes had been flying around Africa in warheads fifteen years ago that someone could have altered HIV and turned it into an airborne, rather than blood-borne, virus – like the rickettsial haemorrhagic fever that had wiped out all of Johannesburg’s blood banks in a single day and made social pariahs of blacks all over Europe and America overnight.

The sun dropped below the horizon like a guillotine blade, and it was suddenly night, as if someone had flicked a switch in Heaven. Mativi had gotten too used to life off the equator, had been working on the basis that night would steal up slowly as it had in Quebec and Patagonia. But the busy equatorial night had no time for twilight. He hadn’t brought night vision goggles. Had he brought a torch?

As they walked up the street, a wind gathered, as if the landscape sensed his unease.

“You have to be careful,” said the girl, “tread only where I tread. And you have to bend down.” She nodded at Mativi’s Kinshasa Rolex. “You have to leave your watch outside.”

Why? So one of your bacheque boyfriends can steal it while I’m in there? To satisfy the girl’s insistence, he slid the watch off his wrist and set it on a brick, but picked it up again when she wasn’t looking and dropped it into his pocket.

“Where are we going?” he said.

“In there.” She pointed. Half-buried in the rubble was a concrete lintel, one end of a substantial buried structure, through which the wind was whistling.

No. Correction. Out of which the wind was whistling.

She slipped under the lintel, on which was fixed a sign saying warning! extreme personal danger! The room beyond had once had skylights. Now, it had ruined holes in the roof, into which the geostationary UNPEFORCONG security moon poured prisms of reflected sunlight. 35,900 kilometres above Mativi’s head, he and five million other Kinshasans were being watched with five thousand cameras. This had at first seemed an outrageous intrusion on his privacy, until he’d realized that he’d have to commit a thousand murders before any of the cameras was likely to catch him in the act.

“Don’t step any closer,” said the girl. “It will take you.”

The entrance had promised an interior like any other minor military strongpoint – only just large enough to contain a couple of hammocks and a machine gun, maybe. But inside, after only a few steps down, the room was huge, the size of a factory floor. They had entered via an engineer’s inspection catwalk close to the roof. He was not sure how far down the floor was.

The wind in here was deafening. The girl had to shout. “THERE IS MORE THAN ONE IN HERE. THEY lIVE IN THE MACHINES. THE GOVERNMENT MADE THE MACHINES, BUT NOT WITH TECHNICIANS AND ElECTRICIANS. WITH SORCERY.”

The machines did not look made by sorcery. They were entirely silent, looking like rows of gigantic, rusted steel chess pawns twice the height of a man, with no pipes or wires entering or leaving them, apparently sitting here unused for any purpose. Mativi felt an urgent, entirely rational need to be in another line of employment.

“HAVE YOU ANY IDEA WHAT THE MACHINES WERE BUIlT FOR?” said Mativi, who had.

The girl nodded. “THE DEMONS ARE IN THE MACHINES,” she said. “THE MACHINES WERE BUIlT AS CAGES. THE MIlITARY MEN WHO MADE THIS PlACE WARNED All THE MOST IMPORTANT MEN IN OUR DISTRICT OF THIS. THEY WARNED MY FATHER. THEY TOlD HIM NEVER TO BREAK ANY OF THE MACHINES OPEN. BUT OVER TIME, THEY lEAK, AND THE DEMONS CAN GET OUT. THE FIRST TWO MACHINES ARE SAFE, FOR NOW. BUT YOU MUST BE CAREFUl, BECAUSE WE THOUGHT THE THIRD ONE WAS SAFE TOO, AND IT TOOK ClAUDE.”

“WHAT DID IT DO TO ClAUDE, WHEN IT TOOK HIM?” said Mativi. He could not see any damage to the walls around the third machine beyond, perhaps, a certain swept-clean quality of the dust on the floor around it.

“IT TOOK HIM,” said the girl. “IT MADE HIM SMAll. IT SUCKED HIM UP.”

“THE MACHINES,” said Mativi in broken lingala. “THEY ARE COVERED WITH…WITH ThINgS.”

The heads of the chess-pawns, under the light of Mativi’s torch, were surrealistically coiffured with assorted objects – spanners, wire, door furniture, and, worryingly, a single fragmentation grenade. Many, perhaps more than half of the things were ferrous metal. But some looked like aluminium. Some were even bits of wood or plaster.

Not just magnetism, then.

He fished the fake Rolex out of his pocket, waved it in the direction of the machines, and felt a strong tug on it as he held it in his hand. But he also felt a strong tug on the sleeve of his shirt, and on his arm itself.

He realized with growing unease that the wind was not blowing out of the chamber, but into it, pushing him from behind. It also appeared to be blowing in through the skylights in the roof above. It did not seem to be blowing out anywhere.

The girl gasped. “YOU SHOUlD NOT HAVE DONE THAT! NOW YOUR WATCH WIll NOT KEEP GOOD TIME.”

“IS THAT HOW THE MACHINE SUCKED ClAUDE UP?”

“NO. All THE MACHINES DRAW THINGS IN, BUT YOU CAN PUll YOURSElF lOOSE FROM MOST OF THEM. BUT THE ONES THE DEMONS lIVE IN WIll SUCK YOU RIGHT INSIDE WHERE THE DEMON lIVES, AND NOT lEAVE A HAIR BEHIND.”

“WHOlE PEOPlE?”

“PEOPlE, METAl, ANYTHING.”

“STONES?” Mativi picked up a fragment of loose plaster from the floor.

“YES. BUT YOU SHOUlD NOT THROW THINGS.”

He threw it. The girl winced. He saw the plaster travel halfway across the floor until it passed the second machine. Then it jerked sideways in mid-air, as if attached to invisible strings, puffed into a long cone of powder, and vanished.

The girl was angry. “YOU MUST DO WHAT I SAY! THE MIlITARY MEN SAID WE SHOUlD NOT THROW THINGS INTO THE BAD MACHINES. THEY SAID IT MADE THE DEMONS STRONGER.”

“YES,” said Mativi. “AND THEY WERE ABSOlUTElY RIGHT. NOT MUCH STRONGER, BUT IF ENOUGH PEOPlE THREW IN ENOUGH UNCHARGED MATERIAl OVER ENOUGH TIME…”

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN BY uNcharged maTerIal.”

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I MEAN BY ‘EVERYONE WOUlD DIE’?”

The girl nodded. “WE SHOUlD NOT STAY TOO lONG IN HERE. PEOPlE WHO STAY TOO lONG IN HERE GET SICK. THE DEMONS MAKE THEM SICK.”

Mativi nodded. “AND I SUPPOSE THIS SICKNESS TAKES THE FORM OF HAIR lOSS, SHORTNESS OF BREATH, ExTREME PAlENESS OF THE SKIN?”

“YES,” said the girl. “THE VICTIMS DISPlAY THE ClASSIC SYMPTOMS OF RADIATION AlOPECIA AND STEM CEll DEATH.”

Well, I’ll be damned. But after all, she has lived through a nuclear war. She’s been living among radiation victims her entire life. Probably taught herself to read using red cross posters.

“WEll, THE SAME DEMONS THAT WERE USED IN THE RADIATION BOMBS ARE IN HERE. SlIGHTlY DIFFERENT, BECAUSE THESE ARE A SlIGHTlY DIFFERENT WEAPON. BUT THE SAME DEMONS.”

The girl nodded. “BUT THESE ARE NOT RADIATION BOMBS,” she said. “THIS MEANS YOU HAVE TO PAY ME DOUBlE.” She held out her hand.

Mativi nodded. “THIS MEANS I HAVE TO PAY YOU DOUBlE.” He fished in his wallet for a fistful of United Nations scrip.

after all, why shouldn’t I pay you? None of this money is going to be worth anything if these things destroy the world tomorrow.

“I’m telling you, there are at least forty of them. I counted them. Five rows by eight…I didn’t go to the hotel because I didn’t want to call you in the clear. We have to be the only people who know about this…Because if anyone wanders into that site, anyone at all, and does anything they shouldn’t, we will all die. I’m not saying they, I’m saying we, and I’m not saying might die, I’m saying will die…Yes, this is a Heavy Weapons alert…No, I can’t tell you what that means…All I can tell you is that you must comply with the alert to the letter if you’re interested in handing on the planet to your children…Your children will grow out of that, that hating their father thing. All teenagers go through that phase. And credit where credit’s due, you really shouldn’t have slept with their mother’s sister in the first place…No, I do not want ‘an inspection team’. I want troops. Armed troops with a mandate to shoot to kill, not a detachment of graduates in Peace Studies from liechtenstein in a white APC. And when I put the phone down on you, I want to know that you’re going to be picking up your phone again and dialling the IAEA. I am serious about this, louis…All right. All right. I’ll see you at the site tomorrow.”

When he laid the handset down, he was trembling. In a day when there were over a hundred permanent websites on the Antarctic ice shelf, it had taken him five hours to find a digital phone line in a city of five million people. Which, to be fair, fifteen years ago, had been a city of ten million people.

Of course, his search for a phone line compatible with his encryption software would probably be for nothing. If there were this few digital lines in the city, there was probably a retrotech transistor microphone planted somewhere in the booth he was sitting in, feeding data back to a mainframe at police headquarters. But at least that meant the police would be the only ones who knew. If he’d gone through the baroque network of emergency analogue lines, every housewife in the cité would have known by morning.

He got up from the booth, walked to the desk, and paid the geek

– the geek with a submachinegun – who was manning it. There was no secret police car waiting outside – the car would have been unmarked, but extremely obvious due to the fact that no one but the government could afford to travel around in cars. The Congolese sun came up like a jack in a box and it was a short walk through the zero tolerance district back to his hotel, which had once been a Hilton. He fell into the mattress, which bludgeoned him compliantly unconscious.

When he opened his hotel room door in the morning to go to the one functioning bathroom, a man was standing outside with a gun.

Neither the man nor the gun were particularly impressive – the gun because it appeared to be a pre-War cased ammunition model that hadn’t been cleaned since the Armistice, and the man because his hand was shaking like a masturbator’s just before orgasm, and because Mativi knew him to be a paterfamilias with three kids in kindergarten and a passion for N gauge model railways.

However, the gun still fired big, horrid bullets that made holes in stuff, and it was pointing at Mativi.

“I’m sorry, Chet, I can’t let you do it.” The safety catch, Mativi noted, was off.

“Do what?” said Mativi.

“You’re taking away my livelihood. You know you are.”

“I’m sorry, Jean, I don’t understand any of this. Maybe you should explain a little more?” Jean-Baptiste Ngoyi, an unremarkable functionary in the United Nations Temporary Administration Service (Former People’s Democratic Republic of Congo), appeared to have put on his very best work clothes to murder Mativi. The blue UNTASFORDEMRECONG logo was embroidered smartly (and widely) on his chest pocket.

“I can’t let you take them away.” There were actually tears in the little man’s eyes.

“Take what away?”

“You know what. everybody knows. They heard you talking to Grosjean.”

Mativi’s eyes popped. “No. Ohhh shit. No.” He leaned back against crumbling postmodernist plasterwork. “Jean, don’t take this personally, but if someone as far down the food chain as you knows, everyone in the city with an email address and a heartbeat knows.” He looked up at Ngoyi. “There was a microphone in the comms booth, right?”

“No, the geek who mans the desk is President lissouba’s police chief ’s half brother. The police are full of lissouba men who were exonerated by the General Amnesty after the Armistice.”

“Shit. Shit. What are they doing, now they know?”

“‘Emergency measures are being put in place to contain the problem’. That’s all they’d say. Oh, and there are already orders out for your arrest For Your Own Safety. But they didn’t know which hotel you were staying in. One of them was trying to find out when he rang me.”

Mativi walked in aimless circles, holding his head to stop his thoughts from wandering. “I’ll bet he was. God, god. And you didn’t tell them where I was. Does that mean you’re, um, not particularly serious about killing me?” He stared at Ngoyi ingratiatingly. But the gun didn’t waver – at least, not any more than it had been wavering already. Never mind. It had been worth a try.

“It means I couldn’t take the chance that they really did want you arrested for your own safety,” said Ngoyi. “If a UN Weapons Inspector died in Kinshasa, that would throw the hand grenade well and truly in the muck spreader for the police chiefs, after all.”

“I take it some of them are the men who originally installed the containers. If so, they know very well full amnesties are available for war crimes – ”

Ngoyi shook his head. “Not for crimes committed after the war.”

Mativi was alarmed. “After?”

“They’ve been using the machines as execution devices,” said Ngoyi. “No mess, no body, no incriminating evidence. And they work, too. The bacheques are terrified of them, will do anything to avoid being killed that way. They think they’re the homes of demons – ”

“They’re not far wrong,” muttered Mativi.

“ – and then there are the undertakers,” continued Ngoyi. “They’ve been using the machines for mass burials. Otherwise the bodies would just have piled up in the streets in the epidemics. And the domestic waste trucks, about five of them stop there several times a week and dump stuff in through the skylights. And my own trucks – ”

“Your own trucks?”

“Yes. Three times a week, sometimes four or five.” Ngoyi returned Mativi’s accusing stare. “Oh, sure, the UN gives us Geiger counters and that bacterial foam that fixes fallout, and the special vehicles for sucking up the fixed material and casting it into lead glass bricks – ”

“Which you’re supposed to then arrange for disposal by the IAEA by burial underground in the Devil’s Brickyard in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica,” finished Mativi. “Only you haven’t been doing that, have you? You thought you’d cut a few corners.”

“The UN gives us a budget of only five million a year!” complained Ngoyi. “And by the time that reaches us, it has, by the magic of African mathematics, become half a million. Have you any idea what it costs to ship a single kilo of hazardous waste to Antarctica?”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do,” repeated Mativi, staring up the barrel of the gun, which somehow did not matter quite so much now.

“We were talking astrophysics in the Bar B Doll only the other night. You told me then that once something crosses the Event Horizon, it never comes out!” said the civil servant, mortified. “You promised!”

“That’s absolutely correct,” said Mativi. “Absolutely, totally and utterly correct.”

“Then,” said Ngoyi, his face brightening insanely, “then there is no problem. We can throw as much stuff in as we want to.”

“Each one of those containers,” said Mativi, “is designed to hold a magnetically charged object that weighs more than ten battleships. Hence the reinforced concrete floor, hence the magnetized metal casing that attracts every bit of ferrous metal in the room. Now, what do you think is going to happen if you keep piling in extra uncharged mass? Nothing that crosses the Event Horizon comes out, Jean. Nothing. ever. Including you, including me, including Makemba and Kimbareta and little laurent.”

Ngoyi’s face fell. Then, momentarily, it rose again. “But our stuff is only a few hundred kilos a week,” he began. “Much less than what the domestic waste people put in.”

“I feel better already. You’re not going to be personally responsible for getting the whole planet sucked into oblivion, it’s going to be some other guy.”

“The sewage outlet, mind you,” continued Ngoyi. “That must be pumping in a good thousand litres a day – ”

Mativi’s jaw dropped. “Sewage outlet?”

