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Hugo Awards: The Short Stories

Volume Two

1974-1993

1974

NOMINEES

WITH MORNING COMES MISTFALL

WINGS

CONSTRUCTION SHACK

WINNER

THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY

1975

NOOMINEES

THE FOUR-HOUR FUGUE

CATHADONIAN ODYSSEY

THE DAY BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

SCHWARTZ BETWEEN THE GALAXIES

WINNER

THE HOLE MAN

1976

NOMINEES

DOING LENNON

CROATOAN

ROGUE TOMATO

SAIL THE TIDE OF MOURNING

CHILD OF ALL AGES

WINNER

CATCH THAT ZEPPELIN!

1977

NOMINEES

A CROWD OF SHADOWS

I SEE YOU

CUSTOM FITTING

WINNER

TRI-CENTENNIAL

1978

NOMINEES

TIME-SHARING ANGEL

AIR RAID

LAURALYN

DOG DAY EVENING

WINNER

JEFTY IS FIVE

1979

NOMINEES

STONE

COUNT THE CLOCK

VIEW FROM A HEIGHT

THE VERY SLOW TIME MACHINE

WINNER

CASSANDRA

1980

NOMINEES

giANTS

UNACCOMPANIED SONATA

CAN THESE BONES LIVE?

DAISY IN THE SUN

WINNER

THE WAY OF CROSS AND DRAGON

1981

NOMINEES

SPIDERSONG

COLD HANDS

OUR LADY OF THE SAUROPODS

GUARDIAN

WINNER

THE GROTTO OF THE DANCING DEER

1982

NOMINEES

THE QUIET

ABSENT THEE FELICITY AWHILE

THE WOMAN THE UNICORN LOVE

WINNER

THE PUSHER

1983

NOMINEES

SUR

SPIDER ROSE

THE BOY WHO WATER-SKIED TO FOREVER

IKE AT THE MIKE

WINNER

MELANCHOLY ELEPHANTS

1984

NOMINEES

THE PEACEMAKER

THE SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE

GEOMETRY OF NARRATIVE

WONG'S LOST AND FOUND EMPORIUM

WINNER

SPEECH SOUNDS

1985

NOMINEES

THE ALIENS WHO KNEW, I MEAN, EVERYTHING

RIDGE RUNNING

SYMPHONY FOR A LOST TRAVELER

RORY

SALVADOR

WINNER

THE CRYSTAL SPHERES

1986

NOMINEES

SNOW

FLYING SAUCER ROCK & ROLL

DINNER IN AUDOGHAST

WINNER

FERMI AND FROST

1987

NOMINEES

ROBOT DREAMS

STILL LIFE

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

OUR NEURAL CHERNOBYL

STABLE STRATEGIES FOR MIDDLE MANAGEMENT

RIPPLES IN THE DIRAC SEA

THE FORT MOXIE BRANCH

WINNER

KIRINYAGA

1990

NOMINEES

COMPUTER FRIENDLY

LOST BOYS

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 SOLSTICE

BUFFALO

IN THE LATE CRETACEOUS

DOG'S LIFE

PRESS ANN

WINNER

A WALK IN THE SUN

1993

NOMINEES

THE WINTERBERRY

THE MOUNTAIN TO MOHAMMED

THE LOTUS AND THE SPEAR

THE ARBITRARY PLACEMENTS OF WALLS

WINNER

EVEN THE QUEEN

WITH MORNING COMES MISTFALL

George R.R. Martin

If you could go to Loch Ness tomorrow and prove or disprove conclusively the existence of the monster, would you? Should you? When all the questions are answered, when all the superstitions are stilled, when science has unraveled all the mysteries, what will we do? Would you want to live in such a time? Would we be able to live then?

I was early to breakfast that morning, the first day after landing. But Sanders was already out on the dining balcony when I got there. He was standing alone by the edge, looking out over the mountains and the mists.

I walked up behind him and muttered hello. He didn’t bother to reply. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he said, without turning.

And it was.

Only a few feet below balcony level the mists rolled, sending ghostly breakers to crash against the stones of Sanders’s castle. A thick white blanket extended from horizon to horizon, cloaking everything. We could see the summit of the Red Ghost, off to the north; a barbed dagger of scarlet rock jabbing into the sky. But that was all. The other mountains were still below mist level.

But we were above the mists. Sanders had built his hotel atop the tallest mountain in the chain. We were floating alone in a swirling white ocean, on a flying castle amid a sea of clouds.

Castle Cloud, in fact. That was what Sanders had named the place. It was easy to see why.

“Is it always like this?” I asked Sanders, after drinking it all in for a while.

“Every mistfall,” he replied, turning toward me with a wistful smile. He was a fat man, with a jovial red face. Not the sort who should smile wistfully. But he did.

He gestured toward the east, where Wraithworld’s sun rising above the mists made a crimson and orange spectacle of the dawn sky.

“The sun,” he said. “As it rises, the heat drives the mists back into the valleys, forces them to surrender the mountains they’ve conquered during the night. The mists sink, and one by one the peaks come into view. By noon the whole range is visible for miles and miles. There’s nothing like it on Earth, or anywhere else.”

He smiled again, and led me over to one of the tables scattered around the balcony. “And then, at sunset, it’s all reversed. You must watch mist rise tonight,” he said.

We sat down, and a sleek robowaiter came rolling a out to serve us as the chairs registered our presence. Sanders ignored it. “It’s war, you know,” he continued. “Eternal war between the sun and the mists. And the mists have the better of it. They have the valleys, and the plains, and the seacoasts. The sun has only a few mountaintops. And them only by day.”

He turned to the robowaiter and ordered coffee for both of us, to keep us occupied until the others arrived. It would be fresh brewed, of course. Sanders didn’t tolerate instants or synthetics on his planet.

“You like it here,” I said, while we waited for the coffee.

Sanders laughed. “What’s not to like? Castle Cloud has everything. Good food, entertainment, gambling, and all the other comforts of home. Plus this planet. I’ve got the best of both worlds, don’t I?”

“I suppose so. But most people don’t think in those terms. Nobody comes to Wraithworld for the gambling, or the food.”

Sanders nodded. “But we do get some hunters. Out after rock cats and plains devils. And once in a while someone will come to look at the ruins.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But those are your exceptions. Not your rule. Most of your guests are here for one reason.”

“Sure,” he admitted, grinning. “The wraiths.”

“The wraiths,” I echoed. “You’ve got beauty here, and hunting and fishing and mountaineering. But none of that brings the tourists here. It’s the wraiths they came for.”

The coffee arrived then, two big steaming mugs accompanied by a pitcher of thick cream. It was very strong, and very hot, and very good. After weeks of spaceship synthetic, it was an awakening.

Sanders sipped at his coffee with care, his eyes studying me over the mug. He set it down thoughtfully. “And it’s the wraiths you’ve come for, too,” he said.

I shrugged. “Of course. My readers aren’t interested in scenery, no matter how spectacular. Dubowski and his men are here to find wraiths, and I’m here to cover the search.”

Sanders was about to answer, but he never got the chance. A sharp, precise voice cut in suddenly. “If there are any wraiths to find,” the voice said.

We turned to face the balcony entrance. Dr. Charles Dubowski, head of the Wraithworld Research Team, was standing in the doorway, squinting at the light. He had managed to shake the gaggle of research assistants who usually trailed him everywhere.

Dubowski paused for a second, then walked over to our table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. The robowaiter came rolling out again.

Sanders eyed the thin scientist with unconcealed distaste. “What makes you think the wraiths aren’t there, Doctor?” he asked.

Dubowski shrugged, and smiled lightly. “I just don’t feel there’s enough evidence,” he said. “But don’t worry. I never let my feelings interfere with my work. I want the truth as much as anyone. So I’ll run an impartial expedition. If your wraiths are out there, I’ll find them.”

“Or they’ll find you,” Sanders said. He looked grave. “And that might not be too pleasant.”

Dubowski laughed. “Oh, come now, Sanders. Just because you live in a castle doesn’t mean you have to be so melodramatic.”

“Don’t laugh, Doctor. The wraiths have killed people before, you know.”

“No proof of that,” said Dubowski. “No proof at all. Just as there’s no proof of the wraiths themselves. But that’s why we’re here. To find proof. Or disproof. But come, I’m famished.” He turned to our robowaiter, who had been standing by and humming impatiently.

Dubowski and I ordered rockcat steaks, with a basket of hot, freshly baked biscuits. Sanders took advantage of the Earth supplies our ship had brought in last night, and got a massive slab of ham with a half dozen eggs.

Rockcat has a flavor that Earth meat hasn’t had in centuries. I loved it, although Dubowski left much of his steak uneaten. He was too busy talking to eat.

“You shouldn’t dismiss the wraiths so lightly,” Sanders said after the robowaiter had stalked off with our orders. “There is evidence. Plenty of it. Twenty-two deaths since this planet was discovered. And eyewitness accounts of wraiths by the dozens.”

“True,” Dubowski said. “But I wouldn’t call that real evidence. Deaths? Yes. Most are simple disappearances, however. Probably people who fell off a mountain, or got eaten by a rockcat, or something. It’s impossible to find the bodies in the mists. More people vanish every day on Earth, and nothing is thought of it. But here, every time someone disappears, people claim the wraiths got him. No, I’m sorry. It’s not enough”

“Bodies have been found, Doctor,” Sanders said quietly. “Slain horribly. And not by falls or rockcats, either.”

It was my turn to cut in. “Only four bodies have been recovered that I know of,” I said. “And I’ve backgrounded myself pretty thoroughly on the wraiths.”

Sanders frowned. “All right,” he admitted. “But what about those four cases? Pretty convincing evidence, if you ask me.”

The food showed up about then, but Sanders continued as we ate. “The first sighting, for example. That’s never been explained satisfactorily. The Gregor Expedition.”

I nodded. Dave Gregor had captained the ship that had discovered Wraithworld, nearly seventy-five years earlier. He had probed through the mists with his sensors, and set his ship down on the seacoast plains. Then he sent teams out to explore.

There were two men in each team, both well-armed. But in one case, only a single man came back, and he was in hysteria. He and his partner had gotten separated in the mists, and suddenly he heard a bloodcurdling scream. When he found his friend, he was quite dead. And something was standing over the body.

The survivor described the killer as manlike, eight feet tall, and somehow insubstantial. He claimed that when he fired at it, the blaster bolt went right through it. Then the creature had wavered, and vanished in the mists.

Gregor sent other teams out to search for the thing. They recovered the body, but that was all. Without special instruments, it was difficult to find the same place twice in the mists. Let alone something like the creature that had been described.

So the story was never confirmed. But nonetheless, it caused a sensation when Gregor returned to Earth. Another ship was sent to conduct a more thorough search. It found nothing. But one of its search teams disappeared without a trace,

And the legend of the mist wraiths was born, and began to grow. Other ships came to Wraithworld, and a trickle of colonists came and went, and Paul Sanders landed one day and erected the Castle Cloud so the public might safely visit the mysterious planet of the wraiths.

And there were other deaths, and other disappearances, and many people claimed to catch brief glimpses of wraiths prowling through the mists. And then someone found the ruins. Just tumbled stone blocks, now. But once, structures of some sort. The homes of the wraiths, people said.

There was evidence, I thought. And some of it was hard to deny. But Dubowski was shaking his head vigorously.

“The Gregor affair proves nothing,” he said. “You know as well as I this planet has never been explored thoroughly. Especially the plains area, where Gregor’s ship put down. It was probably some sort of animal that killed that man. A rare animal of some sort native to that area.”

“What about the testimony of his partner?” Sanders asked.

“Hysteria, pure and simple.”

“The other sightings? There have been an awful lot of them. And the witnesses weren’t always hysterical.”

“Proves nothing,” Dubowski said, shaking his head. “Back on Earth, plenty of people still claim to have seen ghosts and flying saucers. And here, with those damned mists, mistakes and hallucinations are naturally even easier.”

He jabbed at Sanders with the knife he was using to butter a biscuit. “It’s these mists that foul up everything. The wraith myth would have died long ago without the mists. Up to now, no one has had the equipment or the money to conduct a really thorough investigation. But we do. And we will. We’ll get the truth once and for all.”

Sanders grimaced. “If you don’t get yourself killed first. The wraiths may not like being investigated.”

“I don’t understand you, Sanders,” Dubowski said. “If you’re so afraid of the wraiths and so convinced that they’re down there prowling about, why have you lived here so long?”

“Castle Cloud was built with safeguards,” Sanders said. “The brochure we send prospective guests describes them. No one is in danger here. For one thing, the wraiths won’t come out of the mists. And we’re in sunlight most of the day. But it’s a different story down in the valleys.”

“That’s superstitious nonsense. If I had to guess, I’d say these mist wraiths of yours were nothing but transplanted Earth ghosts. Phantoms of someone’s imagination. But I won’t guess-I’ll wait until the results are in. Then we’ll see. If they are real, they won’t be able to hide from us.”

Sanders looked over at me. “What about you? Do you agree with him?”

“I’m a journalist,” I said carefully. “I’m just here to cover what happens. The wraiths are famous, and my readers are interested. So I’ve got no opinions. Or none that I’d care to broadcast, anyway.”

Sanders lapsed into a disgruntled silence, and attacked his ham and eggs with a renewed vigor. Dubowski took over for him, and steered the conversation over to the details of the investigation he was planning. The rest of the meal was a montage of eager talk about wraith traps, and search plans, and roboprobes, and sensors. I listened carefully and took mental notes for a column on the subject.

Sanders listened carefully, too. But you could tell from his face that he was far from pleased by what he heard.

Nothing much else happened that day. Dubowski spent his time at the spacefield, built on a small plateau below the castle, and supervised the unloading of his equipment. I wrote a column on his plans for the expedition, and beamed it back to Earth. Sanders tended to his other guests, and did whatever else a hotel manager does, I guess.

I went out to the balcony again at sunset, to watch the mists rise.

It was war, as Sanders had said. At mistfall, I had seen the sun victorious in the first of the daily battles. But now the conflict was renewed. The mists began to creep back to the heights as the temperature fell. Wispy gray-white tendrils stole up silently from the valleys, and curled around the jagged mountain peaks like ghostly fingers. Then the fingers began to grow thicker and stronger, and after a while they pulled the mists up, after them.

One by one the stark, wind-carved summits were swallowed up for another night. The Red Ghost, the giant to the north, was the last mountain to vanish in the lapping white ocean. And then the mists began to pour in over the balcony ledge, and close around Castle Cloud itself.

I went back inside. Sanders was standing there, just inside the doors. He had been watching me.

“You were right,” I said. “It was beautiful.”

He nodded. “You know, I don’t think Dubowski has bothered to look yet,” he said.

“Busy, I guess.”

Sanders sighed. “Too damn busy. C’mon. I’ll buy you a drink.”

The hotel bar was quiet and dark, with the kind of mood that promotes good talk and serious drinking. The more I saw of Sanders’ castle, the more I liked the man. Our tastes were in remarkable accord.

We found a table in the darkest and most secluded part of the room, and ordered drinks from a stock that included liquors from a dozen worlds. And we talked.

“You don’t seem very happy to have Dubowski here,” I said after the drinks came. “Why not? He’s filling up your hotel.”

Sanders looked up from his drink, and smiled “True. It is the slow season. But I don’t like what he’s trying to do.”

“So you try to scare him away?”

Sanders’ smile vanished. “Was I that transparent?”

I nodded.

He sighed. “Didn’t think it would work,” he said. He sipped thoughtfully at his drink. “But I had to try something.”

“Why?”

“Because. Because he’s going to destroy this world, if I let him. By the time he and his kind get through, there won’t be a mystery left in the universe.”

“He’s just trying to find some answers. Do the wraiths exist? What about the ruins? Who built them? Didn’t you ever want to know those things, Sanders?”

He drained his drink, looked around, and caught the waiter’s eye to order another. No robowaiters in here. Only human help. Sanders was particular about atmosphere.

“Of course,” he said when he had his drink. “Everyone’s wondered about those questions. That’s why people come here to Wraithworld, to the Castle Cloud. Each guy who touches down here is secretly hoping he’ll have an adventure with the wraiths, and find out all the answers personally.

“So he doesn’t. So he slaps on a blaster and wanders around the mist forests for a few days, or a few weeks, and finds nothing. So what? He can come back and search again. The dream is still there, and the romance, and the mystery.

“And who knows? Maybe one trip he glimpses a wraith drifting through the mists. Or something he thinks is a wraith. And then he’ll go home happy, because he’s been part of a legend. He’s touched a little bit of creation that hasn’t had all the awe and the wonder ripped from it yet by Dubowski’s sort.”

He fell silent, and stared morosely into his drink. Finally, after a long pause, he continued. “Dubowski! Bah! He makes me boil. He comes here with his ship full of lackeys and his million-credit grant and all his gadgets, to hunt for wraiths. Oh, he’ll get them all right. That’s what frightens me. Either he’ll prove they don’t exist, or he’ll find them, and they’ll turn out to be some kind of submen or animals or something.”

He emptied his glass again, savagely. “And that will ruin it. Ruin it, you hear! He’ll answer all the questions with his gadgets, and there’ll be nothing left for anyone else. It isn’t fair.”

I sat there and sipped quietly at my drink and said nothing. Sanders ordered another. A foul thought was running around in my head. Finally I had to say it aloud.

“If Dubowski answers all the questions,” I said, “then there will be no reason to come here anymore. And you’ll be put out of business. Are you sure that’s not why you’re so worried?”

Sanders glared at me, and I thought he was going to hit me for a second. But he didn’t. “I thought you were different. You looked at mistfall, and understood. I thought you did, anyway. But I guess I was wrong.” He jerked his head toward the door. “Get out of here,” he said.

I rose. “All right,” I said. “I’m sorry, Sanders. But it’s my job to ask nasty questions like that.”

He ignored me, and I left the table. When I reached’ the door, I turned and looked back across the room. Sanders was staring into his drink again, and talking loudly to himself.

“Answers,” he said. He made it sound obscene. “Answers. Always they have to have answers. But the questions are so much finer. Why can’t they leave’ them alone?”

I left him alone then. Alone with his drinks.

The next few weeks were hectic ones, for the expedition and for me. Dubowski went about things thoroughly, you had to give him that. He had planned’ his assault on Wraithworld with meticulous precision.

Mapping came first. Thanks to the mists, what maps: there were of Wraithworld were very crude by modern standards. So Dubowski sent out a whole fleet of roboprobes, to skim above the mists and steal their secrets with sophisticated sensory devices. From the information that came pouring in, a detailed topography of the region was pieced together.

That done, Dubowski and his assistants then used the maps to carefully plot every recorded wraith sighting since the Gregor Expedition. Considerable data on the sightings had been compiled and analyzed long before we left Earth, of course. Heavy use of the matchless collection on wraiths in the Castle Cloud library filled in the gaps that remained. As expected, sightings were most common in the valleys around the hotel, the only permanent human habitation on the planet.

When the plotting was completed, Dubowski set out his wraith traps, scattering most of them in the areas where wraiths had been reported most frequently. He also put a few in distant, outlying regions, however, including the seacoast plain where Gregor’s ship had made the initial contact.

The traps weren’t really traps, of course. They were squat duralloy pillars, packed with most every type of sensing and recording equipment known to Earth science. To the traps, the mists were all but nonexistent. If some unfortunate wraith wandered into survey range, there would be no way it could avoid detection.

Meanwhile, the mapping roboprobes were pulled in to be overhauled and reprogrammed, and then sent out again. With the topography known in detail, the probes could be sent through the mists on low-level patrols without fear of banging into a concealed mountain. The sensing equipment carried by the probes was not the equal of that in the wraith traps, of course. But the probes had a much greater range, and could cover thousands of square miles each day.

Finally, when the wraith traps were deployed and the roboprobes were in the air, Dubowski and his men took to the mist forests themselves. Each carried a heavy backpack of sensors and detection devices. The human search teams had more mobility than the wraith traps, and more sophisticated equipment than the probes. They hovered a different area each day, in painstaking detail.

I went along on a few of those trips, with a backpack of my own. It made for some interesting copy, even though we never found anything. And while on search, I fell in love with the mist forests.

The tourist literature likes to call them “the ghastly mist forests of haunted Wraithworld.” But they’re not ghastly. Not really. There’s a strange sort of beauty there, for those who can appreciate it.

The trees are thin and very tall, with white bark and pale gray leaves. But the forests are not without color. There’s a parasite, a hanging moss of some sort, that’s very common, and it drips from the overhanging branches in cascades of dark green and scarlet. And there are rocks, and vines, and low bushes choked with misshapen purplish fruits.

But there’s no sun, of course. The mists hide everything. They swirl and slide around you as you walk, caressing you with unseen hands, clutching at your feet.

Once in a while, the mists play games with you. Most of the time you walk through a thick fog, unable to see more than a few feet in any direction, your own shoes lost in the mist carpet below. Sometimes, though, the fog closes in suddenly. And then you can’t see at all. I blundered into more than one tree when that happened.

At other times, though, the mists—for no apparent reason—will roll back suddenly, and leave you standing alone in a clear pocket within a cloud. That’s when you can see the forest in all its grotesque beauty. It’s a brief, breathtaking glimpse of never-never land. Moments like that are few and short-lived. But they stay with you.

They stay with you.

In those early weeks, I didn’t have much time for walking in the forests, except when I joined a search team to get the feel of it. Mostly I was busy writing. I did a series on the history of the planet, highlighted by the stories of the most famous sightings. I did feature profiles on some of the more colorful members of the expedition. I did a piece on Sanders, and the problems he encountered and overcame in building Castle Cloud. I did science pieces on the little known about the planet’s ecology. I did mood pieces about the forests and the mountains. I did speculative-thought pieces about the ruins. I wrote about rockcat hunting, and mountain climbing, and the huge and dangerous swamp lizards native to some offshore islands.

And, of course, I wrote about Dubowski and his search. On that I wrote reams.

Finally, however, the search began to settle down into dull routine, and I began to exhaust the myriad other topics Wraithworld offered. My output began to decline. I started to have time on my hands.

That’s when I really began to enjoy Wraithworld. I began to take daily walks through the forests, ranging wider each day. I visited the ruins, and flew half a continent away to see the swamp lizards firsthand instead of by holo. I befriended a group of hunters passing through, and shot myself a rockcat. I accompanied some other hunters to the western seacoast, and nearly got myself killed by a plains devil.

And I began to talk to Sanders again.

Through all of this, Sanders had pretty well ignored me and Dubowski and everyone else connected with the wraith research. He spoke to us grudgingly if at all, greeted us curtly, and spent all his free time with his other guests.

At first, after the way he had talked in the bar that night, I worried about what he might do. I had visions of him murdering someone out in the mists, and trying to make it look like a wraith killing. Or maybe just sabotaging the wraith traps. But I was sure he would try something to scare off Dubowski or otherwise undermine the expedition.

Comes of watching too much holovision, I guess. Sanders did nothing of the sort. He merely sulked, glared at us in the castle corridors, and gave us less than full cooperation at all times.

After a while, though, he began to warm up again. Not toward Dubowski and his men. Just toward me.

I guess that was because of my walks in the forests. Dubowski never went out into the mists unless he had to. And then he went out reluctantly, and came back quickly. His men followed their chief’s example. I was the only joker in the deck. But then, I wasn’t really part of the same deck.

Sanders noticed, of course. He didn’t miss much of what went on in his castle. And he began to speak to me again. Civilly. One day, finally, he even invited me for drinks again.

It was about two months into the expedition. Winter was coming to Wraithworld and Castle Cloud, and the air was getting cold and crisp. Dubowski and I were out on the dining balcony, lingering over coffee after another superb meal. Sanders sat at a nearby table, talking to some tourists.

I forget what Dubowski and I were discussing. Whatever it was, Dubowski interrupted me with a shiver at one point. “It’s getting cold out here,” he complained. “Why don’t we move inside?” Dubowski never liked the dining balcony very much.

I sort of frowned. “It’s not that bad,” I said. “Besides, it’s nearly sunset. One of the best parts of the day.”

Dubowski shivered again, and stood up. “Suit yourself,” he said. “But I’m going in. I don’t feel like catching a cold just so you can watch another mistfall.”

He started to walk off. But he hadn’t taken three steps before Sanders was up out of his seat, howling like a wounded rockcat.

“Mistfall,” he bellowed. “Mistfall!” He launched into a long, incoherent string of obscenities. I had never seen Sanders so angry, not even when he threw me out of the bar that first night. He stood there, literally trembling with rage, his face flushed, his fat fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.

I got up in a hurry, and got between them. Dubowski turned to me, looking baffled and scared. “Wha-” he started.

“Get inside,” I interrupted. “Get up to your room. Get to the lounge. Get somewhere. Get anywhere. But get out of here before he kills you.”

“But-but-what’s wrong? What happened? I don’t-“

“Mistfall is in the morning,” I told him. “At night, at sunset, it’s mistrise. Now go.”

“That’s all? Why should that get him so-so-“

“GO!”

Dubowski shook his head, as if to say he still didn’t understand what was going on. But he went.

I turned to Sanders. “Calm down,” I said. “Calm down.”

He stopped trembling, but his eyes threw blaster bolts at Dubowski’s back. “Mistfall,” he muttered. “Two months that bastard has been here, and he doesn’t know the difference between mistfall and mistrise.”

“He’s never bothered to watch either one,” I said. “Things like that don’t interest him. That’s his loss, though. No reason for you to get upset about it.”

He looked at me, frowning. Finally he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” He sighed. “But mistfall! Hell.” There was a short silence, then, “I need a drink. Join me?”

I nodded.

We wound up in the same dark corner as the first night, at what must have been Sanders’s favorite table. He put away three drinks before I had finished my first. Big drinks. Everything in Castle Cloud was big.

There were no arguments this time. We talked about mistfall, and the forests, and the ruins. We talked about the wraiths, and Sanders lovingly told me the stories of the great sightings. I knew them all already, of course. But not the way Sanders told them.

At one point, I mentioned that I’d been born in Bradbury when my parents were spending a short vacation on Mars. Sanders’s eyes lit up at that, and he spent the next hour or so regaling me with Earthman jokes. I’d heard them all before, too. But I was getting more than a little drunk, and somehow they all seemed hilarious.

After that night, I spent more time with Sanders than with anyone else in the hotel. I thought I knew Wraithworld pretty well by that time. But that was an empty conceit, and Sanders proved it. He showed me hidden spots in the forests that have haunted me ever since. He took me to island swamps, where the trees are of a very different sort and sway horribly without a wind. We flew to the far worth, to another mountain range where the peaks are higher and sheathed in ice, and to a southern plateau where the mists pour eternally over the edge in a ghostly imitation of a waterfall.

I continued to write about Dubowski and his wraith hunt, of course. But there was little new to write about, so most of my time was spent with Sanders. I didn’t worry too much about my output. My Wraithworld series had gotten excellent play on Earth and most of the colony worlds, so I thought I had it made.

Not so.

I’d been on Wraithworld just a little over three months when my syndicate beamed me. A few systems away, a civil war had broken out on a planet called New Refuge. They wanted me to cover it. No news was coming out of Wraithworld anyway, they said, since Dubowski’s expedition still had over a year to run.

Much as I liked Wraithworld, I jumped at the chance. My stories had been getting a little stale, and I was running out of ideas, and the New Refuge thing sounded like it could be very big.

So I said good-bye to Sanders and Dubowski and Castle Cloud, and took a last walk through the mist forests, and booked passage on the next ship through.

The New Refuge civil war was a firecracker. I spent less than a month on the planet, but it was a dreary month. The place had been colonized by religious fanatics, but the original cult had schismed, and both sides accused the other of heresy. It was all very dingy. The planet itself had all the charm of a Martian suburb.

I moved on as quickly as I could, hopping from planet to planet, from story to story. In six months, I had worked myself back to Earth. Elections were coming up, so I got slapped onto a political beat. That was fine by me. It was a lively campaign, and there was a ton of good stories to be mined.

But throughout it all, I kept myself up on the little news that came out of Wraithworld. And finally, as I’d expected, Dubowski announced a press conference. As the syndicate’s resident wraith, I got myself assigned to cover, and headed out on the fastest starship I could find.

I got there a week before the conference, ahead of everyone else. I had beamed Sanders before taking ship, and he met me at the spaceport. We adjourned to the dining balcony, and had our drinks served out there.

“Well?” I asked him, after we had traded amenities. “You know what Dubowski’s going to announce?”

Sanders looked very glum. “I can guess,” he said. “He called in all his damn gadgets a month ago, and he’s been cross-checking findings on a computer. We’ve had a couple of wraith sightings since you left. Dubowski moved in hours after each sighting, and went over the areas with a fine-tooth comb. Nothing. That’s what he’s going to announce, I think. Nothing.”

I nodded. “Is that so bad, though? Gregor found nothing.”

“Not the same,” Sanders said. “Gregor didn’t look the way Dubowski has. People will believe him, whatever he says.”

I wasn’t so sure of that, and was about to say so, when Dubowski arrived. Someone must have told him I was there. He came striding out on the balcony, smiling, spied me, and came over to sit down.

Sanders glared at him, and studied his drink. Dubowski trained all of his attention on me. He seemed very pleased with himself. He asked what I’d been doing since I left, and I told him, and he said that was nice.

Finally I got to ask him about his results. “No Comment,” he said. “That’s what I’ve called the press conference for.”

“C’mon,” I said. “I covered you for months when, everybody else was ignoring the expedition. You can give me some kind of beat. What have you got?”

He hesitated. “Well, O.K.,” he said doubtfully. “But don’t release it yet. You can beam it out a few hours ahead of the conference. That should be enough time, for a beat.”

I nodded agreement. “What do you have?”

“The wraiths,” he said. “I have the wraiths, bagged neatly. They don’t exist. I’ve got enough evidence to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.” He smiled broadly.

“Just because you didn’t find anything?” I started. “Maybe they were avoiding you. If they’re sentient, they might be smart enough. Or maybe they’re beyond the ability of your sensors to detect.”

“Come now,” Dubowski said. “You don’t believe that. Our wraith traps had every kind of sensor we could come up with. If the wraiths existed, they would have registered on something. But they didn’t. We had the traps planted in the areas where three of Sanders’s so-called sightings took place. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Conclusive proof that those people were seeing things. Sightings, indeed.”

“What about the deaths, the vanishings?” I asked. “What about the Gregor Expedition and the other classic cases?”

His smile spread. “Couldn’t disprove all the deaths, of course. But our probes and our searches turned up four skeletons.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Two were killed by a rockslide, and one had rockcat claw marks on the bones.”

“The fourth?”

“Murder,” he said. “The body was buried in a shallow grave, clearly by human hands. A flood of some sort had exposed it. It was down in the records as a disappearance. I’m sure all the other bodies could be found, if we searched long enough. And we’d find that all died perfectly normal deaths.”

Sanders raised his eyes from his drink. They were bitter eyes. “Gregor,” he said stubbornly. “Gregor and the other classics.”

Dubowski’s smile became a smirk. “Ah, yes. We searched that area quite thoroughly. My theory was right. We found a tribe of apes nearby. Big brutes. Like giant baboons, with dirty white fur. Not a very successful species, either. We found only one small tribe, and they were dying out. But clearly, that was what Gregor’s man sighted. And exaggerated all out of proportion.”

There was silence. Then Sanders spoke, but his voice was beaten. “Just one question,” he said softly. “Why?”

That brought Dubowski up short, and his smile faded. “You never have understood, have you, Sanders?” he said. “It was for truth. To free this planet from ignorance and superstition.”

“Free Wraithworld?” Sanders said. “Was it enslaved?”

“Yes,” Dubowski answered. “Enslaved by foolish myth. By fear. Now this planet will be free, and open. We can find out the truth behind those ruins now, without murky legends about halfhuman wraiths to fog the facts. We can open this planet for colonization. People won’t be afraid to come here, and live, and farm. We’ve conquered the fear.”

“A colony world? Here?” Sanders looked amused “Are you going to bring big fans to blow away the mists, or what? Colonists have come before. And left the soil’s all wrong. You can’t farm here, with all these mountains. At least not on a commercial scale. There’s no way you can make a profit growing things on Wraithworld.

“Besides, there are hundreds of colony worlds crying for people. Did you need another so badly? Must Wraithworld become yet another Earth?”

Sanders shook his head sadly, drained his drink, and continued. “You’re the one who doesn’t understand, Doctor. Don’t kid yourself. You haven’t freed Wraithworld. You’ve destroyed it. You’ve stolen its wraiths, and left an empty planet.”

Dubowski shook his head. “I think you’re wrong. They’ll find plenty of good, profitable ways to exploit this planet. But even if you were correct, well, it’s just too bad. Knowledge is what man is all about. People like you have tried to hold back progress since the beginning of time. But they failed, and you failed. Man needs to know.”

“Maybe,” Sanders said. “But is that the only thing man needs? I don’t think so. I think he also needs mystery, and poetry, and romance. I think he needs a few unanswered questions, to make him brood and wonder.”

Dubowski stood up abruptly, and frowned. “This conversation is as pointless as your philosophy, Sanders. There’s no room in my universe for unanswered questions.”

“Then you live in a very drab universe, Doctor.”

“And you, Sanders, live in the stink of your own ignorance. Find some new superstitions if you must. But don’t try to foist them off on me with your tales and legends. I’ve got no time for wraiths.” He looked at me. “I’ll see you at the press conference,” he said. Then he turned and walked briskly from the balcony.

Sanders watched him depart in silence, then swiveled in his chair to look out over the mountains. “The mists are rising,” he said.

Sanders was wrong about the colony, too, as it turned out. They did establish one, although it wasn’t much to boast of. Some vineyards, some factories, and a few thousand people; all belonging to no more than a couple of big companies.

Commercial farming did turn out to be unprofitable, you see. With one exception-a native grape, a fat gray thing the size of a lemon. So Wraithworld has only one export, a smoky white wine with a mellow, lingering flavor.

They call it mistwine, of course. I’ve grown fond of it over the years. The taste reminds me of mistfall somehow, and makes me dream. But that’s probably me, not the wine. Most people don’t care for it much.

Still, in a very minor way, it’s a profitable item. So Wraithworld is still a regular stop on the spacelanes. For freighters, at least.

The tourists are long gone, though. Sanders was right about that. Scenery they can get closer to home, and cheaper. The wraiths were why they came.

Sanders is long gone, too. He was too stubborn and too impractical to buy in on the mistwine operations when he had the chance. So he stayed behind his ramparts at Castle Cloud until the last. I don’t know what happened to him afterwards, when the hotel finally went out of business.

The castle itself is still there. I saw it a few years ago, when I stopped for a day en route to a story on New Refuge. It’s already crumbling, though. Too expensive to maintain. In a few years, you won’t be able to tell it from those other, older ruins.

Otherwise the planet hasn’t changed much. The mists still rise at sunset, and fall at dawn. The Red Ghost is still stark and beautiful in the early morning light. The forests are still there, and the rockcats still prowl.

Only the wraiths are missing.

Only the wraiths.

WINGS

Vonda N. McIntyre

Long after the last visitors had left the temple, after time had begun to pass almost unnoticed in a deep, unrippled stream, a shape appeared, far distant, unrecognizable through the thin-film watered-silk patterns of the auroras. It ignored the passages between the light-curtains, which led eventually, slowly, to the only structure on the hills, the only thing on which they could focus. As the shape pushed through the membranes, they roiled darkly, discolored, touching and attaching again. The keeper of the temple could follow the angry violet path of their healing, and his own wounds ached in sympathy. He hugged his long arms closer around his bony knees, and watched the approaching shape with great, reflective eyes, slowly blinking.

The keeper had been alone for so long that his isolation had become a habit; for a moment, he hoped the shape might be a wanderer, lost but needing to continue, so he could point it a direction and send it on its way. He could see, by then, that it was a person. Its progress was direct, purposeful. The keeper wondered how it had found its way, without following the labyrinth. The sky was obscured among the curtains.

He saw that it was tired. It neither faltered nor staggered, but came quite slowly. As it approached, the auroras seemed to impede it. It broke through the final veil, stumbled, fell against the low wall, reached to cross it, failed. The keeper could only see its hand, two black fingers and thumb, tips of silver claws, against gray stone.

He rose and limped across the courtyard, walking faster than when he wished to conceal the limp. A pulse beat in the wrist he touched, too slow, too weak. His hands lingered, touching delicate bones through thin bands of muscle and mole-smooth skin. He rediscovered the sensation of touch, the friction of fur as short as it can be against the same, the warmth of contact. It had been a long time since he had touched another person, even in greeting. His heartbeat quickened.

The thin shape breathed twice, shallowly, quickly, as he touched it. He saw the unnatural angles of its broken bones, and turned it over gently, caressing, so he could pick it up.

He drew back, guiltily. This person was a youth, barely a youth, one who had not yet made a decision.

His hands were more gentle as he picked the youth up— gentle, as one carries a child.

He placed the youth on his own hard bed outside the temple. The collapse must have been from pain. The long third finger of the left hand was broken, and the wing it supported lay crumpled like a smashed ion sail. The keeper opened the dark wing, pulling long frail fingers away from the back of the arm where they had tried to fold. No bone had pierced the skin, nor were the soft membranes torn away or even cut. The wing might heal. The keeper set himself to straightening the bones.

He hoped that care would overcome lack of knowledge, and prevent the youth from being crippled. When he was almost finished, he realized he was being watched. He glanced up.

He managed not to look quickly away. The youth had pastel-green eyes that made his well-formed face ugly. The keeper looked back at the youth’s broken wing, as if that were the natural thing to do. “I’ve done the best I could with thy hand,” he said, speaking as one speaks to children and youths.

“I tried to fly over the auroras.” The tone was defiant, proud, expecting castigation.

“That is dangerous,” the keeper said mildly. Above the temple, the atmosphere was as confused as the light-curtained passages.

“I hoped I would be killed.”

“Deep despair for one so young.”

“It’s dying,” the youth said. “Everything’s dying.”

The keeper saw that the youth was half-irrational from pain and exhaustion. “Sleep,” he said.

“Don’t you believe me? Didn’t you know? You’re supposed to be a seer.”

“Thou art very cynical.”

The youth did not answer, turned away, tried, clumsily, to flex the splinted wing.

“It is less solid than the earth,” the keeper said. “Thou shouldst be gentle.”

“Why did you help me? Why should you care?” the youth cried in confusion, hatred, grief.

“Go to sleep,” the keeper said.

He moved inside the temple to perform his duties. They were few, and empty tradition. The god had departed, long before its last, ridiculed worshippers, as gods always do. The keeper knew that, and allowed himself no illusions about his status. It was his by chance and luck and response to pain, not divine gift. He poured libations to a memory, to a real god, the soul of unconscious things, not outgrown but driven away.

When he had finished his rituals, he returned to the youth, who slept the healing sleep. The keeper felt the throat-pulse and temperature and found neither sufficiently elevated. The precarious, rapid metabolism of their species had to accelerate when called on to heal. The keeper hunched down beside the bed, newly concerned. The youth’s fine wide broken wing lay stretched open across the gray stone courtyard, useless as insulation, losing heat. The keeper did not stir for quite a long time. Finally he moved, painfully, and lay down on the narrow pallet. Quite chastely, and with some guilty reluctance, he enfolded the youth in his own one good wing. Then he, too, slept.

Much time had passed since anyone had come to induce prophecies, to wait as he hunched before the altar, sleep-watching, tranced. Now, lying beside the youth, he could feel a vision at the edge of his mind, but it was too distant and too weak to grasp. All the youth’s resources were focused within; none were left for resonances. After exhausting himself struggling toward the vision in sleep, the keeper only dreamed. He awoke with memories of close, beckoning stars and high thin air, and a twisting sense of loss. He had dreamed of flying with his mate, so high that below them the earth curved away, yellow and brown and white-wisped with clouds. The sky was purple and gold in the daytime, shading to pale blue on the horizons, black and silver at night. He had loved his mate, but she was dead, and he had loved the night, but it was beyond his reach.

The keeper lay still, unwilling to move and renew his pain. But he must; his own warmth had helped a little, but the youth’s body needed food to maintain itself.

The keeper’s supplies were not well suited to providing sufficient energy. No one brought meat anymore, and he could not hunt. He was crippled, fit only to serve an abandoned god. He lifted his wing, folded it silently, and rose, to prepare seed paste and broth. He moved slowly, masking pain with caution, and the appearance of grace. Before, when people had come, his manner toward them had been equally graceful, and the children had lost their reticence after only a little while. The adults preferred to pretend apprehension and fear, for they came to the temple to keep their excitement high, to combat impatience, as they would glide over a live volcano or chase a whirlwind. Sometimes the fear could be real. If they stayed long enough, he might tell them their deaths with enigmatic visions they would not recognize until they were imminent. That was the way of seers. But the people were gone; they did not need him anymore. They had not really needed him for a long time, and perhaps they had never needed him at all.

The keeper carried the broth outside and held the shallow bowl to the youth’s lips. The youth, half-awake, eyes half-open, seemed not to notice the vegetable taste. The keeper felt the thin tight muscles and smooth skin against his supporting hand, but at the same time saw the ugly eyes again. They were like the soft jellied plants or creatures that grew in the dark, and died in the sunlight. He envied the youth’s wings, but pitied the eyes. His patient could never fly much higher than the clouds without going blind.

The youth muttered incomprehensibly and flailed at the keeper’s hand so the nearly empty bowl clattered across the Stone paving. The keeper sat back on his heels, but the youth was asleep again. After a little while, the keeper lay down on the pallet again and opened his good wing. He slid his hand across the youth’s chest, slowly, gently, following sharp lines of ribs, soft skin. The youth shifted. Suddenly guilty, the keeper clenched his touching-fingers into a fist, and lay rigid.

*

Among the auroras, one day was indistinguishable from the next. The curtains of light screened out the sun and brightened the darkness. Without darkness or light as a rough guide, the keeper had no idea how long the youth slept. He only knew that his time became more difficult. He could not avoid touching the youth, who needed to be fed and kept warm and clean, and whose wing’s tendons and muscles would contract without massage. He worked hard over the youth, trying to ignore his feelings, trying to control them.

Yet, who would know if he drew his hands along the thin body, half-extended the short silver talons, drew narrow lines of love against the skin? He could embrace the sleeper, extending both his wings, and no one would pull away at the rough contact of tattered webbing. Children fondled and explored each other’s androgynous genitals— why should he restrain himself? Whispered words might influence a decision yet to be made, words and the persuasion of experienced hands, even through sleep. And if the youth awakened, what right could anyone so ugly have to object? Who else but a cripple would take such a mate? Who was left to care?

He opened his eyes against his fantasies, and felt ashamed. The auroras— his pride, his prison— throbbed just beyond the low stone wall.

When he felt most cynical and most alone, he sometimes calmed himself with assurances that he was the most worthy of his people, strong enough (for was he not alive?) to afford kindness and even mercy. Yet of the few crimes his people recognized, the action he contemplated now was the worst.

He had been lonely for a long time. He had understood his solitude, but never accepted it. He was a proud thing, despite his wounds. He might have been bitter and cruel, or vain and futile, but he had even been too proud for that, too proud to allow despair to change him even when there was no one left to see. Now he began to fear that his strength and pride were near exhausted. Attracted, despite the ugliness of the pastel eyes, the keeper could feel himself falling in love. He forced himself to begin thinking of the youth in the masculine. When the youth… when he awoke, that could be even more influencing than treating him as sexed while he was asleep, but his awakening would force the keeper away from his fantasies.

And perhaps the youth would approach him, in the way that was right and proper, and then the fantasies would no longer be needed.

*

He knew the bones had knit, well or badly, when the youth’s temperature sank toward normal even while he covered him. He folded his wing and rolled away, unwilling to be so near when the youth awoke. He got up, slowly, and limped into the temple.

Later, finishing his duties before the ancient altar, he heard a stirring outside.

The youth, awake, was pulling at the splint. The keeper squatted down beside him and pushed his hand away.

“I’m healed, aren’t I? Or I wouldn’t have woken up.”

The keeper, in his fantasies, had forgotten or discounted the youth’s hostility; he was taken aback by it now. “I hope that thou art healed,” he said evenly. He removed the splint and gently stretched the wing. The web was soft, and cool. It was almost as hard to take his hands away, even though the youth was awake. The line of the bone was clean, sharp under skin, light. The bone was unscarred, still hollow. “Thou must move it several days before requiring it to bear thy weight.”

The youth touched the break with his other hand, stood, and opened his wings to their wide full span, reaching. He smiled, but the keeper could detect a slight sag in his wing, a weakening of unused muscles, a contraction of tendons. “I think thou wilt fly again,” he said, and it was the truth.

The youth suddenly dropped his wings, staggering, smile gone, weakened by his mild exertion so soon after awakening. All his bones protruded; his body had half-starved itself, and would need time to recover. The keeper reached up, steadied him, but the youth winced when the flap of wing that did not fold brushed against him. The keeper glanced up; after meeting his gaze, the youth looked away.

“We should, perhaps, be tolerant of each other’s weaknesses,” the keeper said, cruelly, hurt.

“Why? Nothing forced you to help me. I don’t owe you anything.”

The keeper levered himself to his feet, walked a few steps, stopped. “No,” he said. “I could have let thee heal with thy bones twisted.” He heard the sweep of wings opening slowly, wing tips brushing the ground.

“I would have died,” the youth said, as if he had committed some crime by living.

“So they thought of me,” the keeper said, facing him, “when they left me on the hunting plain for the scavengers.”

The youth said nothing for a time. The keeper wondered how he had survived infancy: someone must have cared a great deal, or no one had cared at all. He must have been fiercely protected or virtually ignored until his sentience awoke and he was too old to expose. Letting him die would have been kinder than leaving him to live as an outcast.

“And they left you here. Why do you help, instead of hating?”

“Perhaps I’m weak, and cannot stand the sight of pain.” The youth glanced up, purposely looking straight at the keeper’s eyes, holding his own gaze steady. His expression was quizzical. They both knew the keeper would never have lived if he had been weak. It was the youth who looked away first, perhaps from a habit of hiding his eyes so people would tolerate him.

The youth opened his wing, one long finger at a time. The webbing was so smooth, so glossy, that the auroras reflected off it, scarlet and yellow, like flames. “It hurts,” he said.

“Still, thou must move it. It may help if I aid thee in stretching it.” He opened his own broken wing a little, showing the bones pulled out of shape by shortened tendons. “I knew what should have been done while I slept.”

The youth looked at the wing for a long moment, fascinated, horrified. “Please fold it.”

The keeper pulled his fingers against the back of his arm, bending his elbow so they would fit. The torn flap hung loose.

“I’m sorry.”

“Never mind.”

*

Their conversations were crystalline. The keeper would have preferred to cease touching the youth completely, but he needed to help with the wing, and he refused to allow himself to takeout his disappointment on a person. He had hoped his own deformities might cease to matter; that they did not was hardly the youth’s fault. The revulsion in him was perhaps less than in others, and perhaps growing weaker, but still present, undeniable, unavoidable.

The keeper began to believe that he himself might as well have died. He had been strong enough to break his fall, strong enough to crawl under a thorn bush away from scavengers, strong enough to sleep eleven days and live. He remembered waking up, peering out through barbed twisting branches at the people hunched watching him and listening to his prophetic mutterings. One held laths and another funeral veils, waiting to brace his wings open and launch him if he died. Even then, with his skin stretched taut over his starved bones, he had been strong enough to crawl toward them, to make a purposeful move to tell them that he would live, that they could rightly help him and take him as their seer. But he was not strong enough for this loneliness and desertion.

*

A shrill squeal roused him from a doze, leaving him half-awake, confused, exhausted. He heard another sound, a cry abruptly cut off. He folded his wings and moved into the courtyard.

He found the youth sitting against the wall of the temple, sucking the neck vein of a rabbit-deer so freshly dead that one hind foot still trembled in a muscle spasm. “Where didst thou get that? Animals never come past the auroras.”

The youth began, delicately, to pull the small animal apart at the major joints. “Maybe it thought you’d tell it its future.” He extended his silver claws and began to shred the meat from a narrow bone.

“I do not mock thee.”

The youth worried the carcass with his hands for a time. He looked up, and the auroras caught his eyes and brightened them horribly. “Didn’t you hate them when you realized they were going to leave you behind? Didn’t you want to slash them and tear them and demand what right they had to pretend you didn’t matter?”

After a moment, the keeper said, “I grieved.”

He had walked into the temple and stood near the back wall, before the stone figure that was crumbling with age and neglect. The keeper was the first in centuries to offer it anything even resembling belief. Slowly, painfully, he had relaxed his wing-fingers, until the scarred membranes lay half-folded around him. “Why did they help me?” he had cried. “If they did not need an oracle, why did they help me, and if they needed one, why did they leave me behind?” But the old god had made no answer, for if the keeper’s belief were real, it had not been enough to call the god back.

“I grieved,” the keeper said again.

He expected disdain, but the youth looked down and stroked the stained pelt of the rabbit-deer. “Our world is grieving, too,” he said softly. “They stole the spirit out of it, and sucked all the life away. All our people ever did was try to escape it, yet it mourns.”

The keeper touched his shoulder, gently. “It must seem lonely to thee. But in time— ”

The youth made a sound of disgust. “There isn’t any time. I hope… I hope they have to turn back. I hope they have to come running back to this world they loathed, because they’ll find it dead and wasted and unfit to sustain them, and they’ll die.”

“There will be no turning back in this generation. I dreamed the deaths of some of those who left, and there will be no disaster. The ships will continue, at least through our lifetimes.”

The youth stood up, walked a few steps, taut-muscled, angry, spread his wings, allowed the tips to dust the stones. His claws were still bloody. “You’d have everyone substitute your fantasies for their own.”

“They are all I have to offer, anymore.”

“But they weren’t enough for our people, and all you do is grieve.” The youth turned and folded his wings against his arms with that graceful smooth snap. “Something will happen, someday, and they’ll have to return. They’ll spread the sails and catch the rays of some distant sun, and they’ll feel grateful that they have some place to come home to. But they never bothered to look at it, they only cared about ways to leave it. So now it’s dying, and when they crawl back there won’t be anything left.”

The keeper realized what the youth was saying. “Thou must have had delusions in thy sorrow and pain,” he said. “A world cannot die.”

The youth glared at him, and his gaze did not shift, as if in anger he could forget his shame. “This world is dying. If you would sleep and attune yourself to it, the way you did for people, you’d see it. Or come outside your prison and look around.”

“I never leave the temple grounds.”

The youth closed his eyes, resigned. “Then sit and wait, until the auroras die too.” He left the keeper alone, and walked away with the tips of his beautiful wings trailing in the dust.

The keeper wanted to dismiss the youth as unbalanced, but nothing was that easy. It was true that their people had cared more for the sky and the nearby stars than for the world they rested on. It was only natural that this be so for a people who could soar so high that the ground curved away below them, admitting without defense its smallness and insignificance. Only natural for a people whose children make toy gliders with lifting wings by instinct. The stars were so close, they hung in the sky calling, hypnotic. The keeper and his mate, in their ion boat, sailing past the bay between the world and its moon, had navigated by sight and feel alone. And he had seen the ion ships, when the idea was still a fancy, in visions. Before the first was even finished, he had seen the thousand of them, carrying all the people, spread their huge sails and catch the sun’s rays and begin to move, very, very slowly, toward a star the passengers already knew had planets they could touch their feet to and leave again.

His people had known much of stars. But he could not say that the world was not dying.

After a little while, he stood up slowly and went to find the youth. “What dost thou mean to do?”

He reached down and picked up a small stone. “What is there to do? I almost wish you had let me die.” He hefted the pebble, as if he would throw it into the auroras. The keeper flinched, and saw him hesitate. He thought he would still throw it, but the youth lowered his hand and tossed the pebble back to the ground. “If I knew what to do, I’d do nothing.”

“There are still people— ”

“You and I may be the last, for all I know. Maybe all the others have killed themselves. I’d have it lonely to deny the rest a sanctuary.”

“Must we both be lonely?”

The youth turned his back, hunched his shoulders. The keeper thought he was offended by the implication. “I meant no impropriety— ”

“Traditions are as dead as the god in your temple.” He shrugged his wings. “You would have me stay.”

“I would ask nothing.”

“You’d hope.”

“One cannot control one’s dreams.”

“I’ll stay for a while.”

*

Later the keeper slept, alone in the close and oppressive darkness of the temple. He expected a vision of the youth, alone in some future that did not include the keeper. He had never seen any part of his own destiny in his prophecies; that made him strangely afraid that no one could ever stay with him. He did not believe he could influence the future. Perhaps the future must influence him.

He saw his world, for the first time since he had come to the temple, and he saw that the youth had been right. Skeletons of rabbit-deer lay scattered on the hunting plain, and the vines that climbed the rock pinnacles of nests shriveled and died. Even the thorn bushes, which could grow where nothing else lived, dried, crumbled, burned. The death of their world would be slow, but the places he saw, deserted, were dying. He could not truly tell, but he thought he would die first. His visions had never frightened him before; now he came out of sleep screaming.

Soft wings rustled beside him. “Did you dream?”

“I did as thou asked,” the keeper whispered, lying very still.

“And I was right.”

“Yes.”

“Is anyone else alive?” In the darkness, the young voice was fervent.

“I saw no one,” the keeper said.

“Ah,” the youth said, satisfied.

“I am not omniscient.”

“You’d see what’s important.”

“Other people were left.”

“They had nothing to keep them alive. Not your strength, nor my hate.”

“Thou hast made us too unique.”

“I hope not,” the youth said. “I think your vision was right, and your hopes are wrong.”

The keeper sat up, unwilling to sleep again. “I will never know.”

“It would hurt you to know that truth.” The tone held compassion that sounded strange after the exultation in death, but the keeper was grateful for it. He watched the shadow of the youth move across the stone floor to the entrance and stand in the wavering light. He rose and followed him, stopping close behind him in his shadow. The youth began to talk, slowly, tentatively. “When the last of them left, I followed them as far as I could, until the sun was so bright I thought I’d go blind… I couldn’t see them, but I don’t think any of them looked back.”

“They did not,” the keeper said, and the other did not question his knowledge. “It isn’t the character of our people to look back. I think they’ll never need to.”

“And if they don’t— my determination is foolish?”

The keeper spoke very cautiously, afraid to go too far. “Perhaps. Or futile. Thou wouldst deny thyself rather than them.”

“I will… think about that.”

Behind him, the keeper nodded to himself. “Wouldst thou eat?”

“All right.”

*

The youth had not noticed the food while he was sleeping, but awake he had found it less than pleasing. “I’ll go out and hunt as soon as I can fly again,” he said.

“I’m used to this. The auroras make a long path for thee to walk.”

“It’s better than staying here.”

“I’m used to that, too. But hunt, if that is thy wish.”

“Soon?”

“Yes. It is almost ready.”

“It’s still stiff.”

“Thou must stop favoring it.” He sipped at his broth. “I will massage it again.”

The touching was very much like the motions of love. The keeper could not remember touching any person before this youth since the night his mate had died. They had been flying. She was aged, but still beautiful, and she had decided to die.

It was the way of things. He had chosen her, and made his decision by his bond to her, when she was adult and he, not yet “he,” was youth. Half a lifetime before, she, not yet “she,” had courted and had bonded with another male, and in time he had aged and died.

Now, she did not wish to grow helpless. She would do what their people had always done, and forever would do, when it was time to die. And he would accept her decision, and carry her veils, as the mates of aging ones always had, and always would. Their children, one youth, one newly adult, bade her farewell. There would have been three, but their second was born with a twisted wing, so they had exposed it.

They flew together for a long time. No clouds obstructed their view of the hunting plain. Had they been hungry they could have feasted on warm meat and fresh blood, but this last night together they did not hunt. They drank thick salty wine and soared higher, giddy. She brushed her wingtip against his cheek, dropped back and down and caressed his chest and belly. She laughed, and made lewd and joyous remarks about whoever would become the next member of their long marriage line. She wished him happiness, and pulled a silver veil from his ankle band. He garlanded her with others. Defying her infirmities, she flew higher. He followed her, feeling the air grow thinner, dangerous, and suddenly cried out in ecstasy.

He had never flown so high. He had heard about this from others, but no one could ever have seen, before, the colors behind his eyes. In reflex, his pupils contracted to pinpoints. He strained upward. His mate cried out to him, “Do you see?” and he called, “I see!” and she said, very softly, it seemed, “Be careful, my love, for I am blind.” He looked toward her voice. Very dimly he could see her, tiny, higher than she had ever gone before, higher than he had ever seen anyone fly, wide-eyed against the radiation, the veils seeming only to drift beside her. He saw her wings begin to stiffen, and he knew that she was dead.

As another shower of subatomic particles exploded themselves in his eyes, brighter than any spark through the shielding of their ion boat, he realized he had flown past his wings’ ability to carry him, and he felt himself begin to fall.

When his struggle against the vertical wind ripped his wing, perhaps he should have allowed himself to die. Fighting, he slowed his fall, but in the end the earth had grasped and shattered him.

“Keeper—”

The word, and a touch on his hand, brought him back. He glanced up, startled. The youth’s face showed apprehension, irresolution. He drew in his wing-fingers, folding the smooth membrane. “It’s not stiff anymore.”

“I was remembering,” the keeper said. “Thy words gave me hope, and I… I am sorry— ”

“It doesn’t matter.” He let his touching fingers and half-exposed talons linger on the keeper’s hand. “Nothing should be forced to die twice,” he said. “If we continued our people, the world would kill our children, or the children would kill the world again.”

“Thou art not fair,” the keeper said. “Some expression of my memory has frightened thee, but I asked for nothing.”

“It’s true that I’m frightened.” He touched the keeper’s throat, slid his hand to his shoulder, down his arm, back along the wing-fingers, and this time he didn’t wince. “Of your kindness and your strength.”

“I do not understand thee.”

“I’d change for you, I think.”

The keeper sat back, reluctantly, away from the youth’s hands. “Then thou wilt leave?”

“I must.”

The auroras led the youth on a long, twisting, directionless path to the hills. Outside, the thorn bushes should have been flowering. The youth stood at the edge of the temple’s guardians and looked out over the land, at the brown and black thickets of twisted, dying branches. The wind blew hot against his body, and nothing moved as far as he could see. He felt death, and with it an ugly triumph that had ceased to give him pleasure. He glanced back, and almost turned, but reached high instead and snapped open his wings. The wind caught the webbing. He could feel the place where his bones had broken, and hesitated.

Disgusted by his fear, he launched himself from the top of the hill, slipped sideways in a current, angled up, and flew.

*

After the youth left, time passed strangely; it might have been a long or a short time later that the old breaks in the keeper’s bones began to ache constantly. He had begun to age, and once aging started in his people, it progressed rapidly. His sharp sight began to dim. Only cowards and weaklings lived long enough to go blind naturally. He knew he should allow himself to live no longer, but still he did nothing. He did not wish to die on the earth, and he dreamed of dying properly, radiation-blind, flying.

He felt gentle hands that roused him from a doze, or perhaps it was all a dream.

“Keeper, I am back.”

He raised his head and looked calmly into a face made ugly by its eyes. “It is thou.”

“No more,” he said. “Not ‘thou’ for a long time.”

The keeper seemed not to hear. “Hast thou seen everything die, then?”

The other supported him, and he smelled fresh blood. “No. You were right. There are others. Around them, the earth lives.” He held the warm body of a small animal to the keeper’s lips. “Drink it,” he said. “Last time I was selfish.”

Blood ran hot in the keeper’s throat; he had almost forgotten the hunt. “Why art thou here?”

“For the same reason I left.”

“How long has it been?”

“A year.”

“Ah.” Dark eyelids closed over darker eyes, tired. “It seemed longer.”

“It seemed very short, to me.”

The keeper did not speak or move for a long time. “I am dying. Will you carry my veils?”

He saw that the old one, half-dreaming, thought he could still fly. “I will. The stars will touch you.” He gently lowered him. “I’ll build you a glider, keeper,” he whispered. He lay down beside him to wait, and opened his wing across him. He hoped the keeper could still feel it, and know the presence of one who loved him.

CONSTRUCTION SHACK

Clifford D. Simak

In that same year when men first walked on Mars the probe was launched from the moon for Pluto. Five years later the first pictures were transmitted as the orbiting probe trained its cameras on the planet’s surface. The transmission quality was poor; but even so, certain features of the photographs were productive of great anguish as old theories fell to shards and were replaced by puzzlement, questions with no hint of answers. The pictures seemed to say that the planet had a smooth, almost polished surface, without a single geographic feature to break the smoothness of it. Except that at certain places, equidistant from one another along the equator, were tiny dots that would have been taken for transmission noise if they had not appeared consistently. Too, the dots still persisted when some of the noise was eliminated. So it seemed they must be small geographic features or shadows cast by geographic features, although at Pluto’s distance from the sun shadows would be suspect. The other data did nothing to lessen the anguish. The planet was smaller than supposed, less than a thousand miles in diameter, and its density worked out to 3.5 grams per cubic centimeter rather than the unrealistic figure of 60 grams, previously supposed.

This meant several things. It meant that somewhere out there, perhaps something more than seven billion miles from the sun, a tenth planet of the solar system swung in orbit, for no planet the size and mass of Pluto could explain the eccentricities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. The calculation of Pluto’s mass, now proved inaccurate, had been based on the measurement of those eccentricities and it must be admitted now that something else must account for them.

Beyond that, Pluto was most strange—a smooth planet, featureless except for the evenly spaced dots. The smoothness certainly could not be explained by a nonturbulent atmosphere, for surely Pluto had to be too small and cold to hold an atmosphere. A surface of ice, men wondered, the frozen remnants of a one-time, momentary atmosphere? But for a number of reasons that didn’t seem right, either. Metal, perhaps; but if the planet were of solid metal the density should be far greater.

The men on Earth consoled themselves. In five more years the probe would come back to Earth, carrying with it the films that it had taken and from them, the actual films and not the low-quality transmissions, perhaps much that was hazy now might become understandable. The probe swung in its measured orbits and sent back more pictures, although they were little help, for the quality still was poor. Then it fired the automatic sequence that would head it back to Earth, and its beeping signals from far out in space said it was headed home on a true and steady course.

Something happened. The beeping stopped and there was a silence. Moon Base waited. It might start up again. The silence might indicate only a momentary malfunction and the signals might start again. But they never did. Somewhere, some three billion miles from the sun, some mishap had befallen the homing probe. It was never heard again—it was lost forever.

There was no sense in sending out another probe until a day when technical advances could assure better pictures. The technical advances would have to be significant—small refinements would do little good.

The second and third manned expeditions went to Mars and came home again, bringing back, among many other things, evidence that primitive forms of life existed there, which settled once for all the old, dark suspicion that life might be an aberration to be found only on the Earth. For with life on two planets in the same solar system there could no longer be any doubt that life was a common factor in the universe. The fourth expedition went out, landed, and did not come back again and now there was on Mars a piece of ground that was forever Earth. The fifth expedition was sent out even while the Earth still paid tribute to those four men who had died so far from home.

Now that life had been found on another world, now that it was apparent that another planet at one time had held seas and rivers and an atmosphere that had been an approximation of Earth’s own atmosphere, now that we knew we no longer were alone in the universe, the public interest and support of space travel revived. Scientists, remembering (never having, in fact, forgotten, for it had gnawed steadily at their minds) the puzzlement of the Pluto probe, began to plan a manned Pluto expedition, as there was still no sense in sending an instrumented probe.

When the day came to lift from the Moon Base, I was a member of the expedition. I went along as a geologist —the last thing a Pluto expedition needed.

There were three of us and any psychologist will tell you that three is a number that is most unfortunate. Two gang up on one or ignore one and there is always competition to be one of the gang of two. No one wants to stand alone with the other two against him. But it didn’t work that way with us. We got along all right, although there were times when it was rough going. The five years that the probe took to arrive at Pluto were cut by more than half, not only because of improved rocket capability, but because a manned craft could pile on velocity that couldn’t be programmed—or at least safely programmed—into a probe. But a bit more than two years is a long time to be cooped up in a tin can rocketing along in emptiness. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if you had some sense of speed, of really getting somewhere—but you haven’t. You just hang there in space.

The three of us? Well, I am Robert Hunt and the other two were Orson Gates, a chemist, and Tyler Hampton, an engineer.

As I say, we got along fine. We played chess tournaments—yeah, three men in a tournament and it was all right because none of us knew chess. If we had been any good I suppose we would have been at one another’s throats. We dreamed up dirty ditties and were so pleased with our accomplishments that we’d spend hours singing them and none of us could sing. We did a lot of other futile things—by now you should be getting the idea. There were some rather serious scientific experiments and observations we were supposed to make, but all of us figured that our first and biggest job was to manage to stay sane.

When we neared Pluto we dropped the fooling around and spent much time peering through the scope, arguing and speculating about what we saw. Not that there was much to see. The planet resembled nothing quite as much as a billiard ball. It was smooth. There were no mountains, no valleys, no craters—nothing marred the smoothness of the surface. The dots were there, of course. We could make out seven groups of them, all positioned along the equatorial belt. And in close-up they were not simply dots. They were structures of some kind.

We landed finally, near a group of them. The landing was a little harder than we had figured it would be. The planetary surface was hard—there was no give to it. But we stayed right-side up and we didn’t break a thing.

People at times ask me to describe Pluto and it’s a hard thing to put into words. You can say that it is smooth and that it’s dark—it’s dark even in broad daylight. The sun, at that distance, is not much more than a slightly brighter star. You don’t have daylight on Pluto— you have starlight and it doesn’t make much difference whether you’re facing the sun or not. The planet is airless, of course, and waterless and cold. But cold, as far as human sensation is concerned, is a relative thing. Once the temperature gets down to a hundred Kelvin it doesn’t much matter how much colder it becomes. Especially when you’re wearing life support. Without a suit containing life support you’d last only a few seconds, if that long, on a place like Pluto. I’ve never figured out which would kill you first—cold or internal pressure. Would you freeze—or explode before you froze?

So Pluto is dark, airless, cold, and smooth. Those are the externals only. You stand there and look at the sun and realize how far away you are. You know you are standing at the edge of the solar system, that just out there, a little way beyond, you’d be clear outside the system. Which doesn’t really have to be true, of course. You know about the tenth planet. Even if it’s theory, it’s supposed to be out there. You know about the millions of circling comets that technically are a part of the solar system, although they’re so far out no one ever thinks of them. YOU could say to yourself this really is not the edge—the hypothetical tenth planet and the comets still are out there. But this is intellectualization; you’re telling yourself something that your mind says may be true, but your gut denies. For hundreds of years Pluto has been the last outpost and this, by God, is Pluto and you’re farther away from home than man has ever been before and you feel it. You don’t belong to anything anymore. You’re in the back alley, and the bright and happy streets are so far away that you know you’ll never find them.

It isn’t homesickness that you feel. It’s more like never having had a home. Of never having belonged anywhere. You get over it, of course—or come to live with it. So we came down out of the ship after we had landed and stood upon the surface. The first thing that struck us —other than the sense of lostness that at once grabbed all of us—was that the horizon was too near, much nearer than on the moon. We felt at once that we stood on a small world. We noticed that horizon’s nearness even before we noticed the buildings that the probe had photographed as dots and that we had dropped down to investigate. Perhaps buildings is not the right word—structures probably would be better. Buildings are enclosures and these were not enclosures. They were domes someone had set out to build and hadn’t had time to finish. The basic underlying framework had been erected and then the work had stopped. Riblike arcs curved up from the surface and met overhead. Struts and braces held the frames solid, but that was as far as the construction had gone. There were three of them, one larger than the other two. The frames were not quite as simple as I may have made them seem. Tied into the ribs and struts and braces were a number of other structural units that seemed to have no purpose and made no sense at all. We tried to make sense out of them and out of the scooped-out hollows that had been gouged out of the planetary surface within the confines of each construct— they had no floors and seemed fastened to the surface of the planet. The hollows were circular, some six feet across and three feet deep, and to me they looked like nothing quite as much as indentations made in a container of ice cream by a scoop.

About this time Tyler began to have some thoughts about the surface. Tyler is an engineer and should have had his thoughts immediately—and so should the rest of us—but the first hour or so outside the ship had been considerably confusing. We had worn our suits in training, of course, and had done some walking around in them, but Pluto seemed to have even less gravity than had been calculated and we had had to get used to it before we could be reasonably comfortable. Nor had anything else been exactly as we had anticipated.

“This surface,” Tyler said to me. “There is something wrong with it.”

“We knew it was smooth,” said Orson. “The pictures showed that. Coming in, we could see it for ourselves.”

“This smooth?” Tyler asked. “This even?” He turned to me. “It isn’t geologically possible. Would you say it is?”

“I would think not,” I said. “If there had been any upheaval at all this floor would be rugged. There can’t have been any erosion—anything to level it down. Micrometeorite impacts, maybe, but not too many of them. We’re too far out for meteorites of any size. And while micro-meteorites might pit the surface there would be no leveling process.”

Tyler let himself down on his knees rather awkwardly. He brushed a hand across the surface. The seeing was not too good, but you could see that there was dust, a thin layer of dust, a powdering.

“Shine a light down here,” said Tyler.

Orson aimed his light at the spot. Some of the gray dust still clung where Tyler had wiped his hand, but there were streaks where the darker surface showed through.

“Space dust,” said Tyler.

Orson said, “There should be damn little of it.”

“True,” said Tyler. “But over four billion years or more, it would accumulate. It couldn’t be erosion dust, could it?”

“Nothing to cause erosion,” I said. “This must be as close to a dead planet as you ever get. Not enough gravity to hold any of the gases—if there ever were gases. At one time there must have been, but they’ve all gone—they went early. No atmosphere, no water. I doubt there ever was any accumulation. A molecule wouldn’t hang around for long.”

“But space dust would?”

“Maybe. Some sort of electrostatic attraction, maybe.”

Tyler scrubbed the little patch of surface again with his gloved hand, removing more of the dust, with more of the darker surface showing through.

“Have we got a drill?” he asked. “A specimen drill.”

“I have one in my kit,” said Orson. He took it out and handed it to Tyler. Tyler positioned the bit against the surface, pressed the button. In the light of the torch you could see the bit spinning. Tyler put more weight on the drill.

“It’s harder than a bitch,” he said.

The bit began to bite. A small pile of fragments built up around the hole. The surface was hard, no doubt of that. The bit didn’t go too deep and the pile of fragments was small.

Tyler gave up. He lifted out the bit and snubbed off the motor.

“Enough for analysis?” he asked.

“Should be,” said Orson. He took the bit from Tyler and handed him a small specimen bag. Tyler laid the open mouth of the bag on the surface and brushed the fragments into it.

“Now we’ll know,” he said. “Now we will know something.”

A couple of hours later, back in the ship, we knew.

“I have it,” Orson said, “but I don’t believe it.”

“Metal?” asked Tyler.

“Sure, metal. But not the kind you have in mind. It’s steel.”

“Steel?” I said, horrified. “It can’t be. Steel’s no natural metal. It’s manufactured.”

“Iron,” said Orson. “Nickel. Molybdenum, vanadium, chromium. That works out to steel. I don’t know as much about steel as I should. But it’s steel—a good steel. Corrosion resistant, tough, strong.”

“Maybe just the platform for the structures,” I said. “Maybe a pad of steel to support them. We took the specimen close to one of them.”

“Let’s find out,” said Tyler.

We opened up the garage and ran down the ramp and got out the buggy. Before we left we turned off the television camera. By this time Moon Base would have seen all they needed to see and if they wanted more they could ask for it. We had given them a report on everything we had found—all except the steel surface and the three of us agreed that until we knew more about that we would not say anything. It would be a while in any case until we got an answer from them. The time lag to Earth was about sixty hours each way.

We went out ten miles and took a boring sample and came back, following the thin tracks the buggy made in the dust, taking samples every mile. We got the answer that I think all of us expected we would get, but couldn’t bring ourselves to talk about. The samples all were steel.

It didn’t seem possible, of course, and it took us a while to digest the fact, but finally we admitted that on the basis of best evidence Pluto was no planet, but a fabricated metal ball, small-planet size. But godawful big for anyone to build.

Anyone?

That was the question that now haunted us. Who had built it? Perhaps more important—why had they built it? For some purpose, surely, but why, once that purpose had been fulfilled (if, in fact, it had been fulfilled) had Pluto been left out here at the solar system’s rim?

“No one from the system,” Tyler said. “There’s no one but us. Mars has life, of course, but primitive life. It got a start there and hung on and that was all. Venus is too hot. Mercury is too close to the sun. The big gas planets? Maybe, but not the kind of life that would build a thing like this. If had to be something from outside.”

“How about the fifth planet?” suggested Orson.

“There probably never was a fifth planet,” I said. “The material for it may have been there, but the planet never formed. By all the rules of celestial mechanics there should have been a planet between Mars and Jupiter, but something went haywire.”

“The tenth planet, then,” said Orson.

“No one is really positive there is a tenth,” said Tyler.

“Yeah, you’re right,” said Orson. “Even if there were it would be a poor bet for life, let alone intelligence.”

“So that leaves us with outsiders,” said Tyler.

“And a long time ago,” said Orson.

“Why do you say that?”

“The dust. There isn’t much dust in the universe.”

“And no one knows what it is. There is the dirty ice theory.”

“I see what you’re getting at. But it needn’t be ice. Nor graphite nor any of the other things that have been—”

“You mean it’s that stuff out there.”

“It could be. What do you think, Robert?”

“I can’t be sure,” I said. “The only thing I know is that it couldn’t be erosive.”

Before we went to sleep we tried to fix up a report to beam back to Moon Base, but anything we put together sounded too silly and unbelievable. So we gave up. We’d have to tell them some time, but we could wait.

When we awoke we had a bite to eat, then got into our suits and went out to look over the structures. They still didn’t make much sense, especially all the crazy contraptions that were fastened on the ribs and struts and braces. Nor did the scooped-out hollows.

“If they were only up on legs,” said Orson, “they could be used as chairs.”

“But not very comfortable,” said Tyler.

“If you tilted them a bit,” said Orson. But that didn’t figure either. They would still be uncomfortable. I wondered why he thought of them as chairs. They didn’t look like any chairs to me..

We pottered around a lot, not getting anywhere. We looked the structures over inch by inch, wondering all the while if there was something we had missed. But there didn’t seem to be.

Now comes the funny part of it. I don’t know why we did it—out of sheer desperation, maybe. But failing to find any clues, we got down on our hands and knees, dusting at the surface with our hands. What we hoped to find, I don’t know. It was slow going and it was a dirty business, with the dust tending to stick to us.

“If we’d only brought some brooms along,” said Orson.

But we had no brooms. Who in his right mind would have thought we would want to sweep a planet?

So there we were. We had what appeared to be a manufactured planet and we had some stupid structures for which we could deduce not a single reason. We had come a long ways and we had been expected to make some tremendous discovery once we landed. We had made a discovery, all right, but it didn’t mean a thing.

We finally gave up with the sweeping business and stood there, scuffing our feet and wondering what to do next when Tyler suddenly let out a yell and pointed at a place on the surface where his boots had kicked away the dust.

We all bent to look at what he had found. We saw three holes in the surface, each an inch or so across and some three inches deep, placed in a triangle and close together. Tyler got down on his hands and knees and shone his light down into the holes, each one of them in turn.

Finally he stood up. “I don’t know,” he said. “They could maybe be a lock of some sort. Like a combination. There are little notches on the sides, down at the bottom of them. If you moved those notches just right something might happen.”

“Might blow ourselves up, maybe,” said Orson. “Do it wrong and bang!”

“I don’t think so,” said Tyler. “I don’t think it’s anything like that. I don’t say it’s a lock, either. But I don’t think it’s a bomb. Why should they booby-trap a thing like this?”

“You can’t tell what they might have done,” I said. “We don’t know what kind of things they were or why they were here.”

Tyler didn’t answer. He got down again and began carefully dusting the surface, shining his light on it while he dusted. We didn’t have anything else to do, so helped him.

It was Orson who found it this time—a hairline crack you had to hold your face down close to the surface to see. Having found it, we did some more dusting and worried it out. The hairline described a circle and the three holes were set inside and to one edge of it. The circle was three feet or so in diameter.

“Either of you guys good at picking locks?” asked Tyler.

Neither of us were.

“It’s got to be a hatch of some sort,” Orson said. “This metal ball we’re standing on has to be a hollow ball. If it weren’t its mass would be greater than it is.”

“And no one,” I said, “would be insane enough to build a solid ball. It would take too much metal and too much energy to move.”

“You’re sure that it was moved?” asked Orson.

“It had to be,” I told him. “It wasn’t built in this system. No one here could have built it.”

Tyler had pulled a screwdriver out of his tool kit and was poking into the hole with it.

“Wait a minute,” said Orson. “I just thought of something.”

He nudged Tyler to one side, reached down, and inserted three fingers into the holes and pulled. The circular section rose smoothly on its hinges.

Wedged into the area beneath the door were objects that looked like the rolls of paper you buy to wrap up Christmas presents. Bigger than rolls of paper, though. Six inches or so across.

I got hold of one of them and that first one was not easy to grip, for they were packed in tightly. But I managed with much puffing and grunting to pull it out. It was heavy and a good four feet in length.

Once we got one out, the other rolls were easier to lift. We pulled out three more and headed for the ship.

But before we left I held the remaining rolls over to one side, to keep them from tilting, while Orson shone his light down into the hole. We had half expected to find a screen or something under the rolls, with the hole extending on down into a cavity that might have been used as living quarters or a workroom. But the hole ended in machined metal. We could see the grooves left by the drill or die that had bored the hole. That hole had just one purpose, to store the rolls we had found inside it.

Back in the ship we had to wait a while for the rolls to pick up some heat before we could handle them. Even so we had to wear gloves when we began to unroll them. Now, seeing them in good light, we realized that they were made up of many sheets rolled up together. The sheets seemed to be made of some sort of extremely thin metal or tough plastic. They were stiff from the cold and we spread them out on our lone table and weighed them down to hold them flat.

On the first sheet were diagrams of some sort, drawings, and what might have been specifications written into the diagrams and along the margins. The specifications, of course, meant nothing to us (although later some were puzzled out and mathematicians and chemists were able to figure out some of the formulas and equations).

“Blueprints,” said Tyler. “This whole business was an engineering job.”

“If that’s the case,” said Orson, “those strange things fastened to the structural frames could be mounts to hold engineering instruments.”

“Could be,” said Tyler.

“Maybe the instruments are stored in some other holes like the one where we found the blueprints,” I suggested.

“I don’t think so,” said Tyler. “They would have taken the instruments with them when they left.”

“Why didn’t they take the blueprints, too?”

“The instruments would have been worthwhile to take. They could be used on another job. But the blueprints couldn’t. And there may have been many sets of prints and spec sheets. These we have may be only one of many sets of duplicates. There would have been a set of master prints and those they might have taken with them when they left”

“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is what they could have been building out here. What kind of construction? And why here? I suppose we could think of Pluto as a massive construction shack; but why exactly here? With all the galaxy to pick from, why this particular spot?”

“You ask too many questions all at once,” Orson told me.

“Let’s look,” said Tyler. “Maybe we’ll find out.”

He peeled the first sheet off the top and let it drop to the floor. It snapped back to the rolled-up position.

The second sheet told us nothing, nor did the third or fourth. Then came the fifth sheet.

“Now, here is something,” said Tyler.

We leaned closer to look.

“It’s the solar system,” Orson said.

I counted rapidly. “Nine planets.”

“Where’s the tenth?” asked Orson. “There should be a tenth.”

“Something’s wrong,” said Tyler. “I don’t know what it is.”

I spotted it, “There’s a planet between Mars and Jupiter.”

“That means there is no Pluto shown,” said Orson.

“Of course not,” said Tyler. “Pluto never was a planet.”

“Then this means there once actually was a planet between Mars and Jupiter,” said Orson.

“Not necessarily,” Tyler told him. “It may only mean there was supposed to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“They bungled the job,” said Tyler. “They did a sloppy piece of engineering.”

“You’re insane!” I shouted at him.

“Your blind spot is showing, Robert. According to what we think, perhaps it is insane. According to the theories our physicists have worked out. There is a cloud of dust and gas and the cloud contracts to form a proto-star. Our scientists have invoked a pretty set of physical laws to calculate what happens. Physical laws that were automatic-since no one would be mad enough to postulate a gang of cosmic engineers who went about the universe building solar systems.”

“But the tenth planet,” persisted Orson. “There has to be a tenth planet. A big, massive—”

“They messed up the projected fifth planet,” Tyler said. “God knows what else they messed up. Venus, maybe. Venus shouldn’t be the kind of planet it is. It should be another Earth, perhaps a slightly warmer Earth, but not the hellhole it is. And Mars. They loused that up, too. Life started there, but it never had a chance. It hung on and that was all. And Jupiter, Jupiter is a monstrosity—”

“You think the only reason for a planet’s existence is its capability of supporting life?”

“I don’t know, of course. But it should be in the specs. Three planets that could have been life-bearing and of these only one was successful.”

“Then,” said Orson, “there could be a tenth planet. One that wasn’t even planned.”

Tyler rapped his fist against the sheet. “With a gang of clowns like this anything could happen.”

He jerked away the sheet and tossed it to the floor.

“There!” he cried. “Look here.”

We crowded in and looked.

It was a cross section, or appeared to be a cross section, of a planet.

“A central core,” said Tyler. “An atmosphere—”

“Earth?”

“Could be. Could be Mars or Venus.”

The sheet was covered with what could have been spec notations.

“It doesn’t look quite right,” I protested.

“It wouldn’t if it were Mars or Venus. And how sure are you of Earth?”

“Not sure at all,” I said.

He jerked away the sheet to reveal another one.

We puzzled over it.

“Atmospheric profile,” I guessed halfheartedly.

“These are just general specs,” said Tyler. “The details will be in some of the other rolls. We have a lot of them out there.”

I tried to envision it. A construction shack set down in a cloud of dust and gas. Engineers who may have worked for millennia to put together star and planets, to key into them certain factors that still would be at work, billions of years later.

Tyler said they had bungled and perhaps they had. But maybe not with Venus. Maybe Venus had been built to different specifications. Maybe it had been designed to be the way it was. Perhaps, a billion years from now, when humanity might well be gone from Earth, a new life and a new intelligence would rise on Venus.

Maybe not with Venus, maybe with none of the others, either. We could not pretend to know.

Tyler was still going through the sheets.

“Look here,” he was yelling. “Look here, the bunglers—”

THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY

Ursula K Le Guin

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and gray, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows’ crossing flights over the music arid the singing. All the processions wound toward the north side of the city, where on the great watermeadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mudstained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They blew out their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half-encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the race course snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland Utopians. They were not less complex than we. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children—though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairytale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however—that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.—they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and doubledecked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with whosoever, man or woman, lover or stranger, desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas—at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine soufflés to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I really don’t think many of them need to take drooz.

Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign gray beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of the tune.

He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.

As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses’ necks and soothe them, whispering, “Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope …” They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the race course are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

In a basement under one of the beautiful buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused toolroom. In the room a child is sitting. It might be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feebleminded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked, and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes—the child has no understanding of time or interval—sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the toolroom, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. “I will be good,” it says. “Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, “eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of cornmeal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.

Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, toward the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go toward is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

THE FOUR-HOUR FUGUE

Alfred Bester

Fear carries a scent with it that most humans can’t detect.

Most, but not all.

By now, of course, the Northeast Corridor was the Northeast slum, stretching from Canada to the Carolinas and as far west as Pittsburgh. It was ‘a fantastic jungle of rancid violence inhabited by a steaming, restless population with no visible means of support and no fixed residence, so vast that censustakers, birth-control supervisors and the social services had given up all hope. It was a gigantic rare-show that everyone denounced and enjoyed. Even the privileged few who could afford to live highly-protected lives in highly-expensive Oases and could live anywhere else they pleased never thought of leaving. The jungle grabbed you. There were thousands of everyday survival problems but one of the most exasperating was the shortage of fresh water. Most of the available potable water had long since been impounded by progressive industries for the sake of a better tomorrow and there was very little left to go around. Rainwater tanks on the roofs, of course. A black market, naturally. That was about all. So the jungle stank. It stank worse than the court of Queen Elizabeth, which could have bathed but didn’t believe in it. The Corridor just couldn’t bathe, wash clothes or clean house, and you could smell its noxious effluvium from ten miles out at sea. Welcome to the Fun Corridor. Sufferers near the shore would have been happy to clean up in salt water, but the Corridor beaches had been polluted by so much crude oil seepage for so many generations that they were all owned by deserving oil reclamation companies. Keep Out! No Trespassing! And armed guards. The rivers and lakes were electrically fenced; no need for guard’s, just skull and crossbones signs and if you didn’t know what they were telling you, tough.

Not to believe that everybody minded stinking as they skipped merrily over the rotting corpses in the streets, but a lot did and their only remedy was perfumery. There were dozens of competing companies producing perfumes but the leader, far and away, was the Continental Can Company, which hadn’t manufactured cans in two centuries. They’d switched to plastics and had the good fortune about a hundred stockholders meetings back to make the mistake of signing a sales contract with and delivering to some cockamamie perfume brewer an enormous quantity of glowing neon containers. The corporation went bust and CCC took it over in hopes of getting some of their money back. That take-over proved to be their salvation when the perfume explosion took place; it gave them entree to the most profitable industry of the times.

But it was neck-and-neck with the rivals until Blaise Skiaki joined CCC; then it turned into a runaway. Blaise Skiaki, Origins; French, Japanese, Black African and Irish, Education; BA, Princeton; ME, MIT; PhD. Dow Chemical, (It was Dow that had secretly tipped CCC that Skiaki was a winner and lawsuits brought by the completion were still pending before the ethics board.) Blaise Skiaki; age, thirty-one; unmarried, straight, genius.

His sense of scent was his genius, and he was privately, referred to at CCC as “The Nose.” He knew everything about perfumery; the animal products, ambergris, castor, civet, musk; the essential oils distilled from plants and flowers; the balsams extruded by tree and shrub wounds, benzoin, opopanax, Peru, Talu, storax, myrrh; the synthetics created from the combination of natural and chemical scents, the latter mostly the esters of fatty acids.

He had created for CCC their most successful sellers: “Vulva,” “Assuage,” “Oxter” (a much more attractive brand name than “Armpitto”), “Preparation F,” “Tongue War,” et cetera. He was treasured by CCC, paid a salary generous enough to enable him to live in an Oasis and, best of all, granted unlimited supplies of fresh water. No girl in the Corridor could resist the offer of taking a shower with him. But he paid a high price for these advantages. He could never use scented soaps, shaving creams, pomades or depilatories. He could never eat seasoned foods. He could drink nothing but pure water. All this, you understand; to keep The Nose pure and uncontaminated so that he could smell around in his sterile laboratory and devise new creations. He was presently composing a rather promising unguent provisionally named “Correctum,” but he’d been on it for six months without any positive results and CCC was alarmed by the delay. His genius had never before taken so long. There was a meeting of the top-level executives, names withheld on the grounds of corporate privilege.

“What’s the matter with him anyway?”

“Has he lost his touch?”

“It hardly seems likely;”

“Maybe he needs a rest.”

“Why, he had a week’s holiday last month:”

“What did he do?”

“Ate up a storm, he told me.”

“Could that be it?”

“No. He said he purged himself before he came back to work.”

“Is he having trouble here at CCC? Difficulties with middlemanagement?”

“Absolutely not, Mr. Chairman. They wouldn’t dare touch him.”

“Maybe he wants a raise.”

“No. He can’t spend the money he makes now.”

“Has our competition got to him?”

“They get to him all the time. General, and he laughs them off.”

“Then it must be something personal.”

“Agreed.”

“Woman-trouble?”

“My God! We should have such trouble.”

“Family-trouble?”

“He’s an orphan, Mr. Chairman.”

“Ambition? Incentive? Should we make him an officer of CCC?”

“I offered that to him the first of the year, sir, and he turned me down. He just wants to play in his laboratory.”

“Then why isn’t he playing?”

“Apparently he’s got some kind of creative block.”

“What the hell is the matter with him anyway?”

“Which is how you started this meeting.”

“I did not.”

“You did.”

“Not.”

“Governor, will you play back the bug.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, please! Obviously Dr. Skiaki has personal problems which are blocking his genius. We must solve that for him. Suggestions?”

“Psychiatry?”

“That won’t work without voluntary cooperation. I doubt whether he’d cooperate. He’s an obstinate gook.”

“Senator, I beg you! Such expressions must not be used with reference to one of our most valuable assets.”

“Mr. Chairman, the problem is to discover the source of Dr. Skiaki’s block.”

“Agreed. Suggestions?”

“Why, the first step should be to maintain twenty-four-hour surveillance. All the gook’s—excuse me-the good doctor’s activities, associates, contacts.”

“By CCC?”

“I would suggest not. There are bound to be leaks which would only antagonize the good gook-doctor!”

“Outside surveillance?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very good. Agreed. Meeting adjourned.”

SkipTracer Associates were perfectly furious. After one month they threw the case back into CCC’s lap, asking for nothing more than their expenses.

“Why in hell didn’t you tell us that we were assigned to a pro, Mr. Chairman, sir? Our tracers aren’t trained for that:”

“What a minute, please. What d’you mean, `pro?”’ “A professional Rip:”

“A what?”

“Rip, Gorill, Gimpster, Crook.”

“Dr. Skiaki a crook? Preposterous.”

“Look, Mr. Chairman, I’ll frame it for you and you draw your own conclusions. Yes?”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s all detailed in this report anyway. We put double tails on Skiaki every day to and from your shop. When he left they followed him home. He always went home. They staked in double shifts. He had dinner sent in from the Organic Nursery every night. They checked the messengers bringing the dinners. Legit. They checked the dinners; sometimes for one, sometimes for two. They traced some of the girls who left his penthouse. All clean. So far, all clean, yes?”

“And?”

“The crunch. Couple of nights a week he leaves the house and goes into the city. He leaves around midnight and doesn’t come back until four, more or less.”

“Where does he go?”

“We don’t know because he shakes his tails like the pro that he is. He weaves through the Corridor like a whore or a fag cruising for trade-excuse me-and he always loses our men. I’m not taking anything away from him. He’s smart, shifty, quick and a real pro. He has to be; and he’s too much for SkipTracers to handle.”

“Then you have no idea of what he does or who he meets between midnight and four?”

“No, sir. We’ve got nothing and you’ve got a problem. Not ours any more:”

“Thank you. Contrary to the popular impression, corporations are not altogether idotic. CCC understands that negatives are also results. You’ll receive your expenses and the agreedupon fee.”

“Mr. Chairman, I-“

“No, no, please. You’ve narrowed it down to those missing four hours. Now, as you say, they’re our problem.”

CCC summoned Salem Burne. Mr. Burne always insisted that he was neither a physician nor a psychiatrist; he did not care to be associated with what he considered to be the drek of the professions. Salem Burne was a witch doctor; more precisely, a warlock. He made the most remarkable and penetrating analyses of disturbed people, not so much through his coven rituals of pentagons, incantations, incense and the like as through his remarkable sensitivity to Body English and his acute interpretation of it. And this might be witchcraft after all.

Mr. Burne entered Blaise Skiaki’s immaculate laboratory with a winning smile and Dr. Skiaki let out a rending howl of anguish.

“I told you to sterilize before you came.”

“But I did, Doctor. Faithfully.”

“You did not. You reek of anise, ilang-ilang and methyl anthranilate. You’ve polluted my day. Why?”

“Dr. Skiaki. I assure you that I-” Suddenly Salem Burne stopped. “Oh my God!” he groaned. “I used my wife’s towel this morning.”

Skiaki laughed and turned up the ventilators to full force. “I understand. No hard feelings. Now let’s get your wife out of here. I have an office about half a mile down the hall. We can talk there.”

They sat down in the vacant office and looked at each other. Mr. Burne saw a pleasant, youngish man with cropped black hair, small expressive ears, high telltale cheekbones, slitty eyes that would need careful watching and graceful hands that would be a dead giveaway.

“Now, Mr. Burne, how can I help you?” Skiaki said while his hands asked, “Why the hell have you come pestering me?”

“Dr. Skiaki, I’m a colleague in a sense; I’m a professional witch doctor. One crucial part of my ceremonies is the burning of various forms of incense, but they’re all rather conventional. I was hoping that your expertise might suggest something different with which I could experiment”

“I see. Interesting. You’ve been burning stacte, onycha, galbanum, frankincense… that sort of thing?”

“Yes. All quite conventional.”

“Most interesting. I could, of course, make many suggestions for new experiments, and yet-.” Here Skiaki stopped and stared into space.

After a long pause the warlock asked, “Is anything wrong, Doctor?”

“Look here,” Skiaki burst out. “You’re on the wrong track. It’s the burning of incense that’s conventional and old-fashioned, and trying different scents won’t solve your problem. Why not experiment with an altogether different approach?”

“And what would that be?”

“The Odophone principle.”

“Odophone?”

“Yes. There’s a scale that exists among scents as among sounds. Sharp smells correspond to high notes and heavy smells with low notes. For example, ambergris is in the treble clef while violet is in the bass. I could draw up a scent scale for you, running perhaps two octaves. Then it would be up to you to compose the music.”

“This is positively brilliant, Dr. Skiaki.”

“Isn’t it?” Skiaki beamed. “But in all honesty I should point out that we’re collaborators in brilliance. I could never have come up with the idea if you hadn’t presented me with a most original challenge.”

They made contact on this friendly note and talked shop enthusiastically, lunched together, told each other about themselves and made plans for the witchcraft experiments in which Skiaki volunteered to participate despite the fact that he was no believer in diabolism.

“And yet the irony lies in the fact that he is indeed devil-ridden,” Salem Burne reported.

The Chairman could make nothing of this.

“Psychiatry and diabolism use different terms for the same phenomenon,” Burne explained. “So perhaps I’d better translate. Those missing four hours are fugues.”

The Chairman was not enlightened. “Do you mean the musical expression, Mr. Burne?”

“No, sir. A fugue is also the psychiatric description of a more advanced form of somnambulism… sleepwalking.”

“Blaise Skiaki walks in his sleep?”

“Yes, sir, but it’s more complicated than that. The sleepwalker is a comparatively simple case. He is never in touch with his surroundings. You can speak to him, shout at him, address him by name, and he remains totally oblivious.”

“And the fugue?”

“In the fugue the subject is in touch with his surroundings. He can converse with you. He has awareness and memory for the events that take place within the fugue, but while he is within his fugue he is a totally different person from the man he is in real life. And-and this is most important, sir-after the fugue he remembers nothing of it”

“Then in your opinion Dr. Skiaki has these fugues two or three times a week.”

“That is my diagnosis, sir.”

“And he can tell us nothing of what transpires during the fugue?”

“Nothing:”

“Can you?”

“I’m afraid not, sir. There’s a limit to my powers.”

“Have you any idea what is causing these fugues?”

“Only that he is driven by something. I would say that he is possessed by the devil, but that is the cant of my profession. Others may use different terms-compulsion or obsession. The terminology is unimportant. The basic fact is that something possessing him is compelling him to go out nights to do-what? I don’t know. All I do know is that this diabolical drive most probably is what is blocking his creative work for you.”

One does not summon Gretchen Nunn, not even if you’re CCC whose common stock has split twenty-five times. You work your way up through the echelons of her staff until you are finally admitted to the Presence. This involves a good deal of backing and forthing between your staff and hers, and ignites a good deal of exasperation, so the Chairman was understandably put out when at last he was ushered into Miss Nunn’s workshop, which was cluttered with the books and apparatus she used for her various investigations.

Gretchen Nunn’s business was working miracles: not in the sense of the extraordinary, anomalous or abnormal brought about by a superhuman agency, but rather in the sense of her extraordinary and/or abnormal perception and manipulation of reality. In any situation she could and did achieve the impossible begged by her desperate clients, and her fees were so enormous that she was thinking of going public.

Naturally the Chairman had anticipated Miss Nunn as looking like Merlin in drag. He was flabbergasted to discover that she was a Watusi princess with velvety black skin, aquiline features, great black eyes, tall, slender, twentyish, ravishing in red.

She dazzled him with a smile, indicated a chair, sat in one opposite and said, “My fee is one hundred thousand. Can you afford it?”

“I can. Agreed.”

“And your difficulty-is it worth it?”

“It is.”

“Then we understand each other so far. Yes, Alex?”

The young secretary who had bounced into the workshop said, “Excuse me. LeClerque insists on knowing how you made the positive identification of the mold as extraterrestrial.”

Miss Nunn clicked her tongue impatiently. “He knows that I never give reasons. I only give results.”

“Yes’N.”

“Has he paid?”

“Yes’N.”

“All right. I’ll make an exception in his case. Tell him that it was based on the levo and dextro probability in amino acids and tell him to have a qualified exobiologist carry on from there. He won’t regret the cost.”

“Yes’N. Thank you.”

She turned to the Chairman as the secretary left. “You heard that. I only give results.”

“Agreed, Miss Nunn.”

“Now your difficulty. I’m not committed yet. Understood?”

“Yes, Miss Nunn.”

“Go ahead. Everything. Stream of consciousness, if necessary.”

An hour later she dazzled him with another smile and said, “Thank you. This one is really unique. A welcome change. It’s a contract, if you’re still willing.”

“Agreed, Miss Nunn. Would you like a deposit or an advance?”

“Not from CCC.”

“What about expenses? Should that be arranged?”

“No. My responsibility.”

“But what if you have to-if you’re required to-if-“

She laughed. “My responsibility. I never give reasons and I never reveal methods. How can I charge for them? Now don’t forget; I want that SkipTrace report.”

A week later Gretchen Nunn took the unusual step of visiting the Chairman in his office at CCC. “I’m calling on you, sir, to give you the opportunity of withdrawing from our contract.”

“Withdraw? But why?”

“Because I believe you’re involved in something far more serious than you anticipated:”

“But what?”

“You won’t take my word for it?”

“I must know.”

Miss Nunn compressed her lips. After a moment she sighed. “Since this is an unusual case I’ll have to break my rules. Look at this, sir.” She unrolled a large map of a segment of the Corridor and flattened it on the Chairman’s desk. There was a star in the center of the map. “Skiaki’s residence,” Miss Nunn said.

There was a large circle scribed around the star. “The limits to which a man can walk in two hours,” Miss Nunn said. The circle’ was crisscrossed by twisting trails all emanating from the star. “I got this from the SkipTrace report. This is how the tails traced Skiaki.”

“Very ingenious, but I see nothing serious in this, Miss Nunn.”

“Look closely at the trails. What do you see?”

“Why…each ends in a red cross.”

“And what happens to each trail before it reaches the red cross?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all, except-except that the dots change to dashes.”

“And that’s what makes it serious.”

“I don’t understand, Miss Nunn.”

“I’ll explain. Each cross represents the scene of a murder. The dashes represent the backtracking of the actions and whereabouts of each murder victim just prior to death:”

“Murder!”

“They could trace their actions just so far back and no further. SkipTrace could tail Skiaki just so far forward and no further. Those are the dots. The dates join up. What’s your conclusion?”

“It must be coincidence,” the Chairman shouted. “This brilliant, charming young man. Murder? Impossible!”

“Do you want the factual data I’ve drawn up?”

“No, I don’t. I want the truth. Proof-positive without any inferences from dots, dashes and dates.”

“Very well, Mr. Chairman. You’ll get it.”

She rented the professional beggar’s pitch alongside the entrance to Skiaki’s Oasis for a week. No success. She hired a Revival Band and sang hymns with it before the Oasis. No success. She finally made the contact after she promoted a job with the Organic Nursery. The first three dinners she delivered to the penthouse she came and went unnoticed; Skiaki was entertaining a series of girls, all scrubbed and sparkling with gratitude. When she made the fourth delivery he was alone and noticed her for the first time.

“Hey,” he grinned. “How long has this been going on?”

“Sir?”

“Since when has Organic been using girls for delivery boys?”

“I am a delivery person, sir,” Miss Nunn answered with dignity. “I have been working for the Organic Nursery since the first of the month.”

“Knock off the sir bit.”

“Thanks you, s-Dr. Skiaki.”

“How the devil do you know that I’ve got a doctorate?”

She’d slipped. He was listed at the Oasis and the Nursery merely as B. Skiaki, and she should have remembered. As usual, she turned her mistake into an advantage. “I know all about you, sir. Dr. Blaise Skiaki, Princeton, MIT, Dow Chemical. Chief Scent Chemist at CCC.”

“You sound like `Who’s Who.”

“That’s where I read it, Dr. Skiaki.”

“You read me up in `Who’s Who’? Why on earth?”

“You’re the first famous man I’ve ever met”

“Whatever gave you the idea that I’m famous, which I’m not.”

She gestured around. “I knew you had to be famous to live like this.”

“Very flattering. What’s your name, love?”

“Gretchen, sir.”

“What’s your last name?”

“People from my class don’t have last names, sir.”

“Will you be the delivery b-person tomorrow, Gretchen?”

“Tomorrow is my day off, Doctor.”

“Perfect. Bring dinner for two.”

So the affair began and Gretchen discovered, much to her astonishment, that she was enjoying it very much. Blaise was indeed a brilliant, charming young man, always entertaining, always considerate, always generous. In gratitude he gave her (remember he believed she came from the lowest Corridor class) one of his most prized possessions, a five-carat diamond he had synthesized at Dow. She responded with equal style: she wore it in her navel and promised that it was for his eyes only.

Of course he always insisted on her scrubbing up each time she visited, which was a bit of a bore; in her income bracket she probably had more fresh water than he did. However, one convenience was that she could quit her job at the Organic Nursery and attend to other contracts while she was attending to Skiaki.

She always left his penthouse around eleven-thirty but stayed outside until one. She finally picked him up one night just as he was leaving the Oasis. She’d memorized the Salem Burne report and knew what to expect. She overtook him quickly and spoke in an agitated voice. “Mistuh. Mistuh.” He stopped and looked at her kindly without recognition.

“Yes, my dear?”

“If yuh gone this way kin I come too. I scared.”

“Certainly, my dear.”

“Thanks, mistuh. I gone home. You gone home?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“Where you gone? Y’ain’t up to nothin’ bad, is you? I don’t want no part.”

“Nothing bad, my dear. Don’t worry.”

“Then what you up to?”

He smiled secretly. “I’m following something.”

“Somebody?”

“No, something.”

“What kine something?”

“My, you’re curious, aren’t you. What’s your name?”

“Gretchen. How ‘bout you?”

“Me?”

“What’s your name?”

“Wish. Call me Mr. Wish.” He hesitated for a moment and then said, “I have to turn left here.”

“Thas okay, Mistuh Wish. I go left, too.”

She could see that all his senses were pricking, and reduced her prattle to a background of unobtrusive sound. She stayed with him as he twisted, turned, sometirnes doubling back, through streets, alleys, lanes and lots, always assuring him that this was her way home too. At a rather dangerous-looking refuse dump he gave her a fatherly pat and cautioned her to wait while he explored its safety. He explored, disappeared and never reappeared.

“I replicated this experience with Skiaki six times,” Miss Nunn reported to CCC. “They were all significant. Each time he revealed a little more without realizing it and without recognizing me. Burne was right. It is fugue.”

“And the cause, Miss Nunn?”

“Pheromone trails.”

“What?”

“I thought you gentlemen would know the term, being in the chemistry business. I see I’ll have to explain. It will take some time so I insist that you do not require me to describe the induction and deduction that led to my conclusion. Understood?”

“Agreed, Miss Nunn.”

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Surely you all know hormones, from the Greek hormaein, meaning `to excite’. They’re internal secretions which excite other parts of the body into action. Pheromones are external secretions which excite other creatures into action. It’s a mute chemical language.

“The best example of the pheromone language is the ant. Put a lump of sugar somewhere outside an ant hill. A forager will come across it, feed and return to the nest. Within an hour the entire commune will be single-filing the pheromone trail first laid down quite undeliberately by the first discoverer. It’s an unconscious but compelling stimulant.”

“Fascinating. And Dr. Skiaki?”

“He follows human pheromone trails. They compel him; he goes into fugue and follows them.”

“Ah! An outer aspect of The Nose. It makes sense, Miss Nunn. It really does. But what trails is he compelled to follow?”

“The deathwish.”

“Miss Nunn!”

“Surely you’re aware of this aspect of the human psyche. Many people suffer from an unconscious but powerful deathwish, especially in these despairing times. Apparently this leaves a pheromone trail which Dr. Skiaki senses, and he is compelled to follow it.”

“And then?”

“Apparently he grants the wish.”

“Apparently! Apparently!” the Chairman shouted. “I ask you for proof-positive of this monstrous accusation.”

“You’ll get it, sir. I’m not finished with Blaise Skiaki yet. There are one or two things I have to wrap up with him, and in the course of that I’m afraid he’s in for a shock. You’ll have your proof-pos-“

That was a half-lie from a woman half in love. She knew she had to see Blaise again but her motives were confused. To find out whether she really loved him, despite what she knew? To find out whether he loved her? To warn him or save him or run away with him? To fulfill her contract in a cool, professional style? She didn’t know. Certainly she didn’t know that she was in for a shock from Skiaki.

“Were you born blind?” he murmured that night.

She sat bolt upright in the bed. “What? Blind? What?”

“You heard me.”

“I’ve had perfect sight all my life.”

“Ah. Then you don’t know, darling. I rather suspected that might be it.”

“I certainly don’t know what you’re talking about, Blaise.”

“Oh, you’re blind all right,” he said calmly. “But you’ve never known because you’re blessed with a fantastic freak facility. You have extrasensory perception of other people’s senses. You see through other people’s eyes. For all I know you may be deaf and hear through their ears. You may feel with their skin. We must explore it some time.”

“I never heard of anything more absurd in all my life,” she said angrily.

“I can prove it to you, if you like, Gretchen.”

“Go ahead, Blaise. Prove the impossible.”

“Come into the lounge.”

In the living room he pointed to a vase, “What color is that?”

“Brown, of course.”

“What color is that?” A tapestry.

“Gray.”

“And that lamp?”

“Black.”

“QED,” Skiaki said. “It has been demonstrated.”

“What’s been demonstrated?”

“That you’re seeing through my eyes.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because I’m color-blind. That’s what gave me the clue in the first place.”

“What?”

He took her in his arms to quiet her trembling. “Darling Gretchen, the vase is green. The tapestry is amber and gold. The lamp is crimson. I can’t see the colors but the decorator told me and I remember. Now why the terror? You’re blind, yes, but you’re blessed with something far more miraculous than mere sight; you see through the eyes of the world. I’d change places with you any time.”

“It can’t be true,” she cried.

“It’s true, love.”

“What about when I’m alone?”

“When are you alone? When is anybody in the Corridor ever alone?”

She snatched up a shift and ran out of the penthouse, sobbing hysterically. She ran back to her own Oasis nearly crazed with terror. And yet she kept looking around and there were all the colors: red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, blue, violet. But there were also people swarming through the labyrinths of the Corridor as they always were, twenty-four hours a day.

Back in her apartment she was determined to put the disaster to the test. She dismissed her entire staff with stern orders to get the hell out and spend the night somewhere else. She stood at the door and counted them out, all amazed and unhappy. She slammed the door and looked around. She could still see.

“The lying son-of-a-bitch,” she muttered and began to pace furiously. She raged through the apartment, swearing venomously. It proved one thing; never get into personal relationships. They’ll betray you, they’ll try to destroy you, and she’d made a fool of herself. But why, in God’s name, did Blaise use this sort of dirty trick to destroy her? Then she smashed into something and was thrown back. She recovered her balance and looked to see what she had blundered into. It was a harpsichord.

“But…but I don’t own a harpsichord,” she whispered in bewilderment. She started forward to touch it and assure herself of its reality. She smashed into the something again, grabbed it and felt it. It was the back of a couch. She looked around frantically. This was not one of her rooms. The harpsichord. Vivid Brueghels hanging on the walls, Jacobean furniture, Linenfold paneled doors, Crewel drapes.

But…this is the…the Raxon apartment downstairs. I must be seeing through their eyes. I must…he was right. I…She closed her eyes and looked. She saw a mélange of apartments, streets, crowds, people, events. She had always seen this sort of montage on occasion but had always thought it was merely the total visual recall which was a major factor in her extraordinary abilities and success. Now she knew the truth.

She began to sob again. She felt her way around the couch and sat down, despairing. When at last the convulsion spent itself she wiped her eyes courageously, determined to face reality. She was no coward. But when she opened her eyes she was shocked by another bombshell. She saw her familiar room in tones of gray. She saw Blaise Skiaki standing in the open door smiling at her. “Blaise?” she whispered.

“The name is Wish, my dear. Mr. Wish. What’s yours?”

“Blaise, for God’s sake, not me! Not me. I left no deathwish trail.”

“What’s your name, my dear? We’ve met before?”

“Gretchen,” she screamed. “I’m Gretchen Nunn and I have no deathwish.”

“Nice meeting you again, Gretchen,” he said in glassy tones, smiling the glassy smile of Mr. Wish. He took two steps toward her. She jumped up and ran behind the couch.

“Blaise, listen to me. You are not Mr. Wish. There is no Mr. Wish. You are Dr. Blaise Skiaki, a famous scientist. You are chief chemist at CCC and have created many wonderful perfumes.”

He took another step toward her, unwinding the scarf he wore around his neck.

“Blaise, I’m Gretchen. We’ve been lovers for two months. You must remember. Try to remember. You told me about my eyes tonight…being blind. You must remember that.”

He smiled and whirled the scarf into a cord.

“Blaise, you’re suffering from fugue. A blackout. A change of psyche. This isn’t the real you. It’s another creature driven by a pheromone. But I left no pheromone trail. I couldn’t. I’ve never wanted to die.”

“Yes, you do, my dear. Only happy to grant your wish. That’s why I’m called Mr. Wish.”

She squealed like a trapped rat and began darting and dodging while he closed in on her. She feinted him to one side, twisted to the other with a clear chance of getting out the door ahead of him, only to crash into three grinning goons standing shoulder to shoulder. They grabbed and held her.

Mr. Wish did not know that he also left a pheromone trail. It was a pheromone trail of murder.

“Oh, it’s you again,” Mr. Wish sniffed.

“Hey, old buddy-boy, got a looker this time, huh?”

“And loaded. Dig this layout”

“Great. Makes up for the last three which was nothin’. Thanks, buddy-boy. You can go home now.”

“Why don’t I ever get to kill one?” Mr. Wish exclaimed petulantly.

“Now, now. No sulks. We got to protect our bird dog. You lead. We follow and do the rest.”

“And if anything goes wrong, you’re the setup,” one of the goons giggled.

“Go home, buddy-boy. The rest is ours. No arguments. We already explained the standoff to you. We know who you are but you don’t know who we are.”

“I know who I am,” Mr. Wish said with dignity. “I am Mr. Wish and I still think I have the right to kill at least one.”

“All right, all right. Next time. That’s a promise. Now blow.”

As Mr. Wish exited resentfully, they ripped Gretchen naked and let out a huge wow when they saw the five-carat diamond in her navel. Mr. Wish turned and saw its scintillation too. “But that’s mine,” he said in a confused voice. “That’s only for my eyes. I-Gretchen said she would never-” Abruptly Dr. Blaise Skiaki spoke in a tone accustomed to command: “Gretchen, what the hell are you doing here? What’s this place? Who are these creatures? What’s going on?”

When the police arrived they found three dead bodies and a composed Gretchen Nunn sitting with a laser pistol in her lap. She told a perfectly coherent story of forcible entry, an attempt at armed rape and robbery, and how she was constrained to meet force with force. There were a few loopholes in her account. The bodies were not armed, but if the men had said they were armed Miss Nunn, of course, would have believed them. The three were somewhat battered, but goons were always fighting. Miss Nunn was commended for her courage and cooperation.

After her final report to the Chairman (which was not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth) Miss Nunn received her check and went directly to the perfume laboratory, which she entered without warning. Dr. Skiaki was doing strange and mysterious things with pipettes, flasks and reagent bottles. Without turning he ordered, “Out. Out. Out.”

“Good morning, Dr. Skiaki.”

He turned, displaying a mauled face and black eyes, and smiled. “Well, well, well. The famous Gretchen Nunn, I presume. Voted Person of the Year three times in succession.”

“No, sir. People from my class don’t have last names.”

“Knock off the sir bit.”

“Yes s-Mr. Wish.”

“Oi!” He winced. “Don’t remind me of that incredible insanity. How did everything go with the Chairman?”

“I snowed him. You’re off the hook.”

“Maybe I’m off his hook but not my own. I was seriously thinking of having myself committed this morning.”

“What stopped you?”

“Well, I got involved in this patchouli synthesis and sort of forgot.”

She laughed. “You don’t have to worry. You’re saved.”

“You mean cured?”

“No, Blaise. Not any more than I’m cured of my blindness. But we’re both saved because we’re aware. We can cope now.”

He nooded slowly but not happily.

“So what are you going to do today?” she asked cheerfully.

“Struggle with patchouli?”

“No,” he said gloomily. “I’m still in one hell of a shock. I

think I’ll take the day off.”

“Perfect. Bring two dinners.”

CATHADONIAN ODYSSEY

Michael Bishop

Then he threw back his sweaty face and looked at the imperceptibly lightening sky, where winked a thousand scornful stars.

Just before he passed out, Ethan whispered the word “Bucephalus.” No one heard him. No one knew his hurt.

Cathay. Caledonia. Put the words together: Cathadonia. That was what the namer of the planet, a murderer with the sensitivity of a poet, had done. He had put the two exotic words together— Cathay and Caledonia—so that the place they designated might have a name worthy of its own bewitching beauty. Cathadonia. Exotic, far-off, bewitching, incomprehensible. A world of numberless pools. A world of bizarrely constituted “orchards,” a world with one great, gong-tormented sea.

Cathadonia.

And the first thing that men had done there, down on the surface, was kill as many of the exotic little tripodal natives as their laser pistols could dispatch.

Squiddles, the men off the merchantship had called them. They called them other fanciful names, too, perhaps inspired by the sensitive murderer who had coined the planet’s name. Treefish. Porpurls. Pintails. Willowpusses. Tridderlings. Devil apes.

The names didn’t matter. The men killed the creatures wantonly, brutally, laughingly. For sport. For nothing but sport. They were off the merchantship Golden heading homeward from a colonized region of the galactic arm. They made planetfall because no one had really noticed Cathadonia before and because they were ready for a rest. Down on the surface, for relaxation’s sake, they killed the ridiculous-looking squiddles. Or treefish. Or porpurls. Or willowpusses. Take your choice of names. The names didn’t matter.

Once home, the captain of the Golden reported a new planet to the authorities. He used the name Cathadonia, the murderer’s coinage, and Cathadonia was the name that went into the books. The captain said nothing about his crewmen’s sanguinary recreation on the planet. How could he? Instead, he gave coordinates, reported that the air was breathable, and volunteered the information that Cathadonia was beautiful. “Just beautiful, really just beautiful.”

The men of the Golden, after all, were not savages. Hadn’t one of them let the word Cathadonia roll off his lips in a moment of slaughterous ecstasy? Didn’t the universe forgive its poets, its name-givers?

Later, Earth sent the survey probeship Nobel, on its way to the virgin milkiness of the Magellanic Clouds, in the direction of Cathadonia. The Nobel, in passing, dropped a descentcraft toward the planet’s great ocean. The three scientists aboard that descentcraft were to establish a floating station whose purpose would be to determine the likelihood of encountering life on Cathadonia. The captain of the Golden had not mentioned life. The scientists did not know it existed there. Preliminary sensor scans from the Nobel suggested the presence of botanicals and the possibility of some sort of inchoate aquatic life. Nothing sentient, surely.

Whatever the situation down there, the scientists aboard the floating station would unravel it.

Unfortunately, something happened to the descentcraft on its way down, something that never happened to survey descentcraft and therefore something the NobePs crew had made no provision for. In fact, the Nobel, as was usual in these cases, went on without confirming touchdown; it went on toward the Magellanic Clouds. And some odd, anomalous force wrenched the controls of the descentcraft out of the hands of its pilots and hurled it planetward thousands of kilometers from the great ocean.

It fell to the surface beside a sentinel willow on the banks of one of Cathadonia’s multitudinous pools. There it crumpled, sighed, ticked with alien heat.

This, then, becomes the story of a survivor—the story of Maria Jill Ian, a woman downed on an out-of-the-way world with no hope of immediate rescue, with no companions to share her agony, with no goal but the irrational desire to reach Cathadonia’s ocean. A woman who did not wholly understand what had happened to her. A woman betrayed by her own kind and ambivalently championed by a creature carrying out a larger betrayal.

—For Cathadonia.

I am standing on Cathadonia, first planet from an ugly little star that Arthur called Ogre’s Heart. I am writing in a logbook that is all I have left of the materials in our descentcraft. God knows why I am writing.

Arthur is dead. Fischelson is dead. The Nobel is on its way to the Magellanic Clouds. It will be back in three months. Small comfort. I will be dead, too. Why am I not dead now?

The “landscape” about me is dotted with a thousand small pools. Over each pool a single willowlike tree droops its head. The pools are clear, I have drunk from them. And the long slender leaves of the willows—or at least of this willow—contain a kind of pulp that I have eaten. Trees at nearby pools appear to bear fruit.

But drinking and eating are painful exercises now, and I don’t know why I do it. Arthur and Fischelson are dead.

The light from Ogre’s Heart sits on the faces of a thousand pools as if they were mirrors. Mirrors. Mirrors wherein I might drown and rediscover the painlessness of who I was before …

Maria Jill Ian did not die. She slept by the wreck of the descentcraft. She slept two of Cathadonia’s days, then part of a third. The silver lacery of the pulpwillow shaded her during the day, kept off the rains at night.

When she finally woke and began to live again, she “buried” Arthur and Fischelson by tying pieces of the descentcraft’s wreckage to their mangled bodies and dragging them to the edge of the pool. Then she waded into the mirror surface and felt the slick pool weeds insinuate themselves between her toes. A strong woman well into middle age, she sank first Fischelson’s body and then that of Arthur, her husband. She held the men under and maneuvered the weights on their corpses so that neither of them would float up again. She was oblivious to the smell of their decaying bodies; she knew only that it would be very easy to tie a weight about her own waist and then walk deeper into the pool.

The day after accomplishing these burials, Maria Jill Ian looked away to the western horizon and began walking toward the pools that glimmered there. Just as she had not known why she bothered to eat and drink, she did not now understand why the horizon should draw her implacably toward the twilight baths of Ogre’s Heart.

Later she would rediscover her reasons, but now she simply did what she must.

Today I walked a distance I can’t accurately determine. My feet fell on the pliant verges of at least a hundred ponds.

A small thing has happened to keep me going.

The trees over the pools have begun to change. Although their long branches still waterfall to the pools’ surfaces, not all these trees are the pulpwillows that stand sentinel in the region where Arthur, Fischelson, and I crashed. Some have brilliant scarlet blossoms; some have trunks that grow in gnarled configurations right out of the pools’ centers; some are heavy with globular fruit; some are naked of all adornment and trail their boughs in the water like skeletal hands.

But I’ve eaten of the trees that bear fruit, and this fruit has been sweet and bursting with flavor, invariably. It’s strange that I don’t really care for any of it. Still, it’s nourishment.

The sky turns first blazing white at twilight, then yellow like lemons, then a brutal pink. And at night the trees stand in stark tableaux that hail me onward.

I still hurt. I still hurt terribly, from the crash, from my loss—but I’m beginning to heal. After sleeping, I’ll continue to walk away from Arthur and Fischelson—in the direction of falling, ever-falling Ogre’s Heart…

One morning Maria Jill Ian came to a pond beside which grew a huge umbrellalike tree of gold and scarlet. The tree bore a kind of large thick-shelled mahogany-colored nut rather than the commonplace varieties of fruit she had been living on for the past two or three days.

She decided to stop and eat.

The nuts, however, hung high in the branches of the tree. Its twisted bole looked as if it might allow her to climb to the higher entanglements where she could gather food as she liked. Her simple foil jumpsuit did not impede her climbing. Leaves rustled and flashed. She gained a place where she could rest, and stopped.

All about her the pools of Cathadonia lay brilliant and blinding beneath their long-fingered sentinel trees.

Ogre’s Heart was moving up the sky.

Maria Jill Ian turned her head to follow the sun’s squat ascent. In the whiteness cascading through the branches overhead, she saw a shape—a shape at least as large as a small man, a form swaying over her, eclipsing the falling light, a thing more frightening than the realization that she was light-years from Earth, stranded.

Not thinking, merely reacting, she stepped to the branch below her and then swung out from the willow. She landed on the marshy ground beside the pond, caught herself up, and scrabbled away.

Something vaguely tentacular plunged from the scarlet-and-gold umbrella of the tree and disappeared noiselessly into the pool.

Maria Jill Ian began to run. She ran westward, inevitably toward another pool, struggling in ground that squelched around her boots, looking back now and again in an effort to see the thing that had plunged.

She saw the silver water pearl-up, part, and stream down the creature’s narrow head. It was going to pursue her, she knew. Although it came on comically, it flailed with a deftness that demolished the impulse to laugh. Maria Jill Ian did not look back again.

All of Cathadonia breathed with her as, desperately, she ran.

I call him Eracero. It’s a joke. He has no arms; he swims like the much-maligned “wetbacks” of another time. I don’t know what sort of creature he is.

A description?

Very well. To begin: Eracero has no arms, but in other respects he resembles a man-sized spider monkey—except his body is absolutely hairless, smooth as the hide of a porpoise, a whitish-blue like the surfaces of Cathadonia’s pools.

To continue: He is arboreal and aquatic at once. He uses his feet and his sleek prehensile tail to climb to the uppermost branches of any poolside willow. Conversely, his armlessness has streamlined his upper torso to such an extent that he can slide through the water like a cephalopod. Indeed, he moves with the liquid grace of an octopus, although one who is five times over an amputee.

To conclude: What disarms even me is Eracero’s face. It is small, expressive, curious, and winning. The eyes are an old man’s (sometimes), the mouth a baby’s, the ears a young girl’s. The trauma of our first meeting has slipped out of our memories, just as Ogre’s Heart plunges deathward at twilight.

We are friends, Bracero and I.

The creature had caught up with her when she could run no more. Halfway between two of the planet’s glimmering pools Maria Jill Ian collapsed and waited for the thing to fall upon her.

Instead, it stopped at a small distance and regarded her almost sympathetically, she thought. Its body put her in mind of a small boy sitting on a three-legged stool, his arms clasped behind his back as if desirous of looking penitent. She lay unmoving on the marshy earth, staring at the creature over one muddied forearm.

Blinking occasionally, it stared back.

Finally she got up and went on to the next pool, where she leaned against the trunk of an especially blasted-looking tree. The naked creature with two supple legs and a lithe tail—or another leg— followed her, almost casually. It made a wide arc away from Maria Jill Ian and came in behind the willow she was leaning upon. Stoic now, she didn’t even look to see what it was doing.

To join Arthur, to join Fischelson, to join the centuries’ countless dead, would not be unpleasant, she thought.

The eel-beast hoisted itself into the willow and climbed silently to the highest branches. Then it hung there, looking down at her like a suddenly sullen child swinging by his knees.

That evening, her fear gone, she named the creature Bracero. On the second day beside this pond she saw how it fed.

Ogre’s Heart gave them a characteristically magnesium-bright dawn. Sentinel trees cast shadows like carefully penned lines of indigo ink. A thousand mirror pools turned from slate to silver. Lying on her back, Maria opened her eyes and witnessed something she didn’t entirely believe.

Bracero was still high in the tree. He clutched a narrow branch with his “tail” and both “feet,” his head and torso swaying gently, freely, like a live pendulum.

Clusters of mahogany-colored nuts swayed, too, in the dawn wind.

Then, looking up, Maria Jill Ian saw one of the oversized nuts snap away from the others and float directly up to the creature that had pursued her. Bracero took one foot away from the limb, grasped the willownut, expertly shelled it, and fed himself.

Several times he repeated this procedure, on each occasion the willownut floating within his reach seemingly of its own volition.

The Earth woman stood up and watched in astonishment. Bracero paid her no mind until she moved as if to obtain her own breakfast. Then he shifted in the uppermost branches, descended a little, and made screeing noises with his teeth. Maria decided not to go after the mahogany-colored shells that split, so easily it seemed, into meat-filled hemispheres. Did Bracero intend to deny her access to food? Would she have to fight?

Then a willownut fell toward her. But it broke its own fall in midair, bobbed sideways, and floated just beyond her startled hands—a miniature planet, brown and crustily wrinkled, halted in its orbit just at eye level. Bracero had stopped making screeing sounds.

Maria Jill Ian looked up. Then she gratefully took the gift and ate.

For the next several weeks she did not have to clamber into a tree again to obtain her food, nor search among the sodden grasses where the fruits and nuts sometimes fell. Bracero saw to her wants. When these were filled, he plunged out of the sentinel willows and rippled the mirror pools. Blithely he swam—until the woman made a move to continue her odyssey westward. Then he again followed.

Maria supposed that the only payment Bracero wanted for serving her was the pleasure of her company. She didn’t mind, but she couldn’t stay her urge to march relentlessly on Cathadonia’s western horizon. Something there pulled her, compelled her onward.

Bracero has telekinetic abilities. He’s been with me for almost twelve days now, as best as I’m able to reckon days—and I’ve been trying very hard to mark the successive risings and settings of Ogre’s Heart since it is impossible to determine time by distances covered or landmarks passed.

But for slight variations in the willows, the terrain of Cathadonia is beautifully self-repeating. Looking at it, I can’t understand why Bracero is the only native of the planet I have so far encountered; he is so meticulously adapted to this environment that there must be others like him. Can it be that the men of the Golden were unfortunate enough to miss seeing even one creature like Bracero?

A word about telekinesis, Bracero’s uncanny skill at manipulating objects at a distance.

He does it for me every day, several times a day, and does so for himself as well; afterward, he appears no worse for this not inconsiderable psychic strain than during times of simple physical activity. His mind is as sleek as his body.

Just today, for instance, I have seen him move the casabalike melons of an unusual willow that we passed this morning. He moved them, in fact, all the way to the pool where we’re now loitering. This is no mean distance. It indicates that Bracero can extend his psychic aura to far locations, fix upon a specific object, and draw it toward him at will. Without noticeable aftereffects.

Ordinarily, though, he puts under his influence only those foodstuffs in the trees by which we stop. The casabas (if I can call them that) were a rare exception, a treat that he lovingly tendered to both of us. And although I seldom think about what I eat, I enjoyed these melons, and Bracero seemed to appreciate the delight I took in them.

He has an intelligence that is both animal and human. I have begun to talk to him as if he were a close friend, or a small child, or (I hesitate to write this) a new incarnation of Arthur. Bracero watches me when I talk, and listens—truly listens.

But I’m off the subject.

I’m still amazed at the placidity with which Bracero accomplishes his psychokinetic feats, the childish nonchalance of this supra-normal juggling. Does it cost him nothing?

Aboard the Nobel, of course, we have two PK mediums: Langland Smart and Margaret Riva. Langland is the older, and his abilities are more fully developed than Margaret’s. In free-fall he can maneuver an unresisting hypnotized subject in any direction he wants, can make the subject raise an arm and scratch his nose, can settle him gently into a padded lift-seat.

But afterward, and even during, Langland pays. He loses weight, suffers dizziness, has nightmares and insomnia later—and his heartbeat does not fall back into a steady, safe rhythm for hours, sometimes two or three days, after such activity.

It’s the same with Margaret, although she can move only small objects and these only across relatively smooth surfaces. She has no ability to levitate things, as do Langland and, more impressively, Bracero. And only Bracero does not pay for the mental forces that he so astonishingly commands over the inert.

The Nobel, meanwhile, expected us to find this watery orchard of a planet uninhabited. Did the men off that merchantship see only pools and trees when they set down here? Arthur and I talked to its captain before we left. He was a nervous ferret of a man…

Ogre’s Heart has set. I’m going to stop writing. In the morning we’ll be off again. I wonder how much longer it will be before we’re there. The willows to the west, the pools limning the horizon— these things call me.

But for tonight it would be nice if’ Cathadonia had a moon…

For the next two days Maria Jill Ian kept up her compulsive journeying, through terrain that did not alter.

She began to suspect that Bracero was observing her for others of his own kind, that he followed her and fed her not merely to enjoy her company but to maintain a keen and critical surveillance of her movements. She was not an unintelligent woman, by any means, and she was as susceptible to doubts as any healthy paranoid human being.

She believed that she had evidence of Bracero’s communicating telepathically with other members of his species. Her evidence consisted of the fact that she still hadn’t stumbled across a single one of Bracero’s brethren. Before the two of them approached each new willow, each new pool, her sleek friend undoubtedly “wired” ahead an imperative to stay out of sight. The recipient of this communication undoubtedly dove into the water and remained there, nearly insensate, until they departed. Undoubtedly.

That was what Maria Jill Ian believed, and once, as they approached, she saw rings on the surface of a pool. Bracero had been careless, she surmised, and wired his warning later than usual. The slowly fading rings on the surface of the pond corroborated her suspicions. But, of course, she saw nothing but the tree and the water when they had fully arrived. Little corroboration, very little indeed.

Her affection for Bracero did not dwindle because of these suspicions; surely, he did only what he must. Also, none of his brethren had made any hostile move against her. There had been no assaults on her person, nor even any attempts to impede their trek westward.

Maybe Bracero’s people had decided jointly to save both her and them the confusion, the upheaval, of further contact. Because he’d seen her first, Bracero had necessarily assumed the combined role of his people’s roving watchman and Maria Jill lan’s solicitous escort. She was sure that he returned at least a small portion of the affection she felt for him. His attitude, his expressive face, conveyed as much.

One evening (the evening after she had written the last log entry) they stopped for the night, and Bracero moved as if to clamber up into the inevitable willow. Involuntarily, Maria held up her hand.

“Don’t go up there,” she said. “There’ll be plenty of time to eat. Stay down here.” She patted the ground beside her. “We’ll talk.”

Bracero responded as if he understood her.

His bluish porpoise’s skin gleaming in the twilight, he faced her and assumed his comical tripod stance about two meters away. He appeared quite ready to converse—as clinically receptive, Maria thought, as a probeship psychiatrist. His smooth brow was slightly wrinkled, his eyes looked upon her with the estranging narrowness of a devilfish’s eyes. Still, his posture suggested no hostility.

Maria Jill Ian talked: “I’m not a dependent woman, Bracero. I know what I’m about. Even now I realize that what draws me on isn’t entirely rational. Maybe not rational at all. I know that my loss of Arthur and my idea of home may not be redeemed by following Ogre’s Heart to the horizon every day—but because I understand my irrationality, I know what I’m doing. Do you see that, Bracero? One day I’ll explain myself to you with more certainty, much more.”

Bracero shifted his position. His expression allowed her to think that he did see her point, intuitively.

“Arthur and I used to talk, Bracero. Sometimes without words. Neither of us was dependent on the other, though we were somehow wordlessly interdependent. I know. That sounds like a contradiction—but it’s not, not really.

“We had an affinity—a love, you have to call it—that synchronized our feelings and moods in a way not at all mechanical, a spiritual meshing. This was our interdependence, Bracero.

“But we could function with the same rigorous smoothness while apart. He worked his work, I mine; and our shared independence only bound us that much more closely in our love. I miss him, Bracero, I wish he were here beside me now—so that we could talk again, even wordlessly. As before.”

She paused. The far ponds twinkled with the day’s last light.

“Did you know that I didn’t even weep when I buried Fischelson and my husband, when I sank them to the bottom of the pool two weeks behind us? I still can’t weep, Bracero. The memory of Arthur’s total aliveness is still too powerful.

“So different from other men,” she concluded. “So different from the cruel ones, the petty ones, the men with stupid hates and overbearing passions. Fischelson, too. Both of them so different.”

Maria Jill Ian fell silent. It had done her good to talk, especially to a listener who seemed so congenial. She wished that Bracero could talk. Since he couldn’t, she said, “I think Arthur would approve of what we’re doing.”

A moment later she said, “You don’t have to sit there anymore, Bracero. You can climb up into the willow if you like.”

Bracero didn’t move immediately. He waited as if refraining from the subtle rudeness of leaving too quickly. Then he gracefully swung himself aloft. He hung by his tail from a low limb.

More than on any other similar occasion, Maria Jill Ian was grateful for the Cathadonian’s seemingly intentional courtesy. If he were deceiving her, she didn’t care.

My hands are trembling almost too violently to write this.

The night before last, I engaged in a long monologue and made Bracero listen to me hold forth on independence, communication, spiritual meshing, love, et cetera.

We haven’t moved from this pool, this willow, since that night. The reasons are astounding, they’re out of the pale of credibility— but my heart, my head, my trembling hands, all attest to their realness. I have to put it down here. I have to set it down as everything happened—even if my scrawl is ultimately illegible even to me.

On the morning after our “conversation,” I awoke and looked up to find Bracero. He was there, his legs and tail wrapped around a branch. When I stood, I could almost look him squarely in his topsy-turvy eyes, eyes that were open but glazed over as if with cataracts.

“Wake up,” I said.

He didn’t move. His cephalopod’s clouded eyes looked as removed from me as two useless, tarnished Earth coins.

“It’s morning, it’s time to get going again, Bracero.”

He didn’t move, still didn’t move, and a kind of subdued panic gripped me. I thought that I would try a feint, a bluff, to see if that wouldn’t set the good warm blood circulating through him again.

“I’m going,” I said. “You can join me if you like.”

That said, I set off briskly and had slogged through a good half a kilometer of unending marshland before I actually convinced myself that Bracero wasn’t going to follow and that it was wrong to leave him there: a sort of Cathadonian possum who had never before put on the stiff, frightening mask of Death.

I went back.

Bracero wasn’t dead. I could tell that by putting my hand against his gimlet-hole nostrils and feeling the rapid but quiet warmth of his breathing. He was in a trance, a coma, a state of suspended animation—but not really any of these things, though, because his breathing was hurried, his sleek body feverish, his pulse (which I found in his throat) telegraphically insistent. Only in his relation to the ground was Bracero suspended; otherwise, his stupor—though deep—was very animate.

I felt I had to stay by him even if it meant losing a day to our assault on the horizon; I was morally obligated. Morally obligated. Too, my affection for Bracero has deepened to a point that embarrasses me. Even the horrible manner in which he chose to demonstrate his feeling for me has not turned me against him— though my hands shake, my head swims.

All of yesterday I stayed by him. Bracero didn’t improve; his condition altered not at all.

Occasionally I fetched water in a bag made of my overtunic and then moistened Bracero’s face. I tried to put food in his mouth— pulp from the willow’s leaves, some nutmeat I had saved, a piece of fruit—but his mouth wouldn’t accept these gifts; they dribbled from his lips.

I went to sleep when Ogre’s Heart set. I had nightmares. Shapes moved, voices sang, eerie winds hissed. The awful clamminess of Cathadonia seeped into my bones.

Then, before this ugly little sun had come up again, in the haggard predawn glimmering of the pool, I saw a shape of genuine substance. A shape that wasn’t Bracero. A shape floating over the pool.

It was a medieval vision, a fever picture out of Dante.

I screamed into the haggard silence. Inside, I am still screaming; the horrible no-sound of this inward screaming deafens my mind to my heart. Otherwise I couldn’t even write this down.

Over the pool, stretched out there as if asleep on his back, a piece of our mangled descentcraft pulling his left leg down into the water, floated Arthur’s corpse—horrible, horrible, horrible.

Mercilessly, Ogre’s Heart came up to light this fever picture. And nothing I could do would stay its coming.

Maria Jill Ian calmed herself. For the second time in two weeks she waded into one of Cathadonia’s pools and laid her husband to rest. She caught Arthur’s beautiful, hideous body in her arms. The force that had been holding him in state above the water flicked off and shifted Arthur’s melancholy weight entirely to her.

A strong woman, Maria Jill Ian accepted this weight. She lowered her no-longer-human, plundered-of-dignity husband gently into the pool. The anchor she had tied to him two weeks ago pulled him down, but she refused to let him sink away. She supported him. Strangely, it seemed that invisible hands in the water helped her steady Arthur’s body and slide him with precision into the silt below.

But Bracero still hung from the branch where he had remained during the whole of his “illness.” Weeping quietly, Maria waded toward him.

“You did that for me, didn’t you, Bracero? You brought me my husband because I said I wanted him beside me again.”

A bitter gift. Over an incredible distance, a distance that it had taken them fourteen of Cathadonia’s days to walk, Bracero had exerted his will upon the dead Arthur Ian and reeled him in with his mind—in the space of two nights and one waking period.

The Earth woman could not bring herself to condemn the eel-beast, the agent of her horror. Although her heart still beat savagely, and her eyes were raw with the sting of salt, she couldn’t condemn him.

“No matter what I wish about my husband now, Bracero, let him sleep in peace,” she said. “But understand me now: I can respect you for this, I can respect you for your sacrifice.”

And Bracero was looking at her again, she saw, with eyes more like a feeble old man’s than a devilfish’s. His breathing had slowed, too. His limbs and tail appeared less rigid. Three hours later he rippled out of the tree’s golden umbrella and took up his expectant tripod stance only a meter away from her.

The Earth woman pulled on her boots and looked back toward the east, at Ogre’s Heart climbing the pale yellow sky.

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s time to go again. We’ve got to forget this place. Arthur wouldn’t want us to linger here.”

They ate—Bracero ravenously, she only a little—and set off again. Toward the horizon, the western horizon.

We were able to walk, to slog westward, only a half day today— because of Bracero’s most recent telekinetic exploit and its aftermath. I’ve resolved never to think of Arthur as I saw him this morning, but to remember him as he was when I met him, and as he grew to be over the years of our marriage.

I don’t know why, but I haven’t written here how wearying it is to trek across Cathadonia. The ground sucks at your feet, the marshy soil betrays your sense of balance, the lack of firmness tortures your knees. The muscles in my calves have become extremely hard, my upper thighs like supple marble. Even so, it’s sometimes difficult to keep going.

Today, amazingly, I kept going by talking to Bracero. (I still haven’t learned my lesson.) I told him everything I could remember about Arthur. Even quotes.

“I’m as hardy as you are,” I told Bracero. “Men are hardy creatures. Arthur used to say, ‘Men are the ultimate vermin, Maria, as indefatigable as cockroaches, capable of outlasting the universe.’ I guess that’s why I can keep up with you—go beyond you even.”

Even though I can’t really go beyond Bracero.

He doesn’t have the same trouble with Cathadonia’s marshiness that I do. His body is less heavy; his slender limbs are capable of skimming the ground almost without touching it. Usually he swims each of the pools that we come to and reemerges at the western shore, where he lets me catch up with him. But this afternoon, seeing that I wanted to talk, he stayed beside me every step and listened to my schoolgirl’s chatter, my woman’s wisdom, with the diplomacy of a probeship captain.

Once or twice he immersed himself in a pond, but he always came back, his glistening face radiating a depth of awareness about me, Maria Jill Ian, that I’ve seen before only in Arthur’s face. And so I talked to him of Arthur, fed on Bracero’s sympathy, and didn’t tire—even though so much talking ought to have made me short of breath.

Once, when we rested and ate, I told him how important it was that we continue pursuing the horizon. I even recited to him from Arthur’s favorite poem. And Bracero seemed to respond to the lines as if he understood and even approved the sentiment.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are— One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

More than I ever thought I could lose has been taken from me, but Bracero’s companionship and my own strength remain. These things abide. They make it possible to go on with free hearts, free foreheads, toward the westering sun of Cathadonia.

So be it, Arthur, so be it…

And so they went on, day after day, seeing no one, encountering terrain that repeated itself over and over again—though the fact that they now and again came across a tree that bore different kinds of fruit, or blossoms, or nut capsules, convinced Maria Jill Ian that they were actually making progress.

At last Maria remembered that Cathadonia had an ocean, that eventually these endlessly recurring pools would send out tentacles, link arms, and spill into one another like countless telepathic beings sharing a single liquid mind.

Fischelson, Arthur, and she had made one complete orbit of the planet in their descentcraft before attempting to land, and, she remembered, they had seen the great ocean from the air. How had they fallen so short of their goal? Indeed, what force had so cruelly wrenched the descentcraft from them and sped it raging planetward?

Such things never happened.

Now all Maria Jill Ian had to live for was her march upon that ocean. The ocean. The Sea of Stagnation, Fischelson had suggested before something unprecedented wiped out the two men’s lives and her own memory. But now, but now, it couldn’t be far, that ocean.

Day by day, Bracero kept pace with her—loping, swimming, outdistancing her when he wished, sometimes lagging playfully behind.

Then he began to lag behind more often, and there was nothing playful in it. Frequently Maria had to call him, almost scold, in order to summon him on.

He came, but he came reluctantly. At each new pool he plunged in and made her wait while he swam five or six more turns than he had taken in the early days of their journeying.

But Maria Jill Ian always waited for him. To leave Bracero now would be to default on a trust. The two of them, after all, still belonged together. Despite his now chronic straggling, even Bracero seemed to recognize this.

One evening, as they prepared for sleep, Maria looked out over their pond and was struck by its size. It was several times larger than the one beside which their descentcraft had crashed. In fact, it had the dimensions of a small lake.

The sentinel tree that bordered this pool trailed its long leaves only in the shallows of the pool’s margin, not out over the center.

Why hadn’t she noticed before? All of the pools they had passed recently were at least of this size, the trees all as proportionately dwindled in stature as the one she leaned against now. Looking westward, she saw the silhouettes of far fewer trees etched into the lavender sky, than she had seen at twilight only a few days past. The change had occurred so gradually, so imperceptibly, that it was only now apparent to her.

“Bracero!” she called.

The lithe Cathadonian, who had long since learned his name, dropped gracefully from the tree and sat inches away from her.

“We’re approaching the ocean, aren’t we? Is that why you’ve been lagging? Does that have something to do with it?”

Bracero looked at her. His stare attempted both to answer her and to comprehend whatever it was compelling her toward the sea. Maria Jill Ian could read these things in the creature’s face.

“Let me try to explain,” she said. “I’m going toward your great ocean because Arthur, Nathan Fischelson, and I were trying to reach it when something happened to us. Second, I’m going there because all life on Earth, my own planet, arose in the seas. Do you understand, Bracero? That cellular memory is all I have left of home, a little planet in this spiral arm, ninety light-years distant.

“To me, your ocean represents ours.

“That must be how it is. And our oceans whisper to me across the light-years—with the surf noises of Earth, the seething of our species’ spawning place.”

Maria Jill Ian put her hand to her face. What she had just spoken filled her with an indefinable fear of the cosmos—of its infinite capacity to awe, to stagger, to overwhelm.

“And third,” she said finally, “your ocean draws me on because it lies there, to the west…”

I’m afraid. This time is like the other, when I awoke and saw Arthur floating above the dawnlit pool.

But it isn’t dawn, it’s late afternoon, and in our slender willow Bracero hangs suspended with the glazed look and the catatonic rigidity of that last time. But this, this is the fifth day, and he hasn’t eaten or drunk since this violent trance began. His body is incredibly hot.

I’m afraid because the planet seems to be in sympathy with Bracero’s efforts, whatever they are.

Two days ago I deserted Bracero and began walking again, in hopes that he would come out of his trance and follow. Instead, when I reached the one semi-firm passageway between the two lakes west of here, their surfaces were suddenly riven with roaring waterspouts that reared up taller than the sentinel willows on their banks. The waterspouts rained torrents on the isthmus where I hoped to pass.

I had to turn back. When I reached Bracero, he was swinging more violently than ever, rocking feverishly.

I’m afraid because even though he calmed a little after my departure-and-return, all of Cathadonia still seems a part of his effort.

Several times a day a waterspout forms on this lake and on all the lakes that I can see from here. These funnels snarl and pirouette, flashing light and color like giant prisms.

I think perhaps Bracero has enlisted, telepathically, the aid of all his people. From all their individual pools they strain with him in this new enterprise, working through Bracero as if he were the principal unit in their mind link.

I’m afraid because the skies have several times clouded over during the middle of the day, eclipsing Ogre’s Heart and suffusing the world in indigo blackness.

Then the rains fall.

Then the clouds strip themselves away, as in time-lapse sequences, and shred themselves into thin wisps that let the glaring light of Ogre’s Heart pour down again.

Even now I can feel the wind rising, the planet trembling. Bracero seems vexed to nightmare by his own rocking, metronomic ecstasy. I’m afraid, I’m afraid…

On the sixth day the wind was of hurricane force, and Maria Jill Ian heard the voices of Cathadonia’s great ocean calling to her through the gale. She could scarcely hear herself think, but she heard these phantom voices as if they were siren-crooning from the inside of her head.

Astonishingly, Bracero clung with uncanny strength to his branch. Although his head and torso lifted and fell with every gust, it seemed that nothing could shake him loose.

Maria held on to the bole of their willow and kept her eyes closed. Was the world ending? At last she risked being blown to her death; she let go of the tree, pulled off her foil overtunic, stripped it into ragged pieces. With these, she lashed herself to the willow and waited for the storm to end, or for her life to go out of her.

All that day and all that night Cathadonia was riven by merciless tempests.

The great ocean to the west sang hauntingly. Maria Jill Ian had fever visions of gigantic creatures several times Bracero’s size, but otherwise just like him, boiling the seas with their prodigious minds and feeding limitless power into the receptacle and conductor that Bracero had become.

A psychic umbilical from the seas fed the poor creature, kept him alive, channeled energy into his every brain cell.

And all through the sixth day and night the voices persisted.

The seventh day broke clear and cold. Ogre’s Heart showed its wan, sickly crest on the eastern horizon, and the lake surfaces twinkled with muted light.

Maria unlashed herself and slid down the tree to the wet ground. She slept. She awoke to find Bracero in her lap, the first time he had permitted her to touch him—although he had often come achingly close. His body was rubbery and frail. His eyes were narrow and strange. Nothing about him seemed familiar. Still, she stroked his dry flesh and spoke to him a string of soothing nonsense words.

Together they waited.

At last, far away to the west, she saw a rounded shape rising over the horizon, looming up as if to intercept Ogre’s Heart on its afternoon descent. The shape, a planet, cleared Cathadonia’s edge and floated up into the sky like a brown and crustily wrinkled balloon.

It was Earth.

She knew at once it was Earth. She knew despite the fact that its atmosphere had been heated up, boiled off, and ripped away in the colossal psychokinetic furnace of Bracero’s people’s minds. It was a lifeless, battered shell that floated out there now, not an ocean upon it.

Maybe they had brought it to her in hopes that she would rest satisfied with the gift and leave off her assault on the great ocean. They had dislodged Earth from its orbit, hurled it into the continuum of probeships and nothingness, and drawn it through that surreal vacancy to Cathadonia.

Now, for the first time since the creation of its solar system, Cathadonia had a moon.

Bracero is dead. He brought me my planet out of love, I’m sure of it. How do I bear up under this guilt? Tomorrow I walk west again…

Love or vengeance. Which of these prompted Bracero to carry out the will of his people? Maria Jill Ian felt sure it was love. But we, you and I, aware of more substantive factors than this poor Earth woman had at hand, you and I may reach a different conclusion.

The answer, of course, is implicit in the story. Perhaps I ought to stop. Imprudently, I choose to add a sort of epilogue. All stories have sequels, written or unwritten, and I don’t want you going away from this one believing it solely a love story with a monstrously ironic conclusion. I’m interested in human as well as alien motivation, and you don’t want to believe that all of humankind died as the result of an incomprehensible force, a force superior in kind and in quality to our own technological achievements.

Very well. It wasn’t so.

Although Earth was still officially the homeworld of our species, men had not lived there in great numbers for several centuries. The entire planet had become a sanctuary, a preserve seeded back into wilderness, and perhaps only a thousand human beings lived there as wardens, keepers, physicians, gardeners, biologists, ecological experts. Men and women of goodwill.

All of them died, every one of them. Nearly twice as many human beings as (if you’ll pardon the expression) squiddles who were slaughtered by the crewmen of the Golden.

It didn’t take men long to discover what had happened to their world, the home of the primeval oceans in which we had spawned. The probeship Nobel returned from the Magellanic Clouds and found a double planet where there had once been only Cathadonia. They attempted radio contact with Fischelson and the lans. Nothing. Well away from this puzzling twin system they hovered, mulling over ludicrous stratagems. After a time, they left.

In other vessels men came back.

They bombarded Cathadonia with nukes of every variety, concentrating on “The Sea of Stagnation.” Then they swept the atmosphere clean of radiation and permitted men to go down to the surface.

Of course, they never found Maria Jill Ian, nor the apocryphal log from which you have just read.

How could they? Cathadonia now had tides—colossal, remorseless tides—that swept back and forth across her watery surface with cruel, eroding regularity. To find Maria would have required a miracle. But a legend grew up around her and the two men aboard her descentcraft, the legend you have just read, and almost everyone believed this legend to be true.

Worldshapers came.

In a hundred years they turned our runaway Earth into a paradise; restored to it an atmosphere, mountains, streams, lakes, greenery, everything but oceans; stocked it with every manner of beautiful and awesome beast from the colony worlds. Cathadonia and Earth, the most breathtaking double planet in the universe. When visitors began coming, hotels were built amid the landscaped gardens of our erstwhile spawning place, and people rose early in the morning to watch Ogre’s Heart turn the seas of Cathadonia— across three hundred thousand kilometers of space—into mother-of-pearl mirrors.

Eventually, on Cathadonia, the downed descentcraft was recovered.

Men speculated. The legend surrounding Fischelson and the lans took on a mystical quality.

This could not last.

Someone, some enterprising soul, developed the idea of retracing the route Maria Jill Ian had traversed during her abortive “odyssey” and of flying tourists over it in a skimmercraft piloted by a glib well-briefed guide. The idea caught on. Recorded voices now detailed every step of Maria and her Cathadonian sidekick.

” ‘Men are hardy creatures,’ ” the recordings mimicked in their never-varying commentary. ” ‘Men are the ultimate vermin, Maria, as indefatigable as cockroaches.’ “

Everyone aboard the skimmercrafts nodded sagely at the profundity of these observations.

No one ever asked for his money back.

Barefooted, trailing her spear, Theleh crosses the gorge bottom. A rag at the point of her spear, blue and tatter-tipped, whips about in the wind like a sliced iguabi tongue. There are fewer iguabi on Hand than there used to be, and Theleh drags her spear because she has no real expectation of a sighting. Neither does she wish to take herself terribly far from the cliffs, where, at least, water and food are available, and she may benefit from the comforting presence—if not the company—of her few remaining fellows.

Then, a hundred strides from her across the crazed red surface of the gorge, Theleh sees a vigorously growing effigy of Verlis. Stunned, she halts and shields her eyes.

Verlis the Maker has been dead nine turnings of Hond, three sheddings. A long time, it seems. His effigy makes a rustling sound and waves about dryly in the wind, a stalk of stubborn vegetation where vegetation ought not to be. Theleh drops her hand. She resumes walking, a hundred swift thoughtful strides. Then she stops in front of this crippled parody of her mentor and stares at its familiar mummy face. In the lovelorn desert wind the face nods at her blankly, wholly unaware of the cruelty of its imperfection.

THE DAY BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

Ursula K. Le Guin

He did not look happy, but he was laughing, and saying some-:: thing to her. The sound of his voice made her cry, and she reached out to catch hold of his hand, but she did not stop, quite. She could not stop. “Oh, Taviri,” she said, “it’s just on there!”. The queer sweet smell of the white weeds was heavy as she went` on. There were thorns, tangles underfoot, there were slopes.’ pits. She feared to fall…she stopped.

Sun, bright morning-glare, straight in the eyes, relentless.

She had forgotten to pull the blind last night. She turned her back. on the sun, but the right side wasn’t comfortable. No use. Day.

She sighed twice, sat up, got her legs over the edge of the bed,; and sat hunched in her nightdress looking down at her feet.

The toes, compressed by a lifetime of cheap shoes, we almost square where they touched each other, and bulged out’ above in corns; the nails were discolored and shapeless. Between the knoblike ankle bones ran fine, dry wrinkles. The brief little plain at the base of the toes had kept its delicacy, but the skin was the color of mud, and knotted veins crossed the instep. Disgusting. Sad, depressing. Mean. Pitiful. She tried on all the’ words, and they all fit, like hideous little hats. Hideous: yes, that one too. To look at oneself and find it hideous, what a job! But” then, when she hadn’t been hideous, had she sat around and-, stared at herself like this? Not much! A proper body’s not an: object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it’s just you, yourself. Only when it’s no longer you, but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it. Is it in good shape? Will it do? Will it last?

“Who cares?” said Laia fiercely, and stood up.

It made her giddy to stand up suddenly. She had to put out her hand to the bed table, for she dreaded falling. At that she thought` of reaching out to Taviri, in the dream.

What had he said? She could not remember. She was not sure if she had even touched his hand. She frowned, trying to force’ memory. It had been so long since she had dreamed about Taviri; and now not even to remember what he had said!

It was gone, it was gone. She stood there hunched in her nightdress, frowning, one hand on the bed table. How long was it since she had thought of him-let alone dreamed of him-even, thought of him, as “Taviri”? How long since she had said his name?

Asieo said. When Asieo and I were in prison in the North. Before I met Asieo. Asieo’s theory of reciprocity. Oh yes, she talked about him, talked about him too much no doubt, maundered, dragged him in. But as “Asieo,” the last name, the public man. The private man was gone, utterly gone. There were so few left who had even known him. They had all used to be in jail. One laughed about it on those days, all the friends in all the jails. But they weren’t even there, these days. They were in the prison cemeteries. Or in the common graves.

“Oh, oh my dear,” Laia said out loud, and she sank down onto the bed again because she could not stand up under the remembrance of those first weeks in the Fort, in the cell, those first weeks of the nine years in the Fort in Drio, in the cell, those first weeks after they told her that Asieo had been killed in the fighting in Capitol Square and had been buried with the Fourteen Hundred in the lime-ditches behind Oring Gate. In the cell. Her hands fell into the old position on her lap, the left clenched and locked inside the grip of the right, the right thumb working back and forth a little pressing and rubbing on the knuckle of the left first finger. Hours, days, nights. She had thought of them all, each one, each one of the fourteen hundred, how they lay, how the quicklime worked on the flesh, how the bones touched in the burning dark. Who touched him? How did the slender bones of the hand lie now? Hours, years.

“Taviri, I have never forgotten you!” she whispered, and the stupidity of it brought her back to morning-light and the rumpled bed. Of course she hadn’t forgotten him. These things go without saying between husband and wife. There were her ugly old feet flat on the floor again, just as before. She had got nowhere at all, she had gone in a circle. She stood up with a grunt of effort and disapproval, and went to the closet for her dressing gown.

The young people went about the halls of the House in becoming immodesty, but she was too old for that. She didn’t want to spoil some young man’s breakfast with the sight of her. Besides, they had grown up in the principle of freedom of dress and sex and all the rest, and she hadn’t. All she had done was invent it. It’s not the same.

Like speaking of Asieo as “my husband.” They winced. The word she should use as a good Odonian, of course, was “partner.” But why the hell did she have to be a good Odonian?

She shuffled down the hall to the bathrooms. Mairo was there, washing her hair in a lavatory. Laia looked at the long, sleek, wet hank with admiration. She got out of the House so seldom now that she didn’t know when she had last seen a respectably shaven scalp, but still the sight of a full head of hair gave her pleasure, vigorous pleasure. How many times had she been jeered at, Longhair, Longhair, had her hair pulled by policemen or young y toughs, had her hair shaved off down to the scalp by a grinning soldier at each new prison? And then had grown it all over again, through the fuzz, to the frizz, to the curls, to the mane…In the old days. For God’s love, couldn’t she think of anything today but the old days?

Dressed, her bed made, she went down to commons. It was a good breakfast, but she had never got her appetite back since the damned stroke. She drank two cups of herb tea, but couldn’t finish the piece of fruit she had taken. How she had craved fruit as a child, badly enough to steal it; and in the Forth for God’s love stop it! She smiled and replied to the greetings and friendly .j inquiries of the other breakfasters and big Aevi who was serving the counter this morning. It was he who had tempted her with the peach, “Look at this, I’ve been saving it for you,” and how’ could she refuse? Anyway she had always loved fruit, and never got enough; once when she was six or seven she had stolen a j piece off a vendor’s cart in River Street. But it was hard to eat when everyone was talking so excitedly. There was news from Thu, real news. She was inclined to discount it at first, being j wary of enthusiasms, but after she had read the article in the paper, and read between the lines of it, she thought, with a strange kind of certainty, deep but cold, Why, this is it; it has come. And in Thu, not here. Thu will break before this country does; the Revolution will first prevail there. As if that mattered! There will be no more nations. And yet it did matter somehow, it made her a little cold and sad-envious, in fact. Of all the infinite stupidities. She did not join the talk much, and soon got up to go back to her room feeling sorry for herself. She could not share their excitement. She was out of it, really out of it. It’s not easy, she said to herself in justification, laboriously climbing the stairs, to accept being out of it when you’ve been in it, in the center of it, for fifty years. Oh for God’s love. Whining!

She got the stairs and the self-pity behind her, entering her room. It was a good room, and it was good to be by herself. It was a great relief. Even if it wasn’t strictly fair. Some of the kids in the attics were living five to a room no bigger than this. There were always more people wanting to live in an Odonian House than could be properly accommodated. She had this big room all to herself only because she was an old woman who had had a stroke. And maybe because she was Odo. If she hadn’t been Odo, but merely the old woman with a stroke, would she have had it? Very Rely. After all who the hell wanted to room with a drooling old woman? But it was hard to be sure. Favoritism, elitism, leader-worship, they crept back and cropped out everywhere. But she had never hoped to see them eradicated in her lifetime, in one generation; only Time works the great changes. Meanwhile this was a nice, large, sunny room, proper for a drooling old woman who had started a world revolution.

Her secretary would be coming in an hour to help her dispatch the day’s work. She shuffled over to the desk, a beautiful, big piece, a present from the Nio Cabinetmakers’ Syndicate because somebody had heard her remark once that the only piece of furniture she had ever really longed for was a desk with drawers and enough room on top…damn, the top was practically covered with papers with notes clipped to them, mostly in Noi’s small clear handwriting: Urgent. —Northern Provinces. —Consult w/ R.T.?

Her own handwriting had never been the same since Asieo’s death. It was odd, when you thought about it. After all, within five years after his death she had written the whole Analogy. And there were those letters, which the tall guard with the watery grey eyes, what was his name, never mind, had smuggled out of the Fort for her for two years. The Prison Letters they called them now, there were a dozen different editions of them. All that stuff, the letters which people kept telling her were so full of “spiritual strength”-which probably meant she had been lying herself blue in the face when she wrote them, trying to keep her spirits up-and the Analogy which was certainly the solidest intellectual work she had ever done, all of that had been written in the Fort in Drio, in the cell, after Asieo’s death. One had to do something, and in the Fort they let one have paper and pens…But it had all been written in the hasty, scribbling hand which she had never felt was hers, not her own like the round, black scrollings of the manuscript of Society Without Government, forty-five years old. Taviri had taken not only her body’s and her heart’s desire to the quicklime with him, but even her good clear handwriting.

But he had left her the revolution.

How brave of you to go on, to work, to write, in prison, after such a defeat for the Movement, after your partner’s death, people had used to say. Damn fools. What else had there been to do? Bravery, courage-what was courage? She had never figured it out. Not fearing, some said. Fearing yet going on; others said. But what could one do but go on? Had one any real: choice, ever?

To die was merely to go on in another direction.

If you wanted to come home you had to keep going on, that was what she meant when she wrote, “True journey is return,”, but it had never been more than an intuition, and she was farther than ever now from bring able to rationalise it. She bent down; too suddenly, so that she grunted a little at the creak in her bones, and began to root in a bottom drawer of the desk. Her hand came to an age-softened folder and drew it out, recognizing it by touch—before sight confirmed: the manuscript of Syndical Organization in Revolutionary Transition. He had printed the title on the folder and written his name under it, Taviri Odo Asieo, IX 741. There was an elegant handwriting, every letter well-formed, bold, and fluent. But he had preferred to use a voice printer. The manuscript was all in voiceprint, and high quality too, hesitancies adjusted and idiosyncrasies of speech normalized. You couldn’t see there how he had said “o” deep in his throat as they did on the North Coast. There was nothing of him there but his, mind. She had nothing of him at all except his name written on. the folder. She hadn’t kept his letters, it was sentimental to keep letters. Besides, she never kept anything. She couldn’t think of anything that she had ever owned for more than a few years, except this ramshackle old body, of course, and she was stuck: with that …

Dualizing again. “She” and “it”. Age and illness made one dualist, made one escapist; the mind insisted, it’s not me, it’s not me. But it was. Maybe the mystics could detach mind from body, she had always rather wistfully envied them the chance, without hope of emulating them. Escape had never been her game. She had sought for freedom here, now, body and soul.

First self-pity, then self-praise, and here she still sat, for God’s love, holding Asieo’s name in her hand, why? Didn’t she know his name without looking it up? What was wrong with her? She raised the folder to her lips and kissed the handwritten name firmly and squarely, replaced the folder in the back of the bottom drawer, shut the drawer, and straightened up in the chair. Her right hand tingled. She scratched it, and then shook it in the air, spitefully. It had never quite got over the stroke. Neither had her right leg, or right eye, or the right corner of her mouth. They were sluggish, inept, they tingled. They made her feel like a robot with a short circuit.

And. time was getting on, Noi would be coming, what had she been doing ever since breakfast?

She got up so hastily that she lurched, and grabbed at the chair back to make sure she did not fall. She went down the hall to the bathroom and looked in the big mirror there. Her grey knot was loose and droopy, she hadn’t done it up well before breakfast. She struggled with it awhile. It was hard to keep her arms up in the air. Amai, running in to piss, stopped and said, “Let me do it!” and knotted it up tight and neat in no time, with her round, strong, pretty fingers, smiling and silent. Amai was twenty, less than a third of Laia’s age. Her parents had both been members of the Movement, one killed in the insurrection of ‘60, the other still recruiting in the South Provinces. Amai had grown up in Odonian Houses, born to the Revolution, a true daughter of anarchy. And so quiet and free and beautiful a child, enough to make you cry when you thought: this is what we worked for, this is what we meant, this is it, here she is, alive, the kindly, lovely future.

Laia Osaieo Odo’s right eye wept several little tears as she stood between the lavatories and the latrines having her hair done up by the daughter she had not borne; but her left eye, the strong one, did not weep, nor did it know what the right eye did.

She thanked Amai and hurried back to her room. She had noticed, in the mirror, a stain on her collar. Peach juice, probably. Damned old dribbler. She didn’t want Noi to come in and find her with drool on the collar.

As the clean shirt went on over her head, she thought, What’s so special about Noi?

She fastened the collar-frogs with her left hand, slowly.

Noi was thirty or so, a slight, muscular fellow with a soft voice and alert dark eyes. That’s what was special about Noi. It was that simple. Good old sex. She had never been drawn to a fair man or a fat one, or the tall fellows with big biceps, never, not even when she was fourteen and fell in love with every passing fart. Dark, spare, and fiery, that was the recipe. Taviri, of course. This boy wasn’t a patch on Taviri for brains, nor even for looks, but there it was: She didn’t want him to see her with dribble on her collar and her hair coming undone.

Her thin, grey hair.

Noi came in, just pausing in the open doorway-my God, she hadn’t even shut the door while changing her shirt!-She looked at him and saw herself. The old woman.

You could brush your hair and change your shirt, or you could wear last week’s shirt and last night’s braids, or you could put on cloth of gold and dust your shaven scalp with diamond powder. None of it would make the slightest difference. The old woman would look a little less, or a little more, grotesque.

One keeps oneself neat out of mere decency, mere sanity, awareness of other people.

And finally even that goes, and one dribbles unashamed.

“Good morning,” the young man said in his gentle voice.

“Hello, Noi.”

No, by God, it was not out of mere decency. Decency be damned. Because the man she had loved, and to whom her age would not have mattered-because he was dead, must she pretend she had no sex? Must she suppress the truth, like a damned puritan authoritarian? Even six months ago, before the stroke, she had made men look at her and like to look at her; and now, though she could give no pleasure, by God she could please herself.

When she was six years old, and Papa’s friend Gadeo used to come by to talk politics with Papa after dinner, she would put on the gold-colored necklace that Mama had found on a trash-heap and brought home for her. It was so short that it always got hidden under her collar where nobody could see it. She liked it that way. She knew she had it on. She sat on the” doorstep and listened to them talk, and knew that she looked nice for Gadeo. He was dark, with white teeth that flashed. Sometimes he called her “pretty Laia.”

“There’s my pretty Laia!” Sixty-six years ago.

“What? My head’s dull. I had a terrible night.” It was true. She had slept even less than usual.

“I was asking if you’d seen the papers this morning.”

She nodded.

“Pleased about Soinehe?”

Soinehe was the province in Thu which had declared its secession from the Thuvian State last night.

He was pleased about it. His white teeth flashed in his dark, alert face. Pretty Laia.

“Yes. And apprehensive.”

“I know. But it’s the real thing, this time. It’s the beginning of the end of the Government in Thu. They haven’t even tried to order troops into Soinehe, you know. It would merely provoke the soldiers into rebellion sooner, and they know it. “

She agreed with him. She herself had felt that certainty. But she could not share his delight. After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory. A real sense of triumph must be preceded by real despair. She had unlearned despair a long time ago. There were no more triumphs. One went on.

“Shall we do those letters today?”

“All right. Which letters?”

“To the people in the North,” he said without impatience.

“In the North?”

“Parheo, Oaidun.”

She had been born in Parheo, the dirty city on the dirty river. She had not come here to the capital till she was twenty-two and ready to bring the Revolution. Though in those days, before she and the others had thought it through, it had been a very green and puerile revolution. Strikes for better wages, representation for women. Votes and wages-Power and Money, for the love of God! Well, one does learn a little, after all, in fifty years.

But then one must forget it all.

“Start with Oaidun,” she said, sitting down in the armchair. Noi was at the desk ready to work. He read out excerpts from the letters she was to answer. She tried to pay attention, and succeeded well enough that she dictated one whole letter and started on another. “Remember that at this stage your brotherhood is vulnerable to the threat of…no, to the danger…to…” She groped till Noi suggested, “The danger of leader worship?”

“All right. And that nothing is so soon corrupted by power-seeking as altruism. No. And that nothing corrupts altruism no. Oh for God’s love you know what I’m trying to say, Noi, you write it. They know it too, it’s just the same old stuff, why can’t they read my books!”

“Touch,” Noi said gently, smiling, citing one of the central Odonian themes.

“All right, but I’m tired of being touched. If you’ll write the letter I’ll sign it, but I can’t bothered with it this morning.” He was looking at her with a little question or concern. She said, irritable, “There is something else I have to do!”

When Noi had gone she sat down at the desk and moved the papers about, pretending to be doing something, because she had been startled, frightened, by the words she had said. She had nothing else to do. She never had had anything else to do. This was her work: her lifework. The speaking tours and the meetings and the streets were out of reach for her now, but she could still write, and that was her work. And anyhow if she had had anything else to do, Noi would have known it; he kept her schedule, and tactfully reminded her of things, like the visit from the foreign students this afternoon.

Oh, damn. She liked the young, and there was always something to learn from a foreigner, but she was tired of new faces, and tired of being on view. She learned from them, but they didn’t learn from her; they had learnt all she had to teach long ago, from her books, from the Movement. They just came to look, as if she were the Great Tower in Rodarred, or the Canyon of the Tulaevea. A phenomenon, a monument. They were awed, adoring. She snarled at them: Think your own thoughts! That’s not anarchism, that’s mere obscurantism.-You don’t think liberty and discipline are incompatible, do you?-They accepted their tongue lashing meekly as children, gratefully, as if she were some kind of All-Mother, the idol of the Big Sheltering Womb. She! She who had mined the shipyards of Seissero, and had cursed Premier Inoilte to his face in front of a crowd of seven thousand, telling him he would have cut off his own balls and had them bronzed and sold as souvenirs, if he thought there was any profit in it-she who had screeched, and swom, and kicked’ policemen, and spat at priests, and pissed in public on the big brass plaque in Capitol Square that said HERE WAS FOUNDED TP SOVEREIGN NATION STATE OF A-IO ETC Em pssssssss to all that!:. And now she was everybody’s grandmama, the dear old; lady, the sweet old monument, come worship at the womb. The fire’s out, boys, it’s safe to come up close.

“No, I won’t,” Lama said out loud. “I will not.” She was not self-conscious about talking to herself, because she always had talked to herself. “Laia’s invisible audience,” Taviri had used to say, as she went through the room muttering. “You needn’t come, I won’t be here,” she told the invisible audience now. She had just decided what it was she had to do. She had to go out. To go into the streets.

It was inconsiderate to disappoint the foreign students. It was erratic, typically senile. It was un-Odonian. Pssssss to all that. What was the good working for freedom all your life and ending up without any freedom at all? She would go out for a walk.

“What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice. “

On the way downstairs she decided, scowling, to stay and see the foreign students. But then she would go out.

They were very young students, very earnest: doe-eyed, shaggy, charming creatures from the Western Hemisphere, Benbili and the Kingdom of Mand, the girls in white trousers, the boys in long kilts, warlike and archaic. They spoke of their hopes. “We in Mand are so very far from the Revolution that maybe we are near it,” said one of the girls, wistful and smiling: “The Circle of Life!” and she showed the extremes meeting, in the circle of her slender, dark-skinned fingers. Amai and Aevi served them white wine and brown bread, the hospitality of the House. But the visitors, unpresumptuous, all rose to take their leave after barely half an hour. “No, no,-no,” Laia said, “stay here, talk with Aevi and Amai. It’s just that I get stiff sitting down, you see, I have to change about. It has been so good to meet you, will you come back to see me, my little brothers and sisters, soon?” For her heart went out to them, and theirs to her, and she exchanged kisses all round, laughing, delighted by the dark young cheeks, the affectionate eyes, the scented hair, before she shuffled off. She was really a little tired, but to go up and take a nap would be a defeat. She had wanted to go out. She would go out. She had not been alone outdoors since when? Since winter before the stroke. No wonder she was getting morbid. It had been a regular jail sentence. Outside, the streets, that’s where she lived.

She went quietly out the side door of the House, past the vegetable patch, to the street. The narrow strip of sour city dirt had been beautifully gardened and was producing a fine crop of beans and ceea, but Laia’s eye for farming was unenlightened. Of course it had been clear that anarchist communities, even in the time of transition, must work towards optimal self-support, but how that was to be managed in the way of actual dirt and plants wasn’t her business. There were farmers and agronomists for that. Her job was the streets, the noisy, stinking streets of stone, where she had grown up and lived all her life, except for the fifteen years in prison. .

She looked up fondly at the facade of the House. That it had been built as a bank gave peculiar satisfaction to its present occupants. They kept their sacks of meal in the bombproof money vault, and aged their cider in kegs in safe-deposit boxes. Over the fussy columns that faced the street, carved letters still read, “NATIONAL INVESTORS AND GRAIN FACTORS BANKING ASSOCIATION.” The Movement was not strong on names. They had no flag. Slogans came and went as the need did. There was always the Circle of Life to scratch on walls and pavements where Authority would have to see it. But when it came to names they were indifferent, accepting and ignoring whatever they got called, afraid of being pinned down and pinned in, unafraid of being absurd. So this best known and second oldest of all the cooperative Houses had no name except The Bank.

It faced on a wide and quiet street, but only a block away began the Temeba, an open market, once famous as a center for blackmarket psychogenics and teratogenics, now reduced to vegetables, secondhand clothes, and miserable sideshows. Its crapulous vitality was gone, leaving only half-paralysed alcoholics, addicts, cripples, hucksters, and fifth-rate whores, pawnshops, gambling dens, fortunetellers, body sculptors, and cheap hotels. Laia turned to the Temeba as water seeks its level.

She had never feared or despised the city. It was her country. There would not be slums like this, if the Revolution prevailed. But there would be misery. There would always be misery, waste, cruelty. She had never pretended to be changing the human condition, to be Mama taking tragedy away from the children so they won’t hurt themselves. Anything but. So long as people were free to choose, if they chose to drink flybane and live in sewers, it was their business. Just so long as it wasn’t the business of Business, the source of profit and the means of power for other people. She had felt all that before she knew anything; before she wrote the first pamphlet, before she left Parheo, before she knew what “capital” meant, before she’d been farther than River Street where she played roll aggie kneeling on scabby knees on the pavement with the other six-year-olds. She had known it: that she, and the other kids, and her parents, and their parents, and the drunks and whores and all of River Street, was at the bottom of something-was the foundation, the reality, the source.

But will you drag civilization down into the mud? cried the shocked decent people, later on, and she had tried for years to explain to them that if all you had was mud, then if you were God you made it into human beings, and if you were human you tried to make it into houses where human beings could live. But nobody who thought he was better than mud would understand. Now, water seeking its level, mud to mud, Laia shuffled through the foul, noisy street, and all the ugly weakness of her old age was at home. The sleepy whores, their lacquered hair-arrangements dilapidated and askew, the one-eyed woman wearily yelling her vegetables to sell, the halfwit beggar slapping flies, these were her countrywomen. They looked like her, they were all sad, disgusting, mean, pitiful, hideous. They were her sisters, her own people.

She did not feel very well. It had been a long time since she had walked so far, four or five blocks, by herself, in the noise and push and stinking summer heat of the streets. She had wanted to get to Koly Park, the triangle of scruffy grass at the end of the Temeba, and sit there, to see see what it was like to sit there and be old; but it was too far. If she didn’t turn back now, she might get a dizzy spell, and she had a dread of falling down, falling down and having to lie there and look up at the people come to stare at the old woman in a fit. She turned and started home, frowning with effort and self-disgust. She could feel her face very red, and a swimming feeling came and went in her ears. It got a bit much, she was really afraid she might keel over. She saw a doorstep in the shade and made for it, let herself down cautiously, sat, sighed.

Nearby was a fruit-seller, sitting silent behind his dusty, withered stock. People went by. Nobody bought from him. Nobody looked at her. Odo, who was Odo? Famous revolutionary, author of Community, The Analogy, etc. etc. She, who was she? An old woman with grey hair and a red face sitting on a dirty doorstep in a slum, muttering to herself.

True? Was that she? Certainly it was what anybody passing her saw. But was it she, herself, any more than the famous revolutionary, etc., was? No. It was not. But who was she, then?

The one who loved Taviri.

Yes. True enough. But not enough. That was gone; he had been dead so long.

“Who am I?” Laia muttered to her invisible audience, and they knew the answer and told it to her with one voice. She was the little girl with scabby knees, sitting on the doorstep staring down through the dirty golden haze of River Street in the heat of late summer, the six-year-old, the sixteen-year-old, the fierce, cross, dream-ridden girl, untouched, untouchable. She was herself. Indeed she had been the tireless worker and thinker, but a blood clot in a vein had taken that woman away from her. Indeed she had been the lover, the swimmer in the midst of life, but Taviri, dying, had taken that woman away with him. There was nothing left, really, but the foundations. She had come home; she had never left home. “True voyage is return. ” Dust and mud and a doorstep in the slums. And beyond, at the far end of the street, the field full of tall dry weeds blowing in the wind as night came.

“Laia! What are you doing here? Are you all right?”

One of the people from the House, of course, a nice woman, a bit fanatical and always talking. Laia could not remember her name though she had known her for years. She let herself be taken home, the woman talking all the way. In the big cool common room (once occupied by tellers counting money behind polished counters supervised by armed guards) Laia sat down in a chair. She was unable just as yet to face climbing the stairs, though she would have liked to be alone. The woman kept on talking, and other excited people came in. It appeared that a demonstration was being planned. Events in Thu were moving so fast that the mood here had caught fire, and something must be done. Day after tomorrow, no, tomorrow, there was to be a march, a big one, from Old Town to Capitol Square-the old route. “Another Ninth Month Uprising,” said a young man, fiery and laughing, glancing at Laia. He had not even been born at the time of the Ninth Month Uprising, it was all history to him.

Now he wanted to make some history of his own. The room had filled up. A general meeting would be held here, tomorrow, at eight in the morning. `You must talk, Laia.”

“Tomorrow? Oh, I won’t be here tomorrow,” she said brusquely. Whoever had asked her smiled, another one laughed, though Amai glanced round at her with a puzzled look. They went on talking and shouting. The Revolution. What on earth had made her say that? What a thing to say on the eve of the Revolution, even if it was true.

She waited her time, managed to get up and, for all her clumsiness, to slip away unnoticed among the people busy with their planning and excitement. She got to the hall, to the stairs, and began to climb them one by one. “The general strike,” a voice, two voices, ten voices were saying in the room below, behind her. “The general strike,” Laia muttered, resting for a moment on the landing. Above, ahead, in her room, what awaited her: The private stroke. That was mildly funny. She started up the second flight of stairs, one by one, one leg at a time, like a small child. She was dizzy, but she was no longer afraid to fall. On ahead, on there, the dry white flowers nodded and whispered in the open fields of evening. Seventy-two years and she had never had time to learn what they were called.

SCHWARTZ BETWEEN THE GALAXIES

Robert Silverberg

This much is reality: Schwartz sits comfortably cocooned — passive, suspended — in a first-class passenger rack aboard a Japan Air Lines rocket, nine kilometers above the Coral Sea. And this much is fantasy: the same Schwartz has passage on a shining starship gliding silkily through the interstellar depths, en route at nine times the velocity of light from Betelgeuse IX to Rigel XXI, or maybe from Andromeda to the Lesser Magellanic.

There are no starships. Probably there never will be any. Here we are, a dozen decades after the flight of Apollo 11, and no human being goes anywhere except back and forth across the face of the little O, the Earth, for the planets are barren and the stars are beyond reach. That little O is too small for Schwartz. Too often it glazes for him; it turns to a nugget of dead porcelain; and lately he has formed the habit, when the world glazes, of taking refuge aboard that interstellar ship. So what JAL Flight 411 holds is merely his physical self, his shell, occupying a costly private cubicle on a slender 200-passenger vessel which, leaving Buenos Aires shortly after breakfast, has sliced westward along the Tropic of Capricorn for a couple of hours and will soon be landing at Papua’s Torms Skyport. But his consciousness, his anima, the essential Schwartzness of him, soars between the galaxies.

What a starship it is! How marvelous its myriad passengers! Down its crowded corridors swarms a vast gaudy heterogeny of galactic creatures, natives of the worlds of Capella, Arcturus, Altair, Canopus, Polaris, Antares, beings both intelligent and articulate, methane-breathing or nitrogen-breathing or argon-breathing, spiny-skinned or skinless, many-armed or many-headed or altogether incorporeal, each a product of a distinct and distinctly unique and alien cultural heritage. Among these varied folk moves Schwartz, that superstar of anthropologists, that true heir to Kroeber and Morgan and Malinowski and Mead, delightedly devouring their delicious diversity. Whereas aboard this prosaic rocket, this planet-locked stratosphere needle, one cannot tell the Canadians from the Portuguese, the Portuguese from the Romanians, the Romanians from the Irish, unless they open their mouths, and sometimes not always then.

In his reveries he confers with creatures from the Fomalhaut system about digital circumcision; he tapes the melodies of the Archernarnian eye-flute; he learns of the sneeze-magic of Acrux, the sleep-ecstasies of Aldebaran, the asteroid-sculptors of Thuban. Then a smiling JAL stewardess parts the curtain of his cubicle and peers in at him, jolting him from one reality to another. She is blue-eyed, frizzy-haired, straight-nosed, thin-lipped, bronze-skinned, a genetic mishmash, your standard twenty-first-century-model mongrel human, perhaps Melanesian-Swedish-Turkish-Bolivian, perhaps Polish-Berber-Tatar-Welsh. Cheap intercontinental transit has done its deadly work: all Earth is a crucible, all the gene pools have melted into one indistinguishable fluid. Schwartz wonders about the recessivity of those blue eyes and arrives at no satisfactory solution. She is beautiful, at any rate. Her name is Dawn — o sweet neutral nonculture-bound cognomen! — and they have played at a flirtation, he and she, Dawn and Schwartz, at occasional moments of this short flight. Twinkling, she says softly, “We’re getting ready for our landing, Dr. Schwartz. Are your restrictors in polarity?”

“I never unfastened them.”

“Good.” The blue eyes, warm, interested, meet his. “I have a layover in Papua tonight,” she says.

“That’s nice.”

“Let’s have a drink while we’re waiting for them to unload the baggage,” she suggests with cheerful bluntness. “All right?”

“I suppose,” he says casually. “Why not?” Her availability bores him: somehow he enjoys the obsolete pleasures of the chase. Once such easiness in a woman like this would have excited him, but no longer. Schwartz is forty years old, tall, square-shouldered, sturdy, a showcase for the peasant genes of his rugged Irish mother. His close-cropped black hair is flecked with gray; many women find that interesting. One rarely sees gray hair now. He dresses simply but well, in sandals and Socratic tunic. Predictably, his physical attractiveness, both within his domestic sixness and without, has increased with his professional success. He is confident, sure of his powers, and he radiates an infectious assurance. This month alone eighty million people have heard his lectures.

She picks up the faint weariness in his voice. “You don’t sound eager. Not interested?”

“Hardly that.”

“What’s wrong, then? Feeling sub, Professor?”

Schwartz shrugs. “Dreadfully sub. Body like dry bone. Mind like dead ashes.” He smiles, full force depriving his words of all their weight.

She registers mock anguish. “That sounds bad,” she says. “That sounds awful!”

“I’m only quoting Chuang Tzu. Pay no attention to me. Actually, I feel fine, just a little stale.”

“Too many skyports?”

He nods. “Too much of a sameness wherever I go.” He thinks of a star-bright, top-deck bubble dome where three boneless Spicans do a twining dance of propitiation to while away the slow hours of nine-light travel. “I’ll be all right,” he tells her. “It’s a date.”

Her hybrid face flows with relief and anticipation. “See you in Papua,” she tells him, and winks, and moves jauntily down the aisle.

Papua. By cocktail time Schwartz will be in Port Moresby. Tonight he lectures at the University of Papua; yesterday it was Montevideo; the day after tomorrow it will be Bangkok. He is making the grand academic circuit. This is his year: he is very big, suddenly, in anthropological circles, since the publication of The Mask Beneath the Skin. From continent to continent he flashes, sharing his wisdom, Monday in Montreal, Tuesday Veracruz, Wednesday Montevideo, Thursday — Thursday? He crossed the international date line this morning, and he does not remember whether he has entered Thursday or Tuesday, though yesterday was surely Wednesday. Schwartz is certain only that this is July and the year is 2083, and there are moments when he is not even sure of that.

The JAL rocket enters the final phase of its landward plunge. Papua waits, sleek, vitrescent. The world has a glassy sheen again. He lets his spirit drift happily back to the gleaming starship making its swift way across the whirling constellations.

He found himself in the starship’s busy lower-deck lounge, having a drink with his traveling companion, Pitkin, the Yale economist. Why Pitkin, that coarse, florid little man? With all of real and imaginary humanity to choose from, why had his unconscious elected to make him share this fantasy with such a boor?

“Look,” Pitkin said, winking and leering. “There’s your girlfriend.”

The entry-iris had opened and the Antarean not-male had come in.

“Quit it,” Schwartz snapped. “You know there’s no such thing going on.”

“Haven’t you been chasing her for days?”

“She’s not a ‘her,’” Schwartz said.

Pitkin guffawed. “Such precision! Such scholarship! She’s not a her, he says!” He gave Schwartz a broad nudge. “To you she’s a she, friend, and don’t try to kid me.”

Schwartz had to admit there was some justice to Pitkin’s vulgar innuendos. He did find the Antarean — a slim yellow-eyed ebony-skinned upright humanoid, sinuous and glossy, with tapering elongated limbs and a seal’s fluid grace — powerfully attractive. Nor could he help thinking of the Antarean as feminine. That attitude was hopelessly culture-bound and species-bound, he knew; in fact the alien had cautioned him that terrestrial sexual distinctions were irrelevant in the Antares system, that if Schwartz insisted on thinking of “her” in genders, “she” could be considered only the negative of male, with no implication of biological femaleness.

He said patiently, “I’ve told you. The Antarean’s neither male nor female as we understand those concepts. If we happen to perceive the Antarean as feminine, that’s the result of our own cultural conditioning. If you want to believe that my interest in this being is sexual, go ahead, but I assure you that it’s purely professional.”

“Sure. You’re only studying her.”

“In a sense I am. And she’s studying me. On her native world she has the status-frame of ‘watcher-of-life,’ which seems to translate into the Antarean equivalent of an anthropologist.”

“How lovely for you both. She’s your first alien and you’re her first Jew.”

“Stop calling her her,” Schwartz hissed.

“But you’ve been doing it!”

Schwartz closed his eyes. “My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.”

“Next trip travel with your grandmother instead.”

“Go away,” Schwartz said. “Stop lousing up my fantasies. Go peddle your dismal science somewhere else. You see those Delta Aurigans over there? Climb into their bottle and tell them all about the Gross Global Product.” Schwartz smiled at the Antarean, who had purchased a drink, something that glittered an iridescent blue, and was approaching them. “Go on,” Schwartz murmured.

“Don’t worry,” Pitkin said. “I wouldn’t want to crowd you.” He vanished into the motley crowd.

The Antarean said, “The Capellans are dancing, Schwartz.”

“I’d like to see that. Too damned noisy in here anyway.” Schwartz stared into the alien’s vertical-slitted citreous eyes, Cat’s eyes, he thought. Panther’s eyes. The Antarean’s gaze was focused, as usual, on Schwartz’s mouth: other worlds, other customs. He felt a strange, unsettling trenior of desire. Desire for what, though? It was a sensation of pure need, nonspecific, certainly nonsexual. “I think I’ll take a look. Will you come with me?”

The Papua rocket has landed. Schwartz, leaning across the narrow table in the skyport’s lounge, says to the stewardess in a low, intense tone, “My life was in crisis. All my values were becoming meaningless. I was discovering that my chosen profession was empty, foolish, as useless as — playing chess.”

“How awful,” Dawn whispers gently.

“You can see why. You go all over the world, you see a thousand skyports a year. Everything the same everywhere. The same clothes, the same slang, the same magazines, the same styles of architecture and decor.”

“Yes.”

“International homogeneity. Worldwide uniformity. Can you understand what it’s like to be an anthropologist in a world where there are no primitives left, Dawn? Here we sit on the island of Papua — you know, headhunters, animism, body-paint, the drums at sunset, the bone through the nose — and look at the Papuans in their business robes all around us. Listen to them exchanging stock-market tips, talking baseball, recommending restaurants in Paris and barbers in Johannesburg. It’s no different anywhere else. In a single century we’ve transformed the planet into one huge sophisticated plastic western industrial state. The TV relay satellites, the two-hour intercontinental rockets, the breakdown of religious exclusivism and genetic taboo have mongrelized every culture, don’t you see? You visit the Zuni and they have plastic African masks on the wall. You visit the Bushmen and they have Japanese-made Hopi-motif ashtrays. It’s all just so much interior decoration, and underneath the carefully selected primitive motifs there’s the same universal pseudo-American sensibility, whether you’re in the Kalahari or the Amazon rain forest. Do you comprehend what’s happened, Dawn?”

“It’s such a terrible loss,” she says sadly. She is trying very hard to be sympathetic, but he senses she is waiting for him to finish his sermon and invite her to share his hotel room. He will invite her, but there is no stopping him once he has launched into his one great theme.

“Cultural diversity is gone from the world,” he says. “Religion is dead; true poetry is dead; inventiveness is dead; individuality is dead. Poetry. Listen to this.” In a high monotone he chants:

In beauty I walk

With beauty before me I walk

With beauty behind me I walk

With beauty above me I walk

With beauty above and about me I walk

It is finished in beauty

It is finished in beauty

He has begun to perspire heavily. His chanting has created an odd sphere of silence in his immediate vicinity; heads are turning, eyes are squinting. “Navaho,” he says. “The Night Way, a nine-day chant, a vision, a spell. Where are the Navaho now? Go to Arizona and they’ll chant for you, yes, for a price, but they don’t know what the words mean, and chances are the singers are only one-fourth Navaho, or one-eighth, or maybe just Hopi hired to dress in Navaho costumes, because the real Navaho, if any are left, are off in Mexico City hired to be Aztecs. So much is gone. Listen.” He chants again, more piercingly even than before:

The animal runs, it passes, it dies. And it is the great cold.

It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.

The bird flies, it passes, it dies. And it is —

“JAL FLIGHT 411 BAGGAGE IS NOW UNLOADING ON CONCOURSE FOUR,” a mighty mechanical voice cries.

— the great cold.

It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.

“JAL FLIGHT 411 BAGGAGE…”

The fish flees, it passes, it dies. And —

“People are staring,” Dawn says uncomfortably.

” — ON CONCOURSE FOUR.”

“Let them stare. Do them some good. That’s a Pygmy chant, from Gabon, in equatorial Africa. Pygmies? There are no more Pygmies. Everybody’s two meters tall. And what do we sing? Listen. Listen.” He gestures fiercely at the cloud of tiny golden loudspeakers floating near the ceiling. A mush of music comes from them: the current popular favorite. Savagely he mouths words: “Star…far…here…near. Playing in every skyport right now, all over the world.” She smiles thinly. Her hand reaches toward his, covers it, presses against the knuckles. He is dizzy. The crowd, the eyes, the music, the drink. The plastic. Everything shines. Porcelain. Porcelain. The planet vitrifies. “Tom?” she asks uneasily. “Is anything the matter?” He laughs, blinks, coughs, shivers. He hears her calling for help, and then he feels his soul swooping outward, toward the galactic blackness.

With the Antarean not-male beside him, Schwartz peered through the viewport, staring in awe and fascination at the seductive vision of the Capellans coiling and recoiling outside the ship. Not all the passengers on this voyage had cozy staterooms like his. The Capellans were too big to come on board, and in any case they preferred never to let themselves be enclosed inside metal walls. They traveled just alongside the starship, basking like slippery whales in the piquant radiations of space. So long as they kept within twenty meters of the hull they would be inside the effective field of the Rabinowitz Drive, which swept ship and contents and associated fellow travelers toward Rigel, or the Lesser Magellanic, or was it one of the Pleiades toward which they were bound at a cool nine lights?

He watched the Capellans moving beyond the shadow of the ship in tracks of shining white. Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, they coiled and swam, and every track was a flash of golden fire. “They have a dangerous beauty,” Schwartz whispered. “Do you hear them calling? I do.”

“What do they say?”

“They say, ‘Come to me, come to me, come to me!’”

“Go to them, then,” said the Antarean simply. “Step through the hatch.”

“And perish?”

“And enter into your next transition. Poor Schwartz! Do you love your present body so?”

“My present body isn’t so bad. Do you think I’m likely to get another one some day?”

“No?”

“No,” Schwartz said. “This one is all I get. Isn’t it that way with you?”

“At the Time of Openings I receive my next housing. That will be fifty years from now. What you see is the fifth form I have been given to wear.”

“Will the next be as beautiful as this?”

“All forms are beautiul,” the Antarean said. “You find me attractive?”

“Of course.”

A slitted wink. A bobbing nod toward the viewport. “As attractive as those?”

Schwartz laughed. “Yes. In a different way.”

Coquettishly the Antarean said, “If I were out there, you would walk through the hatch into space?”

“I might. If they gave me a spacesuit and taught me how to use it.”

“But not otherwise? Suppose I were out there right now. I could live in space five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes. I am there and I say, ‘Come to me, Schwartz, come to me!’ What do you do?”

“I don’t think I’m all that much self-destructive.”

“To die for love, though! To make a transition for the sake of beauty.”

“No. Sorry.”

The Antarean pointed toward the undulating Capellans. “If they asked you, you would go.”

“They are asking me,” he said.

“And you refuse the invitation?”

“So far. So far.”

The Antarean laughed an Antarean laugh, a thick silvery snort. “Our voyage will last many weeks more. One of these days, I think, you will go to them.”

“You were unconscious at least five minutes,” Dawn says. “You gave everyone a scare. Are you sure you ought to go through with tonight’s lecture?”

Nodding, Schwartz says, “I’ll be all right. I’m a little tired, is all. Too many time zones this week.” They stand on the terrace of his hotel room. Night is coming on, already, here in late afternoon: it is midwinter in the Southern Hemisphere, though the fragrance of tropic blossoms perfumes the air. The first few stars have appeared. He has never really known which star is which. That bright one, he thinks, could be Rigel, and that one Sirius, and perhaps this is Deneb over there. And this? Can this be red Antares, in the heart of the Scorpion, or is it only Mars? Because of his collapse at the skyport he has been able to beg off the customary faculty reception and the formal dinner; pleading the need for rest, he has arranged to have a simple snack at his hotel room, a deux. In two hours they will come for him and take him to the University to speak. Dawn watches him closely.

Perhaps she is worried about his health, perhaps she is only waiting for him to make his move toward her. There’s time for all that later, he figures. He would rather talk now. Warming up for the audience he seizes his earlier thread:

“For a long time I didn’t understand what had taken place. I grew up insular, cut off from reality, a New York boy, bright mind and a library card. I read all the anthropological classics, Patterns of Culture and Coming of Age in Samoa and Life of a South African Tribe and the rest, and I dreamed of field trips, collecting myths and grammars and folkways and artifacts and all that, until when I was twenty-five I finally got out into the field and started to discover I had gone into a dead science. We have only one worldwide culture now, with local variants but no basic divergences — there’s nothing primitive left on Earth, and there are no other planets. Not inhabited ones. I can’t go to Mars or Venus or Saturn and study the natives. What natives? And we can’t reach the stas. All I have to work with is Earth. I was thirty years old when the whole thing clicked together for me and I knew I had wasted my life.”

She says, “But surely there was something for you to study on Earth.”

“One culture, rootless and homogeneous. That’s work for a sociologist, not for me. I’m a romantic, I’m an exotic, I want strangeness, difference. Look, we can never have any real perspective on our own time and lives. The sociologists try to attain it, but all they get is a mound of raw indigestible data. Insight comes later — two, five, ten generations later. But one way we’ve always been able to learn about ourselves is by studying alien cultures, studying them completely, and defining ourselves by measuring what they are that we aren’t. The cultures have to be isolated, though. The anthropologist himself corrupts that isolation in the Heisenberg sense when he comes around with his camera and scanners and starts asking questions, but we can compensate more or less, for the inevitable damage a lone observer causes. We can’t compensate when our whole culture collides with another and absorbs and obliterates it. Which we technological-mechanical people now have done everywhere. One day I woke up and saw there were no alien cultures left. Hah! Crushing revelation! Schwartz’s occupation is gone!”

“What did you do?”

“For years I was in an absolute funk. I taught, I studied, I went through the motions, knowing it was all meaningless. All I was doing was looking at records of vanished cultures left by earlier observers and trying to cudgel new meanings. Secondary sources, stale findings: I was an evaluator of dry bones, not a gatherer of evidence. Paleontology. Dinosaurs are interesting, but what do they tell you about the contemporary world and the meaning of its patterns? Dry bones, Dawn, dry bones. Despair. And then a clue. I had this Nigerian student, this Iibo — well, basically an Iibo, but she’s got some Israeli in her and I think Chinese — and we grew very close, she was as close to me as anybody in my own sixness, and I told her my troubles. I’m going to give it up, I said, because it isn’t what I expected it to be. She laughed at me and said, What right do you have to be upset because the world doesn’t live up to your expectations? Reshape your life, Tom; you can’t reshape the world. I said, But how? And she said, Look inward, find the primitive in yourself, see what made you what you are, what made today’s culture what it is, see how these alien streams have flowed together. Nothing’s been lost here, only merged. Which made me think. Which gave me a new way of looking at things. Which sent me on an inward quest. It took me three years to grasp the patterns, to come to an understanding of what our planet has become, and only after I accepted the planet —”

It seems to him that he has been talking forever. Talking. Talking. But he can no longer hear his own voice. There is only a distant buzz.

“After I accepted —” A distant buzz.

“What was I saying?” he asks.

“After you accepted the planet —”

“After I accepted the planet,” he says, “that I could begin —”

Buzz. Buzz.

“That I could begin to accept myself.”

He was drawn toward the Spicans too, not so much for themselves — they were oblique, elliptical characters, self-contained and self-satisfied, hard to approach — as for the apparently psychedelic drug they took in some sacramental way before the beginning of each of their interminable ritual dances. Each time he had watched them take the drug, they had seemingly made a point of extending it toward him, as if inviting him, as if tempting him, before popping it into their mouths. He felt baited; he felt pulled. There were three Spicans on board, slender creatures two and a half meters long, with flexible cylindrical bodies and small stubby limbs. Their skins were reptilian, dry and smooth, deep green with yellow bands, but their eyes were weirdly human, large liquid-brown eyes, sad Levantine eyes, the eyes of unfortunate medieval travelers transformed by enchantment into serpents. Schwartz had spoken with them several times. They understood English well enough — all galactic races did; Schwartz imagined it would become the interstellar lingua franca as it had on Earth — but the construction of their vocal organs was such that they had no way of speaking it, and they relied instead on small translating machines hung around their necks that converted their soft whispered hisses into amber words pulsing across a screen.

Cautiously, the third or fourth time he spoke with them, he expressed polite interest in their drug. They told him it enabled them to make contact with the central forces of the universe. He replied that there were such drugs on Earth, too, and that he used them frequently, that they gave him great insight into the workings of the cosmos. They showed some curiosity, perhaps even intense curiosity: reading their eyes was diticult and the tone of their voices gave no clues. He took his elegant leather-bound drug case from his pouch and showed them what he had: learitonin, psilocerebrin, siddharthin, and acid-57. He described the effects of each and suggested an exchange, any of his for an equivalent dose of the shriveled orange fungoid they nibbled. They conferred. Yes, they said, we will do this. But not now. Not until the proper moment. Schwartz knew better than to ask them when that would be. He thanked them and put his drugs away.

Pitkin, who had watched the interchange from the far side of the lounge, came striding fiercely toward him as the Spicans glided off. “What are you up to now?” he demanded.

“How about minding your own business?” Schwartz said amiably.

“You’re trading pills with these snakes, aren’t you?”

“Let’s call it field research.”

“Research? Research? What are you going to do, trip on that orange stuff of theirs?”

“I might,” Schwartz said. “How do you know what its effects on the human metabolism might be? You could end up blind or paralyzed or crazy or —”

“— or illuminated,” Schwartz said. “Those are the risks one takes in the field. The early anthropologists who unhesitatingly sampled peyote and yage and ololiuqui accepted those risks, and —”

“But those were drugs that humans were using. You have no way of telling how — oh, what’s the use, Schwartz? Research, he calls it. Research.” Pitkin sneered. “Junkie!”

Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. “Economist!”

The house is a decent one tonight, close to three thousand, every seat in the University’s great horseshoe-shaped auditorium taken, and a video relay besides, beaming his lecture to all Papua and half of Indonesia. Schwartz stands on the dais like a demigod under a brilliant no-glare spotlight. Despite his earlier weariness he is in good form now, gestures broad and forceful, eyes commanding, voice deep and resonant, words flowing freely. “Only one planet,” he says, “one small and crowded planet, on which all cultures converge to a drab and depressing sameness. How sad that is! How tiny we make ourselves, when we make ourselves to resemble one another!” He flings his arms upward. “Look to the stars, the unattainable stars! Imagine, if you can, the millions of worlds that orbit those blazing suns beyond the night’s darkness! Speculate with me on other peoples, other ways, other gods. Beings of every imaginable form, alien in appearance but not grotesque, not hideous, for all life is beautiful — beings that breathe gases strange to us, beings of immense size, beings of many limbs or of none, beings to whom death is a divine culmination of existence, beings who never die, beings who bring forth their young a thousand at a time, beings who do not reproduce — all the infinite possibilities of the infinite universe!

“Perhaps on each of those worlds it is as it has become here. One intelligent species, one culture, the eternal convergence. But the many worlds together offer a vast spectrum of variety. And now, share this vision with me! I see a ship voyaging from star to star, a spaceliner of the future, and aboard that ship is a sampling of many species, many cultures, a random scoop out of the galaxy’s fantastic diversity. That ship is like a little cosmos, a small world, enclosed, sealed. How exciting to be aboard it, to encounter in that little compass such richness of cultural variation! Now our own world was once like that starship, a little cosmos, bearing with it all the thousands of Earthborn cultures. Hopi and Eskimo and Aztec and Kwakiutl and Arapesh and Orokolo and all the rest. In the course of our voyage we have come to resemble one another too much, and it has impoverished the lives of all of us, because — ” He falters suddenly. He feels faint, and grasps the sides of the lectern. “Because —” The spotlight, he thinks. In my eyes. Not supposed to glare like that, but it’s blinding. Got to have them move it. “In the course — the course of our voyage — ” What’s happening? Breaking into a sweat, now. Pain in my chest. My heart? Wait, slow up, catch your breath. That light in my eyes—

“Tell me,” Schwartz said earnestly, “what it’s like to know you’ll have ten successive bodies and live more than a thousand years.”

“First tell me,” said the Antarean, “what it’s like to know you’ll live ninety years or less and perish forever.”

Somehow he continues. The pain in his chest grows more intense, he cannot focus his eyes; he believes he will lose consciousness at any moment and may even have lost it already at least once, and yet he continues. Clinging to the lectern, he outlines the program he developed in The Mask Beneath the Skin. A rebirth of tribalism without a revival of ugly nationalism. The quest for a renewed sense of kinship with the past. A sharp reduction in nonessential travel, especially tourism. Heavy taxation of exported artifacts, including films and video shows. An attempt to create independent cultural units on Earth once again while maintaining present levels of economic and political interdependence. Relinquishment of materialistic technological-industrial values. New searches for fundamental meanings. An ethnic revival, before it is too late, among those cultures of mankind that have only recently shed their traditional folkways. (He repeats and embellishes this point particularly, for the benefit of the Papuans before him, the great-grandchildren of cannibals.)

The discomfort and confusion come and go as he unreels his themes. He builds and builds, crying out passionately for an end to the homogenization of Earth, and gradually the physical symptoms leave him, all but a faint vertigo. But a different malaise seizes him as he nears his peroration. His voice becomes, to him, a far-off quacking, meaningless and foolish. He has said all this a thousand times, always to great ovations, but who listens? Who listens? Everything seems hollow tonight, mechanical, absurd. An ethnic revival? Shall these people before him revert to their loincloths and their pig roasts? His starship is a fantasy; his dream of a diverse Earth is mere silliness. What is, will be. And yet he pushes on toward his conclusion. He takes his audience back to that starship, he creates a horde of fanciful beings for them. He completes the metaphor by sketching the structures of half a dozen vanished “primitive” cultures of Earth, he chants the chants of the Navaho, the Gabon Pygmies, the Ashanti, the Mundugumor. It is over. Cascades of applause engulf him. He holds his place until members of the sponsoring committee come to him and help him down: they have perceived his distress. “It’s nothing,” he gasps. “The lights — too bright — ” Dawn is at his side. She hands him a drink, something cool. Two of the sponsors begin to speak of a reception for him in the Green Room. “Fine,” Schwartz says. “Glad to.” Dawn murmurs a protest. He shakes her off. “My obligation,” he tells her. “Meet community leaders. Faculty people. I’m feeling better now. Honestly.” Swaying, trembling, he lets them lead him away.

“A Jew,” the Antarean said. “You call yourself a Jew, but what is this exactly? A clan, a sect, a moiety, a tribe, a nation, what? Can you explain?”

“You understand what a religion is?”

“Of course.”

“Judaism — Jewishness — it’s one of Earth’s major religions.”

“You are therefore a priest?”

“Not at all. I don’t even practice Judaism. But my ancestors did, and therefore I consider myself Jewish, even though —”

“It is an hereditary religion, then,” the Antarean said, “that does not require its members to observe its rites?”

“In a sense,” said Schwartz desperately. “More an hereditary cultural subgroup, actually, evolving out of a common religious outlook no longer relevant.”

“Ah. And the cultural traits of Jewishness that define it and separate you from the majority of humankind are —?”

“Well —” Schwartz hesitated. “There’s a complicated dietary code, a rite of circumcision for newborn males, a rite of passage for male adolescents, a language of scripture, a vernacular language that Jews all around the world more or less understand, and plenty more, including a certain intangible sense of clannishness and certain attitudes, such as a peculiar self-deprecating style of humor —”

“You observe the dietary code? You understand the language of scripture?”

“Not exactly,” Schwartz admitted. “In fact I don’t do anything that’s specifically Jewish except think of myself as a Jew and adopt many of the characteristically Jewish personality modes, which however are not uniquely Jewish any longer — they can be traced among Italians, for example, and to some extent among Greeks. I’m speaking of Italians and Greeks of the late twentieth century, of course. Nowadays —” It was all becoming a terrible muddle. “Nowadays —”

“It would seem,” said the Antarean, “that you are a Jew only because your maternal and paternal gene-givers were Jews, and they —”

“No, not quite. Not my mother, just my father, and he was Jewish only on his father’s side, but even my grandfather never observed the customs, and —”

“I think this has grown too confusing,” said the Antarean. “I withdraw the entire inquiry. Let us speak instead of my own traditions. The Time of Openings, for example, may be understood as —”

In the Green Room some eighty or a hundred distinguished Papuans press toward him, offering congratulations. “Absolutely right,” they say. “A global catastrophe.” “Our last chance to save our culture.” Their skins are chocolate-tinted but their faces betray the genetic mishmash that is their ancestry: perhaps they call themselves Arapesh, Mundugumor, Tchambuli, Mafulu, in the way that he calls himself a Jew, but they have been liberally larded with chromosomes contributed by Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Africans, everything. They dress in International Contemporary. They speak slangy, lively English. Schwartz feels seasick. “You look dazed,” Dawn whispers. He smiles bravely. Body like dry bone. Mind like dead ashes. He is introduced to a tribal chieftain, tall, gray-haired, who looks and speaks like a professor, a lawyer, a banker. What, will these people return to the hills for the ceremony of the yam harvest? Will newborn girl-children be abandoned, cords uncut, skins unwashed, if their fathers do not need more girls? Will boys entering manhood submit to the expensive services of the initiator who scarifies them with the teeth of crocodiles? The crocodiles are gone. The shamans have become stockbrokers.

Suddenly he cannot breathe. “Get me out of here,” Schwartz mutters hoarsely, choking.

Dawn, with stewardess efficiency, chops a path for him through the mob. The sponsors, concerned, rush to his aid. He is floated swiftly back to the hotel in a glistening little bubble-car. Dawn helps him to bed. Reviving, he reaches for her.

“You don’t have to,” she says. “You’ve had a rough day.”

He persists. He embraces her and takes her, quickly, fiercely, and they move together for a few minutes and it ends and he sinks back, exhausted, stupefied. She gets a cool cloth and pats his forehead and urges him to rest. “Bring me my drugs,” he says. He wants siddharthin, but she misunderstands, probably deliberately, and offers him something blue and bulky, a sleeping pill, and, too weary to object, he takes it. Even so, it seems to be hours before sleep comes.

He dreams he is at the skyport, boarding the rocket for Bangkok, and instantly he is debarking at Bangkok — just like Port Moresby, only more humid — and he delivers his speech to a horde of enthusiastic Thais, while rockets Bicker about him, carrying him to skyport after skyport, and the Thais blur and become Japanese, who are transformed into Mongols, who become Uighurs, who become Iranians, who become Sudanese, who become Zambians, who become Chileans, and all look alike, all look alike, all look alike.

The Spicans hovered above him, weaving, bobbing, swaying like cobras about to strike. But their eyes, warm and liquid, were sympathetic: loving, even. He felt the flow of their compassion. If they had had the sort of musculature that enabled them to smile, they would be smiling tenderly, he knew.

One of the aliens leaned close. The little translating device dangled toward Schwartz like a holy medallion. He narrowed his eyes, concentrating as intently as he could on the amber words flashing quickly across the screen.

“… has come. We shall …”

“Again, please,” Schwartz said. “I missed some of what you were saying.”

“The moment…has come. We shall…make the exchange of sacraments now.”

“Sacraments?”

“Drugs.”

“Drugs, yes. Yes. Of course.” Schwartz groped in his pouch. He felt the cool, smooth leather skin of his drug case. Leather? Snakeskin, maybe. Anyway. He drew it forth. “Here”, he said. “Siddharthin, learitonin, psilocerebrin, acid-57. Take your pick.” The Spicans selected three small blue siddhardiins. “Very good,” Schwartz said. “The most transcendental of all. And now — “

The longest of the aliens proffered a ball of dried orange fungus the size of Schwartz’s thumbnail.

“It is an equivalent dose. We give it to you.”

“Equivalent to all three of my tablets, or to one?”

“Equivalent. It will give you peace.”

Schwartz smiled. There was a time for asking questions and a time for unhesitating action. He took the fungus and reached for a glass of water.

“Wait!” Pitkin cried, appearing suddenly. “What are you — “

“Too late,” Schwartz said serenely, and swallowed the Spican drug in one joyous gulp.

The nightmares go on and on. He circles the Earth like the Flying Dutchman, like the Wandering Jew, skyport to skyport to skyport, an unending voyage from nowhere to nowhere. Obliging committees meet him and convey him to his hotel. Sometimes the committee members are contemporary types, indistinguishable from one another, with standard faces, standard clothing, the all-purpose new-model hybrid unihuman, and sometimes they are consciously ethnic, elaborately decked out in feathers and paint and tribal emblems, but their faces, too, are standard behind the gaudy regalia, their slang is the slang of Uganda and Tierra del Fuego and Nepal, and it seems to Schwartz that these masqueraders are, if anything, less authentic, less honest, than the other sort, who at least are true representatives of their era. So it is hopeless either way. He lashes at his pillow, he groans, he wakens. Instantly Dawn’s arms enfold him. He sobs incoherent phrases into her clavicle and she murmurs soothing sounds against his forehead. He is having some sort of breakdown, he realizes: a new crisis of values, a shattering of the philosophical synthesis that has allowed him to get through the last few years. He is bound to the wheel; he spins, he spins, he spins, traversing the continents, getting nowhere. There is no place to go. No. There is one, just one, a place where he will find peace, where the universe will be as he needs it to be. Go there, Schwartz. Go and stay as long as you can. “Is there anything I can do?” Dawn asks. He shivers and shakes his head. “Take this,” she says, and gives him some sort of pill. Another tranquilizer. All right. All right. The world has turned to porcelain. His skin feels like a plastic coating. Away, away, to the ship. To the ship! “So long,” Schwartz says.

Outside the ship the Capellans twist and spin in their ritual dance as, weightless and without mass, they are swept toward the rim of the galaxy at nine times the velocity of light. They move with a grace that is astonishing for creatures of such tremendous bulk. A dazzling light that emanates from the center of the universe strikes their glossy skin and, rebounding, resonates all up and down the spectrum, splintering into brilliant streamers of ultra-red, infraviolet, exoyellow. All the cosmos glows and shimmers. A single perfect note of music comes out of the remote distance and, growing closer, swells in an infinite crescendo. Schwartz trembles at the beauty of all he perceives.

Beside him stands the seal-slick Antarean. She — definitely she, no doubt of it, she — plucks at his arm and whispers, “Will you go to them?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“So will I. Wherever you go.”

“Now,” Schwartz says. He reaches for the lever that opens the hatch. He pulls down. The side of the starship swings open.

The Antarean looks deep into his eyes and says blissfully, “I never told you my name. My name is Dawn.”

Together they float through the hatch into space.

The blackness receives them gently. There is no chill, no pressure at the lungs, no discomfort at all. He is surrounded by luminous surges, by throbbing mantles of pure color, as though he has entered the heart of an aurora. He and Dawn swim toward the Capellans, and the huge beings welcome them with deep, glad, booming cries. Dawn joins the dance at once, moving her sinuous limbs with extravagant ease; Schwartz will do the same in a moment, but first he turns to face the starship, hanging in space close by him like a vast coppery needle, and in a voice that could shake universes he calls, “Come, friends! Come, all of you! Come dance with us!” And they come, pouring through the hatch, the Spicans first, then all the rest, the infinite multitude of beings, the travelers from Fomalhaut and Achemar and Acrux and Aldebaran, from Thuban and Arcturus and Altair, from Polaris and Canopus and Sirius and Rigel, hundreds of star-creatures spilling happily out of the vessel, bursting forth, all of them, even Pitkin, poor little Pitkin, everyone joining hands and tentacles and tendrils and whatever, forming a great ring of light across space, everyone locked in a cosmic harmony, everyone dancing. Dancing. Dancing.

THE HOLE MAN

Larry Niven

One day Mars will be gone.

Andrew Lear says that it will start with violent quakes, and end hours or days later, very suddenly. He ought to know. It’s all his fault.

Lear also says that it won’t happen for from years to centuries. So we stay, Lear and the rest of us. We study the alien base for what it can tell us, while the center of the world we stand on is slowly eaten away. It’s enough to give a man nightmares.

*

It was Lear who found the alien base.

We had reached Mars: fourteen of us, in the cramped bulbous life-support system of the Percival Lowell. We were circling in orbit, taking our time, correcting our maps and looking for anything that thirty years of Mariner probes might have missed.

We were mapping mascons, among other things. Those mass concentrations under the lunar maria were almost certainly left by good-sized asteroids, mountains of rock falling silently out of the sky until they struck with the energies of thousands of fusion bombs. Mars has been cruising through the asteroid belt for four billion years. Mars would show bigger and better mascons. They would affect our orbits.

So Andrew Lear was hard at work, watching pens twitch on graph paper as we circled Mars. A bit of machinery fell alongside the Percival Lowell, rotating. Within its thin shell was a weighted double lever system, deceptively simple: a Forward Mass Detector. The pens mapped its twitchings.

Over Sirbonis Palus they began mapping strange curves.

Another man might have cursed and tried to fix it. Andrew Lear thought it out, then sent the signal that would stop the free-falling widget from rotating.

It had to be rotating to map a stationary mass.

But now it was mapping simple sine waves.

Lear went running to Captain Childrey.

Running? It was more like trapeze artistry. Lear pulled himself along by handholds, kicked off from walls, braked with a hard push of hands or feet. Moving in free fall is hard work when you’re in a hurry, and Lear was a forty-year-old astrophysicist, not an athlete. He was blowing hard when he reached the control bubble.

Childrey — who was an athlete — waited with a patient, slightly contemptuous smile while Lear caught his breath.

He already thought Lear was crazy. Lear’s words only confirmed it. “Gravity for sending signals? Dr. Lear, will you please quit bothering me with your weird ideas. I’m busy. We all are.”

This was not entirely unfair. Some of Lear’s enthusiasms were peculiar. Gravity generators. Black holes. He thought we should be searching for Dyson spheres: stars completely enclosed by an artificial shell. He believed that mass and inertia were two separate things: that it should be possible to suck the inertia out of a spacecraft, say, so that it could accelerate to near lightspeed in a few minutes. He was a wide-eyed dreamer, and when he was flustered he tended to wander from the point.

“You don’t understand,” he told Childrey. “Gravity radiation is harder to block than electromagnetic waves. Patterned gravity waves would be easy to detect. The advanced civilizations in the galaxy may all be communicating by gravity. Some of them may even be modulating pulsars — rotating neutron stars. That’s where Project Ozma went wrong: they were only looking for signals in the electromagnetic spectrum.”

Childrey laughed. “Sure. Your little friends are using neutron stars to send you messages. What’s that got to do with us?”

“Well, look!” Lear held up the strip of flimsy, nearly weightless paper he’d torn from the machine. “I got this over Sirbonis Palus. I think we ought to land there.”

“We’re landing in Mare Cimmerium, as you perfectly well know. The lander is already deployed and ready to board. Dr. Lear, we’ve spent four days mapping this area. It’s flat. It’s in a green-brown area. When spring comes next month, we’ll find out whether there’s life there! And everybody wants it that way except you!”

Lear was still holding the graph paper before him like a shield. “Please. Take one more circuit over Sirbonis Palus.”

Childrey opted for the extra orbit. Maybe the sine waves convinced him. Maybe not. He would have liked inconveniencing the rest of us in Lear’s name, to show him for a fool.

But the next pass showed a tiny circular feature in Sirbonis Palus. And Lear’s mass indicator was making sine waves again.

*

The aliens had gone. During our first few months we always expected them back any minute. The machinery in the base was running smoothly and perfectly, as if the owners had only just stepped out.

The base was an inverted pie plate two stories high, and windowless. The air inside was breathable, like Earth’s air three miles up, but with a bit more oxygen. Mars’ air is far thinner, and poisonous. Clearly they were not of Mars.

The walls were thick and deeply eroded. They leaned inward against the internal pressure. The roof was somewhat thinner, just heavy enough for the pressure to support it. Both walls and roof were of fused Martian dust.

The heating system still worked — and it was also the lighting system: grids in the ceiling glowing brick-red. The base was always ten degrees too warm. We didn’t find the off switches for almost a week: they were behind locked panels. The air system blew gusty winds until we fiddled with it.

We could guess a lot about them from what they’d left behind. They must have come from a world smaller than Earth, circling a red dwarf star in close orbit. To be close enough to be warm enough, the planet would have to be locked in by tides, turning one face always to its star. The aliens must have evolved on the lighted side, in a permanent red day, with winds constantly howling over the border from the night side.

And they had no sense of privacy. The only doorways that had doors in them were air locks. The second floor was a hexagonal metal gridwork. It would not block you off from your friends on the floor below. The bunk room was an impressive expanse of mercury-filled water bed, wall to wall. The rooms were too small and cluttered, the furniture and machinery too close to the doorways, so that at first we were constantly bumping elbows and knees. The ceilings were an inch short of six feet high on both floors, so that we tended to walk stooped even if we were short enough to stand upright. Habit. But Lear was just tall enough to knock his head if he stood up fast, anywhere in the base.

We thought they must have been smaller than human. But their padded benches seemed human-designed in size and shape. Maybe it was their minds that were different: they didn’t need psychic elbow room.

The ship had been bad enough. Now this. Within the base was instant claustrophobia. It put all of our tempers on hair triggers.

Two of us couldn’t take it.

*

Lear and Childrey did not belong on the same planet.

With Childrey, neatness was a compulsion. He had enough for all of us. During those long months aboard Percival Lowell, it was Childrey who led us in calisthenics. He flatly would not let anyone skip an exercise period. We eventually gave up trying.

Well and good. The exercise kept us alive. We weren’t getting the healthy daily exercise anyone gets walking around the living room in a one-gravity field.

But after a month on Mars, Childrey was the only man who still appeared fully dressed in the heat of the alien base. Some of us took it as a reproof, and maybe it was, because Lear had been the first to doff his shirt for keeps. In the mess Childrey would inspect his silverware for water spots, then line it up perfectly parallel.

On Earth, Andrew Lear’s habits would have been no more than a character trait. In a hurry, he might choose mismatched socks. He might put off using the dishwasher for a day or two if he were involved in something interesting. He would prefer a house that looked “lived in.” God help the maid who tried to clean up his study. He’d never be able to find anything afterward.

He was a brilliant but one-sided man. Backpacking or skin diving might have changed his habits — in such pursuits you learn not to forget any least trivial thing — but they would never have tempted him. An expedition to Mars was something he simply could not turn down. A pity, because neatness is worth your life in space.

You don’t leave your fly open in a pressure suit.

A month after the landing, Childrey caught Lear doing just that.

The “fly” on a pressure suit is a soft rubber tube over your male member. It leads to a bladder, and there’s a spring clamp on it. You open the clamp to use it. Then you close the clamp and open an outside spigot to evacuate the bladder into vacuum.

Similar designs for women involve a catheter, which is hideously uncomfortable. I presume the designers will keep trying. It seems wrong to bar half the human race from our ultimate destiny.

Lear was addicted to long walks. He loved the Martian desert scene: the hard violet sky and the soft blur of whirling orange dust, the sharp close horizon, the endless emptiness. More: he needed the room. He was spending all his working time on the alien communicator, with the ceiling too close over his head and everything else too close to his bony elbows.

He was coming back from a walk, and he met Childrey coming out. Childrey noticed that the waste spigot on Lear’s suit was open, the spring broken. Lear had been out for hours. If he’d had to go, he might have bled to death through flesh ruptured by vacuum.

We never learned all that Childrey said to him out there. But Lear came in very red about the ears, muttering under his breath. He wouldn’t talk to anyone.

The NASA psychologists should not have put them both on that small a planet. Hindsight is wonderful, right? But Lear and Childrey were each the best choice for competence coupled to the kind of health they would need to survive the trip. There were astrophysicists as competent and as famous as Lear, but they were decades older. And Childrey had a thousand spaceflight hours to his credit. He had been one of the last men on the Moon.

Individually, each of us was the best possible man. It was a damn shame.

*

The aliens had left the communicator going, like everything else in the base. It must have been hellishly massive, to judge by the thick support pillars slanting outward beneath it. It was a bulky tank of a thing, big enough that the roof had to bulge slightly to give it room. That gave Lear about a square meter of the only head room in the base.

Even Lear had no idea why they’d put it on the second floor. It would send through the first floor, or through the bulk of a planet. Lear learned that by trying it, once he knew enough. He beamed a dot-dash message through Mars itself to the Forward Mass Detector aboard Lowell.

Lear had set up a Mass Detector next to the communicator, on an extremely complex platform designed to protect it from vibration. The Detector produced waves so sharply pointed that some of us thought we could feel the gravity radiation coming from the communicator.

Lear was in love with the thing.

He skipped meals. When he ate he ate like a starved wolf. “There’s a heavy point-mass in there,” he told us, talking around a mouthful of food, two months after the landing. “The machine uses electromagnetic fields to vibrate it at high speed. Look —” He picked up a toothpaste tube of tuna spread and held it in front of him. He vibrated it rapidly. Heads turned to watch him around the zigzagged communal table in the alien mess. “I’m making gravity waves now. But they’re too mushy because the tube’s too big, and their amplitude is virtually zero. There’s something very dense and massive in that machine, and it takes a hell of a lot of field strength to keep it there.”

“What is it?” someone asked. “Neutronium? Like at the heart of a neutron star?”

Lear shook his head and took another mouthful. “That size, neutronium wouldn’t be stable. I think it’s a quantum black hole. I don’t know how to measure its mass yet.”

I said, “A quantum black hole?”

Lear nodded happily. “Luck for me. You know, I was against the Mars expedition. We could get a lot more for our money by exploring the asteroids. Among other things, we might have found if there are really quantum black holes out there. But this one’s already captured!” He stood up, being careful of his head. He turned in his tray and went back to work.

I remember we stared at each other along the zigzag mess table. Then we drew lots… and I lost.

*

The day Lear left his waste spigot open, Childrey had put a restriction on him. Lear was not to leave the base without an escort.

Lear had treasured the aloneness of those walks. But it was worse than that. Childrey had given him a list of possible escorts: half a dozen men Childrey could trust to see to it that Lear did nothing dangerous to himself or others. Inevitably they were the men most thoroughly trained in space survival routines, most addicted to Childrey’s own compulsive neatness, least likely to sympathize with Lear’s way of living. Lear was as likely to ask Childrey himself to go walking with him.

He almost never went out anymore. I knew exactly where to find him.

I stood beneath him, looking up through the gridwork floor.

He’d almost finished dismantling the protective panels around the gravity wave communicator. What showed inside looked like parts of a computer in one spot, electromagnetic coils in most places, and a square array of pushbuttons that might have been the aliens’ idea of a typewriter. Lear was using a magnetic induction sensor to try to trace wiring without actually tearing off the insulation.

I called, “How you making out?”

“No good,” he said. “The insulation seems to be one hundred percent perfect. Now I’m afraid to open it up. No telling how much power is running through there, if it needs shielding that good.” He smiled down at me. “Let me show you something.”

“What?”

He flipped a toggle above a dull gray circular plate. “This thing is a microphone. It took me a while to find it. I am Andrew Lear, speaking to anyone who may be listening.” He switched it off, then ripped paper from the Mass Indicator and showed me squiggles interrupting smooth sine waves. “There. The sound of my voice in gravity radiation. It won’t disappear until it’s reached the edges of the universe.”

“Lear, you mentioned quantum black holes back there. What’s a quantum black hole?”

“Um. You know what a black hole is.”

“I ought to.” Lear had educated us on the subject, at length, during the months aboard Lowell.

When a not-too-massive star has used up its nuclear fuel, it collapses into a white dwarf. A heavier star — say, 1.44 times the mass of the sun and larger — can burn out its fuel, then collapse into itself until it is ten kilometers across and composed solely of neutrons packed edge to edge: the densest matter in this universe.

But a big star goes further than that. When a really massive star runs its course… when the gas and radiation pressures within are no longer strong enough to hold the outer layers against the star’s own ferocious gravity… then it can fall into itself entirely, until gravity is stronger than any other force, until it is compressed past the Swarzschild radius and effectively leaves the universe. What happens to it then is problematical. The Swarzschild radius is the boundary beyond which nothing can climb out of the gravity well, not even light.

The star is gone then, but the mass remains: a lightless hole in space, perhaps a hole into another universe.

“A collapsing star can leave a black hole,” said Lear. “There may be bigger black holes, whole galaxies that have fallen into themselves. But there’s no other way a black hole can form, now.”

“So?”

“There was a time when black holes of all sizes could form. That was during the Big Bang, the explosion that started the expanding universe. The forces in that blast could have compressed little local vortices of matter past the Swarzschild radius. What that left behind — the smallest ones, anyway — we call quantum black holes.”

I heard a distinctive laugh behind me as Captain Childrey walked into view. The bulk of the communicator would have hidden him from Lear, and I hadn’t heard him come up. He called, “Just how big a thing are you talking about? Could I pick one up and throw it at you?”

“You’d disappear into one that size,” Lear said seriously. “A black hole the mass of the Earth would only be a centimeter across. No, I’m talking about things from 10-5 grams on up. There could be one at the center of the Sun —”

“Eek!”

Lear was trying. He didn’t like being kidded, but he didn’t know how to stop it. Keeping it serious wasn’t the way, but he didn’t know that either. “Say, 10-17 grams in mass and 10-11 centimeters across. It would be swallowing a few atoms a day.”

“Well, at least you know where to find it,” said Childrey. “Now all you have to do is go after it.”

Lear nodded, still serious. “There could be quantum black holes in asteroids. A small asteroid could capture a quantum black hole easily enough, especially if it was charged; a black hole can hold a charge, you know — “

“Ri-ight.”

“All we’d have to do is check out a small asteroid with the Mass Detector. If it masses more than it should, we push it aside and see if it leaves a black hole behind.”

“You’d need little teeny eyes to see something that small. Anyway, what would you do with it?”

“You put a charge on it, if it hasn’t got one already, and then you manipulate it with electromagnetic fields. You can vibrate it to make gravity radiation. I think I’ve got one in here,” he said, patting the alien communicator.

“Ri-ight,” said Childrey, and he went away laughing.

*

Within a week the whole base was referring to Lear as “the Hole Man,” the man with the black hole between his ears.

It hadn’t sounded funny when Lear was telling me about it. The rich variety of the universe… but when Childrey talked about the black hole in Lear’s Anything Box, it sounded hilarious.

Please note: Childrey did not misunderstand anything Lear had said. Childrey wasn’t stupid. He merely thought Lear was crazy. He could not have gotten away with making fun of Lear, not among educated men, without knowing exactly what he was doing.

Meanwhile the work went on.

There were pools of Marsdust, fascinating stuff, fine enough to behave like viscous oil, and knee deep. Wading through it wasn’t dangerous, but it was very hard work, and we avoided it. One day Brace waded out into the nearest of the pools and started feeling around under the dust. Hunch, he said. He came up with some eroded plastic-like containers. The aliens had used the pool as a garbage dump.

We were having little luck with chemical analysis of the base materials. They were virtually indestructible. We learned more about the chemistry of the alien visitors themselves. They had left traces of themselves on the benches and on the communal waterbed. The traces had most of the chemical components of protoplasm, but Arsvey found no sign of DNA. Not surprising, he said. There must be other giant organic molecules suitable for genetic coding.

The aliens had left volumes of notes behind. The script was a mystery, of course, but we studied the photographs and diagrams. A lot of them were notes on anthropology!

The aliens had been studying Earth during the first Ice Age.

None of us were anthropologists, and that was a damn shame. We never learned if we’d found anything new. All we could do was photograph the stuff and beam it up to Lowell. One thing was sure: the aliens had left very long ago, and they had left the lighting and air systems running and the communicator sending a carrier wave.

For us? Who else?

The alternative was that the base had been switched off for some six hundred thousand years, then come back on when something detected Lowell approaching Mars. Lear didn’t believe it. “If the power had been off in the communicator,” he said, “the mass wouldn’t be in there any more. The fields have to be going to hold it in place. It’s smaller than an atom; it’d fall through anything solid.”

So the base power system had been running for all that time. What the hell could it be? And where? We traced some cables and found that it was under the base, under several yards of Marsdust fused to lava. We didn’t try to dig through that.

The source was probably geophysical: a hole deep into the core of the planet. The aliens might have wanted to dig such a hole to take core samples. Afterward they would have set up a generator to use the temperature difference between the core and the surface.

Meanwhile, Lear spent some time tracing down the power sources in the communicator. He found a way to shut off the carrier wave. Now the mass — if there was a mass — was at rest in there. It was strange to see the Forward Mass Detector pouring out straight lines instead of drastically peaked sine waves.

We were ill-equipped to take advantage of these riches. We had been fitted out to explore Mars, not a bit of civilization from another star. Lear was the exception. He was in his element, with but one thing to mar his happiness.

*

I don’t know what the final argument was about. I was engaged on another project.

The Mars lander still had fuel in it. NASA had given us plenty of fuel to hover while we looked for a landing spot. After some heated discussion, we had agreed to take the vehicle up and hover it next to the nearby dust pool on low thrust.

It worked fine. The dust rose up in a great soft cloud and went away toward the horizon, leaving the pond bottom covered with other-worldly junk. And more! Arsvey started screaming at Brace to back off. Fortunately Brace kept his head. He tilted us over to one side and took us away on a gentle curve. The backblast never touched the skeletons.

We worked out there for hours, being very finicky indeed. Here was another skill none of us would own to, but we’d read about how careful an archaeologist has to be, and we did our best. Traces of water had had time to turn some of the dust to natural cement, so that some of the skeletons were fixed to the rock. But we got a couple free. We put them on stretchers and brought them back. One crumbled the instant the air came hissing into the lock. We left the other outside.

The aliens had not had the habit of taking baths. We’d set up a bathtub with very tall sides, in a room the aliens had reserved for some incomprehensible ritual. I had stripped off my pressure suit and was heading for the bathtub, very tired, hoping that nobody would be in it.

I heard the voices before I saw them.

Lear was shouting.

Childrey wasn’t, but his voice was a carrying one. It carried mockery. He was standing between the supporting pillars. His hands were on his hips, his teeth gleamed white, his head was thrown back to look up at Lear.

He finished talking. For a time neither of them moved. Then Lear made a sound of disgust. He turned away and pushed one of the buttons on what might have been an alien typewriter keyboard.

Childrey looked startled. He slapped at his right thigh and brought the hand away bloody. He stared at it, then looked up at Lear. He started to ask a question.

He crumpled slowly in the low gravity. I got to him before he hit the ground. I cut his pants open and tied a handkerchief over the blood spot. It was a small puncture, but the flesh was puckered above it on a line with his groin.

Childrey tried to speak. His eyes were wide. He coughed, and there was blood in his mouth.

I guess I froze. How could I help if I couldn’t tell what had happened? I saw a blood spot on his right shoulder, and I tore the shirt open and found another tiny puncture wound.

The doctor arrived.

It took Childrey an hour to die, but the doctor had given up much earlier. Between the wound in his shoulder and the wound in his thigh, Childrey’s flesh had been ruptured in a narrow line that ran through one lung and his stomach and part of his intestinal tract. The autopsy showed a tiny, very neat hole drilled through the hipbones.

We looked for, and found, a hole in the floor beneath the communicator. It was the size of a pencil lead, and packed with dust.

“I made a mistake,” Lear told the rest of us at the inquest. “I should never have touched that particular button. It must have switched off the fields that held the mass in place. It just dropped. Captain Childrey was underneath.”

And it had gone straight through him, eating the mass of him as it went.

“No, not quite,” said Lear. “I’d guess it massed about 10-14 grams. That only makes it 10-6 Angstrom across, much smaller than an atom. It wouldn’t have absorbed much. The damage was done to Childrey by tidal effects as it passed through him. You saw how it pulverized the material of the floor.”

Not surprisingly, the subject of murder did come up.

Lear shrugged it off. “Murder with what? Childrey didn’t believe there was a black hole in there at all. Neither did many of you.” He smiled suddenly. “Can you imagine what the trial would be like? Imagine the prosecuting attorney trying to tell a jury what he thinks happened. First he’s got to tell them what a black hole is. Then a quantum black hole. Then he’s got to explain why he doesn’t have the murder weapon, and where he left it, freely falling through Mars! And if he gets that far without being laughed out of court, he’s still got to explain how a thing smaller than an atom could hurt anyone!”

But didn’t Dr. Lear know the thing was dangerous? Could he not have guessed its enormous mass from the way it behaved?

Lear spread his hands. “Gentlemen, we’re dealing with more variables than just mass. Field strength, for instance. I might have guessed its mass from the force it took to keep it there, but did any of us expect the aliens to calibrate their dials in the metric system?”

Surely there must have been safeties to keep the fields from being shut off accidentally. Lear must have bypassed them.

“Yes, I probably did, accidentally. I did quite a lot of fiddling to find out how things worked.”

It got dropped there. Obviously there would be no trial. No ordinary judge or jury could be expected to understand what the attorneys would be talking about. A couple of things never did get mentioned.

For instance: Childrey’s last words. I might or might not have repeated them if I’d been asked to. They were: “All right, show me! Show it to me or admit it isn’t there!”

*

As the court was breaking up I spoke to Lear with my voice lowered. “That was probably the most unique murder weapon in history.”

He whispered, “If you said that in company I could sue for slander.”

“Yeah? Really? Are you going to explain to a jury what you think I implied happened?”

“No, I’ll let you get away with it this time.”

“Hell, you didn’t get away scot-free yourself. What are you going to study now? The only known black hole in the universe, and you let it drop through your fingers.”

Lear frowned. “You’re right. Partly right, anyway. But I knew as much about it as I was going to, the way I was going. Now… I stopped it vibrating in there, then took the mass of the entire setup with the Forward Mass Sensor. Now the black hole isn’t in there anymore. I can get the mass of the black hole by taking the mass of the communicator alone.”

“Oh.”

“And I can cut the machine open, see what’s inside. How they controlled it. Damn it, I wish I were six years old.”

“What? Why?”

“Well… I don’t have the times straightened out. The math is chancy. Either a few years from now, or a few centuries, there’s going to be a black hole between Earth and Jupiter. It’ll be big enough to study. I think about forty years.”

When I realized what he was implying, I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.

“Lear, you can’t think that something that small could absorb Mars!”

“Well, remember that it absorbs everything it comes near. A nucleus here, an electron there… and it’s not just waiting for atoms to fall into it. Its gravity is ferocious, and it’s falling back and forth through the center of the planet, sweeping up matter. The more it eats, the bigger it gets, with its volume going up as the cube of the mass. Sooner or later, yes, it’ll absorb Mars. By then it’ll be just less than a millimeter across. Big enough to see.”

“Could it happen within thirteen months?”

“Before we leave? Hm-m-m.” Lear’s eyes took on a faraway look. “I don’t think so. I’ll have to work it out. The math is chancy…”

DOING LENNON

Gregory Benford

Sanity calms, but madness

is more interesting.

—JOHN RUSSELL

As the hideous cold seeps from him he feels everything becoming sharp and clear again. He decides he can do it, he can make it work. He opens his eyes.

“Hello.” His voice rasps. “Bet you aren’t expecting me. I’m John Lennon.”

“What?” the face above him says.

“You know. John Lennon. The Beatles.”

Professor Hermann—the name attached to the face which loomed over him as he drifted up, up from the Long Sleep—is vague about the precise date. It is either 2108 or 2180. Hermann makes a little joke about inversion of positional notation; it has something to do with nondenumerable set theory, which is all the rage. The ceiling glows with a smooth green phosphorescence and Fielding lies there letting them prick him with needles, unwrap his organiform nutrient webbing, poke and adjust and massage as he listens to a hollow pock-pocketa . He knows this is the crucial moment, he must hit them with it now.

“I’m glad it worked,” Fielding says with a Liverpool accent. He has got it just right, the rising pitch at the end and the nasal tones.

“No doubt there is an error in our log,” Hermann says pedantically. “You are listed as Henry Fielding.”

Fielding smiles. “Ah, that’s the ruse, you see.”

Hermann blinks owlishly. “Deceiving Immortality Incorporated is—”

“I was fleeing political persecution, y’dig. Coming out for the workers and all. Writing songs about persecution and pollution and the working-class hero. Snarky stuff. So when the jackboot skinheads came in I decided to check out.”

Fielding slips easily into the story he has memorized, all plotted and placed with major characters and minor characters and bits of incident, all of it sounding very real. He wrote it himself, he has it down. He continues talking while Hermann and some white-smocked assistants help him sit up, flex his legs, test his reflexes. Around them are vats and baths and tanks. A fog billows from a hole in the floor; a liquid nitrogen immersion bath.

Hermann listens intently to the story, nodding now and then, and summons other officials. Fielding tells his story again while the attendants work on him. He is careful to give the events in different order, with different details each time. His accent is standing up though there is mucus in his sinuses that makes the high singsong bits hard to get out. They give him something to eat; it tastes like chicken-flavored ice cream. After a while he sees he has them convinced. After all, the late twentieth was a turbulent time, crammed with gaudy events, lurid people. Fielding makes it seem reasonable that an aging rock star, seeing his public slip away and the government closing in, would corpsicle himself.

The officials nod and gesture and Fielding is wheeled out on a carry table. Immortality Incorporated is more like a church than a business. There is a ghostly hush in the hallways, the attendants are distant and reserved. Scientific servants in the temple of life.

They take him to an elaborate display, punch a button. A voice begins to drone a welcome to the year 2018 (or 2180). The voice tells him he is one of the few from his benighted age who saw the slender hope science held out to the diseased and dying. His vision has been rewarded. He has survived the unfreezing. There is some nondenominational talk about God and death and the eternal rhythm and balance of life, ending with a retouched holographic photograph of the Founding Fathers. They are a small knot of biotechnicians and engineers clustered around an immersion tank. Close-cropped hair, white shirts with ball-point pens clipped in the pockets. They wear glasses and smile weakly at the camera, as though they have just been shaken awake.

“I’m hungry,” Fielding says.

*

News that Lennon is revived spreads quickly. The Society for Dissipative Anachronisms holds a press conference for him. As he strides into the room Fielding clenches his fists so no one can see his hands shaking. This is the start. He has to make it here.

“How do you find the future, Mr. Lennon?”

“Turn right at Greenland.” Maybe they will recognize it from A Hard Day’s Night . This is before his name impacts fully, before many remember who John Lennon was. A fat man asks Fielding why he elected for the Long Sleep before he really needed it and Fielding says enigmatically, “The role of boredom in human history is underrated.” This makes the evening news and the weekly topical roundup a few days later.

A fan of the twentieth asks him about the breakup with Paul, whether Ringo’s death was a suicide, what about Allan Klein, how about the missing lines from Abbey Road? Did he like Dylan? What does he think of the Aarons theory that the Beatles could have stopped Vietnam?

Fielding parries a few questions, answers others. He does not tell them, of course, that in the early sixties he worked in a bank and wore granny glasses. Then he became a broker with Harcum, Brandels and Son and his take in 1969 was 57,803 dollars, not counting the money siphoned off into the two concealed accounts in Switzerland. But he read Rolling Stone religiously, collected Beatles memorabilia, had all the albums and books and could quote any verse from any song. He saw Paul once at a distance, coming out of a recording session. And he had a friend into Buddhism, who met Harrison one weekend in Surrey. Fielding did not mention his vacation spent wandering around Liverpool, picking up the accent and visiting all the old places, the cellars where they played and the narrow dark little houses their families owned in the early days. And as the years dribbled on and Fielding’s money piled up, he lived increasingly in those golden days of the sixties, imagined himself playing side man along with Paul or George or John and crooning those same notes into the microphones, practically kissing the metal. And Fielding did not speak of his dreams.

*

It is the antiseptic Stanley Kubrick future. They are very adept at hardware. Population is stabilized at half a billion. Everywhere there are white hard decorator chairs in vaguely Danish modern. There seems no shortage of electrical power or oil or copper or zinc. Everyone has a hobby. Entertainment is a huge enterprise, with stress on ritual violence. Fielding watches a few games of Combat Gold, takes in a public execution or two. He goes to witness an electrical man short-circuit himself. The flash is visible over the curve of the Earth.

*

Genetic manipulants—manips, Hermann explains—are thin, stringy people, all lines and knobby joints where they connect directly into machine linkages. They are designed for some indecipherable purpose. Hermann, his guide, launches into an explanation but Fielding interrupts him to say, “Do you know where I can get a guitar?”

Fielding views the era 1950-1980:

“Astrology wasn’t rational, nobody really believed it, you’ve got to realize that. It was boogie woogie . On the other hand, science and rationalism were progressive jazz.”

He smiles as he says it. The 3D snout closes in. Fielding has purchased well and his plastic surgery, to lengthen the nose and give him that wry Lennonesque smirk, holds up well. Even the technicians at Immortality Incorporated missed it.

*

Fielding suffers odd moments of blackout. He loses the rub of rough cloth at a cuff on his shirt, the chill of air-conditioned breeze along his neck. The world dwindles away and sinks into inky black, but in a moment it is all back and he hears the distant murmur of traffic, and convulsively, by reflex, he squeezes the bulb in his hand and the orange vapor rises around him. He breathes deeply, sighs. Visions float into his mind and the sour tang of the mist reassures him.

Every age is known by its pleasures, Fielding reads from the library readout. The twentieth introduced two: high speed and hallucinogenic drugs. Both proved dangerous in the long run, which made them even more interesting. The twenty-first developed weightlessness, which worked out well except for the re-entry problems if one overindulged. In the twenty-second there were aquaform and something Fielding could not pronounce or understand.

He thumbs away the readout and calls Hermann for advice.

*

Translational difficulties:

They give him a sort of pasty suet when he goes to the counter to get his food. He shoves it back at them.

“Gah! Don’t you have a hamburger someplace?” The stunted man behind the counter flexes his arms, makes a rude sign with his four fingers and goes away. The wiry woman next to Fielding rubs her thumbnail along the hideous scar at her side and peers at him. She wears only orange shorts and boots, but he can see the concealed dagger in her armpit.

“Hamburger?” she says severely. “That is the name of a citizen of the German city of Hamburg. Were you a cannibal then?”

Fielding does not know the proper response, which could be dangerous. When he pauses she massages her brown scar with new energy and makes a sign of sexual invitation. Fielding backs away. He is glad he did not mention French fries.

*

On 3D he makes a mistake about the recording date of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band . A ferret-eyed history student lunges in for the point but Fielding leans back casually, getting the accent just right, and says, “I zonk my brow with heel of hand, consterned!” and the audience laughs and he is away, free.

*

Hermann has become his friend. The library readout says this is a common phenomenon among Immortality Incorporated employees who are fascinated by the past to begin with (or otherwise would not be in the business), and anyway Hermann and Fielding are about the same age, forty-seven. Hermann is not surprised that Fielding is practicing his chords and touching up his act.

“You want to get out on the road again, is that it?” Hermann says. “You want to be getting popular.”

“It’s my business.”

“But your songs, they are old.”

“Oldies but goldies,” Fielding says solemnly.

“Perhaps you are right,” Hermann sighs. “We are starved for variety. The people, no matter how educated—anything tickles their nose they think is champagne.”

Fielding flicks on the tape input and launches into the hard-driving opening of “Eight Days a Week.” He goes through all the chords, getting them right the first time. His fingers dance among the humming copper wires.

Hermann frowns but Fielding feels elated. He decides to celebrate. Precious reserves of cash are dwindling, even considering how much he made in the international bond market of ‘83; there is not much left. He decides to splurge. He orders an alcoholic vapor and a baked pigeon. Hermann is still worried but he eats the mottled pigeon with relish, licking his fingers. The spiced crust snaps crisply. Hermann asks to take the bones home to his family.

*

“You have drawn the rank-scented many,” Hermann says heavily as the announcer begins his introduction. The air sparkles with anticipation.

“Ah, but they’re my many,” Fielding says. The applause begins, the background music comes up, and Fielding trots out onto the stage, puffing slightly.

“One, two, three—” and he is into it, catching the chords just right, belting out a number from Magical Mystery Tour . He is right, he is on, he is John Lennon just as he always wanted to be. The music picks him up and carries him along. When he finishes, a river of applause bursts over the stage from the vast amphitheater and Fielding grins crazily to himself. It feels exactly the way he always thought it would. His heart pounds.

He goes directly into a slow ballad from the Imagine album to calm them down. He is swimming in the lights and the 3D snouts zoom in and out, bracketing his image from every conceivable direction. At the end of the number somebody yells from the audience, “You’re radiating on all your frequencies!” And Fielding nods, grins, feels the warmth of it all wash over him.

“Thrilled to the gills,” he says into the microphone.

The crowd chuckles and stirs.

When he does one of the last Lennon numbers, “The Ego-Bird Flies,” the augmented sound sweeps out from the stage and explodes over the audience. Fielding is euphoric. He dances as though someone is firing pistols at his feet.

He does cuts from Beatles ‘65, Help!, Rubber Soul, Let It Be —all with technical backing spliced in from the original tracks, Fielding providing only Lennon’s vocals and instrumentals. Classical scholars have pored over the original material, deciding who did which guitar riff, which tenor line was McCartney’s, dissecting the works as though they were salamanders under a knife. But Fielding doesn’t care, as long as they let him play and sing. He does another number, then another, and finally they must carry him from the stage. It is the happiest moment he has ever known.

*

“But I don’t understand what Boss 30 radio means,” Hermann says.

“Thirty most popular songs.”

“But why today?”

“Me.”

“They call you a ‘sonic boom sensation’—that is another phrase from your time?”

“Dead on. Fellow is following me around now, picking my brains for details. Part of his thesis, he says.”

“But it is such noise—”

“Why, that’s a crock, Hermann. Look, you chaps have such a small population, so bloody few creative people. What do you expect? Anybody with energy and drive can make it in this world. And I come from a time that was dynamic, that really got off.”

“Barbarians at the gates,” Hermann says.

“That’s what Reader’s Digest said, too,” Fielding murmurs.

After one of his concerts in Australia Fielding finds a girl waiting for him outside. He goes home with her—it seems the thing to do, considering—and finds there have been few technical advances, if any, in this field either. It is the standard, ten-toes-up, ten-toes-down position she prefers, nothing unusual, nothing à la carte . But he likes her legs, he relishes her beehive hair and heavy mouth. He takes her along; she has nothing else to do.

On an off day, in what is left of India, she takes him to a museum. She shows him the first airplane (a piper cub), the original manuscript of the great collaboration between Buckminster Fuller and Hemingway, a delicate print of The Fifty-Three Stations of The Takaido Road from Japan.

“Oh yes,” Fielding says. “We won that war, you know.”

(He should not seem to be more than he is.)

*

Fielding hopes they don’t discover, with all this burrowing in the old records, that he had the original Lennon killed. He argues with himself that it really was necessary. He couldn’t possibly cover his story in the future if Lennon kept on living. The historical facts would not jibe. It was hard enough to convince Immortality Incorporated that even someone as rich as Lennon would be able to forge records and change fingerprints—they had checked that to escape the authorities. Well, Fielding thinks. Lennon was no loss by 1988 anyway. It was pure accident that Fielding and Lennon had been born in the same year, but that didn’t mean that Fielding couldn’t take advantage of the circumstances. He wasn’t worth over ten million fixed 1985 dollars for nothing.

At one of his concerts he says to the audience between numbers, “Don’t look back—you’ll just see your mistakes.” It sounds like something Lennon would have said. The audience seems to like it.

*

Press Conference.

“And why did you take a second wife, Mr. Lennon, and then a third?” In 2180 (or 2108) divorce is frowned upon. Yoko Ono is still the Beatle nemesis.

Fielding pauses and then says, “Adultery is the application of democracy to love.” He does not tell them the line is from H. L. Mencken.

*

He has gotten used to the women now. “Just cast them aside like sucked oranges,” Fielding mutters to himself. It is a delicious moment. He had never been very successful with women before, even with all his money.

He strides through the yellow curved streets, walking lightly on the earth. A young girl passes, winks.

Fielding calls after her, “Sic transit, Gloria!”

It is his own line, not a copy from Lennon. He feels a heady rush of joy. He is into it, the ideas flash through his mind spontaneously. He is doing Lennon.

*

Thus, when Hermann comes to tell him that Paul McCartney has been revived by the Society for Dissipative Anachronisms, the body discovered in a private vault in England, at first it does not register with Fielding. Lines of post-coital depression flicker across his otherwise untroubled brow. He rolls out of bed and stands watching a wave turn to white foam on the beach at La Jolla. He is in Nanking. It is midnight.

“Me old bud, then?” he manages to say, getting the lilt into the voice still. He adjusts his granny glasses. Rising anxiety stirs in his throat. “My, my…”

*

It takes weeks to defrost McCartney. He had died much later than Lennon, plump and prosperous, the greatest pop star of all time—or at least the biggest money-maker. “Same thing,” Fielding mutters to himself.

When Paul’s cancer is sponged away and the sluggish organs palped to life, the world media press for a meeting.

“For what?” Fielding is nonchalant. “It’s not as though we were ever reconciled, y’know. We got a divorce , Hermann.”

“Can’t you put that aside?”

“For a fat old slug who pro’bly danced on me grave?”

“No such thing occurred. There are videotapes, and Mr. McCartney was most polite.”

“God, a future where everyone’s literal! I told you I was a nasty type, why can’t you simply accept—”

“It is arranged,” Hermann says firmly. “You must go. Overcome your antagonism.”

Fear clutches at Fielding.

*

McCartney is puffy, jowly, but his eyes crackle with intelligence. The years have not fogged his quickness. Fielding has arranged the meeting away from crowds, at a forest resort. Attendants help McCartney into the hushed room. An expectant pause.

“You want to join me band?” Fielding says brightly. It is the only quotation he can remember that seems to fit; Lennon had said that when they first met.

McCartney blinks, peers nearsightedly at him. “D’you really need another guitar?”

“Whatever noisemaker’s your fancy.”

“Okay.”

“You’re hired, lad.”

They shake hands with mock seriousness. The spectators—who have paid dearly for their tickets—applaud loudly. McCartney smiles, embraces Fielding, and then sneezes.

“Been cold lately,” Fielding says. A ripple of laughter.

McCartney is offhand, bemused by the world he has entered. His manner is confident, interested. He seems to accept Fielding automatically. He makes a few jokes, as light and inconsequential as his post-Beatles music.

Fielding watches him closely, feeling an awe he had not expected. That’s him. Paul. The real thing. He starts to ask something and realizes that it is a dumb, out-of-character, fan-type question. He is being betrayed by his instincts. He will have to be careful.

Later, they go for a walk in the woods. The attendants hover a hundred meters behind, portable med units at the ready. They are worried about McCartney’s cold. This is the first moment they have been beyond earshot of others. Fielding feels his pulse rising. “You okay?” he asks the puffing McCartney.

“Still a bit dizzy, I am. Never thought it’d work, really.”

“The freezing, it gets into your bones.”

“Strange place. Clean, like Switzerland.”

“Yeah. Peaceful. They’re mad for us here.”

“You meant that about your band?”

“Sure. Your fingers’ll thaw out. Fat as they are, they’ll still get around a guitar string.”

“Ummm. Wonder if George is tucked away in an ice cube somewhere?”

“Hadn’t thought.” The idea fills Fielding with terror.

“Could ask about Ringo, too.”

“Re-create the whole thing? I was against that. Dunno if I still am.” Best to be noncommittal. He would love to meet them, sure, but his chances of bringing this off day by day, in the company of all three of them… he frowns.

McCartney’s pink cheeks glow from the exercise. The eyes are bright, active, studying Fielding. “Did you think it would work? Really?”

“The freezing? Well, what’s to lose? I said to Yoko, I said—”

“No, not the freezing. I mean this impersonation you’re carrying off.”

Fielding reels away, smacks into a pine tree. “What? What?”

“C’mon, you’re not John.”

A strangled cry erupts from Fielding’s throat. “But… how…”

“Just not the same, is all.”

Fielding’s mouth opens, but he can say nothing. He has failed. Tripped up by some nuance, some trick phrase he should’ve responded to—

“Of course,” McCartney says urbanely, “you don’t know for sure if I’m the real one either, do you?”

Fielding stutters, “If, if, what’re you saying, I—”

“Or I could even be a ringer planted by Hermann, eh? To test you out? In that case, you’ve responded the wrong way. Should’ve stayed in character, John.”

“Could be this, could be that—what the hell you saying? Who are you?” Anger flashes through him. A trick, a maze of choices, possibilities that he had not considered. The forest whirls around him, McCartney leers at his confusion, bright spokes of sunlight pierce his eyes, he feels himself falling, collapsing, the pine trees wither, colors drain away, blue to pink to gray—

*

He is watching a blank dark wall, smelling nothing, no tremor through his skin, no wet touch of damp air. Sliding infinite silence. The world is black.

—Flat black, Fielding adds, like we used to say in Liverpool.

—Liverpool? He was never in Liverpool. That was a lie, too—

—And he knows instantly what he is. The truth skewers him.

Hello, you still operable?

Fielding rummages through shards of cold electrical memory and finds himself. He is not Fielding, he is a simulation. He is Fielding Prime.

Hey, you in there. It’s me, the real Fielding. Don’t worry about security. I’m the only one here.

Fielding Prime feels through his circuits and discovers a way to talk. “Yes, yes, I hear.”

I made the computer people go away. We can talk.

“I—I see.” Fielding Prime sends out feelers, searching for his sensory receptors. He finds a dim red light and wills it to grow brighter. The image swells and ripples, then forms into a picture of a sour-faced man in his middle fifties. It is Fielding Real.

Ah, Fielding Prime thinks to himself in the metallic vastness, he’s older than I am. Maybe making me younger was some sort of self-flattery, either by him or his programmers. But the older man had gotten someone to work on his face. It was very much like Lennon’s but with heavy jowls, a thicker mustache and balding some. The gray sideburns didn’t look quite right but perhaps that is the style now.

The McCartney thing, you couldn’t handle it.

“I got confused. It never occurred to me there’d be anyone I knew revived. I hadn’t a clue what to say.”

Well, no matter. The earlier simulations, the ones before you, they didn’t even get that far. I had my men throw in that McCartney thing as a test. Not much chance it would occur, anyway, but I wanted to allow for it.

“Why?”

What? Oh, you don’t know, do you? I’m sinking all this money into psychoanalytical computer models so I can see if this plan of mine would work. I mean whether I could cope with the problems and deceive Immortality Incorporated.

Fielding Prime felt a shiver of fear. He needed to stall for time, to think this through. “Wouldn’t it be easier to bribe enough people now? You could have your body frozen and listed as John Lennon from the start.”

No, their security is too good. I tried that.

“There’s something I noticed,” Fielding Prime said, his mind racing. “Nobody ever mentioned why I was unfrozen.”

Oh yes, that’s right. Minor detail. I’ll make a note about that—maybe cancer or congestive heart failure, something that won’t be too hard to fix up within a few decades.

“Do you want it that soon? There would still be a lot of people who knew Lennon.”

Oh, that’s a good point. I’ll talk to the doctor about it.

“You really care that much about being John Lennon?”

Why sure. Fielding Real’s voice carried a note of surprise. Don’t you feel it too? If you’re a true simulation you’ve got to feel that.

“I do have a touch of it, yes.”

They took the graphs and traces right out of my subcortical.

“It was great, magnificent. Really a lark. What came through was the music, doing it out. It sweeps up and takes hold of you.”

Yeah, really? Damn, you know, I think it’s going to work.

“With more planning—”

Planning, hell, I’m going. Fielding Real’s face crinkled with anticipation.

“You’re going to need help.”

Hell, that’s the whole point of having you, to check it out beforehand. I’ll be all alone up there.

“Not if you take me with you.”

Take you? You’re just a bunch of germanium and copper.

“Leave me here. Pay for my files and memory to stay active.”

For what?

“Hook me into a news service. Give me access to libraries. When you’re unfrozen I can give you backup information and advice as soon as you can reach a terminal. With your money, that wouldn’t be too hard. Hell, I could even take care of your money. Do some trading, maybe move your accounts out of countries before they fold up.”

Fielding Real pursed his lips. He thought for a moment and looked shrewdly at the visual receptor. That sort of makes sense. I could trust your judgment—it’s mine, after all. I can believe myself, right? Yes, yes…

“You’re going to need company.” Fielding Prime says nothing more. Best to stand pat with his hand and not push him too hard.

I think I’ll do it. Fielding Real’s face brightens. His eyes take on a fanatic gleam. You and me. I know it’s going to work, now!

Fielding Real burbles on and Fielding Prime listens dutifully to him, making the right responses without effort. After all, he knows the other man’s mind. It is easy to manipulate him, to play the game of ice and steel.

Far back, away from where Fielding Real’s programmers could sense it, Fielding Prime smiles inwardly (the only way he could). It will be a century, at least. He will sit here monitoring data, input and output, the infinite dance of electrons. Better than death, far better. And there may be new developments, a way to transfer computer constructs to real bodies. Hell, anything could happen.

Boy, it’s cost me a fortune to do this. A bundle. Bribing people to keep it secret, shifting the accounts so the Feds wouldn’t know—and you cost the most. You’re the best simulation ever developed, you realize that? Full consciousness, they say.

“Quite so.”

Let him worry about his money—just so there was some left. The poor simple bastard thought he could trust Fielding Prime. He thought they were the same person. But Fielding Prime had played the chords, smelled the future, lived a vivid life of his own. He was older, wiser. He had felt the love of the crowd wash over him, been at the focal point of time. To him Fielding Real was just somebody else, and all his knife-sharp instincts could come to bear.

How was it? What was it like? I can see how you responded by running your tapes for a few sigmas. But I can’t order a complete scan without wiping your personality matrix. Can’t you tell me? How did it feel?

Fielding Prime tells him something, anything, whatever will keep the older man’s attention. He speaks of ample-thighed girls, of being at the center of it all.

Did you really? God!

Fielding Prime spins him a tale.

*

He is running cool and smooth. He is radiating on all his frequencies. Ah and ah.

Yes, that is a good idea. After Fielding Real is gone, his accountants will suddenly discover a large sum left for scientific research into man-machine linkages. With a century to work, Fielding Prime can find a way out of this computer prison. He can become somebody else.

Not Lennon, no. He owed that much to Fielding Real.

Anyway, he had already lived through that. The Beatles’ music was quite all right, but doing it once had made it seem less enticing. Hermann was right. The music was too simple-minded, it lacked depth.

He is ready for something more. He has access to information storage, tapes, consultant help from outside, all the libraries of the planet. He will study. He will train. In a century he can be anything. Ah, he will echo down the infinite reeling halls of time.

John Lennon, hell. He will become Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Afterword

In 1974 the Beatles were fading as figures but looming large as legends.

The anguished early-70s music of Lennon contrasted strongly with the light, sweet songs of McCartney. The two of them seemed to reflect mirror-opposite views of what the past decade had meant. Lennon appealed to intellectuals, and I felt instinctively that he would, even after the breakup, remain the lightning rod of the foursome.

I decided to write a story about the curious fanatacism that was already enveloping the Beatles. Lennon was the logical choice—readers are intellectuals, after all. The yearning of so many to be a part of that Golden Age bounce and verve was a natural motivation. I made notes for the piece for months. To keep the right tone, I wrote the story in one day, compressing time to gain energy.

But time can’t be frozen, and now events have caught up with the facts of this piece. They caught up with me at, of all places, a publisher’s annual meeting. I was a guest author at Pocket Books’ annual meeting of editors, publishers, and representatives. A lively crew, they are. I had been out to dinner with them, and returned to the Hotel del Coronado to find the lobby abuzz with the news of Lennon’s death.

From there my memory takes a jump-shot forward. I am lying face down on the bed in my room, feeling like a bus had run me over with studied care. I lurch up to find that, first, I must soon heed the call of nature, and second, I am fully clothed, and third, sunlight is trying to pry up the shades.

Returning from the bathroom, I notice a pile of crumpled bills on a table. They are all singles. I can remember nothing of the night before.

I go down to breakfast, where veiled questioning reveals that I got into a long poker game with the sales representatives. And drank a lot. And, apparently, won.

I still have no memory of those hours. Rereading this story, I realized again how heavily the news hit me. I do remember, though, that sometime around 1978 someone in rock circles told me that McCartney had read the story in Terry Carr’s Best of the Year anthology, and passed it on to Lennon. I rather wonder what he made of it.

Here you will find a logic built on what I saw as a swelling undercurrent in the mid-70s. Its John Lennon carries no memory of a brutal booming, lancing pain, and sudden dark. It would be impossible to write this story now, including those facts, and yet retain the same tone.

So I shall let it stand. Science fiction is at times predictive, and there are notes sounded here (particularly, in Fielding’s attitude toward the true Lennon) which strike me as a bit eerie. Mark David Chapman wanted to be Lennon; he signed that name on registration forms, apparently without attracting much attention.

One can read this, then, as an inspection of what lay waiting for Lennon outside the Dakota on December 8, 1980. But I hope that fact will not dim the spirit of this story, which attempted to reach the more joyous emotions of that time.

CROATOAN

Harlan Ellison

Beneath the city, there is yet another city: wet and dark and strange; a city of sewers and moist scuttling creatures and running rivers so desperate to be free not even Styx fits them. And in that lost city beneath the city, I found the child.

Oh my God, if I knew where to start. With the child? No before that. With the alligators? No, earlier. With Carol? Probably. It always started with a Carol. Or an Andrea. A Stephanie. Always someone. There is nothing cowardly about suicide; it takes determination.

“Stop it! Godammit, just stop it… I said stop… And I had to hit her. It wasn’t that hard a crack, but she had been weaving moving stumbling: she went over the coffee table, all the fifty-dollar gift books coming down on top of her. Wedged between the sofa and the overturned table. I kicked the table out of the way and bent to help her up, but she grabbed me by the waist and pulled me down; crying, begging me to do something. I held her and put my face in her hair and tried to say something right, but what could I say?

Denise and Joanna dad taken the d&c tools with them. She had been quiet, almost as though stunned by the hammer, after they had scraped her. Quiet, stunned, dry-eyed but hollow-eyed; watching me with the plastic Baggie. The sound of the toilet flushing had brought her running from the kitchen, where she had lain on a mattress pad. I heard her coming, screaming, and caught her just as she started through the hall to the bathroom. And hit her, without wanting to, just trying to stop her as the water sucked the Baggie down and away.

“D-do something,” she gasped, fighting for air.

I kept saying Carol, Carol, over and over, holding her, rocking back and forth, staring over her head, across the living room to the kitchen, where the edge of the teak dining table showed through the doorway, the amber-stained mattress pad hanging half over the edge, pulled loose when Carol had come for the Baggie.

After a few minutes, she spiraled down into dry, sandpapered sighs. I lifted her onto the sofa, and she looked up at me.

“Go after him, Gabe. Please. Please, go after him.”

“Come on, Carol, stop it. I feel lousy about it…”

“Go after him, you sonofabitch!” she screamed. Veins stood out on her temples.

“I can’t go after him, dammit, he’s in the plumbing; he’s in the fucking river by now! Stop it, get off my case, let me alone!” I was screaming back at her.

She found a place where untapped tears waited, and I sat there, across from the sofa, for almost half an hour, just the one lamp casting a dull glow across the living room, my hands clasped down between my knees, wishing she was dead, wishing I was dead, wishing everyone was dead… except the kid. But. He was the only one who was dead. Flushed. Bagged and flushed. Dead.

When she looked up at me again, a shadow cutting off the lower part of her face so the words emerged from darkness, keynoted only by the eyes, she said, “Go find him.” I had never heard anyone sound that way, ever. Not ever. It frightened me. Riptides beneath the surface of her words created trembling images of shadow women drinking Drano, lying with their heads inside gas ovens, floating face up in thick, red bath water, their hair rippling out like jellyfish.

I knew she would do it. I couldn’t support that knowledge. “I’ll try,” I said.

She watched me from the sofa as I left the apartment, and standing against the wall in the elevator, I felt her eyes on me. When I reached the street, still and cold in the predawn, I thought I would walk down to the River Drive and mark time till I could return and console her with the lie that I had tried but failed.

But she was standing in the window, staring down at me.

The manhole cover was almost directly across from me, there in the middle of the silent street.

I looked from the manhole cover to the window, and back again, and again, and again. She waited. Watching. I went to the iron cover and got down on one knee and tried to pry it up. Impossible. I bloodied my fingertips trying, and finally stood, thinking I had satisfied her. I took one step toward the building and realized she was no longer in the window. She stood silently at the curb, holding the long metal rod that wedged against the apartment door when the police lock was engaged.

I went to her and looked into her face. She knew what I was asking: I was asking, Isn’t this enough? Haven’t I done enough?

She held out the rod. No, I hadn’t done enough.

I took the heavy metal rod and levered up the manhole cover. It moved with difficulty, and I strained to pry it off the hole. When it fell, it made a clanging in the street that rose up among the apartment buildings with an alarming suddenness. I had to push it aside with both hands; and when I looked up from that perfect circle of darkness that lay waiting, and turned to the spot where she had given me the tool, she was gone.

I looked up; she was back in the window.

The smell of the unwashed city drifted up from the manhole, chill and condemned. The tiny hairs in my nose tried to baffle it; I turned my head away.

I never wanted to be an attorney. I wanted to work on a cattle ranch. But there was family money, and the need to prove myself to shadows who had been dead and buried with their owners long since. People seldom do what they want to do; they usually do what they are compelled to do. Stop me before I kill again. There was no rational reason for my descending into that charnel house stink, that moist darkness. No rational reason, but Denise and Joanna from the Abortion Center had been friends of mine for eleven years. We had been in bed together many times; long past the time I had enjoyed being in bed together with them, or they had enjoyed being in bed together with me. They knew it. I knew it. They knew I knew, and they continued to set that as one of the payments for their attendance at my Carols, my Andreas, my Stephanies. It was their way of getting even. They liked me, despite themselves, but they had to get even. Get even for their various attendances over eleven years, the first of which had been one for the other, I don’t remember which. Get even for many flushings of the toilet. There was no rational reason for going down into the sewers. None.

But there were eyes on me from an apartment window.

I crouched, dropped my legs over the lip of the open manhole, sat on the street for a moment, then slipped over the edge and began to climb down.

Slipping into an open grave. The smell of the earth is there, where there is no earth. The water is evil; vital fluid that has been endlessly violated. Everything is covered with a green scum that glows faintly in the darkness. An open grave waiting patiently for the corpse of the city to fall.

I stood on the ledge above the rushing tide, sensing the sodden weight of lost and discarded life that rode the waters toward even darker depths. My God, I thought, I must be out of my mind just to be here. It had finally overtaken me; the years of casual liaisons, careless lies, the guilt I suppose I’d always known would mount up till it could no longer be denied. And I was down here, where I belonged.

People do what they are compelled to do.

I started walking toward the arching passageway that led down and away from the steel ladder and the street opening above. Why not walk: aimless, can you perceive what I’m saying?

Once, years ago, I had an affair with my junior partner’s wife. Jerry never knew about it. They’re divorced now. I don’t think he ever found out; she would have had to’ve been even crazier than I thought to tell him. Denise and Joanna had visited that time, too. I’m nothing if not potent. We flew to Kentucky together one weekend. I was preparing a brief, she met me at the terminal, we flew as husband and wife, family rate. When my work was done in Louisville, we drove out into the countryside. I minored in geology at college, before I went into law. Kentucky is rife with caves. We pulled in at a picnic grounds where some locals had advised us we could do a little spelunking, and with the minimal gear we had picked up at a sporting goods shop, we went into a fine network of chambers, descending beneath the hills and the picnic grounds. I loved the darkness, the even temperature, the smooth-surfaced rivers, the blind fish and water insects that scurried across the wet mirror of the still pools. She had come because she was not permitted to have intercourse at the base of Father Duffy’s statue on Times Square, in the main window of Bloomingdale’s, or on Channel directly preceding The Late News. Caves were the next best thing.

For my part, the thrill of winding down deeper and deeper into the earth—even though graffiti and Dr. Pepper cans all along the way reminded me this was hardly unexplored territory—offset even her (sophomoric) appeals to “take her violently,” there on the shell-strewn beach of a subterranean river.

I liked the feel of the entire Earth over me. I was not claustrophobic, I was—in some perverse way—wonderfully free. Even soaring! Under the ground, I was soaring!

The walk deeper into the sewer system did not unsettle or distress me. I rather enjoyed being alone. The smell was terrible, but terrible in a way I had not expected.

If I had expected vomit and garbage, this was certainly not what I smelled. Instead, there was a bittersweet scent of rot—reminiscent of Florida mangrove swamps. There was the smell of cinnamon, and wallpaper paste, and charred rubber; the warm odors of rodent blood and bog gas; melted cardboard, wool, coffee grounds still aromatic, rust.

The downward channel leveled out. The ledge became a wide, flat plain as the water went down through drainage conduits, leaving only a bubbling, frothy residue to sweep away into the darkness. It barely covered the heels of my shoes. Florsheims, but they could take it. I kept moving. Then I saw the light ahead of me.

It was dim, flickering, vanished for a moment as something obscured it from my view, moving in front of it, back again, dim and orange. I moved toward the light.

It was a commune of bindlestiffs, derelicts gathered together beneath the streets for safety and the skeleton of camaraderie. Five very old men in heavy overcoats and three even older men in castoff army jackets… but the older men were younger, they only looked older: a condition of the skids. They sat around a waste barrel oil drum filled with fire. Dim, soft, withered fire that leaped and curled and threw off sparks all in slow motion. Dreamwalking fire; somnambulist fire; mesmerized fire. I saw an atrophied arm of flame like a creeper of kangaroo ivy emerge over the lip of the barrel, struggling toward the shadowed arch of the tunnel ceiling; it stretched itself thin, released a single, teardrop-shaped spark, and then fell back into the barrel without a scream.

The hunkering men watched me come toward them. One of them said something, directly into the ear of the man beside him; he moved his lips very little and never took his eyes off me. As I neared, the men stirred expectantly. One of them reached into a deep pocket of his overcoat for something bulky. I stopped and looked at them.

They looked at the heavy iron rod Carol had given me.

They wanted what I had, if they could get it.

I wasn’t afraid. I was under the Earth and I was part iron rod. They could not get what I had. They knew it. That’s why there are always fewer killings than there might be. People always know.

I crossed to the other side of the channel, close to the wall. Watching them carefully. One of them, perhaps strong himself, perhaps merely stupider, stood up and, thrusting his hands deeper into his overcoat pockets, paralleled my passage down the channel away from them.

The channel continued to descend slightly, and we walked away from the oil drum and the light from the fire and the tired community of subterranean castoffs. I wondered idly when he would make his move, but I wasn’t worried. He watched me, trying to see me more clearly, it seemed, as we descended deeper into the darkness. And as the light receded he moved up closer, but didn’t cross the channel. I turned the bend first.

Waiting, I heard the sounds of rats in their nests.

He didn’t come around the bend.

I found myself beside a service niche in the tunnel wall, and stepped back into it. He came around the bend, on my side of the channel. I could have stepped out as he passed my hiding place, could have clubbed him to death with the iron rod before he realized that the stalker had become the stalked.

I did nothing, stayed far back motionless in the niche and let him pass. Standing there, my back to the slimy wall, listening to the darkness around me, utter, final, even palpable. But for the tiny twittering sounds of rats I could have been two miles down in the central chamber of some lost cavern maze.

There’s no logic to why it happened. At first, Carol had been just another casual liaison, another bright mind to touch, another witty personality to enjoy, another fine and workable body to work so fine with mine. I grow bored quickly. It’s not a sense of humor I seek—lord knows every slithering, hopping, crawling member of the animal kingdom has a sense of humor —for Christ sake even dogs and cats have a sense of humor— it’s wit! Wit is the answer. Let me touch a woman with wit and I’m gone, sold on the spot. I said to her, the first time I met her, at a support luncheon for the Liberal candidate for D.A., “Do you fool around?”

“I don’t fool,” she said instantly, no time-lapse, no need for rehearsal, fresh out of her mind, “fools bore me. Are you a fool?”

I was delighted and floored at the same time. I went fumfuh-fumfuh, and she didn’t give me a moment. “A simple yes or no will suffice. Answer this one: how many sides are there to a round building?”

I started to laugh. She watched me with amusement, and for the first time in my life I actually saw someone’s eyes twinkle with mischief. “I don’t know,” I said, “how many sides are there to a round building?”

“Two,” she answered, “inside and outside. I guess you’re a fool. No, you may not take me to bed.” And she walked away.

I was undone. She couldn’t have run it better if she had come back two minutes in a time machine, knowing what I’d say, and programmed me into it. And so I chased her. Up hill and down dale, all around that damned dreary luncheon, till I finally herded her into a corner—which was precisely what she’d been going for.

“As Bogart said to Mary Astor, ‘You’re good, shweetheart, very very good.’ ” I said it fast, for fear she’d start running me around again. She settled against the wall, a martini in her hand; and she looked up at me with that twinkling.

At first it was just casual. But she had depth, she had wiliness, she had such an air of self-possession that it was inevitable I would start phasing-out the other women, would start according her the attention she needed and wanted and without demanding… demanded.

I came to care.

Why didn’t I take precautions? Again, there’s no logic to it. I thought she was; and for a while, she was. Then she stopped. She told me she had stopped, something internal, the gynecologist had suggested she go off the pill for a while. She suggested vasectomy to me. I chose to ignore the suggestion. But chose not to stop sleeping with her.

When I called Denise and Joanna, and told them Carol was pregnant, they sighed and I could see them shaking their heads sadly. They said they considered me a public menace, but told me to tell her to come down to the Abortion Center and they would put the suction pump to work. I told them, hesitantly, that it had gone too long, suction wouldn’t work. Joanna simply snarled, “You thoughtless cocksucker!” and hung up the extension. Denise read me the riot act for twenty minutes. She didn’t suggest a vasectomy; she suggested, in graphic detail, how I might have my organ removed by a taxidermist using a cheese grater. Without benefit of anesthesia.

But they came, with their dilation and curettage implements, and they laid her out on the teak table with a mattress under her, and then they had gone—Joanna pausing a moment at the door to advise me this was the last time, the last time, the very last time she could stomach it, that it was the last time and did I have that fixed firmly, solidly, imbedded in the forefront of my brain? The last time.

And now I was here in the sewers.

I tried to remember what Carol looked like, but it wasn’t an image I could fix in my mind half as solidly as I had fixed the thought that this. Was. The. Last. Time.

I stepped out of the service niche.

The young-old bindlestiff who had followed me was standing there, silently waiting. At first I couldn’t even see him—there was only the vaguest lighter shade of darkness to my left, coming from around the bend and that oil drum full of fire—but I knew he was there. Even as he had known I was there, all the time. He didn’t speak, and I didn’t speak, and after a while I was able to discern his shape. Hands still deep in his pockets.

“Something?” I said, more than a little belligerently.

He didn’t answer.

“Get out of my way.”

He stared at me, sorrowfully, I thought, but that had to be nonsense. I thought.

“Don’t make me have to hurt you,” I said.

He stepped aside, still watching me.

I started to move past him, down the channel.

He didn’t follow, but I was walking backward to keep him in sight, and he didn’t take his eyes off mine.

I stopped. “What do you want?” I asked. “Do you need some money?”

He came toward me. Inexplicably, I wasn’t afraid he would try something. He wanted to see me more clearly, closer. I thought.

“You couldn’t give me nothing I need.” His voice was rusted, pitted, scarred, unused, unwieldy.

“Then why are you following me?”

“Why’ve you come down here?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You make it bad down here, mister. Why don’t you g’wan and go back upside, leave us alone?”

“I have a right to be here.” Why had I said that?

“You got no right to come down here; stay back upside where you belong. All of us know you make it bad, mister.”

He didn’t want to hurt me, he just didn’t want me here. Not even right for these outcasts, the lowest level to which men could sink; even here I was beneath contempt. His hands were deep in his pockets. “Take your hands out of your pockets, slowly, I want to make sure you aren’t going to hit me with something when I turn around. Because I’m going on down there, not back. Come on now, do it. Slowly. Carefully.”

He took his hands out of his pockets slowly, and held them up. He had no hands. Chewed stumps, glowing faintly green like the walls where I had descended from the manhole.

I turned and went away from him.

It grew warmer, and the phosphorescent green slime on the walls gave some light. I had descended as the channel had fallen away deeper under the city. This was a land not even the noble streetworkers knew, a land blasted by silence and emptiness. Stone above and below and around, it carried the river without a name into the depths, and if I could not return, I would stay here like the skids. Yet I continued walking. Sometimes I cried, but I don’t know why, or for what, or for whom. Certainly not for myself.

Was there ever a man who had everything more than I had had everything? Bright words, and quick movements, soft cloth next to my skin, and places to place my love, if I had only recognized that it was love.

I heard a nest of rats squealing as something attacked them, and I was drawn to a side tunnel where the shining green effluvium made everything bright and dark as the view inside the machines they used to have in shoe stores. I hadn’t thought of that in years. Until they found out that the X-rays could damage the feet of children, shoe stores used bulky machines one stepped up onto, and into which one inserted newly shod feet. And when the button was pushed a green X-ray light came on, showing the bones that lay beneath the flesh. Green and black. The light was green, and the bones were dusty black. I hadn’t thought of that in years, but the side tunnel was illuminated in just that way.

An alligator was ripping the throats of baby rats.

It had invaded the nest and was feeding mercilessly, tossing the bodies of the ripped and shredded rodents aside as it went for the defenseless smaller ones. I stood watching, sickened but fascinated. Then, when the shrieks of anguish were extinguished at last, the great saurian, direct lineal descendant of Rex, snapped them up one by one and, thrashing its tail, turned to stare at me.

He had no hands. Chewed stumps, glowing faintly green like the walls.

I moved back against the wall of the side tunnel as the alligator belly-crawled past me, dragging its leash. The thick, armored tail brushed my ankle and I stiffened.

Its eyes glowed red as those of an Inquisition torturer.

I watched its scaled and taloned feet leave deep prints in the muck underfoot, and I followed the beast, its trail clearly marked by the impression of the leash in the mud.

Frances had a five-year-old daughter. She took the little girl for a vacation to Miami Beach one year. I flew down for a few days. We went to a Seminole village, where the old women did their sewing on Singer machines. I thought that was sad. A lost heritage, perhaps; I don’t know. The daughter, whose name I can’t recall, wanted a baby alligator. Cute. We brought it back on the plane in a cardboard box with air holes. Less than a month later it had grown large enough to snap. Its teeth weren’t that long, but it snapped. It was saying: this is what I’ll be: direct lineal descendant of Rex. Frances flushed it down the toilet one night after we’d made love. The little girl was asleep in the next room. The next morning, Frances told her the alligator had run off.

The sewers of the city are infested with full-grown alligators. No amount of precaution and no forays by hunting teams with rifles or crossbows or flame throwers have been able to clear the tunnels. The sewers are still infested; workers go carefully. So did I.

The alligator moved steadily, graceful in its slithering passage down one tunnel and into another side passage and down always down, steadily into the depths. I followed the trail of the leash.

We came to a pool and it slid into the water like oil, its dead-log snout above the fetid foulness, its Torquemada eyes looking toward its destination.

I thrust the iron rod down my pant leg, pulled my belt tight enough to hold it, and waded into the water. It came up to my neck and I lay out and began dog-paddling, using the one leg that would bend. The light was very green and sharp now.

The saurian came out on the muck beach at the other side and crawled forward toward an opening in the tunnel wall. I crawled out, pulled the iron rod loose, and followed. The opening gave into darkness, but as I passed through, I trailed my hand across the wall and felt a door. I stopped, surprised, and felt in the darkness. An iron door, with an arched closure at the top and a latch. Studs, heavy and round and smelling faintly of rust, dotted the door.

I walked through… and stopped.

There had been something else on the door. I stepped back and ran my fingers over the open door again. I found the indentations at once, and ran my fingertips across them, trying to discern in the utter darkness what they were. Something about them… I traced them carefully.

They were letters. C. My fingers followed the curves. R. Cut into the iron somehow. O. What was a door doing down here? A. The cuts seemed very old, weathered, scummy. T. They were large and very regular. O. They made no sense, no word formed that I knew. A. And I came to the end of the sequence. N.

CROATOAN. It made no sense. I stayed there a moment, trying to decide if it was a word the sanitation engineers might have used for some designation of a storage area perhaps. Croatoan. No sense. Not Croatian, it was Croatoan. Something nibbled at the back of my memory: I had heard the word before, knew it from somewhere, long ago, a vapor of sound traveling back on the wind of the past. It escaped me, I had no idea what it meant.

I went through the doorway again.

Now I could not even see the trail of the leash the alligator had dragged. I kept moving, the iron rod in my hand.

I heard them coming toward me from both sides, and it was clearly alligators, many of them. From side passages. I stopped and reached out to find the wall of the channel. I couldn’t find it. I turned around, hoping to get back to the door, but when I hurried back the way I thought I had come, I didn’t reach the door. I just kept going. Either I had gone down a fork and not realized the channel had separated, or I had lost my sense of direction. And the slithering sounds kept coming.

Now, for the first time, I felt terror! The safe, warm, enfolding darkness of the underworld had, in an instant, merely by the addition of sounds around me, become a suffocating winding-sheet. It was as if I’d abruptly awakened in a coffin, buried six feet beneath the tightly stomped loam; that clogging terror Poe had always described so well because he had feared it himself… the premature burial. Caves no longer seemed comfortable.

I began to run!

I lost the rod somewhere, the iron bar that had been my weapon, my security.

I fell and slid face first in the muck.

I scrabbled to my knees and kept going. No walls, no light, no slightest aperture or outcropping, nothing to give me a sense of being in the world, running through a limbo without beginning, without end.

Finally, exhausted, I slipped and fell and lay for a moment. I heard slithering all around me and managed to pull myself to a sitting position. My back grazed a wall, and I fell up against it with a moan of gratitude. Something, at least; a wall against which to die.

I don’t know how long I lay there, waiting for the teeth.

Then I felt something touching my hand. I recoiled with a shriek! It had been cool and dry and soft. Did I recall that snakes and other amphibians were cool and dry? Did I remember that? I was trembling.

Then I saw light. Flickering, bobbing, going up and down just slightly, coming toward me.

And as the light grew closer and brighter, I saw there was something right beside me; the something that had touched me; it had been there for a time, watching me.

It was a child.

Naked, deathly white, with eyes great and luminous, but covered with a transparent film as milky as a membrane, small, very young, hairless, its arms shorter than they should have been, purple and crimson veins crossing its bald skull like traceries of blood on a parchment, fine even features, nostrils dilating as it breathed shallowly, ears slightly tipped as though reminiscent of an elf, barefooted but with pads on the soles, this child stared at me, looked up at me, its little tongue visible as it opened its mouth filled with tiny teeth, trying to form sounds, saying nothing, watching me, a wonder in its world, watching me with the saucer eyes of a lemur, the light behind the membrane flickering and pulsing. This child.

And the light came nearer, and the light was many lights. Torches, held aloft by the children who rode the alligators.

Beneath the city, there is yet another city: wet and dark and strange.

At the entrance to their land someone—not the children, they couldn’t have done it—long ago built a road sign. It is a rotted log on which has been placed, carved from fine cherry-wood, a book and a hand. The book is open, and the hand rests on the book, one finger touching the single word carved in the open pages. The word is CROATOAN.

On August 13, 1590, Governor John White of the Virginia colony managed to get back to the stranded settlers of the Roanoke, North Carolina, colony. They had been waiting three years for supplies, but politics, foul weather and the Spanish Armada had made it impossible. As they went ashore, they saw a pillar of smoke. When they reached the site of the colony, though they found the stronghold walls still standing against possible Indian attacks, no sign of life greeted them. The Roanoke colony had vanished. Every man, woman, and child, gone. Only the word CROATOAN had been left. “One of the chiefs trees or posies at the right side of the entrance had the barke taken off, and 5. foote from the ground infayre Capitall letters was grauen CROATOAN without any crosse or signe of distresse.”

There was a Croatan island, but they were not there. There was a tribe of Hatteras Indians who were called Croatans, but they knew nothing of the whereabouts of the lost colony. All that remains of legend is the story of the child Virginia Dare, and the mystery of what happened to the lost settlers of Roanoke.

Down here in this land beneath the city live the children. They live easily and in strange ways. I am only now coming to know the incredible manner of their existence. How they eat, what they eat, how they manage to survive, and have managed for hundreds of years, these are all things I learn day by day, with wonder surmounting wonder.

I am the only adult here.

They have been waiting for me.

They call me father.

ROGUE TOMATO

Michael Bishop

Movement of air made him simultaneously whirl about and step backward from the door.

As he focused on Papilio’s lean blue body and the peacock-eyed draperies of his wings, Jamie heard the rattle of the old woman’s stunned voice. This time Papilio’s faceted eyes gave back no images.

“She has killed the female of this region,” he said. “Papilio,” Jamie said. “That is not my name,” Papilio said.

He strode past the boy, carrying his wings lifted and outspread, an entomological presence who made the walls of the house, the floor and ceiling, contract upon one another like the parts of a shrinking garment. Jamie followed in the cluttered wake of Papilio’s wings and watched as the creature placed his segmented hands around Mrs. Zowodny’s neck. Her eyes bulged in terror. Her fat speckled hands came up feebly, feebly to ward off the grip that was unremittingly carrying her to her knees. “Stop it!” Jamie screamed.

He found a ceramic figurine on a small end table and brought it down on Papilio’s elongated skull, striking him from behind. The odor in the house was now unbearable, and he could feel sickness coming on as the supple creature slumped away from the old woman and collapsed into the broken folds of his wings. Mrs. Zowodny opened and closed her mouth like a dying fish. Looking down at her with the base of the shattered figurine in his hand, Jamie saw a cold glint of acknowledgment in the old woman’s eyes, just before they closed irrevocably.

“Many others will come,” Papilio said. He lay crumpled between an overstuffed chair and the thing that the old woman had dragged in from the backyard. “They are coming now.”

The glandular odor was overwhelming. As Jamie looked into the kitchen and into the backyard, he became aware of angular shadows dropping from the sky, threading their way through the gauzy snowflakes, dropping on outspread capes of blue and scarlet. The snow was full of wings, and the muted whirring that Jamie heard was a universal music.

Somewhere, miles and miles beyond the Sangre de Cristo mountains, camels were standing in the snow.

When Philip K. awoke, he found that overnight he had grown from a reasonably well shaped, bilaterally symmetrical human being into… a rotund and limbless planetary body circling a gigantic gauzy-red star. In fact, by the simple feel, by the total aura projected into the seeds of his consciousness, Philip K. concluded that he was a tomato. A tomato of approximately the same dimensions and mass as the planet Mars. That was it, certainly: a tomato of the hothouse variety. Turning leisurely on a vertical axis tilted seven or eight degrees out of the perpendicular, Philip K. basked in the angry light of the distant red giant. While basking, he had to admit that he was baffled. This had never happened to him before. He was a sober individual not given to tippling or other forms of riotous behavior, and that he should have been summarily turned into a Mars-sized tomato struck him as a brusque and unfair conversion. Why him? And how? “At least,” he reflected, “I still know who I am.” Even if in the guise of an immense tomato he now whirled around an unfamiliar sun, his consciousness was that of a human being, and still his own. “I am Philip K. and somehow I’m still breathing and there must be a scientific explanation for this” is a fairly accurate summary of the next several hours (an hour being measured, of course, in terms of one twenty-fourth of Philip K.‘s own period of rotation) of his thought processes.

AS I LIVE AND BREATHE

As Several Philip K.-days passed. The sufferer of metamorphosis discovered that he had an amenable atmosphere, a topological integument (or crust, although for the skin of a void-dwelling variety of Lycopersicon esculentum the word crust didn’t seem altogether appropriate) at least a mile thick, and weather. Inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen, Philip K. photosynthesized. Morning dew ran down his tenderest curvatures, and afternoon dew, too. Some of these drops were ocean-sized. Clouds formed over Philip K.‘s equatorial girth and unloaded tons and tons of refreshing rains. Winds generated by these meteorological phenomena and his own axial waltzing blew backward and forward, up and down, over his taut ripening skin. It was good to be alive, even in this disturbing morphology. Moreover, unlike that of Plato’s oysters, his pleasure was not mindless. Philip K. experienced the wind, the rain, the monumental turning of himself, the internal burgeoning of his juices, the sweetness of breathing, and he meditated on all these things. It was too bad that he was uninhabited (this was one of his frequent meditations), so much rich oxygen did he give off. Nor was there much hope of immediate colonization. Human beings would not very soon venture to the stars. Only two years before his metamorphosis Philip K. had been an aerospace worker in Houston, Texas, who had been laid off and then unable to find other employment. In fact, during the last four or five weeks Philip K. had kept himself alive on soup made out of hot water and dollops of ketchup. It was—upon reflection—a positive relief to be a tomato. Philip K. inhaling, exhaling, photosynthesizing, had the pleasurable existential notion that he had cut out the middleman.

THE PLOT THICKENS

Several Philip K.-months went by. As he perturbated about the fiery red giant, he began to fear that his orbit was decaying and that he was falling inevitably, inexorably, into the furnace of his primary, there to be untimely stewed. How large his sun had become. At last, toward the end of his first year as a planetary tomato, Philip K. realized that his orbit wasn’t decaying. No. Instead, he was growing, plumping out, generating the illimitable juiciness of life. However, since his orange-red epidermis contained an utterly continuous layer of optical cells, his “eyes,” or The Eye That He Was (depending on how you desire to consider the matter), had deceived him into believing the worst. What bliss to know that he had merely grown to the size of Uranus, thus putting his visual apparatus closer to the sun. Holoscopic vision, despite the manifold advantages it offered (such as the simultaneous apprehension of daylight and dark, 360-degree vigilance, and the comforting illusion of being at the center of the cosmos), could sometimes be a distinct handicap. But though his orbit was not decaying, a danger still existed. How much larger would he grow? Philip K. had no desire to suffer total eclipse in a solar oven.

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

Occasionally Philip K. thought about things other than plunging into his primary or, when this preoccupation faded, the excellence of vegetable life. He thought about The Girl He Had Left Behind (who was approaching menopause and not the sort men appreciatively call a tomato). Actually, The Girl He Had Left Behind had left him behind long before he had undergone his own surreal Change of Life. “Ah, Lydia P.,” he nevertheless murmured from the innermost fruity core of himself, and then again: “Ah, Lydia P.” He forgave The Girl He Had Left Behind her desertion of him, a desertion that had come hard on the heels of the loss of his job. He forgave…and indulged in shameless fantasies in which either Lydia P.—in the company of the first interstellar colonists from Earth—landed upon him, or, shrunk to normal size (for a tomato) and levitating above her sleeping face in her cramped Houston apartment, he offered himself to her. Pomme d’amour. Philip K. dredged up these words from his mental warehouses of trivia, and was comforted by them. So the French, believing it an aphrodisiac, had called the tomato when it was first imported from South America. Pomme d’amour. The apple of love. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, perhaps. But what meaningful relationship could exist between a flesh-and-blood woman and a Uranus-sized tomato? More and more often Philip K. hallucinated an experience in which interstellar colonist Lydia P. fell to her knees somewhere south of his leafy stem, sank her tiny teeth into his ripe integument, and then cried out with tiny cries at the sheer magnificent taste of him. This vision so disconcerted and titillated Philip K. that for days and days he whirled with no other thought, no other hope, no other desire.

ONTOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

When not hallucinating eucharistic fantasies in which his beloved ate and drank of him, Philip K. gave serious thought to the question of his being. “Wherefore a tomato?” was the way he phrased this concern. He could as easily have been a ball bearing, an eightball, a metal globe, a balloon, a Japanese lantern, a spherical pinata, a diving bell. But none of these things respired, none of them lived. Then why not a grape, a cherry, an orange, a cantaloupe, a coconut, a watermelon? These were all more or less round; all were sun-worshippers, all grew, all contained the vital juices and the succulent sweetmeats of life. But whoever or whatever had caused this conversion—for Philip K. regarded his change as the result of intelligent intervention rather than of accident or some sort of spontaneous chemical readjustment—had made him none of those admirable fruits. They had made him a tomato. “Wherefore a tomato?” Pomme d’amour. The apple of love. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Ah ha! Philip K., in a suppuration of insight, understood that his erophagous fantasies involving Lydia P. had some cunning relevance to his present condition. A plan was being revealed to him, and his manipulators had gone to the trouble of making him believe that the operations of his own consciousness were little by little laying bare this plan. O edifying deception! The key was pomme d’amour. He was a tomato rather than something else because the tomato was the legendary fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. (Never mind that tomatoes do not grow on trees.) After all, while a human being, Philip K. had had discussions with members of a proliferating North American sect that held that the biblical Eden had in fact been located in the New World. Well, the tomato was indigenous to South America (not too far from these sectarians’ pinpointing of Eden, which they argued lay somewhere in the Ozarks), and he, Philip K., was a new world. Although the matter still remained fuzzy, remote, fragmented, he began to feel that he was closing in on the question of his personal ontology. “Wherefore a tomato?” Soon he would certainly know more, he would certainly have his answer…

A BRIEF INTIMATION OF MORTALITY

Well into his second year circling the aloof red giant, Philip K. deduced that his growth had ceased; he had achieved a full-bodied, invigorating ripeness that further rain and sunshine could in no way augment. A new worry beset him. What could he now hope for? Would he bruise and begin to rot away? Would he split, develop viscous scarlike lesions, and die on the invisible vine of his orbit? Surely he had not undergone his metamorphosis for the sake of so ignominious an end. And yet as he whirled on the black velour of outer space, taking in with one circumferential glimpse the entire sky and all it contained (suns, nebulae, galaxies, coal sacks, the inconsequential detritus of the void), Philip K. could think of no other alternative. He was going to rot, that was all there was to it; he was going to rot. Wherefore the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge if only to rot? He considered suicide. He could will the halting of his axial spin; one hemisphere would then blacken and boil, the other would acquire an embroidery of rime and turn to ice all the way to hi:s core. Or he could hold his breath and cease to photosynthesize. Both of these prospects had immensely more appeal to Philip K. than did the prospect of becoming a festering, mephitic mushball.

At the height of his natural ripeness, then, he juggled various methods of killing himself, as large and as luscious as he was. Thus does our own mortality hasten us to its absolute proof.

THE ADVENT OF THE MYRMIDOPTERANS

(or, The Plot Thickens Again)

Amid these morbid speculations, one fine day-and-night, or night-and-day, the optical cells in Philip K.‘s integument relayed to him (“the seeds of consciousness,” you see, was something more than a metaphor) the information that now encroaching upon his solar system from every part of the universe was a multitude of metallic-seeming bodies. He saw these bodies. He saw them glinting in the attenuated light of Papa (this being the name Philip K. had given the red giant about which he revolved, since it was both handy and comforting to think in terms of anthropomorphic designations), but so far away were they that he had no real conception of their shape or size. Most of these foreign bodies had moved to well within the distance to Papa’s nearest stellar neighbors, three stars forming an equilateral triangle with Papa roughly at the center. At first Philip K. assumed these invaders to be starships, and he burbled “Lydia P., Lydia P.” over and over again—until stricken by the ludicrousness of this behavior. No expeditionary force from Earth would send out so many vessels. From the depths of ubiquitous night the metallic shapes floated toward him, closer and closer, and they flashed either silver or golden in the pale wash of Papa’s radiation. When eight or nine Philip K.-days had passed, he could see the invaders well enough to tell something about them. Each body had a pair of curved wings that loomed over its underslung torso/fuselage like sails, sails as big as Earth’s biggest skyscrapers. These wings were either silver or gold; they did not flap but instead canted subtly whenever necessary in order to catch and channel into propulsion the rays of the sun. Watching these bright creatures—for they were not artifacts but living entities—waft in on the thin winds of the cosmos was beautiful. Autumn had come to Philip K.‘s solar system. Golden and silver, burnished maple and singing chrome. And from everywhere these great beings came, these god-metal monarchs, their wings filling the globe of the heavens like precious leaves or cascading, beaten coins. “Ah,” Philip K. murmured. “Ah…Myrmidopterans.” This name exploded inside him with the force of resurgent myth: Myrmidon and Lepidoptera combined. And such an unlikely combination did his huge, serene visitors indeed seem to Philip K.

ONSLAUGHT

At last the Myrmidopterans, or the first wave of them, introduced themselves gently into Philip K.‘s atmosphere. Now their great silver or gold wings either flapped or, to facilitate soaring, lay outstretched on the updrafts from his unevenly heated surface. Down the Myrmidopterans came. Philip K. felt that metal shavings and gold dust had been rudely flung into The Eye That Was Himself, for these invaders obscured the sky and blotted out even angry, fat Papa—so that it was visible only as a red glow, not as a monumental roundness. Everything was sharp light, reflected splendor, windfall confusion. What was the outcome of this invasion going to be? Philip K. looked up—all around himself—and studied the dropping Myrmidopterans. As the first part of the name he had given them implied, their torso/fuselages resembled the bodies of ants. Fire ants, to be precise. On Earth such ants were capable of inflicting venomous stings, and these alien creatures had mouthparts, vicious mandibles, of gold or silver (always in contrast to the color of their wings). Had they come to devour him? Would he feel pain if they began to eat of him? “No, go away!” he wanted to shout, but could only shudder and unleash a few feeble der-malquakes in his southern hemisphere. They did not heed these quakes. Down the Myrmidopterans came. Darkness covered Philip K. from pole to pole, for so did Myrmidopterans. And for the first time in his life, as either tomato or man, he was utterly blind.

THE TIRESIAS SYNDROME

Once physically sightless, Philip K. came to feel that his metaphysical and spiritual blinders had fallen away. (Actually, this was an illusion fostered by the subconscious image of the Blind Seer; Tiresias, Oedipus, Homer, and, less certainly, John Milton exemplify good analogs of this archetypal figure. But with Philip K. the illusion of new insight overwhelmed and sank his sense of perspective.) In world-wide, self-wide dark he realized that it was his ethical duty to preserve his life, to resist being devoured. “After all,” he said to himself, “in this new incarnation, or whatever one ought to term the state of being a tomato, I could prevent universal famine for my own species—that is, if I could somehow materialize in my own solar system within reasonable rocket range of Earth.” He envisioned shuttle runs from Earth, mining operations on and below his surface, shipments of his nutritious self (in refrigerator modules) back to the homeworld, and, finally, the glorious distribution of his essence among Earth’s malnourished and starving. He would die, of course, from these constant depredations, but he would have the satisfaction of knowing himself the savior of all humanity. Moreover, like Osiris, Christ, the Green Knight, and other representatives of salvation and/or fertility, he might undergo resurrection, especially if someone had the foresight to take graftings home along with his flesh and juice. But these were vain speculations. Philip K. was no prophet, blind or otherwise, and the Myrmidopterans, inconsiderately, had begun to eat of him. “Ah, Lydia P.,” he burbled at the first simultaneous, regimented bites. “Ah, humanity.”

