Civilizations are the products of historical continuity: knowledge, traditions, and technology develop over many centuries and are strongly influenced by local climates and topology. Today, of course, we're approaching the reality of the "global village" via greatly increased ease of travel and communications . . . but we still speak many different languages, literally and figuratively. What if all the people in the world woke up one morning and found themselves in a different country? Would they be able to deal with the situation well enough to continue civilization as we know it? Would they even want to?

Michael Bishop, whose most recent novel is Transfigurations, has appeared twice before in Universe, with "Old Folks at Home" in §8 and "Saving Face" in §10.

• THE QUICKENING

Michael Bishop

Lawson came out of his sleep feeling drugged and disoriented. Instead of the susurrus of traffic on Rivermont and the early-morning barking of dogs, he heard running feet and an unsettling orchestration of moans and cries. No curtains screened or softened the sun that beat down on his face, and an incandescent blueness had replaced their ceiling. "Marlena," Lawson said doubtfully. He wondered if one of the children was sick and told himself that he ought to get up to help.

But when he tried to rise, scraping the back of his hand on a stone set firmly in mortar, he found that his bed had become a parapet beside a river flowing through an unfamiliar city. He was wearing, instead of the green Chinese-peasant pajamas that Marlena had given him for Christmas, a suit of khaki 1505s from his days in the Air Force and a pair of ragged Converse sneakers. Clumsily, as if deserting a mortuary slab, Lawson leapt away from the wall. In his sleep, the world had turned over. The forms of a bewildered anarchy had begun to assert themselves.

The city—and Lawson knew that it sure as hell wasn't Lynchburg, that the river running through it wasn't the James—was full of people. A few, their expressions terrified and their postures defensive, were padding past Lawson on the boulevard beside the parapet. Many shrieked or babbled as they ran. Other human shapes dressed not even remotely alike, were lifting themselves bemusedly from paving stones, or riverside benches, or the gutter beyond the sidewalk. Their grogginess and their swiftly congealing fear, Lawson realized, mirrored his own: like him, these people were awakening to nightmare.

Because the terrible fact of his displacement seemed more important than the myriad physical details confronting him, it was hard to take in everything at once—but Lawson tried to balance and integrate what he saw.

The city was foreign. Its architecture was a clash of the Gothic and the sterile, pseudoadobe Modern, one style to each side of the river. On this side, palm trees waved their dreamy fronds at precise intervals along the boulevard, and toward the city's interior an intricate cathedral tower defined by its great height nearly everything beneath it. Already the sun crackled off the rose-colored tower with an arid fierceness that struck Lawson, who had never been abroad, as Mediterranean. . . . Off to his left was a bridge leading into a more modern quarter of the city, where beige and brick-red highrises clustered like tombstones. On both sides of the bridge buses, taxicabs, and other sorts of motorized vehicles were stalled or abandoned in the thoroughfares.

Unfamiliar, Lawson reflected, but not unearthly—he recognized things, saw the imprint of a culture somewhat akin to his own. And, for a moment, he let the inanimate bulk of the city and the languor of its palms and bougainvillea crowd out of his vision the human horror show taking place in the streets.

A dark woman in a sari hurried past. Lawson lifted his hand to her. Dredging up a remnant of a high-school language course, he shouted, "¿Habla Español?" The woman quickened her pace, crossed the street, recrossed it, crossed it again; her movements were random, motivated, it seemed, by panic and the complicated need to do something.

At a black man in a loincloth farther down the parapet, Lawson shouted, "This is Spain! We're somewhere in Spain! That's all I know! Do you speak English? Spanish? Do you know what's happened to us?"

The black man, grimacing so that his skin went taut across his cheekbones, flattened himself atop the wall like a lizard. His elbows jutted, his eyes narrowed to slits. Watching him, Lawson perceived that the man was listening intently to a sound that had been steadily rising in volume ever since Lawson had opened his eyes: the city was wailing. From courtyards, apartment buildings, taverns, and plazas, an eerie and discordant wail was rising into the bland blue indifference of the day. It consisted of many strains. The Negro in the loincloth seemed determined to separate these and pick out the ones that spoke most directly to him. He tilted his head.

"Spain!" Lawson yelled against the uproar. "¡España!"

The black man looked at Lawson, but the hieroglyph of recognition was not among those that glinted in his eyes. As if to dislodge the wailing of the city, he shook his head. Then, still crouching lizard-fashion on the wall, he began methodically banging his head against its stones. Lawson, helplessly aghast, watched him until he had knocked himself insensible in a sickening, repetitive spattering of blood.

But Lawson was the only one who watched. When he approached the man to see if he had killed himself, Lawson's eyes were seduced away from the African by a movement in the river. A bundle of some sort was floating in the greasy waters below the wall—an infant, clad only in a shirt. The tie-strings on the shirt trailed out behind the child like the severed, wavering legs of a water-walker. Lawson wondered if in Spain, they even had water-walkers. . . .

Meanwhile, still growing in volume, there crooned above the highrises and Moorish gardens the impotent air-raid siren of 400,000 human voices. Lawson cursed the sound. Then he covered his face and wept.

The city was Seville. The river was the Guadalquivir. Lynchburg and the James River, around which Lawson had grown up as the eldest child of an itinerant fundamentalist preacher, were several thousand miles and one helluva big ocean away. You couldn't get there by swimming, and if you imagined that your loved ones would be waiting for you when you got back, you were probably fantasizing the nature of the world's changed reality. No one was where he or she belonged anymore, and-Lawson knew himself lucky even to realize where he was. Most of the dispossessed, displaced people inhabiting Seville today didn't know that much; all they knew was the intolerable cruelty of their uprooting, the pain of separation from husbands, wives, children, lovers, friends. These things, and fear.

The bodies of infants floated in the Guadalquivir; and Lawson, from his early reconnoiterings of the city on a motor scooter that he had found near the Jardines de Cristina park, knew that thousands of adults already lay dead on streets and in apartment buildings—victims of panic-inspired beatings or their own traumatized hearts. Who knew exactly what was going on in the morning's chaos? Babel had come again and with it, as part of the package, the utter dissolution of all family and societal ties. You couldn't go around a corner without encountering a child of some exotic ethnic caste, her face snot-glazed, sobbing loudly or maybe running through a crush of bodies calling out names in an alien tongue.

What were you supposed to do? Wheeling by on his motor scooter, Lawson either ignored these children or searched their faces to see how much they resembled his daughters.

Where was Marlena now? Where were Karen and Hannah? Just as he played deaf to the cries of the children in the boulevards, Lawson had to harden himself against the implications of these questions. As dialects of German, Chinese, Bantu, Russian, Celtic, and a hundred other languages rattled in his ears, his scooter rattled past a host of cars and buses with uncertain-seeming drivers at their wheels. Probably he too should have chosen an enclosed vehicle. If these frustrated and angry drivers, raging in poly got defiance, decided to run over him, they could do so with impunity. Who would stop them?

Maybe—in Istanbul, or La Paz, or Mangalore, or Jonko-ping, or Boise City, or Kaesong—his own wife and children had already lost their lives to people made murderous by fear or the absence of helmeted men with pistols and billy sticks. Maybe Marlena and his children were dead. . . .

I'm in Seville, Lawson told himself, cruising. He had determined the name of the city soon after mounting the motor scooter and going by a sign that said Plaza de Toros de Sevilla. A circular stadium of considerable size near the river. The bullring. Lawson's Spanish was just good enough to decipher the signs and posters plastered on its walls. Corrida a las cinco de la tarde. (Garcia Lorca, he thought, unsure of where the name had come from.) Sombray sol. That morning, then, lie took the scooter around the stadium three or four times and then shot off toward the center of the city.

Lawson wanted nothing to do with the nondescript high-rises across the Guadalquivir, but had no real idea what he was going to do on the Moorish and Gothic side of the river, cither. All he knew was that the empty bullring, with its dormant potential for death, frightened him. On the other hand, how did you go about establishing order in a city whose population had not willingly chosen to be there?

Seville's population, Lawson felt sure, had been redistributed across the face of the globe, like chess pieces flung from a height. The population of every other human community on Earth had undergone similar displacements. The result, as if by malevolent design, was chaos and suffering. Your ears eventually tried to shut out the audible manifestations of this pain, but your eyes held you accountable and you hated yourself for ignoring the wailing Arab child, the assaulted Polynesian woman, the blue-eyed old man bleeding from the palms as he prayed in the shadow of a department-store awning. Very nearly, you hated yourself for surviving.

Early in the afternoon, at the entrance to the Calle de las Sierpes, Lawson got off his scooter and propped it against a wall. Then he waded into the crowd and lifted his right arm above his head.

"I speak English!" he called. " Y hablo un poco Español! Any who speak English or Spanish please come to me!"

A man who might have been Vietnamese or Kampuchean, or even Malaysian, stole Lawson's motor scooter and rode it in a wobbling zigzag down the Street of the Serpents. A heavyset blond woman with red cheeks glared at Lawson from a doorway, and a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy who appeared to be Italian clutched hungrily at Lawson's belt, seeking purchase of an adult, hoping for commiseration. Although he did not try to brush the boy's hand away, Lawson avoided his eyes.

"English! English here! ¡Un poco Español también!"

Farther down Sierpes, Lawson saw another man with his hand in the air; he was calling aloud in a crisp but melodic Slavic dialect, and already he had succeeded in attracting two or three other people to him. In fact, pockets of like-speaking people seemed to be forming in the crowded commercial avenue, causing Lawson to fear that he had put up his hand too late to end his own isolation. What if those who spoke either English or Spanish had already gathered into survival-conscious groups? What if they had already made their way into the countryside, where the competition for food and drink might be a little less predatory? If they had, he would be a lost, solitary Virginian in this Babel. Reduced to sign language and guttural noises to make his wants known, he would die a cipher. . . .

"Signore," the boy hanging on his belt cried. "Stgnore."

Lawson let his eyes drift to the boy's face. ''Ciao,'' he said. It was the only word of Italian he knew, or the only word that came immediately to mind, and he spoke it much louder than he meant.

The boy shook his head vehemently, pulled harder on Lawson's belt. His words tumbled out like the contents of an unburdened closet into a darkened room, not a single one of them distinct or recognizable.

"English!" Lawson shouted. "English here!"

"English here, too, man!" a voice responded from the milling crush of people at the mouth of Sierpes. "Hang on a minute, I'm coming to you!"

A small muscular man with a large head and not much chin stepped daintily through an opening in the crowd and put out his hand to Lawson. His grip was firm. As he shook hands, he placed his left arm over the shoulder of the Italian boy hanging on to Lawson's belt. The boy stopped talking and gaped at the newcomer.

"Dai Secombe," the man said. "I went to bed in Aberystwyth, where I teach philosophy, and I wake up in Spain. Pleased to meet you, Mr.—"

"Lawson," Lawson said.

The boy began babbling again, his hand shifting from I.awson's belt to the Welshman's flannel shirt facing. Secombe took the boy's hands in his own. "I've got you, lad. There's a ragged crew of your compatriots in a pool-hall pub right down this lane. Come on, then, I'll take you." He glanced at Lawson. "Wait for me, sir. I'll be right back."

Secombe and the boy disappeared, but in less than five minutes the Welshman had returned. He introduced himself all over again. "To go to bed in Aberystwyth and to wake up in Seville," he said, "is pretty damn harrowing. I'm glad to be alive, sir."

"Do you have a family?"

"Only my father. He's eighty-four."

"You're lucky. Not to have anyone else to worry about, I mean."

"Perhaps," Dai Secombe said, a sudden trace of sharpness in his voice. "Yesterday I would not've thought so."

The two men stared at each other as the wail of the city modulated into a less hysterical but still inhuman drone. People surged around them, scrutinized them from foyers and balconies, took their measure. Out of the corner of his eye Lawson was aware of a moonfaced woman in summer deerskins slumping abruptly and probably painfully to the street. An Eskimo woman—the conceit was almost comic, but the woman herself was dying and a child with a Swedish-steel switchblade was already freeing a necklace of teeth and shells from her throat.

Lawson turned away from Secombe to watch the plundering of the Eskimo woman's body. Enraged, he took off his wristwatch and threw it as the boy's head, scoring a glancing sort of hit on his ear.

"You little jackal, get away from there!"

The red-cheeked woman who had been glaring at Lawson applied her foot to the rump of the boy with the switchblade and pushed him over. Then she retrieved the thrown watch, hoisted her skirts, and retreated into the dim interior of the café whose door she had been haunting.

"In this climate, in this environment," Dai Secombe told Lawson, "an Eskimo is doomed. It's as much psychological and emotional as it is physical. There may be a few others who've already died for similar reasons. Not much we can do, sir."

Lawson turned back to the Welshman with a mixture of awe and disdain. How had this curly-haired lump of a man, in the space of no more than three or four hours, come to respond so lackadaisically to the deaths of his fellows? Was it merely because the sky was still blue and the edifices of another age still stood?

Pointedly, Secombe said, "That was a needless forfeiture of your watch, Lawson."

"How the hell did that poor woman get here?" Lawson demanded, his gesture taking in the entire city. "How the hell did any of us get here?" The stench of open wounds and the first sweet hints of decomposition mocked the luxury of his ardor.

"Good questions," the Welshman responded, taking Lawson's arm and leading him out of the Calle de las Sierpes. "It's a pity I can't answer 'em."

Ml.

That night they ate fried fish and drank beer together in a dirty little apartment over a shop whose glass display cases were filled with a variety of latex contraceptives. They had obtained the fish from a pescadería voluntarily tended by men and women of Greek and Yugoslavian citizenship, people who had run similar shops in their own countries. The beer they had taken from one of the classier bars on the Street of the Serpents. Both the fish and the beer were at room temperature, but tasted none the worse for that.

With the fall of evening, however, the wail that during the day had subsided into a whine began to reverberate again with its first full burden of grief. If the noise was not quite so loud as it had been that morning, Lawson thought, it was probably because the city contained fewer people. Many had died, and a great many more, unmindful of the distances involved, had set out to return to their homelands.

Iyawson chewed a piece of adobo and washed this down with a swig of the vaguely bitter Cruz del Campo beer.

"Isn't this fine?" Secombe said, his butt on the tiles of the room's one windowsill. "Dinner over a rubber shop. And this a"Catholic country, too."

"I was raised a Baptist," Lawson said, realizing at once that his confession was a non sequitur.

"Oh," Secombe put in immediately. "Then I imagine you could get all the rubbers you wanted.''

"Sure. For a quarter. In almost any gas-station rest-room."

"Sorry," Secombe said.

They ate for a while in silence. Lawson's back was to a cool plaster wall; he leaned his head against it, too, and released a sharp moan from his chest. Then, sustaining the sound, he moaned again, adding his own strand of grief to the cacophonous harmonies already afloat over the city. He was no different from all the bereaved others who shared his pain by concentrating on their own.

"What did you do in . . .in Lynchburg?" Secombe suddenly asked.

"Campus liaison for the Veterans Administration. I traveled to four different colleges in the area straightening out people's problems with the GI Bill. I tried to see to it that— Sweet Jesus, Secombe, who cares? I miss my wife. I'm afraid my girls are dead."

"Karen and Hannah?"

"They're three and five. I've taught them to play chess. Karen's good enough to beat me occasionally if I spot her my queen. Hannah knows the moves, but she hasn't got her sister's patience—she's only three, you know. Yeah. Sometimes she sweeps the pieces off the board and folds her arms, and we play hell trying to find them all. There'll be pawns under the sofa, horsemen upside dov^n in the shag—" Law-son stopped.

"She levels them," Secombe said. "As we've all been leveled. The knight's no more than the pawn, the king no more than the bishop."

Lawson could tell that the Welshman was trying to turn aside the ruinous thrust of his grief. But he brushed the metaphor aside: "I don't think we've been 'leveled,' Secombe."

"Certainly we have. Guess who I saw this morning near the cathedral when I first woke up."

"God only knows."

"God and Dai Secombe, sir. I saw the Marxist dictator of . . . oh, you know, that little African country where there's just been a coup. I recognized the bastard from the telly broadcasts during the purge trials there. There he was, though, in white ducks and a ribbed T-shirt—terrified, Law-son, and as powerless as you or I. He'd been quite decidedly leveled; you'd better believe he had."

"I'll bet he's alive tonight, Secombe."

The Welshman's eyes flickered with a sudden insight. He extended the greasy cone of newspaper from the pescadería. ' 'Another piece of fish, Lawson? Come on, then, there's only one more."

"To be leveled, Secombe, is to be put on a par with everyone else. Your dictator, even deprived of office, is a grown man. What about infant children? Toddlers and preadoles-cents? And what about people like that Eskimo woman who haven't got a chance in an unfamiliar environment, even if its inhabitants don't happen to be hostile? ... I saw a man knock his brains out on a stone wall this morning because he took a look around and knew he couldn't make it here. Maybe he thought he was in Hell, Secombe. I don't know. But his chance certainly wasn't ours."

"He knew he couldn't adjust."

"Of course he couldn't adjust. Don't give me that bullshit about leveling!''

Secombe turned the cone of newspaper around and withdrew the last piece of fish. "I'm going to eat this myself, if you don't mind." He ate. As he was chewing, he said, "I didn't think that Virginia Baptists were so free with their

tongues, Lawson. Tsk, tsk. Undercuts my preconceptions." "I've fallen away." "Haven't we all."

Lawson took a final swig of warm beer. Then he hurled the botde across the room. Fragments of amber glass went everywhere. "God!" he cried. "God, God, God!" Weeping, he was no different from three quarters of Seville's new citizens-by-chance. Why, then, as he sobbed, did he shoot such guilty and threatening glances at the Welshman?

"Go ahead," Secombe advised him, waving the empty cone of newspaper. "I feel a litde that way myself."

iv.

In the morning an oddly blithe woman of forty-five or so accosted them in the alley outside the contraceptive shop. A military pistol in a patent-leather holster was strapped about her skirt. Her seeming airiness, Lawson quickly realized, was a function of her appearance and her movements; her eyes were as grim and frightened as everyone else's. But, as soon as they came out of the shop onto the cobblestones, she approached them fearlessly, hailing Secombe almost as if he were an old friend.

"You left us yesterday, Mr. Secombe. Why?"

"I saw everything dissolving into cliques."

"Dissolving? Coming together, don't you mean?"

Secombe smiled noncommittally, then introduced the woman to Lawson as Mrs. Alexander. "She's one of your own, Lawson. She's from Wyoming or some such place. I met her outside the cathedral yesterday morning when the first self-appointed muezzins started calling their language-mates together. She didn't have a pistol then."

"I got it from one of the Guardia Civil stations," Mrs. Alexander said. "And I feel lots better just having it, let me tell you." She looked at Lawson. "Are you in the Air Force?"

"Not any more. These are the clothes I woke up in."

"My husband's in the Air Force. Or was. We were stationed at Warren in Cheyenne. I'm originally from upstate New York. And these are the clothes ƒ woke up in." A riding skirt, a blouse, low-cut rubber-soled shoes. "I think they tried to give us the most serviceable clothes we had in our wardrobes—but they succeeded better in some cases than others."

" 'They' ?" Secombe asked.

"Whoever's done this. It's just a manner of speaking."

"What do you want?" Secombe asked Mrs. Alexander. His brusqueness of tone surprised Lawson.

Smiling, she replied, "The word for today is Exportadora. We're trying to get as many English-speaking people as we can to Exportadora. That's where the commercial center for American servicemen and their families in Seville is located, and it's just off one of the major boulevards to the south of here."

On a piece of paper sack Mrs. Alexander drew them a crude map and explained that her husband had once been stationed in Zaragoza in the north of Spain. Yesterday she had recalled that Seville was one of the four Spanish cities supporting the American military presence, and with persistence and a little luck a pair of carefully briefed English-speaking DPs (the abbreviation was Mrs. Alexander's) had discovered the site of the American PX and commissary just before nightfall. Looting the place when they arrived had been an impossibly mixed crew of foreigners, busily hauling American merchandise out of the ancient buildings. But Mrs. Alexander's DPs had run off the looters by the simple expedient of revving the engine of their comandeered taxicab and blowing its horn as if to announce Armageddon. In ten minutes the little American enclave had emptied of all human beings but the two men in the cab. After that, as English-speaking DPs all over the city learned of Exporta-dora's existence and sought to reach it, the place had begun to fill up again.

"Is there an air base in Seville?" Lawson asked the woman.

"No, not really. The base itself is near Moron de la Frontera, about thirty miles away, but Seville is where the real action is." After a brief pause, lifting her eyebrows, she corrected herself: "Was."

She thrust her map into Secombe's hands. "Here. Go on out to Exportadora. I'm going to look around for more of us. You're the first people I've found this morning. Others are looking, too, though. Maybe things'U soon start making some sense."

Secombe shook his head. "Us. Them. There isn't anybody now who isn't a 'DP,' you know. This regrouping on the basis of tired cultural affiliations is probably a mistake. I don't like it."

"You took up with Mr. Lawson, didn't you?"

"Out of pity only, I assure you. He looked lost. Moreover, you've got to have companionship of some sort—especially when you're in a strange place."

"Sure. That's why the word for today is Exportadora."

"It's a mistake, Mrs. Alexander."

"Why?"

"For the same reason your mysterious 'they' saw fit to displace us to begin with, I'd venture. It's a feeling I have."

"Old cultural affiliations are a source'of stability," Mrs. Alexander said earnestly. As she talked, Lawson took the rumpled map out of Secombe's fingers. "This chaos around us won't go away until people have setded themselves into units—it's a natural process, it's beginning already. Why, walking along the river this morning, I saw several groups of like-speaking people burying yesterday's dead. The city's churches and chapels have begun to fill up, too. You can still hear the frightened and the heartbroken keening in solitary rooms, of course—but it can't go on forever. They'll either make connection or die. I'm not one of those who wish to die,

Mr. Secombe."

"Who wishes that?" Lawson put in, annoyed by the shallow metaphysical drift of this exchange and by Secombe's irrationality. Although Mrs. Alexander was right, she didn't have to defend her position at such length. The map was her most important contribution to the return of order in their lives, and Lawson wanted her to let them use that map.

"Come on, Secombe." He said. "Let's go out to this Exportadora. It's probably the only chance we have of making it home."

"I don't think there's any chance of our making it home again, Lawson. Ever."

Perceiving that Mrs. Alexander was about to ask the Welshman why, Lawson turned on his heel and took several steps down the alley. ''Come on, Secombe. We have to try. What the hell are you going to do in this flip-flopped city all by yourself?"

"Look for somebody else to talk to, I suppose."

But in a moment Secombe was at Lawson's side helping him decipher the smudged geometries of Mrs. Alexander's map, and the woman herself, before heading back to Sierpes to look for more of her own kind, called out, "It'll only take you twenty or so minutes, walking. Good luck. See you later."

Walking, they passed a white-skinned child lying in an alley doorway opening on to a courtyard festooned with a two-day-old washing and populated by a pack of orphaned dogs. The child's head was covered by a coat, but she did appear to be breathing. Lawson was not even tempted to examine her more closely, however. He kept his eyes resolutely on the map.

The newsstand in the small American enclave had not been looted. On Lawson's second day at Exportadora it still contained quality paperbacks, the most recent American news and entertainment magazines, and a variety of tabloids, including the military paper The Stars and Stripes. No one knew how old these publications were because no one knew over what length of time the redistribution of the world's population had taken place. How long had everyone slept? And what about the discrepancies among time zones and the differences among people's waking hours within the same time zones? These questions were academic now, it seemed to Lawson, because the agency of transfer had apparently encompassed every single human being alive on Earth.

Thumbing desultorily through a copy of Stars and Stripes, he encountered an article on the problems of military hospitals and wondered how many of the world's sick had awakened in the open, doomed to immediate death because the care they required was nowhere at hand. The smell of spilled tobacco and melted Life Savers made the newsstand a pleasant place to contemplate these horrors; and, even as his conscience nagged and a contingent of impatient DPs awaited him, Lawson perversely continued to flip through the newspaper.

Secombe's squat form appeared in the doorway. "I thought you were looking for a local roadmap."

"Found it already, just skimmin' the news."

"Come on, if you would. The folks're ready to be off."

Reluctantly, Lawson followed Secombe outside, where the raw Andalusian sunlight broke like invisible surf against the pavement and the fragile-seeming shell of the Air Force bus. It was of the Bluebird shuttle variety, and Lawson remembered summer camp at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and bus rides from his squadron's minimum-maintenance ROTC barracks to the survival-training camps near the swamp. That had been a long time ago, but this Bluebird might have hailed from an even more distant era. It was as boxy and sheepish-looking as if it had come off a 1954 assembly line, and it appeared to be made out of warped tin rather than steel. The people inside the bus had opened all its windows, and many of those on the driver's side were watching Secombe and Lawson approach.

"Move your asses!" a man shouted at them. "Let's get some wind blowing through this thing before we all suffo-damn-cate."

"Just keep talking," Secombe advised him. "That should do fine."

Aboard the bus was a modey lot of Americans, Britishers, and Australians, with two or three English-speaking Europeans and an Oxford-educated native of India to lend the group ballast. Lawson took up a window seat over the hump of one of the bus's rear tires, and Secombe squeezed in beside him. A few people introduced themselves; others, lost in fitful rev-cries, ignored them altogether. The most unsetding thing about the contingent to Lawson was the absence of children. Although about equally divided between men and women, the group contained no boys or girls any younger than their early teens.

Lawson opened the map of southern Spain he had found in the newsstand and traced his finger along a highway route leading out of Seville to two small American enclaves outside (he city, Santa Clara and San Pablo. Farther to the south were Jerez and the port city of Cadiz. Lawson's heart misgave him; the names were all so foreign, so formidable in what they evoked, and he felt this entire enterprise to be hopeless. . . .

About midway along the right-hand side of the bus a black woman was sobbing into the hem of her blouse, and a man perched on the Bluebird's long rear seat had his hands clasped to his ears and his head canted forward to touch his knees. Lawson folded up the map and stuck it into the crevice between the seat and the side of the bus.

"The bottom-line common denominator here isn't our all speaking English," Secombe whispered. "It's what we're suffering.''

Driven by one of Mrs. Alexander's original explorers, a doctor from Ivanhoe, New South Wales, the Bluebird shuddered and lurched forward. In a moment it had left Exportadora and begun banging along one of the wide avenues that would lead it out of town.

"And our suffering," Secombe went on, still whispering, "unites us with all those poor souls raving in the streets and sleeping facedown in their own vomit. You felt that the other night above the condom shop, Lawson. I know you did, talking of your daughters. So why are you so quick to go looking for what you aren't likely to find? Why are you so ready to unite yourself with this artificial family born out of catastrophe? Do you really think you're going to catch a flight home to Lynchburg? Do you really think the bird driving this sardine can—who ought to be out in the streets plying his trade instead of running a shuttle service—d'you really think he's ever going to get back to Australia?"

"Secombe—"

"Do you, Lawson?"

Lawson clapped a hand over the Welshman's knee and wobbled it back and forth. "You wouldn't be badgering me like this if you had a family of your own. What the hell do you want us to do? Stay here forever?"

"I don't know, exactly." He removed Lawson's hand from his knee. "But I do have a father, sir, and I happen to be fond of him. . . . All I know for certain is that things are supposed to be different now. We shouldn't be rushing to restore what we already had."

"Shit," Lawson murmured. He leaned his head against the bottom edge of the open window beside him.

From deep within the city came the britde noise of gunshots. The Bluebird's driver, in response to this sound and to the vegetable carts and automobiles that had been moved into the streets as obstacles, began wheeling and cornering like a stock-car jockey. The bus clanked and stuttered alarmingly. It growled through an intersection below a stone bridge, leapt over that bridge like something living, and roared down into a semi-industrial suburb of Seville where a Coca-Cola bottling factory and a local brewery lifted huge competing signs.

On top of one of these buildings Lawson saw a man with a rifle taking unhurried potshots at anyone who came into his sights. Several people already lay dead.

And a moment later the Bluebird's front window shattered, another bullet ricocheted off its flank, and everyone in the bus was either shouting or weeping. The next time Law-son looked, the bus's front window appeared to have woven inside it a large and exceedingly intricate spider's web.

The Bluebird careened madly, but the doctor from Ivan-hoe kept it upright and turned it with considerable skill onto the highway to San Pablo. Here the bus eased into a quiet and rhythmic cruising that made this final incident in Seville—except for the evidence of the front windows—seem only the cottony afterstate of nightmare. At last they were on their way. Maybe.

"Another good reason for trying to get home," Lawson said.

"What makes you think it's going to be different there?"

Irritably Lawson turned on the Welshman. "I thought your idea was that this change was some kind of improvement."

"Perhaps it will be. Eventually."

Lawson made a dismissive noise and looked at the olive orchard spinning by on his left. Who would harvest the crop? Who would set the aircraft factories, the distilleries, the chemical and textile plants running again? Who would see to it that seed was sown in the empty fields?

Maybe Secombe had something. Maybe, when you ran for home, you ran from the new reality at hand. The effects of this new reality's advent were not going to go away very soon, no matter what you did—but seeking to reestablish yesterday's order would probably create an even nastier entropic pattern than would accepting the present chaos and working to rein it in. How, though, did you best rein it in? Maybe by trying to get back home. . . .

Lawson shook his head and thought of Marlena, Karen, Hannah; of the distant, mist-softened cradle of the Blue Ridge. Lord. That was country much easier to get in tune with than the harsh, white-sky bleakness of this Andalusian valley. If you stay here, Lawson told himself, the pain will never go away.

They passed Santa Clara, which was a housing area for the officers and senior NCOs who had been stationed at Moron. With its neatly trimmed hedgerows, tall aluminum street-lamps, and low-roofed houses with carports and picture windows, Santa Clara resembled a middle-class exurbia in New Jersey or Ohio. Black smoke was curling over the area, however, and the people on the streets and lawns were definitely not Americans—they were transplanted Dutch South Africans, Amazonian tribesmen, Poles, Ethiopians, God-only-knew-what. All Lawson could accurately deduce was that a few of these people had moved into the vacant houses— maybe they had awakened in them—and that others had aimlessly set bonfires about the area's neighborhoods. These fires, because there was no wind, burned with a maddening slowness and lack of urgency.

"Litde America," Secombe said aloud.

"That's in Antarctica," Lawson responded sarcastically.

"Right. No matter where it happens to be."

"Up yours."

Their destination was now San Pablo, where the Americans had hospital facilities, a library, a movie theater, a snackbar, a commissary, and, in conjunction with the Spaniards, a small commercial and military airfield. San Pablo lay only a few more miles down the road, and Lawson contemplated the idea of a flight to Portugal. What would be the chances, supposing you actually reached Lisbon, of crossing the Atlantic, either by sea or air, and reaching one of the United States's coastal cities? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? Less than that?

A couple of seats behind the driver, an Englishman with a crisp-looking moustache and an American woman with a distinct Southwestern accent were arguing the merits of bypassing San Pablo and heading on to Gibraltar, a British possession. The Englishman seemed to feel that Gibraltar would have escaped the upheaval to which the remainder of the world had fallen victim, whereas the American woman thought he was crazy. A shouting match involving five or six other passengers ensued. Finally, his patience at an end, the Bluebird's driver put his elbow on the horn and held it there until everyone had shut up.

"It's San Pablo," he announced. "Not Gibraltar or anywhere else. There'll be a plane waitin' for us when we get there."

vi.

Two aircraft were waiting, a pair of patched-up DC-7s that
had once belonged to the Spanish airline known as Iberia.
Mrs. Alexander had recruited one of her pilots from the DPs
who had shown up at Exportadora; the other, a retired TWA
veteran from Riverside, California, had made it by himself
to the airfield by virtue of a prior acquaintance with Seville
and its American military installations. Both men were eager
to carry passengers home, one via a stopover in Lisbon and
the other by using Madrid as a stepping-stone to the British
Isles. The hope was that they could transfer their passengers
to jet aircraft at these cities' more cosmopolitan airports, but
no one spoke very much about the real obstacles to success
that had already begun stalking them: civil chaos, delay, in-
adequate communications, fuel shortages, mechanical hang-
ups, doubt and ignorance, a thousand other things.-------------

At twilight, then, Lawson stood next to Dai Secombe at the chain link fence fronting San Pablo's pothole-riven runway and watched the evening light glimmer off the wings of the DC-7s. Bathed in a muted dazzle, the two old airplanes were almost beautiful. Even though Mrs. Alexander had informed the DPs that they must spend the night in the installation's movie theater, so that the Bluebird could make several more shuttle runs to Exportadora, Lawson truly believed that he was bound for home.

"Good-bye," Secombe told him.

"Good-bye? . . . Oh, because you'll be on the other flight?"

"No, I'm telling you good-bye, Lawson, because I'm leaving. Right now, you see. This very minute." "Where are you going?" "Back into the city." "How? What for?"

"I'll walk, I suppose. As for why, it has something to do with wanting to appease Mrs. Alexander's 'they,' also with finding out what's to become of us all. Seville's the place for that, I think."

"Then why'd you even come out here?"

"To say good-bye, you bloody imbecile." Secombe laughed, grabbed Lawson's hand, shook it heartily. "Since I couldn't manage to change your mind."

With that, he turned and walked along the chain link fence until he had found the roadway past the installation's commissary. Lawson watched him disappear behind that building's Complicated system of loading ramps. After a time the Welshman reappeared on the other side, but, against the vast Spanish sky, his compact striding form rapidly dwindled to an imperceptible smudge. A smudge on the darkness.

"Good-bye," Lawson said.

That night, slumped in a lumpy theater chair, he slept with nearly sixty other people in San Pablo's movie house. A teenage boy, over only a few objections, insisted on showing

all the old movies still in tins in the projection room. As a result, Lawson awoke once in the middle of Apocalypse Now and another time near the end of Kubrick's The Left Hand of Darkness. The ice on the screen, dunelike sastrugi ranged from horizon to horizon, chilled him, touching a sensitive spot in his memory. "Little America," he murmured. Then he went back to sleep.

With the passengers bound for Lisbon, Lawson stood at the fence where he had stood with Secombe, and watched the silver pinwheeling of propellers as the aircraft's engines engaged. The DC-7s flying to Madrid would not leave until much later that day, primarily because it still had several vacant seats and Mrs. Alexander felt sure that more English-speaking DPs could still be found in the city.

The people at the gate with Lawson shifted uneasily and whispered among themselves. The engines of their savior airplane whined deafeningly, and the runway seemed to tremble. What woebegone eyes the women had, Lawson thought, and the men were as scraggly as railroad hoboes. Feeling his jaw, he understood that he was no more handsome or well-groomed than any of those he waited with. And, like them, he was impatient for the signal to board, for the thumbs-up sign indicating that their airplane had passed its latest rudimentary ground tests.

At least, he consoled himself, you're not eating potato chips at ten-thirty in the morning. Disgustedly, he turned aside from a jut-eared man who was doing just that.

"There're more people here than our plane's supposed to carry," the potato-chip cruncher said. "That could be dangerous."

"But it isn't really that far to Lisbon, is it?" a woman replied. "And none of us has any luggage."

"Yeah, but—" The man gagged on a chip, coughed, tried to speak again. Facing deliberately away, Lawson felt that the man's words would acquire eloquence only if he suddenly volunteered to ride in the DC-7s unpressurized baggage compartment.

As it was, the signal came to board and the jut-eared man had no chance to finish his remarks. He threw his cellophane sack to the ground, and Lawson heard it crackling underfoot as people crowded through the gate onto the grassy verge of the runway.

In order to fix the anomaly of San Pablo in his memory, Lawson turned around and walked backward across the field. He saw that bringing up the rear were four men with automatic weapons—weapons procured, most likely, from the installation's Air Police station. These men, like Lawson, were walking backward, but with their guns as well as their eyes trained on the weirdly constituted band of people who had just appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, along the airfield's fence.

One of these people wore nothing but a ragged pair of shorts, another an ankle-length burnoose, another a pair of trousers belted with a rope. One of their number was a doe-eyed young woman with an exposed torso and a circlet of bright coral on her wrist. But there were others, too, and they all seemed to have been drawn to the runway by the airplane's engine whine; they moved along the fence like desperate ghosts. As the first members of Lawson's group mounted into the plane, even more of these people appeared—an assembly of nomads, hunters, hodcarriers, fishers, herdspeople. Apparendy they all understood what an airplane was for, and one of the swarthiest men among them ventured out onto the runway with his arms thrown out imploringly.

"Where you go?" he shouted. "Where you go?" "There's no more room!" responded a blue-jean-clad man with a machine gun. "Get back! You'll have to wait for

another flight!"

Oh, sure, Lawson thought, the one to Madrid. He was at the base of the airplane's mobile stairway. The jut-eared man who had been eating potato chips nodded brusquely at him.

"You'd better get on up there," he shouted over the robust hiccoughing of the airplane's engines, "before we have unwanted company breathing down our necks!"

"After you." Lawson stepped aside.

Behind the swarthy man importuning the armed guards for a seat on the airplane, there clamored thirty or more insistent people, their only real resemblance to one another their longing for a way out. "Where you go? Where you go?" the bravest and most desperate among them yelled, but they all wanted to board the airplane that Mrs. Alexander's charges had already laid claim to; and most of them could see that it was too late to accomplish their purpose without some kind of risk-taking. The man who had been shouting in English, along with four or five others, broke into an assertive dogtrot toward the plane. Although their cries continued to be modesdy beseeching, Lawson could tell that the passengers' guards now believed themselves under direct attack.

A burst of machine-gun fire sounded above the field and echoed away like rain drumming on a tin roof. The man who had been asking, "Where you go?," pitched forward on his lace. Others fell beside him, including the woman with the coral bracelet. Panicked or prodded by this evidence of their assailants' mortality, one of the guards raked the chain link fence with his weapon, bringing down some of those who had already begun to retreat and summoning forth both screams and the distressingly incongruous sound of popping wire. Then, eerily, it was quiet again.

"Get on that airplane!" a guard shouted at Lawson. He was the only passenger still left on the ground, and everyone wanted him inside the plane so that the mobile stairway could be rolled away.

"I don't think so," Lawson said to himself.

Hunching forward like a man under fire, he ran toward the gate and the crude mandala of bodies partially blocking it. The slaughter he had just witnessed struck him as abysmally repetitive of a great deal of recent history, and he did not wish to belong to that history anymore. Further, the airplane behind him was a gross iron-plated emblem of the burden he no longer cared to bear—even if it also seemed to represent the promise of passage home.

"Hey, where the hell you think you're goin'?"

Lawson did not answer. He stepped gingerly through the corpses on the runway's margin, halted on the other side of the fence, and, his eyes misted with glare and poignant bewilderment, turned to watch the 1X3-7 taxi down the scrub-lined length of concrete to the very end of the field. There the airplane negotiated a turn and started back the way it had come. Soon it was hurtling along like a colossal metal dragonfly, building speed. When it lifted from the ground, its tires screaming shrilly with the last series of bumps before take-off, Lawson held his breath.

Then the airplane's right wing dipped, dipped again, struck the ground, and broke off like a piece of balsa wood, splintering brilliandy. After that, the airplane went flipping, cartwheeling, across the end of the tarmac and into the desolate open field beyond, where its shell and remaining wing were suddenly engulfed in flames. You could hear people frying in that inferno; you could smell gasoline and burnt flesh.

"Jesus," Lawson said.

He loped away from the airfield's fence, hurried through the short grass behind the San Pablo library, and joined a group of those who had just fled the English-speaking guards' automatic-weapon fire. He met them on the highway going back to Seville and walked among them as merely another of their number. Although several people viewed his 1505 trousers with suspicion, no one argued that he did not belong, and no one threatened to cut his throat for him.

As hangdog and exotically nondescript as most of his companions, Lawson watched his tennis shoes track the pavement like the feet of a mechanical toy. He wondered what he was going to do back in Seville. Successfully dodge bullets and eat fried fish, if he was lucky. Talk with Secombe again, if he could find the man. And, if he had any sense, try to organize his life around some purpose other than the insane and hopeless one of returning to Lynchburg. What purpose, though? What purpose beyond the basic, animal purpose of staying alive?