“Sure. The sanitation guys rerouted the main waste pipe for the city as a temporary measure. They have to keep replacing the last few metres – the machine keeps eating the pipe.” Ngoyi shrugged. “How else do you think they keep five million people’s shit out of the drinking water?”

“Jean-Baptiste, you people have to stop this. You have to stop it now. You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.”

The gun was still pointing at the centre of Mativi’s chest; now, just for a moment, it stopped wavering and hit dead centre.

“I know exactly what I’m doing. I am making sure I can feed my wife and children.”

The finger coiled round the trigger, slowed down as if falling down gravity slopes. Mativi winced.

The gun clunked and did nothing.

Ngoyi stared at his uncooperative weapon tearfully.

“I must warn you,” lied Mativi, “that I led my university karate team.”

“You should leave,” said Ngoyi. “I think I recognized the municipal sanitation inspector’s car following the bus I took down here. He had a rocket propelled grenade launcher on his parcel shelf.”

The road surface rose and fell under the Hyundai like a brown ocean swell, testing its suspension to the limit. Mativi heard things grounding that probably ought not to.

“Can I drop you off anywhere?” He braked gently as the traffic hit the blast craters around the freeway/railway junction, which had been a prime military target. Robot repair units were still working on it, and their operators did not pay much attention to cars that weighed one tenth what a mine clearance tractor did. The streetlights seemed to be out on this stretch of road, and the only illumination came from car headlights bouncing up and down like disco strobes. The robot tractors did not need visible light to see.

“The stadium will do fine. I can catch a bus out to Ndjili from there.”

“You live that far out of town?”

“We don’t all live on Geneva salaries, you know.” Ngoyi’s face blanched suddenly as he stared into the evening traffic. “Stop the car! Handbrake turn! Handbrake turn!”

Mativi stared into the traffic. “Why?”

“Four secret police cars, dead ahead!”

It was true, and Mativi cursed himself for not having seen it. The SUV’s stood out like aluminium islands in the sea of polyurea AfriCars. Each one of them would have cost ten times an ordinary Kinshasan’s annual salary.

“It’s not a roadblock,” said Mativi.

“So I should care? They’re out looking for you!”

“looks like an escort. They’re not even coming down this road. They’re turning onto the freeway to Djelo-Binza. They’re escorting that big, heavy launch tractor…one of the ones designed to carry clutches of heavy ballistic missiles out to the pads at Malebo.” He peered out of the driver-side window. “The one whose suspension is scraping the ground – ”

He did a handbrake turn and left the road in the direction of Djelo-Binza. The suspension hardly noticed the difference. The only reason people drove on roads any more in Kinshasa was because the road was slightly more likely to have been checked for explosives.

There was only desultory hooting when he rejoined the road. leaving the road and rejoining it after a four-wheel-drive short-cut was common. The four-by-fours were clearly visible now, crammed with whatever men the police chiefs had been able to get their hands on at short notice – some in military uniform, some in T-shirts, some with government-issue sidearms, some with war-era AKMs, yawning, pulled out of bed in the early hours.

The crawler was taking up three lanes of traffic, drawing a horde of honking AfriCars behind it like a bridal train. Despite the horns, the crawler was probably not moving much slower than the cars would have done – the expressway was still a mass of blast craters.

“I can’t believe this,” said Mativi, hugely affronted. “How can they think they can haul a million-tonne object across town without me noticing?”

Ngoyi stared. “You think that thing’s got – things on it?”

Mativi nodded. “One of the things is on board – one of the containers. They’re taking it across town because they can’t bear to lose it…I wonder why.” He winked at Ngoyi. “Maybe they’re in the pay of the office of sanitation?” The car plunged into yet another black void unilluminated by its headlights. “Jesus, I wish those streetlights were working.” He blinked as the car bonnet surged up again into the light.

Then he realized. Not only were there no streetlights, there were also no lights in the city around the road.

“That’s it, isn’t it.”

“What?”

“They’re going to the power company. You dumb fucks have been plugging power into it as well. haven’t you.”

Ngoyi hesitated, then gave up the game and nodded. “It started out as a theoretical weapons project in the last days of the war. But,” he insisted defiantly, “it was a peaceful use we put it to! One of our office juniors, a very clever young man, a PhD from CalTech, suggested that if we aimed an infrared laser beam at the event horizon at a certain angle, it would come out as a gamma-ray beam, which we used to heat a tank of mercury…we tried water first, but it flash evaporated and fused the rock around the tank to glass.” He licked his lips nervously. “The hardest part was designing a turbine system that would work with evaporating mercury. We lost a lot of men to heavy metal poisoning…”

Realisation dawned on Mativi. “You were one of the researchers in lissouba’s government.”

“You think I could have got away with living in the old People’s Democratic Republic with a physics degree without being a weapons researcher?” Ngoyi laughed hollowly. “Dream on, brother. But this is peacetime now. The technology is being used to power the houses of five million people – ”

“Uh-uh. There’s no sidestepping the laws of Thermodynamics. You only get out less than what you put in. You’re only getting power out because you’re sapping the angular momentum of what’s inside the container. I’ll lay a bet that what’s inside the container was created illegally using the lubumba Collider that President lissouba convinced the UN to build to ‘rejuvenate the Congolese economy’.”

Ngoyi squirmed. “He also said scientify the Congolese economy. He actually used the word ‘scientify’.”

Mativi nodded. “In any case, that angular momentum was put into the container by gigawatts of energy pumped into the Collider from the city power grid. Effectively all you’re doing is using up energy someone stole and stored fifteen years ago. It’s no more a power source than a clockwork doll is, Jean-Baptiste. You have to wind it up to watch it go. And all you’ll be left with, in the end, is a non-rotating very heavy lump of extremely bad shit.”

“Well, I must admit,” admitted Ngoyi ruefully, “the amount of juice we can squeeze out of it is getting smaller every year.”

The tractor in front suddenly rumbled to a halt in a cloud of dust big enough to conceal a herd of rhinos. A wall of immobile metal barred the carriageway, and three lanes of drivers performed the peculiarly Congolese manoeuvre of stepping on their brakes and leaning on their horns simultaneously. One of them shrieked suddenly in dismay when a length of caterpillar track resembling a chain of house façades clipped together with traffic bollards slammed down onto his bonnet and crushed it flat, before slapping his saloon into a cabriolet. Paint flakes flew everywhere. The car was a steel one, too

– an old Proton model produced under licence in Afghanistan. Mativi hoped the driver had survived.

Troops poured out of the four-by-fours, ignoring the barrage of horns. They were staring at the side of the tractor. Some good Catholics were even crossing themselves.

Mativi put the handbrake on and left his car. Someone hooted at him. He ignored them. One whole side of the tractor had collapsed into the asphalt. The torsion bars of the vehicle’s suspension, each one a man’s waist thick

and made of substances far, far stronger than steel, had snapped like seaside rock. The load on top of the tractor had slumped sideways underneath its canvas blanket.

Now that he was outside the car, he was aware of a hissing sound. The sound was coming from a hole punched in the canvas cover.

Some of the troopers were walking up towards the load. Mativi danced out onto the grass verge, waving his arms like an isangoma. “No! Non! Get away! Trés dangereux!”

One of the men looked at Mativi as if he were an idiot and took another step forward. His sleeve began to rustle and flap in the direction of the hole in the canvas. Then his hand slapped down onto the canvas cover, and he began to scream, beating on his hand, trying to free it. His comrades began to laugh, looking back towards Mativi, enjoying the joke their friend was having at the crazy man’s expense.

Then he vanished.

Not quite vanished – Mativi and the troops both heard the bones in his hand snap, saw the hand crumple into the canvas like a handkerchief into a magician’s glove, followed by his arm, followed by his shoulder, followed by his head. They saw the flare of crimson his body turned into as skin, bone, blood vessels, all the frail materials meant to hold a body together, degenerated into carmine mulch and were sucked up by the structure. A crimson blot of blood a man wide sprayed onto the canvas – out of which, weirdly, runnels of blood began trailing inward toward the hole, against and at angles to gravity.

The police troops turned and looked at Mativi, then looked back at the tractor.

“alors, chef,” one of them said to him, “qu’est-ce qu’on fait maintenant?”

“It’s loose,” said Ngoyi, his eyes glazed, seeing the ends of worlds. “It’s loose, and I am responsible.”

Mativi shook his head. “It’s not loose. Not yet. We can still tell exactly where it is, just by feeding it more policemen. But its casing’s corroded. It’s sucking in stuff from outside.”

“Not corroded.” Ngoyi shook his head. “It won’t corrode. It’s made of nickel alloy, very strong, very heavy. It’s one of the cases we bored a hole in deliberately, in order to shine in the infrared beam. There’ll be another hole in the casing on the far side. Where the gamma comes out.”

Mativi nodded. One of the machines the demons live in.

Ngoyi still seemed to be wary of even looking at the container. “Could it topple over?”

“No. If it begins to topple, it’ll right itself immediately. It’s probably scrunched itself down into the top of the tractor doing that already. Remember, it’s a small thing rotating, rotating fast, and it weighs over a thousand tonnes. The gyroscopic stability of an object like that doesn’t bear thinking about – ”

“CETAWAYO BRIAN MATIVI! I AM HEREBY BY THE ORDER OF THE UNITED NATIONS PEACEKEEPING FORCES OF THE CONGO PlACING YOU UNDER ARREST.”

Mativi turned. The voice had come from a senior police officer. The amount of shiny regalia on the uniform confused matters, but he was almost certain the man was a lieutenant.

Mativi sighed. “lieutenant – ” he began.

“Major,” corrected the Major.

“ – Major, I am engaged in preventing a public disaster of proportions bigger than anything that might possibly be prevented by arresting me. Do you know what will happen if that load falls off that wagon?”

The Major shrugged. “Do you know what will happen if I see you and don’t drag you down to the cells? I will lose my job, and my wife and children will go hungry.”

Mativi began to back away.

“Hey!” The Major began to pointedly unbutton his revolver.

“I know what will happen to you if you don’t bring me in. And you forgot to mention that there’ll be no power in the city either, and that as a consequence a great number of wives and children will go hungry,” said Mativi, circling around the danger area of bowed, permanently windblown grass near the tractor’s payload. He waved his arms in the direction of the dark horizon. “You can see the evidence of this already. The device on this tractor has been uncoupled from the grid, and immediately there is no power for refrigeration, no power for cooking, or for emergency machinery in hospitals. I know all that.” Slowly, he put his hands up to indicate he was no threat. Then, with one hand, he swung himself up onto the side of the tractor, with the payload between himself and the Major. “But you truly cannot begin to comprehend what will happen to those wives and children if I allow this load to continue on to Djelo-Binza, sir. You see, I understand at a very deep level what is in this container. You do not.”

“I must warn you not to attempt to escape custody,” said the Major, raising his pistol. “I am empowered to shoot.”

“How can I be trying to escape custody?” said Mativi, looking down the barrel of the pistol as if his life depended on it, and sinking in his stance, causing the Major to lower the pistol by a couple of centimetres, still training it on his heart. “I’m climbing on board a police vehicle.”

“Get down off that police vehicle, now,” said the Major. “Or I will shoot.”

Mativi licked his lips, looking up a pistol barrel for the second time that day, but this time attempting to perform complex orbital calculations in his head as he did so. have I factored in relativity properly? It needs to travel dead over the hole –

“Shan’t.”

The gun fired. It made quite a satisfactory boom. There was a red flash in mid-air, and Mativi was still there.

The Major stared at Mativi.

“As I said,” said Mativi, “I understand what is in this cargo. You do not. Do I have your full cooperation?”

The Major’s eyes went even wider than his perceived Remit To Use Deadly Force. He lowered the gun, visibly shaken.

“You do,” he said. “Sir,” he added.

The Hyundai became bogged down by bodies – fortunately living ones

– in the immediate vicinity of the Heavy Weapons Alert site. A crowd of perhaps a thousand goggling locals, all dressed in complementary rayon T-shirts handed out by various multinationals to get free airtime on Third World famine reports, were making road and roadside indistinguishable. But the big blue bull bars parted the crowd discreetly, and Mativi dawdled forward to a hastily-erected barrier of velcrowire into which several incautious onlookers had already been pushed by their neighbours. Velcrowire barbs would sink a centimetre deep into flesh, then open up into barbs that could only be removed by surgeons, providing the owner of the flesh desired to keep it. Barbed wire was not truly barbed. Velcrowire was.

The troops at the only gap in the fence stood aside and saluted for the UN car, and Mativi pulled up next to an ancient Boeing v22 VTOl transport, in the crew door of which a portly black man in a bad safari suit sat juggling with mobile phones. The casings of the phones, Mativi knew, were colour coded to allow their owner to identify them. The Boeing had once been United Nations White. After too many years in the Congo, it was now Well-Used latrine White.

Mativi examined what was being done at the far end of the containment area. The site was a mass of specialized combat engineering machinery. Mativi recognized one of the devices, a Japanese-made tractor designed for defusing unexploded nuclear munitions – or rather, for dealing with what happened when a human nuclear UxB disposal operative made a mistake. Hair trigger sensors on the tractor would detect the incipient gamma flare of a fission reaction, then fire a hundred and twenty millimetre shell into the nuke. This would kill the bomb disposal man and fill the area around the bomb with weapons-grade fallout, but probably save a few million civilians in the immediate area–

Mativi walked across the compound and yelled at the man in the Boeing. “louis, what the hell are your UxB monkeys doing?”

Grosjean’s head whipped round. “Oh, hello, Chet. We’re following standard procedure for dealing with an unexploded weaponized gamma source.”

“Well, first off, this isn’t a weapon – ”

Grosjean’s smile was contemptuous. “It’s something that can annihilate the entire planet, and it isn’t a weapon?”

“It’s thirty-nine things that can annihilate the planet, and they’re not weapons any more. Think about it. Would anyone use a weapon that would blow up the whole world?”

Grosjean actually appeared to seriously consider the possibility; then, he nodded to concede the point. “So what sort of weapon were these things part of?”

“Not weapons,” corrected Mativi. “Think of them as weapons waste. They were the principal components in a Penrose Accelerator.”

“You’re making it up.”

“You damn fool security guy, me weapons inspector. We’ve suspected the People’s Democratic Republic of Congo used Penrose weapons in their war with the Democratic People’s Republic of Congo for some time. They had guns capable of lobbing hundred tonne shells full of plague germs at Pretoria from a distance of four thousand kilometres, for instance. When we examined those guns after UNPEFORCONG overran their positions, what we found didn’t fit. They had magnetic accelerators in their barrels, but at the sort of muzzle velocities they’d have had to have been using, the magnets in the barrels would only have been any use in aiming, not in getting the payload up to speed. And the breech of each weapon had been removed. Something had been accelerating those projectiles, but it wasn’t magnetism, and it wasn’t gunpowder. The projectiles were big, and they were moving fast. You remember that outbreak of airborne rabies in New Zealand two years back? That was one of theirs. A Congolese shell fired too hot and went into orbit. The orbit decayed. The shell came down. Thirteen years after the war. Gunpowder and magnetism don’t do that.”

“So what was it?”