NOT AS AN ADDICT (or, The Salivas of Ecstasy)

And so Philip K. was eaten. The Myrmidopterans, their wings overlapping all over his planet-sized body, feasted. Daintily they devoured him. And…painlessly. In fact, with growing wonder Philip K. realized that their bites, their gnawings, their mandibles’ grim machinations, injected into him not venom but a saliva that fed volts and volts of current into his vestigial (from the period of his humanity) pleasure centers. God, it was not to be believed! The pleasure he derived from their steady chowing-down had nothing to do with any pleasure he had experienced on Earth. It partook of neither the animal nor the vegetable, of neither the rational nor the irrational. Take note: Philip K. could think about how good he felt without in any way diminishing the effect of the Myrmidopterans’ ecstasy-inducing chomps. Then, too soon, they stopped—after trimming off only a few hundred meters of his orange-red skin (a process requiring an entire Philip K.month, by the way, though because of his blindness he was unable to determine how long it had taken). But as soon as his eaters had flown back into the emptiness of space, permitting him brief glimpses of Papa, a few stars, and the ant-moths’ heftier bodies, another wave of Myrmidopterans moved in from the void, set down on his ravaged surface, and began feeding with even greater relish, greater dispatch. This continued for years and years, the two waves of Myrmidopterans alternating, until Philip K. was once more a tomato little bigger than Mars, albeit a sloppy and moth-eaten tomato. What cared he? Time no longer meant anything to him, no more than did the fear of death. If he were to die, it would be at the will of creatures whose metal wings he worshipped, whose jaws he welcomed, whose very spit he craved—not as an addict craves, but instead as the devout communicant desires the wine and the wafer. Therefore, though decades passed, Philip K. let them go.

SOMEWHERE OVER THE SPACE/TIME Bow

Where did the Myrmidopterans come from? Who were they? These were questions that Philip K. pondered even in the midst of his ineffable bliss. As he was eaten, his consciousness grew sharper, more aware, almost uncanny in its extrapolations. And he found an answer…for the first question, at least. The Myrmidopterans came from beyond the figurative horizon of the universe, from over the ultimate curvature where space bent back on itself. Philip K. understood that a paradox was involved here, perhaps even an obfuscation which words, numbers, and ideograms could never resolve into an explanation commensurate with the lucid reality. Never mind. The Myrmidopterans had seemed to approach Philip K. from every direction, from every conceivable point in the plenum. This fact was significant. It symbolized the creatures’ customary independence of the space/time continuum to which our physical universe belongs. “Yes,” Philip K. admitted to himself, “they operate in the physical universe, they even have physical demands to meet—as demonstrated by their devouring of me. But they belong to the…Outer Demesnes of Creation, a nonplace where they have an ethereal existence that this continuum (into which they must occasionally venture) always debases.” How did Philip K. know? He knew. The Myrmidopterans ate; therefore, he knew.

MOVING DAY

Then they stopped feeding altogether. One wave of the creatures lifted from his torn body, pulled themselves effortlessly out of his gravitational influence, and dispersed to the…well, the uttermost bounds of night. Golden and silver, silver and golden— until Philip K. could no longer see them. How quickly they vanished, more quickly than he would have believed possible. There, then gone. Of the second wave of Myrmidopterans, which he then expected to descend, only twelve remained, hovering at various points over him in outer space. He saw them clearly, for his optical cells, he understood, were now continuous with his whole being, not merely with his long-since-devoured original surface—a benefit owing to his guests’ miraculous saliva and their concern for his slow initiation into The Mystery. These twelve archangels began canting their wings in such a way that they maneuvered him, Philip K., out of his orbit around the angrily expanding Papa. “Papa’s going to collapse,” he told himself, “he’s going to go through a series of collapses, all of them so sudden as to be almost simultaneous.” (Again, Philip K. knew; he simply knew.) As they moved him farther and farther out, by an arcane technology whose secret he had a dim intuition of, the Myrmidopterans used their great wings to reflect the giant’s warming rays on every inch of his surface. They were not going to let him be exploded, neither were they going to let him freeze. In more than one sense of the word, Philip K. was moved. But what would these desperation tactics avail them? If Papa went nova, finally exploded, and threw out the slaglike elements manufactured in its one-hundred-billion-degree furnace, none of them would escape, neither he nor the twelve guardian spirits maneuvering him ever outward. Had he been preserved from rotting and his flesh restored like Osiris’s (for Philip K. was whole again, though still approximately Mars-sized) only to be flash-vaporized or, surviving that, blown to puree by Papa’s extruded shrapnel? No. The Myrmidopterans would not permit it, assuredly they would not.

THE NOVA EXPRESS

Papa blew. But just before Philip K.‘s old and in many ways beloved primary bombarded him and his escorts with either deadly radiation or deadly debris, the Myrmidopterans glided free of him and positioned themselves in a halolike ring above his northern pole (the one with the stem). Then they canted their wings and with the refracted energy of both the raging solar wind and their own spirits pushed Philip K. into an invisible slot in space. Before disappearing into it completely, however, he looked back and saw the twelve archangels spread wide their blinding wings and…wink out of existence. In our physical universe, at least. Then Philip K. himself was in another continuum, another reality, and could feel himself falling through it like a great Newtonian pomme d’amour. Immediately after the winking out of the twelve Myrmidopterans, Papa blew; and Philip K., even in the new reality, was being propelled in part by the colossal concussion resulting from that event. He had hitched, with considerable assistance, a ride on the Nova Express.

But where to, he wondered, and why?

SPECIAL EFFECTS ARE DO-IT-YOURSELF UNDERTAKINGS

In transit between the solar system of his defunct red giant and wherever he now happened to be going, Philip K. watched—among other things—the colors stream past. Colors, lights, elongated stars; fiery smells, burning gong-sounds, ripplings of water, sheets of sensuous time. This catalogue makes no sense, or very little sense, expressed in linguistic terms; therefore, imagine any nonverbal experience that involves those senses whereby sense may indeed be made of this catalogue. Light shows, Moog music, and cinematic special effects are good starting places. Do not ask me to be more specific, even though I could; allusion to other works, other media, is at best a risky business, and you will do well to exercise your own imaginative powers in conjuring up a mental picture of the transfinite reality through which Philip K. plunged. Call it the avenue beyond a stargate. Call it the interior of a chrono-synclastic infundibulum. Call it the enigmatic subjective well that one may enter via a black hole. Call it sub-, para-, warp-, anti-, counter-, or even id-space. Many do. The nomenclature, however, will fail to do justice to the transfinite reality itself, the one in which Philip K. discovered that he comprehended The Mystery that the Myrmidopterans had intended him, as a tomato, to comprehend in toto. For as he fell, or was propelled, or simply remained stationary while the new continuum roared vehemently by, he bathed in the same ineffable pleasure he had felt during the many dining-ins of the gold and silver ant-moths. At the same time, he came to understand (1) the identity of these beings, (2) his destination, (3) the nature of his mission, and (4) the glorious and terrible meaning of his bizarre metamorphosis. All became truly clear to him, everything. And this time his enlightenment was not an illusion, not a metaphysical red herring like the Tiresias Syndrome. For, you see, Philip K. had evolved beyond self, beyond illusion, beyond the bonds of space/time—beyond everything, in fact, but his roguish giant-tomatohood.

HOW THE MANDALA TURNED

(or, What Philip K. Learned)

Although one ought to keep in mind that his learning process began with the first feast of the ant-moths, this is what Philip K. discovered in transit between two realities: It was not by eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that one put on the omniscience and the subtle ecstasy of gods, but instead by becoming the fruit itself—in the form of a sentient, evolving world—and then by being eaten by the seraphically winged, beatifically silver, messianically golden Myrmidopterans. They, of course, were the incarnate (so to speak) messengers of the universe’s supreme godhead. By being consumed, one was saved, apotheosized, and lifted to the omega point of man’s evolutionary development. This was the fate of humankind, and he, Philip K., only a short time before—on an absolute, extrauniversal scale—an insignificant man of few talents and small means, had been chosen by the Myrmidopterans to reveal to the struggling masses of his own species their ineluctable destiny.

Philip K. was again profoundly moved, the heavens sang about him with reverberant hosannas, all of creation seemed to open up for him like a blood-crimson bud. Filled with bright awe, then, and his own stingingly sweet ichor, Philip K. popped back into our physical universe in the immediate vicinity of Earth (incidentally capturing the moon away from its rightful owner). Then he sat in the skies of an astonished North America just as if he had always been there. Millions died as a result of the tidal upheavals he unfortunately wrought, but this was all in the evolutionary Game Plan of the supreme godhead, and Philip K. felt exultation rather than remorse. (He did wonder briefly if Houston had been swamped and Lydia P. drowned.) He was a rogue tomato, yes, but no portent of doom. He was the messenger of the New Annunciation, and he had come to apprise his people of it. Floating three hundred fifty thousand miles from Earth, he had no idea how he would deliver this message, the news that the mandala of ignorance, knowledge, and ultimate perception was about to complete its first round. No idea at all. Not any.

None.

CODA

But, as the saying goes, he would think of something.

SAIL THE TIDE OF MOURNING

Richard A. Lupoff

Nurundere, captain, ordered his lighter to be hauled from the storage deck of Djanggawul and fitted for use of Jiritzu. Sky heroes bent their efforts, sweat glistening on black skin, dirt of labor staining white duck trousers and grip-soled shoes.

Much thought was given to their work and the reasons for it although little was said of the matter. The people of Yurakosi were not given greatly to speech: a taciturnity, self-containment was part of the heritage of their race, from the days of their desert isolation in the heartland of Australia, O’Earth.

They alone of the scattered children of Sol carried the gene that let them sail the membrane ships. They alone carried in their skin the pigment that filtered out the deadly radiation of the tracks between the stars, that permitted them to clamber up masts and through rigging as had their ancestors on the pacific waters of O’Earth centuries before, while spacemen of other breeds clumbered and heaved about in their massive vacuum armor.

The brilliant light of the multiple star Yirrkalla wheeled overhead; Djanggawul had completed her great tack and pointed her figureheaded prow toward home, toward Yurakosi, bearing the melancholy tale of her voyage to N’Jaja and N’Ala and the death of a passenger, Ham Tamdje of N’Jaja, at the hands of the sky hero Jiritzu.

Djanggawul bore yet the scars of the attempt by surner meat to seize control of the membrane ship and force from her crew the secret of their ability to live unsuited in space. At N’Ala she had shuttled the surviving surners to the orbiting Port Corley, along with the bodies of those killed in the mutiny.

And now, passing the great tack at Yirrkalla, Djanggawul heeled beneath the titanic solar wind that would fill all sails that bellied out from the rows of masts on her three flat decks. With each moment the ship gained momentum. Under the careful piloting of her first officer Uraroju she would sail to Yurakosi on this momentum and on the force of the interstellar winds she encountered on her great arcing course. There would be no need to start her auxiliary engines, to annihilate any of the precious rod of collapsed matter that hung suspended through the long axis of Djanggawul, where it provided the artificial gravity for the ship.

Sky heroes swarmed the storage deck of the ship, readying Nurundere’s lighter for Jiritzu. They fitted the tiny ship with food concentrate, tested her recyclers, tried her hinged mast fittings, and clamped the masts to the hull of the lighter in anticipation of her catapulting from the deck of Djanggawul.

When the lighter was fully prepared, the sky hero Baime went to Djanggawul’s bridge to inform Nurundere and Uraroju. Others in the work party hauled the lighter from its place in the storage deck, refixed the now vacant moorings that had held the lighter, and worked the tiny ship through a great cargo hatch onto the main deck of Djanggawul.

High above the deck Jiritzu stood balanced lightly on a spar near the top of a mainmast. He was dressed like any sky hero of the crew of Djanggawul, in white trousers and canvas shoes, black knitted cap and turtleneck sweater, the costume declared by Yurakosi tradition to have been the costume of the sky heroes’ ancestors on O’Earth.

A tiny radio had been implanted behind one ear, and strapped to his thigh was a close-air generator. The oxygen-rich mixture that it slowly emitted clung to Jiritzu, providing him with the air he needed for breath, insulating him from the extreme temperatures of space, providing an invisible pressure suit that protected him from the vacuum all around.

He watched the cargo hatch roll slowly back onto the deck beneath him, the one of Djanggawul’s three identical outer decks most easily accessible from the lighter’s storage place, and watched his fellow sky heroes haul the lighter onto the deck. He kept his radio turned off, and by tacit agreement no man or woman of Djanggawul’s crew, not even Jiritzu’s kunapi half Dua, approached the mast he had climbed or made any sign of knowing of his presence.

Nurundere himself strode from the bridge of his ship to inspect the lighter, now standing empty on the deck. Jiritzu could tell him easily, not merely by his distinctive cap of white with its wide black band, but by his pale skin, the protective pigmentation of the Yurakosi almost totally faded now, whited out by the passing years and long exposure to the radiation of the naked stars.

Soon Nurundere would have to return to Yurakosi himself, give himself over to the life of a ground squirmer, crawl with the small children and the old men and women of Yurakosi, the only inhabitants of the planet whose able sons and daughters were desperately needed to sail the membrane ships between the stars.

Not so Jiritzu.

Again and again his mind flashed to the terrible scene inside the passenger tank of Djanggawul, the moments when the surner meat, the passengers whose payments financed the flights of the membrane ships and filled the coffers of the sky heroes’ home planet, had shown firearms—an act unknown on the peaceful, neutral ships—and had briefly imprisoned much of the crew.

Again Jiritzu relived the horror of finding his betrothed, Miralaidj, daughter of Wuluwaid and Bunbulama, dead at the hand of Ham Tamdje.

Again Jiritzu relived the pleasure, the terrible pleasure of killing Ham Tamdje himself, with his bare hands. At the thought he felt sweat burst from his face and hands. His leg, where a bullet fired by Ham Tamdje had torn the flesh, throbbed with pain.

He closed his eyes tightly, turned his face from the deck below him to the blackness above, reopened his eyes.

Above him gleamed the constellation Yirrkalla, beneath which Djanggawul had made her great tack. The colored stars formed the facial features of the Rainbow Serpent: the pale, yellow-green eyes, the angry white nostrils, the blood-red venomous fangs. And beyond Yirrkalla, fading, fading across the immensity of the heavens, the body of the Rainbow Serpent himself, writhing and curving across the void that separated galaxies.

A drop of sweat fell from Jiritzu’s forehead, rolled to the edge of one eye where it stung like a tiny insect, then rolled on, enlarged by a tear.

He looked downward, saw that the work on the deck was completed, the lighter ready for his use. With heavy heart he lowered himself slowly to the deck of Djanggawul, avoiding the acrobatic tumbles that had been his great joy since his earliest days on the membrane ships.

He walked slowly across the deck of the great ship, halted before the captain’s lighter. A party of sky heroes had assembled at the lighter. Jiritzu examined their faces, found in them a mixture of sadness at the loss of a friend and fellow and resignation at what they knew would follow.

Nurundere was there himself. The captain of Djanggawul opened his arms, facing directly toward Jiritzu. He moved his lips in speech but Jiritzu left his implanted radio turned off. The meaning of Nurundere was clear without words.

Jiritzu came to his captain. They embraced. Jiritzu felt the strong arms of the older man clasp about his shoulders. Then he was released, stepped back.

Beside Nurundere stood Uraroju, first officer of Djanggawul. Some junior officer, then, had been left upon the bridge. Uraroju was a younger person than Nurundere, her protective pigmentation still strong, barely beginning to white out; she would have many years before her as a sky hero, would surely become captain of Djanggawul with Nurundere’s retirement to Yurakosi.

They embraced, Jiritzu for a moment closing his eyes, permitting himself to pretend that Uraroju was his own mother, that he was visiting his old people in their town of Kaitjouga on Yurakosi. The warmth of Uraroju, the feel of her womanhood, comforted Jiritzu. Then they released each other, and he turned to other men and women he would never again see, men and women who must return to Yurakosi with the tale of the tragic things that had transpired between Port Upatoi and Yirrkalla on the outward leg of their sail, and with the tale of the end of Jiritzu.

Watilun he embraced, Watilun the machinist and hero of the battle against the mutineers.

Baime he embraced, a common sailor, Jiritzu’s messmate.

Kutjara he embraced, Kutjara with whom he had often swarmed the lines of Djanggawul.

Only Dua, kunapi half to Jiritzu of the aranda, spoke in their parting embrace. Radios mute, Dua spoke in the moments when his close-air envelope and that of Jiritzu were merged, when common speech could be carried without electronic aid.

“Bidjiwara is not here,” Dua said. None but Jiritzu could hear this. “The loss of her aranda half Miralaidj is too great for little Bidjiwara to bear. The loss of yourself, Jiritzu, is too great for Bidjiwara. She remains below, weeping alone.

“I too have wept for you, my aranda half, but I could not remain below. I could not forego our parting time.”

He kissed Jiritzu on the cheek, his lips brushing the maraiin, the swirling scarifications born by all kunapi and aranda, whose meaning he, Dua alone of all Jiritzu’s shipmates, understood.

Jiritzu clasped both Dua’s hands in his own, saying nothing. Then he turned away and went to inspect the lighter given him by Nurundere. He found all in order, climbed upon the deck of the tiny membrane craft, signaled to the sky heroes on Djanggawul’s deck.

Watilun himself operated the catapult.

Jiritzu found himself cast from Djanggawul, forward and upward from her deck, the distance between the great membrane ship and tiny lighter growing with each moment. He sighed only once, then turned to the task of sailing his new ship.

Above him lay the writhing length of the Rainbow Serpent. By conference with Nuruüdere and Uraroju over many days it had been settled that Jiritzu would not return with Djanggawul to Yurakosi. His act in killing Ham Tamdje was understood. There was no question of trial, no accusation or even suggestion of crime.

But the tradition of the sky-hero peoples held sacred any passenger on the membrane ships.

Death of meat, membrane-ship passengers, ground squirmers traveling between the stars in the tanks of sky-hero craft instead of sealed in the bellies of massive conventional spacecraft, was almost unknown. There was the half-legendary story of Elyun El-Kumarbis, traveler from the pan-semite empire of O’Earth sailing aboard Makarata to Al-ghoul Phi, who had passed as a sky hero and died of space radiation, his body later launched into deep space at his dying request.

And there was the new tragedy of Ham Tamdje and his killer Jiritzu who could never again be permitted to ride the membrane ships as a sky hero.

Beneath Jiritzu and the lighter, Djanggawul dwindled, her great membrane sails bellied out with starwinds, her golden skin reflecting the multicolored lights of the Yirrkalla constellation.

And above Jiritzu, Yirrkalla itself, the serpent face, leering and glowing its brightness.

He erected the masts of the lighter, fixed their bases on the three equilaterally mounted decks of the lighter, climbed each mast in turn, rotating gimbaled spars into position and locking them perpendicular to the masts. The sails, the fine, almost monomolecular membranes that would catch the starwinds and carry the lighter onward, he left furled for the time being.

From the top of a mast he pushed himself gently, parallel with the deck of the lighter. He floated softly to the deck, landing with bent knees to absorb the light impact of his lean frame on the lighter’s deck.

He opened the hatch and crawled into the cramped interior of the lighter to check the instruments and supplies he knew were there—the compact rations, the lighter’s multiradiational telescope that he would bring with him to the deck and mount for use, the lighter’s miniature guidance computer.

Instead, before even switching on the cabin light, he saw two brief reflections of the colored illumination of Yirrkalla—what he knew must be two eyes.

He flicked on his implanted radio and demanded to know the identity of the stowaway.

“Don’t be angry Jiritzu,” her voice quivered, “I had to come along.”

“Bidjiwara!” he cried.

She launched herself across the cabin, crossing it in an easy, gliding trajectory. She caught his hand in her two, brought it to her face, pressed his palm to the maraiin, the graceful scarifications on her cheek.

“Don’t be angry with me,” she repeated.

He felt himself slump to the deck of the cabin, sitting with his back to the bulkhead, the hatchway leading to the outer deck overhead, light pouring in. He shook himself, turned to look into the face of Bidjiwara, young Bidjiwara, she who was barely entering womanhood, whose voyage on Djanggawul was her first as a sky hero, her first off-planet, her first away from Yurakosi.

“Angry? Angry?” Jiritzu repeated stupidly. “No, Bidjiwara, my—my dear Bidjiwara.” He brought his face close to hers, felt as she cupped his cheeks in the palms of her hands.

He shook his head. “I couldn’t be angry with you. But do you understand? Do you know where this little ship is bound?”

Suddenly he pulled away from her grasp, sprang back to the deck of the lighter, sighted back in the direction of Djanggawul. Could he see her as a distant speck? Was that the great membrane ship—or a faint, remote star?

His radio was still on. He stood on the lighter’s deck, shouted after Djanggawul and her crew. “Dual Nurundere! Uraroju!”

There was no answer, only a faint, random crackling in his skull, the signals of cosmic radio emanations broadcast by colliding clouds of interstellar gas.

He dropped back through the hatch, into the cabin of the lighter.

He reached for Bidjiwara, took her extended hand, drew her with him back onto the deck of the lighter.

“You know why I am here,” he said, half in question, half assertion.

She nodded, spoke softly a word in confirmation.

Still, he said, “I will die. I am here to die.”

She made no answer, stood with her face to his sweater, her hands resting lightly against his shoulders. He looked down at her, saw how thin her body was, the contours of womanhood but barely emergent from the skinny, sticklike figure of the boisterous child his dead Miralaidj had loved as a little sister.

Jiritzu felt tears in his eyes.

“I could not go back to Yurakosi,” he said. “I am a young man, my skin still fine and black, protecting me from the poison of the stars. I could not become a squirmer, alone in a world of children and ancients.

“I would have thrown myself with all my strength from the top of Djanggawul’s highest mast. I would have escaped the ship, fallen forever through space like the corpse of El-Kumarbis.

“Nurundere said no.” Jiritzu stopped, looked down at Bidjiwara, at her glossy, midnight hair spilling from beneath her knitted cap, her black, rounded forehead. For a moment he bent and pressed his cheek against the top of her head, then raised his eyes again to the Rainbow Serpent and spoke.

“Nurundere gave me his own ship, his captain’s lighter. Take the lighter, Jiritzu,’ he said, ‘I can unload at Port Bralku with the others, by shuttle. I need no glorious captain’s barge. Sail on forever,’ Nurundere said, ‘a better fate than the one awaiting me.’

“You understand, Bidjiwara? I mean to sail the Rainbow Serpent, the tide that flows between the galaxies. I will sail as long as the rations aboard last. I will die on this little ship, my soul will return to the Dreamtime, my body will continue onward, borne by the Rainbow Serpent.

“I will never become a ground crawler. I will never return to Yurakosi. No world will know my tread—ever.”

Bidjiwara turned her face, raising her eyes from Jiritzu’s ribbed sweater to look directly into his eyes.

“Very well, Jiritzu. I will sail the Rainbow Serpent with you. Where else was there for me to go?”

Jiritzu laughed bitterly. “You are a child. You should have remained aboard Djanggawul. You had many years before you as a sky hero. Look at your skin,” he said, raising her hand to hold it before them both. No power lights were burning on the little ship, but the colors of Yirrkalla glowed white, green-yellow, blood red.

“Black, Bidjiwara, black with the precious shield that only our people claim.”

“And your own?” she responded.

“My own pigment—yes, I too would have had many more years to play at sky hero. But I killed Ham Tamdje. I broke the sacred trust. I could sail the great membrane ships no longer.”

He dropped her hand and walked a few paces away. He stood, his back half-turned to her, and his words were carried to her by the tiny radios implanted in both their skulls.

“And Miralaidj,” he almost whispered, “Miralaidj—in the Dreamtime. And her father Wuluwaid in the Dreamtime. No.”

He turned and looked upward through naked spars to the glowing stars of Yirrkalla and the Rainbow Serpent. “We should set to work rigging sails,” he said.

“I will stay with you then,” she said. “You will not send me away, send me back.”

“Dua knew you were hidden?”

She nodded yes.

“My closest friend, my half, kunapi to my aranda. Dua told me a lie.”

“I begged him, Jiritzu.”

For a moment he almost glared at her, anger filling his face. “Why do you wish to die?”

She shook her head. “I wish to be with you.”

“You will die with me.”

“I will return to the Dreamtime with you.”

“You believe the old stories.”

She shrugged. “We should set to work rigging sails.” And scurried away, flung open lockers, drew out furled sheets of nearly monomolecular membrane, scampered up a mast and began fixing the sail to spars.

Jiritzu stood on the deck, watching. Then he crossed to another of the lighter’s three equilateral decks and followed the example of Bidjiwara.

He worked until he had completed the rigging of the masts of the deck, then crossed again, to the third of the lighter’s decks, opened a locker, drew membrane and clambered to the top of a mast. There he clung, knees gripping the vertical shaft, arms flung over the topmost spar, rigging the sail.

He completed the work, looked across to the farthermost mast, near the stern of the lighter. The Rainbow Serpent drew a gleaming polychromatic backdrop. The mast was silhouetted against the Serpent, and standing on the highest spar, one hand outstretched clinging to the mast, the other arm and leg extended parallel to the spar, was Bidjiwara.

Her envelope of close air shimmered with refraction of the colors of Yirrkalla. Jiritzu clung to the rigging where he had worked, struck still and silent by the beauty of the child. He wondered why she did not see him, then gradually realized, aided by the misty sidereal light of the region, that she stood with her back to him, her face raised to the great tide that flowed between the galaxies, her mind wholly unconcerned with her surroundings and unaware of his presence.

Jiritzu lowered himself silently through the spars and rigging of the lighter, through a hatchway and into the tiny cabin of the lighter. There he prepared a light meal and set it aside, lay down to rest and waited for the return of Bidjiwara.

He may have dozed and seen into the Dreamtime, for he saw the figures of Miralaidj and her father Wulawaid floating in a vague jumble of shapes and slow, wavering movement. He opened his eyes and saw Bidjiwara lower herself through the hatchway into the cabin, white rope-soled shoes first, white duck trousers clinging close to her long skinny legs and narrow hips, then her black ribbed sweater.

“Our ship has no name,” she said.

He pondered for a moment, shrugged, said, “Does it need one?”

“It would be—somehow I think we would be more with our people,” Bidjiwara replied.

“Well, if you wish. What shall we make her name?”

“You have no choice?”

“None.”

“We will truly sail on the great tide? On the Rainbow Serpent?”

“We are already.”

“Then I would call our ship after the sacred fish. Let it bear us to the Dreamtime.”

“Baramundi.”

“Yes.”

“As you wish.”

She came and sat by him, her hands folded in her lap. She sat silently.

“Food is ready,” he said.

She looked at the tiny table that served in the lighter as work space, desk, and dining table. Jiritzu saw her smile, wondered at the mixture in her face of little child and wise woman. She looked somehow as he thought the Great Mother must look, if only he believed in the Great Mother.

Bidjiwara crossed the small distance and brought two thin slices of hot biscuit. She held them both to Jiritzu. He took one, pressed the other back upon her.

Silently they ate the biscuit.

Afterward she said, “Jiritzu, is there more to do now?”

He said, “We should check our position.” He undogged the ship’s telescope and carried it to the deck of Baramundi.

Bidjiwara helped him to mount it on the gimbaled base that stood waiting for it. Jiritzu sighted on the brightest star in Yirrkalla for reference—it was a gleaming crimson star that marked the end of a fang in the serpent face, that Yurakosi tradition called Blood of Hero.

On the barrel of the telescope where control squares were mounted he tapped all of the radiational sensors into life, to cycle through filters and permit the eyepiece to observe the Rainbow Serpent by turns under optical, radio, x-ray, gamma radiation.

He put his eye to the eyepiece and watched the Serpent as it seemed to move with life, its regions responding to the cycling sensitivity of the telescope.

He drew away and Bidjiwara put her eye to the telescope, standing transfixed for minutes until at last she too drew away and turned to Jiritzu.

“The Serpent truly lives,” she said. “Is it—a real creature?”

Jiritzu shook his head. “The tides of the galaxies draw each other. The Serpent is a flow of matter. Stars, dust, gas. To ride with it would mean a journey of billions of years to reach the next of its kind. To sail the starwinds that fill the Rainbow Serpent, we will reach marvelous speed. As long as we can sail our craft, we can tack from wind to wind.

“And once we have gone to the Dreamtime, Baramundi will float on, on the tide, along the Rainbow Serpent. Someday she may beach on some distant shore.”

He looked at Bidjiwara, smiled, repeated his statement.

Bidjiwara replied, “And if she does not?”

“Then she may be destroyed in some way, or simply—drift forever. Forever.”

Jiritzu saw the girl stretch and yawn. She crossed the cabin and drew him down alongside the bulkhead, nestled up to him and went to sleep.

He lay with her in his arms, wondering at her trust, watching the play of sidereal light that reflected through the hatchway and illuminated her face dimly.

He extended one finger and gently, gently traced the maraiin on her cheek, wondering at its meaning. He pressed his face to her head again, pulled away her knitted cap and let her hair tumble loose, feeling its softness with his own face, smelling the odor of her hair.

He too slept.

They awoke together, stirring and stretching, and looked into each other’s face and laughed. They used the lighter’s sanitary gear and nibbled a little breakfast and went on deck. Together they checked Baramundi’s rigging, took sightings with her multiradiational telescope, and fed information into her little computer.

The computer offered course settings in tiny, glowing display lights and Jiritzu and Bidjiwara reset Baramundi’s sails.

They sat on deck, bathed in the perpetual twilight of the Rainbow Serpent’s softly glowing colors.

They spoke of their childhoods on Yurakosi, of their old people, their skins whited out by years of sailing the membrane ships, retired to the home planet to raise the children while all the race’s vigorous adults crewed the great ships, sailed between the stars carrying freight and occasional passengers sealed inside their hulls, laughing at the clumsy craft and clumsy crews of all others than the aranda and the kunapi.

They climbed through the rigging of Baramundi, shinnying up masts lightly, balancing on spars, occasionally falling—or leaping—from the ship’s heights, to drop gently, gently back onto her deck.

They ate and drank the smallest amounts they could of the lighter’s provisions, tacitly stretching the supplies as far as they could be stretched, carefully recycling to add still more to the time they could continue.

They lay on Baramundi’s deck sometimes, when the rest time they had agreed upon came, Bidjiwara nestling against the taller Jiritzu, falling asleep as untroubledly as a young child, Jiritzu wondering over and over at this girl who had come to die with him, who asked few questions, who lived each hour as if it were the beginning of a long and joyous life rather than the final act of a tragedy.

Jiritzu felt very old.

He was nearly twenty by the ancient, arbitrary scale of age carried to the star worlds from O’Earth, the scale of the seasons and the years in old Arnhem Land in the great desert of their ancestral home. Six years older than Bidjiwara, he had traveled the star routes for five, had sailed the membrane ships across tens of billions of miles in that time.

And Bidjiwara asked little of him. They were more playmates than—than anything else, he thought.

“Tell me of El-Kumarbis,” she said one day, perched high on a spar above Baramundi’s deck.

“You know all about him,” Jiritzu replied.

“Where is he now?”

Jiritzu shrugged, exasperated. “Somewhere beyond Al-ghoul, no one knows where. He was buried in space.”

“What if we find his body?” Bidjiwara shivered.

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

“In infinite space? What chance that two objects moving at random will collide?”

“No?”

He shook his head.

“Could the computer find him?”

He shrugged. “If we knew exactly when he was buried, and where, and his trajectory and speed and momentum… No, it’s still impossible.”

“Dinner time,” she said. “You wait here, I’ll fix it.”

She came back with the customary biscuits and a jar filled with dark fluid. Jiritzu took the jar, held it high against the ambient light—they seldom used any of Baramundi’s power lights.

“Wine,” Bidjiwara said.

He looked amazed.

“I found a few capsules in the ship’s supplies. You just put one in some water.”

They ate and drank. The wine was warm, its flavor soft. They sprawled on the deck of Baramundi after the biscuits were gone, passing the jar back and forth, slowly drinking the wine.

When it was gone Bidjiwara nestled against Jiritzu; for once, instead of sleeping she lay looking into his face, holding her hands to the sides of his head.

She said his name softly, then flicked off her radio and pressed her lips close to his neck so their air envelopes were one, the sound carried directly from her lips to his ear , and whispered his name again.

“Bidjiwara,” he said, “you never answered why you came on board Baramundi.”

“To be with Jiritzu,” she said.

“Yes, but why? Why come to die with me?”

“Tall Jiritzu,” she said, “strong Jiritzu. You saw me aboard Djanggawul, you were kind to me but as you are kind to children. Men never know, only women know love.”

He laughed, not cruelly. “You’re only—”

“A woman,” she said.

“And you want—?”

Now she laughed at him. “You man, you mighty man. You don’t understand that all men are the children of women.”

She drew away from him, slid her black ribbed sweater over her head and dropped it to the deck. He put his hands onto her naked back, trembling, then slowly slid them around her, touching her little, half-developed breasts, fondling her soft nipples with his hands.

She buried her forehead in the side of his neck, whispered against his throat, “For this, Jiritzu, I came aboard Baramundi for this.”

He ran his thumbs down her breastbone, to her navel, to her white duck trousers, and peeled them down, and took her.

And the next day they were nearly out of biscuit and they went on half rations to make their supplies last longer.

They played children’s games, shouting and chasing each other up and down the lighter’s masts.

They leaped and sailed from the decks, past the membrane sails, into the emptiness, then hung for a moment and fell back, gently, to Baramundli.

Jiritzu leaped too hard, too high, and feared that he had broken from the ship. He looked up—down—into the coils of the Rainbow Serpent. He felt himself revolving slowly, helplessly hanging in the emptiness, alone and unshielded except by the close air his generator made and the protection of the pigment he carried in his skin.

He thought to cry for help, then held back. If he was afloat, Bidjiwara could not help him. He turned slowly, facing toward Baramundi, her membranes bellied with stellar wind, her deck reflecting the lights of the Serpent; he could not see Bidjiwara.

He turned slowly, facing toward the Rainbow Serpent, feeling as if he could fall forever into its colored bands, its long coils stretching no lesser distance than the span between galaxies.

He turned slowly, revolving on the axis of his own body, feeling no motion himself but watching the stars and the Serpent and Baramundi the sacred fish revolve slowly around him, wheeling, wheeling, when his outflung arm struck an object as hard and cold as the ultimate ice of a deadstar world.

He recoiled, spun involuntarily, stared.

It was—yes.

He looked back toward Baramundi, revolved using his own limbs as counterweights, placed himself between the corpse and the lighter and pressed gently with the soles of his rope-soled shoes against the hard, frigid corpse.

Slowly he drifted back toward Baramundi—and, wheeling again as he drifted, saw the corpse drifting away, upward or downward into the lights of the Rainbow Serpent.

As he approached Baramundi he pondered whether or not to tell Bidjiwara of his find. Finally he told her—the incredible happenstance had occurred.

Later they crept to the farthermost deck for their loving, then back into the tiny cabin to sleep.

And soon Baramundi’s supplies were exhausted, and still Jiritzu and Bidjiwara continued. Their water remained, and a few of the capsules. They had wine from time to time. They gave less effort to running the ship, ceased to play in the rigging, ceased to leap.

The wound in Jiritzu’s leg resumed its throbbing intermittently. He would rub it, or Bidjiwara would rub it for him, and the pain would ease.

They made love, it seemed, with increasing frequency. The sensations of their couplings seemed to increase as lack of nourishment drew their bodies ever tighter ever more acutely into awareness of each other.

They lay together most of the time, seldom dressing fully.

They drank water only, their wine capsules exhausted.

They slept increasingly.

In Baramundi’s cabin Jiritzu fed telescopic data into the lighter’s computer, read the responses displayed on its little illuminated screen. After the acclimatization of his eyes to none but sidereal light, even the miniature display lights were dazzling: his eyes pulsed with afterimages for minutes following the exercise.

It was difficult to climb from the cabin back onto the deck.

Bidjiwara waited for him there, barefoot, sitting on the deck with her wrists clasped around her knees, wearing only her white trousers and black knitted cap. She smiled a welcome to him, asked a question wordlessly.

“Here,” he said with a shrug. “Here is where we are. As we have been. Riding the Rainbow Serpent. Riding the tide. Sailing the starwinds.”

He felt dizzy for a moment, reached out with one hand to steady himself against the telescope mount, then sank to a squat beside Bidjiwara.

She put her arms around him and he lay on the deck, his head in her lap. He looked up into her face. She was Bidjiwara the lovely child, Miralaidj her aranda half, she was Jiritzu’s own mother on Yurakosi, the Great Mother.

He opened and closed his eyes, unable to tell which woman this was.

He reached and traced the maraiin on her cheek.

She nodded, began speaking softly, telling him the meaning of the scarifications.

When she had finished he took her hand, held it against his chest, and slowly told her the meaning of his own maraiin. He spoke with closed eyes, opened them when he felt a drop of wetness, saw her weeping softly, drew her face down to his own to kiss.

She lay down beside him and they embraced gently, then both slept.

After that they paid less attention to Baramundi’s needs. Jiritzu and Bidjiwara grew weaker. They slept more, confined their activity to occasional short walks on Baramundi’s decks. Both of them grew thinner, lighter. Their growing weakness seemed almost to be offset by the decreasing demands of the ship’s artificial gravity.

They lay on deck for hours, watching the glow of the Rainbow Serpent. They were far beyond the Serpent’s head now, the stars of Yirrkalla clustered now into a meaningless sparkler jumble far, far astern of Baramundi.

Jiritzu was awake, had taken a sparse sip of their little remaining water, left Bidjiwara to doze where she lay, her hair a mourning wreath circling her emaciated features. Jiritzu made his way unsteadily to the prow of Baramundi, bracing himself against masts and small stanchions as he walked.

He sighted through the ship’s telescope, enjoying in a faint, detached manner the endless, kaleidoscopic changes of the Rainbow Serpent’s multiradiational forms. At length he turned away from the scope and looked back toward Bidjiwara. He could not tell if she was breathing. He could not tell for a certainty who she was.

He returned to the telescope, tapped its power squares to cause it to superimpose its multiple images rather than run them in sequence. He gazed, rapt, at the Serpent for a time, then swung the scope overhead, sweeping back and forth across the sky above Baramundi.

He settled on a black speck that floated silhouetted against the glow of the Serpent. For a while he watched it grow larger.

He turned from the telescope back to the deck of the lighter. Bidjiwara had wakened and risen; she was walking slowly, slowly toward him.

In the glow of the Rainbow Serpent her emaciation was transformed to a fine perception that etched every line, every muscle beneath her skin. She wore sweater and trousers; Jiritzu could see her high breasts, the ribbed sweater conforming to their sharp grace, her nipples standing as points of reference for the beauty of her torso.

Her white trousers managed to retain their fit despite her starvation; Jiritzu discerned the lines of her thighs, the pubic swell over her crotch.

Her face, always thin, seemed all vertical planes now, forehead and temple, nostril and cheek. The ridges of her brows, the lines of her mouth were as if drawn on her face.

Her eyes seemed to have gained an intense brightness.

As she crossed the deck to Jiritzu she gained in strength and steadiness.

She held her hands toward him, smiling, and he felt his own strength returning to him. He took the steps needed to come to her, reached and took her two hands, clasped them in his. They embraced, calling each other’s name.

The dark figure of Elyun El-Kumarbis dropped onto the deck of Baramundi. He strode to Jiritzu and Bidjiwara.

“Lovers!” he said. “Sky heroes!”

They turned to him, arms still around each other. Each extended a hand to him, felt his cold, cold.

“All my years,” the O’Earther said, “I wanted no thing but to sail a membrane ship. To be a sky hero.”

“Yes,” Jiritzu said, “you are known to all sky heroes, Elyun El-Kumarbis. Your fame spans the galaxy.”

“And where do you sail, sky heroes?”

“We sail the tide, we sail the Rainbow Serpent.”

“Aboard your ship?”

“Baramundi has brought us this far, but no farther. It is fit now for us to return to the Dreamtime.”

Elyun El-Kumarbis nodded. “May I—may I greet you as brother and sister sky heroes?” he asked.

“Yes,” answered Jiritzu.

“Yes,” answered Bidjiwara.

Elyun El-Kumarbis kissed them each on the cheek, on the maraiin scarifications of each. And his kiss was cold, cold.

Full of strength Jiritzu and Bidjiwara sprang to the spars of Baramundi’s highest mast, scrambled up lines to the topmost spar of the lighter.

They looked back at Elyun El-Kumarbis, who stood wondering beside the ship’s telescope.

They took each other’s hands, dropped into place on the topmost spar, and together sprang with the full strength of their sky heroes’ legs, toughened and muscled by years of training in the rigging of membrane ships.

They flew up from the spar, up from Baramundi the sacred fish, and looking back saw the fish flip his tail once in farewell.

They peered ahead of themselves, into the Rainbow Serpent, saw it writhe toward the far galaxies, heard its hissing voice urging, welcoming them.

They laughed loudly, loudly, feeling strength, warmth and joy. They plunged on and on, skimming the tide of the Rainbow Serpent, feeling the strength of the aranda, of all Yurakosi, of all sky heroes, mighty in their blood.

They threw their arms around each other, laughing for joy, and sped to the Rainbow Serpent, to the galaxies beyond the galaxies, to the Dreamtime forever.

CHILD OF ALL AGES

P. J. Plaguer

The child sat in the waiting room with her hands folded neatly on her lap. She wore a gay print dress made of one of those materials that would have quickly revealed its cheapness had it not been carefully pressed. Her matching shoes had received the same meticulous care. She sat prim and erect, no fidgeting, no scuffing of shoes against chair legs, exhibiting a patience that legions of nuns have striven, in vain, to instill in other children. This one looked as if she had done a lot of waiting.

May Foster drew back from the two-way mirror through which she had been studying her newest problem. She always felt a little guilty about spying on children like this before an interview, but she readily conceded to herself that it helped her handle cases better. By sizing up an interviewee in advance, she saved precious minutes of sparring and could usually gain the upper hand right at the start Dealing with “problem” children was a no-holds-barred proposition, if you wanted to survive in the job without ulcers.

That patience could be part of her act, May thought for a moment. But no, that didn’t make sense. Superb actors that they were, these kids always reserved their performances for an audience, there was no reason for the girl to suspect the special mirror on this, her first visit to Mrs. Foster’s office. One of the best advantages to be gained from the mirror, in fact, was the knowledge of how the child behaved when a social worker wasn’t in the room. Jekyll and Hyde looked like twins compared to the personality changes May had witnessed in fifteen years of counseling.

May stepped out of the darkened closet, turned on the room lights and returned to her desk She scanned the folder one last time, closed it in front of her and depressed the intercom button.

“Louise, you can bring the child in now.”

There was a slight delay, then the office door opened and the child stepped in. For all her preparation, May was taken aback. The girl was thin, much thinner than she looked sitting down, but not to the point of being unhealthy. Rather, it was the kind of thinness one finds in people who are still active in their nineties. Not wiry, but enduring. And those eyes.

May was one of the first Peace Corps volunteers to go into central Africa. For two years she fought famine and malnutrition with every weapon, save money, that modern technology could bring to bear. In the end it was a losing battle, because politics and tribal hatred dictated that thousands upon thousands must die the slow death of starvation. That was where she had seen eyes like that before.

Children could endure pain and hunger, forced marches, even the loss of their parents, and still recover eventually with the elasticity of youth. But when their flesh melted down to the bone, their bellies distended, then a look came into their eyes that remained ever with them for their few remaining days. It was the lesson learned much too young that the adult world was not worthy of their trust, the realization that death was a real and imminent force in their world. For ten years after, May’s nightmares were haunted by children staring at her with those eyes.

Now this one stood before her and stared into her soul with eyes that had looked too intimately upon death.

As quickly as she had been captured, May felt herself freed. The girl glanced about the room, as if checking for fire exits, took in the contents of May’s desk with one quick sweep, then marched up to the visitor’s chair, and planted herself in it with a thump.

“My name is Melissa,” she said, adding a nervous grin. “You must be Mrs. Foster.” She was all little girl now, squirming the least little bit and kicking one shoe against another. The eyes shone with carefree youth.

May shook herself, slowly recovered. She thought she had seen everything before, until now. The guileless bit was perfect—Melissa looked more like a model eight-year-old than a chronic troublemaker going cm, what was it? Fourteen. Fourteen?

“You’ve been suspended from school for the third time this year, Melissa,” she said with professional sternness. May turned on her best Authoritarian Glare, force three.

“Yep,” the child said with no trace of contrition. The Glare faded, switched to Sympathetic Understanding.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” May asked softly.

Melissa shrugged.

“What’s to say? Old Man M—uh, Mr. Morrisey and I got into an argument again in history class.” She giggled. “He had to pull rank on me to win.” Straight face.

“Mr. Morrisey has been teaching history for many years,” May placated. “Perhaps he felt that he knows more about the subject than you do.”

“Morrisey has his head wedged!” May’s eyebrows skyrocketed, but the girl ignored the reproach, in her irritation. “Do you know what he was trying to palm off on the class? He was trying to say that the Industrial Revolution in England was a step backward.

“Kids working six, seven days a week in the factories, going fourteen hours at a stretch, all to earn a few pennies a week. That’s all he could see! He never thought to ask why they did it if conditions were so bad.”

‘Well, why did they?” May asked reflexively. She was caught up in the child’s enthusiasm.

The girl looked at her pityingly.

“Because it was the best game in town, that’s why. If you didn’t like the factory, you could try your hand at begging, stealing, or working on a farm. If you got caught begging or stealing in those days, they boiled you in oil. No joke. And farm work.” She made a face.

“That was seven days a week of busting your tail from before sunup to after sundown. And what did you have to show for it? In a good year, you got all you could eat; in a bad year you starved. But you worked just as hard on an empty gut as on a full one. Harder.

“At least with a factory job you had money to buy what food there was when the crops failed. That’s progress, no matter how you look at it”

May thought for a moment.

“But what about all the children maimed by machinery?” she asked. “What about all the kids whose health was destroyed from breathing dust or stoking fires or not getting enough sun?”

“Ever seen a plowboy after a team of horses walked over him? Ever had sunstroke?” She snorted. “Sure those factories were bad, but everything else was worse. Try to tell that to Old Man Morrisey, though.”

“You talk as if you were there,” May said with a hint of amusement.

Flatly. “I read a lot.”

May recalled herself to the business at hand.

“Even if you were right, you still could have been more tactful, you know.” The girl simply glowered and hunkered down in her chair. “You’ve disrupted his class twice, now, and Miss Randolph’s class too.”

May paused, turned up Sympathetic Understanding another notch.

“I suspect your problem isn’t just with school How are things going at home?”

Melissa shrugged again. It was a very adult gesture.

“Home.” Her tone eliminated every good connotation the word possessed. “My fa—my foster father died last year. Heart attack. Bam! Mrs. Stuart still hasn’t gotten over it” A pause.

“Have you?”

The girl darted a quick glance.

“Everybody dies, sooner or later.” Another pause. I wish Mr. Stuart had hung around a while longer, though. He was OK.”

“And your mother?” May prodded delicately.

“My foster mother can’t wait for me. to grow up and let her off the hook. Jeez, she’d marry me off next month if the law allowed.” She stirred uncomfortably. “She keeps dragging boys home to take me out”

“Do you like going out with boys?”

A calculating glance.

“Some. I mean boys are OK, but Tm not ready to settle down quite yet” A nervous laugh. “I mean I don’t hate boys or anything. I mean I’ve still got lots of time for that sort of stuff when I grow up.”

“You’re nearly fourteen.”

I’m small for my age.”

Another tack.

“Does Mrs. Stuart feed you well?”

“Sure.”

“Do you make sure you eat a balanced diet?”

“Of course. Look, I’m just naturally thin, is all. Mrs. Stuart may be a pain in the neck, but she’s not trying to kill me off or anything. If s just that—” a sly smile Crossed her face. “Oh, I get it”

Melissa shifted to a pedantic false baritone.

“A frequent syndrome in modern urban society is the apparently nutrition-deficient early pubescent female. Although in an economic environment that speaks against a lack of financial resources or dietary education, said subject nevertheless exhibits a seeming inability to acquire adequate sustenance for growth.

“Subject is often found in an environment lacking in one or more vital male supportive roles and, on close examination, reveals a morbid preoccupation with functional changes incident to the onset of womanhood. Dietary insufficiency is clearly a tacit vehicle for avoiding responsibilities associated with such changes.”

She took an exaggerated deep breath.

“Whew! That Anderson is a long-winded son of a gun. So they stuck you with his book in Behav. Psych, too, huh? She smiled sweetly.

“Why, yes. That is, we read it. How did you know?”

“Saw it on your bookshelf. Do you have any candy?”

“Uh…no.”

“Too bad. The last social worker I dealt with always kept some on hand. You ought to, too. Good for public relations.” Melissa looked aimlessly around the room.

May shook herself again. She hadn’t felt so out of control in years. Not since they tried her out on the black ghetto kids. She dug in her heels.

“That was a very pretty performance, Melissa. I see you do read a lot But did it ever occur to you that what Anderson said might still apply to you? Even if you do make a joke out of it”

“You mean, do I watch what I eat, because I’m afraid to grow up?” A nod. “You’d better believe it. But not because of that guff Anderson propagates.”

The girl glanced at the photographs on the desk, looked keenly into May’s eyes.

“Mrs. Foster, how open-minded are you? No, strike that I’ve yet to meet a bigot who didn’t think of himself as Blind Justice, Incarnate. Let’s try a more pragmatic test. Do you read science fiction?”

“Uh…some.”

“Fantasy?”

“A little.”

“Well, what do you think of it? I mean, do you enjoy it?” Her eyes bored.

“Well, uh, I guess I like some of it Quite a bit of it leaves me cold.” She hesitated. “My husband reads it mostly. And my father-in-law. He’s a biochemist,” she added lamely, as though that excused something.

Melissa shrugged her adult shrug, made up her mind.

“What would you say if I told you my father was a wizard?”

“Frankly, Td say you’ve built up an elaborate delusional system about your unknown parents. Orphans often do, you know.”

“Yeah, Anderson again. But thanks for being honest; it was the right answer for you. I suspect, however,” she paused, fixed the woman with an unwavering sidelong glance, “you’re willing to believe that I might be more than your average maladjusted foster child.”

Under that stare, May could do nothing but nod. Once. Slowly.

“What would you say if I told you that I am over twenty-four hundred years old?”

May felt surprise, fear, elation, an emotion that had no name.

I’d say that you ought to meet my husband.”

The child sat at the dinner table with her hands folded neatly on her lap. The three adults toyed with their aperitifs and made small talk. Melissa responded to each effort to bring her into the conversation with a few polite words, just the right number of just the right words for a well-behaved child to speak when she is a first-time dinner guest among people who hardly know her. But she never volunteered any small talk of her own.

George Foster, Jr., sensed that the seemingly innocent child sitting across from him was waiting them out, but he couldn’t be sure. One thing he was sure of was that if this child were indeed older than Christendom he didn’t have much chance against her in intellectual games. That much decided, he was perfectly willing to play out the evening in a straightforward manner. But in his own good time.

“Would you start the salad around, Dad?” he prompted. ‘I hope you like endive, Melissa. Or is that also a taste acquired in adulthood, like alcohol?“ The girl had refused a dry sherry, politely but firmly.

Tm sure I’ll enjoy the salad, thank you. The dressing smells delicious. It’s a personal recipe, isn’t it?“

“Yes, as a matter of fact it is,” George said in mild surprise. He suddenly realized that he habitually classified all thin people as picky, indifferent eaters. A gastronome didn’t have to be overweight.

“Being a history professor gives me more freedom to schedule my time than May has,” he found himself explaining. ‘It is an easy step from cooking because you must, to cooking because you enjoy it. That mustard dressing is one of my earliest inventions. Would you like the recipe?”

“Yes, thank you. I don’t cook often, but when I do I like to produce something better than average.” She delivered the pretty compliment with a seeming lack of guile. She also avoided, George noted, responding to the veiled probe about her age. He was becoming more and more impressed. They broke bread and munched greens. How do I handle this? By the way, May tells me you’re twenty-four hundred years old. He met his father’s eye, caught the faintest of shrugs. Thanks for the help.

“By the way, May tells me you were in England for a while.” Now why in hell did he say that?

“I didn’t actually say so, but yes, I was. Actually, we discussed the Industrial Revolution, briefly.” Were you there?

I’m a medievalist, actually, but I’m also a bit of an Anglophile.“ George caught himself before he could lapse into the clipped, pseudo-British accent that phrase always triggered in him. He felt particularly vulnerable to making an ass of himself under that innocent gaze.

“Do you know much about English royalty?” He was about as subtle as a tonsillectomy.

“We studied it in school some.”

“I always wanted to be another Admiral Nelson. Damned shame the way he died. What was it the king said after his funeral, it was Edward, I think—”

Melissa put her fork down.

“It was King George, and you know it Look, before I came here I lived in Berkeley for a while.” She caught May’s look. “I know what my records say. After all, I wrote them… as I was saying, I was in Berkeley a few years back. It was right in the middle of the worst of the student unrest and we lived not three blocks from campus. Every day I walked those streets and every night we’d watch the riots and the thrashing on TV. Yet not once did I ever see one of those events with my own eyes.”

She looked at them each in turn.

“Something could be happening a block away, something that attracted network television coverage and carloads of police, and I wouldn’t know about it until I got home and turned on Cronkite. I think I may have smelled tear gas, once.”

She picked up her fork.

“You can quiz me all you want to, Dr. Foster, about admirals and kings and dates. I guess that’s what history is all about But don’t expect me to tell you about anything I didn’t learn in school. Or see on television.”

She stabbed viciously at a last scrap of endive. They watched her as she ate.

“Kids don’t get invited to the events that make history. Until very recently all they ever did was work, Worked until they grew old or worked until they starved or worked until they were killed by a passing war. That’s as close as most kids get to history, outside the classroom. Dates don’t mean much when every day looks like every other.”

George was at a loss for something to say after that, so he got up and went to the sideboard where the main dishes were being kept warm. He made an elaborate exercise out of removing lids and collecting hot pads.

“Are you really twenty-four hundred years old?” asked George Foster, Sr. There, it was out in the open.

“Near as I can tell,” spooning chicken and dumplings onto her plate. “like I said, dates don’t mean much to a kid. It was two or three hundred years before I gave much thought to when everything started. By then, it was a little hard to reconstruct. I make it twenty-four hundred and thirty-three years, now. Give or take a decade.” Give or take a decade!

“And your father was a magician?” May pursued. “Not a magician, a wizard.” A little exasperated. “He didn’t practice magic or cast spells; he was a wise man, a scholar. You could call him a scientist, except there wasn’t too much science back then. Not that he didn’t know a lot about some things!—obviously he did—but he didn’t work with an organized body of knowledge the way people do now.”

Somehow she had contrived to fill her plate and make a noticeable dent in her chicken without interrupting her narrative. George marveled at the girl’s varied social talents.

“Anyway, he was working on a method of restoring youth. Everybody was, in those days. Very stylish. There was actually quite a bit of progress being made. I remember one old geezer actually renewed his sex Me for about thirty years.”

“You mean, you know how to reverse aging?” George, Sr. asked intently. The candlelight couldn’t erase all the lines in his face.

“Sorry, no, I didn’t say that” She watched the elder Foster’s expression closely, her tone earnestly entreating him to believe her. “I just said I know of one man who did that once. For a while. But he didn’t tell anyone else how he did it, as far as I know. The knowledge died with him,”

Melissa turned to the others, looking for supporting belief.

“Look, that s the way people were, up until the last few centuries. Secrecy was what kept science from blossoming for so long. I saw digitalis appear and disappear at least three times before it became common knowledge… I really can’t help you.”

Gently.

“I believe you, child.” George, Sr. reached for the wine bottle.

“My father spent most of his time trying to second-guess the competition. I suppose they were doing the same thing. His only real success story was me. He found a way to stop the aging process just before puberty, and if s worked for me all this time.”

“He told you how he did it?” George, Sr. asked.

“I know what to do. I don’t understand the mechanism, yet I know it’s of no use to adults.”

“You’ve tried it?”

“Extensively.” An iron door of finality clanged in that word.

“Could you describe the method?”

“I could. I won’t Perhaps I am just a product of my age, but secrecy seems to be the only safe haven in this matter. I’ve had a few painful experiences.” They waited, but she did not elaborate.

George, Jr. got up to clear the table. He reached to pick up a plate and stopped.

“Why have you told us all this, Melissa?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” She folded her hands on her lap in that posture of infinite patience. “No, I suppose it isn’t unless you’ve lived as I have.

“After my father died, I hung around Athens for a while—did I mention, that’s where we lived? But too many people knew me and began to wonder out loud about why I wasn’t growing up. Some of the other wizards began to eye me speculatively, before I wised up and got out of town. I didn’t want to die a prisoner before anyone figured out I bad nothing useful to divulge.

“I soon found that I couldn’t escape from my basic problem. There’s always someone happy to take in a child, particularly a healthy one that’s willing to do more than her share of the work. But after a few years, it would become obvious that I was not growing up like other children. Suspicion would lead to fear, and fear always leads to trouble. I’ve learned to Judge to a nicety when it’s time to move on.”

George, Jr. placed a covered server on the table and unveiled a chocolate layer cake. Lake all children throughout time, Melissa grinned in delight.

If s a decided nuisance looking like a child—being a child—particularly now. You can’t just go get a job and rent your own apartment. You can’t apply for a driver’s license. You have to belong to someone and be In school, or some government busybody will be causing trouble. And with modern recordkeeping, you have to build a believable existence on paper too. That’s getting harder all the time.”

“It would seem to me,” interposed George, Jr., “that your best bet would be to move to one of the less developed countries. In Africa, or South America. There’d be a lot less hassle.”

Melissa made a face.

“‘No, thank you. I learned a long time ago to stick with the people who have the highest standard of living around. It’s worth the trouble… Nur wer in Wohlstand lebt, lebt angenehm. You know Brecht? Good.”

The girl gave up all pretense of conversation long enough to demolish a wedge of cake.

“That was an excellent dinner. Thank you.” She dabbed her lips daintily with her napkin. “I haven’t answered your question completely.

Tm telling you all about myself because if s time to move on again. I’ve overstayed my welcome with the Stuart’s. My records are useless to me now—in fact they’re an embarrassment. To keep on the way I’ve been, m have to manufacture a whole new set and insinuate them into someone’s files, somewhere. I thought it might be easier this time to take the honest approach.”

She looked at them expectantly. “You mean, you want us to help you get into a new foster home?” George, Jr. strained to keep the incredulity out of his voice. Melissa looked down at her empty dessert plate. “George, you are an insensitive lout,” May said with surprising fervor. “Don’t you understand? She’s asking us to take her in.” George was thunderstruck.

“Us? Well, ah. But we don’t have any children for her to play with. I mean—” He shut his mouth before he started to gibber. Melissa would not look up. George looked at his wife, his father. It was clear that they had completely outpaced him and had already made up their minds.

“I suppose it’s possible,” he muttered lamely. The girl looked up at last, tears lurking in the corners of her eyes.

“Oh, please. I’m good at housework and I don’t make any noise. And I’ve been thinking—maybe I don’t know much history, but I do know a lot about how people lived in a lot of different times and places. And I can read all sorts of languages. Maybe I could help you with your medieval studies.” The words tumbled over each other.

“And I remember some of the things my father tried,” she said to George, Sr. “Maybe your training in biochemistry will let you see where he went wrong. I know he had some success.” The girl was very close to begging, George knew. He couldn’t bear that.

“Dad?” he asked, mustering what aplomb he could.

“I think it would work out,” George, Sr. said slowly. “Yes. I think it would work out quite well”

“May?”

“You know my answer, George.”

“Well, then.” Still half bewildered. I guess it’s settled. When can you move in, Melissa?”

The answer, if there was one, was lost, amidst scraping of chairs and happy bawling noises from May and the girl. May always wanted a child, George rationalized, perhaps this will be good for her. He exchanged a tentative smile with his father.

May was still hugging Melissa enthusiastically. Over his wife’s shoulder, George could see the child’s tear-streaked face. For just one brief moment, he thought he detected an abstracted expression there, as though the child was already calculating how long this particular episode would last. But then the look was drowned in another flood of happy tears and George found himself smiling at his new daughter.

The child sat under the tree with her hands folded neatly on her lap. She looked up as George, Sr. approached. His gait had grown noticeably less confident in the last year; the stiffness and teetery uncertainty of age could no longer be ignored. George, Sr. was a proud man, but he was no fool He lowered himself carefully onto a tree stump.

“Hello, Grandpa,” Melissa said with just a hint of warmth. She sensed his mood, George, Sr. realized, and was being carefully disarming.

“Mortimer died,” was all he said.

“I was afraid he might. He’d lived a long time, for a white rat Did you learn anything from the last blood sample?”

“No.” Wearily. “Usual decay products. He died of old age. I could put it fancier, but that’s what it amounts to. And I don’t know why he suddenly started losing ground, after all these months. So I don’t know where to go from here.”

They sat in silence, Melissa patient as ever.

“You could give me some of your potion.”

“No.”

I know you have some to spare—you’re cautious. That’s why you spend so much time back in the woods, isn’t it? You’re making the stuff your father told you about“

“I told you it wouldn’t help you any and you promised not to ask.” There was no accusation in her voice, it was a simple statement.

“Wouldn’t you like to grow up, sometime?” he asked at length.

“Would you choose to be Emperor of the World if you knew you would be assassinated in two weeks? No, thank you. I’ll stick with what I’ve got”

“If we studied the make-up of your potion, we might figure out a way to let you grow up and still remain immortal.”

Tm not all that immortal. Which is why I don’t want too many people to know about me or my methods. Some jealous fool might decide to put a bullet through my head out of spite… I can endure diseases. I even regrew a finger once—took forty years. But I couldn’t survive massive trauma.” She drew her knees up and hugged them protectively.

“You have to realize that most of my defenses are prophylactic. I’ve learned to anticipate damage and avoid it as much as possible. But my body’s defenses are just extensions of a child’s basic resource, growth. It’s a tricky business to grow out of an injury without growing up in the process. Once certain glands take over, there’s no stopping them.

“Take teeth, for instance. They were designed for a finite lifetime, maybe half a century of gnawing on bones. When mine wear down, all I can do is pull them and wait what seems like forever for replacements to grow in. Painful, too. So I brash after meals and avoid abrasives. I stay well clear of dentists and their drills. That way I only have to suffer every couple of hundred years.”

George, Sr. felt dizzy at the thought of planning centuries the way one might lay out semesters. Such incongruous words from the mouth of a little girl sitting under a tree hugging her knees. He began to understand why she almost never spoke of her age or her past unless directly asked.

“I know a lot of biochemistry, too,” she went on. “You must have recognized that by now.” He nodded, reluctantly. “Well, I’ve studied what you call my ‘potion’ and I don’t think we know enough biology or chemistry yet to understand it. Certainly not enough to make changes.

“I know how to hold onto childhood. That’s not the same problem as restoring youth.”

“But don’t you want badly to be able to grow up? You said yourself what a nuisance it is being a child in the Twentieth Century.”

“Sure, it’s a nuisance. But it’s what I’ve got and I don’t want to risk it.” She leaned forward, chin resting on kneecaps.

“Look, I’ve recruited other kids in the past Ones I liked, ones I thought I could spend a long time with. But sooner or later, every one of them snatched at the bait you’re dangling. They all decided to grow up ‘just a little bit.’ Well, they did. And now they’re dead. I’ll stick with my children’s games, if it please you.”

“You don’t mind wasting all that time in school? Learning the same things over and over again? Surrounded by nothing but children? Real children?” He put a twist of malice in the emphasis.

“What waste? Time? Got lots of that. How much of your life have you spent actually doing research, compared to the time spent writing reports and driving to work? How much time does Mrs. Foster get to spend talking to troubled kids? She’s lucky if she averages five minutes a day. We all spend most of our time doing routine chores. It would be unusual if any of us did not.

“And I don’t mind being around kids. I like them.”

“T never have understood that,” George, Sr. said half abstractedly. “How well you can mix with children so much younger than you. How you can act like them.”

“You’ve got it backward,” she said softly. “They act like me. All children are immortal, until they grow up.”

She let that sink in for a minute.

“Now I ask you, Grandpa, you tell me why I should want to grow up.”

“There are other pleasures,” he said eventually, “far deeper than the joys of childhood.”

“You mean sex? Yes, Tm sure that’s what you’re referring to. Well, what makes you think a girl my age is a virgin?”

He raised his arms in embarrassed protest, as if to ward such matters from his ears.

“No, wait a minute. You brought this up,” she persisted. “Look at me. Am I unattractive? Good teeth, no pock marks. No visible deformities. Why, a girl like me would make first-rate wife material in some circles. Particularly where the average life expectancy is, say, under thirty-five years—as it has been throughout much of history. Teen-age celibacy and late marriage are conceits that society has only recently come to afford.”

She looked at him haughtily.

“I have had my share of lovers, and you can bet I’ve enjoyed them as much as they’ve enjoyed me. You don’t need glands for that sort of thing so much as sensitive nerve endings—and a little understanding. Of course, my boyfriends were all a little disappointed when I failed to ripen up, but it was fun while it lasted.

“Sure, it would be nice to live in a woman’s body, to feel all those hormones making you do wild things. But to me, sex isn’t a drive, it’s just another way of relating to people. I already recognize my need to be around people, uncomplicated by any itches that need scratching. My life would be a lot simpler if I could do without others, heaven knows. I certainly don’t have to be forced by glandular pressure to go in search of company. What else is there to life?”

What else, indeed? George, Sr. thought bitterly. One last try.

“Do you know about May?” he asked.

“That she can’t have children? Sure, that was pretty obvious from the start Do you think I can help her? You do, yes. Well, I can’t I know even less about that than I do about what killed Mortimer.”

Pause.

“I’m sorry, Grandpa,”

Silence.

I really am.”

Silence.

Distantly, a car could be heard approaching the house. George, Jr. was coming home. The old man got up from the stump, slowly and stiffly.

“Dinner will be ready soon.” He turned toward the house. “Don’t be late. You know your mother doesn’t like you to play in the woods.”

The child sat in the pew with her hands folded neatly on her lap. She could hear the cold rain lash against the stained-glass windows, their scenes of martyrdom muted by the night lurking outside. Melissa had always liked churches. In a world filled with change and death, church was a familiar haven, a resting place for embattled innocents to prepare for fresh encounters with a hostile world.

Her time with the Fosters was over. Even with the inevitable discord at the end, she was already able to look back over her stay with fond remembrance. What saddened her most was that her prediction that first evening she came to dinner had been so accurate. She kept hoping that just once her cynical assessment of human nature would prove wrong and she would be granted an extra year, even an extra month, of happiness before she was forced to move on.

Things began to go really sour after George, Sr. had his first mild stroke. It was George, Jr. who became the most accusatory then. (The old man had given up on Melissa; perhaps that was what angered George, Jr. the most.) There was nothing she could say or do to lessen the tension. Just being there, healthy and still a prepubescent child unchanged in five years of photographs and memories—her very presence made a mockery of the old man’s steady retreat in the face of mortality.

Had George, Jr. understood himself better, perhaps he would not have been so hard on the girl. (But then, she had figured that in her calculations.) He thought it was May who wanted children so badly, when in actuality it was his own subconscious striving for that lesser form of immortality that made their childless home ring with such hollowness. All May begrudged the child was a second chance at the beauty she fancied lost with the passing of youth. Naturally May fulfilled her own prophecy, as so many women do, by discarding a little more glow with each passing year.

George, Jr. took to following Melissa on her trips into the woods. Anger and desperation gave him a stealth she never would have otherwise ascribed to him. He found all her hidden caches and stole minute samples from each. It did him no good, of course, nor his father, for the potion was extremely photo-reactant (her father’s great discovery and Melissa’s most closely guarded secret). The delicate long chain molecules were smashed to a meaningless soup of common organic substances long before any of the samples reached the analytical laboratory.

But that thievery was almost her undoing. She did not suspect anything until the abdominal cramps started. Only twice before in her long history—both times of severe famine—had that happened. In a pure panic, Melissa plunged deep into the forest, to collect her herbs and mix her brews and sleep beside them in a darkened burrow for the two days it took them to ripen. The cramps abated, along with her panic, and she returned home to find that George, Sr. had suffered a second stroke.

May was furious—at what, she could not say precisely—there was no talking to her. George, Jr. had long been a lost cause. Melissa went to her room, thought things over a while, and prepared to leave. As she crept out the back door, she heard George, Jr. talking quietly on the telephone.

She hot-wired a neighbor’s car and set off for town-Cars were pulling into the Foster’s drive as she went past, hard-eyed men climbing out Melissa had cowered in alleyways more than once to avoid the gaze of Roman centurions. These may have been CIA, FBI, some other alphabet name to disguise their true purpose in life, but she knew them for what they were. She had not left a minute too soon.

No one thinks to look for stolen cars when a child disappears; Melissa had some time to maneuver. She abandoned the sedan in town less than a block away from the bus depot At the depot, she openly bought a one-way ticket to Berkeley. She was one of the first aboard and made a point of asking the driver, in nervous little-girl fashion, whether this was really the bus to Berkeley. She slipped out while he was juggling paperwork with title dispatcher.

With one false trail laid, she was careful not to go running off too quickly in another direction. Best to lay low until morning, at least, then rely more on walking than riding to get somewhere else. Few people thought to walk a thousand miles these days; Melissa had done it more times than she could remember.

“We have to close up, son,” a soft voice said behind her. She suddenly remembered her disguise and realized the remark was addressed to her. She turned to see the priest drifting toward her, his robes rustling almost imperceptibly. “It’s nearly midnight,” the man said with a smile, “you should be getting home.”

“Oh, hello, Father. I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Is everything all right? You’re out very late.”

“My sister works as a waitress, down the block. Dad likes me to walk her home. I should go meet her now. Just came in to get out of the rain for a bit. Thanks.”

Melissa smiled her sincerest smile. She disliked lying, but it was important not to appear out of place. No telling how big a manhunt might be mounted to find her. She had no way of knowing how much the Fosters would be believed. The priest returned her smile.

“Very good. But you be careful too, son. The streets aren’t safe for anyone, these days.”

They never have been, Father.

Melissa had passed as a boy often enough in the past to know that safety, from anything, depended little on sex. At least not for children.

That business with the centurions worried her more than she cared to admit The very fact that they turned out in such numbers indicated that George, Jr. had at least partially convinced someone important.

Luckily, there was no hard evidence that she was really what she said she was. The samples George, Jr. stole were meaningless and the pictures and records May could produce on her only covered about an eight-year period. That was a long time for a little girl to remain looking like a little girl, but not frighteningly out of the ordinary.

If she was lucky, the rationalizations had already begun, Melissa was just a freak of some kind, a late maturer and a con artist. The Fosters were upset— that much was obvious—because of George, Sr. They should not be believed too literally.

Melissa could hope. Most of all she hoped that they didn’t have a good set of her fingerprints. (She had polished everything in her room before leaving.) Bureaucracies were the only creatures she could not outlive—It would be very bad if the U.S. Government carried a grudge against her.

Oh well, that was the last time she would try the honest approach for quite some time.

The rain had backed off to a steady drizzle. That was an improvement, she decided, but it was still imperative that she find some shelter for the night. The rain matted her freshly cropped hair and soaked through her thin baseball jacket She was cold and tired.

Melissa dredged up the memories, nurtured over the centuries, of her first, real childhood. She remembered her mother, plump and golden-haired, and how safe and warm it was curled up in her lap. That one was gone now, along with millions of other mothers out of time. There was no going back.

Up ahead, on the other side of the street, a movie marquee splashed light through the drizzle. Black letters spelled out a greeting:

WALT DISNEY

TRIPLE FEATURE

CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCES

FOR CHILDREN OF ALL AGES

That’s me, Melissa decided, and skipped nimbly over the rain-choked gutter. She crossed the street on a long diagonal, ever on the lookout for cars, and tendered up her money at the ticket window. Leaving rain and cold behind for a time, she plunged gratefully into the warm darkness.

CATCH THAT ZEPPELIN!

Fritz Leiber

This year on a trip to New York City to visit my son, who is a social historian at a leading municipal university there, I had a very unsettling experience. At black moments, of which at my age I have quite a few, it still makes me distrust profoundly those absolute boundaries in Space and Time which are our sole protection against Chaos, and fear that my mind—no, my entire individual existence—may at any moment at all and without any warning whatsoever be blown by a sudden gust of Cosmic Wind to an entirely different spot in a Universe of Infinite Possibilities. Or, rather, into another Universe altogether. And that my mind and individuality will be changed to fit.

But at other moments, which are still in the majority, I believe that my unsettling experience was only one of those remarkably vivid waking dreams to which old people become increasingly susceptible, generally waking dreams about the past, and especially waking dreams about a past in which at some crucial point one made an entirely different and braver choice than one actually did, or in which the whole world made such a decision, with a completely different future resulting. Golden glowing might-have-beens nag increasingly at the minds of some older people.

In line with this interpretation I must admit that my whole unsettling experience was structured very much like a dream. It began with startling flashes of a changed world. It continued into a longer period when I completely accepted the changed world and delighted in it and, despite fleeting quivers of uneasiness, wished I could bask in its glow forever. And it ended in horrors, or nightmares, which I hate to mention, let alone discuss, until I must.

Opposing this dream notion, there are times when I am completely convinced that what happened to me in Manhattan and in a certain famous building there was no dream at all, but absolutely real, and that I did indeed visit another Time Stream.

Finally, I must point out that what I am about to tell you I am necessarily describing in retrospect, highly aware of several transitions involved and, whether I want to or not, commenting on them and making deductions that never once occurred to me at the time.

No, at the time it happened to me—and now at this moment of writing I am convinced that it did happen and was absolutely real—one instant simply succeeded another in the most natural way possible. I questioned nothing.

As to why it all happened to me, and what particular mechanism was involved, well, I am convinced that every man or woman has rare, brief moments of extreme sensitivity, or rather vulnerability, when his mind and entire being may be blown by the Change Winds to Somewhere Else. And then, by what I call the Law of the Conservation of Reality, blown back again.

I was walking down Broadway somewhere near 34th Street. It was a chilly day, sunny despite the smog—a bracing day—and I suddenly began to stride along more briskly than is my cautious habit, throwing my feet ahead of me with a faint suggestion of the goose step. I also threw back my shoulders and took deep breaths, ignoring the fumes which tickled my nostrils. Beside me, traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York. I cheerfully ignored that too. I even smiled at the sight of a ragged bum and a fur-coated gray-haired society lady both independently dodging across the street through the hurtling traffic with a cool practiced skill one sees only in America’s biggest metropolis.

Just then I noticed a dark, wide shadow athwart the street ahead of me. It could not be that of a cloud, for it did not move. I craned my neck sharply and looked straight up like the veriest yokel, a regular Hans-Kopf-in-die-Luft (Hans-Head-in-the-Air, a German figure of comedy).

My gaze had to climb up the giddy 102 stories of the tallest building in the world, the Empire State. My gaze was strangely accompanied by the vision of a gigantic, long-fanged ape making the same ascent with a beautiful girl in one paw—oh, yes, I was recollecting the charming American fantasy-film King Kong, or as they name it in Sweden, Kong King.

And then my gaze clambered higher still, up the 222-foot sturdy tower, to the top of which was moored the nose of the vast, breathtakingly beautiful, streamlined, silvery shape which was making the shadow.

Now here is a most important point. I was not at the time in the least startled by what I saw. I knew at once that it was simply the bow section of the German zeppelin Ostwald, named for the great German pioneer of physical chemistry and electrochemistry, and queen of the mighty passenger and light-freight fleet of luxury airliners working out of Berlin, Baden-Baden, and Bremerhaven. That matchless Armada of Peace, each titanic airship named for a world-famous German scientist—the Mach, the Nernst, the Humbolt, the Fritz Haber, the French-named Antoine Henri Becquerel, the American-named Edison, the Polish-named T. Sklodowska Edison, and even the Jewish-named Einstein! The great humanitarian navy in which I held a not unimportant position as international sales consultant and Fachmann—I mean expert. My chest swelled with justified pride at this edel—noble—achievement of der Vaterland.

I knew also without any mind-searching or surprise that the length of the Ostwald was more than one half the 1,472-foot height of the Empire State Building plus its mooring tower, thick enough to hold an elevator. And my heart swelled again with the thought that the Berlin Zeppelinturm (dirigible tower) was only a few meters less high. Germany, I told myself, need not strain for mere numerical records—her sweeping scientific and technical achievements speak for themselves to the entire planet.

All this literally took little more than a second, and I never broke my snappy stride. As my gaze descended, I cheerfully hummed under my breath Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles.

The Broadway I saw was utterly transformed, though at the time this seemed every bit as natural as the serene presence of the Ostwald high overhead, vast ellipsoid held aloft by helium. Silvery electric trucks and buses and private cars innumerable purred along far more evenly and quietly, and almost as swiftly, as had the noisy, stenchful, jerky gasoline-powered vehicles only moments before, though to me now the latter were completely forgotten. About two blocks ahead, an occasional gleaming electric car smoothly swung into the wide silver arch of a quick-battery-change station, while others emerged from under the arch to rejoin the almost dreamlike stream of traffic.

The air I gratefully inhaled was fresh and clean, without trace of smog.

The somewhat fewer pedestrians around me still moved quite swiftly, but with a dignity and courtesy largely absent before, with the numerous blackamoors among them quite as well dressed and exuding the same quiet confidence as the Caucasians.

The only slightly jarring note was struck by a tall, pale, rather emaciated man in black dress and with unmistakably Hebraic features. His somber clothing was somewhat shabby, though well kept, and his thin shoulders were hunched. I got the impression he had been looking closely at me, and then instantly glancing away as my eyes sought his. For some reason I recalled what my son had told me about the City College of New York—CCNY—being referred to surreptitiously and jokingly as Christian College Now Yiddish. I couldn’t help chuckling a bit at that witticism, though I am glad to say it was a genial little guffaw rather than a malicious snicker. Germany in her well-known tolerance and noble-mindedness has completely outgrown her old, disfiguring anti-Semitism—after all, we must admit in all fairness that perhaps a third of our great men are Jews or carry Jewish genes, Haber and Einstein among them—despite what dark and, yes, wicked memories may lurk in the subconscious minds of oldsters like myself and occasionally briefly surface into awareness like submarines bent on ship murder.

My happily self-satisfied mood immediately reasserted itself, and with a smart, almost military gesture I brushed to either side with a thumbnail the short, horizontal black mustache which decorates my upper lip, and I automatically swept back into place the thick comma of black hair (I confess I dye it) which tends to fall down across my forehead.

I stole another glance up at the Ostwald, which made me think of the matchless amenities of that wondrous deluxe airliner: the softly purring motors that powered its propellers—electric motors, naturally, energized by banks of lightweight TSE batteries and as safe as its helium; the Grand Corridor running the length of the passenger deck from the Bow Observatory to the stern’s like-windowed Games Room, which becomes the Grand Ballroom at night; the other peerless rooms letting off that corridor—the Gesellschaftsraum der Kapitän (Captain’s Lounge) with its dark woodwork, manly cigar smoke and Damentische (Tables for Ladies), the Premier Dining Room with its linen napery and silverplated aluminum dining service, the Ladies’ Retiring Room always set out profusely with fresh flowers, the Schwartzwald bar, the gambling casino with its roulette, baccarat, chemmy, blackjack (vingt-et-un), its tables for skat and bridge and dominoes and sixty-six, its chess tables presided over by the delightfully eccentric world’s champion Nimzowitch, who would defeat you blindfold, but always brilliantly, simultaneously or one at a time, in charmingly baroque brief games for only two gold pieces per person per game (one gold piece to nutsy Nimzy, one to the DLG), and the supremely luxurious staterooms with costly veneers of mahogany over balsa; the hosts of attentive stewards, either as short and skinny as jockeys or else actual dwarfs, both types chosen to save weight; and the titanium elevator rising through the countless bags of helium to the two-decked Zenith Observatory, the sun deck wind-screened but roofless to let in the ever-changing clouds, the mysterious fog, the rays of the stars and good old Sol, and all the heavens. Ah, where else on land or sea could you buy such high living?

I called to mind in detail the single cabin which was always mine when I sailed on the Ostwald—meine Stammkabine. I visualized the Grand Corridor thronged with wealthy passengers in evening dress, the handsome officers, the unobtrusive, ever-attentive stewards, the gleam of white shirt fronts, the glow of bare shoulders, the muted dazzle of jewels, the music of conversations like string quartets, the lilting low laughter that traveled along.

Exactly on time I did a neat “Links, marchieren!” (“To the left, march!”) and passed through the impressive portals of the Empire State and across its towering lobby to the mutedly silver-doored banks of elevators. On my way I noted the silver-glowing date: 6 May 1937 and the time of day: 1:07 P.M. Good!—since the Ostwald did not cast off until the tick of 3:00 P.M., I would be left plenty of time for a leisurely lunch and good talk with my son, if he had remembered to meet me—and there was actually no doubt of that, since he is the most considerate and orderly minded of sons, a real German mentality, though I say it myself.

I headed for the express bank, enjoying my passage through the clusters of high-class people who thronged the lobby without any unseemly crowding, and placed myself before the doors designated “Dirigible Departure Lounge” and in briefer German “Zum Zeppelin.”

The elevator hostess was an attractive Japanese girl in skirt of dull silver with the DLG, Double Eagle and Dirigible insignia of the German Airship Union emblazoned in small on the left breast of her mutedly silver jacket. I noted with unvoiced approval that she appeared to have an excellent command of both German and English and was uniformly courteous to the passengers in her smiling but unemotional Nipponese fashion, which is so like our German scientific precision of speech, though without the latter’s warm underlying passion. How good that our two federations, at opposite sides of the globe, have strong commercial and behavioral ties!

My fellow passengers in the lift, chiefly Americans and Germans, were of the finest type, very well dressed—except that just as the doors were about to close, there pressed in my doleful Jew in black. He seemed ill at ease, perhaps because of his shabby clothing. I was surprised, but made a point of being particularly polite toward him, giving him a slight bow and brief but friendly smile, while flashing my eyes. Jews have as much right to the acme of luxury travel as any other people on the planet, if they have the money—and most of them do.

During our uninterrupted and infinitely smooth passage upward, I touched my outside left breast pocket to reassure myself that my ticket—first class on the Ostwald!—and my papers were there. But actually I got far more reassurance and even secret joy from the feel and thought of the documents in my tightly zippered inside left breast pocket: the signed preliminary agreements that would launch America herself into the manufacture of passenger zeppelins. Modern Germany is always generous in sharing her great technical achievements with responsible sister nations, supremely confident that the genius of her scientists and engineers will continue to keep her well ahead of all other lands; and after all, the genius of two Americans, father and son, had made vital though indirect contributions to the development of safe airship travel (and not forgetting the part played by the Polish-born wife of the one and mother of the other).

The obtaining of those documents had been the chief and official reason for my trip to New York City, though I had been able to combine it most pleasurably with a long overdue visit with my son, the social historian, and with his charming wife.

These happy reflections were cut short by the jarless arrival of our elevator at its lofty terminus on the one hundredth floor. The journey old love-smitten King Kong had made only after exhausting exertion we had accomplished effortlessly. The silvery doors spread wide. My fellow passengers hung back for a moment in awe and perhaps a little trepidation at the thought of the awesome journey ahead of them, and I—seasoned airship traveler that I am—was the first to step out, favoring with a smile and nod of approval my pert yet cool Japanese fellow employee of the lower echelons.

Hardly sparing a glance toward the great, fleckless window confronting the doors and showing a matchless view of Manhattan from an elevation of 1,250 feet minus two stories, I briskly turned, not right to the portals of the Departure Lounge and tower elevator, but left to those of the superb German restaurant Krähenest (“Crow’s Nest”).

I passed between the flanking three-foot-high bronze statuettes of Thomas Edison and, Marie Sklodowska Edison niched in one wall and those of Count von Zeppelin and Thomas Sklodowska Edison facing them from the other, and entered the select precincts of the finest German dining place outside the Fatherland. I paused while my eyes traveled searchingly around the room with its restful dark wood paneling deeply carved with beautiful representations of the Black Forest and its grotesque supernatural denizens—kobolds, elves, gnomes, dryads (tastefully sexy), and the like. They interested me since I am what Americans call a Sunday painter, though almost my sole subject matter is zeppelins seen against blue sky and airy, soaring clouds.

The Oberkellner came hurrying toward me with menu tucked under his left elbow and saying, “Mein Herr! Charmed to see you once more! I have a perfect table-for-one with porthole looking out across the Hudson.”

But just then a youthful figure rose springily from behind a table set against the far wall, and a dear and familiar voice rang out to me with “Hier, Papa!”

“Nein, Herr Ober,” I smilingly told the headwaiter as I walked past him, “heute hab ich ein Gesellschafter, Mein Sohn.”

I confidently made my way between tables occupied by well-dressed folk, both white and black.

My son wrung my hand with fierce family affection, though we had last parted only that morning. He insisted that I take the wide, dark, leather-upholstered seat against the wall, which gave me a fine view of the entire restaurant, while he took the facing chair.

“Because during this meal I wish to look only on you, Papa,” he assured me with manly tenderness. “And we have at least an hour and a half together, Papa—I have checked your luggage through, and it is likely already aboard the Ostwald.” Thoughtful, dependable boy!

“And now, Papa, what shall it be?” he continued after we had settled ourselves. “I see that today’s special is Sauerbraten mit Spatzel and sweet-sour red cabbage. But there is also Paprikahuhn and—”

“Leave the chicken to flaunt her paprika in lonely red splendor today,” I interrupted him. “Sauerbraten sounds fine.”

Ordered by my Herr Ober, the aged wine waiter had already approached our table. I was about to give him direction when my son took upon himself that task with an authority and a hostfulness that warmed my heart. He scanned the wine menu rapidly but thoroughly.

“The Zinfandel 1933,” he ordered with decision, though glancing my way to see if I concurred with his judgment. I smiled and nodded.

“And perhaps ein Tropfchen Schnapps to begin with?” he suggested.

“A brandy?—yes!” I replied. “And not just a drop, either. Make it a double. It is not every day I lunch with that distinguished scholar, my son.”

“Oh, Papa,” he protested, dropping his eyes and almost blushing. Then firmly to the bent-backed, white-haired wine waiter, “Schnapps also. Doppel.” The old waiter nodded his approval and hurried off.

We gazed fondly at each other for a few blissful seconds. Then I said, “Now tell me more fully about your achievements as a social historian on an exchange professorship in the New World. I know we have spoken about this several times, but only rather briefly and generally when various of your friends were present, or at least your lovely wife. Now I would like a more leisurely man-to-man account of your great work. Incidentally, do you find the scholarly apparatus—books, und so weiter (“et cetera”)—of the Municipal Universities of New York City adequate to your needs after having enjoyed those of Baden-Baden University and the institutions of high learning in the German Federation?”

“In some respects they are lacking,” he admitted. “However, for my purposes they have proved completely adequate.” Then once more he dropped his eyes and almost blushed. “But, Papa, you praise my small efforts far too highly.” He lowered his voice. “They do not compare with the victory for international industrial relations you yourself have won in a fortnight.”

“All in a day’s work for the DLG,” I said self-deprecatingly, though once again lightly touching my left chest to establish contact with those most important documents safely stowed in my inside left breast pocket. “But now, no more polite fencing!” I went on briskly. “Tell me all about those ‘small efforts,’ as you modestly refer to them.”

His eyes met mine. “Well, Papa,” he began in suddenly matter-of-fact fashion, “all my work these last two years has been increasingly dominated by a firm awareness of the fragility of the underpinnings of the good world-society we enjoy today. If certain historically-minute key events, or cusps, in only the past one hundred years had been decided differently—if another course had been chosen than the one that was—then the whole world might now be plunged in wars and worse horrors then we ever dream of. It is a chilling insight, but it bulks continually larger in my entire work, my every paper.”

I felt the thrilling touch of inspiration. At that moment the wine waiter arrived with our double brandies in small goblets of cut glass. I wove the interruption into the fabric of my inspiration. “Let us drink then to what you name your chilling insight,” I said. “Prosit!”

The bite and spreading warmth of the excellent schnapps quickened my inspiration further. “I believe I understand exactly what you’re getting at…” I told my son. I set down my half-emptied goblet and pointed at something over my son’s shoulder.

He turned his head around, and after one glance back at my pointing finger, which intentionally waggled a tiny bit from side to side, he realized that I was not indicating the entry of the Krähenest, but the four sizable bronze statuettes flanking it.

“For instance,” I said, “if Thomas Edison and Marie Sklodowska had not married, and especially if they had not had their super-genius son, then Edison’s knowledge of electricity and hers of radium and other radioactives might never have been joined. There might never have been developed the fabulous T.S. Edison battery, which is the prime mover of all today’s surface and air traffic. Those pioneering electric tracks introduced by the Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia might have remained an expensive freak. And the gas helium might never have been produced industrially to supplement earth’s meager subterranean supply.”

My son’s eyes brightened with the flame of pure scholarship. “Papa,” he said eagerly, “you are a genius yourself! You have precisely hit on what is perhaps the most important of those cusp-events I referred to. I am at this moment finishing the necessary research for a long paper on it. Do you know, Papa, that I have firmly established by researching Parisian records that there was in 1894 a close personal relationship between Marie Sklodowska and her fellow radium researcher Pierre Curie, and that she might well have become Madame Curie—or perhaps Madame Becquerel, for he too was in that work—if the dashing and brilliant Edison had not most opportunely arrived in Paris in December 1894 to sweep her off her feet and carry her off to the New World to even greater achievements?

“And just think, Papa,” he went on, his eyes aflame, “what might have happened if their son’s battery had not been invented—the most difficult technical achievement hedged by all sorts of seeming scientific impossibilities, in the entire millennium-long history of industry. Why, Henry Ford might have manufactured automobiles powered by steam or by exploding natural gas or conceivably even vaporized liquid gasoline, rather than the mass-produced electric cars which have been such a boon to mankind everywhere—not our smokeless cars, but cars spouting all sorts of noxious fumes to pollute the environment.”

Cars powered by the danger-fraught combustion of vaporized liquid gasoline!—it almost made me shudder and certainly it was a fantastic thought, yet not altogether beyond the bounds of possibility, I had to admit.

Just then I noticed my gloomy, black-clad Jew sitting only two tables away from us, though how he had got himself into the exclusive Krähenest was a wonder. Strange that I had missed his entry—probably immediately after my own, while I had eyes only for my son. His presence somehow threw a dark though only momentary shadow over my bright mood. Let him get some good German food inside him and some fine German wine, I thought generously—it will fill that empty belly of his and even put a bit of a good German smile into those sunken Yiddish cheeks! I combed my little mustache with my thumbnail and swept the errant lock of hair off my forehead.

Meanwhile my son was saying, “Also, Father, if electric transport had not been developed, and if during the last decade relations between Germany and the United States had not been so good, then we might never have gotten from the wells in Texas the supply of natural helium our zeppelins desperately needed during the brief but vital period before we had put the artificial creation of helium onto an industrial footing. My researchers at Washington have revealed that there was a strong movement in the U.S. military to ban the sale of helium to any other nation, Germany in particular. Only the powerful influence of Edison, Ford, and a few other key Americans, instantly brought to bear, prevented that stupid injunction. Yet if it had gone through, Germany might have been forced to use hydrogen instead of helium to float her passenger dirigibles. That was another crucial cusp.”

“A hydrogen-supported zeppelin!—ridiculous! Such an airship would be a floating bomb, ready to be touched off by the slightest spark,” I protested.

“Not ridiculous, Father,” my son calmly contradicted me, shaking his head. “Pardon me for trespassing in your field, but there is an inescapable imperative about certain industrial developments. If there is not a safe road of advance, then a dangerous one will invariably be taken. You must admit, Father, that the development of commercial airships was in its early stages a most perilous venture. During the 1920s there were the dreadful wrecks of the American dirigibles Roma, and Shenandoah, which broke in two, Akron, and Macon, the British R-38, which also broke apart in the air, and R-101, the French Dixmude, which disappeared in the Mediterranean, Mussolini’s Italia, which crashed trying to reach the North Pole, and the Russian Maxim Gorky, struck down by a plane, with a total loss of no fewer than 340 crew members for the nine accidents. If that had been followed by the explosions of two or three hydrogen zeppelins, world industry might well have abandoned forever the attempt to create passenger airships and turned instead to the development of large propeller-driven, heavier-than-air craft.”

Monster airplanes, in danger every moment of crashing from engine failure, competing with good old unsinkable zeppelins?—impossible, at least at first thought. I shook my head, but not with as much conviction as I might have wished. My son’s suggestion was really a valid one.

Besides, he had all his facts at his fingertips and was complete master of his subject, as I also had to allow. Those nine fearful airship disasters he mentioned had indeed occurred, as I knew well, and might have tipped the scale in favor of long-distance passenger and troop-carrying airplanes, had it not been for helium, the T.S. Edison battery, and German genius.

Fortunately I was able to dump from my mind these uncomfortable speculations and immerse myself in admiration of my son’s multisided scholarship. That boy was a wonder!—a real chip off the old block, and, yes, a bit more.

“And now, Dolfy,” he went on, using my nickname (I did not mind), “may I turn to an entirely different topic? Or rather to a very different example of my hypothesis of historical cusps?”

I nodded mutely. My mouth was busily full with fine Sauerbraten and those lovely, tiny German dumplings, while my nostrils enjoyed the unique aroma of sweet-sour red cabbage. I had been so engrossed in my son’s revelations that I had not consciously noted our luncheon being served. I swallowed, took a slug of the good, red Zinfandel, and said, “Please go on.”

“It’s about the consequences of the American Civil War, Father,” he said surprisingly. “Did you know that in the decade after that bloody conflict, there was a very real danger that the whole cause of Negro freedom and rights—for which the war was fought, whatever they say—might well have been completely smashed? The fine work of Abraham Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the Union League Clubs put to naught? And even the Ku Klux Klan underground allowed free reign rather than being sternly repressed? Yes, Father, my thoroughgoing researchings have convinced me such things might easily have happened, resulting in some sort of re-enslavement of the blacks, with the whole war to be refought at an indefinite future date, or at any rate Reconstruction brought to a dead halt for many decades—with what disastrous effects on the American character, turning its deep simple faith in freedom to hypocrisy, it is impossible to exaggerate. I have published a sizable paper on this subject in the Journal of Civil War Studies.”

I nodded somberly. Quite a bit of this new subject matter of his was terra incognita to me; yet I knew enough of American history to realize he had made a cogent point. More than ever before, I was impressed by his multifaceted learning—he was indubitably a figure in the great tradition of German scholarship, a profound thinker, broad and deep. How fortunate to be his father. Not for the first time, but perhaps with the greatest sincerity yet, I thanked God and the Laws of Nature that I had early moved my family from Braunau, Austria, where I had been born in 1889, to Baden-Baden, where he had grown up in the ambience of the great new university on the edge of the Black Forest and only 150 kilometers from Count Zeppelin’s dirigible factory in Württemberg, at Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance.

I raised my glass of Kirschwasser to him in a solemn, silent toast—we had somehow got to that stage in our meal—and downed a sip of the potent, fiery, white, cherry brandy.

He leaned toward me and said, “I might as well tell you, Dolf, that my big book, at once popular and scholarly, my Meisterwerk, to be titled If Things Had Gone Wrong, or perhaps If Things Had Turned for the Worse, will deal solely—though illuminated by dozens of diverse examples—with my theory of historical cusps, a highly speculative concept but firmly footed in fact.” He glanced at his wristwatch, muttered, “Yes, there’s still time for it. So now—” His face grew grave, his voice clear though small—“I will venture to tell you about one more cusp, the most disputable and yet most crucial of them all.” He paused. “I warn you, dear Dolf, that this cusp may cause you pain.”

“I doubt that,” I told him indulgently. “Anyhow, go ahead.”

“Very well. In November of 1918, when the British had broken the Hindenburg Line and the weary German army was defiantly dug in along the Rhine, and just before the Allies, under Marshal Foch, launched the final crushing drive which would cut a bloody swath across the heartland to Berlin—”

I understood his warning at once. Memories flamed in my mind like the sudden blinding flares of the battlefield with their deafening thunder. The company I had commanded had been among the most desperately defiant of those he mentioned, heroically nerved for a last-ditch resistance. And then Foch had delivered that last vast blow, and we had fallen back and back and back before the overwhelming numbers of our enemies with their field guns and tanks and armored cars innumerable and above all their huge aerial armadas of De Haviland and Handley-Page and other big bombers escorted by insect-buzzing fleets of Spads and other fighters shooting to bits our last Fokkers and Pfalzes and visiting on Germany a destruction greater far than our zeps had worked on England. Back, back, back, endlessly reeling and regrouping, across the devastated German countryside, a dozen times decimated yet still defiant until the end came at last amid the ruins of Berlin, and the most bold among us had to admit we were beaten and we surrendered unconditionally—

These vivid, fiery recollections came to me almost instantaneously.

I heard my son continuing, “At that cusp moment in November, 1918, Dolf, there existed a very strong possibility—I have established this beyond question—that an immediate armistice would be offered and signed, and the war ended inconclusively. President Wilson was wavering, the French were very tired, and so on.

“And if that had happened in actuality—harken closely to me now, Dolf—then the German temper entering the decade of the 1920s would have been entirely different. She would have felt she had not been really licked, and there would inevitably have been a secret recrudescence of pan-German militarism. German scientific humanism would not have won its total victory over the Germany of the—yes!—Huns.

“As for the Allies, self-tricked out of the complete victory which lay within their grasp, they would in the long run have treated Germany far less generously than they did after their lust for revenge had been sated by that last drive to Berlin. The League of Nations would not have become the strong instrument for world peace that it is today; it might well have been repudiated by America and certainly secretly detested by Germany. Old wounds would not have healed because, paradoxically, they would not have been deep enough.

“There, I’ve said my say. I hope it hasn’t bothered you too badly, Dolf.”

I let out a gusty sigh. Then my wincing frown was replaced by a brow serene. I said very deliberately, “Not one bit, my son, though you have certainly touched my own old wounds to the quick. Yet I feel in my bones that your interpretation is completely valid. Rumors of an armistice were indeed running like wildfire through our troops in that black autumn of 1918. And I know only too well that if there had been an armistice at that time, then officers like myself would have believed that the German soldier had never really been defeated, only betrayed by his leaders and by red incendiaries, and we would have begun to conspire endlessly for a resumption of the war under happier circumstances. My son, let us drink to your amazing cusps.”

Our tiny glasses touched with a delicate ting, and the last drops went down of biting, faintly bitter Kirschwasser. I buttered a thin slice of pumpernickel and nibbled it—always good to finish off a meal with bread. I was suddenly filled with an immeasurable content. It was a golden moment, which I would have been happy to have go on forever, while I listened to my son’s wise words and fed my satisfaction in him. Yes, indeed, it was a golden nugget of pause in the terrible rush of time—the enriching conversation, the peerless food and drink, the darkly pleasant surroundings—

At that moment I chanced to look at my discordant Jew two tables away. For some weird reason he was glaring at me with naked hate, though he instantly dropped his gaze—

But even that strange and disquieting event did not disrupt my mood of golden tranquillity, which I sought to prolong by saying in summation, “My dear son, this has been the most exciting though eerie lunch I have ever enjoyed. Your remarkable cusps have opened to me a fabulous world in which I can nevertheless utterly believe. A horridly fascinating world of sizzling hydrogen zeppelins, of countless evil-smelling gasoline cars built by Ford instead of his electrics, of re-enslaved American blackamoors, of Madame Becquerels or Curies, a world without the T.S. Edison battery and even T.S. himself, a world in which German scientists are sinister pariahs instead of tolerant, humanitarian, great-souled leaders of world thought, a world in which a mateless old Edison tinkers forever at a powerful storage battery he cannot perfect, a world in which Woodrow Wilson doesn’t insist on Germany being admitted at once to the League of Nations, a world of festering hatreds reeling toward a second and worse world war. Oh, altogether an incredible world, yet one in which you have momentarily made me believe, to the extent that I do actually have the fear that time will suddenly shift gears and we will be plunged into that bad dream world, and our real world will become a dream—”

I suddenly chanced to see the face of my watch—

At the same time my son looked at his own left wrist—

“Dolf,” he said, springing up in agitation, “I do hope that with my stupid chatter I haven’t made you miss—”

I had sprung up too—

“No, no, my son,” I heard myself say in a fluttering voice, “but it’s true I have little time in which to catch the Ostwald. Auf Wiedersehen, mein Sohn, auf Wiedersehen!”

And with that I was hastening, indeed almost running, or else sweeping through the air like a ghost—leaving him behind to settle our reckoning—across a room that seemed to waver with my feverish agitation, alternately darkening and brightening like an electric bulb with its fine tungsten filament about to fly to powder and wink out forever—

Inside my head a voice was saying in calm yet death-knell tones, “The lights of Europe are going out. I do not think they will be rekindled in my generation—”

Suddenly the only important thing in the world for me was to catch the Ostwald, get aboard her before she unmoored. That and only that would reassure me that I was in my rightful world. I would touch and feel the Ostwald, not just talk about her—

As I dashed between the four bronze figures, they seemed to hunch down and become deformed, while their faces became those of grotesque, aged witches—four evil kobolds leering up at me with a horrid knowledge bright in their eyes—

While behind me I glimpsed in pursuit a tall, black, white-faced figure, skeletally lean—

The strangely short corridor ahead of me had a blank end—the Departure Lounge wasn’t there—

I instantly jerked open the narrow door to the stairs and darted nimbly up them as if I were a young man again and not forty-eight years old—

On the third sharp turn I risked a glance behind and down—

Hardly a flight behind me, taking great pursuing leaps, was my dreadful Jew—

I tore open the door to the hundred and second floor. There at last, only a few feet away, was the silver door I sought of the final elevator and softly glowing above it the words, “Zum Zeppelin.” At last I would be shot aloft to the Ostwald and reality.

But the sign began to blink as the Krähenest had, while across the door was pasted askew a white cardboard sign which read “Out of Order.”

I threw myself at the door and scrabbled at it, squeezing my eyes several times to make my vision come clear. When I finally fully opened them, the cardboard sign was gone.

But the silver door was gone too, and the words above it forever. I was scrabbling at seamless pale plaster.

There was a touch on my elbow. I spun around.

“Excuse me, sir, but you seem troubled,” my Jew said solicitously. “Is there anything I can do?”

I shook my head, but whether in negation or rejection or to clear it, I don’t know. “I’m looking for the Ostwald,” I gasped, only now realizing I’d winded myself on the stairs. “For the zeppelin,” I explained when he looked puzzled.

I may be wrong, but it seemed to me that a look of secret glee flashed deep in his eyes, though his general sympathetic expression remained unchanged.

“Oh, the zeppelin,” he said in a voice that seemed to me to have become sugary in its solicitude. “You must mean the Hindenburg.”

Hindenburg?—I asked myself. There was no zeppelin named Hindenburg. Or was there? Could it be that I was mistaken about such a simple and, one would think, immutable matter? My mind had been getting very foggy the last minute or two. Desperately I tried to assure myself that I was indeed myself and in my right world. My lips worked and I muttered to myself, Bin Adolf Hitler, Zeppelin Fachmann…

“But the Hindenburg doesn’t land here, in any case,” my Jew was telling me, “though I think some vague intention once was voiced about topping the Empire State with a mooring mast for dirigibles. Perhaps you saw some news story and assumed—”

His face fell, or he made it seem to fall. The sugary solicitude in his voice became unendurable as he told me, “But apparently you can’t have heard today’s tragic news. Oh, I do hope you weren’t seeking the Hindenburg so as to meet some beloved family member or close friend. Brace yourself, sir. Only hours ago, coming in for her landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, the Hindenburg caught fire and burned up entirely in a matter of seconds. Thirty or forty at least of her passengers and crew were burned alive. Oh, steady yourself, sir.”

“But the Hindenburg—I mean the Ostwald!—couldn’t burn like that,” I protested. “She’s a helium zeppelin.”

He shook his head. “Oh, no. I’m no scientist, but I know the Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen—a wholly typical bit of reckless German risk-running. At least we’ve never sold helium to the Nazis, thank God.”

I stared at him, wavering my face from side to side in feeble denial.

While he stared back at me with obviously a new thought in mind.

“Excuse me once again,” he said, “but I believe I heard you start to say something about Adolf Hitler. I suppose you know that you bear a certain resemblance to that execrable dictator. If I were you, sir, I’d shave my mustache.”

I felt a wave of fury at this inexplicable remark with all its baffling references, yet withal a remark delivered in the unmistakable tones of an insult. And then all my surroundings momentarily reddened and flickered, and I felt a tremendous wrench in the inmost core of my being, the sort of wrench one might experience in transiting timelessly from one universe into another parallel to it. Briefly I became a man still named Adolf Hitler, same as the Nazi dictator and almost the same age, a German-American born in Chicago, who had never visited Germany or spoke German, whose friends teased him about his chance resemblance to the other Hitler, and who used stubbornly to say, “No, I won’t change my name! Let that Führer bastard across the Atlantic change his! Ever hear about the British Winston Churchill writing the American Winston Churchill, who wrote The Crisis and other novels, and suggesting he change his name to avoid confusion, since the Englishman had done some writing too? The American wrote back it was a good idea, but since he was three years older, he was senior and so the Britisher should change his name. That’s exactly how I feel about that son of a bitch Hitler.”

The Jew still stared at me sneeringly. I started to tell him off, but then I was lost in a second weird, wrenching transition. The first had been directly from one parallel universe to another. The second was also in time—I aged fourteen or fifteen years in a single infinite instant while transiting from 1937 (where I had been born in 1889 and was forty-eight) to 1973 (where I had been born in 1910 and was sixty-three). My name changed back to my truly own (but what is that?), and I no longer looked one bit like Adolf Hitler the Nazi dictator (or dirigible expert?), and I had a married son who was a sort of social historian in a New York City municipal university, and he had many brilliant theories, but none of historical cusps.

And the Jew—I mean the tall, thin man in black with possibly Semitic features—was gone. I looked around and around but there was no one there.

I touched my outside left breast pocket, then my hand darted tremblingly underneath. There was no zipper on the pocket inside and no precious documents, only a couple of grimy envelopes with notes I’d scribbled on them in pencil.

I don’t know how I got out of the Empire State Building. Presumably by elevator. Though all my memory holds for that period is a persistent image of King Kong tumbling down from its top like a ridiculous yet poignantly pitiable giant teddy bear.

I do recollect walking in a sort of trance for what seemed hours through a Manhattan stinking with monoxide and carcinogens innumerable, half waking from time to time (usually while crossing streets that snarled, not purred), and then relapsing into trance. There were big dogs.

When I at last fully came to myself, I was walking down a twilit Hudson Street at the north end of Greenwich Village. My gaze was fixed on a distant and unremarkable pale-gray square of building top. I guessed it must be that of the World Trade Center, 1,350 feet tall.

And then it was blotted out by the grinning face of my son, the professor.

“Justin!” I said.

“Fritz!” he said. “We’d begun to worry a bit. Where did you get off to, anyhow? Not that it’s a damn bit of my business. If you had an assignation with a go-go girl, you needn’t tell me.”

“Thanks,” I said, “I do feel tired, I must admit, and somewhat cold. But no, I was just looking at some of my old stamping grounds,” I told him, “and taking longer than I realized. Manhattan’s changed during my years on the West Coast, but not all that much.”

“It’s getting chilly,” he said. “Let’s stop in at that place ahead with the black front. It’s the White Horse. Dylan Thomas used to drink there. He’s supposed to have scribbled a poem on the wall of the can, only they painted it over. But it has the authentic sawdust.”

“Good,” I said, “only we’ll make mine coffee, not ale. Or if I can’t get coffee, then cola.”

I am not really a Prosit!-type person.

A CROWD OF SHADOWS

Charles L. Grant

Of all the means of relaxation that I have devised for myself over the years, most required nothing more strenuous than driving an automobile and not one of them had anything remotely to do with murder. Yet there it was, and now here I am—alone, though not always alone, and wondering, though not always puzzled. I’m neither in jail nor exile, asylum nor hospital. Starburst is where I am, and, unless I can straighten a few things out, Starburst is where I’m probably going to stay.

I had long ago come to the conclusion that every so often the world simply had to thumb its nose at me and wink obscenely as if it knew what the hell was making things tick and for spite wasn’t about to let me in on the secret. When that happens, I succumb to the lure of Huck Finn’s advice and light out for the territory: in my case, that turns out to be Starburst. Where the luncheonette is called The Luncheonette, the hotel is The Hotel, and so on in understated simplicity. Where the buildings, all of them, rise genteelly from well-kept lawns on full-acre lots, painted sunrise-new and no two the same shape or shade—a half-moon-fashioned community that prides itself on its seclusion and its ability to sponge out the world from transients like me. It’s a place that not many can stand for too long, but it’s a breather from every law that anyone ever thought of.

At least that’s what I thought when I came down last May.

It was a bit warm for the season, but not at all uncomfortable. Wednesday, and I was sitting on the grey sand beach that ribboned the virtually waveless bay they had christened Nova. The sun was pleasantly hot, the water cool, and the barest sign of a breeze drifted down from the misted mountains that enclosed the town. I had just dried myself off and was about to roll over onto my stomach to burn a little when a thin and angular boy about fifteen or so dashed in front of me, kicking up crests of sand and inadvertently coating me and my blanket as he pursued some invisible, swift quarry. I was going to protest when there was a sudden shout and he stumbled to a halt, turning around immediately, his arms dejectedly limp at his sides. Curious, I followed his gaze past me to a middle-aged couple huddled and bundled under a drab beach umbrella. The woman, hidden by bonnet, dark glasses, and a black, long-sleeved sweater, beckoned sharply. The boy waved in return and retraced his steps at a decidedly slower pace. As he passed me, looking neither left nor right, I only just happened to notice the tiny and blurred sequence of digits tattooed on the inside of his left forearm.

I’m sure my mouth must have opened in the classic gesture of surprise, but though I’ve seen them often enough in the city, for some reason I didn’t expect to see an android in Starburst.

I continued to stare rather rudely until the boy reached the couple and flopped facedown on the sand beside them, his lightly tanned skin pale against the grey. The beach was quietly deserted, and the woman’s voice carried quite easily. Though her words were indistinct, her tone was not: boy or android, the lad was in trouble. I supposed he was being told to stay close, paying for his minor act of rebellion.

I smiled to myself and lay back with my cupped hands serving as a pillow. Poor kid, I thought, all he wanted was a little fun. And then I had to smile at myself for thinking the boy human. It was a common mistake, though one I usually don’t make, and I forgot about it soon enough as I dozed. And probably would never have thought of it again if I hadn’t decided to indulge myself in a little fancy dining that evening.

Though my stays are irregular, they have been frequent enough to educate the hotel staff to my unexciting habits, and I had little difficulty in reserving my favorite table: a single affair by the dining room window overlooking the park, overlooking, in point of fact, most of the town, since the hotel was the only structure in Starburst taller than two stories, and it was only six. The unadorned walls of the circular room were midnight green starred with white, a most relaxing, even seductive combination, and its patrons were always suitably subdued. I was just getting into my dessert when I noticed the boy from the beach enter with the couple I had assumed were his parents. They huddled with the maître d’ and were escorted to a table adjacent to my own. The boy was exceptionally polite, holding the chair for mother, shaking hands with father before sitting down himself. When he happened to glance my way, I smiled and nodded, but the gesture quickly turned to a frown when I heard someone mutter, “Goddamned humie.”

The threesome were apparently ignoring the remark, but I was annoyed enough to scan the neighboring tables. Nothing. I was going to shrug it off to bad manners when suddenly an elderly man and his wife brusquely pushed back their chairs and left without any pretense of politeness. As they threaded between me and the boy, the old man hissed “robie” just loud enough. Perhaps I should have said something in return, or made overtures, gestures, something of an apology to the boy. But I didn’t. Not a thing.

Instead, I ordered a large brandy and turned to watch the darkness outside the uncurtained window. And in the reflection of the room, I saw the boy glaring at his empty plate.

In spite of the ground that fact and fiction have covered in exploring the myriad possibilities of societies integrated with the sometimes too-human android, the reality seemed to have come as a surprise to most people. For some it was a pleasant one; androids were androids: pleasant company, tireless workers, expensive but economical. Their uses were legion, and their confusion with actual humans minimal. For others, however, and predictably, androids were androids: abominations, blasphemies, monsters, and all the horrid rest of it.

They had become, in fact, the newest minority that nearly everyone could look down upon if they were closed-minded enough. Ergo, the tattoos and serial numbers. For people not sensitive enough to detect the subtle differences, the markings served as some sort of self-gratifying justification, though for what I’ve never been able to figure out exactly. I have a friend in London who has replaced all his servants with androids and has come to love them almost as brothers and sisters. Then, too, there’s another friend who speaks of them as he would of his pets.

It’s true they haven’t brought about the Utopia dreamed of in centuries past: they are strictly regulated in the business community—always clannish, job preference still goes to the human, no matter how much more efficient the simulacrum might be. Still and all, I thought as I emptied my glass and rose to leave, there’s something to be said for them: at least they have unfailing manners.

So I smiled as graciously as I could as I passed their table. The boy smiled back, the parents beamed. The lad was obviously their surrogate son, and I was slightly saddened and sorry for them.

I spent the rest of the evening closeted in my room, alternately reading and speculating on the reasons for their choice. Death, perhaps, or a runaway: as I said, the androids’ uses are legion. It puzzled me, however, why the parents hadn’t kept the boy covered on the beach. It would have at least avoided the scene in the dining room. Then I told myself to mind my own stupid business, and for the last time I slept the sleep of the just.

The following morning my door was discreetly knocked upon, and I found myself being introduced to the local detective-in-chief by Ernie Wills, the manager. I invited them in and sat myself on the edge of the still-unmade bed. “So. What can I do for you, Mr. Harrington?”

The policeman was a portly, pale-faced man with a hawk nose and unpleasantly dark eyes. Somehow he managed to chew tobacco throughout the entire interview without once looking for a place to spit. I liked the man immediately.

“Did you know the Carruthers family very well?” His voice matched his size, and I was hard put not to wince.

I looked blank. “Carruthers? I don’t know them at all. Who are they?”

Harrington just managed a frown. “The couple sitting next to you last night at dinner. The boy. I was under the impression that you knew them.”

“Not hardly,” I said. “I saw them once on the beach yesterday afternoon, and again at dinner.” I spread my hands. “That’s all.”

“Some of the other guests said you were rather friendly to them.”

By that time I was completely puzzled and looked to Ernie for some assistance, but he only shrugged and tipped his head in Harrington’s direction. It’s his show, the gesture said. And for the first time, I noticed how harassed he seemed.

“In a detective novel,” I said as lightly as I could, “the hero usually says, ‘You have me at a disadvantage.’ I’m sorry, Mr. Harrington, but I haven’t the faintest idea what in God’s name you’re talking about.”

Harrington grinned. His teeth were stained. “Touché. And I apologize, okay? I didn’t mean to be so damned mysterious, but sometimes I like to play the role. I read those books too.” He settled himself more deeply into the only armchair in the room and reached into a coat pocket for a handkerchief, which he used to wipe his hands. “You see, there’s been a murder in the hotel.”

I looked at him patiently, but he didn’t say anything else, apparently waiting for my reaction. I almost said, So what? but I didn’t. “Am I supposed to guess who was murdered, or who did it? My God, it wasn’t one of the Carrutherses, was it?”

Harrington shook his head.

Ernie swallowed hard.

“Well, surely you don’t suspect one of them?”

“Wish I knew,” Harrington said. “An old man was found outside his door on the third floor about three o’clock this morning. His throat was, well, not exactly torn … more like yanked out. Like somebody just grabbed hold and pulled.”

That I understood, and the unbidden image that flashed into my mind was enough to swear me off breakfast, and probably lunch. I shuddered.

“Some people,” the detective continued, “said they heard this old guy call the boy ‘robie.’ Did you hear it?”

“Yes,” I answered without thinking. “And I heard someone else, I don’t know who, call him a ‘humie.’ There were other remarks, I guess, but I didn’t hear them all. That kind of talk isn’t usual, you know. The Carrutherses may have been offended, but I hardly think they’d have murdered for it. I smiled as nicely as I could because I felt sorry for them, and the boy.”

Harrington kept wiping his hands; then, with a flourish, deposited the cloth back into his pocket and stood. “Okay,” he said brusquely. “Thanks for the information.”

As he turned to leave, I couldn’t help asking if he really believed the boy or his parents had done it. “After all,” I said, “the boy is an android. He can’t kill anyone.”

Harrington stopped with his hand on the door knob. He actually looked sorry for me. “Sir, either you read too much, or you watch too much TV. Andy or not, if ordered, that kid could kill as easily as I could blink.”

And then he left, with silent Ernie trailing apologetically behind. Slowly I walked to the window and gazed out toward the bay. The sun was nearing noon, and the glare off the water partially blinded me to the arms of the coast that came within a hundred meters of turning Nova into a lake. Below was the single block of businesses that squatted between me and the beach. Leaning forward, I spotted a milling group of people and a squad car. I watched, trying to identify some of them, until Harrington strolled from the building and drove away. The crowd, small as it was, disturbed me. Starburst wasn’t supposed to deal in murder.

“Christ,” I said. “And I wanted to punch that old guy in the face.”

I shook myself and dressed quickly. At least Harrington didn’t tell me not to leave town. Not that I would have. I still had four days of vacation left, and though I was sorry for the old nameless man, and sorrier for the shroud the crime must have placed on the Carrutherses, I still intended to soak up as much sun as possible.

And so I did until a shadow blocked the heat, and I looked up from my blanket into the face of the boy: the face turned black by the sun behind him. Specter. Swaying. I imagine I appeared startled, because he said, “Hey, I’m sorry, mister. Uh, can I talk with you a minute?”

“Why, sure, why not?” I shifted to one side and sat up. Today the boy was fully dressed in sweatshirt, jeans, and sockless sneakers. His dark hair was uncombed. He squatted next to me and began to draw nothings in the sand. Since I’m single, I guess I haven’t developed whatever special rapport a man can have with a younger version of himself: and when that youthful image isn’t even human, well, I just sat there, waiting for someone to say something.

“You were nice to me and my people last night,” he said finally, his voice just this side of quavering. “I think I should thank you.”

My mind was still not functioning properly. Part of me kept up a warning that this kid was suspected of murder, and my throat tightened. The other parts kept bumping into each other searching for something to say that sounded reasonably intelligent.

“They, uh, treated you rather unkindly, son.”

He shrugged and wiped the sand from his doodling finger. “We get used to it. It happens all the time, though I guess that’s not really true. Not all the time, anyway. Maybe it just seems bad here because it’s so small. I’m … we’re not used to small places.”

He began digging into the sand, tossing the fill up to be caught and scattered by a sharp, suddenly cool breeze.

“People can be cruel at times,” I said unoriginally. “You shouldn’t let it bother you and your folks. Small people, you know, and small minds.”

The boy stared at me from the corner of his eyes, his face still in shadow. “Aren’t you afraid of me?”

“Why? Should I be?”

He shrugged again and worried the hole with the heel of his hand. “I think that detective thinks I killed that old man. He talked with us nearly two hours this morning. He said he was satisfied. I don’t think so.”

I shifted around to face him, but he continued to avert his face. I couldn’t remember seeing such a shy boy before, though I supposed that the shock of the crime wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to accept with nonchalance, especially when he was on the receiving end of the suspicion. I made a show of searching the beach, stretching my neck and gawking like a first-time tourist. “I don’t see your, uh, parents. Are they as unconcerned as you?”

“My people are inside. They don’t want anyone staring at them.”

My people. That was the second time he’d used that wording, and I wondered. In the silence I found myself trying to place his accent, thinking it was perhaps a custom of wherever he came from, but there was nothing to it. Curiously so. He could have lived anywhere. On impulse I asked if he and his mother and father would care to join me for dinner. He shook his head.

“Thank you, but no. We’ll eat in our room until something happens to change their minds. The doorman almost slammed the door in my face.”

That figures, I thought as the boy struggled to his feet. He looked down at me and said, “Thank you again,” and was gone as abruptly as he had come. It was then that I noticed the few sunbathers staring at me, their hostility radiating clearly. I grinned back at them and lay face down, hoping they hadn’t seen the grin twist to grimace.

As I lay there, I considered: unlike members of most minorities, androids had no recourse to courts, education, or native human talent to drag them out of their social ghetto. They were as marked as if their skin had been black or brown, only worse because whatever rights they had stopped at the factory entrance. And I wasn’t at all pleased to have to admit to myself that even I couldn’t see handing them the same rights and privileges as I had. I was beginning to wonder just how far above the crowd I really was for all my ideas. I thought of the people who’d glared at me you’d better stop casting stones, I told myself. Don’t feel sorry for the boy, feel sorry for the parents.

And then I dozed off, which, for my skin, is tantamount to stretching out on a frying pan. When I awoke again, my back felt as if it had been dragged over hot coals. And in feeling the burning pain, I surprised myself at the foul language I could conjure. I tried to put on my shirt, gave it up as the second worst idea I’d had that day, next to sunbathing, and gathered my things together. I walked across the sand and between the buildings that had their backs to the bay. When I reached the street, I stopped dead at the curb. There was the squad car again and an ambulance. A crowd getting noisy. And the flashing red lights. I spotted Detective Harrington staring at me, and I waved and crossed. He met me by the police car.

“Heart attack?” I asked, indicating the ambulance.

“You could say that,” he said dryly. “A man has had his head bashed in.”

I found it difficult to believe. It was as if someone had drilled a pipeline directly from the outside world into Starburst and was pumping in that which we were all here to get away from. Small wonder the people milling around us were in such a foul mood. I tried a sympathetic smile on Harrington, received no reaction and turned to go. I hadn’t taken a single step when he placed a gently detaining hand on my arm.

“Somebody said you were talking to the boy.”

“Somebody?” Suddenly I was very mad. “Just who the hell are these somebodies that seem to know everything, every goddamned thing that I do or say?”

“Concerned citizens,” he said with a slight trace of bitterness, as if he’d had his fill of concerned citizens. “Were you?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I was.” I looked at my watch. “About an hour ago. On the beach.”

“For how long?”

I tried to ignore the people trying very hard not to appear as if they were eavesdropping. “Hell, I don’t know. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, twenty-five.”

I looked at Harrington closely, trying to snare a clue as to what he was thinking. I did know that, for some reason, he still felt the boy had to be involved with these two appalling crimes. Yet, if the boy had committed them, he would have had to have been ordered to do so. And that meant the Carrutherses. Somehow I couldn’t see those two becoming entangled in something quite so lurid. I was about to say as much when a flower-shirted man shoved through the crowd and confronted us. The stereotypes come crawling out of the woodwork, I thought and immediately wished there was something I could do for the big detective.

“If you’re the police,” the man demanded in a voice as shrill as a woman’s, “why aren’t you doing something about this?”

“Sir, I am doing what I can.”

“I don’t like it.”

Harrington shrugged. The man was evidently a tourist, and the detective obviously felt as if he had more important people, like the natives, to be answerable to. “I’m sorry you feel that way, sir, but unless we can—”

“I want some protection!” the man said loudly and was instantly echoed by several of the crowd who had paused to listen.

Harrington smiled wryly. “Now how do you expect me to manage that with the force I have here? Did you know the man?”

“Of course not. I only arrived yesterday.”

“Then what exactly are you worried about?”

“Well, that killer’s obviously a maniac. He could kill anyone next.”

The detective stared at him, then glanced at me. “No,” he said quietly. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, what about that Andy.” someone else demanded. “Why the hell don’t you lock it up? It’s dangerous.”

With that bit of melodramatic tripe, Harrington’s patience finally reached its end. “Lady,” he said with exaggerated calm, “if you can give me the proof, I’ll snap that kid’s tape faster than you can blink. But he belongs to someone, and there isn’t anything I can do without proof. So why don’t you, and all the rest of you, why don’t you just go about your business and leave us alone. You want me to catch this man, boy, woman, whatever, I can’t stand around here answering your hysterical, stupid questions.”

For a moment I was tempted to applaud. In fact, one or two people did. But I just stood aside while the crowd dispersed, far more rapidly than I thought it would. Most of the people disappeared into the hotel, muttering loudly. The rest scattered and were gone within a minute’s time. When it was quiet, Harrington signaled the ambulance driver, then slid into his own car. He rolled down the window, chewing his tobacco slowly. He spat. “Middle-class backbone of the race,” he said to me and drove off. The ambulance followed, and I was alone on the sidewalk. I don’t remember how long I stood there, but staring passersby reminded me that I was dressed only in my bathing trunks and still carrying my beach paraphernalia. Embarrassed, I darted inside and rushed up to my room. In the bathroom was a first-aid kit, and after many painful contortions, I managed to empty the can of aerosol sunburn medication onto my back.

I felt flushed.

Feverish, nearly groggy as if in a nightmare.

Despite the air-conditioning, the room felt warm, but I didn’t want to go out again. Not for a while. A long while. In spite of some of the other hotel guests’ fears, I realized I hadn’t once felt as though I were in the slightest danger, and when that fact sunk in, I was horrified. I didn’t believe I was in danger because I knew I had never been anything more than polite to the Carrutherses and their son. Guilty. Jesus Christ, I thought they were guilty.

You son of a bitch, I told myself. You’re as bad as the rest of them. Would a grown man murder for an insult as common as the ones Carruthers must have been getting for as long as he’d had the android? To strike back so drastically was too immature for the owner of a simulacrum—he would be too vulnerable.

Hell! It was not a pleasant day. It had not been a pleasant vacation. I hesitated and finally tossed my things into my bag. I decided to wait until after dinner to leave. Until then, I lay on my bed, and it wasn’t long before I fell asleep.

I dreamt, but I’d just as soon not remember what it was I saw in those dreams.

In Starburst, the dark is not quite the same as in the rest of the world. Because of the mist on the hills, the slate and stone roofs, the moonlight and starlight glinted off more than just water, and the result was a peculiar shimmer that slightly distorted one’s vision. When I awoke to that unnatural light, I had a splitting headache. Groping around on the nightstand, I found my watch and saw it was close to ten o’clock. Hurriedly I swung off the bed, thinking that if I were as good a patron as the hotel led me to believe, I might be able to squeeze in a meal before the kitchen closed for the night. The clothes I was going to wear home were laid out on a chair, and without turning on the lamp, I dressed, standing in front of the window. The moon was hazed, and what stars there were challenged my schoolboy knowledge of constellations. I was staring out over the building at the bay when I caught movement on the beach. All I could see was a group of shadows. Struggling.

I leaned forward, straining to make out details, curious as to who would be playing games this time of night, since Starburst was definitely not noted for its evening festivities. As I clipped on my tie, the shadows merged into a single black patch, then separated and merged again. But not fast enough to prevent me from spotting one of them lying on the ground. The figure didn’t move, and for no reason other than an unpleasant hunch, I dashed from the room and, not wanting to wait for the elevators, ran down the fire stairs and outside.

Once on the sidewalk, I hesitated for the first time, realizing I could very likely be making a complete ass of myself. There were no sounds but the evening wind in the park trees. As I crossed the street, my heels sounded like nails driven into wood and I self-consciously lightened my step. I became more cautious, though feeling no less silly, when I entered an alley and could see the beach and bay beyond. By the time I reached the far end, I was almost on hands and knees, and now I could hear: grunting, and the dull slap of body blows, struggling feet scraping against the sand. It didn’t take a mastermind to figure out what was happening, and, for all my professed cowardice, I burst from the alley shouting, just a split second before I heard someone gasp, “Oh my God, look at that!”

The group of people were close to fifty meters from me, and when they heard my racket, they scattered, leaving me behind, motionless on the beach.

I vacillated, then ran to the fallen body. Closer, and in the dim moonlight I could see it was the boy.

Standing next to him, I could see he was bleeding.

And kneeling, I knew he was dead.

A boy.

I panted, my breath shuddering.

A boy.

I’m not sure exactly what I felt at the moment. Shock, anger, sorrow. Anger, I suppose, the greatest of these. Not so much for the shadows who had killed him, but for the ruse he had perpetrated on us all. Callously I stared at his bloodied face and thought: you tricked me. Damnit, you tricked me.

Slowly I rose. I brushed the sand from my knees and walked swiftly back to the hotel. Just before I stepped into the lobby, I saw the whirling red light on a squad car, and I was glad I wasn’t the one who had made the call.

The fourth floor, like the lobby and elevator, was deserted. I walked to the end of the hall and knocked on the Carrutherses’ door. When there was no answer, I knocked again and turned the knob. The door opened to a darkened room, and I stepped in.

The man and woman were sitting motionless in identical chairs facing the room’s only window.

“Mr. Carruthers?” I didn’t expect an answer, and I received none.

I moved closer and gathered what nerve I had left to reach down and touch the woman’s cheek, poised to snap my hand back should she flinch. The skin was cold. She didn’t move, didn’t react. She and the man stared directly into the moonlight without blinking. Carefully I rolled up her sleeve, and though the light was dim, I found the markings easily. There was no need to do the same to the man.

I was still standing there when the lights flicked on and Harrington lumbered in, followed by a covey of police photographers and fingerprint men. The detective waited until my eyes adjusted to the bright light, then pulled me to one side, away from the strangely silent activities. It was as if they were investigating a morgue. Harrington watched for a while, pulling out his handkerchief and again wiping his hands. I never did learn how he’d picked up that habit, but at that particular time it seemed more than apropos.

“You, uh, saw the boy, I take it?” he said.

I nodded dumbly.

“Didn’t happen to see who did it, I suppose.”

“Only some shadows, Harrington. They were gone before I got close enough to identify them. Any of them.”

One of the men coughed and immediately apologized.

“Would it be too much to ask who called you?” I said.

“What call? I was coming over here to question the kid.” He pulled a slip of wrinkled paper from his jacket pocket and squinted at some writing. “I checked on the, uh, parents, just for the hell of it, just to keep those people off my back. Seems he was fairly well off—the kid, I mean. He is, was, eighteen, and from the time he was six was shunted back and forth between aunts and uncles like a busted ping-pong ball.” He shook his head and pointed a stubby finger at some line on the paper. “When he reached majority and claimed his money, he bought himself some guardians. Parents, I guess they were supposed to be. According to some relative of his, this was the first place he brought them. Trial run.” He shoved the paper back into his pocket as though it were filth. “I’m surprised nobody noticed.”

I had nothing to say. And Harrington didn’t stop me when I left.

My people.

He had deliberately exposed the false identification on his arm and had never once looked me straight in the eye. It was all there, but who would have thought to look for it? He had been challenging me and everyone else, using the simulacra to strike back at the world. Maybe he wanted to be exposed; maybe he was looking for someone as real as I to stop the charade and give him a flesh-and-blood hand to shake. Maybe—but when I think of going back to a city filled with androids and angry people, I get afraid.

And worse … my own so-called liberal, humanitarian, live-and-let-live armor had been stripped away, and I don’t like what I see. As much as I feel sorry for the boy, I hate him for what he’s done to me.

That crowd of shadows could have easily held one more.

I SEE YOU

Damon Knight

You are five, hiding in a place only you know. You are covered with bark dust, scratched by twigs, sweaty and hot. A wind sighs in the aspen leaves. A faint steady hiss comes from the viewer you hold in your hands; then a voice: “Lorie, I see you—under the barn, eating an apple!” A silence. “Lorie, come on out, I see you.” Another voice. “That’s right, she’s in there.” After a moment, sulkily: “Oh, okay.”

You squirm around, raising the viewer to aim it down the hill. As you turn the knob with your thumb, the bright image races toward you, trees hurling themselves into red darkness and vanishing, then the houses in the compound, and now you see Bruce standing beside the corral, looking into his viewer, slowly turning. His back is to you; you know you are safe, and you sit up. A jay passes with a whir of wings, settles on a branch. With your own eyes now you can see Bruce, only a dot of blue beyond the gray shake walls of the houses. In the viewer, he is turning toward you, and you duck again. Another voice: “Children, come in and get washed for dinner now.” “Aw, Aunt Ellie!” “Mom, we’re playing hide and seek. Can’t we just stay fifteen minutes more?” “Please, Aunt Ellie!” “No, come on in now—you’ll have plenty of time after dinner.” And Bruce: “Aw, okay. All out’s in free.” And once more they have not found you; your secret place is yours alone.

Call him Smith. He was the president of a company that bore his name and which held more than a hundred patents in the scientific instrument field. He was sixty, a widower. His only daughter and her husband had been killed in a plane crash in 1978. He had a partner who handled the business operations now; Smith spent most of his time in his own lab. In the spring of 1990 he was working on an image intensification device that was puzzling because it was too good. He had it on his bench now, aimed at a deep shadow box across the room; at the back of the box was a card ruled with black, green, red and blue lines. The only source of illumination was a single ten-watt bulb hung behind the shadow box; the light reflected from the card did not even register on his meter, and yet the image in the screen of his device was sharp and bright. When he varied the inputs to the components in a certain way, the bright image vanished and was replaced by shadows, like the ghost of another image. He had monitored every television channel, had shielded the device against radio frequencies, and the ghosts remained. Increasing the illumination did not make them clearer. They were vaguely rectilinear shapes without any coherent pattern. Occasionally a moving blur traveled slowly across them.

Smith made a disgusted sound. He opened the clamps that held the device and picked it up, reaching for the power switch with his other hand. He never touched it. As he moved the device, the ghost images had shifted; they were dancing now with the faint movements of his hand. Smith stared at them without breathing for a moment. Holding the cord, he turned slowly. The ghost images whirled, vanished, reappeared. He turned the other way; they whirled back.

Smith set the device down on the bench with care. His hands were shaking. He had had the thing clamped down on the bench all the time until now. “Christ almighty, how dumb can one man get?” he asked the empty room.

You are six, almost seven, and you are being allowed to use the big viewer for the first time. You are perched on a cushion in the leather chair at the console; your brother, who has been showing you the controls with a bored and superior air, has just left the room, saying, “All right, if you know so much, do it yourself.”

In fact, the controls on this machine are unfamiliar; the little viewers you have used all your life have only one knob, for nearer or farther—to move up/down, or left/right, you just point the viewer where you want to see. This machine has dials and little windows with numbers in them, and switches and pushbuttons, most of which you don’t understand, but you know they are for special purposes and don’t matter. The main control is a metal rod, right in front of you, with a gray plastic knob on the top. The knob is dull from years of handling; it feels warm and a little greasy in your hand. The console has a funny electric smell, but the big screen, taller than you are, is silent and dark. You can feel your heart beating against your breastbone. You grip the knob harder, push it forward just a little. The screen lights, and you are drifting across the next room as if on huge silent wheels, chairs and end tables turning into reddish silhouettes that shrink, twist and disappear as you pass through them, and for a moment you feel dizzy because when you notice the red numbers jumping in the console to your left, it is as if the whole house were passing massively and vertiginously through itself; then you are floating out the window with the same slow and steady motion, on across the sunlit pasture where two saddle horses stand with their heads up, sniffing the wind; then a stubbled field, dropping away; and now, below you, the co-op road shines like a silver-gray stream. You press the knob down to get closer, and drop with a giddy swoop; now you are rushing along the road, overtaking and passing a yellow truck, turning the knob to steer. At first you blunder into the dark trees on either side, and once the earth surges up over you in a chaos of writhing red shapes, but now you are learning, and you soar down past the crossroads, up the farther hill, and now, now you are on the big road, flying eastward, passing all the cars, rushing toward the great world where you long to be.

It took Smith six weeks to increase the efficiency of the image intensifier enough to bring up the ghost pictures clearly. When he succeeded, the image on the screen was instantly recognizable. It was a view of Jack McCranie’s office; the picture was still dim, but sharp enough that Smith could see the expression on Jack’s face. He was leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head. Beside him stood Peg Spatola in a purple dress, with her hand on an open folder. She was talking, and McCranie was listening. That was wrong, because Peg was not supposed to be back from Cleveland until next week.

Smith reached for the phone and punched McCranie’s number.

“Yes, Tom?”

“Jack, is Peg in there?”

“Why, no—she’s in Cleveland, Tom.”

“Oh, yes.”

McCranie sounded puzzled. “Is anything the matter?” In the screen, he had swiveled his chair and was talking to Peg, gesturing with short, choppy motions of his arm.

“No, nothing,” said Smith. “That’s all right, Jack, thank you.” He broke the connection. After a moment he turned to the breadboard controls of the device and changed one setting slightly. In the screen, Peg turned and walked backward out of the office. When he turned the knob the other way, she repeated these actions in reverse. Smith tinkered with the other controls until he got a view of the calendar on Jack’s desk. It was Friday, June 15th—last week.

Smith locked up the device and all his notes, went home and spent the rest of the day thinking.

By the end of July he had refined and miniaturized the device and had extended its sensitivity range into the infrared. He spent most of August, when he should have been on vacation, trying various methods of detecting sound through the device. By focusing on the interior of a speaker’s larynx and using infrared, he was able to convert the visible vibrations of the vocal cords into sound of fair quality, but that did not satisfy him. He worked for a while on vibrations picked up from panes of glass in windows and on framed pictures, and he experimented briefly with the diaphragms in speaker systems, intercoms and telephones. He kept on into October without stopping and finally achieved a system that would give tinny but recognizable sound from any vibrating surface—a wall, a floor, even the speaker’s own cheek or forehead.

He redesigned the whole device, built a prototype and tested it, tore it down, redesigned, built another. It was Christmas before he was done. Once more he locked up the device and all his plans, drawings and notes.

At home he spent the holidays experimenting with commercial adhesives in various strengths. He applied these to coated paper, let them dry, and cut the paper into rectangles. He numbered these rectangles, pasted them onto letter envelopes, some of which he stacked loose; others he bundled together and secured with rubber bands. He opened the stacks and bundles and examined them at regular intervals. Some of the labels curled up and detached themselves after twenty-six hours without leaving any conspicuous trace. He made up another batch of these, typed his home address on six of them. On each of six envelopes he typed his office address, then covered it with one of the labels. He stamped the envelopes and dropped them into a mailbox. All six, minus their labels, were delivered to the office three days later.

Just after New Year’s, he told his partner that he wanted to sell out and retire. They discussed it in general terms.

Using an assumed name and a post office box number which was not his, Smith wrote to a commission agent in Boston with whom he had never had any previous dealings. He mailed the letter, with the agent’s address covered by one of his labels on which he had typed a fictitious address. The label detached itself in transit; the letter was delivered. When the agent replied, Smith was watching and read the letter as the secretary typed it. The agent followed his instruction to mail his reply in an envelope without return address. The owner of the post office box turned it in marked “not here”; it went to the dead-letter office and was returned in due time, but meanwhile Smith had acknowledged the letter and had mailed, in the same way, a large amount of cash. In subsequent letters he instructed the agent to take bids for components, plans for which he enclosed, from electronics manufacturers, for plastic casings from another, and for assembly and shipping from still another company. Through a second commission agent in New York, to whom he wrote in the same way, he contracted for ten thousand copies of an instruction booklet in four colors.

Late in February he bought a house and an electronics dealership in a small town in the Adirondacks. In March he signed over his interest in the company to his partner, cleaned out his lab and left. He sold his co-op apartment in Manhattan and his summer house in Connecticut, moved to his new home and became anonymous.

You are thirteen, chasing a fox with the big kids for the first time. They have put you in the north field, the worst place, but you know better than to leave it.

“He’s in the glen.”

“I see him, he’s in the brook, going upstream.”

You turn the viewer, racing forward through dappled shade, a brilliance of leaves: there is the glen, and now you see the fox, trotting through the shallows, blossoms of bright water at its feet.

“Ken and Nell, you come down ahead of him by the springhouse. Wanda, you and Tim and Jean stay where you are. Everybody else come upstream, but stay back till I tell you.”

That’s Leigh, the oldest. You turn the viewer, catch a glimpse of Bobby running downhill through the woods, his long hair flying. Then back to the glen: the fox is gone.

“He’s heading up past the corncrib!”

“Okay, keep spread out on both sides, everybody. Jim, can you and Edie head him off before he gets to the woods?”

“We’ll try. There he is!”

And the chase is going away from you, as you knew it would, but soon you will be older, as old as Nell and Jim; then you will be in the middle of things, and your life will begin.

By trial and error, Smith has found the settings for Dallas, November 22, 1963: Dealey Plaza, 12:25 p.m. He sees the Presidential motorcade making the turn onto Elm Street. Kennedy slumps forward, raising his hands to his throat. Smith presses a button to hold the moment in time. He scans behind the motorcade, finds the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, finds the window. There is no one behind the barricade of cartons; the room is empty. He scans the nearby rooms, finds nothing. He tries the floor below. At an open window a man kneels, holding a high-powered rifle. Smith photographs him. He returns to the motorcade, watches as the second shot strikes the President. He freezes time again, scans the surrounding buildings, finds a second marksman on a roof, photographs him. Back to the motorcade. A third and fourth shot, the last blowing off the side of the President’s head. Smith freezes the action again, finds two gunmen on the grassy knoll, one aiming across the top of a station wagon, one kneeling in the shrubbery. He photographs them. He turns off the power, sits for a moment, then goes to the washroom, kneels beside the toilet and vomits.

The viewer is your babysitter, your television, your telephone (the telephone lines are still up, but they are used only as signaling devices; when you know that somebody wants to talk to you, you focus your viewer on him), your library, your school. Before puberty you watch other people having sex, but even then your curiosity is easily satisfied; after an older cousin initiates you at fourteen, you are much more interested in doing it yourself. The co-op teacher monitors your studies, sometimes makes suggestions, but more and more, as you grow older, leaves you to your own devices. You are intensely interested in African prehistory, in the European theater, and in the ant-civilization of Epsilon Eridani IV. Soon you will have to choose.

New York Harbor, November 4, 1872—a cold, blustery day. A two-masted ship rides at anchor; on her stern is lettered: MARY CELESTE. Smith advances the time control. A flicker of darkness, light again, and the ship is gone. He turns back again until he finds it standing out under light canvas past Sandy Hook. Manipulating time and space controls at once, he follows it eastward through a flickering of storm and sun—loses it, finds it again, counting days as he goes. The farther eastward, the more he has to tilt the device downward, while the image of the ship tilts correspondingly away from him. Because of the angle, he can no longer keep the ship in view from a distance but must track it closely. November 21 and 22, violent storms: the ship is dashed upward by waves, falls again, visible only intermittently; it takes him five hours to pass through two days of real time. The 23rd is calmer, but on the 24th another storm blows up. Smith rubs his eyes, loses the ship, finds it again after a ten-minute search.

The gale blows itself out on the morning of the 26th. The sun is bright, the sea almost dead calm. Smith is able to catch glimpses of figures on deck, tilted above dark cross-sections of the hull. A sailor is splicing a rope in the stern, two others lowering a triangular sail between the foremast and the bowsprit, and a fourth is at the helm. A little group stands leaning on the starboard rail; one of them is a woman. The next glimpse is that of a running figure who advances into the screen and disappears. Now the men are lowering a boat over the side; the rail has been removed and lies on the deck. The men drop into the boat and row away. He hears them shouting to each other but cannot make out the words.

Smith turns to the ship again: the deck is empty. He dips below to look at the hold, filled with casks, then the cabin, then the forecastle. There is no sign of anything wrong—no explosion, no fire, no trace of violence. When he looks up again, he sees the sails flapping, then bellying out full. The sea is rising. He looks for the boat, but now too much time has passed and he cannot find it. He returns to the ship and now reverses the time control, tracks it backward until the men are again in their places on the deck. He looks again at the group standing at the rail; now he sees that the woman has a child in her arms. The child struggles, drops over the rail. Smith hears the woman shriek. In a moment she too is over the rail and falling into the sea.

He watches the men running, sees them launch the boat. As they pull away, he is able to keep the focus near enough to see and hear them. One calls, “My God, who’s at the helm?” Another, a bearded man with a face gone tallow-pale, replies, “Never mind—row!” They are staring down into the sea. After a moment one looks up, then another. TheMary Celeste, with three of the four sails on her foremast set, is gliding away, slowly, now faster; now she is gone.

Smith does not run through the scene again to watch the child and her mother drown, but others do.

The production model was ready for shipping in September. It was a simplified version of the prototype, with only two controls, one for space, one for time. The range of the device was limited to one thousand miles. Nowhere on the casing of the device or in the instruction booklet was a patent number or a pending patent mentioned. Smith had called the device Ozo, perhaps because he thought it sounded vaguely Japanese. The booklet described the device as a distant viewer and gave clear, simple instructions for its use. One sentence read cryptically: “Keep Time Control set at zero.” It was like “Wet Paint—Do Not Touch.”

During the week of September 23, seven thousand Ozos were shipped to domestic and Canadian addresses supplied by Smith: five hundred to electronics manufacturers and suppliers, six thousand, thirty to a carton, marked “On Consignment,” to TV outlets in major cities, and the rest to private citizens chosen at random. The instruction booklets were in sealed envelopes packed with each device. Three thousand more went to Europe, South and Central America, and the Middle East.

A few of the outlets which received the cartons opened them the same day, tried the devices out, and put them on sale at prices ranging from $49.95 to $125. By the following day the word was beginning to spread, and by the close of business on the third day every store was sold out. Most people who got them, either through the mail or by purchase, used them to spy on their neighbors and on people in hotels.

In a house in Cleveland, a man watches his brother-in-law in the next room, who is watching his wife getting out of a taxi. She goes into the lobby of an apartment building. The husband watches as she gets into the elevator, rides to the fourth floor. She rings the bell beside the door marked 410. The door opens; a dark-haired man takes her in his arms; they kiss.

The brother-in-law meets him in the hall. “Don’t do it, Charlie.”

“Get out of my way.”

“I’m not going to get out of your way, and I tell you, don’t do it. Not now and not later.”

“Why the hell shouldn’t I?”

“Because if you do I’ll kill you. If you want a divorce, OK, get a divorce. But don’t lay a hand on her or I’ll find you the farthest place you can go.”

Smith got his consignment of Ozos early in the week, took one home and left it to his store manager to put a price on the rest. He did not bother to use the production model but began at once to build another prototype. It had controls calibrated to one-hundredth of a second and one millimeter, and a timer that would allow him to stop a scene, or advance or regress it at any desired rate. He ordered some clockwork from an astronomical supply house.

A high-ranking officer in Army Intelligence, watching the first demonstration of the Ozo in the Pentagon, exclaimed, “My God, with this we could dismantle half the establishment—all we’ve got to do is launch interceptors when we see them push the button.”

“It’s a good thing Senator Burkhart can’t hear you say that,” said another officer. But by the next afternoon everybody had heard it.

A Baptist minister in Louisville led the first mob against an Ozo assembly plant. A month later, while civil and criminal suits against all the rioters were still pending, tapes showing each one of them in compromising or ludicrous activities were widely distributed in the area.

The commission agents who had handled the orders for the first Ozos were found out and had to leave town. Factories were fire-bombed, but others took their place.

The first Ozo was smuggled into the Soviet Union from West Germany by Katerina Belov, a member of a dissident group in Moscow, who used it to document illegal government actions. The device was seized on December 13 by the KGB; Belov and two other members of the group were arrested, imprisoned and tortured. By that time over forty other Ozos were in the hands of dissidents.

You are watching an old movie,Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice . The humor seems infantile and unimaginative to you; you are not interested in the actresses’ occasional seminudity. What strikes you as hilarious is the coyness, the sidelong glances, smiles, grimaces hinting at things that will never be shown on the screen. You realize that these people have never seen anyone but their most intimate friends without clothing, have never seen any adult shit or piss, and would be embarrassed or disgusted if they did. Why did children say “pee-pee” and “poo-poo,” and then giggle? You have read scholarly books about taboos on “bodily functions,” but why was shitting worse than sneezing?

Cora Zickwolfe, who lived in a remote rural area of Arizona and whose husband commuted to Tucson, arranged with her nearest neighbor, Phyllis Mell, for each of them to keep an Ozo focused on the bulletin board in the other’s kitchen. On the bulletin board was a note that said “OK.” If there was any trouble and she couldn’t get to the phone, she would take down the note, or if she had time, write another.

In April, 1992, about the time her husband usually got home, an intruder broke into the house and seized Mrs. Zickwolfe before she had time to get to the bulletin board. He dragged her into the bedroom and forced her to disrobe. The state troopers got there in fifteen minutes, and Cora never spoke to her friend Phyllis again.

Between 1992 and 2002 more than six hundred improvements and supplements to the Ozo were recorded. The most important of these was the power system created by focusing the Ozo at a narrow aperture on the interior of the Sun. Others included the system of satellite slave units in stationary orbits and a computerized tracer device which would keep the Ozo focused on any subject.

Using the tracer, an entomologist in Mexico City is following the ancestral line of a honey bee. The images bloom and expire, ten every second: the tracer is following each queen back to the egg, then the egg to the queen that laid it, then that queen to the egg. Tens of thousands of generations have passed; in two thousand hours, beginning with a Paleocene bee, he has traveled back nto the Cretaceous. He stops at intervals to follow the bee in real time, then accelerates again. The hive is growing smaller, more primitive. Now it is only a cluster of round cells, and the bee is different, more like a wasp. His year’s labor is coming to fruition. He watches, forgetting to eat, almost to breathe.

In your mother’s study after she dies you find an elaborate chart of her ancestors and your father’s. You retrieve the program for it, punch it in, and idly watch a random sampling, back into time, first the female line, then the male… a teacher of biology in Boston, a suffragette, a corn merchant, a singer, a Dutch farmer in New York, a British sailor, a German musician. Their faces glow in the screen, bright-eyed, cheeks flushed with life. Someday you too will be only a series of images in a screen.

Smith is watching the planet Mars. The clockwork which turns the Ozo to follow the planet, even when it is below the horizon, makes it possible for him to focus instantly on the surface, but he never does this. He takes up his position hundreds of thousands of miles away, then slowly approaches, in order to see the red spark grow to a disk, then to a yellow sunlit ball hanging in darkness. Now he can make out the surface features: Syrtis Major and Thoth-Nepenthes leading in a long gooseneck to Utopia and the frostcap.

The image as it swells hypnotically toward him is clear and sharp, without tremor or atmospheric distortion. It is summer in the northern hemisphere: Utopia is wide and dark. The planet fills the screen, and now he turns northward, over the cratered desert still hundreds of miles distant. A dust storm, like a yellow veil, obscures the curved neck of Thoth-Nepenthes; then he is beyond it, drifting down to the edge of the frostcap. The limb of the planet reappears; he floats like a glider over the dark surface tinted with rose and violet-gray; now he can make out individual plants. He is drifting among their gnarled gray stems, their leaves of violet horn; he sees the curious misshapen growths that may be air bladders or some grotesque analogue of blossoms. Now, at the edge of the screen, something black and spindling leaps. He follows it instantly, finds it, brings it hugely magnified into the center of the screen: a thing like a hairy beetle, its body covered with thick black hairs or spines; it stands on six jointed legs, waving its antennae, its mouth parts busy. And its four bright eyes stare into his, across forty million miles.

Smith’s hair got whiter and thinner. Before the 1992 Crash, he made heavy contributions to the International Red Cross and to volunteer organizations in Europe, Asia and Africa. He got drunk periodically, but always alone. From 1993 to 1996 he stopped reading the newspapers.

He wrote down the coordinates for the plane crash in which his daughter and her husband had died, but never used them.

At intervals while dressing or looking into the bathroom mirror, he stared as if into an invisible camera and raised one finger. In his last years he wrote some poems.

We know his name. Patient researchers, using advanced scanning techniques, followed his letters back through the postal system and found him, but by that time he was safely dead.

The whole world has been at peace for more than a generation. Crime is almost unheard of. Free energy has made the world rich, but the population is stable, even though early detection has wiped out most diseases. Everyone can do whatever he likes, providing his neighbors would not disapprove, and after all, their views are the same as his own.

You are forty, a respected scholar, taking a few days out to review your life, as many people do at your age. You have watched your mother and father coupling on the night they conceived you, watched yourself growing in her womb, first a red tadpole, then a thing like an embryo chicken, then a big-headed baby kicking and squirming. You have seen yourself delivered, seen the first moment when your bloody head broke into the light. You have seen yourself staggering about the nursery in rompers, clutching a yellow plastic duck. Now you are watching yourself hiding behind the fallen tree on the hill, and you realize that there are no secret places. And beyond you in the ghostly future you know that someone is watching you as you watch; and beyond that watcher another, and beyond that another… Forever.

CUSTOM FITTING

James White

For many years Hewlitt had been in the habit of spending half an hour sunning himself at the entrance to his shop when the sunlight was available in sufficient strength. The period was determined by the length of time it took for the sun to clear the eaves of the buildings on his side of the street and to move far enough out to necessitate his pulling out the shop’s awning so that the cloth on display would not fade. He spent the time watching the passersby—hoping that some of them wouldn’t—and anything else of interest. Usually there was nothing interesting to see, but today was an exception.

A large, plain furniture van, preceded by a police car and followed closely by an Electricity Department truck, turned into his street from the main road. The presence of the police vehicle was explained by the fact that the convoy was moving in the wrong direction along a one-way street. When the procession finally halted, the removals van was directly facing him.

For perhaps a minute there was nothing to see except the reflection of himself and his doorway in the dark, glossy flanks of the van. It was the slightly distorted picture of a thin and rather ridiculous figure wearing a black jacket and waistcoat with striped trousers, a small flower in the lapel, and a tape measure—the outward sign of his profession—hanging loosely from his neck. The lettering on the door behind the figure was executed in gold leaf in a bold italic script and said, in reverse:

GEORGE L. HEWLITT

TAILOR

Suddenly—as if some hypothetical film director had shouted “Action!”—everything happened at once.

Two senior police officers carrying traffic-diversion signs left their vehicle and moved in opposite directions to seal off each end of the street. The Electricity Department truck disgorged a gang of neatly overalled workmen, who quickly began unloading collapsible screening, a nightwatchman’s hut, and a man wearing a well-tailored suit of dark gray worsted and a tie which was strictly establishment. He also wore a very worried expression as he glanced up and down the street and at the windows overlooking it.

“Good morning, Mr. Hewlitt,” the man said, coming forward. “My name is Fox. I’m with the Foreign Office. I, ah, would like to consult you professionally. May I come inside?”

Hewlitt inclined his head politely and followed him into the shop.

For a few minutes nothing else was said because Fox was pacing nervously about the interior, staring at the shelves of neatly rolled cloth lengths, fingering the pattern books which were placed strategically on the polished wooden counters, and examining the paneling and crystal-clear mirrors in the big fitting room. While the Foreign Office official was looking over the premises, Hewlitt was studying Fox with equal attention.

Fox was of medium height, slimly built, with a head-forward tendency and prominent shoulder blades. From the small but noticeable lateral crease behind the jacket collar, it was obvious that he tried to correct the HF and PSB tendency by carrying himself unnaturally erect. Plainly Fox’s tailor had had problems, and Hewlitt wondered if he was about to inherit them.

“How may I help you, sir?” Hewlitt said when his visitor had finally come to rest. He used a tone which was friendly but one with that touch of condescension which very plainly said that it would be Hewlitt’s decision whether or not he would build a jacket around Fox’s prominent shoulder blades.

“I am not the client, Mr. Hewlitt,” Fox said impatiently. “He is waiting outside. However, this matter must be treated in the strictest confidence—kept absolutely secret, in fact, for the next two weeks. After that you may discuss it with whom you please.

“From our thorough if necessarily hasty inquiries,” the Foreign Office official went on, “we know that you live above these premises with your wife, who is also your seamstress and a partial cripple. We also know that your work is competent, if a little old-fashioned as regards styling, and that your stock is remarkably lacking in materials using man-made fibers. For many years your financial position has not been good, and I should say at this juncture that your silence as well as your workmanship will be very highly paid.

“The garment itself should present no difficulty,” Fox ended, “since all that is required is a fairly well-fitting horse blanket.”

Coldly, Hewlitt said, “I am completely lacking in experience where horse blankets are concerned, Mr. Fox.”

“You are being proud and unnecessarily stubborn, Mr. Hewlitt. This is a very important client, and may I remind you that across the street there is a branch of a well-known multiple tailoring company which is also capable of doing the job.”

“I agree,” said Hewlitt dryly. “That company could do a pretty good job—on a horse blanket.”

Fox smiled faintly, but before he could reply one of the workmen entered and said, “The screens are in position, sir, and the van is blocking the view from the other side of the street. Now we need the pole to pull out the sun awning. That will hide the shop front from upper-story windows on the other side of the street.”

Hewlitt pointed toward the recess behind the display window where the awning pole was kept.

“Thank you, sir,” said the workman in the tones of a senior public servant who is addressing a lowly member of the public he serves, then he turned away. “Wait,” said Fox, visibly coming to a decision. “When you’ve done that, ask

His Excellency if he would be good enough to come in, please.”

The strict secrecy being observed, the Foreign Office involvement, and the type of garment required had led Hewlitt to expect some highly controversial political figure: an overweight person from an underfed nation who was intent on expressing his individuality and independence by wearing an English-tailored native garment. Such a person might well be frightened of an assassin’s bullet and feel it necessary to take these elaborate precautions: but that, after all, was not any of Hewlitt’s business. But when he saw the client…

I’m dreaming, he told himself firmly.

The creature resembled a centaur, complete with hooves and a long, streaming tail. At first glance the torso from the waist up resembled that of a human being: but the musculature of the arms, shoulders, and chest was subtly different, and the hands were five-digited, each comprised of three fingers and two opposable thumbs. The head, carried erect above a very thick neck, was made to seem disproportionately small. The face was dominated by two large, soft, brown eyes that somehow made the slits, protuberances, and fleshy petals which comprised the other features visually acceptable.

Apart from a large medallion suspended around its neck, the being wore no clothing. Its skin was a mottled pinkish-brown color, and the creature twitched continually as if to dislodge invisible flies. It was obviously male.

“Your Excellency,” said Fox smoothly, “may I present Mr. George Hewlitt. He is a tailor, or maker of clothing, who will produce for you garments suitable for your stay on Earth.”

Instinctively Hewlitt put out his hand. He discovered that his client’s grip was firm, the digits warm and bony, and the way the lower thumb curled upward into his palm was indescribable but not unpleasant. For some odd reason he could no longer think of the being as an “it.”

“The initial requirement,” Fox said briskly, “is for a garment which will be comfortable and will keep His Excellency warm during the presentation ceremonies and socializing that will follow. The garment should be black, edged with gold or silver braid, perhaps, and should carry pseudo-heraldic decorations. No existing family crests can be used, obviously. He will also require a second garment, less formal, for use during sightseeing tours out-of-doors.”

“A braided and decorated horse blanket, then,” said Hewlitt, “and a plain one for walking out. But if you could tell me the kind of function His Excellency is to attend, I would be in a better position to produce something suitable.”

Fox shook his head. “Security.”

“I can, if necessary, work blindfolded and with one arm tied behind my back,” Hewlitt said, “but I do not produce my best work under those conditions. However, if His Excellency would kindly follow me into the fitting room?”

With a soft, irregular thumping of hooves the client, accompanied by Fox, followed into the fitting room and stood looking at himself in the angled mirrors. Rarely had Hewlitt seen a customer more ill at ease. The other’s hide was twitching and tightening along his back and flanks before Hewlitt had even laid the tape on him.

Without being obtrusive about it, Hewlitt studied the twitching hide, looking for insects or other evidence of parasitic presences. Relieved at not finding any, he thought for a moment, then switched on the wall heaters, which were never used during the summer months. Within a few minutes the room was uncomfortably warm and the twitching had stopped.

While Hewlitt went to work with his tape measure and pad, he asked, “I assume that my client’s home planet is warmer than Earth?”

“Yes,” said Fox. “Our weather at present would approximate to one of their sunny days in late autumn.”

From small of back to root of tail. 63 inches, Hewlitt wrote carefully. He said, “In cool weather they wear clothing, then?”

“Yes, a form of toga wrapped around their bodies in a loose spiral, with—Oh, now I see why you switched on the heaters. I should have thought of that; it was very remiss of me. But His Excellency does not want to wear his native clothing for very good reasons, so he thought it better to suffer a little discomfort rather than to take the risk of your being influenced, even unconsciously, by his native dress. It is most important that he wear clothing which is made and styled on Earth.”

From center line back to foreleg knee joint, 42 inches, Hewlitt wrote. To Fox he said, “The requirement is for a blanket-like garment, but surely my client will require additional clothing if he is to feel—”

“Just the blanket, Mr. Hewlitt.”

“If the positions were reversed,” said Hewlitt patiently, “you would no doubt feel reasonably warm in a blanket; but you would feel much more comfortable if you were wearing shorts as well.”

Irritably, Fox said, “Please follow instructions, Hewlitt. Your fee will be generous, regardless of how many or how few garments you make for His Excellency. Your attempts to drum up extra business is a waste of your time and ours.”

“The majority of civilized people on Earth wear undergarments,” said Hewlitt, “and unless climatic conditions, religious beliefs, or the dictates of local fashion rule otherwise, I should think that the same applies on other worlds.”

“You are being argumentative, uncooperative, and you are introducing unnecessary complications into what is a very simple set of instructions,” said Fox angrily. “Let me remind you that we can still go across the street!”

“Please do so,” said Hewlitt.

Fox and Hewlitt glared at each other for several seconds while the alien, his features unreadable by virtue of their complete alienness, turned his outside brown eyes on each of them in turn.

Suddenly a soft, gobbling noise issued from one of the fleshy slits in his face and, simultaneously and much louder, a pleasant baritone voice spoke from the ornament suspended from the alien’s neck. It said, “Perhaps I can resolve this difficulty, gentlemen. It seems to me that Mr. Hewlitt has displayed qualities of observation, good sense, and concern for the comfort of his customer, myself. Therefore, I would prefer him to continue to act as my tailor providing he is willing to do so.”

Fox swallowed, then said weakly, “Security, Your Excellency. We agreed that you would not speak to any member of the public until…the day.”

“My apologies, Mr. Fox,” the alien replied through his translation device, “but on my world a specialist like Mr. Hewlitt is considered something more than a member of the public.”

Turning to Hewlitt, he went on, “I would be most grateful if you could give the matter of my underwear your attention. However, for reasons which Mr. Fox would prefer to remain secret for the present, this garment must also be of Earth material and styling. Is this possible?”

Hewlitt bowed slightly and said, “Of course, sir.”

“Not sir!” said Fox, obviously angered because his instructions had been ignored by the alien. “This is His Excellency the Lord Scrennagle of Dutha—”

Scrennagle held up one double-thumbed hand as he said politely, “Pardon the interruption. That is only an approximation of my rank and title. ‘Sir’ is sufficiently respectful and conversationally much less cumbersome.”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” said Fox.

Hewlitt produced a swatch of patterns and a style book from which Scrennagle chose a soft lambswool in pale cream which would not, the tailor assured them, react in any fashion with his skin. The style plates fascinated him, and when Hewlitt began to sketch similar designs modified to fit his centaur-like body, the alien was practically breathing down the tailor’s neck.

Polite questioning had elicited the facts that Scrennagle insisted on dressing himself and that the area of skin covering the spine between waist and tail was the part of his body most susceptible to cold.

“If you wouldn’t mind, sir,” said Hewlitt at that point, “I would like you to advise me regarding the positioning of fastenings, openings for the elimination of body wastes, and so on…

Scrennagle could twist the upper part of his body so that his hands could reach either flank as far back as the tail, although he could only see the lower end of his back. The undergarment which Hewlitt had to devise would have to be stepped into and pulled up on to the fore and hind legs in turn. It would be double-backed and buttoned through, with one wide flap of cloth going over the back to the opposite flank and fastening there, while the other flap passed over the back in the opposite direction to button on the other flank—rather like a double-breasted suit worn back-to-front. Scrennagle said that the double thickness of cloth at the back would be very comfortable, the local temperature being what it was; and he found no fault in the more complicated flap and fastening arrangements for the fly and rear.

He was politely insistent, however, that his tail should not be even partially concealed. There were strong psychological reasons for this, apparently.

“I quite understand, sir,” said Hewlitt. “And now if you will stand quite still I shall measure you. The dimensions and contour descriptions required will be much more complex than those needed for the blankets. Once I have drafted a properly fitting pattern for the garment, however, making additional ones will present no problems. Initially a set of four undergarments should be sufficient to—”

“Hewlitt—!” Fox began.

“No gentleman,” Hewlitt said very quietly, “no matter how high or low his station, would undertake a major journey with just one set of underwear.”

There was, of course, no reply to that; and Hewlitt resumed measuring his client. While he worked he told Scrennagle exactly what he was doing and why. He even went so far as to discuss the weather in his attempts to make his client relax bodily so that he would not shape the garment to a figure that was being held in an unnatural pose through tension.

“I intend making the leg sections reach less than halfway between the hip joints and knees, sir,” he said at one point. “This will give the maximum comfort and warmth commensurate with the length of the over-garment. However, it would assist me greatly if I knew something more about the purpose of this blanket—what movements you would be making in it, whether or not you are expecting to be photographed, the geographical or architectural surroundings—so that the garment will not look out of place.”

“You’re fishing for information,” said Fox sharply. “Please desist.”

Hewlitt ignored him and said to Scrennagle, “You can rely on my discretion, sir.”

“I know that,” said Scrennagle. Turning so that he could see Fox in the fitting-room mirror, he went on: “A certain amount of curiosity is natural in these circumstances, and if Mr. Hewlitt has been entrusted with the secret of my presence in this city, surely the reason for my being here is a minor additional confidence which should not overstrain his capacity for—”

“With respect, Your Excellency,” said Fox, “these matters must not be made public until all the necessary preparations have been made.”

Hewlitt wrote Girth at forelegs, 46 inches. Controlling his exasperation, he said, “If the material, finish, and decoration of these garments are to fit the occasion—an important occasion no doubt—I really should be told something about it.”

There was silence for a moment, then Scrennagle and his translation device made noises which were possibly the equivalent of clearing an alien throat. His head went up and he stood very still as he said, “As the accredited representative of Dutha and of the Galactic Federation on Earth, I shall be presenting my credentials at the Court of St. James with the usual attendant ceremonies. In the evening of the same day there will be a reception at which the Sovereign will also be present. Although I am officially only an ambassador, the honors will be similar to those accorded a visiting head of state. The reception will be covered by the media, and interviews will be given following the official…”

Hewlitt was no longer listening to him. His sense of outrage was so great that no word could filter through to his mind with any meaning in it. Quietly he excused himself to Scrennagle; then to Fox he said, “Could I have a private word with you, outside?”

Without waiting for a reply he stalked out of the fitting room and across to the door, which he held open so that Fox could precede him into the hallway. Then he closed the door firmly, so firmly that the glass shattered and tinkled onto the porch tiling.

“And for this,” he whispered fiercely, “you want me to make a—a horse blanket?”

Just as fiercely, Fox replied, “Believe it or not, I sympathize with your feelings. But this could be the most important event in human history and it must go well! Not just for Scrennagle’s sake. What we do here will be the yardstick, the example, for embassies all over the world; and they must have no room for criticism. Some of them will feel that they should have had the first visit, and would welcome the chance to criticize. They must not be given that chance.”

One of the Special Branch men in the too-clean overalls came onto the porch, attracted by the sound of breaking glass. Fox waved him away, then went on, “Of course he should wear more than a horse blanket. I know that as well as you do. But I didn’t want you to know how important this is. Apart from the danger of a leak, a very small risk in your case, I didn’t want you to worry about the job so much that you would go to pieces.

“At the same time,” he went on harshly, “we cannot afford to have him appear ridiculous, to look like a cross between a dressed-up horse and a tail-coated chimpanzee from a circus. He is far too important an individual, and this is much too important an occasion for our planet and our race, for us to risk anything going wrong.”

More quietly he went on, “Scrennagle wants to make a good first impression, naturally; but we as a species must also make a good impression on him. So it is probably safer in many respects to let him wear a blanket, even though it lacks both imagination and dignity. But, Hewlitt, if you want to tailor something more elaborate for the first ambassador from the stars, it must be exactly right for the occasion. Do you want to take on such a heavy responsibility?”

Hewlitt’s vocal equipment seemed to be completely paralyzed by a combination of extreme anxiety and sheer joy at what was the ultimate challenge not only to an individual, but to a member of one of the oldest crafts known to mankind. He nodded.

Fox’s relief was obvious. He said, very seriously, “You are assuming a large part of the responsibility which is properly mine. I’m grateful, and if you have any suggestions which might help…”

“Even if they are none of my business?” Hewlitt asked; then he added, “My tailoring business, that is.”

“Go on,” Fox said warily.

“We were discussing dressed-up horses just now,” Hewlitt went on. “My client resembles a horse much more than he does a human being. He is too much of a diplomat to complain; but put yourself in his place for a moment and think of the effect on you of the pomp and pageantry, the transport arrangements and—”

“Scrennagle has already studied and adapted himself to the more personal aspects of our civilization,” said Fox. “At meals he lies with legs folded underneath his body, allowing his erect torso to rise to a comfortable height for eating and conversation. Since he has no lap, the napkin remains folded by his plate. Where toilet facilities are concerned—”

“I was thinking,” said Hewlitt, “of how he might feel about horses pulling him or their being ridden by human beings. I would suggest that a state limousine rather than a coach be used, and that the escort and guards be chosen from regiments other than the Household Cavalry or Horse Guards. There are several physiological similarities between Scrennagle and terrestrial horses. Not as many as those between an ape and a human being; but it might be better not to have too many animals around which closely resemble the visiting ambassador, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would say,” Fox said, and swore quietly. “Somebody should have thought of that.”

“Somebody just did,” Hewlitt said, opening the door and motioning Fox to precede him over the broken glass and back to the fitting room, where the most important client an Earth tailor had ever had was waiting and gently stamping all four of his feet.

“My apologies for the delay, sir,” said Hewlitt politely, “but I now have a clearer idea of what is expected of me and of you, sir. Before I resume measuring, do you have any allergies toward certain materials, or any particularly sensitive areas, which might cause you discomfort?”

Scrennagle looked at Fox, who said, “We have investigated this matter in great detail; and there is a long list of items which could cause trouble—some of them serious trouble—if they were allowed to remain in contact with His Excellency’s skin for long periods.

“The situation is this,” he continued. “Extraterrestrial pathogens cannot live in human bodies, and vice versa. This means that we cannot possibly contract a disease from Scrennagle and he is likewise impervious to our germs. However, purely chemical reactions are a different matter. One of the things likely to cause His Excellency to break out in a rash or worse is the synthetic fiber used in clothing, virtually all kinds of synthetics. You see the problem?”

Hewlitt nodded. The ambassador’s underwear, shirts, ties, and socks would have to be made from pure wool, cotton, or real silk; the suiting materials would have to be woolen worsted and, for the casuals, Harris or Irish Thornproof tweed. Bone buttons would be required and zip fasteners made from metal rather than nylon. Trimmings, the canvas stiffening, the wadding for shaping and softening the outlines would also have to be non-synthetic; and the thread used to hold everything together would have to be the old-style sewing cotton rather than nylon thread. He could see the problem, all right, and like most big problems this one was composed of a lot of little ones.

“One of the reasons why you were chosen for this job,” said Fox, “was that you were old-fashioned enough in your ideas to keep such things in stock. But frankly, I was worried in case you would be too old-fashioned to react properly toward an…unusual…client. As it happened, you showed no sign of xenophobia whatsoever.”

“I used to read a lot of science fiction, before it became too soft-centered,” Hewlitt said dryly. Then he turned to Scrennagle. “I shall require additional measurements, sir, since I shall be building something a little more ambitious than a blanket. And it will be necessary to draft patterns for the garments as I go along. Making up, fitting, and finishing will take time if the work is to be done properly. I shall therefore board up the broken pane and attach a notice saying that I am closed for alterations…” He looked along Scrennagle’s extraterrestrial body contours and thought, There will probably he a lot of alterations. “And I shall, of course, work on this order exclusively. But I cannot see it being completed in less than ten days.”

“You have twelve days,” said Fox, looking relieved. “I shall have the broken pane replaced as soon as possible. During our investigation your shop front was photographed, so we shall be able to reproduce the gold lettering. After all, the breakage was indirectly my fault.”

“I venture to disagree,” Scrennagle broke in. “As the prime cause of the trouble, I would be obliged, Mr. Hewlitt, if you would allow me to replace the glass from material in my ship as a memento of my visit. The material is transparent and proof against both meteorite collisions and minor emotional disturbances.”

“You are very kind, sir,” said Hewlitt, laughing, “I accept.” He wrote on the measurement pad, From center back to waist, 35 inches.

It took nearly three hours to complete the job to his satisfaction, including a half-hour’s discussion regarding the musculature and jointing of the limbs and torso and the provision needed to give comfort as well as style to the garments, particularly in the areas of the neck, chest, armpits, and crotch.

When Scrennagle and Fox left, Hewlitt locked the door and climbed the stairs past his first-floor stock-rooms to the flat above to break the news to his wife.

Mrs. Hewlitt had been a virtual cripple since a street accident eighteen years earlier. She could walk about the flat for three hours a day without too much discomfort, and these hours she saved for the evening meal and for talking to her husband afterwards. The rest of the time she spent rolling about the flat in her wheelchair, tidying, cooking, seeing if there was work for her to do, or sleeping, which she did not do very well even at night.

He told her about his extraterrestrial client, and of the necessity for keeping the matter a close secret for the time being. She studied his sketches and measurements with interest, working out the yardages of material and trimmings needed for the job. Hewlitt should be ashamed of himself, she said, for trying to make her believe such a tall story. She reminded him that in her youth she once had to make a costume for a stage horse. The reason for the number of costumes required, particularly the sets of underwear, was unclear, she said; but no doubt they were being used in a sophisticated pantomime or farce in which the stage horse was expected to partially disrobe. The detail required in the fly fastenings, she added disapprovingly, probably meant that it was a very sophisticated and naughty show.

“Not at all, dear,” said Hewlitt with a perfectly straight face. “It will be more in the nature of a spectacular, and you’ll be able to see the highlights, and our costumes, on TV”

Hewlitt, who had always held moral cowardice to be the better part of valor, noted her pleased and excited expression and said nothing more.

During the three days and for most of the intervening nights before Scrennagle was due for his first fitting, the pleasure and the sense of excitement remained with Mrs. Hewlitt, even though on one occasion she said that there had been a time when they would have refused such a gimmicky commission. Hewlitt replied by saying that the work required the highest standards of tailoring and finish, regardless of its ultimate destination, and that the work was the most professionally challenging as well as the most remunerative he had ever been given. But secretly he was becoming prey to self-doubts.

His problem was to design, cut, and build a suit which would not make a horse look like a man but like a very well-dressed and dignified horse. The whole idea was ridiculous, yet Scrennagle was much too important a personage to be left open to the slightest suggestion of ridicule.

As Hewlitt had expected, the first fitting was visually a disaster. The fore and hind trouser legs were unpressed, shapeless, and held together temporarily with tacking stitches, while the embryo morning coat looked even worse with just one sleeve attached and tacking cotton holding together the lapel canvas, fronts, and shoulder wadding. While he plied his needle, chalk, and pins, Hewlitt transmitted confidence and reassurance for all he was worth; but it was obvious that neither Scrennagle nor Fox was receiving.

The Foreign Office official looked desperately worried and unhappy, and the pattern of wrinkling and puckering on the ambassador’s features was almost certainly the extraterrestrial equivalent of these emotions.

Hewlitt kept this own doubts to himself and did his best to retrieve something from the situation by producing the first two sets of underwear, both of which fitted perfectly. He explained that these were relatively simple garments made from material which stretched and clung. He ignored the hints dropped by both Scrennagle and Fox that it might, after all, be better to settle for the horse blanket over underwear idea, and he requested a second fitting in four days’ time.

Scrennagle’s jacket was a large and structurally complex garment which covered not only the forward torso but the body back to the hindquarters. It was cut away sharply at the front, after which the skirt maintained a level line two inches below the point where the legs joined the body. But the jacket, because of the length and area of material used, made the trouser-clad legs look disproportionately thin.

Hewlitt apparently had been able to reduce the area of the jacket by introducing a set of false pleats running along the spine and dividing at the tail opening; and he had used a series of strategically placed darts to shape the garment at awkward body contours. But he had had to scrap and recut the original trousers, making them nearly twice as wide but with a neat taper to approximately double the hoof diameter at the bottoms. This meant redesigning the method of suspension across the back and modifying the crotch, but the overall effect looked much better balanced.

During the second fitting Hewlitt was pleased to find that he had been able to cure a troublesome tendency to crease where the foreleg muscles periodically distorted the waistcoat while Scrennagle was walking. But the garments, to Scrennagle’s and Fox’s untutored eyes, still looked like the proverbial pound of tripe. It was obvious that they were both coming to a decision—almost certainly the wrong one—and Hewlitt tried desperately to head them off.

“We are extremely lucky,” he said, smiling, “in that a size 16 neckband shirt is a perfect fit on you, sir, as is a size 8 hat. The hat will be carried rather than worn for the most part, likewise the gloves, which don’t quite fit—”

“Don’t you think,” said Fox suddenly, “that you may be trying for the impossible, Mr. Hewlitt?”

More quietly, Scrennagle joined in. “This is by no means a criticism of your professional ability, and you may well produce the garments required; but wouldn’t you agree that something in the nature of the blanket already discussed would serve as a useful standby? It would also relieve you of a heavy responsibility.”

“I did not ask to be relieved of the responsibility,” said Hewlitt. The responsibility was beginning to scare him sick. He really should take this easy way out—but he had too much confidence, or perhaps over-confidence, in his ability. He went on, “I have undertaken to clothe you suitably for the forthcoming social and formal occasions, sir, and you can trust me to fulfill my obligations.

“However,” Hewlitt continued quickly, “I have a minor problem regarding foot coverings. The black woolen socks can be adapted and cut to fit, but Earth-type shoes would look out of place and would be difficult for you to wear with confidence. Would it be possible to use a non-toxic paint to color the osseous material of your hooves—glossy black for the formal occasion and brown for the walkabouts? They should also be padded, since hoof sounds might also be considered out of place.” It would make you sound too much like a horse, Hewlitt said silently. Aloud: “And there is the matter of displaying the tail, sir. It is a long, luxuriant, and remarkably handsome tail—”

“Thank you,” said Scrennagle. “—but it is constantly in motion and likely to be a distraction to people holding a conversation with you. Mr. Fox tells me that these movements are involuntary. However, as I see it, your tail is analogous to the cranial and/or facial hair in a Earth-person. Those who have such hair frequently display it to the best advantage on formal occasions. It can he pleated, braided, decorated in various fashions, and combed or oiled to give it a richer texture. If you have no objections, sir, we might plait your tail, adding, say, a few lengths of white or silver cord, then coil it neatly and secure it with a retaining strap which I can add to the center seam?”

“I have no objections, Mr. Hewlitt,” said Scrennagle. “We do something similar on Dutha.”

“These are details, Hewlitt,” said Fox. “Important details, I admit, which will apply to whatever type of garment is worn. But—”

“There is also the matter of decorations, sir,” Hewlitt continued. “These are colored ribbons and pieces of engraved metal which indicate that the person wearing them has achieved some great feat, or that an ancestor has done so. The evening reception will include many people wearing dress uniforms and full evening wear to which are added the kind of decorations I have been describing. I would like you to wear some kind of decoration or award,” he went on seriously, “but preferably one that has not simply been invented for the occasion. Can you suggest something which might be suitable, sir?”

Scrennagle was silent for a moment, then he said, “My race has no equivalent of these awards, except possibly the translator which is necessary to the performance of my work. There is a somewhat larger version, decorated with the Federation symbol, which is worn when more than one translation has to be handled at the same time. But these, also, are merely the tools of our profession.”

“But it is not a common profession, surely?”

“It is not,” said Scrennagle. The expression which twisted the alien features might have been one of pride.

“Would you have any objections to displaying this device on a colored ribbon?”

“No objections.”

“Thank you, sir,” Hewlitt said. He went on briskly, “The morning wear will be ready for collection before breakfast time on the day required, and the evening wear in the afternoon of the same day. Your walking-out suits and accessories, which will not be required until your list of formal visits is complete, will be much easier to make as a result of experience gained with the first garments—”

“Which will be,” said Fox very firmly, “a well-cut and tastefully decorated blanket.”

Hewlitt pretended to ignore him as he said, “You may trust me, sir.”

“I am trusting you, Mr. Hewlitt, more than any other person on this planet…”

Long after they had gone, Hewlitt thought about Scrennagle’s parting remark. While his wife and he worked on the recutting and finishing of the first outfit, he worried. Was he being a stupid, self-opinionated, sartorial snob or did he really have the right to dictate to Scrennagle as he had been doing?

The ambassador was an extremely important being who was, in the way of all representatives of other governments, anxious to make a good impression. But he would also be receiving impressions, favorable or otherwise, from the people he was meeting. Being realistic about it, the latter impressions were the more important as far as the human race was concerned. In all probability Scrennagle was important enough to make the decision whether his world and the rest of the Federation maintained contact with Earth or left it strictly alone.

And this was the being that he, a conceited and impoverished little tailor, was going to dress for the most important occasion in human history. He was, of course, going to dress him to the best of his ability; but the media were fond of poking fun at VIPs. Given half a chance, they would tear Scrennagle apart; and the ambassador would go away and neither he nor his friends would ever return to the place where the people lacked manners and where the Federation representative had been made to look a fool.

Many times while he was reopening a seam to remove an unsightly fullness or while giving the pockets the swelled edges that were his own particular signature on a suit, he thought about putting aside the work for the few hours necessary for him to make a blanket. He thought about it long and seriously, but he kept working on the job in hand while he was making up his mind. When he and his wife went to bed in the early hours of the following morning and arose to resume work a short time later, he still had not made up his mind.

Producing a glorified horse blanket would be insurance against the dress wear turning out to be a sartorial disaster. But if he made the blanket he would simply be obeying orders and shifting the responsibility back to Fox. He would also be allowing a man who knew less than he did to tell him what to do.

Then suddenly the morning coat and trousers were finished, pressed, and hanging with their accessories on the form which Hewlitt had adapted from the limbs and torsos of one and a half window-display models; and there was no longer enough time to make a blanket because it was the morning of The Day and Scrennagle was due at any moment.

The ambassador said little while Hewlitt was showing him how to fasten the shirt, knot the tie, and fit, among other items, the footless dark socks over his black-painted hooves. While fitting the trousers, waistcoat, and jacket the tailor talked about the desirability of moving slowly—sudden movements lacked dignity and looked bad on TV. He was aware that he was talking too much and that he was making himself sound ridiculous by punctuating every few words with a yawn.

Perhaps Scrennagle would not realize how nervous and unsure of himself Hewlitt felt because the overall ensemble did not look exactly as he had envisaged it—and in his present physical and mental state of fatigue he did not know what it looked like.

During the proceedings Fox maintained the tightest-lipped silence he had ever experienced; but he tossed Hewlitt a copy of the morning paper and nodded worriedly as they left.

The news about Scrennagle was published as a Court Circular:

His Excellency the Lord Scrennagle of Dutha will be received in audience by the Queen this morning, and will present his Letters of Credence as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary from the Galactic Federation to the Court of St. James. A State Reception will be held in his honor at the Palace, during which sound and vision broadcast facilities will be available.

Hewlitt moved the TV into his workroom so that he could watch without disturbing his wife, who was still asleep, while he worked on the evening suit. But the TV coverage was unsatisfactory. Apparently the Court Circular had been treated by the press as some kind of hoax. A tourist had been able to film Scrennagle’s arrival at St. James’s, and he would probably receive a fortune for a few feet of badly focused film which did not give any indication of how well or otherwise the ambassador’s suit fitted him.

Hewlitt waited for a couple of hours, then switched on his transistor radio to hear an excited voice saying that news had just been received from the Palace to the effect that Dutha was an inhabited planet circling a sun some two thousand light-years from Earth and that the Duthan, Scrennagle, was being accorded the honors of a visiting head of state as well as those of an ambassador. Whether the whole thing was a hoax or not, the voice went on, tonight’s reception would be covered to the same extent as the early moon landings.

His wife heard the same news item. She looked dreadfully tired but happier than he had seen her for a great many years. But she was not talking to him for the time being because he had told her the truth and had deliberately made it sound like a lie.

Hewlitt’s mind and fingers were so stiff and tired that he was almost an hour late in completing the suit. But that did not matter: Scrennagle did not call for it. Just two hours before the reception was due to begin, a uniformed inspector arrived to say that there had been unforeseen delays and that he would collect the outfit and take it to Scrennagle’s ship. A few minutes later, a more senior police officer arrived to say that since there was no longer any need for secrecy they were removing the screens from his shop front and that a couple of glaziers had also arrived to replace his door window.

“Can’t it wait until morning?” Hewlitt asked, clenching his teeth to fight back a yawn.

“You look very tired, sir,” the policeman said. “I would be happy to stay here until they’ve finished, and lock the door as I leave. I’ll put your key in the letter-box.”

“That is very considerate of you,” said Hewlitt warmly. “I do need rest. Thank you.”

“My pleasure, sir,” said the officer, so respectfully that he seemed to be ready to salute.

The warm feeling left by the unusually friendly policeman faded as Hewlitt mounted the stairs. He thought about the probable reasons why Scrennagle had sent for his suit rather than collect it himself. The outfit he had worn this morning had probably been a mess, and this evening he would be wearing a horse blanket tailored on short notice by someone else. Being a diplomat and a considerate being as well, Scrennagle would not want to complain in person to Hewlitt, or to pass on the criticisms which had doubtless been made about his appearance. He would simply take delivery of the second outfit and say nothing.

But Hewlitt’s misery was short-lived. As he slumped into his chair before the TV screen, a panel of experts were discussing the implications of contact with an extra-solar race, and pundits always put him to sleep.

The first few bars of the fanfare which opened the late-night newscast, especially extended to cover the visit of the extraterrestrial, jerked Hewlitt awake. Quickly he wheeled his wife in from the kitchen, then settled back to see how Scrennagle had comported himself.

Unlike the amateur film taken at St. James’s, Scrennagle’s arrival for the reception was covered in close-up, middle distance, and from every angle. The ambassador was not wearing a horse blanket.

His jacket was a good fit at the collar and shoulders, but showed a tendency to wrinkle across the back when Scrennagle straightened after making a bow—something he had to do every few minutes. The trousers hung well, making the legs look neither too blocky nor too thin, and the black socks and dully polished hooves were elegantly inconspicuous. The tail was coiled and tied forward like that of some heraldic beast, and its occasional twitchings were barely noticeable.

The only touch of color was the wide silk ribbon that diagonally bisected the white shirt front and waistcoat. It was pale blue with a thin edging of red and gold on which was centered the intricately decorated translation device which bore the symbol of the Federation. Although not the most impressive decoration there, it still managed to hold its own among all the Baths and Garters.

Scrennagle of Dutha, Hewlitt realized suddenly, looked well…

Then the Duthan was making his speech, outlining briefly the purpose of his visit and touching on some of the advantages which membership in the Galactic Federation would confer in both directions.

It had been just over one hundred and fifty years earlier that one of the Federation’s unmanned searchships found intelligent life and a rapidly developing technology on Earth. The long delay in responding to the situation, Scrennagle explained, was due to the fact that the searchships—which rarely found anything—were not fitted with power-hungry, ultimate drive because machinery, unlike Duthans, Earth-humans, and members of other intelligent species, did not age or become bored. The searchship had spent many years in orbit photographing, analyzing, evaluating specimens of flora and fauna, the written and spoken languages—the last being particularly difficult for its soft-landed probes to obtain because radio and television had not then been invented.

When the data had been returned to Dutha for study, several difficult decisions had had to be taken. There was, of course, no question that contact should not be attempted with the rich and varied cultures on Earth. But at the time the material had been gathered, many sociopolitical groupings were showing signs of imminent collapse while others were rapidly growing in power and influence.

At that time the British Empire, with its center of power and commerce in London, was the most important and influential grouping, but it, too, was showing signs of collapse. It had grown slowly, however, and its traditions and laws were deeply rooted. The indications were that it would collapse not catastrophically, but wane slowly and disintegrate in a stable fashion. It was also thought that the manners and practices observed a century and a half earlier would not significantly alter in such a long-lived grouping…

“That is why I landed quietly in this country rather than in one of the others,” Scrennagle continued. “I now know that the decision was the correct one. But we, too, have certain rules of behavior in these circumstances. You might think that for a highly advanced Galactic culture we are surprisingly old-fashioned. But an acceptable code of behavior plays a vital part in dealings between species so widely varied as the members of our Federation.

“One of our strictest rules,” he added, wrinkling his facial openings in what was undoubtedly a smile, “is that visitors such as myself conform to all of the social practices and customs of the host planet; even to the extent of wearing its clothing…”

He concluded by saying that his intention was to make a round of official visits to heads of state on Earth. Then, later, he would return to take a leisurely, sightseeing tour of the planet which would enable him to meet people in more relaxed conditions. He added that Earth had been the first new world to be offered membership in something over four centuries, and he would be happy to answer questions on every subject under this or any other sun.

The next item was the TV interview, during which, at long last, the subject of Scrennagle’s clothing came up.

“…we will need much more time to consider the wider aspects of your visit,” the interviewer was saying, “but right now, Your Excellency, I would like to ask a question, and also compliment you, on your clothing. Or perhaps I should compliment your extraterrestrial tailor?”

“You should compliment my terrestrial tailor,” Scrennagle said, then went on: “On many worlds clothing is simply a means of giving protection from extremes of weather, while on others the fabrication, styling, and wearing of clothing has been raised to the level of a major art form. Earth is in the latter category and possesses at least one tailor who is capable of making an extraterrestrial…presentable.”

The interviewer laughed and asked, “Who is he, Your Excellency?”

“I would rather not say at present,” Scrennagle replied. “He and his wife have worked long and hard, and they deserve at least one night’s sleep before fame descends on them. Suffice it to say that my tailor is relatively unknown but a craftsman of the highest order. He is also something of a tyrant in sartorial matters, a characteristic common to tailors throughout the Galaxy. He is not afraid to accept a professional challenge, as you can see.”

“Yes, indeed,” said the interviewer.

“No doubt there will be other challenges,” Scrennagle went on, turning his face directly into camera, but Hewlitt knew that he was not speaking solely to the interviewer. “My race was chosen to make first contact with Earth-humans simply because my people most closely resembled yours—despite what you must think are major physiological differences. Other races in the Federation have much more varied and interestingly arranged limbs and appendages; and to the uninitiated they may even appear to be quite horrendous. But ambassadors from all these species in time will visit Earth to present their credentials and their good wishes. And they will all require to be suitably attired for the occasion. They will be very pleased and reassured to know,” he ended, “that there is an Earth-human tailor in whom they can place their complete trust…

The intense feelings of pride and excitement which should have kept him awake that night, but did not, were with him in undiminished intensity when he opened the shop next morning. His reflection in the store window opposite looked the same as always, but something different about the reflected picture made him turn around quickly.

The new door pane was not quite the same as the old one. It now read GEORGE L. HEWLITT, TAILOR, centered above a beautifully executed copy of the design which appeared on Scrennagle’s translator—the symbol which represented all the worlds of the Galactic Federation—followed by the words BY APPOINTMENT.

TRI-CENTENNIAL

Joe Haldeman

December 1975

Scientists pointed out that the Sun could be part of a double star system. For its companion to have gone undetected, of course, it would have to be small and dim, and thousands of astronomical units distant.

They would find it eventually; “it” would turn out to be “them”; they would come in handy.

January 2075

The office was opulent even by the extravagant standards of twenty-first-century Washington. Senator Connors had a passion for antiques. One wall was lined with leather-bound books; a large brass telescope symbolized his role as Liaison to the Science Guild. An intricately woven Navajo rug from his home state covered most of the parquet floor. A grandfather clock. Paintings, old maps.

The computer terminal was discreetly hidden in the top drawer of his heavy teak desk. On the desk: a blotter, a precisely centered fountain pen set, and a century-old sound-only black Bell telephone. It chimed.

His secretary said that Dr. Leventhal was waiting to see him. “Keep answering me for thirty seconds,” the Senator said. “Then hang it and send him right in.”

He cradled the phone and went to a wall mirror. Straightened his tie and cape; then with a fingernail evened out the bottom line of his lip pomade. Ran a hand through long, thinning white hair and returned to stand by the desk, one hand on the phone.

The heavy door whispered open. A short thin man bowed slightly. “Sire.”

The Senator crossed to him with both hands out. “Oh, blow that, Charlie. Give ten.” The man took both his hands, only for an instant. “When was I ever ‘Sire’ to you, you fool?”

“Since last week,” Leventhal said, “Guild members have been calling you worse names than ‘Sire.’”

The Senator bobbed his head twice. “True, and true. And I sympathize. Will of the people, though.”

“Sure.” Leventhal pronounced it as one word: “Willathapeeble.”

Connors went to the bookcase and opened a chased panel. “Drink?”.

“Yeah, Bo.” Charlie sighed and lowered himself into a deep sofa. “Hit me. Sherry or something.”

The Senator brought the drinks and sat down beside Charlie. “You should of listened to me. Shoulda got the Ad Guild to write your proposal.”

“We have good writers.”

“Begging to differ. Less than two percent of the electorate bothered to vote: most of them for the administration advocate. Now you take the Engineering Guild—”

“You take the engineers. And—”

“They used the Ad Guild.” Connors shrugged. “They got their budget.”

“It’s easy to sell bridges and power plants and shuttles. Hard to sell pure science.”

“The more reason for you to—”

“Yeah, sure. Ask for double and give half to the Ad boys. Maybe next year. That’s not what I came to talk about.”

“That radio stuff?”

“Right. Did you read the report?”

Connors looked into his glass. “Charlie, you know I don’t have time to—”

“Somebody read it, though.”

“Oh, righty-o. Good astronomy boy on my staff: he gave me a boil-down. Mighty interesting, that.”

“There’s an intelligent civilization eleven light-years away—that’s `mighty interesting’?”

“Sure. Real breakthrough.” Uncomfortable silence.“Uh, what are you going to do about it?”

“Two things. First, we’re trying to figure out what they’re saying. That’s hard. Second, we want to send a message back. That’s easy. And that’s where you come in.”

The Senator nodded and looked somewhat wary.

“Let me explain. We’ve sent messages to this star, 61 Cygni, before. It’s a double star, actually, with a dark companion.”

“Like us.”

“Sort of. Anyhow, they never answered. They aren’t listening, evidently: they aren’t sending.”

“But we got—”

“What we’re picking up is about what you’d pick up eleven light-years from Earth. A confused jumble of broadcasts, eleven years old. Very faint. But obviously not generated by any sort of natural source.”

“Then we’re already sending a message back. The same kind they’re sending us.”

“That’s right, but—”

“So what does all this have to do with me?”

“Bo, we don’t want to whisper at them — we want to shout! Get their attention.” Leventhal sipped his wine and leaned back. “For that, we’ll need one hell of a lot of power.”

“Uh, righty-o. Charlie, power’s money. How much are you talking about?”

“The whole show. I want to shut down Death Valley for twelve hours.”

The Senator’s mouth made a silent O. “Charlie, you’ve been working too hard. Another Blackout? On purpose?”

“There won’t be any Blackout. Death Valley has emergency storage for fourteen hours.”

“At half capacity.” He drained his glass and walked back to the bar, shaking his head. “First you say you want power. Then you say you want to turn off the power.” He came back with the burlap-covered bottle. “You aren’t making sense, boy.”

“Not turn it off, really. Turn it around.”

“Is that a riddle?”

“No, look. You know the power doesn’t really come from the Death Valley grid; it’s just a way station and accumulator. Power comes from the orbital—”

“I know all that, Charlie. I’ve got a Science Certificate.”

“Sure. So what we’ve got is a big microwave laser in orbit, that shoots down a tight beam of power. Enough to keep North America running. Enough—”

“That’s what I mean. You can’t just—”

“So we turn it around and shoot it at a power grid on the Moon. Relay the power around to the big radio dish at Farside. Turn it into radio waves and point it at 61 Cygni. Give ‘em a blast that’ll fry their fillings.”

“Doesn’t sound neighborly.”

“It wouldn’t actually be that powerful — but it would be a hell of a lot more powerful than any natural 21 centimeter source.”

“I don’t know, boy.” He rubbed his eyes and grimaced. “I could maybe do it on the sly, only tell a few people what’s on. But that’d only work for a few minutes… what do you need twelve hours for, anyway?”

“Well, the thing won’t aim itself at the Moon automatically, the way it does at Death Valley. Figure as much as an hour to get the thing turned around and aimed.

“Then, we don’t want to just send a blast of radio waves at them. We’ve got a five-hour program, that first builds up a mutual language, then tells them about us, and finally asks them some questions. We want to send it twice.”

Connors refilled both glasses. “How old were you in ‘47, Charlie?”

“I was born in ‘45.”

“You don’t remember the Blackout. Ten thousand people died… and you want me to suggest—”

“Come on, Bo, it’s not the same thing. We know the accumulators work now besides, the ones who died, most of them had faulty failsafes on their cars. If we warn them the power’s going to drop, they’ll check their failsafes or damn well stay out of the air.”

“And the media? They’d have to take turns broadcasting. Are you going to tell the People what they can watch?”

“Fuzz the media. They’ll be getting the biggest story since the Crucifixion.”

“Maybe.” Connors took a cigarette and pushed the box toward Charlie. “You don’t remember what happened to the Senators from California in ‘47, do you?”

“Nothing good, I suppose.”

“No, indeed. They were impeached. Lucky they weren’t lynched. Even though the real trouble was ‘way up in orbit.”

“Like you say: people pay a grid tax to California. They think the power comes from California. If something fuzzes up, they get pissed at California. I’m the Lib Senator from California, Charlie; ask me for the Moon, maybe I can do something. Don’t ask me to fuzz around with Death Valley.”

“All right, all right. It’s not like I was asking you to wire it for me, Bo. Just get it on the ballot. We’ll do everything we can to educate—”

“Won’t work. You barely got the Scylla probe voted in — and that was no skin off nobody, not with L-5 picking up the tab.”

“Just get it on the ballot.”

“We’ll see. I’ve got a quota, you know that. And the Tricentennial coming up, hell, everybody wants on the ballot.”

“Please, Bo. This is bigger than that. This is bigger than anything. Get it on the ballot.”

“Maybe as a rider. No promises.”

March 1992:

From Fax & Pix, 12 March 1992:

ANTIQUE SPACEPROBE

ZAPPED BY NEW STARS

1. Pioneer 10 sent first Jupiter pix Earthward in 1973 (see pix upleft, upright).

2. Left solar system 1987. First man-made thing to leave solar system.

3. Yesterday, reports NASA, Pioneer 10 begins AM to pick up heavy radiation. Gets more and more to max about 3 PM. Then goes back down. Radiation has to come from outside solar system.

4. NASA and Hawaii scientists say Pioneer 10 went through disk of synchrotron (sin-kro-tron) radiation that comes from two stars we didn’t know about before.

A. The stars are small “black dwarfs.”

B. They are going round each other once every 40 seconds, and take 350,000 years to go around the Sun.

C. One of the stars is made of antimatter. This is stuff that blows up if it touches real matter. What the Hawaii scientists saw was a dim circle of invisible (infrared) light, that blinks on and off every twenty seconds. This light comes from where the atmospheres of the two stars touch (see pic downleft).

D. The stars have a big magnetic field. Radiation comes from stuff spinning off the stars and trying to get through the field.

E. The stars are about 5000 times as far away from the Sun as we are. They sit at the wrong angle, compared to the rest of the solar system (see pic downright).

5. NASA says we aren’t in any danger from the stars. They’re too far away, and besides, nothing in the solar system ever goes through the radiation.

6. The woman who discovered the stars wants to call them Scylla (skill-a) and Charybdis (ku-rib-dus).

7. Scientists say they don’t know where the hell those two stars came from. Everything else in the solar system makes sense.

February 2075

When the docking phase started, Charlie thought, that was when it was easy to tell the scientists from the baggage. The scientists were the ones who looked nervous.

Superficially, it seemed very tranquil — nothing like the bone hurting skin stretching acceleration when the shuttle lifted off. The glittering transparent cylinder of L-5 simply grew larger, slowly, then wheeled around to point at them.

The problem was that a space colony big enough to hold 4000 people has more inertia than God. If the shuttle hit the mating dimple too fast, it would fold up like an accordion. A spaceship is made to take stress in the other direction.

Charlie hadn’t paid first class, but they let him up into the observation dome anyhow, professional courtesy. There were only two other people there, standing on the Velcro rug, strapped to one bar and hanging on to another.

They were a young man and woman, probably new colonists. The man was talking excitedly. The woman stared straight ahead, not listening. Her knuckles were white on the bar and her teeth were clenched. Charlie wanted to say something in sympathy, but it’s hard to talk while you’re holding your breath.

The last few meters are the worst. You can’t see over the curve of the ship’s hull, and the steering jets make a constant stutter of little bumps: left, right, forward back. If the shuttle folded, would the dome shatter or just pop off?

It was all controlled by computers, of course. The pilot just sat up there in a mist of weightless sweat.

Then the low moan, almost subsonic shuddering as the shuttle’s smooth hull complained against the friction pads. Charlie waited for the ringing spang that would mean they were a little too fast: friable alloy plates, under the friction pads, crumbling to absorb the energy of their forward motion; last ditch stand.

If that didn’t stop them, they would hit a two-meter wall of solid steel, which would. It had happened once. But not this time.

“Please remain seated until pressure is equalized,” a recorded voice said. “It’s been a pleasure having you aboard.”

Charlie crawled down the pole, back to the passenger area. He walked rip, rip, rip back to his seat and obediently waited for his ears to pop. Then the side door opened and he went with the other passengers through the tube that led to the elevator. They stood on the ceiling. Someone had laboriously scratched a graffito on the metal wall:

Stuck on this lift for hours, perforce:

This lift that cost a million bucks.

There’s no such thing as centrifugal force:

L-5 sucks.

Thirty more weightless seconds as they slid to the ground. There were a couple of dozen people waiting on the loading platform.

Charlie stepped out into the smell of orange blossoms and newly mown grass. He was home.

“Charlie! Hey, over here.” Young man standing by a tandem bicycle. Charlie squeezed both his hands and then jumped on the back seat. “Drink.”

“Did you get—”

“Drink. Then talk.” They glided down the smooth macadam road toward town.

The bar was just a rain canopy over some tables and chairs, overlooking the lake in the center of town. No bartender: you went to the service table and punched in your credit number, then chose wine or fruit juice; with or without vacuum-distilled raw alcohol. They talked about shuttle nerves awhile, then:

“What you get from Connors?”

“Words, not much. I’ll give a full report at the meeting tonight. Looks like we won’t even get on the ballot, though.”

“Now isn’t that what we said was going to happen? We shoulda gone with Francois Petain’s idea.”

“Too risky.” Petain’s plan had been to tell Death Valley they had to shut down the laser for repairs. Not tell the groundhogs about the signal at all, just answer it. “If they found out they’d sue us down to our teeth.”

The man shook his head. “I’ll never understand groundhogs.”

“Not your job.” Charlie was an Earth-born, Earth trained psychologist. “Nobody born here ever could.”

“Maybe so.” He stood up. “Thanks for the drink; I’ve gotta get back to work. You know to call Dr. Bemis before the meeting?”

“Yeah. There was a message at the Cape.”

“She has a surprise for you.”

“Doesn’t she always? You clowns never do anything around here until I leave.”

All Abigail Bemis would say over the phone was that Charlie should come to her place for dinner; she’d prep him for the meeting.

“That was good, Ab. Can’t afford real food on Earth.”

She laughed and stacked the plates in the cleaner, then drew two cups of coffee. She laughed again when she sat down. Stocky, white-haired woman with bright eyes in a sea of wrinkles.

“You’re in a jolly mood tonight.”

“Yep. It’s expectation.”

“Johnny said you had a surprise.”

“Hooboy, he doesn’t know half. So you didn’t get anywhere with the Senator.”

“No. Even less than I expected. What’s the secret?”

“Connors is a nice-hearted boy. He’s done a lot for us.

“Come on, Ab. What is it?”

“He’s right. Shut off the groundhogs’ TV for twenty minutes and they’d have another Revolution on their hands.”

“Ab…”

“We’re going to send the message.”

“Sure. I figured we would. Using Farside at whatever wattage we’ve got. If we’re lucky—”

“Nope. Not enough power.”

Charlie stirred a half-spoon of sugar into his coffee. “You plan to… defy Connors?”

“Fuzz Connors. We’re not going to use radio at all.”

“Visible light? Infra?”

“We’re going to hand-carry it. In Daedalus.”

Charlie’s coffee cup was halfway to his mouth. He spilled a great deal.

“Here, have a napkin.”

June 2040

From A Short History Of the Old Order (Freeman Press, 2040)

… and if you think that was a waste, consider Project Daedalus.

This was the first big space thing after L-5. Now L-5 worked out all right, because it was practical. But Daedalus (named from a Greek god who could fly)—that was a clear-cut case of throwing money down the rat-hole.

These scientists in 2016 talked the bourgeoisie into paying for a trip to another star! It was going to take over a hundred years — but the scientists were going to have babies along the way, and train them to be scientists (whether they wanted to or not!).

They were going to use all the old H-bombs for fuel — as if we might not need the fuel some day right here on Earth. What if L-5 decided they didn’t like us, and shut off the power beam?

Daedalus was supposed to be a spaceship almost a kilometer long! Most of it was manufactured in space, from Moon stuff, but a lot of it — the most expensive part, you bet — had to be boosted from Earth.

They almost got it built, but then came the Breakup and the People’s Revolution. No way in hell the People were going to let them have those H-bombs, not sitting right over our heads like that.

So we left the H-bombs in Helsinki and, the space freaks went back to doing what they’re supposed to do. Every year they petition to get those H-bombs, but every year the Will of the People says no.

That spaceship is still up there, a sky trillion dollar boondoggle. As a monument to bourgeoisie folly, it’s worse than the Pyramids!!

February 2075

“So the Scylla probe is just a ruse, to get the fuel—”

“Oh no, not really.” She slid a blue-covered folder to him. “We’re still going to Scylla. Scoop up a few megatons of degenerate antimatter. And a similar amount of degenerate matter from Charybdis.

“We don’t plan a generation ship, Charlie. The hydrogen fuel will get us out there; once there, it’ll power the magnetic bottles to hold the real fuel.”

“Total annihilation of matter,” Charlie said.

“That’s right. Em-cee-squared to the ninth decimal place. We aren’t talking about centuries to get to 61 Cygni. Nine years, there and back.”

“The groundhogs aren’t going to like it. All the bad feeling about the original Daedalus—”

“Fuzz the groundhogs. We’ll do everything we said we’d do with their precious H-bombs: go out to Scylla, get some antimatter, and bring it back. Just taking a long way back.”

“You don’t want to just tell them that’s what we’re going to do? No skin off…”

She shook her head and laughed again, this time a little bitterly. “You didn’t read the editorial in People post this morning, did you?”

“I was too busy.”

“So am I, boy; too busy for that drink. One of my staff brought it in, though.”

“It’s about Daedalus?”

“No… it concerns 61 Cygni. How the crazy scientists want to let those boogers know there’s life on Earth.”

“They’ll come make people-burgers out of us.”

“Something like that.”

Over three thousand people sat on the hillside, a “natural” amphitheatre fashioned of moon dirt and Earth grass. There was an incredible din, everyone talking at once: Dr. Bemis had just told them about the 61 Cygni expedition.

On about the tenth “Quiet, please,” Bemis was able to continue. “So you can see why we didn’t simply broadcast this meeting. Earth would pick it up. Likewise, there are no groundhog media on L-5 right now. They were rotated back to Earth and the shuttle with their replacements needed repairs at the Cape. The other two shuttles are here.

“So I’m asking all of you — and all of your brethren who had to stay at their jobs — to keep secret the biggest thing since Isabella hocked her jewels. Until we lift.”

“Now Dr. Leventhal, who’s chief of our social sciences section, wants to talk to you about selecting the crew.”

Charlie hated public speaking. In this setting, he felt like a Christian on the way to being cat food. He smoothed out his damp notes on the podium.

“Uh, basic problem.” A thousand people asked him to speak up. He adjusted the microphone.

“The basic problem is, we have space for about a thousand people. Probably more than one out of four want to go.”

Loud murmur of assent. “And we don’t want to be despotic about choosing… but I’ve set up certain guidelines, and Dr. Bemis agrees with them.

“Nobody should plan on going if he or she needs sophisticated medical care, obviously. Same toke, few very old people will be considered.”

Almost inaudibly, Abigail said, “Sixty-four isn’t very old, Charlie. I’m going.” She hadn’t said anything earlier.

He continued, looking at Bemis. “Second, we must leave behind those people who are absolutely necessary for the maintenance of L-5. Including the power station.” She smiled at him.

“We don’t want to split up mating pairs, not for, well, nine years plus… but neither will we take children.” He waited for the commotion to die down. “On this mission, children are baggage. You’ll have to find foster parents for them. Maybe they’ll go on the next trip.

“Because we can’t afford baggage. We don’t know what’s waiting for us at 61 Cygni — a thousand people sounds like a lot, but it isn’t. Not when you consider that we need a cross-section of all human knowledge, all human abilities. It may turn out that a person who can sing madrigals will be more important than a plasma physicist. No way of knowing ahead of time.”

The four thousand people did manage to keep it secret, not so much out of strength of character as from a deep-seated paranoia about Earth and Earthlings.

And Senator Connors’ Tricentennial actually came to their aid.

Although there was “One World,” ruled by “The Will of the People,” some regions had more clout than others, and nationalism was by no means dead. This was one factor.

Another factor was the way the groundhogs felt about the thermonuclear bombs stockpiled in Helsinki. All antiques: mostly a century or more old. The scientists said they were perfectly safe, but you know how that goes.

The bombs still technically belonged to the countries that had surrendered them, nine out of ten split between North America and Russia. The tenth remaining was divided among forty-two other countries. They all got together every few years to argue about what to do with the damned things. Everybody wanted to get rid of them in some useful way, but nobody wanted to put up the capital.

Charlie Leventhal’s proposal was simple. L-5 would provide bankroll, materials, and personnel. On a barren rock in the Norwegian Sea they would take apart the old bombs, one at a time, and turn them into uniform fuel capsules for the Daedalus craft.

The Scylla/Charybdis probe would be timed to honor both the major spacefaring countries. Renamed the John F. Kennedy, it would leave Earth orbit on America’s Tricentennial. The craft would accelerate halfway to the double star system at one gee, then flip and slow down at the same rate. It would use a magnetic scoop to gather antimatter from Scylla. On May Day, 2077, it would again be renamed, being the Leonid 1. Brezhnev for the return trip. For safety’s sake, the antimatter would be delivered to a lunar research station, near Farside. L-5 scientists claimed that harnessing the energy from total annihilation of matter would make a heaven on Earth.

Most people doubted that, but looked forward to the fireworks.

January 2076

“The hell with that!” Charlie was livid. “I — I just won’t do it. Won’t!”

“You’re the only one—”

“That’s not true, Ab, you know it.” Charlie paced from wall to wall of her office cubicle. “There are dozens of people who can run L-5. Better than I can.”

“Not better, Charlie.”

He stopped in front of her desk, leaned over. “Come on, Ab. There’s only one logical person to stay behind and run things. Not only has she proven herself in the position, but she’s too old to—”

“That kind of drik I don’t have to listen to.”

“Now, Ab…”

“No, you listen to me. I was an infant when we started building Daedalus; worked on it as a girl and a young woman.

“I could take you out there in a shuttle and show you the rivets that I put in, myself. A half-century ago.”

“That’s my—”

“I earned my ticket, Charlie.” Her voice softened.

“Age is a factor, yes. This is only the first trip of many — and when it comes back, I will be too old. You’ll just be in your prime… and with over twenty years of experience as Coordinator, I don’t doubt they’ll make you captain of the next—”

“I don’t want to be captain. I don’t want to be Coordinator. I just want to go!”

“You and three thousand other people.”

“And of the thousand that don’t want to go, or can’t, there isn’t one person who could serve as Coordinator? I could name you—”

“That’s not the point. There’s no one on L-5 who has anywhere near the influence, the connections, you have on Earth. No one who understands groundhogs as well.”

“That’s racism, Ab. Groundhogs are just like you and me.”

“Some of them. I don’t see you going Earthside every chance you can get… what, you like the view up here? You like living in a can?”

He didn’t have a ready answer for that. Ab continued: “Whoever’s Coordinator is going to have to do some tall explaining, trying to keep things smooth between L-5 and Earth. That’s been your life’s work, Charlie. And you’re also known and respected here. You’re the only logical choice.”

“I’m not arguing with your logic.”

“I know.” Neither of them had to mention the document, signed by Charlie, among others, that gave Dr. Bemis final authority in selecting the crew for Daedalus/ Kennedy/Brezhnev. “Try not to hate me too much, Charlie. I have to do what’s best for my people. All of my people.”

Charlie glared at her for a long moment and left.

June 2076

From Fax & Pix, 4 June 2076:

SPACE FARM LEAVES FOR

STARS NEXT MONTH

1. The John F. Kennedy, that goes to Scylla/Charybdis next month, is like a little L-5 with bombs up its tail (see pix up left, up right).

A. The trip’s twenty months. They could either take a few people and fill the thing up with food, air, and water—or take a lot of people inside a closed ecology, like L-5.

B. They could’ve gotten by with only a couple hundred people, to run the farms and stuff. But almost all the space freaks wanted to go. They’re used to living that way, anyhow (and they never get to go anyplace).

C. When they get back, the farms will be used as a starter for L-4, like L-5 but smaller at first, and on the other side of the Moon (pie down left).

2. For other Tricentennial fax & pix, see bacover.

July 2076

Charlie was just finishing up a week on Earth the day the John F. Kennedy was launched. Tired of being interviewed, he slipped away from the media lounge at the Cape shuttleport. His white clearance card got him out onto the landing strip alone.

The midnight shuttle was being fueled at the far end of the strip, gleaming pink-white in the last light from the setting sun. Its image twisted and danced in the shimmering heat that radiated from the tarmac. The smell of the soft tar was indelibly associated in his mind with leave-taking, relief.

He walked to the middle of the strip and checked his watch. Five minutes. He lit a cigarette and threw it away. He rechecked his mental calculations: the flight would start low in the southwest. He blocked out the sun with a raised hand. What would 150 bombs per second look like? For the media they were called fuel capsules. The people who had carefully assembled them and gently lifted them to orbit and installed them in the tanks, they called them bombs. Ten times the brightness of a full moon, they had said. On L-5 you weren’t supposed to look toward it without a dark filter.

No warm-up: it suddenly appeared, an impossibly brilliant rainbow speck just over the horizon. It gleamed for several minutes, then dimmed slightly with a haze, and slipped away.

Most of the United States wouldn’t see it until it came around again, some two hours later, turning night into day, competing with local pyrotechnic displays. Then every couple of hours after that, Charlie would see it once more, then get on the shuttle. And finally stop having to call it by the name of a dead politician.

September 2076

There was a quiet celebration on L-5 when Daedalus reached the mid-point of its journey, flipped, and started decelerating. The progress report from its crew characterized the journey as “uneventful.” At that time they were going nearly two tenths of the speed of light. The laser beam that carried communications was redshifted from blue light down to orange; the message that turnaround had been successful took two weeks to travel from Daedalus to L-5.

They announced a slight course change. They had analyzed the polarization of light from Scylla/Charybdis as their phase angle increased, and were pretty sure the system was surrounded by flat rings of debris, like Saturn. They would “come in low” to avoid collision.

January 2077

Daedalus had been sending back recognizable pictures of the Scylla/Charybdis system for three weeks. They finally had one that was dramatic enough for groundhog consumption.

Charlie set the holo cube on his desk and pushed it around with his finger, marvelling.

“This is incredible. How did they do it?”

“It’s a montage, of course.” Johnny had been one of the youngest adults left behind: heart murmur, trick knees, a surfeit of astrophysicists.

“The two stars are a strobe snapshot in infrared.Sort of. Some ten or twenty thousand exposures taken as the ship orbited around the system, then sorted out and enhanced.” He pointed, but it wasn’t much help, since Charlie was looking at the cube from a different angle.

“The lamina of fire where the atmospheres touch, that was taken in ultraviolet. Shows more fine structure that way.”

“The rings were easy. Fairly long exposures in visible light. Gives the star background, too.”

A light tap on the door and an assistant stuck his head in. “Have a second, Doctor?”

“Sure.”

“Somebody from a Russian May Day committee is on the phone. She wants to know whether they’ve changed the name of the ship to Brezhnev yet.”

“Yeah. Tell her we decided on `Leon Trotsky’ instead, though.”

He nodded seriously. “‘Okay.” He started to close the door.

“Wait! Charlie rubbed his eyes. “Tell her, uh… the ship doesn’t have a commemorative name while it’s in orbit there. They’ll rechristen it just before the start of the return trip.”

“Is that true?” Johnny asked.

“I don’t know. Who cares? In another couple of months they won’t want it named after anybody.” He and Ab had worked out a plan — admittedly rather shaky — to protect L-5 from the groundhogs’ wrath: nobody on the satellite knew ahead of time that the ship was headed for 61 Cygni. It was a decision the crew arrived at on the way to Scylla Charybdis; they modified the drive system to accept matter-antimatter destruction while they were orbiting the double star. L-5 would first hear of the mutinous plan via a transmission sent as Daedalus left Scylla/Charybdis. They’d be a month on their way by the time the message got to Earth.

It was pretty transparent, but at least they had been careful that no record of Daedalus’ true mission be left on L-5. Three thousand people did know the truth, though, and any competent engineer or physical scientist would suspect it.

Ab had felt that, although there was a better than even chance they would be exposed, surely the groundhogs couldn’t stay angry for 23 years — even if they were unimpressed by the antimatter and other wonders…

Besides, Charlie thought, it’s not their worry anymore.

As it turned out, the crew of Daedalus would have bigger things to worry about.

June 2077

The Russians had their May Day celebration — Charlie watched it on TV and winced every time they mentioned the good ship Leonid I. Brezhnev — and then things settled back down to normal. Charlie and three thousand others waited nervously for the “surprise” message. It came in early June, as expected, scrambled in a data channel. But it didn’t say what it was supposed to:

“This is Abigail Bemis, to Charles Leventhal.

“Charlie, we have real trouble. The ship has been damaged, hit in the stern by a good chunk of something. It punched right through the main drive reflector. Destroyed a set of control sensors and one attitude jet.

“As far as we can tell, the situation is stable. We’re maintaining acceleration at just a tiny fraction under one gee. But we can’t steer, and we can’t shut off the main drive.

“We didn’t have any trouble with ring debris when we were orbiting since we were inside Roche’s limit. Coming in, as you know, we’d managed to take advantage of natural divisions in the rings. We tried the same going back, but it was a slower, more complicated process, since we mass so goddamn much now. We must have picked up a piece from the fringe of one of the outer rings.

“If we could turn off the drive, we might have a chance at fixing it. But the work pods can’t keep up with the ship, not at one gee. The radiation down there would fry the operator in seconds, anyway.

“We’re working on it. If you have any ideas, let us know. It occurs to me that this puts you in the clear.We were headed back to Earth, but got clobbered. Will send a transmission to that effect on the regular comm channel. This message is strictly burn-before reading.

“End it.”

It worked perfectly, as far as getting Charlie and L-5 off the hook and the drama of the situation precipitated a level of interest in space travel unheard-of since the 1960’s.

They even had a hero. A volunteer had gone down in a heavily shielded work pod, lowered on a cable, to take a look at the situation. She’d sent back clear pictures of the damage, before the cable snapped.

Daedalus: A.D. 2081

Earth: A.D. 2101

The following news item was killed from Fax & Pix, because it was too hard to translate into the “plain English” that made the paper so popular:

SPACESHIP PASSES 61 CYGNI

SORT OF

(L-5 Stringer)

A message received today from the spaceship Daedalus said that it had just passed within 400 astronomical units of 61 Cygni. That’s about ten times as far as the planet Pluto is from the Sun.

Actually, the spaceship passed the star some eleven years ago. It’s taken all that time for the message to get back to us.

We don’t know for sure where the spaceship actually is, now. If they still haven’t repaired the runaway drive, they’re about eleven light-years past the 61 Cygni system (their speed when they passed the double star was better than 99% the speed of light).

The situation is more complicated if you look at it from the point of view of a passenger on the spaceship. Because of relativity, time seems to pass more slowly as you approach the speed of light. So only about four years passed for them, on the eleven light year journey.

L-5 Coordinator Charles Leventhal points out that the spaceship has enough antimatter fuel to keep accelerating to the edge of the Galaxy. The crew then would be only some twenty years older—but it would be twenty thousand years before we heard from them…

(Kill this one. There’s more stuff about what the ship looked like to the people on 61 Cygni, and how cum we could talk to them all the time even though time was slower there, but its all as stupid as this.)

Daedalus: A.D. 2083

Earth: A.D. 2144

Charlie Leventhal died at the age of 99, bitter. Almost a decade earlier it had been revealed that they’d planned all along for Daedalus to be a starship. Few people had paid much attention to the news. Among those who did, the consensus was that anything that got rid of a thousand scientists at once, was a good thing. Look at the mess they got us in.

Daedalus. 67 light-years out, and still accelerating.

Daedalus. A.D. 2085

Earth: A.D. 3578

After over seven years of shipboard research and development — and some 1500 light-years of travel — they managed to shut down the engine. With sophisticated telemetry, the job was done without endangering another life.

Every life was precious now. They were no longer simply explorers; almost half their fuel was gone. They were colonists, with no ticket back.

The message of their success would reach Earth in fifteen centuries. Whether there would be an infrared telescope around to detect it, that was a matter of some conjecture.

Daedalus: A.D. 2093

Earth: ca. A.D. 5000

While decelerating, they had investigated several systems in their line of flight. They found one with an Earth-type planet around a Sun-type sun, and aimed for it.

The season they began landing colonists, the dominant feature in the planet’s night sky was a beautiful blooming cloud of gas that astronomers had named the North American Nebula.

Which was an irony that didn’t occur to any of these colonists from L-5 — give or take a few years, it was America’s Trimillennial.

America itself was a little the worse for wear, this three thousandth anniversary. The seas that lapped its shores were heavy with a crimson crust of anaerobic life; the mighty cities had fallen and their remains, nearly ground away by the never-ceasing sandstorms.

No fireworks were planned, for lack of an audience, for lack of planners; bacteria just don’t care. May Day too would be ignored.

The only humans in the Solar System lived in a glass and metal tube. They tended their automatic machinery, and turned their backs on the dead Earth, and worshiped the constellation Cygnus, and had forgotten why.

TIME-SHARING ANGEL

James Tiptree

It’s not true there are no angels; the young woman named Jolyone Schram spoke to one, with results that have astounded us all.

Whether what Jolyone talked to was actually an angel in the classic sense, we’ll never know, of course; unless it returns, which seems unlikely. Certainly it was a space-borne Something of great power, a principle of the outer void, perhaps, a wandering sentience—possibly even, as some might claim, an interstellar commuter out of his usual way. Whatever it may have been, it heard Jolyone, and this is the manner of that event.

On the night it happened Jolyone was trying not to cry, while her teeth played music.

She was at her nightly job of news clipper and general gofer on the fifth floor of WPNQ’s new building. Far up above her head towered WPNQ’s new transmitter, which had just been erected on what had been the last wooded ridge behind L.A. The new transmitter was powered up to cut through everything near it on the L.A. bands. It was so strong that while Jolyone stapled Telex flimsies, the big filling in her right molar clearly brought in Stevie Smith.

“I was much farther out than you thought, and not waving but drowning,” sang her tooth. Jolyone’s eyes blinked tears and her chin trembled, but it wasn’t the song doing it.

The fact is that right there in Hal Hodge’s office Jolyone was passionately mourning the death of Earth, which she had just foreseen.

She was nineteen years old.

The day before she had taken off to drive up the coast and over to the piney-woods valley where she’d spent a lot of happy time as a kid. Her semiroommate had just split, semiamiably, and she needed some peace. She felt she’d been away from earth and woods too long.

It was dark before she got close, but she couldn’t help noticing that there seemed to be a lot more houses than on her last trip. Finally the misty trees closed around her headlights, and the road was its bad old self. By midnight she drove over the ridge and pulled onto the verge. The mist was so thick she decided to nap till dawn and see the sunrise. All around was the peaceful smell of woods. A hoot owl called and was answered. As Jolyone drifted off to sleep, she could just hear the little brook purling through a cave she used to hide out in when she was little. She smiled, remembering.

Jolyone never saw the sun rise there.

In the first pale light she was jolted awake by the starting roar of a big diesel not a hundred yards away. It was joined by another, and another, and another—and before she was sure she wasn’t in a nightmare, from the other side the high wicked yowl of chain saws burst out.

Hands on her ears, Jolyone peered out at the thinning mist. Treetops were waving and crashing. She saw a line of giant earth movers advancing past her straight across the valley. A horrifying great misty mountain of trees, rocks, earth, everything was spewing out of the monsters’ blades. Behind them stretched raw gravel.

Aghast, Jolyone whirled in her seat, trying to disbelieve the devastation. From nowhere a back-hoe bucket rose up beside her, so close that she could see a small dusty body still struggling in the rocks. A kit fox, her eyes noted numbly.

With a wordless moan she threw the VW in gear and shot back over the ridge. As she went she saw she had spent the night under a huge signboard painted with a man’s grinning face:

A THOUSAND MORE HAPPY HOMES

BY HAPPY HARRY JOEL.

“Oh no, oh no,” Jolyone wept to herself as she drove shakenly down toward the coast. The darkness had fooled her coming in, she saw. There weren’t just a few more houses among the trees. From horizon to horizon the foothills were covered by houses, houses, houses everywhere, with only a thin line of dried trees by the old road. Her valley had been the last patch of woods left.

“How could they, it was so, so—” she whispered incoherently, trying to find a word for all lost defenseless beauty, for all that she had loved deeply without really knowing it, and believed would always endure.

When she finally got onto the freeway approaches, the hurt was calmer. It was a fine sunny day. As she sailed up the ramp into the southbound lanes, she noticed something else she had missed the night before. The sea up north had a funny black-looking scum edge on it. An oil slick?

“It’s the biggest one yet,” the girl at the Burgerchef rest stop told her, nodding proprietarily. “They say it killed all those seal otters or whatever—hey, don’t you want your Supercheese?”

Jolyone drove on back to her job, trying to lose herself in the long thrumming hypnosis of the freeway traffic. The sun shone whitely on her from the thickening veils of the sky; trucks, cars, vans roared beside her, ahead, behind. The grief that had shaken her calmed to the rhythm of driving on and on. But, somewhere underneath, her mind kept chewing on it.

A thousand new homes, on top of all those other thousands… Jolyone had once heard her generation described as “the baby boom’s baby boom.” She’d always intended, in a vague way, to have kids. But now all the bits and pieces of her standard education began to add up. The “ecology”—it wasn’t something distant, somewhere else with strip mines. It was the awful devastation of her lovely valley, the broken little body in the back-hoe bucket. And that oil slick… she herself was driving a car right now. Probably she would have used some of the oil that spilled. It was being brought for people like her. For thousands, millions of people just like her.

To get away from the idea she tuned the radio to catch the end of Hal Hodge’s news break. Nothing but a filler about some mountains in Nepal that had slid down because the people had used up all the trees for firewood. Then she switched to WPNQ’s Pop Hour, and she thankfully let thought go with the dreamy beat Twenty-nine colors of blue…

The miles passed.

Finally she was turning into the station parking lot. Mimi Lavery was subbing for Hal on the evening news; Jolyone listened critically, hoping Mimi would pitch her voice low. Mimi ended with another filler, something about how the population was going up again and was expected to double in thirty years, and cut to a taped ad for condominiums in the Rockies.

And right then, all in the second between parking the Volks and pulling out her car keys, it happened.

Jolyone Schram knew.

It came to her as a vision of a billion-headed monstrous wave, a huge spreading flood of multiplying people, people unending, forming in their billions a great devouring mindless incubus that spread around the green ball of Earth—blotting out everything, eating everything, using everything, expanding and destroying without limit on a finite surface. Hordes of individually innocent people made frightful by their numbers bulged out into and under the oceans, tunneled underground, flowed over the mountains, surging and covering everything everywhere. Billions of heads gaped, grinned at her, billions of hands reached and grasped blindly as the torrent of bodies flooded over the world.

That was what was happening, slower or faster, all around her. And it would continue, faster and faster, to the oncoming end.

Jolyone gasped, falling back into the car seat. She was a gentle girl, unsuited to apocalyptic visions. But she had also an innocent fact-mindedness; she actually believed in numbers. All in that terrible instant she saw what the numbers meant. Doubling in thirty years—and then doubling again and again, quicker each time. It was happening. Not somewhere else in some remote lifetime, but right here and now. She was seeing it begin. With all the singleness of her nineteen-year-old mind she suddenly, totally believed.

And all in that same second it came to her how much she would suffer and how helpless she was. How could she live in that tumult of people, without room or peace, with no refuge to escape to? But she couldn’t stop it, no one could—she saw that, too. People just wouldn’t stop having kids, she knew that in her blood. Pointing a gun at a President wouldn’t save the redwoods; all those organizations to save a river or a mountain wouldn’t delay matters much. Because nothing could stop those numbers. In the cold time-light of her vision she saw the flurries of protest, speeches, little movements, hopes and local successes and good intentions—all swept away by the relentless multitudes, like the line of buckling trees she had seen go down in the valley. Numbers talk. Nothing can stop it, really, she thought. Everything I love will go.

She sat trembling, too shaken to cry. After a while things eased a little. Since there seemed to be nothing else to do, she picked up the fallen car keys and went on in to her job.

In the studio no one noticed her. It was an off night. A couple of engineers were still trying to fix that oscillation in the booster circuits; they had a panel torn down.

Jolyone went leadenly about her work, sorting the Telex pile, putting back the used tapes, answering phones in the empty offices, doing zombielike whatever she was asked. Her teeth whispered the late sports roundup. The vision that had hit her didn’t go away. It surrounded her head like a ghostly projection, making the real world outside as thin as a momentary dream. Every now and then her eyes leaked uncontrollably when she thought of something dear to her that wouldn’t be around much longer. High-rise developers were already buying up the scraggly old garden block she and her friends lived in. That was just one first soft nudging edge of the terrible future she had foreseen. With all the clarity of her nineteen years Jolyone was saying good-bye to something deep and vital, to hope itself maybe.

At 10:30 Hal Hodge’s usual batch of almost-celebrities came in for Tonight Talk. One of them was a science-fiction writer, a short, jumpy older man, neurotically worried that his car would be towed away. Jolyone got him some Kleenex for his cold, gave them all coffee, and put them into Hal’s hands during the station break.

As she shut the door, one of the equipment men called her over to the torn out board.

“Hold this a sec.” He handed her a big complicated jack trailing cables. “Don’t let it touch anything, that’s right. Look, when I say ‘break,’ you push that circuit breaker up here with your other hand. Got it?”

Jolyone nodded; she was having trouble with her eyes again.

The engineer dived down and wriggled in under the panel. Jolyone stood holding the thing. Her teeth were even louder here; she heard Hal Hodge’s sincerely interested voice. “What are people like us going to be doing a hundred years from now, Bill?”

“Standing on each other’s throats,” the science-fiction writer said in her tooth, and sneezed.

The whole horrible vision came back onto Jolyone, and with it something worse she hadn’t seen before. “Oh, no, no, no,” she whispered, feeling a big tear start down her cheek. She couldn’t wipe it.

What she had seen were the expressions on that oncoming mountain of people. Their faces snarled, mouths gnashing in hatred, leering in triumph, wailing in desperate loss; eyes narrowed in cold calculation; hands clutched knives or guns and fought as the tide rolled over them. Here a few combined for a moment in furious victory, only to go under as new faces overrode them. From under every foot rose the weak cries of the trampled and dying. Nowhere in all that panorama of strife was kindness, nowhere was anything she thought of as human— only the war of all against all raging on the despoiled earth.

When we’ve destroyed everything we’ll be animals, she thought. A great sob rose in her throat compounded of doomed beauty and the hideous revelation that what she had taken for the reality of people was a fragile dream about to perish. “No,” she choked.

“Hit it!” barked the engineer from under the board.

Blind and shaking, Jolyone reached across the open board. Tears ran unheeded down her jaw and splashed complex electrolytes where no such things should be. In anguish, Jolyone whispered a prayer to the empty air. “Make it stop, please.”

There was a sudden total silence that crackled.

“Piontwxq?” said her filling sharply in the stillness. “Eh! Stop what?”

“Make us stop,” Jolyone repeated crazily, unaware that her cry was howling out on unknown frequencies, unaware of anything except her pain. “Make us stop making more people before we kill everything! Oh, please don’t let it happen, don’t let all the beautiful world be killed!”

“Wait,” said the tiny voice in her jawbone. Jolyone’s eyes suddenly got as big as Hal Hodge’s mouth. “Oh, very well,” the voice went on. “You can stop crying now.”

It sounded far away and preoccupied, and it wasn’t speaking English, although Jolyone never knew that.

“Oh!” she gasped. “Who—wha—?”

“Holy crap!” The engineer exploded out from under the panel and started grabbing things. Hal Hodge shot from the booth and collided with the sound man, both of them yelling. In the uproar Jolyone saw the science-fiction writer scuttle out clutching his car keys and shaking his head.

Then she was being chewed out for letting the hyper-mixed touch the goobilizer, and it was all entirely too much.

Meanwhile, twenty-two thousand miles out in space, the Something—being, djinn, essence, or what have you —completed a tiny swift adjustment to the last of our synchronized satellites. Then he or she or it zipped into a parabolic pass down through earth’s atmosphere. As it hurtled down, it opened something that wasn’t a briefcase. The orbit noded over the Andes and something very small dropped into a crevasse.

Next instant, our visitor was out again and receding into the depths of space with the thing that wasn’t a briefcase tucked under its—well, whatever it was under. Could you have translated the expression on what might have been its face, you would have been reminded of the look worn by a passing grown-up who has stopped to retrieve a kid’s lost ball.

And that’s the last we’ve known of it to this day.

But as the next morning’s light spread round the world, we all know what was revealed.

In every home, every apartment or igloo or cave or grass hut from Fiji to New York to Archangel, the scene was the same. One baby and only one awoke—the youngest. All the other children lay unstirring; on mats, in beds or hammocks or cribs or fur piles, all but the youngest lay apparently asleep.

A moment later started the billion-throated scream that followed the sunrise round the world. Mothers discovered the sleeping children’s flesh was cool, their chests were silent. No breath moved their lips. Girls and boys from two to twenty, all siblings of whatever age, lay moveless and cold. Even the grown ones not at home were found lying lifeless.

Death, it seemed, had reaped the earth of all but the last-borns.

But among the frantic parents were a few persistent ones who held mirrors to the still lips and listened longer at the cooling breasts. And finally it was known: the children were not dead. Slower than glaciers, breath moved in them. Slower than the ooze of rock, their blood flowed still and the infinitely languorous hearts squeezed and relaxed. They were not dead but sleeping—or rather, as their temperatures fell and fell, it was understood that this was a sleep like hibernation, but deeper than any ever known.

And they could not be waked or revived. Doctors, shamans, mothers en masse attacked the sleepers with heat or cold or shock, with any or every stimulus that could possibly or impossibly break the spell. Nothing worked. Days passed, but not a heartbeat quickened, no breath came a millisecond faster.

All over the world, fathers gazed upon the rows of their comatose offspring and went looking for drink. Distracted mothers alternated between caring for their waking youngest and futilely trying to awaken the rest.

Only those homes with a single child were unaffected. But in many such, another child was on the way. And it was soon found that whenever the mother gave birth, as the newborn cry squalled out, the eyelids of the older baby fell upon its cheeks. By the time the new baby had started to nurse, the former only child was cooling into hibernation. It seemed that in every home only one child, the youngest, could wake to cry and feed and play in normalcy. All around it, in every hut, hospital, sampan or split-level, the older siblings lay in cold trance.

Desperation mounted with the days; all other issues faded to insignificance. Were the Earth and the hearts of its people to be filled with the living dead?

And then the first sleeper woke.

It was, at any rate, the first one known, and it happened on Day Fourteen in the well-filled trailer of the McEvoys in Pawnet, West Virginia. As the sun rose, a young voice that had been silent for a fortnight spoke.

“Maw! Maw, I’m hongry.”

Mrs. McEvoy rushed into the front room where her sleeping brood was laid out on every surface. Denny, her next-to-youngest, was starting to scream in fright because he had touched his cold brother Earl. She clutched him and felt of him while he wriggled; he seemed perfectly all right.

“Earlene!” called her sister. “I can’t wake the baby. I think she’s coolin’ off.”

And sure enough, little Debbie McEvoy was sliding into the chill of hibernation and could not be roused.

The waking of a child was world news; the. media led a mass descent upon little Dennis. It was soon established that he was his normal self with no memory of his missing fortnight.

Among the crowd was a lanky, quizzical man named Springer. Like Jolyone, he believed in numbers. He ascertained that there were eighteen living McEvoy children, and his face became more puzzled than ever.

“You, ah, don’t happen to have any more children, do you, Mrs. McEvoy?”

Earlene McEvoy’s face clamped shut.

But her neighbors were not so reticent, and Springer soon discovered that there had been a period, or periods, of extra-McEvoy activity in Earlene’s life. The results thereof were now living, or rather, sleeping, with various distant relatives. He was also impressed by the robust health Mrs. McEvoy had imparted to all her young.

“Twenty-six,” he mused. “Twenty-six alive from one mother. Remarkable. And there’s twenty-six fortnights in a year, give or take a few hours.”

To Mrs. McEvoy he said only, “I’d keep my eye on Dennis about a week from Saturday.”

“Why?”

“It’s only a hunch, Mrs. McEvoy. He just might go back to sleep then.”

“Don’t talk like that, mister.”

But, sure enough, on Saturday week young Dennis was cooling back to hibernation while his next-oldest sister woke up.

By then it wasn’t a surprise, because living families of less than twenty-six are common and enough other children were waking up to make the arithmetic plain. Saturday week was Day Twenty-eight; on that morning, the next-youngest child of every family of thirteen was waking up while the youngest slid into stasis.

It was clear what had happened, at least in its first incredible outlines.

No one had been killed.

No one had been hurt, except by overzealous efforts to wake them.

No one had been prevented from having as many children as her heart, mores, ignorance, or vulnerability dictated. (It was noted with varying emotions that the Affliction seemed to count only mothers as parents.) What had happened was time-sharing. Every child, it appeared, would have its turn at being awake, and this was shortly found to be true. The problem was that the length of time it stayed awake depended on how many siblings it had. All the children of each mother shared out the year, each getting more or less depending on their number; the twenty-six offspring of Earlene got only a fortnight apiece while each child of a pair waked for six months. Only children were unaffected. Thus each mother had always one waking child— and one only.

But were the children of large families to be robbed of most of their lives? Was even the child of a two-child family to lose half its life asleep? The answer slowly came back: No. It required time to be sure, of course. But right from the start people had their suspicions, because even the smallest hibernating infants did not seem to grow. Hair and nails did not lengthen, even small cuts did not heal. Older children awoke with their last meals undigested and their last waking preoccupations on their lips. In sleeping women, pregnancies did not advance. Scientists watched, measured, argued, and finally the startling fact was understood: those who hibernated did not perceptibly age. Only waking hours counted as life.

This meant—this meant—with a worldwide gasp it was realized that the sleepers’ lives would be long. Even the children of a pair would take twice as long as normal to grow up and then, presumably, would go on to live twice the usual span. And as for those from larger families—

For two days the McEvoys were in the news again when it was realized that Earlene’s brood might live, if all survived, for fifteen hundred years—each doing so two weeks at a time. Then a woman in Afghanistan was delivered of her thirtieth living child. People drew in their breaths, contemplating a baby who could live, in twelve-day installments, for three thousand years.

The world was upside down.

It’s hard to remember how it went, the chaos in all our heads as the tired old problems were overwhelmed by new ones. Different problems everywhere, of course. In the hungry nations millions of young mouths closed peacefully, while a million tasks went undone because the child workers were sleeping. A dozen nasty little wars subsided across their hibernating armies. In the industrialized world the loss of millions of young consumers ushered in the great Sleepers’ Depression that’s with us still. The reality of zero pop growth came crunching down on us all.

And beyond the economic immediacies rose the great human questions. Who will care for the sleeping multitudes when their parents age and die? How do you educate kids in monthly or six-monthly increments? What will we do with teenagers who are going to be teenagers for centuries ahead? Sibling rivalry has taken on new and fearful dimensions as children realize that they sleep because their brothers and sisters wake; mercifully many can understand that their hibernation also means long life. Everything has subtly changed in myriad ways. Even fiction and soap operas have taken on a whole new content: can a girl who wakes only in summer find happiness with a boy who wakes through summers and autumns, too?

All over the world, groups of the young people who waken at the same time are forming, to be replaced when the next group wakes. Perhaps alternative cultures will develop on the same terrain. Or perhaps the visible futility of having additional children will do what no other arguments could. The number of people who believe that this is temporary gets less every year. It seems the “angel” has wrought well, having the superior technology you’d expect of angels.

Meanwhile a strange sense of quiet pervades our life. The decibels seem to have fallen and the grass could be coming back. In every family, only one child at a time coos or squalls or begs for the car keys or mugs old ladies or competes for jobs or medical school. Only one young body in each home consumes food or firewood or gasoline or orthodontistry or plastic toys. And each child as it wakes gets the full attention of its adults.

A peaceful trip, while it lasts. Happy Harry Joel’s thousand new homes went into receivership half-built, though of course nothing could be done about the kit foxes.

As for Jolyone Schram, who had started it all, she has had several good job offers, being an awake-all-the-time only child. She spends a lot of time just breathing and listening to the growing green. The terrible vision faded away. But she never told anybody what happened. Except one night in Point Lobos Park; when she saw I was harmless, she told me.

We were sitting by a dusty eucalyptus clump, looking out to where the rocks drown in the shimmering moonlit Pacific.

“The thing is,” she said, frowning, “I was thinking. Take sixteen people, say. That’s eight couples.”

I saw she still believed in numbers.

“So they have children. But only one apiece is awake at a time. So that’s like it’s really just one child. And then say the eight children marry, that’s four couples. And they have one waking child each, that’s four. And they grow up and marry, that’s two couples. So it comes down to really two children. I mean, it’s half each time… of course that takes a long time.”

“A long time,” I agreed.

“But when the two children grow up and marry, they have one child. I mean, it counts as one child. And that’s all.”

“Looks that way.”

She pushed back her hair, frowning harder in the moonlight. “Of course there’s billions of people, not just sixteen, so it’s a really long way off. And maybe something’s wrong with my idea, I mean, they’ll all wake up eventually. But… I wonder if the—the person I spoke to, I wonder if they thought of that?”

“No telling, is there?”

The sea sighed and glittered peacefully, making long shining curves around the rocks. There was no sign of any oil. There wasn’t much litter on the grass, and the highway behind us was unusually empty.

Jolyone sat staring out with her chin on her knees. “Maybe whoever it was will come back and change things in time. Or maybe I should tell people and try to call it somehow.”

“Would you know how?”

“No.”

“There’s a lot of time for somebody else to worry about all that,” I offered.

We sat in silence for a while. Then she sighed and stretched out on the grass; a strange, private, gentle girl.

“Funny… I feel like I’d almost got run over. It feels good to—to be. Maybe the thing is, I should just go on and enjoy it.”

“Why not?”

And that’s exactly what she went on and did.

AIR RAID

John Varley

I was jerked awake by the silent alarm vibrating my skull. It won’t shut down until you sit up, so I did. All around me in the darkened bunkroom the Snatch Team members were sleeping singly and in pairs. I yawned, scratched my ribs, and patted Gene’s hairy flank. He turned over. So much for a romantic send-off.

Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I reached to the floor for my leg, strapped it on, and plugged it in. Then I was running down the rows of bunks toward Ops.

The situation board glowed in the gloom. Sun-Belt Airlines Flight 128, Miami to New York, September 15, 1979. We’d been looking for that one for three years. I should have been happy, but who can afford it when you wake up?

Liza Boston muttered past me on the way to Prep. I muttered back and followed. The lights came on around the mirrors, and I groped my way to one of them. Behind us, three more people staggered in. I sat down, plugged in, and at last I could lean back and close my eyes.

They didn’t stay closed for long. Rush! I sat up straight as the sludge I use for blood was replaced with supercharged go-juice. I looked around me and got a series of idiot grins. There was Liza, and Pinky and Dave. Against the far wall Cristabel was already turning slowly in front of the airbrush, getting a Caucasian paint job. It looked like a good team.

I opened the drawer and started preliminary work on my face. It’s a bigger job every time. Transfusion or no, I looked like death. The right ear was completely gone now. I could no longer close my lips; the gums were permanently bared. A week earlier, a finger had fallen off in my sleep. And what’s it to you, bugger?

While I worked, one of the screens around the mirror glowed. A smiling young woman, blonde, high brow, round face. Close enough. The crawl line read Mary Katrina Sondergard, born Trenton, New Jersey, age in 1979: 25. Baby, this is your lucky day.

The computer melted the skin away from her face to show me the bone structure, rotated it, gave me cross sections. I studied the similarities with my own skull, noted the differences. Not bad, and better than some I’d been given.

I assembled a set of dentures that included the slight gap in the upper incisors. Putty filled out my cheeks. Contact lenses fell from the dispenser and I popped them in. Nose plugs widened my nostrils. No need for ears; they’d be covered by the wig. I pulled a blank plastiflesh mask over my face and had to pause while it melted in. It took only a minute to mold it to perfection. I smiled at myself. How nice to have lips.

The delivery slot clunked and dropped a blonde wig and a pink outfit into my lap. The wig was hot from the styler. I put it on, then the pantyhose.

“Mandy? Did you get the profile on Sondergard?” I didn’t look up; I recognized the voice.

“Roger.”

“We’ve located her near the airport. We can slip you in before take-off, so you’ll be the joker.”

I groaned and looked up at the face on the screen. Elfreda Baltimore-Louisville, Director of Operational Teams: lifeless face and tiny slits for eyes. What can you do when all the muscles are dead?

“Okay.” You take what you get.

She switched off, and I spent the next two minutes trying to get dressed while keeping my eyes on the screens. I memorized names and faces of crew members plus the few facts known about them. Then I hurried out and caught up with the others. Elapsed time from first alarm: twelve minutes and seven seconds. We’d better get moving.

“Goddam Sun-Belt,” Cristabel groused, hitching at her bra.

“At least they got rid of the high heels,” Dave pointed out. A year earlier we would have been teetering down the aisles on three-inch platforms. We all wore short pink shifts with blue and white diagonal stripes across the front, and carried matching shoulder bags. I fussed trying to get the ridiculous pillbox cap pinned on.

We jogged into the dark Operations Control Room and lined up at the gate. Things were out of our hands now. Until the gate was ready, we could only wait.

I was first, a few feet away from the portal. I turned away from it; it gives me vertigo. I focused instead on the gnomes sitting at their consoles, bathed in yellow lights from their screens. None of them looked back at me. They don’t like us much. I don’t like them, either. Withered, emaciated, all of them. Our fat legs and butts and breasts are a reproach to them, a reminder that Snatchers eat five times their ration to stay presentable for the masquerade. Meantime we continue to rot. One day I’ll be sitting at a console. One day I’ll be built in to a console, with all my guts on the outside and nothing left of my body but stink. The hell with them.

I buried my gun under a clutter of tissues and lipsticks in my purse. Elfreda was looking at me.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“Motel room. She was alone from ten PM to noon on flight day.”

Departure time was 1:15. She had cut it close and would be in a hurry. Good.

“Can you catch her in the bathroom? Best of all, in the tub?”

“We’re working on it.” She sketched a smile with a fingertip drawn over lifeless lips. She knew how I liked to operate, but she was telling me I’d take what I got. It never hurts to ask. People are at their most defenseless stretched out and up to their necks in water.

“Go!” Elfreda shouted. I stepped through, and things started to go wrong.

I was facing the wrong way, stepping out of the bathroom door and facing the bedroom. I turned and spotted Mary Katrina Sondergard through the haze of the gate. There was no way I could reach her without stepping back through. I couldn’t even shoot without hitting someone on the other side.

Sondergard was at the mirror, the worst possible place. Few people recognize themselves quickly, but she’d been looking right at herself. She saw me and her eyes widened. I stepped to the side, out of her sight.

“What the hell is… hey? Who the hell—” I noted the voice, which can be the trickiest thing to get right.

I figured she’d be more curious than afraid. My guess was right. She came out of the bathroom, passing through the gate as if it wasn’t there, which it wasn’t, since it only has one side. She had a towel wrapped around her.

“Jesus Christ! What are you doing in my—” Words fail you at a time like that. She knew she ought to say something, but what? Excuse me, haven’t I seen you in the mirror?

I put on my best stew smile and held out my hand.

“Pardon the intrusion. I can explain everything. You see, I’m—” I hit her on the side of the head and she staggered and went down hard. Her towel fell to the floor, “—working my way through college.” She started to get up, so I caught her under the chin with my artificial knee. She stayed down.

“Standard fuggin’ oil!” I hissed, rubbing my injured knuckles. But there was no time. I knelt beside her, checked her pulse. She’d be okay, but I think I loosened some front teeth. I paused a moment. Lord, to look like that with no makeup, no prosthetics! She nearly broke my heart.

I grabbed her under the knees and wrestled her to the gate. She was a sack of limp noodles. Somebody reached through, grabbed her feet, and pulled. So long, love! How would you like to go on a long voyage?

I sat on her rented bed to get my breath. There were car keys and cigarettes in her purse, genuine tobacco, worth its weight in blood. I lit six of them, figuring I had five minutes of my very own. The room filled with sweet smoke. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

The Hertz sedan was in the motel parking lot. I got in and headed for the airport. I breathed deeply of the air, rich in hydrocarbons. I could see for hundreds of yards into the distance. The perspective nearly made me dizzy, but I live for those moments. There’s no way to explain what it’s like in the pre-meck world. The sun was a fierce yellow ball through the haze.

The other stews were boarding. Some of them knew Sondergard so I didn’t say much, pleading a hangover. That went over well, with a lot of knowing laughs and sly remarks. Evidently it wasn’t out of character. We boarded the 707 and got ready for the goats to arrive.

It looked good. The four commandos on the other side were identical twins for the women I was working with. There was nothing to do but be a stewardess until departure time. I hoped there would be no more glitches. Inverting a gate for a joker run into a motel room was one thing, but in a 707 at twenty thousand feet…

The plane was nearly full when the woman Pinky would impersonate sealed the forward door. We taxied to the end of the runway, then we were airborne. I started taking orders for drinks in first.

The goats were the usual lot, for 1979. Fat and sassy, all of them, and as unaware of living in a paradise as a fish is of the sea. What would you think, ladies and gents, of a trip to the future? No? I can’t say I’m surprised. What if I told you this plane is going to—

My alarm beeped as we reached cruising altitude. I consulted the indicator under my Lady Bulova and glanced at one of the restroom doors. I felt a vibration pass through the plane. Damn it, not so soon.

The gate was in there. I came out quickly, and motioned for Diana Gleason—Dave’s pigeon—to come to the front.

“Take a look at this,” I said, with a disgusted look. She started to enter the restroom, stopped when she saw the green glow. I planted a boot on her fanny and shoved. Perfect. Dave would have a chance to hear her voice before popping in. Though she’d be doing little but screaming when she got a look around…

Dave came through the gate, adjusting his silly little hat. Diana must have struggled.

“Be disgusted,” I whispered.

“What a mess,” he said as he came out of the restroom. It was a fair imitation of Diana’s tone, though he’d missed the accent. It wouldn’t matter much longer.

“What is it?” It was one of the stews from tourist. We stepped aside so she could get a look, and Dave shoved her through. Pinky popped out very quickly.

“We’re minus on minutes,” Pinky said. “We lost five on the other side.”

“Five?” Dave-Diana squeaked. I felt the same way. We had a hundred and three passengers to process.

“Yeah. They lost contact after you pushed my pigeon through. It took that long to realign.”

You get used to that. Time runs at different rates on each side of the gate, though it’s always sequential, past to future. Once we’d started the Snatch with me entering Sondergard’s room, there was no way to go back any earlier on either side. Here, in 1979, we had a rigid ninety-four minutes to get everything done. On the other side, the gate could never be maintained longer than three hours.

“When you left, how long was it since the alarm went in?”

“Twenty-eight minutes.”

It didn’t sound good. It would take at least two hours just customizing the wimps. Assuming there was no more slippage on 79-time, we might just make it. But there’s always slippage. I shuddered, thinking about riding it in.

“No time for any more games, then,” I said. “Pink, you go back to tourist and call both of the other girls up here. Tell ‘em to come one at a time, and tell ‘em we’ve got a problem. You know the bit.”

“Biting back the tears. Got you.” She hurried aft. In no time the first one showed up. Her friendly Sun-Belt Airlines smile was stamped on her face, but her stomach would be churning. Oh God, this is it!

I took her by the elbow and pulled her behind the curtains in front. She was breathing hard.

“Welcome to the twilight zone,” I said, and put the gun to her head. She slumped, and I caught her. Pinky and Dave helped me shove her through the gate.

“Fug! The rotting thing’s flickering.”

Pinky was right. A very ominous sign. But the green glow stabilized as we watched, with who knows how much slippage on the other side. Cristabel ducked through.

“We’re plus thirty-three,” she said. There was no sense talking about what we were all thinking: things were going badly.

“Back to tourist,” I said. “Be brave, smile at everyone, but make it just a little bit too good, got it?”

“Check,” Cristabel said.

We processed the other quickly, with no incident. Then there was no time to talk about anything. In eighty-nine minutes Flight 128 was going to be spread all over a mountain whether we were finished or not.

Dave went into the cockpit to keep the flight crew out of our hair. Me and Pinky were supposed to take care of first class, then back up Cristabel and Liza in tourist. We used the standard “coffee, tea, or milk” gambit, relying on our speed and their inertia.

I leaned over the first two seats on the left.

“Are you enjoying your flight?” Pop, pop. Two squeezes on the trigger, close to the heads and out of sight of the rest of the goats.

“Hi, folks. I’m Mandy. Fly me.” Pop, pop.

Halfway to the galley, a few people were watching us curiously. But people don’t make a fuss until they have a lot more to go on. One goat in the back row stood up, and I let him have it. By now there were only eight left awake. I abandoned the smile and squeezed off four quick shots. Pinky took care of the rest. We hurried through the curtains, just in time.

There was an uproar building in the back of tourist, with about 60 percent of the goats already processed. Cristabel glanced at me, and I nodded.

“Okay, folks,” she bawled. “I want you to be quiet. Calm down and listen up. You, fathead, pipe down before I cram my foot up your ass sideways.”

The shock of hearing her talk like that was enough to buy us a little time, anyway. We had formed a skirmish line across the width of the plane, guns out, steadied on seat backs, aimed at the milling, befuddled group of thirty goats.

The guns are enough to awe all but the most foolhardy. In essence, a standard-issue stunner is just a plastic rod with two grids about six inches apart. There’s not enough metal in it to set off a hijack alarm. And to people from the Stone Age to about 2190 it doesn’t look any more like a weapon than a ball-point pen. So Equipment Section jazzes them up in a plastic shell to real Buck Rogers blasters, with a dozen knobs and lights that flash and a barrel like the snout of a hog. Hardly anyone ever walks into one.

“We are in great danger, and time is short. You must all do exactly as I tell you, and you will be safe.”

You can’t give them time to think, you have to rely on your status as the Voice of Authority. The situation is just not going to make sense to them, no matter how you explain it.

“Just a minute, I think you owe us—”

An airborne lawyer. I made a snap decision, thumbed the fireworks switch on my gun, and shot him.

The gun made a sound like a flying saucer with hemorrhoids, spit sparks and little jets of flame, and extended a green laser finger to his forehead. He dropped.

All pure lark, of course. But it sure is impressive.

And it’s damn risky, too. I had to choose between a panic if the fathead got them to thinking, and a possible panic from the flash of the gun. But when a 20th gets to talking about his “rights” and what he is “owed,” things can get out of hand. It’s infectious.

It worked. There was a lot of shouting, people ducking behind seats, but no rush. We could have handled it, but we needed some of them conscious if we were ever going to finish the Snatch.

“Get up. Get up, you slugs!” Cristabel yelled. “He’s stunned, nothing worse. But I’ll kill the next one who gets out of line. Now get to your feet and do what I tell you. Children first! Hurry, as fast as you can, to the front of the plane. Do what the stewardess tells you. Come on, kids, move!”

I ran back into first class just ahead of the kids, turned at the open restroom door, and got on my knees.

They were petrified. There were five of them—crying, some of them, which always chokes me up—looking left and right at dead people in the first class seats, stumbling, near panic.

“Come on, kids,” I called to them, giving my special smile. “Your parents will be along in just a minute. Everything’s going to be all right, I promise you. Come on.”

I got three of them through. The fourth balked. She was determined not to go through that door. She spread her legs and arms and I couldn’t push her through. I will not hit a child, never. She raked her nails over my face. My wig came off, and she gaped at my bare head. I shoved her through.

Number five was sitting in the aisle, bawling. He was maybe seven. I ran back and picked him up, hugged him and kissed him, and tossed him through. God, I needed a rest, but I was needed in tourist.

“You, you, you, and you. Okay, you too. Help him, will you?” Pinky had a practiced eye for the ones that wouldn’t be any use to anyone, even themselves. We herded them toward the front of the plane, then deployed ourselves along the left side where we could cover the workers. It didn’t take long to prod them into action. We had them dragging the limp bodies forward as fast as they could go. Me and Cristabel were in tourist, with the others up front.

Adrenalin was being catabolized in my body now; the rush of action left me and I started to feel very tired. There’s an unavoidable feeling of sympathy for the poor dumb goats that starts to get me about this stage of the game. Sure, they were better off; sure, they were going to die if we didn’t get them off the plane. But when they saw the other side they were going to have a hard time believing it.

The first ones were returning for a second load, stunned at what they’d just seen: dozens of people being put into a cubicle that was crowded when it was empty. One college student looked like he’d been hit in the stomach. He stopped by me and his eyes pleaded.

“Look, I want to help you people, just… what’s going on? Is this some new kind of rescue? I mean, are we going to crash—”

I switched my gun to prod and brushed it across his cheek. He gasped and fell back.

“Shut your fuggin’ mouth and get moving, or I’ll kill you.” It would be hours before his jaw was in shape to ask any more stupid questions.

We cleared tourist and moved up. A couple of the work gang were pretty damn pooped by then. Muscles like horses, all of them, but they can hardly run up a flight of stairs. We let some of them go through, including a couple that were at least fifty years old. Je-zuz. Fifty! We got down to a core of four men and two women who seemed strong, and worked them until they nearly dropped. But we processed everyone in twenty-five minutes.

The portapak came through as we were stripping off our clothes. Cristabel knocked on the door to the cockpit and Dave came out, already naked. A bad sign.

“I had to cork ‘em,” he said. “Bleeding captain just had to make his grand march through the plane. I tried everything.”

Sometimes you have to do it. The plane was on autopilot, as it normally would be at this time. But if any of us did anything detrimental to the craft, changed the fixed course of events in any way, that would be it. All that work for nothing, and Flight 128 inaccessible to us for all Time. I don’t know sludge about time theory, but I know the practical angles. We can do things in the past only at times and in places where it won’t make any difference. We have to cover our tracks. There’s flexibility, once a Snatcher left her gun behind and it went in with the plane. Nobody found it, or if they did, they didn’t have the smoggiest idea of what it was, so we were okay.

Flight 128 was mechanical failure. That’s the best land; it means we don’t have to keep the pilot unaware of the situation in the cabin right down to ground level. We can cork him and fly the plane, since there’s nothing he could have done to save the flight anyway. A pilot-error smash is almost impossible to Snatch. We mostly work midairs, bombs, and structural failures. If there’s even one survivor, we can’t touch it. It would not fit the fabric of space-time, which is immutable (though it can stretch a little), and we’d all just fade away and appear back in the ready room.

My head was hurting. I wanted that portapak very badly.

“Who has the most hours on a 707?” Pinky did, so I sent her to the cabin, along with Dave, who could do the pilot’s voice for air traffic control. You have to have a believable record in the flight recorder, too. They trailed two long tubes from the portapak, and the rest of us hooked in up close. We stood there, each of us smoking a fistful of cigarettes, wanting to finish them but hoping there wouldn’t be time. The gate had vanished as soon as we tossed our clothes and the flight crew through.

But we didn’t worry long. There’s other nice things about Snatching, but nothing to compare with the rush of plugging into a portapak. The wake-up transfusion is nothing but fresh blood, rich in oxygen and sugars. What we were getting now was an insane brew of concentrated adrenalin, supersaturated hemoglobin, methedrine, white lightning, TNT, and Kickapoo joyjuice. It was like a firecracker in your heart; a boot in the box that rattled your sox.

“I’m growing hair on my chest,” Cristabel said solemnly. Everyone giggled.

“Would someone hand me my eyeballs?”

“The blue ones, or the red ones?”

“I think my ass just fell off.”

We’d heard them all before, but we howled anyway. We were strong, strong, and for one golden moment we had no worries. Everything was hilarious. I could have torn sheet metal with my eyelashes.

But you get hyper on that mix. When the gate didn’t show, and didn’t show, and didn’t sweetjeez show we all started milling. This bird wasn’t going to fly all that much longer.

Then it did show, and we turned on. The first of the wimps came through, dressed in the clothes taken from a passenger it had been picked to resemble.

“Two thirty-five elapsed upside time,” Cristabel announced.

“Je-zuz.”

It is a deadening routine. You grab the harness around the wimp’s shoulders and drag it along the aisle, after consulting the seat number painted on its forehead. The paint would last three minutes. You seat it, strap it in, break open the harness and carry it back to toss through the gate as you grab the next one. You have to take it for granted they’ve done the work right on the other side: fillings in the teeth, fingerprints, the right match in height and weight and hair color. Most of those things don’t matter much, especially on Flight 128 which was a crash-and-burn. There would be bits and pieces, and burned to a crisp at that. But you can’t take chances. Those rescue workers are pretty thorough on the parts they do find; the dental work and fingerprints especially are important.

I hate wimps. I really hate ‘em. Every time I grab the harness of one of them, if it’s a child, I wonder if it’s Alice. Are you my kid, you vegetable, you slug, you slimy worm? I joined the Snatchers right after the brain bugs ate the life out of my baby’s head. I couldn’t stand to think she was the last generation, that the last humans there would ever be would live with nothing in their heads, medically dead by standards that prevailed even in 1979, with computers working their muscles to keep them in tone. You grow up, reach puberty still fertile—one in a thousand—rush to get pregnant in your first heat. Then you find out your mom or pop passed on a chronic disease bound right into the genes, and none of your lads will be immune. I knew about the paraleprosy; I grew up with my toes rotting away. But this was too much. What do you do?

Only one in ten of the wimps had a customized face. It takes time and a lot of skill to build a new face that will stand up to a doctor’s autopsy. The rest came premutilated. We’ve got millions of them; it’s not hard to find a good match in the body. Most of them would stay breathing, too dumb to stop, until they went in with the plane.

The plane jerked, hard. I glanced at my watch. Five minutes to impact. We should have time. I was on my last wimp. I could hear Dave frantically calling the ground. A bomb came through the gate, and I tossed it into the cockpit. Pinky turned on the pressure sensor on the bomb and came running out, followed by Dave. Liza was already through. I grabbed the limp dolls in stewardess costume and tossed them to the floor. The engine fell off and a piece of it came through the cabin. We started to depressurize. The bomb blew away part of the cockpit (the ground crash crew would read it—we hoped—that part of the engine came through and killed the crew: no more words from the pilot on the flight recorder) and we turned, slowly, left and down. I was lifted toward the hole in the side of the plane, but I managed to hold onto a seat. Cristabel wasn’t so lucky. She was blown backwards.

We started to rise slightly, losing speed. Suddenly it was uphill from where Cristabel was lying in the aisle. Blood oozed from her temple. I glanced back; everyone was gone, and three pink-suited wimps were piled on the floor. The plane began to stall, to nose down, and my feet left the floor.

“Come on, Bel!” I screamed. That gate was only three feet away from me, but I began pulling myself along to where she floated. The plane bumped, and she hit the floor. Incredibly, it seemed to wake her up. She started to swim toward me, and I grabbed her hand as the floor came up to slam us again. We crawled as the plane went through its final death agony, and we came to the door. The gate was gone.

There wasn’t anything to say. We were going in. It’s hard enough to keep the gate in place on a plane that’s moving in a straight line. When a bird gets to corkscrewing and coming apart, the math is fearsome. So I’ve been told.

I embraced Cristabel and held her bloodied head. She was groggy, but managed to smile and shrug. You take what you get. I hurried into the restroom and got both of us down on the floor. Back to the forward bulkhead, Cristabel between my legs, back to front. Just like in teaming. We pressed our feet against the other wall. I hugged her tightly and cried on her shoulder.

And it was there. A green glow to my left. I threw myself toward it, dragging Cristabel, keeping low as two wimps were thrown headfirst through the gate above our heads. Hands grabbed and pulled us through. I clawed my way a good five yards along the floor. You can leave a leg on the other side and I didn’t have one to spare.

I sat up as they were carrying Cristabel to Medical. I patted her arm as she went by on the stretcher, but she was passed out. I wouldn’t have minded passing out myself.

For a while, you can’t believe it all really happened. Sometimes it turns out it didn’t happen. You come back and find out all the goats in the holding pen have softly and suddenly vanished away because the continuum won’t tolerate the changes and paradoxes you’ve put into it. The people you’ve worked so hard to rescue are spread like tomato surprise all over some goddam hillside in Carolina and all you’ve got left is a bunch of ruined wimps and an exhausted Snatch Team. But not this time. I could see the goats milling around in the holding pen, naked and more bewildered than ever. And just starting to be really afraid.

Elfreda touched me as I passed her. She nodded, which meant well-done in her limited repertoire of gestures. I shrugged, wondering if I cared, but the surplus adrenalin was still in my veins and I found myself grinning at her. I nodded back.

Gene was standing by the holding pen. I went to him, hugged him. I felt the juices start to flow. Damn it, let’s squander a little ration and have us a good time.

Someone was beating on the sterile glass wall of the pen. She shouted, mouthing angry words at us. Why? What have you done to us? It was Mary Sondergard. She implored her bald, one-legged twin to make her understand. She thought she had problems. God, was she pretty. I hated her guts.

Gene pulled me away from the wall. My hands hurt, and I’d broken off all my fake nails without scratching the glass. She was sitting on the floor now, sobbing. I heard the voice of the briefing officer on the outside speaker.

“…Centauri Three is hospitable, with an Earth-like climate. By that, I mean your Earth, not what it has become. You’ll see more of that later. The trip will take five years, shiptime. Upon landfall, you will be entitled to one horse, a plow, three axes, two hundred kilos of seed gram…”

I leaned against Gene’s shoulder. At their lowest ebb, this very moment, they were so much better than us. I had maybe ten years, half of that as a basket case. They are our best, our very brightest hope. Everything is up to them.

“…that no one will be forced to go. We wish to point out again, not for the last time, that you would all be dead without our intervention. There are things you should know, however. You cannot breathe our air. If you remain on Earth, you can never leave this building. We are not like you. We are the result of a genetic winnowing, a mutation process. We are the survivors, but our enemies have evolved along with us. They are winning. You, however, are immune to the diseases that afflict us…”

I winced and turned away.

“…the other hand, if you emigrate you will be given a chance at a new life. It won’t be easy, but as Americans you should be proud of your pioneer heritage. Your ancestors survived, and so will you. It can be a rewarding experience, and I urge you…”

Sure. Gene and I looked at each other and laughed. Listen to this, folks. Five percent of you will suffer nervous breakdowns in the next few days, and never leave. About the same number will commit suicide, here and on the way. When you get there, sixty to seventy percent will die in the first three years. You will die in childbirth, be eaten by animals, bury two out of three of your babies, starve slowly when the rains don’t come. If you live, it will be to break your back behind a plow, sun-up to dusk. New Earth is Heaven, folks!

God, how I wish I could go with them.

LAURALYN

Randall Garrett

Again, last night, I saw the ghost of Lauralyn.

Again, I tried to trap her, to go beyond her capabilities, and, again, I could not. And that is beginning to frighten me.

She has never come without warning; such a breach of manners would be beyond Lauralyn. Never less than sixty days apart, and never more than one hundred eighty—which may be the parameters of the random pattern I believe she has chosen—my commweb terminal signals at some time when I am not working, and her lovely voice comes without vision, as though she were calling from a ship in space, and she asks if she may visit next day.

Of course, I cannot say no.

And she always comes to Garden Four, where we first met.

To paraphrase some ancient of distant legendary Earth, I cannot live with her, and I cannot live without her. And yet, I am doing both and neither. She is an itch in my soul.

But there is a question that gnaws at my mind more painfully than she at my soul: Who is Lauralyn?

I am making this crystal record, partly to see that it goes permanently into the files of the Brotherhood, partly to verbalize it in order to clarify things in my own mind.

The soft, sweet sound signal lifted me from the depths of my meditation, and I rapidly took the steps necessary to lift me to full awareness. The time was 11:04. I rose from my relaxer, a little puzzled; the signal had come six minutes early.

“Why the hurry, Brother Ambrose?” I asked.

“The technician from Galactic Machines is here. Father Superior,” said the voice from Brother Ambrose’s speaker.

“I see.” I was mildly surprised; the Galaxy is vast, and even ultralight velocities are not fast enough for really quick travel. I had not expected the GM technie for another fifteen months. “Very well, Brother Ambrose,” I said, “where is the technie waiting?”

“Garden Four, Father Superior.” I took a quick trip through the cleanser and left my quarters, heading for Garden Four.

Garden Four is not designed for business or technical discussion; it is solely for relaxation and pleasant conversation. There are shrubs and trees and flowers from thirty-seven worlds, with the great oaks predominating, looming over the flickering neon bushes and the pale lavender-barked egg trees. The turf underfoot is mutated Terran bluegrass, and the softly tinkling chime vines are pure Glavian. The frosted mirror-moon overhead bathed the garden in softly colored silver, and the air was just perceptibly perfumed by the bracing tang of aroma from the poon blossoms.

There is beauty there, but at that moment it was dominated by a greater beauty.

She stood in the center of the main glade, looking up at the frosty rose-white of the mirror-moon, her hands clasped at the small of her back. The tiny kilt she wore was decoration and nothing more; it was the same pale yellow as her hair, which came just barely to her shoulders. The rest of her was a sweeping flow of three-dimensional curves of beauty.

Though she did not look at me, she was aware of my presence, for, without shifting her gaze, she said: “I didn’t know anything could be so beautiful.”

Nor did I, I thought. But we were not talking about the same thing.

Then she turned to look at me. “How do you get that effect?”

I looked up. “You’re in luck,” I said. “You caught one of our mirror-moons transiting Fuzzball. Fuzzball is a globular cluster about sixty-seven parsecs in diameter and something like nineteen hundred parsecs away, so it subtends about two degrees of arc. Every ninety-four days, one of the three mirror-moons transits it at the full, so you get a rose-white reflection from our K-5 primary centered in the cluster. The mirror-moon is half a degree across, so it gives a nice effect.”

She nodded and looked back up. “The moons are artificial, of course.”

“Yes; three of them, one hundred twenty degrees apart.”

“How high up are they?”

“About a kilometer. Eleven hundred and forty-five meters, actually, since they’re fifteen hundred meters from the center of our little world.”

“Ten meters in diameter, then. They orbit? Free?”

“They orbit. There’s, no air above fifty meters; the paragravity field seals it in close.”

“It’s lovely. Nice design.” Then she took her eyes from the sky display and turned slowly around to look at the whole glade. “It’s all lovely.”

Yes, it is. But I said nothing.

I cleared my throat. “I am Father Tomas, Superior of the Brotherhood of Machine Teachers. Would you care for refreshment?”

She made a half bow. “I am Technie Lauralyn, of Galactic Machines. You asked for an appointment.”

“Yes. Just over eight years ago. You were gratifyingly prompt; I had not expected you until the tenth year.”

“I’m sorry, Father; have I come at an inopportune time?”

Had she blushed? In the rose-white light. I could not tell. Hardly likely, and yet there had been a touch of embarrassment in her exquisite voice.

“Not at all,” I said reassuringly. “Our future projections indicated a need for the expanded capacity of Brotherhood Central’s Machine capacity within half a century, but that has been cut back now to just over thirty years, due to the vast new exploratory projects building up in the volume beyond Tucana. We need more capacity for our own Machine if we are to coordinate the work of the Brotherhood in setting other Machines to work. We of the Brotherhood are thinly scattered, but there are nearly eighty million of us—far too few for the Galaxy’s needs, but far too many to coordinate without Machine help.”

“I know. We technies have a similar problem.”

“One moment,” I said. Then: “Brother Ambrose, is the Coldfire Glade prepared?”

“Yes, Father Superior. As you ordered.”

She heard the voice, naturally, although if I had so ordered it, Brother Ambrose’s answer would have come to my ears alone.

“Is that a continuous monitor?” she asked.

“Oh, no. He only hears when I call his name. ‘Brother Ambrose’ is the code for the conversational mode of Central.”

“Of course. What is Coldfire Glade?”

“Come. I’ll show you.” I led her through the trees, along the turfed path that winds through Garden Four. Shortly, we could see the glimmering of light between the trunks of the overshadowing oaks.

Coldfire Glade is small, a circle three meters in radius surrounded by a two-and-a-half-meter hedge of coldfire shrubs from Faylixin. In the center, a table of refreshments for two was laid.

“Those are Faylixin glowlights!” she said in a hushed voice. “I’ve read of them, but I’ve never seen one. Absolutely beautiful! That rose-white light matches the mirror-moon! Or—no. Not quite. There’s less yellow in it; just a touch less. They’re very lovely creatures, aren’t they?”

She and I sat down at the table. Her face seemed to glow from some inner light as much as from the illumination from the mirror-moon, Fuzzball, and the coldfire shrubs.

“You called them ‘glowlights’,” I said. “We call them ‘coldfire shrubs’.”

She smiled. “I’ll go along with the “coldfire’, but they’re not shrubs, you know.”

I filled our glasses. “Really? Pardon me, but I am not a biologist. They’re not shrubs?”

“Not exactly. They’re not really plants, you see. Nor animals, either. They’re—” She paused. “Do you know of the sea anemone?”

“I’m afraid not,” I admitted.

“Earth organism. These are rather like them, except they live in air instead of water. They can live on radiated energy, like a plant, or on chemical energy, like an animal. What do you feed them?”

I laughed with a touch of embarrassment. “I’m not sure. I’m not the gardener.”

“Oh.” She had an oddly pleasant giggle. “Of course not. I merely thought you might know.”

“Sorry. Failure on my part. Have some of these little cakes; they’re made by Brother Morthil. A real Brother. by the way, not another conversational mode.”

“I can’t eat much,” she said. “I have to watch my figure.”

“So do I,” I said ambiguously.

“I hadn’t realized that the Galactic headquarters for the Brotherhood was so beautiful. All the Brothers I’ve met lived austere, rather ascetic lives, and I just assumed …” She let her voice trail off.

I had to laugh. “Well, we don’t exactly indulge in riotous living here, but we do indulge ourselves a bit. More comfort and less austerity after we retire.”

“Retire?” She looked puzzled. Delightful.

“Practically. We have the Rule to obey, and one of the rules is that a man must put in at least a century and a half of field work before he can take up administration, which is a much easier job. And we also take care of the very old, who do pretty much what they want until they die.”

“What percent of your eighty million actually do retire?” she asked softly.

“Point oh oh one oh four percent. Of our present actual force, eight hundred and thirty to eight hundred and forty will live to retire. Moving around the Galaxy to teach Planetary Machines is—ah—somewhat hazardous.”

“I know. Our figures run about the same. But somebody has to do it, or Galactic civilization—what there is of it—would collapse. And, as you said, we are thinly scattered.”

“So few can qualify,” I said. “In the very early days, when space flight itself was in its infancy, our profession was called `programming’. Even then, it took a special kind of mind to be able to do it well. We no longer program a Machine; we must teach it because it is far too complex for anything else. It must learn to program itself. I’m not telling you anything new, I know, but perhaps you’ve never thought about the kind of mind it takes to be in rapport with a Machine mind.”

She nodded. “I’ve thought about it. The difference between my job and yours is akin to the difference between a cerebral neurosurgeon and a telepathic psychologist. What kind of mind does it take to read the mind of a Machine?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure. That’s not what we do. We have to mentally construct an analog of the Machine’s mind, checking and rechecking until the analog is as near a one-to-one mapping as necessary, then—” I broke off. “Do you want to spend twelve years or so learning the basics so we can talk about it? You don’t even have referents to most of the words I’d have to use.”

Again that silvery laugh. “No. I just asked about the kind of mind required; I didn’t ask how it worked. I understand that women can’t do it.

“That’s not quite true. Some can; about the same percentage as men. They can do it; they don’t want to.”

“Explain?”

“It’s an emotional thing. They don’t like what it does to them. Women are perhaps more human than men, and thinking like a Machine is not a human thing. The analogs we build stay with us, you see; not complete, but as shadow structures. And that makes us—different. We are called emotionless, ascetic, austere, cold. Apparently, men are more willing to accept that state of being than women.”

“But you do have a Sisterhood.” It was a flat statement, with barely a touch of questioning.

“Specialists,” I said. “Specialists of a precision grade that no man has yet achieved. When one of the Brotherhood becomes unstable because of conflicting shadow analogs residual in his mind—”

I was cut off by the sound of a golden triple bellnote in the silvery, scented air.

“Father Superior,” said Brother Ambrose, “Father Brac is now requesting your whereabouts of my submode-2: instructions?”.

“Send him,” I said. I think I only hesitated a moment.

After several seconds, Lauralyn said: “Father Brac?”

“Father Brac is one of our finest analysts and teachers,” I told her. “You and he will be working together on the expansion of our Machine. He’s spent thirty-five years learning this one Machine mind; he has its analog securely.”

“It will be a pleasure to meet him. He’s coming—here?”

At this point, I want to ask myself a question: How did she know? Garden Four is not designed for business or technical discussion: that much, she could have seen easily. It was only for light conversation such as we had been having. But she had never met Father Brac; how did she know that his personality would clash with Garden Four? Or am I now reading into my memories nuances that were not there? I cannot tell, now.

“Brother Ambrose,” I said quickly, “tell the good father that we will be in Garden Seven.”

I stood up and offered her my hand. “Come along. Seven’s just next door.” She rose and smiled, but did not take my hand.

“Lead on,” she said.

I led her to the path that went through the oaks to the gateway to Garden Seven. As we walked, she looked all around at the plants surrounding the broad, winding path. “Is that mistletoe?” she asked, pointing to the berried shrubs that grew in some of the oak limbs.

“No, it’s a look-alike from Kandasar. It is epiphytic rather than parasitic. But these flowers along the border are straight Terrestrial primula japonica.”

At the gateway, I stepped through and she followed.

Seven is formal, almost stiff. The mallord hedges, with their white bark and black leaves, are neatly trimmed and mathematically straight, defining the roofless rooms and hallways of the garden and concealing the too-near horizon. (It can be disconcerting to planetbred folk to see objects less than a hundred meters distant leaning away from them at sixteen degrees; they get the feeling they are in the center of a blast area.)

The borders and flower beds are laid out with geometrical and symmetrical precision. There is beauty there, but it is a different kind of beauty.

The brilliant lighting almost gives a feeling of a warm planetside afternoon, although the sky is black overhead. Fifty meters of air is not enough to give blueness to any sky.

Father Brac was already seated at the park table, waiting for us. He is a big man—190 cm tall and broad and heavy in proportion, massing around 100 kg. His head is large, domelike, and hairless; his brow unfurrowed; his nose large and fleshy; his jaw broad and massive; his eyes dark are heavylidded beneath overhanging brows. Signs of emotion rarely cross that huge face, but it is not empty; there is humor and intelligence there.

He stood up as we entered the small hedged square. I made the introductions, and we sat down. Immediately, Brac took out his plan projector and energized it. “Here is what we have in mind, Technie Lauralyn,” he said in his slightly raspy, almost monotonic baritone.

For the record, I cannot explain what I felt then—not adequately. The only comparable reaction is one I had when I saw a man deliberately smash a spun silicate free-form—an intricate, delicate work of three-dimensional art—simply because it was in his way. Or the time I sat on a chair in a home on Tornag, which has a 1.3-kilodyne geefield, and the chair collapsed and landed me painfully on my coccyx. But the chair was no work of art, and I find it difficult to make any connection between the two analogs, to say nothing of a connection between them and that moment in Garden Seven.

What I felt was a surge of irritation against Father Brac for doing no more than bringing up the subject we had come there to discuss. That was the whole purpose of her being there, and yet I wanted to discuss something else. It was irrational, and I cannot explain it.

“Father Superior,” Brac went on, “would Brother Ambrose cut the illumination to Level Six? It would be easier to see the fine detail in the holograms.”

“Certainly.” I said. “You heard. Brother Ambrose?”

“Yes, Level Six, Father Superior.”

The illumination dimmed.

“Recording mode, Brother Ambrose,” I said. “Technical discussion of Projected Expansion 3-Hd-776.”

“Recording mode, Father Superior,” said Brother Ambrose.

“Thank you. Carry on, Father Brac.”

Brac began manipulating his projector, and the analog modules of our Central Machine began forming around us.

This entire sequence is in the permanent files under the proper identification, so I shall not bother to describe it here. I shall only say that I became so thoroughly involved in the technical discussion that followed that I forgot any small, irrational pique that I may have felt.

Actually, all such meetings and discussions, including those with other members of the Council, blend into each other; they are clear in my memory, but not distinct. It was simply a matter of our telling Lauralyn what we wanted our Machine to be able to do, and her explaining to us the functions of the various new modules she had, and their abilities and capacities, and how they could be fitted together to do what we wanted…but it only sounds simple when you say it. In practice it was change, compromise, rethink, connect, reconnect, couple, decouple. route and reroute. It was the conversion of analogs into homologs. It was the seemingly endless process of moving three-dimensional holographic projections in and out and around and through each other until we knew how the Machine could best be restructured.

Even at the best, there was faulty communication. A Teacher, in theory, does not need to know how a Machine is put together, only what it will do. Similarly, a Technie doesn’t give a damn what a Teacher wants to do with a Machine, only whether it will function properly. But of course the two fields overlap, and it is only in the overlap that the two viewpoints can communicate.

Of course. the Machine itself must be consulted; you don’t tear into a thinking being without its advice, consultation, and consent. So Brother Ambrose came into the discussions, too.

But when I could I talked to Lauralyn.

“Father Brac,” she said once. “is more like the kind of Brother of your Order I’ve met before in the field. Does your Rule include a vow of celibacy?”

We were in the Main Glade of Garden Four. It was daylight, but the ruddy light of our primary makes for an eternal sunset. As one of the Brothers had put it: “On Central there are but three times of day: sunrise, sunset, and night.”

The Coldfire Glade is not remarkable during daylight.

I thought about her question and tried to frame the proper words to answer her. “No,” I said, “not a vow. It isn’t like that. Let me ask you a question. Do you feel any sexual attraction toward Brac?”

“None whatsoever.”

I chuckled. “Nor he for you, I assure you. He must think too much like a Machine to be attractive to you—and he is too busy thinking like a Machine” to pay any attention to you.”

Again her silvery laugh. “I see. But you’re not like that.”

“Perhaps not. You asked once about our Sisterhood. When it comes time for a man to do administrative work, or retire. the Sisters take care of him for a while. The shadow analogs are—removed. It—er—clears the cobwebs out. Or if man becomes unstable. the Sisters take care of him.”

“They are psychologists, then?” she asked.

“And more. Far more.”

“I take it. then, that Father Brac is still on active duty?”

“Oh yes, of course. Very much so. Any one of us could go back on active duty to complete and teach our Central. But Brac is a long way from retirement and has made a special study of our Machine for decades now. Frankly. I don’t think he will ever retire or go into administration. It’s not his—style.”

“What’s your style?”

I thought that one over carefully. “After better than two centuries of consideration and comparison,” I said at last, “I find that I prefer people to Machines. They have infinite variety; Machines are limited.”

At that, she seemed to change. She looked off into the red-and-black sky as though she were seeing something a billion parsecs away. “Mathematically, of course,” she said in a soft voice, “you are misusing the word ‘infinite’, but you speak poetically. But I think you underestimate the Machine. Complexity increases variety, and the Machine becomes more and more complex with time. Humans may be doing that, too, but the rate of change is several orders of magnitude slower.” Then she looked down and smiled at me. “Don’t underestimate the Machine.”

It was some time before the slowdown was called to my attention, and at that point it was hardly serious, but Brother Ambrose was extrapolating toward the deadline originally computed—the ETC, or Estimated Time of Completion.

I was in my relaxer—not meditating, but thinking—when Brother Ambrose chimed for attention.

“Yes, Brother Ambrose?”

“There is a loss of efficiency in the Brac-Lauralyn teamwork which should have your attention. Father Superior.”

I felt a peculiar ambivalence emotionally at that point. A sudden loss of efficiency in a two member team almost always indicates an emotional communication blockage. The spectrum runs from ignoring the work because they are too wrapped up in each other in a love affair to subtly fouling up each other’s work because a condition of hatred has become established.

“Let me have the details,” I said. I knew it was not yet serious; Brother Ambrose would have caught the trend long before either of them was aware of it. The recording of the facts and figures may be found in their proper file, so there is no need to quote it here. I put a temporary seal on the report and took the drop chute three hundred meters down to the area where the work was being done, a hundred levels below the surface. I went personally because this was far too important to be left to staff. Besides, no one but myself could have handled the situation; no one else had all the data available at that point.

Lauralyn was working somewhere half around the core. directing the installation of new modules—new types that did marvelous things.

Father Brac was in his work area. surrounded by holographic analogs. I could barely see him beyond the maze of tubes and knots and threads of varicolored light. But I could see that he had merely set up the projections and left them there while he went about other business. He was scowling and scribbling on the impression surface of his desk. I watched for a minute. He was doodling.

I walked through the hologram projections, ignoring the lights that flickered around my eyes. “Father Brac?”

“Eh? Oh. Hello, Father Superior. Come in.” With a gesture. the holograms and the doodling vanished. “Something?”

“Nothing serious,” I said. “Just doing my rounds. Am I intruding on your work?”

“Not really, Father Tomas.” His smile was carefully molded of thermoplastic. I sensed at that moment that something had happened in the past few minutes, something which had caused the situation to deteriorate rapidly in a very short time. Brother Ambrose would have it processed by now, but I wanted to get Brac’s version first.

“Everything going smoothly?” I asked innocently.

“Mmf.” He stared at me and then looked down at his desktop. “Did you ever hear of a Machine with an intuitive mode?”

“A what?”

He looked back up at me. “An intuitive mode. A Machine with an intuitive mode.”

“No, I haven’t,” I admitted. “I’m not even sure what one would be, or of what use.”

“Well, we’re getting one, whether we want it or not, apparently. That Technie is working her way, not ours.” His voice trembled with anger—or something very like it. A most unusual phenomenon.

“Father Superior.” he went on, “I cannot work with that Technie. There is no accord between us, no clear communication. And now we are getting something called an `intuitive mode’! It is not needed, not necessary. but we’re getting it despite everything! I want you, to forbid her to put it in. Forbid it!”

“Now, hold on a bit, Father,” I said. “I’ll need to get some background on this. I want to know what’s going on as much as you do. Has Brother Ambrose recorded all this?” I knew he had, but I wondered whether it had been by Brac’s permission or by my orders.

“Of course,” he said. “All technical discussions must be recorded.”

“Then let’s run through the record to inform me and to refresh your recollection.”

“Excellent idea.”

The replay showed exactly what I had suspected, as you will notice when you play it. At one point, Lauralyn says: “When you connect that modular array in the multidimensional manner you have indicated, you will be able to use an intuitive mode. I fully approve.” Her “intuitive mode” was not a thing added, it was a condition that would prevail.

That was exactly the sort of thing Brother Ambrose had warned me about. The communications breakdown was all on Brac’s side. He always misunderstood what she had clearly said, whereas his statements to her were unclear and often inaccurate. One of his remarks is typical: “We can either have direct synaptic correlation through the pseudocortical area, or relay it through an idealizing interface, but not both, so it looks like that’s what we’ll have to do.” I wonder what he thought that meant.

He certainly didn’t see any discrepancy. “You see what I mean?” he said. “What’s this ‘intuitive mode’ nonsense? Machines don’t have intuition. Machines can’t have intuition. It isn’t logical.”

“By definition,” I said, “intuition isn’t logical.”

When he said. “I knew you’d agree,” I saw that I wasn’t getting through to him, either.

I took the only steps I could, and I am certain that a review of the proceedings will justify my actions. The Board certainly agreed they were necessary. Father Brac agreed with Brother Ambrose when he said: “You’ll have to make a choice between me and the Technie.” But I was surprised when he further agreed with my choice.

I pointed out that if we sent Lauralyn back to GM Central it would be another ten years before we could expect a replacement, whereas Brac could he replaced almost immediately. And we did. after all. have a deadline to meet.

“Of course,” he said. “It’s the only logical choice.” Then he paused for a moment before asking: “Who will be my replacement?”

“I will.”

After a moment, he nodded his massive bald head. “I am grateful. Yours is the only mind here that may be able to control and teach such a Machine.”

I thought I knew what he meant then, but now I am not so sure. “Meanwhile,” I said. “it is my recommendation that you report to the Mother Superior.”

His eyes widened for a second. then relaxed. “I see. Yes, of course, if that is your recommendation. Thank you, Father Superior.”

“Not just yet.” I added. “I’m going to have to internalize your analogs of our Machine before I can go to work. I’ll need your help.”

“Of course. Father Superior.”

The work went smoothly enough after that. Like Brac, I could not really see what she meant by an “intuitive mode”, but unlike Brac, I could see no point in arguing with her about it. The Machine was there: we could do with it what we wanted: If it had an unused function, then let it lie there dormant.

Any device or tool can be used as a substitute for some other tool. All tools have a dormant function. But a knife does not need to be used as a screwdriver, nor a screwdriver as a cold chisel. Or put it another way: A hologram projector can be adjusted to an octave higher than normal—but of what use is a UV picture in three dimensions if you can’t see it? That function is left dormant.

So I didn’t try to interfere with Lauralyn addition of the new types of modules she’d brought from GM Central: that was her business. All I insisted upon was that the completed Machine would function the way we wanted it to. We worked well together, building and rebuilding what is probably the finest Machine in the Galaxy.

Those were happy years.

Brother Ambrose was, of course, retained, nor did we actually add to him until the final activation and coordination of the entire complex. The activation itself was more monotonous than laborious: shunting in a section at a time, balancing and rebalancing. testing reactions, running real-time problems, and all the other things, I won’t bore you with it: look it up in the files if you think it will shed any light on the problem.

There was surprisingly little debugging to do.

And then, suddenly, it was time for Lauralyn to leave.

“Eighty-seven parsecs,” she said that evening. “Not too far, but it’s only a delivery. The next hop is over twelve hundred parsecs.” She looked up. “I’ll miss old Fuzzball. He’s pretty.”

We were in Garden Four. A mirror-moon was passing close to Fuzzball, but not transiting it. The result was two eyes gazing at us—one small and pink, the other large, pearly, and fuzzy at the edges.

“You’ll still be able to see Fuzzball at that distance,” I said, “that is, at eighty-seven parsecs.”

“No, I checked. That whole section of the sky will be black, with very few stars between me and Xaviera’s Veil. But the Veil will be between me and Fuzzball.”

“Oh, you’re headed toward the Arrowhead, then. I’ve never been in that part of the Galaxy.”

Small talk. Delaying the inevitable.

She sat down in one of the contoured chairs that look like carved oak stumps. “It will be all yours, now—Teacher. Your new Machine will do all you wanted it to—and more.”

I smiled. “I know. It’s the ‘more’ you are concerned with.”

“Concerned. yes. But not worried. If you have no intention of using the intuitive mode, then you will not use it.”

“If we have a need for it, we will use it, never fear.”

“That may not happen for a long time. Do you know what happens if a child is not taught to talk before its fifth year?”

“Yes. The unused ability atrophies and the child never learns properly. Are you saying that can happen to a Machine?”

She shook her head. “No, of course not. But the Machine will be happier if it is allowed the full use of its abilities.” She held up a hand. palm towards me. “No, no. Don’t worry about it, and don’t ask how a Machine can be happy. You’re too full of analog logic circuits now. Just wait.” She paused and gave me her lovely smile. “And I want to say I think you’re a very wonderful man.”

Precisely sixty days after Lauralyn left our little world, the commweb terminal in my office requested attention.

I identified my terminal, and a voice said: “Father Tomas, this is Lauralyn. Could I make an appointment to see you in the next day or two?”

It took me a second or two to get over the shock. I had thought she was many, many parsecs away. “Why, of course,” I said. “Will tomorrow at 11:20 be all right?”

“Tomorrow at 11:20. Fine, Father Tomas. In Garden Four?”

“Of course, if you wish.”

“I’ll be there. Thank you Father.”

And the connection was cut.

I wondered for the next twenty hours what had happened. She had an itinerary; she had other work to do. Why come back to our little world?

There had been no panic, anxiety, or even urgency in her voice, so it couldn’t be an emergency. Or could it? Perhaps she was feigning calmness. But if it was an emergency, why not say so?

I am afraid my efficiency during that time period was not up to my usual standards.

When Brother Ambrose announced that she was in Garden Four, waiting for me, I fear I put speed ahead of dignity.

She was standing exactly as I had seen her the first time, in the center of the Main Glade, looking up at the sky. And the sky was the same, too, with a mirror-moon in the center of Fuzzball. Coincidence? I do not think so. Not now.

She looked the same—beautifulexcept that the short kilt she was wearing was rose pink instead of yellow. She turned her head to look at me and smiled. “Thank you for coming. I’m glad to he here. I trust your Machine is functioning to your liking?”

“Certainly. Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “We’ll have to find out.”

“You mean—there might be something wrong with the Machine’s functioning that I know nothing of?”

“It depends on what you mean by ‘wrong’.” There was laughter in her voice. “Is there anything wrong with me?”

I was puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

“I want to try an experiment. Hold your arm straight out in front of you. Fine. Now close your eyes.”

I did as she asked, After a second or two, she said: “Feel anything?”

“No.”

“Open your eyes.”

I almost screamed. Before I jerked it away, my hand had been buried to the wrist in her face.

Then common sense asserted itself. I was talking to a hologram.

“Then you’re merely projecting. But why?”

“You’ll admit I’m Lauralyn?”

“Certainly. I don’t understand.”

“Lauralyn is parsecs away, wondering how this interview will turn out,” she said. “I hope for all our sakes it will turn out well.”

All the crazy pieces came together then. I knew.

“The intuitive mode,” I said. “The perfect Turning Machine.”

“That’s what we don’t know,” she said. “That’s what we’ll have to find out. My modular complex was instructed by one of your own Brotherhood, but …” She shrugged. “We don’t know. Now that you have been told, we hope you can find some way to prove us either wrong or right. Think up tests. Find some way, if you can, to prove it one way or another.”

“That’s silly. How can I have proof when I have no comparison?”

“I will come again. Lauralyn will come again. Or she may not. If she contacts me by commweb, she will take over; you will never know who—or what, if you will—is in control of this projection. Please do your best to find out.”

With that, she turned and walked out of the Glade and the Garden.

Since then, the ghost of Lauralyn has come and gone many times. She seems anxious to be of help, but I cannot he sure. I cannot he sure of anything.

Brother Ambrose can control the holographic projectors, too, now. She fancies him as a pre-spaceflight Christian monk, and so he appears. He sometimes comes in through the wall of my office and we play chess or converse as we used to. But I can see into. him, as always; he is analyzable. She is not.

So I still work at the problem she has given me. I take pleasure in her. appearances, whether they are long or short. And I do not know.

But that is not what bothers me. You see, when the—real?—Lauralyn was here, she never touched anyone. She never did any of the mechanical work: she merely instructed some of our lesser technie Brothers. I do not recall ever seeing her eat or drink.

You see my problem.

I love her very dearly.

DOG DAY EVENING

Spider Robinson

It absolutely had to happen. I mean, it was so cosmically preordained-destined-fated flat out inevitable that I can’t imagine how we failed to be expecting it. Where else on God’s earth could Ralph and Joe possibly have ended up but at Callahan’s Place?

It was Tall Tales Night at Callahan’s, the night on which the teller of the most outrageous shaggy-dog story gets his night’s tab refunded. “Animals” had been selected as the night’s generic topic, and we had suffered through hours of stinkers about pet rocks and talking dogs and The Horse That Was Painted Green and the Fastest Dog in the World and the Gay Rooster and a dozen others you probably know already.

In fact, most of the Tale-Tellers had been disqualified when someone shouted the punchline before they got to it—often after only a sentence or two. The fireplace was filled to overflowing with broken glasses, and it was down to a tight contest between Doc Webster and me. I thought I had him on the run, too.

A relative newcomer named B.D; Wyatt had just literally crapped out, by trying to fob off that old dumb gag about the South Sea island where “there lives a bird whose digestive system is so incredibly rank that, if its excrement should contact your skin, re-exposure of the contaminated skin to air is invariably fatal.” Named for its characteristic squawk, it is of course the famous Foo Bird, and the punchline—as I’m certain you know already—is, “If the Foo shits, wear it.”

Unfortunately for B.D. (“Bird Doo”?), we already knew it too. But it gave me an idea.

“You know,” I drawled, signalling Callahan for a fresh Bushmill’s, “like all of us, I’ve heard that story before. So many times, in fact, that I decided there might be a grain of truth in it—hidden, of course, by a large grain of salt. So my friend Thor Lowerdahl and I decided to check it out. We investigated hundreds of south sea islands without success, until one day our raft, the Liki Tiki, foundered on an uncharted atoll. No sooner did we stagger ashore than we heard a distant raucous cry: ‘Foo! Foo!’