"Are any of you hungry?" Lawson asked.

He was regarded with suspicious curiosity.

"Hungry," he repeated. "(Time hambre?"

English? Spanish? Neither worked. What languages did they have, these refugees from an enigma? It looked as if they had all tried to speak together before and found the task impossible—because, moving along the asphalt under the hot Andalusian sun, they now relied on gestures and easily interpretable noises to express themselves.

Perceiving this, Lawson brought the fingers of his right hand to his mouth and clacked his teeth to indicate chewing.

He was understood. A thin barefoot man in a capacious linen shirt and trousers led Lawson off the highway into an orchard of orange trees. The fruit was not yet completely ripe, and was sour because of its greenness, but all twelve or thirteen of Lawson's crew ate, letting the juice run down their arms. When they again took up the trek to Seville, Law-son's mind was almost absolutely blank with satiety. The only thing ratding about in it now was the fear that he would not know what to do once they arrived. He never did find out if the day's other scheduled flight, the one to Madrid, made it safely to its destination, but the matter struck him now as of little import. He wiped his sticky mouth and trudged along numbly.

VIH.

He lived above the contraceptive shop. In the mornings he walked through the alley to a bakery that a woman with calm Mongolian features had taken over. In return for a daily allotment of bread and a percentage of the goods brought in for barter, Lawson swept the bakery's floor, washed the utensils that were dirtied each day, and kept the shop's front counter. His most rewarding skill, in fact, was communicating with those who entered to buy something. He had an uncanny grasp of several varieties of sign language, and, on occasion, he found himself speaking a monosyllabic patois whose derivation was a complete mystery to him. Sometimes he thought that he had invented it himself; sometimes he believed that he had learned it from the transplanted Sevillanos among whom he now lived.

English, on the other hand, seemed to leak slowly out of his mind, a thick, unrecoverable fluid.

The first three or four weeks of chaos following The Change had, by this time, run their course, a circumstance that surprised Lawson. Still, it was true. Now you could lie down at night on your pallet without hearing pistol reports or fearing that some benighted freak was going to set fire to your staircase. Most of the city's essential services—electricity, water, and sewerage—were working again, albeit uncertainly, and agricultural goods were coming in from the countryside. People had gone back to doing what they knew best, while those whose previous jobs had had little to do with the basics of day-to-day survival were now apprenticing as bricklayers, carpenters, bakers, fishers, water and power technicians. That men and women chose to live separately and that children were as rare as sapphires, no one seemed to find disturbing or unnatural. A new pattern was evolving. You lived among your fellows without tension or quarrel, and you formed no dangerously intimate relationships.

One night, standing at his window, Lawson's knee struck a loose tile below the casement. He removed the tile and set it on the floor. Every night for nearly two months he pried away at least one tile and, careful not to chip or break it, stacked it near an inner wall with those he had already removed.

After completing this task, as he lay on his pallet, he would often hear a man or a woman somewhere in the city singing a high, sweet song whose words had no significance for him. Sometimes a pair of voices would answer each other, always in different languages. Then, near the end of the summer, as Lawson stood staring at the lathing and the wall beams he had methodically exposed, he was moved to sing a melancholy song of his own. And he sang it without knowing what it meant.

The days grew cooler. Lawson took to leaving the bakery during its midafternoon closing and proceeding by way of the Calle de las Sierpes to a bodega across from the bullring. A crew of silent laborers, who worked very purposively in spite of their seeming to have no single boss, was dismantling the Plaza de Toros, and Lawson liked to watch as he drank his wine and ate the breadsticks he had brought with him.

Other crews about the city were carefully taking down the government buildings, banks, and barrio chapels that no one frequented anymore, preserving the bricks, tiles, and beams as if in the hope of some still unspecified future construction. By this time Lawson himself had knocked out the rear wall of his room over the contraceptive shop, and he felt a strong sense of identification with the laborers craftily gutting the bullring of its railings and barricades. Eventually, of course, everything would have to come down. Everything.

The rainy season began. The wind and the cold. Lawson continued to visit the sidewalk café near the ruins of the stadium; and because the bullring's destruction went forward even in wet weather, he wore an overcoat he had recendy acquired and staked out a nicely sheltered table under the bodega's awning. This was where he customarily sat.

One particularly gusty day, rain pouring down, he shook out his umbrella and sat down at this table only to Find another man sitting across from him. Upon the table was a wooden game board of some kind, divided into squares.

"Hello, Lawson," the interloper said.

Lawson blinked and licked his lips thoughtfully. Although he had not called his family to mind in some time, and wondered now if he had ever really married and fathered children, Dai Secombe's face had occasionally floated up before him in the dark of his room. But now Lawson could not remember the Welshman's name, or his nationality, and he had no notion of what to say to him. The first words he spoke, therefore, came out sounding like dream babble, or a voice played backward on the phonograph. In order to say hello he was forced to the indignity, almost comic, of making a childlike motion with his hand.

Secombe, pointing to the game board, indicated that they should play. From a carved wooden box with a velvet lining he emptied the pieces onto the table, then arranged them on both sides of the board. Chess, Lawson thought vaguely, but he really did not recognize the pieces—they seemed changed from what he believed they should look like. And when it came his turn to move, Secombe had to demonstrate the capabilities of all the major pieces before he, Lawson, could essay even the most timid advance. The piece that most reminded him of a knight had to be moved according to two distinct sets of criteria, depending on whether it started from a black square or a white one; the "rooks," on the other hand, were able, at certain times, to jump an opponent's intervening pieces. The game boggled Lawson's understanding. After ten or twelve moves he pushed his chair back and took a long, bittersweet taste of wine. The rain continued to pour down like an endless curtain of deliquescent beads.

"That's all right," Secombe said. "I haven't got it all down yet myself, quite. A Bhutanese fellow near where I live made the pieces, you see, and just recendy taught me how to play."

With difficulty Lawson managed to frame a question: "What work have you been doing?"

"I'm in demolition. As we all will be soon. It's the only really constructive occupation going." The Welshman chuckled mildly, finished his own wine, and rose. Lifting his umbrella, he bid Lawson farewell with a word that, when Lawson later tried to repeat and intellectually encompass it, had no meaning at all.

Every afternoon of that dismal, rainy winter Lawson came back to the same table, but Secombe never showed up there again. Nor did Lawson miss him terribly. He had grown accustomed to the strange richness of his own company. Besides, if he wanted people to talk to, all he needed to do was remain behind the counter at the bakery.

ix.

Spring came again. All of his room's interior walls were down, and it amused him to be able to see the porcelain chalice of the commode as he came up the stairs from the contraceptive shop.

The plaster that he had sledgehammered down would never be of use to anybody again, of course, but he had saved from the debris whatever was worth the salvage. With the return of good weather, men driving oxcarts were coming through the city's backstreets and alleys to collect these items. You never saw anyone trying to drive a motorized vehicle nowadays, probably because, over the winter, most of them had been hauled away. The scarcity of gasoline and replacement parts might well have been a factor, too—but, in truth, people seemed no longer to want to mess with internal-combustion engines. Ending pollution and noise had nothing to do with it, either. A person with dung on his shoes or front stoop was not very likely to be convinced of a vast improvement in the environment, and the clattering of wooden carts—the ringing of metal-rimmed wheels on cobblestone— could be as ear-wrenching as the hum and blare of motorized traffic. Still, Lawson liked to hear the oxcarts turn into his alley. More than once, called out by the noise, he had helped their drivers load them with masonry, doors, window sashes, even ornate carven mantles.

At the bakery the Mongolian woman with whom Lawson worked, and had worked for almost a year, caught the handle of his broom one day and told him her name. Speaking the odd, quicksilver monosyllables of the dialect that nearly everyone in Seville had by now mastered, she asked him to call her Tij. Lawson did not know whether this was her name from before The Change or one she had recently invented for herself. Pleased in either case, he responded by telling her his own Christian name. He stumbled saying it, and when Tij also had trouble pronouncing the name, they laughed together about its uncommon awkwardness on their tongues.

A week later he had moved into the tenement building where Tij lived. They slept in the same "room" three flights up from a courtyard filled with clambering wisteria. Because all but the supporting walls on this floor had been knocked out, Lawson often felt that he was living in an open-bay barracks. People stepped over his pallet to get to the stairwell and dressed in front of him as if he were not even there. Always a quick study, he emulated their casual behavior.

And when the ice in his loins finally began to thaw, he turned in the darkness to Tij—without in the least worrying about propriety. Their coupling was invariably silent, and the release Lawson experienced was always a serene rather than a shuddering one. Afterward, in the wisteria fragrance pervading their building, Tij and he lay beside each other like a pair of larval bumblebees as the moon rolled shadows over their naked, sweat-gleaming bodies.

Each day after they had finished making and trading away their bread, Tij and Lawson closed the bakery and took long walks. Often they strolled among the hedge-enclosed pathways and the small wrought-iron fences at the base of the city's cathedral. From these paths, so overwhelmed were they by buttresses of stones and arcaded balconies, they could not even see the bronze weathervane of Faith atop the Giralda. But, evening after evening, Lawson insisted on reluming to that place, and at last his persistence and his sense of expectation were rewarded by the sound of jackhammers biting into marble in each one of the cathedral's five tremendous naves. He and Tij, holding hands, entered.

Inside, men and women were at work removing the altar screens, the metalwork grilles, the oil paintings, sections of stained-glass windows, religious relics. Twelve or more oxcarts were parked beneath the vault of the cathedral, and the noise of the jackhammers echoed shatteringly from nave to nave, from floor to cavernous ceiling. The oxen stood so complacently in their traces that Lawson wondered if the drivers of the carts had somehow contrived to deafen the animals. Tij released Lawson's hand to cover her ears. He covered his own ears. It did no good. You could remain in the cathedral only if you accepted the noise and resolved to be a participant in the building's destruction. Many people had already made that decision. They were swarming through its chambered stone belly like a spectacularly efficient variety of stone-eating termite.

An albino man of indeterminate race—a man as pale as a termite—thrust his pickax at Lawson. Lawson uncovered his ears and took the pickax by its handle. Tij, a moment later, found a crowbar hanging precariously from the side of one of the oxcarts. With these tools the pair of them crossed the nave they had entered and halted in front of an imposing mausoleum. Straining against the cathedral's poor light and the strange linguistic static in his head, Lawson painstakingly deciphered the plaque near the tomb.

"Christopher Columbus is buried here," he said.

Tij did not hear him. He made a motion indicating that this was the place where they should start. Tij nodded her understanding. Together, Lawson thought, they would dismantle the mausoleum of the discoverer of the New World and bring his corrupt remains out into the street. After all these centuries they would free the man.

Then the bronze statue of Faith atop the belltower would come down, followed by the lovely belltower itself. After that, the flying buttresses, the balconies, the walls; every beautiful, tainted stone.

It would hurt like hell to destroy the cathedral, and it would take a long, long time—but, considering everything, it was the only meaningful option they had. Lawson raised his pickax.

Here is a very odd, sedately lunatic story about a project to experiment in manipulation of animal behavior . . . and, inevitably, human behavior too. Set in a future society whose social hierarchy is so rigidly stratified that it has an almost Victorian aura, "The Snake Who Had Read Chomsky'' makes its satirical points in a series of decidedly peculiar developments. Are they the result of changes in behavior? You may decide for yourself .

Josephine Saxton is an English author who writes much too seldom for her many fans. Her novels include Vector for Seven and The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith.

THE SNAKE WHO HAD READ CHOMSKY

Josephine Saxton

They spent almost all their nonofficial working time, and their spare time, in that part of the lab which had been requisitioned for them. Although it was not large, it sufficed; to unravel nucleic acid chains does not require a dance hall plus arcades. They were very satisfied with the robot assistance that Selly had allowed them, plus computer time, subelec-tron microscope, chemical analyzer, and all the animals they needed.

"Yes, certainly, Marvene and Janos, if you wish to research into some aspects of the genetic part of animal behavior then I shall be pleased to encourage you, just so long as your work here for me does not suffer, of course." Their work had not suffered, they saw to that. Their private work was not exactly what they stated, but it was near enough to deceive an observer who would be scrupulous and not snoop extensively. There was a litde more to it than the behavior of the cat, but even to themselves they maintained a neutral attitude to their information, knowing only what they hoped.

There were mice being used, and a boa constrictor called

Lupus the Loop who had a sole right to mice as food, and who possibly resented the fact that Marvene used a large proportion of them for her work instead of feeding them to him.

"Getting the information to link itself to all the cell types is the final key," said Janos, taking a look at some mice who were hibernating in a lowered temperature even though they were a nonhibernating variety. "These mice are hibernating, but they will never shed their skin." Janos very much wanted to have a coup with this research. He stood to be what he wanted for the rest of his life if all went well.

Marvene glanced at him with concealed contempt. "The skin-shedding isn't important at this stage, surely? If we stick to the line we are on, we shall have the final tests ready in weeks," she told him evenly and not without effort. Working in such close confines with one person for so long was not good for personal regard, but worse, it almost inclined one to show that bad feeling. She was taking extra pains with her good manners. She too wanted to be rewarded by the world for this work, and she had no intention of allowing Janos to take the whole accolade, as she righdy suspected he would like to do. They had not discussed this aspect of the project, it would have been quite rude to do so, but instead maintained an implicit agreement that like all scientists they would share honors. It was certain that they had both been equally dedicated and both worked hard and with concentration. Not a moment was wasted in idle chatter. They had sufficient incentive not to waste their opportunity, for they could also be revenged upon Selly, whom they hated. That greasy, plump, celibate person was not to be allowed to share any reflected glory from their work. He had irritated and disgusted them for so long with his unaesthetic presence, and they meant to be revenged upon him. It was worth the risk of discovery, they had decided; the plan was irresistible. When they thought of this they would laugh together, but when they thought of their separate plans, they laughed apart, and si-lendy.

Selly rarely visited them in their area; he went home at night to who knew what, alone in his bachelor apartment. Sour as old socks, Selly, white as suet but softer, secretive, and full of bile. But very clever, and this they respected. It was one of the reasons they were at this lab, Selly's notorious cleverness. They had hoped to learn from him and in many ways they had. He was already near the top of the social list, even though he socialized so little. He was known for being something of a recluse, and for his genius and originality in demonstrating his ideas.

Selly had wished to demonstrate that light-obedient hormones were involved in flight patterns in birds, and he had caused a skylark to dive into the depths of illuminated water, singing. The audience had considered this very amusing. What had made it unpleasant was the way Selly laughed at the sight of the little creature trying to warble until it was drowned in watery light.

He had done some useful things, also, in the business of providing food for the world's surplus people. He had produced a runner bean which was 50 percent first-class animal protein. These could be fed on petroleum by-products, having the ability to make the chemical changes within their own metabolism and, also, the useful ability to cleanse the soil by exuding a solvent which was biodegradable. It was true, Selly was no slouch in his work.

As for Marvene and Janos' part in Selly's work, they were assisting him in breeding a two-kilo mouse which would at first be used in factory soupmeat and later, after sufficient publicity, as a roast. So far the creatures had died before slaughtering could take place, so there was still work to do on strengthening the heart muscles of these little giants. These animals were fed on processed petroleum by-products. There was a vast store of fossil fuels since the melting of the polar ice caps had made it available. The lab in which they worked was part of a redundant atomic power station, ideal because of its isolation coupled with easy access by underground train to the living complexes: it took them only five minutes to return to the other world. In one of the larger central areas of the building they had constructed a reproduction of a typical deserted domestic setdement of the lower classes. The actual work of course had been done by a workgang from the lower classes. If such settlements could be shown to be suitable for breeding mice, then some of them could be used, for there were many such ghost towns since the suicide epidemics. There was no question of experimenting with a real one; they were all too far away from civilization. Their main problem had been getting the right light and darkness periods, because even though there was so little difference between them since the canopy came over the ancient skies, the animals all had residual circadian rhythms. All the upper-class human beings had artificial moonlight and sunlight in regulated phases because it had been shown to have an important psychological effect on brain chemistry, but the lower classes, for whom such things did not matter, lived in a dim limbo, monotonous and drear.

As a companion work on food they were breeding a potato containing every known nutritional element in correct proportion for maintaining human life. This was proving harder than anticipated, because some vitamins destroyed others when existing in the same plant. But they would succeed, with Selly's guidance. It was going to make the lower-class menu very dull, but that did not matter. Selly could have existed on such fodder, for he was a very poor aesthete in the matter of food as in other things. This disgusted them. Selly did not enjoy life; he enjoyed ideas about life. He once confided in a rare moment of intimacy: "There is a life of the mind which I have hardly touched upon yet." They could have expanded on that comment but chose not.

In some ways, Selly was downright immature, a state not at all to be admired. She did not'think him fit to live in the wonderful architectural fantasy of their upper-class setdement; he was an eyesore. They all had very small apartmerits, but it was one of the best specialist settlements in existence. The upper classes needed the stimulus of interesting surroundings, and interest had been taken well toward the limits both visually and kinetically. Their settlement was famous for its dissolving architecture; at any moment a balcony might disappear and drop people to their deaths. This did not happen so often that it was monotonous, but often enough to make living there exciting. In historical times, those people living on fault lines must have been exhilarated in much the same way, Marvene reflected. How ghasdy it must be to live in the utilitarian warrens of the lower classes! Would society never find a humane way of ridding itself of all those surplus people left over since human labor had become almost redundant? Marvene profoundly hoped so: they were an anchor to a civilization that needed to sail ahead.

If Selly were successful even with the potatoes, he would become a very high-ranking upper-class person. They considered him a totally unsuitable candidate for this because of his vulgarity. But whatever they thought, it was necessary to apply the art of flattery. He was always susceptible.

"Selly, I feel constrained to voice my admiration for your working method today. You are so stylish in your approach to what must feel like mundane tasks to one so advanced as yourself. I wish very much to cultivate your self-control." Marvene smiled sweedy at him through her diamante-effect contact lenses. The twinkling was a stunning effect, and hid real feeling. Selly was not susceptible to female charm, but in his genetic makeup somewhere there must surely have been a response to beauty, for once, just once, he had reached out to touch Marvene's hair, which had been trained to move con-standy in shining coils, always changing its shape like a mass of slowly dancing snakes. Strictly speaking she was reaching above her present level of society with such styles, but sometimes beauty was forgiven social errors. Because she made such a beautiful model she had managed to get it done free, but she had been obliged to have all the actichips inserted in her skull with only local anaesthetic.

"Thank you, Marvene. I'm glad you appreciate the difference between mere routine work well done and a truly aesthetic approach to the mundane. I may be able to give you some instruction on that."

"Selly, I would be so grateful if you could. If I could only emulate you . . . ."

"Marvene, it is all inner work. One has to control the entire self in order to properly control things like grace and care." He didn't really have grace, she thought, he was just lethargic.

"If you talk to yourself, Marvene, daily, and draw all your energies in toward your working self every morning, you will be able to bring more presence to your work." This wholly patronizing speech was typical and it made her angry. She already did this rather commonplace exercise every morning. She had presence and style, and knew it, and she practiced attitudes toward the day when she meant to grace the highest levels of society. When Marvene had completed her research she would not only have put horrible Selly down, but have a weapon which could forever quell invaders, preventing war, and could possibly be used to keep the lower classes perma-nendy occupied, if not eliminated. She would be remembered.

They already had the means of fixing Selly and of testing out their work at the same time, but for mass use they needed a foolproof method of dissemination which would disperse itself in a population per body-weight and type equally everywhere. If they could only have had a few humans to experiment upon, the job would by now have been done; but there was still too much opposition to human experimentation to make it popular, and it was certainly illegal to use human beings without their recorded consent, and this applied even to the lower classes, a very atavistic area of the law. With this work they hoped to justify human experimentation and thus earn the gratitude of scientists everywhere whose work was held up for lack of suitable material.

Selly was an ideal subject, being so predictable and stable in his habits, and in having no close friends. Selly could not be bothered with friends. He occasionally arranged some social life, of course, buying a dinner party for himself in some exotic building, but these occasions were only meant to keep his name in circulation and to impress the influential. It was always necessary to keep in favor in order to get financial patronage. He was ideal because any noticeable effects must be observed only by themselves until such time as they wished it otherwise.

"You know, Marvene," said Janos, showing his small and boringly ordinary teeth in a slow smile of what in a stronger personality would have been consummate awful-ness, "I have to admire Selly for his independence of other people, especially women."

"And what's so good about that?" she demanded icily, fire flashing off her eyeballs. "I don't see where the style is, in being by yourself. There's nobody to appreciate a lone person. One needs other opinions."

Janos chose to overlook her anger, regarding it as one might a bit of flatus. "If you're good enough and know it, then nobody is going to think better of you than yourself," he replied. He had that relentless argumentative tone in his voice that she had once found very attractive, believing it to be self-assurance. It was certain that nobody was going to think better of Marvene and Janos than themselves. Marvene still required that the whole of society admire her, as soon as possible. So did Janos, of course; he was indulging in conceit with his words. He did not know it but he had managed without her good opinion for years.

"I have to disagree. An isolated opinion is not valid, especially when the subject cannot see the self from outside, which is a rare achievement. How can you ever really know what impression you are making?"

"I have practiced projecting myself, metaphorically speaking, and using my imagination to know what impression I am making. Doesn't everyone do that, Marvene?"

' 'Of course, but it is a matter of degree and skill. It will still be a heavily subjective result."

He did not like that idea, clearly. "If you persist in making destructive statements against me, I shall be obliged to be rude to you."

This formal warning was rather extreme, so she knew she had gone too far. He didn't have good style and tended to think that all negative statements reflected upon him. He must be guilty about something, she thought.

"I apologize. I had not meant the statement to be destructive, merely in opposition."

He gave her a conciliatory nod, the kind meant to conceal the atmosphere, but his gestures always had a patronizing tone that ruined the effect. She must find stylish ways of dealing with him, and was indeed working upon that.

Another problem was the question of reversibility in the chromosome interference. Perhaps the answer lay where she thought it did, in electronic control, but that posed problems for the masses. Not difficult for one subject, and things would go a stage at a time. She was determined not to rush. After a while, Janos seemed to have recovered from their litde contretemps, for he suddenly suggested that they buy a dinner party for themselves for the following night, and he suggested that with luck it might be possible to get somewhere in a fashionable building, perhaps the Cairns or the Herberg Suite? Here was proof that he required the admiration of a crowd, but she let it pass and instead complimented him on his wonderful idea. They set about compiling a guest list, an unusual thing for them to do during working hours.

They already had a few well-thought-of people on their social list, and several who might demean themselves for an evening. All their acquaintances were bioengineers: it was rare to meet anyone outside one's own discipline; there was not enough time. This was a price all talented people had to pay, but the rewards were greater than the penalties. They had been awarded knowledge implants as well as memory reinforcement grafts in their youth, which enhanced their natural brilliance and capacity for application. Everyone preferred a hard life to the appalling possibility of being in the lower classes, who had little in their lives except prescribed entertainment. The had very little spare time, so she should feel privileged that he proposed using some of his time with her, but as it was not done to give a party without a member of the opposite sex as cohost, she did not make too much of the situation. She liked playing hostess and knew herself excellent at the task. When the overworked upper classes relaxed, they tried always to make the occasion rare without always being monotonously outrageous. So what theme had he thought of?

"Animals. Fancy dress." She smiled with glittering delight, her hair seemirig to express a rise in her spirits. But it would be impossible for everyone to obtain a costume in time for the following night. He looked annoyed and downcast; he did not want to postpone the occasion.

"Why not have animals but not costumes—ask everyone to mime?"

After a few tense moments his face showed reluctant" pleasure. Fun, but not too spectacular. They must never be accused of self-aggrandizement. They got out all the invitations and replies of acceptance and ordered the Herberg Suite to be done out to have the appearance of a twenty-second-century zoological garden at a time when animals had not been so rare. The food would be in feeding trays and the drink in gravity feeders.

They were especially pleased to have Selly's acceptance. To have Selly behaving like an animal in public at their expense would afford them some glee. What animal would he mime? They were sure they could guess. In order to have plenty of energy for the party, they retired early and did not return later for more work.

The lab was at rest, and Lupus the Loop lay coiled on his simulated branch in the simulated moonlight, smiling to himself, for had he not been eavesdropping on them every night for months?

The party was a great success. Within the general benevolent atmosphere there were memorable moments. The sight of two well-known agriculturalists, who had made their name as the team that caused real animal fur to grow on sheets of plastic, behaving like a couple of Nubian goats was worth remembering. It seemed that they could cheerfully mime mating for hours without being vulgar, and very convincingly in spite of their very creative human appearance. They were both quite hairless and had gold eyeballs and teeth and nails, but their acting was so convincing that few had to ask what they were.

Janos made a wonderful mouse. He nibbled his way through his food, delightfully twitching some imaginary whiskers. His very ordinary appearance seemed to fit the mouse image. He had never indulged in even so much as a tattoo to decorate his person, just like the lower classes who were obliged by law to wear uniforms and were prohibited from any form of distinguishing mark. Janos, the little gray mouse, nibbling away at fame with determination.

And Selly, the great scientist, being what she had hoped he would be, a cat. He rubbed round people's legs in a feline manner, getting tidbits dropped for him, and being stroked and fondled although someone made the joke of treating him like a lab cat, miming the drilling of holes into the skull. He went so far as to jump onto someone's lap and attempt to curl up, his great bulk hanging down on all sides, making the catness of cat seem very droll indeed. Fat, satisfied, smug, comfort-loving, lethargic Selly. It suited him. He could make a purring noise and wash his face with the back of his wrist, where his watch lay embedded in his wristbone. This instrument gave not only astronomical information, longitude and latitude, time and date, but the state of his brainwaves, blood sugar, and noradrenalin. Few people still had these things embedded, for they had proved to be painful to many people in later years. Marvene stroked Selly cat and told him what a lovely pussy, he was.

"This is a lovely party, Marvene. I shall remember this for a long time," purred the monster feline.

"And I also," said the man beneath Selly in a breathy manner. "This is a wonderful idea; I shall tell everyone about this." Marvene glowed witn pleasure then, thinking that it had been worth the trouble if they were to be favorably talked about. Even the most brilliant upper-class people did not get funds if they were not in circulation.

Marvene felt she should do a little more about acting a snake. She began to hypnotize a female frog who had hopped over to her and sat crouched at her feet blowing a pouch and staring vacantly. Marvene slowly wound herself around the creature, who put hands over eyes as frogs in danger will, a clever touch. Marvene's extreme yoga lessons had kept her supple enough to coil backward around another human being and to mime squeezing the life out of the frog, the proportion of the creatures not detracting from their dual performance. Everyone seemed suitably amused.

A rhinoceros, more usually an invertebrate engineer, came over to congratulate her.

"You have a gift as an actress as well as a scientist," he grunted, swinging his invisible horn about on a great head, peering with little eyes full of stupid malevolence which was really a gaze of intellectual penetration. She liked the rhino-man; she was dazzled by his achievements and creations. His most famous work was the culturing of a hybrid toxicaría which could be absorbed in spore form through human skin and, when mature, grow to twenty feet long with the ability to bore through bone, disposing rather definitely of any enemy unlucky enough to pick up its invisible spores. He had also, of course, developed an immunity for the aggressor.

And this was not all he had done to improve the world. He had written whole series of papers on parasites of the universe, and presented one of the most controversial theories of the millennium. He was an authority on evolution and had shown, conclusively for many, that Homo sapiens far from being the highest product of a chain of events was intended to be the lowest in another chain of events, but when the Sol system had been cut off in a crucial period in its development in order to quarantine it, that destiny had not been fulfilled. The Aldebaran Apple People had not wanted parasites, and indeed, not everyone on Earth relished the idea that humanity's true end was as a kind of maggot, burrowing through giant fruit.

The party was made complete with a tragic ending. A serious accident or fatality always lent interest to the story of a party. For some, the main game of an evening was to walk home, the building being more active at night. There was a far higher risk of a step collapsing beneath the foot or a balcony disappearing leaving a person teetering on the edge of death with no choice but to jump—there was no rescue system; that would have taken the element of chance out of the game. A few people did not care for this entertainment, but they became impossible to socialize with, cowardice being so disgusting, and they were often relegated to live in the safe lower-class architecture. So a courageous woman who had mimed a dove all evening plummeted to her death on the deep glass floor below, showing that her miming did not extend to real flight. Exhilarated, Marvene and Janos walked home in amicable silence. Next day, everything was back to normal and both Selly's work and their own proceeded stead-

ay-

They had made excellent progress, and Marvene knew that it was her insight which had made possible the step in personally controlling the subject. Selly needed a few more "doses" to give them conclusive proof. But it was to be admitted that they had taken this line from original ideas of Selly's. He had connections with espionage and had thought that if a human being could be made temporarily to behave as an alien in all respects, including instinctive behavior, there would be no chance of discovery when spying in other star systems. This of course applied only to those aliens whose outward physiology closely resembled the human. There were several important "human" cultures having totally different metabolism to Homo sapiens and who behaved differendy in many respects. For example, the Wilkins Planet race, who were of shining intelligence and naturally extremely advanced (more than humanity in some things) but who loped around at high speed on all fours and who had a mating season once every four of their years.

Selly had been held up by lack of subjects because, although he had applied for volunteers, he did not trust the authorities to keep his research secret if he explained exactly why he required people, and this was requisite. But Marvene and Janos were ahead of Selly. Everything had depended upon what Selly had not quite seen, which was B/B serotonin pathways through the subelectronic RNA polymerase. They had the potion which had made Bottom the Weaver behave like an ass, though they had never heard of him. Selly was to become the cat which he had so obligingly played at the party. She had given him a gift of sweets containing more necessary doses and had the minute control constructed which she could activate whenever she cared to do so.

She had come up with all these ideas while talking to Lupus the Loop. She often wandered in there to have a chat with him; it was an aid to projecting her thoughts. This was her secret; the other two would have thought her slighdy deranged but she trusted her instincts, when controlled with careful thought. Lupus the Loop seemed to tell her things she needed to know.

"Tell me, Lupus, have you any idea how I can control the newly altered instincts of Selly so that he will not always behave under the new influence?" she had asked the great snake as he lay coiled and smugly full of food.

"It's perfectly simple," the snake had seemed to say. "You will construct a monitor which you will keep in your possession, transmitting impulses that will inhibit or release the metabolic pathways you have interfered with."

And it had been that simple in essence, although difficult to effect. An extremely sophisticated form of radio control. Beautiful! She had hugged him in thanks, knowing that of course the idea had come from her own mind. Snakes do not have minds. But even plants sometimes spoke to Marvene, when she was alone with them. She had discovered as a child that you can talk to anything and get a reply, and learned later about the projection of the mind, and had then kept it all secret for such things were despised by intelligent persons.

Janos was straightening his papers, which were all handwritten—very unusual. There was only one copy of each; he kept them in an insulated box for safety. Marvene was observing the mice. They were reprogrammed as dogs, and as she watched, one little male cocked its leg up and put a marker on an upright post. Another one was burying a fragment of bone, and two of the females were playing together in an unmouselike manner. Most amusing!

She supposed that Janos' ideas had an ecological beauty about them, for if he succeeded in ridding the world of excess people and making animals able to do the few tasks left requiring human labor, then they could be cannibalized, whereas human beings could not, at least aesthetically.

That evening when they arrived for their session, Selly was in their part of the lab. They detested his intrusion but could say nothing.

"I came to find out why our mice were so noisy," he explained, grinning. He was obviously embarrassed. He offered each of them a conciliatory smoke and they accepted even though they were his last; he said he had another pack. They smoked together in silence, then Selly said he was going and did so. Janos immediately checked his papers but nothing seemed to have been touched. Was Selly snooping? There was no evidence. Marvene decided that she felt tired and left early, and soon after that Janos wandered into the snake house.

The great constrictor was coiled rather torpidly except for his eyes, which seemed to follow every movement. Janos did not like taking samples from this beast; he was secretly afraid of it but would have died rather than admit as much. He sprayed the skin thoroughly with a penetrating local anaesthetic and took a syringeful of spinal fluid from behind the head. His hands shook and he imagined that the snake knew lie was frightened.

"There you are, Lupus the Loop, that didn't bother you did it?" he cooed insincerely. The snake ignored this transparent mollification. It was a very large specimen that had been reared in Nature, having all the instincts and qualities of the wild creature, which lab specimens did not show so strongly after a few generations. Someday Janos would like to visit Nature, that large zoological garden that had once been called Australia. The snake moved, sliding like oil along the branch toward him. He watched spellbound, noticing how it could move without disturbing its surroundings. What intensity. What grace. Collecting himself he suddenly ran, closing the door securely. How primitive those creatures were, how far removed from himself. Shuddering, he thrust the samples away and then suddenly noticed that Selly was standing watching him, and he' almost collapsed with fright.

Selly was holding a mouse, stroking it, although he was no animal lover. The unmoving moonlight illuminated the plump face making a mirror image of artificial Selene herself, smiling full at the trembling Janos who was in no social position to lose his temper and managed not to do so.

"I forgot something; I returned for a moment," said Selly. "I'm sorry if I startled you."

"That's quite all right. I respect your attention to detail, you know that."

Selly replaced the mouse in the vivarium, where it had been trying to build a bridge from the little island upon which it had been placed, to a happy land at the edge of the world where nuts and other choice scraps tempted. Together they watched the mouse in its occupation without comment. Selly nodded in benevolent approval, absentmindedly scratching his ear and shaking his head. Janos was very offended at this utterly disgusting behavior until he realized with a thrill that Selly was behaving like a cat. Of course, the nasty man sometimes scratched himself anyway. He looked for the control which Marvene had been constructing and it had gone. Had she finished it; had she gone ahead without him? How long had she been secretly experimenting with Selly without his knowledge? Janos looked at Selly looking at the mouse. The fellow was drooling.

Shaking with fury, he took his leave and went to find Marvene. She was there, outside the lab, and had been observing both of them through the glass door. She told him that she had been looking for him; she had a surprise for him. Confused, he told her he thought'he knew what it was.

"But watch this," she said, waving the tiny box between a thumb and finger. She indicated Selly. They were fascinated to observe Selly slowly take off all his clothes and prowl round slowly; and then, fat though he was, crouch down on his haunches and with much puffing and heaving somehow manage to get his leg up around the back of his neck where it stuck up pointing at the ceiling, his foot extended like that of a dancer. He slowly reached forward with tongue extended and made a bold attempt to wash his own genitals, pausing to nibble at something bothering him on his thigh. Janos thought: I shall remember this moment all my life. It is one of the great moments of science that we are privileged to witness.

They were all invited to another party, and this was very exciting, the host being the renowned Roald, who had made breakthroughs in bringing back seals to land and breeding them as household pets. Miniature seals were a favorite in many homes, lolling around on sofas and balancing things on their noses. To have reversed evolution in this way was a considerable feat and might lead to a further breed of useful seal. Selly wobbled with anticipation.

"It is to be a swimming party. What a sense of humor the man has!" Janos laughed aloud, a thing he seldom did, usually expressing amusement with breathy exhalations. He was delighted because he swam very well indeed and would be able to exhibit this talent. Marvene was less happy because she had never swum well and had no confidence in water. The pool contained dolphins and she disliked them, fearing that they might bite and imagining that they would read her mind. She knew that they did not bite but still the fear was there, secreted behind her immaculate eyes.

"I may go in aquatic costume," Janos said, "if costume is allowed." Marvene dreaded that there might only be seafood, which she could not bear.

"I hope they have seafood," said Selly. "If there's one thing I like, it is a nice bit offish." But the main thing to be glad about was that they were privileged to be visiting Roald, for he had a very high position and, following so soon on their own party, they could make a continued good impression. Each would have preferred to have a reputation alone, but together was better than nothing.

Work continued without further discussion, and Janos locked away all his notes when he was done, and hid the key.

The party was going well when they arrived and they were well received and introduced to important people. They were feeling confident of themselves, and Marvene had resigned herself to not making much of a showing in the water; she draped herself at the edge of the pool, bravely throwing her supper to the dolphin, which did seem to be reading her mind because it always leapt a split second before she threw a morsel. Janos was posing nearby eating prawns and clams with evident enjoyment. He planned to dive into the pool, when there were not many swimming, and execute a graceful water dance. If he had not been a scientist, he could have been a great water athlete. Selly was chatting easily with Roald himself, and several important people stood near them waiting to have a word with the great man. Suddenly Mar-vene saw her chance: if Selly misbehaved here, he would be forever out of countenance. She activated his new behavior.

Selly abruptly crouched on the floor on his haunches and got himself into a complicated position whereby he could lick the backs of his own thighs. The effect was immediate then— good! Had he done that at their animal mime party he would have received applause, but one never repeated a performance or did anything out of tune with the prescribed atmosphere. Roald stared unbelieving at this awful display, seeming at a loss, and other important people tried to ignore Selly, everyone suffering from acute embarrassment.

Janos was horrified. Why had she done this here? Did she not realize that it would bring bad attention to all three of them? What lack of tact! He decided to try to divert attention from the scene and ran up the steps to the diving board, sparing a look of hatred for Marvene, who was actually displaying her glee at Selly's display. He prepared to dive, calming himself for an especially elegant performance.

Selly, while engaged in cat behavior which did not seem at all unusual to him, noticed his wrist monitor because his tortured position brought it right in front of his eyes. His brainwave readings and noradrenalin were abnormal. They would be normal for a cat, though, and of course all manner of other realizations came with this knowledge—these made him snarl and begin a howling growl which made the blood run chill. He could take his revenge immediately without a show of power, without explanation. He would bring them both down—if he was to be ruined, then it would not happen in solitude. It must be Janos who had done this thing to him, he believed, for he had read Janos' notes fairly extensively in his spying. But his discoveries had enabled him to do something very similar. He had not believed that they would dare attempt this on him, but he had been waiting his chance to experiment with Janos.

His hands felt very clumsy because his thumb did not want to oppose itself and his claws wanted to retract in a most uncomfortable way, because he did not have claws. With a triumph of control, considering that everyone was staring at him as if he had gone mad, he activated a control directed at Janos.

Janos was posied for action. He looked down to judge the height and was overcome with waves of prickling terror at the sight of the water. Water! He had come the wrong way. He turned to retreat, wobbling wildly between diving skills which he knew he had and the total unfamiliarity with water that belongs to mice. He clutched himself with his little front paws, balancing on his hind legs by an act of will, and people turned to see a man hesitating to dive because of lack of nerve. He was creating a totally unfavorable diversion, but his rodent instincts made him tremble and stay. There was derisive laughter from one or two impolite guests and Roald glared at them, then at Janos. This spurred him to action and he fell into the water with a disgraceful splash, squeaking with fear he could not master. He floundered around trying to swim but a lab mouse had no inkling of such motion. He panicked.

Marvene collected herself and without thinking slid into the water to rescue him. She swam well. Janos had activated her snake instincts, thus ensuring her increased confidence in water, although it was certainly still not her favorite element. The onlookers were impressed with Marvene in spite of themselves, and she was obscurely aware that she had done something amazing and unaccustomed. While the disgraced Janos was being taken away to dress and the impossible Selly escorted to another room to hide himself, she enjoyed a certain amount of qualified glory. It was while she was experiencing a strange desire to slither away underneath a piece of furniture that she guessed what was happening to her. Her jaws drew open with reptilian fury. There was something so obviously wrong with her now that people left her alone. The three of them were in disgrace; it was demonstrated that they were no longer desirable. Marvene knew then that all the work would come to an end. It would be impossible to find another good place in upper-class society. She burned with hatred of her two colleagues. They had stolen the work and used it against her! The very thought filled her with the will to kill them both. She felt that she could strangle them slowly while telling them why she was doing so, and then swallow them whole to eliminate them from her ruined world.

It was discreetly suggested to her in a message from Roald that she leave the party with Selly and Janos. They were ruining his party. She acquiesced with graceful dignity and as she glided away she looked her host in the eye in such a way that he felt threatened. Everything was over now; what did it matter? Then the three of them were out in the night. None of them spoke; there was too much suppressed anger beneath the tough veneer of politeness for any to dare. Janos' upper lip twitched dangerously and Selly's mouth was ajar in a silent snarl as he regarded Janos with malice. He had hunger in his face and Janos felt threatened; a paralysis seemed to have overcome him. Marvene slid away from them, which broke the gaze and the two men followed.