“A Penrose accelerator. You get yourself a heavy-duty rotating mass, big enough to have stuff orbit round it, and you whirl ordnance round those orbits, contrary to the direction of the mass’s rotation. Half of your ordnance separates from the payload, and drops into the mass. The other half gets kicked out to mind-buggering velocities. The trouble is, none of this works unless the mass is dense enough to have an escape velocity greater than light.”

“A black hole.”

“Yes. You have yourself thirty-nine charged rotating black holes, formerly used as artillery accelerators, now with nowhere to go. Plus another hole lodged precariously on the back of a tractor on the public highway halfway between here and Djelo-Binza. And the only way for us to find enough energy to get rid of them, I imagine, would be to use another black hole to kick them into orbit. They also give off gamma, almost constantly, as they’re constantly absorbing matter. You point one of those UxB defuser tractors at them and throw the safety on the gun, and – ”

“JESUS.” Grosjean stared at the ground floor entrance where his men had been preparing to throw heavy artillery shells at the problem, jumped up, and began frantically waving his arms for them to stop. “OuI! OuI! arrÊTe! arrÊTe! And we thought getting rid of nuclear waste was difficult.”

“looks easy to me,” said Mativi, nodding in the direction of the highway. Two trucks with UNSMATDEMRECONG livery, their suspensions hanging low, had stopped just short of the military cordon in the eastbound lane. Their drivers had already erected signs saying light heat here for dollars, and were handing out clear resin bricks that glowed with a soft green light to housewives who were coming out of the darkened prefabs nearby, turning the bricks over in their hands, feeling the warmth, haggling over prices.

“Is that what I think it is?” said Grosjean. “I should stop that. It’s dangerous, isn’t it?”

“Don’t concern yourself with it right now. Those bricks can only kill one family at a time. Besides,” said Mativi gleefully, “the city needs power, and Jean-Baptiste’s men are only supplying a need, right?”

Ngoyi, still in the passenger seat of the Hyundai, stared sadly as his men handed out radionuclides, and could not meet Mativi’s eyes. He reached in his inside pocket for the gun he had attempted to kill Mativi with, and began, slowly and methodically, to clear the jam that had prevented him from doing so.

“Once you’ve cordoned the area off,” said Mativi, “we’ll be handling things from that point onwards. I’ve contacted the IAEA myself. There’s a continental response team on its way.”

In the car, Ngoyi had by now worked the jammed bullet free and replaced it with another. At the Boeing, Grosjean’s jaw dropped. “You have teams set up to deal with this already?”

“Of course. You don’t think this is the first time this has happened, do you? It’s the same story as with the A-bomb. As soon as physicists know it’s possible, every tinpot dictator in the world wants it, and will do a great deal to get it, and certainly isn’t going to tell us he’s trying. Somewhere in the world at a location I am not aware of and wouldn’t tell you even if I were, there is a stockpile of these beauties that would make your hair curl. I once spoke to a technician who’d just come back from there…I think it’s somewhere warm, he had a sun-tan. He said there were aisles of the damn things, literally thousands of them. The UN are working on methods of deactivating them, but right now our best theoretical methods for shutting down a black hole always lead to catastrophic Hawking evaporation, which would be like a thousand-tonne nuclear warhead going off. And if any one of those things broke out of containment, even one, it would sink through the Earth’s crust like a stone into water. It’d get to the Earth’s centre and beyond before it slowed down to a stop – and then, of course, it’d begin to fall to the centre again. It wouldn’t rise to quite the same height on the other side of the Earth, just like a pendulum, swinging slower and slower and slower. Gathering bits of Earth into itself all the time, of course, until it eventually sank to the centre of the world and set to devouring the entire planet. The whole Earth would get sucked down the hole, over a period which varies from weeks to centuries, depending on which astrophysicist you ask. And you know what?” – and here Mativi smiled evilly. This was always the good part.

“What?” Grosjean’s Bantu face had turned whiter than a Boer’s. From the direction of the car, Mativi heard a single, slightly muffled gunshot.

“We have no way of knowing whether we already missed one or two. Whether one or two of these irresponsible nations carrying out unauthorized black hole research dropped the ball. How would we know, if someone kept their project secret enough? How would we know there wasn’t a black hole bouncing up and down like a big happy rubber ball inside the Earth right now? Gravitational anomalies would eventually begin to show themselves, I suppose – whether on seismometers or mass detectors. But our world might only have a few decades to live – and we wouldn’t be any the wiser.

“Make sure that cordon’s tight, louis.”

Grosjean swallowed with difficulty, and nodded. Mativi wandered away from the containment site, flipping open his mobile phone. Miracle of miracles, even out here, it worked.

“Hello darling…No, I think it’ll perhaps take another couple of days…Oh, the regular sort of thing. Not too dangerous. Yes, we did catch this one…Well, I did get shot at a little, but the guy missed. He was aiming on a purely Euclidean basis…Euclidean. I’ll explain when I get home…Okay, well, if you have to go now then you have to go. I’ll be on the 9am flight from Kinshasa.”

He flicked the phone shut and walked, whistling, towards the Hyundai. There was a spiderweb of blood over the passenger side where Ngoyi had shot himself. Still, he thought, that’s someone else’s problem. This car goes back into the pool tomorrow. at least he kept the side window open when he did it. made a lot less mess than that bastard lamant did in Quebec city. and they made me clean that car.

He looked out at the world. “Saved you again, you big round bugger, and I hope you’re grateful.”

For the first time in a week, he was smiling.

SINGING MY SISTER DOWN

Margo Lanagan

We all went down to the tar-pit, with mats to spread our weight.

Ikky was standing on the bank, her hands in a metal twin-loop behind her. She’d stopped sulking; now she looked, more, stare-y and puzzled.

Chief Barnarndra pointed to the pit. ‘Out you go then, girl. You must walk on out there to the middle and stand. When you picked a spot, your people can join you.’

So Ik stepped out, very ordinary. She walked out. I thought---hoped, even---she might walk right across and into the thorns the other side; at the same time, I knew she wouldn’t do that.

She walked the way you walk on the tar, except without the arms balancing. She nearly fell from a stumble once, but Mumma hulloo’d to her, and she straightened and walked a straight upright line out to the very middle, where she slowed and stopped, not looking back.

Mumma didn’t look to the chief, but all us kids and the rest did. ‘Right, then,’ he said.

Mumma stepped straight out, as if she’d just herself that moment happened to decide to. We went after her---only us, Ik’s family, which was like us being punished too, everyone watching us walk out to that girl who was our shame.

In the winter you come to the pit to warm your feet in the tar. You stand long enough to sink as far as your ankles---the littler you are, the longer you can stand. You soak the heat in for as long as the tar doesn’t close over your feet and grip, and it’s as good as warmed boots wrapping your feet. But in summer, like this day, you keep away from the tar, because it makes the air hotter and you mind about the stink.

But today we had to go out, and everyone had to see us go.

Ikky was tall, but she was thin and light from all the worry and prison; she was going to take a long time about sinking. We got our mats down, all the food-parcels and ice-baskets and instruments and such spread out evenly on the broad planks Dash and Felly had carried out.

‘You start, Dash,’ said Mumma, and Dash got up and put his drum-ette to his hip and began with ‘Fork-Tail Trio’, and it did feel a bit like a party. It stirred Ikky awake from her hung-headed shame; she lifted up and even laughed, and I saw her hips move in the last chorus, side to side.

Then Mumma got out one of the ice-baskets, which was already black on the bottom from meltwater.

Ikky gasped. ‘Ha! What! Crab! Where’d that come from?’

‘Never you mind, sweet-thing.’ Mumma lifted some meat to Ikky’s mouth, and rubbed some of the crush-ice into her hair.

‘Oh, Mumma!’ Ik said with her mouth full.

‘May as well have the best of this world while you’re here,’ said Mumma. She stood there and fed her like a baby, like a pet guinea-bird.

‘I thought Auntie Mai would come,’ said Ik.

‘Auntie Mai, she’s useless,’ said Dash. ‘She’s sitting at home with her handkerchief.’

‘I wouldn’t’ve cared, her crying,’ said Ik. ‘I would’ve thought she’d say goodbye to me.’

‘Her heart’s too hurt,’ said Mumma. ‘You frightened her. And she’s such a straight lady---she sees shame where some of us just see people. Here, inside the big claw, that’s the sweetest meat.’

‘Oh, yes! Is anyone else feasting with me?’

‘No, darlin’, this is your day only. Well, okay, I’ll give some to this little sad-eyes here, huh? Felly never had crab but the once. Is it yum? Ooh, it’s yum! Look at him!’

Next she called me to do my flute---the flashiest, hardest music I knew. And Ik listened, who usually screamed at me to stop pushing spikes into her brain; she watched my fingers on the flute-holes and my sweating face and my straining, bowing body, and for the first time I didn’t feel like just the nuisance-brother to her. I played well, out of the surprise of her not minding. I couldn’t’ve played better. I heard everyone else being surprised, too, at the end of those tunes, that they must’ve all known too, too well from all my practising.

I sat down, very hungry. Mumma passed me the water-cup and a damp-roll.

‘I’m stuck now,’ said Ik, and it was true---the tar had her by the feet, closed in a gleaming line like that pair of zipper-slippers I saw once in the shoe-master’s vitrina.

‘Oh yeah, well and truly stuck,’ said Mumma. ‘But then, you knew when you picked up that axe-handle you were sticking yourself.’

‘I know.’

‘No coming unstuck from this one. You could’ve let that handle lie.’ That was some serious teasing.

‘No, I couldn’t, Mumma, and you know.’

‘I do, baby chicken. I always knew you’d be too angry, once the wedding-glitter rubbed off your skin. It was a good party, though, wasn’t it?’ And they laughed at each other, Mumma having to steady Ikky or her ankles would’ve snapped over. And when their laughter started going strange Mumma said, ‘Well, this party’s going to be almost as good, ’cause it’s got children. And look what else!’ And she reached for the next ice-basket.

And so the whole long day went, in treats and songs, in ice and stink and joke-stories and gossip and party-pieces. On the banks, people came and went, and the chief sat in his chair and was fanned and fed, and the family of Ikky’s husband sat around the chief, being served too, all in purple-cloth with flashing edging, very prideful.

She went down so slowly.

‘Isn’t it hot?’ Felly asked her.

‘It’s like a big warm hug up my legs,’ said Ik. ‘Come here and give me a hug, little stick-arms, and let me check. Oof, yes, it’s just like that, only lower down.’

‘You’re coming down to me,’ said Fel, pleased.

‘Yeah, soon I’ll be able to bite your ankles like you bite mine.’

Around mid-afternoon, Ikky couldn’t move her arms any more and had a panic, just quiet, not so the bank-people would’ve noticed. ‘What’m I going to do, Mumma?’ she said. ‘When it comes up over my face? When it closes my nose?’

‘Don’t you worry about that. You won’t be awake for that.’ And Mumma cooled her hands in the ice, dried them on her dress, and rubbed them over Ik’s shoulders, down Ik’s arms to where the tar had locked her wrists.

‘You better not give me any teas, or herbs, or anything,’ said Ik. ‘They’ll get you, too, if you help me. They’ll come out to see and make sure.’

Mumma put her hands over Felly’s ears. ‘Tristem give me a gun,’ she whispered.

Ikky’s eyes went wide. ‘But you can’t! Everyone’ll hear!’

‘It’s got a thing on it, quietens it. I can slip it in a tar-wrinkle, get you in the head when your head is part sunk, fold back the wrinkle, tell ’em your heart stopped, the tar pressed it stopped.’

Felly shook his head free. Ikky was looking at Mumma, quietening. There was only the sound of Dash tearing bread with his teeth, and the breeze whistling in the thorn-galls away over on the shore. I was watching Mumma and Ikky closely---I’d wondered about that last part, too. But now this girl up to her waist in the pit didn’t even look like our Ikky. Her face was changing like a cloud, or like a masque-lizard’s colours; you don’t see them move but they become something else, then something else again.

‘No,’ she said, still looking at Mumma. ‘You won’t do that. You won’t have to.’ Her face had a smile on it that touched off one on Mumma’s too, so that they were both quiet, smiling at something in each other that I couldn’t see.

And then their eyes ran over and they were crying and smiling, and then Mumma was kneeling on the wood, her arms around Ikky, and Ikky was ugly against her shoulder, crying in a way that you couldn’t interrupt them.

That was when I realised how many people were watching, when they set up a big, spooky oolooling and stamping on the banks, to see Mumma grieve.

‘Fo!’ I said to Dash, to stop the hair creeping around on my head from that noise. ‘There never was such a crowd when Chep’s daddy went down.’

‘Ah, but he was old and crazy,’ said Dash breadily, ‘and only killed other olds and crazies.’

‘Are those fish-people? And look at the yellow-cloths---they’re from up among the caves, all that way!’

‘Well, it’s nearly Langasday, too,’ said Dash. ‘Lots of people on the move, just happening by.’

‘Maybe. Is that an honour, or a greater shame?’

Dash shrugged. ‘This whole thing is up-ended. It’s like a party, but who would have a party in the tar, and with family going down? I don’t get it.’

‘It’s what Mumma wanted.’

‘Better than having her and Ik be like this all day.’ Dash’s hand slipped into the nearest ice-basket and brought out a crumb of coconut-ice. He ate it as if he had a perfect right.

Everything went slippery in my mind, after that. We were being watched so hard! Even though it was quiet out here, the pothering wind brought crowd-mumble and scraps of music and smoke our way, so often that we couldn’t be private and ourselves. Besides, there was Ikky with the sun on her face, but the rest of her from the rib-peaks down gloved in tar, never to see sun again. Time seemed to just have gone, in big clumps, or all the day was happening at once or something, I was wondering so hard about what was to come, I was watching so hard the differences from our normal days. I wished I had more time to think, before she went right down; my mind was going a bit breathless, trying to get all its thinking done.

But evening came and Ik was a head and shoulders, singing along with us in the lamplight, all the old songs---‘A Flower for You’, ‘Hen and Chicken Bay’, ‘Walking the Tracks with Beejum Singh’, ‘Dollarberries’. She sang all Felly’s little-kid songs that normally she’d sneer at; she got Dash to teach her his new one, ‘A Camo Mile’, with the tricky chorus, made us all work on that one like she was trying to stop us noticing the monster bonfires around the shore, the other singing, of fishing songs and forest songs, the stomp and clatter of the dancing. But they were there all the time, and no other singing in our lives had had all this going on behind it in the gathering darkness.

When the tar began to tip Ik’s chin up, Mumma sent me for the wreath. ‘Mai will have brought it, over by the chief’s chair.’

I got up and started across the tar, and it was as if I cast magic ahead of me, silence-making magic, for as I walked---and it was good to be walking, not sitting---musics petered out, and laughter stopped, and dancers stood still, and there were eyes at me, all along the dark banks, strange eyes and familiar both.

The wreath showed up in the crowd ahead, a big, pale ring trailing spirals of whisper-vine, the beautifullest thing. I climbed up the low bank there, and the ground felt hard and cold after a day on the squishy tar. My ankles shivered as I took the wreath from Mai. It was heavy; it was fat with heavenly scents.

‘You’ll have to carry those,’ I said to Mai, as someone handed her the other garlands. ‘You should come out ,anyway. Ik wants you there.’