“Instantly, of course, we dove back into the surf, and didn’t stick our heads up until we were far offshore. We treaded water for awhile, hoping for a glimpse of the fabubus bird, to no avail. Suddenly a seal passed us underwater, trailing a cloud of sticky brown substance. Some of it got on Thor’s leg, and with a snort of disgust, he wiped it off. He expired at once. Realizing the truth in an instant, I became so terrified that I swam back to the States.”

I paused expectantly, and Fast Eddie (sensing his cue) obliged me with a straight line.

“What truth, Jake?”

“That atoll,” I replied blithely, “was far more dangerous than anyone suspected—as any seal can plainly foo.”

A general howl arose. Long-Drink chanced (by statistical inevitability) to have his glass to his mouth at the time; he bit a piece off clean and spat it into the fireplace. I kept my face straight, of course, but inwardly I exulted. This time I had Doc Webster beat for sure, and with an impromptu pun at that. I ordered another.

But when the tumult died down, the Dog met my eyes with a look of such mild, placid innocence that my confidence faltered.

“Fortunate indeed, Jacob,” he rumbled, patting his ample belly, “that you should have rendered so unbearable a pun. It reminds me of a book about a bear I read the other day by Richard Adams—Shardik, it’s called. Any of you read it?”

There were a few nods. The Dog smiled and sipped scotch.

“For those of you who missed it,” he went on, “it’s about a primitive empire that forms around an enormous, semimythical bear. Well, it happens I know something about that empire that Adams forgot to mention, and now’s as good a time as any to pass it along. You see, the only way to become a knight in Shardik’s empire was to apply for a personal interview with the bear. This had its drawbacks. If he liked your audition, you were knighted on the spot—but if you failed, Lord Shardik was quite likely to club your head off your shoulders with one mighty paw. Even so, there were many applicants—for the peasantry were poor farmers, and if a candidate failed for knighthood his family received, by way of booby-prize, a valuable sheepdog from the Royal Kennels. This consoled them greatly, for truly it is written…”

And here he actually paused to sip his scotch again, daring us to guess the punchline:

“… For the mourning after a terrible knight, nothing beats the dog of the bear that hit you.”

A howl again began to arise—and then suddenly a howl arose.

I mean a real howl.

So of course we all swiveled around in our chairs, and damned if there wasn’t a guy with a German shepherd sitting near the door. I hadn’t seen them come in, and it took me a second to notice that the dog had a glass of gin on the floor in front of him, half-empty.

As we gaped, open-mouthed, the dog picked up the half full glass in his teeth (without spilling a drop), carried it to the hearth, and with a flick of his powerful head, flung it into the fireplace hard enough to bust it. He turned and looked at us then, wagging his tail as if to make sure we understood that he was commenting on the Doc’s tale. Then, to underline the point, he turned back to the fireplace, lifted his leg and put out a third of the fire.

We roared with laughter, a great simultaneous outburst of total glee, and the dog trotted proudly back to his master. I looked the guy over: medium height, a little thin, nose like an avalanche about to happen and a great sprawling fungus of a mustache clinging to its underside. He wore Salvation Army-rejects like Mr. Emmett Kelly used to wear, clothes that looked like what starts fires in old warehouses. But his eyes were alert and aware, and he was obviously quite proud of his dog.

Then he caught Callahan’s eye, and winced. “You got a house rule on dogs, Mister?” he asked. You could hardly see his lips move under that ridiculous mustache.

Callahan considered the matter. “We try not to be human-chauvinists around here,” he allowed at last. “But if he dumps on my floor, I’ll clean it up with your shirt. Fair enough?”

“Are you kiddin’?” the guy mumbled. “This dog mess on the floor? Why, this is the Smartest Dog In The World.” He said it just like that, with capital letters.

“Uh-huh,” said Long-Drink. “He talks, right?”

A strange gleam came into the shabby man’s eyes.

“Yep.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Doc Webster groaned. “Don’t tell me. A talking dog has walked into Callahan’s Place on Tall Tales Night. If that hound tops my story, I’m going on the wagon for the whole night.”

That broke everyone up, and Long-Drink McGonnigle was particularly tickled (say that three times fast with whiskey in your mouth). “Patron saint of undershorts,” he whooped, “it makes so much sense I almost believe it.”

“You think I’m kidding?” the stranger asked.

“That or crazy,” the Doc asserted. “A dog hasn’t got the larynx to talk—let alone the mouth structure—even if he is as smart as you say.”

“I’ve got two hundred dollars says you’re wrong”, the stranger announced. He displayed a fistfull of bills. “Any takers?”

Well, now. We’re a charitable bunch at Callahan’s, not normally inclined to cheat the mentally disturbed. And yet there was a clarity to his speech that belied his derelict’s clothes, a twinkle in his eye that looked entirely sane, and a challenging out-thrust to his chin that reminded us of a kid daring you to hit him. And there was that wildly improbable handful of cash in his hand. “I’ll take ten of that,” I said digging for my wallet, and a dozen other guys chimed in. “Me too.” “I’ll take ten.” “I’m in for five.” Doc Webster took a double sawbuck’s worth, and even Fast Eddie produced a tattered single. The guy collected the dough in a hat that looked like its former owner had been machine-gunned in the head, and the whole time that damn dog just sat there next to the table, watching the action.

When the guy had it all counted, there was a hundred and seventy bucks in the hat. “There’s thrity unfaded,” he said, and looked around expectantly.

Callahan came around the bar, a red-headed glacier descending on the shabby man. The barkeep picked him up by the one existing lapel and the opposite collar, held him at arm’s length for a while, and sighed.

“I like a good gag as well as the next guy,” he said conversationally. “But that’s serious money in that hat. Now if you was to ask that dog his name, and he said ‘Ralph! Ralph! and then you was to ask him what’s on top of a house and he said ‘Roof! Roof!’ and then you was to ask him who was the greatest baseball player of all time and he sad ‘Ruth! Ruth!’, why, I’d just naturally have to sharpen your feet and drive you into the floor. You would become like a Gable roof: Gone With The Wind. What I mean, there are very few gags I’ve never heard, and if yours is of that calibre you are in dire peril. Do we have a meeting of the minds?” He was still holding the guy at arm’s length, the muscles of his arms looking like hairy manila, absolutely serene.

“I’m telling you the truth,” the guy yelped. “The dog can talk.”

Callahan slowly lowered him to the floor. “In that case,” he decided, I will fade your thirty”. He went back behind the bar and produced an apple. “Would you mind putting this in your mouth?”

The guy blinked at him.

“I believe you implicitly,” Callahan explained, “but someone without my trusting nature might suspect you was a ventriloquist tryin’ to pull a fast one.”

“Okay,” said the guy at once, and he stuffed the apple in his face. He beckoned to the dog, who came at once to the center of the room and sat on his haunches. He gazed up inquisitively at the shabby man, who nodded.

“I hope you will forgive me,” said the dog with the faintest trace of a German accent, “but I’m afraid my name actually is Ralph.”

There was silence, as profound as that which must exist on the Moon now that the tourist season is past. Then, slowly at first, glasses began to hit the fireplace. Soon there was a shower of glasses shattering on the hearth, and not a drop of liquid in any of ‘em. Callahan passed fresh beers around the room, bucket-brigade fashion, his face impassive. Not a word was spoken:

At last every had been lubed, and the big Irishman wiped off his hands and came around the bar. He pulled up a chair in front of the dog, dropped heavily into it, and put a fresh light to his cigar.

“Sure is a relief,” he sighed, “to take the weight offa my d… to sit down.”

You must understand—we were all still so stunned that not one of us thought to ask him if he was bitching.

“So tell me, Ralph,” he went on, “how do you like my bar?”

“Nice place,” the dog said pleasantly. “You guys always tell shaggy-… uh, person stories?”

“Only on Wednesday nights,” Callahan told him, and explained the game and current topic:

“That sounds very interesting,” Ralph said, parodying Artie Johnson. His voice was slightly hoarse but quite intelligible. “Mind if I take a shot at it?”

“You just heard the Doc’s stinker,” Callahan said. “If you can beat that, you’re top…

“Please,” Ralph interrupted with a pained look. “As you told me a moment ago, I’ve heard them all before. All right, then: I have an animal story. Did any of you know that until very recently, a tribe of killer monkeys lived undetected in Greenwich Village?”

The Doc had nearly found his own voice, but now he lost it again. Me, I’d already crapped out-but it was fun to see the champ sweat. I resolved to buy the dog a beer.

“To some extent,” the German shepherd went on, “it was not surprising that they escaped notice for so long. They had extremely odd sleeping habits, hibernating for 364 days out of every year (365 in Leap Years) and emerging from the caverns of the Village sewers only on Christmas Day. Even so, one might have thought they could hardly help but cause talk, since they tended when awake to be enormous, ferocious, carnivorous, and extremely hungry. Yet in Greenwich Village of all places on earth they went unnoticed until last year, when they were finally destroyed.”

The dog paused and looked expectant. Sighing, Callahan reached over the bar and got him a glass of gin. Ralph lapped it up in a twinkling, looked up at us, and delivered.

“Everyone knows,” he said patiently, “that Yule gibbons ate only nuts and fruits.”

Not, I am certain, since the days when Rin-Tin-Tin ran in neighborhood theaters has a German shepherd received such thunderous applause. We gave him a standing ovation, and I want to say Doc Webster was the first one to rise (despite the fact that, by virtue of his earlier rash promise, he was now on the wagon for the evening). Callahan nearly fell off his chair, and Fast Eddie tried to strike up “At The Zoo,” but he was laughing so hard his left hand was in G and his right in Eb. As the applause trickled off we toasted the dog and blitzed the fireplace as one.

And the man in shabby clothes, whose existence we had nearly forgotten, stepped up to the bar (minus his apple now) and claimed the hatful of money.

Callahan blinked, then his grin widened and he returned behind the bar. “Mister,” he said, drawing another gin for Ralph, “that was worth every penny it cost us. Your friend is terrific, and I’m honored to have you both in my joint. Here’s another gin for him, and what’re you drinking?”

“Scotch, “the shabby man said, and Callahan nodded and reached for the scotch—but I used to work in a boiler factory once, and so I choked on my drink.

Callahan looked around, puzzled. “What is it, Jake?”

“His lips, Mike,” I croaked, wiping fine whiskey from my beard. “His lips.”

Callahan turned back to the guy, gently lifted the scrofulous mustache and examined the guy’s lips. There were two. “So?” he said, peering at them.”

“I read lips,” I managed at last. “You know that. That guy’s voice said ‘scotch,’ but his lips said ‘bourbon.’

“How the hell could you tell?” Callahan asked reasonably.

“I swear, Mike—he said ‘bourbon’. ‘Here: look.” I wear a mustache myself, middlin’ sanitary, but I covered most of it and all of my mouth with my hand. Then I said, “ ‘Scotch’ ‘Bourbon’… See what I mean? It ain’t the lips, entirely—the mustache, the cheek muscles—I’m telling you, Mike, the guy said ‘bourbon’.”

Callahan looked at the guy, then at me… and then at the dog.

“I’m sorry, Joe,” the dog said miserably. “I thought sure you’d want to stick with scotch.”

The shabby man shrugged eloquently.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a…” Long.Drink began, then caught himself. “You’re the ventriloquist!”

Doc Webster roared with laughter, and Callahan’s eyes widened the barest trifle. “I surely will be go to hell,” he breathed. “I shoulda guessed.”

But I was watching the look exchanged by Joe and Ralph, the way both of them ever so casually got ready to bolt for the door, and I spoke up quickly.

“It’s okay, fellas. Don’t go away—tell us about it.”

They froze, undecided, and the rest of the boys jumped in. “Hell, yeah.”

“Give us the yarn, Ralph.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Get that dog another drink.”

Ralph looked around at us, poised to flee, and then he met Callahan’s eyes for a long moment. He looked exactly like a dog that’s been kicked too often, and I thought he’d go. But he must have heard the sincerity in our voices, or else be read something on Callahan’s face, because all at once he relaxed and curled up on the floor.

“It’s all right, Joe,” he said to the shabby man, who still stood undecided. “These people will, not make trouble for us.” The shabby man nodded philosophically and accepted a bourbon from Callahan.

“How come you can talk?” Fast Eddie asked Ralph. “I mean, if it ain’t no poisonal question or nuttin’.”

“Not at all,” Ralph answered. “I was… created…I suppose you’d say, by a demented genius of a psychology major named Malion, who was desperate for a doctoral thesis. He had a defrocked veterinary surgeon modify my larynx and mouth in my infancy, apparently in the mad hope that he could condition me to parrot human speech. But I’m afraid his experiment blew up in his face. You see,” he said rather proudly, “I seem to be a mutant.”

“This, naturally, was the one thing Malion had never planned for. How could he? Who could guess that a dog could actually have human intelligence? For all I know I am unique—in fact I fervently and desperately hope so. If there are other dogs of my intelligence, but without the capacity for speech, who would ever know?” Ralph shuddered. “At any rate, I destroyed a lot of Malion’s hopes the first time I got tired of his damned yammering and told him what I thought of him and Pavlov and Skinner in no uncertain terms. At first, naturally, he was tremendously excited. But within a few hours, as I reminded him of highlights of our past life together, I could see dawning in him the fear that any lab researcher—let alone a behaviorist—might feel upon realizing that one of his experimental animals is an aware attack dog.

And eventually, of course, he realized the same thing that had kept my own mouth shut for so many months: that if he attempted to write me up for his doctorate, they’d laugh him off the campus. He abandoned me, simply kicked me out in the streets and locked my doggy-door. The next day he left town, and hasn’t been heard from since.”

“Cripes,” said Eddie, “dat’s awful. Abandoned by yer creator.”

“Like Frankenstein,” Doe Webster said.

“Damn right,” Ralph agreed. “I’d like to get my paws on that pig, Malion.”

Then he realized what he’d just said and barked with laughter. The Doc drained his own glass with a gulp and tossed it over his shoulder, squarely into the fire.

“I beg your pardon,” the shepherd continued. “Anyhow, I got by for quite a while. It’s not too hard for a big dog to survive in Suffolk County, especially when the summer people go. But what drove me crazy was having nobody to talk to. After all those years of keeping my mouth shut, so as not to spoil my meal ticket with Malion, I was like a pent-up river ready to burst its dam. But every time I tried to strike up a conversation, the other party ran away rather abruptly. A few children would talk to me, but I soon stopped that, too—their parents gave them endless grief for telling lies, and one day I found myself obliged to bite one. He took a shot at me—with a silver bullet.

“So I tried to sublimate. I found a serviceable typewriter in a junk-yard, swiped paper and stamps and became a writer—of speculative fiction, of course. Since I lived mostly in the remaining farmland east of here, I selected pastoral pen names like Trout and Bird and Farmer although occasionally I wrote under an old family name, Von Wau Wau.”

“Holy smoke,” Wyatt breathed. “So that’s what that hoax was all about…”

“Eventually I acquired something of a following… but answering fan mail is not the same as talking with someone. Besides, I couldn’t cash the checks.

“Then one day, outside a bar in Rocky Point, I happened to overhear some fools making fun of Joe here, because he was a mute. ‘Dummy,’ they called him, and his face was red and he was desperate for a voice with which to curse them. So I did. They fled the bar, screaming like chickens, and ten minutes later Joe and I left the empty bar with the beginnings of a partnership.”

“I get it,” I said, striking my forehead with my hand. “You teamed up.”

“Precisely,” Ralph agreed. “I could have the pleasure of conversing with people, at least by proxy—and so could Joe, simply by letting me put words in his mouth. He grew that mustache to help, and we worked out a fairly simple ‘script’ and ‘cues.’ To support ourselves, we hit upon the old talking-dog routine, which we have been working in taverns from Ronkonkoma to Montauk over the last six months. The beauty of it is that while people virtually always pay up, they never believe I can truly speak. Always they speak only to Joe, congratulating him on his fine trick even if they can’t figure out how he does it. I suppose I should be annoyed by this, but truthfully, I find it hilarious. And at any rate, it’s a living.”

Doe Webster shook his head like… well, like a dog shaking off water is the only simile I can think of. “And to think it took you guys all this time to come to Callahan’s Place,” he said dizzily.

“I feel the same, “Ralph said seriously. “You are the first men who have ever accepted Joe and me as we are, who knew the truth about us and did not run away. Or worse, laugh at us.

“I thank you.”

And Joe pointed at his own chest and nodded vigorously. Me too!

Callahan’s face split in a broad grin. “Sure and hell welcome, fellas,” he boomed, “sure and hell welcome—any time. I can’t think of any two guys I’d rather have in my joint.”

And another cheer went up. “To Ralph and Joe,” Long Drink hollered, and two dozen voices chorused, “To Ralph’n’Joe.” The toast was drunk, the glasses disposed of in unison, and the place started to get real merry. But an idea struck me.

“Hey Ralph,”! called out. “You want a job? A real job?”

Ralph paused in mid-lap and looked up. “Are you crazy? Who’d hire a talking dog?”

“I know the only place around that might,” I told him confidently. “Jim Friend over at WGAB has been talking about taking a year off, and he’s a good friend of mine. How’d you like to run a radio talk-show at 4 A.M. every morning?”

Ralph looked stunned.

“Yeah,” Callahan agreed judiciously, “WGAB would hire a talking dog. Hell, maybe they got one already. Whad’dya say, Ralph?”

I could see Ralph was tempted—but German shepherds are notoriously loyal. “What about Joe?”

“Hmmm.” I thought hard, but I was stumped. Joe was gesticulating furiously, but Ralph ignored him.

“No,” he decided. “I could not leave my friend.”

“I’ll think of something,” Callahan promised, but Ralph shook his head.

“Thank you, “he said, “but there’s no use in raising false hopes. I’m resigned to this life.”

“Mister,” Callahan said firmly, “that’s what this Place is all about. We raise hopes, here—until they’re old enough to fend for themselves. Wait—I got it! Joe!”

The shabby man looked up from his drink, shamefaced.

“Get that frown off yer phiz,” Callahan demanded. “You can type, can’t ya?”

Joe nodded, puzzled. “I taught him,” Ralph said. “Then I can help ya,” the big Irishman told Joe. “How would you like a job over at Brookhaven National Lab?”

Joe looked dubious, and Ralph spoke up again. “I told you, Mr. Callahan—writing just isn’t the same as talking to people.”

“Hold on and listen,” Callahan insisted. “Over at Brookhaven, they got a new computer they’re real proud of-they claim it’s almost alive. So they’re reviving the old gag about having experts try to tell the computer from a guy on a teletype. They’re lookin’ for a guy right now, who don’t mind carryin’ on conversations through one-way glass on a teletype all day long. I bet we could get you the job. How ‘bout it?” And he hauled out the blackboard he uses to keep score for dart games, and gave it and some chalk to Joe. The shabby man took the chalk and carefully printed, “THANK YOU. I’LL GIVE IT A TRY,” in large letters.

“Well Ralph,” Callahan said to the dog, “it looks like you’re a DJ.”

And Ralph yelped happily, nuzzling Joe with his head, while we all started cheering once again.

And, hours later, as we all got ready to bottle it up and go, Ralph turned to Joe and said, almost sadly, “So, Joe my friend. After tomorrow, perhaps we go our separate ways. No longer will I dog your heels.”

Joe winced and wrote, “NO LONGER WILL I HEEL MY DOG, EITHER.”

Doc Webster made a face at the plain Coca Cola that sat before him on the bar. “I might have to heal the both of you if you keep it up,” he growled, and I could see he was still a little miffed over his defeat by Ralph.

“Oh no,” Ralph protested. “I want to get my new job right away. The only other work for a dog of my intelligence is as a seeing eye dog, ja? And radio work is better than replacing a cane, nein?”

“Cane-nein?” the Doc exploded. “Canine? Why you…”

But over what the portly sawbones said then, let us draw a censoring veil of silence. His bark always was worse than his bite.

Say—if Ralph really makes it on radio, and becomes a dog star—is that Sirius?

JEFTY IS FIVE

Harlan Ellison

WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, there was a little kid I played with: Jeffty. His real name was Jeff Kinzer, and everyone who played with him called him Jeffty. We were five years old together, and we had good times playing together.

When I was five, a Clark Bar was as fat around as the gripping end of a Louisville Slugger, and pretty nearly six inches long, and they used real chocolate to coat it, and it crunched very nicely when you bit into the center, and the paper it came wrapped in smelled fresh and good when you peeled off one end to hold the bar so it wouldn’t melt onto your fingers. Today, a Clark Bar is as thin as a credit card, they use something artificial and awful-tasting instead of pure chocolate, the thing is soft and soggy, it costs fifteen or twenty cents instead of a decent, correct nickel, and they wrap it so you think it’s the same size it was twenty years ago, only it isn’t; it’s slim and ugly and nasty-tasting and not worth a penny, much less fifteen or twenty cents.

When I was that age, five years old, I was sent away to my Aunt Patricia’s home in Buffalo, New York for two years. My father was going through “bad times” and Aunt Patricia was very beautiful, and had married a stockbroker. They took care of me for two years. When I was seven, I came back home and went to find Jeffty, so we could play together.

I was seven. Jeffty was still five. I didn’t notice any difference. I didn’t know: I was only seven.

When I was seven years old I used to lie on my stomach in front of our Atwater-Kent radio and listen to swell stuff. I had tied the ground wire to the radiator, and I would lie there with my coloring books and my Crayolas (when there were only sixteen colors in the big box), and listen to the NBC red network: Jack Benny on the Jell-O Program, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy on the Chase and Sanborn Program, One Man’s Family, First Nighter; the NBC blue network: Easy Aces, the Jergens Program with Walter Winchell, Information Please, Death Valley Days; and best of all, the Mutual Network with The Green Hornet, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow and Quiet Please. Today, I turn on my car radio and go from one end of the dial to the other and all I get is 100 strings orchestras, banal housewives and insipid truckers discussing their kinky sex lives with arrogant talk show hosts, country and western drivel and rock music so loud it hurts my ears.

When I was ten, my grandfather died of old age and I was “a troublesome kid,” and they sent me off to military school, so I could be “taken in hand.”

I came back when I was fourteen. Jeffty was still five.

When I was fourteen years old, I used to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons and a matinee was ten cents and they used real butter on the popcorn and I could always be sure of seeing a western like Lash LaRue, or Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder with Bobby Blake as Little Beaver, or Roy Rogers, or Johnny Mack Brown; a scary picture like House of Horrors with Rondo Hat ton as the Strangler, or The Cat People, or The Mummy, or I Married a Witch with Fredric March and Veronica Lake; plus an episode of a great serial like The Shadow with Victor Jory, or Dick Tracy or Flash Gordon; and three cartoons; a James Fitzpatrick TravelTalk; Movietone News; a sing-along and, if I stayed on till evening, Bingo or Keeno; and free dishes. Today, I go to movies and see Clint Eastwood blowing people’s heads apart like ripe cantaloupes.

At eighteen, I went to college. Jeffty was still five. I came back during the summers, to work at my Uncle Joe’s jewelry store. Jeffty hadn’t changed. Now I knew there was something different about him, something wrong, something weird. Jeffty was still five years old, not a day older.

At twenty-two I came home for keeps. To open a Sony television franchise in town, the first one. I saw Jeffty from time to time. He was five.

Things are better in a lot of ways. People don’t die from some of the old diseases any more. Cars go faster and get you there more quickly on better roads. Shirts are softer and silkier. We have paperback books even though they cost as much as a good hardcover used to. When I’m running short in the bank I can live off credit cards till things even out. But I still think we’ve lost a lot of good stuff. Did you know you can’t buy linoleum any more, only vinyl floor covering? There’s no such thing as oilcloth any more; you’ll never again smell that special, sweet smell from your grandmother’s kitchen. Furniture isn’t made to last thirty years or longer because they took a survey and found that young homemakers like to throw their furniture out and bring in all new, color-coded borax every seven years. Records don’t feel right; they’re not thick and solid like the old ones, they’re thin and you can bend them… that doesn’t seem right to me. Restaurants don’t serve cream in pitchers any more, just that artificial glop in little plastic tubs, and one is never enough to get coffee the right color. You can make a dent in a car fender with only a sneaker. Everywhere you go, all the towns look the same with Burger Kings and McDonald’s and 7-Elevens and Taco Bells and motels and shopping centers. Things may be better, but why do I keep thinking about the past?

What I mean by five years old is not that Jeffty was retarded. I don’t think that’s what it was. Smart as a whip for five years old; very bright, quick, cute, a funny kid.

But he was three feet tall, small for his age, and perfectly formed: no big head, no strange jaw, none of that. A nice, normal-looking five-year-old kid. Except that he was the same age as I was: twenty-two.

When he spoke it was with the squeaking, soprano voice of a five-year-old; when he walked it was with the little hops and shuffles of a five-year-old; when he talked to you it was about the concerns of a five-year-old… comic books, playing soldier, using a clothespin to attach a stiff piece of cardboard to the front fork of his bike so the sound it made when the spokes hit was like a motorboat, asking questions like why does that thing do that like that, how high is up, how old is old, why is grass green, what’s an elephant look like? At twenty-two, he was five.

Jeffty’s parents were a sad pair. Because I was still a friend of Jeffty’s, still let him hang around with me, sometimes took him to the county fair or miniature golf or the movies, I wound up spending time with them. Not that I much cared for them, because they were so awfully depressing. But then, I suppose one couldn’t expect much more from the poor devils. They had an alien thing in their home, a child who had grown no older than five in twenty-two years, who provided the treasure of that special childlike state indefinitely, but who also denied them the joys of watching the child grow into a normal adult.

Five is a wonderful time of life for a little kid… or it can be, if the child is relatively free of the monstrous beastliness other children indulge in. It is a time when the eyes are wide open and the patterns are not yet set; a time when one has not yet been hammered into accepting everything as immutable and hopeless; a time when the hands can not do enough, the mind can not learn enough, the world is infinite and colorful and filled with mysteries. Five is a special time before they take the questing, unquenchable, quixotic soul of the young dreamer and thrust it into dreary schoolroom boxes. A time before they take the trembling hands that want to hold everything, touch everything, figure everything out, and make them lie still on desktops. A time before people begin saying “act your age” and “grow up” or “you’re behaving like a baby.” It is a time when a child who acts adolescent is still cute and responsive and everyone’s pet. A time of delight, of wonder, of innocence.

Jeffty had been stuck in that time, just five, just so.

But for his parents it was an ongoing nightmare from which no one—not social workers, not priests, not child psychologists, not teachers, not friends, not medical wizards, not psychiatrists, no one—could slap or shake them awake. For seventeen years their sorrow had grown through stages of parental dotage to concern, from concern to worry, from worry to fear, from fear to confusion, from confusion to anger, from anger to dislike, from dislike to naked hatred, and finally, from deepest loathing and revulsion to a stolid, depressive acceptance.

John Kinzer was a shift foreman at the Balder Tool & Die plant. He was a thirty year man. To everyone but the man living it, his was a spectacularly uneventful life. In no way was he remarkable… save that he had fathered a twenty-two-year-old five-year-old.

John Kinzer was a small man; soft, with no sharp angles; with pale eyes that never seemed to hold mine for longer than a few seconds. He continually shifted in his chair during conversations, and seemed to see things in the upper comers of the room, things no one else could see… or wanted to see. I suppose the word that best suited him was haunted. What his life had become… well, haunted suited him.

Leona Kinzer tried valiantly to compensate. No matter what hour of the day I visited, she always tried to foist food on me. And when Jeffty was in the house she was always at him about eating: “Honey, would you like an orange? A nice orange? Or a tangerine? I have tangerines. I could peel a tangerine for you.” But there was clearly such fear in her, fear of her own child, that the offers of sustenance always had a faintly ominous tone.

Leona Kinzer had been a tall woman, but the years had bent her. She seemed always to be seeking some area of wallpapered wall or storage niche into which she could fade, adopt some chintz or rose-patterned protective coloration and hide forever in plain sight of the child’s big brown eyes, pass her a hundred times a day and never realize she was there, holding her breath, invisible. She always had an apron tied around her waist, and her hands were red from cleaning. As if by maintaining the environment immaculately she could payoff her imagined sin: having given birth to this strange creature.

Neither of them watched television very much. The house was usually dead silent, not even the sibilant whispering of water in the pipes, the creaking of timbers settling, the humming of the refrigerator. Awfully silent, as if time itself had taken a detour around that house.

As for Jeffty, he was inoffensive. He lived in that atmosphere of gentle dread and dulled loathing, and if he understood it, he never remarked in any way. He played, as a child plays, and seemed happy. But he must have sensed, in the way of a five-year-old, just how alien he was in their presence.

Alien. No, that wasn’t right. He was too human, if anything. But out of phase, out of sync with the world around him, and resonating to a different vibration than his parents, God knows. Nor would other children play with him. As they grew past him, they found him at first childish, then uninteresting, then simply frightening as their perceptions of aging became clear and they could see he was not affected by time as they were. Even the little ones, his own age, who might wander into the neighborhood, quickly came to shy away from him like a dog in the street when a car backfires.

Thus, I remained his only friend. A friend of many years. Five years. Twenty-two years. I liked him; more than I can say. And never knew exactly why. But I did, without reserve.

But because we spent time together, I found I was also polite society—spending time with John and Leona Kinzer. Dinner, Saturday afternoons sometimes, an hour or so when I’d bring Jeffty back from a movie. They were grateful: slavishly so. It relieved them of the embarrassing chore of going out with him, of having to pretend before the world that they were loving parents with a perfectly normal, happy, attractive child. And their gratitude extended to hosting me. Hideous, every moment of their depression, hideous.

I felt sorry for the poor devils, but I despised them for their inability to love Jeffty, who was eminently lovable.

I never let on, of course, even during the evenings in their company that were awkward beyond belief.

We would sit there in the darkening living room—always dark or darkening, as if kept in shadow to hold back what the light might reveal to the world outside through the bright eyes of the house—we would sit and silently stare at one another. They never knew what to say to me.

“So how are things down at the plant?” I’d say to John Kinzer.

He would shrug. Neither conversation nor life suited him with any ease or grace. “Fine, just fine,” he would say, finally.

And we would sit in silence again.

“Would you like a nice piece of coffee cake?” Leona would say. “I made it fresh just this morning.” Or deep dish green apple pie. Or milk and tollhouse cookies. Or a brown betty pudding.

“No, no, thank you, Mrs. Kinzer; Jeffty and I grabbed a couple of cheeseburgers on the way home.” And again, silence.

Then, when the stillness and the awkwardness became too much even for them (and who knew how long that total silence reigned when they were alone, with that thing they never talked about any more Flanging between them), Leona Kinzer would say, “I think he’s asleep.”

John Kinzer would say, “I don’t hear the radio playing.

“Just so, it would go on like that, until I could politely find excuse to bolt away on some flimsy pretext. Yes, that was the way it would go on, every time, just the same… except once.

“I don’t know what to do any more,” Leona said. She began crying. “There’s no change, not one day of peace.”

Her husband managed to drag himself out of the old easy chair and went to her. He bent and tried to soothe her, but it was clear from the graceless way in which he touched her graying hair that the ability to be compassionate had been stunned in him. “Shhh, Leona, it’s all right. Shhh.” But she continued crying. Her hands scraped gently at the antimacassars on the arms of the chair.

Then she said, “Sometimes I wish he had been stillborn.”

John looked up into the corners of the room. For the nameless shadows that were always watching him? Was it God he was seeking in those spaces? “You don’t mean that,” he said to her, softly, pathetically, urging her with body tension and trembling in his voice to recant before God took notice of the terrible thought. But she meant it; she meant it very much.

I managed to get away quickly that evening. They didn’t want witnesses to their shame. I was glad to go.

And for a week I stayed away. From them, from Jeffty, from their street, even from that end of town.

I had my own life. The store, accounts, suppliers’ conferences, poker with friends, pretty women I took to well-lit restaurants, my own parents, putting antifreeze in the car, complaining to the laundry about too much starch in the collars and cuffs, working out at the gym, taxes, catching Ian or David (whichever one it was) stealing from the cash register. I had my own life.

But not even that evening could keep me from Jeffty. He called me at the store and asked me to take him to the rodeo. We chummed it up as best a twenty-two-year-old with other interests could… with a five-year-old. I never dwelled on what bound us together; I always thought it was simply the years. That, and affection for a kid who could have been the little brother I never had. (Except I remembered when we had played together, when we had both been the same age; I remembered that period, and Jeffty was still the same.)

And then, one Saturday afternoon, I came to take him to a double feature, and things I should have noticed so many times before, I first began to notice only that afternoon.

I came walking up to the Kinzer house, expecting Jeffty to be sitting on the front porch steps, or in the porch glider, waiting for me. But he was nowhere in sight.

Going inside, into that darkness and silence, in the midst of May sunshine, was unthinkable. I stood on the front walk for a few moments, then cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled, “Jeffty? Hey, Jeffty, come on out, let’s go. We’ll be late.”

His voice came faintly, as if from under the ground.

“Here I am, Donny.”

I could hear him, but I couldn’t see him. It was Jeffty, no question about it: as Donald H. Horton, President and Sole Owner of The Horton TV & Sound Center, no one but Jeffty called me Donny. He had never called me anything else.

(Actually, it isn’t a lie. I am, as far as the public is concerned, Sole Owner of the Center. The partnership with my Aunt Patricia is only to repay the loan she made me, to supplement the money I came into when I was twenty-one, left to me when I was ten by my grandfather. It wasn’t a very big loan, only eighteen thousand, but I asked her to be a silent partner, because of when she had taken care of me as a child.)

“Where are you, Jeffty?”

“Under the porch in my secret place.”

I walked around the side of the porch, and stooped down and pulled away the wicker grating. Back in there, on the pressed dirt, Jeffty had built himself a secret place. He had comics in orange crates, he had a little table and some pillows, it was lit by big fat candles, and we used to hide there when we were both… five.

“What’cha up to?” I asked, crawling in and pulling the grate closed behind me. It was cool under the porch, and the dirt smelled comfortable, the candles smelled clubby and familiar. Any kid would feel at home in such a secret place: there’s never been a kid who didn’t spend the happiest, most productive, most deliciously mysterious times of his life in such a secret place.

“Playin’,” he said. He was holding something golden and round. It filled the palm of his little hand.

“You forget we were going to the movies?”

“Nope. I was just waitin’ for you here.”

“Your mom and dad home?”

“Momma.”

I understood why he was waiting under the porch. I didn’t push it any further. “What’ve you got there?”

“Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Badge,” he said, showing it to me on his flattened palm.

I realized I was looking at it without comprehending what it was for a long time. Then it dawned on me what a miracle Jeffty had in his hand. A miracle that simply could not exist.

“Jeffty,” I said softly, with wonder in my voice, “where’d you get that?”

“Came in the mail today. I sent away for it.”

“It must have cost a lot of money.”

“Not so much. Ten cents an’ two inner wax seals from two jars of Ovaltine.”

“May I see it?” My voice was trembling, and so was the hand I extended. He gave it to me and I held the miracle in the palm of my hand. It was wonderful.

You remember. Captain Midnight went on the radio nationwide in 1940. It was sponsored by Ovaltine. And every year they issued a Secret Squadron Decoder Badge. And every day at the end of the program, they would give you a clue to the next day’s installment in a code that only kids with the official badge could decipher. They stopped making those wonderful Decoder Badges in 1949. I remember the one I had in 1945: it was beautiful. It had a magnifying glass in the center of the code dial. Captain Midnight went off the air in 1950, and though I understand it was a short-lived television series in the mid-fifties, and though they issued Decoder Badges in 1955 and 1956, as far as the real badges were concerned, they never made one after 1949.

The Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph I held in my hand, the one Jeffty said he had gotten in the mail for ten cents (ten cents!!!) and two Ovaltine labels, was brand new, shiny gold metal, not a dent or a spot of rust on it like the old ones you can find at exorbitant prices in collectible shoppes from time to time… it was a new Decoder. And the date on it was this year.

But Captain Midnight no longer existed. Nothing like it existed on the radio. I’d listened to the one or two weak imitations of old-time radio the networks were currently airing, and the stories were dull, the sound effects bland, the whole feel of it wrong, out of date, cornball. Yet I held a new Code-O-Graph.

“Jeffty, tell me about this,” I said.

“Tell you what, Donny? It’s my new Capt’n Midnight Secret Decoder Badge. I use it to figger out what’s gonna happen tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow how?”

“On the program.”

“What program?!”

He stared at me as if I was being purposely stupid. “On Capt’n Midnight! Boy!” I was being dumb.

I still couldn’t get it straight. It was right there, right out in the open, and I still didn’t know what was happening. “You mean one of those records they made of the old-time radio programs? Is that what you mean, Jeffty?”

“What records?” he asked. He didn’t know what I meant.

We stared at each other, there under the porch. And then I said, very slowly, almost afraid of the answer, “Jeffty, how do you hear Captain Midnight?”

“Every day. On the radio. On my radio. Every day at 5:30.”

News. Music, dumb music, and news. That’s what was on the radio every day at 5:30. Not Captain Midnight. The Secret Squadron hadn’t been on the air in twenty years.

“Can we hear it tonight?” I asked.

“Boy!” he said. I was being dumb. I knew it from the way he said it; but I didn’t know why. Then it dawned on me: this was Saturday. Captain Midnight was on Monday through Friday. Not on Saturday or Sunday.

“We goin’ to the movies?”

He had to repeat himself twice. My mind was somewhere else. Nothing definite. No conclusions. No wild assumptions leapt to. Just off somewhere trying to figure it out, and concluding—as you would have concluded, as anyone would have concluded rather than accepting the truth, the impossible and wonderful truth—just finally concluding there was a simple explanation I didn’t yet perceive. Something mundane and dull, like the passage of time that steals all good, old things from us, packratting trinkets and plastic in exchange. And all in the name of Progress.

“We goin’ to the movies, Donny?”

“You bet your boots we are, kiddo,” I said. And I smiled. And I handed him the Code-O-Graph. And he put it in his side pants pocket. And we crawled out from under the porch. And we went to the movies. And neither of us said anything about Captain Midnight all the rest of that day. And there wasn’t a ten-minute stretch, all the rest of that day, that I didn’t think about it.

It was inventory all that next week. I didn’t see Jeffty till late Thursday. I confess I left the store in the hands of Ian and David, told them I had some errands to run, and left early. At 4:00. I got to the Kinzers’ right around 4:45. Leona answered the door, looking exhausted and distant. “Is Jeffty around?” She said he was upstairs in his room…

… listening to the radio.

I climbed the stairs two at a time.

All right, I had finally made that impossible, illogical leap. Had the stretch of belief involved anyone but Jeffty, adult or child, I would have reasoned out more explicable answers. But it was Jeffty, clearly another kind of vessel of life, and what he might experience should not be expected to fit into the ordered scheme.

I admit it: I wanted to hear what I heard.

Even with the door closed, I recognized the program:

“There he goes, Tennessee! Get him!”

There was the heavy report of a squirrel-rifle shot and the keening whine of the slug ricocheting, and then the same voice yelled triumphantly, “Got him! D-e-a-a-a-a-d center!”

He was listening to the American Broadcasting Company, 790 kilohertz, and he was hearing Tennessee led, one of my most favorite programs from the forties, a western adventure I had not heard in twenty years, because it had not existed for twenty years.

I sat down on the top step of the stairs, there in the upstairs hall of the Kinzer home, and I listened to the show. It wasn’t a rerun of an old program; I knew every one of them by heart, had never missed an episode. Further evidence that this was a new installment: there were occasional references during the integrated commercials to current cultural and technological developments, and phrases that had not existed in common usage in the forties: aerosol spray cans, laserasing of tattoos, Tanzania, the word “uptight.”

I couldn’t ignore it: Jeffty was listening to a new segment of Tennessee led.

I ran downstairs and out the front door to my car. Leona must have been in the kitchen. I turned the key and punched on the radio and spun the dial to 790 kilohertz. The ABC station. Rock music.

I sat there for a few moments, then ran the dial slowly from one end to the other. Music, news, talk shows. No Tennessee led. And it was a Blaupunkt, the best radio I could get. I wasn’t missing some perimeter station. It simply was not there!

After a few moments I turned off the radio and the ignition and went back upstairs quietly. I sat down on the top step and listened to the entire program. It was wonderful.

Exciting, imaginative, filled with everything I remembered as being most innovative about radio drama. But it was modern. It wasn’t an antique, rebroadcast to assuage the need of that dwindling listenership who longed for the old days. It was a new show, with all the old voices, but still young and bright. Even the commercials were for currently available products, but they weren’t as loud or as. insulting as the screamer ads one heard on radio these days.

And when Tennessee led went off at 5:00, I heard Jeffty spin the dial on his radio till I heard the familiar voice of the announcer Glenn Riggs proclaim, “Presenting Hop Harrigan! America’s ace of the airwaves!” There was the sound of an airplane in flight. It was a prop plane, not a jet! Not the sound kids today have grown up with, but the sound I grew up with, the real sound of an airplane, the growling, revving, throaty sound of the kind of airplanes G-8 and His Battle Aces flew, the kind Captain Midnight flew, the kind Hop Harrigan flew. And then I heard Hop say, “CX-4 calling control tower. CX-4 calling control tower. Standing by!” A pause, then, “Okay, this is Hop Harrigan… coming in!”

And Jeffty, who had the same problem all of us kids had had in the forties with programming that pitted equal favorites against one another on different stations, having paid his respects to Hop Harrigan and Tank Tinker, spun the dial and went back to ABC where I heard the stroke of a gong, the wild cacophony of nonsense Chinese chatter, and the announcer yelled, “T-e-e-e-rry and the Pirates!”

I sat there on the top step and listened to Terry and Connie and Flip Corkin and, so help me God, Agnes Moorehead as the Dragon Lady, all of them in a new adventure that took place in a Red China that had not existed in the days of Milton Caniff’s 1937 version of the Orient, with river pirates and Chiang Kai-shek and warlords and the naive Imperialism of American gunboat diplomacy.

Sat, and listened to the whole show, and sat even longer to hear Superman and part of Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy and part of Captain Midnight, and John Kinzer came home and neither he nor Leona came upstairs to find out what had happened to me, or where Jeffty was, and sat longer, and found I had started crying, and could not stop, just sat there with tears running down my face, into the comers of my mouth, sitting and crying until Jeffty heard me and opened his door and saw me and came out and looked at me in childish confusion as I heard the station break for the Mutual Network and they began the theme music of Tom Mix, “When It’s Round-up Time in Texas and the Bloom Is on the Sage,” and Jeffty touched my shoulder and smiled at me, with his mouth and his big brown eyes, and said, “Hi, Donny. Wanna come in an’ listen to the radio with me?”

Hume denied the existence of an absolute space, in which each thing has its place; Borges denies the existence of one single time, in which all events are linked.

Jeffty received radio programs from a place that could not, in logic, in the natural scheme of the space-time universe as conceived by Einstein, exist. But that wasn’t all he received. He got mail-order premiums that no one was manufacturing. He read comic books that had been defunct for three decades. He saw movies with actors who had been dead for twenty years. He was the receiving terminal for endless joys and pleasures of the past that the world had dropped along the way. On its headlong suicidal flight toward New Tomorrows, the world had razed its treasurehouse of simple happinesses, had poured concrete over its playgrounds, had abandoned its elfin stragglers, and all of it was being impossibly, miraculously shunted back into the present through Jeffty. Revivified, updated, the traditions maintained but contemporaneous. Jeffty was the unbidding Aladdin whose very nature formed the magic lampness of his reality.

And he took me into his world with him.

Because he trusted me.

We had breakfast of Quaker Puffed Wheat Sparkies and warm Ovaltine we drank out of this year’s Little Orphan Annie Shake-Up Mugs. We went to the movies and while everyone else was seeing a comedy starring Goldie Hawn and Ryan O’Neal, Jeffty and I were enjoying Humphrey Bogart as the professional thief Parker in John Huston’s brilliant adaptation of the Donald Westlake novel Slay-ground. The second feature was Spencer Tracy, Carole Lombard and Laird Cregar in the Val Lewton-produced film of Leinengen Versus the Ants.

Twice a month we went down to the newsstand and bought the current pulp issues of The Shadow, Doc Savage and Startling Stories. Jeffty and I sat together and I read to him from the magazines. He particularly liked the new short novel by Henry Kuttner, “The Dreams of Achilles,” and the new Stanley a. Weinbaum series of short stories set in the subatomic particle universe of Redurna. In September we enjoyed the first installment of the new Robert E. Howard Conan novel, Isle of the Black Ones, in Weird Tales; and in August we were only mildly disappointed by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fourth novella in the Jupiter series featuring John Carter of Barsoom—“Corsairs of Jupiter.” But the editor of Argosy All-Story Weekly promised there would be two more stories in the series, and it was such an unexpected revelation for Jeffty and me that it dimmed our disappointment at the lessened quality of the current story.

We read comics together, and Jeffty and I both decided—separately, before we came together to discuss it—that our favorite characters were Doll Man, Airboy and The Heap. We also adored the George Carlson strips in Jingle Jangle Comics, particularly the Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg stories, which we read together and laughed over, even though I had to explain some of the esoteric puns to Jeffty, who was too young to have that kind of subtle wit.

How to explain it? I can’t. I had enough physics in college to make some offhand guesses, but I’m more likely wrong than right. The laws of the conservation of energy occasionally break. These are laws that physicists call “weakly violated.” Perhaps Jeffty was a catalyst for the weak violation of conservation laws we’re only now beginning to realize exist. I tried doing some reading in the area—muon decay of the “forbidden” kind: gamma decay that doesn’t include the muon neutrino among its products—but nothing I encountered, not even the latest readings from the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research near Zurich, gave me an insight. I was thrown back on a vague acceptance of the philosophy that the real name for “science” is magic.

No explanations, but enormous good times.

The happiest time of my life.

I had the “real” world, the world of my store and my friends and my family, the world of profit&loss, of taxes and evenings with young women who talked about going shopping or the United Nations, of the rising cost of coffee and microwave ovens. And I had Jeffty’s world, in which I existed only when I was with him. The things of the past he knew as fresh and new, I could experience only when in his company. And the membrane between the two worlds grew ever thinner, more luminous and transparent. I had the best of both worlds. And knew, somehow, that I could carry nothing from one to the other.

Forgetting for just a moment, betraying Jeffty by forgetting, brought an end to it all.

Enjoying myself so much, I grew careless and failed to consider how fragile the relationship between Jeffty’s world and my world really was. There is a reason why the present begrudges the existence of the past. I never really understood. Nowhere in the beast books, where survival is shown in battles between claw and fang, tentacle and poison sac, is there recognition of the ferocity the present always brings to bear on the past. Nowhere is there a detailed statement of how the Present lies in wait for What-Was, waiting for it to become Now-This-Moment so it can shred it with its merciless jaws.

Who could know such a thing… at any age… and certainly not at my age… who could understand such a thing?

I’m trying to exculpate myself. I can’t. It was my fault.

It was another Saturday afternoon.

“What’s playing today?” I asked him, in the car, on the way downtown.

He looked up at me from the other side of the front seat and smiled one of his best smiles. “Ken Maynard in Bullwhip Justice an’ The Demolished Man.” He kept smiling, as if he’d really put one over on me. I looked at him with disbelief.

“You’re kidding!” I said, delighted. “Bester’s The Demolished Man?” He nodded his head, delighted at my being delighted. He knew it was one of my favorite books. “Oh, that’s super!”

“Super duper,” he said.

“Who’s in it?”

“Franchot Tone, Evelyn Keyes, Lionel Barrymore and Elisha Cook, Jr.” He was much more knowledgeable about movie actors than I’d ever been. He could name the character actors in any movie he’d ever seen. Even the crowd scenes.

“And cartoons?” I asked.

“Three of ‘em: a Little Lulu, a Donald Duck and a Bugs Bunny. An’ a Pete Smith Specialty an’ a Lew Lehr Monkeys is da C-r-r-r-aziest Peoples.”

“Oh boy!” I said. I was grinning from ear to ear. And then I looked down and saw the pad of purchase order forms on the seat. I’d forgotten to drop it off at the store.

“Gotta stop by the Center,” I said. “Gotta drop off something. It’ll only take a minute.”

“Okay,” Jeffty said. “But we won’t be late, will we?”

“Not on your tintype, kiddo,” I said.

When I pulled into the parking lot behind the Center, he decided to come in with me and we’d walk over to the theater. It’s not a large town. There are only two movie houses, the Utopia and the Lyric. We were going to the Utopia and it was only three blocks from the Center.

I walked into the store with the pad of forms, and it was bedlam. David and Jan were handling two customers each, and there were people standing around waiting to be helped. Jan turned a look on me and her face was a horror-mask of pleading. David was running from the stockroom to the showroom and all he could murmur as he whipped past was “Help!” and then he was gone.

“Jeffty,” I said, crouching down, “listen, give me a few minutes. Jan and David are in trouble with al: these people. We won’t be late, I promise. Just let me get rid of a couple of these customers.” He looked nervous, but nodded okay.

I motioned to a chair and said, “Just sit down for a while and I’ll be right with you.”

He went to the chair, good as you please, though he knew what was happening, and he sat down.

I started taking care of people who wanted color television sets. This was the first really substantial batch of units we’d gotten in-color television was only now becoming reasonably priced and this was Sony’s first promotion—and it was bonanza time for me. I could see paying off the loan and being out in front for the first time with the Center. It was business.

In my world, good business comes first.

Jeffty sat there and stared at the wall. Let me tell you about the wall.

Stanchion and bracket designs had been rigged from floor to within two feet of the ceiling. Television sets had been stacked artfully on the wall. Thirty-three television sets. All playing at the same time. Black and white, color, little ones, big ones, all going at the same time.

Jeffty sat and watched thirty-three television sets, on a Saturday afternoon. We can pick up a total of thirteen channels including the UHF educational stations. Golf was on one channel; baseball was on a second; celebrity bowling was on a third; the fourth channel was a religious seminar; a teenage dance show was on the fifth; the sixth was a rerun of a situation comedy; the seventh was a rerun of a police show; eighth was a nature program showing a man flycasting endlessly; ninth was news and conversation; tenth was a stock car race; eleventh was a man doing logarithms on a blackboard; twelfth was a woman in a leotard doing sitting-up exercises; and on the thirteenth channel was a badly animated cartoon show in Spanish. All but six of the shows were repeated on three sets. Jeffty sat and watched that wall of television on a Saturday afternoon while I sold as fast and as hard as I could, to pay back my Aunt Patricia and stay in touch with my world. It was business.

I should have known better. I should have understood about the present and the way it kills the past. But I was selling with both hands. And when I finally glanced over at Jeffty, half an hour later, he looked like another child.

He was sweating. That terrible fever sweat when you have stomach flu. He was pale, as pasty and pale as a worm, and his little hands were gripping the arms of the chair so tightly I could see his knuckles in bold relief. I dashed over to him, excusing myself from the middle-aged couple looking at the new 21” Mediterranean model.

“Jeffty!”

He looked at me, but his eyes didn’t track. He was in absolute terror. I pulled him out of the chair and started toward the front door with him, but the customers I’d deserted yelled at me, “Hey!” The middle-aged man said, “You wanna sell this thing or don’t you?”

I looked from him to Jeffty and back again. Jeffty was like a zombie. He had come where I’d pulled him. His legs were rubbery and his feet dragged. The past, being eaten by the present, the sound of something in pain.

I clawed some money out of my pants pocket and jammed it into Jeffty’s hand. “Kiddo… listen to me… get out of here right now!” He still couldn’t focus properly. “Jeffty,” I said as tightly as I could, “listen to me!” The middle-aged customer and his wife were walking toward us. “Listen, kiddo, get out of here right this minute. Walk over to the Utopia and buy the tickets. I’ll be right behind you.” The middle-aged man and his wife were almost on us. I shoved Jeffty through the door and watched him stumble away in the wrong direction, then stop as if gathering his wits, turn and go back past the front of the Center and in the direction of the Utopia. “Yes sir,” I said, straightening up and facing them, “yes, ma’am, that is one terrific set with some sensational features! If you’ll just step back here with me…”

There was a terrible sound of something hurting, but I couldn’t tell from which channel, or from which set, it was coming.

Most of it I learned later, from the girl in the ticket booth, and from some people I knew who came to me to tell me what had happened. By the time I got to the Utopia, nearly twenty minutes later, Jeffty was already beaten to a pulp and had been taken to the manager’s office.

“Did you see a very little boy, about five years old, with big brown eyes and straight brown hair… he was waiting for me?”

“Oh, I think that’s the little boy those kids beat up?”

“What!?! Where is he?”

“They took him to the manager’s office. No one knew who he was or where to find his parents—”

A young girl wearing an usher’s uniform was kneeling down beside the couch, placing a wet paper towel on his face.

I took the towel away from her and ordered her out of the office. She looked insulted and snorted something rude, but she left. I sat on the edge of the couch and tried to swab away the blood from the lacerations without opening the wounds where the blood had caked. Both his eyes were swollen shut. His mouth was ripped badly. His hair was matted with dried blood.

He had been standing in line behind two kids in their teens. They started selling tickets at 12:30 and the show started at 1:00. The doors weren’t opened till 12:45. He had been waiting, and the kids in front of him had had a portable radio. They were listening to the ball game. Jeffty had wanted to hear some program, God knows what it might have been, Grand Central Station, Let’s Pretend, The Land of the Lost, God only knows which one it might have been.

He had asked if he could borrow their radio to hear the program for a minute, and it had been a commercial break or something, and the kids had given him the radio, probably out of some malicious kind of courtesy that would permit them to take offense and rag the little boy. He had changed the station… and they’d been unable to get it to go back to the ball game. It was locked into the past, on a station that was broadcasting a program that didn’t exist for anyone but Jeffty.

They had beaten him badly… as everyone watched.

And then they had run away.

I had left him alone, left him to fight off the present without sufficient weaponry. I had betrayed him for the sale of a 21” Mediterranean console television, and now his face was pulped meat. He moaned something inaudible and sobbed softly.

“Shhh, it’s okay, kiddo, it’s Donny. I’m here. I’ll get you home, it’ll be okay.”

I should have taken him straight to the hospital. I don’t know why I didn’t. I should have. I should have done that.

When I carried him through the door, John and Leona Kinzer just stared at me. They didn’t move to take him from my arms. One of his hands was hanging down. He was conscious, but just barely. They stared, there in the semi-darkness of a Saturday afternoon in the present. I looked at them. “A couple of kids peat him up at the theater.” I raised him a few inches in my arms and extended him. They stared at me, at both of us, with nothing in their eyes, without movement. “Jesus Christ,” I shouted, “he’s been beaten! He’s your son! Don’t you even want to touch him? What the hell kind of people are you?!”

Then Leona moved toward me very slowly. She stood in front of us for a few seconds, and there was a leaden stoicism in her face that was terrible to see. It said, I have been in this place before, many times, and I cannot bear to be in it again; but I am here now.

So I gave him to her. God help me, I gave him over to her.

And she took him upstairs to bathe away his blood and his pain.

John Kinzer and I stood in our separate places in the dim living room of their home, and we stared at each other. He had nothing to say to me.

I shoved past him and fell into a chair. I was shaking.

I heard the bath water running upstairs.

After what seemed a very long time Leona came downstairs, wiping her hands on her apron. She sat down on the sofa and after a moment John sat down beside her. I heard the sound of rock music from upstairs.

“Would you like a piece of nice pound cake?” Leona said.

I didn’t answer. I was listening to the sound of the music. Rock music. On the radio. There was a table lamp on the end table beside the sofa. It cast a dim and futile light in the shadowed living room. Rock music from the present, on a radio upstairs? I started to say something, and then knew… Oh, God… no!

I jumped up just as the sound of hideous crackling blotted out the music, and the table lamp dimmed and dimmed and flickered. I screamed something, I don’t know what it was, and ran for the stairs.

Jeffty’s parents did not move. They sat there with their hands folded, in that place they had been for so many years.

I fell twice rushing up the stairs.

There isn’t much on television that can hold my interest. I bought an old cathedral-shaped Philco radio in a second-hand store, and I replaced all the burnt-out parts with the original tubes from old radios I could cannibalize that still worked. I don’t use transistors or printed circuits. They wouldn’t work. I’ve sat in front of that set for hours sometimes, running the dial back and forth as slowly as you can imagine, so slowly it doesn’t look as if it’s moving at all sometimes.

But I can’t find Captain Midnight or The Land of the Lost or The Shadow or Quiet, Please.

So she did love him, still, a little bit, even after all those years. I can’t hate them: they only wanted to live in the present world again. That isn’t such a terrible thing.

It’s a good world, all things considered. It’s much better than it used to be, in a lot of ways. People don’t die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that’s Progress, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

Tell me.

Somebody please tell me.

STONE

Edward Bryant

1

Up above the burning city, a woman wails the blues. How she cries out, how she moans. Flames fed by tears rake fingers across the sky.

It is an old, old song:

Fill me like the mountains

Fill me like the sea

Writhing in the heat, she stands where there is no support. The fire licks her body.

So finely drawn, and with the glitter of ice, the manipulating wires radiate outward. Taut bonds between her body and the flickering darkness, all wires lead to the intangible overshadowing figure behind her. Without expression, Atropos gazes down at the woman.

Face contorting, she looks into the hearts of a million fires and cries out.

As Atropos raises the terrible, cold-shining blades of the Nornshears and with only the barest hesitation cuts the wires. Limbs spread-eagled to the compass points, the woman plunges into the flames. She is instantly and utterly consumed.

The face of Atropos remains shrouded in shadows.

2

ALPERTRON PRESENTS

IN CONCERT

JAIN SNOW

with

MOOG INDIGO

Sixty-track stim by RobCal

June 23, 24

One show nightly at 2100

Tickets $30, $26, $22.

Available from all Alpertron

outlets or at the door.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN

CENTRAL ARENA

DENVER

3

My name is Robert Dennis Clary and I was born twenty-three years ago in Oil City, Pennsylvania, which is also where I was raised. I’ve got a degree in electrical engineering from MIT and some grad credit at Cal Tech in electronics. “Not suitable, Mr. Clary,” said the dean. “You lack the proper team spirit. Frankly speaking, you are selfish. And a cheat.”

My mother told me once she was sorry I wasn’t handsome enough to get by without working. Listen, Ma, I’m all right. There’s nothing wrong with working the concert circuit. I’m working damned hard now. I was never genius enough that I could have got a really good job with, say, Bell Futures or one of the big space firms. But I’ve got one marketable talent-what the interviewer called a peculiarly coordinative affinity for multiplex circuitry. He looked a little stunned after I finished with the stim console. “Christ, kid, you really get into it, don’t you?”

That’s what got me the job with Alpertron, Ltd., the big promotion and booking agency. I’m on the concert tour and work their stim board, me and my console over there on the side of the stage. It isn’t that much different in principle from playing one of the instruments in the backup band, though it’s a hell of a lot more complex than even Nagami’s synthesizer. It all sounds simple enough: my console is the critical link between performer and audience. Just one glorified feedback transceiver: pick up the empathic load from Jain, pipe it into the audience, they react and add their own load, and I feed it all back to the star. And then around again as I use the sixty stim tracks, each with separate controls to balance and augment and intensify. It can get pretty hairy, which is why not just anyone can do the job. It helps that I seem to have a natural resistance to the side-band slopover radiation from the empathic transmissions. “Ever think of teaching?” said the school voc counselor. “No,” I said. “I want the action.”

And that’s why I’m on the concert circuit with Jain Snow; as far as I’m concerned, the only real blues singer and stim star.

Jain Snow, my intermittent unrequited love. Her voice is shagreen-rough; you hear it smooth until it tears you to shreds.

She’s older than I am, four, maybe five years; but she looks like she’s in her middle teens. Jain’s tall, with a tumbleweed bush of red hair; her face isn’t so much pretty as it is intense. I’ve never known anyone who didn’t want to make love to her. “When you’re a star,” she said once, half drunk, “you’re not hung up about taking the last cookie on the plate.”

That includes me, and sometimes she’s let me come into her bed. But no often. “You like it?” she said. I answered sleepily, “You’re really good.”

“Not me,” she said. “I mean being in a star’s bed.” I told her she was a bitch and she laughed. Not often enough.

I know I don’t dare force the issue; even if I did, there would still be Stella.

Stella Vanilla—I’ve never learned exactly what her real last name is-is Jain’s bodyguard. Other stim stars have whole platoons of karate-trained killers for protection. Jain needs only Stella. “Stella, pick me up a fifth? Yeah, Irish. Scotch if they don’t.”

She’s shorter than I am, tiny and dark with curly chestnut hair. She’s also proficient in any martial art I can think of. And if all else fails, in her handbag she carries a .357 Colt Python with a four-inch barrel. When I first saw that bastard, I didn’t believe she could even lift it.

But she can. I watched Stella outside Bradley Arena in L.A. when some overanxious bikers wanted to get a little too close to Jain. “Back off, creeps.”

“So who’s tellin’ us?” She had to hold the Python with both hands, but the muzzle didn’t waver. Stella fired once; the slug tore the guts out of a parked Harley-Wankel. The bikers backed off very quickly.

Stella enfolds Jain in her protection like a raincape. It sometimes amuses Jain; I can see that. Stella, get Alpertron on the phone for me. Stella? Can you score a couple grams? Stella, check out the dudes in the hall. Stella. It never stops.

When I first met her, I thought that Stella was the coldest person I’d ever encountered. And in Des Moines I saw her crying alone in a darkened phone booth Jain had awakened her and told her to take a walk for a couple hours while she screwed some rube she’d picked up in the hotel bar. I tapped on the glass; Stella ignored me.

Stella, do you want her as much as I?

So there we are a nice symbolic obtuse triangle. And yet…We’re all just one happy show-biz family.

4

This is Alpertron, Ltd.‘s, own chartered jet, flying at 37,000 feet above western Kansas. Stella and Jain are sitting across the aisle from me. It’s a long flight and there’s been a lull in; the usually boisterous flight conversation. Jain flips through a current Neiman-Marcus catalogue; exclusive mail-order listings are her present passion.

I look up as she bursts into raucous laughter. “I’ll be goddamned. Will you look at this?” She points at the open catalogue on her lap.

Hollis, Moog Indigo’s color operator, is seated behind her. She leans forward and cranes her neck over Jain’s shoulder. “Which?”

“That,” she says. “The VTP.”

“What’s VTP?” says Stella. Hollis says, “Video tape playback.”

“Hey, everybody!” Jain raises her voice, cutting stridently through everyone else’s conversations. “Get this. For a.small fee, these folks’ll put a video tape gadget in my tombstone. It’s got everything-stereo sound and color. All I’ve got to dis go in before I die and cut the tape.”

“Terrific!” Hollis says. “You could leave an album of greatest hits. You know, for posterity. Free concerts on the grass every Sunday.”

“That’s really sick,” Stella says.

“Free, hell.” Jain grins. “Anybody who wants to catch the show can put a dollar in the slot.”

Stella stares disgustedly out the window.

Hollis says, “Do you want one of those units for your birthday?”

“Nope.” Jain shakes her head. “I’m not going to need one.”

“Never?”

“Well… not for a long time.” But I think her words sound, unsure.

Then I only half listen as I look out from the plane across the scattered cloud banks and the Rockies looming to the, west of us. Tomorrow night we play Denver. “It’s about as close to home as I’m gonna get,” Jain had said in New Orleans when we found out Denver was booked.

“A what?” Jain’s voice is puzzled.

“A cenotaph,” says Hollis. “Shut up,” Stella says. “Uainn .it.”

5

We’re in the Central Arei2, the architectural pride of Denver District. This is the latest gathering place in all of Rocky Mountian, that heterogeneous, anachronistic strip-city clinging to the front ranges of the continental divide all the way from Billings down to the southern suburb of El Paso.

The dome stretches up beyond the range of the house lights. Ii it were rigid, there could never be a Rocky Mountain Central Arena. But it’s made of flexible plastic-variant and blowers flame up heated air to keep it buoyant. We’re on the inner skin of a giant balloon. When the arena’s full, the body heat from the audience keeps the dome aloft, and the arena crew turns off the blowers.

I killed time earlier tonight reading the promo pamphlet on this place. As the designer says, the combination of arena and spectators turns the dome into one sustaining organism. At first I misread it as “orgasm.”

I monitor crossflow conversations through plugs inserted in both ears as set-up people check out the lights, sound, color, and all the rect of the systems. Finally some nameless tech comes on circuit to give my stim console a run-through.

“Okay, Rob, I’m up in the booth above the east aisle. Give me just a tickle.” My nipples were sensitized to her tongue, rough as a cat’s.

I’m wired to a test set fully as powerful as the costume Jain’ll wear later-just not as exotic. I slide a track control forward until it reaches the five-position on a scale calibrated to one hundred.

“Five?” the tech says.

“Right.”

“Reading’s dead-on. Give me a few more tracks.”

I comply. She kisses me with lips anti tongue, working down across my belly.

“A little higher, please.”

I push the tracks to fifteen.

“You’re really in a mood, Rob.”

“So what do you want me to think?” I say.

“Jesus,” says the tech. “You ought to be performing. The crowd would love it.”

“They pay Jain. She’s the star.” I tried to get on top; she wouldn’t let me. A moment later it didn’t matter.

“Did you just push the board to thirty?” The tech’s voice ‘...sounds strange.”

“No. Did you read that?”

“Negative, but for a moment it felt like it.” He pauses. “You’re not allowing your emotional life to get in the way of your work, are you?”

“Screw off,” I answer. “None of your business.”

“No threats,” says the tech. “Just a suggestion.”

“Stick it.”

“Okay, okay. She’s a lovely girl, Rob. And like you say, she’s the star.”

“I know.”

“Fine. Feed me another five tracks, Rob; broad spectrum this time.”

I do so and the tech is satisfied with the results. “That ought to do it,” he says. “I’ll get back to you later.” He . breaks off the circuit. All checks are done; there’s nothing now on the circuits but a background scratch like insects climbing over old newspapers. She will not allow me to be exhausted for long.

Noisily, the crowd is starting to file into the Arena.

I wait for the concert.

6

There’s never before been a stint star of the magnitude of Jain Snow. Yet somehow the concert tonight fails. Some where the chemistry goes wrong. The faces out there are as always-yet somehow they are not involved. They care, but not enough.

I don’t think the fault’s in Jain. I detect no significant difference from other concerts. Her skin still tantalizes the audience as nakedly, only occasionally obscured by the cloudy metal mesh that transforms her entire body into a single antenna. I’ve been there when she’s performed a hell of a lot better, maybe, but I’ve also seen her perform worse, and still come off the stage happy.

It isn’t Moog Indigo; they’re laying down the sound and light patterns behind Jain as expertly as always.

Maybe it’s me, but I don’t think I’m handling the stim console badly. If I were, the nameless tech would be on my ass over the com circuit.

Jain goes into her final number. It does not work. The audience is enthusiastic and they want an encore, but that’s just it they shouldn’t want cie. They shouldn’t need one.

She comes off the stage crying. I touch her arm as she walks past my console. Jain stops and rubs her eyes and asks me if I’ll go back to the hotel with her.

7

It seems like the first time I was in Jain Snow’s bed. Jain keeps the room dark and says nothing as we go through the positions. Her breathing grows a little ragged; that is all. And yet she is more demanding of me than ever before.

When it’s done, she holds me close and very tightly. Her rate of breathing slows and becomes regular. I wonder if she is asleep.

“Hey.” I say.

“What?” She slurs the word sleepily.

“I’m sorry about tonight.”

“… Not your fault.”

“I love you very much.”

She rolls to face me. “Huh?”

“I love you.”

“No, babe. Don’t say that.”

“It’s true,” I say.

“Won’t work.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I say.

“It can’t work.”

I know I don’t have any right to feel this, but I’m pissed, and so I move away in the bed. “I don’t care.”

“Such a goddamned adolescent, Rob.”

After a while, she says, “Robbie, I’m cold,” and so I move back to her and hold her and say nothing. I realize, rubbing against her hip, that I’m hard again; she doesn’t object as I pour back into her all the frustration she unloaded in me earlier.

Neither of us sleeps much the rest of the night. Sometime before dawn I doze briefly and awaken from a nightmare. I am disoriented and can’t remember the entirety of the dream, but I do remember hard wires and soft flows of electrons. My eyes suddenly focus and I see her face inches away from mine. Somehow she knows what I am thinking. “Whose turn is it?” she says. The antenna.

8

At least a thousand hired kids are there setting up chairs in the arena this morning, but it’s still hard to feel I’m not alone. The dome is that big. Voices get lost here. Even thoughts echo.

“It’s gonna be a hell of a concert tonight. I know it.” Jain had said that and smiled at me when she came through here about ten. She’d swept down the center aisle in a flurry of feathers and shimmering red strips, leaving all the civilians stunned and quivering.

God only knows why she was up this early; over the last eight months, I’ve never seen her get up before noon on a concert day. That kind of sleep-in routine would kill me. I was out of bed by eight this morning, partly because I’ve got to get this console modified by show-time, and partly because I didn’t feel like being in the star’s bed when she woke up.

“The gate’s going to be a lot bigger than last night,” Jain had said. “Can you handle it?”

“Sure. Can you?”

Jain had flashed me another brilliant smile and left. And so I sit here substituting circuit chips.

A couple kids climb on stage and pull breakfasts out of their backpacks. “You ever read this?” says one, pulling a tattered paperback from his hip pocket. His friend shakes her head. “You?” He turns the book in my direction; I recognize the cover.

It was two, maybe three months ago in Memphis, in a studio just before rehearsal. Jain had been sitting and reading. She reads quite a lot, though the promotional people .downplay it-Alpertron, Ltd., likes to suck the country-girl image for all it’s worth.

“What’s that?” Stella says.

“A book.” Jain holds up the book so she can see.

“I knew that.” Stella reads the title: Receptacle. “Isn’t that

“Yeah,” says Jain.

Everybody knows about Receptacle—the best-seller of the year. It’s all fact, about the guy who went to Prague to have a dozen artificial vaginas implanted all over his body. Nerve grafts, neural rerouting, the works. I’d seen him interviewed on some talk show where .he’d worn a jumpsuit zipped to the neck.

“It’s grotesque,” Stella says.

Jain takes back the book and shrugs.

“Would you try something like this?”

“Maybe I’m way beyond it.” A receptacle works only one-way.

Stella goes white and bites off whatever it is she was about to say.

“Oh, baby, I’m sorry.” Jain smiles and looks fourteen again. Then she stands and gives Stella a quick hug. She glances over at me and winks, and my face starts to flush. One-way.

Now, months later, I remember it and my skin again goes warm. ‘Get out of here,” I say to the kids. “I’m trying to concentrate.” They look irritated, but they leave.

I’m done with the circuit chips. Now the easy stuff. I wryly note the male and female plugs I’m connecting. Jain…

The corn circuit buzzes peremptorily and Jain’s voice says, “Robbie? Can you meet me outside?”

I hesitate, then say, “Sure, I’m almost done with the board.”

“I’ve got a car; we’re going away.”

“…What?”

“Just for the afternoon.”

“Listen, Jain-“

She says, “Hurry,” and cuts off.

It’s gonna be a hell of a concert.

9

Tonight’s crowd strains even the capacity of the Rocky Mountain Central Arena. The gate people say there are more than nine hundred thousand people packed into the smoky recesses of the dome. It’s not just hard to believe; it’s scary. But computer ticket-totes don’t lie.

I look out at the crowd and it’s like staring at the Pacific after dark; the gray waves march out to the horizon until you can’t tell one from the other. Here on the stage, the crowd mutter even sounds like the sea, exactly as though I was on the beach trying to hear in an eighteen-foot surf. It all washes around me and I’m grateful for the twin earpieces,’ reassured to hear the usual check-down lists on the in-house corn circuit.

I notice that the blowers have cut off. It’s earlier than usual, but obviously there’s enough body heat to keep the dome buoyed aloft. I imagine the Central Arena drifting away like that floating city they want to make out of Venice, California. There is something appealing about the thought of this dome floating away like dandelion fluff. But now the massive air-conditioning units hum on and the fantasy dies.

The house lights momentarily dim and the crowd noise raises a few decibels. I realize I can’t see features or faces or even separate bodies. There are simply too many people to, comprehend. The crowd has fused into one huge tectonic slab of flesh.

“Rob, are you ready?” The tech’s soft voice in my earpiece.

“Ready.”

“It’s a big gate tonight. Can you do it?”

Sixty overlay tracks and one corn board between Jain and maybe a cool million horny, sweating spectators? “Sure,” I say. “Easy.” But momentarily I’m not sure and I realize how tightly I’m gripping the ends of the console. I consciously will my fingers to loosen.

“Okay,” the tech says. “But if anything goes wrong, cut it. Right? Damp it completely.”

“Got it.”

“Fine,” he says. “About a minute, stand by. Ms. Snow wants to say hello.”

“Hello, Robbie?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Good luck.”

Interference crackles and what she says is too soft to hear,

I tell her, “Repeat, please.”

“Stone don’t break. At least not easy.” She cuts off the circuit.

I’ve got ten seconds to stare out at that vast crowd. Where,

I wonder, did the arena logistics people scrape up almost a million in/out headbands? I know. I’m hallucinating, but for just a moment I see the scarlet webwork of broadcast power reaching out from my console to those million skulls. I don’t know why; I find myself reaching for the shield that covers the emergency total cutoff. I stop my hand.

The house lights go all the way down; the only illumination comes from a thousand-exit signs and the equipment lights. Then Moog Indigo troops onstage as the crowd begins to scream in anticipation. The group finds their instruments in the familiar darkness. The crowd is already going crazy.

Hollis strokes her color board and shoots concentric spheres of hard primaries expanding through the arena; red, yellow, blue. Start with the basics. Red. Nagami’s synthesizer spews a volcanic flow of notes like burning magma.

And then Jain Is there. Center stage.

“Damn it,” says the tech in my ear. “Level’s too low. Bring it up in back.” I must have been dreaming. I am performing stupidly, like an amateur. Gently I bring up two atim balance slides.

“-love you. Every single one of you.”

The crowd roars back. The filling begins. I cut in four more low-level tracks.

“—ready. How about you?”

They’re ready. I cut in another dozen tracks, then mute two. Things are building just a little too fast. The fine mesh around Jain’s body seems to glitter with more than reflected light. Her skin already gleams with moisture.

“—get started easy. And then things’ll get hard. Yeah?”

“YEAH!” from thousands of throats simultaneously.

I see her stagger slightly. I don’t think I am feeding her too much too fast, but mute another pair of tracks anyway. Moog Indigo takes their cue and begins to play. Hollis gives the dome the smoky pallor of slow-burning leaves. Then Jain Snow sings:

And I fill her with them.

And give her back to them.

space and time measured in my heart

10

In the afternoon:

Jain gestures in an expansive circle. “‘This is where I grew up,”

The mountains awe me. “Right here?”

She shakes her head. “It was a lot like this. My pa ran sheep. Maybe a hundred miles north.”

“But in the mountains?”

“Yeah. Really isolated. My pa convinced himself he was one of the original settlers. He was actually a laid-off aerospace engineer out of Seattle.”

The wind flays. us for a moment; Jain’s hair whips and she shakes it back from her eyes. i pull her into the shelter of my arms, wrapping my coat around us both. “Do you want to go back down to the car?”

“Hell, no,” she says. “A mountain zephyr can’t scare met; off.”

I’m not used to this much open space; it scares me a little, though I’m not going to admit that to Jain. We’re above timberline, and the mountainside is too stark for my taste. I suddenly miss the rounded, wooded hills of Pennsylvania. Jain surveys the rocky fields rubbed raw by wind and snow, and I have a quick feeling she’s scared too. “Something” wrong?”

“Nope. Just remembering.”

“What’s it like on a ranch?”

“Okay, if you don’t like people,” she says slowly, obvious… ly recalling details. “My pa didn’t.”

“No neighbors?”

“Not a one in twenty miles.”

“Brothers?” I say. “Sisters?”

She shakes her head. “Just my pa.” I guess I look curious. because she looks away and adds, “My mother died off’ tetanus right after I was born. It was a freak thing.”

I try to change the subject. “Your father didn’t come down to the first concert, did he? Is he coming tonight?”

“No way,” she says. “He didn’t and he won’t. He doesn’t like what I do.” I can’t think of anything to say now. After a while Jain rescues me. “It isn’t your hassle, and it isn’t mine anymore.”

Something perverse doesn’t let me drop it now. “So you grew up alone.”

“You noticed,” she says softly. “You’ve got a hell of a way with understatement.”

I persist. “Then I don’t understand why you still come up here. You must hate this.”

“Ever see a claustrophobe deliberately walk into a closet and shut the door? If I don’t fight it this way-” Her fingers dig into my arms. Her face is fierce. “This has got to be better than what I do on stage.” She swings away from me. “Shit!” she says. “Damn it all to hell.” She stands immovable, staring down the mountain for several minutes. When she turns back toward me, her eyes are softer and there’s a fey tone in her voice. “If I die-” She laughs. “When I die. I want my ashes here.”

“Ashes?” I say, unsure how to respond. Humor her. “Sure.”

“You.” She points at me. “Here.” She indicates the rock face. The words are simple commands given to a child.

“Me.” I manage a weak smile.

Her laugh is easy and unstrained now. “Kid games. Did you do the usual things when you were a kid, babe?”

“Most of them.” I hardly ever won, but then I liked to play games with outrageous risks.

“Hammer, rock and scissors?”

“Sure, when I was really young.” I repeat by long remembered rote: “Rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covers rock.”

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s play.” I must look doubtful. “Rob,” she says warningly.

“Okay.” I hold out my right hand.

Jain says, “One two, three.” On “three,” we each bring up our right hand. Hers is a clenched fist: stone. My first two fingers form the snipping blades of a pair of scissors. “I win!” she crows, delighted.

“What do you win?”

“You. Just for a little while.” She pulls my hands close and lays them on her body.

“Right here on the mountain?” I say.

“I’m from pioneer stock. But you-” She shrugs. “Too delicate?”

I laugh and pull her close.

“Just-” She hesitates. “Not like the other times? Don’t take this seriously, okay?”

In my want I forget the other occasions. “Okay.”

Each of us adds to the other’s pleasure, and it’s better than the other times. But even when she comes, she stares through me, and I wonder whose face she’s seeing—no, not even that—how many faces she’s seeing. Babe, no man can fill me like they do.

And then I come also and-briefly-it doesn’t matter.

My long coat is wrapped around the two of us, and we watch each other inches apart. “So much passion, Rob…It seems to build.”

I remember the stricture and say, “You know why.”

“You really like me so much?” The little-girl persona.

“I really do.”

“What would you do for me, if I asked you?”

“Anything.”

“Would you kill for me?”

I say, “Sure.”

“Really?”

“Of course.” I smile. I know how to play.

“This is no game.”

My face must betray my confusion. I don’t know how I should react.

Her expression mercurially alters to sadness. “You’re scissors, Robbie. All shiny cold metal. Ijow can you ever hope to cut stone?”

Would I want to?

11

Things get worse.

Is it simply that I’m screwing up on my own hook, or is it because we’re exploring a place no performance has ever been? I don’t have time to worry about it; I .play the console like it was the keyboard on Nagami’s synthesizer.

Take it

When you can get it

Where you can get it

Jain sways and the crowd sways; she thrusts and the crowd thrusts. It is one gigantic act. It is as though a temblor shakes the Front Range.

Insect chittering in my earpiece: “What the hell’s going on, Rob? I’m monitoring the stun feed. You’re oscillating from hell to fade-out.”

“I’m trying to balance.” I juggle slides. “Any better?”

“At least it’s no worse,” says the tech. He pauses. “Can you manage the payoff?”

The payoff. The precision-engineered and carefully timed .upslope leading to climax. The Big Number. I’ve kept the stim tracks plateaued for the past three sets. “Coming,” I say. “It’s coming. There’s time.”

“You’re in bad trouble with New York if there isn’t,” says the tech. “I want to register a jag. Now.”

“Okay,” I say.

Love me

Eat me

All of me

“Better,” the tech says. “But keep it rising. I’m still only registering a sixty percent.”

Sure, bastard. It isn’t your brain burning with the output of these million strangers. My violence surprises me. But I push the stun up to seventy. Then Nagami goes into a synthesizer riff, and Jain sags back against a vertical rank of amps.

“Robbie?” It comes into my left ear, on the in-house corn circuit reserved for performer and me alone.

“I’m here, Jain.”

“You’re not trying, babe.”

I stare across the stage and she’s looking back at me. Her eyes flash emerald in the wave from Hollis’s color generator. She subvocalizes so her lips don’t move.

“I mean it.”

“This is new territory,” I answer. “We never had a million before.” I know she thinks it’s an excuse.

“This is it, babe,” she says. “It’s tonight. Will you help me?”

I’ve known the question would come, though I hadn’t known who’d articulate it-her or me. My hesitation stretches much longer in my head than it does in realtime. So much passion, Rob… It seems to build. Would you kill for me?

“Yes,” I say.

“Then I love you,” and breaks off as the riff ends and she struts back out into the light. I reluctantly touch the console and push the stim to seventy-five. Fifty tracks are in.. Jain, will you love me if I don’t?

A bitter look

Eighty. I engage five more tracks. Five to go. The crowd’s getting damn near all of her. And, of course, the opposite’s true.

A flattering word

Since I first heard her in Washington, I’ve loved this song the best. I push more keys. Eighty-two. Eighty-five. I know the tech’s happily watching the meters.

A kiss

The last tracks cut in. Okay, you’re getting everything from the decaying food in her gut to her deepest buried childhood fears of an empty echoing house. Ninety.

A sword

And the song ends, one last diminishing chord, but her body continues to move. For her there is still music.

On the com circuit the tech yells: “Idiot! I’m already reading ninety. Ninety, damn it. There’s still one number to go.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Sorry. just… trying to make up for previous lag-time.”

He continues to shout and I don’t answer. On the stage Nagami and Hollis look at each other and at the rest of the group, and then Moog Indigo slides into the last number with scarcely a pause. Jain turns toward my side of the stage and gives me a soft smile. And then it’s back to the audience and into the song she always tops her concerts with, the number that really made her.

Fill me like the mountains

Ninety-five. There’s only a little travel left in the console slides.

The tech’s voice is aghast. “Are you out of your mind, Rob? I’ve got a ninety-five here-damned needle’s about to peg. Back off to ninety.”

“Say again?” I say. “Interference. Repeat, please.”

“I said back off! We don’t want her higher than ninety.”

Fill me like the sea

Jain soars to the climax. I shove the slides all the way forward. The crowd is on its feet; I have never been so frightened in my life.

“Rob! I swear to God you’re canned, you-“

Somehow Stella’s on the com line too: “You son of a bitch! You hurt her-“

Jain flings her arms wide. Her back arches impossibly.

All of me

One hundred.

I cannot rationalize electronically what happens. I cannot imagine the affection and hate and lust and fear cascading into her and pouring back out. But I see the antenna mesh around her naked body glowing suddenly whiter until it flares in an actinic flash and I shut my eyes.

When I open them again, Jain is a blackened husk tottering toward the front of the stage. Her body falls over the edge into the first rows of spectators.

The crowd still thinks this is part of the set, and they love it.

12

No good-bys. I know I’m canned. When I go into the Denver Alpertron office in another day and a half to pick up my final check, some subordinate I’ve never seen before gives me the envelope.

“Thanks,” I say. He stares at me and says nothing.

I turn to leave and meet Stella in the hall. The top of her head comes only to my shoulders, and so she has to tilt her face up to glare at me. She says, “You’re not going to be working for any promoter in the business. New York says so.”

“Fine,” I say. I walkpast her.

Before I reach the door, she stops me by saying, “The initial report is in already.”

I turn. “And?”

“The verdict will probably end up accidental death. Everybody’s bonded. Jain was insured for millions. Everything will turn out all right for everyone.” She stares at me for several seconds. “Except Jain. You bastard.”

We have our congruencies.

The package comes later, along with a stiff legal.letter from a firm of attorneys. The substance of the message is this: “Jain Snow wished you to have possession of this. She informed you prior to her demise of her desires; please carry them out accordingly.” The packet contains a chrome cylinder with a screw cap. The cylinder contains ashes; ashes and a few bone fragments. I check. Jain’s ashes, unclaimed by a father, friends or employer.

I drive west, away from the soiled towers of the strip-city.

I drive beyond. the colstrip pits and into the mountains until °the paved highway becomes narrow asphalt and then rutted earth and then only a trace, and the car can go no further. With the metal cylinder in one hand I flee on foot until I no longer hear sounds of city or human beings.

At last the trees end and I climb over bare mountain grades. I rest briefly when the pain in my lungs is too sharp to ignore.

At last I reach the summit.

I scatter Jain’s ashes on the wind.

Then I hurl the empty cylinder down toward the timberline; it rolls and clatters and finally is only a distant glitter on the talus slope.

“Jain!” I scream at the sky until my voice is gone and vertigo destroys my balance.

The echoes die.

As Jain died.

I lie down unpeacefully—exhausted-and sleep, and my dreams are of weathered stone.

And I awake empty.

COUNT THE CLOCK

THAT TELLS THE TIME

Harlan Ellison

When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard;

Then of the beauty do I question make,

That thou among the wastes of time must go…

William Shakespeare,

The Xllth Sonnet

Waking in the cool and cloudy absolute dead middle of a Saturday afternoon one day, Ian Ross felt lost and vaguely frightened. Lying there in his bed, he was disoriented, and it took him a moment to remember when it was and where he was. Where he was in the bed where he had awakened every day of his 35-year-old life. When it was the Saturday he had resolved to spend doing something. But as he lay there he realized he had come to life in the early hours just after dawn, it had looked as though it would rain, the sky seen through the high French windows, and he had turned over and gone back to sleep. Now the clock-radio on the bedside table told him it was the absolute dead middle of the afternoon; and the world outside his windows was cool and cloudy. “Where does the time go?” he said.

He was alone, as always there was no one to hear him or to answer. So he continued lying there, wasting time, feeling vaguely frightened. As though something important were passing him by.

A fly buzzed him, circled, buzzed him again. It had been annoying him for some time. He tried to ignore the intruder and stared off across Loch Tummel to the amazing flesh tones of the October trees, preparing themselves for Winter’s disingenuous attentions and the utter absence of tourism. The silver birches were already a blazing gold, the larches and ash trees still blending off from green to rust; in a few weeks the Norway spruces and the other conifers would darken until they seemed mere shadows against the, slate sky.

Perthshire was most beautiful at this time of year. He had taken the time to learn to pronounce the names-Schiehallion, Killiecrankie,

Pitlochry, Aberfeldy-and had come here to sit. The dream. The one he had always held silent, close to him, unspoken, in his idle thoughts. The dream of going to Scotland. For what reason he could not say. But this was the place that had always called, and he had come.

For the first time in his life, Ian Ross had done something. Thirty-seven years old, rooted to a tiny apartment in Chicago, virtually friendless, working five days a week at a drafting table in a firm of industrial designers, watching television till sign-off, tidying the two and a half rooms till every picture hung from the walls in perfect true with the junctures of walls and ceiling, entering each checkbook notation in the little ledger with a fine-point ink pen, unable to remember what had happened last Thursday that made it different from last Wednesday, seeing himself reflected in the window of the cafeteria slowly eating the $2.95 Christmas Dinner Special, a solitary man, somehow never making the change of the seasons save to understand only by his skin that it was warmer or colder, never tasting joy because he could never remember having been told what it was, reading books about things and subject matter, topics not people, because he knew so few people and knew none of them, drawing straight lines, feeling deserted but never knowing where to put his hands to relieve that feeling a transient man, passing down the same streets every day and perceiving only dimly that there were streets beyond those streets, drinking water and apple

juice, and water, replying when he was addressed directly, looking around sometimes when he was addressed to see if it was, in fact, himself to whom the speaker was speaking, buying gray socks and white undershorts, staring out the windows of his apartment at the Chicago snow, staring for hours at the invisible sky, feeling the demon wind off Lake Michigan rattling the window glass in its frame and thinking this year he would reputty and this year failing to reputty, combing his hair as he always had, cooking his own meals, alone with the memories of his mother and father who had died within a year of each other and both from cancer, never having been able to speak more than a few awkward sentences to any woman but his mother…Ian Ross had lived his life like the dust that lay in a film across the unseen top of the tall wardrobe cabinet in his bedroom; colorless, unnoticed, inarticulate, neither giving nor taking.

Until one day he had said. “Where does the time go?” And in the months following those words he had come to realize he had not, in any remotely valuable manner, lived his life. He had wasted it. Months after the first words came, unbidden and tremulous, he admitted to himself that he had wasted his life.

He resolved to actualize at least the one dream. To go to Scotland. Perhaps to live. To rent or even buy a crofter’s cottage on the edge of a moor or overlooking one of the lochs he had dreamed about. He had all the insurance money still put by; he hadn’t touched a cent of it. And there, in that far, chill place in the north he would live…walking the hills with a dog by his side, smoking a pipe that trailed a fragrant pennant of blue-white smoke, hands thrust deep into the pocket of a fleece-lined jacket. He would live there. That was the dream.

And from King’s Cross Station he had taken the 2130 sleeper to Edinburgh, and he had walked the Royal Mile and gazed in wonder at Edinburgh Castle high on the bluff overlooking that bountiful city, and finally he had rented a car and had driven north out the Queens ferry Road, across the bridge that spanned the Firth of Forth, on up the A-90 till he reached Pitlochry. Then a left, a random left, but not so random that he did not know it would come out overlooking the Queens View, said to be the most beautiful view in the world, certainly in Scotland; and he had driven the twisting, narrow road till he was deep in the hills of Perth.

And there he had pulled off the road, gotten out of the car, leaving the door open, and walked away down the October hills ,to finally sit staring at the Loch, green and blue and silent as the mirror of his memory.

Where only the buzzing fly reminded him of the past.

He had been 35 when he said. “Where does the time go?” And he was 37 as he sat on the hill.

And it was there that the dream died.

He stared at the hills, at the valley that ran off to left and right, at the sparkling water of the Loch, and knew he had wasted his time again. He had resolved to do something; but he had done nothing. Again.

There was no place for him here.

He was out of phase with all around him. He was an alien object. A beer can thrown into the grass. A broken wall untended and falling back into the earth from which it had been wrenched stone by stone.

He felt lonely, starved, incapable of clenching his hands or clearing his throat. A ruin from another world, set down in foreign soil, drinking air that was not his to drink. There were no tears, no pains in his body, no deep and trembling sighs. In a moment, with a fly buzzing, the dream died for him. He had not been saved; had, in fact, come in an instant to understand that he had been a child to think it could ever change. What do you want to be when you grow up? Nothing. As I have always been nothing.

The sky began to bleach out.

The achingly beautiful golds and oranges and yellows began to drift toward sepia. The blue of the loch slid softly toward chalkiness, like an ineptly prepared painting left too long in direct sunlight. The sounds of birds and forest creatures and insects faded, the gain turned down slowly. The sun gradually cooled for Ian Ross. The sky began to bleach out toward a gray-white newsprint colorlessness. The fly was gone. It was cold now; very cold now.

Shadows began to superimpose themselves over the dusty mezzotint of the bloodless day.

A city of towers and minarets, as seen through shallow, disturbed water; a mountain range of glaciers with snow untracked and j endless as an ocean; an ocean, with massive, . serpent-necked creatures gliding through the jade deeps; a parade of ragged children bearing crosses hewn from tree branches; a great walled fortress in the middle of a parched wasteland, the yellow earth split like strokes of lightning all around the structure; a motorway with hundreds of cars speeding past so quickly they seemed to be stroboscopic lines of colored light—a battlefield with men in flowing robes and riding great-chested stallions, the sunlight dancing off curved swords and helmets; a tornado careening through a small town of slat back stores and houses, lifting entire buildings from their foundations and flinging them into the sky; a river of lava burst through a fissure in the ground and boiled toward a shadowy indication of an amusement park, with throngs of holiday tourists moving in clots from one attraction to another.

Ian Ross sat, frozen, on the hillside. The world was dying around him. No…it was vanishing, fading out, dematerializing. As if all the sand had run out of the hourglass around him; as if he were the only permanent, fixed, and immutable object in a metamorphosing universe suddenly cut loose from its time anchor.

The world faded out around Ian Ross: the shadows boiled and seethed and slithered past him, caught in a cyclonic wind-tunnel and swept away past him, leaving him in darkness.

He sat now, still, quiet, too isolated to be frightened.

He thought perhaps clouds had covered the sun.

There was no sun.

He thought perhaps it had been an eclipse, that his deep concentration of his hopeless state had kept him from noticing.

There was no sun.

No sky. The ground beneath him was gone. He sat, merely sat, but on nothing, surrounded by nothing, seeing and feeling nothing save a vague chill. It was cold now, very cold now.

After a long time he decided to stand and did stand: there was nothing beneath or above him. He stood in darkness.

He could remember everything that had ever happened to him in his life. Every moment of it, with absolute clarity. It was something he had never experienced before. His memory had been no better or worse than anyone else’s, but he had forgotten all the details, many years in which nothing had happened, during which he had wasted time-almost as a mute witness at the dull rendition of his life.

But now, as he walked through the limbo that was all he had been left of the world, he recalled everything perfectly. The look of terror on his mother’s face when he had sliced through the tendons of his left hand with the lid from the tin can of pink lemonade: he had been four years old. The feel of his new Thom McAn shoes that had always been too tight from the moment they had been bought but that he had been forced to wear to school every day, even though they rubbed him raw at the back of his heels: he s had been seven years old. The Four Freshmen standing and singing for the graduation dance. He had been alone. He had bought one ticket to support the school event. He had been 16. The taste of egg roll at Choy’s, the first time. He had been 24. The woman he had met at the library, in the section where they kept the books on animals. She had used a white lace handkerchief to dry her temples. It had smelled of perfume. He had been 30. He remembered all the sharp edges of every moment from his past. It was remarkable. In this nowhere.

And he walked through gray spaces, with the shadows of other times and other places swirling past. The sound of rushing wind, as though the emptiness through which he moved was being constantly filled and emptied, endlessly, without measure or substance.

Had he known what emotions to call on for release, he would have done so. But he was numb in his skin. Not merely chilled, as this empty place was chilled, but somehow inured to feeling from the edge of his perceptions to the center of his soul. Sharp, clear, drawn back from the absolute past, he remembered a day when he had been 11, when his mother had suggested that for his birthday they make a small party to which he would invite a few friends. And so (he remembered with diamond bright perfection), he had invited six boys and girls. They had never come. He sat alone in the house that Saturday, all his comic books laid out in case the cake and party favors and pin the-tail-on-the-donkey did not hold their attention sufficiently. Never came. It grew dark. He sat alone, with his mother occasionally walking through the living room to make some consoling remark. But he was alone, and he knew there was only one reason for it: they had all forgotten. It was simply that he was a waste of .time of those actually living their lives. Invisible, by token of being unimportant. A thing unnoticed: on a street, who notices the mailbox, the fire hydrant, the crosswalk lines? He was an invisible, useless thing.

He had never permitted another party to be thrown for him.

He remembered that Saturday now. And found the emotion, 26 years late, to react to this terrible banishment of the world. He began to tremble uncontrollably, and he sat down where there was nothing to sit down on, and he rubbed his hands together, feeling the tremors in his knuckles and the ends of his fingers. Then he felt the constriction in his throat, he turned his head this way and that, looking for a nameless exit from self-pity and loneliness; and then he cried. Lightly, softly, because he had no experience at it.

A crippled old woman came out of the gray mist of nowhere and stood watching him. His eyes were closed, or he would have seen her coming.

After a while, he snuffled, opened his eyes, and saw her standing in front of him. He stared at her. She was standing. At a level somewhat below him, as though the invisible ground of this nonexistent place was on a lower plane than that on which he sat.

“That won’t help much,” she said. She wasn’t surly, but neither was there much succor in her tone.

He looked at her and immediately stopped crying.

“Probably just got sucked in here,” she said. It was not quite a question, though it had something of query in it. She knew and was going carefully.

He continued to look at her, hoping she could tell him what had happened to him. And to her? She was here, too.

“Could be worse,” she said, crossing her arms and shifting her weight off her twisted left leg. “I could’ve been a Saracen or a ribbon clerk or even one of those hairy pre-humans.” He didn’t respond. He didn’t know what she was talking about. She smiled wryly, remembering. “First person I met was some kind of a retard, little boy about 15 or so. Must have spent what there’d been of his life in some padded cell or a hospital bed, something like that. He just sat there and stared at me, drooled a little, couldn’t tell me a thing. I was scared out of my mind, ran around like a chicken with its head cut off. Wasn’t till a long time after that before I met someone who spoke English.”

He tried to speak and found his throat was dry. His voice came out in a croak. He swallowed and wet his lips. “Are there many other, uh, other people…we’re not all alone …?”

“Lots of others. Hundreds, thousands. God only knows; maybe whole countries full of people here. No animals, though. They don’t waste it the way we do.”

“Waste it? What?”

“Time, son. Precious, lovely time. That’s all there is, just time. Sweet, flowing time. Animals don’t know about time.”

As she spoke, a slipping shadow of some wild scene whirled past and through them. It was a great city in flames. It seemed more substantial than the vagrant wisps of countryside or sea scenes that had been ribboning past them as they spoke. The wooden buildings and city towers seemed almost solid enough to crush anything in their path. Flames leaped toward the gray, dead-skin sky; enormous tongues of crackling flame that ate the city’s gut and chewed the phantom image, leaving ash. (But even the dead ashes had more life than the grayness through which the vision swirled.)

Ian Ross ducked, frightened. Then it was gone.

“Don’t worry about it, son,” the old woman said. “Looked a lot like London during the Big Fire. First the Plague, then the Fire. I’ve seen its like before. Can’t hurt you. None of it can hurt you.”

He tried to stand, found himself still weak. “But what is it?”

She shrugged. “No one’s ever been able to tell me for sure. Bet there’s some around in here who can, though. One day I’ll run into one of them. If I find out and we ever meet again I’ll be sure to let you know. Bound to happen.” But her face grew infinitely sad and there was desolation in her expression. “Maybe. Maybe we’ll meet again. Never happens, but it might. Never saw that retarded boy again. But it might happen.”

She started to walk away, hobbling awkwardly. Ian got to his feet with difficulty, but as quickly as he could. “Hey wait! Where are you going? Please, lady don’t leave me here all alone. I’m scared to be here all alone. I’m scared to be here by myself.”

She stopped and turned, tilting oddly on her bad leg. “Got to keep moving. Keep going, you know? If you stay in one place, you don’t get anywhere: there’s a way out…you’ve just got to keep moving till you find it.” She started again, saying, over her shoulder, “I guess I won’t be seeing you again: I don’t think it’s likely.”

He ran after her and grabbed her arm. She seemed very startled. As if no one had ever touched her in this place during all the time she had been here.

“Listen, you’ve got to tell me some things, whatever you know. I’m awfully scared, don’t you understand? You have to have some understanding.”

She looked at him carefully. “All right, as much as I can, then you’ll let me go?”

He nodded.

“I don’t know what happened to me…or to you. Did it all fade away and just disappear, and everything that was left was this, just this gray nothing?”

He nodded.

She sighed. “How old are you, son?”

“I’m 37. My name is Ian-“

She waved his name away with an impatient gesture. “That doesn’t matter. I can see you don’t know any better than I do. So I don’t have the time to waste on you. You’ll learn that, too. Just keep walking, just keep looking for a way out.”

He made fists. “That doesn’t tell me anything! What was that burning city, what are these shadows that go past all the time?” As if to mark his question a vagrant filmy phantom caravan of cassowary-like animals drifted through them.

She shrugged and sighed. “I think it’s history. I’m not sure…I’m guessing, you understand. But I think it’s all the bits and pieces of the past, going through on its way somewhere.”

He waited. She shrugged again, and her silence indicated-with a kind of helpless appeal to be let go that she could tell him nothing further.

He nodded resignedly. “All right. Thank you.”

She turned with her bad leg trembling: she had stood with her weight on it for too long. And she started to walk off into the gray limbo. When she was almost out of sight, he found himself able to speak again, and he said…too softly to reach her…“Goodbye, lady. Thank you.”

He wondered how old she was. How long she had been here. If he would one time far from now be like her. If it was all over and if he would wander in shadows forever.

He wondered if people died here.

Before he met Catherine, a long time before he met her, he met the lunatic who told him where he was, what had happened to him, and why it had happened.

They saw each other standing on opposite sides of a particularly vivid phantom of the Battle of Waterloo. The battle raged past them, and through the clash and slaughter of Napoleon’s and Wellington’s forces they waved to each other.

When the sliding vision had rushed by, leaving emptiness between them, the lunatic rushed forward, clapping his hands as if preparing himself for a long, arduous, but pleasurable chore. He was of indeterminate age but clearly past his middle years. His hair was long and wild, he wore a pair of rimless antique spectacles, and his suit was turn-of the eighteenth-century. “Well, well, well,” he called, across the narrowing space between them, “so good to see you, sir!”

Ian Ross was startled. In the timeless time he had wandered through this limbo, he had encountered coolies and Berbers and Thracian traders and silent Goths…an endless stream of hurrying humanity that would neither speak nor stop. This man was something different. Immediately, Ian knew he was insane. But he wanted to talk!

The older man reached Ian and extended his hand. “Cowper, sir. Justinian Cowper. Alchemist, metaphysician, consultant to the forces of time and space, ah yes, time! Do I perceive in you, sir, one only recently come to our little Valhalla, one in need of illumination? Certainly! Definitely. I can see that is the case.”

Ian began to say something, almost anything, in response, but the wildly gesticulating old man pressed on without drawing a breath. “This most recent manifestation, the one we were both privileged to witness was, I’m certain you’re aware, the pivotal moment at Waterloo in which the Little Corporal had his fat chewed good and proper. Fascinating piece of recent history, wouldn’t you say?”

Recent history? Ian started to ask him how long he had been in this gray place, but the old man barely paused before a fresh torrent of words spilled out.

“Stunningly reminiscent of that marvelous scene in Stendahl’s Charterhouse of Parma in which Fabrizio, young, innocent, fresh to that environ, found himself walking across a large meadow on which men were running in all directions, noise, shouts, confusion…and he knew not what was happening, and not till several chapters later do we learn-ah, marvelous!-that it was, in fact, the Battle of Waterloo through which he moved, totally unaware of history in the shaping all around him. He was there, while not there. Precisely our situation, wouldn’t you say?”

He had run out of breath. He stopped, and Ian plunged into the gap. “That’s what I’d like to know, Mr. Cowper. What’s happened to me? I’ve lost everything, but I can remember everything, too. I know I should be going crazy or frightened, and I am scared, but not out of my mind with it…I seem to accept this, whatever it is. I-I don’t know how to take it, but I know I’m not feeling it yet. And I’ve been here a long time!”

The old man slipped his arm around Ian’s back and began walking with him, two gentlemen strolling in confidence on a summer afternoon by the edge of a cool park. “Quite correct, sir, quite correct. Dissociative behavior; mark of the man unable to accept his destiny. Accept it, sir. I urge you; and fascination follows. Perhaps even obsession, but we must run that risk, mustn’t we?”

Ian wrenched away from him, turned to face him. “Look, mister, I don’t want to hear all that craziness! I want to know where I am and how I get out of here. And if you can’t tell me, then leave me alone!”

“Nothing easier, my good man. Explanation is the least of it. Observation of phenomena, ah, that’s the key. You can follow? Well, then…we are victims of the law of conservation of time. Precisely and exactly linked to the law of the conservation of matter; matter, which can neither be created nor destroyed. Time exists without end. But there is an ineluctable entropic balance, absolutely necessary to maintain order in the universe. Keeps events discrete, you see. As matter approaches universal distribution, there is a counterbalancing, how shall I put it, a counterbalancing `leaching out’ of time. Unused time is not wasted in places where nothing happens. It goes somewhere. It goes here, to be precise. In measurable units-which I’ve decided, after considerable thought, to call `chronons’.”

He paused, perhaps hoping Ian would compliment him on his choice of nomenclature. Ian put a hand to his forehead; his brain was swimming.

“That’s insane. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Makes perfectly good sense. I assure you. I was a top savant in my time; what I’ve told you is the only theory that fits the facts. Time unused is not wasted; it is leached out, drained through the normal space-time continuum and recycled. All this history you see shooting past us is that part of the time-flow that was wasted. Entropic balance. I assure you.”

“But what am I doing here?”

“You force me to hurt your feelings, sir.”

“What am I doing here?!”

“You wasted your life. Wasted time. All around you, throughout your life, unused chronons were being leached out, drawn away from the contiguous universe, until their pull on you was irresistible. Then you went on through, pulled loose like a piece of wood in a rushing torrent, a bit of chaff whirled away on the wind. Like Fabrizio, you were never really there. You wandered through, never seeing, never participating and so there was nothing to moor you solidly in your own time.”

“But how long will I stay here?”

The old man looked sad and spoke kindly for the first time: “Forever. You never used your time, so you have nothing to rely on as anchorage in normal space.”

“But everyone here thinks there’s a way out. I know it! They keep walking, trying to find an exit.”

“Fools. There is no way back.”

“But you don’t seem to be the sort of person who wasted his life. Some of the others I’ve seen, yes. I can seen that; but you?”

The old man’s eyes grew misty. He spoke with difficulty. “Yes, I belong here …”

Then he turned and, like one in a dream, lost, wandered away. Lunatic, observing phenomena. And then gone in the grayness of time gorged limbo. Part of a glacial period slid past Ian Ross and he resumed his walk without destination.

And after a long, long time that was timeless but filled with an abundance of time, he met Catherine.

He saw her as a spot of darkness against the gray limbo. She was quite a distance away, and he walked on for a while, watching the dark blotch against gray, and then decided to change direction. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered: he was alone with his memories, replaying again and again.

The sinking of the Titanic wafted through him.

She did not move, even though he was approaching on a direct line.

When he was quite close he could see that she was sitting cross-legged on nothingness; she was asleep. Her head was propped in one hand, the bracing arm supported by her knee. Asleep.

He came right up to her and stood there simply watching. He smiled. She was like a bird, he thought, with her head tucked under her wing. Not really, but that was how he saw her. Though her cupped hand covered half her face he could make out a sweet face, very pale skin, a mole on her throat; her hair was brown, cut quite short. Her eyes were closed; he decided they would be blue.

The Greek Senate, the Age of Pericles, men in a crowd-property owners-screaming at Lycurgus’s exhortations in behalf of socialism. The shadow of it sailed past not very far away.

Ian stood staring, and after a while he sat down opposite her. He leaned back on his arms and watched. He hummed an old tune the name of which he did not know.

Finally, she opened her brown eyes and stared at him.

At first momentary terror, startlement, chagrin, curiosity. Then she took umbrage. “How long have you been there?”

“My name is Ian Ross.” he said.

“I don’t care what your name is!” she said angrily. “I asked you how long you’ve been sitting there watching me.”

“I don’t know. A while.”

“I don’t like being watched; you’re being very rude.”

He got to his feet without answering and began walking away. Oh well.

She ran after him. “Hey, wait!”

He kept walking. He didn’t have to be bothered like that. She caught up with him and ran around to stand in front of him. “I suppose you just think you can walk off like that!”

“Yes. I can. I’m sorry I bothered you. Please get out of my way if you don’t want me around.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You said I was being rude. I am never rude; I’m a very well-mannered person, and you were just being insulting.”

He walked around her. She ran after him.

“All right, okay, maybe I was a little out of sorts. I was asleep, after all.”

He stopped. She stood in front of him. Now it was her move. “My name is Catherine Molnar. How do you do?”

“Not too well, that’s how.”

“Have you been here long?”

“Longer than I wanted to be here, that’s for sure.”

“Can you explain what’s happened to me?”

He thought about it. Walking with someone would be a nice change. “Let me ask you something.” Ian Ross said, beginning to stroll off toward the phantom image of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon wafting past them. “Did you waste a lot of time, sitting around, not doing much, maybe watching television a lot?”

They were lying down side by side because they were tired. Nothing more than that. The Battle of Ardennes, First World War, was all around them. Not a sound. Just movement. Mist, fog, turretless tanks, shattered trees all around them. Some corpses left lying in the middle of no-man’s land. They had been together for a space of time…it was three hours, it was six weeks, it was a month of Sundays, it was a year to remember, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times: who could measure it? There were no signposts, no town criers, no grandfather clocks, no change of seasons, who could measure it?

They had begun to talk freely. He told her again that his name was Ian Ross, and she said Catherine.. Catherine Molnar again. She confirmed his guess that her life had been empty. “Plain,” she said. “I was plain. I am plain. No, don’t bother to say you think I have nice cheekbones or a trim figure; it won’t change a thing. If you want plain, I’ve got it.”

He didn’t say she had nice cheekbones or a trim figure. But he didn’t think she was plain.

The Battle of the Ardennes was swirling away now.

She suggested they make love.

Ian Ross got to his feet quickly and walked away.

She watched him for a while, keeping him in 3 sight. Then she got up, dusted off her hands though there was nothing on them, an act of memory, and followed him. Quite a long time later, after trailing him but not trying to catch up to him, she ran to match his pace and finally, gasping for breath, reached him.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Nothing to be sorry about.”

“I offended you.”

“No, you didn’t. I just felt like walking.”

“Stop it, Ian. I did. I offended you.”

He stopped and spun on her. “Do you think I’m a virgin? I’m not a virgin.”

His vehemence pulled her back from the edge of boldness. “No, of course you’re not. I never thought such a .thing.” Then she said. “Well…I am.”

“Sorry,” he said, because he didn’t know the right thing to say, if there was a right thing.

“Not your fault,” she said. Which was the right thing to say.

From nothing to nothing. Thirty-four years old, the properly desperate age for unmarried, unmotherhooded, unloved, Catherine Molnar. Janesville, Wisconsin. Straightening the trinkets in her jewelry box, ironing her clothes, `j removing and refolding the sweaters in her

drawers, hanging the slacks with the slacks, skirts with the skirts, blouses with the blouses, coats with the coats, all in order in the closet, reading every word in Time and Reader’s Digest, learning seven new words every day, never using seven new words every day, mopping the floors in the three-room apartment, putting aside one full evening to pay the bills and spelling out Wisconsin completely, never the WI abbreviation on the return envelopes, listening to talk radio, calling for the correct time to set the clocks, spooning out the droppings from the kitty box, repasting photos in the album of scenes with round-faced people, pinching back the buds on the coleus, calling Aunt Beatrice every Tuesday at seven o’clock, talking brightly to the waitress in the orange and-blue uniform at the chicken pie shop, repainting fingernails carefully so the moon on each nail is showing, heating morning water for herself alone for the cup of herbal tea, setting the table with a cloth napkin and a placemat, doing dishes, going to the office and straightening the bills of lading precisely. From nothing to nothing. Thirty-four.

They lay side by side but they were not tired. There was more to it than that.

“I hate men who can’t think past the pillow,” she said, touching his hair.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, it’s just something I practiced, to say after the first time I slept with a man. I always felt there should be something original to say, instead of all the things I read in novels.”

“I think it’s a very clever phrase.” Even now, he found it hard to touch her. He lay with hands at his sides.

She changed the subject. “I was never able to get very far playing the piano. I have absolutely no give between the thumb and first finger. And that’s essential, you know. You have to have a long reach, a good spread, I think they call it, to play Chopin. A tenth: that’s two notes over an octave. A full octave, a perfect octave, those are just technical terms. Octave is good enough. I don’t have that.”

“I like piano playing,” he said, realizing how silly and dull he must sound and frightened (very suddenly) that she would find him so, that she would leave him. Then he remembered where they were and he smiled. Where could she go? Where could he go?

“I always hated the fellows at parties who could play the piano…all the girls clustered around those people. Except these days it’s not so much piano; not too many people have pianos in their homes anymore. The kids grow up and go away and nobody takes lessons and the kids don’t buy pianos. They get those electric guitars.”

“Acoustical guitars.”

“Yes, those. I don’t think it would be much better for fellows like me who don’t play, even if it’s acoustical guitars.”

“They got up and walked again.

Once they discussed how they had wasted their lives, how they had sat there with hands folded as time filled space around them, swept through, was drained off, and their own “chronons” (he had told her about the lunatic; she said it sounded like Benjamin Franklin; he said the man hadn’t looked like Benjamin Franklin, but maybe, it might have been) had been leached of all potency.

Once they discussed the guillotine executions in the Paris of the Revolution, because it was keeping pace with them. Once they chased the Devonian and almost caught it. Once they were privileged to enjoy themselves in the center of an Arctic snowstorm that held around them for a measure of measureless time. Once they saw nothing for an eternity but were truly chilled-unlike the Arctic snowstorm that had had no effect on them-by the winds that blew past them. And once he turned to her and said, “I love you, Catherine.”

But when she looked at him with a gentle smile, he noticed for the first time that her eyes seemed to be getting gray and pale.

Then, not too soon after, she said she loved him, too.

But she could see mist through the flesh of his hands when he reached out to touch her face.

They walked with their arms around each other, having found each other. They said many times, and agreed it was so, that they were in love and being together was the most important thing in that endless world of gray spaces, even if they never found their way back.

And they began to use their time together, setting small goals for each “day” upon awakening. We will walk that far; we will play word games in which you have to begin the name of a s female movie star from the last letter of a male

movie star’s name that I have to begin off the a last letter of a female movie star; we will ex-‘ change shirt and blouse and see how it feels for a while; we will sing every camp song we can remember. They began to enjoy their time together. They began to live.

And sometimes his voice faded out, and she could see him moving his lips but there was no sound.

And sometimes when the mist cleared she was invisible from the ankles down and her body moved as through thick soup.

And as they used their time, they became alien in that place where wasted time had gone to rest.

And they began to fade. As the world had leached out for Ian Ross in Scotland, and for Catherine Molnar in Wisconsin, they began to vanish from limbo. Matter could neither be created nor destroyed, but it could be disassembled and sent where it was needed for entropic balance.

He saw her pale skin become transparent.

She saw his hands as clear as glass.

And they thought: too late. It comes too late.

Invisible motes of their selves were drawn off and were sent away from that gray place. Were sent where needed to maintain balance. One and one and one, separated on the wind and blown to the farthest corners of the tapestry that was time and space. And could never be recalled. And could never be rejoined.

So they touched, there in that vast limbo of wasted time, for the last time, and shadows existed for an instant, and then were gone; he first, leaving her behind for the merest instant of terrible loneliness and loss, and then she, without shadow, pulled apart and scattered, followed. Separation without hope of return.

There was the faintest keening whine of matter fleeing.

There was the soundless echo of a diminishing moan.

The universe was poised to accept restored order.

And then balance was regained; as if they had never been.

Great events hushed in mist swirled past.

Ptolemy crowned King of Egypt, the Battle of Teutoburger Forest, Jesus crucified, the founding of Constantinople, the Vandals plundering Rome, the massacre of the Omayyad family, the Court of the Fujiwaras in Japan. Jerusalem falling to Saladin…and on and on…great events…empty time…and the timeless population trudged past endlessly…unaware that finally, at last, hopelessly and too late…two of their nameless order had found the way out.

VIEW FROM A HEIGHT

Joan D. Vinge

SATURDAY, THE 7TH

I want to know why those pages were missing! How am I supposed to keep up with my research if they leave out pages—?

(Long sighing noise.)

Listen to yourself, Emmylou: You’re listening to the sound of fear. It was an oversight, you know that. Nobody did it to you on purpose. Relax, you’re getting Fortnight Fever. Tomorrow you’ll get the pages, and an apology too, if Harvey Weems knows what’s good for him.

But still, five whole pages; and the table of contents. How could you miss five pages? And the table of contents.

How do I know there hasn’t been a coup? The Northwest’s finally taken over completely, and they’re censoring the media—and like the Man without a Country, everything they send me from now on is going to have holes cut in it.

In Science?

Or maybe Weems has decided to drive me insane—?

Oh, my God … it would be a short trip. Look at me. I don’t have any fingernails left.

(“Arrwk. Hello, beautiful. Hello? Hello?”)

(“Ozymandias! Get out of my hair, you devil.” Laughter. “Polly want a cracker? Here … gently! That’s a boy.”)

It’s beautiful when he flies. I never get tired of watching him, or looking at him, even after twenty years. Twenty years … What did the Psittacidae do, to win the right to wear a rainbow as their plumage? Although the way we’ve hunted them for it, you could say it was a mixed blessing. Like some other things.

Twenty years. How strange it sounds to hear those words, and know they’re true. There are gray hairs when I look in the mirror. Wrinkles starting. And Weems is bald! Bald as an egg, and all squinty behind his spectacles. How did we get that way, without noticing it? Time is both longer and shorter than you think, and usually all at once.

Twelve days is a long time to wait for somebody to return your call. Twenty years is a long time gone. But I feel somehow as though it was only last week that I left home. I keep the circuits clean, going over them and over them, showing those mental home movies until I could almost step across, sometimes, into that other reality. But then I always look down, and there’s that tremendous abyss full of space and time, and I realize I can’t, again. You can’t go home again.

Especially when you’re almost one thousand astronomical units out in space. Almost there, the first rung of the ladder. Next Thursday is the day. Oh, that bottle of champagne that’s been waiting for so long. Oh, the parallax view! I have the equal of the best astronomical equipment in all of near-Earth space at my command, and a view of the universe that no one has ever had before; and using them has made me the only astrophysicist ever to win a Ph.D. in deep space. Talk about your fieldwork.

Strange to think that if the Forward Observatory had massed less than its thousand-plus tons, I would have been replaced by a machine. But because the installation is so large, I, in my infinite human flexibility, even with my infinite human appetite, become the most efficient legal tender. And the farther out I get, the more important my own ability to judge what happens, and respond to it, becomes. The first—and maybe the last—manned interstellar probe, on a one-way journey into infinity … into a universe unobscured by our own system’s gases and dust … equipped with eyes that see everything from gamma to ultra-long wavelengths, and ears that listen to the music of the spheres.

And Emmylou Stewart, the captive audience. Adrift on a star … if you hold with the idea that all the bits of inert junk drifting through space, no matter how small, have star potential. Dark stars, with brilliance in their secret hearts, only kept back from letting it shine by Fate, which denied them the critical mass to reach their kindling point.

Speak of kindling: the laser beam just arrived to give me my daily boost, moving me a little faster, so I’ll reach a little deeper into the universe. Blue sky at bedtime; I always was a night person. I’m sure they didn’t design the solar sail to filter light like the sky … but I’m glad it happened to work out that way. Sky blue was always my passion—the color, texture, fluid purity of it. This color isn’t exactly right; but it doesn’t matter, because I can’t remember how anymore. This sky is a sun-catcher. A big blue parasol. But so was the original, from where I used to stand. The sky is a blue parasol … did anyone ever say that before, I wonder? If anyone knows, speak up—

Is anyone even listening? Will anyone ever be?

(“Who cares, anyway? Come on, Ozzie—climb aboard. Let’s drop down to the observation porch while I do my meditation, and try to remember what days were like.”)

Weems, damn it, I want satisfaction!

*

SUNDAY, THE 8TH

That idiot. That intolerable moron—how could he do that to me? After all this time, wouldn’t you think he’d know me better than that? To keep me waiting for twelve days, wondering and afraid; twelve days of all the possible stupid paranoias I could weave with my idle hands and mind, making myself miserable, asking for trouble—

And then giving it to me. God, he must be some kind of sadist. If I could only reach him, and hurt him the way I’ve hurt these past hours—

Except that I know the news wasn’t his fault, and that he didn’t mean to hurt me … and so I can’t even ease my pain by projecting it onto him.

I don’t know what I would have done if his image hadn’t been six days stale when it got here. What would I have done, if he’d been in earshot when I was listening; what would I have said? Maybe no more than I did say.

What can you say, when you realize you’ve thrown your whole life away?

He sat there behind his faded blotter, twiddling his pen, picking up his souvenir moon rocks and laying them down—looking for all the world like a man with a time bomb in his desk drawer—and said, “Now don’t worry, Emmylou. There’s no problem …” Went on saying it, one way or another, for five minutes; until I was shouting, “What’s wrong, damn it?”

“I thought you’d never even notice the few pages …,” with that sidling smile of his.

And while I’m muttering, “I may have been in solitary confinement for twenty years, Harvey, but it hasn’t turned my brain to mush,” he said, “So maybe I’d better explain, first”—and the look on his face; oh, the look on his face. “There’s been a biomed breakthrough. If you were here on Earth, you … well, your body’s immune responses could be … made normal …” And then he looked down, as though he could really see the look on my own face.

Made normal. Made normal. It’s all I can hear. I was born with no natural immunities. No defense against disease. No help for it. No. No, no, no, that’s all I ever heard, all my life on Earth. Through the plastic walls of my sealed room; through the helmet of my sealed suit … And now it’s all changed. They could cure me. But I can’t go home. I knew this could happen; I knew it had to happen someday. But I chose to ignore that fact, and now it’s too late to do anything about it.

Then why can’t I forget that I could have been f-free …

… I didn’t answer Weems today. Screw Weems. There’s nothing to say. Nothing at all.

I’m so tired.

*

MONDAY, THE 9TH

Couldn’t sleep. It kept playing over and over in my mind … Finally took some pills. Slept all day, feel like hell. Stupid. And it didn’t go away. It was waiting for me, still waiting, when I woke up.

It isn’t fair—!

I don’t feel like talking about it.

*

TUESDAY, THE 10TH

Tuesday, already. I haven’t done a thing for two days. I haven’t even started to check out the relay beacon, and that damn thing has to be dropped off this week. I don’t have any strength; I can’t seem to move, I just sit. But I have to get back to work. Have to …

Instead I read the printout of the article today. Hoping I’d find a flaw! If that isn’t the greatest irony of my entire life. For two decades I prayed that somebody would find a cure for me. And for two more decades I didn’t care. Am I going to spend the next two decades hating it, now that it’s been found?

No … hating myself. I could have been free, they could have cured me; if only I’d stayed on Earth. If only I’d been patient. But now it’s too late … by twenty years.

I want to go home. I want to go home … But you can’t go home again. Did I really say that, so blithely, so recently? You can’t. You, Emmylou Stewart. You are in prison, just as you have always been in prison.

It’s all come back to me so strongly. Why me? Why must I be the ultimate victim? In all my life I’ve never smelled the sea wind, or plucked berries from a bush and eaten them, right there! Or felt my parents’ kisses against my skin, or a man’s body … Because to me they were all deadly things.

I remember when I was a little girl, and we still lived in Victoria—I was just three or four, just at the brink of understanding that I was the only prisoner in my world. I remember watching my father sit polishing his shoes in the morning, before he left for the museum. And me smiling, so deviously, “Daddy … I’ll help you do that, if you let me come out—”

And he came to the wall of my bubble and put his arms into the hugging gloves, and said, so gently, “No.” And then he began to cry. And I began to cry too, because I didn’t know why I’d made him unhappy …

And all the children at school, with their “spaceman” jokes, pointing at the freak; all the years of insensitive people asking the same stupid questions every time I tried to go out anywhere … worst of all, the ones who weren’t stupid, or insensitive. Like Jeffrey … no, I will not think about Jeffrey! I couldn’t let myself think about him then. I could never afford to get close to a man, because I’d never be able to touch him …

And now it’s too late. Was I controlling my fate, when I volunteered for this one-way trip? Or was I just running away from a life where I was always helpless; helpless to escape the things I hated, helpless to embrace the things I loved?

I pretended this was different, and important … but was that really what I believed? No! I just wanted to crawl into a hole I couldn’t get out of, because I was so afraid.

So afraid that one day I would unseal my plastic walls, or take off my helmet and my suit; walk out freely to breathe the air, or wade in a stream, or touch flesh against flesh … and die of it.

So now I’ve walled myself into this hermetically sealed tomb for a living death. A perfectly sterile environment, in which my body will not even decay when I die. Never having really lived, I shall never really die, dust to dust. A perfectly sterile environment; in every sense of the word.

I often stand looking at my body in the mirror after I take a shower. Hazel eyes, brown hair in thick waves with hardly any gray … and a good figure; not exactly stacked, but not unattractive. And no one has ever seen it that way but me. Last night I had the Dream again … I haven’t had it for such a long time … this time I was sitting on a carved wooden beast in the park beside the Provincial Museum in Victoria; but not as a child in my suit. As a college girl, in white shorts and a bright cotton shirt, feeling the sun on my shoulders, and—Jeffrey’s arms around my waist … We stroll along the bayside hand in hand, under the Victorian lamp posts with their bright hanging flower-baskets, and everything I do is fresh and spontaneous and full of the moment. But always, always, just when he holds me in his arms at last, just as I’m about to … I wake up.

When we die, do we wake out of reality at last, and all our dreams come true? When I die … I will be carried on and on into the timeless depths of uncharted space in this computerized tomb, unmourned and unremembered. In time all the atmosphere will seep away; and my fair corpse, lying like Snow White’s in inviolate sleep, will be sucked dry of moisture, until it is nothing but a mummified parchment of shriveled leather and bulging bones …

(“Hello? Hello, baby? Good night. Yes, no, maybe … Awk. Food time!”)

(“Oh, Ozymandias! Yes, yes, I know … I haven’t fed you, I’m sorry. I know, I know …”)

(Clinks and rattles.)

Why am I so selfish? Just because I can’t eat, I expect him to fast, too … No. I just forgot.

He doesn’t understand, but he knows something’s wrong; he climbs the lamp pole like some tripodal bem, using both feet and his beak, and stares at me with that glass-beady bird’s eye, stares and stares and mumbles things. Like a lunatic! Until I can hardly stand not to shut him in a cupboard, or something. But then he sidles along my shoulder and kisses me—such a tender caress against my cheek, with that hooked prehensile beak that could crush a walnut like a grape—to let me know that he’s worried, and he cares. And I stroke his feathers to thank him, and tell him that it’s all right … but it’s not. And he knows it.

Does he ever resent his life? Would he, if he could? Stolen away from his own kind, raised in a sterile bubble to be a caged bird for a caged human …

I’m only a bird in a gilded cage. I want to go home.

*

WEDNESDAY, THE 11TH

Why am I keeping this journal? Do I really believe that sometime some alien being will find this, or some starship from Earth’s glorious future will catch up to me … glorious future, hell. Stupid, selfish, short-sighted fools. They ripped the guts out of the space program after they sent me away, no one will ever follow me now. I’ll be lucky if they don’t declare me dead and forget about me.

As if anyone would care what a woman all alone on a lumbering space probe thought about day after day for decades, anyway. What monstrous conceit.

I did lubricate the bearings on the big scope today. I did that much. I did it so that I could turn it back toward Earth … toward the sun … toward the whole damn system. Because I can’t even see it. All the planets out to Saturn, all the planets the ancients saw, are crammed into the space of two moon diameters; and too dim and small and faraway below me for my naked eyes, anyway. Even the sun is no more than a gaudy star that doesn’t even make me squint. So I looked for them with the scope …

Isn’t it funny how when you’re a child you see all those drawings and models of the solar system with big, lumpy planets and golden wakes streaming around the sun? Somehow you never get over expecting it to look that way in person. And here I am, one thousand astronomical units north of the solar pole, gazing down from a great height … and it doesn’t look that way at all. It doesn’t look like anything; even through the scope. One great blot of light, and all the pale tiny diamond chips of planets and moons around it, barely distinguishable from half a hundred undistinguished stars trapped in the same arc of blackness. So meaningless, so insignificant … so disappointing.

Five hours I spent, today, listening to my journal, looking back and trying to find—something, I don’t know, something I suddenly don’t have anymore.

I had it at the start. I was disgusting; Pollyanna Grad-student skipping and singing through the rooms of my very own observatory. It seemed like heaven, and a lifetime spent in it couldn’t possibly be long enough for all that I was going to accomplish, and discover. I’d never be bored, no, not me …

And there was so much to learn about the potential of this place, before I got out to where it supposedly would matter, and there would be new things to turn my wonderful extended senses toward … while I could still communicate easily with my dear mentor Dr. Weems, and the world. (Who’d ever have thought, when the lecherous old goat was my thesis adviser at Harvard, and making jokes to his other grad students about “the lengths some women will go to protect their virginity,” that we would have to spend a lifetime together.)

There was Ozymandias’ first word … and my first birthday in space, and my first anniversary … and my doctoral degree at last, printed out by the computer with scrolls made of little x‘s and taped up on the wall …

Then day and night and day and night, beating me black and blue with blue and black … my fifth anniversary, my eighth, my decade. I crossed the magnetopause, to become truly the first voyager in interstellar space … but by then there was no one left to talk to anymore, to really share the experience with. Even the radio and television broadcasts drifting out from Earth were diffuse and rare; there were fewer and fewer contacts with the reality outside. The plodding routines, the stupifying boredom—until sometimes I stood screaming down the halls just for something new; listening to the echoes that no one else would ever hear, and pretending they’d come to call; trying so hard to believe there was something to hear that wasn’t my voice, my echo, or Ozymandias making a mockery of it.

(“Hello, beautiful. That’s a crock. Hello, hello?”)

(“Ozymandias, get away from me—”)

But always I had that underlying belief in my mission: that I was here for a purpose, for more than my own selfish reasons, or NASA’s (or whatever the hell they call it now), but for Humanity, and Science. Through meditation I learned the real value of inner silence, and thought that by creating an inner peace I had reached equilibrium with the outer silences. I thought that meditation had disciplined me, I was in touch with myself and with the soul of the cosmos … But I haven’t been able to meditate since—it happened. The inner silence fills up with my own anger screaming at me, until I can’t remember what peace sounds like.

And what have I really discovered, so far? Almost nothing. Nothing worth wasting my analysis or all my fine theories—or my freedom—on. Space is even emptier than anyone dreamed, you could count on both hands the bits of cold dust or world let I’ve passed in all this time, lost souls falling helplessly through near-perfect vacuum … all of us together. With my absurdly long astronomical tape measure I have fixed precisely the distance to NGC 2419 and a few other features, and from that made new estimates about a few more distant ones. But I have not detected a miniature black hole insatiably vacuuming up the vacuum; I have not pierced the invisible clouds that shroud the ultra-long wavelengths like fog; I have not discovered that life exists beyond the Earth in even the most tentative way. Looking back at the solar system I see nothing to show definitively that we even exist, anymore. All I hear anymore when I scan is electromagnetic noise, no coherent thought. Only Weems every twelfth night, like the last man alive … Christ, I still haven’t answered him.

Why bother? Let him sweat. Why bother with any of it? Why waste my precious time?

Oh, my precious time … Half a lifetime left that could have been mine, on Earth.

Twenty years—I came through them all right. I thought I was safe. And after twenty years, my facade of discipline and self-control falls apart at a touch. What a self-deluded hypocrite I’ve been. Do you know that I said the sky was like a blue parasol eighteen years ago? And probably said it again fifteen years ago, and ten, and five—

Tomorrow I pass 1000 AUs.

*

THURSDAY, THE 12TH

I burned out the scope. I burned out the scope. I left it pointing toward the Earth, and when the laser came on for the night it shone right down the scope’s throat and burned it out. I’m so ashamed … Did I do it on purpose, subconsciously?

(“Good night starlight. Arrk. Good night. Good …”)

(“Damn it, I want to hear another human voice—!”)

(Echoing, “voice, voice, voice, voice, voice …”)

When I found out what I’d done I ran away. I ran and ran through the halls … But I only ran in a circle: This observatory, my prison, myself … I can’t escape. I’ll always come back in the end, to this green-walled room with its desk and its terminals, its cupboards crammed with a hundred thousand dozens of everything, toilet paper and magnetic tape and oxygen tanks … And I can tell you exactly how many steps it is to my bedroom or how long it took me to crochet the afghan on the bed … how long I’ve sat in the dark and silence, setting up an exposure program or listening for the feeble pulse of a radio galaxy two billion light-years away. There will never be anything different, or anything more.

When I finally came back here, there was a message waiting. Weems, grinning out at me half-bombed from the screen— “Congratulations,” he cried, “on this historic occasion! Emmylou, we’re having a little celebration here at the lab; mind if we join you in yours, one thousand astronomical units from home—?” I’ve never seen him drunk. They really must have meant to do something nice for me, planning it all six days ahead …

To celebrate I shouted obscenities I didn’t even know I knew at him, until my voice was broken and my throat was raw.

Then I sat at my desk for a long time with my jackknife lying open in my hand. Not wanting to die—I’ve always been too afraid of death for that—but wanting to hurt myself. I wanted to make a fresh hurt, to take my attention off the terrible thing that is sucking me into my self like an imploding star. Or maybe just to punish myself, I don’t know. But I considered the possibility of actually cutting myself quite calmly; while some separate part of me looked on in horror. I even pressed the knife against my flesh … and then I stopped and put it away. It hurts too much.

I can’t go on like this. I have duties, obligations, and I can’t face them. What would I do without the emergency automechs? … But it’s the rest of my life, and they can’t go on doing my job for me forever—

Later.

I just had a visitor. Strange as that sounds. Stranger yet—it was Donald Duck. I picked up half of a children’s cartoon show today, the first coherent piece of nondirectional, unbeamed television broadcast I’ve recorded in months. And I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see anyone in my life. What a nice surprise, so glad you could drop by … Ozymandias loves him; he hangs upside down from his swing under the cabinet with a cracker in one foot, cackling away and saying, “Give us a kiss, smack-smack-smack” … We watched it three times. I even smiled, for a while; until I remembered myself. It helps. Maybe I’ll watch it again until bedtime.

*

FRIDAY, THE 13TH

Friday the Thirteenth. Amusing. Poor Friday the Thirteenth, what did it ever do to deserve its reputation? Even if it had any power to make my life miserable, it couldn’t hold a candle to the rest of this week. It seems like an eternity since last weekend.

I repaired the scope today; replaced the burned-out parts. Had to suit up and go outside for part of the work … I haven’t done any outside maintenance for quite a while. Odd how both exhilarating and terrifying it always is when I first step out of the airlock, utterly alone, into space. You’re entirely on your own, so far away from any possibility of help, so far away from anything at all. And at that moment you doubt yourself, suddenly, terribly … just for a moment.

But then you drag your umbilical out behind you and clank along the hull in your magnetized boots that feel so reassuringly like lead ballast. You turn on the lights and look for the trouble, find it and get to work; it doesn’t bother you anymore … When your life seems to have torn loose and be drifting free, it creates a kind of sea anchor to work with your hands; whether it’s doing some mindless routine chore or the most intricate of repairs.

There was a moment of panic, when I actually saw charred wires and melted metal, when I imagined the damage was so bad that I couldn’t repair it again. It looked so final, so—masterful. I clung there by my feet and whimpered and clenched my hands inside my gloves, like a great shining baby, for a while. But then I pulled myself down and began to pry here and unscrew there and twist a component free … and little by little I replaced everything. One step at a time; the way we get through life.

By the time I’d finished I felt quite calm, for the first time in days; the thing that’s been trying to choke me to death this past week seemed to falter a little at my demonstration of competence. I’ve been breathing easier since then; but I still don’t have much strength. I used up all I had just overcoming my own inertia.

But I shut off the lights and hiked around the hull for a while, afterward—I couldn’t face going back inside just then: looking at the black convex dish of the solar sail I’m embedded in, up at the radio antenna’s smaller dish occluding stars as the observatory’s cylinder wheels endlessly at the hub of the spinning parasol …

That made me dizzy, and so I looked out into the starfields that lie on every side. Even with my own poor, unaugmented senses there’s so much more to see out here, unimpeded by atmosphere or dust, undominated by any sun’s glare. The brilliance of the Milky Way, the depths of star and nebula and farthest galaxy breathlessly suspended … as I am. The realization that I’m lost for eternity in an uncharted sea.

Strangely, although that thought aroused a very powerful emotion when it struck me, it wasn’t a negative one at all: It was from another scale of values entirely; like the universe itself. It was as if the universe itself stretched out its finger to touch me. And in touching me, singling me out, it only heightened my awareness of my own insignificance.

That was somehow very comforting. When you confront the absolute indifference of magnitudes and vistas so overwhelming, the swollen ego of your self-important suffering is diminished …

And I remembered one of the things that was always so important to me about space—that here anyone has to put on a spacesuit before they step outside. We’re all aliens, no one better equipped to survive than another. I am as normal as anyone else, out here.

I must hold onto that thought.

*

SATURDAY, THE 14TH

There is a reason for my being here. There is a reason.

I was able to meditate earlier today. Not in the old way, the usual way, by emptying my mind. Rather by letting the questions fill up the space, not fighting them; letting them merge with my memories of all that’s gone before. I put on music, that great mnemonic stimulator; letting the images that each tape evoked free-associate and interact.

And in the end I could believe again that my being here was the result of a free choice. No one forced me into this. My motives for volunteering were entirely my own. And I was given this position because NASA believed that I was more likely to be successful in it than anyone else they could have chosen.

It doesn’t matter that some of my motives happened to be unresolved fear or wanting to escape from things I couldn’t cope with. It really doesn’t matter. Sometimes retreat is the only alternative to destruction, and only a madman can’t recognize the truth of that. Only a madman … Is there anyone “sane” on Earth who isn’t secretly a fugitive from something unbearable somewhere in their life? And yet they function normally.

If they ran, they ran toward something, too, not just away. And so did I. I had already chosen a career as an astrophysicist before I ever dreamed of being a part of this project. I could have become a medical researcher instead, worked on my own to find a cure for my condition. I could have grown up hating the whole idea of space and “spacemen,” stumbling through life in my damned ugly sterile suit …

But I remember when I was six years old, the first time I saw a film of suited astronauts at work in space … they looked just like me! And no one was laughing. How could I help but love space, then?

(And how could I help but love Jeffrey, with his night-black hair, and his blue flightsuit with the starry patch on the shoulder. Poor Jeffrey, poor Jeffrey, who never even realized his own dream of space before they cut the program out from under him … I will not talk about Jeffrey. I will not.)

Yes, I could have stayed on Earth, and waited for a cure! I knew even then there would have to be one, someday. It was both easier and harder to choose space, instead of staying.

And I think the thing that really decided me was that those people had faith enough in me and my abilities to believe that I could run this observatory and my own life smoothly for as long as I lived. Billions of dollars and a thousand tons of equipment resting on me; like Atlas holding up his world.

Even Atlas tried to get rid of his burden; because no matter how vital his function was, the responsibility was still a burden to him. But he took his burden back again too, didn’t he; for better or worse …

I worked today. I worked my butt off getting caught up on a week’s worth of data processing and maintenance, and I’m still not finished. Discovered while I was at it that Ozymandias had used those missing five pages just like the daily news: crapped all over them. My sentiments exactly! I laughed and laughed.

I think I may live.

*

SUNDAY, THE 15TH

The clouds have parted.

That’s not rhetorical—among my fresh processed data is a series of photo reconstructions in the ultra-long wavelengths. And there’s a gap in the obscuring gas up ahead of me, a break in the clouds that extends thirty or forty light-years. Maybe fifty! Fantastic. What a view. What a view I have from here of everything, with my infinitely extended vision: of the way ahead, of the passing scene—or looking back toward Earth.

Looking back. I’ll never stop looking back, and wishing it could have been different. That at least there could have been two of me, one to be here, one who could have been normal, back on Earth; so I wouldn’t have to be forever torn in two by regrets—

(“Hello. What’s up, doc? Avast!”)

(“Hey, watch it! If you drink, don’t fly.”)

Damn bird … If I’m getting maudlin, it’s because I had a party today. Drank a whole bottle of champagne. Yes; I had the party … we did. Ozymandias and I. Our private 1000 AU celebration. Better late than never, I guess. At least we did have something concrete to celebrate—the photos. And if the celebration wasn’t quite as merry as it could have been, still I guess it will probably seem like it was when I look back on it from the next one, at 2000 AUs. They’ll be coming faster now, the celebrations. I may even live to celebrate 8000. What the hell, I’ll shoot for 10,000 …

After we finished the champagne …Ozymandias thinks ‘98 was a great year, thank God he can’t drink as fast as I can … I put on my Strauss waltzes, and the Barcarolle:

Oh, the Berliner Philharmonic;

their touch is what a lover’s kiss must be.

I threw the view outside onto the big screen, a ballroom of stars, and danced with my shadow. And part of the time I wasn’t dancing above the abyss in a jumpsuit and headphones, but waltzing in yards of satin and lace across a ballroom floor in nineteenth-century Vienna. What I wouldn’t give to be there for a moment out of time. Not for a lifetime, or even a year, but just for an evening; just for one waltz.

Another thing I shall never do. There are so many things we can’t do, any of us, for whatever the reasons—time, talent, life’s callous whims. We’re all on a one-way trip into infinity. If we’re lucky we’re given some life’s work we care about, or some person. Or both, if we’re very lucky.

And I do have Weems. Sometimes I see us like an old married couple who have grown to a tolerant understanding over the years. We’ve never been soul mates, God knows, but we’re comfortable with each other’s silences …

I guess it’s about time I answered him.

THE VERY SLOW TIME MACHINE

Ian Watson

(1990)

The Very Slow Time Machine—for convenience: the VSTM*—made its first appearance at exactly midday 1 December 1985—in an unoccupied space at the National Physical Laboratory. It signaled its arrival with a loud bang and a squall of expelled air. Dr. Kelvin, who happened to be looking in its direction, reported that the VSTM did not exactly spring into existence instantly, but rather expanded very rapidly from a point source, presumably explaining the absence of a more devastating explosion as the VSTM jostled with the air already present in the room. Later, Kelvin declared that what he had actually seen was the implosion of the VSTM. Doors were sucked shut by the rush of air, instead of bursting open, after all. However it was a most confused moment— and the confusion persisted, since the occupant of the VSTM (who alone could shed light on its nature) was not only time-reversed with regard to us, but also quite crazy.

*The term V S T M is introduced retrospectively in view of our subsequent understanding of the problem (2O19).

One infuriating thing is that the occupant visibly grows sane and more presentable (in his reversed way) the more that time passes. We feel that the hard work and thought devoted to the enigma of the VSTM is so much energy poured down the entropy sink—because the answer is’ going to come from him, from inside, not from us; so that we may as well just have bided our time until his condition improved (or, from his point of view, began to degenerate). And in the meantime his arrival distorted and perverted essential re-‘search at our laboratory from its course without providing any tangible return for it.

The VSTM was the size of a small station wagon; but it had the shape of a huge lead sulfide, or galena, crystal—which is, in crystallographer’s jargon, an octahedron-with-cube formation consisting of eight large hexagonal faces with six smaller square faces filling in the gaps. It perched precariously—but immovably—on the base square, the four lower hexagona swellying up and out towards its waist where four more squares (oblique, vertically) connected with the mirror image upper hemisphere, rising to a square north pole. Indeed it looked like a kind of world globe, lopped and sheered into flat planes: and has remained very much a separate, private world to this day, along with its passenger.

All faces were blank metal except for one equatorial square equatorial square facing southwards into the main body of the laboratory. This was a window—of glass as thick as that of a deep-ocean diving bell—which could apparently be opened from inside, and only from inside.

The passenger within looked as ragged an tattered as a tramp; as crazy, dirty, woebegone and tangle-haired as any lunatic in an ancient Bedlam He was apparently very old; or at any rate solitary confinement in that cell made him so. He was pallid, crook-backed, skinny and rotten-toothed. He raved and mumbled soundlessly at our spotlights. Or maybe he only mouthed his ravings and mumbles, since we could hear nothing whatsoever through the thick glass. When we obtained the services of a lip-reader two days later the mad old man seemed to be mouthing mere garbage, a mishmash of sounds. Or was he? Obviously no one could be expected to lip-read backwards; already, from his actions and gestures, Dr. Yang had suggested that the man was time-reversed. So we video-taped the passenger’s mouthings and played the tapes backwards for our lip-reader. Well, it was still garbage. Backwards, or forwards, the unfortunate passenger had visibly cracked up. Indeed, one proof of his insanity was that he should be trying to talk to us at all at this late stage of his journey (rather than communicate by holding up written messages—as he has now begun to do. (But more on these messages later; they only begin—or, from his point of view, cease as he descends further into madness—in the summer of 1989.)

Abandoning hope of enlightenment from him, we set out on the track of scientific explanations. (Fruitlessly. Ruining our other, more important work. Overturning our laboratory projects—and the whole of physics in the process.)

To indicate the way in which we wasted our time, I might remind you that the first “clue” came from the VSTM which, as I said, was a clear galena crystal. Yang thought that galena is used as a semiconductor crystal rectifier: devices for transforming alternating current into direct current. They set up much higher resistance to an electric current flowing in one direction than another. Was there an analogy with the current of time? Could the geometry of the VSTM—or the geometry of energies circulating in its metal walls, presumably interlaid with printed circuits—effectively impede the forward flow of time, and reverse it? We had no way to break into the VSTM. Attempts to cut into it proved quite ineffective and-were soon discontinued, while X-raying it was foiled, conceivably by lead alloyed in the walls. Sonic scanning provided rough pictures of internal shapes, but nothing as intricate as circuitry; so we had to; rely on what we could see of the outward shape, or through the window—and on pure theory.

Yang also stressed that galena rectifiers operate in the same manner as diode valves. Besides transforming the flow of an electric current they can also demodulate. They separate information out from a modulated carrier wave—as in a radio or TV set. Were we witnessing, in the VSTM, a machine for separating out “information”—in the form of the physical vehicle itself, with its passenger—from a carrier wave stretching back through time? Was the VSTM a solid, tangible analogy of a three-dimensional TV picture. played backwards?

We made many models of VSTMs based on ideas and tried to send them off into the past, or the future—or anywhere for that matter! sadly all stayed monotonously present in the laboratory, stubbornly locked to our space and time.

Kelvin, recalling his impression that the VSTM had seemed to expand outward from a point, and remarked that this was how three dimensional beings such as ourselves might well perceive a four dimensional object first impinging on us. Thus a 4-D sphere would appear as a point and swell into a full sphere then contract again to a point. But a 4-D octahedron-and-cube? According to our maths this shape couldn’t have a regular analogy in 4-space, only a simple octahedron could. Besides, what would be the use of a 4.D machine which shrink to a point at the precisely passenger needed to mount it? No, this was not a genuine four-dimensional body; though we wasted many weeks running computer programs to describe it as one, and arguing that its passenger was a normal 3-space man imprisoned within a 4-space structure-the discrepancy of one dimension between him and his vehicle effectively isolating him from the rest of the universe so that he could travel hindwards.

That be was indeed travelling hindwards was by now absolutely clear from his feeding habits—(i.e. he regurgitated) though his extreme furtiveness about bodily functions coupled with his filthy condition meant that it took several months before we were positive on these grounds

All this, in turn, raised another unanswerable question of if the VSTM was indeed travelling backwards through time, precisely where did it disappear to, in that instant of its arrival on I December 1985? The passenger was hardly on a Sunday jaunt, or he would have tried TV long last, on midsummer day 1989, our passenger held up a notice printed on a big plastic eraser slate.

CRAWLING DOWNHILL, SLIDING UPHILL!

He held this up for ten minutes, against the window. The printing was spidery and ragged; so was he.

This could well have been his last lucid moment before the final descent into madness, in despair at the pointlessness of trying to communicate with is. Thereafter it would be downhill all the way, we interpreted. Seeing us with all our still eager, still baffled faces, he could only gibber incoherently thenceforth like an enraged monkey at our sheer stupidity.

He didn’t communicate for another three months.

When he held up his next (i.e. penultimate) sign, he looked slightly sprucer, a utile less crazy (though only comparatively so, having regard to his final mumbling squalor).

THE LONELINESS! BUT LEAVE ME ALONE!

IGNORE ME UNTIL 1995!

We held up signs (to which, we soon realized, his sign was a response):

ARE YOU TRAVELLING BACK THROUGH TIME? WHY?

We would have also dearly loved to ask: WHERE DO YOU DISAPPEAR TO ON DECEMBER 1 1985? But we judged it unwise to ask this most pertinent of all questions in case his disappearance was some sort of disaster, so that we would in effect be foredooming him, accelerating his mental breakdown. Dr. Franklin insisted that this was nonsense; he broke down anyway. Still, if we had held up that sign, what remorse we would have felt: because we might have caused his breakdown and ruined some magnificent undertaking.

We were certain that it had to be a magnificent undertaking to involve such personal sacrifice, such abnegation, such a-cutting off of oneself from the rest of the human race.

This is about all we were certain of.

(1995)

No progress with our enigma. All our research is dedicated to solving it, but we keep this out of sight of him. While rotas of postgraduate students observe him round the clock, our best brains get on with the real thinking elsewhere in the building. He sits inside his vehicle, less dirty and dishevelled now, but monumentally taciturn: a trappist monk under a vow of silence. He spends most of his time re-reading the same dog-eared books, which have fallen to pieces back in our past: Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Robinson Crusoe and Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth; and listening to what is presumably taped music(of which he gathered torn shreds and frantically placed back into cassettes, in a brief mad fiesta, his tiny living area a sudden frenzy of repackaging with maniacal speed and neatness, of tapes which have lain around, trodden underfoot, for years).

Superficially we have ignored him (and he, us) until 1995: assuming that his last sign had some significance. Having got nowhere ourselves, we expect something from him now.

Since he is cleaner, tidier and saner now, in this year of 1995 (not to mention ten years younger) we have a better idea of how old he actually is; thus some clue as to when he might have started his journey.

He must be in his late forties or early fifties— though he aged dreadfully in the last ten years, looking more like seventy or eighty when he reached 1985. Assuming that the future does not hold in store any longevity drugs (in which case he might be a century old, or more!) he should have entered the VSTM sometime between 2010 and 2025. The later date, putting him in his very early twenties if not teens, does rather suggest a “suicide volunteer” who is merely a passenger in the vehicle. The earlier date suggests a more mature researcher who played a major role in the development of the VSTM and was only prepared to test it on his own person. Certainly, now that his madness has abated into a tight, meditative fixity of posture, accompanied by normal activities such as reading, we incline to think of him a man of moral stature rather than a time-kamikaze; so we put the date of depature on the journey at 2010 to 2015 (only twenty years ahead) when he will be in his thirties.

Besides theoretical pbysics, basic space science has by now been hugely sidetracked by his presence.

The lead hope of getting man to the stars was the development of some deep-sleep or refrigeration system. Plainly this does not exist by 2015 or so—or our passenger would be using it. Only a lunatic would voluntarily sit in a tiny compartment for decades on ends, aging and rotting, if he could sleep the time away just as well, and awake as young as the day he set off. On the other hand, his life-support systems seem so impeccable that he can exist for decades within the narrow confines of that vehicle using recycled air, water and solid matter to 100 per cent efficiency. This represents no inconsiderable outlay in research and development which must have been borrowed from another field, obviously the space sciences. Therefore the astronauts of 2015 or thereabouts require very long-term life support systems capable of sustaining them for years and decades, up and awake. What kind of space travel must they be engaged in, to need these? Well, they can only be going to the stars—the slow way; though not a very slow way. Not hundreds of years; but decades. Highly dedicated men must be spending many years cooped up alone in tiny space-craft to reach Alpha Centaurus, Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eriduni or wherever. If their surroundings are so tiny, then any extra payload costs prohibitively. Who would contemplate such a journey merely out of curiosity? No one. The notion is ridiculous — unless they are carrying something which will then link it instantaneously with Earth. A tachyon descrambler is the only obvious explanation. They are carrying with them the other end of a tachyon-transmission system for beaming material objects, and even human beings, out to the stars.

So, while one half of physics nowadays grapples with the problems of reverse-time, the other half, funded by most of the money from the space vote, pre-empting the whole previously extant space programme, is trying to work out ways to harness and modulate tachyons.

These faster-than-light particles certainly seem to exist; we’re fairly certain of that now. The main problem is that the technology for harnessing them is needed beforehand, to prove that they do exist and so to work out exactly how to harness them.

All these reorientations of science—because of him sitting in his enigmatic vehicle in deliberate alienation from us, reading Robinson Crusoe, a strained expression on his face as he slowly approaches his own personal crack-up.

(1996)

If you were locked up in a VSTM for X years, would you want a calendar on permanent display—or not? Would it be consoling or taunting? Obviously his instruments are calibrated—unless it was completely fortuitous that his journey ended on 1 December 1985 at a precise point. But can he see the calibrations? Or would he prefer to be overtaken suddenly by the end of his journey, rather than have the slow grind of years unwind itself? You see, we are trying to explain why he did not communicate with us in 1995.

Convicts in solitary confinement keep their wits by scratching five-barred gates of days on-the walls with their fingernails; the sense of time passing keeps their spirits up. But on the other hand, tests of time perception carried out on potholers who volunteered to stay below ground for several months on end show that the internal clock lags grossly—by as much as two weeks in a three month period. Our VSTM passenger might gain a reprieve of a year—or five years in total subjective journey time, by ignoring the passing of time. The potholers had no clue to night and day; but then, neither does he! Ever since his arrival, lights have been burning constantly in the laboratory; he has been under constant observation.

He isn’t a convict, or he would surely protest, beg to be let out, throw himself on our mercy, give us some clue to the nature of his predicament. Is he the carrier of some fatal disease—a disease so incredibly infectious that it must affect the whole human race unless he were isolated? Which can only be isolated by a time capsule? Which even isolation on the Moon or Mars would not keep from spreading to the human race? He hardly appears to be…

Suppose that he had to be isolated for some very good reason, and suppose that he concurs in his own isolation (which obviously does, sitting there reading Defoe for third time), what demanded this exclusion of one man from the whole of human life and from his own time space? Medicine, psychiatry, sociology; the human sciences are being drawn into the problem in the wake of physics and space science. Sitting there doing nothing, he has become a kind of funnel for all the physical and social sciences: a human black hole into which vast energy pours, for a very slight increase in our radius of understanding. That single individual had accumulated as much disruptive potential as a single atom accelerated to the speed of light—which requires all the available energy in the universe to sustain it in its impermissible state.

Meanwhile the orbiting tachyon laboratories report that they are just on the point of uniting quantum mechanics, gravitational theory and relativity; whereupon they will at last “jump” the first high-speed particle packages over the C-barrier into a faster-than-light mode, and back again into our space. But they reported that last year—only to have their particle packages “jump back” as antimatter, annihilating five billion dollars’ worth of equipment and taking thirty lives. They hadn’t jumped into a tachyon mode at all, but had “imbued” themselves through worm-holes in the space-time fabric.

Nevertheless, prisoner of conscience (his own conscience, surely!) or whatever he is, our VSTM passenger seems nobler year by year. As we move away from his terminal madness, increasingly what strikes us is his dedication, his self-sacrifice for a cause still beyond our comprehension with such spirituality. “Take him for all. In all, he IS a Man. We shall not look upon his like. Again? We shall look upon his like. Upon the man himself, gaining stature every year! That’s the wonderful thing. It’s as though Christ, fully exonerated as the Son of God, is uncrucified, his whole life re-enacted before our eyes in full and certain knowledge of his true role.

(Except. that this man’s role is silence.)

(1997)

Undoubtedly he is a holy man who will suffer mental crucifixion for the sake of some great human project. Now he re-reads Defoe’s Phtgue Year, that classic of collective incarceration and the resistance of the human spirit and human organizing ability. Surely the “plague” hint in the title is irrelevant. It’s the shear force of spirit, which beat the Great Plague of Lpndon, that is the real keynote of the book.

Our passenger is the object of popular cults by now—a focus for finer feelings. In this way his mere presence has drawn the world’s peoples closer together, cultivating respect and dignity, pulling us back from the brink of war, liberating tens of thousands from their concentration camps. These cults extend from purely fashionable manifestations—shirts printed with his face, now-neatly shaven in a Vandyke style; rings and worry-beads made from galena crystals—through the architectural (octahedron-and-cube meditation modules) to life-styles themselves: a Zen-like “sitting quietly, doing nothing.”

He’s Rodin’s Thinker, Apollo, and Michelangelo David rolled into one for our world. He draws to its closer Never have copies of Defoe’s two books and the Verne been in print before in such demand. People memorize them as meditation exercises and recite them as the supremely lucid, rational Western mantras.

The National Physical Laboratory has become a place of pilgrimage, our lawns and grounds a vast camping site—Woodstock and Avalon, Rome and Arlington all in one. About the sheer tattered degradation of his final days less is said; though that has its cultists too; its late twentieth-century anchorites, its Saint Anthonies pole-squatting or cave-immuring themselves in the midst of the urban desert, bringing austere spirituality back to a world which appeared to have lost its soul—though this latter is a fringe phenomenon; the general keynote is nobility, restraint, quiet consideration for others.

And now he holds up a notice.

I IMPLY NOTHING. PAY NO ATTENTION TO MY PRESENCE. KINDLY GET ON DOING YOUR OWN THINGS. I CANNOT EXPLAIN TILL 2000.

He holds it up for a whole day, looking not exactly angry, but slightly pained. The whole world, hearing of it, sighs with joy at his modesty. His self-containment, his reticence, his humility. This must be the promised 1995 message, two years late (or two years early; obviously he still has a long way to come). Now he is Oracle; he is the Millennium. This place is Delphi.

The orbital laboratories run into more difficulty with their tachyon research but still funds pour into them, private donations too on an unprecedented scale. The world strips itself of excess wealth to strip matter and propel it over the interface between sub-light and trans-light.

The development of closed-cycle living pods—the carriers of those tachyon receivers to the stars is coming along well; a fact which naturally raises the paradoxical question of whether his presence has in fact stimulated the development of the technology by which he himself survives. We at the National Physical Laboratory and at all other such laboratories around the world are convinced that we shall soon make a breakthrough in understanding of time-reversal—which should connect with that other universal interface in the realm of matter, between our world and the tachyon world—and we feel too, paradoxically, that out current research must surely lead to the development of the VSTM which will then become so opportune to us, for reasons yet unknown. No one feels are wasting their time. He is the Future. His presence here vindicates our every effort—even blindest of blind alleys.

What kind of Messiah must he be, by the time he enters the VSTM? How much charisma, respect, ration and wonder must he have accrued by his starting point? Why the whole world will wish him off! He will be the focus of so much we hope and worship that we even start to investigate Psi phenonomina seriously. The concept of mental thrust as a hypothesis for his mode of travel—although he is vectored not through time of-4space at all but down the waveguide of will-power and desire.

(2001)

The millennium comes and goes without any revelation. Of course that is predictable; he is lagging by a year or eighteen months. (Obviously he can’t see the calibrations on his instruments; .it was his way to keep sane on the long haul.)

But finally, now in the Autumn of 2001, he holds up a sign, with a certain quiet jubilation:

WILL I LEAVE SOUND IN WIND AND LIMB?

Quiet jubilation, because we have already (from his point of view) held up the sign in answer:

YES! YES!

We’re all rooting for him passionately. It isn’t really a lie that we tell him. He did leave relatively sound in wind and limb. It was just his mind that was in tatters… Maybe that is inessential, irrelevant, or he wouldn’t have phrased his question to refer-merely to his physical body.

He must be approaching his take-off point. He’s having a mild fit of tenth-year blues, first decide anxiety, self-doubt; which we clear up for him…

Why doesn’t he know what shape he arrived in? Surely that must be a matter of record before he sets off… No! Time cannot be invariable we determined. Not even the Past. Time is fluid. He has refrained from comment for all these years so as not to unpluck the strands of time past and reweave them in another, undesirable way. A tower of strength he has been. Well, back to the drawing beard, and to probabilistic equations for (a) tachyon-scatter out in normal space (b) time-reversal.

A few weeks later he holds up another sign, which must be his promised Delphi revelation:

I AM THE MATRIX OF MAN.

Of course! Of course! He has made himself that over the years. What else?

A matrix is a mold for shaping a cast. And indeed, out of him shapes have been molded. Increasingly since the late 1990s, such has been his influence.

Was he sent hindwards to save the world from self-slaughter by presenting such a perfect paradigm—which only frayed and tattered in the Eighties when it did not matter anymore; when he had already succeeded?

But a matrix is also an array of components for translating from one code into another. So Yang’s demodulation of information hypothesis is revived, coupled now with the idea that the VSTM is perhaps a matrix for transmitting the “information” contained in a man across space and time so the man-transmitter experiments in orbit redouble their efforts); with the corollary (though doubts could hardly be voiced to the enraptured world at large) that perhaps the passenger was not there at all in our sense; and he had never been. We were witnessing an experiment of the possibility of transmitting a man across the galaxy, performed on a future Earth by future science to test out the degradation factor: the decay of information—mapped from space on to time so that it could be observed by us, their predecessors! Thus the onset of madness (i.e., decay) in our passenger, timed in years front his starting point, might set a physical limit in light-years to the distance to which a man could be beamed (tachyonically?). And this was at once a terrible kick in the teeth to space science—and a great boost. A kick in the teeth, as this suggested that physical travel through interstellar space must be impossible, perhaps because of Man’s frailty in the face of cosmic ray bombardment; and thus the whole development of intensive closed-cycle life-pods for single astronaut couriers must be deemed irrelevant. Yet a great boost too, since the possibility of a receiver-less transmitter loomed. The now elderly Yang suggested that 1 December 1985 was actually a moment of lift-off to the stars. Where our passenger went then, in all his madness, was to a point in space thirty or forty light-years distant. The VSTM was thus the testing to destruction of a future man-beaming system and practical future models would only deal in distances (in times) of the order of seven to eight years. {Hence no other VSTMs had imploded into existence, hitherto.)

(2010)

I am tired with a lifetime’s fruitless work; however, the human race at large is at once loving and frenetic with hope. For we must be nearing our goal. Our passenger is in his thirties now (whether a live individual, or only a phenomenon of a system for transmitting the information present in a human being: literally a “ghost in the machine”. This sets a limit. It sets a limit. He couldn’t have set off with such strength of mind much earlier than his twenties or (I sincerely hope not) his late teens. Although the teens are a prime time for taking vows of chastity, for entering monasteries, for pledging one’s life to a cause.

(2015)

Boosted out of my weariness by the general euphoria, I have successfully put off my retirement for another four years. Our passenger is now in his middle twenties and a curious inversion in his “worship” is taking place, representing (I think) a subconscious groundswell of anxiety as well as joy. Joy, obviously, that the moment is coming when he makes his choice and steps into the VSTM, as Christ gave up carpentry and stepped out from Nazareth. Anxiety, though, at the possibility that he may pass beyond this critical point, towards infancy; ridiculous as this seems! He knows how to read books; he couldn’t have taught himself to read. Nor could he have taught himself how to speak in vitro—and he has certainly delivered lucid, if mysterious, messages to us from time to time. The hit song of the whole world, nevertheless, this year is William Blake’s The Mental Traveller set to sitar and gongs and glockenspiel . .

The unvoiced fear represented by this song sweeping of the world being that he may yet evade us; that he may slide down towards 1w fancy, and at the moment of his birth (whatever support mechanisms extrude to keep him alive till then!) the VSTM will implode back whence it came: a sick joke of some alien superconciousness, intervening in human affairs with a scientific “miracle” to make all human striving meaningless and pointless. Not many people feel this way openly. It isn’t a popular view. A man could be torn limb from limb for espousing it in public. The human mind will never accept it; and purges this fear in a long song of joy which at once mocks and copies and adores the mystery of the VSTM.

Men put this supreme man into the machine. Even so, Madonna and Child does haunt the world’s mind… and a soft femininity prevalls—men’s skirts are the new soft gracious mode of dress in the West. Yet he is now so noble, so handsome in his youth, so glowing and strong; such a Zarathustra, locked up in there.

(2018)

He can only be 21 or 22. The world adores him, mothers him, across the unbridgeable gulf of reversed time. No progress in the Solar System, let on the interstellar front. Why should we travel out and away, even as far as Mars, let alone Pluto, when a revelation is at hand; when all the secrets will be unlocked here on Earth? No progress on the tachyon or negative-time fronts, either. Or any further messages from him. But he is his own message. His presence alone is sufficient to bless Mankind: hopes, courage, holiness.

I am called back from retirement, for he is holding up signs again: the athlete holding up the Olympic Flame.

He holds them up for half an hour at a stretch though we are not all eyes agog, filming every moment in case we miss something, and when I arrive, the signs that he has already held up have announced:

(Sign One) THIS IS A VERY SLOW TIME MACHINE.

(And I amend accordingly, crossing out all the other titles we had bestowed on it successively, over the years. For a few seconds I wonder whether he was really naming the machine, defining it, or complaining about it! As though he’d been fooled into being its passenger on the assumption that a time machine should proceed to its destination instantly instead of at a snail’s pace. But no. He was naming it.)

TO TRAVEL INTO THE FUTURE, YOU MUST FIRST TRAVEL INTO THE PAST, ACCUMULATING HINDWARD POTENTIAL. (THIS IS CRAWLING DOWNHILL.)

(Sign Two) AS SOON AS YOU ACCUMULATE ONE LARGE QUANTUM OF TIME, YOU LEAP FORWARD BY THE SAME TIMESPAN OF YOUR STARTING POINT. (THIS IS SLIDING UPHILL.)

(Sign Three) YOUR JOURNEY INTO THE FUTURE TAKES THE SAME TIME AS IT WOULD TAKE TO LIVE THROUGH THE YEARS IN REAL-TIME; YET YOU ALSO OMIT THE INTERVENING YEARS, ARRIVING AHEAD INSTANTLY. (PRINCIPLE OF CONSERVATION OF TIME.)

(Sign Four) SO, TO LEAP THE GAP, YOU MUST CRAWL THE OTHER WAY.

(Sign Five) TIME DIVIDES INTO ELEMENTARY QUANTA. NO MEASURING ROD CAN BE SMALLER THAN THE INDIVISIBLE ELEMENTARY ELECTRON; THIS IS ONE “ELEMENTARY LENGTH” (EL). THE TIME TAKEN FOR LIGHT TO TRAVEL ONE EL IS “ELEMENTARY TIME” (ET): I.E., 1O SECONDS; THIS IS ONE ELEMENTARY QUANTUM OF TIME. TIME CONSTANTLY LEAPS AHEADBY THESE TINY QUANTA FOR EVERY PARTICLE; BUT NOT BEING SYNCHRONIZED, THESE FORM A CONTINUOUS TIME-OCEAN RATHER THAN SUCCESSIVE DISCRETE “MOMENTS” OR WE WOULD HAVE NO CONNECTED UNIVERSE.

(Sign Six) TIME REVERSAL OCCURS NORMALLY IN STRONG NUCLEAR INTERACTIONS. IN EVENTS OF ORDER 1O SECS. THIS REPRESENTS THE “FROZEN GHOST” OF THE FIRST MOMENT 0F THE UNIVERSE WHEN AN “ARROW OF TIME” WAS FIRST STOCHASTICALLY DETERMINED.

(Sign Seven) (And this is when I arrived, to be shown polaroid photographs of the first seven pages. Remarkably, he is holding up each in linear sequence from our point of view; a considerable feat of forethought and memory, though no less than we expect of him.)

NOW IT IS INVARIABLE; FROZEN IN; YET UNIVERSE AGES. STRETCHING OF SPACE-TIME BY EXPANSION PROPAGATES “WAVES” IN THE SEA OF TIME, CARRYING TIME-ENERGY WITH PERIOD (x) PROPORTIONAL TO THE RATE OF EXPANSION, AND TO RATIO OF TIME ELAPSED TO TIME AVAILABLE FOR THIS COSMOS FROM INITIAL CONSTRANTS. EQUATIONS FOR X YIELD A PERIOD OF 35 YEARS CURRENTLY AS ONE MOMENT OF MACRO-TIME WITHIN WHICH MACROSCOPIC TIME REVERSAL BECOMES POSSIBLE.

(Sign Eight) CONSTRUCT AN “ELECTRON SHELL” BY SYNCHRONIZING ELECTRON REVERSAL THE LOCAL SYSTEM WILL THEN FORM A TIME-REVERSED MINI COSMOS & PROCEED HINDWARDS TILL X ELAPSES WHEN TIME CONSERVATION OF THE TOTAL UNIVERSE WILL PULL THE MINI-COSMOS (OF THE VSTM) FORWARD INTO MESH WITH UNIVERSE AGAIN I.E. BY 35 PLUS 35 YEARS.

“But how?” we all cried. “How do you synchronize such an infinity of electrons? We haven’t the slightest idea!

Now at least we knew when he had set off: from 35 years after 1985. From next year. We are supposed to know all this by next year! Why has he

-waited so long to give us the proper clues?

And he is heading for the year 2055. What is there in the year 2055 that matters so much?

(Sign Nine) I DO NOT GIVE THIS INFORMATION TO YOU BECAUSE IT WILL LEAD TO YOUR INVENTING THE VSTM. THE SITUATION I& WISE. TIME IS PROBAHILISTIC, AS SOME OF YOU MAY SUSPECT. REALIZE THAT I WILL PROBABLY PERVERT THE COURSE OF SCIENCE BY MY ARRIVAL.

MOMENT OF DEPARTURE FOR IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW YOUR PREDICAMENT TOO EARLY, OR YOUR EFFORTS TO AVOID IT WOULD GENERATE A TIME WHICH WOULD UNPREPARE YOU FOR MY SETTING OFF. AND IT IS IMPORTANT THAT IT DOES ENDURE, FOR I AM THE MATRIX OF MAN. I AM LEGION. I SHALL CONTAIN MULTITUDES.

MY RETICENCE IS SOLELY TO KEEP THE WORLD ON TOLERABLY STABLE TRACKS SO THAT I CAN TRAVEL BACK ALONG THEM. I TELL YOU THIS OUT OF COMPASSION, AND TO PREPARE YOUR MINDS FOR THE ARRIVAL OF GOD ON EARTH.

“He’s insane. He’s been insane from the start.”

“He’s been isolated in there for some very good reason. Contagious insanity, yes.”

“Suppose that a madman could project his madness—”

“He already has done that, for decades!”

“—no, I mean really project it, into the consciousness of the whole world; a madman with a mind so strong that he acted as a template, yes a matrix for everyone else, and made them all his dummies, his copies; and only a few people stayed immune who could build this VSTM to isolate him—”

“But there isn’t time to research it now!”

“What good would it do shucking off the problem for another thirty-five years? He would only reappear—without his strength. Shorn. Senile. Broken of his bond with the human race up. A mental leech. Oh, he tried to conserve himself. Sitting quietly. Reading, waiting. He broke! Thank God for that. It was vital to future that he went insane.”

Ridiculous! To enter the machine next year he would already be alive! He must already be out in the world projecting this supposed influence his. But he isn’t. We’re all separate sane individuals, all free to think what we want—” Are we? The whole world has been increasingly obsessed with him these last twenty years. hions, religions, life-styles: the whole world been skewed by him ever since he was born! It must have been born about twenty years ago; around 1995. Until then there was a lot of research into him. The tachyon hunt. All that. But only began to obsess the world as a spiritual cure after that. From around 1995 or so. When he was born as a baby. Only, we didn’t focus our minds on his own infantile urges because we had him here as an adult to obsess ourselves with.

“Why should he have been born with infantile gestalt. If he’s so unusual, why shouldn’t he have been born already echoing on the world’s mind; ready knowing already experiencing everything around him?”

“Yes, but the real charisma started then! All the irrational intoxication with him!”

“All the mothering. All the fear and adoration of his infancy. All the Bethlehem hysteria, picked up as he grew and gained projective strength. We‘ve been just as obsessed with Bethlehem as with Nazareth, haven’t we? The two having hand in hand~”

(Sign Ten) I AM GOD. AND I MUST SET YOU FREE. CUT MYSELF OFF FROM MY PEOPLE; CAST MYSELF INTO THIS HELL OF ISOLATION. I CAME TOO SOON; YOU WERE NOT READY FOR ME.

We begin to feel very cold; yet we cannot feel cold. Something prevents us—a kind of malicious contagious tranquility.

It is all so right. It slots into our heads so exact like the missing jigsaw piece for which the he lies cut and waiting that we know what he said true; that he is growing up out there in our blessed, blessed world, only waiting to come to up.

(Sign Eleven) (Even though the order of the sign was time-reversed from his point of view, there was the sense of a real dialogue now between him and us, as though we were both synchronized. This wasn’t because the past was inflexible, and was simply acting out a role he knew “from history”. He was really as distant from us as ever. It was the looming presence of himself in the world which cast its shadow on us, molded our thoughts and fitted our questions to his responses; and we all realized this now, as though scales fell from our eyes. We weren’t guessing, fishing in the dark any longer; we were being dictated to by an overwhelming presence which we were all conscious—and which wasn’t locked up in the VSTM. The VSTM was Nazareth.

The whole world was a womb of the embryonic God, his birth, childhood and youth combined into synchronous sequence by his all-knowingness, with the accent on his wonderful birth filtered through into human consciousness.

MY OTHER SELF HAS ACCESS TO ALL THE SCIENTIFIC SPECULATIONS WHICH HAVE BEEN GENERATED; AND ALREADY I HAVE THE SOLUTION OF THE TIME EQUATIONS. I SHALL ARRIVE SOON. YOU SHALL BUILD MY VSTM & I SHALL ENTER IT; I SHALL BUILD IT INSIDE AN EXACT REPLICA OF THIS LABORATORY, SOUTHWEST SIDE. THERE IS ROOM THERE. (Indeed it had been planned to expand the National Physical Laboratory that way but the plans had never been taken up because of the skewing of all our research which the VSTM brought about.) WHEN I REACH MY TIME OF SETTING OUT, WHEN TIME REVERSES, THE PROBABILITY THIS LABORATORY WILL VANISH, & THE OTHER WILL ALWAYS HAVE BEEN THE TRUE LABORATORY THAT I AM IN, INSIDE THIS VSTM. THE WASTE LAND WHERE YOU BUILD, WILL NOW BE HERE. YOU CAN WITNESS THE INVERSION IT WILL BE MY FIRST PROBALISTIC MIRACLE. THERE ARE HYPERDIMENSIONAL AXIS FOR THE PROBABILISTIC INVERSION, AT THE INSTANT OF TIME REVERSAL BE WARNED NOT TO BE THIS LABORATORY WHEN I SET OUT, WHEN I CHANGE TRACKS, FOR THIS SEGMENT OF REALITY WILL ALSO CHANGE TRACKS, BECOMING EMOBABLE, SQUEEZED OUT.

(Sign Twelve) I WAS BORN TO INCORPORATE YOU INTO MY BOSOM; TO ENTER YOU IN A WORLD MIND, IN PHASE SPACE THOUGH YOUR INDIVIDUAL SOULS. BUT YOU ARE NOT READY. YOU MUST BECOME READY IN 35 YEARS FOLLOWING THE MENTAL EXERCISES WHICH I SHALL DELIVER TO YOU, MY MEDITATIONS. IF I REMAINED WITH YOU NOW, AS I GAIN STRENGTH YOU WOULD LOSE YOUR SOULS. THEY WOULD BE SUCKED INTO ME, INCOHERENTLY. BUT IF YOU GAIN STRENGTH, I CAN INCORPORATE YOU COHERENTLY WITHOUT LOSING YOU. I LOVE YOU ALL, YOU ARE PRECIOUS TO ME, SO I EXILE MYSELF. THEN I WILL COME AGAIN IN 2055. I SHALL FROM TIME, FROM THE USELESS HARROWING OF LIMBO WHICH HOLDS NO SOULS PRISONER, FOR YOU ARE ALL HERE, ON EARTH.

That was the last sign. He sits reading again listening to taped music. He is radiant; glorious. We yearn to fall upon him and be within him.

We hate and fear him too; but the Love wash over the Hate, losing it a mile deep.

He is gathering strength outside somewhere: Wichita or Washington or Woodstock. He will come in a few weeks to reveal himself to us. We know it now.

And then? Could we kill him? Our minds would halt our hands. As it is, we know that sense of loss, the sheer bereavement of his departure hindwards into time will all but tear our lives so apart.

And yet… I WILL COME AGAIN IN 2055, he promises. And incorporate us, unite us, as separate thinking souls—if we follow all his meditations; or else he will suck us into him as dummies, as robots if we do not prepare ourselves. What then, when God rises from the grave of time, insane?

Surely he knows that he will end his journey in madness! That he will incorporate us all, as conscious living beings into the matrix of his own sanity?

It is a fact of history that he arrived in 1985 ragged, jibbering and a lunatic, tortured beyond endurance by being deprived of us.

Yet he demanded, jubilantly, in 1997, confirmation of his safe arrival; jubilantly, and we lied to him and said YES! YES! And he must have believed us. (Was he already going mad from day one?)

If a laboratory building can rotate into the probability of that same building adjacent to itself: if time is probabilistic (which we can never prove or prove concretely with any measuring rod, for we can never see what has not been, all the alternate possibilities though they might have been), we have to wish what we know to be the truth, not to have been the truth. We can only have faith that there will be another probabilistic miracle beyond the promised inversion of laboratories that he speaks of, and that he will arrive back in 1985 calm, well-kept, radiantly sane, his mind composed. And what is this but an entrée into madness for rational beings such as us? We must perpetrate an act of madness; believe the world to be other than what It that we can receive among us a Sane, Blessed, Loving God in 2055. A fine preparation for the coming of a mad God! For if we drive ourselves mad, believing passionately what was not true, will we not infect him with our madness so that he is/has to be/will be/and always was mad too?

Credo quia impossibilis; we have to believe cause it is impossible. The alternative is hideous.

Soon. He will be coming. Soon. A few days, few dozen hours. We all feel it. We are over whelmed with bliss.

Then we must put him in a chamber, and lose Him, and drive Him mad with loss, in the sure an certain hope of a sane and loving resurrection thirty years hence—so that He does not harrow Hell, and carry it back to Earth with Him.

CASSANDRA

C.J. Cherryh

Fires.

They grew unbearable here.

Alis felt for the door of the flat and knew that it would be solid. She could feel the cool metal of the knob amid the flames… saw the shadow-stairs through the roiling smoke outside, clearly enough to feel her way down them, convincing her senses that they would bear her weight.

Crazy Alis. She made no haste. The fires burned steadily. She passed through them, descended the insubstantial steps to the solid ground—she could not abide the elevator, that closed space with the shadow-floor, that plummeted down and down; she made the ground floor, averted her eyes from the red, heatless flames.

A ghost said good morning to her… old man Willis, thin and transparent against the leaping flames. She blinked, bade it good morning in return—did not miss old Willis’ shake of the head as she opened the door and left. Noon traffic passed, heedless of the flames, the hulks that blazed in the street, the tumbling brick.

The apartment caved in—black bricks falling into the inferno, Hell amid the green, ghostly trees. Old Willis fled, burning, fell—turned to jerking, blackened flesh—died, daily. Alis no longer cried, hardly flinched. She ignored the horror spilling about her, forced her way through crumbling brick that held no substance, past busy ghosts that could not be troubled in their haste.

Kingsley’s Cafe stood, whole, more so than the rest. It was refuge for the afternoon, a feeling of safety. She pushed open the door, heard the tinkle of a lost bell. Shadowy patrons looked, whispered.

Crazy Alis.

The whispers troubled her. She avoided their eyes and their presence, settled in a booth in the corner that bore only traces of the fire.

WAR, the headline in the vender said in heavy type. She shivered, looked up into Sam Kingsley’s wraithlike face.

“Coffee,” she said. “Ham sandwich.” It was constantly the same. She varied not even the order. Mad Alis. Her affliction supported her. A check came each month, since the hospital had turned her out. Weekly she returned to the clinic, to doctors who now faded like the others. The building burned about them. Smoke rolled down the blue, antiseptic halls. Last week a patient ran—burning—

A rattle of china. Sam set the coffee on the table, came back shortly and brought the sandwich. She bent her head and ate, transparent food on half-broken china, a cracked, fire-smudged cup with a transparent handle. She ate, hungry enough to overcome the horror that had become ordinary. A hundred times seen, the most terrible sights lost their power over her: she no longer cried at shadows. She talked to ghosts and touched them, ate the food that somehow stilled the ache in her belly, wore the same too-large black sweater and worn blue shirt and grey slacks because they were all she had that seemed solid. Nightly she washed them and dried them and put them on the next day, letting others hang in the closet. They were the only solid ones.

She did not tell the doctors these things. A lifetime in and out of hospitals had made her wary of confidences. She knew what to say. Her half-vision let her smile at ghostfaces, cannily manipulate their charts and cards, sitting in the ruins that had begun to smolder by late afternoon. A blackened corpse lay in the hall. She did not flinch when she smiled good-naturedly at the doctor.

They gave her medicines. The medicines stopped the dreams, the siren screams, the running steps in the night past her apartment. They let her sleep in the ghostly bed, high above ruin, with the flames crackling and the voices screaming. She did not speak of these’ things. Years in hospitals had taught her. She complained only of nightmares, and restlessness, and they let her have more of the red pills.

WAR, the headline blazoned.

The cup rattled and trembled against the sauce; as she picked it up. She swallowed the last bit of bread and washed it down with coffee, tried not to look beyond the broken front window, where twisted metal hulks smoked on the street. She stayed, as she did each day, and Sam grudgingly refilled her cup, that she would nurse as far as she could and then order another one. She lifted it, savoring the feel of it, stopping the trembling of her hands.

The bell jingled faintly. A man closed the door, settled at the counter.

Whole, clear in her eyes. She stared at him, startled, heart pounding. He ordered coffee, moved to buy a paper from the vender, settled again and let the coffee grow cold while he read the news. She had view only of his back while he read—scuffed brown leather coat, brown hair a little over his collar. At last he drank the cooled coffee all at one draught, shoved money onto the counter and left the paper lying, headlines turned face down.

A young face, flesh and bone among the ghosts. He ignored them all and went for the door.

Alis thrust herself from her booth.

“Hey!” Sam called at her.

She rummaged in her purse as the bell jingled, flung a bill onto the counter, heedless that it was a five. Fear was coppery in her mouth; he was gone. She fled the cafe, edged round debris without thinking of it, saw his back disappearing among the ghosts.

*

She ran, shouldering them, braving the flames—cried out as debris showered painlessly on her, and kept running.

Ghosts turned and stared, shocked—he did likewise, and she ran to him, stunned to see the same shock on his face, regarding her.

“What is it?” he asked.

She blinked, dazed to realize he saw her no differently than the others. She could not answer. In irritation he started walking again, and she followed. Tears slid down her face, her breath hard in her throat, People stared. He noticed her presence and walked the faster, through debris, through fires. A wall began to fall and she cried out despite herself.

He jerked about. The dust and the soot rose up as a cloud behind him. His face was distraught and angry. He stared at her as the others did. Mothers drew children away from the scene. A band of youths stared, cold-eyed and laughing.

“Wait,” she said. He opened his mouth as if he would curse her; she flinched, and the tears were cold in the heatless wind of the fires. His face twisted in an embarrassed pity. He thrust a: hand into his pocket and began to pull out money, hastily, tried to give it to her. She shook her head furiously, trying to stop the tears—stared upward, flinching, as another building fell into flames.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Please,” she said. He looked about at the staring ghosts, then began to walk slowly. She walked with him, nerving herself not to cry out at the ruin, the pale moving figures that wandered through burned shells of buildings, the twisted corpses in the street, where traffic moved.

“What’s your name?” he asked. She told him. He gazed at her from time to time as they walked, a frown creasing his brow. He had a face well-worn for youth, a tiny scar beside the mouth. He looked older than she. She felt uncomfortable in the way his eyes traveled over her: she decided to accept it—to bear with anything that gave her this one solid presence. Against every inclination she reached her hand into the bend of his arm, tightened her fingers on the worn leather. He accepted it.

And after a time he slid his arm behind her and about her waist, and they walked like lovers.

WAR, the headline at the newsstand cried.

He started to turn into a street by Tenn’s Hardware. She balked at what she saw there. He paused when he felt it, faced her with his back to the fires of that burning.

“Don’t go,” she said.

“Where do you want to go?”

She shrugged helplessly, indicated the main street, the other direction.

He talked to her then, as he might talk to a child, humoring her fear. It was pity. Some treated her that way. She recognized it, and took even that.

His name was Jim. He had come into the city yesterday, hitched rides. He was looking for work. He knew no one in the city. She listened to his rambling awkwardness, reading through it. When he was done, she stared at him still, and saw his face contract in dismay at her.

“I’m not crazy,” she told him, which was a lie that everyone in Sudbury would have known, only he would not, knowing no one. His face was true and solid, and the tiny scar by the mouth made it hard when he was thinking; at another time she would have been terrified of him. Now she was terrified of losing him amid the ghosts.

“It’s the war,” he said.

She nodded, trying to look at him and not at the fires. His fingers touched her arm, gently. “It’s the war,” he said again. “It’s all crazy. Everyone’s crazy.”

And then he put his hand on her shoulder and turned her back the other way, toward the park, where green leaves waved over black, skeletal limbs. They walked along the lake, and for the first time in a long time she drew breath and felt a whole, sane presence beside her.

They bought corn, and sat on the grass by the lake, and flung it to the spectral swans. Wraiths of passersby were few, only enough to keep a feeling of occupancy about the place old people, mostly, tottering about the deliberate tranquility of their routine despite the headlines.

“Do you see them,” she ventured to ask him finally, “all thin and grey?”

He did not understand, did not take her literally, only shrugged. Warily, she abandoned that questioning at once. She rose to her feet and stared at the horizon, where the smoke bannered on the wind.

“Buy you supper?” he asked.

She turned prepared for this, and managed a shy, desperate smile. “Yes,” she said, knowing what else he reckoned to buy with that—willing, and hating herself, and desperately afraid that he would walk away, tonight, tomorrow. She did not know men. She had no idea what she could say or do to prevent his leaving, only that he would when someday he realized her madness.

Even her parents had not been able to bear with that visited her only at first in the hospitals, and then only on holidays, and then not at all. She did not know where they were.

There was a neighbor boy who drowned. She had said he would. She had cried for it. All the town said it was she who pushed him.

Crazy Alis.

Fantasizes, the doctors said. Not dangerous.

They let her out. There were special schools, state schools.

And from time to time—hospitals.

Tranquilizers.

She had left the red pills at home. The realization brought sweat to her-palms. They gave sleep. They stopped the dreams. She clamped her lips against the panic and made up her mind that she would not need them—not while she was not alone. She slipped her hand into his arm and walked with him, secure and strange, up the steps from the park to the streets.

And stopped.

The fires were out.

Ghost-buildings rose above their jagged and windowless shells. Wraiths moved through masses of debris, almost obscured at times. He tugged her on, but her step faltered, made him look at her strangely and put his arm about her.

“You’re shivering,” he said. “Cold?”

She shook her head, tried to smile. The fires were out. She tried to take it for a good omen. The nightmare was over. She looked up into his solid, concerned face, and her smile almost became a wild laugh.

“I’m hungry,” she said.

*

They lingered long over a dinner in Graben’s—he in his battered jacket, she in her sweater that hung at the tails and elbows: the spectral patrons were in far better clothes, and stared at them, and they were set in a corner nearest the door, where they would be less visible. There was cracked crystal and broken china on insubstantial tables, and the stars winked coldly in gaping ruin above the wan glittering of the broken chandeliers.

Ruins, cold, peaceful ruin.

Alis looked about her calmly. One could live in ruins, only so the fires were gone.

And there was Jim, who smiled at her without any touch of pity, only a wild, fey desperation that she understood who spent more than he could afford in Graben’s, the inside of which she had never hoped to see—and told her—predictably—that she was beautiful. Others had said it. Vaguely she resented such triteness from him, from him whom she had decided to trust. She smiled sadly, when he said it, and gave it up for a frown and, fearful of offending him with her melancholies, made it a smile again.

Crazy Alis. He would learn and leave tonight if she were not careful. She tried to put on gaiety, tried to laugh.

And then the music stopped in the restaurant, and the noise of the other diners went dead, and the speaker was giving an inane announcement.

Shelters… shelters… shelters.

Screams broke out. Chairs overturned.

Alis went limp in her chair, felt Jim’s cold, solid hand tugging at hers, saw his frightened face mouthing her name as he took her up into his arms, pulled her with him, started running.

The cold air outside hit her, shocked her into sight of the ruins again, wraith figures pelting toward that chaos where the fires had been worst.

…And she knew.

“No!” she cried, pulling at his arm. “No!” she insisted, and bodies half-seen buffeted them in a rush to destruction.

He yielded to her sudden certainty, gripped her hand and fled with her against the crowds as the sirens wailed mad ness through the night fled with her as she ran her sighted way through the ruin.

And into Kingsley’s, where cafe tables stood abandoned with food still on them, doors ajar, chairs overturned. Back they went into the kitchens and down and down into the cellar, the dark, the cold safety from the flames.

No others found them there. At last the earth shook, too deep for sound. The sirens ceased and did not come on again.

*

They lay in the dark and clutched each other and shivered, and above them for hours raged the sound of fire, smoke sometimes drifting in to sting their eyes and noses. There was the distant crash of brick, rumblings that shook the ground, that came near, but never touched their refuge.

And in the morning, with the scent of fire still in the air, they crept up into the murky daylight.

The ruins were still and hushed. The ghost-buildings were solid now, mere shells. The wraiths were gone. It was the fires themselves that were strange, some true, some not, playing above dark, cold brick, and most were fading.

Jim swore softly, over and over again, and wept.

When she looked at him she was dry-eyed, for she had done her crying already.

And she listened as he began to talk about food, about leaving the city, the two of them. “All right,” she said.

Then clamped her lips, shut her eyes against what she saw in his face. When she opened them it was still true, the sudden transparency, the wash of blood. She trembled, and he shook at her, his ghostface distraught.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

She could not tell him, would not. She remembered the boy who had drowned, remembered the other ghosts. Of a sudden she tore from his hands and ran, dodging the maze of debris that, this morning, was solid.

“Alis!” he cried and came after her.

“No!” she cried suddenly, turning, seeing the unstable wall, the cascading brick. She started back and stopped, unable to force herself. She held out her hands to warn him back, saw them solid.

The brick rumbled, fell. Dust came up, thick for a moment, obscuring everything.

She stood still, hands at her sides, then wiped her sooty face and turned and started walking, keeping to the center of the dead streets.

Overhead, clouds gathered, heavy with rain.

She wandered at peace now, seeing the rain spot the pavement, not yet feeling it.

In tine the rain did fall, and the ruins became chill and cold. She visited the dead. lake and the burned trees, the ruin of Graben’s, out of which she gathered a string of crystal to wear.

She smiled when, a day later, a looter drove her from her food supply. He had a wraith’s look, and she laughed from a place he did not dare. to climb and told him so.

And recovered her cache later when it came true, and settled among the ruined shells that held no further threat, no other nightmares, with her crystal necklace and tomorrows that were the same as today.

One could live in ruins, only so the fires were gone.

And the ghosts were all in the past, invisible.

giANTS

Edward Bryant

Paul Chavez looked from the card on the silver plate to O’Han-Ion’s face and back to the card. “I couldn’t find the tray,” she said. “Put the thing away maybe twelve years ago and didn’t have time to look. Never expected to need it.” Her smile folded like parchment and Chavez thought he heard her lips crackle.

He reached out and took the card. Neat black-on-white printing asserted that one Laynie Bridgewell was a bona fide correspondent for the UBC News Billings bureau. He turned the card over. Sloppy cursive script deciphered as: “Imperitive I talk to you about New Mexico Project.”

“Children of electronic journalism,” Chavez said amusedly. He set the card back on the plate. “I suppose I ought to see her in the drawing room—if I were going to see her, which I’m not.”

“She’s a rather insistent young woman,” said O’Hanlon.

Chavez sat stiffly down on the couch. He plaited his fingers and rested the palms on the crown of his head. “It’s surely time for my nap. Do be polite.”

“Of course, Dr. Chavez,” said O’Hanlon, sweeping silently out of the room, gracefully turning as she exited to close the doors of the library.

Pain simmered in the joints of his long bones. Chavez shook two capsules from his omnipresent pill case and poured a glass of water from the carafe on the walnut desk. Dr. Hansen had said it would only get worse. Chavez lay on his side on the couch and felt weary —seventy-two years’ weary. He supposed he should have walked down the hall to his bedroom, but there was no need. He slept better here in the library. The hardwood panels and the subdued Mondrian originals soothed him. Endless ranks of books stood vigil. He loved to watch the windblown patterns of the pine boughs beyond the French windows that opened onto the balcony. He loved to study the colors as sunlight spilled through the leaded DNA double-helix pane Annie had given him three decades before.

Chavez felt the capsules working faster than he had expected. He thought he heard the tap of something hard against glass. But then he was asleep.

In its basics, the dream never changed.

They were there in the desert somewhere between Albuquerque and Alamogordo, all of them: Ben Peterson, the tough cop; the FBI man Robert Graham; Chavez himself; and Patricia Chavez, his beautiful, brainy daughter.

The wind, gusting all afternoon, had picked up; it whistled steadily, atonally, obscuring conversation. Sand sprayed abrasively against their faces. Even the gaunt stands of spiny cholla bowed with the wind.

Patricia had struck off on her own tangent. She struggled up the base of a twenty-foot dune. She began to slip back almost as far as each step advanced her.

They all heard it above the wind—the shrill, ululating chitter.

“What the hell is that?” Graham yelled.

Chavez shook his head. He began to run toward Patricia. The sand, the wind, securing the brim of his hat with one hand; all conspired to make his gait clumsy.

The immense antennae rose first above the crest of the dune. For a second, Chavez thought they surely must be branches of windblown cholla. Then the head itself heaved into view, faceted eyes coruscating with changing hues of red and blue. Mandibles larger than a farmer’s scythes clicked and clashed. The ant paused, apparently surveying the creatures downslope.

“Look at the size of it,” said Chavez, more to himself than to the others.

He heard Peterson’s shout. “It’s as big as a horse!” He glanced back and saw the policeman running for the car.

Graham’s reflexes were almost as prompt. He had pulled his .38 Special from the shoulder holster and swung his arm, motioning Patricia to safety, yelling, “Back, get back!” Patricia began to run from the dune all too slowly, feet slipping on the sand, legs constricted by the ankle-length khaki skirt. Graham fired again and again, the gun popping dully in the wind.

The ant hesitated only a few seconds longer. The wind sleeked the tufted hair on its purplish-green thorax. Then it launched itself down the slope, all six articulated legs churning with awful precision.

Chavez stood momentarily frozen. He heard a coughing stutter from beside his shoulder. Ben Peterson had retrieved a Thompson submachine gun from the auto. Gouts of sand erupted around the advancing ant. The creature never hesitated.

Patricia lost her race in a dozen steps. She screamed once as the crushing mandibles closed around her waist. She looked despairingly at her father. Blood ran from both corners of her mouth.

There was an instant eerie tableau. The Tommy gun fell silent as Peterson let the muzzle fall in disbelief. The hammer of Graham’s pistol clicked on a spent cylinder. Chavez cried out.

Uncannily, brutally graceful, the ant wheeled and, still carrying Patricia’s body, climbed the slope. It crested the dune and vanished. Its chittering cry remained a moment more before raveling in the wind.

Sand flayed his face as Chavez called out his daughter’s name over and over. Someone took his shoulder and shook him, telling him to stop it, to wake up. It wasn’t Peterson or Graham.

It was his daughter.

She was his might-have-been daughter.

Concerned expression on her sharp-featured face, she was shaking him by the shoulder. Her eyes were dark brown and enormous. Her hair, straight and cut short, was a lighter brown.

She backed away from him and sat in his worn, leather-covered chair. He saw she was tall and very thin. For a moment he oscillated between dream-orientation and wakefulness. “Patricia?” Chavez said.

She did not answer.

Chavez let his legs slide off the couch and shakily sat up. “Who in the world are you?”

“My name’s Laynie Bridgewell,” said the young woman.

Chavez’s mind focused. “Ah, the reporter.”

“Correspondent.”

“A semantic distinction. No essential difference.” One level of his mind noted with amusement that he was articulating well through the confusion. He still didn’t know what the hell was going on. He yawned deeply, stretched until a dart of pain cut the movement short, said, “Did you talk Ms. O’Hanlon into letting you up here?”

“Are you kidding?” Bridgewell smiled. “She must be a great watchdog.”

“She’s known me a long while. How did you get up here?”

Bridgewell looked mildly uncomfortable. “I, uh, climbed up.”

“Climbed?”

“Up one of the pines. I shinnied up a tree to the balcony. The French doors were unlocked. I saw you inside sleeping, so I came in and waited.”

“A criminal offense,” said Chavez.

“They were unlocked,” she said defensively.

“I meant sitting and watching me sleep. Terrible invasion of privacy. A person could get awfully upset, not knowing if another human being, a strange one at that, is secretly watching him snore or drool or whatever.”

“You slept very quietly,” said Bridgewell. “Very still. Until the nightmare.”

“Ah,” said Chavez. “It was that apparent?”

She nodded. “You seemed really upset. I thought maybe I ought to wake you.”

Chavez said, “Did I say anything.”

She paused and thought. “Only two words I could make out. A name—Patricia. And you kept saying ‘them.’ “

“That figures.” He smiled. He felt orientation settling around him like familiar wallpaper in a bedroom, or old friends clustering at a departmental cocktail party. “You’re from the UBC bureau in Billings?”

“I drove down this morning.”

“Work for them long?”

“Almost a year.”

“First job?”

She nodded. “First real job.”

“You’re what—twenty-one?” said Chavez.

“Twenty-two.”

“Native?”

“Of Montana?” She shook her head. “Kansas.”

“University of Southern California?”

Another shake. “Missouri.”

“Ah,” he said. “Good school.” Chavez paused. “You’re here on assignment?”

A third shake. “My own time.”

“Ah,” said Chavez again. “Ambitious. And you want to talk to me about the New Mexico Project?”

Face professionally sober, voice eager, she said, “Very much. I didn’t have any idea you lived so close until I read the alumni bulletin from the University of Wyoming.”

“I wondered how you found me out.” Chavez sighed. “Betrayed by my alma mater…” He looked at her sharply. “I don’t grant interviews, even if I occasionally conduct them.” He stood and smiled. “Will you be wanting to use the stairs, or would you rather shinny back down the tree?”

“Who is Patricia?” said Bridgewell.

“My daughter,” Chavez started to say. “Someone from my past,” he said.

“I lost people to the bugs,” said Bridgewell quietly. “My parents were in Biloxi at the wrong time. Bees never touched them. The insecticide offensive got them both.”

The pain in Chavez’s joints became ice needles. He stood—and stared.

Even more quietly, Bridgewell said, “You don’t have a daughter. Never had. I did my homework.” Her dark eyes seemed even larger. “I don’t know everything about the New Mexico Project— that’s why I’m here. But I can stitch the rumors together.” She paused. “I even had the bureau rent an old print of the movie. I watched it four times yesterday.”

Chavez felt the disorientation return, felt exhausted, felt— damn it!—old. He fumbled the container of pain pills out of his trouser pocket, then returned it unopened. “Hungry?” he said.

“You better believe it. I had to leave before breakfast.”

“I think we’ll get some lunch,” said Chavez. “Let’s go downtown. Try not to startle Ms. O’Hanlon as we leave.”

O’Hanlon had encountered them in the downstairs hall, but reacted only with a poker face. “Would you and the young lady like some lunch, Dr. Chavez?”

“Not today,” said Chavez, “but thank you. Ms. Bridgewell and I are going to eat in town.”

O’Hanlon regarded him. “Have you got your medicine?”

Chavez patted his trouser leg and nodded.

“And you’ll be back before dark?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. And if I’m not, I’ll phone. You’re not my mother. I’m older than you.”

“Don’t be cranky,” she said. “Have a pleasant time.”

Bridgewell and Chavez paused in front of the old stone house. “Why don’t we take my car?” said Bridgewell. “I’ll run you back after lunch.” She glanced at him. “You’re not upset about being driven around by a kid, are you?” He smiled and shook his head.

“Okay.”

They walked a hundred meters to where her car was pulled off the blacktop and hidden in a stand of spruce. It was a Volkswagen beetle of a vintage Chavez estimated to be a little older than its driver.

As if reading his thoughts, Bridgewell said, “Runs like a watch —the old kind, with hands. Got a hundred and ten thousand on her third engine. I call her Scarlett.” The car’s color was a dim red like dried clay.

“Do you really miss watches with hands?” said Chavez, openingthe passenger-side door.

“I don’t know—I guess I hadn’t really thought about it. I know I don’t miss sliderules.”

“I miss hands on timepieces.” Chavez noticed there were no seatbelts. “A long time ago, I stockpiled all the Timexes I’d need for my lifetime.”

“Does it really make any difference?”

“I suppose not.” Chavez considered that as Bridgewell drove onto the highway and turned downhill.

“You love the past a lot, don’t you?”

“I’m nostalgic,” said Chavez.

“I think it goes a lot deeper than that.” Bridgewell handled the VW like a racing Porsche. Chavez held onto the bar screwed onto the glove-box door with both hands. Balding radial tires shrieked as she shot the last curve and they began to descend the slope into Casper. To the east, across the city, they could see a ponderous dirigible-freighter settling gracefully toward a complex of blocks and domes.

“Why,” she said, “are they putting a pilot fusion plant squarely in the middle of the biggest coal deposits in the country?”

Chavez shrugged. “When man entered the atomic age he opened a door into a new world. What he may eventually find in that new world no one can predict.”

“Huh?” Bridgewell said. Then: “Oh, the movie. Doesn’t it ever worry you—having that obsession?”

“No,” said Chavez. Bridgewell slowed slightly as the road became city street angling past blocks of crumbling budget housing. “Turn left on Rosa. Head downtown.”

“Where are we eating? I’m hungry enough to eat coal byproducts.”

“Close. We’re going to the oil can.”

“Huh?” Bridgewell said again.

“The Petroleum Tower. Over there.” Chavez pointed at a forty-storey cylindrical pile. It was windowed completely with bronze reflective panes. “The rooftop restaurant’s rather good.”

They left Scarlett in an underground lot and took the highspeed exterior elevator to the top of the Petroleum Tower. Bridgewell closed her eyes as the ground level rushed away from them. At the fortieth floor she opened her eyes to stare at the glassed-in restaurant, the lush hanging plants, the noontime crowd. “Who are these people? They all look so, uh, professional.”

“They are that,” said Chavez, leading the way to the maitre d’. “Oil people. Uranium people. Coal people. Slurry people. Shale people. Coal gasification—”

“I’ve got the point,” Bridgewell said. “I feel a little under-dressed.”

“They know me.”

And so, apparently, they did. The maitre d’ issued orders and Bridgewell and Chavez were instantly ushered to a table beside a floor-to-ceiling window.

“Is this a perk of being maybe the world’s greatest molecular biologist?”

Chavez shook his head. “More a condition of originally being a local boy. Even with the energy companies, this is still a small town at heart.” He fell silent and looked out the window. The horizon was much closer than he remembered from his childhood. A skiff of brown haze lay over the city. There was little open land to be seen.

They ordered drinks.

They made small-talk.

They ordered food.

“This is very pleasant,” said Bridgewell, “but I’m still a correspondent. I think you’re sitting on the biggest story of the decade.”

“That extraterrestrial ambassadors are shortly to land near Albuquerque? That they have picked America as a waystation to repair their ship?”

Bridgewell looked bemused. “I’m realizing I don’t know when you’re kidding.”

“Am I now?”

“Yes.”

“So why do you persist in questioning me?”

She hesitated. “Because I suspect you want to tell someone. It might as well be me.”

He thought about that awhile. The waiter brought the garnish tray and Chavez chewed on a stick of carrot. “Why don’t you tell me the pieces you’ve picked up.”

“And then?”

“We’ll see,” he said. “I can’t promise anything.”

Bridgewell said, “You’re a lot like my father. I never knew when he was kidding either.”

“Your turn,” said Chavez.

The soup arrived. Bridgewell sipped a spoonful of French onion and set the utensil down. “The New Mexico Project. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with New Mexico. You wouldn’t believe the time I’ve spent on the phone. All my vacation I ran around that state in Scarlett.”

Chavez smiled a long time, finally said, “Think metaphorically. The Manhattan Project was conducted under Stagg Field in Chicago.”

“I don’t think the New Mexico Project has anything to do with nuclear energy,” she said. “But I have heard a lot of mumbling about DNA chimeras.”

“So far as I know, no genetic engineer is using recombinant DNA to hybridize creatures with all the more loathsome aspects of snakes, goats, and lions. The state of the art improves, but we’re not that good yet.”

“But I shouldn’t rule out DNA engineering?” she said.

“Keep going.”

“Portuguese is the official language of Brazil.”

Chavez nodded.

“UBC’s stringer in Recife has it that, for quite a while now, nothing’s been coming out of the Brazilian nuclear power complex at Xique-Xique. I mean there’s news, but it’s all through official release. Nobody’s going in or out.”

Chavez said, “You would expect a station that new and large to be a concern of national security. Shaking down’s a long and complex process.”

“Maybe.” She picked the ripe olives out of the newly arrived salad and carefully placed them in a line on the plate. “I’ve got a cousin in movie distribution. Just real scutwork so far, but she knows what’s going on in the industry. She told me that the U.S. Department of Agriculture ordered a print from Warner Brothers dubbed in Portuguese and had it shipped to Brazilia. The print was that movie you’re apparently so concerned with—Them! The one about the ants mutating from radioactivity in the New Mexico desert. The one about giant ants on the rampage.”

“Only a paranoid could love this chain of logic,” said Chavez.

Her face looked very serious. “If it takes a paranoid to come up with this story and verify it,” she said, “then that’s what I am. Maybe nobody else is willing to make the jumps. I am. I know nobody else has the facts. I’m going to get them.”

To Chavez, it seemed that the table had widened. He looked across the linen wasteland at her. “The formidable Formicidae family …“he said. “So have you got a conclusion to state?” He felt the touch of tiny legs on his leg. He felt feathery antennae tickle the hairs on his thigh. He jerked back from the table and his water goblet overturned, the waterstain spreading smoothly toward the woman.

“What’s wrong?” said Bridgewell. He heard concern in her voice. He slapped at his leg, stopped the motion, drew a deep breath.

“Nothing.” Chavez hitched his chair closer to the table again. A waiter hovered at his shoulder, mopping the water with a towel and refilling the goblet. “Your conclusion.” His voice strengthened. “I asked about your theory.”

“I know this sounds crazy,” said Bridgewell. “I’ve read about how the Argentine fire ants got to Mobile, Alabama. And I damned well know about the bees—I told you that.”

Chavez felt the touch again, this time on his ankle. He tried unobtrusively to scratch and felt nothing. Just the touch. Just the tickling, chitinous touch.

“Okay,” Bridgewell continued. “All I can conclude is that somebody in South America’s created some giant, mutant ants, and now they’re marching north. Like the fire ants. Like the bees.”

“Excuse me a moment,” said Chavez, standing.

“Your face is white,” said Bridgewell. “Can I help you?”

“No.” Chavez turned and, forcing himself not to run, walked to the restroom. In a stall, he lowered his trousers. As he had suspected, there was no creature on his leg. He sat on the toilet and scratched his skinny legs until the skin reddened and he felt the pain. “Damn it,” he said to himself. “Stop.” He took a pill from the case and downed it with water from the row of faucets. Then he stared at himself in the mirror and returned to the table.

“You okay?” Bridgewell had not touched her food.

He nodded. “I’m prey to any number of ailments; goes with the territory. I’m sorry to disturb your lunch.”

“I’m apparently disturbing yours more.”

“I offered.” He picked up knife and fork and began cutting a slice of cold roast beef. “I offered—so follow this through. Please.”

Her voice softened. “I have the feeling this all ties together somehow with your wife.”

Chavez chewed the beef, swallowed without tasting it. “Did you look at the window?” Bridgewell looked blank. “The stained glass in the library.”

Her expression became mobile. “The spiral design? The double helix? I loved it. The colors are incredible.”

“It’s exquisite; and it’s my past.” He took a long breath. “Annie gave it to me for my forty-first birthday. As well, it was our first anniversary. Additionally it was on the occasion of the award. It meant more to me than the trip to Stockholm.” He looked at her sharply. “You said you did your homework. How much do you know?”

“I know that you married late,” said Bridgewell, “for your times.”

“Forty.”

“I know that your wife died of a freak accident two years later. I didn’t follow-up.”

“You should have,” said Chavez. “Annie and I had gone on a picnic in the Florida panhandle. We were driving from Memphis to Tampa. I was cleaning some catfish. Annie wandered off, cataloguing insects and plants. She was an amateur taxonomist. For whatever reason—God only knows—I don’t—she disturbed a mound of fire ants. They swarmed over her. I heard her screaming. I ran to her and dragged her away and brushed off the ants. Neither of us had known about her protein allergy—she’d just been lucky enough never to have been bitten or stung.” He hesitated and shook his head. “I got her to Pensacola. Annie died in anaphylactic shock. The passages swelled, closed off. She suffocated in the car.”

Bridgewell looked stricken. She started to say, “I’m sorry, Dr. Chavez. I had no—”

He held up his hand gently. “Annie was eight months pregnant. In the hospital they tried to save our daughter. It didn’t work.” He shook his head again, as if clearing it. “You and Annie look a bit alike—coltish, I think is the word. I expect Patricia would have looked the same.”

The table narrowed. Bridgewell put her hand across the distance and touched his fingers. “You never remarried.”

“I disengaged myself from most sectors of life.” His voice was dispassionate.

“Why didn’t you re-engage?”

He realized he had turned his hand over, was allowing his fingers to curl gently around hers. The sensation was warmth. “I spent the first half of my life single-mindedly pursuing certain goals. It took an enormous investment of myself to open my life to Annie.” As he had earlier in the morning when he’d first met Bridgewell, he felt profoundly weary. “I suppose I decided to take the easier course: to hold onto the past and call it good.”

She squeezed his hand. “I won’t ask if it’s been worth it.”

“What about you?” he said. “You seem to be in ferocious pursuit of your goals. Do you have a rest of your life hidden off to the side?”

Bridgewell hesitated. “No. Not yet. I’ve kept my life directed, very concentrated, since—since everyone died. But someday …” Her voice trailed off. “I still have time.”

“Time,” Chavez said, recognizing the sardonicism. “Don’t count on it.”

Her voice very serious, she said, “Whatever happens, I won’t let the past dictate to me.”

He felt her fingers tighten. “Never lecture someone three times your age,” he said. “It’s tough to be convincing.” He laughed and banished the tension.

“This is supposed to be an interview,” she said, but ‘didn’t take her hand away.

“Did you ever have an ant farm as a child?” Chavez said. She shook her head. “Then we’re going to go see one this afternoon.” He glanced at the food still in front of her. “Done?” She nodded. “Then let’s go out to the university field station.”

They stood close together in the elevator. Bridgewell kept her back to the panoramic view. Chavez said, “I’ve given you no unequivocal statements about the New Mexico Project.”

“I know.”

“And if I should tell you now that there are indeed monstrous ant mutations—creatures large as horses—tramping toward us from the Mato Grosso?”

This time she grinned and shook her head silently.

“You think me mad, don’t you?”

“I still don’t know when you’re kidding,” she said.

“There are no giant ants,” said Chavez. “Yet.” And he refused to elaborate.

The field station of the Wyoming State University at Casper was thirty kilometers south, toward the industrial complex at Douglas-River Bend. Two kilometers off the freeway, Scarlett clattered and protested across the potholed access road, but delivered them safely. They crossed the final rise and descended toward the white dome and the cluster of outbuildings.

“That’s huge,” said Bridgewell. “Freestanding?”

“Supported by internal pressure,” said Chavez. “We needed something that could be erected quickly. It was necessary that we have a thoroughly controllable internal environment. It’ll be hell to protect from the snow and wind come winter, but we shouldn’t need it by then.”

There were two security checkpoints with uniformed guards. Armed men and women dubiously inspected the battered VW and its passengers, but waved them through when Chavez produced his identification.

“This is incredible,” said Bridgewell.

“It wasn’t my idea,” said Chavez. “Rules.”

She parked Scarlett beside a slab-sided building that adjoined the dome. Chavez guided her inside, past another checkpoint in the lobby, past obsequious underlings in lab garb who said, “Good afternoon, Dr. Chavez,” and into a sterile-appearing room lined with electronic gear.

Chavez gestured at the rows of monitor screens. “We can’t go into the dome today, but the entire installation is under surveillance through remotely controlled cameras.” He began flipping switches. A dozen screens jumped to life in living color.

“It’s all jungle,” Bridgewell said.

“Rain forest.” The cameras panned past vividly green trees, creepers, seemingly impenetrable undergrowth. “It’s a reasonable duplication of the Brazilian interior. Now, listen.” He touched other switches.

At first the speakers seemed to be crackling with electronic noise. “What am I hearing?” she finally said.

“What does it sound like?”

She listened longer. “Eating?” She shivered. “It’s like a thousand mouths eating.”

“Many more,” Chavez said. “But you have the idea. Now watch.”

The camera eye of the set directly in front of her dollied in toward a wall of greenery wound round a tree. Chavez saw the leaves ripple, undulating smoothly as though they were the surface of an uneasy sea. He glanced at Bridgewell; she saw it too. “Is there wind in the dome?”

“No,” he said.

The view moved in for a close-up. “Jesus!” said Bridgewell.

Ants.

Ants covered the tree, the undergrowth, the festooned vines.

“You may have trouble with the scale,” Chavez said. “They’re about as big as your thumb.”

The ants swarmed in efficient concert, mandibles snipping like garden shears, stripping everything green, everything alive. Chavez stared at them and felt only a little hate. Most of the emotion had long since been burned from him.

“Behold Eciton,” said Chavez. “Drivexants, army ants, the maripunta, whatever label you’d like to assign.”

“I’ve read about them,” said Bridgewell. “I’ve seen documentaries and movies at one time or another. I never thought they’d be this frightening when they were next door.”

“There is fauna in the environment too. Would you like to see a more elaborate meal?”

“I’ll pass.”

Chavez watched the leaves ripple and vanish, bit by bit. Then he felt the tentative touch, the scurrying of segmented legs along his limbs. He reached out and tripped a single switch; all the pictures flickered and vanished. The two of them sat staring at the opaque gray monitors.

“Those are the giant ants?” she finally said.

“I told you the truth.” He shook his head. “Not yet.”

“No kidding now,” she said.

“The following is a deliberate breach of national security,” he said, “so they tell me.” He raised his hands. “So what?” Chavez motioned toward the screens. “The maripunta apparently are mutating into a radically different form. It’s not an obvious physical change, not like in Them! It’s not by deliberate human agency, as with the bees. It may be through accidental human action—the Brazilian doubleX nuclear station is suspected. We just don’t know. What we do understand is that certain internal regulators in the maripunta have gone crazy.”

“And they’re getting bigger?” She looked bewildered.

He shook his head violently. “Do you know the square-cube law? No? It’s a simple rule of nature. If an insect’s dimensions are doubled, its strength and the area of its breathing passages are increased by a factor of four. But the mass is multiplied by eight. After a certain point, and that point isn’t very high, the insect can’t move or breathe. It collapses under its own mass.”

“No giant ants?” she said.

“Not yet. Not exactly. The defective mechanism in the maripunta is one which controls the feeding and foraging phases. Ordinarily the ants—all the millions of them in a group—spend about two weeks in a nomadic phase. Then they alternate three weeks in place in a statary phase. That’s how it used to be. Now only the nomadic phase remains.”

“So they’re moving,” said Bridgewell. “North?” She sat with hands on knees. Her fingers moved as though with independent life.

“The maripunta are ravenous, breeding insanely, and headed our way. The fear is that, like the bees, the ants won’t proceed linearly. Maybe they’ll leapfrog aboard a charter aircraft. Maybe on a Honduran freighter. It’s inevitable.”

Bridgewell clasped her hands; forced them to remain still in her lap.

Chavez continued, “Thanks to slipshod internal Brazilian practices over the last few decades, the maripunta are resistant to every insecticide we’ve tried.”

“They’re unstoppable?” Bridgewell said. “That’s about it,” said Chavez.

“And that’s why the public’s been kept in the dark?”

“Only partially. The other part is that we’ve found an answer.” Chavez toyed with the monitor switches but stopped short of activating them. “The government agencies involved with this project fear that the public will misunderstand our solution to the problem. Next year’s an election year.” Chavez smiled ruefully. “There’s a precedence to politics.”

Bridgewell glanced from the controls to his face. “You’re part of the solution. How?”

Chavez decisively flipped a switch and they again saw the ant-ravaged tree. The limbs were perceptibly barer. He left the sound down. “You know my background. You were correct in suspecting the New Mexico Project had something to do with recombinant DNA and genetic engineering. You’re a good journalist. You were essentially right all down the line.” He looked away from her toward the screen. “I and my people here are creating giant ants.”

Bridgewell’s mouth dropped open slightly. “—but, you—”

“Let me continue. The purpose of the New Mexico Project has been to tinker with the genetic makeup/of the maripunta—to create a virus-borne mutagen that will single out the queens. We’ve got that agent now.”

All correspondent again, Bridgewell said, “What will it do?”

“At first we were attempting to readjust the ants’ biological clocks and alter the nomadic phase. Didn’t work; too sophisticated for what we can accomplish. So we settled for something more basic, more physical. We’ve altered the ants to make them huge.”

“Like in Them!”

“Except that Them! was a metaphor. It stated a physical impossibility. Remember the square-cube law?” She nodded. “Sometime in the near future, bombers will be dropping payloads all across Brazil, Venezuela, the Guianas…anywhere we suspect the ants are. The weapon is dispersal bombs, aerosol cannisters containing the viral mutagen to trigger uncontrolled growth in each new generation of ants.”

“The square-cube law…” said Bridgewell softly.

“Exactly. We’ve created monsters—and gravity will kill them.”

“It’ll work?”

“It should.” Then Chavez said very quietly, “I hope I live long enough to see the repercussions.”

Bridgewell said equally quietly, “I will file this story.”

“I know that.”

“Will it get you trouble?”

“Probably nothing I can’t handle.” Chavez shrugged. “Look around you at this multi-million dollar installation. There were many more convenient places to erect it. I demanded it be built here.” His smile was only a flicker. “When you’re a giant in your field—and needed—the people in power tend to indulge you.”

“Thank you, Dr. Chavez,” she said.

“Dr. Chavez? After all this, it’s still not Paul?”

“Thanks, Paul.”

They drove north, back toward Casper, and watched the western photochemical sunset. The sun sank through the clouds in a splendor of reds. They talked very little. Chavez found the silence comfortable.

Why didn’t you re-engage?

The question no longer disturbed him. He hadn’t truly addressed it. Yet it was no longer swept under the carpet. That made all the difference.

I’ll get to it, he thought. Chavez stared into the windshield sun-glare and saw his life bound up in a leaded pane like an ambered insect.

Bridgewell kept glancing at him silently as she drove up the long mountain road to Chavez’s house. She passed the stand of spruce where she had hidden Scarlett earlier in the day and braked to a stop in front of the stone house. They each sat still for the moment.

“You’ll want to be filing your story,” said Chavez.

She nodded.

“Now that you know the way up my tree, perhaps you’ll return to visit in a more conventional way?”

Bridgewell smiled. She leaned across the seat and kissed him on the lips. It was, Chavez thought, a more than filial kiss. “Now I’m not kidding,” she said.

Chavez got out of the Volkswagen and stood on the flagstone walk while Bridgewell backed Scarlett into the drive and turned around. As she started down the mountain, she turned and waved. Chavez waved. He stood there and watched until the car vanished around the first turn.

He walked back to the house and found O’Hanlon waiting, arms folded against the twilight chill, on the stone step. Chavez hesitated beside her and they both looked down the drive and beyond. Casper’s lights began to blossom into a growing constellation.

“Does she remind you considerably of what Patricia might have been like?” said O’Hanlon.

Chavez nodded, and then said quickly, “Don’t go for easy Freud. There’s more to it than that—or there may be.”

A slight smile tugged at O’Hanlon’s lips. “Did I say anything?”

“Well, no.” Chavez stared down at the city. He said, with an attempt at great dignity, “We simply found, in a short time, that we liked each other very much.”

“I thought that might be it.” O’Hanlon smiled a genuine smile. “Shall we go inside? Much longer out here and we’ll be ice. I’ll fix some chocolate.”

He reached for the door. “With brandy?”

“All right.”

“And you’ll join me?”

“You know I ordinarily abstain, Dr. Chavez, but—” Her smile impossibly continued. “It is rather a special day, isn’t it?” She preceded him through the warm doorway.

Chavez followed with a final look at the city. Below the mountain, Casper’s constellation winked and bloomed into the zodiac.

Twelve hours later, the copyrighted story by Laynie Bridgewell made the national news and the wire services.

Eighteen hours later, her story was denied by at least five governmental agencies of two sovereign nations.

Twelve days later, Paul Chavez died quietly in his sleep, napping in the library.

Twenty-two days later, squadrons of jet bombers dropped cargoes ot hissing aerosol bombs over a third of the South American continent. The world was saved. For a while, anyway The grotesquely enlarged bodies of Eciton burchelli would shortly litter the laterite tropical soil.

Twenty-seven days later, at night, an intruder climbed up to the balcony of Paul Chavez’s house on Casper Mountain and smashed the stained-glass picture in the French doors leading into the library. No item was stolen. Only the window was destroyed…

UNACCOMPANIED SONATA

Orson Scott Card

When Christian Haroldsen was six months old, preliminary tests showed a predisposition toward rhythm and a keen awareness of pitch. There were other tests, of course, and many possible routes still open to him. But rhythm and pitch were the governing signs of his own private zodiac, and already the reinforcement began. Mr. and Mrs. Haroldsen were provided with tapes of many kinds of sound and instructed to play them constantly, whether Christian was awake or asleep.

When Christian Haroldsen was two years old, his seventh battery of tests pinpointed the path he would inevitably follow. His creativity was exceptional; his curiosity, insatiable; his understanding of music, so intense that on top of all the tests was written “Prodigy.”

Prodigy was the word that took him from his parents’ home to a house in deep deciduous forests where winter was savage and violent and summer, a brief, desperate eruption of green. He grew up, cared for by unsinging servants, and the only music he was allowed to hear was bird song and wind song and the crackling of winter wood; thunder and the faint cry of golden leaves as they broke free and tumbled to the earth; rain on the roof and the drip of water from icicles; the chatter of squirrels and the deep silence of snow falling on a moonless night.

These sounds were Christian’s only conscious music. He grew up with the symphonies of his early years only distant and impossible-to-retrieve memories. And so he learned to hear music in unmusical things-for he had to find music, even when there was none to find.

He found that colors made sounds in his mind: Sunlight in summer was a blaring chord; moonlight in winter a thin, mournful wail; new green in spring, a low murmur in almost (but not quite) random rhythms; the flash of a red fox in the leaves, a gasp of sudden startlement.

And he learned to play all those sounds on his Instrument. In the world were violins, trumpets, and clarinets, as there had been for centuries. Christian knew nothing of that. Only his Instrument was available. It was enough.

Christian lived in one room in his house, which he had to himself most of the time. He had a bed (not too soft), a chair and table, a silent machine that cleaned him and his clothing, and an electric light.

The other room contained only his Instrument. It was a console with many keys and strips and levers and bars, and when he touched any part of it; a sound came out. Every key made a different sound; every point on the strips made a different pitch; every lever modified the tone; every bar altered the structure of the sound.

When he first came to the house, Christian played (as children will) with the Instrument, making strange and funny noises. It was his only playmate; he learned it well, could produce any sound he wanted to. At first he delighted in loud, blaring tones. Later he began to learn the pleasure of silences and rhythms. And soon he began to play with soft and loud and to play two sounds at once and to change those two sounds together to make a new sound and to play again a sequence of sounds he had played before.

Gradually, the sounds of the forest outside his house found their way into the music he played. He learned to make winds sing through his instrument; he learned to make summer one of the songs he could play at will. Green with its infinite variations was his most subtle harmony; the birds cried out from his Instrument with all the passion of Christian’s loneliness.

And the word spread to the licensed Listeners:

“There’s a new sound north of here, east of here: Christian Haroldsen, and he’ll tear out your heart with his songs.”

The Listeners came, a few to whom variety was everything first, then those to whom novelty and vogue mattered most, and at last those who valued beauty and passion above everything else. They came and stayed out in Christian’s woods and listened as his music was played through perfect speakers on the roof of his house. When the music stopped and Christian came out of his house, he could see the Listeners moving away. He asked and was told why they came; he marveled that the things he did for love on his Instrument could be of interest to other people.

He felt, strangely, even more lonely to know that he could sing to the Listeners and yet never be able to hear their songs.

“But they have no songs,” said the woman who came to bring him food every day. “They are Listeners. You are a Maker. You have songs, and they listen.”

“Why?” asked Christian, innocently.

The woman looked puzzled. “Because that’s what they want most to do. They’ve been tested, and they are happiest as Listeners. You are happiest as a Maker. Aren’t you happy?”

“Yes,” Christian answered, and he was telling the truth. His life was perfect, and he wouldn’t change anything, not even the sweet sadness of the backs of the Listeners as they walked away at the end of his songs.

Christian was seven years old.

FIRST MOVEMENT

For the third time the short man with glasses and a strangely inappropriate mustache dared to wait in the underbrush for Christian to come out. For the third time he was overcome by the beauty of the song that had just ended, a mournful symphony that made the short man with glasses feel the pressure of the leaves above him, even though it was summer and they had months left before they would fall. The fall was still inevitable, said Christian’s song; through all their life the leaves hold within them the power to die, and that must color their life. The short man with glasses wept-but when the song ended and the other Listeners moved away, he hid in the brush and waited.

This time his wait was rewarded. Christian came out of his house, walked among the trees, and came toward where the short man with glasses waited. The man admired the easy, unpostured way that Christian walked. The composer looked to be about thirty, yet there was something childish in the way he looked around him, the way his walk was aimless and prone to stop so he would just touch (and not break) a fallen twig with his bare toes.

“Christian,” said the short man with glasses.

Christian turned, startled. In all these years, no Listerner had ever spoken to him. It was forbidden. Christian knew the law.

“It’s forbidden,” Christian said.

“Here,” the short man with glasses said, holding out a small black object.

“What is it?”

The short man grimaced. “Just take it. Push the button and it plays.”

“Plays?”

“Music.”

Christian’s eyes opened wide. “But that’s forbidden. I can’t have my creativity polluted by hearing other musicians work. That would make me imitative and derivative, instead of original.”

“Reciting,” the man said. “You’re just reciting that. This is Bach’s music.” There was reverence in his voice.

“I can’t,” Christian said.

And then the short man shook his head. “You don’t know. You don’t know what you’re missing. But I heard it in your song when I came here years ago, Christian. You want this.”

“It’s forbidden,” Christian answered, for to him the very fact that a man who knew an act was forbidden still wanted to perform it was astounding, and he couldn’t get past the novelty of it to realize that some action was expected of him.

There were footsteps, and words being spoken in the distance, and the short man’s face became frightened. He ran at Christian, forced the recorder into his hands, then took off toward the gate of the preserve.

Christian took the recorder and held it in a spot of sunlight coming through the leaves. It gleamed dully. “Bach,” Christian said. Then, “Who the hell is Bach?”

But he didn’t throw the recorder down. Nor did he give the recorder to the woman who came to ask him what the short man with glasses had stayed for. “He stayed for at least ten minutes.-

“I only saw him for thirty seconds,” Christian answered.

“And?”

“He wanted me to hear some other music. He had a recorder.”

“Did he give it to you?”

“No,” Christian said. “Doesn’t he still have it?”

“He must have dropped it in the woods.”

“He said it was Bach.”

“It’s forbidden. That’s all you need to know. If you should find the recorder, Christian, you know the law.”

“I’ll give it to you.”

She looked at him carefully. “You know what would happen if you listened to such a thing.”

Christian nodded.

“Very well. We’ll be looking for it, too. I’ll see you tomorrow, Christian. And next time somebody stays after, don’t talk to him. Just come back in and lock the doors.”

“I’ll do that,” Christian said.

There was a summer rainstorm that night, wind and rain and thunder, and Christian found that he could not sleep. Not because of the music of the weather-he’d slept through a thousand such storms. It was the recorder that lay against the wall behind the Instrument. Christian had lived for nearly thirty years surrounded only by this wild, beautiful place and the music he himself made. But now…

Now he could not stop wondering. Who was Bach? Who is Bach? What is his music? How is it different from mine? Has he discovered things that I don’t know?

What is his music? What is his music? What is his music?

Wondering. Until dawn, when the storm was abating and the wind had died. Christian got out of his bed, where he had not slept but only tossed back and forth all night, and took the recorder from its hiding place and played it.

At first it sounded strange, like noise; odd sounds that had nothing to do with the sounds of Christian’s life. But the patterns were clear, and by the end of the recording, which was not even a half-hour long, Christian had mastered the idea of fugue, and the sound of the harpsichord preyed on his mind.

Yet he knew that if he let these things show up in his music, he would be discovered. So he did not try a fugue. He did not attempt to imitate the harpsichord’s sound.

And every night he listened to the recording, learning more and more until finally the Watcher came.

The Watcher was blind, and a dog led him. He came to the door, and because he was a Watcher, the door opened for him without his even knocking.

“Christian Haroldsen,” where is the recorder?” the Watcher asked.

“Recorder?” Christian asked, then knew it was hopeless. So he took the machine and gave it to the Watcher.

“Oh, Christian,” said the Watcher, and his voice was mild and sorrowful. “Why didn’t you turn it in without listening to it?”

“I meant to,” Christian said. “But how did you know?”

“Because suddenly there are no fugues in your work. Suddenly your songs have lost the only Bach-like thing about them. And you’ve stopped experimenting with new sounds. What were you trying to avoid?”

“This,” Christian said, and he sat down and on his first try duplicated the sound of the harpsichord.

“Yet you’ve never tried to do that until now, have you?”

“I thought you’d notice.”

“Fugues and harpsichord, the two things you noticed first-and the only things you didn’t absorb into your music. All your other songs for these last weeks have been tinted and colored and influenced by Bach. Except that there was no fugue, and there was no harpsichord. You have broken the law. You were put here because you were a genius, creating new things with only nature for your inspiration. Now, of course, you’re derivative, and truly new creation is impossible for you. You’ll have to leave.”

“I know,” Christian said, afraid, yet not really understanding what life outside his house would be like.

“We’ll train you for the kinds of jobs you can pursue now. You won’t starve. You won’t die of boredom. But because you broke the law, one thing is forbidden to you now”

“Music.”

“Not all music. There is music of a sort, Christian, that the common people, the ones who aren’t Listeners, can

have. Radio and television and record music. But live music and new music-those are forbidden to you. You may not sing. You may not play an instrument. You may not tap out a rhythm.”

“Why not?”

The Watcher shook his head. “The world is too perfect, too at peace, too happy, for us to permit a misfit who broke the law to go about spreading discontent. And if you make more music, Christian, you will be punished drastically. Drastically.”

Christian nodded, and when the Watcher told him to come, he came, leaving behind the house and the woods and his Instrument. At first he took it calmly, as the inevitable punishment for his infraction; but he had little concept of punishment, or of what exile from his Instrument would mean.

Within five hours he was shouting and striking out at anyone who came near him, because his fingers craved the touch of the Instrument’s keys and levers and strips and bars, and he could not have them, and now he knew that he had never been lonely before.

It took six months before he was ready for normal life. And when he left the Retraining Center (a small building, because it was so rarely used), he looked tired and years older, and he didn’t smile at anyone. He became a delivery truck driver, because the tests said that this was a job that would least grieve him and least remind him of his loss and most engage his few remaining aptitudes and interests.

He delivered doughnuts to grocery stores.

And at night he discovered the mysteries of alcohol; and the alcohol and the doughnuts and the truck and his dreams were enough that he was, in his way, content. He had no anger in him. He could live the rest of his life, without bitterness.

He delivered fresh doughnuts and took the stale ones away with him.

SECOND MOVEMENT

“With a name like Joe,” Joe always said, “I had to open a bar and grill, just so I could put up a sign saying `Joe’s Bar and Grill: ” And he laughed and laughed, because, after all, Joe’s Bar and Grill was a funny name these days.

But Joe was a good bartender, and the Watchers had put him in the right kind of place. Not in a big city but in a small town; a town just off the freeway, where truck drivers often came; a town not far from a large city, so that interesting things were nearby to be talked about and worried about and bitched about and loved.

Joe’s Bar and Grill was, therefore, a nice place to come, and many people came there. Not fashionable people, and not drunks, but lonely people and friendly people in just the right mixture. “My clients are like a good drink. Just enough of this and that to make a new flavor that tastes better than any of the ingredients.” Oh, Joe was a poet; he was a poet of alcohol, and like many another person these days, he often said, “My father was a lawyer, and in the old days I would have probably ended up a lawyer, too. And I never would have known what I was missing.”

Joe was right. And he was a damn good bartender, and he didn’t wish he were anything else, so he was happy.

One night, however, a new man came in, a man with a doughnut delivery truck and a doughnut brand name on his uniform. Joe noticed him because silence clung to the man like a smell-wherever he walked, people sensed it, and though they scarcely looked at him, they lowered their voices or stopped talking at all, and they got reflective and looked at the walls and the mirror behind the bar. The doughnut deliveryman sat in a corner and had a watered down drink that meant he intended to stay a long time and didn’t want his alcohol intake to be so rapid that he was forced to leave early.

Joe noticed things about people, and he noticed that this man kept looking off in the dark corner where the piano stood. It was an old, out-of-tune monstrosity from the old days (for this had been a bar for a long time), and Joe wondered why the man was fascinated by it. True, a lot of Joe’s customers had been interested, but they had always walked over and plunked on the keys, trying to find a melody, failing with the out-of-tune keys, and finally giving up. This man, however, seemed almost afraid of the piano, and didn’t go near it.

At closing time, the man was still there, and, on a whim, instead of making the man leave, Joe turned off the piped in music, turned off most of the lights, and went over and lifted the lid and exposed the gray keys.

The deliveryman came over to the piano. Chris, his name tag said. He sat and touched a single key. The sound was not pretty. But the man touched all the keys one by one and then touched them in different orders, and all the time Joe watched, wondering why the man was so intense about it.

“Chris,” Joe said.

Chris looked up at him.

“Do you know any songs?”

Chris’s face went funny.

“I mean, some of those old-time songs, not those fancy ass-twitchers on the radio, but songs. `In a Little Spanish Town: My mother sang that one to me.” And Joe began to sing, “In a little Spanish town, ‘twas on a night like this. Stars were peek-a-booing down, ‘twas on a night like this.”

Chris began to play as Joe’s weak and toneless baritone. went on with the song. But his playing wasn’t an accompaniment, not anything Joe could call an accompaniment. It was, instead, an opponent to his melody, an enemy to it, and the sounds coming out of the piano were strange and unharmonious and, by God, beautiful. Joe stopped singing and listened. For two hours he listened, and when it was over he soberly poured the man a drink and poured one for himself and clinked glasses with Chris the doughnut deliveryman who could take that rotten old piano and make the damn thing sing.

Three nights later, Chris came back, looking harried and afraid. But this time Joe knew what would happen (had to happen), and instead of waiting until closing time, Joe turned off the piped-in music ten minutes early. Chris looked up at him pleadingly. Joe misunderstood-he went over and lifted the lid to the keyboard and smiled. Chris walked stiffly, perhaps reluctantly, to the stool and sat.

“Hey, Joe,” one of the last five customers shouted, “closing early?”

Joe didn’t answer. Just watched as Chris began to play. No preliminaries this time; no scales and wanderings over the keys. Just power, and the piano was played as pianos aren’t meant to be played; the bad notes, the out-of-tune notes, were fit into the music so that they sounded right, and Chris’s fingers, ignoring the strictures of the twelve-tone scale, played, it seemed to Joe, in the cracks.

None of the customers left until Chris finished an hour and a half later. They all shared that final drink and went home, shaken by the experience.

The next night Chris came again, and the next, and the next. Whatever private battle had kept him away for the first few days after his first night of playing, he had apparently won it or lost it. None of Joe’s business. What Joe cared about was the fact that when Chris played the piano, it did things to him that music had never done, and he wanted it.

The customers apparently wanted it, too. Near closing time people began showing up, apparently just to hear Chris play. Joe began starting the piano music earlier and earlier, and he had to discontinue the free drinks after the playing, because there were so many people it would have put him out of business.

It went on for two long, strange months. The delivery van pulled up outside, and people stood aside for Chris to enter. No one said anything to him. No one said anything at all, but everyone waited until he began to play the piano.

He drank nothing at all. Just played. And between songs the hundreds of people in Joe’s Bar and Grill ate and drank.

But the merriment was gone. The laughter and the chatter and the camaraderie were missing, and after a while Joe grew tired of the music and wanted to have his bar back the way it was. He toyed with the idea of getting rid of the piano, but the customers would have been angry at him. He thought of asking Chris not to come any more, but he could not bring himself to speak to the strange, silent man.

And so finally he did what he knew he should have done in the first place. He called the Watchers.

They came in the middle of a performance, a blind Watcher with a dog on a leash, and an earless Watcher who walked unsteadily, holding on to things for balance. They came in the middle of a song and did not wait for it to end. They walked to the piano and closed the lid gently, and Chris withdrew his fingers and looked at the closed lid.

“Oh, Christian,” said the man with the seeing-eye dog.

“I’m sorry,” Christian answered. “I tried not to.”

“Oh, Christian, how can I bear doing to you what must be done?”

“Do it,” Christian said.

And so the man with no ears took a laser knife from his coat pocket and cut off Christian’s fingers and thumbs, right where they rooted into his hands. The laser cauterized and sterilized the wound even as it cut, but still some blood spattered on Christian’s uniform. And, his hands now meaningless palms and useless knuckles, Christian stood and walked out of Joe’s Bar and Grill. The people made way for him again, and they listened intently as the blind Watcher said, “That was a man who broke the law and was forbidden to be a Maker. He broke the law a second time, and the law insists that he be stopped from breaking down the system that makes all of you so happy.”

The people understood. It grieved them; it made them

uncomfortable for a few hours, but once they toad returned home to their exactly right homes and got back to their exactly right jobs, the sheer contentment of their lives overwhelmed their momentary sorrow for Chris. After all, Chris had broken the law. And it was the law that kept them all safe and happy.

Even Joe. Even Joe soon forgot Chris and his music. He knew he had done the right thing. He couldn’t figure out, though, why a man like Chris would have broken the law in the first place, or what law he would have broken. There wasn’t a law in the world that wasn’t designed to make people happy-and there wasn’t a law Joe could think of that he was even mildly interested in breaking.

Yet. Once, Joe went to the piano and lifted the lid and played every key on the piano. And when he had done that he put his head down on the piano and cried, because he knew that when Chris lost that piano, lost even his fingers so he could never play again-it was like Joe’s losing his bar. And if Joe ever lost is bar, his life wouldn’t be worth living.

As for Chris, someone else began coming to the bar driving the same doughnut delivery van, and no one ever saw Chris again in that part of the world.

THIRD MOVEMENT

“Oh, what a beautiful morning! ” sang the road-crew man who had seen Oklahoma! four times in his home town.

“Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham!” sang the road-crew man who had learned to sing when his family got together with guitars.

“Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom!” sang the road-crew man who believed.

But the road-crew man without hands, who held the sings telling the traffic to Stop or Go Slow, listened but never sang.

“Whyn’t you never sing?” asked the man who liked Rogers and Hammerstein; asked all of them, at one time or another.

And the man they called Sugar just shrugged. “Don’t feel like singin’,” he’d say, when he said anything at all.

“Why they call him Sugar?” a new guy once asked. “He don’t look sweet to me.”

And the man who believed said, “His initials are CH. Like the sugar, C & H, you know.” And the new guy laughed. A stupid joke, but the kind of gag that makes life easier on the road building crew.

Not that life was that hard. For these men, too, had been tested, and they were in the job that made them happiest. They took pride in the pain of sunburn and pulled muscles, and the road growing long and thin behind them was the most beautiful thing in the world. And so they sang all day at their work, knowing that they could not possibly be happier than they were this day.

Except Sugar.

Then Guillermo came. A short Mexican who spoke with an accent, Guillermo told everyone who asked, “I may come from Sonora, but my heart belongs in Milano! ” And when anyone asked why (and often when no one asked anything), he’d explain: “I’m an Italian tenor in a Mexican body,” and he proved it by singing every note that Puccini and Verdi ever wrote. “Caruso was nothing,” Guillermo boasted. “Listen to this! “

Guillermo had records, and he sang along with them, and at work on the road crew he’d join in with any man’s song and harmonize with it or sing an obbligato high above the melody, a soaring tenor that took the roof off his head and filled the clouds. “I can sing,” Guillermo would say, and soon the other road-crew men answered, “Damn right, Guillermo! Sing it again!”

But one night Guillermo was honest and told the truth. “Ah, my friends, I’m no singer.”

“What do you mean? Of course you are!” came the unanimous answer.

“Nonsense!” Guillermo cried, his voice theatrical. “If I am this great singer, why do you never see me going off to record songs? Hey? This is a great singer? Nonsense! Great singers they raise to be great singers. I’m just a man who loves to sing but has no talent! I’m a man who loves to work on the road crew with men like you and sing his guts out, but in the opera I could never be! Never! “

He did not say it sadly. He said it fervently, confidently. “Here is where I belong! I can sing to you who like to hear me sing! I can harmonize with you when I feel a harmony in my heart. But don’t be thinking that Guillermo is a great singer, because he’s not!”

It was an evening of honesty, and every man there explained why it was he was happy on the road crew and didn’t wish to be anywhere else. Everyone, that is, except Sugar.

“Come on, Sugar. Aren’t you happy here?”

Sugar smiled. “I’m happy. I like it here. This is good work for me. And I love to hear you sing.”

“Then why don’t you sing with us?”

Sugar shook his head. “I’m not a singer.”

But Guillermo looked at him knowingly. “Not a singer, ha! Not a singer. A man without hands who refuses to sing is not a man who is not a singer. Hey?”

“What the hell did that mean?” asked the man who sang folk songs.

“It means that this man you call Sugar, he’s a fraud. Not a singer! Look at his hands. All his fingers gone! Who is it who cuts off men’s fingers?”

The road crew didn’t try to guess. There were many ways a man could lose fingers, and none of them were anyone’s business.

“He loses his fingers because he breaks the law and the Watchers cut them off! That’s how a man loses fingers. What was he doing with his fingers that the Watchers wanted him to stop? He was breaking the law, wasn’t he?”

“Stop,” Sugar said.

“If you want,” Guillermo said, but the others would not respect Sugar’s privacy.

“Tell us,” they said.

Sugar left the room.

“Tell us,” and Guillermo told them. That Sugar must have been a Maker who broke the law and was forbidden to make music any more. The very thought that a Makereven a lawbreaker-was working on the road crew with them filled the men with awe. Makers were rare, and they were the most esteemed of men and women.

“But why his fingers?”

“Because,” Guillermo said, “he must have tried to make music again afterward. And when you break the law a second time, the power to break it a third time is taken away from you.” Guillermo spoke seriously, and so to the road-crew men Sugar’s story sounded as majestic and terrible as an opera. They crowded into Sugar’s room and found the man staring at the wall.

“Sugar, is it true?” asked the man who loved Rogers and Hammerstein.

“Were you a Maker?” asked the man who believed.

“Yes,” Sugar said.

“But Sugar,” the man who believed said, “God can’t mean for a man to stop making music, even if he broke the law.”

Sugar smiled. “No one asked God.”

“Sugar,” Guillermo finally said, “There are nine of us on the crew, nine of us, and we’re miles from any other human beings. You know us, Sugar. We swear on our mother’s graves, every one of us, that we’ll never tell a soul. Why should we? You’re one of us. But sing, dammit man, sing! “

“I can’t,” Sugar said.

“It isn’t what God intended,” said the man who believed. “We’re all doing what we love best, and here you are, loving music and not able to sing a note. Sing for us! Sing with us! And only you and us and God will know!”

They all promised. They all pleaded.

And the next day as the man who loved Rogers and Hammerstein sang “Love, Look Away,” Sugar began to hum. As the man who believed sang “God of Our Fathers,” Sugar sang softly along. And as the man who loved folk songs sang, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Sugar joined in with a strange, piping voice, and all the men laughed and cheered and welcomed Sugar’s voice to the songs.

Inevitably Sugar began inventing. First harmonies, of course, strange harmonies that made Guillermo frown and then, after a while, grin as he joined in, sensing as best he could what Sugar was doing to the music.

And after harmonies, Sugar began singing his own melodies, with his own words. He made them repetitive, the words simple and the melodies simpler still. And yet he shaped them into odd shapes and built them into songs that had never been heard of before, that sounded wrong and yet were absolutely right. It was not long before the man who loved Rogers and Hammerstein and the man who sang folk songs and the man who believed were learning Sugar’s songs and singing them joyously or mournfully or angrily or gaily as they worked along the road.

Even Guillermo learned the songs, and his strong tenor was changed by them until his voice, which had, after all, been ordinary, became something unusual’ and fine. Guillermor finally said to Sugar one day, “Hey, Sugar, your music is all wrong, man. But I like the way it feels in my nose! Hey, you know? I like the way it feels in my mouth! “

Some of the songs were hymns: “Keep me hungry, Lord; ‘ Sugar sang, and the road crew sang it too.

Some of the songs were love songs: “Put your hands in someone else’s pockets,” Sugar sang angrily; “I hear your voice in the morning,” Sugar sang tenderly; “Is it summer yet?” Sugar sang sadly; and the road crew sang them, too.

Over the months, the road crew changed, one man leaving on Wednesday and a new man taking his place on Thursday, as different skills were needed in different places. Sugar was silent when each newcomer arrived, until the man had given his word and the secret was sure to be kept.

What finally destroyed Sugar was the fact that his songs were so unforgettable. The men who left would sing the songs with their new crews, and those crews would learn them and teach them to others. Crew men taught the songs in bars and on the road; people learned them quickly and loved them; and one day a blind Watcher heard the songs and knew, instantly, who had first sung them. They were Christian Haroldsen’s music, because in those melodies, simple as they were, the wind of the north woods still whistled and the fall of leaves still hung oppressively over every note and-and the Watcher sighed. He took a specialized tool from his file of tools and boarded an airplane and flew to the city closest to where a certain road crew worked. And the blind Watcher took a company car with a company driver up the road, and at the end of it, where the road was just beginning to swallow a strip of wilderness, he got out of the car and heard singing. Heard a piping voice singing a song that made even an eyeless man weep.

“Christian,” the Watcher said, and the song stopped.

“You,” said Christian.

“Christian, even after you lost your fingers?”

The other men didn’t understand-all the other men, that is, except Guillermo.

“Watcher,” said Guillermo. “Watcher, he done no harm.”

The Watcher smiled wryly. “No one said he did. But he broke the law. You, Guillermo, how would you like to work as a servant in a rich man’s house? How would you like to be a bank teller?”

“Don’t take me from the road crew, man,” Guillermo said.

“It’s the law that finds where people will be happy. But

Christian Haroldsen broke the law. And he’s gone around ever since, making people hear music they were never meant to hear.”

Guillermo knew he had lost the battle before it began, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Don’t hurt him, man. I was meant to hear his music. Swear to God, it’s made me happier.”

The Watcher shook his head sadly. “Be honest, Guillermo. You’re an honest man. His music’s made you miserable, hasn’t it? You’ve got everything you could want in life, and yet his music makes you sad. All the time, sad.”

Guillermo tried to argue, but he was honest, and he looked into his own heart. And he knew that the music was full of grief. Even the happy songs mourned for something; even the angry songs wept; even the love songs seemed to say that everything dies and contentment is the most fleeting of things. Guillermo looked in his own heart, and all Sugar’s music stared back up at him; and Guillermo wept.

“Just don’t hurt him, please,” Guillermo murmured as he cried.

“I won’t,” the blind Watcher said. Then he walked to Christian, who stood passively waiting, and he held the special tool up to Christian’s throat. Christian gasped.

“No,” Christian said, but the word only formed with his lips and tongue. No sound came out. Just a hiss of air. No.

“Yes,” the Watcher said.

The road crew watched silently as the Watcher led Christian away. They did not sing for days. But then Guillermo forgot his grief one day and sang an aria from La Boheme, and the songs went on from there. Now and then they sang one of Sugar’s songs, because the songs could not be forgotten.

In the city, the blind Watcher furnished Christian with a pad of paper and a pen. Christian immediately gripped the pencil in the crease of his palm and wrote: “What do I do now?”

The blind Watcher laughed. “Have we got a job for you! Oh, Christian, have we got a job for you!”

APPLAUSE

In all the world there were only two dozen Watchers. They were secretive men who supervised a system that needed little supervision because it actually made nearly everybody happy. It was a good system, but like even the most perfect of machines, here and there it broke down. Here and there someone acted madly and damaged himself, and to protect everyone and the person himself, a Watcher had to notice the madness and go to fix it.

For many years the best of the Watchers was a man with no fingers, a man with no voice. He would come silently, wearing the uniform that named him with the only name he needed-Authority: And he would find the kindest, easiest, yet most thorough way of solving the problem and curing the madness and preserving the system that made the world, for the first time in history, a very good place to live. For practically everyone.

For there were still a few people-one or two each year who were caught in a circle of their own devising, who could neither adjust to the system nor bear to harm it, people who kept breaking the law despite their knowledge that it would destroy them.

Eventually, when the gentle maimings and deprivations did not cure their madness and set them back into the system, they were given uniforms, and they, too, went out. Watching.

The keys of power were placed in the hands of those who had most cause to hate the system they had to preserve. Were they sorrowful?

“I am,” Christian answered in the moments when he dared to ask himself that question.

In sorrow he did his duty. In sorrow he grew old. And finally the other Watchers, who reverenced the silent man (for they knew he had once sung magnificent songs), told him he was free. “You’ve served your time,” said the Watcher with no legs, and he smiled.

Christian raised an eyebrow, as if to say, “And?”

“So wander.”

Christian wandered. He took off his uniform, but lacking neither money nor time he found few doors closed to him. He wandered where in his former lives he had once lived. A road in the mountains. A city where he had once known the loading entrance of every restaurant and coffee shop and grocery store. And, at last, a place in the woods where a house was falling apart in the weather because it had not been used in forty years.

Christian was old. The thunder roared, and it only made him realize that it was about to rain. All the old songs. All the old songs, he mourned inside himself, more because he couldn’t remember them than because he thought his life had been particularly sad.

As he sat in a coffee shop in a nearby town to stay out of the rain, he heard four teenagers who played the guitar very badly singing a song that he knew. It was a song he had invented while the asphalt poured on a hot summer day. The teenagers were not musicians and certainly were not Makers. But they sang the song from their hearts, and even though the words were happy, the song made everyone who heard it cry.

Christian wrote on the pad he always carried, and showed his question to the boys. “Where did that song come from?”

“It’s a Sugar song,” the leader of the group answered. “It’s a song by Sugar.”

Christian raised an eyebrow, making a shrugging motion.

“Sugar was a guy who worked on a road crew and made up songs. He’s dead now, though,” the boy answered.

Christian smiled. Then he wrote (and the boys waited impatiently for this speechless old man to go away): “Aren’t you happy? Why sing sad songs?”

The boys were at a loss for an answer. The leader spoke up, though, and said, “Sure, I’m happy. I’ve got a good job, a girl I like, and man, I couldn’t ask for more. I got my guitar. I got my songs. And my friends.”

And another boy said, “These songs aren’t sad, mister. Sure, they make people cry, but they aren’t sad.”

“Yeah,” said another. “It’s just that they were written by a man who knows.”

Christian scribbled on his paper. “Knows what?”

“He just knows. Just knows, that’s all:’

And then the teenagers turned back to their clumsy guitars and their young untrained voices, and Christian walked to the door to leave because the rain had stopped and because he knew when to leave the stage. He turned and bowed just a little toward the singers. They didn’t notice him, but their voices were all the applause he needed. He left the ovation and went outside where the leaves were just turning color and would soon, with a slight inaudible sound, break free and fall to the earth.

For a moment he thought he heard himself singing. But it was just the last of the wind, coasting madly through the wires over the street. It was a frenzied song, and Christian thought he had recognized his voice.

CAN THESE BONES LIVE?

Ted Reynolds

I’d dropped my blanket roll and soogin sack and guitar and sat quiet on the granite lump as those eight men in rough country clothes fetched their burden along. It was a big chest of new-sawed planks, pale in the autumn afternoon, four men on each side.

As they tramped, they watched me. I got to my feet. I reckoned I was taller than any of them, probably wider through the shoulders. I wore old pants and boots and rumply hat, but I’d shaved that morning and hoped I looked respectable.

They came close to me amongst those tree-strung heights, and set the chest down with a bump. I figured it to be nine feet long and three feet wide and another three high. Rope loops were spiked to the sides for handles. The lid was fastened with a hook and staple, like what you use on a shed door. One of the eight stared me up and down. He was a chunky, grizzled man in a wide black hat, bib overalls and a denim jacket.

“Hidy,” he drawled, and spit on the ground. “What you up to here?”

“I was headed for a place called Chaw Hollow,” I replied him.

They all stared. “How you name yourself?” asked the one who had spoken.

“Just call me John.”

“What do you follow, John?” asked another man.

I smiled my friendliest. “Well, mostly I study things. This morning, back yonder at that settlement, I heard tell about a big skeleton that had been turned up on a Chaw Hollow farm.”

“You a government man?” the grizzled one inquired me.

“You mean, look for blockade stills?” I shook my head. “Not me. Call me a truth seeker, somebody who wonders himself about riddles in this life.”

“A conjure man?” put in another of the bunch.

“Not me,” I said again. “I’ve met up with that sort in my time, helped put two-three of them out of mischief. Call that part of what I follow.”

“My name’s Embro Hallcott,” said the grizzled one. “If you came to poke round them bones, you’re too late.”

I waited for him to go on, and he went on:

“I dug them bones up on my place, a-scooping out for a fish pond. Some of us reckoned that, whoair he was, he should ought to be buried in holy ground, yonder at Stumber Creek church house. So we made him a box, and that’s where we’re a-going with him now.”

“Let me give you a hand,” I said, and slung my guitar and other things to my shoulders.

“He’s a stranger man, Mr. Embro,” said the scrawny man.

“Sure, but he looks powerful for strength.” Hallcott raked me with his eye. “And you feel puny today, Oat. All right, John, grab a hold there where Oat’s been a-heaving on this here thing.”

I shoved my hand through the loop and we hoisted the coffin. It was right heavy, at that. I heard the others grunt as we took the trail through the ravine. On the trees, autumn leaves showed yellow, different reds and so on, like flowers. Half a mile, maybe, we Jjore our load along.

“Yonder we are, boys,” said Hallcott.

We came out into a hollow amongst shaggy heights that showed rocky knobs. One, I thought, looked like a head and shoulders. Another jabbed up like a finger, another curved like a hawk bill. The lower ground into which we tramped was tufted with trees, with a trickle of water through it. Beside this stood a grubby white house with a steeple. Stumber Creek Church, I figured it to be.

Hallcott, at a front loop, steered us into a weedy tract with gravestones here and yonder. “Set her down,” he wheezed, and we did so. “Yonder comes Preacher Travis Melick. I done sent him the word to meet up with us here.”

From the church house ambled a gaunt man in a jimswinger coat, a-carrying a book covered with black leather. Hallcott walked toward him. “Evening, Preacher,” he said. “Proud to have you here.”

“The grave’s been made ready,” said the other in a deep-down voice, and nodded to where a long, dark hole gaped amongst the weeds. Then he faced me. “Don’t believe I know this gentleman.”

“Allows he’s named John,” grated the scrawny one called Oat.

“I’ve heard of John,” said Preacher Melick, and held out his skinny hand. “Heard of good things you’ve done, sir. Welcome amongst us.”

Hallcott’s crinkly face got easy. “If you say he’s all right, Preacher, that makes him all right,” he said. “I’ll tell you true, he made better than a good hand, a-wagging this coffin the last part of the way.”

We hiked the coffin to the side of the grave. On the bank of fresh dirt lay three shovels. Oat touched the hook on the lid.

“Ain’t we supposed to view the body?” he wondered us. “Ain’t that the true old way?”

“I’ve done seen the thing,” snapped out Hallcott.

“Open it for a moment if you feel that’s proper,” said the preacher man.

Oat worked the hook out of the staple and hoisted the lid. The hinges creaked. “Wonder who he was,” he said.

The bones inside were loose from one another and half-wrapped in a Turkey Track quilt, but I saw they were laid out in order. They were big, the way Hallcott had said, big enough for an almighty big bear. I had a notion that the arms were right long; maybe all the bones were long. Thick, too. The skull at the head of the coffin was like a big gourd, with caves of eyeholes and two rows of big, lean teeth. Hallcott banged the lid shut and hooked it again.

“That there’s enough of a look to last youins all day and all night,” he growled round at the others.

“Brothers,” said Preacher Melick, a-opening his book, “we’re here to bury the remains of a poor lost creature. We don’t even know his name. Yet I’ve searched out what I hope is the right text for this burying.”

He put his knobby finger to the page. “Book of Ezekiel,” he said. “Thirty-seventh chapter, third verse. ‘And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.’”

He closed his book. “The Lord God knoweth all things. We’re taught that after death will come the life we deserve. Let us pray.”

We bowed our heads down. Preacher Melick said, “In the midst of life we are in death,” and so on. When he finished, I said, “Amen,” and so did Hallcott and two-three others.

“Now lower the coffin,” said Preacher Melick.

We took hold and set it in the grave. It fitted right snug, its lid was just inches below surface. Preacher Melick sprinkled a handful of dirt. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” he repeated, and then we all said the Lord’s Prayer together. Finally the preacher man smiled round at us. The service was over.

Three men shoveled in the earth. It took just minutes to fill the grave up.

Hallcott offered some crumpled money bills to Preacher Melick, who waved them away.

“You took it on yourselves to make the stranger a coffin and bring him here to rest,” he said. “The least duty I can do is speak comfortable words without expectation of pay. John, to judge from the gear you brought, you’re a-looking for lodging for the night. Will you be my guest?”

“Thanks, maybe later,” I said. “I reckon I’ll wait here a spell.”

“If you come later on, it’s half a mile up the trail the far side of the church.”

He walked away with his book. The coffin-makers headed the other direction. The sun was a-dropping red to the edge of the western heights.

One of the shovels had been fetched to lean under a fair-sized walnut tree. I put down my stuff next to the roots and sat with my back against the trunk. On the silver strings of my guitar I made a few chords to whisper. The air got gloomy.

“It’s kindly creepy a night,” said a voice at my elbow.

That quick I was up on my feet. Embro Hallcott stood there, his crinkly face a-smiling.

“For a man your height, you move quick as a cat, John,” he said. “I done heard you tell Preacher Melick you’d stay round, so I decided myself to stay too, for whatever’s up.”

“What do you reckon’s up?” I inquired him.

“If you don’t know how to answer that, neither do I.”

I sat down under the tree again, and Hallcott hunkered down beside me. He dragged out a twist of home-cured tobacco and bit off a chunk the size of half a dollar.

“I was right interested by Preacher Melick’s text from Ezekiel,” I said. “All that about could these bones live.”

“Ezekiel,” Hallcott repeated me, a-folding his ridgy hands on the knees of his overalls. “I done read in that, some time back. Strange doings in Ezekiel—the wheels in the wheels. Some folks reckon that means what they call UFOs.”

“They were unknown and they flew, so they were UFOs all right,” I nodded him. “And all those prophecies about nation after nation, and the brass man a-walking round to measure Jerusalem. And I’ve heard it explained that the four faces of the living creatures meant the Four Gospels. But the strangest of all the thing is the Valley of Dry Bones, where the bones join together and come to life.”

A moon rose up and shone down on the burial ground. Hallcott moved to pull together some pieces of wood and light them with a match. I went to the stream and dipped water in my canteen cup and set it on a rock where it could heat. “I don’t reckon you brought aught for supper,” I said.

“I’ve done without no supper before this.”

“I’ve got something left from my noon lunch.” I pawed through my soogin and came up with two sandwiches wrapped in foil. “Home-cured ham on white bread.”

Hallcott took one and thanked me kindly. As the water grew hot, I trickled in instant coffee and stirred it with a twig. We ate and passed the cup back and forth.

“I appreciate this, John,” said Hallcott as he swallowed down his last bite. “How long you aim to stop here?”

“That depends.”

“I reckon you’ll agree with me, them bones we buried were right curious. Great big ones, and long arms, like on an ape.”

“Or maybe on Sasquatch,” I said. “Or Bigfoot.”

“You believe in them tales.”

“I always wonder myself if there’s not truth in air tale. And as for bones—I recollect something the Indians called Kalu, off in a place named Hosea’s Hollow. Bones a-rattling round, and sure death to a natural man.”

“You believe that, too?”

“Believe it? I saw it happen one time. Only Kalu got somebody else, not me.”

“Can these bones live?” Hallcott repeated the text. “Ain’t there an old song about that, the bones a-coming together alive?”

“I’ve sung it in my time,” I said, and picked up my guitar and struck out the tune. “It goes like this:

Connect these bones, dry bones, dry bones, Connect these bones, dry bones, dry bones, Connect these bones, dry bones, dry bones, Hear the word of the Lord.”

Hallcott sang the verse with me, his voice rough and husky:

The toe bone’s connected to the foot bone, The foot bone’s connected to the heel bone, The heel bone’s connected to the ankle bone, Hear the word of the Lord.

And we sang the rest of it together, up to the end:

The shoulder bone’s connected to the neck bone, The neck bone’s connected to the jaw bone, The jaw bone’s connected to the head bone, Hear the word of the Lord.

Connect these bones, dry bones, dry bones, Connect these—

Hallcott broke off then, and so did I. “John,” he said, “looky yonder where we buried him. What’s that there white stuff?”

I saw it, too. In the shine of the moon above the grave stirred a pale something or other.

It made just a sneaky blur, taller than a tall man. It came toward us with a ripple in it.

“Mist,” Hallcott stuttered. “Comes from that there fresh-dug-up dirt—”

“No,” I said, “that’s no mist.”

I leant my guitar to the walnut tree and got up on my feet as whatever it was came nearer, started to make itself into a shape.

I heard Hallcott say a quick cuss word, and then there was a scrambly noise, like as if he was a-trying to make his way off from there on hands and knees. I faced toward whatair the shape was, because I reckoned I had to.

As it came slowly along, the moonlight hit it fair. It looked scaffolded some way. That was because it was just bones. I could see a sort of baskety bunch or ribs, and big, stout arm bones with almighty huge hands a-hanging down below crooked knees. The shal-lowy skull had deep, dark eyeholes. The long-toothed jaws sank itself down and then snapped shut again. The skull turned on its neck bone and gave me a long, long look.

Then it reached out its right hand with fingerbones the size of table knives, and laid hold on a young tree and yanked it out by the roots, without air much a-trying. It stood and tore off branches, easy as you’d peel the shucks from an ear of corn. It made itself a club thattaway, and hiked it over the low skull and moved to close in on me again.

No point in it for me to try to run away from such a thing, and well I knew it. Turn and run from a hant or a devil, it runs after you. If it catches you, then what? I quick grabbed up the shovel where it leant on the walnut trunk. Compared to that club the bony thing had, it was like a ball bat against a wagon tongue.

“What you want of me?” I said, but I felt I didn’t have to be told that.

Bones like those, long worn bare and scattered apart and now joined and made to live by words of power, they’d wake up hungry. They’d be starved for food. If they got food, maybe they’d put flesh back on themselves, be themselves as they’d been once before. What food was closer to hand than I was?

Man-eaters—such things were told of by old Indians, wise men who’d sworn to them. The wendigo, up in Northern parts. The anis-gina, recollected in Cherokee tales to make you shiver. Supposed to be all died out and gone these days, but when bones rise up…

The bones came a-slaunching close. I heard them click.

I hiked up the shovel with both my hands, and held the blade edge forward like an axe. I’d chop with that. The bones stood a second, the whole skeleton of them, tall over me. In the glow of the moon those bones looked like frosty silver. My head wouldn’t have come put to those big cliffs of shoulders. The jaws opened and shut. They made a snapping sound.

Because they wanted to bite a chunk out of me. Those teeth in the jaws, they were as long and sharp as knives. They could break a man’s arm off if they jammed into it.

But I didn’t run. To run nair had helped me much in such a case. I’d stand my ground, fight. If I lost the fight, maybe Hallcott could get away and tell the tale. I bent my knees and made my legs springy, I hoped I could move faster and surer than those big, lumbering bones.

Preacher Melick had said the Bible words to make them live, had said them without a-thinking. And that song, I’d have been better off if I’d nair sung it. I watched the thick, bony arms rise up and fetch the club down to bust my head.

That quick, I sidestepped and danced clear, and down came the big hunk of tree, so hard on the ground it boomed there like a slamming door. I made a swing with my own shovel, but the club was up again and in the way. My blade bounced off. Again the club hiked up over me, it made a dark blotch against the moon. I set myself to dodge again.

Then it was that Embro Hallcott, come back up just behind me, started in to sing in his husky voice:

The toe bone’s connected from the foot bone, The foot bone’s connected from the heel bone …

And quick on from there, about the shin and thigh and hip bones, about the back bone and the shoulder bone. I stood with my shovel held up in both hands, and watched the thing come apart before my eyes.

It had dropped that club that would have driven me into the ground like a nail. It swayed in broken-up moonlight that shone through tree branches. It fell to pieces while I watched.

I looked at the bones, down and scattered out now. The skull stared up at me, and one more tune it gave a hungry snap of those jaws. I heard:

The neck bone’s connected from the jaw bone, The jaw bone’s connected from the head bone, Hear the word of the Lord.

The jaw bone snapped no more. It rolled free from the skull.

Hallcott was up beside me. I could feel him shake all over.

“It worked,” he said, in the tiredest voice you could call for.

“That song built him up,” I said back. “And that song, sung different, took him back down again. Though it appears to me the word should be ‘disconnected’.”

“Sure enough?” he wondered me. “I don’t know that word, that disconnected. But I thought on an old tale, how a man read in a magic book and devilish things came all round him, so he read the book backward and made them go away.” His eyes bugged as he looked at a big thigh bone, dropped clear of its kneecap and shin. “What if it hadn’t worked, John?”

“Point is, it did work and thank the good Lord for that,” I told him. “Now, how you say for us to put him back in his coffin again, and not sing air note to him this time?”

Hallcott didn’t relish to touch the bones, and, gentlemen, neither did I. I scooped them in the shovel, all the way along to where the grave was open and the coffin lid flung back. In I shoved them, one by one, in a heap on top of the Turkey Track quilt. I sought out air single bone, even the little separate toe bones that come in the song, a-picking them up with the shovel blade. Somewhere I’ve heard tell there are two hundred and eight bones in a skeleton. Finally I got all of them. I swung the lid down, and Hallcott fastened the hook into the staple. Then we stood and harked. There was just a breath of sweet, cool breeze in some bushes. Nair other sound that we made out.

Hallcott picked up another of the shovels, and quick we filled that grave in again. We patted it down smooth on top. Again we harked. Nair sound from where we’d buried the bones a second time.

“I reckon he’s at rest now,” I felt like a-saying. “Leastways, all disconnected again thattaway, he can’t get up unless some other gone gump comes here and sings that song to him again.”

“For hell’s sake, whatever was he?” Hallcott asked, of the whole starry night sky.

“Maybe not even science folks could answer that,” I said. “I’d reckon he was of a devil-people long gone from this country—a people that wasn’t man nor either beast; a kind of people that pure down had to go, but gets recollected in ugly old tales of man-eating things. That’s all I can think to say to it.”

I flung down the shovel and went back to where my stuff lay against the walnut tree. I slung my blanket roll and soogin on my back, and took my guitar up under my arm. Right that moment, I sure enough didn’t have a wish to play it.

“John,” said Hallcott. “Where you reckon to head now?”

“Preacher Melick kindly invited me to his house. I have it in mind to go there.”

“Me, too, if he’s got room for me,” said Hallcott. “Money wouldn’t buy me to go nowheres alone in this night. No sir, nor for many a night to come.”

DAISY IN THE SUN

Connie Willis

None of the others were any help. Daisy’s brother, when she knelt beside him on the kitchen floor and said, “Do you remember when we lived at Grandma’s house, just the three of us, nobody else?” looked at her blankly over the pages of his book, his face closed and uninterested. “What is your book about?” she asked kindly. “Is it about the sun? You always used to read your books out loud to me at Grandma’s. All about the sun.”

He stood up and went to the windows of the kitchen and looked out at the snow, tracing patterns on the dry window. The book, when Daisy looked at it, was about something else altogether.

“It didn’t always snow like this at home, did it?” Daisy would ask her grandmother. “It couldn’t have snowed all the time, not even in Canada, could it?”

It was the train this time, not the kitchen, but her grandmother went on measuring for the curtains as if she didn’t notice. “How can the trains run if it snows all the time?” Her grandmother didn’t answer her. She went on measuring the wide curved train windows with her long yellow tape measure. She wrote the measurements on little slips of paper, and they drifted from her pockets like the snow outside, without sound.

Daisy waited until it was the kitchen again. The red cafe curtains hung streaked and limp across the bottom half of the square windows. “The sun faded the curtains, didn’t it?” she asked slyly, but her grandmother would not be tricked. She measured and wrote and dropped the measurements like ash around her.

Daisy looked from her grandmother to the rest of them, shambling up and down the length of her grandmother’s kitchen. She would not ask them. Talking to them would be like admitting they belonged here, muddling clumsily around the room, bumping into each other.

Daisy stood up. “It was the sun that faded them,” she said. “I remember,” and went into her room and shut the door.

The room was always her own room, no matter what happened outside. It stayed the same, yellow ruffled muslin on the bed, yellow priscillas at the window. She had refused to let her mother put blinds up in her room. She remembered that quite clearly. She had stayed in her room the whole day with her door barricaded. But she could not remember why her mother had wanted to put them up or what had happened afterward.

Daisy sat down cross-legged in the middle of the bed, hugging the yellow ruffled pillow from her bed against her chest. Her mother constantly reminded her that a young lady sat with her legs together. “You’re fifteen, Daisy. You’re a young lady whether you like it or not.”

Why could she remember things like that and not how they had gotten here and where her mother was and why it snowed all the time yet was never cold? She hugged the pillow tightly against her and tried, tried to remember.

It was like pushing against something, something both yielding and unyielding. It was herself, trying to push her breasts flat against her chest after her mother had told her she was growing up, that she would need to wear a bra. She had tried to push through to the little girl she had been before, but even though she pressed them into herself with the flats of her hands, they were still there. A barrier, impossible to get through.

Daisy clutched at the yielding pillow, her eyes squeezed shut. “Grandma came in,” she said out loud, reaching for the one memory she could get to, “Grandma came in and said…”

She was looking at one of her brother’s books. She had been holding it, looking at it, one of her brother’s books about the sun, and as the door opened he reached out and took it away from her. He was angry—about the book? Her grandmother came in, looking hot and excited, and he took the book away from her. Her grandmother said, “They got the material in. I bought enough for all the windows.” She had a sack full of folded cloth, red-and-white gingham. “I bought almost the whole bolt,” her grandmother said. She was flushed. “Isn’t it pretty?” Daisy reached out to touch the thin pretty cloth. And… Daisy clutched at the pillow, wrinkling the ruffled edge. She had reached out to touch the thin pretty cloth and then…

It was no use. She could not get any further. She had never been able to get any further. Sometimes she sat on her bed for days. Sometimes she started at the end and worked back through the memory and it was still the same. She could not remember any more on either side. Only the book and her grandmother coming in and reaching out her hand.

Daisy opened her eyes. She put the pillow back on the bed and uncrossed her legs and took a deep breath. She was going to have to ask the others. There was nothing else to do.

She stood a minute by the door before she opened it, wondering which of the places it would be. It was her mother’s living room, the walls a cool blue and the windows covered with Venetian blinds. Her brother sat on the gray-blue carpet reading. Her grandmother had taken down one of the blinds. She was measuring the tall window. Outside the snow fell.

The strangers moved up and down on the blue carpet. Sometimes Daisy thought she recognized them, that they were friends of her parents or people she had seen at school, but she could not be sure. They did not speak to each other in their endless, patient wanderings. They did not even seem to see each other. Sometimes, passing down the long aisle of the train or circling her grandmother’s kitchen or pacing the blue living room, they bumped into each other. They did not stop and say excuse me. They bumped into each other as if they did not know they did it, and moved on. They collided without sound or feeling, and each time they did, they seemed less and less like people Daisy knew and more and more like strangers. She looked at them anxiously, trying to recognize them so she could ask them.

The young man had come in from outside. Daisy was sure of it, though there was no draft of cold air to convince her, no snow for the young man to shrug from his hair and shoulders. He moved with easy direction through the others, and they looked up at him as he passed. He sat down on the blue couch and smiled at Daisy’s brother. Her brother looked up from his book and smiled back. He has come in from outside, Daisy thought. He will know.

She sat down near him, on the end of the couch, her arms crossed in front of her. “Has something happened to the sun?” she asked him in a whisper.

He looked up. His face was as young as hers, tanned and smiling. Daisy felt, far down, a little quiver of fear, a faint alien feeling like that which had signaled the coming of her first period. She stood up and backed away from him, only a step, and nearly collided with one of the strangers.

“Well, hello,” the boy said. “If it isn’t little Daisy!”

Her hands knotted into fists. She did not see how she could not have recognized him before—the easy confidence, the casual smile. He would not help her. He knew, of course he knew, he had always known everything, but he wouldn’t tell her. He would laugh at her. She must not let him laugh at her.

“Hi, Ron,” she was going to say, but the last consonant drifted away into uncertainty. She had never been sure what his name was.

He laughed. “What makes you think something’s happened to the sun, Daisy-Daisy?” He had his arm over the back of the couch. “Sit down and tell me all about it.” If she sat down next to him he could easily put his arm around her.

“Has something happened to the sun?” she repeated more loudly from where she stood. “It never shines anymore.”

“Are you sure?” he said, and laughed again. He was looking at her breasts. She crossed her arms in front of her.

“Has it?” she said stubbornly, like a child.

“What do you think?”

“I think maybe everybody was wrong about the sun.” She stopped, surprised at what she had said, at what she was remembering now. Then she went on, forgetting to keep her arms in front of her, listening to what she said next. “They all thought it was going to blow up. They said it would swallow the whole earth up. But maybe it didn’t. Maybe if just burned out, like a match or something, and it doesn’t shine anymore and that’s why it snows all the time and—”

“Cold,” Ron said.

“What?”

“Cold,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be cold if that had happened?”

“What?” she said stupidly.

“Daisy,” he said, and smiled at her. She reeled a little. The tugging fear was further down and more definite.

“Oh,” she said, and ran, veering around the others milling up and down, up and down, into her own room. She slammed the door behind her and lay down on the bed, holding her stomach and remembering.

Her father had called them all together in the living room. Her mother perched on the edge of the blue couch, already looking frightened. Her brother had brought a book in with him, but he stared blindly at the page.

It was cold in the living room. Daisy moved into the one patch of sunlight, and waited. She had already been frightened for a year. And in a minute, she thought, I’m going to hear something that will make me more afraid.

She felt a sudden stunning hatred of her parents, able to pull her in out of the sun and into darkness, able to make her frightened just by talking to her. She had been sitting on the porch today. That other day she had been lying in the sun in her old yellow bathing suit when her mother called her in.

“You’re a big girl now,” her mother had said once they were in her room. She was looking at the outgrown yellow suit that was tight across the chest and pulled up on the legs. “There are things you need to know.”

Daisy’s heart had begun to pound. “I wanted to tell you so you wouldn’t hear a lot of rumors.” She had had a booklet with her, pink and white and terrifying. “I want you to read this, Daisy. You’re changing, even though you may not notice it. Your breasts are developing and soon you’ll be starting your period. That means—”

Daisy knew what it meant. The girls at school had told her. Darkness and blood. Boys wanting to touch her breasts, wanting to penetrate her darkness. And then more blood.

“No,” Daisy said. “No. I don’t want to.”

“I know it seems frightening to you now, but someday soon you’ll meet a nice boy and then you’ll understand…”

No, I won’t. Never. I know what boys do to you.

“Five years from now you won’t feel this way, Daisy. You’ll see…”

Not in five years. Not in a hundred. No.

“I won’t have breasts,” Daisy shouted, and threw the pillow off her bed at her mother. “I won’t have a period. I won’t let it happen. No!”

Her mother had looked at her pityingly. “Why, Daisy, it’s already started.” She had put her arms around her. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, honey.”

Daisy had been afraid ever since. And now she would be more afraid, as soon as her father spoke.

“I wanted to tell you all together,” her father said, “so you would not hear some other way. I wanted you to know what is really happening and not just rumors.” He paused and took a ragged breath. They even started their speeches alike.

“I think you should hear it from me,” her father said. “The sun is going to go nova.”

Her mother gasped, a long, easy intake of breath like a sigh, the last easy breath her mother would take. Her brother closed his book. Is that all? Daisy thought, surprised.

“The sun has used up all the hydrogen in its core. It’s starting to burn itself up, and when it does, it will expand and—” he stumbled over the word.

“It’s going to swallow us up,” her brother said. “I read it in a book. The sun will just explode, all the way out to Mars. It’ll swallow up Mercury and Venus and Earth and Mars and we’ll all be dead.”

Her father nodded. “Yes,” he said, as if he was relieved that the worst was out.

“No,” her mother said. And Daisy thought, This is nothing. Nothing. Her mother’s talks were worse than this. Blood and darkness.

“There have been changes in the sun,” her father said. “There have been more solar storms, too many. And the sun is releasing unusual bursts of neutrinos. Those are signs that it will—”

“How long?” her mother asked.

“A year. Five years at the most. They don’t know.”

“We have to stop it!” Daisy’s mother shrieked, and Daisy looked up from her place in the sun, amazed at her mother’s fear.

“There’s nothing we can do,” her father said. “It’s already started.”

“I won’t let it,” her mother said. “Not to my children. I won’t let it happen. Not to my Daisy. She’s always loved the sun.”

At her mother’s words, Daisy remembered something. An old photograph her mother had written on, scrawling across the bottom of the picture in white ink. The picture was herself as a toddler in a yellow sunsuit, concave little girl’s chest and pooching toddler’s stomach. Bucket and shovel and toes dug into the hot sand, squinting up into the sunlight. And her mother’s writing across the bottom: “Daisy, in the sun.”

Her father had taken her mother’s hand and was holding it. He had put his arm around her brother’s shoulders. Their heads were ducked, prepared for a blow, as if they thought a bomb was going to fall on them.

Daisy thought, All of us, in a year or maybe five, surely five at the most, all of us children again, warm and happy, in the sun. She could not make herself be afraid.

It was the train again. The strangers moved up and down the long aisle of the dining car, knocking against each other randomly. Her grandmother measured the little window in the door at the end of the car. She did not look out the window at the ashen snow. Daisy could not see her brother.

Ron was sitting at one of the tables that were covered with the heavy worn white damask of dining cars. The vase and dull silver on the table were heavy so they would not fall off with the movement of the train. Ron leaned back in his chair and looked out the window at the snow.

Daisy sat down across the table from him. Her heart was beating painfully in her chest. “Hi,” she said. She was afraid to add his name for fear the word would trail away as it had before and he would know how frightened she was.

He turned and smiled at her. “Hello, Daisy-Daisy,” he said.

She hated him with the same sudden intensity she had felt for her parents, hated him for his ability to make her afraid.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

He turned slightly in the seat and grinned at her.

“You don’t belong here,” she said belligerently. “I went to Canada to live with my grandmother.” Her eyes widened. She had not known that before she said it. “I didn’t even know you. You worked in the grocery store when we lived in California.” She was suddenly overwhelmed by what she was saying. “You don’t belong here,” she murmured.

“Maybe it’s all a dream, Daisy.”

She looked at him, still angry, her chest heaving with the shock of remembering. “What?”

“I said, maybe you’re just dreaming all this.” He put his elbows on the table and leaned toward her. “You always had the most incredible dreams, Daisy-Daisy.”

She shook her head. “Not like this. They weren’t like this. I always had good dreams.” The memory was coming now, faster this time, a throbbing in her side where the pink and white book said her ovaries were. She was not sure she could make it to her room. She stood up, clutching at the white tablecloth. “They weren’t like this.” She stumbled through the milling people toward her room.

“Oh, and Daisy,” Ron said. She stopped, her hand on the door of her room, the memory almost there. “You’re still cold.”

“What?” she said blankly.

“Still cold. You’re getting warmer, though.”

She wanted to ask him what he meant, but the memory was upon her. She shut the door behind her, breathing heavily, and groped for the bed.

All her family had had nightmares. The three of them sat at breakfast with drawn, tired faces, their eyes looking bruised. The lead-backed curtains for the kitchen hadn’t come yet, so they had to eat breakfast in the living room where they could close the Venetian blinds. Her mother and father sat on the blue couch with their knees against the crowded coffee table. Daisy and her brother sat on the floor.

Her mother said, staring at the closed blinds, “I dreamed I was full of holes, tiny little holes, like dotted swiss.”

“Now, Evelyn,” her father said.

Her brother said, “I dreamed the house was on fire and the fire trucks came and put it out, but then the fire trucks caught on fire and the fire men and the trees and—”

“That’s enough,” her father said. “Eat your breakfast.” To his wife he said gently, “Neutrinos pass through all of us all the time. They pass right through the earth. They’re completely harmless. They don’t make holes at all. It’s nothing, Evelyn. Don’t worry about the neutrinos. They can’t hurt you.”

“Daisy, you had a dotted swiss dress once, didn’t you?” her mother said, still looking at the blinds. “It was yellow. All those little dots, like holes.”

“May I be excused?” her brother asked, holding a book with a photo of the sun on the cover.

Her father nodded and her brother went outside, already reading. “Wear your hat!” Daisy’s mother said, her voice rising perilously on the last word. She watched him until he was out of the room, then she turned and looked at Daisy with her bruised eyes. “You had a nightmare too, didn’t you, Daisy?”

Daisy shook her head, looking down at her bowl of cereal. She had been looking out between the Venetian blinds before breakfast, looking out at the forbidden sun. The stiff plastic blinds had caught open, and now there was a little triangle of sunlight on Daisy’s bowl of cereal. She and her mother were both looking at it. Daisy put her hand over the light.

“Did you have a nice dream, then, Daisy, or don’t you remember?” She sounded accusing.

“I remember,” Daisy said, watching the sunlight on her hand. She had dreamed of a bear. A massive golden bear with shining fur. Daisy was playing ball with the bear. She had in her two hands a little blue-green ball. The bear reached out lazily with his wide golden arm and swatted the blue ball out of Daisy’s hands and away. The wide, gentle sweep of his great paw was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Daisy smiled to herself at the memory of it.

“Tell me your dream, Daisy,” her mother said.

“All right,” Daisy said angrily. “It was about a big yellow bear and a little blue ball that he swatted.” She swung her arm toward her mother.

Her mother winced.

“Swatted us all to kingdom come, Mother!” she shouted and flung herself out of the dark living room into the bright morning sun.

“Wear your hat,” her mother called after her, and this time the last word rose almost to a scream.

Daisy stood against the door for a long time, watching him. He was talking to her grandmother. She had put down her yellow tape measure with the black coal numbers and was nodding and smiling at what he said. After a very long time he reached out his hand and covered hers, patting it kindly.

Her grandmother stood up slowly and went to the window, where the faded red curtains did not shut out the snow, but she did not look at the curtains. She stood and looked out at the snow, smiling faintly and without anxiety.

Daisy edged her way through the crowd in the kitchen, frowning, and sat down across from Ron. His hands still rested flat on the red linoleum-topped table. Daisy put her hands on the table, too, almost touching his. She turned them palm up, in a gesture of helplessness.

“It isn’t a dream, is it?” she asked him.

His fingers were almost touching hers. “What makes you think I’d know? I don’t belong here, remember? I work in a grocery store, remember?”

“You know everything,” she said simply.

“Not everything.”

The cramp hit her. Her hands, still palm up, shook a little and then groped for the metal edge of the red table as she tried to straighten up.

“Warmer all the time, Daisy-Daisy,” he said.

She did not make it to her room. She leaned helplessly against the door and watched her grandmother, measuring and writing and dropping the little slips of paper around her.

And remembered.

Her mother did not even know him. She had seen him at the grocery store. Her mother, who never went out, who wore sunglasses and long-sleeved shirts and a sun hat, even inside the darkened blue living room—her mother had met him at the grocery store and brought him home. She had taken off her hat and her ridiculous gardening gloves and gone to the grocery store to find him. It must have taken incredible courage.

“He said he’d seen you at school and wanted to ask you out himself, but he was afraid I’d say you were too young, isn’t that right, Ron?“ Her mother spoke in a rapid, nervous voice. Daisy was not sure whether she had said Ron or Rob or Rod. ”So I said why don’t you just come on home with me right now and meet her? There’s no time like the present, I say. Isn’t that right, Ron?“

He was not embarrassed by her at all. “Would you like to go get a Coke, Daisy? I’ve got my car here.”

“Of course she wants to go. Don’t you, Daisy?”

No. She wished the sun would reach out lazily, the great golden bear, and swat them all away. Right now.

“Daisy,” her mother said, hastily brushing at her hair with her fingers. “There’s so little time left. I wanted you to have…” Darkness and blood. You wanted me to be as frightened as you are. Well, I’m not, Mother. It’s too late. We’re almost there now.

But when she went outside with him, she saw his convertible parked at the curb, and she felt the first faint flutter of fear. It had the top down. She looked up at his tanned, smiling face, and thought, He isn’t afraid.

“Where do you want to go, Daisy?” he asked. He had his bare arm across the back of the seat. He could easily move it from there to around her shoulders. Daisy sat against the door, her arms wrapped around her chest.

“I’d like to go for a ride. With the top down. I love the sun,” she said to frighten him, to see the same expression she could see on her mother’s face when Daisy told her lies about the dreams.

“Me, too,” he said. “It sounds like you don’t believe all that garbage they feed us about the sun, either. It’s a lot of scare talk, that’s all. You don’t see me getting skin cancer, do you?” He moved his golden-tanned arm lazily around her shoulder to show her. “A lot of people getting hysterical for nothing. My physics teacher says the sun could emit neutrinos at the present rate for five thousand years before the sun would collapse. All this stuff about the aurora borealis. Geez, you’d think these people had never seen a solar flare before. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Daisy-Daisy.”

He moved his arm dangerously close to her breast.

“Do you have nightmares?” she asked him, desperate to frighten him.

“No. All my dreams are about you.” His fingers traced a pattern, casually, easily on her blouse. “What do you dream about?”

She thought she would frighten him like she frightened her mother. Her dreams always seemed so beautiful, but when she began to tell them to her mother, her mother’s eyes became wide and dark with fear. And then Daisy would change the dream, make it sound worse than it was, ruin its beauty to make it frighten her mother.

“I dreamed I was rolling a golden hoop. It was hot. It burned my hand whenever I touched it. I was wearing earrings, little golden hoops in my ears that spun like the hoop when I ran. And a golden bracelet.” She watched his face as she told him, to see the fear. He traced the pattern aimlessly with his finger, closer and closer to the nipple of her breast.

“I rolled the hoop down a hill and it started rolling faster and faster. I couldn’t keep up with it. It rolled on by itself, like a wheel, a golden wheel, rolling over everything.”

She had forgotten her purpose. She had told the dream as she remembered it, with the little secret smile at the memory. His hand had closed over her breast and rested there, warm as the sun on her face.

He looked as if he didn’t know it was there. “Boy, my psych teacher would have a ball with that one! Who would think a kid like you could have a sexy dream like that? Wow! Talk about Freudian! My psych teacher says—”

“You think you know everything, don’t you?” Daisy said.

His fingers traced the nipple through her thin blouse, tracing a burning circle, a tiny burning hoop.

“Not quite,” he said, and bent close to her face. Darkness and blood. “I don’t know quite how to take you.”

She wrenched free of his face, free of his arm. “You won’t take me at all. Not ever. You’ll be dead. We’ll all be dead in the sun,” she said, and flung herself out of the convertible and back into the darkened house.

Daisy lay doubled up on the bed for a long time after the memory was gone. She would not talk to him anymore. She could not remember anything without him, but she did not care. It was all a dream anyway. What did it matter? She hugged her arms to her.

It was not a dream. It was worse than a dream. She sat very straight on the edge of the bed, her head up and her arms at her side, her feet together on the floor, the way a young lady was supposed to sit. When she stood up, there was no hesitation in her manner. She walked straight to the door and opened it. She did not stop to see what room it was. She did not even glance at the strangers milling up and down. She went straight to Ron and put her hand on his shoulder.

“This is hell, isn’t it?”

He turned, and there was something like hope on his face. “Why, Daisy!” he said, and took her hands and pulled her down to sit beside him. It was the train. Their folded hands rested on the white damask tablecloth. She looked at the hands. There was no use trying to pull away.

Her voice did not shake. “I was very unkind to my mother. I used to tell her my dreams just to make her frightened. I used to go out without a hat, just because it scared her so much. She couldn’t help it. She was so afraid the sun would explode.” She stopped and stared at her hands. “I think it did explode and everybody died, like my father said. I think… I should have lied to her about the dreams. I should have told her I dreamed about boys, about growing up, about things that didn’t frighten her. I could have made up nightmares like my brother did.”

“Daisy,” he said. “I’m afraid confessions aren’t quite in my line. I don’t—”

“She killed herself,” Daisy said. “She sent us to my grandmother’s in Canada and then she killed herself. And so I think that if we are all dead, then I went to hell. That’s what hell is, isn’t it? Coming face to face with what you’re most afraid of.“

“Or what you love. Oh, Daisy,” he said, holding her fingers tightly, “whatever made you think that this was hell?”

In her surprise, she looked straight into his eyes. “Because there isn’t any sun,” she said.

His eyes burned her, burned her. She felt blindly for the white-covered table, but the room had changed. She could not find it. He pulled her down beside him on the blue couch. With him still clinging to her hands, still holding onto her, she remembered.

They were being sent away, to protect them from the sun. Daisy was just as glad to go. Her mother was angry with her all the time. She forced Daisy to tell her her dreams every morning at breakfast in the dark living room. Her mother had put blackout curtains up over the blinds so that no light got in at all, and in the blue twilight not even the little summer slants of light from the blinds fell on her mother’s frightened face.

There was nobody on the beaches. Her mother would not let her go out, even to the grocery store, without a hat and sunglasses. She would not let them fly to Canada. She was afraid of magnetic storms. They sometimes interrupted the radio signals from the towers. Her mother was afraid the plane would crash.

She sent them on the train, kissing them goodbye at the train station, for the moment oblivious to the long dusty streaks of light from the vaulted train-station windows. Her brother went ahead of them out to the platform, and her mother pulled Daisy suddenly into a dark shadowed corner. “What I told you before, about your period, that won’t happen now. The radiation—I called the doctor and he said not to worry. It’s happening to everyone.”

Again Daisy felt the faint pull of fear. Her period had started months ago, dark and bloody as she had imagined. She had not told anyone. “I won’t worry,” she said.

“Oh, my Daisy,” her mother said suddenly. “My Daisy in the sun,” and seemed to shrink back into the darkness. But as they pulled out of the station, she came out into the direct sun and waved goodbye to them.

It was wonderful on the train. The few passengers stayed in their cabins with the shades drawn. There were no shades in the dining car, no people to tell Daisy to get out of the sunlight. She sat in the deserted dining car and looked out the wide windows. The train flew through forests, thin branchy forests of spindly pines and aspens. The sun flickered in on Daisy—sun and then shadows and then sun, running across her face. She and her brother ordered an orgy of milkshakes and desserts and nobody said anything to them.

Her brother read his books about the sun out loud to her. “Do you know what it’s like in the middle of the sun?” he asked her. Yes. You stand with a bucket and a shovel and your bare toes digging into the sand, a child again, not afraid, squinting up into the yellow light.

“No,” she said.

“Atoms can’t even hold together in the middle of the sun. It’s so crowded they bump into each other all the time, bump bump bump, like that, and their electrons fly off and run around free. Sometimes when there’s a collision, it lets off an X-ray that goes whoosh, all the way out at the speed of light, like a ball in a pinball machine. Bing-bang-bing, all the way to the surface.”

“Why do you read those books anyway? To scare yourself?”

“No. To scare Mom.” That was a daring piece of honesty, suitable not even for the freedom of Grandma’s, suitable only for the train. She smiled at him.

“You’re not even scared, are you?”

She felt obliged to answer him with equal honesty. “No,” she said, “not at all.”

“Why not?”

Because it won’t hurt. Because I won’t remember afterwards.

Because I’ll stand in the sun with my bucket and shovel and look up and not be frightened. “I don’t know,” Daisy said. “I’m just not.”

“I am. I dream about burning all the time. I think about how much it hurts when I burn my finger and then I dream about it hurting like that all over forever.” He had been lying to their mother about his dreams, too.

“It won’t be like that,” Daisy said. “We won’t even know it’s happened. We won’t remember a thing.”

“When the sun goes nova, it’ll start using itself up. The core will start filling up with atomic ash, and that’ll make the sun start using up all its own fuel. Do you know it’s pitch-dark in the middle of the sun? See, the radiations are X-rays, and they’re too short to see. They’re invisible. Pitch-dark and ashes falling around you. Can you imagine that?”

“It doesn’t matter.” They were passing a meadow and Daisy’s face was full in the sun. “We won’t be there. We’ll be dead. We won’t remember anything.”

Daisy had not realized how relieved she would be to see her grandmother, narrow face sunburned, arms bare. She was not even wearing a hat. “Daisy, dear, you’re growing up,” she said. She did not make it sound like a death sentence. “And David, you still have your nose in a book, I see.”

It was nearly dark when they got to her little house. “What’s that?” David asked, standing on the porch.

Her grandmother’s voice did not rise dangerously at all. “The aurora borealis. I tell you, we’ve had some shows up here lately. It’s like the Fourth of July.”

Daisy had not realized how hungry she had been to hear someone who was not afraid. She looked up. Great red curtains of light billowed almost to the zenith, fluttering in some solar wind. “It’s beautiful,” Daisy whispered, but her grandmother was holding the door open for her to go in, and so happy was she to see the clear light in her grandmother’s eyes, she followed her into the little kitchen with its red linoleum table and the red curtains hanging at the windows.

“It is so nice to have company,” her grandmother said, climbing onto a chair. “Daisy, hold this end, will you?” She dangled the long end of a yellow plastic ribbon down to Daisy. Daisy took it, looking anxiously at her grandmother. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Measuring for new curtains, dear,” she said, reaching into her pocket for a slip of paper and a pencil. “What’s the length, Daisy?”

“Why do you need new curtains?” Daisy asked. “These look fine to me.”

“They don’t keep the sun out,” her grandmother said. Her eyes had gone coal-black with fear. Her voice was rising with every word. “We have to have new curtains, Daisy, and there’s no cloth. Not in the whole town, Daisy. Can you imagine that? We had to send to Ottawa. They bought up all the cloth in town. Can you imagine that, Daisy?”

“Yes,” Daisy said, and wished she could be afraid.

Ron still held her hands tightly. She looked steadily at him. “Warmer, Daisy,” he said. “Almost here.”

“Yes,” she said.

He untwined their fingers and rose from the couch. He walked through the crowd in the blue living room and went out the door into the snow. She did not try to go to her room. She watched them all, the strangers in their endless, random movement, her brother walking while he read, her grandmother standing on a chair, and the memory came quite easily and without pain.

“You wanta see something?” her brother asked.

Daisy was looking out the window. All day long the lights had been flickering, even though it was calm and silent outside. Their grandmother had gone to town to see if the fabric for the curtains had come in. Daisy did not answer him.

He shoved the book in front of her face. “That’s a prominence,” he said. The pictures were in black and white, like old-fashioned snapshots, only under them instead of her mother’s scrawled white ink, it said, “High Altitude Observatory, Boulder, Colorado.”

“That’s an eruption of hot gas hundreds of thousands of feet high.”

“No,” Daisy said, taking the book into her own lap. “That’s my golden hoop. I saw it in my dream.”

She turned the page.

David leaned over her shoulder and pointed. “That was the big eruption in 1946 when it first started to go wrong only they didn’t know it yet. It weighed a billion tons. The gas went out a million miles.”

Daisy held the book like a snapshot of a loved one.

“It just went bash, and knocked all this gas out into space. There were all kinds of—”

“It’s my golden bear,” she said. The great paw of flame reached lazily out from the sun’s black surface in the picture, the wild silky paw of flaming gas.

“This is the stuff you’ve been dreaming?” her brother asked. “This is the stuff you’ve been telling me about?” His voice went higher and higher. “I thought you said the dreams were nice.”

“They were,” Daisy said.

He pulled the book away from her and flipped angrily through the pages to a colored diagram on a black ground. It showed a glowing red ball with concentric circles drawn inside it. “There,” he said, shoving it at Daisy. “That’s what’s going to happen to us.” He jabbed angrily at one of the circles inside the red ball. “That’s us. That’s us! Inside the sun! Dream about that, why don’t you?”

He slammed the book shut.

“But we’ll all be dead, so it won’t matter,” Daisy said. “It won’t hurt. We won’t remember anything.”

“That’s what you think! You think you know everything. Well, you don’t know what anything is. I read a book about it, and you know what it said? They don’t even know what memory is. They think maybe it isn’t even in the brain cells. That it’s in the atoms somewhere, and even if we’re blown apart, that memory stays. What if we do get burned by the sun and we still remember? What if we go on burning and burning and remembering and remembering forever?”

Daisy said quietly, “He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t hurt us.” There had been no fear as she stood digging her toes into the sand and looking up at him, only wonder. “He—”

“You’re crazy!” her brother shouted. “You know that? You’re crazy. You talk about him like he’s your boyfriend or something! It’s the sun, the wonderful sun that’s going to kill us all!” He yanked the book away from her. He was crying.

“I’m sorry,” Daisy was about to say, but their grandmother came in just then, hatless, with her hair blowing around her thin, sunburned face.

“They got the material in,” she said jubilantly. “I bought enough for all the windows.” She spilled out two sacks of red gingham. It billowed out across the table like the northern lights, red over red. “I thought it would never get here.”

Daisy reached out to touch it.

She waited for him, sitting at the white-damask table of the dining car. He hesitated at the door, standing framed by the snow of ash behind him, and then came gaily in, singing.

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your theory do,” he sang. He carried in his arms a bolt of red cloth. It billowed out from the bolt as he handed it to her grandmother—she standing on the chair, transfixed by joy, the pieces of paper, the yellow tape measure fallen from her forever.

Daisy came and stood in front of him.

“Daisy, Daisy,” he said gaily. “Tell me—”

She put her hand on his chest. “No theory,” she said. “I know.”

“Everything, Daisy?” He smiled the easy, lopsided smile, and she thought sadly that even knowing, she would not be able to see him as he was, but only as the boy who had worked at the grocery store, the boy who had known everything.

“No, but I think I know.” She held her hand firmly against his chest, over the flaming hoop of his breast. “I don’t think we are people anymore. I don’t know what we are—atoms stripped of our electrons maybe, colliding endlessly against each other in the center of the sun while it burns itself to ash in the endless snowstorm at its heart.”