Selly loped along silendy on the balls of his feet, going ahead and returning, quickly but without fuss, circling them and then trotting off like a shadow. Marvene glided quickly then, head held erect, fixing Janos with a gaze, and he trotted agitatedly, head down in his shoulders. Around them the fantasy of the city glowed, the illuminated towers and balconies and flights of stairs and terraces were beautiful, everywhere glass, every aspect designed to astonish and amuse. Marvene spoke first.

"Janos, I am going to kill you. I am going to punish you for spoiling my life. There is nothing you can do; you are going to die.'' He kept his nervous eyes upon her and tripped over the bottom step of a winding flight that led to a broad esplanade, a favorite nightwalk because of its elevation over an abyss and the astounding view. The banisters of the stairway were hollow and filled with small alien lifeforms from other planets. Janos had always loved this walk; he always stopped to take a look at the lizard people or the gloriously beautiful butterfly people in their simulated environment. Now, he would have given a lot to be a prisoner in a bottle like these highly intelligent specimens; anything would have been better than to have only space between Marvene and himself.

Suddenly she reached out to grab him and he jumped; he ran up the stairway at speed but saw Selly ahead, crouched on all fours. The grotesque image of fat Selly crouching to spring almost made him squeak with hysterical laughter, out of control. In a blind panic he whimpered and ran down again. Marvene reached him and almost had hold of him by the neck when Selly leapt with a screech. The stairway beneath them all disappeared instantly and all Marvene could hear was her own ghasdy hissing shriek as she clung to a balustrade, winding herself around it clinging, watching the litde butterfly people escape as their prison dissolved. They would not live long. And Janos had lost the night game; he fell to his death among a cloud of exquisite wings.

Selly had changed direction in midleap and somersaulted out into space in a wonderful arc to land with ease upon his feet on an impossible balcony two flights below. He crouched there moaning with the physical shock, looking down to see Janos land on solid glass. And then he looked up at Marvene, her hair coiling wildly.

"We shall all die. I shall kill you myself. None of us has a life now."

"And we have come such a long way together." "Not together."

"I'll switch off the control if you will. Do we want to be
like this?" It was self and not-self, this snake that she felt to
be. '

"No. You are a snake. It suits your nature. And it must have been Janos who did that to you."

Probably true; it didn't matter now. She ran then, bitter and wild, not home but making for the lab in the underground, down to it through the glittering arcades aware that Selly followed. Kill herself? Where was the courage for that? How did snakes kill themselves? She was drawn to her most familiar surroundings and stood among the cages, uncertain. She reached in and picked up a mouse by its tail. It kicked as she dangled it over her open mouth. Selly got there, howling eerily with laughter and reached out a paw to get the mouse for himself. The little creature was dashed away and ran to trembling safety in a heap of mouse bedding, heaps of paper shredded but still showing that it was covered with Janos' handwriting. Then she laughed too, for he had been careless; now there would be nothing left to show what the research had been. The two humans engaged in a clumsy struggle— Marvene lacked weight and Selly was too fat to get her arms around to squeeze and he was hitting her with the flat of his hand.

Behind him on the bench were the dissecting knives, and she reached out and grasped one. She pushed the instrument into the side of his throat and cut, and cut. He was thick and tough and she could hardly believe that he was dead when his weight went slack and slid to the floor in a great pool of his blood. She found the control in his belt pack and deactivated it, examining it with a detached curiosity to see if it was a good copy. She felt different now, active and tense but more like herself. She felt disgusted that she had almost eaten a mouse. What a powerful discovery they had made. She turned over in her mind ways in which she could use this to make a new life for herself. It was a powerful control weapon. Perhaps she could still be famous if she completed the research alone. She had nobody holding her back now, crippling her sense of style. She turned from the mess and wandered into the snake house.

"Marvene, I have waited for you," said Lupus the Loop, smiling with pleasure. The hallucination of his actually speaking to her was very strong. All the disturbances she had endured had upset her mental balance. "Chomsky was right, Marvene. That ancient debate is at an end. Language is innate, you know." She stared at him, knowing perfectly well that the vocal cords of snakes were so. . . .

"Selly very kindly gave me his powers of verbal communication when he gave me his own instincts. You didn't know he was trying that, did you?"

"You cannot speak," she said, obviously expecting it to interpret.

"Did you hear a voice, my dear? I am transmitting to you telepathically, my usual method of communication with other snakes, of course."

Marvene laughed thinly. "What an imagination I have sometimes. Dear Lupus, come to me then, tell me more. Give me answers out of my own brain." But she had not read Chomsky. He glided to her and swiftly wound himself around her, head down and gripping tightly.

"Marvene, I want us to mate. I have needed a female for some time, but my cruel imprisonment here did not allow that. Snakes are more passionate than humans realize, and Selly too had his passions. Secretly, he much desired you, my dear." She screamed again and again, begging him to let her go. He was embracing her desperately, frustrated and in anguish. He gripped her tighter and her bones slowly snapped and the breath went out of her so that she could not scream any more. Finally, possessing her in the only way he could, he swallowed her whole, taking his time, covering her broken body over with his own beautiful elastic skin.

* * *

The little mouse who had escaped was busy. It was releasing its fellow prisoners, who were not only grateful to be released, but said so.

The advance of technology affects everything in our culture . . . yes, even art. For decades, science fiction writers have warned us that fallible human authors may one day be replaced by robots or computers programmed to produce stories that will be without flaws (and usually without surprises). But Nancy Kress suggests, in this very human story, that perfection in writing may be developed sooner using human authors aided by precise physiological monitoring. This would certainly be an improvement; still, "perfection" always raises questions, some very basic.

"Shadows on the Cave Wall" is the fifth short story Nancy Kress has sold; her earlier ones were published in Omni, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and Galaxy. Her first novel, Prince of Morning Bells, appeared recently from Pocket Books. A teacher of English at the college level, she lives in Brockport, New York, with her husband and two sons.

SHADOWS ON THE CAVE WALL

Nancy Kress

"Our music, our poetry, our language itself, are not satisfactions, but suggestions."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

On Tuesday it was préadolescent girls for Matthew Mc-Gratty, a free-lancer we'd just put under contract. McGratty always chooses the obvious, so naturally it was a horse story. Garber said he wasn't crazy about having his studio used for a horse story, the same studio where two months ago Gar-ber's great undiscovered protégé Johannsen had final-auded Greta. But McGratty had a decent if uninspired composing record, we had him under contract, and Garber had no real choice except to grumble a little about the perversion of art and the debasement of public taste and so forth, and then give the go-ahead. Garber has fits like that, delusions that G-M Press is more than just a third-rate c-aud shop for freelancers; we on the staff humor him. And every so often we do come up with a Greta, although we're no Harper and Simon, and for us it's a windfall, a lucky lightning, a comet's tail we don't even try to grab but just sparkle in the light of before it whizzes past. Last week Johannsen signed a contract with Harper and Simon.

Still, Greta is supposed to be really good. We only had it for the last, twenty-fifth taping; Johannsen must have been running out of money, to come to us at all. Garber burst into my office, all excited, because he heard that someone on the Times might review it.

"What do you think, Mary? Jameson? Maybe Jameson might review it? Jameson would do it a lot of good. I have a feeling about this one, Mary!"

"Jameson isn't going to review it."

He glared at me from under lowered eyebrows. They're nearly white now, and in his rumpled jumpsuit, Garber looks like a seedy Santa Glaus reduced to dealing in hot toys. God, I love him. If I ever forgive that bitch Mummy-sweet at all, it will be because she somehow tangled Garber in her long string of husbands.

"He might review it!"

"He won't. You know that. Think. It's a book for children. ''

"Young adults!"

"All right, young adults. But he's not going to review it in the Times. We'll probably do all right on it financially— although that was a pretty selective c-aud index Johannsen showed me. At least we shouldn't lose money on it. Setde for that."

"You haven't even read it!"

I hadn't, although I'd had the manuscript for nearly a month. Press of work, busy time of year, I just hadn't had the time. Oh, hell, yes I'd had. That wasn't the reason.

"I know I haven't read it. Maybe it's terrific. Maybe it's an instant classic. Maybe it's Hamlel for the acne set. But Jameson won't review it. Let it go, Garber."

"I think you're wrong."

I sighed. Garber was a walking lesson on how to achieve business failure: enthusiasm without judgment. That we had gotten even this far was due only to the hefty alimony Garber had pried out of Mummy-sweet, and that he had gotten so much alimony in a retroactive setdement was due only to the lawyer I'd hired for him. She isn't ever going to forgive me, either.

"You're wrong, Mary. This time I know it."

"Garber, if you were a critic, and in the exact same week publishers brought out the original appearances of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Anna Karenina, Song of Myself, and The Little Engine that Could, what would you not review?"

"Greta isn't . . ."

"I have to go. McGratty's waiting for me in the studio." "To compare it to The Little ..."

"Garber, he's waiting with forty-seven kids. I have to go." I put my arms around him and kissed him on the top of his head. It was going bald; in another year he would have a tonsure. I found that I liked the idea. When I was eleven years old, Garber found out from the upstairs maid that I vomited uncontrollably after each visit from Mummy-sweet, and he took me himself to boarding school, holding my hand on the train and talking in a low, confidential voice about baseball, and caterpillars, and the marvelous way really high-quality peppermints melted first around the edges of one's mouth.

"Mary," he said, his arms still around me, "do me a favor?"

"Of course."

"Promise?"

"Of course, Garber. Anything. You know that. Just ask.'' "When you're home tonight, read Greta."

"Oh, Garber, I'm really sorry but tonight I have to . . ." "No. You don't."

I didn't. He tilted back his head and looked at me steadily out of blue eyes that look a litde more sunken every month. Five years more, the doctors say. Even virotherapy doesn't arrest it forever, any of it . . . not the cancer, and not the pain. It had been Garber who'd brought me my first copy of Alice in Wonderland.

"Read it, Mary."

My daughter, Susan, calls Garber "Grandpa." I've never let her meet a single other one of her relations. Or even told her about them. When that fool of a teacher Susan is so stuck on gave them the assignment to trace their family trees, I lied and gave her Garber's.

"I'll read it, Garber."

"Promise?"

"Promise. But, look, McGratty's waiting."

He unwrapped his arms and winked. "Have fun!" His point won, Jameson and the nonexistent review forgotten, equanimity restored. Garber is a big child. I hurried out of the office; he stayed to study the cover painting for a preschool picture book on space, smiling at the teddy bear in the cockpit and whisding to himself. Both hands rubbed his plump belly: a right jolly old elf. And now I was committed to reading Greta.

Hell.

McGratty had lined the kids up against the studio wall, three deep, well away from the computer and the aud-units. He was talking to them in that charming drawl that convinced each and every litde heart that she was an utterly fascinating almost-woman, and the whole gaggle of ten- and eleven-year olds was giggling and twitching and popping moonies. The popping punctuated languishing sidelong glances at McGratty that ended in even louder explosions of moonies. He gestured with one hand, and forty-seven pairs of eyes followed the hand's arc through the air. Under all this attention, McGratty expanded, the girls expanded. The studio threatened to explode outward from all the hot air.

"All right, kids, line up over here. Tallest first. Let's go!"

They stared at me like poison. A few scowled.

"Come on, let's get started here. You, with the red pigtails . . . come here, honey, and we'll get you strapped into a unit."

She came forward slowly, standing in front of me with scrawny feet planted apart, arms akimbo. "Not pigtails." "What?"

"They're not pigtails. They're called 'fashion braids.' That's what they're called."

I couldn't suppress my smile in time. "Sorry. 'Fashion braids.' "

She looked me up and down. "And I'm not 'honey.' "

My smile vanished. There's always one. Behind the pig-tailed redhead, someone tittered.

"My name is Nellie Kay Armbruster, not 'honey'!" I caught the quaver in her voice under the skinny bravado, but it only increased my irritation. Ms. Nellie Kay Armbruster didn't know what it meant to have something for her voice to quaver over. Looking at her bleakly, I saw another eleven-year-old, howling and thrashing in a room with walls padded in a fashionable pale yellow. Mummy-sweet had excellent taste, don't you know.

"All right, then, Ms. Armbruster, if you'll just consent to step this way. . ." The child flushed, and I knew I'd missed it again, the tone of companionable bantering that was supposed to make it all right. Girls this age . . . McGratty was looking at me with narrowed eyes. He didn't want me upsetting his c-aud, and I didn't blame him. Well, if he were good enough, it wouldn't matter.

I strapped Nellie Kay Armbruster into her unit. She winced a litde when I fitted on the scalp wires and then clamped her head immobile, but she didn't even deign to notice when I pricked the needle into her arm or adjusted the screen the right distance from her pupils. Our units are about five years old, and we've missed out on some of the new, subtle indices, but those are more useful for adult c-auds anyway. We only do children and young adults, so only the frontal lobe cortex and amino acid indices really count, although we monitor the rest of the basic stuff, too: pupil dilation, thoracic respiration, blood flow, galvanic skin response.

When all the kids had been strapped in—the others wouldn't look directly at me, either—I took my place at the computer and McGratty, at the author's console, began typing.

suddenly. that was how the wild palomino came back into carianna's life, leaping over the white picket fence into her aunt's vegetable garden, tossing his magnificent white mane. he must have come from the desert, carianna thought in confusion— but she didn't care where he had come from; she was transfixed with delight, just watching him.

Rapid, low-voltage, irregular waves appeared on my synthesis screen: McGratty's narrative hook had engaged their attention. I scanned the individuals. Only two showed latencies. One was so uninvolved she was practically in alpha waves, and I pressed for an IQ_: 72. McGratty wasn't aiming at that audience; how the hell had her card slipped in? I punched the keys that canceled her responses from the synthesis, though I kept her individuals.

The word-by-word looked good, except for a slight flag on "transfixed." McGratty might consider changing it; it was possible some of them didn't know what it meant. High response to the name "Carianna." A few subliminal-stimulus lights even flickered, and I wondered yet again why little girls always went for such flashy names. The emotional-involvemerit index wasn't pronounced, but that didn't matter much at the beginning. The attention patterns were the important thing.

the palomino snorted, then arched his long neck forward to pull at aunt maud's carrot tops. sunlight poured over his golden coat. then, all at once, carianna saw the notch on the horse's ear. "rocket," she whispered, stunned. "it's rocket!"

The attention curves were still rising, with a slight dip at the sentence about the sunlight. But that's inevitable with description, even when you keep it short. The individuals showed the beginning of emotional involvement in four girls. I checked the running evals to see if there was a conscious critical reaction to that awkward "all at once, Carianna saw" (how else would she see except all at once?) but the evals were all flat. Preadolescent girls are not a very critical audience. I've never monitored an adult-level composing session, although I've seen tapes with myself as subject. Even interpreting those made me dizzy. How complex are your reactions when you read Macbeth?

slowly, trying not to startle the beautiful palomino, carianna moved sideways toward the fence, where her lariat hung. she still couldn't believe it was rocket. she had been so sure he was lost to her forever, that terrible day two years ago when he took to the desert. two steps more, one more, and her fingers closed on the lariat.

I would bet my job that not one of these New York kids has even seen a lariat, except on video. Nor a desert, nor a wild horse, nor a carrot still in the ground—probably not even a goddam picket fence. And as a work of art, McGratty's story was . . . straight from the horse. But engagement derives from subjective significance, the unconscious effect of personal, social, and subliminal factors. It looked like McGratty was in.

carianna raised the lariat, as uncle bob had taught her. rocket looked up, his nostrils flaring. outlined by the blazing sun, he was so beautiful that carianna felt her throat tighten. but her hand was steady as she twirled the rope and sent it flying toward the palomino's neck. rocket reared and plunged, tearing up the carrots. carianna cried out, despite herself. had she missed? or did she—could she—have rocket again for herself?

The synthesis of evoked potentials was so thick it looked like a Rorschach smear. Good readings on the glutanic and aspartic acids that go with prolonged attentiveness, nice curves on emotional engagement and subliminal stimuli, even the start of a negative cortical variation, and it was early for that. I glanced at the evals: flat. But, then, McGratty's preselects had included no IO_'s over sigma one. He knew his limits. Within those limits, it looked promising, unless he stumbled badly later in the story, and even if he did, we could probably fix it. Three or four more c-auds, and the story would evoke exacdy the response patterns that sold the best. Another triumph for American fiction.

No, that wasn't fair. After all, Nellie Kay Armbruster had as much right to have her cortical attention engaged by whatever happened to engage it as did the readers of Shakespeare or Joyce. And McGratty's opus might even make us a little money, while the preselects for something like Greta were always incredibly restricted: bright, intense "young adults" with a lit-passion of 11 or better.

I didn't want to read Greta.

Rocket plunged over the edge of a convenient mesa, and one of the girls gasped loudly. Quickly I checked the distraction-wave index: nothing. The others were so absorbed they hadn't heard her. McGratty was in.

"Look at this, Mary," Garber said. The printouts from McGratty's c-aud spread over his desk, looping in tangled coils and trailing gracefully to the floor. A coffee mug sat on top, spreading a leisurely brown stain over an aspartic acid curve. Garber ignored all of it, squinting through his sunken blue eyes at a piece of green paper.

"Look at what?" I said, removing the coffee mug.

"That's the third one this week. I think they're growing."

He handed me the paper. It was a leaflet printed in blurry block letters on cheap poison-green newsprint.

THE UNSUSPECTED DANGER

What is the most dangerous enemy presently in the United States? What force poses the most long-term threat to you, your children, and their children? Do YOU know?

It's not what you may think! This is a hidden danger, a danger to the MIND. It's the so-called "composing-audience' ' writing of the books you read, the books your children read, and YES! even the textbooks they use in their schools! Do you want your children guided by teachings and so-called art composed by machines? Haven't we lost enough of our humanity to the computer? Aren't enough of our decisions already removed from our own human hands to cold and inhuman machines? How brainwashed and helpless do YOU want to be before the all-powerful computer?

YOU CAN HELP! Just detach and return the attached coupon with a 50$ donation to help the crusade against dehumanization and brainwashing!

□YES! I want to cry out against control of my mind by a machine! Enlist me as a crusader! 50* donation enclosed.

□ Send me more information on computer control of school textbooks!

I laughed. "It's nothing but a con for suckers, Garber." "With what fifty cents buys now? I doubt they're even covering their printing costs." "A bunch of splitbrains, then."

"Maybe." He drummed his fingers on McGratty's printout, a muffled noise like the falling of fat, cushiony rocks. A loop of the printout creased in erratic folds. "But there's a lot of them out there, then. Practically every time I leave the building I get one of these shoved at me."

"Garber, why are you even concerned? Of course there's a lot of splitbrains out there. There's supposed to be a lot of them; the tourists wouldn't feel they were getting their money's worth out of New York if it weren't swarming with splitbrains. And you know what this garbage is as well as I do—it's just the inevitable fussing about any move to automation. People fussed when babies were conceived in tubes. People fussed when electric looms wrecked handweaving. People even fussed when eating with forks replaced fingers, for chrissake—did you know that?" Garber didn't answer. One of his most endearing traits is his acceptance of other people's melodrama. Specifically mine.

"It's true. Forks. They yelled 'lifeless' and 'inhuman' and 'foul' until, after a while, they saw that it was just another tool, and the yelling died down and everybody went home. This is just the same. Another tool. So why are you upset?"

"I don't know." He gave me a little, indulgent half smile for my performance, but kept on drumming his fingers. I slid McGratty's now-wrinkled printout from under them and began rolling it up.

"Mary, I talked to Jameson today."

"He's not going to review Greta?"

"No."

"Well, I expected that."

"He sounded . . . strange. Evasive. Something had upset him. A lot."

I shrugged and kept on rolling. "So he's being sued for libel. Or divorce. Or bankruptcy."

"No, it didn't . . . feel like anything personal. Just something big."

I stopped rolling and looked at Garber. He may have no business judgment whatever, but he can have a shrewdness, an intuition, about people that I've learned to think twice about. Even if it did fail him spectacularly in the case of Mummy-sweet.

"What sort of a something big?"

"I don't know."

"You don't think it's connected with that nonsense?" I nodded toward the poison-green leaflet.

Garber frowned, Santa Claus with a wayward reindeer. "No. Not directly, anyway. But something's up, somewhere. And of all the big-league critics, Jameson's been the one singing loudest hosannas for c-auds.''

This wasn't strictly accurate, but I allowed Garber his hyperbole, although the picture of a wizened little Times literary critic as a hosanna-singing archangel was pretty funny. "New Century Renaissance"—Jameson had been the first to come up with the term, but now they all used it, all sounded equally enthusiastic hosannas. And why not? Critics may distrust authors, but they love and delight in truly good writing. "Renaissance" is even too pale a word for the works that have come out of the last twenty years, since c-auds. To know for sure when your vision as a writer has gone beyond the peculiarities of the singular "I." To be able to hammer at that vision until it reaches and moves readers at the subliminal, universal level of involuntary body responses, not merely the tangled and ego-guarded one of verbalized "criticism." To move that hammering from a lonely, locked-room struggle to a shared struggle, a cooperative act between creator and a selected, involved audience who also became creators, participatory gods. Is it any wonder that the New Century Renaissance has given us The Golden Grasses, Cranston's Mountain, All the Winning Numbers, A

Sheep of Mantua? Critics like Jameson don't care if Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays or c-aud "wrote" The Golden Grasses. The play's the thing. So what was wrong? "So what's wrong, Garber?"

"I keep telling you, I don't know!" He frowned again, then shook his head vigorously from side to side like some mangy, whitened bear, and smiled. It's Garber favorite trick for erasing trouble, for reorienting himself to some inner, serene world. The anxieties just shake out of his ears or something, and poof! they're gone. It's what he did when the doctors told him about the cancer; it's what he does after each virotherapy session; it's what he did after he told me all those years ago that he was divorcing my mother. Shake, shake. God, I envy him.

"Have dinner with me, Mary. I'll take you to Cellini's."

"I can't, Garber. Susan'11 be home."

"I thought Tuesday she had Star Scouts."

"She quit. 'Too babyish.' "

"Then bring her along. She'll like Cellini's."

I was tempted. Discreet service, good wine, the illusion of space and leisure in the midst of New York's steel caves. Cellini's incomparable beef Wellington. The relaxed luxury of inconsequential shop talk away from the pressing decisions of an actual shop. Garber was wonderful at that; in the pampered atmosphere of a good restaurant he seemed to expand and glow, like the rosy potbellied candles on each table, into a genial incandescence that shone benignly on all. The quality of mercy.

But Susan would object when Garber and I talked shop; I would object when she insisted on having a cocktail; Garber would object, with genuine if genial distress, that Susan and I were battling yet again. He would remind us how well we used to get along when Susan was a baby. Susan would say that she was not a baby and would thank everyone to remember that. I would reply, with some heat, that Garber hadn't said she was, and Garber would look from Susan to me and back again with pained, puzzled incomprehension and ask Susan how her teacher was. Then we'd listen for forty minutes to the wonders of the handsome Mr. Blake, who understood young women perfectly even if he didn't try to publish babyish books for them.

"I can't, Garber. Really."

"Well, next week then. We'll do it next week."

"Love to."

"Anyway, you promised to read Greta tonight." Damn.

"You will read it, Mary?" "I'll read it."

He kissed me good-bye, giving me one of those measuring glances that always seem out of character. I just missed the subway. While I was waiting for the next one, a thin anemic-looking kid pushed another one of the poison-green leaflets into my hand. C-AUD: A DEAD END FOR HUMANITY. I tore it into litde pieces, threw it on the subway tracks, and got slapped with a fine for malicious littering.

"I got a D," Susan announced over the spaghetti. She widened her eyes at me and held her fork upright, like a spear. "Ms. Lugo gave me a D."

"Ms. Lugo? What happened to Mr. Blake?"

Susan rolled her eyes heavenward. "I told you, he's been out because his mother died. Ms. Lugo is the sub. And she gave me a D on my family-tree assignment!"

"Why?"

"You should know! It's your fault!" "My fault?"

"You know it is. And when Mr. Blake comes back on Friday, he'll see that D and ask me about it, and I just can't bear it!"

I twirled spaghetti on my fork with great, calm deliberation.

"And just how is this D my fault, Susan?"

''We're supposed to have all this oral history to go with the family tree we had to do. I told you. And all I had to put on my cassette was those few things you told me about Grandpa Garber, because you were so busy writing or whatever that you wouldn't hardly even talk to me. So Ms. Lugo marked "skimpy content" and "lack of effort" on the checklist and gave me a D."

"Honey, it wasn't because I was too busy writing!"

"Don't call me 'honey'! I hate it when you call me 'honey'!"

Twice in one day. I put down my fork and forced myself to speak calmly to the hysterical, overgrown prosecutor sitting in my daughter's chair. J'accuse.

"Susan, it wasn't because I was too busy writing. It wasn't that at all. It was because ..." Because what? Because the family tree I gave her was Garber's, and I don't know any more about it. Because I don't know what her father, that anonymous doner of sperm, might have had for his oral history. Because I don't want to give her mine, don't want her to look at herself as the cast-off granddaughter of a rich bitch whose notorious cruelties revolted even the mostly unrevoltable set that spawned her. Because I don't want Susan to look at me in the lurid and violent light that any recitation of my own childhood would have to, in Susan's eyes, set me in now and forever, world without end.

"Because of what?" Susan demanded. "Because of what didn't you tell me more for the project?"

I couldn't answer her.

Two large tears rolled out of the corners of her eyes. She jumped up, dashed them away, and screamed at me across the spaghetti. "You don't have a reason! You know you don't! You just don't care if I get a D on my project, you just don't have time to talk to me about it, you just have time to lock yourself in your room and scribble your own things! You don't understand me at all!"

She ran from the room. A second later I heard the door slam, catch on something in the way, then slam again, this time successfully enough to shake the pictures on the wall. Victoria Falls shuddered and slid to the floor.

I pushed away the plate of congealing spaghetti. All right, I told myself yet again, it's just normal preadolescent mother-daughter wangling. Her body's under a lot of stress, it's changing too fast, this is all normal, it will all pass. The constant lashing out at me, the moods, the tears, the lightning highs and lows—all would pass. I understood. Didn't I? I did. I had been that age once; I knew what it felt like to be Susan with her "D" or Nellie Kay Armbruster with her fashion braids; I knew what—

No. I didn't know what it felt like. Not from where Susan was standing. I only knew what it had looked like from where / had been, such a vastly different and splintered place that I'd been an emotional mutant, adapted to fit an alien landscape, and thus alone. I couldn't reach my daughter 'that way, through the tunnel of a common experience. There wasn't one. My childhood was useless for that.

But I could do something else with that childhood, and had been doing it, for months now. I could transform the whole abusive nightmare into something that made sense, perhaps even beauty. Dickens had done it for his childhood of grinding poverty, in Oliver Twist. Rashi had done it for hers, in Gremlin. If the private past could be transcended, transformed into the public vision . . .

I left the spaghetti on the table. I left the unread copy of Greta on the floor, next to Victoria Falls. I left the fine for malicious littering of the poison-green pamphlet in my coat pocket. I left Garber's mysterious worry about Jameson's mysterious worry, and Susan's worry about her D, and my worry about Susan, and I went into my bedroom and scribbled some more on the secret manuscript I had been scribbling on every night. The manuscript that I knew would make it all hang together, turn it all into some kind of integrated sense, make it all worthwhile.

I wrote until I fell asleep, sometime after two, still slumped at my desk. When I woke a few hours later, the light cube had burned out. My shoulders and arms felt stiff, circulation had stopped in one leg, and my mouth tasted foul. It was nearly dawn. In the half-light from the window my writing lay lighdy on the crumpled pages, a lacy pattern of dim shadows.

and so little agnes came home again, much the wiser for her adventure. and her mother met her at the door, and her loving brothers, and, best of all, tags. he barked and romped, and little agnes knew she could never, ever leave him again!

I stared at the monitor screen in disbelief. Alpha waves— four of the individual curves showed alpha waves! Leaning around the edge of the computer, I searched for the four kids. All of them had their eyes closed. Kids still staring at their screens were slumped in their seats, and a slump is hard to do when your head is held immobile. The evoked potentials were low and monotonous, the acid curves flat, the subliminal stimuli not even registering. Only the evals showed activity, a high curve that didn't need my training to be interpreted: they hated it.

At the master console the proud author typed the last period and beamed through her bifocals.

Garber, I thought. Let Garber handle it. Garber would tell her better than I.

I released the helmets and the kids scrambled out gratefully. The author busded up, patting lavender curls squashed by a net so carefully arranged that I fought a sudden urge to play tic-tac-toe in its symmetrical squares.

"Well, it went splendidly, didn't it, my dear? Just splendidly. My, I find a c-aud studio so interesting!"

I stared at the printout as if it were the Rosetta stone, and hoped she couldn't read graphs.

"Why don't you just go on ahead to Mr. Garber's office, Ms. Tidwell, and I'll be along as soon as I sort these out."

"Oh, I don't mind waiting for you, dear. Not at all."

"Well, it's just that it might take a while."

She laughed brightly, a kind laugh around big horse teeth. "Oh, I guess I can wait, all right. I've waited twenty-two years, you know. That's how long I've been working on Little Agnes' Adventure. On and off, of course. You can't rush inspiration, you know—what's that, dear?"

"Nothing. Nothing. I just . . . cleared my throat."

"Would you like a cough drop? No? You have to take care of yourself, dear, a young woman like you. I learned that, I should hope, in all my years of teaching—did I tell you I was a schoolteacher, dear? Retired, now, as of last year. Taught forty-four years. And then I said to myself, I said, Ida Tidwell, if you're ever going to take that book and publish it, now's the time. So I just pulled my savings out of the bank— you sure you don't want a cough drop? That does sound bad!"

"No . . . no."

"Well, you know best, of course. So I just pulled my savings out and came to Mr. Garber with my manuscript, and here I am, a real live author! My, I can't wait to see Little Agnes in print."

Garber. Yes. Let Garber do it.

"Can I help you roll those up, dear?"

"No. No, thank you. Ms. Tidwell, May I ask you something?"

"Certainly, dear. About Agnes? Was some part not clear?"

"Not about Agnes. Ms. Tidwell, what was it all those years?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"What did you teach? Was it English?"

"Oh, my, no, dear!"

"Not literature?"

"I taught algebra."

I smiled gratitude on behalf of forty-four years of literature classes. "Tell you what, Ms. Tidwell, I know you must be tired from this long session. If you'll just run along"—oh hell, I never say things like "just run along"—"to Mr. Gar-ber's office ..."

"Oh, I don't mind waiting, dear." She smiled at me with baby-blue eyes, serene and flat as an empty sky. "This is all so very exciting for me. It's always been my dream, you know, to write a book. And I knew I could do it. I knew it would make everything all worthwhile."

"What?"

"What . . . why, dear, what's the matter?" "What did you just say?"

"I said I knew the book would make it all worthwhile. All those years of teaching algebra. Why, dear, you look so—"

"I've finished here. Let's see Mr. Garber now, shall we?"

I ushered her into Garber's office, put the printouts on his desk, and pleaded my bladder. When I returned from the toilet, twenty-five minutes later, she was gone, but the office still held the unmistakable feel of disaster. There's a theory that any monitor's repeated experiences of seeing brain waves related to graphic interpretation leads to a slight rise in natural sensing of electromagnetic auras. Nobody's ever proved it. But Garber's office was soggy with ineffectual disillusionment, wadding up the air like damp tissues.

"Was it very bad?"

"If you'd stayed, you'd know."

"I'm sorry, Garber, really I am. But I couldn't. I just couldn't."

He swept the rolls of printout off the side of his desk and toward the wastebasket. They missed.

"Garber, I don't know exactly how to say this, but about her contract . . . her life savings—"

"I already refunded it."

I walked over and kissed him. "I should have known you would. Then there's no real harm done, is there? She'll get over it. Don't look like that—people have to learn every day that they don't have talents they'd hoped for."

He looked at me with a sudden intensity.

"After all," I said, too loudly, "the city is swarming with would-be writers, everyone knows that. Scratch a schoolteacher and you find a c-aud applicant, right?"

"Right," Garber said. "Yes. Well." He reached for my hand and began playing with the fingers, crossing and uncrossing them. A silence stretched itself too long, then went on even longer.

"Mary . . ."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"No, what were you going to say?"

"Nothing." With the hearty air of a man skillfully changing the subject, he added, "Hey—did you look out the window yet? Look down there. They've been at it all morning."

Ten stories below, pickets marched. I could just make out the block lettering on the poison-green signs.

C AUD-ARTIST FRAUD

GIVE BOOKS BACK TO HUMANS!

CHILDREN DESERVE MORE THAN MECHANICAL MINDS

"They had a bunch of children marching with them earlier," Garber said. "Tots about six or seven." "Are they all nonviolent?" "So far."

I shrugged. ' 'Then let them march. What does it matter?"

Garber swiveled his chair back toward his desk and said, as though it were an answer, "Jameson videoed me this morning.''

"He called you?" G-M Press is definitely not accustomed to getting videos from famous critics.

"He's sending me a manuscript to read."

I sat on Garber's desk. "What kind of manuscript?"

"I don't know. He wouldn't say. But he made me promise to drop everything else and read it instantly. He looked disturbed, rumpled, and upset, but in an odd sort of way."

"What sort of odd sort of way?"

"Like a journalist with an exclusive on the Titanic. Mary, what do you think art is for?"

I blinked. Abstractions are not Garber's style. No one at G-M Press asks what art is for, unless he's being high-camp humorous; Garber was not. It was a question I hadn't even heard spoken aloud since lecture classes at college. Garber was looking at me with the rumpled half embarrassment of a man who knows he's just said something faintly impractical and ridiculous, and I looked away and fumbled.

"Garber, I couldn't—"

"No, forget it. Stupid question." He shook his head from side to side, the old mind-cleaning bounce, and came up smiling.

"Dinner at Cellini's?"

Susan's oral-history project hung in the air, joining Ida TidweU's tears and Garber's abashed rhetoric.

"No, you can't, I know," Garber said. "But next week? For sure?"

"For sure."

As I left, he went back to the window, watching the picketers with mild geniality. Ms. Tidwell's printouts unrolled a litde more on the carpeted floor.

It had started to rain. I put down the last page of Greta, leaned over the desk, and opened my tiny bedroom's one window. Outside it was dark, with smeared blurs of light shining through the rain, and soft splats as the drops hit the screen. Drifting in were those summer-night smells that even New York can't totally obliterate: damp earth, wet dust from the screen, and, improbably, roses.

Were there roses in the minipark across the street? Suddenly it seemed very important to remember. I leaned my forehead against the dark wet screen, its slippery wire squares reminding me of Ms. TidwelPs hairnet, and tried to picture the park. One chipped bench, one maple tree protected by a ten-foot whitewashed cage, one litter basket overflowing with objects not bearing close examination, and one flower bed. Were there roses in the flower bed? And if so, were they red or pink or white or yellow? Long-stemmed or clustered on low bushes? Straggly or well pruned? Buds or already blowsy, their ripeness turning messy, dropping silky petals like specks of blood?

I couldn't see the roses. All I could see was the child protagonist of Greta.

It was a fabulous book. Literally: a book fabled, beyond human expectations, removed from the mundane not because of what happened in it, but because of what it made of what happened. Huckleberry Finn without the leaky ending. A female Holden Caulfield brought with power and poignancy into the 1990's. Oliver Twist without bathos. Johannsen had painted Greta's rite of passage with the uncompromising harshness of a Faulkner, the detail of a Colette, the controlled compassion of a Steinbeck.

So many literary allusions. But they weren't quite right, after all. It wasn't those other masters Johannsen had echoed, it was me, my own deepest resonances in the subconscious, or wherever the hell they're supposed to be kept now, so that as I read, litde shocks of recognition and discovery flashed between me and the badly typed pages. More: Greta was the universal childhood experience, being a stranger in a harsh and unfamiliar adult land, lifted to a peak so lucid and sharp that it might have been the prototype for Twain, Dickens, et al, instead of their culmination.

I saw that I had set the last page crookedly on top of the rest. I straightened it carefully, taking a long time to get it ex-acdy right, all four corners perfectly aligned to slide the manuscript into its cardboard box. There was a stain on one corner of the box; it looked like jelly. Meticulously I rubbed it with a tissue, then an eraser, until the smear was gone and the rubbed nap all lay in the same direction.

Then there was nothing else to do.

Greta had done it all.

I undressed, hanging my jumpsuit with mathematical care. Shoulders equidistant on the hanger, boots lined up at right angles, toothbrush plumb-line vertical in its holder. The hairbrush free of all pulled strands. Everything necessary attended to. The key to the locked drawer holding my manuscript made a tinny, gurgling sound as I flushed it down the toilet, but it didn't clog the pipe.

I went to bed.

At a third-rate c-aud publisher, art is for making money. But now I thought about McGratty and the little girls he had entertained so well. I thought about Garber dying, and Ida Tidwell smiling so much over so little. I thought about Susan and about Nellie Kay Armbruster, both glaring at me as if we belonged to different species, with no possible hope of first contact. I thought about Johannsen, composing Greta out of whatever universal vision blazed from him through G-M's aging equipment to his c-aud, and back again. And again. And I thought about Mummy-sweet. All that pain, then: wasted. Never used; never transformed; never, dammit, justified. Not by me.

The rain stopped. The sliding sounds of traffic on wet pavement drifted in the dark window. A dog barked.

So what do you do, when somebody else builds the pyramids where you needed to put up your bark hut? First you think, a dead dream and then you tell yourself that the least you can do is avoid thinking in those damn tired cliches. Then you realize that even telling yourself that is a cliche, and so is the realization that it is. Then you plod round and round the same tired track, trying not to see what's there—or, rather, trying to see what's not there, the unique deep contribution that all of a sudden is now neither unique nor necessary, nor even, by comparison, very deep. You listen to traffic. You listen to your own heartbeat, and to those weird New York night sounds that are never identifiable but always familiar: thumps and hoots and blurred, distant wails from God-knows-what. You pick apart into bloody shreds everything that ever happened to you, everything you've ever done, and finally you make yourself stop that because soggy self-pity won't help, only survival-oriented tough-minded hard-nosed gut will help, kid, so stop ya blubberin' and strap on that there gun. And then you tell yourself to avoid thinking in those damn tired cliches.

Finally you roll over and sleep, because even the pyramids don't change having to get up early to go to work, and fix your daughter's breakfast, and stop at the bank to pay the utility. And sometime in the night the rain starts again, smelling of phantom roses.

In the morning the pickets were back, treading an oval on the sidewalk. Seen up close, they were an odd lot: two kids with the single scalp-strip of curled hair that is the current fashion in parent-annoyance, an intense academic type wearing middle-age badly, a woman dressed in nurse uniform, cap, and stethoscope, and an old spoonhead I had seen last week carrying a sandwich board for Harvey's Eats. They carried a new collection of signs:

HUMAN BOOKS FOR HUMAN HEARTS

SAVE OUR CHILDREN'S MINDS

A C-AUD IS A COMPUTER'S BAWD

(That was the academic.)

IS NOTHING SACRID?

NO SEA TO SHINING C-AUD

" 'Sacred' is misspelled," I said, to no one in particular. One of the kids squinted at me. "It should be s-a-c-r-«-d."

He scanned the signs until he saw the one I meant, carried by the spoonhead. I ducked into the building. No one tried to stop me, although the nurse gave me the pitying look of the elect for the damned.

Garber wasn't in his office. My desk was cluttered with the usual jetsam, all claiming to be important.

The computer tech wanted payment for the last set of equipment repairs.

The utility company regretted to inform us of a rate hike.

Ms. Ida Tidwell had submitted another application for a free-lance c-aud. This one was for a book called Tiny Tina's Lesson. Check enclosed, drawn on a savings bank.

Matthew McGratty wanted to explore the possibility of renegotiating our contract. He had received this offer from a well-known publisher he didn't feel at liberty to name. . . .