She shook her head. ‘She’s cloven my heart in two with that axe of hers.’

‘What, so you’ll chop hers too, this last hour?’

We glared at each other in the bonfire light, all loaded down with the fine, pale flowers.

‘I never heard this boy speak with a voice before, Mai,’ said someone behind her.

‘He’s very sure,’ said someone else. ‘This is Ikky’s Last Things we’re talking about, Mai. If she wants to you be one of them…’

‘She shouldn’t have shamed us all, then,’ Mai said, but weakly.

‘You going to look back on this and think yourself a po-face,’ said the first someone.

‘But it’s like---’ Mai sagged and clicked her tongue. ‘She should have cared what she did to this family,’ she said with her last fight. ‘That it’s more than just herself.’

‘Go on, take the flowers. Don’t make the boy do this twice over. Time is short.’

‘Yeah, everybody’s time is short,’ said the first someone.

Mai stood, pulling her mouth to one side.

I turned and propped the top of the wreath on my forehead, so that I was like a little bride, trailing my head of flowers down my back to the ground. I set off over the tar, leaving the magic silence in the crowd. There was only the rub and squeak of flower-stalks in my ears; in my eyes, instead of the flourishes of bonfires, there were only the lamps in a ring around Mumma, Felly, Dash, and Ikky’s head. Mumma was kneeling bonty-up on the wood, talking to Ikky; in the time it had taken me to get the wreath, Ikky’s head had been locked still.

‘Oh, the baby,’ Mai whimpered behind me. ‘The little darling.’

Bit late for darling-ing now, I almost said. I felt cross and frightened and too grown-up for Mai’s silliness.

‘Here, Ik, we’ll make you beautiful now,’ said Mumma, laying the wreath around Ik’s head. ‘We’ll come out here to these flowers when you’re gone, and know you’re here.’

‘They’ll die pretty quick---I’ve seen it.’ Ik’s voice was getting squashed, coming out through closed jaws. ‘The heat wilts ’em.’

‘They’ll always look beautiful to you,’ said Mumma. ‘You’ll carry down this beautiful wreath, and your family singing.’

I trailed the vines out from the wreath like flares from the edge of the sun.

‘Is that Mai?’ said Ik. Mai looked up startled from laying the garlands between the vines. ‘Show me the extras, Mai.’

Mai held up a garland. ‘Aren’t they good? Trumpets from Low Swamp, Auntie Patti’s whisper-weed, and star-vine to bind. You never thought ordinary old stars could look so good, I’ll bet.’

‘I never did.’

It was all set out right, now. It went in the order: head, half-ring of lamps behind (so as not to glare in her eyes), wreath, half-ring of garlands behind, leaving space in front of her for us.

‘Okay, we’re going to sing you down now,’ said Mumma. ‘Everybody get in and say a proper goodbye.’ And she knelt inside the wreath a moment herself, murmured something in Ikky’s ear and kissed her on the forehead.

We kids all went one by one. Felly got clingy and made Ikky cry; Dash dashed in and planted a quick kiss while she was still upset and would hardly have noticed him; Mumma gave me a cloth and I crouched down and wiped Ik’s eyes and nose---and then could not speak to her bare, blinking face.

‘You’re getting good at that flute,’ she said.

But this isn’t about me, Ik. This is not at all about me.

‘Will you come out here some time, and play over me, when no one else’s around?’

I nodded. Then I had to say some words, of some kind, I knew. I wouldn’t get away without speaking. ‘If you want.’

‘I want, okay? Now give me a kiss.’

I gave her a kid’s kiss, on the mouth. Last time I kissed her, it was carefully on the cheek as she was leaving for her wedding. Some of her glitter had come off on my lips. Now I patted her hair and backed away over the wreath.

Mai came in last. ‘Fairy doll,’ I heard her say sobbingly. ‘Only-one.’

And Ik: ‘It’s all right, auntie. It’ll be over so soon, you’ll see. And I want to hear your voice nice and strong in the singing.’

We readied ourselves, Felly in Mumma’s lap, then Dash, then me next to Mai. I tried to stay attentive to Mumma, so Mai wouldn’t mess me up with her weeping. It was quiet except for the distant flubber and snap of the bonfires.

We started up, all the ordinary evening songs for putting babies to sleep, for farewelling, for soothing broke-hearted people---all the ones everyone knew so well that they’d long ago made ruder versions and joke-songs of them. We sang them plain, following Mumma’s lead; we sang them straight, into Ikky’s glistening eyes, as the tar climbed her chin. We stood tall, so as to see her, and she us, as her face became the sunken centre of that giant flower, the wreath. Dash’s little drum held us together and kept us singing, as Ik’s eyes rolled and she struggled for breath against the pressing tar, as the chief and the husband’s family came and stood across from us, shifting from foot to foot, with torches raised to watch her sink away.

Mai began to crumble and falter beside me as the tar closed in on Ik’s face, a slow, sticky, rolling oval. I sang good and strong---I didn’t want to hear any last whimper, any stopped breath. I took Mai’s arm and tried to hold her together that way, but she only swayed worse, and wept louder. I listened for Mumma under the noise, pressed my eyes shut and made my voice follow hers. By the time I’d steadied myself that way, Ik’s eyes were closing.

Through our singing, I thought I heard her cry for Mumma; I tried not to, yet my ears went on hearing. This will happen only the once---you can’t do it over again if ever you feel like remembering. And Mumma went to her, and I could not tell whether Ik was crying and babbling, or whether it was a trick of our voices, or whether the people on the banks of the tar had started up again. I watched Mumma, because Mumma knew what to do; she knew to lie there on the matting, and dip her cloth in the last water with the little fading fish-scales of ice in it, and squeeze the cloth out and cool the shrinking face in the hole.

And the voice of Ik must have been ours or others’ voices, because the hole Mumma was dampening with her cloth was by her hand movements only the size of a brassboy now. And by a certain shake of her shoulders I could tell: Mumma knew it was all right to be weeping now, now that Ik was surely gone, was just a nose or just a mouth with the breath crushed out of it, just an eye seeing nothing. And very suddenly it all was too much---the flowers nodding in the lamplight, our own sister hanging in tar, going slowly, slowly down like van der Berg’s truck that time, like Jappity’s cabin with the old man still inside it, like any old villain or scofflaw of around these parts, and I had something like a big sicking-up of tears, and they tell me I made an awful noise that frightened everybody right up to the chief, and that the groom’s parents thought I was a very ill-brought-up boy for upsetting them instead of allowing them to serenely and superiorly watch justice be done for their lost son.

I don’t remember a lot about it. I came back to myself walking dully across the tar between Mai and Mumma, hand in hand, carrying nothing, when I had come out here laden, when we had all had to help. We must have eaten everything, I thought. But what about the mats and pans and pots and all? Then I heard a screeking clanking behind me, which was Dash hoisting up too heavy a load of pots.

And Mumma was talking, wearily, as if she’d been going on a long time, and soothingly, which was like a beautiful guide-rope out of my sick difficulty, which my brain was following hand over hand. It’s what they do to people, what they have to do, and all you can do yourself is watch out who you go loving, right? Make sure it’s not someone who’ll rouse that killing-anger in you, if you’ve got that rage, if you’re like our Ik---

Then the bank came up in front of us, high and white-grassed, and beyond it were all the eyes, and attached to the eyes the bodies, shuffling aside for us.

I knew we had to leave Ik behind, and I did not make a fuss, not now. I had done all my fussing, all at once; I had blown myself to pieces out on the tar, and now several monstrous things, several gaping mouths of truth, were rattling the pieces of me around their teeth. I would be all right, if Mai stayed quiet, if Mumma kept murmuring, if both their hands held me as we passed through this forest of people, these flitting firefly eyes.

They got me up the bank, Mumma and Aunty; I paused and they stumped up and then lifted me, and I walked up the impossible slope like a demon, horizontal for a moment and then stiffly over the top---

---and into my Mumma, whose arms were ready. She couldn’t’ve carried me out over the tar, or we’d both have sunk, with me grown so big now. But here on the hard ground she took me up, too big as I was for it. And, too big as I was, I held myself onto her, crossing my feet around her back, my arms behind her neck. And she carried me like Jappity’s wife used to carry Jappity’s idiot son, and I felt just like that boy, as if the thoughts that were all right for everyone else weren’t coming now, and never would come, to me. As if all I could do was watch, but not ever know anything, not ever understand. I pushed my face into Mumma’s warm neck; I sealed my eyes shut against her skin; I let her strong warm arms carry me away in the dark.

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS

Michael A. Burstein

Isabel paused at the entrance of the Hart Senate Office Building. She turned southwest for a moment to take one last look at the shell of the Capitol Building. A rare Columbia District snowfall obscured her view slightly, but she could still make out the scaffolding surrounding the dome. They were saying that it wouldn't be rebuilt until the summer, half a year or so away.

She turned around, loosened her coat, and walked through the main entrance of the Hart Building. She showed her special visitor's badge to the security guards hearing the telltale hum as she passed through the one thin electronic railgate that scanned her body and briefcase. When she failed to set off any alarms, one of the guards nodded to her, and she stepped into the main atrium of the building.

She walked quickly past the Alexander Calder sculpture "Mountains and Clouds" that filled the cavernous atrium. The black aluminum sheets of the suspended "clouds" and the standing "mountains" contrasted with the white marble of the floor and walls. Many times before, Isabel had appreciated the majestic feeling the sculpture gave to the atrium. But not today. Today she had to focus on her mission, and she couldn't afford any distractions.

She entered an empty elevator, which whisked her up to the seventh floor, where Peter had his office. Not Peter, she thought. Not even Fitz. Think of him as Senator Fitzgerald. Maintain a proper level of detachment. Approach him first as a historian, not as an ex-wife.

The elevator opened, and her feet remembered the way. She felt as if she was watching her body from outside as she glided to Peter's office.

She pushed the button next to the door, and within a moment she was buzzed into the outer office. The place looked sparse. A calendar on the wall displayed today's date: Thursday, February 27, 2098.

The senator's chief of staff, James MacDonald Wills, nodded at her from behind his desk as she slid into the outer office. His blue blazer clung tightly to his slight frame.

"Hi, Jim."

"Hi, Isabel," he said, still staring at whatever images his glasses were displaying. "Give me a moment to kill the feed."

She nodded. He pushed a button on his earpiece, and his eyes focused onto her.

"What was it?"

"Nothing important." He smiled, and she understood. Whatever he had been studying was not for public consumption.

She inclined her head towards the door. "How's the old man?"

Jim shrugged. "Same as always, I suppose. He's expecting you."

"Can I go in, then?"

Jim nodded. "Sure. Although I'd love to know what this is all about."

She *looked back at Jim. "He hasn't told you?"

"Nary a peep."

She nodded. "Well, I'm sure he'll tell you eventually." She took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

#

Isabel had not been in Peter's office since the divorce, so many years ago. She recalled that it had always been a maelstrom of chaos, with handhelds, pads, and even actual papers scattered all over his desk and his chairs. So she was surprised to discover Peter sitting behind an oak desk with an uncluttered surface, upon which sat only a cup and a terminal.

She was even more surprised when she looked at Peter.

Peter's hair had long ago turned grey, and in response he had undergone depilation. His head, once covered in dark, thick hair, was now bald. She had also remembered his wrinkled face, and its current smoothness advertised the benefits of the rejuvenation therapies medical science had developed within the last ten years. Isabel had last seen Peter up close ten years ago, but today he looked not ten years older, but many more years younger.

"Hello, Senator," she said.

"Hello, Isabel. It's been a long time, but you can still call me Peter." He inclined his head, and a chair slid towards Isabel. As she settled herself into it, he reached for his cup and took a sip.

"Comfortable?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Good. I'm glad you wanted to come see me."

"That's crap, and you know it," she replied after only a moment's hesitation.

Peter paused with the cup halfway back to the desk. "Pardon me?"

"Peter, cut the geniality for the moment. I know as well as you do how much pull it took for me to arrange this meeting."

He put the cup back down and shrugged. "You haven't changed, Isabel. You're still as blunt as ever." He rubbed his eyes. "Fine. I resent this meeting and I have no interest in talking to you. Are you going to do me the favor of leaving now?"

"No, I'm not. I'm going to have my say."

He smiled. "Have your say, then. It's not going to change anything."

"Very well. I'm here to ask you to leave Title 13 of the United States Code alone."

He sighed. "Tell me something I don't know."

"I doubt I'll be able to, Peter. But maybe I can give you a different perspective on it."

"A different perspective? On my Census bill?"

Isabel opened up her briefcase and removed one of her handhelds. "I have here the text of your bill, and the argument that you've given in favor of it."

"Mrrph."

Isabel turned the handheld on and read to herself briefly. "According to this, your bill would push the date of release of the individual Census forms from seventy-two to seventy- five years."

"It makes sense, Isabel."

"It does?"

He pointed to her handheld. "You say you have my argument in there."

"I do. And I find it specious."

"Oh, really?"

She nodded. "You're very clever, the way you're hiding this change as a way to save money for both the federal government and the taxpayers."

"Well, it does save money. With more time to process the individual Census reports, the less we'll have to pay overall. And who cares if we delay the release of the individual questionnaires from 2030? It's not like there are a ton of people dying to see them."

"But there are. I represent a coalition of historians--"

"That wasn't a joke?"

"No, it's not a joke."

"Look, historians have always waited seventy-two years for the individual questionnaires to be released. And they have the statistical data; hell, they've had it since the Census was taken. This is such a minor thing; I have no idea why you're so upset about it."

"Then let me tell you. Suppose you do push the release date to seventy-five years. And the world doesn't come to an end."

"So?"

"So a precedent is set. A few years later, someone else suggests that we push it to eighty years, then ninety, then one hundred. Before you know it, Census data is kept confidential in perpetuity and history is lost. And all because you managed to push the date of release to seventy-five years."

Peter stared at her for a moment, then let loose with a raucous guffaw. "History is lost? You're kidding, right?"

"No, I'm not. It's like the great copyright battles of the early twenty-first century. When all the corporations fought for copyright extensions so they could hold onto the rights to their characters so that no one else could ever use them."

"So Time-Warner-Marvel-Disney still owns Mickey Mouse, Superman, and Spider- Man. So what?"

"So our cultural heritage is taken away from the public and reserved for the corporations. Now it's our historical identity that you're threatening to rob with your new bill."

"Isabel, it's not just the money."

"Right. It's also the longevity factor."

Peter looked surprised, but nodded. "People live longer today. Our founding fathers lived in a world in which the average lifespan was barely forty years. They couldn't fathom a world in which people routinely lived to be three times that age. But here we are today, and there are millions of people alive right now who filled out that Census back in 2030. Releasing the information too soon would be a violation of their privacy. History must be subservient to the living."

She shook her head slowly. "You don't really believe that, Peter. I know you too well. Perhaps you think that history ought to be subservient to you, but not to the rest of us."

"So what if I do? The argument still holds."

She sighed. "Peter, you're forcing my hand. And I really don't think you want to do that."

He leaned back in his chair and gave Isabel a small smile. "Oh, why not? Amuse me. What else have you got?"