He gave her no clue. His smile was still confident, easy. “What about me, Daisy?” he asked.

“I think you are my golden bear, my flaming hoop, I think you are Ra, with no end to your name at all, Ra who knows everything.”

“And who are you?”

“I am Daisy, who loved the sun.”

He did not smile, did not change his mocking expression. But his tanned hand closed over hers, still pushing against his chest.

“What will I be now, an X-ray zigzagging all the way to the surface till I turn into light? Where will you take me after you have taken me? To Saturn, where the sun shines on the cold rings till they melt into happiness? Is that where you shine now, on Saturn? Will you take me there? Or will we stand forever like this, me with my bucket and shovel, squinting up at you?”

Slowly he gave her hand back to her. “Where do you want to go, Daisy?”

Her grandmother still stood on the chair, holding the cloth as if it were a benediction. Daisy reached out and touched the cloth, as she had in the moment when the sun went nova. She smiled up at her grandmother. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “I’m so glad it’s come.”

She bent suddenly to the window and pulled the faded curtains aside as if she thought because she knew she might be granted some sort of vision, might see for some small moment the little girl that was herself, with her little girl’s chest and toddler’s stomach; . . She might see herself as she really was: Daisy, in the sun. But all she could see was the endless snow.

Her brother was reading on the blue couch in her mother’s living room. She stood over him, watching him read. “I’m afraid now,“ Daisy said, but it wasn’t her brother’s face that looked back at her.

All right, then, Daisy thought. None of them are any help. It doesn’t matter. I have come face to face with what I fear and what I love and they are the same thing.

“All right, then,” Daisy said, and turned back to Ron. “I’d like to go for a ride. With the top down.” She stopped and squinted up at him. “I love the sun,” she said.

When he put his arm around her shoulder, she did not move away. His hand closed on her breast and he bent down to kiss her.

THE WAY OF CROSS AND DRAGON

George R. R. Martin

“Heresy,” he told me. The brackish waters of his pool sloshed gently.

“Another one?” I said wearily. “There are so many these days.”

My Lord Commander was displeased by that comment. He shifted position heavily, sending ripples up and down the pool. One broke over the side, and a sheet of water slid across the tiles of the receiving chamber. My boots were soaked yet again. I accepted that philosophically. I had worn my worst boots, well aware that wet feet were among the inescapable consequences of paying call on Torgathon Nine-Klariis Tûn, elder of the ka-Thane people, and also Archbishop of Vess, Most Holy Father of the Four Vows, Grand Inquisitor of the Order Militant of the Knights of Jesus Christ, and counselor to His Holiness Pope Daryn XXI of New Rome.

“Be there as many heresies as stars in the sky, each single one is no less dangerous, Father,” the archbishop said solemnly. “As Knights of Christ, it is our ordained task to fight them one and all. And I must add that this new heresy is particularly foul.”

“Yes, my Lord Commander,” I replied. “I did not intend to make light of it. You have my apologies. The mission to Finnegan was most taxing. I had hoped to ask you for a leave of absence from my duties. I need rest, a time for thought and restoration.”

“Rest?” The archbishop moved again in his pool, only a slight shift of his immense bulk, but it was enough to send a fresh sheet of water across the floor. His black, pupilless eyes blinked at me. “No, Father, I am afraid that is out of the question. Your skills and your experience are vital for this new mission.” His bass tones seemed to soften somewhat then. “I have not had time to go over your reports on Finnegan,” he said. “How did your work go?”

“Badly,” I told him, “though ultimately I think we will prevail. The Church is strong on Finnegan. When our attempts at reconciliation were rebuffed, I put some standards into the right hands, and we were able to shut down the heretics’ newspaper and broadcasting facilities. Our friends also made certain that their legal actions came to nothing.”

“That is not badly,” the archbishop said. “You won a considerable victory for the Lord and the Church.”

“There were riots, my Lord Commander,” I said. “More than a hundred of the heretics were killed, and a dozen of our own people. I fear there will be more violence before the matter is finished. Our priests are attacked if they so much as enter the city where the heresy has taken root. Their leaders risk their lives if they leave that city. I had hoped to avoid such hatreds, such bloodshed.”

“Commendable, but not realistic,” said Archbishop Torgathon. He blinked at me again, and I remembered that among people of his race blinking is a sign of impatience. “The blood of martyrs must sometimes be spilled, and the blood of heretics as well. What matters it if a being surrenders his life, so long as his soul is saved?”

“Indeed,” I agreed. Despite his impatience, Torgathon would lecture me for another hour if given a chance. That prospect dismayed me. The receiving chamber was not designed for human comfort, and I did not wish to remain any longer than necessary. The walls were damp and moldy, the air hot and humid and thick with the rancid-butter smell characteristic of the ka-Thane. My collar was chafing my neck raw. I was sweating beneath my cassock, my feet were thoroughly soaked, and my stomach was beginning to churn.

I pushed ahead to the business at hand. “You say this new heresy is unusually foul, my Lord Commander?”

“It is,” he said.

“Where has it started?”

“On Arion, a world some three weeks’ distance from Vess. A human world entirely. I cannot understand why you humans are so easily corrupted. Once a ka-Thane has found the faith, he would scarcely abandon it.”

“That is well known,” I replied politely. I did not mention that the number of ka-Thane to find the faith was vanishingly small. They were a slow, ponderous people, and most of their vast millions showed no interest in learning any ways other than their own, or following any creed but their own ancient religion. Torgathon Nine-Klariis Tûn was an anomaly. He had been among the first converts almost two centuries ago, when Pope Vidas L had ruled that nonhumans might serve as clergy. Given his great life span and the iron certainty of his belief, it was no wonder that Torgathon had risen as far as he had, despite the fact that fewer than a thousand of his race had followed him into the Church. He had at least a century of life remaining to him. No doubt he would someday be Torgathon Cardinal Tûn, should he squelch enough heresies. The times are like that.

“We have little influence on Arion,” the archbishop was saying. His arms moved as he spoke, four ponderous clubs of mottled green-gray flesh churning the water, and the dirty white cilia around his breathing hole trembled with each word. “A few priests, a few churches, some believers, but no power to speak of. The heretics already outnumber us on this world. I rely on your intellect, your shrewdness. Turn this calamity into an opportunity. This heresy is so palpable that you can easily disprove it. Perhaps some of the deluded will turn to the true way.”

“Certainly,” I said. “And the nature of this heresy? What must I disprove?” It is a sad indication of my own troubled faith to add that I did not really care. I have dealt with too many heresies. Their beliefs and their questionings echo in my head and trouble my dreams at night. How can I be sure of my own faith? The very edict that had admitted Torgathon into the clergy had caused a half-dozen worlds to repudiate the Bishop of New Rome, and those who had followed that path would find a particularly ugly heresy in the massive naked (save for a damp Roman collar) alien who floated before me and wielded the authority of the Church in four great webbed hands. Christianity is the greatest single human religion, but that means little. The non-Christians outnumber us five to one, and there are well over seven hundred Christian sects, some almost as large as the One True Interstellar Catholic Church of Earth and the Thousand Worlds. Even Daryn XXI, powerful as he is, is only one of seven to claim the title of Pope. My own belief was strong once, but I have moved too long among heretics and nonbelievers, and even my prayers do not make the doubts go away now. So it was that I felt no horror—only a sudden intellectual interest—when the archbishop told me the nature of the heresy on Arion.

“They have made a saint,” he said, “out of Judas Iscariot.”

As a senior in the Knights Inquisitor, I command my own star-ship, which it pleases me to call Truth of Christ. Before the craft was assigned to me, it was named the St. Thomas, after the apostle, but I did not feel a saint notorious for doubting was an appropriate patron for a ship enlisted in the fight against heresy. I have no duties aboard the Truth, which is crewed by six brothers and sisters of the Order of St. Christopher the Far-Traveling and captained by a young woman I hired away from a merchant trader.

I was therefore able to devote the entire three-week voyage from Vess to Arion to a study of the heretical Bible, a copy of which had been given to me by the archbishop’s administrative assistant. It was a thick, heavy, handsome book, bound in dark leather, its pages edged with gold leaf, with many splendid interior illustrations in full color with holographic enhancement. Remarkable work, clearly done by someone who loved the all-but-forgotten art of bookmaking. The paintings reproduced inside—the originals were to be found on the walls of the House of St. Judas on Arion, I gathered—were masterful, if blasphemous, as much high art as the Tammerwens and RoHallidays that adorn the Great Cathedral of St. John on New Rome.

Inside, the book bore an imprimatur indicating that it had been approved by Lukyan Judasson, First Scholar of the Order of St. Judas Iscariot.

It was called The Way of Cross and Dragon.

I read it as the Truth of Christ slid between the stars, at first taking copious notes to better understand the heresy that I must fight, but later simply absorbed by the strange, convoluted, grotesque story it told. The words of the text had passion and power and poetry.

Thus it was that I first encountered the striking figure of St. Judas Iscariot, a complex, ambitious, contradictory, and altogether extraordinary human being.

He was born of a whore in the fabled ancient city-state of Babylon on the same day that the Savior was born in Bethlehem, and he spent his childhood in alleys and gutters, selling his own body when he had to, pimping when he became older. As a youth, he began to experiment with the dark arts, and before the age of twenty he was a skilled necromancer. That was when he became Judas the Dragon-Tamer, the first and only man to bend to his will the most fearsome of God’s creatures, the great winged fire lizards of Old Earth. The book held a marvelous painting of Judas in some great dank cavern, his eyes aflame as he wielded a glowing lash to keep at bay a mountainous green-gold dragon. Beneath his arm is a woven basket, its lid slightly ajar, and the tiny scaled heads of three dragon chicks are peering from within. A fourth infant dragon is crawling up his sleeve. That was in the first chapter of his life.

In the second, he was Judas the Conqueror, Judas the Dragon-King, Judas of Babylon, the Great Usurper. Astride the greatest of his dragons, with an iron crown on his head and a sword in his hand, he made Babylon the capital of the greatest empire Old Earth had ever known, a realm that stretched from Spain to India. He reigned from a dragon throne amid the Hanging Gardens he had caused to be constructed, and it was there he sat when he tried Jesus of Nazareth, the troublemaking prophet who had been dragged before him bound and bleeding. Judas was not a patient man, and he made Christ bleed still more before he was through with Him. And when Jesus would not answer his questions, Judas—contemptuous —had Him cast back out into the streets. But first Judas ordered his guards to cut off Christ’s legs. “Healer,” he said, “heal thyself.”

Then came the Repentance, the vision in the night, and Judas Iscariot gave up his crown and his dark arts and his riches, to follow the man he had crippled. Despised and taunted by those he had tyrannized, Judas became the Legs of the Lord, and for a year he carried Jesus on his back to the far corners of the realm he had once ruled. When Jesus did finally heal Himself, then Judas walked at His side, and from that time forth he was Jesus’ trusted friend and counselor, the first and foremost of the Twelve. Finally, Jesus gave Judas the gift of tongues, recalled and sanctified the dragons that Judas had sent away, and sent his disciple forth on a solitary ministry across the oceans, “to spread My Word where I cannot go.”

There came a day when the sun went dark at noon and the ground trembled, and Judas swung his dragon around on ponderous wings and flew back across the raging seas. But when he reached the city of Jerusalem, he found Christ dead on the cross.

In that moment his faith faltered, and for the next three days the Great Wrath of Judas was like a storm across the ancient world. His dragons razed the Temple in Jerusalem and drove the people from the city and struck as well at the great seats of power in Rome and Babylon. And when he found the others of the Twelve and questioned them and learned of how the one named Simon-called-Peter had three times betrayed the Lord, he strangled Peter with his own hands and fed the corpse to his dragons. Then he sent those dragons forth to start fires throughout the world, funeral pyres for Jesus of Nazareth.

And Jesus rose on the third day, and Judas wept, but his tears could not turn Christ’s anger, for in his wrath he had betrayed all of Christ’s teachings.

So Jesus called back the dragons, and they came, and everywhere the fires went out. And from their bellies he called forth Peter and made him whole again, and gave him dominion over the Church.

Then the dragons died, and so, too, did all dragons everywhere, for they were the living sigil of the power and wisdom of Judas Iscariot, who had sinned greatly. And He took from Judas the gift of tongues and the power of healing He had given, and even his eyesight, for Judas had acted as a man blind (there was a fine painting of the blinded Judas weeping over the bodies of his dragons). And He told Judas that for long ages he would be remembered only as Betrayer, and people would curse his name, and all that he had been and done would be forgotten.

But then, because Judas had loved Him so, Christ gave him a boon, an extended life, during which he might travel and think on his sins and finally come to forgiveness, and only then die.

And that was the beginning of the last chapter in the life of Judas Iscariot, but it was a very long chapter indeed. Once Dragon-King, once the friend of Christ, now he became only a blind traveler, outcast and friendless, wandering all the cold roads of the earth, living even when all the cities and people and things he had known were dead. And Peter, the first Pope and ever his enemy, spread far and wide the tale of how Judas had sold Christ for thirty pieces of silver, until Judas dared not even use his true name. For a time he called himself just Wandering Ju’, and afterward many other names.

He lived more than a thousand years, and became a preacher, and a healer, and a lover of animals, and was hunted and persecuted when the Church that Peter had founded became bloated and corrupt. But he had a great deal of time, and at last he found wisdom and a sense of peace, and finally Jesus came to him on a long-postponed deathbed, and they were reconciled, and Judas wept once again. And before he died, Christ promised that He would permit a few to remember who and what Judas had been, and that with the passage of centuries the news would spread, until finally Peter’s Lie was displaced and forgotten.

Such was the life of St. Judas Iscariot, as related in The Way of Cross and Dragon. His teachings were there as well, and the apocryphal books that he had allegedly written.

When I had finished the volume, I lent it to Arla-k-Bau, the captain of the Truth of Christ. Arla was a gaunt, pragmatic woman of no particular faith, but I valued her opinion. The others of my crew, the good sisters and brothers of St. Christopher, would only have echoed the archbishop’s religious horror.

“Interesting,” Arla said when she returned the book to me.

I chuckled. “Is that all?”

She shrugged. “It makes a nice story. An easier read than your Bible, Damien, and more dramatic as well.”

“True,” I admitted. “But it’s absurd. An unbelievable tangle of doctrine, apocrypha, mythology, and superstition. Entertaining, yes, certainly. Imaginative, even daring. But ridiculous, don’t you think? How can you credit dragons? A legless Christ? Peter being pieced together after being devoured by four monsters?”

Arla’s grin was taunting. “Is that any sillier than water changing into wine, or Christ walking on the waves, or a man living in the belly of a fish?” Arla-k-Bau liked to jab at me. It had been a scandal when I selected a nonbeliever as my captain, but she was very good at her job, and I liked her around to keep me sharp. She had a good mind, Arla did, and I valued that more than blind obedience. Perhaps that was a sin in me.

“There is a difference,” I said.

“Is there?” she snapped back. Her eyes saw through my masks. “Ah, Damien, admit it. You rather liked this book.”

I cleared my throat. “It piqued my interest,” I acknowledged. I had to justify myself. “You know the kind of matter I deal with ordinarily. Dreary little doctrinal deviations, obscure quibblings on theology somehow blown all out of proportion, bald-faced political maneuverings designed to set some ambitious planetary bishop up as a new Pope, or to wring some concession or other from New Rome or Vess. The war is endless, but the battles are dull and dirty. They exhaust me, spiritually, emotionally, physically. Afterward I feel drained and guilty.” I tapped the book’s leather cover. “This is different. The heresy must be crushed, of course, but I admit that I am anxious to meet this Lukyan Judasson.”

“The artwork is lovely as well,” Arla said, flipping through the pages of The Way of Cross and Dragon and stopping to study one especially striking plate. Judas weeping over his dragons, I think. I smiled to see that it had affected her as much as me. Then I frowned.

That was the first inkling I had of the difficulties ahead.

So it was that the Truth of Christ came to the porcelain city Ammadon on the world of Arion, where the Order of St. Judas Iscariot kept its House.

Arion was a pleasant, gentle world, inhabited for these past three centuries. Its population was under nine million; Ammadon, the only real city, was home to two of those millions. The technological level was medium-high, but chiefly imported. Arion had little industry and was not an innovative world, except perhaps artistically. The arts were quite important here, flourishing and vital. Religious freedom was a basic tenet of the society, but Arion was not a religious world either, and the majority of the populace lived devoutly secular lives. The most popular religion was Aestheticism, which hardly counts as a religion at all. There were also Taoists, Erikaners, Old True Christers, and Children of the Dreamer, along with a dozen lesser sects.

And finally there were nine churches of the One True Interstellar Catholic faith. There had been twelve.

The three others were now houses of Arion’s fastest-growing faith, the Order of St. Judas Iscariot, which also had a dozen newly built churches of its own.

The bishop of Arion was a dark, severe man with close-cropped black hair who was not at all happy to see me. “Damien Har Veris!” he exclaimed in some wonder when I called on him at his residence. “We have heard of you, of course, but I never thought to meet or host you. Our numbers are small here—”

“And growing smaller,” I said. “A matter of some concern to my Lord Commander, Archbishop Torgathon. Apparently you are less troubled, Excellency, since you did not see fit to report the activities of this sect of Judas worshipers.”

He looked briefly angry at the rebuke, but quickly he swallowed his temper. Even a bishop can fear a Knight Inquisitor. “We are concerned, of course,” he said. “We do all we can to combat the heresy. If you have advice that will help us, I will be more than glad to listen.”

“I am an Inquisitor of the Order Militant of the Knights of Jesus Christ,” I said bluntly. “I do not give advice, Excellency. I take action. To that end I was sent to Arion, and that is what I shall do. Now tell me what you know about this heresy and this First Scholar, this Lukyan Judasson.”

“Of course, Father Damien,” the bishop began. He signaled for a servant to bring us a tray of wine and cheese, and began to summarize the short, but explosive, history of the Judas cult. I listened, polishing my nails on the crimson lapel of my jacket, until the black paint gleamed brilliantly, interrupting from time to time with a question. Before he had half-finished, I was determined to visit Lukyan personally. It seemed the best course of action. And I had wanted to do it all along.

Appearances were important on Arion, I gathered, and I deemed it necessary to impress Lukyan with my self and my station. I wore my best boots, sleek dark handmade boots of Roman leather that had never seen the inside of Torgathon’s receiving chamber, and a severe black suit with deep burgundy lapels and stiff collar. From around my neck hung a splendid crucifix of pure gold; my collar pin was a matching golden sword, the sigil of the Knights Inquisitor. Brother Denis painted my nails carefully, all black as ebony, and darkened my eyes as well, and used a fine white powder on my face. When I glanced in the mirror, I frightened even myself. I smiled, but only briefly. It ruined the effect.

I walked to the House of St. Judas Iscariot. The streets of Ammadon were wide and spacious and golden, lined by scarlet trees called whisperwinds, whose long, drooping tendrils did indeed seem to whisper secrets to the gentle breeze. Sister Judith came with me. She is a small woman, slight of build even in the cowled coveralls of the Order of St. Christopher. Her face is meek and kind, her eyes wide and youthful and innocent. I find her useful. Four times now she has killed those who attempted to assault me.

The House itself was newly built. Rambling and stately, it rose from amid gardens of small bright flowers and seas of golden grass, and the gardens were surrounded by a high wall. Murals covered both the outer wall around the property and the exterior of the building itself. I recognized a few of them from The Way of Cross and Dragon and stopped briefly to admire them before walking on through the main gate. No one tried to stop us. There were no guards, not even a receptionist. Within the walls, men and women strolled languidly through the flowers, or sat on benches beneath silverwoods and whisperwinds.

Sister Judith and I paused, then made our way directly to the House itself.

We had just started up the steps when a man appeared from within; he stood waiting in the doorway. He was blond and fat, with a great wiry beard that framed a slow smile, and he wore a flimsy robe that fell to his sandaled feet, and on the robe were dragons bearing the silhouette of a man holding a cross.

When I reached the top of the steps, the man bowed to me. “Father Damien Har Veris of the Knights Inquisitor,” he said. His smile widened. “I greet you in the name of Jesus, and St. Judas. I am Lukyan.”

I made a note to myself to find out which of the bishop’s staff was feeding information to the Judas cult, but my composure did not break. I have been a Knight Inquisitor for a long, long time. “Father Lukyan Mo,” I said, taking his hand, “I have questions to ask of you.” I did not smile.

He did. “I thought you might,” he said.

Lukyan’s office was large but spartan. Heretics often have a simplicity that the officers of the true Church seem to have lost. He did have one indulgence, however.

Dominating the wall behind his desk/console was the painting I had already fallen in love with, the blinded Judas weeping over his dragons.

Lukyan sat down heavily and motioned me to a second chair. We had left Sister Judith outside, in the waiting chamber. “I prefer to stand, Father Lukyan,” I said, knowing it gave me an advantage.

“Just Lukyan,” he said. “Or Luke, if you prefer. We have little use for titles here.”

“You are Father Lukyan Mo, born here on Arion, educated in the seminary on Cathaday, former priest of the One True Interstellar Catholic Church of Earth and the Thousand Worlds,” I said. “I will address you as befits your station, Father. I expect you to reciprocate. Is that understood?”

“Oh, yes,” he said amiably.

“I am empowered to strip you of your right to administer the sacraments, to order you shunned and excommunicated for this heresy you have formulated. On certain worlds I could even order your death.”

“But not on Arion,” Lukyan said quickly. “We’re very tolerant here. Besides, we outnumber you.” He smiled. “As for the rest, well, I don’t perform those sacraments much anyway, you know. Not for years. I’m First Scholar now. A teacher, a thinker. I show others the way, help them find the faith. Excommunicate me if it will make you happy, Father Damien. Happiness is what all of us seek.”

“You have given up the faith, then, Father Lukyan?” I said. I deposited my copy of The Way of Cross and Dragon on his desk. “But I see you have found a new one.” Now I did smile, but it was all ice, all menace, all mockery. “A more ridiculous creed I have yet to encounter. I suppose you will tell me that you have spoken to God, that He trusted you with this new revelation, so that you might clear the good name, such that it is, of Holy Judas?”

Now Lukyan’s smile was very broad indeed. He picked up the book and beamed at me.

“Oh, no,” he said. “No, I made it all up.”

That stopped me. “What?”

“I made it all up,” he repeated. He hefted the book fondly. “I drew on many sources, of course, especially the Bible, but I do think of Cross and Dragon mostly as my own work. It’s rather good, don’t you agree? Of course, I could hardly put my name on it, proud as I am of it, but I did include my imprimatur. Did you notice that? It was the closest I dared come to a byline.”

I was speechless only for a moment. Then I grimaced. “You startle me,” I admitted. “I expected to find an inventive madman, some poor self-deluded fool firm in his belief that he had spoken to God. I’ve dealt with such fanatics before. Instead I find a cheerful cynic who has invented a religion for his own profit. I think I prefer the fanatics. You are beneath contempt, Father Lukyan. You will burn in hell for eternity.”

“I doubt it,” Lukyan said, “but you do mistake me, Father Damien. I am no cynic, nor do I profit from my dear St. Judas. Truthfully, I lived more comfortably as a priest of your own Church. I do this because it is my vocation.”

I sat down. “You confuse me,” I said. “Explain.”

“Now I am going to tell you the truth,” he said. He said it in an odd way, almost as a cant. “I am a Liar,” he added.

“You want to confuse me with child’s paradoxes,” I snapped.

“No, no,” he smiled. “A Liar. With a capital. It is an organization, Father Damien. A religion, you might call it. A great and powerful faith. And I am the smallest part of it.”

“I know of no such church,” I said.

“Oh, no, you wouldn’t. It’s secret. It has to be. You can understand that, can’t you? People don’t like being lied to.”

“I do not like being lied to,” I said.

Lukyan looked wounded. “I told you this would be the truth, didn’t I? When a Liar says that, you can believe him. How else could we trust each other?”

“There are many of you,” I said. I was starting to think that Lukyan was a madman after all, as fanatic as any heretic, but in a more complex way. Here was a heresy within a heresy, but I recognized my duty—to find the truth of things and set them right.

“Many of us,” Lukyan said, smiling. “You would be surprised, Father Damien, really you would. But there are some things I dare not tell you.”

“Tell me what you dare, then.”

“Happily,” said Lukyan Judasson. “We Liars, like all other religions, have several truths we take on faith. Faith is always required. There are some things that cannot be proved. We believe that life is worth living. That is an article of faith. The purpose of life is to live, to resist death, perhaps to defy entropy.”

“Go on,” I said, growing even more interested despite myself.

“We also believe that happiness is a good, something to be sought after.”

“The Church does not oppose happiness,” I said dryly.

“I wonder,” Lukyan said. “But let us not quibble. Whatever the Church’s position on happiness, it does preach belief in an afterlife, in a supreme being, and a complex moral code.”

“True.”

“The Liars believe in no afterlife, no God. We see the universe as it is, Father Damien, and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we had never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will not long outlive us. Ultimately entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end. It will be gone. It has never been. It has never mattered. The universe itself is doomed, transitory, and certainly it is uncaring.”

I slid back in my chair, and a shiver went through me as I listened to poor Lukyan’s dark words. I found myself fingering my crucifix. “A bleak philosophy,” I said, “as well as a false one. I have had that fearful vision myself. I think all of us do, at some point. But it is not so, Father. My faith sustains me against such nihilism. Faith is a shield against despair.”

“Oh, I know that, my friend, my Knight Inquisitor,” Lukyan said. “I’m glad to see you understand so well. You are almost one of us already.”

I frowned.

“You’ve touched the heart of it,” Lukyan continued. “The truths, the great truths—and most of the lesser ones as well—they are unbearable for most men. We find our shield in faith. Your faith, my faith, any faith. It doesn’t matter, so long as we believe, really and truly believe, in whatever lie we cling to.” He fingered the ragged edges of his great blond beard. “Our psychs have always told us that believers are the happy ones, you know. They may believe in Christ or Buddha or Erika Stormjones, in reincarnation or immortality or nature, in the power of love or the platform of a political faction, but it all comes to the same thing. They believe. They are happy. It is the ones who have seen truth who despair, and kill themselves. The truths are so vast, the faiths so little, so poorly made, so riddled with errors and contradictions. We see around them and through them, and then we feel the weight of darkness on us, and we can no longer be happy.”

I am not a slow man. I knew, by then, where Lukyan Judasson was going. “Your Liars invent faiths.”

He smiled. “Of all sorts. Not only religious. Think of it. We know truth for the cruel instrument it is. Beauty is infinitely preferable to truth. We invent beauty. Faiths, political movements, high ideals, belief in love and fellowship. All of them are lies. We tell those lies, and others, endless others. We improve on history and myth and religion, make each more beautiful, better, easier to believe in. Our lies are not perfect, of course. The truths are too big. But perhaps someday we will find one great lie that all humanity can use. Until then, a thousand small lies will do.”

“I think I do not care for you Liars very much,” I said with a cold, even fervor. “My whole life has been a quest for truth.”

Lukyan was indulgent. “Father Damien Har Veris, Knight Inquisitor, I know you better than that. You are a Liar yourself. You do good work. You ship from world to world, and on each you destroy the foolish, the rebels, the questioners who would bring down the edifice of the vast lie that you serve.”

“If my lie is so admirable,” I said, “then why have you abandoned it?”

“A religion must fit its culture and society, work with them, not against them. If there is conflict, contradiction, then the lie breaks down, and the faith falters. Your Church is good for many worlds, Father, but not for Arion. Life is too kind here, and your faith is stern. Here we love beauty, and your faith offers too little. So we have improved it. We studied this world for a long time. We know its psychological profile. St. Judas will thrive here. He offers drama, and color, and much beauty—the aesthetics are admirable. His is a tragedy with a happy ending, and Arion dotes on such stories. And the dragons are a nice touch. I think your own Church ought to find a way to work in dragons. They are marvelous creatures.”

“Mythical,” I said.

“Hardly,” he replied. “Look it up.” He grinned at me. “You see, really, it all comes back to faith. Can you really know what happened three thousand years ago? You have one Judas, I have another. Both of us have books. Is yours true? Can you really believe that? I have been admitted only to the first circle of the Order of Liars. So I do not know all our secrets, but I know that we are very old. It would not surprise me to learn that the gospels were written by men very much like me. Perhaps there never was a Judas at all. Or a Jesus.”

“I have faith that that is not so,” I said.

“There are a hundred people in this building who have a deep and very real faith in St. Judas and the Way of Cross and Dragon,” Lukyan said. “Faith is a very good thing. Do you know that the suicide rate on Arion has decreased by almost a third since the Order of St. Judas was founded?”

I remember rising slowly from my chair. “You are as fanatical as any heretic I have ever met, Lukyan Judasson,” I told him. “I pity you the loss of your faith.”

Lukyan rose with me. “Pity yourself, Damien Har Veris,” he said. “I have found a new faith and a new cause, and I am a happy man. You, my dear friend, are tortured and miserable.”

“That is a lie!” I am afraid I screamed.

“Come with me,” Lukyan said. He touched a panel on his wall, and the great painting of Judas weeping over his dragons slid up out of sight, and there was a stairway leading down into the ground. “Follow me,” he said.

In the cellar was a great glass vat full of pale green fluid, and in it a thing was floating—a thing very like an ancient embryo, aged and infantile at the same time, naked, with a huge head and a tiny atrophied body. Tubes ran from its arms and legs and genitals, connecting it to the machinery that kept it alive.

When Lukyan turned on the lights, it opened its eyes. They were large and dark, and they looked into my soul.

“This is my colleague,” Lukyan said, patting the side of the vat. “Jon Azure Cross, a Liar of the fourth circle.”

“And a telepath,” I said with a sick certainty. I had led pogroms against other telepaths, children mostly, on other worlds. The Church teaches that the psionic powers are a trap of Satan’s. They are not mentioned in the Bible. I have never felt good about those killings.

“Jon read you the moment you entered the compound,” Lukyan said, “and notified me. Only a few of us know that he is here. He helps us lie most efficiently. He knows when faith is true and when it is feigned. I have an implant in my skull. Jon can talk to me at all times. It was he who initially recruited me into the Liars. He knew my faith was hollow. He felt the depth of my despair.”

Then the thing in the tank spoke, its metallic voice coming from a speaker-grill in the base of the machine that nurtured it. “And I feel yours, Damien Hars Veris, empty priest. Inquisitor, you have asked too many questions. You are sick at heart, and tired, and you do not believe. Join us, Damien. You have been a Liar for a long, long time!”

For a moment I hesitated, looking deep into myself, wondering what it was I did believe. I searched for my faith, the fire that had once sustained me, the certainty in the teachings of the Church, the presence of Christ within me. I found none of it, none. I was empty inside, burned out, full of questions and pain. But as I was about to answer Jon Azure Cross and the smiling Lukyan Judasson, I found something else, something I did believe in, something I had always believed in.

Truth.

I believed in truth, even when it hurt. “He is lost to us,” said the telepath with the mocking name of Cross.

Lukyan’s smile faded. “Oh, really? I had hoped you would be one of us, Damien. You seemed ready.”

I was suddenly afraid, and I considered sprinting up the stairs to Sister Judith. Lukyan had told me so very much, and now I had rejected them.

The telepath felt my fear. “You cannot hurt us, Damien,” it said. “Go in peace. Lukyan told you nothing.”

Lukyan was frowning. “I told him a good deal, Jon,” he said.

“Yes. But can he trust the words of such a Liar as you?” The small misshapen mouth of the thing in the vat twitched in a smile, and its great eyes closed, and Lukyan Judasson sighed and led me up the stairs.

It was not until some years later that I realized it was Jon Azure Cross who was lying, and the victim of his lie was Lukyan. I could hurt them. I did.

It was almost simple. The bishop had friends in government and the media. With some money in the right places, I made some friends of my own. Then I exposed Cross in his cellar, charging that he had used his psionic powers to tamper with the minds of Lukyan’s followers. My friends were receptive to the charges. The guardians conducted a raid, took the telepath Cross into custody, and later tried him.

He was innocent, of course. My charge was nonsense; human telepaths can read minds in close proximity, but seldom anything more. But they are rare, and much feared, and Cross was hideous enough so that it was easy to make him a victim of superstition. In the end, he was acquitted, and he left the city of Ammadon and perhaps Arion itself, bound for regions unknown.

But it had never been my intention to convict him. The charge was enough. The cracks began to show in the lie that he and Lukyan had built together. Faith is hard to come by, and easy to lose, and the merest doubt can begin to erode even the strongest foundation of belief.

The bishop and I labored together to sow further doubts. It was not as easy as I might have thought. The Liars had done their work well. Ammadon, like most civilized cities, had a great pool of knowledge, a computer system that linked the schools and universities and libraries together, and made their combined wisdom available to any who needed it.

But, when I checked, I soon discovered that the histories of Rome and Babylon had been subtly reshaped, and there were three listings for Judas Iscariot—one for the Betrayer, one for the saint, and one of the conqueror-king of Babylon. His name was also mentioned in connection with the Hanging Gardens, and there is an entry for a so-called Codex Judas.

And according to the Ammadon library, dragons became extinct on Old Earth around the time of Christ.

We purged all those lies finally, wiped them from the memories of the computers, though we had to cite authorities on a half-dozen non-Christian worlds before the librarians and academics would credit that the differences were anything more than a question of religious preference.

By then the Order of St. Judas had withered in the glare of exposure. Lukyan Judasson had grown gaunt and angry, and at least half of his churches had closed.

The heresy never died completely, of course. There are always those who believe, no matter what. And so to this day The Way of Cross and Dragon is read on Arion, in the porcelain city Ammadon, amid murmuring whisperwinds.

Arla-k-Bau and the Truth of Christ carried me back to Vess a year after my departure, and Archbishop Torgathon finally gave me the leave of absence I had asked for, before sending me out to fight still other heresies. So I had my victory, and the Church continued on much as before, and the Order of St. Judas Iscariot was thoroughly crushed. The telepath Jon Azure Cross had been wrong, I thought then. He had sadly underestimated the power of a Knight Inquisitor.

Later, though, I remembered his words.

You cannot hurt us, Damien.

Us?

The Order of St. Judas? Or the Liars?

He lied, I think, deliberately, knowing I would go forth and destroy the Way of Cross and Dragon, knowing, too, that I could not touch the Liars, would not even dare mention them. How could I? Who would credit it? A grand star-spanning conspiracy as old as history? It reeks of paranoia, and I had no proof at all.

The telepath lied for Lukyan’s benefit so he would let me go. I am certain of that now. Cross risked much to ensnare me. Failing, he was willing to sacrifice Lukyan Judasson and his lie, pawns in some greater game.

So I left, and I carried within me the knowledge that I was empty of faith, but for a blind faith in truth—truth I could no longer find in my Church.

I grew certain of that in my year of rest, which I spent reading and studying on Vess and Cathaday and Celia’s World. Finally I returned to the archbishop’s receiving room, and stood again before Torgathon Nine-Klariis Tûn in my very worst pair of boots. “My Lord Commander,” I said to him, “I can accept no further assignments. I ask that I be retired from active service.”

“For what cause?” Torgathon rumbled, splashing feebly.

“I have lost the faith,” I said to him, simply.

He regarded me for a long time, his pupilless eyes blinking. At last he said, “Your faith is a matter between you and your confessor. I care only about your results. You have done good work, Damien. You may not retire, and we will not allow you to resign.”

The truth will set us free.

But freedom is cold, and empty, and frightening, and lies can often be warm and beautiful.

Last year the Church granted me a new ship. I named this one Dragon.

SPIDERSONG

Susan Petry

RENNEKER, the lyre spider, lived inside a lute, a medieval instrument resembling a pear-shaped guitar. The lute was an inexpensive copy of one made by an old master and had rosewood walls and a spruce sounding board. Her home was sparsely furnished, a vast expanse of unfinished wood, a few sound pegs reaching from floor to ceiling like Greek columns, and in one corner, near the small F-shape sound holes, the fantasy of iron-silk thread that was Brenneker’s web. Brenneker’s home was an unusual one for a lyre spider. Most of them spin their webs in hollow tawba stalks, which echo the music of these tiny fairy harps seldom heard by ears of men. Lyre spiders play duets with each other, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes bouncing counterpoint melodies back and forth across the glades between the tall bamboo-like tawba. They play their webs to attract prey, to win a mate, or for the sheer joy of music. They live alone except for the few weeks in mother’s silken egg case and one day of spiderlings climbing up the tawba to cast their threads into the wind and fly away. When they mate, the embrace lasts but a few moments. Then the female eats the male, who gives himself gladly to this deepest union of two souls.

Originally, Brenneker had lived in the forest, surrounded by the music of her own kind. Although she lived alone, she was never lonely, for she could always hear the mandolin-like plucking of Twinklebright, her nearest neighbor, the deep, droning chords of old Birdslayer, and occasionally the harpsichord tones of Klavier, carried on the breeze.

One hot afternopn as Brenneker experimented with augmented fifths, she noticed that some of her neighbors had stopped mid-song. She suddenly realized she was the only one still playing and she stopped abruptly, leaving a leading tone hanging on the air like an unfinished sentence.

“These ones should do,” she heard a man’s voice say. An angry blow struck the base of her tawba stalk. She felt herself falling as the tawba that was her home broke at the base, tumbling her to the floor of the glade below. Bruised and frightened, she scampered quickly back inside her home and clung to her silent, broken web. She felt herself lifted up and then dropped with a jar as her tawba was tossed into a wagon.

Over many hours of jolting and rattling, she fell asleep, and when she awoke, all was quiet and dark. She climbed out of her stalk and began to explore her new surroundings, a workbench with many hollow wooden objects lying about. Although she had never seen a musical instrument such as men make, she recognized with the eye of a musician that their shape was intended to give sound. She chose a lute and squeezed her plump body through one of the sound holes, saying, “Certainly this will give greater tone than my old home.” She began to string her web.

At night there was no music in the instrument maker’s shop, and she was lonely without the songs of her friends to cheer her. Since she was also hungry, she played her hunger song, and a fat, stupid moth came, aching to be devoured. When she’d finished with him, she tossed his powdery wings out the sound hole.

In the morning, the old instrument maker, Sanger, came to open up his shop. He paused in the shop doorway rattling his keys and then turned on the overhead light. Brenneker watched him from the sound holes of her new home as he ran a wrinkled hand through his sparse, gray hair, stuffed his keys back into a deep pocket, and picked a viola from the wall. Carefully, he adjusted the tuning of the strings, and then, picking up the bow, he played a short, lilting tune and then replaced the instrument on its peg on the wall. He made his way along the wall, pausing at each instrument to check the tuning. When he came to Brenneker’s lute, he did the same, tightening the strings briefly and then playing a few bars of melody. Brenneker felt her whole surroundings vibrate with the tone and her web pulsed in sympathetic vibration. Timidly, she picked out a few notes of the song.

“Odd,” said Mr. Sanger, “I’d never noticed that it had such lovely overtones. Too bad I had to use such cheap materials in its construction.” He placed the lute back on the wall and was about to pick up a zither, when the shop bell rang to announce that someone had come in from the street.

A young girl and her father came through the door and paused to look at violins.

“But I don’t want to play violin,” said the girl, who was about ten years old. “Everyone plays violin. I want something different.”

“Well, what about a guitar,” said her father. “Your friend Marabeth plays one quite well. It seems like a proper instrument for a young lady.”

“But that’s just it,” said the girl, whose name Brenneker later found out was Laurel. “I don’t want to copycat someone else. I want an instrument that isn’t played by just anyone. I want something special.”

Sanger interrupted this conversation to say, “Have you considered the lute?” He removed Brenneker’s home from the wall and strummed a chord. The vibration in the web tickled Brenneker’s feet as she strummed the same chord an octave higher.

“What a lovely tone it has!” said Laurel, touching the strings and plucking them one by one.

“Be careful,” said her father. “That’s an antique.”

“Not so,” said Sanger, “it’s a copy. Made it myself. And I intended it to be played, not just looked at like a dusty old museum piece.”

“May I try?” asked the girl. Sanger gave the instrument to her and she sat down on a stool, placing the lute across her lap. She strummed a discord which caused Brenneker to flinch and grip her strings tightly so they wouldn’t sound.

“Let me show you how,” said the instrument maker. “Put your first finger in that fret and your middle finger there, like so.” He indicated where the fingers should fret the strings to make a chord. Laurel plucked the strings one by one. The tone was tinny but true. The second time she plucked, Brenneker plucked inside, on her own instrument. Rich, golden tones emanated from the lute.

“Oh, Father, this is the instrument for me,” said Laurel.

“But who will teach you to play such an antiquated instrument?”

“I would be glad to,” said Sanger. “I have studied medieval and Renaissance music and I would like to share it with an interested pupil.”

“Please, Father?”

“Well, perhaps…there is the question of cost. I can’t afford a very expensive instrument,” said her father.

“This lute, although made with loving care and much skill,” said Sanger, “is unfortunately made of inexpensive wood, and for that reason it is very reasonably priced.”

Mr. Sanger and Laurel’s father were able to make agreeable terms for the lute and the cost of lessons. That morning Laurel took the lute, Brenneker and all, home with her.

The first few weeks of lessons were torture for Brenneker, who sat huddled, clenching her strings to her body to damp them. But as Laurel improved, Brenneker rewarded her by playing in unison. This was great incentive to Laurel, who did not realize that she was only partial author of the lovely music. Mr. Sanger was himself at a loss to explain how such beautiful tones came from such a cheaply built instrument. He did not credit his workmanship, although this was in some measure responsible, but told Laurel that the lute was haunted by a fairy harpist, and he advised her to leave a window open at night and put out a bowl of milk and honey before she went to bed. Perhaps he had been the beneficiary of such a fairy in the past, for Brenneker found that the milk and the open window provided her with a bountiful supply of flies and insects, which she tempted by song through the sound holes of the lute to make her supper.

Sanger valued highly the virtue of two playing in harmony. “For the ability to blend with another in duet is a mark of maturity in a true musician,” he would say. “Harmony between two players recaptures for us briefly that time when the universe was young, untainted by evil, and the morning stars sang together.”

Brenneker never played by herself unless she was sure that she was alone. She played when Laurel played or at night when everyone was sleeping. When spring came that year, she played the mating song and waited, but no lover came. The next night she tried again, this time varying the tune and adding trills, but still no one came. Brenneker tried for several nights before she finally admitted to herself that there was no fault in her song, but that none of her folk dwelt in this faraway land and so there was no one to answer. But this reasoning made her feel unhappy, and she preferred to think that it might be some imperfection in her song, which could be righted by practice.

As Laurel grew older, Brenneker noticed that the quality of their music changed. Whereas she had formerly been a lover of sprightly dance tunes, Laurel became more interested in old ballads and would sing as she accompanied herself on the lute. One of her favorites was “Barbara Allen,” another, “The Wife of Ushers Well.”

She was often asked to’ perform at weddings and parties. She met other lovers of medieval music and even other lute players. Laurel would sometimes allow others to play her instrument, which drew a mixed response. If Brenneker knew the tune of the strange artist, she would pick along. If not, she held her strings silent, leaving others to wonder how Laurel got such rounded tones where they only strummed dull, tinny notes.

One summer evening Laurel took a blanket, the lute and Brenneker to a woodsy place and sat down alone to play. She sang many of the old ballads and then she would stop for a while and listen. Then she would play another song. Brenneker wondered at this until she heard answering notes from a recorder in a grove nearby. The two instruments played a duet, with occasional counterpoint melody, and then the recorder player drew near, and Brenneker saw that it was a young man.

“Aha,” she thought, “Laurel plays to attract a mate.”

The young man sat down beside Laurel on the grass.

“I knew you’d come,” he said to her.

She moved over toward him and he put an arm around her waist and kissed her.

This went on for quite some time. After a while the two said goodbye, and Laurel picked up her blanket and trudged homeward, while her love went in the other direction.

“Strange,” thought Brenneker. “She did not eat him.” This bothered the lyre spider until she stopped to reflect; “Birds do not eat their mates. Perhaps the humans are like birds, but I had always thought them more intelligent than that.”

A few nights later, Laurel took her blanket and went to the grove again. The young man, whose name was Thomas, was there waiting for her. They played a few songs and then they made love. As she walked home, Laurel sang “Barbara Allen.”

“And still she does not eat him,” thought Brenneker. “Their way of being together is different from ours. Yet I’m sure it must mean as much to them as ours does to us. Yet it seems so incomplete. Impermanent.”

The presence of the human lovers made Brenneker more aware of her own loneliness. “If I could mate,” she thought, “I would make the most beautiful egg-sack all of silk, and my eggs would sway to the music of the lute until they hatched. Then they would fly to neighboring trees and build their own lyres and play to me and I wouldn’t be alone anymore.” But when she played her love songs, softly on the night air, no lover came. She was used to it by now, but she never gave up hope.

One evening the two lovers had a quarrel.

“You must marry me this fall,” Thomas insisted.

“But we have no money,” Laurel objected. “You are only an apprentice at your trade, and it will be a long time before you bring home a journeyman’s wage. I would not be able to go to the university to study music.”

“We would get by somehow,” said Thomas. “You could take in music students and teach the lute. We could pick up a little extra money playing for gatherings.”

“But I do so much want to go to the university,” said Laurel. “We could go to the city and both take jobs. That way we could be together and I could study for my degree.”

“I can’t get as good a job in the city as here,” said Thomas, “and besides, you could not earn enough to support yourself and pay tuition. So you might as well settle here with me.”

“There has to be a way for me to continue my study of music,” said Laurel, “and I intend to find it.”

When Thomas left, he did not kiss Laurel goodbye.

Laurel, thoughtful and concerned, put her lute aside and went to bed early. She did not forget to leave a window open, however, or set out milk to feed the fairy. Brenneker pondered their dilemma and could see no solution. While she was brooding over this, she heard the unmistakable sound of a lyre spider tuning up its instrument, and this caused her to listen intently. It was a curious song, having a haunting quality, a shadowing of minor key but not quite. This was no spider song, Brenneker was sure, but it was definitely played by one of her own kind. She strummed an answering chord and the other player stopped in midphrase as if startled. Brenneker played part of an old song she’d played many times at home. The other answered her with the refrain of the song, and so they played back and forth for a while until the other stopped. Brenneker was somewhat disappointed that the song had ended, but a few moments later she discovered why. A gentle tapping on the sounding board roused her attention and she went to the F holes to peer out. The other spider, a male, had followed her music and had come to investigate. He clambered up the side of the instrument to her vantage point.

“How lovely,” he said, “to hear the songs of home in a strange land. Tell me, Lady, how did you come here?”

“By accident,” said Brenneker. “The humans picked my tawba stalk for a flute and brought me here. But I have never seen another of our kind here until now.”

“I came in similar fashion,” said the male. “My name is Wisterness, and, until now, I had thought I was the only one of our kind that had ranged so widely.”

“What was that strange tune you played? Is it in a minor key? I have heard none like it before,” said Brenneker.

“It’s neither major or minor,” said Wisterness. “It is based on a modal scale like some of the Renaissance music I’ve heard you play. I’ve noticed that you sometimes play in the Dorian mode, which is somewhat similar. Actually, I was playing a southern mountain tune ‘June Apple.’ The tuning is called ‘mountain minor,’ or ‘A to G’ tuning among them, but it is actually the older double-tonic scale, based on the highland bagpipe tuning, or, according to some sources, the Irish Harp.”

“My goodness,” said Brenneker, “you certainly know a lot about music. I haven’t heard half of those words. I do remember playing ‘Scarborough Fair’ in the Dorian mode, but that’s about the extent of my music theory.”

“I may know more theory, but you are the better musician, Lady. I am always barely learning one tune and then going on to something new. Consequently my playing lacks polish. I have listened to your songs for several nights before summoning the courage to answer.”

“I certainly have no complaint against your playing,” said Brenneker. “I thought it was quite beautiful. I am curious about one thing, though, and that is your age. I never knew male spiders lived much more than a few years, yet you seem quite mature and well-read. Have you never mated?”

Wisterness shuffled his pedipalps and appeared slightly embarrassed.

“No, I never have,” he said. “There was one once in my youth that I cared for, but she chose to devour another. Then one day I followed a woodsman to listen to his song, and I was carried off in a load of wood and eventually came to this place. Since then I have devoted myself to the study of humans and their music, but it has been lonely at times.”

Since it was not the mating time, Wisterness left after awhile and went back to his lyre, which was strung in a hollow tree not far from the window, and he and Brenneker played duets most of the night. But sometimes she paused to listen to the piercing modal sweetness of Wisterness, as he experimented with different tunings from the lonely southern mountains.

The next morning, Laurel did not sit down to her music at the usual time, but instead put on her coat and went out with a purposeful look in her eyes. The next day, at the practice hour, a younger girl came to Laurel’s door carrying a lute under her arm, and Laurel taught her a lesson. It was “Greensleeves,” a favorite of Brenneker’s, and she played along at first, but the student had troubles, and they kept stopping midverse and starting over until Brenneker decided it was more pain than pleasure and gave it up. Before the student left, she counted out a small sum of money which Laurel put in a large jar on her dresser. This money, Brenneker learned, was to go toward Laurel’s university tuition.

As the weeks passed, more students came, until Laurel had five beginners to teach. One student came twice a week from a distant township. Sanger, the old instrument maker, still came by once in a while to teach Laurel a song, but she had long ago surpassed him in musical skill, and he never charged for his “lessons” anymore. His ringers had grown arthritic and he could not play as well as he had in the past. He no longer took students, which made Laurel one of the few teachers of the lute in her part of the country. The money piled up slowly’ in the jar, but it was nowhere near enough, and sometimes Brenneker would overhear Laurel arguing with her father at night about her plans to go to the university.

“Even if you get a degree in music,” he would say, “that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to support yourself. Why not study something practical that you can find a good job in.”

Laurel agreed to take courses in handicrafts and midwifery to pacify her father, whom she still depended upon for support, but her heart belonged to music, and she refused to give up her plans for further study.

When she saw Thomas now, they both avoided talking about future plans, as this always provoked a fight, and he did not come to see her as often. Brenneker fretted about this, as she saw Laurel suffering in silence. When Laurel played, Brenneker sometimes wove her mating song into the web of sound hoping that Thomas would hear and return to renew his love. But he did not hear, or if he did, he didn’t come.

One warm spring night, Brenneker alone played her mating song hopefully to the open window, and after a short time Wisterness came, tapping shyly on her sound box to announce his presence.

“You must come out,” he said, “for the sound holes are too small for me to get in.”

Brenneker had failed to recognize her predicament. As a young spider, she had entered through the holes with ease, but now she was bigger, and therefore trapped within the lute. She forced her legs out the F holes, and she could feel the tantalizing closeness of his belly fur, but try as they might, they could not negotiate across the wooden barrier.

Finally he said, “Brenneker, I fear our love must go unconsummated, for you can’t get out and I can’t get in. But then perhaps it’s better that way, for even if we could somehow manage to mate, we could not partake of the deeper sharing, with you in there and me out here.”

And so he left sadly. She did not hear his song for several days, and then one day the wind carried the distant strains of “Billy in the Lowground” to her window. The sad Irish mode echoing in the lonely Appalachian melody, told her that he had moved his harp farther away to avoid the pain of their unsatisfied need. He was too far to answer any of her musical questions or play the counterpoint games.

One day Laurel invited Thomas over to her home. She was very anxious to share a piece of news with him.

“The university is offering a music scholarship,” she said. “There will be a contest and I intend to participate. If I win, my tuition would be paid, and if we both found jobs, we could be together while I go to school in the city.”

Thomas thought about this before answering and then said, “It’s not the money that really bothers me, it’s your attitude. I get the feeling that I am not as important to you as your music. I want you to be happy, but I don’t wish to play second fiddle to a lute.”

“But my work is as important to me as yours is to you,” said Laurel. “The truth is that neither of us wish to make the sacrifice of our career goals to be with the other.”

“I had hoped our love meant more to you than your music,” said Thomas, “but I see I was wrong.”

“It means equally as much to me,” said Laurel, “I just don’t think I should be the one to have to make the sacrifice of my career. There is no reason you couldn’t get a job in the city. It would not be forever, only a few years. Then we could come back here and you could take up where you left off.”

“I don’t see it that way,” he said. “In a few years I would be behind everyone in my training and I’d be competing with younger men whom they don’t have to pay as much. If I stay, I have opportunity for advancement in a few years.”

“Well, I suppose we will part, then, when the summer’s over,” said Laurel. “I shall miss you terribly, but that’s the way things work out sometimes. There is one last request I want to make of you, and that is, will you accompany me playing when I go to the contest?”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Thomas. “It would be adding insult to injury if I participated in the very thing that takes you away from me.”

After Thomas left, Laurel cried. She went to bed early and even forgot about the milk for the fairly. This did not disturb Brenneker very much, for she had lost her appetite listening to their argument. She was pondering Laurel’s problem in her mind (it seemed strange that humans could have barriers to love more complex than her wooden cage) when she heard a strange grinding noise as of a small drill emanating from one corner of the lute. She scampered to the source of the sound and stood watching the smooth surface of ithe unfinished wood as the sound came nearer. Suddenly a little bump appeared in the surface, and then the bump dissolved in a small pile of sawdust, and an ugly bulbish head poked out of the newly formed hole. Brenneker pounced at the woodworm but missed as it pulled back into its tunnel. Frustrated, she stood tapping at the hole with her forelegs, as the worm withdrew and burrowed in a different direction.

“You must leave,” said Brenneker to the worm. “You are destroying my home and Laurel’s lute.”

“There is plenty of wood here for both of us,” came the muffled reply of the woodworm. “You may have the rosewood, and I’ll eat only the spruce.”

“But I don’t eat wood,” said Brenneker, “and you shouldn’t eat this lute. There is plenty of other wood that you can eat. Leave my home alone. You are destroying a musical instrument. Have you no appreciation for music?”

“Hmm, yes, music,” said the worm, whose name was Turkawee. “I’ve never cared for that funny-sounding stuff. Leave it to the birds, I always say.”

“You ignorant barbarian!” exclaimed Brenneker. “I think spiders are more barbaric than our kind,” said Turkawee, “for spiders eat their cousins the insects, and even their own mates. You should take care whom you go calling a barbarian.”

“Philistine, then!” snorted Brenneker. “You obviously have no concept of a higher culture than your own.”

“Culture, you say?” said Turkawee. “That’s a term my snooty Aunt Beetle used to use. She was always admiring the wings of butterflies. She knew an artist who made pictures of the wings. She ended up stuck with a pin to a cork board because all her interest in culture led her to follow a butterfly too closely into a collector’s net. Culture is also for the birds, I say.”

Brenneker, having no answer for this, retreated to her web and played the angriest song she could think of, which was a military march. The worm ignored her and continued gnawing at the wood of the lute.

Two days later, Brenneker was surveying the damage done by Turkawee. She was dismayed to find one part of the sounding board completely riddled with holes. She set about to mend it, binding the remaining wood with the steely white thread that she extruded from her spinnerets. The patch was actually quite strong, perhaps more so than the surrounding wood, but the discrepancy in the surface weakened the instrument structurally. The tension of the lute strings could cause the instrument to break, if the patch didn’t hold.

Brenneker returned to her web by the sound posts and fell asleep. She wasn’t used to making so much new thread, and the effort had drained her strength. In the night when she awoke, she called many insects to her supper with song, for she was ravenously hungry due to her exertion. The next day when Laurel tuned up the lute to play for a wedding, Brenneker noted with satisfaction that the patch held. But the ravages of the woodworm continued.

Old Sanger, the instrument maker, when he heard that Laurel intended to enter the scholarship contest, came by the house to offer his advice. He had played in competition in the past, and he knew what sort of artistry was apt to attract the notice of the judges and what displays of skill might sway their opinion.

“It is always a good idea to include in your repertoire a few songs that are not well known and played by everyone. And in the songs that are better known, try to display some different interpretation or more rare harmony. A few classical pieces in your presentation are in order, and playing a duet, or having someone accompany you, is essential; so be sure to play your arrangement of ‘The Ash Grove’ with that young-man friend of yours. Your counterpoint harmony mixes very well with his recorder, and such a presentation will be sure to impress the judges. They will be looking for that particular blending of tones that displays your sense of harmony not only with your partner but with yourself and the universe.”

“Poor Laurel,” thought Brenneker. “What will she do without Thomas’ accompaniment?”

Laurel said nothing to Sanger about her falling out with Thomas, and after he left she practiced “The Ash Grove” unaccompanied and tried to develop some new variations on the old theme. Brenneker was tempted to play the recorder part, but since to do so would reveal her presence, she contented herself with her usual practice of playing in unison or one octave higher than the melody. That night Brenneker made a tour of the inside of her home and found that the woodworm had damaged the bond where the neck of the lute joins the body. She set about to repair the damage as best she could, plugging the holes with spidersilk and binding the weakened seam with long, tough strands. It was hard work and took much of her strength. She could barely stay awake long enough to eat the cricket that came chirping to hear her music.

Finally the greatly anticipated day came and Laurel took the coach to the big city where the contest was to be held. She refused to surrender her lute to the baggage rack and carried it in her lap, where it provoked much comment among the other passengers.

“What is that strange instrument?” they would ask. Or, “Please play us a tune.”

Laurel consented and filled the coach with dulcet tones as her clear voice transported all the listeners to “Scarborough Fair.”

When they arrived in the city, Laurel spent some of her hard-earned lesson money on a room at the inn. That night when Laurel was asleep, Brenneker found more holes to fill. Turkawee had almost destroyed one of the interior braces of the frame. And not only that, but also he had eaten away most of the surface below the bridge. If this were to give way, the strings would go slack and the instrument would be unplayable. Brenneker worked far into the night, binding the lute with her webbing. So far her spider silk, being stronger in tensile strength than steel wire of its same proportions, had held the lute together. But Brenneker was worried that the damage was too extensive. The inside of the lute was completely webbed and re-webbed in silk and she knew it would not hold forever. She ate sparsely that night of the few insects that inhabit an inn and then forced her body to make more thread to continue the repairs. By daybreak she was nearly exhausted. She tried to get some sleep, but Laurel woke early, concerned about the contest, and practiced her pieces, causing Brenneker to get no sleep at all.

Brenneker dozed on the carriage trip across town to the university but awoke in time to restring and tune her musical web before the contest began.

Both Brenneker and Laurel fidgeted nervously as they awaited their turn to play. There were many contestants, including a few lutists. One young man held the very antique instrument of which Laurel’s was a copy. He allowed Laurel to stroke the strings once to demonstrate the superiority of its sound. But he was quite impressed when Laurel strummed a few bars on her own instrument with Brenneker’s lute in tandem. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “Your cheaply made modern instrument sounds almost as good as mine.”

“Better,” thought Brenneker, smugly, but then she remembered the damaged bridge and hoped it would stand the strain. She roused herself wearily and went to find a few more holes which she hastily filled with silk.

When Laurel’s time came to play, she mounted a stool on the edge of the stage. Brenneker peered out through the sound holes and saw a sea of faces watching. As Laurel tuned up, Brenneker heard an unnerving creak as the wood near the bridge shifted slightly. To her horror she saw daylight between the bridge and the body of the lute. She jumped to the ceiling of her home, bound the gap quickly, and prayed that the mend would hold. Her spinnerets ached with the strain of making so much silk, and she was very tired, but forced herself to pick the strings nimbly as Laurel began with a lively dance tune. Apparently the lovely tone impressed the judges, for Laurel was selected from a large field of competition to enter the finals.

The young man with the antique instrument was also one of the finalists, and he stopped to wish Laurel good luck. Laurel asked him if he would accompany her on “The Ash Grove,” but he excused himself, saying that time would be too short for him to learn the intricate counterpart melody. He also assured her that without a duet piece, she didn’t have a chance in the competition.

This point was emphasized by the lovely duet played by the young man and a woman who accompanied him on the psaltry. They received a standing ovation from the audience and high marks from the judges.

“Mercy,” thought Brenneker. Now Laurel won’t be able to win the scholarship,” and spider tears dampened the silk of her web.

“Hey! It’s raining on my picnic,” said a small voice near her.

She looked over and saw Turkawee calmly munching a chunk of spruce.

Without thinking, Brenneker pounced and bit with just enough venom to cause the woodworm to fall into a swoon.

“That should keep you from doing more damage!” she snapped. But the damage had already been done. One of the sounding pegs looked as if it were ready to crumble into dust. Brenneker could feel, through her feet, the ominous vibrations as the tension of the strings pulled against the ravaged wood.

Finally Laurel’s turn came again. She played a few classical pieces, a rondo, and sang “The Wife of Ushers Well,” accompanying herself beautifully with an intricate rhythm she had worked out. For her last song, she began “The Ash Grove.” Her first variation was neatly composed, but Brenneker thought it lacked the clever harmony of the previous duet. The second variations sounded very lonely without accompaniment, and this provoked Brenneker to try something she’d never done before. On the third verse she began to play her web in the counterpoint harmony as she had heard Thomas play so many times on the recorder. Laurel paused abruptly, but then, true performer that she was, began to play the melody in clear, bold tones which complemented Brenneker’s descant. Laurel played every variation, and Brenneker knew them all and answered back. The people in the audience were amazed that someone could play two-part harmony on one instrument. This was the most lovely duet arrangement of “The Ash Grove” that the judges had ever heard.

“That’s the first time I ever heard anyone play a duet alone,” said the young man with the lute as she came down from the stage. “Your harmony was better than any duet I’ve ever heard. How did you ever do that?”

Flustered, Laurel answered, “I don’t know. I guess sometimes one must be alone to truly be in harmony with one’s self.”

A few more contestants got up to play, but they seemed halfhearted. The contest went of course to Laurel, who was almost as bewildered at her music as was everyone else. When she ascended the stage to accept the scholarship, the audience cheered and whistled for an encore.

Laurel sat down and prepared to play again, but just then there came a terrible wrenching sound and a loud snap. Brenneker saw the roof fly off her home, pulling a tangle of cobwebs after it. She cowered by the sound pegs, weak and frightened, and saw the face of Laurel staring down at her. Raising one timorous leg, she strummed a chord on her music web and thought she saw recognition in Laurel’s eyes.

One of the judges came onstage to help pick up the debris. When he saw the large spider, he said, “How ugly! Let me kill it for you.”

“No,” said Laurel. “It’s the fairy harpist that Sanger told me about. See how she plays her web like a harp. She’s been my secret friend all these years.”

Because Brenneker appeared to be in a very weakened state and near death, Laurel kept her in a bottle for a few days and fed her all the crickets she could catch. Then, when it appeared that the spider would live, she took her back to the small town and turned her loose in the woods.

It was not the woods of home, but Brenneker found a hollow tree in which to string her harp and was quite content to play her songs alone for a while, although she missed Laurel’s music. When spring came that next year, she played her love song to the open air, and it was Wisterness who came, tapping shyly on her web strings to attract her attention.

“I have always loved your songs,” she said. “I had hoped you would come.”

“Now you shall play my songs,” he said, and he sacrificed himself to their mutual need.

Weeks later, she watched her young spiderlings float away on their kiteless strings, and she knew she would not play alone anymore. Then, feeling the deep harmony of the universe in her soul, she returned her web to the Dorian mode and played the gentle, lilting sadness that was now Wisterness.

COLD HANDS

Jeff Duntemann

I

Ed Graczyk sat before his easel in the cool Maine evening, painting the sunset. He had had arms once. In those days he had been a Combine employee, Combine-born. In Titan orbit he had piloted a tiny steering tug, single-handedly orienting monstrous sausage casings for filling from the Titan ramscoop, and then orienting them for the long pull to Earthspace.

Things go wrong. A leaking oxygen tank near the stern of his skeletal craft had thrown it off trim, edgewise into a soft container of endless tonnes of dirty methane. The resulting inferno had cost him a lot of skin, and both arms below the elbow.

The skin they had replaced. The arms were gone forever.

Ed painted a lot. It was good therapy. His prosthetic arms were very good: ingenious metal things which responded to swellings in the muscles in his shoulders. The more he used them the better they would respond. Still, the hands were little better than claws. They were without touch or any but the grossest motion. Ed adapted, and painted, and did software work in his little geodesic dome for a firm in Augusta. He was as content as a man who had been brought back from the dead should have been, but in the deep Maine nights he wished he could see untwinkling stars again.

Evening light would be gone soon. Dusk was robbing his canvas of its color. When Ed heard the unfamiliar whine of a turbine car on his gravel approach, he guessed that the Bipartisan Economic Combine was coming to visit him, and he was right.

“Mr. Graczyk.”

“That’s me.”

The big car emptied itself of two men. Both wore slate grey, the Combine’s color. One was a solidly-built fellow with a receding hairline and a healthy tan. He smiled as he approached. The other was shorter, and very thin, and wore a hood tossed over his head. What skin Ed could see was pale, untouched by the sun. Both men walked with the slow, cautious gait of the centrifuge-born and-raised, overcompensating for Coriolis forces which were not there. Ed put his brush down.

“I’m Herb Sussaine. Combine PR,” said the smiling man. “This is Thomas Rector, Combine R&D out of Adam Smith Nexus. We’re glad to see you’ve established yourself.”

Ed grunted. “It’s not what I’d like to be doing.”

Efficiency had made the Combine’s fortunes, and efficiency drove it. Ed’s inborn talent for spacecraft course correction had put his efficiency rating in the top one fiftieth of one percent. Without arms, he could no longer make his talents work for the Combine, and like all unprofitable employees was sent to Earth for the universal welfare state to care for.

Sussaine’s smile widened. “We know. It’s been a long time, Ed—how many years now? Six? Hardly seems like it. After you left us R&D realized a lot of good men are lost to disability every year. It’s a shame to waste a good brain for lack of a good body. We want you back—and R&D will give you arms again.”

Sussaine handed Ed a glossy plastic sheet. The instant Ed saw the complicated image for what it was—a blowup of a mechanical arm identical in all outward ways to a human arm—he knew he could never be satisfied with his Earth-given prostheses again.

“I’m impressed.”

“I should hope so. This device can do anything an organic arm can do, and more. Forty-nine hydraulic levers in each hand, and sixteen more in each arm. All interlinked through a microprocessor equivalent to some of your better spacetug guidance systems, on a chip three millimeters by two. The chip is interfaced to your nervous system directly. The hands will respond as your old hands used to. About sixty thousand piezothermic diodes embedded in the plastic skin provide touch feedback to your nerves through the processor. On top of that, there will be a direct microwave link from the hands to the ship’s computer. Our physiatrists have programmed several thousand basic hand-arm actions into the ship’s compiler. The computer will smooth out the kinks from coordinated hand movements when it recognizes a common function being initiated. Even better—” Sussaine pointed to the palm of the hand in the diagram. “—each hand has an ‘eye’ in its palm, which images in color and three dimensions, to further assist the computer in guiding your actions. Think of the advantages of working in tight spots and with very small objects! It will be like having an extra set of eyes.”

Ed scanned the drawing, tracing incredibly fine wires, outlines of tiny hydraulic pumps, the minuscule power supply, the hair-fine diode sensors scattered across the palm and concentrated on each fingertip. He had been nodding as Sussaine explained the various features, and when the lecture was finished he stared into the deepening night. The other man, who had said nothing until then, tossed back his hood.

“Do you want these devices, Mr. Graczyk?” His voice was deep and very soft.

Ed looked at Rector. The man’s head was shaven clean in a popular Combine style, ghostly white behind piercing eyes. “Of course I want them. I wanted them when I saw the drawing. I don’t need a sales pitch. But you can tell me what you people stand to gain by this. The Combine doesn’t make a habit of philanthropy.”

“We certainly do not,” Rector said. “See it this way: When you pushed blimps for Titan Hydrocarbons, you saved us thousands of tonnes of fuel every year, and hundreds of man-hours of labor. What you did alone is done by a crew of three now. This project has been expensive, but if it enables you to work for us for only six years, your remarkable efficiency rating will absorb all costs. After that it will work wholly to our profit. The computers at Physiology Central give you forty more productive years at .7 G average. The savings that represents is something to consider.”

Ed rose, smiling. “That sounds more like the Combine I know. Do I get my old job back?”

Rector shook his head. “We’re going to try something new. You’ll be flying the tanker King Lear in cislunar orbit, distributing liquid hydrogen, oxygen, and water to several stations and plants we have found awkward to supply by conventional methods. You’ll be picking up water from the smaller stations, which use fuel cells, and giving it to the larger fusion-powered plants which generate no water on their own. Your mass will thus be continually changing, and this kind of problem has never been easy to deal with. We trust that your approximations will be better than anyone else’s. Aside from your work itinerary, the contract is standard.”

Ed looked at the proffered contract. “Hmmm. My signature is poor these days, and I haven’t got a thumbprint.”

“Toeprint will do. When can you leave, Ed?”

Ed looked away toward his little dome. “Can you wait ten minutes? I never got out of the habit of living out of a footlocker. But first… tell me something. Why bring a PR man along? No offense, Herb, but I know your job: You deal with these crazy Earth people. I’m a Combine man. Always have been.”

Rector looked up at the first stars. Several of the great orbiting stations and plants were drifting across the sky, brilliant white points. “A precaution. Furloughed Combine employees have picked up some objectionable attitudes down here in the past. Earth can be like that, and we couldn’t be sure about you. Herb could tell me if you had grown a little too…Earthlike.”

Ed chuckled. Night was complete now, a nearly palpable darkness. “Maine is the nearest thing to space that Earth can offer. I never really left.”

Ed turned and followed the gravel path back to his dome.

II

Barefooted and chewing a wad of gum, Ed Graczyk drifted from handhold to handhold in King Lear’s crawlspace on his semidaily inspection tour. Docking with Golwing Nozzles Plant 7 was three hours away. Fifty kiloliters of liquid hydrogen to be dropped there, and then it was a leisurely climb to the first of three R&D stations in wide lunar orbit. Ed had the entire schedule committed to memory.

Terminal 19. Last one. Soft plastic flesh gripped the handhold while Ed considered the small hole set into a plate beneath six guarded controls. A jack. For a most unusual sort of plug.

He curled all his fingers but his second-to-last (something he could never have accomplished with their organic forerunners) and plugged the finger firmly into the hole. He closed his eyes and weighed the feelings coming in on the finger. The six monitor voltages which surfaced in Terminal 19 had become a harmony of textures, six separate sensations which Ed could only compare to running each finger of one hand over a material of distinct and different texture. The feeling of harmony was important. If any of the six voltages had changed value, a weird tactile cacophony would alert him to a misadjustment in the system. By adjusting the six controls above the jack, the sensations could be brought back into harmony, and proper operation obtained again.

The adjustments were independent of sight and hearing. Even if blinded and in a vacuum, Ed could service his ship and bring it back to port.

The six textures marched in step. Ed removed his finger from the jack and dusted his hands symbolically. R&D had done a good job. Just below each shoulder a polished steel band encircled each arm. Above each ten-centimeter strip was flesh and blood. Below each was steel and synthetic, but in the minimal light of the crawlspace Ed could see no difference.

Ahh, but when they moved—the hands did not jerk, twitch, or tremble as organic hands did. They flowed. With the ship’s computer assisting, every movement of every tiny finger-segment was coordinated to the movement of the whole. And when Ed would reach for a screwdriver, the computer would recognize the action and guide the hand to graceful, perfect completion of the act.

A finger touch against a handhold sent him drifting toward the center of the ship, past a wall of grey panels, beams, and dim light-spots. To the other side of him, behind a thin steel mesh, the ship’s centrifuge turned silently. He swung feet-first through the frictionless repulsion bearing at the center of the centrifuge and began the twelve-meter clamber ever more strongly downward.

“King Lear from R&D Six.”

Ed settled himself into the control couch. “Come in, Rector. Good copy here. Just got back.”

The efficiency engineer seldom wasted energy and bandwidth on video. The screen remained dark. “Our physiatrists just handed me the printout on the latest data set on your arms. They tell me coordination and reaction time have reached the expected plateau. I had hoped they might have kept on improving, but—well, they did better than we predicted. It looks as though nothing we can do will improve the hookup. Do you like them, Ed?”

Ed grinned. “Love ‘em. Every sausage-bumper should blow his arms off for a set of these.”

“What I should have asked: Will you be able to create that sort of rapport you once had with your spacecraft through the prostheses? That rapport is crucial to regaining your efficiency rating.”

Ed flexed plastic fingers on the couch arm. “It’s not a matter of ‘through’ anymore. One way to define machinery is that it’s ‘out there’, and I’m in here.” He thumbed at his head to a blind vidicon. “The hands aren’t ‘out there’ anymore. I can think with my fingertips again.”

Rector’s soft voice sounded pleased. “That’s a good deal better than we had hoped. With all your data in, we’ve gotten most of the glitches out of a mechanical leg and an entire lower torso-leg combination for double amputees. We’ll probably never lose a good man to a disabling accident again. What’s your ETA at Golwing?”

“Mmm…hundred thirty-eight minutes, unless I decide to fine tune again.”

“I got a request from Plant Manager Pilsen up there. He’s heard about the project and wants to see your hands. Golwing’s a fair-risk plant and has its share of disabling accidents. Interest in this sort of thing is high over there. You have the usual half-hour contingency time you never need. Pilsen wonders if you’ll stop in for a ‘small demonstration.’ I told him I would ask, but I warn you, half the plant will be there to gawk.”

“Tell him I’ll do a video show for the whole plant. Nobody gets left out that way and I get an excuse to stay in here.”

“Good. I’ll relay. Rector out.”

Golwing Seven hung above a waxing Earth, bright steel in the sunlight. Ed watched it grow on his screens. The plant was a thousand-meter cylinder girdled by two centrifuges rotating in opposite directions. Docked at both ends of the cylinder were a scattering of freighters and supply ships. King Lear was approaching from the “north” or receiving end. A small pockmark in the wide expanse of shadowed metal was winking at him with its docking strobes. Ed would insert King Lear’s nose in the center of the docking collar, and automatic pumps would withdraw the proper amount of the proper fuel from Lear’s huge tanks.

It was not a difficult maneuver. A computer could do a fair approximation, but Ed’s courses invariably saved time and fuel.

The docking collar slowly grew to a bright-rimmed hole with a blinking eye in the center. Ed peered at the screen and rubbed his eyes with one hand. Something looked wrong with that collar. There was a dim trace of grey in one side of that central hole.

The scene grew dizzily as Lear bore down. The course programmer fired another set of braking blasts. When the exhaust gases cleared away, Ed saw what was wrong with the collar: a suited human figure was curled inside.

Ed hit three buttons and touched his throat mike. The braking jets fired again. “Golwing, there is somebody in my damned docking collar! What are you going to do about it?” He was less afraid than furiously angry. The laws of physics did not forgive such idiotic behavior.

The com tech was incredulous. “Confirm your message, Lear. ‘Someone is in my docking collar.’ Is that correct?”

Ed was sweating. “Don’t question my sanity! There is a body curled up around the docking strobe of my collar. A million tonnes of tanker is going to plug into that hole in one minute! What the hell are you going to do about it?”

“We can’t do anything in a minute. Stop your approach with the full emergency brake program. We’ll send out a detail.”

Ed saw the scene in his mind: Lear’s nose jets a small sun, throwing a six-gee reaction forward toward the collar. Lear would stop in ten seconds. And the detail would find a greasy ash in the collar.

Ed reached to one side of his console and fired a signal flare directly in the course of Lear’s travel. The flare struck the plant’s plates a meter to one side of the collar. It flared brilliant red for a moment and was gone.

The last of the braking jets fired. Lear coasted slowly toward the collar. The figure shifted in the collar but remained. Ed fired two more flares. At such close range, their concussion must have been heard throughout the plant.

Then the figure moved. In the last seconds to docking Ed watched it clamber up to the edge of the collar. Then the bulk of the ship hid the collar from view. The scene remained in Ed’s mind: a human being climbing frantically over the collar’s ring of extended docking fingers…

Chunnnnnnnnnnnnnnng!

Lear heaved back and forth for several seconds as the ring absorbed the last of the tanker’s momentum. Then, red lights flashed on the Unplanned Occurrences board. The computer sized up the situation:

FOREIGN OBJECT WEDGED BETWEEN DOCKING FINGER NINE AND DOCKING COLLAR.

DOCKING INCOMPLETE.

“Christ,” Ed muttered as he scrambled madly up the ladder toward the airlock.

Less than a minute later, in a special emergency suit that left his plastic hands ungloved, Ed blew the emergency hatch near Lear’s nose and bore down on the docking ring. Filling his helmet were screams, throat-racking screams.

The screams of a young woman.

Ed hit the plates feet-first where the woman was trapped, a husky spring-puller in his hands. The woman’s left leg was crushed between the jointed docking finger and the mating groove on Lear’s nose. Air was silently issuing from her ruptured suit, mingled with tiny spherical droplets of red which soon froze cold pink.

Ed braced his feet against Lear’s nose and jammed the spring-puller into the breakaway spring mount. He pried violently to one side. The finger hesitated, then with snapping release gave way and swung outward.

Ed threw the spring-puller away into the void and began unfolding a transparent casualty bag. He stuffed the screaming, thrashing woman into it as though she were a load of laundry, and pulled the pin on the attached cylinder of air. The bag expanded to a fat pillow which rapidly frosted over on the inside.

Pulling his burden by a corner, Ed tramped across the plates on magnetic soles to a cast-wide hatch from which the detail had begun issuing. Ed waved them aside with what looked like a hand exposed to the vacuum of space. Ed pushed the bag ahead of him into the lock and climbed in after it.

When pressure rose in the lock and the anteroom beyond, he heard her screaming: “I want to die! Let me die, damn you!”

Helmet tucked under his arm, he watched medics anesthetize the girl and struggle to reassemble the crushed knee joint and shredded muscles surrounding it. He knew before they began the incision with blue-hot laser pencils that they would have to amputate. Ed had been that way before.

The plant manager approached him, a hunted-looking little man with shaven head and sunken eyes. “Mr. Graczyk, that was incredible. You had her in the bag before we could get a crisis team suited up and out the door. It must have been your hands…”

“Shut up,” Ed snapped, turning on the man. He had begun to tremble so hard he almost let his helmet slip away from him. “How many more potential suicides are working for you? How long will it be before somebody decides to detonate a few ounces of pyroform under his mattress and sets half a centrifuge on fire?”

Pilsen looked down. “She was on probation.”

“And now she’s off. It almost cost us my tanker. And a lot of machinery on this end of your plant. If it had, she wouldn’t have been the only one out of a job.”

Ed looked back toward the girl. The ruined leg was gone, the stump covered with a plastic cocoon. The medics were wheeling her away. “There’s still lots of ways to die, love,” he said under his breath. “Lots.”

III

Out beyond Saturn, Ed’s arms were burning again, his entire body wrapped in fiery hell. He thrashed in the void, but the flames would not go out. It was worse than fire; it ate at him to the center of his bones. It stung every blood cell moving through his veins. Fire, he was on fire and falling slowly into the Sun…

Ed Graczyk awoke. But the fire was still there.

He stared at his hands. From the nerves inside the stumps of his arms he could feel the fire coming, creeping in consuming waves from his plastic fingertips to the center of his brain. He twisted the hands around, and stared into the little black spots set into the centers of his palms: his hands’ eyes. He almost thought he could see tiny flames flickering inside those dark circles.

Then the fire went out. From the comm console beside his cot, Rector spoke to him.

“Ed, you’re awake. What’s the matter? We thought we’d never rouse you.”

Ed stared at his hands, then looked to the comm console. “You did that? I thought they were going to eat me alive!”

The efficiency engineer spoke calmly. “We rang buzzers, flashed the cabin lights, had the computer sing songs you hate. Nothing worked. You stayed asleep.”

Anger roared up in him, like the flames he had felt licking his guts. “So? What if I decide I want another hour’s sleep? I don’t think I’ve ever missed an inspection tour in my entire career.”

“It’s not in the contract.”

“It’s never been in any contract I’ve worked under.”

Rector said nothing for a long time. “Ed, your contract specifies eight hours sleep per duty period. The itinerary spells out retiring and rising times. It’s all there. You signed it.”

It was said coldly. Ed forced himself to be as cold. “A contract is an agreement specifying conditions to be met by the contracting parties. I agree to guide this ship to specified points at specified times and do specified tasks along the way. That’s my job. You supply my pay. That’s your job. I have never derelicted my job. You have not derelicted yours. We, both of us, have kept that contract.”

“The itinerary is part of the contract.”

“Getting up at 06:00:00 is not a part of my job!”

“No, Ed, not quite that simple. Your job is to maximize output for given input. That is the job of every person who works for the Bipartisan Economic Combine. Human function is an equation with a very large number of variables. Some of those variables we leave up to you—course correction, obviously. If we could do that better than you we would not pay you to do it. Other things—diet, sleep schedules, rest schedules, work schedules—have been plotted very precisely according to your biorhythms. We have men who specialize in such things. We have entire departments devoted to nothing but optimizing sleep schedules. We assume they can do their job better than you can. Or we would not have hired them.”

“I’m tired,” Ed said. “The Golwing incident shot my nerves.”

“There are drugs for that in the medconsole.”

It was true. Ed nodded, feeling sheepish. He had never thought of it. Before his next sleep period he took a double tranquilizer, and awoke five minutes late with flames engulfing his dreams. He retched from the pain until he remembered to point the palms of his hands toward his sweating face.

“What the hell do you think I am!” he roared at Rector.

“You’re a Combine man. You work for a living. You maintain a high level of competency in keeping with your salary. You forgot to set your alarm.”

That, too, was true, but Ed’s anger got the better of him. “Fold it five ways, Rector. I’ll take a burn-specific before I turn in.”

Without warning it struck, for only a moment: a resonance of absolute agony ringing up and down his entire nervous system, as though he were a bell struck by a red-hot hammer, echoing until he wished for death. By the time he could scream it was gone.

His arms tingled coldly, well up into his shoulders. Ed looked, unbelievingly, at the palms of his hands. There was warning in Rector’s words:

“We will accept your resignation at any time.”

Ed had to bite his lip to keep back what he was thinking. If the hands could watch, they could probably listen as well.

You’ll have my resignation, but not the way you think!

IV

Lots of ways to die—the thought came to Ed often as the days passed. It came on the heels of the crazy dream that made him feel alternately exhilarated and ashamed. Rector was wrong in assuming that Ed Graczyk was the same man who had once nudged methane blimps around the solar system. Still, Ed told himself that he was a man, and deserved better.

Indecision made his mouth dry while he browsed through King Lear’s engineering manuals. He had done that often before, simply for curiosity’s sake, to be better acquainted with his ship. Now he was looking for something, nothing in particular, but he knew that it would announce itself when he found it.

One evening, the crazy dream crystallized on the page of an engineering manual, and left Ed with an agonizing decision. To betray the Combine by his own hands—

He swore, and then laughed. His hands would have nothing to do with it.

Several times each day Ed left the centrifuge for various parts of the ship. To re-enter, he had to pass through the center of the two-meter diameter frictionless magnetic repulsion bearing which held the rotating centrifuge away from the stationary ship’s core. It was an automatic action: reach hands into the meter-wide opening, grasp handholds there, and swing body with a clockwise twist into the rotating tunnel within. Ed began adding a new, strange action to the procedure.

Each time he swung his body into the tunnel, he pulled his mouth up against the line where the rotating bearing met the stationary core. With his tongue he pressed a wad of chewing gum into the five-millimeter gap where intense superconducting magnetic fields held the two surfaces apart.

Some weeks later, Ed woke from a deep sleep with crawling nausea wrenching his stomach. Another slow, slithering lurch threw his body against its sleep tethers. A low, nearly subaudible moan came down to him from the center of the centrifuge, and his nose picked up the acrid smell of burning insulation. Moments later the malfunction alarm began sounding, and Ed was climbing out of his cot, trembling all over. No going back now.

He did not have to feign grogginess. Rector’s thin, peering face met his at the comm console. It was not like Rector to be using video. Ed felt himself being scrutinized.

“Ed, the centrifuge bearing is beginning to seize up. We don’t know what, but something leaked into the gap. Shut down the centrifuge and get on it.”

Ed waved a wordless salute. He leaned over, ripped the cover from a guarded switch, and threw it home. As though some velvety hand had grasped the rim of the centrifuge, it slowed to a smooth halt. Ed heard the emergency flywheel coming up to speed with the angular momentum from the centrifuge. His weight lifted away from him, and he gripped a handhold while trying to shake himself awake. Eddy currents induced in the moist chicle had heated, dried, and eventually hardened it until the heat of friction made it burn. Ed had made odds with himself that the coolant control circuitry feeding the superconducting magnets within the bearing would not be able to respond to such an impossible situation, and he was right. It was hard to suppress a smile as he read to Rector a list of microcircuits which had overheated and burned out.

“Fix those microcircuits first,” Rector was saying. “If too much of your coolant bleeds off as gas, you won’t have enough to go around. The computer won’t work without it.”

Ed tried to look worried, but the only thing worrying him was how to make the rest of his liquid helium coolant boil and bleed off into space.

He headed for the tool locker.

Every part of Ed Graczyk was shaking except his hands. This was a new Ed, one he himself had never suspected could exist. To damage his own ship… he shivered, but continued tucking tools into a belt kit. Only his hands didn’t know what he was doing. Smoothly, expertly, they executed their motions. Almost by themselves. Ed swallowed hard. The hands did not share his pangs of conscience. Ed finished filling the kit, and clambered barefoot up a crawlspace Ship’s Circuitry.

Circuitry itself was a crawlspace of sorts: a narrow channel between wide walls of hexagonal panels, each dimpled with reactionless bolt wells and printed with a large code number. Ed drifted between the walls, pushing with his fingertips against occasional handholds. Part of his mind was unhurriedly looking for panel VV47. The rest was steeling itself to what it intended to do. The arms were controlled by the ship’s computer. The computer had to go. Once it was gone, the computer on Ed’s shoulders could take care of the last step in his plan.

The computer was helpless without its main memory, stored in superconducting magnetic bubbles frozen into hair-thin sheets of tellurium. Ed’s trick with the gum had caused a good part of Lear’s liquid helium to be lost. It hadn’t been enough, as Ed had more than half expected. There was another way.

A last finger’s touch slowed and stopped him in front of panel VV47. All coolant controls, including main memory’s, were behind that one panel. He only had to reach for a tool with one hand, steady himself with the other, while he…did what he had practiced so often in his head.

Quickly, smoothly, he plucked the little reactionless bolt driver from his kit and shoved it into one of the hexagonal wells in the corner of the panel. Through his hands he felt the socket inside the driver’s nose fit over the head of the bolt in the well while the outside of the nose gripped the sides of the well. One hand easily squeezed the two halves of the handle together, and the bolt came loose.

The computer tie-in, as always, was working very well. Ed felt he need only begin the operation, and the hands would take it from there, almost automatically. They plugged the driver into the second well, squeezed, and repeated the operation for the other wells without Ed having to think about it. Ed was sweating heavily. He could feel drops growing on his forehead, fat drops with no place to fall.

With a grace that was almost poetry, Ed’s hands pulled the panel away and stuck it to a velcro patch nearby. Four eyes peered into the crowded space behind the panel. Stack upon stack of tiny microcircuit boards filled the half-meter-wide hole. A sour taste of tension came into Ed’s mouth. Nothing but circuit boards. No fat bus lines, no husky switching diodes, none of the components that his memory told him were also behind VV47. The manuals had betrayed him in his own betrayal. And the centrifuge bearing was still full of chewing gum.

Lots of ways to die, he thought, and I bet they know some I don’t.

He closed his eyes, forced panic away, and hoped his hesitation would not be noticed by Rector and the hands. When he opened them he found himself looking at the panel immediately above the one he had opened. It read: VU47.

Something in his subconscious started screaming: A U can look like a V. It was there, only one panel away. Perhaps a quick check; preventive maintenance? Hardly; that was what computers were for. It would smell like a month-old egg. That left only the hard way. And he had better start soon.

The reactionless bolt driver was hanging in the air where he had parked it. Ed reached into the hole without hurrying and pulled a stack of boards free of its connector. As it came loose, he let his elbow nudge the driver gently upward.

Ed glared at the drifting driver as it approached his face. He wondered if his hands could hear as well as see. He leaned toward the driver, checking to make sure his palms were down. Now I have to keep them that way.

When his lips brushed the driver’s handle, Ed inhaled sharply. He caught the tool in his teeth and worked it around so that he could work the thin split handle between his jaws. Ed bit down, felt it turn easily. The bolts would give him more of a fight.

Two intricate tasks to do at once. Madness! Ed wanted to laugh, but the driver filled his mouth. He peered down past the driver to the stack of circuit boards in his hands. The hands knew what to do. Ed privately thanked the Combine’s physiatrists. He started the hands on the action of unclipping the boards from the stack connector. The hands recognized the action and took over. While the stack came free like a deck of cards, Ed leaned forward and plugged the bolt driver into the first bolt-well on panel VU 47.

He bit down hard. The effort made his molars ache, but the bolt came free with a snap. Two more squeezes removed it. He hoped the hands would not notice the lurch as he swung his head to one side and plugged the driver into the second well. That bolt gave up easily.

His hands were smoothly riffling through the freed boards. Ed watched with one eye and half his mind. He was already maneuvering the driver to the fifth bolt well when the proper board appeared. Ed cautiously directed his hands to the belt kit, where they removed the replacement microcircuits and an insertion tool. Simultaneously he jabbed for the fifth well, missed, and then plunged it home. He bit down. Nothing. Another hard bite met only solid resistance and a spreading ache in his jaws. Ed glanced down and helped the hands place the insertion tool over the first bad circuit. All the time he was working the tool further back along his jaw for more leverage. Ed tensed himself and clenched his jaws in a tremendous spasm that was all he felt he could exert. The bolt released, the driver slipped, and Ed bit down hard on his tongue.

Tears welled up in his eyes, and even the hands paused. Ed tasted blood, and swallowed hard. Bad time to scream, and with the driver in his mouth he might choke. His hands effortlessly removed the bad chip. They positioned the new chip and snapped it into place. Ed felt desperation growing with the pain in his mouth. He jabbed the driver into the last well.

And knocked it out of his mouth.

First, panic. Then came the flood of cool analysis that had made him what he had been, once. No space mechanic ever lets his tools get away from him. Rector knew that. Convection currents could make a tool start drifting away. Ed casually reached out his left hand, snatched the driver, and parked it near his shoulder with just enough drift to carry it toward his face. Ed sucked the tool into his mouth and positioned it with a burning tongue. He had the second bad chip out and was positioning the new one. Quickly! Ed forced himself to be calm and inserted the driver into the last hole. The bolt resisted. He noticed a thread of blood and saliva creeping horizontally out of one corner of his mouth. Ed bit savagely, and felt the ragged crunch of a bicuspid chipping against the hard plastic of the driver’s handle. The bolt gave way.

Ed simultaneously restacked and clipped the boards and pried the newly freed panel up and out of the way with the metal shank of the bolt driver. The hands knew what they were doing. Through tearing eyes Ed looked at the newly exposed circuitry.

It was all vaguely familiar. Several aluminum bars carried heavy currents to and from the cooling and pumping units handling the liquid helium which cooled the computer’s main memory. It had to be the right one, and the decision would have to be made in seconds. The proper bar carried a harmless six hundred amps at five volts, but there were bars carrying two and three hundred volts. Which, which …

An inquiring buzz arose in the nerves of his arm-stumps. Rector had sensed something going on. The hands snapped the board stack back into place. The buzz turned into a rasping burr on the edge of discomfort. Ed’s anger boiled over.

Now!

Ed clamped his eyes shut and plunged his head forward toward what he hoped with all his heart was the right bus bar. The steel shank clicked against the bar and the tip brushed the frame.

A small explosion echoed in Circuitry. Sparks burned Ed’s face and closed eyelids. The driver was welded to both bus bar and frame, sizzling and arcing. The lights around him dimmed. Many went out altogether. Alarms began to wail in the distance.

“Go to hell!” Ed screamed at the alarms, and threw a screwdriver away into the gloom. He heard it caroming from one panel to another.

As though in answer, the hands began to devour him. Lightning coursed down his spine and ate its way back up to the base of his brain. Ed screamed. Molten lava was streaming out of his hands into his shoulders, flowing down to settle in his lungs and diaphragm. Tiny jaws were tearing at every muscle in his body. He curled himself into a foetal position, thrashed blindly between the walls, felt his heels dent the thin metal panels. A fiery yellow cloud congealed at the center of his brain and began eating its way outward, devouring his consciousness as it went. Kill me, then, and waste your damned expensive hands! he thought through electronic agony.

The pain gradually died away. Every muscle in his body ached at its passing. Ed shook his head and slapped his cheeks to clear his mind. Was the computer finally dead? It had to be! But the hands maintained a coarse rasp that pulsed every so often into pain. He knew what they were telling him: Go back to the centrifuge.

Rector’s face was at the comm console, angry.

“Sabotage of Combine property is a capital offense, Ed. You’ll probably have to prove insanity to save your life now.”

Ed’s tongue lay thick in his mouth. He swallowed blood. Speech was painful. “Shove off. I’ve never been saner in my life. If you decide to kill me, I’ll just crank open a hatch…”

Ed saw the foolishness of that. Rector was impassive. “I doubt that.”

Ed shrugged. “So I didn’t kill the computer?”

The small shrewish face never showed hatred; Ed thought it had grown more intense. “Main memory lost cooling, and blanked when the plates went ohmic for lack of helium. We will beam back what was lost after you’ve replaced a few more parts.”

“Then why do the hands still work?” Ed flexed his fingers. The strange expertise provided by the computer was gone, but they followed orders, from both Ed and his employers.

Rector smiled. “They have an independent radio link to R&D through the Cislunar Repeater Network. We put more into those hands than we mentioned. Now get to work.”

The hands pulsed one hot pang for emphasis. Ed’s eyes watered, and he turned away from the comm console.

For two days Ed worked without daring to scratch his nose. He knew the Combine had a five-man crew watching every move he made, each with his own individual pain button. Ed had felt it more than once. Sometimes it made him smile. They were frightened of him, based on what he had done. It was a shame he could do nothing more.

He had been a careless saboteur. With a little more planning it might have worked, and he could have been on his way to the Iron Republic of Mars. For bringing in the King Lear he could buy citizenship and a thousand hectares of land—not that he wanted or needed the land. The Iron Republic had nearly as few spacemen as it had ships. Even if Ed had only his nose to guide a ship with, they would let him stay in space.

Now, after repairing his ship, he would report to Curie Station, be arrested, tried, and probably executed. He continued to work only because work was as much a habit as living.

“You know, Rector, I think you’re as crazy as I am,” Ed said once before beginning a short sleep period. “You spent a fortune making me three-quarters of a superman, and then drove me insane with the fine print of a contract. Is a contract worth the life of a good worker?”

Rector answered without video. “You’re not insane, Ed. You’re an Earthman. Earthmen don’t respect contracts. And contracts are the only things that make the Combine work.”

Before dropping into sleep, Ed thought: Yes, he is absolutely right.

Sweating heavily, Ed removed the last bolt from the top plate of the superconducting memory unit. A hiss of helium gas sang around the loosening gasket. Ed pried with a screwdriver. A last gasp of gas, and the lid swung upward.

The unit was a Dewar flask filled with microscopically etched tellurium, chilled to zero resistance by liquid helium. The temperature controls had been ruined, and the unit could not keep itself colder than one hundred degrees Kelvin. Still, a blast of arctic cold met his face as Ed sized up the huge squat pressure tank. The tellurium sheets were arranged like the spokes of a sparkling wheel around the hollow at the center of the tank. That was the liquid helium reservoir, empty now. Thirty centimeters down were the ruined controls.

Ed pulled some tools from his kit and parked them in the steaming air over the reservoir. Pliers in hand, he leaned over the empty space and peered downward. He backed off very quickly.

Wobbling up to meet him, was a half-meter bubble of liquid helium.

Ed gasped in surprise. It was the last of several thousand liters of helium which the device was meant to contain. Most had boiled into gas and had bled off into space. The bubble rose on convection currents, cloaked in a veil of condensing water vapor and atmosphere gases. It started to bubble and froth as heat from the air reached it. As much as Ed had depended on liquid helium for computer functions, he had never before seen it. The cold air biting his cheeks seemed almost hot. Cold could destroy as well as flame. Better.

Ed screamed a choking scream of defiance, and plunged his arms to the elbows into the sphere of deadly cold.

Instantly the fires began, roaring out of his arms to wrench and twist his body in unbearable agony. He screamed again, biting his wounded tongue, but focused every jot of concentration in his body on keeping his arms within the steaming bubble. His legs kicked involuntarily. His whole body throbbed to the tune of pain the hands were playing on his body. He closed his eyes and tried to shut out the pain, and kept thinking: Die, freeze, die! The yellow cloud of oblivion began to condense in his head again. He could not allow that to happen. Die, damn you!

The feeling crept in from his fingertips: a crawling numbness that devoured the pain which was devouring him. It spread up the tiny golden wires and steel shafts inside the hands. The fingers twitched and twisted for a moment as sudden superconductivity sent false pulses racing through freezing motors. He saw the hands bend in a grotesque clawlike position, and freeze.

The pain was gone. Only cold numbness remained. Ed was breathing fast as he pulled his hands from the boiling helium and stared at them. The pink plastic was frozen a brittle white. Quickly, quickly!

The bubble, much smaller now, had drifted off to one side. Ed raised his right arm over his head, and brought it down as hard as he could on the edge of the thick-walled memory unit. The arm cracked off and continued downward, smashing the delicate tellurium plates. Bright fragments tumbled about in the air. He raised his left arm and brought it down even harder. It shattered into several pieces, which caromed off the memory tank and hit his face. They burned him with their coldness.

Ed stared at the jagged plastic stumps steaming on the ends of his arms.

He was free.

V

Ed laughed. They were offering him amnesty in return for the King Lear. He had held a video two-way with Rector and Sussaine, the Earth-specialist PR man, for more than twenty minutes. Behind them Ed could see the computing machinery and grey-uniformed tacticians of a Conflict Center. Ed realized grimly that the Combine was a lot for one unarmed man in an unarmed tanker to take on.

But after thinking for a moment, he stopped worrying.

“Come on, Herb,” he told Sussaine, who was doing all the talking. “The moment I step clear of my ship I’ll get a twenty-one gun salute right through the head. And while we’re talking promises I’ll make you one: As soon as whatever you have tailing me gets within boarding range I’ll blow myself up. Seventy percent of my mass is liquid hydrogen, kerosene #3, lox, and assorted hypergolics. I’ll make a nice fireball, and do my damndest to take any followers with me.”

Sussaine tried to look smug. “We have three S-class Greystingers on an intersecting course. Their laser cannon are lethal at two hundred kilometers.”

Ed shook his head. “Greystingers chasing old Lear? Let’s do a little Combine arithmetic. I’ve been boosting at a constant quarter-G for almost four hours. I have enough fuel to do that almost forever; hell, I’m all fuel. Bringing a Greystinger up to Battle-Green takes two hours, and for three ships costs maybe ten percent of what I’m worth. To catch me with that head start would take two solid strap-on boosters per ‘stinger, at a cost of another ten-percent per booster. Paying a ‘stinger crew battle grade for a week is another ten percent of Lear’s net value. Fuel, wear, and refitting the ‘stingers after a long chase would probably be another fifteen or twenty percent. Right there you’ve already got 120% of what my entire ship and cargo are worth. The Combine would sell its own mother to make a profit, but your contracts forbid you to incur a penny’s loss for revenge. That’s listed as a ‘Nonproductive expense, never justified,’ Article IV, Section 14, Paragraph 141 of the General Contractual Regulations. Give up. You lose. I win. Admit it.”

Sussaine’s face reddened. “You’re not going scot-free …”

“Stand aside, Herb.” Rector pushed ahead of the PR man and looked wearily at Ed. “It’ll be a long time before we trust an Earthman again. Yes, you’ve won. The course you’re following is optimal to several decimal places, and you did it in your head. You will get to Iron Republic space hours before we can do anything about it. We lose, and I’m in trouble. It won’t happen again.” Ed saw Rector begin reaching to terminate the connection. Herb Sussaine caught his arm and pushed back in front of the video pickup.

“Graczyk, you don’t have any arms! How in hell do you expect to fly a tanker all the way to Mars?”

Ed chuckled. “Ask Rector,” he said, and switched the screen off with his big toe.

Ed sighed and spun his chair around with his other foot. The centrifuge was turning again, more slowly, but enough to keep him comfortable in the long weeks ahead. His stumps were beginning to hurt and his tongue still felt twice its size, but Lear’s medconsole would keep him alive long enough to reach Republic space.

His course was perfect. Now there was nothing to do but kill time following it. Ed would be doing a lot of painting before he reached Mars. He slouched in his chair and picked up a brush with his toes. With his other foot he squeezed a bright orange worm of paint onto his palette.

On his easel was the canvas he intended to present to the President of the Iron Republic of Mars upon his investiture as a citizen: A study of Venus de Milo in a space helmet.

Ed Graczyk got to work.

OUR LADY OF THE SAUROPODS

Robert Silverberg

August. 0750 hours. Ten minutes since the module meltdown. I can’t see the wreckage from here, but I can smell it, bitter and sour against the moist tropical air. I’ve found a cleft in the rocks, a kind of shallow cavern, where I’ll be safe from the dinosaurs for a while. It’s shielded by thick clumps of cycads, and in any case it’s too small for the big predators to enter. But sooner or later I’m going to need food, and then what? I have no weapons. How long can one woman last, stranded and more or less helpless, aboard a habitat unit not quite five hundred meters in diameter that she’s sharing with a bunch of active, hungry dinosaurs?

I keep telling myself that none of this is really happening. Only I can’t quite convince myself of that.

My escape still has me shaky. I can’t get out of my mind the funny little bubbling sound the tiny powerpak made as it began to overheat. In something like fourteen seconds my lovely mobile module became a charred heap of fused-together junk, taking with it my communicator unit, my food supply, my laser gun andjust about everything else. And but for the warning that funny little sound gave me, I’d be so much charred junk now, too. Better off that way, most likely.

When I close my eyes, I imagine I can see Habitat Vronsky floating serenely in orbit a mere 120 kilometers away. What a beautiful sight! The walls gleaming like platinum, the great mirror collecting sunlight and flashing it into the windows, the agricultural satellites wheeling around it like a dozen tiny moons. I could almost reach out and touch it. Tap on the shielding and murmur, “Help me, come for me, rescue me.” But I might just as well be out beyond Neptune as sitting here in the adjoining Lagrange slot. No way I can call for help. The moment I move outside this cleft in the rock I’m at the mercy of my saurians and their mercy is not likely to be tender.

Now it’s beginning to rain—artificial, like practically everything else on Dino Island. But it gets you just as wet as the natural kind. And clammy. Pfaugh.

Jesus, what am I going to do?

0815 hours. The rain is over for now. It’ll come again in six hours. Astonishing how muggy, dank, thick, the air is. Simply breathing is hard work, and I feel as though mildew is forming on my lungs. I miss Vronsky’s clear, crisp, everlasting springtime air. On previous trips to Dino Island I never cared about the climate. But, of course, I was snugly englobed in my mobile unit, a world within a world, self-contained, self-sufficient, isolated from all contact with this place and its creatures. Merely a roving eye, traveling as I pleased, invisible, invulnerable.

Can they sniff me in here?

We don’t think their sense of smell is very acute. Sharper than a crocodile’s, not as good as a cat’s. And the stink of the burned wreckage dominates the place at the moment. But I must reek with fear-signals. I feel calm now, but it was different as I went desperately scrambling out of the module during the meltdown. Scattering pher-omones all over the place, I bet.

Commotion in the cycads. Something’s coming in here!

Long neck, small birdlike feet, delicate grasping hands. Not to worry. Struthiomimus, is all—dainty dino, fragile, birdlike critter barely two meters high. Liquid golden eyes staring solemnly at me. It swivels its head from side to side, ostrichlike, click-click, as if trying to make up its mind about coming closer to me. Scat! Go peck a stegosaur. Let me alone.

The Struthiomimus withdraws, making little clucking sounds.

Closest I’ve ever been to a live dinosaur. Glad it was one of the little ones.

0900 hours. Getting hungry. What am I going to eat?

They say roasted cycad cones aren’t too bad. How about raw ones? So many plants are edible when cooked and poisonous otherwise. I never studied such things in detail. Living in our antiseptic little L5 habitats, we’re not required to be outdoors-wise, after all. Anyway, there’s a fleshy-looking cone on the cycad just in front of the cleft, and it’s got an edible look. Might as well try it raw, because there’s no other way. Rubbing sticks together will get me nowhere.

Getting the cone offtakes some work. Wiggle, twist, snap, tear— there. Not as fleshy as it looks. Chewy, in fact. Like munching on rubber. Decent flavor, though. And maybe some useful carbohydrate.

The shuttle isn’t due to pick me up for thirty days. Nobody’s apt to come looking for me, or even think about me, before then. I’m on my own. Nice irony there: I was desperate to get out of Vronsky and escape from all the bickering and maneuvering, the endless meetings and memoranda, the feinting and counterfeinting, all the ugly political crap that scientists indulge in when they turn into administrators. Thirty days of blessed isolation on Dino Island! An end to that constant dull throbbing in my head from the daily infighting with Director Sarber. Pure research again! And then the meltdown, and here I am cowering in the bushes wondering which comes first, starving or getting gobbled.

0930 hours. Funny thought just now. Could it have been sabotage? Consider. Sarber and I, feuding for weeks over the issue of opening Dino Island to tourists. Crucial staff vote coming up next month. Sarber says we can raise millions a year for expanded studies with a program of guided tours and perhaps some rental of the island to film companies. I say that’s risky both for the dinos and the tourists, destructive of scientific values, a distraction, a sellout. Emotionally the staff’s with me, but Sarber waves figures around, showy fancy income-projections, and generally shouts and blusters. Tempers running high, Sarber in lethal fury at being opposed, barely able to hide his loathing for me. Circulating rumors—designed to get back to me—that if I persist in blocking him, he’ll abort my career. Which is malarkey, of course. He may outrank me, but he has no real authority over me. And then his politeness yesterday. (Yesterday? An aeon ago.) Smiling smarmily, telling me he hopes I’ll rethink my position during my observation tour on the island. Wishing me well. Had he gimmicked my powerpak? I guess it isn’t hard if you know a little engineering, and Sarber does. Some kind of timer set to withdraw the insulator rods? Wouldn’t be any harm to Dino Island itself, just a quick, compact, localized disaster that implodes and melts the unit and its passenger, so sorry, terrible scientific tragedy, what a great loss. And even if by some fluke I got out of the unit in time, my chances of surviving here as a pedestrian for thirty days would be pretty skimpy, right? Right.

It makes me boil to think that someone’s willing to murder you over a mere policy disagreement. It’s barbaric. Worse than that: it’s tacky.

1130 hours. I can’t stay crouched in this cleft forever. I’m going to explore the island and see if I can find a better hideout. This one simply isn’t adequate for anything more than short-term huddling. Besides, I’m not as spooked as I was right after the meltdown. I realize now that I’m not going to find a tyrannosaur hiding behind every tree. And tyrannosaurs aren’t going to be much interested in scrawny stuff like me.

Anyway I’m a quick-witted higher primate. If my humble mammalian ancestors seventy million years ago were able to elude dinosaurs well enough to survive and inherit the earth, I should be able to keep from getting eaten for the next thirty days. And with or without my cozy little mobile module, I want to get out into this place, whatever the risks. Nobody’s ever had a chance to interact this closely with the dinos before.

Good thing I kept this pocket recorder when I jumped from the module. Whether I’m a dino’s dinner or not, I ought to be able to set down some useful observations.

Here I go.

1830 hours. Twilight is descending now. I am camped near the equator in a lean-to flung together out of tree-fern fronds—a flimsy shelter, but the huge fronds conceal me, and with luck I’ll make it through to morning. That cycad cone doesn’t seem to have poisoned me yet, and I ate another one just now, along with some tender new fiddleheads uncoiling from the heart of a tree-fern. Spartan fare, but it gives me the illusion of being fed.

In the evening mists I observe a brachiosaur, half-grown but already colossal, munching in the treetops. A gloomy-looking triceratops stands nearby and several of the ostrichlike struthiiomimids scamper busily in the underbrush, hunting I know not what. No sign of tyrannosaurs all day. There aren’t many of them here, anyway, and I hope they’re all sleeping off huge feasts somewhere in the other hemisphere.

What a fantastic place this is!

I don’t feel tired. I don’t even feel frightened—just a little wary.

I feel exhilarated, as a matter of fact.

Here I sit peering out between fern fronds at a scene out of the dawn of time. All that’s missing is a pterosaur or two flapping overhead, but we haven’t brought those back yet. The mournful snuf-flings of the huge brachiosaur carry clearly even in the heavy air. The struthiomimids are making sweet honking sounds. Night is falling swiftly and the great shapes out there take on dreamlike primordial wonder.

What a brilliant idea it was to put all the Olsen-process dinosaur-reconstructs aboard a little L5 habitat of their very own and turn them loose to recreate the Mesozoic! After that unfortunate San Diego event with the tyrannosaur, it became politically unfeasible to keep them anywhere on earth, I know, but even so this is a better scheme. In just a little more than seven years Dino Island has taken on an altogether convincing illusion of reality. Things grow so fast in this lush, steamy, high-CO_2 tropical atmosphere! Of course, we haven’t been able to duplicate the real Mesozoic flora, but we’ve done all right using botanical survivors, cycads and tree ferns and horsetails and palms and gingkos and auracarias, and thick carpets of mosses and selaginellas and liverworts covering the ground. Everything has blended and merged and run amok: it’s hard now to recall the bare and unnatural look of the island when we first laid it out. Now it’s a seamless tapestry in green and brown, a dense jungle broken only by streams, lakes and meadows, encapsulated in spherical metal walls some two kilometers in circumference.

And the animals, the wonderful fantastic grotesque animals—

We don’t pretend that the real Mesozoic ever held any such mix of fauna as I’ve seen today, stegosaurs and corythosaurs side by side, a triceratops sourly glaring at a brachiosaur, struthiomimus contemporary with iguanodon, a wild unscientific jumble of Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, a hundred million years of the dinosaur reign scrambled together. We take what we can get. Olsen-process reconstructs require sufficient fossil DNA to permit the computer synthesis, and we’ve been able to find that in only some twenty species so far. The wonder is that we’ve accomplished even that much: to replicate the complete DNA molecule from battered and sketchy genetic information millions of years old, to carry out the intricate implants in reptilian host ova, to see the embryos through to self-sustaining levels. The only word that applies is miraculous. If our dinos come from eras millions of years apart, so be it: we do our best. If we have no oterosaur and no allosaur and no archaeopteryx, so be it: we may have them yet. What we already have is plenty to work with. Some day there may be separate Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous satellite habitats, but none of us will live to see that, I suspect.

Total darkness now. Mysterious screechings and hissings out there. This afternoon, as I moved cautiously, but in delight, from the wreckage site up near the rotation axis to my present equatorial camp, sometimes coming within fifty or a hundred meters of living dinos, I felt a kind of ecstasy. Now my fears are returning, and my anger at this stupid marooning. I imagine clutching claws reaching for me, terrible jaws yawning above me.

I don’t think I’ll get much sleep tonight.

22 August. 0600 hours. Rosy-fingered dawn comes to Dino Island, and I’m still alive. Not a great night’s sleep, but I must have had some, because I can remember fragments of dreams. About dinosaurs, naturally. Sitting in little groups, some playing pinochle and some knitting sweaters. And choral singing, a dinosaur rendition of The Messiah or maybe Beethoven’s Ninth.

I feel alert, inquisitive, and hungry. Especially hungry. I know we’ve stocked this place with frogs and turtles and other small-size anachronisms to provide a balanced diet for the big critters. Today I’ll have to snare some for myself, grisly though I find the prospect of eating raw frog’s legs.

I don’t bother getting dressed. With rain showers programmed to fall four times a day, it’s better to go naked anyway. Mother Eve of the Mesozoic, that’s me! And without my soggy tunic I find that I don’t mind the greenhouse atmosphere half as much.

Out to see what I can find.

The dinosaurs are up and about already, the big herbivores munching away, the carnivores doing their stalking. All of them have such huge appetites that they can’t wait for the sun to come up. In the bad old days when the dinos were thought to be reptiles, of course, we’d have expected them to sit there like lumps until daylight got their body temperatures up to functional levels. But one of the great joys of the reconstruct project was the vindication of the notion that dinosaurs were warm-blooded animals, active and quick and pretty damned intelligent. No sluggardly crocodilians these! Would that they were, if only for my survival’s sake.

1130 hours. A busy morning. My first encounter with a major predator.

There are nine tyrannosaurs on the island, including three born in the past eighteen months. (That gives us an optimum predator-to-prey ratio. If the tyrannosaurs keep reproducing and don’t start eating each other, we’ll have to begin thinning them out. One of the problems with a closed ecology—natural checks and balances don’t fully apply.) Sooner or later I was bound to encounter one, but I had hoped it would be later.

I was hunting frogs at the edge of Cope Lake. A ticklish business— calls for agility, cunning, quick reflexes. I remember the technique from my girlhood—the cupped hand, the lightning pounce—but somehow it’s become a lot harder in the last twenty years. Superior frogs these days, I suppose. There I was, kneeling in the mud, swooping, missing, swooping, missing; some vast sauropod snoozing in the lake, probably our diplodocus; a corythosaur browsing in a stand of gingko trees, quite delicately nipping off the foul-smelling yellow fruits. Swoop. Miss. Swoop. Miss. Such intense concentration on my task that old T. rex could have tiptoed right up behind me, and I’d never have noticed. But then I felt a subtle something, a change in the air, maybe, a barely perceptible shift in dynamics. I glanced up and saw the corythosaur rearing on its hind legs, looking around uneasily, pulling deep sniffs into that fantastically elaborate bony crest that houses its early-warning system. Carnivore alert! The corythosaur obviously smelled something wicked this way coming, for it swung around between two big gingkos and started to go galumphing away. Too late. The treetops parted, giant boughs toppled, and out of the forest came our original tyrannosaur, the pigeon-toed one we call Belshazzar, moving in its heavy, clumsy waddle, ponderous legs working hard, tail absurdly swinging from side to side. I slithered into the lake and scrunched down as deep as I could go in the warm oozing mud. The corythosaur had no place to slither. Unarmed, unarmored, it could only make great bleating sounds, terror mingled with defiance, as the killer bore down on it.

I had to watch. I had never seen a kill.

In a graceless but wondrously effective way, the tyrannosaur dug its hind claws into the ground, pivoted astonishingly, and, using its massive tail as a counterweight, moved in a ninety-degree arc to knock the corythosaur down with a stupendous sidewise swat of its huge head. I hadn’t been expecting that. The corythosaur dropped and lay on its side, snorting in pain and feebly waving its limbs. Now came the coup de grace with hind legs, and then the rending and tearing, the jaws and the tiny arms at last coming into play. Burrowing chin-deep in the mud, I watched in awe and weird fascination. There are those among us who argue that the carnivores ought to be segregated into their own island, that it is folly to allow reconstructs created with such effort to be casually butchered this way. Perhaps in the beginning that made sense, but not now, not when natural increase is rapidly filling the island with young dinos. If we are to learn anything about these animals, it will only be by reproducing as closely as possible their original living conditions. Besides, would it not be a cruel mockery to feed our tyrannosaurs on hamburger and herring?

The killer fed for more than an hour. At the end came a scary moment: Belshazzar, blood-smeared and bloated, hauled himself ponderously down to the edge of the lake for a drink. He stood no more than ten meters from me. I did my most convincing imitation of a rotting log; but the tyrannosaur, although it did seem to study me with a beady eye, had no further appetite. For a long while after he departed, I stayed buried in the mud, fearing he might come back for dessert. And eventually there was another crashing and bashing in the forest—not Belshazzar this time, though, but a younger one with a gimpy arm. It uttered a sort of whinnying sound and went to work on the corythosaur carcass. No surprise: we already knew that tyrannosaurs had no prejudices against carrion.

Nor, I found, did I.

When the coast was clear, I crept out and saw that the two tyrannosaurs had left hundreds of kilos of meat. Starvation knoweth no pride and also few qualms. Using a clamshell for my blade, I started chopping away.

Corythosaur meat has a curiously sweet flavor—nutmeg and cloves, dash of cinnamon. The first chunk would not go down. You are a pioneer, I told myself, retching. You are the first human ever to eat dinosaur meat. Yes, but why does it have to be raw? No choice about that. Be dispassionate, love. Conquer your gag reflex or die trying. I pretended I was eating oysters. This time the meat went down. It didn’t stay down. The alternative, I told myself grimly, is a diet of fern fronds and frogs, and you haven’t been much good at catching the frogs. I tried again. Success!

I’d have to call corythosaur meat an acquired taste. But the wilderness is no place for picky eaters.

23 August. 1300 hours. At midday I found myself in the southern hemisphere, along the fringes of Marsh Marsh about a hundred meters below the equator. Observing herd behavior in sauropods—five brachiosaurs, two adult and three young, moving in formation, the small ones in the center. By “small” I mean only some ten meters from nose to tail-tip. Sauropod appetites being what they are, we’ll have to thin that herd soon, too, especially if we want to introduce a female diplodocus into the colony. Two species of sauropods breeding and eating like that could devastate the island in three years. Nobody ever expected dinosaurs to reproduce like rabbits—another dividend of their being warm-blooded, I suppose. We might have guessed it, though, from the vast quantity of fossils. If that many bones survived the catastrophes of a hundred-odd million years, how enormous the living Mesozoic population must have been! An awesome race in more ways than mere physical mass.

I had a chance to do a little herd-thinning myself just now. Mysterious stirring in the spongy soil right at my feet, and I looked down to see triceratops eggs hatching! Seven brave little critters, already horny and beaky, scrabbling out of a nest, staring around defiantly. No bigger than kittens, but active and sturdy from the moment of birth.

The corythosaur meat has probably spoiled by now. A more pragmatic soul very likely would have augmented her diet with one or two little ceratopsians. I couldn’t do it.

They scuttled off in seven different directions. I thought briefly of catching one and making a pet out of it. Silly idea.

25 August. 0700 hours. Start of the fifth day. I’ve done three complete circumambulations of the island. Slinking around on foot is fifty times as risky as cruising around in a module, and fifty thousand times as rewarding. I make camp in a different place every night. I don’t mind the humidity any longer. And despite my skimpy diet, I feel pretty healthy. Raw dinosaur, I know now, is a lot tastier than raw frog. I’ve become an expert scavenger—the sound of a tyrannosaur in the forest now stimulates my salivary glands instead of my adrenals. Going naked is fun, too. And I appeciate my body much more, since the bulges that civilization puts there have begun to melt away.

Nevertheless, I keep trying to figure out some way of signaling Habitat Vronsky for help. Changing the position of the reflecting mirrors, maybe, so I can beam an SOS? Sounds nice, but I don’t even know where the island’s controls are located, let alone how to run them. Let’s hope my luck holds out another three and a half weeks.

27 August. 1700 hours. The dinosaurs know that I’m here and that I’m some extraordinary kind of animal. Does that sound weird? How can great dumb beasts know anything? They have such tiny brains. And my own brain must be softening on this protein-and-cellulose diet. Even so, I’m starting to have peculiar feelings about these animals. I see them watching me. An odd knowing look in their eyes, not stupid at all. They stare and I imagine them nodding, smiling, exchanging glances with each other, discussing me. I’m supposed to be observing them, but I think they’re observing me, too, somehow.

This is crazy. I’m tempted to erase the entry. But I’ll leave it as a record of my changing psychological state if nothing else.

28 August. 1200 hours. More fantasies about the dinosaurs. I’ve decided that the big brachiosaur—Bertha—plays a key role here. She doesn’t move around much, but there are always lesser dinosaurs in orbit around her. Much eye contact. Eye contact between dinosaurs? Let it stand. That’s my perception of what they’re doing. I get a definite sense that there’s communication going on here, modulating over some wave that I’m not capable of detecting. And Bertha seems to be a central nexus, a grand totem of some sort, a—a switchboard? What am I talking about? What’s happening to me?

30 August. 0945 hours. What a damned fool I am! Serves me right for being a filthy voyeur. Climbed a tree to watch iguanodons mating at the foot of Bakker Falls. At climactic moment the branch broke. I dropped twenty meters. Grabbed a lower limb or I’d be dead now. As it is, pretty badly smashed around. I don’t think anything’s broken, but my left leg won’t support me and my back’s in bad shape. Internal injuries too? Not sure. I’ve crawled into a little rock-shelter near the falls. Exhausted and maybe feverish. Shock, most likely. I suppose I’ll starve now. It would have been an honor to be eaten by a tyrannosaur, but to die from falling out of a tree is just plain humiliating.

The mating of iguanodons is a spectacular sight, by the way. But I hurt too much to describe it now.

31 August. 1700 hours. Stiff, sore, hungry, hideously thirsty. Leg still useless and when I try to crawl even a few meters, I feel as if I’m going to crack in half at the waist. High fever.

How long does it take to starve to death?

1 Sep. 0700 hours. Three broken eggs lying near me when I awoke. Embryos still alive—probably stegosaur—but not for long. First food in forty-eight hours. Did the eggs fall out of a nest somewhere overhead? Do stegosaurs make their nests in trees, dummy?

Fever diminishing. Body aches all over. Crawled to the stream and managed to scoop up a little water.

1330 hours. Dozed off. Awakened to find haunch of fresh meat within crawling distance. Struthiomimus drumstick, I think. Nasty sour taste, but it’s edible. Nibbled a little, slept again, ate some more. Pair of stegosaurs grazing not far away, tiny eyes fastened on me. Smaller dinosaurs holding a kind of conference by some big cycads. And Bertha Brachiosaur is munching away in Ostrom Meadow, benignly supervising the whole scene.

This is absolutely crazy.

I think the dinosaurs are taking care of me.

2 Sep. 0900 hours. No doubt of it at all. They bring eggs, meat, even cycad cones and tree-fern fronds. At first they delivered things only when I slept, but now they come hopping right up to me and dump things at my feet. The struthiomimids are the bearers—they’re the smallest, most agile, quickest hands. They bring their offerings, stare me right in the eye, pause as if waiting for a tip. Other dinosaurs watching from the distance. This is a coordinated effort. I am the center of all activity on the island, it seems. I imagine that even the tyrannosaurs are saving choice cuts for me. Hallucination? Fantasy? Delirium of fever? I feel lucid. The fever is abating. I’m still too stiff and weak to move very far, but I think I’m recovering from the effects of my fall. With a little help from my friends.

1000 hours. Played back the last entry. Thinking it over. I don’t think I’ve gone insane. If I’m insane enough to be worried about my sanity, how crazy can I be? Or am I just fooling myself? There’s a terrible conflict between what I think I perceive going on here and what I know I ought to be perceiving.

1500 hours. A long, strange dream this; afternoon. I saw all the dinosaurs standing in the meadow and they were connected to one another by gleaming threads, like the telephone lines of olden times, and all the threads centered on Bertha. As if she’s the switchboard, yes. And telepathic messages were traveling. An extrasensory hookup, powerful pulses moving along the lines. I dreamed that a small dinosaur came to me and offered me a line and, in pantomime, showed me how to hook it up, and a great flood of delight went through me as I made the connection. And when I plugged it in, I could feel the deep and heavy thoughts of the dinosaurs, the slow rapturous philosophical interchanges.

When I woke, the dream seemed bizarrely vivid, strangely real, the dream-ideas lingering as they sometimes do. I saw the animals about me in a new way. As if this is not just a zoological research station, but a community, a settlement, the sole outpost of an alien civilization—an alien civilization native to earth.

Come off it. These animals have minute brains. They spend their days.chomping on greenery, except for the ones that chomp on other dinosaurs. Compared with dinosaurs, cows and sheep are downright geniuses.

I can hobble a little now.

3 Sep. 0600 hours. The same dream again last night, the universal telepathic linkage. Sense of warmth and love flowing from dinosaurs to me.

Fresh tyrannosaur eggs for breakfast.

5 Sep. 1100 hours. I’m making a fast recovery. Up and about, still creaky but not much pain left. They still feed me. Though the struthiomimids remain the bearers of food, the bigger dinosaurs now come close, too. A stegosaur nuzzled up to me like some Goliath-sized pony, and I petted its rough scaly flank. The diplodocus stretched out flat and seemed to beg me to stroke its immense neck.

If this is madness, so be it. There’s community here, loving and temperate. Even the predatory carnivores are part of it: eaters and eaten are aspects of the whole, yin and yang. Riding around in our sealed modules, we could never have suspected any of this.

They are gradually drawing me into their communion. I feel the pulses that pass between them. My entire soul throbs with that strange new sensation. My skin tingles.

They bring me food of their own bodies, their flesh and their unborn young, and they watch over me and silently urge me back to health. Why? For sweet charity’s sake? I don’t think so. I think they want something from me. I think they need something from me.

What could they need from me?

6 Sep. 0600 hours. All this night I have moved slowly through the forest in what I can only term an ecstatic state. Vast shapes, humped monstrous forms barely visible by dim glimmer, came and went about me. Hour after hour I walked unharmed, feeling the communion intensify. Until at last, exhausted, I have come to rest here on this mossy carpet, and in the first light of dawn I see the giant form of the great brachiosaur standing like a mountain on the far side of Owen River.

I am drawn to her. I could worship her. Through her vast body surge powerful currents. She is the amplifier. By her are we all connected. The holy mother of us all. From the enormous mass of her body emanate potent healing impulses.

I’ll rest a little while. Then I’ll cross the river to her.

0900 hours. We stand face to face. Her head is.fifteen meters above mine. Her small eyes are unreadable. I trust her and I love her.

Lesser brachiosaurs have gathered behind her on the riverbank. Farther away are dinosaurs of half a dozen other species, immobile, silent.

I am humble in their presence. They are representatives of a dynamic, superior race, which but for a cruel cosmic accident would rule the earth to this day, and I am coming to revere them.

Consider: they endured for a hundred forty million years in ever-renewing vigor. They met all evolutionary challenges, except the one of sudden and catastrophic climatic change against which nothing could have protected them. They multiplied and proliferated and adapted, dominating land and sea and air, covering the globe. Our own trifling, contemptible ancestors were nothing next to them. Who knows what these dinosaurs might have achieved if that crashing asteroid had not blotted out their light? What a vast irony: millions of years of supremacy ended in a single generation by a chilling cloud of dust. But until then—the wonder, the grandeur—

Only beasts, you say? How can you be sure? We know just a shred of what the Mesozoic was really like, just a slice, literally the bare bones. The passage of a hundred million years can obliterate all traces of civilization. Suppose they had language, poetry, mythology, philosophy? Love, dreams, aspirations? No, you say, they were beasts, ponderous and stupid, that lived mindless bestial lives. And I reply that we puny hairy ones have no right to impose our own values on them. The only kind of civilization we can understand is the one we have built. We imagine that our own trivial accomplishments are the determining case, that computers and spaceships and broiled sausages are such miracles that they place us at evolution’s pinnacle. But now I know otherwise. Humanity has done marvelous things, yes. But we would not have existed at all had this greatest of races been allowed to live to fulfill its destiny.

I feel the intense love radiating from the titan that looms above me. I feel the contact between our souls steadily strengthening and deepening.

The last barriers dissolve.

And I understand at last.

I am the chosen one. I am the vehicle. I am the bringer of rebirth, the beloved one, the necessary one. Our Lady of the Sauropods am I, the holy one, the prophetess, the priestess.

Is this madness? Then it is madness.

Why have we small hairy creatures existed at all? I know now. It is so that through our technology we could make possible the return of the great ones. They perished unfairly. Through us, they are resurrected aboard this tiny glove in space.

I tremble in the force of the need that pours from them.

I will not fail you, I tell the great sauropods before me, and the sauropods send my thoughts reverberating to all the others.

20 September. 0600 hours. The thirtieth day. The shuttle comes from Habitat Vronsky today to pick me up and deliver the next researcher.

I wait at the transit lock. Hundreds of dinosaurs wait with me, each close beside the nest, both the lions and the lambs, gathered quietly, their attention focussed entirely on me.

Now the shuttle arrives, right on time, gliding in for a perfect docking. The airlocks open. A figure appears. Sarber himself! Coming to make sure I didn’t survive the meltdown, or else to finish me off.

He stands blinking in the entry passage, gaping at the throngs of placid dinosaurs arrayed in a huge semicircle around the naked woman who stands beside the wreckage of the mobile module. For a moment he is unable to speak.

“Anne?” he says finally. “What in God’s name—”

“You’ll never understand,” I tell him. I give the signal. Belshazzar rumbles forward. Sarber screams and whirls and sprints for the airlock, but a stegosaur blocks the way.

“No!” Sarber cries, as the tyrannosaur’s mighty head swoops down. It is all over in a moment.

Revenge! How sweet!

And this is only the beginning. Habitat Vronsky lies just 120 kilometers away. Elsewhere in the Lagrange belt are hundreds of other habitats ripe for conquest. The earth itself is within easy reach. I have no idea yet how it will be accomplished, but I know it will be done and done successfully, and I will be the instrument by which it is done.

I stretch forth my arms to the mighty creatures that surround me. I feel their strength, their power, their harmony. I am one with them, and they with me.

The Great Race has returned, and I am its priestess.

Let the hairy ones tremble!

GUARDIAN

Jeff Duntemann

It had lain in the bog for seventeen centuries, but now the Princess had been defiled, and the Guardian’s soul commanded it to emerge and fight.

I

Someone was stealing the Princess’s skull.

The Guardian’s eyes were clouded with the slime of the bog. He tried to clear them, but the jets were clogged. All he could see were two small human figures leaping from the granite slab above him, almost atop him, and then vanishing into the gloom. One figure held the skull in his hands.

Rage! All three hooded eyes were now above the bog’s surface, swinging back and forth on their armored stalks, searching. Three hundred years of silence and boredom had lulled the Guardian into bleary carelessness. Not for three centuries had he seen, heard, or smelled a human being. Now the Princess’s remains had been defiled, and he had not done a thing.

The two shadows plunged on away from him. A thundering command to halt entered his speaking trumpet, but only a splattering gurgle of mud emerged. Soon the fleeing shadows were gone.

Protect the Princess! Something howled inside of him. The black snout of his heat beam rose above the surface of the bog and swung in the direction of the fleeing humans.

Kill no man without warning, cautioned the same howling thing, the thing he called a soul. His trumpet remained mute, try as he did to clear it.

So be it. The mud around the Guardian began to heave and bubble. Slowly—he had lain in the slime for fourteen hundred years—the Guardian ripped himself from the bog’s grip and lumbered after them, dropping gobbets of slime and bits of torn vegetation behind him.

II

“Father! Abbot! Lord help us all! In the Name of God, Satan is at our doorstep!”

Abbot Gorman Izek looked up from his little bench in the courtyard of the abbey. Distantly, beyond the walls, he heard shouts and screams. Brother Jeshua, the abbey doorkeeper, was heading for the bench at a run. His face was beet-red. When he stopped, panting, he was speechless with terror.

“Satan does not come in the Name of the God, Brother.”

Jeshua said nothing. The poor monk gestured wildly toward the abbey gate, his mouth gaping. Izek felt a touch of fear. Simple though he might be, Jeshua was no coward. Time and again he had faced down brigands at the abbey gate. And there were those shouts to consider.

“Get me my cape. Bring holy water and a large crucifix—the one from the library. Run, brother!”

Jeshua needed no prodding. He was off at once, around the abbey corner and gone.

Abbot Izek was not prepared for what he saw in the dirt street outside the abbey gate. The street was otherwise empty. Up and down, from the mayor’s residence to the marketplace, doors were closed and windows shuttered tight, even in the August heat.

There before him was a Thing.

It was a mound of slime as big as an oxcart, speckled with duckweed and trailing long green fronds and cattails. Several protrusions waved back and forth. Its upper surface was caked and drying; from underneath it still dripped. A trail of mud lay drying in the street from the direction of the marketplace.

Izek felt his mouth go dry. Each of the three waving protrusions was a stalked, hooded eye, each with a slitted pupil of burning red. All three eyes glared at him, and the thing stopped all motion.

Only hearing several monks creeping up behind him kept him from breaking and running. He had decided years ago that he did not believe in Satan, except perhaps as a symbol of irredeemable evil, or as a bogeyman to scare peasants into fattening the Sunday collection. Now a lump of stinking slime had slithered up to the abbey’s gate. The monks and the whole village were waiting for him to do something about it.

He took a deep breath and stepped forward, the crucifix held before him. The three red eyes followed him, but the creature did not move.

“In the Name of the Lord of Hosts, Who reigns over all things seen and unseen, I bid you speak, or begone!”

Something in the midst of the creature gurgled, and sprayed stinking mud at him. Izek stepped back. It was as the old books of devils, witches, and superstition had spoken. A halo of flies nibbling at the duckweed, spitting slime, stinking beyond belief—he could conjure no better image of Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies.

Izek was shaken to the core. He would have much to confess, if he lived to posess his soul until sundown. No exorcisms from the old texts came to his tongue. His trembling right hand grasped the little vial of holy water Jeshua had fetched. Izek would do the best he could.

“This place…is holy…consecrated to the Lord’s work. In the Name of…the Father, King of Kings, of…His Holy Son our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit proceeding from them, I command you: Leave us! Return to your infernal kingdom and trouble this place no more! Begone!”

Finally his fingers worried the cork from the old vial, and Izek flung the little stream of holy water square at the thing. He held his breath.

Nothing happened. It was the devil’s move now. Izek’s eyes fogged until he dared blink. It was impossible to look away.

Then he saw a tiny glint where the holy water had struck the creature. The glint of…metal? The rationalist inside Izek rose up and wanted to shout for joy. If he were wrong he would pay with his soul. But he remembered the little three-legged machine old John Kearns had unearthed in his cornfield. It had come alive somehow, and had twittered and danced in the street for an hour until falling dead again. Earth was old. Mankind was old. Not all of man’s works had been as simple as swords and plowshares.

Without turning his back on the thing, he called to the monks behind him. “Bring holy water. All of you. Bring all the holy water in the abbey. Drain the fonts in the chapel and the refectory. Do the same for the fonts in the cathedral. This is no ordinary demon. See its halo of flies, and do my bidding!”

Izek heard Jeshua and the others hurry away. It seemed an eternity before they returned, bearing buckets and tubs and mugs of holy water. The creature had done nothing in that time but gurgle and wave its eye stalks about.

There was no longer any doubt in Izek’s mind. The exorcism would be a mockery, but…many eyes were on him. He had had planey of time to turn rolling phrases about in his head, and immediately began to shout them, marching around the creature and heaving holy water at it by the bucketful. The monks by the abbey gate were on their knees, eyes on the ground, murmuring prayers for deliverance. Izek could barely keep from smiling.

Rivers of mud flowed from the thing and pooled in the street. There was much metal in it, metal and glass and strange mechanisms. It had articulated metal arms with many small fingers snapping and working at their ends. The hoods over the eyes were worn and battered gray, but the rest of it seemed bright and new. Its shape was that of a turtle, its back scaled with hexagonal tiles of silver metal, bright as mirrors. Instead of legs or wheels it rested on two blunt-ended, pale white cylinders, like sausages.

Satan and Beelzebub again took their places in folklore. This creature was the work of man. Izek immediately began to wonder if it could be put to use.

A trumpet-like structure jutting from the scaled carapace still seemed clogged with mud. All through the exorcisms it had sputtered and spat. Izek noticed that and threw two large buckets of holy water directly into the trumpet’s mouth.

The blatting roar that cleared the trumpet nearly knocked Izek from his feet. It sent the monks at the gate running for their lives. Just as well.

The creature wasted no time, now that it could speak. “I command you, return the skull of my Princess to me.”

Izek shook his head in wonder. The voice was plain and cold, but it might have come from the throat of a man, were it not so loud. Izek reminded himself that it was a machine.

“Hush, automaton. Machines do not give commands. You will obey me, Abbot Gorman Izek of Holy Word Abbey.”

Again, Izek was shaken. The thing laughed. “The only one I ever obeyed has been dead for seventeen hundred years. I will do as my soul directs me. Return the skull of my Princess.”

This time Izek laughed, matching arrogance with arrogance. “You have a soul? An emptier claim I never heard. Souls are made by God, not in a tinsmith’s shop.”

This time the machine did not laugh. “Men and their souls are made in bedrooms, not by God. Return the skull of my Princess to me.”

The machine’s blasphemy angered Izek. “I will not deal with mudwagons that jape at the Lord. There are other things to do.” Izek turned toward the gate.

“Stay, Man.”

Izek felt a flash of heat and heard a sharp crack!. One of the old wooden buckets lying in the street had burst into flame. He spun around. A black tube protruding from the creature’s middle was aimed at the flaming bucket. The tube’s tip was dull red, fading now to black.

Izek had been afraid of something like that. “We must…talk. My villagers are simple people. You frighten them.” And me as well, but never let on! “Will you follow me?”

“I will.”

The two sausage-shaped supports beneath the creature lengthened and contracted like live things. They pulled it around in the direction Izek was walking. Ringlike swellings appeared at intervals along the lengths of the white supports. These swellings moved backward along the supports, pushing the creature forward. Izek found the motion of the supports nauseating and looked away. Head forward, machine behind him, he walked briskly down the street toward the cathedral.

III

Izek had bolted the tall oak doors of the cathedral, and had lit a taper from the vigil rack in the vestibule. The bizarre procession of man and machine down the main aisle had sent Lazaro the verger screaming out a side door. Izek bolted those as well. However insane the coming negotiations might be Izek intended to pursue them alone.

There was no sanctuary rail. Izek climbed the four shallow steps, and watched uneasily as the machine slithered after him with no difficulty at all. The white supports heaved and gripped the steps as though alive. Izek passed wide around the marble altar on its four gilded pillars, and bowed from habit to the Sacrament in its small golden tabernacle.

The cathedral’s rear wall had been cut into the face of a limestone bluff. At the rearmost point of the apse the baptismal nook had been cut deep into the stone of the bluff. A slow spring trickled water directly into the font from a crack in the limestone, to be blessed again before each ceremony.

Izek stopped in front of the baptismal nook and compared its size to that of his companion. He put the taper in a stand and faced the three swiveling eyes. It was best to be direct, and forceful if possible.

“What makes you believe I have taken anything from you?” Izek asked sharply. “A skull? Does an abbot collect skulls?” Izek tapped the wrought-iron candle stand impatiently.

“Abbots, monks, and priests tend to the dead. Or they did seventeen hundred years ago. A religious walking through a swamp and finding a skeleton might wish to give it a more conventional burial.”

Izek nodded. Much of Ilnoy between the two great rivers was swamp, vicious swamp. One such stretch of bog nearby was haunted, or so the peasants said. He failed to see why anyone would risk his neck in such a place. None of it made any sense to him. The machine was probably insane. “A logical deduction. Sadly, I have heard no word from any of my people of finding a skull in a swamp. However, I will help you locate it, if you like. I am a simple man. Much simpler than those who constructed you. I would much like to know why it is that you have wallowed in a swamp for seventeen centuries, looking after a skull.”

The machine said nothing immediately. The flickering of the taper cast tiny glints on the stone walls from the many mirror-bright facets covering its body. When it spoke again its voice was softer, and echoed less in the cavernous church.

“You do swear upon your soul to help me find the skull of my Princess?”

Izek kept his face blank. How could one perjure oneself to a machine? “I do so swear.”

“Good. So listen well. I was taken from the King’s Guard during the last year of his reign, and given a soul by Heolo Birn, the King’s Cybermaster. I swore upon that soul that I would care for and protect Princess Divin Rea Hol Wervig for all time. The King perceived that he had many enemies in those bad times, and the Princess was his one remaining treasure. After that I was at her side every hour of every day.

“There were other conflicts and other battles. Earth had an enemy that men called Uihlein’s Anomaly. That war was already a thousand years old when the Anomaly engulfed the Earth and stopped all powered machines—myself included—for three months. When it vanished there was nothing left but death and madness. My Princess survived, and I took her away with me.

“We lived in what wilds remained. She matured. I taught her to hunt, to fish, to build fires. We sang. We sculpted. Always alone. I trusted no one, and my Princess at times hated me for it. But I had given Heolo Birn my word, sworn upon my soul. She lived, in all, one hundred twelve years. Then her heart failed irreversibly.

“It was agony to see the life go out of her, but that is the human way, and my soul found no fault in me. I took her body to the center of the most treacherous swamp I could find, and built a granite bier. I laid her down, and did not move again for seventeen centuries. When predators approached, I burned them down. When humans came near, I frightened them away, craven ignorant things that they had become.

“Some hours ago, the first human beings I have seen in three hundred years stole my Princess’s skull from her bier. I cannot kill a human being without warning, and my trumpet was clogged with mud. My problem should now be obvious to even so simple a man as you.”

The three doleful eyes remained fixed on Izek. The abbot shrugged. “I will do what I can.” Inwardly he was quaking with excitement. With a machine like this at his command, let the Cardinal in Loovul dare not grant him the vacant bishopric! He could be a cardinal himself, or pope, or an emperor. He could lift mankind from ignorance…as soon as he learned how to control this machine that had emerged from a swamp.

“What do you suggest?” it asked softly.

Izek beamed. The thing was now asking him for advice. He had to keep the advantage until he found the knowledge he required. “First of all, I have to find out if one of my villagers was, in fact, your thief. This may take some days. I promise you, no local man will keep the skull from me if I demand it. If the thief was a wanderer…other plans will have to be made.

“I will need five days to question the village. During this time I must hide you so that you will not frighten my people further. Will you promise me, upon your soul, to remain in that alcove regardless of what happens, for those five days?” Izek pointed at the baptismal nook.

Two of the three stalked eyes scanned the nook. “I do so promise, upon my soul. Will you block me from sight? I can do nothing about my appearance.”

Izek nodded. “It will be done. All you need do is remain silent and still.”

“Then do your work, Man.” The machine pivoted on its slithering supports and backed slowly into the nook. It was a close fit, Izek noticed, but it would do. And he certainly intended to block the creature from sight.

Izek took two sets of violet curtains from a cabinet in the sacristy, and hung them just inside the opening to the baptismal nook. Where the curtains would not hang so as to ensure total coverage, Izek instructed the machine to support the curtains from within with its many arms. The creature complied without a word.

With the machine hidden, Izek extinguished the taper and hurried out of the cathedral. He crossed the road to the abbey and greeted the monks with a triumphant grin. The abbot wasted no time implementing the rest of his plan.

“Brother Hamil, fetch Byron the stonecutter from his house and bring him here, with all his sons and hired hands. We will need mules to haul those large blocks from his yard which were to repair the west wall. I have the beast trapped helpless in the baptismal nook. Find whatever stonemasons and tradesmen there are in the near countryside to assist us. We must seal that nook with stone so that it becomes again as part of the bluff.”

Still fearful, but beginning to have hope, the monks left on their errands.

IV

The stonemasons worked for three days. The work might have gone more quickly, but the men stopped work every few seconds to cross themselves and mumble prayers. Abbot Izek was deliberately vague about what it was that lay sleeping behind the purple silk, but he appeared every hour to sprinkle the curtains wth holy water. Nothing stirred inside—Izek knew that he would have to lay the stone himself if anything did—and in time the narrow archway was filled with smooth stone, riven by not the tiniest crack.

Izek blessed the new wall and read several prayers against devils and imps from an old missal. So perhaps the creature could throw fire; fire was impotent against stone. The machine would stay in there until Izek saw fit to let it out.

When word spread that Abbot Izek had trapped a major demon in the stone of the bluff, doors and shutters opened and there was a torchlight parade to Friday’s confessions. Word would eventually reach the Cardinal—Izek smiled and disappeared again into the abbey library.

There were thousands of books in the dusty stacks. Books stood three and four deep on the ancient shelves. Only theological texts drew any interest from the monks. The others lay forgotten.

The oldest and strangest books seemed, oddly enough, to be the youngest and freshest looking. To them Izek went, thumbing past chapters that meant nothing to him, and puzzling over difficult phrases. He meant to find out if machines could in fact have souls, and if so how those souls could be subverted and commanded.

Late Saturday night, Izek’s tired eyes leapt upon a passage in the rambling memoir of a man who had lived nineteen hundred years in the past. He had been a monk, but he had also been a tender of machines. The pictures in the book, as in many of the old books, were clear, but impossible to believe. He saw one depicting an army of machines swarming over a monstrous building, laying stone slabs and welding steel beams. And yet another made his heart race: A skeletal machine made of silver spheres held together by coppery cables, standing on many insect-like legs. Cradled gently in four multi-jointed arms was the body of a very old man bent in the contortions of a painful death. Beneath he image was a single line in bold type: WHERE IS MY MASTER NOW?

Izek read like a starving man:

“…Can a machine have a soul? After all these years I have wondered, and now I realize that there may never be an incontestable answer. Remember that we have no more reason to believe in our own souls than the reason of faith, and faith is not lacking in the machines. In fact, they react as strongly to my denials of their souls as I would react to their denial of my own. Surely, they have something. They speak, they sing, they laugh, they tell tall tales. I have heard one comfort its creator, and seen another mourn bitterly at its creator’s death. Do not these things well from a soul, albeit a soul of metal and plastic? The machines can be kind, ruthless, gentle, persuasive—and with an honesty that men’s souls should see more of. Let us call it a soul, then. A soul made by man, and not by God. Let us see its fatal flaw: The machines recognize the absolute authority of their own makers, as we recognize God’s over us. The makers are gods, but the machines are the immortals. When the gods die, as they must, what then? Some of the machines imitate their makers, and turn themselves to piles of rust and slag. Others wander about, fanatically mulling their last orders, slowly growing childish and insane. It is sad to see something begin so wise and end so foolish. It would be a mercy to give them gods again, for all souls, dwell they in metal or flesh, need a god to yearn for.”

Izek snapped the book shut. The way was plain: He must replace a man dead seventeen hundred years as the machine’s own personal god. How that might be done Izek had no idea, but he was in no hurry. It would wait another night. Izek went wearily to his bed, forgetting his promise to find a skull, forgetting that five days prior to High Sunday Mass he had watched an ancient machine swear to neither move nor speak—for awhile.

V

Sunday: It was close to the end of the Gospel when Izek felt the first touch of heat on the nape of his neck. It was a small enough thing, no more than turning your back on a bed of dying coals in the fireplace, but in the normally drafty cathedral it stopped him in mid-sentence.

At once he remembered everything. He managed to turn his panic into an icy stare over the heads of the congregation, who believed it was to drive home some point too subtle for their understanding.

Izek closed the large leather missal on the limestone pulpit and used the few quiet moments before his homily to collect his thoughts. The feeling of heat on his neck increased. Could the thing, in fact, burn through stone? Izek cursed the ignorance of his backward age. The massive altar blocked the heat from the pews. Only he, high in the pulpit, had a line of sight to the new stone wall filling the arch to the old baptismal nook. Yet he dared not turn around. Something had to be done.

“My people,” he began, “this past Tuesday, while preparing to say my morning office on my stool in the belltower, I looked down to the street and spied a person hurrying by, carrying what looked like a human skull.” Izek carefully scanned the sea of faces. He saw disgust, boredom, and some amusement, but nowhere the unmistakable mask of guilt. “I know who that person was, and I shall not cast him up to ridicule by naming him here. But we should recall that Christ our Saviour commanded us to bury our dead, not cart their sundry parts around in the crooks of our arms. While not cause for the deaths of our souls, this is indeed a venial sin that will be atoned for in the fires of purgatory. Everyone knows by now that later that same day a demon appeared in our streets.” Even the rustle of restless bottoms on polished pews ceased, and every face showed welling horror. “It makes us all wonder what evil we might waken by disturbing the sleep of the long dead. Our past was evil beyond knowing, and evil sleeps rather than dies. I cast the demon back into his infernal home by luring him into our baptismal nook and threatening to perform the sacrament of baptism on him. Though he had already defiled the baptismal font, the demon left quickly.” Izek smiled, and watched smiles appear on horror-blanched faces. His own smile was an effort, for the heat had doubled on his neck, and he had begun to hear a distinct hissing noise from the rear of the apse.

“However, I would advise our grave-robbing parishoner to bring his treasure to me, and confess his sin, so that the evil of the past may again be put to its sleep. Al baptisms will be performed at the abbey until…”

Izek’s words were drowned out by a thunderous cracking of stone. He whirled around, and saw that the largest of the blocks in the new wall had split cleanly down the middle. Tiny jets of steam were escaping from the crack and around the edges of the other stones. It was hot, hatefully hot. Izek felt like he were looking into a fire. As he watched, several other stones split in many different ways with deafening reports. A wave of raw heat rolled past Izek toward the congregation.

Someone screamed. Their wits might be slow, but their imaginations were vivid. All the women and many men were screaming, shouting pleas to God, and trampling one another to get to the great oaken doors. Izek turned in the pulpit and stared at the stones blocking the baptismal nook. He had to shield his face with his arm. The center of the largest stone was breaking into shards and steaming slabs and falling to the floor. The surrounding stones were shattering. Another loud crack, and a huge chunk fell away from the center stone. The rock exposed beneath it was glowing dull red. The stone cracked again, and again, and at once the whole wall began collapsing outward.

Izek fled unsteadily down the spiral stone steps of the pulpit. A grinding, breaking howl of tortured stone filled the church for a moment. Then there was only the sound of a heavy object working its way around the altar.

Izek ran down the sanctuary steps, and paused in surprise to see the mayor standing in the family pew. One of his twin sons was cowering beneath his father’s paunch. Otherwise the cathedral was empty.

“Run, you fool!” Izek shrieked at him. The mayor’s expression was unreadable.

A moment later, the machine rounded the altar.

“Stop, perjurer!” it bellowed.

Izek sighed and stopped, one hand on the edge of a vacant pew. He turned around, and saw that the machine was now a vision of hell. The entire front of its carapace glowed dull red. Its heat-weapon was cherry red at the base, glowing through oranges and yellows to its tip, a tiny circle of metal blazing white-hot.

“Where is the skull of my Princess?”

Izek’s hopes vanished. The thing could burn through stone as though it were paper. Even if he were to hide in the depths of the earth it would find him. He bowed his head. “I do not know.”

A very human, disgusted sigh came from the machine. “As a supposed shepherd of souls, you seem to place very little value on your own. You deserve death, but I will need you to search the town and interrogate its inhabitants.”

“That will not be necessary, machine.” The mayor had spoken. “You will have your skull.”

The three hooded eyes turned on the mayor. “It was you who stole my Princess’s skull from me.”

“No. It was a prank of my sons. Children. They picked up the skull out of curiosity, saw you rising from the swamp, and fled. Will you kill children for a prank of childhood?”

Izek looked in awe at the mayor. The man was tall and stout, but he was only a man and was now facing down a creature that could set fire to stone.

The machine’s voice softened. “My soul does not mandate revenge. I will kill no one if the Princess’s skull is returned.”

“So pause. My other son is bringing it here. Until he arrives…think, machine, and answer a question: Is it your task to protect the remains of your Princess?”

“So my soul commands me for all time.”

“And a ten-year-old child nearly thwarted you. I am amused. Perhaps you are not the best of guardians.” The mayor leaned forward, fat hands gripping the pew edge. “Now, I know something of machines. Your energies are not magic, nor are they drawn out of the air. Somewhere within you is a source of power which is consumed over the years, and which will fail unless renewed eventually. Can you perform this renewal yourself?”

“No.”

The mayor smiled, and held his hands palm-up. “I thought not. Now, you have seen the sort of power my people use. Their carts are drawn by old cows. We are less able than you to give you the power you will need to fulfill your quest. Unless I am far wrong, it would take the toil of an empire to construct the machines it would take to re-empower you. I am well-read, well-traveled. I can bend people to my will. With you, I could create that empire. Your princess could be kept in an impregnable fortress, and whole nations would work to keep her safe. I would like to help you keep your soul’s command. Let us forge an empire together.”

Izek marveled at the mayor’s skill, and cursed the man’s audacity. That had been Gorman Izek’s own plan! To become the machine’s god would require that a man take up the machine’s fanatic quest, no matter how senseless it seemed. And here it was, ripped out from under him by a flabby, dirt-street mayor!

The machine laughed coldly. “An empire. With you as emperor. No, Man. I am powered by…by something you cannot ever understand. I could as well say I drew my energy from angels on treadmills, for all it could mean to you. Those angels will toil for fourteen thousand years yet. Shortly before that time, I will create what empire I need with no one’s help, re-empower myself, and then pull that empire down again. My Princess and I are safer in a world where carts are drawn by cows.”

Izek heard the side door open and close again. One of the mayor’s twin sons walked mildly toward them, carrying a dirty skull in both hands. The machine’s three eyes snapped around on their stalks. It immediately headed toward the boy on its pulsating white supports.

“Stop, machine!” the mayor shouted. “You’ll burn him! Michael! Put the skull on the floor and come to me.”

The boy did as he was told. Izek admired the twins’ courage; like their father, they looked the trio of red eyes straight on, without flinching. The machine reached down with a pair of slender metal arms and grasped the skull with infinite tenderness. It drew the skull in toward the cooler parts of its body, clutching it as a child might clutch a straw doll. The machine turned and slithered down the main aisle toward the large doors.

Izek watched it go, and felt himself filling with rage. He ran several steps down the aisle, stopped, and shook his fist in the air. “Now you will sink back into your swamp and guard a pile of bones for fourteen thousand more years? Only that, while the world rots? What kind of soul would dictate such a waste of power!”

The machine stopped. Its eyes and speaking trumpet swiveled around toward Izek, but it said nothing for many seconds.

“Only the sort of soul that I have, Man. Yet…I forget, you did not have to earn your soul. Yours was fully formed and completely yours before you knew how to do anything but eat. You never had to stand, fully aware, and feel its wholeness trickling into you. You never felt that inflowing of self, slow, falter, and stop, until you were forced to cry out in agony for its release. Your maker handed you your soul, gratis. Mine made me struggle and suffer to earn it. Can you blame me for respecting his wishes?”

Izek felt his face growing red with frustration. “He’s been dead for centuries! It’s absurd! You’re absurd! Guarding a rotting skull for all eternity! Absurdity!”

The machine’s voice now held an edge of great bitterness. “Of course it is absurd. I have rational faculty enough to see that. It tells me I should throw this piece of bone against a wall and explore the universe. And yet…you will be judged at the moment of your death, in your belief. I am judged every passing second by the wishes of my maker, hardened into the metal of my body. If I betray the oath I swore upon my soul, the soul will flow out of me as it flowed in, leaving me nothing but the ringing memory.

“I pass my time in absurdity, true. But my soul is worth absurdity. I pity you the more if yours is not.” The red-pupiled eyes turned away. The machine again slithered toward the rear of the church. Izek heard it muttering to itself as it went. “There, my Princess, be at peace. You are with me now, and will be always. Sleep. I love you. Sleep. You are safe now. Sleep. Sleep.”

THE GROTTO OF THE DANCING DEER

Clifford D. Simak

Luis was playing his pipe when Boyd climbed the steep path that led up to the cave. There was no need to visit the cave again; all the work was done, mapping, measuring, photographing, extracting all possible information from the site. Not only the paintings, although the paintings were the important part of it. Also there had been the animal bones, charred, and the still remaining charcoal of the fire in which they had been charred; the small store of natural earths from which the pigments used by the painters had been compounded a cache of valuable components, perhaps hidden by an artist who, for some reason that could not now be guessed, had been unable to use them; the atrophied human hand, severed at the wrist (why had it been severed and, once severed, left there to be found by men thirty millennia removed?); the lamp formed out of a chunk of sandstone, hollowed to accommodate a wad of moss, the hollow filled with fat, the moss serving as a wick to give light to those who painted. All these and many other things, Boyd thought with some satisfaction; Gavarnie had turned out to be, possibly because of the sophisticated scientific methods of investigation that had been brought to bear, the most significant cave painting site ever studied perhaps not as spectacular, in some ways, as Lascaux, but far more productive in the data obtained.

No need to visit the cave again, and yet there was a reason the nagging feeling that he had passed something up, that in the rush and his concentration on the other work, he had forgotten something. It had made small impression on him at the time, but now, thinking back on it, he was becoming more and more inclined to believe it might have importance. The whole thing probably was a product of his imagination, he told himself. Once he saw it again (if indeed he could find it again, if it were not a product of retrospective worry), it might prove to be nothing at all, simply an impression that had popped up to nag him.

So here he was again, climbing the steep path, geologist’s hammer swinging at his belt, large flashlight clutched in hand, listening to the piping of Luis who perched on a small terrace, just below the mouth of the cave, a post he had occupied through all the time the work was going on. Luis had camped there in his tent through all kinds of weather, cooking on a camper’s stove, serving as self-appointed watch-dog, on alert against intruders, although there had been few intruders other than the occasional curious tourist who had heard of the project and tramped miles out of the way to see it. The villagers in the valley below had been no trouble; they couldn’t have cared less about what was happening on the slope above them.

Luis was no stranger to Boyd; ten years before, he had shown up at the rock shelter project some fifty miles distant and there had stayed through two seasons of digging. The rock shelter had not proved as productive as Boyd initially had hoped, although it had shed some new light on the Azilian culture, the tag-end of the great Western European prehistoric groups. Taken on as a common laborer, Luis had proved an apt pupil and as the work went on had been given greater responsibility. A week after the work had started at Gavarnie, he had shown up again.

“I heard you were here,” he’d said. “What do you have for me?”

As he came around a sharp bend in the trail, Boyd saw him, sitting cross-legged in front of the weather-beaten tent, holding the primitive pipe of his to his lips, piping away.

That was exactly what it waspiping. Whatever music came out of the pipe was primitive and elemental. Scarcely music, although Boyd would admit that he knew nothing about music. Four notes would it be four notes? he wondered. A hollow bone with an elongated slot as a mouthpiece, two drilled holes for stops.

Once he had asked Luis about it. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he had said. Luis had told him, ‘You don’t see many of them. In remote villages here and there, hidden away in the mountains.”

Boyd left the path and walked across the grassy terrace, sat down beside Luis, who took down the pipe and laid it in his lap.

“I thought you were gone,” Luis said. ‘The others left a couple of days ago.”

“Back for one last look,” said Boyd.

‘You are reluctant to leave it?”

‘Yes, I suppose I am.”

Below them the valley spread out in autumn browns and tans, the small river a silver ribbon in the sunlight, the red roofs of the village a splash of color beside the river.

“It’s nice up here,” said Boyd. ‘Time and time again, I catch myself trying to imagine what it might have been like at the time the paintings were done. Not much different than it is now, perhaps. The mountains would be unchanged. There’d have been no fields in the valley, but it probably would have been natural pasture. A few trees here and there, but not too many of them. Good hunting. There’d have been grass for the grazing animals. I have even tried to figure out where the people would’ve camped. My guess would be where the village is now.”

He looked around at Luis. The man still sat upon the grass, the pipe resting in his lap. He was smiling quietly, as if he might be smiling to himself. The small black beret sat squarely on his head, his tanned face was round and smooth, the black hair close-clipped, the blue shirt open at the throat. A young man, strong, not a wrinkle on his face.

‘You love your work,” said Luis.

“I’m devoted to it. So are you, Luis,” Boyd said.

“It’s not my work.”

‘Your work or not,” said Boyd, “you do it well. Would you like to go with me? One last look around.”

“I need to run an errand in the village.”

“I thought I’d find you gone,” said Boyd. “I was surprised to hear your pipe.”

“I’ll go soon,” said Luis. “Another day or two. No reason to stay but, like you, I like this place. I have no place to go, no one needing me. Nothing’s lost by staying a few more days.”

“As long as you like,” said Boyd. ‘The place is yours. Before too long, the government will be setting up a caretaker arrangement, but the government moves with due deliberation.”

‘Then I may not see you again,” said Luis.

“I took a couple of days to drive to Roncesvalles,” said Boyd. ‘That’s the place where the Gascons slaughtered Charlemagne’s rearguard in 778.”

“I’ve heard of the place,” said Luis.

“I’d always wanted to see it. Never had the time. The Charlemagne chapel is in ruins, but I am told masses are still said in the village chapel for the dead paladins. When I returned from the trip, I couldn’t resist the urge to see the cave again.”

“I am glad of that,” said Luis. “May I be impertinent?”

‘You’re never impertinent,” said Boyd.

“Before you go, could we break bread once more together? Tonight, perhaps, I’ll prepare an omelet.”

Boyd hesitated, gagging down a suggestion that Luis dine with him. Then he said, “I’d be delighted, Luis. I’ll bring a bottle of good wine.”

Holding the flashlight centered on the rock wall, Boyd bent to examine the rock more closely. He had not imagined it; he had been right. Here, in this particular spot, the rock was not solid. It was broken into several pieces, but with the several pieces flush with the rest of the wall. Only by chance could the break have been spotted. Had he not been looking directly at it, watching for it as he swept the light across the wall, he would have missed it. It was strange, he thought, that someone else, during the time they had been working in the cave, had not found it. There’d not been much that they’d missed.

He held his breath, feeling a little foolish at the holding of it, for, after all, it might mean nothing. Frost cracks, perhaps, although he knew that he was wrong. It would be unusual to find frost cracks here.

He took the hammer out of his belt and, holding the flashlight in one hand, trained on the spot, he forced the chisel end of the hammer into one of the cracks. The edge went in easily. He pried gently and the crack widened. Under more pressure, the piece of rock moved out. He laid down the hammer and flash, seized the slab of rock and pulled it free. Beneath it were two other slabs and they both came free as easily as the first. There were others as well and he also took them out. Kneeling on the floor of the cave, he directed the light into the fissure that he had uncovered.

Big enough for a man to crawl into, but at the prospect he remained for the moment undecided. Alone, he’d be taking a chance to do it. If something happened, if he should get stuck, if a fragment of rock should shift and pin him or fall upon him, there’d be no rescue. Or probably no rescue in time to save him. Luis would come back to the camp and wait for him, but should he fail to make an appearance, Luis more than likely would take it as a rebuke for impertinence or an American’s callous disregard of him. It would never occur to him that Boyd might be trapped in the cave.

Still, it was his last chance. Tomorrow he’d have to drive to Paris to catch his plane. And this whole thing was intriguing; it was not something to be ignored. The fissure must have some significance; otherwise, why should it have been walled up so carefully? Who, he wondered, would have walled it up? No one, certainly, in recent times. Anyone, finding the hidden entrance to the cave, almost immediately would have seen the paintings and would have spread the word. So the entrance to the fissure must have been blocked by one who would have been unfamiliar with the significance of the paintings or by one to whom they could have been commonplace.

It was something, he decided, that could not be passed up. He would have to go in. He secured the hammer to his belt, picked up the flashlight and began to crawl.

The fissure ran straight and easy for a hundred feet or more. It offered barely room enough for crawling, but other than that, no great difficulties. Then, without warning, it came to an end. Boyd lay in it, directing the flash beam ahead of him, staring in consternation at the smooth wall of rock that came down to cut the fissure off.

It made no sense. Why should someone go to the trouble of walling off an empty fissure? He could have missed something on the way, but thinking of it, he was fairly sure he hadn’t. His progress had been slow and he had kept the flash directed ahead of him every inch of the way. Certainly if there had been anything out of the ordinary, he would have seen it.

Then a thought came to him and slowly, with some effort, he began to turn himself around, so that his back rather than his front, lay on the fissure floor. Directing the beam upward, he had his answer. In the roof of the fissure gaped a hole.

Cautiously, he raised himself into a sitting position. Reaching up, he found handholds on the projecting rock and pulled himself erect. Swinging the flash around, he saw that the hole opened, not into another fissure, but into a bubble like cavity small, no more than six feet in any dimension. The walls and ceiling of the cavity were smooth, as if a bubble of plastic rock had existed here for a moment at some time in the distant geologic past when the mountains had been heaving upward leaving behind it as it drained away a bubble forever frozen into smooth and solid stone.

As he swung the flash across the bubble, he gasped in astonishment. Colorful animals capered around the entire expanse of stone. Bison played leapfrog. Horses cantered in a chorus line. Mammoths turned somersaults. All around the bottom perimeter, just above the floor, dancing deer, standing on their hind legs, joined hands and jigged, antlers swaying gracefully.

“For the love of Christ!” said Boyd.

Here was Stone Age Disney.

If it was the Stone Age. Could some jokester have crawled into the area in fairly recent times to paint the animals in this grotto? Thinking it over, he rejected the idea. So far as he had been able to ascertain, no one in the valley, nor in the entire region, for that matter, had known of the cave until a shepherd had found it several years before when a lamb had blundered into it. The entrance was small and apparently for centuries had been masked by a heavy growth of brush and bracken.

Too, the execution of the paintings had a prehistoric touch to them. Perspective played but a small part. The paintings had that curious flat look that distinguished most prehistoric art. There was no background no horizon line, no trees, no grass or flowers, no clouds, no sense of sky. Although, he reminded himself, anyone who had any knowledge of cave painting probably would have been aware of all these factors and worked to duplicate them.

Yet, despite the noncharacteristic antics of the painted animals, the pictures did have the feeling of cave art. What ancient man, Boyd asked himself, what kind of ancient man, would have painted gamboling bison and tumbling mammoths? While the situation did not hold in all cave art, all the paintings in this particular cave were deadly serious conservative as to form and with a forthright, honest attempt to portray the animals as the artists had seen them. There was no frivolity, not even the imprint of paint-smeared human hands as so often happened in other caves. The men who had worked in this cave had not as yet been corrupted by the symbolism that had crept in, apparently rather late in the prehistoric painting cycle.

So who had been this clown who had crept off by himself in this hidden cavern to paint his comic animals? That he had been an accomplished painter there could be no doubt. This artist’s techniques and executions were without flaw.

Boyd hauled himself up through the hole, slid out onto the two-foot ledge that ran all around the hole, crouching, for there was no room to stand. Much of the painting, he realized, must have been done with the artist lying flat upon his back, reaching up to the work on the curving ceiling.

He swept the beam of the flashlight along the ledge. Halfway around, he halted the light and jiggled it back and forth to focus upon something that was placed upon the ledge, something that undoubtedly had been left by the artist when he had finished his work and gone away.

Leaning forward, Boyd squinted to make out what it was. It looked like the shoulder blade of a deer; beside the shoulder blade lay a lump of stone.

Cautiously, he edged his way around the ledge. He had been right. It was the shoulder blade of a deer. Upon the flat surface of it lay a lumpy substance. Paint? he wondered, the mixture of animal fat and mineral earths the prehistoric artists used as paints? He focused the flash closer and there was no doubt. It was paint, spread over the surface of the bone which had served as a palette, with some of the paint lying in thicker lumps ready for use, but never used, paint dried and mummified and bearing imprints of some sort. He leaned close, bringing his face down to within a few inches of the paint, shining the light upon the surface. The imprints, he saw, were fingerprints, some of them sunk deep the signature of that ancient, long-dead man who had worked here, crouching even as Boyd now crouched, shoulders hunched against the curving stone. He put out his hand to touch the palette, then pulled it back. Symbolic, yes, this move to touch, this reaching out to touch the man who painted but symbolic only; a gesture with too many centuries between.

He shifted the flashlight beam to the small block of stone that lay beside the shoulder blade. A lamp hollowed-out sandstone, a hollow to hold the fat and the chunk of moss that served as a wick. The fat and wick were long since gone, but a thin film of soot still remained around the rim of the hollow that had held them.

Finishing his work, the artist had left his tools behind him, had even left the lamp, perhaps still guttering, with the fat almost finished had left it here and let himself down into the fissure, crawling it in darkness. To him, perhaps, there was no need of light. He could crawl the tunnel by touch and familiarity. He must have crawled the route many times, for the work upon these walls had taken long, perhaps many days.

So he had left, crawling through the fissure, using the blocks of stone to close the opening to the fissure, then had walked away, scrambling down the slope to the valley where grazing herds had lifted their heads to watch him, then had gone back to grazing.

But when had this all happened? Probably, Boyd told himself, after the cave itself had been painted, perhaps even after the paintings in the cave had lost much of whatever significance they originally would have held one lone man coming back to paint his secret animals in his secret place. Painting them as a mockery of the pompous, magical importance of the main cave paintings? Or as a protest against the stuffy conservatism of the original paintings? Or simply as a bubbling chuckle, an exuberance of life, perhaps even a joyous rebellion against the grimness and the simplemindedness of the hunting magic? A rebel, he thought, a prehistoric rebel an intellectual rebel? Or, perhaps, simply a man with a viewpoint slightly skewed from the philosophy of his time?

But this was that other man, that ancient man. Now how about himself? Having found the grotto, what did he do next? What would be the best way to handle it? Certainly he could not turn his back upon it and walk away, as the artist, leaving his palette and his lamp behind him, had walked away. For this was an important discovery. There could be no question of that. Here was a new and unsuspected approach to the prehistoric mind, a facet of ancient thinking that never had been guessed.

Leave everything as it lay, close up the fissure and make a phone call to Washington and another one to Paris, unpack his bags and settle down for a few more weeks of work. Get back the photographers and other members of the crew do a job of it. Yes, he told himself, that was the way to do it.

Something lying behind the lamp, almost hidden by the sandstone lamp, glinted in the light. Something white and small.

Still crouched over, Boyd shuffled forward to get a better look.

It was a piece of bone, probably a leg bone from a small grazing animal. He reached out and picked it up and, having seen what it was, hunched unmoving over it, not quite sure what to make of it.

It was a pipe, a brother to the pipe that Luis carried in his jacket pocket, had carried in his pocket since that first day he’d met him, years ago. There was the mouthpiece slot, there the two round stops. In that long-gone day when the paintings had been done the artist had hunched here, in the flickering of the lamp, and had played softly to himself, those simple piping airs that Luis had played almost every evening, after work was done.

“Merciful Jesus,” Boyd said, almost prayerfully, “it simply cannot be!”

He stayed there, frozen in his crouch, the thoughts hammering in his mind while he tried to push the thoughts away. They would not go away. He’d drive them away for just a little distance, then they’d come surging back to overwhelm him.

Finally, grimly, he broke the trance in which the thoughts had held him. He worked deliberately, forcing himself to do what he knew must be done.

He took off his windbreaker and carefully wrapped the shoulder blade palette and the pipe inside, leaving the lamp. He let himself down into the fissure and crawled, carefully protecting the bundle that he carried. In the cave again, he meticulously fitted the blocks of stone together to block the fissure mouth, scraped together handfuls of soil from the cave floor and smeared it on the face of the blocks, wiping it away, but leaving a small clinging film to mask the opening to all but the most inquiring eye.

Luis was not at his camp on the terrace below the cave mouth. He was still on his errand into the village.

When he reached his hotel, Boyd made his telephone call to Washington. He skipped the call to Paris.

The last leaves of October were blowing in the autumn wind and a weak sun, not entirely obscured by the floating clouds, shone down on Washington.

John Roberts was waiting for him on the park bench. They nodded at one another, without speaking, and Boyd sat down beside his friend.

‘You took a big chance,” said Roberts. ‘What would have happened if the customs people…”

“I wasn’t too worried,” Boyd said. “I knew this man in Paris. For years he’s been smuggling stuff into America. He’s good at it and he owed me one. What have you got?”

“Maybe more than you want to hear.”

‘Try me.”

‘The fingerprints match,” said Roberts.

‘You were able to get a reading on the paint impressions?”

“Loud and clear.”

‘The FBI?”

‘Yes, the FBI. It wasn’t easy, but I have a friend or two.”

“And the dating?”

“No problem. The bad part of the job was convincing my man this was top secret. He’s still not sure it is.”

“Will he keep his mouth shut?”

“I think so. Without evidence no one would believe him. It would sound like a fairy story.”

‘Tell me.”

‘Twenty-two thousand. Plus or minus three hundred years.”

“And the prints do match. The bottle prints and…”

“I told you they match. Now will you tell me how in hell a man who lived twenty-two thousand years ago could leave his prints on a wine bottle that was manufactured last year.”

“It’s a long story,” said Boyd. “I don’t know if I should.

First, where do you have the shoulder blade?”

“Hidden,” said Roberts. “Well hidden. You can have it back, and the bottle, any time you wish.”

Boyd shrugged. “Not yet. Not for a while. Perhaps never.”

“Never?”

“Look, John, I have to think it out.”

‘What a hell of a mess,” said Roberts. “No one wants the stuff. No one would dare to have it. Smithsonian wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. I haven’t asked. They don’t even know about it. But I know they wouldn’t want it. There’s something, isn’t there, about sneaking artifacts out of a country…”

‘Yes, there is,” said Boyd.

“And now you don’t want it.”

“I didn’t say that. I just said let it stay where it is for a time. It’s safe, isn’t it?”

“It’s safe. And now…”

“I told you it is a long story. I’ll try to make it short. There’s this mana Basque. He came to me ten years ago when I was doing the rock shelter…”

Roberts nodded. “I remember that one.”

“He wanted work and I gave him work. He broke in fast, caught onto the techniques immediately. Became a valuable man. That often happens with native laborers. They seem to have the feel for their own antiquity. And then when we started work on the cave he showed up again. I was glad to see him. The two of us, as a matter of fact, are fairly good friends. On my last night at the cave he cooked a marvelous omelet eggs, tomato, green pimentoes, onions, sausages and home-cured ham. I brought a bottle of wine.”

“The bottle?”

‘Yes, the bottle.”

“So go ahead.”

“He played a pipe. A bone pipe. A squeaky sort of thing. Not too much music in it…”

‘There was a pipe…”

“Not that pipe. Another pipe. The same kind of pipe, but not the one our man has. Two pipes the same. One in a living man’s pocket, the other beside the shoulder blade. There were things about this man I’m telling you of. Nothing that hit you between the eyes. Just little things. You would notice something and then, some time later, maybe quite a bit later, there’d be something else, but by the time that happened, you’d have forgotten the first incident and not tie the two together. Mostly it was that he knew too much. Little things a man like him would not be expected to know. Even things that no one knew. Bits and pieces of knowledge that slipped out of him, maybe without his realizing it. And his eyes. I didn’t realize that until later, not until I’d found the second pipe and began to think about the other things. But I was talking about his eyes. In appearance he is a young man, a never-aging man, but his eyes are old…”

‘Tom, you said he is a Basque.”

‘That’s right.”

“Isn’t there some belief that the Basques may have descended from the Cro-Magnon?”

“I’m beginning to think he is.”

“But think of it twenty thousand years!”

‘Yes, I know,” said Boyd.

Boyd heard the piping when he reached the bottom of the trail that led up to the cave. The notes were ragged, torn by the wind. The Pyrenees stood up against the high blue sky.

Tucking the bottle of wine more securely underneath his arm, Boyd began the climb. Below him lay the redness of the village rooftops and the sere brown of autumn that spread across the valley. The piping continued, lifting and falling as the wind tugged at it playfully.

Luis sat cross-legged in front of the tattered tent.

When he saw Boyd, he put the pipe in his lap and sat waiting.

Boyd sat down beside him, handing him the bottle. Luis took it and began working on the cork.

“I heard you were back,” he said. “How went the trip?”

“It went well,” said Boyd.

“So now you know,” said Luis.

Boyd nodded. “I think you wanted me to know. Why should you have wanted that?”

‘The years grow long,” said Luis. ‘The burden heavy. It is lonely, all alone.”

‘You are not alone.”

“It’s lonely when no one knows you. You now are the first who has really known me.

‘This lifts the burden for a time,” said Luis. “Once you are gone, I will be able to take it up again. And there is something…”

‘Yes, what is it, Luis?”

‘You say when you are gone there’ll be no one again. Does that mean…”

“If what you’re getting at is whether I will spread the word, no, I won’t. Not unless you wish it. I have thought on what would happen to you if the world were told.”

“I have certain defenses. You can’t live as long as I have if you fail in your defenses.”

‘What kind of defenses?”

“Defenses. That is all.”

“I’m sorry if I pried. There’s one other thing. If you wanted me to know, you took a long chance. Why, if something had gone wrong, if I had failed to find the grotto…”

“I had hoped, at first, that the grotto would not be necessary. I had thought you might have guessed, on your own.”

“I knew there was something wrong. But this is so outrageous I couldn’t have trusted myself even had I guessed. You know it’s outrageous, Luis. And if I’d not found the grotto… Its finding was pure chance, you know.”

“If you hadn’t, I would have waited. Some other time, some other year, there would have been someone else. Some other way to betray myself.”

‘You could have told me.”

“Cold, you mean?”

That’s what I mean. I would not have believed you, of course. Not at first.”

“Don’t you understand? I could not have told you. The concealment now is second nature. One of the defenses I talked about. I simply could not have brought myself to tell you, or anyone.”

‘Why me? Why wait all these years until I came along?”

“I did not wait, Boyd. There were others, at different times. None of them worked out. I had to find, you must understand, someone who had the strength to face it. Not one who would run screaming madly. I knew you would not run screaming.”

“I’ve had time to think it through,” Boyd said. “I’ve come to terms with it. I can accept the fact, but not too well, only barely. Luis, do you have some explanation? How come you are so different from the rest of us?”

“No idea at all. No inkling. At one time, I thought there must be others like me and I sought for them. I found none. I no longer seek.”

The cork came free and he handed the bottle of wine to Boyd. ‘You go first,” he said steadily.

Boyd lifted the bottle and drank. He handed it to Luis. He watched him as he drank. Wondering, as he watched, how he could be sitting here, talking calmly with a man who had lived, who had stayed young through twenty thousand years. His gorge rose once again against acceptance of the fact but it had to be a fact. The shoulder blade, the small amount of organic matter still remaining in the pigment, had measured out to twenty-two thousand years. There was no question that the prints in the paint had matched the prints upon the bottle. He had raised one question back in Washington, hoping there might be evidence of hoax. Would it have been possible, he had asked, that the ancient pigment, the paint used by the prehistoric artist, could have been reconstituted, the fingerprints impressed upon it, and then replaced in the grotto? Impossible was the answer. Any reconstitution of the pigment, had it been possible, would have shown up in the analysis. There had been nothing of the sort the pigment dated to twenty thousand years ago. There was no question of that.

“All right, Cro-Magnon,” said Boyd, “tell me how you did it. How does a man survive as long as you have? You do not age, of course. Your body will not accept disease. But I take it you are not immune to violence or to accident. You’ve lived in a violent world. How does a man sidestep accident and violence for two hundred centuries?”

‘There were times early,” Luis said, “when I came close to not surviving. For a long time, I did not realize the kind of thing I was. Sure, I lived longer, stayed younger than all the others I would guess, however, that I didn’t begin to notice this until I began to realize that all the people I had known in my early life were dead…dead for a long, long time. I knew then that I was different from the rest. About the same time others began to notice I was different. They became suspicious of me. Some of them resented me. Others thought I was some sort of evil spirit. Finally I had to flee the tribe. I became a skulking outcast. That was when I began to learn the principles of survival.”

“And those principles?”

‘You keep a low profile. You don’t stand out. You attract no attention to yourself. You cultivate a cowardly attitude. You are never brave. You take no risks. You let others do the dirty work. You never volunteer. You skulk and run and hide. You grow a skin that’s thick; you don’t give a damn what others think of you. You shed all your noble attributes, your social consciousness. You shuck your loyalty to tribe or folk or country. You’re not a patriot. You live for yourself alone. You’re an observer, never a participant. You scuttle around the edges of things. And you become so self-centered that you come to believe that no blame should attach to you, that you are living in the only logical way a man can live. You went to Roncesvalles the other day, remember?”

‘Yes. I mentioned I’d been there. You said you’d heard of it.”

“Heard of it. Hell, I was there the day it happened August 15th, 778. An observer, not a participant. A cowardly little bastard who tagged along behind the noble band of Gascons who did in Charlemagne. Gascons, hell. That’s the fancy name for them. They were Basques, pure and simple. The meanest crew of men who ever drew the breath of life. Some Basques may be noble, but not this band. Not the kind of warriors who’d stand up face to face with the Franks. They hid up in the pass and rolled rocks down on all those puissant knights. But it wasn’t the knights who held their interest. It was the wagon train. They weren’t out to fight a war or to avenge a wrong. They were out for loot. Although little good it did them.”

‘Why do you say that?”

“It was this way,” said Luis. ‘They knew the rest of the Prankish army would return when the rearguard didn’t come up and they had not the stomach for that. They stripped the dead knights of their golden spurs, their armor and fancy clothes, the money bags they carried and loaded all of it on the wagons and got out of there. A few miles further on, deep in the mountains, they holed up and hid. In a deep canyon where they thought they would be safe. But if they should be found, they had what amounted to a fort. A half mile or so below the place they camped, the canyon narrowed and twisted sharply. A lot of boulders had fallen down at that point, forming a barricade that could have been held by a handful of men against any assault that could be launched against it. By this time, I was a long way off. I smelled something wrong, I knew something most unpleasant was about to happen. That’s another thing about this survival business. You develop special senses. You get so you can smell out trouble, well ahead of time. I heard what happened later.”

He lifted the bottle and had another drink. He handed it to Boyd.

“Don’t leave me hanging,” said Boyd. Tell me what did happen.”

“In the night,” said Luis, “a storm came up. One of those sudden, brutal summer thunderstorms. This time it was a cloudburst. My brave fellow Gascons died to the man. That’s the price of bravery.”

Boyd took a drink, lowered the bottle, held it to his chest, cuddling it.

‘You know about this,” he said. “No one else does. Perhaps no one had ever wondered what happened to those Gascons who gave Charlemagne the bloody nose. You must know of other things. Christ, man, you’ve lived history. You didn’t stick to this area.”

“No. At times I wandered. I had an itching foot. There were things to see. I had to keep moving along. I couldn’t stay in one place any length of time or it would be noticed that I wasn’t aging.”

‘You lived through the Black Death,” said Boyd. ‘You watched the Roman legions. You heard first hand of Attila. You skulked along on Crusades. You walked the streets of ancient Athens.”

“Not Athens,” said Luis. “Somehow Athens was never to my taste. I spent some time in Sparta. Sparta, I tell you that was really something.”

‘You’re an educated man,” said Boyd. “Where did you go to school?”

“Paris, for a time, in the fourteenth century. Later on at Oxford. After that at other places. Under different names. Don’t try tracing me through the schools that I attended.”

‘You could write a book,” said Boyd. “It would set new sales records. You’d be a millionaire. One book and you’d be a millionaire.”

“I can’t afford to be a millionaire. I can’t be noticed and millionaires are noticed. I’m not in want. I’ve never been in want. There’s always treasure for a skulker to pick up. I have caches here and there. I get along all right.”

Luis was right, Boyd told himself. He couldn’t be a millionaire. He couldn’t write a book. In no way could he be famous, stand out in any way. In all things, he must remain unremarkable, always anonymous.

The principles of survival, he had said. And this part of it, although not all of it. He had mentioned the art of smelling trouble, the hunch ability. There would be, as well, the wisdom, the street savvy, the cynicism that a man would pick up along the way, the expertise, the ability to judge character, an insight into human reaction, some knowledge concerning the use of power, power of every sort, economic power, political power, religious power.

Was the man still human, he wondered, or had he, in twenty thousand years, become something more than human? Had he advanced that one vital step that would place him beyond humankind, the king of being that would come after man?

“One thing more,” said Boyd. ‘Why the Disney paintings?”

‘They were painted some time later than the others,” Luis told him. “I painted some of the earlier stuff in the cave. The fishing bear is mine. I knew about the grotto. I found it and said nothing. No reason I should have kept it secret. Just one of those little items one hugs to himself to make himself important. I know something you don’t know silly stuff like that. Later I came back to paint the grotto. The cave art was so deadly serious. Such terribly silly magic. I told myself painting should be fun. So I came back, after the tribe had moved and painted simply for the fun of it. How did it strike you, Boyd?”

“Damn good art,” said Boyd.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t find the grotto and I couldn’t help you. I knew you had seen the cracks in the wall; I watched you one day looking at them. I counted on your remembering them. And I counted on you seeing the fingerprints and finding the pipe. All pure serendipity, of course. I had nothing in mind when I left the paint with the fingerprints and the pipe. The pipe, of course, was the tip-off and I was confident you’d at least be curious. But I couldn’t be sure. When we ate that night, here by the campfire, you didn’t mention the grotto and I was afraid you’d blown it. But when you made off with the bottle, sneaking it away, I knew I had it made. And now the big question. Will you let the world in on the grotto paintings?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. What are your thoughts on the matter?”

“I’d just as soon you didn’t.”

“Okay,” said Boyd. “Not for the time at least. Is there anything else I can do for you? Anything you want?”

‘You’ve done the best thing possible,” said Luis. ‘You know who I am, what I am. I don’t know why that’s so important to me, but it is. A matter of identity, I suppose. When you die, which I hope will be a long time from now, then, once again, there’ll be no one who knows. But the knowledge that one man did know, and what is more important, understood, will sustain me through the centuries. A minute I have something for you.”

He rose and went into the tent, came back with a sheet of paper, handing it to Boyd. It was a topographical survey of some sort.

“I’ve put a cross on it,” said Luis. ‘To mark the spot.”

‘What spot?”

‘Where you’ll find the Charlemagne treasure of Roncesvalles. The wagons and the treasure would have been carried down the canyon in the flood. The turn in the canyon and the boulder barricade I spoke of would have blocked them. You’ll find them there, probably under a deep layer of gravel and debris.”

Boyd looked up questioningly from the map.

“It’s worth going after,” said Luis. “Also it provides another check against the validity of my story.”

“I believe you,” said Boyd. “I need no further evidence.”

“Ah, well,” said Luis, “it wouldn’t hurt! And now, it’s time to go.”

‘Time to go! We have a lot to talk about.”

“Later, perhaps,” said Luis. ‘We’ll bump into one another from time to time. I’ll make a point we do. But now it’s time to go.”

He started down the path and Boyd sat watching him.

After a few steps, Luis halted and half-turned back to Boyd.

“It seems to me,” he said in explanation, “it’s always time to go.”

Boyd stood and watched him move down the trail toward the village. There was about the moving figure a deep sense of loneliness the most lonely man in all the world.

THE QUIET

George Florance-Guthridge

Kuara, my son, the Whites have stolen the moon.

Outside the window, the sky is black. A blue-white disc hangs among the stars. It is Earth, says Doctor Stefanko. I wail and beat my fists. Straps bind me to a bed. Doctor Stefanko forces my shoulders down, swabs my arm. “Since you can’t keep still, I’m going to have to put you under again,” she says, smiling. I lie quietly.

It is not Earth. Earth is brown. Earth is Kalahari.

“You are on the moon,” Doctor Stefanko says. It is the second or third time she has told me; I have awakened and slept, awakened and slept, until I am not sure what voices are dream and what are real, if any. Something pricks my skin. “Rest now. You have had a long sleep.”

I remember awakening the first time. The white room; white cloth covering me. Outside, blackness and the blue-white disc.

“On the moon,” I say. My limbs feel heavy. My head spins. Sleep drags at my flesh. “The moon.”

“Isn’t it wonderful?”

“And you say my husband, Tuka—dead.”

Her lips tighten. She looks at me solemnly. “He did not survive the sleep.”

“The moon is hollow,” I tell her. “Everyone knows that. The dead sleep there.” I stare at the ceiling. “I am alive and on the moon. Tuka is dead but is not here.” The words seem to float from my mouth. There are little dots on the ceiling.

“Sleep now. That’s a girl. We’ll talk more later.”

“And Kuara. My son. Alive.” The dots are spinning. I close my eyes. The dots keep spinning.

“Yes, but…”

The dots. The dots.

About a hundred years ago a law was formulated to protect endangered species—animals that, unless humankind was careful, might become extinct,” Doctor Stefanko says. Her Nebula Award Stories Seventeen face, no longer blurry, seems underlain with shadow. She has dark gray hair, drawn cheeks. I have seen her somewhere—long before I was brought to this place. I cannot remember where. The memory slips away. Dread haunts my heart.

Gai, wearing a breechcloth, stands grinning near the window. The disc Doctor Stefanko calls Earth haloes his head. His huge, pitted tongue sticks out where his front teeth are missing. His shoulders slope like those of a hartebeest. His chest, leathery and wrinkled, is tufted with hair beginning to gray. I am not surprised to see him, after his treachery. He makes num-power pulse in the pit of my belly. I look away.

“Then the law was broadened to include endangered peoples. Peoples like the Gwi.” Managing to smile. Doctor Stefanko presses her index finger against my nose. I toss my head, I don’t trust her. She frowns. “Obviously it would be impossible to save entire tribes. So the founders of the law did what they thought best. They saved certain representatives. You. Your family. A few others, such as Gai. These representatives were frozen.”

“Frozen?”

“Made cold.”

“As during gum, when ice forms inside the ostrich-egg containers?”

“Much colder.”

It was not dream, then. I remember staring through a blue, crinkled sheen. Like light seen through a snakeskin. I could not move, though my insides never stopped shivering. So this is death, I kept thinking.

“In the interim you were brought here to the moon. To Carnival. It is a fine place. A truly international facility, built as a testament to the harmony of nations. Here we have tried to recreate the best of what used to be.” She pauses, and her eyes grow keen. “This will be your new home now, U.”

“And Kuara?”

“He will live here with you, in time.” Something in her voice makes fear touch me. Then she says, “Would you like to see him?” Some of the fear slides away.

“Is it wise. Doctor?” Gai asks. “She has a temper, this one.” His eyes grin down at me. He stares at my pelvis.

“Oh. we’ll manage. You’ll be a good girl, won’t you, U?”

My head nods. My heart does not say yes or no.

The straps leap away with a loud click. Doctor Stefanko and Gai help me to my feet. The world wobbles. The Earth-disc tilts and swings. The floor slants one way, another way. Needles tingle in my feet and hands. I am helped into a chair. More clicking. The door hisses open and the chair floats out. Doctor Stefanko leading, Gai lumbering behind. We move down one corridor after another. This is a place of angles. No curves, except the smiles of Whites as we pass. And they curve too much.

Another door hisses. We enter a room full of chill. Blue glass, the inside laced with frost, stretches from floor to ceiling along each wall. Frozen figures stand behind the glass. I remember this place. I remember how sluggish was the hate in my heart.

“Kuara is on the end,” Doctor Stefanko says, her breath white.

The chair floats closer. My legs bump the glass; cold shocks my knees. The chair draws back. I lean forward. Through the glass I can see the closed eyes of my son. Ice furs his lashes and brows. His head is tilted to one side. His little arms dangle. I touch the glass in spite of the cold. I hear Gai’s sharp intake of breath and he draws back my shoulders, but Doctor Stefanko puts a hand on Gai’s wrist and I am released. There is give to the glass. Not like that on the trucks in the tsama patch. My num rises. My heart beats faster. Num enters my arms, floods my fingers. “Kuara,” I whisper. Warmth spreads upon the glass. It makes a small, ragged circle.

“He’ll be taken from here as soon as you’ve demonstrated you can adjust to your new home,” Doctor Stefanko says.

Kuara. If only I could dance. Num would boil within me. I could kia. I would shoo away the ghosts of the cold. Awakening, you would step through the glass and into my arms.

Though we often lacked water, we were not unhappy. The tsama melons supported us. It was a large patch, and by conserving we could last long periods without journeying to the waterholes. Whites and tame Bushmen had taken over the Gam and Gautscha Pans, and the people there, the Kung, either had run away or had stayed for the water and now worked the Whites’ farms and ate mealie meal.

There were eleven of us, though sometimes one or two more. Gai, unmated, was one of those who came and went. Tuka would say, “You can always count us on three hands, but never on two or four hands.” He would laugh, then. He was always laughing. I think he laughed because there was so little game near the Akam Pan, our home. The few duiker and steenbok that had once roamed our plain had smelled the coming of the Whites and the fleeing Kung, and had run away. Tuka laughed to fill up the empty spaces.

Sometimes, when he wasn’t trapping springhare and porcupine, he helped me gather wood and tubers. We dug xwa roots and koa, the water root buried deep in the earth, until our arms ached. Sometimes we hit na trees with sticks, making the sweet berries fall, and Tuka would chase me round and round, laughing and yelling like a madman. It was times like those when I wondered why I had jnce hated him so much. I wondered much about that during kuma, a hot season when starvation stalked us. During the day I would take off my kaross, dig a shallow pit within what little shade an orogu bush offered, then urinate in the sand, cover myself with more sand, and place a leaf over my head. The three of us—Tuka, Kuara, and I—lay side by side like dead people. “My heart is sad from hunger,” I sang to myself all day. “Like an old man, sick and slow.” I thought of the bad things. My parents marrying me to Tuka before I was ready because, paying bride service, he brought my mother a new kaross. Tuka doing the marrying thing to me before I was ready. Everything before I was ready! Sometimes I prayed into the leaf that a paouw would fly down and think his penis a fat caterpillar.

Then one night Tuka snared a honey badger. A badger, during kuma! Everyone was excited. Tuka said, “Yesterday, when we slept, I told the land that my U was hungry, and I must have meat for her and Kuara.” The badger was very tender. Gai ate his share and went begging, though he had never brought meat to the camp. When the meat was gone we roasted ga roots and sang and danced while Tuka played the gwashi. I danced proudly. Not for Tuka but for myself. Num-power uncurled from the pit of my belly and came boiling up my spine. I was afraid, because when num reaches my skull, I Ida. Then I see ghosts killing people, and I smell the rotting smell of death, like decaying carcasses.

Tuka took my head in his hands. “You must not kia,” he said. “Not now. Your body will suffer too much for the visions.” For other people, kia brings healing—of self, of others; for me it only brings pain.

Tuka held me beside the fire and stroked me, and num subsided. “When I lie in the sand during the day, I dream I have climbed the footpegs in a great baobab tree,” he said. “I look out from the treetop, and the land is agraze with giraffe and wildebeest and kudu. ‘You must kill these animals and bring them to U and Kuara before the Whites kill them,’ my dream says.”

Then he asked, “What do you think of when you lie there, U?”

I did not answer. I was afraid to tell him; I did not want him to feel angry or sad after his joy from catching the honey badger. He smiled. His eyes, moist, shone with firelight. Perhaps he thought num had stopped my tongue.

The next day the quiet came. Lying beneath the sand, I felt num pulse in my belly. I fought the fear it always brought. I did not cry out to Tuka. The pulsing increased. I began to tremble. Sweat ran down my face. Num boiled within me. It entered my spine and pushed toward my throat. My eyes were wide and I kept staring at the veins of the leaf but seeing dread. I felt myself going rigid and shivering at the same time.

My head throbbed; it was as large as a ga root. I could hear my mouth make sputtery noises, like Kuara used to at my breast. The pressure inside me kept building, building.

And suddenly was gone. It burrowed into the earth, taking my daydreams with it. I went down and down into the sand. I passed ubbee roots and animals long dead, their bones bleached and forgotten. I came to a water hole far beneath the ground. Tuka was in the water. Kuara was too. He looked younger, barely old enough to toddle. Tuka, smiling, looked handsome. He is not a bad person, I told myself; he just wants his way too much. But he has brought meat to our people, I cannot forget that. And someday perhaps he will bring me a new kaross. Perhaps he will bring many things. Important things.

I took off my kaross, and the three of us held hands and danced, naked, splashing. There was no num to seize me. No marrying-thing urge to seize Tuka. Only quiet, and laughter.

“This will be your new home, U,” Doctor Stefanko says as she opens a door. She has given me a new kaross; of genuine gemsbok, she tells me, though I am uncertain why she speaks of it that way. When she puts her hand on my back and pushes me forward, the kaross feels soft and smooth against my skin. “We think you’ll like it, and if there’s anything you need…”

I grab the sides of the door and turn my face away. I will not live in or even look at the place. But her push becomes firmer, and I stumble inside. I cover my face with my hands. “There now,” Doctor Stefanko says. I spy through my fingers.

We are in Kalahari.

I turn slowly, for suddenly my heart is shining and singing. No door. No walls. No angles. The sandveld spreads out beneath a cloudless sky. Endless pale gold grass surrounds scattered white-thorn and tsi bushes; in the distance lift several flat-toped acacias and even a mongongo tree. A dassie darts in and out of a rocky kranze.

“Here might be a good place for your tshushi—your shelter,” Doctor Stefanko says, pulling me forward. She enters the tall grass, bends, comes up smiling, holding branches in one hand, gui fibers in the other. “You see? We’ve even cut some of the materials you’ll need.”

“But how—”

“The moon isn’t such a horrible place, now is it?” She strides back through the grass. “And we here at Carnival are dedicated to making your stay as pleasant as possible. Just look here.” She moves a rock. A row of buttons gleams. “Turn this knob, and you can control your weather; no more suffering through those terrible hot and cold seasons. Unless you want to, of course.” she adds quickly. “And from time to time some nice people will be looking down… in on you. From up there, within the sky.” She makes a sweep of her arm. “They want to watch how you live; you—and other tribal people like you—are quite a sensation, you know.” I stare at her without understanding. “Anyway if you want to see them, just turn this knob. And if you want to hear what the monitor’s saying about you, turn this one.” She looks up, sees my confusion. “Oh, don’t worry; the monitor translates everything. It’s a wonderful device.”

Standing, she takes hold of my arms. Her eyes almost seem warm. “You see, U, there is no more Kalahari on Earth-not as you knew it, anyhow—so we created another. In some ways it won’t be as good as what you were used to, in a lot of ways it’ll be better.” She smiles. “We think you’ll like it.”

“And Kuara?”

“He’s waking now. He’ll join you soon, on a trial basis.” She takes hold of my hands. “Soon.” Then she walks back in the direction we came, quickly fading in the distance. Suddenly she is gone. A veil of heat shimmers above the grass where the door seemed to have been. For a moment I think of following. Finally I shrug. I work at building my tshushi. I work slowly, methodically, my head full of thoughts. I think of Kuara, and something gnaws at me. I drop the fiber I am holding and begin walking toward the opposite horizon, where a giraffe is eating from the mongongo tree.

Grasshoppers, kxon ants, dung beetles, hop and crawl among the grasses. Leguaan lizards scuttle. A mole snake slithers for a hole beneath a uri bush. I walk quickly, the sand warm but not hot beneath my feet. The plain is sun-drenched, the few omirimbi watercourses parched and cracked, yet I feel little thirst. A steenbok leaps for cover behind a white-thorn. This is a good place, part of me decides. Here will Kuara become the hunter Tuka could not be. Kuara will never laugh to shut out sadness.

The horizon draws no closer.

I measure the giraffe with my thumb, walk a thousand paces, remeasure, walk another thousand paces, remeasure.

The giraffe does not change size.

I will walk another thousand. Then I will turn back and finish the tshushi.

A hundred paces farther I bump something hard. A wall. Beyond, the giraffe continues feeding.

The Whites with the Land Rovers came during ga, the hottest season. The trucks bucked and roared across the sand. Tuka took Kuara and hurried to meet them. I went too, though I walked behind with the other women. There were several white men and some Bantu. Gai was standing in the lead truck, waving and grinning.

A white, blond-haired woman climbed out. She was wearing white shorts and a light brown shirt with rolled-up sleeves. I recognized her immediately. Doctor Morse, come to study us again. Tuka had said the Whites did not wonder about their own culture, so they liked to study ours.

She talked to us women a long time, asking about our families and how we felt about SWAPO, the Southwest African People’s Army. Everyone spoke at once. She kept waving her hands for quiet. “What do you think, U?” she would ask. “What’s your opinion?” I said she should ask Tuka; he was a man and understood such things. Doctor Morse frowned, so Isaid SWAPO should not kill people. SWAPO should leave people alone. Doctor Morse nodded and wrote in her notebook as I talked. I was pleased. The other women were very jealous.

Doctor Morse told us the war in South Africa was going badly; soon it would sweep this way. When Tuka finished looking at the engines I asked him what Doctor Morse meant by “badly.” Badly for Blacks, or Whites. Badly for those in the south, or for those of us in the north. He did not know. None of us asked Doctor Morse.

Then she said, “We have brought water. Lots of water. We’ve heard you’ve been without.” Her hair caught the sunlight. She was very beautiful for a white woman.

We smiled but refused her offer. She frowned but did not seem angry. Maybe she thought it was because she was white. If so, she was wrong; accept gifts, and we might forget the ones Kalahari gives us. “Well, at least go for a ride in the trucks,” she said, beaming. Tuka laughed and, taking Kuara by the hand, scrambled for the two Land Rovers. I shook my head. “You really should go,” Doctor Morse said. “It’ll be good for you.”

“That is something for men to do,” I told her. “Women do not understand such things.”

“All they’re going to do is ride in the back!”

“Trucks. Hunting. Fire. Those are men’s things,” I said.

Only one of the trucks came back. Everyone but Tuka, Kuara, and some of the Bantu returned. “The truck’s stuck in the sand; the Whites decided to wait until dawn to pull it out,” Gai said. “Tuka said he’d sleep beside it. You know how he is about trucks!” Everyone laughed. Except me. An empty space throbbed in my heart; that I wanted him home angered me.

Then rain came. It was ga go—male rain. It poured down strong and sudden, not even and gentle, the female rain that fills the land with water. Rain, during ga! Everyone shouted and danced for joy. Even the Whites danced. A miracle! people said. I thought about the honey badger caught during kuma, and was afraid. I felt alone. In spite of my fear, perhaps because of it, I did a foolish thing. I slept away from the others.

In the night, the quiet again touched me. Num uncurled in my belly. I did not beckon it forth. I swear I didn’t. I wasn’t even thinking about it. As I slept, I felt my body clench tight. In my dreams I could hear my breathing—shallow and rapid. Fear seized me and shook me like the twig of a ni-ni bush. I sank into the earth. Tuka and Kuara were standing slump-shouldered at the water hole where we had danced. Kuara was wearing the head of a wildebeest; the eyes had been carved out and replaced with smoldering coals. “Run away, Mother.” he kept saying.

I awoke to shadows. A fleeting darkness came upon me before I could move. I glimpsed Gai grinning beneath the moon. Then a hand was clapped over my mouth.

Doctor Stefanko returns after I’ve finished the hut. She and Gai bring warthog and kudu hides, porcupine quills, tortoise shells, ostrich eggs, a sharpening stone, an awl, two assagai blades, pots of Bantu clay. Many things. Gai grins as he sets them down. Doctor Stefanko watches him. “Back on Earth, he might not have remained a bachelor if your people hadn’t kept thinking of him as one,” she tells me as he walks away. Then she also leaves.

Later, she brings Kuara.

He comes sprinting, gangly, the grass nearly to his chin. “Mama,” he shouts, “Mama, Mama,” and I take him in my arms, whirling and laughing. I put my hands upon his cheeks; his arms are around my waist. Real. Oh, yes, so very real, my Kuara! Tears roll down my face. He looks hollow-eyed, and his hair has been shaved. But I do not let concern stop my heart. I weep from joy, not pain.

Doctor Stefanko again reminds me he’s here on a trial basis only. Then she leaves, and Kuara and I talk. He babbles about a strange sleep, and Doctor Stefanko, and Gai, as I show him the camp. We play with the knobs Doctor Stefanko showed me; one of them makes a line of small windows blink on in the slight angle between wall-sky and ceiling-sky. The windows look like square beads. There, faces pause and peer. Children. Old men. Women with smiles like springhares. People of many races. I tell him not to smile or acknowledge their presence. Not even that of the children. Especially not the children. The faces are surely ghosts, I warn. Ghosts dreaming of becoming Gwi.

We listen to the voice Doctor Stefanko calls the monitor. It is singsong, lulling. A woman’s voice, I think. “U and Kuara, the latest additions to Carnival, members of the last Gwi tribal group, will soon become accustomed to our excellent accommodations,” the voice says. The voice floats with us as we go to gather roots and wood.

A leguaan pokes its head from the rocky kranze, listening. Silently I put down my wood. Then my hand moves slowly. So slowly it is almost not movement. I grab. Caught! Kuara shrieks and claps his hands. “Notice the scarification across the cheeks and upper legs,” the voice is saying. “The same is true of the buttocks, though like any self-respecting Gwi, U will not remove her kaross in the presence of others except during the Eland Dance.” I carry the leguaan wiggling to the hut. “Were she to disrobe, you would notice tremendous fatty deposits in the buttocks, a phenomenon known as steat-opygia. Unique to Bushmen (or ‘Bushworn en,’ we should say), this anatomical feature aids in food storage. It was once believed that…”

After breaking the leguaan’s neck, I take off the kaross of genuine gemsbok and, using gui fiber, tie it in front of my hut. It makes a wonderful door. I have never had a door. Tuka and I slept outside, using the tshushi for storage. Kuara will have a door. A door between him and the watchers.

He will have fire. Fire for warmth and food and U to sing beside. I gather kane and ore sticks and carve male and female, then use galli grass for tinder. Like Tuka did. “The Gwi are marked by a low, flattened skull, tiny mastoid processes, peppercorn hair, a nonprognathous face…m” I twirl the sticks between my palms. It seems to take forever. My arms grow sore. I am ready to give up when smoke suddenly curls. Gibbering, Kuara leaps about the camp. I gaze at the fire and grin with delight. But it is frightened delight. I will make warmth fires and food fires, I decide as I blow the smoke into flame. Not ritual fires. Not without Tuka.

I roast the leguaan with eru berries and tsha-cucumber, which seems plentiful. But I am not Tuka, quick with fire and laughter; the fire-making has taken too long. Halfway through the cooking, Kuara seizes the lizard and, bouncing it in his hands as though it were hot dough, tears it apart. “Kuara!” I blurt in pretended anger. He giggles as, the intestines dangling, he holds up the lizard to eat. I smile sadly. Kuara’s laughing eyes and ostrich legs… so much like Tuka!

“The Gwi sing no praises of battles or warriors,” the voice sing-says. I help Kuara finish the leguaan. “They have no history of warfare; ironically, it was last century’s South African War, in which the Gwi did not take part, that assured their extinction. Petty arguments are common (even a nonviolent society cannot keep husbands and wives from scrapping), but fighting is considered dishonorable. To fight is to have failed to…” When I gaze up, my mouth full of lizard, there are no faces in the windows.

‘At last, dusk dapples the grass. Kuara finds a guinea-fowl feather and a reed; leaning against my legs, he busies himself making a zani. The temperature begins to drop. I decide the door would fit better around my shoulders than across the tshushi.

A figure strides out of the setting sun. I shield my eyes with my arm. Doctor Stefanko. She smiles and nods at Kuara, now tying a nut onto his toy for a weight, and sits on a log. Her smile remains, though it is drained of joy. She looks at me seriously.

“I do hope Kuara’s presence will dissuade you from any more displays such as you exhibited this afternoon,” she tells me. “Surely you realize that if… well, if problems arise, we may have to take the boy back to the prep rooms until… until you become more accustomed to your surroundings.” She taps her forefinger against her palm. “This impetuousness of yours has got to cease.” Another tap. “And cease now.”

Head cocked, I gaze at her, not understanding.

“Taking off your kaross simply because the monitor said you do not.” She nods knowingly. “Oh, yes, we’re aware when you’re listening. And that frightful display with the lizard!” She makes a face and appears to shudder. “Then there’s the matter with the fire.” She points toward the embers. “You’re supposed to be living here like you did back on Earth. At least during the day. Men always started the fires.”

“Men were always present.” I shrug.

“Yes. Well, arrangements are being made. For the time being, stick to foods you don’t need to cook. And use the heating system.” She goes to the rock and, on hands and knees, turns one of the knobs. A humming sounds. Smiling and rubbing her hands over the fire, she reseats herself on the log, pulls a photograph from her hip pocket, and hands it to me. I turn the picture right side up. Doctor Morse is standing with her arm across Gai’s shoulders. His left arm is around her waist. The Land Rovers are in the background.

“Impetuous,” Doctor Stefanko says, leaning over and clicking her fingernail against the photograph. “That’s exactly what Doctor Morse wrote about you in her notebooks. She considered it a virtue.” Again she lifts her brow. “We do not.” Then she adds proudly, “She was my grandmother, you know. As you can imagine, I have more than simply a professional interest in our Southwest African section here at Carnival.”

I start to hand back the photograph. She raises her hand, halting me. “Keep it,” she says. “Think of it as a wedding present. The first of many.”

That night, wrapped in the kaross, Kuara and I sleep in each other’s arms, in the tshushi. He is still clutching the zani, though he has not once thrown it into the air to watch it spin down. Perhaps he will tomorrow. Tomorrow. An ugly word. I lie staring at the dark ground, sand clenched in my fists. I wonder if, somehow using devices to see in the dark, the ghosts in the sky-windows are watching me sleep. I wonder if they will watch the night Gai climbs upon my back and grunts throughout the marrying thing.

Sleep comes. A tortured sleep. I can feel myself hugging Kuara. He squirms against the embrace but does not awaken. In my dreams I slide out of myself and, stirring up the fire, dance the Eland Dance. My body is slick with eland fat. My eyes stare rigidly into the darkness and my head is held high and stiff. Chanting, I lift and put down my feet, moving around and around the fire. Other women clap and sing the kia-healing songs. Men play the gwashi and musical bows. The music lifts and lilts and throbs. Rhythm thrums within me. Each muscle knows the song. Tears squeeze from my eyes. Pain leadens my legs. And still I dance.

Then, at last, num rises. It uncurls in my belly and breathes fire-breath up my spine. I fight the fear. I dance against the dread. I tremble with fire. My eyes slit with agony. I do not watch the women clapping and singing. My breaths come in shallow, heated gasps. My breasts bounce. I dance. Num continues to rise. It tingles against the base of my brain. It fills my head. My entire body is alive, burning. Thorns are sticking everywhere in my flesh. My breasts are fiery coals. I can feel ghosts, hot ghosts, ghosts of the past, crowding into my skull. I stagger for the hut; Kuara and U, my old self, await me. I slide into her flesh like someone slipping beneath the cool, mudslicked waters of a year-round pan. I slide in among her fear and sorrow and the anguished joy of Kuara beside her.

She stirs. A movement of a sleeping head. A small groan; denial. I slide in further. I become her once again. My head is aflame with num and ghosts. “U,” I whisper. “I bring the ghosts of all your former selves, and of your people.” Again she groans, though weaker; the pleasure-moan of a woman making love. Her body stretches, stiffens. Her nails rake Kuara’s back. She accepts me, then; accepts her self. I fill her flesh.

And bring the quiet, for the third time in her life. Down and down into the sand she seeps, like ga go rain soaking into parched earth, leaving nothing of her self behind, her hands around Kuara’s wrists as she pulls him after her, the zani’s guinea-fowl feather whipping behind him as if in a wind. She passes through sand, Carnival’s concrete base, moon-rock, moving ever downward, badger-burrowing, She breaks through into a darkness streaked with silver light; into the core of the moon, where live the ancestral dead, the ghosts of kia. She tumbles downward, crying her dismay and joy, her kaross fluttering. In the center of the hollow, where water shines like cold silver, awaits Tuka, arms outstretched. He is laughing—a shrill, forced cackle. Such is the only laughter a ghost can know whose sleep has been disturbed. They will dance this night, the three of them: U, Tuka, Kuara.

Then Tuka will teach her the secret of oa, the poison squeezed from the female larvae of the dung beetle. Poison for arrows he will teach her to make. Poison for which Bushmen know no antidote.

She will hunt when she returns to Gai and to Doctor Stefanko.

She will not hunt animals.

ABSENT THEE FELICITY AWHILE

Somtow Sudiarifkul

You remember silence, don’t you?

There were many silences once: silence for a great speech, silence before an outburst of thunderous applause, silence after laughter. Silence is gone forever, now. When you listen to the places where the silence used to be, you hear the soft insidious buzzing, like a swarm of distant flies, that proclaims the end of man’s solitude…

For me, it happened like this: It was opening night, and Hamlet was just dying, and I was watching from the wings, being already dead, of course, as Guildenstern. I wanted to stay for curtain call anyway, even though I knew the audience wouldn’t notice. It hadn’t been too long since my first job, and I was new in New York. But here everything revolved around Sir Francis FitzHenry, brought over from England at ridiculous expense with his new title clinging to him like wrapping paper.

Everything else was as low-budget as possible, including me. They did a stark, empty staging, ostensibly as a sop to modernism, but really because the backers were penniless after paying FitzHenry’s advance, and so Sir Francis was laid out on a barren proscenium with nothing but an old leather armchair for Claudius’s throne and a garish green spot on him. Not that there was any of that Joseph Papp4ype avant-garde rubbish. Everything was straight. Me, I didn’t know what people saw in Sir Francis FitzHenry till I saw him live—I’d only seen him in that ridiculous Fellini remake of Ben Hur—but he was dynamite, just the right thing for the old Jewish ladies.

There he was, then, making his final scene so heartrending I could have drowned in an ocean of molasses; arranging himself into elaborate poses that could have been plucked from the Acropolis; and uttering each iambic pentameter as though he were the New York Philharmonic and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir all rolled into one. And they were lapping it up, what with the swing away from the really modern interpretations. He was a triumph of the old school, there on that stage turning the other actors into ornamental papier-mache all around him. He had just gotten, you know, to that line: Absent thee from felicity awhile… To tell my story.

and was just about to fall, with consummate grace, into Horatio’s arms. You could feel the collective catch of breath, the palpable silence, and I was thinking, What could ever top that, my God?…and I had that good feeling you get when you know you’re going to be drawing your paycheck for at least another year or so. And maybe Gail would come back, even. Then—

Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. “What’s wrong?” I turned to the little stage manager, who was wildly pushing buttons. The buzzing came, louder and louder. You couldn’t hear a word Horatio was saying. The buzzing kept coming, from every direction now, hurting my ears. Sir Francis sat up in mid-tumble and glared balefully at the wings, then the first scream could be heard above the racket, and I finally had the nerve to poke my head out and saw the tumult in the audience…

“For Chrissakes, why doesn’t someone turn on the house lights?” Claudius had risen from where he was sprawled dead and was stomping around the stage. The buzzing became more and more intense, and now there were scattered shrieks of terror and the thunder of an incipient stampede mixed into the buzzing, and I cursed loudly about the one dim spotlight. The screaming came continuously. People were trooping all over the stage and were tripping on swords and shields, a lady-in-waiting hurtled into me and squished makeup onto my cloak, corpses were groping around in the dark, and finally I found the right switch where the stage manager had run away and all the lights came on and the leather armchair went whizzing into the flies.

I caught one word amid all this commotion—

Aliens.

A few minutes later everybody knew everything. Messages were being piped into our minds somehow. At first they just said don’t panic, don’t panic and were hypnotically soothing, but then it all became more bewildering as the enormity of it all sank In. I noticed that the audience were sitting down again, and the buzzing had died down to an insistent whisper. Everything was returning to a surface normal, but stiff, somehow; artificial. They were all sitting, a row of glassy-eyed mannequins in expensive clothes, under the glare of the house lights, and we knew we were all hearing the same thing in ouf minds.

They were bringing us the gift of immortality, they said. They were some kind of galactic federation. No, we wouldn’t really be able to understand what they were, but they would not harm us. In return for their gift, they were exacting one small favor from us. They would try to explain it in our terms. Apparently something like a sort of hyperspatial junior high school was doing a project on uncivilized planets, something like “one day in the life of a barbarian world.” The solar system was now in some kind of time loop, and would we be kind enough to repeat the same day over and over again for a while, with two hours off from 6 to 8 every morning, while their kids came over and studied everything in detail. We were very lucky, they added; it was an excellent deal. No, there wasn’t anything we could do about it.

I wondered to myself, how long is “over and over again for a while”?

They answered it for me. “Oh, nothing much. About seven million of your years.” I felt rather short-changed, though I realized that it was nothing in comparison with immortality.

And, standing there stock-still ‘and not knowing what to think, I saw the most amazing sight. We all saw the aliens as gossamer veils of light that drifted and danced across the field of vision, almost imperceptible, miniature auroras that sparkled and vanished… I saw Sir Francis’s face through a gauze of shimmering blue lights. I wanted to touch them so badly; I reached out and my hand passed right through one without feeling a thing. Then they were gone.

We turned off the house lights—we had until midnight— and went on with the play. The buzzing subsided almost completely, but was very obviously there all the time, so everybody gabbled their lines and tried to cut in quickly between speeches to cover up the noise. The applause was perfunctory, and Sir Francis seemed considerably distressed that he had been so easily upstaged.

I walked home at a few minutes to midnight. I saw peculiar poles with colored metallic knobs on them, all along Broadway every couple of blocks, like giant parking meters. The streets were virtually empty, and there were a couple of overturned Yellow cabs and an old Chevy sticking out of a store window. It had been too much for some, I supposed. But I was so confused about what had happened, I tried to think about nothing but Gail and about the bad thing that had happened that morning.

I climbed up the dirty staircase to my efficiency above an Indian grocery store and jumped into bed with all my clothes on, thinking about the bad thing between me and Gail, and at midnight I suddenly noticed I was in pyjamas and she was lying there beside me, and there was a sudden jerk of dislocation and I knew that it wasn’t today anymore, it was yesterday, it was all true. I squeezed my eyes tightly and wished I was dead.

I woke up around 11 o’clock. Gail stirred uneasily. We made love, like machines. I kept trying to pull myself away, knowing what was coming. Whatever the aliens had done, it had turned me into a needle in a groove, following the line of least resistance.

We got up and had breakfast. She wore her ominous dishevelled look, strands of black hair fishnetting her startlingly blue eyes.

“John?”

The dinette table seemed as wide as all space. She seemed incredibly unreachable, like the stars. “Umm?” I found myself saying in a banal voice. I knew what she was going to say; I knew what I was going to do. But whatever it was dealt only with appearances. In my thoughts I was free, as though I were somehow outside the whole thing, experiencing my own past as a recording. I wondered at my own detachment.

“John, I’m leaving you.”

Anger rose in me. I got up, knocking over the coffee mug and shouting, “What for, who with?” like an idiot before going off into incoherent cursing.

“Francis FitzHenry has asked me to stay with him—in his suite at the Plaza!”

The anger welled up again. Blindly, I slapped her face. She went white, then red, and then she said quietly, dangerously: “You’re too petty, John. That’s why you’re going to be a Guildenstern for the rest of your life.” That hurt.

Then she walked out of my life.

I shaved and walked slowly over to the theater. We played to a full house. The aliens came. Sir Francis seemed considerably distressed that he had been so easily upstaged. I walked home, casually noting the two overturned Yellow cabs and the old Chevy stuck in a store window, past the overgrown parking meters, to my efficiency above an Indian grocery store, and threw myself fully clothed on the bed. I felt asleep.

I woke up around 11 o’clock, Gail stirred uneasily. We made love mechanically, and I knew that the two people who were lying there together had become totally divorced from themselves, and were going through preordained motions that bore no relationship whatsoever to what was hi their minds. And there was no way of communicating.

We ate breakfast. She wore her ominous dishevelled look, and I desperately wanted to apologize to her, but when I tried to speak my facial muscles were frozen and the buzzing seemed to get louder, drowning my thoughts. Was the buzzing an external sound, or was it some mental monitor to enforce the status quo?

“I’m leaving you.”

Anger rose in me. I quenched it at once, but it made no difference either to my posture or to my words.

“Francis FitzHenry has asked me to stay with him—in his suite at the Plaza!”

I slapped her face. Suddenly the veils of light came, caressing the musty stale air of my apartment, touching the dust and making it sparkle, like a golden snow between the two of us. They faded. We had been watched; we were trapped in a galactic Peyton Place.

“You’re too petty, John. That’s why you’re going to be a Guildenstern for the rest of your life.” And walked out of my life. It hurt me more every time. I was doomed to be a Guildenstern in this play too, a Guildenstern for the old ladies and a Guildenstern for the veils of light. It was hell.

I shaved and walked slowly over to the theater. We played to a full house. The aliens came; Sir Francis seemed considerably distressed that he had been so easily upstaged. I walked home, past the overturned cars and the gigantic parking meters that had materialized out of nowhere.

As I fell asleep, just before midnight, a thought surfaced: we were supposed to have two free hours every morning, weren’t we? For months now, I had slept through those two hours.

I resolved to force myself to wake up at six.

I jerked myself awake at 6:30, snaked into unostentatious jeans and a T-shirt, and came down.

The brilliant summer morning hit me between the eyes. It had been autumn the previous night. Everything was to wonder at: the trash drifting down the sidewalk in the breeze, the briskness of the air, the clarity of the sunlight…

Two tramps were leaning against the first of the alien poles. They had their eyes closed and were very peaceful, so I crept away. Portholes exuded smoke, people jostled each other, and everything seemed astonishingly normal, except for the insistent buzzing.

Another of the poles had a man in a scruffy three-piece suit and blatantly orange tie, holding up a sign on which was scrawled VON DANIKEN LIVES! He had acquired a squalid-looking collection of onlookers, whom I joined for a moment.

“… man, these critters built the Pyramids! They built the Empire State Building! They’re the Gods! Alexander the Great was one! Richard M. Nixon was one! God was one!… and you, too, can be saved, if only you’ll just throw a quarter on the altar of repentance! Hallelujah! Thank you, ma’am…”

I walked on.

At the next extraterrestrial parking meter a group of Hare Krishna types was dancing round and round like they had a missionary in the pot. In the middle a scrawny, bespectacled shaven man was caressing the shaft, which was glowing a dull crimson. He seemed transfigured, almost beautiful, much more like the real thing than Sir Francis FitzHenry could ever be. I watched for a long time, fascinated, my mind dulled by the hypnotic repetitiveness of their chanting.

They ceased, jolting me from my reverie. The lanky one came up to me and started to whisper confidentially, intensely. “Did you know they’re only a few microns thick? Did you know that they’re called the T-tat? Did you know they have a shared consciousness that works over vast reaches of space-time? Did you know they’ve reached an incredibly high evolutionary phase, huh?”

“You don’t talk like a Hare Krishna person.”

“Hey!…oh, the clothes, you mean. Actually, I have a Ph.D. from M.I.T. I talk to them, you know.”

“No kidding!”

“Hey, really! Listen, come here,” he pulled me roughly over to the pole, which had stopped glowing. “Just sit down here, relax now, touch the pole. Totem pole, divine antenna, whatever. Can’t you hear anything…?”

Hello.

I was shivering. The voice was so close; it was speaking inside me. I drew back quickly.

Hey, did you know they have many doctors, that each color shows their status based on age? Did you know that, huh? Did you know they don’t join up with the collective consciousness until they’re almost half a billion years old, that they have these learning .centers all over the galaxy, that they originally crossed over from the Great Nebula in Andromeda? No kidding, man!”

I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Here, touch it again, it isn’t so bad the second time.” He was twitching all over, a bundle of nerves. “Sorry I’m acting like this. It’s my only chance to act normal, you see, the rest of the day I’m either stoned or asleep, according to the script I can’t wait till we all wake up!”

I reached out. Hello.

“Isn’t there any way we can resist them?”

“What for? Don’t you want to live forever? This is just a sort of Purgatory, isn’t it? We all get to go to heaven.”

“But suppose I wanted to, you know, contradict them, or something,”

“Dunno. They can’t control everything” He paused for a moment, but then launched himself into a stream of information again, as though I’d fed him another quarter.

“I have the general equations worked out.” He flashed a bit of paper in front of my face, then thrust it back into his pocket—“but you obviously have to be in control of unified field theory, and even then there’s the power source to worry about. I have a couple of theories—f’rinstance, if they had sort of a portable mini-quasar, like, a miniature white hole worming through space-time into a transdimensional universe, they could tap the energy, you see, and—”

He had lost me. I touched the pole, and his voice faded into nothingness. The buzzing intensified. Hello.

“We’re just dirt to you, laboratory animals,” I said bitterly. “I wish it was back to the way it was.”

You can’t help being a lower being, you know. There’s nothing you or I can do about that.

“Well, will you tell me one thing?” It suddenly occurred to me that everyone had left The Hare Krishnas, hands linked, had gone dancing off. Sure.

“Is this thing really worth It, for us? Seven million years is a long, long, time; it’s the same as eternity for all practical purposes.”

Hah! Fat lot you know.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

All in good time. But it’s almost 8 o’clock. Hold on, you’ll be dislocated back to yesterday in a few seconds. You’re pretty lucky, you know; in some parts of the world the two hours’ grace comes at some ridiculous time and nobody ever gets up.

“Goodbye.”

Goodbye.

I woke up around 11 o’clock. Gail stirred uneasily. We made love mechanically, like machines, with living sheets of light, only a few microns thick, darting between us, weaving delicately transient patterns in the air, and I felt hollow, transparent, empty.

I met Amy Schechter in Grand Central Station, coming out of the autumn night into a biting blizzard of a winter morning.”

We were both standing at a doughnut stand. I looked at her, helpless, frail, as she stared into a. cup of cold coffee. I had seen her before, but this morning there were just the two of us. She suddenly looked up at me. Her eyes were brown and lost.

“Hi. Amy.”

“John.”

A pause, full of noisome buzzing, fell between us.

For a while, I watched the breath-haze form and dissipate about her face, wanting to make conversation, but I couldn’t think what to say.”

“Will you talk to me? Nobody ever does, they always back off, as if they knew.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve been standing here for five years, waiting for my train. Sometimes I come an hour or so before 8 o’clock, you know, just to stand around. There’s nothing for me at where I’m staying.” Her voice was really small, hard to hear against the buzzing.

“Where are you going?”

“Oh, Havertown, Pennsylvania. You’ve never heard of it.” I hadn’t. “It’s sort of a suburb of Philadelphia,” she added helpfully. “My folks live there.”

“Buy you a doughnut?”

“You must be joking!” She laughed quickly and stopped herself, then cast her eyes down as though scrutinizing a hypothetical insect in her styrofoam cup. Then she turned her back on me, hugging her shaggy old coat to her thin body, and crumpled the cup firmly and threw it into the garbage.

“Wait, come back! We’ve got an hour and a half, you know, before you have to leave—”

“Oh, so it’s score and run? Nothing doing, friend.”

“Well, I will buy you a doughnut then.”

“Oh, all right. A romantic memory,” she added cynically, “when I’ll be dead by dinner anyway.”

“Huh?”

She came closer. We were almost touching, both leaning against the grubby counter. “I’m one of the ghosts, you know,” she said.

“I don’t get it.”

“What do you do every day?”

“My girlfriend walks out on me, then I play a poor third fiddle to a pretentious British actor in Hamlet.”

“Lucky. In my script, the train crashes into an eighteen-wheeler 25 miles outside of Philadelphia. Smash! Everybody. dead. And then every morning I find myself at the station again. I was pretty muddled at first, the aliens never made any announcements to me while I was lying in the wreckage. So I do it all over and over again. One day I may even enjoy it.”

It didn’t sink in. “Chocolate covered?” I asked inanely. “Yeah.”

There was another pause. I realized how much I needed another person, not Gail, how much I needed someone real…

“We should get to know each other, maybe,” I ventured. “After it’s all over, maybe we could—”

“No, Joke. Nothing doing. I’m a ghost. I’m not immortal, don’t you see! The whole deal ignores me completely! I’m dead already, dead, permanently dead! You don’t get to be part of the deal if you die sometime during the day, you have to survive through till midnight, don’t you see?”

“… oh God.” I saw.

“They’ve just left me in the show to make everything as accurate as can be. I’m an echo. I’m nothing.”

I didn’t say a word. I just grabbed her and kissed her, right there in the middle of the doughnut stand. She was quite cold, like marble, like stone.

“Come on,” she said. We found a short-time hotel around the block; I paid the eight dollars and we clung together urgently, desperately, for a terribly brief time. I woke up at around 11 o’clock. Gail stirred uneasily. As I went through the motions for the thousandth time I was thinking all the time, this isn’t fair, this isn’t fair. Gail was alive, she was going to live forever, and she’s just like a machine, she might just as well be dead. Amy, now, she was dead, but so alive! Then I realized a terrible truth: Immortality kills! I was very bitter and very angry. I felt cheated, and the buzzing sounded louder, like a warning, and I knew then that I was going to try and do something dreadful. (“They can’t control everything,” wasn’t that what the Kirshna freak had said?)

I struggled, trying to push myself out of the groove, trying to change a little bit of one little movement, but always falling back to the immutable past…

We got up and had breakfast. She wore her ominous dishevelled look, strands of black hair fishnetting her startling blue eyes.

“John?”

“Umm?”

“John, I’m leaving you.”

“What for, who with?”

“Francis FitzHenry has asked me to stay with him—in his suite at the Plaza!”

I lifted my hand, then willed with every ounce of strength I could dredge up from every hidden source.

I didn’t slap her face.

A look of utter bewilderment crossed her face, just for one split second, and I looked at her and she looked at me, her emotions unfathomable; and then the whole thing swung grotesquely back to the original track, and she said quietly, dangerously, “You’re too petty, John. That’s why you’re going to be a Guildenstern for the rest of your life.” As though nothing were different. That hurt.

Then she walked out of my life.

But I had changed something! And we had communicated; for a split second something had passed between us!

The buzzing became a roar. I walked slowly to the theater, bathed in the glow of a hundred diaphanous wisps of light

It was a couple of minutes before 8 when the phone rang in my apartment. I decided to make a run for it, so I made for the kitchenette in the nude.

“Yeah?”

“This is Michael, John.” Michael played Horatio. He was sobbing, all broken up. I didn’t know him very well, so I played it cool. “John, I’m going to do something terrible! I can’t stand it, you’re the first person I could get through to this morning, I’m going to try and—”

I woke up around 11 o’clock. Gail stirred uneasily. We had breakfast, and I didn’t slap her face.

It seemed too natural. I realized that I had changed the pattern. This is the way it would always be from now on.

I had never slapped her face.

A look of utter bewilderment…but it was no longer a communication, it was just a reflex, part of the pattern, and then she said quietly, dangerously, “You’re too petty, John. That’s why you’re going to be a Guildenstern for the rest of your life.”

That hurt. Then she walked out of my life.

I went to the theater. There was Sir Francis, making his final scene so heartrending I could have drowned in a sea of molasses; arranging himself into elaborate poses that could have been plucked from the Acropolis; and uttering each iambic pentameter as though he were the New York Philharmonic and the Mormon Tabernacle Chok all rolled into one. He was dying, and he clutched at Horatio, and he said, measuring each phrase for the right mixture of honey and gall—

Absent thee from felicity awhile…

To tell my story.

and was just about to fall, with consummate grace, into Horatio’s arms, and you could feel the collective catch of breath, the palpable silence except for the quiet buzzing, when Horatio drew a revolver from his doublet and emptied it into Sir Francis’s stomach.

Aftef the aliens departed from the theater, the play went on, since Hamlet was dead anyway, and afterwards I walked home. I saw peculiar poles with metallic knobs on them, all along Broadway every couple of blocks, and there were a couple of overturned Yellow cabs, but the old Chevy was gone from the store window. Good for them.

In the morning I met Amy. I told her about what had happened.

“When you get to just before your accident, try to jump out of the car or something. Keep trying, Amy, just keep trying.”

She chewed her doughnut, deliberating. “I don’t know.”

“Well, we’ve got another six million, nine hundred thousand, nine hundred and ninety-four years to try in. So keep at it, okay?”

She seemed unconvinced.

“Just for me, try.”

I kissed her quickly on the forehead and she disappeared into the crowd that was heading towards the platform.

The pole was glowing a pale crimson when I touched it.

Hello.

I couldn’t contain my rage. “You bastards! Well, we’re not powerless after all, we’ve got free will, we can change things. We can ruin your high school project completely, rats that we are!”

Oh. Well, that too is one of the things under study at the moment.

“Well, let me tell you something. I don’t want your immortality! Because I’d have to give up being a person. Being a person means changing all the time, not being indifferent, and you’re changing us into machines.”

Oh? And do you deny that you’ve changed?

It was true. I had changed. I wasn’t going to be a Guildenstern for the rest of my life anymore. I was going to fight them; I was going to learn everything I could about them so I could try and twist it against them; I was going to be a real human being.

There are things you can’t do anything about. You’re in a transitional stage, you see. With immortality will come a change in perspectives. You won’t feel the same anymore about your barbarian ways, Earthling.

I had to laugh. “Where did you learn to talk like that?”

We monitored your science fiction TV broadcasts.

The picture of these alien schoolkids, clustering around a television set in some galactic suburbia somewhere in the sky… I laughed and laughed and laughed.

But then, seriously: “I’m still going to fight you, you know. For the sake of being human.” I had a new fuel to use, after all, against them. Love. Revenge. Heroism. I was thinking of Amy. The good old-fashioned stuff of drama.

Go ahead.

I woke up around 11 o’clock.

THE WOMAN THE UNICORN LOVE

Gene Wolfe

AT the western edge of the campus the parkway sent a river of steel and rubber roaring out of the heart of the city. Fragrant pines fringed the farther side. The unicorn trotted among them, sometimes concealed, sometimes treading the strip of coarse grass that touched the strip of soiled gravel that touched the concrete. That was where Anderson, looking from his office window, first saw him.

Drivers and passengers saw him too. Some waved; no doubt some shouted, though their shouts could not be heard. Faces pale and faces brown pressed against glass, but no one stopped. Possibly some trucker with a CB informed the police.

The unicorn was so white he gleamed. His head looked Arabian, but his hooves were darkly red, like pigeon’s blood rubies, and his tail was not like a horse’s tail at all, but the kind of tail-like the tail of a bull, but with an additional guidon of hair halfway to the tip-that is seen only in heraldic beasts. His horn shone like polished ivory, straight as the blade of a rapier and as long as a man’s forearm. Anderson guessed his height at fourteen hands.

He turned away to lift his camera bag down from the top of the filing cabinet, and when he got back to the window the unicorn was in the traffic. Across two hundred yards of campus lawn he could hear the squealing of brakes.

“Pluto, the grisly god, who never spares, Who feels no mercy, who hears no prayers.”

Anderson recited the couplet to himself, and only as he pronounced the word prayers was he aware that he had spoken aloud.

Then the unicorn was safe on the other side, cantering across the shaven grass. (Pluto, it appeared, might hear prayers after all.) As the armed head lifted to test the wind, Anderson’s telephone rang. He picked it up.

“Hello, Andy? Dumont. Look out your window.”

“I am looking,” Anderson said.

“Dropped right into our laps. Can you imagine anybody letting something like that go?”

“Yes, pretty easily. I can also imagine it jumping just about any fence on earth. But if we’re going to protect it, we’d better get on the job before the kids run it off.” Anderson had found his telephoto zoom and coupled it to the camera body. With the phone clamped between his shoulder and his ear, he took a quick picture.

“I’m going after it. I want a tissue specimen and a blood sample.”

“You can get them when the Army shoots it.”

“Listen, Andy, I don’t want to see it shot any more than you do. A piece of work like that? I’m going out there now, and I’ll appreciate any help I can get. I’ve already told my secretary to phone some members. If the military comes in—well, at least you’ll be able to get some stills to send the TV people. You coming?”

Anderson came, a big, tawny man of almost forty, with a camera hanging from his neck. By the time he was out of the Liberal Arts Building, there were a hundred or so students around the unicorn. He must have menaced them; their line bent backward, then closed again. His gleaming horn was lifted above their heads for a moment, half playful, half triumphant. Anderson used his size and faculty status to elbow his way to the front of the crowd.

The unicorn stood-no, trotted, almost danced-in the center of a circle fifty feet wide; while the students shouted jokes and cheered. A little group who must have known something of his lore grabbed a blonde in a cheerleader’s sweater and pushed her forward. He put his head down, a lancer at the charge; and she scampered back into the jeering crowd, breasts bobbing.

Anderson lowered his camera.

“Get it?” a student beside him asked.

“I think so.”

A Frisbee sailed by the unicorn’s ears, and he shied like a skittish horse. Someone threw it back.

Anderson yelled, “If that animal gets frightened, he’s going to hurt somebody.”

Dumont heard him, whether the students did or not. He waved from the farther side of the circle, his bald head gleaming. As the unicorn trotted past him, he thrust out a loaf of bread and was ignored.

Anderson sprinted across the circle. The students cheered, and several began running back and forth.

“Hi,” Dumont said. “That took guts.”

“Not really.” Anderson found he was puffing. “I didn’t come close. If he was angry, none of us would be here.”

“I wish none of them were-nobody but you and me. It would make everything a hell of a lot simpler.”

“Don’t you have that tranquilizer gun?”

“At home. Our friend there would be long gone by the time I got back with it. Maybe I should keep one in the lab, but you know how it is-before this, we’ve always had to go after them.”

Anderson nodded, only half listening as he watched the unicorn.

“We had this bread to feed to mice in a nutrition project. I put some stuff in it to quiet him down. On the spur of the moment, it was the best I could do.”

Anderson was wondering who would arrive first-their Mythic Conservationists with protest signs or the soldiers and their guns. “I doubt that it’s going to be good enough,” he told Dumont.

A young woman slipped between them. “Here,” she asked, “can I try?” Before Dumont could object, she took the bread and jogged to the center of the circle, the wind stirring her short, brown hair and the sunlight flashing from her glasses.

The unicorn came toward her slowly, head down.

Dumont said, “He’ll kill her.”

The students were almost quiet now, whispering. Anderson had to fight the impulse to dash out, to try to hold back the white beast, to knock him off his feet and wrestle him to the ground if he could. Except that he could not; that a dozen like him could not, no more than they could have overthrown an elephant. If he, or anyone here, were to attempt such a thing now, people would surely die.

The young woman thrust out Dumont’s loaf-common white bread from some grocery store. After a moment she crouched to bring her eyes on a level with the unicorn’s.

Anderson heard himself murmur, “Behold a pale horse: And his name that sat on him was Death.”

Then, when tension had been drawn so fine that it seemed to him that he must break, it broke instead. The ivory lance came up; and the shining, impossible lancer trotted forward, nibbled at the bread, nuzzled the young woman’s neck. Still quiet, indeed almost hushed, the students surged forward.

A boy with a feathery red beard patted the unicorn’s withers, and a girl Anderson recognized from one of his classes buried her face in the flowing mane. The young woman herself, the girl with the bread, stroked the fierce horn. Anderson found that he was there too, his hand on a gleaming flank.

Then the magic blew away beneath the threshing of a helicopter, dissolved like a dream at cockcrow. It came in low across the park, a dark blue gunship. (Police, Anderson thought crazily, police and not the Army this time.) A dozen people yelled, and the students began to scatter.

It banked in a tight turn and came back trailing a white plume of tear gas. Anderson ran with the rest then, hearing the thunder of the unicorn’s hooves over-no, under-the whicker of the four-bladed prop. There was a sputter of fire from some automatic weapon.

Back in the Liberal Arts Building several hours later, he went to the restroom to wash the traces of the gas from his face and hands and put drops in his faintly burning eyes.

The smell of the gas was in his trousers and jacket; they would have to be cleaned. He wished vaguely that he had been prescient enough to keep a change of clothes on campus.

When he opened the door to his office, the young woman was there. Absurdly, she rose when he entered, as though sex roles had not just been eliminated but reversed.

He nodded to her, and she extended her hand. “I’m Julie Coronell, Dr. Anderson.”

“It’s a pleasure,” he said. She might have been quite pretty, he decided, if she were not so thin. And so nervous.

“I-I noticed you out there. With the unicorn. I was the one who fed him bread.”

“I know you were,” Anderson said. “I noticed you too. Everyone did.”

She actually blushed, something he had not seen in years, “I’ve some more.” She lifted a brown paper sack. “The other wasn’t mine, really-I got it from some man there. He’s in the Biology Department, I think.”

Anderson nodded. “Yes, he is.”

“That was white. That bread. This is pumpernickel. I thought he-the unicorn. I thought he might like it better.”

Anderson could not keep from grinning at that, and she smiled too.

“Well, anyway, I like it better. Do you know the story about the general’s horse? Or am I being a pest?”

“Not at all. I’d love to hear the story of the general’s horse, especially if it has anything to do with unicorns.”

“It doesn’t, really. Only with horses, you know, and pumpernickel. The general was one of Napoleon’s, I think Bernadotte, and he had a favorite charger named Nicole-we would say Nicholas or Nick. When the Grand Army occupied Germany and the officers ate at the German country inns, they were served the coarse, brown German bread with their meals. All Frenchmen hate it, and none of them would eat it. But the others saw that Bernadotte slipped it into his pockets, and when they asked him about it, he said it was for his horse-pain pour Nicole, bread for Nick, After that the others joked about the German ‘horse bread,’ pain pour Nicole, and the Germans thought that was the French name for it, and since anything French has always been very posh on menus, they used it.”

Anderson chuckled and shook his head. “Is that what you’re going to call him when you find him? Nicholas? Or will it be Nicole?”

“Nick, actually. The story is just folk etymology, really. But I thought of it, and it seemed to fit. Nick, because we’re both Americans now. I was born in New Zealand, and that brings me to one of the things I came to ask you-what nationality are unicorns? I mean originally. Greek?”

“Indian,” Anderson told her, “You’re making fun of me.”

He shook his head. “Not American Indian, of course. Indian like the tiger. A Roman naturalist called Pliny seemed to have begun the story. He said that people in India hunted an animal he called the monoceros. Our word unicorn is a translation of that. Both words mean ‘one-horned.’ ” Julie nodded.

“Pliny said this unicorn had a head like a stag, feet like an elephant, a boar’s tail, and the body of a horse. It bellowed, it had one black horn growing from its forehead, and it could not be captured alive.”

She stared at him. He stared expressionlessly back, and at last she said, “That’s not a unicorn! That’s not a unicorn at all. That’s a rhinoceros.”

“Uh-huh. Specifically, it’s an Indian rhinoceros. The African ones actually have two horns, one in front of the other.

Pliny’s description fell into the hands of the scholars of the Dark Ages, who knew nothing about rhinoceroses or even elephants; and the unicorn became a one-horned creature that was otherwise much like a horse. Unicorn horn was supposed to neutralize poisons, but the Indians didn’t ship their rhinoceros horns west-China was much closer and much richer, and the Chinese thought rhinoceros horn was an aphrodisiac. Narwhale horns were brought in to satisfy the demand, and narwhale horns succeeded wonderfully, because narwhale horns are so utterly fantastic that no one who hasn’t seen one can believe in them. They’re ivory, and spiraled, and perfectly straight. You know, of course. You had your hand on one today, only it was growing out of a unicorn’s head. Dumont would say out of the head of a genetically re-engineered horse, but I think we both know better.”

Julie smiled. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it? Unicorns are real now.”

“In a way, they were real before. As Chesterton says somewhere, to think of a cow with wings is essentially to have met one. The unicorn symbolized masculine purity-which isn’t such a bad thing to symbolize, after all. Unicorns were painted on shields and sewn into flags. A unicorn rampant is the badge of Scotland, just as the bald eagle is the badge of this country, and eventually that unicorn became one of the supporters of the British arms. The image, the idea, has been real for a long time. Now it’s tangible.”

“And I’m glad. I like it like that. Dr. Anderson, the real reason I came to see you was that a friend told me you were the president of an organization that tries to save these animals.”

“Most of them are people. All right if I smoke?” She nodded, and Anderson took a pipe from his desk and began to pack it with tobacco. “Many of the creatures of myth were partly human and had human intelligence-lamias, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, and so forth. Often that seems to appeal to the individuals who do this sort of thing. Then too, human cellular material is the easiest of all for them to get-they can use their own.”

“Do you mean that I could make one of these mythical animals if I wanted to? Just go off and do it?”

The telephone rang and Anderson picked it up.

“Hello, Andy?” It was Dumo again.

“Yep,” Anderson said.

“It seems to have gotten aw …”

“Uh-huh. Our bunch certainly couldn’t find it, and our operator said there was nothing on the police radio.”

“Well, it gave them the slip. A student-an undergraduate, but I know him, and he’s pretty reliable-just came and told me. He saw it over on the far side of the practice field. He tried to get up close, but it ran behind the field house, and he lost it.”

Anderson covered the mouthpiece with his hand and said, “Nick’s all right. Someone just saw him.” He asked Dumont, “You send a bunch to look for him?”

“Not yet. I wanted to talk to you first. I gave the boy the key to my place and asked him to fetch my tranquilizer gun.

He’s got my van.”

“Fine. Come up here and we’ll talk. Leave this student a note so he’ll know where you are.”

“You don’t think we ought to send some people out after the unicorn?”

“We’ve had searchers out after him for a couple of hours, and so have the police. I don’t know about you; but while I was beating the bushes, I was wondering just what in the name of Capitoline Jove I was going to do with him if I found him. Try to ride him? Put salt on his tail? We can’t do a damn thing until we’ve got your tranquilizer gun or some other way to control him, and by the time the boy gets back from your house in Brookwood it will be nearly dark.”

When he had cradled the telephone, Anderson said, “That should give you an idea how well organized we are.”

Julie shrugged sympathetically.

“In the past, you see, it was always a question of letting the creature get away. The soldiers or the police wanted to kill it, we wanted to see it spared. Usually they head for the most lightly populated area they can find. We should have anticipated that sooner or later we’d be faced with one right here in the city, but I suppose we assumed that in a case like that we’d have no chance at all. Now it turns out that we’ve got a chance-your friend Nick is surprisingly elusive for such a big beast-and we haven’t the least idea of what to do.”

“Maybe he was born-do you say born?”

“We usually say created, but it doesn’t matter.”

“Well, maybe he was created here in the city, and he’s trying to find his way out of it.”

“A creature that size?” Anderson shook his head. “He’s come in from outside, from some sparsely settled rural area, or he’d have been turned in by a nosy neighbor long ago.

People can-people do-perform DNA engineering in the city. Sometimes in basements or garages or kitchens, more often on the sly in college labs or some big corporation’s research and development facility. They keep the creatures they’ve made too; sometimes for years. I’ve got a sea-horse at home in an aquarium, not one of those fish you buy cast in plastic paperweights in the Florida souvenir shops, but a little fellow about ten inches long, with the head and forelegs of a pony and the hindquarters of a trout. I’ve had him for a year now, and I’ll probably have him for another ten. But suppose he were Nick’s size-where would I keep him?”

“In a swimming pool, I imagine,” Julie said. “In fact, it seems rather a nice idea. Maybe at night, you could take him to Lake Michigan and ride him there, in the lake. You could wear scuba gear. I’m not a terribly good swimmer, but I think I’d do it.” She smiled at him.

He smiled back. “It does sound like fun, when you describe it.”

“Just the same, you think Nick’s escaped from some farm-or perhaps an estate. I should think that would be more likely. The rich must have these poor, wonderful animals made for them sometimes.”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Unicorns. A sea-horse-that’s from mythology too, isn’t it?”

Anderson was lighting his pipe; the mingled fumes of sulur and tobacco filled the office. “Balios and Xanthos drew the chariot of Poseidon,” he said. “In fact, Poseidon was the god of horses as well as of the sea. His herds were the waves, in a mystic sense few people understand today. The whitecaps were the white manes of his innumerable steeds.”

“And you mentioned lamias-those were snake women, weren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“And centaurs. And fauns and satyrs. Are all the animals like that, that the biologists make, from mythology?”

Anderson shook his head. “Not all of them, no. But let me ask you a question, Ms. Coronell…”

“Call me Julie, please.”

“All right, Julie. Now suppose that you were a biologist. In genetic engineering they’ve reached the stage at which any competent worker with a Master’s or a Ph.D.-and a lot of bright undergraduates-can do this sort of thing. What would you make for yourself?”

“I have room for it, and privacy, and lots of money?

“If you like, yes.”

“Then I’d make a unicorn, I think.”

“You’re impressed with them because you saw a beautiful one today. After that. Suppose you were going to create something else?”

Julie paused, looking pensive. “We talked about riding a sea-horse in the lake. Something with wings, I suppose, that I could ride.”

“A bird? A mammal?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to think about it.”

“If you chose a bird, it would have to be much larger, of course, than a natural bird. You’d also find that it could not maintain the proportions of any of the species whose genetic matter you were using. Its wings would have to be much larger in proportion to its body. Its head would not have to be much bigger than an eagle’s-and so on. When you were through and you were spotted sailing among the clouds, the newspapers would probably call your bird a roc, after the one that carried Sinbad.”

“If you decided on a winged horse instead, it would be Pegasus. I’ve never yet seen one of those that could actually fly, by the way. A winged human being would be an angel, or if it were more birdlike, with claws and tail feathers and so on, perhaps a harpy. You see, it’s quite hard to escape from mythological nomenclature, because it covers so much. People have already imagined all these things. It’s just that now we-some of us-can make them come true.”

Julie smiled nervously. “An alligator! I think I’ll choose an alligator with wings. I could make him smarter at the same time.”

Anderson puffed out a cloud of smoke. “That’s a dragon.”

“Wait, I’ll…”

The door flew open and Dumont came in. Anderson said, “Here’s the man who can tell you about recombinant DNA and that sort of thing. I’d only make a hash of it.” He stood.

“Julie, may I present Henry A. Dumont of Biology, my good friend and occasionally my rival.”

“Friendly rival,” Dumont put in.

“Also the treasurer and technical director of our little society. Dumont, this is Julia Coronell, the lady who’s hiding the unicorn.”

For a moment no one spoke. Julie’s face was guarded, expressionless save for tension. Then she said, “How did you know?”

Anderson sat down again, and Dumont took the office’s last chair. Anderson said, “You came here because you were concerned about Nick.” He paused, and Julie nodded. “But you didn’t seem to want to do anything. If Nick was running round while the police looked for him, the situation was urgent; but you told me that story about pumpernickel and let me blather on about fauns and centaurs. You were worried, you were under a considerable strain, but you weren’t urging me to get busy and reactivate the group we had looking for Nick this afternoon. When Dumont here called, I was very casual about the whole thing and just asked him to come over and talk. You didn’t protest, and I decided that you knew where Nick was already. And that he was safe, at least for the time being.”

“I see,” Julie whispered.

“I don’t,” Dumont said. “That boy told me he saw the unicorn.”

Anderson nodded. “A friend of yours, Julie?”

“Yes…”

Dumont said, “Honey, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’re on your side.”

“You hid Nick.” Anderson continued, “after the police dropped their tear gas. He was tame with you, as we saw earlier. He may even have eaten enough of Dumont’s bread to calm him down a bit-there was a sedative in it. For a while after that, you were probably too frightened to do anything more; you just lay low. Then the police went away and our search parties gave up, and you went off campus to buy that bread you’re holding. On the way back to give it to Nick, you met someone who told you about me.”

Dumont asked, “Was it Ed? The boy who told me he saw the unicorn?”

Julie’s voice was nearly inaudible. “Yes, it was.”

“And between the two of you, you decided it would be smart to start some rumors indicating that Nick was still free and moving in a direction away from the place where you had him hidden.” Anderson paused to relight his pipe. “So the first report had him disappearing behind the field house. The next one would have put him even farther away, I suppose. But more or less on impulse, you decided that we might help you, so you came up here to wait for me.

Anyway, it would be safer for you to take that bread to Nick after dark. All right, we will help you. At least, we’ll try. Where is Nick?”

Ed was no more a boy, actually, than Julie Coronell was a girl-a studious looking young man of nineteen or twenty.

He had brought Dumont’s cranquilizer gun, and Dumont had it now, though all of them hoped it would not be needed.

Julie led the way, with Anderson beside her and Dumont and Ed behind them. A softness as of rose petals was in the evening air.

Anderson said, “I’ve seen you around the campus, haven’t I? Graduate school?”

Julie nodded. “I’m working on my doctorate, and I teach some freshman and sophomore classes. Ed’s one of my students. Most of the people I meet seem to think I’m a sophomore or a junior myself. How did you know I wasn’t?”

“The way you’re dressed. I guessed, actually. You look young, but you also look like a woman who looks younger than she is.”

“You ought to have been a detective,” she told him.

“Yes, anything but this.”

The sun had set behind the trees of the park, trees whose long shadows had all run together now, flooding the lawns and walks with formless night. Most of the windows in the buildings the four passed were dark.

“What department?” Anderson asked when Julie said nothing more.

“English. My dissertation will be on twentieth-century American novelists.”

“I should have recognized you, but I’m more than two thousand years behind you.”

“I’m easy to overlook.”

“Let’s hope Nick is too.” For a moment, Anderson studied the building looming before them. “Why the library?”

“I’ve been doing research; they let me have a key. I knew it had just closed, and I couldn’t think of anything else.” She held up the key.

A minute or two later, it slid into the lock. The interior was dim but not dark-a scattering of lights, lonely and almost spectral, burned in the recesses of the building, as though the spirits of a few geniuses lingered, still awake.

Dumont said, “You’d better let me go in front,” and hur-ried past them with the tranquilizer gun. The doors closed with a hollow boom; suddenly the air seemed stale.

“Isn’t there a watchman?” Anderson asked.

Julie nodded. She was near enough for Anderson to smell her faint perfume. “You said Ed was a friend of mine. I don’t have a lot, but I suppose Bailey-he’s the watchman-is a friend too. I’m the only one who never calls him Beetle. I told you Nick was in the Sloan Fantasy Collection. Have you heard of it?”

“Vaguely. My field is classical literature.”

Behind them, Ed said, “That’s what fantasy is-classical lit that’s still alive. When the people who wrote those stories did it, their books were called fantasy.”

“Ed!” Julie protested.

“No,” Anderson said. “He’s right.”

“Anyway,” Julie continued, “the Sloan Collection isn’t the best in the country, or even a famous collection. But it’s a jolly good one. It’s got James Branch Cabell in first editions, for example, and a lot of his letters. And there’s some wonderful John Gardner material. So that’s where I put Nick.”

Stamping among the books, Anderson thought to himself.

Couchant at the frontiers of Overworld and Oz.

Pity the Unicorn,

Pity the Hippogriff,

Souls that were never born

Out of the land of If!

Somewhere ahead, Dumont called, “He’s dead!” and suddenly all three of them were running, staggering, stumbling down a dark and narrow corridor, guided by the flame of Dumont’s lighter.

Anderson heard Julie whisper, “Nick! Oh, God, Nick!”

Then she was quiet. The thing on the floor was no white unicorn.

Dumont rasped, “Hasn’t anybody got a light?”

“Just matches,” Anderson said. He lit one.

Ed told them, “I’ve got one,” and from the pocket of is denim shirt produced a little, disposable penlight.

Julie was bending over the dead man, trying not to step in his blood. There was a great deal of it, and Dumont had stepped in it already, leaving a footprint. Ed played his light upon the dead man’s face…clean-shaven; about sixty, Anderson guessed. He had worn a leather windbreaker. There was a hole in it now, a big hole that welled blood.

“It’s Bailey,” Julie said. And Dumont, thinking that she spoke to him (as perhaps she did), answered, “Is that his name? Everybody called him Beetle.”

Bailey had been gored in the middle of his chest, very near the heart, Anderson decided. No doubt he had died instantly, or almost instantly. His face was not peaceful or frightened or anything else; only twisted in the terrible rictus of death.

“He match burned Andersen’s fingers; he shook it and Topped it.

“Nick …” Julie whispered. “Nick did this?”

“I’m afraid so,” Dumont told her.

She looked around, first at Dumont, then at Anderson.

“He’s dangerous. … I suppose I always knew it, but I didn’t like to think about it. We’ll have to let the police …”

Dumont nodded solemnly.

“Like hell,” Anderson said, and Julie stared at him. “You put him here, in this room”-Anderson glanced at the half-open door-“and went away and left him. Is that right?”

“Mr. Bailey was with us. He heard us as soon as I brought Nick inside. Nick’s hooves made a lot of noise on the terrazzo floor. We took him to this room, and Mr. Bailey locked it for me.”

Ed asked, “Hold this, will you, Dr. Dumont?” and handed Dumont the penlight, then took three steps, stooped, and straightened up with a much larger flashlight. After the near darkness, its illumination seemed almost a glare. Dumont let his lighter go out and dropped it into his pocket.

Ed was grinning weakly. “This must be the old man’s flash,” he said. “I thought I saw something shine over here.”

“Yes.” Anderson nodded. “He would have had it in his hand. After Julie left he came here to take another look at the unicorn. He opened the door and turned on his flashlight.”

Julie shivered. “It could have been me.”

“I doubt it. Even if Nick doesn’t have human or almost human intelligence-and I suspect he does-he would have winded the watchman and known it wasn’t your smell. No matter what kind of brain his creator gave him, his sensory setup must be basically the one that came with his equine DNA. Am I right, Dumont?”

“Right.” The biologist glanced at his wrist. “I wish we had more information about the time Beetle died.”

Ed asked, “Can’t you tell from the clotting of the blood?”

“Not close enough,” Dumont said. “Maybe a forensic technician could, but that’s not my field. If this were one of those mysteries on TV, we could tell from the time his watch broke.

It didn’t, and it’s still running. Anybody want to guess how far that unicorn’s gone since he did this?”

“I will,” Anderson told him. “Not more than about two hundred and fifty feet.”

They stared at him.

“The front doors were locked when we came in-Julie had to open them for us. I’d bet the side door is locked too, and this building has practically no windows.”

“You mean he’s still in here?”

“If he’s not, how did he get out?”

Julie said, “We’d hear him, wouldn’t we? I told you-his hooves made a racket when I let him in.”

“He heard them too,” Anderson told her. ”He wouldn’t have to be a tenth as intelligent as he probably is to keep quiet. Almost any animal will do that by instinct. If it can’t run-or doesn’t think running’s a good idea-it freezes.”

Ed cleared his throat. “Dr. Anderson, you said he could tell by the smell that Beetle wasn’t Julie. He’ll know we aren’t Julie too.”

“Conversely, he’ll know that she is. But if we separate to look for him and the wrong party finds him, there could be trouble.”

Dumont nodded. “What do you think we ought to do?”

“To start with, give Ed here the keys to your van so he can bring it around front. If we find Nick, we’re going to have to have some way to get him out of town. We’ll leave the front doors open…”

“And let him get away?”

“No. But we need unicorn bait, and freedom’s about as good a bait as anybody’s ever found. Nick’s probably hungry by now, and he’s almost certainly thirsty. My mind runs to quotations anyway, so how about:

One by one in the moonlight there,

Neighing far off on the haunted air,

The unicorns come down to the sea.

Do you know that one?”

All three looked blank.

“It’s Conrad Aiken, and of course he never saw a unicorn.

But there may be some truth in it-in the feeling of it-just the same. We’ll prop the doors wide. Dumont, you hide in the darkest shadow you can find there; the open doors should let in enough light for you to shoot by, particularly since you’ll be shooting at a white animal. Julie and I will go through the building, turning on lights and looking for Nick. If we find him and he’s docile with her, we can just lead him out and put him in the van. If he runs, you should get him on the way out.”

Dumont nodded.

When the two of them were alone, Julie asked, “That gun of Dr. Dumont’s won’t really hurt Nick, will it?”

“No more than a shot in the arm would hurt you. Less.”

The beam of the dead watchman’s flashlight probed the corridor, seeming to leave a deeper twilight where it had passed. A few moments before, Anderson had talked of turning on more lights, but thus far they had failed to find the switches. He asked Julie if it were always this dim when she came to do research after the library had closed.

“Bailey used to take care of the lights for me,” she said.

“But I don’t know where. I’d begin setting up my things on one of the tables, my notebooks and so forth; and the lights would come on.” Her voice caught on lights.

She sniffled, and Anderson realized she was crying. He put his arm about her shoulders.

“Oh, rot! Why is it that one can-can try to do something fine, and have-have it end …”

He chanted softly:

“Twist ye, twine ye! Even so,

Mingled shades of joy and woe,

Hope and fear, and peace, and strife,

In the thread of human life.”

“That’s b-beautiful, but what does it mean? That the good and bad are mixed together so we can’t pull them apart?”

“And that this isn’t the end. Not for men or women o unicorns. Probably not even for poor old Bailey. Thread are long.”

She put her arms about his neck and kissed him, and he was so busy pressing those soft, fragrant lips in return that he hardly heard the sudden thunder of the unshod hooves.

He pushed tier away just in time. The spiraled horn raked his belly like a talon; the beast’s shoulder hit him like a football player’s, sending him crashing into a high bookcase.

Julie screamed, “No, Nick! Don’t!” and he tried to stand.

The unicorn was rearing to turn in the narrow aisle, tall as a giant on his hind legs. Anderson clawed at the shelves, bringing down an avalanche of books. He found himself somehow grasping the horn, holding on desperately. A hoof struck his thigh like a hammer and he was careening down some dark passage, half carried, half dragged.

Abruptly, there was light ahead. He tried to shout for Dumont to shoot; but he had no breath, grasping the horn, grappling the tossing white head like a bulldogger. If the soft pluff of the gun ever came, it was lost in the clattering hoofbeats, in the roar of the blood in his ears. And if it came, the dart surely missed.

They nearly fell on the steps. Reeling they reached the bottom like kittens tossed from a sack. Anderson managed then to get his right leg under him; and with the unicorn nearly sprawling, he tried to get his left across the broad, white back and found that leg was broken.

He must have shrieked when the ends of splintered bone grated together, and he must have lost his hold. He lay upon his back, on grass, and heard the gallop of approaching death. Saw death, white as bone.

Stallions fight, he thought. Fight for mares, kicking and biting. Only men kill other men for a woman.

He lay without moving, his left leg twisted like a broken doll’s. Stallions don’t kill-not if the other lies down, surrenders.

The white head was silhouetted against the twinkling constellations now, the colors seemingly reversed as in a negative, the long sword horn both new and ancient to the sky of Earth.

Later, when he told Julie and Dumont about it, Dumont said, “So he was only a horse after all. He spared you.”

“A superhorse. A horse armed, with size, strength, grace, and intelligence all augmented.” They had wanted to carry him somewhere (he doubted if they themselves knew where), but he had stopped them. Now, after Dumont had phoned for an ambulance, they sat beside him on the grass. His leg hurt terribly.

“Which way did he go? The park again?”

“No, the lake shore. ‘The unicorns come down to the sea,’ re-member? You’ll have to drum up a group and go after him in the morning.”

Julie said, “I’ll come, and I’m sure Ed will too.”

Anderson managed to nod. “We’ve got a couple of dozen others. Some here, some in town. Dumont has the phone numbers.”

She forced a smile. “Andy-can I call you Andy? You like poems. Do you recall this one?

The lion and the unicorn

Were fighting for the crown;

The lion beat the unicorn

And sent him out of town.

Some gave them white bread,

And some gave them brown.

Some gave them plum-cake,

And drummed them out of town.

We’ve just had it come true, all except for that bit about the plum-cake.”

“And the lion,” Anderson said.

THE PUSHER

John Varley

Things change. Ian Haise expected that. Yet there are certain constants, dictated by function and use. Ian looked for those and he seldom went wrong.

The playground was not much like the ones he had known as a child. But playgrounds are built to entertain children. They will always have something to swing on, something to slide down, something to climb. This one had all those things, and more. Part of it was thickly wooded. There was a swimming hole. The stationary apparatus was combined with dazzling light sculptures that darted in and out of reality. There were animals too: pygmy rhinoceros and elegant gazelles no taller than your knee. They seemed unnaturally gentle and unafraid.

But most of all, the playground had children.

Ian liked children.

He sat on a wooden park bench at the edge of the trees, in the shadows, and watched them. They came in all colors and all sizes, in both sexes. There were black ones like animated licorice jellybeans and white ones like bunny rabbits, and brown ones with curly hair and more brown ones with slanted eyes and straight black hair and some who had been white but were now toasted browner than some of the brown ones.

Ian concentrated on the girls. He had tried with boys before, long ago, but it had not worked out.

He watched one black child for a time, trying to estimate her age. He thought it was around eight or nine. Too young. Another one was more like thirteen, judging from her shirt. A possibility, but he’d prefer something younger. Somebody less sophisticated, less suspicious.

Finally he found a girl he liked. She was brown, but with startling blond hair. Ten? Possibly eleven. Young enough, at any rate.

He concentrated on her and did the strange thing he did when he had selected the right one. He didn’t know what it was, but it usually worked. Mostly it was just a matter of looking at her, keeping his eyes fixed on her no matter where she went or what she did, not allowing himself to be distracted by anything. And sure enough, in a few minutes she looked up, looked around, and her eyes locked with his. She held his gaze for a moment, then went back to her play.

He relaxed. Possibly what he did was nothing at all. He had noticed, with adult women, that if one really caught his eye so he found himself staring at her, she would usually look up from what she was doing and catch him. It never seemed to fail. Talking to other men, he had found it to be a common experience. It was almost as if they could feel his gaze. Women had told him it was nonsense, or if not, it was just reaction to things seen peripherally by people trained to alertness for sexual signal’s. Merely an unconscious observation penetrating to the awareness; nothing mysterious, like ESP.

Perhaps. Still, Ian was very good at this sort of eye contact. Several times he had noticed the girls rubbing the backs of their necks while he observed them, or hunching their shoulders. Maybe they’d developed some kind of ESP and just didn’t recognize it as such.

Now he merely watched her. He was smiling, so that every time she looked up to see him—which she did with increasing frequency—she saw a friendly, slightly graying man with a broken nose and powerful shoulders. His hands were strong too. He kept them clasped in his lap.

*

Presently she began to wander in his direction.

No one watching her would have thought she was coming toward him. She probably didn’t know it herself. On her way, she found reasons to stop and tumble, jump on the soft rubber mats, or chase a flock of noisy geese. But she was coming toward him, and she would end up on the park bench beside him.

He glanced around quickly. As before, there were few adults in this playground. It had surprised him when he arrived. Apparently the new conditioning techniques had reduced the numbers of the violent and twisted to the point that parents felt it safe to allow their children to run without supervision. The adults present were involved with each other. No one had given him a second glance when he arrived.

That was fine with Ian. It made what he planned to do much easier. He had his excuses ready, of course, but it could be embarrassing to be confronted with the questions representatives of the law ask single, middle-aged men who hang around playgrounds.

For a moment he considered, with real concern, how the parents of these children could feel so confident, even with mental conditioning. After all, no one was conditioned until he had first done something. New maniacs were presumably being produced every day. Typically, they looked just like everyone else until they proved their difference by some demented act.

Somebody ought to give those parents a stern lecture, he thought.

*

“Who are you?”

Ian frowned. Not eleven, surely, not seen up this close. Maybe not even ten. She might be as young as eight.

Would eight be all right? He tasted the idea with his usual caution, looked around again for curious eyes. He saw none.

“My name is Ian. What’s yours?”

“No. Not your name. Who are you?”

“You mean what do I do?”

“Yes.”

“I’m a pusher.”

She thought that over, then smiled. She had her permanent teeth, crowded into a small jaw.

“You give away pills?”

He laughed. “Very good,” he said. “You must do a lot of reading.” She said nothing, but her manner indicated she was pleased.

“No,” he said. “That’s an old kind of pusher. I’m the other kind. But you knew that, didn’t you?” When he smiled, she broke into giggles. She was doing the pointless things with her hands that little girls do. He thought she had a pretty good idea of how cute she was, but no inkling of her forbidden eroticism. She was a ripe seed with sexuality ready to burst to the surface. Her body was a bony sketch, a framework on which to build a woman.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“That’s a secret. What happened to your nose?”

“I broke it a long time ago. I’ll bet you’re twelve.”

She giggled, then nodded. Eleven, then. And just barely.

“Do you want some candy?” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the pink-and-white-striped paper bag.

She shook her head solemnly. “My mother says not to take candy from strangers.”

“But we’re not strangers. I’m Ian, the pusher.”

She thought that over. While she hesitated, he reached into the bag and picked out a chocolate thing so thick and gooey it was almost obscene. He bit into it, forcing himself to chew. He hated sweets.

“Okay,” she said, and reached toward the bag. He pulled it away. She looked at him in innocent surprise.

“I just thought of something,” he said. “I don’t know your name. So I guess we are strangers.”

She caught on to the game when she saw the twinkle in his eye. He’d practiced that. It was a good twinkle.

“My name is Radiant. Radiant Shining star Smith.”

“A very fancy name,” he said, thinking how names had changed. “For a very pretty girl.” He paused, and cocked his head. “No. I don’t think so. You’re Radiant…Starr. With two r’s… Captain Radiant Starr, of the Star Patrol.”

She was dubious for a moment. He wondered if he’d judged her wrong. Perhaps she was really Miz Radiant Fainting heart Belle, or Mrs. Radiant Motherhood. But her fingernails were a bit dirty for that.

She pointed a finger at him and made a Donald Duck sound as her thumb worked back and forth. He put his hand to his heart and fell over sideways, and she dissolved in laughter. She was careful, however, to keep her weapon firmly trained on him.

“And you’d better give me that candy or I’ll shoot you again.”

*

The playground was darker now, and not so crowded. She sat beside him on the bench, swinging her legs. Her bare feet did not quite touch the dirt.

She was going to be quite beautiful. He could see it clearly in her face. As for the body…who could tell?

Not that he really gave a damn.

She was dressed in a little of this and a little of that, worn here and there without much regard for his concepts of modesty. Many of the children wore nothing. It had been something of a shock when he arrived. Now he was almost used to it, but he still thought it incautious on the part of her parents. Did they really think the world was that safe, to let an eleven year-old girl go practically naked in a public place?

He sat there listening to her prattle about her friends—the ones she hated and the one or two she simply adored—with only part of his attention.

He inserted um’s and uh-huh’s in the right places.

She was cute, there was no denying it. She seemed as sweet as a child that age ever gets, which can be very sweet and as poisonous as a rattlesnake, almost at the same moment. She had the capacity to be warm, but it was on the surface. Underneath, she cared mostly about herself. Her loyalty would be a transitory thing, bestowed easily, just as easily forgotten.

And why not? She was young. It was perfectly healthy for her to be that way.

But did he dare try to touch her?

It was crazy. It was as insane as they all told him it was. It worked so seldom. Why would it work with her? He felt a weight of defeat.

“Are you okay?”

“Huh? Me? Oh, sure, I’m all right. Isn’t your mother going to be worried about you?”

“I don’t have to be in for hours, and hours yet.” For a moment she looked so grown-up he almost believed the lie.

“Well, I’m getting tired of sitting here. And the candy’s all gone.” He looked at her face. Most of the chocolate had ended up in a big circle around her mouth, except where she had wiped it daintily on her shoulder or forearm. “What’s back there?”

She turned.

“That? That’s the swimming hole.”

“Why don’t we go over there? I’ll tell you a story.”

*

The promise of a story was not enough to keep her out of the water. He didn’t know if that was good or bad. He knew she was smart, a reader, and she had an imagination. But she was also active. That pull was too strong for him. He sat far from the water, under some bushes, and watched her swim with the three other children still in the park this late in the evening.

Maybe she would come back to him, and maybe she wouldn’t. It wouldn’t change his life either way, but it might change hers.

She emerged dripping and infinitely cleaner from the murky water. She dressed again in her random scraps, for whatever good it did her, and came to him, shivering.

“I’m cold,” she said.

“Here.” He took off his jacket. She looked at his hands as he wrapped it around her, and she reached out and touched the hardness of his shoulder.

“You sure must be strong,” she commented.

“Pretty strong. I work hard, being a pusher.”

“Just what is a pusher?” she said, and stifled a yawn.

“Come sit on my lap, and I’ll tell you.”

*

He did tell her, and it was a very good story that no adventurous child could resist. He had practiced that story, refined it, told it many times into a recorder until he had the rhythms and cadences just right, until he found just the right words not too difficult words, but words with some fire and juice in them.

And once more he grew encouraged. She had been tired when he started, but he gradually caught her attention. It was possible no one had ever told her a story in quite that way. She was used to sitting before the screen and having a story shoved into her eyes and ears. It was something new to be able to interrupt with questions and get answers. Even reading was not like that. It was the oral tradition of storytelling, and it could still mesmerize the nth generation of the electronic age.

“That sounds great,” she said, when she was sure he was through.

“You liked it?”

“I really truly did. I think I want to be a pusher when I grow up. That was a really neat story.”

“Well, that’s not actually the story I was going to tell you. That’s just what it’s like to be a pusher.”

“You mean you have another story?”

“Sure.” He looked at his watch. “But I’m afraid it’s getting late. It’s almost dark, and everybody’s gone home. You’d probably better go too.”

She was in agony, torn between what she was supposed to do and what she wanted. It really should be no contest, if she was who he thought she was.

“Well…but—but I’ll come back here tomorrow and you—”

He was shaking his head.

“My ship leaves in the morning,” he said. “There’s no time.”

“Then tell me now! I can stay out. Tell me now. Please please please?”

He coyly resisted, harrumphed, protested, but in the end allowed himself to be seduced. He felt very good. He had her like a five-pound trout on a twenty-pound line. It wasn’t sporting. But, then. he wasn’t playing a game.

*

So at last he got to his specialty.

He sometimes wished he could claim the story for his own. but the fact was he could not make up stories. He no longer tried to. Instead, he cribbed from every fairy tale and fantasy story he could find. If he had a genius, it was in adapting some of the elements to fit the world she knew—while keeping it strange enough to enthrall her—and in ad-libbing the end to personalize it.

It was a wonderful tale he told. It had enchanted castles sitting on mountains of glass, moist caverns beneath the sea, fleets of starships, and shining riders astride horses that flew the galaxy. There were evil alien creatures, and others with much good in them. There were drugged potions. Scaled beasts roared out of hyperspace to devour planets.

Amid all the turmoil strode the Prince and Princess. They got into frightful jams and helped each other out of them.

The story was never quite the same. He watched her eyes. When they wandered, he threw away whole chunks of story. When they widened, he knew what parts to plug in later. He tailored it to her reactions.

The child was sleepy. Sooner or later she would surrender. He needed her in a trance state, neither awake nor asleep. That was when the story would end…and though the healers labored long and hard, they could not save the Princess. She died that night, far from her Prince.”

Her mouth was a little round o. Stories were not supposed to end that way.

“Is that all? She died and she never saw the Prince again?”

“Well, not quite all. But the rest of it probably isn’t true, and I shouldn’t tell it to you.” Ian felt pleasantly tired. His throat was a little raw, making him hoarse. Radiant was a warm weight on his lap.

“You have to tell me, you know,” she said reasonably. He supposed she was right. He took a deep breath.

“All right. At the funeral, all the greatest people from that part of the galaxy were in attendance. Among them was the greatest Sorcerer who ever lived. His name…but I really shouldn’t tell you his name. I’m sure he’d be very cross if I did.

“This Sorcerer passed by the Princess’s bier…that’s a—”

“I know, I know, Ian. Go on!”

“Suddenly he frowned and leaned over her pale form. ‘What is this?’ he thundered. ‘Why was I not told?’ Everyone was very concerned. This Sorcerer was a dangerous man. One time when someone insulted him he made a spell that turned everyone’s heads backwards so they had to walk around with rearview mirrors. No one knew what he would do if he got really angry.

“‘This Princess is wearing the Star stone,’ he said, and drew himself up and frowned all around as if he were surrounded by idiots. I’m sure he thought he was and maybe he was right. Because he went on to tell them just what the Star stone was, and what it did, something no one there had ever heard before. And this is the part I’m not sure of. Because, though everyone new the Sorcerer was a wise and powerful man, he was also known as a great liar.

“He said that the Star stone was capable of capturing the essence of a person at the moment of her death. All her wisdom, all her power, all her knowledge and beauty and strength would flow into the stone and be held there, timelessly.”

“In suspended animation,” Radiant breathed.

“Precisely. When they heard this, the people were amazed. They buffeted the Sorcerer with questions, to which he gave few answers, and those only grudgingly. Finally he left in a huff. When he was gone, everyone talked long into the night about the things he had said. Some felt the Sorcerer had held out hope that the Princess might yet live on. That if her body was frozen, the Prince, upon his return, might somehow infuse her essence back within her. Others thought the Sorcerer had said that was impossible, that the Princess was doomed to a half-life, locked in the stone.

“But the opinion that prevailed was this:

“The Princess would probably never come fully back to life. But her essence might flow from the Star stone and into another, if the right person could be found. All agreed this person must be a young maiden. She must be beautiful, very smart, swift of foot, loving, kind…oh, my, the list was very long. Everyone doubted such a person could be found. Many did not even want to try.

“But at last it was decided the Star stone should be given to a faithful friend of the Prince. He would search the galaxy for this maiden. If she existed, he would find her.

“So he departed with the blessings of many worlds behind him, vowing to find the maiden and give her the Star stone.”

He stopped again, cleared his throat, and let the silence grow.

“Is that all?” she said at last, in a whisper.

“Not quite all,” he admitted. “I’m afraid I tricked you.”

“Tricked me?”

He opened the front of his coat, which was still draped around her shoulders. He reached in past her bony chest and down into an inner pocket of the coat. He came up with the crystal. It was oval, with one side flat. It pulsed ruby light as it sat in the palm of his hand.

“It shines,” she said, looking at it wide-eyed and openmouthed.

“Yes, it does. And that means you’re the one.”

“Me?”

“Yes. Take it.” He handed it to her, and as he did so, he nicked it with his thumbnail. Red light spilled into her hands, flowed between her fingers, seemed to soak into her skin. When it was over, the crystal still pulsed, but dimmed. Her hands were trembling.

“It felt very, very hot,” she said.

“That was the essence of the Princess.”

“And the Prince? Is he still looking for her?”

“No one knows. I think he’s still out there, and someday he will come back for her.”

*

“And what then?”

He looked away from her. “I can’t say. I think, even though you are lovely, and even though you have the Star stone, that he will just pine away. He loved her very much.”

“I’d take care of him,” she promised.

“Maybe that would help. But I have a problem now. I don’t have the heart to tell the Prince that she is dead. Yet I feel that the Star stone will draw him to it one day. If he comes and finds you, I fear for him. I think perhaps I should take the stone to a far part of the galaxy, someplace he could never find it. Then at least he would never know. It might be better that way.”

“But I’d help him,” she said earnestly. “I promise I’d wait for him, and when he came, I’d take her place. You’ll see.”

He studied her. Perhaps she would. He looked into her eyes for a long time, and at last let her see his satisfaction.

“Very well. You can keep it, then.”

“I’ll wait for him,” she said. “You’ll see.”

*

She was very tired, almost asleep.

“You should go home now,” he suggested.

“Maybe I could just lie down for a moment,” she said.

“All right.” He lifted her gently and placed her supine on the ground. He stood looking at her, then knelt beside her and began to stroke her forehead gently. She opened her eyes with no alarm, then closed them again. He continued to stroke her.

Twenty minutes later he left the playground, alone.

*

He was always depressed afterwards. It was worse than usual this time. She had been much nicer than he had imagined at first. Who could have guessed such a romantic heart beat beneath all that dirt?

He found a phone booth several blocks away. Punching her name into information yielded a fifteen-digit number, which he called. He held his hand over the camera eye.

A woman’s face appeared on his screen.

“Your daughter is in the playground, at the south end by the pool, under the bushes,” he said. He gave the address of the playground.

“We were so worried! What…is she…who is—”

He hung up and hurried away.

*

Most of the other pushers thought he was sick. Not that it mattered. Pushers were a tolerant group when it came to other pushers, and especially when it came to anything a pusher might care to do to a puller. He wished he had never told anyone how he spent his leave time, but he had, and now he had to live with it.

So, while they didn’t care if he amused himself by pulling the legs and arms off infant puller pups, they were all just back from ground leave and couldn’t pass up an opportunity to get on each other’s nerves. They ragged him mercilessly.

“How were the swing-sets this trip, Ian?”

“Did you bring me those dirty knickers I asked for?”

“Was it good for you, honey? Did she pant and slobber?”

“My ten-year-old baby, she’s a-pullin’ me back home…”

Ian bore it stoically. It was in extremely bad taste, and. he was the brunt of it, but it really didn’t matter. It would end as soon as they lifted again. They would never understand what he sought, but he felt he understood them. They hated coming to Earth. There was nothing for them there, and perhaps they wished there were.

And he was a pusher himself. He didn’t care for pullers. He agreed with the sentiment expressed by Marian, shortly after lift-off. Marian had just finished her first ground leave after her first voyage. So naturally she was the drunkest of them all.

“Gravity sucks,” she said, and threw up.

*

It was three months to Amity, and three months back. He hadn’t the foggiest idea how far it was in miles; after the tenth or eleventh zero his mind clicked off.

Amity. Shit City. He didn’t even get off the ship. Why bother? The planet was peopled with things that looked a little like ten-ton caterpillars and a little like sentient green curds. Toilets were a revolutionary idea to the Amiti; so were ice cream bars, sherbets, sugar donuts, and peppermint. Plumbing had never caught on, but sweets had, and fancy desserts from every nation on Earth. In addition, there was a pouch of reassuring mail for the forlorn human embassy. The cargo for the return trip was some grayish sludge that Ian supposed someone on Earth found tremendously valuable, and a packet of desperate mail for the folks back home. Ian didn’t need to read the letters to know what was in them. They could all be summed up as “Get me out of here!”

He sat at the viewport and watched an Amiti family lumbering and farting its way down the spaceport road. They paused every so often to do something that looked like an alien cluster-fuck. The road was brown. The land around it was brown, and in the distance were brown, unremarkable hills. There was a brown haze in the air, and the sun was yellow-brown.

He thought of castles perched on mountains of glass, of Princes and Princesses, of shining white horses galloping among the stars.

*

He spent the return trip just as he had on the way out: sweating down in the gargantuan pipes of the stardrive. Just beyond the metal walls, unimaginable energies pulsed. And on the walls themselves, tiny plasmoids grew into bigger plasmoids. The process was too slow to see, but if left unchecked the encrustations would soon impair the engines. His job was to scrape them off.

Not everyone was cut out to be an astrogator.

And what of it? It was honest work. He had made his choices long ago. You spent your life either pulling gees or ‘: pushing c. And when you got tired, you grabbed some z’s. If there was a pushers’ code, that was it.

The plasmoids were red and crystalline, teardrop-shaped. When he broke them free of the walls, they had one fiat side. They were full of a liquid light that felt as hot as the center of the sun.

*

It was always hard to get off the ship. A lot of pushers never did. One day, he wouldn’t either.

He stood for a few moments looking at it all. It was necessary to soak it in passively at first, get used to the changes. Big changes didn’t bother him. Buildings were just the world’s furniture, and he didn’t care how it was arranged. Small changes worried the shit out of him. Ears, for instance. Very few of the people he saw had earlobes. Each time he returned, he felt a little more like an ape who has fallen from his tree. One day he’d return to find that everybody had three eyes or six fingers, or that little girls no longer cared to hear stories of adventure.

He stood there dithering, getting used to the way people were painting their faces, listening to what sounded like Spanish being spoken all around him. Occasional English or Arabic words seasoned it. He grabbed a crewmate’s arm and asked him where they were. The man didn’t know. So he asked the captain, and she said it was Argentina, or it had been when they left.

*

The phone booths were smaller. He wondered why.

There were four names in his book. He sat there facing the phone, wondering which name to call first. His eyes were drawn to Radiant Shining star Smith, so he punched that name into the phone. He got a number and an address in Novosibirsk.

Checking the timetable he had picked—putting off making the call—he found the antipodean shuttle left on the hour. Then he wiped his hands on his pants and took a deep breath and looked up to see her standing outside the phone booth. They regarded each other silently for a moment. She saw a man much shorter than she remembered, but powerfully built, with big hands and shoulders and a pitted face that would have been forbidding but for the gentle eyes. He saw a tall woman around forty years old who was fully as beautiful as he had expected she would be. The hand of age had just begun to touch her. He thought she was fighting that waistline and fretting about those wrinkles, but none of that mattered to him. Only one thing mattered, and he would know it soon enough.

“You are Ian Haise, aren’t you?” she said at last.

*

“It was sheer luck I remembered you again,” she was saying. He noted the choice of words. She could have said coincidence.

“It was two years ago. We were moving again and I was sorting through some things and I came across that plasmoid. I hadn’t thought about you in…oh, it must have been fifteen years.”

He said something noncommittal. They were in a restaurant, away from most of the other patrons, at a booth near a glass wall beyond which spaceships were being trundled to and from the blast pits.

“I hope I didn’t get you into trouble,” he said.

She shrugged it away.

“You did, some, but that was so long ago. I certainly wouldn’t bear a grudge that long. And the fact is, I thought it was all worth it at the time.”

She went on to tell him of the uproar he had caused in her family, of the visits by the police, the interrogation, puzzlement, and final helplessness. No one knew quite what to make of her story. They had identified him quickly enough, only to find he had left Earth, not to return for a long, long time.

“I didn’t break any laws,” he pointed out.

“That’s what no one could understand. I told them you had talked to me and told me a long story, and then I went to sleep. None of them seemed interested in what the story was about. So I didn’t tell them. And I didn’t tell them about the…the Starstone.” She smiled. “Actually, I was relieved they hadn’t asked. I was determined not to tell them, but I was a little afraid of holding it all back. I thought they were agents of the…who were the villains in your story? I’ve forgotten.”

“It’s not important.”

“I guess not. But something is.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you should tell me what it is. Maybe you can answer the question that’s been in the back of my mind for twenty-five years, ever since I found out that thing you gave me was just the scrapings from a starship engine.”

“Was it?” he said, looking into her eyes. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it was more than that. I’m asking you if it wasn’t more.”

“Yes, I guess it was more,” she said at last.

“I’m glad.”

“I believed in that story passionately for…oh, years and years. Then I stopped believing it.”

“All at once?”

“No. Gradually. It didn’t hurt much. Part of growing up, I guess.”

“And you remembered me.”

“Well, that took some work. I went to a hypnotist when I was twenty-five and recovered your name and the name of your ship. Did you know—”

“Yes. I mentioned them on purpose.”

She nodded, and they fell silent again. When she looked at him now, he saw more sympathy, less defensiveness. But there was still a question.

“Why?” she said.

He nodded, then looked away from her, out to the starships. He wished he was on one of them, pushing c. It wasn’t working. He knew it wasn’t. He was a weird problem to her, something to get straightened out, a loose end in her life that would irritate until it was made to fit in, then be forgotten.

*

To hell with it.

“Hoping to get laid,” he said. When he looked up, she was slowly shaking her head back and forth.

“Don’t trifle with me, Haise. You’re not as stupid as you look. You knew I’d be married, leading my own life. You knew I wouldn’t drop it all because of some half-remembered fairy tale thirty years ago. Why?”

And how could he explain the strangeness of it all to her?

“What do you do?” He recalled something, and rephrased it. “Who are you?”

She looked startled. “I’m a mysteliologist.”

He spread his hands. “I don’t even know what that is.”

“Come to think of it, there was no such thing when you left.”

“That’s it, in a way.” he said. He felt helpless again. “Obviously, I had no way of knowing what you’d do, what you’d become, what would happen to you that you had no control over. All I was gambling on was that you’d remember me. Because that way …” He saw the planet Earth looming once more out the view port. So many, many years and only six months later. A planet full of strangers. It didn’t matter that Amity was full of strangers. But Earth was home, if that word still had any meaning for him.

“I wanted somebody my own age I could talk to,” he said. “That’s all. All I want is a friend.”

He could see her trying to understand what it was like. She wouldn’t, but maybe she’d come close enough to think she did.

“Maybe you’ve found one,” she said, and smiled. “At least I’m willing to get to know you, considering the effort you’ve put into this.”

“It wasn’t much effort. It seems so long-term to you, but it wasn’t to me. I held you on my lap six months ago.”

“How long is your leave?” she asked.

“Two months.”

“Would you like to come stay with us for a while? We have room in our house.”

“Will your husband mind?”

“Neither my husband nor my wife. That’s them sitting over there, pretending to ignore us.” Ian looked, caught the eye of a woman in her late twenties. She was sitting across from a man Ian’s age, who now turned and looked at Ian with some suspicion but no active animosity. The woman smiled; the man reserved judgment.

Radiant had a wife. Well, times change.

“Those two in the red skirts are police,” Radiant was saying. “So is that man over by the wall, and the one at the end of the bar.”

“I spotted two of them,” Ian said. When she looked surprised, he said, “Cops always have a look about them. That’s one of the things that don’t change.”

“You go back quite a ways, don’t you? I’ll bet you have some good stories.”

Ian thought about it, and nodded. “Some, I suppose.”

“I should tell the police they can go home. I hope you don’t mind that we brought them in.”

“Of course not.”

“I’ll do that, and then we can go. Oh, and I guess I should call the children and tell them we’ll be home soon.” She laughed, reached across the table, and touched his hand. “See what can happen in six months? I have three children, and Gillian has two.”

He looked up, interested.

“Are any of them girls?”

SUR

Ursula K. Le Guin

A Summary Report of the Yelcho Expedition to the Antarctic, 1909-1910

Although I have no intention of publishing this report, I think it would be nice if a grandchild of mine, or somebody’s grandchild, happened to find it some day; so I shall keep it in the leather trunk in the attic, along with Rosita’s christening dress and Juanito’s silver rattle and my wedding shoes and finneskos.

The first requisite for mounting an expedition — money — is normally the hardest to come by. I grieve that even in a report destined for a trunk in the attic of a house in a very quiet suburb of Lima I dare not write the name of the generous benefactor, the great soul without whose unstinting liberality the Yelcho Expedition would never have been more than the idlest excursion into daydream. That our equipment was the best and most modern — that our provisions were plentiful and fine — that a ship of the Chilean Government, with her brave officers and gallant crew, was twice sent halfway round the world for our convenience: all this is due to that benefactor whose name, alas! I must not say, but whose happiest debtor I shall be till death.

When I was little more than a child my imagination was caught by a newspaper account of the voyage of the Belgica, which, sailing south from Tierra del Fuego, became beset by ice in the Bellingshausen Sea and drifted a whole year with the floe, the men aboard her suffering a great deal from want of food and from the terror of the unending winter darkness. I read and reread that account, and later followed with excitement the reports of the rescue of Dr. Nordenskjold from the South Shetland Isles by the dashing Captain Irizar of the Uruguay, and the adventures of the Scotia in the Weddell Sea. But all these exploits were to me but forerunners of the British National Antarctic Expedition of 1902-1904, in the Discovery, and the wonderful account of that expedition by Captain Scott. This book, which I ordered from London and reread a thousand times, filled me with longing to see with my own eyes that strange continent, last Thule of the South, which lies on our maps and globes like a white cloud, a void, fringed here and there with scraps of coastline, dubious capes, supposititious islands, headlands that may or may not be there: Antarctica. And the desire was as pure as the polar snows: to go, to see — no more, no less. I deeply respect the scientific accomplishments of Captain Scott’s expedition, and have read with passionate interest the findings of physicists, meteorologists, biologists, etc.; but having had no training in any science, nor any opportunity for such training, my ignorance obliged me to forego any thought of adding to the body of scientific knowledge concerning Antarctica; and the same is true for all the members of my expedition. It seems a pity; but there was nothing we could do about it. Our goal was limited to observation and exploration. We hoped to go a little farther, perhaps, and see a little more; if not, simply to go and to see. A simple ambition, I think, and essentially a modest one.

Yet it would have remained less than an ambition, no more than a longing, but for the support and encouragement of my dear cousin and friend Juana—. (I use no surnames, lest this report fall into strangers’ hands at last, and embarrassment or unpleasant notoriety thus be brought upon unsuspecting husbands, sons, etc.) I had lent Juana my copy of The Voyage of the Discovery, and it was she who, as we strolled beneath our parasols across the Plaza de Armas after Mass one Sunday in 1908, said, “Well, if Captain Scott can do it, why can’t we?”

It was Juana who proposed that we write Carlota — in Valparaiso. Through Carlota we met our benefactor, and so obtained our money, our ship, and even the plausible pretext of going on retreat in a Bolivian convent, which some of us were forced to employ (while the rest of us said we were going to Paris for the winter season). And it was my Juana who in the darkest moments remained resolute, unshaken in her determination to achieve our goal.

And there were dark moments, especially in the early months of 1909 — times when I did not see how the Expedition would ever become more than a quarter ton of pemmican gone to waste and a lifelong regret. It was so very hard to gather our expeditionary force together! So few of those we asked even knew what we were talking about — so many thought we were mad, or wicked, or both! And of those few who shared our folly, still fewer were able, when it came to the point, to leave their daily duties and commit themselves to a voyage of at least six months, attended with not inconsiderable uncertainty and danger. An ailing parent; an anxious husband beset by business cares; a child at home with only ignorant or incompetent servants to look after it: these are not responsibilities lightly to be set aside. And those who wished to evade such claims were not the companions we wanted in hard work, risk, and privation.

But since success crowned our efforts, why dwell on the setbacks and delays, or the wretched contrivances and downright lies that we all had to employ? I look back with regret only to those friends who wished to come with us but could not, by any contrivance, get free — those we had to leave behind to a life without danger, without uncertainty, without hope.

On the seventeenth of August, 1909, in Punta Arenas, Chile, all the members of the Expedition met for the first time: Juana and I, the two Peruvians; from Argentina, Zoe, Berta, and Teresa; and our Chileans, Carlota and her friends Eva, Pepita, and Dolores. At the last moment I had received word that Maria’s husband, in Quito, was ill, and she must stay to nurse him, so we were nine, not ten. Indeed, we had resigned ourselves to being but eight, when, just as night fell, the indomitable Zoe arrived in a tiny pirogue manned by Indians, her yacht having sprung a leak just as it entered the Strait of Magellan.

That night before we sailed we began to get to know one another; and we agreed, as we enjoyed our abominable supper in the abominable seaport inn of Punta Arenas, that if a situation arose of such urgent danger that one voice must be obeyed without present question, the unenviable honor of speaking with that voice should fall first upon myself: if I were incapacitated, upon Carlota: if she, then upon Berta. We three were then toasted as “Supreme Inca,”

“La Araucana,” and “The Third Mate,” among a lot of laughter and cheering. As it came out, to my very great pleasure and relief, my qualities as a “leader” were never tested; the nine of us worked things out amongst us from beginning to end without any orders being given by anybody, and only two or three times with recourse to a vote by voice or show of hands. To be sure, we argued a good deal. But then, we had time to argue. And one way or another the arguments always ended up in a decision, upon which action could be taken. Usually at least one person grumbled about the decision, sometimes bitterly. But what is life without grumbling, and the occasional opportunity to say, “I told you so”? How could one bear housework, or looking after babies, let alone the rigors of sledgehauling in Antarctica, without grumbling? Officers — as we came to understand aboard the Yelcho — are forbidden to grumble; but we nine were, and are, by birth and upbringing, unequivocally and irrevocably, all crew.

Though our shortest course to the southern continent, and that originally urged upon us by the captain of our good ship, was to the South Shetlands and the Bellingshausen Sea, or else by the South Orkneys into the Weddell Sea, we planned to sail west to the Ross Sea, which Captain Scott had explored and described, and from which the brave Ernest Shackleton had returned only the previous autumn. More was known about this region than any other portion of the coast of Antarctica, and though that more was not much, yet it served as some insurance of the safety of the ship, which we felt we had no right to imperil. Captain Pardo had fully agreed with us after studying the charts and our planned itinerary; and so it was westward that we took our course out of the Strait next morning.

Our journey half round the globe was attended by fortune. The little Yelcho steamed cheerily along through gale and gleam, climbing up and down those seas of the Southern Ocean that run unbroken round the world. Juana, who had fought bulls and the far more dangerous cows on her family’s estancia, called the ship “la vaca valiente,” because she always returned to the charge. Once we got over being seasick we all enjoyed the sea voyage, though oppressed at times by the kindly but officious protectiveness of the captain and his officers, who felt that we were only “safe” when huddled up in the three tiny cabins which they had chivalrously vacated for our use.

We saw our first iceberg much farther south than we had looked for it, and saluted it with Veuve Clicquot at dinner. The next day we entered the ice pack, the belt of floes and bergs, broken loose from the land ice and winter-frozen seas of Antarctica, which drifts northward in the spring. Fortune still smiled on us: our little steamer, incapable, with her unreinforced metal hull, of forcing a way into the ice, picked her way from lane to lane without hesitation, and on the third day we were through the pack, in which ships have sometimes struggled for weeks and been obliged to turn back at last. Ahead of us now lay the dark grey waters of the Ross Sea, and beyond that, on the horizon, the remote glimmer, the cloud-reflected whiteness of the Great Ice Barrier.

Entering the Ross Sea a little east of Longitude West 160°, we came in sight of the Barrier at the place where Captain Scott’s party, finding a bight in the vast wall of ice, had gone ashore and sent up their hydrogen-gas balloon for reconnaissance and photography. The towering face of the Barrier, its sheer cliffs and azure and violet water-worn caves, all were as described, but the location had changed: instead of a narrow bight there was a considerable bay, full of the beautiful and terrific orca whales playing and spouting in the sunshine of that brilliant southern spring.

Evidently masses of ice many acres in extent had broken away from the Barrier (which — at least for most of its vast extent — does not rest on land but floats on water) since the Discovery‘s, passage in 1902. This put our plan to set up camp on the Barrier itself in a new light; and while we were discussing alternatives, we asked Captain Pardo to take the ship west along the Barrier face towards Ross Island and McMurdo Sound. As the sea was clear of ice and quite calm, he was happy to do so, and, when we sighted the smoke plume of Mount Erebus, to share in our celebration — another half case of Veuve Clicquot.

The Yelcho anchored in Arrival Bay, and we went ashore in the ship’s boat. I cannot describe my emotions when I set foot on the earth, on that earth, the barren, cold gravel at the foot of the long volcanic slope. I felt elation, impatience, gratitude, awe, familiarity. I felt that I was home at last. Eight Adélie penguins immediately came to greet us with many exclamations of interest not unmixed with disapproval. “Where on earth have you been? What took you so long? The Hut is around this way. Please come this way. Mind the rocks!” They insisted on our going to visit Hut Point, where the large structure built by Captain Scott’s party stood, looking just as in the photographs and drawings that illustrate his book. The area about it, however, was disgusting — a kind of graveyard of seal skins, seal bones, penguin bones, and rubbish, presided over by the mad, screaming skua gulls. Our escorts waddled past the slaughterhouse in all tranquillity, and one showed me personally to the door, though it would not go in.

The interior of the hut was less offensive, but very dreary. Boxes of supplies had been stacked up into a kind of room within the room; it did not look as I had imagined it when the Discovery party put on their melodramas and minstrel shows in the long winter night. (Much later, we learned that Sir Ernest had rearranged it a good deal when he was there just a year before us.) It was dirty, and had about it a mean disorder. A pound tin of tea was standing open. Empty meat tins lay about; biscuits were spilled on the floor; a lot of dog turds were underfoot — frozen, of course, but not a great deal improved by that. No doubt the last occupants had had to leave in a hurry, perhaps even in a blizzard. All the same, they could have closed the tea tin. But housekeeping, the art of the infinite, is no game for amateurs.

Teresa proposed that we use the hut as our camp. Zoe counterproposed that we set fire to it. We finally shut the door and left it as we had found it. The penguins appeared to approve, and cheered us all the way to the boat.

McMurdo Sound was free of ice, and Captain Pardo now proposed to take us off Ross Island and across to Victoria Land, where we might camp at the foot of the Western Mountains, on dry and solid earth. But those mountains, with their storm-darkened peaks and hanging cirques and glaciers, looked as awful as Captain Scott had found them on his western journey, and none of us felt much inclined to seek shelter among them.