I was staring at it all with profound disinterest when Garber came in. He entered quiedy, gendy, almost as if he were apologizing for something, or afraid of intruding on mourning. He looked terrible. His suit was even more rumpled than usual, his sunken blue eyes rimmed with purple shadows. I tensed, knowing he would discuss Greta, and bracing myself for—what? We had never talked direcdy about my writing. For unspoken pity, then. For penetrating looks and restrained curiosity. But instead Garber just laid a package on my desk.

"Read this, Mary. Now. Please." He didn't look at me.

"Garber, what—"

"Please."

He turned and left, closing the door behind him. Gently.

I opened the package. It was a manuscript, a photocopy, marked "To C. Jameson. Molloy Press. C-AUD 22, final taping." The tide was Floor of Heaven. I thought a moment, then located the title in The Merchant of Venice. The author was a name instantly recognizable, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a brilliant writer with the sort of reputation that even high school sophomores have heard of. I had reread her last book twice. What was she doing sending a manuscript to Garber, via Jameson? It made no sense.

I began to read. Twenty pages in, I realized that, in the essentials that truly count, the characters and meaning and nuances of emotional and intellectual theme that make a book what it is, I knew the book already.

I had read it last night.

Garber was sitting in his office, with the lights off. He'd pulled his chair over to the window and looped back the curtain, and he sat in the half-light with his hands folded on his belly, gazing out. It had started to drizzle. Far below, the corners of the pickets' cardboard signs curled over on themselves like sea waves.

I laid Floor of Heaven on his desk.

"Collusion . . ."I said, the word trailing off into nothing. The author of Floor of Heaven was neither unscrupulous nor insane. No motive. More loudly I said, "A bad practical joke." Garber didn't answer, but I rushed on.

"Of course, Garber. That's all it is. Some arrested-development who's willing to go to elaborate lengths to . . . to scare Jameson!" Only, of course, Jameson wasn't scared. "To make him look foolish, then. Utterly, ridiculously foolish, in print."

Garber smiled.

"It happens all the time. Literary hoaxes. So much a part of publishing history that it's . . . practically obligatory, every once in a while. Patriotic, even. That's all it is."

Garber gestured out the window. "They'll be ecstatic," he said, smiling, still smiling, and I exploded.

"Come on, Garber, one duplication doesn't prove anything! Even random chance allows for some total improbabilities! If all the monkeys in the British Museum began typing—no, that's not right, if all the monkeys in the world—"

"No," Garber said, his voice quiet against my shrillness. "No, one duplication doesn't prove anything."

"—began typing all the books in—all the books in the British ... oh, hell, Garber."

"Yes," Garber said. He was still smiling, a remote smile that made me uneasy. I looked away.

"So what happens next?"

The smile widened. "Jameson showed me his article. To be published next week. Quite a privilege, actually, considering who he is, and that when all this came up he thought my name was 'Farber.' It's quite a story. About Plato."

•'Plato?"

"Plato."

"The ancient Greek Plato?" "That's the one."

"How . . ."I almost had it, but it slipped my mind. A long time since college.

"Jameson gave me a copy." Garber opened his desk drawer, drew out a pile of paper, and pulled the third and fourth sheets. Sections were circled with thick, waxy red, and I knew that Garber must have marked it, not Jameson. Garber is probably the only company president in New York who keeps PreSchool Crayolas in his desk.

"Just read that," he said, still with the same casual, remote smile. "Go ahead, read it, skip the rest and start there."

Jameson was given to parenthetical clauses. His dense, twisty sentences snaked themselves at me from the page:

But all these esoteric theories, fascinating sport though their intellectual gymnastics may provide, reduce in the end to a theory so old that it is embarrassing to realize by how many centuries we may have been anticipated. Two books, inde-pendendy written, yet identical in character and incident and theme and, above all, in emotional impact, in the images evoked in that older brain that lies below the one usually concerned with words. Identical, and both brilliant, with the brilliance of a perfect object illuminated in firelight. And here it all comes together.

We have always assumed human experience to be too varied for meaningful, exact duplication. We have always supposed that how an artist "handled" a theme—as though love, death, and whatever were so many unbroken colts— was more important than the theme itself. We have always supposed that a talented writer need give only a "fresh reworking" to an archetypal experience, and the result was a new and separate work of art.

But what if we were wrong? What if the number of real, deep experiences open to man is actually small? Or, more accurately put, what if the number of resonances, of ways that seemingly varied experiences strike the human subconscious and set up answering echoes so that experience becomes meaningful, is small? And, furthermore, what if the multiplicity of presentations of these experiences, the endless boy-meets-then-loses-girl books and plays and poems from Romeo and Juliet to True Romances, were valued only because the isolated individual writer had no way to come closer to a complete rendering of what that complete archetypal ideal would feel like within the human brain?

It was Plato who wrote that man stares eternally at a cave wall, with his back to reality. What we see, what we call reality, is only shadows cast on that wall, fire-lit shadows from the actual reality behind us. The shadows dance and nod and flit, some much sharper than others, as some books and plays and poems are sharper, closer to the bone. And sometimes these authors' made-up lies about the same experience seem to cancel each other out—as shadows must if we view them from different angles.

Romanticism. Naturalism. Realism. Epic heroism. Escapism. All our literature has, until now, been cast from a flickering fire—the imperfect glow of one artist's mind, one artist's fragmented perceptions of those archetypal experiences that make up human reality within the brain. The resuits have been fitfuUy brilliant, fitfully dim. Even Shakespeare is conceded to have shadowy, murky patches, though the very gloom may cast the comforting shades of ambiguity around his harsher truths and thus render them the more acceptable. But if a way could be found to build that fire higher, to build it to a steady brilliant heat that casts ever more steady and brilliant shadows, eventually those shadows will merge and overlap until they stand as sharply etched as the original, a virtual copy of the reality, unmistakable and complete. What has done so, of course, is the technology of the composing-audience, that bringing together of many minds to cast light from all angles on an experience, until the fragmented shadows from each overlap and are again whole, and all the racial and archetypal responses are cast cleanly on that cave wall, in their one universal form.

How many such forms exist buried in the human mind? We don't yet know, but if the virtual congruence of Greta and Floor of Heaven is any indication, the number may be more sharply limited than we formerly thought. Or wished.

What this posits about the definitive pinnacles of art is . . .

" 'Fragmented shadows' is lousy," I said, too loudly. "What?" Garber said.

" 'Fragmented shadows.' On the fourth page. It's a lousy image. You can't fragment a shadow. It's a mixed metaphor. Or something."

"I'll tell him you said so."

I knelt on the floor next to his chair and put my arms around him. "We've got lots of time, though, Garber. It's not as though G-M Press will be obsolete tomorrow. Finding these archetypal works, or whatever, will take time. Years."

"Yes."

"Any anyway, now that I think about it, Jameson's talking about the masterpieces, the heights of experience. All this probably won't even apply to us at all! We'll just keep on as

we always have, turning out entertainment for children!" "Yes."

"We won't really be that affected at all. Kids will always need variety, even if it's 'fragmented.' They don't care. It's not as though G-M ever expected to produce a masterpiece, for chrissake."

Garber didn't answer.

"But maybe we just will, anyway!" I said, and heard my own desperate brightness, and tried not to wonder what Gar-ber's private dreams as a publisher had been. "And, in any case, there's lots of time!"

He looked at me steadily. The jolly elf was gone, the scatterbrained enthusiast was gone, the casual smiling fatalist was gone. He was the Garber who had come to see me in the sanitarium, the Garber who'd taken me to boarding school on the train, the Garber who'd stripped me of all my old destructive defenses, and so also stripped himself.

"I don't have lots of time, Mary."

I didn't say anything to that. There wasn't anything to say.

The shoulder of his jumpsuit felt rough against my cheek. I kept my arms around him, and we watched the pickets walking below in the rain. A bus went by, and three prohibitively expensive taxis, and pair of kids who probably should have been in school. They wore yellow rainsuits and walked through every puddle, splashing and stamping. From what I could see at this distance, they never looked at the pickets at all. But from this distance, I couldn't see much.

Garber stood up, shook his head vigorously from side to side, and grinned.

"So what's this about more deathless prose from the pen of IdaTidwell?"

I got to my feet. "You won't believe it, Garber; you just won't believe it. It's for this incredibly sappy proposal—"

I managed to remove the manuscripts of both Greta and Floor of Heaven from the desk without actually looking at sither of them. Then those of us who were not scaling the definitive pinnacles of art went back to work.

"Well, I hope you're satisfied," Susan said, before I had closed the apartment door. "I just hope you're satisfied. " "And it's nice to see you, too," I said wearily. "Mother—"

"Look, do you think I could at least get my coat off before you start in, Susan? At least?"

She folded her arms and waited, boulder silence under downy brows. Her shoulders were trembling. The sofa overflowed with crumpled paper, her recorder, cassettes, books, and tissues. I hung up my coat very slowly.

"All right, Susan. What is it?"

"Mr. Blake is back. He's back, and he saw my D that substitute gave me on my oral history project, and he said I could do it over to raise my grade. Only my grade won't raise, because I know it won't be any different this time; I still don't know enough stuff to do it right, and I'll just end up with two D's, and it'll junk my whole quarter's grade! I hope you're satisfied!"

She scowled horribly, and I saw the insane effort not to cry in front of me, the enemy. Had grades mattered so much to me, at ten? Had the handsome Mr. Blakes? No, of course not; both had been lost in bigger nightmares. But Susan was not me.

"You don't care. You just don't care," she said. "Lya's mother told her heaps. Cassettes and cassettes worth!"

Not me, and not in my version of pain. But she was in pain, however trivial it might look to me. What is artfor? Gar-ber had asked, and I had thought I'd known the answer: to transform and justify pain. If we can. But not all of us can. What if the alchemy is missing?

"Mr. Blake looked at me like he was so surprised, and so disappointed in me. And he asked me what happened because I never get D's, and I started to cry. ..."

What is art for? To order human experience, to reach toward some ultimate expression of what we are. And if that ultimate expression has already been reached?

". . .all the other kids looking at me bawling, and Mr. Blake just standing . . ."

So it's been reached. What then? Or, rather, what before—long before, when pain was the daily expectation, and language too crude for the transformation to beauty. The base of Jameson's pinnacle, before the long climb to the dizzying top. When shadows on cave walls was not a metaphor, but the real thing, flickering with hidden menace all night long. All the way back.

". . .so embarrassed I wanted to die, and you just treat me like a child anyway, and—"

All the way back.

"Susan, honey—no, I know you don't like to be called 'honey'—Susan, then—Susan, come here. Sit down. No, there on the sofa—sit next to me. Listen. I know you're not a child anymore, even if you ... I know it. You're old enough to ... I know. I'll help you with your history project. Sit down."

Susan glared at me, eyes mutinous through a sheen of tears, but she sat.

"Wait right here, Susan. I have to get something, something I want you to see, want you to read. I have to get—"

I remembered the key flushed down the toilet. What I would have to get was a crowbar. Pry open the desk drawer, or see if I could break the lock—but that part could wait, after all. The written manuscript could come later, had always come later. Susan would have to read it, yes, it would make it easier for her to understand if she read it, easier to see where I had changed things, reaching for . . . But later.

All the way back.

I drew a deep breath.

"Listen, Susan. I'm going to tell you something that happened to me, when I was your age. It's a part of our family.

The proliferation of technology brings with it many threats to the balance of nature, as ecologists and environmentalists have warned us for decades. Twenty-five years ago, they had to contend with the lunatic-fringe reputation of those people who warned darkly that unusually hot or rainy summers were caused by nuclear tests, but by now we have enough evidence to know that even such "minor" developments as the widespread use of aerosol sprays have effected great damage to Earth's atmosphere. What else may be happening even now to cause, for instance, serious changes in worldwide weather patterns?

It isn't necessary to postulate a Second Deluge that would flood the whole world. As Kim Stanley Robinson shows us in this evocative and moving story, the loss of a single city, famed for its beauty and history, would be catastrophe enough.

Kim Stanley Robinson lives in Southern California. An alumnus of the Clarion SF Writers' Conference, he had sold stories to such publications as Orbit and Clarion.

VENICE DROWNED

Kim Stanley Robinson

By the time Carlo Tafur struggled out of sleep, the baby was squalling, the teapot whistled, the smell of stove smoke filled the air. Wavelets slapped the walls of the floor below. It was just dawn. Reluctantly he untangled himself from the bedsheets and got up. He padded through the other room of his home, ignoring his wife and child, and walked out the door onto the roof.

Venice looked best at dawn, Carlo thought as he pissed into the canal. In the dim mauve light it was possible to imagine that the city was just as it always had been, that hordes of visitors would come flooding down the Grand Canal on this fine summer morning. . . . Of course, one had to ignore the patchwork constructions built on the roofs of the neighborhood to indulge the fancy. Around the church—San

Giacomo du Rialto—all the buildings had even their top floors awash, and so it had been necessary to break up the tile roofs, and erect shacks on the roofbeams made of materials fished up from below: wood, brick, lath, stone, metal, glass. Carlo's home was one of these shacks, made of a crazy combination of wood beams, stained glass from San Giacometta, and drainpipes beaten flat. He looked back at it and sighed. It was best to look off over the Rialto, where the red sun blazed over the bulbous domes of San Marco.

"You have to meet those Japanese today," Carlo's wife Luisa said from inside.

"I know." Visitors still came to Venice, that was certain.

"And don't go insulting them and rowing them without your pay," she went on, her voice sounding clearly out of the doorway, "like you did with those Hungarians. It really doesn't matter what they take from under the water, you know. That's the past. That old stuff isn't doing anyone any good under there, anyway." ■

"Shut up," he said wearily. "I know."

"I have to buy stovewood and vegetables and toilet paper and socks for the baby," she said. "The Japanese are the best customers you've got; you'd better treat them well."

Carlo reentered the shack and walked into the bedroom to dress. Between putting on one boot and the next he stopped to smoke a cigarette, the last one in the house. While smoking he stared at his pile of books on the floor, his library as Luisa sardonically called the collection; all books about Venice. They were tattered, dog-eared, mildewed, so warped by the damp that none of them would close properly, and each moldy page was as wavy as the Lagoon on a windy day. They were a miserable sight, and Carlo gave the closest stack a light kick with his cold boot as he returned to the other room.

"I'm off," he said, giving his baby and then Luisa a kiss. "I'll be back late; they want to go to Torcello."

"What could they want up there?"

He shrugged. "Maybe just to see it." He ducked out the door.

Below the roof was a small square where the boats of the neighborhood were moored. Carlo slipped off the tile onto the narrow floating dock he and the neighbors had built, and crossed to his boat, a wide-beamed sailboat with a canvas deck. He stepped in, unmoored it; and rowed out of the square onto the Grand Canal.

Once on the Grand Canal he tipped the oars out of the water and let the boat drift downstream. The big canal had always been the natural course of the channel through the mudflats of the Lagoon; for a while it had been tamed, but now it was a river again, its banks made of tile rooftops and stone palaces, with hundreds of tributaries flowing into it. Men were working on roof-houses in the early morning light; those who knew Carlo waved, hammers or rope in hand, and shouted hello. Carlo wiggled an oar perfunctorily before he was swept past. It was foolish to build so close to the Grand Canal, which now had the strength to knock the old structures down, and often did; but that was their business. In Venice they all were fools, if one thought about it.

Then he was in the Basin of San Marco, and he rowed through the Piazetta beside the Doge's Palace, which was still imposing at two stories high, to the Piazza. Traffic was heavy as usual; it was the only place in Venice that still had the crowds of old, and Carlo enjoyed it for that reason, though he shouted curses as loudly as anyone when gondolas streaked in front of him. He jockeyed his way to the Basilica window and rowed in.

Under the brilliant blue and gold of the domes it was noisy. Most of the water in the rooms had been covered with a floating dock; Carlo moored his boat to it, heaved his four scuba tanks on, and clambered up after them. Carrying two tanks in each hand he crossed the dock, on which the fish market was in full swing. Displayed for sale were flats of mullet, lagoon sharks, tunny, skates, flatfish, and little red fish packed in crates head up, looking appalled at their situation.

Clams were piled in trays, their shells gleaming in the shaft of sunlight from the east window; men and women pulled live crabs out of holes in the dock, risking fingers in the crab-jammed traps below; octopuses inked their buckets of water, sponges oozed foam; beyond them were trays of fish parts, steaks, joints, guts, glistening roe, beady-eyed heads; a slippery field of pink and white and yellow and red and blue.

In the middle of the fish market Ludovico Salerno, one of Carlo's best friends, had his stalls of scuba gear. Carlo's two Japanese customers were there. He greeted them and handed his tanks to Salerno, who began refilling them from his machine. They conversed in quick, slangy Italian while the tanks filled; Carlo paid him and led the Japanese back to his boat. They got in and stowed their backpacks under the canvas decking; Carlo joined them with the scuba gear.

"We are ready to voyage at Torcello?" one asked, and the other smiled and repeated the question. Their names were Hamada and Taku; they had made a few jokes concerning the latter name's similarity to Carlo's own, but Taku was the one with less Italian, so the sallies hadn't gone on for long. They had hired him four days before, at Salerno's stall.

"Yes," Carlo said. He rowed out of the Piazza and up back canals past Campo San Maria Formosa, which was nearly as crowded as the Piazza. Beyond that the canals were empty, and only an occasional roof-house marred the look of flooded tranquility.

"That part of city Venice here not many people live," Hamada observed. "Not houses on houses."

"That's true," Carlo replied. As he rowed past San Zanipolo and the hospital, he explained, "It's too close to the hospital here, where many diseases were contained. Sicknesses, you know."

"Ah, the hospital!" Hamada nodded, as did Taku. "We have swam hospital in our Venice voyage previous to that one here. Salvage many fine statues from lowest rooms."

"Stone lions," Taku added. "Many stone lions with wings in room below Twenty-forty waterline."

"Is that right," Carlo said. Stone lions, he thought, set up in the entry way of some expensive Japanese businessman's home around the vvorld. . . . He tried to divert his thoughts by watching the brilliandy healthy, masklike faces of his two passengers as they laughed over their reminiscences.

Then they were over the Fondamente Nuova, the northern limit of the city, and on the Lagoon. There was a small swell from the north. Carlo rowed out a way and then stepped forward to raise the boat's single sail. The wind was from the east, so they would make good time north to Torcello. Behind them Venice looked beautiful in the morning light, as if they were miles away, and a watery horizon blocked their full view of it.

The two Japanese had stopped talking and were looking over the side. They were over the cemetery of San Michele, Carlo realized. Below them lay the island that had been the city's chief cemetery for centuries; they sailed over a field of tombs, mausoleums, gravestones, obelisks that at low tide could be a navigational hazard. . . . Just enough of the bizarre white blocks could be seen to convince one that they were indeed the result of the architectural thinking of fishes. Carlo crossed himself quickly to impress his customers and sat back down at the tiller. He pulled the sail tight and they heeled over slightly, slapped into the waves.

In no more than twenty minutes they were east of Mu-rano, skirting its edge. Murano, like Venice an island city crossed with canals, had been a quaint little town before the flood. But it didn't have as many tall buildings as Venice, and it was said that an underwater river had undercut its islands; in any case, it was a wreck. The two Japanese chattered with excitement.

"Can we visit to that city here, Carlo?" asked Hamada.

"It's too dangerous," Carlo answered. "Buildings have fallen into the canals."

They nodded, smiling. "Are people live here?" Taku asked.

"A few, yes. They live in the highest buildings on the floors still above water, and work in Venice. That way they avoid having to build a roof-house in the city."

The faces of his two companions expressed incomprehension.

"They avoid the housing shortage in Venice," Carlo said. "There's a certain housing shortage in Venice, as you may have noticed." His listeners caught the joke this time and laughed uproariously.

"Could live on floors below if owning scuba such as that here," Hamada said, gesturing at Carlo's equipment.

"Yes," he replied. "Or we could grow gills." He waved his fingers at his neck and bugged his eyes out to indicate gills. The Japanese loved it.

Past Murano the Lagoon was clear for a few miles, a sunbeaten blue covered with choppy waves. The boat tipped up and down, the wind tugged at the sail cord in Carlo's hand. He began to enjoy himself. "Storm coming," he volunteered to the others and pointed at the black line over the horizon to the north. It was a common sight; short, violent storms swept over Brenner Pass from the Austrian Alps, dumping on the Po Valley and the Lagoon before dissipating in the Adriatic . . . once a week, or more, even in the summer. That was one reason the fish market was held under the domes of San Marco; everyone had gotten sick of trading in the rain.

Even the Japanese recognized the clouds. "Many rain fall soon here," Taku said.

Hamada grinned and said, "Taku and Tafur, weather prophets no doubt, make big company!"

They laughed. "Does he do this in Japan, too?" Carlo asked.

"Yes indeed, surely. In Japan rains every day—Taku says, it rains tomorrow for surely. Weather prophet!" After the laughter receded, Carlo said, "Hasn't all the

rain drowned some of your cities too?" "What's that here?"

"Don't you have some Venices in Japan?"

But they didn't want to talk about that. "I don't understand. . . . No, no Venice in Japan," Hamada said easily, but neither laughed as they had before. They sailed on. Venice was out of sight under the horizon, as was Murano. Soon they would reach Burano. Carlo guided the boat over the waves and listened to his companions converse in their improbable language, or mangle Italian in a way that alternately made him want to burst with hilarity or bite the gun-whale with frustration.

Gradually Burano bounced over the horizon, the campanile first, followed by the few buildings still above water. Murano still had inhabitants, a tiny market, even a midsummer festival; Burano was empty. Its campanile stood at a distinct angle, like the mast of a foundered ship. It had been an island town, before 2040; now it had "canals" between every rooftop. Carlo disliked the town intensely and gave it a wide berth. His companions discussed it quiedy in Japanese.

A mile beyond it was Torello, another island ghost town. The campanile could be seen from Burano, tall and white against the black clouds to the north. They approached in silence. Carlo took down the sail, set Taku in the bow to look for snags, and rowed cautiously to the edge of town. They moved between rooftops and walls that stuck up like reefs or like old foundations out of the earth. Many of the roof tiles and beams had been taken for use in construction back in Venice. This happened to Torcello before; during the Renaissance it had been a little rival of Venice, boasting a population of 20,000, but during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it had been entirely deserted. Builders from Venice had come looking in the ruins for good marble or a staircase of the right dimensions. . . . Briefly a tiny population had returned, to make lace and host those tourists who wanted to be melancholy; but the waters rose, and Torcello died for good. Carlo pushed off a wall with his oar, and a big section of it tilted over and sank. He tried not to notice.

He rowed them to the open patch of water that had been the Piazza. Around them stood a few intact rooftops, no taller than the mast of their boat; broken walls of stone or rounded brick; the shadowy suggestion of walls just under water. It was hard to tell what the street plan of the town would have been. On one side of the Piazza was the cathedral of Santa Maria Ascunta, however, still holding fast, still supporting the white campanile that stood square and solid, as if over a living community.

"That here is the church we desire to dive," Hamada said.

Carlo nodded. The amusement he had felt during the sail was entirely gone. He rowed around the Piazza looking for a flat spot where they could stand and put the scuba gear on. The church outbuildings—it had been an extensive structure—were all underwater. At one point the boat's keel scraped the ridge of a roof. They rowed down the length of the barnlike nave, looked in the high windows: floored with water. No surprise. One of the small windows in the side of the campanile had been widened with sledgehammers; di-recdy inside it was the stone staircase, and a few steps up, a stone floor. They hooked the boat to the wall and moved their gear up to the floor. In the dim midday light the stone of the interior was pocked with shadows; it had a rough-hewn look. The citizens of Torcello had built the campanile in a hurry, thinking that the world would end at the milennium, the year 1000. Carlo smiled to think how much longer they had had than that. They climbed the steps of the staircase, up to the sudden sunlight of the bell chamber, to look around; viewed Burano, Venice in the distance ... to the north, the shallows of the Lagoon, and the coast of Italy. Beyond that the black line of clouds was like a wall nearly submerged under the horizon, but it was rising; the storm would come.

They descended, put on the scuba gear, and flopped into the water beside the campanile. They were above the complex of church buildings, and it was dark; Carlo slowly led the two Japanese back into the Piazza and swam down. The ground was silted, and Carlo was careful not to step on it. His charges saw the great stone chair in the center of the Piazza (it had been called the Throne of Attila, Carlo remembered from one of his moldy books, and no one had known why), and waving to each other they swam to it. One of them made ludicrous attempts to stand on the bottom and walk around in his fins; he threw up clouds of silt. The other joined him. They each sat in the stone chair, columns of bubbles rising from them, and snapped pictures of each other with their underwater cameras. The silt would ruin the shots, Carlo thought. While they cavorted, he wondered sourly what they wanted in the church.

Eventually Hamada swam up to him and gestured at the church. Behind the mask his eyes were excited. Carlo pumped his fins up and down slowly and led them around to the big entrance at the front. The doors were gone. They swam into the church.

Inside it was dark, and all three of them unhooked their big flashlights and turned them on. Cones of murky water turned to crystal; the beams swept about. The interior of the church was undistinguished, the floor thick with mud. Carlo watched his two customers swim about and let his flashlight beam rove the walls. Some of the underwater windows were still intact, an odd sight. Occasionally the beam caught a column of bubbles, transmuting them to silver.

Quickly enough the Japanese went to the picture at the west end of the nave, a tile mosaic. Taku (Carlo guessed) rubbed the slime off the tiles, vastly improving their color. They had gone to the big one first, the one portraying the Crucifixion, the Resurrection of the Dead, and the Day of Judgment: a busy mural. Carlo swam over to have a better look. But no sooner had the Japanese wiped the wall clean than they were off to the other end of the church, where above the stalls of the apse was another mosaic. Carlo followed.

It didn't take long to rub this one clean; and when the water had cleared, the three of them floated there, their flashlight beams converged on the picture revealed.

It was the Teotoca Madonna, the God-bearer. She stood against a dull gold background, holding the Child in her arms, staring out at the world with a sad and knowing gaze. Carlo pumped his legs to get above the Japanese, holding his light steady on the Madonna's face. She looked as though she could see all of the future, up to this moment and beyond; all of her child's short life, all the terror and calamity after that. '. . . There were mosaic tears on her cheeks. At the sight of them Carlo could barely check tears of his own from joining the general wetness on his face. He felt that he had suddenly been transposed to a church on the deepest floor of the ocean; the pressure of his feelings threatened to implode him, he could scarcely hold them off. The water was freezing, he was shivering, sending up a thick, nearly continuous column of bubbles . . . and thé Madonna watched. With a kick he turned and swam away. Like startled fish his two companions followed him. Carlo led them out of the church into murky light, then up to the surface, to the boat and the window casement.

Fins off, Carlo sat on the staircase and dripped. Taku and Hamada scrambled through the window and joined him. They conversed for a moment in Japanese, clearly excited. Carlo stared at them blackly.

Hamada turned to him. "That here is the picture we desire," he said. "The Madonna with child."

"What?" Carlo cried.

Hamada raised his eyebrows. "We desire taking home that here picture, to Japan."

"But it's impossible! The picture is made of little tiles stuck to the wall—there's no way to get them off!"

"Italy government permits," Taku said, but Hamada silenced him with a gesture:

"Mosaic, yes. We use instruments we take here—water torch. Archaeology method, you understand. Cut blocks out of wall, bricks, number them—construct on new place in Japan. Above water." He flashed his pearly smile.

"You can't do that," Carlo stated, deeply affronted.

"I don't understand?" Hamada said. But he did: "Italian government permits us that."

"This isn't Italy," Carlo said savagely, and in his anger stood up. What good would a Madonna do in Japan, anyway? They weren't even Christian. "Italy is over there," he said, in his excitement mistakenly waving to the southeast, no doubt confusing his listeners even more. "This has never been Italy! This is Venice! The Republic!"

"I don't understand." He had that phrase down pat. "Italian government has giving permit us."

"Christ," Carlo said. After a disgusted pause: "Just how long will this take?"

"Time? We work that afternoon, tomorrow; place the bricks here, go hire Venice barge to carry bricks to Venice—"

"Stay here overnight? I'm not going to stay here overnight, God damn it!"

"We bring sleeping bag for you—"

"No!" Carlo was furious. "I'm not staying, you miserable heathen hyenas—" He pulled off his scuba gear. "I don't understand."

Carlo dried off, got dressed. "I'll let you keep your scuba tanks, and I'll be back for you tomorrow afternoon, late. Understand?"

"Yes," Hamada said, staring at him steadily, without expression. "Bring barge?"

"What?—yes, yes, I'll bring your barge, you miserable slime-eating catfish. Vultures ..." He went on for a while, getting the boat out of the window.

"Storm coming!" Taku said brightly, pointing to the north.

"To hell with you!" Carlo said, pushing off and beginning to row. "Understand?"

He rowed out of Torcello and back into the Lagoon. Indeed, a storm was coming; he would have to hurry. He put up the sail and pulled the canvas decking back until it covered everything but the seat he was sitting on. The wind was from the north now, strong but fitful. It pulled the sail taut; the boat bucked over the choppy waves, leaving behind a wake that was bright white against the black of the sky. The clouds were drawing over the sky like a curtain, covering half of it: half black, half colorless blue, and the line of the edge was solid. It resembled that first great storm of 2040, Carlo guessed, that had pulled over Venice like a black wool blanket and dumped water for forty days. And it had never been the same again, not anywhere in the world. . . .

Now he was beside the wreck of Burano. Against the black sky he could see only the drunken campanile, and suddenly he realized why he hated the sight of this abandoned town: it was a vision of the Venice to come, a cruel model of the future. If the water level rose even three meters, Venice would become nothing but a big Burano. Even if the water didn't rise, more people were leaving Venice every year. . . . One day it would be empty. Once again the sadness he had felt looking at the Teotaca filled him, a sadness become a bottomless despair. "God damn it," he said, staring at the crippled campanile; but that wasn't enough. He didn't know words that were enough. "God damn it."

Just beyond Burano the squall hit. It almost blew the sail out of his hand; he had to hold on with a fierce clench, tie it to the stern, tie the tiller in place, and scramble over the pitching canvas deck to lower the sail, cursing all the while. He brought the sail down to its last reefing, which left a handkerchief-sized patch exposed to the wind. Even so the boat yanked over the waves and the mast creaked as if it would tear loose. . . . The choppy waves had become whitecaps;

in the screaming wind their tops were tearing loose and flying through the air, white foam in the blackness. . . .

Best to head for Murano for refuge, Carlo thought. Then the rain started. It was colder than the Lagoon water and fell almost horizontally. The wind was still picking up; his handkerchief sail was going to pull the mast out. . . . "Jesus," he said. He got onto the decking again, slip up to the mast, took down the sail with cold and disobedient fingers. He crawled back to his hole in the deck, hanging on desperately as the boat yawed. It was almost broadside to the waves and hastily he grabbed the tiller and pulled it around, just in time to meet a large wave stern-on. He shuddered with relief. Each wave seemed bigger than the last; they picked up quickly on the Lagoon. Well, he thought, what now? Get out the oars? No, that wouldn't do; he had to keep stern-on to the waves, and besides, he couldn't row effectively in this chop. He had to go where the waves were going, he realized; and if they missed Murano and Venice, that meant the Adriatic.

As the waves lifted and dropped him, he grimly contemplated the thought. His mast alone acted like a sail in a wind of this force; and the wind seemed to be blowing from a bit to the west of north. The waves—the biggest he had ever seen on the Lagoon, perhaps the biggest ever on the Lagoon— pushed in about the same direction as the wind, naturally. Well, that meant he would miss Venice, which was directly south, maybe even a touch west of south. Damn, he thought. And all because he had been angered by those two Japanese and the Teotaca. What did he care what happened to a sunken mosaic from Torcello? He had helped foreigners find and cart off the one bronze horse of San Marco that had fallen . . . more than one of the stone lions of Venice, symbol of the city . . . the entire Bridge of Sighs, for Christ's sake! What had come over him? Why should he have cared about a forgotten mosaic?

Well, he had done it; and here he was. No altering it. Each wave lifted his boat stern first and slid under it until he could look down in the trough, if he cared to, and see his mast nearly horizontal, until he rose over the broken, foaming crest, each one of which seemed to want to break down his little hole in the decking and swamp him—for a second he was in midair, the tiller free and useless until he crashed into the next trough. Every time at the top he thought, this wave will catch us, and so even though he was wet and the wind and rain were cold, the repeated spurts of fear adrenalin and his thick wool coat kept him warm. A hundred waves or so served to convince him that the next one would probably slide under him as safely as the last, and he relaxed a bit. Nothing to do but wait it out, keep the boat exactly stern-on to the swell. . . and he would be all right. Sure, he thought, he would just ride these waves across the Adriatic to Trieste or Rijeka, one of those two tawdry towns that had replaced Venice as Queen of the Adriatic . . . the princesses of the Adriatic, so to speak, and two little sluts they were, too. . . . Or ride the storm out, turn around and sail back in, better yet. . . .

On the other hand, the Lido had become a sort of reef, in most places, and waves of this size would break over it, capsizing him for sure. And, to be realistic, the top of the Adriatic was wide; just one mistake on the top of these waves (and he couldn't go on forever) and he would be broached, capsized, and rolled down to join all the other Venetians who had ended up on the bottom of the Adriatic. And all because of that damn Madonna. Carlo sat crouched in the stern, adjusting the tiller for the particulars of each wave, ignoring all else in the howling, black, horizonless chaos of water and air around him, pleased in a grim way that he was sailing to his death with such perfect seamanship. But he kept the Lido out of mind.

And so he sailed on, losing track of time as one does when there is no spatial referent. Wave after wave after wave. A little water collected at the bottom of his boat, and his spirits sank; that was no way to go, to have the boat sink by degrees under him. . . .

Then the high-pitched, airy howl of the wind was joined by a low booming, a bass roar. He looked behind him in the direction he was being driven and saw a white line, stretching from left to right; his heart jumped, fear exploded through him. This was it. The Lido, now a barrier reef tripping the waves. They were smashing down on it; he could see white sheets bouncing skyward and blowing to nothing. He was terrifically frightened. It would have been so much easier to founder at sea.

But there—among the white breakers, off to the right—a gray finger pointing up at the black—

A campanile. Carlo was forced to look back at the wave he was under, to straighten the boat; but when he looked back it was still there. A campanile, standing there like a dead lighthouse. "Jesus," he said aloud. It looked as if the waves were pushing him a couple hundred meters to the north of it. As each wave lifted him he had a moment when the boat was sliding down the face of the wave as fast as it was moving under him; during these moments he shifted the tiller a bit and the boat turned and surfed across the face, to the south, until the wave rose up under him to the crest, and he had to straighten it out. He repeated the delicate operation time after time, sometimes nearly broaching the boat in his impatience. But that wouldn't do—just take as much from each wave as it will give you, he thought. And pray it will add up to enough.

The Lido got closer, and it looked as if he was directly upwind of the campanile. It was the one at the Lido channel entrance or perhaps the one at Pellestrina, farther south; he had no way of knowing and couldn't have cared less. He was just happy that his ancestors had seen fit to construct such solid bell towers. In between waves he reached under the decking and by touch found his boathook and the length of rope he carried. It was going to be a problem, actually, when he got to the campanile—it would not do to pass it helplessly by a few meters; on the other hand he couldn't smash into it and expect to survive either, not in these waves. In fact the more he considered it the more exact and difficult he realized the approach would have to be, and fearfully he stopped thinking about it and concentrated on the waves.

The last one was the biggest. As the boat slid down its face the face got steeper, until it seemed they would be swept on by this wave forever. The campanile loomed ahead, big and black. Around it waves pitched over and broke with sharp, deadly booms; from behind, Carlo could see the water sucked over the breaks, as if over short but infinitely broad waterfalls. The noise was tremendous. At the top of the wave it appeared he could jump in the campanile's top windows—he got out the boathook, shifted the tiller a touch, took three deep breaths. Amid the roaring, the wave swept him just past the stone tower, smacking against it and splashing him; he pulled the tiller over hard, the boat shot into the wake of the campanile—he stood and swung the boathook over a window casement above him. It caught, and he held on hard.

He was in the lee of the tower; broken water rose and dropped under the boat hissing, but without violence, and he held. One-handed he wrapped the end of his rope around the sailcord bolt in the stern, tied the other end to the boathook. The hook held pretty well; he took a risk and reached down to tie the rope firmly to the bolt. Then another risk: when the boiling soupy water of another broken wave raised the boat, he leaped off his seat, grabbed the stone windowsill, which was too thick to get his fingers over—for a moment he hung by his fingertips. With desperate strength he pulled himself up, reached in with ooe hand and got a grasp on the inside of the sill, and pulled himself in and over. The stone floor was about four feet below the window. Quickly he pulled the boathook in and put it on the floor, and took up the slack in the rope.

He looked out the window. His boat rose and fell, rose and fell. Well, it would sink or it wouldn't. Meanwhile, he was safe. Realizing this he breathed deeply, let out a shout. He remembered shooting past the side of the tower, face no more than two meters from it—getting drenched by the wave slapping the front of it—Christ, he had done it perfecdy! He couldn't do it again like that in a million tries. Triumphant laughs burst out of him, short and sharp: "Ha! Ha! Ha! Jesus Christ! Wow!"

"Whoooo's theeeerre?" called a high scratchy voice, floating down the staircase from the floor above. "Whoooooo's there? . . ."

Carlo froze. He stepped lighdy to the base of the stone staircase and peered up; through the hole to the next floor flickered a faint light. To put it better, it was less dark up there than anywhere else. More surprised than fearful (though he was afraid), Carlo opened his eyes as wide as he could—

"Whoooooo's theeeeeeerrrrrrrre? . . ."

Quickly he went to the boathook, untied the rope, felt around on the wet floor until he found a block of stone that would serve as anchor for his boat. He looked out the window: boat still there; on both sides white breakers crashed over the Lido. Taking up the boathook, Carlo stepped slowly up the stairs, feeling that after what he had been through he could slash any ghost in the ether to ribbons.

It was a candle lantern, flickering in the disturbed air—a room filled with junk—

"Eeek! Eeek!"

"Jesus!"

"Devil! Death, away!" A small black shape rushed at him, brandishing sharp metal points.

"Jesus!" Carlo repeated, holding the boathook out to defend himself. The figure stopped.

"Death comes for me at last," it said. It was an old woman, he saw, holding lace needles in each hand.

"Not at all," Carlo said, feeling his pulse slow back down.

"Swear to God, Grandmother, I'm just a sailor, blown here by the storm."

The woman pulled back the hood of her black cape, revealing braided white hair, and squinted at him.

"You've got the scythe," she said suspiciously. A few wrinkles left her face as she unfocused her gaze.

"A boathook only," Carlo said, holding it out for her inspection. She stepped back and raised the lace needles threateningly. "Just a boathook, I swear to God. To God and Mary and Jesus and all the saints, Grandmother. I'm just a sailor, blown here by the storm from Venice." Part of him felt like laughing.

"Aye?" she said. "Aye, well then, you've found shelter. I don't see so well anymore, you know. Come in, sit down, then." She turned around and led him into the room. "I was just doing some lace for penance, you see . . . though there's scarcely enough light." She lifted a tomboli with the lace pinned to it; Carlo noticed big gaps in the pattern, as in the webs of an injured spider. "A little more light," she said and, picking up a candle, held it to the lit one. When it was fired, she carried it around the chamber and lit three more candles in lanterns which stood on tables, boxes, a wardrobe. She motioned for him to sit in a heavy chair by her table, and he did so.

As she sat down across from him, he looked around the chamber. A bed piled high with blankets, boxes and tables covered with objects . . . the stone walls around, and another staircase leading up to the next floor of the campanile. There was a draft. "Take off your coat," the woman said. She arranged the little pillow on the arm of her chair and began to poke a needle in and out of it, pulling the thread slowly.

Carlo sat back and watched her. "Do you live here alone?"