Isabel took a deep breath and considered her words carefully before she spoke. "Very well. Peter, according to your birth certificate, you've just turned 68 years old this month. And the significance of your age is not lost on me. You're in the 2030 census. It's not others you're trying to protect; it's yourself."

#

Time seemed to stand still for Isabel. She had not wanted to bring up her trump card, but here it was. And Peter sat there, quiet and unmoving, his face unreadable.

Isabel counted off thirty seconds in her head before she found the courage to break the silence. "Peter?"

"Senator," he replied.

She nodded. "Senator Fitzgerald. Will you agree to drop the bill? Or should I--"

Peter cut her off. "No. Go on. I want to hear what you have to say."

"Okay. Let me start from basics, then. If Title 13 stays the same, the 2030 census data will be released in 2102. But if your law gets passed, it doesn't get released until 2105."

"So?"

"You're planning to run for president in 2104, aren't you?"

He glared at her. "The media's speculations --"

"Screw the media, Senator. I'm not about to head out your office door and go blogging on the Holosites. For the moment, this is just you and me in your office. So are you running for president in 2104?"

"I'm running for re-election now, Isabel. In case you had forgotten, my current term as senator expires this year. And the voters of Massachusetts either support the idea of pushing the Census release ahead by three years, or they don't care. And given the demographics of the rest of the country--"

"I know the demographics of the country. Over forty percent of the population is over sixty-five. If you bother to present the longevity argument to them, they may very well support the bill. But think for a moment. I'm not the only one who's going to be able to make this connection. It's obvious that if Title 13 is changed, your personal first Census record will stay hidden until after the election of 2104.

"So what's in the census of 2030 that you want to hide?"

Peter sighed. "I always said you were smarter than I was, Isabel. Why didn't you go into politics?"

"I preferred teaching history at Harvard."

"Yes, you did. Well, I didn't tell you my secret when we were married; what makes you think I'll tell you now?"

"Because I wanted to give you the chance to do so before I told it to you."

For the first time that she could recall, Isabel saw fear on Peter's face. He tried to cover it up with a sneer, but Isabel could see right through him.

"Oh, really?" he asked. "You think you know what I'm hiding?"

"Yes. I did some digging of my own." She reached into her briefcase and pulled out another handheld. "The United States went through a bizarre period at the turn of the millennium. We were polarized between the liberal states and the conservative states, kind of like we are today. Even the war on terror couldn't unite the country for more than a brief period of time. And our state, Massachusetts, has always been among the most radical. Lexington and Concord. The only state not to vote for Nixon. Same sex marriage from 2004 to 2044. Polygamy approved under the second Mormon governor."

She paused. "And, thanks to MIT and Harvard, legal human cloning for a very brief window in the 2020s."

Peter coughed. "That has nothing to do with me."

"Not according to your birth certificate, no. But birth certificates never revealed that information. The Census, on the other hand, added a question in April of 2030, because of the legality of cloning."

Isabel studied Peter's face; the fear was gone.

"Isabel--" he began.

"There's no record of your mother, Peter."

"She died in childbirth."

"That's what you always told me before. But that's not what I found." She paused. "You're a clone of your father, Peter. Or rather, of one of them. And I have proof."

Peter remained quiet, so Isabel pressed on. "Before 2004, your biological father would have been what was euphemistically referred to as a confirmed bachelor. But according to records in Brookline Town Hall, your father was married to another man when you were born. Of course, in this day and age no one may care about that, especially since your fathers divorced shortly after you were born.

"But they will care about the fact that you're a clone."

Peter bit his lip. "I'm just as much a human being as anyone else."

"Of course you are, Peter. I don't deny it. But there are people out there who will claim that you're not, that you lack a soul, or that you're a demon. Insufferable bigots, all of them. But unfortunately for you, there's still a stigma."

"Are you going to reveal this?"

"Only if you make me. The way I see it, Peter, if you pull back from your position on Title 13, you have a chance that no one will find out your secret. After all, there's a lot of Census data to go through. On the other hand, since you've been so vocal about pushing the release date to seventy-five years, your opponents might very well do some extensive digging before the election. But that's a chance you've got to take. Because if you don't back off, I'm releasing what I know to the press. And your secret will definitely be out."

He wrung his hands. "It was never about protecting history with you at all, Isabel. You just wanted to ruin me."

"Partly," she admitted. "I hated the way politics tore us apart. But I'd rather not ruin you if I don't have to. There is another way."

"What?"

"Be bold, for once in your life."

"What are you talking about?"

Isabel smiled. "Throughout our history, great men and women have stepped forward to stop discrimination. Rosa Parks. Martin Luther King. Margaret Marshall." She paused. "You can be one of them. Fight the good fight. Let the world know that you're a clone before the Census data is released in 2102."

He shook his head. "I don't know. I'm not sure I have the strength for that kind of fight anymore."

"Then you shouldn't be in the Senate anymore, should you?" She paused. "You fought like this once before. You can do it again. Hell, don't wait until the presidential election of 2104. Announce it now, during your '98 re-election campaign."

"I'll lose my seat."

"So what? You'll gain a place in history, a far more important place than if you became president. I know you've always been obsessed with history, Peter. That's why I married you. Return the favor to history."

Peter sighed and pushed back away from his desk. He stood up, walked around Isabel, and stopped at his office window. He stood there quietly for a moment, then turned to face Isabel again. She could see a weary look in his eyes.

"Well?" she asked.

"I don't know if I can handle it," he said.

"I'm sure you can."

He closed the distance between them and took her hand, surprising her. "Perhaps I could," he said. "But only on one condition."

"You're naming conditions?"

"Yes." He paused. "Stay with me."

"I'm sorry?"

"I never should have let you go."

"Is this blackmail?"

He sighed again. "No, no it's not. I'll do what you ask, whether or not you join me again. But you were always the stronger of the two of us. And this burden...it would be better shared."

She looked into his eyes, and for the first time in years, saw in his soul the man she remembered. Gently, she squeezed his hand, and felt him squeeze hers back.

"It would be," she said.

DOWN MEMORY LANE

Mike Resnick

Hugo- and Nebula-winner Mike Resnick follows 2004’s “Travels with My Cats” (February 2004) and “A Princess of Earth”(December 2004) with this moving tale of love and sacrifice. Watch for Mike’s latest novels, A Gathering of Widowmakers and Lady with an Alien, which will hit the stores shortly.

Gwendolyn sticks a finger into her cake, pulls it out, and licks it with a happy smile on her face.

“I like birthdays!” she says, giggling with delight.

I lean over and wipe some frosting off her chin. “Try to be a little neater,” I say. “You wouldn’t want to have to take a bath before you open your present.”

“Present?” she repeats excitedly, her gaze falling on the box with the colorful wrapping paper and the big satin bow. “Is it time for my present now? Is it?”

“Yes, it is,” I answer. I pick up the box and hand it to her. “Happy birthday, Gwendolyn.”

She tears off the paper, shoves the card aside, and opens the box. An instant later she emits a happy squeal and pulls out the rag doll. “This is my very favorite day of my whole life!” she announces.

I sigh and try to hold back my tears.

Gwendolyn is eighty-two years old. She has been my wife for the last sixty of them.

I don’t know where I was when Kennedy was shot. I don’t know what I was doing when the World Trade Center collapsed under the onslaught of two jetliners. But I remember every single detail, every minute, every second, of the day we got the bad news.

“It may not be Alzheimer’s,” said Dr. Castleman. “Alzheimer’s is becoming a catchword for a variety of senile dementias. Eventually we’ll find out exactly which dementia it is, but there’s no question that Gwendolyn is suffering from one of them.”

It wasn’t a surprise—after all, we knew something was wrong; that’s why she was being examined—but it was still a shock.

“Is there any chance of curing it?” I asked, trying to keep my composure.

He shook his head sadly. “Right now we’re barely able to slow it down.”

“How long have I got?” said Gwendolyn, her face grim, her jaw set.

“Physically you’re in fine shape,” said Castleman. “You could live another ten to twenty years.”

“How long before I don’t know who anyone is?” she persisted.

He shrugged helplessly. “It proceeds at different rates with different people. At first you won’t notice any diminution, but before long it will become noticeable, perhaps not to you, but to those around you. And it doesn’t progress in a straight line. One day you’ll find you’ve lost the ability to read, and then, perhaps two months later, you’ll see a newspaper headline, or perhaps a menu in a restaurant, and you’ll read it as easily as you do today. Paul here will be elated and think you’re regaining your capacity, and he’ll call me and tell me about it, but it won’t last. In another day, another hour, another week, the ability will be gone again.”

“Will I know what’s happening to me?”

“That’s almost the only good part of it,” replied Castleman. “You know now what lies ahead of you, but as it progresses you will be less and less aware of any loss of your cognitive abilities. You’ll be understandably bitter at the start, and we’ll put you on anti-depressants, but the day will come when you no longer need them because you no longer remember that you ever had a greater mental capacity than you possess at that moment.”

She turned to me. “I’m sorry, Paul.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said.

“I’m sorry that you’ll have to watch this happen to me.”

“There must be something we can do, some way we can fight it. . . .” I muttered.

“I’m afraid there isn’t,” said Castleman. “They say there are stages you go through when you know you’re going to die: disbelief, then anger, then self-pity, and finally acceptance. No one’s ever come up with a similar list for the dementias, but in the end what you’re going to have to do is accept it and learn to live with it.”

“How long before I have to go to . . . to wherever I have to go when Paul can’t care for me alone?”

Castleman took a deep breath, let it out, and pursed his lips. “It varies. It could be five or six months, it could be two years, it could be longer. A lot depends on you.”

“On me?” said Gwendolyn.

“As you become more childlike, you will become more curious about things that you no longer know or recognize. Paul tells me you’ve always had a probing mind. Will you be content to sit in front of the television while he’s sleeping or otherwise occupied, or will you feel a need to walk outside and then forget how to get back home? Will you be curious about all the buttons and switches on the kitchen appliances? Two-year-olds can’t open doors or reach kitchen counters, but you will be able to. So, as I say, it depends on you, and that is something no one can predict.” He paused. “And there may be rages.”

“Rages?” I repeated.

“In more than half the cases,” he replied. “She won’t know why she’s so enraged. You will, of course—but you won’t be able to do anything about it. If it happens, we have medications that will help.”

I was so depressed I was thinking of suicide pacts, but Gwendolyn turned to me and said, “Well, Paul, it looks like we have a lot of living to cram into the next few months. I’ve always wanted to take a Caribbean cruise. We’ll stop at the travel agency on the way home.”

That was her reaction to the most horrific news a human being can receive.

I thanked God that I’d had sixty years with her, and I cursed Him for taking away everything that made her the woman I loved before we’d said and done all the things we had wanted to say and do.

She’d been beautiful once. She still was. Physical beauty fades, but inner beauty never does. For sixty years we had lived together, loved together, worked together, played together. We got to where we could finish each other’s sentences, where we knew each other’s tastes better than we knew our own. We had fights—who doesn’t?—but we never once went to bed mad at each other.

We raised three children, two sons and a daughter. One son was killed in Vietnam; the other son and the daughter kept in touch as best they could, but they had their own lives to lead, and they lived many states away.

Gradually our outside social contacts became fewer and fewer; we were all each other needed. And now I was going to watch the only thing I’d ever truly loved become a little less each day, until there was nothing left but an empty shell.

The cruise went well. We even took the train all the way to the rum factory at the center of Jamaica, and we spent a few days in Miami before flying home. She seemed so normal, so absolutely herself, that I began thinking that maybe Dr. Castleman’s diagnosis had been mistaken.

But then it began. There was no single incident that couldn’t have occurred fifty years ago, nothing that you couldn’t find a reasonable excuse for—but things kept happening. One afternoon she put a roast in the oven, and at dinnertime we found that she’d forgotten to turn the oven on. Two days later we were watching The Maltese Falcon for the umpteenth time, and suddenly she couldn’t remember who killed Humphrey Bogart’s partner. She “discovered” Raymond Chandler, an author she’d loved for years. There were no rages, but there was everything else Dr. Castleman had predicted.

I began counting her pills. She was on five different medications, three of them twice a day. She never skipped them all, but somehow the numbers never came out quite right.

I’d mention a person, a place, an incident, something we’d shared together, and one time out of three she couldn’t recall it—and she’d get annoyed when I’d explain that she had forgotten it. In a month it became two out of three times. Then she lost interest in reading. She blamed it on her glasses, but when I took her to get a new prescription, the optometrist tested her and told us that her vision hadn’t changed since her last visit two years earlier.

She kept fighting it, trying to stimulate her brain with crossword puzzles, math problems, anything that would cause her to think. But each month the puzzles and problems got a little simpler, and each month she solved a few less than she had the month before. She still loved music, and she still loved leaving seeds out for the birds and watching them come by to feed—but she could no longer hum along with the melodies or identify the birds.

She had never allowed me to keep a gun in the house. It was better, she said, to let thieves steal everything than to get killed in a shootout—they were just possessions; we were all that counted—and I honored her wishes for sixty years. But now I went out and bought a small handgun and a box of bullets, and kept them locked in my desk against the day that she was so far gone she no longer knew who I was. I told myself that when that day occurred, I would put a bullet into her head and another into my own . . . but I knew that I couldn’t. Myself, yes; the woman who’d been my life, never.

I met her in college. She was an honor student. I was a not-very-successful jock—third-string defensive end in football, back-up power forward in basketball, big, strong, and dumb—but she saw something in me. I’d noticed her around the campus—she was too good-looking not to notice—but she hung out with the brains, and our paths almost never crossed. The only reason I asked her out the first time was because one of my frat brothers bet me ten dollars she wouldn’t give me the time of day. But for some reason I’ll never know she said yes, and for the next sixty years I was never willingly out of her presence. When we had money we spent it, and when we didn’t have money we were every bit as happy; we just didn’t live as well or travel as much. We raised our kids, sent them out into the world, watched one die and two move away to begin their own lives, and wound up the way we’d started—just the two of us.

And now one of us was vanishing, day by day, minute by minute.

One morning she locked the bathroom door and couldn’t remember how to unlock it. She was so panicky that she couldn’t hear me giving her instructions from the other side. I was on the phone, calling the fire department, when she appeared at my side to ask why I was talking to them and what was burning.

“She had no memory of locking herself in,” I explained to Dr. Castleman the next day. “One moment she couldn’t cope with a lock any three-year-old could manipulate, and the next moment she opened the door and didn’t remember having any problem with it.”

“That’s the way these things progress,” he said.

“How long before she doesn’t know me any more?”

Castleman sighed. “I really don’t know, Paul. You’ve been the most important thing in her life, the most constant thing, so it stands to reason that you’ll be the last thing she forgets.” He sighed again. “It could be a few months, or a few years—or it could be tomorrow.”

“It’s not fair,” I muttered.

“Nobody ever said it was,” he replied. “I had her checked over while she was here, and for what it’s worth she’s in excellent physical health for a woman of her age. Heart and lungs are fine, blood pressure’s normal.”

Of course her blood pressure was normal, I thought bitterly. She didn’t spend most of her waking hours wondering what it would be like when the person she had spent her life with no longer recognized her.