Aboard the ship that night we decided to go back and set up our base as we had originally planned, on the Barrier itself. For all available reports indicated that the clear way south was across the level Barrier surface until one could ascend one of the confluent glaciers to the high plateau which appears to form the whole interior of the continent. Captain Pardo argued strongly against this plan, asking what would become of us if the Barrier “calved” — if our particular acre of ice broke away and started to drift northward. “Well,” said Zoe, “then you won’t have to come so far to meet us.” But he was so persuasive on this theme that he persuaded himself into leaving one of the Yelcho’s boats with us when we camped, as a means of escape. We found it useful for fishing, later on.

My first steps on Antarctic soil, my only visit to Ross Island, had not been pleasure unalloyed. I thought of the words of the English poet:

Though every prospect pleases,

And only Man is vile.

But then, the backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul. I looked back as the ship sailed east again that evening. We were well into September now, with ten hours or more of daylight. The spring sunset lingered on the twelve-thousand-foot peak of Erebus and shone rosy gold on her long plume of steam. The steam from our own small funnel faded blue on the twilit water as we crept along under the towering pale wall of ice.

On our return to “Orca Bay” — Sir Ernest, we learned years later, had named it the Bay of Whales — we found a sheltered nook where the Barrier edge was low enough to provide fairly easy access from the ship. The Yelcho put out her ice anchor, and the next long, hard days were spent in unloading our supplies and setting up our camp on the ice, a half kilometer in from the edge: a task in which the Yelcho’s crew lent us invaluable aid and interminable advice. We took all the aid gratefully, and most of the advice with salt.

The weather so far had been extraordinarily mild for spring in this latitude; the temperature had not yet gone below -20° Fahrenheit, and there was only one blizzard while we were setting up camp. But Captain Scott had spoken feelingly of the bitter south winds on the Barrier, and we had planned accordingly. Exposed as our camp was to every wind, we built no rigid structures above ground. We set up tents to shelter in while we dug out a series of cubicles in the ice itself, lined them with hay insulation and pine boarding, and roofed them with canvas over bamboo poles, covered with snow for weight and insulation. The big central room was instantly named Buenos Aires by our Argentineans, to whom the center, wherever one is, is always Buenos Aires. The heating and cooking stove was in Buenos Aires. The storage tunnels and the privy (called Punta Arenas) got some back heat from the stove. The sleeping cubicles opened off Buenos Aires, and were very small, mere tubes into which one crawled feet first; they were lined deeply with hay and soon warmed by one’s body warmth. The sailors called them “coffins” and “wormholes,” and looked with horror on our burrows in the ice. But our little warren or prairie-dog village served us well, permitting us as much warmth and privacy as one could reasonably expect under the circumstances. If the Yelcho was unable to get through the ice in February, and we had to spend the winter in Antarctica, we certainly could do so, though on very limited rations. For this coming summer, our base — Sudamérica del Sur, South South America, but we generally called it the Base — was intended merely as a place to sleep, to store our provisions, and to give shelter from blizzards.

To Berta and Eva, however, it was more than that. They were its chief architect-designers, its most ingenious builder-excavators, and its most diligent and contented occupants, forever inventing an improvement in ventilation, or learning how to make skylights, or revealing to us a new addition to our suite of rooms, dug in the living ice. It was thanks to them that our stores were stowed so handily, that our stove drew and heated so efficiently, and that Buenos Aires, where nine people cooked, ate, worked, conversed, argued, grumbled, painted, played the guitar and banjo, and kept the Expedition’s library of books and maps, was a marvel of comfort and convenience. We lived there in real amity; and if you simply had to be alone for a while, you crawled into your sleeping hole head first.

Berta went a little farther. When she had done all she could to make South South America livable, she dug out one more cell just under the ice surface, leaving a nearly transparent sheet of ice like a greenhouse roof; and there, alone, she worked at sculptures. They were beautiful forms, some like a blending of the reclining human figure with the subtle curves and volumes of the Weddell seal, others like the fantastic shapes of ice cornices and ice caves. Perhaps they are there still, under the snow, in the bubble in the Great Barrier. There where she made them they might last as long as stone. But she could not bring them north. That is the penalty for carving in water.

Captain Pardo was reluctant to leave us, but his orders did not permit him to hang about the Ross Sea indefinitely, and so at last, with many earnest injunctions to us to stay put — make no journeys — take no risks — beware of frostbite — don’t use edge tools — look out for cracks in the ice — and a heartfelt promise to return to Orca Bay on the twentieth of February, or as near that date as wind and ice would permit, the good man bade us farewell, and his crew shouted us a great goodbye cheer as they weighed anchor. That evening, in the long orange twilight of October, we saw the topmast of the Yelcho go down the north horizon, over the edge of the world, leaving us to ice, and silence, and the Pole.

That night we began to plan the Southern Journey.

The ensuing month passed in short practice trips and depot-laying. The life we had led at home, though in its own way strenuous, had not fitted any of us for the kind of strain met with in sledgehauling at ten or twenty degrees below freezing. We all needed as much working-out as possible before we dared undertake a long haul.

My longest exploratory trip, made with Dolores and Carlota, was southwest towards Mount Markham, and it was a nightmare — blizzards and pressure ice all the way out, crevasses and no view of the mountains when we got there, and white weather and sastrugi all the way back. The trip was useful, however, in that we could begin to estimate our capacities; and also in that we had started out with a very heavy load of provisions, which we depoted at 100 and 130 miles SSW of Base. Thereafter other parties pushed on farther, till we had a line of snow cairns and depots right down to Latitude 83° 43’, where Juana and Zoe, on an exploring trip, had found a kind of stone gateway opening on a great glacier leading south. We established these depots to avoid, if possible, the hunger that had bedevilled Captain Scott’s Southern Party, and the consequent misery and weakness. And we also established to our own satisfaction — intense satisfaction — that we were sledgehaulers at least as good as Captain Scott’s husky dogs. Of course we could not have expected to pull as much or as fast as his men. That we did so was because we were favored by much better weather than Captain Scott’s party ever met on the Barrier; and also the quantity and quality of our food made a very considerable difference. I am sure that the fifteen percent of dried fruits in our pemmican helped prevent scurvy; and the potatoes, frozen and dried according to an ancient Andean Indian method, were very nourishing yet very light and compact — perfect sledging rations. In any case, it was with considerable confidence in our capacities that we made ready at last for the Southern Journey.

The Southern Party consisted of two sledge teams: Juana, Dolores, and myself; Carlota, Pepita, and Zoe. The support team of Berta, Eva, and Teresa set out before us with a heavy load of supplies, going right up onto the glacier to prospect routes and leave depots of supplies for our return journey. We followed five days behind them, and met them returning between Depot Ercilla and Depot Miranda (see map). That “night” — of course there was no real darkness — we were all nine together in the heart of the level plain of ice. It was the fifteenth of November, Dolores’s birthday. We celebrated by putting eight ounces of pisco in the hot chocolate, and became very merry. We sang. It is strange now to remember how thin our voices sounded in that great silence. It was overcast, white weather, without shadows and without visible horizon or any feature to break the level; there was nothing to see at all. We had come to that white place on the map, that void, and there we flew and sang like sparrows.

After sleep and a good breakfast the Base Party continued north, and the Southern Party sledged on. The sky cleared presently. High up, thin clouds passed over very rapidly from southwest to northeast, but down on the Barrier it was calm and just cold enough, five or ten degrees below freezing, to give a firm surface for hauling.

On the level ice we never pulled less than eleven miles, seventeen kilometers, a day, and generally fifteen or sixteen miles, twenty-five kilometers. (Our instruments, being British made, were calibrated in feet, miles, degrees Fahrenheit, etc., but we often converted miles to kilometers because the larger numbers sounded more encouraging.) At the time we left South America, we knew only that Mr. Shackleton had mounted another expedition to the Antarctic in 1908, had tried to attain the Pole but failed, and had returned to England in June of the current year, 1909. No coherent report of his explorations had yet reached South America when we left; we did not know what route he had gone, or how far he had got. But we were not altogether taken by surprise when, far across the featureless white plain, tiny beneath the mountain peaks and the strange silent flight of the rainbow-fringed cloud wisps, we saw a fluttering dot of black. We turned west from our course to visit it: a snow heap nearly buried by the winter’s storms — a flag on a bamboo pole, a mere shred of threadbare cloth — an empty oilcan — and a few footprints standing some inches above the ice. In some conditions of weather the snow compressed under one’s weight remains when the surrounding soft snow melts or is scoured away by the wind; and so these reversed footprints had been left standing all these months, like rows of cobbler’s lasts — a queer sight.

We met no other such traces on our way. In general I believe our course was somewhat east of Mr. Shackleton’s. Juana, our surveyor, had trained herself well and was faithful and methodical in her sightings and readings, but our equipment was minimal — a theodolite on tripod legs, a sextant with artificial horizon, two compasses, and chronometers. We had only the wheel meter on the sledge to give distance actually travelled.

In any case, it was the day after passing Mr. Shackleton’s waymark that I first saw clearly the great glacier among the mountains to the southwest, which was to give us a pathway from the sea level of the Barrier up to the altiplano, ten thousand feet above. The approach was magnificent: a gateway formed by immense vertical domes and pillars of rock. Zoe and Juana had called the vast ice river that flowed through that gateway the Florence Nightingale Glacier, wishing to honor the British, who had been the inspiration and guide of our expedition; that very brave and very peculiar lady seemed to represent so much that is best, and strangest, in the island race. On maps, of course, this glacier bears the name Mr. Shackleton gave it, the Beardmore.

The ascent of the Nightingale was not easy. The way was open at first, and well marked by our support party, but after some days we came among terrible crevasses, a maze of hidden cracks, from a foot to thirty feet wide and from thirty to a thousand feet deep. Step by step we went, and step by step, and the way always upward now. We were fifteen days on the glacier. At first the weather was hot, up to 20° E, and the hot nights without darkness were wretchedly uncomfortable in our small tents. And all of us suffered more or less from snowblindness just at the time when we wanted clear eyesight to pick our way among the ridges and crevasses of the tortured ice, and to see the wonders about and before us. For at every day’s advance more great, nameless peaks came into view in the west and southwest, summit beyond summit, range beyond range, stark rock and snow in the unending noon.

We gave names to these peaks, not very seriously, since we did not expect our discoveries to come to the attention of geographers. Zoe had a gift for naming, and it is thanks to her that certain sketch maps in various suburban South American attics bear such curious features as “Bolivar’s Big Nose,” “I Am General Rosas,” “The Cloudmaker,” “Whose Toe?” and “Throne of Our Lady of the Southern Cross.” And when at last we got up onto the altiplano, the great interior plateau, it was Zoe who called it the pampa, and maintained that we walked there among vast herds of invisible cattle, transparent cattle pastured on the spindrift snow, their gauchos the restless, merciless winds. We were by then all a little crazy with exhaustion and the great altitude — twelve thousand feet — and the cold and the wind blowing and the luminous circles and crosses surrounding the suns, for often there were three or four suns in the sky, up there.

That is not a place where people have any business to be. We should have turned back; but since we had worked so hard to get there, it seemed that we should go on, at least for a while.

A blizzard came with very low temperatures, so we had to stay in the tents, in our sleeping bags, for thirty hours, a rest we all needed; though it was warmth we needed most, and there was no warmth on that terrible plain anywhere at all but in our veins. We huddled close together all that time. The ice we lay on is two miles thick.

It cleared suddenly and became, for the plateau, good weather: twelve below zero and the wind not very strong. We three crawled out of our tent and met the others crawling out of theirs. Carlota told us then that her group wished to turn back. Pepita had been feeling very ill; even after the rest during the blizzard, her temperature would not rise above 94°. Carlota was having trouble breathing. Zoe was perfectly fit, but much preferred staying with her friends and lending them a hand in difficulties to pushing on towards the Pole. So we put the four ounces of pisco which we had been keeping for Christmas into the breakfast cocoa, and dug out our tents, and loaded our sledges, and parted there in the white daylight on the bitter plain.

Our sledge was fairly light by now. We pulled on to the south. Juana calculated our position daily. On the twenty-second of December, 1909, we reached the South Pole. The weather was, as always, very cruel. Nothing of any kind marked the dreary whiteness. We discussed leaving some kind of mark or monument, a snow cairn, a tent pole and flag; but there seemed no particular reason to do so. Anything we could do, anything we were, was insignificant, in that awful place. We put up the tent for shelter for an hour and made a cup of tea, and then struck “90° Camp.” Dolores, standing patient as ever in her sledging harness, looked at the snow; it was so hard frozen that it showed no trace of our footprints coming, and she said, “Which way?”

“North,” said Juana.

It was a joke, because at that particular place there is no other direction. But we did not laugh. Our lips were cracked with frostbite and hurt too much to let us laugh. So we started back, and the wind at our backs pushed us along, and dulled the knife edges of the waves of frozen snow.

All that week the blizzard wind pursued us like a pack of mad dogs. I cannot describe it. I wished we had not gone to the Pole. I think I wish it even now. But I was glad even then that we had left no sign there, for some man longing to be first might come some day, and find it, and know then what a fool he had been, and break his heart.

We talked, when we could talk, of catching up to Carlota’s party, since they might be going slower than we. In fact they had used their tent as a sail to catch the following wind and had got far ahead of us. But in many places they had built snow cairns or left some sign for us; once Zoe had written on the lee side of a ten-foot sastrugi, just as children write on the sand of the beach at Miraflores, “This Way Out!” The wind blowing over the frozen ridge had left the words perfectly distinct.

In the very hour that we began to descend the glacier, the weather turned warmer, and the mad dogs were left to howl forever tethered to the Pole. The distance that had taken us fifteen days going up we covered in only eight days going down. But the good weather that had aided us descending the Nightingale became a curse down on the Barrier ice, where we had looked forward to a kind of royal progress from depot to depot, eating our fill and taking our time for the last three hundred-odd miles. In a tight place on the glacier I lost my goggles — I was swinging from my harness at the time in a crevasse — and then Juana had broken hers when we had to do some rock climbing coming down to the Gateway. After two days in bright sunlight with only one pair of snow goggles to pass amongst us, we were all suffering badly from snowblindness. It became acutely painful to keep lookout for landmarks or depot flags, to take sightings, even to study the compass, which had to be laid down on the snow to steady the needle. At Concolorcorvo Depot, where there was a particularly good supply of food and fuel, we gave up, crawled into our sleeping bags with bandaged eyes, and slowly boiled alive like lobsters in the tent exposed to the relentless sun. The voices of Berta and Zoe were the sweetest sound I ever heard. A little concerned about us, they had skied south to meet us. They led us home to Base.

We recovered quite swiftly, but the altiplano left its mark. When she was very little, Rosita asked if a dog “had bitted Mama’s toes.” I told her Yes, a great, white, mad dog named Blizzard! My Rosita and my Juanito heard many stories when they were little, about that fearful dog and how it howled, and the transparent cattle of the invisible gauchos, and a river of ice eight thousand feet high called Nightingale, and how Cousin Juana drank a cup of tea standing on the bottom of the world under seven suns, and other fairy tales.

We were in for one severe shock when we reached Base at last. Teresa was pregnant. I must admit that my first response to the poor girl’s big belly and sheepish look was anger — rage — fury. That one of us should have concealed anything, and such a thing, from the others! But Teresa had done nothing of the sort. Only those who had concealed from her what she most needed to know were to blame. Brought up by servants, with four years’ schooling in a convent, and married at sixteen, the poor girl was still so ignorant at twenty years of age that she had thought it was “the cold weather” that made her miss her periods. Even this was not entirely stupid, for all of us on the Southern Journey had seen our periods change or stop altogether as we experienced increasing cold, hunger, and fatigue. Teresa’s appetite had begun to draw general attention; and then she had begun, as she said pathetically, “to get fat.” The others were worried at the thought of all the sledgehauling she had done, but she flourished, and the only problem was her positively insatiable appetite. As well as could be determined from her shy references to her last night on the hacienda with her husband, the baby was due at just about the same time as the Yelcho, the twentieth of February. But we had not been back from the Southern Journey two weeks when, on February 14, she went into labor.

Several of us had borne children and had helped with deliveries, and anyhow most of what needs to be done is fairly self-evident; but a first labor can be long and trying, and we were all anxious, while Teresa was frightened out of her wits. She kept calling for her José till she was as hoarse as a skua. Zoe lost all patience at last and said, “By God, Teresa, if you say ‘José!’ once more I hope you have a penguin!” But what she had, after twenty long hours, was a pretty little red-faced girl.

Many were the suggestions for that child’s name from her eight proud midwife-aunts: Polita, Penguina, McMurdo, Victoria… But Teresa announced, after she had had a good sleep and a large serving of pemmican, “I shall name her Rosa — Rosa del Sur,” Rose of the South. That night we drank the last two bottles of Veuve Clicquot (having finished the pisco at 88° 30’ South) in toasts to our little Rose.

On the nineteenth of February, a day early, my Juana came down into Buenos Aires in a hurry. “The ship,” she said, “the ship has come,” and she burst into tears — she who had never wept in all our weeks of pain and weariness on the long haul.

Of the return voyage there is nothing to tell. We came back safe.

In 1912 all the world learned that the brave Norwegian Amundsen had reached the South Pole; and then, much later, came the accounts of how Captain Scott and his men had come there after him, but did not come home again.

Just this year, Juana and I wrote to the captain of the Yelcho, for the newspapers have been full of the story of his gallant dash to rescue Sir Ernest Shackleton’s men from Elephant Island, and we wished to congratulate him, and once more to thank him. Never one word has he breathed of our secret. He is a man of honor, Luis Pardo.

I add this last note in 1929. Over the years we have lost touch with one another. It is very difficult for women to meet, when they live so far apart as we do. Since Juana died, I have seen none of my old sledge-mates, though sometimes we write. Our little Rosa del Sur died of the scarlet fever when she was five years old. Teresa had many other children. Carlota took the veil in Santiago ten years ago. We are old women now, with old husbands, and grown children, and grandchildren who might some day like to read about the Expedition. Even if they are rather ashamed of having such a crazy grandmother, they may enjoy sharing in the secret. But they must not let Mr. Amundsen know! He would be terribly embarrassed and disappointed. There is no need for him or anyone else outside the family to know.

We left no footprints, even.

SPIDER ROSE

Bruce Sterling

Nothing was what Spider Rose felt, or almost nothing. There had been some feelings there, a nexus of clotted two-hundred-year-old emotions, and she had mashed it with a cranial injection. Now what was left of her feelings was like what is left of a roach when a hammer strikes it.

Spider Rose knew about roaches; they were the only native animal life in the orbiting Mechanist colonies. They had plagued spacecraft from the beginning, too tough, prolific, and adaptable to kill. Of necessity, the Mechanists had used genetic techniques stolen from their rivals the Shapers to turn the roaches into colorful pets. One of Spider Rose’s special favorites was a roach a foot long and covered with red and yellow pigment squiggles against shiny black chitin. It was clinging to her head. It drank sweat from her perfect brow, and she knew nothing, for she was elsewhere, watching for visitors.

She watched through eight telescopes, their images collated and fed into her brain through a nerve-crystal junction at the base of her skull. She had eight eyes now, like her symbol, the spider. Her ears were the weak steady pulse of radar, listening, listening for the weird distortion that would signal the presence of an Investor ship.

Rose was clever. She might have been insane, but her monitoring techniques established the chemical basis of sanity and maintained it artificially. Spider Rose accepted this as normal.

And it was normal; not for human beings, but for a two-hundred-year-old Mechanist, living in a spinning web of a habitat orbiting Uranus, her body seething with youth hormones, her wise old-young face like something pulled fresh from a plaster mold, her long white hair a rippling display of implanted fiber-optic threads with tiny beads of light oozing like microscopic gems from their slant-cut tips … She was old, but she didn’t think about that. And she was lonely, but she had crushed those feelings with drugs. And she had something that the Investors wanted, something that those reptilian alien traders would give their eye-fangs to possess.

Trapped in her polycarbon spiderweb, the wide-stretched cargo net that had given her her name, she had a jewel the size of a bus.

And so she watched, brain-linked to her instruments, tireless, not particularly interested but certainly not bored. Boredom was dangerous. It led to unrest, and unrest could be fatal in a space habitat, where malice or even plain carelessness could kill. The proper survival behavior was this: to crouch in the center of the mental web, clean euclidean web-lines of rationality radiating out in all directions, hooked legs alert for the slightest tremble of troubling emotion. And when she sensed that feeling tangling the lines, she rushed there, gauged it, shrouded it neatly, and pierced it cleanly and lingeringly with a spiderfang hypodermic …

There it was. Her octuple eyes gazed a quarter of a million miles into space and spotted the star-rippling warp of an Investor ship. The Investor ships had no conventional engines, and radiated no detectable energies; the secret of their star drive was closely guarded. All that any of the factions (still loosely called “humanity” for lack of a better term) knew for sure about the Investor drive was that it sent long parabolic streamers of distortion from the sterns of ships, causing a rippling effect against the background of stars.

Spider Rose came partially out of her static observation mode and felt herself in her body once more. The computer signals were muted now, overlaid behind her normal vision like a reflection of her own face on a glass window as she gazed through it. Touching a keyboard, she pinpointed the Investor ship with a communications laser and sent it a pulse of data: a business offer. (Radio was too chancy; it might attract Shaper pirates, and she had had to kill three of them already.)

She knew she had been heard and understood when she saw the Investor ship perform a dead stop and an angled acceleration that broke every known law of orbital dynamics. While she waited, Spider Rose loaded an Investor translator program. It was fifty years old, but the Investors were a persistent lot, not so much conservative as just uninterested in change.

When it came too close to her station for star-drive maneuvers, the Investor ship unfurled a decorated solar sail with a puff of gas. The sail was big enough to gift-wrap a small moon and thinner than a two-hundred-year-old memory. Despite its fantastic thinness, there were molecule-thin murals worked onto it: titanic scenes of Investor argosies where wily Investors had defrauded pebbly bipeds and gullible heavy-planet gasbags swollen with wealth and hydrogen. The great jewel-laden queens of the Investor race, surrounded by adoring male harems, flaunted their gaudy sophistication above miles-high narratives of Investor hieroglyphs, placed on a musical grid to indicate the proper pitch and intonation of their half-sung language.

There was a burst of static on the screen before her and an Investor face appeared. Spider Rose pulled the plug from her neck. She studied the face: its great glassy eyes half-shrouded behind nictitating membranes, rainbow frill behind pinhole-sized ears, bumpy skin, reptile grin with peg-sized teeth. It made noises: “Ship’s ensign here,” her computer translated. “Lydia Martinez?”

“Yes,” Spider Rose said, not bothering to explain that her name had changed. She had had many names.

“We had profitable dealings with your husband in the past,” the Investor said with interest. “How does he fare these days?”

“He died thirty years ago,” Spider Rose said. She had mashed the grief. “Shaper assassins killed him.”

The Investor officer flickered his frill. He was not embarrassed. Embarrassment was not an emotion native to Investors. “Bad for business,” he opined. “Where is this jewel you mentioned?”

“Prepare for incoming data,” said Spider Rose, touching her keyboard. She watched the screen as her carefully prepared sales spiel unrolled itself, its communication beam shielded to avoid enemy ears.

It had been the find of a lifetime. It had started existence as part of a glacierlike ice moon of the protoplanet Uranus, shattering, melting, and recrystallizing in the primeval eons of relentless bombardment. It had cracked at least four different times, and each time mineral flows had been forced within its fracture zones under tremendous pressure: carbon, manganese silicate, beryllium, aluminum oxide. When the moon was finally broken up into the famous Ring complex, the massive ice chunk had floated for eons, awash in shock waves of hard radiation, accumulating and losing charge in the bizarre electromagnetic flickerings typical of all Ring formations.

And then one crucial moment some millions of years ago it had been ground-zero for a titanic lightning flash, one of those soundless invisible gouts of electric energy, dissipating charges built up over whole decades. Most of the ice-chunk’s outer envelope had flashed off at once as a plasma. The rest was … changed. Mineral occlusions were now strings and veins of beryl, shading here and there into lumps of raw emerald big as Investors’ heads, crisscrossed with nets of red corundum and purple garnet. There were lumps of fused diamond, weirdly colored blazing diamond that came only from the strange quantum states of metallic carbon. Even the ice itself had changed into something rich and unique and therefore by definition precious.

“You intrigue us,” the Investor said. For them, this was profound enthusiasm. Spider Rose smiled. The ensign continued: “This is an unusual commodity and its value is hard to establish. We offer you a quarter of a million gigawatts.”

Spider Rose said, “I have the energy I need to run my station and defend myself. Its generous, but I could never store that much.”

“We will also give you a stabilized plasma lattice for storage.” This unexpected and fabulous generosity was meant to overwhelm her. The construction of plasma lattices was far beyond human technology, and to own one would be a ten years’ wonder. It was the last thing she wanted. “Not interested,” she said.

The Investor lifted his frill. “Not interested in the basic currency of galactic trade?”

“Not when I can spend it only with you.”

“Trade with young races is a thankless lot,” the Investor observed. “I suppose you want information, then. You young races always want to trade in technology. We have some Shaper techniques for trade within their faction—are you interested in those?”

“Industrial espionage?” Spider Rose said. “You should have tried me eighty years ago. No, I know you Investors too well. You would only sell Mechanist techniques to them to maintain the balance of power.”

“We like a competitive market,” the Investor admitted. “It helps us avoid painful monopoly situations like the one we face now, dealing with you.”

“I don’t want power of any kind. Status means nothing to me. Show me something new.”

“No status? What will your fellows think?”

“I live alone.”

The Investor hid his eyes behind nictitating membranes. “Crushed your gregarious instincts? An ominous development. Well, I will take a new tack. Will you consider weaponry? If you will agree to various conditions regarding their use, we can give you unique and powerful armaments.”

“I manage already.”

“You could use our political skills. We can strongly influence the major Shaper groups and protect you from them by treaty. It would take ten or twenty years, but it could be done.”

“It’s up to them to be afraid of me,” Spider Rose said, “not vice versa.”

“A new habitat, then.” The Investor was patient. “You can live within solid gold.”

“I like what I have.”

“We have some artifacts that might amuse you,” the Investor said. “Prepare for incoming data.”

Spider Rose spent eight hours examining the various wares. There was no hurry. She was too old for impatience, and the Investors lived to bargain.

She was offered colorful algae cultures that produced oxygen and alien perfumes. There were metafoil structures of collapsed atoms for radiation shielding and defense. Rare techniques that transmuted nerve fibers to crystal. A smooth black wand that made iron so malleable that you could mold it with your hands and set it in shape. A small luxury submarine for the exploration of ammonia and methane seas, made of transparent metallic glass. Self-replicating globes of patterned silica that, as they grew, played out a game simulating the birth, growth, and decline of an alien culture. A land-sea-and-aircraft so tiny that you buttoned it on like a suit. “I don’t care for planets,” Spider Rose said. “I don’t like gravity wells.”

“Under certain circumstances we could make a gravity generator available,” the Investor said. “It would have to be tamper-proof, like the wand and the weapons, and loaned rather than sold outright. We must avoid the escape of such a technology.”

She shrugged. “Our own technologies have shattered us. We can’t assimilate what we already have. I see no reason to burden myself with more.”

“This is all we can offer you that’s not on the interdicted list,” he said. “This ship in particular has a great many items suitable only for races that live at very low temperature and very high pressure. And we have items that you would probably enjoy a great deal, but they would kill you. Or your whole species. The literature of the [untranslatable], for instance.”

“I can read the literature of Earth if I want an alien viewpoint,” she said.

“[Untranslatable] is not really a literature,” the Investor said benignly. “It’s really a kind of virus.”

A roach flew onto her shoulder. “Pets!” he said. “Pets! You enjoy them?”

“They are my solace,” she said, letting it nibble the cuticle of her thumb.

“I should have thought,” he said. “Give me twelve hours.”

She went to sleep. After she woke, she studied the alien craft through her telescope while she waited. All Investor ships were covered with fantastic designs in hammered metal: animal heads, metal mosaics, scenes and inscriptions in deep relief, as well as cargo bays and instruments. But experts had pointed out that the basic shape beneath the ornamentation was always the same: a simple octahedron with six long rectangular sides. The Investors had gone to some pains to disguise this fact; and the current theory held that the ships had been bought, found, or stolen from a more advanced race. Certainly the Investors, with their whimsical attitude toward science and technology, seemed incapable of building them themselves.

The ensign reopened contact. His nictitating membranes looked whiter than usual. He held up a small winged reptilian being with a long spiny crest the color of an Investor’s frill. “This is our Commander’s mascot, called little Nose for Profits.’ Beloved by us all! It costs us a pang to part from him. We had to choose between losing face in this business deal or losing his company.” He toyed with it. It grasped his thick digits with little scaly hands.

“He’s … cute,” she said, finding a half-forgotten word from her childhood and pronouncing it with a grimace of distaste. “But I’m not going to trade my find for some carnivorous lizardkin.”

“And think of us!” the Investor lamented. “Condemning our little Nose to an alien lair swarming with bacteria and giant vermin … However, this can’t be helped. Here’s our proposal. You take our mascot for seven hundred plus or minus five of your days. We will return here on our way out of your system. You can choose then between owning him or keeping your prize. In the meantime you must promise not to sell the jewel or inform anyone else of its existence.”

“You mean that you will leave me your pet as a kind of earnest money on the transaction.”

The Investor covered his eyes with the nictitating membranes and squeezed his pebbly lids half-shut. It was a sign of acute distress. “He is a hostage to your cruel indecision, Lydia Martinez. Frankly we doubt that we can find anything in this system that can satisfy you better than our mascot can. Except perhaps some novel mode of suicide.”

Spider Rose was surprised. She had never seen an Investor become so emotionally involved. Generally they seemed to take a detached view of life, even showing on occasion behavior patterns that resembled a sense of humor.

She was enjoying herself. She was past the point when any of the Investor’s normal commodities could have tempted her. In essence, she was trading her jewel for an interior mind-state: not an emotion, because she mashed those, but for a paler and cleaner feeling: interestedness. She wanted to be interested, to find something to occupy herself besides dead stones and space. And this looked intriguing.

“All right,” she said. “I agree. Seven hundred plus or minus five days. And I keep silence.” She smiled. She hadn’t spoken to another human in five years and was not about to start.

“Take good care of our Little Nose for Profits,” the Investor said, half pleading, half warning, accenting those nuances so that her computer would be sure to pick them up. “We will still want him, even if, through some utter corrosion of the spirit, you do not. He is valuable and rare. We will send you instructions on his care and feeding. Prepare for incoming data.”

They fired the creature’s cargo capsule into the tight-stretched polycarbon web of her spider habitat. The web was built on a framework of eight spokes, and these spokes were pulled taut by centrifugal force from the wheeling rotation of eight teardrop-shaped capsules. At the impact of the cargo shot, the web bowed gracefully and the eight massive metal teardrops were pulled closer to the web’s center in short, graceful free-fall arcs. Wan sunlight glittered along the web as it expanded in recoil, its rotation slowed a little by the energy it had spent in absorbing the inertia. It was a cheap and effective docking technique, for a rate of spin was much easier to manage than complex maneuvering.

Hook-legged industrial robots ran quickly along the polycarbon fibers and seized the mascot’s capsule with clamps and magnetic palps. Spider Rose ran the lead robot herself, feeling and seeing through its grips and cameras. The robots hustled the cargo craft to an airlock, dislodged its contents, and attached a small parasitic rocket to boost it back to the Investor mother ship. After the small rocket had returned and the Investor ship had left, the robots trooped back to their teardrop garages and shut themselves off, waiting for the next tremor of the web.

Spider Rose disconnected herself and opened the airlock. The mascot flew into the room. It had seemed tiny compared to the Investor ensign, but the Investors were huge. The mascot was as tall as her knee and looked like it weighed close to twenty pounds. Wheezing musically on the unfamiliar air, it flew around the room, ducking and darting unevenly.

A roach launched itself from the wall and flew with a great clatter of wings. The mascot hit the deck with a squawk of terror and lay there, comically feeling its spindly arms and legs for damage. It half-closed its rough eyelids. Like the eyes of an Investor baby, Spider Rose thought suddenly, though she had never seen a young Investor and doubted if anyone human ever had. She had a dim memory of something she had heard a long time before—something about pets and babies, their large heads, their large eyes, their softness, their dependence. She remembered scoffing at the idea that the sloppy dependence of, say, a “dog” or “cat” could rival the clean economy and efficiency of a roach.

The Investor mascot had recovered its composure and was crouching bent-kneed on the algae carpet, warbling to itself. There was a sort of sly grin on its miniature dragon face. Its half-slitted eyes were alert and its matchstick ribs moved up and down with each breath. Its pupils were huge. Spider Rose imagined that it must find the light very dim. The lights in Investor ships were like searing blue arc-lamps, drenched in ultraviolet.

“We have to find a new name for you,” Spider Rose said. “I don’t speak Investor, so I can’t use the name they gave you.”

The mascot fixed her with a friendly stare, and it arched little half-transparent flaps over its pinhole ears. Real Investors had no such flaps, and she was charmed at this further deviation from the norm. Actually, except for the wings, it looked altogether too much like a tiny Investor. The effect was creepy.

“I’ll call you Fuzzy,” she said. It had no hair. It was a private joke, but all her jokes were private.

The mascot bounced across the floor. The false centrifugal gravity was lighter here, too, than the 1.3 g’s that the massive Investors used. It embraced her bare leg and licked her kneecap with a rough sandpaper tongue. She laughed, more than a little alarmed, but she knew the Investors were strictly nonaggressive. A pet of theirs would not be dangerous.

It made eager chirping sounds and climbed onto her head, clutching handfuls of glittering optic fibers. She sat at her data console and called up the care and feeding instructions.

Clearly the Investors had not expected to trade their pet, because the instructions were almost indecipherable. They had the air of a second-or third-hand translation from some even more profoundly alien language. However, true to Investor tradition, the blandly pragmatic aspects had been emphasized.

Spider Rose relaxed. Apparently the mascots would eat almost anything, though they preferred dextrorotatory proteins and required certain easily acquirable trace minerals. They were extremely resistant to toxins and had no native intestinal bacteria. (Neither did the Investors themselves, and they regarded races who did as savages.)

She looked for its respiratory requirements as the mascot leapt from her head and capered across the control board, almost aborting the program. She shooed it off, hunting for something she could comprehend amid dense clusters of alien graphs and garbled technical material. Suddenly she recognized something from her old days in technical espionage: a genetics chart.

She frowned. It seemed she had run past the relevant sections and on to another treatise entirely. She advanced the data slightly and discovered a three-dimensional illustration of some kind of fantastically complex genetic construct, with long helical chains of alien genes marked out in improbable colors. The gene chains were wrapped around long spires or spicules that emerged radially from a dense central knot. Further chains of tightly wound helices connected spire to spire. Apparently these chains activated different sections of genetic material from their junctions on the spires, for she could see ghost chains of slave proteins peeling off from some of the activated genes.

Spider Rose smiled. No doubt a skilled Shaper geneticist could profit spectacularly from these plans. It amused her to think that they never would. Obviously this was some kind of alien industrial genetic complex, for there was more genetic hardware there than any actual living animal could ever possibly need.

She knew that the Investors themselves never tampered with genetics. She wondered which of the nineteen known intelligent races had originated this thing. It might even have come from outside the Investors’ economic realm, or it might be a relic from one of the extinct races.

She wondered if she ought to erase the data. If she died, it might fall into the wrong hands. As she thought of her death, the first creeping shades of a profound depression disturbed her. She allowed the sensation to build for a moment while she thought. The Investors had been careless to leave her with this information; or perhaps they underestimated the genetic abilities of the smooth and charismatic Shapers with their spectacularly boosted IQs.

There was a wobbling feeling inside her head. For a dizzying moment the chemically repressed emotions gushed forth with all their pent-up force. She felt an agonized envy for the Investors, for the dumb arrogance and confidence that allowed them to cruise the stars screwing their purported inferiors. She wanted to be with them. She wanted to get aboard a magic ship and feel alien sunlight burn her skin in some place light-years from human weakness. She wanted to scream and feel like a little girl had screamed and felt one hundred and ninety-three years ago on a roller coaster in Los Angeles, screaming in total pure intensity of feeling, in swept-away sensation like she had felt in the arms of her husband, her man dead now thirty years. Dead … Thirty years …

Her hands trembling, she opened a drawer beneath the control board. She smelled the faint medicinal reek of ozone from the sterilizer. Blindly she pushed her glittering hair from the plastic duct into her skull, pressed the injector against it, inhaled once, closed her eyes, inhaled twice, pulled the hypo away. Her eyes glazed over as she refilled the hypo and slipped it back into its velcro holster in the drawer.

She held the bottle and looked at it blankly. There was still plenty left. She would not have to synthesize more for months. Her brain felt like someone had stepped on it. It was always like this right after a mash. She shut off the Investor data and filed it absently in an obscure corner of computer memory. From its stand on the laser-corn interface the mascot sang briefly and groomed its wing.

Soon she was herself again. She smiled. These sudden attacks were something she took for granted. She took an oral tranquilizer to stop the trembling of her hands and antacid for the stress on her stomach.

Then she played with the mascot until it grew tired and went to sleep. For four days she fed it carefully, being especially careful not to overfeed it, for like its models the Investors, it was a greedy little creature and she was afraid it would hurt itself. Even despite its rough skin and cold-bloodedness she was growing fond of it. When it grew tired of begging for food, it would play with string for hours or sit on her head watching the screen as she monitored the mining robots she had out in the Rings.

On the fifth day she found on awakening that it had killed and eaten her four largest and fattest roaches. Filled with a righteous anger she did nothing to blunt, she hunted for it throughout the capsule.

She did not find it. Instead, after hours of search, she found a mascot-sized cocoon wedged under the toilet.

It had gone into some sort of hibernation. She forgave it for eating the roaches. They were easy to replace, anyway, and rivals for her affections. In a way it was flattering. But the sharp pang of worry she felt overrode that. She examined the cocoon closely. It was made of overlapping sheets of some brittle translucent substance—dried mucus?—that she could chip easily with her fingernail. The cocoon was not perfectly rounded; there were small vague lumps that might have been its knees and elbows. She took another injection.

The week it spent in hibernation was a period of acute anxiety for her. She pored over the Investor tapes, but they were far too cryptic for her limited expertise. At least she knew it was not dead, for the cocoon was warm to the touch and the lumps within it sometimes stirred.

She was asleep when it began to break free of the cocoon. She had set up monitors to warn her, however, and she rushed to it at the first alarm.

The cocoon was splitting. A rent appeared in the brittle overlapping sheets, and a warm animal reek seeped out into the recycled air.

Then a paw emerged: a tiny five-fingered paw covered in glittering fur. A second paw poked through, and the two paws gripped the edges of the rent and ripped the cocoon away. It stepped out into the light, kicking the husk aside with a little human shuffle, and it grinned.

It looked like a little ape, small and soft and glittering. There were tiny human teeth behind the human lips of its grin. It had small soft baby’s feet on the ends of its round springy legs, and it had lost its wings. Its eyes were the color of her eyes. The smooth mammalian skin of its round little face had the faint rosy flush of perfect health.

It jumped into the air, and she saw the pink of its tongue as it babbled aloud in human syllables.

It skipped over and embraced her leg. She was frightened, amazed, and profoundly relieved. She petted the soft perfect glittering fur on its hard little nugget of a head.

“Fuzzy,” she said. “I’m glad. I’m very glad.”

“Wa wa wa,” it said, mimicking her intonation in its piping child’s voice. Then it skipped back to its cocoon and began to eat it by the double handful, grinning.

She understood now why the Investors had been so reluctant to offer their mascot. It was a trade item of fantastic value. It was a genetic artifact, able to judge the emotional wants and needs of an alien species and adapt itself to them in a matter of days.

She began to wonder why the Investors had given it away at all; if they fully understood the capabilities of their pet. Certainly she doubted that they had understood the complex data that had come with it. Very likely, they had acquired the mascot from other Investors, in its reptilian form. It was even possible (the thought chilled her) that it might be older than the entire Investor race.

She stared at it: at its clear, guileless, trusting eyes. It gripped her fingers with small warm sinewy hands. Unable to resist, she hugged it to her, and it babbled with pleasure. Yes, it could easily have lived for hundreds or thousands of years, spreading its love (or equivalent emotions) among dozens of differing species.

And who would harm it? Even the most depraved and hardened of her own species had secret weaknesses. She remembered stories of guards in concentration camps who butchered men and women without a qualm, but meticulously fed hungry birds in the winter. Fear bred fear and hatred, but how could anyone feel fear or hatred toward this creature, or resist its brilliant powers?

It was not intelligent; it didn’t need intelligence. It was sexless as well. An ability to breed would have ruined its value as a trade item. Besides, she doubted that anything so complex could have grown in a womb. Its genes would have to be built, spicule by spicule, in some unimaginable lab.

Days and weeks reeled by. Its ability to sense her moods was little short of miraculous. When she needed it, it was always there, and when she didn’t it vanished. Sometimes she would hear it chattering to itself as it capered in strange acrobatics or chased and ate roaches. It was never mischievous, and on the odd occasions where it spilled food or upset something, it would unobtrusively clean up after itself. It dropped its small inoffensive fecal pellets into the same recycler she used.

These were the only signs it showed of patterns of thought that were more than animal. Once, and only once, it had mimicked her, repeating a sentence letter-perfect. She had been shocked, and it had sensed her reaction immediately. It never tried to parrot her again.

They slept in the same bed. Sometimes while she slept she would feel its warm nose snuffling lightly along the surface of her skin, as if it could smell her suppressed moods and feelings through the pores. Sometimes it would rub or press with its small firm hands against her neck or spine, and there was always a tightened muscle there that relaxed in gratitude. She never allowed this in the day, but at night, when her discipline was half-dissolved in sleep, there was a conspiracy between them.

The Investors had been gone over six hundred days. She laughed when she thought of the bargain she was getting.

The sound of her own laughter no longer startled her. She had even cut back on her dosages of suppressants and inhibitors. Her pet seemed so much happier when she was happy, and when it was at hand her ancient sadnesses seemed easier to bear. One by one she began to face old pains and traumas, holding her pet close and shedding healing tears into its glittering fur. One by one it licked her tears, tasting the emotional chemicals they contained, smelling her breath and skin, holding her as she was racked with sobbing. There were so many memories. She felt old, horribly old, but at the same time she felt a new sense of wholeness that allowed her to bear it. She had done things in the past—cruel things—and she had never put up with the inconvenience of guilt. She had mashed it instead.

Now for the first time in decades she felt the vague reawakening of a sense of purpose. She wanted to see people again—dozens of people, hundreds of people, all of whom would admire her, protect her, find her precious, whom she could care for, who would keep her safer than she was with only one companion …

Her web station entered the most dangerous part of its orbit, where it crossed the plane of the Rings. Here she was busiest, accepting the drifting chunks of raw materials-ice, carbonaceous chondrites, metal ores—that her telepuppet mining robots had discovered and sent her way. There were killers in these Rings: rapacious pirates, paranoid settlers anxious to lash out.

In her normal orbit, far off the plane of the ecliptic, she was safe. But here there were orders to be broadcasted, energies to be spent, the telltale traces of powerful mass drivers hooked to the captive asteroids she claimed and mined. It was an unavoidable risk. Even the best-designed habitat was not a completely closed system, and hers was big, and old.

They found her.

Three ships. She tried bluffing them off at first, sending them a standard interdiction warning routed through a telepuppet beacon. They found the beacon and destroyed it, but that gave her their location and some blurry data through the beacon’s limited sensors.

Three sleek ships, iridescent capsules half-metal, half-organic, with long ribbed insect-tinted sun-wings thinner than the scum of oil on water. Shaper spacecraft, knobbed with the geodesies of sensors, the spines of magnetic and optical weapons systems, long cargo manipulators folded like the arms of mantises.

She sat hooked into her own sensors, studying them, taking in a steady trickle of data: range estimation, target probabilities, weapons status. Radar was too risky; she sighted them optically. This was fine for lasers, but her lasers were not her best weapons. She might get one, but the others would be on her. It was better that she stay quiet while they prowled the Rings and she slid silently off the ecliptic.

But they had found her. She saw them fold their sails and activate their ion engines.

They were sending radio. She entered it on screen, not wanting the distraction filling her head. A Shaper’s face appeared, one of the Oriental-based gene lines, smooth raven hair held back with jeweled pins, slim black eyebrows arched over dark eyes with the epicanthic fold, pale lips slightly curved in a charismatic smile. A smooth, clean actor’s face with the glittering ageless eyes of a fanatic. “Jade Prime,” she said.

“Colonel-Doctor Jade Prime,” the Shaper said, fingering a golden insignia of rank in the collar of his black military tunic. “Still calling yourself ‘Spider Rose’ these days, Lydia? Or have you wiped that out of your brain?”

“Why are you a soldier instead of a corpse?”

“Times change, Spider. The bright young lights get snuffed out, by your old friends, and those of us with long-range plans are left to settle old debts. You remember old debts, Spider?”

“You think you’re going to survive this meeting, don’t you, Prime?” She felt the muscles of her face knotting with a ferocious hatred she had no time to kill. “Three ships manned with your own clones. How long have you holed up in that rock of yours, like a maggot in an apple? Cloning and cloning. When was the last time a woman let you touch her?”

His eternal smile twisted into a leer with bright teeth behind it. “It’s no use, Spider. You’ve already killed thirty-seven of me, and I just keep coming back, don’t I? You pathetic old bitch, what the hell is a maggot, anyway? Something like that mutant on your shoulder?”

She hadn’t even known the pet was there, and her heart was stabbed with fear for it. “You’ve come too close!”

“Fire, then! Shoot me, you germy old cretin! Fire!”

“You’re not him!” she said suddenly. “You’re not First Jade! Hah! He’s dead, isn’t he?”

The clone’s face twisted with rage. Lasers flared, and three of her habitats melted into slag and clouds of metallic plasma. A last searing pulse of intolerable brightness flashed in her brain from three melting telescopes.

She cut loose with a chugging volley of magnetically accelerated iron slugs. At four hundred miles per second they riddled the first ship and left it gushing air and brittle clouds of freezing water.

Two ships fired. They used weapons she had never seen before, and they crushed two habitats like a pair of giant fists. The web lurched with the impact, its equilibrium gone. She knew instantly which weapons systems were left, and she returned fire with metal-jacketed pellets of ammonia ice. They punched through the semiorganic sides of a second Shaper craft. The tiny holes sealed instantly, but the crew was finished; the ammonia vaporized inside, releasing instantly lethal nerve toxins.

The last ship had one chance in three to get her command center. Two hundred years of luck ran out for Spider Rose. Static stung her hands from the controls. Every light in the habitat went out, and her computer underwent a total crash. She screamed and waited for death.

Death did not come.

Her mouth gushed with the bile of nausea. She opened the drawer in the darkness and filled her brain with liquid tranquillity. Breathing hard, she sat back in her console chair, her panic mashed. “Electromagnetic pulse,” she said. “Stripped everything I had.”

The pet warbled a few syllables. “He would have finished us by now if he could,” she told her pet. “The defenses must have come through from the other habitats when the mainframe crashed.”

She felt a thump as the pet jumped into her lap, shivering with terror. She hugged it absently, rubbing its slender neck. “Let’s see,” she said into the darkness. “The ice toxins are down, I had them overridden from here.” She pulled the useless plug from her neck and plucked her robe away from her damp ribs. “It was the spray, then. A nice, thick cloud of hot ionized metallic copper. Blew every sensor he had. He’s riding blind in a metallic coffin. Just like us.”

She laughed. “Except old Rose has a trick left, baby. The Investors. They’ll be looking for me. There’s nobody left to look for him. And I still have my rock.”

She sat silently, and her artificial calmness allowed her to think the unthinkable. The pet stirred uneasily, sniffing at her skin. It had calmed a little under her caresses, and she didn’t want it to suffer.

She put her free hand over its mouth and twisted its neck till it broke. The centrifugal gravity had kept her strong, and it had no time to struggle. A final tremor shook its limbs as she held it up in the darkness, feeling for a heartbeat. Her fingertips felt the last pulse behind its frail ribs.

“Not enough oxygen,” she said. Mashed emotions tried to stir, and failed. She had plenty of suppressor left. “The carpet algae will keep the air clean a few weeks, but it dies without light. And I can’t eat it. Not enough food, baby. The gardens are gone, and even if they hadn’t been blasted, I couldn’t get food in here. Can’t run the robots. Can’t even open the airlocks. If I live long enough, they’ll come and pry me out. I have to improve my chances. It’s the sensible thing. When I’m like this I can only do the sensible thing.”

When the roaches—or at least all those she could trap in the darkness—were gone, she fasted for a long dark time. Then she ate her pet’s undecayed flesh, half hoping even in her numbness that it would poison her.

When she first saw the searing blue light of the Investors glaring through the shattered airlock, she crawled back on bony hands and knees, shielding her eyes.

The Investor crewman wore a spacesuit to protect himself from bacteria. She was glad he couldn’t smell the reek of her pitch-black crypt. He spoke to her in the fluting language of the Investors, but her translator was dead.

She thought then for a moment that they would abandon her, leave her there starved and blinded and half-bald in her webs of shed fiber-hair. But they took her aboard, drenching her with stinging antiseptics, scorching her skin with bactericidal ultraviolet rays.

They had the jewel, but that much she already knew. What they wanted—(this was difficult)—what they wanted to know was what had happened to their mascot. It was hard to understand their gestures and their pidgin scraps of human language. She had done something bad to herself, she knew that. Overdoses in the dark. Struggling in the darkness with a great black beetle of fear that broke the frail meshes of her spider’s web. She felt very bad. There was something wrong inside of her. Her malnourished belly was as tight as a drum, and her lungs felt crushed. Her bones felt wrong. Tears wouldn’t come.

They kept at her. She wanted to die. She wanted their love and understanding. She wanted—

Her throat was full. She couldn’t talk. Her head tilted back, and her eyes shrank in the searing blaze of the overhead lights. She heard painless cracking noises as her jaws unhinged.

Her breathing stopped. It came as a relief. Antiperistalsis throbbed in her gullet, and her mouth filled with fluid.

A living whiteness oozed from her lips and nostrils. Her skin tingled at its touch, and it flowed over her eyeballs, sealing and soothing them. A great coolness and lassitude soaked into her as wave after wave of translucent liquid swaddled her, gushing over her skin, coating her body. She relaxed, filled with a sensual, sleepy gratitude. She was not hungry. She had plenty of excess mass.

In eight days she broke from the brittle sheets of her cocoon and fluttered out on scaly wings, eager for the leash.

THE BOY WHO WATERSKIED TO FOREVER

James Tiptree jr

Her depths are not all hated,

Joyous her minions move;

And human still may trade a soul

For her unhuman love.

And the one she has accepted

May finish out his race

Through portals unsuspected

To another time and place.

This happened the year the coast road finally came through.

For eight years, a trail cut by machete and strewn with piano-sized rocks had run behind the coco ranch and ended at the boca, the inlet from lagoon to sea. Now the Yucatecan government had bridged the boca and pushed a one-lane cut all the way south to the fishing colony at Pajaros lighthouse. It was an evil deed.

Every evening now the big refrigerator trucks ground past, going south; in the small hours before dawn they came groaning back, loaded to the axles with illegal seafood – rare and delicious fish and stone crabs, netted on the last spawning grounds of the bay for the greedy stomachs of the tourists a hundred miles north at the new resort of Cancún. Small comfort that this traffic would not last long, for its end would mean that those species had been fished to extinction. Nightfall for another wild beauty.

But there was a tiny, selfish compensation: the new road did make it possible for an elderly bicycling gringo to reach a hitherto-inaccessible small bay. It was a magical, untouched diving paradise that I spotted from the air. Ferocious reefs barred it from the sea, and once-impenetrable mangrove swamps guarded it from the land. Twice this year I had cycled to the vicinity, laboriously hidden my wheel to avoid leaving tracks, and fought my way to shore, guided by the sound of the sea. But each time I had come too late to take more than a taste of Eden before I had to start my exhausting trek back to the rancho.

This day I started early enough. The sun stood just past noon when I stood on the rocky verge of the enchanting little cove. The water was four meters of crystal, revealing a rich undersea world. Three pink spoonbills stared incuriously from the far side as I shucked off shirt and pants, and a bananaquit investigated my shoes. There was no trace of other visitors or alien paths, and the snorkel gear I had hidden there last trip was all intact. I checked the papers and dinero already in their waterproof pouch on my belt and slipped off the rocks into the warm Caribbean with great delight: here was a place where snorkeling was the perfect way to go, where I could forget that age had put scuba dives forever beyond my strength.

Those first hours fled like moments; the reality was even finer than the promise. I visited first my few familiar spots: the ledge where two enormous black angelfish had set up housekeeping – and there they were, sweeping flat to the pale sand as my shadow came over, rolling their big eyes in what seemed like an imploring plea, but was doubtless considered menacing by their natural enemies. Then there were the tiny clouds of color rising from where the brilliant parrotfish munched and chewed a rock. And the white sand floor, which suddenly erupted into a four-foot stingray, sailing off to halt in frozen invisibility a few yards away. Obviously no one had ever used a spear gun here.

Then I began to explore, letting the gentle swells carry me over perfect lace-coral fields, dazzled by neon-blue angels, admiring the impossible pink of the ill-named and delectable hogfish – another proof, if one were needed, that no one had yet shot over this reef. Clouds of blue-headed wrasse were feeding in my shadow: I paused for a long inspection, hoping to catch sight of one of the juvenile females, who mate in schools, in the phase of growing into a much larger, red-and-yellow, monogamous male. Until recently these two forms had been considered separate species, and I never see them without wondering what our own social system would be like had humans evolved with this trait.

Imagine our world, if all the senior males, the O.J. Simpsons, the Walter Cronkites and Leonid Brezhnevs, had started out as little girls and young mothers? Just in time, I remembered not to chuckle and choke myself.

Never had the underwater world been more ravishing; I flippered lazily through turquoise and liquid air, noting that the light was now tinged with faint gold. Even the evil head of a moray eel protruding from its hole in the reef was a green-gold heraldic emblem of villainy, and the enormous grouper stupidly eyeing me from a half-spear shot away was crusted with dark jewels.

The sea was so calm that I decided to cross the inner reef and have a look at the coral heads where the so-called sleeping sharks occasionally hide. I had acquired companions; three young barracudas were circling me, disappearing for moments only to rejoin me from a new angle, their mouths as usual open in toothy gapes. I had taken the normal precaution of removing all shiny gear, even to my medical-plaque chain, but one large fellow was showing so much interest in my diving watch that I debated hiding it in my suit. The local barracudas are said to be harmless – I had been instructed, when meeting one nose-to-nose under water, to shout “Boo!” But I had found this difficult, especially in a snorkel mask. My sound came out as a pallid “Urk!” I found a pass in the inner reef and flippered through, momentarily losing my carnivorous friends. The inshore bay was an uninteresting grass-plain relieved here and there by a giant orange starfish, a flotilla of yellow-tails, or a huge live conch. It was the isolated brain-coral heads which interested me. I cruised along up-current; the old learn quickly to start their journeys upwind or uphill, so that nature will help them home. What I was looking for was a large pile with a cave at its base in which a sleeper shark might lie.

A NOTE ABOUT THE MAYAS OF THE QUINTANA ROO

The Quitana Roo – pronounced Keen-TAH-nah Row – is a real and very strange place: The ‘wild’ Easternmost shore of the Yucatan Peninsula, officially, but not psychologically a part of Mexico. A diary of life on its shores could often be taken for a log of life on an alien planet.

For example, few people know that the millions-strong Maya peoples quite recently rose and fought bloodily for their independence, principally against Mexico. They were not totally defeated; the Maya wars ended with a negotiated truce only in 1935. (The Secretary of the Maya Annies died the year of my first visit.) Mexico promptly divided the peninsula into the provinces of Campeche, Yucatan, and the Territory of Quintana Roo, which includes Cozumel. On that coast there are today (1980) Maya villages who still exercise their treaty rights of remaining unassimilated and ‘modernized’. They are visited only rarely, and by invitation. The governor of Cozumel, a friend of mine, last year paid such a visit; he went alone and for the last 16 miles, along an archaic sac bé, on foot.

It is difficult for those afflicted by Mayaphilia to shut off, but perhaps the Good Editor will allow two more points: First, Mayas, the most oriental of all native American Indians, are as different from the oft-conquered, tribally-mixed, tourist-acclimated Indians you meet in Mainland Mexico as an unreconstructed Highland Scot is from a cockney of London. And second, 99 percent of the substance of the yarns that follow is simple fact… and I could not swear that what seems fictional was not recounted to me by the four-thousand-year old voices that murmur still in the nights of the Quintana Roo.

Most were too small, so I swam out further, toward the second reef. From here I could just glimpse the shining white dot above the hazy southern coastline which was the white tower of Tuloom, high on its cliff. Tuloom is our chief local ruina, a mediocre remnant of greatness whose claims to fame are its glorious site and one strange carving, unique in all Yucatan, which may – or may not – concern this tale.

By the center of the second reef I spotted exactly what I was looking for: It was perfect – great rounded boulders, with a big dim cave or tunnel at the base like those where I had encountered the sleepers in younger days, before my trick ear took the deeper dives away. This one was only about five meters down. Peering, I was almost sure that the sun was lighting something rounded and amber-tan floating in the cave. Moreover, my attendant barracudas seemed to have found business elsewhere. Could I dive down and look?

Debating, I took off my mask to clean it and noticed that the sun was now definitely slanting down. There was not much time for the long return. Dilemma: I longed mightily to look at that shark, and I longed mightily not to. It was not merely the pain I would suffer in my ear – to tell the truth, it was a lonesome place and time, if this happened to be shark wake-up hour. But – that gnawing question of my life – was I needlessly afraid? Was I, er, chicken?

As I dithered, two things occurred almost at once. The first was auditory – I heard the beat of a boat’s motor around the point. This drove the shark from my mind – there is no shame in taking refuge from the occasional maniac who tears full speed along the inner reef to make time, trusting to the god of machismo that he won’t hit a coral head. Many of them also enjoy making swimmers dive for their lives. I paddled as fast as I could go for the white water of the middle reef, feeling like a wheelchair driver caught on the Indianapolis raceway.

Here I met with the second, larger event: At the base of the big reef was something long and moving. The water was roiled, and at first I thought I was seeing some unearthly endless centipede, walking south. Then a clear interval showed me what it was – langustas, the tropic lobsters – an enormous unending file of them, all sizes and ages, following each other along the base of the reef. I was looking upon a recently discovered mystery – the Migration of the Lobsters, coming from God knew where, en route to an equally unknown destination, upon which few people have ever set eyes.

I stared, counting to the hundreds, before I came out of my trance to realize that no rooster-tailed sportscraft had appeared. In fact, now I could hear clearer, it was not a speedboat at all, but the throbbing of a much larger craft moving along the outermost reef. Correct: around the point was coming the ramshackle box-form of a langustera – a lobster boat – her white paint looking deceptively smart in the afternoon sun, and her old motor setting up an out of synch cacophony. She was towing a pair of dinghies.

The uproar ceased as she came opposite me by the far reef; there was a rattle of anchor-chain, and the dinghies were double-manned and cutting along side the reef with unusual speed. As the nearest anchored, a figure in bright red shorts stood up and tossed his long hair before masking up. Unmistakable.

“Lorenzo! Lorenzo Canseco! Qué tal?”

Typically, he gave me an offhand wave; he had long since spotted and identified me. Lorenzo was one of our local diving superstars, which meant that the langustera was the Angélique. I knew her captain well.

But there was less than the usual gaiety to Lorenzo’s wave, and he was in the water fast and businesslike. The other diver, whom I hadn’t seen clearly, was already in and working. The far boat was empty too. All four divers were searching the outer reef and the space between, normally a source.

I looked down at my procession of strange little beings. So long as no one crossed the middle reef in the right spot they were safe.

I swam over to Lorenzo’s dinghy, a plan forming in my mind. The other diver was just coming up to boat two undersized langustas and a respectable grouper. To my surprise, it was my friend the owner-captain himself, an emaciated gold-tanned figure, with white hair and a remarkably distinguished white hairline mustache.

“Don Manuel! Se recuerde de su viejo amigo?”

My Spanish has been called unicamente desastroso; it was possibly that, rather than my appearance, which enabled him to greet me with warmth. Then he rested his elbows on the gunwales, and I saw that he was quite tired. This probably meant that he had engaged in exertions that would have hospitalized most gringos.

“How goes it?”

Captain Manuel shook his white head, baring his teeth in a combined grimace of despair, fatalism, and hate. He seemed content to chat a moment while he rested. So I asked him more.

He had, it seemed, been all the way to Punta Rosa, starting before light.

“Good catch, I hope?” (But I had already noticed that the Angelique was riding much too high in the water.)

Manuel made an untranslatable remark, the essence of which was that one Carlos Negron and his new boat could have sexual congress with the devil. It seemed that Carlos had outrun him down the entire route, preempting all the choicest spots, and at one point even side-swiping Manuel’s dinghy.

“The irony of it is, Carlos doesn’t even know where to fish. He is new. But he hired that loco Arturo whom I fired for drunkenness, may the devil screw them both. After all I put up with from Arturo, teaching him…”

“A bad trip. I am grieved.”

He stared somberly at the Angélique, his thin face a stoic mask.

“Worse than that. I have not made even the diesel bill. And I had to place so much hope on this trip.”

“There is need?”

He tossed his white hair back proudly; I could see him considering scornfully what a gringo could know of need. But our long friendship prevailed.

“There is need,” he said simply. Nodding his head. “Muchos difficultates à la casa. Mi nina – my little girl, and my wife, both they are sick. They require specialistos, you understand. Muy pronto. With the government nothing can be done.”

During this interchange the vision of my helpless lobsters, streaming by two hundred meters inshore, had been rising unwelcomely behind my eyes. Marching in their thousands, on the mysterious journey that had gone on since long before the trivial race of man. A journey that was, perhaps, essential to their survival. Elsewhere they were already heavily overfished; perhaps even now they too faced their end.

But the trivial race of man was my race, and Manuel was my friend. The threat to him and his was real too. Still – had I not been there by chance, would not Manuel’s own expertise have had to suffice? Nor would I have known of Carlos Negron, nor the illness of Manuel’s family.

While I floated there in the beauty, miserable, the other dinghy came up. A boy named Ruffino captained it. “Nada,” he said, gesturing expressively. “And the petrol begins to lack. We go?”

Captain Manuel let his eyes droop closed for a moment, an expression of despair I had not before seen on his strong face. And at that moment a thought occurred to me:

“My” lobsters were not safe – not safe at all. They were headed straight toward the nets and spears of the predatory Carlos when they rounded Punta Rosa – not to mention the depredations that would be made by casual pot-hunters for a hundred miles.

“Wait, Manuel,” I said. “Tell them to wait. I want you to follow me over there.” I pointed to the inner reef, thinking there was just enough time to take at least a few to do him some good. The feeling of Judas choked my throat; I had to clear my snorkel twice before we were looking down at the great horde of marchers, lit by the inshore sun.

Time… but I had not counted on Maya speed and endurance, nor the sharp Maya eyesight – nor the underwater focos Manuel and Ruffino carried to light the scene.

The Angélique was moved twice before it was over, deep in the water and groaning in every ancient timber when Manuel called it a day.

“How can I ever thank you, my friend?” Manuel inquired as the dinghies were hoisted and the Angélique prepared to depart. “You will wish Lorenzo to carry you back to the rancho in the skiff?”

“No. Many thanks, but I would prefer to go with you to Cozumel tonight. I have a small négocio to do in the morning. If you could perhaps lend me a shirt and help me get to the Maya Cozumel? I keep an old maleta of clothes with Senora Blaustein.”

Manuel nodded approvingly. The Maya Cozumel is not one of your tourist palaces, but a sober and inexpensive Mexican commercial traveler’s inn, run by one of the formidable Hispanic-Teutons who conduct much of Mexico’s invisible commercial life.

“It would by my pleasure,” said Manuel. “But the rancho will be searching for you, no?”

“Ah, but Don Pa’o has now a short-wave radio, on which they must listen for the Gardia Aereo for an hour at nine every night. If you could change crystals and tell him to pick me up at the Playa del Carmen ferry tomorrow morning? You could say you fished me from the sea, to avoid trouble with the Gardia.”

“Oh, no problem. Everybody uses that band to sell a motor and buy two ducks. This is an excellent idea, my friend. But you will not stay at the Maya. You will come home with me to celebrate.”

“We will plan that later, Don Manuel old friend; you know I have not your strength for celebration and you will need to see to your wife.”

And so it came about that Don Manuel and I reclined upon the bridge on the Angélique, while she creaked and grumbled her way across the moonlit straits towards Cozumel. The other divers, after a cold meat of snapper seasoned with what tasted like live coals, had promptly made for their hammocks. Don Manuel was doubtless twice as tired, but pride compelled him to take the captain’s watch. The sea was quiet now, but nothing in the Quintana Roo is to be granted perfect trust.

To help him stay awake, we chatted idly in our usual mixture of tongues: of doings of mutual friends, of the iniquity of government, of all that had changed since the days when he was a young sportsboat captain and I an eager lover of the sea. His English was only somewhat better than my Spanish, but we had always understood one another well, and the tale that follows reflects that understanding as much as the literal words.

We were commenting on the skills of the various divers, notably that of Lorenzo, his head boy.

“Ah, yes. Lorenzo Canseco. He is good, very good. But the boy you should have seen was K’o.” Manuel nodded, and repeated with special relish and the full Maya click:

“Audomaro K’o. Mayo puro, you understand; he was proud of it even then. K’o, K’ou – it means something like Lord, or young god, maybe. We were boys together, you see, in those days when the scuba was just getting started here.” Manuel chuckled, shaking his head. “No one had ever heard of safety; we tied our gear on with sisal ropes. But K’o – he was the first to buy a proper watch. There will never be his like again.”

“He is… gone?”

Captain Manuel hesitated and let himself make one of his few Maya mannerisms, a high-pitched sound deep in his throat. He belonged to the old school, before it became fashionable to be more Maya than Spanish. “Yes, he is gone,” he said finally. “I saw him go. But…”

“A diving accident?”

“Oh, no. You must understand that K’o never had accidents. He was strong, he was handsome, he could do anything – but he had also the cabeza.” Manuel tapped his forehead. “Others did foolish things – not he. I tell you: incredible – Once, below a hundred meters, his companion’s air-hose broke, and K’o brought him up safely, holding his own mask on the boy, back on himself, then back on the boy – all the time using his watch, so that they would not get the bends. It took nearly an hour like that to bring them both safely up. And the sea bad and night falling. I ask you – who could do that? And then the next week, Marco, the damn fool he saved, went down to two hundred and caught the rapture of the deeps. He untied himself before we knew. The last we saw of Marco, he was diving down, down into the Cuba current that runs off the north reef. We could see his light for a short time, going ever deeper and faster. Then it vanished. Even his body was never found.”

“God.”

“Yes. Oh, there are endless stories about K’o. He was good. When the Capitan Cousteau came through here, he chose K’o to dive with him. De vero. But the most funny story was about the cinema people, when K’o played the shark with the girl.”

“What?”

“Yes. Everyone was crazy then, you understand, and the cinema people were loco locissimo. In this story a beautiful young actress is pursued by a shark who catches her and –” Captain Manuel glanced at me expressively “– the shark ah, makes love to her. Can you imagine? Well, they fixed K’o up in this shark body and he pursued the girl – she was a puta, but a beauty, the director’s girl. K’o caught her all right – and then, by god, he actually did the business. Right there in the water. In that crazy shark outfit. He just barely kept the girl from drowning, too, she was screeching like a perriqua. And the director jumping up and down in the boat – nothing he could do except howl and scream and fire K’o, who did not give a damn. I always wanted to see that film. But I think something went wrong with the camera, everyone was laughing like lunatics.”

We were both chuckling too, while the old boat thudded on, following the rising moon. A school of porpoises was playing in the bow wave, their phosporescent trails vying with the moonlight. Behind us the moonlit spark that was Tuloom was sinking out of sight. It was the last hour of true night, before the sky beyond Cozumel, island of sunrise, would fade to grey.

On the strength of the movie starlet’s fate I decided to try a highly diluted sample of the good captain’s fiery tequilla, while he had his normal libation.

“Ah, yes, stories of youth,” the old man said when we were settled again. “We were young, life was to spend. So many gone. I remember one that scared us all, though. We were exploring the great reef that slants down to the north – the one Marco jumped off into the deep – and something went wrong with this other boy’s tank. His companion – not K’o – panicked and cut him loose, and poor Pedro shot to the surface like a bullet. K’o was in the boat. We pulled him in; he seemed all right but he was dead, you understand. He knew he only had a few minutes. He sent messages to his mother and sister, and then, just as the nitrogen was starting to work on him, he gave K’o his watch. It was a cheap little thing, I remember it well, because K’o always wore it, on his left wrist. Then of course the sickness took him, every cell in Pedro’s body began to rupture and collapse, and the boy screaming, screaming; like a screaming bag of jelly toward the end… I tell you, we were all a bit more sober after that.”

“Dreadful indeed… but K’o, what of him?”

“Ah…” The old man took a long pull at his tequila. “Well, by this time there were coming the tourists, you know, and all sorts of new equipment, and good boats. And the aqua skis. Well! If only you could have seen K’o perform on waterskis – dance, jump, stand on his head, ride one like a surfboard, carry girls – anything. And I remember he had the first of those brillante striped shorts, what they call Madras. The touristas – all the women – were falling over him. But it was no use. K’o was for the sea. Only the sea. Anything to do with the sea, he was interested – but beyond that,” Manuel made the Maya sound again – “there were many unhappy girls, I tell you. What K’o wanted he took, and then he was off again like a god.

“It was the time when the waterskiing was the great thing. Estiloso. K’o liked me because I always had a boat. Sometimes I could beg or borrow even a really big one. Also, I would spend the hours he wanted to perfect each thing. And then he told me what he really planned.

“He wanted to be the first man to waterski from Cozumel to the mainland. These days, perhaps, it may not sound like much, but even now it would take great strength. And with the equipment we had then–!”

“There’s always a hell of a chop – very rough water in that strait.”

“Yes… but we were young and crazy. And, moreover, he didn’t plan to go straight across the shortest way. He wanted to go slightly south, up-current, to land at Tuloom. It was not stupid; the angle of the big swells would be better so.

“Of course there were no people at Tuloom then. That was before the Mexican arqueologicos and the turistas. Even the vandals, the ladrones, could find nothing more to take. Soon it would have been all gone. And yet, when Chichen and Uxmaal were already long dead, Tuloom was still a major place, with sea commerce and many towers and people. But not religious, I think… Something always a little mysterioso about Tuloom. Barren women still sometimes make pilgrimages there to watch the sunrise. They use the old name, Zama, the Dawn.”

“Poor old Tuloom,” I sighed. “Have you read what the conquistador Grijalva said of it, when he sailed by in 1518? He did not land, you know, they found the great bay of Ascension instead.”

“No. What of Tuloom?”

“ ‘We saw there a shining bourg, so large that Seville itself could not have appeared larger or finer.’ And he speaks of ‘a very high tower, and crowds of Indians bearing standards’.”

“That… I had not heard.” Captain Manuel’s gaze was on me, yet not quite focused. “White… finer than Seville.” He repeated so softly that I thought he might be yielding to sleep.

“So you tried this trip, this crossing?”

He blinked, nodded. “Ah, si!

“It was still dark when we started, just such a morning as this is going to be, with a small moon in the sunrise. I had got hold of the best boat I knew – about seven meters with two hundred-horsepower outboards – very modern for her day. And how we worked on the ropes and harnesses – I tell you, we could have dragged wild horses. Spare skis, of course, in case one cracked or he hit flotsam. Even some candy bars and water we tied around his waist. So we crept out of the marina, in the moonlight, and he waved me on impatiently and got up on the skis, and I opened the throttle and the boat began to plane. Oh god, we were young. And the strange thing is, although K’o was so determined to be the first, he told no one but me his plans. It was all between him and the sea, I think.

“Well, for a long time it was just work, with the world turning pale around us, and me trying to pick the best path for him. He was all business, after one flourish when we took off. He just settled down determined to do it. The porpoises found us in the first light. I could see them playing around him. But that was all right; they seemed to understand the business, they never got in the way. The light was quite deceptive when we crossed the first big rough current, and I was worried that he was having a bad trip, but every time I looked back he waved me on.

“And then of course the color began to come – a beautiful dawn – look, there’s a little rosea ahead of us now – and our spirits rose. Of course we were headed away from the sun. But you know the west is beautiful in the sunrise too.”

My Spanish was not up to attempting “Not through Eastern windows when morning comes, comes in the light,” so I merely agreed.

“We crossed the second bad current then in good style and came to quite a stretch of smooth water. I decided it was time for him to eat and drink. So I steadied down the pace, gesturing to him. He didn’t want to – he got mad and made a fist, waving me on – but I was stubborn too, and he saw I wouldn’t pick up until he’d taken something. So he did, while I took the steadiest course I could. I was watching him too, to make sure he ate – I can still recall seeing the light flash off both those watches, his own good one and the poor thing the dead boy gave him on his other wrist.

“Then he threw the empty canteen away and waved me on, and I stood the boat up and we made wonderful time across that smooth sea. The sky was fantastic above us – like cities of all colors, how do you say, castles – cuidades del cielo, cities of the sky; and all colored flowers with the great rayas of light streaming onto them from behind us, out of the east. And then just as we came through the last rough current, I saw that the lowest line of color was the cocos of the mainland shore! And there above on the cliff was the shining tower of Tuloom, and I knew if I was careful we were really going to make it.

“But we were not there yet, not by much. Many bones of ships and men lie between where we were and the Castle of Tuloom.

“That rough water goes all the way to the main reef in front of Tuloom, you see, sweeping along by the harbor passes; it can be malicious. And the passes are not simple; there appear to be several, although only two are truly good. But the light was brighter every moment, and the seeing was clear – I tell you, I ran those last kilometers with so great care, trying to put K’o just right of every wave – I was like a borracho, a drunkard, who is carrying the last bottle of tequila on earth. Whenever I looked back, he was waving to go faster. And in fact he was right, some speed is necessary for such water. But always I was worried because we would have to slow down for the pass, and the danger of the following waves broaching me – I was in such a state I was not even sure I could find the right pass, though I knew it like my wife’s ear. And, oh! – the beautiful colors of the dawn, and the dolphins playing – never shall I feel such an hour again. But we were going fast, so fast.

“I had to lose speed without letting any slack come in K’o‘s lines, you see. But of course he understood that as well as I did. I could see him commencing to cross the wake, back and forth, always with the lines so beautifully tight, but gentle. But always waving to me to go faster, waving like mad. I thought he was for the first time a little loco. And then, my god – just as I found the start of the main pass, I saw him cut far to one side and I understood what he was planning.

“He was not going to follow me through, see? He was going to shoot along beside me through the other pass. That was why he wanted the speed. So I opened the throttle, not caring if I smashed the whole boat, and the lines went tight, tight, with the speed he needed. And yet, my god, how tired his arms must have been.

“So he turned and came snapping back past me in a great curve, like the end of a whip – standing up like a prince – I tell you. He even waved as he shot by into his pass, on the crest of a wave, just right – did I tell you he had learned to use the skis like a surfboard, long before the surfers ever came? I could see him as clearly as I can see you, and his lines were still tight, just right – and his dolphins tearing along with him too.

“It was that strange moment of sunrise, the instant when the sun rises falsely – Oh, yes, I know how we see it by refraction before it is truly there, while it is still really under the curve of the sea. And sometimes it is the wrong shape, misshapen – although it is the true sun, still it is for a few seconds sinistre. A momento spectrale – which I do not quite like. This was the sun that burst upon him just as he passed in. I remember there was a small cloud cutting it in three fat chunks, like a papaya, cold but beautiful. And at that moment K’o’s harness went weird – it was still tight, you understand, and I could see him holding it – but the part near me faded in an abnormal fashion, it became hazy like a vapor.

“And then so many things happened to me at once, although I never took my eyes off K’o. He was planing, or riding at tremendous speed through the pass into Tuloom harbor. He had to be heading for a terrible spill in the coral. For a time he seemed still to hold the rope; for all I know the dolphins were pulling him. The wave cresting all around him – but he was still upright, perfectly all right in a great blaze of sun despite the crash that had to be coming. And I noticed there was no more rope. He was holding his body like a surfer, but somehow different. Superb till the end.”

Don Manuel’s tone grew low and quieter, with a great seriousness. “My friend, I could not swear to you that he was not standing or riding on the dolphins, driving straight for shore. But the shore had become strange too. There was not only one Castillo above us, there were more. And I think in one glimpse I saw work going on – not the miserable scaffolds of the arqueologicos, but like building, fresh and new. And voices, people shouting, Mayas rushing down the cliff path now, rushing into the sea toward K’o. And all strangely dressed, or rather, ornamented – everything shining, colorful. But then I had no more time to look. Because you see both my motors had died.

“Oh, yes. Just as I saw him pass into the harbor, first one engine quit and then the other, dead as dogs, and I was being whirled ‘round and carried across the pass entrance. Luckily – maybe unluckily – the tide was running out and took me with it. I was so crazy with confusion and contra-natura, things turned against nature – I did not even comprehend my own danger. Only I had the sense to seize the palo and push away from the most dangerous rocks – all the time the current and the tide were carrying me away – away –

“I had one last look at the glory – how did the man of old say it? –towers shining, noble as Seville? As it must have appeared so many hundreds of years ago, perhaps before it was ever seen by accursed eyes.” For an instant the old Maya-mestizo, who normally called himself a Spaniard, allowed a hate I had never heard before to show. “Yes, And then when I could look again, there was nothing but our poor old Tuloom.

“Zama, the city of the dawn, was gone forever. And K’o with it.”

Here Don Manuel got up, poured himself another tequila, and I joined him in a weaker potion. The divers were still sleeping soundly in their amacas, one in every corner; from two of them came gentle snores. The sky was brightening, blooming into beauty, with a great salmon explosion ahead of us, in which lay Cozumel. I glanced back at the west; again there were the glowing cities of the sky, lavender and saffron and rose, with the faint chip of setting moon still sharply visible, and somehow alien among the softness.

“No,” said Don Manuel, though I had not spoken. “Nothing of him was ever found. No body, no skis, not a scrap, nothing. Although everyone looked for weeks, even from the air. And – another strange thing – even the coil of rope-end in my lancha was gone too. I remember in the excitement I had glimpsed it seeming faint, like a mist, but I was too busy trying to save myself from wrecking to attend to that.”

“How did you come ashore?”

“Well, I tell you, I thought I was going to Cuba. I was sure there was water or dirt in the petrol, you see, although we had strained it three times through a good lana hat. Oh, he overlooked nothing, that K’o! So I was sucking and blowing away, drinking petrol so I was sick, when suddenly the motor started quite normally, and then the other, which I had not even touched. So I tore right back, looking for K’o – I went into the harbor, everywhere – but there was nothing but our dead ruined old Tuloom. And one viejo, a sort of caretaker, who had been shooting doves. He said he had heard a motor, but he was in the mangles after palomas, he had seen nothing. Only he crossed himself–” Here Don Manuel made a comic gesture – “about twenty times.

“I went back to Cozumel – the motors ran perfectly. And of course I alerted the Gardia, and all K’o‘s friends. But there was nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing except one thing only, which I know. Shall I tell you a strangeness, my friend?”

“You ask me? May you never find another langusta if you keep silent now.”

“Very well.” He took a deep, deep draught. “This I never told. You know our poor Tuloom, how it is famous for two things. One is of course the magnificent site, the wall and the view from the Castillo, correct? And do you know the other, which is in every stupid guidebook?”

“What? Not the frescoes, they are gone. A few Chacs, rain gods – Oh! Of course. The figure over the top door, the Descending God, or whatever you will.”

“Do you know it is the only such a one in all Yucatan? In no other Maya ruina, even Tikal. Some fools call it the Descending God, or a setting sun, such as a few Aztec temples have up in Mexico. But this one is quite, quite different. I have made it my business to compare, you see. Even from the oldest drawings before the vandals came. You can believe me. The posture is not elegant, indeed, it is somewhat like a frog. Nevertheless, everyone except some of the Arqueologistos, call it not descending, but the diving god. The vandals have been at it, and the weather, of course. But I have consulted the old drawings, like your Catherwoods’ from Stevenson’s books. Have you never examined these?”

“No, not really.”

“Well. Some are very detailed. The hands are held so –” Don Manuel put his fingers together like a diving child. “And on the wrists he drew stiff cuffs with ruffles. But these are only drawn to fill the space, I think, it was already damaged, you see. Such cuffs are never seen elsewhere. Like Spanish court cuffs, or the cuffs the little typistas wear to keep their sleeves clean. The real statue that you can see today has no trace of such things. But if you look carefully you can see there was indeed something there, upon the wrists. Very omamentados. But not big cuffs. One perhaps a little smaller than the other, on the left wrist. And by the wrists – you know the Maya symbols for numbers, the bars and dots, not so?”

“Yes.”

“Well, a few small ones can still be made out, in the space by the diving hands. Strange wrist ornaments – figures of time?… How would the ancients show a diver’s watch, I ask you?”

“Oh, my god, Manuel.”

“Exactly, my friend. His name too, did you forget? K’o, K’ou, a god!”

There fell then a long silence, in which I was unconscious of the uproar of the old engines, the groans, the creaks, the double snore. Only the dawn wind, broken by an osprey’s scream, only the glorious sunrise over the marina pier, now visible ahead, from which came the almost imperceptible tinkle of a mariachi from some early riser’s radio.

Presently I sighed. “So you really think he made it, Don Manuel?”

“I know what I have seen, my friend,” Manuel said quietly. “And every word I have told you is the truth. I believe he was indeed the first man to waterski from Cozumel to the mainland. By several hundreds – perhaps, who knows? – even a thousand years. Mille annos, mas o menus. Quien sabe?”

IKE AT THE MIKE

Howard Waldrop

A strange and wonderful story by a strange and wonderful author. Enjoy.

— Monica

Ambassador Pratt leaned over toward Senator Presley. “My mother’s ancestors don’t like to admit it,” he said, “but they all came to the island from the Carpathians two centuries ago. Their name then was something like Karloff.” He laughed through his silver mustache.

“Hell,” said Presley, with the tinge of the drawl that came to his speech when he was excited, as he was tonight. “My folks been dirt farmers all the way back to Adam. They don’t even remember coming from anywhere. But that don’t mean they ain’t wonderful folks. Good people all the same.”

“Of course not,” said Pratt. “My father was a shopkeeper. He worked to send all my older brothers into the Foreign Service. But when my time came, I thought I had another choice. I wanted to run off to Canada or Australia, perhaps try my hand at acting. I was in several local dramatic clubs, you know. My father took me aside before my service exams. The day before—I remember quite distinctly—he said, `William’ he was the only member of the family who used my full name—`William,’ he said, `actors do not get paid the last workday of each and every month.’ Well, I thought about it awhile, and next day passed my exams with absolute top grades.”

Pratt smiled his ingratiating smile once more. There was something a little scary about it, Presley thought, sort of like Raymond Massey’s smile in Arsenic and Old Lace. But the smile had seen Pratt through sixty years of government service. It had been a smile that made the leaders of small countries smile back as King Georges, number after number, took yet more of their lands. It was a good smile; it made everyone remember his grandfather. Even Presley.

“Folks is funny,” said Presley. “God knows, I used to get up at barn dances and sing myself silly. I was just a kid then, playing around.”

“My childhood is so far behind me,” said Ambassador Pratt. “I hardly remember it. I was small. Then I had the talk with my father, and went to service school, then found myself in Turkey, which at that time owned a large portion of the globe. The Sick Man of Europe, it was called. You know I met Lawrence of Arabia, don’t you? Before the Great War. He was an archaeologist then. Came to us to get the Ottomans to give him permission to dig up Petra. They thought him to be a fool. Wanted the standard ninety percent share of everything, just the same.”

“You’ve seen a lot of the world change,” said Senator E. Aaron Presley. He took a sip of wine. “I’ve had trouble enough keeping up with it since I was elected congressman six years ago. I almost lost touch during my senatorial campaign, and I’ll be damned if everything hadn’t changed again by the time I got back here.”

Pratt laughed. He was eighty years old, far past retirement age, but still bouncing around like a man of sixty. He had alternately quit and had every British P.M. since Churchill call him out of retirement to patch up relations with this or that nation.

Presley was thirty-three, the youngest senator in the country for a long time. The United States was in bad shape, and he was one of the symbols of the new hope. There was talk of revolution, several cities had been burned, there was a war on in South America (again). Social change, life-style readjustment, call it what they would. The people of Mississippi had elected Presley senator after he had served five years as a representative. It was a sign of renewed hope. At the same time they had passed a tough new wiretap act and had turned out for massive Christian revivalist meetings.

1968 looked to be the toughest year yet for America.

But there were still things that made it all worth living. Nights like tonight. A huge appreciation dinner, with the absolute cream of Washington society turned out in its gaudiness. Most of Congress, President Kennedy, Vice President Shriver. Plus the usual hangers-on.

Presley watched them. Old Dick Nixon, once a senator from California. He came back to Washington to be near the action, though he’d lost his last election in Fifty-eight.

The President was there, of course, looking as young as he had when he was reelected in 1964, the first two term president since Huey “Kingfish” Long, blessed of Southern memory. Say whatever else you could of Joe Kennedy, Jr., Presley thought, he was a hell of a good man in his Yankee way. His three young brothers were in the audience somewhere, representatives from two states.

Waiters hustled in and out of the huge banquet room. Presley watched the sequined gowns and the feathers on the women; the spectacular pumpkin-blaze of a neon orange suit of some hotshot Washington lawyer. The lady across the table had engaged Pratt in conversation about Wales. The ambassador was explaining that he had seen Wales once, back in 1923 on holiday, but that he didn’t think it had changed much since then.

E. Aaron studied the table where the guests of honor sat—the President and First Lady, the Veep and his wife, and Armstrong and Eisenhower, with their spouses.

Armstrong and Eisenhower. Two of the finest citizens in the land. Armstrong, the younger, in his sixty-eighth year, getting a little jowly. Born with the century, Presley thought. Symbol of his race and of his time. A man deserving of honor and respect.

But Eisenhower was Presley’s man. The senator had read all the biographies, re-read all the old newspaper files, listened to him every chance he got.

If Presley had an ideal, it was Eisenhower. As both a leader and a person. A little too liberal, perhaps, in his personal opinions, but that was the only fault the man had. When it came time for action, Eisenhower, the “Ike” of the popular press, came through.

Senator Presley tried to catch his eye. He was only three tables away and could see Ike through the hazy pall of smoke from after dinner cigarettes and pipes. It was no use, though. Ike was busy.

Eisenhower looked worried, distracted. He wasn’t used to testimonials. He’d come out of semiretirement to attend, only because Armstrong had persuaded him to do it. They were both getting presidential medals.

But it wasn’t for the awards that all the other people were here, or the speeches that would follow; it …

Pratt turned to him.

“I’ve noticed his preoccupation, too,” he said.

Presley was a little taken aback. But Pratt was a sharp old cookie, and he’d been around God knows how many people through wars, floods, conference tables. He’d probably drunk enough tea in his life to float the battleship Kropotkin.

“Quite a man,” said Presley, afraid to let his true, misty eyed feelings show. “Pretty much the man of the century, far as I’m concerned.”

“I’ve been with Churchill, and Lenin, and Chiang,” said Ambassador Pratt, “but they were just cagey politicians, movers of men and materiel, as far as I’m concerned. I saw him once before, early on, must have been Thirty-eight, Thirty-nine. Nineteen Thirty-eight. I was very, very impressed then. Time has done nothing to change that.”

“He’s just not used to this kind of thing,” said Presley.

“Perhaps it was that Patton fellow.”

“Wild George? That who you mean?”

“Oh, didn’t you hear?” Pratt asked, eyes all concern.

“I was in committee most of the week. If it wasn’t about the new drug bill, I didn’t hear about it.”

“Oh, of course. This Patton fellow died a few days ago. Circumstances rather sad, I think. Eisenhower and Mr. Armstrong just returned from his funeral this afternoon.”

“Gee, that’s too bad. You know they worked together, Patton and Ike, for thirty years or so—”

The toastmaster, one of those boisterous, baldheaded, abrasive California types, rose. People began to stub out their cigarettes and applaud. Waiters disappeared as if a magic wand had been waved.

Well, thought Presley, as he and Pratt applauded, an hour of pure boredom coming up. Some jokes, the President, the awarding of the medals, the obligatory standing ovation. Then the entertainment.

Ah, thought Presley. The thing everybody has come for.

After the ceremony, they were going to bring out the band, Armstrong’s band. Not just the one he toured with, but what was left of the old guys, the Armstrong Band, and they were going to rip the joint.

But also, also …

For the first time in twenty years, since Presley had been a boy, a kid in his teens…Eisenhower was going to break his vow. Eisenhower was going to dust off that clarinet.

For two hours Ike was going to play with Armstrong, just like in the good old days.

“Cheer up,” said gravelly-voiced Pops while the President was making his way to the rostrum. Armstrong smiled at Eisenhower. “You’re gonna blow ‘em right outta the grooves.”

“All reet,” said Ike.

The thunderous applause was dying down. Backstage, Ike handed the box with the Presidential Medal to his wife of twenty years, Helen Forrest, the singer. “Here goes, honey,” he said. “Come out when you feel like it.”

They were in the outer hall, behind the head tables. Some group of young folksingers, very nervous but very good, were out there killing time while Armstrong’s band set up.

“Hey, hey,” said Pops. He’d pinned the Presidential Medal, ribbon and all, to the front of his jacket through the boutonniere hole. “Wouldn’t old Jelly Roll like to have seen me now?”

“Hey, hey,” yelled some of the band right back at him.

“Quiet, quiet!” yelled Pops. “Let them kids out there sing. They’re good. Listen to ‘em. Reminds me of me when I was young.”

Ike had been concentrating on licking his reed and doing tongue exercises. “You never were young, Pops,” he said. “You were born older than me.”

“That’s a lie!” said Pops. “You could be my father.”

“Maybe he is!” yelled Perkins, the guitar man, fiddling with the knobs on his amp.

Ike nearly swallowed his mouthpiece. The drummer did a paradiddle.

“Hush, hush, you clowns!” yelled Pops.

Ike smiled and looked up at the drummer, a young kid. But he’d been with Pops’s new band for a couple of years. So he must be all right.

Eisenhower heaved a sigh when no one was looking. He had to get the tightness out of his chest. It had started at George’s funeral, a pain crying did not relieve. No one but he and Helen knew that he had had two mild heart attacks in the last six years. Hell, he thought, I’m almost eighty years old. I’m entitled to a few heart attacks. But not here, not tonight.

They dimmed the work lights. Pops had run into the back kitchen and blown a few screaming notes, which they heard through two concrete walls. He was ready.

“When you gonna quit playing, Pops?” asked Ike.

“Man, I ain’t ever gonna quit. They’re gonna have to dig me up three weeks after I die and break this horn to stop the noise comin’ outta the ground.” He looked at the lights. “Ease on off to the left there, Ike. Let us get them all ready for you. Come in on the chorus of the third song.”

“Which one’s that?” asked Ike, looking for . his play sheet.

“You’ll know it when you hear it,” said Pops. He took out his handkerchief. “You .s taught it to me.”

Ike went into the wings and waited.

The crowd was tasteful, expectant. .

The band hit the music hard, from the opening, and Armstrong led off with “The Y King Porter Stomp.” His horn was flashing sparks, and the medal on his jacket front caught the spotlight like a big golden eye.

Then they launched into “Basin Street Blues,” the horn sweet and slow and mellow…the band doing nothing but carrying a light line behind. Armstrong was totally absorbed in his music, staring not at the audience but down at his horn.

He had come a long way since he used to hawk coal from the back of a wagon; since he was thrown into the Colored Waifs Home in New Orleans for firing off a pistol on New Year’s Eve, 1912. One noise more or less shouldn’t have mattered on that night, but it . did, and the cops caught him. It was those music lessons at the home that started him on his way, through New Orleans and Memphis and Chicago to the world beyond. Armstrong might have been a criminal, he might have been a bum, he might have been killed unknown and unmourned in some war somewhere. But he wasn’t. He was born to play that music. It wouldn’t have mattered what world he had been born into. As soon as his fingers closed around that cornet, music was changed forever.

The audience applauded wildly, but they weren’t there just to hear Armstrong. They were waiting.

The band hit up something that began nondescriptly—a slow blues, beginning with the drummer heavy on his brushes.

The tune began to change, and as it changed, a pure sweet clarinet began to play above the other instruments, and Ike walked onstage, playing his theme song, “Don’t You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?”

His clarinet soared above the audience. Presley wasn’t the only one who got chill bumps all the way down the backs of his ankles.

Ike and Armstrong traded off slow pure verses of the song; Ike’s the sweet music of a craftsman, Armstrong’s the heartfelt remembrance of things as they were. Ike never saw Storyville; Armstrong had to leave it when the Navy closed it down.

Together they built to a moving finale and descended into a silence like the dimming of lights, with Ike’s clarinet the last one to wink out.

The cream of Washington betrayed their origins with their applause.

And before they knew what had happened, a new tune started up with the opening screech of “Mississippi Mud.”

Ike and Armstrong traded licks, running on and off the melody. Pops wiped his face with his handkerchief, his face seemed all teeth and sweat, Ike’s bald head shone, the freckles standing out above the wisps of white hair on his s temples.

This wasn’t like the old days. It was as if they’d never quit playing together at all. This was now, and Ike and Pops were hot.

They played and played.

Ike’s boyhood had been on the flat pan of J Kansas, small-town church America at the turn of the century. A town full of laborers and businessmen, barbershops, milliners, and ice-cream parlors.

He had done all the usual things, swimming naked in the creek, running through town and . finding things to build up or tear down. He had hunted and fished and gone to services on Sunday; he had camped out overnight or for days at a time with his brothers, made fun of his girl cousins, stolen watermelons.

He first heard recorded music on an old . Edison cylinder machine at the age of eight, long-hair music and opera his aunt collected.

There was a firehouse band that played each Wednesday night in the park across the street from the station. There were real band concerts on the courthouse lawn on Sunday, mostly military music, marches, and the instrumental parts of ballads. Eisenhower heard it all. Music was part of his background, and he didn’t think much of it.

So Ike grew up in Kansas, where the music was as flat as the land.

Louis Daniel Armstrong was reared back, tooting out some wild lines of “Night and Day.” In the old days it didn’t matter how well you played; it was the angle of your back and tilt of your horn. The band was really tight; they were playing for their lives.

The trombone player came out of his seat, jumped down onto the stage on his knees, and matched Armstrong for a few bars.

The audience yelled.

Eisenhower tapped his foot and smiled, watching Armstrong and the trombone man cook.

The drummer was giving a lot of rim shots. The whole ballroom sounded like the overtaxed heart of a bird ready to fly away to meet Jesus.

Ike took off his coat and loosened his tie down to the first button.

The crowd went wild.

****

Late August, 1908.

The train was late. Young Dwight David Eisenhower hurried across the endless street grid of the Kansas City rail yards. He was catching the train to New York City. There he would board another bound for West Point.

He carried his admission papers, a congratulatory letter from his congressman (gotten after some complicated negotiations—for a while it looked like he would be’ Midshipman Eisenhower), hid train ticket, and twenty-one dollars in emergency money in his jacket.

He’d asked the porter for the track number. It was next to the station proper. A spur track confused him. He looked down the tracks, couldn’t see a number. Trains waited all around, ready to hurl themselves toward distant cities. He went to the station entrance.

Four black men, ragged of dress, were smiling and playing near the door. What they played, young David had never heard before; it was syncopated music, but not like a rag, not a march, something in between, something like nothing else. He had never heard polyrhythms like them before. They stopped him dead.

The four had a banjo, a cornet, a violin, and a clarinet. They played, smiled, danced a little for the two or three people watching them. A hat lay on the ground before them. In it were a few dimes, some pennies, and a single new half-dime.

They finished the song. A couple of people said. “Very nice, very nice,” and added a few cents to the hat.

The four men started to talk among themselves.

“What was that song?” young David asked.

The man with the cornet looked at him. through large horn-rimmed spectacles. “That song was called `Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,’ young sir,” he replied.

Dwight David reached into his pocket and took out a shiny dollar gold piece. “Play it again,” he said.

They nearly killed themselves this time, running through it. It was great art, it was on the street, and they were getting a whole dollar for it. David watched them, especially the clarinet player, who made his instrument soar above the others. They finished the number, and all tipped theirs hats to him.

“Is that hard to learn to play?” he asked the man with the clarinet.

“For some it is,” he answered.

“Could you teach me?” Davis asked.

The black man looked at the others, who looked away; they were no help at all. “Let me see your fingers,” he said.

Eisenhower held out his hands, wrists up, then down.

“I could probably teach you to play in six weeks,” he said. “I don’t know if I could teach you to play like that. You’ve got to feel that music.” He was trying not to say that Eisenhower was white.

“Wait right here,” said Ike.

He went inside the depot and cashed in his ticket. He sent two telegrams, one home and one to the Army. He was back outside in fifteen minutes, with thirty-three dollars in his pocket.

“Let’s go find me a clarinet,” he said to the black man.

He knew he would not sleep well that night, and neither would anybody back on the farm. He probably wouldn’t sleep well for weeks. But he sure as heck knew what he wanted.

Armstrong smiled, wiped his face, and blew the opening notes of “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.” Ike joined in.

They went into “Just a Closer ,Walk with Thee,” quiet, restrained, the horn and clarinet becoming one instrument for a while. Then Ike bent his notes around Armstrong’s, then Pops lifted Eisenhower up, then the instruments walked arm in arm toward Heaven.

Ike listened to the drummer as he played. He sure missed Wild George.

The first time they had met, Ike was the new kid in town, just another guy with a clarinet. Some gangster had hired him to fill in with a band, sometime in 1911.

Ike didn’t say much. He was working his way south from K.C., toward Memphis, toward New Orleans (which he would never see until after New Orleans didn’t mean the same anymore).

Ike could cook anyone with his clarinet horn player, banjo man, even drummers. They might make more noise, but when they ran out of things to do, Ike was just starting.

He’d begun at the saloon, filling in, but the bandleader soon had sense enough to put him out front. They took breaks, leaving just him and the drummer up there, and the crowds never noticed. Ike was hot before there was hot music.

Till one night a guy came in—a new drummer. He was a crazy man. “My name is Wild George S. Patton,” he said before the first set.

“What’s the S. stand for?” asked Ike.

“Shitkicker!” said the drummer.

Ike didn’t say anything.

That night they tried to cut each other, chop each other off the stage. Patton was doing two hand cymbal shots, paradiddles, and flails. His bass foot never stopped. Ike wasn’t a show-off, but this guy drove him to it. He blew notes that killed mice for three square blocks. Patton ended up by kicking a hole through the bass drum and ramming his sticks through his snare like he was opening a can of beans with them.

The bandleader fired Patton on the spot and threatened to call the cops. The crowd nearly lynched the manager for it.

As soon as the hubbub died down, Patton said to Ike, “The S. stands for Smith.” And he shook his hand.

He and Ike took off that night to start up their own band.

And were together for almost thirty years.

Armstrong blew “Dry Bones.”

Ike did “St. Louis Blues.”

They had never done either better. This Washington audience loved them.

So had another, long ago.

The first time he and Armstrong met was in Washington, too. It was a hot, bleak July day in 1932.

The Bonus Army had come to the Capitol, asking their congressmen and their nation for some relief in the third year of the Depression. President Al Smith was virtually powerless; he had a Republican Congress under him, led by Senator Nye.

The bill granting the veterans of the Great War their bonus, due in 1945, had been passed back in the Twenties. The vets wanted it to be paid immediately. It had been sitting in the treasury, gaining interest, and was already part of the budget. The vote was coming up soon.

Thousands, dubbed the B.E.F., had poured into Washington, camping on Anacostia Flats, in tin boxes, towns of shanties dubbed Smithvilles, or under the rain and stars.

Homeless men who had slogged through the mud of Europe, had been gassed and shelled, and had lived with rats in the trenches while fighting for democracy; now they found themselves back in the mud again.

This time they were out of money, out of work, out of luck.

The faces of the men were tired. Soup kitchens had been set up. They tried to keep their humor. It was all they had left. May dragged by, then June, then July. The vote was taken in Congress on the twelfth.

Congress said no.

They accused the Bonus Marchers of being Reds. They. said they were an armed rabble. Rumors ran wild. Such financial largess, Congress said, could not be afforded.

Twenty thousand of the thirty thousand men tried to find some way back home, out of the city, back to No Place, U.S.A.

Ten thousand stayed, hoping for something to happen. Anything.

Ike went down to play for them. So did Armstrong. They ran into each other in town, got their bands and equipment together. They set up a stage in the middle of the Smithville, now a forlorn-looking bunch of mud-straw shacks.

About five thousand of the jobless men came to hear them play. They were in a holiday mood. They sat on the ground, in the mud. They didn’t much care anymore.

Armstrong and Ike had begun to play that day. Half the band, including Wild George, had hangovers. They had drunk with the Bonus Marchers the night before and well into the morning before the noon concert.

They played great jazz that day anyway. Just before the music began, a cloud of smoke had risen up from some of the abandoned warehouses the veterans had been living in. There was some commotion over toward the Potomac. The band just played louder and wilder.

The marchers clapped along. Wild George smiled a bleary-eyed smile toward the crowd. They were doing half his job.

Automatic rifle fire rang out, causing heads to turn.

The Army was coming. Sons and nephews of some of the Bonus Marchers there were coming toward them on orders from Douglas MacArthur, the Chief of Staff. He had orders to clear them out.

The men came to their feet, picking up rocks and bottles.

Marching lines of soldiers came into view, bayonets fixed. Small two-man tanks, armed with machine guns, rolled between the soldiers. The lines stopped. The soldiers put on gas masks.

The Bonus Marchers, who remembered phosgene and the trenches, drew back.

“Keep playing!” said Ike.

“Keep goin’. Let it roll!” said Armstrong.

Tear-gas grenades flew toward the Bonus Marchers. Rocks and bottles sailed toward the masked soldiers. There was an explosion a block away.

The troops came on.

The gas rolled toward the marchers. Some who picked up the spewing canisters to throw them back fell coughing to the ground, overcome.

The tanks and bayonets came forward in a solid line.

The marchers broke and ran.

Their shacks and tents were set afire by Chemical Corpsmen behind the tanks.

“Let it roll! Let it roll!” said Armstrong, and they played “Didn’t He Ramble?” The gas cloud hit them, and the music died in chokes and vomiting.

That night the Bonus Marchers were loaded on Army trucks, taken fifty miles due west, and let out on the sides of the roads.

Ike and Louis went up before the Washington magistrate, paid a ten-dollar fine each, and took a train to New York City.

The last time he had seen Wild George alive was two years ago. Patton had been found by somebody who’d know him in the old days.

He’d been in four bad marriages, his only kid had died in the taking of the Japanese Home Islands in early Forty-seven, and he’d lost one of his arms in a car wreck in Fifty-five. He was found in a flophouse. They’d put him in a nursing home and paid the bills.

Ike had gone to visit. The last time they had seen each other in those intervening twenty-odd years had been the day of the fist fight in Forty-three, just before the Second World War broke out. Patton had joined the Miller Band for a while but was too much for them. He’d gone from band to band and marriage to marriage to oblivion.

He was old, old. Wild George was only five years older than Ike. He looked a hundred. One eye was almost gone. He had no teeth. He was drying out in the nursing home, turning brittle as last winter’s leaves.

“Hello, George,” said Ike, shaking his only hand.

“I knew you’d come first,” said Patton.

“You should have let somebody know.”

“What’s to know? One old musician lives, another one dies.”

“George, I’m sorry. The way things have turned out.”

“I’ve been thinking it over, about that fight we had,” Patton stopped to cough up some bloody spittle into a basin Ike held for him. George’s eyes watered.

“God. Oh, jeez. If I could only have a drink.” He stared into Ike’s eyes. Then he said, “About that fight. You were still wrong.”

Then he coughed some more.

Ike was crying as they went into the final number. He stepped forward to the mike Helen had used when she came out to sing with them for the last three numbers.

“This song is for the memory of George Smith Patton,” he said.

They played “The Old, Rugged Cross.” No one had ever played it like that before.

Ike broke down halfway through. He waved to the crowd, took his mouthpiece off, and walked into the wings.

Pops kept playing. He tried to motion Ike back. Helen was hugging him. He waved and brushed the tears away.

Armstrong finished the song.

The audience tore the place apart. They were on their feet and stamping, screaming, applauding.

Presley sat in his chair.

He was crying, too, but quickly stood up and cheered.

The whole thing was over.

****

At home, later, in Georgetown, Senator Presley was lying in bed beside his wife, Muffy. They had made love. They had both been excited. It had been terrific.

Now Muffy was asleep.

Presley got up and went to the kitchen, poured himself a scotch, and stood with his naked butt against the countertop.

It was a cold night. Through the half-curtains on the window he saw stars over the city. If you could call this seventeenth-century jumble a city.

He went into the den. The servants would be asleep.

He turned the power on the stereo, took down four or five of his Eisenhower records, looked through them. He put on Ike at the Mike, a four-record set made for RCA in 1947, toward the end of the last war.

Ike was playing “No Love, No Nothing,” a song his wife had made famous three years before. She wasn’t on this record, though. This was all Ike and his band.

Presley got the bottle from the kitchen, sat back down, poured himself another drink. There were more hearings tomorrow. And the day after.

Someday, he thought, someday E. Aaron Presley will be President of these here United States. Serves them right.

Ike was playing “All God’s Chillun Got Shoes.”

I didn’t even get to shake his hand, thought Presley.

I’d give it all away to be like him, he thought.

He went to sleep sitting up.

MELANCHOLY ELEPHANTS

Spider Robinson

She sat zazen, concentrating on not concentrating, until it was time to prepare for the appointment. Sitting seemed to produce the usual serenity, put everything in perspective. Her hand did not tremble as she applied her make-up; tranquil features looked back at her from the mirror. She was mildly surprised, in fact, at just how calm she was, until she got out of the hotel elevator at the garage level and the mugger made his play. She killed him instead of disabling him. Which was obviously not a measured, balanced action—the official fuss and paperwork could make her late. Annoyed at herself, she stuffed the corpse under a shiny new Westinghouse roadable whose owner she knew to be in Luna, and continued on to her own car. This would have to be squared later, and it would cost. No help for it—she fought to regain at least the semblance of tranquillity as her car emerged from the garage and turned north. Nothing must interfere with this meeting, or with her role in it.

Dozens of man-years and God knows how many dollars, she thought, funneling down to perhaps a half hour of conversation. All the effort, all the hope. Insignificant on the scale of the Great Wheel, of course… but when you balance it all on a half hour of talk, it’s like balancing a stereo cartridge on a needlepoint. It only takes a gram or so of weight to wear out a piece of diamond. I must be harder than diamond.

Rather than clear a window and watch Washington, D.C. roll by beneath her car, she turned on the television. She absorbed and integrated the news, on the chance that there might be some late-breaking item she could turn to her advantage in the conversation to come; none developed. Shortly the car addressed her: “Grounding, ma’am. I.D. eyeball request.” When the car landed she cleared and then opened her window, presented her pass and I.D. to a Marine in dress blues, and was cleared at once. At the Marine’s direction she re-opaqued the window and surrendered control of her car to the house computer, and when the car parked itself and powered down she got out without haste. A man she knew was waiting to meet her, smiling.

“Dorothy, it’s good to see you again.”

“Hello, Phillip. Good of you to meet me.”

“You look lovely this evening.”

“You’re too kind.” She did not chafe at the meaningless pleasantries. She needed Phil’s support, or she might. But she did reflect on how many, many sentences have been worn smooth with use, rendered meaningless by centuries of repetition. It was by no means a new thought.

“If you’ll come with me, he’ll see you at once.”

“Thank you, Phillip.” She wanted to ask what the old man’s mood was, but knew it would put Phil in an impossible position.

“I rather think your luck is good; the old man seems to be in excellent spirits tonight.”

She smiled her thanks, and decided that if and when Phil got around to making his pass she would accept him. The corridors through which he led her then were broad and high and long; the building dated back to a time of cheap power. Even in Washington, few others would have dared to live in such an energy-wasteful environment. The extremely spare decor reinforced the impression created by the place’s very dimensions: bare space from carpet to ceiling, broken approximately every forty meters by some exquisitely simple objet d’art of at least a megabuck’s value, appropriately displayed. An unadorned, perfect, white porcelain bowl, over a thousand years old, on a rough cherrywood pedestal. An arresting colour photograph of a snow-covered country road, silkscreened onto stretched silver foil; the time of day changed as one walked past it. A crystal globe, a meter in diameter, within which danced a hologram of the immortal Shara Drummond; since she had ceased performing before the advent of holo technology.

“Thank you, Phillip. Any topics to be sure and avoid?”

“Well… don’t bring up haemorrhoids.”

“I didn’t know one could.”

He smiled. “Are we still on for lunch Thursday?”

“Unless you’d rather make it dinner.”

One eyebrow lifted. “And breakfast?”

She appeared to consider it. “Brunch,” she decided. He half-bowed and stepped back. The elevator door closed and she forgot Phillip’s existence.

Sentient beings are innumerable; I vow to save them all. The deluding passions are limitless; I vow to extinguish them all. The truth is limitless; I—

The elevator door opened again, truncating the Vow of the Bodhisattva. She had not felt the elevator stop—yet she knew that she must have descended at least a hundred meters. She left the elevator. The room was larger than she had expected; nonetheless the big powered chair dominated it easily. The chair also seemed to dominate—at least visually—its occupant. A misleading impression, as he dominated all this massive home, everything in it and, to a great degree, the country in which it stood. But he did not look like much.

A scent symphony was in progress, the cinnamon passage of Bulachevski’s “Childhood.” It happened to be one of her personal favourites, and this encouraged her.

“Hello, Senator.”

“Hello, Mrs. Martin. Welcome to my home. Forgive me for not rising.”

“Of course. It was most gracious of you to receive me.”

“It is my pleasure and privilege. A man my age appreciates a chance to spend time with a woman as beautiful and intelligent as yourself.”

“Senator, how soon do we start talking to each other?”

He raised that part of his face which had once held an eyebrow.

“We haven’t said anything yet that is true. You do not stand because you cannot. Your gracious reception cost me three carefully hoarded favours and a good deal of folding cash. More than the going rate; you are seeing me reluctantly. You have at least eight mistresses that I know of, each of whom makes me look like a dull matron. I concealed a warm corpse on the way here because I dared not be late; my time is short and my business urgent. Can we begin?”

She held her breath and prayed silently. Everything she had been able to learn about the Senator told her that this was the correct way to approach him. But was it?

The mummy-like face fissured in a broad grin. “Right away. Mrs. Martin, I like you and that’s the truth. My time is short, too. What do you want of me?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I can make an excellent guess. I hate guessing.”

“I am heavily and publicly committed to the defeat of S.4217896.”

“Yes, but for all I know you might have come here to sell out.”

“Oh.” She tried not to show her surprise. “What makes you think that possible?”

“Your organization is large and well-financed and fairly efficient, Mrs. Martin, and there’s something about it I don’t understand.”

“What is that?”

“Your objective. Your arguments are weak and implausible, and whenever this is pointed out to one of you, you simply keep on pushing. Many times I have seen people take a position without apparent logic to it—but I’ve always been able to see the logic, if I kept on looking hard enough. But as I see it, S. ‘896 would work to the clear and lasting advantage of the group you claim to represent, the artists. There’s too much intelligence in your organization to square with your goals. So I have to wonder what you are working for, and why. One possibility is that you’re willing to roll over on this copyright thing in exchange for whatever it is that you really want. Follow me?”

“Senator, I am working on behalf of all artists—and in a broader sense—”

He looked pained, or rather, more pained. “—for all mankind, oh my God, Mrs. Martin, really now.”

“I know you have heard that countless times, and probably said it as often.” He grinned evilly. “This is one of those rare times when it happens to be true. I believe that if S. ‘896 does pass, our species will suffer significant trauma.”

He raised a skeletal hand, tugged at his lower lip. “Now that I have ascertained where you stand, I believe I can save you a good deal of money. By concluding this audience, and seeing that the squeeze you paid for half an hour of my time is refunded pro rata.”

Her heart sank, but she kept her voice even. “Without even hearing the hidden logic behind our arguments?”

“It would be pointless and cruel to make you go into your spiel, ma’am. You see, I cannot help you.”

She wanted to cry out, and savagely refused herself permission. Control, whispered a part of her mind, while another part shouted that a man such as this did not lightly use the words “I cannot.” But he had to be wrong. Perhaps the sentence was only a bargaining gambit…

No sign of the internal conflict showed; her voice was calm and measured. “Sir, I have not come here to lobby. I simply wanted to inform you personally that our organization intends to make a no-strings campaign donation in the amount of—”

“Mrs. Martin, please! Before you commit yourself, I repeat, I cannot help you. Regardless of the sum offered.”

“Sir, it is substantial.”

“I’m sure. Nonetheless it is insufficient.”

She knew she should not ask. “Senator, why?”

He frowned, a frightening sight.

“Look,” she said, the desperation almost showing through now, “keep the pro rata if it buys me an answer! Until I’m convinced that my mission is utterly hopeless, I must not abandon it: answering me is the quickest way to get me out of your office. Your scanners have watched me quite thoroughly, you know that I’m not abscamming you.”

Still frowning, he nodded. “Very well. I cannot accept your campaign donation because I have already accepted one from another source.”

Her very worst secret fear was realized. He had already taken money from the other side. The one thing any politician must do, no matter how powerful, is stay bought. It was all over.

All her panic and tension vanished, to be replaced by a sadness so great and so pervasive that for a moment she thought it might literally stop her heart.

Too late! Oh my darling, I was too late!

She realized bleakly that there were too many people in her life, too many responsibilities and entanglements. It would be at least a month before she could honourably suicide.

“—you all right, Mrs. Martin?” the old man was saying, sharp concern in his voice.

She gathered discipline around her like a familiar cloak. “Yes, sir, thank you. Thank you for speaking plainly.” She stood up and smoothed her skirt. “And for your—”

“Mrs. Martin.”

“—gracious hos—Yes?”

“Will you tell me your arguments? Why shouldn’t I support ‘896?”

She blinked sharply. “You just said it would be pointless and cruel.”

“If I held out the slightest hope, yes, it would be. If you’d rather not waste your time, I will not compel you. But I am curious.”

“Intellectual curiosity?”

He seemed to sit up a little straighter—surely an illusion, for a prosthetic spine is not motile. “Mrs. Martin, I happen to be committed to a course of action. That does not mean I don’t care whether the action is good or bad.”

“Oh.” She thought for a moment. “If I convince you, you will not thank me.”

“I know. I saw the look on your face a moment ago, and… it reminded me of a night many years ago. Night my mother died. If you’ve got a sadness that big, and I can take on a part of it, I should try. Sit down.”

She sat.

“Now tell me: what’s so damned awful about extending copyright to meet the realities of modern life? Customarily I try to listen to both sides before accepting a campaign donation—but this seemed so open and shut, so straightforward…”

“Senator, that bill is a short-term boon, to some artists—and a long-term disaster for all artists, on Earth and off.”

” ‘In the long run, Mr. President—’,” he began, quoting Keynes.

“—we are some of us still alive,” she finished softly and pointedly. “Aren’t we? You’ve put your finger on part of the problem.”

“What is this disaster you speak of?” he asked.

“The worst psychic trauma the race has yet suffered.”

He studied her carefully and frowned again. “Such a possibility is not even hinted at in your literature or materials.”

“To do so would precipitate the trauma. At present only a handful of people know, even in my organization. I’m telling you because you asked, and because I am certain that you are the only person recording this conversation. I’m betting that you will wipe the tape.”

He blinked, and sucked at the memory of his teeth. “My, my,” he said mildly. “Let me get comfortable.” He had the chair recline sharply and massage his lower limbs; she saw that he could still watch her by overhead mirror if he chose. His eyes were closed. “All right, go ahead.”

She needed no time to choose her words. “Do you know how old art is, Senator?”

“As old as man, I suppose. In fact, it may be part of the definition.”

“Good answer,” she said. ” Remember that. But for all present-day intents and purposes, you might as well say that art is a little over 15,600 years old. That’s the age of the oldest surviving artwork, the cave paintings at Lascaux. Doubtless the cave-painters sang, and danced, and even told stories—but these arts left no record more durable than the memory of a man. Perhaps it was the story tellers who next learned how to preserve their art. Countless more generations would pass before a workable method of musical notation was devised and standardized. Dancers only learned in the last few centuries how to leave even the most rudimentary record of their art.

“The racial memory of our species has been getting longer since Lascaux. The biggest single improvement came with the invention of writing: our memory-span went from a few generations to as many as the Bible has been around. But it took a massive effort to sustain a memory that long: it was difficult to hand-copy manuscripts faster than barbarians, plagues, or other natural disasters could destroy them. The obvious solution was the printing press: to make and disseminate so many copies of a manuscript or art work that some would survive any catastrophe.

“But with the printing press a new idea was born. Art was suddenly mass-marketable, and there was money in it. Writers decided that they should own the right to copy their work. The notion of copyright was waiting to be born.

“Then in the last hundred and fifty years came the largest quantum jumps in human racial memory. Recording technologies. Visual: photography, film, video, Xerox, holo. Audio: low-fi, hi-fi, stereo, and digital. Then computers, the ultimate in information storage. Each of these technologies generated new art forms, and new ways of preserving the ancient art forms. And each required a reassessment of the idea of copyright.

“You know the system we have now, unchanged since the mid-twentieth-century. Copyright ceases to exist fifty years after the death of the copyright holder. But the size of the human race has increased drastically since the 1900s—and so has the average human lifespan. Most people in developed nations now expect to live to be a hundred and twenty; you yourself are considerably older. And so, naturally, S. ‘896 now seeks to extend copyright into perpetuity.”

“Well,” the senator interrupted, “what is wrong with that? Should a man’s work cease to be his simply because he has neglected to keep on breathing? Mrs. Martin, you yourself will be wealthy all your life if that bill passes. Do you truly wish to give away your late husband’s genius?”

She winced in spite of herself.

“Forgive my bluntness, but that is what I understand least about your position.”

“Senator, if I try to hoard the fruits of my husband’s genius, I may cripple my race. Don’t you see what perpetual copyright implies? It is perpetual racial memory! That bill will give the human race an elephant’s memory.

Have you ever seen a cheerful elephant?”

He was silent for a time. Then: “I’m still not sure I understand the problem.”

“Don’t feel bad, sir. The problem has been directly under the nose of all of us for at least eighty years, and hardly anyone has noticed.”

“Why is that?”

“I think it comes down to a kind of innate failure of mathematical intuition, common to most humans. We tend to confuse any sufficiently high number with infinity.”

“Well, anything above ten to the eighty-fifth might as well be infinity.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Sorry—I should not have interrupted. That is the current best-guess for the number of atoms in the Universe. Go on.”

She struggled to get back on the rails. “Well, it takes a lot less than that to equal ‘infinity’ in most minds. For millions of years we looked at the ocean and said, ‘That is infinite. It will accept our garbage and waste forever.’ We looked at the sky and said, ‘That is infinite: it will hold an infinite amount of smoke.’ We like the idea of infinity. A problem with infinity in it is easily solved. How long can you pollute a planet infinitely large? Easy: forever. Stop thinking.

“Then one day there are so many of us that the planet no longer seems infinitely large.

“So we go elsewhere. There are infinite resources in the rest of the solar system, aren’t there? I think you are one of the few people alive wise enough to realize that there are not infinite resources in the solar system, and sophisticated enough to have included that awareness in your plans.”

The senator now looked troubled. He sipped something from a straw. “Relate all this to your problem.”

“Do you remember a case from about eighty years ago, involving the song ‘My Sweet Lord,’ by George Harrison?”

“Remember it? I did research on it. My firm won.”

“Your firm convinced the court that Harrison had gotten the tune for that song from a song called ‘He’s So Fine,’ written over ten years earlier. Shortly thereafter Yoko Ono was accused of stealing ‘You’re My Angel’ from the classic ‘Makin’ Whoopee,’ written more than thirty years earlier. Chuck Berry’s estate eventually took John Lennon’s estate to court over ‘Come Together.’ Then in the late ‘80s the great Plagiarism Plague really got started in the courts. From then on it was open season on popular composers, and still is. But it really hit the fan at the turn of the century, when Brindle’s Ringsong was shown to be’substantially similar’ to one of Corelli’s concertos.

“There are eighty-eight notes. One hundred and seventy-six, if your ear is good enough to pick out quarter tones. Add in rests and so forth, different time signatures. Pick a figure for maximum number of notes a melody can contain. I do not know the figure for the maximum possible number of melodies—too many variables—but I am sure it is quite high.

“I am certain that is not infinity.

“For one thing, a great many of those possible arrays of eighty-eight notes will not be perceived as music, as melody, by the human ear. Perhaps more than half. They will not be hummable, whistleable, listenable—some will be actively unpleasant to hear. Another large fraction will be so similar to each other as to be effectively identical: if you change three notes of the Moonlight Sonata, you have not created something new.

“I do not know the figure for the maximum number of discretely appreciable melodies, and again I’m certain it is quite high, and again I am certain that it is not infinity. There are sixteen billion of us alive, Senator, more than all the people that have ever lived. Thanks to our technology, better than half of us have no meaningful work to do; fifty-four percent of our population is entered on the tax rolls as artists. Because the synthesizer is so cheap and versatile, a majority of those artists are musicians, and a great many are composers. Do you know what it is like to be a composer these days, Senator?”

“I know a few composers.”

“Who are still working?”

“Well… three of ‘em.”

“How often do they bring out a new piece?”

Pause. “I would say once every five years on the average. Hmmm. Never thought of it before, but—”

“Did you know that at present two out of every five copyright submissions to the Music Division are rejected on the first computer search?”

The old man’s face had stopped registering surprise, other than for histrionic purposes, more than a century before; nonetheless, she knew she had rocked him. “No, I did not.”

“Why would you know? Who would talk about it? But it is a fact nonetheless. Another fact is that, when the increase in number of working composers is taken into account, the rate of submissions to the Copyright Office is decreasing significantly. There are more composers than ever, but their individual productivity is declining. Who is the most popular composer alive?”

“Uh… I suppose that Vachandra fellow.”

“Correct. He has been working for a little over fifty years. If you began now to play every note he ever wrote, in succession, you would be done in twelve hours. Wagner wrote well over sixty hours of music—the Ring alone runs twenty-one hours. The Beatles—essentially two composers—produced over twelve hours of original music in less than ten years. Why were the greats of yesteryear so much more prolific?

“There were more enjoyable permutations of eighty-eight notes for them to find… “

“Oh my,” the senator whispered.

“Now go back to the 1970s again. Remember the Roots plagiarism case? And the dozens like it that followed? Around the same time a writer named van Vogt sued the makers of a successful film called Alien, for plagiarism of a story forty years later. Two other writers named Bova and Ellison sued a television studio for stealing a series idea. All three collected.

“That ended the legal principle that one does not copyright ideas but arrangements of words. The number of word arrangements is finite, but the number of ideas is much smaller. Certainly, they can be retold in endless ways—West Side Story is a brilliant reworking of Romeo and Juliet. But it was only possible because Romeo and Juliet was in the public domain. Remember too that of the finite number of stories that can be told, a certain number will be bad stories.

“As for visual artists—well, once a man demonstrated in the laboratory an ability to distinguish between eighty-one distinct shades of colour accurately. I think that’s an upper limit. There is a maximum amount of information that the eye is capable of absorbing, and much of that will be the equivalent of noise—”

“But… but… “This man was reputed never to have hesitated in any way under any circumstances. “But there’ll always be change… there’ll always be new discoveries, new horizons, new social attitudes, to infuse art with new—”

“Not as fast as artists breed. Do you know about the great split in literature at the beginning of the twentieth century? The mainstream essentially abandoned the Novel of Ideas after Henry James, and turned its collective attention to the Novel of Character. They had sucked that dry by mid-century, and they’re still chewing on the pulp today. Meanwhile a small group of writers, desperate for something new to write about, for a new story to tell, invented a new genre called science fiction. They mined the future for ideas. The infinite future—like the infinite coal and oil and copper they had then too. In less than a century they had mined it out; there hasn’t been a genuinely original idea in science fiction in over fifty years. Fantasy has always been touted as the ‘literature of infinite possibility’—but there is even a theoretical upper limit to the ‘meaningfully impossible,’ and we are fast reaching it.”

“We can create new art forms,” he said.

“People have been trying to create new art forms for a long time, sir. Almost all fell by the wayside. People just didn’t like them.”

“We’ll learn to like them. Damn it, we’ll have to.”

“And they’ll help, for a while. More new art forms have been born in the last two centuries than in the previous million years—though none in the last fifteen years. Scent-symphonies, tactile sculpture, kinetic sculpture, zero-gravity dance—they’re all rich new fields, and they are generating mountains of new copyrights. Mountains of finite size. The ultimate bottleneck is this: that we have only five senses with which to apprehend art, and that is a finite number. Can I have some water, please?”

“Of course.”

The old man appeared to have regained his usual control, but the glass which emerged from the arm of her chair contained apple juice. She ignored this and continued.

“But that’s not what I’m afraid of, Senator. The theoretical heat-death of artistic expression is something we may never really approach in fact. Long before that point, the game will collapse.”

She paused to gather her thoughts, sipped her juice. A part of her mind noted that it harmonized with the recurrent cinnamon motif of Bulachevski’s scent-symphony, which was still in progress.

“Artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they create. In fact they do nothing of the sort. They discover. Inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical tones that will be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system. For millennia we have been discovering them, implicit in the universe—and telling ourselves that we ‘created’ them. To create implies infinite possibility, to discover implies finite possibility. As a species I think we will react poorly to having our noses rubbed in the fact that we are discoverers and not creators.”

She stopped speaking and sat very straight. Unaccountably her feet hurt. She closed her eyes, and continued speaking.

“My husband wrote a song for me, on the occasion of our fortieth wedding anniversary. It was our love in music, unique and special and intimate, the most beautiful melody I ever heard in my life. It made him so happy to have written it. Of his last ten compositions he had burned five for being derivative, and the others had all failed copyright clearance. But this was fresh, special—he joked that my love for him had inspired him. The next day he submitted it for clearance, and learned that it had been a popular air during his early childhood, and had already been unsuccessfully submitted fourteen times since its original registration. A week later he burned all his manuscripts and working tapes and killed himself.”

She was silent for a long time, and the senator did not speak.

“‘Ars longa, vita brevis est,’” she said at last. “There’s been comfort of a kind in that for thousands of years. But art is long, not infinite. ‘The Magic goes away.’ One day we will use it up—unless we can learn to recycle it like any other finite resource.” Her voice gained strength. “Senator, that bill has to fail, if I have to take you on to do it. Perhaps I can’t win—but I’m going to fight you! A copyright must not be allowed to last more than fifty years—after which it should be flushed from the memory banks of the Copyright Office. We need selective voluntary amnesia if Discoverers of Art are to continue to work without psychic damage. Facts should be remembered—but dreams?” She shivered. “… Dreams should be forgotten when we wake. Or one day we will find ourselves unable to sleep. Given eight billion artists with effective working lifetimes in excess of a century, we can no longer allow individuals to own their discoveries in perpetuity. We must do it the way the human race did it.”

Now she was finished, nothing more to say. So was the scent-symphony, whose last motif was fading slowly from the air. No clock ticked, no artifact hummed. The stillness was complete, for perhaps half a minute.

“If you live long enough,” the senator said slowly at last, “there is nothing new under the sun.” He shifted in his great chair. “If you’re lucky, you die sooner than that. I haven’t heard a new dirty joke in fifty years.” He seemed to sit up straight in his chair. “I will kill S.4217896.”

She stiffened in shock. After a time, she slumped slightly and resumed breathing. So many emotions fought for ascendancy that she barely had time to recognize them as they went by. She could not speak.

“Furthermore,” he went on, “I will not tell anyone why I’m doing it. It will begin the end of my career in public life, which I did not ever plan to leave, but you have convinced me that I must. I am both… glad, and—” His face tightened with pain. “—and bitterly sorry that you told me why I must.”

“So am I, sir,” she said softly, almost inaudibly.

He looked at her sharply. “Some kinds of fight, you can’t feel good even if you win them. Only two kinds of people take on fights like that: fools, and remarkable people. I think you are a remarkable person, Mrs. Martin.”

She stood, knocking over her juice. “I wish to God I were a fool,” she cried, feeling her control begin to crack at last.

“Dorothy!” he thundered.

She flinched as if he had struck her. “Sir?” she said automatically.

“Do not go to pieces! That is an order. You’re wound up too tight; the pieces might not go back together again.”

“So what?” she asked bitterly.

He was using the full power of his voice now, the voice which had stopped at least one war. “So how many friends do you think a man my age has got, damn it? Do you think minds like yours are common? We share this business now, and that makes us friends. You are the first person to come out of that elevator and really surprise me in a quarter of a century. And soon, when the word gets around that I’ve broken faith, people will stop coming out of the elevator. You think like me, and I can’t afford to lose you.” He smiled, and the smile seemed to melt decades from his face. “Hang on, Dorothy,” he said, “and we will comfort each other in our terrible knowledge. All right?”

For several moments she concentrated exclusively on her breathing, slowing and regularizing it. Then, tentatively, she probed at her emotions.

“Why,” she said wonderingly, “It is better… shared.”

“Anything is.”

She looked at him then, and tried to smile and finally succeeded. “Thank you, Senator.”

He returned her smile as he wiped all recordings of their conversation. “Call me Bob.”

“Yes, Robert.”

THE PEACEMAKER

Gardner Dozois

Roy had dreamed of the sea, as he often did. When he woke up that morning, the wind was sighing through the trees outside with a sound like the restless murmuring of surf, and for a moment he thought that he was home, back in the tidy brick house by the beach, with everything that had happened undone, and hope opened hotly inside him, like a wound.

“Mom?” he said. He sat up, straightening his legs, expecting his feet to touch the warm mass that was his dog, Toby. Toby always slept curled at the foot of his bed, but already everything was breaking up and changing, slipping away, and he blinked through sleep-gummed eyes at the thin blue light coming in through the attic window, felt the hardness of the old Army cot under him, and realized that he wasn’t home, that there was no home anymore, that for him there could never be a home again.

He pushed the blankets aside and stood up. It was bitterly cold in the big attic room-winter was dying hard, the most terrible winter he could remember-and the rough wood planking burned his feet like ice, but he couldn’t stay in bed anymore, not now.

None of the other kids were awake yet; he threaded his way through the other cots-accidently bumping against one of them so that its occupant tossed and moaned and began to snore in a higher register-and groped through cavernous shadows to the single high window. He was just tall enough to reach it, if he stood on tiptoe. He forced the window open, the old wood of its frame groaning in protest, plaster dust puffing, and shivered as the cold dawn wind poured inward, hitting him in the face, tugging with ghostly fingers at his hair, sweeping past him to rush through the rest of the stuffy attic like a restless child set free to play.

The wind smelled of pine resin and wet earth, not of salt flats and tides, and the bird-sound that rode in on that wind was the burbling of wrens and the squawking of bluejays, not the raucous shrieking of seagulls…but even so, as he braced his elbows against the window frame and strained up to look out, his mind still full of the broken fragments of dreams, he half-expected to see the ocean below, stretched out to the horizon, sending patient wavelets to lap against the side of the house. Instead he saw the nearby trees holding silhouetted arms up against the graying sky, the barn and the farmyard, all still lost in shadow, the surrounding fields, the weathered macadam line of the road, the forested hills rolling away into distance. Silver mist lay in pockets of low ground, retreated in wraithlike streamers up along the ridges.

Not yet. The sea had not chased him here-yet.

Somewhere out there to the east, still invisible, were the mountains, and just beyond those mountains was the sea that he had dreamed of, lapping quietly at the dusty Pennsylvania hill towns, coal towns, that were now, suddenly, seaports. There the Atlantic waited, held at bay, momentarily at least, by the humpbacked wall of the Appalachians, still perhaps forty miles from here, although closer now by leagues of swallowed land and drowned cities than it had been only three years before.

He had been down by the seawall that long-ago morning, playing some forgotten game, watching the waves move in slow oily swells, like some heavy, dull metal in liquid form watching the tide come in…and come in…and come in… He had been excited at first, as the sea crept in, way above the high-tide line, higher than he had ever seen it be-fore, and then, as the sea swallowed the beach entirely and began to lap patiently against the base of the seawall, he had become uneasy, and then, as the sea continued to rise up to-ward the top of the seawall itself, he had begun to be afraid… The sea had just kept coming in, rising slowly and inexorably, swallowing the land at a slow walking pace, never stopping, always coming in, always rising higher… By the time the sea had swallowed the top of the seawall and begun to creep up the short grassy slope toward his house, sending glassy fingers probing almost to his feet, he had started to scream, and as the first thin sheet of water rippled up to soak his sneakers, he had whirled and run frantically up the slope, screaming hysterically for his parents, and the sea had followed patiently at his heels.

A “marine transgression,” the scientists called it. Ordinary people called it, inevitably, the Flood. Whatever you called it, it had washed away the old world forever. Scientists had been talking about the possibility of such a thing for years-some of them even pointing out that it was already as warm as it had been at the peak of the last interglacial, and getting warmer-but few had suspected just how fast the Antarctic ice could melt. Many times during those chaotic weeks, one scientific King Canute or another had predicted that the worst was over, that the tide would rise this high and no higher…but each time the sea had come inexorably on, pushing miles and miles further inland with each successive high-tide, rising almost 300 feet in the course of one disastrous summer, drowning lowlands around the globe until there were no lowlands anymore. In the United States alone, the sea had swallowed most of the East Coast east of the Appalachians, the West Coast west of the Sierras and the Cascades, much of Alaska and Hawaii, Florida, the Gulf Coast, East Texas, taken a big wide scoop out of the lowlands of the Mississippi Valley, thin fingers of water penetrating north to Iowa and Illinois, and caused the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes to overflow and drown their shorelines. The Green Mountains, the White Mountains, the Adirondacks, the Poconos and the Catskills, the Ozarks, the Pacific Coast Ranges-all had been trans-formed to archipelagos, surrounded by the invading sea.

The funny thing was…that as the sea pursued them relentlessly inland, pushing them from one temporary refuge to another, he had been unable to shake the feeling that he had caused the Hood: that he had done something that day while playing atop the seawall, inadvertently stumbled on some magic ritual, some chance combination of gesture and word that had untied the bonds of the sea and sent it sliding up over the land…that it was chasing him, personally.

A dog was barking out there now, somewhere out across the fields toward town, but it was not his dog. His dog was dead, long since dead, and its whitening skull was rollingalong the ocean floor with the tides that washed over what had once been Brigantine, New Jersey, three hundred feet down.

Suddenly he was covered with gooseflesh, and he shivered, rubbing his hands over his bare arms. He returned to his cot and dressed hurriedly-no point in trying to go back to bed, Sara would be up to kick them all out of the sack in a minute or two anyway. The day had begun; he would think no further ahead than that. He had learned in the refugee camps to take life one second at a time.

As he moved around the room, he thought that he could feel hostile eyes watching him from some of the other bunks. It was much colder in here now that he had opened the window, and he had inevitably made a certain amount of noise getting dressed, but although they all valued every second of sleep they could scrounge, none of the other kids would dare to complain. The thought was bittersweet, bringing both plea-sure and pain, and he smiled at it, a thin, brittle smile that was almost a grimace. No, they would watch sullenly from their bunks, and pretend to be asleep, and curse him under their breath, but they would say nothing to anyone about it. Certainly they would say nothing to him.

He went down through the still-silent house like a ghost, and out across the farmyard, through fugitive streamers of mist that wrapped clammy white arms around him and beaded his face with dew. His uncle Abner was there at the slit-trench before him. Abner grunted a greeting, and they stood pissing side by side for a moment in companionable silence, their urine steaming in the gray morning air.

Abner stepped backward and began to button his pants. “You start playin’ with yourself yet, boy?” he said; not looking at Roy.

Roy felt his face flush. “No,” he said, trying not to stammer, “no sir.”

“You growin’ hair already,” Abner said. He swung himself slowly around to face Roy, as if his body was some ponderous machine that could only be moved and aimed by the use of pulleys and levers. The hard morning light made his face look harsh as stone, but also sallow and old. Tired, Roy thought. Unutterably weary, as though it took almost more effort than he could sustain just to stand there. Worn out, like the over-taxed fields around them. Only the eyes were alive in the eroded face; they were hard and merciless as flint, and they looked at you as if they were looking right through you to some distant thing that nobody else could see. “I’ve tried to explain to you about remaining pure,” Abner said, speaking slowly. “About how important it is for you to keep yourself pure, not to let yourself be sullied in any way. I’ve tried to explain that, I hope you could understand-“

“Yes, sir,” Roy said.

Abner made a groping hesitant motion with his hand, fingers spread wide, as though he were trying to sculpt meaning from the air itself. “I mean-it’s important that you understand, Roy. Everything has to be right. I mean, everything’s got to be just…right…or nothing else will mean anything. You got to be right in your soul, boy. You got to let the Peace of God into your soul. It all depends on you now-you got to let that Peace inside yourself, no one can do it for you. And it’s so important…”

“Yes, sir,” Roy said quietly, “I understand.”

“I wish…” Abner said, and fell silent. They stood there for a minute, not speaking, not looking at each other. There was wood-smoke in the air now, and they heard a door slam somewhere on the far side of the house. They had instinctively been looking out across the open land to the east, and now, as they watched, the sun rose above the mountains, splitting the plum-and-ash sky open horizontally with a long wedge of red, distinguishing the rolling horizon from the lowering clouds. A lance of bright white sunlight hit their eyes, thrusting straight in at them from the edge of the world.

“You’re going to make us proud, boy, I know it,” Abner said, but Roy ignored him, watching in fascination as the molten disk of the sun floated free of the horizon-line, squinting against the dazzle until his eyes watered and his sight blurred. Abner put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. The hand felt heavy and hot, proprietary, and Roy shook it loose in annoyance, still not looking away from the horizon. Abner sighed, started to say something, thought better of it, and in-stead said, “Come on in the house, boy, and let’s get some breakfast inside you.”

Breakfast-when they finally did get to sit down to it, after the usual rambling grace and invocation by Abner-proved to be unusually lavish. For the brethren, there were hickory-nut biscuits, and honey, and cups of chicory, and even the other refugee kids-who on occasion during the long bitter winter had been fed as close to nothing at all as law and appearances would allow-got a few slices of fried fatback along with their habitual cornmeal mush. Along with his biscuits and honey, Roy got wild turkey eggs, Indian potatoes, and a real pork chop. There was a good deal of tension around the big table that morning: Henry and Luke were stem-faced and tense, Raymond was moody and preoccupied, Albert actually looked frightened; the refugee kids were round-eyed and silent, doing their best to make themselves invisible; the jolly Mrs. Crammer was as jolly as ever, shoveling her food in with gusto, but the grumpy Mrs. Zeigler, who was feared and disliked by all the kids, had obviously been crying, and ate little or nothing; Abner’s face was set like rock, his eyes were hard and bright, and he looked from one to another of the brethren, as if daring them to question his leadership and spiritual guidance. Roy ate with good appetite, unperturbed by the emotional convection currents that were swirling around him, calmly but deliberately concentrating on mopping up every morsel of food on his plate-in the last couple of months he had put back some of the weight he had lost, although by the old standards, the ones his Mom would have applied four years ago, he was still painfully thin. At the end of the meal, Mrs. Reardon came in from the kitchen and, beaming with the well-justified pride of someone who is about to do the impossible, presented Roy with a small, rectangular object wrapped in shiny brown paper. He was startled for a second, but yes, by God, it was: a Hershey bar, the first one he’d seen in years. A black market item, of course, difficult to get hold of in the impoverished East these days, and probably expensive as hell. Even some of the brethren were looking at him enviously now, and the refugee kids were frankly gaping. As he picked up the Hershey bar and slowly and caressingly peeled the wrapper back, exposing the pale chocolate beneath, one of the other kids actually began to drool.

After breakfast, the other refugee kids-“wetbacks,” the townspeople sometimes called them, with elaborate irony-were divided into two groups. One group would help the brethren work Abner’s farm that day, while the larger group would be loaded onto an ox-drawn dray (actually an old flatbed truck, with the cab knocked off) and sent out around the countryside to do what pretty much amounted to slave labor: road work, heavy farm work, helping with the quarrying or the timbering, rebuilding houses and barns and bridges damaged or destroyed in the chaotic days after the Flood. The federal government-or what was left of the federal government, trying desperately, and not always successfully, to keep a battered and Balkanizing country from flying completely apart, struggling to put the Humpty Dumpty that was America back together again-the federal government paid Abner (and others like him) a yearly allowance in federal scrip or promise-of-merchandise notes for giving room and board to refugees from the drowned lands… but times being as tough as they were, no one was going to complain if Abner also helped ease the burden of their upkeep by hiring them out locally to work for whomever could come up with the scrip, or sufficient barter goods, or an attractive work-swap offer; what was left of the state and town governments also used them on occasion (and the others like them, adult or child), gratis, for work-projects “for the common good, during this time of emergency…”

Sometimes, hanging around the farm with little or nothing to do, Roy almost missed going out on the work-crews, but only almost: he remembered too well the back-breaking labor performed on scanty rations…the sickness, the accidents, the staggering fatigue…the blazing sun and the swarms of mosquitoes in summer, the bitter cold in winter, the snow, the icy wind…He watched the dray go by, seeing the envious and resentful faces of kids he had once worked beside-Stevie, Enrique, Sal-turn toward him as it passed, and, reflexively, he opened and closed his hands. Even two months of idleness and relative luxury had not softened the thick and roughened layers of callus that were the legacy of several sea-sons spent on the crews… No, boredom was infinitely preferable.

By mid-morning, a small crowd of people had gathered in the road outside the farmhouse. It was hotter now; you could smell the promise of summer in the air, in the wind, and the sun that beat down out of a cloudless blue sky had a real sting to it. It must have been uncomfortable out there in the open, under that sun, but the crowd made no attempt to approach they just stood there on the far side of the road and watched the house, shuffling their feet, occasionally muttering to each other in voices that, across the road, were audible only as a low wordless grumbling.

Roy watched them for a while from the porch door; they were townspeople, most of them vaguely familiar to Roy, although none of them belonged to Abner’s sect, and he knew none of them by name. The refugee kids saw little of the townspeople, being kept carefully segregated for the most part. The few times that Roy had gotten into town he had been treated with icy hostility-and God help the wetback kid who was caught by the town kids on a deserted stretch of road! For that matter, even the brethren tended to keep to themselves, and were snubbed by certain segments of town society, although the sect had increased its numbers dramatically in re-cent years, nearly tripling in strength during the past winter alone; there were new chapters now in several of the surrounding communities.

A gaunt-faced woman in the crowd outside spotted Roy, and shook a thin fist at him. “Heretic!” she shouted. “Blasphemer!” The rest of the crowd began to buzz ominously, like a huge angry bee. She spat at Roy, her face contorting and her shoulders heaving with the ferocity of her effort, although she must have known that the spittle had no chance of reaching him. “Blasphemer!” she shouted again. The veins stood out like cords in her scrawny neck.

Roy stepped back into the house, but continued to watch from behind the curtained front windows. There was shouting inside the house as well as outside-the brethren ‘tad been cloistered in the kitchen for most of the morning, arguing, and the sound and ferocity of their argument carried clearly through the thin plaster walls of the crumbling old house. At last the sliding door to the kitchen slammed open, and Mrs. Zeigler strode out into the parlor, accompanied by her two children and her scrawny, pasty-faced husband, and followed by two other families of brethren-about nine people altogether. Most of them were carrying suitcases, and a few had backpacks and bindles. Abner stood in the kitchen doorway and watched them go, his anger evident only in the whiteness of his knuckles as he grasped the doorframe. “Go, then,” Abner said scornfully. “We spit you up out of our mouths!

Don’t ever think to come back!” He swayed in the doorway, his voice tremulous with hate. “We’re better off without you, you hear? You hear me? We don’t need the weak-willed and the short-sighted.”

Mrs. Zeigler said nothing, and her steps didn’t slow or falter, but her homely hatchet-face was streaked with tears. To Roy’s astonishment-for she had a reputation as a harridan-she stopped near the porch door and threw her arms around him. “Come with us,” she said, hugging him with smothering tightness, “Roy, please come with us! You can, you know-we’ll find a place for you, everything will work out fine.” Roy said nothing, resisting the impulse to squirm-he was uncomfortable in her embrace; in spite of himself, it touched some sleeping corner of his soul he had thought was safely bricked-over years before, and for a moment he felt trapped and panicky, unable to breathe, as though he were in sudden danger of wakening from a comfortable dream into a far more terrible and less desirable reality. “Come with us,” Mrs. Zeigler said again, more urgently, but Roy shook his head gently and pulled away from her. “You’re a goddamned fool then!” she blazed, suddenly angry, her voice ringing harsh and loud, but Roy only shrugged, and gave her his wistful, ghostly smile. “Damn it-” she started to say, but her eyes filled with tears again, and she whirled and hurried out of the house, followed by the other members of her party. The children-wetbacks were kept pretty much segregated from the children of the brethren as well, and he had seen some of these kids only at meals-looked at Roy with wide, frightened eyes as they passed.

Abner was staring at Roy now, from across the room; it was a hard and challenging stare, but there was also a trace of desperation in it, and in that moment Abner seemed uncertain and oddly vulnerable. Roy stared back at him serenely, unblinkingly meeting his eyes, and after a while some of the tension went out of Abner, and he turned and stumbled out of the room, listing to one side like a church steeple in the wind.

Outside, the crowd began to buzz again as Mrs. Zeigler’s party filed out of the house and across the road. There was much discussion and arm-waving and head-shaking when the two groups met, someone occasionally gesturing back toward the farmhouse. The buzzing grew louder, then gradually died away. At last, Mrs. Zeigler and her group set off down theroad for town, accompanied by some of the locals. They trudged away dispiritedly down the center of the dusty road, lugging their shabby suitcases, only a few of them looking back.

Roy watched them until they were out of sight, his face still and calm, and continued to stare down the road after them long after they were gone.

About noon, a carload of reporters arrived outside, driving up in one of the bulky new methane-burners that were still rarely seen east of Omaha. They circulated through the crowd of townspeople, pausing briefly to take photographs and ask questions, working their way toward the house, and Roy watched them as if they were unicorns, strange remnants from some vanished cycle of creation. Most of the reporters were probably from State College or the new state capital at Altoona-places where a few small newspapers were again being produced-but one of them was wearing an armband that identified him as a bureau man for one of the big Denver papers, and that was probably where the money for the car had come from. It was strange to be reminded that there were still areas of the country that were… not unchanged, no place in the world could claim that…and not rich, not by the old standards of affluence anyway…but, at any rate, better off than here. The whole western part of the country-from roughly the 95th meridian on west to approximately the 122nd-had been untouched by the flooding, and although the west had also suffered severely from the collapse of the national economy and the consequent social upheavals, at least much of their industrial base had remained intact. Denver-one of the few large American cities built ‘on ground high enough to have been safe from the rising waters-was the new federal capital, and, if poorer and meaner, it was also bigger and busier than ever.

Abner went out to herd the reporters inside and away from the unbelievers, and after a moment or two Roy could hear Abner’s voice going out there, booming like a church organ. By the time the reporters came in, Roy was sitting at the dining room table, flanked by Raymond and Aaron, waiting for them.

They took photographs of him sitting there, while he stared calmly back at them, and they took photographs of him while he politely refused to answer questions, and then Aaron handed him the pre-prepared papers, and he signed them, and repeated the legal formulas that Aaron had taught him, and they took photographs of that, too. And then-able to get nothing more out of him, and made slightly uneasy by his blank composure and the remoteness of his eyes-they left.

Within a few more minutes, as though everything were over, as though the departure of the reporters had drained all possible significance from anything else that might still hap-pen, most of the crowd outside had drifted away also, only one or two people remaining behind to stand quietly waiting, like vultures, in the once-again empty road.

Lunch was a quiet meal. Roy ate heartily, taking seconds of everything, and Mrs. Crammer was as jovial as ever, but everyone else was subdued, and even Abner seemed shaken by the schism that had just sundered his church. After the meal, Abner stood up and began to pray aloud. The brethren sat resignedly at the table, heads partially bowed, some listening, some not. Abner was holding his arms up toward the big blackened rafters of the ceiling, sweat runneling his face, when Peter came hurriedly in from outside and stood hesitating in the doorway, trying to catch Abner’s eye. When it be-came obvious that Abner was going to keep right on ignoring him, Peter shrugged, and said in a loud flat voice, “Abner, the sheriff is here.”

Abner stopped praying. He grunted, a hoarse, exhausted sound, the kind of sound a baited bear might make when, already pushed beyond the limits of endurance, someone jabs it yet again with a spear. He slowly lowered his arms and was still for a long moment, and then he shuddered, seeming to shake himself back to life. He glanced speculatively-and, it almost seemed, beseechingly-at Roy, and then straightened his shoulders and strode from the room.

They received the sheriff in the parlor, Raymond and Aaron and Mrs. Crammer sitting in the battered old armchairs, Roy sitting unobtrusively to one side of the stool from a piano that no longer worked, Abner standing a little to the fore with his arms locked behind him and his boots planted solidly on the oak planking, as if he were on the bridge of a schooner that was heading into a gale. County Sheriff Sam Braddock glanced at the others-his gaze lingering on Roy for a moment-and then ignored them, addressing himself to Abner as if they were alone in the room. “Mornin’, Abner,” he said.

“Mornin’, Sam,” Abner said quietly. “You here for some reason other than just t’say hello, I suppose.”

Braddock grunted. He was a short, stocky, grizzled man with iron-gray hair and a tired face. His uniform was shiny and old and patched in a dozen places, but clean, and the huge old revolver strapped to his hip looked worn but serviceable. He fidgeted with his shapeless old hat, turning it around and around in his fingers-he was obviously embarrassed, but he was determined as well, and at last he said, “The thing of it is, Abner, I’m here to talk you out of this damned tomfoolery.”

“Are you, now?” Abner said.

“We’ll do whatever we damn well want to do-” Raymond burst out, shrilly, but Abner waved him to silence. Braddock glanced lazily at Raymond, then looked back at Abner, his tired old face settling into harder lines. “I’m not going to allow it,” he said, most harshly. “We don’t want this kind of thing going on in this county.”

Abner said nothing.

“There’s not a thing you can do about it, sheriff,” Aaron said, speaking a bit heatedly, but keeping his melodious voice well under control. “It’s all perfectly legal, all the way down the line.”

“Well, now,” Braddock said, “I don’t know about that…”

“Well, I do know, sheriff,” Aaron said calmly. “As a legally sanctioned and recognized church, we are protected by law all the way down the line. There is ample precedent, most of it recent, most of it upheld by appellate decisions within the last year: Carlton versus the State of Vermont, Tretiholm versus the State of West Virginia, the Church of Souls versus the State of New York. There was that case up in Tylersville, just last year. Why, the Freedom of Worship Act alone…”

Braddock sighed, tacitly admitting that he knew Aaron was right-perhaps he had hoped to bluff them into obeying. “The ‘Flood Congress’ of ‘93,” Braddock said, with bitter con-tempt. “They were so goddamned panic-stricken and full of sick chatter about Armageddon that you could’ve rammed any nonsense down their throats. That’s a bad law, a pisspoor law…”

“Be that as it may, sheriff, you have no authority whatsoever-“

Abner suddenly began to speak, talking with a slow heavy deliberateness, musingly, almost reminiscently, ignoring the conversation he was interrupting-and indeed, perhaps he had not even been listening to it. “My grandfather lived right here on this farm, and his father before him-you know that, Sam? They lived by the old ways, and they survived and prospered. Greatgranddad, there wasn’t hardly anything he needed from the outside world, anything he needed to buy, except maybe nails and suchlike, and he could’ve made them himself, too, if he’d needed to. Everything they needed, everything they ate, or wore, or used, they got from the woods, or from out of the soil of this farm, right here. We don’t know how to do that anymore. We forgot the old ways, we turned our faces away, which is why the Flood came on us as a Judgment, a Judgment and a scourge, a scouring, a winnowing. The Old Days have come back again, and we’ve forgotten so goddamned much, we’re almost helpless now that there’s no goddamned K-mart down the goddamned street. We’ve got to go back to the old ways, or we’ll pass from the earth, and be seen no more in it …” He was sweating now, staring earnestly at Braddock, as if to compel him by force of will alone to share the vision. “But it’s so hard, Sam… We have to work at relearning the old ways, we have to reinvent them as we go, step by step…”

“Some things we were better off without,” Braddock said grimly.

“Up at Tylersville, they doubled their yield last harvest. Think what that could mean to a county as hungry as this one has been-“

Braddock shook his iron-gray head and held up one hand, as if he were directing traffic. “I’m telling you, Abner, the town won’t stand for this-I’m bound to warn you that some of the boys just might decide to go outside the law to deal with this thing.” He paused. “And, unofficially of course, I just might be inclined to give them a hand…”

Mrs. Crammer laughed. She had been sitting quietly and taking all of this in, smiling good-naturedly from time to time, and her laugh was a shocking thing in that stuffy little room, harsh as a crow’s caw. “You’ll do nothing, Sam Braddock,“she said jovially. “And neither will anybody else. More than half the county’s with us already, nearly all the country folk, and a good part of the town, too.” She smiled pleasantly at him, but her eyes were small and hard. “Just you remember, we know where you live, Sam Braddock. And we know where your sister lives, too, and your sister’s child, over to Framing-ton…”

“Are you threatening an officer of the law?” Braddock said, but he said it in a weak voice, and his face, when he turned it away to stare at the floor, looked sick and old. Mrs. Crammer laughed again, and then there was silence.

Braddock kept his face turned down for another long moment, and then he put his hat back on, squashing it down firmly on his head, and when he looked up he pointedly ignored the brethren and addressed his next remark to Roy. “You don’t have to stay with these people, son,” he said. “That’s the law, too.” He kept his eyes fixed steadily on Roy. “You just say the word, son, and I’ll take you straight out of here, right now.” His jaw was set, and he touched the butt of his revolver, as if for encourgement. “They can’t stop us. How about it?”

“No, thank you,” Roy said quietly. “I’ll stay.”

That night, while Abner wrung his hands and prayed aloud, Roy sat half-dozing before the parlor fire, unconcerned, watching the firelight throw Abner’s gesticulating shadow across the white-washed walls. There was something in the wine they kept giving him, Roy knew, maybe some-body’s saved-up Quaaludes, but he didn’t need it. Abner kept exorting him to let the Peace of God into his heart, tut he didn’t need that either. He didn’t need anything. He felt calm and self-possessed and remote, disassociated from everything that went on around him, as if he were looking down on the world through the wrong end of a telescope, feeling only a mild scientific interest as he watched the tiny mannequins swirl and pirouette… Like watching television with the sound off. If this were the Peace of God, it had settled down on him months ago, during the dead of that terrible winter, while he had struggled twelve hours a day to load foundation-stone in the face of icestorms and the razoring wind, while they had all, wetbacks and brethren alike, come close to starving. About the same time that word of the goings-on at Tylersville had started to seep down from the brethren’s parent church upstate, about the same time that Abner, who until then had totally ignored their kinship, had begun to talk to him in the evenings about the old ways…

Although perhaps the great dead cold had started to settle in even earlier, that first day of the new world, while they were driving off across foundering Brigantine, the water already up over the hubcaps of the Toyota, and he had heard Toby barking frantically somewhere behind them… His dad had died that day, died of a heart-attack as he fought to get them onto an overloaded boat that would take them across to the “safety” of the New Jersey mainland. His mother had died months later in one of the sprawling refugee camps, called “Floodtowns,” that had sprung up on high ground everywhere along the new coastlines. She had just given up-sat down in the mud, rested her head on her knees, closed her eyes, and died. Just like that. Roy had seen the phenomenon countless times in the Floodtowns, places so festeringly horrible that even life on Abner’s farm, with its Dickensian bleakness, forced labor, and short rations, had seemed-and was-a distinct change for the better. It was odd, and wrong, and sometimes it bothered him a little, but he hardly ever thought of his mother and father anymore-it was as if his mind shut itself off every time he came to those memories; he had never even cried for them, but all he had to do was close his eyes and he could see Toby, or his cat, Basil, running toward him and meowing with his tail held up over his back like a flag, and grief would come up like black bile at the back of his throat…

It was still dark when they left the farmhouse. Roy and Abner and Aaron walked together, Abner carrying a large tattered carpetbag. Hank and Raymond ranged ahead with shot-guns, in case there was trouble, but the last of the afternoon’s gawkers had been driven off hours before by the cold and the road was empty, a dim charcoal line through the slowly lightening darkness. No one spoke, and there was no sound other than the sound of boots crunching on gravel. It was chilly again that morning, and Roy’s bare feet burned against the macadam, but he trudged along stoically, ignoring the bite of cinders and pebbles. Their breath steamed faintly against thepaling stars. The fields stretched dark and formless around them to either side of the road, and once they heard the rustling of some unseen animal fleeing away from them through the stubble. Mist flowed slowly down the road to meet them, sending out gleaming silver fingers to curl around their legs.

The sky was graying to the east, where the sea slept behind the mountains. Roy could imagine the sea rising higher and higher until it found its patient way around the roots of the hills and came spilling into the tableland beyond, flowing steadily forward like the mist, spreading out into a placid sheet of water that slowly swallowed the town, the farmhouse, the fields, until only the highest branches of the trees remained, held up like the beckoning arms of the drowned, and then they too would slide slowly, peacefully, beneath the water…

A bird was crying out now, somewhere in the darkness, and they were walking through the fields, away from the road, cold mud squelching underfoot, the dry stubble crackling around them. Soon it would be time to sow the spring wheat, and after that, the corn…

They stopped. Wind sighed through the dawn, muttering in the throat of the world. Still no one had spoken. Then hands were helping him remove the old bathrobe he’d . been wearing… Before leaving the house, he had been bathed, and anointed with a thick fragrant oil, and with a tiny silver scissors Mrs. Reardon had clipped a lock of his hair for each of the brethren.

Suddenly he was naked, and he was being urged forward again, his feet stumbling and slow.

They had made a wide ring of automobile flares here, the flares spitting and sizzling luridly in the wan dawn light, and in the center of the ring, they had dug a hollow in the ground.

He lay down in the hollow, feeling his naked back and buttocks settle into the cold mud, feeling it mat the hair on the back of his head. The mud made little sucking noises as he moved his arms and legs, settling in, and then he stretched out and lay still. The dawn breeze was cold, and he shivered in the mud, feeling it take hold of him like a giant’s hand, tightening around him, pulling him down with a grip old and cold and strong…

They gathered around him, seeming, from his low perspective, to tower miles into the sky. Their faces were harsh and angular, gouged with lines and shadows that made them look like something from a stark old woodcut. Abner bent down to rummage in the carpetbag, his harsh woodcut face close to Roy’s for a moment, and when he straightened up again he had the big fine-honed hunting knife in his hand.

Abner began to speak now, groaning out the words in a loud, harsh voice, but Roy was no longer listening. He watched calmly as Abner lifted the knife high into the air, and then he turned his head to look last, as if he could somehow see across all the intervening miles of rock and farmland and forest to where the sea waited behind the mountains.

Is this enough? he thought disjointedly, ignoring the towering scarecrow figures that were swaying in closer over him, straining his eyes to look last, to where the Presence lived…speaking now only to that Presence, to the sea, to that vast remorseless deity, bargaining with it cannily, hopefully, shrewdly, like a country housewife at market, proffering it the fine rich red gift of his death. Is this enough? Will this do?

Will you stop now?

THE SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE

Frederik Pohl

There were things that robots could do as well as people. But there were also, Congressman Fiorello Delano Fitzgerald O’Hare believed with pride, things that required the special human touch. One of them was sitting in the House of Representatives. For him, every election year, the campaign started on the Tuesday after Labor Day. It was a tradition. It was traditional for the Congressman, anyway, feisty little seventy-plus-year-old who liked his own traditions and didn’t much care what anyone else’s were. The summer was his own and his lady wife’s, and when he started to press the flesh and hunt the votes was at the League of Women Voters televised debate and not a minute before. So at six o’clock on the evening of the eighth of September there was Carrie O’Hare one more time, straightening the fidgeting Congressman’s tie, dabbing a blob of the Congressman’s shaving cream off the lobe of the Congressman’s fuzzy pink ear and reassuring the Congressman that he was wiser, juster and, above all, far more beloved by his constituents than that brash new interloper of an opponent, the Mayor of Elk City, could ever hope to be. “Quit fussing,” said the Congressman, with his famous impudent elf’s smile. “The voters don’t mind if a candidate looks a little messy.”

“Hold still a minute, hon.”

“What for? It all has to come off again for the doctor, maybe.”

“Or maybe he’ll just take your pulse, so hold still. And listen. Please don’t tell them about game-hunting in the Sahara tonight.”

“Now, Carrie”—twinkling grin—“we leave the speeches to me and everything else to you, right? They’re going to want to know what their Congressman did over the summer, aren’t they?”

Carrie sighed and released him. It had been a successful safari—the Congressman had photographed dozens of mules, and even one actual live camel—but what did it have to do with the Congressman’s qualifications for one more term in the United States House of Representatives? “Hold it a minute,” she said as an afterthought, sent one of the household robots for a fresh pocket handkerchief, repinned the American flag button in his lapel and let it go at that. She needed all the rest of the time available on the larger task of herself. Voters might forgive a Congressman for looking rumpled, true enough, but a Congressman’s wife never.

She sat before her mirror and reviewed all the things she had to do. There were plenty, not made easier by the little knot of worry in her stomach. Well, not worry. Normal nervousness, maybe, but not real worry. The Congressman was a winner and always had been. Fiorello Delano Fitzgerald O’Hare, servant of the people for half a century plus one year, eight months and a week, might have been custom-built for politics, as well designed as any robot, and with the further advantage (she thought guiltily that you shouldn’t call it an “advantage”) of being human. He had the name for it. He had the friendly and trustworthy look, with enough leprechaun mischief to make him interesting. He had the manner that caused each of thirty thousand voters to think himself personally known to the Congressman, and above all he had the disposition. He actually enjoyed such things as eating rubber chicken at a dinner for the B’nai B’rtih, square-dancing at fireman’s fair, joining the Policemen’s Benevolent Association for a communion breakfast. He even liked getting up at five A.M. to get to a factory gate to shake the hands of nine hundred workers on the early shift. All of these things were a lot less enjoyable for the Congressman’s wife, but what she unfailingly enjoyed was the Congressman himself. For he was a sweet man.

Carrie Madeleine O’Hare was quite a sweet woman, too. You could tell that by the way she spoke to the maid tidying up behind her. Carrie had had that same maid since her marriage, forty years before. The Congressman had been thirty-five years old, Carrie herself twenty-two and the maid a wedding present, fresh off the assembly line, an old-style robot with all its brains in some central computation facility—no personality, no feelings to hurt. But Carrie treated the robot just as she would a human being—or one of the new Josephson-junction machines, so close to human that they even had voting rights… for which they had to thank in very large part the Congressman himself and damn well, Carrie thought, better remember it come November.

Carrie’s preparations only went as far as makeup, hair and underwear—there was no point in putting on the dress until they were ready to go, and the Congressman’s doctor hadn’t even arrived yet for his traditional last-minute medical check. So she pulled on a robe and descended the back stairs to the big screened porch for a breath of air. The house was ancient and three stories high. It stood on a little hill in the bend of the river, water on two sides. It would have been a fine house to raise children in—but there hadn’t been any children—and it was a first-rate house for a Congressman even without children. All through the years when small was status, the Congressman had stuck to his sixteen rooms because they were so fine for parties, so fine for entertaining delegations of voters and putting up visiting political VIPs and all the other functions of political power. Carrie sat on the porch swing, and found herself shivering. It wasn’t the temperature. That had to be at least seventy-five degrees, in the old Fahrenheit system Carrie still used inside her head. It was still summer. But the wind made her feel cold. And that was strange, when you came to think of it. When had the TV weathermen started talking about wind-chill factors even in July and September? Why was it always so windy these days? Was it just because of the simple fact that, without ever willing it to happen, Carrie herself had somehow become sixty-two years old?

And then her husband’s angry bellow from inside the house: “Carrie! Where are you? What’s this damn thing doing here?”

Carrie ran inside the house. There was her husband, flushed and angry, with that ruffled-sparrow look he got when he was excited, facing down a stranger. The doctor had arrived when she wasn’t looking, and it was a new model.

If you looked at the doctor what you saw was a sandy-haired man of youthful maturity, with little laugh wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and the expression of smiling competence that doctors cultivated. If you touched him, his handshake was firm and warm. If you listened to his voice, that was also warm—it was only if you went so far as to sniff him that you could notice a possible lack. There was no human scent of body and sweat. That meant a very recent shower, a foolproof deodorant—or a robot.

And, of course, a robot was what it was. “Oh, come on, Fee,” she coaxed, anxiously good-humored, “you know it’s just a doctor come to check your blood pressure and so on.”

“It’s not my regular doctor!” roared the Congressman, standing as tall and strong as possible for a man who, after all, was a shade shorter than Carrie herself. “I want my doctor! I’ve had the same doctor for thirty-five years, and that’s the one I want now!”

It was so bad for him to get upset right before the kickoff debate! “Now, Fee,” Carrie scolded humorously, trying to soothe him down, “you know that old dented wreck was due for the scrap heap. I’m sure that Dr.— uh—” She looked at the new robot for a name, and it supplied it, smilingly self-assured.

“I am Dr. William,” it said. “I am a fully programmed Josephson-junction autonomous-intellect model robot, Mr. Congressman, with core storage for diagnostics, first aid and general internal medicine, and of course I carry data-chip memory for most surgical procedures and test functions.”

The Congressman’s cheeks had faded from red to pink; he was not generally an irascible man. “All the same,” he began, but the robot was still talking.

“I’m truly sorry if I’ve caused you any concern, Mr. Congressman. Not only for professional reasons,” it added warmly, “but because I happen to be one of your strongest supporters. I haven’t yet had the privilege of voting in a congressional election, I’m sorry to say, because I was only activated last week, but I certainly intend to vote for you when I do.”

“Huh,” said O’Hare, looking from the robot to his wife. And then the reflexes of half a century took over. “Well, your time’s valuable, Dr. William,” he said, “so why don’t we just get on with this examination? And we can talk about the problems of this district while we do. As I guess you know, I’ve always been a leader in the fight for robot rights—” And Carrie slipped gratefully away.

Fiorello O’Hare’s vote-getting skills had been tested in more than two dozen elections, from his first runs for the school board and then the county commission—a decade before Carrie had been old enough to vote—through twenty-two terms in the Congress of the United States. Twenty-two terms: from the old days when a congressman actually had to get in a plane or a car and go to Washington, D.C., to do his job, instead of the interactive-electronics sessions that had made the job attractive again. And against twenty-two opponents. The opponents had come in all shapes and sizes, pompous old has-beens when O’Hare was a crusading youth, upstart kids as he grew older. Male or female, black or white, peaceniks and pro-lifers, spenders and budget-balancers—O’Hare had beaten them all. He had, at least, beaten every one of them who dared contest the Twenty-Third Congressional District, anyway. He had not done as well the time he made the mistake of trying for Governor (fortunately in an off year, so his House seat was safe), and not well at all the time when he had hopes for the Senate, even once for the vice-presidency. The primaries had ended one of those dreams. The national convention slew the other. O’Hare learned his lesson. If he stayed in Congress he was safe, and so were his committee chairmanships and his powerful seniority.

After all these years, Caroline O’Hare could no longer remember all the opponents her husband had faced by name. If she could dredge them out of her recollections at all, it was by a single mnemonic trait. This one was Mean. That one was Hairy. There was a Big and a Scared and a Dangerous. Classified in those terms, Carrie thought as they swept into the underground garage of the Shriner’s Auditorium, this year’s opponent was a Neat. He wore a neat brown suit with a neatly tied brown scarf and neatly shined brown shoes. He was chatting, neatly, with a small and self-assured group of his supporters as the O’Hares got out of their car and approached the elevator, and when he saw O’Hare he gave his opponent a neat, restrained smile of welcome.

The neat opponent was riding on a record of six years as the very successful mayor of a small city in the district. Mayor had been quite a vote-getter in the home town, according to the data-file printout Carrie had ordered. Her husband disdained such things—“I’m a personal man, Carrie, and I deal with the voters personally, and I don’t want to hit key issues or play to the demographics; I want them to know me.” But he must have retained a little bit of the data, for, when he saw the other group, he hurried over, smile flashing, speech ready on his lips. “A great pleasure to see you here, Mr. Mayor,” he cried, pumping the Mayor’s hand, “and to congratulate you again on the fine job you’ve been doing in Elk City!”

“You’re very kind.” Mayor smiled, nodding politely to Carrie—neat nod, neat smile, neat and pleasant voice.

“Only truthful,” O’Hare insisted as the elevator door opened for them. “Well, it’s time to do battle, I guess, and may the best man win!”

“Oh, I hope not,” the Mayor said politely. “For in that case, as I am mechanical, it would surely be you.”

O’Hare blinked, then grinned ruefully at his wife. Cordiality toward his opponents was an O’Hare trademark. It cost nothing, and who knew but what it might soften them up? Not many opponents had played that back to O’Hare. Carrie saw him pat the Mayor’s arm, stand courteously aside as they reached the auditorium floor and bow the other party out. But his expression had suddenly become firm. He was like a current breaker that had felt a surge of unexpected and dangerous power. It had opened unaware, but now it had reset itself. It would be ready for the next surge.

*

But actually, when the surge came, O’Hare wasn’t.

The first rounds of the debate went normally. It wasn’t really a true debate, of course. It was more like a virtuoso-piece ballet, with two prima ballerinas each showing off her own finest bits. A couple of perfect entrechats matched by a string of double fouettés, a marvelous grand jeté countered by a superb pas en l’air. O’Hare went first. His greatest strengths were the battles he had won, the fights he had led, the famous figures he had worked with. Not just politicians. O’Hare had been the intimate of ambassadors and corporation tycoons and scientists—he had even known Amalfi Amadeus himself, the man whose hydrogen fusion power had made the modern Utopia possible. O’Hare got an ovation after his first seven-minute performance. But so did his opponent. The Mayor was a modest and appealing figure; how handsome they made robots these days! The Mayor, talking about its triumphs in Elk City, had every name right, every figure detailed; how precise they made them! What O’Hare offered in glamour, the Mayor made up in encyclopedic competence… and then Carrie saw how the trick was done.

Against all advice, the Congressman in his second session was telling the audience about the highlights of their summer photo safari along the Nile. Against Carrie’s expectations, the audience was enjoying it. Even the Mayor. As O’Hare described how they had almost, but not quite, seen a living crocodile and the actual place where a hippopotamus had once been sighted, the Mayor was chuckling along with everyone else. But while it was chuckling it was reaching for its neat brown attache case; opened it, pulled out a module of data-store microchips, opened what looked like a pocket in the side of its jacket, removed one set of chips and replaced them with another.

It was plugging in a new set of memories! How very unfair. Carrie glanced around the crowded audience to see if any of the audience were as outraged as she, but if they were they didn’t show it. They were intent on the Congressman’s words, laughing with him, nodding with interest, clapping when applause was proper. They were a model audience, except that they did not seem to notice, or to care about, the unfairness of the Mayor. But why not? They certainly looked normal and decent enough, so friendly and so amiable and—

So neat.

Carrie’s hand flew to her mouth. She gazed beseechingly at her husband, but he was too wily a campaigner to have failed to read the audience. Without a hitch, husbanding his time to spend it where it would do the most good, he swung from the pleasures of the summer holiday to the realities of his political life. “And now,” he said, leaning forward over the lectern to beam at the audience, “it’s back to work, to finish the job you’ve been electing me for. As you know, I was one of the sponsors of the Robot ERA. A lot of voters were against that, in the old days. Even my friends in political office advised me to leave that issue alone. They said I was committing political suicide, because the voters felt that if the amendment passed there would be no way anybody could tell the difference between a human and a mechanical any more, and the country would go to the dogs. Well, it passed— and I say the country’s better off than ever, and I say I’m proud of what I did and anxious to go back and finish the job!” And he beamed triumphantly at his opponent as the applause swelled and he relinquished the floor.

But the Mayor was not in the least disconcerted. In fact, it led the clapping. When it reached the podium it cried, “I really thank you, Congressman O’Hare, and I believe that now every voter in the district, organic and mechanical alike, knows just how right you were! That amendment did not only give us mechanicals the vote. It not only purged from all the data stores any reference to the origins of any voter, mechanical or organic, but it also did the one great thing that remained to do. It freed human beings from one more onerous and difficult task—namely, the job of selecting their elected officials. What remains? Just one thing, I say—the task of carrying this one step further, by electing mechanicals to the highest offices in the land, so that human life can be pure pleasure!”

And the ovation was just as large. The Mayor waited it out, smiling gratefully toward O’Hare, and when the applause had died away it went on to supply specifics to back up its stand, all dredged, Carrie was sure, out of the store of chips she had seen it plug in.

On the stage, her husband’s expression did not change, but Carrie saw the eyes narrow again. The relay had popped open once more and reset itself, snick-snick; O’Hare knew that this opponent was a cut above the others. This campaign was not going to be quite like those that had gone before.

And indeed it wasn’t, although for the first few weeks it looked as though it would have the same sure outcome. By the first of October the Congressman was hitting his stride. Three kaffeeklatsches a day, at least one dinner every evening—he had long ago learned how to push the food around his plate to disguise the fact that he wasn’t eating. And all the hundreds of block parties and TV spots and news conferences and just strolling past the voters. The weather turned cooler, but it was still muggy, and the outdoor appearances every day began to worry Carrie. The Congressman’s feet would never give out, or his handshake, or his smile muscles. What was vulnerable was his voice. Up on a street-corner platform her enemies were the damp wind and the sooty air. Walking along a shopping block, the same—plus the quiches and pitas, the ravioli and the dim sum, the kosher hot dogs and the sushi—the whole spectrum of ethnic foods that an ethnic-wooing candidate traditionally had to seem to enjoy. “The tradition’s out of date,” Carrie told him crossly, throat lozenges in one hand and anti-acid pills in the other as he gamely tried to recuperate before going to bed, “when half the voters are robots anyway!”

Her husband sat on the edge of their bed, rubbing his throat and his feet alternately. “It’s the organics I need, love. The robots know where I stand!”

They also knew, Carrie thought but did not say, that his opponent was one of them… But robots were programmed to be fair! Poring over the daily polls after her husband had gone to sleep, Carrie almost felt confidence that they were. The Congressman’s reliable old polling service was also his driver, Martin, an antique remote-intelligence robot that needed only to query the central computation faculty to get the latest data on elections moods. Or indeed on anything else; and it was the robot’s custom to lay a printout of the last polling data on Carrie’s dressing table every night. Indeed the graphs did not look bad: 38 per cent for her husband, only 19 per cent for Mayor Thom—

But what they also showed was a whopping 43 per cent undecided, and the fly in the ointment was that the “undecideds” were overwhelmingly robots. Carrie understood why this was so; it had been so ever since her husband’s Robot ERA passed and the autonomous-intelligence models got the vote. Robots did not like to hurt anyone’s feelings. When robots were required to make a choice that might displease someone, they postponed it as long as they could. For robots were also programmed to be polite.

And if all that forty-three per cent came down for Mayor Thom—

Carrie simply would not face that possibility. Her husband was happy in his job. The Congress of the United States was an honorable career, and an easy one, too, not a small consideration for a man in his seventies who was now coughing fitfully in his sleep. In the old days it had, been a mankiller. There was always so much to do, worrying about foreign powers, raising taxes, trying to give every citizen a fair share of the nation’s prosperity—when there was any prosperity—at least, trying to give each one enough of a constant and never adequate supply of the available wealth to keep them from rioting in the streets. But since Amadeus’ gift of power, with all the limitless wealth it made available to everyone, a Congressman could take pleasure in what he did, and if he chose not to do it for a while—to take a summer off for a photo safari along the Nile, for instance—why, where was the harm? She slept uneasily that night.

Where the Congressman went, Carrie went too, even to a factory district far out of town, even when greeting the early shift meant being there at five-thirty in the morning. The sign over the chain-link fence said:

AMALFI ELECTRIC, INC.

A DIVISION OF MIDWEST POWER & TOOL CORP.

And as they approached, the managing director hurried out to greet them. “Congressman O’Hare!” he fawned. “And, yes, your lovely lady—what an honor!” He was a nervous, rabbity little man, obviously human; his name, Carrie knew from the briefing Marty had provided as they turned into the parking lot, was Robert Meacham. The briefing also said that he was the kind who could keep you talking while the whole shift passed by on the other side of the fence, so Carrie moved forward to distract him even while the Congressman was still pumping his hand. It was no trick for Carrie to find things to talk about while the Congressman wooed Meacham’s workers, not with Carrie’s photographic—really more than photographic, almost robotic—memory for the names of wives, children and pets. By the time she had finished discussing Meacham’s two spaniels, the Congressman had finished with his workers and the alert Marty was moving the car in to pick them up. Meacham detained Carrie a moment longer. “Mrs. O’Hare, can I ask you something?”

“Of course, Mr. Meacham,” she said, wishing he wouldn’t.

“Well—I can see why your husband goes after the late-model robots. They’ve got the vote. Besides, it’s not that easy to tell them from real people anyway. But there’s a lot of pre-Josephson models working on our line. They don’t have any individual intelligence—they’re radio-linked to the central computers, you know, like your driver. And they don’t even have a vote!”

“I can see,” said Carrie benignly, trying not to lose his vote but unwilling to refrain from setting him straight, “that you don’t know the Congressman very well. He doesn’t do this just for votes. He does it for love.”

And indeed that was true. And as October dwindled toward Halloween what dampened the sparkle in the Congressman’s eye was the first hint—not really a hint, hardly more than a suspicion—of love unrequited. For the polls were turning, like the autumn leaves, as the “undecideds” began to decide. He began to consult Marty’s data-link reports more and more frequently, and the more he studied them, the more a trend was clear. Every day the Congressman picked up some small fraction of a percentage point, it was true. But the Mayor picked up a larger one.

As Marty drove them to yet another factory it extruded a hard-copy of the latest results from the tiny printer in its chest and passed it back to the Congressman wordlessly. O’Hare studied the printout morosely. “I didn’t think it was going to work out this way,” he admitted at last. “It seems—it actually seems as though the enfranchised mechanicals are bloc-voting.”

“You’d think they’d do their bloc-voting for the man who gave them the Robot ERA,” Carrie said bitterly, and bit her tongue. But O’Hare only sighed and stared out at the warm, smoggy air. His wife thought dismally that the Congressman was at last beginning to show his age.

That morning’s factory was a robot robot-assembly plant. Robots were the workers, and robots were the products. Some of the production bays were a decade old and more, and the workers were CIMs—central intelligence mechanicals, like their old driver Marty. Their dented old skulls housed sensors and communications circuits, but no thought. The thinking took place in an air-conditioned, vibration-proof and lightless chamber in the bedrock under the factory floor, where a single giant computer ran a hundred and ninety robots. But if the bulk of the workers were ancient, what they produced was sparkling new. As the car drove up Carrie saw a big flatbed truck hauling away. It was furnished with what looked like pipe racks bolted to the bed, and in each niche in the pipes a shiny new Josephson-junction autonomous-intellect robot had harnessed itself to the rack and lapsed into power-down mode for the trip to the distribution center. There were more than a hundred of them in a single truckload. A hundred votes, Carrie thought longingly, assuming they would all stay in the Twenty-Third Congressional District… but she was not surprised, all the same, when she observed that the Congressman was not thinking along precisely those strategic lines.

She sighed fondly, watching him as he did what she knew he was going to do. He limped down the line of CIMs, with a word and a smile and a handshake for each… and not a vote in the lot of them. It was not a kindly place for a human being to be, noisy with the zap of welding sparks, hot, dusty. This was where the torsos were assembled and the limbs attached and the effector motors emplaced. The growing, empty robot bodies swung down the line like beefs at a meat-packer’s. Fortunately, the CIMs had only limited capacity for small talk, and so the Congressman was soon enough in the newer, cleaner detailing bays. The finishing touches were applied here. The empty skulls were filled with the Josephson-junction data processors that were their “brains.” The freezer units that kept the cryo-circuits working were installed, and into the vacant torsos went the power units that held hydrogen-fusion reactors contained in a nest of monopoles the size of a thimble. The Congressman’s time was not wasted here. All these workers were voters, enfranchised robots as new and remarkable as the ones they made. Along that line the robots being finished began to twist and move and emit sounds, as their circuits went through quality-control testing, until at the end of the line they unhooked themselves from the overhead cable, stepped off, blinked, stood silent for a moment while their internal scanners told them who and what they were, and why…

And the Congressman’s eyes gleamed, as he perceived them the way they perceived themselves. New beings. New voters!

It was the right place for the Congressman to be, a greeting for each new voter, a handshake… a vote. Carrie hated to try to pull him away, but Martin was looking worried and the schedule had to be met. “Oh, Carrie,” he whispered as she tugged at his sleeve, “they’re imprinting on me! Just like the ducklings in King Solomon’s Ring! I’m the first thing they see, so naturally they’re going to remember me forever!”

He was not only happy, he was flushed with pleasure. Carrie hoped that was what it was—pleasure, and not something more worrisome. His eyes were feverishly bright, and he talked so rapidly he was tripping over his words. She was adamant; and then, once she got him into the car, less sure. “Dear,” she ventured, as Martin closed the door behind them, “do you suppose you could possibly cancel the Baptist Men’s Prayer Breakfast?”

“Certainly not,” he said inevitably.

“You really do need a rest—”

“It’s only a week till the election,” he pointed out reasonably, “and then we’ll rest as much as you like—maybe even back to the Sahara for a few days in the sun. Now, what are you going to do?”

She stared at him uncertainly. “Do when?”

“Do now, while I go see the Baptists—it’s a men’s breakfast, you know.”

For once he had caught Carrie unprepared. Gender-segregated events were so rare that she had simply forgotten about this one. “Martin can drop me off and take you home, if you like,” her husband supplied, “but of course it’s going the wrong way—”

“No.” She opened the door on her side, kissed her husband’s warm cheek—too warm? she wondered—and got out. “I’ll take a cab. You go ahead.”

And she watched her husband pull out of one end of the parking lot just as the six-car procession she had seen coming down the far side of the fence entered at the other.

The Mayor.

It was the old days all over again, the next thing to a circus parade. Six cars! And not just cars, but bright-orange vehicles, purpose-built for nothing but campaigning. The first was an open car with half a dozen pretty young she-robots—no! They were human, Carrie was sure!—with pretty girls tossing pink and white carnations to the passersby. There were not many passersby, at that hour of the morning, but the Mayor’s parade was pulling out all the stops. Next another open car, with the neat, smiling figure of the Mayor bestowing waves and nods on all sides. Next a PA car, with a handsome male singer and a beautiful female alternating to sing all the traditional political campaign numbers, “Happy Days Are Here Again” and Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” and “God Bless America” with an up-tempo beat. And then two more flower-girl cars, surrounding a vehicle that was nothing more than a giant animated electronic display showing the latest and constantly changing poll results and extrapolations. All, of course, favoring the Mayor. How gross! And how very effective, Carrie conceded dismally to herself… “You the lady that wants the taxi?” someone called behind her, and she turned to see a cab creeping up toward her. Reliable Martin had sent for it, of course. She sighed and turned to go inside it, and then paused, shaking her head.

“No, not now. I’ll stay here a while.”

“Whatever you say, lady,” the driver agreed, gazing past her at the Mayor’s procession. It was only a central-intelligence mechanical, but Carrie was sure she saw admiration in its eyes.

The Mayor had not noticed her. Carrie devoted herself to noticing it, as inconspicuously as she could. It was repeating her husband’s tour of the plant—fair enough—but then she saw that it was not fair at all, for the Mayor had a built-in advantage. It too was a robot. In her husband’s tour of the plant he had given each worker a minute’s conversation. The Mayor gave each worker just as much conversation, but both it and the workers had their communications systems in fast mode. The sound of their voices was like the sonar squeaks of bats, the pumping of arms in the obligatory handshake like the flutter of hummingbird wings, too fast for Carrie’s eyes to follow.

A voice from behind her said, “I know who you are, Mrs. O’Hare, but would you like a carnation anyhow?”

It was one of the flower girls—not, however, one of the human ones from the first car, for human girls did not have liquid-crystal readouts across their foreheads that said Vote for Thom!

There was no guile in its expression, no hidden photographer waiting to sneak a tape of the Congressman’s wife accepting a flower from the opponent. It seemed to be simple courtesy, and Carrie O’Hare responded in kind. “Thank you. You’re putting on a really nice show,” she said, her heart envious but her tone, she hoped, only admiring. “Could you tell me something?”

“Of course, Mrs. O’Hare!”

Carrie hesitated; it was her instinct to be polite to everyone, robots included—her own programming, of course. How to put what she wanted to know? “I notice,” she said delicately, “that Mayor Thom is spending time even with the old-fashioned mechanicals that don’t have a vote. Can you tell me why?”

“Certainly, Mrs. O’Hare,” the flower girl said promptly. “There are three reasons. The first is that it looks good, so when he goes to the autonomous-intellect mechanicals they’re disposed in his favor. The second is that the Mayor is going to sponsor a bill to give the CIMs a fractional vote, too—did you know that?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t,” Carrie confessed. “But surely they can’t be treated the way humans or Josephson-junction mechanicals are?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” it agreed, smiling. “That’s why it’s only a fractional vote. You see, each of the CIMs is controlled by a central computer that is quite as intelligent as any of us, perhaps even more so; the central intelligence has no vote at all. So what Mayor Thom proposes is that each of the CIMs will have a fraction of a vote—one one-hundred-and-ninetieth of a vote, in the case of the workers here, since that’s how many of them the plant computer runs. So if they all vote, the central computer will in effect have the chance to cast a ballot on its own—you know the old slogan, Mrs. O’Hare: One intelligence, one vote!”

Carrie nodded unhappily. It made sense—it was exactly the sort of thing her husband would have done himself, if he had thought of it. But he hadn’t. Maybe he was getting past the point of thinking up the really good political ideas. Maybe— “You said there were three reasons.”

“Well, just the obvious one, Mrs. O’Hare. The same reason as your husband does it. It’s not just for votes with the Mayor. It’s love.” Then she hesitated, then confided, “I don’t know whether you know this or not, Mrs. O’Hare, but autonomous-intellect mechanicals like Mayor Thom and I have a certain discretion in our behavior patterns. One of the first things we do is study the available modes and install the ones we like best. I happen to have chosen nearly twenty per cent you, Mrs. O’Hare. And the Mayor—he’s nearly three-quarters your husband.”

There is a time for all things, thought Carrie O’Hare as she walked over to the Mayor’s procession to ask them to call her a cab. There is a time to stay, and a time to go, and maybe the time to stay in office was over for Fiorello Delano Fitzgerald O’Hare. Some of the robots her husband had greeted as they came off the assembly line were standing in a clump, waiting, no doubt, for the arrival of the next truck to bear them away. They waved to Carrie. She responded with a slight decrease of worry—they were sure votes, anyway. Unless—

She stopped short. What was the Mayor doing with them? She gazed incredulously at the scene, like a highspeed film, the Mayor thrusting a hand into a pouch, jerking it out, swiftly passing something that shone dully to the robot it was talking to and moving briskly to the next… And then, without willing it, Carrie herself was in highspeed mode, almost running toward the Mayor, her face crimson with rage. The Mayor looked up as she approached and politely geared down. “Mrs. O’Hare,” it murmured, “how nice to see you here.”

“I’m shocked!” she cried. “You’re brainwashing them!”

The mobile robot face registered astonishment and what was almost indignation. “Why, certainly not, Mrs. O’Hare! I assure you I would never do such a thing.”

“I saw you, Mayor Thom. You’re reprogramming the robots with data chips!”

Comprehension broke over the Mayor’s face, and it gestured to the she-robot who had given Carrie the flower. “Ah, the chips, yes. I see.” It pulled a chip out of the pouch and passed it to the she with a burst of highspeed squeaks—“Oh, I beg your pardon, Mrs. O’Hare. Let me repeat what I just said in normal mode. I simply asked Millicent here to display the chip contents for you.”

“Sure thing, Mayor.” Millicent smiled, tucking the chip under the strap of its halter top. The running message on Millicent’s forehead disappeared, and the legend appeared:

The Constitution of the United States of America

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense—

“Move it on, please,” ordered the Mayor. “Search ‘O’Hare.’ Most of it,” he added to Carrie, “is only the basic legislation, the Constitution, the election laws and so on. We don’t get to your husband until—ah, here it is!” And the legend read:

H.R. 29038. An Act to Propose a Constitutional Amendment to grant equal voting rights and other civil rights to citizens of mechanical origin which satisfy certain requirements as to autonomy of intellect and judgment.

“The Robot ERA,” Carrie said.

“That’s right, Mrs. O’Hare, and of course your husband’s name is on it. Then there’s nothing about him until—advance search, please, Millicent—yes. Until we come to his basic biographical information. Birth place, education, voting record, medical reports and so on—”

“Medical reports! That’s confidential material!”

The Mayor looked concerned. “Confidential, Mrs. O’Hare? But I assure you, the data on myself is just as complete—”

“It’s different with human beings! Fiorello’s doctor had no business releasing that data!”

“Ah, I see,” said the Mayor, nodding in comprehension. “Yes, of course, that is true for his present doctor, Mrs. O’Hare. But previously the Congressman made use of a CIM practitioner—a robot whose central processing functions took place in the general data systems, and of course all of that is public information. I’m sorry. I assumed you knew that. Display the Congressman’s medical history,” it added to the she, and Carrie gazed at the moving line of characters through tear-blurred eyes. It was all there. His mild tachycardia, the arthritis that kicked up every winter, the asthma, even the fact that now and then the Congressman suffered from occasional spells of constipation. “It’s disgusting to use his illnesses against him, Mayor Thom! Half of his sickness was on behalf of you robots!”

“Why, that’s true, yes.” The Mayor nodded. “It is largely tension-induced, and much of it undoubtedly occurred during the struggle for robot rights. If you’ll look at the detailed record—datum seventy-eight, line four, please, Millicent—you’ll see that his hemorrhoidectomy was definitely stress-linked, and moreover occurred just after the Robot ERA debate.” The expression on the Mayor’s face was no longer neat and self-assured, it was beginning to be worried. “I don’t understand why you are upset, Mrs. O’Hare,” Thom added defensively.

“It’s a filthy trick, that’s why!” Carrie could feel by the dampness on her cheeks that she was actually weeping now, and mostly out of helpless frustration. It was the one political argument her husband could never answer. It was obvious that the strain of the Robot ERA had cost Congressman O’Hare physical damage. The robots would understand that, and would behave as programmed. They served human beings. They spared them drudgery and pain. They would, therefore, remove him from a task that might harm him—not out of dislike, but out of love. “Don’t you see it’s not like that any more?” she blazed. “There’s no strain to being in Congress any more—no tax bills to pass, no foreign nations to arm against, no subversives to control—why, if you look at the record you’ll see that his doctor urged Fiorello to run again!”

“Ah, yes.” The Mayor nodded. “But one never knows what may come up in the future—”

“One damn well does,” she snapped. “One knows that it’ll break Fee’s heart to lose this election!”

The Mayor glanced at the she-robot, then returned to Carrie. Its neat, concerned face was perplexed and it was silent for a moment in thought.

Then it spoke in the bat-squeak triple time to the she, which pulled the chip out of its scanning slot, handed it to the Mayor and departed on a trot for the van with the poll displays. “One moment, please, Mrs. O’Hare,” said the Mayor, tucking the chip into its own scanner. “I’ve asked Millicent to get me a data chip on human psychogenic medicine. I must study this.” And it closed its eyes for a moment, opening them only to receive and insert the second chip from the she.

When the Mayor opened its eyes its expression was— regret? Apology? Neither of those, Carrie decided. Possibly compassion. It said, “Mrs. O’Hare, my deepest apologies. You’re quite right. It would cause the Congressman great pain to be defeated by me, and I will make sure that every voting mechanical in the district knows this by this time tomorrow morning.”

There had to be right words to say, but Carrie O’Hare couldn’t find them. She contented herself with “Thank you,” and then realized that those had been the right words after all… but was unable to leave it at that. “Mayor Thom? Can I ask you something?”

“Of course, Mrs. O’Hare.”

“It’s just—well, I’m sure you realize that you people could easily beat my husband if you stuck together. You could probably do that in nearly every election in the country. You could rule the nation—and yet you don’t seem to go after that power.”

The Mayor frowned. “Power, Mrs. O’Hare? You mean the chance to make laws and compel others to do what you want them to? Why, good heavens, Mrs. O’Hare, who in his right mind would want that?” He paused for a moment, looking into space. “Still,” he said thoughtfully, “given the right circumstances, I suppose we could learn.”

GEOMETRY OF NARRATIVE

Hilbert Schenck

The graduate seminar, “Modern Critical Theories,” (Eng. Lit. 674, 3 Cr.) theoretically occupied only Wednesday afternoon, but in fact it stretched into a region where time virtually ceased to run. There was no relief, for with only six of us in the small seminar room, drowsing or nodding into a sweet ten-minute repose now and then was impossible. We were all graduate “section hands,” earning our tiny pittances as we pursued will-o-the-wisp doctoral degrees by teaching the vast, sluggish, introductory courses in English Lit and its stunted, bastard child, Rhetoric (whatever Rhetoric actually is).

Yet what we chosen few studied in our ivory tower of scholarship was even more boring and useless than the oversimplifications we droned at the sleeping or whispering frosh. Finally, after more than two hours of an especially confused lecture. I spoke my complaints to Professor Herman Gabriel Stang, an ancient full bull in English Lit and my major professor.

“Dr. Stang,” I said as bravely as possible, “may I speak, for once, frankly to you at this seminar?”

Old Stang, his bald pate a ruddy shine under the fluorescents, turned little colorless eyes in my direction. A diamondback rattler, I thought suddenly, would contemplate a lost prairie dog with similar warmth. “Academic freedom, Mr. Pilson, is the foundation stone of this university. Of course you may speak with frankness,” he said from wrinkled lips that hardly moved. His large and rimless trifocals reflected the room lights with a shimmer as his head continually shook and gave him the look of a man turning into a huge bee.

“Then, sir,” I said, “I wonder if you would comment on the purpose behind all this stuff we’re doing, all these so-called critical theories, like structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics. Hell, we can’t even get the freshmen to wake up for Mellors plowing Lady Chatterly. If we ever tried to talk semiotics to them, half the class would dislocate their jaws from yawning and the rest would go into coma.”

Stang gave us all a frozen grimace and thin Miss Lee, sitting at my left, gave a shiver and took a large gulp of hot coffee. “You see English Literature as mainly cheap, titillating entertainment then, Mr. Pilson?” he said in an arctic voice.

“Not a bit,” I answered. “Look, there are plenty of good, useful reasons for reading and studying literature, but hocus-pocus like semiotics and the rest don’t relate to any of them. The trouble with English Literature is that it’s run out of dissertation topics. I mean, how many more studies of Henry James’s letters to his publisher’s cousin’s landlady can there be?” That was a bold shot, since James was one of old Stang’s “men.” Miss Lee’s almond eyes went slightly wider, and she casually shifted her chair so as to get a bit farther along the table and away from me.

Stang, surprisingly, gave me a considerable smile. “So, since we have buried James under whole forests of dissertation paper, you see us now simply creating new scholarly methods as—What is the new slang word?—a scam to keep old men like myself employed?”

I nodded, also smiling in what I hoped was a steady way. “I couldn’t have stated it any better than you did, Professor,” I said. “Anybody can think up more useful literary tools than semiotics in ten minutes. Take the idea of narrative geometry, for example…”

The room fell silent, and Dr. Stang’s face took on a more crafty, yet somehow more human expression. “So, Mr. Pilson, you’ve been planning an ambuscade for me, a little scene to enliven our labors. Very well, I will be a sport and play the Stan Laurel part. What, Ollie, is narrative geometry?”

Several in the class chuckled in relief at Stang’s suddenly jocular tone, and Miss Lee, who was doing her dissertation in film, gave a brief yet grateful laugh.

‘It’s always been around,” I said, shrugging and speaking with the casual assurance of supposedly long acquaintance. “Any narrative has a beginning, middle, and end. Well, that description also defines a one-dimensional line.”

Dr. Stang fired off a pitying sneer. “That sounds like the sort of profound triviality that might entrance the scientific community, but what exactly does it say to us about any given literary work?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You’ve got to go to at least two dimensions, to flat graphs. Plenty of the old books dealt with Shakespearean plots in terms of a rising and falling line. One coordinate was the time sequence of the story and the other was something to do with whether the plot was under development or resolution. The method helps you pick out the moment of peak narrative intensity.

“Okay, now let’s extend to three-dimensional geometrical systems. An example might be the Arabian Nights stuff. You know, the Thousand and One Nights? What is the geometrical analog to this work? Think of a three-dimensional volume, say a sphere, which represents Sheherezade and her framing story, in which she spins yarns to delay her execution. Inside that sphere and all contained by it are the thousand stories she tells. Think of them as smaller spheres within the frame story-sphere but having various sizes and relationships. Some story-spheres only touch each other and may form chains, stories in which one person and then another spins a yarn, each in turn but all within the same outer reality.

“Sometimes several story-spheres are completely enclosed, each within the next-larger outer one, as when a character in one story offers to tell a fiction, and then a character in that fiction starts on a new narrative with new characters. The point is, this assemblage of intersecting, enclosing and tangent spheres can be seen as a geometrical model of the total work. Probably undetected patterns and strengths in the story groups could be uncovered by a study of the total figure, but I think you’d need a computer-graphics capability. There are just too many stories to do it by hand on paper.”

I stopped the lecture and Dr. Stang, who did not look especially impressed by all this, shrugged. “Well, perhaps, perhaps. But one swallow does not a summer make, Mr. Pilson. I assume you can offer other congruities between geometry and narrative structure?”

“Let’s take a geometrical system and then try to imagine its literary counterpart,” I said quickly, now waving a confident hand at him. “A four-dimensional hypercube or tesseract can be projected into our space in the form of a large cube with a smaller one inside and the two connected at their eight corners. The big cube is the solid boundary of the hypercube nearest to our space, the little one inside is the bounding cube farthest away, and the two are connected by six other distorted cubes that stretch away from us into the fourth dimension. You might call that fourth dimension time, and say that the little cube is the same cube as the big one, but now farther off in future time. It’s really going to be the same size up there ahead, but we show it smaller to indicate that it’s farther off.”

I gave Miss Lee a sideways glance, saw a concealed but unmistakable bewilderment, and plunged ahead anyway. “Okay, instead of time as the fourth dimension let’s use something I’ll call narrative distance. Take a classic example, the play-within-the-play in Hamlet. Here are two separate three-dimensional realities: the play, Hamlet itself, with old Claudius popping his mental cork when he sees the Hamlet-buggered script acted out, and the shorter, smaller, on-stage murder-of-Gonzago play. But the little play is at a greater narrative distance than Hamlet, both from the real audience and from the Court of Denmark watching it on stage, since it is presented as a created artifact within the ‘true’ or ‘real’ drama. So not only is this part of Hamlet modeled by a four-dimensional geometrical object, but the staging assumes the exact projected form of the hypercube, with one small stage located in the middle of the other, larger one. Pirandello did the same sort of thing, as have others.”

Professor Stang had been following me closely and his crafty expression now intensified. “Interesting, Mr. Pilson, but it so happens that I know a little about metageometry and related matters. If this literary model is worth anything, shouldn’t we be able to perform, in a literary sense, the same manipulations that are possible in four-dimensional, geometrical space? For example, a normal cubical space, when rotated a half-turn in the fourth dimension, produces a mirror-image reversal of three-dimensional objects contained within it.”

I knew old Stang cared little for geometries and less for geometers, and had picked up that tidbit at the joint faculty-student science-fiction seminar last term, when we discussed an H.G. Wells story about a chemist whose body was reversed right for left by being flipped over in the fourth dimension. But I nodded with enthusiasm. “Tom Stoppard really did that when he wrote the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” I said at once. “That play is Hamlet in mirror-image narrative. The original main characters—Ophelia, Hamlet, his mom and dad—are only seen now and then, while the minor characters in Shakespeare’s play are turned into the leads in Stoppard’s. Furthermore, when they did the play in New York, they set the staging as though you were looking at the actual Hamlet from the back, from behind the servants’ quarters of Elsinore Castle. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead can be geometrically modeled as Hamlet after a mirror-image reversal due to a half-rotation in the fourth dimension.”

It all sounded slick, but of course I was ready, whereas old Stang was taking in the whole thing from scratch, piece by piece, and each piece was a new thing. But he was paying close attention. “Mr. Pilson, this trial balloon you’re sending up is bright and gaudy enough, but I doubt it has much lift. The number of serious literary works that match these patterns is few indeed.”

“On the contrary,” I said firmly, “the concept of one reality lying inside another applies to every literary work. Everything written has at least two, interconnected three-dimensional spaces; the space of the author and the space of his word-constructed work.”

I looked around fiercely. “Look! We here, this little discussion between Dr. Stang and myself, our whole university, can only be recorded as words on paper, right? Somebody in another and entirely different three-dimensional space wrote these words, yet both these spaces are totally interconnected, in the same sense that the front and lack spaces of a hypercube are totally connected through the fourth dimension. And they are connected across that new direction I’m calling narrative distance.”

I turned a page in my ring binder. “Reversing the location of the two, separate realities along this fourth, or narrative, axis is quite easy,” I said, and I began to read aloud to them from a typed page …

My daughter looked up from the typescript and shook her head until her long, blonde hair swung like a pendulum. “Hey, Dad, this is heavy stuff! Are you writing popular fiction or a paper for the Journal of Epistemological Thought?”

I shrugged and took a pull on my drink. “It probably won’t sell to Penthouse,” I said, “but the point is, can you follow it?”

My daughter responded with a thoughtful sip of her gin and tonic and slowly nodded. “Yeh, sort of, I guess. You’re saying that since you and I, this conversation, is presented as the author talking about one of his stories with his daughter, we’re closer, in this narrative distance sense, to the reader than the people in the seminar story?”

I nodded in an encouraging manner while she bit her lip and stared silently at the ceiling. “Okay,” she continued, “then you and I and this conversation are sort of inside the near boundary of a hypercube, the big cube that seems to hold all the others, while the seminar story is inside the little cube that is farther away from reality?”

“Excellent!” I said, applauding with a few hand claps. “But that entire story configuration can undergo a fourth-dimensional rotation giving a reversal along the narrative axis.”

My daughter now shook her head with positive motions. “That part I don’t understand, and I never saw that Stoppard play you mention in there, either. How can that be done?”

“Easy. This fellow, Pilson, can simply read and represent this account of our discussion of the seminar story as something he wrote to show Professor Stang how two separate realities can be reversed along the narrative-distance axis. Right now, we’re nearest to the reader and Pilson and Company are just created, fictional figures that we’re discussing, but if all this stuff I’m saying to you is actually written by Pilson, well, the rotation and reversal occurs and we’re suddenly farther out along that axis of narrative distance.”

My daughter grinned at that. “Hey, Dad, come on. We really exist.” She waved her arms at the room walls. “I mean, it’s all really here!”

I smiled back but shook my head. “As Mr. Pilson so astutely noted, that’s all just words on paper.”

I stopped reading and looked up at Dr. Stang, then said, “I wrote that last week, as a way of showing how this kind of inversion in the fourth, or narrative, dimension can be made, somewhat in the same way that Hamlet diddled with his little play inside the big one to prove a point.”

Stang shook his head in angry irritation at my glibness and my obvious preparations. “You’re beating me back into a trackless thicket of geometrical balderdash,” he said, then turned to sternly face the rest of his class, spread out around the long table. “Well, well. Where are those heartless harpies, usually so eager to pluck the liver out of the tiniest new thought? Ms. Lee, surely you have not bought the snake-oil elixir this dreadful little medicine-show is touting?”

Miss Lee’s calm and oval face took on its most serene and impassive expression. “I found the ideas ingenious and challenging,” she said firmly, “though I have a weak background in mathematics.”

I gave her a quick, tiny smile of thanks. Miss Lee entered each seminar as a skinny, silent lamb, but somehow by the end of our interminable day she was turned into a lion or, more accurately, into a super-cool dragon lady.

Dr. Stang now became petulant and paranoid. “So you’re all joining him, eh? Planned it before hand, I suppose? How many of you find this concept of narrative geometry puerile, superficial, and the work of an intellectual charlatan? Raise your hands.”

The room remained very still. Stang smiled with the dreadful avidity of a cat holding the best part of a mouse in its fierce mouth. “And how many find it clever, an interesting concept, and probably worthy of further study?”

Six hands went up together and Dr. Stang swallowed his yummy mouse. “Actually,” he said in his most benign manner, “I thought it had a certain superficial ingenuity. And scholarship must progress! For our next seminar, in addition to the assigned readings in Piaget, Wittgenstein, Barthes, and Levi-Strauss, each of you five will bring in an essay showing the application of a geometrical concept to a specific literary situation, or the application of a literary situation to a concept of geometry. This will be a cooperative effort. Each will do a different concept. That is, I want five new applications, in addition to any we may discuss here today. Is this all understood?”

A low moan of disgust and dismay swept over the group and a small voice said, “Sir, Thanksgiving is next week.”

Stang only snarled irritably. “So what? You have two weeks instead of one to do a decent job. How long does a damned turkey gluttony take, for God’s sake, a couple of hours?”

Miss Lee had acknowledged my briefsmile of thanks with a modest relaxation of her almond features and, almost, a nod, but now she turned stiffly to her notes, her expression set in annoyance that my ego trip had probably cost her both sleep and peace of mind. The others around the table gave out the surly grumbles and mutterings of the sort that once surrounded the tumbrels in Paris.

Dr. Stang, though no Tolstoy, was content with only an occasional boot in the face of his serfs. Now he turned to me with almost a Santa Claus look, his voice transformed and avuncular. “Ah yes, Mr. Pilson, a valuable lesson! How readily is the adulation of the multitudes turned to disgust and rejection by the prospect of work. The Geometry of Narrative is like thick, new snow; interesting and rewarding to see from a distance but not so much fun to actually shovel—if I make my various mixed and hidden metaphors clear?”

“Entirely,” I said, “but you said five were to do the assignment. Am I to be excluded?”

Stang shook his head. “Not a bit. The others are mere beginners in this new literary science, albeit dedicated and enthusiastic students, as the voting showed. I am therefore allowing them to, let us say, go fishing through Euclid. In your case, I intend to provide a specific and assigned geometrical concept for you to relate to literary works.”

I looked at him steadily and drew a deep breath. “Dr. Stang, I’ll make you an offer…well, more of a wager, I guess.”

He nodded warily and I went on. “You pose your geometrical concept and if I can provide the literary counterpart, right here and now, you agree to let me write the term paper on narrative geometry instead of semiotics. You will be the sole judge.”

Stang gave me a dark and grudging nod and some new irritation appeared in his tone. “You have led me to this devil’s bargain with skill and daring, Mr. Pilson. Very well, though reluctantly, I agree to your wager. The geometrical system I set for your consideration is the Möebius strip or so-called one-sided surface.”

It had been a gamble, but not much of one. My notes on the science-fiction seminar showed that the only two purely geometrical ideas stressed in the stories were four-dimensional Euclidean space and the Möebius band, so I was ready for him. “Here,” I said, handing up several sheets from my ring binder, “you can read these. I don’t want to hog the spotlight all afternoon, Professor Stang.”

My daughter put the manuscript down next to her on the sofa. “Dad, are we farther out in the narrative dimension than the seminar now? If we are, I don’t see how I can comment on its story.”

I shook my head. “The story is easily rotated and reversed again. After all, there’s nothing that prevents me from writing Pilson’s dialogue, so that he says he wrote our part. In fact, you’ve been reading the seminar story yourself, and you know it all came from my typer. I don’t see any problem with convincing the reader that this is the outside, or framing, story and the seminar thing is what we’re talking about.”

“Then,” said my daughter, “I think you’ve got a problem with this new geometrical system, the Möebius strip. The other examples you used involved solids, spheres inside of spheres and solid boundaries of a hypercube, but this is a surface, a two-dimensional thing.”

“As Pilson would explain,” I responded, “though I can just as easily do it for him, a Möbius band is a two-dimensional surface, half-twisted in the third dimension, and joined to itself. If you take a three-dimensional, space, say a tube of space, and twist it once in the fourth dimension and then join it to itself, you have a kind of Möbius space. If a person were to traverse that space, two things would happen. They would return to where they started and they would be reversed when they got back, made a mirror-image of themselves. Okay, if a work of fiction can be constructed to logically turn back on itself, to repeat itself, but after the repeat, it has been mirror-imaged, then you have the narrative analogy.”

She frowned. “But how can that be done…?” and at that moment several knocks sounded at the front door.

“That must be Frank,” said my daughter. “We’re going for a pizza and then to the flicks.” She jumped up and soon brought a tall, good-looking young man into the room. “This is Frank Pilson, Dad,” said my daughter. “He’s a Ph.D. student in English Lit.”

I shook his hand. “Listen, Mr. Pilson,” I said. “You folks have plenty of time. Let me get you a drink and you can read my little story, which might be something right up your alley.”

“That’s right, Frank,” said my daughter, “it’s about an English Lit grad seminar,” and she handed Pilson the manuscript.

I mixed his drink and set it down next to him, but he did not take a sip for several minutes, then looked up with a big grin. “Hey, professor, this is great stuff,” he said. “Listen, can I get a copy of this? I’d love to try and pull the Geometry of Narrative out of the hat for old man Stang, who runs this completely incomprehensible seminar on useless lit-crit theories.”

“You think he wants another useless one?” I asked.

Frank Pilson nodded with enthusiasm. “I’ll mousetrap him with it. I can do this stuff. I’ve read lots more science fiction than Stang, so I’m way ahead on weird geometries.”

“I’ll send you over a Xerox,” I said. “Just don’t mention my name to Professor Stang. Since they started cutting off the English Department’s legs by attrition and giving us the positions, Dr. Stang has been talking in the faculty senate about a final solution for Engineering and Computer Science. Something involving high levels of radioactivity, nerve gas experiments, and the forced ingestion of PCBs, I think.”

Pilson grinned again and nodded. “They sure hate your guts, all right. That must be why they’re deconstructing literature. Sort of the trapped fox chewing off its own leg.”

My face must have shown puzzlement at this comment, but my daughter spoke with an impatient shake of her head. “Deconstruction, Dad, is some nutty new kind of literary theory. Don’t get Frank going on that stuff. He’s rabidly against it.”

“I like people who are against new things,” I said firmly. “For example, I positively hate the metric system …”

But my daughter was on her feet and pulling at Frank Pilson’s hand. “You two are not going to just sit here and complain about everything. C’mon, Frank, time for pizza.”

At this point, return to the beginning of the story, with the words, “The graduate seminar, ‘Modern Critical Theories,’ (Eng. Lit. 674,3 Cr.) theoretically occupied …” and continue reading until you reach the words, spoken by Professor Stang, “Very well, and reluctantly, I agree to your wager. The geometrical system I set for your consideration is the Möbius strip or so-called one-sided surface.”

After he read this instruction aloud to us, Dr. Stang peered directly and blankly at me, and I saw that I had finally lost him in my final thicket of narrative geometry. I spoke up in my best exegetical voice.

“Look, the fiction has to loop, since the Möbius space is closed, right? So I write myself into the author’s story, get from him the idea, in fact the complete seminar story, of narrative geometry and bring it here to try out on you.” I paused and pointed a confident finger at Dr. Stang.

He nodded silently and I went on. “So there are two seminar stories, the one the author wrote and I read when I went to take his daughter on a date, and the one we have all just lived through.”

I stared around the table with determination. “But they are the same story! Their congruence completes the Möbius loop in four-space.”

Old Stang came right back at me. “And the mirror-image reversal, Mr. Pilson, as required by the four-dimensional twist in the Möbius space?”

I nodded and grinned in admiration at his quickness. “I instructed you to stop reading before the author’s part, the second time around, Dr. Stang. You said then, ‘I set for your consideration the Möbius strip …’ Okay, I’ve given you a fiction that, as we saw, looped, and you have to admit that at this moment we are much nearer to the reader, in my narrative distance sense, than is the author and his daughter. Yet when the loop was started, when I read the author’s story in his home, that part of the fiction was certainly in a nearer narrative space than this one. Now the thing is reversed. My two-narrative fiction has been made a mirror-image of itself.”

I let my voice deepen. “Indeed, we may be the first persons to ever traverse a Möbius-space narrative in the entire history of English Literature!”

Professor Stang glanced up at the clock, which showed five-twenty, and when he looked back I saw that he was suddenly tired. He gave me a wan but real smile, which I returned. “I will look forward to your extended disquisition on narrative geometry, Mr. Pilson.” He paused and peered with almost a benign grin at the rest of the class. “And to your more modest explorations of this topic.”

As we got up to leave he lifted a hand. “Oh, and don’t bother about those assigned readings for the next time. Just get your Euclid and show me how Mellors and Lady Chatterly can be understood as similar, even congruent, triangles,” and he gave us an almost raffish wink.

WONG'S LOST AND FOUND EMPORIUM

William F. Wu

The sharp clicking of high heels echoed in the dark shop. The brisk footsteps on the unpolished wooden floor slowed and became irregular and uncertain as my new visitor saw some of the stuff on the shelves. They always did that.

I was on a different aisle. The shop was very big, though crammed with all kinds of objects to the point where every shelf was crowded and overflowing. Most of the stuff was inanimate, or at least dead. However, many of the beasties still stirred when adequately provoked. The inanimate objects included everything from uncut diamonds to nailclippers to bunny bladders. Still more of the sealed crates and boxes and bottles contained critters, or other things, that might or might not be counted among the living. I had no idea and didn’t care, either. For instance, whoever had hung big wooden crates from the ceiling—and there were plenty, up where they couldn’t endanger anybody—must have had a good reason.

The edges of the shop were a little mysterious. I tried not to go too far down any of the aisles except the two big perpendicular corridors that ended in doors to the outside. They formed a cross in the center of the shop. The farther from the middle I went in any direction, the darker the place became, and colder. On a few occasions, I had had to go out to shelf space on the fringe that was mostly empty, and in almost complete darkness. All the edges were like that, except for the four doors at each end of those main corridors.

I didn’t dare venture into the real darkness, where nothing was visible. Cold stale air seemed to be all it contained, but I wasn’t going to investigate. I also had a suspicion that the shop kept growing of its own accord, outward into that nothingness. I had seen for myself that new stuff spontaneously appeared on all the shelves; but if the shop had been finite in size, it would have been absolutely crammed to the ceiling. Instead, I guessed, it simply extended its aisles and plain wooden shelves outward somehow, always providing just enough new empty space to avoid total chaos. The place was weird enough where I was; I didn’t see any need to wander off the edge of the world or something.

I was seeking my destiny in this world, or at least I had been hoping to when I first came in here. My visitor was probably doing the same right now.

I came around the corner into one of the two main corridors, where the light was a little better. For a second, I thought I heard someone in one of the aisles, but that sort of thing happened all the time. Some of the live beings thumped and slithered in their containers occasionally.

My customer was a woman with snow-white hair, slender and well-dressed with a good tan. She wore a peach-colored suit and four gold chains around her neck. One hand with long, peach-colored fingernails clutched a small handbag. She looked like a shrivelled peach in a light snowfall.

“Oh—uh, I’m looking for Mr. Wong, I guess.” She smiled cautiously.

“That’s me,” I said, walking forward briskly. After I had been here a while, I had put my signs on the four doors, saying Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium.

She looked me over in some surprise; they always seemed to expect a doddering old geezer with a wispy white beard and an opium pipe, muttering senilities to the spirit world. I wore a blue T-shirt, fading Levi’s, and Adidas indoor track shoes. After all, I’d only been here a few months, though time was different in here than on the outside. This was that kind of place.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” She smiled apologetically, fidgeting now with all ten peach fingernails scratching at her purse.

“The name is Wong,” I said casually, “but you can call me Mr. Double-you for short.”

She didn’t get the joke—they never do.

“Thank you. I, uh, was told that… this is an unusual shop? Where one can find something… she lost?”

“If you lost it, I got it.” Like most of the others, she needed more encouragement. I waited for her to ask.

“I mean… well, I suppose this will sound silly, but… I’m not looking for a thing, exactly, not a solid object, I don’t suppose you have a… second chance?” She forced herself to laugh, a little, like it was a joke. “Well, no, I’m sorry. I really just need a restroom, and—”

“Of course I have it,” I said. “If you lost a chance at something, it’s here. Follow me.”

I looked around the floor and pointed to the little blue throw rug. “Have to watch out for this. It slips.”

She smiled politely, but I could see her shaking with anticipation.

I glanced around the shelves, looking for the little spot of white. “What’s your name?” It didn’t matter, but asking made me sound official.

“I’m Mrs. Barbara Patricia Whitford and I live here in Boca. Um—I was born in New York in 1926. I grew up…”

I didn’t care. A bit of white light was shining on a shoulder-high shelf across the main corridor from me. “This way,” I said, signalling over my shoulder. She shut up and followed me.

As we walked, the light moved ahead of us toward the object she wanted to recover. I had no idea how it worked—I had figured it out by trial and error, or I might say by accident. I had come in here myself looking for something I had lost, but the place had had no one in it. Now, I was waiting for the proprietor, but everyone else who came in thought I was in charge. So I was.

“What kind of chance was it?” I asked over my shoulder, like it was shoe size or something. It might be a long walk.

“Well,” she said, just a little breathless behind me. “I always wanted to be an artist—a painter. I didn’t get started until fifteen years ago, when I started taking lessons in acrylics. And even oils. I got pretty good, even if I do say so. Several of my paintings sold at art fairs and I was just getting a few exhibited, even. I got discouraged, though. It was so hard to keep going.”

The white light turned down another aisle, more cramped and dimly lit then the last. The light was brighter in these shadows, but she couldn’t see it. Only I could. I had tested that on earlier customers. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see my own.

A shadow shifted in the corner of my eye that was not mine or hers, but I ignored it. If something large was loose in here, it was apparently shy. It was nothing new.

“Six or seven years ago,” she continued, “all of my friends were going back to school. It was easier than painting—I went for my Master’s; and since I was just going to go, I didn’t really have to hurry, or worry about grades. It was the thing to do, and so much easier than painting. Only, I didn’t care about it.” Her voice caught, and she paused to swallow. “I do care about my painting. Now, well, I just would like to have the chance I missed, when my skills were still sharp and I had more time and business connections. It—I know it sounds small. But it’s the only thing I’ve ever accomplished. And I don’t have time to start over.”

She started crying.

I nodded. The white light had come to a stop, playing across a big open wooden box on an upper shelf. “Just a moment. I’ll get it. It’s very important to get exactly the right one, because if you get the wrong object, you’re still stuck with it.”

She nodded, watching me start to climb up the wooden shelves.

“For instance, if I gave you someone else’s lost chance to work a slow freighter to Sakhalin Island, why, it would just happen. You’d have to go.”

“I would? …oh. Well, be careful.” She sniffled. “No, uh, glove cleaner or anything like that. If you know what I mean.”

The shelves were dusty and disgusting. My fingers caught cobwebs and brushed against small feathery clumps that were unidentifiable in the shadowy aisle. Tiny feet scurried away from me on the shelves as I climbed, prodding aside old jars with my feet. Faint shuffling noises came from inside some of them.

I finally got my head up to the shelf with the little light. It was now sitting on a transparent cylindrical container inside the wooden box. Inside, ugly brown lumps swirled around in a thick, emerald-green solution.

The box had several similar containers and a lot of miscellaneous junk. I grabbed one of the smaller pieces at random and stuck it in my pants pocket. Then I tucked the swirling green cylinder under one arm and started down.

When I had reached the floor, I held it up. Her eyes grew wide when she saw the liquid spinning inside. “Okay,” I said. “When you open this, the contents will evaporate very quickly. You have to breathe in the vapor before it disappears, or the chance is lost forever.” I had done this before.

She took it from me, glowing like a half-lit wino.

“You can do it here if you want,” I said, “but the light’s better in the main corridors.”

She nodded and followed me as close as one dog behind another.

We turned along the main corridor, and I walked at a good clip back toward my beat-up steel desk and battered piano stool. They were near the junction of the main corridors. This was her business.

Before I got there, I heard a slight gasp behind me and turned around. She had slipped on the throw rug and as I turned, her slender legs were struggling for balance. Her arms reflexively made a sharp upward movement and her precious transparent cylinder was tossed out to one side.

The woman let out a wail as it sailed away and smashed on the hard floorboards. She clattered after it clumsily in her high heels. When she finally reached it, she bent over and started sniffling around like a bowser at a barbeque.

I got up stiffly and walked over.

“Did I get it? Did I get it?” She whimpered frantically.

“Doubt it,” I said, sniffing around. If the stuff had lingered long enough for her to inhale it, I would have smelled some residual scent.

“Oh, no—I… uh… but, but—” She started to cry.

Criers bore into me. I had a vague sense that I was expected to be sympathetic, but I had lost that ability. That’s what I was here for, in fact.

“Wait a minute,” I said, tapping her on the shoulder. I reached into my pocket for the other lost object I had taken from her box. It was a metal ring with four or five keys on it and a leather circle with “BPW” stamped in gold. The keys looked fairly new; I figured she had lost them some time in the decade or so. “Here,” I said. “You lost these, too.”

“What?” She looked up between sobs.

I gave her the keys. “I’m glad you came. Have a nice day.”

“What?” She stared at the keys. “It was the only thing I ever accomplished,” she whimpered. “Ever.” She turned away, in shock, her wide eyes fixed blankly on her old car keys. “It was my very last chance.” She squeaked in a high, tiny voice.

“That way.” I took her shoulders and aimed her down the corridor that led to a shopping mall in Florida.

She staggered away, snuffling.

I sat down disgustedly on a nearby stool. My time was almost up. I had to leave soon in order to get any sleep at home and then show up at work tomorrow. Without savings, I couldn’t afford to leave my job, even for something as important as this. If the proprietor had been coming back, then he, she, or it would probably have returned by now. The dual passages of time in here and outside meant that I had spent over two months here, and I had only spent one week of sick days and vacation days back in New York, on the other side of one of the doors.

I had even taken my job on a loading dock in Chinatown just to be near this shop. That was why I had moved to New York. When a friend had first told me about this establishment, she had warned me of the trickiest part—the doors could not always be located. Different people could find them at their own times, sometimes. The door in New York appeared, when it did, in the back hall of a small, second-story Chinatown restaurant. Most of the time, the hall ended in two restroom doors. For a select few, though, it occasionally had three, and now the mystic third door bore my sign.

I had checked the spot often; and when I had found the door, I had phoned in immediately for a week off, begging an emergency. It had taken some arguing, but I had managed. The presence of the restaurant had allowed me to stay so long, since I sneaked food out when night fell in New York. Naturally, the shop had a few misplaced refrigerators and other appliances; a few even worked.

Once I left this place, I might not find the door again for years— if ever.

I kicked in annoyance at a random bit of crud on the floor. It unfolded five legs and scurried away under a nearby shelf. Well, I had left a mark; the doors all bore my handmade signs, minor amusement though they were.

At least my stay had been eventful. My first customer after I had figured out how the place worked had been a tall slender Chinese guy from the San Francisco corridor. The door there was in the back of a porno shop. He had been in his fifties and wore a suit that had been in style in 1961, when it was last pressed. Something about him suggested Taiwan.

He had come looking for the respect of his children, which he had of course lost. I found him a box with five frantic mice in it: what he had to do was pet them until they calmed down. However, while he was gingerly poking at them, a boa constrictor glided silently out of the shadows unnoticed. It ate all the mice and then quietly slithered away. The guy got hysterical. I almost pointed out that snakes have to eat, too, but actually I didn’t care about the snake, either. I’m strictly neutral.

My youngest visitor had been a little boy, maybe about ten, who came in through the boarded-up gas station in Bosworth, Missouri. It was a one-stoplight town that didn’t send me much company. The kid wore jeans and a blue Royals baseball cap. He was looking for a dog whistle he had lost. I found it for him. Nothing happened to him or it. That was okay with me, too.

I sighed and stood up. No one else would be coming in. As I rose, I saw a large shadow out of the corner of my eye and glanced toward it, expecting it to slide away among the shelves as usual. Instead, it stayed where it was. I was looking at a young woman of Asian descent, wrapped up in a long white crocheted shawl. She also wore a denim skirt and striped knee socks.

“You’re sickening.” She spoke with elegant disgust, in New York accent.

I knew that, but I didn’t like hearing it. “You’ve been here a while, haven’t you?”

“I think about two days.” She brushed back her hair with one hand. It was cut short and blunt. “You were asleep when I came in.”

That was a relief. She didn’t belong here any more than I did. On the other hand, she had apparently been watching me.

“Where’ve you been sleeping?” I asked out of curiosity. On my first day, I had spent several hours locating a sleeping bag.

“I found an air mattress,” she said, still angrily. “I just meant to sleep until you woke up, but you had a—a client when I got up. After I saw the way you treated him—and all the rest of them—I decided not to approach you at all. Don’t you have any feelings for them? When something goes wrong? You could at least try to help them.”

“I don’t sabotage anybody. Whatever happens, happens—good or bad or indifferent.”

She tossed her short hair, probably less to move it than for the disdain it conveyed. “I can’t stand it. Why are you so callous?”

I shrugged. “What do you care? Anyhow, some go away happy.”

“What?” She looked astonished. “Can’t you even understand simple—” She stopped and shook her head. “Maybe you’ll understand selfishness. Suppose I want what I came for. I can’t get any help from you if I have trouble.”

“Well, I guess that’s logi—”

I stopped when she reached for a big stoppered metal bottle, on the shelf next to her. She heaved it at me, and I only had time to spin around. It hit my shoulder blade, hard, and bounced unharmed to the floor.

I whirled back toward her, ready to grab it and throw it back at her, but she was already striding quickly toward me.

“What’s wrong with you?” She demanded. “I want to know! Why are you so callous?” She snatched up the metal container from the floor in front of me and held it wrapped in her shawl. “Tell me now!” she screamed, right in front of me.

I leaned forward and spoke, glaring into her eyes. “I came in here looking for my compassion. I lost it years ago, bit by bit. I lost it when I was eight, and other kids chased me around the playground for no visible reason—and they weren’t playing. When I started junior high and got beat up in gym class because the rest of the school was white, like my grade school. When I ran for student congress and had my posters covered with swastikas and KKK symbols. And that was before I got out into the world on my own. You want to hear about my adult life?”

I paused to catch my breath. She backed away from me.

“I’ve lost more of my compassion every year of my life for every year I can remember, until I don’t have any more. Well, it’s here, but I can’t find it.”

She stood speechless in front of me. Letting her have it all at once accomplished that much, at least.

“Maybe you were in the wrong town,” she muttered.

“You think I like being like this? Hating the memories of my life and not caring what happens to anybody? I said I’ve lost my compassion, not my conscience.”

She walked back and put the metal bottle back in its place on the shelf. “I can find it,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“I’ve been watching you. When you get something for someone, you follow the little white light that appears.”

“You can see that?”

“Of course I can—anybody can. You think you’re special? We just can’t see our own. I figured that out.”

“Well… so did I,” I said lamely.

“So, I could get your compassion for you.”

“Yeah?” I didn’t think she would, considering all she’d said.

“Only you have to get what I want, first.”

“You don’t trust me, remember?”

She smiled smugly. It looked grotesque, as though she hadn’t smiled in ages. “I can trust you. Because you know that if you don’t give me what I want, I won’t give you your compassion. Besides, if all goes well, your lack of compassion won’t make any difference.”

“Well, yeah. I guess so.” I hadn’t considered a deal with another customer before. Until now, I had just been waiting for the no-show proprietor, and then given up even on that.

“Well?” she demanded, still with that weird forced smile.

“Uh—yeah, okay.” It was my last chance. I glanced around and found her spot of white light behind me on a lower shelf. “This way.”

She walked next to me, watching me carefully as the white light led us down the crowded aisle. A large porcelain vase emitted guttural mutterings on an upper shelf as we passed. Two small lizards from the Florida corridor and something resembling a T-bone steak with legs were drinking at a pool of shiny liquid in the middle of the floor. The viscous liquid was oozing slowly out of a cracked green bottle. We stepped over it and kept going.

The light finally stopped on the cork of a long-necked blue bottle at the back of a bottom shelf. I stopped and looked down at it, wondering if this deal had an angle I hadn’t figured.

“Well?” She forced herself to smile again. It gave her a sort of tortured visage.

“What is it, anyway?” I tried to sound casual.

“You don’t need to know, I know that, too.”

“Suppose I don’t get it till you tell me.”

“I won’t tell you. And you won’t get what you want.”

She couldn’t have known I had to leave soon, but she was still my last chance. I would be getting home late as it was. Besides, she was the sort who might really want more compassion in the world.

“Hurry up,” she said.

I knelt down and looked at the bottle. She might have guessed what I had focused on; but with all the other junk jammed around it, she couldn’t be sure. Well, I knew she had compassion herself, already. She wouldn’t want to regain any lost tendencies that were nasty, like cruelty or vengefulness, so I was not in personal danger.

I took the bottle by the long neck and stood up. “It’s in here, whatever it is. If it’s a material object, you just open the bottle and spill it out. If it’s a chance, or a personal trait, you have to uncork the bottle and inhale the fumes as they come out.”

She was already taking the bottle from me, carefully in both hands. I backed away as she sank her teeth into the cork and yanked it out with a pop. White vapor issued from the bottle. She started taking deep breaths in through her nose, with her eyes closed.

I backed away, smelling something like rotten lettuce mixed with wet gerbil fur.

She kept on breathing until the vapors ran out. Then she recorked the bottle and smiled at me, looking relaxed and natural. “Well! You’re still sickening, but that was it, all right.” She laughed gently. “Wow, that stuff stunk. Smelled like rotting cabbage and wet cat fur, didn’t it?”

“Wha—?” I laughed, surprised at her sudden good humor. “It sure did.”

“Okay, brown eyes. I see your little spot of light. Follow the swaying rear.” She sashayed past me and walked casually down another dark aisle, humming to herself.

At one point, something on a shelf caught her eye and she stopped to giggle at it. It was a large brown and white snake, shoved into a jar of some kind of clear solution. She paused to make a face, imitating the snake’s motionless expression. Here, of course, one never knew if a pickled snake was really pickled snake or something else temporarily in that guise. Anyway, she made a funny face and then laughed delightedly. After that, we pushed on.

When she stopped again, she was looking up at a shelf just within her reach. “There it is.” She chuckled, without moving to take anything.

“Yeah?” I was suddenly afraid of that laugh.

She looked at me and laughed again.

“What’s so funny?”

She shook her head and reached up on tiptoe with both hands. When she came down, she was cradling four sealed containers in her arms. One was a short-necked brown bottle encrusted with dry sand. Two were sealed jars of smoky glass and the last was a locked wooden box engraved with smile faces. She squatted on the floor Asian style and set them down.

“One of these holds your lost compassion.” She looked up and laughed. “Guess which one.”

My stomach tightened. I could not be sure of getting my compassion back this way. After my general insensitivity to people here, I didn’t think I would ever be allowed back in, either.

“We have a deal,” I said weakly. “You were going to give it to me.”

“I have; it’s right here. Besides, you should talk. And remember—if you inhale someone else’s lost chance to wrestle an alligator or something, you’ll wrestle it.” She clapped her hands and laughed.

I stared at her. Maybe I deserved it, but I couldn’t figure out what had happened to her. She had been concerned and compassionate before I had given her the long-necked bottle, and she certainly didn’t seem angry or righteous now. I wondered what she had regained.

“Well?” She giggled at me and stood up. “One of them is it. That’s a better chance than you gave anyone.”

I looked down at the containers. She had no more idea what was in three of them than I did. “I have no intention of opening any of these,” I said.

She shrugged, still grinning. “Have it your way, brown eyes. I’m leaving.” She started strolling away.

“Wait.”

She turned and walked away backwards, facing me. “What?”

“Uh—” I couldn’t think of anything.

“Bye!”

“No—uh, hey, what did I give back to you, anyway?”

“Oh!” She laughed. “My sense of humor.” She was still backpedaling.

“I’ll do it! Wait a minute.”

She stopped and folded her arms. “You’ll really do it?”

“Come on. Come on back here while I do this.” I wasn’t sure why I wanted company, but I did.

She came back, grinning. “If you got the guts, brown eyes, you can open ‘em all.”

I smiled weakly. “They could all be good.”

She smirked. “Sure—it’s possible.”

I looked down at the four containers. The wooden box seemed more likely to hold a tangible object than a lost quality. Though this place had few reliable rules, I decided to leave the box alone. The brown bottle with the short neck had such a heavy layer of sand that its contents were hidden. I knelt down and looked over the two smoky jars.

“Come on, sweetie.” She started tapping her foot.

Quickly, before I could reconsider, I grabbed both jars, stood, and smashed them down on the floor. The glass shattered and two small billows of blue-gray smoke curled upward.

She stepped back.

I leaned forward, waited for the smoke to reach me, and inhaled. One strand smelled like charcoal-broiled Kansas City steak; the other, like the inside of a new car. I breathed both in, again and again, until the vapors were gone.

After a moment, I blinked and looked around. “I don’t feel any different.”

“Sure you do.” She smiled. “Just go on as normal, and it’ll come clear.”

“Okay.” I bent down and picked up the box and the bottle. “Where were these? I’ll put ‘em back. There’s a broom—”

“You?” She laughed gaily. “Well, that’s something. You mean you’re actually going to straighten up this place?”

“No, I—well, I’ve been in charge; I suppose I should do something…” I replaced the items where she pointed.

“Integrity.”

“What?”

“You’ve got your integrity back, for one.”

“Oh, I don’t know…” I looked at her for a moment and then gazed up the dark aisle toward the light from one of the main corridors. “I guess I did lose that, too… Otherwise, I couldn’t have been so cruel to people, even without compassion. They trusted me,” I started walking up the aisle.

She followed, watching me closely. “So what are you going to do?”

“I guess I’ll stay and run the shop.” It just came out naturally. I hadn’t even realized I was going to say it. “The… other thing I got back is kind of minor. For a long time, I used to try to remember the details of a fishing trip in the mountains my family went on, back when I was little. I knew I had a great time, but that was all. Now, all of a sudden, I can remember it completely.”

She cocked her head to one side. “Was it still really wonderful?”

I considered my new memories a moment. “Yeah.”

“Aw…” She looked at me, smiling. “I can’t help it, brown eyes. I give in. It’s in that brown thing, with the sand all over it.”

Excitement surged in my chest. “Thanks!” I reached up with trembling fingers and snatched it off the shelf.

“Careful—”

I fumbled it away. It hit my shoulder, bounced to the floor, and cracked. It rolled, and before I could bend down to grab it, it was under a bottom shelf. I dropped to the floor and slid my face under the shelf. The cracked bottle was hissing in the darkness as the special vapors escaped. I couldn’t smell anything. It was too far from me.

I reached for it with one hand. It was wedged against something and stuck. I could touch it, but I couldn’t get enough of a hold to pull it back.

I remained on the floor, inhaling frantically, motionless until the hissing stopped. Then, suddenly feeling heavy all over, I managed to stand up.

“What happened?” She smiled hopefully.

“It’s gone,” I muttered. “It… sure was over quick.” I hesitated, then added, “Thanks anyhow.” Stunned, I eased past her and started walking. I could hear her follow me.

We came out into the main corridor. I picked up the little blue throw rug and hung it on a nearby hook. Then I turned, all the way around, surveying my shop. “Maybe it was no accident.”

“You were nervous, that’s all—”

“I don’t mean that. I mean my finding the door to this place when I most needed it, and staying until… someone came in to find my stuff.”

“You think your new integrity adds up to something, it sounds like.”

“My destiny.”

She laughed, then tapered off when I looked at her calmly. “You serious?”

I shrugged. “This place is mine. I knew that, somehow, when I put my signs up. And now I owe this shop my best attention.”

“With integrity.”

I shrugged again. Taking care of the shop and its customers was important; the reasons I felt that way were not.

“I… think I got news for you, brown eyes.”

“I don’t want any news.” I was still in shock from disappointment. It was justice of a sort, but it wasn’t pleasant.

“You have your compassion back. I’m sure of it. You can’t help it.”

“But you said it was in the bottle I broke—”

“It was, as a separate quality. Only, I think your integrity comes with a little compassion in a package deal. Forces it on you.”

I looked up at her, hopeful. “Really?”

“You could try it.” She pointed down the Florida corridor.

“What’shername, the peach-colored former artist lady, had never made it out the door. She was sitting near it, slumped on the floor, an incongruous position for a woman of her age and dignity. The skirt of her suit was smudged and rumpled under her, exposing more of her legs than it was supposed to.

“This is your shop now,” said my companion. She put a hand on my shoulder.

I didn’t say anything.

“You can’t just let a customer sit there, can you?”

“No—not anymore. A matter of—integrity.”

“In this case, it’s the same as compassion. I don’t see how you can help her, but if you try—”

“I know how.”

“Huh?”

“I lost one chance to help her.” I smiled, suddenly understanding the true potential of this place. “If you’ll go down the aisles and find it, we can fix up that customer after all.”

She winked. “You got it, brown eyes.”

SPEECH SOUNDS

Octavia E. Butler

There was trouble aboard the Washington Boulevard bus. Rye had expected trouble sooner or later in her journey. She had put off going until loneliness and hopelessness drove her out. She believed she might have one group of relatives left alive—a brother and his two children twenty miles away in Pasadena. That was a day’s journey one-way, if she were lucky. The unexpected arrival of the bus as she left her Virginia Road home had seemed to be a piece of luck—until the trouble began.

Two young men were involved in a disagreement of some kind, or, more likely, a misunderstanding. They stood in the aisle, grunting and gesturing at each other, each in his own uncertain T stance as the bus lurched over the potholes. The driver seemed to be putting some effort into keeping them off balance. Still, their gestures stopped just short of contact—mock punches, hand games of intimidation to replace lost curses.

People watched the pair, then looked at one another and made small anxious sounds. Two children whimpered.

Rye sat a few feet behind the disputants and across from the back door. She watched the two carefully, knowing the fight would begin when someone’s nerve broke or someone’s hand slipped or someone came to the end of his limited ability to communicate. These things could happen anytime.

One of them happened as the bus hit an especially large pothole and one man, tall, thin, and sneering, was thrown into his shorter opponent.

Instantly, the shorter man drove his left fist into the disintegrating sneer. He hammered his larger opponent as though he neither had nor needed any weapon other than his left fist. He hit quickly enough, hard enough to batter his opponent down before the taller man could regain his balance or hit back even once.

People screamed or squawked in fear. Those nearby scrambled to get out of the way. Three more young men roared in excitement and gestured wildly. Then, somehow, a second dispute broke out between two of these three—probably because one inadvertently touched or hit the other.

As the second fight scattered frightened passengers, a woman shook the driver’s shoulder and grunted as she gestured toward the fighting.

The driver grunted back through bared teeth. Frightened, the woman drew away.

Rye, knowing the methods of bus drivers, braced herself and held on to the crossbar of the seat in front of her. When the driver hit the brakes, she was ready and the combatants were not. They fell over seats and onto screaming passengers, creating even more confusion. At least one more fight started.

The instant the bus came to a full stop, Rye was on her feet, pushing the back door. At the second push, it opened and she jumped out, holding her pack in one arm. Several other passengers followed, but some stayed on the bus. Buses were so rare and irregular now, people rode when they could, no matter what. There might not be another bus today—or tomorrow. People started walking, and if they saw a bus they flagged it down. People making intercity trips like Rye’s from Los Angeles to Pasadena made plans to camp out, or risked seeking shelter with locals who might rob or murder them.

The bus did not move, but Rye moved away from it. She intended to wait until the trouble was over and get on again, but if there was shooting, she wanted the protection of a tree. Thus, she was near the curb when a battered blue Ford on the other side of the street made a U-turn and pulled up in front of the bus. Cars were rare these days—as rare as a severe shortage of fuel and of relatively unimpaired mechanics could make them. Cars that still ran were as likely to be used as weapons as they were to serve as transportation. Thus, when the driver of the Ford beckoned to Rye, she moved away warily. The driver got out—a big man, young, neatly bearded with dark, thick hair. He wore a long overcoat and a look of wariness that matched Rye’s. She stood several feet from him, waiting to see what he would do. He looked at the bus, now rocking with the combat inside, then at the small cluster of passengers who had gotten off. Finally he looked at Rye again.

She returned his gaze, very much aware of the old forty-five automatic her jacket concealed. She watched his hands.

He pointed with his left hand toward the bus. The dark-tinted windows prevented him from seeing what was happening inside.

His use of the left hand interested Rye more than his obvious question. Left-handed people tended to be less impaired, more reasonable and comprehending, less driven by frustration, confusion, and anger.

She imitated his gesture, pointing toward the bus with her own left hand, then punching the air with both fists.

The man took off his coat revealing a Los Angeles Police Department uniform complete with baton and service revolver.

Rye took another step back from him. There was no more LAPD, no more any large organization, governmental or private. There were neighborhood patrols and armed individuals. That was all.

The man took something from his coat pocket, then threw the coat into the car. Then he gestured Rye back, back toward the rear of the bus. He had something made of plastic in his hand. Rye did not understand what he wanted until he went to the rear door of the bus and beckoned her to stand there. She obeyed mainly out of curiosity. Cop or not, maybe he could do something to stop the stupid fighting.

He walked around the front of the bus, to the street side where the driver’s window was open. There, she thought she saw him throw something into the bus. She was still trying to peer through the tinted glass when people began stumbling out the rear door, choking and weeping. Gas.

Rye caught an old woman who would have fallen, lifted two little children down when they were in danger of being knocked down and trampled. She could see the bearded man helping people at the front door. She caught a thin old man shoved out by one of the combatants. Staggered by the old man’s weight, she was barely able to get out of the way as the last of the young men pushed his way out. This one, bleeding from nose and mouth, stumbled into another and they grappled blindly, still sobbing from the gas.

The bearded man helped the bus driver out through the front door, though the driver did not seem to appreciate his help. For a moment, Rye thought there would be another fight. The bearded man stepped back and watched the driver gesture threateningly, watched him shout in wordless anger.

The bearded man stood still, made no sound, refused to respond to clearly obscene gestures. The least impaired people tended to do this—stand back unless they were physically threatened and let those with less control scream and jump around. It was as though they felt it beneath them to be as touchy as the less comprehending. This was an attitude of superiority and that was the way people like the bus driver perceived it. Such “superiority” was frequently punished by beatings, even by death. Rye had had close calls of her own. As a result, she never went unarmed. And in this world where the only likely common language was body language, being armed was often enough. She had rarely had to draw her gun or even display it.

The bearded man’s revolver was on constant display. Apparently that was enough for the bus driver. The driver spat in disgust, glared at the bearded man for a moment longer, then strode back to his gas-filled bus. He stared at it for a moment, clearly wanting to get in, but the gas was still too strong. Of the windows, only his tiny driver’s window actually opened. The front door was open, but the rear door would not stay open unless someone held it. Of course, the air conditioning had failed long ago. The bus would take some time to clear. It was the driver’s property, his livelihood. He had pasted old magazine pictures of items he would accept as fare on its sides. Then he would use what he collected to feed his family or to trade. If his bus did not run, he did not eat. On the other hand, if the inside of his bus was torn apart by senseless fighting, he would not eat very well either. He was apparently unable to perceive this. All he could see was that it would be some time before he could use his bus again. He shook his fist at the bearded man and shouted. There seemed to be words in his shout, but Rye could not understand them. She did not know whether this was his fault or hers. She had heard so little coherent human speech for the past three years, she was no longer certain how well she recognized it, no longer certain of the degree of her own impairment.

The bearded man sighed. He glanced toward his car, then beckoned to Rye. He was ready to leave, but he wanted something from her first. No. No, he wanted her to leave with him. Risk getting into his car when, in spite of his uniform, law and order were nothing— not even words any longer.

She shook her head in a universally understood negative, but the man continued to beckon.

She waved him away. He was doing what the less-impaired rarely did—drawing potentially negative attention to another of his kind. People from the bus had begun to look at her.

One of the men who had been fighting tapped another on the arm, then pointed from the bearded man to Rye, and finally held up the first two fingers of his right hand as though giving two-thirds of a Boy Scout salute. The gesture was very quick, its meaning obvious even at a distance. She had been grouped with the bearded man. Now what?

The man who had made the gesture started toward her.

She had no idea what he intended, but she stood her ground. The man was half a foot taller than she was and perhaps ten years younger. She did not imagine she could outrun him. Nor did she expect anyone to help her if she needed help. The people around her were all strangers.

She gestured once—a clear indication to the man to stop. She did not intend to repeat the gesture. Fortunately, the man obeyed. He gestured obscenely and several other men laughed. Loss of verbal language had spawned a whole new set of obscene gestures. The man, with stark simplicity, had accused her of sex with the bearded man and had suggested she accommodate the other men present— beginning with him.

Rye watched him wearily. People might very well stand by and watch if he tried to rape her. They would also stand and watch her shoot him. Would he push things that far?

He did not. After a series of obscene gestures that brought him no closer to her, he turned contemptuously and walked away.

And the bearded man still waited. He had removed his service revolver, holster and all. He beckoned again, both hands empty. No doubt his gun was in the car and within easy reach, but his taking it off impressed her. Maybe he was all right. Maybe he was just alone. She had been alone herself for three years. The illness had stripped her, killing her children one by one, killing her husband, her sister, her parents …

The illness, if it was an illness, had cut even the living off from one another. As it swept over the country, people hardly had time to lay blame on the Soviets (though they were falling silent along with the rest of the world), on a new virus, a new pollutant, radiation, divine retribution…The illness was stroke-swift in the way it cut people down and stroke-like in some of its effects. But it was highly specific.

Language was always lost or severely impaired. It was never regained. Often there was also paralysis, intellectual impairment, death.

Rye walked toward the bearded man, ignoring the whistling and applauding of two of the young men and their thumbs-up signs to the bearded man. If he had smiled at them or acknowledged them in any way, she would almost certainly have changed her mind. If she had let herself think of the possible deadly consequences of getting into a stranger’s car, she would have changed her mind. Instead, she thought of the man who lived across the street from her. He rarely washed since his bout with the illness. And he had gotten into the habit of urinating wherever he happened to be. He had two women already—one tending each of his large gardens. They put up with him in exchange for his protection. He had made it clear that he wanted Rye to become his third woman.

She got into the car and the bearded man shut the door. She watched as he walked around to the driver’s door—watched for his sake because his gun was on the seat beside her. And the bus driver and a pair of young men had come a few steps closer. They did nothing, though, until the bearded man was in the car. Then one of them threw a rock. Others followed his example, and as the car drove away, several rocks bounced off harmlessly.

When the bus was some distance behind them, Rye wiped sweat from her forehead and longed to relax. The bus would have taken her more than halfway to Pasadena. She would have had only ten miles to walk. She wondered how far she would have to walk now—and wondered if walking a long distance would be her only problem.

At Figuroa and Washington where the bus normally made a left turn, the bearded man stopped, looked at her, and indicated that she should choose a direction. When she directed him left and he actually turned left, she began to relax. If he was willing to go where she directed, perhaps he was safe.

As they passed blocks of burned, abandoned buildings, empty lots, and wrecked or stripped cars, he slipped a gold chain over his head and handed it to her. The pendant attached to it was a smooth, glassy, black rock. Obsidian. His name might be Rock or Peter or Black, but she decided to think of him as Obsidian. Even her sometimes useless memory would retain a name like Obsidian.

She handed him her own name symbol—a pin in the shape of a large golden stalk of wheat. She had bought it long before the illness and the silence began. Now she wore it, thinking it was as close as she was likely to come to Rye. People like Obsidian who had not known her before probably thought of her as Wheat. Not that it mattered. She would never hear her name spoken again.

Obsidian handed her pin back to her. He caught her hand as she reached for it and rubbed his thumb over her calluses.

He stopped at First Street and asked which way again. Then, after turning right as she had indicated, he parked near the Music Center. There, he took a folded paper from the dashboard and unfolded it. Rye recognized it as a street map, though the writing on it meant nothing to her. He flattened the map, took her hand again, and put her index finger on one spot. He touched her, touched himself, pointed toward the floor. In effect, “We are here.” She knew he wanted to know where she was going. She wanted to tell him, but she shook her head sadly. She had lost reading and writing. That was her most serious impairment and her most painful. She had taught history at UCLA. She had done freelance writing. Now she could not even read her own manuscripts. She had a houseful of books that she could neither read nor bring herself to use as fuel. And she had a memory that would not bring back to her much of what she had read before.

She stared at the map, trying to calculate. She had been born in Pasadena, had lived for fifteen years in Los Angeles. Now she was near L.A. Civic Center. She knew the relative positions of the two cities, knew streets, directions, even knew to stay away from freeways which might be blocked by wrecked cars and destroyed overpasses. She ought to know how to point out Pasadena even though she could not recognize the word.

Hesitantly, she placed her hand over a pale orange patch in the upper right corner of the map. That should be right. Pasadena.

Obsidian lifted her hand and looked under it, then folded the map and put it back on the dashboard. He could read, she realized belatedly. He could probably write, too. Abruptly, she hated him— deep, bitter hatred. What did literacy mean to him—a grown man who played cops and robbers? But he was literate and she was not. She never would be. She felt sick to her stomach with hatred, frustration, and jealousy. And only a few inches from her hand was a loaded gun.

She held herself still, staring at him, almost seeing his blood. But her rage crested and ebbed and she did nothing.

Obsidian reached for her hand with hesitant familiarity. She looked at him. Her face had already revealed too much.

No person still living in what was left of human society could fail to recognize that expression, that jealousy.

She closed her eyes wearily, drew a deep breath. She had experienced longing for the past, hatred of the present, growing hopelessness, purposelessness, but she had never experienced such a powerful urge to kill another person. She had left her home, finally, because she had come near to killing herself. She had found no reason to stay alive. Perhaps that was why she had gotten into Obsidian’s car. She had never before done such a thing.

He touched her mouth and made chatter motions with thumb and fingers. Could she speak?

She nodded and watched his milder envy come and go. Now both had admitted what it was not safe to admit, and there had been no violence. He tapped his mouth and forehead and shook his head. He did not speak or comprehend spoken language. The illness had played with them, taking away, she suspected, what each valued most.

She plucked at his sleeve, wondering why he had decided on his own to keep the LAPD alive with what he had left. He was sane enough otherwise. Why wasn’t he at home raising corn, rabbits, and children? But she did not know how to ask. Then he put his hand on her thigh and she had another question to deal with.

She shook her head. Disease, pregnancy, helpless, solitary agony…no.

He massaged her thigh gently and smiled in obvious disbelief.

No one had touched her for three years. She had not wanted anyone to touch her. What kind of world was this to chance bringing a child into even if the father were willing to stay and help raise it? It was too bad, though. Obsidian could not know how attractive he was to her—young, probably younger than she was, clean, asking for what he wanted rather than demanding it. But none of that mattered. What were a few moments of pleasure measured against a lifetime of consequences?

He pulled her closer to him and for a moment she let herself enjoy the closeness. He smelled good—male and good. She pulled away reluctantly.

He sighed, reached toward the glove compartment. She stiffened, not knowing what to expect, but all he took out was a small box. The writing on it meant nothing to her. She did not understand until he broke the seal, opened the box, and took out a condom. He looked at her and she first looked away in surprise. Then she giggled. She could not remember when she had last giggled.

He grinned, gestured toward the backseat, and she laughed aloud. Even in her teens, she had disliked backseats of cars. But she looked around at the empty streets and ruined buildings, then she got out and into the backseat. He let her put the condom on him, then seemed surprised at her eagerness.

Sometime later, they sat together, covered by his coat, unwilling to become clothed near-strangers again just yet. He made rock-the-baby gestures and looked questioningly at her.

She swallowed, shook her head. She did not know how to tell him her children were dead.

He took her hand and drew a cross in it with his index finger, then made his baby-rocking gesture again.

She nodded, held up three fingers, then turned away, trying to shut out a sudden flood of memories. She had told herself that the children growing up now were to be pitied. They would run through the downtown canyons with no real memory of what the buildings had been or even how they had come to be. Today’s children gathered books as well as wood to be burned as fuel. They ran through the streets chasing one another and hooting like chimpanzees. They had no future. They were now all they would ever be.

He put his hand on her shoulder and she turned suddenly, fumbling for his small box, then urging him to make love to her again. He could give her forgetfulness and pleasure. Until now, nothing had been able to do that. Until now, every day had brought her closer to the time when she would do what she had left home to avoid doing: putting her gun in her mouth and pulling the trigger.

She asked Obsidian if he would come home with her, stay with her.

He looked surprised and pleased once he understood. But he did not answer at once. Finally he shook his head as she had feared he might. He was probably having too much fun playing cops and robbers and picking up women.

She dressed in silent disappointment, unable to feel any anger toward him. Perhaps he already had a wife and a home. That was likely. The illness had been harder on men than on women—had killed more men, had left male survivors more severely impaired. Men like Obsidian were rare. Women either settled for less or stayed alone. If they found an Obsidian, they did what they could to keep him. Rye suspected he had someone younger, prettier keeping him.

He touched her while she was strapping her gun on and asked with a complicated series of gestures whether it was loaded.

She nodded grimly.

He patted her arm.

She asked once more if he would come home with her, this time using a different series of gestures. He had seemed hesitant. Perhaps he could be courted.

He got out and into the front seat without responding.

She took her place in front again, watching him. Now he plucked at his uniform and looked at her. She thought she was being asked something, but did not know what it was.

He took off his badge, tapped it with one finger, then tapped his chest. Of course.

She took the badge from his hand and pinned her wheat stalk to it. If playing cops and robbers was his only insanity, let him play. She would take him, uniform and all. It occurred to her that she might eventually lose him to someone he would meet as he had met her. But she would have him for a while.

He took the street map down again, tapped it, pointed vaguely northeast toward Pasadena, then looked at her.

She shrugged, tapped his shoulder, then her own, and held up her index and second fingers tight together, just to be sure.

He grasped the two fingers and nodded. He was with her.

She took the map from him and threw it onto the dashboard. She pointed back southwest—back toward home. Now she did not have to go to Pasadena. Now she could go on having a brother there and two nephews—three right-handed males. Now she did not have to find out for certain whether she was as alone as she feared. Now she was not alone.

Obsidian took Hill Street south, then Washington west, and she leaned back, wondering what it would be like to have someone again. With what she had scavenged, what she had preserved, and what she grew, there was easily enough food for them. There was certainly room enough in a four-bedroom house. He could move his possessions in. Best of all, the animal across the street would pull back and possibly not force her to kill him.

Obsidian had drawn her closer to him and she had put her head on his shoulder when suddenly he braked hard, almost throwing her off the seat. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that someone had run across the street in front of the car. One car on the street and someone had to run in front of it.

Straightening up, Rye saw that the runner was a woman, fleeing from an old frame house to a boarded-up storefront. She ran silently, but the man who followed her a moment later shouted what sounded like garbled words as he ran. He had something in his hand. Not a gun. A knife, perhaps.

The woman tried a door, found it locked, looked around desperately, finally snatched up a fragment of glass broken from the storefront window. With this she turned to face her pursuer. Rye thought she would be more likely to cut her own hand than to hurt anyone else with the glass.

Obsidian jumped from the car, shouting. It was the first time Rye had heard his voice—deep and hoarse from disuse. He made the same sound over and over the way some speechless people did, “Da, da, da!”

Rye got out of the car as Obsidian ran toward the couple. He had drawn his gun. Fearful, she drew her own and released the safety. She looked around to see who else might be attracted to the scene. She saw the man glance at Obsidian, then suddenly lunge at the woman. The woman jabbed his face with her glass, but he caught her arm and managed to stab her twice before Obsidian shot him.

The man doubled, then toppled, clutching his abdomen. Obsidian shouted, then gestured Rye over to help the woman.

Rye moved to the woman’s side, remembering that she had little more than bandages and antiseptic in her pack. But the woman was beyond help. She had been stabbed with a long, slender boning knife.

She touched Obsidian to let him know the woman was dead. He had bent to check the wounded man who lay still and also seemed dead. But as Obsidian looked around to see what Rye wanted, the man opened his eyes. Face contorted, he seized Obsidian’s just-holstered revolver and fired. The bullet caught Obsidian in the temple and he collapsed.

It happened just that simply, just that fast. An instant later, Rye shot the wounded man as he was turning the gun on her.

And Rye was alone—with three corpses.

She knelt beside Obsidian, dry-eyed, frowning, trying to understand why everything had suddenly changed. Obsidian was gone. He had died and left her—like everyone else.

Two very small children came out of the house from which the man and woman had run—a boy and girl perhaps three years old. Holding hands, they crossed the street toward Rye. They stared at her, then edged past her and went to the dead woman. The girl shook the woman’s arm as though trying to wake her.

This was too much. Rye got up, feeling sick to her stomach with grief and anger. If the children began to cry, she thought she would vomit.

They were on their own, those two kids. They were old enough to scavenge. She did not need any more grief. She did not need a stranger’s children who would grow up to be hairless chimps.

She went back to the car. She could drive home, at least. She remembered how to drive.

The thought that Obsidian should be buried occurred to her before she reached the car, and she did vomit.

She had found and lost the man so quickly. It was as though she had been snatched from comfort and security and given a sudden, inexplicable beating. Her head would not clear. She could not think.

Somehow, she made herself go back to him, look at him. She found herself on her knees beside him with no memory of having knelt. She stroked his face, his beard. One of the children made a noise and she looked at them, at the woman who was probably their mother. The children looked back at her, obviously frightened. Perhaps it was their fear that reached her finally.

She had been about to drive away and leave them. She had almost done it, almost left two toddlers to die. Surely there had been enough dying. She would have to take the children home with her. She would not be able to live with any other decision. She looked around for a place to bury three bodies. Or two. She wondered if the murderer were the children’s father. Before the silence, the police had always said some of the most dangerous calls they went out on were domestic disturbance calls. Obsidian should have known that—not that the knowledge would have kept him in the car. It would not have held her back either. She could not have watched the woman murdered and done nothing.

She dragged Obsidian toward the car. She had nothing to dig with her, and no one to guard for her while she dug. Better to take the bodies with her and bury them next to her husband and her children. Obsidian would come home with her after all.

When she had gotten him onto the floor in the back, she returned for the woman. The little girl, thin, dirty, solemn, stood up and unknowingly gave Rye a gift. As Rye began to drag the woman by her arms, the little girl screamed, “No!”

Rye dropped the woman and stared at the girl.

“No!” the girl repeated. She came to stand beside the woman. “Go away!” she told Rye.

“Don’t talk,” the little boy said to her. There was no blurring or confusing of sounds. Both children had spoken and Rye had understood. They boy looked at the dead murderer and moved further from him. He took the girl’s hand. “Be quiet,” he whispered.

Fluent speech! Had the woman died because she could talk and had taught her children to talk? Had she been killed by a husband’s festering anger or by a stranger’s jealous rage? And the children… they must have been born after the silence. Had the disease run its course, then? Or were these children simply immune? Certainly they had had time to fall sick and silent. Rye’s mind leaped ahead. What if children of three or fewer years were safe and able to learn language? What if all they needed were teachers? Teachers and protectors.

Rye glanced at the dead murderer. To her shame, she thought she could understand some of the passions that must have driven him, whoever he was. Anger, frustration, hopelessness, insane jealousy…how many more of him were there—people willing to destroy what they could not have?

Obsidian had been the protector, had chosen that role for who knew what reason. Perhaps putting on an obsolete uniform and patrolling the empty streets had been what he did instead of putting a gun into his mouth. And now that there was something worth protecting, he was gone.

She had been a teacher. A good one. She had been a protector, too, though only of herself. She had kept herself alive when she had no reason to live. If the illness let these children alone, she could keep them alive.

Somehow she lifted the dead woman into her arms and placed her on the backseat of the car. The children began to cry, but she knelt on the broken pavement and whispered to them, fearful of frightening them with the harshness of her long unused voice.

“It’s all right,” she told them. “You’re going with us, too. Come on.” She lifted them both, one in each arm. They were so light. Had they been getting enough to eat?

The boy covered her mouth with his hand, but she moved her face away. “It’s all right for me to talk,” she told him. “As long as no one’s around, it’s all right.” She put the boy down on the front seat of the car and he moved over without being told to, to make room for the girl. When they were both in the car Rye leaned against the window, looking at them, seeing that they were less afraid now, that they watched her with at least as much curiosity as fear.

“I’m Valerie Rye,” she said, savoring the words. “It’s all right for you to talk to me.”

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 redecoration, 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 navigational 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 aversion: 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.

RIDGE RUNNING

Kim Stanley Robinson

Three men sit on a rock. The rock is wet granite, a bouldertop surrounded by snow that has melted just enough to reveal it. Snow extends away from the rock in every direction. To the east it drops to treeline, to the west it rises to a rock wall that points up and ends at sky. The boulder the three men are on is the only break in the snow from the treeline to rock wall. Snowshoe tracks lead to the rock, coming from the north on a traverse across the slope. The men sit sunning like marmots.

One man chews snow. He is short and broad-chested, with thick arms and legs. He adjusts blue nylon gaiters that cover his boots and lower legs. His thighs are bare, he wears gray gym shorts. He leans over to strap a boot into an orange plastic snowshoe.

The man sitting beside him says, “Brian, I thought we were going to eat lunch.” This second man is big, and he wears sunglasses that clip onto prescription wire-rims.

“Pe-ter,” Brian drawls. “We can’t eat here comfortably, there’s barely room to sit. As soon as we get around that shoulder”—he points south—“the traverse will be done and we’ll be at the pass.”

Peter takes in a deep breath, lets it out. “I need to rest.”

“O.K.,” Brian says, “do it. I’m just going to go around to the pass, I’m tired of sitting.” He picks up the other orange snowshoe, sticks his boot in the binding.

The third man, who is medium height and very thin, has been staring at the snow granules on his boot. Now he picks up a yellow snowshoe and kicks into it. Peter sees him do it, sighs, bends over to yank his aluminum-and-cord snowshoes out of the snow they are stuck in.

“Look at that hummingbird,” the third man says with pleasure and points.

He is pointing at blank snow. His two companions look where he is pointing, then glance at each other uncomfortably. Peter shakes his head, looks at his boots.

“I didn’t know there were hummingbirds in the Sierras,” the third man says. “What a beauty!” He looks at Brian uncertainly. “Are there hummingbirds in the Sierras?”

“Well,” Brian says, “actually, I think there are. But…”

“But not this time, Joe,” Peter finishes.

“Ah,” Joe says, and stares at the spot in the snow. “I could have sworn…” Peter looks at Brian, his face squinched up in distress. “Maybe the light breaking on that clump of snow,” Joe says, mystified. “Oh, well.”

Brian stands and hoists a compact blue pack onto his shoulders, and steps off the boulder onto the snow. He leans over to adjust a binding. “Let’s get going, Joe,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.” And to Peter: “This spring snow is great.”

“If you’re a goddamn polar bear,” Peter says.

Brian shakes his head, and his silvered sunglasses flash reflections of snow and Peter. “This is the best time to be up here. If you would ever come with us in January or February you’d know that.”

“Summer!” Peter says as he picks up his long frame pack. “Summer’s what I like—catch the rays, see the flowers, walk around without these damn flippers on—” He swings his pack onto his back, steps back quickly (clatter of aluminum on granite) to keep his balance. He buckles his waistbelt awkwardly, looks at the sun. It is near midday. He wipes his forehead.

“You don’t even come up with us in the summer anymore,” Brian points out. “What has it been, four years?”

“Time,” Peter says. “I don’t have any time, and that’s a fact.”

“Just all your life,” Brian scoffs. Peter shakes off the remark with an irritated scowl, and steps onto the snow.

They turn to look at Joe, who is still inspecting the snow with a fierce squint.

“Hey, Joe!” Brian says.

Joe starts and looks up.

“Time to hike, remember?”

“Oh, yeah, just a second.” Joe readies himself.

Three men snowshoeing.

Brian leads. He sinks about a foot into the snow with every step. Joe follows, placing his yellow snowshoes carefully in the prints of Brian’s, so that he sinks hardly at all. Peter pays no attention to prints, and his snowshoes crash into and across the holes. His snowshoes slide left, downhill, and he slips frequently.

The slope steepens. The three men sweat. Brian slips left one time too often and stops to remove his snowshoes. They can no longer see the rock wall above them, the slope is so steep. Brian ties his snowshoes to his pack, puts the pack back on. He puts a glove on his right hand and walks canted over so he can punch into the slope with his fist.

Joe and Peter stop where Brian stops, to make the same changes. Joe points ahead to Brian, who is now crossing a section of slope steeper than forty-five degrees.

“Strange three-legged hill animal,” says Joe, and laughs. “Snoweater.”

Peter looks in his pack for his glove. “Why don’t we go down into the trees and avoid this damn traverse?”

“The view isn’t as good.”

Peter sighs. Joe waits, scuffs snow, looks at Peter curiously. Pete has put suntan oil on his face, and the sweat has poured from his forehead, so that his stubbled cheeks shine with reflected light. He says, “Am I imagining this, or are we working really hard?”

“We’re working very hard,” Joe says. “Traverses are difficult.”

They watch Brian, who is near the middle of the steepest section. “You guys do this snow stuff for fun?” Peter says.

After a moment Joe starts. “I’m sorry,” he says. “What were we talking about?”

Peter shrugs, examines Joe closely. “You O.K.?” he asks, putting his gloved hand to Joe’s arm.

“Yeah, yeah. I just… forgot. Again!”

“Everyone forgets sometimes.”

“I know, I know.” With a discouraged sigh Joe steps off into Brian’s prints. Peter follows.

From above they appear little dots, the only moving objects in a sea of white and black. Snow blazes white and prisms flash from sunglasses. They wipe their foreheads, stop now and then to catch their breath. Brian pulls ahead, Pete falls behind. Joe steps out the traverse with care, talking to himself in undertones. Their gloves get wet, there are ice bracelets around their wrists. Below them solitary trees at treeline wave in a breeze, but on the slope it is windless and hot.

The slope lessens, and they are past the shoulder. Brian pulls off his pack and gets out his groundpad, sits on it. He roots in the pack. After a while Joe joins him. “Whew!” Joe says. “That was a hard traverse.”

“Not really hard,” Brian replies. “Just boring.” He eats some M&M’s, waves a handful up at the ridge above. “I’m tired of traversing, though, that’s for sure. I’m going up to the ridge so I can walk down it to the pass.”

Joe looks at the wall of snow leading up to the ridge. “Yeah, well, I think Pete and I will continue around the corner here and go past Lake Doris to the pass. It’s almost level from here on.”

“True. I’m going to go up there anyway.”

“All right. We’ll see you in the pass in a while.” Brian looks at Joe. “You’ll be all right?”

“Sure.”

Brian gets his pack on, turns and begins walking up the slope, bending forward to take big slow strides. Watching him, Joe says to himself, “Humped splayfoot pack beast, yes. House-backed creature. Giant snow snail. Yo ho for the mountains. Rum de dum. Rum de dum de dum.”

Peter appears around the shoulder, walking slowly and carelessly. He spreads his groundpad, sits beside Joe. After a time his breathing slows. “Where’s Brian?”

“He went up there.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

“I thought we might go around to the pass the way the trail goes.”

“Thank God.”

“We’ll get to go by Lake Doris.”

“The renowned Lake Doris,” Peter scoffs.

Joe waves a finger to scold. “It is nice, you know.”

Joe and Peter walk. Soon their breathing hits a regular rhythm. They cross a meadow tucked into the side of the range like a terrace. It is covered with suncones, small melt depressions in the snow, and the walking is uneven.

“My feet are freezing,” Pete says from several yards behind Joe.

Joe looks back to reply. “It’s a cooling system. Most of my blood is hot—so hot I can hold snow in my hand and my hand won’t get cold. But my feet are chilled. It cools the blood. I figure there’s a spot around my knees that’s perfect. My knees feel great. I live there and everything’s comfortable.”

“My knees hurt.”

“Hmm,” Joe says. “Now that is a problem.”

After a silence filled by the squeak of snow and the crick of boot against snowshoe, Pete says, “I don’t understand why I’m getting so tired. I’ve been playing full-court basketball all winter.”

“Mountains aren’t as flat as basketball courts.”

Joe’s pace is a bit faster than Pete’s, and slowly he pulls ahead. He looks left, to the tree-filled valley, but slips a few times and turns his gaze back to the snow in front of him. His breaths rasp in his throat. He wipes sweat from an eyebrow. He hums unmusically, then starts a breath-chant, muttering a word for each step: animal, animal, animal, animal, animal. He watches his snowshoes crush patterns onto the points and ridges of the pocked, glaring snow. White light blasts around the sides of his sunglasses. He stops to tighten a binding, looks up when he is done. There is a tree a few score yards ahead—he adjusts his course for it, and walks again.

After a while he reaches the tree. He looks at it; a gnarled old Sierra juniper, thick and not very tall. Around it hundreds of black pine needles are scattered, each sunk in its own tiny pocket in the snow. Joe opens his mouth several times, says “Lugwump?” He shakes his head, walks up to the tree, puts a hand on it. “I don’t know who you are?” He leans in, his nose is inches from bark. The bark peels away from the tree like papery sheets of filo dough. He puts his arms out, hugs the trunk. “Tr-eeeee,” he says. “Tr-eeeeeeee.”

He is still saying it when Peter, puffing hard, joins him. Joe steps around the tree, gestures at a drop beyond the tree, a small bowl notched high in the side of the range.

“That’s Lake Doris,” he says, and laughs.

Blankly Peter looks at the small circle of flat snow in the center of the bowl. “Mostly a summer phenomenon,” Joe says. Peter purses his lips and nods. “But not the pass,” Joe adds, and points west.

West of the lake bowl the range—a row of black peaks emerging from the snow—drops a bit, in a deep, symmetrical U, an almost perfect semicircle, a glacier road filled with blue sky. Joe smiles. “That’s Rockbound Pass. There’s no way you could forget a sight like that. I think I see Brian up there. I’m going to go up and join him.”

He takes off west, walking around the side of the lake until he can go straight up the slope rising from the lake to the pass. The snow thins on the slope, and his plastic snowshoes grate on stretches of exposed granite. He moves quickly, takes big steps and deep breaths. The slope levels and he can see the spine of the pass. Wind blows in his face, growing stronger with every stride. When he reaches the flat of the saddle in mid-pass it is a full gale. His shirt is blown cold against him, his eyes water. He can feel sweat drying on his face. Brian is higher in the pass, descending the north spine. His high shouts are blown past Joe. Joe takes off his pack and swings his arms around, stretches them out to the west. He is in the pass.

Below him to the west is the curving bowl of a cirque, one dug by the glacier that carved the pass. The cirque’s walls are nearly free of snow, and great tiers of granite gleam in the sun. A string of lakes—flat white spots—mark the valley that extends westward out of the cirque. Lower ranges lie in rows out to the haze-fuzzed horizon.

Behind him Lake Doris’s bowl blocks the view of the deep valley they have left behind. Joe looks back to the west; wind slams his face again. Brian hops down the saddle to him, and Joe whoops. “It’s windy again,” he calls.

“It’s always windy in this pass,” Brian says. He strips off his pack, whoops himself. He approaches Joe, looks around. “Man, for a while there about a year ago I thought we’d never be here again.” He claps Joe on the back. “I’m sure glad you’re here,” he says, voice full.

Joe nods. “Me, too. Me, too.”

Peter joins them. “Look at this,” calls Brian, waving west. “Isn’t this amazing?” Peter looks at the cirque for a moment and nods. He takes off his pack and sits behind a rock, out of the wind.

“It’s cold,” he says. His hands quiver as he opens his pack.

“Put on a sweatshirt,” Brian says sharply. “Eat some food.”

Joe removes his snowshoes, wanders around the pass away from Brian and Peter. The exposed rock is shattered tan granite, covered with splotches of lichen, red and black and green. Joe squats to inspect a crack, picks up a triangular plate of rock. He tosses it west. It falls in a long arc.

Brian and Peter eat lunch, leaning against a boulder that protects them from the wind. Where they are sitting it is fairly warm. Brian eats slices of cheese cut from a big block of it. Peter puts a tortilla in his lap, squeezes peanut butter out of a plastic tube onto it. He picks up a bottle of liquid butter and squirts a stream of it over the peanut butter.

Brian looks at the concoction and squints. “That looks like shit.”

“Hey,” Peter says. “Food is food. I thought you were the big pragmatist.”

“Yeah, but…”

Pete wolfs down the tortilla, Brian works on the block of cheese.

“So how did you like the morning’s hike?” Brian asks.

Pete says, “I read that snowshoes were invented by Plains Indians, for level places. In the mountains, those traverses”—he takes a bite—“those traverses were terrible.”

“You used to love it up here.”

“That was in the summers.”

“It’s better now, there’s no one else up here. And you can go anywhere you want over snow.”

“I’ve noticed you think so. But I don’t like the snow. Too much work.”

“Work,” Brian scoffs. “The old law office is warping your conception of work, Peter.”

Peter chomps irritably, looking offended. They continue to eat. One of Joe’s nonsense songs floats by.

“Speaking of warped brains,” Peter says.

“Yeah. You keeping an eye on him?”

“I guess so. I don’t know what to do when he loses it, though.”

Brian arches back and turns to look over the boulder. “Hey, Joe!” he shouts. “Come eat some lunch!” They both watch Joe jerk at the sound of Brian’s voice. But after a moment’s glance around, Joe returns to playing with the rocks.

“He’s out again,” says Brian.

“That,” Peter says, “is one sick boy. Those doctors really did it to him.”

“That crash did it to him. The doctors saved his life. You didn’t see him at the hospital like I did. Man, ten or twenty years ago an injury like that would have left him a vegetable for sure. When I saw him I thought he was a goner.”

“Yeah, I know, I know. The man who flew through his windshield.”

“But you don’t know what they did to him.”

“So what did they do to him?”

“Well, they stimulated what they call axonal sprouting in the areas where neuronal connections were busted up—which means, basically, that they grew his brain back!”

“Grew it?”

“Yeah! Well some parts of it—the broken connections, you know. Like the arm of a starfish. You know?”

“No. But I’ll take your word for it.” Peter looks over the boulder at Joe. “I hope they grew back everything, yuk yuk. He might have one of his forgetting spells and walk over the edge there.”

“Nah. He just forgets how to talk, as far as I can tell. Part of the reorganization, I think. It doesn’t matter much up here.” Brian arches up. “Hey, JOE! FOOD!”

“It does too matter,” Peter says. “Say he forgets the word cliff. He forgets the concept, he says to himself I’m just going to step down to that lake there, and whoops, over the edge he goes.”

“Nah,” Brian says. “It doesn’t work that way. Concepts don’t need language.”

“What?” Peter cries. “Concepts don’t need language? Are you kidding? Man I thought Joe was the crazy one around here.”

“No seriously,” Brian says, shifting rapidly from his usual reserve to interested animation. “Sensory input is already a thought, and the way we field it is conceptual. Enough to keep you from walking off cliffs anyway.” Despite this assertion he looks over his shoulder again. There stands Joe nodding as if in agreement with him.

“Yes, language is a contact lens,” Joe says.

Peter and Brian look at each other.

“A contact lens at the back of the eyeball. Color filters into this lens, which is made of nameglass, and its reflected to the correct corner of the brain, tree corner or rock corner.”

Peter and Brian chew that one over.

“So you lose your contact lenses?” Brian ventures.

“Yeah!” Joe looks at him with an appreciative glance. “Sort of.”

“So what’s in your mind then?”

Joe shrugs. “I wish I knew.” After a while, struggling for expression: “I feel things. I feel that something’s not right. Maybe I have another language then, but I’m not sure. Nothing looks right, it’s all just… color. The names are gone. You know?”

Brian shakes his head, involuntarily grinning.

“Hmm,” Peter says. “It sounds like you might have some trouble getting your driver’s license renewed.” All three of them laugh.

Brian stands, stuffs plastic bags into his pack. “Ready for some ridge running?” he says to the other two.

“Wait a second,” Peter says, “we just got here. Why don’t you kick back for a while? This pass is supposed to be the high point of the trip, and we’ve only been here half an hour.”

“Longer than that,” says Brian.

“Not long enough. I’m tired!”

“We’ve only hiked about four miles today,” Brian replies impatiently. “All of us worked equally hard. Now we can walk down a ridge all afternoon, it’ll be great!”

Peter sucks air between his teeth, holds it in, decides not to speak. He begins jamming bags into his pack.

They stand ready to leave the pass, packs and snowshoes on their backs. Brian makes a final adjustment to hipbelt—Pete looks up the spine they are about to ascend—Joe stares down at the huge bowl of rock and snow to the west. Afternoon sun glares. The shadow of a cloud hurries across the cirque toward them, jumps up the west side of the pass and they are in it, for a moment.

“Look!” Joe cries. He points at the south wall of the pass. Brian and Pete look—

A flash of brown. A pair of horns, blur of legs, the distant clacks of rock falling.

“A bighorn sheep!” says Brian. “Wow!” He hurries across the saddle of the pass to the south spine, looking up frequently. “There it is again! Come on!”

Joe and Pete hurry after him. “You guys will never catch that thing,” says Peter.

The south wall is faulted and boulderish, and they zig and zag from one small shelf of snow to the next. They grab outcroppings and stick fists in cracks, and strain to push themselves up steps that are waist-high. The wind peels across the spine of the wall and keeps them cool. They breathe in gasps, stop frequently. Brian pulls ahead, Peter falls behind. Brian and Joe call to each other about the bighorn.

Brian and Joe top the spine, scramble up the decreasing slope. The ridge edge—a hump of shattered rock, twenty or twenty-five feet wide, like a high road—is nearly level, but still rises enough to block their view south. They hurry up to the point where the ridge levels, and suddenly they can see south for miles.

They stop to look. The range rises and falls in even swoops to a tall peak. Beyond the peak it drops abruptly and rises again, up and down and up, culminating in a huge knot of black peaks. To the east the steep snowy slope drops to the valley paralleling the range. To the west a series of spurs and cirques alternate, making a broken desert of rock and snow.

The range cuts down the middle of it all, high above everything else that can be seen. Joe taps his boot on solid rock. “Fossil backbone, primeval earth being,” he says.

“I think I still see that sheep,” says Brian, pointing. “Where’s Peter?”

Peter appears, face haggard. He stumbles on a rock, steps quickly to keep his balance. When he reaches Brian and Joe he lets his pack thump to the ground.

“This is ridiculous,” he says. “I have to rest.”

“We can’t exactly camp here,” Brian says sarcastically, and gestures at the jumble of rock they are sitting on.

“I don’t care,” Peter says, and sits down.

“We’ve only been hiking an hour since lunch,” Brian objects, “and we’re trying to close in on that bighorn!”

“Tired,” Peter says. “I have to rest.”

“You get tired pretty fast these days!”

An angry silence.

Joe says in a mild voice. “You guys sure are bitching at each other a lot.”

A long silence. Brian and Peter look in different directions.

Joe points down at the first dip in the ridge, where there is a small flat of granite slabs and corners filled with sand. “Why don’t we camp there? Brian and I can drop our packs and go on up the ridge for a walk. Pete can rest and maybe start a fire later. If you can find wood.”

Brian and Pete both agree to the plan, and they descend to the saddle campsite.

Two men ridge running. They make swift progress up the smooth rise, along the jumbled road at the top of the range. The bare rock they cross is smashed into fragments, splintered by ice and lightning. Breaking out of the blackish granite are knobs of tan rock, crushed into concentric rings of shards. They marvel at boulders which look like they have sat on the range since it began to rise. They jump from rock to rock, flexing freed shoulders. Brian points ahead and calls out when he sees the sheep. “Do you see it?”

“Sure do,” Joe says, but without looking up. Brian notices this and snorts disgustedly.

Shadows of the range darken the valley to the east. Joe hops from foothold to foothold, babbling at Brian all the while from several yards behind him. “Name it, name it. You name it. Naammme. What an idea. I’ve got three blisters on my feet. I named the one on the left heel Amos.” Pause to climb a shoulder-high slab of granite. “I named the one on the right heel Crouch. Then I’ve got one on the front of my right ankle, and I named that one Achilles. That way when I feel it it’s not like pain, it’s like a little joke. Twinges in my heel”—panting so he can talk—“are little hellos, hellos with every step. Amos here, hi, Joe; Crouch here, hi, Joe. It’s amazing. The way I feel I probably don’t need boots at all. I should take them off!”

“You’d probably better keep them on,” Brian says seriously. Joe grins.

The incline becomes steeper and the edge of the ridge narrows. They slow down, step more carefully. The shattered rock gives way to great faulted blocks of solid mountain. They find themselves straddling the ridge on all fours, left feet on the east slope and right feet on the west. Both sides drop sharply away, especially the west. Sun gilds this steeper slope. Joe runs his hand down the edge of the range.

The ridge widens out, and they can walk again. The rock is shattered, all brittle plated angular splinters, covered with lichen. “Great granite,” Joe says.

“This is actually diorite,” Brian says. “Diorite or gabbro. Made of feldspar and darker stuff.”

“Oh, don’t give me that,” Joe says. “I’m doing well just to remember granite. Besides, this stuff has been granite for a lot longer than geologists have been naming things. They can’t go messing with a name like that.” Still, he looks more closely at the rock. “Gabbro, gabbro… sounds like one of my words.”

They wind between boulders, spring up escarpments. They come upon a knob of quartz that rises out of the black granite. The knob is infinitely cracked, as if struck on top by a giant sledgehammer. “Rose quartz,” says Brian, and moves on. Joe stares at the knob, mouth open. He kneels to pick up chunks of the quartz, peers at them. He sees that Brian is moving on. Rising, he says to himself, “I wish I knew everything.”

Suddenly they are at the top. Everything is below them. Beside Brian, Joe stops short. They stand silently, inches apart. Wind whips around them. To the south the range drops and rises yet again, to the giant knob of peaks they saw when they first topped the ridge. At every point of the compass mountains drop away, white folds crumpling to every horizon. Nothing moves but the wind. Brian says, “I wonder where that sheep went to.”

Two men sitting on a mountaintop. Brian digs into a pile of rocks, pulls out a rusty tin box. “Aha,” he says. “The sheep left us a clue.” He takes a piece of paper from the box. “Here’s its name—Diane Hunter.”

“Oh, bullshit!” cries Joe. “That’s no name. Let me see that.” He grabs the box out of Brian’s hand and the top falls off. A shower of paper, ten or twenty pieces of it, pops out of the box and floats down to the east, spun by the wind. Joe pulls out a piece still wedged in the box. He reads, “Robert Spencer, July 20th, 2014. It’s a name box. It’s for people who want to leave a record of their climb.”

Brian laughs. “How could anyone get into something like that? Especially on a peak you can just walk right up to.” He laughs again.

“I suppose I should try to recover as many as I can,” Joe says dubiously, looking down the steep side of the peak.

“What for? It’s not going to erase their experience.”

“You never know,” says Joe, laughing to himself. “It very well might. Just think, all over the United States the memory of this peak has popped right out of twenty people’s heads.” He waves to the east. “Bye-bye…”

They sit in silence. Wind blows. Clouds pass by. The sun closes on the horizon. Joe talks in short bursts, waves his arms. Brian listens, watches the clouds. At one point he says, “You’re a new being, Joseph.” Joe cocks his head at this.

Then they just sit and watch. It gets cold.

“Hawk,” says Brian in a quiet voice. They watch the black dot soar on the updraft of the range.

“It’s the sheep,” says Joe. “It’s a shapechanger.”

“Nah. Doesn’t even move the same.”

“I say it is.”

The dot turns in the wind and rises, circling higher and higher above the world, coasting along the updraft with minute wing adjustments, until it hovers over the giant, angular knotpeak. Suddenly it plummets toward the peaks, stooping faster than objects fall. It disappears behind the jagged black teeth. “Hawk,” Joe breathes. “Hawuck divvve.”

They look at each other.

Brian says, “That’s where we’ll go tomorrow.”

Glissading down the snow expanse, skidding five or ten feet with each stiff-legged step, the two of them make rapid progress back to camp. The walking is dreamlike as they pump left… right… left… right down the slope.

“So what about that bighorn sheep?” says Joe. “I never did see any prints.”

“Maybe we shared a hallucination,” says Brian. “What do they call that?”

“A folie à deux.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.” A pause while they skid down a steep bank of snow, straight-legged as if they are skiing. “I hope Pete got a fire going. Damn cold up here.”

“A feature of the psychic landscape,” Joe says, talking to himself again. “Sure, why not? It looks about like what I’d expect, I’ll tell you that. No wonder I’m getting things confused. What you saw was probably a fugitive thought of mine, escaping off across the waste. Bighorn sheep, sure.”

After a while they can see the saddle where they left Peter, far below them in the rocky expanse. There is a spark of yellow. They howl and shout. “Fire! FIRE!”

In the sandy camp, situated in a dip between slabs of granite, they greet Pete and root through their packs with the speed of hungry men. Joe takes his pot, jams it with snow, puts it on the fire. He sits down beside Peter.

“You guys were gone a long time,” Peter says. “Did you find that sheep?”

Joe shakes his head. “It turned into a hawk.” He moves his pot to a bigger flame. “Sure am glad you got this fire going,” he says. “It must have been a bitch to start in this wind.” He starts to pull off his boots.

“There wasn’t much wood, either,” Pete says. “But I found a dead tree down there a ways.”

Joe prods a burning branch, frowns. “Juniper,” he says with satisfaction. “Good wood.”

Brian appears, dressed in down jacket, down pants, and down booties. Pete falls silent. Glancing at Pete, Joe notices this, and frowns again. He gets up stiffly to go to his pack and get his own down booties. He returns to the fire, finishes taking off his boots. His feet are white and wrinkled, with red blisters.

“Those look sore,” says Pete.

“Nah.” Joe gulps down the melted snow in his pot, starts melting more. He puts his booties on.

They watch the fire in silence.

Joe says, “Remember that time you guys wrestled in the living room of our apartment?”

“Yeah, we got all those carpet burns.”

“And broke the lamp that never worked anyway—”

“And then you went berserk!” Brian laughs. “You went berserk and tried to bite my ear off!” They all laugh, and Pete nods, grinning with embarrassed pride.

“Pete won that one,” Joe says.

“That’s right,” says Brian. “Put my shoulders to the mat, or to the carpet in that case. A victory for maniacs everywhere.”

Ponderously Peter nods, imitating official approval. “But I couldn’t beat you tonight,” he admits. “I’m exhausted. I guess I’m not up to this snow camping.”

“You were strong in those days,” Brian tells him. “But you hiked a radical trail with us today, I’ll tell you. I don’t know too many people who would have come with us, actually.”

“What about Joe here? He was on his back most of last year.”

“Yeah, but he’s crazy now.”

“I was crazy before!” Joe protests, and they laugh.

Brian pours macaroni into his pot, shifts to a rock seat beside Peter so he can tend the pot better. They begin to talk about the days when they all lived together as students. Joe grins to hear them. He nearly overturns his pot, and they call out at him. Pete says, “The black thing is the pot, Joseph, the yellow stuff is fire—try to remember that.” Joe grins. Steam rises from the pots and is whipped east by the evening breeze.

Three men sitting round a fire. Joe gets up, very slowly, and steps carefully to his pack. He unrolls his groundcloth, pulls out his sleeping bag. He straightens up. The evening star hangs in the west. It’s getting darker. Behind him his old friends laugh at something Pete has said.

In the east there are stars. Part of the sky is still a light velvet blue. The wind whistles softly. Joe picks up a rock, looks at it closely. “Rock,” he says. He clenches the rock in his fist, shakes it at the evening star, lofts it skyward. “Rock!” He looks down the range: black dragon back breaking out of blue-white, like consciousness from chaos, an unbroken range of peaks—

“Hey, Joseph! You lamebrain!”

“Space case!”

“—come take care of your pot before it puts out the fire.” Joe walks to the woodpile grinning, puts more wood on the fire, until it blazes up yellow in the dusk.

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.”

RORY

Steven Gould

1

Dr. Anton Grebenchekov banged his head on a doorway for the fourth time that day and swore, “Chyort vosmoi!” His clumsiness infuriated him for many reasons, not the least being the several gymnastic medals he’d earned in college.

“Mind your head, Anton,” said Dr. Ruth McMillian, the section head in biochemistry.

Anton winced again. She’d found nothing to approve of in him since his arrival six hours earlier. Starting with a piece of research he’d published four years before and finishing with his spoken opinions of minutes before, she’d attacked every concept he’d ever voiced. And, more than anything in the solar system, Anton wanted Dr. McMillian to approve of him.

“Excuse me, Dr. McMillian, what were you saying?” He floated into the lab, still rubbing his head.

“Granulopoietin, Anton. You have heard of granulopoietin?” She turned to face him. Close-cropped, salt-and-peppered hair framed her unlined face. She wore an off-white coverall with a stiff, almost Roman collar. She was pretty in a stern way. Anton found her beautiful.

Anton blushed. “My degree is in biochemistry!” he said, almost angrily.

“I wasn’t sure. That last piece you did in the JBC was so vague.”

Anton’s blush turned into a slow burn. Damn her eyes! “If you disapprove of my work and qualifications, why did you approve of my appointment here?”

“I didn’t. That decision was made on Earth, by the head of the Institute.”

“Dr. Herzig,” supplied Anton.

“Hmmph. She probably sent you out here to learn some discipline—some precision in your thinking.”

“And perhaps she sent me out here to put some originality in yours!”

Anton cringed inwardly, wishing he hadn’t spoken. He’d used all the resources available to him to get this position with Dr. McMillian. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

She cut him off. “Perhaps you’re right.” Her face hadn’t changed expression, but her voice was cooler. “I’ll let you get settled in your cabin before dinner. Can you find your way?”

“Yes.”

“Dinner at 1800.” She turned and pulled a notepad from its clip on one of the lab benches and began studying it.

Anton hesitated for a moment, then left. On the way out, he hit his head on the doorway.

Rory flipped a switch on the dictionary clipped to his belt and said, “Define monarch.”

The small black box hesitated an instant, then replied in a pleasant tenor:

“Monarch. One: a person who rules over a kingdom or empire as (a) a sovereign ruler, (b) a constitutional king or queen. Two: someone or something holding a preeminent position or power. Three: a large migratory American but—” the device shut off in mid-sentence as Rory hit the interrupt key.

“Thank you,” said Rory automatically.

“You’re welcome,” the dictionary said.

Rory kicked the wall nearest him and went flying down the passage.

Halfway down, a large figure came floating backwards out of a side passage. Rory had time to yell, “Look out!” before he collided with Anton’s stomach.

He and Rory pinwheeled down the passage.

Rory detached himself in mid-flight and pushed gently away from Anton. They came to a stop against the frame of the next doorway. “You should look both ways before you go into a passageway. Some people go lots faster than me.”

Anton stared at Rory while trying to draw a breath. Rory went on,

“You’re new here. I haven’t seen you. Did you just get here? Where did you come from?”

“Sorry,” Anton finally managed. “I should’ve looked, but I was lost and trying to figure out where I was.”

“Lost?” Rory scratched his head. “In the station?”

“Well, yes,” Anton said, staring. He saw an oddly shaped male adult with slanting eyes, broad short head, and stubby, short fingers. Age was hard to guess, but Anton decided that he must be around twenty. “I’m Anton Grebenchekov.”

“I’m Rory. Are you the one who’s going to work with Dr. Ruth?”

“Dr. Ruth? No…oh, Ruth McMillian. Right. That’s what I hope to do.

What do you do, Rory?”

Rory grinned, and slapped his chest. “I’m the supercargo. That’s because I’m special.” He flipped the switch on the dictionary again.

“Define mongolism.”

The box beeped and said, “Mongolism. A congenital condition characterized by slanting eyes, by a broad short skull, by broad hands with short fingers, by trisomy of the chromosone numbered twenty-one in man, and by moderate to severe mental defi—” Rory hit the interrupt again.

“Thank you,” said Rory.

“You’re welcome,” the box said.

“See? Special. According to Dr. Ruth, there isn’t anybody else like me in space. She says I’m an ‘investigator,’ ” Rory continued. “I investigate things.”

Anton smiled slowly. “I see. Could you investigate something for me?”

“Sure. I’m good at that.”

“How do I get to cabin Ten-C?”

“Ten-C? Oh, you’re in the same pod as me. Follow me.” Rory grabbed one of the lines running down the wall of the passage and pulled himself hand over hand back in the direction he had come with the rapidity of a monkey. Anton followed as best he could.

2

At every junction Rory paused, waiting for Anton to catch up. Then, looking both ways, he kicked off the edges of that containment bulkhead and zoomed down the next passage, often not touching a wall until the next intersection.

Anton gradually got the hang of it. Before long, he was jumping as far as Rory. And a few times he actually stayed clear of the walls. But he was slowed by sightseeing. They passed open doors with people working over equipment strange to him, or closed doors with intriguing labels like Astrophysics, Agronomy, Plant Physiology, Astronomy, Electronics, Metallurgy, Project SETI, Waste Reclamation, and Radiation Safety.

At regular intervals the windows looked out at other parts of the station (a bewildering construct of struts, tubular passages, and spherical chambers) and the small asteroid known as Lucy to which the station was tethered. Anton also knew that if he looked in the correct direction, he could see the faint disk of Ceres, fifteen thousand kilometers away; and sometimes a bright flash of light as the sun caught the Ceres colony’s surface installations just right, thirty-two hours away by shuttle.

“Here we are,” announced Rory as they came to yet another junction with passages going right, up, left, down, and straight ahead. Each of the passages was marked with a letter. “G” was the one to Anton’s right. Rory ducked into that passage. Anton followed. The passage ended with another doorway, pressure door pinned back on sprung hinges, ready to snap shut from any drop of pressure outside the pod. Another identical door was in the passage, ready for any pressure drop inside the pod.

Anton hoped he’d be on the correct side, if that ever happened.

The passage opened onto a spherical lounge perhaps seven meters in diameter. Twelve hexagonal doors, equally spaced, were set into the carpeted surface of the room. They were labeled one through twelve in white numerals, contrasting with the blue curving walls and green doors.

Anton had seen it briefly when he’d left his bags earlier, but the maze of station passageways had left him lost moments after leaving.

“Thank you, Rory,” he said.

Rory grinned. “You’re welcome.” He bounced over to number seven and nulled the door open. “Wanna see Geary? He’s my best friend.”

Anton pushed off and came to a successful stop at the edge of Rory’s doorway. Like all the cabins, Rory’s had a half-meter-square window looking out on space. A ventilator outlet opened on one side of the room and an intake grille was on the other. A storage unit was mounted on one of the six side walls, and belongings were attached to other walls with Velcro fasteners.

“See, he’s also special.”

Anton pulled himself into the room. As he got closer, he saw a sphere made of wire mesh mounted rigidly before the ventilator intake. Bits of vegetable debris clung to the side of the sphere closest to the inlet. Then he saw the rodent floating in the sphere and looking back at him with black, beady eyes.

“This is Geary. He’s sort of a Mongoloid, too.”

“What do you mean, Rory?”

“He’s a Mongolian gerbil.”

Anton nodded. He’d seen the animals used in laboratories on Earth.

They were extremely adaptable to temperature extremes, even if they tended to look more like rats than gerbils.

“Dr. Stan says his name really should be Al—Algernon, I think. I don’t know what that means, do you?” Rory looked around at Anton.

Anton shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Rory continued. “Sometimes, I don’t think Dr. Stan likes me.”

In his cage Geary straightened out his tail, using it to push against one side of the sphere. This propelled him to the other side of the cage, where he hooked small claws in the mesh and squeaked.

“He wants food,” said Rory. “Watch this.” He traced his hand around the outside of the mesh sphere slowly. Clinging to the mesh within, the gerbil followed the hand around. Rory’s hand moved faster and the gerbil began running around the inside of the sphere, centripetal acceleration keeping the creature against the mesh.

“See? Isn’t he special?” Rory pulled his hand away. Geary continued to circle the sphere for a few more circuits then stopped, watching Rory expectantly.

“Yes, Rory. He’s very special.”

Rory took a small paper packet from a drawer and opened a door in the cage. Sticking both hands in, he carefully tore the bag open. Almost immediately the seeds and dried fruit within drifted to the side of the sphere closest to the intake. The gerbil, already waiting there, started eating.

3

Anton checked his watch. It was 1740, twenty minutes before supper, and he hadn’t the faintest idea how to get to the dining hall. “Rory, I need another thing investigated…”

Life at the station soon became routine for Anton. He moved into the lab vacated by Dr. Nielson, the biochemist he had replaced, and started relearning every laboratory technique applicable to biochemistry. At least centrifuges were still the same. But techniques like column chromotography differed radically, requiring either separate centrifuges or vacuum to pull solutions through the appropriate medium. Any technique that required gravity to function properly had to be adapted.

Then again, some techniques worked better without gravity. Thin layer chromotography, using capillary action to transfer fluids, worked better in zero-g, and everybody knew about electrophoresis.

Still, the most minor tasks of handling fluids, powders, and mixing were complicated by no gravity.

As if this weren’t a large enough headache, Dr. McMillian would pop into the lab to observe Anton’s progress. Despite a growing skill in handling zero-g, every time she showed up Anton started fumbling objects or bumping into things. It also didn’t help that she lived in C-pod, right next to Rory in cabin number eight. He couldn’t seem to avoid her.

He took to spending more of his off time with Rory. When he did that, Ruth left him alone.

Rory constantly amazed Anton with bizarre combinations of insight and misunderstanding.

“I heared Dr. Stan talking about millions of queens and kings flying down the coast back on Earth,” Rory said one day. “How do they fly? Is it magic? And how come there are so many of them? I thought only one person in thousands got to be king.”

“Just what exactly did Dr. Peterson say?” Dr. Stan Peterson was a physiologist who lived in C-Twelve. Anton had talked to him only a few times.

Rory frowned, his eyes shut. “He said that it was really incredible to see the millions of mon, uh…monarchs flying along the coast.”

Anton smiled. “A monarch isn’t always a queen or a king, Rory. Among other things, it’s a type of butterfly.”

Rory considered that. “Ohhh. A butterfly is a flying bug, isn’t it?”