"Always alone," she replied. "I don't want it otherwise." With the candle before her face, she resembled Carlo's mother or someone else he knew. It seemed very peaceful in the room after the storm. The old woman bent in her chair until her face was just above her tomboli; still Carlo couldn't help noticing that her needle hit far outside the apparent pattern of lace, striking here and there randomly. She might as well have been blind. At regular intervals Carlo shuddered with excitement and tension; it was hard to believe he was out of danger. More infrequendy they broke the silence with a short burst of conversation, then sat in the candlelight absorbed in their own thoughts, as if they were old friends.

"How do you get food?" Carlo asked, after one of these silences had stretched out. "Or candles?"

"I trap lobsters down below. And fishermen come by and trade food for lace. They get a good bargain, never fear. I've never given less, despite what he said—" Anguish twisted her face like the squinting had, and she stopped. She needled furiously, and Carlo looked away. Despite the draft he was warming up (he hadn't removed his coat, which was wool, after all), and he was beginning to feel drowsy. . . .

"He was my spirit's mate, do you comprehend me?" - Carlo jerked upright. The old woman was still looking at her tomboli.

"And—and he left me here, here in this desolation when the floods began, with words that I'll remember forever and ever and ever. Until death comes. ... I wish you had been death!" she cried. "I wish you had."

Carlo remembered her brandishing the needles. "What is this place?" he asked gendy.

"What?"

"Is this Pellestrina? San Lazzaro?"

"This is Venice," she said.

Carlo shivered convulsively, stood up.

"I'm the last of them," the woman said. "The waters rise, the heavens howl, love's pledges crack and lead to misery. I—I live to show what a person can bear and not die. I'll live till the deluge drowns the world as Venice is drowned, I'll live till all else living is dead; I'll live ..." Her voice trailed off; she looked up at Carlo curiously. "Who are you, really? Oh, I know, I know. A sailor."

"Are there floors above?" he asked, to change the subject.

She squinted at him. Finally she spoke. "Words are vain. I thought I'd never speak again, not even to my own heart, and here I am, doing it again. Yes, there's a floor above intact; but above that, ruins. Lightning blasted the bell chamber apart, while I lay in that very bed." She pointed at her bed, stood up. "Come on, I'll show you." Under her cape she was tiny.

She picked up the candle lantern beside her, and Carlo followed her up the stairs, stepping carefully in the shifting shadows.

On the floor above, the wind swirled, and through the stairway to the floor above that, he could distinguish black clouds. The woman put the lantern on the floor, started up the stairs. "Come up and see," she said.

Once through the hole they were in the wind, out under the sky. The rain had stopped. Great blocks of stone lay about the floor, and the walls broke off unevenly.

"I thought the whole campanile would fall," she shouted at him over the whistle of the wind. He nodded, and walked over to the west wall, which stood chest high. Looking over it he could see the waves approaching, rising up, smashing against the stone below, spraying back and up at him. He could feel the blows in his feet. Their force frightened him; it was hard to believe he had survived them and was now out of danger. He shook his head violently. To his right and left, the white lines of crumbled waves marked the Lido, a broad swath of them against the black. The old woman was speaking, he could see; he walked back to her side to listen.

"The waters yet rise," she shouted. "See? And the lightning . . . you can see the lightning breaking the Alps to dust. It's the end, child. Every island fled away, and the mountains were not found . . . the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea, and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living thing died in the sea.'' On and on she spoke, her voice mingling with the sound of the gale and the boom of the waves, just carrying over it all . . . until Carlo, cold and tired, filled with pity and a black anguish like the clouds rolling over them, put his arm around her thin shoulders and turned her around. They descended to the floor below, picked up the extinguished lantern, and descended to her chamber, which was still lit. It seemed warm, a refuge. He could hear her still speaking. He was shivering without pause.

"You must be cold," she said in a practical tone. She pulled a few blankets from her bed. "Here, take these." He sat down in the big heavy chair, put the blankets around his legs, put his head back. He was tired. The old woman sat in her chair and wound thread onto a spool. After a few minutes of silence she began talking again; and as Carlo dozed and shifted position and nodded off again, she talked and talked, of storms, and drownings, and the world's end, and lost love. . . .

In the morning when he woke up, she wasn't there. Her room stood revealed in the dim morning light: shabby, the furniture battered, the blankets worn, the knickknacks of Venetian glass ugly, as Venetian glass always was . . . but it was clean. Carlo got up and stretched his stiff muscles. He went up to the roof: she wasn't there. It was a sunny morning. Over the east wall he saw that his boat was still there, still floating. He grinned—the first one in a few days; he could feel that in his face.

The woman was not in the floors below, either; the lowest one served as her boathouse, he could see. In it were a pair of decrepit rowboats and some lobster pots. The biggest "boatslip" was empty; she was probably out checking pots. Or perhaps she hadn't wanted to talk with him in the light of day.

From the boathouse he could walk around to his craft, through water only knee deep. He sat in the stern, reliving the previous afternoon, and grinned again at being alive.

He took off the decking and bailed out the water on the keel with his bailing can, keeping an eye out for the old woman. Then he remembered the boathook and went back upstairs for it. When he returned there was still no sight of her. He shrugged; he'd come back and say good-bye another time. He rowed around the campanile and off the Lido, pulled up the sail and headed northwest, where he presumed Venice was.

The Lagoon was flat as a pond this morning, the sky cloudless, like the blue dome of a great basilica. It was amazing, but Carlo was not surprised. The weather was like that these days. Last night's storm, however, had been something else. That was the mother of all squalls; those were the biggest waves in the Lagoon ever, without a doubt. He began rehearsing his tale in his mind, for wife and friends.

Venice appeared over the horizon right off his bow, just where he thought it would be: first the great campanile, then San Marco and the other spires. The campanile . . . Thank God his ancestors had wanted to get up there so close to God—or so far off the water—the urge had saved his life. In the rain-washed air the sea approach to the city was more beautiful than ever, and it didn't even bother him as it usually did that no matter how close you got to it, it still seemed to be over the horizon. That was just the way it was, now. The Serenissima. He was happy to see it.

He was hungry, and still very tired. When he pulled into the Grand Canal and took down the sail, he found he could barely row. The rain was pouring off the land into the Lagoon, and the Grand Canal was running like a mountain river. It was tough going. At the fire station where the canal bent back, some of his friends working on a new roof-house waved at him, looking surprised to see him going upstream so early in the morning. "You're going the wrong way!" one shouted.

Carlo waved an oar weakiy before plopping it back in. "Don't I know it!" he replied.

Over the Rialto, back into the little courtyard of San Giacometta. Onto the sturdy dock he and his neighbors had built, staggering a bit—careful there, Carlo.

"Carlo!" his wife shrieked from above. "Carlo, Carlo, Carlo!" She flew down the ladder from the roof.

He stood on the dock. He was home.

"Carlo, Carlo, Carlo!" his wife cried as she ran onto the dock.

"Jesus," he pleaded, "shut up." And pulled her into a rough hug.

"Where have you been, I was so worried about you because of the storm, you said you'd be back yesterday, oh Carlo, I'm so glad to see you. ..." She tried to help him up the ladder. The baby was crying. Carlo sat down in the kitchen chair and looked around the little makeshift room with satisfaction. In between chewing down bites of a loaf of bread, he told Luisa of his adventure: the two Japanese and their vandalism, the wild ride across the Lagoon, the madwoman on the campanile. When he had finished the story and the loaf of bread, he began to fall asleep.

"But, Carlo, you have to go back and pick up those Japanese."

"To hell with them," he said slurrily. "Creepy little bastards. . . . They're tearing the Madonna apart, didn't I tell you? They'll take everything in Venice, every last painting and statue and carving and mosaic and all. ... I can't stand it."

"Oh, Carlo. . . . It's all right. They take those things all over the world and put them up and say this is from Venice, the greatest city in the world."

"They should be here."

"Here, here, come in and lie down for a few hours. I'll go see if Giuseppe will go to Torcello with you to bring back those bricks." She arranged him on their bed. "Let them have what's under the water, Carlo. Let them have it." He slept.

He sat up struggling, his arm shaken by his wife. "Wake up, it's late. You've got to go to Torcello to get those men. Besides, they've got your scuba gear." Carlo groaned.

"Maria says Giuseppe will go with you; he'll meet you with his boat on the Fondamente."-"Damn."

"Come on, Carlo, we need the money."

"All right, all right." The baby was squalling. He collapsed back on the bed. "I'll do it; don't pester me."

He got up and drank her soup. Stiffly he descended the ladder, ignoring Luisa's good-byes and warnings, and got back in his boat. He untied it, pushed off, let it float out of the courtyard to the wall of San Giacometta. He stared at the wall.

Once, he remembered, he had put on his scuba gear and swum down into the church. He had sat down in one of the stone pews in front of the altar, adjusting his weight belts and tank to do so, and had tried to pray through his mouthpiece and the facemask. The silver bubbles of his breath had floated up through the water toward heaven; whether his prayers had gone with them, he had no idea. After a while, feeling somewhat foolish—but not entirely—he had swum out the door. Over it he had noticed an inscription and stopped to read it, facemask centimeters from the stone. Around this Temple Let the Merchant's Law Be Just, His Weight True, and His Covenants Faithful. It was an admonition to the old usurers of the Rialto, but he could make it his, he thought; the true weight could refer to the diving belts, not to overload his clients and sink them to the bottom. . . .

The memory passed and he was on the surface again, with a job to do. He took in a deep breath and let it out, put the oars in the oarlocks and started to row.

Let them have what was under the water. What lived in Venice was still afloat.

Carter Scholz's first contribution to Universe ("The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs, " in #7) was nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo awards, and Scholz himself was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award as "best new writer.'' Last year he appeared in both Universe and New Dimensions, with "The Johann Sebastian Bach Memorial Barbecue and Nervous Breakdown" and "Amadeus"—both stories, like the first in Universe, being about famous composers (though much different in plot and tone).

This new story is totally unlike those earlier ones. It tells of an exploration team visiting a planet circling a faraway star . . . and of humanity 's first contact with an alien race, raising disturbing questions about our view of life and species evolution.

Scholz is another Clarion alumnus and has also distinguished himself in the fields of art and music. His other stories have appeared in Orbit, Altemities, Clarion, and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

IN RETICULUM

Carter Scholz

1. The Burial of the Dead

They came down out of the long night and set their rocket on cool evening sands. Wind blew the smoke away in shreds, and the metal creaked under strain of weight and temperature. Dust devils played around the landing legs.

Not far off stood a fragile sandstone building. How much had been carved by hand, and how much by wind, was impossible to judge. The wind had made or enlarged windows. Walls joined around tear-shaped gaps, where the thin wind abraded endlessly, and the building had ceded with grace.

They had come across an inconceivable amount of space for reasons equally inconceivable. Each had a network of personal reasons that had driven him to the irrevocable loneliness of space flight, and these they would not, or could not, discuss. Then there were the larger reasons of government and industry which had sent them here, and those they were not privy to. The immediate, the putative, reason was the building.

After a time they emerged.

There were five in all. Bright, the sixth, was in a sling in the ship. There the gravity varied in hour-long pulses from zero to one sixth that of Earth. Two days from planetfall, after their torturous awakening, Bright had been afflicted with the commonest of spacemen's psychoses, the Berkeleian conviction that nothing outside oneself is real. In Bright this had taken a nasty turn: he believed himself dead, and everything else illusions of torment. Therapy made it worse. Twice he had tried to swing the ship out of orbit, and finally he had broken into the reactor room. Then he had been restrained. Keitel had wanted to postpone the landing, fearing the effects of gravity on Bright: the irrefutable proof of an external force would, he feared, shatter Bright's defenses. Koster had said that was too damned bad. They had compromised and brought the ship down with negative gravity in Bright's cabin only.

They blinked under the strange sun. Here was a frozen twilight, for the planet was so old that the tides of its moon had slowed its rotation to twice a year. The moon itself was long gone. The sun was a bitter and brutal orange, a hands-breadth over the horizon.

Koster and the others approached the building in a rough arc. They were space-suited and they carried meter-high spindles of metal. These they arranged around the building, and then attached cables between them. The ship itself formed the sixth point on the perimeter enclosing the building. Keitel observed Jobes with the control box, waving the others away from the ring of spindles.

The field leaped, and at once a bubble of interference formed on the slope nearest Koster. Rainbows slid down the bubble, faster and faster, and within a second the field broke.

Roster's voice came on the intercom without preamble.

—Keitel, move your spindle back ten meters.

On the second try, the field held for five seconds, until a dimple formed on the slope near Wulf and pulled it apart in a vortex. Wulf s voice came on:

—There's a ferrous deposit here. Keitel, five meters back. Roeg, ten meters forward.

This time the field held, and after Jobes had made flux measurements, Keitel and Roeg returned to the ship to release the tinned atmosphere. During the hundred-year flight, the small hydroponics farm on board had processed their cold exhalations and stored two thousand tons of oxygen. Harvesters had plowed the uneaten crops into nutrient vats and waste sinks, whence came their monthly injections and inert gases stored against planet fall. Waste from engines and batteries was likewise stored, and the legumes were periodically stripped of nitrogen. These tanks now vented an atmosphere into the force bubble in a long polyphonic hiss; as much air again was held in reserve. The air smelled like Los Angeles on a summer day. Condensation set streams free on the invisible skin of the field.

The field was extravagant, but necessary. Men could not come out of a century's cold sleep and be asked to function in space suits. They needed the illusion of sky, freedom, unimpeded movement.

The building had six rooms. The largest was tiled in monochrome hexagons; at the moment of entrance Roeg had taken them, impossibly, for heptagons. The floor was half obscured by a fine red dust. Jobes scooped a sample into a small plastic sack.

The strange shapes thrown into twilit relief reminded one man of reefs he had seen in the Bahamas; another recalled mesas in Arizona; another thought of Mars; another was stirred as if the figures were from his own dreams; but none spoke. After the void, and the fierce screaming hour of descent, all voice for the moment had left them.

The danger of the field breaking was greatest in its first twelve hours, so they spent their first night in the ship. Jobes punched four figures into the lock, which changed its entrance combination every twenty-four hours by a cesium clock that kept Earth time, and the outer door swung back. There was a brief aseptic pulse of hard ultraviolet which blackened their visors momentarily. After the pressure cycle, the inner door opened; they desuited and went in.

Keitel checked on Bright, who slept. Three dreams had been recorded. From a sense of responsibility rather than interest, he played them back. The interpreter had boggled at the first dream, and offered twenty-two different visuals. Keitel reflected that if it was going to be that complicated he would rather not know about the dreams. By now Earth likely had a machine that not only recorded dreams accurately, but supplied interpretation and therapy, and in extreme cases administered euthanasia on the spot. Of course that was the kind of thinking that had got him into the space services in the first place.

Jobes relaxed in his cabin after depositing his sample in the bioanalytic computer. A few microbes, perhaps. But at this end of a planet's life-cycle there could be no surprises. He allowed himself half of his computer memory space to begin a painting on the four-foot viewscreen.

Roeg, in his cabin, worked on the fifth dimension of his chess program. Interesting problem with knight moves in the odd dimensions. He thought he had a handle on a general algorithm for n-dimensional chess. He did not play the game.

Wulf played solitaire with a deck of Bicycle playing cards, brought at great cost. The deck weighed 70.6 grams. By leaving the jokers on Earth he had saved enough energy to light New York for a day.

Of them all, only Koster worried about the purpose of the flight.

In the year 2040 there had commenced, from a point in the constellation Reticulum, a history of radio on Earth. A repeater station was amplifying and replaying every signal from Earth it could pick up. Radio astronomers at Jodrell Bank, Green Bank, Arecibo, RA-TAN-Gorki, and at the Very Large Array in New Mexico were receiving television broadcasts, navigational beacons,.and so on—all a hundred years old.

The frequencies of the original broadcasts had been raised by a factor of pi.

By the act of repetition this far point was indicating that it had seen Earth. There was no attempt to send data, hence no problems with language or coding—just the standing if ambiguous invitation: Here.

First ships had gone to nearer stars: Proxima, Sirius, Barnard's, Wolf 359, Ross 154. Some Jupiter-class planets were found, void of life. The transmissions from Reticulum continued. By 2230 the agency was prepared to send a ship there. Only the state of microelectronics caused the delay: cosmic radiation destroyed silicon substrates over long exposures, and a flight to Reticulum would take over a hundred years each way. In 2240 this problem was solved, and the ship Janus commissioned.

The lander, heart and brain of the ship, large as it was, was one-thousandth the mass of the whole. The shell and bulk were still in orbit, comprising two remaining thrusters, immense hemispherical reaction chambers ringed by fuel tanks, in which half a million tons of deuterium and tritium would be ignited on the trip back, hundreds of bombs per second for twenty years, until the coasting velocity of .7 c was reached. The last twenty years of the flight would be a like deceleration.

What worried Koster was that he did not know the purpose of the flight.

* * *

Prepared they were, within limits. But no simulation could prepare a man for the return from cold sleep. This explained the presence of Keitel and the oneiranalytic devices. Emerging from that long suspension, where the blood was near freezing and the pulse a daily tick, the brain rebelled. After the first few waking days it began to cut capers; routinely these were dreams in which the dreamer was forced back into cold sleep. Regarding significant content, these dreams were void: they were so explicit as to suggest nothing, expressing only a deep feral terror that surpassed any psychotic response to death or sex.

The first morning on the planet only Bright was undisturbed by dreams. Keitel had a particularly bad one, in which unseen hands pushed him face first into a black door. He was crushed and finally smeared into the material of the door, which he knew was dense as a dark star. There was nothing at all on the other side.

He prescribed, against his conscience, Thorazine for the whole crew.

Jobes's bioanalysis was negative, as expected, and after bathing the enclosed area in ultraviolet for the proscribed hour, he went out unsuited. The air under the field was warm, and fresher than yesterday. Twenty meters from the ship he dug a water hole, lined it with polystyrene, and filled it from the ship's water. Then he stripped and jumped in, yelling.

—Rubber men! he shouted up hoarsely. —Stretch out those relativistic kinks! Come out of that god damned meat locker!

Placid Wulf emerged, yawning. Then came Keitel, still worrying over Bright, and Roeg holding a steaming coffee, and lasdy sour Koster, who wandered toward the building. While the first three were still in the pool, Roeg reentered the ship and came out naked, strapped in a hopper. He soared in four-meter leaps on the negative-gravity pulses, stretched out as if to touch the sky field.

—How's this for rubber! he shouted.

—Shut it off! yelled Koster. He ran to intercept Roeg, who turned a high somersault and came down by the edge of the pool.

Koster reached them, scowling. —It's bad enough we have a basket case inside. Do you know how much power that uses?

—Ten thousand watts a jump, sir, said Roeg, unbuckling the device.

Wulf said ingenuously, —Sir, could we turn on the sunlamp for a spell?

Koster relented. —All right. Damn it, you could have broken a leg, Roeg. He walked into the ship.

Wulf directed Roeg a look of mock contrition. Keitel said, —That's all very nice, but now he'll make me take Bright out of the sling.

—Oh, all right, William. Christ's sake, said Roeg.

—How is Jack? Wulf asked.

—I don't know. I ought to check on him.

—Can't you sun a bit first? asked Jobes.

Keitel looked at the plate warming red on the lander's side against the black sky. —Better not. I, I have to . . . He left them without finishing.

—Narcosynthesis? said Bright as Keitel entered the cabin. —That's right, Jack.

—Don't think I need it today. The drugs, I mean. I've been dreaming anyway. Dreaming that I'm here.

Keitel looked at his hands for a minute. —All right. We'll see how it goes. Why did you enter the service, Jack?

—They'd been taking me a piece at a time, said Bright pleasantly. —Cancer of the testicles, of the lungs, of the larnyx, of the stomach. Never a metastasis, always piecemeal, and the doctor, an ethical son of a bitch, the last time I was in asked me seriously if I wanted to go on that way. That was for the lungs. He said, you won't have any feeling there.

The Teflon sac will work like a lung, but you won't feel it working. Well, I wondered. You knew I had an artificial larnyx, Will. It was a chore getting used to it; I literally had to learn to talk again. So I wondered about that lung. About being cut off that way. Damned son, I said to myself, let them. Let them take liver, lights, and endocrine glands. The seat of your soul, if you have one, is surely your brain, worse luck, and that they can't replace, not yet. So I told the doctor, just leave the brain. Take out the whole damned diaphragm and bumgut if you have to, but don't touch the brain. —Why did you join, Jack?

—By then of course they didn't call it cancer, no, cancer was licked. Instead we had this, a kind of lupus, used to be called noli-metangere, this whatever the hell it is, thoroughgoing viral internal leprosy. But I called it cancer. I knew well enough what they were up to. Any cancer they couldn't cure was lupus, you see.

—But tell me why.

—One time, I'll tell you, one time I hiked up Half Dome in California, and at that time they hadn't hewn the steps or sunk the railings in the last approach to the brow. You had to climb cables, and I went, nervous, I'll tell you, right after the snows had melted, and not knowing were the cables sound or not. Well, halfway up I looked over my shoulder. Two thousand feet to a pine-and-granite floor, and I wondered, why not? Hell yes, this is what you came for, why not, sick son? And I turned cold, not from fear of death, not exacdy. I feared I would die yet not be extinguished. If I could have known that all profit of experience, all laborious mental roads, would be effaced by death, I would have dropped, then and there. But I imagined a trap waiting for me, just this side of death. An anteroom. Not a spiritual state, but a state of prolonged physical torment, in which my damned brain just would not give up the ghost. I saw myself like a sack of rotten vegetables on the valley floor and the damned brain still trying to get up. You see, my instincts for selfpreservation were too damned good. I didn't trust my brain to know when it was licked. —Yes?

—Odd thing is, it makes you immune to other diseases. The body's very systematically burning itself and it wants no outside interference. Whole damned field crew in Venezuela caught malaria, but not me. Well, this is ideal for interstel-lars, you see; you don't have to worry about your man kicking off suddenly.

Keitel decided to chance a direct statement. —You wanted a cure, and couldn't afford cryogenics on Earth.

Said Bright, —And isn't that where the service gets half its men? But not me. The pain of consciousness, which death does not abate, is what I want a cure for.

—Are you dead, Jack?

—I'm a memory. See, that's how I know. I always had a dreadful memory, Will, but now everything is coming back—why, I've remembered a dream I had when I was five, two hundred years ago. In the dream I wake up before morning, the house is dark, and I try to put on lights. But they come on only faindy, and as I jiggle the switches it gets darker and darker. Then the shadows come alive. And I even remember that I told my brother this dream once, and he said seriously, I have a flashlight under my bed, and you can use that; it always works. And you know, it did. I never had that dream again. And I remember too when I was in school studying literature this line from a story: mirrors and copulation are abominable because they duplicate entities. Now what is that from? It was on an upper-right hand page.

—I don't know.

—You ought to know, Will. And ... I never had a woman.

—Jack, that's not true.

—Even before, I never had a woman who wasn't contra-cepted. Never a chance to, to. . . . Suicide missions. I feel them thrashing there in the dark.

Bright then covered his head with his arms. When he looked out he said, —What was that? —Was what?

—What I was saying. Did I fall asleep?

—No. I think we're done for today. Try to get some rest.

—Yes. Let the dead bury the dead.

2. A Game of Chess —Wulf? said Koster. —This is it?

—Oh yes. Concatenation of narrow-band signals at one megawatt. No mistaking it.

—So where the hell's the antenna? The power supply?

—Underground.

—Ridiculous. Why hide it?

—Sir, the best guess was that this is an automated station. I think that's right. This planet is long dead.

—And it's been transmitting for what, three hundred years? Without maintenance? Without power?

—Tides, possibly. Planet this size has a lot of kinetic energy even turning slow as it does.

The dwarf sun was now threatening the horizon. They stood at the threshold of the building.

—We go in singly. Each take a room. Keep your recorders running. Twenty minutes if you don't find anything.

They went in.

Violet shimmer in the air. Keitel turned. A purple sphere circled him and colored through the spectrum to red, then vanished. He ceased to turn. Then in front of him a diffuse orange glow condensed into a sphere large as himself and turned milky. The milk pulled itself into galactic spirals, which commenced to swirl so rapidly they disappeared. Then the sphere was blue, brown, and green. Keitel circled it and saw it was a globe with one land mass. A faint blue halo extended nearly an inch from its surface. Broad estuaries slowly cracked the continent. He ran his hand over a brown area and felt a roughness like unfinished wood. The blue area was wet; his finger penetrated it to a depth of a millimeter and then encountered the same roughness.

Now there were four distinct continents on the globe, or perhaps five. In the slanting light, microscopic mountains cast shadows. On the night side of the globe he fancied brief red pinpricks. The continents pulled apart, making six, two of them bound by a slender isthmus, another two roughly abutted. Cold white pulsed regularly down from the pole. For hours he was rapt as a child with a kaleidoscope. Occasionally he sat on the floor with his eyes shut for a few minutes and returned to find the continents inches farther apart. When the configuration grew familiar, he commenced to scan the globe closely. He found, in a favorable light, a line no thicker than a blond hair snaking up the east of Asia. On the night side he hunted for faint yellow glows.

It seemed to him the white wisps of galaxies were becoming more distinct, and the continents now moved imperceptibly, as if the time scale of the model was slowing.

His hand was resting on Japan when he felt a stab of pain. On his palm were two charred dots, equivalent to burns from a powerful laser pulsed for a nanosecond. He backed away. Almost at once there was a constellation of white flashes across Asia and America. He covered his eyes with his burned hand.

When he looked up he saw a fading streak like a vapor trail, cleary diagrammatic and not part of the model; it circled Earth twice and extended tangentially through a wall of the room. He peered closer, his eyes weak from much seeing, but now granted it seemed a second precision from fatigue, and saw glinting motes like dust moving in blurry circles two inches above the globe. After many minutes more he saw a considerable silver speck, the size of a comma, hanging in synchronous orbit over America. As he watched, it vanished, leaving the same diagrammatic vapor trail he had seen before. With this the model came to rest. The milk coalesced into clouds and stood still. The orbiting motes stopped. Kei-tel knew without doubt that he had just witnessed the launch of Daedelus 7, the first mile-long, manned interstellar craft to leave Earth in 2082.

Whine overhead. Jobes hunched like a dog. The tone descended in pitch, until the entire room throbbed like an organ loft. Jobes clapped his hands to his ears, and the pitch went lower still, loosening his sphincters. When he came to himself he was kneeling in a pool of urine. His nose bled. A drop of blood struck the tile and vanished into it. Then, in a red glow over the tile, Joves saw a sudden shifting of images, resolving into a gelatinous sphere enclosing a smaller sphere of deeper hue. He studied this, and at last said: —A red corpuscle.

The image blurred and twisted itself. Jobes took a breath. —Deoxyribonucleic acid.

The image changed again. Jobes confronted himself, naked, six inches tall. —Oh my God.

The image waited. Jobes said: —Homo sapiens.

There was a pause. Then the image flickered rapidly. Barely able to keep up, Jobes said: —Homo neanderthalen-sis, Homo erectus, pithecanthropus, australopithecus, rama-pithecus, proconsul, p, propliopithecus, amphipithecus . . . Christ! He left off. Another minute passed in silence. At last the image rested. Said Jobes: —Chaos chaos, I believe.

In a moment the image reversed itself and, like a maturing tree, created branches, first dozens, then hundreds and thousands, filling the tiles, turning the room into a menagerie. At his feet Jobes saw his own image emerge unchanged.

—Do that again, he said.

The room complied, and this time he watched some of the beasts evolve. Each had a characteristic movement, which generally repeated a number of times and terminated in a green splash of dissolution. He observed the great lizards, and the amphibians, and was startled again when the tree shrew scampered to its feet and grew, in thirty seconds, to the image of himself. But this time the room went on, and he saw, almost before it happened, the abrupt disappearance of genus homo. Cetaceans frolicked a moment, then the room was filled with a polyphonic glissade of membranous wings; his hands flailed through the holographic swarm. Then a barrage of green flashes left the room blank.

He turned, and saw his body again, life size. A speedy and deft dissection followed. The major systems were left standing in single file, unsupported. Another image detailed the articulation of the hand. Another detailed the brain, shrinking and expanding parts in orderly fashion. The gray dome was shot through with rivers of phosphorescence. It dizzied him to watch, and so he left.

In Roeg's room a resdess hum. It had thickness, and a constandy shifting overtone structure. —What is this? murmured Roeg.

The timbre of the sound slid slighdy, as if rocks had been moved in a fast-running brook.

Roeg repeated: —I said, what is this?

The timbre of the stream shifted again and began to stutter. Suddenly Roeg recognized the sound: it was a set of vowels, changing rapidly and at random.

—You're listening to me. Trying to learn to speak:

Again the babel of vowels changed. There began scattered stops and plosives, and Roeg could now distinguish discrete phonemes.

—How far can this go? Is it possible you can extract meaning? First you'd want a hierarchy of rules, what sounds can and can't go together, then some assumptions about grammar, and finally a vocabulary of words that can't be defined from context.

The stream broadened, slowed, and the sounds became more prolonged.

—Personally I don't believe it. You may be a deft mimic, but. . . .

The sound abrupdy stopped. In the silence Roeg stopped as well. Then he heard: —What is mimic?

—Well I'll be damned, said Wulf.

A small table, loaded to groaning with platters, carafes, bowls, in the center of the room. He approached the buffet.

—Koster would have a fit if I ate any of this.

He lifted covers, bathing his face in steam.

—Damned if that's not Mongolian beef. And here? Rijs-taffel, carré d'agneau, artichoke and aioli, zabaglione, saumon béarnaise, calamari, and a Caesar salad. And I am very much mistaken if this is not a Château Margaux. Wulf tipped a decanter and nibbled a crouton.

—Well, it must be a hallucination, and I surely can't die from it.

He arranged the dishes in his mind: the lighter first, the fishes, then the sauced and sautéed meats, finally the hot Indonesian and Szechwan, with breaks to clear the palate with salad and wines, and last the sweets and fruits.

—Fall to, old man.

He spent a good three hours at it, after which the table folded into itself in midair and vanished. He flipped his empty port glass at the spot, and it vanished too.

—Four-star, gentlemen. Service exemplary. I thought I detected an excessive enthusiasm for cilantro in the moussaka, but perhaps not. No bill? Well, twenty percent of nothing is nothing, I fear. Many thanks.

When Koster entered his room the temperature dropped forty degrees. He extended a hand back through the entrance. Outside the air was normal. As he stood there the temperature rapidly ascended, and he yanked his hand back inside. Once he broke a sweat the temperature plummeted. He hunched over for warmth, and after twenty seconds was roasted once more. The next time it grew cold, he passed out.

He awoke in fetal posture with two memories of awakening superimposed: when, as a boy, he had fallen from a rooftop and, coming to, found everything strange and new; and when, as a trainee, he had been taken from a sense-deprivation tank after eight hours. He imagined the sterile vaseline scent of the lab. He began to open his eyes, then* clamped them shut again: he smelled wisteria. After a moment it was gone, and a heavy hydrogen sulfide funk was in the room. He coughed, and the odor was replaced by a faint perfume. Tears of longing sprang to his eyes, but the scent was gone before he could recognize it. Then, rapidly: cut grass, gasoline, rain on hot tar, rotting mulch, cold stone, distilled alcohol, deep jungle, grape must, sharp nullity of Freon, menstrual blood, sawdust, old books, musk, chlorine, the heavy sweet of yeast, and each of these carried its freight of memory, till he could not bear it, and cried out: —Stop! Stop it! and all sank in windless air. Like a man half-drowned he staggered up, coughing long strings of mucus from his nose. He wept and went from there, not seeing the others in their rooms.

That night the computer prescribed a game of dollar-ante poker. Keitel lost a year's wages, nearly eight hundred fifty dollars.

3. The Fire Sermon

Keitel was outside when the sky turned red. There was a sound like a deep insensible bell, and his ears popped. Above him the air boiled. Rose rivers of flux wiped out the stars and bitter brick sun. Under this inverted bowl of lava he ran to the ship. He had to try three combinations before the airlock opened. The pressure outside was so lowered that the warm push from within almost knocked him backward. He went in and swallowed furiously as the lock shut and filled.

In the common room Bright was lazing in a chair. Koster stood by, dull with fury. Roeg and Jobes were sipping coffee. Wulf stared into space.

—This bastard depolarized the field.

—I was outside, said Keitel.

—Four times. Four times he's tried to kill us.

—Koster, he doesn't know. He thinks he's dead. He thinks we're all dead.

—If he does this once more, he won't be wrong. Lock him up, Keitel! Kostel worked controls to let the last of the ship's air into the restored field.

Outside there was a faint thunder.

—Now what the hell?

A monitor showed dust from the building. A weakened wall had collapsed under the renewed air pressure.

—What is life? asked Bright. —We would never have known of them or they of us but for a certain progression of materials. Transfer of information. For them the earth was barren before radio.

—And for us? said Keitel. —Five million years of slime and blood before we had shelter and food when we needed it. That's not life?

—Preparation. No life till after death. That's what I learned on the way out. It almost came to me on the Sirius flight, coming out of the sleep, but they kept us doped and I lost the meaning of it. You see, we are material. Life is techne. We stripped the planet, poisoned it, and only then did our cosmic life begin, when we had depleted all our resources, transformed them, and pushed outward. Radio was a birth cry. We are living now on the outer margin of depletion. That's why we're out here, seeking.

—Seeking what?

—A way of living, Will, of living past depletion. We've depleted physical, discursive, and spiritual resources. Life . . . you reach a physical age of about twenty-five, and you begin to break down, bit by bit. A glide pattern. Probably most races, by the time they achieve space flight, are too depleted to find a new perspective. But we're lucky, Will. We found one close by. We may have a chance. But we can't do it in the usual ways. We can't expect to bring anything back from here.

Though Bright could not have known it, this was quite true. All recorders had come out of the building blank. The crew met at the Andrew's-cross table in the common room, Koster at the head and the other four in the crotches. Keitel recalled that the last ship he had served on had a table formed like a stellated hexagon.

Roeg read from notes he had taken shorthand.

—Then at last God called the human embryo to the throne, and it said, "Please, God, I think you have made me in the best form possible, and it would be rude to change. If I must choose, I will stay as I am, a defenseless embryo, doing my best to make myself a few poor tools from whatever you put before me." "Well done," said God, smiling. "Here, all you embryos with your bills, gills, wings, and whatnot, come look upon genus homo. He is the only one to have guessed Our secret. He will look like an embryo till he dies, but the rest of you will be embryos before him. Eternally undeveloped, he will remain ever potential, and able to see some of Our own joys and sorrows. We are partly sorry for you, homo, but partly hopeful. Go and do your best to survive." Asked homo timidly, "And if I succeed?" God ceased to smile.

Roeg said: —This is like a story I read once, but the point is that the building made it up. In less than an hour it advanced from random sounds to esthetic discourse. This violates every tenet of information theory I've ever heard.

—Did you bother to ask it what it was?

—I don't think it understood me. I asked who its makers were, where they lived, I asked what its purpose was, and how long it's been here. I asked if it was a form of life. It seemed happy to affirm any possibility I advanced.

Koster turned to Keitel. —Did you get anything?

—Blank tape. It showed me the history of Earth up to our departure. I saw the globe, and touched it. But no image recorded. Unconsciously, Keitel rubbed two fingers against his burned palm.

Said Wulf: —I think it was taking measurements. It was pushing the outer limits of our senses, each of us.

—And we have nothing for it. Just Roeg's fairy tale. What are we supposed to do, tear the damned thing apart to get to its guts? We were scheduled to spend two weeks here. Bright has cut that in half. Gone two hundred years, and we come home empty-handed. They'll like that.

—I was thinking, said Keitel. —Since nothing records, it must be reaching our brains direcdy. We could use an oneiranalysis rig, hook it to someone to get a record.

—Who? asked Koster. —It almost cooked me. I don't want to risk anyone.

Jobes said, —Bright.

Keitel looked at him, stricken. Koster said, —Hell, yes. Bright.

Keitel said, —Look here, the man's unbalanced. His EEG shows theta spindles the size of. . . . No, I won't have it.

—That makes him ideal, doesn't it? REM-like state, half asleep, we'll get a good reading.

—No!

—Keitel, you just keep your damned mouth shut. You're a psychometrist. You have the lowest rating on this vessel. —I'll certify you, Koster.

—You'll do no such thing. Koster swung around the lazy Susan holding the computer console and punched a request. He then swung the unit to face Keitel.

The silver screen was dark with characters. Koster's rating was 5.2, indicating optional retirement. Keitel's was 0.8, indicating mandatory retirement. Next to Koster's name were three dark stars, indicating that Keitel would be decommissioned on the moment he certified the captain.

Bright's rating was classified.

Keitel thought a moment and swung the unit to Wulf. —Punch in JANUS and the Earth date, said Koster. Wulf did so and swung the unit the long way around, so that Keitel could read it before it stopped in front of Koster. Bright's rating was 9.9.

Koster swore, and Keitel said, —I take it we have to ask Jack's permission.

Bright consented. Eagerly.

Around the cross table they listened to the tides of Bright's brain. It was a placid sound, like waves breaking stricdy along the tones of a harmonic series.

After a while Bright's voice came.

—The history of humanity is a series of transformations. Your race is bilaterally symmetric, but imperfecdy so. Consider the notion of past and future. Consider symmetry. Nothing in your physics points the direction of time, so you had to invent a thermodynamics to give time the meaning you wished it to bear. And then you invented a thermodynamics of information.

—What are we listening to? asked Wulf.

—Bright's mind. The building is speaking. His vocal cords move sympathetically, so we hear his voice.

—All things suffer entropy: organisms, races, machines, messages. A linear sense of time, that is, a sense of entropy, is necessary to develop intelligence, but it is not sufficient to maintain it. This is the next indicated transformation. You must transform entropy. You yourselves are its refutation. You strive for symmetry while your bodies abhor the idea: a crystal of levophenylalariine would cause you to sicken and die, while its right-handed equivalent would not.

Then Bright's own voice spoke, and the difference was that between a telephone and a live voice. —What is life?

—If there is a difference between life and death it cannot be found in your chemistry. Your Wohler synthesized urea five hundred years ago. You can create bacteria at will and destroy them. Yet you cannot see the reason. Life is due to an event of singular and improbable character, occurring once by accident and thus starting an avalanche by autocatalytic multiplication.

—How singular? asked Bright. —Are we alone?

—Define alone.

There was a long, liquid silence, and nothing from Bright's mind.

—What is this? demanded Koster. —I don't want a god damned philosophical discussion on these tapes. Why doesn't he ask it something useful?

—You insisted on putting a sick man in there, said Keitei. —Now shut up and listen.

—You are alone, said the building. —This is what makes you you. You are self. You are dirt. All cognate with the word human.

—Where in Christ's name did it get all this?

—Three hundred years of listening to radio, said Roeg drily.

—Why are you afraid of mirrors? asked the building. —But you know that, said Bright.

—Duplication. Self-absorption. Ruinous self-reflection. Infinite regress. Loss of origin. —Yes, said Bright.

—But that is the symmetry you crave.

—Yes. Symmetry of life and death, past and future. But how achieve it?

All at once there was a pulsing in the room. Complex patterns of tone skirled in the air. Keitei was on his feet at the oneiranalyzer. Two discrete patterns suddenly meshed, and a single chord of tones smote them, rapidly repeated.

—My God, said Keitel. —It's done something to him. His two hemispheres are in unison. His right and left brain are doing the same.

The heavy pulse in major key was still proceeding when Bright entered the ship with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance.

Keitel was awakened by a distant clangor. The sharp scent of fuel was in his nostrils.

They had stopped Bright before much fuel had been dumped. The cocks shut, Bright restrained, Koster furious astride the computer as Keitel entered the common room, all successfully suppressed a dream he had had of universal destruction. Entering, his mind put away for future reference the image of a burning house, a large house in which everyone he had e'ver known (and he was two hundred and fifty years old) was quartered.

—One thousand kilos overweight, said Koster, with some satisfaction. —We haven't enough fuel left to get off the ground.