Then I realized that she didn’t spend most of her waking hours thinking of anything, and I felt guilty for pitying myself when she was the one whose mind and memories were racing away at an ever-faster rate.

Two weeks later we went shopping for groceries. She wandered off to get something—ice cream, I think—and when I’d picked up what I needed and went over to the frozen food section she wasn’t there. I looked around, checked out the next few aisles. No luck.

I asked one of the stock girls to check the women’s rest room. It was empty.

I started getting a panicky feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was just about to go out into the parking lot to look for her when a cop brought her into the store, leading her very gently by the arm.

“She was wandering around looking for her car,” he explained. “A 1961 Nash Rambler.”

“We haven’t owned that car in forty years or more,” I said. I turned to Gwendolyn. “Are you all right?”

Her face was streaked by tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t remember where we parked the car.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

She kept crying and telling me how sorry she was. Pretty soon everyone was staring, and the store manager asked if I’d like to take her to his office and let her sit down. I thanked him and the cop, but decided she’d be better off at home, so I led her out to the Ford we’d owned for the past five years and drove her home.

As we pulled into the garage and got out of the car, she stood back and looked at it.

“What a pretty car,” she said. “Whose is it?”

“They’re not sure of anything,” said Dr. Castleman. “But they think it’s got something to do with the amyloid beta protein. An abundance of it can usually be found in people suffering from Alzheimer’s or Down Syndrome.”

“Can’t you take it out, or do something to neutralize it?” I asked.

Gwendolyn sat in a chair, staring at the wall. We could have been ten thousand miles away as far as she was concerned.

“If it was that simple, they’d have done it.”

“So it’s a protein,” I said. “Does it come in some kind of food? Is there something she shouldn’t be eating?”

He shook his head. “There are all kinds of proteins. This is one you’re born with.”

“Is it in the brain?”

“Initially it’s in the spinal fluid.”

“Well, can’t you drain it out?” I persisted.

He sighed. “By the time we know it’s a problem in a particular individual, it’s too late. It forms plaques on the brain, and once that happens, the disease is irreversible.” He paused wearily. “At least it’s irreversible today. Someday they’ll cure it. They should be able to slow it down before too long. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it eradicated within a quarter of a century. There may even come a day when they can test embryos for an amyloid beta imbalance and correct it in utero. They’re making progress.”

“But not in time to help Gwendolyn.”

“No, not in time to help Gwendolyn.”

Gradually, over the next few months, she became totally unaware that she even had Alzheimer’s. She no longer read, but she watched the television incessantly. She especially liked children’s shows and cartoons. I would come into the room and hear the eighty-two-year-old woman I loved singing along with the Mickey Mouse Club. I had a feeling that if they still ran test patterns she could watch one for hours on end.

And then came the morning I had known would come: I was fixing her breakfast—some cereal she’d seen advertised on television—and she looked up at me, and I could tell that she no longer knew who I was. Oh, she wasn’t afraid of me, or even curious, but there was absolutely no spark of recognition.

The next day I moved her into a home that specialized in the senile dementias.

“I’m sorry, Paul,” said Dr. Castleman. “But it really is for the best. She needs professional care. You’ve lost weight, you’re not getting any sleep, and to be blunt, it no longer makes any difference to her who feeds and cleans and medicates her.”

“Well, it makes a difference to me,” I said angrily. “They treat her like an infant!”

“That’s what she’s become.”

“She’s been there two weeks, and I haven’t seen them try—really try—to communicate with her.”

“She has nothing to say, Paul.”

“It’s there,” I said. “It’s somewhere inside her brain.”

“Her brain isn’t what it once was,” said Castleman. “You have to face up to that.”

“I took her there too soon,” I said. “There must be a way to connect with her.”

“You’re an adult, and despite her appearance, she’s a four-year-old child,” said Castleman gently. “You no longer have anything in common.”

“We have a lifetime in common!” I snapped.

I couldn’t listen to any more, so I got up and stalked out of his office.

I decided that depending on Dr. Castleman was a dead end, and I began visiting other specialists. They all told me pretty much the same thing. One of them even showed me his lab, where they were doing all kinds of chemical experiments on the amyloid beta protein and a number of other things. It was encouraging, but nothing was going to happen fast enough to cure Gwendolyn.

Two or three times each day I picked up that pistol I’d bought and toyed with ending it, but I kept thinking: what if there’s a miracle—medical, religious, whatever kind? What if she becomes Gwendolyn again? She’ll be all alone with a bunch of senile old men and women, and I’ll have deserted her.

So I couldn’t kill myself, and I couldn’t help her, and I couldn’t just stand by and watch her. Somehow, somewhere, there had to be a way to connect with her, to communicate on the same level again. We’d faced some pretty terrible problems together—losing a son, suffering a miscarriage, watching each of our parents die in turn—and as long as we were together we were able to overcome them. This was just one more problem—and every problem is capable of solution.

I found the solution, too. It wasn’t where I expected, and it certainly wasn’t what I expected, but she was eighty-two years old and sinking fast, and I didn’t hesitate.

That’s where things stand this evening. Earlier today I bought this notebook, and this marks the end of my first entry.

Friday, June 22. I’d heard about the clinic while I was learning everything I could about the disease. The government outlawed it and shut it down, so they moved it lock, stock and barrel to Guatemala. It wasn’t much to look at, but then, I wasn’t expecting much. Just a miracle of a different sort.

They make no bones about what they anticipate if the experiment goes as planned. That’s why they only accept terminal patients—and because they have so few and are so desperate for volunteers, that’s also why they didn’t challenge me when I told them I had a slow-acting cancer. I signed a release that probably wouldn’t hold up in any court of law outside Guatemala; they now have my permission to do just about anything they want to me.

Saturday, June 23. So it begins. I thought they’d inject it into my spine, but instead they went through the carotid artery in my neck. Makes sense; it’s the conduit between the spine and the brain. If anything’s going to get the protein where it can do its work, that’s the ticket. I thought it would hurt like hell, but it’s just a little sore. Except for that, I don’t feel any different.

Wednesday, June 27. Fourth day in a row of tedious lectures explaining how some of us will die but a few may be saved and all humanity will benefit, or something like that. Now I have an inkling of how lab rats and guinea pigs feel. They’re not aware that they’re dying; and I guess before too long, we won’t be either.

Wednesday, July 3. After a week of having me play with the most idiotic puzzles, they tell me that I’ve lost 6 percent of my cognitive functions and that the condition is accelerating. It seems to please them no end. I’m not convinced; I think if they’d give me a little more time I’d do better on these damned tests. I mean, it’s been a long time since I was in school. I’m out of practice.

Sunday, July 7. You know, I think it’s working. I was reading down in the lounge, and for the longest time I couldn’t remember where my room was. Good. The faster it works, the better. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

Tuesday, July 16. Today we got another talking-to. They say the shots are stronger and the symptons are appearing even faster than they’d hoped, and it’s almost time to try the anecdote. Anecdote. Is that the right word?

Friday, July 26. Boy am I lucky. At the last minute I remembered why I went there in the furst place. I wated until it was dark and snuck out. When I got to the airport I didnt have any money, but they asked to see my wallet and took out this plastic card and did something with it and said it was OK and gave me a ticket.

Saturday, july 27. I wrote down my address so I wouldnt forget, and boy am i lucky I did, because when I got a cab at the airporte I coudlnt’ remember what to tell him. We drove and we drove and finally I remembered I had wrote it down, but when we got home i didnt’ have a key. i started pounding on the door, but no one was there to let me in, and finally they came with a loud siren and took me somewere else. i cant stay long. I have to find gwendolyn before it is too late, but i cant remember what it wood be too late for.

Mundy, august. He says his name is Doctr Kasleman and that i know him, and he kept saying o paul why did you do this to yourself, and i told him i didn’t remember but i know I had a reason and it had something to do with gwendolyn. do you remember her he said. of course i do i said, she is my love and my life. I askt when can i see her & he said soon.

wensday. they gave me my own room, but i dont want my own room i want to be with gwendolyn. finaly they let me see her and she was as beutiful as ever and i wanted to hug her and kiss her but wen i walked up to her she started krying and the nurse took her away

it has been 8 daz since i rote here. or maybe 9. i keep forgeting to. today i saw a prety littl girl in the hall, with prety white hair. she reminds me of someone but i dont know who. tomorrow if i remember i will bring her a prezent

i saw the pretti gurl again today. i took a flower from a pot and gave it to her and she smiled and said thank you and we talkt alot and she said i am so glad we met & i am finaly happy. i said so am i. i think we are going to be great friends becauz we like each other and have so mucch in commmon. i askt her name and she couldnt remember, so i will call her gwendolyn. i think i nu someone called gwendolyn once a long time ago and it is a very pretti name for a very pretti new frend.

TK’TK’TK

David D. Levine

Walker’s voice recorder was a beautiful thing of aluminum and plastic, hard and crisp and rectangular. It sat on the waxy countertop, surrounded by the lumpy excreted-looking products of the local technology. Unique selling proposition, he thought, and clutched the leather handle of his grandfather’s briefcase as though it were a talisman.

Shkthh pth kstphst, the shopkeeper said, and Walker’s hypno-implanted vocabulary provided a translation: “What a delightful object.” Chitinous fingers picked up the recorder, scrabbling against the aluminum case with a sound that Walker found deeply disturbing. “What does it do?”

It took him a moment to formulate a reply. Even with hypno, Thfshpfth was a formidably complex language. “It listens and repeats,” he said. “You talk all day, it remembers all. Earth technology. Nothing like it for light-years.” The word for “light-year” was hkshkhthskht, difficult to pronounce. He hoped he’d gotten it right.

“Indeed yes, most unusual.” The pink frills, or gills, at the sides of the alien’s head throbbed. It did not look down—its faceted eyes and neckless head made that impossible—but Walker judged its attention was on the recorder and not on himself. Still, he kept smiling and kept looking the alien in the eyes with what he hoped would be interpreted as a sincere expression.

“Such a unique object must surely be beyond the means of such a humble one as myself,” the proprietor said at last. Sthshsk, such-a-humble- one-as-myself—Walker could die a happy man if he never heard those syllables again.

Focus on value, not price. “Think how useful,” he hissed in reply. “Never forget things again.” He wasn’t sure you could use htpthtk, “things,” in that way, but he hoped it got the point across.

“Perhaps the honored visitor might wish to partake of a cup of thshsh?”

Walker’s smile became rigid. Thshsh was a beverage nearly indistinguishable from warm piss. But he’d learned that to turn down an offer of food or drink would bring negotiations to an abrupt close. “This-humble-one-accepts-your-most-generous-offer,” he said, letting the memorized syllables flow over his tongue.

He examined the shopkeeper’s stock as it prepared the drink. It all looked like the products of a sixth-grade pottery class, irregular clots of brown and gray. But the aliens’ biotech was far beyond Earth’s—some of these lumps would be worth thousands back home. Too bad he had no idea which ones. His expertise lay elsewhere, and he was here to sell, not buy.

The shopkeeper itself was a little smaller than most of its kind, about a hundred forty centimeters tall, mostly black, with yellow spine-tips and green eyes. Despite its insectile appearance, it was warm-blooded—under its chitin it had bones and muscle and organs not unlike Walker’s own. But its mind and culture were even stranger than its disturbing mouth- parts.

“The cup of friendship,” the alien said, offering a steaming cup of thshsh. Walker suppressed a shudder as his fingers touched the alien’s—warm, covered with fine hairs, and slightly sticky—but he nodded politely and raised the cup to his lips.

He sipped as little as he felt he could politely get away with. It was still vile.

“Very good,” he said.

Forty-five minutes later the conversation finally returned to the voice recorder. “Ownership of this most wondrous object is surely beyond price. Perhaps the honored guest would be willing to lend it for a short period?”

“No trial period necessary. Satisfaction is guaranteed.” He was taking a risk with that, he knew, but the recorder had never failed him in all the years he’d owned it.

Tk’tk’tk, the alien said, tapping its mouthparts together. There was no translation for that in Walker’s vocabulary. He wanted to throttle the thing—couldn’t it even stick to its own language?—but he struggled not to show his impatience.

After a pause, the alien spread a hand—a gesture that meant nothing to Walker. “Perhaps the honored owner could be compensated for the temporary use of the property.”

“Humbly requesting more details.”

“A loan of this type is generally for an indefinite period. The compensation is, of course, subject to negotiation. . . .”

“You make offer?” he interrupted. He realized that he was not being as polite as he could be. But it was already late afternoon, and he hadn’t eaten since breakfast—and if he didn’t conclude this deal successfully he might not have enough money for lunch.

Tk’tk’tk again. “Forty-three,” it said at last.

Walker seethed at the offer. He had hoped to sell the recorder for enough to live on for at least a week, and his hotel alone—barely worthy of the name—cost twenty-seven a night. But he had already spent most of a day trying to raise some cash, and this was the only concrete offer he’d gotten.

“Seventy?”

The alien’s gills, normally in constant slight motion, stopped. Walker knew he had offended it somehow, and his heart sank. But his smile never wavered.

“Seventy is a very inopportune number. To offer seventy to one of your exalted status would be a great insult.”

Damn these aliens and their obscure numerology! Walker began to sputter an apology.

“Seventy-three, on the other hand,” the shopkeeper continued, “is a number with an impeccable lineage. Would the honored guest accept compensation in this amount?”

He was so busy trying to apologize that he almost didn’t recognize the counter-offer for what it was. But some salesman’s instinct, some fragment of his father’s and his grandfather’s DNA, noticed it, and he managed to hiss out “This-humble-one-accepts-your-most-generous-offer” before he got in any more trouble.

It took another hour before the shopkeeper actually counted the money—soft brown lumps like rabbit droppings, each looking exactly like the others—into Walker’s hand. He passed his reader over them; it smelled the lumps and told him they were three seventeens, two nines, and a four, totaling seventy-three as promised. He sorted them into different pockets so he wouldn’t accidentally give the luggage-carrier a week’s salary as a tip again. It angered him to be dependent on the Chokasti-made reader, but he would rather use alien technology than try to read the aliens’ acrid pheromonal “writing” with his own nose.

Walker pressed through the labia of the shop entrance into the heat and noise and stink of the street. Hard orange shafts of dusty late-afternoon sun glinted dully on the scuttling carapaces of the populace: little merchants and bureaucrats, big laborers and warriors, hulking mindless transporters. No cars, no autoplanes . . . just a rustling mass of aliens, chuttering endlessly in their harsh sibilant language, scraping their hard spiny limbs and bodies against each other and the rounded, gourd-like walls. Here and there a knot of two or three in conversation blocked traffic, which simply clambered over them. The aliens had no concept of personal space.

Once a swarm of juveniles had crawled right over him—a nightmare of jointed legs and chitinous bodies, and a bitter smell like rusty swamp water. They had knocked his briefcase from his hand, and he had scrambled after it under the scrabbling press of their bodies. He shuddered at the memory—not only did the briefcase contain his most important papers, it had belonged to his grandfather. His father had given it to him when he graduated from college.

He clutched his jacket tight at his throat, gripped his briefcase firmly under his arm, and shouldered through the crowd.