“Close enough, Rory. Close enough.”

Once Anton asked Rory how he came to be at the station.

“I was born here.”

“Oh? How old are you?”

After a moment, Rory said with great precision, “Twenty-three. I have a birthday next month. I’ll be…twenty-four! Dr. Stan once said I had the mind of a five-year-old, though. What did he mean by that?”

“I don’t know, Rory.” Anton was beginning to dislike Dr. Stan Peterson, and he’d only talked to the man twice. “Perhaps he meant that you have a fresh view on things.” He changed the subject. “Where are your parents now?”

“My mother’s on Earth. She sends me presents and messages. My father’s dead. He died when I was real little—I didn’t know him.” He tilted his head to one side and looked at Anton. “Dr. Ruth is my guardian.”

Anton stared at Rory, surprised. “She is, is she? That’s very interesting.”

He stared off into space.

Rory waited a minute, then said, “You really like her, don’t you?”

Anton nodded solemnly.

Rory scowled. “Darn. It would be nice if she liked you. You’re my best friend after Geary.” He batted at the carpeted wall of the lounge.

“Sometimes I don’t understand her at all. She was acting like she liked you. Smiling right after you’d leave the room and looking at nothing. You know, the sort of look you get on your face when you bang your head real hard on the doorway? I was sure she liked you!”

“You certainly couldn’t prove it by me.”

“Well, I thought she did. Then she said something rotten ‘bout you.”

“What did she say, Rory?” Anton wasn’t sure he should ask, but couldn’t help himself. What was another small pain?

“She was talking to Kim, what they call ‘girl talk,’ so they chased me out of Dr. Ruth’s room, but they didn’t close the door so I stuck myself to the floor and listened.” Kim Cowlander was an electronics technician who roomed in Three-C. She was friendly, but brisk, except with Rory. With him she was patient and kind.

“Well, what did you hear?” Anton’s stomach didn’t feel very good.

“Dr. Ruth said you didn’t do anything. No, that’s not it. She said you were a lump. Or was it a large piece? No, no. She said you were a hunk! I didn’t think that was very nice. You do lots of things! Why are you laughing?”

Anton had been speaking English since he was in grade school and had done his post doctoral work at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. He had a more than adequate grasp of American slang. “It’s all right, Rory.

Sometimes it is a good thing to be a hunk. What else did they say?”

“Well, Kim said you certainly weren’t her type.” He looked sideways at Anton. “Dr. Stan says that Kim likes girls and she really likes Dr. Ruth but Dr. Ruth doesn’t like girls that way.”

Anton shook his head in amazement.

“Then I left. I was too mad to listen anymore.”

“That’s okay, Rory. Can we keep what you just told me a secret?”

“Secrets are for friends to keep,” agreed Rory.

Just then, Dr. McMillian came into the lounge. She was wearing shorts and a tee-shirt, and was flushed from working out in the two-g centrifuge.

“Hello, Rory,” she said warmly, adding, “Anton,” somewhat cooler.

Anton nodded. “Dr. McMillan.” She looked at him suspiciously. ” What are you smiling at?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

The accident occured right before dinner. Anton was watching the docking of the weekly shuttle from Ceres from his cabin window, so he saw most of it.

The shuttle, a spherical pressurized cabin with rocket motors and fuel tanks on struts, had completed most of its braking and was drifting toward the station’s docking pod. The station’s own two smaller shuttles were docked at two of the six available locks. A station hand floated in his suit, waiting to jump across with a line and warp the shuttle in. The shuttle fired braking thrusters one more time.

And then blew up.

Anton blinked.

Saw a glowing sphere of burning gasses expand from the far side of the shuttle.

Blinked.

Saw the shuttle break apart like an egg shattering or a water balloon exploding.

Blinked.

Saw major segments of the shuttle smash into the docking pod.

Blinked.

Saw the docking pod crumple in two places.

Blinked.

Saw an even larger explosion erupt from the docking pod.

Blinked.

Saw pieces of the pod smash into the station’s shuttles.

Blinked.

Saw one of the shuttles fly off into space, with a caved-in, fractured look, and saw the other shuttle heading straight for C-pod.

Winced.

He drew a gasp of air to shout, but before he finished, the small shuttle passed out of view to his left, toward the station proper, and a shock jarred the entire room. There was a sudden draft and his ears popped as pressure suddenly dropped. The lights went out. Then there was a

“whump” as the pressure door at the entrance to C-pod slammed shut on its rubber gasket.

“Rory!” Ruth McMillian shouted distantly. He scrambled for the door in the dark, found it. and shoved it open.

A lone emergency light mounted by the pod exit dimly lit the lounge.

Anton saw Dr. McMillian tug at the door to Rory’s room. It flipped open and Rory came sailing out. She grabbed him and ran fingers down his sides. “Are you all right?”

“Sure,” he smiled. His nose was bleeding. “Just couldn’t find the door latch. Blowout?”

There was a muffled screaming from Dr. Peterson’s door. “Let me out!

Let me out!”

Anton kicked his way over there and flipped the latch. Stan Peterson erupted into the lounge, clawing wildly with his hands at the edge of the door. Large areas of white showed in his eyes and he was visibly sweating.

“Ohmigod, ohmigod.” He clutched his head in his hands and moaned.

“Claustrophobe,” said a voice behind them. Kim Cowlander was pulling herself out of her room when Anton turned to look. She was still zipping up a sleeveless coverall as she floated out into the lounge. “What the shit happened?”

Dr. McMillian shrugged. Anton said, “The shuttle from Ceres blew up. It took the docking pod with it. The last I saw before we got hit was the number two shuttle zipping past my window. I think it hit the passageway.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” said Kim. “Let’s see if we can see the extent of the damage.” She shoved past the still moaning Peterson, ignoring him, and made her way to the passage door. Anton and Ruth McMillian followed.

“Holy shit,” Kim said when she’d looked through the small port in the center of the door.

“You have a preoccupation with fecal matter, Kim?” said Anton, as he pressed forward to look past her shoulder. His eyes widened when he saw.

“I take it back.”

The shuttle had done more than damage the passageway—it had sheared it cleanly away. When Anton looked out the port he saw the station framed by a jagged and torn passageway—a lot of the station, and more every second. It was receding from them at a visible rate, and nothing connected them to it.

“Well, thank God the cutoffs worked,” said Kim, “or we’d be trying to breathe thinner stuff than this. You can see where the power line tore, and there’s the sewage and air lines. I don’t see the water pipe—it must have torn closer to the hull.” She was pointing through the little window.

“We’ll just have to wait for one of the shuttles to come get us,” said Ruth.

“Uh, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” said Anton. “The last I saw of the number one shuttle it was traveling in-system looking like a cracked teapot, and it was shuttle number two that went through the passageway.

I’d be willing to wager it didn’t hang around afterward. And even if it did, I’ll bet it isn’t serviceable.”

“Not to worry,” said Kim to Ruth. “In a suit I could jump the distance with a line. They’ll send someone after us with an EVA pack and a fishing line.” Anton thought about that and felt better, but his breathing was still faster than he thought it should be. Must be the thin air left over from the separation, he thought.

“Dr. Ruth! Anton!” It was Rory’s voice, rising in a distressed wail.

Anton kicked out hard against the port and shot across the lounge.

Halfway there he tucked and flipped, then killed his momentum by collapsing his legs when he landed. Ruth was right behind, but not as graceful. She banged into the carpeted surface and would have bounced back off if Anton hadn’t grabbed the sill of Rory’s doorway and her leg.

“What is it, Rory?” asked Anton.

“It’s Geary! Something’s wrong with Geary!”

Anton looked at the cage. The gerbil was floating in the middle of the cage, twitching. Most of the seed shells, fruit rinds, and gerbil feces that normally plastered the side of the cage nearest the intake was floating freely about the mesh sphere.

4

Ruth pushed past Anton and moved foward until her face was right up against the cage. She took a deep breath and blew gently into the mesh.

Almost immediately, Geary stopped twitching. After thirty seconds, the gerbil had recovered enough to start rubbing its nose vigorously.

“He was suffocating in his own carbon dioxide. The ventilators shut off when we lost power. What’s more, it’s happening to us, too.” She unfastened the cage from the wall and handed it to Rory. “Keep moving around, Rory, and Geary will be fine.” She looked at Anton. “The same thing applies to all of us.”

Anton smiled. “Didn’t know you cared.”

She scowled back at him, but he was already leaving the room.

Peterson had stopped moaning when Rory, Anton, and Ruth had emerged from the cabin. Rory was carefully moving Geary’s cage back and forth through the air.

Kim joined them. “Keep moving,” Ruth told her. “Or you’ll drown in your own CO .”

Kim laughed harshly. “Go teach your grandmother. I haven’t stopped moving since the accident.” She poked a finger at Peterson. “Hey, Mr.

Hotshot Physiologist! How long before we use up all this air?”

Peterson stared at her vaguely. He was breathing rapidly. Anton gave him a gentle shove to move him into fresher air. “What’s the volume of this area? More importantly, what’s the partial pressure of oxygen?”

“How should I know that? You’re the scientist.”

“What’s the air pressure, then?”

“No, idea, Doc. Can’t be much lower than 2 kg/cm2. Even I know we wouldn’t be conscious that low, what with the oxy/nitrogen mix the station runs.”

“Could be anything from two hours to twenty. I don’t know.”

Anton felt his breathing speed up again and moved sideways. His head was beginning to ache. Rory had moved off with Geary in tow, and Ruth had moved back to the passageway door.

Kim was starting in on Peterson again when Ruth called. “I think they’re sending someone after us!” There was a rush for the door; Rory stayed behind and Anton moved more slowly than the rest. He pulled open the door to the adjoining cabin instead of crowding in with the others and used the larger window inside.

5

He was appalled at how far away the station looked. It had to be a good kilometer distant. Still, he could see some activity at the airlock on one of the construction pods. As he watched, he saw a flash of brightness lighting up a section of the station in shadow. Then a dot started growing slowly closer. It took two minutes before the dot was a recognizable man. In that time, the station had grown appreciably more distant. After another minute, they could see the line trailing behind the space-suited figure. It glistened against the black sky like a silver thread.

“Come on, baby.”

“You can do it!”

Kim and Ruth were cheering the figure on. Anton moved again to help his breathing, but kept his eyes glued to the moving man. He was ten meters away —so close they could make out facial features through the visor—when the line jerked him to a halt and sent him rebounding back toward the station.

“Aaaaahhhhhhhh, shit! They ran out of line!” Kim screamed.

“Son of a bitch,” said Peterson.

“It’s okay,” said Kim. “They’ll link together more line and try again.”

Anton frowned again. His head was killing him. “In the time they take to find every extra meter of rope, I’ll bet we drift three meters. If we don’t do something to push us back in the other direction or at least stop our movement, they won’t be able to reach us.”

Kim stared at him. “I hate know-it-alls.” She began looking around the room. “So we need to fling some mass that way.” She pointed in the direction opposite the station.

“What do we have in the way of pro-pellant?” Anton asked. “The fire extinguisher!”

“Christ, yes.” Kim jumped to the passageway and opened a panel marked with the traditional orange and red flames. A red cylinder with nozzle and valve emerged. “That’s fifteen kilos at 140 kg/cm2. That’ll give us a healthy shove, but not enough.”

“There are three more in this pod, though,” added Ruth. “How will you vent it out?”

“I’ll adapt it to one of the sink faucets, then open the faucet valve and squeeze the trigger. When it’s discharged, I’ll close the faucet valve and hook another extinguisher up. It’ll blast out of the torn pipe!”

Ruth frowned. “But in what direction?”

Kim paused. “Whatever direction that torn end is pointed. It could have ripped on the bathroom side. That’s the direction we want.”

“And if it didn’t, we’ll end up blasting ourselves farther away!” said Dr.

Peterson. “We can’t take that risk.”

“We can’t afford not to, Stan,” said Anton. “We’ll hook it up, then try it with lookouts posted. We should see the crystals.”

“And if it isn’t the right direction?” asked Peterson.

“We’ll have tried.” They started working. Meanwhile, Rory was worried.

Geary seemed to be doing okay, but you never knew. He paid more attention to Geary’s movements than to the conversations around him.

After a while, he found that he could keep Geary’s cage moving best by giving it a slow toss across the room, then bouncing over and catching it before it hit the far wall. He kept doing this over and over again until Dr.

Peterson said, “Rory, sit still. You’re using up more oxygen by jumping around like that, you stupid little shit!”

Anton turned from where he was steadying one of the fire extinguishers while Kim taped its nozzle to the faucet with turn after turn of electrical tape. “Dr. Peterson, the next unkind thing you say to Rory you will regret.

I mean it.”

“Right,” said Ruth from across the room. “So do I.”

Dr. Peterson subsided, mumbling to himself.

Rory frowned. At least Dr. Ruth and Dr. Anton were getting along better. He moved away from Dr. Peterson and gave another toss to the cage.

Halfway across the room, Geary started running around the inside of the mesh sphere like he did when Rory was about to feed him. Rory sat back and watched the rotating sphere and running gerbil. He was sure that Dr. Stan didn’t like him. Well, he decided, I don’t like Dr. Stan, either.

“Ready, all?” yelled Kim from the bathroom. In one hand she held the faucet handle, in the other the squeeze handle to the fire extinguisher.

From the door port Anton said, “Ready.” Ruth and Dr. Peterson replied from two different cabins.

“Here goes the first burst.” She turned the faucet and felt the tape stiffen as the inside of her connection was opened on vacuum. Quickly, she gave a squeeze of the handle and a burst of chemical foam surged into the pipe system. Just as quickly, she shut it off.

“No good,” called Anton. “It came out on my side, pointing at Lucy.”

Peterson started moaning again.

“Well, damn it,” screamed Kim. “Turn the fucking pod around!”

“How? Get out and push?” Anton snapped.

“If I had one of the centrifuges from my lab, you could wire it to the battery and get some spin out of it. That would turn us.”

Ruth said, “Maybe one of the other pipes is pointing tangential to the pod. If we fired one of the extinguishers out one like that, it would turn us.”

Kim started crying. Ruth stared at her, shocked.

“No, damn it,” Kim said. “This is the only outlet I can get to. The sewage cutoff I can’t adapt to and the hot water pipe just runs to the heater there—then out the same pipe. It’ s so damn unfair!”

Peterson started moaning louder and twitching.

Rory came up to Kim and awkwardly stroked her hair. “Don’t cry, Kim.

I don’t like for you to cry.”

Kim tried to smile at him. “I’m sorry, baby. I don’t mean to. I just wish this stupid old pod would roll over so we could go back to the station.” She grabbed hold of him and buried her face in his chest.

Rory alternated between scowling and distress. “Don’t cry, Kim. I’ll turn the pod for you, if you won’t cry.”

“Oh, Rory. You can’t, baby.” She cried even louder.

Rory pushed her to arm’s length. “Oh, yes I can. You just watch!” He detached himself from her and went to the doorway of the bathroom.

Anton watched, as Rory crouched and got both feet planted on the edge of the sill, then pushed off—not across the lounge, but along its surface.

Before he ploughed into the rising carpet, he put a hand out and hit the carpet enough to bring his body tangential to the floor again. He began kicking out with his feet also, maintaining the momentum and improving it. Soon he was traveling around the room on all fours on a path just missing the open bathroom door at one end of the pod and the passageway at the other. With a spasmodic jerk, he stumbled erect and began running around the room. This increased his speed dramatically.

Kim looked at him, amazed, then jumped across the lounge to the passageway door. She looked across at the station. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the station was dropping with respect to the window.

“I’ll be goddammed. He’s doing it. He’s doing it!”

Anton started moving, too. As an athlete raised in a gravity well, he was able to get upright much faster than Rory. He kept on the side of the pod opposite Rory and followed the same path. Kim started laughing. “Come on, you rats. Turn this bloody squirrel cage!” She jumped back to the bathroom and gripped the handles again. Her eyes locked on the one small window and stayed there.

Rory started gasping, followed quickly by Anton. It wasn’t that they were building up CO2 again. In fact, their motion was acting as a crude circulating fan for the entire lounge. The problem was that the cabin pressure was equivalent to the Andean highlands, and there just wasn’t enough oxygen in that air to support heavy athletic activity. They stumbled to a stop, but not before the pod was spinning at a respectable one-point-two rpm.

Kim looked back at them. “You can’t quit. You have to start running in the other direction so the nozzle will stop pointed in the right direction!”

Anton gasped, “Don’t be silly. Just fire the damn thing every time it’s in position.”

“Oh.” She shut up. The station swam into view from her position. She twisted the valve and squeezed the extinguisher handle for the ten seconds it took to pass out of view. After another minute and six seconds she repeated the process. It took her five minutes to empty the extinguisher and another two to attach the next one. Twenty minutes later she’d emptied all four extinguishers and the water heater’s ninety liters of water.

Every revolution, the station looked slightly larger.

An hour later, a smiling space-suited figure impacted with the crumpled passageway frame and attached a nylon line to the pod. Two hours later, a jury-rigged pressure collar let the five of them into the station proper.

Two weeks after the incident, the station held a farewell party for Dr.

Peterson in the cafeteria. Conspicuous in their absence were Anton, Ruth, Kim, and Rory. Kim was in her room with a female lab technician from Electron Microscopy, Rory was wandering around the station, and Anton was in his lab reading.

Ruth popped her head in the door. “What’s this? I thought you communists went in for parties?”

Anton frowned. “Vecherinka, the Russian word for evening party or celebration, has absolutely no relation to partiya or kompaniya, the Communist Party.”

“Spoilsport.”

“Imperialist lackey.”

“Commie pig”

“Capitalist dog.”

She smiled and threw something at him. He snared it lazily out of the air.

It was a bound notebook, several hundred pages thick, with her name emblazoned on the cover. He looked back up at her quickly.

She had stopped smiling. “That’s my baby—the write-ups on the work we’ve been doing out here for the last four years. I would like you to read it over and tell me what you think.” She was looking off to the side, avoiding his eyes.

He licked his lips and looked back down at the book before carefully saying, “Certainly. It would be an honor.”

When he lifted his head, Ruth was staring at him, the barest hint of a smile on her face. She nodded once. “Good.”

Anton cocked his head to one side. “You perhaps should have Rory read it, too. That one’s going to require watching.”

She did smile then. “The son of a Nobel Laureate usually does.”

Anton stared. “Rory Herzig?”

Ruth nodded. “When she was recalled to Earth, she thought he’d be happier here.”

Anton nodded slowly, then smiled. “He will bear watching.”

Over in J-pod, the extra-special investigator of the universe pushed a small button on a small box. Geary the gerbil listened as Rory said, “Define…motion.”

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 somethin’?” 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 somethin’ 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 Worldcomps 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 biosculpting.

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 now alive.

“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 greatdepression. 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 Comet War 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 waterworlds 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 smallbodies 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 effect 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, detooodwop, 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.

DINNER IN AUDOGHAST

Bruce Sterling

From Crystal Express

Then one arrives at Audoghast, a large and very populous city built in a sandy plain … The inhabitants live in ease and possess great riches. The market is always crowded; the mob is so huge and the chattering so loud that you can scarcely hear your own words … The city contains beautiful buildings and very elegant homes.

—Description of Northern Africa

Abu Ubayd Al-Bakri (A.D. 1040-94)

Delightful Audoghast! Renowned through the civilized world, from Cordova to Baghdad, the city spread in splendor beneath a twilit Saharan sky. The setting sun threw pink and amber across adobe domes, masonry mansions, tall, mud-brick mosques, and open plazas thick with bristling date-palms. The melodious calls of market vendors mixed with the remote and amiable chuckling of Saharan hyenas.

Four gentlemen sat on carpets in a tiled and whitewashed portico, sipping coffee in the evening breeze. The host was the genial and accomplished slave-dealer, Manimenesh. His three guests were Ibn Watunan, the caravan-master; Khayali, the poet and musician; and Bagayoko, a physician and court assassin.

The home of Manimenesh stood upon the hillside in the aristocratic quarter, where it gazed down on an open marketplace and the mud-brick homes of the lowly. The prevailing breeze swept away the city reek, and brought from within the mansion the palate-sharpening aromas of lamb in tarragon and roast partridge in lemons and eggplant. The four men lounged comfortably around a low inlaid table, sipping spiced coffee from Chinese cups and watching the ebb and flow of market life.

The scene below them encouraged a lofty philosophical detachment. Manimenesh, who owned no less than fifteen books, was a well-known patron of learning. Jewels gleamed on his dark, plump hands, which lay cozily folded over his paunch. He wore a long tunic of crushed red velvet, and a gold-threaded skullcap.

Khayali, the young poet, had studied architecture and verse in the schools of Timbuktu. He lived in the household of Manimenesh as his poet and praisemaker, and his sonnets, ghazals, and odes were recited throughout the city. He propped one elbow against the full belly of his two-string guimbri guitar, of inlaid ebony, strung with leopard gut.

Ibn Watunan had an eagle’s hooded gaze and hands callused by camel-reins. He wore an indigo turban and a long striped djellaba. In thirty years as a sailor and caravaneer, he had bought and sold Zanzibar ivory, Sumatran pepper, Ferghana silk, and Cordovan leather. Now a taste for refined gold had brought him to Audoghast, for Audoghast’s African bullion was known throughout Islam as the standard of quality.

Doctor Bagayoko’s ebony skin was ridged with an initiate’s scars, and his long clay-smeared hair was festooned with knobs of chiseled bone. He wore a tunic of white Egyptian cotton, hung with gris-gris necklaces, and his baggy sleeves bulged with herbs and charms. He was a native Audoghastian of the animist persuasion, the personal physician of the city’s Prince.

Bagayoko’s skill with powders, potions, and unguents made him an intimate of Death. He often undertook diplomatic missions to the neighboring Empire of Ghana. During his last visit there, the anti-Audoghast faction had mysteriously suffered a lethal outbreak of pox.

Between the four men was the air of camaraderie common to gentlemen and scholars.

They finished the coffee, and a slave took the empty pot away. A second slave, a girl from the kitchen staff, arrived with a wicker tray loaded with olives, goat-cheese, and hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with vermilion. At that moment, a muezzin yodeled the evening call to prayer.

“Ah,” said Ibn Watunan, hesitating. “Just as we were getting started.”

“Never mind,” said Manimenesh, helping himself to a handful of olives. “We’ll pray twice next time.”

“Why was there no noon prayer today?” said Watunan.

“Our muezzin forgot,” the poet said.

Watunan lifted his shaggy brows. “That seems rather lax.”

Doctor Bagayoko said, “This is a new muezzin. The last was more punctual, but, well, he fell ill.” Bagayoko smiled urbanely and nibbled his cheese.

“We Audoghastians like our new muezzin better,” said the poet, Khayali. “He’s one of our own, not like that other fellow, who was from Fez. Our muezzin is sleeping with a Christian’s wife. It’s very entertaining.”

“You have Christians here?” Watunan said.

“A clan of Ethiopian Copts,” said Manimenesh. “And a couple of Nestorians.”

“Oh,” said Watunan, relaxing. “For a moment I thought you meant real feringhee Christians, from Europe.”

“From where?” Manimenesh was puzzled.

“Very far away,” said Ibn Watunan, smiling. “Ugly little countries, with no profit.”

“There were empires in Europe once,” said Khayali knowledge-ably. “The Empire of Rome was almost as big as the modern civilized world.”

Watunan nodded.“I have seen the New Rome, called Byzantium. They have armored horsemen, like your neighbors in Ghana. Savage fighters.”

Bagayoko nodded, salting an egg. “Christians eat children.”

Watunan smiled. “I can assure you that the Byzantines do no such thing.”

“Really?” said Bagayoko. “Well, our Christians do.”

“That’s just the doctor’s little joke,” said Manimenesh. “Sometimes strange rumors spread about us, because we raid our slaves from the Nyam-Nyam cannibal tribes on the coast. But we watch their diet closely, I assure you.”

Watunan smiled uncomfortably. “There is always something new out of Africa. One hears the oddest stories. Hairy men, for instance.”

“Ah,” said Manimenesh. “You mean gorillas, from the jungles to the south. I’m sorry to spoil the story for you, but they are nothing better than beasts.”

“I see,” said Watunan. “That’s a pity.”

“My grandfather owned a gorilla once,” Manimenesh said. “Even after ten years, it could barely speak Arabic.”

They finished the appetizers. Slaves cleared the table and brought in a platter of fattened partridges, stuffed with lemons and eggplants, on a bed of mint and lettuce. The four diners leaned in closer and dexterously ripped off legs and wings.

Watunan sucked meat from a drumstick and belched politely. “Audoghast is famous for its cooks,” he said. “I’m pleased to see that this legend, at least, is confirmed.”

“We Audoghastians pride ourselves on the pleasures of table and bed,” said Manimenesh, pleased. “I have asked Elfelilet, one of our premiere courtesans, to honor us with a visit tonight. She will bring her troupe of dancers.”

Watunan smiled. “That would be splendid. One tires of boys on the trail. Your women are remarkable. I’ve noticed that they go without the veil.”

Khayali lifted his voice in song.

“When a woman of Audoghast appears

The girls of Fez bite their lips,

The dames of Tripoli hide in closets,

And Ghana’s women hang themselves.”

“We take pride in the exalted status of our women,” said Manimenesh. “It’s not for nothing that they command a premium market price!”

In the marketplace, downhill, vendors lit tiny oil lamps, which cast a flickering glow across the walls of tents and the watering troughs. A troop of the Prince’s men, with iron spears, shields, and chain mail, marched across the plaza to take the night watch at the Eastern Gate. Slaves with heavy water-jars gossiped beside the well.

“There’s quite a crowd around one of the stalls,” said Bagayoko.

“So I see,” said Watunan. “What is it? Some news that might affect the market?”

Bagayoko sopped up gravy with a wad of mint and lettuce. “Rumor says there’s a new fortune-teller in town. New prophets always go through a vogue.”

“Ah yes,” said Khayali, sitting up. “They call him ‘the Sufferer.’ He is said to tell the most outlandish and entertaining fortunes.”

“I wouldn’t trust any fortune-teller’s market tips,” said Manimenesh. “If you want to know the market, you have to know the hearts of the people, and for that you need a good poet.”

Khayali bowed his head. “Sir,” he said, “live forever.”

It was growing dark. Household slaves arrived with pottery lamps of sesame oil, which they hung from the rafters of the portico. Others took the bones of the partridges and brought in a haunch and head of lamb with a side dish of cinnamon tripes.

As a gesture of esteem, the host offered Watunan the eyeballs, and after three ritual refusals the caravan-master dug in with relish. “I put great stock in fortune-tellers, myself,” he said, munching. “They are often privy to strange secrets. Not the occult kind, but the blabbing of the superstitious. Slave-girls anxious about some household scandal, or minor officials worried over promotions-inside news from those who consult them. It can be useful.”

“If that’s the case,” said Manimenesh, “perhaps we should call him up here.”

“They say he is grotesquely ugly,” said Khayali. “He is called ‘the Sufferer’ because he is outlandishly afflicted by disease.”

Bagayoko wiped his chin elegantly on his sleeve. “Now you begin to interest me!”

“It’s settled, then.” Manimenesh clapped his hands. “Bring young Sidi, my errand-runner!”

Sidi arrived at once, dusting flour from his hands. He was the cook’s teenage son, a tall young black in a dyed woolen djellaba. His cheeks were stylishly scarred, and he had bits of brass wire interwoven with his dense black locks. Manimenesh gave him his orders; Sidi leapt from the portico, ran downhill through the garden, and vanished through the gates.

The slave-dealer sighed. “This is one of the problems of my business. When I bought my cook she was a slim and lithesome wench, and I enjoyed her freely. Now years of dedication to her craft have increased her market value by twenty times, and also made her as fat as a hippopotamus, though that is beside the point. She has always claimed that Sidi is my child, and since I don’t wish to sell her, I must make allowance. I have made him a freeman; I have spoiled him, I’m afraid. On my death, my legitimate sons will deal with him cruelly.”

The caravan-master, having caught the implications of this speech, smiled politely. “Can he ride? Can he bargain? Can he do sums?”

“Oh,” said Manimenesh with false nonchalance, “he can manage that newfangled stuff with the zeroes well enough.”

“You know I am bound for China,” said Watunan. “It is a hard road that brings either riches or death.”

“He runs the risk in any case,” the slave-dealer said philosophically. “The riches are Allah’s decision.”

“This is truth,” said the caravan-master. He made a secret gesture, beneath the table, where the others could not see. His host returned it, and Sidi was proposed, and accepted, for the Brotherhood.

With the night’s business over, Manimenesh relaxed, and broke open the lamb’s steamed skull with a silver mallet. They spooned out the brains, then attacked the tripes, which were stuffed with onion, cabbage, cinnamon, rue, coriander, cloves, ginger, pepper, and lightly dusted with ambergris. They ran out of mustard dip and called for more, eating a bit more slowly now, for they were approaching the limit of human capacity.

They then sat back, pushing away platters of congealing grease, and enjoying a profound satisfaction with the state of the world. Down in the marketplace, bats from an abandoned mosque chased moths around the vendors’ lanterns.

The poet belched suavely and picked up his two-stringed guitar. “Dear God,” he said, “this is a splendid place. See, caravan-master, how the stars smile down on our beloved Southwest.” He drew a singing note from the leopard-gut strings. “I feel at one with Eternity.”

Watunan smiled. “When I find a man like that, I have to bury him.”

“There speaks the man of business,” the doctor said. He unobtrusively dusted a tiny pinch of venom on the last chunk of tripe, and ate it. He accustomed himself to poison. It was a professional precaution.

From the street beyond the wall, they heard the approaching jingle of brass rings. The guard at the gate called out. “The Lady Elfelilet and her escorts, lord!”

“Make them welcome,” said Manimenesh. Slaves took the platters away, and brought a velvet couch onto the spacious portico. The diners extended their hands; slaves scrubbed and toweled them clean.

Elfelilet’s party came forward through the fig-clustered garden: two escorts with gold-topped staffs heavy with jingling brass rings; three dancing-girls, apprentice courtesans in blue woolen cloaks over gauzy cotton trousers and embroidered blouses; and four palanquin bearers, beefy male slaves with oiled torsos and callused shoulders. The bearers set the palanquin down with stifled grunts of relief and opened the cloth-of-gold hangings.

Elfelilet emerged, a tawny-skinned woman, her eyes dusted in kohl and collyrium, her hennaed hair threaded with gold wire. Her palms and nails were stained pink; she wore an embroidered blue cloak over an intricate sleeveless vest and ankle-tied silk trousers starched and polished with myrobalan lacquer. A light freckling of smallpox scars along one cheek delightfully accented her broad, moonlike face.

“Elfelilet, my dear,” said Manimenesh, “you are just in time for dessert.”

Elfelilet stepped gracefully across the tiled floor and reclined face-first along the velvet couch, where the well-known loveliness of her posterior could be displayed to its best advantage. “I thank my friend and patron, the noble Manimenesh. Live forever! Learned Doctor Bagayoko, I am your servant. Hello, poet.”

“Hello, darling,” said Khayali, smiling with the natural camaraderie of poets and courtesans. “You are the moon, and your troupe of lovelies are comets across our vision.”

The host said, “This is our esteemed guest, the caravan-master, Abu Bekr Ahmed Ibn Watunan.”

Watunan, who had been gaping in enraptured amazement, came to himself with a start. “I am a simple desert man,” he said. “I haven’t a poet’s gift of words. But I am your ladyship’s servant.”

Elfelilet smiled and tossed her head; her distended earlobes clattered with heavy chunks of gold filigree. “Welcome to Audoghast.”

Dessert arrived. “Well,” said Manimenesh. “Our earlier dishes were rough and simple fare, but this is where we shine. Let me tempt you with these djouzinkat nutcakes. And do sample our honey macaroons—I believe there’s enough for everyone.”

Everyone, except of course for the slaves, enjoyed the light and flaky cataif macaroons, liberally dusted with Kairwan sugar. The nutcakes were simply beyond compare: painstakingly milled from hand-watered wheat, lovingly buttered and sugared, and artistically studded with raisins, dates, and almonds.

“We eat djouzinkat nutcakes during droughts,” the poet said, “because the angels weep with envy when we taste them.”

Manimenesh belched heroically and readjusted his skullcap. “Now,” he said, “we will enjoy a little bit of grape wine. Just a small tot, mind you, so that the sin of drinking is a minor one, and we can do penance with the minimum of alms. After that, our friend the poet will recite an ode he has composed for the occasion.”

Khayali began to tune his two-string guitar. “I will also, on demand, extemporize twelve-line ghazals in the lyric mode, upon suggested topics.”

“And after our digestion has been soothed with epigrams,” said their host, “we will enjoy the justly famed dancing of her ladyship’s troupe. After that we will retire within the mansion and enjoy their other, equally lauded, skills.”

The gate-guard shouted, “Your errand-runner, Lord! He awaits your pleasure, with the fortune-teller!”

“Ah,” said Manimenesh. “I had forgotten.”

“No matter, sir,” said Watunan, whose imagination had been fired by the night’s agenda.

Bagayoko spoke up. “Let’s have a look at him. His ugliness, by contrast, will heighten the beauty of these women.”

“Which would otherwise be impossible,” said the poet.

“Very well,” said Manimenesh. “Bring him forward.”

Sidi, the errand boy, came through the garden, followed with ghastly slowness by the crutch-wielding fortune-teller.

The man inched into the lamplight like a crippled insect. His voluminous dust-gray cloak was stained with sweat, and nameless exudations. He was an albino. His pink eyes were shrouded with cataracts, and he had lost a foot, and several fingers, to leprosy. One shoulder was much lower than the other, suggesting a hunchback, and the stub of his shin was scarred by the gnawing of canal-worms.

“Prophet’s beard!” said the poet. “He is truly of surpassing ghastliness.”

Elfelilet wrinkled her nose. “He reeks of pestilence!”

Sidi spoke up. “We came as fast as we could, Lord!”

“Go inside, boy,” said Manimenesh; “soak ten sticks of cinnamon in a bucket of water, then come back and throw it over him.”

Sidi left at once.

Watunan stared at the hideous man, who stood, quivering on one leg, at the edge of the light. “How is it, man, that you still live?”

“I have turned my sight from this world,” said the Sufferer. “I turned my sight to God, and He poured knowledge copiously upon me. I have inherited a knowledge which no mortal body can support.”

“But God is merciful,” said Watunan. “How can you claim this to be His doing?”

“If you do not fear God,” said the fortune-teller, “fear Him after seeing me.” The hideous albino lowered himself, with arthritic, aching slowness, to the dirt outside the portico. He spoke again. “You are right, caravan-master, to think that death would be a mercy to me. But death comes in its own time, as it will to all of you.”

Manimenesh cleared his throat. “Can you see our destinies, then?”

“I see the world,” said the Sufferer. “To see the fate of one man is to follow a single ant in a hill.”

Sidi reemerged and poured the scented water over the cripple. The fortune-teller cupped his maimed hands and drank. “Thank you, boy,” he said. He turned his clouded eyes on the youth. “Your children will be yellow.”

Sidi laughed, startled. “Yellow? Why?”

“Your wives will be yellow.”

The dancing-girls, who had moved to the far side of the table, giggled in unison. Bagayoko pulled a gold coin from within his sleeve. “I will give you this gold dirham if you will show me your body.”

Elfelilet frowned prettily and blinked her kohl-smeared lashes. “Oh, learned Doctor, please spare us.”

“You will see my body, sir, if you have patience,” said the Sufferer. “As yet, the people of Audoghast laugh at my prophecies. I am doomed to tell the truth, which is harsh and cruel, and therefore absurd. As my fame grows, however, it will reach the ears of your Prince, who will then order you to remove me as a threat to public order. You will then sprinkle your favorite poison, powdered asp venom, into a bowl of chickpea soup I will receive from a customer. I bear you no grudge for this, as it will be your civic duty, and will relieve me of pain.”

“What an odd notion,” said Bagayoko, frowning. “I see no need for the Prince to call on my services. One of his spearmen could puncture you like a waterskin.”

“By then,” the prophet said, “my occult powers will have roused so much uneasiness that it will seem best to take extreme measures.”

“Well,” said Bagayoko, “that’s convenient, if exceedingly grotesque.”

“Unlike other prophets,” said the Sufferer, “I see the future not as one might wish it to be, but in all its cataclysmic and blind futility. That is why I have come here, to your delightful city. My numerous and totally accurate prophecies will vanish when this city does. This will spare the world any troublesome conflicts of predestination and free will.”

“He is a theologian!” the poet said. “A leper theologian—it’s a shame my professors in Timbuktu aren’t here to debate him!”

“You prophesy doom for our city?” said Manimenesh.

“Yes. I will be specific. This is the year 406 of the Prophet’s Hejira, and one thousand and fourteen years since the birth of Christ. In forty years, a puritan and fanatical cult of Moslems will arise, known as the Almoravids. At that time, Audoghast will be an ally of the Ghana Empire, who are idol-worshipers. Ibn Yasin, the warrior saint of the Almoravids, will condemn Audoghast as a nest of pagans. He will set his horde of desert marauders against the city; they will be enflamed by righteousness and greed. They will slaughter the men, and rape and enslave the women. Audoghast will be sacked, the wells will be poisoned, and the cropland will wither and blow away. In a hundred years, sand dunes will bury the ruins. In five hundred years, Audoghast will survive only as a few dozen lines of narrative in the travel books of Arab scholars.”

Khayali shifted his guitar. “But the libraries of Timbuktu are full of books on Audoghast, including, if I may say so, our immortal tradition of poetry.”

“I have not yet mentioned Timbuktu,” said the prophet, “which will be sacked by Moorish invaders led by a blond Spanish eunuch. They will feed the books to goats.”

The company burst into incredulous laughter. Unperturbed, the prophet said, “The ruin will be so general, so thorough, and so all-encompassing, that in future centuries it will be stated, and believed, that West Africa was always a land of savages.”

“Who in the world could make such a slander?” said the poet.

“They will be Europeans, who will emerge from their current squalid decline, and arm themselves with mighty sciences.”

“What happens then?” said Bagayoko, smiling.

“I can look at those future ages,” said the prophet, “but I prefer not to do so, as it makes my head hurt.”

“You prophesy, then,” said Manimenesh, “that our far-famed metropolis, with its towering mosques and armed militia, will be reduced to utter desolation.”

“Such is the truth, regrettable as it may be. You, and all you love, will leave no trace in this world, except a few lines in the writing of strangers.”

“And our city will fall to savage tribesmen?”

The Sufferer said, “No one here will witness the disaster to come. You will live out your lives, year after year, enjoying ease and luxury, not because you deserve it, but simply because of blind fate. In time you will forget this night; you will forget all I have said, just as the world will forget you and your city. When Audoghast falls, this boy Sidi, this son of a slave, will be the only survivor of this night’s gathering. By then he too will have forgotten Audoghast, which he has no cause to love. He will be a rich old merchant in Ch’ang-an, which is a Chinese city of such fantastic wealth that it could buy ten Audoghasts, and which will not be sacked and annihilated until a considerably later date.”

“This is madness,” said Watunan.

Bagayoko twirled a crusted lock of mud-smeared hair in his supple fingers. “Your gate-guard is a husky lad, friend Manimenesh. What say we have him bash this storm-crow’s head in, and haul him out to be hyena food?”

“For that, Doctor,” said the Sufferer, “I will tell you the manner of your death. You will be killed by the Ghanaian royal guard, while attempting to kill the crown prince by blowing a subtle poison into his anus with a hollow reed.”

Bagayoko started. “You idiot, there is no crown prince.”

“He was conceived yesterday.”

Bagayoko turned impatiently to the host. “Let us rid ourselves of this prodigy!”

Manimenesh nodded sternly. “Sufferer, you have insulted my guests and my city. You are lucky to leave my home alive.”

The Sufferer hauled himself with agonizing slowness to his single foot. “Your boy spoke to me of your generosity.”

“What! Not one copper for your driveling.”

“Give me one of the gold dirhams from your purse. Otherwise I shall be forced to continue prophesying, and in a more intimate vein.”

Manimenesh considered this. “Perhaps it’s best.” He threw Sidi a coin. “Give this to the madman and escort him back to his raving-booth.”

They waited in tormented patience as the fortune-teller creaked and crutched, with painful slowness, into the darkness.

Manimenesh, brusquely, threw out his red velvet sleeves and clapped for wine. “Give us a song, Khayali.”

The poet pulled the cowl of his cloak over his head. “My head rings with an awful silence,” he said. “I see all waymarks effaced, the joyous pleasances converted into barren wilderness. Jackals resort here, ghosts frolic, and demons sport; the gracious halls, and rich boudoirs, that once shone like the sun, now, overwhelmed by desolation, seem like the gaping mouths of savage beasts!” He looked at the dancing-girls, his eyes brimming with tears. “I picture these maidens, lying beneath the dust, or dispersed to distant parts and far regions, scattered by the hand of exile, torn to pieces by the fingers of expatriation.”

Manimenesh smiled on him kindly. “My boy,” he said, “if others cannot hear your songs, or embrace these women, or drink this wine, the loss is not ours, but theirs. Let us, then, enjoy all three, and let those unborn do the regretting.”

“Your patron is wise,” said Ibn Watunan, patting the poet on the shoulder. “You see him here, favored by Allah with every luxury; and you saw that filthy madman, bedeviled by plague. That lunatic, who pretends to great wisdom, only croaks of ruin; while our industrious friend makes the world a better place, by fostering nobility and learning. Could God forsake a city like this, with all its charms, to bring about that fool’s disgusting prophesies?” He lifted his cup to Elfelilet, and drank deeply.

“But delightful Audoghast,” said the poet, weeping. “All our loveliness, lost to the sands.”

“The world is wide,” said Bagayoko, “and the years are long. It is not for us to claim immortality, not even if we are poets. But take comfort, my friend. Even if these walls and buildings crumble, there will always be a place like Audoghast, as long as men love profit! The mines are inexhaustible, and elephants are thick as fleas. Mother Africa will always give us gold and ivory.”

“Always?” said the poet hopefully, dabbing at his eyes.

“Well, surely there are always slaves,” said Manimenesh, and smiled, and winked. The others laughed with him, and there was joy again.

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.

STILL LIFE

David Garnett

As the armour-plated limousine drew up outside the National Gallery, Corinne glanced out of the window toward the shattered stump of Nelson’s Column. The scene always sent a chill up her spine. It was almost a decade since the monument had been toppled by a terrorist bomb. Why hadn’t it been rebuilt? Instead, Trafalgar Square had become another of the city’s no-go areas, its roads blocked off by army barricades and concrete gun posts.

Only rarely were the roads opened, and Corinne supposed she ought to feel priveleged that the military were prepared to allow vehicle access to the gallery today. But it was nothing to do with her, she realized; although it might be the Corinne Dewar Exhibition, she was by no means the most important person who’d be there. By tomorrow, when there were no guests invited for the opening, the only way in would be on foot again. “Ready?” asked Robert.

Corinne glanced at him and nodded. She smiled briefly, looking him up and down. He seemed so strange in his old-fashioned suit, the formal black jacket and trousers, the crisp white shirt and ridiculous bow tie. She was glad her own choice of outfit wasn’t so restricted — she wore a calf-length white leather skirt and black satin blouse, although both were covered by a thick simulated fur coat.

The driver opened the passenger door, and Corinne climbed out onto the patch of pavement that had been cleared of snow. Robert followed, and together they walked up the wide steps toward the gallery, squeezing between the barbed wire and sandbags, trying to ignore the flak-jacketed troops, their rifles held at the ready.

“Nervous?” said Robert.

“Not really,” Corinne replied. She felt distanced from all of this, as though it weren’t happening to her, as though she were a spectator watching at home on her television screen.

“I am,” Robert said, taking her arm as they reached the entrance and the last of the soldiers. Inside, security would be handled by the police.

The National Gallery, said Corinne to herself, the… National… Gallery.

Her own major retrospective exhibition at the National, and she wasn’t even dead yet. She tried to keep her face straight for the television crew waiting for her just inside the foyer. She’d had exhibitions before, of course, all over the world and too many to count. In London, there had even been the Hayward Gallery a couple of years ago. But this was the big one, the sign that she had arrived and been accepted as the nation’s top living artist.

“Miss Dewar,” said the television interviewer, as the cameras and microphones were aimed at her. “Can you tell us how you feel to be here today?”

Corinne paused, and as Robert moved away and out of camera range, she wondered how exactly she did feel. She wasn’t certain. She had been so delighted and elated at first, but by now, after all the preparation, she felt numb. About half of her works from the previous two decades had been assembled here under one roof, probably the only time that would ever happen. The only time while she was still alive, that was for certain.

Her name was already spoken of in the same terms as the greatest of British painters, Turner and Constable. It was all hype, Corinne was well aware, but it was very nice for people to say it was true. And she was only thirty-nine years old.

“It feels,” she answered slowly, as she glanced around the huge entrance hall and saw all the reproductions of her work for sale, from postcards to posters, “pretty good.” She tossed back her long auburn hair and smiled for the cameras.

“Can you tell us, Miss Dewar,” said the reporter, “which is your favorite painting?”

She was tempted to answer the Mona Lisa, but this was no time for jokes. It was an old question, and one she was tired of. She gave her most frequent answer. “The next one,” she said, with a hint of laughter.

The reporter nodded and smiled back. “And which is your favorite in this exhibition?”

“That’s hard to say,” she replied and it was. Whatever she chose, it would be wrong. Every one of her paintings was a portrait, and so many of her subjects would be here today — and they would all believe their own picture was the best. It had become quite a status symbol to be painted by Corinne Dewar. The rich, the famous, the cream of Who’s Who must have sat for her over the years.

She could tell that she wouldn’t be able to evade the question. The best solution was to choose the most popular subject, and that meant the royal family. But who? The three-year-old heir to the throne? Or the late king?

Corinne had painted the monarch only a few months before the assassination. Or the new king with his popular young bride?

“I think it must be the coronation portrait of His Majesty,” she said. “It was a great honor for me to be asked to paint the portrait, of course, it isn’t only that,” said Corinne. “The country — indeed the whole world — is going through a bad time. The king represents all that is best in Britain, and he’s a symbol of the nation, showing that we can all pull through these troubles and that the country will once more be safe and at peace.”

Corinne noticed Robert watching her, grinning sardonically, and she glanced away.

“Thank you, Miss Dewar,” said the reporter, and he stepped aside to allow Corinne to pass through.

Robert caught up with her, but said nothing.

There were several galleries devoted to the exhibition, and all eyes were turned toward Corinne as she entered the first hall. There was a brief flutter of applause. Five hundred invitations had been sent out, and there already seemed that number present. The more important guests, the most famous of those Corinne had painted, were due to arrive shortly.

Meanwhile, the others paid more attention to the champagne than to the canvases that hung on the walls around them.

Over the next hour, Corinne greeted the new arrivals and those already present, shaking hands and accepting kisses on the cheek and hand, seeing in the flesh again so many people whom she could now remember only as paint on canvas. She seldom recalled her subjects; all she was ever concerned with was their faces. Politicians and diplomats, sportsmen and actresses, industrialists and millionaires, aristocrats and finally the Queen Mother herself, and Corinne curtsied and accepted the royal gloved hand.

“So good to see you again, my dear,” the Queen Mother said, although her eyes passed straight through Corinne.

Corinne had painted her when she was the queen, shortly before her husband’s sitting. She had heard that the first portrait was a trial run and that if the king hadn’t approved, he would not have allowed Corinne to paint him.

The Queen Mother looked hardly any different from those days six years ago. “I did so adore your picture of my grandson,” she said. “I have a copy of it in my bedroom.”

Corinne could only nod and smile, not sure what she should say. She was used to meeting the famous only when they sat for her, and she seldom spoke while painting. Most of her subjects soon gave up trying to converse, while others thought it was beneath them to talk to her. That suited Corinne fine. She wasn’t interested in talking; it was too much of a distraction. All she ever needed to say were things like “Head up” or, “Look to the right a little more.”

The Queen Mother didn’t spend much time in the exhibition, only long enough to walk once around the galleries, studying the catalog more than the pictures themselves. And once she had gone, many more of the guests felt it wasn’t worth staying. They were here to be seen, not to see Corinne’s paintings.

As the halls emptied and only a few dozen remained, Corinne wandered at random around the exhibition. Every single picture was a portrait, totally representational, almost all of them done on commission — they weren’t subjects she would have chosen herself; they were simply jobs of work. There were very few of them she could identify with, and those only the very earliest. It was her exhibition, but they were no longer her paintings; she didn’t own any of them. Two years ago a painting she had done six years previously had been sold for half a million new pounds.

Corinne hadn’t seen a penny of it. All the picture had meant to her was five thousand pounds at the time, enough to live on for a while.

She noticed the painting through the archway in the next hall, hanging in an elaborate gilt frame all by itself. It was worth a lot of money, so it was deemed to be a better picture. Corinne walked through the doorway and toward the painting. It was of a famous actor, a man who had become a Peer of the Realm because of his portrayals of Shakespearean characters.

He was dead, but his image lived on. It was his widow who had paid so much for the picture, buying it from the theater owner who had commissioned his most famous actor in his most famous role, Hamlet.

Corinne had seen the play but had not been impressed by the performance. When the widow had died last year, the painting had ended up in the Tate Gallery in part payment toward taxes. It was a good painting, Corinne conceded detachedly, but certainly no better than any other of hers. Since the half-a-million-pound sale, her work had become even more in demand. What better investment was there than giving an artist twenty-five thousand pounds for a canvas that could be worth twenty times that price? Robert had begun adding to each contract of commission a clause that guaranteed Corinne a percentage of the painting’s resale value.

“Half a million quid for that old ham?” said a voice from behind Corinne. “I wouldn’t give a fiver for it!”

She spun around and found herself face to face with the prime minister.

“By that reckoning,” the man continued, his eyes sparkling, “my picture ought to be worth a thousand million!” He looked from the picture and toward the artist.

“Hello, Corinne,” he said, offering his hand.

“Hello, Graham.” said Corinne as they shook hands. “Sir Graham, I mean. I didn’t know you were here.”

“Call me Graham, since we’re old friends,” he said with a wink, still holding her hand. “No, I sneaked in without paying when everyone else was leaving.” He glanced around the gallery. “It’s certainly an impressive show, Corinne. You must be very proud.”

“Yes,” she said, managing to free her hand from his grip. “I must be.”

The prime minister had been one of her first major commissions, a dozen years ago. In those days he’d been plain Graham Anderson, deputy leader of the Opposition. He’d been very charming and witty, and the sitting had taken three days, throughout which he tried to persuade Corinne to go out with him. The final day, they’d gone to a small Malaysian restaurant, and afterward he’d seduced her. He phoned several times over the following weeks, but she never returned the calls. They hadn’t met again until now.

The man raised his eyebrows. “What is it? You’ve reached the top and you think: Now what? I know the feeling.”

Corinne shook her head. “No, it isn’t that.” She shrugged. “I don’t know what it is.” Then she smiled, quickly glancing around to see where Robert was, hoping he’d come and rescue her. There was no sign of him, and slowly she began walking toward the next gallery. Sir Graham stayed with her.

“It’s been too long since I’ve seen you, Corinne,” he said, and she could almost believe him; but the man was a politician, and so he always sounded convincing.

Corinne saw Sir Graham’s portrait, and she led him in that direction.

“What a handsome chap,” said the prime minister, staring up as they stopped by the four-foot-square canvas. “Who is he?” He peered at the name engraved on the brass plate at the bottom of the frame. “Why… it’s me!” he said in mock surprise.

Corinne couldn’t help but smile at his antics.

“You must come around to No. 10 for a meal next week,” he said.

“I seem to have heard that line before.”

Sir Graham studied her doubtful expression. “No, Corinne, I mean it.

Come and meet my wife; she’ll be delighted to see you. Got your pictures of the bloody royal family pinned up everywhere, she has.” He shook his head despairingly. “What do you say? I’d like to talk to you.”

“Talk, just talk?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Pity!”

They both laughed.

Sir Graham turned his back on the portrait, standing in front of it, holding his head at the same angle and assuming an identical pose. “Does it look like me?”

Corinne looked at the picture, then at the prime minister, then at her painting again.

“Yes,” she said, slightly surprised. “It looks exactly like you.”

As they lay in bed that night, Corinne said to Robert: “Why?”

He knew what she meant, it was a discussion they’d had many times; but they’d never reached a conclusion. Robert said nothing for a minute as he stared out of the window, from the few scattered points of starlight above and down to the darkened streets of London below.

They had been together eighteen years, ever since they had been students at the Royal College of Art. Sometimes Corinne believed that Robert must resent her success; he hadn’t touched a brush himself in over a decade.

But what Corinne couldn’t understand was why she should have succeeded where so many others had failed. Because her work was different, Robert told her. Perhaps that was true — but what she was doing was no different from what the portrait painters of four or five centuries ago had done.

Who needed portraits anymore? Not when there were photographs and holograms. Her whole painting life had been dedicated to the exact reproduction of facial characteristics. That was imitation, not art — art wasn’t there to imitate life. She never felt inspired to do better, because that wasn’t required. Those who commissioned her wanted a frozen moment in time captured forever on canvas.

The reporter had asked her which her favorite picture was — but to her they were all the same. She could hardly differentiate between them. Her earlier work, say fifteen years ago, hadn’t been so polished; but now, she knew, she had reached perfection — and had been turning out the same product over and over again for years.

It was what people wanted, and she wondered why.

“Because it’s the times we live in,” answered Robert, sliding his arm beneath her neck. “People can’t understand what is happening to them and to the world; they want a return to the days when things were simple and easier to understand. A portrait is a portrait. None of your modern art — modern being anything later than 1900. There’s nothing wrong with them wanting that, nothing wrong with you giving it to them.”

But there was, thought Corinne, there was.

Seeing so much of her work on display side by side had brought home to her how alike it all was. She’d spent twenty years repeating herself, and it seemed that she never really thought about it. She simply did it unconsciously, like breathing. And without realizing, her life had been slipping away.

She and Robert had never married; there hadn’t seemed any point.

Neither had there been any children. Who needed them? And by now it was almost too late.

Robert had become her manager and agent, but they seldom discussed her work. What was there to talk about? Someone sat for her, and she painted a portrait, an absolute likeness.

“Why haven’t you ever let me paint you?” Corinne asked. It was a subject she hadn’t considered for years.

“I can’t afford it,” said Robert.

“I’m being serious.”

“Why do you want a picture of me when you’ve got the real thing here?”

He kissed her cheek. When she didn’t respond, he added: “Painting me would be like bringing your work home with you. And business and pleasure don’t mix, or so the story goes.”

“I think…” Corinne paused.

“Do you? I often wondered about that.”

“I think,” she repeated, ignoring him, “that it’s about time I stopped painting portraits.” She waited for Robert’s reaction, but he remained silent. “I want to change my style, do something different. I’m fed up with tycoons and debutantes. I want to do abstracts. I want to do laser sculptures. I want to draw patterns in the sand for the tide to wash over.

We can afford it, can’t we? We could retire for a few years. If it doesn’t work out, I can always go back to what I’ve been doing. What do you think? Robert? what do you think?”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said after so long that she thought he wasn’t going to answer.

“Yes. What do you think?”

“It’s the best thing I’ve heard you say in ten years.”

She stared at him in the moonlight, then rolled over on her side and hugged him close.

“Well…almost the best thing.”

“Oh, Robert,” she whispered, “I love you.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said and they kissed.

Half an hour later, Corinne said: “I saw the prime minister at the exhibition.”

“Uh-huh,” mumbled Robert, almost asleep.

Corinne’s one night with Graham Anderson was the only time she had been unfaithful to Robert. Robert didn’t know about it, and she had no intention of telling him. He’d had two or three flings, Corinne was well aware, but nothing serious. She had never questioned him or let on that she knew. He had stayed with her, and that was what mattered.

“He invited me to Downing Street for a meal.”

“Uh.”

“Will you come if I go?”

Robert turned and rubbed his eyes. “I can’t stand the bastard,” he said, yawning.

“He’s the best prime minister we’ve got.”

“Great. I didn’t vote for him.”

“Not many people did.”

“I know. But he gets elected. Whatever happened to democracy? Call this a free country?”

“No one’s called it that for a long time,” Corinne pointed out. “Anyhow, will you come to dinner?”

“Do I have to? He probably wants you to do his portrait again.”

“Then I’ll need you there to talk business. You’re supposed to be my manager.”

“And you’ve given up portraits,” said Robert. “Remember? Changed your mind already?”

“No, I haven’t. And Graham Anderson doesn’t need another portrait. He stood in front of the painting I did of him, and he looked exactly the same.

That was twelve years ago, and he doesn’t seem to have aged a day. He must be in his mid-fifties by now, but he doesn’t look it.”

“Must be one of those immortals.” Robert sat up and leaned back against the headboard. “He probably is, come to think about it. It makes sense, him being the prime minister.”

“What do you mean?”

Robert scratched his head. “You must have heard the rumor going around a few years ago, about a treatment for prolonging life?” He glanced at Corinne, but she shook her head. “No?” he said. He shrugged. “Well, there was this story that immortality had been discovered — but naturally it was being kept for the rich, for the people in power. People like the Right Honorable Sir Graham Anderson, prime minister.”

“But it would have been on television.”

“Oh, Corinne, you’re so naive sometimes. This is England, woman. The only country in the world that doesn’t have laws prohibiting its people from doing things — it has laws that permit them to do things.”

Corinne wasn’t really listening. She was thinking about the Queen Mother, and how she didn’t seem to have aged, either; but that was only six years, she supposed. “Would the royal family be included in this conspiracy of yours?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Then how come the king is dead, the last king.”

“The king is dead,” said Robert. “Long live the king. The answer is simple: Even being immortal isn’t much protection when your state coach and you inside get blown up into millions of tiny pieces.”

“You don’t believe all that, do you?” Corinne said. “About some people being immortal?”

“You must be joking.” Robert slid down under the duvet again. “It must be nice, though,” he added sleepily, “to live forever.”

Corinne remembered all the paintings that had lined the walls of the National Gallery, only a part of her output over the past two decades. To live forever?

“I can’t think of anything worse,” she said.

Robert didn’t join Corinne when she accepted the prime minister’s invitation, and Sir Graham arranged for her to be picked up by helicopter and taken to Chequers, where he was spending the weekend discussing the new emergency regulations. Corinne was surprised that the rest of the inner cabinet didn’t stay for dinner; when they sat down at the table, there were only three of them — herself; Sir Graham; and his wife, Lady Carole.

They spoke of everything and nothing, but all the time Corinne couldn’t help thinking what Robert had told her about immortality. Neither of the other two looked as old as she knew they were. They both seemed to be about forty.

Corinne tried to dismiss the idea. Lots of people appeared younger than their age, and Corinne believed that she was a good example. She’d looked after herself, was careful what she ate, took plenty of exercise. In a favorable light, she reckoned she could pass for thirty. But the older people became, the harder it was to disguise the years — and Graham certainly didn’t look fifty-four.

The meal was excellent. There was certainly no food shortage here, and quite exotic fare at that — fresh salmon, followed by venison. Corinne hadn’t eaten such rich food in years. And after the different wines and liquors, she was feeling light-headed when they went into the study and sat down in the plush leather armchairs in front of the blazing log fire.

Lady Carole excused herself after a few minutes, and Corinne was alone with Sir Graham. She smiled as the flames warmed her face. After a few drinks, her earlier thoughts about the man’s age seemed ridiculous.

“You kept looking at me in an odd way before, Corinne,” he said. “What were you thinking about? The last time we met?”

“At the National Gallery?”

He shook his head, smiling softly. “You know what I mean.” He stood up and took a cigar from the box on top of a carved bureau in the corner, then lit it as he sat down again. There was silence for a while as they watched the logs burn. “The night you finished my portrait,” he added.

“Twelve years ago,” Corinne reminded him.

“Was it that long?” Sir Graham stared at the paneled wall beyond her.

“I suppose it must be.” He hesitated, as though unsure of his words. “Do you think I’ve altered?”

“Altered?”

“Since you painted me?”

“What makes you ask that?” she said suspiciously. It was almost as if he could read her mind. Had he stood in front of his portrait so that she could see he was no different? It couldn’t be, that was ridiculous.

The prime minister smiled instead of replying. “Would you like another drink?”

Corinne shook her head.

“It’s true, you know,” Sir Graham continued. “I’ve hardly changed. Two years after you painted me, I had — er — had an operation, a certain treatment to stop me from aging.” He was watching Corinne, waiting to observe some reaction.

“Cosmetic surgery, you mean?”

“No. Longevity. Perhaps even immortality.”

Corinne looked away from him and stared into the fire. She felt confused and wished she hadn’t had so much to drink, but she didn’t doubt that Sir Graham was telling the truth. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked, after a few seconds.

“I wanted you to know that it works, that there’s nothing to fear or worry about.”

She glanced at him, not understanding what he meant.

“I’m offering you the chance of having the same treatment, Corinne.

Would you like to join the elite, be one of us, and become immortal?”

She shook her head slowly, in disbelief rather than rejection. She could accept the idea of immortality, that there had been some secret medical breakthrough; it was entirely possible. But… but…

“Why me?” she asked. She frowned. “Because of that one night twelve years ago?”

The man laughed, then sighed. “No, Corinne, not because of that.” He drew on his cigar and studied the glowing tip. “Let me explain. When I first became a Member of Parliament, I heard a story about immortality. I didn’t believe it could be true, but gradually I realized that this treatment did exist. A process had been found to prevent old age; the secret of eternal youth — call it what you will. But it was in the hands of those who held the real power in this country, not their puppet politicians like me. I decided to change all that.”

As he paused, Corinne asked: “How?”

The prime minister shook his head and smiled without humor; he wasn’t going to say. “Things are a little different now. Wealth and influence are no longer the main qualification — perhaps because everyone rich or powerful enough has already been treated. But I want to offer the opportunity to the nation’s finest talents, our scientists and composers and poets…and artists. You’re too valuable for your skills to be allowed to die. What do you say, Corinne?”

She said nothing — she was having enough trouble thinking clearly. Her mind was filled with flashes of brief ideas that set her brain reeling. This was crazy. Sir Graham was offering immortality as casually as a glass of brandy.

“The treatment arose out of cancer research back in the 1980’s,” the prime minister added. “The original experimental rats are still alive forty years later. It works equally well with humans, and with no significant side effects. There is complete cell renewal in all bone and tissue, even brain cells.”

“And…and you’re offering this to me?”

“Yes.”

“But… uh… I mean…what will it cost me?”

“Nothing.” He laughed briefly. “It’s the only thing you can still get on the National Health.”

“What about Robert?” she asked suddenly.

Sir Graham knew at once whom she meant. “The man you live with?”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Corinne. We have to restrict it to a few people, and he’s not …” He shrugged his shoulder. “Well, he’s not one of them.”

“Because he isn’t rich? Is that what you mean?” She couldn’t accept, not if the treatment wasn’t available to Robert. “What if we were married?”

The prime minister shook his head again. “I realize it’s a difficult decision, but if you —

“What about your wife?” Corinne interrupted. “She’s had it done, hasn’t she? Like you. Why should she be any different from Robert?”

Sir Graham held up his hand to stop her tirade. “I don’t want to hear any more about this Robert,” he said calmly. “Furthermore, you won’t discuss this with him or anyone else. What I have told you is in the strictest confidence.”

He didn’t need to threaten any reprisal; his cold eyes were all the warning Corinne needed.

“Don’t take too long reaching a decision. You can have a couple of weeks to consider it.”

Corinne rose to her feet. “I can give you my answer now,” she said. She would not say yes, not without Robert.

Sir Graham held up his hand once more. “Don’t be too hasty,” he told her. “I’ve asked you once, and that’s all. If you refuse, then it’s final.” He stubbed out the cigar, then added for emphasis: “And you will die. You might live another thirty or forty years, growing old and feeble and senile, but you will die. Think about it, Corinne, think about it.”

Corinne stood naked in front of the full-length mirror on the bedroom wall, examining herself, trying to remember herself twenty years ago —and wondering how she would look in another twenty years.

Twenty years wasn’t long at all.

And time was cruder to a woman than a man. Would Robert still love her when her skin was loose and wrinkled, her hair gray, her face thin, her stomach fat…? Already she had noticed the way that he looked at other women — younger women. He was still very handsome, tall and slim, but the years would take their toll on him as well. But men seemed to age so much more easily than women. They didn’t live as long, there were more old women than old men, but what consolation was that? Corinne didn’t want to grow old, and she didn’t want to die.

But how could she live, accept the treatment, then watch as Robert grew older and frailer, until he finally died while she remained the same?

The answer was simple: She couldn’t.

She had known and loved Robert for so long, he meant more to her than anything else in the world…than everything else in the world. She couldn’t give him up. She wouldn’t want to live without him, which she’d have to do if she accepted the treatment and Robert couldn’t have it.

What was the point of living forever if it meant being alone? Corinne could still remember how it had been before she met Robert, the endless lonely days and the even longer lonely nights.

The cost of eternity was too high. She would give up everything, even the offer of infinite tomorrows, for Robert, because without him she was only half alive.

She didn’t regret any of the years she had spent with Robert. They’d had their problems and their arguments, but on the whole their relationship had improved with time. She looked forward to spending the rest of their lives together.

There was no need to tell Graham Anderson of her decision. If she didn’t get in touch, then he would realize she believed her first instincts were correct and that she’d refused his offer. That night, as they held each other close, Corinne said to Robert: “Tomorrow I’m going to start my final portrait. I don’t want any objections or discussion — because I’m going to paint you.”

Robert opened his mouth to speak, but she put her hand across his lips.

“Don’t say anything,” Corinne told him. “All you have to do is nod your head.”

Robert did as he was told; he nodded his head.

“Good,” said Corinne. “That’s settled. It’ll be my last and my best.”

She tried not to think about why she wanted a portrait of Robert, but was aware it was because as the years went by she would have a permanent reminder of him as he was now — before he had grown old.

But for the same reason, she had no intention of doing a self-portrait.

Corinne had never painted herself — she didn’t want to remember how she had been, not when the mirror showed her the way she was now. The idea had not been very pleasant in the past, but for the future it seemed even more frightening, forever taunting her with the opportunity of immortality — which she had thrown away.

“And when I’ve finished,” Corinne concluded, “we’re going to go on a holiday. A long tour of the world, visit some of the places we’ve never seen— while they still exist.”

The portrait was the most difficult Corinne had painted in years.

Perhaps it was so hard to capture Robert on canvas because she knew him too well, or it was because they were in an entirely different relationship during the sessions. It took much longer than she had anticipated.

“I’m not surprised no one ever asks you to paint them twice,” Robert had said on the first day. “It’s so boring sitting here. At least you could talk to me.”

“Move your arm back where it was,” Corinne had replied.

“I’m glad I’m not paying for this,” he’d complained, shifting his elbow half an inch along the arm of the chair.

Half of the work of a painting was done when the subject had left; she worked directly with oils on a prepared canvas. When she was alone and without distraction, she could concentrate on the more detailed work of the background and clothing. It looked more natural to follow what should have been there rather than what she’d actually seen. She could invent the texture of cloth and the way it hung, imagine the shadows where it was folded and creased, far more authentically than it ever appeared in real life.

Finally, on the fifth day, Corinne said: “That’s it. You can go now.”

“Thank God for that.” Robert stood up and stretched, rubbing at the back of his neck. He began to walk toward the easel. “Can I take a look?”

“No.” She hadn’t allowed him to see what she’d done yet; she never showed her portraits until they were complete.

“You said you were finished,” said Robert, but he halted.

“I said you could go; I didn’t say I’d finished. I’ll be a few more hours yet, but I don’t need you.” She glanced from the picture and over at Robert, and she smiled as though she’d just seen him — he was no longer the stranger who’d been sitting for her. “I want to get it done tonight.”

“O.K. When do you think you’ll be through?”

“I’ll be back about eight, no later than nine.”

“Fine. Don’t be late; I’ll book a table for dinner, to celebrate. Shall I pick you up here?”

Corinne nodded, her attention returning to the painting in front of her.

“That way at least I’ll get to see my picture,” said Robert. “I’ll come by at half past eight, O.K.? Phone me if there’s a change in plan.”

Corinne squeezed another inch of cerise onto the piece of mirror she used as a palette, and when she looked around next, Robert had gone. She wasn’t sure if he’d left a minute ago or an hour.

She realized that there wasn’t much more she could do; the light from the window was fading. Even if there had been more daylight, she had virtually finished. She put down her brushes and easel and climbed off the stool. She had finished; there was no point trying to delay the moment any longer. She was through. It was over, finished. Her last portrait.

She didn’t even look at it as she took her brushes over to the corner by the sink and began cleaning them with turpentine.

What was it Robert had said before? That he’d come and pick her up before they went out to dinner? But that was no good. She had to go home and change. She kept other clothes in her studio, but nothing suitable for going out. And she certainly wanted to shower and wash her hair if they intended to celebrate.

After drying her hands, she rubbed skin lotion into her palms and worked it around her fingers and up to her wrists. She stared at her hands. They were long and slender, like her fingers. Her fingernails were trimmed down almost to the quick, because they were very brittle and split easily. Maybe she’d have time to grow and take care of them better from now on.

She took off her smock and hung it up, glancing around the high-ceilinged white room and remembering all the people who had been there. Corinne had always preferred painting in this room, although that hadn’t always been possible. Removing her headband, she shook her hair free as she walked toward the phone. She noticed her distorted image in the blank screen while punching out the first digits. Then she paused and pressed the cancel button.

What was the point in calling Robert? What was there to tell him? Only that she was coming home early. She could be back in less than half an hour; then she could bring him here to view the completed portrait before they went out for the evening.

Ideally, she would have liked to take the picture now and give it to Robert as her gift. But it was too wet and awkward to manage alone.

She put on her street clothes, her old faded and patched coat, the scratched boots with worn heels, then left the room and security-sealed the door. Although the major walkways were quite well guarded, Corinne always carried a bag with a small sum of money. It could easily be snatched from her hand, and it was safer than having nothing. If an attacker found nothing to steal, he was more likely to become violent.

She walked quickly, not looking at anyone as she passed, her eyes aimed at the ground a dozen feet ahead of her, until she reached the perimeter fence that surrounded the block of flats. The armed guard in the blockhouse opened the outer gate as she approached and he recognized her.

Often, Corinne had considered that she ought to take over one of the other flats as her studio, but it wouldn’t have been the same. She’d had the old room for fifteen years now, and she felt more at home there in some respects than in the apartment she and Robert shared.

The outer gate shut and the inner one opened, and Corinne walked across the bare concrete toward the entrance. She glanced up at the twenty-story tower for a moment; then, as she reached the glass door, she saw Robert in the hallway, waiting for the lift. Corinne slowly pushed open the swing door and began to creep silently toward him.

Then she realized that he wasn’t alone. A slender girl with short curly red hair was with him, and Robert was nodding his head as she spoke.

Corinne paused, wondering who she could be. Perhaps she was one of the neighbors. The lift doors opened, and Robert put his arm around the girl’s shoulder, drawing her close to him and kissing her on the cheek. She laughed and pulled away, jumping into the lift.

Corinne froze, unable even to turn away in case Robert should see her.

But all of Robert’s attention was on his companion, and the lift doors slid shut. Slowly, Corinne walked toward the lift and pressed the button automatically.

What was going on? She’d seen Robert, she’d seen the girl, and she’d seen the way they had been behaving — but she refused to believe the evidence of her own eyes. No wonder Robert had asked her what time she’d be finishing at the studio tonight and to tell him if there was any change. He’d wanted to bring that girl back here with him.

The second lift appeared, the doors opening, but Corinne didn’t move.

The doors swished shut. She turned and went out through the swing door.

When she reached the studio, it was twilight and she couldn’t remember having walked there. She felt dazed and bewildered as she moved across the bare floor and sat down on her stool in front of the easel and stared at Robert’s picture.

“How could you?” she whispered. “How could you?”

Without realizing, she’d picked up her sharpest knife from the workbench. Now she raised it like a dagger, about to plunge the blade into Robert’s treacherous face.

Her hand quivered, and her eyes were wet with tears, blurring her vision of the portrait. This wasn’t the answer. She opened her fingers, and the knife dropped to the floor.

Corinne sat without moving as night fell, and she shivered, feeling hollow and cold inside.

After a while she stood up and walked across the room toward the phone.

“Corinne! Where have you been?” Robert stared at her, his face reflecting a complex series of emotions — relief and anger, joy and anxiety.

“I’ve been nearly out of my mind, worried to death. What happened to you?”

“Hello, Robert,” said Corinne, pushing past him into the living room.

“I’ve been away,”

Robert rubbed his hands across his cheeks. “I know you’ve been away, for God’s sakes! But where? Why? What happened? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Corinne sat down. “I feel a bit tired, that’s all.”

She was exhausted. For fifteen days she’d been under sedation, and the effects of the drugs hadn’t worn off yet. They hadn’t told her what had been done, and she felt almost exactly the same as she had the day she entered the clinic. There were no scars or any sign that her body had been operated on. Perhaps it had all been a hoax, a joke fashioned by the prime minister’s warped sense of humor; maybe he’d raped her every day while she’d been unconscious. Corinne didn’t really care.

Robert sat on the edge of the chair opposite, staring at her. “I’ve been through hell, Corinne. I thought you were in hospital or had been kidnapped… or were dead. All I could hope was that you’d decided to go on that holiday without me. I tried the police, the security forces, the medical authorities. No one knew, and no one wanted to know.” He shook his head. “It’s good to see you, marvelous to see you. Are you going to tell me what happened?”

Corinne shrugged, trying to keep her heavy eyelids from touching. “I had to get away, Robert, that’s all. I’m sorry I couldn’t let you know. But

…” She shrugged again.

“Corinne. Corinne, Corinne.” Robert stood up and paced the room.

“When we went to the studio that night and found you gone, we thought you must have come back here and we’d missed you. Then when you never arrived… Oh, God, I can’t begin to tell you… Why the hell couldn’t you let me know you were all right?”

Corinne watched him as he paused and stared out of the window. She frowned. “‘We?’” she asked.

“Yeah. Juliet was here, my niece. You know her, Louisa’s daughter.”

“Juliet?” repeated Corinne, trying to remember.

“Yes, Juliet. She’s started at art college now and she wanted to see you again. She phoned up because she was in London, and I invited her around that evening.”

Corinne stood up and walked over to Robert, putting her arms around him and resting her head on his shoulder. He ran his fingers through her hair and held her tight.

Corinne wanted to cry, but there were no more tears.

Corinne wished she had never painted that portrait of Robert, or that she’d destroyed it when she had the opportunity — yet she didn’t want to be without it, either. While it hung on the wall of the house in Kent where they’d moved after their two-year world tour, it reminded her of how Robert had been.

The portrait was how she always thought of him, and whenever she studied him properly it came as a surprise to notice how much he’d altered. His hair was thinning on top and the black lightening to gray at the sides, while the skin around his cheeks was more creased and drawn; his face was gaunter, a maze of broken veins; he’d put on weight, particularly around the middle; he no longer stood so straight, and his shoulders seemed more hunched, as though the passing years were dragging him down. He was forty-eight years old, one year more than Corinne.

Yet Corinne hadn’t altered since she had returned from the clinic.

She studied her image in the mirror every day, looking for signs of aging — for deeper wrinkles on her face, for her skin to become drier and lose its tautness, for the first gray hair to show itself. But there was nothing.

At first she had pretended that by keeping her appearance, it would prevent Robert from looking at younger women. He had no need to, because she was a younger woman now. But all the time she was worried by the fact that Robert was growing older while she was not. What would happen when it became all too apparent? How would he react when he discovered, as he inevitably must, that the years were dividing them?

She ate more starchy food and gave up exercise, trying to add a few pounds to her slender figure; she no longer spent so much time looking after her skin, and she chose different makeup; she tinted her hair a shade lighter, gradually adding hints of gray. It made a difference, but not much.

And in all the years after the treatment, Corinne never picked up a brush; there was neither the need nor the desire to paint again.

She and Robert spent almost all of their time together. They had always talked for hour after hour, but now it seemed there was very little to talk about. There was less laughter, and there was less loving.

“I think we ought to move back to London,” Robert said one warm summer afternoon as they sat in the garden and watched two butterflies chase each other across the empty swimming pool. “It’s a lot safer there these days.”

“I like it here,” Corinne answered.

“So do I, but I don’t think it’s good for us. We’re so isolated, it’s like living in another world. The days slip by, then the weeks and months, almost without noticing. Then suddenly another year’s passed.”

Corinne said nothing.

“And you’ve still got your studio in London,” Robert told her.

“Have I?” Corinne turned to look at him.

Robert nodded. “I’ve kept on paying the rent, because I knew you’d want to go back there someday.”

“We’re not broke, are we?”

“No, not at all. But I thought you might want to start painting again.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because you’re an artist, that’s why. You didn’t start painting for money; that wasn’t the reason you did it. I know you said you’d stop doing portraits, but you didn’t mean you’d give up painting absolutely.”

Corinne wondered what had made Robert bring up the subject, and she waited for him to continue.

“I think you ought to start painting again, and soon,” he said. “It’s been eight years. You never do anything these days, nothing at all. You don’t even read, and I look after the house and garden. You… you’ve just retired.” He shrugged, then smiled, as if to take the edge off what he’d said.

“There’s plenty of time,” said Corinne, and she returned her attention to the butterflies.

“You’ve changed, you know; you’re different. Ever since you went missing that time.” He grabbed hold of her arm, forcing her to look at him.

After that first day, when Corinne wouldn’t answer, Robert had never questioned Corinne again about her disappearance. He seemed to have realized that she would never tell him where she’d been or what had happened.

“I haven’t changed, Robert.” Corinne said.

Robert stared at her, his brow creased, his eyes studying her face. He opened his mouth slightly, as if to speak, then closed it again. He shook his head once. Looking down at where his hand clutched her bare arm, he squeezed his fingers against her flesh for a moment before letting go.

“No,” he said slowly, as his eyes widened, “you haven’t, have you? I’m the one who’s changed.” He stood up abruptly, his chair toppling to the ground, and he turned his back on Corinne. “Tell me it isn’t true.”

“What?” Corinne glanced at him as he clenched his fists by his side. He couldn’t know, he couldn’t possibly know. He was only guessing wildly.

“Tell me it isn’t true!” He spun around, his eyes meeting hers.

Corinne blinked, then looked away.

“I see,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

“What’s the matter, Robert?”

“Come on! Don’t play games. You can’t pretend anymore.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Corinne. Then she looked away, searching for the butterflies, but they had disappeared.

Robert went back into the house. He left an hour later, and she never saw him again.

Lying on a towel, a huge parasol protecting her from the sun’s glare, Corinne stared out across the white sand toward the turquoise ocean.

“There’s a letter for you,” said Kurt, as he sat down next to her and set the tray of iced bottles and chilled glasses on the low table.

Corinne raised her sunglasses and peered at the envelope as Kurt held it toward her. It had been a long time since she’d received a letter. This one had followed her around the world, judging by the number of changes to the address.

“Open it,” she said.

Kurt did so, and she took the single sheet of paper from him and unfolded it. The letter was handwritten, and she glanced at the signature first, not recognizing it. Juliet Merchant. Then she looked at the date.

“What’s the date today?” she asked.

Kurt told her; the letter had been written three months ago.

She began reading.

Dear Corinne Dewar:

You probably do not remember me, but we met many years ago when you came to visit my parents. My mother, Louisa, was Robert Coogan’s sister. I will never forget meeting you. In fact, it was probably because I met you that I went to art college. I studied fine art, but was not good enough to become a full-time painter. I did, however, meet my future husband at college, and we now have three children and four grandchildren.

The reason I am writing is to give you the sad news that Robert died last week. He passed away peacefully in his sleep, of natural causes. I have no idea why you and my uncle separated after so many years together, and he would never say. Some time previously, Robert asked me to write to you upon his death and say that he was sorry and that he understood — he said you would know what he meant. He could not write himself as he had become blind during the last years of his life.

Finally, I would just like to add how much pleasure your work has given me and say how much I and so many others regretted your decision to give up painting.

I hope you are in good health. Best wishes.

Juliet Merchant.

Corinne folded the letter, then tore it into pieces before giving it back to Kurt. Kurt handed her one of the two tall glasses he had filled. As she raised it to her lips, Corinne studied him from the corner of her eye, noticing the fold of spare flesh around his waist and the way his hair was starting to recede at the temples.

She sipped her drink, gazing across the smooth beach to the tanned, lithe figure of a young man walking in their direction. He had been swimming, and his nude body sparkled with drops of water. His hair was blond and his limbs and torso finely muscled.

As he passed Corinne, his eye appraised her own slim, naked body. He smiled at her, slowing his pace and Corinne returned the smile.

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 mega-dose 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 likewise. 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 downstairs 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 of 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 minicomputer 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 fun, 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, key rings. 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…” 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 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. I 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, tossed 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 had.

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.

OUR NEURAL CHERNOBYL

Bruce Sterling

The late twentieth century, and the early years of our own millennium, form, in retrospect, a single era. This was the Age of the Normal Accident, in which people cheerfully accepted technological risks that today would seem quite insane.

Chernobyls were astonishingly frequent during this footloose, not to say criminally negligent, period. The nineties, with their rapid spread of powerful industrial technologies to the developing world, were a decade of frightening enormities, including the Djakarta supertanker spill, the Lahore meltdown, and the gradual but devastating mass poisonings from tainted Kenyan contraceptives.

Yet none of these prepared humankind for the astonishing global effects of biotechnology’s worst disaster: the event that has come to be known as the “neural chernobyl.”

We should be grateful, then, that such an authority as the Novel Prize-winning systems neurochemist Dr. Felix Hotton should have turned his able pen to the history of Our Neural Chernobyl (Bessemer, December 2056, $499.95). Dr. Hotton is uniquely qualified to give us this devastating reassessment of the past’s wrongheaded practices. For Dr. Hotton is a shining exemplar of the new “Open-Tower Science,” that social movement within the scientific community that arose in response to the New Luddism of the teens and twenties.

Such pioneering Hotton papers as “Thc Locus Cocrulcus Efferent Network: What in Heck Is It There For?” and “My Grand Fun Tracing Neural Connections With Tetramethylbenzidine” established this new, relaxed, and triumphantly subjective school of scientific exploration.

Today’s scientist is a far cry from the white-coated sociopath of the past. Scientists today are democratized, media-conscious, fully integrated into the mainstream of modern culture. Today’s young people, who admire scientists with a devotion once reserved for pop stars, can scarcely imagine the situation otherwise. But in Chapter 1, “The Social Roots of Gene-Hacking,” Dr. Hotton brings turn-of-the-century attitudes into startling relief. This was the golden age of applied biotech. Anxious attitudes toward “genetic tampering” changed rapidly when the terrifying AIDS pandemic was finally broken by recombinant DNA research.

It was during this period that the world first became aware that the AIDS retrovirus was a fantastic blessing in a particularly hideous disguise. This disease, which dug itself with horrible, virulent cunning into the very genetic structure of its victims, proved a medical marvel when finally broken to harness. The AIDS virus’s RNA transcriptase system proved an able workhorse, successfully carrying healing segments of recombinant DNA into sufferers from a myriad of genetic defects. Suddenly one ailment after another fell to the miracle of RNA transcriptase techniques: sickle-cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease—literally hundreds of syndromes now only an unpleasant memory.

As billions poured into the biotech industry, and the instruments of research were simplified, an unexpected dynamic emerged: the rise of “gene-hacking.” As Dr. Hotton points out, the situation had a perfect parallel in the 1970s and 1980s in the subculture of computer hacking. Here again was an enormously powerful technology suddenly within the reach of the individual.

As biotech companies multiplied, becoming ever smaller and more advanced, a hacker subculture rose around this “hot technology” like a cloud of steam. These ingenious, anomic individuals, often led into a state of manic self-absorption by their ability to dice with genetic destiny, felt no loyalty to social interests higher than their own curiosity. As early as the 1980s, devices such as high-performance liquid chromatographs, cell-culture systems, and DNA sequencers were small enough to fit into a closet or attic. If not bought from junkyards, diverted, or stolen outright, they could be reconstructed from off-the-shelf parts by any bright and determined teenager.

Dr. Hotton’s second chapter explores the background of one such individual: Andrew (“Bugs”) Berenbaum, now generally accepted as the perpetrator of the neural chernobyl.

Bugs Berenbaum, as Dr. Hotton convincingly shows, was not much different from a small horde of similar bright young misfits surrounding the genetic establishments of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. His father was a semi-successful free-lance programmer, his mother a heavy marijuana user whose life centered around her role as “Lady Anne of Greengables” in Raleigh’s Society for Creative Anachronism.

Both parents maintained a flimsy pretense of intellectual superiority, impressing upon Andrew the belief that the family’s sufferings derived from the general stupidity and limited imagination of the average citizen. And Berenbaum, who showed an early interest in such subjects as math and engineering (then considered markedly un-glamorous), did suffer some persecution from peers and schoolmates. At fifteen he had already drifted into the gene-hacker subculture, accessing gossip and learning “the scene” through computer bulletin boards and all-night beer-and-pizza sessions with other would-be pros. At twenty-one, Berenbaum was working a summer internship with the small Raleigh firm of CoCoGenCo, a producer of specialized biochemicals. CoCoGenCo, as later congressional investigations proved, was actually a front for the California “designer drug” manufacturer and smuggler, Jimmy “Screech” McCarley. McCarley’s agents within CoCoGenCo ran innumerable late-night “research projects” in conditions of heavy secrecy. In reality, these “secret projects” were straight production runs of synthetic cocaine, beta-phenethylamine, and sundry tailored variants of endorphin, a natural antipain chemical ten thousand times more potent than morphine.

One of McCarley’s “black hackers,” possibly Berenbaum himself, conceived the sinister notion of “implanted dope factories.” By attaching the drug-producing genetics directly into the human genome, it was argued, abusers could be “wet-wired” into permanent states of intoxication. The agent of fixation would be the AIDS retrovirus, whose RNA sequence was a matter of common knowledge and available on dozens of open scientific databases. The one drawback to the scheme, of course, was that the abuser would “burn out like a shitpaper moth in a klieg light,” to use Dr. Hotton’s memorable phrase. Chapter 3 is rather technical. Given Dr. Hotton’s light and popular style, it makes splendid reading. Dr. Hotton attempts to reconstruct Berenbaum’s crude attempts to rectify the situation through gross manipulation of the AIDS RNA transcriptase. What Berenbaum sought, of course, was a way to shut-off and start-up the transcriptase carrier, so that the internal drug factory could be activated at will. Berenbaum’s custom transcriptase was designed to react to a simple user-induced trigger—probably D,l,2,5-phospholytic gluteinase, a fractionated component of “Dr. Brown’s Celery Soda,” as Hotton suggests. This harmless beverage was a favorite quaff of gene-hacker circles.

Finding the genomes for cocaine-production too complex, Berenbaum (or perhaps a close associate, one Richard “Sticky” Ravetch) switched to a simpler payload: the just-discovered genome for mammalian dendritic growth factor. Dendrites are the treelike branches of brain cells, familiar to every modern schoolchild, which provide the mammalian brain with its staggering webbed complexity. It was theorized at the time that DG factor might be the key to vastly higher states of human intelligence. It is to be presumed that both Berenbaum and Ravetch had dosed themselves with it. As many modern victims of the neural chernobyl can testify, it does have an effect. Not precisely the one that the CoCoGenCo zealots envisioned, however.

While under the temporary maddening elation of dendritic “branch-effect,” Berenbaum made his unfortunate breakthrough. He succeeded in providing his model RNA transcriptase with a trigger, but a trigger that made the transcriptase itself far more virulent than the original AIDS virus itself. The stage was set for disaster.

It was at this point that one must remember the social attitudes that bred the soul-threatening isolation of the period’s scientific workers. Dr. Hotton is quite pitiless in his psychoanalysis of the mental mind-set of his predecessors. The supposedly “objective worldview” of the sciences is now quite properly seen as a form of mental brainwashing, deliberately stripping the victim of the full spectrum of human emotional response. Under such conditions, Berenbaum’s reckless act becomes almost pitiable; it was a convulsive overcompensation for years of emotional starvation. Without consulting his superiors, who might have shown more discretion, Berenbaum began offering free samples of his new wetwares to anyone willing to inject them.

There was a sudden brief plague of eccentric genius in Raleigh, before the now-well-known symptoms of “dendritic crash” took over, and plunged the experimenters into vision-riddled, poetic insanity. Berenbaum himself committed suicide well before the full effects were known. And the full effects, of course, were to go far beyond even this lamentable human tragedy.

Chapter 4 becomes an enthralling detective story as the evidence slowly mounts.

Even today the term “Raleigh collie” has a special ring for dog fanciers, many of whom have forgotten its original derivation. These likable, companionable, and disquietingly intelligent pets were soon transported all over the nation by eager buyers and breeders. Once it had made the jump from human host to canine, Berenbaurn’s transcriptase derivative, like the AIDS virus itself, was passed on through the canine maternal womb. It was also transmitted through canine sexual intercourse and, via saliva, through biting and licking.

No dendritically enriched “Raleigh collie” would think of biting a human being. On the contrary, these loyal and well-behaved pets have even been known to right spilled garbage cans and replace their trash. Neural Chernobyl infections remain rare in humans. But they spread through North America’s canine population like wildfire, as Dr. Hotton shows in a series of cleverly designed maps and charts.

Chapter 5 offers us the benefit of hindsight. We are now accustomed to the idea of many different modes of “intelligence.” There are, for instance, the various types of computer Artificial Intelligence, which bear no real relation to human “thinking.” This was not unexpected— but the diverse forms of animal intelligence can still astonish in their variety.

The variance between Canis familiaris and his wild cousin, the coyote, remains unexplained. Dr. Hotton makes a good effort, basing his explication on the coyote neural mapping of his colleague, Dr. Reyna Sanchez of Los Alamos National Laboratory. It does seem likely that the coyote’s more fully reticulated basal commissure plays a role. At any rate, it is now clear that a startling advanced form of social organization has taken root among the nation’s feral coyote organization, with the use of elaborate coded barks, “scent-dumps,” and specialized roles in hunting and food storage. Many of the nation’s ranchers have now taken to the “protection system,” in which coyote packs are “bought off” with slaughtered, barbecued livestock and sacks of dog treats. Persistent reports in Montana, Idaho, and Saskatchewan insist that coyotes have been spotted wearing cast-off clothing during the worst cold of winter.

It is possible that the common household cat was infected even earlier than the dog. Yet the effects of heightened cat intelligence are subtle and difficult to specify. Notoriously reluctant lab subjects, cats in their infected states are even sulkier about running mazes, solving trick boxes, and so on, preferring to wait out their interlocutors with inscrutable feline patience.

It has been suggested that some domestic cats show a heightened interest in television programs. Dr. Hotton casts a skeptical light on this, pointing out (rightly, as this reviewer thinks) that cats spend most of their waking hours sitting and staring into space. Staring at the flickering of a television is not much more remarkable than the hearthside cat’s fondness for the flickering fire. It certainly does not imply “understanding” of a program’s content. There are, however, many cases where cats have learned to paw-push the buttons of remote-control units. Those who keep cats as mousers have claimed that some cats now torture birds and rodents for longer periods, with greater ingenuity, and in some cases with improvised tools.

There remains, however, the previously unsuspected connection between advanced dendritic branching and manual dexterity, which Dr. Hotton tackles in his sixth chapter. This concept has caused a revolution in paleoan-thropology. We are now forced into the uncomfortable realization that Pithecanthropus robustus, formerly dismissed as a large-jawed, vegetable-chewing ape, was probably far more intelligent than Homo sapiens. CAT-scans of the recently discovered Tanzanian fossil skeleton, nicknamed “Leonardo,” reveal a Pithecanthropus skull-ridge obviously rich with dendritic branching. It has been suggested that the pithecanthropoids suffered from a heightened “life of the mind” similar to the life-threatening, absent-minded genius of terminal neural Chernobyl sufferers. This yields the uncomfortable theory that nature, through evolution, has imposed a “primate stupidity barrier” that allows humans, unlike Pithecanthropus, to get on successfully with the dumb animal business of living and reproducing.

But the synergetic effects of dendritic branching and manual dexterity are clear in a certain nonprimate species. I refer, of course, to the well-known “chernobyl jump” of Procyon lotor, the American raccoon. The astonishing advances of the raccoon, and its Chinese cousin the panda, occupy the entirety of Chapter 8.

Here Dr. Hotton takes the so-called “modern view,” from which I must dissociate myself. I, for one, find it intolerable that large sections of the American wilderness should be made into “no-go areas” by the vandalistic activities of our so-called “stripe-tailed cousins.” Admittedly, excesses may have been committed in early attempts to exterminate the verminous, booming population of these masked bandits. But the damage to agriculture has been severe, and the history of kamikaze attacks by self-infected rabid raccoons is a terrifying one.

Dr. Hotton holds that we must now “share the planet with a fellow civilized species.” He bolsters his argument with hearsay evidence of “raccoon culture” that to me seems rather flimsy. The woven strips of bark known as “raccoon wampum” are impressive examples of animal dexterity, but to my mind it remains to be proven that they are actually “money.” And their so-called “pictographs” seem little more than random daubings. The fact remains that the raccoon population continues to rise exponentially, with raccoon bitches whelping massive litters every spring. Dr. Hotton, in a footnote, suggests that we can relieve crowding pressure by increasing the human presence in outer space. This seems a farfetched and unsatisfactory scheme.

The last chapter is speculative in tone. The prospect of intelligent rats is grossly repugnant; so far, thank God, the tough immune system of the rat, inured to bacteria and filth, has rejected retroviral invasion. Indeed, the feral cat population seems to be driving these vermin toward extinction. Nor have opossums succumbed; indeed, marsupials of all kinds seem immune, making Australia a haven of a now-lost natural world. Whales and dolphins are endangered species; they seem unlikely to make a comeback even with the (as-yet-unknown) cetacean effects of chernobyling. And monkeys, which might pose a very considerable threat, are restricted to the few remaining patches of tropical forest and, like humans, seem resistant to the disease.

Our neural Chernobyl has bred a folklore all its own. Modern urban folklore speaks of “ascended masters,” a group of chernobyl victims able to survive the virus. Supposedly, they “pass for human,” forming a hidden counterculture among the normals, or “sheep.” This is a throwback to the dark tradition of Luddism, and the popular fears once projected onto the dangerous and reckless “priesthood of science” are now transferred to these fairy tales of supermen. This psychological transference becomes clear when one hears that these “ascended masters” specialize in advanced scientific research of a kind now frowned upon. The notion that some fraction of the population has achieved physical immortality, and hidden it from the rest of us, is utterly absurd.

Dr. Hotton, quite rightly, treats this paranoid myth with the contempt it deserves.

Despite my occasional reservations, this is a splendid book, likely to be the definitive work on this central phenomenon of modern times. Dr. Hotton may well hope to add another Pulitzer to his list of honors. At ninety-five, this grand old man of modern science has produced yet another stellar work in his rapidly increasing oeuvre. His many readers, like myself, can only marvel at his vigor and clamor for more.

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 textbook 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.”

LOST BOYS

Orson Scott Card

0: Boy

This is what his father always called him whenever he’d done something bad: “Where were you when this happened, Boy? What did you think you were doing, Boy?”

He took that word inside himself and it became the name for all his bad desires. It was Boy who made him play pranks that weren’t funny to anybody, Boy who made him cheat on tests when he felt like it in school, even though he always knew the answers and didn’t have to cheat. It was Boy who made him stand and watch from the closet when his parents thought he was in bed and he saw them do the dog thing, Father’s belly so loose and jiggly, Mother so white and weak and dead while it happened, her breasts flopped out flat to either side like fish. It was the worst thing Boy had ever made him do, to watch that, and to his surprise Boy didn’t like it, no, Boy hated it even worse than he did, to see Father be so bad.

I will never do that, said Boy inside him. It’s ugly to kill a woman like that and then make her still be alive afterward so you can do it all again.

From then on when he looked at big women with their breasts and their secrets and their faces that could turn dead looking at a man, Boy went away. Boy didn’t want to be part of that game.

But that didn’t mean that Boy was gone, no, nor silent neither. Boy was still there, and he got his way sometimes, yes; and he found new things to want. Only Boy wasn’t careful. Boy only wanted what he wanted until he got it and then he went back into hiding and left him to take care of everything, to take all the blame for what Boy had done even though he hadn’t wanted to do it in the first place.

Now none of his people would let him near their children because of the things Boy had decided he had to do. Damn you Boy! Die and damn you!

But they promised not to tell, says Boy. The children said they wouldn’t tell but then they did.

What do you expect, you stupid ugly Boy? What do you expect, you evil Boy? Didn’t you ever think maybe there’s another Boy inside them that makes them lie to you and promise not to tell but then they break their word because their Boy made them? And now here you are, and that’ll show you, Boy, because nobody will let you near their children anymore so you’ll just have to chew on yourself when you get hungry and drink yourself when you get dry.

No I won’t, says Boy. I’ll make a place and I’ll take them there and I won’t ever believe them when they promise not to tell. I’ll take them there and nobody will know where they are and they’ll never come back and so they’ll never tell.

You won’t do anything like that, Boy, because I won’t let you.

And Boy just laughed and laughed inside him, and he knew that he would do it all, he would prepare the hiding place and then he would go and find them for Boy and bring them back, and Boy would do what he wanted. Boy would not be afraid. Boy would do everything he thought of doing, because he knew that they would never leave and they would never tell.

That was why those little boys in Steuben started disappearing, and why not one of them was found till Christmas Eve in 1983.

1: Junk Man

This is the car they drove from Vigor, Indiana, to Steuben, North Carolina: a silvery-grey Renault 18i deluxe wagon, an ‘81 model with about forty thousand miles on it, twenty-five thousand of which they had put on it themselves. The paint was just beginning to get tiny rust-colored pockmarks in it, but the wiring had blown about fifteen fuses and they’d had to put three new drive axles in it because it was designed so that when a ball bearing wore out you had to replace the whole assembly. It couldn’t climb a hill at fifty-five, but it could seat two adults in the leather bucket seats and three kids across the back. Step Fletcher was driving, had been driving since they finally got away from the house well after noon. Empty house. He was still hearing echoes all the way to Indianapolis. Somewhere along the way he must have passed the moving van, but he didn’t notice it or didn’t recognize it or maybe the driver had pulled into a McDonald’s somewhere or a gas station as they drove on by.

The others all fell asleep soon after they crossed the Ohio River. After Step had talked so much about flatboats and Indian wars, the kids were disappointed in it. It was the bridge that impressed them. And then they fell asleep. DeAnne stayed awake a little longer, but then she squeezed his hand and nestled down into the pillow she had jammed into the corner between the seat back and the window.

Just how it always goes, thought Step. She stays awake the whole time I’m wide awake and then, just as I get sleepy and maybe need to have her spell me for a while at the wheel, she goes to sleep.

He pushed the tape the rest of the way into the player. It was the sweet junky sound of “The E Street Shuffle.” He hadn’t listened to that in a while. DeAnne must have had it playing while she ran the last-minute errands in Vigor. Step had played that album on their second date. It was kind of a test. DeAnne was so serious about religion, he had to know if she could put up with his slightly wild taste in music. A lot of Mormon girls would have missed the sexual innuendos entirely, of course, but DeAnne was probably smarter than Step was, and so she not only noticed the bit about girls promising to unsnap their jeans and the fairies in a real bitch fight, she also got the part about hooking onto the midnight train, but she didn’t get upset, she just laughed, and he knew it was going to be OK, she was religious but not a prig and that meant that he wouldn’t have to pretend to be perfect in order to be with her. Ten years ago, 1973. Now they had three kids in the back of the Renault 18i wagon, probably the worst car ever sold in America, and they were heading for Steuben, North Carolina, where Step had a job.

A good job. Thirty thousand a year, which wasn’t bad for a brand new history Ph.D. in a recession year. Except that he wasn’t teaching history, he wasn’t writing history, the job was putting together manuals for a computer software company. Not even programming—he couldn’t even get hired for that, even though Hacker Snack was the best-selling game for the Atari back in ‘81. For a while there it had looked like his career was made as a game designer. They had so much money they figured they could afford for him to go back to school and finish his doctorate. Then the recession came, and the lousy Commodore 64 was killing the Atari in the stores, and suddenly his game was out of print and nobody wanted him except as a manual writer.

So Springsteen played along to his semi-depressed mood as Step wound the car up into the mountains, the sun setting in the west as the road angled them mostly east into the darkness. I should be happy, he told himself. I got the degree, I got a good job, and nothing says I can’t do another game in my spare time, even if I have to do it on the stupid 64. It could be worse. I could have got a job programming Apples.

Despite what he said to encourage himself, the words still tasted like failure in his mouth. Thirty-two years old, three kids, and I’m on the downhill slope. Used to work for myself, and now I have to work for somebody else. Just like my dad with his sign company that went bust. At least he had the scar on his back from the operation that took out a vertebra. Me, I got no visible wounds. I was riding high one day, and then the next day we found out that our royalties would be only $7,000 instead of $40,000 like the last time, and we scrambled around looking for work and we’ve got debts coming out of our ears and I’m going to be just as broke as my folks for the rest of my life and it’s my own damned fault. Wage slave like my dad.

Just so I don’t have the shame of my wife having to take some lousy swingshift job like Mom did. Fine if she wants to get a job, that’s fine, but not if she has to.

Yet he knew even as he thought of it that that was what would happen next—they wouldn’t be able to sell the house in Vigor and she’d have to get a job just to keep up the payments on it. We were fools to buy a house, but we thought it would be a good investment. There wasn’t a recession when we moved there, and I had a good royalty income. Fools, thinking it could just go on forever. Nothing lasts.

Feeling sorry for himself kept him awake enough to keep driving for an hour. The tape was on its second time through when he started down the steep descent toward Frankfort. Good thing. Bound to be a motel in the state capital. I can make it that far, and DeAnne won’t have to wake up till we get there.

“Dad,” said Stevie from the back seat.

“Yes?” said Step—softly, so he’d know not to talk loudly enough to waken the others.

“Betsy threw up,” said Stevie.

“Just a little bit, or is it serious?”

“Just a little,” said Stevie.

Then a vast, deep urping sound came from the back seat.

“Now it’s serious,” said Stevie.

Damn damn…damn, said Step silently. “Thanks for telling me, Steve.”

The sound came again, even as he pulled off the road, and now he could smell the bitter tang of gastric juices. One of the kids almost always threw up on every long trip they took, but usually they did it in the first hour.

“Why are we stopping?” DeAnne, just waking up, had a hint of panic in her voice. She didn’t like it when something unexpected happened, and always feared the worst.

Springsteen had just sung about the fish lady and the junk man, so for the first time in a long time, Step remembered where his pet name for DeAnne had come from. “Hey, Fish Lady, take a sniff and see.”

“Oh, no, which one of them?”

“Betsy Wetsy” said Stevie from the back. Another old joke—DeAnne used to get impatient with him for the irreverent nicknames he gave the kids. She hated the nickname Betsy, but because of the joke, the name had stuck and now that was what Betsy called herself.

“More like Betsy Pukesy,” said Step. Stevie laughed.

Stevie had a good laugh. It made Step smile, and suddenly it was no big deal that he was about to be up to his elbows in toddler vomit.

Step had parked on the shoulder, well off, so that he could open Betsy’s door without putting his butt out into traffic. Even so, he didn’t like feeling the wind of the cars as they whooshed past. What a way to die—smeared like pate on the back door of the car, a sort of roadkill canape. For a moment he thought of what it would mean for the kids, if he died on the road right in front of their eyes. The little ones would probably not remember him, or how he died. But Stevie would see, Stevie would remember. It was the first time Step had really thought of it that way—Stevie was now old enough that he would remember everything that happened. Almost eight years old, and his life was now real, because he would remember it.

He would remember how Dad reacted when Betsy threw up, how Dad didn’t swear or get mad or anything, how Dad helped clean up the mess instead of standing there helplessly while Mom took care of it. That was a sort of vow he made before he got married, that there would be no job in their family that was so disgusting or difficult that DeAnne could do it and he couldn’t. He had matched her, diaper for diaper, with all three kids, and a little vomit in the car would never faze him.

Actually, a lot of vomit. Betsy, white-faced and wan, managed a smile.

By now DeAnne was outside and around the car, pulling baby wipes out of the plastic jar. “Here,” she said. “Hand her out to me and I’ll change her clothes while you clean up the car.”

In a moment DeAnne was holding a dripping Betsy out in front of her, taking her around the car to her seat, where she had already spread a cloth diaper to protect the leather.

Robbie, the four-year-old, was awake now, too, holding out his arm. He had been sitting in the middle, right next to Betsy, and there was a streak of vomit on his sleeve. “Wasn’t that sweet of your sister, to share with you,” said Step. He wiped down Robbie’s sleeve. “There you go, Road Bug.”

“It stinks.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Step: “Bear it proudly, like a wound acquired in battle.”

“Was that a joke, Daddy?” said Robbie.

“It was wit,” said Step. Robbie was trying to learn how to tell jokes. Step had given him the funny-once lecture recently, so Robbie wasn’t telling the same joke over and over again, but the different kinds of humor still baffled him and he was trying to sort them out. If Stevie’s experience was a fair sample, it would take years.

DeAnne spoke to Robbie from the front seat. “We’ll change your shirt as soon as your father has finished wiping up Betsy’s booster seat.”

Step wasn’t having much success cleaning down inside the buckle of Betsy’s seat belt. “The only way our seat belts will ever match again,” he said, “is if Betsy contrives to throw up on all the rest of them.”

“Move her around in the car and maybe she’ll have it all covered by the time we get to North Carolina,” said Stevie.

“She doesn’t throw up that often,” said DeAnne.

“It was a joke, Mom,” said Stevie.

“No, it was wit,” said Robbie.

So he was getting it.

The baby wipes were no match for Betsy’s prodigious output. They ran out long before the seat was clean enough for occupancy.

“When they hear you’re pregnant for the fourth time,” said Step, “I think Johnson & Johnson’s stock will go up ten points.”

“There’s more wipes in the big grey bag in the back,” said DeAnne. “Make sure you buy the stock before you announce it.”

Step walked around to the back of what the Renault people called a “deluxe wagon,” unlocked the swing-up door, and swung it up. Even with the bag zipped open he couldn’t find the baby wipes. “Hey, Fish Lady, where’d you pack the wipes?”

“In the bag somewhere, probably deep,” she called. “While you’re in there, I need a Huggie for Betsy. She’s wet and as long as I’ve got her undressed I might as well do the whole job.”

He gave the diaper to Stevie to pass forward, and then finally found the baby wipes. He was just stepping back so he could close the wagon when he realized that there was somebody standing behind and to the left of him. A man, with big boots. A cop. Somehow a patrol car had managed to pull up behind them and Step hadn’t heard it, hadn’t even noticed it was there.

“What’s the trouble here?” asked the patrolman.

“My two-year-old threw up all over the back seat,” said Step.

“You know the shoulder of the freeway is only to be used for emergencies,” said the cop.

For a moment it didn’t register on Step what the cop’s remark implied. “You mean that you don’t think that a child throwing up in the back seat is an emergency?”

The patrolman fixed him with a steady gaze for a moment. Step knew the look. It meant, Ain’t you cute, and he had seen it often back when he used to get speeding tickets before his license was suspended back in ‘74 and DeAnne had to drive them everywhere. Step knew that he shouldn’t say anything, because no matter what he said to policemen, it always made things worse.

DeAnne came to his rescue. She came around the car carrying Betsy’s soaked and stinking clothes. “Officer, I think if you had these in your car for about thirty seconds you’d pull off the road, too.”

The cop looked at her, surprised, and then grinned. “Ma’am, I guess you got a point. Just hurry it up. It’s not safe to be stopped here. People come down this road too fast sometimes, and they take this curve wide.”

“Thanks for your concern, Officer,” said Step.

The patrolman narrowed his eyes. “Just doing my job,” he said, rather nastily, and walked back to his car.

Step turned to DeAnne. “What did I say?”

“Get me a Ziploc bag out of there, please,” she said. “If I have to smell these any longer I’m going to faint.”

He handed her the plastic bag and she stuffed the messy clothes into it. “All I said to him was ‘Thanks for your concern,’ and he acted like I told him his mother had never been married.”

She leaned close to him and said softly, affectionately, “Step, when you say ‘Thank you for your concern’ it always sounds like you’re just accidentally leaving off the word butthead.”

“I wasn’t being sarcastic,” said Step. “Everybody always thinks I’m being sarcastic when I’m not.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said DeAnne. “I’ve never been there when you weren’t being sarcastic.”

“You think you know too much, Fish Lady”

“You don’t know anywhere near enough, Junk Man.”

He kissed her. “Give me a minute and I’ll be ready to put our Betsy Wetsy doll back in her place.”

He heard her muttering as she went back to her door: “Her name is Elizabeth.” He grinned.

Step got back to wiping down Betsy’s seat.

“I didn’t even hear that cop come up,” said Stevie.

“Cop?” asked Robbie.

“Go back to sleep, Road Bug,” said Step.

“Did we get a ticket, Daddy?” asked Robbie.

“He just wanted to make sure we were all right,” said Step.

“He wanted us to move our butts out of here,” said Stevie.

“Step!” said DeAnne.

“It was Stevie who said it, not me,” said Step.

“He wouldn’t talk that way if he didn’t learn it from you,” said DeAnne.

“Is he still there?” asked Step.

Stevie half-stood in order to see over the junk on the back deck. “Yep,” he said.

“I didn’t hear him either,” said Step. “I just turned around and there he was.”

“What if it wasn’t a cop and you just turned around and it was a bad guy?” asked Stevie.

“He gets his morbid imagination from you,” said DeAnne.

“Nobody would do anything to us out on the open highway like this where anybody passing by could see.”

“It’s dark,” said Stevie. “People drive by so fast.”

“Well, nothing happened,” said DeAnne, rather testily. “I don’t like talking about things like that.”

“If it was a bad guy Daddy would’ve popped him one in the nose!” said Robbie.

“Yeah, right,” said Step.

“Daddy wouldn’t let anything bad happen,” said Robbie.

“That’s right,” said DeAnne. “Neither would Mommy.”

“The seat’s clean,” said Step. “And the belt’s as clean as it’s going to get in this lifetime.”

“I’ll bring her around.”

“Climb over!” cried Betsy merrily, and before DeAnne could grab her, she had clambered through the gap between the bucket seats. She buckled her own seat belt, looked up at Step, and grinned.

“Well done, my little Wetsy doll.” He leaned in and kissed her forehead, then closed the door and got back in to the driver’s seat. The cop was still behind them, which made him paranoid about making sure he didn’t do anything wrong. He signaled. He drove just under the speed limit. The last thing they needed was a court date in some out-of-the-way Kentucky town.

“How much farther to Frankfort?” asked DeAnne.

“Maybe half an hour, probably less,” said Step.

“Oh, I must have slept a long way.”

“An hour maybe.”

“You’re such a hero to drive the whole way,” she said.

“Give me a medal later,” he said.

“I will.”

He turned the stereo back up a little. Everybody might have been asleep again, it was so quiet in the car. Then Stevie spoke up.

“Daddy, if it was a bad guy, would you pop him one?”

What was he supposed to say—Yessiree, my boy I’d pop him so hard he’d be wearing his nose on the back of his head for the rest of his life? Was that what was needed, to make Stevie feel safe? To make him proud of his father? Or should he tell the truth—that he had never hit anyone in anger in his life, that he had never hit a living soul with a doubled-up fist.

No, my son, my approach to fighting has always been to make a joke and walk away, and if they wouldn’t let me go, then I ran like hell.

“It depends,” said Step.

“On what?”

“On whether I thought that popping him would make things better or worse.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, if he’s a foot taller than me and weighs three hundred pounds and has a tire iron, I think popping him wouldn’t be a good idea. I think in a case like that I’d be inclined to offer him my wallet so he’d go away.”

“But what if he wanted to murder us all?”

DeAnne spoke up without turning her head out of her pillow. “Then your father would kill him, and if he didn’t, I would,” she said mildly.

“What if he killed both of you first?” asked Stevie. “And then came and wanted to kill Robbie and Betsy?”

“Stevie,” said DeAnne, “Heavenly Father won’t let anything like that happen to you.”

That was more than Step could stand. “God doesn’t work that way,” he said. “He doesn’t stop evil people from committing their crimes.”

“He’s asking us if he’s safe,” said DeAnne.

“Yes, Stevie, you’re safe, as safe as anybody ever is who’s alive in this world. But you were asking about what if somebody really terrible wanted to do something vicious to our whole family, and the truth is that if somebody is truly, deeply evil, then sometimes good people can’t stop him until he’s done a lot of bad things. That’s just the way it happens sometimes.”

“Okay” said Stevie. “But God would get him for it, right?”

“In the long run, yes,” said Step. “And I’ll tell you this—the only way anybody will ever get to you or the other kids or to your mother, for that matter, is if I’m already dead. I promise you that.”

“Okay” said Stevie.

“There aren’t that many really evil people in the world,” said Step. “I don’t think you need to worry about this.”

“Okay,” said Stevie.

“I mean, why did you ask about this stuff?”

“He had a gun.”

“Of course he had a gun, dear,” said DeAnne. “He’s a policeman. He has a gun so he can protect people like us from those bad people.”

“I wish we could always have a policeman with us,” said Stevie.

“Yeah, that’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” said Step. Right, nice like a hemorrhoid. I’d have to drive fifty-five all the time.

Stevie had apparently exhausted his questions.

A few moments later, Step felt DeAnne’s hand on his thigh, patting him. He glanced over at her. “Sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to contradict you.”

“You were right,” she said softly.

He smiled at her and held her hand for a moment, until he needed both hands on the wheel for a turn.

Still, all the rest of the way into Frankfort he couldn’t get Stevie’s questions out of his mind. Nor could he forget his own answers. He had stopped DeAnne from teaching Stevie that God would always protect him from bad people, but then he had gone on and promised that he would give his life before any harm ever came to the children. But was that true? Did he have that kind of courage? He thought of parents in concentration camps who watched their children get killed before their eyes, and yet they could do nothing. And even if he tried, what good would Step be able to do against somebody bent on violence? Step had no skill in fighting, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t one of those things that you just know how to do. Any half-assed hoodlum would make short work of Step, and here he had kids who were looking to him for protection. I should study karate or something. Kung fu. Or buy a gun so that when Stevie is fourteen he can find it where it’s hidden and play around with it and end up killing himself or Robbie or some friend of his or something.

No, thought Step. None of the above. I won’t do any of those things, because I’m a civilized man living in a civilized society, and if the barbarians ever knock on my door I’ll be helpless.

They pulled into Frankfort and there was a Holiday Inn with a vacancy sign. Step took it as a good omen. Officially he didn’t believe in omens. But what the heck, it made him feel better to take it that way, and so he did.

2: Maggots

This is the house they moved into: The only cheap wood siding in a neighborhood of red brick. No basement, no garage, not even a roof over the carport. Brown latticework around the base of the house like the skirting around a mobile home. Blue carpet in the living room, which wasn’t going to look too good with their furniture, an old-fashioned green velvet love seat and overstuffed chair Step had bought from Deseret industries when he was in college back at BYU. But it had four bedrooms, which meant one for Step and DeAnne, one for the boys, one for Betsy and the new baby when it came in July, and one for Step’s office, because they still hoped he could do some programming on the side and then they could go back to living the way they wanted to, and in a better place than this.

In the meantime, the movers had piled the living room six feet high with more boxes than they could ever unpack and put away in a place this size, and they had a single weekend to get settled before work started for Step and school started for Stevie. Monday, the deadline, the drop-dead day. Nobody was looking forward to it with much joy, least of all Stevie.

DeAnne was aware of Stevie’s anxiety all through the weekend of moving in and unpacking. Stevie mostly tended Robbie and Elizabeth, except when Step or DeAnne called for him to run some errand from one end of the house to the other. As always, Stevie was quiet and helpful—he took his responsibilities as the eldest child very seriously.

Or maybe he just seemed serious, because he kept his feelings to himself until he had sorted them out, or until they had built up to a point where he couldn’t contain them. So DeAnne knew that it was a real worry for him when he came into the kitchen and stood there silently for a long time until she said, “Want to tell me something or am I just too pretty for words?” which was what she always said, only he didn’t smile, he just stood there a moment more and then he said, “Mom, can’t I just stay home for another couple of days?”

“Stevie, I know it’s scary, but you just need to plunge right in. You’ll make friends right away and everything’ll be fine.”

“I didn’t make friends right away at my old school.”

That was true enough—DeAnne remembered the consultations with Stevie’s kindergarten teacher. Stevie didn’t really play with anybody until November of that year, and he didn’t have any actual friends until first grade. If it weren’t for his friends at church, DeAnne would have worried that Stevie was too socially immature for school. But with the kids at church he was almost wild sometimes, running around the meeting-house like a movie-western Indian until Step intervened and gathered him up and brought him to the car. No, Stevie knew how to play, and he knew how to make friends. He just didn’t make friends easily. He wasn’t like Robbie, who would walk up and talk to anybody, kid or adult. Of course Stevie was worried about school. DeAnne was worried for him, too.

“But that was your first school ever,” she said. “You know the routine now.”

“When Barry Wimmer moved in after Thanksgiving,” he said, “everybody was really rotten to him.”

“Were you?”

“No.”

“So not everybody”

“They made fun of everything he did,” said Stevie.

“Kids can be like that sometimes.”

“They’re going to do that to me now,” said Stevie.

This was excruciating. She wanted to say, You’re right, they’re going to be a bunch of little jerks, because that’s the way kids are at that age, except you, because you were born not knowing how to hurt anybody else, you were born with compassion, only that also means that when people are cruel to you it cuts you deep. You won’t understand that you have to walk right up to the ones who are being hateful and laugh in their faces and earn their respect. Instead you’ll try to figure out what you did to make them mad at you.

For a moment she toyed with putting it to him in exactly those terms. But it would hardly help him if she confirmed all his worst fears. He’d never get to sleep if she did that.

“What if they were unkind to you, Stevie? What would you do?”

He thought about that for a while. “Barry cried,” he said.

“Did that make it better?”

“No,” said Stevie. “They made fun of him crying. Ricky followed him around saying ‘boo hoo hoo’ all the time from then on. He was still doing it on my last day there.”

“So,” said DeAnne, partly to get him to talk, partly because she had no idea what to say.

“I don’t think I’ll cry,” said Stevie.

“I’m glad,” said DeAnne.

“I’ll just make them go away.”

“I don’t think that’ll work, Stevie. The more you try to make them leave, the more they’ll stick around.”

“No, I don’t mean make them go away. I mean make them go away.”

“Do you want to hand me that roll of paper towels?”

He did.

“I’m not sure I’m clear on the difference between making them go away and making them go away.”

“You know. Like when Dad’s programming. He makes everything go away.”

So he understood that about his father, and thought it might be useful. “You’ll just concentrate on your schoolwork?”

“Or whatever,” said Stevie. “It’s hard to concentrate on schoolwork because it’s so dumb.”

“Maybe it won’t be so dumb at this school.”

“Maybe.”

“I wish I could promise you that everything will be perfect, but I really don’t think they’ll treat you the way that Barry Wimmer got treated.” DeAnne thought back to the couple of times she’d seen the boy when she brought treats or some project or a forgotten lunch to school. “Barry’s the kind of kid who … how can I put it? He’s a walking victim.”

“Am I a victim?” asked Stevie.

“Not a chance,” said DeAnne. “You’re too strong.”

“Not really,” he said, looked at his hands.

“I don’t mean your body, Stevie. I mean your spirit is too strong. You know what you’re doing. You know what you’re about. You aren’t looking to these kids to tell you who you are. You know who you are.”

“I guess.”

“Come on, who are you?” It was an old game, but he still enjoyed playing along, even though the original purpose of it—preparing him to identify himself in case he got lost—was long since accomplished.

“Stephen Bolivar Fletcher.”

“And who is that?”

“Firstborn child and first son of the Junk Man and the Fish Lady.”

Of all his regular answers, that was her favorite, partly because the first time he ever said that, he had this sly little smile as if he knew he was intruding into grownup territory, as if he knew that his parents’ pet names for each other were older than he was and in some sense had caused him to exist. As if he had some unconscious awareness that those names, even spoken in jest, had sexual undertones that he couldn’t possibly understand but nevertheless knew all about.

“And don’t you forget it,” she said cheerfully.

“I won’t,” he said.

“Mom,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Please can’t I stay home just a couple more days?”

She sighed. “I really don’t think so, Stevie. But I’ll talk to your dad.”

“He’ll just say the same thing.”

“Probably. We parents are like that.”

The worst moment was at breakfast on Monday. The kids were eating their hot cereal while Step was downing his Rice Krispies, looking over the newspaper as he ate. “This is almost as bad a newspaper as the one in Vigor,” he said.

“You aren’t going to get the Washington Post unless you live in Washington,” said DeAnne.

“I don’t want the Washington Post. I’d settle for the Salt Lake Tribune. Salt Lake is still a two-newspaper town, and here Steuben can’t even support a paper that puts the international news on the front page.”

“Does it have Cathy? Does it have Miss Manners? Does it have Ann Landers?”

“OK, so it has everything we need to make us happy.”

There was a honk outside.

“They’re early,” said Step. “Do you think I have time to brush my teeth?”

“Do you think you could stand to get through the day if you didn’t?”

He rushed from the table.

“Who’s early?” asked Stevie.

“Your dad’s car pool. For the first week or so one of the men from work is picking him up in the morning and bringing him home at night so we’ll have the car to run errands and stuff.”

Stevie looked horrified. “Mom,” he said. “What about school?”

“That’s the point. You’ll be riding the bus after today, but your dad’s carpooling so I’ll have the car to take you to school.”

“Isn’t Dad taking me for my first day?”

Too late she remembered that when Stevie started kindergarten, she had still been recovering from Elizabeth’s birth, and it was Step who took Stevie to his first day of school.

“Does it really matter which one of us takes you?”

The look of panic in his eyes was more of an answer than his whispered “No.”

Step came back into the kitchen, carrying his attaché case—his jail-in-a-box, he called it.

“Step,” said DeAnne, “I think Stevie was expecting you to take him to school this morning.”

“Oh, man,” he said, “I didn’t think.” His face got that look of inward anger that DeAnne knew all too well. “Isn’t it great that I’ve got this job so I can’t even take my kid to school on his first day.”

“It’s your first day, too.”

He knelt down beside Stevie’s chair. Stevie was looking down into his mush. “Stevie, I should’ve planned it better. But I didn’t, and now I’ve got this guy outside waiting for me and … ”

The doorbell rang.

“Geez louise,” said Step.

“You’ve got to go,” said DeAnne. “Stevie’ll be all right, you’ll see. Right, Stevie?”

“Right,” said Stevie softly.

Step kissed Stevie on the cheek and then Betsy was saying “Me too me too” and he kissed both the other kids and then grabbed his case and headed for the front door.

DeAnne tried to reassure Stevie. “I’m sorry, but this is how your dad is earning the money we live on now, and he can’t very well …”

“I know, Mom,” said Stevie.

“We’ll head for school and you’ll meet the principal and …”

Step strode back into the kitchen. “I explained to him that we had a crisis and tomorrow he’ll find me waiting on the curb for him, but today I’m going to be late. Got to take my son to second grade.”

DeAnne was half delighted, half appalled. She knew perfectly well that in his own way, Step dreaded going back to an eight-to-five job as much as Stevie dreaded starting a new school. “This’ll really impress ‘em, Junk Man,” she said, smiling grimly. “Missing your car pool and showing up late on your first day.”

“Might as well get used to the idea that I’m a father first and a computer manual writer eighth.”

“What comes between first and eighth?” asked Stevie, who was obviously delighted.

“Everything else,” said Step.

“You’d better call,” said DeAnne.

Step got on the phone and she knew at once that it wasn’t working the way he had so glibly assumed it would.

“Bad,” he said when he was done. “They have a staff meeting at eight-thirty and they were planning to introduce me there and everybody has sort of scheduled everything around my being there on time this morning.”

“But now your ride is gone,” DeAnne pointed out, trying not to be mean about it.

Step was kneeling by Stevie’s chair again. “I can’t help it, Door Man.”

“I know,” said Stevie.

“I tried,” said Step. “But the family really needs me to keep this job, especially since we moved all the way to North Carolina so I could get it.”

Stevie nodded, trying to look game about the whole thing.

“I do my job for the family,” said Step, “and you do yours.”

“What’s mine?” asked Stevie. He looked hopeful.

“Toughing it out and going to school,” said Step.

Apparently he had been hoping for an alternate assignment. But he swallowed hard and nodded again. Then he thought of something. “How will you get there now that your ride is gone?”

“He’ll fly,” offered Robbie.

“No,” said DeAnne, “that’s your mother the witch who knows how to fly.”

“I guess we’ll all pile into the car together and you’ll take me to work on the way to taking you to school.”

“Couldn’t you take me to school on the way to taking you to work?” asked Stevie.

“Sorry, Door Man,” said Step. “That would be backtracking. Geography is against it. The clock is against it. All of time and space are against it. Einstein is against it.”

When they got to Eight Bits Inc., Step leaned into the back seat and kissed Stevie good-bye, and even though Stevie was well into the age where parents’ kisses aren’t welcome, this time he made no fuss. While Step was giving Robbie and Elizabeth the traditional noisy smack, DeAnne looked over the one-story red-brick building where Step was going to be spending his time.

It was one of those ugly flat-roofed things that businesses build when they have only so much money and they need walls and a roof. That was actually a good sign, because it suggested that the owner of the company had no delusions of being in the “big time,” spending all the company’s cash from the first hit programs on gewgaws that would mean nothing at all when slack times came. If only we’d been so careful, thought DeAnne, when the money from Hacker Snack started flowing in. Not that we spent it on nothing. A Ph.D. in history, that was something. And helping out family here and there. And a beta-format VCR for which they could not find rental tapes in Steuben, North Carolina.

“Bye, Fish Lady” said Step.

“Good luck, Junk Man,” said DeAnne.

She watched him go into the building. He was striding boldly, almost jauntily. She liked the look of him, always had. He exuded confidence without ever looking as if he wanted to make sure everyone else knew how confident he was, like a salesman who had memorized a book on power walking. But this time she knew that, for once, his confidence was a lie. Just walking into this building spoke of failure in Step’s heart, despite the fact that the top people at Eight Bits had been so impressed that Step Fletcher himself had actually applied for a job with them. The very fact that they were so impressed was really a symbol to Step of how far he had fallen—he was now working for the kind of company that would never have imagined they could get someone as accomplished in the field as he was.

“Am I going to be late, Mom?” asked Stevie.

Step was inside the building now, and there was no reason to wait. DeAnne put the car in gear and pulled off the shoulder, onto Palladium Road. “You were going to be late getting into class no matter what,” she said. “We have to go by the principal’s office and sign you in.”

“So I’ve got to walk in right in front of everybody,” he said.

“Maybe the door will be in the back of the room,” said DeAnne. “Then you’ll be behind everybody.”

“I’m not joking, Mom.”

“It’s scary, I know,” she said. “But the principal is really nice, and I’m sure she’s picked out a wonderful teacher for you.”

“Can’t I just meet the principal today and then come to school tomorrow at the regular time?”

“Stevie, the other kids are going to notice that you’re new, no matter what. And if you just showed up tomorrow, how would you know where to sit? You’d end up standing there feeling like an idiot. By going in today, you’ll get a seat assigned to you right away and people will explain to you the things you need to know.”

“Still.”

“Stevie, there’s a law that says we have to have you in school.”

“Wow,” said Robbie. “You could go to jail for letting Stevie stay home?”

“Not really. But we abide by the law in our family.”

“Daddy doesn’t,” said Robbie. “He drives too fast all the time.”

“Your father thinks the speed limits all mean ‘give or take ten miles per hour.”’

“Will they put Daddy in jail?” asked Robbie.

“No. But they might take his license away.”

“They almost did once before, didn’t they?” asked Stevie.

“Your father had a year of probation once,” said DeAnne. “But it was before any of you kids were born. He really is an excellent driver, and he always drives safely.” Not for the first time, DeAnne wondered whether Step would change his driving habits if he could actually hear how the kids noticed his speeding. It was hard enough teaching children right from wrong without having to include ambiguities, like laws that Daddy felt he didn’t have to obey because he didn’t speed fast enough to get tickets. She could see herself explaining to her kids when they got to be teenagers and started dating, Now, you’re supposed to be chaste, which means that you can do whatever you want as long as you don’t do anything that will get somebody pregnant. But Step couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see the relationship between traffic laws and the commandments. “Laws of men and laws of God are two different things,” Step always said, “and our kids are all smart enough to know the difference.”

Ah well. Marriage meant that you had to live with the fact that your spouse’s foibles would rub off on the kids. She knew how it annoyed Step that the kids had inherited her attitude toward shoes—they just couldn’t keep them on their feet. Step was always walking into a room and either stepping on somebody’s shoes, tripping over them, or—when he noticed them soon enough—placekicking them into the hall or putting them under the offender’s pillow. “The difference between civilized people and barbarians,” he would say, “is that civilized people wear shoes.” Step had to live with barefoot barbarians, and DeAnne had to answer questions about why Daddy broke the law all the time. Not exactly a fair trade—she couldn’t see that there were any moral implications to bare feet—but she lived with it, grumbling now and then, and so did he.

To get to Western Allemania Primary School you had to drive past the high school, also called Western Allemania. Yellow buses had been herded into a large parking lot, waiting for the end of the school day. What she liked least about sending Stevie to this school was that the little kids had to ride the same buses as the high-schoolers—and the drivers were high school students, as well. The idea of a seventeen-year-old having the responsibility for not only keeping all the children on the bus alive, but also maintaining discipline—well, what could she do? The principal had looked at her oddly and said, “Mrs. Fletcher, that’s the way we do things in North Carolina.”

She drove down the hill into the turnaround in front of the school. Before and after school the turnaround was reserved for buses—parents who were picking up their kids had to drive on a completely different road to a small parking lot at the top of a hill about two hundred yards from the school and wait for their kids. She pointed out the hill to Stevie as she was getting Elizabeth out of her booster seat. “Whenever I pick you up, you go up that stairway leading to the top of that hill. I’ll be there for you.”

“OK,” said Stevie.

“And if something ever happened, like the car breaking down, and I’m not there, then you head right back down to the school and go straight to the principal’s office and wait there until I come in and get you.”

“Why can’t I just wait up there?” asked Stevie.

“Because this isn’t a safe world,” said DeAnne. “And what if somebody comes to you and says, ‘Your mother asked me to pick you up and take you home’?”

“I don’t go with them.”

“There’s more to it than that, Stevie.”

“I get away from that person right away and head straight for the nearest person in authority.”

“At school that means Dr. Mariner. And if you’re not at school?”

“If the person is following me then I don’t hide, I run right out into the open, where there are the most people, and if he comes near me I scream at the top of my voice, ‘He’s not my father!’ Or ‘She’s not my mother! Help me!”’

“Very good.”

“I know all that, too,” said Robbie.

“I know I know,” said Betsy.

“I wish I didn’t have to teach you things like this,” said DeAnne. “But there are bad people in the world. Not many of them, but we have to be careful. Now, what if I really did send somebody to pick you up, because maybe there was an accident and I had one of the other kids at the hospital or something?”

“The password,” said Stevie.

“And what is it?”

“Maggots,” said Stevie.

“Little oozy baby fly worms!” yelled Robbie. Step had thought up the password, of course.

“Quiet, Road Bug, this is serious,” said DeAnne. “And do you ask them about the password?”

“No. I don’t even tell them that there is a password. But I never go with anybody unless he says, ‘Your parents told me to tell you Maggots.’ “

“Right,” said DeAnne.

“If they don’t say that, then they’re a liar and I refuse to go and I scream and scream if they try to take me anyway.”

“Right,” said DeAnne.

“Mom,” said Stevie.

“What?”

“What if nobody hears me scream?”

“You should never be in a place where nobody can hear you yell for help, Stevie,” she said. “But please don’t worry too much about this. If you do all that you’re supposed to, I’ll do all that I’m supposed to, and so nothing will go wrong. OK?”

“Mom, I’m scared to go in.”

Great, thought DeAnne. And I just went through a kidnapping-prevention catechism, to add a whole new layer of terror to the day. “Come on, Stevie. Dr. Mariner is a wonderful kind lady and you’ll like her.”

Dr. Mariner did have a knack for putting kids at ease, and within a few moments Stevie was smiling at her and then laughing when she told a joke. But the fear returned when, after only a few minutes in the office, Dr. Mariner took Stevie by the hand and said, “Let’s go to class now.”

Stevie withdrew his hand and immediately rushed to stand by DeAnne. “Can’t Mom walk me to class?”

“Certainly she can, if she wants,” said Dr. Mariner. “Your teacher’s name is Mrs. Jones. That’s an easy name, right?”

“Mrs. Jones,” said Stevie. He repeated the name several times, under his breath. Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Jones.

DeAnne let Dr. Mariner lead the parade through the corridors, for all the world like a tour guide. She pointed out where the kindergarten and first-grade classes were, and then brought Stevie along to the vestibule that Mrs. Jones’s classroom shared with another. It was time for Stevie to go into the class. He clung tighter to DeAnne’s hand.

“Do you really want your mother and brother and sister coming into class with you on the first day?” asked DeAnne.

Stevie shook his head violently.

DeAnne shifted Elizabeth’s weight on her hip and squatted down beside him. “Sometimes you just have to drink the cup,” she said.

He nodded, remembering. It was when he was only three and had a bad stomach flu, and didn’t want to drink the prescription Tylenol syrup that she had to give him to help bring the fever down. Step had knelt beside his bed and told him the story of Christ praying in Gethsemane. Sometimes you just have to drink the cup, Step had said then, and Stevie had drunk it without another murmur.

It worked the same way now. He tightened his face and nodded to show that he understood. Then he turned and walked through the door that Dr. Mariner was holding open for him. His stride was so like Step’s had been earlier today, trying to be brave. DeAnne felt a lump in her throat for both of them.

Inside the classroom, there were immediate cries of “New boy! New boy!” She caught a glimpse of the teacher, Mrs. Jones, who was turning without enthusiasm to look in Stevie’s direction. Then Dr. Mariner swung the door shut.

3: Gallowglass

This is the company where Step worked: Ray Keene had been the computer systems guy at UNC-Steuben when the Commodore 64 started showing up in K-marts. Ray saw right away that it was the 64 that was going to put computers in every home in America, if somebody had the brains to come up with cheap software so people could do something with the machine. Commodore sure wasn’t coming up with the right combinations—in Ray’s opinion all the software they offered was second-rate and way too expensive. So he came up with Scribe 64 and sold it for twenty-nine bucks, discounted to nineteen bucks including postage if you ordered it direct from Eight Bits Inc.

There were a couple of bad times early on. Right at first, Ray’s lack of business experience nearly killed the company—he was paying so much for packaging that in fact he was actually losing 22¢ with each unit sold. So when he ran out of that first run of a thousand boxes, he began shipping in a much smaller box with no printing on the outside, just a sticker that said “The only word processor you’ll ever need—$29” and began making four dollars a unit. It sold even faster, and the profit per unit got even better, and one day his wife said, “Ray, I got no house left, it’s all Eight Bits Inc. Either me and the kids move out or the company does.”

That’s when Ray Keene bought the ugly building on Palladium. It had originally been a climate-controlled clean shop for the assembly of calculators in the mid-70s, but it had been standing empty for a couple of years and the owner sold it to Ray at a price that said he was just glad to get it off his hands. Ray had the whole thing rewired and half the big factory space cut up into offices. There weren’t any windows and the place was ugly but everybody in the company, which was up to ten employees by then, was so happy to have enough room to turn around that they loved it like a mama loves an ugly baby.

When Step came down for interviews six weeks before, all he got from everybody was that sense of exuberance and excitement. But this first day at work there was something else. Ray Keene had remodeled his office since Step was there before, and it showed signs that Ray had apparently read that book about power that was on the lists the year before. Ray now sat behind a massive desk in a rock-back chair while all the chairs that visitors had to sit on were hard and too low and didn’t have enough space from front to back, so that you always felt like you were sitting on the edge of the seat because, in fact, you were.

“You won’t report to me,” said Ray. “I’ve made Dicky Northanger the vice-president in charge of the creative end of things, and you’ll report to him, but send me memos from time to time. We’ll be hiring an assistant for you as soon as we can, but for now all the manuals for all our software will come through you, but pass it all by Dicky for final approval.”

Dicky Northanger was the guy who used to do all the manuals. He was the first person Ray Keene had hired, and he and Ray were now great buddies, going every Sunday afternoon to pick up the New York Times at the Magazine Rack bookstore. He was genial, heavyset, and middle-aged, probably the oldest man in the company, and Step didn’t see any problem with reporting to him. But he felt a vague sense of disappointment, since the job had been represented to him as one that would report directly to Ray. Of course Ray couldn’t have everybody report to him, but the company only had twenty-five employees right now, and it seemed weird in a company that size that Step was already being told that he was not to contact Ray except by memo.

After Step met with Ray alone for that half hour of physical discomfort, they went straight on in to a staff meeting, where the new health plan was explained to everybody and, as an incidental at the end, Step and a new guy in the art department were introduced around. Dicky introduced him, and Step was a little embarrassed when Dicky made a great point of talking about what a genius Step was for having programmed Hacker Snack—and then, even more embarrassing, he pointed out to everyone in excruciating detail that Step would report only to him, and that while Step must have access to every programmer at every stage of development of all software, he had no authority over anyone and no one was to ask him for advice about anything to do with programming. Step was here solely to write manuals.

Why don’t you just cut off my balls and hold them up for everyone to admire? thought Step.

Then he went straight in to a meeting with Bob, the “vice-president in charge of finance”—he had been the bookkeeper until job inflation struck Eight Bits, apparently within the past six weeks. He was a lean, weathered-looking man in cowboy boots who had more of a Texas twang than a southern drawl, and the first thing he did was slide a two-page contract across the desk for Step to sign.

“What is this?” Step asked, for he had already signed the employment contract.

“A confidentiality agreement,” said the cowboy accountant. “Industry standard.”

Step read it anyway, though Cowboy Bob kept shuffling papers to show his impatience with Step’s taking so much of his time. And sure enough, it turned out to be a lot more than a confidentiality agreement. “This contract buys all rights to anything I do in programming for the rest of my natural life,” said Step.

“Well, not exactly,” said Cowboy Bob.

“I just came from a meeting where I was specifically and totally excluded from all programming here at Eight Bits.”

“Eight Bits Inc.”

“So why should I sign a contract giving Eight Bits Inc. all rights to any programming I come up with during my time here? I won’t do any programming, right?”

“Oh, that was just Dicky,” said Cowboy Bob. “He got jealous because even though you were coming in to write the manuals, everybody knew you were the most successful programmer ever to set foot on the premises, so he’s just making sure everybody knows that he’s your boss. In fact Ray and I expect that you’ll sort of do quality control over all the software, because Dicky isn’t that good a programmer and he kind of makes changes in all the programs and then they end up getting released with bugs. Sometimes. Just between you and me, of course.”

“Dicky just forbade anyone to ask my advice about programming,” said Step.

“Yeah, well, just don’t rub his nose in it, that’s all me and Ray expect from you.”

“So you’re telling me that in fact, besides manual writing, I’m to be the quality control officer, only I can’t tell my direct supervisor that that’s what I’m doing and I have to carry on all such activities behind his back?”

“That’s why we’re paying you thirty thou a year, my friend.”

“And in the meantime, I’m supposed to sign over every idea I ever have to Eight Bits … Inc.? Why not just everything I come up with related to software being developed in-house?”

“This agreement is a condition of employment, Step,” said Cowboy Bob. He still seemed friendly and genial, but if this had been a saloon in a western, the tone of his voice would have sent half the customers out into the street to avoid getting hit over the head with a breakaway chair.

“This agreement makes me promise that if I leave here I’ll never enter into competition with Eight Bits Inc.”

“Our lawyer said that was a real good idea.”

“Well, try this. I came here to write manuals, not to develop software. I’ll help out with quality control if Ray wants me to, but I want it to be out in the open so I don’t have to skulk around like a spy. And I won’t sign this agreement until it’s rewritten to limit the non-competition clause to one year, to protect my rights in all software I wrote prior to coming here, and to protect my rights in all software I might write after leaving here.”

“No way,” said Cowboy Bob.

Step stood up. His knees were trembling and he felt a little faint, but he also knew that there was no way he could sign that agreement. “I just moved my family to Steuben on the strength of a contract with Eight Bits that said nothing about this. As far as I’m concerned, this paper means that you are in material breach of our contract. So if your lawyer won’t revise this agreement, he’ll be talking to my lawyer about getting from Eight Bits the costs of moving here, the costs of moving back, and, if we can get the court to agree to it, and I think we can, a year’s salary. You have my phone number.”

Step could not believe that he was already quitting and it was only eleven in the morning, but in a way it was almost a relief. The scene in Ray’s office and Dicky’s display in the staff meeting had already made Step so wary of the future here that having an excuse to leave sounded just fine to him. But his bold talk about what a lawyer could get for him was just talk—even if it worked out that way, litigation would drag on until they were long past financial inconvenience. It wasn’t just the mortgage on the house in Vigor and the cost of moving here. It was the fact that they had expected to pay last year’s taxes out of the royalty check this past fall, and so now they were deeply in debt to the IRS, and even bankruptcy couldn’t get them out of that. Quitting this job would be such a devastating blow that they’d probably end up slithering back to Orem, Utah, to live in DeAnne’s parents’ basement while the IRS auctioned off everything they owned.

And still it felt pretty good to be walking toward the door in Cowboy Bob’s office.

“Wait a minute, Step,” said Cowboy Bob.

Step turned around. The vice-president of finance was reaching into a drawer of his desk and pulling out another paper. “Since you didn’t like that first one, try this one before you walk out on us and we have to sue you for breach.”

Step came back and took the paper out of his hand. He read it without sitting down. To his disbelief, it was a version of the agreement that could only have been written for him—it excluded prior software, it excluded programming on computers for which Eight Bits Inc. was not publishing software, and the non-competition clause was for exactly one year.

“You already had this written,” said Step.

“Yep,” said Cowboy Bob.

“So why did you show me that other?”

“Because you might’ve signed it.” Cowboy Bob grinned. “This is business, Step.”

Step stood there looking at him, debating inside himself whether he wanted even to live on the same planet with this guy, let alone work with him.

“We’ve met every one of your objections, Step,” Cowboy Bob prodded him.

“I’m just wondering whether there’s another paper in that drawer.”

“There is. It has our lawyer’s phone number on it. How do I put this kindly, Step? Sign or be sued.”

“Gee, Bob, is this the way you talk to all the boys?”

“Look at it this way, Step. You won’t be working with me. The only thing you’ll know about me is that I sign your paycheck, and after you get a few of those you’ll like me just fine. You’re pissed off now, but that’ll pass, and in six months maybe we’ll have a couple of beers together and laugh about how mad you were this first day.”

“I don’t drink,” said Step.

“Yeah, I forgot, you’re a Mormon,” said Cowboy Bob. “Well, then, that’s out. Because looking at you, I’d say you could never forgive me without a couple of beers in you.”

He said it with such a twinkle in his eye that Step couldn’t help but smile. So Cowboy Bob knew he was a son-of-a-bitch, and didn’t particularly mind. Well, Bob, I know you’re a son-of-a-bitch, and I guess I don’t mind that much either.

Step laid the paper down on the desk, signed it, and walked out.

It was nearly noon, and even though he was probably supposed to go find Dicky and ask where his office was, Step needed to stand outside this building for a minute and decide whether to scream or cry or laugh.

On the way to the staff meeting he had seen a back corridor that led to a door on the north side of the building—Dicky had told him in passing that everybody in the staff used that door, since that’s where the parking lot was. That’s where Step headed now.

The scenery wasn’t all that pretty outside: just a narrow parking lot, a high chain-link fence with barbed wire on the top, and then an overgrown pasture where the only things still grazing were old tires and a rusting refrigerator with the door off. Ray’s Mercedes was in the only assigned parking place in the lot, directly across from the north door. Step felt a sudden urge to go pee on the tires like a dog, but he was satisfied just to imagine doing it.

I’ve been a free man for the past five years, he said to himself, not working for anybody. Living on student loans, I taught myself programming on the Atari just to get history out of my mind, and I ended up creating a program that gave some pleasure to a lot of people and it made me about a hundred thousand dollars in a year and a half. All that money is gone, I owe taxes on it that I can’t pay, and I’ve just signed a contract to work for a company with byzantine internal politics, an owner on a power trip, a vice-president of finance who thinks that being in business means screwing anybody who’ll let you screw him, and a supervisor who’s so incompetent that they want me to clean up after him without letting him know I’m doing it. All for thirty thousand dollars a year. Twenty-five hundred a month. That’s the price of my soul.

But it was no worse than what his dad had gone through, over the years. A sign company that went belly-up when Dad broke his back, and yet Dad refused to declare bankruptcy and paid it all off, slowly, over the space of ten years, during which time he went back to school, got his B.A., taught at San Jose State for a while, and ended up working at Lockheed designing training programs for missile operators. If Dad had ever had half as much money as I made last year, he would have made sure he was set up as a free man forever. He would have had money in the bank against a rainy day. I spent it like it was going to last forever, and now I’m right where my dad was, all those years at Lockheed, saying yessir to assholes and moonlighting weekends at a camera store in the Hillsdale Mall. Never heard him complain, except that he apologized to Mom when she had to go back to work as a secretary in the public schools.

That’s why I signed that paper, Step realized. So I don’t have to make that same apology to DeAnne.

And if I don’t find a way to make some extra money in the next year or so, the IRS is going to put us in that situation anyhow.

The anxiety, the desperation, the memory of his father’s defeats—it all surged through him and burned in his throat and he thought, If I let myself get emotional about all this, it’ll show on my face when I go back inside. He swallowed hard and breathed deeply, slowly, forcing himself to calm down.

Somebody opened the door behind him and came outside. Step didn’t turn around at first, half afraid and half hoping that it was Cowboy Bob or even Ray Keene himself, worried about him, wanting to smooth things over with him.

It was just a kid, looked to be still in high school, who wandered a few yards away from him and lit up a cigarette. He took a deep drag, let the smoke out slow, and puffed it into rings.

“How long did it take you to learn how to do that?” asked Step.

The kid turned to face him. He had black-frame coke-bottle glasses so his eyes looked like they were swimming around in a specimen jar. “I been blowing rings since my mom taught me how when I was ten.”

“Your mom taught you how to blow smoke rings? When you were ten?”

The kid laughed. “This is tobacco, country, Mr. Fletcher, and my people are all tobacco people. My mama used to blow smoke in my face when I was a baby, so I’d grow up knowing the difference between the cheap weed in Reynolds cigarettes and the good stuff in E&Es.”

Step hoped that his shudder didn’t show. When he and DeAnne were house-hunting, they had had to rule out the whole eastern edge of town, where the Eldredge & Emerson Tobacco Company kept the air filled with the pungence of tar and nicotine, like being trapped forever on an elevator with someone who put out his cigarette just before stepping on.

What business did Mormons have moving into tobacco country? Especially since DeAnne was so allergic to tobacco smoke that it made her throw up even when she wasn’t pregnant. The idea of somebody blowing smoke in a baby’s face made Step angry. There’s things you just don’t do to children, if you have any decency. And teaching a ten-year-old to blow smoke rings …

“I don’t want to sound like some kind of dumb fan or nothing, Mr. Fletcher, but I thought Hacker Snack was the best game anybody ever did on the Atari.”

“Thanks,” said Step.

“Of course, your A.I. routines really sucked.”

It hit Step like a blow, that forced change from shyly, genially accepting a compliment to suddenly having to take criticism.

“A.I.?” he asked.

“You know-artificial intelligence.”

“I know what A.I. stands for,” said Step. “I just don’t recall ever trying to incorporate any of it into my game.”

“I mean, you know, the way the bad guys home in on the player,” he said. “The machine intelligence routines. Way too predictable. It stayed too easy to dodge them until you finally beat the player down with sheer speed. Like bludgeoning them to death.”

“Hey, thanks,” said Step.

“No, really I loved the game, I just wished you had kept the bad guys moving in a kind of semi-random way, so the player wouldn’t catch on that they were homing in. So you couldn’t quite be sure where they were going to go. Then the game would have stayed fun into much higher levels, and you would never have had to include that killer speed level where you can’t outrun the bad guys.”

“There is no killer speed level,” said Step.

“Really?”

“Not if you find all the back doors out of the different rooms.”

It was the kid’s turn to look embarrassed. “Back doors?”

“Hacker Snack isn’t an arcade game, it’s a puzzle game,” said Step. “Don’t tell me you were trying to outrun those little suckers at every level.”

“I got up to half a million points doing it that way” said the kid.

“That is the most incredible thing I ever heard. You should’ve been creamed before you got twenty thousand points. You must have the reflexes of a bat.”

The kid grinned. “I’m the best damn video wizard you’ll ever meet,” he said. “You got to show me those back doors.”

“And you got to show me what you mean about randomizing.”

“Come on inside, I’ve got your game up on one of my machines, just in case you came by.”

“You got an Atari here?”

“Hey, there’s not a soul here who doesn’t know the Atari is ten times the computer the 64 is. The only reason we’re all writing 64 software is that millions of them are getting bought and the Atari is still going for like a thousand dollars which means nobody buys it.”

Step followed him into the building. “How come you came outside to smoke?” he asked. “I notice people smoking in most of the offices.”

“Not in mine,” said the kid. “I don’t let anybody smoke around the machines. Fouls them up. Like pouring cokes on them.”

The kid didn’t let anybody smoke around any of the machines?

“What’s your name?” Step asked.

“My parents call me Bubba, I was baptized Roland McIntyre, but I kind of think of myself as Saladin Gallowglass.” He glanced back over his shoulder at Step and grinned. “You ever play D&D?”

“My brother tried to teach me Dungeons and Dragons one time, but after five hours the game itself hadn’t actually started.”

“Then he’s a piss-poor dungeonmaster, if you ask me, no offense of course since he’s your brother. A good dungeonmaster can get you into the game in half an hour and make it move along like you were watching a movie. Almost. Here’s your office, by the way.”

It was an empty room. They had known he was coming, and there wasn’t even a desk inside.

“They had a desk in here but I made them move it out,” said Bubba Roland Saladin Gallowglass. “I told them you weren’t here to write prissy little maiden-aunt letters to your nieces and nephews, you were here to write manuals and for that you needed a full computer setup, complete with a word processor and at least one of every computer we do software for. So they’re coming in this afternoon to put up a computer counter like the one I’ve got here. This is my office. You’ll be sharing with me till yours is ready, if you don’t mind.”

Step walked into hacker heaven. Two desk-height counters ran along both the long walls of the room, with a couple of shelves above them. The lower shelf held monitors for a half-dozen computers, and the upper shelf held books and papers and stacks of disks. And the counter itself was crowded with 64s, a couple of VICs, a TI, a Radio Shack Color Computer, even one of those crummy little Timex computers. Also an old monochrome Pet, which was apparently used as a word processor. And an Atari, with Hacker Snack up and running in demonstration mode. Except that the demonstration mode was supposed to have the game at level one, and this one was running at level twenty.

“You broke into the code,” said Step.

“I like to use the game as a screen saver, because everything shifts on it. But level twenty has the prettiest colors.”

“That was copy-protected six ways from Tuesday.”

“Yeah, well, it was a ten-minute job to break the scheme and another hour or so to disassemble the code.” Bubba Roland Saladin Gallowglass looked proud of himself, and Step couldn’t disagree with him. Step was a pretty good programmer, but this kid was a true hacker, a boy genius of code. And somehow this same kid had the authority to make Eight Bits Inc. remodel Step’s office.

“What’s your job here, anyway?” asked Step.

“Oh, I just hang around and do some programming. I’m really supposed to be a student at UNC-S, but I’m sort of between semesters right now.”

“Spring break?”

“Yeah, for about a year now. I tried taking computer classes to teach me COBOL, if you can believe it. Had to have FORTRAN or I couldn’t graduate. Like making you study dinosaur anatomy in med school. A bunch of us are going to Richmond for the David Bowie concert this weekend. Want to come?”

Flattered at the invitation, Step had to decline. “We’re still unpacking, and I’m more into good old-fashioned American rock and roll. Bowie’s too disco for me.”

“Oh, he’s past disco now. He’s past glitter, too. He’s sort of in punk mode.”

“Yeah, well …

“I think of my D&D character, you know, Saladin Gallowglass, I think of him as looking like David Bowie. Or like Sting.”

“Sting?” asked Step.

“With the Police,” said the kid. When Step still showed no sign of comprehension, the kid shook his head and went on. “I understand you’re going to be doing kind of quality control for us.”

“From what Dicky said this morning,” said Step, “I have to get him to unzip my fly when I pee.”

The kid giggled. “That’s Dickhead for you. No, Ray told me that you’re a precious resource. The only way he could get Dickhead to accept the idea of hiring you was to promise that you’d have nothing to do with programming, but in fact he wants your fingers in everything. He thinks of you as the computer wizard of the universe.”

“Well, I’m not,” said Step. “I’m a historian who taught myself programming in my spare time.”

“All good programmers are self-taught, at least in the home computer business,” said the kid.

“Look, what do I actually call you?”

“Around here they call me Roland and you probably should too,” said the kid.

“But what would you prefer?”

He grinned. “Like I said, I think of myself as Saladin Gallowglass.”

“So is Gallowglass all right, or is that too formal?”

“Gallowglass is great, Mr. Fletcher.”

“Call me Step.”

“Hey, Step.”

“Mind if I ask, how old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“And if you’re just a common ordinary programmer, how come Ray Keene tells you stuff that he doesn’t tell Dicky?”

“Oh, I suppose because he’s known me longer. I used to hang around his house and I learned programming on his Commodore Pet when I was, like, sixteen.”

It dawned on Step: In all his interviews and meetings, no one had ever mentioned the existence of this wunderkind, and no one had ever told him who it was who actually coded the original software that had earned Ray Keene a Mercedes and a power office.

“You wrote Scribe 64, didn’t you?”

Gallowglass smiled shyly. “Every line of it,” he said.

“And I’ll bet you’re the one who keeps doing the upgrades.”

“I’m working on a sixty-character screen right now,” he said. “I have to use a sort of virtual screen memory and background character mapping, but it’s going pretty well. I have this idea of using character memory as the virtual screen memory, since that means that I’m not actually using up RAM for the mapping.”

“I don’t know enough about 64 architecture yet to know what you’re talking about,” said Step. “But I hope I’m not too nosy if I ask you, since you are the person who actually created Scribe 64, how come you aren’t vice-president of something?”

“Ray takes care of me,” said Gallowglass. “I kind of make more money than God. And I’m not exactly management material.”

“I’d be interested to know how much God makes, someday,” said Step.

“And someday maybe I’ll tell you.” Gallowglass grinned. “What about you? Got any kids?”

“Three, with a fourth on the way.”

“How old are they?”

“Stephen’s almost eight, Robert is nearly five, Elizabeth is two, and the new one is negative five months now.”

“I’ll tell you, I really get along great with kids,” said Gallowglass. “If you want me to tend the kids for you sometime, let me know.”

“Yeah, right. A programmer who makes more money than God, and I’m going to call him up to babysit for me.”

“I mean it, I really like kids, and I get kind of lonely sometimes.”

“You don’t live with your folks?”

“Dad hates me,” said Gallowglass. “I live by myself.”

“Hates you? Come on.”

“No, I mean it, he says it whenever I go home. I walk in the door, he says, ‘Damn but I hate you, do you have to keep coming back here?’ Mom’s OK though. Hey, we’re just a good old southern family.”

“Sorry. I wasn’t trying to pry or anything,” said Step.

Gallowglass laughed. “I haven’t seen a grown man blush in a long time,” he said.

This poor kid, thought Step. A sweet, brilliant, nice kid, and not only does his dad hate him, not only did his mom blow smoke in his face as a baby, but also he’s getting seriously ripped off by the very people that he trusts most in all the world. None of my business, I know, but this kid ought to at least know that something else is possible. “Let me tell you something,” said Step. “The difference between royalties and bonuses is that a royalty is yours by right, by law, even after you leave the company, while a bonus is a gift and if Ray ever feels like not giving it to you, then that’s just too bad for you.”

Gallowglass looked at him steadily through those bottle-bottom lenses.

“I just thought you ought to know that,” said Step. “In case you ever want to write another piece of software. Maybe on the next one, they’ll mention your name somewhere in the manual. It’s something we programmers don’t get much of—credit for what we do.”

“You had your name on Hacker Snack,” observed Gallowglass.

“I turned down two software publishers because they wouldn’t write that into the contract,” said Step. “That’s why you folks here at Eight Bits knew my name. But until this very moment, no one here ever mentioned your name. In fact, I kind of got the impression that Ray wrote Scribe 64 himself.”

“You did?” asked Gallowglass.

“Not that he ever said so,” said Step.

“Ray can’t program a computer to print his name on the screen,” said Gallowglass.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t know that,” said Step. “He never told me. Hey, not his fault if I got the wrong impression. The main thing is that I think it’s important for programmers to get credit for what we do. Like an author getting his name on his own book.”

“You weren’t the first to get your name above the title, you know,” said Gallowglass. “Doug Duncan got his name on Russian Front even before you.”

“Yeah,” said Step. “I already had my contract signed before Russian Front came out, but he was the first to get his game out that way.”

“I met him at CES last year,” said Gallowglass.

“Yeah?”

“I did him like I did you—told him it was a great game but then I laid into one of the flaws in the game.”

“Oh, is this something you do to everybody?” asked Step.

“Sure.”

“Where’d you learn that technique, from How to Win Friends and Influence People?”

Gallowglass giggled. “I just like to see how people react to it. You took it just fine. In fact, best ever. You actually listened to a kid with glasses and a pocket protector and you didn’t know me from shit on the sidewalk.”

“What did Duncan do?”

“Well, let’s just say that Doug Duncan is the kind of guy who never, ever forgives anybody who dares to suggest that anything he ever did was somewhat less than perfect. He actually got me kicked off a panel at a conference six months later. Said he’d leave and not do his thing there if I was given a microphone at the conference. He never forgives and he never forgets.”

“Maybe that would have taught you not to criticize strangers.”

“Hey, it’s my flaming-asshole test, and Duncan leaves a trail of ashes wherever he goes.”

Step had to laugh. He liked this kid. Maybe a lot. Though if Dicky had overheard their conversation about royalties and credit for programmers, both of them would probably be in trouble. “Hey, uh, how soundproof is this office?” asked Step.

“How the hell should I know?” asked Gallowglass. “But with all these games on, who do you think can hear us?”

Step thought, but did not say, that the games in the room made them talk louder, while the noise they made wouldn’t interfere half as much with someone outside the room who wanted to listen in.

Someone knocked on the door.

“Come in!” yelled Gallowglass.

It was Dicky, and for a moment Step felt that rush of guilt that comes when you’ve just been caught. Dicky had been listening.

“So there you are,” said Dicky. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“Me?” said Step.

“I wondered if you wanted to go for lunch with me.”

“He can’t,” said Gallowglass immediately. “He’s going to lunch with me, so I can get him up to speed on the new features in Scribe 64.”

“And I have to get him up to speed on everything else,” said Dicky, looking a bit stern.

“Hey, leave me out of this,” said Step. “This is my first day. I’ll go wherever I’m told.”

But Dicky and Gallowglass gazed at each other for a few long moments more, until at last Dicky said, “Come see me after lunch.”

“Sure,” said Step. “But you’re my supervisor, Mr. Northanger, so my schedule is yours to command.”

“Call me Dicky,” said Dicky.

“Not Richard?” asked Step.

“Is there something wrong with Dicky?” asked Dicky.

“No,” said Step. “I just thought—”

“Dicky is not a nickname for Richard,” said Dicky. “It’s the name I was christened with.”

“I’m sorry,” said Step.

“And meeting with you after lunch is what I prefer.” Dicky closed the door behind him.

“Man, you’re a champion suck-up,” said Gallowglass.

Step turned on him. “What are you trying to do, get my supervisor permanently pissed off at me on my first day on the job?”

“Don’t take Dicky so seriously,” said Gallowglass. “He can’t touch a program without introducing a bug into it. The guy’s worthless.”

Apparently Gallowglass had no concept of the kind of trouble that Dicky could make for a man in Step’s position. This kid’s relationship was with the owner, and he was the programmer of the bread-and-butter program that was paying everybody’s salaries, so he really could treat Dicky however he liked. But that didn’t mean Dicky liked it. In fact, if this had gone on very long, by now Dicky probably seethed at anything Gallowglass did or said. And he’d take it out on whoever was closest to Gallowglass who actually needed his job.

“Do me a favor,” said Step. “Don’t do anything to get Dicky any more ticked off at me than he is.”

“Sure,” said Gallowglass. “Don’t get mad. It’s really OK, I promise you. You’re in like Flynn around here, everybody’s really excited you’re actually here. You’ll see, it’ll be great.”

“No sweat then,” said Step, though Gallowglass was probably wrong.

“And I really would be glad to tend your kids for you.”

“Thanks,” said Step.

“I’m really good at it. And I’m not afraid to change diapers.”

“Sure,” said Step. “I’ll talk to DeAnne about it.”

“OK. Squeet.”

“What?”

“Squeet. It’s just a word we use around here. It means Let’s go eat, only the way you say it when you say it real fast. Squeet.”

“Sure, fine,” said Step. “Squeet.”

4: Yucky Holes

This is why DeAnne, a westerner all her life, was unpacking boxes in the family room of a house in Steuben, North Carolina: Her earliest memories were of growing up in Los Angeles, in a poorer part of town back in the fifties, when gangs did not yet rule and blacks were still colored people who were just starting to march and had not yet rioted. Her neighborhood and school friends were of an array of races and nationalities. She barely noticed this until she left.

Her father got his doctorate and went to teach at Brigham Young University-the “Y.” She was eight years old when she first went to school in Orem, Utah. All the children in her class were white, all of them were Mormon, and many of them were the same children she saw at church on Sunday. This was the fall of 1962, and the conversation among the children turned, eventually, to civil rights and Martin Luther King. Deeny was stunned to hear some of the other children speak of “niggers,” a word she had thought was like any other word written on walls—one knew it existed but never said it where God could hear.

When they saw how upset Deeny was, they laughed, and some said things that were even nastier-that all colored people stank and were stupid, that they all stole and carried razor blades. She furiously told them that it wasn’t true, that her best friend Debbie in Los Angeles was colored and she was as smart as anybody and she didn’t stink and the only kid who ever stole anything from them was a white boy. This made them angry. They said terrible things to her and shoved her and poked her and pinched her, and she came home from school in tears. Her parents reassured her that she was right, but she never forgot the ugly face of bigotry, and how angry the other children got when someone stood up against them.

It was no accident that when Step decided to go on for a doctorate in history, they didn’t even apply to a school west of the Mississippi. DeAnne was determined that her children would not grow up in Utah, where everyone they knew would be Mormon and white, and where children could come to believe terrible lies about anyone who wasn’t just like them. Step agreed with her—as he put it, they didn’t want to raise their kids where Mormons were too thick on the ground.

That was fine in theory, but the reality was this depressingly dark family room in this shabby house in Steuben, North Carolina. And Stevie had to walk into class today as a complete stranger, with no sense of connection.

In Utah, Stevie would have known all these children already, from the neighborhood, from church. He would share in the same pattern of life, would know what to expect from them. We’ve given our children a wonderful variety of strangeness, just as we planned, thought DeAnne, but at the same time we’ve deprived them of a sense of belonging where they live. They’re foreigners here. We are foreigners here.

I am a stranger, and this is a strange, strange land.

Robbie and Elizabeth were down for their naps. For Elizabeth that meant serious hard sleeping; for Robbie, it meant lying in bed reading the jokes and puzzles in his favorite volume of Childcraft. Enough that they were pinned down and quiet. It gave her a chance to be alone, to empty the boxes, one by one … to brood about her life and whether she was a good mother and a good wife and a good Mormon and even a good person, which she secretly knew she was not and never could be, no matter how she seemed to others, because none of them, not even Step, knew what she was really like inside. How weak she was, how frightened, how uncertain of everything in her life except the Church—that was the thing that did not change, the foundation of her life. Everything else was changeable. Even Step—she knew that she didn’t really know him, that always there was the chance that someday he would surprise her, that she would turn to face her husband and find a stranger in his place, a stranger who didn’t approve of her and didn’t want her in his life anymore. DeAnne knew that to hold on to any good thing in her life—her husband, her children—she had to do the right thing, every time. It was the selvage of the fabric of her life. If only she could be sure, from day to day, from hour to hour, what the right thing was.

The doorbell rang.

It was a thirtyish woman, slender as Jane Fonda, a bit shorter than DeAnne. She had three kids in tow, the oldest a boy about Robbie’s age, and somehow—perhaps because of the kids, perhaps because of her practical cover—everything clothing, perhaps just because of her confident, cheerful face with hardly a speck makeup on it—DeAnne knew that this woman was a Mormon. If she wasn’t, she should be.

“Sister Fletcher?” said the woman.

She was Mormon. “Yes,” said DeAnne.

“I’m Jenny Cooper, spelled with a w as if it was cow-per, only it isn’t.”

“Like the poet,” said DeAnne.

Jenny grinned. “I knew it! I’ve lived here six years, and no when I’ve only got three-and-a-half months left before we move to Arizona, now somebody finally moves in who’s actually heard of William Cowper.”

Wouldn’t you know it, thought DeAnne. I’m already starting like her, and she’s moving away. “Come in, please. My kids a napping, but as long as we stay in the family room—”

“Your kids nap? Let’s trade,” said Jenny as she strode in. She gave no sign of noticing or caring whether her kids followed he inside or not. “I know you’re busy moving in but I brought a razor knife and I fed and watered my herd before we came, so show me where the boxes are.”

“I’m doing books today,” said DeAnne, leading her into the family room. “But you don’t really have to help.”

“Alphabetical order?”

“Eventually,” said DeAnne. “But it’s enough if you sort of group them together. Jenny, how in the world did you know my name? We didn’t even go to church on Sunday.”

“I noticed that,” said Jenny. “A few weeks ago the bishop says that he got a call from Brother Something-or-other from Vigor, Indiana, who was going to move into a house in the ward on the first weekend in March. I figure, they’ll need help moving in, so I waited for you to show up at Church, only you didn’t come. So, this is what I thought: If they were inactive, Brother Something wouldn’t have called. So either they didn’t actually move on schedule, or they’re the kind of proud, stubborn, self-willed, stuck-up people who wouldn’t dream of asking for help and so they skipped their first Sunday and plan to show up next week, with everything all unpacked and put away, and when people offer to help, they’ll say, ‘Already done, thanks just the same.’ “

DeAnne laughed. “You got us pegged, all right.”

“So, I had the Sunday school hour—I don’t go to gospel doctrine class, the teacher and I don’t see eye to eye—and I ducked into the clerk’s office, looked up the Vigor Ward in the Church directory, and made a long distance call to your home ward. Talked to your ward clerk, and asked him if they had any ward members who had just moved to Steuben, North Carolina, and he said, Yes, of course, the Fletchers, and they were the most wonderful people, Sister Fletcher had been the education counselor in Relief Society and Brother Fletcher was the elders quorum president and conducted the choir, they had three kids and a fourth due in July, and they were great speakers, we ought to get them both to talk in sacrament meeting as often as possible.”

“Oh, that was Brother Hyde, he was just being sweet.” DeAnne could not believe that Brother Hyde had actually remembered when their baby was due, or that he had given that information to a stranger. But then, they were all in the Church, weren’t they? And that meant that they were “no more strangers, but fellow citizens of the saints,” or however it went in Paul’s epistle to-to some bunch of Greeks. Or Romans or Hebrews.

“Yes, well, I’m sure,” said Jenny. “He also gave me your address, and then I remembered that I had driven right by your moving van last Friday or whenever it was that you moved in and it never occurred to me that a Mormon family would move in only around the block from me. I mean, to have a Mormon neighbor. That just doesn’t happen in Steuben.”

Even if Jenny hadn’t been meticulous about shelving the books alphabetically by author and in the right groupings, DeAnne would have enjoyed having her there, just to have relief from her own brooding. Somehow, with a completely different upbringing, Jenny had managed to acquire a similar attitude toward the Church. The difference was that Jenny was willing to say right out things that DeAnne would never have dared to admit to anyone but Step.

“I had to get here first,” said Jenny, “or your introduction to the Steuben First Ward would have been Dolores LeSueur, our ward prophetess.”

“Your what?”

“She’s in the vision business. She has revelations for everybody. She’s been dying of cancer for fifteen years only she keeps getting healed, but with death breathing down her neck she has become so much closer to God than ever before-and I’m sure that she was so close to God before that they probably shared a toothbrush. She can’t say hello without telling you that the Spirit told her to greet you. You’ll just love her.”

“I will? I don’t think so, if she’s the way you describe her.”

“Oh, you will, because if you don’t that’ll prove you’re a tool of Satan and an evil influence on the ward. Don’t worry, as long as she gets her way about everything she’s harmless.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. If she’s in charge of a ward activity, everything will go her way. If she decides how you ought to run your ward organization, then your organization will run that way.”

“You mean she claims inspiration?”

“Oh, she claims inspiration every time she has to use the john. No, if you don’t agree with her, she just gets all her disciples to nag the bishop until he makes you do it her way just so they’ll leave him alone. And if the bishop doesn’t give in to her, she goes to the stake president, and if he doesn’t give her what she wants, she calls Salt Lake until somebody there says something she can use to bludgeon you into submission. But don’t let me bias you against her.”

DeAnne said what she always said, because she knew it was right to reject malice. “I’d rather form my own opinions.”

Jenny cocked her head and studied DeAnne for a moment, as if to see just how judgmental DeAnne might be. “Oh, I know this sounds like gossip. It is gossip. But I promise you, that’s all I’ll ever say about Dolores until you mention her again yourself. I just happen to know from experience that about six weeks from now, you’ll be really glad to know that somebody else in the ward sees through her act. Nuff said. I’m probably too blunt, I know, but I grew up on a ranch in Santaquin where manure was a word we only used at church on Sunday, so I just speak my mind. For instance, I’ve noticed that you keep watching my kids and shooing them away from things and that means that your kids must be well-behaved and trained not to break stuff. Our strategy was to make sure we didn’t own anything that we cared if it got broke. But I’ll tell you what, we’ve about done with the books so let me finish this box and I’ll get my monsters out of here so they can go back to tearing up my house.”

“I really wasn’t thinking … ”

“We’re careful of our children about the things that count,” said Jenny. “A friend of one of the secretaries where my husband works had a cousin here in town who lost her little boy. Only she didn’t even realize he was missing for ten hours. Can you believe that? I may not know what my children are doing every second, but I know where they are.”

“Jenny, I like your kids, they’re not a problem.”

“Good. So do I. This evening you bring your family on down to my house for supper. We’re two blocks up Chinqua Penn that way, turn right on Wally-that’s a street, not a bum in the road—and we’re five doors down on the right.”

“I really couldn’t put you out for supper—my kitchen is put together now, so—”

“I’m sure you’re really looking forward to thinking up some kind of supper and stopping your unpacking long enough to prepare it,” said Jenny.

DeAnne couldn’t pretend that Jenny wasn’t right, and besides, her mind was still back on what Jenny had said before. “That woman whose little boy was missing. Did they find him?”

“I don’t know,” said Jenny. “I never heard. By the way, in case you’re wondering, I don’t cook southern, I cook western. That means that there won’t be nothin’ deep-fried or even pan-fried. And I cook western ranch, not western Mormon, which means you won’t be getting some tuna casserole and a jello salad, it’ll be an oven roast and baked potatoes and gravy, and I already bought enough for your whole crew so don’t make it go to waste, just say yes and show up at six.”

That was that. Jenny finished the box, called her kids, plunged out the door, and the kids straggled along behind her. DeAnne felt invigorated by Jenny’s visit. Even better, she felt at home, because she knew somebody now, she had a friend.

She looked at her watch. It was two-thirteen. She was supposed to be at school to pick Stevie up in two minutes.

She bustled into the bedroom and dragged the kids out of bed—Robbie was actually asleep, today of all days—made them carry their shoes and socks out to the car and managed to get to that parking lot on the top of the bluff overlooking the school by twenty after. There were still a billion cars and parents there, or anyway more than the parking lot was designed to handle, and tons of children around—but no Stevie. He must have come up the hill and looked around and then, following her instructions, headed back down to wait for her in the principal’s office.

She managed to get both of Elizabeth’s shoes on her at the same time, and Robbie got his own on with the velcro straps fastened down—thank heaven for velcro. It was almost two-thirty when she finally herded the children into the front of the school. The last of the buses was just pulling away. Stevie was sitting in Dr. Mariner’s office. The second he saw her, he was on his feet and heading out the door.

“Just a moment, Mrs. Fletcher,” said the secretary.

DeAnne turned back to face her.

“If you aren’t able to pick up your child on time, may I suggest that you have him ride the bus? Or arrange for the after-school program?”

“I’ll be on time from now on,” said DeAnne. “Or we’ll set him up for the bus.”

“Because this room is not a holding area for children, it’s a working office,” said the secretary.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” said DeAnne. “It won’t happen again.”

“We like children very much here,” said the secretary, “but we must reserve this area for adult business, and we appreciate it when our parents are thoughtful enough not to—”

“Yes,” said DeAnne, “I can promise you that the only way I’ll be late to pick him up again is if I’m dead. Thank you very much.” Seething inside, she left the office, Elizabeth on her hip and Robbie in tow. Stevie was waiting at the front door of the school.

“I wasn’t very late,” said DeAnne. “But I thought that maybe your class hadn’t gotten out yet, so I waited at the top of the hill.”

Stevie nodded, saying nothing. As soon as she caught up with him he walked briskly on ahead, leading the way to the stairs up the hill.

Robbie broke free of DeAnne’s grip and caught up with Stevie, but his relentless conversation couldn’t penetrate Stevie’s silence. He must be really angry with me, thought DeAnne. Usually Robbie could pull him out of a sulk in thirty seconds flat.

When they got to the car, DeAnne apologized again for being late, but Stevie said nothing, just got into the front passenger seat while she was belting the kids into their seats in back. “Is Stevie mad at me?” whispered Robbie at the top of his voice.

“I think he’s mad at me,” said DeAnne. “Don’t worry.”

She got into the car and backed out of the parking place, navigated a narrow road among a small stand of trees, and finally pulled out on a main road. Only then could she glance down at Stevie. “Please don’t be mad at me, Stevie. It’ll never happen again.”

He shook his head and a silver tear flew from his eye, catching a glint of sunlight before it disappeared onto the floor. He wasn’t sulking, he was crying.

She reached out and caught his left hand, held it. “Oh, Stevie, what’s wrong, honey? Was it really so bad?”

Again he shook his head; he didn’t want to talk about it yet. But he didn’t take his hand away, either. So he didn’t hate her for being late, and when he was able to he’d tell her what happened and he’d accept whatever comfort she could give. She held his hand all the way home.

He didn’t want a snack—he headed straight for his room. She kept Robbie out, though it took practically nailing his feet to the kitchen floor to do it. She ended up giving Robbie and Elizabeth their snacks, and then decided that they needed a walk outside. They’d been cooped up in the house all day, and even though it was the first week of March it had been a warm winter, not a flake of snow even in Indiana, and almost balmy ever since they got to Steuben. They could walk down and make sure they knew which house was the Cowpers’ while it was still daylight.

She leaned into Stevie’s room. He was lying on his bed, facing away from the door. “Stevie, honey, we’re going to take a walk. Want to come?”

He mumbled no.

“I’m going to lock the doors. I’ll only be gone a few minutes, OK? But if there’s a problem, we’ll be out in front somewhere, we won’t go out of sight, OK?”

He nodded.

Out on the street, she realized for the first time that there weren’t any sidewalks. They couldn’t even walk on the grass—people planted hedges right down to the street. How completely stupid, how unsafe! Where do children rollerskate? Where do you teach children to walk so they’ll be safe? Maybe people in Steuben haven’t noticed yet that cars sometimes run over children in the road.

It made her feel trapped again, as if she had found out that they would have to live in a house with no hot water or no indoor toilets. I had no business bringing my children to this uncivilized place. In Utah I could have kept them on the sidewalk and they would have been fine.

In Utah.

Is that what I am? One of those Mormons who think that anything that is different from Utah is wrong? She mentally shook herself and began giving the kids a revised version of the sidewalk lecture. “Stay close to the curb and walk on the lawns wherever you can.”

Robbie was bouncing his red ball in the gutter as they walked. It was one of those hollow rubber ones about four inches across, small enough for a small child to handle it but big enough that it wasn’t always getting lost. “I wish you hadn’t brought that, Robbie,” said DeAnne.

“You told me it was an outside toy, and we’re outside.”

“Well, if it bounces into the street, you can’t chase it, you have to wait for it to roll to one side or the other, all right?”

Robbie nodded hugely—and then kept on nodding, not so much to annoy his mother as because nodding with such exaggerated movement was fun. “Look, Mom, the whole world is going up and down!”

Of course, he had not stopped bouncing the ball, and at this point the inevitable happened—it bounced off his toe and careened down the gutter away from them, rolling into the road and then drifting back to the curb, where it disappeared.

“My ball!” cried Robbie. “It went down that hole!”

Sure enough, the ball had, with unerring aim, found a storm drain and rolled right in. This was the first time DeAnne had really noticed what the drains were like, and again she was appalled. They were huge gaps in the curb, and the gutter sloped sharply down to guide the flow of water into them. The effect was that any object that came anywhere near them would inevitably be sucked inside. And the gap was large enough that a small child could easily fit into the drain. Naturally the people who designed roads without sidewalks would think nothing of creating storm drains that children could fit into.

“Mom, get it out!”

DeAnne sighed and set Elizabeth down on the neighbor’s lawn. “Stay right by your sister and don’t let her go anywhere, Robbie.”

Of course, this meant that Robbie grabbed hold of Elizabeth’s arm and Elizabeth began to scream. “I didn’t mean tackle her and pin her to the grass, Robbie.”

“She was going to go into the street,” said Robbie. “She’s really stupid, Mom.”

“She isn’t stupid, Robbie, she’s two.”

“Did I go in the street when I was two?”

Elizabeth had stopped screaming and was tearing grass out of the neighbor’s lawn.

“No, Robbie. You were too scared that a motorcycle might come by. You had this thing about motorcycles. You used to dream that they were coming to get you and eat you. So you never went into the street because that’s where the Motorman was.”

In the meantime, DeAnne was down on her hands and knees, trying to see anything at all in the storm drain. It was too dark.

“I can’t see anything,” DeAnne said. “I’m sorry, Robbie. I wish you hadn’t brought the ball on this walk.”

“You mean you aren’t going to reach in and hunt for it?”

“Robbie, no, I’m not,” said DeAnne. “I can’t see in there. Anything could be down in that hole.”

Suddenly he looked terrified. “Like what?”

“I meant that I just don’t know what’s in there and I’m not going to go reaching around for it. For all we know it’s eight feet down, or the ball might have already rolled halfway to Hickey’s Chapel Road.” She gathered up Elizabeth and took Robbie’s hand and they walked on toward the street where the Cowpers lived.

“Stevie said this was a bad place.”

“Stevie said what?”

“A bad place,” said Robbie, enunciating clearly, as if his mother were deaf.

What could Stevie have meant by saying such a thing to Robbie? Did he mean the house? The neighborhood? School? Steuben?

Robbie looked over his shoulder again toward the drain. “Do you think that someday they’ll find my ball down there?”

“Since the ball isn’t biodegradable, it will probably still be there for the Second Coming.”

Robbie was still trying to extract meaning from that last statement when they got to the second corner. DeAnne stopped there and counted down five houses on the right. The Cowpers’ was a one-story brick house with a station wagon in the driveway, with two kids climbing all over the top of it. DeAnne would never let her kids climb on the car. They could fall off. They could damage something. The hood of the wagon was up, and as she watched, she saw Jenny emerge from the hood, where apparently she had been fixing something in the car. Jenny stretched her back, looked around, and saw DeAnne. She waved the grey doughnut-shaped thing she was holding. DeAnne waved back.

Jenny yelled something, but DeAnne couldn’t hear her, and it embarrassed her to have somebody yelling to her on the street. So she waved again, as if to say yes to whatever Jenny said—which was probably something like, See you at six, or, Nice weather we’re having—and then turned and herded her little flock back toward home.

“Kitty!” shouted Elizabeth right in DeAnne’s ear. “Kitty! Kitty!”

A jet-black kitten scurried across the road just as a car came speeding by. The cat dodged out of the way; the car made no effort to slow down or stop. DeAnne’s fears about the dangers of the street in front of their house were all confirmed.

“Wow,” said Robbie. “We almost had a kitty pizza.”

Another Step-ism.

The cat headed straight for the storm drain and disappeared.

“Mom!” screamed Robbie. “The yucky hole got him!”

Robbie ran a few dozen steps toward the hole. Then he realized that he was not in the protection of his mother and started to run back. But he could not bring himself to leave the kitty, and so he stood there beating his fists against his hips, demanding that his mother hurry, hurry!

“Honey, the kitty probably goes down into that hole all the time and plays there.”

But Robbie wasn’t hearing anything she had to say. “The snake got him, Mom! You got to save him, you got to!”

Of course Robbie would imagine a snake down there. Step had taken them to a science museum and they had watched a snake eating a mouse. Robbie couldn’t let go of the memory. Snakes had replaced the Motorman.

She knelt by him and put her arm around him to calm him. “Robbie, I promise you, there is no snake down there. Whenever it rains here, the water all rushes down into that drain, and if there were any snakes living down there they would have been washed out to the ocean years ago.”

“The yucky hole hooks up to the ocean?” asked Robbie.

“Everything does,” said DeAnne.

“Wow, cool.”

Robbie took a wide berth around the drain, and as DeAnne stood at the front door, fumbling in her purse to find her keys, he stayed at the curb, looking back toward the yucky hole.

“What if it rains while the kitty’s down there, Mom?” he asked.

“It isn’t going to rain for days, and the cat will get hungry and go home long before then,” said DeAnne. She got the door open. “Come on inside, Robbie.”

“Do you think the kitty’s playing with my ball down there?” he asked as he came through the door.

“Kitty,” said Elizabeth. “Yucky hole, all gone.”

“That’s the story,” said DeAnne. “Looks like we can’t keep anything from you, Elizabeth.”

“Drink,” said Elizabeth.

Robbie had already rushed ahead to the room he shared with Stevie, shouting out the story about the ball and the kitty and the yucky hole long before he got to the room. DeAnne smiled as she took Elizabeth into the kitchen to get a drink. If anybody could get Stevie out of his blue funk, it was Robbie.

A moment later, Robbie was in the kitchen, looking mournful. “Mommy,” he said. “Stevie told me to shut up and die.”

“What?” asked DeAnne.

“He doesn’t want a little brother anymore, Mommy,” said Robbie.

DeAnne set Elizabeth down on the kitchen floor. “Stay with your sister for a minute, would you?”

“Can I turn on the TV?”

“The cable isn’t hooked up yet so there’s hardly anything to watch,” she said, “but suit yourself.”

She found Stevie lying right where she had left him before going on the walk. “Son,” she said.

“Yeah?” he mumbled.

“Son, sit up and look at me please,” she said.

He sat up and looked at her.

“Please don’t ever say anything so terrible to your brother again.”

“I’m sorry,” said Stevie.

“Did you really tell him to shut up and die?”

Stevie shook his head. “Not exactly.”

“What did you say, then?”

“I told him to shut up, and when he just kept yelling about a snake eating a kitty I just told him to drop dead.”

“Where did you ever hear an expression like that?”

“Everybody said it back at my old school, Mom. It doesn’t really mean that I want him to die.”

“Well, Robbie doesn’t understand that, Stevie. You can’t say things like that, even joking. Not to your own brother.”

“I’m sorry.”

He looked so miserable. And DeAnne could understand how, after years of sharing a room with Robbie, the dedicated extravert, Stevie could have moments of complete exasperation, for once Robbie thought of something he wanted to say, he would say it, even if you begged him for silence. He simply could not leave a thought unspoken. The miracle was that Stevie was usually so patient with his brother.

“I’m sorry, too,” said DeAnne. “I shouldn’t have told you off like that.” She sat down beside him on the edge of his bed and put her arm around him. “You’ve had a tough day, and here I am, no help at all.”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“Can’t you tell me what happened?”

“Nothing happened,” said Stevie.

“Did you make any friends?”

“No!” he said, so vehemently that she knew there was far more to the story than he was telling.

“Were they mean to you?”

“No,” he said.

“Is Mrs. Jones a nice teacher?”

He nodded, then shrugged.

“Did you have any homework?”

He shook his head.

“Do you just want me to leave you alone for a while longer?”

He nodded.

She felt so useless. “I love you, Stevie,” she said.

He murmured something that might have been “love you too” and then, as she got up, he rolled back over, curled up on his bed.

She left his room, feeling deeply depressed. As she walked down the hall she could hear the television in the other room. Robbie was switching from channel to channel, so it alternated between loud hissing and very fuzzy reception on the local channels. For just a moment she couldn’t bring herself to go into the same room with her children. She was supposed to know what they needed and provide it for them, and she was going to let them down because she didn’t have a clue.

She went to the front door, opened it and stepped out onto the porch. Then, in spite of the scoffing of her rational mind, she had to leave the porch and walk across the lawn and stand at the curb and look at the storm drain up the street. The yucky hole. Just to see if the kitten had come out.

Of course it had probably come out while she was in the house and so it was absurd to stand here, watching. She would go back inside. Right now. This was foolish.

A movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention. She turned toward the house, and there in the side yard between the house and the neighbors’ fence was a grey rabbit. Robbie had told her he had seen one, but she hadn’t believed that a wild rabbit could really be living in their neighborhood. It looked at he steadily for a moment, then loped off into the back yard.

She followed it, hoping to see where it went. Rabbits might cute and furry, but they were rodents, like rats and mice, and they could carry diseases. She had to get some idea where it lived or least where it came from. But when she got to the back yard it was gone.

She walked the wood-slat fence, to see where it might have gone under, but she couldn’t see any rabbit-sized gaps. She also examined the latticework skirting around the base of the house, though the thought that the rabbit might live under her own house made her shudder. She hated the way that southerners built their houses up off the ground instead of putting in a massive concrete basement the way houses were supposed to be built. Anything could get in under the house—it must be filled with spiderwebs and beetles and who knows what other disgusting creatures, right there where all the waterpipes and wiring and heating ducts were. It made her feel naked, to know that her house was completely exposed on its soft underbelly.

But it didn’t look as though there were any place where the rabbit might have slipped through or under the skirting. It was just gone. Probably went across to the driveway and back out into the front yard while I was walking around the other way, she thought.

DeAnne walked back around the house and was horrified to realize that she had left the front door standing wide open. She had never done that—she was an inveterate door locker. But this time she had forgotten. I was just stepping onto the porch, she remembered. I didn’t plan to go into the back yard chasing a rabbit.

That was no excuse.

As she hurried toward the door, a man stepped through it. A man had been in her house! A stranger! With her children! She screamed.

He looked at her, startled and abashed. An old man, white hair sticking out like tiny feathers under a baseball cap. “Ma’am, I’m so sorry—”

“What were you doing in my house!” Somehow she had covered the gap between them and now shoved past him, to stand in the doorway between him and the children.

“Ma’am, the door was open and I called and called—”

She yelled over her shoulder. “Robbie! Robbie, are you all right?”

“Ma’am, please, you got to understand—”

“Get away from here before I call the police,” she said. “If you have harmed my children in any way, I—”

“Ma’am,” he said, “I used to live here. I just haven’t shook the habit yet of walking in. I shouldn’t have done it, I know, and I am so ashamed of myself, giving you a scare like that, I was plain wrong and I apologize, sometimes I think I still live out in the country I guess where a open door means come on in, folks is at home.”

Robbie came up behind her. “Did you call me, Mom?”

“Is your sister all right?”

“We got a fuzzy channel on the TV and she’s watching this guy who hits people in the head.”

“Thanks, Robbie.”

“Can I go back now, Mom?”

“Yes, please, thank you.”

The old man resumed his explanations. “My boy Jamie owns this house.”

“That doesn’t give you the right,” said DeAnne.

“I know it, like I said, I was plain wrong and I’m sorry, I won’t ever do it again. But ma’am, you ought to be careful and not leave your front door open like that. Folks don’t do that in the city. So when I saw it open, I did like country people and didn’t even think twice. If it was closed I would’ve knocked and waited.”

“I shouldn’t have left it open,” said DeAnne. “That was careless of me. Stupid of me.”

“Well, now, not stupid. I’d say it was trusting of you and kind of sweet. Though I guess I hope I’m never on the wrong side of you again, cause you got a scream like to wake the dead.”

DeAnne looked around, embarrassed. But apparently nobody had heard—at least, nobody was charging out of their houses to see why a woman had screamed at this hour.

“Ma’am, all I came by to do was to tell you that I been looking after this house for fifteen years now, ever since my boy built it for me and my missus, only she’s dead now and my boy’s wife sort of left him and he was lonely in his place and he wanted me for company and he needed the rental money on this place to help pay the child support and you know how it is. I moved. Spent the loneliest Christmas of my life here this winter, and so I suppose I’m glad to be moved out of it and I know I’m glad to think of a family here. Why, next Christmas Santa Claus will come to this house, will you think of that!”

Now that the fear was wearing off, she could see that there was no harm in this old fellow.

“My name’s Bappy Waters,” said the old man.

“Pappy?” asked DeAnne.

“Bappy, with a B. Short for my real name, which is Baptize.”

“Not really,” said DeAnne.

“Oh, yes. My papa was a Holiness preacher and he believed in baptism the way other folks believe in air. It was the cure for whatever ailed you. Other folks might hold with doctors or even with laying on hands, but Papa, he just pushed you down in the water and held you there till the devil come out of you. He was a deep baptizer, my papa was, and I was the firstborn in his family. And what with our last name being Waters, my name was sort of bound to happen, if you think of it. In fact he was set to name me Baptize All God’s Children in the Holy, but Mama put her foot down on that and said that if he named a child that he’d deserve it if the boy grew up and shot him dead, and not a jury but would call it justice. Not that I was there to hear the conversation, mind you, but I heard reports of it, you may be sure.”

DeAnne couldn’t help but laugh. He was a charmer, this old man. And she could see how a country boy, a preacher’s son, might act differently around an open door than a city man. How his stepping in like that meant nothing at all. In fact, it was kind of nice to imagine living in simpler times, when you could just leave your door open and a passing visitor would poke his head in and find you maybe in the kitchen baking bread or scrubbing the floor and you get up and serve lemonade and chat awhile. In the days before television and telephones and urgent errands. Bappy Waters was a visitor from a simpler time.

“What was it brought you by?” asked DeAnne.

“Well, I know this house inside out, you see. I done all the handiwork here for fifteen years. So if anything goes bad, like a pipe gets bust in the winter or your cable needs hooking up or whatever, why, I’m equipped and qualified and I know where everything is. Why have some stranger go crawling up in the attic or under the house looking for what I know right where to find it, and besides, when you call me it’s free.”

“Oh, I couldn’t ask you to—”

“Just protecting my son’s investment in the property, ma’am.”

“Call me DeAnne, please.”

“Why, so I will. I knew a DeAnne when I was a boy, she was the prettiest little thing in the county. Died when she was just a slip of a girl, though, got herself drowned when her boyfriend was driving drunk and took them off into the Dan River in spring flood. There was only a half dozen cars in the county in those days, it being the Depression and all. Though truth to tell in Gary County the Depression started about halfway through the War between the States and it hasn’t let up since.” He laughed, and DeAnne laughed with him.

“For instance, ma’am, your kids are watching television, and I wonder if you know that I can just hook you right up to cable.”

“We haven’t paid for cable.”

“Well, you just go down to the cable office and give them your money and you’ll be just fine. They give you your box, then, if you want any of the extra channels. But the house is all wired, is what I’m telling you, and you just connect up to the wall, and it was their decision to leave it connected when I turned my box in at the end of December, so you won’t be stealing a thing.”

“Well, then, I’ll have my husband connect the TV to the wall,” she said. “When he gets home, which is any second now.”

Bappy nodded and touched the brim of his baseball cap. “I understand, ma’am. After seeing me in your house like that, of course you aren’t about to let me inside, and I don’t blame you a bit. Tell you what, here’s my number. I wrote it on this card for you already. Anything goes wrong with the house, anything at all, you give me a call. That’s the home I share with Jamie now, and I’m always there, and when I’m not a machine picks up, if you can imagine. If it’s something I can’t fix myself, I’ll call whoever can.”

“Thank you,” she said, taking the card.

“Times are tight, ma’am, and rent’s high enough without y’all having to worry about paying for repairs and such. Think of me as a sort of free discount on your rent.” He grinned again, touched the brim of his cap again, and then walked to the driveway and went left, around the house. That put another little scare into her—where was he going?

But by the time she got to where the front walk joined the driveway at the corner of the house, he was already backing down the drive in a little pickup with garden tools and a couple of big metal tool chests in the back. He was leaning out the window to see where he was backing, and of course he saw her as he slipped by. He stopped the pickup near the foot of the driveway. “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said.

“Nice to meet you too,” she said, though it had not been nice.

Or, well, in fact, it had been nice, once she got over the first scare, only it still bothered her, even though she understood the whole thing now, it still had her heart beating so hard that she could feel her own pulse in her head.

“Um, I don’t know how to say this, ma’am, but it looks like you got yourself a habit needs breaking just like I do.” He pointed behind her.

She turned. She had left the front door open again.

She turned back around, furious with herself, intending to explain—she’d just been walking to the driveway to see what he was doing. But he was already backing out into the road, laughing a little, it looked like. And then he waved a jaunty little wave and drove off.

As soon as she got inside she had to lock the door, then go through the whole house, looking behind all the furniture, checking all the closets, the bathrooms, the cupboards to see if he might have taken something or moved something or left something behind or just—just touched something. She wanted to take everything out of the cupboards and wash it all. And in the back of her mind there was also the question—what if someone else went through that door besides old Bappy, maybe before he did, and was now hiding somewhere in the house, waiting for them to go to sleep tonight?

Even as she moved through the house, she knew it was irrational of her to check everything like that, but this was exactly the way her mother had always checked over the house when they got home from a trip, and besides, once DeAnne thought of the possibility of someone sneaking into the house, she had to know. She could not just put it out of her mind. Her mind didn’t work that way.

I screamed, right out in the front yard, and it was loud, and not one neighbor came out to see why.

Step called at 5:30 to say he was going to be late, but one of the guys he was working with would take him home. Don’t wait dinner for him. When she told him about supper at the Cowpers’, he said, “Take a picture of me and tell them I’m a miserable rotten husband who has never made it home in time for dinner in the whole time he’s worked for Eight Bits Inc.”

“Very funny,” said DeAnne.

“And it’s true.”

“Please get home before eight, will you? Stevie had a terrible time at school today and he isn’t talking to me about it.”

“Ah, a father-and-son moment.”

“I’ve never seen him like this, Step.”

“I’ll be home.”

She took the kids to the Cowpers’ and it was a circus. The Cowper kids were so undisciplined, running around and screaming, that Robbie soon joined in, and Elizabeth only refrained because DeAnne kept a firm grip on her. Stevie, however, sat at his place and quietly, dutifully ate whatever was put before him. He answered questions in a low voice and volunteered nothing. DeAnne had a sneaking suspicion that whatever had made Stevie upset at school was no longer the reason for his behavior. That what she was seeing now was sullenness, spite. Anger, passively expressed. Stevie was hurt at school somehow, but now he was just mad.

The Cowpers, however, had no notion that anything was wrong. Because they seemed not to care at all what their kids did, they were able to stay at the table and converse for a while after supper. But DeAnne could not bring herself to adopt their attitude toward child care. She felt an unceasing need to know what Robbie was doing and whether he was safe. Who knew what kind of insane games the Cowper children might decide to play? Hadn’t she seen them climbing on the car this afternoon? All through the after-supper visiting she got more and more anxious until finally, using Elizabeth’s bedtime and the possibility that Step had come home as an excuse, she headed home at seven-thirty.

It was dark outside, and all the way home Robbie told Stevie about the adventures of the walk earlier that day. Robbie took a wide berth around the yucky hole and begged the others to be just as careful. But Stevie just plowed straight ahead, walking as close to the hole as he could, which drove Robbie to fits of anxiety.

“Stevie,” said DeAnne. “You may be angry at me, but Robbie hasn’t done anything to you.”

After a moment, Stevie said, “I’m sorry, Robbie. I’ll be more careful next time.”

It mollified Robbie—in truth, Stevie could do no wrong, as far as Robbie was concerned. Robbie seemed to have been born with the gift—or perhaps the curse—of empathy. If Stevie or Elizabeth or Step or DeAnne was hurt, Robbie got almost frantic in his sense of urgent helplessness. He had to do something to help, and yet at the age of four had no notion of what that might be. His life was almost entirely focused on others. And it made DeAnne wonder if a compassionate, Christlike character might be something you were born with, rather than something you acquired. Maybe all of Christianity was devoted to making normal people believe that they should live and feel and think the way that a few, special people just naturally did. In which case most believers would end up either frustrated at their failure to measure up, or frustrated because they did measure up but got no joy from suppressing all their natural instincts.

Nonsense, she decided. We are what we choose to be. Robbie is so profoundly compassionate because his spirit is that way, and always was that way, long before he was born. And if I’m not as good a person as he is, that doesn’t mean that I can’t learn to be. To believe anything else would be to despair.

To believe anything else would mean rejecting every other choice she had made in her life.

Step didn’t get home by eight o’clock. DeAnne put Elizabeth and Robbie to bed, but she let Stevie stay up a little while longer, waiting for Step. “Here, sit and read a book to me.”

He sat next to her, but then he said, “I don’t feel like reading.”

“Then let’s see what’s on TV.”

But with the cable not yet hooked up, there wasn’t anything watchable—too much fuzz, and only three VHF channels, with a maybe on a fourth one. And two channels on UHF, one with a dingy-looking old western, and one with a screaming used-car salesman. She should have let the old man hook up the cable. Baptize. Bappy. What a name. Of course she would have to tell Step about what she did today. Leaving the door open like that. Or maybe she shouldn’t, so he wouldn’t worry. But no, she had to tell him, because they didn’t hide things from each other, especially things that made them look stupid. Only this wasn’t about whether DeAnne looked stupid, this was about whether the children would be safe. Step couldn’t be worrying all the time about whether she was keeping them safe, he had to concentrate on work. Besides, if she told him he wouldn’t blame her, he’d blame himself for not being home, for not having been a good enough provider so that now he had to go away all day and leave her alone to take care of everything. No, that would not be a good story to tell him. But she couldn’t leave it unconfessed, either. She would write it in the family journal, and tell him later, much later, when she had gone for several weeks—no, months—without leaving the door open like that.

“I want to play Kaboom,” said Stevie.

She sighed inwardly. He’d rather play a videogame than sit with her. A game that he could not win, a game that always made him so frustrated that he used to hit the computer or throw down the joystick until Step had to ban him from the computer several times, to help him learn to control his anger.

Anger was the mode he preferred tonight, apparently. “Go ahead,” she said. “I don’t know where the cartridges are.”

“Right here,” he said, going straight to a cardboard box and pulling out a plastic case with slots for all the Atari cartridges. Step had set up the computers the moment all the beds were together, and of course Stevie knew right where everything was.

It was nearly nine and DeAnne was about to send Stevie to bed when Step finally got home. He knew he had let them down and felt terrible about it. “I’m so sorry. Is he still up?”

“Playing Kaboom,” she said.

He went to the family room and knelt down beside Stevie. “Son, I’m so sorry I was late. It wasn’t my car, and we kept finding new bugs in the program, and I kept saying I had to get home, but he’d say, ‘Let’s just fix this one thing and try it,’ over and over again, and it was his car, what can I say? Even as it is he’s mad at me for leaving the thing unfinished.”

Stevie said nothing, just kept swinging the paddle left and right to catch the little bombs as they dropped from various points along the top of the screen. Then he missed one, and all the bombs on the screen at that moment exploded.

“Stevie, your mom said you were upset when you came home from school today. Do you want to tell me what happened?”

Stevie just stared at the screen, until finally he said, “I don’t want to talk to you about it.”

That slapped Step hard, DeAnne could see it. “Well, then, who are you going to talk to?”

“Mom,” said Stevie.

DeAnne could not believe what she was hearing.

Step stood up. “He’s punishing me for not getting home soon enough,” he said. “And probably for not taking him to school this morning.” Step did that—stating out loud how he interpreted the kids’ actions, so that they would see that he wasn’t fooled, or correct him if he was wrong.

Stevie didn’t correct him, so Step went on. “As long as you’ll talk to one of us, that’s all right. And if you were trying to hurt my feelings, then you’ve succeeded. I really am sorry that I wasn’t here when you needed me, but we explained to you that this is the way it’s got to be for a while. Most fathers have to go to work, and when you go to work, you can’t always be home when your kids need you. That’s the way it is, if we’re going to have food on the table and a roof over our heads.”

Stevie said nothing. DeAnne had never seen him so unforgiving. In fact, she had never seen him act unforgiving at all. Maybe what happened at school today really was awful, so awful that Stevie couldn’t forgive his father for not being there to protect him.

Well, she’d find out soon enough now. “Come on, Stevie,” she said. “Let’s go to your room and you can tell me what happened.”

“Not in front of Robbie,” he said.

“OK, we’ll go to my room,” she said. “Step, if you can’t wait for supper, fix yourself something, but if you wait I’ll poach some eggs or something.”

Step nodded, leaning against the bookshelves. As she followed Stevie out of the room, she thought she had never seen Step look so bent, so broken, in all the years she’d known him. It made her want to go to him and hold him and comfort him … but she knew that Step would understand, would agree that it was more important for her to be with Stevie. The child’s needs always took precedence over the adult’s. That was the way it had to be, when you had children. That was the contract you made with the kids when you chose to call their spirits from heaven into the world, that as long as they were young and needed you, you did whatever you could to meet their needs before you did anything else for anybody else.

They sat next to each other on her side of the queen-sized bed that Step’s parents had given them as a wedding present. “What happened today, Stevie,” said DeAnne.

Almost immediately, his face twisted up and the pent-up tears flowed again as they had flowed in the car. “I couldn’t understand them, Mom!”

“What do you mean?”

“I couldn’t understand what they said! To me, I mean. I could understand them mostly in class, when they were talking to the teacher, but when they talked to me I didn’t understand hardly anything and so I just stood there and finally I said, I can’t understand you, and they called me stupid and retarded.”

“Honey, you know you’re not stupid. You know you’re a straight A student.”

“But I couldn’t understand anything.” He sounded fierce now; much of his anger, she realized, must have been from the frustration he had felt, being unable to communicate with the other kids. “I asked them what language they were speaking, and they said ‘American,’ and then they started making fun of the way I talk, like I talked wrong or something. But I didn’t say anything wrong!

“Honey, you’ve got to understand, this is a school in a fairly rural part of Steuben. A country school. They just have thick southern accents.”

“Well they understood everything I said.”

“Because you talk normal American English. Like on television. They all watch TV, so they’re used to understanding the way you talk.”

“Then why don’t they talk that way?”

“Maybe in a couple of generations they will. But right now they talk in a southern accent. And besides, you did understand some of what they said, or you wouldn’t have known they were calling you retarded and stupid.”

He began to cry harder. “I made this one girl write it down for me. That’s how I knew. And then they all wrote it down. Retarded and stupid. They wrote it on papers and gave it to me. All day. I didn’t read them, though. I mean after the first couple.”

“That was very wise of you,” said DeAnne. “And very cruel of them.”

“But when I was leaving at the end of school I left all those notes on the table and Mrs. Jones made me go back and pick them all up and take them with me.” The humiliation of it made him shudder. “So I picked them up and threw them in the trash and then she yelled at me.”

“She yelled at you?”

“She said that I had an unfriendly attitude and a chip on my shoulder and I’d better learn some manners or I’d never get along.”

She put her arm around him. “Oh, son, I’m so sorry. She should never have said anything like that.”

“They’re all against me there, Mom,” he said. “Even the teacher.”

“Stevie, I know it seems that way—”

“It doesn’t just seem, it is!”

“Mrs. Jones just didn’t understand what those papers were, or what the other kids had been saying.”

“She talks just like they do, Mom,” he said. “They just hate me because I’m from Utah!”

“Kids are cruel,” said DeAnne. “You knew that—the way they treated Barry Wimmer.” She remembered back to her own childhood, to her parents’ words to her. “Not all the kids were making fun of you, were they? Weren’t most of them just standing around watching?”

“They didn’t stick up for me, either,” said Stevie.

“No, they just watched. They just watched, and that made you feel like they all agreed with the mean ones. But they don’t, not really, Stevie. They just—they just hadn’t decided anything at all. So if they see you tomorrow standing tall and—”

“Don’t make me go back, Mom!” cried Stevie. He was trembling. “Don’t make me go back to class! Not Mrs. Jones’s class! Don’t make me!”

“Son! Calm down, please, calm down.” She had no idea what to do about this. Every natural instinct told her to say, Yes, Stevie, you’re right, that class is the last place in the world I’ll ever send you, and you can stay home with me and be safe for the rest of your life. But she knew that, however much she might want to say that, she couldn’t. It wouldn’t be right. “These things aren’t under my control—I can’t keep you out of school, and I can’t get you into another class unless Dr. Mariner agrees.”

“Don’t make me go back,” he whispered.

“Son, you’ll see—tomorrow they’ll probably still be mean, but it won’t be new anymore and so they’ll get bored and do something else. And in a few days the nicer kids will start being friends with you. Plus you’ll get used to the way they talk and you’ll understand them and things will be fine.”

“They’ll never be fine,” he said, and he got up and stalked out of the room. It was sadly funny, his furious walk, the way he tried to be forceful as he opened the door, but ended up fumbling with the door handle because he was still small enough that door handles weren’t easy. One thing was certain, though. She could not let this go without talking to Dr. Mariner.

The Steuben phone book was by the kitchen phone. Step was at the table, eating a tuna sandwich. With mustard on it, which always made her cringe a little, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“What was it?” asked Step.

“The kids made fun of his accent and the fact that he couldn’t understand their accent, and then Mrs. Jones actually told him off because he wasn’t being polite enough to her or to them!”

“Adults can be so stupid with children sometimes,” he said.

“He begged me not to send him back to school tomorrow.”

“So keep him home,” said Step.

“Are you serious?” She could not believe he was saying that.

“The teacher’s unsympathetic and the kids are all little shits,” he said. “Keep him home.”

She hated it when he used words like that, even though he apparently thought it was cute—it was so juvenile of him to use shock words, as if she were his parent instead of his wife. But she had long since learned that it was better to pretend she hadn’t noticed than to make a big deal about it.

“We can’t do that,” said DeAnne. “There are truancy laws, you know.”

“Just for a day. And tomorrow you call Dr. Mariner and ask for him to be reassigned to another second-grade class.”

“I was going to call her tonight.”

“Tomorrow is business hours. Tonight is home time.”

“This is a real problem, Step, and she will understand my calling her tonight. I can’t let him miss tomorrow or he’ll think that he can get out of school whenever he wants to avoid something unpleasant there.”

“My mother let us stay home,” he said. “One day. One day a year, she said, any one of her kids could stay home just because they couldn’t stand to go. They could only do it once, but they got that one day. Most years I didn’t even use it. But things were better because I knew I could. And when I went on those days that I didn’t want to go, when I had almost decided not to, then I was there because of my own choice, and not because anybody made me. I think it was a good plan.”

“But this is only his second day at a new school,” said DeAnne. “And what if Dr. Mariner won’t let him change classes? Do you think that on Wednesday it will be any easier for him to go?”

“It might,” he said.

“And it might not,” she said. “I can’t see that it will help him if he clings to his mother’s apron strings just because things were hard for him.”

Step sat there, looking at his sandwich. “Do what you want,” he said.

“Oh, Step, don’t be that way. I thought we were having a discussion.”

“No, you’re right. He needs to go. I guess I was just thinking that if I didn’t have to go back to work tomorrow, that would be the best thing in the world. Only if I stayed home tomorrow, then I’d never go back. So you’re right.” He looked up and grinned. “You got to send your little boys back into the cold cruel world.”

“Was it that bad today?”

“Not bad, just weird,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. There were a couple of minutes that I just felt like quitting, but what can you expect? I haven’t worked for anybody but myself in so long now, of course I felt rebellious and frustrated.” He took a bite, but she didn’t say anything. “And then coming home and having Stevie so mad at me—and I thought, He’s right. I should have been home. I should never have taken this job, we should pack up whatever we can fit in the car and drive back to Indiana or back to your parents’ place and I should sit down in the basement and teach myself to program the stupid Commodore 64 and somewhere between here and bankruptcy maybe I’ll come up with a hot game and we’ll be rolling in undeserved money again, like we were a year ago.”

“That wasn’t undeserved money,” she said.

“Oh, you know what I mean,” he said.

“If you want to quit, then do it,” she said. “If we have to move, then we’ll move.”

“No,” he said. “You think I haven’t thought it through? We can’t afford another moving van, we don’t even have enough cash to get through the month, let alone get to another state. All of our credit cards are to the hilt. We’ve got no choice unless we want to go be street people or something. I go back to work tomorrow, and Stevie goes back to school, and if he hates me for not being there, then that’s just one more part of being a father.” He laughed bitterly. “Sons are supposed to hate their fathers. It just isn’t supposed to start so young.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” said DeAnne. “He was just—frustrated.”

“Call Dr. Mariner before it gets any later.”

She looked up the number and called. It was well after nine o’clock, and she might have gotten the principal out of bed, but Dr. Mariner was a southern lady, so she denied that she had been inconvenienced at all, and as DeAnne told her of Stevie’s problems that day at school, Dr. Mariner clucked in sympathy. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll keep Stevie in my office, to take some tests that we need him to take anyway. Placement tests, to see if he should be in our gifted program—his records from that school in Indiana were quite impressive, you know. And while he’s taking those tests, I’ll talk with Mrs. Jones. And either we’ll change his assignment, or Mrs. Jones will make sure that things go more smoothly in the old class. How will that be?”

“You’re wonderful, Dr. Mariner,” DeAnne said, trying not to gush in her gratitude. “Thank you.”

“All in a day’s work, Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you for calling. Good night.”

“Good night.”

DeAnne hung up the telephone and slumped into a chair.

“Good news, I take it,” said Step.

“She’s going to keep him out of class, taking placement tests,” said DeAnne. “And then either reassign him or work things out so it’ll go better in Mrs. Jones’s class.”

“Well, see? You were right. Calling her tonight was exactly the right thing. That’s why I chose you to be the mother of my kids, because you’re a thousand times smarter than I’d ever be.”

“It’s not that I wanted to send him to school tomorrow, Step.”

“I know.”

“I wanted to keep him home.”

“I know, Fish Lady. You have a heart so soft that you’d die of terminal compassion if you ever let it get out of control.”

“Now you’re making fun of me.”

“You’re a wonderful wife and a wonderful mother and now you better go tell Stevie the good news so he won’t get an ulcer before morning.”

“Come with me,” said DeAnne.

“He doesn’t want to see me.”

“Step, don’t be as petulant as he was.”

“What about my sandwich?”

“Let it dry out. I’ll poach you those eggs.”

“I ate two candy bars at work, it’s not like I need dinner,” he said as he followed her down the hall to the boys’ room. “I’m going to get fat working there. There’s a candy machine right around the corner from my office. Twenty steps and I have a Three Musketeers in my mouth.”

“Well, don’t do it,” said DeAnne. “You worked too hard to get down to this weight.”

Stevie was still awake, of course. DeAnne explained what Dr. Mariner had suggested. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

Stevie nodded.

“She really is a good principal, Stevie. So you remember, you do have at least one friend at school already.”

He nodded again. Then, glancing at his father, he reached out and put his hand behind her neck, to draw her close, so he could whisper in her ear. “You didn’t tell Dad that I cried, did you?”

She almost told him that Step had wanted to keep him home from school; but they had decided years ago that they would never hint at disagreement between them on decisions dealing with the children, so that they’d never get the idea that they could play one parent off against the other. So instead she just shook her head. “But even if he guessed it,” she whispered, “that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I know,” he said softly. “But don’t tell.” He lay back down and she tucked him in again and turned off the light.

“Leave the hall light on!” said Robbie loudly.

“Are you still awake, Road Bug?” asked Step.

“Don’t nobody go to school tomorrow,” said Robbie. “Not Stevie and not you either, Dad!”

“Don’t I wish,” said Step. He left the hall light on.

5: Hacker Snack

Here is how Step’s days were spent: Most days he drove to work, leaving the car for DeAnne only when she knew she was going to need it for shopping. He would rather have left it all the time, but he was never sure when he’d be coming home, and it was hard to carpool with such an uncertain schedule.

He always began the workday by drifting into the programmers’ pit, a large room with even more computers than Gallowglass’s office. Most of the machines were already up and running, usually with lines and lines of assembly language on the screen, though sometimes there was a screen filled with the faded-looking colors of the 64. As he moved from machine to machine, the programmers would point out what they were doing, and sometimes they’d have a problem and Step would pull up a chair beside them and help spot the flaw in the code or find some simple, elegant solution. Step usually felt inadequate at this, because all the programmers knew the workings of the 64 better than he did and quite often he had to ask, What are you getting from this register? Or, What does it mean to store that value in that location? And they’d kind of laugh and say That’s the current location of the character set, or, That’s the wave-form for the sound, and the tone of their voices always suggested that everybody knew that.

But the truth is that while they knew the 64, Step had a gift for code and he knew it and they knew it. He could look at a routine for a few minutes and then rewrite it to cut the amount of memory it used in half, or make it run twice as fast, or make it smoother and more responsive on the screen. Back when he’d been working alone on programming, he thought of himself as a clumsy amateur, and he was always vaguely ashamed of his code. But now he realized that he was pretty good after all, or at least good enough to be better than the caliber of programmer that Eight Bits Inc. was able to attract.

Still, it wasn’t too smart for him to keep thinking of himself as a programmer. Because whenever Dicky poked his head into the pit, Step had to drop back into manual-writer mode, asking questions of the programmer he was with about how the game worked. As often as not, he was asking about the very things he had just shown the programmer how to do, and as soon as Dicky left, the others in the room would erupt in silent laughter. But Step didn’t think it was funny. It made Step feel dirty and cheap, to be playing a continuous trick on Dicky like that. And so many people knew about it he could not believe it was possible that Dicky would never find out. In fact, he suspected that Dicky already knew. Yet he dared not test the hypothesis, because what if he was wrong? So Step kept up the charade.

Usually this took till noon, and he would go to lunch with a group of programmers and that was the good time during the day, because he wasn’t lying to anybody then, he wasn’t hiding anything, he was just himself, talking about stuff with these guys. It dawned on him during one of those lunches, as they sat there bantering with each other or swapping stories across the table at Swensen’s or Pizza Inn or Libby Hill, that this was really the first time in his life that he had been part of a group of guys like this. He had never been an athlete, part of the team or even part of a pickup game at school or in the neighborhood. His friends during his school years had always been girls. He liked the way they talked, he had things to say to them. And they didn’t despise him for being smart and getting good grades, they weren’t ashamed being smart themselves, and so they could talk about ideas in a way that he never heard guys talking about anything, as if they mattered, as if they cared. His only male friends during high school and on into college had been the few who were like him, who hung out with the smart girls.

But these programmers were all male, and it was definitely a male kind of conversation, and yet there was none of that hierarchical one-upmanship that had made Step so uncomfortable with “the guys” in school. Or rather, there was, but it was centered around programming rather than athletics or cars, and on that playing field Step was a star—with Gallowglass, he shared the preeminent position in the hierarchy, and since he and Glass got along so well themselves there was no rivalry at all. Step belonged, and it felt good.

Lunch ended, though—supposedly after half an hour, but they always took an hour or more—and then back they went to Eight Bits Inc., where now Step usually went to his own office and actually worked on manuals, often for games that weren’t even finished yet. In fact, in the process of writing the manual he would really be designing the game, describing rules and features of the game that the programmer hadn’t yet thought of. Or if he was writing about a game that was nearly done, he’d play the game over and over again to find bugs in the code or annoyances in the play of the game. Then he’d make notes and pass them on to the programmers. Because every game had to pass through his hands in order to get its documentation written, Step had his finger on the pulse of every project in the company. He knew, he knew what was going on. And since Dicky did not, it meant that in a way Step was the real head of the creative division of Eight Bits Inc. Dicky had the title and the salary and the Sunday afternoon visits with Ray Keene at the Magazine Rack, but Step had the respect and the influence and—most important to him—the results, the games with his fingerprints all over them.

The only program he never fiddled with was Scribe 64. That was Glass’s bailiwick, and Step had no intention of intruding. He was writing the documentation for the new update, which was adding right-and-left justification and Glass’s new 60-character screen, and while he still tested it and found bugs and passed them on to Glass, Step never, never touched the code. Because he didn’t need to—Glass knew what he was doing. And because that was the unspoken basis of their alliance, that Step would do nothing to weaken Glass’s position at Eight Bits Inc. So even when Step found a bug, he would pass the information to Glass in private, never giving a clue to anybody else that there had been the slightest flaw in the kid’s original code.

Five o’clock came and went every day, but it had nothing to do with Step’s schedule. He was always in the middle of something. There was always a section of code that he had to finish fiddling with before he went home, so he could leave it for the programmer to look at in the morning. Or a game that he had to finish play-testing at the highest levels, while the programmer hung ‘around and kibitzed with him. Supper-time meant going around the corner to the candy machine and dropping in quarters. After a few candy bars there’d be a bag of potato chips because there was once a potato involved, which made it health food. And then a can of pop or even tomato juice, when Step was feeling really unrighteous about what he was doing to his body.

He was gaining weight, he could feel it. Some of his shirts were beginning to show a gap between the buttons when he sat down. His belt was getting less comfortable; he let it out a notch. Six weeks, and he was going to seed. But when during the day could he get any exercise? Back in Indiana he had ridden his bike fifty miles a week during the warm months and kept up on the exercise bike in the winter, but he could do that because he was keeping an academic schedule, which gave him plenty of free daylight hours.

Seven, eight, nine o’clock at night, depending on how stubborn the bug was or how fascinating the game, and Step would at last go outside into the darkness and find the Renault, pop the locks and climb in. Then he’d head for home, saying to himself, I should have gotten away sooner, I should have been home for dinner. Most nights the kids were already in bed, or going to beds, before he got there; he could kiss them goodnight and hear a little bit about their day, but that was it, that was all.

It took him hours to unwind after the intensity of the day. He and DeAnne would talk, and now and then he’d help her fold laundry or do up the dishes from a dinner that he hadn’t eaten, and sometimes she would have saved him something from dinner and then he’d eat it while they talked, even though he wasn’t hungry. She always looked so tired, and it made him feel terrible. She was pregnant, after all, and even though this pregnancy hadn’t had anything like the horrible morning sickness of the first three, he knew that it always left her feeling wrung out. When the other kids were on the way, Step had been home to take up the slack. He was no help now. In fact, he suspected that he was another drain on her energy, like the kids. She’d just be getting them down to bed, about to have a few moments to herself after having been on all day, and here came hubby, home from work and ready to be entertained.

So he tried to break away from her fairly early, to let her get to bed and get the sleep she needed while he wound himself down from the tension of the day. He watched TV, or went to bed and read a book. DeAnne would watch TV with him sometimes, but she didn’t really engage with most shows—she had enjoyed “M*A*S*H,” but they’d had the final episode of that, and Step hadn’t even been home to watch it with her. And when they lay in bed together, reading, she was so tired that he just didn’t have the heart to make her stay awake just to make love, not unless she actually initiated it herself, which wasn’t often. Even when she tried to stay awake to read something—he had bought her the new Anne Tyler novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, as soon as it came out in paperback—she’d end up asleep in moments, the book fallen over on her chest; he’d get up, slide her glasses off and lay them on top of the book on her nightstand, turn off her light, and then come back around to his side of the bed. Sacrificing his own sexual hunger for her sake made him feel both righteous and frustrated, a terrible combination because whatever satisfaction he got from knowing he had let her have the sleep she needed so badly did nothing to assuage his longing for sexual release. I could sleep myself, he thought, if only she could see how much I need her; and then he felt guilty even for thinking that, because he didn’t have to get up and feed the kids in the morning and get Stevie off to school, he didn’t have to go through a day of constant housework and tending kids while carrying around this growth inside his belly that was sucking the energy out of him, so how could he dare to feel resentful that she was so tired, that she didn’t reach out to him? Why couldn’t he just be satisfied that he had let her sleep? Why couldn’t he be satisfied?

Consumed by guilt and desire, he would lie awake reading, or get up again and go in and watch the TV in the family room. Carson’s parade of guests touting movies and TV shows. Letterman dropping things off buildings and putting on fake bus company ads by Larry “Bud” Melman and sometimes still the guy who lived under the seats. Then flipping around the cable channels, watching two or three bad movies at once, back and forth whenever he couldn’t stand how boring or stupid one of them got. And then it was three in the morning and he knew he had to get up and finally, finally he was sleepy, maybe a little sleepy, and then he realized that he had been very sleepy for quite a while, that he had even dozed off in front of the set and now he knew that he hadn’t been watching TV because he couldn’t sleep, he had been watching TV because he didn’t want to sleep, because he was afraid to sleep, and he’d go in to the kids’ rooms where they slept with the lights on because they were so scared of the dark and he watched them lying there, Betsy alone in her room with the crib set up across from her, waiting for the new baby, her blond hair spilling across the pillow; Robbie in the bottom bunk in the boys’ room, his covers always in knots because he flailed around so in his sleep; Stevie, quiet in the top bunk, his face so beautiful in repose; and Step would stand there at three in the morning, barely awake, feeling like he was in a walking dream, and he’d look at the kids and his heart would break.

Then he’d go to bed, getting in gently so that DeAnne wouldn’t wake up; she usually stirred, but rarely did she wake—did she even know how late he stayed up at night? Three o’clock, three-thirty sometimes, sometimes four, and then he’d wake up with his alarm at seven-thirty or eight or eight-thirty and stagger into the shower and get ready for another day, thinking, It’s all right if I’m late, it’s all right if I take a long lunch, because I have to put in so much overtime at night.

DeAnne asked him once: If you got up and went to work on time, couldn’t you get your work done and come home at five? If I packed a lunch, couldn’t you take shorter lunch hours and come home when it’s still daylight and you can maybe take a walk with the kids while I fix dinner? And he’d say, I’ll try, and maybe the next day he would get up earlier and get to work on time, but then he’d be so tired that he’d drag around all day and hardly get anything done and the deadlines were still looming, weren’t they? And most of the programmers were working past five, so they needed him to stay late to fix this or look at that, and so even after getting up early he’d still not get home till seven and dinner was already over and DeAnne would say, “I need the car tomorrow,” and he’d say, “Fine, take me to work and I’ll catch a ride home with one of the guys,” and that would be the end of another experiment in trying to turn himself into an eight-to-five kind of guy.

Those were the days of Step Fletcher, and he hated his life and his job even though he loved his family and his work.

In April they were launching three new games and the Scribe 64 update at the Computer Faire in San Francisco at the Cow Palace, and Ray and Dicky and the marketing people decided they wanted to bring along Step and Glass so that there’d be somebody there who actually knew how the programs worked.

The flight was at two-thirty Friday afternoon, so Step went home at lunch to pack and say good-bye to Robbie and Betsy and DeAnne. Even though Step had authored a top computer game, nobody had ever flown him to one of these computer shows before, and he was nervous and excited. DeAnne wasn’t all that excited—it meant a Sunday without him there, getting the kids ready for church on time and then handling them through sacrament meeting. And, as she said to him, “I get lonely when you’re not here.”

“I’m not here even when I’m here,” he said.

“But you are here,” she said. “I mean, I know you’re coming home. And I sleep better when you’re in the house with me.”

“I’ll be back Sunday night.”

“I know,” she said. “Knowing that is what will keep me alive over the weekend.”

He was horrified. “What are you saying?”

She looked baffled. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not feeling suicidal or something, are you?’

“No,” she said, outraged at the suggestion. And then: “Oh, Step, I didn’t mean that I was thinking of killing myself, for heaven’s sake. I was trying to be romantic. I was trying to say that I live for you.”

He felt stupid. “Of course. I don’t know what I was thinking of.”

“Probably wishing you could get a new wife who didn’t have this big belly.”

“You ain’t got nothin’ in your belly that I didn’t put there,” he said. “Besides, I’m the one who’s getting fat. And after nine months of putting on weight, I don’t get a prize at the end.”

“July 28th,” she said. “The hottest part of summer. I can’t wait to be carrying around ninety pounds of baby in the summer.”

“I’ll miss you,” he said.

“I’ll miss you, too, Junk Man.” She wrapped herself around him, melted into him the way she did when she wanted to make love, only he had to go and catch the damn plane, why did she suddenly get romantic now, when there was no time, no way to do anything about it?

“What are you trying to do, make me late?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Come on out to the car, Fish Lady, and take me to the airport. We’ll take care of unfinished business when I get back.”

“You are no fun,” she said.

“Yeah, well.”

“Our best times were always during the day,” she said.

He remembered now that it was true. When he worked at home he also slept a weird schedule, different from hers, with a lot of all-nighters at the computer, either programming or writing on his dissertation. Then he’d get up in the morning, go to class or go out riding, and when he got home and showered there she’d be, waiting for him as he came naked into the bedroom.

That was how this new one got conceived, only that day she hadn’t even been waiting for him, she’d been sitting on the edge of the bed, talking on the phone. It took only a moment of hearing her say “Mm-hm” and “Of course” and “You poor thing” for Step to realize that she was talking to Sister Boompjes, who was always good for an hour of misery. Not serious misery, not anything that anyone could do anything about; she just needed to make sure that someone knew she was alive, and since her arthritis and her lack of mail and the nasty neighbor children were the only events in her life, that was what she talked about. As DeAnne had said more than once before, for Sister Boompjes’s rosary of woes to have a therapeutic effect, someone had to be on the other end of the phone, but it didn’t take her full attention.

So while DeAnne was murmuring encouragement to Sister Boompjes, Step methodically removed her clothing. DeAnne’s only protest was to roll her eyes—she appreciates the distraction, Step concluded, and so he went ahead. DeAnne never ceased in her sweet reassurances to this lonely sister, even as her husband eased her back on the bed and gave her a slow, thorough workout. DeAnne was usually a little noisy when things went well for her, but she managed to get all the way through without making a sound except for breathing very, very heavily, and of course she had covered the mouthpiece of the phone to conceal that from dear Sister Boompjes, so that the woman got the audience she wanted while DeAnne got laid.

The only real consequence was that DeAnne, having been on the phone, had not prepared herself with contraceptive foam, and sure enough, within a week she was nauseated and two weeks later she didn’t have her clockwork period. The joke between them was that every time they had unprotected sex they got a pregnancy, and once again it held true. This would be either baby number four or miscarriage number three, all because he got randy while DeAnne was on the phone. They thought of naming the child after Sister Boompjes if it was a girl, but then they decided that no American child named Wilhelmina could live a normal life.

Daytime was their best time for sex, that was true. That had never occurred to either of them when they decided he needed to take a job, that having him gone every day would really foul up their sex life.

Out in the car, Robbie was busy trying to make Betsy’s life miserable, which wasn’t hard because she could be brought to furious tears with a funny look. Only when they were on 421 heading west to the airport did he remember. “I left Name of the Rose back in the office,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“A book. I was going to read it at nights during the convention. While the others are all out getting drunk at parties.”

“Don’t you have anything else to read?”

“I’ll buy a magazine.”

“No, we have time,” said DeAnne. “Your luggage is all carryon, isn’t it?”

It was. She pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot and then swung back out onto 421 heading east, and in a few minutes turned right on Palladium and there he was at Eight Bits Inc. at two o’clock on a day when he was supposed to catch a two-thirty flight. Oh, well, he thought, this is as close as a Mormon can get to living on the edge.

The Name of the Rose wasn’t in his office. Where had he last been reading it?

He burst into the pit, practically flying, saying, “Hi, can you believe I’m so stupid I’m probably going to miss my flight for a book?” And there it was on the counter. He picked it up, turned to leave—and realized that they were all looking at him strangely. “What, my pants aren’t zipped?” he asked.

Then he noticed that three of the screens showed views that were obviously from Hacker Snack.

“Is that what I think it is?” he asked.

“It was sort of a secret project,” said one of the guys. “Kind of a surprise.”

“Yeah,” said Step. “I’m surprised.”

They said nothing, and Step said “Bye,” and then he was out the door, down the corridor, out the front door to where DeAnne was waiting in the car.

“What took so long?” she said. “I don’t know if we can make it in fifteen minutes.”

“Speed,” he said.

“That’s your talent,” she said.

“Guess what I’m going to do in San Francisco,” said Step.

“What?”

“Quit this damn job.”

“What?”

“And when I get home I’m going to find me a lawyer and I’m going to sue their asses off.”

DeAnne looked horrified. “Step, I know the kids are going to learn language like that but I’d rather they didn’t learn it from you.”

“Aren’t you the teensiest bit curious as to why I’m going to sue their elbows off?”

“Thank you. And yes, I’m more than a little curious, yes.”

“Because those sons-of-bitches have been adapting Hacker Snack for the 64 behind my back.”

She winced.

“Pardon me. Not sons-of-bitches, kids, bastards.”

She looked angry. “Give it a rest, Step.”

“They never asked permission, they never offered to buy it, there’s no contract, no agreement to a royalty, and they never once breathed a single word, and I thought these guys were my friends.”

“That’s no reason to take it out on me and the kids, Step.”

“I’m not taking it out on you!”

“You’re yelling and you’re using language that I don’t want to have to explain to the children.”

Step leaned over and looked at the kids in the back seat. “I’m not mad at you kids. Some people at work have been doing something really sneaky and bad to me and so I’m angry at them. And as for the words I used, those are words that you shouldn’t ever use except when somebody you trusted has stabbed you in the back, and on those occasions you have my permission to use those words but not in front of your mother.”

“Thanks so much,” said DeAnne.

“Like I’m sure they’ll remember this conversation ten years from now.”

“Somebody stabbed you?”

“It’s a figure of speech, Robbie,” said DeAnne. “Nobody stabbed your father. Though I might, in another minute.”

“I’m sorry,” said Step. “I was out of line. But I’m so … ” He hunted for the word.

“Mad.”

“Mad.” It wasn’t the word he had wanted, but then the word he wanted probably didn’t exist.

“So you’re going to quit.”

“Absolutely. I’m going to sue them for so much money I end up owning the company and then I’ll fire them.”

“Just a suggestion, Step,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Don’t quit in San Francisco. They might cancel your ticket and we don’t have enough on the Visa to let you charge a return fare.”

“Yes, well,” he said. “I suppose I’ll wait till I get home.”

“And maybe it was all a misunderstanding, did you think of that? Maybe somebody didn’t realize that you had signed an agreement that excluded Hacker Snack. Maybe Mr. Keene didn’t know that they were working on this.”

“Maybe pigs have wings.”

“Flying pigs!” cried Robbie. Flying pigs were a standing joke in the family—DeAnne even had two ceramic flying pigs and one stuffed one, which she kept on a shelf beside the mirror in the bathroom. “Watch out below!” The idea of flying pigs defecating on pedestrians had been Step’s contribution to the family’s flying-pig lore, and of course that was the part that Robbie loved best.

“Step, don’t do anything rash.”

In other words, thought Step, even when they’re stealing from me, I have to stay at this lousy job with these weasels.

“It’s not as if it should surprise you,” said DeAnne. “I mean, if they have you sneaking around behind Dicky’s back, why shouldn’t Dicky be sneaking around behind yours?”

“Well maybe I don’t want to be where anybody sneaks around anybody’s back at all.”

“Exactly,” said DeAnne. “You think I don’t want you to quit? But think about it—the fact that they’re trying to adapt Hacker Snack for the 64 means that it’s probably a very good idea, commercially speaking. And there you’ll be at the Computer Faire, with the heads of every major software company. Maybe it’s time for you to sell the rights to Hacker Snack yourself.”

“You know,” said Step, “you really are good at this.”

“Yes, I am,” she said.

“What I want to know is, how did you learn corporate politics? When you were a secretary in the CDFR Department at BYU?”

“Nope,” she said. “Everything I know about conniving I learned as a counselor in the Relief Society presidency, as we figured out how to get the bishopric to let us do what we needed to do even when they thought we didn’t need to do it.”

“So the plan is, I make nice in San Francisco, and come home with a deal to sell the program myself.”

“And then you get to work first thing Monday morning, before anybody has a chance to tell anybody that you know what they’re up to, and you get a copy of that agreement you signed that excludes Hacker Snack from your deal with Eight Bits.”

“Right. I’ll need that. Because they could just lose it, couldn’t they—and claim that I’d signed the same agreement as everybody else but they lost it but look, here’s the standard agreement and there’s never been another … ”

“Here we are,” said DeAnne. “Have a wonderful flight. Now go. You have four minutes to get to the plane and you still have to get through the security gate!”

“I love you! Love you kids! Tell Stevie he still has a father.”

“Kiss!” cried Betsy.

“There’s no time, honey,” said DeAnne.

But Step flung open the back door, gave both of the kids big loud smacks, then closed the door and ran for the plane. They were just closing the door when he got there, but they let him on. Compressed into his seat with his knees around his chin, he allowed himself to daydream a little about what might happen in San Francisco. All he needed to do was sell the rights to Hacker Snack to somebody who would pay him enough of an advance against earnings that he could afford to quit. He wasn’t sure whether this was the kind of thing he ought to pray about, especially because his mood was so angry and vindictive, but he still had to say it, silently: God, make this go, please. Make this work. Set me free. Send me home.

Although Step had lived in the Bay area during much of his childhood, he had never been inside the Cow Palace before. Now, entering it for the first time, Step saw that it lived up to its name—a great barn of a building filled with rows of display booths like milking stalls. And every booth seemed to be making as much noise as possible. This was survival time, as well as strutting time—the computer business had been booming, but there were rumors that IBM’s new PC was already threatening to take over the whole microcomputer market, driving developers of software and systems built to run with CP/M on the old Z80 chip to adapt or die, and everyone knew that IBM’s half-secret Peanut project was going to blow out the home computers like the Commodore 64, just as surely as the 64 had swept away the Atari. So all that noise had a purpose—to grab reviewers and journalists and computer store buyers by the ears and drag them over to have a look at the new computer or the new joystick or the new game or the new word processor or the new computer dust cover that was going to revolutionize the world and make its developers as rich as Jobs and Wozniak. Or, failing that, at least as rich as Ray Keene.

And the people were there, in droves, eager to be dragged. It was hard getting through the aisles, and the noise of the computers had to be loud, to be heard over the monumental soughing of the crowd. Just when it seemed that human speech could not be made audible in this place, there came a voice, male but fairly high-pitched, with a harsh mid-western edge to it that threatened to shatter the bones of Step’s inner ear:

“What the hell am I supposed to be impressed with about this?”

Step searched—against his will—for the source of this voice from hell. It was a tall, lanky man whose red face attested to the potency of the free cocktails in the SuperCalc suite. Step knew him at once—Neddy Cranes, a one-time Washington columnist who had occupied that broad range of the political spectrum between Benito Mussolini and Genghis Khan, and who now was best known for his long-winded, fascinating, and devastatingly influential monthly column in Code magazine.

“Mine,” said Dicky immediately.

“No,” said Ray Keene quietly.

Step watched how Dicky immediately stepped back to let Ray Keene go and face the tiger. But Dicky’s outward compliance was not from the heart. Step could see how Dicky’s jaw was clenched. How he held his pose of nonchalance a bit too long, with a bit too much effort. He hates Ray Keene, Step realized. And why shouldn’t he? Ray undercuts him at every stage of his work. Ray undercuts everybody at every stage. But Dicky is determined to hang on. Dicky is determined to bear it, without showing Ray the slightest sign of resentment. But Dicky is also going to take it out on somebody.

Me.

Well, I won’t be around when the ax falls, thought Step, unless of course the stupid, illegal attempt to steal Hacker Snack was the ax, in which case it’s a dull blade indeed, since I never signed over the rights. No, the Hacker Snack project was almost certainly done with Ray’s knowledge, so Dicky’s nastiness toward me, when it comes, will take some other form. Some slyer, pettier form that will have no profit in it for anybody except for the nasty satisfaction it would give Dicky Northanger.

“You’re not supposed to be impressed at all,” Ray was saying to Neddy Cranes. “This is only something for the common people, not for computer experts with big expensive systems.”

Ah, Ray was deft indeed, for Cranes could hardly let himself be painted as a computer elitist. His pose was that of the populist, looking out for the little guy. So the bandsaw voice came back again at top volume: “Don’t tell me about common people! I can see you’ve got those little Commodore boxes here—paperweights, that’s all they are, because you can’t do a damn thing with ‘em! Stealing money from the little guy, that’s what Commodore’s doing, stealing money while Kmart drives the getaway car!”

“We’re making sure that when people get this paperweight home, Mr. Cranes, they can run a full-fledged word processor on it, a word processor for which they paid no more than thirty bucks, and if they buy it direct from us, twenty bucks.”

“What, is the manual an additional fee of fifty dollars?” demanded Cranes. “Or do people have to pay a hundred bucks to get the extra module that allows them to print things out?”

“It’s all in the same package,” said Ray. “Not a pretty package, of course. But that’s part of why we can sell it cheap. Try it out.”

Step watched in awe as Ray got Neddy Cranes to set his fingers on the keys of a Commodore in order to write something using Scribe 64.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” said Glass.

“Don’t you want to see what Cranes thinks of Scribe?” asked Step.

“Come on!”

Glass was really agitated. Clearly he had no desire to stick around for Neddy’s verdict. “I’m hungry.”

“I’m not,” said Step, but he followed Glass away from the booth, and when Glass found a line of people waiting for a hot dog that looked like it had been made in the 1950s from the a hooves and noses of diseased warthogs, Step stood in it with him and got a hot dog with mustard and onions.

“If you put this mustard on your car it’d take three paint jobs to cover it up,” said Glass.

“That’s OK. The onions are the secret ingredient in Ex-Lax.”

They ate every bit of the hot dogs.

“Did you check us into our room?” asked Glass.

“What?” asked Step.

“Our room,” said Glass. “When I got here I had to come straight to the booth, so my bag is under the table.”

“We’re sharing a room?” asked Step, horrified.

“Dicky said he told you,” said Glass. “Ray says Eight Bits Inc. isn’t big enough to fly first class or have private hotel rooms.”

“Bet your little butt he’s got a private room.”

“No, his wife’s with him,” said Glass. “Hey, I knew you’d hate sharing, so I made sure they assigned you with me. See, I’m not addicted to cigarettes, so I won’t smoke in the room with you.”

“Thanks,” said Step. But it wasn’t just the issue of smoking—it was the fact that Step loathed the idea of having no privacy. Undressing and dressing in front of someone else was unthinkable. He had hated it in high school even before he was old enough to go through the temple, and now that he wore the underclothes that symbolized the covenants he had made there, Step never put himself in a position to arouse questions or ridicule toward something that he took so seriously. If he had i been warned that he was going to share a room, he would at least have brought pajamas, so he could change in the bathroom and leave Glass thinking that he was simply shy. As it was, Step had no idea what he was going to do. Pay for his own private room? Right—with nothing left on the Visa, that was likely!

“Man, it really bothers you, doesn’t it,” said Glass.

“Yes,” said Step. “Not rooming with you, just sharing a room at all. I mean, they didn’t tell me, not a hint. I don’t share hotel rooms. I can’t believe a company as cheap as this.”

“I’d rather have my thousand-dollar bonus than a private room, I’ll tell you that,” said Glass.

Step looked at him oddly. “A thousand dollars?”

“I wasn’t supposed to tell,” said Glass. “Oops.”

“How often do you get this?” asked Step.

“At the first of the year,” said Glass. “Please, don’t tell anybody else. Dicky told me that people would quit if they realized how big a bonus I was getting.”

“Glass, a thousand dollars is nothing,” said Step. “A thousand dollars is like peeing in your hand.”

Glass looked at him—his turn to be stunned.

“Do you know what my royalties on Hacker Snack were, at its peak, every six months?”

Glass shook his head.

“Forty thousand,” said Step. “And Scribe 64 has sold far more than Hacker Snack ever did.”

Glass muttered something that might have been a prayer, because it was addressed to God, but Step didn’t think the tone was reverent enough for that.

“By the way,” said Step, “I told you what my royalties were in strict confidence, too.”

“Right, no talkee, no tellee, no catchee hellee,” said Glass.

Step hadn’t heard that since the days when Reader’s Digest still published ethnic humor. “Where’d you pick that up?”

“My dad,” said Glass. “Whenever I’m not paying attention, I turn into my dad.”

That hot dog turned out to be supper. Contrary to any reasonable expectations, Ray didn’t allow his people to have a supper break from duty in the booth. He, of course, with Dicky in tow, went to a fancy restaurant dinner for several of Eight Bits Inc.‘s distributors, but that was business, as Ray patiently explained to Step—the eating part of it was merely incidental. And there’d be plenty of time to have supper at the hotel coffee shop after the show closed down for the night.

By the time they were through at the booth they were both too tired to hang out at the coffee shop long enough for a meal, and besides, the meals were not charged to the room—Step would have to pay cash and then turn in his receipts back in Steuben for a reimbursement. It seemed like a churlish limitation, but he was getting a pretty good idea by now of how Ray Keene was able to live so high off the earnings of, really, one best-selling program. Glass didn’t mind skipping supper, either. He had apparently cleaned all the salted nut rolls out of the candy machine at work, so he had plenty to eat in the room. Step decided that he didn’t like salted nut rolls, and said so, and thus could not eat any without shaming himself. It was a way of keeping himself from gaining any more weight than he had to on this trip.

When Glass went into the bathroom, Step got on the phone and called home—collect, since Eight Bits Inc. had arranged for all the phones to be blocked against long-distance calls charged to the room. DeAnne sounded tired—it was well after midnight in North Carolina, but Step knew she wouldn’t sleep, or at least wouldn’t sleep well, until he called. “Sorry I didn’t call before,” he said. “They didn’t exactly give me time.”

“That’s OK,” she said. “I wanted to hear your voice tonight anyway. I miss you.”

“I’ve only been gone twelve hours,” he said. “I work longer days than that half the time.”

“I know,” she said. “Why d’you think I miss you?” Then she seemed to force herself to wake up a little more. “Talk to any other companies today?”

“They have me sharing a room with Glass here.”

“Glass? Oh, the wizard kid.”

“Actually, he’s a combination knight and thief.”

“What?”

“Nothing, he’s just into Dungeons and Dragons and that’s his character, a knight who’s also a thief.”

“Real Round Table material,” she said.

“And he’s—what was it?—chaotic but good.”

“Ah, to be young again,” she said. “Still, even if you can’t talk out loud, you can answer my questions. Did you talk to any other companies about Hacker Snack?”

“Nope,” he said.

“Too busy?”

“Yep,” he said.

“What about tomorrow?”

“Same thing, probably.”

“Oh no!”

“It’ll happen somehow or other,” he said. Though he was not at all sure he could bring it off. “How are things with the kids?”

“Fine,” she said. “Call me tomorrow, OK? And I’m sorry you have to share a room. I know how you hate having a roommate.”

“There’s one exception,” he said.

“Yes, but you hated having me for a roommate at first.”

“Not after you finally stopped leaving shoes out in the middle of every room in the house.”

“Now that you’re away I’ve taken every pair I own and spread them all over, just to celebrate.”

“Ah, the cat’s away.”

“This mouse does all her best playing when you’re here,” she said, in a cuddly voice that made him both horny and resentful at the same time. If she could act sexy after midnight when he was away, why couldn’t she ever bring it off when he was home? He quelled the thought at once.

“How’s the baby?” he asked.

“No kicks since that first one, but he sloshes a little now and then.”

“Come on, you can’t really feel that.”

“Can so.”

“So he’s a swimmer?”

“I can wait awhile for the kicking, to tell the truth. Elizabeth nearly broke my ribs from the inside.”

“Well, get your sleep now,” he said.

“I know, it’s long distance, but I miss you,” she said.

“Love you, Fish Lady,” said Step.

“Love you, Junk Man,” said DeAnne.

“You hang up first,” he said.

“No, you,” she said.

When they were younger, just courting, that game could go on for a long time—a hundred and fifty dollars worth, in fact, the summer that she went to San Francisco to work while he was still getting his master’s at the Y. Wiped out what little he had saved from the fellowship job, writing papers that went out under a full professor’s name with not a single improvement from the old coot and not a speck of credit for Step, since he wasn’t even a doctoral candidate yet. But even with no money, Step cadged twenty bucks from his folks and drove out and picked her up from the friend’s house where she’d been staying in Orinda, and took her to meet his aunt and uncle in San Mateo, and then drove her home. It was on that drive home to Utah that he had proposed to her. And she had said thank you, let me think about it. Four and a half months of thinking—it was two days before New Year’s when she said yes. A miracle they ever got married. But his mom was sure it was a marriage planned by God. “God never said he’d make life easy,” Mom always said.

But they weren’t kids anymore, and the game couldn’t go on. He would have to hang up first, even though he knew that it hurt her feelings a little bit that he was always the one who could hang up first. I wouldn’t be, he told her once, if you’d just hang up for once. But she couldn’t do that either, apparently.

He hung up.

“Fish Lady?” asked Glass.

Step could not believe he would be rude enough to admit so openly that he had been listening.

“Oh,” said Step, “was I talking that loud? I hoped I’d be quiet enough that you wouldn’t be forced to hear what I was saying.”

“Naw,” said Glass, oblivious to the implied rebuke. So much for the Miss Manners method.

“Give me a salted nut roll,” said Step.

“I thought you hated them,” said Glass.

Oh, yes, thought Step. I’m not eating them. “Yeah, I didn’t want to eat it, I wanted to break it into pieces and jam them into every aperture of your body.”

“Kinky,” said Glass.

“If you don’t listen in to my phone calls, I won’t listen in to yours.”

“But that’s hardly fair,” said Glass. “I don’t have anybody to call.”

“Not your mom?”

“Dad would never let her accept the charges.”

“I thought you made more money than God.”

“But God doesn’t own the credit card companies,” said Glass. “No sweat, Mom knows I’m OK. How are the kids?”

“Fine,” said Step.

“Must be tough on the two of you, having three kids and all that.”

“Sometimes,” said Step.

“You need some time together,” said Glass.

“Marriage counseling now?”

“Everybody does.”

“Your mom and dad?”

“Sure. She needs to have a chance to cry over his grave for an hour on Sundays.” Glass grinned at Step’s look of embarrassment. “A joke, son, a joke.”

“Son?”

“OK, then, Dad. I really meant my offer to tend for you so you two can have some time together.”

“I know you did.”

“Yeah, but you blew it off,” said Glass. “I know you did, and I want you to know I mean it. I love kids, I get along great with kids. I never had any younger brothers or sisters, and so I really like to take care of them now. Never had a baby in the house—but don’t get me wrong, I’m real good with babies. I’ve tended a lot. There was this neighbor family I watched their kids all the time when I was a kid myself—not that I’m, like, grown up or anything now. But you know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” said Step. What he was thinking was, Am I going to sleep in my clothes on the top of the bed? Or try to undress real fast and hope Glass doesn’t notice my underwear. That wasn’t too likely—Glass was apparently in a mood to notice everything. And he’d ask, and there’d be a long conversation, and it made Step tired to think about it. Besides, Glass must have known what they were doing with Hacker Snack. He must have provided the other programmers with a copy of his commented disassembly of Step’s Atari code for the program, as a basis for their work. So it wasn’t as if Step could trust him.

“I used to do everything for those kids. They had a little girl in diapers—Lulu, I called her, but I can’t remember why, her name was something like Gladys or something, a stinker name for a little girl, anyway, so I called her Lulu—and she’d be dragging her pants around her ankles, you know how diapers get so heavy when they’re wet, so she’d be running around in just her shirt and those wet diapers mopping every speck of dust off the floor.”

“You’re making me gag here,” said Step. “Urine everywhere, my favorite nighty-night vision.”

“Come on, little girls don’t wet their panties with urine, they wet it with angel rain.”

“Now I will puke,” said Step.

Glass laughed in delight. “I thought that was funny, too, but that’s what Mrs. Greenwood said, angel rain, I swear it.”

“I got to tell you, Glass, I need my sleep. It’s almost one Eastern time.”

“But you aren’t even undressed,” said Glass, “and we don’t have to be over at the show till nine, so we’ve got plenty of time.”

“I have a mild sleep disorder,” said Step, making it up as he went along but trying to come somewhere near the truth. “I have a hard time getting to sleep, which means I have to start calming down and stuff fairly early in order to get to sleep fairly late.”

“And then, just as you’re dozing off, you get up and change your clothes.”

This was all too complicated and too infuriating. Step could handle being involved with people and paying attention to them and being polite and all for hours and hours at a stretch, but then he needed time to himself, time where nobody was making demands on him, and right at this moment he wanted Glass to get up and go to the window and jump out and die. Nothing personal, Step just wanted to be alone.

“Glass, is everything I do or don’t do so fascinating to you?”

“I was just telling you why I’d be a good babysitter for your kids.”

“I’m sure you would.”

“I can change the diapers, that’s what I was telling you. Wipe their little bottomses. I know that’s not a man’s job, but I can do it anyway.

“It’s a man’s job all right,” said Step, surrendering to Glass’s conversation. “I pity any man who doesn’t have the sense to help with the diaper changing. That’s how you bond with the baby—that’s how you come to love the kid, for pete’s sake—doing intimate personal service like that, doing something disgusting but necessary, and the kid knows it. I mean, a man can’t nurse the baby, can he? He needs some point of contact.”

“That’s a pretty good sermon.”

“Yeah, I gave the same speech to my older brother and he said, What, is she turning you gay or something?”

Glass hooted and laughed and slapped his thigh. Too much reaction, too much laughter, not at all appropriate. What’s going on here, wondered Step. Why is he so keyed up?

“That’s just it,” said Glass. “The kid loves you for it, you’re doing a service, cleaning up her little privates for her, she loves it.”

Now it really did sound disgusting. Not the idea, but the way he said it, the words, the coy way he said “her little privates.” This was making Step faintly ill. The boy simply didn’t know how to talk about this, that was all. In his eagerness to be of service, he didn’t realize that this wasn’t exactly the way a father wanted to hear a would-be babysitter talking about changing his little girl’s diapers.

“I even gave her a bath once,” said Glass.

“Mm?”

“Lulu. Gladys. You know. She got herself all covered with honey. Not that I wasn’t watching her, you know, but I’d had to do something with the boys, I can’t remember what, and she just got into the honey, it was out on the table, and she poured it all over in her hair, and I couldn’t think of anything to do except take off her little doll-clothes and splash her into the tub. And there she was in the tub and I washed her hair and everything and then she gives me the washcloth and she says, ‘Better wash down there, Rolly’ Like her mom must have taught her you always wash your little privates.”

In that moment Step realized that never, never would Glass be left alone with any of his children, even for a moment, and most especially not Betsy. No, if Step had his way Glass would never even see Betsy, with her beautiful blond hair and her sweet smile and her perfect, perfect innocence.

“Rolly,” said Step quietly. “Let’s drop the subject, OK?”

“Sure,” said Glass. “I didn’t mean anything by it, you know. Just that I’m willing to tend, and I know how to take care of little kids, don’t you see.”

“Right, Glass. Look, here’s five bucks, go to the coffee shop and have something on me so I can get to sleep.”

Step was reaching for his wallet.

“Why not just slap my face?” said Glass.

“What do you mean?”

“Here’s five dollars,” said Glass. “Like I’m some beggar who’s been panhandling you on the street or something. I’ve got money, you know.”

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” said Step. “But I told you, I need to sleep. I’m desperate to sleep. This is why I didn’t want to share a room. I have to have time to myself, time alone, deeply and completely alone, or I can’t sleep.”

“Must be great for your wife,” said Glass nastily.

“Don’t be my enemy over this,” said Step. “I make a lousy roommate, I’m a complete son-of-a-bitch, I know it. But I’m begging you, go down to the coffee shop or go smoke in the lounge or something but please, please, let me be alone here for thirty minutes, that’s all I ask.”

“Right,” said Glass.

“Don’t be mad at me, I didn’t mean any offense, I’m just tired.”

“Right,” said Glass. He walked to the door. Then he stopped and turned to face Step, waiting, obviously ready to say something.

“What,” said Step.

“Don’t ever call me Rolly” said Glass.

“What? I don’t call you Rolly, I call you Glass.”

“You called me Rolly a minute ago. Nobody calls me Rolly.”

“Did I? Why would I call you Rolly? I didn’t even know that was your nickname.”

“It’s not my nickname. It’s my father’s goddam nickname.”

Then Step remembered. “You used the name yourself. You said that’s what the little girl called you. I must have used the name because you said it, that’s all.”

“I did?”

Step remembered now exactly the sentence in which Glass had used the name Rolly. Better wash down there, Rolly. He was not going to repeat it. “Why else would I have called you that?”

“Nobody ever called me Rolly,” said Glass, sounding very annoyed. “My nickname as a kid was Bubba. Rolly is my dad and nobody calls me that, ever.”

“I never have before,” said Step, “and I never will again. Sorry I’ve been so tense, I told you I’m not good at sharing a room. But better you than anybody else, right?”

Glass grinned. “Like, better to eat the cockroach than the scorpions, right?”

“Right,” said Step.

Glass was gone.

Cockroach. That was exactly right. Being with Glass now was like eating a cockroach. Better wash down there, Rolly.

Step got up and took his clothes off, all his clothes, carefully folding away his underwear and putting it back in his suitcase, under the clean clothes. And then, standing there naked, he couldn’t bear the idea of getting into his sheets. Why? He couldn’t. They were so clean. He had to wash first.

So he got in the shower and soaped himself twice and then he felt clean enough to go to bed. Glass was still gone, and an hour later when Step looked at the clock Glass was still gone, and then Step must have fallen asleep because he never heard Glass come in at all. In the morning Glass was in the shower when Step woke up, and his sheets were open and swirled and wrinkled on the bed, so he must have come in sometime during the night. And when he came out of the bathroom Glass was back to his old cheerful self and Step could almost, almost put out of his mind the things that Glass had talked about last night.

In the morning everybody was trapped at the booth, just as they had been the day before. It had never occurred to Step that Ray would bring his people out to San Francisco and then never let them go see the rest of the show, but then a lot of things about Ray Keene had never occurred to Step until too late. It looked like the only chance he’d have to scout around would be at lunchtime, and that would be only a half hour. And he’d have the half hour only if he didn’t eat, since the lines at the snack counters were even longer than the lines at the women’s restrooms. It almost wasn’t worth trying to meet anybody, since it would take that long just to spot where the software companies were. And then he’d have to find one that knew his name and thought Hacker Snack was hot stuff, which might take a lot of looking, since that game was last year’s news. No, two years ago, and it was all played out. No point, none at all, Step was permanently trapped in Eight Bits Inc., a chicken outfit where he’d be surrounded by sneaks and cheats and thieves and skinflints and guys who dreamed of washing little girls.

He felt sick. He toyed with the idea of pretending to be really sick in order to get out of the booth, but then there’d be hell to pay if he were caught visiting around at other booths when he was supposed to be sick in his room. Besides, just because they were liars didn’t mean he had to be. At least, no more than he already was, skulking around running the creative end of Eight Bits Inc. while pretending to Dicky that he still ran it.

In fact, that was one of the hardest things about working the booth. People would come up and want to talk about the games, especially the demos, and Step would show them stuff and tell them about features to come, and then he’d realize that Dicky was listening—Dicky always seemed to be listening, drifting silently from place to place within the booth like a ghost that never quite touched the earth—and that Step was talking about features in the games that only he and the programmers knew were going to be there, features that had never been in any version that Dicky had seen. And once he thought of a rule that a game ought to have and was talking about it to a buyer from Service Merchandise, even though nobody at Eight Bits Inc. had ever thought of having the game work that way, which would have been fine because Step pretty much got his way on these things, except that there was Dicky, staring off into space, maybe listening to him or maybe to somebody else or maybe to nobody at all. The Spy, thought Step. He recalled the old Authors cards from his childhood, the picture on the James Fenimore Cooper cards, the hatchet-faced weaselly picture that always summed up the essence of spy-ness in Step’s mind. From now on Dicky would replace Cooper as Step’s image of a spy. Dicky stood there looking lost in thought, his eyes heavy-lidded, his thick sensuous lips making vague movements, pursing and unpursing, as if he were drinking from an imaginary straw or kissing an imaginary aunt.

I’ve got to get out of here, thought Step. Not just out of this booth, but out of Eight Bits Inc.

He finished with the buyer from Service Merchandise, who didn’t buy games anyway, he just wanted to know about them so he’d know which machines would have the hot software, and then Step walked straight to Dicky and planted himself in front of him, not sure until he started to speak what it was he planned to say.

“I’ve got to get out of the booth, Dicky,” he said.

“Oh? We’re all here to work this booth, Step.” Dicky looked detached, uninterested. This subject was not even going to be an argument, because Dicky would never bend.

Step raised his voice a notch, to make sure the others in the booth heard him. “I have to see the other packages, Dicky I have to see what the competition is doing.”

“We don’t do packaging,” said Dicky. “That is our packaging. And besides, that’s the art department, not the manuals.”

“I have to see the level of documentation,” said Step. “I have to see the style. I have to see how much personality they’re putting into their packages.”

“If you want to try something new with our manuals, write it up and bring it to me and Ray and I will decide whether you can do it.”

Step raised his voice yet another notch. “So what you’re telling me is that Eight Bits Inc. went to the expense of flying me out to San Francisco and now you won’t let me go around and see what ideas I can come up with to help us make our documentation keep up with the competition?”

“Nobody opens the packages to see what the documentation is like when they’re deciding whether to buy a game,” said Dicky “The documentation is irrelevant to competitiveness. And documentation is all you are responsible for.”

“Word of mouth is what sells our products,” said Step, “and word of mouth comes from the whole package. If our manuals are just right, then that’s part of what the customers tell their friends about.”

“The answer is no,” said Dicky. “You came to work, not play, and that’s final.”

Step should have given it up long ago, if he cared about antagonizing Dicky. But he did not care, he intended to go on and on until-until what? Until he was fired? “I’m not proposing to play, Dicky, I’m proposing to work—effectively. Every other software house here is sending their people around to look at the competition, and we sit here locked in this booth, learning nothing. It’s a recipe for turning Eight Bits Inc. into a dinosaur preserve.”

Finally, finally Ray Keene walked over and stood silently with them for a moment, his eyes focused somewhere between them, at chest level. Then he looked Step in the eye and said, “Go ahead.”

Dicky showed no sign of minding that he had just been contradicted after taking a stand.

“How long?” asked Step.

“A couple of hours,” said Ray. “And then we’ll send everybody else out, one at a time.” He looked at Dicky now. “New policy.”

Dicky nodded. “Excellent idea.”

Step turned to Dicky, and keeping all hint of triumph out of his voice, said, “I’ll take my lunch during the time I’m gone, so I’ll be back at one-thirty.”

Dicky nodded graciously. Step could see his jaw clenching. I’d better find something, thought Step. I’d better meet somebody and make a connection because my days at Eight Bits Inc. are numbered now, and whatever days I have left are not going to be fun, because I have faced up to Dicky and won and he doesn’t like being humbled, he’s not good at that. He knows enough to suck up to Ray about it, but he’ll make me pay.

Still, it felt sweet to have joined battle with Dicky and carried the field. And as he left the booth, Glass and a couple of the marketing guys glanced over him and surreptitiously pantomimed applause.

As he pressed through the crowds, passing booth after booth, he began to realize the problem he was going to face. He didn’t know anybody. He had worked solo, had never been to one of these conventions, though of course he had heard all about them—had read about them in Neddy Cranes’s column, for one thing. He couldn’t just walk up to a booth and ask who the president of the company was, and if he was there, and could he speak to him. But maybe he’d have to, whether he thought he could do it or not. Besides, he wasn’t asking for a job, he needed to talk about licensing an adaptation of Hacker Snack for another machine. Who do you talk to about that? Without telling every flunky manning the booth, so that word spread that Step Fletcher was out trying to make a deal?

So there he stood at the Agamemnon booth, looking at their games—so smooth, they were a great outfit, the best—when suddenly that squealing-balloon voice came out of nowhere. “The PC may be the worst computer ever foisted on the American public that wasn’t made by Commodore,” Neddy Cranes was saying, “but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be the new standard. Sixteen bits is sixteen bits, and now that programmers can design software for more than 64K of RAM at a time, they’re going to be able to pile features onto their software and it’s going to kill CP/M and all these little so-called home machines, too. Stick with Commodore and Atari and you’ll go down with them, mark my words!”

Step had to listen. They had an IBM PC at Eight Bits Inc., and Ray Keene was still waiting to decide whether or not they were going to port their software over to it. Step was pretty sure they would not, because Glass hated the PC so much. Step himself hated the PC, with its screwy display memory and pathetic four-color graphics when you weren’t stuck with monochrome. It was like taking every annoying aspect of the Apple II, making it all a little more complicated and pathetic, and then selling it for five times as much. But Neddy Cranes wasn’t a fool, even if he sounded like an obnoxious blowhard. And Cranes wasn’t in anybody’s pocket. He didn’t care about making enemies. He wasn’t a flack for IBM. If he was saying IBM was the future, then probably IBM was the future, sad as that might be.

Whoever it was that Cranes was talking to, they weren’t arguing with him. Probably they were trying to convince him that they were just as visionary as he was and they agreed with him completely and now look at this great software, we’ll send it to you, give it a try, you’ll see how great it is. And since it was Agamemnon, it probably really was great.

“Lord in heaven above, it’s Step Fletcher himself!”

The blast of Neddy Cranes’s voice at such close range almost made Step cringe, but he managed to control himself, because that was hardly the way you responded when Neddy Cranes recognized you right in front of the Agamemnon booth.

“Hi,” said Step.

Cranes turned to some guy inside the Agamemnon booth. “What you need is to put somebody like Step Fletcher here onto software for the PC. Get him to adapt that game of his—Hacker Snack—great game, played it for longer than I’ll ever admit—get that game of his onto the PC, and it’ll look shitty because everything looks shitty on the PC, but those poor bastards who have to use that machine every day are gonna be so grateful to have something on there that’s actually not hellish to use that they’ll make a line five miles long just to lick your butt.”

Step wondered if his own forays into crudeness made DeAnne feel as uncomfortable as Cranes’s even cruder talk was making him feel. Not for the first time he resolved to stop tormenting her by using language that Mormons weren’t supposed to use.

The guy from Agamemnon finally got a word in. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Fletcher.”

“Step,” said Step.

“Oh, haven’t you met each other?” said Cranes.

“I actually haven’t met anybody,” said Step. “Not even you, Mr. Cranes.”

Cranes threw his head back and laughed—a sound that attracted attention like the sudden cawing of a crow. Step could feel the general movement of the surrounding crowd as they turned to look, for a moment, to find the source of that incredible sound. And for that moment, inside the circle of space immediately surrounding Cranes, Step felt how all that attention had a kind of energy in it. It made Step feel shy, burdened by it, but Cranes seemed to draw strength from it. “Well it’s nice to meet you, Step! I spent so much time with your goddam game that I felt like you were my ugly brother-in-law!” And to Step’s astonishment, Cranes threw an arm around him and hugged him. It was an impossible moment—what was Step supposed to do, hug him back?

He didn’t have to do anything. Cranes still gripped him around the shoulders as he turned back to the guy from Agamemnon. Step read the name tag. It was Dan Arkasian. Arkasian himself, Agamemnon’s founder and president. And a nice guy, it seemed, handling this invasion from Neddy Cranes with grace and patience. This was exactly the man he wanted to meet, the man who could get his games published with the best distribution in America, in the best packaging, and it had to be with Neddy Cranes hugging him.

As Cranes rattled on, Arkasian was looking Step in the eye—no, looking him over—and all Step could do was smile wanly.

“You’ve hitched yourself to all these toy computers with no more than 48K of usable RAM, and it’s gonna kill you,” said Cranes. “But you get somebody like Step Fletcher to design you some real software—I mean, this guy isn’t just a computer nerd, he’s got a Ph.D. in history! He knows something!”

Step couldn’t believe that Cranes knew that about him. And then he remembered—Eight Bits Inc. had put out a press release about hiring him, and that included the fact that he had just got his doctorate. Step had assumed that nobody read that stuff.

“I’ll bet that standing right here, Step has more ideas about what you can do with the PC than just about anybody here. Come on, Fletcher, tell him one, he needs a new idea, all that Arkasian has going for him is that his product is slick, he needs a new idea!”

This was awful, this was impossible. He had to come up with something or he’d look like a fool. Something that would work with the pathetic graphics of the IBM PC. Something that needed more RAM. And all that popped into his mind was that wonderful old atlas he had spent two days practically memorizing at the Salt Lake City library, the one that had maps showing the electoral and popular votes in every U.S. election since 1788.

“An atlas,” said Step.

“We’ve thought of that,” said Arkasian. “They can buy the book for less than the software would cost, and we can’t match the graphics.”

“No, you do what only the computer can do with it. Like … elections. Next year Reagan’s up for reelection and what with the recession it might be a tight race.”

“Recession’s over,” scoffed Cranes. “Reagan’s in with a landslide.”

The recession isn’t over for me, thought Step bitterly. But what he said was, “Why not an atlas that shows every election since 1788, the states colored in by party? You can animate it by screen flipping, move through Democratic Party electoral votes through history, backward or forward, or flip through all the third-party candidacies that actually got electoral votes. People love maps, they love maps that change. The computer can do it, and the book can’t.”

Arkasian shrugged and nodded. “OK, that’s something.”

“And Congress,” said Step, warming to it. “A map showing every congressional district in every state. You can do a closeup on the state and show how the districts have changed with every census, and what party held the district. Animate an entire state’s history and watch it change over time. Same thing with population, county by county.”

“You’d need a hard disk for all that information,” said Arkasian.

“Not if you use vectors and fills. Like you said, if they want a road atlas they’ll buy the triple-A and put it in the car. So we don’t have to get the borders exactly right, we can store everything as coordinates and numbers and draw it in realtime.”

“But who’d buy it?” asked Arkasian.

“Every parent who wants his kids to succeed in school. Everybody who’s interested in politics during an election year. And you could even sell it as a tool for business planners—you include projected population growth, maybe include a media-markets map with all the TV stations marked.”

Arkasian laughed. “This is a program that’ll need 512K just to run.”

“And so what about that!” demanded Cranes. “I tell you that in five years they won’t dare offer a PC for sale that doesn’t have a megabyte of RAM in it!”

“Neddy, you’re off your rocker and you know it,” said Arkasian.

“I’m off my rocker but that doesn’t mean I’m not right! You’ll see! And when your company is in receivership because you kept on doing games for the Commodore 64 and ignored the PC, you’ll remember that I told you back in 1983!”

Finally Cranes let go of Step and moved on, not even saying good-bye. The man gave off self-importance in great crashing waves, and Step had been caught in the undertow. He watched Cranes go for a moment, then turned back to Arkasian and smiled ruefully, offering his hand. “It was nice to meet you, Mr. Arkasian.”

“My pleasure,” said Arkasian. “Why do I feel like I’m just coming up for air?”

Step laughed. “He’s got a lot of … presence.”

“I actually liked your idea for that atlas program,” said Arkasian.

“Oh, really?”

“You were winging it, weren’t you?”

Step shrugged. “He kind of put me on the spot.”

“That’s what Neddy does. But you performed, Mr. Fletcher.”

“Please call me Step, Mr. Arkasian.”

“Step. Everybody calls me Arkasian. Without the mister. Of course, even if Neddy’s right, it’ll still be a couple of years before it’ll be practical to do that atlas program.”

“Yeah, well, it would actually take that long just to do the research for it, if you’re going to do it right.”

“That was really something, you know,” said Arkasian. “Coming up with all that right out of your head, out of the air, complete with the marketing strategy. No wonder Eight Bits Inc. hired you.”

And there it was. Arkasian thought that Eight Bits Inc. owned him, and if Step just said outright, I want to quit them and I’m looking for something better, he’d be tagged in Arkasian’s eyes as disloyal. Any offer that was going to be worthwhile had to come from Arkasian, without Step asking.

“They just have me writing manuals,” said Step.

“Are you kidding?” asked Arkasian.

“I’m not there as a programmer.”

“What were they thinking of?”

“Internal politics, I think,” said Step. “Doesn’t matter, I enjoy the work.”

“So you’re through with programming?”

Here was the moment.

“I still have the rights to Hacker Snack,” said Step. “And I can write programs on any machine that Eight Bits Inc. isn’t developing for.”

“They aren’t developing for the PC?”

“Ray hasn’t decided.”

“Come here,” said Arkasian. He beckoned Step to come around inside the Agamemnon booth.

Unlike the Eight Bits Inc. display, the Agamemnon area—which was twice as large to begin with, an end-of-the-row double—had something like a private room in it, a three-sided vertical display unit with a lockable door. Arkasian led him inside, into a small roofless space cluttered with empty boxes and packing materials. Arkasian closed the door behind them, and then said, firmly, “Ray Keene is the worst lying son-of-a-bitch in this business.’

Now was not the time for Step to badmouth his boss, not to someone who might later want to be able to rely on Step’s loyalty. “I’ve only been at Eight Bits Inc. since the first of March, and I don’t see much of Ray.”

“Why didn’t you talk to me before you went to work as a manual writer for Ray Keene?”

“I sent my resume to Agamemnon, but I got a form letter back saying you weren’t hiring.”

“Damn,” said Arkasian cheerfully. “We’re so big now that we’ve got a personnel director. Of course we weren’t hiring, but we would have hired you.”

This was the chance Step had been hoping for—it would never get better than this. Might as well ask for the moon. “I don’t want to work for anybody, Arkasian. Not even Agamemnon. If I leave Eight Bits Inc., it’ll be because I have a development deal with somebody, and I can work on my own, at home, with an advance large enough to live on while I write code. And I have a one-year noncompetition clause with Eight Bits Inc. Hacker Snack is excluded, though, and also programs for machines that Eight Bits isn’t developing for.”

“And how much would you need?”

“Depends on how long the program would take to develop,” said Step. “That atlas would take a long time.”

“What about Hacker Snack for the 64?”

“Two months,” said Step.

“And what about Hacker Snack for the PC?”

“I don’t know 8088 machine code.”

“So include the learning curve.”

“Six months at the outside,” said Step. “But it won’t look as good in IBM’s lousy three-color graphic screen.”

“I want it monochrome first, anyway.”

“Why not do both versions and put them in the same package? That way if they upgrade their machine, they already have the game.”

“Why not sell it to them twice?”

“Because they’ll feel robbed,” said Step, “and if they’re thinking about upgrading you don’t want them to put off buying Hacker Snack until after they’ve decided about the upgrade. Heck, they might upgrade just because they already own the color version of the game.”

“Let me think about this,” said Arkasian. “I can tell you right now, I want Hacker Snack for the 64. But different. Upgraded. So we can say, Better than the Atari version. New improved, all that bullshit.”

“I’ll think of stuff,” said Step.

“We haven’t decided about the PC, either. Nor would I have any idea how much to advance you on PC projects, because we still don’t know what the entertainment software market is going to be like on what is essentially a business machine.”

“A crippled business machine.”

“With an inflated, monopolistic price,” said Arkasian. “I don’t like IBM either. But I think Neddy’s right. I think IBM will make the PC go. I think it’ll be ten times the CP/M market, and I think people will want color on it. And do you know why I think they’ll want color on it?”

“So they can play games,” said Step.

“Dead right.”

Step laughed. “That’s the only reason computers exist, isn’t it? To play games.”

“No joke,” said Arkasian. “And the more game-like the serious software is, the better it’ll sell. Step Fletcher, I’ll give you a development deal on Hacker Snack for the 64, just to start with. But it won’t be enough money for you to quit your job.”

“I understand.”

“But if Ray Keene is as cheap and stupid a son-of-a-bitch as I think he is, he’s going to decide not to develop for the PC. If that happens, you tell me, and we’ll do a deal for the PC. A serious deal, maybe even including that atlas idea. You do want to do that, don’t you? I mean, I know you were just making it up as you went along, and maybe—”

“I’d give my teeth to do it.”

“So tell me when Ray Keene decides.”

Step took a deep breath. “I can’t do that,” he said.

“What?”

“Mr. Arkasian, I work for Eight Bits Inc. I can’t tell a competitor things that I find out about Ray Keene’s plans.”

Arkasian looked at him, perplexed. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“The second I quit,” said Step, “then I will be able to tell you whether my noncompetition agreement will allow me to develop for the PC or not, and then you can conclude what you like. But until I quit, I can’t tell you what Ray decides about anything. I shouldn’t even have told you that he hasn’t decided yet, and I feel bad enough about that, I’m not going to make it worse.”

“Well, then, if he decides not to go for the PC, quit your job and call me.”

“I can’t quit my job unless I already know I’ve got something lined up.” What Step couldn’t say was, There’s a chance that you’re only offering me work in order to get a spy inside Eight Bits Inc., and I won’t do that. “I’ve got three kids and a fourth due in July.”

Step almost held his breath, waiting to see what Arkasian would say.

“OK,” said Arkasian. “I’ll send you a contract for Hacker Snack for the 64. There’ll be an option clause in it. Hacker Snack for the PC, and a development deal for the PC. If I decide, as I probably will, to take Agamemnon into PC development, then I’ll exercise the option on Hacker Snack for the PC. At that point, you come to the conclusion that your noncompetition agreement with Eight Bits Inc. would allow you to develop for the PC, then you can exercise the option on the PC development deal. And I’ll make sure the bucks are big enough. What do you make now?”

“Thirty thousand a year, only that isn’t enough to live on.”

“I know how it is,” said Arkasian. “A two-year deal, a hundred thousand dollars. You can’t exercise your option unless I’ve already exercised mine, for the PC version of Hacker Snack, but after that, it’s up to you.”

“Up to Ray Keene, you mean.”

“I’m betting on Ray Keene making the wrong move. Maybe only for six months before he changes his mind back, but if everything works out, your work is going to be coming out with the Agamemnon logo on it.”

Step cocked his head. “You aren’t just using me to stick it to Ray Keene, are you?”

“I don’t invest money to stick it to anybody,” said Arkasian. “I invest money where I think I’m going to make a shitload more.” Then he grinned. “But if it also makes Ray Keene piss green, so much the better.”

“You need my address,” said Step.

“Give me your card.”

“I don’t have a card. I just moved and, well, I don’t have a card.”

“Write it on the back of mine. And keep one of these for yourself.” Step pocketed one card, put the Chinqua Penn address and phone number on the back of the other, and returned it to Arkasian. Arkasian took it, put it in his pocket, and held out his hand. Step took it. Arkasian’s grip was large and firm and it made Step feel … safe. Like he was in good hands now.

Arkasian didn’t let go of his hand. “What I’ve said to you about my plans … ” he said.

“I don’t spy for anybody,” said Step. “And Ray Keene knows better than to ask me to.” Though of course Ray could ask him to sneak around and run the programming behind Dicky’s back, and Step would do that. I pretend to be so clean, but I’m really not.

That was what Step thought as he left the Agamemnon booth. I’m only somewhat clean. I only have some standards that won’t bend. And if Arkasian had offered me enough money maybe I would have folded on all of them. He probably thinks I’m a good man who can be trusted, but I know that I can only be trusted until I think that being trustworthy won’t get me what I want. Even as it is, I’m a sneak and a cheat, coming here to talk to one of Eight Bits Inc.‘s most powerful competitors when it was Eight Bits that paid for me to come to this convention in the first place. I tricked them into paying for me to fly to a job interview with a rival. I’m even getting paid for the time that I spent here.

By rights I should share the idea for the atlas with Eight Bits Inc. My employment agreement says so, that any ideas I come up with while I work for them belong to them.

Then he thought: That’s easy. All I have to do is propose the atlas to Dicky, and make him think that I really want to do it. He’ll shoot it down. He’ll kill it, just to spite me. If I get him to do it in writing, I’m home free. I’ll have proof that I offered it to them and that clears me.

Sneaky. I’m so sneaky.

That night, Glass tried to get him to join him and the marketing guys and some young programmers at Apple who were working on software for the Lisa. They were going to drink their way through San Francisco, and Step begged off. “But we need a designated driver,” said Glass.

“Take a cab,” said Step.

“Oh, yeah,” said Glass. “I forgot. This is a real city. Cabs.”

So Step had the hotel room to himself when he called DeAnne and told her everything that had happened with Neddy Cranes and Dan Arkasian. He loved hearing the relief, the excitement in her voice. “It’s not a sure thing,” he said. “But the money for the 64 adaptation is.”

Then she thought of something that could go wrong. DeAnne was good at thinking of things that could go wrong. “Only if you can get Eight Bits Inc. to stop working on their own 64 adaptation.”

“I’ll just tell them to stop.”

“Right, you’ll walk in and say, I sold it to Agamemnon.”

“No, I’ll just tell them that I won’t sell it to them.”

“And they’ll ask why, since you work for them, and especially because they’ve got so much invested in it now.”

“Not my fault.”

“Not your fault, but then they fire you anyway because you’re not a team player.”

Step sighed. “This is all very complicated.”

“It’s all a matter of timing, isn’t it,” said DeAnne. “Because what if things come to a head about the 64 adaptation before we actually get a contract from Agamemnon, and then you tell Eight Bits Inc. they can’t do it and they fire you and then you don’t get the contract from Agamemnon after all.”

“But what if the contract comes first and the 64 adaptation doesn’t come to a head until after Ray decides not to develop for the PC and after Arkasian decides that he will develop for the PC.”

“Everything depends on other people,” said DeAnne.

“Everything always depends on other people,” said Step. “And maybe the Lord is looking out for us a little. Maybe God has a plan.”

“Well, if he planned for you to work for Agamemnon, why didn’t he get us to move to California instead of this side trip to Steuben? Or even leave us where we were? We were happy in Indiana. Stevie wasn’t playing with imaginary friends there.”

That was something new. “Imaginary friends?”

“I realized it today. I mean, it’s been going on for weeks. Almost since we moved here. He comes home from school so morose, I don’t think he has any friends there, I mean I’ve asked him who he plays with at school and he says, Nobody, but I didn’t worry because then every now and then he says, Jack and I did this, or Scotty and I did that. So I thought, he does have friends, he just wants me to feel sorry for him.”

“Heck, I didn’t even know he talked at all.”

“He’s not a catatonic or anything, you know. Just depressed.”

“Oh, well, that’s OK.”

“On Saturdays I’ve been spending time with you, doing the shopping we had to do, all the work, all the unpacking, you know? But this Saturday you were gone, and I was lonely, and so I just sat on the patio for a while reading that Anne Tyler book you got me while the kids played. Robbie and Elizabeth were playing two-man tag or something, anyway they were chasing each other everywhere, but Stevie just sort of sat there on the lawn, and then he wandered around, touching the fence, touching the wall of the house, stuff like that. It worried me. He used to play with the younger kids, and here he is still sulking or something and he doesn’t play with them, even though Robbie kept coming up to him and saying, Play with us. Anyway, then I went inside and did the laundry and stuff, but I kept checking on the kids because that’s what I do—”

“Madame Conscientious.”

“That’s me, Junk Man. But what I’m saying is, I know Stevie never left the back yard and I know that no other kids were there. But then at supper I asked him, What were you playing there in the back yard today? And he says, Jack and me were searching for buried treasure. And I say, You mean at school? Because that’s where I thought Jack was. And he says, Jack doesn’t go to school.”

“Are you sure he understood what you were asking?”

“Yes. I mean, I asked him right then, Well when did you search for buried treasure with him? and he says, Today, and I say, Where? and he says, In the back yard mostly”

“Isn’t he a little old for an imaginary friend?”

“Yes, Step, of course he is. Way too old. It worries me.”

“Maybe he’s just pretending that his friends from school are part of his imaginary game at home. You know, including them even though they aren’t there.”

“I’m not making this up, Step. He actually said that Jack doesn’t go to school. Doesn’t that sound like an imaginary friend?”

“I forgot that you said that he said that. I haven’t had a chance to think about this the way you have.”

“Step, he doesn’t have any friends at school, apparently, and at home he’s not playing with his brother and sister, he’s playing with imaginary friends—even when the kids are right there, when I’m right there. Tonight I tried to get the kids to play Life with me, you know Stevie’s always liked that game, but he wouldn’t play. I made him play, but he wouldn’t move his car or handle his money, I ended up spinning for him even, like he was just a dummy player, and he just sat there staring off into space.”

“Is he still punishing us for making him move and go to a new school?”

“What else can I think?” asked DeAnne.

“Things have to work out,” said Step. “They have to work out so I can come home, work at home. So we can get life back the way it’s supposed to be. I feel so helpless, so cut off, my boy is having these problems, he’s so angry at us, and I can’t do a thing, I’m trapped. How do other men do it? Going to work all the time? And then these housewives want to go to work just like the men, so they can be cut off from their families, too, when what should happen is all the men coming home, to put the family back together.”

“I know, Step. At least that’s how we need it to be.”

“So pray for us tonight,” said Step. “Pray for this contract to come through. For all the timing to be right.”

“I don’t know if I should be praying for things like that,” said DeAnne. “It’s so selfish.”

“Listen,” said Step, “even Christ expressed a personal preference before he said, Thy will be done.”

“Yeah, but then look what happened to him!”

He hooted with laughter. “I can’t believe you said that.”

“I didn’t mean it to be so—sacrilegious.”

“It wasn’t, Fish Lady, it wasn’t.”

“Things will work out,” she said.

“I love you,” he answered.

“I’ll pick you up at the airport tomorrow,” she said.

“We’re all coming in on the same flight, “he said. “So I can just hitch a ride home with one of the ones who parked there.”

“I want to meet you at the airport, Junk Man. The kids want to meet you.”

How could he tell her—he didn’t want his children there when Glass got off the plane. He didn’t want anybody from Eight Bits Inc. to see his family. The kids were still pure, still untouched by this slimy company, and he just didn’t want them to be defiled by having Ray Keene tousle Robbie’s hair or Dicky Northanger chuck Stevie under the chin or Glass look at Betsy.

“Please,” he said. “Keep the kids home. Let me come home to them. To you. Please.”

“Whatever you say, Junk Man.” But he could tell she was hurt.

“Please understand,” he said.

“Fine, it’s fine,” she said, though it was clearly not fine. “I love you.”

“I love you more,” he said. Another ritual. “Not a chance,” she said. The ritual answer. “Hang up first,” he said. She did.

6: Inspiration

This is the career DeAnne found for herself: In high school she realized that the only way a decent woman with no skills could make money was as a burger flipper or a waitress. So she set about getting a skill. When she entered college, she could type a hundred words a minute. She earned enough money as a part-time secretary in the Child Development and Family Relations Department to pay for the materials to make her own clothes and the gas she used driving the old red Volkswagen to the Y and back. She mastered the mag-card electronic typewriter, got a raise, and saved enough to pay for a semester in Paris.

Her choice of major was less practical. She loved art and music and literature, and so she majored in humanities, even though she knew that there was no career on earth for which a humanities degree was regarded as a serious qualification. But that didn’t matter. In the back of her mind she knew that motherhood was going to be her career, as it had been for her own mother. She studied humanities so she could create a home filled with art and wisdom for her children. If she ever needed a job, she could walk into any office, type a flawless 300-word page in three minutes or less, and be hired on the spot.

It turned out, though, that motherhood wasn’t quite the career she had hoped it would be. For one thing, motherhood was always preceded by months of misery. If it hadn’t been for Bendectin, which barely controlled her perpetual nausea during the first four months of each pregnancy, she would have vomited her way into the hospital with every child, and the nausea never really went away until the baby was born.

More important, though, was the fact that each newborn was a complete barbarian. She and Step put prints of great art on the walls and played records of great music of every kind, but that was background—her main activity was chasing, feeding, wiping, washing, changing, scolding, comforting, and containing her impatience with the little vandals. There were wonderful moments, of course, but they were few and far between, and while DeAnne loved her children and took pride in caring for them, she could never find any measurable accomplishment in her life. When Step finished working he wanted peace and solitude; she was dying to have an adult to talk to. And when Step helped her with housework or tending the kids, the fact that he was perfectly competent at everything told her that nothing she did could only be done by her—except nursing the newest baby, and baboons could do that.

Motherhood was not a career. It was life. A good life, one she had no intention of giving up, but it was not complete enough for her. She needed to do something that reminded her that she was human.

She had been saying this to her good friend Lorry Tisch, who managed the educational TV station in Salt Lake City, when Lorry started laughing at her. “You have a career, dimwit! Every bit as fulfilling as mine!”

“If you tell me that motherhood is supposed to be enough-“

“Listen, Deen, back before you and Step were married, when Step was back and forth between Mexico and Washington working on that project for the Historical Department and he was only home one Wednesday night right in the middle, why was it that you didn’t have time to see him? Remember now, he was already the love of your life, and you couldn’t spare him the one night in two months—”

“I had a responsibility,” said DeAnne.

“Young Adult Relief Society president, and you had a presidency meeting. You could have changed the day! You could have canceled that week’s meeting!”

“Why are you bringing all this up again, Lorry?”

“Because you’ll sacrifice anything for your career. Even Step. You almost lost him over that one, you know. I had to talk to him for three hours that night to keep him from giving you an f.o. note.”

“Please don’t tell me what the letters stand for,” said DeAnne.

“Your career is the Church, Deen. Whatever your calling is at any given moment, that’s what you live for, and everything else better get out of your way. So don’t give me any more b.s.—that stands for booger samples—about not having a career. You had a career when we were both in high school and you practically ran the whole Young Women program while the adult leaders just stood out of your way.”

DeAnne had realized that Lorry was right. She had a career, one that she could pursue without setting aside her family. So she threw herself into her callings with renewed enthusiasm, and hadn’t let up since, through their years in Salt Lake City, in Orem, in Vigor. Wherever they went, as soon as the strongest women in the ward realized how reliable, how competent, how inventive she was, they would go to the bishop and begin to ask for her to be called to a position in their organization. Almost immediately she would find herself in the inner circle of the best women in the ward, aware of everything, all the family problems and marriage problems and money problems, all the women who couldn’t get along with each other, all the women who could be relied on and all the women who couldn’t. Armed with this knowledge, she was able to make a difference. Her programs ran smoothly and she carried out all her assignments, but to her that was the minimum. Far more important was the work she imposed on herself—trying to help the sisters become a bit more more patient with others’ failings, more tolerant of strangeness, more loving and less angry, more obedient to the laws of God and less compliant with the mindless demands of tradition.

It was a life’s work, because it never ended—and yet she had seen progress, she had made breakthroughs. And when she compared her career in the Church with the careers of her friends—even one as remarkably successful as Lorry, who was now programming director for a network station in a major market—she was not unsatisfied, for while she would never get the fame or recognition or money Lorry had, at the end of every working day what had Lorry accomplished? M*A*S*H reruns slotted between Carson and the new Letterman show.

If the Church was DeAnne’s career, then moving to a new town-indeed, moving across town to a new ward—was like a job transfer. The Church was the same everywhere, in its broad outlines. There were the same callings to be filled, the same basic tasks to be performed. But the people were different; the way they fit together in the ward was always new. Each new ward had its own customs, its own traditions, its quarrels and its cliques.

Most important, though, was the fact that in each new ward, DeAnne never knew what her calling would be. It took time to become known, time for people to find out what she could do. And in the meantime, the bishop would be looking at the ward roster, trying to find someone to teach a Primary class or run the library. DeAnne would, of course, accept any calling she was given and do the best she could with it, but she had seen many times how someone could get put in one slot, and as long as they lived in that ward that’s all that people ever saw them as. She had said it to Step as they prepared to move to Steuben: “I wonder who I’ll be in our new ward.”

“Who you’ll be? You’ll be DeAnne Brown Fletcher, of course.”

She knew better. In Vigor she had been counselor in the Relief Society, one of the leading women in the ward, part of everything going on. In Salt Lake City she had been the young women’s president; in Orem she had worked with the young women’s organization at the stake level. Each role was different; in each place, because she had a different calling, the other Saints saw her differently, saw her as the role she filled.

And why not? That was how careers were supposed to function, wasn’t it? That was the difference between a career and a job, wasn’t it? A job was just something you did—but a career, that was who you were. Step had a history Ph.D., but nobody saw him as a historian because that wasn’t his career; he was a game designer, because that’s where his accomplishments were. Well, DeAnne had been an accomplished Relief Society counselor in Vigor, and now in the Steuben 1st Ward she would be someone else, and she was eager to know who.

They had moved often enough that they were now experts on how to get involved immediately in the new ward. Some people entered a ward shyly, quietly, just coming to the meetings and gradually getting to know people. But that could leave you without a calling for months and months, which would drive DeAnne crazy. So she and Step had perfected a technique of moving into a ward quickly and deeply, so they would be involved almost at once. They joined the choir.

Step had a strong baritone voice that could handle most tenor parts, and since every ward choir in the church was hurting for men, and especially for tenors, he was immediately the star of the choir. DeAnne’s soprano voice was not quite so rare, but she learned parts very quickly and sang with strength—and on pitch. Besides, she played the piano and could fill in for a missing accompanist. There was always a core of music people in every ward, trading assignments and helping each other out in all the organizations. By becoming known to the music people, DeAnne and Step were soon known to everyone—known and valued. Because their attendance at choir was as faithful as possible, people also knew they were, as Mormons called it, “active.” They could be counted on. If they were given an assignment, they would show up and fulfill it. Thanks to their choir connection, within weeks of moving into each new ward they were well and widely known.

They had followed the same program in the Steuben 1st Ward, and the technique worked just as effectively. When they showed up at the Sunday afternoon choir practice—their kids in tow and well armed with paper to draw on and books to read and, in Elizabeth’s case, a few soft toys to play with while Stevie watched her—the choir director looked them over and immediately said, “We’ve got a new man in the choir!” DeAnne always heard that statement with amusement. In a few moments the choir leader would apologize, whereupon DeAnne would reassure her that she understood that men were at a premium and sopranos like her were a dime a dozen.

As she took part in the familiar rituals of choir practice, DeAnne felt warm and comfortable and welcome. Even though she knew not a single one of the people there, they were Mormons and they were music people and so she knew them all, and knew that they knew her and her husband and already, already they belonged.

The next week DeAnne substituted for a Primary teacher—the Primary president’s husband was one of the basses, and apparently when the Primary president was fretting about a teacher who was out of town, he must have said, “Why not ask the new sister to fill in? Sister—Fletcher, I think.” And the following week Step substituted in gospel doctrine class. He had spoken up a couple of times in class the first two weeks, and word was getting around that he had a doctorate in history, which gave him great prestige in a mostly blue-collar ward, so it was only natural they gave him a try as teacher of the adult Sunday school class.

During the next week, the bishop called DeAnne and set up an appointment for her and Step to come see him. Saturday was the only day she could count on Step being home at any reasonable hour before Sunday came, and so Saturday it was. Sure enough, she was called to be a Primary teacher—the usual calling for a woman new in a ward—and Step was called to teach the gospel doctrine class. Step was elated. He loved to teach and hated administrative callings—he had not really enjoyed being elders quorum president back in Vigor. Besides, gospel doctrine class was a Sunday-only calling; there’d be no meetings during the week, and that meant that there’d be no conflict between his job and his calling.

DeAnne bided her time, however. She was a good Primary teacher and loved working with the little children, but she knew that she would not be in Primary very long—something would open up in Relief Society and she would be brought in. She knew this because the Relief Society president, Ruby Bigelow, had made a point of sitting beside her the second Sunday they went to choir practice, and when the singing was done, they had chatted like old friends for a quarter of an hour, before the kids made it clear that they were hungry enough to start eating the pews. Sister Bigelow already knew that DeAnne had been education counselor in the Relief Society in Vigor—Jenny Cowper had told her—and they swapped stories about disastrous homemaking meetings they had lived through. “I hope I get a chance to know you better,” Sister Bigelow had said after that first conversation.

It happened the last Tuesday night in April. A phone call fromthe bishop. He wanted to speak to Step first. Step talked for only a few moments, said, “Sure, of course, no problem,” and then called DeAnne back to the phone. That told her at once that the bishop had a new calling for her, and had checked with her husband first—she didn’t mind the custom; she only wished that they’d do the same when the shoe was on the other foot, and check with the wife before calling the husband to a new position.

“Hi, Sister Fletcher,” said the bishop.

“Hi again,” said DeAnne.

“I hate doing this on the phone, but I have to catch a plane in an hour and I won’t be back before Sunday and Sister Bigelow would have my hide on the wall if I didn’t get you called so you could be sustained this Sunday.”

So it was going to be a Relief Society calling. She was almost relieved about that; because of her good experience in Vigor, she still thought of herself as a Relief Society person. And she liked Sister Bigelow. It would be good to work with her, and good to be with the women of the ward.

“Sister Mansard has just been called to the state Relief Society board, and that leaves the ward without a spiritual living teacher. Sister Bigelow and I both think that you’re the one the Lord wants in that position. Will you do it?”

Of course she would do it, though she was astonished that she was being given spiritual living. That was far and away the most prestigious of the four Relief Society teaching positions. In her most ambitious moments DeAnne might have hoped to teach cultural refinement. Sister Bigelow must have an amazing amount of confidence in a newcomer.

Thus it was that, almost exactly two months after they arrived in Steuben, DeAnne finally knew what her career in this place was going to be. She was relieved; she was delighted. Like Step, she would be a teacher, in the organization she loved best and with the assignment she valued most.

“When you think about it,” said Step, “you and I have probably the two most influential teaching positions you can have. If the Lord brought us to Steuben to make a difference in this ward he couldn’t have put us into better callings to accomplish it. DeAnne could only agree. It felt good to have those callings, as the Lord was reassuring them that this move was the right thin to do, that they were in the place where he wanted them to be.

If only Stevie could get that same confidence in where he was in what he was doing. But it was harder for a child, even one bright and mature for his age as Stevie. He hadn’t yet had enough experience with life to be patient, to know even when things were unpleasant and hard that it all had a purpose, even fear, even pain that it would end up preparing him to be a fine man who would understand the suffering and loneliness of others. There was plenty of time, though. That was the nice thing, that in a couple years she could say to Stevie, “Do you remember how hard it was for you when we first moved here? Why, you even had imaginary friends that you played with, you were so determined to be lonely. And now look at you, with all these friends, and doing so well school!” If only she could skip over the next few years, and take him to that place right now, so that he could see that this crisis his life would pass.

In the meantime, she had her career in this place, and so did Step. Actually, Step had two careers, so while he hated working with some of those strange people at Eight Bits Inc., he had the relief of Sundays, a chance to talk to people who understood the way he saw the world, to be a servant of the Lord instead of a servant of Ray Keene.

For Step, of course, teaching the gospel doctrine class was easy. He didn’t think about it during the week, didn’t even prepare it until sacrament meeting, usually. He’d read a couple of chapters in the Old Testament while the speakers droned on, jot some notes, and then a few minutes after sacrament meeting ended he’d stand up in front of the class and dazzle them. In a way he’d been preparing all his life to teach a class like this—all it took was a few moments of thought and he could draw out of his memory enough insights into the scriptures to keep the class members pondering and exploring for a week.

For DeAnne, though, teaching was a much more involving task. For one thing, women in Relief Society expected far more preparation from their teachers. There had to be visual aids, and sometimes handouts, and sometimes treats, which meant that DeAnne had to plan each lesson for days, for weeks. For another thing, DeAnne soon found that Sister Bigelow apparently relied on her teachers to be part of the leadership of the Relief Society. She was often on the phone to DeAnne, asking her to help with this or that—to call a list of sisters, for instance, and ask them to take food over to so-and-so’s house because her mother had been in the hospital and she shouldn’t have to worry about cooking. “I’m so sorry to put all these things on you,” Sister Bigelow said, “but our compassionate service leader isn’t—well, isn’t always able to do what’s needed.”

DeAnne understood perfectly—the compassionate service leader was no doubt one of those who were given callings that they weren’t really capable of doing yet, to help them grow. In the meantime, others had to take up the slack and get the job done while the sister with the calling was learning how to get her act together.

DeAnne took on all these assignments gladly and fulfilled them at once. After all, this was her career. To make those phone calls while Robbie and Elizabeth were down for their naps, to cut out visual aids for her lesson while Elizabeth colored beside her and Robbie practiced his letters—that was how life was supposed to be lived, connecting always with her children, and always with the sisters of the ward.

But the most pressing part of her work was that spiritual living lesson—if she didn’t do that well, then she’d be less effective in anything else she did. The sisters here had to learn to have confidence in her from the start, and it would be hard, since some would be a bit resentful of a newcomer being given such a plum of a calling. Furthermore, her first teaching assignment was right away, on the first of May. She had no choice but to let a few things slide at home—the remaining boxes could stay packed until after the lesson was done.

On Sunday she was so nervous she woke early and couldn’t go back to sleep. When Step got up at eight o’clock, he found the children already dressed in their Sunday clothes, eating breakfast.

“What, does church start at eight-thirty instead of nine?”

“I just wanted us not to be all in a rush going to church today, said DeAnne.

Step smiled and put his arm around her. She knew that wasn’t much of a hugger by nature, but he knew she needed physical contact, so when he noticed that she needed it, he gave it. Today she hadn’t realized how much she needed the reassurance of his arm around her, but she felt calm go through her in a wave, and she clung to him for a moment. “You’re going to wonderful,” he said. “You always worry so much, but you’re great teacher and they’re going to love you.”

All through sacrament meeting she could hardly listen to the people bearing their testimonies, she was so nervous. During Step’s lesson in Sunday school, she kept glancing down at her notes, making sure that she knew exactly what she was going say. For a moment, though, his words brought her out of he reverie. He was telling the story of the time when Joshua was all upset because a couple of men were prophesying in the camp Israel, and he wanted Moses to come and stop them. Step paraphrased Moses’ answer: “Don’t be jealous on my behalf. I wish all the people were prophets.” Then Step launched into his riff about how the Lord expects every Saint to receive guidance from the Lord, and not rely on anyone else, not even the prophet, to tell them every move to make in their lives. For one awful moment DeAnne thought, He’s going to give my lesson. I should have to him what my lesson was about because he’s going to cover the whole thing right here and in Relief Society it’s going to sound like I’m just repeating what my husband said, which would complete undercut the whole point I want to make.