—Keitel, said Roeg, give us some drugs. —Get him out of here, said Koster, and Jobes led Bright away.

Practiced Wulf was calculating. —What can we leave behind?

—Not much. Leftover air. Personal memory boards. Spindles. Some batteries. Jumpers. Not bloody much. Cutting everything to the bone, we're still sixty kilos over.

Wulf sadly drew his playing cards from a pocket. Everyone smiled sourly at that.

—Can we bring the big ship to a closer rendezvous?

—Not unless you want to risk crashing it.

There was a silence. Koster began to nod, looking at the others.

—What does Bright weigh? Keitel sat down.

Roeg punched the console and said, —Sixty-five kilos. —That's it, then. Weight for thrust.

After much arguing, Keitel went to tell Bright. He was in the sling, though the antigravity was off. The cabin was dark.

—Jack, why?

—You know, I used to think that there were beings in mirrors. I stared and stared when I was little, and a couple of times I thought I saw something move, very far in.

Keitel foolishly pushed the stud on his recorder, then realized that no therapy could help Bright now. Nonetheless he let the machine run.

—Why are you so interested in mirrors?

—That's all this place is.

—We came this far to find ourselves, is that it?

—In a way. Or else we're mirrors. Have you thought that what we see and hear in there is not what the building intends? That our minds read the information according to their own biased patterns?

Bright's language became more fevered; he rushed fragments with groping pauses between.

—Consider Parsifal, who passed by the Grail the first time he saw it and thereby did greatly sin. This, this is our Grail: like the kalpa vrishka of the Jains, wish-fulfilling trees which gave sweet fruit, leaves that sang at night, and gave forth light. But the Grail is invisible to those not pure.

He paused, and continued almost sanely: —On Earth they told me I was the most important man on this ship. Because of my instinct for self-preservation. I spent forty hours in the sense-deprivation tank, Will, and they took me out only because they couldn't believe it; they thought I was in trauma. But I could have stayed there forever. It's where I first learned the meaning of depletion. And farther in space.

Though they meant to sacrifice me, I loved them for it. They were teaching me. And now I must return this gift, by teaching them. All systems on Earth, from the economic to the biologic, have been corrupted, by death, by fear of death. They cannot survive that way. This mission is a last hope, Will, to find a race that has survived that fear of death and transcended entropy. But we must stay here for the learning. We can't return to Earth with our samples and tapes, where the agency will twist us and see only what they want to see, use knowledge for profit.

Keitel could not bear the strain any longer. He burst out: —Jack we're leaving you here.

—What?

—You drained too much fuel. We're overweight. We have to leave you behind. It's not my decision.

Bright sat silent for a minute, then said: —You have brought me pain as well as joy, yet more honor than I have ever received from any before.

4. Death by Water

Working alone in the hour before lift-off, Keitel placed spindles close around the building, powering them with a battery. He drained the last of the ship's air into the small field. It would not last long, but neither would the battery. He brought Bright there.

—You'll drown me, Will?

—Jack.

—Pearls for my eyes. An end to profit and loss. —Jack!

—Will, it's so simple, and you can't see it. We were sent to bring back. And here is something we can't bring back, can't balance their books back home. We need to stay, Will, we really do.

—I don't want to do this thing. Oh Christ.

—It's not enough to leave me. We all have to stay. Will, haven't you learned? There is no return. You leave your world, and in the course of your travels it changes. You return only to a changed world. Christ, the horror of it. We're farther out than any have been. Drowned and gone. Those who sent us long dead. They think of us as dead, Will. We're lost. We should stay here, lost.

—Jack, we can't stay. We haven't enough air or food or water.

—Don't need. We're dead already. We're information. Koster entered. —Let's go. —I had hoped, said Bright.

—I know what you hoped, you bastard. You hoped to strand us all here.

Bright pressed palms together before his mouth. —Give, sympathize, control. We have given ourselves to the sky. Now we must sympathize, and later we may control. Why are you afraid? We can learn all this place has to offer. When the time came our message would get through.

—Two minutes, Keitel, or we'll leave you too.

—What message, Jack?

—One who has been made mad by the sight of a demon will be healed upon glancing in the mirror. Earth's demon is space. Death. The long cold sleep. But you all look away.

—We think we'll drown there, said Keitel, trying to understand. —Mirrors lead to, to loss of origin. . . .

—Oh, Will, said Bright, sorrowing.

—I have to go.

—When you get back, don't hate me.

—Hate you?

—For what I've done.

Keitel felt tears starting. —Jack, you've done nothing.

—What we've done. He spread his arms. —You can't carry this fear of death out here. You just can't. And you're all so afraid.

—What, Jack? What have you done?

Koster said, —That's it. Dope him.

Keitel leaned forward with the hypo. He lifted Bright's arm, but on impulse bent instead and applied the snout to Bright's breast. Bright slumped.

5. What the Thunder Said

On waking he left the building, hoping to see the fusion drive of the main ship come on. There was a bright star in the sky opposite the set sun, roughly where the ship should be once under way, but he could not be sure. So he went back in. He thought of the custom of covering mirrors in a room containing a corpse. This was to prevent it looking out a comrade from among those present. But that custom would not work here.

In the main room he said a few words. The computer beneath the building reversed fields, switching from analysis to synthesis. It commenced to make projections. It told Bright how long his air would last. Then, at his request, it created Earth models, and it told Bright in great detail the future of Earth and of genus homo. There was not very much to tell.

Ten years later the transmissions from Earth ceased. Bright was long dead. The relay station spent a short time trying to regain the signals, then it marked its hypothesis verified and began scanning the sky for another radio source.

A hundred years later the decelerating Janus, still outside the orbit of Pluto, awoke its crew ahead of schedule. There was a malfunction. It could not find the beacon needed to navigate to Earth.

They found Earth with the optical telescope and navigated back by eye. But by the time they had seen that the moon was gone, and that the seas were red, and the continents ashen, and the sky utterly without clouds, there had been much violence on the ship, and there was no one left to land it.

Here's a fascinating story about a secret, illegal experiment in DNA manipulation for the purpose of creating Homo superior—immediately, transforming a woman and a man of today into super humans, many stages of evolution beyond you or me. But who can say what directions human evolution might take? Ian Watson, one of the premier writers of "idea" science fiction, suggests some answers. . . .

Watson, who lives in England, has written such acclaimed novels as The Embedding and The Martian Inca; a collection of his short stories, The Very Slow Time Machine, was published in 1979. His most recent novel, written in collaboration with Michael Bishop, is Under Heaven's Bridge.

JEAN SANDWICH, THE SPONSOR, AND I

Ian Watson

Jean Sandwich was not her real name. Her real name was Jean Sandra Norwich, but she had slammed two of the names together in bitter humor at her situation.

She did not alter the spelling of her first name to make her point even plainer. As "Gene" she might have been sexually confusing, and she was not in the least confused about her sex, nor about the fact that sex (in the broadest sense) had done her in—had hogtied her, condemned her to a ludicrous fate.

However, it was not annoyance at sexual role-typing which inspired her sarcastic change of name. It was something much more basic. As one scientist had put it, "A human being is just a device used by a gene, to manufacture another gene." Like a sort of comic book antihero, whirling around and stripping off her mundane disguise to reveal her secret nature, Jean Sandra Norwich became: a gene sandwich, the slice of meat imprisoned between the genes of her parents and the genes of her offspring.

She went where she wanted, she spoke her mind, she showed all the signs of free will and of leading her own uniquely precious, autonomous existence—yet she knew it was all an utter illusion. She was sandwiched. For the genes had expressed themselves in exactly the same way in Jean's daughter as they had in her mother. Jean had believed fiercely that she was an improvement on her mother—until her own daughter was born. She was sure she had pulled herself up by her own bootstraps—till her own stupid mother was repeated, out of Jean's womb.

The genes couldn't have cared less for Jean's creativity and sensitivity, for the things of beauty she had wrought in oils and fabric and clay, or for the creature of beauty and wit she had made of herself. Jean dreamed that a daughter of hers would outdazzle her as much as she outdazzled her own mother. "Irrelevant machine," said the genes; and out of her squirmed another creature so lacking in sensitivity that she would be able to run through life, as Jean's mother had, like a chicken with its head chopped off.

Perhaps the genes, smelling the competition of an overcrowded world, had decided that sensitivity was out of place? Perhaps they had foreseen a nuclear war or an ice age, whereby life would be a matter of grubbing around for the next few thousand years? Jean might be best-lean meat, but bread was the" staple.

While her daughter was still young and there was hope, Jean threw herself into imprinting love and humor, excellence and sensitivity into the palimpsest of her daughter. But the inflexible programs were already written, and as her daughter grew up the writing showed through ever more clearly: the dumb vandalistic scrawl on the wall, which denied that there was any particular point in Jean's own life.

In her chagrin, Jean Sandra Norwich became Jean Sandwich.

* * *

Oh, how lucky we were to discover her! For Jean was the ideal volunteer for the great experiment. She would join in our project with a passion that went far beyond the lure of earning one million Swiss-banked dollars.

Indeed, she almost sought us out, though at the time she had no idea that we existed. Nor does anyone—apart from us ourselves, and Jean now, and of course our sponsor, originator of the millions of dollars. The whole matter is far too controversial not to be kept secret.

Jean advertised herself, as it were, by a series of vehement articles in a newspaper under the byline of Jean Sandwich, in which she explained why she had walked out on her husband and her daughter, and railed against Nature's deceits. She would do anything to pay Nature back for the trick it had played on her. But of course there was nothing that one could do! One of her articles even touched, plaintively, on the theme of DNA research; though of course, if a single egg from her ovaries could theoretically be removed and retai-lored to give rise, in a test tube, to something nearer to her heart's desire, all the remaining eggs would still bear the same betraying message written in them—as would every damn cell in her whole body. Whatever miracle the DNA tinkers achieved in their laboratories, she would still be Jean Sandwich. Even so, she was fiercely on the side of human DNA experiments.

It was following this article—and a painstaking check-out of Jean's background through our sponsor's organization— that I contacted her.

"Five thousand dollars for hearing me out—then saying nothing whatever about this conversation, which, believe me, you could never prove took place—"

"It would seem exacdy like the sort of thing that I'd make up?" She smiled devastatingly. Jean was beautiful, with glossy brown eyes, short auburn hair cut in a pageboy style, and a perfect creamy skin. Her nose was Grecian, her chin firm, and her figure was as trim as it had been before her terrible child was born and reared. Her body had never despaired, as other women's bodies might have done; the sad thing was that, coiled up in each cell in it, was the genetic government—temporarily in exile—that had swept back to power in that child. Jean herself was a sort of sport of Nature: a once-only Romeo and Juliet tossed off by the genetic monkey typists, who tapped out dumb pulp "novels" the rest of the time.

"Exacdy. May I call you Jean? Please call me Frank." "Which isn't your real name?"

"Actually, it is. So, five thousand for listening to me. And one million dollars clear, banked in Zurich in your name, if you'll go through with what I propose—whether it succeeds or not."

"How can a girl refuse?"

I put a packet of money on the table. She riffled through the big bills without bothering to count them.

"We'd like you to take part in a DNA experiment, Jean—an illegal one, but one that I'm sure from your writings that you'll approve."

"Illegal? The genes are the real law—and look what their law had done to me." She lit a cigarette, then hesitated.

"We aren't worried about you breaking chromosomes," I reassured her. "We're way beyond that kind of small change. No, I was referring to illegal in the public sense. The prohibition on human experimentation."

"You want an egg? Permission granted!" She exhaled smoke. "No, that's ridiculous. It would be the most expensive egg in the world; and surely you've got some women on your team. ... So you want me to play host mother, do you? No, that's silly too. You could easily hire some poor cow for a lot less than that. What is it?"

"Just this. Our sponsor is a rich man—very rich. Obviously I'm not going to tell you his name. He would like to be a superman, Homo superior, in his own lifetime—and to sire supermen. And superwomen. The next race. He wants to be the first, the founder, the Adam." "And I'm to be . . . ?"

"In this case, Eve will be created first. We don't quite know whether we can do it with a human being, though it has worked with rats and monkeys. The monkey subjects are, well, supermonkeys now. But a supermonkey isn't the same as an 'almost man.' They belong to a different niche of existence. There isn't a simple ladder with monkeys down there and us up here."

"And the rats?"

"We've had to destroy the rats. If they escaped into the wild, well. . ."I left the outcome undefined, but Jean could guess it.

"Not," I hastened to add, "that we intend to destroy the supermonkeys. That would be . . . unfair. Our sponsor is most scrupulous." Nor destroy you either, Jean. ... But that was better left unsaid.

"So he has set up a million-dollar trust fund for them too?"

"They have delightful conditions. We have sterilized their offspring, though. As a precaution."

"Yech," said Jean. But she accepted it. "How is this miracle accomplished?"

"It depends on the preadaptation of many gene sites for a sort of quantum jump to a new order of being. The old notion of evolution as something slow has gone out the window. Change happens rapidly—like a seed crystal suddenly altering the whole consistency of a saturated solution. Of course, it might be a million years before it does happen. But when it does, it happens fast. The new being is waiting in us like the butterfly in the chrysalis. This isn't any ordinary tinkering with a few genes, and recombination. It's a question of nudging the whole works. We've developed a self-replicating virus which will attach to the DNA and spread through all the cells in the whole body, optimizing the genetic potential and the very body and brain—the whole protein and nerve package—of the infected party. The flesh itself changes, not just the seed. But our sponsor wants to see this new being—Eve—before he commits himself, as Adam."

"So I'll become Super Eve? Arid he'll be my mate, once he takes the plunge?"

"That's about it. It'll certainly alter you. It altered the rats and the monkeys—but there was less potential for change there. We believe the human potential is enormous."

Jean giggled. "Maybe I'll be able to fly by will power? Maybe I'll become Wonder Woman? Or a telepath?"

"Who knows?"

"I'd hardly need a million dollars then. Though," she added hastily, "it'll be handy to have them."

"The money's more by way of reassurance, in case it doesn't work. Obviously, if it does, you'll be our sponsor's only peer on Earth."

"In case? Were they any mishaps with the monkeys?"

"None," I assured her.

"I'll have to think about it." '

"Take your time, Jean. Take a week. Two weeks." "Hell, I've thought already. The answer's yes. I'd like to see your monkey farm, though." "Be our guest."

The visit to the farm (to use Jean's word) went well. She scanned all the videotapes of the superrats, and met the supermonkeys, conversing with them through a sign language interpreter. She was most impressed. She preened herself. Nature had played the devil's own trick on her, but now Nature would get its rightful comeuppance. Not that Nature wasn't preparing for better things—but in her own bad time.

And Jean Sandwich dropped out of sight of the world— inasmuch as the world cared whether she was in sight or not.

The day came to inject the virus into her. It should take a day to establish itself, and a further week to replicate itself through her body, and a week more to express itself in a new Jean, Super Eve. This latter would be a painful week, as her very body reabsorbed itself and generated new tissue. However, she would spend all that time under full sedation, to be awakened when it seemed that the process had run its full course. Our sponsor would be watching all this very closely over a closed-circuit link.

We injected—feeling that the syringe was rather like God's finger up on the Sistine Chapel roof. Then we settled ourselves, to await developments.

The transformation of Jean into Jean-Eve, Homo superior, began—imperceptibly at first—eight days after the injection.

Sedated now, and connected to a spaghetti tangle of catheters and intravenous drips and vital sign monitors, she lay naked in the glassed, sterile room upon a white waterbed that should conform to any bodily alterations—not that any really drastic ones were expected. She wasn't, for example, very likely to sprout wings.

The waterbed looked like a great slab of white bread. Jean lay on it, sandwiched between the past of the human race— and the future. However, the future was as yet invisible: she was an open sandwich.

Gradually, day by day, the alterations became more obvious.

Her face grew plumper, with an expression that was a weird blend of cunning and vacuity. We hoped this was just the effect of the sedative and a certain retensioning of facial muscles. She put on fat all over, draining our intravenous drips dry time and again. Her chin was engulfed, doubled. Her neat breasts swelled. Her creamy skin grew ruddy, as though she had been exposed to a cold wind for weeks; but also her body temperature was quite high—perhaps this was

just the fever of the change in her. Her pageboy hair fell out, and grew back again at amazing speed, thick and black and greasy, as though her scalp had become a spinning loom.

Her skeletal structure enlarged; she became not merely fat, but more massive.

We watched, bemused, wondering how our sponsor was reacting to this metamorphosis. I suppose you could say that the figure developing on the waterbed possessed a kind of coarse Rubens magnificence . . . however, she was hardly a svelte beauty queen by our standards. Still, the sponsor did not complain; he kept his musings to himself. One thing already was for sure: this was not Jean's mother, rebom in her own flesh—nor was it anything like her daughter extrapolated into adult shape.

By the tenth day of the metamorphosis, which was taking quite a bit longer than the monkey metamorphoses—as I suppose we should have expected—much of Jean's new fat had compacted into well-buffered muscle, and she was a prima donna Wagnerian Valkyrie with a huge bust and great limbs. She had become a giantess two meters tall and proportionately girthed, weighing almost two hundred kilos. The Rubens-like impression had given place to something out of heroic legend: one of the giants who predated the Gods on Earth, the first type of being to emerge from the icy void—a troll woman, who could have taken Thor's hammer from him with one hand.

By the thirteenth day she was two and a quarter meters long (or tall) and massed well over two hundred kilos.

Was this to be the future of the human race: a race of giants? Myth had been turned inside-out in the past few days! But was this giantess clever, or was she dumb? Had all the energy she had soaked up been poured into mere bone and body tissue? What had happened to Jean's mind?

By the fourteenth day the changes seemed to have stopped. We eased off the sedatives, disconnected her from the drips and catheters, and on the next day early in the morning she awoke.

She arose suddenly, her mighty muscles rippling, a female Samson or Goliath with thongs of oily hair whipping her shoulders.

Stepping off the waterbed, she gazed at herself in a long mirror. And laughed boomingly, slapping her palms against her thighs in a way reminiscent of the display of a gorilla.

The two doctors who were in the room with her inquired, quailingly, how she felt. Beside her they seemed like a pair of thin, shaved monkeys in white coats.

She grinned hugely. "I feel like a million dollars. And I feel like swallowing my daughter for breakfast. Or perhaps a roast ox. Feed me!" she ordered. She glanced round the aseptic room as though it were really some cave littered with carcasses and bones. She strode from the room, through to where we were, tossing the two steel doors open jarringly, and thumped herself onto a steel table, after dismissing the available chairs as too miniature.

Hesitandy, I held out the largest smock I could find. She accepted it ironically and pulled it over her head, the better, to demonstrate its inadequacy. The garment parted at the seams. She blew her nose boisterously on the torn fabric, balled it up and tossed it aside.

"I shall wear robes," she announced. "Something long and strong and bright, with a leather belt, and thong sandals."

"It'll take a while."

She waved my apologies aside with a great hand. The draft was terrific.

I gave instructions by telephone, then asked her cautiously: "You are still . . .Jean?"

"I have eaten Jean," said the giantess. "Jean is too mean a name for me. She was just hors d'oeuvres. Everyone is just that. But I'm the main course. I shall call myself. . . well, I shall decide that after breakfast."

Presendy, sitting vastly naked on the steel table, Jean-that-was demolished five steaks in a row and a dozen fried eggs. I was beginning to wonder—as I'm sure we all were— where exactly to draw the line between exuberance and incipent madness.

After her megabreakfast, she belched appreciatively.

"This room's too small," she remarked. "All your rooms are puny. I need great halls." She focused on the camera, by which our distant sponsor was watching. She waved to it. "Hi. When are the next Olympic Games?"

Our hearts were in our shoes by now. Surely the sponsor couldn't contemplate . . . congress, with this titan? And he certainly wasn't a sports promoter, even if Jean-that-was did now seem like the ultimate East European athlete, pumped up with anabolic steroids. On the other hand, maybe she was on to something—if she was as fleet as she was mighty. But that wasn't the point, damn it! The point was what a future superbeing would be like. If they were all going to be like this, we'd eat ourselves into extinction. Come to think of it, perhaps that was what had really gone wrong with the dinosaurs: they had dined too sumptuously. They had cleaned the board. Left nothing for the next meal.

"I know! I shall call myself Geneva. That's Jean, plus Eva—from Eve. And all my money's in Zurich." She laughed, deafening us.

At which point the orange telephone burbled—the hot line to the sponsor. It fell to me to pick it up.

"Frank Caldero speaking."

"This is . . ." Who else? I had heard his voice half a dozen times before. It was a twangy, singsong voice, of a man of about forty, but I could never be sure whether it was lyrically contented or about to become enraged. Particularly at this moment I detected no clue in the tone.

"She isn't what I expected, exacdy. But of course, none of us knew what to expect, did we? I am . . . shocked—and pleased too. Such strength and presence pleases me, Frank. I can hardly feel amorously attracted to her, but of course I am viewing her with the eyes of now, not the eyes of someone transformed. Could a prehuman possibly feel excited by an example of Homo sapiens? Hardly! I do recognize this, Frank.

Perhaps you thought that I expected a Primavera or an Aphrodite? Rather than a Titan? Not necessarily. You have done remarkable work, all of you. At the moment I cannot like her, or admire her—though there is admiration in my soul for the prodigy she has become. I'm coming down in person, Frank. Anyone in the world can be ordinarily handsome and clever and strong—but we seek the extraordinary, don't we? I certainly do. I want security precautions redoubled, Frank. I'll need a few days to arrange things. I don't think I'm going to be very interested in my old life-style in a few weeks' time. I too will be a prodigy. We shall be the first of a new race."

"What about Jean—I mean, Geneva?"

"Request her to remain there, till we can meet ... on equal terms."

I cradled the phone and told the team. We all breathed out and clapped each other on the back. Fortunately, Geneva refrained from joining us.

"I'd forgotten about him," she said, with a peculiar expression on her face.

"It's part of the deal," I reminded her cautiously.

"Ho, ho," she said. "He'll need to be superb, to bowl me over."

I couldn't visualize the sponsor, or anyone, bowling her over and taking her; and personally I would want to have a few inches of steel between me and that tryst of the Titans. There was little point in harping on her obligations, though.

"Point taken," I agreed. "He'll need to be."

We could always shoot a hypodermic dart into her— something suitable for stunning rhino, say—and do the job with an A.I. syringe. But somehow I didn't think that was what the sponsor had in mind; he had sounded intoxicated by the coming wedding of the giants.

Geneva spent the next couple of weeks, duly robed and thong-sandaled, sprinting about the extensive grounds of the farm, splashing through lakes, scaling hills, crashing through thickets. Her amazing new body seemed quite tireless. She made no attempts on our high-walled, electrified frontiers. Why should she? She wasn't particularly a prisoner, and if she took it into her head to burst out, barreling straight through the main gate, where would she find a plentiful enough supply of steaks and such in the rural vicinity? Raw, on the hoof? The idea of roaming the countryside like some kind of Grecian-attired Bigfoot no doubt had litde appeal.

Meanwhile, in a well-curtained, black-glassed limousine, our sponsor arrived and was whisked down to the Transformation Room.

He was a wiry—or weedy—specimen of a man, depending upon one's point of view, and I couldn't help thinking of those advertisements for Charles Adas body-building courses, where the runt has sand kicked in his face by the tough guy. Obviously our sponsor had developed his financial muscles to the bursting point, but when it came to making his body superhuman only science was going to help, not workouts.

He was injected, and later sedated to lie on Geneva's waterbed while his two bodyguards stood watch with us, turn by turn, in the observation room.

Presently, while Geneva thrashed around the estate, enjoying herself, the changes began.

He went through what I now thought of as the stage of banal caricature—just as Geneva had looked for a while: merely fat, stupid, and sly.

However, during this period he actually shrank, becoming more like an Egyptian mummy, shriveled and dried up, as though not only were the catheters draining fluid from his body but so were the feeding tubes. It was as though he were regressing to some wizened monkey thing. We watched this with considerable concern—especially the bodyguards, who were seeing the body they were paid to guard evaporate before their very eyes.

But then he stabilized. He did not build back, though. Instead—weighing by now less than fifteen kilos, and just over a meter long from head to foot—he became ineffably beautiful: a sprite, something elfin, fairylike, angelic. We were consumed with wonder and anxiety.

"I don't think we got it right," murmured Axel Norman to me, out of hearing of the bodyguards. "This can't be the future of the human race: giant ladies and tiny males. It wouldn't work with our species. We aren't spiders! What's happening, Frank, I do believe, is a strange psychobiological change: it's what the subject really wants to become, deep down in his soul. It's how he really feels he is: the idealization of himself. Himself as metaphor, rather than meat. A dream person."

"There's plenty of meat on Geneva," I pointed out.

"So that was her secret dream. To be an Amazon—it was her soul's dream, unknown even to her."

"And his dream was to be a fairy?"

"His soul's dream was that. He wanted to be utterly beautiful—and damn it, he is, but it isn't any ordinary human standard of good looks. It's the beauty of a hummingbird or a butterfly. I bet that if you took the drug, you wouldn't turn out anything like either of them. You might be a werewolf or . . . oh, I don't know what. Breathe water, maybe."

"The rats and monkeys all ended up looking physically similar, by and large."

"Monkeys have dexterity, rats have cunning—that's their dream. They haven't as much imagination. But with us, it's . . . it's everyone's form of'perfect satisfaction—as though the world is newly made, and you can create yourself according to your heart's desire. Without prejudice. Only you can't consciously command what it'll produce. You can't foreguess it either. Because none of us knows what we really want. But the body cells do. Or something does—the unconscious? This is mythological, Frank; it's the real dream of mythology. It's the way back to a crazy, magical race of Sirens and Harpies and Manticoras and Mermaids. Everyone his or her own race. This thing's a soul teratogen. It produces monsters, but perfectly viable ones. Beautiful ones, all in their own terms. Wow."

"That's one way of looking at it."

"It'll be kis way of looking at it. I know it will."

"He'll be satisfied? Lord, let's hope so. The way I see it, this whole project has just gone up the spout."

"Oh no, Frank, no."

"How are they going to mate?"

"Don't you see, other people will join this . . . this Wonderland by invitation? With his consent, that is. Brave spirits, bold spirits—they'll beg to. Naturally, we'll have to be very discreet about it. . . . And if they don't beg, well, he'll still want unusual company, won't he?"

"For Christ's sake!"

"Plenty of room here. Big estate. Geneva seems pretty delighted with her transformation, unexpected as it was. I haven't heard her going on about her Swiss bank account lately."

"This isn't what the experiment was about!" "It could just be this is what it's about now." "Axel!"

"Okay, just elaborating. Fantasizing. Joking off the top of my head, really. It's pretty crazy, this." But Dr. Axel Norman did not sound like he was joking.

Our sponsor became slighdy smaller, and even more beautiful, before he awoke. A kind of filmy ballooning membrane—angel wings, fixed like the membrane of some gliding animal—grew between his arms and sides, extending from wrist and waist. We got a sort of electric shock when we touched his comatose body now—a fierce protective shock.

We discontinued the sedation, and the next morning he sat up and saw himself.

He stared in amazement, and unrecognition, with great dewy eyes. Then he warbled . . . joyously, and hopped about the room, the membrane inflating as he danced, holding him momentarily free of the ground like twin-arm parachutes. He was a fairy kite, something that children might fly high on the end of a string on a blowy, sunny day. Except, he was the child and the kite, together in one. It was his apotheosis, from long ago, before the paper of the kite became one color: green, printed with bank serial numbers.

"Sir," I said hesitandy, fearing his electric eel defenses— electricity conducting down that string out of the heavens. "How do you feel, sir?"

I thought perhaps he couldn't talk, but only warble like that bird character in The Magic Flute. Or so I remembered The Magic Flute, no doubt inaccurately—an opera needs a verbal libretto, after all.

He could speak, singingly, lyrically.

"Geneva doesn't need a million dollars!" he trilled. "She already has what she needs! She must know that by now. Let me out; let me out onto the grounds!"

Naturally we complied. He was still the sponsor; and there was no binding someone who could shock you dead—any more than mighty Geneva could be restrained by anything less than a cannon.

Half an hour later, I watched through field glasses as our sponsor—who had decided on the spur of the moment to rename himself Ariel—came gliding in from some trees to land on Geneva's great shoulder. No shock encounter there! So it was under voluntary control now. She laughed merrily as he whispered in her ear. Then she picked him from her shoulder and tossed him high into the air, and he glided around her head and around, to land again, and bend as though to sip at her breast. The ill-matched pair, the great troll woman and the sprite, seemed to be getting on famously. I'd have said they were in love—much more so than if there had been a rambunctious thrashing about of randy Titans. They were in love with what they were, because of what they were.

They did not return to the farm buildings that night; but what they were up to, I've no idea. Geneva checked in, in the morning, ravenous for steaks—with Ariel perched on her shoulder, wanting a bowl of milk and honey.

Which would have been a fine, if interim, ending to the saga of Jean Sandwich and our sponsor, except that a few days later during one of their mighty and minute banquets, Geneva pointed a great finger at me while Ariel twittered excitedly in her ear. Later I saw Dr. Axel Norman conferring with the sponsor, with a wry smile upon his lips.

I tried to escape from the farm that night, but one of the guards brought me down with a hypodermic dart in my buttocks. When I awoke, I was in the Transformation Room, with a giantess and a fairy and various of my ex-colleagues peering in.

I wonder: did Geneva point her finger at me in revenge—or was it out of gratitude?

When I wake up as a hobgoblin or an ogre or a centaur, to join them in their play, will I feel grateful too?

Stories of alien invasions of Earth have been a standard form of science fiction since at least the time of H. G. Wells—in fact, this subgenre was so thoroughly explored and exploited in sf's early years that writers soon had to turn to variations on the theme. (Perhaps the classic novel of this latter type was Fredric Brown's Martians, Go Home, published more than a quarter century ago.) Still, sf writers are known for their ingenuity, so they're still able to come up with new approaches. . . Carol Emshwiller has long been one of our most original writers, and her version of the alien invasion is characteristically offbeat, intriguing . . . and satirical.

Carol Emshwiller's stories have been appearing in the genre sf publications since 1955; many have also turned up in nongenre magazines such as Cavalier, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, Trans-atlantic Review, and TriQuarterly. A collection of her short stories, Joy in Our Cause, was published in 1974.

THE START OF THE END OF THE WORLD

Carol Emshwiller

First the distant sound of laughter. i thought it was laughter. Kind of chuckling . . . choking maybe ... or spasms of some sort. Can't explain it. Scary laughter coming closer. Then they came in in a scary way, pale, with shiny raincoats and fogged glasses, sat down, and waited out the storm here. Asked only for warm water to sip. Crossed their legs with refined grace and watched late-night TV. They spoke of not wanting to end up in a museum . . . neither them nor their talismans nor their flags, their dripping flags. They looked so vulnerable and sad . . . chuckling, choking sad that I lost all fear of them. They left in the morning, most of them. All but three left. Klimp, their regional director, and two others stayed.

"It is important and salutary to speak of incomprehensible things," they said, and so we did till dawn. They also said that their love for this planet, "this splendid planet," knows no bounds, and that they could take over with just a tiny smidgen of violence, especially since we had been softening up the people ourselves as though in preparation for them. I believed them. I saw their love for this place in their eyes.

"But am I"—and I asked them this directly—"am I, a woman, and a woman of, should I say, a certain age, am I really to be included in the master plan?" They implied, yes, chuckling (choking), but then everyone has always tried to give me that impression (former husband especially) and it never was true before. It's nice, though, that they said they couldn't do it without me and others like me.

What they also say is, "As sun to earth, so kitchen is to house and so house is to the rest of the world. Politics," they say, "begins at home, and most especially in the kitchen, place of warmth, chemistry, and changes, means toward ends. Grandiose plans cooked up here. A house," they say, "hardly need be more than kitchen and a few good chairs." Where they come from that's the way it is. And I agree that if somebody wanted to take over the Earth, it's true: they could do worse than to do it from the kitchen.

They also say that it will be necessary to let the world lie fallow and recoup for fifteen years. That's about step number three of their plan.

"But first," they say (step number one), "it will be necessary to get rid of the cats."

Klimp! His kind did not, absolutely not descend from apelike creatures, but from higher beings. Sky folk. We can't understand that, he said. Their sex organs are, he told me, pure and unconnected to excretory organs in any way. Body hair in different patterns. None, and this is significant, under the arms, and, actually, what's on their head really isn't hair either. Just looks like it. They're a manifestation in living form of a kind of purity not to be achieved by any of us except by artificial means. They also say that, because of what they are, they will do a lot better with this world than we do. Klimp promises me that and I believe him. They're simply crazy about this world. "It's a treasure," Klimp keeps saying.

I ask, "How much time is there, actually, till doomsday, or whatever you call it?"

No special name, though Restoration Day or (even better) Resurrection Day might serve. No special time either. ("Might take a lifetime. Might not.") They live like that but without confusion.

But first, as they say, it is necessary to get rid of the cats, though I am trying to see both sides: (a) Klimp's and his friends' and (b) trying to come to terms with three hyperactive cats that I've had since the divorce. The white one is throwing up on the rug. Turns out to be a rubber band and a long piece of string.

Of the three, Klimp is clearly mine. He likes to pass his cool hands . . . his always-cold hands through my hair, but if I try to sit on his lap to confirm our relationship, he can't bear that. We've known each other almost two weeks now, shuffled along in the park (I name the trees), the shady side of streets, examined the different kinds of grasses. (I never noticed how many kinds there were.) He looks all right from every angle but one, and he always wears his raincoat so we don't have any trou.ble.

"I accept," I say, when he asks me a few days later, anthropomorphising as usual, and tired of falling in love with TV stars and newsmen or the equivalent. I put on my old wedding ring and start, then, to keep a record of the takeover, kitchen by kitchen by kitchen. . . .

Klimp says, "Let's get in bed and see what happens."

Something does, but I won't say what.

I haven't seen any of them, even Klimp, totally naked, though a couple of times I saw him wearing nothing but a teacup.

(They read our sex manuals before beginning their takeover.)

But willing servants (women are) of almost anything that looks or feels like male or has a raspy voice, regardless of the real sex whatever that may be, or if sex at all. And sometimes one had to make do (we older women do, anyway) with the peculiar, the alien or the partly alien, the egocentric, the dis-grunded, the dissipated. . . . But also, and especially, willing servants of things that can fly, or things, rather, that may have descended from things that could fly once or things that could almost fly (though lots of things can almost fly). But I heard some woman say that someone told her that one had been seen actually vibrating himself into the sky, arched back, hands in pockets . . . had also, this person said, been seen throwing money off the Ambassador Bridge. The ultimate subversion.

Also I heard they may have already infiltrated the mayonnaise company. A great deal of harm can be done simply by loosening all the jar lids. Is this without violence! And when one of them comes up behind you on the street, grabs your arm with long, strong thumb and forefinger, quietly asking for money and your watch and promising not to hurt you

. . especially not to hurt you, then you give them. Afterward I hear they sometimes crumple the bills into their big, white pipes and smoke them on the spot. They flush the watches down toilets. This last I've seen myself.

But is all this without violence! Klimp takes the time to explain it to me. We're using the same word with two somewhat different meanings, as happens with people from different places. But then there's never any need to justify the already righteous. Sure of his own kindnesses, as look at him right now, Klimp, kiss to earlobe and one finger drawing tickly circles in the palm of my hand. He sees, he says, the Eastern Seaboard as it could be were it the kind of perfection that it should be. He says it will be splendid and these are means toward that end.

Random pats, now, in the region of the belly button. (His pats. My belly button.) Asks me if I ever saw a cat fly. It's important. "Not exacdy," I say, "but I saw one fall six stories once and not get hurt, if that counts."

As we sit here, the white cat eats a twenty-dollar bill.

I was divorced, as I mentioned. We were, all of us women who are in this thing with them, all divorced. DIVORCE. A tearing word. I was divorced in the abdomen and in the chest. In those days I sometimes telephoned just to hear "Hello." I was divorced at and against sunsets, hills, fall leaves, and, later on in the spring, I was divorced from spring. But now, suddenly, I have not failed everything. None of us has failed. And we want nothing for ourselves. Never have. We want to do what's best for the planet.

Sometimes lately, when the afternoon is perfect . . a pale, humid day, the kind they like the most . . . cool . . . white sky . . . and Klimp or one of the others (it's hard to tell them apart sometimes, though Klimp usually wears the largest cap . . . yellow plastic cap) . . . when the one I think is Klimp is on the lawn chair figuring how to get rid of all the bees by too much spraying of fruit trees or how best to distribute guns to the quick tempered or some such problems, then I think that life has turned perfect already, though they keep telling me that comes later . . . but perfect right now, at least as far as I'm concerned. I like it with the take-over only half begun. Doing the job, it's been said, is half the fun. To me it's all the fun. And I especially like the importance of the kitchen for things other than mere food. Yesterday, for instance, 1 destroyed (at the self-cleaning setting) a bushel of important medical records plus several reference works and dictionaries, also textbooks and a bin of brand-new maps. When I see Klimp, then, on the lawn, or all three sometimes, and all three gauzy, pale blue flags unfurled, and they're chuckling and whispering and choking together, I feel as though the kitchen itself, by its several motors, will take off into the air . . . hum itself into the sunset riding smoothly on a warm updraft, all its engines turned to low. I want to tell them how I feel. "Perfect," I say. "Everything's perfect except for these three things: wet sand tracked into the vestibule, stepping on the tails of cats, and please don't look at me with such a steady, fishlike gaze, because when you do, I can't read the recipes you gave me for things that make pco-pie feel good, rot the brain, and cost a lot."

But I shouldn't have reminded them of the cats. They are saying again that I have to choose between the cats or them. They say their talismans are getting lost under the furniture, that some of their wafers have been found chewed on and spat out. They say I don't realize the politics of the situation and I suppose I don't. I never did pay much attention to politics. "You have to realize everything is political," they say, "even cats."

I'm thinking perhaps I'll take them to the state park outside of town. They'll do all right. Cats do. Get rid of them in some nice place I'd like to be in myself, by a river, near some hills. . . . Leave them with full stomachs. Be up there and back by evening. Klimp will be pleased.

But look what's coming true now! Dead cats . . drowned cats washed up on the beaches. I saw the pictures on the news. Great flocks of cats, as though they had been caught at sea in a storm, or as though they had flown too far from shore and fallen into the ocean from exhaustion. Perhaps I understand even less about politics than I thought.

I decide to please my cats with a big dish of fresh fish. (Klimp is out tonight turning up amplifiers in order to impair hearing, while the others are out pulling the hands off clocks.)

The house has a sort of air space above the attic. There's a litde vent which, if removed, a cat could live up there quite comfortably, climbing up and down by way of the roof of the garage and a tree near it. A cat could be fed secretly outside and might not be recognized as one who lived here. It isn't that I don't dedicate myself to Klimp and the others. I do, but, as for the cats, I also dedicate myself to them.

Klimp and the others come back at dawn, flags furled, tired but happy. "Job's well done," they say. I fill the bathtub, boil water for them to dip their wafers in. They chuckle, pat me. (They're so demonstrative. Not at all like my husband used to be.) They move their hands in cryptic signals, or perhaps it's just nervousness. They blink at each other. They even blink at me. I'm thinking this is pure joy. Must never end. And now I have the cats and them also. I love. I love. Luff. . . loove . . . loofe . . they can't pronounce it, but they use the word all the time. Sometimes I wonder exactly what they mean by it, it comes so easily to their lips.

At least I know what / mean by "love," and I know I've gone from having nothing and nobody (I had the cats, of course, but I have people now) to having all the best things in life: love and a kind of family and meaningful work to do

. . world-shaking work. . . . All of us useless old women, now part of a vast international kitchen network and I'm wondering if we can go even further. Get to be sort of a world-watching crew while the earth lies fallow. "Listen, what about us in all this?" I ask, my arm across Klimp's barrel chest. "We're no harm. We're all over childbearing age. What about if we watch over things for you during the time the Earth rests up?"

He answers, "Is as does. Does as is." (If he really loves me, he'll do it.)

"Listen,' we could see to it that no smart ape would start leveling out hills."