Walker sat in the waiting room of his most promising prospect—to be blunt, his only prospect—a manufacturer of building supplies whose name translated as Amber Stone. Five days in transit, eight weeks in this bug-infested hellhole of a city, a fifteen-megabyte database of contacts from five different species, and all he had to show for it was one lousy stinking customer. Potential customer at that . . . it hadn’t signed anything yet. But Walker had been meeting with it every couple of days for two weeks, and he was sure he was right on the edge of a very substantial sale. All he had to do was keep himself on site and on message.

The light in the palm-sized windows shaded from orange to red before Amber Stone finally appeared from its inner office. “Ah, human! So very pleased that you honor such a humble one as myself with your delightful presence.” The aliens couldn’t manage the name “Walker,” and even “human” came out more like hsshp’k.

“Honor is mine, Amber Stone. You read information I give you, three days?”

“Most intriguing, yes. Surely no finer literature has ever been produced.”

“You have questions?”

Questions it did have, yes indeed, no end of questions—who performed the translation, where did you have it reproduced, is it really as cold there as they say, did you come through Pthshksthpt or by way of Sthktpth . . . but no questions about the product. I’m building rapport with the customer, Walker thought grimly, and kept up his end of the conversation as best he could.

Finally Walker tried to regain control. “Your business, it goes well?”

Tk’tk’tk, the customer said, and placed its hands on its shoulders. “As the most excellent guest must surely have noticed, the days are growing longer.”

Walker had no idea what that might mean. “Good business or bad, always need for greater efficiency.”

“The honored visitor graces this humble one with the benefits of a unique perspective.”

Though the sweat ran down behind his tie, Walker felt as though he were sliding on ice—his words refusing to gain traction. “My company’s software will improve inventory management efficiency and throughput by three hundred percent or more,” he said, pulling out one of his best memorized phrases.

“Alas, your most marvelous software is surely so far superior to our humble computers that no accommodation could be made.”

“We offer complete solution. Hardware, software, support. Fully compatible. Satisfaction guaranteed.” Walker smiled, trying to project confidence—no, not just confidence, love, for the product.

Tk’tk’tk. Was that an expression of interest? “Most intriguing, yes. Most unique. Alas, sun is setting.” It gestured to the windows, which had faded from red to nearly black. “This most humble one must beg the honored visitor’s forgiveness for consuming so much valuable time.”

“Is no problem. . . .”

“This one would not dream of insulting an honored guest in such a way. Please take your rest now, and honor this unworthy establishment with your esteemed presence again tomorrow.” The alien turned and vanished into the inner office.

Walker sat and seethed. Dismissed by a bug, he thought, how much lower can you sink? He stared into the scuffed leather surface of his briefcase as though he’d find the answer there. But it just sat on his lap, pressing down with the hard-edged weight of two generations of successful salesmen.

Though the sun had set, the street was still oppressively hot and still teemed with aliens. The yellow-green bioluminescent lighting made them look even stranger, more unnatural. Walker clutched his grandfather’s briefcase to his chest as the malodorous crowd bumped and jostled him, spines catching on his clothing and hair.

It didn’t help his attitude that he was starving. He’d left most of his lunch on the plate, unable to stomach more than a few wriggling bites, and that had been hours ago. He hoped he’d be able to find something more palatable for dinner, but he wasn’t very optimistic. It seemed so cruel of the universe to make travelers find food when they were hungry.

But then, drifting between the sour and acrid smells of the bustling street, Walker’s nose detected a warm, comforting smell, something like baked potatoes. He wandered up and down the street, passing his reader over pheromone-lines on the walls advertising SUPERLATIVE CHITIN-WAX and BLUE RIVER MOLT-FEVER INSURANCE. Finally, just as he was coming to the conclusion the smell was a trick of his homesick mind, the reader’s tiny screen told him he had arrived at the SPIRIT OF LIFE VEGETARIAN RESTAURANT.

He hadn’t even known the Thfshpfth language had the concept “vegetarian.” But whatever it was, it certainly smelled good. He pushed through the restaurant’s labia.

The place was tiny and low-ceilinged, with a single low, curving counter and five squatting-posts. Only one of the posts was occupied, by a small brown alien with white spine-tips and red eyes. It sat quietly, hands folded on the counter, in an attitude that struck Walker as contemplative. No staff was in evidence.

Walker chose a post, placed his folded jacket on it as a cushion, and seated himself as comfortably as possible. His space at the counter had the usual indentation, into which his order would be ladled, and was equipped with a double-ended spoon, an ice-pick, a twisty implement whose use he had yet to decipher, and a small bowl of water (which, he had learned to his great embarrassment, was for washing the fingertips, not drinking). But there was no menu.

Menus were one of the most frustrating things about this planet. Most of the items listed on the pheromone-tracked planks were not in his reader’s vocabulary, and for the rest the translations were inadequate—how was he supposed to know whether or not “land-crab in the northern style” was something he would find edible? Time and again he had gone hungry, offended the server, or both. Even so, menus were something he understood. He had no idea what to order, or even how, without a menu to point at.

He drummed his fingers on the countertop and fidgeted while he waited for the server to appear. Say what you like about these creatures, they were unfailingly polite, and prompt. Usually. But not here, apparently. Finally, frustrated, he got up to leave. But as he was putting on his jacket, trying to steel himself for the crowd outside, he caught another whiff of that baked-potato smell. He turned back to the other customer, still sitting quietly. “No menu. No server. Hungry. How order?”

The alien did not turn. “Sit quietly. With peace comes fulfillment.” Its voice was a low susurration, not as harsh as most of the others he’d heard.

With peace comes fulfillment? Walker opened his mouth for a sarcastic reply, but found his grammar wasn’t up to the task. And he was hungry. And the food smelled good. So he took off his jacket and sat down again.

He sat with back straight and hands folded, staring at the swirled brown and cream colors of the wall in front of him. It might have come from Amber Stone’s factory, produced by a huge genetically modified life form that ate garbage and shat building supplies. He tried not to think about it too much . . . the aliens’ biotechnology made him queasy.

Looking at the wall, he thought about what it would take to sell Amber Stone’s products on Earth. They couldn’t be any more incomprehensible to him than the software he had been sent here to sell, and as his father always said, “a good salesman can sell anything.” Though with three failed jobs and a failed marriage behind him, he was no longer sure that description had ever really fit him. No matter, he was too old to change careers now. The most he could hope for now was to stay alive until he could afford to retire. Get off the treadmill, buy a little house in the woods, walk the dog, maybe go fishing. . . .

Walker’s reverie was interrupted when the other customer rose from its squatting-post and walked around the counter to stand in front of him. “Greetings,” it said. “This one welcomes the peaceful visitor to the Spirit of Life.”

Walker sputtered. “You . . . you server?”

“All serve the Spirit of Life, well or poorly, whether they understand it or not. This one serves food as well. The visitor is hungry?”

“Yes!” Walker’s head throbbed. Was the alien laughing at him?

“Then this one will bring food. When peace is attained, satisfaction follows.” It vanished through the door behind the counter.

Walker fumed, but he tried to wait peacefully. Soon the alien returned with a steaming pot, and ladled out a portion into the indentation in front of Walker. It looked like chunks of purple carrot and pale-yellow potato in a saffron-colored sauce, and it smelled wonderful. It tasted wonderful, too. A little strange, maybe—the purple carrots were bitter and left an odd aftertaste—but it had a complex flavor and was warm and filling. Walker spooned up every bit of it.

“Very good,” he said to the server, which had returned to its previous station in front of the counter. “How much?”

It spread its hands and said “This establishment serves the Spirit of Life. Any donation would be appropriate.” It pointed to a glass jar on the counter, which contained a small pile of money.

Walker considered. How much of his limited funds could he spare? Yesterday’s lunch had cost him five and a half. This place, and the food, were much plainer. But it was the single best meal he had eaten in weeks. Finally he chose a seven from his pocket, scanned it with his reader to make sure, and dropped it in the jar.

“This one thanks the peaceful guest. Please return.”

Walker gave an awkward little bow, then pushed through the restaurant’s labia into the nightmare of the street.

Walker waved his room key, a twisted brown stick reeking with complex pheromones, at the hotel desk clerk. “Key no work,” he said. “No let me in.”

The clerk took the key, ran its fingers over it to read the codes. “Ah. Yes. This most humble one must apologize. Fthshpk starts tomorrow.”

“What is Fthshpk?”

“Ah. Yes. This humble one has been so unkind as to forget that the most excellent guest is not familiar with the poor customs of this humble locale. Fthshpk is a religious political holiday. A small and insignificant celebration by our guest’s most elevated standards, to be sure.”

“So why it not work, the key?”

“Humble though it may be, Fthshpk is very important to the poor folk of the outlying regions. They come to the city in great numbers. This humble room has long been promised to such as these. And surely the most honored guest does not wish to share it?”

“No. . . .” The room was tiny enough for Walker alone. And he didn’t want to find out how some of the equipment in the toilet-room was used.

“Indeed. So this most humble establishment, in a poor attempt to satisfy the most excellent human guest, has moved the guest’s belongings to another room.” It held out a new key, identical in appearance to the old one.

Walker took the key. “Where is?”

“Three levels down. Most cozy and well-protected.”

The new room was larger than the old one, having two separate antechambers of unknown function. But the rounded ceiling was terribly low—though Walker could stand up straight in the middle of the room, he had to crouch everywhere else—and the lighting was dim, the heat and humidity desperately oppressive, and everything in the room stank of the aliens.

He lay awake for hours, staring into the sweltering darkness.

In the morning, he discovered that his shaver and some other things had vanished in the move. When he complained at the front desk, he got nothing but effusive, meaningless praise—oh yes, the most wonderful guest must be correct, our criminal staff is surely at fault—and a bill for the previous night’s stay.

“Three hundred eighty-three!”

“The usual Fthshpk rate for our highest-quality suite is five hundred sixty-one. This most inadequate establishment has already offered a substantial reduction, out of respect for the highly esteemed guest and the unfortunate circumstances.”

“Highest-quality suite? Too hot! Too dark! Too low!”

“Ah. Yes. The most excellent guest has unique tastes. Alas, this poor room is considered the most preferential in the hotel. The heat and light are praised by our other, sadly unenlightened, customers. These most lowly ones find it comforting.”

“I not have so much money. You take interstellar credit? Bank draft?”

The clerk’s gills stopped pulsing and it drew back a step, going tk’tk’tk. “Surely this humble one has misheard the most honored guest, for to offer credit during Fthshpk would be a most grave insult.”

Walker licked his lips. Though the lobby was sweltering hot, suddenly he felt chilled. “Can pay after holiday?” He would have to find some other source of local currency.

Tk’tk’tk. “If the most honored visitor will please be patient. . . .” The clerk vanished.

Walker talked with the front desk manager, the chief hotelier, and the thkfsh, whatever that was, but behind the miasma of extravagant politeness was a cold hard wall of fact: he would pay for the room, he would pay in cash, and he would pay now.

“This establishment extends its most sincere apologies for the honored guest’s unfortunate situation,” said the thkfsh, which was dark yellow with green spine-tips and eyes. “However, even in this most humble city, payment for services rendered is required by both custom and law.”

Walker had already suffered from the best the city had to offer—he was terrified of what he might find in the local jail. “I no have enough money. What can I do?”

“Perhaps the most honored guest would consider temporarily lending some personal possessions to the hotel?”

Walker remembered how he had sold his voice recorder. “Lend? For indefinite period?”

Tk’tk’tk. “The honored guest is most direct and forthright.”

Walker thought about what they might want that he could spare. Not his phone, or his reader. “Interest in clothes? Shoes?”

“The highly perceptive guest will no doubt have noticed that the benighted residents of this city have not yet learned to cover themselves in this way.”

Walker sighed, and opened his briefcase. Mostly papers, worthless or confidential or both. “Paper fastening device,” he said, holding up his stapler. “Earth technology. Nothing like it for sixty-five light years.”

“Surely such an item is unique and irreplaceable,” said the thkfsh. “To accept the loan of this fine device would bring shame upon this humble establishment. However, the traveling-box . . .”

“Not understanding.”

The thkfsh touched the scuffed leather of Walker’s briefcase. “This traveling-box. It is most finely made.”

Walker’s chest tightened. “This humble object . . . only a box. Not worth anything.”

“The surface has a most unusual and sublime flavor. And the texture is unlike anything this unworthy one has touched.”

Desperately, Walker dug under papers for something, anything else. He found a pocket umbrella. “This, folding rain-shield. Most useful. Same technology used in expanding solar panels.”

“The honored visitor’s government would surely object to the loan of such sensitive technology. But the traveling-box is, as the visitor says, only a box. Its value and interest to such a humble one as myself are far greater than its value to the exalted guest.”

Walker’s fingernails bit into his palms. “Box has . . . personal value. Egg-parent’s egg-parent used it.”

“How delightful! For the temporary loan of such a fine and significant object, this establishment might be willing to forgive the most worthy visitor’s entire debt.”

It’s only a briefcase, Walker thought. It’s not worth going to jail for. But his eyes stung as he emptied it out and placed its contents in a cheap extruded carry-bag.

Unshaven, red-eyed, Walker left the hotel carrying all his remaining possessions: a suitcase full of clothes and the carry-bag. He had less than a hundred in cash in his pockets, and no place to spend the night.

Harsh sunlight speared into his eyes from a flat blue sky. Even at this hour of the morning, the heat was already enough to make sweat spring from his skin. And the streets swarmed with aliens—more of them, in greater variety, and more excited than he had ever seen before.

A group of five red-and-black laborers, each over two and a half meters tall, waded through the crowd singing—or at least chattering rhythmically in unison. A swarm of black juveniles crawled over them in the opposite direction, flinging handfuls of glittering green rings into the air. All around, aliens large and small spun in circles, waving their hands in the air. Some pounded drums or wheedled on high-pitched flutes.

A yellow merchant with black spines grabbed Walker’s elbows and began spinning the two of them around, colliding with walls and with other members of the crowd. The merchant chattered happily as they spun, but its words were lost in the maelstrom of sound that surrounded them. “Let go! Let go!” Walker shouted, clutching his suitcase and his bag as he tried to squirm away, but the merchant couldn’t hear—or wasn’t listening—and its chitinous hands were terribly strong.

Finally Walker managed to twist out of the merchant’s grasp, only to spin away and collide with one of the hulking laborers. Its unyielding spines tore Walker’s jacket.

The laborer stopped chanting and turned to face Walker. It grasped his shoulders, turned him side to side. “What are you?” it shouted. Its breath was fetid.

“Visitor from Earth,” Walker shouted back, barely able to hear himself.

The laborer called to its companions, which had moved on through the crowd. They fought their way back, and the five of them stood around him, completely blocking the light.

“This one is a visitor from h’th,” said the first laborer.

One of the others grabbed a handful of green rings from a passing juvenile, scattered them over Walker’s head and shoulders. They watched him expectantly.

“Thank you?” he said. But that didn’t seem to be what they wanted.

The first laborer cuffed Walker on the shoulder, sending him reeling into one of the others. “The visitor is not very polite,” it said. The aliens loomed close around him.