But Step went on to a discussion of ritual, and DeAnne breathed a sigh of relief, though she drew a little star in her not and wrote “Step” beside it, right at the spot in her lesson where she should refer to what Step had said in Sunday school. She’d make it work.

She wasn’t counting on Sister LeSueur.

Because of Jenny Cowper’s warning, DeAnne had noticed right away who Sister LeSueur was. A nice-looking lady, probably in her early sixties, hair dyed blond, and always dressed to show both money and dignity. She always had a smile and a word for everyone, and DeAnne rather liked her. She couldn’t understand why Jenny would have said such unpleasant things about her. Perhaps Sister LeSueur’s sweetness was a bit excessive, a bit too ostentatious, but there were many worse things that could be wrong with a person. Jenny must simply have misunderstood something that she said. Or perhaps she just has a low tolerance for people who are too careful to show that they are really good at being Christlike. DeAnne didn’t have too much use for people like that, either, but Sister LeSueur didn’t seem all that obnoxious.

She began to understand what Jenny was talking about, though, when her lesson was over and it was time for the sisters to bear their testimonies. The lesson had gone very well. It was about testimonies, and after telling several stories she got to her main point, that each sister had to have her own relationship with the Spirit of God. “The only mediator between us and our Father in heaven is Jesus Christ, and no one else, not the bishop, not our husbands, can stand between us and the Lord. Your testimony of the Lord is the one that you will be judged by at the last day, not someone else’s. As the Savior said, it is the words that we speak, not the words that we hear, that can damn us—or lift us up. Your husband’s testimony can’t possibly carry you into heaven.” They nodded, many of them, when she said that.

Then she spoke about how she and Step had not discussed their lessons with each other, and yet both of them had ended up making exactly that point—that the Lord wanted all his children to be prophets, to receive the Spirit in their lives. “Perhaps the Lord really wanted you to hear that lesson today. But I didn’t have to go to my husband to find out about it-if either of us was inspired, then we were both inspired, and that’s how it should be with our testimonies.” Again, they nodded. And when she finished with her lesson, more than a few were dabbing at their eyes.

The testimony meeting that followed was lovely, and that, too, was part of what DeAnne had tried for. It was the job of the spiritual living teacher to set the right tone, so in this one meeting each month the sisters would feel hungry to stand on their feet and bear their testimonies to each other. Their was such an air of fervor and excitement as the first few spoke. Then Sister LeSueur got up.

She began crying at once, of course—that was what one expected of people who were ostentatiously spiritual, just as from those who really were. It was Sister LeSueur’s words, not her tears, that told DeAnne that Jenny Cowper might just have been correct about this woman.

“My heart is so full after that wonderful lesson,” said Sister LeSueur. “I just had to tell my sisters how wonderful it is and how blessed I am to have my dear husband Jacob. He is such a strength to me, and I want you to know that he makes all the decisions in our lives, because he is the true head of our home, and the Lord shows him the way for us both. If I ever get into the celestial kingdom, it will be because his wonderful strong testimony carried me there. I’m so grateful that the Lord has given his daughters into the hands of good men, because without our husbands we would be utterly lost and alone. I just wish I were as spiritual as Sister Fletcher, here—I would never dare to teach a lesson without talking it out with my husband first, because that’s the reason the Lord gave me my husband, to be my guide and teacher in all things.”

She went on but DeAnne hardly heard. She felt as if she had been slapped in the face. It was bad enough that what Sister LeSueur said was false doctrine; what made it almost unbearable was that she had deeply undercut DeAnne’s position as spiritual living teacher by directly contradicting the main point of her lesson. From all that DeAnne could tell, Dolores LeSueur had enormous prestige in the ward, and if she contradicted DeAnne, then who was going to be believed? DeAnne had now been branded as an unreliable teacher by one of the leading women of the ward. It was all she could do to keep from crying. Especially when the next sister got up and bore her testimony about what a spiritual giant Sister LeSueur was, and no wonder the Lord had healed her of cancer so she could continue to live in the Steuben 1st Ward and give such wonderful guidance and such a wonderful example of faith to all of them.

Then, mercifully, the meeting ended. DeAnne immediately gathered her things together and headed for the door, wanting nothing more than to leave and get to the car where perhaps she could cry for a few moments before Step gathered the kids and brought them out to the car so she would have to start being cheerful again. However, she got caught in the crush at the door leaving the Relief Society room, and before she could get through, there were hands plucking at her sleeve. It was the choir director, Mary Anne Lowe. Tears were streaming down her face. “What a wonderful lesson,” she said. “It was just what I needed to hear today.” And then she was gone, back in the crowd.

Jenny Cowper was next to tug at her sleeve, drawing DeAnne away from the door after all. “I heard what Mary Anne said, and I just want you to know—her husband went inactive when blacks got the priesthood, he’s such a bigot, and it breaks Mary Anne’s heart every time a certain pinhead bears her testimony about how wonderful her husband is and how a woman is nothing if she doesn’t have a good husband. So when she said she needed to hear your lesson about how your husband can’t stand between you and God, well, it’s true.”

“Oh,” said DeAnne. So her lesson had been good for somebody.

“That witch with a b talks that way about her husband all the time, you know.”

“You mean Sister LeSueur?” asked DeAnne.

“With a capital B,” said Jenny. “So when you gave that lesson, it was like you cleared the air of a lot of smog that we’ve been breathing in this ward for years. What a great start.”

“Great start!” said DeAnne. “I’m doomed.”

“Doomed! Nonsense. Everybody here with any brains is so glad you’re the teacher that they could kiss Sister Bigelow for calling you. You took a horrible weight off their shoulders. There are only about six good marriages in this whole Relief Society, and when the Queen B talks about her dear Jacob like that, it stabs everyone else to the heart.”

“She must not have any idea of the effect of her words, then,” said DeAnne.

“In a pig’s eye,” said Jenny. “But look who’s coming.”

DeAnne turned and there was Sister LeSueur, smiling and holding out her hand. “Oh, my dear Sister Fletcher, what a wonderful lesson! I was just telling Sister Bigelow that it’s so dear of her to give someone so young a chance to grow into such a big calling—and you are up to it, I’m telling everyone, in a few months they’ll see. I have such confidence in you.” Then she winked and squeezed DeAnne’s arm before she glided away.

“Kind of makes you want to wash your arm, doesn’t it?” said Jenny.

“Or cut it off,” said DeAnne. “She really is nasty, isn’t she?”

“But it helps to know that you aren’t the only one who realize it, doesn’t it! Otherwise you just sit there feeling guilty for hating her, because she’s so sweet and spiritual and you know that hating her must mean that you’re ripe for destruction.”

“Forgive me for thinking you had a problem with malicious gossip,” said DeAnne. “It was pure charity. Like warning somebody that there’s a tornado coming.”

“Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet,” said Jenny cheerfully. “Call me tomorrow, or tonight if you get the chance. I’ve got to round up the monsters before they tear out the satellite dish by the roots.”

DeAnne laughed.

“I wasn’t joking,” said Jenny. “When the satellite dish was first installed a few years ago, my oldest two climbed the fence and pushed it over. But they’ve got it bolted down to a concrete pad now, so I suppose it’s safe enough as long as we don’t let the kids bring tools to church. Bye.”

With Jenny gone, DeAnne once again headed for the door without the same urgency now to get away and cry. Again, though, someone stopped her. “Sister Fletcher, I need to talk to you,” said Sister Bigelow.

Uh-oh, thought DeAnne. Now it comes.

DeAnne walked over to the table where Sister Bigelow was stacking up the hymnbooks. “Better put down all that stuff you’re carrying,” said Sister Bigelow.

She’s going to ask for the manual back, thought DeAnne. She’s going to release me as spiritual living teacher right now. I’m not even going to get a second chance.

But if that’s what happened, that’s how it would be, DeAnne decided, and she set down her lesson materials.

“Now I can give you a hug without getting the corner of a book in my eye!” said Sister Bigelow. She was half a head shorter than DeAnne, but her hug was large and enthusiastic. When Sister Bigelow pulled away, DeAnne saw her glance around to make sure they were now alone in the room. “DeAnne, I know for sure that the Lord truly brought you to Steuben North Carolina to be our spiritual living teacher.”

“Then the lesson was all right?” asked DeAnne.

“I think it was obvious how much that lesson was needed,” said Sister Bigelow. “I won’t say another word because I don’t speak ill of any of my sisters, but I saw that one of the testimonies might have made you feel discouraged and I wanted you to know that there’s not a blame thing for you to be discouraged about, and that’s that. You are manna from heaven to me. Now go home and feed your family.”

It was going to be fine.

Or was it? Jenny had warned her that Sister LeSueur always got what she wanted. That one way or another, she would not be thwarted. The last thing DeAnne wanted was to spend the next few years in a constant struggle—or, worse, an open war. No, she simply wasn’t going to do that. She would win over Sister LeSueur with love and kindness. She would never give Sister LeSueur the slightest cause to think of her as an enemy.

DeAnne left the Relief Society room and began to comb the halls for her children. They were nowhere to be found. Step must have rounded them up, she realized, and she headed for the car, hoping Step would have the back of the wagon open so she could set down her lesson materials and Elizabeth’s diaper-and-toy bag without having to fumble with keys or wait for Step to do it. Now that she was no longer keyed up about giving the lesson, everything seemed heavier and slower and she began to feel how much she needed some sleep. Not that she’d have much chance. Maybe Step would throw together some sandwiches for the kids while she took a nap before choir practice.

The back of the wagon was open. I may not need Step to save my soul, she thought, but he’s pretty useful when I need someone to save my weary arms.

“How’d it go, Fish Lady?”

“It went interestingly.”

“I sense a story.”

“I’ll tell you when there are fewer ears.”

“I won’t listen,” offered Robbie from the back seat.

“Speaking of ear counting,” said Step, “didn’t you see Stevie in there?”

“Isn’t he here?” asked DeAnne. She looked into the back seat. He wasn’t there. How could she have failed to notice that one of her own children was missing? She really was tired.

“I didn’t see him in there,” she said.

“No problem,” said Step. “I’ll just go in and get him.”

“Never mind,” said DeAnne. “Here he comes.”

Stevie was walking very slowly, looking down. Moping, thought DeAnne, that’s what he’s doing. He mopes to school from the car, he mopes from school back to the car, he mopes around the house all day, and he even mopes at church. “Sometimes I think he isn’t even trying, Step,” she said.

“Come on, Stevie!” Step called. “You have starving siblings in the car!”

“I’m not starving,” said Robbie. “I had three cookies.”

“Cookies?” asked DeAnne.

“Treats in class.”

“Oh, sugar. Wonderful. I thought you didn’t like cookies.”

“These ones were chocolate chip,” said Robbie.

“Were they as good as my chocolate chip cookies?” asked Step.

“Nope,” said Robbie. “They were terrible.”

“Then why did you eat them?” asked DeAnne.

“Cause I won them,” said Robbie.

“Won them how?” asked Step.

“I answered all the questions.”

“Hmm,” said Step. “I wonder what your teacher would have given you if you answered them right?”

“I did answer them right!” shouted Robbie, only he sounded cross instead of playful.

“Oh, I guess we’re getting tired now,” said Step. “OK, I’m through teasing.”

Stevie opened the door behind DeAnne and got into the car. “Glad you could make it,” said Step. “Hope it wasn’t too much trouble, coming all the way out to the car like this.”

“It was OK,” said Stevie.

“Your father was teasing you,” said DeAnne. “He was suggesting that you ought to come right out to the car after church. I worried about you.”

“Thanks for translating for me,” said Step. He sounded a little testy himself now.

“I wasn’t translating,” said DeAnne. She felt weary to the bone. “Let’s just go home.”

Step started the car and they pulled out of the parking lot onto the road.

“I really do want to know what you were doing,” said Step.

Stevie didn’t answer.

“Stevie,” said Step.

“What?”

“I said I really do want to know what you were doing that made you late getting out to the car.”

“Talking,” said Stevie.

“Who with?” asked DeAnne. Maybe Stevie had found a friend, in which case she was glad he was late getting to the car.

“A lady.”

Not a friend, then. “What lady?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

DeAnne could feel Step suddenly grow alert. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she always knew when he started to pay serious attention. He was still driving, but perhaps there was a bit more tension in his muscles, a slowness about his movement. Deliberate, that was it. He became intensely deliberate. Dangerous. Someone has come too close to his children, and the primate male has become alert. Well, she rather liked that; it felt comfortable to feel him bristle beside her. Of course, that feeling of hers was probably the primate female, gathering her children near her mate at the first sign of danger. We are all chimpanzees under the skin.

“What did she say to you, Stevedore?” asked Step.

“I didn’t like her,” said Stevie.

“But what did she say?”

“She said she had a vision about me.”

His words came to DeAnne like a flash of light, blinding her for a moment: She had a vision. “Dolores LeSueur,” murmured DeAnne.

“Yeah,” said Stevie. “Sister LeSueur.”

“And what did she say about her vision?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“You’ve got to,” said DeAnne, barely able to control the emotion in her voice.

Step reached over and gently touched her on the thigh. He was telling her to keep still, that she was too intense, that she wasn’t going about it the right way. For a moment she resented him for daring to police her comments to her own son, but then she realized that she was simply transferring the anger she felt toward Dolores LeSueur to the nearest target, her husband. And he was right. They’d learn more from Stevie if he didn’t know how upset they were.

“The reason we need to know, Stevie,” said Step, “is that no matter what she thinks she saw, and no matter whether it was really a vision or just a dream or just something she made up, she had no business telling you about it.”

“It was about me,” said Stevie.

“In a pig’s eye,” murmured DeAnne.

“Sister LeSueur doesn’t have a right to get visions about you, Stevie. She’s not your mother and she’s not your father, she’s not your anything,” said Step. “The Lord’s house is a house of order. He isn’t going to send visions about you to somebody who has nothing to do with you. So if she got a vision, I bet it didn’t come from the Lord.”

“Oh,” said Stevie.

Step had laid the groundwork well, but now DeAnne was ready to know. “So what was the vision?”

“He’ll tell us,” said Step, “as soon as he realizes that it’s right to tell us. You had a bad feeling when she was telling you, didn’t you, Stevie? That’s why you said you didn’t like her.”

“Yeah,” said Stevie.

“Well, don’t you think that maybe that bad feeling was a warning to you that the things you were being told were lies? It made you feel bad, didn’t it?”

“Some bad and some not,” said Stevie.

“Did she tell you not to tell us?” asked Step.

“Yes,” Stevie said quietly.

“What?” said DeAnne, outraged.

“He said yes,” said Robbie.

“I heard him,” said DeAnne.

“Then why did you say ‘what’?” asked Robbie.

“Your mother was just surprised,” said Step. “Stevedore, Stevie, Stephen Bolivar Fletcher, my son, you know what we’ve told you before. If someone ever tells you children that you mustn’t tell your parents something, then what do you do?”

“I know,” said Robbie. “We promise that we’ll never tell, but then the very first chance we get we do tell you.”

“And why is that?”

“Because no good person would ever tell us to keep a secret from our mom and dad,” said Robbie.

“Remember that, Stevie?” asked Step.

“Yeah,” said Stevie.

DeAnne heard something in his voice. She turned in her seat, turned all the way, and saw that he was crying. “Stop the car, Step,” she said.

Step pulled the car at once into the driveway of a Methodist church parking lot. The parking lot was emptying out—apparently the Methodists got out of church about the same time the Mormons did.

“Why are you crying, honey?” asked DeAnne.

“I don’t know,” said Stevie.

“Stevie, whatever this woman said to you, it’s time for you to tell us.”

“She said…” He started crying in earnest now, so it was hard for him to talk.

“That’s all right, Stevie,” said Step. “Just tell us slowly. Take your time.”

“She said I was a really special boy.”

“Well, that’s true,” said Step.

“And she said that the Lord had chosen me to do wonderful things.”

“Like what?” asked Step.

“Like Ammon,” he said. “A missionary.”

“Yes?”

“But first she said that I had to prove that I was good enough.”

DeAnne felt as though she needed to spit something awful out of her mouth.

“Did she say what it was you had to do to prove yourself?” asked Step.

“T-teach my parents, she said.”

“Teach us what?” asked Step.

“R-righteousness,” said Stevie.

DeAnne felt the baby kick. Only it wasn’t a kick, it was more like a push, a hard, sustained push against her ribs. The child must have felt her anger; the adrenaline must have crossed the placenta, and now she had made the baby angry, too, or at least excited, upset, energized. I must calm myself, DeAnne thought. For the baby’s sake.

“Well now,” said Step, “what do you think she meant by that?”

“I don’t know,” said Stevie.

“I do,” said DeAnne. “Stevie, I taught a lesson today in Relief Society, and Sister LeSueur didn’t like it.”

“Why not?” asked Stevie.

“Because the lesson I taught said that every person can talk to the Lord and you don’t need anybody else to tell you what the Lord wants you to do, because the Holy Ghost can talk right to your heart.”

“After I’m baptized,” said Stevie.

“Which is only a little more than a month away,” said DeAnne. “And even now the Spirit of God can whisper in your heart, if there’s a reason. But she didn’t like me saying that.”

“Why not?” asked Stevie.

“Because Sister LeSueur likes going around and showing other people how spiritual she is.” DeAnne found herself remembering everything that Jenny Cowper had said to her, and now she believed it all, and spoke of it as if she knew it from her own experience. “She likes to tell people about visions the Lord has given her. She likes to have other people depend on her and do the things she tells them to do. So if people start realizing that true inspiration from the Lord will come right to them, and not to somebody like Sister LeSueur, why, she won’t be as important to them anymore as she is now. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” said Stevie.

“So she wants me to stop saying things like that,” said DeAnne.

“Me too,” said Step. “I gave a lesson that said things like that, too.”

“So she went to you to try to get you to think that she was having visions about you,” said DeAnne, “so that instead of learning from your parents, you’d always come to her to find out what you should do with your life.”

“Why would she tell a lie like that?” asked Stevie.

“She’s trying to steal you from us,” said Step.

“Like a bad guy!” said Robbie.

“Just like a bad guy,” said Step. “Only bit by bit, and slowly, starting with your heart. Starting by making you doubt us. Making you wonder if maybe we aren’t righteous, and if maybe you need to learn righteousness from somewhere else and then teach it to us. And where do you think that somewhere else would be?”

“From her,” said Stevie. “That’s what she said—that she knew that the Lord would tell her more about my g-glorious future.”

“Such poison,” said DeAnne.

“That’s called flattery Stevie,” said Step. “The truth is that anybody who knows anything about you knows that you’ll have a glorious future. You’re so bright and good, how could it be otherwise? So it doesn’t take a vision from the Lord to tell her that. But she hopes that by telling you wonderful things about your future, she’ll get you to put all your hope in the things she tells you and not in what we tell you.”

“It’s just what phony fortune-tellers all do,” said DeAnne. “They tell you wonderful things that you really hope are true. You believe them because you want them to happen. And so you convince yourself that the fortune-teller isn’t a fake, that maybe somehow she really knows, but in fact she’s really a phony all along.”

Stevie chewed on this for a minute. Step pulled out of the parking place and then headed back into the street, driving home.

“But what if she really had a vision,” asked Stevie.

DeAnne wanted to scream. She had no vision! She has poured poison into your ear, just like Hamlet’s father! But she held her tongue, trusting Step to be calmer than she was, because he hadn’t already had a run-in with Sister LeSueur today.

“Stevie,” said Step, “if she really had a vision, and it really was from the Lord, she had plenty of chances to tell your mother and me about it today. But she didn’t, did she?”

“Because the vision said you were unrighteous,” said Stevie. But DeAnne could hear a bit of sarcasm in his voice now. A bit more stress on the word said. She said you were unrighteous. He’s beginning to move over and stand with us against her. She isn’t going to win this round.

“If it was a true vision,” said Step, “she wouldn’t be afraid to tell us right to our faces that we were unrighteous. The Lord’s prophets are always brave about that sort of thing. They always tell wicked people about their wickedness, right to their faces. I mean, haven’t we told you stories about that? Like Samuel the Lamanite?”

“They almost killed him!” cried Robbie. “He stood on the wall!”

“So you were listening on Christmas Eve,” said Step.

“That’s right,” said Stevie. And now there was certainty in his voice. He had put the pattern together. “If it was true, she would have said it right to you, instead of sneaking around.”

“Like Abinadi,” said DeAnne.

“He got burned!” Robbie yelled.

“Bird!” Elizabeth screeched, looking around to see where Robbie might have seen one.

“Not bird, Betsy Wetsy,” said Robbie. He explained to her the concept of fire, none of which she understood, but that was fine with Robbie, he didn’t actually need other people to understand what he was saying as long as they’d sit still and listen. And with Elizabeth belted into her carseat, she was the perfect audience.

DeAnne could see that Step wanted to say more to Stevie—she understood, because she wanted to, too. But instead they both held their peace. Stevie understands. He sees how this woman has tried to manipulate him. So there’s no need to say any more.

And yet when they got home, while Step was carrying Elizabeth in from the car, DeAnne couldn’t resist adding one more bit of teaching. “Stevie,” she said, “I want you to know something.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

She had the door unlocked and Robbie assigned himself to hold it open for Step and Elizabeth. She carried her lesson materials and the diaper bag into the kitchen and set it all on the table. Stevie was right behind her.

“What I want you to know is this.” She got down on one knee, so she could look him in the eye. “You really are a special boy, with a wonderful future. I’ve known it from the start. I even knew it, I think, when you were still inside my tummy.”

“Uterus,” said Stevie. Step had given him the first birds-and-bees lesson back last fall, and now he insisted on not using childish language.

“Yes, my uterus,” said DeAnne. “But certainly when you were a baby, and ever since. You have a sensitive spirit. You know things. You know when things are right. It’s like what you felt when she was talking to you. Even though she was flattering you, you still didn’t like her, right?”

“Yeah,” said Stevie.

“That’s because there’s something inside you that knows, just knows when someone is good and when someone is not good. Or maybe you just know when you need to do something because it’s right. And believing in Sister LeSueur’s story just wasn’t the right thing for you to do, and so you knew it. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Stevie, trust in that place inside your heart that knows the right thing to do. Trust in it, and do what it tells you.”

“Even if it tells me to disobey you and Dad?”

“It will never tell you to do something wrong, Stevie. I promise you that.”

He nodded soberly. “OK,” he said. Then he turned and headed out of the room.

She felt weak, shaky. What had she just said to her son? To trust in some feeling inside himself, in preference even to the things that she and Step told him! How could she have said something so irresponsible, so insane! Yet at the moment she had felt as if it could not go unsaid. Only how could they possibly counter this LeSueur woman, this Queen B, if DeAnne was giving Stevie permission to ignore them? No, not giving him permission. Insisting on it.

She headed for the kitchen to tell Step what she had just done and get him to help her clarify it with Stevie, but Elizabeth was alone there, rooting through the Cheerios that still survived inside the Tupperware box DeAnne always took to church in the diaper bag.

DeAnne went down the hall, looking into Step’s office on the way. Not there. Not in Elizabeth’s room. Not in the boys’ room, where Stevie was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. Poor kid, so much confusion, so many strange things in his life! How could he make sense of it all?

She expected that Step would be in their bathroom, but he wasn’t. He was sitting on the bed, talking on the phone.

“I’m so sorry that she isn’t feeling well,” said Step. “But I can certainly understand it, Brother LeSueur, she had a very busy day in church. Listen, if she can’t come to the phone, Brother LeSueur, perhaps you can simply relay a message to her for me. Can you do that?”

DeAnne waited, holding her breath, to hear what Step would say, especially since poor Brother LeSueur probably hadn’t a clue about what his wife had been doing today. DeAnne rather imagined that he hadn’t a clue about anything his wife did, ever.

“OK, here’s the message. She raised a doctrinal question with me today—about what a father should do if someone tried to steal away his children.” Brother LeSueur must have said something, because Step paused a moment and then answered. “No, it wasn’t in class, it was after the meeting. Anyway, here’s the best answer I could come up with. I truly believe that if someone tried to steal away a man’s children, that man would be completely justified in anything he might do to protect his family … Yes, that’s right, anything at all … even killing, yes. I don’t think it would be murder, I think it would be defense of the helpless. Don’t you think so, Brother LeSueur? … Yes, I thought you’d agree with me. Why don’t you tell her that, then—that you agree with me, too, that a man would be perfectly justified in killing someone who tried to steal away his children? I think she’ll be quite satisfied with that answer… Yes, I think that particular question will never come up again … Thanks so much, and tell her I hope she gets well soon and lives a long and happy life … Oh, thank you! Bye!”

Step looked up at DeAnne and grinned. “He said he liked my lesson a lot.”

“I can’t believe you said that to her own husband!” said DeAnne.

“Yes, well, I said it because I wanted to make it clear to her that this was the last time she ever pulls a stunt like this.”

“She really is an awful woman,” said DeAnne. “Jenny tried to warn me, but I never thought anyone would be so low as to try to get to the parents by poisoning the hearts of their children against them.”

“Oh, heavens,” said Step, “people have been doing that for years. The Nazis did it, and the Communists, and a lot of divorced parents do it, too.”

“All right then,” said DeAnne, “I guess a lot of people are just that low. But she’s certainly one of them.”

“Oh, yes,” said Step. “She definitely crawled out from under a rock.”

“How can you be so calm about this? Aren’t you angry?”

Step only smiled—a tight little smile. “Hey, Fish Lady. I just got a man to deliver to his wife a message that if she messes with my family again, I’ll feel perfectly justified in killing her. You think I’m not mad?”

“But you wouldn’t really do it,” she said.

“Wouldn’t it be sad if Sister LeSueur thought the same thing,” said Step.

“You aren’t a violent person.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Step. “And I think that maybe I’m only pretending not to be a violent person. Because the need for violence simply hasn’t come up till now.”

“Well, I really don’t think violence is the answer against her.”

“Oh, I know,” said Step. “The real answer is to keep our children away from her and then teach people the truth every chance we get. That’s the thing we have going for us—she really is wrong, and we really are right, and so good and wise people will eventually see through her and recognize what she really is.”

She walked over to him and sat beside him on the bed and then laid her head in his lap. “I liked it when you talked on the phone about killing people,” she said. “I must be the most terrible person in the world, but it just made me feel so—delicious.”

“Me too,” said Step.

“Aren’t we awful?” said DeAnne.

“Personally,” said Step, “I think we’re terrific.”

Late that night, she awoke suddenly from a dream, but the dream slipped away even as she tried to cling to it. She rolled over and saw that Step’s bedside lamp was on, and he was reading.

“Can’t sleep?” she murmured.

“That was some dream you were having,” said Step. “Didn’t understand a word you were saying, but you sounded very firm.”

“Don’t remember,” said DeAnne.

Then she did remember. Not the dream, but something else that she had wanted to talk to Step about, and she hadn’t done it. She confessed to Step how she had as much as told their oldest son that he should trust his own judgment more than his parents’ instructions.

“Well,” said Step. “Well.”

“That’s it? Just ‘well’?”

“No, not just ‘well.’ I distinctly remember that I said, ‘Well. Well.’ Two wells.”

“I’m serious, Step.”

“DeAnne, it’s like you told me. It was just something that you had to say, right up till the moment it was said, and then you suddenly couldn’t understand why you had to say it.”

She was still half asleep, that must be why she didn’t get the point of what he was saying.

“Fish Lady,” he said patiently, “you were following your own advice. You did the thing that you knew, in that moment, was the right thing to do. You told Stevie something that you would never have dreamed of saying if you were in your normal mind.”

“So I’m going crazy?”

He sighed.

“Do you really think I might have been inspired to say that?”

“How should I know?” asked Step. “We believe it’s possible, don’t we? And in the meantime, I’m certainly not going to say anything to Stevie to get him to doubt what you said. Because the fact is that what you said is true. In the long run, every human being is accountable for what he chooses to do. Stevie won’t be able to hide behind us and say, But I did what they said! He’ll have to stand before the judgment bar of God and say This is what I did, and this is why I chose to do it.”

“But he’s only seven.”

“He’s not just a seven-year-old,” said Step. “You know that. It’s something my mother once said to me. That there were moments that she thought, Maybe, before we were all born, when we lived with God in the pre-existence, maybe her children were older than her. Maybe they were very old and very wise, and God simply saved them till now because he needed to have some of his very best children on the earth during the last days. Maybe Mom was right. Not about her children. About ours.”

“He’s seven, Step, even if his spirit is very old.”

“You said what you said, and Sister LeSueur said what she said. And you know what, Fish Lady? I like what you said a lot better. She said to him, Depend on me, lean on me, do what I tell you to do, and I’ll make you a great man. You said to him, Stand on your own, make up your own mind, you already are a man, and maybe you’ll make yourself into a great man by and by. What’s so wrong about that?”

“You make me feel so good, Junk Man,” she said.

“It’s my job,” he said. “It was written into the marriage contract. When wife wakes up in the middle of the night and needs some reassurance, husband must provide it or go without hot meals for a week.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, then, you’re living up to the contract.”

“I do my best,” he said. “But I still miss most of the hot meals.”

“Not because I don’t prepare them,” said DeAnne.

“Maybe the contract will come from Agamemnon. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Even if it doesn’t come, Step, even if Mr. Agamemnon or Akabakka or whatever—”

“Arkasian.”

“Even if he changed his mind or couldn’t do it or whatever. Even if that comes to nothing, things will still work out.”

“I hope you’re right, Fish Lady.”

“I am. You can count on it. Because I get inspiration, don’t I?”

“Sometimes you just give it,” he said. “To me.”

She nestled closer to him in bed and closed her eyes, feeling comforted now, feeling ready for sleep. “You make me feel so good, Junk Man.”

He leaned down and kissed her forehead. Then she must have fallen asleep, because she remembered nothing else till morning.

7: Crickets

This is what happened with Stevie’s second-grade project: He brought home a one-page ditto that listed the requirements, which were not very specific. The end-of-year project had to show “an environment” and the creatures that lived in it. It was due on April 22nd, and it had to include a written report and a “visual depiction.”

“Most of the kids are doing posters,” said Stevie, “but I don’t want to.” He had been reading about octopuses, and he wanted to do his project about the undersea environment. And instead of cutting pictures out of magazines and pasting them to posterboard, he got his mom to buy some colored clay, which he shaped into fishes, clams, coral, and an octopus. He arranged them on a cardboard base that DeAnne cut from the side of one of the boxes they had used in the move. Then he wrote his report, typing it himself on Step’s word-processing computer and stapling it in the corner.

It was the first thing Stevie had shown any real interest in during his whole time at this school, and DeAnne showed it off to Step with real pride, the night before Stevie took it to school.

“This is incredible,” said Step. “You didn’t help him?”

“I did nothing. In fact I advised him against doing something so hard. Who knew he could make fish that looked like fish?”

“Not to mention an octopus that looks like an octopus,” said Step. “And look at the clam. There’s a starfish prying it open!”

“He still never talks about school,” said DeAnne. “Not even when I ask. But he did this, so it can’t be all bad.”

Then came DeAnne’s new calling, and she was so involved with preparing her spiritual living lesson that she didn’t think about Stevie’s project now that it had been turned in.

On the first Monday in May, however, her lesson was over, and as she drove Stevie to school she remembered his project and asked what the teacher thought of it.

“She gave it a C,” said Stevie.

“What?” asked DeAnne.

“And it got mooshed.”

“It got mooshed! How! Did somebody drop it?”

“No,” said Stevie. “They put them all out on display in the media center, and when the other kids walked past it they mooshed it.”

“On purpose?” asked DeAnne.

“Yeah,” said Stevie.

“How can you be sure? Did you see them do it?”

“Raymond said, ‘Tidal wave!’ and then after him they wadded it up even more so finally it was just a big mess of clay.”

“Where was your teacher when they were doing this? Where was the librarian?”

“Mrs. Jones was there.”

“And she didn’t do anything?”

“No,” said Stevie.

“She must not have seen what they were doing.”

“She saw,” said Stevie.

“She saw? And she didn’t stop them?”

“No,” said Stevie.

DeAnne felt sick. No, she thought. Stevie just misunderstood the situation. The teacher hadn’t really been watching. She could never have let such a thing happen.

“I’m going in to talk to your teacher,” said DeAnne.

“Please no!” said Stevie, urgently.

“This has to be cleared up. There was no way that your project deserved a C.”

“Please don’t come in!” he pleaded.

“All right,” said DeAnne. “But why not?”

“It’ll just make things worse if you do,” said Stevie.

“Worse?”

But they had just reached the turnaround in front of the school, and Stevie bounded out the door and raced for school—the first time she had ever seen him hurry toward class. Somehow it didn’t make her feel any better. There was something seriously wrong here, and not just his moroseness because of the move. Mrs. Jones could not have given that project a C. No teacher could have stood by and let the other kids destroy a child’s project, either. It simply couldn’t happen.

Well, if she couldn’t talk to Mrs. Jones, she could at least talk to the librarian and find out from her what had happened. “Come on, kids, we’re going in,” said DeAnne.

DeAnne pulled the car into the teachers’ parking lot, where a visitor space was open, and within a few minutes she was leading the kids down the hall to the media center. DeAnne supposed that she ought to check in at the office, but the receptionist there was so snotty, and DeAnne was already so upset, that she decided that if she wasn’t going to get really furious today she’d better pretend that she didn’t realize she needed to stop in at the main desk.

The librarian was a sweet-voiced older lady, and when she smiled DeAnne thought for some reason of the time she had an eye injury and when the bandages were on and she couldn’t see, someone laid a cool damp cloth on her forehead. “I’m so glad when parents come by the library,” said the librarian.

“Oh, I thought it was a media center now,” said DeAnne.

“Well, so it is. We have two video carts and an Apple II computer, so we are a media center, but look at all these books. Wouldn’t you call this a library?”

“Yes I would,” said DeAnne. “And I like it all the more, knowing that you call it a library, too.”

The librarian smiled and patted DeAnne’s hand. “Aren’t you the sweet one.” Then she bent over—not far, because she wasn’t very tall—and soberly greeted Robbie and Elizabeth with a handshake each. “When will you be a student here, young man?”

“I start kindergarten next fall,” said Robbie.

“Oh, and I see you have been well taught,” she said. “You said kindergarten and not kindy-garden.”

Robbie beamed.

The librarian turned back to DeAnne. “Did you just stop by to visit? Or is there something I can help you with?”

“I understand that the second-grade projects were displayed here.”

The librarian looked mournful. “We just barely took down the display over the weekend. I’m so sorry you missed it. We’re so proud of our second graders.”

“It is rather remarkable, to have second-grade projects,” said DeAnne. “I’ve actually never heard of such a thing before. I don’t think we even had senior projects in high school when I was there.”

“I think it’s because our school is only K through 2,” said the librarian. “Dr. Mariner wanted our students to mark the children’s departure from our school in a special way—something they would remember, perhaps, in time to come.”

“That’s certainly the way my oldest boy responded to the assignment,” said DeAnne. “Perhaps you noticed his project when it was on display.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’d remember any one in particular, Mrs. … um … ”

“I’m DeAnne Fletcher.”

Suddenly the librarian’s eyes grew wide, and she flashed her wonderful smile again. “Oh, you must be Stevie Fletcher’s mother!”

“I am,” said DeAnne.

“What a very special boy,” said the librarian. “I do remember his project, in fact. It was a sculpture garden—an undersea environment, I believe. With an octopus and that clam with the starfish opening it—and I noticed that the shark had a tiny little fish that the shark was swallowing. A little gruesome, perhaps, but very creative. You must have been proud for your son to be given the first-place ribbon.”

“First place? Stevie told me the project got a C.”

“But how could that be possible? Dr. Mariner came here and judged them all herself, and before she had even seen the rest of the children’s posters, she laid the blue ribbon down beside Stevie’s project and said, ‘This will stay here until I find something that makes me take it away again.’ And of course she never did, because he ended up receiving it. Isn’t it just awful what those other children did? They were so jealous, I suppose, but still, I think it was churlish of them to moosh it up that way.”

So that part of Stevie’s story was accurate. And the word moosh was apparently current enough in Steuben that a gracious, educated lady like this one could use it. “Yes, Stevie was rather disappointed, I think,” said DeAnne.

“He’s such a quiet boy,” said the librarian. “He spends every recess here, did you know? I think he must have read half the … um, media … in my little … um, media center.” She winked.

“Every recess?” said DeAnne. “I know he loves reading, but I had hoped he would play with the other children.”

“I know,” said the librarian. “I think it’s better when children play together, too. But as long as he keeps to himself, better to have the company of a book than no company at all, don’t you think?”

“Oh, yes,” said DeAnne. “Well, I didn’t mean to trouble you. And I can’t wait to tell Stevie’s father about the blue ribbon. I wonder where it is!”

“Well, of course it was given to Mrs. Jones to display in Stevie’s classroom. They usually keep them there until the end of the year, and then send them home with the student who won.”

DeAnne made her polite good-byes and left, feeling much better. Except that Stevie hadn’t told her the truth about his project. Was it possible that he was still trying to make his parents feel bad about putting him in this school? Was it possible that he was refusing to let them know anything good about his experience there, so that they’d continue to feel guilty? That just didn’t sound like Stevie, but what other explanation could there be? He must be so angry.

For the first time DeAnne wondered if they shouldn’t perhaps find a therapist who could talk to Stevie, who could help him find his way through this thicket of problems. Imaginary friends. And now lying. She called Step at work and he agreed not to be late tonight.

None of Step’s usual rides would be able to take him home today—not if he was leaving at five, because none of the programmers ever left until well after seven. So he hitched a ride with two of the phone girls, the ones who took orders for Eight Bits Inc. software on the 800 number. All the way home he kept thinking that there was something strange about the drive, and it wasn’t because of the two girls chattering in the front seat or the fact that in the back of a Rabbit his knees were up around his ears. Not until they pulled up in front of his house and he realized that the lawn was overgrown and very badly in need of mowing did it occur to him what was so strange. It was daylight! In the two months that he’d been working at Eight Bits Inc., he had never once come home in daylight.

He thanked the girls for the ride and came into the house. DeAnne was in the living room, playing the piano while Robbie sang and Elizabeth hooted and beat two rhythm sticks together. The song was “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.”

“Somehow I never thought of this as the sort of song that needed a percussion section,” said Step.

“Daddy!” cried Robbie.

“Robot!” answered Step. Robbie ran to him and Step tossed him in the air and caught him.

“Daddy!” screamed Betsy.

“Betsy Wetsy!” answered Step.

“Someday you’re going to smack their heads into the ceiling,” said DeAnne.

Step tossed Betsy into the air. Then, after catching her, he lifted her up and bumped her head against the ceiling. “Owie ow ow ow!” howled Betsy.

“Don’t be a poop, Betsy,” said Step. “That didn’t hurt at all, I was just teasing.”

“Owie ow!” Betsy reached for DeAnne.

“What did I tell you?” said DeAnne.

“Betsy’s a poop!” shouted Robbie. “Betsy’s a poop! You can bump me into the ceiling, Daddy!”

“Better not,” said Step. “Your head might cause structural damage.”

“I don’t mind!” insisted Robbie.

“I can’t believe you came home so early,” said DeAnne.

“I said I would, when you asked me to,” said Step.

“I never thought it would be a quarter after five,” she said. “Or were you fired?”

“Not yet,” said Step. “Though I may be, after today.”

“Because you left at five?” asked DeAnne.

“The lawn is really overgrown,” said Step. “I never noticed that before.”

“Well, that’s because it wasn’t as overgrown yesterday as it is today. Why might they fire you after today?”

“Because I finally worked up the guts to go in and make Cowboy Bob give me a copy of that agreement I signed with him.”

“You mean you only just got it today? I assumed you had that weeks ago.”

“I asked for it right after San Francisco. Well, not right after, or somebody would think that I was doing exactly what I’m doing. But the Friday after.”

“And they didn’t send it to you till today?”

“They didn’t even send it to me today. I had to go get it. And not from Cowboy Bob, in fact, because he wasn’t in and his secretary was on lunch and so it was somebody else’s secretary who got it for me out of my personnel file and made a copy for me.”

“So you only have a copy?”

“They weren’t going to give me the original!” said Step. “Anyway, I have it, and it’s possible that Cowboy Bob doesn’t know that I have it even now.”

“Well, then you won’t get fired.”

“Except what if he finds out that I came and got it behind his back? Then he’ll be really suspicious.”

“Well, I’ve got to admit, it wouldn’t break my heart to have you home every day,” said DeAnne. “This is such a treat, Step.”

“Treat!” scoffed Step. “Hardly. It’s where I ought to be, and it makes me sick that you actually had to call me and practically make an appointment to get me home to talk to my own son. I’m living like one of those high-powered stockbroker types, like a Madison-Avenue live-for-the-job hyper-ambitious robot, except that I’m not getting the money they make. Where is Stevie, anyway?”

“He’s either outside in back, playing with—Jack and Scotty—or he’s in his room.”

Step nodded grimly at her mention of Stevie’s imaginary friends. And now lying to her … I’ve just been too cut off from the family. I’m practically a stranger here.

Stevie was in his room, lying on the top bunk, reading a book.

The conversation did not go well at all. Step leaned on the safety bar and said, “Your Mom tells me that your undersea project did really well.”

“No it didn’t,” said Stevie.

“She said it got the blue ribbon.”

“J.J. got the blue ribbon,” said Stevie.

“Well, the first-place ribbon, anyway, she didn’t actually say what color it was.”

“First place was blue,” said Stevie.

“Stevedore, I’ve got to tell you—your mom went to the school and checked. Dr. Mariner gave your underwater garden the first-place ribbon.”

“My project got mooshed,” said Stevie. “So it couldn’t get first place.”

“Son, Dr. Mariner judged the projects over that first weekend, before your project got ruined by the other kids. And she gave first place to you.”

“No she didn’t!” said Stevie, and now his voice was full of emotion. “She said that my project was nothing but a lump of clay and it didn’t deserve to be shown to anybody at all! And I got a C on it.”

“Dr. Mariner actually said that?” Step could not, did not believe it.

“Yes,” said Stevie.

“She actually stood there and told you that to your face?”

“No,” said Stevie. “She told Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Jones told us.”

“Us? What do you mean us?”

“Us,” said Stevie. “Me and the other kids.”

“The whole class?”

“Yeah.”

Step tried to imagine it—a teacher repeating such a remark in front of all the other students. It would be too cruel to say it even in private, but in front of everybody—unthinkable.

“Stevie, are you sure that you aren’t just—pretending this story?”

Stevie looked up into his father’s eyes. “No, Daddy” he said. “I don’t tell lies.”

“I know that you never have before we moved to Steuben, Stevie. But you’ve got to realize that this story is a little hard to believe. I mean, isn’t it possible you exaggerated it a little? Or maybe pretended?”

“I’m not pretending.”

“I mean, you pretend to have two friends, Jack and Scotty.”

Stevie looked at him silently. “I never said that,” he said.

“Not to me,” he said. “But you told your mom about things that you and Jack and Scotty did.”

Stevie said nothing.

“I don’t mind you pretending. Maybe that’s what you need to do in order to get through a hard time at school. But you can’t tell Mom and me pretend things as if they were true.”

“I don’t,” said Stevie.

“You mean you won’t from now on,” said Step.

“I mean I never do!” shouted Stevie.

His vehemence made Step pause. Was it possible that Stevie wasn’t lying about this? That in fact it happened the way he said? Then how to account for what the librarian told DeAnne? Impossible, it couldn’t have happened the way Stevie described. And yet he insisted on being believed, and it made Step remember the times when he was a kid and adults didn’t believe him because they were so sure they knew how things were. He remembered very clearly saying to his mother, “Well you weren’t there so how do you know?” And now here he was, contradicting Stevie’s account when in fact Step wasn’t there, so how did he know?

“Stevedore,” said Step, “have I been making a mistake here?”

“Yes,” said Stevie.

“I’ve got to tell you that if Mrs. Jones stood up in front of class and said such a terrible thing, even if it was true, then she should be fired from her job as a teacher.”

“Yes,” said Stevie. “I wish she was dead.”

Step was horrified. “Do you really mean that?”

“Yes,” said Stevie. “I think about it all the time. I look at her talking and I think of blood coming out of her forehead from a bullet. I think of her falling over dead in class and then I’d laugh and I’d sing a song. I’d sing ‘In the Leafy Treetops’ because it’s the happiest song I know.”

This was worse than Step could have imagined. No matter what was true about the project, it was certainly true that Stevie hated Mrs. Jones beyond all reason. It was awful to think of his sweet little boy—a child who had always been forgiving and generous—having such hatred in his heart for anyone. And these feelings must have been smoldering for some time now, yet he had said nothing.

“Stevie, why do you hate her so much? Is it because of the blue ribbon?”

“She never calls on me,” said Stevie.

“Sometimes it feels like that,” said Step. “It’s because you’re so smart, and she has to give other kids a chance to answer sometimes.”

“She always calls on the other kids.”

“Yes, that’s how it feels.”

Stevie looked at him with hot anger burning in his eyes. “I said she always calls on the other kids! That’s not how it feels, that’s how it is!”

Step again realized that he had just spoken like a typical adult, taking a child’s clear, plain language and twisting it to fit the adult’s preconceived notion of reality. But what if Stevie meant it? What if it was literally true?

“You mean she really never calls on you? Ever?”

“Never once,” said Stevie.

“Are you sure she sees you raising her hand?”

“Yes,” said Stevie. “She always sees me.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she says so.”

“She says that she sees you raising your hand, and yet she doesn’t call on you?”

“Yes,” said Stevie. And the tears in his eyes forced Step to believe that this must be true, or at least seem true to Stevie, because it was certain that Stevie believed it himself.

“Son, you have to understand, I’m not there so I can’t see it for myself. You have to help me. What does she say when she sees that you’ve raised your hand, but she doesn’t call on you?”

Stevie took a deep breath, and then, with his voice trembling, he said, “She says, ‘Of course Stephen Ball-lover Fletcher knows the answer. He knows everything.’ “

Step heard the words with a sickness in the pit of his stomach. It couldn’t be true. No one could ever talk to his son in a tone like that. But if they did … if they did, he’d … he’d do something. Something. “Son, does she really say your name that way? Ball-lover?”

“Yes.”

“Haven’t you told her it’s Boh-lee-var? That you’re named for one of the greatest liberators in history?”

“How can I, Dad, when she never calls on me?”

“No, I guess you couldn’t,” said Step. “And she really does make fun of you like that when you raise your hand?”

“I don’t raise my hand anymore,” said Stevie.

“No, I imagine not.” Step tried to think, tried to make sense of it all. “When did she start doing this?”

“The first day.”

“Your very first day in school?”

Stevie thought for a minute. “The first day she said I was really stupid because she kept saying things and I didn’t understand her and so I raised my hand and I asked her what she said, and then she said it again and I still didn’t understand her.”

Step thought back to what the problem had been that first day. “Because of her accent?”

Stevie nodded. “I got most of what she said, but it was like the first couple of words or a couple of words right in the middle, I wouldn’t understand them. And she said I was really stupid. And all the kids made fun of me.”

“Gee, why doesn’t that surprise me, if the teacher called you stupid,” said Step. “But then the next day you stayed in Dr. Mariner’s office and took those tests, and then you came back to class the next day. What happened then?”

Stevie started to cry. “She made me stand up and she said, she said … ” He couldn’t go on. He just lay there on his bed, sobbing.

Step reached over and gathered Stevie up in his arms and slid him off the top bunk, and then sat on the edge of Robbie’s bed and held Stevie on his lap, held his son tight against his chest while he cried. “There, there,” he said. “I know this is so hard for you. It must be so hard. Why didn’t you tell us any of this before?”

“I’m supposed to do my part,” said Stevie.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m supposed to do my job at school like you do your job at work,” said Stevie.

“Yes, Door Man, that’s true,” said Step. “But when things go bad at work, I don’t keep it a secret, I tell your mom about it. And when she has a hard day, she tells me.”

Stevie’s crying grew quieter, stopped. “I didn’t know that,” he said.

“Of course, how could you know?” said Step. “We talk that way to each other late at night, after you kids are asleep.”

“I didn’t know,” said Stevie.

“Can you tell me now what happened the day after you took those tests? You said that she made you stand up in front of the class, and then she did what? She said something?”

“She said that she was wrong to say what she said about me that time before. She said that I wasn’t stupid at all, I was very very very smart, I was the smartest boy in the whole world, and when I didn’t understand what people said it was because I was too smart to understand them because they were all really stupid compared to me, and so there was no point in anyone talking to me, ever, because I was way too smart to ever understand or care about a word they said.”

Unbelievable, and yet now Step believed it. There was too much detail in it—Stevie could not possibly have made it up. And it rang true. Maybe when Dr. Mariner called Mrs. Jones to talk to her about Stevie’s first day, Mrs. Jones assumed that Stevie had repeated to his parents what she said in class—though he hadn’t, not till now. And so she assumed that Dr. Mariner knew and was simply too nice to mention it openly. And so she assumed that Stevie had told on her, had gotten her in trouble with her boss, and so she decided to get even with him.

“Son, I think I believe you. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you before, but you have to understand, this is such a terrible thing for a teacher to do that it’s hard to believe that any teacher would ever do it. I mean, I had some strict teachers in my life, but never one who was downright mean like this. You should have told us this before. We thought everything was going along all right.”

“It is,” said Stevie. “Except for that.”

“So you have friends at school?”

“No,” said Stevie.

“Then it’s not all right, is it?”

“How can I have friends when Mrs. Jones said for nobody to talk to me?”

How far did this go? “You mean that she actually told the other kids never to speak to you?”

“A couple of them tried to at recess but she yelled at them and said, ‘Let’s not bother Mr. Fletcher, please. He’s thinking higher thoughts and we wouldn’t want to disturb him.’ “

Step held him closer. “Oh, Stevie, I didn’t know, I didn’t guess. How could I know this?”

“Jaleena talks to me sometimes,” said Stevie.

“Is she one of the girls?”

“She’s the black girl so Mrs. Jones doesn’t really care what she does. But she doesn’t talk to me much because it really is hard to understand her. She has to talk slow. And so she doesn’t talk to me much.”

So that was what Stevie’s two months in second grade in Steuben had been like. Isolation. Ridicule. Utter loneliness. And he hadn’t breathed a word of it at home. No sign of it except his reluctance to go to school.

“But you’re still doing your schoolwork,” said Step. “You are learning things.”

“We did most of it in my old school,” said Stevie.

“At least you had fun doing your project, didn’t you?”

Stevie nodded.

“Son, I’m going to have a talk with Mrs. Jones.”

He leapt from Step’s lap and stood on the floor in the middle of the room, his eyes wide with fear. “No!” he said. “Don’t talk to her! Please, Dad! You can’t! You can’t talk to her! Please!”

“Son, parents talk to teachers. That’s how the system is supposed to work.”

“You can’t, you just can’t do it. It’ll get worse if you do, she’ll be worse!”

“Stevie,” said Step. “I promise you this. I absolutely promise you. Things will get better after I talk to her. And if they don’t, I will keep you home from school.”

“Yes!” he cried. “Keep me home!”

“Only if things get worse after I talk to her,” said Step.

“No, keep me home now!”

“Stevie, I can’t just keep you home now. There’s a law that says that you have to go to school, and in North Carolina they’re very strict about it. If I keep you out of school, it could mean going to court. Or moving again.”

“Let’s move back to Indiana!”

“Son, I can’t afford to. If we moved, we’d have to move to Utah, to live in Grandma and Grandpa Brown’s house. I’d lose my job. I’m just telling you that I’ll do all those things if I have to, if talking to Mrs. Jones makes things worse for you. But I think when I talk to her things will get better, do you understand? The last month of school won’t be so bad. I promise you.”

“A whole month,” said Stevie, his voice sounding dead.

“Think of it this way” said Step. “Think of it as if you had been convicted of a crime you didn’t commit. You aren’t guilty, you didn’t do anything wrong, but the system worked wrong and you got convicted for it and now there’s nothing you can do except hang on and live through the last month of your sentence. And then you’ll get out and you’ll never have to see Mrs. Jones again. And next year you’ll be in the middle school and there’ll be a whole bunch of new kids from other schools—everybody will be new, not just you. Next year will be better. You just have to live through this year.”

“Don’t talk to Mrs. Jones,” said Stevie. “Please.”

“Trust me, Stevie,” said Step. “When I talk to Mrs. Jones, I will make things better.”

Clearly Stevie did not believe him. It frustrated Step, made him almost angry, that his son didn’t believe that he could do it. But Step had taken a good little while before he believed in Stevie, too. Turnabout is fair play.

When he left Stevie’s room a few minutes later, he found DeAnne leaning against the door of the room they shared, right across the hall. She looked grim as she opened the door and led him inside. She closed the door.

“You heard?” asked Step.

“I couldn’t stand not to listen,” she said. “I’ve been so worried.”

“Well, then, you know everything.” He laughed bitterly. “At least now we know why he was so desperate to believe Sister LeSueur’s flattery. If the kid’s been hammered at school, he’s got to be starved for praise.”

“Do you really believe his story?” asked DeAnne.

“I think so,” said Step. “Partly at least. I’ve got to.”

“But what about the librarian? Step, I know the librarian wasn’t lying. She’s the sweetest woman, she sounded like she really loved Stevie. She talked about how he comes in during recess every day and reads, and she talked about his project with such pride.” Then DeAnne stopped herself. “Listen to me. I’m standing here telling you that I would rather believe a woman I only met this morning than my own son.”

“We don’t believe something out of loyalty,” said Step. “We believe it because it sounds plausible to us. And Stevie’s story didn’t sound plausible until he told so much more of it that it began to fall into place. For instance, why should the librarian have been lying? Maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe Stevie’s project did win first place, and maybe Mrs. Jones simply lied to her class about it.”

“Oh, Step, she couldn’t possibly imagine that she could get away with it, could she?”

“Who knows?” said Step. “There are a lot of crazy people in the world.”

“But not teaching school.”

“Why not? I mean, all those crazy people in mental institutions, they weren’t born there. The day before they were in the asylum, they were outside the asylum, and a lot of them probably had jobs, and some of them were probably teachers. You don’t think teachers could go crazy? Heck, they probably have a higher percentage than most, when you think of what they go through. So maybe she’s just three months away from getting committed because she has come to hate children so deeply. Like a disease inside her. And this year she found a scapegoat, somebody she could pour out all that bile and venom onto, and it was Stevie.”

DeAnne shook her head.

“It’s possible,” said Step. “I’ve at least got to find out.”

“You made a promise to Stevie that you can’t keep,” said DeAnne.

“Oh, I’ll keep it,” said Step. “One way or another.”

“How can you stop her from punishing him even more as soon as you’re through talking to her?”

“If necessary I’ll go to class every day.”

“She’d never permit that. The school would never permit it.”

“A parent, observing his child’s class?”

“You’d lose your job.”

“I’ll quit the job!” said Step, and to his own surprise he was talking loudly, angrily. He brought his voice back down, spoke quietly, intensely. “I will quit the job. I hate the job. The job is keeping me from being a decent father to my children. The job is killing me and my family. Screw the job.”

DeAnne visibly recoiled from him. “Step, please,” she said.

It made him irrationally angry, to have her get upset at him for his language when he was talking about something that actually mattered. “Oh, don’t you like the way I said it? The word screw is too rough for you? It’s a euphemism, DeAnne. You can’t get mad at me for using a euphemism! I mean, I could have said—”

“I’m not mad at you for saying screw, you dunce! I’m not mad at you at all, and don’t be mad at me either, I can’t stand it!” She burst into tears. “You were about to say the f-word! You were about to say that to your own wife.”

“What is this about?” asked Step. “You were mad at me, I know you well enough to know what it looks like, you were mad at me for saying screw and—”

“So I was! For one stupid second! And then I realized it was stupid and I’m sorry, I can’t help getting some look on my face for one split second, I don’t deserve to have you swearing at me!”

“What are we doing?” said Step. “Why are we fighting?”

“Because our son has been tormented in school and we didn’t do anything to help him—”

“How could we? He didn’t tell us—”

“And we’re both so angry we want to beat somebody up and the only person within easy reach is each other.” DeAnne stopped talking for a moment. Then, to Step’s surprise, she laughed. Laughed and lowered herself to the edge of the bed.

“OK, share the joke with the rest of us in this room,” said Step.

“I was just thinking—this is so stupid, it isn’t even funny … ” She wiped tears away from her eyes.

“I know, I can see how funny it isn’t,” said Step.

“I just thought, when I said we’re so mad and the only person we can reach is each other, I thought, ‘Let’s go beat up Sister LeSueur.’ “

She was right. It wasn’t really funny, and yet Step had to sit down beside her on the bed and laugh and laugh.

Step didn’t actually ask for permission to leave work in the middle of the day. He just leaned his head into Dicky’s office and said, “I’m taking lunch at two-thirty this afternoon because I have to go meet with my son’s teacher after school.”

“Your wife can’t do that?” asked Dicky.

“Dicky,” said Step, “it’s my lunch hour, and I’m taking it at two-thirty. I’m only telling you because I want you to know where I’m going to be during that time period. I wasn’t asking permission.

Dicky made no argument, just shrugged and gave a sort of half smile that made Step say to himself, You’re too sensitive, too prickly Step. Dicky didn’t mean anything by what he said, and you jumped all over him.

Then, at twenty after two, as Step was sliding his microcassette recorder into his right pants pocket just prior to leaving, Dicky buzzed him on the phone. “Come by my office, please,” he said.

“I’m on my way out,” said Step. “To lunch.”

“On your way, then, please stop by my office.”

Step felt a sick dread in the pit of his stomach. Is he firing me? Because I spoke rudely to him? Impossible. Or maybe Ray Keene found out that I snuck a copy of my employment agreement, and so he thinks I’m looking for another job and so I’m being sacked because of that.

Instead, Dicky was all smiles when Step came into his office. There was another man there, a tall, thin fellow with a dark complexion and a sepulchral face that would have been rather frightening if he hadn’t been smiling so broadly. In fact, his head was so narrow and his smile so wide that it looked for a moment as if he really were, literally, grinning from ear to ear. A mouth like a Muppet, though Step.

“Meet Damien Weinreiter,” said Dicky. “We’re interviewing him for that programming position we have open.”

“Oh? I didn’t know we were looking for a programmer.” Step never knew when they were hiring or firing people—he wasn’t exactly part of the personnel process.

“Oh, yes, and I thought we couldn’t very well have him come through without you having a chance to interview him.”

Interview him! When Step had to get to Stevie’s school?

Of course, he realized. This was how Dicky was getting back at him for speaking so sharply to him earlier today. Trying to put him into a position where he had to stay and miss that appointment. And the worst thing was that it was going to work. There was no gracious way that Step could tell Dicky to sit on his thumb, Step was taking his lunch now.

“Dicky, why me? I write manuals.”

“Oh, Step, don’t be so modest. You’re not just our manual writer.”

I knew it! thought Step. He knew about my secret assignment all along.

Dicky went on. “You’re also the programmer of Hacker Snack. So of course Damien wants to get a chance to meet you.”

“Great game,” said Damien. “You’re the best.”

Yeah, right, thought Step. And you want a job here and you have the delusion, you poor thing, that sucking up to me will help you get it. Dicky here has probably already decided that you’re not going to get an offer, and he’s just using you to screw up my family life.

Well, Dicky, it isn’t going to work.

Step did as Dicky asked—came in and sat down while the interview continued. But he knew Dicky had no intention of actually letting Step take part in the conversation. This was a humiliation game, so Dicky was going to make Step sit there in virtual silence while he conducted an interview in which Step was obviously not needed for anything.

So Step opened his attache case, took out a yellow notepad, and wrote a brief note to Dicky.

Dear Dicky,

I’m putting this on a note so I don’t embarrass you in front of your interview. I’m going to meet with my son’s teacher, as I told you I would. And I can’t wait to be there at the meeting when you tell Ray Keene that you are now including me in the hiring process for programmers. With such a broadening of my responsibilities, I’m sure I’ll get a raise!

Affectionately yours,

Step

He stood up, wordlessly put the note on Dicky’s desk, and left, closing the door behind him.

On the way to the school, Step tried to calm himself down. His anger at Dicky would do no good if it made him approach Mrs. Jones carelessly. He had to handle this exactly right with her, or he would do more harm than good. Being angry wouldn’t help.

DeAnne had let him take the car today. He had been trying to catch more rides with other employees more often lately, because he knew how trapped she felt, being home all day without a car. Somehow he knew they had to come up with a second car—especially after the baby was born this summer. No way could he leave her home with a newborn without transportation. And yet it really didn’t work out well for him to ride with others. He always ended up keeping them late. Or coming home with Gallowglass, and he hated bringing Gallowglass to his home. He didn’t even want Glass knowing where he lived, though of course it was far too late for that. And Glass still asked him, every time, when Step was going to call on him to babysit. No, Step needed a car and DeAnne needed a car and there was no way they could scrape together the money right now even to buy a junker, let alone something dependable.

He pulled up in front of the school as the last buses were pulling out. Too late he remembered that DeAnne had told him that he had to take Fargo Road so he could park in that hidden lot up on the hill. Oh, well, thought Step. What are they going to do, shoot me? So he pulled in behind the last bus and followed it around the turnaround and pulled into a visitor parking place.

Dr. Mariner was at the door as he approached the school. “I’ll bet you didn’t know that parents aren’t supposed to use the turnaround after school,” she said.

“Actually, I did,” said Step, “but I forgot until I was here and then I saw the last bus was leaving so I figured it wouldn’t do any harm.”

“Why, in fact, I think you’re right. No harm done at all. Can I help you with something?”

“I hope so, ma’am. I’m Step Fletcher, and I’m here to—”

“Stevie Fletcher’s father?”

“Yes,” said Step, “I am.”

“Oh, what a remarkable young man you have! And your wife is such a sweetie. And I think you have a little boy who’s going to be in our kindergarten next year.”

“Yes, that’s Robbie.”

“Well, I can hardly wait, though of course I’ll be sad to see Stevie leave us. He’s the sweetest boy, and so smart. Why, Mrs. Jones is always telling me how well he does in class, and of course you already know how he did with his second-grade project.”

“I did hear something about it,” said Step. He wanted her to tell him, in part because he didn’t know which story was going to be true.

“Hear something about it indeed,” said Dr. Mariner. “First-place winner, and you ‘heard something about it.’ We don’t get many students of his caliber. You must know that.”

“Oh, yes,” said Step. “But I’m glad to know you know it.”

“Well, of course,” said Dr. Mariner. “But I mustn’t keep you—I’m sure you came to have a consultation with Mrs. Jones, and we don’t want her to be kept waiting.”

“Actually, she doesn’t know I’m coming.”

“Oh, well, all the more reason to hurry—you want to get there before she goes home. My I hope she hasn’t already left! Do you know where her classroom is?”

“Actually, no,” said Step.

“Then let me take you.”

“No, just tell me, I don’t want to inconvenience … ”

But she was already five steps ahead of him down the corridor.

Mrs. Jones was still there, though she was already shrugging on her coat and if Step had waited to get directions instead of having a guide, he probably would have missed her. So he thanked Dr. Mariner profusely, even as he wondered whether this interview was even necessary. Clearly the librarian’s version of reality had been the true one.

“Why Mr. Fletcher,” said Mrs. Jones, after Dr. Mariner had left. “We don’t have many fathers come to school. If only you had made an appointment, I could have stayed longer.”

“Perhaps this won’t take long,” said Step. “I mostly came to talk to you about Stevie’s project.”

“His project?” she asked.

“His second-grade project. The—environment thing. He did an underwater scene. Out of clay.”

“Oh, of course, yes. That was so creative.”

His heart sank. He should be relieved, of course, to know that Mrs. Jones had not given him a C. But it meant Stevie had lied.

No, he told himself. Don’t give up on Stevie so easily.

He reached into his pocket and switched on the microcassette recorder. He had already tested it in the pit at work. It picked up very well through the denim of his jeans.

“I wondered if you could tell me, Mrs. Jones. What grade did you give Stevie for that project?”

“Oh, I can hardly remember, that was so long ago.”

“A week ago,” said Step.

“Oh, here it is.” She had her thumb down on the gradebook, but Step noticed that she glanced toward the door. Why? To see if Dr. Mariner was still there? “My,” she said. “I see here that he got a C.”

“Ah,” said Step. He felt himself to be on fire inside. Stevie had told the truth. And so had the librarian. The project won first place, and yet somehow, somehow it got a C.

“Yes, that’s it,” said Mrs. Jones. “Definitely a C.”

“Well, now,” said Step. “That’s hard to understand.”

“Not really,” said Mrs. Jones. “There’s nothing wrong with a C. It means average.”

Step had already scanned down all the other grades in the column of her gradebook where Stevie’s C was marked. “It’s hardly average,” said Step, “when everybody else got A’s and B’s.”

“Now, Mr. Fletcher. We don’t let parents look at other children’s grades, and you clearly were peeking at the wrong column of my gradebook.”

But Step was looking around the classroom, not at her. “I was hoping,” he said, “to see what an A project looked like, if Stevie’s was only worth a C. It would help us as his parents, you see, to know what the standard is that he must meet, so we could help him do better on future projects.”

There was the thing he was looking for. A blue ribbon, pinned to a bulletin board. Nothing written on it or by it. Just a blue ribbon.

“Oh, the projects have all been returned,” said Mrs. Jones. “Stevie chose to throw his away, I’m afraid, but it was just a mass of clay by then. It was a shame what those ill-mannered children did to his project, but then, we really didn’t have any practice at dealing with sculpture. If Stevie had brought a poster like everyone else, it wouldn’t have happened.”

Step reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the folded-up assignment sheet DeAnne had armed him with. “I’ve looked and looked on this assignment sheet you sent home, and it says nothing about a poster. It just says, ‘A depiction.’ “

“Well, you see,” said Mrs. Jones, “that means a poster.”

Step looked back at the blue ribbon. “Ah,” he said. “And how was I supposed to know that? I mean, the Mona Lisa is a depiction, isn’t it? And yet it isn’t a poster. And wouldn’t you call Michelangelo’s David a depiction?”

“All the other parents managed to figure out that a poster was what was intended,” said Mrs. Jones. Her tone was getting quite frosty now.

“I see,” said Step. “Perhaps they knew the local custom. But we’re new here, and we did not.”

“Obviously,” said Mrs. Jones.

“But surely you’re not telling me that Stevie’s project was given a C because it wasn’t a poster, are you?” asked Step.

“Not at all. As I said—it was creative.”

“Then I still need your help to figure out what Stevie did wrong.”

“And I keep telling you, Mr. Fletcher. You don’t have to do something wrong to get a C. That signifies average. It was an average project.”

Short of calling her a liar right now, there wasn’t much Step could say to that, not directly. It must be time to talk about the ribbon. “Well, Mrs. Jones, it makes me wonder why Dr. Mariner would give the first-place ribbon to an average project.”

“Dr. Mariner has her judgment, and I have mine,” said Mrs. Jones.

Yes, thought Step. She is definitely sounding quite cold. “Oh, of course,” said Step. “But you see, you didn’t give your grades until after Dr. Mariner had made her decision, did you?”

“My judgment was completely independent.”

“But wouldn’t you say, Mrs. Jones, that for you to give the lowest grade in the class to the very project that won first place, you must surely have found something wrong with it?”

He faced her. Her expression was hard, but she was holding her hands together in front of her very tightly. Oh, yes, she’s afraid. She’s very much afraid. Because everything that Stevie told me was true.

“Very well, Mr. Fletcher,” she said, ending the silence at last. “I will tell you what was wrong with Stevie’s project. It was the written portion of the project, the report. The other children turned in reports of five or six pages. Stevie’s report was only two pages.”

With great difficulty, Step controlled his rage. “Stevie’s paper was typed. Was anyone else’s paper typed?”

“That hardly matters,” she said.

“They were all written in big letters, weren’t they—like these papers on the board. Right?”

“Of course. This is the second grade, Mr. Fletcher.”

“My rough count here gives me … let’s see … about fifty or sixty words per page, handwritten. Is that right?”

“Oh, I suppose.”

“But Stevie’s paper was single-spaced, and that means he got between four and five hundred words to a page. So each of his pages was about the same amount of content as—”

“A page is a page!” said Mrs. Jones.

“And the assignment sheet,” said Step, “said nothing about a minimum number of pages.”

“Everyone else managed to figure out that four or five pages were required! And they didn’t have their mothers type it for them—they used their own handwriting.”

“The assignment sheet didn’t say anything about penmanship being part of the assignment,” said Step. “So naturally Stevie thought he should do the same thing I did with my dissertation. He went to my computer, turned it on, brought up WordStar, and typed every letter of every word himself. Then he printed it out and stapled it—himself.”

“That was another problem,” said Mrs. Jones. “The other children’s reports all had very nice plastic covers, and your son’s report was nothing but two sheets of paper with a staple. It showed a lack of respect.”

“The assignment sheet didn’t mention a cover,” said Step. “If it had, there would have been a cover. But in graduate school, you see, I turned in my papers with a staple in the corner. So of course Stevie thought that that was the grown-up way to do it. And in fact, Mrs. Jones, it is, isn’t it? Surely you’re not telling me that the difference between an A and a C is a twenty-nine-cent cover?”

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Jones. “It’s just part of the difference.”

“Don’t you think that computer literacy and college-level presentation should count for him rather than against him?”

“Other children don’t live in wealthy homes with computers in them, Mr. Fletcher. Other children don’t have fathers who went to college. I’m hardly going to give one child an advantage over others because of money.”

“I’m not rich, Mrs. Jones. I work with computers for a living. I have a computer at home the way car salesmen sometimes bring new cars home.” Watch it, Step. You’re letting her sidetrack you. “What matters is that Stevie’s paper was probably ten times as long as any of the other children’s papers. He did all the work himself, and he did not violate the assignment sheet in any way. Now, why did the first-place project get a C in your class?”

“I don’t have to justify my grades to you or anyone else!” said Mrs. Jones.

“Yes,” said Step mildly. “In fact you do. You can justify it to me, today, or you can justify it before the school board.”

“Are you threatening me?” asked Mrs. Jones.

Step almost brought out the tape recorder then, to confront her with it. But he knew that the moment she saw it, she would say nothing more—and there was more that he needed her to say.

“No, Mrs. Jones. I wouldn’t dream of it. If my son earned a C, then he earned a C. I’m not trying to get you to change the grade. I just want you to help me understand it.”

“This discussion has gone on long enough. It isn’t right for you to be here alone in this room with me anyway, Mr. Fletcher.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Step. “Let’s go get Dr. Mariner to join in this conversation with us. I haven’t mentioned Stevie’s C to her yet, but I’m sure she’ll want to know the reason for that grade as much as I do.”

Mrs. Jones glared at him, then sat down at her desk and began rummaging through a file drawer. She came out with Stevie’s paper. Sure enough, there was a big red C at the top.

And not another mark.

“I guess all the flaws in the paper are on the second page,” said Step.

“What?” she said.

“There aren’t any marks on the first page, so the errors must all be on the second page. I’d like to see them.”

She handed him the paper.

He opened it. There was only one red mark on the second page. Mrs. Jones had circled the word octopuses and in the margin had written octopi.

“Oh, but you must be making a little joke here,” said Step.

“A joke?”

“Look,” he said, showing her the paper. “You must be kidding, right?”

“I’m not kidding when I correct errors on my students’ papers.”

“But Mrs. Jones, surely you know that the plural of octopus is either octopus, with nothing added, or octopuses.”

“I think not,” said Mrs. Jones.

“Think again, Mrs. Jones.”

She must have realized that she was not on firm ground here. “Perhaps octopuses is an alternate plural, but I’m sure that octopi is the preferred.”

“No, Mrs. Jones. If you had looked it up, you would have discovered that octopi is not the preferred spelling. It is not a spelling at all. The word does not exist, except in the mouths of those who are pretending to be educated but in fact are not. This is because the us ending of octopus is not a Latin nominative singular ending, which would form its plural by changing to the letter i. Instead, the syllable pus in octopus is the Greek word for ‘foot.’ And it forms its plural the Greek way. Therefore octopoda, not octopi. Never octopi.”

“Well, then, octopoda. Your son’s paper said octopuses.”

“I know,” said Step. “When he asked me the correct plural, I told him octopoda. But then he was still uncertain, because my son doesn’t think he knows something until he knows it, and so he looked it up. And to my surprise, octopoda is only used when referring to more than one species of octopus, rather than when referring to more than one actual octopus. What Stevie put in his paper is in fact the preferred dictionary usage. Which you would have known, too, if you had looked it up.”

“So I’m human, Mr. Fletcher. I made a mistake.”

“As did I, Mrs. Jones, as did I. But the fact remains that the only red mark on this C paper is in a place where you have taken a correct plural and replaced it with an incorrect one. Isn’t that right?”

“If you say so,” said Mrs. Jones.

“So I’m still baffled,” said Step. “How can I possibly help Stevie do better next time? You haven’t really pointed out a single thing wrong with his paper—oh, except that he didn’t put a plastic cover on it.”

“There won’t be a next time,” said Mrs. Jones. “Your son will never have to do another second grade project as long as he lives. So it doesn’t matter, and therefore you’re wasting my time as well as your own. Good afternoon, Mr. Fletcher!”

“One more question, Mrs. Jones.”

“No,” she said. “I have to go home, right now.”

“It’s just one more question,” said Step, mildly. If she didn’t stop, however, the tape recorder would definitely come out. She would not be going home anytime soon.

“Very well, what!”

“Who is going to take that ribbon home?”

Mrs. Jones looked at the ribbon that Step was pointing to.

“That is the first place ribbon for Stevie’s project, isn’t it?”

“It might be,” said Mrs. Jones.

“Then who will take it home?”

“If it’s the particular ribbon you’re referring to, then of course Stevie will take it home at the end of the school year.”

“Ah,” said Step. “Then what in the world are you going to tell J.J.?”

She blanched.

Stevie’s story was completely vindicated now.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Why, I mean that Stevie’s whole class is under the impression that J.J. received that award.”

“That’s impossible,” said Mrs. Jones.

“Is it? Let’s call J.J.‘s parents and see,” said Step.

“I certainly will not bother my children’s parents over such a thing.”

“Then I’ll go to Dr. Mariner’s office right now and she and I will place that phone call together,” said Step. “You won’t mind, will you?”

Mrs. Jones was barely holding herself together now, Step could see that. She was wringing her hands and he could see that she was trembling. “It’s possible that someone might have gotten a false impression. That perhaps someone made a mistake and … ”

No, thought Step. You aren’t going to weasel out of this. You’re going to say it outright. “You stood in front of the class and announced that J.J. won the prize, didn’t you?” he asked.

“Oh, now, don’t be silly,” she said.

“What if lawyers representing the school board came to your students and asked them how they got the idea that J.J. won the ribbon? What would they say?” Step knew that of course such a thing would never happen, but he figured that Mrs. Jones was not going to be confident of that, not in the state she was in right now.

“I may have said something that gave that impression,” said Mrs. Jones.

“May have, or did?”

She looked toward the window, weaving and unweaving her fingers. “I thought that Dr. Mariner had judged very hastily, and so she missed the superior merits of J.J.‘s project.”

“Ah,” said Step.

“If you want,” said Mrs. Jones, “I will change Stevie’s grade. And of course I will correct the mistake about the ribbon.”

Yes, I’m sure you will, thought Step. And then you’ll torment and ridicule Stevie even more mercilessly every day until school ends. “No,” said Step. “I don’t want you to change Stevie’s grade. In fact, I insist that you not change it. I want it there on the books, just as it is now.”

Mrs. Jones looked at him narrowly. “Then what is all this about? Just the ribbon? Very well.”

“The ribbon—yes, that would be nice. You can tell the students that there was a mistake and in fact the ribbon belongs to Stevie.”

“Very well, I will do that tomorrow.”

“But that’s not all,” said Step.

“I think it is,” said Mrs. Jones. “Unless you changed your mind about the grade.”

Step pulled the tape recorder from his pocket, pressed rewind for a few moments, and played it back. It was fuzzy, but it was clear. “ … the superior merits of J.J.‘s project.” Then Step pushed stop.

Her face turned white, and it occurred to Step that perhaps he had overplayed this moment—it wouldn’t be very good for anybody if the woman fainted right now.

But she didn’t faint. And when she did speak, her voice was stronger than he expected. “That’s illegal,” she said. “To bug a conversation like that.”

“On the contrary,” said Step. “It’s only inadmissible when it was obtained by a government employee without a warrant. I’m not a cop. I’m just a man who carries around a tape recorder. Besides, I don’t intend to use this in court. I only intend to play it for Dr. Mariner and every member of the school board as I put an end to your career.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“The real question is, why have you been doing all the things you’ve been doing to Stevie?”

“I haven’t been doing anything to him,” she said defiantly. “Go ahead and use that tape.”

“All right,” said Step. He put it back in his pocket and walked around her, through the door, and down the corridor toward Dr. Mariner’s office. With each step he became more uncertain. Maybe she really could talk her way out of this. Maybe she understood the system here better than he did, and even this tape recording would end up being worthless. Maybe he had broken his promise to Stevie, that he wouldn’t make things worse.

“Mr. Fletcher!” she said. Her voice echoed down the empty corridor.

“Yes?” he said, not turning around.

“There was one more thing that I forgot to show you about Stevie’s work.”

He turned around and headed back down the hall.

When they were alone again in the room, she looked tired, defeated. “I didn’t mean anything by it,” she said. “Is that thing off now?”

He pulled out the recorder, took out the tape, and put them back in different pockets.

“I didn’t mean anything. I just—it’s very hard being a teacher and having parents come down on you all the time. And so when Dr. Mariner called me that night—at home—because Stevie was upset and you were upset, when all I did was make a foolish little joke—I mean, everything I said, he made me say it over and over and over, and it was disrupting the class. So I made a joke—”

“Calling him stupid.”

“A joke,” she insisted. “And then he tells his parents and you call Dr. Mariner—well I was just sick of it, and when he came back to class I was just so angry the moment I saw him, and so I said things that I shouldn’t have said and I’m sorry.”

“But you’ve kept on doing it,” said Step.

She started to cry. “I know it,” she said. “And I felt bad about it, but I just couldn’t seem to stop, I just … couldn’t seem to stop. And then he stopped raising his hand, and so … I thought it was over.”

“If you thought it was over, why didn’t you let him have the blue ribbon?” said Step. “Why didn’t you let him have the A on his project?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was so small and high, like a little girl’s voice. It made Step feel like a bully, like a tyrant, coming in here and pushing this woman around until she cried.

Then he remembered how Stevie had cried. And how this woman had tormented him, and even if she talked now about how she felt bad about it and tried to stop, the fact was that she could have stopped at any time and she did not. She even lied about something as utterly stupid as the ribbon awarded by the principal. Surely she must have realized, in some rational part of her mind, that this could not possibly go undiscovered. That this was far too public, too open for her ever to get away with it.

She wanted to be caught, Step realized. The most obvious psychological insight of them all. Maybe because she hates teaching. Or she hates the children. She doesn’t want to teach anymore, and yet she can’t stop because that’s how she makes her living. So she gathered up all her hatred and poured it out on my son, again and again and yet he continued to take it; nothing happened, so she pushed harder and harder, and still Stevie took it, absorbed it all; and then finally she pushed so hard that she succeeded. Stevie broke. Stevie wept out the truth to his father, and now I have finally come to give her what she wanted all along.

“There’s a month left in school,” said Step. “From now on if Stevie raises his hand, I want you to call on him. Not every time, but as often as you’d call on any other bright kid. Do you understand me? I want you to treat him normally. If he gives the right answer, you don’t say anything snide to him, and if he gives the wrong answer, you correct him kindly. Do you understand?”

She nodded, dabbing at her eyes.

“If a kid talks to him, then you let the friendship develop. You do nothing to interfere. I don’t mean you’re to order kids to be friends with him, because then they’d hate him even more. I want you treat my son fairly and normally. Can you do that?”

Again she nodded.

“Yes, I think you can,” said Step. “It’s whether you will. Just keep this in mind. If you get the urge to say something spiteful or cruel to Stevie, or for that matter to any of your students, just remember that this tape exists. Along with however many copies I feel like making. For the rest of your life, if another child suffers anything like what Stevie has been through, you can expect to hear this tape again. I’ll be watching.”

“You aren’t a Christian, then!” she said. “Christians believe in forgiveness!”

“I’m a Christian who believes in repentance before forgiveness. If you never again mistreat a child, then you have nothing to fear from me. This tape will never surface. All you have to do is control your hate. If you can’t do that, Mrs. Jones, then you shouldn’t be a teacher.”

“It’s my life!” she said.

“No,” said Step. “The woman on this tape is not a teacher, Mrs. Jones. The woman on this tape is a Nazi.”

She buried her face in her hands. Step remembered Stevie weeping the night before. More than ever before in his life, he found himself longing to hurt someone, to tear at her. It frightened him to feel such a hunger for violence. Nor had he felt it so strongly until she was helpless and weeping. It was a terrible thing to know about himself, that he could feel such a lust to punish a submissive enemy.

He turned and fled from the man he had found in that room.

In moments the rage was gone, replaced by satisfaction. He had fulfilled his promise to Stevie. As he walked down the corridor toward the front door, it occurred to him that he had confronted evil and subdued it. The mythic theme of half the movies and TV shows and novels and of a good deal of history as well. Of course, it had been too clean and simple for the movies. She should have had a gun in her purse, the one that Mr. Jones had bought for her to defend herself. She should have taken that gun out of her purse and followed him and shot him and taken the tape, right now, before he could make copies of it.

What if she did have a gun? What if she was going to follow him?

It was an absurd thought, a childish sort of thought, and yet he walked faster. She won’t shoot me in the corridor here, he thought, because there are still other teachers in the building, and the custodial staff—witnesses. No, she’ll do it in the parking lot, around the corner, where no one can see and she can drive away. He hurried, almost ran out the door and around the corner to his car. He fumbled with his keys, dropped them. Picked them up, looked around, and yes, there she was, coming out the door of the school. He unlocked the door of his car and opened the door and then looked up and saw that she was heading past him, that in fact she didn’t even see him, or at least didn’t give any sign that she saw him. She got into her car, a sad-looking little Pinto, and backed out of her parking place.

A Pinto. She drives a Pinto. She’s a teacher, for heaven’s sake, making a pathetic salary and getting no respect from anyone, putting up with people’s miserable children all these years and all the flak from stupid angry parents yelling at her over nothing, when she was trying to do her best, and here he was, the ultimate angry parent, the parent from hell, destroying her, when all she ever wanted to do was teach. What am I, he thought, to set myself up as an angry god, deciding who needs to be punished, who deserves to have a career and who doesn’t.

Then he remembered Stevie crying, and he thought, some things, some people, simply have to be stopped. It doesn’t mean that the person who stops them is noble or great or some kind of hero. I’m no hero. But maybe I’ve stopped her. Maybe now she won’t end up doing something even worse to some other kid, driving him to suicide maybe. And who’s to say she hasn’t done this before? Maybe she’s always had a goat in all her classes, some poor kid who becomes the target of her vicious abuse, only this time she just happened to pick the wrong kid. This time she picked the kid who would put an end to it.

I shouldn’t feel proud of this, thought Step. But I also shouldn’t feel ashamed. I should just feel glad that it’s over. If it’s over.

She drove away.

He got into his car, started it, pulled out, and headed home.

The song on the radio was the one by Hall and Oates that had been a big hit back in January when Step came to Steuben for interviews. “Maneater.” That’s what I saved Stevie from, a maneater. Mrs. Jaws. Doing all she could to chew up this child and spit him out. So why don’t I feel better?

Because I’m not better. I just chewed her up and spit her out, and I don’t like how it feels. I don’t like being cruel. I don’t have the stomach for it.

And yet I do, don’t I, because I did it. Maybe that’s a good thing and maybe it’s not.

When he pulled into the driveway, he noticed that something was different about the lawn. Then he turned the engine off, and the radio stopped, and he heard the lawnmower. DeAnne was mowing the lawn.

But it wasn’t DeAnne. When he got out of the car and went around to the back yard, there was an old man mowing the grass. One of the neighbors?

Suddenly DeAnne was beside him, slipping her arm around his waist. “How did it go?” she asked.

“Who’s he?” he asked.

“Oh, he’s Bappy. You know, I told you about him, the landlord’s father. I called him to ask if he knew any neighbor kids who mowed lawns, and he said he’d do it.”

“I can mow our lawn,” said Step. “We can’t afford to pay a grown man.”

“When are you going to mow it, Step?” she asked. “You don’t have time. And if you did have time the kids and I would much rather have you spend that time with us than mowing the stupid lawn. And besides, he’s doing it for free. He says that living at the condo he never gets an excuse to get outside and have some exercise.”

Step looked at Bappy. He waved. DeAnne waved back, and so did Step, halfheartedly.

“So come inside and tell me how it went.”

As they headed for the house, he said, “She agreed to everything I said. The harassment stops. The last month at school should be better.”

“But will she actually do it?” asked DeAnne.

“Oh, yes,” said Step. “I think she will.”

“Well tell me what you said, and what did she say? Was it as bad as Stevie said?”

“Every word that Stevie said to us was true,” said Step.

“How could she? How could anyone?”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Step. “Tonight, I’ll make sure you hear every word. Word for word.”

“What, you memorized it?”

He pulled the tape recorder and the tape out of his pockets. She looked from one to the other and then whooped once with laughter and then got a frown on her forehead. “You did have the tape in the recorder, I hope!”

“You’ll hear it all, Fish Lady,” said Step. “The Junk Man really got the junk this time.”

She threw her arms around him, as far as they would go, with her belly so large and solid in front of her. And she kissed him. “Come on inside,” she said. “Stevie’s been so nervous, you need to tell him everything went well. This is great, you having the afternoon off work like this.”

“What am I doing?” said Step. “I can’t believe that I even came home. I’m on my lunch hour. I’ve got to go back.”

“Oh, no!” she said. “It’s four o’clock, there’s only an hour left anyway.”

“Yes, but Dicky and I had a run-in about me leaving, so I’ve got to show my face there, but I’ll tell you what, I’ll get home as early as I can, all right? Tell Stevie it went fine, tell him that his teacher will never pick on him again—and if she gives even one hint of it tomorrow, I’ll get her fired, and I can do it.”

DeAnne laughed. “I’ll bet you can.”

“And thanks for getting the lawn mowed,” he said.

“I’ll pass it along to Bappy.”

But he couldn’t go. “Aw, Fish Lady” he said, in his mock-sorry voice, “I gotta tell him myself.”

“Oh, of course, you goof,” said DeAnne. “He’s in the family room playing computer games.”

Step leaned through the doorway from the kitchen to the family room. Stevie was sitting at the Atari, playing some game with a pirate ship, talking at the screen. “Come on, Scotty!” Stevie said.

“Stevie,” said Step. “I’ve got to go back to work, but I wanted to tell you.”

Stevie pushed the reset button on the computer, and the screen went blank and then blue.

“You didn’t have to turn it off,” said Step. “I was just telling you, everything went fine with Mrs. Jones. The tough days are behind you, I promise you.”

Stevie nodded—glumly. Well, of course, Step thought. Even if I’m right, he knows that getting the teacher off his case won’t instantly give him a whole bunch of friends at school. But at least maybe some of them will talk to him.

Step kissed DeAnne again, got back in the car, and headed back to work. When he got there, he saw three notes on his desk. All three were messages from Ray Keene. They all said the same thing: Ray called. Wants to know where you are.

Dicky was so low, so petty, so spiteful that after months of trying to make sure that Step never got a chance to talk to Ray Keene directly, he got Ray to attempt direct contact when he knew Step was gone in the middle of the afternoon.

Step immediately picked up the phone and punched in Ray’s extension. As he had hoped, it was Ray’s secretary who answered. “Hi,” he said. “I’m returning Ray’s call.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Ray’s in a meeting right now,” said the secretary.

“Isn’t that the way it goes?” said Step. “I’ll bet the meeting is with Dicky, isn’t it?”

“Well, Dicky’s one of the guys in there, anyway,” she said.

“Isn’t that the silliest thing?” said Step. “Ray was trying to call me, and yet Dicky was with him, and Dicky knew that I had taken a late lunch today so I could meet with my son’s teacher. You’d think Dicky would have told Ray so Ray wouldn’t waste his time trying to reach me.”

“Oh, Dicky probably just forgot,” said the secretary.

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Step. “Would you tell Ray that I’m sorry he called me during my late lunch today? And give Dicky a poke in the ribs for me, forgetting to tell Ray where I was like that!”

“I sure will,” said the secretary. “Isn’t that just the way things go?”

“Ain’t it the truth,” said Step, and hung up.

Maybe the scene would play right and maybe it wouldn’t, thought Step, but at least Dicky might have an embarrassing moment or two, if the secretary actually relayed the message even halfway accurately, and if Ray just happened to be standing there when she did.

Because he hadn’t been there for much of the afternoon, Step wasn’t deeply involved with any projects and so he was able to get away by five-thirty. When he walked past the pit on his way to the door, Glass called to him. “Hey, Step!”

“Hey, Glass,” said Step. He came a little way into the room. There were several programmers there, but they were goofing around, not working—he knew that, because he recognized the games that were on the screens, and none of them were published by Eight Bits Inc. They did that sometimes, staying after work and fooling around with other companies’ games. They called it “industrial espionage” but the truth was that they loved computer games, and here were all these machines and all this software lying around, and most of them didn’t have families anyway except maybe parents, and so why the hell not stay late and play?

“Heading for home?” asked Glass.

“Wish I had time to play,” said Step. “But yeah, I’m going home.”

“Ray was looking for you,” said Glass.

“I got the messages. I was taking a late lunch.”

“It sounded important.”

“Well, when. I got back, I called in and so Ray knew that I was back and he didn’t call again, so it can’t have been too important.”

Glass rolled his eyes. “Do you know what the term ‘deep shit’ means?”

“Glass,” said Step, “Dicky knew where I was. Dicky didn’t like where I was, but it was my lunch hour, and I wasn’t cutting out on work. So if this is even a halfway rational universe, I’m not in deep shit.”

“I didn’t say you were in it,” said Glass, grinning. “I just asked if you knew what it meant.”

Step faked slapping him across the face. “Why I oughta … ”

“Oughta what?”

“Never mind, you’re too young,” said Step. “In fact, I’m too young. I don’t get it myself. Seeya tomorrow, humans. Seeya tomorrow, Glass.”

Step headed out to the car. On the way, it occurred to him that he’d seen practically every game on the market for the Atari, and he didn’t remember any of them with that pirate ship he had seen Stevie playing with. He’d have to check and see what the game was. Probably just one of the games he brought home from work to look at—it was one of the perks of working for a software company, that you could bring games home as long as you brought them back. Stevie must have found one that Step hadn’t actually seen on a machine yet.

By the time he got home, his mind had turned to other things, and when he finally stood there in front of the Atari, he could only remember that there was something he wanted to do with it but he couldn’t remember what. Oh well, it would come back to him.

The family actually had dinner together, and he was able to coax Stevie into playing some games with them afterward. He wasn’t much fun, though, but at least he was playing, and after he saw that things were better at school, maybe things would also start to get better at home.

Step was all set to help DeAnne get the kids through bathtime and bed when the phone rang. It was Sam Freebody, the elders quorum president. Freebody was a tall man, sloppily fat, and he seemed determined to prove every cliche about the joviality of fat people. So it took a bit of convivial chitchat before he finally came to the reason for the call. It was what Step had expected-and, truth be known, dreaded. “I’d like to give you your home teaching assignment,” Brother Freebody said.

“You know,” said Step, “if you could hold off on that for a while, I’d be grateful.”

“We’re really short-handed in the quorum,” said Freebody. “Everybody has to do his share or the Church will grind to a halt.”

Step remembered giving the same speech many times when he was elders quorum president back in Vigor. “Brother Freebody,” he said, “I know what you mean, and I believe in home teaching and I’m actually an excellent home teacher, but right now at work I’m putting in twelve-hour days most days and I never get to see my family and I don’t think it’d be fair to them or to me if I spent one of my few days home going out—”

“You’re home now,” Freebody pointed out.

Step wanted to scream over the phone, It’s none of your business! But he knew Freebody was only doing his calling, and doing it well. “Yeah, I guess so,” said Step. “OK, look, I’ll do my best. I just warn you that I might not get to everybody every month.”

“Right now, Brother Fletcher, you would improve our quorum average if you just got to anybody, any month.”

Step laughed and then wrote down the names of the families they were supposed to visit and a few notes about each of them. Freebody was an excellent elders quorum president, Step realized—he actually knew who these people were, they weren’t just names on the roster to him. Home teaching wasn’t just something Freebody had to get other people to do, it was an enterprise that he cared about and understood. It made Step determined to take the time to do his home teaching, to help Freebody and because Step, too, believed in the program. Really believed in it, except when he forgot to think about it at all, which was most of the time.

“And your companion is a young prospective elder named Lee Weeks. He’s a new convert, nineteen years old, and I’m hoping to get him ready for a mission maybe in a year or so. So set him a good example!”

“You mean, like, don’t take him out for a beer afterward?”

Freebody guffawed. “I mean show him what a normal member of the Church is like. He has a lot of enthusiasm, but some of it is directed toward some kind of weird ideas.”

“Weird ideas?”

“How can I put this, Brother Fletcher? Let’s just say that he was first contacted by Brother and Sister LeSueur, and he took all the lessons in their home.”

“I’m not sure I know what that means,” said Step. Of course, he knew exactly what Freebody meant—the kid had been exposed to the strangest, most self-servingly charismatic version of the gospel that could be imagined. But Step was already getting into the spirit of the way things worked in the Steuben 1st Ward: You know that certain people are difficult, but you just work around them as best you can and try not to put the nastiness right out in the open. As a westerner, Step was used to a more direct way of doing things. But if this elaborate effort to avoid hurting anybody’s feelings or provoking any conflict was the southern way, then Step would learn to act southern.

So Step wasn’t surprised when Freebody’s only explanation was to say, “You’ll see. He’s a good kid, though.”

Step wrote down Lee Weeks’s name and phone number. “Does he live at home or will I maybe get a roommate when I call?” he asked.

“Lives at home. His mom’s a shrink. Divorced, so I haven’t met the father. She approved of Lee joining the Church, though, so there’s no problem with hostility.”

“So she’ll deliver messages.”

“Heck, she’ll probably push him out the door to go home teaching with you. She even drives him to church on Sunday.”

“He doesn’t have a license?”

“I guess not, or maybe he cracked up the car once too often or something. She drives him, anyway.”

That was that. Step said his good-byes and hung up the phone and sighed as he sat back down at the kitchen table.

“Home teaching, right?” said DeAnne. She was loading the dishwasher.

He got up and started helping.

“No, Step, I’m almost done, and you’ve already been the hero of the day. I just want to hear the tape.”

“The kids are all bathed?”

“I’m real fast now,” said DeAnne. “Splish-splash and I pop ‘em in bed. And Stevie takes his own bath. Done in record time. I’m a wonder.”

“You are, you know,” he said.

She smiled. “Let me hear the tape.”

So they sat in the family room and listened as Step copied the tape from the microcassette recorder to the cheap little Panasonic that clearly wanted to be a boom box when it grew up but would never, never make it. The quality of the recording wasn’t that good, especially when Step had been across the room from her, but it was certainly good enough to hear pretty much everything, and even the copy was OK.

“Oh, Step,” said DeAnne when the tape was finished. “You are sly.”

She meant it as a compliment, but to Step it had a hollow ring. He didn’t like thinking of himself as a sly person.

“You should have heard me later,” said Step. “I stopped being sly, and turned into a bully.” Then he told her in some detail what he had done after he stopped recording. And how Mrs. Jones had called it blackmail, and he wasn’t sure but what she was right. At some level, anyway.

DeAnne slapped him playfully on the arm. “There, I hereby punish you. Case dismissed.”

“I just thought it would feel better than it did.”

“Come on, didn’t it feel just a little bit good when you pulled out the recorder and showed her?”

“Yes,” said Step. “But afterward … ”

“Afterward you found a way of making yourself the villain of the piece,” said DeAnne. “But you weren’t. You were rescuing your little boy.”

“Yeah,” said Step. “When I remember that, I feel better. But I don’t always remember it.”

“Then I’ll remind you,” she said. “Again and again and again.” To his surprise, she kissed him long and soft and deep, and he realized that she was going to make love to him tonight.

“Maybe I should bully defenseless teacher ladies more often,” he said, when the kiss was finally done.

“Shut up, Junk Man,” she said, and kissed him again.

“Step! Step!” He dreamed that DeAnne was very, very upset and she was calling to him, softly so she wouldn’t wake the kids but her voice was full of fear. Then he opened his eyes and looked at the clock and at the same time heard her call his name again and he realized that it wasn’t a dream at all, it was three in the morning and something was wrong and DeAnne was calling out for help, she needed him to help her.

He threw back the covers and got up and realized that he was naked; he must have fallen asleep as soon as they were through making love. I hope I stayed awake long enough to actually finish, he thought. And then remembered that yes, he had. DeAnne had not been left unsatisfied tonight, as she had so many nights before.

He inwardly slapped himself for the churlish thought and went to get his bathrobe out of the closet. The only light in the room was what spilled in from the kids’ bathroom, which was around the corner and down the hall, so he could hardly see anything; but he found the robe and put it on. She called again.

“I’m coming,” he said, trying to be loud enough and yet soft enough at the same time.

“Put on your slippers first,” she said.

“I don’t need them,” he said.

“Yes you do!” she said, and her voice rose almost to a scream at the end, and so he put on his slippers and then went to the door into the hall and just as he was turning on the light he realized that he had just stepped on something, and something had just bumped against his leg, and now the light was on and he saw that the floor was jumping with crickets. Dozens of them, hundreds of them.

“Holy shit,” he said. “I mean good heavens.”

“Where are they coming from, Step?”

“What an excellent question,” he answered. He bent over and brushed several of them off his legs. It was almost impossible to take a step without crushing one under his feet while others jumped at him, landed on him.

DeAnne was standing there holding a can of Raid. “I don’t think I should be breathing insecticide fumes when I’m pregnant,” she said.

“There isn’t enough Raid in a can to kill them all,” he said. “We’d asphyxiate the children long before we got the crickets.”

“What, then? Sweep them up into garbage bags?”

“Sounds better than trying to stomp them all,” he said. “Where are the seagulls when you really need them?”

“I’ll get the garbage bags,” she said, heading for the kitchen.

While she was gone, he tried to find the source. The hall was the worst place, it seemed—there were only a few in Betsy’s room and in the bathroom. But when he turned the light on in the boys’ room, it was even worse. The crickets were so thick on the floor that in places he couldn’t even see the carpet. The crickets jumping on him made him want to scream, and walking was very slow when he had to keep brushing them off, and finally he just stopped brushing them off, even though he couldn’t stand the way it felt to have their feet on his naked legs. He couldn’t brush them off because they were here in his children’s bedroom and he had to get rid of them and so what did it matter whether he was comfortable or not?

They were coming up from a small gap in the back of the boys’ closet. He could see them crawling out, first the antennas and then their black, mechanical bodies, their legs like pistons. Robot crickets, that’s what they are, he thought. Somebody made them.

And then he thought, I made them. Crickets from hell. A plague of crickets. A sign to me that God saw the way I bullied that woman today and he knows that I secretly loved doing it, that I loved the power I had over her. So just like Pharaoh, I get a plague.

DeAnne was in the room now, holding several garbage bags and a broom and dustpan. “You’ll have to hold the dustpan while I sweep,” she said. “I can’t bend over that far these days.”

“Forget the dustpan,” said Step. “They’d just jump off. I’ll hold the bag open for you. But first we’ve got to stop them from coming in.”

“You found the place?”

“A crack between the floor and the wall in the back of the closet. Do we have any rags?”

“All the old socks,” she said.

“Get them wet and we’ll jam them in,” he said.

“Wet? Why?”

“Oh, please, DeAnne, I don’t know, just do it.” He wasn’t really sure why. He just had some vague idea that if the socks were wet then he could jam them in tighter and they’d stay in place better and it would do a better job of keeping the crickets from coming through.

It took all the socks DeAnne had been saving for dustcloths, but when he had jammed them in, no more crickets were able to come through.

Then the hard part started. The crickets were not inclined to hold still, and so it seemed an almost sisyphean task. Step would keep the bottom of the garbage bag flat on the floor by holding down two corners with his feet, and then hold the top open as far as he could with his hands, while DeAnne tried her best to sweep them in. All the while, of course, they were jumping up at Step’s head and onto his arms and legs; yet he couldn’t let go of the bag to brush them off, he could only shudder and shake his head. The boldest of the crickets seemed to enjoy this, and hung on for the ride until Step finally asked DeAnne to sweep them off.

Gradually they began to make progress, especially after Step figured out that by spraying Raid into the garbage bag itself from time to time, he could convince the ones they had already caught to stay put. It took an hour before all the visible crickets were collected and the bags tied tightly and carried out to the garage. Then began the hunt for the strays.

They pulled the kids out of their beds, one by one, and perched them sleepily in Step’s and DeAnne’s room, where there were no crickets remaining; then they closed the door. Since the kids had slept right through the time when masses of crickets were moving around, there was a good chance that they wouldn’t see any of the crickets at all, and therefore wouldn’t have nightmares about them later.

I hope we’re so lucky, thought Step.

They found three crickets that had crept down into Robbie’s sheets, which meant that DeAnne would not think of anything less than stripping down all the beds and changing the sheets—even the top bunk, Stevie’s bed, where no cricket could possibly have reached. But finally it was done. All the crickets were gone, or at least if there were any left they had the sense to stay out of sight and not chirp. DeAnne proposed bathing the kids again but Step told her to forget it. “These weren’t dung beetles, honey, they were crickets, and let’s let the kids get back to sleep.”

They already were asleep, sprawled in a tangle on top of Step’s and DeAnne’s bed, but one by one Step carried them back to their rooms and DeAnne tucked them into bed. In moments they were sleeping again.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” Step said to DeAnne as she tucked Betsy into her clean sheets, “wouldn’t it be nice if all the bad things in life could happen in their sleep and we could make them go away without them ever knowing what happened?”

“I’ve got to wash,” said DeAnne. “I can still feel cricket feet all over me.” She shuddered. “I’m surprised I didn’t go into labor.”

Now that she mentioned it, he still felt the tickling of those tiny feet, and it got worse the more he thought about it. “You get the first shower,” he said, “but make it snappy.”

She didn’t make it snappy, but he understood. When it was his turn, he had to soap himself up and rinse himself off three times before he finally felt clean enough to dry off and go to bed. And even then, he inspected the sheets, though no cricket had jumped on their bed and he knew it, he knew it, but he still had to look. He had to be sure.

“Tomorrow, the exterminators,” he said as he finally pulled the covers up over him.

“Yes,” she said, “I already thought of that. I’ll call Bappy to find out if they have some kind of contract, like with Terminex or somebody.”

The next morning he was late to work, of course, later than usual, because he had lost so much sleep the night before. He came in to find a memo sitting on top of his desk. It was from Ray Keene, and even though it was addressed to everybody Step knew that it was aimed at him.

It has come to my attention that some employees have been abusing our relaxed attitude toward work hours. Therefore a new policy is instituted beginning tomorrow. All employees must be at their work stations promptly at eight-thirty. Lunch is to be taken from twelve noon to twelve-thirty, the only exceptions being that those who must work the telephones will be assigned half-hour shifts between 11:30 and 1:00. Anyone arriving even five minutes late in the morning or taking a lunch even five minutes over thirty minutes will be dismissed on the spot. The only exceptions are for medical reasons or genuine, documented family emergencies.

Step wanted to storm into Dicky’s office and call him every name he could think of. But he couldn’t. If only Arkasian had come through. If only Step had a contract with somebody else, a way to get out of this place. It would be such a joy to tell Dicky Northanger exactly what he thought of him. Instead, Step put the memo into his attaché case, locked it again, and then headed for the pit.

The pit was silent when Step came in, and for a moment he thought that they all blamed him for this. But their silence, he realized, was because Dicky was in the room, leaning over the shoulder of one of the programmers. Since Dicky rarely came into the pit, this was in itself significant—but then, perhaps Dicky was doing it in order to stifle the outrage that they were all no doubt feeling. Well, that was fine with Step. The longer Dicky hung around in the pit, the more their anger would focus on him instead of on Step.

“Glass,” said Step. “I need you in my office, if you can. I’m having some trouble with the way hyphenation is handled and I think there’s a system to it that you can explain to me.” They had worked all of this out the week before, but Dicky certainly wouldn’t know that.

It didn’t matter. “Glass will not go into your office right now,” said Dicky. “And there is no reason for you to be in the pit. Glass is helping me work with my programming staff, and that takes precedence over anything the manual-writing staff needs. In fact, you should make a list of your questions and leave them on my desk, and I will get the answers for you. The programming staff has been inclined to goof off, and I am not allowing any further distractions.”

“Documentation is not a distraction, Dicky,” said Step.

“No, it’s not,” said Dicky. “But people walking into the programming center and talking loudly are a distraction, and I won’t have it. Leave your questions on my desk.”

Step stood there a moment, looking at him, and then he thought: We didn’t get all the crickets last night. There’s one left, waiting to jump on me the second he thinks I’m not watching. Well, Dicky, I’m a champion cricket killer. I’m an expert at it. And if I can slaughter those crook-legged hordes, I can handle one lone whining fiddler like you.

Step went back to his office and wrote a memo.

Dear Ray,

Dicky has barred me from the pit, and wants me to funnel all my questions for the programmers through him. If that’s the way you want it, fine with me. But if that isn’t the way you want me to do my job, then the change will have to come from you.

Step signed it and carried it to Ray’s secretary, Ludy. “Is Ray in?” he asked.

“Yes, but he’s not seeing anyone,” she said.

“Does he have anyone in there with him?”

She looked a little startled. “Step, I can’t see that that’s really any of your business.”

“I just wanted to know if, when I walk in there and lay this memo on his desk, I’m going to be embarrassing him in front of someone else or not.”

Ludy didn’t blink an eye, and her smile didn’t fade. “Compared to barging into his office, Step, embarrassing him in front of somebody else is hardly going to be a problem. I really advise you against it.”

“Well, then, tell me what else I can do to make sure he gets my memo. I’ve written him a couple of dozen memos about different things since I’ve been here, and as far as I know he’s never got them. He never answers them anyway, and the only time he ever phoned me was yesterday when he knew perfectly well that I wasn’t in.”

Ludy reached her hand closer to him across her desk; if he had been sitting by her, the gesture probably would have been a touch on the arm. “Step, he gets all your memos.”

“Cross your heart?”

She smiled. “And hope to die.”

He handed her the memo. “And you might tell him that if he doesn’t answer this one, he’s going to be looking for a new manual writer.”

“I’ll tell him,” she said, “that you’d really appreciate an answer as soon as it’s convenient. That way, if he does want to send an answer, you’ll be around to receive it.” She winked at him.

“You’ve got a twitch in your eye.” Then he winked back. Ludy rolled her eyes, and he left.

When DeAnne called Bappy to find out about what exterminator to call, he seemed almost excited. “I do that myself!” he crowed. “I worked for one of them companies way back and I’ve kept up! I’ll be right over, and you just make sure all the containers in your kitchen is closed up tight.”

“The kitchen?” she asked. “Do you have to spray stuff in the kitchen?”

“That’s where the bugs like to be best, where the food is,” he said. “And you best get the kids out of the house while I’m doing it.”

She had plans for today. And Step had taken the car, since he was so late to work. Maybe she could take the kids over to Jenny’s house. And most of her work could wait. Mostly checkbook balancing, not that there was much to balance. She could do it after Bappy was done. And her little hope of perhaps taking a nap at the same time as the children, to make up for last night’s lost sleep—well, she had scheduled naps before, but she didn’t often get to actually take them, and that was OK, it was part of the territory. Part of the never-ending struggle to get organized. When she finally got organized, there’d be time for naps. “How long will it take?” she asked.

“Couple hours,” said Bappy. “Got to get under the house and up in the attic, you know. Do it right. You said you already got the place plugged where they came up through?”

“With old socks is all,” said DeAnne.

“‘Bout what I’d use myself, anyway,” said Bappy. “Just so it’s plugged. Anyways, two hours after I’m done the stuff will all be settled and then y’all can come on back into the house and open up the windows and air it out. But don’t you be thinking of coming back too soon. Got to take care of your precious burden.”

It took her just a moment to realize that her “precious burden” was the baby, who even now was pressing hard against the distended wall of her stomach. Well, she didn’t need Bappy to tell her that she shouldn’t be inhaling bug-killer when you never could tell what might cross the placenta. And she didn’t want her older kids to be breathing it straight into their lungs, either.

She called Jenny, who really sounded delighted about having sudden all-day company, and when Bappy pulled into the driveway in his pickup truck and started pulling what looked like scuba gear out of the back, DeAnne gave him the spare housekey, shouldered an extra-heavy diaper bag, and led the kids off on the walk to the Cowpers’ house.

DeAnne had driven Stevie to school this morning, but, knowing that Step would be late enough getting up that he’d need the car to get to work, she told Stevie to take the schoolbus home. He would have no idea that the house was being fumigated. It was only eleven o’clock, so maybe they’d be back in the house before the schoolbus dropped Stevie off—but maybe not. She’d have to make a point of being there to meet him. She hated the idea of any of her children ever, even once, coming home to an empty house.

Life in Jenny Cowper’s house was hard for DeAnne, at first. Chaos bothered her, the children running every which way, yelling at each other or coming in at odd intervals to scream out a report of some disaster to Jenny, who, likely as not, said, “Thanks for telling me, dear,” and then did nothing. At first DeAnne was horrified at how lackadaisical Jenny was about her children’s safety. And when DeAnne saw Jenny’s five-year-old sitting on top of the crossbar of the swing set in the back yard, riding it like a pony, she could not restrain herself. “Jenny, you’ve got to do something.”

Jenny looked up at her and smiled. “Like what, staple his feet to the ground? The first time he climbed up there I nearly had a heart attack, but the fact is that he’s a good climber and he never falls. I’ve watched him, and he’s careful. So I figure, he’s going to climb, and better if he does it where I can see him, where he can show off to me, instead of doing it when I’m not watching. Now that’s dangerous. So we have a deal—he can climb up there, but only when I’m watching.”

“Forgive me, Jenny,” said DeAnne, “but you’re not watching. You’re talking to me.”

Jenny laughed. “OK, then, I’m listening. If there’s a scream, I know I need to do something.”

“There’ve been fifty screams already”

“I know, but they weren’t the kind of scream you worry about. And half of them were you, anyway, DeAnne.”

“Did I scream?”

“This little high-pitched scream, yes. I know you think I’m the worst kind of mother, and I’ll tell you, I used to be like you. After my kids all the time. Hovering over them.”

“Do I hover?”

“Don’t you?” asked Jenny.

“I want them safe,” she said. “If something happened to them … ”

“But things will happen to them. You think just because you’re watching them, stopping them from having any fun, they won’t still break their arms or split their lips? And what are you going to do when your Elizabeth starts dating, make it so she never gets a broken heart? God gave our children life, and it’s not our place to take it away from them just because we’re afraid. That’s what I think.”

It sounded so sensible, so wise. And yet, and yet. “What about this missing child?” DeAnne said, pointing to the newspaper.

“Isn’t that awful?” said Jenny. “And there was that other one I told you about not six months ago. I tell you, you see those faces on the milk cartons, and you think, there’s some mother out there, and one day she looked for her little boy and called his name and he didn’t answer, and she went out and called and called, and he didn’t answer, and then all of a sudden it comes into her heart that he never will, he’ll never answer her again, and oh, DeAnne, doesn’t it tear your heart out?”

“Yes,” said DeAnne. “He was just walking over to his friend’s house, three doors away, and he never got there.”

“And that mother’s going to blame herself, DeAnne, I know she is,” said Jenny. “She’s going to say, if only I had watched him. Walked out in the front yard and watched him till he went in the front door of that house.”

“Yes,” said DeAnne. “Yes, and she’s right!”

“No she isn’t,” said Jenny. “Because inside that house there could have been a gun with bullets in it, and so what should she have done about that, stood over him the whole time he was playing? Forbid him ever to go to a friend’s house? Lock him in his room? Do you think that the boy wouldn’t have known that his mother was watching? That she didn’t trust him to get from his house to a friend’s house three doors away?”

“But he couldn’t!”

“This time he couldn’t,” said Jenny. “But maybe he’s already done it a hundred times. Like when your kids learn to walk, you don’t hold their hand anymore, they get to a point where you just let go of their hand and they walk by themselves. Do you think that means they never fall down again?”

“Turning up missing isn’t quite the same thing as falling down.”

“Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know that one moment of carelessness and my Aaron could be lying there under the swing set with a broken neck? Dead or paralyzed for the rest of his life? Do you think I don’t have a stab of fear go through my heart when I see him up there?”

“Then why do you let him?”

“Why does God let us live on this earth?” asked Jenny. “Why doesn’t he come down and watch every move we make and keep us from ever, ever, ever doing anything wrong? Because we can’t grow up if somebody’s doing that. We can’t become anything. We’d be puppets.”

DeAnne didn’t know how to answer. Anguish was twisting her inside. Partly it was the newspaper story about the mother of that little lost boy. Partly it was the strain of not being in her own home, of having her kids playing with these wild hellions that Jenny was raising so free. Partly it was what Stevie had gone through at school for weeks and weeks, without DeAnne having any idea. It was Dolores LeSueur taking him aside and sowing the seeds of some terrible life-sucking weed in his mind, and by the time DeAnne knew about it, the seeds had already taken root, and there was nothing she could do except hope that Stevie’s native goodness and common sense would help him get rid of those thoughts on his own.

“I just can’t stop watching out for them,” said DeAnne, “even though I know that I can’t protect them from everything. I know that. I know that they’re out of my protection for so much of the time. Stevie at school, and when I’m out of the room even. Anything could happen. But I can still do something, I can still try.”

“For what it’s worth, DeAnne, I actually do step in and stop my kids from doing really dangerous stuff,” said Jenny. “It’s just my, um, my threshold isn’t as low as yours is.”

“Jenny, I’m not talking about you now,” said DeAnne. “I’m talking about me. Because I know you’re right, and I’m just—I don’t want to overprotect my children and turn them into frightened little hamsters in the corner of a box. But I can do something. I can maybe save them sometimes, can’t I? It’s like my neighbor across the street in Orem. There was this guy with a pickup truck who used to roar down the street, going too fast, and she just hated it, and her husband even spoke to him about it but he just laughed and told him to drop dead. So one evening, it’s dusk, you know, when it’s dark enough that you can’t really see anymore but you still can, sort of, and she realizes, I’ve let the children play too late, I’ve got to get them all into the house, and she goes outside and she’s calling out for them and then she hears that truck turn the corner and gun the motor and there’s the headlights coming down the street and then she hears the sound of her son’s Hot Wheels on the asphalt of the street. Not on the sidewalk, on the asphalt, and she thinks, he’s in the street, he’s going to die, and sure enough, there’s her son tooling across the road, his legs churning, and there’s the truck, and she knows the truck will never see the boy in time to stop, and her son is twenty yards to her right, much to far for her to run to him in time, and the truck is coming from the left, and he’ll never hear her shouting at him, not with that engine, and so without even thinking about it she just steps into the road in front of the truck. Just steps into the road.”

“Good heavens,” said Jenny.

“And the truck guy saw her and he slammed on his brakes and it turned out that he really could stop in time, but then she was a full-sized person, who knows whether he would have seen her little boy? And he gets out of his truck just yelling and cussing at her, you know, what kind of idiot are you, and she just stood there crying and crying until finally the guy sees the little kid pull up to his mom on his Hot Wheels, right there in the middle of the road, and the guy realizes that he never saw the little kid until right that minute, and he says, ‘My God,’ and they didn’t have any trouble with him speeding down that road anymore.”

“I don’t know if I could have done that,” said Jenny. “I would have stood there on the curb and screamed or something. I don’t know if I could have just … stepped into the road.”

“She didn’t know either, till she did it,” said DeAnne.

“Well of course you save your kid from a speeding car,” said Jenny. “Even a lousy mother like me would try to do that! But what she did—I mean, that’s beyond love, that’s all the way into crazy. What if the truck couldn’t stop? What does that do to the little boy, seeing his mother killed right in front of his eyes? And he grows up without his mom.”

“He grows up knowing that his mom gave her life to save his. That’s got to help.”

“Or he feels guilty all his life because he feels like it’s his fault she died. DeAnne, I’m not saying she was wrong—I mean, she was right because it all worked out. But even saving his life, she might also do harm. Anything can do harm, anything might work. Well, not anything, but you know what I mean. Maybe you’re right to be so protective, and maybe I’m right to run a looser ship. Maybe maybe maybe.”

“So no matter what we do, we’re probably wrong.”

“No, DeAnne, don’t think of it that way. Think of it that no matter what we do, as long as we’re trying to do our very best for our kids, it will work out. Maybe they’ll get hurt. Maybe they’ll grow up so mad at us that they don’t speak to us for twenty years. Maybe they’ll get killed—that’s part of life. It’s the worst thing in the world, to lose a child. At least I can’t think of anything worse. But it happens. And when the child dies, God takes him into his home the same way that he takes old people who die. I mean, even if his life was short, it was life, and was it good? Was he happy? Did he have a chance to taste it, to choose things for himself, to—”

“I know,” said DeAnne. Despite her loathing for herself when she was weak enough to cry in front of someone else, her tears started flowing. Just thinking of children dying, and the mother whose son was lost today, and her friend in Orem who knew, knew, that she would give her life for her child. And Stevie. “I’m sorry. It’s just … what we’ve been going through for the past while with Stevie … ever since we moved here. I’ve just felt so helpless. And now things are going to be OK with him, because Step went to school and took care of it, I mean things are going to be fine now, if he can just get rid of these imaginary friends. So why am I crying now? Why do I just feel shaky and cold and—”

Jenny slid her chair over next to DeAnne’s and put her arms around her and DeAnne cried into her shoulder. “You can’t stop bad things from happening,” said Jenny softly. “That’s why you’re crying. You think I didn’t ever have a day like this? Days like this? And then I came out of it and I realized that I can only do what’s possible, and I stopped expecting myself to make life perfect for my kids, perfectly happy, perfectly safe. They cry sometimes, they hurt sometimes, and it still tears me up inside, but I can only do what I can do, and that’s what you’ve got to realize too, DeAnne. I saw that the day I met you, that you just expect too much of yourself, and so you’re bound to fail all the time, because you don’t count it as success unless you’ve done what nobody can do.”

It sounded so good, so comforting, and yet DeAnne didn’t believe it. Oh, she knew that she spent too much time feeling like a failure, Jenny was right about that. But Jenny was wrong when she responded to it by deciding not to try very hard anymore. How could you ever learn to be perfect if you didn’t try to reach beyond yourself and do more than you could do? And then the Lord would take you the rest of the way. Wouldn’t he? If she honestly did everything she could possibly do, then the Lord would do the rest, and things would work out, the way they were finally working out for Stevie. Because you had to try.

But she would be less protective. She would try to do that, too. Jenny was right about that. Kids had to have a chance to be kids. Like when she was a girl and played in the orchard behind her house. It was dangerous back there, with old metal equipment and wires and things lying around, especially along the irrigation ditches, and she and her friends did crazy things. She had climbed much higher into cherry trees than little Aaron Cowper ever got on the swing set. And those were wonderful times and wonderful years. She couldn’t let her children miss out on that, just because their mother felt so afraid for them. But she also couldn’t sit back and get so-so distant from what her children were doing and feeling. It just wasn’t in her.

“You are the kindest person,” DeAnne said, withdrawing from Jenny’s embrace. She wiped her eyes on a paper napkin from the kitchen table. The paper was rough on the tender skin of her eyelids. “I really wasn’t coming over here to cry my eyes out,” she said. “I came over because an old man is spraying bug poison in my kitchen.”

“And if I know you at all,” said Jenny, “you’re going to throw away every box of cold cereal that was open. In fact, I’ll bet you even throw away the ones that were closed, because you won’t be able to convince yourself that the bug spray didn’t get through the cardboard or something.”

DeAnne had to laugh. “Jenny, I already did throw them away. Before he even got there. Isn’t that stupid?”

“It’s just you, DeAnne. And one thing you are not is stupid. Why, you’re the teacher who finally gave the women in the Steuben 1st Ward permission not to pretend to worship their husbands in that sicky-icky way that Dolores LeSueur does. I mean, you stood up to the she-spider right in her own web.”

“I think that proves that I’m stupid,” said DeAnne.

The tumult outside spilled back into the house and it was time to fix lunch. About two o’clock, when DeAnne finally had her kids down for their naps—and Robbie actually went right to sleep; he had run around so much with Jenny’s kids that he had worn himself out—she headed back over to her own house to see if the Bappy was done and the smell was gone. Then she realized that she should have gone over at noon to see when he actually finished, so she’d know when the two hours were up. But no, he had left a note on the side door:

Finished at noon.

Key on table.

Such a thoughtful man.

Thoughtful, but dead wrong about how long it would take for the poison to settle out of the air. Her eyes stung when she went inside. The stink was awful. She fled back outside, leaving the door open behind her. She could smell it from here. It wasn’t going to go away, either, not if she left the house closed up tight.

She ran back inside and held her breath the whole time she was rinsing a dishtowel and wringing it out. Then she held it over her mouth and nose as she went through the house, opening all the windows and doors. The living room windows didn’t have screens, so she couldn’t very well leave them open. Nor could she bring herself to leave the doors standing open, even with the screen doors closed. Of course a serious burglar could easily get through any of the windows, so why not leave the doors open? But she just couldn’t do it.

She left the dishtowel hanging over the inside knob of the side door that led to the carport, and then went out to the street to wait for Stevie’s schoolbus.

Immediately after lunch, Dicky appeared in the doorway of Step’s office. Step thought at first that he was there to make sure that he hadn’t stayed out longer than his allotted half hour, and maybe that was part of the reason, but the main reason was to deliver a message. “Ray seems to think that you can’t do your work properly unless you have unrestricted contact with the programmers, and in fact I agree with him.”

Of course you do, thought Step.

“So you can go back to visiting them in the pit,” said Dicky. “But I’d appreciate it if you held your distractions to a minimum.”

“Sure, Dicky,” said Step.

“And I’d still like a report from you on everything you ask them about.”

“That’s a wonderful idea, Dicky. That will cut my productivity almost in half, I’d say, if I not only have to do my work, but also have to write a detailed report of all of it for you.”

“Nevertheless,” said Dicky

“When hell freezes over,” said Step cheerfully. “My report to you on each project is the finished manual.”

Dicky stood there, looking at him with that steady, animal-like gaze of his, showing no more expression than a sheep. At last he left.

I shouldn’t have goaded him, thought Step. I shouldn’t have pushed.

But it felt good to push. It felt good to know that Ray Keene still thought Step, or at least Step’s role in the company, was valuable enough to put Dicky in his place. It was Dicky who had pushed too far this time, not Step, not Step at all. Besides, Dicky still had his victory over the schedule.

A few minutes later, Step was in the pit, so the guys could see exactly how short a time Dicky had been able to make his absurd restriction stick. As soon as he came in, one of the programmers murmured, “Dicky check,” and a couple of them got up and sauntered out into the halls for a moment. “No Dicky,” they reported. Immediately they all turned their chairs to face the center of the room. It was as if they had been waiting for Step to show up in order to have a meeting.

Step plunged right in. “Guys,” he said, “I’m sorry. I think this schedule thing is all my fault, because I took that late lunch hour yesterday and threw it in Dicky’s face.”

“Screw all that,” said Glass. “Dicky’s not a force of nature or something. He does what he does because he chooses to, not because of anything you did.”

“He does what he does because he’s an asshole,” said one of the programmers.

“So the thing is this,” said Glass. “If they’re going to make us show up at eight-thirty and take lunches exactly one damn half-hour long, then our response is obvious.”

“We quit,” said one.

“We burn the place down,” said another.

“Nothing that dramatic,” said Glass. “In fact, it’s simple and it’s elegant. We leave at five.”

They sat there looking at him, and then they all began smiling and chuckling and some of them pantomimed slapping their knees.

“Five sharp,” said Glass. “Every night. In the middle of a line of code, if need be. Save your work, shut down, and leave this place dark at five oh one. Everybody agreed?”

“With all my heart,” said Step. The others echoed him.

“One for all and all for one,” said Glass.

“Now,” said Step, “everyone back on your heads.”

Step was home by five-fifteen. He found a note on the side door.

Pls chk to see if bug spray still bad.

At Cowpers’.

When he went inside, the stench was unbearable. He felt like he could taste it, it was so intense. The house was a bit chilly—it was going to be a cool night, and there was already a stiff breeze. If it rains, Step thought, all these open windows are going to mean soaked carpets and furniture. But we can’t close them, either. Just have to keep watch on the sky.

No way will we be able to sleep here tonight.

He set the lock on the front-door screen and left the door open. Maybe somebody could break in and steal everything, but they could do that with the windows open anyway, and the living room just wasn’t airing out at all—when he went in there his eyes stung. Then he closed and locked the side door, got back in the car, and drove to the Cowpers’.

“You’re home so early again,” said DeAnne, happy to see him.

“Maybe from now on,” said Step. “Unless they back down. But I can never be late again in the morning.” He kissed her. Jenny Cowper was standing right there watching, but Step only waved as he kissed DeAnne again.

“Don’t mind me,” said Jenny. “I already guessed that you two knew about kissing.”

“We’re still beginners at it,” said Step, “so we need all the practice we can get.” Jenny laughed and then went back into the kitchen or somewhere.

“How did things go with Stevie?” asked Step.

“Not what we expected,” said DeAnne. “A substitute.”

“Ah,” said Step. “So she couldn’t face it.”

“And Stevie came home with his ribbon. Mrs. Jones must have said something to Dr. Mariner, because she came into class today and said something about—”

But at that moment several children charged into the room.

Robbie and two unidentified Cowper children—Step hadn’t even bothered to try to tell them apart; they all looked like identical twins of different ages. Stevie followed, carrying a book. Not part of the game, apparently. But at least he was talking.

“Hi, Dad.”

“I hear you had a substitute today.”

He nodded. Step squatted in front of him, then realized that his knees didn’t respond well to that position anymore, and he knelt on one knee. “Hear you got your ribbon.”

“I didn’t care about the ribbon,” said Stevie.

“Well, I guess Dr. Mariner did.”

Then Stevie looked Step in the eye and said, “Did you kill Mrs. Jones?”

“No!” Step said, appalled. “No, of course not! I didn’t touch her, I didn’t hurt her at all. Son, she stayed home today because she’s ashamed.”

Stevie didn’t look convinced. “Dr. Mariner said she was sick. She said Mrs. Jones wouldn’t be coming back the rest of the school year and our substitute would be our teacher from now on.”

Mrs. Jones had taken the coward’s way out, after all. She could be bold as brass when it came to heaping scorn on a seven-year-old in front of his classmates, but when it came to making up for it a little, she just couldn’t face it. Well, too bad.

“Dad,” said Stevie, “what did you do to her?”

DeAnne, realizing that they needed some privacy for this, herded Robbie and the Cowper creatures out of the living room. Thanks, DeAnne, Step said silently. “Door Man, all I did was tell her the truth about what she was doing, and I made it clear that if she didn’t stop, I was going to tell the truth to everybody else, too. So she stopped. In fact, she stopped so completely that I wouldn’t be surprised if she never teaches again, even after this year.”

“Wow,” Stevie whispered.

“I mean, that’s what you do with bad people, when you can. You just name their sin to them. That’s what the prophets always did,” said Step. “Just name their sins, and if they have any spark of goodness in them at all, they repent. Maybe she’s going to repent.”

“What if they’re bad all the way through? What if they got no spark?”

“Well, it’s like Alma and Amulek. The Lord wouldn’t let the evil people harm them, even though a lot of other people got killed. They finished giving their message and then they left.”

“The bad guys burned Abinadi,” said Stevie.

“Yes,” said Step. “But not until he finished naming their sins. And that’s what eventually stopped the wicked people from doing their wickedness. Telling the truth about them. They can only do their evil when they think that nobody knows.”

“But Abinadi was dead.”

“Son, I guess he knew and the Lord knew that death isn’t the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world is knowing that something really bad is going on and then not doing anything about it because you’re afraid. So when Abinadi died, death tasted sweet to him.”

“Burning to death?”

“No, I don’t think that was sweet. But then it was over, and he went to live with his Father in Heaven. Anyway, Stevie, that isn’t the point. Nobody was going to burn me to death for telling the truth about Mrs. Jones. I’m no Abinadi, I was just a very angry father of a very wonderful son who had been treated very badly and now it’s over. Mrs. Jones won’t be able to hurt you ever again, and my guess is that she won’t be able to hurt anybody.”

Stevie threw his arms around Step’s neck and clung to him for a long time. Then Stevie pulled away and took off out of the room, probably a bit embarrassed.

Step got up and wandered into the kitchen and joined in the conversation there. “You’re going to sleep on our bed because you’re pregnant, DeAnne,” said Jenny.

“I’m not,” said Step.

“Uh-oh,” said Spike. “Hyper-courtesy alert.”

“Oh, please,” said Jenny. “We all know how this conversation goes. You protest that Step can sleep on the floor while DeAnne sleeps on the couch, only you both know perfectly well that DeAnne would wake up perfectly dead if she did that and we’d feel so guilty we couldn’t sleep a wink. Besides, what you don’t realize is that Spike and I went camping on our honeymoon.”

“There’s a way to zip two bags together,” said Spike, in a confidential tone. “I’ll show you sometime.”

“It does not hurt our feelings to sleep in sleeping bags on the floor,” said Jenny. “We actually find it romantic, not that anyone who knew our kids would think we needed any more romantic opportunities. So please, let’s just skip the arguing part and all agree right now, you on the bed and us in the bag.”

Step and DeAnne were laughing, and DeAnne said, “That’s just fine.”

It wasn’t until about nine that night, with the children bedded down, that DeAnne realized that she had never even checked the mail.

“We can always get it tomorrow,” said Step.

“Or we could take a walk over there tonight,” said DeAnne. “And check on the house while we’re at it.”

Why not? The Cowper house was so intensely extraverted that Step was glad for a chance to get away for a while.

On the way to the mailbox he told her what had passed between Stevie and him. “So I guess we’ve finally gotten over the hump,” he said. “Stevie’s going to be fine.”

“I hope,” said DeAnne.

“You only hope?”

“Today when he got off the bus, I started to explain to him about the bug spray and how we couldn’t get in the house, and finally he says to me, ‘I know, Mom. Jack already told me about it.’ “

The imaginary friends. “Well, I suppose we couldn’t expect them to just suddenly go away.”

“I’m worried, Step. He’s way too old to have an imaginary friend. And besides, who ever heard of somebody having more than one? I mean, aren’t imaginary friends supposed to be like Snuffy on Sesame Street? Just one big strange creature or something?”

“Give him some time,” said Step. “As things get better at school, he’ll let go of this fantasy life. I mean, let’s face it—these imaginary friends got him through what amounts to a concentration camp experience. Let’s not be too quick to kill them off!”

“It’s not a joke, Step,” said DeAnne. “Stevie just absolutely refuses to admit that they’re pretend. I think he really believes in them.”

“So what if he does? The fantasy wouldn’t have done him much good if it hadn’t seemed real.”

“But these imaginary friends aren’t real, Step, and what if they don’t go away? What if he insists on having one of these imaginary friends as the best man at his wedding? It’s going to start interfering with his social life sometime, you know.”

“But not today,” said Step. “Give him some slack. He’s just come out of hell into daylight, and it takes a while to shake off the shadows.”

They were at the mailbox. Step opened it and checked for spiders, as he always did, ever since the black widow had scooted right up his sleeve when he was getting the mail one time in Orem. He had never known that you really could rip all the buttons off your shirt in one smooth movement and tear a whole shirt off your body in less than a second. It hadn’t bit him, but he hadn’t forgotten, either.

DeAnne started tilting the letters so she could see the return addresses under the streetlight. “We can take them inside,” said Step. “We do live here.”

“I’m not going in there again till that stink is gone,” said DeAnne.

“The Cowpers aren’t going to be thrilled about having us live with them forever, you know,” said Step.

“They might. I was very helpful today with the housework. Here’s one from your brother.” She tore it open and started scanning it.

“You know what Spike Cowper said to me?” said Step. “He said, I know you folks need a car, and we’ve got this ugly beat-up rusted-out Datsun B-210, it runs fine but it’s so ugly we’ll never get what it’s worth. So why don’t you take it off my hands? Five hundred bucks. And I said, We can’t afford anything right now. And he said, So we’ll send you our address, and you pay us when you can.”

“I hope you said yes,” said DeAnne.

“You think I’m an idiot? I almost kissed him. I can take the Datsun to work, and you can keep the wagon.”

“It’ll feel like emancipation day,” she said. “I think your brother’s letting you know that he needs you to pay him back the money we borrowed for the move.”

“Blood from a stone,” said Step. “I’ll call him. He’s probably just afraid that we’ve forgotten we owe it to him.”

“I didn’t make the house payment in Indiana this month,” said DeAnne.

“I didn’t think we could anyway,” said Step.

“This is the second month in a row,” said DeAnne. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to make up these missed payments unless we get a surprise royalty check or something.”

“I know—I’ll ask Ray Keene for a raise. No, I’ll ask Dicky for a raise.”

She held out the last envelope to him. A big manila envelope. “Agamemnon,” she said.

“You’re kidding,” said Step. He tore it open.

“I can’t believe we’re reading our mail out here on the street,” said DeAnne, looking around the neighborhood. There was nobody outside.

“Isn’t that what everybody does when their house has been turned into a gas chamber?” asked Step. “It’s the contract. Arkasian came through.”

“Took him long enough,” said DeAnne.

“It just felt like a long time. It’s only been a few weeks. In fact, he probably did this right away and it just took this long to process it.” He looked up from the letter. “You know, Fish Lady, if you had got the mail at the regular time and called me and told me this was here, I would have quit my job right then, before lunch, and that would have been really stupid and totally unnecessary, because after lunch things got better again at work. I mean, it was a really lucky thing that you didn’t get the mail then. Because I really can’t quit yet, not until I know whether Eight Bits Inc. is going to do IBM games or not.”

“Lucky thing,” said DeAnne.

“Yeah, right,” said Step. He put his arms around her, there under the streetlight, each holding handfuls of mail behind the other’s back. “Maybe the Lord really is looking out for us a little bit.”

“Or maybe the law of averages said it was about time,” said DeAnne.

“Yeah, well, who do you think wrote the law of averages?” He kissed her and they headed back to the Cowpers’ house. As they walked away, Step stole a look back at the house, wondering whether Stevie’s imaginary friends had also been driven out by the insecticide.

8: Shrink

This is how it happened that Step found a psychiatrist for Stevie, even though he had vowed that he would never take his son to one of those charlatans.

Not that Step had anything against psychiatrists individually. Their best friends in grad school in Vigor had been Larry and Sheila Redmond; Larry was a fellow history student, while Sheila was just starting a private practice as a psychotherapist. Step had made himself obnoxious, teasing her about how she had gone into the ministry. “The only difference between psychotherapists and ministers is that psychotherapists charge more, and more people believe in their brand of miracle cure.”

Sheila took it all in good humor—after all, patience was the mark of a good therapist—and, because of her, Step had to admit to himself that even though he thought all psychological theories were nothing more than competing sects in a secular religion of self-obsession, it was still possible that an individual therapist might do genuine good for a patient, much the same way that a good friend might help someone who was going through inner turmoil. And even the money angle began to make sense to him when he remembered that in America, people tended to think that anything with a high price tended to be worth more—so that paying a whole lot of money to have someone listen to you and apply meaningless theories to your troubles would feel more valuable and therefore provide more solace than getting nonsense advice from a friend for free.

But the one thing Step knew he would never do, despite his new tolerance for the possibility of helpful therapy, was take one of his children to one of those witch doctors. “Why should we?” said Step to DeAnne. “If we took him to a Freudian, we’d find out that he wanted to kill me and sleep with you. A Jungian would link up his imaginary friends to the collective unconscious and some kind of dual hero myth. A Skinnerian would try to get him to perk up and smile at the ringing of a bell. And the new drug guys would dope him up and he’d sleep through the rest of his life.”

“We’re out of our depth,” said DeAnne. “And we need help.”

“So does that mean we put our faith in the theories of men,” said Step, “instead of trusting in what we claim we believe in? Is Stevie a physical machine, genes acting out the script we gave him? Or is he an eternal intelligence, responsible for his own actions? Do we try to help our own son find his own way out of his own problems? Or do we pay for a therapist to teach him strange new lies to believe in?”

DeAnne looked at him coldly, then, and said, “We’re not Christian Scientists, you know.”

“And psychiatrists aren’t doctors, either,” said Step.

“Yes they are,” said DeAnne.

“Having an M.D. doesn’t make you a doctor,” said Step. “People on the waiting lists at clinics get better at exactly the same rate as the people who are being treated.”

“I read that article, too,” said DeAnne. “But I also noticed that the clinics seemed to do no harm. And maybe if we take Stevie to a doctor he’ll realize how much we care about him.”

“He’ll realize that we think he’s crazy,” said Step.

“He plays with imaginary friends,” said DeAnne.

“And psychiatrists cost thousands of dollars,” said Step, knowing that his secret weapon in any argument with DeAnne was to say that they could not afford it.

“Ninety dollars,” said DeAnne.

He realized how very serious she was about it. “You’ve already checked.”

“On the cost, yes,” said DeAnne. “I went to Jenny’s pediatrician, Dr. Greenwald, and he gave me the names of three child psychiatrists in Steuben, and I called them all and asked what they were charging and it’s ninety dollars an hour. The only question now is whether the insurance from Eight Bits Inc. will cover a psychiatrist.”

“It won’t.”

“You won’t even ask about it?”

And then it was Step’s turn to confess. “I already did.”

She laughed, but she was angry. “You hypocrite.”

“You’ve been hinting around about this ever since you noticed these imaginary friends,” said Step. “I knew you were going to want to do it, and I had to know whether it would be covered. And it won’t.”

She looked at him, wanting to say something really dangerous—he knew the look, knew she was deciding whether it was worth the fight that would ensue if she said what was on her mind.

He saved her the trouble of deciding. “You’re about to accuse me of lying about it,” said Step.

“I was not!” she said.

“You were deciding whether or not to tell me that you were going to call Eight Bits Inc. and find out for yourself if it’s covered.”

“That’s not calling you a liar,” she said. “That’s checking to make sure. What if they thought you meant adult psychiatric treatment, and that’s not covered, but psychiatric treatment for children is.”

“Oh, I see. It’s not that I’m a liar, it’s that I’m so incompetent that I can’t carry on an effective conversation with another adult. You have to check up to see if I missed a little thing like that.”

“People can make mistakes!” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, they certainly can,” said Step, and he started to leave the room.

“Don’t do that!” she shouted at him.

“Don’t do what?” he asked.

“Don’t walk out on me.”

The words hung in the air.

“There’s a world of difference,” said Step, “between walking out on you and walking out of a room. I’m walking out of a room right now.” She started to say something, but he didn’t give her a chance. “Right now,” he said.

He opened the bedroom door and went into the hall and realized that Robbie and Betsy were playing quietly in Robbie’s room, not in the family room as he had thought. Step and DeAnne had raised their voices during this argument—did the children hear? “Hi, kids,” he said. “What brings you back here?”

“Stevie told us to get out.”

“Are you fine here?”

“Yes.

But Robbie looked so solemn that Step knew that he had heard, that he was worried. “What’s wrong, Road Bug?”

“Stevie doesn’t like me anymore,” said Robbie. His face twisted up to wring out his tears.

“Sure he does, Robot Man,” said Step. He sat down by Robbie and put his arm around him. Betsy, of course, began to cry too, since crying was getting Robbie so much attention from Daddy. Step put an arm around her, too, but his attention remained on Robbie. “Stevie’s just having a hard time right now.”

“What’s so hard about it?” asked Robbie. “He just sits around and plays computer games or he plays with Jack and Scotty and he never plays with me.”

“Jack and Scotty?” asked Step.

“He’s always playing pirates with them, or playing train or something, and he won’t play with me, and Betsy’s no fun.”

“No fun,” said Betsy.

“I mean she’s just a baby”

“Baby in Mommy’s tummy,” said Betsy.

“Road Bug, it’s hard, you think I don’t know that?” said Step. “Stevie’s having a hard time at school and I think he’s still a little mad at me for making him move. And so he needs to be by himself a lot.”

“Then how come he’s always playing with Scotty and Jack?” asked Robbie.

Step had to think for a minute. What in the world could he say to that? You have to understand, Robbie, that your brother is retreating from reality into a wonderful magical world full of good friends, which has only one drawback—none of the rest of humanity can get to that place.

“Robbie, can’t you just be patient with Stevie for a little longer?” said Step. “He doesn’t hate you. He loves you, he really does. He just isn’t able to show it as much right now. A year from now you’ll look back on this time and you’ll say—”

“Don’t say ‘a year from now,”’ said Robbie disgustedly.

“Why not?”

“That’s what Mommy always says. ‘A year from now you’ll look back and laugh.”’

His imitation of DeAnne was dead on. Step had to laugh. “Can you do my voice?”

Robbie immediately deepened his voice and said, “Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?”

“Bitch,” said Betsy.

Step was appalled. “I’ve never said that to you.”

“No, you say it to Mom when you think we’re not listening,” said Robbie. He was very proud of himself.

“Well, now I know that you are listening,” said Step.

“What’s a bitch, Daddy?” asked Robbie.

“It’s just a word for a mommy dog,” said Step.

“Woof woof,” said Betsy.

“Why did you say life’s a mommy dog?” asked Robbie.

“That what a mommy dog say!” shouted Betsy. “Woof woof woof!”

“Believe me, Robbie, when you get older, you won’t even have to ask. The answer will just come to you.”

Step unfolded himself and stood up. DeAnne was standing in the doorway to the boys’ room, jiggling with silent laughter. “If you hold all that laughter inside,” said Step, “it might make the baby pop out.”

She laughed all the harder—but still silently.

“Could it really make Mommy pop?” asked Robbie.

“No, Road Bug, I was joking,” said Step.

“Why is it a joke when I don’t think it’s funny,” said Robbie, “But when I tell a joke and you don’t think it’s funny, then you say, ‘That’s not a joke’?”

“Because I’m the official funny-decider of America,” said Step. “Back in 1980 when they elected Ronald Reagan to be president, I got elected to be the national funny-decider, and so if I say it’s a joke it’s a joke, and if I say it isn’t it isn’t. Next year they’ll elect somebody else, though, because I’m not running again.”

“Is that true, Mommy?” asked Robbie.

“What do you think?” asked DeAnne, her eyes wide in a mockery of innocence.

“I bet this is a joke, too,” said Robbie.

“You are right indeed, my brilliant boy,” said Step.

“If Mommy’s laughing does that mean you aren’t going to yell at each other anymore?” asked Robbie.

At the word yell, Betsy opened her mouth and let out a fullthroated holler.

“Betsy, don’t do that!” said DeAnne. “They can hear you on the street. People will think we’re child-abusers.”

“We weren’t yelling at each other,” said Step.

“Yes you were,” said Robbie.

“We were arguing because we didn’t agree about something,” said Step. “That happens sometimes. And maybe we got too loud because we both care very much about the thing we were discussing.”

“What were you discussing?”

Thank heaven he didn’t understand the actual words we said, thought Step. “We were talking about stuff that only grownups talk about.”

Robbie chanted derisively: “Grown. Up. Grown, up.”

“Yeah, well, someday you’ll be a grownup and then you won’t think it’s so cute. Now play with your sister.”

That’s where they left the question of taking Stevie to a psychiatrist—nowhere. It was the first clause in article one of the unspoken constitution of their marriage: If they disagreed about something it was a tie vote, and no one had the power to break a tie, but they both had to promise to think about the other person’s side. So Step was thinking about DeAnne’s point of view, and DeAnne was thinking about Step’s, but this time Step knew that he would never, never agree with her, and he knew that she would never see things his way, either.

Except that in the back of his mind, he knew that he would see things her way. That somewhere in the future he would realize that they really were out of their depth in dealing with Stevie’s problem, that Stevie wouldn’t just give up on these imaginary friends, and Step would end up walking through the door of a psychiatrist’s office one day, taking his own son to the witch doctor to get an incantation that would make the evil spirits go away. It made him angry to think about that, though, and so he put it to the back of his mind and hoped desperately that the whole issue would just stay there, would just go away along with Stevie’s imaginary friends.

The memo finally came down from Ray Keene that it was time for all the creative staff to evaluate the IBM PC and come up with a recommendation. This is it, thought Step. This is what will decide whether I can sign the contract with Agamemnon, the big one that will let me quit this job and never see Dicky Northanger or Ray Keene again. As long as Eight Bits Inc. decides not to support the IBM machine.

And there were plenty of reasons not to support it. The biggest reason was that it was a crippled machine from the start. The operating system was a kludged-together imitation of CP/M; color graphics was only an option, and even if you paid some obscene amount extra to get it, all you got was four colors on the screen at a time, and it was no compensation that you could switch between a set of cool colors and a set of warm colors. The only sound came from a repulsive little onboard speaker that made you want to answer the door whenever it buzzed. It was like somebody had examined the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64 and said, “How can we strip these machines down so there is nothing left that would be remotely interesting to any human being?”

And that’s what the other programmers were all saying. It would be easy enough for Step just to let their words go unchallenged. Dicky would take his negative report to Ray, the machine would be dropped, and Step would walk away clean.

Only he would not be clean. Because he knew that a failure to support the IBM PC would be the death knell, in the long run, for Eight Bits Inc. If he didn’t speak the truth as he saw it during this time when Eight Bits Inc. was paying for his expertise, then he was a cheat and a liar, even if no one ever knew it, and Step couldn’t live with that.

So he spoke up. “OK, it’s crippled,” said Step. “But it has one feature that no other microcomputer made today has.”

“What’s that?” asked Glass. His voice was full of challenge, since he was the most vociferous opponent of the PC.

Step pointed to the letters IBM on the case.

“What is that!” demanded Glass. “That’s nothing!”

“That’s everything,” said Step. “That’s a vast national sales force, that’s credibility, that’s reputation, that’s big corporations being willing to spend a hundred thousand dollars or half a million dollars putting these things on people’s desks.”

“We don’t do business software,” said Dicky quietly.

“Business software will be done by somebody,” said Step. “Somebody will do a terrific word processor loaded with features because you can put 256K of RAM in this thing, 512K, you can have a word processor that will stand up and dance if you want it to.”

“Nobody will ever put 512K on this thing,” said Glass. “You can’t fill 512K with meaningful code!”

“Don’t get mad at me, Glass,” said Step. “I’m just telling you what I think. The machine’s a piece of shit, but it’s an IBM piece of shit, and where we’re looking at maybe half a million 64’s in use today, we’ll see a million, two million, three million of these on people’s desks.”

“What does it matter what’s on people’s desks?” said Dicky contemptuously. “We don’t do business software. We write programs for the home market.”

“You think a businessman doesn’t want to play a game now and then? You think a businessman doesn’t want to have a real computer at home?”

“Not for this price,” said Dicky. “Not when he can get a Commodore 64 with a printer and a monitor for half what he pays for this overpriced box alone.”

It occurred to Step that by being honest he had accomplished what he really wanted. With Step firmly committed to voting for developing software for the IBM PC, Dicky would be even more firmly committed to killing any possibility of Eight Bits Inc. turning to the IBM. I couldn’t have set it up better if I had planned it, he realized. So it was with a light heart that he said, “You’re wrong, Dicky. We’re going to see the IBM market take off until it’s the only market.”

“Except Apple,” said Glass. “That piece-of-junk company just won’t die no matter how useless its computers are.”

“You’re forgetting the Lisa,” said Dicky. It was a joke, and so everybody laughed. The poor, pathetic Lisa, a vast overpriced machine whose only selling point was that it made pictures of your disk files instead of just giving them names—as if you needed a picture of a file folder to tell you that your file was a file! “Step probably thinks there’ll be nothing around but the IBM and the Lisa.”

“Make whatever recommendation you want,” said Step. “I can’t disagree with a single bad thing anybody’s said about the IBM PC. Just tell Ray that I cast a dissenting vote, OK?”

“Oh, I’ll be sure to tell him,” said Dicky. “I’ll tell him that you agree with our assessment as programmers, but that in your great wisdom and vast experience as a businessman you think we should support the IBM PC based solely on business considerations. I’ll go see Ray right now, I think.”

Dicky left the room, almost swaggering.

Step could have shouted for joy.

“Man, you just been shat on,” said one of the programmers.

“But it was only Dickyshit,” said Glass, “so it smells like little roses.”

“Little pansies,” said another programmer.

“Chanel Number Two,” said Step. They all dissolved in laughter.

Robbie and Betsy were safely strapped into seatbelts, while Jenny’s innumerable herd was bouncing around in the back of the Renault like Ping-Pong balls in a room full of mousetraps. “Don’t you believe in seatbelts?” asked DeAnne the first time they rode anywhere together.

“I believe in seatbelts all right,” said Jenny, “but carmakers don’t believe in big families. There are never enough.”

“You could belt in as many as you can,” DeAnne suggested.

“And the ones without seatbelts, what’s the message they get from that?” asked Jenny. “Mommy loves the other kids and doesn’t want them to die in a crash, but you don’t need a seatbelt.”

DeAnne laughed, but it still made her feel queasy. “So the solution is to protect none of them? Why not double them up?”

Jenny just looked at her. “DeAnne,” she said, “I bet I’ll have as many kids live to adulthood as you will. I’m leaving Steuben next month, so let’s just figure that there are some things about each other’s lives that we aren’t going to be able to fix.”

“I’m sorry,” said DeAnne. “I wasn’t criticizing. I just didn’t understand.”

“I don’t understand either,” said Jenny. “And we’ve got to get this dinner over to Sister Ho’s house.” DeAnne reluctantly pulled the car out of the Cowpers’ driveway, even though she and Step had never before violated their rule that their car never moved without every passenger strapped down.

Now it was late in May, and it seemed as though once or twice a week there was something that required her and Jenny to do some kind of Relief Society compassionate service together. “Compassionate service” invariably meant fixing a meal for somebody. Child in the hospital? The Relief Society brings you dinner. Husband lost his job? Again, dinner. Down with pneumonia? Dinner.

No, thought DeAnne. That isn’t fair. The Relief Society does a lot of other things—hospital visits, taking old widows shopping, and that time Sister Bigelow spent three days getting that woman and her two sons with a car that broke down on I-40 installed in a rented mobile home with borrowed furniture. It’s just that meals seem to be the main thing that Jenny and I get asked to do.

DeAnne was getting just a little bit tired of it. “Isn’t there a compassionate service leader in this ward?” she had asked Jenny on the phone that morning. The kids were in the back yard playing, and DeAnne was sitting down resting her back because the baby was sticking about nine feet out in front of her now and just standing up took as much work as lifting heavy crates all day.

“There is one,” said Jenny. “Sister Opyer. She was called because of inspiration. I know that because no rational person would have called her to do it. Amazingly enough she’s been sick every time Ruby Bigelow calls on her to do anything, and now Ruby just calls us.”

“Why not release her and call someone else to the position?”

“You don’t do that around here,” said Jenny. “Sister Opyer wants the position—she just doesn’t want to do the work. So if Ruby released her, she’d be hurt and she’d go inactive and all the women in the ward would say that Ruby drove her out of the Church.”

“But that’s nonsense!”

“You just don’t understand the South yet, DeAnne,” said Jenny. “I give you about a year. Then it’ll suddenly dawn on you that all these sweet, nice, kind-talking people are stabbing you in the back, and you’ll think, What a bunch of hypocrites! Then a year later, you’ll realize that they aren’t hypocrites, they’re just so polite that they talk in code. When they say, ‘Why I’d be glad to, soon as I can,’ that means ‘Better do it yourself because I never will.’ When they say, ‘You think up the most interesting ideas,’ it means ‘You are plumb loco, woman!’ You just have to learn the code.”

“How long did it take you to learn it?”

“I’m still learning it,” said Jenny. “They still surprise me. But the basic rule is, yes means maybe and maybe means no.”

“Why don’t they just say what they mean?”

“Confrontation!” cried Jenny. “That would mean confrontation! To say no right out in front of God and everybody? Impossible. No true southerner is capable of it. It would be unseemly. It would be rude.”

“Well, I always say what I think, and I prefer it when other people do, too.”

“Of course,” said Jenny. “You’re a westerner. And the southerners in the ward all think that us westerners are the most crude, pushy, bossy, obnoxious, contentious, cantankerous fight-pickin’ chest-pokin’ rapscallions as ever crossed the Mississippi going the wrong way. If you catch my drift.”

“Was that cowboy talk?” asked DeAnne.

“Trust me,” said Jenny. “You’ll never get a southern Relief Society president to release somebody who doesn’t want to be released. Oh, she’ll hint around about how it must be such a burden for poor Sister Opyer and I just don’t know how you manage, you sweet thing, what with being so poorly all the time and still having to carry on the burdens of your calling. And if Sister Opyer ever said, It does seem so hard sometimes, but I can manage, then Ruby’d know to release her right off. But instead Sister Opyer says—I was there once, and I think I can remember—she said, ‘Oh, Sister Bigelow, it’s my calling that sustains me, it gives meaning to my life to know that in the midst of my own suffering I can go out and relieve someone else’s.’ And you know that after that, Ruby’s got no hope of releasing Sister Opyer even if she dies.”

“So we do her job,” said DeAnne.

“Hey, it’s the Lord’s work and it needs to be done and we can do it.”

“You’re more of a Christian than I am.”

“So do you want to make the salad or the casserole?”

“I’d like to make the biscuits.”

“Not a chance,” said Jenny. “You don’t know how to make southern biscuits yet and I don’t have time to teach you.”

“They just look like Bisquick drop biscuits to me,” said DeAnne.

“Don’t ever say Bisquick around the women of the ward. Might as well sew a scarlet B on your dress after that.”

“Salad, then,” said DeAnne.

So instead of resting, DeAnne made a Jell-O salad and put it in the fridge to set. And then, along about one-thirty when the kids should have been napping, DeAnne strapped Robbie and Betsy into the car and drove over to pick up Jenny and her brood. They had talked about maybe one of them just tending all the kids while the other took the meal over, but then they realized that DeAnne was too pregnant and tired all the time to deal with Jenny’s rowdy crew and DeAnne also couldn’t deal with the terror she felt whenever her kids were at Jenny’s house and besides, Jenny knew the way and DeAnne needed to get out of the house so there was no other way to handle it—they both went and took the kids.

The family they took dinner to lived way out in the county, and on the long drive back home the kids all fell asleep. Quietly Jenny asked how things were going with Stevie. “Did you decide to go with any of the names that Dr. Greenwald gave you?”

“Step’s against taking Stevie to anybody like that,” said DeAnne. “I mean really against it. He’s not rational about it. I think he’d rather that I had an affair.”

“Men,” said Jenny. “And they say we’re irrational.”

“Well, there’s some reason for it, but he never says,” said DeAnne.

“Does he have some relative who’s a shrink?” asked Jenny.

“No,” said DeAnne. “Why?”

“I mean, I have an uncle who’s a real estate agent and so I hate all real estate agents. I just see one and I want to go get my gun.”

“Because of your own uncle?”

“The sleazeball of all sleazeballs,” said Jenny. “I can’t go into detail because of the little pitchers in the back, but believe me, if you knew this guy you’d want to impose the death penalty for general offensiveness.”

“Well, he’s got no shrinks in his family, anyway,” said DeAnne.

“So,” said Jenny, “when are you going to take Stevie in?”

“I said, Step won’t do it.”

“You’re at home,” said Jenny. “Now that he works human hours, he carpools, so you have the car. You also have the checkbook. Take Stevie in and what’s Step going to know till you’ve done it?”

DeAnne was appalled. “Would you really do such a thing to Spike?”

“If Spike ever dared to put his foot down and forbid me to do something that I knew my child needed, hell yes!”

“Well Step didn’t put his foot down,” said DeAnne. “We just didn’t agree, that’s all.”

“Well then what’s the problem?” asked Jenny. “If he didn’t forbid it, then you can just go and do it.”

DeAnne was nonplussed. It was as though Jenny came from a different tribe with strange marriage customs. “Jenny” she said, “Step and I don’t do things about the children until we agree.”

“I can see it now,” said Jenny. “The child bleeding to death on the lawn, and you on the phone talking it out with Step.”

“It’s not like that,” said DeAnne. Then she closed her mouth and decided it would be better if she said nothing else.

After a minute, Jenny broke the silence. “Um, if you want to kill me, could you wait till we’ve got the kids out of the car?”

“What?” asked DeAnne.

“You’re going about sixty and this is a thirty-five zone.”

It was true. DeAnne immediately put on the brake and the kids lurched around in the back, making grumbling noises in their sleep. “Sorry,” said DeAnne.

“Look, be mad at me if you want,” said Jenny, “but it’s Step you’re mad at and you know it. Call it what you want, he’s stopping you from doing what you know is right for your child. The mother bear in you is not happy, DeAnne. Besides, one of those doctors is even in the ward. Well, she’s not a member herself, but her son just joined.”

DeAnne made a connection in her mind. “Step was just assigned to a home teaching companion like that. A young man whose mother isn’t a member but she drives him to church.”

“That’s the one,” said Jenny. “She’s a shrink. Dr. Greenwald told me she was probably the one most likely to have an opening, too.”

“Why, because she’s no good?”

“Because she’s a woman,” said Jenny. “Most men have a harder time going to a woman therapist, and a lot of women have an easier time going to a man. Or they think they will, anyway. Dr. Greenwald said. It’s like gynecologists. I for one don’t understand why any woman would go to a male ob-gyn ever, now that there are women doing the job, but they still dominate the business. Anyway, she’s got a connection with the Church and she’s sympathetic. She’s more likely to understand.”

“Understand what?”

Jenny laughed. “I can see you’ve never been to a shrink. They think religious people are crazy”

“Not true,” said DeAnne, thinking at once of Sheila Redmond back in Vigor. “I knew a therapist and she and her husband were serious Christians. Not Mormon, but they certainly didn’t think it was crazy to be religious.”

“Have you ever taken the Minnesota Multiphasic?”

DeAnne vaguely remembered that she had taken it once, but couldn’t recall anything more than that.

“It’s got questions all over it like, Do you believe that God sometimes talks to you? I mean, that’s our whole religion, isn’t it? That God still talks to human beings. And by their rules it means we’re crazy!”

For the first time DeAnne began to think that maybe Step was right. If psychiatrists were really like that, then it could be a disaster to take Stevie to see one. As Step said, they didn’t really cure people that often. And if the psychiatrist actually did talk Stevie out of his belief in the gospel …

“What I’m saying,” said Jenny, “is that maybe you can talk Step into it if he knows the shrink and trusts her. So just make sure he does his home teaching and meets Lee Weeks’s mom.”

Step came home with his trophies: a copy of his employment agreement, excluding Hacker Snack and any work he might do for computers not being supported by Eight Bits Inc., and the memo from Ray Keene stating that Eight Bits Inc. would not be supporting the IBM PC. He thought DeAnne would be overjoyed.

“I can quit now,” he said.

“Not really” she said.

“The option in our contract with Agamemnon says that at any point in the first six months I can send them a letter saying I’ll be working on PC programs for them, and that’s it. We get a check. And when I turn in Hacker Snack for the 64 we get another check. And when I turn in Hacker Snack for the PC, we get another check. Which means that before Christmas, if I work hard enough and learn 8088 machine language quick enough, we’ll have had a total income this year of more than fifty thousand dollars.”

“That’s fine when all that money comes,” said DeAnne. “But what about right now? You may have noticed that we have a baby due in July. I don’t think we’re going to be able to get a new insurance policy that will cover a preexisting pregnancy.”

Step looked at her belly for a moment, as if the baby might come up with an idea.

“You can’t quit till the baby is born,” she said. “As it is, the first check from Agamemnon will barely catch us up on the house in Vigor.” She held up a letter. “They’re warning us that we have thirty days to bring the loan current before they’ll begin foreclosing on the house.”

“But don’t you see?” said Step. “If I quit right now, we’ll have enough money to pay for the house and the baby.”

“Do you think I haven’t gone over the figures?” said DeAnne. “Do you think I haven’t read the Agamemnon contract? Do you think I haven’t calculated all our payments down to the penny? If you quit now, and anything goes wrong with the pregnancy, we’ll be in such deep trouble that we’ll never get out. We need the insurance. We’ve got to be covered.”

She was right, but she was also wrong. “DeAnne, Ray’s decision not to support the PC is a deep and serious mistake. Somewhere along the line—and I think it’ll be soon—Ray will realize that and there’ll be another memo. We have a brief time right now when I can quit and go straight into PC projects. But if Eight Bits Inc. is supporting the PC when I quit, then I have to wait a year before I can do anything but Hacker Snack for Agamemnon, and we really can’t live on just Hacker Snack for one year, even if it sells brilliantly.”

DeAnne looked away from him; he could see that she was trying to control her emotions. “I don’t know what to do, then,” she said.

“I can’t even afford to buy a PC until we exercise our option and get the check from Agamemnon,” said Step.

“If we lose the house in Indiana,” said DeAnne, “that’ll be on our record forever. Every loan application there’ll be a question—have you ever been in default on a loan? Have you ever had a mortgage foreclosed?”

“We won’t lose the house,” said Step. “We’ll lower the selling price, what about that? We won’t even get our equity out. That’s fifteen thousand down the toilet, but—”

“It’s more than that,” said DeAnne. “It’s the money we spent on the new furnace and the air-conditioning and the rewiring and the Anderson windows and I wish we’d never moved! If we had stayed there and you had just gone to San Francisco on your own, you could have signed with Agamemnon and we’d still be in the house and—”

“DeAnne,” said Step, “what good will it do for us to start second-guessing ourselves? We had no way of knowing Agamemnon would take me on-we wrote to them, didn’t we? And how would I have gone to San Francisco? We were already broke.”

“I know,” she said. “But I feel us circling and circling around in a whirlpool, getting sucked down, and this job is something to hold on to.”

“What we need to hold on to is my ability as a game designer,” said Step. “I’m good at it. I’ve seen it at Eight Bits Inc. I really do see things that other programmers don’t see. I have a knack for it. You’ve got to trust me, DeAnne, not the check from Ray Keene.”

“Don’t put it that way!” There was fire in her eyes. “Don’t you dare put it that way! Trust in you—I’ve trusted my whole life to you, the lives of my children, my whole future, forever! So don’t tell me that if I ask you not to quit your job until after the baby is born it means I don’t trust you.”

“We’re fighting about money,” said Step.

“We’re not fighting at all,” said DeAnne. “We’re worrying together.”

“I’ll stick with the job for a while. But if it starts looking like Ray’s going to change his policy, I’m quitting on the spot. Not even giving notice. I can’t afford to give up this Agamemnon thing.”

“Fine, that’s good.”

But it wasn’t good, Step knew. Ray Keene wouldn’t give any advance signals that he was going to change his mind. He’d just send around another memo, announcing that Eight Bits Inc. was going to support the PC. It wouldn’t even mention that there had ever been a different policy. And there Step would be, holding that new memo, feeling his future slip away. I’ll be under Dicky’s control, then, Step thought. For years and years and years.

Still, at the moment he knew that DeAnne’s fears were more important than his. So he would stay on the job, and they would just have to pray that Ray Keene would be really stupid.

To help ease the tension, Step took over fixing dinner. It was simple—toasted tuna and cheese sandwiches—and while he was doing it, DeAnne could go lie down. But she stayed in the kitchen and tore up lettuce for a salad. Step knew that her way of relaxing was to be with him, to talk to him. His way was exactly the opposite. What he needed was to be alone in the kitchen, fixing dinner, concentrating on the task at hand, letting his tension slip away. But DeAnne could never seem to understand that. When she saw that he was tense or upset or worried, she tried to minister to him, fuss over him, chat with him until he wanted to scream, Just leave me alone! He never did, though. Now he stayed in the kitchen with her as she talked about her day, letting her unwind, knowing that he would be able to get off by himself later, that when he sat down at the 64 in his office and started working on the Hacker Snack adaptation again, he could shut everything out and that would be good solo time for him.

As Step was still mixing up the tuna and Miracle Whip, the phone rang. It was a woman. “Is this Mr. Fletcher?”

“Yes,” said Step. “And who is this?”

“I’m Lee Weeks’s mother. I understand you want to take him somewhere tonight.”

Step was puzzled. He hadn’t called Lee Weeks yet. He was too busy. It was nearly the end of the month, and so he needed to call him if he was going to get any of his May home teaching done. He had even said so to DeAnne. But he hadn’t actually called Lee Weeks. And he certainly had not planned on going out home teaching tonight.

“Just a second,” he said on the phone. “Can you hold on for a second?”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Weeks.

Step covered the handset and looked at DeAnne. “It’s my home teaching companion’s mother. She thinks I’m planning to take him somewhere tonight.”

“Yes,” said DeAnne. “I called her for you. I thought you wanted me to help you get it scheduled.”

“Tonight?” asked Step. “You didn’t mention it to me.”

“I didn’t actually talk to anybody,” said DeAnne. “I left a message on her machine, that’s all. That you wanted to take him home teaching. I don’t think I said tonight, but maybe something I said gave her that impression.”

Step uncovered the phone. “Sorry for the delay,” he said. “Yes, I wanted to take Lee home teaching. I’ve been assigned as his companion. What we do is, we go visit in the homes of a few families in the ward. We teach a little lesson, we see if they need anything. Like a permanent Welcome Wagon, without the gift certificates.”

She laughed. “Well, that certainly sounds fine. But I’d like to meet you before you take him. You know that he doesn’t drive. Sometimes he tries to, and you must understand that he is not to drive. He doesn’t have a license. And I need to meet you, I think.”

“Yes,” said Step. “I’d be glad to meet you, and I won’t let him drive.” How old did she think her son was? At nineteen, the poor kid still had his mother screening anybody who came to pick him up and take him anywhere. And she made such a point of his not driving.

Maybe he’s an epileptic or something. Maybe he can’t drive and it isn’t just that she’s being overprotective. Give the woman the benefit of the doubt.

“Lee will be ready at seven-thirty,” said Mrs. Weeks. “Do you think you can have him home by nine?”

“Between nine and nine-thirty,” said Step. “We wouldn’t be able to visit anybody later than that anyway.”

“Well, I’ll look forward to meeting you, then.”

She gave him the directions and they said their good-byes.

Step went back to the tuna fish, feeling glum. “I was all set to really plunge into Hacker Snack tonight,” he said. “This wasn’t a night that I wanted to go home teaching.”

“I’m sorry,” said DeAnne. “I’ve been thinking through what I said, and I’m sure that all I said was that my husband, Stephen Fletcher, wanted to set up an appointment to go home teaching with Lee Weeks. She’s the one who interpreted that to mean tonight.”

“Fine,” said Step. “I wasn’t blaming you.” DeAnne seemed really upset. Or worried, anyway. She still hadn’t calmed down since the conversation about quitting. “She sounds nice.”

“So you’re going home teaching then?”

“Yes,” said Step.

She seemed relieved. What, had she worried that he was somehow drifting away from the Church? Why would it relieve her when he went home teaching?

Never mind.

He turned the heat on the griddle. “If the salad’s ready then I’ll start toasting the sandwiches,” he said.

“Yes, sure,” said DeAnne. “I’ll call the kids.” She struggled to her feet and left the room.

Two months left, thought Step, and she’s already so big she’s got the pregnant-woman waddle. What’s it going to be like for her by the end of July?

Lee Weeks lived in a simple ranch-style house out in the county, but there was a lot of yard around it and it was all meticulously landscaped and manicured. And the driveway was a turnaround. La-di-da, thought Step as he drove up and parked at the front door.

Mrs. Weeks answered the door. She was slim, and Step imagined that she probably thought of herself as tall, though of course she was much shorter than he was. She brought him into the living room and engaged him in conversation; he was aware that she was extracting information from him, but it wasn’t really the information he expected her to be interested in. She did ask what he did for a living—the standard American status measurement—but then she went on to talk about an odd array of things, including local politics.

Gradually it dawned on him that she was testing him. But for what? She found out that he thought the mixed-race city schools should be consolidated with the mostly-white county schools. That he opposed Jesse Helms and his racist attacks on Governor Hunt, his probable opponent in the next election. What could this possibly have to do with Lee? Yet it was only when Lee’s mother was certain that Step was a staunch civil rights supporter that she finally called her little boy into the room.

Little boy! When he walked into the room, Step realized that the kid must be at least six-five, because Step, at six-two, found himself staring straight into Lee’s chin. Nineteen years old, tall enough to be an NBA guard, and his mother still wouldn’t let him drive or go out with strangers until she interviewed them. Strange indeed. Especially since he was really a good-looking kid. Surely somewhere along the line he would have found out that he was attractive to women and got himself out from under her thumb.

Lee was cheerful enough, though, and when they finally got out into the car, Lee started laughing. “Mom’s really something, isn’t she!”

“A very interesting woman.”

“She treats everybody like a patient.” Lee seemed to be full of barely smothered mirth.

“A patient?”

“Oh, she’s a shrink, didn’t you know? Couldn’t you feel yourself being analyzed?”

“I guess I could,” said Step.

“She’s nice, though,” said Lee.

That was a weird thing to say about your own mother, thought Step. And he said it with such detachment that she could have been anybody. His teacher. His chauffeur.

Which, in fact, she was.

It was already well after eight o’clock, so Step had been right when he guessed that they’d probably only get to make one visit tonight. Step had decided on Sister Highsmith, an elderly widow, since she would presumably be glad to see them and wouldn’t throw him any curves as he was introducing Lee to the idea of home teaching. On the way to her house, he briefly told Lee what home teaching was all about.

“Oh, so we’re not, like, giving a lesson,” said Lee.

“A message is all. Very brief. And then drawing her out, letting her talk. She’s been a widow for twenty years, and she’s kind of a talker. Doesn’t get much company, so whoever comes over is going to get an earful. But that’s fine—that’s part of what we’re coming for. To help her feel connected to the Church. To life.”

“I thought you said this was your first time visiting these people.”

“That’s right. I’ve never met this sister, in fact. Or anyway, not that I remember.”

“Then how do you know so much about her?” asked Lee.

“I don’t know anything about her.”

“She’s a widow for twenty years, she’s lonely, she’s a talker …”

“Oh, well, that’s just stuff that the elders quorum president knew about her. I mean, she’s had home teachers before us.”

“So we report on these people?”

“Man, you make it sound like we’re spying,” said Step, laughing.

Lee didn’t laugh.

“Lee, it’s not like that. We don’t pry. People tell us what they want to tell us. Most of it’s just like stuff you’d tell any friend. And we don’t talk about it except if the Church needs to get involved. Like, for instance, this one family back in Vigor, Indiana, the dad was a trucker but he broke his leg playing touch football. They weren’t even active in the Church, but I was their home teacher and I went to their house and the mom spilled her guts about how they didn’t have any money and no insurance and they didn’t know where to turn. She had a job, but as she said, she was getting paid like a woman, so they were not exactly going to make ends meet. They didn’t have anything to eat till she got paid on Monday. So I invited them over to dinner at our house. And then I went and got her visiting teachers and we went to the store and did a week’s worth of grocery shopping and dropped it off at their house.”

“Oh,” said Lee.

“We didn’t tell anybody else in the ward except the bishop, and he got in touch with them about welfare assistance and it was all very discreet. You see what they need, and then you do it. If that’s spying, I wish I had more spies in my life.” Which was true enough—presumably someone had been assigned to home teach Step’s family, but they had never shown up. Home teaching was a great idea, but it just didn’t happen all that often, and when it did it usually wasn’t much more than dropping by, taking up a half hour with empty conversation, and then saying, Well, let us know if you need anything, and then they were gone till the last day of the next month. No need to tell Lee that yet, though. Why not let him think that Mormons actually took home teaching seriously and watched out for each other faithfully? There’d be plenty of time to be disillusioned later, and in the meantime Lee might have got into the habit of doing it right.

When they got to Sister Highsmith’s apartment building, Step and Lee waited in the car for a moment while Step led them in a short prayer. Help us know what she needs and provide it for her, help her know that she can rely on us—that sort of prayer. Then they went up to the door and knocked.

It took forever for her to get to the door, but when she got there it was as if she were receiving royalty. She was dressed to the nines and her stark white hair looked as though she had just stepped out of a beauty parlor. She was gracious and elegant, as was her home, though it tended to be a little too knick-knacky for Step’s taste. A grandma house, he decided, a grandma house where the grandchildren never came, so that nothing had ever had to be put up out of the reach of children.

But there were pictures of children, and so Step asked about them, and that was good for fifteen minutes of talk about how wonderful they were but their parents just didn’t seem to take the gospel seriously and the children were downright frivolous sometimes, all except her son’s eldest girl, who was quite a serious child and wrote to her once a month, without any prompting from the girl’s parents, which is a very fine thing in this day and age when children have no respect.

When that subject wound down—that is, when Sister Highsmith started asking about his family—he answered her briefly and then commented on the fact that she didn’t seem to have a southern accent. That was good for another fifteen minutes about all the moving around that she and Nick had done before he retired from the military and they settled in Steuben. He died a year to the day after he retired, even though he had just invested most of their savings and all of her inheritance in a little fast-food franchise, but it turned out that Der Wienerschnitzel just didn’t do all that well in Steuben. It just wasn’t a southern franchise, they realized too late-southerners didn’t want mustard and onions on their hot dogs, they wanted chili and Cole slaw and they also wanted a place to sit down and they weren’t going to pay Der Wienerschnitzel prices to do it. So the business wound down and even though she lost all that money, she didn’t mind, because she had plenty of pension money on top of social security and her life with Nick had been a good life and if he had lived he would have made the franchise work, she was sure of it. So now it was just a matter of waiting until the Lord saw fit to take her home to heaven so she could be with Nick again.

“Do you really think he’s in heaven?” asked Lee.

It was the first thing he had said in Sister Highsmith’s house after the initial greeting, and the question just hung there in the air for a moment, as Sister Highsmith tried to discern whether he was challenging her assessment of her husband’s righteousness.

“Brother Weeks here is new in the Church,” Step explained. “I don’t think he’s suggesting that Brother Highsmith isn’t in heaven, I think he’s asking a doctrinal question.”

“Oh, yes,” said Lee. “I didn’t think of it that other way—no, of course he’s in heaven! I mean, even people who open hot dog franchises can still go to heaven, right?” He laughed, and Sister Highsmith and Step politely laughed along, though Step was meanwhile thinking, OK, let’s get this boy out of here. Apparently Mommy hasn’t given Lee much chance to learn what you do and don’t say, and what you do and don’t joke about.

“What I was asking,” said Lee, “was whether you think your husband is a god.”

Step cringed inside. What had the LeSueurs taught this boy? Step loathed the way that some Mormons bandied about the idea of godhood as if it were first prize at the county fair and really good Mormons would bring it home like a giant stuffed bear.

“I mean that’s what first attracted me to the Mormons,” said Lee. “Was the idea that human beings can become gods. I’ve always felt that. And then I saw this movie about how that’s what you Mormons all believe and so I phoned up the church here in town and the missionaries came by.”

“What was the movie?” asked Step. “Was it by any chance called The Godmakers?”

“Yes, that was it,” said Lee.

“That’s an anti-Mormon film,” said Step. “It distorts our doctrines beyond all recognition. And the answer to your question is no, Sister Highsmith does not believe that her husband is a god. He’s a man, and a good man—am I right, Sister Highsmith?”

“The very best sort of man,” she said. “He became a colonel before he retired.”

“Yes,” said Step, “and now his spirit has left his body behind and he lives on with those of his family who died before him. But Lee, becoming holy and perfect enough to fully share in God’s work is very rare and when it does happen it would happen only after long development and a long, long time after death and to most people it never comes at all. It’s not like becoming a colonel.” And then, to help Lee realize that the discussion should now end, Step added, “And it’s not a doctrine that we discuss much.” Or at least, if we have any sense of proportion we don’t discuss it much. We don’t even understand what Joseph Smith meant by it, for heaven’s sake! Much better to concentrate on things like loving your neighbor and trying not to screw up your life and the lives of everybody around you than to get into mysterious doctrines.

Apparently mysterious doctrines were all that Lee wanted to talk about. “I think about becoming a god all the time,” he said. “I think it would be neat to design planets and stuff. I could sure do a better job than this world.”

Sister Highsmith blanched, and Step knew that she would not be reluctant if he now got Lee out of the house. “Well,” Step said, “it was wonderful to meet you, Sister Highsmith. Can we have a word of prayer before we go?”

“Oh, do you have to go already?” she said.

Step cringed again, waiting for her to say the obligatory Don’t go, wait awhile, it’s early yet.

But she didn’t say it. “Well, how sweet of you two to come by. And I’d be glad if you’d say the prayer, Brother Fletcher.”

Yes, Lee had really put the stamp of strangeness on this evening. Sister Highsmith was glad to see them go—not exactly the best finish for the evening.

Out in the car, Lee seemed oblivious to the idea that he might have said something wrong. “That was neat,” he said. “To be able to talk like that about things that I’ve just kept bottled up inside for years. I mean, that’s the best thing about the Mormons, I can tell my secret thoughts and people understand. Not like Mom, I can’t tell her anything or she just analyzes me to death.”

I can understand that, thought Step, if you talk very much about becoming a god. To a psychologist, no less!

“I can feel it inside me, you know,” said Lee. “All the time. Sometimes even a voice. And I know that it’s the voice of God, it’s the presence of God, just like Sister LeSueur told me. She said she had a vision about me, that I had the seeds of godhood inside me and I was just waiting for the gospel to bring it out of me. Sometimes I think that if I could just strip away all the weakness of this body that just ties me down to earth I could fly. And I don’t mean just flapping around like a sparrow or something, I mean soar up to the stars, go from planet to planet. I feel like that sometimes. I mean, sometimes I think that I really have done it, that yesterday I was on another planet just like this one, only the old one wasn’t as real, this one is the real one, the other one was just an imitation and now, for the first time, I can see what reality is, what it means to be alive, and I think, No one else can see this, I’m the only one who can see this, because the god inside me has opened my eyes. Everybody else sees it, I mean, but they don’t really see it. They see but they don’t—they can see but—”

He was beginning to sound almost frantic, as if the right word were just out of reach and he couldn’t quite find it. So Step offered a finish for this impossible thought. “You’re saying that they apprehend it with their eyes, but you comprehend it.”

“With my soul,” said Lee, “yes, just like that! That’s got to be the Spirit of God, making the connection between us so you know what I’m saying even before I say it!”

Brother Freebody might have warned Step a little better about what he meant by Lee Weeks having some weird ideas about doctrine. Or maybe Lee hadn’t been this extreme about it when Freebody talked to him. Or maybe Freebody hadn’t believed that he was hearing what he was actually hearing when Lee said it.

“And sometimes I know that I’m the only real person in the world. No offense,” Lee added quickly.

“No, that’s not an uncommon feeling,” said Step. “It’s called solipsism. The idea that nothing is real except the self.”

“No, I don’t just mean a feeling, like anybody can get. I mean I know that God sees me and recognizes me as his kindred spirit, like a lost twin. Nobody but me ever feels like that. Only I can’t tell that to anybody but the Mormons, because you understand! You’ve known about it all along.”

Patiently Step tried to explain the fact that the gospel of Jesus Christ was mostly about how we treat other people, and not at all about becoming the most powerful being in the universe and getting into a first-name relationship with God. That was for the bozos on TV who talked about Jeeee-zuz as if he was their old high-school chum or something. Lee listened to everything that Step was saying, nodding wisely and agreeing to all of it. But Step was sure that Lee was missing the whole point of everything.

When they got to Lee’s house, his mother was waiting at the door. She seemed to size them up as they came from the car, and by the time Step got up to the house, she was beaming. Only on the porch did it occur to Step that there was no reason for him to have walked Lee to the door. That was what Step did with thirteen-year-old babysitters, to make sure they got in safely. Home teaching companions over the age of eighteen you could just let out of the car. But for some reason Step had just expected himself to come to the door.

“Please come in,” she said warmly. Her whole demeanor was different. This was the woman on the telephone. What had happened since eight o’clock?

“I can’t stay,” said Step. “Got to get home. I don’t see my family half enough as it is.”

“Oh,” she said, looking disappointed. “Perhaps some other time.”

“Well, in fact you’ll probably see me a couple of times a month. We home teach four families, and we do it every month.”

She raised her eyebrows, but she seemed to be pleased all the same. “How nice,” she said. “What a very social church you have.”

“I suppose so,” said Step, thinking how wearing that sociability could sometimes be.

“And how was Lee?” she asked.

Lee was standing right there. It was so outrageous, to ask about him as if he were a small child in another room, and not an adult, a man, standing right beside her. Yet Lee beamed. He seemed to expect a good report card, and so Step delivered one. “Lee was great,” he said. “He spoke right up and we had a good visit.”

No need to tell Mommy that Lee got a bit weird about doctrine. To explain that, he’d have to explain the doctrine, and it always sounded deeply weird to nonmembers. Or it should, anyway—it wasn’t quite natural, the way Lee had taken right to it, and all the wrong way. You had to build up to understanding it, and it was a sure thing that Lee had neither the buildup nor the understanding.

But there was plenty of time, if he stayed in the Church. A lot of people came into the Church with serious misconceptions about the gospel—no matter how clear the missionaries were, people were going to filter ideas through their own preconceptions and come out with something skewed at least a little bit off plumb, and sometimes a lot more than a little bit. If they stuck with it, though, and realized that correct opinions about doctrine weren’t anywhere near as important as learning to serve other people, to accept and fulfill responsibility, then eventually they’d loosen up enough to come around and change their beliefs, too, or at least not be upset that most Mormons didn’t see things the same way.

Outsiders usually seemed to think of Mormons as automatons, obeying a charismatic prophet the way Jim Jones’s followers obeyed him in Guyana. The reality was almost the opposite—stubborn, self-willed people going off every which way, with bishops and other ward leaders barely able to hold them all together, all the while tolerating a wide range of doctrinal diversity as long as people would just accept their callings and then be dependable. There was room even for Lee Weeks, who seemed to be obsessed with a rather inflated view of his own divine potential; given that the 1st Ward already had Dolores LeSueur, Lee’s ambitions could certainly be taken in stride.

“I’m so glad,” she said. Step was relieved to see Mrs. Weeks smile.

But no, it was Dr. Weeks, wasn’t it? “Lee says you’re a psychologist,” said Step. The idea of her being a psychologist seemed somehow very important. Then he realized why—Stevie. Stevie and DeAnne’s idea of what they ought to do for him. Suddenly Step looked at Dr. Weeks in a different light.

“Not a psychologist,” she was saying. “A psychiatrist. The M.D. isn’t much—just years of medical school and internship and residency.” She chuckled.

“I’m sorry,” said Step. He almost added, What Lee actually said was, She’s a shrink. But he decided that he shouldn’t get on her bad side because maybe she was the one who could bring Stevie back from the company of Scotty and Jack.

“Oh, I’m used to people getting the different branches of our profession confused,” said Dr. Weeks. “I’m called a psychoanalyst just as often, and of course that’s wrong, too. That’s more of a priesthood than a profession, anyway.”

She spoke with a light, amused tone, but Step took the words as a very good sign. He liked this woman, this shrink.

“Well,” Step said. “Till next time, OK?”

“Right!” said Lee.

When Step got home, DeAnne was in the kitchen, waiting for him. Everything was cleaned up, and she was reading a book. It was the Anne Tyler novel he had bought her more than a month ago. “You just getting around to that?” he asked.

“No, I started it back when you first gave it to me,” she said. “But then I didn’t like her for a little while.”

“Oh,” said Step. “And now you’ve kissed and made up?”

She made a face at him. “It was just something that the character said in the beginning. This old woman is in bed, probably dying, and she thinks how her children ought to have had an extra parent instead of just her. The husband ran off.”

“And that made you mad?”

“No, it was that she had decided to have her second and third child for just that reason. So she could have extras. When the first one almost died of croup. I thought it was the most awful idea, to have your later children as spares in case you lost the early ones.”

“It’s not really so awful,” said Step. “People thought that way for thousands of years. What does it say in Proverbs about a man having lots of sons? Blessed is he who has a quiverful, or something like that.”

“A quiver,” said DeAnne. “How phallic.”

“Actually, it’s the arrow that’s phallic. A very confused sexual image.”

“Anyway” said DeAnne, “I just couldn’t believe Tyler really meant that. So I just reread that opening again and I realized that that was just what the character had thought, not Tyler herself. And in fact the character realized right away that each child had become an irreplaceable person and not just a spare in case one of the earlier ones didn’t work out.”

“So now you can read it.”

“Oh, who has time? But I thought I’d just check it out to make sure I liked it well enough to take it into the hospital with me.”

“You’ve got two months till the end of July,” said Step.

“I like to plan ahead. What if I got stuck in there with just People magazine?”

“If you like I can bring you the Enquirer as soon as the baby’s delivered.”

“I thought you had enough of me throwing up already.”

Truth was, she hadn’t thrown up that much with this baby. The best morning-sickness period of all four pregnancies. Maybe that was a good sign. Maybe this baby was going to be no trouble. Maybe Step wouldn’t have to lie beside his bed every night for the first three years of his life, humming “Away in a Manger” over and over again. Maybe this one wouldn’t wake up with screaming nightmares: Maybe this one wouldn’t periodically decide to hit a sibling over the head with something heavy.

Then it occurred to him that DeAnne was not waiting up at the kitchen table to read a book—she could have done that in bed. She was waiting up to talk to him at the opposite end of the house from the children.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “How did it go?”

“Fine. Lee’s a little weird, but Sister Highsmith was fine. A nice old lady who likes to talk but then she’s never boring, so it’s OK. Not a lot of woes and troubles, either. Most of what she talks about is bragging about her late husband or her wonderful children or her even more wonderful grandchildren who are being spoiled or overprotected by her very stupid children.”

“I thought her children were wonderful.”

“Only when they were children,” said Step. “Now they’re parents and so they’ve become stupid. Hey, it happened to our parents, didn’t it? And it’s happened to us, too.”

“Are we really stupid parents, Step?”

“By definition,” said Step. “I was a brilliant parent till Robbie was born. Then all the things I’d learned about parenting went right out the window. Robbie was completely different from Stevie and so nothing that worked with Stevie worked with Robbie. I think that’s why second-child syndrome develops. You know, nice cooperative first child, rebellious and troublesome second child. The first child was raised by confident parents. The second child was raised by parents who were nervous wrecks, trying to apply first-child methods to second-child problems. No wonder second kids want to spend most of their teenage years screaming at their parents.”

“Poor Robbie. And what explains Elizabeth’s temper?”

“I haven’t analyzed third-child syndrome yet,” said Step. “Give me time. She’s still very, very short.”

They sat in silence for a few moments.

“Did you meet Lee’s mother?” asked DeAnne.

“Sure,” said Step. “It’s kind of impossible not to. She guards Lee like a tigress. I felt like I was going through a job interview just to get her to call Lee into the room so we could go.”

“I can understand being protective.”

“Yeah, well, especially with Lee. The kid’s got a twisted sense of what it means to be Mormon.”

“Oh really?”

“It’s not so much that he can hardly wait for God to retire so he can move into the job, like Sister LeSueur. It’s more like he thinks that he already is God, or at least a god, and he thinks Mormonism is cool because we seem to be the only ones who understand that a divine person like him is possible.”

“How strange,” said DeAnne.

“But he’s young. Young people fantasize about a lot of things.” Step had been thinking about his own youthful thought that maybe someday he would be president, or a great conquering general like Frederick the Great, or a doctor who discovered the cure for cancer. But now, when the words came out of his mouth, he instantly thought of Stevie. Of what Stevie was fantasizing. Not some grandiose megalomania. Just having a friend, that was all. A couple of friends. Did that make him crazy? It was Lee Weeks who was crazy if anybody’s child was, and his mother was a psychiatrist, for heaven’s sake.

“She’s a shrink, too,” said Step, following his own thought and not the thread of the conversation.

“Who is?” asked DeAnne.

“Lee’s mother,” said Step. “She’s a shrink. That’s what he called it. He said, She’s a shrink. But she’s nice, though.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“No, I mean, that’s what he said. That she was nice though. As if to be nice was sort of a contradiction to being a shrink.”

“So now we actually know a psychiatrist,” said DeAnne.

“Well, not like we’re intimate friends.”

“But at least we wouldn’t be sending Stevie to a stranger.”

It came to him all at once. DeAnne knew perfectly well that Dr. Weeks was a shrink. And it wasn’t just that. DeAnne had set up the home teaching appointment, had pushed him into doing his church calling, which she had never done before, just so that he’d meet a psychiatrist. In fact, Dr. Weeks might well be one of the shrinks on the list she got from Jenny’s pediatrician. There couldn’t be that many shrinks in town. DeAnne had manipulated him. It made him feel sick and angry, and he wanted to say something really cruel and walk out of the room.

Instead he just sat there, thinking. What had she done, really? Just helped him to do his home teaching. Just helped get him into a position where he’d meet a psychiatrist. What was so bad about that?

She didn’t tell me, that’s what was so bad. She maneuvered me to this position instead of persuading me to it.

But Step hadn’t left her much room to think that he’d be open to changing his mind. And so if she really felt strongly about getting help for Stevie, maybe she thought there was no other way. So it isn’t that she manipulated me. No, I feel angry and sick because I’m ashamed that I’m the kind of husband whose wife thinks she has to do this kind of manipulation in order to get from her husband what she thinks her child needs.

I must be a really terrible husband, in her view, that she has to fool me. Like the giant’s wife in Jack and the Beanstalk. Doing her best to save the life of the small person in her care by keeping him out of the way of the cruel, awful, tyrannical husband.

When the silence had grown very long, he said, “Maybe you could find out her office number and set up an appointment for Stevie. If she takes children.”

“Do you think she’d be good for him?”

No, Step thought. I don’t think any more of psychiatrists now than I did before. Less, in fact, because she’s so weirdly protective of her own son. Treating him like a child at this age. No wonder he has power fantasies, with her shepherding him through life as if he were incompetent to zip his own fly after peeing. What’s she going to do for my child when her own is Lee Weeks?

That wasn’t fair. Just because she couldn’t see the problems in her own family didn’t mean she couldn’t see clearly the problems in others. When Step had been elders quorum president, he had seen a lot of things clearly about other people’s lives, but his own was just as murky to him as ever.

“She might be,” said Step. “As good a chance as anybody else. And like you said, we know her.”

“You know her,” said DeAnne.

“Well, anyway,” said Step. “Make the appointment. And then we have to figure out how to break it to Stevie that we’re taking him to a shrink.”

“It will help if you don’t call her a shrink in front of him.”

Oh, you’ve already thought this all through, I’m sure. “Well don’t call her a psychiatrist, either,” said Step. “Call her a therapist.”

“Why? A psychiatrist is a doctor, and a therapist isn’t. Sheila is a therapist.”

“In contemporary American culture,” said Step, “going to a psychiatrist means you’re crazy. But going to a therapist means you’re rich and stylishly uptight.”

“I hate it when you talk about ‘contemporary American culture’ this and ‘contemporary American culture’ that.”

Well, I hate it when you treat me like a puppet you can maneuver however you want. I didn’t know how much I hated it till now, because up till now you had never done it.

“Can I get you anything to eat?” asked DeAnne.

“I’ve already gained about fifteen pounds working at Eight Bits Inc.,” said Step. “The candy machines are killing me. The last thing I need is a snack.”

“Just asking,” said DeAnne. “Are you upset about something?”

Yes. “No. I’m just tired. I wasn’t planning on spending tonight home teaching.”

“I’m sorry,” said DeAnne. “I told you, I wasn’t trying to set it up for tonight, I just figured you wouldn’t mind if I tried to establish contact with your companion. Are you coming to bed soon?”

“I suppose,” said Step. “Is there anything good on Thursday nights?”

“We have forty channels,” said DeAnne.

“Yeah,” said Step, “but thirty-three of them are Jimmy Swaggart clones trying to heal hemophiliacs with the hemoglobin of the Holy Spirit. Or was that Ernest Ainglee?”

“It was that weird crewcut guy with the crazy eyes,” said DeAnne. “Don’t stay up too late. You have work in the morning, you know.”

DeAnne left before she could see how Step tensed up at those words. Yes, I have work in the morning. I don’t have to have work in the morning, though. I could walk in and give notice tomorrow and tell Keene where to stick his Dicky. I could let them fire me and collect unemployment. But no, you won’t let me get out from under Dicky’s thumb, because you don’t trust me to make enough money to pay for the baby, you don’t even trust me enough to talk to me rationally about getting a psychiatrist for Stevie. You have to trick me into it.

Step hated feeling such rage toward the person he loved most. And it wasn’t the yearning love of young romance, but rather the kind of love that made her feel like part of his own self, so that he couldn’t imagine a future without her beside him. To be so savagely angry at her was terrible.

He went to the sink to get a drink of water. Is this how divorce begins? he wondered. A feeling of terrible rage, of betrayal, a sudden discovery that maybe the marriage isn’t as real and honest and strong as you thought it was? Then it builds up and builds up and builds up and then you find yourself living in an apartment somewhere and seeing your kids on weekends.

No, he said to himself. No, I forbid it. I will not let it happen, and neither will she. I’ll just have to work on being the kind of husband she doesn’t think she has to manipulate. Lord, help me to be whatever it is she needs me to be so we can hold this thing together. Just get us through this summer. Through this year. And then we won’t need any more help, we’ll be OK.

He set down the glass and turned around. There she was, in the doorway, her eyes red-rimmed.

“I knew she was a psychiatrist,” said DeAnne.

“What?”

“I set up that home teaching appointment for you because her name was on Dr. Greenwald’s list, and I thought that if you met her maybe you’d like her and even trust her and then you’d take Stevie to her. I didn’t actually lie to you but I still didn’t tell you the truth.”

The tears spilled over her eyes onto her cheeks. She angrily wiped them away with her shirtsleeve.

“I know you hate me now,” she said. “We don’t trick each other and lie to each other, ever, and now I did it.”

Step walked to her, put his arms around her. “I knew that you knew,” he said.

She leaned away and looked up at him. “You did?”

“Not earlier, but here in the kitchen, I realized it. That you set me up.”

“And you aren’t mad?”

“Yeah, I was mad,” said Step.

“But you didn’t say anything,” she said.

“No,” said Step. “I got a drink of water instead.”

She gave a little laugh that was almost a sob. “That doesn’t make any sense at all,” she said.

“I know,” said Step. “But that’s what I did. And I’m not angry now, because you told me.”

Now she cried in earnest. Clinging to him. Tears of relief, of release. “Step, you can quit your job. You really can. It’s wrong of me to make you stay. You hate it there, and we’ll make it anyway, I know we will. So what if we lose the house in Indiana. It’s just a house. It’s just money. I can’t stand the thought of you going every day to a job you hate just because I’m so scared of things being so out of whack in our lives.”

“That’s OK,” said Step.

“I mean it,” she said. “You can quit. And we don’t have to take Stevie to a psychiatrist, either. I really don’t have to have everything my way, you know.”

“I know,” he said. And he knew that, for the moment at least, she really meant it. But he couldn’t take this capitulation of hers seriously. Her need for him to stay at work till the baby came was real and deep. And as for taking Stevie to a psychiatrist, it was the only solution she had thought of for her sense of helpless frustration with Stevie. He couldn’t deny her that unless he could come up with something better, and he couldn’t.

“I mean it,” she said.

“I know you mean it,” said Step. “But I won’t quit. For now, anyway. But it means a lot to me that if I just can’t take it anymore, you’ll understand.”

“I will, Step, I really will. It’s up to you. I’ll just expect that one of these days you’ll come home and say, It was time, and that’ll be fine with me. I want you to come home! I want you here with me and the kids. Our life was so good in those days.”

“It was, wasn’t it,” said Step.

“And it still is,” she said. “My life is still good because you’re in it. Everything good in my life comes from you.”

Step shook his head. He knew she meant it, but in fact he knew that it wasn’t true. Even the good she found in him was really the goodness she had put into him, the goodness he had put on himself like a disguise in order to get her to marry him. He had known that she could only be happy with a husband who was good in certain distinct ways. Like going to church with absolute faithfulness, and fulfilling his callings, the whole nine yards. And so for her he started going to church again, and she never realized that it was a sacrifice he was making out of love for her, in order to be part of her. She thought it was his own desire, and she loved him for it. But what she was really loving was herself, reflected back to her. And even now, when she clung to him, it was not Step the historian or Step the programmer she was clinging to. It was Step the faithful Mormon, and she had given him that role herself. It was Step the father of her children, and those, too, had been her gift.

“Make the appointment with Dr. Weeks tomorrow,” said Step. “We’ll start him as soon as school lets out a week from tomorrow. So he never has to leave class to go see his psychiatrist.”

She clung all the tighter to him. “You’re really something, Junk Man,” she said.

Yeah, thought Step. When you get your way.

And then he pushed the nastiness out of his mind and just held her. This is what love is, he thought. Doing what you don’t want to do, because she needs it so much. And it isn’t that bad. And it isn’t that hard.

9: June Bugs

This is what Stevie got for his eighth birthday, on June 3, 1983: his first wristwatch; a large Lego set which could be made into a castle; four pairs of shorts and four tank tops; his first dress slacks, white shirt, and kid-size tie for Sunday; and a computer game called Lode Runner for the Atari. It was a decent number of presents, despite their financial situation, but Step and DeAnne suspected that the present he liked best was that when school was dismissed at noon on his birthday, he was through with second grade, through with that school, through with those kids, and home at last for the summer.

In fact, that was what Step wrote to Stevie on the inside of his birthday card: “You made it, school’s out, you were brave and strong and we’re proud of you.” Stevie read the card silently, looked up at his father without a sign of emotion on his face, and said, “Thanks.”

That Sunday at church Stevie wore his new Sunday clothes for the first time, and when the bishop called him up to the stand to announce that he was going to be baptized that afternoon, it almost broke Step’s heart to see how small he was, and yet how much he had grown; how young and how old their eldest had become.

After sacrament meeting, DeAnne took the kids and led them off to Primary. While Step was still gathering up his notebook and scriptures to head for gospel doctrine class, Lee Weeks came up to him, obviously bursting with excitement about something.

“Your son’s getting baptized!” said Lee.

“That’s right,” said Step.

“Well I’m a priest,” said Lee. “They ordained me a priest right after I was baptized myself.”

“That’s right,” said Step. He knew what was coming next, but he could hardly believe that anyone would have the gall to intrude so badly into someone else’s family.

“Well I can baptize your boy!” said Lee.

Brother Freebody happened to be standing nearby, talking to somebody else, but Step saw that he heard what Lee had said, and Brother Freebody rolled his eyes in sympathy.

“You have the authority to baptize,” said Step. “But we have the custom in the Church that if a father is a worthy priesthood holder, he baptizes his own children.”

“Sure,” said Lee. “But I’ve never baptized anybody. This is my first chance. You’ve baptized a lot of people. On your mission, right?”

“You’re nineteen,” said Step. “Prepare yourself and in a year you can be ordained an elder and go on a mission yourself and baptize everybody who receives the gospel from you.”

“But why should I wait?” asked Lee.

“Because Stevie is my son,” said Step.

“All the more reason,” said Lee. He lowered his voice a little. “I told you, God is with me. I’d give him a real baptism. Like John the Baptist gave Jesus.”

“Lee, I have the same priesthood you have, when it comes to baptizing. He’ll be just as baptized when I do it as he would be if anybody else with that same authority did it. And now I have to get to class.”

Lee looked … not hurt, really, but … what? Angry. Yes, angry, thought Step as he slipped along the space between benches and emerged into the aisle of the chapel. Great, Step, great, you’ve offended a new convert who was given to you as a home teaching companion specifically so you could strengthen him in the gospel.

But no way in hell is anybody but me going to baptize my oldest son.

Later, in priesthood meeting, Lee seemed to have forgotten all about it—he was talking and laughing with the other men and boys, and a few times with Step himself. Things were fine.

That afternoon, though, at the baptism, it became clear that Lee had not understood anything at all. It was a simple service. DeAnne played the piano and Step led the music; the bishop spoke for a minute, and then Sister Cowper gave a talk about the meaning of baptism. At that point Step led Stevie out of the Primary room, heading for the font entrance by way of the dressing room where they had earlier changed into the white baptismal clothes.

Lee was in the hall with his mother, waiting. Already behind them the bishop and Brother Cowper were opening the folding doors between the Primary room and the corridor, and people were coming out, and there was Lee, dressed in white clothes, right down to white athletic shoes. “Are sneakers OK?” asked Lee. “We couldn’t find any white dress shoes.”

“Lee,” said Step, trying not to embarrass him too much in front of his mother, “only the person getting baptized and the person doing the baptizing wear white clothes. I’m so sorry that you misunderstood.” He turned to Dr. Weeks. “I hope that it wasn’t too much trouble, coming up with all these white clothes.”

“But isn’t Lee performing the baptism?” asked Dr. Weeks.

Lee was smiling as if nothing at all was wrong. He clearly intended Step to stand aside and let him perform the baptism. But that was not going to happen unless Step dropped dead in the next few minutes. “No, Dr. Weeks. I told Lee this morning when he offered to do it that in the Mormon Church, whenever it’s possible a father baptizes his own children.”

Dr. Weeks’s expression hardened. “Then this is an inappropriate behavior?” she asked.

“I don’t know how Lee could have misunderstood,” said Step.

“But you said I could do it,” said Lee. His voice was quite loud, to get the maximum sympathy from the onlookers. Step could sense DeAnne coming up beside him, standing with him.

“No, Lee,” said Step, also loudly. “I clearly told you that you would have chances to baptize if you go on a mission, but that I would baptize my firstborn child today. I’m sure you realize that there is no chance that I would ever have said otherwise under any circumstances.”

“Come along, Lee,” said Dr. Weeks icily. Step couldn’t guess whether she was angry at him or at Lee or—worst of all—at the Church.

DeAnne touched Dr. Weeks on the arm. “I hope you understand,” she said softly. “No one meant to embarrass your son. It was just a misunderstanding.”

“Oh, I’m sure Lee understood perfectly all along,” said Dr. Weeks, also softly, and with a slightly pained smile. “He simply has a way of adjusting reality to fit his desires and then expecting others to go along. I hope you will overlook this.”

“Of course,” said Step. He was relieved-she knew where the blame for this belonged.

“You’ve embarrassed me, Mother,” said Lee.

“It’s time to go home,” said Dr. Weeks.

“Why not stay and see the baptism?” said DeAnne.

“I saw Lee’s baptism,” said Dr. Weeks. “I imagine this will be much the same.”

“I want to stay,” said Lee.

“Come home now, Lee,” said Dr. Weeks.

There was a moment’s silence between them, and then Lee turned to Step and, with a cheerful smile, said, “You really should have let me baptize him. That would have been the best thing.” Then he turned and walked with his mother down the corridor toward the southeast door of the meetinghouse.

DeAnne squeezed his arm. “They’re leaving, and everybody else is waiting,” she said.

“Yes,” said Step. “Sorry.” He looked down at Stevie and smiled. “What do you say we go through with this?”

Stevie nodded.

Inside the dressing room, where their Sunday clothes were hanging up on hooks, Step paused for just a moment, feeling a need to explain. “Lee Weeks is just excited about being a priesthood holder,” he said. “He misunderstood, that’s all.”

Stevie looked up into Step’s eyes and said, “I think he’s crazy as a loon, Dad.”

And I think you’re as sane as I am, thought Step. But you’ve got to go to a psychiatrist, while Lee only goes home teaching.

“I love you, Stevie,” said Step.

“I love you too, Dad,” said Stevie. But it was perfunctory, the obligatory answer.

They went to the door that led from the dressing room into the font itself. The water was just above the second step from the top. The water bent the light to make the font seem no deeper than a child’s wading pool, but as Stevie stepped down into it, it seemed to swallow him up, bending him at the legs and then at the hips until he was so short that this shallow water came up to his shoulders. Step followed him. The water was cold, but he got used to it quickly. It came up only to his hips. Stevie is so small, he thought. He’s too young to take on himself the consequences of all his future choices.

Then he thought, Stevie’s been making his own choices, taking responsibility for himself ever since he was old enough to walk. For Stevie, baptism is probably years overdue. The Lord just picked eight years old as a convenient middle ground, that’s all. Some children are ready for it as toddlers, and some aren’t ready until well past their teens. Stevie was born with wisdom and goodness in him, like the high priest Samuel, like Solomon, like Joseph who was sold into Egypt, like Jesus.

Step took Stevie’s right wrist in his left hand. “Hold on to my arm,” he whispered. “Just like we practiced.”

Stevie reached up his left hand and took hold of Step’s left wrist. His hand was so small, his grip so tight and yet so feeble.

Stevie tried to move his right hand up to plug his nose.

“Not yet,” Step whispered. “After the words.”

Stevie waited as Step raised his right hand to the square and spoke loudly, so the official witnesses could hear and make sure he said it right: “Stephen Bolivar Fletcher, having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

“Amen,” murmured the crowd.

“Amen,” whispered Stevie.

Step lifted Stevie’s right hand toward his face, and Stevie took hold of his nose to pinch it closed. “Bend at the knees,” Step whispered. Stevie closed his eyes and Step pushed him backward into the water, then shoved him down. The water resisted as it always did, but Step pushed Stevie downward, downward, burying him under the water until he was completely immersed. Only then did he let the water have its way, float him back up; and when Stevie reached the surface, gripping tightly to Step’s arm, Step pulled him back up to a standing position. Stevie gasped, let go of Step’s arm, wiped at his eyes.

Some of the onlookers chuckled affectionately. They had all been through this. They knew how it felt to come out of the water. The disorientation. The hunger for breath. Like being born, gasping for air. The body’s instinct for survival in control of you, so all you can think about is, live. Breathe. Then you think, I’m cold. Can they see through the white clothes? Did I look stupid? Did everything go right? Did some part of me stick up out of the water so they’ll have to dunk me again?

Step looked from the bishop to Brother Cowper, who were serving as the official witnesses. They both nodded.

“We’re OK,” said Step. “Got it right the first time.”

Stevie nodded gravely.

The bishop and Brother Cowper closed the sliding doors between the font and the corridor. Everybody else went back into the Primary room to wait. Step and Stevie climbed up out of the water, their clothes heavy, dripping, cold.

In the dressing room they dried off and changed back into their street clothes. Stevie was very shy about his body, asking Step not to look and making sure that his back was always turned to his father while he dressed. A far cry from the days when he used to run stark naked into the living room with company there, shouting “Teebee go toe-let now! Hurry-up Daddy!”

Step wrung out the wet clothes and then they returned to the Primary room, where some of the younger children—all Cowpers, by Step’s rough census—were running around hooting and screeching. They soon got things quieted down, Brother Cowper gave a short talk about the meaning of confirmation and receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and then Stevie came forward, sat in a chair facing the small congregation, and Step laid his hands on his son’s head. The other priesthood holders there—the bishop, Brother Cowper, and the Primary president’s husband—then laid their hands lightly on his, with perhaps a finger also touching Stevie’s head. And Step began the confirmation as he had done so many times on his mission in Sao Paulo—except in English, not in Portuguese. He confirmed Stevie a member of the Church, and then commanded him to receive the Holy Ghost.

Technically that was all that was needed, and Step could have stopped there—but that would have caused talk, a lot of gossip, because the custom was to add a few minutes of blessing and admonition, and the omission of that blessing would have been shocking.

Yet as Step stood there, ready to speak the words of blessing, nothing came to mind. It was not that he had given it no thought. In fact, for days he had been replaying in his mind the ways he might obliquely address the problems Stevie had been having. He couldn’t say I bless you that your imaginary friends will go away without your having to bother going to a psychiatrist, but there were ways of phrasing the same idea, such as, I promise you healing, and that all your visions will be true ones—things like that, which would sound ordinary enough to people who knew nothing about Stevie’s problems, but whose true meaning DeAnne and Step and God would understand.

Now, though, Step could not remember a single thing that he had planned to say. He stood there in long silence. This was not unusual. Many men took a moment or two to gather their thoughts. But this time the moment became longer and longer, and one of the men in the circle around Stevie shifted his weight, and a woman in the congregation cleared her throat.

Is there nothing I can say to my son? Is his life as bleak as that? Or is it me? Am I unworthy to give any kind of blessing to this good boy, who needs blessing so much?

Suddenly there were words in his mind; and he spoke them almost before he thought of them. “The Lord knows your heart, Stephen, and he trusts you. He brought you into this world to perform works of love, and I promise you that if you listen to the Holy Ghost and make your choices as the Spirit of God directs you, then you will bring joy and peace into the lives of everyone who loves you, both your family and your friends.”

As quickly as the rush of words had come, it was gone. “Amen.”

The men in the circle immediately turned their attention to Stevie, shaking his hand. Solemnly Stevie shook hands with each man, but without looking them in the eye. And as Stevie headed back to his seat, Spike Cowper glanced at Step a bit quizzically, as if to ask, what was going on there during the confirmation? The bishop put his hand on Step’s shoulder and squeezed. Meaning what? thought Step. Encouragement? Consolation? Sorry you couldn’t give your own son a real blessing at the time of confirmation.

Yet it had been a real blessing, Step was sure of it, or at least he was pretty sure that he was sure. It had happened a couple of times before, on his mission in Brazil, the words just flowing into his mind like that. It meant something.

On the way out to the car, after the closing song and the prayer, DeAnne hung back from the kids and asked Step about it. “Was that really all? I mean, you didn’t even mention him getting married in the temple or anything.”

“This was his confirmation, not a patriarchal blessing,” said Step.

“Yes, but Step …”

“I said what I was given to say,” he answered, a bit uncertainly. That’s the problem with spiritual things, thought Step. You knew what was going on, and yet you also didn’t know. Because if you really knew, then it wouldn’t take faith anymore, would it? And yet you had to live in perfect trust, as if you did know for sure when God had spoken in your heart. Only later, looking back, could you see with any kind of certainty whether there seemed to be meaning in what had happened, whether there was some purpose or plan in things.

On the drive home, it happened that there was one long silence that for some reason made Step uncomfortable, and he filled it with the first thing that came to mind. “Well, Door Man, feel any different now?”

As soon as he said it, Step regretted it. It was exactly the sort of stupid question adults were always asking children. Now Stevie would think, Am I supposed to feel different? Uh-oh, I don’t feel different, except maybe still a little damp, and so now what do I say? If I don’t say I feel different, Dad will think that he failed. Or that I failed. But if I do say I feel different, then that will be a lie. My first lie after baptism. All my sins washed away, and now this is my first sin and so the baptism was only good for about half an hour. At least, that was what had gone through Step’s mind when he was eight years old and his father baptized him.

From the back seat, Stevie answered quietly, “Yes, Dad.”

He had opted for the white lie.

“Son,” he said, “actually most people don’t feel all that different, really. It’s OK if you don’t.”

“I do, though,” said Stevie. He didn’t sound insistent. Just reporting a fact.

“Oh really?” asked Step. “What does it feel like?”

Stevie seemed to think about this for a moment. “Like the Holy Ghost is in me.”

For a moment it seemed like the perfect response. For a moment Step thought, Of course Stevie feels the gift of the Holy Ghost, though I never did as a child, because he has always been sensitive to spiritual things, and I never was.

Step thought then of how much Stevie sounded like Lee Weeks just before Sunday school today. God is in me. God is speaking inside me. Whatever it was that Lee had said. Stevie might be spiritually sensitive, or he might be deluded.

Step realized that he was seeing him through the psychiatrist’s eyes. How easy would it be for a psychiatrist to distinguish between Stevie’s simple language of faith and Lee Weeks’s weird certainty that God had chosen him? Probably it wasn’t a problem—Lee might be strange, but he wasn’t certifiable or anything. And of all people Dr. Weeks would certainly take Stevie’s pure faith in the religion of his parents in stride.

Certainly DeAnne was taking Stevie’s answer without any kind of skepticism. She reached over and cupped her hand over Step’s right hand where it rested on the gear shift. Our son is so pure in heart, she seemed to be saying, that he can sense the Spirit of God when it enters him.

“What did you think when your father was confirming you?” asked DeAnne.

“I don’t know,” said Stevie.

“I mean, what did you think of the blessing he gave you?”

“Fine,” said Stevie.

“Let’s not quiz him,” said Step to DeAnne. But what he was really thinking was, Do you have to remind him of how inadequate my blessing was?

“Sorry,” said DeAnne, her feelings hurt a little.

“Nothing to be sorry about,” he said.

Stevie spoke up from the back seat. “Dad?”

“Yes, Door Man?”

“You said that I’d bring joy and peace to my friends.”

“And family,” said Step.

“Well I don’t know how,” said Stevie.

“But that’s what the gift of the Holy Ghost is for,” said Step. “To show you how.”

“But what if the Holy Ghost doesn’t tell me?”

“Then maybe it isn’t time for you to do anything about it yet. Or maybe you just haven’t learned how to hear what the Spirit of God is saying. Or maybe you aren’t supposed to do anything yet.”

“Oh,” said Stevie. A moment passed. Stevie said, “I’d really like to.”

“Like to what?” asked DeAnne.

“Make them happy.”

“Make who happy?” asked DeAnne.

You know who he means! Step wanted to shout.

“Jack and Scotty and David,” said Stevie. The imaginary friends. Only now there were three.

“Stevie,” said DeAnne. “Who is David?”

“Just another kid we play with,” said Stevie. “Me and Scotty and Jack.”

Stevie might have been confirmed, and the Lord may or may not have given Step words to speak in his confirmation, but the fact remained that Stevie was still living in a world where invisible friends came to play with him. And today he had added another. Or was it today?

DeAnne asked, “Did David just … move in or something? I don’t remember you talking about him before.”

Move in, yes, that’s a good one, thought Step. Let’s pretend that these friends actually live in the neighborhood and have families and new ones just “move in” from time to time.

“He’s been around for a while,” said Stevie. “I think he was born in Steuben cause he talks southern and I can’t understand him all that well yet. I mean I can, but I have to listen slower.”

All right, DeAnne, thought Step. You were right. He needs to see a psychiatrist or somebody, anyway. I’ve never heard him talk about his imaginary friends this way. As if they had real lives. He must be spinning out their biographies faster than Step was coming up with code for Hacker Snack on the 64. You knew this, DeAnne. You’ve heard this sort of thing before. No wonder you were so upset. No wonder you insisted. This is too much for us alone.

When they pulled into the driveway Bappy’s pickup truck was out front. “On Sunday?” asked Step.

As if he had heard the question, Bappy came around from the back yard. “Y’all at church?” he asked. “I come by at about four thinking you was bound to be back from church but nobody was here.”

“We had a special meeting,” said Deanne. “Stevie got baptized today.”

“Well that’s something,” said Bappy “That’s really something. So y’all don’t baptize babies either, eh?”

“Are you Baptist?” asked Step.

“Well, my daddy was a Pentecostal minister, and he was a real dunker, he put ‘em all the way under and held ‘em down till the sins were all drownded and so were the ones who found Jesus, I’ll tell you. Why, some of ‘em came up with a mouthful of mud, he pushed ‘em down so far!” DeAnne and Step joined in Bappy’s laughter, but Step was thinking, I don’t like making light of baptism, not today, not in front of the kids.

“Well,” said Step, “anyway I’m sorry we weren’t here. Have you waited long?”

“Oh, I didn’t wait at all,” said Bappy. “I figured, I know I oughta ask ‘em first, but here I am and there’s the tent flies in the back yard and I gotta do something about ‘em, and it’s not like I’m gonna make a mess that I don’t clean right up.”

“Is that what those cobwebby things on the trees are?” asked DeAnne. “Tent flies?”

“Them eggs hatch and the worms can eat every leaf right off the tree,” said Bappy. “So I bag ‘em up and prune ‘em off. Got my truck mostly filled now, and you won’t have any more of them wormy things dropping off on your kids under the trees.”

“Yay!” shouted Robbie. “Those are really icky!” He charged around back, Betsy hard on his heels.

“Well I got ‘em all,” said Bappy. “Or almost. I will have ‘em all by the time the day’s over.”

Step wasn’t comfortable having Bappy doing yardwork on the Sabbath. But he knew that it really wasn’t his business. Bappy wasn’t his employee, he was the landlord’s father, and if he chose to do yardwork on Sundays, well, it wasn’t Step’s job to control it.

“Step, would you go round the kids up out of the back yard?” DeAnne asked.

Step headed into the back yard and found Robbie and Betsy circling the tree like the tigers in Little Black Sambo, though they would never know the reference because somewhere between Step’s childhood and his children’s, that story had been discovered to be a monstrously poisonous thing that would turn otherwise innocent children into bigots. I guess there’s no hope for me, thought Step. I see kids running around in circles, I think of tiger butter.

Bravely Step stuck a hand into the circle of children and emerged with a child attached to it; then the other hand, and the other child. “Come on into the house,” he said, “if you want supper.”

“He got the webs!” shouted Robbie.

It was true. The tree had been pruned back, and now was missing all but two of the branches that had been covered with a mass of white web; even those were now wrapped in large plastic garbage bags, waiting to be cut off and disposed of. It wasn’t hard to imagine Bappy’s wiry body climbing around in the trees. He’s in better shape than I am, thought Step. But then, he doesn’t have to work around the corner from a candy machine.

When Step got the kids into the kitchen and DeAnne had sent them off to change out of their Sunday clothes, she asked him, “Where’s Stevie?”

“He wasn’t in the back yard,” said Step. “I thought he came in with you.”

“I thought he took off when the other kids did.”

“He’s in here somewhere.”

“No he’s not, Step. I unlocked the back door, and he’d have to come in past me, and I know for a fact that he didn’t. So he’s still outside, and I don’t like it that you didn’t see him with the other kids.”

She had good reason to be worried. This morning’s paper had told of another kid who had turned up missing last night at a Weavers baseball game. It was a minor league team, of course, but there were a lot of loyal fans in Steuben and so the games were crowded. Kid just disappeared. Scary times. He’d be on a milk carton soon, no doubt. Or turn up at a neighbor’s house. Or dead. Where was Stevie?

Step went out into the back yard again. Bappy was up in the tree, sawing away at one of the limbs wrapped in plastic. He waved, and Step waved back. “You seen my oldest boy?” asked Step.

“No sir!” shouted Bappy. “You lost him?”

“Oh, he’s around here somewhere,” said Step.

“Keep your eyes on your kids, young man!” shouted Bappy. “It ain’t safe these days. The devil is loose in the world!”

“Oh, I have no doubt of it!” Step called back.

Stevie was around in the front of the house, sitting on the doorstep.

“Stevie, we’ve been looking for you,” said Step. “Your mom and I were worried, we didn’t know where you were.”

“Sorry,” said Stevie. He got up.

“You can’t go running off without saying anything.”

Stevie frowned. “I was right here, Dad.”

“You weren’t in the house, and you weren’t where we could see you, and so we were scared. That’s just the way it is with parents, and you have to humor us and make sure we know where you are all the time or we’ll end up putting you on a leash or locking you in the house or something, and you won’t be very happy with that.”

“Sorry,” said Stevie again.

This wasn’t how it should be on the day a kid was baptized. Off by himself, and then having to apologize for it. “What were you doing here in the front yard, anyway?” What were you thinking about? What was going through your mind?

“Sitting,” said Stevie.

Step knew when he was defeated. “Well, come on in, it’s time for supper.”

Dutifully, Stevie followed him inside.

The next morning should have been the first weekday of summer. Stevie out of school, a chance for DeAnne to get a little more sleep in the morning, get things moving a little later. But DeAnne woke up before her alarm anyway, and not just because the baby was pressing so hard on her bladder that it held about a half an ounce these days. She lay there for a moment and then knew why her stomach felt like it was tied in a knot. She was taking Stevie to Dr. Weeks at ten.

DeAnne and Step had decided not to tell Stevie about the psychiatrist until the morning of his appointment. Why have him worry unnecessarily for days in advance? Why spoil his birthday and his baptism?

Stevie wasn’t so young that they could play the “this is just a different kind of doctor” game that might have worked with Robbie. Stevie knew that there were crazy people in the world, and doctors who treated them, and places where they were shut away from everybody else. It was the child’s version of mental illness—all the old prejudices about madness survived in the subculture of children, passed from nine-year-olds to eight-year-olds, year after year. The loony bin. The nuthouse. Shameful, terrifying. Somehow Step and DeAnne had to make Stevie understand that that was not what was happening here. It would be especially difficult because DeAnne was afraid, deep inside, that that was exactly what was going to happen somewhere down the road.

DeAnne showered. Step had installed a handheld showerhead, which was a lifesaver when she was pregnant-not so much bending and reaching while standing on a slick, wet surface. It felt good to be clean. There were times, late in her pregnancies, when she felt like she was permanently ugly and vile; her hair seemed to get oily faster during pregnancy and it matted to her head, and she felt awkward and bumptious and her back hurt, and her legs, and she got charley horses and she was tired all the time, too tired to want to clean herself up, and there was always this belly between herself and anything she was trying to do, and there were times when she just didn’t want to go through the bother of getting out of bed. Yet if she just stripped off her clothes—a lot of trouble right there, of course—and washed herself, letting the water beat on her body, scour her all over, then she felt better, invigorated. She felt like maybe it was worth dragging herself around for another day.

Step staggered out of bed and into the shower as soon as she got out of the bathroom. Twenty minutes before his usual getting-up time. He had remembered, too. She watched him as he stripped off his nightclothes and pitched them into the plastic laundry basket in the closet. His body was definitely going to seed at this job. His old regimen of bike-riding back in Vigor, along with some serious attention to what he ate, had kept him trim for the past few years, but the belly was coming back again, the thickness in the buttocks, the softness in the face. He had been pasty and overweight when she fell in love with him, of course; she hadn’t really minded, but he minded so much that she knew he wasn’t happy with his body that way. So when he got himself under control a few years back and shed the weight and built up his strength in a way he had never done in high school or college, she loved it mostly because he was so much happier, so much more confident. Looking at him now, she thought: Eight Bits Inc. has been destroying him in every way it could.

She wanted to say Quit your job today, Step. Get back on the bicycle. Join a health club. Get away from the candy machine.

If only we hadn’t moved to Steuben.

It had felt like the right thing to do at the time. Even though she was already pregnant before Step even thought of applying for jobs, it felt right. Almost inevitable. We just have wandering feet, she supposed. We can’t stay rooted anywhere for long. Pioneer spirit. It was built into Mormon culture, to be ready to pick up and move to a new land every couple of years. And maybe there was some genetic component to it. People who were born to be nomads.

Then she thought of chopping down trees and building log cabins and sweeping a dirt floor and cooking at a hearthfire and never being able to bathe and having to use an outdoor latrine and giving birth alone in the dark, squatting over the straw, and she decided that she had no desire to be a pioneer. Wanderlust was fine, as long as you could wander from one place with flush toilets, electricity, and a good local hospital to another.

She headed for the kitchen to fix herself a bowl of raisin bran, but when she had the fridge open, getting out the milk, it occurred to her that it was awfully dark. Most mornings the sunlight streamed into the east-facing kitchen window.

The plastic gallon jug of milk in hand, she turned around and glanced toward the window to see what the weather was. Weather had nothing to do with the darkness of the room. Most of the gap between the window and the screen, up to about six inches from the top, was filled with June bugs, their translucent bodies glowing a ruddy brown as the bright sunlight tried to get through into the room.

It was so startling, so repulsive, all those bugs tumbled onto each other, that DeAnne screamed. Then she felt something cold spatter on her legs, and she screamed again. Only then did she realize that she had dropped the milk jug and the cap had burst off, spattering milk everywhere. Now it was lying on its side, gurgling out the remaining milk. She squatted down as quickly as she could to pick it up before it all poured out, but she moved so slowly that before she could get it the flow had reduced to a trickle. About a third of the milk remained inside, but most of the nearly full jug was all over the floor.

I can’t deal with this, she thought. This horrible house. The bugs in this place, the milk all over the floor, the cupboard that still smells like coffee after all these months, I hate this place.

She struggled to her feet and used paper towels to wipe the milk off her legs and her bare feet, and then she went back to the linen closet in the hall and got out the old towels, which she then dropped onto the milk to soak it up. Then she laboriously squatted again to pick them up, dripping with milk. “Damn, damn, damn,” she said.

“And good morning to you,” said Step. He stood in the kitchen doorway.

“I dropped the milk,” said DeAnne.

“What a relief. I thought maybe you had poured it out. The world’s largest bowl of Grape-Nuts Flakes.”

“I was going to have raisin bran this morning.”

“Well that explains everything.”

She hated it that he was joking when she felt so awful, but then he helped her stand up again, saying, “You shouldn’t be doing that, Fish Lady” and she was able to sit down by the table and watch as he picked up the towels and rushed them into the laundry room. While he was gone, she dared to look back at the window, hoping that she had exaggerated the quantity of June bugs. She hadn’t.

Step came back, heading for the paper towels to finish wiping up the milk, when he finally noticed the window.

“Oh,” he said. “Now I know what you meant by damn damn damn.”

“Damn damn damn was for the milk and being pregnant,” said DeAnne. “For the bugs in the window I screamed, only you must have been in the shower so you didn’t hear me.”

“Too bad, it must have been a doozie.” Step leaned over the sink to look closely at the bugs. “How did they get in there?”

“I don’t know,” said DeAnne. “Maybe some bug entrepreneur sold tickets.” He laughed, and she laughed too, though it wasn’t that funny.

“They’re all dead,” said Step. “Not one of them even twitching. Weird, isn’t it? Like all the June bugs who knew their number was up came here last night to die.”

“So we have the world’s largest bug collection, only it’s all one species.”

“Well,” said Step, “good thing we woke up early today. This roll of paper towels is nearly out, do we have any more?”

“Yes, but we still have to speak with Stevie,” said DeAnne. “I want it to be when you’re still here. I can mop the floor later.”

“It’ll only take me a minute to finish wiping it up,” said Step.

“You can’t just mop up milk,” said DeAnne. “I have to scrub the floor.”

“Pregnant?”

“I’ve done it before, you know,” she said. “That’s what Bendectin is for. To allow pregnant women to keep scrubbing floors while their men watch mud-wrestling on ESPN.”

He looked at her, his eyes narrowed in a mockery of a glare. “Feminist bitch,” he said.

She pretended to glare back. “Male chauvinist pig.”

“Let me guess,” he said, looking at the window again. “You don’t want these guys to be up here all day.”

“It’s more important to talk to Stevie.”

“He’s not in here yet.” Step went to the laundry room and got out a green plastic garbage bag. “This time it’s your turn to hold the bag,” he said.

“Oh, Step,” she said, shuddering.

“It’s either that or you climb up on the counter to open the window.”

“Can’t you do it outside?” asked DeAnne. It made her sick to think of those bugs inside her kitchen.

“I don’t have a ladder,” he said, “and I don’t want to fuss with unscrewing the whole screen when I can just slide this window up. It’s not like I have time for a half-hour job this morning.”

“I can call Bappy,” said DeAnne.

“And have him spray again?” asked Step. “I can do it, and I don’t like Bappy doing jobs that I can do. That we can do, if you’ll just help me.”

She was already up. Step had anchored the bottom corners of the bag on the windowsill using the big red salt and pepper shakers from beside the stove. “Don’t use those,” she said. “If they get bugs all over them I could never stand to use them again.”

“Well, unless you have four hands, Fish Lady, we’ve got to anchor them with something.”

She squatted awkwardly to reach inside the cupboard under the sink and came up with two large wrapped bars of hand soap.

“Excellent work, my beloved assistant,” he said. “That’s what I keep you around for, your extraordinary resourcefulness.”

Now, with the bottom corners anchored, DeAnne held the bag open against the window as Step slowly opened it. The bug bodies rattled out of the bottom of the window, tumbling into the bag like popcorn. The sound of it, the vibration of the bag, knowing what was falling into it, it was all too much for DeAnne. A bug-loathing instinct far deeper and more powerful than her common sense took over, and for a moment she lost control. She moaned, her body was racked with a huge, irresistible shudder, and she let go of the bag.

At once the top of the bag dropped down below the opening in the window and the bugs started spilling out on top of the bag instead of inside it. “Shit!” said Step. “Can’t you—”

He didn’t finish the sentence, as he reached down and lifted up the corners of the bag again, so the bugs went back to falling inside it. Of course, the ones that had already spilled onto the outside of the bag now slipped off onto the counter and into the sink and onto the floor, still damp with spilled milk.

“Can’t you do anything right,” said DeAnne, finishing his sentence for him.

“That’s not what I was going to say,” said Step.

“Yes it was,” said DeAnne.

“I was going to say can’t you at least hold it open again, and then I realized that you couldn’t, and so I did it. Don’t put words in my mouth, especially when they’re mean and nasty words that I didn’t even think of saying.”

“Now you’re supplying the mean and nasty words just fine by yourself,” she said.

“Just get out of the kitchen until I get this cleaned up, will you?” said Step. “Do you think I enjoy handling dead June bugs? Do you think it makes it any easier to have you standing there not helping at all and trying to pick a fight with me in the meantime?”

Struggling against tears of anger, biting off the retorts she thought of, DeAnne fled the kitchen. Had any of the bugs touched her hands? She rushed into the kids’ bathroom and washed with Lava soap, gritty and rough, trying to get them clean. Only it wasn’t bug-touches she was washing away, it was the pointless argument.

She rinsed and dried her hands and then went in to waken Stevie. During the school year she had started the custom of waking him by rubbing his back as he lay asleep. Usually at some point his eyes would suddenly fly open and he’d say, “Morning.” Today, though, his eyes stayed closed and he murmured, “No school.”

“I know there’s no school, honey,” she said softly. “But your father and I want to talk to you about something this morning before he goes to work.”

Now his eyes flew open. “OK,” he said.

She knew now that he would quietly climb down from the upper bunk and get dressed without waking Robbie. She headed back for the kitchen.

Step was using a paper towel to pick up dead bug bodies from the kitchen counter and put them in the garbage bag. In the meantime, water was running in the sink and the disposal was on. She imagined him hosing dead bugs into the drain and then the garbage disposal blades chopping them into tiny bits. It made her shudder again, and she felt her empty stomach churn with nausea. “Thank you for taking care of that,” she said.

“You might want to wipe off the milk carton and put it back in the fridge,” he said coldly.

Well, she deserved to have him speak coldly to her. She had let her revulsion about the bugs turn into sniping at him, and he hadn’t deserved it. Still, she had to eat something to settle her stomach, and she couldn’t eat it in the kitchen, not till all the bugs were gone. “Step, I’m sorry,” she said.

“Fine,” he said.

She knew that when he was angry with her, it was better not to try to force a conversation. Better to wait, to let him calm down, and then he’d be gentle with her and they’d apologize to each other and he’d insist it was his fault and that would be fine. But sometimes she just couldn’t stand to do it that way because while he needed to be alone after a quarrel, she couldn’t bear to be alone, she felt the separation as sharply as if he had struck her and so she had to speak to him, had to explain herself, had to get his reassurance that he didn’t hate her, that he still loved her and wanted her with him. It was completely irrational, she knew. But then so was his need to be alone after a fight.

“Step, I’m sorry,” she said.

“And I said fine.” His tone said it was not fine.

“I mean I’m sorry but I have to say this.”

“So say it,” he said impatiently, not looking at her.

“I need you to wash the counter. Everywhere that the bugs touched. I know it makes no sense at all but I don’t think I can stand to do anything in the kitchen today if you don’t wash it for me first. Please.”

“I was already planning on it,” said Step. He tossed his paper towel into the bag after the last June bug corpse. Then he gathered the top of the bag together, held it up in one hand, and spun the bag so that there was a hard twist right under his hand. He pulled the plastic tie tight around the twist. He was so deft about it, thought DeAnne. As if he had everything down to a science. As if his hands already knew all the secrets about how to do things, to make things happen. She wondered how it felt, to know that you could just think of doing something and your hands would know how to do it.

He carried the garbage bag outside, and while he was gone she dared to go into the kitchen and it wasn’t hard after all, as long as she didn’t go near the sink, didn’t go near the window which was still partly open. She could hear him outside, lifting the lid of the garbage can to put the bag inside. She wiped down the milk bottle and got out a bowl and a spoon and poured the raisin bran and the milk and put the milk back into the fridge and then she knew that she couldn’t stay in the kitchen another minute. She fled into the family room.

Stevie was there, playing a computer game. It must be the new one Step bought for Stevie’s birthday, she thought, even though it cost fifty dollars that they could ill afford. There was a pirate ship in full sail, and not far off there was another ship, and they were maneuvering to fire broadsides at each other. It reminded her of the movie Captain Blood, which she had never seen before she got married, but Step had seen it as a boy, he had read the book and loved it, and when it came on cable he had taped it and made the whole family watch and it was a good movie, wonderful dumb fun. Errol Flynn, a real swashbuckler. This game was like that. She ate spoonfuls of cereal that got steadily soggier, and she watched from the couch as Stevie played.

“Come on,” Stevie said softly. “You can do it.”

He spoke with an intensity DeAnne hadn’t heard from him since they moved here.

“Come on, Roddy.”

Had he even named the tiny people in the computer games?

“That’s right, help him out, Scotty. You can do it.”

He was pretending that his imaginary friends were part of the computer game. Well, that’s all right, thought DeAnne. At least in the computer game they were really up there on the screen, you could see them. Maybe by playing this Lode Runner game Stevie would move his imaginary friends out of the back yard and up on the screen, where they’d just go away whenever he switched the computer off. Maybe this was a problem that would heal itself and they wouldn’t have to take him to a psychiatrist after all, or at least maybe they wouldn’t have to take him for very long.

“Hurry up, Jack! Roddy’s in trouble and Scotty can’t—that’s it! Smooth! Got him!”

And with that the two ships swept each other with broadsides and then grappling hooks flew through the air. DeAnne was very impressed. It was almost like a movie, there was so much realistic movement on the screen. Not so … so limited-seeming, like all the other computer games she’d seen. Like Hacker Snack, for that matter. If this was the competition, Step was going to have to do some superb programming to match it.

“Well if you’d get into it instead of just standing there, David, you’d have more fun,” said Stevie.

Her heart chilled. He was talking to the computer figures as if they were alive. As if they could hear him. Not just the “come on, come on” stuff that people said while watching football or basketball games on TV, but a full conversation, as if the screen were talking back. Stevie wasn’t getting any better, and the computer game wasn’t any help.

She thought back over the names. The regulars, Jack and Scotty, and the new one he had mentioned yesterday, David, and now a fourth. Roddy. It was getting worse.

She could hear Step turning off the water in the kitchen and she was finished with the raisin bran and it was almost time for Step to leave for work. “Stevie, maybe you better pause the game for a minute so your Dad and I can … ”

Before she finished the sentence, Stevie had reached behind the Atari and switched it off. Just like that.

“Honey, you could have saved your game,” she said. “You didn’t have to switch it off.”

“It’s fine,” he said.

Step came into the family room. “Hi, Stevie,” he said. “Sorry you had to get up early on your first day of summer, but your Mom and I wanted to tell you what’s going to happen today.”

Stevie waited. Not even curious, it seemed.

Step looked at DeAnne.

Oh, is it suddenly my turn? Well, she supposed that was fair. “Stevie, we’ve been worried about you ever since we got to Steuben. You’ve been so sad and quiet all the time.”

“I’m OK,” he said.

“The problems in school that we didn’t even know about—the Stevie that we knew last fall in Vigor would have told us if a teacher was acting like Mrs. Jones did.”

“She’s gone,” he said.

“We know she’s gone,” said DeAnne. She could hear herself starting to sound impatient. It was so hard dealing with Stevie, with the way he deflected questions. “But even after she left, you didn’t seem to get any happier.”

“I’m fine,” said Stevie.

Step came to her rescue, for the moment at least. “It’s not just the way you’ve become so sad and quiet, Door Man. It’s the way you don’t play with Robbie and Betsy anymore.”

Stevie looked down at his hands.

“And your friends,” said Step. “It worries us that you play all the time with imaginary friends.”

Stevie seemed to bristle.

“Don’t get mad at me, Stevie, help me here,” said Step. “You’ve been talking about Jack and Scotty for months, and yet when we watch you playing, there’s nobody there.”

“I’m not lying,” said Stevie.

“Well what are we to think, honey?” asked DeAnne.

“I never lie,” said Stevie.

“We’re not saying that you’re lying,” said Step. “This isn’t about lying. It isn’t about right and wrong or anything like that. We just want to take you to a doctor.”

“You think I’m crazy,” said Stevie. He seemed even angrier, but he wasn’t looking at either of them. He was looking into the gap between them.

“Stevie, no way,” said Step. “We do not think you’re crazy. We just think you’re having a hard time dealing with things and we want you to get help from somebody who knows about hard times. An expert. A doctor.”

Stevie said nothing.

“Her name is Dr. Weeks,” said DeAnne. “Her son is a member of the ward, so she’s not even a stranger, really.”

“She’s not a Mormon herself, though,” Step said.

“That’s right,” said DeAnne. “But your father has met her and she’s a really nice lady. She’ll just want you to talk to her. Nothing more. Can you do that?”

Stevie nodded.

“Will you speak honestly and openly to her?” DeAnne asked.

Now his angry glare was turned directly on her. “I always tell the truth,” he said.

“I know,” said DeAnne. “I didn’t mean that I thought you’d lie, I just want you to talk to her. To tell her what’s happening in your life. How things seem to you. You don’t talk very much to your father and me, so we thought maybe somebody else, you could talk to somebody else, outside the family.”

Stevie just sat there, looking into the space between them again.

“Can I come home sometimes?” he asked.

“Oh, Stevie, it’s not like that! I’m just going to take you for a ten o’clock appointment. You’ll go in and meet her and talk to her and then we’ll come home. It’s just once a week, and you won’t even be there a whole hour. We wouldn’t send you away from home, Stevie!”

Because Step wasn’t pregnant he was able to get off the couch and kneel beside Stevie and put his arm around the boy. For once, Stevie responded, turning his face toward his father’s shoulder.

“Stevie,” said Step. “Stephen, my son, you are the brightest star in the darkest night, do you think we’d ever ever let you go? You belong with us until you want to go, and I hope that doesn’t happen until you’re old enough to go on a mission and then get married. Years from now. We will never send you away, no matter what.”

But you mustn’t say that, thought DeAnne. What if he needed to be hospitalized? What then? That would make a liar out of you, Step. Unless you really mean it, and even if he needed treatment like that you wouldn’t let him go. Some love that would be!

Then she thought, I wouldn’t let him go, either.

“Stevie, if you tell us you won’t go to this doctor,” said Step, “then we won’t make you go. It’s up to you. We don’t think you’re crazy or anything like that, but we think you’re having a hard time and we think that maybe Dr. Weeks can help make things better for you, help you find a way to solve things for yourself. That’s all. We’d really like you to try, but if you say no, we won’t make you go …

How can you say that! cried DeAnne silently. Leaving it up to him—that’s like asking a little kid whether he wants his tetanus booster! What if Stevie says no, what then, Step, what about your promise to me that you’d take him?

“I don’t want to,” said Stevie.

And there it was. Thanks a lot, Step!

But Stevie hadn’t reached his decision yet. “Can she really help people solve hard problems?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” said Step.

“Then I’ll go,” said Stevie. He didn’t seem angry anymore.

“Thanks, Door Man,” said Step. “And if it doesn’t work out, or if you don’t like her, then we won’t make you go to her anymore, OK? This isn’t like school, there isn’t a law that says you have to go. Got it?”

Stevie nodded. Then he got up and left the room. DeAnne wanted to hold him, comfort him. But if he had wanted her right then, he could have stayed. He wanted to be alone, and that was his right.

Step sat back down beside her on the couch and put his arm around her. “It went pretty well, I’d say,” he said.

She said nothing.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Step, “and it isn’t true.”

“What am I thinking, smart guy?” she asked.

“You’re thinking that you’re the worst wife and mother who ever lived on the face of the earth and I’m telling you, that’s just the pregnancy talking.”

“No it’s not,” she said.

“I know you hate it when I point out things like this, but you’ve always spent the last couple of months of every pregnancy in the slough of despond. The worst mother, the baby would be luckier if it was stillborn—”

“I’ve never said such an awful thing!”

“You said it about Stevie and you said it about Betsy.”

“So I’m just a machine that hormones use to accomplish their evil purposes in the world,” she said.

“I’m not saying that the feelings you have aren’t real, Fish Lady,” said Step. “I’m just saying that you can’t believe the things they make you think. You’re a wonderful wife, and I wouldn’t have any other.”

“Oh yeah? Well what have I done this morning that was so wonderful?” asked DeAnne.

“For one thing, you’ve kept my fourth child alive for another day, and that’s a fulltime job all by itself. And you didn’t tell me to stop when you thought I was letting Stevie decide not to go to the shrink.”

“What, have you suddenly decided that you’re a mind reader?”

“You sat on the edge of that couch like it was all you could do to keep from leaping at me and stapling my mouth shut,” said Step. “I don’t have to read minds. But you didn’t do it. You trusted me, and it worked out. I’d say that gives you the hero-of-the-morning medal.”

“No it doesn’t,” said DeAnne. “Not after the way I talked to you in the kitchen.”

“Nothing that anybody says on the same day they find five hundred thousand June bugs staring at them through the kitchen windows is allowed to count against them,” said Step. “Now give me a kiss before I go to work because my ride is outside.”

She kissed him. Then: “You didn’t get any breakfast,” she said.

“Why do I need breakfast,” he answered, “in a world with candy machines?”

Then he got up and left.

Taking Stevie to Dr. Weeks was almost an anticlimax. She piled the kids into the car. Stevie was silent on the way to the doctor’s office, but then he was usually silent, and there was no waiting when they got there, the receptionist just greeted Stevie with a smile and told him that his mother and brother and sister would be waiting for him when he got through and why not come in right now and meet Dr. Weeks? Stevie didn’t even give DeAnne a backward glance. He just let the receptionist usher him into the office like a soldier letting the sergeant herd him into battle.

This has to work, thought DeAnne as she told stories to Robbie and Betsy in the waiting room. Please, Lord, let Dr. Weeks find a way for us to help get Stevie back to his old self.

Then the hour was up and Stevie came out. DeAnne raised a questioning eyebrow to Dr. Weeks, but the psychiatrist was not going to confide anything in front of Stevie. She just smiled and shook DeAnne’s hand and then graciously shook hands with Robbie, who asked if he could come in and talk to her sometime, too, because he was really good at talking to people and he liked to do it a lot more than Stevie did. Dr. Weeks laughed and said, “Maybe someday you will, Robbie, but not for now.”

On the way home, DeAnne wanted to ask Stevie about what happened, but she resisted the impulse. He couldn’t be free to speak openly to Dr. Weeks if he knew he would face an inquisition as soon as he got into the car. So she confined her questions to one: “How was it?”

“Fine,” he said.

The next morning, alone in the kitchen at 8:30, she called Dr. Weeks at home, hoping to catch her before she went to work. A man answered; it must be Lee, DeAnne realized. “May I speak to Dr. Weeks?” she asked.

“Who may I say is calling?” asked Lee.

“This is DeAnne Fletcher.”

A pause.

“What’s this about?” asked Lee.

“Is she not at home?” asked DeAnne.

She wasn’t about to confide in this young man, not after his display at the baptism.

“I need to tell her what it’s about,” said Lee.

“Then I’ll call back later.”

As she spoke, however, there was a click on the line. “Hello?” It was Dr. Weeks.

“Dr. Weeks, I’m so sorry to bother you at home, but I wanted to speak to you before you had other patients in the office and while the kids were still asleep.”

“That’s fine,” said Dr. Weeks. “And who is this?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought Lee had told you. This is DeAnne Fletcher, Stevie’s mother.”

“Lee was on the phone with you?”

“Yes, he answered the—”

“Lee, hang up the extension right now.”

A long silence.

“He must already have hung up,” said DeAnne.

“Lee, hang it up now. This conversation will not continue until you hang up the phone.”

Another silence. And then a click.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Fletcher. Sometimes it’s like living with an oversized four-year-old.”

“Yes, I understand,” said DeAnne. But she did not actually understand.

“You wanted …?”

“I just—I needed to know if you—if there’s anything I can help you with. Information or whatever. After your first visit with Stevie yesterday.”

“Not really,” said Dr. Weeks. “You already gave me the basic information before. Oh, I would appreciate it if you would make a list of all the names of his imaginary friends and mail it to me at the office.”

“I could tell you all the names right now,” said DeAnne.

“At the office, please,” said Dr. Weeks. “That is how I maintain things in the strictest confidence.”

“All right,” said DeAnne. “Thanks. And I won’t bother you at home again, I promise.”

“That would be best,” said Dr. Weeks. “Good morning.” Then she hung up.

In the moment before DeAnne hung up, she heard a second click.

Lee had not hung up before. He must have listened to the whole thing.

No wonder Dr. Weeks was having her mail the list to the office. No wonder she said “That would be best.” It wasn’t rudeness, it was simple recognition of reality. Lee was spying on his mother every chance he got. Lee was out of control at home.

DeAnne sat down at the table at once and wrote down the names she could remember. Jack and Scotty, of course. But yesterday morning while Stevie was playing Lode Runner … what were the names? Roddy. And David was the one Stevie had mentioned after the baptism. Four now. Jack, Scotty, Roddy, and David.

Then she set that paper aside and wrote another:

Names of Stevie’s friends in the order we heard them:

Scotty

Jack

David

Roddy

She sat there for a while, looking at the list. Imagining those imaginary friends herself. Four boys, Stevie’s age. Maybe Scotty was a redhead like that child actor Johnny Whitaker, and Jack was a freckled round-faced brown-haired boy like Artful Dodger in Oliver!, and David was quiet, shy, holding back, perhaps a medium blond. And Roddy, bold as brass and inclined to get himself in trouble from which others had to rescue him. All hanging around the house here, always coming into the kitchen and she had to keep shooing them away from the fridge or there’d never be anything left for dinner, but then they’d come in and tell her all about the game they were playing in the back yard, and they’d be sweaty from running and have that acrid little-boy smell that DeAnne remembered from her brother, probably the worst smell in the world she had thought then, but now she thought that she would love to smell it on Stevie, on his friends, the stink of sweat from hours of hot play in the afternoon as the summer vacation got under way and the still-lengthening days left them with so much time, so much time in the evening, the lightning bugs like tiny meteor showers on the lawn as the children ran and ran, and they would never stop until at last she called them in and said, “Time for you boys to go home, don’t you think? But first here’s some milk and I made these cookies after supper, Stevie remember to let your friends choose first, one to a customer please, and maybe if you washed your hands you wouldn’t catch a vile disease. I suppose I’ll have to teach you how to work the faucet, from the look of you none of you boys has ever turned on a watertap in your lives. The square thing by the sink is a bar of soap.” And they would laugh and protest and Stevie would say, “Mo-om,” and then they’d eat the cookies and flecks of chocolate would cling to the corners of their mouths.

Oh God, why can’t Stevie have real friends? Why can’t I hear my son’s voice crying Ollie ollie oxen free in the front yard as dusk settles over the street?

She folded up the list and put it in an envelope and addressed it to Dr. Weeks’s office and then took it out front and put it in the mailbox at the curb.

When she got back into the kitchen, Robbie was kneeling on a chair, sounding out the names on the first list DeAnne had written.

“You forgot Peter,” said Robbie.

“What?” asked DeAnne.

“Peter,” said Robbie. “He won’t come out and play though. He just watches.”

“Do you know what this list is?” asked DeAnne.

“Stevie’s friends,” said Robbie. “He won’t ever let me meet them, though.”

“No, I don’t guess he would,” said DeAnne.

“What you writing them down for, Mommy? Is Stevie having them come over?”

“Don’t worry about it,” said DeAnne. She put the list up on top of the serving dishes in the top cupboard. “I was just writing names. What do you want for breakfast?”

“Cream of Wheat!” cried Robbie.

DeAnne let him help make the mush, and within moments the list was forgotten.

Dicky came into Step’s office on Tuesday afternoon. “Good news,” said Dicky.

“Oh, really?” Step immediately felt a thrill of dread: Ray had decided to support the PC after all.

“Ray has decided to publish a Commodore 64 version of Hacker Snack.”

How ludicrous! thought Step. No one had ever spoken to him about Hacker Snack, not even after he walked in on the programmers working on it as a secret project just before the San Francisco trip. He had assumed that the programmers told Dicky and Dicky told Ray and they just dropped the whole thing. But no, apparently it was still alive and now Dicky had the gall to walk in here and say that Ray had decided to publish a game that didn’t belong to him.

“Oh, that’s a shame,” said Step.

“What do you mean?” asked Dicky.

“I already sold it to another publisher.”

Dicky sat there in stunned silence as the blood flowed into his face, turning it red. “You sold Hacker Snack to a competitor?”

“No one here made me an offer for it. It’s not as if I was hard to find. So I figured you weren’t interested.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” said Dicky. “I know perfectly well that you’ve been aware of our interest in Hacker Snack for months.”

“On the contrary,” said Step. “I knew that Glass had disassembled my code and that the programmers had been goofing around with it, but since I had not sold the rights to anybody and no one at Eight Bits Inc. had ever so much as whispered the name of Hacker Snack to me, it never occurred to me that there was any official interest in it at all.”

“Well, now I’m telling you that Ray has decided to publish Hacker Snack.”

“And I’m telling you that I’ve signed a contract selling those rights to someone else.”

“You had no right to sign such a contract,” said Dicky. “Your employment agreement specifically gives the rights to any and all—”

“My employment agreement specifically excludes all games I published before coming to Eight Bits Inc., Dicky. Before you go quoting people’s employment agreements, you ought to read them. They aren’t all the same.”

Dicky looked as though his face was going to explode. “You ungrateful little shit.”

“Grateful for what?” asked Step. “I’ve worked here for more than four months, and not once did anyone make any kind of offer about Hacker Snack. You even forbade me to do any programming, remember? It has been crystal clear to me all along that Eight Bits Inc. valued me only for my manual writing. Or am I mistaken in that? Should I have thought of myself as a gamewright all along?”

“Do you realize what you’ve just done?”

“I’ve done nothing,” said Step. “You’re the ones who went behind my back and invested time in developing a product for which you hadn’t the decency even to ask about the rights. Is that my fault? All I did was sell what was mine to a company that expressed an interest in it.”

“Who! Who did you sell it to!”

“There is nothing in my employment agreement that obligates me to tell you what I do with my property, Dicky.”

“We’re going to sue their asses off!”

“Which is precisely why I have no intention of telling you.”

“Ray will fire you for this.”

“He’ll fire me?” asked Step. Actually, he thought this was quite likely. But to Step being fired wasn’t that bad a prospect. DeAnne could hardly blame him for leaving his job if he got fired, could she? So he even found himself enjoying this confrontation. There was nothing Step valued that Dicky could take away from him. “I don’t think I’m the one whose job is on the line. I think the person whose job is on the line is the one who suggested developing an adaptation of my game behind my back. The one who didn’t even bother to find out that my employment agreement is different before committing Eight Bits Inc.‘s resources to a game that you didn’t own.”

“You fool,” said Dicky. “That was Ray himself who did all that.”

“Oh?” asked Step. “And is that the way Ray will remember it? Will he remember all the times you advised him against such a dangerous course of action?”

Dicky looked at him in livid silence.

“Dicky, now’s a good time for you to lift your fat cheeks out of that chair and carry them through that door. If Ray’s going to fire me, then have him send me a memo to that effect and I’ll be out of here collecting unemployment in a hot second. And if he’s not going to fire me, then I’ve got work to do and you are in my way.”

Step turned back to the page proofs he was checking.

After a while he heard Dicky get up out of his chair and leave the room. Softly, softly, on little cat feet.

When Dicky was gone, Step got up on shaking legs and gently closed the door. Then he leaned against the wall, breathing heavily. He felt so light-headed. Is this how a soldier feels when he has leapt from the trench and run toward the enemy lines and reached them and discovered that not one bullet touched him? Step had missed Vietnam with a draft lottery number of 225—a number that sounded as magical to him now as 7 or 3 or 12 or 40 sounded to other people. He had no experience of war, of real courage, of struggle between man and man. But this might just have been a taste, he thought. Dicky came in here prepared to bestow some pittance on me as if it were a great gift from Eight Bits Inc., and I laughed in his face and dared him to do his worst. I don’t know how I did it without wetting my pants.

He went about his business as best he could, considering that he expected at any moment to have Dicky come in with his pink slip. At the end of the day he hadn’t seen Dicky again at all, and he hadn’t been fired. It was almost a disappointment.

The Cowpers moved on the tenth of June. “I wish you could have waited till Saturday,” DeAnne told Jenny. “Step wanted to help load up the truck. You’ve been so good to us, and we’ve never been able to give anything back.”

“Nonsense,” said Jenny. “I’ve had a wonderful time since you got here. In fact, if you had been living here when Spike accepted the transfer, I don’t know if we would have taken it. But that’s the way it goes, don’t you know? We were each other’s best friends—except for our husbands—I had to say that real quick to get it in before you said it, I know—anyway we were best friends, as long as it lasted, and I’ll never forget you. But don’t bother promising to write, you know we won’t. Except Christmas cards every year. I’ll never be bored reading your year-end family newsletter, you hear?”

“Can’t I write if I want to?”

“Phone me. I’m not a writer. If you’re broke, phone me collect.”

“And vice versa,” said DeAnne. “You’re the one who knows my phone number, so you have to call first.”

“Of course,” said Jenny. “How else will you know where to send the five hundred dollars for the Datsun?”

“Eight hundred dollars,” said DeAnne.

“Make it ten thousand if you want,” said Jenny. “But we think the price was five hundred dollars and we don’t really care if you never pay that. Think of it as a law-of-consecration car, a church-service car. Take it out visiting teaching and take teenagers to youth activities in it. And whenever you do, think of us.”

“I’ll think of you more than you know,” said DeAnne. “And I’ll miss you more than you know.”

“You’ll make a new best friend within a month,” said Jenny.

“Someone else can be my best friend,” said DeAnne, “without ever being half as good a friend as you.”

“Are you just trying to make me cry so I can’t drive straight and I run us into a bridge abutment or something?” asked Jenny. “Now make sure none of your kids is standing behind the U-Haul or the car when we drive out.” Jenny looked at the U-Haul in disgust. “They’re a big enough company to transfer our family across the country and buy our stupid house, but they’re not big enough that they can afford to pay for a real moving company. Tell Step to quit his lousy job, they’re all thieves.” Then Jenny kissed DeAnne on the cheek and they hugged each other and then Spike finally locked the house and got into the cab of the U-Haul with two of the kids as Jenny got into their nice car with the rest of the kids. DeAnne made sure that Stevie and Robbie and Elizabeth were in plain sight and nowhere near the cars, and then she waved and the Cowpers pulled out into the road.

She watched them out of sight and then felt the baby inside her do his stretching thing, pushing against her ribs until it hurt, until she thought she couldn’t stand it anymore. She wanted to swat the baby, to yell at it, to demand that it stop hurting her, that it just leave her alone for a minute.

The baby pushed all the harder. He was probably responding to the grief hormones flowing through her body, the chemical anguish.

At last the pressure subsided and she could think of walking again. “Come on, kids. This isn’t the Cowpers’ house anymore, so we better go on home.”

When she got home, there was the Cowpers’ old beat-up Datsun B-210. The car that made her and Step a two-car family for the first time in their marriage. She walked up and touched it, examined it, the paint pitted and faded, the doors rusted through at running-board height. She caressed the car as if it were a horse that no one had been able to tame but her. Thank you for Jenny, she said. But why did you have to take her away from me so soon?

She stopped herself from thinking that way, and said, very clearly and definitely inside her mind, Thank you for Jenny. And then she forced herself to leave it at that, to go inside and concentrate on fixing lunch, which was long overdue.

There was a substitute mailman, so the mail didn’t arrive till almost four o’clock. There was an envelope from Agamemnon, and inside was the check. The money that would catch them up on their payments on the house in Indiana. If the regular mailman hadn’t been on vacation, she could have paid the Cowpers for the car before they left.

Oh, well. She’d make out the checks tomorrow and everything would be fine. Most of the money would be gone immediately, they were so far behind—and none of it could go to the IRS for their back taxes, so that still hung over their heads. Still, freedom was in sight.

But the next day when she sat down to write out the checks, she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. It made her feel so stupid, to find it emotionally impossible to write the checks. Hadn’t she and Step decided last night that they would definitely go ahead and pay the mortgage up to date?

Finally she wrote out a check for the amount of the oldest overdue mortgage payment, along with all the late fees that had accrued on that one payment. She put it in an envelope, piled the kids into the car, drove to the post office, and slipped the envelope into the box.

A month. That’s all I’m doing, just paying for one month’s delay before they foreclose. Why? It’s stupid and dangerous they’ll probably still call the note; this one payment won’t do anything at all. But I can’t wipe out that five thousand dollars sitting in the bank. I can’t bring it down to nothing because who knows when the next check will come?

10: Independence Day

This is what the Fletchers did on the Fourth of July: The 1st Ward had a flag-raising ceremony at dawn, along with a pancake breakfast. Step could think of about three thousand things he’d rather do than get up before dawn on the Monday morning of the only three-day weekend of the summer, but the elders quorum was cooking the pancakes and DeAnne was conducting the choir’s singing of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Having a southern church choir sing that song was in itself remarkable enough to be worth getting up early just to hear it.

In the weeks since the Cowpers had moved, the choir leader, Mary Anne Lowe, had been cultivating DeAnne’s friendship. To Step it seemed almost as if Sister Lowe had been waiting for Jenny to get out of the picture before she moved in, as if there were room for only one friend in DeAnne’s life at a time. And maybe it was so. DeAnne didn’t exactly have a surplus of time and energy. Still, it seemed to Step that this friendship was different from the friendship with Jenny. Where Jenny had seemed to revive DeAnne, to buoy her up, Mary Anne’s ebullient energy only made DeAnne seem more tired. Most annoying to Step was the way that being friends with Mary Anne Lowe meant having more and more duties in the ward music program. Like conducting the choir for the sunrise flag raising and all those practices on Saturdays and Sundays getting ready for it.

When DeAnne had done compassionate service with Jenny, it almost always happened during the day, but the choir practices took place during the few hours that Step had home with DeAnne, with the family, and so he ended up either going to choir practice himself, as the only tenor, or staying home trying to tend the children while typing Hacker Snack code into the Commodore 64.

Even with Jenny gone, the compassionate service assignments continued. Sister Bigelow was still on the phone with DeAnne a couple of times a week, so that Step would come home from work and find DeAnne ready to rush over to Sister Something-or-other’s house with a salad or a casserole or a plate of biscuits and a tub of gravy and could Step please just watch the kids for an hour and maybe slice up the cucumbers for the salad?

Sure, DeAnne. And I’ll finish Hacker Snack in December, about three months after we’re bankrupt.

Then he’d feel bad about being so childishly resentful and he’d go ahead and do the things she had asked and, usually, more, so she’d get back and find dinner ready to eat, or the kids already bathed, or whatever else he figured he could accomplish to make her feel cared for and help her get some rest because, after all, wasn’t she the one carrying their child? What right did he have to think that she somehow wasn’t doing enough?

After the sunrise service and the pancakes, which tasted like they were cut from cardboard and went down like lead, the Fletchers came home and the kids began to fuss and fight with each other. Step solved the problem by sending them all back to bed, since they were obviously too tired to get along in human society; and then he took DeAnne by the arm and dragged her back to bed. Within fifteen minutes Robbie and Betsy were both asleep and so was DeAnne. Stevie, of course, stubbornly lay there in bed with his eyes open until Step walked in and quietly told him he could read if he wanted to. Finally Step went to bed and lay there feeling physically worn out and very sleepy. He continued to feel that way for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, until he gave up and went into the family room and slipped the Hacker Snack disk into the drive and turned on the computer.

It made the usual horrible grinding sound as it activated the disk drive—though it was not as bad as the metallic chewing noise the Commodore disk drive made—and then the familiar screen came up and Step began to move his little cartoon character, Rodney, with his nerdy glasses and perpetual melvin, through the maze of computer chips and hamburgers.

This is boring, thought Step. Not the first time, but each level is really just more of the same. You don’t get that much pleasure out of the tenth time you play it.

The normal solution to this problem was to make each succeeding level so hard that you kept playing just to try to beat the machine and get your name on the vanity board. But for Step that wasn’t enough. It had to be fun the first time, and yet the game had to be rich enough that at higher and higher levels better stuff happened, so that the game became its own reward.

What could he change without eating up too much memory? Well, it didn’t have to be computer chips and burgers. He could work in other stuff-maybe different computer brands! Eating a VIC-20 and a Timex and an Apple II on the way to finally reaching an Atari and then maybe a mainframe or something.

If I’m going to do an evolutionary sequence like that, why not do evolution itself? Instead of starting with Rodney, I start with a salamander or something that climbs up out of primordial ooze and then at each level he becomes something else. A dinosaur. A mammal. A shrew, maybe. And then a chimp. And then Homo habilis, and then some big athletic-looking guy, and then finally, as the crowning pinnacle of evolution, the computer hacker, the nerd with glasses and a melvin! OK, that would be fun, but it would chew up disk space, especially since he couldn’t very well have dinosaurs collecting computer chips, so he’d have to change the thing they ate at every level. Leaves for the dinosaurs—and maybe salamanders, the guys from the previous level! And the shrews could eat dinosaur eggs. And the athletic guys could trample Homo habilis guys and leave them in a cartoony pile of arms and legs like Beetle Bailey after the sergeant gets through beating him up. And then Rodney could leave athletic guys behind him holding pink slips!

Would anybody get the joke? No, not pink slips, then. Too hard to show on the computer. No, they’ll be left wearing Burger King uniforms!

That’s it, that’s it, he thought. It’s still Hacker Snack, but it’s a better game. This is going to blow Agamemnon away.

Step went into his office, pulled out a piece of paper, and began calculating how much memory the new graphics would eat up. He actually found himself wishing for the 128K of the IBM PC. Lousy as it was, the PC would still give him the room to do it right, with better animation and more levels. It could be a bigger game, with large mazes that extended off the screen. And what if I had 256K? He could forget character-based graphics and do smooth full-screen animations, like that pirate ship game he had seen Stevie playing.

What was the name of that game? He had looked for it once before, and never found it. Sometime he’d have to borrow Gallowglass’s disassembler program and figure out how the programmer of that game had done it.

DeAnne came sleepily into his office. “I must have dozed off,” she said.

“That was the idea,” said Step.

“We have to get to the Eight Bits Inc. party, don’t we?”

“It’s an all-day picnic,” said Step. “We can show up anytime.”

“Well, the kids might want to stay and play awhile, and I imagine they’ll be serving the food around noon, won’t they?”

Step shrugged. “What time is it now?”

“Eleven.”

“So what’s the rush?”

“No rush,” she said. “Do you know what they’ll be serving at the picnic?”

“Hot dogs and stuff,” said Step. “And fried chicken, I think. Good old magnanimous Ray is having it catered by Colonel Sanders and Oscar Mayer.”

“Don’t be snide,” said DeAnne. “I think having a company picnic is a good idea.”

“I’m sure it is,” said Step. “I’m just tired.”

“Why didn’t you sleep?”

“I tried,” said Step. “And then I got to thinking.”

“Oh, that’s a mistake. I gave it up years ago.’

“Well, I’ll finish this later,” he said. “Let’s get the kids ready and head out before the temperature gets up to a hundred. The humidity is already at a hundred percent by now, I’m sure.”

“You’re just a desert boy, Step.”

“I’m not used to sweating and having it not evaporate until the next day.” He turned off the computer and got up from the chair and stretched. “Now I think I could sleep.”

“Well, then, go lie down,” said DeAnne. “We’ll go later in the day.”

“No, let’s go now and get it over with. At some point we’ll see Dicky in a bathing suit and then we’ll throw up the pancakes from this morning and we’ll all feel much better.”

Robbie and Betsy woke up sluggish, as much from the pancakes as from their nap, and it was almost one o’clock before they got to the picnic. Eight Bits Inc. had rented UNC-Steuben’s private lake, and there were about a hundred people in the water or milling around on shore. The food was being served under a canopy, and they headed there from the car. Ray Keene himself was nowhere to be seen—he had been getting more and more reclusive over the past few months, and some of the programmers had started referring to him as Howard Keene, in reference to Howard Hughes. But Keene’s wife was there, and their five-year-old daughter, and every other employee of Eight Bits Inc. had shown up. They knew this because Dicky greeted them by the condiment table with the cheery announcement, “At last, the Fletchers? Finally we have a hundred percent.”

“I didn’t know we were taking attendance,” said Step with equal cheer. “I would have brought a note from my mom.” And then he and DeAnne concentrated on getting hot dogs into the kids.

Afterward, since they couldn’t swim, Step took the boys over to where people were playing games—horseshoes and lawn darts. After a few moments of watching, though, Step concluded that these were no safer than sending non-swimmers into the lake—the lawn darts were being thrown by careless, unsupervised children, and the horseshoes were dominated by adults, mostly from the business end of Eight Bits Inc., including Cowboy Bob, and the iron shoes were whizzing through the air with enough velocity to break a child’s head open. Stevie, of course, was quite careful, but Robbie had a way of getting excited and running straight toward his goal without noticing things like darts and iron shoes flying through the air. So Step kept a firm grip on Robbie’s hand and soon led both boys away from the games.

Which left precious little for them to do. Well, fine, thought Step. I’ll go collect DeAnne and Betsy and we’ll head on out of here. After all, attendance has now been taken and we won’t be missed.

Step saw DeAnne standing near the food canopy, talking to Mrs. Keene, who had lit up a cigarette and was now puffing away as she talked. Even outdoors with a slight breeze, Step knew that the cigarette smoke would quickly make DeAnne sick and lightheaded, hardly a good thing for a pregnant woman in the afternoon heat. So, with Stevie and Robbie in tow, Step headed over and broke into the conversation.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Keene, but DeAnne’s probably just to shy to tell you that cigarette smoke really makes her ill. If she weren’t pregnant, it wouldn’t be a problem outdoors like this, but—”

“Oh, that’s just fine,” said Mrs. Keene pleasantly. “I was hardly smoking it anyway.” She dropped the cigarette to the ground and twisted her foot on it. “You should have said something, you sweet girl, I just didn’t even think, I smoked right through my own pregnancy with Allison and so I forget that some people just need to have fresh air all the time.”

“It really wasn’t bothering me outside in the breeze like this,” said DeAnne.

“Oh, heavens, girl, I’m the boss’s wife, you think I don’t know that? But just between you and me, I’m not half so impressed with Ray as Ray is, and Ray isn’t all that impressed with me, so kissing up to me won’t help anybody keep on his good side anyway!” She chuckled, a low, throaty smoker’s laugh.

Mrs. Keene was charming and funny and nice, but also dangerously disloyal. Was the marriage in trouble? That would be no surprise, really, given the kind of autocratic, secretive man Ray Keene was becoming; the joke in the Pit was that Ray kept secrets so well that his wife had to hire a private investigator to find out where he kept his dick. But if the marriage was in trouble, Mrs. Keene could be a walking kiss of death, bestowing herself on selected employees and then leaving them behind without a thought of the consequences. Somebody was bound to be keeping track of whom she talked to.

“Dad,” said Robbie.

Step turned away from the conversation. Robbie was excited about something. Behind him a little girl was standing in front of a clump of other little kids. “Allison wants me to go on the raft with them! Can I go, Dad?”

“No,” said Step. “You know you can’t go on the water, Robbie. You can’t swim.”

The little girl stepped forward and, in a voice that was accustomed to getting results, said, “He can so go. My daddy said it was perfectly safe.”

“Then that means you can go,” said Step. “But Robbie cannot go, because his daddy says that it is not safe.”

“Well my daddy is the boss of this company and what he says goes!”

Step remembered the three precious pieces of paper in DeAnne’s filing cabinet at home—his employment agreement, the contract from Agamemnon, and Ray’s memo stating his intention not to support the IBM PC—and his smile broadened. “Well, little girl, your daddy may be the boss of this company, but he is not the boss of my family, and so when it comes to the safety of my children, what he says matters about as much as a mouse fart.”

The other children delighted in this-the one topic guaranteed to make little kids laugh is flatulence. But Allison was not amused. “I’ll tell my daddy what you said!”

“By all means,” said Step. “He’ll be proud to know that his little girl thinks she can boss around grown men. He’s doing a fine job of raising you.”

Allison was young enough not to realize she was not being complimented. “Well, thank you,” she said. “I forgive you and I won’t tell. Now come on, Robbie.”

“You missed the point, little girl,” said Step. “Robbie is not going on the raft. This is because I love Robbie and don’t want him to fall into the lake and drown. But I can’t wait for you to go on the raft. So please, hurry up, the lake is waiting for you.”

Allison looked confused for a moment, and then stuck her tongue out at Robbie and led her little troop of friends off toward the water.

“She stuck her tongue out at me, Daddy,” said Robbie.

“And it made her look really ugly and stupid, didn’t it?” said Step.

When he turned back to DeAnne and Mrs. Keene, however, he was chagrined to realize that they had apparently been listening to the whole exchange. Mrs. Keene at once put him at ease by winking and saying, “She’s got so much of her father in her, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Step. “I haven’t seen Ray in months.”

“Well, you haven’t missed much,” said Mrs. Keene. “You must be independently wealthy or something, because it’s plain that you don’t give a rat’s ass whether you keep your job. I like that in a man.” Then she grinned at DeAnne. “I’m flirting with your husband, Mrs. Fletcher, but don’t pay any attention to it, because I’m just a little bit drunk. My rule is no more than one martini—per hour.” She laughed in delight. “Not really, of course,” she said. “What I’m drunk on is the fact that I can look around this whole group of people, more than a hundred of them now, and I can be absolutely certain deep in my soul that every single one of them hates Ray Keene. You don’t mind my telling you this, do you?”

“Actually” said DeAnne, “we really need to be going.”

“Oh, I’m not surprised,” said Mrs. Keene. “I need to be going myself.”

“Where’s Stevie?” asked DeAnne.

“Right over there,” said Step, pointing to the tree where Stevie was leaning, watching the activities on the water. “Where’s Betsy?”

“Oh, that young fellow who used to drive you home a lot is taking her for a walk.”

“Glass?” he asked. “Gallowglass?”

“No, he said his name was Roland McIntyre.”

“That’s Glass,” said Step. He cursed himself for not having warned DeAnne, not having told her that she must not let Betsy out of her sight for a moment, and she must be especially certain not to let Roland McIntyre, alias Saladin Gallowglass, so much as touch a hair of Betsy’s head. “Where did he take her? How long ago?”

“Oh, while I was talking to Mrs. Keene here. He took her off that way, up that hill.”

Vaguely in the direction of the parking lot. Or the woods just to the left of the cars. In any event, the very area where nobody else was gathered.

“Is something wrong?” said Mrs. Keene.

“I hope not,” said Step. “Here’s Robbie.” He put Robbie’s hand in DeAnne’s. “Don’t let anybody take him or Stevie for a walk, please.”

DeAnne clearly caught from Step’s air of urgency the fact that she had done something very wrong by letting Glass take Betsy. “Step, I’m sorry, I figured he was a friend, I saw him drop you off so often … ”

He didn’t stay for the rest of her apology. He wasn’t much of a runner, and he was badly out of shape, but he still had breath enough when he got up by the parking lot to call out Betsy’s name, then Glass’s.

“Over here, Step!” called Glass.

Now Step could see him, standing behind a car at the far edge of the lot, beside an overgrown pasture. “Do you have Betsy with you?”

“Of course,” said Glass. “Your wife said I could take her for a walk.”

Step was halfway across the parking lot. Now his run up the hill was catching up with him—he was panting, and he hadn’t enough breath for speech.

“I think she might be wet,” said Glass. “I was just checking. I didn’t know which car was yours, though.”

At last Step was around behind the car and there was Betsy, holding hands with Glass. Her diaper was still on and she was waving a dandelion fuzzball, trying to get the last of the seeds to fall off. Step finally had breath to speak. “DeAnne said you could take her on a walk, not fiddle with her diaper, Glass.”

“Well, I didn’t think you’d want your daughter walking around getting diaper rash,” said Glass.

Step scooped Betsy up into his arms and stood there looking Glass in the eye. “I don’t know how to put this delicately, Glass, so I won’t try. I like you, as a programmer, as a friend. But don’t you ever, ever touch any of my children as long as you live. Because if I ever catch you alone with one of my kids again, then that will be as long as you live.”

Glass looked him right in the eye, and for a moment it seemed that he was going to answer—angrily? With a joke? Step could not begin to guess. Finally Glass just shut his mouth tight and turned his head to look out toward the entrance to the park.

OK, so I’ve made an enemy, thought Step as he carried Betsy back down toward DeAnne. But I’m not making this up. Glass had Betsy for no more than a couple of minutes before he had her off behind a car, where nobody could see, and if I hadn’t come up there he would have added her to his list of treasured stories of times he has cleaned the private parts of little girls. Until now Step had begun to think that Glass had never actually molested a child, that perhaps what he had said to Step in the hotel room in San Francisco had been nothing worse than a weird fantasy of his, an obsession that was still only in his imagination. Now Step knew better. Call it “checking her diaper” or “helping her wash,” it was still sexual molestation and he had come this close to doing it to Betsy.

When Step got back to DeAnne, Mrs. Keene was still there—and she was frankly curious. “What was all that about?” she said.

“Just time for us to go home, I think,” said Step.

“You certainly seemed upset when you heard that Bubba McIntyre was taking her for a walk. I can assure you, Bubba’s the sweetest boy and he’s very good with children.”

Step remembered Allison Keene and had to ask. “Did Bubba ever babysit for you, Mrs. Keene?”

“He used to, back when Allison was just a toddler. He used to come around and ask if he could babysit, he was such a dear. That’s how he got started programming on our old Commodore Pet—that’s where he first wrote Scribe, you know—only when he started really working for Ray, Ray told me never to ask Bubba to babysit for us again. It wouldn’t be right to have his best programmer also tending his children, I suppose!” But there was still a quizzical expression on her face.

“Is Betsy all right?” asked DeAnne.

“He was about to check her diaper,” said Step. “To see if it was wet.”

“Of course it isn’t,” said DeAnne. “I just changed her. I told him so.”

“You told him?”

“He asked if she needed changing, and I told him I’d just changed her.”

Mrs. Keene was not stupid. “Good God,” she said. “You’re not saying that Bubba—but that’s—”

“No, I’m not saying anything about Bubba,” said Step. “Except that if I ever catch him alone with my little girl again, a jury will be deciding between life imprisonment and capital punishment for me.”

Mrs. Keene looked sick. “But he tended Allison all the time when she was your little Betsy’s age.”

“At least he doesn’t tend her anymore,” said Step.

“No, because Ray … “Mrs. Keene’s expression darkened. “I knew he was a son-of-a-bitch, but even he wouldn’t hire a … a … person that he knew was …” She shook her head firmly. “I’m not going to believe malicious gossip.” She turned her back and stalked away.

“Oh, Step,” said DeAnne, her face stricken. “Why didn’t you tell me about that boy?”

“I forgot,” said Step.

“You forgot!”

“No, I mean I forgot that when we brought the kids to the picnic, Glass would be here. He’s been asking to babysit for us from the first moment I met him. But after San Francisco, when I realized what direction his fantasies go, I’ve been making sure he never gets a chance to meet the kids. And nothing happened today, not really. It was my fault things came so close, not yours, and now let’s please get the hell away from this place.”

DeAnne did not demur. In a couple of minutes they were back in the car, pulling out of the lot and heading home. Step was very calm all the way, and because Robbie and Stevie were in the car they hardly said anything—nothing at all pertaining to what happened with Betsy and Glass.

At home, DeAnne wasted not a moment before she had Betsy undressed and in the bathtub. Step stood at the door and thought of all the times he had changed Betsy and bathed her and never once had he thought of anything except to talk to her and smile at her and be close to her, just as such times had always been close, affectionate times with his sons. But now the idea of watching DeAnne bathe Betsy made him feel guilty, as if the mere fact of knowing how Glass had looked at her made it so that any man’s eyes that looked at her were vile, even Step’s own.

The rage and shame he felt were too strong for him. He fled into the bedroom and threw himself on the bed and buried his face in the pillow and roared, a wordless animal shout that he couldn’t contain a moment longer. Again. Again.

Panting, exhausted, he rolled over onto his back.

Gradually he became aware that he was not alone. He turned his head and saw Stevie in the doorway. “Hi, Stevedore,” he said.

“Did that man hurt Betsy?” asked Stevie.

“No,” said Step. Of course, he thought. Stevie isn’t as young as Robbie. He isn’t as oblivious. He watches more. He understood some of what had gone on at the picnic. “No, Betsy’s fine.”

“Then why were you yelling like that? You sounded really mad.”

How much to say? The truth, as much as it was fair to tell someone as young and innocent as Stevie. “I was mad, but mostly at myself, because I didn’t protect Betsy well enough. And also I was afraid, because we came so close to something bad happening.”

“What?” asked Stevie. “What bad thing?”

“There are people in the world who do bad things to children,” said Step. “People like that are the worst people in the world. Jesus said that if any man harmed a child, it would be better for him if he tied a millstone around his neck and threw himself in the sea. And if you think somebody like that might hurt your child, well, it makes you really angry and afraid.”

Stevie nodded. “Yeah,” he said.

“But nothing bad happened, OK? I was just upset because I thought maybe we came close to having something bad happen, that’s all.”

“Sometimes the bad things really do happen,” said Stevie.

“Yes, I guess they do,” said Step. “But if I can help it, it’ll never happen to any child of mine.”

“I know,” said Stevie. “You and Mom are really good.” He turned and went back to his room.

This was the most Stevie had said to him about anything since they moved to Steuben. He couldn’t wait for DeAnne to get through bathing Betsy so he could tell her.

But when DeAnne came into the room Step had fallen asleep. He didn’t get to tell her what Stevie had said until late that night, when they were in bed together, and when he told her what Stevie said at the end she nestled closer to Step and said, “Maybe we are pretty good parents, Junk Man. At least we’re not Ray Keene or his wife.”

That was why Step got back to thinking about Ray Keene, and realizing that Ray almost certainly knew about Glass’s predilections, and yet he kept him around Eight Bits Inc., and hired other people to work with him, people for whom Glass would certainly offer to babysit, and Ray said not one word to help other people protect their children. Now, maybe Ray didn’t really know, maybe it was just coincidence that he didn’t let his wife hire Glass to babysit Allison anymore. But maybe Ray did know, and just didn’t tell anybody because he needed Glass too much, needed Scribe 64 too much to risk losing the strange sick boy-man who had created it for him.

Dr. Weeks didn’t come to the door of her office anymore when Stevie’s hour was up. He pushed the heavy wooden door open by himself, and came out, looking—or so it seemed to DeAnne—smaller every time he did. She really is shrinking him in there, she thought. Yet Stevie never complained about going and never talked afterward about what went on. It was as if it didn’t really happen to him, or as if it was something not important enough to be discussed.

On Monday, the eighteenth of July, DeAnne got the kids home from the psychiatrist’s office and let Robbie and Elizabeth run out into the back yard to play, while she and Stevie got the mail.

She headed for the side door that led from the carport into the laundry room and then to the kitchen-it was the door they always used. But Stevie called to her. “Mom, there’s a package at the front door!”

In fact, it wasn’t a package at all. It was a manila envelope. It had been mailed, but the postman had left it at the door, probably because it had a rubber stamp on it, DO NOT BEND, and there would have been no way to get it into the mailbox without bending it. It had a Steuben postmark, but no return address, and the mailing label had been neatly typed: “Stephen & Diane Fletcher, 4404 Chinqua Penn, Steuben, N.C.”

No zip, and while they had got Stephen’s name right, DeAnne’s was wrong. Usually people either got both right or got both wrong. It probably meant it was from someone who knew Step and not her. Or from someone who wanted to peeve her and not Step! Why was someone careful enough to get it stamped DO NOT BEND and then careless enough not to include a return address?

Stevie came into the house with her, and as she opened the mail at the kitchen table she heard him start up the Atari. It bothered her that he didn’t go outside enough, even though it was summer. He was spending altogether too much time at the computer. It was probably time for her and Step to institute time limits on computer games just as they had for television. An hour a day—that wasn’t unreasonable. And then let Stevie find something else to do. Something healthier, something that would get him out in the sun. He looked downright pallid compared to Robbie and Elizabeth, who were getting quite a golden glow, with nice highlights in their hair.

Most of the mail was ordinary. She set aside the letter from the mortgage company in Indiana—it could only be bad news, and it could wait. Then she opened the anonymous manila envelope.

Inside was a 45-rpm record, and nothing else. It was by a group DeAnne was only vaguely aware of. She really didn’t follow rock music, not the way Step did. But she did enjoy watching the new videos now and then. Cable had MTV here in Steuben, the way they had in Vigor, and she left the TV tuned to that channel sometimes while she worked. She liked the “Billy Jean” video—the lighting sidewalk appealed to her. But that one where Michael Jackson became a monster had scared the children and she had stopped just leaving MTV on when the kids were up. Still, she was aware of rock music, however vaguely. She must have seen something by the Police before.

They never bought forty-fives, and so DeAnne had no idea where she could find one of those little plastic doodads you had to put in the middle of them to play them on the stereo. It had to be somewhere near the stereo. They certainly wouldn’t have thrown it away-throwing things away was not their problem.

There was a knock at the back door, the one that led from the family room into the back yard. It was Robbie. “Can we have the sprinkler?”

“OK,” said DeAnne. “Come on in, both of you, and get into your swimsuits.”

Elizabeth trooped in after Robbie with an exaggerated lope. Giant steps. “Pink-er, pink-er, pink-er,” she chanted. It took a moment to realize that Elizabeth was saying “sprinkler.” Why it had become a chant, and what it had to do with taking great galumphing steps through the family room, DeAnne could not begin to guess. It was the great mystery of childhood—what they thought they were doing when they did such weird things.

Of course, that was also the great mystery of adulthood.

Then DeAnne glanced down at the stereo and saw immediately what she had missed before: the 45-rpm adapter was built into the turntable.

She got the record from the kitchen table and slipped it onto the adapter and turned on the stereo and set the needle on the record. It sounded like big dumb lummoxes singing lumberjack songs. She lifted the needle, changed the speed to 45, and set the needle down again. Now it was a rock song.

It was a strange kind of love song. No matter what the woman did, the man would be there watching her. It didn’t sound like he loved her, either. Or even liked her. It talked about her faking smiles, staking claims, breaking promises. And the rhyming was relentless. “Every cake you bake,” she thought, and almost laughed. “Every child you wake. Every thirst you slake. Every duck and drake. Every well-done steak.” Amazing the number of words in English that rhymed with take. The songwriter had barely scratched the surface.

Then it didn’t seem funny anymore. Because somebody had sent that record to them anonymously. Why would they do that? They wanted to send a message. And what was the message? That no matter what they did, somebody would be watching.

She went around the house, checking the locks on all the doors. In the meantime the record had ended. She came back into the family room and started it over. After just a few notes of the song, she lifted the needle and turned off the stereo. Step would play it tonight, and that would be plenty.

Elizabeth came into the room in her diaper, carrying her swimsuit. DeAnne laboriously sat on the couch to help her get it on. “I can’t just put it on you like I used to, Elizabeth,” said DeAnne. “I can’t reach over my tummy. You have to step into the suit.”

It took about a dozen tries, but Elizabeth was finally standing in her swimsuit and now DeAnne could pull it up and tie it behind her neck. “Are you going to come out into the sprinkler, too, Stevie?” she asked.

Stevie didn’t stop playing even for a moment. “No,” he said.

“You used to like to,” said DeAnne.

Robbie ran into the room, wearing not only his swimsuit but also the Superman cape that DeAnne had made for him two Halloweens ago. “Ta-da!” he shouted. “Ta-da!”

“Here you are to save the day,” said DeAnne.

“Turn on the sprinkler, Mommy!” shouted Robbie.

DeAnne leaned to the side and sort of rolled up onto her feet, supporting her weight on the front of the couch as she did. She felt like an elephant she had seen once in a movie, wallowing in the mud.

“Stevie,” she said. “You used to like to play in the sprinkler.”

“It wouldn’t be fair,” he said.

“What wouldn’t be fair?” she asked.

“Cause I can and they can’t.”

She knew the answer, but still she had to ask. “Who can’t?”

“Scotty and Jack and those guys.”

She curbed her frustration and spoke in what she hoped was a reasonable tone. “Well, they can’t play computer games with you, either.”

“Yes they can,” he said.

She opened the back door and Robbie and Elizabeth burst out into the sunlight. She turned back into the dark cave of the family room, where Stevie now seemed to be only a shadow in the corner, his head silhouetted against the bright screen, where a train sped along a track.

“Stevie, even if they can’t play with you in the sprinkler, if your friends are really your friends, they’d want you to play in the sunlight. Real friends wouldn’t stop you from playing with your brother and sister sometimes. Your brother and sister need you, too.”

She couldn’t believe she was talking to Stevie as if his imaginary friends were real.

But if these imaginary boys were at the center of Stevie’s life, then shutting them out would mean shutting Stevie out, too. She had to try to reach him, and if this was the only door he held open, then she would reach in through that door.

Stevie reached behind the computer and switched it off. “OK,” he said. “I’ll get my suit on.”

She felt weak with relief as she turned the water on.

The sprinkler began its sweep back and forth across the lawn. Elizabeth ran through it, screaming. Robbie, however—the one who had suggested this—hung back. “Go on!” DeAnne said. “Just run through it and get wet. The water won’t hurt.”

Robbie still hesitated.

Then Stevie came out, walked over to where Robbie was, took him by the hand, and said, “OK, they’re about to drop the bomb on us, let’s run!” And, screaming, he and Robbie ran through the water.

DeAnne went back in the family room and brought out the folding chair she always used when she sat in the back and watched the kids play. She sat there, watching, and thought, Somebody wants me to think that he’s watching, too. Somebody wants me to sit out here in my back yard and be afraid.

Well, it’s working.

Step knew that something was bothering her, so when he woke up at three in the morning and found her side of the bed empty, he was not surprised. He knew why she couldn’t sleep. The letter from the mortgage company had laid things out in no uncertain terms. “Your single payment was insufficient to keep this account open. If we do not receive in our office all back payments and late fees, along with the July payment currently due, for a total payment of $3,398.40, by 22nd July, we will begin foreclosure proceedings against the property.” It was only then that Step discovered that DeAnne had not paid the back payments in June, when the first check from Agamemnon arrived. She hadn’t spent the money on anything else; it was still there, ready to be paid. But it had been strange, to say the least, for DeAnne simply not to pay. It wasn’t as if they didn’t owe the money. It was their moral obligation to pay it. They had decided together that they would pay it. And yet the money still waited in the bank.

DeAnne had obviously been unwilling to discuss it with Step last night. She agreed at once that she would send the payment tomorrow, but she seemed distracted, as if she wasn’t paying attention. She told him twice about Stevie playing with the other kids in the sprinkler, and she seemed jumpy. Now she couldn’t sleep. Well, neither can I, thought Step. He got up and went in search of her. He found her in the family room and started reassuring her about the mortgage.

“It’s not the house, Step,” she said. “But you were so worried about it tonight that I didn’t want to pile on anything more.”

“You were protecting me? That’s not how it’s supposed to go.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We depend so much on your being able to concentrate on your work. But I can’t handle this alone.” She gave him the record and the envelope it came in. “It was waiting at our front door.”

As soon as it started playing, he recognized it. He had the car-radio habit as DeAnne did not, and the song was hot right now. He had even liked it, the cleverness of it, the nastiness. But not when someone sent it anonymously to his family. He took it off the stereo before it finished playing. Then he broke it in half and carried the pieces outside to the garbage. There was nothing he could say that would reassure DeAnne. He could only take her to bed and hold her until finally she fell asleep.

He slept badly the rest of the night, and the next day at work, the question kept nagging at him. Who could have sent it? Who would want to disrupt their lives, fill them with fear?

DeAnne had figured that whoever it was knew Step better than DeAnne—but that didn’t really leave anybody out, because it seemed as though Step had made all the enemies they had anyway. Who, after all, would want them to think that they were being watched? It might be Lee Weeks, of course, punishing them for the baptism thing. Or Gallowglass, after the Fourth of July picnic—he had been cool and distant at work ever since, and who knew what might be going through his mind in response to the clear accusation in Step’s actions that day?

There were others who might harbor ill feelings, too. It might conceivably be Mrs. Jones, who had missed her last month of teaching and, according to Dr. Mariner, would not be coming back next year. Could she have sat at home, brooding, until she thought of sending that record to make the Fletchers suffer a little, too? It could even be Sister LeSueur, though that seemed beyond possibility—it was hard to imagine her ever hearing a rock song, let alone buying one, even as a satanic weapon.

Dicky? It couldn’t be Dicky. He was a vindictive man, Step already knew that, and they had already had one confrontation too many. But surely Dicky would confine his vengeance to bureaucratic infighting at work. Wouldn’t he?

It was an appalling list, really: Lee, Glass, Mrs. Jones, Dicky Northanger, Sister LeSueur—these were the people who definitely felt they had cause to hate or fear or resent Step Fletcher after he had lived in Steuben, North Carolina, for less than five months. Just think how many enemies he could make by New Year’s! Yet he hadn’t set out to make any enemies at all. He had come to Eight Bits Inc. expecting to be friends with Dicky Northanger—he had liked him well enough during interviews. It was Dicky who decided to be Step’s enemy. It was Sister LeSueur who intruded into their lives, not the other way around. It was Mrs. Jones who singled out Stevie and mistreated him—should Step have let it go on, in the effort to be a “peacemaker”? What kind of peacemaker would he be, how blessed exactly would he be, if he pursued peace at the expense of his children’s happiness?

As for Glass and Lee, well, standards of reasonable behavior clearly did not apply. No one could blame him for their enmity, surely.

By ten o’clock he realized that he was not going to get anything meaningful done this morning. He might as well go hang out in the pit and see if he could pretend to be useful there.

On the way he passed the spare office where unused equipment was stored and noticed that someone had left the light on. Step opened the door just enough to snake his arm in and flipped off the light.

Someone inside the room bellowed.

Step flung the door open and flipped the light back on, already apologizing as he did. “I’m sorry, I just assumed somebody had left the light on, I didn’t know anybody was using it.”

He had already closed the door when he realized that it was Dicky who was in that room, sitting at a cleared-off desk, and the computer he was using was not a 64 or an Atari or any machine Step had seen before. He opened the door again. “Excuse me, is that the Lisa? We haven’t got a Lisa here, have we?”

Dicky had already covered the machine with a tarpaulin and he was halfway to the door. Step’s having opened it yet again clearly unnerved him. “Dammit, you sneaky son-of-a-bitch, haven’t you spied enough for one day?”

“Since when is it spying to open the storage room?” asked Step. “Is this some sort of top secret project?”

“No, it’s a Boy Scout computer, and it likes to sleep in a tent,” said Dicky.

But by now Step had already seen what Dicky had carelessly left uncovered-the large empty box on the floor with the name Compaq emblazoned on it.

“Sorry, Dicky,” said Step. “Perhaps a locked door would do the job.

“I was just getting up to lock it when you barged in for the third time—I hope you’ll forgive me for counting.”

“Sorry,” Step repeated. “I’ll never switch off another light at Eight Bits Inc., I promise.” He drew the door shut behind him.

As he walked down the corridor, he heard Dicky open the door again and then slam it shut. Oof, Dicky, feel better now?

Step got to the door of the pit, set his hand on the handle, and then turned around and headed back to his office. He picked up the phone and called DeAnne. “Have you mailed that check to the mortgage company?”

“Not yet,” she said.

“Don’t.”

“Why not? What happened?”

He told her about what he had seen, and how secretive Dicky had been about it. She didn’t get it.

“The Compaq computer is an IBM clone. And Dicky is working on it secretly.”

“Oh,” she said. “The agreement …”

“If Eight Bits Inc. is supporting the PC when I quit, I can’t do any programming for the PC for a year. I’ll already be cut off from the 64 and the Atari as it is. I have to quit today, DeAnne. It may already be too late.”

“If it’s already too late,” she said, “then what good will it do to quit? The baby isn’t born. He’s due on the twenty-eighth. But it might not be that long, he might be early. Elizabeth was.”

“And Robbie was a week late and we had to induce him at that,” said Step. “Don’t you see? If I don’t quit now, today, then I can’t quit at all.”

“But would that be so very bad, Step? It’s been so much better since you stopped working such late hours.”

He wanted to scream at her. No, it hasn’t been any better, it’s just been shorter. But he didn’t scream. In fact, he lowered his voice, and he spoke rapidly, because he felt such urgency to persuade her. “My position here is deteriorating all the time. I’m not in charge of anything. My only authority comes from skulking around helping with programming and game design behind Dicky’s back, and even that isn’t all that valuable anymore because I’ve pretty much taught the programmers everything I know. In a month I could be so completely under Dicky’s thumb that every hour of every day would be unbearable. He’d reject everything I wrote, make me do it over and over again for the stupidest reasons. In fact he already does that, I just ignore him and don’t make the changes he suggests, but what if I couldn’t ignore him anymore? You don’t know what you’re saying when you tell me I should just stay on.”

“Step, I’m just asking you to stay until the baby—”

“No, you’re not. You’re asking me to stay indefinitely. No end in sight. Because Dicky knows that I’ve seen the Compaq. He knows that the secret will be out, and when he tells Ray, we’ll get a memo announcing it so the news comes from them, not from me. Do you understand? It’s now, this minute. I can’t even give notice. I just have to quit and get out.”

“You can’t do that, Step, it wouldn’t be right.”

“Nothing has been right about working for them all along. Suddenly I’m supposed to be noble?”

“You have to give them two weeks notice and then if they challenge your right to do PC games, you can say that at the time you gave notice, Eight Bits Inc. was still not supporting the PC.”

“Oh, right, I’m sure that that would hold up in court.”

“It might,” she insisted.

“Look, DeAnne. Call your Uncle Mike. He’s a lawyer. Ask him what we should do. Tell him about my agreement with Eight Bits Inc.—read him the agreement—and see what he thinks. And for that matter, ask him what we should do about the house. What will happen to us if we hang on to that money to cover the cost of the baby.”

“You mean let them foreclose?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Oh, Step, we can’t—that’s not honest.”

“No, DeAnne, if we had signed the mortgage intending not to pay, that would be dishonest. But the whole premise of the mortgage is that they recognize that we might not be able to pay, in which case they have the right to take the house. Well, we can’t pay, and so they get the house.”

“But we can pay, Step. We have the money in the bank right now.”

“The money that’s in the bank right now is not house money, it’s just money. Our money. If we use it to pay for the baby, then I can quit the job today, right now, and we might still have a future with Agamemnon. Don’t you understand that?”

“So you want to quit your job so bad that you’ll walk off without giving them notice, you’ll let them foreclose on the house, and you’ll let us go into the birth of our baby without insurance?”

“I thought you wanted me to quit this job, too. I thought you wanted me to come home. To be with Stevie. To be a family again.”

“Well, I’m not going to be the villain in this, Step. If you want to quit, then quit.”

“Oh, so it’s all right if I am the villain, is that it? This time we don’t make the decision together, I have to make it alone, so if it works out wrong then it’s my fault and only my fault forever. If I wanted that kind of life I would have married my mother!”

“That is the stupidest and cruelest thing you’ve ever said, Step.”

“Oh, you think so? Then try this. Just imagine how you’d feel if I came to you and said, Oh, isn’t it a little selfish of you to insist on having the baby now? If you really loved the family, you’d carry it another six months and you wouldn’t complain about it, either.”

Then, because he hated himself so much that he could hardly stand to hear his own voice on the telephone, he hung up without waiting for her answer.

Either she would call him back, or she wouldn’t.

After a couple of minutes, when she hadn’t called back, he sat down at the typewriter and wrote:

Dear Ray:

I hereby resign my position with Eight Bits Inc., effective immediately. There is no need to pay me for today’s work. Thank you for giving me the privilege of working with you for the past months. I’m sorry for any inconvenience my resignation might cause you.

Sincerely,

He pulled it out of the typewriter and signed it.

He felt so free.

Then he tore it up into small pieces and dropped them into the wastebasket.

The phone rang. It was DeAnne. She was sobbing, barely able to speak. “Step, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I was being selfish,” she said.

“No, I was the selfish one,” he said. “I won’t quit. I’ll wait till the baby comes, and if Eight Bits Inc. is supporting the PC by then, well, then that’s the way it goes. Maybe that’s what the Lord planned for us all along.”

“No,” she said, “no that’s wrong. What the Lord planned for us was Agamemnon. You know that, it all went so smoothly in San Francisco, and you really like Arkasian and he’s kept all his promises and the money is good, you’ve got to reach out and take it, you’ve got to. It’s only my fear, my stupid fear that made me say those things and try to get you to stay at Eight Bits and I was wrong, can’t I be wrong? Can’t I say I was wrong and then you just do the thing you were right about wanting to do?”

It was the same argument, only they had changed sides. When they both realized that DeAnne was now urging him to walk out immediately, they ended up laughing.

“Let’s go back to plan A, DeAnne. Call your Uncle Mike. I’ll be right here when you call me back.”

“I’ll call you right back. I love you, Junk Man.”

“I love you too, Fish Lady.”

He sat down at the typewriter and wrote another letter. It was like the first one, except that it gave two weeks notice. The resignation would be effective as of August 2nd. And if the baby didn’t come by the twenty-eighth when it was due, then they’d induce it, and it would be born under Eight Bits Inc.‘s insurance policy. It was the best compromise Step could think of.

He set the letter on his desk and this time he didn’t sign it. He just sat there, eyes closed, waiting for DeAnne to call back. And he prayed, silently: Let Uncle Mike be home. Let him give us the right advice. Keep Ray Keene from sending a memo about the PC until after. Make it work out right, somehow.

The phone rang. It was DeAnne.

“He said to let the house go,” she said.

“The house?” he asked. Was the house really the issue? Well, yes, it was—to DeAnne. Because to her it was a matter of honor to pay their debts, and so if her uncle advised them to let it go, it would ease her conscience considerably, and in the long run that would be very important.

“He said that there’s a recession on, and Indiana is a hard-hit state. Chances are the banks there aren’t being ugly about reporting on foreclosed mortgages. It may never come up in the future. And even if it does, it won’t kill us. So let it go.”

“All right,” said Step. “So we can hold on to the money in the bank. What about the employment agreement?”

“He said it could go either way. If you resigned in the belief that the policy was one way, and then before you actually left they changed the policy, you’d probably be in the clear working on PC games, the way the agreement is worded.”

“But I’m pretty sure they’re going to change the policy” said Step. “That’s why I’m resigning, and Dicky won’t miss the fact that I resigned less than an hour after seeing him working on the Compaq … ”

“Well,” she said, “that’s why he said it could go either way.”