"What we need," he says, "are a lot of little, warm, wet places.'' He tells me he's glad the cats are no longer here. He says, "I know you love ('lufF) me now," and wants me to eat a big pink wafer. I try to get out of it politely. Who knows what's in it? And the ones they always eat are white. But what has made me worthy of this honor, just that the cats are no longer in view?

"All right," I say, "but just one tiny bite." Tastes dry and chalky and sweet . . . too sweet. Klimp . . . but I see it's not Klimp this time . . . one of the others . . . urges another bite. "Where's Klimp?" "I also love ('luff) you," he says and "Time to find lots of little dark, wet places. We told you already."

I'm wondering what sort of misunderstanding is happening right now.

I have a vision of a skyful of minnows . . . silver schools of minnows . . . the buzz of air . . . the tinkling . . . the glitter . . . my minnows flashing by. Why not? And then more and more until the sky is bursting with them. I can't tell anymore which are mine. Somewhere a group of thirty-six . . .no, lots more than that . . . eighty-four . . .I'm not sure. One hundred and eight? Yes, my group among the others. They, my own, swim back to me, then swirl up and away. Forever. And forever mine. Why not?

I wake to the sounds of sheep. I have a backyard full of them. Ewes, it turns out. They are contented. As am I. I watch the setting moon, eat the oranges and onions Klimp brings me, sip mint tea, feel slightly nauseous, get a call from a friend. Seems she's had sheep for a couple of weeks now. Took her cats up to the state park just as I'd thought of doing and had sheep the next day, though she wishes now she had put those cats in the attic as I've done, but she's wondering will I get away with it? She wants me to come over, secretly if I can. She says it's important. But there's a lot of work to be done here. Klimp is talking, even now, about important projects such as opening the wild animal cages at the zoo and the best way to drop water into mailboxes and how about digging potholes in the roads? How about handing out free cartons of cigarettes especially those high in tars? He hangs up the phone for me and brings me another onion. I don't need any other friends.

She calls me again a few days later. She says she thinks she's pregnant, but we both know that can't be true. I say to see a doctor. It's probably a tumor. She says they don't want her to, that they drove her car away somewhere. She thinks they pushed it off the pier along with a lot of others. I say I thought they were doing just the opposite. Switching road signs and such to get people to drive around wasting gas. Anyway, she says, they won't let her out of the house. Well, I can't be bothered with the illusions of every old lady around. I have enough troubles of my own and I haven't been feeling so well lately either, tired all the time and a little sick. Irritable. Too irritable to talk with her.

The ewes in the backyard are all obviously pregnant. They swell up fast. The bitch dog next door seems pregnant, too, which is funny because I though she was a spay. It makes you stop and think. I wonder, what if I wanted to go out? And is my old car still in the garage? They've been watching me all the time lately. I can't even go to the bathroom without one of them listening outside-the door. I haven't been able to feed the cats lately. I used to hate it when they killed birds, but now I hope there are some winter birds around. I think I will put up a bird feeder. I think spring is coming. I've lost track, but I'm sure we're well into March now. Klimp says, "I luff, I luff," and wants to rub my back, but I won't let him . . . not anymore ... or not right now. Why won't they all three go out at the same time as they used to?

What's wrong with me lately? Can't sleep . . . itch all over . . . angry at nothing. . . . They're not so bad, Klimp and the others. Actually better than most. Always squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom, leave the toilet seat down

. . they don't cut their toenails and leave them in little piles on the night table, use their own towels usually, listen to me when I talk. Why be so angry?

I must try harder. I will tell Klimp that he can rub my back later. I'll apologize for being angry and I'll try to do it in a nice way. Then I'll go into the bedroom, shut the door, brace it with a chair and be really alone for a while. Lie down and relax. I know I'll miss cooking up some important concoctions, but I've missed a lot of things lately.

Next thing I know I wake up and it's dark outside. I have a terrible stomachache like a lot of gas rolling around inside. I feel very strange. I have to get out of here.

I can hear one of them moving outside the door. I hear him brush against it. . .a chitinous scraping. "Let me in. I loofe you." Then there's that kind of giggle. He can't help it, I know, but it's getting on my nerves. "Is as does," he says. "Now you see that." I put on my sneakers and grab my old sweatshirt. "Just a minute, dear"—I try to say it sweedy—"I just woke up. I'D let you in in a minute. I need a cup of tea. I'd love if you'd get one for me." (I really do need one, but I'm not going to wait around for it.) I open the window and step out on the garage roof, cross to the tree, and climb down. Not hard. I'm a chubby old woman, but I'm in pretty good shape. The cats foDow me. All three.

As I trot by, I see aD the ewes in the backyard lying down and panting. God! I have to get out of here. I run, holding my stomach. I know of an empty lot with an old Norway spruce tree that comes down to the ground aD around. I think I can make that. I see cats aD around me, more than just my own. Maybe six or eight. Maybe more. Hard to see but, thank God, Klimp has broken aD the streetlights. I cross vacant lots, tear through brambles, finally crawl under the spruce branches and lie down panting . . . panting. It feels right to pant. I saw my cat do that under similar circumstances.

I have them. I give birth to them, the little silvery ones squeaking . . . sparkling. I'D surprise Klimp with eighty-four . . . ninety-six . . . one hundred and eight? Look what we did together! But it wasn't Klimp and I. Suddenly I realize it. It was Klimp and that other. Through me. And all those ewes . . . fourteen ewes and one bitch dog times eighty-four or one hundred and eight. That's well over a thousand of them that I know about already.

My litde ones cough and flutter, try to swim into the air, but only raise themselves an inch or so . . . hardly that. They smell of fish. They slither over each other as though looking for a stream. They are covered with a shiny, clear kind of slime. Do I love them or hate them?

So that's the way it is. As with us humans, it takes two, only I wasn't one of them. I might just as well have been a bitch or a ewe . . . better, in fact, to have been some dumb animal. "Lots of little warm, wet places!" It must have been a big night, that night. Some sacred sort of higher beings they turned out to be. That's not love . . . nor luff nor loove. Whatever they mean by those words, this can't be it.

But look what all those hungry cats are doing. Eating up my minnows. I try to gather the little things up, but they're too slippery. I can't even get one. I try to push the cats away, but there are too many of them and they all seem very hungry. And then, suddenly, Klimp is there helping me, kicking out at the cats in a fury and gathering up minnows at the same time. For him it's easy. They stick to him wherever he touches them. He's up to his elbows in them. They cluster on his ankles like barnacles, but I'm afraid lots are eaten up already. And now he's kicking out at me. Hits me hard on the cheek and shoulder. Stamps on my hand.

"I'm confused," I say, getting up, thinking he can explain all this in a fatherly way, but now he stamps on my foot and knocks me down with his elbow. Then I see him give a kind of hop step, the standard dance way of getting from one foot to the other. He was going to lift. I don't know how I know, but I do. He has that look on his face, too, eyes half closed . . . ecstasy. I see it now—flying, or almost flying, is their ultimate orgasm . . . their true love (or loofe) ... if this is flying. Yes, he's up, but only inches, and struggling . . . pulling at my fingers. This is not flying.

"You call this flying!" I yell. "And you call this whole thing being a pure aerial being! I say, cloaca . . . cloaca, I say, is your only orifice." I have, by now, one knee hooked around his neck and both hands grabbing his elbow, and he's not really more than one foot off the ground at the very highest, if that, and struggling for every inch. "Cloaca! You and your 'luff !" The slime and minnows are all over him. He seems dressed in them . . . sparkling like sequins. He's too slippery with them. I can't hang on. I slip off and drop lightly into the brambles. Klimp slides away at a diagonal, right shoulder leading, and glides, luminous with slime, just off the ground. Disappears in a few seconds behind the trees. "Cloaca!" I shout after him. It's the worst I've ever said to anyone. "Filthy fish thing! Call that flying!"

Everything is going wrong. It always does, I should know that by now. I'm thinking that my former husband slipped away in almost exactly the same way. He was slippery too, sneaked out first with younger women and then left for one of them later on. I tried to grab at him the same way I grabbed at Klimp. Tried to hold him back. I even tried to change my ways to suit him. I know I've got faults. I talk too much. I worry about things that never happen (though they did finally happen, almost all of them, and now look).

I hobble back (with cats), too angry to feel the pain of my bruises. No sign of the ewes or the dog, but the backyard looks all silvery. No minnows left there, though, just slime. I have to admit it's lovely. Makes me feel romantic feelings for Klimp in spite of myself. I wonder if he saw it. They're so sensitive to beautiful things and they love glitter. I can see why.

The house is dark. I open the door cautiously. I let in all eight . . . no, nine, maybe ten cats. I call. No answer. I lock all the windows and the doors. I check under the beds and in the closets. Nobody. I go into the bathroom and lock that door too. Fill tub. Take off my clothes. Find two minnows stuck inside my sweatshirt. One is dead. The other very weak. I put him in the tub and he seems to revive a little. He has big eyes, four fins where legs and arms would be, a tail . . . a minnow's tail . . . actually big blue eyes . . . pale blue, like Klimp's. He looks at me with such pleading. He comes to the surface to breathe and squeaks now and then. I keep making reassuring sounds as if I were talking to the cats. Then I decide to get in the tub with him myself. Carefully, though. With me in the tub, the creature seems happier. Swims around making a kind of humming sound and blowing bubbles. Follows my hand. Lets me pick it up. I'm thinking it's a clear case of bonding, perhaps for both of us.

Now that I'm relaxing in the water, I'm feeling a lot better. And nothing like a helpless little blue-eyed creature of some sort to care for to bring brightness back into life. The thing needs me. And so do all those cats.

I lie quietly, cats miawing outside the door, but I just lie here and Charles (Charles was my father's name) . . . Charles? Howard? Henry? He falls asleep in the shallows between my breasts. I don't dare move. The phone rings and there's the thunk of something knocked over by cats. I don't move. I don't care.

So what about ecology? What about our favorite planet, Klimp's and mine? How best save it? And who for? Make it safe for this thing on my chest? (Charles Bird? Henry Fishman?) Quiedy breathing. Blue eyes shut. And what about all those thousands of others? Department of fisheries? Department of lakes and streams? Gelatin factory? Or the damp basements of those housing developments built in former swamps?

* * *

I blame myself. I really do. Perhaps if I'd been more understanding of their problems . . . accepted them as they are. Not criticized all that sand tracked in. And so what if they did step on the tails of cats? I've been so irritable these last few days. No wonder Klimp kicked out at me. If only I had controlled myself and thought about what they were going through. It was a crucial time for them too. But all I thought about was myself and my blowing-up stomach. Me, me, me! No wonder my former husband walked out. And now the same old pattern. Another breakup, another identity crisis. It shows I haven't learned a thing.

I almost fall asleep lying here, but when the water begins to get cold we both wake up, Charles and 1.1 rig up a system, then, with the electric frying pan on the lowest setting and two inches of water on top of a piece of flannel. Put Charles . . . Henry? . . . inside, sprinkle in crumbs of wafer. Lid on. Vent open. Lock the whole business in my bedroom on top of the knickknack shelves. Then I check out their room, Klimp's and the others. It's a mess, wafers scattered around . . . several pink ones, bed not made. If they were, all three, men, I'd understand it, but that can't be. I wonder if they used servants where they come from ... or slaves? Well, Charles will be brought up differendy. Learn to pick up his underwear and help out around the house, cook something besides telephone books and such. I find a talisman under the bed. I shut my eyes, squeeze hard, wondering can I lift with it? Maybe, on the other hand, it's some sort of anchor to stop with or to be let down by. Something thrown out to keep from flying. I'll save it for Charles.

I sit down to rest with a cup of tea, two cats on my lap and one across my shoulders. All the cats seem fat and happy, and I really feel pretty happy too . . . considering.

The telephone rings again and this time I answer it. It's a love call. I think I recognize Klimp's voice, but he won't say if it's him and they do all sound a lot alike, sort of muffled and slurred. Anyway, he says he wants to do all those things with me, things, actually, he already did. I suppose this call is part of a new campaign. I don't think much of it and I tell him so. "How about breaking school windows and stealing library books?" I say. But whose side am I on now? "Listen," I say, "I know of a nice wet place devoid of cats. It's called The Love. Canal and you'll love it. Lots of empty houses. And there's another place in New Jersey that I know of. Call me back and I'll have the exact address for you." I think he believes me. (Evidendy they haven't read all the books about women.)

Political appointees. I'll bet that's what they are. Makes a lot of sense. I could do as well myself. And who was it sent them out with spray-paint cans? Who told them how to cause static on TV? Who had thousands of stickers made up reading: NO DANGER, NONTOXIC, and GENERALLY REGARDED AS SAFE?

We can do all this by ourselves. Let's see: number 1, day-care-aquarium centers; number 2, separate cat-breeding facilities; number 3, the take-over proper; number 4, the lying-fallow period. And we have time . . . plenty of time. Our numbers keep increasing, too, though slowly . . . the rejected, the divorced, the growing older, the left out. . . . Maybe they've already started it. I can't be the only one thinking this way. Maybe they're out there just waiting for my call, kitchens all warmed up. I'll dial my old friend. "Include me in," I'll say.

Everything perfect, and I even have Charles. We don't need them. Bunch of bureaucrats. That wasn't flying.

The possibility, or et\ n probability, of a major disaster in a nuclear energy plant has been discussed by nearly every major columnist or opin-ionator for years. (Yes, long before the ' 'event'' at Three Mile Island.) In the following suspenseful story, Michael Swanwick shows us a future in which a meltdown at Three Mile Island has occurred. . and the results nearly a century from now.

Michael Swanwick is a new writer whose other sales have been to Destinies, New Dimensions, TriQuarterly, and Penthouse. He lives in Philadelphia, where he works for the National Solar Heating and Cooling Information Center at the Franklin Institute.

MUMMER KISS

Michael Swanwick

It was Mummers Eve morning, and a cold north wind was blowing out of the Drift. Keith Piotrowicz eased the tanker truck through the blockade, his nucleopore mask hanging loosely around his neck. Jimmy Bowles dozed lightly in the seat beside him, dark face at ease.

The guard waved his clipboard overhead. Keith nodded, fed the engine more alcohol, shifted gears. With a low growl, the truck surged forward. The guard, stationhouse, and red-and-white signs marked DRIFT with radiation logos went bounce, bounce and were gone from the rearview mirror.

"Hey!" Keith jabbed his co-worker's shoulder. "Get out that map; tell me where we're supposed to be going."

Bowles snorted, and his eyes jerked open. He fumbled out a map, unfolded it across two-thirds of the cab, and said: "Out past King of Prussia. You've been that way before, right?" The truck jolted roughly over untended highway.

"Yeah."

"Then don't wake me up again till we get there." » * *

They back-ended the truck to the edge of a short cliff, a drop of perhaps ten feet, and, donning protective garb, climbed out.

Keith undogged the hose and pulled it loose while Bowles took a wrench and started to mate the connectors. He stood near the lip of the cliff, feet wide, bracing himself. A century-old division of tract houses lay below, silent among small patches of snow. Gendy rolling hills slowly rose to the horizon, covered with a black stubble of stunted, sometimes twisted, trees.

Bowles cursed as the cold hindered his efforts to open the master valve.

The hose was thick and filled Keith's gloved hands; together they barely circled it. There was a sharp clank as the valve unfroze under Bowles' wrench. The hose throbbed and moved. Keith staggered and quickly recovered as milky-white industrial waste spurted from the nozzle.

The liquid flew out in a long shallow arc to the frozen ground. It flowed sluggishly, covering sere brown grasses in an ever-widening puddle. Yellowish crystals formed, then were partially redissolved as new liquid overran them. They were supposed to find a new site each time out; it was usually easier to reuse the old dumps.

The land was bleak and dreary. It depressed Keith, left him feeling dull and nihilistic. He remembered stories told of how sometimes the toxic chemical wastes from one dumping would combine with those from previous dumps, and strange alchemical interactions would take place. The ground would burst into flames or weird orange worms crawl out of the earth. There was a site he had seen in upper Bucks County where the ground actually crawled, boiling and bubbling year-round.

Burst into flames, he thought at the ground. But nothing

happened. The last lucid drops of waste fell from the hose.

He shook it, then started to reel it back up.

• * *

Back in the cab, Bowles had pulled down his cleansuit's orange hood, and slipped off his nucleopore before Keith could get the air-recycler going. Like most old-timers, he didn't wear his mask much, didn't believe that something he couldn't smell, taste, feel, or see could possibly hurt him. Bowles, taking his turn at the wheel, eased the tanker onto the highway.

"Looking forward to the parade, hey, boy?" Bowles asked.

"I guess. Hey, watch the road." The cab lurched as they ran full-tilt over a mudslide that had obliterated twenty yards of roadway. Bowles cackled.

Bowles was the only black on Quaker City Industrial Disposal's payroll. Politics had gotten him the job, and it was politics that kept it for him; he was out "sick" more often than any man Keith knew. But Bowles played for a second-rate North Philly string band, and even a black man could swing a job with that kind of pull. "Don't start talking like my maiden aunt," he said. "Not much traffic out here, is there?"

"Yeah, well. I'd still feel better if. . ."Bowles swung the truck through a figure-S, grazing both sides of the road, and Keith shut up. They roared past the ruins of a bank, and the wind kicked up a white spume of powder from a mound of asbestos tailings that had been dumped in its parking lot.

"There's some nice land out back, away from the dump sites," Bowles said reflectively. "If I was young like you, I'd take over an old farmhouse, do a little homesteading. You don't really believe it's dangerous out here, do you, son?"

I've heard this rap before, Keith thought. That was the trouble with Philadelphia: it was all Irish and Italian. So naturally the Mick dispatcher always puts the Nigger and the Polack together. Gives you a chance to learn how tired you can get of one man.

"You set up a farm out here and your privates will mutate into green fungus," he said, instandy hating himself for the words, for playing down to Bowles' level.

Bowles laughed, showing a meager scattering of eroded yellow teeth. He swerved to avoid the trunk of a mutated tree that crawled along the ground like a vine, intruding onto the highway. "Then you should join the Mummers. Good thing for an ambitious young man to do."

If he pointed out that he didn't have the pull to get into the Mummers, Bowles would sneer and lecture him that if a black boy could join, then a white boy certainly could, having natural advantages of skin tone and ancestry. Instead he said, "I don't have the money, and I'd look funny wearing feathers. Anyway, I'm not interested in politics."

Keith's father had been in the Mummers, the bottom rung anyway, more gofer than marcher, and much good it had done him. Kept him poor paying for the costumes, and all the medical benefits hadn't stopped his wife from dying of leukemia. It had probably killed him in the end, too. The old man had died of something funny, anyway, which Keith had always suspected he'd picked up on the job the Mummers had gotten him. The job that was all he'd had to leave to his son. . . .

Bowles, swinging wide around a blind corner, turned and said, "I'm talking serious. If you—" "Jesus, look out!"

Bowles, startled, cut the wheel hard. The front wheels hit a patch of ice, and the truck skidded out of control. Keith was slammed against the door, his nucleopore swinging wildly.

Something flashed by the windshield, a woman riding a dirt bike. She had been cutting across the road when the truck rounded the corner and its tires lost traction. She leaned over the handlebars, coaxing the last bit of speed from her machine. "Dear God," Keith prayed as the bike slipped past the front fender, barely evading collision.

Before the motorcyclist could clear the road, the tank slewed around, catching the bike a glancing blow on its rear tire. There was a sickeningly loud crunch. Keith caught a glimpse of something flying through the air.

Bowles was all elbows and motion, braking the truck and simultaneously trying to keep it on the road. He fought it to a halt, tires screeching, truck still upright, one wheel resting on the shoulder.

Bowles leaped from the truck, his door swinging loosely on its hinges behind him. Keith automatically cut the motor, pulled on his mask, and followed.

The woman's fall had been broken by a tangle of dead brush. She lay still and crumpled, looking like a bundle of discarded clothing. Some way beyond her lay the dirt bike, bent and twisted, clearly beyond repair.

"You know any first aid?" Bowles asked.

"A little," Keith said. "Jesus." He stared at a trickle of blood creeping out of the woman's nostril. It was paralyzing, this livid, glistening red. He shook off the feeling, bent to examine her.

"First we look for any obvious broken bones, um, severe bleeding—it's been a long time since I learned this stuff." She was a lean muscular woman, somewhere in her late thirties or early forties. Slavic cheekbones, a fierce set to her face, even unconscious. A heavy kaftan-like robe had fallen partially open, revealing khaki fatigues, the light green kind that the Northern Liberation Front had worn two decades ago. Her nucleopore was knocked half off her face. He checked to see that she was still breathing, reset it. "Well, / don't see anything."

"What next?"

"Um, we treat her for shock. Cushion the head, raise the feet." He started to take off his jacket to form a pillow, stopped. "This is no good. We've got to get her into town."

They carried her to the cab, awkwardly distributing her weight across their laps. Keith took the wheel, carefully started the truck rolling.

"What's this tangled around her neck?" Bowles asked. He unstrapped a leather case, looked inside. "Binoculars."

He set them carefully on the dashboard, began going through her pockets. "Passport here, stamped in Philadelphia. Occupation: Scholar." He paused. "Didn't know you could make a living at that. Special Drift clearance to visit Souderton."

"Souderton's nowhere near here," Keith said. "It's hardly in the Drift at all."

"Do tell." Bowles replaced the document, continued rummaging. "Hello. She's got two of them." He pulled a second passport from an inner pocket.

"Hey, maybe you shouldn't be going through her things like that," Keith said uneasily. Bowles ignored him.

"Says Suzette Fletcher on both of them. Same name, same height. Age: Forty-two. That's the same. Occupation: Reporter. Now isn't that funny? She's a reporter for the Boston Globe, up north. And it's not stamped in Philadelphia at all."

"Hey, really, man. I'd feel a lot better if you didn't do that."

"Yeah, okay, okay." Bowles replaced the passport, smoothed the kaftan shut again-. He studied the woman's face, nested in a mass of dirty blond hair in Keith's lap. "This is one damn handsome woman," he said. "How's it feel, having that face in your crotch?"

Keith slowed to negotiate a tricky patch of road, where a careless dumping had let a frozen chemical slick form on the concrete. "Aw come on," he mumbled, involuntarily embarrassed. "She's old enough to be my mother."

"Looks like she's still got bright eyes, though," Bowles said cheerily. "Bet she's got a bushy tail, too. A young man like you could leam something from an older woman."

The woman stirred and groaned as the truck crossed Two Street. The sun was a red smear against the horizon, weakly echoed in the rearview mirror's grimy streaks. Scattered sweepers cleaning the streets for tomorrow's parade brushed the ancient asphalt free of any lingering hot particles blown in from the Drift. They were the hard-core unemployed, unable to pay the Mummers Gift in cash, with only their services to offer. They had been working all day and would go on working until the job was done. Then they would be given a hot meal, with maybe a cup of alky-laced hot cider, and the stupid asses would be grateful.

The woman opened her eyes, painfully drew herself into a sitting position. "Philadelphia," Bowles said. "My name's Jimmy Bowles, and my partner's Keith Piotrowicz."

She bent forward, gingerly touched her forehead. "God that smarts." She snuffled slightly, accepted a handkerchief from Bowles, held it to her nose.

"Jimmy's the first man ever to create a traffic accident in the Drift," Keith said with a touch of malice. Bowles glared at him wordlessly.

The woman straightened a bit. A corner of her faded blond hair caught the sun, glinted red. "Oh yes, it all comes back to me now." She forced a grin. "S. J. Fletcher. Everybody calls me Fletch."

"Pleased to meet you, Fletch," Keith said. Almost simultaneously, Bowles asked, "What were you doing out in the Drift?"

Fletch watched the tall buildings of Philadelphia glide by. In an abstracted tone, she said, "Some private genealogy. I was researching the records in Souderton—they're almost untouched, you know—and I found my grandmother's marriage license. It said she was born in King of Prussia, so . . . ." She shrugged. "I was hoping for the family Bible, but it looks like a lost cause. Hey, you guys did pick up my stuff, didn't you?"

"On the ledge,'' Bowles said. The had slowed to a crawl as Keith eased it through the narrow riverfront streets. It was a tight turn into the company parking lot, and he nearly scraped two buildings negotiating it.

"Not that!" Fletch snapped. "My goddamn saddlebags. They've got all my . . . supplies and stuff. All my money."

All but a handful of drivers had come in ahead of Keith and his partner. The lot was choked, all the good slots gone. He eased the truck into Slot 97. "Must be with the bike," Bowie said. "We didn't go look at it."

She slammed a fist into her thigh. "Damn damn damn," she muttered to herself. Then, abruptly authoritative, "You'll just have to take me back there to get them."

"Hey now," Bowles objected.

"Look around you," Keith said. The trucks stretched in long, even rows, their biohazard logos dull in the failing sunset. "The Company isn't going to let us take this thing out into the Drift again tonight." He cut the engine, yanked the key.

Bowles hopped out of the cab. "Keith, you come out back and read the meters for me,'' he said. ' 'Then I'll go log us in, and you two can hash this thing out between yourselves."

"Okay." Keith pulled his door open, inhaled deeply, savoring the clean city air. He strolled around to the back of the truck, wondering what Bowles wanted to say. There were no meters, of course; either the truck was empty or it was full. He opened his jacket, letting in a hit of cold air.

"Listen," Bowles hissed fiercely. "You can do what you want with that woman; tell her anything you like. But you will keep your mouth shut about me looking at her papers. You got that? This is Mummer business, boy, and you'd best keep that in mind." He waited for Keith's nod, then began the long walk to the dispatcher's shed.

Keith shrugged to himself, returned to the cab. If Bowles wanted to play secret agent, that was nothing to him.

"I've been thinking," he said to Fletch. "We can take you out the day after tomorrow, if you're willing to spend the day in the truck. The dispatcher won't like it, but Jimmy can work it for you. He's got influence."

"Why not tomorrow?"

"It's the first of January," Keith explained. "Mummers Day. Everything will be closed down."

"And just what the hell am I supposed to do with myself between then and now? Sleep in the gutter?"

"I'll put you up," Keith said unhappily. "I've got a spare couch." He wasn't sure he liked this woman, and he had a sick feeling he was going to regret the offer. But for the life of him he couldn't see any alternative.

When Bowles returned. Keith briefed him on the situation. The old man slapped Keith's back. "Behave yourselves," he said with a smirk.

Keith led Fletch into his fourth-floor walk-up, and hung his nucleopore on a hook by the door. "You can take the bed," he said. "I'll sleep on the couch, I guess."

She wrinkled her nose. "This place is a dump. Don't you ever clean up in here?"

"Well. ..." Keith lifted a clutter of dirty clothes from the floor, dumped them into an already crowded closet. Fletch wandered over to the only window that wasn't boarded over for the winter, jerked the shutters open.

'' Nice view of the harbor if you squint between the buildings on the left," she said wryly. Keith fed a miserly few lumps of coal into the stove, starting a fire with twists of papers from last'week's Inquirer.

Fletch unslung her binoculars, peered through them. "It's too dark to make out," she muttered. "But I could swear that some of those ships are coal burners. Even—Good Lord! That looks like a converted oil tanker.''

"Oh yeah, we get all kinds." He blew gently on the fire, anticipating its warmth. Another few minutes and he'd be able to shed his coat.

"But those things are old! Single-hull construction, with the bottom rusting out and the rivets popping loose. How can you people allow that garbage in your harbor?"

"What harm could it do?" Keith asked. "Any spill would just wash downriver and out to sea. Living this close to the Drift, you learn to appreciate what you've got."

* » *

The dinner plates were piled in the sink, waiting for the nighttime water rates, when there was a knock at the door. Fletch, wearing one of Keith's old sweaters óver her fatigues, answered it.

A dozen or so tenants stood in the hallway. "Mummers Gift, Mummers Gift!" they chanted. A single Mummer, still in street clothes, stood to the fore, holding a muslin sack in one hand.

"Mummers Gift," Keith mumbled to Fletch by way of explanation. He scooped two rolls of silver dollars from a dresser drawer and gave them to the Mummer. The man broke them open, poured them into the sack. Keith ruefully watched this year's savings disappear, and smiled dutifully.

As was customary, the Mummer had started drinking early. He was a small man, with a slightly bloated face, and the flush of alcohol accentuated the broken veins in his nose. "Paid in full," he announced. "Let the revels continue!"

The tenants cheered and poured into the room. Like the drinking, the floating party was an ancient and hallowed custom. Somebody shoveled coal into the stove, and somebody else waved a jug of grain alcohol in the air. Keith hastened to dig out his last gallon of cider for mixer.

Jerry from the third floor grabbed Keith's sleeve and demanded an introduction to Fletch. Keith apologized, and complied. When they heard that she had come out of the Drift, several of his more superstitious friends made the sign of the horns to ward off mutation.

"No, she didn't!"

"Really?"

"Come off it—she'd be dead."

Fletch smiled politely. "You only have to worry about radiation exposure if you're right on top of the Meltdown site. For most of the Drift, the only thing to contend with is particulate matter. As long as you don't eat, drink, or breathe, you're safe."

They laughed, but there was an uneasy edge to their laughter. The rich kid from the ground floor—her father had money, and reputedly she only worked three days a week— tried to change the subject. "Keith said that you're a scholar, Ms. Fletcher," she said.

"Yes, I was mining the records in Souderton and—"

"Next tenant!" the Mummer bellowed. "Time to move the party on, we can't hang around here all night!" He bullied the party out into the hallway. They went willingly, even anxiously. Contrary to custom, Keith and Fletch were not invited along.

"Was it something I said?" Fletch wondered.

"Yes," Keith said. And tried to explain.

Souderton was the last city within the Drift to die. Its contamination levels were low, and the city had strong and determined leaders. For almost twenty years after the Meltdown, Souderton had thrived after a fashion. But after two decades of water and foodstuff laced with radioactive isotopes, the cancers and birth defects and leukemias became too widespread, too common to be ignored.

By popular account, the panic started at a mass town assembly to discuss the problems. An alternative version was that an old woman suffering a heart attack triggered the hysteria. However it began, it turned into a wholesale evacuation of the city, a mob of thousands that fled like lemmings toward Philadelphia.

They were met at the city limits by a horde of self-appointed vigilantes, men who were afraid of mutation, of radiation poisoning, of anything that came out of the Drift.

Masked and hooded men with filters and rebreathers went into Souderton the next day with rifles and mopped things up.

"See, I go out there almost every day so it doesn't bother me. I tend to forget how everybody else feels about the Drift, though," Keith said. "And I guess there's a kind of inherited fear of Souderton itself, of what might have happened if the refugees had gotten through."

"More likely it's inherited guilt." Fletch sat down on the edge of the bed, unlaced her boots, let them drop. "Time for me to hit the sack.'' She pulled off the sweater.

Her breasts bounced once beneath her shirt. They sagged slightly, not much for a woman her age. Keith found himself trying to picture them in his mind. The room was uncomfortably warm, even stuffy. The single drink he had had made him almost dizzy.

"Uh, listen," he said. "The bed's big enough for two."

Fletch smiled scornfully. "Back off, sonny," she said. "You can sleep on the couch for one night without rupturing anything."

At dawn they were awakened by the sound of children running gleefully through the streets, beating on pots and pans with sticks, and shrieking with all the power in their young lungs. Keith trudged down the hall to the bathroom and returned to find Fletch up and dressed. "How you doing this morning?" he forced himself to say.

"Oh, a litde stiff and creaky around the joints, but not bad for a woman who's just been run over by a truck."

After breakfast they lingered for a few hours over cups of mixed chicory and coffee—the only luxury Keith allowed himself—before going to watch the parade. Fletch made no reference to the previous night, and Keith found himself almost liking her again. They were out on Two Street by late morning, in time to see the last several Comic bands.

Fletch watched with fierce interest as men in feathers, in sequins, dressed as clowns, as Indians, as playing cards, strutted by in organized disarray. A female impersonator tagging after one brigade waggled enormous mock-breasts at her, turned around, and flipped up frilly petticoats to reveal grossly overstuffed underthings. She threw back her head and laughed.

"Do women participate in this?" she asked. "All I've seen are men."

' 'They used to. They were banned a long time ago, just after the Meltdown."

The brass band for the Comic troupe, resplendent in feathers, mirrors, and cheap glitter, was playing "The Bummers Reel." Behind them a ragtag batch of clowns pulled a wagon float labeled christmas with truesduel. Atop it stood a skinny man in baggy Santa Claus suit, who handed wrapped presents to blindfolded policemen. "What does that mean?" Fletch asked.

"There's a city councilman named Scott Truesdale, and there was an incident last May . . . um, it's kind of hard to explain if you're not familiar with local politics."

"I get the general picture," Fletch said. "I imagine your Mr. Truesdale won't be too amused by this, however."

'No." It was the end of Truesdale's career, in fact, but Keith didn't bother saying that.

The Comics, with the brass bands, floats, and slapstick anarchy, continued to strut by. At one point Keith bought two soft pretzels from a vendor and introduced Fletch to that old Philadelphia tradition. They were barely warm and cost three cents for the two, a price the vendor could never had gotten away with any other day.

The groups ranged from the bright and gaudy to the bright and gaudy and inventive. Some, obviously, took themselves more seriously than others. By the same token, these were not always more fun to watch.

"Who's next?" Keith asked. The last Comic band was strutting away, strewing confusion and firecrackers in its midst.

Through her glasses, Fletch studied the banner that led off the group. "Looks like . . . Center City Club. Would that be right?"

'Yeah. That's the first of the Fancies. After them come the String Bands."

"How did all this begin?" Fletch asked. "How did it get organized? What's it all for?"

Keith started to answer, stopped, tried again: "Uh. I don't think anybody can answer those questions. My old man used to talk a lot about the history of the Mummers. You can trace them back for centuries, back to Colonial times when they were just random gangs of men wandering around on the First, shooting off guns and raising hell. But you can't say when they became Mummers. They just kind of evolved.''

"I see."

The Fancy club was less than a block away. A hundred-fifty strong, they strutted in neatly ordered rows, their ostrich-plume headdresses bobbing, the feathered, mirrored, and bedangled "capes"—more like false wings than capes, for they towered above the marchers and out to the sides— dipping to the odd cadence of the Mummer's strut.

"Who are they?" Fletch asked, indicating a number of darkly dressed, furtive figures slipping quickly through the crowd, roughly parallel to the band.

"Don't look!" he hissed. "You're supposed to pretend you don't see them."

"But who are they?"

"Men in Black. They're the spotters. They locate certain people and point them out to the King Clown for a tapping-out or . . .or whatever," he finished lamely. At her questioning glance, he added, "The King Clown is their captain, the one marching in front. King Clown used to be a type of costume, but now there's just the one."

Except for the traditional face paint, King Clown's costume was nothing like a real clown's. His cape was a full twelve feet high, and he glittered with sequins and mirrors and even a bit of diffraction grating, which must have come from somebody's grandmother's trunk. Two guylines led from the tips of the cape to his hands, so he could manage the ungainly costume in the light breezes that sometimes blew up. He strutted with great dignity, occasionally bowing slightly to each side in acknowledgment of the cheers that sprang up.

Keith indicated the Men in Black with a sideways nod of his head. "Look. They've marked somebody."

Four Men in Black had slipped up on an unsuspecting watcher, quietly jostling people aside to take up positions immediately behind him.

The Center City troupe Mummer-stepped briskly down Two Street, banjos, glockenspiels, and horns not playing but at ready and, for an instant, looked as if they would pass the man by. Then King Clown raised a gloved hand, and they stopped, wheeling ninety degrees as one man. The Clown strutted around the troupe and into the crowd. They nervously backed away from him.

The Mummer chief strode up to the marked man. The victim flinched away, found himself held firm by the Men in Black. He blanched. King Clown stretched out his arms, took the man by the shoulders.

One arm rose once, twice, again. It fell on the man's shoulders with an audible crack three times. Then King Clown whirled, returning to his troupe. The crowd cheered, and the band broke into "Oh Dem Golden Slippers," turned, and marched on. The man from the crowd joined a modey band of followers in mufti, strutting happily after the troupe.

"What the hell was that all about?" Fletch asked.

"It was a tapping-out. The man was a candidate, and the Mummers have accepted him. He's one of the lucky ones."

"I wouldn't mind knowing more about all this. Do you think I could get an interview with the captain?"

"Don't do it," Keith said tensely. "Don't have anything at all to do with the Mummers. Just smile and watch the parade."

"Why?"

"Forget I said anything." Keith stared down the street, ignoring her as best he could. The Fancy troupe approached, all glitter and flash, advancing, pausing, and advancing again in their odd half dance, half march. It was off, Keith realized, and strange that it took an out-of-towner's questions to make him aware of such a simple fact.

King Clown's troupe was parallel to them, marching past, when the signal came again. They wheeled to face the crowd. King Clown strutted into the crowd, direcdy at Keith and Retch. Sweet Jesus, Keith prayed silendy. Let it be somebody else.

People backed away and King Clown stood before Fletch, placed his hands on her shoulders. He waited a beat. Then he leaned down and kissed her gendy on both cheeks. She smiled brighdy at him and dipped a curtsey. He turned as if to move away.

Then he whirled again, and before Keith could react, the gloved hands were on his shoulders, and he was staring into the man's bloodshot eyes. Keith tried to jerk away, but several pairs of hands held him firm. He could see the weave of the Clown's costume, could smell the alcohol on his breath.

Slowly, very slowly, King Clown bent over and kissed his cheeks.

In an instant the restraining hands, Men in Black, King Clown, and all were gone. The band was Mummer-strutting away, playing "Death March of a Marionette."

Fletch's eyes sparkled and she started to say something bright. Keith grabbed her hand, yanked her into a crowd that shrank away from them. Fletch hung back laughingly, and he gave her arm a ferocious tug.

"Come on!"

"What's the matter?"

"Shut up and run!"

Away from Two Street the city was virtually empty. By law all citizens had to watch at least the middle third of the parade. This worked to their advantage—there was no one about to report the direction of their flight—but it also made them visible a long way off, if anyone was already on their trail. Rounding a corner, Keith came face to face with a large, distraught black man. For an instant he thought he was dead, and then the man had turned and fled, another victim like themselves.

"Why are we running?" Fletch gasped.

"Because they're trying to kill us." He would answer no more of her questions. He needed all his attention to escape.

As a boy he had played Mummer Hunt, both as victim and assassin, with an intensity rivaled only by the real thing. So he fled from the waterfront because he knew that was the first place the hunters would search. He passed by fire escapes and basement windows that looked like they could be forced for much the same reason. North and west he headed, toward the Mummer Hall, which used to be the art museum.

Only when they'd reached their goal did he realize he'd had a goal in mind at all. It was a pre-Meltdown parking garage, its four levels gaping open to the winds. Panting, he arrived at the stairwell. It was dark and too grittily rubbled to take footprints. Once inside they could ascend slowly, try to regain their breaths. As they climbed, Keith explained as best he could.

After the burnings and panic murders of the Meltdown evacuations, Philadelphia's city government collapsed. There was no help to be had from the state, which had just lost its capital, or from the Feds, who were busy with several million refugees. The self-destruction of New York City in a conflagration of riots triggered a world-wide depression almost as a matter of course.

The only organized power remaining in the city was the Mummers. Clowns and buffoons, they existed only because they wanted to. Decent men, they marched and collected money to keep the last hospitals going. When there were no police, they organized volunteers to patrol the neighborhoods. It wasn't long before they controlled the city, and not long after that before they realized that fact.

The Kiss began as a way of flensing mutants and carriers of genetic disease from the population. It was extended to include those who refused vaccinations, when the epidemics began. Finally its potential as a political tool was realized, and no reasons were given.

The rooftop was cold and windy. Bent over, Keith scuttled to the tool shed standing in its center and beckoned for Fletch to follow.

"Push on the upper-right corner of the doorway there." He grabbed the opposite corner and tugged as she did so. After a heartbreaking instant's hesitation, the door lurched in its frame and tilted askew. There was a gap wide enough to crawl inside.