“This-most-humble-one-begs-the-honored-one’s-forgiveness,” Walker chattered out, clutching the carry-bag to his chest, wishing for the lost solidity of his grandfather’s briefcase. But the laborers ignored his apology and began to twirl him around, shouting in unison.

After a few dozen spins he made out the words of the chant: “Rings, dance! Rings, dance!” Desperately, not at all sure he was doing the right thing, he tried to dance in circles as he had seen some of the aliens do.

The laborers pulled the bag from Walker’s hands and began to stomp their feet. “Rings, dance! Rings, dance!” Walker waved his arms in the air as he spun, chanting along with them. His breath came in short pants, destroying his pronunciation.

He twirled, gasping “rings, dance,” until he felt the hot sun on his head, and twirled a while longer until he understood what that sun meant: the laborers, and their shade, had deserted him. He was spinning for no reason, in the middle of a crowd that took no notice. He stopped turning and dropped his arms, weaving with dizziness and relief. But the relief lasted only a moment—sudden panic seized him as he realized his arms were empty.

There was the carry-bag, just a meter away, lying in the dirt surrounded by chitinous alien feet. He plowed through the crowd and grabbed it before it got too badly stomped.

But though he searched for an hour, he never found the suitcase.

Walker leaned, panting, against the outside wall of Amber Stone’s factory. He had fought through the surging streets for hours, hugging the bag to his chest under his tightly buttoned jacket, to reach this point. Again and again he had been sprinkled with green rings and had danced in circles, feeling ridiculous, but not wanting to find out what might happen if he refused. He was hot and sweaty and filthy.

The still-damp pheromone line drawn across the office’s labia read CLOSED FOR FTHSHPK.

Walker covered his face with his hands. Sobs thick as glue clogged the back of his throat, and he stood with shoulders heaving, not allowing himself to make a sound. The holiday crowd streamed past like a river of blackberry vines.

Eventually he recovered his composure and blew his nose, patting his waist as he pocketed the sodden handkerchief. His money belt, with the two hard little rectangles of his passport and return ticket, was still in place. All he had to do was walk to the transit gate, and he could return home—with nothing to show for his appallingly expensive trip. But he still had his papers, his phone, and his reader, and his one prospective customer. It was everything he needed to succeed, as long as he didn’t give up.

“I might have lost your briefcase, Grandpa,” he said aloud in English, “but I’m not going to lose the sale.”

A passing juvenile paused at the odd sound, then continued on with the rest of the crowd.

Walker would never have believed he’d be glad to see anything on this planet, but his relief when he entered the Spirit of Life Vegetarian Restaurant was palpable. The city’s tortuous streets had been made even more incomprehensible by the Fthshpk crowds, and he had begun to doubt he would ever find it, or that it would be open on the holiday. He had been going in entirely the wrong direction when he had found the address by chance, on the pheromone-map at a nearby intersection.

“How long Fthshpk?” he asked the server, once he had eaten. It was the same server as before, brown with white spine-tips; it stood behind the counter, hands folded on its thorax, in a centered and imperturbable stance.

“One day,” it replied. “Though some believe the spirit of Fthshpk should be felt in every heart all year long.”

Walker suppressed a shudder at the thought. “Businesses open tomorrow?”

“Most of them, yes. Some trades take an extended holiday.”

“Building supplies?” Walker’s anxiety made him sputter the word.

“They will be open.” The server tilted its shoulders, a posture that seemed to convey amusement. “The most honored visitor is perhaps planning a construction project?”

“No.” He laughed weakly, a sound that startled the server. “Selling, not buying.”

“The visitor is a most intriguing creature.” The server’s shoulders returned to the horizontal. “This humble one wishes to help, but does not know how.”

“This one seeks business customers. The server knows manufacturers? Inventory controllers? Enterprise resource management specialists?”

“The guest’s words are in the Thfshpfth language, but alas, this one does not understand them.”

“To apologize. Very specialized business.”

The server lowered itself smoothly, bringing its face down to Walker’s level. Its gills moved like seaweed in a gentle current. “Business problems are not this one’s strength. Is the honored visitor having troubles with family?”

It took Walker a moment to formulate his response. “No. Egg-parent, brood-parent deceased. This one no egglings. Brood-partner . . . departed.” For a moment he forgot who, or what, he was talking to. “This one spent too much time away from nest. Brood-partner found another egg-partner.” He fell silent, lost in memory.

The server stood quietly for a moment, leaving Walker to his thoughts. After a while it spoke: “It is good to share these stories. Undigested stories cause pain.”

“Thanking you.”

“This humble one is known as Shining Sky. If the visitor wishes to share further stories, please return to this establishment and request this one by name.”

When Walker left the Spirit of Life, the sun had already set. The Fthshpk crowds had thinned, with just a few revelers still dancing and twirling under the yellow-green street lights, so Walker was relatively unimpeded as he walked to hotel after hotel. Alas, they all said, this humble one apologizes most profusely, no room for the most honored visitor. Finally, exhausted, he found a dark space between buildings. Wrapping his jacket around the carry-bag, he placed it under his head—as a pillow, and for security. He would grab a few hours’ sleep and meet with his customer the first thing in the morning.

He slept soundly until dawn, when the first hot light of day struck his face. He squinted and rolled over, then awoke fully at the sensation of the hard alley floor under his head.

The bag was not there.

He sat up, wide-eyed, but his worst fears were confirmed: his jacket and bag were nowhere to be seen. Panicked, he felt at his waist—his passport and return ticket were safe. But his money, his papers, his phone, and his reader were gone.

“Ah, human!” said Amber Stone. “Once again the most excellent visitor graces this unworthy establishment.” It was late in the morning. Robbed of street signs, addresses, and maps by the loss of his reader, Walker had wandered the streets for hours in search of the factory. Without the accustomed weight of his briefcase, he felt as though he might blow away on the next breeze.

“You requested I come yesterday,” Walker hissed. “I come, factory closed. Come again today. Very important.” Even without the papers from his briefcase, he could still get a verbal commitment, or at least a strong expression of interest . . . some tiny tidbit of achievement to prove to his company, his father, his grandfather, and himself that he wasn’t a complete loss.

“Surely the superlative guest has more important appointments than to meet with this insignificant one?”

“No. Amber Stone is most important appointment. Urgent we discuss purchase of software.”

“This groveling one extends the most sincere apologies for occupying the exalted guest’s time, and will not delay the most highly esteemed one any further.” It turned to leave.

“This-most-humble-one-begs-the-honored-one’s-forgiveness!”

Amber Stone spoke without turning back. “One who appears at a merchant’s establishment filthy, staggering, and reeking of Fthshpk-rings is obviously one whose concerns are so exalted as to be beyond the physical plane. Such a one should not be distracted from its duties, which are surely incomprehensible to mere mortals.”

Walker’s shoulders slumped in defeat, but then it was as though he heard his father’s voice in his inner ear: Ask for the sale. Walker swallowed, then said “Would the honored Amber Stone accept indefinite loan of inventory management system from this humble merchant?”

The alien paused at the threshold of its inner office, then turned back to Walker. “If that is what the most exalted one desires, this simple manufacturer must surely pay heed. Would fifty-three million be sufficient compensation for the loan of a complete system?”

Stunned, Walker leaned against the wall. It was warm and rounded, and throbbed slightly. “Yes,” he said at last. “Yes. Sufficient.”

“Where the hell have you been, Walker? Your phone’s been offline for days. And you look like shit.” Gleason, Walker’s supervisor, didn’t look very good himself—his face on the public phone’s oval screen was discolored and distorted by incompatibilities between the alien and human systems.

“I’ve been busy.” He inserted Amber Stone’s data-nodule into the phone’s receptor.

Gleason’s eyes widened as the contract came up on his display. “Yes you have! This is great!”

“Thanks.” Gleason’s enthusiasm could not penetrate the shell of numbness around Walker’s soul. Whatever joy he might have felt at making the sale had been drowned by three days of negotiations.

“This will make you the salesman of the quarter! And the party’s tomorrow night!”

The End-of-Quarter party. He thought of the bluff and facile faces of his fellow salesmen, the loutish jokes and cheap congratulations of every other EOQ he’d ever attended. Would it really be any different if his name was the one at the top of the list? And then to return to his empty apartment, and go out the next day to start a new quarter from zero. . . .

“Sorry,” Walker said, “I can’t make it.”

“That’s right, what am I thinking? It’s gotta be at least a five day trip, with all the transfers. Look, give me a call whenever you get in. You got my home number?”

“It’s in my phone.” Wherever that was.

“Okay, well, I gotta go. See you soon.”

He sat in the dim, stuffy little booth for a long time. The greenish oval of the phone screen looked like a pool of stagnant water, draining slowly away, reflecting the face of a man with no family, no dog, no little house in the woods. And though he might be the salesman of the quarter today, there were a lot of quarters between here and retirement, and every one of them would be just as much work.

Eventually came the rap of chitinous knuckles on the wall of the booth, and a voice. “This most humble one begs the worthy customer’s forgiveness. Other customers desire to use the phone.”

The booth cracked open like a seed pod. Walker stuck out his head, blinking at the light, and the public phone attendant said “Ah, most excellent customer. This most unworthy one trusts your call went well?”

“Yes. Most well.”

“The price of the call is two hundred sixty-three.”

Walker had about six in cash in his pants pockets. The rest had vanished with his jacket. He thought a moment, then dug in his money belt and pulled out a tiny plastic rectangle.

“What is this?”

“Ticket to Earth.”

“An interstellar transit ticket? To Earth? Surely this humble one has misheard.”

“Interstellar. To Earth.”

“This is worth thousands!”

“Yes.” Then, in English, he said “Keep the change.”

He left the attendant sputtering in incomprehension behind him.

The man was cursing the heat and the crowds as he pushed through the restaurant’s labia from the street, but when he saw Walker he stopped dead and just gaped for a moment. “Jesus!” he said at last, in English. “I thought I was the only human being on this Godforsaken planet.”

Walker was lean and very tan; his salt-and-pepper hair and beard were long but neatly combed, and he stood with folded hands in an attitude of centered harmony. He wore only a short white skirt. “Greetings,” he said in the Thfshpfth language, as he always did. “This one welcomes the peaceful visitor to the Spirit of Life.”

“What are you doing here?” The English words were ludicrously loud and round.

Walker tapped his teeth together, making a sound like tk’tk’tk, before he replied in English: “I am . . . serving food.” The sound of it tickled his mouth.

“On this planet, I mean.”

“I live here.”

“But why did you come here? And why the Hell did you stay?”

Walker paused for a moment. “I came to sell something. It was an Earth thing. The people here didn’t need it. After a while I understood, and stopped trying. I’ve been much happier since.” He gestured to one of the squatting-posts. “Please seat yourself.”

“I, uh . . . I think I’ll pass.”

“You’re sure? The thksh hspthk is very good today.”

“Thanks, but no.” The man turned to go, but then he paused, pulled some money from his pocket, ran a reader over it. “Here,” he said, handing it to Walker. “Good luck.”

As the restaurant’s labia closed behind the visitor, Walker touched the money, then smelled his fingertip. Three hundred and eleven, a substantial sum.

He smiled, put the money in the donation jar, and settled in to wait for the next customer.

Table of Contents

1985

NOMINEES

THE ALIENS WHO KNEW, I MEAN, EVERYTHING

SYMPHONY FOR A LOST TRAVELER

SALVADOR

WINNER

THE CRYSTAL SPHERES

1986

NOMINEES

SNOW

FLYING SAUCER ROCK & ROLL

WINNER

FERMI AND FROST

1987

NOMINEES

ROBOT DREAMS

RAT

THE BOY WHO PLAITED MANES

WINNER

TANGENTS

1988

NOMINEES

ANGEL

THE FAITHFUL COMPANION AT FORTY

CASSANDRA’S PHOTOGRAPH’S

NIGHT OF THE COOTERS

FOREVER YOURS, ANNA

WINNER

WHY I LEFT HARRY’S ALL ALL-NIGHT HAMBURGERS

1989

NOMINEES

THE GIVING PLAGUE

STABLE STRATEGIES FOR MIDDLE MANAGEMENT

RIPPLES IN THE DIRAC SEA

THE FORT MOXIE BRANCH

WINNER

KIRINYAGA

1990

NOMINEES

COMPUTER FRIENDLY

THE RETURN OF WILLIAM PROXMIRE

DORI BANGS

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

WINNER

BOOBS

1991

NOMINEES

THE UTILITY MAN

GODSPEED

VRM-547

CIBOLA

WINNER

BEARS DISCOVER FIRE

1992

NOMINEES

ONE PERFECT MORNING, WITH JACKALS

WINTER SOLTSTICE

IN THE LATE CRETACEOUS

A WALK IN THE SUN

1993

NOMINEES

THE WINTERBERRY

THE MOUNTAIN TO MOHAMMED

THE LOTUS AND THE SPEAR

THE ARBITRARY PLACEMENT OF WALLS

WINNER

EVEN THE QUEEN

1994

NOMINEES

ENGLAND UNDERWAY

WINNER

DEATH ON THE NILE

1995

NOMINEES

DEAD MAN'S CURVE

UNDERSTANDING ENTROPY

WINNER

BARNABY IN EXILE

1996

NOMINEES

TELE-ABSENCE

LIFE ON THE MOON

A BIRTHDAY

WINNER

THE LINCOLN TRAIN

1997

NOMINEES

GONE

DECENCY

THE DEAD

WINNER

UN-BIRTHDAY BOY

1998

NOMINEES

BELUTHAHATCHIE

STANDNG ROOM ONLY

ITSY BITSY SPIDER

THE HAND YOU’RE DEALT

WINNER

THE 43 ANTAREAN DYNASTIES

1999

NOMINEES

COSMIC CORKSCREW

WHIPTAIL

MANEKI NEKO

2000

NOMINEES

MACS

SARAJEVO

HOTHOUSE FLOWERS

ANCIENT ENGINES

WINNER

SCHERZO WITH TYRANNOSUAR

2001

NOMINEES

THE GRAVITY MINE

KADDISH FOR THE LAST SURVIVOR

THE ELEPHANTS ON NEPTUNE

MOON DOGS

WINNER

DIFFERENT KINDS OF DARKNESS

2002

NOMINEES

THE GHOST PIT

THE BONES OF THE EARTH

OLD MACDONOLD HAD A FARM

WINNER

THE DOG SAID BOW-WOW

2003

NOMINEES

CREATION

LAMBING SEASON

FALLING ONTO MARS

"HELLO”, SAID THE STICK

WINNER

THE LITTLE CAT LAUGHED

2004

NOMINEES

PAYING IT FORWARD

FOUR SHORT NOVEL

THE TALE OF THE GOLDEN EAGLE

ROBOTS DON’T CRY

WINNER

A STUDY IN EMERALD

2005

NOMINEES

DECISIONS

THE BEST CHRISTMAS EVER

A PRINCESS OF EARTH

SHED SKIN

2006

NOMINEES

THE CLOCKWORK ATOM BOMB

SINGING MY SISTER DOWN

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS

DOWN MEMORY LANE

WINNER

TK’TK’TK