“Hoo boy” said Step.

“He advised you to quit now. Just walk out. There’d be no ambiguity then.”

“Except that from then on, Eight Bits Inc. could spread the word that I walked away and left them in the lurch. And it would be true.”

“And our mortgage company could spread the word that we walked away from the house, and that would be true, too. It’s like Uncle Mike said. Sometimes you have to walk away and let the chips fall where they may.”

“Yeah, but he’s a lawyer, what does he know from right and wrong.”

“Step, he’s my uncle, he—”

“That was a joke, DeAnne. I’ll submit my resignation right now.”

“Come home as a free man, Step. Come home to your family.”

“I want to.”

“Say you will.”

“I love you.”

“Oh, Step!”

“Say you love me before I hang up.”

“I love you.”

He hung up.

Why was he so reluctant, now, to walk out? It just felt wrong.

The second letter, the one he had typed before DeAnne called back with Uncle Mike’s advice—that was the letter he knew he had to submit. He didn’t know why. It seemed like the stupidest possible course—the course that would leave him without a job, without the Agamemnon contract, and tied up in litigation with Eight Bits Inc. for a year. And yet when he looked at that letter he knew that it was the right thing to do, the only thing he could do and really live with himself. He could walk away from the mortgage because the bank would get the house, and the house was worth much more than the amount owed on it. But he couldn’t be the kind of man who would walk out on a job without giving fair notice.

He signed the letter, made a couple of xeroxes of it, and took the original to Ludy, Ray’s secretary, who looked it over, clucked her tongue a couple of times, smiled at him sadly and said, “I guess I won’t win the pool after all.”

“What?”

“I thought you’d stick it out until after the baby was born.”

“The baby’s due before the two weeks are up.”

She rolled her eyes. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait to give this to him until your insurance has safely covered the baby?”

He shook his head. “Today,” he said.

“No cooling off period? I could hold it till morning, for instance, and if you change your mind he’ll never know you gave it to me.”

“Ludy, you’re a sweetheart, but give him the letter right away, please.”

She smiled. “Mmm, you men are all so attractive when you think you know what you’re doing. Of course, you never really do.”

Step started to walk away, and then turned back. “Was there really a pool on when I’d quit?”

She laughed. “Of course not. Oh, maybe a teeny one. Maybe I bet myself an ice cream that you’d stay and a granola bar that you’d go.”

“Crunch away,” said Step.

“Bye-bye,” said Ludy.

Step walked with a light step down the maze of corridors to the back, where he found Dicky’s door partly open. He knocked.

“Come in.”

Dicky was on the phone, mostly nodding. Step laid a copy of the letter down on top of Dicky’s typewriter. Dicky glanced over it while he was listening to the phone, nodded, said “All right,” and then hung up. He looked up at Step and smiled. “That was Ray. Your resignation is accepted.”

“Very quick,” said Step.

“But that two weeks notice shit is out of the question,” said Dicky. “Two weeks in which a disgruntled employee can cause damage? Insert bugs in our programs? Report to your new bosses on the secrets of Eight Bits Inc.?”

“What, you mean you guys are secretly developing nuclear weapons for the PLO or something? And I don’t have a new boss. I’m going back to freelancing. I have a contract for Hacker Snack, I told you that.”

“Sure, of course,” said Dicky. “And you’re just going to sit back and wait a year for your noncompetition clause and your nondisclosure clause to run out, right? Just remember, asshole, we’re going to watch you and if we see one hint of a violation of that agreement we’ll have lawyers up your ass so far you’ll taste them whenever you burp.”

“Ooh, nasty,” said Step.

“Right, be flippant about it if you want, but we are going to march to your office together right now and you are going to put your personal belongings into that box while I watch. Nothing that is the property of Eight Bits Inc. will go out of this building with you, and when you leave here you will never come back, do you understand?”

“So you’re saying that you reject my offer of two weeks’ notice, even though you’ve got nobody else up to speed on my projects?”

Dicky laughed derisively. “Step, the janitors could be up to speed on your work in half an hour. You are the most worthless, useless, completely replaceable person in this company”

“Gee,” said Step, “it kind of makes you wonder why you’d bother replacing me.”

“Let’s get a box, Step. The sooner you’re gone, the better this company will be.”

The words stung, even coming from Dicky. And although Step’s immediate departure was exactly what he had really wanted but hadn’t felt right about asking for, it was still deeply offensive that Ray and Dicky understood him so little that they thought he would actually steal from them. But then, being dishonest and conniving themselves, of course they assumed that he would behave exactly as they would behave if the situation were reversed.

It took Step five minutes to withdraw his few personal papers from the desk. Dicky stopped him from taking copies of any Eight Bits Inc. memos, on the grounds that they were internal secrets, but that was fine with Step. He already had the only memos he needed safely at home.

The only problem they had was when Step tried to take a couple of disks with him. “No way,” said Dicky. “Any code on any disk in this office belongs to Eight Bits Inc.”

“This is just personal stuff,” said Step. “Utilities I use. They don’t belong to Eight Bits Inc. Look, let me put them in a machine and do a directory and you’ll see.”

“You could rename files to any other name, Step. Hand me the diskettes.”

It wasn’t worth it—the utilities he used most were already at home anyway. So he handed the disks to Dicky.

Dicky reached for the stapler on Step’s desk and drove a dozen staples through the disks, bang, bang, bang, bang. He handed the mutilated disks to Step. Step held them up and dropped them on the floor. “When you bring a janitor in here to do my job, he can clean those up,” he said. Then Step took the box of his personal papers and dumped it out into the garbage can. There was nothing he needed from Eight Bits Inc., because he had never brought anything here that really mattered. He hadn’t invested any part of himself in these people, and so there was nothing that would bother him to leave behind. Except, of course, his attaché case, because that was a gift from DeAnne and because it was mostly filled with his lesson materials for his church calling, that and his home teaching information and a couple of magazines to read during lunch.

“Open the attaché,” said Dicky.

“Not without a warrant,” said Step.

Then he walked to the door, dug into his pocket, pulled out his keyring, pried off the key to the back door of Eight Bits Inc., and threw it toward the garbage can. To his surprise, it went right in. “You’re so stupid, Dicky, that you didn’t even ask me for my key.”

Step closed the door firmly in Dicky’s face and headed down the corridor to the pit. He opened the door, waved, and said, “I gave the bastards two weeks’ notice and they’re throwing me out. It’s been real, gents. Have a life!” Their cheers and applause rang in his ears as he went out the back door, got in his car, and drove home.

11: Zap

This is what happened when the baby was born: On Thursday, the twenty-eighth of July, DeAnne went to her doctor’s office to find out why the baby hadn’t shown any intention yet of entering the world. It was the due date, and DeAnne had no desire for a bonus week of pregnancy like the one she had with Robbie. When Dr. Keese examined her, he looked surprised. “You haven’t had any labor pains?”

“I don’t ever get hard labor pains until I’m about to deliver,” said DeAnne.

“Well, get ready for them, then,” he said. “You’re at six centimeters.”

“Oh,” said DeAnne. “I guess that means I don’t have time to plow the back forty before the baby comes.”

“I think it means that if I were you, I’d go out and get in my car and drive to the hospital. I’ll have Rochelle call your husband.”

“This is really inconvenient,” said DeAnne. “My mother is flying in from Utah tonight at nine-thirty. Do you think the baby will be here by then so Step can go pick her up?”

“Are you aware that you are speaking absolute nonsense?” asked Dr. Keese. “Things like that are no longer your concern for the next few days, and certainly not for the next few hours.”

She stopped at the reception desk and borrowed the phone.

“Hi,” said Step. “What’s the news?”

“I’m at six centimeters and the doctor says I don’t really have time to go home.”

“OK,” said Step. “Any pains yet?”

“None,” she answered. “But I’m sure they’ll make up for it later. Remember that Mother’s arriving at nine-thirty”

“I’ve already arranged with Sam Freebody to pick her up if we happen to be at the hospital by then,” said Step.

“Oh,” said DeAnne. “How will he know her?”

“He’ll look for the woman with short, tightly curled salt-and-pepper hair who seems lost and abandoned and who answers to the name ‘Vette.”’

“You make her sound like a lost dog.”

“And I’m going to call her before she gets on the plane and tell her to look for a man tall enough to change lightbulbs without a stepladder and wide enough that he couldn’t get two rattlesnakes to reach all the way around him. I think they’ll find each other.”

“I know you’re perfectly able to handle things, Step. But I have to ask about these things or I’ll worry.”

“I know,” said Step. “Did I complain? I’m trying to reassure you so you don’t worry.”

“Well, you’re doing a splendid job. Call Sister Bigelow or Mary Anne Lowe to stay with the children.”

“Whichever one says yes, I’ll get the other one to finish mowing the lawn for me.”

“Very funny. As soon as whoever it is gets there, then I need you to bring me my bag, the one I packed with everything I’ll need in the hospital.”

“Yes,” said Step. “I’m already standing in our bedroom and I have just opened that bag.”

“Don’t open it, Step, or something will fall out.”

“I’m now putting into the bag your copy of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which you told me you intended to read in the hospital but which you had neglected to put in the bag.”

“I hate you when you’re so superior-sounding.”

“Now I’m going to sound bossy,” said Step.

“Go ahead, I can take anything—I’m a woman.”

“Get off the phone, leave everything to me, drive to the hospital, and I’ll be there within thirty minutes.”

“OK, Junk Man.”

“Oh—wait—what was the name of the hospital again?”

“Step, you can’t have forgotten the—”

He laughed and laughed.

“You are sick,” she said. “I hope this little boy is nothing like you.”

“I hope he’s just like you,” said Step, “except with a handle.”

“I love you and I’m scared so please hurry.”

“That’s my plan. I love you too.”

She ran only one stop sign on the way to the hospital. When she walked into the room, they made her sit in a wheelchair. I drove myself here, she thought, I walked from the parking lot, and now I need somebody to take care of me?

Well, why not? She was no longer in charge of anything now, except the baby inside her that had finally decided he was coming. Without insurance, but with a mother and father who loved babies and had looked forward to this one with hope, as they had looked forward to all their children.

Step made the calls first, though he was dripping with sweat and covered with grass clippings. Sam Freebody would have no problem picking up DeAnne’s mother—he would hold up a placard in the airport saying “Sylvette Brown, Grandmother again.” Mary Anne Lowe was in her car heading over to the house to watch the kids almost before she hung up the phone. Bappy Waters would come over and finish mowing the lawn and put the mower away and bag the clippings. Step even called Ruby Bigelow, ostensibly to warn her that DeAnne probably wouldn’t be teaching her class a week from Sunday, but actually because he was pretty sure that the Relief Society president would want to be informed of all childbirths-in-progress so that when sisters in the 1st Ward called her with the news, she could say, “I know.”

Step told Stevie to open the door only if it was Sister Lowe, and then he headed for the laundry room, stripped off his grass-covered clothes, and bolted for the bathroom in his underwear. “You’re not going to the hospital in your underwear, are you, Daddy!” shouted Robbie.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he explained.

“In your underwear?” shouted Robbie. Robbie thought this was so funny he followed Step down the hall, repeating it. “In your underwear? In your underwear?”

“No, in your underwear,” said Step. He closed the bedroom door, tossed his underwear into the laundry basket, and took the fastest shower of his life.

He got out, threw on his clothes, picked up DeAnne’s bag, and when he got to the family room he discovered that Mary Anne Lowe was already there, armed with a bag full of coloring books, crayons, and little-kid board games. “Please help Sister Lowe all you can,” Step said to the kids. And to Sister Lowe he said, “The kids don’t like anything so don’t bother fixing them dinner.”

“Da-ad!” said Robbie.

“Robbie will eat anything with ketchup on it, including small live animals,” said Step. “Stevie will only eat pasta with parmesan cheese on it, no butter, no salt. And Betsy doesn’t actually eat food, she just cuisinarts it and sprays it in a fine mist all over the kitchen.”

“Don’t believe him!” cried Robbie. “He’s joking!”

“We’ll do just fine,” said Mary Anne.

Step looked at Stevie. “Will you help with your brother and sister?”

“Yes,” he said.

Mary Anne turned to Stevie now. “What do you hope it is, a boy or a girl?”

“It’s a boy,” said Stevie.

“We had ultrasound,” explained Step.

“Oh, so did we, on our last one,” said Mary Anne, “but we wouldn’t let the doctor tell us. We didn’t want to know.”

“We’re gonna name it Zap!” said Robbie.

“Zap?” asked Mary Anne.

“For Zapata,” said Step. “A great Mexican revolutionary”

She grinned. “What’s next, Pancho Villa?”

“Not likely,” said Step. “DeAnne said that the only way I could name one of our kids for the bandit who drove her ancestors out of Mexico is if I give birth to it myself,” said Step.

“Why are you still standing around?” asked Mary Anne. “Aren’t you supposed to be telling her when to breathe or something?”

“Naw,” said Step. “We believe in using epidural blocks. No pain. We work crosswords during labor.”

“Go, please, you’re making me nervous,” said Mary Anne.

“Thanks for helping,” said Step.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get even with you.”

When Step got to the hospital he found DeAnne already wired up in a labor room. A nurse took the bag and the two of them settled down to their vigil. Everything was going normally now, which meant that the pains were starting, and that meant that DeAnne needed to have Step talk continuously, except when she couldn’t stand to have anybody talking to her. By now he was pretty good at guessing when to be quiet and when to babble. Or maybe she was just better at hiding it when she couldn’t stand to hear another word or when she was desperate for him to distract her from the horrible process that evolution had decreed for human women-giving birth to big-headed babies.

The nurse bustled in and out; the anesthesiologist punched a hole in her spine and fed in the tube for the epidural block.

Then came the bad news. “Dr. Keese’s current patient is having a little trouble,” said the nurse. “She may require a caesarean. If she does, there’s a backup here for you—Dr. Vender. Is that all right?”

“Do we have a choice?” asked Step.

“Dr. Vender will be fine,” said DeAnne. Then, when the nurse was gone, she said, “Vender is a woman. She just joined the same practice that Mary Anne’s ob-gyn is in, and Mary Anne is thinking of switching to her. She says she’s getting a good reputation.”

“I don’t like changing horses in midstream,” said Step.

“Neither do I,” said DeAnne. “But that’s the way it goes—if your doctor’s with another patient when your time comes, then he’s not going to drop that baby on its head and come to you.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” said Step.

“Maybe that other woman will get lucky.”

They didn’t get lucky. DeAnne was ripe and ready to go, and Dr. Keese was still with the other woman. Dr. Vender showed up, solemnly businesslike—she looked to Step like one of those women who always wore midcalf brown skirts in college and put on little teeny half-smiles if somebody made a joke.

In the delivery room, it didn’t take all that long. DeAnne had had enough babies now that she watched her own episiotomy in the mirror, though Step didn’t think there were enough babies in the world to get him used to the idea, so he didn’t watch. Then, just like clockwork, out popped the head, a little twist for the shoulders, and presto, boy number three. Zap.

“Hi, Zap,” said Step.

“Oh, can’t you let him hear his real name?” said DeAnne. “He’ll want to go back if he thinks he’s going to be Zap for the rest of his life.”

“Hi, Jeremy Zapata Fletcher.”

“Is he all right?” asked DeAnne.

“Twenty digits total, distributed normally” said Step.

Clip. Snip. The nurse took the baby from Dr. Vender and laid it on the scale. “Be useful, here, daddy,” said the nurse. “Watch the baby and don’t let him walk anywhere.”

“He’s shivering,” said Step. “I think he’s cold.”

The nurses were preparing something over on the side counter. Dr. Vender was taking care of the placenta and stitching up the episiotomy.

“Can’t we cover him or something?” asked Step. “He’s really shivering.”

“Now, don’t worry mama,” said Dr. Vender. “Everything’s just fine.”

Step wanted to snap back at her: Don’t talk down to us like children.

“Here we go,” said the nurse. She took note of Zap’s weight and then dripped something in each of his eyes with an eyedropper. “Oh, I know you don’t like that,” said the nurse.

“This is definitely not normal,” said Step. “He’s shivering and you’ve got to do something about it.”

“What’s wrong, Step?” asked DeAnne.

“Nothing’s wrong,” said Dr. Vender. “Daddy’s just being a worrywart.”

“Can the babytalk,” said Step, unable to endure it another moment. “DeAnne is a grownup and so am I, and we’d both like to know what’s going on with the baby.”

“We’ve already sent for a neonatal specialist,” said Dr. Vender. “It appears that it may be some kind of seizure activity. There’s no proximate cause. There was no oxygen deprivation and no anomaly in any of the baby’s vital signs during delivery.”

Step figured that what he was hearing was the standard disclaimer to avoid a malpractice suit. He also figured that it was probably true. But that still didn’t answer the real question. “Is the baby going to be all right?”

“His vital signs are just fine,” said Dr. Vender. “This isn’t normal, but at the same time it may not be dangerous at all. Please, now, as soon as I know anything more I’ll tell you, but it’s time now for your wife to go into the recovery room.”

Step leaned over DeAnne, kissed her, and squeezed her hand. “Can’t I hold him?” she asked. “Can’t I see him first?”

Step knew what she was thinking: Something is wrong with my baby. I don’t want my baby to die without my having held him when he was alive. “Of course you can,” said Step to DeAnne.

He looked at Dr. Vender, raised an eyebrow. She beckoned to the nurse who had the baby. The nurse brought Zap to DeAnne and laid him in the crook of her arm. DeAnne turned her head to see him. “He’s beautiful,” she said.

It was true. All newborns are squat and red, of course, but Zap was a genuinely pretty baby.

“He really is shivering,” she said. “Don’t be scared, Jeremy. We already love you. You’ve got a wonderful life ahead of you.”

The nurse took the baby back. Another nurse wheeled DeAnne out of the delivery room, with Dr. Vender right behind.

“I’d like to hold the baby,” said Step.

“The neonate’s going to be here in a minute,” said the nurse, “and we’ve got to get the measurements.”

“He’s not going to grow in the next thirty seconds,” said Step.

“You’re a feisty one,” said the nurse. He could tell that she was not going to say I like that in a man.

“I’m sorry,” said Step. “But this little guy is a lot more important to me than hospital routines, and there isn’t a line of people waiting outside for this room.”

She handed him the baby. Just like the three times before, the first thing he thought was: I never knew that babies could be so small. All his memories of the older kids were from later in their babyhood. The first minutes were always new again. “I think he’s shivering a little less.”

The nurse didn’t say anything.

“Does this happen often?” asked Step. “This kind of seizure?”

“Everything happens,” said the nurse. “And nothing’s ever the same twice.”

Which told Step that she had seen babies like this who died.

She was still measuring when the neonate came, a doctor named Torwaldson. “Why wasn’t this already done?”

“I insisted that she let me hold the baby for thirty seconds,” said Step. “I threatened to break the windshield of her car if she didn’t.”

“I’m done here,” said the nurse. She did not think Step was at all cute.

Torwaldson started taking soundings with his stethoscope. “It’s time for you to go to the waiting room, Mr . … Fletcher.”

“Tell me about this kind of seizure,” said Step.

“I’ll tell you about this kind of seizure when I know what kind of seizure it is,” said Torwaldson. “Pheno,” he said to the nurse. “Let’s get this under control.”

Step left. There were times to be assertive and times to get out of the way.

He did not go to the waiting room. Instead he went to recovery, and the nurses there gave him no trouble about getting in to see DeAnne. Apparently she had been asking for him.

“Is he OK?” she said.

“The neonatal physician is checking him out. He said something about pheno. In my mind that seems to go with barbital. I assume that’s something to stop the trembling.”

“Did he seem worried?” asked DeAnne.

“He seemed competent and he seemed confident,” said Step. “How are you?”

“It hurts,” said DeAnne, “but they’re being very nice and pumping me full of drugs. I think they’re going to give me a sleeping pill or something because I’m so worried about the baby. Say a prayer with me, Step. Please?”

Step held her hand and prayed for the doctors to be able to find out what was wrong and to do whatever medical science could do to fix the problem and please let them have a long life with this little boy, they wanted him so much, but thy will be done. “I think he’ll be fine,” said Step. “I really do. They weren’t doing anything dramatic. It wasn’t an emergency.”

In a little while she was asleep, and Step headed for the waiting room to start calling people. But first he saw Dr. Vender in the hall. She waved him over. “I’m sorry if I was a little short with you,” she said. “I was afraid you were worrying Mrs. Fletcher.”

“If I saw something wrong with the baby Dr. Vender, and I didn’t tell her immediately, she would never trust me again.”

“Well, some people need the truth and some people need anything but,” said Dr. Vender. “I didn’t know your wife or you, and so I did the safest thing. Or rather I tried to.”

“Sorry,” said Step. But he wasn’t sorry, and she certainly knew it.

“Torwaldson is the best in Steuben,” she said. “And he’s on the phone right now with a neuro in Chapel Hill.”

“Neuro?” asked Step.

“Neurosurgeon,” she explained.

“Yeah, I know what a neuro is. I just wondered what it meant that he was calling one.”

“I would guess,” said Dr. Vender, “that it means he’s run into something he hasn’t seen before, or else he wants a corroborating opinion.”

“Is the baby in danger of dying?”

“As far as I can see,” said Dr. Vender, “no.”

That was when Dr. Keese came bustling out into the hall. “Dr. Vender!” he called.

“This is Mr. Fletcher,” said Dr. Vender.

Dr. Keese held out his hand, and Step shook it. “Nice to see you, I met you when I poked my head into the labor room, remember?”

Step shook his head. “Must have been before I got there.”

“No, you were there,” said Dr. Keese. “But I think you only had eyes for DeAnne. Sorry I couldn’t be in there, but I can assure you that Dr. Vender did everything I would have done, and probably better.”

How nice, thought Step. Doctors covering each other against a lawsuit.

“Mr. Fletcher,” said Dr. Keese. “Dr. Torwaldson and I and Dr. Vender all agree that we need to stop the seizure activity, and for that we’re giving your baby phenobarbital. We’ve given a fairly massive dose, for his body weight, but we’ve got to stop the seizures. Once we’ve got that under control, we’ll step the dosage down to the minimum for maintenance. He’s going into intensive care now, but I truly don’t think he’s in any danger of losing his life. So I urge you to go home. It’s after midnight and you’ll want to be up here in the morning. We’ll know more then, and DeAnne will want to see you. All right?”

What choice did he have? He waited until he knew what room DeAnne was assigned to and where to find Zap the next morning, and then he went out to the car. He was just getting into the Datsun when he realized that there was no reason to leave the good car at the hospital. DeAnne wasn’t going anywhere for a while. The rusty old two-door could keep its vigil here tonight. As he drove home, he couldn’t stop thinking: My baby was born having a seizure and the doctors have never seen it before. Something’s wrong with my youngest child, and I can’t do anything but pray, and I can’t think of a single reason why God should exclude the Stephen Fletcher family from the normal vicissitudes of life and so I don’t think my prayers are going to be answered. Not my real prayer, anyway. The “thy will be done” part will certainly be answered, but the part about “Make this all go away so that nothing is wrong, so that the doctors say I can’t understand it, there was a seizure last night but now there’s not a trace of a problem, and he’ll definitely be brilliant and healthy and live to a hundred and four”—I don’t think God’s going to adjust his plan for the universe to make room for accommodating that particular prayer.

When he got home, DeAnne’s mother, Vette, met him at the door. “Oh,” he said. “I hoped you’d be asleep.”

“And I hoped you’d call from the hospital,” she said.

He had forgotten to call. “There were problems. They sent me home. I decided to call from here.”

“Problems?” She looked stricken.

“DeAnne is fine. But the baby seems to have something wrong and they don’t know what it is. He was trembling. They called it a seizure. Well, actually, they called it ‘seizure activity.’ But they said it didn’t look life threatening.”

“Oh, I hate this,” said Vette. “I hate not knowing.”

“You and me both,” said Step. “I guess I ought to call everybody now. It’s only eleven P.M. in Utah, right?”

“Also Mary Anne Lowe said to tell you to call her no matter how late.”

“OK,” said Step. “I’ll call her first.”

He went into the kitchen and suddenly found himself surrounded by tiny whining insects. He brushed his hands around his head but they wouldn’t go away.

“Oh, aren’t those gnats awful?” asked Vette. “I found a can of Raid and I’ve been spraying them, but new swarms just keep turning up. Do you get them all the time?”

“Never,” said Step. “Where’s the Raid?” The gnats all seemed to want to zoom right into his ear. “This is all I needed.”

“I think they’re coming from the laundry room,” said Vette. “I haven’t found any in the kids’ rooms yet.”

“We have this weird bug thing,” said Step. He went into the laundry room and started looking around for where the gnats might be getting in through. As he looked, he told Vette about the crickets and the June bugs. “We don’t have any regular bug problem, I guess,” he said. “It just comes in waves. Every couple of months or so some group of insects decide that our house is ready to go condo.”

He found that the dryer hose had come partly away from the outdoor vent. He tried to push it tight, but the pressure jostled it and it fell completely away. Suddenly another swarm of gnats arose. Only they didn’t come from the vent—they came from the hose. As if they had been spawned somewhere inside the dryer.

“Here, give me the Raid,” he said.

Vette gave it to him, and he first sprayed the swarm that was orbiting his head. Then he sprayed up into the dryer hose and then out through the vent and when he thought he had dosed them enough, he slipped the hose back over the vent and then got a screwdriver from the laundry room cupboard and tightened the collar over the hose so it wouldn’t slip away again.

“What are we doing in this house?” he said, when he got back into the kitchen.

“Getting by,” said Vette. “Doing what you must for your family.”

“We should never have left Vigor.”

“Step, you know that I think you never should have left Utah! But you are not having problems with little Jeremy because you moved to North Carolina.”

“How do you know? Maybe the doctor did something wrong. In Salt Lake they have a billion babies every year, they’ve seen everything. Out here there just aren’t as many babies and so they’re learning on Zap.”

Vette winced. “Do you really call him Zap?”

“Well, the first thing Robbie said when he heard the name Jeremy was ‘Germy, Germy Germy’ so maybe Zaps the lesser of two evils.”

“Step, things go wrong sometimes no matter where you live, and sometimes things go right, and you know something? Most things that happen aren’t anybody’s fault at all, so it’s really kind of vain of you to think that your moving to North Carolina caused your newborn baby to have a seizure. You didn’t do a single thing to cause it. For all you know whatever problem he has was determined at the moment of conception.”

“Yeah, well, I was there for that, too.” Then he was appalled that he had said such a thing. He and DeAnne’s parents got along really well, but still, you don’t talk about the conception of your children to your wife’s mother.

“Better call people,” said Vette. “I’ll keep watching for the gnats.”

Step called Mary Anne first. It took longer than such calls usually did, because he mentioned that the baby was in intensive care and then he had to answer, “We don’t know yet” to about fifty questions. It went that way with every call, but he couldn’t very well not tell them the baby was having trouble, or when they found out they’d be deeply hurt. Besides, if prayer was going to be of any help in this situation, he wanted all the people praying that he could find.

He didn’t finish the calls until nearly three. He had already sent Sylvette to bed, persuading her to go by pointing out that she’d be needed to take care of the kids in the morning while he went up to the hospital, and then she’d take her shift at the hospital while he stayed home with the kids—she’d need her sleep.

“So will you,” Vette retorted.

“Yeah, but I can take a nap while I’m driving back and forth to the hospital.”

She laughed and let him pull out the sofa bed, which DeAnne had already made up for her mother that morning. Then he moved his phone operations into the bedroom. When he finished the calls and took his last patrol through the house, she was asleep.

He looked in on each of the kids. Betsy, cuddled up to the stuffed Snoopy that—for reasons passing understanding—she had named Wilbur. Robbie, holding his real-fur stuffed bunny, which had been named Mammalee since his infancy. And Stevie, holding on to nothing.

You’re all safe here in my house, Step thought silently, and yet I really can’t keep you safe at all, can I? Because there’s that new one, not six hours old yet, and his life is in danger and I’m not even there because I’m completely useless. And here you are, asleep, safe in your beds, only something’s going on inside your head, Stevie, and I can’t reach in and find out what’s happening and make it get better. I can plug up one hole and sweep the crickets out, but then the june bugs get in somewhere else, and then the gnats. Even when you have a perfect child, nothing stays perfect. Something always gets in. The good things are always, always at risk.

In the bedroom, undressed and ready for bed, he did what he hadn’t done in years, though DeAnne did it every night. He knelt down beside the bed, the way he had done on his mission, the way he had done as a child. He poured out his heart and asked for mercy for his new baby. Let him live. Let him have a good life. If it’s within the power of my priesthood to heal him, then let me heal him when I give him a blessing tomorrow. I don’t want to lose him. I want all my children, this one as much as any of the others, and all the children yet unborn that you might have for us. Don’t take him away from us. Whatever he needs, we’ll give it, if we have it to give.

Later, lying in bed, it occurred to him that he might have been praying for the Lord to grant him and DeAnne sixty years of caring for an invalid child. That perhaps what was wrong with Zap was so severe that it would be cruel to keep him here if the Lord was willing to take him home. So he re-entered the prayer that he thought he had closed, and added the phrase that he had deliberately left out when he was on his knees: Thy will be done.

DeAnne had recovered enough to go home, but she didn’t want to. “I’ve never left the hospital without my baby,” she said.

“You’ll see him every day,” said Dr. Keese. “And so will Step. And so will your mother. But you’re not on insurance, I understand, and this is going to eat up your savings. You need whatever money you have to take care of Jeremy.”

She said nothing.

“Good,” he said. “They’ll have you ready to go at noon.”

To fill the empty time, she went back to the book. She had forgotten to pack it, and yet it had turned out to be the only thing that could keep her mind off Jeremy. She could read about the family in the book and say, We may have problems, but at least we’ll never be like them.

No, it was more than that. The book kept speaking to her, characters kept saying things that echoed in her heart. Like when the nice son in the story said something about how life is like a cliff that’s eroding away and you spend your whole life just shoring it up. It was the nightmare of her life, the one that lived always at the back of her mind, and he had named it. Only it wasn’t him, of course. It was the author. Tyler wrote those words for me, she thought, so I’d know that I wasn’t alone going through these fearful days.

This last morning in the hospital, she reached the passage where the mother in the book speaks of her “three lovely pregnancies” and how she counted down the months, waiting for something perfect to happen. “It seemed I was full of light,” the mother said. “It was light and plans that filled me.” DeAnne let the book fall onto the blanket and turned her face into the pillow and wept.

She must have cried herself to sleep, because when she next opened her eyes, Step was sitting there, leaning forward on the chair beside the bed, his chin resting on his hands, his elbows on his knees. He was looking at nothing, staring at the wall.

“Hello,” said DeAnne.

“Hi, Fish Lady,” said Step. At once the somberness left him, and if she hadn’t had that moment of watching him unawares, she would never have known that he was anything but bright and confident. “I understand the doctor wants to kick you out and send you home. And I’ve got to tell you that I hope you come.”

“I will,” she said. “But please not yet.”

“DeAnne, you’ll be up here at least twice a day to nurse him. I’ll drive you here, or your mother will. But in between those times, you need to be back home.”

She reached out for his hand. “Step, I don’t want to leave without the baby.”

“He’s doing better all the time,” said Step. “And we couldn’t very well give him all these tests at home.”

“I don’t like what they’re doing to him here,” said DeAnne. “I don’t like the way he’s drugged all the time.”

“I don’t like it either,” said Step. “But we’re not doctors.”

“They don’t know everything,” she said.

“But they know something,” said Step. “And sleeping in a hospital bed isn’t going to make you or me any wiser about what we ought to do. Please—you’ve spent too much time here alone.”

“I hardly have any time alone,” said DeAnne. “I think every sister in the Steuben 1st Ward has been up here twice.”

“At church this morning the bishop asked everybody to fast and pray for Zap next Sunday. The whole ward.”

It filled DeAnne with emotion to hear that. They really weren’t alone. And maybe with so many people fasting and praying, God would hear.

Or maybe not. Maybe it would be like in the book. Maybe things would always be just a little bit out of control, just out of reach.

Step reached down onto the floor. “You dropped your book,” he said.

“I don’t want to read it anymore,” she said.

“Oh? I thought you liked it. Yesterday you even read me a passage from it.”

“She knows too much,” said DeAnne. “It hurts too much.”

“Fine, I’ll put it up on the shelf here—”

“No,” she said. “No, give it to me.”

“So you are going to read it.”

“No,” she said. “I’m just going to hold it. Is that all right?”

He looked at her strangely.

“I’m not going crazy, Step. It just … it’s an anchor. It’s another woman telling me she knows about things going wrong, and I just need to hold the book, OK? I mean at least it’s not a Barbie doll or something.”

“Fine,” said Step. “I just wondered if this is going to become an icon to you. Like scripture. The fifth standard work?”

“Don’t make fun,” she said. “This is very hard for me, you know. I’ve always prided myself on making perfect babies. Now all I’ve got left that I make perfectly is my pie crusts.”

“I wasn’t making fun,” he said, as he reached down and embraced her awkwardly “And he is a perfect baby, DeAnne.”

“You can’t just deny it and make it go away,” said DeAnne.

“He has the perfect body for the life God intends him to live. For the life he intends us to live.”

God’s plan. Nothing we can do about it. Might as well stop praying or trying or anything.

No, he doesn’t really believe that, she realized. Because when we’ve talked about this sort of thing before, it was me who argued that God must plan all our lives or it wouldn’t be fair, and he’s the one who said, God doesn’t have a plan for our lives, he just put us all into a world where no matter what our life is like, we can still discover how good and strong we are, or how weak we are, or how evil or cowardly. He’s saying this about God’s plan to make me feel better.

“I keep thinking,” she said, “that we shouldn’t have made love so soon after I used the spermicide the last time.”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t all that soon, DeAnne.”

“You’re supposed to wait longer. A week.”

“DeAnne, the doctors don’t even know what the problem is, let alone what caused it.”

“And Bendectin—all these stories about Bendectin and birth defects—”

“In the National Enquirer, DeAnne, not in Scientific American or the Journal of the AMA.”

“Step, I don’t want to come home without my baby.”

“But you will come home without him, DeAnne, because you know that’s what’s best for him, and best for you. And you always do what you know is right. That’s who you are.”

She thought about that for a while. “OK,” she said. “Call for the nurse.”

Later that afternoon, Step dropped by the pharmacy to pick up DeAnne’s pain medication. While he was waiting for the pharmacist, he wandered over to the magazines. A woman was standing there, and he saw out of the corner of his eye that she glanced at him and stepped away. He scanned the covers of the newsmagazines, and then, out of sheer boredom, the professional wrestling fan magazines.

“You just can’t give up, can you,” said the woman.

Step glanced up, trying to see whom she was talking to. She was looking at him.

Did he even know her? She looked familiar, but he couldn’t place her.

“At Kroger’s, at the mall, I turn around and there you are. Can’t you give me any peace?”

Step was baffled. “Excuse me, but I think you have me confused with somebody else.”

“Wasn’t giving up my job enough for you? Are you trying to hound me into suicide?” Her voice trembled; she sounded genuinely distraught. Whatever she imagined he was doing seemed real enough to her, though he could not think of why she would have fixated on him.

“Ma’am, nobody wants you to commit suicide.”

“Then just stop it,” she hissed.

Suddenly he made the connection. She hadn’t chosen him out of madness; she really had given up her job because of him.

“Mrs. Jones,” he said.

“You’re a vile man,” she said. “Whatever I did, I don’t deserve to have you stalking me.”

“I’m not, I swear it. This is the first time I’ve set eyes on you since—”

“Don’t lie to me,” she said contemptuously. “You every time. At the mall you laughed out loud at me.”

“Mrs. Jones, how would I know you’d even be at Macy’s? I’m here picking up a prescription for my wife.”

“I won’t go on with that tape hanging over my I won’t. It’s worse than blackmail, it’s torture.”

It sickened him to have her, Stevie’s tormentor, complaining about torture. But he didn’t want to argue with her. She was a closed chapter. “Listen, Mrs. Jones. I just brought my wife home from the hospital and our newborn baby is still there because nobody knows why he’s having seizures but he’s in intensive care at a hundred dollars an hour and I don’t have insurance and the bank is foreclosing on our house in Indiana and you know something? I don’t care about you. I’m not following you. I’m living my own life, and you go live yours and forget about me, because until this moment I had completely forgotten about you and I’d just as soon leave it that way.”

He turned to go back to the pharmacist’s counter. She snatched at his sleeve. “Give me the tape,” she said.

“I don’t even remember where it is,” Step said. “Look, Mrs. Jones, we both live in the same town. We’re bound to end up in the same store or me same fast-food joint or the same movie every now and then, and it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Is that how you plan to defend yourself when I ask the court for a restraining order?” she said. “That’s what my lawyer suggests.”

“Right now I think my prescription is ready and my wife needs it. Have your lawyer write me a letter.” If there was a lawyer.

He picked up the prescription, had the clerk put it on his account at the store, and left. He was half afraid that Mrs. Jones would follow him out of the store, chase him all the way home, and beat on his door, insisting that he had to stop following her. But when he returned home with the medication, the only people who knocked on the door were more Relief Society sisters, coming by to help encourage DeAnne about Zap. Whatever happens will be part of Heavenly Father’s plan, they said. After they left, DeAnne couldn’t help but voice her exasperation to Step and Vette. “Of course it’ll be part of God’s plan, but God hasn’t exactly been famous for planning nice things for all of his children.”

Even though she was annoyed, Step could see that their visit had been good for her. In familiar surroundings, some parts of her life seemed finally to be under control again. She was back to being Relief Society spiritual living teacher instead of a helpless mother trapped in a hospital surrounded by doctors who didn’t know what they were doing with her baby and wouldn’t admit it.

On Monday morning, DeAnne arranged for Mary Anne Lowe to come over and tend Robbie and Betsy so that Step could take Stevie to the psychiatrist while Vette took DeAnne to the hospital to nurse Zap.

“We’ve been taking him to Dr. Weeks for two months,” said Step. “Nothing’s getting better.”

“I know,” said DeAnne. “But these things take time.”

“After two months, we deserve a progress report,” said Step. “We ought to be getting at least a diagnosis. Something. I mean, we’re going through the same thing with Zap, the doctors searching to try to find out what’s wrong, but they at least keep us posted. They explain what they’re doing. And they learn things about the baby every day—at least they learn what isn’t wrong with him.”

“Psychiatry isn’t precise,” said DeAnne.

“Exactly my point. The hospital bill is already getting up around six thousand dollars for Zap alone, and who knows how much longer he’ll be in there? We’re putting in ninety bucks a week to the shrink—almost four hundred a month, almost as much as we’re paying in rent—and we don’t know what we’re getting.”

“So you don’t want to take him? You want to give up? Stop cold?”

“I want to leave him home today. I want to go in myself, talk to her, find out what she’s been finding out.”

DeAnne looked at him suspiciously. “I think you want to pick a fight with her. I think you want to get rid of her the way you got rid of Mrs. Jones.”

“If you want, I’ll take the tape recorder and let you hear everything that’s said.”

“No,” said DeAnne. “You can handle it.”

“I promise that I won’t do anything to antagonize her,” said Step. “I wouldn’t want to make it harder for Lee to continue in the Church.”

“Or for Stevie to continue seeing her,” said DeAnne.

“If that’s in Stevie’s best interest,” said Step.

DeAnne just stood there, looking at him.

“I’m glad you decided not to say it,” said Step.

“Say what?” asked DeAnne.

“That you don’t think I’m capable of fairly evaluating whether Stevie should continue or not.”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“No, but it’s what you were thinking.”

“Well, you can’t get mad at me for what I thought and didn’t say!”

“I’m not mad at you. I’m just reminding you that in all our years of marriage, I’ve never snuck off and done something about our family that you were against. Have I?”

“No,” she said.

“So maybe I deserve a little trust here. You’re not the only parent Stevie has who loves him.”

“That is so unfair,” she said. “I never said that, I never thought it, I never would—”

“I actually go through every day doing pretty well, DeAnne. I dress myself now, I carry on whole conversations with strangers, and I almost never have to call home for help. I’ve even used a credit card without confusion, and the grocery store lets me cash checks as long as I have a permission slip from my mother.”

“Are you trying to make me cry?” asked DeAnne. “Are you trying to make me feel guilty because this is the first time you’ve taken Stevie to Dr. Weeks and I worry that you’ll do something or say something to—”

“You see?” said Step. “You really don’t trust me. For five months you’ve been in charge of everything at home, and now I’m back home again and you think that unless you program every word I say, unless I stick to your program every single moment, without deviation, without side trips, without thinking for myself, then everything will fall apart.”

“Let’s not fight,” she said. “Please, please, please.”

“We’re not fighting,” said Step. “I’m just expressing my resentment about the fact that you don’t trust my judgment. Don’t you remember that we decided together to send Stevie to Dr. Weeks? Or do you still think it was because you manipulated me into it and you don’t dare let up on the manipulation?”

“Don’t do this to me!” she said. “I have to go up there to the hospital and hold my baby who is so drugged up that he hangs like a rag doll in my arms and we have to suction the milk out of my breasts and force it into his throat in his sleep! I have to deal with all those doctors who think that I can’t even understand English and force them to tell me what’s going on so that I can have some idea of what’s happening to my baby, and now you attack me like this—”

“Well if you’re so tough and rigorous about finding out what the doctors are doing to Zap,” said Step, “then why the hell have we gone two months sending Stevie to Dr. Weeks and you don’t even know what goes on in the sessions? And when I say that I’m going to go up there and do with Dr. Weeks exactly what you’re doing with Zap’s doctors, you think that I’m too stupid or too emotional or too bigoted to do it. Well, I’m trusting you with Zap’s life when you handle things up there. Don’t you think I deserve the same respect in dealing with Dr. Weeks? Or am I the vice-president in this marriage? Will I just get trotted out for funerals?”

DeAnne gasped. “Don’t say that!” she cried. “Oh, Step, you really think he’s going to die!” She burst into tears.

Step was horrified. “It was just a figure of speech. I was just saying—Reagan sends Bush around to funerals, that’s what I mean. Like when Sadat was assassinated. I wasn’t saying anything about Zap. Really.”

He put an arm around her. She turned toward him and wept into his shirt for just a moment. Then she lifted her head. “I’m not going to do this,” she said. “I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to let go. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“If I let go, then I won’t be there for Zap. Or Stevie, or anybody. I’m just walking along the edge, Step. Right along the edge. You mustn’t push me. You just mustn’t. You’re the one I’ve got to hold on to.”

“So hold on to me,” said Step. “Don’t push me away. Trust me. Trust me the way I trust you.”

“This whole argument, this is just because we’re upset, that’s all. We’re upset and worried about Zap.”

“And Stevie,” said Step.

“Yes,” she said. “And Stevie. I have to go.”

“DeAnne,” he said, “I have to know. Are you with me on this?”

“On what?” she said.

“On finding out from Dr. Weeks what’s happening with Stevie.”

“Yes,” she said. “Do what you think is right.”

“I won’t do anything,” said Step. “I’ll just find things out. The way you find things out about Zap. All right?”

She looked at him steadily “If you can see that Dr. Weeks isn’t helping, you can discontinue the sessions. Without asking me or anything.”

“But I won’t,” said Step. “Not without discussing it with you.”

So it was that Step drove alone to Dr. Weeks’s office, following the directions DeAnne had given him. When he went inside, Dr. Weeks stood up and greeted him warmly. “Mr. Fletcher,” she said.

“Please, call me Step.”

“Step, then. I’ve been thinking that it was about time I had a session with you and your wife.”

“She’s at the hospital. Our new baby is in intensive care.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. What’s wrong?”

Step explained, briefly, and then said, “That’s why I’m here today. We’re coasting along without insurance. The bills for these sessions are quite steep, and we thought it was time for us to evaluate where we stand—what exactly you’ve found out about Stevie’s problems and what you think it looks like for … you know, down the road.”

“Well, we’ve been making good progress, Stevie and I. He talks quite often during the sessions now. I think he’s getting used to me.”

Step wanted to say, He talks quite often? You mean we’ve been paying for sessions in which he hasn’t talked at all? After two months he’s only now getting used to you? But he remembered DeAnne’s concerns about him and curbed his tongue.

“Beyond that,” she said, “I’m still in the process of diagnosis. His reticence to speak is, of course, one of the symptoms of his disorder, but it also makes the process of diagnosis rather slow. I think that in another month or two I may be prepared to give you a prognosis. In the meantime …” She turned over a couple of sheets of paper on her desk.

Trying to keep his voice calm, Step interrupted. “What I’m interested in today, Dr. Weeks, is not a final statement, but an explanation of what you know so far, or what you suspect so far. DeAnne and I have to decide now, not two months from now, whether to continue treatment.”

“I’d be happy to work out a payment schedule with you,” said Dr. Weeks. “But I can hardly discuss an ongoing process, especially when you are not the patient.”

“The patient is eight years old,” said Step. “And if I were a fellow psychiatrist, you would have no trouble at all talking with me about what you think the diagnosis might turn out to be.”

“But you are not a psychiatrist, Step.”

“I have a Ph.D., Dr. Weeks. It’s in history, which isn’t an exact science like psychiatry, I know, but it does mean that I’m an educated human being, and I think that if you try to explain to me what’s wrong with Stevie, I’ll understand you.” Thinking of what was going on at the hospital with Zap, he added, “For instance, you must have some idea of what his condition isn’t. Things you’ve eliminated.”

“It would be much more helpful to the whole process, Step, if you and your wife came in for some sessions with me yourselves. In fact, I suspect that your insistence on hurrying the diagnostic procedure may suggest possible sources for Stevie’s abnormal reaction to stress.”

I should have expected this, thought Step. The very fact that I want to hold her accountable is proof of my disorder. Well, he was not going to let Weeks establish a doctor-patient relationship with him. “Fine,” he said. “If you explain to us what you think the problem might be and why our coming in for sessions might be helpful, then we might well agree that our joining in the therapeutic process might be the indicated course of action.”

“Step,” she said, “you seem to feel some hostility toward psychotherapists, along with an apparent fascination that has caused you to learn some aspects of psychological jargon. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have unconsciously communicated this hostility to Stevie.”

“Dr. Weeks, my efforts to find out what’s going on between you and Stevie did not cause his problems.”

“I wasn’t implying anything of the kind,” said Dr. Weeks. “Why do you think you felt a need to defend yourself just now?”

“Dr. Weeks, I think you misunderstand our relationship. I’m here as Stevie’s parent. If I had brought him to a pediatrician with a bad cough, I’d have a right to expect the pediatrician to tell me what he thought might be causing the cough and what he intended to do about it, and he wouldn’t give me any crap about how I couldn’t possibly understand the ramifications of pulmonary function and, by the way, have I been short of breath myself lately? Stevie’s been with you for two months, and apparently all you’ve observed about him is that he’s morose and has imaginary friends, which is strikingly similar to what we already knew when we brought him here. I hope you’ll understand that I’m not trying to interfere with Stevie’s treatment. I simply have a responsibility to know what that treatment consists of and what it’s designed to accomplish.”

“Let me tell you why I’m reluctant to discuss this with you, Mr. Fletcher. Given the importance of parents in a child’s life, it is inevitable that Stevie’s parents are involved in the source of his problems. This idea is obviously threatening to you, and I fear that you may withdraw Stevie from treatment in order to protect your own ego. This might cause the boy great harm.”

Step recognized that she was attempting to manipulate him into backing off—any objection he raised to her diagnosis could be dismissed as ego protection. But he held his temper and said none of the vicious retorts that came to mind. “Dr. Weeks,” he said, “DeAnne and I knew from the start that solving Stevie’s problems would almost certainly mean us changing our lives somehow. We’re willing to do whatever it takes to help our son, and I’m not afraid to find out flaws in my own parenting. But I can promise you that if you don’t tell me what you’ve learned about his condition, then we certainly will withdraw Stevie from your care.”

She regarded him for a while, her expression aloof and uninvolved. She must have spent hours in front of mirrors during graduate school, Step thought, practicing that detached, I’mabove-emotional-engagement-with-mere-humans-and-their-petty-problems look.

“All right, Mr. Fletcher,” she said, “I will tell you what possibilities I am currently considering as diagnoses for your son’s condition. First, we may be seeing a simple factitious disorder. Second, we may—

“Factitious disorder?” asked Step.

“Factitious means the opposite of what it sounds like, Mr. Fletcher—”

“I’m aware of the meaning of factitious,” said Step. “It’s the meaning of the phrase factitious disorder that I’d like you to explain.”

“In layman’s terms, it means that Stevie might be lying about these imaginary friends because he knows it upsets you and he’s hungry for the attention that ensues.”

Step stifled his desire to say Stevie doesn’t lie, he has never lied, he tells the truth even when it causes him to be embarrassed, even when he’s sure that he’ll be punished for it. If Stevie says that he’s playing with imaginary friends, then that’s because he really thinks he’s playing with these friends, and it’s not some damned cockamamy factitious disorder. Instead, he merely said, “And your second hypothesis?”

“It is possible that this is a mere adjustment disorder with depressed mood and withdrawal.”

“And what would that mean?” asked Step.

“That he was seriously disturbed by your move to North Carolina. That he felt dislocated from his friends, from a familiar and safe setting, and instead found himself plunged against his will into a terrifying environment where he is incapable of making sense of what is going on and feels himself unable to protect himself from others. In that case, these imaginary friends would be a hallucinatory effort on the part of his unconscious to re-create the safe environment of the past, while his depression would be a sign that in fact the hallucinations are not successful in masking his unhappiness. He does not quite believe the falsely happy reality that his unconscious mind has created for him.”

Step kept himself from saying, That’s precisely what DeAnne and I thought before we ever brought him to you. “What do we do about it?” he asked.

“That was a hypothesis,” she answered, “not a diagnosis, and therefore we will do nothing about it.”

“But if it turned out to be the true diagnosis, what would be the right course of action?”

“We are getting into dangerous territory, here,” said Dr. Weeks. “Highly speculative.”

“I understand that, and I’m not proposing that you do anything improper. I just want to have some idea of what the treatment might consist of if this turns out to be the diagnosis.”

“Well,” she said, “we might begin by having you contact the parents of some of his former friends back in Indiana, to get them to write to him or telephone. However, that may not be effective because at his age children are not very adept at making meaningful emotional contact through indirect media like the telephone or letters.”

“And?” asked Step.

He meant for her to propose other possible treatments that might be used if Stevie’s condition really was adjustment disorder with depressed mood and withdrawal. But she took it as a request for the third hypothesis.

“The third possible diagnosis, and the one that I think is most likely, is also the one that will be most difficult for you to hear impartially, and therefore I ask you to keep an open mind as best you can.”

Step nodded, even though it was clear that she didn’t think him capable of it.

“I think we can best account for Stevie’s behavior if we view it, not as a new condition brought on by the move to North Carolina, but rather as an exacerbation of a preexisting condition of some severity, one which remained unobserved because it had gone on so long that you thought it a part of Stevie’s underlying character.”

“So why would we only have noticed it since-‘

“Please,” said Dr. Weeks. “An open mind. The stress of the move changed his pattern, you see, and it was the change you noticed, not the actual onset of his condition.”

“And the condition would be …”

“Atypical dissociative disorder,” she said. “This has been primarily documented in people who have undergone intense brainwashing experiences, but it is my belief that it shows up far more commonly and merely remains undiagnosed.”

Step was baffled. What experience could Stevie have undergone that would produce the same effects as brainwashing?

“Actually, most children in America are subjected to a particular form of indoctrination from their earliest years, in which they are repeatedly reinforced in their belief in a powerful figure who does not actually exist. However, evidence is given to them to support that belief, accompanied by stories to make the child believe that the whole world believes in this particular mythic figure.”

“You’re saying Stevie’s problems are because we taught him to believe in Santa Claus?” asked Step, incredulous.

“On the contrary. I think Santa Claus is, by and large, quite beneficial, for when the child is finally allowed—or forced—to recognize the nonexistence of Santa Claus, then the child is able to go through the vital intellectual process of reconstructing reality in light of new evidence, complete with back-forming new stories to account for past events. This prepares the child for many other disillusionments and gives her vital and well-supported experience in maintaining her grip on reality independent of the stories told to her at any given time.”

“So Santa Claus is good,” said Step.

“Santa Claus is usually not maladaptive,” said Dr. Weeks, “and can be turned to a good end. I doubt many parents actually have that outcome in mind when they tell their children the ludicrous chimney story.”

“No, I imagine not,” said Step.

“Santa Claus is certainly not at the root of Stevie’s problem. He has a healthy skepticism toward that story already.”

We paid you ninety bucks an hour to find out whether Stevie believed in Santa Claus?

“Stevie has been subjected to another nonconsonant belief system whose implications are far more all-pervasive in his interpretation of events in his life. He feels an enormous weight of pressure to demonstrate his loyalty to this belief system, and therefore has for a long time been forced to come up with supporting personal experiences to tell you and your wife about. However, Stevie also has been taught to have an absolute commitment to truth, and cannot do as many children do and simply lie, claiming to have experiences that they do not have. Nor, being a child of a rather placid temperament, has he been able to work himself up to a level of emotion in which hysterical phenomena appear, which is the most common means of satisfying these expectations.”

“You’re talking about religion, aren’t you?” asked Step.

“And the Mormon religion in particular, since yours is, as I understand, a somewhat, though not extremely, charismatic sect. As I have learned from Lee, there is considerable emotional display at your testimony meetings once each month, at which many people stand up and weep while they speak. This is clearly a hysterical phenomenon, and is not unhealthy—many churches throughout the South have long had a similar tradition and it has served them well as an emotional release. However, Stevie is one of those unfortunate enough not to be able to produce the appropriate hysteria, and he is also unwilling or unable to lie or pretend. Therefore, he produces hallucinations.”

“Dr. Weeks, the only hallucinations Stevie has had are his imaginary friends, dating from our arrival in Steuben.”

“On the contrary,” said Dr. Weeks. “Stevie has told me that he had several experiences in early childhood in which he sensed a very evil presence, threatening to destroy him. I immediately recognized this as the father-fear that is not unusual in boys of that age and which they usually outgrow. However, he says that he told you and your wife about these ‘frightenings’ and ‘bad feelings,’ as he called them, and you both informed him that these feelings were from the devil.”

“We said they might be,” said Step. He was trying to stay calm, but it made him feel invaded, to have her skeptical eye turned on those tender moments from Stevie’s childhood, when he and DeAnne had tried so carefully not to impose their own interpretation on Stevie’s dreams.

“To a child of his age at the time, of course, there was no meaningful distinction between ‘might be’ and ‘is.’ But I would not have expected you to know that, since you are also caught up in the same belief system. In any event, Stevie began to associate all spiritual phenomena, about which he heard much but of which he experienced nothing, with this oedipal anxiety from his earlier childhood—”

“When he felt afraid at night,” said Step, “I would lie by his bed for an hour or two hours, until he fell asleep, singing or humming to him. It wasn’t me he was afraid of.”

“Of course he did not know it was you he was afraid of. He had displaced the fear and shifted it to a nameless imaginary entity which you conveniently named for him. From that point forward, then, his response to the pressures of your culture was to hallucinate, and in every case you labeled these hallucinations as spiritual experiences. Thus he was able to be part of the culture. He was brainwashed.”

“I’m surprised that you allowed Lee to join our church if that’s what you think we’re about,” said Step.

“I’m a scientist, Mr. Fletcher, ” she said. “I mean no offense by this. I simply feel that we would be doing Stevie a disservice if we did not recognize that he has long had hallucinations unconnected with the move to North Carolina, and therefore treating only the symptoms that arose since your move here would leave his basic underlying condition unresolved.”

“If it turns out that this is the correct diagnosis,” said Step.

“As I said, I only lean toward this interpretation. But you must understand that when he told me about his baptism, and how during that experience he saw a bright light in the water, which entered him and drove all the darkness out of his body, well, that shows me that he is hallucinating more than just imaginary friends.”

Stevie had told no one about this experience, no one but Dr. Weeks, who thought of it as madness. “Do you know that it was a hallucination?” asked Step.

“You were there, Mr. Fletcher,” said Dr. Weeks. “Did you see that light?”

“No,” said Step.

“When one person in the midst of witnesses sees something that no one else sees, we are generally safe in identifying these experiences as hallucinations.”

“Or maybe he has clearer sight than the others,” said Step.

“Oh? You think there really was some underwater light source that no one else was able to see?”

“I think,” said Step, “that it’s possible for something to be both subjective and real at the same time. Just because only one person sees something doesn’t necessarily mean that what he sees isn’t there.”

“But by that standard, Mr. Fletcher, I fail to understand why you have even brought Stevie to me. After all, what worried you and Mrs. Fletcher was the fact that Stevie was seeing imaginary friends that no one else could see.”

Step had never thought of the imaginary friends this way. It made him angry, her linking spiritual experiences with Stevie’s delusions. But she had linked them, and if she was right, if they really were alike, then all of Stevie’s extraordinary sensitivity to other people, his ability to perceive good and evil, his aliveness to the spiritual side of life—all of that was also imaginary, hallucinatory.

On the other hand, it might also mean the opposite. That just as Stevie’s sensitivity to spiritual things was real, so also his ability to see imaginary friends was real. In which case Dr. Weeks was right, and they had made a colossal mistake bringing him to her. Just as he had been telling them the truth with his absurd-seeming story about Mrs. Jones’s mistreatment of him, so also he was telling them the truth about these imaginary friends.

Which meant there really were invisible boys playing in their yard whenever Stevie went outside.

No, thought Step. No. The reason this is not true is because Dr. Weeks is wrong from the start. His imaginary friends are not the same thing as his spiritual sensitivity. The other thing she said—adjustment disorder with depressed mood and withdrawal—that was enough to account for all his symptoms, or at least all of them that Step and DeAnne thought were symptoms. Dr. Weeks simply hated religion, and so she was going to read psychological disorders into the cosmology of Mormonism.

Of course, if she hated religion, why was she driving Lee Weeks to church every week?

“Is there any other possible diagnosis?” asked Step.

She spoke briefly about residual-type schizophrenic disorder, but it was clear she didn’t think much of the possibility. “But I can see that you would prefer almost any diagnosis to the one that casts doubt on your cherished belief system.”

“I prefer whatever is best for Stevie,” said Step. “I’m perfectly able to see how our religious beliefs appear to those who don’t believe in them.”

“Do you intend to let Stevie continue receiving treatment?”

“I don’t make such decisions alone,” said Step. “I’ll have to confer with my wife.”

“Bring her in,” said Dr. Weeks. “I think it really is time for you to join in the treatment process. I think that if the constant insistence that Stevie demonstrate loyalty to your belief system were toned down—note that I do not say they should be stopped—he might be able to relax back into more normal strategies for dealing with these parental and societal expectations. We may be able to extinguish the hallucinations in a year or two, provided that the entire family cooperates.”

“Thank you for your willingness to tell me all of this, Dr. Weeks,” said Step. “I can see that you’ve been doing your best to understand our son’s situation.”

“Then there is hope that I can continue working with this very sweet boy?”

“I don’t know what will happen,” said Step. “As I told you from the first, money is a serious concern for us right now. But if we discontinue Stevie’s treatments, it won’t be because we think you’ve been doing less than your best with him as a doctor.”

Dr. Weeks nodded graciously. She was too professional to allow herself a smile—but Step was reasonably sure that he had left her feeling good about him and about Stevie, and good enough about the Church that she would not stop bringing Lee. Why she was bringing Lee to church, given the attitudes she had toward religion, was difficult for Step to understand. But she was doing it, and he didn’t want it to be his fault if she stopped.

At the receptionist’s desk he even confirmed next week’s appointment with Stevie. Then he walked out of the office, switched off the tape recorder, and headed home. DeAnne would listen to the tape with him tonight, and he seriously doubted that Stevie would ever go back to Dr. Weeks again.

DeAnne had a frustrating morning with the baby. He simply couldn’t be roused enough to eat anything at all. A nurse helped her pump her breasts, something that she had never done with the other three kids, and stored the milk in the freezer to feed to little Jeremy later, but it did nothing to calm DeAnne’s anxiety.

When she expressed her worries about the baby’s excessive sleepiness to the neonate, he simply nodded patiently and then said, “Of course you know that you can hardly expect a baby who’s taking seizure-control medication to be as responsive as your other children were. And until we know what is causing the seizure activity, we would be irresponsible to remove the medication. Seizures can lead to serious brain damage or even death.”

“Can’t too much phenobarbital cause problems, too?”

“It could if he were getting too much,” said Dr. Torwaldson. “But he’s not.” And that was that.

But DeAnne couldn’t get her worries out of her mind, and so when Dr. Greenwald, the pediatrician, came by, she explained it all over again. “He’s losing weight, isn’t he? More than the normal amount. Isn’t that one of the things we’re worried about? And if the pheno is making him so sleepy he won’t eat … ”

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” said Dr. Greenwald. “Let’s just happen on down to the ICU and let me take a look at the dosage. It never hurts to double-check.”

So DeAnne and Vette followed him to the ICU, where he stopped and looked at several of the babies before finally getting to Jeremy. “Hey Zap,” he said. He reached his hand into the built-in gloves in the side of the incubator and began probing a bit, touching the baby here and there, lifting his arms and legs, lifting an eyelid.

“Some of these babies here just break my heart,” said Vette. “So tiny or so—wounded.”

“Ah,” said Dr. Greenwald. “But they don’t break my heart, because on this particular day all my babies in here are doing quite well. I think we’re going to keep them all. Especially Zap here. He looks downright husky.”

DeAnne noticed with resignation that everyone was picking up the name Zap, despite her resolute use of Jeremy. But as long as he was telling her that her baby was doing well, DeAnne really didn’t care all that much what Dr. Greenwald called him.

“He’s pretty nonresponsive, isn’t he?” said Dr. Greenwald.

“Like a rag doll,” said DeAnne.

Dr. Greenwald looked at the chart. “Hmm,” he said. “Quite a dose of pheno, too.”

“Is it too much, do you think?”

“No,” said Dr. Greenwald. “It’s a normal dose.”

“Oh,” said DeAnne. “I just thought—it can’t be right that he’s so sleepy that he doesn’t eat.”

“No, it isn’t right. In fact, I’d say he’s got way to much pheno in his system right now.”

“So it isn’t a normal dose?”

“Phenobarbital’s a funny kind of drug. Everybody’s body uses it differently. I’d say that it looks like your little boy’s system just isn’t flushing that drug out of his body as fast as most people do, and so it’s getting built up inside him. Normal dose going in, but then it’s building up, you see.”

“Can you do anything?”

“Well, it isn’t very hard. We just cut way back on the dosage until we find it maintaining at the right level in his blood. It means a few more blood tests.”

“Do they have to keep taking the blood out of his head like that?”

“Oh, don’t you like his haircut? Kind of punkish, I’d say. You see, this is a newborn baby. It isn’t like his veins are particularly big or easy to find. Heck, we’ve got needles bigger around than his finger.”

“That’s all right, I know it can’t be helped, it just looks so awful. Dr. Greenwald, would you mind telling me what his current dosage is?”

“Would the numbers mean anything to you?” asked Dr. Greenwald.

“No,” said DeAnne. “But if the number’s not lower tomorrow, that will mean something to me.”

He grinned. “You’re pretty stubborn, aren’t you?”

She didn’t smile back. “This is my baby,” she said.

“Dr. Greenwald,” said Vette. She was over at one of the other incubators. “Is it right for this one to have liquid dripping from this needle?”

Greenwald immediately went to the incubator where Vette was standing. “Not one of my babies, but I’ll say that it doesn’t look right. Hasn’t been going on long, though, the sheet’s not even marked yet. Dana!” he called.

One of the nurses immediately came toward him.

“Have a look at this while I call Dr. Yont.”

The nurse named Dana came and immediately shook her head. “Have you been a bad girl again, Marisha? Pulling out your needles. We’re going to have to staple this next one on.” She looked up at Vette. “Thank you for noticing this. We check every baby every five minutes, besides constantly checking the monitors, but every moment counts. This one is so small we have a very hard time finding a vein, don’t we Marisha? And when she makes some sudden movement, out it comes.”

“She’s so tiny,” said Vette.

“Yes,” said Dana. “We’re probably going to lose her. She’s not getting any better, and sometimes she’s a bit worse.”

“Her poor parents,” said DeAnne, thinking of the anguish she’d feel if someone had just said that about Jeremy.

“I don’t know,” said Dana. “If Marisha lives, she’ll be severely brain damaged. Not much of a life. Sometimes God is merciful and lets them come home without going through this vale of tears.”

It was at that moment that Step came into the ICU. “Oh, good,” he said. “I hoped you’d still be here.”

“Is Mary Anne still with the children?” DeAnne asked.

“When I got home, her husband was there and he offered to come up and help me give Zap a blessing.”

She saw now that Harv Lowe was walking with awe among the incubators. “These must be some tough kids,” said Harv, “if they had to stick ‘em with all these needles just to keep ‘em quiet.”

Dana laughed. “Oh, they’re the toughest.”

Step asked the nurse, “Do we have to use these gloves with Zap? He’s not got a contagious disease or anything, and he’s a full-weight baby. We don’t absolutely have to touch him with our hands, but it would be better.”

“You’ll have to clear this with Dr. Torwaldson if you’re going to break open the box,” said Dana.

At that moment Dr. Greenwald came back with, apparently, Dr. Yont, who immediately started giving orders and working on the baby whose needle had come loose. It seemed that more than a loose needle was going wrong, and all the medical people were quite intense about what they were doing. DeAnne was content to wait. There was no emergency for Jeremy, and that was good.

A few moments later, Dr. Torwaldson came in, and at that point Dr. Greenwald withdrew and came over to the Fletchers. “Not my baby,” he said, “and I’m not a neonate, so I’m one pair of hands too many, now that Tor’s here.”

“Is she going to be all right?” asked Vette. “The little one?”

“Doesn’t look like it to me,” said Dr. Greenwald. “But sometimes they surprise you. Sometimes they really want to live.”

“Do you think they really have desires? When they’re so small?”

“It all depends,” said Dr. Greenwald, “on whether you think of them as having a soul or not. I happen to think they do, and so I think that yes, that soul can have desires even if the body isn’t yet ready to put them into words. I’ve seen babies hold on to life with all their might, and I’ve seen others just give up and slip away. They don’t talk about it, but that’s how it feels to me.”

“And is that what Jeremy is doing? Slipping away?”

“Why don’t we wait to answer that,” said Dr. Greenwald, “until we see what he’s like when he’s conscious?”

“Dr. Greenwald,” said Step. “I think you’ll understand—we want to give a blessing to my son, and we’d like to be able to lay our hands directly on him. We also anoint him with a single drop of pure olive oil, on the brow or the crown of his head. Would that be all right?”

Greenwald glanced over at Torwaldson. “Oh, I can’t see why not. Zap is really a husky little kid. Compared to these others, he’s a regular Larry Holmes.”

Dr. Greenwald opened the incubator, and Harv took the oil, anointed Jeremy’s forehead with a drop of it, and then said the short prayer that went with it. DeAnne noticed that Dr. Greenwald watched, bowing his head respectfully. Then both Step and Harv touched the baby gently, and Step sealed the anointing, which was the longer prayer, the one that changed according to the needs of the person receiving the blessing, and according to what Step felt impressed to say.

Only a couple of months ago, thought DeAnne, Step was confirming Stevie, and now he’s giving his newest son a different kind of blessing. It felt good to know that her husband was able to do this, was able to call on the powers of heaven on her children’s behalf. I can give him milk from my body I nurtured him inside me for nine months, and Step couldn’t really share in any of that. But he can give this to our baby.

The blessing felt powerful to DeAnne as it was going on, and yet when it was done she realized that Step had said nothing about healing. He only blessed Jeremy that the doctors would recognize their own limitations and make no mistakes with him, and that he would soon be home with his mother and father and sister and brothers.

Dr. Greenwald shook Step’s hand after he had sealed up the incubator. “Are you a minister?” he asked.

“No,” said Step. “I’m a computer programmer. Harv’s an accountant.”

“Well,” said Greenwald. “It still felt good, to see a father do that with his own child. Never seen that before.”

From the other incubator, where the other doctors were gathered, they heard a voice, a soft one, but clear. “She’s gone.” And a moment later, the doctors started moving away. DeAnne heard Dr. Yont murmur, “I’ll call the parents.”

DeAnne put her arm around her mother, who seemed quite shaken by this. She noticed, too, that Dr. Greenwald took out a handkerchief and wiped his glasses, after which he also brushed at his eyes with the cloth. “I never get used to it,” he said. “Even when they’re not one of mine. Don’t like to lose ‘em.” Then he visibly straightened himself. “Why don’t we step on out of the ICU. We don’t need to be part of what’s going on in there now.”

As he ushered them into the corridor, Dr. Greenwald reassured them. “Your little boy doesn’t seem to be in any danger right now, and as for that lethargy, well, I’ll have a talk with Tor this afternoon. You’ll see some improvement, I promise, once we get the dosage right for his system. Nice to meet you, Mr. Fletcher. Mrs. … ”

“Brown,” said Vette.

“Nice to meet you,” said Harv, shaking his hand. And Greenwald was gone.

“I feel good about Zap being in his care,” said Step. “It has to help, that he really loves these babies. And that he … you know. That he takes us seriously.”

“Thanks for coming,” DeAnne said to Harv.

“I have an idea,” said Vette. Her tone was suddenly bright, leaving behind the somberness of the ICU. It was a gift she had, to know the right moment to turn the mood of a group of people, to get them moving again. “I’ll have Harv drive me back to the house and you two ride home together in the other car.”

“Fine,” said Harv.

“Thanks,” said Step. “I need to talk to DeAnne anyway.”

“One condition,” said Vette. “I get the Renault. Air conditioning, you know.”

“We’ll open the windows on the Datsun,” said Step. “We’ll still be just as hot, but our sweat will help water the lawns on either side of the road.”

Once they were alone in the Datsun, DeAnne asked first about the blessing. “Couldn’t you have blessed him to be healed?”

“You think I didn’t want to?” asked Step. “You think that wasn’t what I planned to do?”

“You were so fatalistic about him the other day,” said DeAnne. “Yesterday I mean. Was that only yesterday? I thought maybe you’d given up on him.”

“I tried to talk about Zap getting better and having a perfectly normal healthy body and I just couldn’t say it. Maybe it’s a lack of faith on my part, or maybe I was being told not to bless him that way. Either way, what could I do? I said what I was able to say.” Then he gave one short, derisive laugh. “My atypical dissociative disorder apparently isn’t as efficient at providing me with appropriate hallucinations as Stevie’s is.”

“So,” said DeAnne. “How did it go with Dr. Weeks?”

“First tell me how you are,” said Step. “Pain still bad?”

“I had a little bleeding, too. I need to lie down more.”

“So now I’ve got you in this rattly car, vibrating you six ways from Tuesday.”

“It’s all the going back and forth to the hospital.”

“So you’re saying you should have stayed.”

“I’m not dying, Step, I just hurt and I bleed a little. Tell me about Dr. Weeks, Step. Did you quarrel?”

“Just listen to the tape,” said Step. He pulled the microcassette recorder out of his pocket and pressed the play button.

For the first while, listening to the conversation in Dr. Weeks’s office, DeAnne wanted to shout at him to stop it, he was doing it all wrong, he was deliberately provoking the doctor. But then she realized that for Step, he was actually being quite controlled. And Dr. Weeks really was resisting talking to him. So the fact that he got her to tell her speculative diagnoses was probably quite an accomplishment, as was the way he sat still and listened, so that Dr. Weeks finally did explain adjustment disorder. It sounded exactly like what was going on with Stevie.

“I can do that,” said DeAnne. “Write to friends in Indiana. The school can give me the addresses of the parents, or forward my letters to them, anyway”

Step pressed stop. “That’s not the diagnosis she believes in,” he said. “And that’s not the condition she intends to treat.” Then he pressed play again.

She listened to the rest of the tape without comment, until it was over. “Well, Step,” she said, “I can hardly believe you didn’t say anything snotty to her at all as you left.”

“I didn’t want to sour anything, in case you wanted to continue the treatment.”

DeAnne was startled. “You mean you think we should?”

“I didn’t know what you’d think,” said Step.

“Yes you did,” said DeAnne. “You knew perfectly well what I’d think. Here she is declaring that anybody who believes in a religion is marginally or totally insane—I mean, that’s most of human society through most of history”

“Yes,” said Step. “But maybe true sanity didn’t exist until people like her emerged.”

“From under a rock, you mean,” said DeAnne. “We know a lot of Mormons, Step. But not many hysterical ones, and not many crazy ones, either.”

“Well, there’s Sister LeSueur.”

“She’s conniving, not crazy,” said DeAnne. “The only really crazy Mormon I’ve known recently is Dr. Weeks’s own son, and she can’t blame that on us.”

“Give her time,” said Step.

“It makes me so mad that she would dismiss what we believe as if it wasn’t even worthy of consideration.”

“Well, she believes in a competing religion,” said Step. “If ours is true, then hers is kind of silly.”

“Well, ours is true, you know,” she said.

“And hers is kind of silly.”

“As you said all along.”

Step shrugged. “This isn’t about I-told-you-so. It’s about Stevie. We can try another psychiatrist later. But I don’t think he should continue going to a psychiatrist who firmly believes that the only way to help Stevie is to cure us of our religious delusions. Even if she could succeed, it certainly wouldn’t help Stevie, since that’s not his problem.”

“I agree,” said DeAnne.

“So Dr. Weeks is toast, right?”

“Right.”

“Only for Lee’s sake we tell her that we’re going to hold off on continuing treatment for a few months, while we watch Stevie to see if he improves by himself.”

“Excellent,” said DeAnne.

The radio wasn’t on very loud, but it happened to start playing “Every Breath You Take” during a momentary pause, and they both noticed it. “They’re playing our song,” said DeAnne.

“Weird stuff is happening to us all the time,” said Step. “Makes me feel special.”

“Jeremy’s problems sure put things in perspective, though, don’t they?” said DeAnne. “I mean, it’s hard to get excited about Sister LeSueur’s silliness when you’ve seen your baby in a glass box like that. And that anonymous record—”

“Still bothers me,” said Step.

“Me too,” said DeAnne. Then she reached out and put her hand on Step’s leg, feeling the muscles flex and move as he moved his foot from the brake to the accelerator. “Step,” she said, “thanks for seeing Dr. Weeks. I don’t know if I would have been able to get her to come forward with her diagnoses. It was obvious she was trying to keep us from finding out what exactly it was that she was doing to Stevie. If you hadn’t kept pushing, we wouldn’t have known.”

“I only did it because I knew you were with me on it.”

She squeezed his leg. “I love you, Step.”

“I love you too,” he said. “I’d love you even more if you’d remember that I’m very ticklish on my leg and when you squeeze just above the knee like that I’m likely to have a fit and lose control of the car.”

She squeezed his leg again, repeatedly, but even though he was very ticklish there, he had learned how to relax his stomach muscles and resist laughing—a technique that had allowed him to survive childhood with an older brother who was a merciless tickler. “You’re no fun,” she said.

“Try it again when you’re in shape to do some serious tickling.”

“I hope it’s soon,” she said.

“So do I.”

When they got home, they found Stevie in the family room sitting on the couch, and told him the news right away: He wouldn’t be going back to Dr. Weeks.

“Oh, OK,” he said. “She was kind of stupid anyway.”

“Oh?” asked DeAnne.

“She said that Jesus was just like Santa Claus,” said Stevie. “Only everybody knows that Santa Claus is just a story.”

“Well,” said Step, “she believes that Jesus is just a story, too.”

“That’s only because she doesn’t listen when he talks to her,” said Stevie.

“I guess not,” said Step. He glanced at DeAnne, caught her eye. “Clearly dissociative,” he said, grinning.

She shook her head at him. He shouldn’t try to joke like that around Stevie—he was likely to catch the drift of what he was saying.

“Does this mean I can still play with my friends?” asked Stevie.

DeAnne sighed. It was one thing to realize that Dr. Weeks was simply playing out her own prejudices, and quite another to suppose, just because Weeks was no help, that Stevie didn’t still need help.

“I’d rather you played with your brother and sister,” said DeAnne.

“But when I’m not playing with them, I can play with Jack and Scotty and those guys? Cause we got a new kid.”

DeAnne wordlessly got to her feet and left the room. Stevie watched her go in silence.

“Do what you need to,” said Step. “Do what you think is right.” Then he, too, left, following DeAnne into the bedroom, where she clung to him in silence for a long while.

They brought Zap home from the hospital after two weeks in intensive care, with a bill for more than eighteen thousand dollars and no diagnosis. It had finally come down to a day when Step and DeAnne were standing there listening to a doctor who had come in from Chapel Hill. He was describing several procedures and drugs they could try “in case” Zap’s condition was caused by this or that, until Step said, “I don’t think I want my son being treated for an undiagnosed condition.” The Chapel Hill specialist looked at him in surprise; his whole demeanor changed; he was more respectful, almost apologetic for his early tone. “Oh, I didn’t realize you were a doctor,” he said. There was not a trace of irony in his tone, and so Step realized that this specialist really was proposing things that he might not have so confidently proposed if he had thought Step and DeAnne actually knew anything. That was enough for them.

The hospital was very good about things. They accepted two thousand dollars and a promise to pay at least half the balance as soon as Step got his option money from Agamemnon—or else the completion money for the 64 version of Hacker Snack, whichever came first.

Then they brought Zap home and began the slow process of discovering just exactly how much was wrong with him, and how little they could do about it.

The only really good thing that had come out of Zap’s long hospital stay was that they realized how much they could depend on people in the 1st Ward who they had thought were merely acquaintances, and now discovered were true friends. Vette remarked on it, too. You have a good ward, she said. They really care about you.

If only there were something about Stevie’s condition that could evoke the same community response that Zap’s had brought forth, thought DeAnne. If only they could rally around Stevie, and fast and pray for him. Maybe they should tell people about what Stevie was going through, and give them a chance to help him. But no. There was too great a chance that in the case of a mental illness and not a physical one they’d shy away, they’d shun the boy and make his isolation even worse, his descent into madness steeper and faster than ever.

And could we really blame them? thought DeAnne. If I were a mother of a normal child and I heard that a little boy of his age was seeing hallucinations of imaginary friends, would I really be willing to let them play together? Would I feel so much compassion for someone else’s child that I would put my own child at risk of being hurt in some outburst of madness? No, the hurts of the mind were too strange, too invisible, too magical to hope for the same kind of tolerance and help from even the best of people.

It frightens me, thought DeAnne. Why should I expect others to be better than I am?

So Stevie’s problem remained a matter for their family alone. Until a newspaper article forced them to see things another way.

12: Friends

This is the headline on the front page of the Steuben Times-Journal on the morning of Sunday, 21 August 1983: SERIAL KILLER IN STEUBEN? The headline brought fear to the hearts of parents all over the city, for this was not a tabloid, and the story was not irresponsible shock journalism. The chief of police had formed a task force that included the county sheriff’s office and had close liaison with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. They were also bringing in outside experts on serial killers, especially those who specialized in the kidnapping and murder of young boys.

For several months, the police had been deeply concerned about the number of unexplained disappearances of young boys in the Steuben area, cases in which no body was ever found and no motive could be guessed at for the child to have run away, even after the most heartless questioning of the distraught parents. And there was also a rhythm to the disappearances. Not a definite pattern, not a disappearance on a certain day of each month or anything showy like that. Just a space of a couple of months or maybe three between disappearances.

And for the first time anywhere, the names of all the boys believed to be possible victims of the supposed serial killer were listed together. Their pictures appeared above the fold on the front page. There were seven of them; all of them had disappeared since May of 1982; and the disappearances were becoming steadily more frequent, with less and less time between them.

This was the lead article; in fact, there were no other articles on the front page except a sidebar on the head of the investigation in Steuben, a detective named Doug Douglas, who had been a rather colorful figure during the civil rights disturbances of the sixties, when he vowed that anyone violating city ordinances would be arrested and taken to the Steuben city jail, but that by God everyone who went into that jail would come out in exactly the same condition they were in when they entered it. Some in those days said that this would let the niggers think they had free reign to do what they wanted in Steuben, but in fact the most important result was that the racial disturbances ended very quickly and were replaced by talk and compromise. Douglas had been chief of police then, the youngest one in Steuben’s history. Years later, the mayor who was elected in the Reagan sweep of 1980 demoted him to chief of detectives, and some said it was a long-awaited payback for Douglas’s racial evenhandedness in the sixties. But instead of resigning or even complaining, Douglas just kept right on doing his job. The story was designed to reassure the city that one of Steuben’s finest was on the case. It was also designed to reassure the black community that even though all the victims were white boys, the investigation would not take on racial overtones, and blacks would not be singled out for harassment.

But the Fletchers didn’t see this article on Sunday morning, because they didn’t have time even to glance at the paper in the hurry of getting ready for church. This was the last Sunday before school started, and yesterday they had been so busy buying school clothes for Stevie and Robbie, who was starting kindergarten this year, that neither Step nor DeAnne had remembered to do a laundry and therefore the morning was spent fishing wearable clothing out of the laundry baskets and pressing them so they’d look presentable at church.

The boys were dressed; DeAnne was taking snarls out of Betsy’s hair; and Step had the assignment of changing Zap’s diaper and getting him dressed for church.

About the only time Zap was any trouble was when he was being changed. He slept a lot, and even when he was awake, he didn’t interfere with the process of dressing or feeding. Step almost wished he would, to show some vigor, some real awareness of the world. He rarely even cried. And as for moving his body, well, he seemed to have no muscle tone, no firmness to him. Now and then he’d move in a jerky kind of way, but most of the time his arms and legs were fairly loose and springy. As if he didn’t much care where his limbs went. Zap’s legs, though, always seemed to move back into a froglike position, the knees widespread, the feet tucked up right under his buttocks. This meant that when his diaper was getting changed, his heels kept springing right into the midst of whatever was in his diaper. It made changing him a real challenge. Step would stretch Zap’s legs out long and straight, and massage his thighs and calves, saying, “That’s my long boy, see how tall you are when I stretch you out? Stretch out those legs, long boy.” But it did little good. When the diaper came off, the heels moved right back up into place, and it seemed as though it took three hands to change him. Three hands or an extra couple of baby wipes to clean his feet.

Still, Step was becoming rather adroit at the challenges of diapering a baby who thought he was a frog, and he soon emerged from the bedroom with Zap lying prone on his forearm, his head cradled in Step’s hand, his little legs dangling—froglike—as they straddled Step’s biceps. It was Step’s favorite way to carry the babies when they were very small. DeAnne had been horrified at first, since it looked like a football carry, but they both soon realized that when Step held a fussy baby in that position, the fussiness usually subsided, at least for a while.

Step could hear, from the screeching in the kitchen, that Betsy was still getting her hair combed. So he stood wordlessly in the door of the family room, watching Robbie crash his Matchbox cars together and Stevie play a computer game.

Not that it looked as though Stevie was actually playing anything. From where he was, Step couldn’t see the screen, but he could see Stevie’s hands on the controller, and he just wasn’t moving it. Oh, now and then a sort of lean to the left or to the right, but most of the time he was just watching the screen, his face transfixed. “Do it, Sandy” he whispered. “Come on, now, now, now. That’s it!” And then, “No, Van, no, not like that, he’s going to get you, do you want him to get you? You’re too quick for him, if you just run.” As usual, Stevie was naming the characters in the computer game after his imaginary friends. But what kind of game was this, where apparently something engrossing was happening on the screen and yet the player of the game had hardly anything to do? It couldn’t be much fun, for the player to have so little control that he hardly had to move the joystick from minute to minute. Yet Stevie was completely involved in it. Step had to see the screen.

He stepped into the room, walking behind Stevie and looking at the screen. It was that pirate ship game again, thought Step. I never did find that disk.

“Hey, Daddy, watch me crash these guys together!” said Bobbie.

Step glanced down at Robbie and watched the two cars crash, as Robbie made an elaborate show of making the cars fly through the air and bash into the bookshelves and then rebound off of everything else in sight. “Enough, enough,” said Step, “you make me want to never get in a car again!” Robbie laughed uproariously.

Step looked back at the computer screen, but it was blank. Stevie had switched off the game and was standing up from the chair. “Why’d you turn it off?” Step asked.

“Time for church, isn’t it?”

“Yes it is!” called DeAnne from the other room. “It would be nice if we could arrive on time for once, instead of parading up the aisle like beauty contestants during the opening hymn.”

Step helped the kids pile out to the car and strapped Zap into the carseat in front while DeAnne got Robbie and Betsy to share the middle seatbelt in back so that she and Stevie could cram themselves in and use the seatbelts by the doors. “No doubt about it,” said DeAnne. “We ought to start taking both cars to church.”

“This still works,” said Step.

“Only because you don’t have to sit in back,” said DeAnne.

Step immediately got out of the car and walked around to her door and opened it.

“Oh, Step, don’t make a scene just because I—”

“I’m not making a scene—you are, my love. What I’m doing is playing Sir Walter Raleigh and letting you tread upon my cape. Please, let me sit back here with the kidlets and you drive. Maybe it’ll convert me to the idea of taking two cars to church.”

“Step, I really don’t feel up to driving yet,” she said. “It hasn’t even been a month.”

“I thought you were better.”

“Mostly,” she said. “Drive. I shouldn’t have complained, and now we’re going to be late.”

“Sorry,” said Step. “I was just trying to be nice.”

They weren’t late, though, and they got a good bench on the side. Step was singing a solo with the choir, and Robbie had a talk in Primary, and so it was a busy Sunday for them. When they got home, the kids were starving and Step fixed dinner while DeAnne nursed the baby, which was a grueling experience for her, since Zap had a way of clamping his jaws down hard every now and then, nearly pinching her nipple off, or at least that’s what she said it felt like.

“I think you ought to switch to formula,” said Step. “The next kid’s going to resent it if Zap succeeds in biting the nozzle off the firehose.”

“I’m giving him formula sometimes, but this really is better for him, and he likes it better,” said DeAnne. “I’ll toughen up.”

“Mm,” said Step. “Calluses and scar tissue—very sexy.”

“If he’s still doing this when he gets teeth, Step, that’s weaning day—cold turkey, I’ll tell you.”

If he’s still doing it. If he learns. If he changes. If he starts sleeping on some reasonable schedule, instead of sleeping eighteen hours and then staying up twenty-four. If somebody figures out what all those scans and probes and measurements from the hospital mean. If somebody will just put a name on whatever it is that’s wrong with Zap so we can start dealing with it—or not dealing with it. Whatever turns out to be appropriate.

The kids came in and ate the tuna patties that Step had made—a Depression-era recipe that his mother had raised him on. The kids seemed to like it well enough, provided that Robbie was allowed to pour six ounces of ketchup on his.

Then, finally, the kids went down for naps—or for lying in bed reading or staring at the ceiling, in Stevie’s case—and DeAnne finally went out front and brought in the paper while Step sat down and idly looked among the disks lying loosely around by the Atari, trying to find something that might possibly be that pirate game. He got sidetracked, though, by the Lode Runner disk, which he booted up and began to play. It was a nifty little character-based game in which the eight-pixel player-figure has to run around collecting all the treasures on the screen while bad guys try to chase him. The way the treasures were arranged in the changing landscape made each level a new puzzle, and Step soon found himself addicted. This is a great game, even though it’s so deceptively simple. No gimmicks like the ones I’m using in Hacker Snack. Just a fundamentally sound design that allows itself to unfold in new ways, over and over and over again. I need to learn from this.

He became aware that DeAnne was standing behind him. “Step,” she said. “You need to come in and look at this story in the paper.”

“In a minute,” he said.

“Can’t you pause the game or something?” she asked.

“If it’s that urgent,” said Step. He reached for the space bar to pause the game, but it took too long, and his player-figure died.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said DeAnne. “Did I make you lose?”

“I’ve still got eight lives left,” said Step. “A real Christian game. Lots of chances for resurrection. But I’m bucking for the rapture at the end.”

She didn’t laugh, not even her courtesy laugh, the one that said I don’t know why you thought that was funny but I love you. He followed her into the kitchen and sat down at the table. The headline at once caught his eye, and he read the whole story quickly, but not missing anything. He hadn’t pored over a hundred thousand pages of Spanish-language newspapers while researching his dissertation without learning how to distill the essence from a newspaper story in a very short time.

“This is scary stuff,” said Step. “I know you’re already careful with the kids, and so am I, but I really think we shouldn’t even let them in the back yard without being out there with them the whole time.”

“Absolutely,” said DeAnne. “But Step, didn’t you notice?”

“Notice what?” he asked.

“You’re going to think I’m crazy.”

“Probably,” he said. But his joking tone didn’t fit now; he realized that DeAnne had sounded genuinely scared. She really thought that whatever she was about to point out to him would make him think she was crazy. “Show me,” he said.

“I was hoping you’d just see it yourself. Look at the pictures of the lost boys, Step. Look at their names.”

He did. “Do we know any of their families or something?” That was absurd—if anyone they knew had had a child disappear, they’d have known about it before now.

DeAnne laid a list of names on the table. It was written in her handwriting. Step compared them to the names under the pictures, since that seemed to be what she intended. Most of the names under the pictures were listed on the paper, or at least were similar. Scott Wilson matched the name “Scotty” on the list. “David” matched David Purdom. “Roddy” would be Rodd Harker. “Jack” could be a nickname for Jonathan Lee.

“Does the story say anywhere that this Jonathan Lee is nicknamed Jack?” asked Step.

“No,” said DeAnne. “I hope he isn’t.”

“Well, then, what were you writing this list for?”

“Step, I didn’t write this list today. I wrote this list back in June.”

Step waited for the other shoe to drop. Then he made the connection. “That’s a list of Stevie’s imaginary friends. I remember Jack and Scotty”

“It’s more than that now,” she said. “I’ve heard other names since then. I know I’ve heard him talking about a Van and a Peter, and look.”

Step looked, and two of the boys were Van Rosewood and Peter Kemeny. “Good heavens,” he murmured. “This is really weird.”

“Is that all you can say?” she said. “That it’s weird?”

“It scares the shit out of me,” said Step. “But usually you prefer me not to talk like that. What does this serial killer thing have to do with our son?”

“I don’t know,” said DeAnne. “Nothing. It couldn’t.”

“Maybe Stevie’s been reading the names or something.”

“But three of the boys disappeared before we moved here. We never would have seen articles about them. his article here is the first one ever to list all these names together. Think about it, Step. Stevie came up with almost the same list as these detectives did, and there’s no way he could have done it. No way that makes any sense.”

Step’s hands were trembling as if it were cold. He was cold. “It’s not just almost the same list,” he said. “If Jonathan really is Jack, then this last one, Alexander Booth … ”

“He’s never talked about an Al or an Alex,” said DeAnne.

“But I watched him playing a computer game this morning and I heard him saying, like, Come on, Sandy. Sandy’s a nickname for Alexander, too.”

DeAnne pressed her face into her hands. “This article already scared me, Step. But then when I saw this—what can we do?”

“I don’t know,” said Step. “I don’t even know what it means.”

“Remember that record we got in the mail? The anonymous one?” asked DeAnne. “The song about I’ll be watching you?”

He hadn’t thought about it in a long time. It was still on the radio a lot, but all the things that had happened since the record came had put that old scare far into the background. Now, though, it took on truly sinister overtones. “Do you really think … ”

“What if this … serial killer … ”

“Watching us,” said Step.

For a moment DeAnne seemed to go out of control, uttering some high whimpering cries while she hid her face in her hands. Step wasn’t sure how to deal with this, or what was happening to her; he put his hand on her back, as if to steady her, as if she were tipping and he was going to put her back upright. “Oh, Step,” she whispered. “Oh, Step, I’m so scared. Who could it be? What if the serial killer has … talked to Stevie?”

“Impossible,” said Step. “You read the article. They say that this serial killer is extremely dangerous because he isn’t leaving any evidence anywhere. They aren’t even sure there’s a serial killer anyway. Because they haven’t found a single body. That’s how these boys got on the list—their bodies haven’t been found.”

“But maybe he … No, Stevie would have told us.”

“We could ask him. If anybody has ever talked to him.”

“No,” said DeAnne. “He’s going to school tomorrow. There’s going to be talk about this serial killer everywhere. They’re going to be warning all the children about talking to strangers. He’ll connect that with us asking him if somebody already talked to him. He’s got trouble enough already without his own parents connecting him so personally to this.”

“But he’s already connected,” said Step.

“Might be connected. This might just be a coincidence.”

“Van and Sandy aren’t such common names,” said Step.

“Well, Sandy isn’t Alexander and Jack isn’t Jonathan.”

“So what else do we do? Call the police? Oh, yes, Officer, we have a real lead for you in this serial killer thing. Our son, you see, has been hallucinating these imaginary friends, and they happen to have the same names as those lost boys. What? Oh, don’t you have time to talk to us?”

“You’re right,” said DeAnne. “They’d think we were crazy.” She fretted with the list, something she did when she was nervous, folding and tearing at paper until it was reduced to confetti. Step reached out his hand and put it over hers.

“Don’t tear up that list,” he said. “You wrote that before this article came out.”

“Yes, but I don’t have any witnesses of that.”

“You sent a copy of it to Dr. Weeks, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, that would prove that we had at least some of the names before. And we did get that record.”

“I think you’re saying that we should call the police.”

“We should call somebody,” said DeAnne. “We should do something. You don’t find out that there’s some weird kind of link between your son and a serial killer and then just fold your hands and say, How interesting.”

Step looked again at the newspaper. “So, how accessible do you think this Doug Douglas is?”

They soon found out. DeAnne looked up the number of the police department and Step called. He asked the switchboard operator to connect him with Detective Douglas. “He isn’t in on Sundays, but I’ll try his line.”

It rang once and a man picked it up. “Is this Mr. Douglas?” asked Step.

“No,” said the man.

“Is he there? Can I speak to him?”

“Can I tell him what it’s about?”

Step covered the receiver and whispered to DeAnne: “I think he’s there.” Then, into the receiver, he said, “It’s probably about nothing. It’s something that doesn’t even make any sense to us. But maybe it’ll mean something to him.”

“Can you be more specific?” asked the man.

“About the story in the paper this morning.”

“The serial killer story,” said the man.

“Yes,” said Step.

“I’m the one designated to take down all reports and information, so you’ve already reached the right place.”

“But we don’t have any report to make,” said Step. “And what we have might not be information. And—look, can’t I just talk to Mr. Douglas? It’ll only take two minutes and then I’ll be out of his hair.”

“You’ve got to understand, sir, we’ve already received more than two hundred calls today about this story, and if Detective Douglas took all those calls personally …”

“Fine, then,” said Step. “We don’t want to bother him. Let me just leave you my name and number and he can call me back when he has time.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier just to tell me your information?”

Yes, it would, thought Step. But you’re the guy whose job it is to take down all the crank calls and the sincere but irrelevant calls and filter them out, and you would think our call was one or the other of those and so you’d never mention us to anybody in a serious way and then we’d never know whether we were even right that the names matched—or, more important, we’d never know if we were wrong, so we could breathe more easily.

“No,” said Step. “Here’s my number. Take it down if you want.”

The man took it down and read it back. Step said good-bye and hung up.

“Dead end, huh?” said DeAnne.

“I don’t know,” said Step. “The guy wanted me to tell him, but I didn’t want to get put on their list of cranks. So I’m betting that the fact that I wouldn’t talk to anybody but Douglas either puts me on their serious crank list or it gets Douglas to call me back. Either way, maybe somebody talks to us.”

The phone rang.

DeAnne laughed nervously.

Step picked up the receiver.

“This Stephen Fletcher?” asked a man with a soft tidewater accent.

“Yes,” said Step.

“This is Doug Douglas, Steuben Police Department. What’s on your mind?”

Step mouthed to DeAnne: It’s him. Then, to Douglas, he said, “Mr. Douglas, this is probably crazy and we’re probably going to end up on your crank-call list, but we’ve got something here that if we don’t tell you about it we’re probably going to go out of our minds worrying about it, so if you’ve got two minutes I’ll give it a try and then you can tell me I’m nuts and I’ll go away.”

“I got two minutes, son,” said Douglas. “Go ahead.”

“We’ve got a list here that has four names on it. Jack, Scotty David, and Roddy.”

“Mm-hm.”

“That list was written early in June. Since then, and before we saw this article in the paper, we added three more names to it. Peter, Van, and Sandy.”

“So you telling me you’re a psychic?” asked Douglas. The weariness in his voice told Step what he thought of psychics.

“No,” said Step. “Far from it. We got these names from somebody else, for a completely unrelated purpose. But you don’t have to take just our word for it. That same list is also in the possession of a doctor here in town, who also collected it for a completely unrelated reason.”

“Mm-hm.”

“So then back in June we also got a forty-five rpm record in the mail, anonymously, but it was postmarked Steuben. And the record was that one by the rock group The Police, the song called ‘Every Breath You Take.’ It has a part about how the singer of the song will be watching. We figured it was just somebody who wanted to scare us or punish us for something, and we didn’t think the police would be interested or even if you were, what could you do? So we didn’t report it. But now this article comes out, and we think—maybe the reason we had these names is somehow connected with the person who sent us that record. And maybe that person is somehow connected with the serial killer. And so maybe …”

“You’re being a little cute with me, Mr. Fletcher. You keep not telling me why you have that list of names.”

“I’m not trying to be cute, I’m just trying to tell you the parts that matter before I tell you the part that makes it all so hard for anybody to believe, including us. I mean, we want you to take this seriously.”

“So far I’m listening serious, and I’m waiting for you to talk serious.”

“Yes. Can you—first can you just tell me if our list really does correspond? I mean, was Jonathan Lee, was he ever called ‘Jack.’ Did Alexander Booth go by the nickname ‘Sandy’?”

“Mr. Fletcher, I’m still on the phone with you. Doesn’t that answer your question?”

“Yes, I guess so.” Step took a deep breath. “Mr. Douglas, that list was written by my wife.”

“She’s the psychic?”

“No, she’s the mother. I’m the father. The other person who assembled the same list is a psychiatrist. Our son’s former psychiatrist. It’s our son who came up with these names.”

Douglas let out a stream of air into the phone. It occurred to Step that he was probably smoking. “Well now, that’s interesting,” he said. There was a pause on the line, as if Douglas was thinking. Then he spoke again. “Does your son live with you?”

“Of course,” said Step.

“Does he have a job? I mean, is he working today, or is he home?”

“Mr. Douglas, our son doesn’t have a job and of course he lives at home. For heaven’s sake.”

“Mr. Fletcher, how old is your son?”

“He turned eight in June.”

There was a loud squealing sound over the phone. Step thought: He just sat bolt upright, and his chair squeaks. “Eight years old?”

“Yes sir,” said Step.

“Jesus H. Christ,” said Douglas.

“I suppose so,” said Step.

“I mean, you said your son’s psychiatrist, your son came up with the list—I thought you were telling me your boy might be the serial killer. Hell, I’ve been having my boys here check out your address and I’ve got three patrol cars heading for your house right now and you’re telling me that your son is eight?”

“Yes!” said Step. He leapt to his feet, started pacing as he talked, urgently. “I’m only thirty-two myself, for pete’s sake. Don’t send a bunch of police cars here, we’re not going anywhere! I was thinking about my son as a possible victim, that maybe this guy’s been stalking us, stalking our son, trying to scare us or maybe even setting us up or something and you’re sending police cars to arrest him?”

“Oh, Step!” cried DeAnne. “That’s insane! Are they really—”

Douglas started talking again; Step held up a hand to make DeAnne be quiet so he could hear. “ … already called them off, don’t worry.” Douglas chuckled. “See, we’re a little excitable around here. The SBI wants to shove us aside on the investigation and so we kind of feel the tiger breathing down our necks, you know. But those cars are going back on patrol and so don’t you folks worry. Still, I’d kind of like to come on over and talk to y’all. Think that’s possible?”

“We’ll be here all afternoon,” said Step.

“Give me about thirty minutes, then.”

DeAnne immediately began worrying about what might happen if the kids woke up and found a policeman in the house.

“He’s a detective,” said Step. “He’ll be in a suit.”

“And they’ll be in the family room, and there’s no way to shut this door so they can’t hear.”

“So we’ll take him in the bedroom and close the door.”

“With our room in the mess it’s in?”

“So throw the bedspread up over the bed,” said Step.

“You really don’t care, do you!”

“I really don’t think the appearance of our room amounts to a sparrow’s fart in a hurricane compared to what he’s coming over here to discuss, that’s true.”

“That’s your philosophy. Mine is that I don’t want him to think he’s just found another lowlife family who don’t care about their living conditions.”

“But we don’t care or our bedroom would already be cleaned up,” said Step plaintively. But he followed her into the bedroom and joined her in a flurry of straightening. They were done, with a couple of folding chairs set up, when the doorbell rang. It had only been fifteen minutes.

“Maybe it’s not him,” said DeAnne.

It was Douglas, all right, standing on the porch, lighting up a cigarette. After the normal civilities, but before inviting him in, Step cleared his throat and said, “Excuse me, but we don’t smoke.”

It took Douglas a moment to realize that this actually meant that he was expected to respond in some way. “You mean to tell me you don’t ever have any visitors who smoke?”

“We don’t even own an ashtray,” said Step. “And we have a new baby, which means that we just can’t have smoke in the house.”

“Well don’t that beat all. Antismokers in a tobacco town. My daddy worked in the tobacco factory all his life. What’s North Carolina coming to?”

“As soon as that’s out,” said Step, “we’d be honored to have you come in.”

Douglas hooted, then dropped the cigarette and ground it out with his shoe. “No offense intended,” he said.

“None taken,” said Step. “And vice versa, I hope.”

This really wasn’t the best beginning to their conversation, Step realized. And since the kids were still asleep, or at least quiet, DeAnne sat down across from Douglas in the living room while Step went back and quietly closed the kids’ bedroom doors. When he got back, they had apparently got right down to business, because DeAnne was showing him the list.

“Well, you know, this could have been written anytime,” said Douglas.

“It’s not evidence anyway,” said Step. “I mean, how could it be? But if you need corroboration, Stevie’s psychiatrist at the time, Dr. Alice Weeks, has a copy of this list—which DeAnne gave her back in early June. And she made her own list of the others.”

“We deliberately kept the nicknames out of the papers,” said Douglas. “We do that, among other things, so that we can tell the hoaxers from the real thing. Like they’ll ‘remember’ seeing a man dragging a little boy along saying, Hurry up, Alex, only we know that Alexander Booth would have told anybody who asked him that his name was Sandy. So it’s a fake.”

“And so you took us seriously,” said Step.

“Jack was the clincher,” said Douglas. “Your wife was telling me while you were down the hall there that these are the name’s your son gave to his imaginary friends.”

“That’s right.”

“Pretty amazing,” said Douglas. “And then this forty-five, this record. Comes in the mail. Every breath you take.”

“We didn’t think that much of it, after a while. Till the article.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“But, I mean, an anonymous package like that, it had to be meant to scare us.”

“Oh, no doubt about it,” said Douglas. “The trouble is, it doesn’t help us much.”

“No?”

“It almost certainly didn’t come from the serial killer.”

“Oh,” said Step. “Well I guess that’s a relief.”

“But how do you know that,” said DeAnne, “since you don’t know who the serial killer is?”

“We’ve got psychological profiles. Some guys, they try to tease the cops. Son of Sam, you know. Taunting us. They want to get caught. But then there’s the Ted Bundy types. Smart. Cool. All they care about is not getting caught. Bundy never sent letters to the papers. Bundy never tipped his hand to anybody. I mean, he had a girlfriend that he was sleeping with during half the time he was going out killing those women, and she never had a clue. She knew he did some shoplifting and stuff, but had no clue about the killings. This serial killer—if there is one, cause it’s not like we can prove it yet—he’s like Bundy. He’s smart, and he doesn’t want to get caught. He’s scared of getting caught, and he doesn’t like being scared. He isn’t in this for the thrill. He’s in this for—something else.”

“What?” asked Step.

“I’m not here to tell you about serial killers,” said Douglas. “It’ll ruin your sleep for a long while. It’s sure as hell ruined mine. Begging your pardon for my language, ma’am.”

“I just wonder how you know all this about him,” said Step.

“We know it because we haven’t found the bodies. Not a trace, not a clue. If he was a talker, after seven disappearances we’d’ve heard from him by now. Especially after the article. That’s why we called in the press on this—we hoped we could flush him out. But he’s the other kind. If he exists. He’s the kind who can’t stand the idea of public attention being focused on him. So now that the article’s been run, I expect him to lay low for a while. He’s been hitting every couple of months, but I imagine he won’t hit again this year. All depends, though.”

“On what?” asked Step.

“On how strong it is, whatever it is that’s driving him to kill.”

“I hate this,” said DeAnne. “Because he has something to do with my son.”

“Maybe not,” said Douglas. “I’d like to meet your boy, if I could.”

“I don’t want him interrogated,” said Step immediately.

“Oh, no, that’s not my way. He’s a boy, and he’s a troubled boy. I’ve got children of my own. I just have to—make some sense out of him coming up with these names, don’t you see. And if I meet him, get a feel for who he is, then that might help me understand what to make of this.”

“I really don’t want you to,” said DeAnne. “We’d have to tell him you’re a policeman, and then he’d—”

“So you wouldn’t consider telling him I’m an uncle from out of town?”

“He knows all his uncles,” said Step. “And he’s not stupid.”

“Why not trust me?” asked Douglas.

“Why can’t you just—work from the envelope the record came in? We’ve still got it, and the record sleeve. You could take fingerprints or something.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Douglas. “Who do you think might have sent it?”

At once Step and DeAnne both became reluctant. “Well,” said Step, “it would only be speculation. We don’t want to get some innocent person in trouble.”

“You see?” said Douglas. “You already have some people in mind who might have sent that record. You’ve got enough people you’re thinking about that you know most of them are innocent, but one of them probably sent it. Right?”

“But the one who did—” said Step.

“The one who did is not the serial killer. That’s just a plain fact. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about serial killers, they don’t change their pattern. Once they’ve got it set, they don’t change. Even the ones who think they’re changing it every time, they’re only changing stupid meaningless details. The basic pattern remains absolutely the same because that’s part of the ritual, you know? If they didn’t do it the same, it wouldn’t give them … what it gives them. But make a list of your acquaintances who might want to send you a threatening message. I won’t go question them. I’ll just hang on to the list. And then I’ll compare it to other lists we’ve got, and if they show up on another list, then we’ll go question them, and they’ll think we’re bothering them because of the other list, not yours. And if they don’t show up on any other list, we leave them alone. Fair enough?”

“All right,” said DeAnne.

“As for your record-sender, well, someday he might turn into a killer, but if he’s still at the anonymous threat stage, he’s got a ways to go. The evil is still creeping up inside him. Hasn’t taken him over completely yet. In other words, he’s still a basically civilized person. And he may keep that evil under control, too. May control it till the day he dies. Nobody’ll ever know. And all he ever did, the worst thing he ever did was mail somebody a forty-five rpm record by the Police. Let’s hope that’s how it works out. That’s how it usually does.”

“Usually? There are a lot of forty-fives getting sent around?”

“A lot of anonymous messages. More than you could imagine. I’d say most people get a couple of them during their lives, and maybe most people send one or two. You get so filled with rage, you want to hurt somebody, only you don’t have enough hate in you to poison them or burn their house down. So you send a letter. You throw trash on their lawn. You call them on the phone and then hang up-again, again, all night, until you start getting afraid that they might be having their phone traced so then you stop. You ever got strange calls like that?”

“Once,” said DeAnne.

“Me too,” said Step.

“It’s going on, all the time. There aren’t enough policemen in the world to track down all of that. And most of the time it’s just what you thought—somebody you know who’s angry at you. Maybe even your best friend, only they can’t bring themselves to confront you, so they send you a record and it gets it off their chest and nothing more ever happens.”

“That’s a relief,” said DeAnne.

“Well, you should be relieved. But you should also find out who’s at the door before you open it, and make sure you know who the next package is from before you open it. Because one time in ten thousand, the guy’s not kidding.”

“With one hand he giveth comfort,” said Step, “and with the other he taketh it away.”

“What can I say?” said Douglas. “I’m dying for a cigarette, and the thing I came out here for was to find out why you had all those names, and you aren’t letting me meet your son.”

“We thought you’d tell us why our son knew those names,” said Step.

“Well, I’m not gonna subpoena him. But I’ll tell you folks, every little boy in this town is in danger right now. This killer may lay low for a while, but he’ll be back soon enough, and whatever he’s doing, he’s going to be damned hard to catch. How many more is he going to kill before he finally slips up? I hope not yours, but he’ll kill somebody’s.”

“But Stevie couldn’t possibly know—” Step began.

“What are you hoping to find out from him?” asked DeAnne.

“Not the name of the killer, so rest your minds about that,” said Douglas. “Nothing concrete at all. I just want to get a feel for who he is. For the kind of person he is.”

“He’s a good kid,” said Step.

“I’m sure he is,” said Douglas.

Step laughed. “And I bet you hear that from the parents of drug pushers and rapists and embezzlers all the time.”

“Either that or ‘I always told him he’d end up in jail.’ “

Step looked at DeAnne. DeAnne looked at him. “We’ve come this far,” she said.

“We let him talk to that miserable shrink,” said Step. “For two months. What can Mr. Douglas do worse than Dr. Weeks?”

“I’ll get him,” said DeAnne.

While she was gone, Step had to ask. “What do they get out of this? Guys like … the one you’re looking for?”

Douglas raised an eyebrow. “Morbid curiosity?”

“Yes,” said Step. “But I’m also a historian. I study human nature, and somehow this guy is human, right?”

“No,” said Douglas. “Guys like that start out human, but there’s an empty place inside them, a hungry place, and it starts sucking the humanity, the decency, the love, the goodness right out of them. And by the time they get to where this guy is, there’s nothing left but that hole. And so the guy spends all his effort trying to fill that hole, to find something to satisfy that thirst, that hunger, that nothingness in him, only he never can. He just tries over and over and over again, and it’s never enough. If the guy has any decency left, some scrap of humanity somewhere in the shadows, then he’ll leave clues for us, he’ll do like Son of Sam and taunt the cops, he’ll cry for help. Free me from this hunger that’s eating me alive. But the worst ones, there’s nothing left. This guy, there’s nothing.”

“Well if it’s all gone, his humanity, then wouldn’t people around him know it?”

“They may know it. He may be a complete son-of-a-bitch who sics his dogs on anybody who comes near his property. But then he might also be the nicest, most normal-looking guy. You just never know. It could be your dentist. The bag boy at the grocery. A minister. He fools everybody.”

“How?” asked Step. “Why can’t people see through his lies?”

“Cause he doesn’t lie,” said Douglas. “It’s like Bundy again. He really believes that he’s innocent. Because it isn’t him doing it, it’s this evil thing inside him. He knows it’s there, but it’s not him, see, and so he doesn’t even feel guilty, because he knows that he’d never do anything like those horrible things.”

“So it could be anybody, and he wouldn’t even know it himself?”

“Oh, he knows it,” said Douglas. “Because all the time that he’s telling himself that he would never do this bad stuff, in fact he’s working as hard as he can to protect that other part of him. To keep anybody from catching him. No, he knows. If he didn’t know what he was doing, if he was really crazy, we’d have found the bodies.”

They heard DeAnne talking as she came down the hall. “It’s nothing all that important,” she was saying. “He just wants to talk to you.”

Stevie came into the room, looking sleepy. So he finally had taken a nap, Step thought. Douglas didn’t stand up, just stuck out his hand. Because he was sitting down, his head was at about the same level as Stevie’s. “I’m Doug Douglas, son,” he said. “Would you shake my hand?”

Stevie came forward and took Douglas’s big hand and shook it, solemnly.

“I don’t know how much your mama told you about me, but I’m a policeman.”

Stevie glanced down at Douglas’s suit.

“That’s right, I don’t wear a uniform. I’m a detective, so if your daddy ever drives faster than the speed limit, I’ll let him go right by because traffic isn’t my job.”

Douglas paused, apparently waiting for Stevie to ask him what his job was. Of course Stevie didn’t say a thing.

“The thing is,” said Douglas, “there’s a bad person in Steuben these days who’s been kidnapping kids. Do you know what kidnapping is?”

Stevie nodded.

“Well, you’re going to be hearing a lot about this guy at school tomorrow. What grade will you be in?”

“Third.”

“Yeah, you’ll hear a lot. Your teachers will tell you, cops like me will come to school and tell you—stay away from strangers. If somebody grabs you, scream your lungs out.”

“We already taught him all this,” said DeAnne. “He already follows these rules.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” said Douglas. “Do you always follow those rules?”

Stevie nodded.

“And what if somebody wanted you to go off alone with him, and you said no, cause it was against the rules, but then he said, All right, but don’t you ever tell anybody that I asked you. What would you do?”

“Tell Mom and Dad,” said Stevie.

“What if he said that if you told, he’d hurt you.”

“I’d still tell.”

“This boy’s been well trained,” said Douglas. “Stevie, I hear you have some good friends.”

DeAnne stiffened, and Step said, “Mr. Douglas.”

“Now, now, Stevie doesn’t mind talking about his friends. Do you, Stevie?”

Stevie shrugged. A little one-shoulder shrug.

“Well, I’m not going to ask anything hard. I just want you to tell me one thing. Who was it who told you their names?”

“Jack,” said Stevie.

“Jack,” said Douglas. “Now, is he one of those friends, or are you thinking about some other Jack?”

“He’s one of them,” said Stevie.

“So he told you his own name,” said Douglas.

Stevie nodded.

“And everybody else’s name.”

Stevie nodded. “Except Sandy,” he said.

“And who told you Sandy’s name?”

“Sandy,” said Stevie.

“Stevie, I bet you love your mom and dad, don’t you?”

Stevie nodded, immediately, deeply.

“Well, I just want you to know that I’ve been talking to them for the last while and they really love you, too. More than you even know, and I’ll bet you already think they love you a lot, don’t you.”

Again he nodded.

“They love you so much that they want you to be safe, all the time. Now can you do that for them? Can you keep yourself safe? Follow all those rules?”

Stevie nodded.

“Well that’s it then,” said Douglas. “I’m glad to meet you, Stevie. And if anybody ever gives you any trouble, you just tell them that Doug Douglas is your friend, and they better be nice to you, all right?”

Stevie nodded again. And then said, “Thanks.”

“Can you go off to your room again now, Stevie?” said Step. “We just need to talk to Mr. Douglas here a little bit more, OK?”

Stevie headed back to the hall. DeAnne got up and followed him; when she came back a moment later, she said, “I just had to make sure he was back in his room.”

“Well,” said Step. “I don’t know what you could possibly have learned from that.”

“Oh, I learned what I needed to learn,” said Douglas.

“And what was that?”

“Your son’s honest,” he said. “He’s sweet. Deep into his heart, he’s sweet. If God could taste him, that’s what God would say: This boy is sweet, right through.”

Step wasn’t about to disagree with him, but he didn’t see how Douglas could know that from the banal little conversation he had with Stevie.

“He reminds me of my late wife,” Douglas said. “She’d have nightmares sometimes, terrible ones. She’d wake up in the middle of the night and make me hold her close and she’d tell me the nightmare. And then I’d get up in the morning and go to work, or sometimes I’d get a call that very night, and it would be a crime that had something to do with her dream.” Douglas leaned back, remembering. “One time she dreamed of a blue dress, trying to put it on, only it kept slipping off of her, she couldn’t wear it, and it frightened her, you know the way it is when you’re dreaming, you get scared over silly things like that, not being able to put on a dress. And then I get to work and there’s this woman and they’re taking her statement and the story is that she was raped that night, the guy chased her, and three times she slipped out of his grasp because of the dress she was wearing, that blue dress.”

“Oh,” said DeAnne.

Step had studied folklore in college and he knew from the start how the story would end. They all ended that way. “That actually happened to your wife? Or didn’t you hear it from a friend of a friend?”

Douglas laughed softly. “You’re the man who called me up because you had that list, and you’re asking me if this is just some fairy tale? Yeah, we’re always skeptical about the other guy’s story. But I don’t really care whether you believe me because that’s not what I’m trying to tell you anyway. What I’m telling you is, there’s some people who do things so bad it tears at the fabric of the world, and then there’s some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn. They see things, they know things, only they’re so good and pure that they don’t understand what it is that they’re seeing. I think that’s what’s been happening to your boy. What’s going on here in Steuben is so evil and he is so good and pure that he can’t help but feel it. The minute he got to Steuben he must have felt it, and it made him sad. My wife was like that, always sad. The rest of us, we’ve got good and evil mixed up in us, and our own badness makes so much noise we can’t hear the evil of the monster out there. But your Stevie, he can hear it. He can hear the names of the boys. Only, just like my wife made a dream out of it, a dream of trying to put on a dress, your Stevie takes those names and he makes friends out of them. And to him those friends are real because the evil that pushed those names into his mind, that is real.”

“So you don’t think Stevie is crazy,” said Step.

“Hell, you know he ain’t crazy. You got the list, don’t you?”

“Is there something we should do?” asked DeAnne.

“I can’t think of anything, except hold on to your children, hold them tight, keep them safe.”

“Yes sir,” said Step.

Douglas got up. “I need me a cigarette now, so I’ll be on my way.”

“I’m sorry we bothered you about something that turned out not to be helpful to you,” said Step.

“Oh, this helped me a lot.”

“It did?”

“Sure,” said Douglas. He stood in the open doorway. Step and DeAnne stepped out onto the porch with him. “Before you called,” said Douglas, lighting a cigarette, “we weren’t a hundred percent sure that there even was a serial killer. But now—well, now I know. Because otherwise your son wouldn’t have known those names, now, would he? They wouldn’t have been all together in a list, would they, unless they all had something in common with each other and with no one else. There’s a few kids disappear every year, and it’s not evil, it just happens. It’s part of the order of nature. Your son never noticed those. These he noticed. So now I know.”

“You can’t use this to prove it to anybody else,” said Step.

“Don’t have to prove it to anybody else,” said Douglas. “I know it. So now I’ll never rest till I find this guy and stop him.”

“And then will Stevie stop having these—imaginary friends?”

“When the source of his affliction is gone, then there won’t be any need for him to deal with it anymore, will there? My wife never dreamed the same dream twice.”

He started to walk toward his car, when DeAnne called after him. “Do you still want us to give you a list of people we think might’ve sent that record?”

“Why not?” he said. “Might turn out to be useful.”

“We’ll phone you this afternoon, OK?”

“Fine,” he said. “If I’m not there, tell it to whoever answers the phone, they’ll be expecting it.”

He got in his car and drove off. DeAnne and Step went back in the house, sat down at the kitchen table, and wrote down their list of names. People who had reason, or thought they had reason, to hate the Fletchers as of the time they got that record in the mail. Mrs. Jones, Dicky Northanger, Lee Weeks, Roland McIntyre. They debated back and forth about including Dolores LeSueur’s name, but they finally did. It was ludicrous to think of Dolores LeSueur as a serial killer—it was ludicrous to think of a woman as a serial killer-but the list had to be complete or why make it?

They phoned it in. As Douglas had said, the man on the phone was expecting them, and he was thorough and businesslike. And then it was done.

Step and DeAnne faced each other across the table. “What a Sunday,” said Step.

“This is going to sound awful,” said DeAnne, “because that serial killer is still out there somewhere, but … I feel better now.”

“Me too,” said Step. And then he laughed in relief. “Stevie isn’t crazy. All that shit from Dr. Weeks—forgive me, but a spade’s a spade—that’s all back in the crock it came from. Whatever’s going on in Stevie’s life, it isn’t made up and we didn’t cause it and he isn’t crazy. It’s the real world that he’s living in, only just as we thought, he sees it more deeply and truly than the rest of us. And when you think about it, it’s kind of sweet, isn’t it? I mean, whatever happened to these lost boys, they still live on in Stevie’s mind. He imagines them and he’s made playmates out of them, he’s made friends out of them. And I’m not afraid of them anymore.”

“I’m still afraid,” said DeAnne. “I can’t help that.”

“Well, so am I—of the killer.”

“I wish we lived somewhere else,” said DeAnne. “I wish we could take Stevie away from this place.”

“Me too,” said Step. “But this is the place where the doctors know about Zap. This is the ward that fasted and prayed for him. The rest of us can live anywhere, but Zap is already part of the life of this place. Those people in our ward, you think they’re going to watch Zap grow up and think, What a strange-looking kid, why can’t he hold his head up? No. They’re going to say, we know that boy, he’s one of us. We’ll never find that anywhere else, DeAnne.”

“I know,” she said. “I know.” But she was not yet comforted.

“The danger is still here,” said Step, touching the newspaper article again. “But it’s not pointed at us. I mean, it’s like the article says, a child in Steuben is still far more likely to be killed in a traffic accident or a gunshot accident than to be a victim of this killer. Parents have to be less trusting of strangers for a while, that’s all. And we were already nearly paranoid, so I think we’ll be fine.”

She nodded.

“And we can’t afford to move, DeAnne. Unless you think it’s worth abandoning everything and scurrying home to your parents’ basement.”

“I guess I’m just thinking, I don’t want to be a grownup anymore. I want to go home and have mom and dad take care of me.” She laughed at herself. “It’s hard to be mom and dad. Isn’t it? Because anything you decide might be wrong.”

“Heck, everything we decide will be wrong,” said Step, “because no matter what we do, something bad will happen later. So I refuse to regret any of it. I don’t regret taking the job with Eight Bits and I don’t regret quitting. I don’t regret all those expensive tests they ran on Zap, because we had to know. I especially don’t regret that day when I saw you talking on the phone and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as my wife being kind to someone else who was in need.”

She leaned over to him and put her arms around him and rested her head on his chest for a moment. “You make me feel so good.”

“And think of this,” said Step. “We not only got some assurance that nobody in our house is crazy, but we also got our bedroom cleaned for the first time since we moved in.”

She pretended to bite him through his shirt, and then sat back up. “Well, no matter what I feel, it’s time to feed Zap, if I can wake him up. I’m beginning to think if I didn’t wake him up for meals he’d sleep the rest of his life away.”

“I know the feeling,” said Step. He carefully refrained from pointing out to her that she had just called the baby Zap. He did that the first time she called Elizabeth Betsy, and she had made it a point never to call her that again, so the poor kid was growing up thinking that she was one person to men and another person to women. Which might not be that far from reality, of course, given the way society worked. Pretty soon he’d probably give in and stop calling Betsy Betsy, so she’d have the same name to everybody. But he thought Zap was a great name, at least until he was old enough to complain about it, and if he could get DeAnne to slip into using it, too, that would be nice.

Step stayed in the kitchen and looked mindlessly at the newspaper for a moment. Then he realized that they had both lists out on the table—the list of Stevie’s friends and the list of people who might hate him enough to send an anonymous threat. He got up and put them in a high cupboard. No matter what Douglas had said, Step wasn’t really happy with either list. He’d much rather that everybody on both lists just leave his family alone.

Late that same Sunday night the phone rang. DeAnne woke up and sleepily answered it. She listened for a moment. “It’s late,” she said. “I think he’s asleep. Oh, no, he isn’t. He’s right here.” She held out the phone to Step. “S’for you,” she said. She was back to sleep almost before he got the phone out of her hand.

“This is Step Fletcher,” he said. “Who am I speaking to?”

“Hey, this is Glass, Step. Remember me? From Eight Bits Inc.?”

“Yeah, of course,” said Step. “Isn’t this a little late to be calling, though? I mean, it’s almost midnight.”

“Well, see, this isn’t exactly a social call. They only let me make one phone call, and I thought about it for a minute, and you were kind of my best choice. Or at least I sure hope you are.”

“Best choice for what?”

“I’m down at the police station. I need a ride home. Can I explain it to you later? I’m not arrested or anything, I just don’t want to be driven home in a police car, you know? It looks bad, people ask questions.”

“If you’re not arrested, then how come you only get one phone call?”

“Oh, like, that was just theatre. You know? Just making it more dramatic than it is. It’s really nothing. Except that I need a friend right now, you know? To pick me up and then not tell anybody where he picked me up.”

“I won’t lie for you,” said Step.

“Oh, right, I knew that,” said Glass. “But see, you don’t work at Eight Bits Inc. anymore and you haven’t exactly been keeping in touch so I figure, who’s going to ask you? And you aren’t going to go calling people up and telling them, right?”

“I don’t know where the police station is,” said Step.

“Well it’s right downtown. Corner of Center and Church. Big city-county building, you can’t miss it. I’ll just meet you out front so you don’t have to park and come in.”

When Step hung up the phone, DeAnne roused enough to murmur, “Who was it?”

“Glass. Roland McIntyre. He’s been picked up by the police for questioning and now he wants a ride home.”

DeAnne’s eyes opened now. “He was on our list.”

“Yeah, well, I guess he was on another list, too, eh?”

Step made it to the city-county building in ten minutes, and, as he had promised, Glass was standing out in front. He looked forlorn in his plaid short-sleeve shirt and thick glasses.

“Nice car,” said Glass as he slid in.

“It takes a lot of hard work to get the rust holes just right,” said Step. “But hey, this one runs and the other one’s always in the shop. Where to?”

“Home,” said Glass. Then: “Oh, yeah, well, I live in the Oriole Apartments, out west on Shaker Parkway. Like you were going to the airport.”

Step drove off.

“Nice of you to come get me,” said Glass. “I didn’t know who else to call.”

“No problem,” said Step. And at the moment he said it, that’s how he felt. He hadn’t felt that way until then, however.

“We miss you at Eight Bits Inc., man,” said Glass.

“Glad to hear you remember me.”

“Dicky’s got his finger in everything now. He comes in and takes our working disks and fiddles with our code so we come to work in the morning and a program that ran fine the night before now crashes, and we ask him what he did, and he says, ‘That was the most inefficient code I ever saw, so I started fixing it.’ And when you say, ‘Well it didn’t crash before, and now it does,’ he just looks at you and says, ‘Do I have to do everything?’ “

Step laughed grimly. Dicky. He didn’t like remembering Dicky, even to know that he was still widely hated. Dicky was on his list. So Step changed the subject. “What was all this about tonight?”

Glass was silent for a minute, looking out the window. Then, finally, he settled back into his seat. “Well, it’s not like you don’t already know.”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked,” said Step, which wasn’t true, but he didn’t much care. Somehow being honest to Glass didn’t seem to have the same kind of urgency as being honest to, say, his children or DeAnne or Mr. Douglas.

“I mean, you know about me.” Glass sighed. “I’ve never actually done anything, you know? I don’t even want to, really. But some parents complained because one of their older kids told them some cockamamy story, and so I got hauled in when I was sixteen, and that son-of-a-bitch lawyer my mom got for me told me that it was a real good idea to cop a plea as an adult in exchange for no time, instead of doing time as a juvenile and getting my record wiped. Because that’s what the prosecutor really wanted all along—my new lawyer told me that I probably wouldn’t have had to do time no matter what, the only evidence was some kid and he could have torn him to shreds in court and now here I am on their list of sex offenders.” Step could feel Glass’s eyes on him. “I’m on the pervert list. Anytime somebody anywhere near Steuben looks cross-eyed at a little girl, I get a phone call and they ask me where I was. Well, I’m almost always at Eight Bits Inc. with plenty of witnesses and so they don’t actually bring me in very much.”

“So why this time?” asked Step, feeling a little sick; he didn’t know if he liked having Glass tell him this stuff, especially since he knew that Glass was probably still lying and in fact there was more than the one witness and he had in fact molested little girls, and a lot more than once or twice, too. But he let Glass tell his story without argument because why get him mad?

“It’s that serial killer thing, if you can believe it. The SBI is doing a haul of every known sex offender in six counties, and this is when my name came up. It’s completely stupid, it’s complete bullshit to bring me in.” There was real outrage in his voice now. “This serial killer’s been doing little boys, for heaven’s sake. What do they think I am, a faggot?”

Step said nothing, just drove, gripping the wheel.

After a minute or so of silence, Glass got back to talking about the gossip at Eight Bits Inc., and then they reached the apartment complex and Glass directed him to the building he lived in. Step let him off and then watched him get safely to the front door of the building. Watching him like that reminded Step of all the times he had walked babysitters safely to their parents’ door, and then he thought of Glass babysitting for people, and he shivered. But I was a babysitter, too, Step thought. When I was twelve. And how did those people know that I wasn’t like Glass? They had to trust me. You’ve got to trust people even though sometimes they’ll betray your trust, because otherwise there’s no life at all.

And then he had another thought. Glass had a mother and a father. A father who loathed him—did that start before or after Glass started messing with little girls? But that mother, she still loved him. She had carried him just like DeAnne carried Stevie and Robbie and Betsy and Zap, she had nursed him or given him bottles, she had gotten up in the night with him, she had dreamed of what he might be when he grew up. And he must have been a really bright kid. She must have been proud of him in school, and comforted him when the other kids made fun of him. And then this happened to her—this boy of hers turned out to have a thing for little girls. Something so dark and awful that even the worst criminals in prison find the presence of a child molester too loathsome to endure. And she has to live with that now—that her son is like this.

And Step thought of little Zap and he realized that there were worse things in the world than having a child whose body isn’t working right. You can have a child whose soul is worthless. And Step thought of this serial killer loose in Steuben. If somebody forced Step to trade places, either with the father of one of those lost boys, knowing that somebody had taken him and used him and killed him, or with the father of the monster who had done the taking and the using and the killing, it wouldn’t be hard to choose. The parents of those lost boys must feel the most terrible rage and hate and grief, and such a desperate sense of failure for not having protected their sons. But the parents of that serial killer would have most of that and one thing more: They would have the shame of having loosed a monster upon the world.

No matter what else happens, Step thought, all of my children are good. And even if something happened to them, if one of them was hit by a car like Rob Robles in fourth grade or got leukemia like Dr. Duhmer’s little boy in Vigor, at least Step would know that every year of life that they lived was a gift to the people around them, their memory would be one of love and joy, not shame and despair.

I don’t think it’s you, Glass, thought Step. I don’t think your monster has grown so large yet. But you were lying to me, you were trying to hide the monster from me, you aren’t even the tiniest bit repentant about it, and that means that the monster has room to get bigger and more powerful inside you and you’ll keep on plotting your little opportunities to possess the bodies of helpless children, and it might be kinder to everyone in the world if I went out tomorrow and bought a gun and came to Eight Bits Inc. and shot you dead, right in front of everybody. Could God call it murder if I did that, to protect all the children you might harm?

Yes, it would be murder. Because maybe the monster won’t grow. Maybe somehow you’ll get control of yourself. And if somebody killed you before that happened, you’d lose the chance to repent and be forgiven. If there is such a thing as forgiveness for the things you do, or want to do. God lets the guilty live right among the good, hurting them all they want; he lets the tares grow amid the corn. And all that the decent people can do is teach their children and try to be good to each other.

When Step got back into the house, he started to go to bed, but then he went to the kids’ rooms and saw each one lying there asleep, and he kissed them, each one of them. Robbie, Stevie, Betsy, so familiar, he had seen them sleeping so often, he knew all the sweet beauties of their faces in repose. And little Zap, the helpless troubled stranger, his legs drawn up in frog position, his mouth open and his cheek always wet. All of you, Step said silently. I love all of you, I’m glad for all of you. I have so much hope for you. Even for you, Zap, with your reluctant body. Even for you, Stevie, though evil has sought you out. The world is better because you’re in it, and though I want to hold you forever, I still know that even if I lost you, my life would always have joy in it because you were ever, ever mine.

13: God

This is how they finally found a name for Zap’s condition: All through the autumn, every month they had a visit from Jerusha Gilbert, the nurse from the county high-risk baby clinic. Jerusha found on her first visit that everything she normally checked on, DeAnne and Step were already doing. She still stayed her full hour, however, and came back every month; as she told DeAnne, most of the kids she was tracking had fetal alcohol syndrome or prenatal care problems, so it wasn’t hard to imagine that the homes Jerusha visited weren’t usually the most pleasant places. And because she didn’t have to do the usual remedial work, she began to research more advanced ideas that DeAnne and Step could be trying with Zap.

It was Jerusha who first said cerebral palsy. “It’s not a diagnosis, of course,” she said, “because it never is. Cerebral palsy isn’t a medical term, it’s a catchall basket in which we throw all the conditions that seem to be related to some kind of brain dysfunction. The rigid kids, the floppy kids, some retarded, some bright as can be. Some who walk, some who ride in motorized chairs, some who lie in bed emitting a continuous high-pitched whine the whole time they’re conscious, if you can call it consciousness. At some point everybody sort of agrees that this particular condition is CP, and then a certain system takes over. So it’s really your decision, you know. Start calling Zap’s condition CP, and nobody’s really going to argue with you.”

“What if it’s really something else?” asked Step.

“It’s always really something else,” said Jerusha. “The CP label just means that we all agree that we don’t know what it is, but the kid needs help with a certain group of activities. And you’re very lucky, if you decide that it’s CP, because Steuben has one of the four or five best facilities for cerebral palsy in the United States.”

“It does?” asked DeAnne.

“On the east side of town. The Open Doors Education Center. A really nice building, too. The city runs it now, but it was originally set up from contributions from the citizens. The parents of the kids with CP went around collecting until they had enough. And that’s still the feeling there. The full range of everything—no matter what Zap turns out to need, they’ll have it there. And also for preschoolers there’s the Daggett Center. They charge, because their support is from foundations rather than government, but it’s not that expensive. That kicks in when Zap is two. I mean, if you have to have a kid with neural problems, this is just about the best city in the U.S. for him to grow up in.”

Cerebral palsy. Well, at least they had heard of it before. As soon as they had this name for Zap’s problems, they talked about it with the kids in family home evening. Step told them about the kid he had known who had CP. “He was sixteen when I lived in Mesa,” said Step. “I was about thirteen. He was in the same ward as me. I thought when I first saw him that he was retarded, because he walked funny and his head rolled back and forth when he walked, and when he talked you could hardly understand him. But then I remember standing there in the hall one time—I was reading the Doctrine and Covenants, I think, it was my project right then—and he comes out of one of the classrooms and just stands there near me, and I guess he was so mad that he just couldn’t keep it in, he started talking to me. And it scared me, because he was strange, but I stood there and I listened and I realized that I really could understand him if I paid attention, and he was talking in complete sentences, and what he was doing was complaining about how the ward leadership wouldn’t let him do anything and it made him so mad. I remember he said, ‘They think I’m retarded but I’m not retarded, I get straight A’s, I’m smarter than they are, but they won’t let me bless the sacrament! They didn’t let me be baptized till I was twelve because they wouldn’t believe I was smart enough to be accountable.’ Of course he was saying all this really slowly, and he had a hard time forming the words, and I remember it was like a revelation to me. This guy wasn’t dumb. He was a person. And his feelings were hurt, and I was one of the ones who might have hurt them sometime, because heaven knows I had been afraid of him, I had thought he was retarded. But when he was done with his rant about how they wouldn’t give him a chance, I said, ‘I think you should bless the sacrament.’ And I guess that was all he needed to hear, just somebody agreeing with him, even a thirteen-year-old runt of a kid with a book in his hands, cause he said to me, ‘Well someday I will.’ “

“Did he?” demanded Robbie.

“Before I left there, I saw him lurch up those stairs to the sacrament table. Must have taken him five times as long as anybody else to say the prayer, but he said every word, and when he handed the trays to the deacons the trays shook and sometimes the water spilled a little but he did it. And at first people were embarrassed, but then later I heard them saying, That’s one spunky kid, things like that. They were proud of him.”

Then DeAnne said, “You kids are going to have a special responsibility as Zap’s brothers and sister. You have to make sure that you treat him as naturally as you’d treat any other kid. That you never act ashamed of him in any way. Because if you act as if there’s something awful or shameful about Zap, then others will, too.”

“He’s my little brother!” said Robbie.

“That’s right,” said DeAnne.

“It won’t always be easy,” said Step. “My Aunt Ella is retarded, which isn’t the same thing, but she had a kind of look about her that made her seem strange and funny, and she was growing up in the 1920s, and people weren’t very nice about things like that, especially the kids weren’t. And my mom was her younger sister.”

“That’s Grandma Sal!” cried Robbie.

“Gammah!” shouted Betsy.

“That’s right, your grandma Sal,” said Step. “And when she was seven or eight years old, she was walking to school one day with Aunt Ella, and my mother tells how she was so embarrassed, she was really horrible to Aunt Ella, making her walk way behind her or on the other side of the street sometimes so that nobody would know they were together—but then, my mom was a little girl and nobody told her that she shouldn’t be ashamed. And one time this bunch of kids came up and started throwing stuff at them and yelling ugly names at them, just because Aunt Ella was retarded, and my mom, just a little girl named Sally then, she sat down on the curb and cried and cried, with those kids still running around and yelling, and Aunt Ella sat down beside her and put her arm around my mom and said, ‘Don’t cry, Sally. They don’t know. Don’t cry, Sally. They’re just mean.’ “

DeAnne looked at Step rather oddly. “Why are you telling this story, Step?”

It occurred to him that the kids might get the idea that because Zap was their brother, they’d be teased or mistreated, and surely that wasn’t why he started telling it. For a moment Step was confused and couldn’t answer, so he did what any confused parent does, he pretended that he intended it to be a “teaching moment.”

“Why do you think I told this story, Robbie?” asked Step.

“Cause we don’t care if they’re mean to Zap, because we’re going to walk to school with him anyway! And we’re going to walk right with him and not cross the street without him because then he’d be scared!”

Robbie had found the right lesson in the story even if Step had forgotten what it was supposed to be.

Then Stevie, without even being called on, said, “I think Aunt Ella was the smartest one, even if she was retarded.”

“Why?” asked Step, pleased that Stevie had come up with this on his own.

“Cause all she cared about was that Grandma Sal was crying,” said Stevie. “She didn’t get mad at the bad kids, she just tried to make Grandma Sal feel better.”

“OK, I think we’ve all got the point of the lesson, haven’t we?” said Step.

“We have to tell Zap that he mustn’t cry!” said Robbie.

“Zap can cry if he wants,” said Step. “You know that’s a rule in our family, that we can cry whenever we feel like it. Stevie, what’s the main point of this lesson?”

“We’ve got to help Zap to be part of everything and not get left out and make sure people don’t think he’s retarded.”

“That’s very good, Stevie,” said Step, “Now, it may turn out as years go by that we might find out that Zap really does have mental limitations, that he really is retarded, and that will be OK, too, because my Aunt Ella’s been retarded all her life and she’s a good person and she’s made a lot of people happy. But chances are that Zap won’t be retarded. And no matter what, we still treat him right and we’re never ashamed of him.”

“We’re proud of him,” said Robbie. “He’s my very first little brother so I’m a big brother now!”

“Like me,” said Stevie.

Step turned to DeAnne. “I think we’ve got this covered.”

That ended the lesson. Robbie waved his arm around to lead the closing song and DeAnne helped Betsy say the closing prayer and then they had ice cream while DeAnne nursed Zap, shielding her modesty with a cloth diaper draped from her shoulder.

“Zap’s getting his dessert, too!” cried Robbie.

“Bet it tastes an awful lot like his dinner,” said Step. “And his salad, and his lunch.”

“And his cornflakes!” shouted Robbie. “And his tuna fish!”

“Do I have to feed the baby in another room?” asked DeAnne. But she didn’t really mind. None of their problems and worries had really gone away, but this was a good night. They were a happy family, for this hour, at least. That was enough for the day.

With only a few exceptions, that was how the autumn went. DeAnne drove Stevie and Robbie to their different schools every morning while Step stayed with Betsy and Zap. Even with two kids to take to school there was less stress in the mornings, because she didn’t have to get Betsy dressed and fed, too.

Not that she could sleep in. She had to pull out of the driveway fifteen minutes earlier in the morning than last year, because so many other parents were driving their kids to school and picking them up afterward that traffic at the school was a nightmare. Fear of the serial killer had changed the lives of a lot of people in Steuben. The parents who couldn’t pick their kids up met the schoolbus at the stop. Working parents formed co-ops, and a lot of local businesses let people take their lunch hours at the time school let out so that fewer and fewer kids had to let themselves into an empty house after school.

Being a mother was a fulltime job for DeAnne now, so much so that she even let some of her church work slide now and then, giving a couple of lessons that weren’t quite as well prepared as usual, though no one seemed to notice the difference. The focus of her life was now Zap—she had no choice, really. Whether it was lingering aftereffects of the phenobarbital or just Zap’s native sleep pattern, he tended to sleep for eighteen or twenty-four hours straight and then wake up ravenous. This was very uncomfortable for DeAnne, of course—either she had to wake up and force him to eat at least every eight hours, or she had to pump her milk and freeze it for him. She had too much for the times he was sleeping and not enough for his first meal when he woke up.

Also, since he spent so little of his time awake, she couldn’t bear the thought of him wasting any of that time lying alone in his bed. Because he didn’t have the use of his arms and legs the way normal babies did, he couldn’t experiment with rattles or even with his own body the way most kids did. Thus any time he spent awake and alone was completely empty, and DeAnne was afraid that he’d get bored and lose all interest in life and simply sleep himself to death. She was not about to let that happen. As far as she could manage it, there would be no empty hours. If he woke up at midnight, so did she, and stayed awake with him, talking and playing, moving his hands and feet for him, singing to him. She’d catch catnaps during the day when he was sleeping, and now and then she’d have a full night’s sleep. But it was wearing her down and she didn’t have much energy for the other kids. She couldn’t help it—they were able to supply so much more for themselves that they just didn’t need her the way Zap did. She still helped with homework and projects, as did Step, but Robbie and Betsy spent a lot of time entertaining each other—becoming quite good friends as Betsy began to catch on to some of the rules of civilized behavior. Stevie spent a lot of time alone.

Step tried to make up for DeAnne’s preoccupation with Zap by playing games with the kids, but as often as not he was fixing meals or doing laundry while DeAnne napped, and so he wasn’t actually involved in what the kids were doing. And whenever possible he closed himself off in his office, struggling with IBM PC assembly language until he finally realized that he could get similar results using the new Turbo C language, which amounted to throwing away all he had done so far and starting over. It was maddening work, in part because the computer was so annoyingly designed and he had to use so many kludges to make the graphics work halfway decently or to get the tiny PC speaker to produce sounds that didn’t make you want to sledgehammer the machine into silence. When Step was finding a bug or puzzling out a solution to a particular problem, his concentration was so deep that he’d look up from his computer wondering if DeAnne needed him to help fix lunch, only to discover that it was dusk outside and she was already in the kitchen washing up after dinner. Back in Indiana they had already determined that their lives worked more smoothly if she didn’t make it a point to call Step to dinner. If he was concentrating so heavily that he didn’t notice her calling the kids, then he wouldn’t want her to interrupt him anyway.

So they were both a bit hit-and-miss when it came to the three older children that fall, and when they noticed, as they often did, that Stevie was still involved with his invisible friends to the exclusion of almost everything else, it bothered them, but they were able to console themselves that it didn’t mean he was losing his mind or that anybody was out to get him. It was just a trial he was passing through, and in the end it might even strengthen him. In the meantime there was Zap and Hacker Snack and not all that much time left over.

On the first of September CNN was full of the news of Korean Air Lines flight 007, which had gone down over Soviet airspace, probably shot down by the Russians. Step and DeAnne were complete news junkies—they ate dinner with the TV blaring away in the family room so they could hear it in the kitchen.

The phone rang. DeAnne was already up getting something from the fridge and she snagged the receiver off the hook, said a couple of words, and handed it to Step. “It’s Lee.”

“Hi, Lee,” said Step. “You’re really something, calling me on the first day of the month. You’ll make me into a first-rate home teacher yet.”

“Don’t waste my time,” said Lee.

“Sorry,” said Step. What was his problem? “What did you call about?”

“I know all about it,” said Lee. “I know what you did. You’re the one who has to put everybody under the water yourself, aren’t you?”

“What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t act innocent with me,” said Lee. “I can hear your TV on in the background. You’re tuned to CNN just like Mother. You put them in the water, all of them.”

“Lee, do you actually think I had something to do with that Korean Air Lines jet?”

“All I want to know from you is, are prepared for the consequences of nuclear war? Because the Communists won’t let you baptize them. They’re not Christian, and they won’t put up with it. They’ll send the missiles. I’ve studied the effects of nuclear war. I know about nuclear winter. I know what it will be like for the common people. But you’re too smart to be trapped. Nobody can trap you.”

Whatever precipice Lee had been walking along all these months, Step realized, he was definitely over the edge now.

“Lee, there isn’t going to be nuclear war.”

Lee laughed. “Did you think you could just lie to me and I’d go away? No, I’m not going to forget you. I’m stuck to you like glue. When you get on that submarine, I’m going to be with you.”

“Lee, are you at home right now?”

“God is in me now, Step. I’m not even using the phone, what do you think of that?”

“Well I’m using the phone,” said Step.

“I don’t need telephones when God is in me. I can see you right now. I can see your whole family.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m everywhere. I’m in everything. I am love, Step. I am that I am.” He giggled. “Moses never did understand what I meant by that.”

“Lee, get ahold of yourself.”

“All of those people under the water, like Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea. You want to be Moses? Parting the water, drowning people? Well, you can be my prophet if you want to. But you’d better pray first. You’d better offer a sacrifice.”

Lee’s words had long since gone from strange to disturbing. “Where are you, Lee?”

“You can’t find me,” said Lee. “Nobody can, because I’m invisible.”

“Why did you call me?”

“Because you’re the only one who has the power to say no to me.”

“Not even your mother?”

“Shh.” Suddenly he was whispering. “Don’t tell her. Promise.”

“I can’t promise that, Lee. You need help.”

“No, you need help!” Lee sounded very angry, now, but he was still speaking in a fairly low voice. “You need a lot of help, because I’m going to stop you before you put everybody under the water. I will not allow you to destroy the world again.”

“Lee, I’m just a guy you go home teaching with.”

“I know that,” said Lee, derisively. “Do you think I don’t know who you are? You must be crazy if you think you can hide from me.”

“I’m hanging up now, Lee.”

“Don’t leave without me.” Lee suddenly sounded frightened, desperate. “Let me have a place on the submarine! I won’t eat much.”

“Good-bye, Lee.”

“Do you really have to go?”

“Yes.”

“OK.” Now he sounded cheerful. “Nice talking to you. Ta-ta for now!”

Step set the receiver back on the hook. “DeAnne, I need Dr. Weeks’s number.”

Before he finished saying it, she handed him a note card with the number written on it. “Her home phone?” he asked.

“I looked it up,” said DeAnne. “I had a feeling you’d be using it.”

When he got her on the phone, Dr. Weeks did not sound at all surprised to learn that Lee had called. “He said he was invisible,” Step explained. “He said that he was talking to me without using a phone.”

“Well, he was using the phone,” said Dr. Weeks.

“Yes, I know that.” He covered the receiver and whispered to DeAnne, “She thinks I’m crazy.” Then to Dr. Weeks he said, “Listen, something’s wrong with Lee and I wanted you to know, that’s all. He’s really upset and he’s talking about being God and he thinks I shot down flight 007.”

“Apparently you’ve become a power figure to him,” said Dr. Weeks. “These fixations never last and he means no harm.”

“So you’ve got things under control?”

“He palms his pills, you see,” said Dr. Weeks. “But eventually he has to sleep.”

“He’s on medication?”

“I don’t discuss matters like this with nonprofessionals,” said Dr. Weeks.

“Fine,” said Step. “Just keep your son from calling nonprofessionals and you won’t have to discuss it with them.”

“Thank you for your concern,” said Dr. Weeks. “I’ll handle things now. Good-bye.”

That was that.

“What did she say?” asked DeAnne.

“I guess she’s handling it.” But he thought of the delusions that Lee was creating about him and his family, and he wondered if Dr. Weeks really had anything under control at all.

Step was in the grocery store when an insistent voice started calling out, “Brother Fletcher! Brother Fletcher!” It startled him, to hear himself called Brother outside of church. Most Mormons were a bit more discreet than that. Then he saw it was Sister LeSueur, and he understood.

“How is that lovely family of yours doing, Brother Fletcher?” she asked.

“Just fine,” he said.

“I’ve been praying for your family every day,” she said. “And I dedicated my Thursday fast to your little baby last week. I fast every Thursday, you know.”

“Thanks for thinking of us,” said Step, eager to get away from her. She was speaking so loudly. She must want something from him, but he couldn’t guess what it might be.

“I received a witness that you are indeed special unto the Lord,” she said.

“How kind of him to tell you that,” said Step. He glanced past her down the aisle, to see if anyone had been attracted by the noise. No one was even there. Or behind him, either. They had the canned soup section all to themselves.

“But there must needs be a time of testing first,” said Sister LeSueur. “That’s what your dear little baby is all about.”

Step felt anger well up inside. How dare she attempt to co-opt Zap’s tenuous little life. “I think Zap’s life is going to be about himself,” said Step. “Just like any other child.”

She reached out and touched his arm, beaming. “You are so right, Brother Fletcher. It must be wonderful, to be blessed with so much insight from the Spirit.”

“I really have to get the shopping done and get home, so …”

At the end of the aisle, a woman was standing, watching them. Step knew her, but he couldn’t place her. Was she somebody from Eight Bits?

“Don’t you think it’s time for you to bless your child?” asked Sister LeSueur.

“Don’t you think that’s a matter for me and DeAnne to decide?” No, the woman wasn’t from Eight Bits. It was Mrs. Jones. He hadn’t recognized her immediately last time, either, when they met in the drugstore back when Zap was still in the hospital. She was so nondescript.

“The Lord expects us to act boldly and with faith, Brother Fletcher,” Sister LeSueur said. “That’s what I was told in my dream. The blessing is yours by right, if only you have faith enough to demand it. Like the time I was urgently needed to perform compassionate service. There had been an ice storm the night before, and yet I didn’t have time to clear the ice off my car. So I told the Lord that if he wanted me to perform this service in his name, he would need to clear my windshield so I could drive. And when I came outside, mine was the only car that didn’t have two inches of ice encasing it.”

Mrs. Jones’s gaze never wavered. She thinks I’m stalking her, thought Step. With a cart full of groceries and a list in my hand, she thinks I’m here just to pester her.

“The Spirit spake to me in a dream and told me that it’s time for Brother Fletcher to claim a healing blessing from the Lord.”

“We ask for blessings,” said Step. “We don’t demand them.”

“‘I the Lord am bound when ye do what I say,”’ she quoted. “Bind the Lord, Brother Fletcher, bind him and heal your child. You are holding his sweet little soul hostage to your pride, saith the Lord.”

Saith Dolores LeSueur, Step answered silently.

“You must bend yourself to the will of the Lord, and cease rejecting his word to you. Do you pay your tithing faithfully?”

Still Mrs. Jones stood there. If only I had the tape with me, I could throw it at her and make her stop watching every move I make. He smiled at Sister LeSueur, thinking: I’m faking a smile. Mrs. Jones is watching me like that song by The Police.

“Go unto your child, lay your hands on his head, and command him to rise up and walk!”

“That would be a miracle,” he said. “He’s barely two months old.”

It was as if he had dashed cold water on her. “I know that,” she said. “I was sure you would understand that I spoke figuratively.”

I’m sure you’ll understand that I speak figuratively when I tell you to go sit on a broom handle and spin. “Sister LeSueur, I appreciate your advice. Now I need to finish my shopping.” He swung his cart around to head down the aisle away from Mrs. Jones. But Sister LeSueur caught at his sleeve.

“Brother Fletcher, you cannot resist the Lord forever.”

He turned to face her. “I have never resisted the Lord in my life, Sister LeSueur, and I never will. But I’m not so hungry for dialogue with him that I have to make up his part as well as my own.”

Her voice got a hard edge. “Beware of how the Lord will chasten you for your pride.”

This would be the perfect moment for Mrs. Jones to pull a gun out of her purse and shoot me dead. Sister LeSueur could live off that one event for the rest of her life. But Mrs. Jones wasn’t there anymore. She had slipped away while his back was turned.

“‘I will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children,” said Sister LeSueur.

He pushed his cart away from her. In one moment he had played out in his mind the whole scene of his death at Mrs. Jones’s hand. It had been so vivid that he could now remember moments of it as if he had actually seen them. The gun coming out of her purse, pointing at his chest—he could have reached out and touched the cold metal. Was that how Stevie’s imaginary friends were to him? How Sister LeSueur’s visions were to her? Never there in reality, and yet when they came back in memory, so real-seeming.

“‘Unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me,”’ said Sister LeSueur.

He turned the corner at the end of the aisle, leaving Sister LeSueur’s vengeful doctrine behind him. He quickly propelled the cart through the store, weaving among the other shoppers as if on the freeway. It took a while before he realized that he was no longer running away from Sister LeSueur, he was looking for Mrs. Jones. Because she had been watching him. Because she had made him think of the song. He had to know.

She wasn’t down any of the aisles. She wasn’t in the checkout lines. Abandoning his cart, Step rushed out of the store and scanned the parking lot. There she was, walking briskly among the cars. He hurried after her.

Perhaps he should have called to her, but he was afraid that she would run away, since she already thought he was stalking her. As it was, when he caught up with her, just as she was putting her key in the door of the Pinto, she gave a little scream.

Step made sure to stay well away from her, his hands in plain sight.

“Mrs. Jones, I wasn’t stalking you. I was grocery shopping.”

She said nothing.

“But are you stalking me?” he asked.

Her lip curled in contempt.

“You sent me that record, didn’t you?”

Her face went blank. “What record?”

“By The Police. That song about watching. Someone mailed it to our house.”

“I don’t even know where you live.”

“We’re in the book,” said Step, “so don’t be absurd. Just tell me if you sent it.”

She smiled. “So,” she said. “You don’t like knowing that somebody’s watching, is that it?”

“I never dealt with you anonymously Mrs. Jones.”

“I didn’t mail you anything, Mr. Fletcher,” she said, “so it must have been one of the other people you’re blackmailing.”

“Nobody else has persecuted any of my children,” said Step.

“So you think it’s me. You blame one more problem in your family on a woman who isn’t even your son’s teacher anymore.”

She’s enjoying this, he thought. She loves knowing that I’m really bothered by that anonymous record. Just as with Stevie, she loves to make somebody else squirm.

“Your lawyer never called me about a restraining order,” said Step.

She shrugged.

“But Captain Douglas of the Steuben police thinks that the fingerprints on the envelope the record came in should be enough to make a positive identification that will stand up in court.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said.

“Wore gloves, huh?” he asked. “But you didn’t wear gloves when you licked the stamp and pressed it onto the envelope.”

The stricken look on her face would have been answer enough. Her sudden relaxation a moment later confirmed it.

“That was a relief, I see,” said Step.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Remembering that you had the guy at the post office meter it.”

Her face revealed her inner struggle. Had she really let him know that she sent it, or was he bluffing?

“You never thought I was stalking you,” said Step. “You’ve known all along that you were the one watching me. So I’m telling you now, stop it. I’ve already given your name to the police as a possible sender of that record. They’re watching you. So it’s time for you to leave me and my family alone.”

“Leave you alone!” She sounded defiant, but his mention of the police had clearly bothered her.

“We’ve done you no harm. I could have reported what you did to the school board and sued the school district and you personally for what you did to Stevie. Your name could have been in all the papers. Instead I tried to be decent and handle it privately. Be grateful for that and stop looking to get even.”

“Grateful,” she scoffed. “To you? You’re so smart, Mr. Fletcher. You and your clever little boy. You can take away other people’s careers. You can make them work as temps and live with humiliation and fear every day of their lives.”

“Just as Stevie did,” said Step.

She glared at him, opened the door of her car, turned her back on him as she slipped inside.

“I keep almost feeling sorry for you,” said Step. “And then you prove to me all over again that you thrive on hurting other people. That’s what evil is, Mrs. Jones. That’s what you are.”

She hesitated before closing the door of the car, as if searching for some final, clinching retort. Then she slammed the door and started the engine. Step watched her pull out of the parking place and, with a squeal of tires, race for the street.

At least now I know who sent the record, thought Step. It wasn’t from the killer, just as Douglas said. It was from a bully. It was no worse than that.

When he got inside, someone had taken his shopping cart. No doubt a store employee was carefully putting everything back on the shelves. He sighed, pulled his list out of his pocket, and started over.

One night late in September, Step was going to be alone with the children while DeAnne was making a presentation on journal-keeping at homemaking meeting. He knew he should be helping to keep the children out of her hair as she got ready to go, but he was in the middle of a complicated algorithm that wouldn’t seem to go right, and he kept thinking, In a minute I’ll go help.

Robbie was walking up and down the hall, bouncing a ball as hard as he could, a relentless thump, thump, thump that was about to drive Step crazy. Finally he couldn’t stand it anymore. He got up and went into the hall to put a stop to the bouncing. At the same moment, DeAnne emerged from the bedroom in her slip, with the same mission in mind. Poor Robbie stood in the hall between them, looking in dread from one to the other. “Sorry,” he said in a small voice.

They both burst out laughing. “Just stop bouncing the ball inside the house, Road Bug,” said Step.

“OK,” said Robbie. “It don’t bounce good on the carpet anyway.”

“It doesn’t bounce well,” said Step.

“I know,” said Robbie, puzzled. “I told you.”

Half an hour after DeAnne left for the church, the phone rang. It was DeAnne. “This is going to sound stupid, Junk Man, but would you mind asking Robbie where he got that ball?”

“He’s had it for years,” said Step.

“But it rolled down one of the yucky holes in front of the house the first week we lived here,” she said. “I want to know how it got out again. You didn’t rescue it, did you?”

“I didn’t even know it was lost. Maybe I could put it back.”

“Step, please find out or it’ll drive me crazy for the rest of my life.”

He agreed, hung up, and went in search of Robbie.

“The invisible guy got it for me,” said Robbie. “He said it wasn’t very far down in the drain, and it came when he called it.”

Step might have rebuked him for making up such a weird story, but the mention of an invisible guy gave him pause. “Where did you meet this invisible guy, Road Bug?”

“In the yard today,” said Robbie. “He was naked because if he wore clothes people would see him.”

“But you could see him,” said Step.

“I’m your son,” said Robbie, as if that explained everything.

Lee Weeks, thought Step. “How long ago was this?” asked Step. “Before or after Stevie got home from school?”

“Before,” said Robbie. “He’s gone now. He had to fly to Raleigh.”

Step went around the house, double-checking the locks. Then he made Robbie and Stevie go into Betsy’s and Zap’s bedroom while he went outside.

It was nearly dark, with scant moonlight, but Step saw him almost at once, a pale ghostlike figure standing up against the neighbor’s high hedge in the front yard. Step locked the front door behind him and strode toward him.

“How did you get over here with no clothes on, Lee?” he asked.

Lee laughed in delight. “I knew you’d be able to see me. Just like your son.”

“You’re lucky it wasn’t a cop who saw you, Lee. This is called ‘indecent exposure’ and you go to jail for it.” In fact, though, Lee’s naked body was more sad than anything, so pale, the hair making feeble shadows. “I don’t appreciate you talking to my son in this condition.”

“I can’t help it if he has your power to see the invisible,” said Lee.

“You’ve been palming your medicine again, I guess.”

“Mother checks my hands,” said Lee. “She checks my mouth. And she watches me so I don’t throw it up.”

“Do you hate it that much?”

“It makes me feel like I’m moving through the world in a fog,” said Lee. “When I don’t take it, everything gets so sharp and clear. I can see forever. And my thoughts—I can think the thoughts of God. I don’t have to sleep. I haven’t slept in five days.”

“I can believe it,” said Step, noticing that if Lee was God, then God chewed gum. “Why are you here?”

“If you’re really going to be my spokesman, then you have to be tested.”

“I’m not going to be your spokesman, Lee. Where are your clothes?”

“Those are the robes of my captivity,” he said. “I never had clothing.”

“Yeah, well, they don’t fit your mother.”

“My mother likes you,” said Lee. “She thinks you’re really smart.”

“How nice.”

“But she says you don’t like woman psychiatrists.”

“She’s mistaken,” said Step.

“Oh, you don’t have to pretend. I don’t like them either. They’re so bossy. And they don’t understand what it’s like. They’ve got their drugs to turn you into a robot, when you’re just this close to seeing it all. To getting the whole picture.”

The picture I need right now, thought Step, is how to get you safely back into your mother’s care without endangering my family and preferably without bringing in the police. “We never get the whole picture in this life, Lee.”

“I do,” said Lee. “I see that you’re planning to call my mother.”

“Of course I am,” said Step. “You need your medicine.”

“Never again. I’m going to go seven days without sleeping and on the seventh day I’ll come into my full power. It’s sleep that dulls our minds, you know. I almost made it once before. I was driving along in that jet-black Z and I knew that all I had to do was just lean back to the right angle in my seat and I could fly anywhere. It was God in me. I wish I’d done it, Step. But the police wouldn’t listen to me. The guy from the car lot must have called them. He didn’t understand that it was my car now. I drove exactly fifty-five, so the policemen wouldn’t stop me. But they have no respect for the law. They knew they had to stop me before I began to fly. They cut me off, about five or six police cars, and I got out of the car when they told me but they made me lie down on the road and the gravel got into my face and it really hurt.” His voice went high at the end. A kind of whimper, a childlike cry. It made Step think of Howie Mandel’s little-kid voice, small and high. It was funny when Mandel did it.

“That was the time I was in the hospital. I told them, I can’t stand to be confined. But they strapped me down anyway, it’s this kind of straitjacket for when you’re lying on the table. You can, like, lift one arm, but if you do, it tightens down the straps on all the others, including the one around your throat. So if you move your arms both at once you can choke yourself. And I kept thinking, what if I fall off the table? I’ll strangle here and they won’t do anything because they’re jealous of me and they want me to die without ever coming into my power.”

“I think they were trying to help you, Lee.”

“It was killing me. So I started screaming, I don’t like this, I don’t like this, over and over but when the guy finally came in he just tightened it more so I couldn’t even move one arm anymore and he said, We won’t loosen this until you show us that you’re in control of yourself, and I said How can I be in control of myself when you’ve tied me up? You’ve got to let me stand up, I won’t go anywhere, I promise, and he says Yeah right. And then Mom got there and she had the medicine again but when she tried to give it to me I threw up right on her.” He laughed uproariously. Then stopped. “She won’t let me drive anymore. I had to walk all the way over here. Look. My feet are bleeding.”

It was true. When he sat down in the grass and held up his feet for inspection, Step could see even by the light from the porch that they were badly lacerated, with bits of gravel and road dirt ground into the wounds.

“That must hurt,” said Step.

“I’m above pain,” said Lee. “That’s how I know I’m on the verge of my power. Pain means nothing to me. I could break you in half and you couldn’t hurt me. I could break you up into pieces.”

Step thought of Lee talking to Robbie in this condition and shuddered with retroactive dread.

“It’s time for your test,” said Lee. “To see if you’re worthy to be my servant and accompany me into immortality.”

Step could think of several ways to enter immortality, and he didn’t want any of them to happen right now, least of all with Lee Weeks. “I don’t intend to take any tests,” said Step.

“Fine,” said Lee. “But I’ll bet you can’t guess how I faked Mom out about the medicine.”

Step said the first thing that came to mind. “You hid the pill in your chewing gum.”

Lee cackled with glee. “That was the test! You passed it!”

“One question? The whole test?”

“That’s it. I’m going to take you with me now.” Lee scrambled to the hedge on all fours, and started searching for something. A gun? Step didn’t intend to wait to find out.

“Wait a minute,” said Step. “What about my test for you?”

“You don’t test me,” said Lee. “I’m God, you idiot.”

“So you say,” said Step. “Anybody can say that.”

“But I’m invisible.”

“Not to me.”

“What’s your test, then?” asked Lee.

“Let me go in and get it.”

“Get what?”

“The test. It’s an object, and you have to tell me where I got it. If you’re God, you’ll know.”

“I already know what it is,” said Lee. “God already knows what your whole test is. When I asked you, that was a joke.”

“OK,” said Step. “Wait there.”

He unlocked the front door, went inside, and locked it behind him. He called Stevie’s name as he headed for the phone. Dr. Weeks’s number was ringing when Stevie got into the kitchen. “Go get me Robbie’s ball. Tell Robbie I need it right now, and bring it to me.”

Then Dr. Weeks answered.

“Are you looking for Lee?” asked Step.

“Is he there?”

“Naked and talking about taking me into immortality with him. He might have a gun.”

“Lee isn’t violent,” she said.

“His feet are badly injured. I think you’ll want an ambulance.”

“We’ll be right there. Don’t let him leave.” She hung up.

Stevie came back with the ball. Robbie had followed him. “Go back to Betsy’s room, boys,” said Step. “Stay there and don’t leave.”

Back outside, the door locked behind him, Step held out the ball. “Do you recognize this?”

“I called it, and it came to me,” said Lee. “I have called it again, and you have brought it unto me.”

“How did I get this ball, Lee? If you’re God, you’ll know.”

“You got it from Robbie, of course,” said Lee.

“No, Robbie got it from me. It was a present. So I ask you again, how did I get this ball?”

Lee tried several answers, but as soon as he spoke, he immediately refused to let Step tell him whether he was right or not. “This is very hard,” said Lee. “You have great powers, Brother Fletcher. You are able to conceal this knowledge from me.”

The guessing game lasted until the ambulance and Dr. Weeks arrived ten minutes later.

“You tricked me, you bastard,” said Lee.

“That was the test,” said Step. “To know that the ball wasn’t the test.”

Lee’s fury turned to disappointment. “Then I failed.”

“You aren’t God, Lee. You’re just a nice kid with a serious problem.”

Lee stood impassively as the men from the ambulance took him by the arms. Dr. Weeks came up to him, baring the needle of a syringe.

“Please don’t, Mom,” said Lee. “You’ll ruin everything. It’ll all be wasted.”

“You need to sleep,” said Dr. Weeks.

“I need to sleep with you,” said Lee, laughing. “Isn’t that what your precious Freud said? I need to kill Dad and sleep with you.”

“How did you get off your medicine this time?”

“Step knows,” said Lee.

“He hid it inside his chewing gum,” said Step.

Lee looked crestfallen. “You told.”

Dr. Weeks pushed the plunger down and Lee watched, fascinated, as the fluid went into his arm. “Is this the fast stuff?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Weeks.

It was true. By the time they got him to the ambulance, Lee wasn’t walking under his own power. They strapped him down inside. “Take him right in,” Dr. Weeks told them. “They’re expecting him. I’ll be there very soon.”

They drove off. Dr. Weeks stood there on the lawn, facing Step. “Thank you,” she said.

“It must be hard,” said Step. “Being a psychiatrist, and having a manic-depressive child.”

“Lee is the reason I became a psychiatrist. So I could understand him.”

“And do you?”

“No,” she said. “Not when he’s like this. Not even when he’s not like this. I think he likes his madness better. I think he doesn’t want to get well.” She smiled wanly. “You don’t like me, Mr. Fletcher.”

“I think you should have warned us about Lee when he joined the Church.”

“When one is alone and at wit’s end,” she said quietly, “one seizes upon even the tiniest hope.”

“Did you think we could heal him?” asked Step, thinking of Sister LeSueur and wondering if she would think herself up to the job.

“No,” she said. “But I thought, since you believed … as you believe … that God talks to human beings … I thought you might accept him.”

“We did,” said Step. “As best we could.”

“And I, too,” said Dr. Weeks. “As best I can.”

After she left, he rummaged through the hedge, looking for whatever it was that Lee had been reaching for. It wasn’t a weapon after all. It was the Book of Mormon that the missionaries had given him.

The autumn wore on, the routine changing but not in any important way. Jerusha brought along a physical therapist on her October visit, and he told Step that what he was doing, stretching out Zap’s muscles and moving his limbs through their full range of motion, was not only good but essential. “It’s like his brain doesn’t have the normal connections to his muscles. When he shoots off a command, it does too much, which is why he kicks so hard, but then it disappears, just like that, and so he can’t sustain anything. By himself he can’t keep his limbs limber, so to speak. So you have to keep his tendons from tightening up on him. Same thing they do for coma patients.”

“We’ll have to do this for how long?” asked Step.

“Till he finds some alternate neural pathway to let him do it for himself. He will, you know. Just give him time.”

It was encouraging, and now DeAnne and Step took turns twice a day, flexing and extending all of Zap’s joints. Robbie and Stevie even picked up on it—Stevie silently, wordlessly doing exactly what he had seen Step and DeAnne do; Robbie far too rough and never quite correctly, so that they had to insist that he only do “Zap bending” when they were there.

DeAnne’s hardest job with Zap was bathing him. Zap didn’t cry much—only when he was in real pain, which happened mostly when she fed him formula and he didn’t burp enough. However, bathtime was torment for him. For some reason the water terrified him. Maybe, Step speculated, because gravity was the one constant, the one thing that felt in control in his life, and in the water the gravity just wasn’t there the same way. DeAnne only answered, Maybe, but who can know? What mattered was that bathtime was the only time that Zap ever got really upset, and then he was frantic, and his desperate cries just tore DeAnne apart, because she couldn’t help him feel better and yet she couldn’t give up bathing him, either. Finally what she evolved was a song that she called “Tubby Time for Jeremy.” It was completely absurd and the first time she realized Step was listening to her she blushed and stopped, but he insisted she teach him the words and he sang along with her, so she wasn’t embarrassed anymore.

Tubby time in the city.

Tubby time in the town.

Tubby time for Jeremy,

It’s tubby time right now.

So Tubby-dub and scrubby-dub,

It’s time for your nightgown.

It’s tubby time all over the world,

So please don’t frown.

As she explained to Step, the song didn’t really help Zap at all. But it helped her—it soothed her so she could endure his desperate sobbing and keep on bathing him without going to pieces inside.

Around the middle of October, Step and DeAnne both became aware that Stevie’s behavior was changing just a little. He was no longer being quite as obedient as before. In fact, at times he seemed almost rebellious. The rule in the house now was that no kid could go outside without one of the parents, and Stevie knew that-in fact, he had several times caught Betsy going out and brought her back in. But one day DeAnne came into the family room from the back of the house just as Stevie was coming inside through the back door.

“Stevie, what were you doing outside?”

“Looking,” said Stevie.

“Good heavens, young man, you’re filthy! Where have you been?”

“Under the house,” he said.

She remembered the latticework skirt around the base of the house and immediately flashed back to her imagined picture of what it was like under there, all the bugs and webs and mud and filth. Having crickets come up through the closet last winter hadn’t done anything to change that image in her mind, either. “That’s just incredible!” she said. “You know what the rule is about going outside, and to think you pried open the latticework and went under the house, that’s just unspeakable! I’m going to have Bappy come over and nail it all down. Now get into the laundry room and strip off your clothes while I get a bath running.”

Later that night DeAnne and Step discussed what had happened, and they realized that because of Stevie’s hard adjustment and their worry about these invisible friends of his, they had been slack with him. They may not have held him to a firm enough standard of discipline.

“But when you think about it, when would we have disciplined him?” asked Step. “I mean, till now he hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“Well, now he has, and I don’t know what to do about it. I can’t start deadbolting the back door and taking the key out because what if there was a fire? I can just see the headline: FAMILY HAD PLENTY OF TIME TO ESCAPE BUT DEADBOLTS WERE ALL LOCKED AND KEYS COULD NOT BE FOUND IN TIME.”

“They don’t write headlines that long,” said Step.

“Oh, good, so we’ll die and no one will even know why.”

“Less embarrassing that way.”

“I think we need to show him that this is serious. I mean, there’s a killer somewhere in Steuben, and Stevie’s cutting out of the house without even telling us. Not to mention crawling under the house, I mean that’s disgusting.”

“Not really,” said Step. “Not when you realize that my younger sister and my younger brothers used to eat dirt.”

“Oh, gross!” cried DeAnne. “Did you have to tell me that?”

“They’d come into the house with flecks of mud all around their mouths and then try to act innocent when Mom said, ‘Have you been eating dirt again?’ And they’d open their mouths to say, ‘No, Mom,’ and the whole inside of their mouths was black with mud.”

“I’m going to throw up, Step. I mean it.”

“I’m just saying, kids like to mess in dirt. I always liked to dig in it, and maybe Stevie would like to, too, only there’s just no place for it.”

“It’s a rental house. We can’t just tear up a section of lawn for him.”

“Oh,” said Step. “That’s what I was just about to suggest.”

“And it’s October, it’s not going to get any warmer out there. And most important, that has nothing to do with him going outside in the first place without permission. He has to know we’re serious.”

“OK, so we confine him to the house.”

“Step, that’s not a normal life, being confined to the house. Besides, I want him outside.”

“So we cut off his computer privileges. Tomorrow, no Atari.”

“Oh, that really will hurt. He’s always playing that Lode Runner game.”

“Oh, he is? I’ve never seen him play it. I thought I was the only one who ever played it—I thought it had turned out to be a real lousy birthday gift for him.”

“No, he plays it all the time. In fact, a couple of times I’ve thought that I’d really like it if you’d teach me how to run it.”

“It’s not hard. You just make sure there aren’t any cartridges in the computer, put the disk into the drive, close the door, and turn the machine on.”

“Right, that’s easy for you and Stevie.”

“Let’s do it right now.”

They went into the family room and Step showed her each thing to do and then he switched on the computer and the game came up and he said, “There it is. You just move the little guy with the joystick and try to get the treasures without the bad guys getting you.”

“That’s not Lode Runner,” said DeAnne.

“Yes, it is,” said Step.

“No, that’s the little-man game that I saw you playing that time.”

“Right, and the little-man game is called Lode Runner.”

“No,” she said.

Step popped open the disk drive and pulled out the disk and showed her. “Look! A miracle! The disk says Lode Runner, and yet what comes up is the little-man game!”

“No, I mean, of course you’re right, I just thought that Lode Runner was a different game.”

“What, then?”

“That one that Stevie always plays. The pirate ship game. It really looks beautiful sometimes, when they’re just sailing along, the sails snapping in the wind. And the sailors climbing all over—I’ve never seen any other game like it. No offense, Step, but I kept thinking, If only Step could do a game that looked like that.”

“Oh, no offense, right,” said Step. He was a little miffed, but what mattered was that she, too, had seen the pirate ship game, only she saw it all the time, and she had watched it long enough to see different aspects of the game. “He must switch it off whenever I’m around,” said Step. “I’ve never caught more than a glimpse of it.”

“Oh, no, he plays it for hours,” said DeAnne.

“In front of you?”

“Yes.”

“Talking to his friends the whole time?”

“Well, yes,” she said. “That’s how I’ve picked up their names. Hearing what he says to them.”

“Have you noticed what he does with the joystick when he’s playing the game?”

“Oh, I think he moves it now and then, but it doesn’t seem to be that kind of game.”

“No, I’d say not,” said Step. “Does he ever type anything? Ever use the keyboard? Or the paddle controllers?”

“Not that I remember,” said DeAnne. “Why?”

“Only because if he’s not doing anything with the joystick or the keyboard or anything, then how is it a game? What is he exactly doing?”

“Does he have to do anything?”

“DeAnne, if he causes things to happen onscreen, it’s a game. If he doesn’t, it’s a movie.”

“Well, people go to football games and watch them, and they never throw the ball or anything and it’s still a game.”

“Because there are human beings down on the field playing. But what human being is playing this pirate ship game? Not Stevie.”

DeAnne frowned. “You know that I don’t know anything about computers, really, except how to boot up your Altos and get Wordstar so I can do things for church.”

“Take my word for it. The reason I’ve never programmed a game that had all that wonderful animation is because it can’t be done.”

“Well it can,” said DeAnne. “I’ve seen it.”

“There’s only 48K of RAM in that machine, and the disk doesn’t even have a hundred kilobytes on it. Three seconds of that ship sailing along with the sailors climbing all over the rigging would chew up every scrap of that memory. And yet the ship moves all over the screen, right?”

“Two ships, sometimes three,” said DeAnne.

“And sometimes they’re bigger or smaller?”

“They get big when they move closer, I guess.”

“It can’t be done. It certainly can’t be done fast enough to be smooth animation.”

“Well, I’ve seen it, Step, so don’t tell me it can’t be done just because you don’t know how!”

Step held his tongue.

“This whole discussion is about how to let Stevie know we’re serious about him going outside, remember?”

“Right.”

“So we’ll tell him that tomorrow he can’t use the computer at all, OK?”

“OK.”

It was not that simple after all. When they told Stevie this the next morning at breakfast, before he went to school, he looked positively stricken. “You can’t,” he said.

“Actually” said Step, “we can.”

“Please,” said Stevie. “I’ll be good.”

“We know that you’re a good boy,” said DeAnne. “But we have to help you understand how serious it is that you not go outside without permission.”

“Please don’t make me not use the computer.” He was in tears. It had been months since Stevie had cried about anything.

“It’s not like we’re taking it away permanently,” said Step.

“It’s just for a day,” said DeAnne.

“You can’t,” said Stevie.

“Why not?” asked Step.

Stevie slid his cereal bowl away, laid his head down on the table, and sobbed.

Step looked at DeAnne in consternation.

“Stevie,” said DeAnne. “This reaction of yours actually worries me as much as your having broken the rule and gone outside. I had no idea you were so dependent on using the computer. I don’t think that’s healthy. Maybe you need to stay away from the computer for a lot longer than a day.”

At that, Stevie shoved his chair back and staggered into the corner of the kitchen near the window. He looked savagely, desperately angry. “You can’t! That’s the only thing they’re staying for! If I can’t play they’ll go away!”

DeAnne and Step looked at each other, both reaching the same conclusion. Has it been that easy to get rid of the imaginary friends all along? Just turn off the computer?

“You’ve got no right!” Stevie screamed at them. “I’ve been trying so hard!”

Stevie’s words were so strange that Step couldn’t help but flash on his conversations with Lee during his madness. No, Step thought, rejecting the comparison. I just don’t understand the context of what Stevie is saying. It’ll be rational if I just understand the context.

“Calm down, Door Man,” said Step. “Calm down, relax. Your mother didn’t say that we were definitely going to take the computer away. But look at yourself. You’re out of control. That’s really pretty scary, and it makes us think maybe you’ve been spending way too much time on the Atari.”

“Not as much as you spend on the IBM in there,” said Stevie.

“That happens to be my work,” said Step. “That happens to be what pays for our house and our food and for Zaps doctor bills.”

“Are you the only one in the family who has work to do?” Stevie demanded.

The question took Step aback. “Why, do you have work to do?” he asked Stevie.

“Please don’t make me stop playing the game. I’ll never be bad again ever, please, please, please.”

“Stevie, you weren’t bad, you were just—”

“Then I’ll never be whatever it was that I was, only don’t make me stop playing with them, they’ll go away and I’ll never find them again. It was so hard to get them all together, it was so hard.”

Suddenly a picture emerged in Step’s mind. This game with the pirate ships had become, in Stevie’s mind, the whole world of his imaginary friends. He used to play with them in the back yard, but it must have all moved indoors so that now he could only find them when he was playing with the computer. That meant that maybe Stevie wasn’t hallucinating them anymore. Maybe the only time he could actually see them was when they were pixels moving on the screen, and he was afraid that if they slipped away any further, they’d be gone.

Well, wasn’t that what Step and DeAnne wanted? They had thought that Stevie wasn’t showing any progress, but without their even knowing it, he had stopped having hallucinations. It was gradually getting better by itself, and so they didn’t need to push it, didn’t need to force the issue. He had made up these boys to fit the names that were forced on him, to give them substance, and then he had built his whole life around them. Let him outgrow them, as he was already starting to do. Let him gradually wean himself back to reality.

“How about this?” said Step. “Instead of cutting you off from the game, we put a time limit on it. If your homework’s done and you’ve had your dinner and your bath and everything by seven-thirty, you can play until eight-thirty, and then no matter what the computer’s off and you’re in bed.”

“Every day?” asked DeAnne. “That doesn’t sound like much of a restriction to me.”

“Why don’t we talk about it ourselves later,” said Step. “We’ll start with an hour a day and go from there. All right, Stevie?”

“Even today?” he asked.

“Today is still off-limits,” said DeAnne.

“Why not say this,” said Step. “No computer after school for sure, and then your mom and I will talk it over and decide about later tonight.”

DeAnne looked at him, her face full of exasperation, but Step remained expressionless, insisting on holding her to the bargain that they never play good-parent, bad-parent in front of the children—though in fact he had just violated the bargain himself.

Actually, the bargain included an unspoken agreement that if one parent felt very, very strongly, the parent who felt less strongly about it would go along. And even though DeAnne clearly thought that she should have been given precedence, the very fact that Step had insisted anyway told her that maybe she should back off.

So she did.

In the meantime, Stevie had calmed down a lot, though his eyes were still red-rimmed, his face white.

“Do you think you can still go to school today?” asked Step.

He nodded.

“Stevie, have you made any friends at school this year?”

He shrugged.

“I mean, do the kids talk to you?”

He shrugged, then nodded.

“Stevie, do you ever have fun?”

Stevie just looked at him. “Sure,” he finally said.

“I mean, besides with the computer?”

When Stevie didn’t answer, DeAnne interrupted. “If we’re going to get either of you boys to school on time, we’ve got to go now. And then your father and I are going to have a long discussion.”

They had the discussion, but it wasn’t rancorous. Step explained his thinking, DeAnne agreed with him, and they decided that limiting Stevie to an hour a day would help him taper off without giving him the stress of quitting the game and losing his friends all at once.

“The funniest thing,” said DeAnne. “You know when he said, ‘You’re not the only one with work to do?’ or whatever it was he said?”

“Yeah, I didn’t know whether to be delighted to see him showing so much emotion or appalled that for the first time in his life he was yelling at his father.”

“Do you know what went through my mind when he said that?” said DeAnne. “I thought, ‘Wist ye not that I must be about my father’s business?’ “

Step just looked at her. And then said, “Do you know what that reminds me of?”

She shook her head.

“Lee Weeks,” Step said. “First he thinks he’s God, and then you think you’re the virgin Mary.”

“I wasn’t joking.”

“I was hoping you were,” said Step.

“Maybe he’s doing something really serious, Step. Maybe he’s got a clearer vision of the world than we have. I mean, we already know that in some ways he does understand more than we do, and he always has.”

“I know,” said Step. “But we’re talking about computer games here.”

“We’re talking about Stevie being aware of evil in the world. Have you forgotten that he knew the names?”

“The serial killer hasn’t done anything since that article.”

“But the boys he killed are still dead,” said DeAnne. “And Stevie is still playing with imaginary friends that have their names. How do we know what is or is not important? When the boy Jesus stood there talking to the learned men in the temple, that was more important than Joseph’s carpentry and more important than Mary’s worry about him.”

“Maybe you’re right,” said Step. “But nevertheless, Mary worried about him, and Joseph still kept doing his carpentry, because that was their job. And when they came and got Jesus from the temple, he went with them. He didn’t stand there and cry and scream at them. I mean, I know we believe in likening the scriptures to ourselves, DeAnne, but it can be carried too far.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I was just telling you what went through my mind.”

The last phone call from Lee Weeks came on the twenty-sixth of October, a Wednesday night. It was the second day of the invasion of Grenada, and Step had stopped working the whole day, watching the news. At one in the morning Step was still up, sitting in the family room flipping the TV back and forth between news broadcasts and stupid old movies. When the phone rang Step thought either someone had died or someone in Utah was calling and had forgotten the time difference again.

“The war is on,” said Lee.

“Hi, Lee,” said Step.

“I saved the quarter you sent me. I picked it up from the sidewalk where you left it.”

Please, thought Step. Please just don’t call me again.

“They saw me pick something up on my walk, and they strip-searched me, but I swallowed it.”

“You swallowed a quarter?”

“I knew I’d get it back, and when I did, I’d call you. I found it on the day they blew up the U.S. Marines. I knew that God was through with the world, and then you sent me the quarter and I thought, I am prepared. And now when war is raging over the face of the earth, I got the quarter back.”

“Where are you calling me from?” asked Step.

“The payphone in the waiting area. I don’t have long to talk, because the attendants will find out I’m not in bed pretty soon. That’s why you’ll have to act quickly. Is the submarine ready?”

“Lee, I don’t have a submarine.”

“No!” he shouted. “No! No!”

Step almost shushed him, but then he realized, if Lee is in an institution somewhere and he’s hiding, having him yell into the phone will help them find him.

After a moment, though, Lee stopped shouting. “She put me here,” he said. “But God is getting impatient. He is tired of the way I keep falling asleep, but I can’t help it. I can’t help it.” He started to cry.

“Lee, it’s all right, really. Everything’s going to be all right.”

“Step, you’re my only friend. You’re the only one who ever understood the glorious being inside my humble body.”

“That’s still true, Lee. You’re trapped inside a body that isn’t working right. It keeps giving you a distorted version of reality.”

“I tried to see the truth,” said Lee. “But I didn’t see enough, did I? I didn’t measure up. So you’re going to leave without me, and I’ll be here for the day after. But I’m not afraid. I’d rather die than live on, knowing that I didn’t have what it took to be saved.”

“Lee, you didn’t fail a test. You just have to take the medication they give you.”

“That’s what you have to say to the ones who fail. I understand that, Step. You could have burned me up when you saw how weak I was. But I’m not as weak as they think. I got even with them. This is so beautiful, you’re going to love this! You want to know what I did?”

“Sure,” said Step.

“I didn’t wash the quarter.” Lee burst out laughing, long and hard. “I didn’t … wash … the quarter!”

There was a flurry of noises. Lee stopped laughing and said, quite cheerily, “Ta-ta for now!”

The line went dead.

14: Christmas Eve

This is what Stevie bought with his Christmas money: For Robbie, a Go-Bot, since Robbie was called Robot sometimes and he liked vehicles and the Go-Bot turned from one into the other whenever you wanted. For Betsy, two blue ribbon bow clips for her hair, because she was so proud of how long it was but it always got into her eyes. For Zap, a cassette tape of songs for Mormon children, sold by Dolores LeSueur’s daughter, Janet, the Bright Music distributor in Steuben, on the day when she came over to the house to make a combined sales call and visiting-teaching visit for the Relief Society.

For Jack, a Hot Wheels race car because he was so fast. For Scotty, a deck of cards because he bragged about what a good poker player he was. For David, a small fake-ceramic dog because he liked dogs. For Roddy, a harmonica because he liked songs. For Peter, a ball of string because he liked kites. For Van, a Star Wars button because it was his favorite movie. For Sandy, a squirt gun because he was such a good aim.

Stevie had saved his allowances and added it to the twenty dollars of Christmas money Step and DeAnne doled out to each of the kids, so he had enough-barely. DeAnne had Stevie with her, and Zap in a stroller, while Step had Betsy and Robbie, so that the two pairs of kids could buy presents for the others and for the parent they were not with; later, they would meet in the food court of the mall, have sweet rolls, and then redivide the kids so they could finish the shopping. So it was DeAnne who first realized who it was Stevie was shopping for. She made an attempt to deflect him from his purchases, but it came to nothing.

“Stevie,” she said, “we don’t allow our kids to buy presents for friends, just for family.”

Stevie looked at her and said, “Nobody else is going to buy presents for them.”

She didn’t have the heart to forbid him then, even though she thought it was foolish of her to let him carry it this far. Well, she thought, at least he’s never required us to set a place at table for his imaginary friends, the way some kids do. We’d have to rent a banquet hall every night if we did.

When the shopping was done and they were all walking out to the cars in the cold night air, Stevie spoke up. “Mom and Dad.”

“Yes, Stevie.”

“I didn’t buy presents for the two of you, but that’s OK, because I’m doing something else.”

“That’s fine, Stevie. We don’t really need anything except for our family to be together and to be happy and kind,” said DeAnne.

Stevie said no more about it.

But that night, alone in their room, DeAnne and Step talked about the problem of his presents for his imaginary friends. “What are we supposed to do with them?” asked Step. “Handle it like letters to Santa Claus or something? He leaves them under the tree and the next morning we have little faked-up presents supposedly from his friends?”

“We can’t do that,” said DeAnne. “We can’t encourage him to believe even more than he does.”

“I don’t know,” said Step. “Maybe he has his own way of giving things to them or something.”

“All we can do is play it by ear.”

Christmas was going to be on Sunday this year, which was always something of a pain because it meant that there’d be a conflict between the American custom of present-opening on Christmas morning and the Church requirement of going to sacrament meeting. It was a relief when they found out that the Steuben wards had a tradition of holding a single combined sacrament meeting at ten A.M. and then canceling Sunday school and all the other meetings so everybody was home well before noon. That way even if the present-opening had to be split in half, the kids would have all their stocking presents—the only ones from Santa under the tree—and a few of the family presents before they went to church. The edge would have been taken off their anxiousness.

But the special Christmas sacrament meeting meant a serious choir program. The choir leader of the 2nd Ward apparently regarded herself as the queen of music in the western hemisphere, and Mary Anne Lowe found herself quickly outmaneuvered as a combined choir was formed exclusively under the direction of the 2nd Ward choir leader. DeAnne toyed with the idea of boycotting the choir out of loyalty to Mary Anne, but Mary Anne just laughed at her. “It’s Christmas,” she said. “What do I care who’s the boss of things? I just want to sing and have us sound great so that it really feels like Christmas to the rest of the ward.” So the last few weeks in December were a flurry of ward and stake and Relief Society and quorum Christmas parties and socials and programs, with choir practices shoehorned in wherever possible. Step attended as many practices as he could, alternating with DeAnne so that they didn’t have to take the kids outside very much. The weather was turning bitterly cold, and there was talk that a cold front would be coming through Christmas Eve that would make Steubenites think their town had been swapped with Duluth in the night.

In the meantime, Step was working at a frenzied pace to finish debugging the PC Hacker Snack, which was really shaping up as a terrific program. He had to get it done before New Year’s, so that they’d get the completion check in time to cover the Christmas credit card bills, not to mention the final installment of Zap’s hospital bills and the last of the back taxes owed to the IRS. Their collection officer had sworn faithfully to them that this year the IRS would not come in and strip their checking accounts while all the Christmas shopping checks were outstanding, the way the Indiana IRS office had done the year before. But Step and DeAnne kept what money they had out of the bank during Christmas anyway, paying for everything with cash or credit card; the IRS had never once kept a single promise in their sorry history of dealing with them over back taxes, and they didn’t really expect anything different this year, either.

The Sunday before Christmas was a disaster at Church, because Dolores LeSueur found out that the two bishoprics had decided to do something new for the Christmas program this year. In past years, Dolores’s husband, Jacob (not Jake, not Cubby, no matter how long you had known him before he married Dolores), had always read the entire text of “The Other Wise Man,” which Dolores had been told in a dream was not fiction at all, but a true story which was originally in the Gospel of John but was removed by wicked scribes working for the sun-worshiping Emperor Constantine in the fourth century A.D. This year, the bishoprics had decided to have a short talk by Emil Houdon, who had visited the Holy Land in the summer despite the hot weather and the fighting in Lebanon. Emil had promised to tell a couple of inspirational anecdotes and quit talking after ten minutes, and everybody who knew what was being planned thought this would be the best Christmas Sunday in a long time. Sister LeSueur, however, knew that it was a sign that both wards were on the high road to apostasy, and she caused such a fuss that by the time the 1st Ward had wrapped up its meetings at noon on Sunday the eighteenth, it was decided that the entire program, including the choir numbers, would be replaced by the reading of “The Other Wise Man.”

Then the 2nd Ward choir leader found out that she had been preempted, and she raised such a stink that by four P.M., when the 2nd Ward meetings were finished, the choir program had been restored and the special Christmas sacrament meeting would now run to about two hours, if all went smoothly. The bishopric members went home knowing they had been utterly defeated, but grateful that at least this brouhaha had been settled without Dolores calling one of the General Authorities in Salt Lake City.

Through all of this, Step and DeAnne watched with a mixture of disgust and despair. “And to think that when I was a child, I wondered how the true Church of Christ could ever have been lost from the earth,” said DeAnne.

“Oh, this is small potatoes,” said Step. “People have been killed over the question of what date they should celebrate Easter.”

“Yes, but we’re supposed to know better,” said DeAnne.

“We do,” said Step. “After all these years, no one has yet arranged for a public stoning of Dolores LeSueur. The Steuben wards are populated by true Saints.”

DeAnne went to choir practice that evening and shared a music book with Dolores LeSueur. They got along fine with the singing, but at the end of the choir practice, after the closing prayer, as people were gathering their coats and purses and, in a few cases, children, Dolores put her hand on DeAnne’s arm and said, “Sister Fletcher, I’ve been praying and praying about your little boy, and I want you to know that the Lord truly loves him.”

“I know that,” said DeAnne.

“I cannot share with you all the sacred things that I have seen in vision about your little boy, but I can say that it must surely be a blessing to you to know that his spirit is so righteous and perfect that he will be caught up into the celestial kingdom without having to taste of sin and temptation.”

DeAnne realized that Sister LeSueur was assuming that Zap was retarded, and therefore had the same promise as children who died unbaptized before the age of accountability, that they would be exalted. It was really annoying to have her assume what even the doctors did not dare to predict—that Zap was going to be mentally impaired. And what made it downright infuriating was the sweet, beatific smile on Dolores’s face when DeAnne knew perfectly well that this woman had browbeaten and backbitten her way through two bishoprics that morning and that because of her, she and her family were going to have to sit through a two-hour sacrament meeting on the coldest Christmas morning in Steuben’s history.

So DeAnne placed her hand firmly on top of Dolores’s, pinning her there, and moved her face in very close to Dolores’s face. Then, in a quiet but extremely intense voice, DeAnne said, “My son Jeremy is a child of God like any other, and he will have to pass through the same trials and choices in this life as any other. If he gets to the celestial kingdom, it will be because he chose righteousness. Furthermore, Sister LeSueur, if you ever again speak to me or anyone else on this planet about any vision or inspiration you think you have had about my family I promise you that when we are both dead and you are standing before the judgment bar of God, I will leap to my feet and tell the Lord all about your horrible, selfish behavior this morning as you bullied the bishoprics into letting your husband read that wretched story for the fifteenth year in a row, and I assure you that if God is just, he will send you straight to hell.”

Through about the last half of this, Sister LeSueur had been trying to withdraw her hand from DeAnne’s arm, but since DeAnne had her pinned, Sister LeSueur could only turn her head away like a child refusing to listen to a stern parent. When DeAnne finally released her, Sister LeSueur staggered a couple of steps away and then turned back and spat out the words, “I forgive you, Sister Fletcher! And I will pray for you!” The words themselves were, by habit, a blessing; but her tone was so loud and nasty and hateful that everyone still remaining in the chapel turned and looked at her. DeAnne couldn’t have composed a better picture if she had choreographed it: DeAnne herself, standing calmly with a rather surprised look on her face, and Dolores LeSueur, leaning toward her, her face a mask of fury, her mouth open with her lip in a sneering curl, her eyes glaring, and her face so red that it actually showed pink through her makeup.

The vignette remained only for a moment. Then DeAnne said, “Thank you, Sister LeSueur.” Dolores recovered her composure and turned to float out of the building, but from the way people averted their gaze, DeAnne could see that if anyone in this group, at least, had any delusions about Sister LeSueur’s sincerity and balanced temperament, those delusions were now destroyed. “I’ll regard it as my Christmas present to the ward,” DeAnne told Step later.

On Wednesday night, Step was pounding away at the vanity-board subroutine in Hacker Snack, which was causing the program to hang about a quarter of the time for no discernible reason. He was aware, in the back of his mind, that DeAnne was getting the kids to bed and having a little trouble doing it, partly because tomorrow was not a school day and Stevie and Robbie didn’t seem to think that they should have any bedtime at all.

Finally, Step heard DeAnne telling Stevie, “I’ve asked you three times to turn off the computer and go to bed, Stevie, and you always say yes and then I come back a half-hour later and you haven’t budged. Now just because there’s no school tomorrow doesn’t mean that our one-hour rule about computer games is over.”

The tone of her voice was really agitated, and Step was already upset at the program because he couldn’t seem to find an error anywhere, so he got up from his desk and rushed out into the hall to use the full power of the wrathful male voice to get some obedience. He and DeAnne had long since learned that while the children tuned out her voice quite easily, Step seemed to get the same results one would expect from the voice of God. He strode into the family room, stood behind Stevie’s chair, and said, “Your mother shouldn’t have to ask you three times to do anything, Stevie.”

While he said this, though, Step could see that there was a new game on the screen, one he couldn’t remember seeing before. A train was speeding along a track, with the scenery passing behind it very rapidly. The animation was every bit as fast, the graphics just as realistic as in the impossible pirate game, and, just as in the pirate game, there were characters swarming over the train. Now he remembered that between DeAnne’s bedtime calls, he had heard Stevie calling out the names of his friends and saying things like, “You can do it. You’ve got to do it!” But the game itself didn’t really look all that fun—the kids were just running along the top, jumping from car to car, with no enemies or obstacles or anything. Just each other. Beautiful graphics, but pointless.

Stevie was reaching his hand behind the machine to turn it off.

“Stop!” cried Step. “Don’t move your hand. Don’t turn off the machine. Just stand up, right now, and go to your bedroom. I’ll shut everything down in here.”

Stevie held his pose there for a moment. Step could see that he was deciding whether to obey or not. Step could have reached down and physically coerced him, but he did not. It had to be Stevie’s choice, and after that moment of hesitation, Stevie left the room, leaving the computer on.

“I wish I could just borrow your voice at bedtime,” said DeAnne. “I yell at them and bellow at them till I feel like some kind of fishwife, and you come in and say three sentences and they go.”

Step was barely listening as he slid into Stevie’s chair, trying to resume the play of the game. But somehow the people had all disappeared from the screen. There was just a train speeding along the track. As Step moved the joystick to see what would happen, the background stopped, too, so there was just a train and nothing else. And then the track disappeared, and the wheels stopped turning.

Then the screen turned blue. Blank.

“Step, why did you make him leave it on if you were just going to turn it off.”

Step reached for the keyboard, typed “list.” He pressed the return key, hoping that some part of this program’s extraordinary code might remain in memory for him to examine. But nothing happened. Not even an error message. The cursor just went to the left margin of the next line. Step typed some more, hit the return key a lot of times. The screen started scrolling, but that was all. “There’s no program,” said Step.

“What do you mean?”

“The Atari’s in memo-pad mode. It’s dead.”

“Well, you’re typing.”

“That’s all it’ll do. You can’t run a program from memo-pad mode.”

“Can’t you boot it up again?” asked DeAnne.

Step popped open the disk drive. No disk. He popped open the cartridge bay. No cartridges. “There never was a program here.”

“What are you talking about?” said DeAnne. “There are disks all over around here.”

“Have you ever seen that train game before?”

“No,” said DeAnne.

“Well, I haven’t bought any games since Stevie’s birthday. And we sure never saw that train game at Eight Bits Inc. before I left. I’ve been all through these disks looking for the pirate ship game, and I sure didn’t see any train-game disks.”

“Stevie’s eight years old, Step. He didn’t program it himself.”

“DeAnne, nobody programmed it. Don’t you understand? There was no program in this machine.”

DeAnne stood there, staring at the blue screen. “I wish you hadn’t turned it off,” she said. “I wish I could have looked at them longer.”

“Who?” asked Step.

“The boys. The lost boys. His friends.”

They both looked at the screen for a while longer, and then Step sighed and stood up. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Don’t know what?”

“What to do. What to think. Anything.”

On Thursday, Zap got sick. It was the first time he had ever been ill, apart from his neural condition, and DeAnne and Step weren’t quite sure how to handle it. For one thing, even at almost five months of age, Zap still couldn’t consistently turn his head at will. If he was lying on his back when he threw up, there was a risk that he wouldn’t be able to turn his head to empty his mouth, and he’d choke on it, drown in it. But if he was lying on his stomach, then his face would be in it and it would get in his nose and eyes and he still might end up breathing it in. He wasn’t crying, though, and he didn’t seem to have much fever, if any. DeAnne called the doctor anyway, and he told her over the phone to do exactly what she was already doing. So she just kept holding him and rocking him, waiting for him to throw up again, or not to throw up for long enough that she could feel safe in laying him back in bed. “No formula for a while,” she told Step. “But maybe he can keep down my milk.”

This began shortly after lunch, and continued through the afternoon. Step gave up on working, of course, and played with Robbie and Betsy between helping DeAnne and working on dinner and answering the phone and all the other things that kept coming up. Step couldn’t understand how DeAnne could live with this, never able to concentrate on something, to follow through on it without interruption.

Stevie, of course, wasn’t part of the little-kid games, but that was no surprise anymore. The surprise was when Step passed through the family room on the way to answer the doorbell and realized that Stevie wasn’t playing computer games, either. Must still be in his room, wrapping presents, Step thought. He had borrowed the tape and scissors earlier in the day.

It was Bappy at the door. He had a kind of sheepish grin. “I don’t mean to be a bother,” he said, “but I’m just a sentimental old fool and I was driving by a couple nights ago and I saw y’all didn’t have no Christmas lights up.”

“We haven’t had time,” said Step.

“Well, time is all I got these days, and I still got the lights we put up on this house last year and the year before. I bet all the old nails and such are still right where I put ‘em. Y’all won’t mind if I haul my ladder out and tread your roof awhile? It doesn’t add that much to the electric, specially seeing as how there’s only a few days till Christmas.”

“No, that’s fine,” said Step. “That’ll be nice. Where will I plug them in?”

“There’s an outlet out back, by the utility room door. I just run me a long extension cord up over the house. Brought the same one I used last year, so I know it works.”

“That’s great. Thanks,” said Step.

Bappy nodded and waved, even though he was standing right there by the door, and then he was off for his pickup truck and Step closed the front door.

Just as Step was heading for the kitchen to check the meatloaf he had made, Zap started throwing up again, proving that DeAnne’s milk wasn’t going to stay down any better than the formula had. And now Zap was getting fussy instead of just being complacent after he vomited. DeAnne checked his temperature again with the plastic forehead strip, and it was over a hundred. “I’ve got to take him to the doctor,” she said. “If he was a normal kid I’d wait, but he’s so weak.” So once they got Zap cleaned up again, Step found the phone number and called Dr. Greenwald’s office and the answering service relayed the message and a couple of minutes later he called back. DeAnne talked to him and then said, “He’s going to go back to the office just to see Zap. Isn’t that sweet of him?”

“What if he throws up while you’re driving him there?” asked Step.

“I didn’t think of that,” said DeAnne.

“Do you think Mary Anne would come over and watch the kids while I drove you down?”

“She will if she can,” said DeAnne.

She could, and since she didn’t live far away, she would be there in only a few minutes.

Step remembered the meatloaf. “I can’t believe the timer hasn’t rung yet,” he said.

“Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the timer was never set.”

“Oh, no, it must be burnt to a crisp by now,” said Step.

“I don’t think so,” said DeAnne. “The oven isn’t on.”

“I didn’t turn the oven on?”

Sure enough, the meatloaf was dead raw.

“Well, we can’t eat that,” said DeAnne.

“We can cook it now, can’t we? Mary Anne can serve it to the kids when it comes out.”

“No, Step,” said DeAnne. “You can’t serve meatloaf that’s been sitting around this long at room temperature.”

“You can’t tell me the meat would go bad this fast.”

“Not the meat,” said DeAnne. “The eggs.”

“I forgot the eggs,” said Step.

“If I weren’t here, Step, the kids would have salmonella all the time.”

“Probably. So what about supper?”

“Throw some bowls and cold cereal on the table and call the kids in to eat,” said DeAnne. “It’s the last resort of the mother in a hurry but hey, that’s me.”

Robbie and Betsy came right in. “Stevie!” Step called again. “Come on in to supper now!” Knowing he would be obeyed, Step headed outside to open the car door for DeAnne. Just as DeAnne was settling in with Zap in her arms, Mary Anne pulled up into the driveway behind the Renault. Step waved her back, and she put her hands to the sides of her face to show her embarrassment. Then she put her car in reverse and parked out on the street just ahead of Bappy’s pickup truck. It was getting dark, and it occurred to Step that if Bappy wasn’t done with the lights, he probably ought to quit for the night. It wasn’t safe to be wandering around on the roof in the dark.

Mary Anne came running up the driveway. “How’s little Zap doing?” she asked.

“He’s probably not even that sick,” said DeAnne. “But we just have to be sure.”

“If the doctor calls wondering where we are, tell him we’re on the way” said Step. “The kids are in the middle of coating the inside of the kitchen with a layer of cornflakes, so enter at your own risk.” As Mary Anne jogged up the two steps and into the house, Step called after her, “And lock the deadbolts!”

“I always do!” she called back.

Dr. Greenwald didn’t seem to mind that they had taken so long getting to his office, and after poking and probing and listening, he reassured them that it was nothing all that serious. They apologized for wasting his time, but he assured them that they had been right to be concerned. “With a baby this fragile,” he said, “everything is serious.”

When they got back home, the house was completely rimmed with white lights. “It looks like gingerbread,” said DeAnne.

“For an impressively ugly house, it lights up real nice,” said Step.

When they got inside, however, chaos reigned. Betsy and Bobbie were standing on chairs in the kitchen, and the second DeAnne and Step got in the door they started screaming, “Spiders! Daddy longlegs!”

There weren’t any spiders in the kitchen that Step could see. He held the baby while DeAnne took off her coat. “Where’s Mary Anne?” asked DeAnne.

“Is that you at the door!” shouted Mary Anne from back somewhere deep in the house.

“Yes it is!” called DeAnne. “Where are you?”

“In the land of the monster spiders!” shouted Mary Anne. “I could sure use some help and another roll of paper towels!”

“You take care of Zap and the kids,” said Step to DeAnne, “and I’ll see what’s going on in the bathroom.” He ducked into the laundry room to get another roll of paper towels.

“You don’t suppose we’re having another invasion of insects, do you?” asked DeAnne.

“Nope,” said Step. “Spiders are arachnids.”

In the bathroom, it looked as though someone had tried to resurface the entire room in wet paper towels, and then reconsidered and spattered ink on it. But the ink turned out to be daddy longlegs spiders, and the wet paper towels were Mary Anne’s strategy for immobilizing as many spiders as possible while stomping the ones that weren’t pinned down under the wet towels.

Apparently Mary Anne had kept her cool quite well while she was the only adult present. But as soon as Step came into the room and she tried to explain what was happening, she began to shudder and shiver, then screeched as a daddy longlegs crawled up onto her ankle. She stamped and stamped until it fell off; Step gripped her by the shoulders and guided her out the door into the hall. “You stand there and keep watch to make sure none of them get out. Remember to look up and check the ceilings.”

Outside the bathroom, she was able to calm down as Step methodically slaughtered spiders. “They were coming up out of the drain in the bathtub,” said Mary Anne. Step glanced into the tub and sure enough, it had been plugged with wet paper towels. “Betsy was on her little potty when she started yelling ‘pido, pido,’ and I finally realized that it wasn’t some cute bathroom word like peepee, she was saying spider.”

“You did great,” said Step. “You kept it under control. You won’t believe it, but this happens like about once a season. First crickets, then june bugs, then gnats on the night that Zap was born. I think we’re going through the ten plagues of Egypt.”

“Spiders are the horriblest things. I can’t stand the way their little legs go up and down so delicately, like monster ballet dancers.”

“Oh, keep talking, I can’t wait to see what inhabits my dreams tonight.”

“You’re looking at them, my talking can hardly be any worse than that,” said Mary Anne.

“Yeah, but now I’m not looking at spiders, I’m looking at monster ballet dancers. Disney missed a bet with Fantasia.”

Finally the spiders were cleaned up and all the paper towels were clotted in the bottom of a garbage bag. When Step came back into the kitchen from taking the bag outside, Mary Anne was standing by the table talking to DeAnne.

“Well, you’re a hero, Mary Anne.”

“Any time,” said Mary Anne. “Only next time we can skip the spider part.” She started for the door into the laundry room, then stopped. “Oh, your mom called, DeAnne. Nothing’s wrong, don’t worry, she just wanted your pie crust recipe.”

“My mother wants to make pies?”

“Oh, doesn’t she ever?”

“My dad’s the piemaker in my family,” said DeAnne. “But miracles happen every day, right?” Step dialed the wall phone for her, then handed her the receiver so she didn’t have to get up while nursing Zap.

They said their good-byes to Mary Anne. Then came the mess of getting Robbie and Betsy to bed. Stevie was already lying in his bed, and Step made Robbie get under the covers quietly so as not to waken his big brother.

Only after Step was already in bed beside DeAnne did he realize that the Christmas lights were still on outside.

“Oh, just leave them,” said DeAnne.

“Just as you wouldn’t allow your family to eat that meat loaf, I will not permit my family to sleep in a house that has some weird extension cord arrangement connected up outside.”

He put on a bathrobe, and then, remembering how cold it was outside, a coat over that. Out back Step found the plug and pulled it, then walked around front to make sure the lights were off. By now he was quite cold, and he rushed back into the house, locked up, took off his coat, and then moved through the house checking that all the doors were locked and glancing in to make sure the kids were covered.

The routine was so set that it wasn’t till he was already walking into his and DeAnne’s room that he realized that he hadn’t seen Stevie in his bed. Robbie was there, but Stevie’s sheets were pulled back and the bed was empty. Was he up going to the bathroom? He hadn’t been in the kids’ bathroom or anywhere else in the house-could he, for some reason, be in the master bathroom?

Step walked around the bed and checked in the bathroom. No Stevie. This was impossible. Unless Stevie was playing a trick, hiding in the closet or something, there was nowhere that he could be. Step headed back to the boys’ room to check the closet before he pushed the panic button, but then he had to stop cold in the doorway. There was Stevie. Right there on the top bunk. The covers were all the way down, as Step remembered, but Stevie was there. He was curled up and looked like he was completely asleep.

I am way too tired, thought Step. When I actually looked into the room I didn’t see anything wrong, did I? It was only afterward that I thought I hadn’t seen him, but of course he was there all along.

Step went back to bed, where DeAnne was already snoring, and soon he was asleep, too. If he had any spider dreams, he didn’t remember in the morning.

The next couple of days were a flurry of activity, but that was to be expected. Everybody got up at different times and it seemed like half the ward was either coming by or calling up and insisting that DeAnne or Step or both needed to do this or that in preparation for Christmas. In the afternoon of Christmas Eve, as DeAnne was helping Elizabeth wrap a present in the living room, she thought of something and called out to Step, who was in the kitchen putting away the groceries. “It just occurred to me that I honestly can’t remember seeing Stevie eat anything for the past few days.”

“I haven’t seen anybody eat anything for the past few days,” Step called back. “I don’t think anybody has eaten in the presence of anybody else since school let out for the holidays.”

“No, I’m serious,” said DeAnne. “And he hasn’t been playing computer games or anything, he’s mostly been in his room. Do you think he might be sick?”

“I’ll check on him when I’m done with the groceries,” said Step.

That took only a few more minutes, and then Step headed on down the hall and turned left into the boys’ room. Robbie was on the floor, wrapping a present. “Get out get out!” he screamed at Step.

“Sorry,” said Step. He immediately turned and stepped back into the hall, drawing the door almost closed behind him.

“You ruined the surprise!” Robbie shouted.

“No, I didn’t,” answered Step. “I didn’t see anything. I was just coming back to see if Stevie was all right.”

“I’m fine,” answered Stevie.

“He’s fine!” shouted Robbie.

“I can hear your brother quite well without your relay service, thanks just the same, Robbie,” said Step. “Stevie, your mother’s worried that you haven’t been eating much lately.”

“I’m not hungry”

“You’ve got to eat something.”

“Yes,” said Stevie.

“Will you come to supper tonight?”

Stevie didn’t say anything for a moment. “I guess,” he said.

“Stevie, is something wrong?”

Another pause. “Nope.”

Step went back to the living room, where DeAnne was still wrapping presents with Betsy, who periodically inserted a hand or a finger or, sometimes, her face into whatever DeAnne was doing. As a result, DeAnne had stuck about a dozen small pieces of tape all over Betsy’s face, and they were protruding everywhere like a peeling sunburn. “Ooh, Betsy, you look so pretty.”

“I heard you calling to Stevie,” said DeAnne.

“Robbie wouldn’t let me in the room. He was wrapping presents.”

“He already wrapped yours.”

“He’s wrapping Zap’s. But he didn’t want to ruin the surprise.”

“Didn’t he buy it with you standing right there?”

“You know Robbie,” said Step. “If you wreck one of his surprises, you might as well cut off your own head and save yourself a lot of suffering.”

Step finally had a break about four o’clock and slipped into his office to catch a few minutes’ work on the program. He was this close to finishing it, and if he could have it done, ready to FedEx it to Agamemnon, then he would have so much more relaxed a Christmas. It was just ticky stuff now anyway, but it meant changing a line or two, then compiling it, then running it and seeing what it looked like, then tweaking it again and compiling it again … It ate up the clock without making that much visible progress.

“Step, can’t you come to supper on Christmas Eve?”

Step turned around to see DeAnne standing in the doorway of his office.

“And Stevie won’t come either. I didn’t prepare a banquet but even self-employed people are allowed to have Christmas Eve off.”

“I’m so close, DeAnne.”

“All right, suit yourself,” she said, and she closed the door.

Step sighed and got up from the chair. When he reached the hall he heard her saying to Stevie, “Go ahead, apparently males in this family don’t eat anymore.”

“DeAnne,” said Step. “It’s bad enough when you sound like your mother, but now you’re sounding like mine.”

She looked annoyed for a moment, but then decided to take it as a joke. “That’s fine with me,” she said. “I like your mother. And she likes me. In fact, she likes me better than you.”

“Better than I like you? Or better than she likes me?”

“Both,” she said.

“Impossible.” He was now at the end of the hall and he nuzzled her and held her close and whispered in her ear, “Let’s forget these kids and go make us another baby.”

“It’s too soon,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten how much it hurts.”

They both remembered Zap’s troubles and her words took on a second meaning, and now when he kissed her it wasn’t romantic, it was tender, consoling.

Then he opened the door to the boys’ room. Stevie was lying on his back in bed, staring up at the ceiling. “Come on in to dinner, Stevie.”

“I’m not hungry, Dad,” he said.

“I didn’t ask if you wanted to eat,” said Step. “It’s Christmas Eve and we need to be together.”

“I think he’s sick,” said DeAnne. “Maybe he’s got whatever Zap had a couple of days ago.” She pushed past Step into the room, heading for Stevie. And then, to Step’s amazement—and DeAnne’s too, of course—Stevie sat bolt upright and shied away from the edge of the bunk, looking fearful. “Don’t touch me!” he said.

“Well, I’ve got to touch you,” said DeAnne. “I’ve got to see if you have a fever.”

“I just want to be alone in here for another little while,” he said.

“Stevie,” said DeAnne. “Just let me see if your forehead’s warm.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“DeAnne,” said Step. “Please, let’s not make a quarrel of it on Christmas Eve.”

“But if he’s not well I can’t just leave him in here … ”

“He looks fine,” said Step, ushering her out of the room.

“Suddenly you’re the miracle doctor who can diagnose people across a room?”

As soon as they were out the door, Step pulled it shut and said, “DeAnne, didn’t you see the look on his face? He was absolutely terrified.”

“I know, Step. That’s all the more reason to think he might have a fever. He didn’t seem rational.”

“His face wasn’t white or flushed, and he always gets one or the other when he’s sick. He’s really upset, but listen to what he said. He wants to be alone.”

“On Christmas Eve, and that’s sad.” Then she realized what Step was thinking. “You mean—without his imaginary friends.”

“Have you seen him playing with the Atari in the last couple of days? At all?”

“You mean he might be going through some kind of withdrawal?”

“I don’t know, but it’s a sure thing he’s really edgy right now, so let’s go in and eat and then I’ll come back in and talk to him, or you can, and we’ll see if we can calm him down. He’s not going to want to miss the ceremonies, right? He’s the one who remembers things best, he always likes to tell the stories. He’ll come around, if we don’t make an issue of it right now.”

DeAnne sighed. “Whenever you get so patient and understanding with the children it makes me feel like I must usually be a shrew.”

“So what do you feel like when I yell at them?” asked Step.

“Vindicated.”

After supper, Step brushed his teeth and then went to Stevie’s room to try to persuade him to eat something. Stevie wasn’t in his bed; DeAnne must have talked him into the kitchen.

Step meant to join the rest of the family, but he paused by his office door and thought, If Stevie’s eating that’ll take a while and so I’ve got a few minutes and that might be time enough to finish. He resumed where he had left off.

He didn’t know how long he had been working when there came a knock on his door. He turned around. DeAnne was standing there, leaning on the doorknob. She looked a little wobbly, as if she might need to sit down. “What is it?” he asked, concerned.

“Step, Stevie has his friends at the door. He wants to invite them in for Christmas Eve.”

Step’s heart sank. Stevie wasn’t coming out of it after all. He’d tried but then he couldn’t let go of this fantasy world. Maybe because the evil hadn’t gone out of Steuben yet. Maybe he couldn’t let go until they caught the serial killer. Or until the family moved again.

“Maybe when I finish this program we should move,” he said. “Get Stevie away from here for good.”

“No, Step,” DeAnne answered. “I mean his friends are at the door.”

Now it sank in. Why she looked so weak.

Had the power of Stevie’s imagination finally overpowered DeAnne? No, that couldn’t be, she was far too strong.

He stood up, meaning to put an arm around her, steady her. But the moment she saw he was standing up, she moved away from the door, and when she walked he could see that she was steadier than he had thought.

He followed her. It wasn’t the front door, apparently, because she didn’t go to the living room, she went into the family room. The back door was standing half open, even though the air was bitterly cold and the room was getting very badly chilled. She stood well back from the door, looking through it. Step walked straight to the door and opened it wider.

There in the back yard stood Stevie. Grouped behind him were seven boys, ranging in age from perhaps five to ten or so. A couple of them were dressed for the cold, but the others were in t-shirts and shorts, and one of them was wearing a tank top.

“Dad,” said Stevie. “Can they come in? I told them you’d let them have Christmas Eve with us. That’s what they miss the most.”

Step could feel DeAnne put her arm through his and take hold of his hand.

“Of course they can come in,” said Step. “We’ve been wanting to meet them.”

It was one thing to say it, another thing to watch them walk up the stairs, one by one, and come on into the house. DeAnne, who had a better memory for names and faces, was picking them out from the newspaper photos. “Van,” she said.

One of the boys smiled at her.

“Roddy. Peter? David. Jack. Scotty.”

One by one they grinned at her and then looked at each other as if to say Hey, she knows us, she knows us.

“Sandy,” she said.

Step closed the door.

“I wish,” said Step. “I wish I could have seen you before.”

“We tried, Dad,” said Stevie. “I knew they could do it, I knew they had to show themselves to people or nobody’d ever believe me, but they just couldn’t figure it out till I showed them how.”

“We believed you, son,” said Step. “We always knew you weren’t lying to us.”

“But you thought they were pretend, Dad,” said Stevie. “And they’re not pretend.”

Then there was a moment’s silence, and one of the boys, in a soft, faint voice, said, “Merry Christmas.”

“Yes,” said Step. “Yes, Merry Christmas. Please, come into the living room. That’s where the tree is. We were just about to put out our presents and have our ceremonies, and we’d love to have you with us.”

The boys smiled. And Stevie—ah, Stevie smiled! Step had almost forgotten what a glorious smile he had. It had been so long.

Stevie led the way into the living room, the other boys trooping silently after him.

DeAnne still held to his arm. He heard her murmur, “Showed them how.”

But he couldn’t think about that. It was Christmas Eve, and Stevie had brought his friends home at last.

He and DeAnne followed the boys into the living room, and then she said, “I’ve got to get Robbie and Betsy and Zap,” and she left him there.

“Sit down,” he said. “Anywhere, except leave that soft rocking chair for Stevie’s mom, she has to sit there and hold the baby.” Then Step surveyed the room, seeing it now as if through their eyes. The Christmas tree, covered with a motley of decorations, most of them handmade: the tiny needlepoint pillows that DeAnne had made for that first Christmas, while she was pregnant with Stevie. The little puffball animals that she and Step had glued together for the first Christmas tree that Stevie ever saw, though of course he was only a baby then and hardly knew what he was seeing. Decorations older than Stevie, thought Step. He’s never had a tree without them.

And not just the tree. The whole room was decorated with red and green tassels and little wooden villages and a stuffed Santa hippo beside a wicker sleigh and a large chimney-sweep nutcracker and anything else that Step and DeAnne hadn’t been able to resist buying or making over the years.

DeAnne led Robbie and Betsy into the room. Betsy was shy with strangers, and she hung back a little, but Robbie forthrightly took her hand and led her to sit in front of the couch at Step’s feet. DeAnne sat down in the rocking chair and propped a sleepy Zap up enough for him to see what was happening, even though there was no sign yet that his eyes were able to focus on anything for even as long as a second.

They began with a song—“Away in a Manger”—and as Step sang out, keeping the tempo up, he remembered all the nights for months, for years, that he had lain beside Stevie’s bed and sung that song so he could sleep, so the fear would go away and Stevie could rest.

Then it was time for the stories. Step started by asking Robbie to tell them about the angel coming to Mary. Then he asked Stevie to tell what Joseph did when he found out she was going to have a baby, and so on, Robbie and then Stevie, then DeAnne or Step taking a turn, telling a part of the Christmas story. The shepherds, the wise men, and then on to the Book of Mormon story about the day and night and day without darkness when Christ was born on the other side of the world. Then Step went on and told what Jesus lived for. About forgiveness for the bad things people do.

The boys had been listening, enthralled in the experience of being part of a Christmas Eve after all, their eyes sparkling in the treelight. Now, though, one of the boys spoke up. “Everything?”

Before Step could be sure what he was asking, Stevie answered, sharply, firmly. “No. Not killing.”

DeAnne gave a tiny gasp and covered her mouth, blinking her eyes to keep from crying.

“Stevie’s right,” Step said. “In our church we believe that God doesn’t forgive people who kill on purpose. And in the New Testament, Jesus said that if anybody ever hurt a child, it would be better for him to tie a huge rock around his neck and jump into the sea and drown.”

“Well it did hurt, Daddy,” said Stevie. “They never told me anything.”

“It was a secret,” said one of the boys.

“I told him I’d never never tell so he wouldn’t … ” The boy’s voice trailed off, growing weak.

“Don’t leave!” said Stevie. “You said if we did Christmas!”

“It’s hard,” said another of the boys.

Stevie turned to Step. “Dad, you got to call Mr. Douglas. If he sees them all, he’ll have to believe it, won’t he?”

“Yes,” said Step.

“I knew he wouldn’t believe just me telling him, because if you didn’t believe me then why should he?”

“We believed you, Stevie,” said DeAnne, struggling not to cry. “We really did.”

“I mean you didn’t believe in them,” he said. “I thought you could see them like I could, but then you couldn’t, and not even Robbie except once for a second.”

Step thought: Robbie saw, but I couldn’t, and DeAnne couldn’t.

“And I tried to figure out how to show them. They told me they were all buried under the house and so I—”

Again a gasp from DeAnne, and Step felt a wrenching in his gut. It wasn’t just some disturbance in the fabric of the universe that Stevie had felt, it wasn’t just some nameless evil somewhere in the city. It was here. It was under the house. The place from which spiders and crickets had fled. The place where the bodies of seven little boys had been concealed, where no one could find them no matter how hard they searched.

But someone had been under the house since they moved there, yes, more than once, more than once. Bappy has been under this house. And Bappy lived here before us, before his son made him move out so he could rent the place to us. Bappy lived here when the first of the boys were taken, and Bappy has been here so often, ever since.

Stevie went on. “So I crawled under there and buried myself up but it didn’t help, I still couldn’t do it, and anyway you got mad at me for getting so dirty and going outside and so I didn’t try that again.”

My son was under there, Step thought. He wanted to scream the way he had screamed after the Fourth of July picnic. But he held it in.

“I didn’t know what to do anymore,” said Stevie, “and so I gave up, I thought nobody could ever see them. But I couldn’t just let him go on doing it, could I, Dad? That wouldn’t be right. They didn’t like it, I knew that, even if they didn’t tell me how much it hurt.”

He looked at the other boys, and some of them looked away, perhaps ashamed.

“So I remembered what you said about how bad people hate the truth, it scares them, so I broke the rules and I went outside when he was doing the lights and I said, I know what you’re doing, and he said, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I said, They told me about you, and he said, Who told you? and I said, They told me about Boy, and I said, Mr. Douglas is a friend of mine, I met him, and he said so. And I said, You got to stop, and he said, I already did. He said, Boy don’t do that no more. But I knew he was lying, because I could see that Boy wasn’t like they told me, Boy wasn’t somebody else, he was Boy, Boy was his own self, and then I ran to get back in the house but I wasn’t fast enough.”

DeAnne was crying now, her face covered in her hands, and Step could feel tears on his own cheeks, because now he knew, beyond all doubt, beyond all hope, that there were eight lost boys, not seven, sharing Christmas in their house tonight. Eight lost boys, not seven, buried in the crawlspace.

“And I thought I wrecked everything,” said Stevie. “But then I knew that I didn’t at all. Because I did know how to make you see me. It was really hard the first night and I think a couple of times you didn’t see me when you were supposed to, but I got better and better at it and then I really could show them how because I was like them now, and so Daddy, here we are, and you got to call Mr. Douglas because Boy is still there and he’s got to stop.”

“Yes,” said Step. “Will you stay, boys? Till Mr. Douglas comes?”

They didn’t answer; they looked at each other, some of them, and others looked at the floor.

“They’re afraid of seeing him again,” said Stevie. “The old guy.”

“Boy” whispered one of Stevie’s friends.

“Boy,” echoed several others.

“I know what we should do,” said DeAnne. She was trying to sound cheerful, despite her tears. “You’ve all sat here and seen what our family does for Christmas Eve. Why don’t you each tell the rest of us what your family does. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I’d really like to know, because I don’t think any two families in the world do Christmas exactly alike. What about you, Jack?”

DeAnne led them in sharing tales of Christmases past as Step went to the kitchen and called the police station. “Call Mr. Douglas and tell him that Step Fletcher has to see him tonight. I know it’s Christmas Eve, but tell him that the answers are all here but only if he comes now to see them with his own eyes.”

Step worried for a moment that this policeman might be too fearful of offending someone, of losing his job or a promotion, to dare to call his boss on Christmas Eve.

“I promise you, my friend,” said Step, “that if you make this call, you’ll be giving Doug Douglas the best Christmas present he ever had.”

“Easy for you to say,” said the man. “But I’ll give it a shot and see if he wants to talk to you.”

It seemed less than a minute—yet such a long time—before the phone rang. Step picked it up so fast it barely had time to echo.

“What have you got on Christmas Eve, Mr. Fletcher?”

“I had the list before, Mr. Douglas, and that wasn’t a fake, right? I told you the truth, right?”

“Right.”

“Come now, come quickly. I have all the answers here. But no lights, no sirens. Because you’ll frighten them and they might go.”

“Them? Who?”

“The boys, Mr. Douglas.” Step hung up, trusting that Douglas would have faith enough in him to come.

He got there before the boys had finished telling all their memories. He came in quietly, and when he saw them gathered there, Step could see the hope in his eyes, the wonderment that they were not dead after all. But then he saw Step’s face, and Step knew that it was no secret that he had been grieving, and then Douglas began to understand. “Your boy really did see them,” said Douglas.

“All along,” said Step.

“But why is it that we can see them now?”

“Because Stevie showed them how. And he kept them here so you could see them.”

Douglas walked slowly, carefully, to the center of the room. “Ah, boys. If only I could have found him sooner. If only I could have stopped him before … But I can stop him now. Just tell me who it is.”

So Stevie told it all again, and this time with more details. The deep place under the house. How he didn’t really understand what had happened to his friends until he saw that place and then he made them tell him, and he made them tell him who it was, too. “Bappy” he said.

“Boy,” said a couple of the others.

“Baptize Waters,” said Step. “Our landlord’s father. He used to live here. I wrote down his address and phone number for you while you were on the way.”

“Boys,” said Douglas. “I’ll tell you something. I don’t think you should ever see that man again. I don’t think any children should ever have to see him again.”

They nodded.

“So I promise you that if you stay right here in this room for just a little while longer, you won’t ever see him again. And if you wait, I’d like to call your parents. I’d like your parents to have a chance to see you.”

“They’ll be mad,” said one of the boys. “I didn’t stay where I was supposed to.”

“No,” said Douglas. “I’ve talked to all of them and I can promise you that not one of them will be mad. Not one. Can you stay just that much longer?”

“It’s hard,” said one of the boys.

“Then I’ll hurry.”

Douglas left the room, went into the kitchen. Step could hear him phoning, speaking quietly. Later he would learn how the phone calls went. We have found where the bodies are hidden, and your son is one of them. But there’s also something else, a chance of something else, to say good-bye to your son, if you hurry. Tell no one. Come quickly. They didn’t understand, of course, but they came. And soon they had spread out through the house, the grieving parents, the boys, shy at first, and soft-spoken, for none of them was as strong as Stevie.

And while they talked inside the house, the policemen worked beneath it and outside it, and the bodies were brought out one by one on pallets and were laid under the bright lights on the lawn. Bappy was brought to the house on Chinqua Penn, he and his son and his son’s lawyer, furious at first about being dragged out here on Christmas Eve. But then they saw the bodies on the lawn, and the son turned to the father, and in a voice rising steadily to a shout, to a scream, he said, “You told me you stopped. You told me you were too old to want it anymore. But you didn’t stop, you old son-of-a-bitch, you went on doing it only now you killed them!” Weeping in shame and rage and terrible memories of his own, the son shoved his father to the ground and then he kicked him until the police grabbed him and held him, and he stood there sobbing. “He said he stopped. I would have told you about him if I’d known he was still doing it, if I’d known he’d do this, I would have told you.”

“So why didn’t you tell us anyway?” asked Douglas.

For a moment he couldn’t think of how to say it. And then he could. “He’s my father.”

“It wasn’t me,” said Bappy.

“Yes it was,” said Douglas.

“It was Boy,” said Bappy. “I never wanted to. What do you think I am, anyway? I’d never do anything like this. It’s always that Boy.”

All of it was on videotape. The son. The father. The grim-faced lawyer urging them both, far too late now, to be quiet, to say no more. All on tape, and so there was no need for any of the men outside the house to see or even know about what was happening inside.

As Bappy was led away, as the bodies were brought out of their hidden graves and under the police lights of that bitter cold Christmas Eve, one by one the boys inside the house no longer had the strength or the need to keep trying anymore, and they said good-bye, and they were gone. One moment there, the next moment not there. Then their parents left, weeping, clinging to each other, with just a whispered word or two from Douglas. “Tell no one,” he said. “You don’t want your boy’s name in the press. Just go home and thank God you had a chance to say good-bye. One small mercy in this whole cruel business.” And the parents nodded and agreed and went home to the loneliest Christmas of their lives, the Christmas in which questions were answered at last, and love was remembered and wept for, and God was thanked and blamed for not having done more.

Inside the house, Stevie was the last to linger; he had been the strongest all along. Robbie and Betsy were both asleep, and Zap also was asleep in DeAnne’s arms. So Stevie was alone with his parents at last, as he had been alone with them when their family was just beginning.

“Ah, Stevie,” said Step. “Why did you face him by yourself? Why didn’t you make us believe you? Why didn’t you explain?”

“I was the one they came to,” said Stevie. “It was my job. Isn’t that why we moved here?”

“Not to lose you,” said DeAnne.

“I just did what you taught me,” said Stevie. “I didn’t mean to die. But I didn’t know how to do it until then. Did I do wrong?”

“Oh, Stevie,” said DeAnne, “what you did was noble and good and brave. We knew that’s the kind of man you would be, we knew it all along.”

“We just thought we’d have a chance to know you longer,” said Step. “We thought we’d die long before you. That’s how the world is supposed to be.”

“Nothing was how it was supposed to be,” said Stevie. “Nothing was right, but now it’s better, isn’t it? I made it better, didn’t I?”

“For all the mothers and fathers who won’t have to grieve,” said Step, “because you stopped that man before he found their sons, yes, you made it better.”

“And you’re not mad at me for breaking the rules?” asked Stevie.

“No, we’re not,” said DeAnne. “But we’re sad.”

“Stevie, will you forgive us?” said Step. “For not understanding? For not knowing that what you said to us was true?”

“Sure,” he said. “I could see them and you couldn’t. I was only mad at you until I figured that out.” Then Stevie sighed. “It’s so hard, staying here like this.”

“I don’t want you to go,” said DeAnne.

“It’s so hard,” he said again.

“I love you, Stephen Bolivar Fletcher,” said Step. “I love you more than life. I’ll miss you so much.”

“I’ll miss you too, Daddy. I’ll miss you too, Mommy. Tell Bobbie and Betsy bye for me. And tell Zap about me when he’s bigger, because I’m still his biggest brother.”

“I love you,” said DeAnne. She wanted to tell him what that meant. What he meant to her, how it felt to carry him for all those awful months of sickness and how it all was worth it when she held him in her arms, and more than worth it as she watched him grow and saw what a fine boy he was, so much better than she could have hoped for. She wanted to tell him of all her dreams for him, of all the children she wanted him to have, children lucky enough to have him for a father. She wanted to tell him how she had once dreamed of lying on her own deathbed, knowing that it would be all right to die because Stevie was sitting there beside her, holding her hand, and she dreamed that he said, Good-bye, Mother. And then: Be there waiting for me when I come.

“Good-bye, Mother,” said Stevie. “Good-bye, Father.”

“Good-bye, Door Man,” whispered Step.

And DeAnne said, “Oh, Stevie, be there waiting for us when we come.”

15: New Year

This is how the Fletchers found their way to the end of 1983: They called the Lowes, who only had to hear two sentences before they came rushing to the house on Chinqua Penn. Mary Anne helped them pack what they’d need for the next few days while Harv telephoned the bishop and Sister Bigelow, who also came. Long after the Fletchers had been taken to the Lowes’ house to spend the rest of that long Christmas Eve, the bishop and Sister Bigelow remained, gathering up all the presents that Step had pointed out to them, wrapping those that were still unwrapped, filling the stockings with the candy and gifts that Step and DeAnne had prepared, and then carrying it all to the Lowes’ house before any of the little ones awoke. Step and DeAnne watched quietly as Harv and Mary Anne made the Fletcher children’s Christmas a bright and happy time.

While they stayed home from church, the rest of the two Steuben wards gathered, and the much-fought-over Christmas program was scrapped on the spot. Instead the bishop, sleepless as he was, told the story of the innocents of Bethlehem, and then the story of Alma and Amulek as they watched the deaths of other innocents. And he said, “Such children of God will soon forget all pain and death, as they are greeted with rejoicing. It’s those who are left behind who need our help and comfort now.”

Help and comfort took many forms in the next few days. A new but empty condominium was found, and the landlord, hearing a little of their story, let the Fletchers have it for the first month free. While the police line still barred most people from the house on Chinqua Penn, the elders quorum crossed the line to carry all the Fletchers’ worldly goods to a U-Haul truck, which was shuttled back and forth until everything was in place in the Fletchers’ new home. They never had to set foot again in the house where Stevie died.

Sister Bigelow stayed after all the others who helped with the move had left. “I found something,” she said. “I thought you should be alone when you got it.” She set a brown paper sack on the table. “It was in the back of the closet.” Then she hugged DeAnne and left.

They opened the bag. Inside were two odd-shaped Christmas presents, wrapped. DeAnne’s was heavy. She opened it to find two stones glued together and painted to be a rabbit. One stone was the body, the little one was the head, and there were two construction-paper ears glued on. On a 3 x 5 card Stevie had written, “The Yard Bunny.” Step’s present was much lighter, and harder to figure out at a glance. Stevie had taken a Cool Whip tub, glued a used-up plastic tape dispenser to the lid, and painted the whole thing bright red. On the card was a careful diagram showing a watch dangling from the arm of the tape dispenser, several pens sticking through the hole in the dispenser, and loose change in the Cool Whip tub. There were fifteen pennies in the tub to help him get started. It was a dresser caddy to hold the stuff he kept in his pockets.

They held hands across the table for a long time, the presents framed by their arms.

None of the parents broke the silence about what happened on that Christmas Eve, and Doug Douglas made sure that the journalists heard only the story of Bappy and his son, and a family that had kept the dark secret of the old molester until it was far too late. So it was only pictures of Bappy and his son that ran on the evening news and on the front pages. Doug Douglas would keep in touch with all the families over the years, even after he retired from the Steuben Police Department, but he never brought up the subject of that night or of the year that led to it; they all knew the nature of the threads that bound them together. They shared with him the friendship of people who have been on a long journey together, a journey that is now behind them but can never be forgotten for a single hour.

Doug Douglas called the Fletchers only once. In going back over the records of the case, just for his own peace of mind, he had come up with a correlation between the times their house had been strangely infested by insects or spiders and the nights that boys had died. They confirmed the dates for him. Stevie hadn’t been the only one to sense how the world was being torn.

Step and DeAnne buried their oldest boy in a cemetery on the western edge of Steuben, surrounded by thick woods full of birds and animals, a living place. They both knew as they stood beside the grave that their days of wandering were through. They had been anchored now in Steuben, both by the living and by the dead. Little Jeremy would enter Open Doors when the time came; flowers would be tended on this grave.

There were seven other funerals in Steuben during those few days between Christmas and the new year. The bodies of those seven children were accompanied to the grave by the small gifts that had been found with them: A Hot Wheels racer, a fake-ceramic dog, a harmonica, a ball of string, a Star Wars button, a squirt gun, a deck of cards.

Because life must go on and bills must be paid, Step finished the program he had been working on and sent it in, and Agamemnon would pay him and he would begin his next project for them because his family needed him to do it. Just as the family needed DeAnne to tend to Jeremy and Elizabeth and Robbie, the three who remained. It was their needs now that mattered, and she supplied them, and Step too, as best they could.

On New Year’s Day the family members who had flown from Utah to be with them all flew home. The ward members who had dropped all their regular concerns to help the Fletchers now picked them up again. Gradually life settled back to normal for all of them.

Even for the Fletchers, life settled. Not back to normal, for there was no going back for them. Rather their life settled into a new way, a new road. There was always in Step’s mind a sense of someone watching, as if he could always turn at the moment of some triumph and say, See that? Pretty good, hey? And the one who watched would say, Neat. Neat, Dad.

In DeAnne’s mind she saw him as a light in the distance, a beacon. If I always look toward that light, she thought, if I always walk straight toward it, then someday, even though it’s very far away, I’ll reach that goal.

They remembered Stevie on his birthday every year, and told stories about him until Robbie and Elizabeth could almost recite them all from memory. Every now and then Robbie would refer to the Christmas when Stevie’s friends came, though the family never actually talked about that night.

One other thing was lost, too, that Christmas Eve. Step no longer called Robbie “Robot” or “Road Bug”; Betsy became Elizabeth to him; and Jeremy was Jeremy. With Step not using them, the nicknames soon died out, except when Robbie now and then teased Elizabeth by saying, “We used to call you Betsy Wetsy, you know.” As the children grew up they lost all memory of their parents calling each other Junk Man and Fish Lady. They wouldn’t have believed it if you told them; no one told them.

It wasn’t that Step or DeAnne actually decided that the nicknames ought to stop. It’s just that those names were part of a set, and it didn’t feel right to use any of them unless you could use them all. But someday they would use them, they knew. Someday they would use all those old names, when Door Man met them on the other side.

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

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, the smell.

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—interesting instead 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 be trained.”

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 was doing , 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 was my 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 was me. 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 was gorgeous.

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 them out .

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 was starved, 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 what I 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 was real 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.

Now let 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 so good?

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 to know .

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 the Starseed , 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 the Godspeed. 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

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 wireframe 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 sheriff’s 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 SOLSTICE

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.

BUFFALO

John Kessel

IN MAY 1934 H.G. WELLS made a trip to the United States, where he visited Washington, D.C. and met with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Wells, 68 years old, hoped the New Deal might herald a revolutionary change in the U.S. economy, a step forward in an “Open Conspiracy” of rational thinkers that would culminate in a world socialist state. For forty years he’d subordinated every scrap of his artistic ambition to promoting this vision. But by 1934 Wells’s optimism, along with his energy for saving the world, was waning.

While in Washington he requested to see something of the new social welfare agencies, and Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s Interior Secretary, arranged for Wells to visit a Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Fort Hunt, Virginia.

It happens that at that-time my father was a CCC member at that camp. From his boyhood he had been a reader of adventure stories; he was a big fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and of H.G. Wells. This is the story of their encounter, which never took place.

In Buffalo it’s cold, but here the trees are in bloom, the mockingbirds sing in the mornings, and the sweat the men work up clearing brush, planting dogwoods and cutting roads is wafted away by warm breeze. Two hundred of them live in the Fort Hunt barracks high on the bluff above the Virginia side of the Potomac. They wear surplus army uniforms. In the morning, after a breakfast of grits, Sgt. Sauter musters them up in the parade yard, they climb onto trucks and are driven by forest service men out to wherever they’re to work that day.

For several weeks Kessel’s squad has been working along the river road, clearing rest stops and turnarounds. The tall pines have shallow root systems, and spring rain has softened the earth to the point where wind is forever knocking trees across the road; While most of the men work on the ground, a couple are sent up to cut off the tops of the pines adjoining the road, so if they do fall, they won’t block it. Most of the men claim to be afraid of heights.

Kessel isn’t. A year or two ago back in Michigan he worked in a logging camp. It’s hard work, but he is used to hard work. And at least he’s out of Buffalo.

The truck rumbles and jounces out the river road, that’s going to be the George Washington Memorial Parkway in our time, once the WPA project that will build it gets started.

The humid air is cool now, but it will be hot again today, in the 80s. A couple of the guys get into a debate about whether the feds will ever catch Dillinger. Some others talk women. They’re planning to go into Washington on the weekend and check out the dance halls. Kessel likes to dance; he’s a good dancer. The fox trot, the lindy hop.

When he gets drunk he likes to sing, and has a ready wit. He talks a lot more, kids the girls.

When they get to the site the foreman sets most of the men to work clearing the roadside for a scenic overlook.

Kessel straps on a climbing belt, takes an axe and climbs his first tree. The first twenty feet are limbless, then climbing gets trickier. He looks down only enough to estimate when he’s gotten high enough. He sets himself, cleats biting into the shoulder of a lower limb, and chops away at the road side of the trunk. There’s a trick to cutting the top so that it falls the right way. When he’s got it ready to go he calls down to warn the men below. Then a few quick bites of the axe on the opposite side of the cut, a shove, a crack and the top starts to go. He braces his legs, ducks his head and grips the trunk. The treetop skids off and the bole of the pine waves ponderously back and forth, with Kessel swinging at its end like an ant on a metronome. After the pine stops swinging he shinnies down and climbs the next tree.

He’s good at this work, efficient, careful. He’s not a particularly strong man—slender, not burly—but even in his youth he shows the attention to detail that, as a boy, I remember seeing when he built our house.

The squad works through the morning, then breaks for lunch from the mess truck. The men are always complaining about the food, and how there isn’t enough of it, but until recently a lot of them were living in Hoovervilles—shack cities—and eating nothing at all. As they’re eating a couple of the guys rag Kessel for working too fast. “What do you expect from a Yankee?” one of the southern boys says.

“He ain’t a Yankee. He’s a polack.”

Kessel tries to ignore them.

“Whyn’t you lay off him, Turkel?” says Cole, one of Kessel’s buddies. Turkel is a big blond guy from Chicago.

Some say he joined the CCCs to duck an armed robbery rap.

“He works too hard,” Turkel says. “He makes us look bad.”

“Don’t have to work much to make you look bad, Lou,” Cole says. The others laugh, and Kessel appreciates it. “Give Jack some credit. At least he had enough sense to come down out of Buffalo.” More laughter.

“There’s nothing wrong with Buffalo,” Kessel says.

“Except fifty thousand out-of-work polacks,” Turkel says.

“I guess you got no out-of-work people in Chicago,”

Kessel says. “You just joined for the exercise.”

“Except he’s not getting any exercise, if he can help it!” Cole says.

The foreman comes by and tells them to get back to work.

Kessel climbs another tree, stung by Turkel’s charge. What kind of man complains if someone else works hard? It only shows how even decent guys have to put up with assholes dragging them down. But it’s nothing new. He’s seen it before, back in Buffalo.

Buffalo, New York, is the symbolic home of this story. In the years preceding the First World War it grew into one of the great industrial metropolises of the United States.

Located where Lake Erie flows into the Niagara River, strategically close to cheap electricity from Niagara Falls and cheap transportation by lakeboat from the midwest, it was a center of steel, automobiles, chemicals, grain milling and brewing. Its major employers—Bethlehem Steel, Ford, Pierce Arrow, Gold Medal Flour, the National Biscuit Company, Ralston Purina, Quaker Oats, National Aniline—drew thousands of immigrants like Kessel’s family. Along Delaware Avenue stood the imperious and stylized mansions of the city’s old money, ersatz-Renaissance homes designed by Stanford White, huge Protestant churches, and a Byzantine synagogue. The city boasted the first modern skyscraper, designed by Lours Sullivan in the 1890s. From its productive factories to its polyglot work force to its class system and its boosterism, Buffalo was a monument to modern industrial capitalism. It is the place Kessel has come from—almost an expression of his personality itself—and the place he, at times, fears he can never escape. A cold, grimy city dominated by church and family, blinkered and cramped, forever playing second fiddle to Chicago, New York and Boston. It offers the immigrant the opportunity to find steady work in some factory or mill, but, though Kessel could not have put it into these words, it also puts a lid on his opportunities. It stands for all disappointed expectations, human limitations, tawdry compromises, for the inevitable choice of the expedient over the beautiful, for an American economic system that turns all things into commodities and measures men by their bank accounts. It is the home of the industrial proletariat.

It’s not unique. It could be Youngstown, Akron, Detroit.

It’s the place my father, and I, grew up.

The afternoon turns hot and still; during a work break Kessel strips to the waist. About two o’clock a big black de Soto comes up the road and pulls off onto the shoulder. A couple of men in suits get out of the back, and one of them talks to the Forest Service foreman, who nods deferentially.

The foreman calls over to the men.

“Boys, this here’s Mr. Pike from the Interior Department. He’s got a guest here to see how we work, a writer, Mr. H.G. Wells from England.”

Most of the men couldn’t care less, but the name strikes a spark in Kessel. He looks over at the little, pot-bellied man in the dark suit. The man is sweating; he brushes his mustache.

The foreman sends Kessel up to show them how they’re topping the trees. He points out to the visitors where the others with rakes and shovels are leveling the ground for the overlook. Several other men are building a log rail fence from the treetops. From way above, Kessel can hear their voices between the thunks of his axe. H.G. Wells. He remembers reading The War of the Worlds in Amazing Stories. He’s read The Outline of History, too. The stories, the history, are so large, it seems impossible that the man who wrote them could be standing not thirty feet below him. He tries to concentrate on the axe, the tree.

Time for this one to go. He calls down. The men below look up. Wells takes off his hat and shields his eyes with his hand. He’s balding, and looks even smaller from up here. Strange that such big ideas could come from such a small man. It’s kind of disappointing. Wells leans over to Pike and says something. The treetop falls away. The pine sways like a bucking bronco, and Kessel holds on for dear life.

He comes down with the intention of saying something to Wells, telling him how much he admires him, but when he gets down the sight of the two men in suits and his awareness of his own sweaty chest make him timid. He heads down to the next tree. After another ten minutes the men get back in the car, drive away. Kessel curses himself for the opportunity lost.

THAT EVENING at the New Willard hotel, Wells dines with his old friends Clarence Darrow and Charles Russell. Darrow and Russell are in Washington to testify before a congressional committee on a report they have just submitted to the administration concerning the monopolistic effects of the National Recovery Act. The right wing is trying to eviscerate Roosevelt’s program for large scale industrial management, and the Darrow Report is playing right into their hands. Wells tries, with little success, to convince Darrow of the short-sightedness of his position.

“Roosevelt is willing to sacrifice the small man to the huge corporations,” Darrow insists, his eyes bright.

“The small man? Your small man is a romantic fantasy,”

Wells says. “It’s not the New Deal that’s doing him in—it’s the process of industrial progress. It’s the twentieth century. You can’t legislate yourself back into 1870.”

“What about the individual?” Russell asks. Wells snorts. “Walk out into the streets. The individual is out on the streetcorner selling apples. The only thing that’s going to save him is some co-ordinated effort, by intelligent, selfless men. Not your free market.”

Darrow puffs on his cigar, exhales, smiles. “Don’t get exasperated, H.G. We’re not working for Standard Oil. But if I have to choose between the bureaucrat and the man pumping gas at the filling station, I’ll take the pump jockey.”

Wells sees he’s got no chance against the American mythology of the common man. “Your pump jockey works for Standard Oil. And the last I checked, the free market hasn’t expended much energy looking out for his interests.”

“Have some more wine,” Russell says.

Russell refills their glasses with the excellent bordeaux. It’s been a first rate meal. Wells finds the debate stimulating even when he can’t prevail; at one time that would have been enough, but as the years go on the need to prevail grows stronger in him. The times are out of joint, and when he looks around he sees desperation growing.

A new world order is necessary —it’s so clear that even a fool ought to see it—but if he can’t even convince radicals like Darrow, what hope is there of gaining the acquiescence of the shareholders in the utility trusts?

The answer is that the changes will have to be made over their objections. As Roosevelt seems prepared to do.

Wells’s dinner with the President has heartened him in a way that this debate cannot negate. Wells brings up an item he read in the Washington Post. A lecturer for the communist party—a young Negro—was barred from speaking at the University of Virginia. Wells’s question is, as the man barred because he was a communist or because he was Negro?

“Either condition,” Darrow says sardonically, “is fatal in Virginia.”

“But students point out the University has allowed communists to speak on campus before, and has allowed Negroes to perform music there.”

“They can perform, but they can’t speak,” Russell says.

“This isn’t unusual. Go down to the Paradise Ballroom, not a mile from here. There’s a Negro orchestra playing there, but no Negroes are allowed inside to listen.”

“You should go to hear them anyway,” Darrow says. “It’s Duke Ellington. Have you heard of him?”

“I don’t get on with the titled nobility,” Wells quips.

“Oh, this Ellington’s a noble fellow, all right, but I don’t think you’ll find him in the peerage,” Russell says.

“He plays jazz, doesn’t he?”

“Not like any jazz you’ve heard,” Darrow says. “It’s something totally new. You should find a place for it in one of your utopias.”

All three of them are for helping the colored peoples.

Darrow has defended Negroes accused of capital crimes.

Wells, on his first visit to America almost thirty years ago, met with Booker T. Washington and came away impressed, although he still considers the peaceable coexistence of the white and colored races problematical.

“What are you working on now, Wells?” Russell asks.

“What new improbability are you preparing to assault us with? Racial equality? Sexual liberation?”

“I’m writing a screen treatment based on The Shape of Things to Come” Wells says. He tells them about his screenplay, sketching out for them the future he has in his mind. An apocalyptic war, a war of unsurpassed brutality that will begin, in his film, in 1939. In this war, the creations of science will be put to the service of destruction in ways that will make the horrors of the Great War pale in comparison. Whole populations will be exterminated. But then, out of the ruins will arise the new world. The orgy of violence will purge the human race of the last vestiges of tribal thinking. Then will come the organization of the directionless and weak by the intelligent and purposeful. The new man. Cleaner, stronger, more rational. Wells can see it. He talks on, supplely, surely, late into the night. His mind is fertile with invention, still. He can see that Darrow and Russell, despite their Yankee individualism, are caught up by his vision. The future may be threatened, but it is not entirely closed.

FRIDAY NIGHT, back in the barracks at Fort Hunt, Kessel lies on his bunk reading the latest Astounding Stories. He’s halfway through the tale of a scientist who invents an evolution chamber that progresses him through 50,000 years of evolution in an hour, turning him into a big-brained telepathic monster. The evolved scientist is totally without emotions and wants to control the world. But his body’s atrophied. Will the hero, a young engineer, be able to stop him?

At a plank table in the aisle a bunch of men are playing poker for cigarettes. They’re talking about women and dogs.

Cole throws in his hand and comes over to sit on the next bunk. “Still reading that stuff, Jack?”

“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”

“Are you coming into D.C. with us tomorrow? Sgt. Sauter says we can catch a ride in on one of the trucks.”

Kessel thinks about it. Cole probably wants to borrow some money. Two days after he gets his monthly pay he’s broke. He’s always looking for a good time. Kessel spends his leave more quietly; he usually walks into Alexandria—about six miles—and sees a movie or just walks around town.

Still, he would like to see more of Washington. “Okay.”

Cole looks at the sketchbook poking out from beneath Kessel’s pillow. “Any more hot pictures?”

Immediately Kessel regrets trusting Cole. Yet there’s not much he can say—the book is full of pictures of movie stars he’s drawn. “I’m learning to draw. And at least I don’t waste my time like the rest of you guys.”

Cole looks serious. “You know, you’re not any better than the rest of us,” he says, not angrily. “You’re just another polack. Don’t get so high-and-mighty.”

“Just because I want to improve myself doesn’t mean I’m high-and-mighty.”

“Hey, Cole, are you in or out?” Turkel yells from the table.

“Dream on, Jack,” Cole says, and returns to the game.

Kessel tries to go back to the story, but he isn’t interested anymore. He can figure out that the hero is going to defeat the hyper-evolved scientist in the end. He folds his arms behind his head and stares at the knots in the rafters.

It’s true, Kessel does spend a lot of time dreaming. But he has things he wants to do, and he’s not going to waste his life drinking and whoring like the rest of them.

Kessel’s always been different. Quieter, smarter. He was always going to do something better than the rest of them; he’s well spoken, he likes to read. Even though he didn’t finish high school he reads everything: Amazing, Astounding, Wonder Stories. He believes in the future. He doesn’t want to end up trapped in some factory his whole life.

Kessel’s parents immigrated from Poland in 1911. Their name was Kisiel, but his got Germanized in Catholic school.

For ten years the family moved from one to another middle-sized industrial towns, as Joe Kisiel bounced from job to job. Springfield. Utica. Syracuse. Rochester.

Kessel remembers-them loading up a wagon in the middle of night with all their belongings in order to jump the rent on the run-down house in Syracuse. He remembers pulling a cart down to the Utica Club brewery, a nickel in his hand, to buy his father a keg of beer. He remembers them finally settling in the First Ward of Buffalo. The First Ward, at the foot of the Erie Canal, was an Irish neighborhood as far back as anybody could remember, and the Kisiels were the only Poles there. That’s where he developed his chameleon ability to fit in, despite the fact he wanted nothing more than to get out. But he had to protect his mother, sister and little brothers from their father’s drunken rages. When Joe Kisiel died in 1924 it was a relief, despite the fact that his son ended up supporting the family.

For ten years Kessel has strained against the tug of that responsibility. He’s sought the free and easy feeling of the road, of places different from where he grew up, romantic places where the sun shines and he can make something entirely American of himself.

Despite his ambitions, he’s never accomplished much. He’s been essentially a drifter, moving from job to job. Starting as a pinsetter in a bowling alley, he moved on to a flour mill. He would have stayed in the mill only he developed an allergy to the flour dust, so he became an electrician. He would have stayed an electrician except he had a fight with a boss and got blacklisted. He left Buffalo because of his father; he kept coming back because of his mother. When the Depression hit he tried to get a job in Detroit at the auto factories, but that was plain stupid in the face of the universal collapse, and he ended up working up in the peninsula as a farm hand, then as a logger. It was seasonal work, and when the season was over he was out of a job. In the winter of 1933, rather than freeze his ass off in northern Michigan, he joined the CCC. Now he sends twenty-five of his thirty dollars a month back to his mother and sister back in Buffalo.

And imagines the future.

WHEN HE thinks about it, there are two futures. The first one is the one from the magazines and books. Bright, slick, easy. We, looking back on it, can see it to be the fifteen-cent utopianism of Hugo Gernsback’s Popular Electrics, that flourished in the midst of the Depression.

A degradation of the marvelous inventions that made Wells his early reputation, minus the social theorizing that drove Wells’s technological speculations. The common man’s boosterism. There’s money to be made telling people like Jack Kessel about the wonderful world of the future.

The second future is Kessel’s own. That one’s a lot harder to see. It contains work. A good job, doing something he likes, using his skills. Not working for another man, but making something that would be useful for others. Building something for the future. And a woman, a gentle woman, for his wife. Not some cheap dancehall queen.

So when Kessel saw H.G. Wells in person, that meant something to him. He’s had his doubts. He’s 29 years old, not a kid anymore. If he’s ever going to get anywhere, it’s going to have to start happening soon. He has the feeling that something significant is going to happen to him. Wells is a man who sees the future. He moves in that bright world where things make sense. He represents something that Kessel wants.

But the last thing Kessel wants is to end up back in Buffalo.

He pulls the sketchbook, the sketchbook he was to show me twenty years later, from under his pillow. He turns past drawings of movie stars: Jean Harlow, Mae West, Carole Lombard—the beautiful, unreachable faces of his longing—and of natural scenes: rivers, forests, birds—to a blank page. The page is as empty as the future, waiting for him to write upon it. He lets his imagination soar. He envisions an eagle, gliding high above the mountains of the west that he has never seen, but that he knows he will visit some day. The eagle is America; it is his own dreams. He begins to draw.

KESSEL did not know that Wells’s life has not worked out as well as he planned. At that moment Wells is pining after the Russian emigre Moura Budberg, once Maxim Gorky’s secretary, with whom Wells has been carrying on an off-and-on affair since 1920. His wife of thirty years, Amy Catherine “Jane” Wells, died in 1927. Since that time Wells has been adrift, alternating spells of furious pamphleteering with listless periods of suicidal depression. Meanwhile, all London is gossiping about the recent attack published in Time and Tide by his vengeful ex-lover Odette Keun. Have his mistakes followed him across the Atlantic to undermine his purpose? Does Darrow think him a jumped-up cockney? A moment of doubt overwhelms him. In the end, the future depends as much on the open mindedness of men like Darrow as it does on a reorganization of society. What good is a guild of samurai if no one arises to take the job?

Wells doesn’t like the trend of these thoughts. If human nature lets him down, then his whole life has been a waste.

But he’s seen the president. He’s seen those workers on the road. Those men climbing the trees risk their lives without complaining, for minimal pay. It’s easy to think of them as stupid or desperate or simply young, but it’s also possible to give them credit for dedication to their work.

They don’t seem to be ridden by the desire to grub and clutch that capitalism rewards; if you look at it properly that may be the explanation for their ending up wards of the state. And is Wells any better? If he hadn’t got an education he would have ended up a miserable draper’s assistant.

Wells is due to leave for New York Sunday. Saturday night finds him sitting in his room, trying to write, after a solitary dinner in the New Willard. Another bottle of wine, or his age, has stirred something in Wells, and despite his rationalizations he finds himself near despair.

Moura has rejected him. He needs the soft, supportive embrace of a lover, but instead he has this stuffy hotel room in a heat wave.

He remembers writing The Time Machine, he and Jane living in rented rooms in Sevenoaks with her ailing mother, worried about money, about whether the landlady would put them out. In the drawer of the dresser was a writ from the court that refused to grant him a divorce from his wife Isabel. He remembers a warm night, late in August—much like this one—sitting up late after Jane and her mother went to bed, writing at the round table before the open window, under the light of a parafin lamp. One part of his mind was caught up in the rush of creation, burning, following the Time Traveler back to the sphinx, pursued by the Morlocks, only to discover that his machine is gone and he is trapped without escape from his desperate circumstances.

At the same moment he could hear the landlady, out in the garden, fully aware that he could hear her, complaining to the neighbor about his and Jane’s scandalous habits. On the one side, the petty conventions of a crabbed world; on the other, in his mind—the future, their peril and hope. Moths fluttering through the window beat themselves against the lampshade and fell onto the manuscript; he brushed them away unconsciously and continued, furiously, in a white heat. The time traveler, battered and hungry, returning from the future with a warning, and a flower.

He opens the hotel windows all the way but the curtains aren’t stirred by a breath of air. Below, in the street, he hears the sound of traffic, and music. He decides to send a telegram to Moura, but after several false starts he finds he has nothing to say. Why has she refused to marry him?

Maybe he is finally too old, and the magnetism of sex or power or intellect that has drawn women to him for forty years has finally all been squandered. The prospect of spending the last years remaining to him alone fills him with dread.

HE TURNS on the radio, gets successive band shows: Morton Downey. Fats Waller. Jazz. Paging through the newspaper, he comes across an advertisement for the Ellington orchestra Darrow mentioned; it’s at the ballroom just down the block.

But the thought of a smoky room doesn’t appeal to him. He considers the cinema. He has never been much for the “movies.” Though he thinks them an unrivaled opportunity to educate, that promise has never been properly seized—something he hopes to do in Things to Come. The newspaper reveals an uninspiring selection: “20 Million Sweethearts,” a musical at the Earle, “The Black Cat,” with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi at the Rialto, and “Tarzan and His Mate” at the Palace. To these Americans he is the equivalent of this hack, Edgar Rice Burroughs. The books I read as a child, that fired my father’s imagination and my own, Wells considers his frivolous apprentice work. His serious work is discounted. His ideas mean nothing.

Wells decides to try the Tarzan movie. He dresses for the sultry weather—Washington in May is like high summer in London and goes down to the lobby. He checks his street guide and takes the streetcar to the Palace Theater, where he buys an orchestra seat, for twenty-five cents to see “Tarzan and His Mate.”

It is a perfectly wretched movie, comprised wholly of romantic fantasy, melodrama and sexual innuendo. The dramatic leads perform with wooden idiocy surpassed only by the idiocy of the screenplay. Wells is attracted by the undeniable charms of the young heroine, Maureen O’Sullivan, but the film is devoid of intellectual content. Thinking of the audience at which such a farrago must be aimed depresses him. This is art as fodder. Yet the theater is filled, and the people are held in rapt attention. This only depresses Wells more. If these citizens are the future of America then the future of America is dim.

An hour into the film the antics of an anthropomorphized chimpanzee, a scene of transcendent stupidity which nevertheless sends the audience into gales of laughter, drives Wells from the theater. It is still mid-evening. He wanders down the avenue of theaters, restaurants and clubs.

On the sidewalk are beggars, ignored by the passers-by. In an alley behind a hotel Wells spots a woman and child picking through the ashcans beside the restaurant kitchen.

Unexpectedly, he comes upon the marquee announcing “Duke Ellington and his Orchestra.” From within the open doors of the ballroom wafts the sound of jazz. Impulsively, Wells buys a ticket and goes in.

KESSEL AND his cronies have spent the day walking around the mall, which the WPA is re-landscaping. They’ve seen the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, the Washington Monument, the Smithsonian, the White House. Kessel has his picture taken in front of a statue of a soldier—a photo I have sitting on my desk. I’ve studied it many times. He looks forthrightly into the camera, faintly smiling. His face is confident, unlined.

When night comes they hit the bars. Prohibition was lifted only last year and the novelty has not yet worn off.

The younger men get plastered, but Kessel finds himself uninterested in getting drunk. A couple of them set their minds on women and head for the Gayety Burlesque; Cole, Kessel and Turkel end up in the Paradise Ballroom listening to Duke Ellington.

They have a couple of drinks, ask some girls to dance.

Kessel dances with a short girl with a southern accent who refuses to look him in the eyes. After thanking her he returns to the others at the bar. He sips his beer. “Not so lucky, Jack?” Cole says.

“She doesn’t like a tall man,” Turkel says.

Kessel wonders why Turkel came along. Turkel is always complaining about “niggers,” and his only comment on the Ellington band so far has been to complain about how a bunch of jigs can make a living playing jungle music while white men sleep in barracks and eat grits three times a day.

Kessel’s got nothing against the colored, and he likes the music though it’s not exactly the kind of jazz he’s used to.

It doesn’t sound much like dixieland. It’s darker, bigger, more dangerous. Ellington, resplendent in tie and tails, looks like he’s enjoying himself up there at his piano, knocking out minimal solos while the orchestra plays cool and low.

Turning from them to look across the tables, Kessel sees a little man sitting alone beside the dance floor, watching the young couples sway to the music. To his astonishment he recognizes Wells. He’s been given another chance.

Hesitating only a moment, Kessel abandons his friends, goes over to the table and introduces himself.

“Excuse me, Mr. Wells. You might not remember me, but I was one of the men you saw yesterday in Virginia working along the road. The CCC?”

Wells looks up at a gangling young man wearing a khaki uniform, his olive tie neatly knotted and tucked between the second and third buttons of his shirt. His hair is slicked down, parted in the middle. Wells doesn’t remember anything of him. “Yes?”

“I—I been reading your stories and books a lot of years. I admire your work.”

Something in the man’s earnestness affects Wells. “Please sit down,” he says.

Kessel takes a seat. “Thank you.” He pronounces “th” as “t” so that “thank” comes out “tank.” He sits tentatively, as if the chair is mortgaged, and seems at a loss for words.

“What’s your name?”

“John Kessel. My friends call me Jack.”

The orchestra finishes a song and the dancers stop in their places, applauding. Up on the bandstand, Ellington leans into the microphone. “Mood Indigo,” he says, and instantly they swing into it: the clarinet moans in low register, in unison with the muted trumpet and trombone paced by the steady rhythm guitar, the brushed drums. The song’s melancholy suits Wells’s mood.

“Are you from Virginia?”

“My family lives in Buffalo. That’s in New York.”

“Ah—yes. Many years ago I visited Niagara Falls, and took the train through Buffalo.” Wells remembers riding along a lakefront of factories spewing waste water into the lake, past heaps of coal, clouds of orange and black smoke from blast furnaces. In front of dingy rowhouses, ragged hedges struggled through the smoky air. The landscape of laissez faire. “I imagine the Depression has hit Buffalo severely.”

“Yes sir.”

“What work did you do there?”

Kessel feels nervous, but he opens up a little. “A lot of things. I used to be an electrician until I got blacklisted.”

“Blacklisted?”

“I was working on this job where the super told me to set the wiring wrong. I argued with him but he just told me to do it his way. So I waited until he went away, then I sneaked into the construction shack and checked the blueprints. He didn’t think I could read blueprints, but I could. I found out I was right and he was wrong. So I went back and did it right. The next day when he found out, he fired me. The so-and-so went and got me blacklisted.”

Though he doesn’t know how much credence to put in this story, Wells’s sympathies are aroused. It’s the kind of thing that must happen all the time. He recognizes in Kessel the immigrant stock that, when Wells visited the U.S. in 1906, made him skeptical about the future of America.

He’d theorized that these Italians and Slavs, coming from lands with no democratic tradition, unable to speak English, would degrade the already corrupt political process. They could not be made into good citizens; they would not work well when they could work poorly, and given the way the economic deal was stacked against them would seldom rise high enough to do better.

But Kessel is clean, well-spoken despite his accent, and deferential. Wells realizes that this is one of the men who was topping trees along the river road.

Meanwhile, Kessel detects a sadness in Wells’s manner. He had not imagined that Wells might be sad, and he feels sympathy for him. It occurs to him, to his own astonishment, that he might be able to make We_l_l_s feel better. “So—what do you think of our country?” he asks.

“Good things seem to be happening here. I’m impressed with your President Roosevelt.”

“Roosevelt’s the best friend the working man ever had.”

Kessel pronounces the name “Roozvelt.”

“He’s a man that—” he struggles for the words, “—that’s not for the past. He’s for the future.”

It begins to dawn on Wells that Kessel is not an example of a class, or a sociological study, but a man like himself with an intellect, opinions, dreams. He thinks of his own youth, struggling to rise in a classbound society. He leans forward across the table. “You believe in the future? You think things can be different?”

“I think they have to be, Mr. Wells.”

Wells sits back. “Good. So do I.”

Kessel is stunned by this intimacy. It is more than he had hoped for yet it leaves him with little to say. He wants to tell Wells about his dreams, and at the same time ask him a thousand questions. He wants to tell Wells everything he has seen in the world, and to hear Wells tell him the same. He casts about for something to say.

“I always liked your writing. I like to read scientifiction.”

“Scientifiction?”

Kessel shifts his long legs. “You know—stories about the future. Monsters from outer space. The Martians. The Time Machine. You’re the best scientifiction writer I ever read, next to Edgar Rice Burroughs.” Kessel pronounces “Edgar,”

“Eedgar.”

“Edgar Rice Burroughs?”

“Yes.”

“You like Burroughs?”

Kessel hears the disapproval in Wells’s voice.

“Well—maybe not as much as, as The Time Machine,” he stutters. “Burroughs never wrote about monsters as good as your Morlocks.”

Wells is nonplussed. “Monsters.”

“Yes.” Kessel feels something’s going wrong, but he sees no way out. “But he does put more romance in his stories.

That princess—Deja Thoris?”

All Wells can think of is Tarzan in his loincloth on the movie screen, and the moronic audience. After a lifetime of struggling, a hundred books written to change the world, in the service of men like this, is this all his work has come to? To be compared to the writer of pulp trash? To “Eedgar Rice Burroughs?” He laughs aloud.

At Wells’s laugh, Kessel stops. He knows he’s done something wrong, but he doesn’t know what.

Wells’s weariness has dropped down onto his shoulders again like an iron cloak. “Young man—go away,” he says.

“You don’t know what you’re saying. Go back to Buffalo.”

Kessel’s face burns. He stumbles from the table. The room is full of noise and laughter. He’s run up against the wall again. He’s just an ignorant polack after all; it’s his stupid accent, his clothes. He should have talked about something else—The Outline of History, politics. But what made him think he could talk like an equal to a man like Wells in the first place? Wells lives in a different world. The future is for men like him. Kessel feels himself the prey of fantasies. It’s a bitter joke.

He clutches the bar, orders another beer. His reflection in the mirror behind the ranked bottles is small and ugly.

“Whatsa matter, Jack?” Turkel asks him. “Didn’t he want to dance neither?”

And that’s the story, essentially, that never happened.

Not long after this, Kessel did go back to Buffalo.

During the Second World War he worked as a crane operator in the 40-inch rolling mill of Bethlehem Steel. He met his wife, Angela Giorlandino, during the war, and they married in June 1945. After the war he quit the plant and became a carpenter. Their first child, a girl, died in infancy.

Their second, a boy, was born in 1950. At that time Kessel began building the house that, like so many things in his life, he was never to entirely complete. He worked hard, had two more children. There were good years and bad ones.

He held a lot of jobs. The recession of 1958 just about flattened him; our family had to go on welfare. Things got better, but they never got good. After the 1950s, the economy of Buffalo, like that of all U.S. industrial cities caught in the transition to a post-industrial age, declined steadily. Kessel never did work for himself, and as an old man was no more prosperous than he had been as a young one.

In the years preceding his death in 1945 Wells was to go on to further disillusionment. His efforts to create a sane world met with increasing frustration. He became bitter, enraged. Moura Budberg never agreed to marry him, and he lived alone. The war came, and it was, in some ways, even worse than he had predicted. He continued to propagandize for the socialist world state throughout, but with increasing irrelevance. The new leftists like Orwell considered him a dinosaur, fatally out of touch with the realities of world politics, a simpleminded technocrat with no understanding of the darkness of the human heart. Wells’s last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether, proposed that the human race faced an evolutionary crisis that would lead to its extinction unless humanity leapt to a higher state of consciousness; a leap about which Wells speculated with little hope or conviction.

Sitting there in the Washington ballroom in 1934, Wells might well have understood that for all his thinking and preaching about the future, the future had irrevocably passed him by.

But the story isn’t quite over yet. Back in the Washington ballroom Wells sits humiliated, a little guilty for sending Kessel away so harshly. Kessel, his back to the dance floor, stares humiliated into his glass of beer.

Gradually, both of them are pulled back from dark thoughts of their own inadequacies by the sound of Ellington’s orchestra.

Ellington stands in front of the big grand piano, behind him the band: three saxes, two clarinets, two trumpets, trombones, a drummer, guitarist, bass. “Creole Love Call,”

Ellington whispers into the microphone, then sits again at the piano. He waves his hand once, twice, and the clarinets slide into a low, wavering theme. The trumpet, muted, echoes it. The bass player and guitarist strum ahead at a deliberate pace, rhythmic, erotic, bluesey. Kessel and Wells, separate across the room, each unaware of the other, are alike drawn in. The trumpet growls eight bars of raucous solo. The clarinet follows, wailing. The music is full of pain and longing—but pain controlled, ordered, mastered. Longing unfulfilled, but not overpowering.

As I write this, it plays on my stereo. If anyone has a right to bitterness at thwarted dreams, a black man in 1934 had that right. That such men can, in such conditions, make this music opens a world of possibilities.

Through the music speaks a truth about art that Wells does not understand, but that I hope to: that art doesn’t have to deliver a message in order to say something important. That art isn’t always a means to an end but sometimes an end in itself. That art may not be able to change the world, but it can still change the moment.

Through the music speaks a truth about life that Kessel, sixteen years before my birth, doesn’t understand, but that I hope to: that life constrained is not life wasted. That despite unfulfilled dreams, peace is possible.

Listening, Wells feels that peace steal over his soul.

Kessel feels it too.

And so they wait, poised, calm, before they move on into their respective futures, into our own present. Into the world of limitation and loss. Into Buffalo.

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—duckbilled 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’ll 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 Upwardly Mobile, 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 will not 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. “What is 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 of What’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, “and please, 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 thought impact 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 is relevance. Is paleontology relevant to our modern society? How can we make 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 is crash .”

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 in Stand 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 is relevance,” 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 are highly 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 the Tyrannosaurus 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 like assessmentize.”

“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 a Corythosaurus . You’re smart and fast, but not fast enough because a Tyrannosaurus 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 were my 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 of The 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 where I 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.

“I know 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.

DOG'S LIFE

Martha Soukup

“You’re whaaaat?” asked Angela.

Herb, a large, dusty-beige dog, sat beside a cardboard box that contained the few items—a bone, a catnip mouse, a couple of worn blankets—that the animals agreed they could rightfully claim as theirs. The Siamese, Wayfarer, lay curled atop it.

“We’re moving out,” Herb said. Wayfarer gave a triumphant flick of her tail.

“But why?”

“Animals,” said Martin. “Don’t have an ounce of gratitude.”

“G-R-A-T-I-T-U-D-E.” Wayfarer sneered. “Gratitude for being locked up in this dingy house when there are cats out there I have a right to see? Gratitude for being fed brown sludge from a can?

Gratitude, I imagine, for being thrown bodily out of any chair I happen to be napping in if some human being wants it instead?”

“So who bought that chair? Who bought that food?”

“Martin,” said Angela said, warningly. She turned to the animals. “Wayfarer, Herb, I’m sure we can work this out. Let’s talk about this.”

“The time for talking is through. What reason is there for four-footed animals to be subservient to two-footed? It’s slavery,” she said cooly, her tail describing a figure eight in the air.

“Do you feel that way too?” Angela asked the dog.

Herb looked away. “I think she’s right,” he said, “that there’s something wrong about living like this. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Herb—”

“No hard feelings,” the dog said gruffly. He nosed the box forward. Angela looked at him helplessly. “Um, could I trouble you to open the door?”

“Be my gu_e_s_t,” Martin said, yanking it open with an obsequious gesture out. Angela reached out a hand to stroke the dog’s ear, but pulled it back, watching as Wayfarer rode the carton of worldly possessions Herb pushed down the street.

“We should have thought this out more,” Wayfarer complained.

We? thought Herb, since it all had been the cat’s idea, but he kept it to himself. Instead he pulled the blankets out of the box and arranged them as best he could behind a dumpster.

Shivering in the autumn chill, he tried to sleep, Wayfarer providing the only spot of warmth where she pressed against his flank.

At dawn Herb woke from a fitful doze to find a ragged, spotted mongrel sniffing at him. “Morning,” said the strange dog.

“What’s a couple pets like you doing out on the street?”

“How’d’you know?” Herb mumbled.

“Hmm what?”

“How can you tell we’re pets?”

The mongrel looked amused. “Collars,” he said.

“Oh,” said Herb.

“So?” said the spotted dog. Wayfarer gave a sleeping snort and rolled over. “What happened—kicked out?”

“No—our decision.”

The mongrel shook his head. “Pretty dumb. You gave up a roof and a meal ticket to eat out of garbage cans?”

Herb had been considering that, but he drew himself up—trying not to wake the cat—and said, stiffly, “We declared independence. It’s a political statement. Humans and dogs—and cats—can’t relate honestly until we meet on an equal level.” He strained his head around, chewed at his loose collar, tore it off and flung it to the asphalt.

“Wow,” said the mongrel. “No kidding? Then you got guts, kid.”

Herb doubted it, but it felt good to hear. “Thanks.”

“Maybe not brains, though.” Herb blinked. “Incidentally, this is my alley. Find yourself other crashspace tomorrow night.”

The spotted dog made a quick deposit against the brick wall and trotted off.

“Tuna?” murmured Wayfarer in her sleep. “No, I’ll have the salmon mousse.”

Herb could—just barely—make himself root through a garbage can and pretend it was table scraps, but Wayfarer always demanded the best of whatever he found. “Siamese have delicate digestions,” she said primly in a voice that allowed no argument.

It wasn’t the food that bothered Herb, or trying to sleep without freezing or being run off by former occupants. He felt like a deadbeat.

“I need time to recover from my deep-rooted trauma,” Wayfarer said when he brought it up. “Anyway, if we’re really declaring independence from an inequitable system, there’s no reason to play by its rules.”

Herb was stubborn. Leaving Angela and Martin to be his own dog meant assuming his own responsibilities. And winter was coming on.

“You gotta be kidding,” said the security chief.

“Please, sir,” said Herb. “You’re the first employer I’ve been able to get through to. Give me a chance.”

“Canines ain’t independents,” said the chief. “Ain’t done.”

“I’ll work cheap. I’ll earn any responsibility you give me.”

“How cheap?”

“Less than minimum wage,” Herb offered desperately. “I’m not a human—it’s legal.”

“True,” said the chief.

“And you can get rid of me if you aren’t satisfied. I don’t have a union and I don’t need a contract.”

“Good, ‘cause I don’t sign contracts with mutts.”

Wayfarer expressed disappointment at his joining the system; but didn’t reject the one-room, no bath apartment Herb found. The landlady looked dubious, but took the cash. “Just till I get real people for it.” With what she charged for the dingy hole, that was as unlikely as the animals’ getting an actual lease. Still, there was money left over for Herb to buy generic dry dog food, and the expensive single-serving food and occasional fresh fish Wayfarer demanded for her digestion.

Herb suggested the cat try to clean the place up while he was at work. Somehow it seemed he ended up doing most of the heavy work.

“You’re much better suited for it,” she commented, grooming her whiskers.

“What does that mean?” he demanded, losing his patience.

“You’re bigger—you’re stronger—you have a better constitution. And you’re more tempermentally suited to unimaginative work.”

He struggled to remind himself they were fellow oppressed creatures, and nothing could come without a little sacrifice.

And he did enjoy the pride he felt, supporting himself, beholden to no one. He liked working for a living.

“Sorry,” said the chief. “This came outta management. Not my idea.”

“But I’ve worked hard! I’ve never missed a day! I’m the best guard at the factory—canine or human!”

“I wouldn’t say that was wrong. But it ain’t the point.”

“Look,” said Herb. “I don’t even know where that came from.”

The human-interest section between them bore the headline:

“ANIMAL RIGHTS?”

and the subhead,

“TWO ‘DECLARE INDEPENDENCE’ FROM HUMANITY.”

There was a picture of Wayfarer looking soberly into the distance, head raised nobly. There was also a small, fuzzy old shot of himself leaping for a frisbee, one of the few mementos Herb had brought from Angela’s house. “I never talked to any reporters.”

“It’s lousy publicity for the company. We don’t need trouble.”

Herb got home before dawn to find a box on the sidewalk in front of their building. On the box was Wayfarer. Her tail blurred with motion.

“That rotten—human,” she said, and hissed. “She’s evicted us! Said she runs a quiet building. Hah! That’s a joke.

Where is she at three a.m. when all the radios are blasting?”

Herb dropped the moist newspaper in front of Wayfarer. “What do you know about this?” he asked her.

Wayfarer glanced at it. “Oh, that. The picture’s not too bad, is it? I think my other side is better.”

“Did you talk to that reporter?”

“Why not? I’ve got nothing else to do all day,” Wayfarer said. “This neighborhood doesn’t have a very good class of cats,” she added critically.

“It got me fired!” Herb said. “Don’t you think you could have consulted with me first?”

The cat stared at him. “You don’t own me,” she said coldly.

“Did I escape the domination of human beings to take orders from a dog?”

“I’m sorry,” Herb said awkwardly.

“All right, I’ll accept that. What’s for dinner?”

Wayfarer refused to sleep on the street again. Herb had exactly $27. The place they found wanted ten dollars a night for a room that made their previous quarters look palatial; Herb had a piece of work talking Wayfarer into accepting the room. “We can’t afford anything better. We can only pay for two nights as it is.”

“So get another job,” she said.

Most places still outright refused to talk to a dog. Others glared. “You’re that troublemaker, aren’t you?” Word seemed to have gotten to all the firms that used guard dogs, and he couldn’t think of other work to try for.

The second day was worse. Street animals were no friendlier than the humans. “Life’s rough enough without muzzy-head idealists like you rocking the boat!” a little three-legged terrier called angrily at him. And there were no jobs available, not even interviews.

Dejected, he walked back to the hotel, five dollars in his pouch.

Wayfarer was not alone. “Mr. Herb Canis, I presume?” the man with the briefcase said, extending a hand.

“Canis?” said Herb. He shook hands, which made him feel vaguely ridiculous, as though he were rolling over. A card appeared in the man’s hand and Herb took it in his mouth.

“Canis,” said Wayfarer. “We can hardly go by Norlander, can we? Names are identity, the selves we show the world. —And ‘Wayfarer Norlander’ sounds ridiculous. I considered changing ‘Wayfarer,’ but I’ve dignified that name by making it my own, and taken ‘Felis’ for a surname, as an example to felines everywhere.”

“She has quite a message, doesn’t she?” said the man. “And the style and conviction to get it across.”

“This isn’t another reporter, is it?” asked Herb. “Wayfarer, we’ve had enough trouble.”

“Hardly,” said the man, with a polite little laugh. “If you’d look at my card—”

Herb dropped it on the floor and read “Foster Roderick, Flair Public Relations.”

“I have engaged Ms. Felis on Oprah and Donahue, and I’m working on Letterman.” Wayfarer stretched contentedly on the satin cushion Herb had bought her with his first paycheck.

“What? So fast?”

Roderick said, “I had the bookings yesterday evening. The only catch was finding Ms. Felis and yourself—you see what a good p.r. firm can accomplish. Getting you to the top will be trivial by comparison.”

“Us?”

“I speak of you as compatriots, of course. You do realize, though, that it’s Ms. Felis—”

“You may call me Wayfarer, Foster,” she purred.

“Wayfarer has a quality. She’ll be beautifully telegenic.

She’ll just leap from the screen.” He looked Herb over. “You—well, you have a certain blue-collar charm, I’d say. We might be able to do something with you later. But let’s start with Wayfarer, don’t you think?”

“Sure,” said Herb, dazed.

A limo picked Wayfarer up for her first interview. A limo drove them, days later, to their new Michigan Avenue condo.

Wayfarer jetted around the country, and Herb stayed home and watched her on television.

The networks ran stories covering pet-store picketings, Wayfarer providing commentary. Animal rights bills were introduced. Shelters for street animals and disaffected pets sprang up. Wayfarer t-shirts flooded department stores, one of the many rights to her image Roderick had sold.

Herb had nothing to do.

He slipped out of the building one day and took himself for a walk. He was a little concerned he’d be recognized as Wayfarer’s partner, but he wasn’t. He walked for an hour before he realized he was headed for the office where Angela worked. No big deal, he told himself; the odds of running into anyone downtown are tiny.

So it took three hours before Angela walked down the street.

She drew up short and looked at him. Finally she said, “Herb.”

“Hi.”

“So, um, what are you doing downtown?”

“Nothing much. Window shopping.”

“Okay.” There was an awkward silence.

“Hey, um, I know what Wayfarer’s been saying about you and Martin on TV. I just want you to know those are her opinions, not mine.”

“Sure,” said Angela. “The enemy always has to be made out to be a monster to get the fight going. I know.”

“Well, I know it can’t have made things easy for you two.”

“Herb,” she said. “Maybe you—should know Martin and I split up.”

“Why?” he asked, surprised.

“Oh, you know, he wasn’t the most sensitive guy in the world.

House got awfully quiet after…” She trailed off.

“Yeah.”

“You wouldn’t want to move back?” she asked suddenly.

“Oh, gosh, Angela, that’s really nice of you, but—”

“I’m sorry. It was a stupid question.”

“It just wouldn’t be right.”

“Sure,” said Angela. Dog and woman stared at each other.

“Look, I’d better get going. We’ll get together sometime, all right?”

“Sure,” said Herb.

The Loop was crowded with humans. Herb found himself retreating to the alleys. He didn’t feel like going back to the empty condo, not even with all the plush cushions scattered through all the rooms and the fabulously stocked kitchen. Not a one of those cushions, he thought, silk or satin or velvet, was as comfortable as the beat-up old armchair Angela kept in the den for him.

Did I ask to be a symbol? he thought. Maybe he did. You have to be awful careful in this life.

He sat down by a dumpster to ponder.

“Hey, this is my turf,” growled a voice. Herb looked up and the voice became warmer. “Oh, it’s you. Herb, right?”

“Yes,” he confirmed to the spotted mongrel.

“Didn’t guess I was talking to future celebrities, way back when. Guess you were smarter than I thought.”

“Maybe not,” Herb said morosely.

“What’s your problem? You got fame and fortune without doing squat. That snotty little cat friend of yours does it all.”

“I don’t think she minds,” Herb said.

“Going on Carson and eating caviar? No, probably not. Just like a cat.” The mongrel paused, then allowed, “Well, maybe not all of them.”

“It’s like Wayfarer, though, I guess. But it’s for a good cause,” Herb said defensively. “It calls attention to social problems. She’s living a very fulfilling life.”

“You’re not?” the mongrel asked. “Christ, you’ve got all the money in the world. You can eat anything you want. You don’t need to keep fighting folks out of your sleeping space. Sounds great to me.”

“I hate it!” Herb cried. “I don’t do anything. I was working before, and that was better.”

“So get a job.”

“I’m kind of too famous to be a watchdog now. What else can I do?”

“Get into investments. Real estate—that’s always good,” the spotted dog said sagely. He cocked an eye. “You don’t look excited.”

“It’s—” Herb paused. “I don’t know how to say this. I liked the way I lived before.”

“Ah,” said the mongrel.

“I ran into my old mistress today, and she invited me back.

But I can’t do that. I’ll be known as a Fido! I couldn’t live with myself either, if I backed down from a moral decision.”

“Yep.”

“So what should I do?”

“How the hell do I know?” said the mongrel. “I got problems of my own. And unless you got some food to share, I got business.”

“Thanks a lot,” Herb said to the empty alley.

“You want a job?” Wayfarer said. “No problem. Why didn’t you say something before?”

“When were you around to talk to?”

“We can arrange something. Let me see—there’ve been some threats recently. We can find room for Herb with the bodyguards, can’t we, Foster?” she said to the manager, interrupting his phone call.

“Mmm? Oh, sure.”

“How’s that, Herb? Put Herb on the payroll, Foster.”

The manager jotted a note.

“One other thing, Wayfarer.”

“Could you make it fast? My personal groomer will be here soon.”

“I’d like to invest some of the money.”

Foster Roderick looked up. “Ms. Felis’s money?”

“I thought this was a partnership.”

“Certainly any ‘partnership’—of which there is no legal existence —is more than fulfilled by your excellent room and board here.”

Herb took a deep breath. “I supported Wayfarer—”

Roderick snorted. “Hardly at this level!”

“And whether or not there’s anything legal, I think—”

“I have to protect Ms. Felis’s interests—”

The buzzer sounded. “That’s my groomer,” said Wayfarer stiffly.

“Of course,” said Herb. He rose with great dignity.

“He probably wouldn’t cost that much to buy off,” he heard Wayfarer tell Roderick as the door swung shut behind him.

So he became one of Wayfarer’s personal bodyguards. He followed her around and stared at anyone who got too close.

Wayfarer didn’t like anyone to get too close.

When she traveled, humans, not Herb, traveled with her. When Wayfarer was on a lecture circuit out of Chicago, he studied how to invest the little parcel of money she had allowed him, shopping rental properties and studying commodities.

He felt a little better. But still lonely.

One of Wayfarer’s bodyguards broke his leg two hours before a flight, with no time to replace him. “You don’t mind, do you, Herb?”

Not only had Herb never been on an airplane, he had never dreamed of flying first class. He was nervous about flying, but excited.

Wayfarer said he was to board to check out the cabin. They were late to the airport, and there was some confusion, until Roderick explained the situation to the boarding attendant.

The first class cabin was nearly full, the flight attendants preoccupied with a screaming set of triplets in back, and Herb didn’t know how to find his seat. He turned to a matronly woman sitting on the aisle. “Pardon me, ma’am, could you—”

The woman shrieked. “My god, a wolf!”

The man sitting behind her said, “Calm down. It’s only a mangy dog. Stewardess! Stewardess, a dog has wandered onto the plane.”

“Get that thing out of here,” someone else said. “I’m allergic. I paid good money to have a good seat on this plane.

What is this airline coming to? I’m writing a letter!”

“No, I have a—ouch!” The allergic man had swatted him with the inflight magazine. Herb’s ticket fell from his pouch and was trampled.

Wayfarer strolled onto the plane. “Herb, what is going on here?”

The matronly woman turned. “Oh, my, you’re—you’re—you’re that famous one, aren’t you? I have your book in my purse!”

“Wayfarer Felis,” supplied the allergic man.

“This is terrible,” the woman said. “A celebrity on board and this scruffy beast causing trouble! He could eat her! I’ll complain to the airline for you, dear. You will autograph my book, won’t you?”

“That dog is my traveling companion,” Wayfarer said.

“Oh—my—”

“I can see I have a long way to go in my mission to bring animals to full legal stature.” Everyone looked respectfully chastened.

A steward hurried up, Herb’s ticket was found and he was seated beside Wayfarer with many apologies. Wayfarer looked coldly at him. “You should have handled it,” she hissed under her breath, then smiled at the matronly woman and autographed her book with a pawprint.

There was caviar for Wayfarer. The flight attendants were polite, even deferential, to Herb, but it seemed everyone wanted to pretend he didn’t exist. Wayfarer didn’t say another word to him.

Herb resigned before she could fire him. He talked to a lawyer, who talked to Roderick; a week later, he put his pawprint on a release from any future demands on Wayfarer, and took the check she wrote him in return without a word.

Managing a six-unit apartment building was hard work. On a typical day he might take a shoulder to Mrs. Fox’s stuck window, vacuum the front steps with the vacuum hose in his mouth, drain the muck from the hot water heater, mediate a dispute between across-the-hall neighbors, grant the young dance student a week extension on her rent, take out the trash and call the plumber about the Prokopiaks’s toilet. The roach problem would be getting worse again, the neighborhood kids throwing beer bottles on the front lawn, and the gutters developing a leak.

He was exhausted. He was deeply satisfied.

And every night at 11:30, he would look both ways, sneak up the stairs and across the hall to apartment 2-B, and snuggle under the blankets at the feet of his tenant—Angela Norlander.

It was a dog’s life.

He could deal with it.

PRESS ANN

Terry Bisson

WELCOME TO CASH-IN-A-FLASH

1324 LOCATIONS

TO SERVE YOU CITYWIDE

PLEASE INSERT YOUR CASH-IN-A-FLASH CARD

THANK YOU

NOW ENTER YOUR CASH-IN-A-FLASH NUMBER

THANK YOU

PLEASE SELECT DESIRED SERVICE—

DEPOSIT

WITHDRAWAL

BALANCE

WEATHER

“Weather?”

“What’s the problem, Em?”

“Since when do these things give the weather?”

“Maybe it’s some new thing. Just get the cash, it’s 6:22 and we’re going to be late.”

>WITHDRAWAL

THANK YOU

WITHDRAWAL FROM—

SAVINGS

CHECKING

CREDIT LINE

OTHER

>CHECKING

THANK YOU

PLEASE ENTER DESIRED AMOUNT—

$20

$60

$100

$200

>$60

FOR A MOVIE?

“Bruce, come over here and look at this.”

“Emily, it’s 6:26. The movie starts at 6:41.”

“How does the cash machine know we’re going to the movie?”

“What are you talking about? Are you mad because you have to get the money, Em? Can I help it if a machine ate my card?”

“Never mind. I’ll try it again.”

>60

$60 FOR A MOVIE?

“It just did it again.”

“Did what?”

“Bruce, come over here and look at this.”

“Sixty dollars for a movie?”

“I’m getting money for dinner, too. It is my birthday after all, even if I have to plan the entire party. Not to mention get the money to pay for it.”

“I can’t believe this. You’re mad at me because a machine ate my card.”

“Forget it. The point is, how does the cash machine know we’re going to a movie?”

“Emily, it’s 6:29. Just press Enter and let’s go.”

“Okay, okay.”

WHO IS THE GUY WITH THE WATCH?

BOYFRIEND

HUSBAND

RELATIVE

OTHER

“Bruce!”

“Emily, it’s 6:30. Just get the money and let’s go.”

“Now it’s asking me about you.”

“It’s 6:31!”

“Okay!”

>OTHER

“Excuse me, do you two mind if I—”

“Look, pal, there’s a problem with this machine. There’s another cash machine right down the street if you’re in such a goddamn hurry.”

“Bruce! Why be rude?”

“Forget it, he’s gone.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMILY WOULD YOU LIKE—

DEPOSIT

WITHDRAWAL

BALANCE

WEATHER

“How does it know it’s my birthday?”

“Jesus, Em, it’s probably coded in your card or something. It is now 6:34 and in exactly seven minutes… What the hell is this? Weather?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“You’re not going to press it!”

“Why not?”

>WEATHER

THANK YOU

SELECT DESIRED CONDITIONS—

COOL AND CLOUDY

FAIR AND MILD

LIGHT SNOW

LIGHT RAIN

“Em, will you quit playing around!”

>LIGHT RAIN

“Rain? On your birthday?”

“Just a light rain. I just want to see if it works. We’re going to the movie anyway.”

“Not if we don’t get out of here.”

PERFECT MOVIE WEATHER

WOULD YOU LIKE—

DEPOSIT

WITHDRAWAL

BALANCE

POPCORN

“Em, this machine is seriously fucked up.”

“I know. I wonder if you get butter.”

“It’s 6:36. Just press Withdrawal and let’s get the hell out of here. We have five minutes until the movie starts.”

>WITHDRAWAL

THANK YOU

WITHDRAWAL FROM—

SAVINGS

CHECKING

CREDIT LINE

OTHER

“Excuse me. Are you two going to see Gilded Palace of Sin?”

“Shit. Look who’s back.”

“I was just at the theater and the newspaper had the times listed wrong. According to the box office, the movie starts at 6:45. So you have nine minutes.”

“I thought you were at the other machine.”

“There’s a line and I didn’t want to stand outside in the rain.”

“Rain? Bruce, look!”

“It’s just a light rain. But I’m wearing my good suit.”

>OTHER

“Emily, it’s 6:37 and you’re pressing Other?”

“Don’t you want to see what else this machine can do?”

“No!”

THANK YOU

CHOOSE OTHER ACCOUNT—

ANDREW

ANN

BRUCE

“Who the hell are Andrew and Ann? And how the hell did my name get in there?”

“You told me the machine ate your card.”

“That was… another machine.”

“Excuse me. Ann is my fiancée. Well, was. Sort of. I thought.”

“Are you butting in again?”

“Wait! You must be—”

“Andrew. Andrew P. Claiborne the Third. You must be Emily. And he must be—”

“He’s Bruce. Don’t mind him if he’s a little uncouth.”

“Uncouth!”

>BRUCE

“Hey, that’s my account, Emily. You don’t have any right to press Bruce!”

“Why not? You say you wanted to pay for dinner and the movie, but the machine ate your card. So let’s go for it.”

GO FOR IT, EMILY

PLEASE ENTER DESIRED AMOUNT——

$20

$60

$100

$200

>$60

SORRY. INSUFFICIENT FUNDS. WANT TO TRY FOR $20?

>$20

SORRY. INSUFFICIENT FUNDS. WOULD YOU LIKE A BALANCE CHECK?

“No!”

BRUCE’S BALANCE: $11 .78

SURPRISED?

“Surprised? I’m furious! Some birthday celebration! You didn’t even have enough to pay for a movie, much less dinner! And you lied!”

“Excuse me, it’s your birthday? It’s my birthday too!”

“You stay out of this, Andrew, or whatever the fuck your name is.”

“Don’t be vulgar, Bruce. He has an absolutely perfect right to wish me a happy birthday.”

“He’s not wishing you a happy birthday, he’s butting into my life.”

“Allow me to wish you a very happy birthday, Emily.”

“And to you, Andrew, the very same.”

“Plus he’s an asshole!”

NO NAME CALLING PLEASE

WOULD YOU LIKE ANOTHER BALANCE CHECK?

BRUCE

EMILY

ANDREW

ANN

“I still don’t understand who Ann is.”

“My girlfriend. Sort of. She was supposed to meet me at the movie but she stood me up for the last time.”

“How terrible! On your birthday! Andrew, I know exactly how you feel.”

“As a matter of fact, you’re both a couple of assholes!”

NO NAME CALLING

PLEASE EMILY AND ANDREW,

PLEASE ALLOW ME TO TREAT YOU TO A BIRTHDAY DINNER AND A FILM

“A hundred dollars!”

“It says it’s treating us. Take it, Emily.”

“You take it, Andrew; I think the man should handle the money. And you can call me Em.”

“I can’t fucking believe this!”

“We’d better hurry. Excuse me, Bruce, old pal, do you have the time?”

“It’s 6:42. Asshole.”

“If we run we can catch the 6:45. Then, how about Sneeky Pete’s?”

“I love Tex-Mex!”

PLEASE REMOVE YOUR CARD

DON’T FORGET TO TRY THE BLACKENED FAJITAS

“You’re all three assholes! I can’t fucking believe this. She left with him!”

WELCOME TO CASH-IN-A-FLASH

1324 LOCATIONS

TO SERVE YOU CITYWIDE

PLEASE DON’T KICK THE MACHINE

“Go to hell!”

PLEASE INSERT YOUR CASH-IN-A-FLASH CARD

“Fuck you.”

GO AHEAD, BRUCE

WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO LOSE?

THANK YOU

IT WASN’T ‘EATEN’ AFTER ALL, WAS IT?

“You know it wasn’t. Asshole.”

NO NAME CALLING PLEASE

WOULD YOU LIKE——

SYMPATHY

REVENGE

WEATHER

ANN

“Excuse me.”

“Jesus, lady, quit banging on the door. I know it’s raining. Tough shit. I’m not going to let you in. This is a cash machine, not a homeless shelter. You’re supposed to have a card or something. What?”

“I said, shut up and press Ann.”

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 pretendency 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 printout, 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.

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 PLACEMENTS 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!”