Keith led the way and, when Fletch crawled after, slammed the door shut with the heel of his palm. "I found a keg of tenpenny nails here when I was a kid," he said. "Rusty, but I sold them for scrap. So probably nobody else has figured out how to get in.

"Very clever," Fletch said. "Now that we're trapped in here, what do we do next?"

"Look. I think I've done pretty good so far," Keith said angrily. "At least I've bought some time to think." He paced the shed—it wasn't large, maybe eight by ten feet—his footing unsure on the rotting burlap sacks that littered the floor. "Why don't you come up with something? You're the one who got me into this mess, miss hotshot reporter.''

"So you know about that," she said.

"Bowles looked through your pockets. Jesus Christ!— what kind of monster story were you working on to get the Mummers so upset?" It was cold inside the workshed. Dim light seeped through vacant nailholes in the roof. He could see Fletch watching him steadily, a vague gray figure.

"Could we sneak aboard one of the ships going to Boston?" she asked.

" 'Could we sneak aboard one of the ships going to Boston?' " he mimicked her bitterly. "No, we could not.

There'll be Mummer agents at every—I can't believe how you've messed up my life! You know, I was doing okay until you came along.''

"Keith," Fletch said quiedy.

"At least I didn't have half of Philadelphia trying to gun me down!" "Keith."

He stopped, looked at her. "Yeah?"

"Stop ranting, and tell me how we're going to get out of here alive."

He angrily thrust his hands in his pockets. There was a slight jangle of metal objects, a few copper coins, a salvageable nail or two—and his key ring.

"God damn," he whispered. He drew out the ring, triumphantly separated out the key to his tanker truck. "Hey, I may not be dead after all."

"Let me see." Fletch snapped her fingers and extended her hand. He could tell by her expression that she had already deduced his plan.

Keith shoved his keys back in his pocket. "Forget it. I don't trust you, and I can't think of a single reason to take you along. You've been deadweight so far, and I might be better off without you entirely."

There was a brief silence. "I see." Something rustled in the gloom. "You want your quid pro quo." With a faint slumping sound, Fletch's kaftan fell to the floor.

"I don't—what do you mean?"

Fletch advanced a step, her eyes steady, her voice preter-naturally calm. "You can take what you want, can't you? I can't exacdy yell for help."

"Hey, I-"

"It's understandable. You're a man, and you've got me alone. Happens all the time."

She was quite close now. Keith flinched back. "You're twisting what I said."

Her expression was scornful. "But you are a man, aren't you? I mean . . . you can still perform?"

Outraged, Keith seized her arms. Cloth bunched up under his angry, clutching fingers. For an instant the tableau held, then he released her, dropping his head in embarrassment. "Hey, I'm sorry," he said, "I really didn't mean to—"

"Oh, come here." She pulled him back to her.

Their lovemaking was almost tender. Fletch spread out her kaftan to protect them from the icy-cold burlap sacks, and they undressed kneeling atop it. Some of what they did was new to Keith, but he assumed from her lack of criticism, indeed her passionate response, that she could not tell.

When it was over, Fletch tugged and jerked the robe about the two of them like a thick, heavy blanket. It was warm within the robe, and tangled within it, Keith felt oddly secure and sure of himself. He felt a sudden, childish urge to shout or yodel or laugh with glee.

"I would've taken you along anyway," he said, not knowing whether it was true or not. "You really didn't have to . . . you know."

Fletch laid a finger on his lips. "It's better this way. Now we can operate as a team."

It was perhaps three in the morning before they made their move. They slipped through the streets cautiously, every sense brisding, avoiding the policed sections. It took an effort to walk slowly, to keep from hunching shoulders and scut-ding from shadow to shadow.

Keith was drenched with sweat by the time they made it to the Company's parking lot. Row upon row of trucks stretched into the darkness; all was still. He paced off the way to Slot 97.

Laying a hand on the cold doorhandle, he grinned and whispered, "I'm begining to think this might work." He yanked the door open.

"Stupid," Jimmy Bowles said. "Very stupid, brother man."

Keith jerked back reflexively, froze. Bowles was sitting in the cab, a gun in one hand. It was pointed straight at Keith.

"You've really blown it," Bowles marveled. A corked bot-de, half full of some dark fluid, lay in Bowles' lap. Its label was nearly rubbed away from endless handlings and refill-ings.

Behind Keith, Fletch shifted her weight ever so subdy. The gun flicked in her direction.

"Don't you move, bitch!" The veins in Bowles' forehead stood out angrily. He passed his free hand over his brow, wiping away sweat. Keith realized that the man was deeply, dangerously drunk.

Bowles' eyes glared at Keith for an instant, then dropped. His face underwent a strange alteration of expression, becoming almost maudlin. "Listen, buddy, I didn't know they would bang on you. I just passed the word about your lady friend's papers up the line, the way I was supposed to." He groped absendy for the botde, uncorked it one-handed. "And then a few hours later they called me up to the Hall—in a car, man, can you believe that?—to say it all over again to the big cats. And they decided to bang the both of you." He took a long swig from the bottle, holding his head sideways and watching them from the corners of his eyes. "I did my best, man. Told them you didn't know from nothin', but the word was to bang you both."

As he talked, Bowles had let the gun sink slowly to rest on his knees. His eyes were unfocused, half lost in introspection. Keith mentally took a deep breath. It's now or never, he thought. He dove for the gun.

There was time enough to take in an incredible amount of detail. The clumsy way his body moved, not at all smoothly, not at all responsive to his will, so that he more fell than leaped upon Bowles. The way Bowles' hand jerked up involuntarily, the gun's muzzle wobbling in a jagged S through the air. The way his hands connected with Bowles' wrist, pushing past cold steel, gripping aged sinew. Contact made, the hand flew up and to the side, and with a shattering roar, the gun went off.

Keith found himself stomach down on the seat, gun clutched maniacally in both hands. He choked it by the barrel, by the back of the stock. There was a fierce ringing in his ears. His palms tingled.

Jimmy Bowles stared stupidly at a hole in the cab's roof. "Aw, man, you didn't have to do that," he mummbled.

Fletch touched Keith's shoulder, put a hand beneath the gun. He straightened his fingers slowly, letting the gun drop. She snapped it up, held it trained on Bowles.

Bowles ignored it. "Didn't think I could go through with it," he said, almost to himself. Then, "Take the truck, man."

He opened the door, unsteadily climbed out. With a glance at Fletch, Keith straightened, slid behind the wheel, put the key in the ignition.

As they eased out of the lot, Bowles was standing alone in Slot 97 crying drunkenly.

They crashed the barrier at top speed, almost 70 kph, leaving splinters of wood flying behind them. The Mummer agents, caught unprepared, fired after them. Three bullets went through the body of the tanker, making hollow, gong-ing noises. Fortunately the tank was empty, and its last cargo apparently not flammable. Something ricocheted about the underside of the truck, as the guards tried to shoot out the tires. Keith kept going.

Just beyond the barrier some joker had put up a sign reading: RADIOACTIVE CONTAMINATION. DRIVE FAST. He proceeded to do just that.

"I don't like the idea of going through the Drift," he said.

"You can think of a better way to lose them? Take an old combat reporter's advice, son. Move fast and don't look back. Hey, isn't this where you hit me?"

"No, it's a few miles on." The truck crested a hill, and he pointed off to their left. "See that blue glow just below the horizon?"

"Yeah." It was a light, eerie smear in the distant black land. No trees obscured it, and it had a curious liquid quality.

"Cherenkov radiation. When the Meltdown happened, there were five trucks loaded with fuel rods they tried to get out. The state police turned them back somewhere around here, so they drove them into the swamps. It makes a good landmark. Your bike's somewhere beyond there."

"Well, keep a sharp eye out for the spot. I want my saddlebags back.

Keith discovered the hole in the fuel tank when they stopped for the bags. A dribble of alcohol was leaking out, one slow, steady drop at a time. The bullet along the underside of the truck had apparently sent a sliver of something through the tank and, in the process, damaged the fuel gauge. Neither Keith nor Fletch could think of any way to fix it. "We should head east," Keith suggested. "Get as far out of the Drift as we can before it dies."

"Will the Mummers follow us into the Drift?"

"Yes."

"Then New Jersey's not good enough. We go north."

The engine breathed its last at dawn. Following Fletch's directions, he let the truck glide to a halt just off the road in a stand of stunted pines.

Because of the bullet hole in the cab's roof, they were both wearing their masks already. Fletch hopped out, slid her rifle from its sheath in the saddlebags, and snapped, "Let's get moving. You take the bags and I'll lead. Don't step in any patches of snow. We can't afford to leave a trail."

Keith shouldered the saddlebags and followed her down the road the way they had come for perhaps a quarter of a kilometer, and then up a slope on the opposite side from the abandoned truck. In places the ground crunched beneath his feet, and climbing the slope was hard work.

"Hey, we've been running a long time," Keith grumbled.

"We'll rest at the top of the hill. Right now we're exposed."

The sun had risen slightly, and shone weakly through the clouds by the time they could rest. The sky was white and gray, almost colorless. The endless hills beneath were not much better. They huddled behind a tangle of thorny bushes, near to a cluster of spruce trees whose needles had a distinctly brownish tinge. A half hour passed.

"Here they come," Fletch said. "Following our trail." She peered through her binoculars, careful to keep them in shadow.

With a low growl, three four-wheel-drive vehicles swung into view. They sped down the roadway in formation, coming to a halt by the abandoned tanker. Six dark figures climbed out, swarmed over the site. They moved quickly, alertly, keeping each other covered at all times. After ten minutes, they returned to their vehicles and moved on down the road, at a much slower-pace.

Fletch stood. "They go that way and we go this way," she said with satisfaction. "Let's go, kid. Miles to go before we sleep, you know."

They were trudging up an endless country road, detouring around the scattered patches of snow. The sun was failing. Keith stepped on a cancerous-looking growth, bent achingly to scoop it up and throw it into the lifeless woods at the side. ". . . snow," Fletch said. Her voice was muffled by the nucleopore and Keith couldn't make out her words.

"What did you say?" he asked, annoyed.

"I said it's like snow!" Then, seeing his difficulty, she fell back a step. "The steam explosions were like a geyser. They sent particulate matter up where the winds could catch it, and it filtered down like snow. Even then, it still got blown about, so you'll have bare spots and hots spots throughout the Drift. The concentrations are still too small to see, but you can gauge them by their effects."

She stopped near an old stone farmhouse nesded within an almost healthy-looking stand of trees, and did a quick scan of their limited horizons through her binoculars. Save for a collapsed front porch, the house was virtually intact. "Not bad," she said. "We'll stay here tonight."

They forced the lock on the kitchen door, and chocked it shut with an old dresser. The interior was untouched from the time of the evacuations. Cigars moldered in a humidor atop the refrigerator. A child's drawing taped to a cupboard crumbled on being touched.

There was a wood stove in the living room. They broke up furniture for firewood and heated tins of beef from Fletch's saddlebags. They had to lift their nucleopores for each bite, replacing them immediately after.

When they were done, Fletch scooped up the empty meat tins and took them outside. She paused on the stoop, cocked her head. "Listen," she said.

Keith joined her, strained his ears. After a moment he caught it—a long, almost musical howl. A pause, and there was another, equally faint howl in reply. "Some kind of mutated dogs," Keith said. "I've seen them. Big, shaggy animals, like wolves."

"Actually, they're a hybrid," Fletch said. "A perfecdy natural cross between a dog and a wolf. They migrated down from Maine a few years back, and now they're expanding through the Drift." She paused. "Good luck to them, say I."

Keith stared into the darkness. But trees blocked his vision, and there was no chance of his seeing the animal. "Hybrid, mutant, what's the difference?" he asked.

Fletch gawked at him. "They really do keep you poor sods ignorant, don't they?" she marveled. She threw the tins away from the house. They fell with a clatter. "The only mutations you have to worry about coming out of the Drift are the new diseases that pop up every year." She stood still, listening. "No animals. Usually there'll be rats at least, in the safe spots." She shrugged. "Oh well, I still say we're okay. Beddy-bye time for me."

She led the way into the house, leaving him to slide the dresser back against the door. When Keith got to the living room, she had dropped her robe and was shedding her shirt. Her breasts were freckled, and they swayed gracefully as she moved. Keith watched them, fascinated, wondered did he really want to make love to this woman again? The passion of the previous night had a strong hold on him, and yet it was tinged with distaste, as if it had been something shameful and unclean.

Fletch caught his glance, looked amused. "Not tonight, boyo. You'll be stiff enough in the morning as it is."

Keith awoke feeling crippled. Fletch had him out on the road before he was awake enough to protest. They passed bleak hours on tedious roads that Fletch puzzled out from a pre-Meltdown Geodesic Survey map.

Once they had to flee the road and hide when a distant growl warned them of an approaching four-wheeler. They watched it go past, two of the Mummer assassins in its seat. Still later they were attacked by a feral cat, a small orange-and-white animal whose ancestors had been domestic pets. It ran at them yowling when they had paused for lunch, and Fletch had to club it to death with the stock of her rifle.

She turned over the small carcass with her boot. "See right there?" she asked. "That big sore on its side? It must've made its lair in a hot spot. It came down with radiation sickness, and the pain made it crazy enough to attack us."

"Fletch," Keith said wearily, "when are we going to be out of this hellish place? I don't know how much more of this I can take."

She gathered him into her arms, gave him a hug. "There, there. I've got friends not far from here. There's a small community of Drifters I know of. They're all outcasts and vagabonds, but reliable in their own way. When we get there we can rest—maybe tonight, if we're lucky."

Two days passed. A noontime sun was shining when they reached the mouth of a small, shallow valley. A handful of nineteenth-century buildings were clustered below, two or three from the mid-twentieth anomalously mingled in. "There it is," Fletch said. She began loading needlelike projectiles into her rifle.

"What's its name?"

"Nameless."

Keith couldn't tell from her answer whether the community was called Nameless or simply lacked a name. But he was weary and short-tempered from three days of forced marches and sexless nights, and he was damned if he was going to ask. "Not much to look at."

Fletch grunted, flicked the safety on her rifle.

It was a short thing, the rifle, about the length of a sawed-off shotgun. The stock was carved to fit her forearm, the trigger was far up along its length, and its barrel, though of normal thickness, had a surprisingly small muzzle. Keith thought, not for the first time, how handy it would have been back in Philadelphia.

Fletch removed her mask, stowed it in a kaftan pocket. "This valley's one of the clean spots I told you about, but you should keep your mask on anyway. Just in case. When we go inside, though, take it off. These people are touchy. Say as litde as possible. Don't criticize anything. Don't start any fights."

"Some friends," Keith snorted.

Fletch raised the rifle so that its barrel rested against her shoulder and its muzzle pointed skyward. She led the way down.

The cluster of buildings had once been the industrial core of a small mill town. Over the years the outlying houses had ' been torn down, bit by bit, for building supplies, for firewood, sometimes just for the sake of doing something. Now all that remained was a miscellany of old factory buildings bordering a small, swift-running river. Sheds and stone additions choked the narrow streets, making the whole a combination windbreak and maze.

There were flickers of movement in the higher windows as they walked past, faces that appeared and were gone, like goldfish coming to the fore of their bowls and whisking away. "There must be a hundred people in this warren," Keith whispered, awed. "What do they all do?"

"Whatever they have to. Now shut up!"

They turned a corner, came face to face with an ancient gas station. Its windows were boarded over, and towers of old tires almost obscured it from view. Keith wondered what possible use anyone could have for them, did not ask. A bell over the door jangled as they went in.

The interior was a packrat's fantasy. Dimly lit by alcohol, lamps were clutters and tangles and piles of fishing equipment, furniture, musical instruments, wood stoves—a thousand items, all battered and old, all obviously looted from homes abandoned during the Meltdown. A pale, pockmarked face appeared in the shadowy rear. "You after girls?" it asked.

"Hell no," Fletch said. She slid the rifle into its sheath, almost unbalancing Keith with the sudden weight in the saddlebags he still carried. The face advanced, became a tall, vacant-eyed man with a slouch belly. She threw him a silver nickel, and he snagged it out of the air. "I want two beers and whatever slop you're serving today."

The man stared at them silendy. "Tables to the rear," he said, and was gone.

Fletch went back to sit down. Keith remained standing, poking through the mounds of objects. He came across a mirror, wiped the grime from it. His reflection was grim. Mean lines around the mouth, a scowl creasing his forehead. He blinked, trying to erase the wildness in his eyes. No good. A smile was gobbled up by his mask. He pushed it down. A red triangle of chafe marks remained. He touched them lighdy with a fingertip, pushed the uncombed hair back from his forehead. Still he retained the look of a hunted animal.

Keith took a deep breath of air that rushed into his lungs so readily he felt momentarily dizzy. To hell with it, he decided; he was not going to put his mask back on until they left.

"Susie!" A gigantic, black-bearded man exploded from the rear of the room. He rushed forward, flung his arms around Fletch, lifted her into the air.

Keith had instinctively grabbed for Fletch's rifle, but drew back when he heard her laugh happily. "Bear, you old pirate!" She hugged him, thumped his back vigorously.

They sat at the table. Keith drew up a chair and joined them. "But what are you doing here?" Fletch asked. "Didn't you have business"—she lowered her voice—"along the coast?"

"Haw! It was a setup. They've got a new administration that's cracking down on smuggling, much good it'll do them. But I've got friends, yes, and they warned me away." He shifted his head toward Keith. "He's okay, right?"

Fletch nodded, performed introductions. Bear was about Fletch's age, perhaps a little older, and he had a bit of a paunch that bulged over the table whenever he leaned forward. "We met when I was covering the Northern Liberation Front," Fletch told Keith. "The guerillas set up their camps in the Drift because the government troops wouldn't go after them."

The pale man brought their beers and two bowls of watery-looking stew. Bear waited for him to leave, then said quiedy, "Listen, Susie. I can see you're planning to rest here a day or so, but I think maybe you and your young friend here should come stay with me in my cabin instead." A stray beam of light glinted on a single gold earring in his matted hair.

Fletch was all serious attentiveness. "Why?"

"I was here two days ago, visiting the"—he looked embarrassed—"the girls in back. And some men came in, asking questions about you. So I decided to hang around, in case you might need some help maybe. But they looked like killers to me. Six or eight of them. Southern accents."

'' Philadelphia accents?''

"Yeah, I think."

"Damn." Her finger tapped the table. "Finish your beer, Keith. Bear, have you still got your buggy?"

"Out back. I've got my own fuel still, too. I'm a rich man!"

The buggy was an open-pit four-wheel drive, and Bear drove it like a madman. Huddled between Bear and Fletch, Keith concentrated on keeping warm and worried for the first time about frostbite. The others chattered happily over his head, ignoring him and his' misery.

"We're here!" Bear roared finally. He drove the buggy along a nearly nonexistent road, across a rough stretch of meadow, and under a stand of gnarled elms. While Bear was covering the vehicle with a tarp, Keith looked about for the cabin. He couldn't see it.

"Back this way." Bear led them up through the trees and gestured with a mittened hand. "How do you like it? Not much, but it's home, hey?"

The cabin was built into the slope of a steep hillside. A log wall with one window and a door and a bit of wood-shingled roof were all that showed.

Bear scooped an armful of wood from a stack beside the door, led them inside. He talked rapidly, as if trying to make a good appearance for a cabin that looked like nothing much. "Built it myself," he said. "Dug it into the hill, so the earth kinda evens out the temperature. I scavenged a lot of styrofoam, packed it between the walls and the earth. Doesn't need much heating wood. Leave it alone and it stays about thirteen-degrees C constant. Summer and winter."

"Very nice," Keith said politely, not meaning it.

Fletch studied the cabin judiciously, thumping the walls with her fist. She came to an inside door, raised an eyebrow. "Root cellar," Bear explained. Fletch smiled.

"So this is your fabled cabin," she said admiringly. "I never thought I'd actually be here." She examined the shelves crammed with boxes and sacks that covered two walls, while Bear pulled out prodigious amounts of bedding from several trunks.

He spilled a final armful onto the floor, then stopped and looked ruefully at the mound he'd created, as if seeing it for the first time. "That may be a bit much," he mumbled embarrassedly.

"Do you really think so?" Fletch asked innocently. Their eyes met and they both laughed in a warm and comfortable way. Their laughter died down, but they remained staring into one another's eyes.

"Keith," Fletch said. "Maybe you should run outside."

"That's a good idea," Bear said. He thrust Fletch's binoculars into Keith's hands. "Play with these for a while." He winked in a warm, conspiratorial fashion, gently pushed Keith toward the door.

Keith stumbled outside. Someone kicked the door shut behind him. He heard the beginning of an intimate chuckle and hastened away.

It was cold outside. A wisp of smoke rose from the cabin's flue and disappeared a few feet up into the gray sky. Keith wandered off to one side and came up against a bramble-choked ravine. It was unpassable; he chunked a rock down it, but didn't hear the splash of water.

Choking with rage, Keith slammed a fist against a gnarled tree trunk. Wood crumbled away, leaving a bite-shaped gap in the tree. He felt sick and confused. Could he really be jealous of a man twice his age? Not long ago he hadn't even been sure he wanted to make love with Fletch a second time. They had made love only once, and then under special circumstances, with death nipping at their heels; Fletch had shown no interest since. He had told himself repeatedly that she was too weary or that she had a low sex drive and required the spice of immediate danger to arouse her. But the tryst with Bear disproved both theories.

There was only one answer: Fletch had used him. He held no sexual interest for her; she's needed a way out of Philadelphia, and she had bought it.

Well grow up, kid, he told himself. Welcome to the real world. But unbidden memories arose in his mind, of her flesh, of their vigorous coupling, images that were at once compelling and newly repulsive.

Keith stumbled away from the ravine, trying to control his thoughts. He raised the binoculars to his eyes, scanned the horizon in an attempt to distract himself. Beneath the amplified image of dead and winter-barren trees, something moved. A needle. Set inside the binoculars was an unmarked graduated scale, with a small red pointer that sprang up when the glasses were raised to the horizontal.

The needle pointed to a position barely on the scale. Keith shifted the binoculars and the reading held steady. Raise the glasses to the sky, lower them to the ground, and the needle sank below the scale. Hold them steady and the position was constant, wherever they were pointed, at rock or hillside, at darkness or light.

The view through the binoculars misted over and was replaced with an involuntary inner vision of Fletch and Bear pleasuring each other on the cabin floor. Keith blinked angrily, shoved the glasses back into their case, stalked on down the slope a way. His feet were growing numb. He stamped them against the ground, wishing the two would hurry up and get done.

Some time later, Fletch appeared in the doorway and waved him in. He entered sullenly, made straight for the wood stove, and hunched over it, holding his hands to the warmth and rubbing them together. From the corner of his eye he could not avoid seeing Bear pulling his trousers up. The man's pubic hair was black against his pale skin, and Keith had to admit inwardly that Bear was better endowed than himself. This helped things not one bit.

For the rest of the afternoon and on through the evening, Bear and Fletch talked avidly of politics in the Greenstate Alliance up north and of goings-on within the Drift. Keith listened quietly, having nothing to contribute. He learned a little, but, for the most part, the dialogue relied on knowledge of previous events that he lacked and was absolutely meaningless to him. He feel asleep to their bright, relaxed chatter.

Something roared at the foot of the hill, a great bass noise that peaked and fell and slowly grew less as it became more distant. Keith's eyes flew open. It was late night, and the Cabin was flooded with gray shadow. "Fletch?" he said. "Bear?" The cabin was empty.

Keith went to the door, stood shivering in the cold. Downslope there was no shadow where Bear's buggy had been. The distant noise dwindled, faded away. He had been abandoned.

Stunned, he went back inside, built up the fire, lit an alcohol lamp. What did he do now? He was somewhere within the Drift, with not the foggiest idea of what roads led out and an unknown number of Mummer assassins scouring the countryside looking for him. His eye was suddenly caught by a square of something white.

It was a sheet of paper. Fletch had left her saddlebags behind, open and partially emptied, with a note atop them. The inner seam of one bag had been ripped open and something—it must have been thin and flat and slightly flexible to be hidden there—removed. The rifle was gone too. Keith picked up the note. It began without preamble.

Heading for coast—Bear thinks he can get me on a ship for Boston. Suggest you keep heading north. Am leaving you most of my supplies & yr partner's gun. Binocs contain ionization meter—don't sleep anywhere that registers over halfway mark. I put a checkmark on map where Nameless is. If you can't figure it out, Bear should be back in a day or two & can help.

Angrily, he crumpled the note and threw it on the floor. "God damn you to hell, Suzette Fletcher," he said aloud. The words seemed foolish and childlishly spiteful even as he said them. He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself.

To his surprise, it was not all that difficult. There was a certain grim satisfaction in knowing the worst: that he had been used and then discarded, that Fletch felt no more than a passing affection for him at best, of the sort one might bestow on a stray dog without the least intention of bringing it home. In a way, the knowledge was easier to handle than the sullen suspicion of it had been. He knelt to take inventory of the saddlebags.

He worked briskly, shoving back inside those items he might need and tossing aside those he saw no use for. He lacked a knife and plundered Bear's possessions until he found one—an Arkansas toothpick with a leather sheath— and clipped it to his belt. The ionization counter would come in handy. He set the binoculars carefully beside the bags and began studying the map.

Keith had about decided he could make his way out of the Drift if only he could retrace his way back to Nameless, when he heard another noise. Dousing the lamp, he picked up his pistol and went outside.

There was a deep growling beyond the hills, a changing chord of four bass lines that rose and fell independent of each other, one growl significantly louder than the rest. Crouching in the cold, Keith tried to place its direction. East? West? It echoed and rebounded, rose and fell, so that there was no hope of getting a fix on it. A pale moon floated high in the sky, visible at rare intervals through gaps in the clouds. The noise grew.

Below and to his left a stretch of road was visible through a break in the trees. A shadow slid across it. Keith shifted position, moving behind an outcropping boulder, and waited.

A buggy careened to a halt below, and two figures jumped out. They were immediately running up the slope, one with long graceful strides, and the other lumbering after.

Three gray shadows slipped across the distant roadway. The roar of engines peaked briefly, treble notes coming together in a high, angry whine.

Keith drew a bead on the leader of the two coming up the hill, wondered whether he'd actually be able to shoot, to kill a human being in cold blood.

"You'd better have some damn fine weapons up there," the lead figure called over her shoulder. Fletch. Keith lowered his pistol.

"Weapons I got," Bear shouted back. "Miracles I'm fresh out of.''

"We'll make our own."

They ran past him, Fletch sparing a single cool glance in passing, and into the cabin. Shoving the gun into his belt, Keith followed.

Bear was wresding a large chest from one of the shelves. "I'm pretty sure I nailed that fink from back in town," he grunted. "You can bet they wouldn't've been waiting for us without his help. Bastard! If he got away, I'll go back and finish him."

Keith smiled sardonically. "Welcome back, Fletch." "Later. What've you got?"

Bear rummaged through the box, yanking things out and tossing them across the floor. "Incendiary grenades. Bando-

Hers. One of those Israeli machine guns from—what was the war again?"

"Before my time."

"It's a museum piece, anyway. But it's in perfect working order, so maybe I'll use it."

"Got into a Hide trouble, did you?"

"Give me that," Fletch said, reaching for a new weapon Bear had uncovered. "I'm pretty good with those."

Keith's coolness faded as the two armed themselves, stead-fasdy paying him no attention. He was not at all sure that he was on Bear's and Fletch's side, but he knew that the Mummers would consider him so.

The growl of approaching vehicles died. Bear grabbed his weaponry, bolted for the door.

"I'll take the left," he threw over his shoulder. "Tell the kid how to provide some distraction, and take the right."

"Gotcha." Fletch took her rifle and thrust it into Keith's hands. It felt odd. He realized that he didn't even know how to fire it. She flipped something on the side of the stock. "Okay, now the safety's off The rifle's ready. I want you to lie down flat in the back of the cabin—they're shooting uphill, so they'll probably fire over you. Shoot at the sky, understand? Don't try to take any of them out when I'm somewhere in front of you—just provide distraction."

"Dammit, I can fight too!" Keith said.

"Like hell. Now, this thing's a compression launcher. The projectiles are small rockets; they ignite about halfway up the barrel, so the thing has a hell of a kick, remember that. The needles hit at supersonic velocities, and the shock wave ruptures every internal organ in the body. If you have to, don't shoot fancy, aim at the middle of the body. Anywhere you hit is lethal. You've got a hundred shots, and don't forgot to save the last for yourself. You stick the muzzle in your mouth and aim up. Got all that?"

"Yeah, sure," he mumbled.

"Sure you do." She tousled his hair, ran for the door, paused just behind it.

A needle of red light, so brief it almost wasn't there, lanced through the cabin, leaving a small charred hole in the front wall, and another at an angle to it in the back.

"Laser pistols," Fletch snorted. "Kiddie weapons!" She was gone.

Three more needles of light laced the cabin. Keith threw himself to the floor to the rear, as directed. Whatever weird weapon Fletch was handling made high, almost whistling shrieks. There was a small explosion, followed by the chatter of Bear's machine gun.

Keith suddenly remembered the rifle, lifted it, pointing its muzzle up and through the window. He squeezed the trigger and the window exploded outward, in a fountain of glass and casement splinters. There was a deafening boom as the projectile went supersonic, and the stock slammed into Keith's shoulder, numbing it, half rolling him over. He fired again, sending a shot through the roof. Another incredible roar.

Plaster, earth, bits of wood showered down. There was a hole the size of a giant's fist in the ceiling.

Four threads of laser light winked in and out of existence, one after the other. Keith's eyes flooded with tears as he realized how right Bear and Fletch had been to leave him behind. He was confused, almost panicked, of no use in a battle that required keeping one's wits.

Somewhere both Fletch and Bear were running, shouting. Their weapons clattered high and low. An incendiary grenade went off, turning night to day for an instant, and there was a hideous, garbled scream.

Blindly Keith fired shot after shot, just barely remembering to aim above the horizon. A laser burst struck the hanging alcohol lamp, exploding it, spilling a gout of alcohol over the wood stove.

With a whoomp, the alcohol was ignited by the hot iron stove. Flames reached up toward the ceiling, licked against the wall. A dribble of alcohol running across the wooden floor went up and Keith tried futilely to beat it out with slaps of his jacketed arm. The flames grew and spread.

Time and again laser bursts pierced the walls but, as promised, they were always too high. The cabin was heating up now, and smoke gathering below the ceiling. Some of it slipped out the hole in the roof, but more was generated than left. The cabin was filling with smoke. Keith gasped and choked. Assassins or no, he had to get out.

He crawled to the door, peeked out at floor level. He could see nothing. It was quieter outside now. There was a short burst of weapons fire, then silence. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He drew himself into a crouch, and ran.

The front wall was burning now. As the cool night air hit him, Keith was involuntarily reminded of a time from his childhood, when a bunch of neighborhood kids had torched a house in an abandoned section of Philadelphia. They'd ringed the building, standing with sticks and old baseball bats, waiting for the rats to come out. Then, when the rats were forced out, maddened with pain, their fur ablaze, they'd methodically clubbed the animals to death.

Keith ran downslope, flung himself to the ground. He peered into the darkness, circles swimming in front of his eyes as they adjusted. He thought he detected motion there and down there.

He snapped his rifle toward a sudden bulking of shadow downslope, and almost fired before he recognized the silhouette as Bear. A sliver of light passed neatly through Bear's head, and he fell. At that same instant, an incendiary grenade went off, briefly illuminating a Mummer assassin. He was on his feet, running, and he twisted in surprise at its sudden glare. Awkwardly he fell on his gun hand, the laser pistol skittering into the night.

Keith shot at the man, not taking time to aim. It made a hell of a noise, and probably hit nothing. His nerves crawled, but there was no answering fire.

Something hulked to one side. "Kid ..."

He whirled and made a snap shot, almost from instinct. The projectile went supersonic with a shattering crash, and the moon broke free of the clouds, briefly flooding the hillside with dim light. He saw Fletch.

He saw her mouth open and neck arch back, as if in the throes of sexual agony. Her blond hair flew forward, back, lashed her face. Her arms thrashed like a rag doll's, impossibly fluid, each broken in several places. She toppled over backward, and he knew even before he fell to his knees beside her body that she was dead.

He reached out gropingly, touched her face with his fingers. They came away warm and sticky with blood. Fletch had another—final—nosebleed. Keith squeezed his eyes shut, let them fall open again. There were no tears. What kind of cold monster have I become? he asked himself. He felt vacant, disbelieving—totally without emotion.

Fletch was dead.

One pocket of her kaftan bulged, the corner of a leather case sticking out of it. For no reason at all he picked up the case, leaving bloody fingerprints across its surface, and opened it. Her binoculars. For whatever purpose, perhaps unconsciously, she had scooped them up in the cabin. Holding them in his hand, he felt strangely moved by the binoculars. They affected him in a way that her corpse could not. They had been hers. She had touched them and used them and left them briefly to his care. Her spirit was in them.

Keith broke down in great, racking sobs, his tears totally out of control. He threw back his head and gasped for air, greatly salty drops of warm fluid running down his cheeks, and along the seal of his nucleopore.

The tears came in a gust, and when he fought them down he was empty again, cold and dry inside. You killed her, he told himself harshly. You shot her because she ditched you and ran off with Bear. Because you felt rejected and spiteful. But he couldn't gauge the emotional truth of the words. It might have been pure reflex, nerves drawn out to the point of panic and no more. Honesty forced him to admit that he did not know.

Downslope he heard a coughing, mechanical noise—the sound of an engine starting up. Keith was on his feet instantly. He ran down through the trees in long, rapid strides, heedless of the risk of falling. Branches whipped across his face, leaving raw welts, and he did not notice.

Keith burst through the trees and was beside the buggies just as the engine caught. A short spring brought him beside the right vehicle, and he was shoving his rifle into the frightened face of a Mummer assassin.

"Cut it off," he said quietly. The Mummer obeyed. Up close Keith could see that the assassin was just a kid—twenty or twenty-two at most, no older than Keith himself. Thin-faced and very, very ordinary. Keith couldn't fix the features in his mind. His subconscious demanded a gargoyle, an ogre, and reality refused to provide. If I closed my eyes, Keith thought, I wouldn't recognize him when they opened again.

"How many of you are left?" Keith asked. He held the rifle's muzzle directly on the kid's face. Scared eyes tried to focus on it.

"None, mister, just me," the kid babbled. "I'm the only one." Keith said nothing. Unnerved, the kid began again. "You killed all them. I can show you the bodies. You killed the captain ..." He broke off when Keith moved the rifle gently, massaging the boy's cheek in a small circular motion.

"Good." His voice was still quiet, preternaturally so. A part of his mind was occupied pushing thought of Fletch's death aside. Like shoveling back the ocean. "Now we come to the good question. Why?"

The kid blinked. Sweat covered his forehead. "Why?" he echoed, bleakly.

"Yes," Keith said sweetly. "Why? Why did you and your friends kill Bear and Suzette Fletcher? Why were you trying to kUl me?"

"I don't know," he said feebly.

"That's not good enough, Jocko!" Keith's voice rose to a scream, and he jerked back his rifle. He lifted it as if he were about to club the boy in his face, and only controlled the motion at the last instant. "You don't kill people just for the hell of it, you have a reason.^You have a god damned good reason! And I . . . want ... to know." He punctuated the last sentence with short, angry jabs of the rifle. The Mummer, sure he was going to die, began to cry, small quiet tears that squeezed out of the corners of his eyes and slid silently down his cheeks.

"Honest, mister, I don't know. The captain knew. But he didn't tell us. He just said we had to bang the woman. He said to get anyone that was with her, but that the woman was the dangerous one, and we had to bang her."

"Kill her," Keith said. "The word is 'kill.' Let's hear you say it."

"Kill her," the kid choked out. "But that was all we were told, mister, that was all I knew."

"You didn't kill her, though," Keith said. The kid looked at him. "I did." The kid said nothing.

Keith still held Fletch's binoculars in his left hand. He dumped them on the Mummer's lap. "Tell that to your owners. Give them her glasses for proof, and tell them I did your dirty work for you." He stood back two paces, said, "Well? What are you waiting for?"

The kid's hands fumbled with the ignition. The motor caught and he pulled out onto the road like a bat out of Hell. Keith stood watching him, his eyes filling with tears again. He wrapped an arm around a pine tree to keep from falling and once again wept uncontrollably.

By dawn he had dragged both Bear's and Fletch's bodies up to the smoldering remains of the cabin. He laid them side by side, then hesitated. It seemed like a violation of the dead.

But he had to have an answer.

Keith opened Fletch's robe and deftly undid the buttons of her shirt. The flesh underneath was an ugly black, massive bruising that had followed her death. Tucked into her belt, protruding over her stomach, was a leather portfolio. He lifted it out, flipped her robe shut.

Standing away from the corpses, his back not quite turned to them, he examined the portfolio's contents. They were handwritten manuscripts, clearly stories Fletch had been working on, cluttered with marginal notes and corrections. They were wrinkled from being carried under Fletch's belt and sewn into the lining of her saddlebags before that, but readable nonetheless.

Keith riffled through thin bundles of paper labeled "Reac-torville," "Mutations/Disease," "Mutagenic Offspr." and the like. Halfway through, he hit pay dirt: a bundle labeled "Phila/Drift." He returned the other papers to their sheath, and began reading.

It's the best-kept secret in Philadelphia. The infant mortality rate is not a matter ot public record. People disappear into the hospitals and theyword filters out that they died of "pneumonia" or "flu" or "superflu." Not a person in a thousand suspects that Philadelphia lies within the Drift.

Keith stopped reading. Here was his answer and it didn't make him any happier knowing it. Philadelphia within the Drift! It was the kiss of death for the city, once the word got out. Philadelphians had a deep, almost superstitious fear of the Drift, and had imbued their home city with mystic faith in its ability to protect them.

A single, thicker piece of paper was enclosed in the bundle. Keith thumbed it out idly. It was a copy of the map of the Drift that had been drawn up almost a century ago for the first official reports on the Meltdown. Long, curving oblongs had been drawn around the reactor site, the outermost just barely grazing Philadelphia. Fletch had jotted a dozen radiation counts onto the map and redrawn the outermost line. There was no doubt that she had done her homework, no chance of her being mistaken.

Keith tried to imagine the damage this article could do. There were over a million people in Philadelphia—it would be the biggest panic evacuation since the Meltdown. He tried to picture a million people, most of them on foot, streaming out of Philadelphia, clogging the bridges to New Jersey, swooping on the lands beyond like a plague of locusts. The United States was not a rich country the way it had been. It had lost a third of its territory in the turbulent post-Melt-down years. There wouldn't be refugee camps set up for the survivors. There would be, instead, men with guns to mow down the new threat to their economic stability.

It was literally unimaginable. Better to concentrate on matters at hand. Keith checked his rifle, paced thirty yards downhill, and raised it to his shoulder. He aimed at the hillside just above the ruins of the cabin. One after the other he shot the projectiles into the earth, until the clip was emptied, and the hillside—whether from the projectiles themselves or from their thundering reverberations—collapsed over the bodies of his former companions.

He dropped the papers on the ground, started to trudge down past the corpses of the fallen Mummer assassins. He hadn't gone far before a thought occurred to him, and he returned to scoop up the stories again.

He weighed them in his hand. There was power here if he knew how to use them. He didn't kid himself. Politics and the acquisition of power were total unknowns to him. But he could learn.

As he started the buggy, Keith became aware again of the irritation his nucleopore caused. He pulled it off, dropped it on the seat beside him. It hardly mattered now.

He shifted gears, began the long trip home to Philadelphia.

* * *

Mummers Day was sunny and blue-skied. Keith stood in the crowd, slapping his arms against his jacket from time to time to keep warm. He was not surprised when the Center City Fancy band stopped in front of him, not at all anxious when King Clown strode straight at him.

The Clown's gloved hands rested on his shoulders, and Keith looked straight into the man's bloodshot eyes. There was a still instant, then whapwhapa>A<z/)/ he had been tapped out, and King Clown was striding away. The crowd cheered.

He joined the ragtag band in mufti strutting happily after the troupe. He was a Mummer now.