FOR

Susan Casper and Christopher Casper

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support:

Michael Swanwick, Susan Casper, Jack Dann, Virginia Kidd, Ellen Datlow, Shawna McCarthy, Sheila Williams, Edward Ferman, Lewis Shiner, Bruce Sterling, Pat Lo Brutto, Terrence Rafferty, Gene Wolfe, Claire Eddy, Susan Allison, Ginjer Buchanan, Scott Edelman, Beth Meacham, Lou Aronica, Tappan King, Charles L. Grant, Stuart Schiff, Janet & Ricky Kagan, John Clute, Greg Feeley, Bob Walters, Don Wollheim, George Scithers, John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly, Jane Yolen, Rena Yount, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, Corroboree Press, the staff of Sir Speedy Xeroxing on 13th St. in Philadelphia (and especially Lisa), Joann Hill, and special thanks to my own editor, Jim Frenkel.

Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose newszine Locus (P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661; subscription rate: $31 for 12 issues by First Class Mail) was used as a reference source throughout the Summation, and to Andrew Porter, whose newszine Science Fiction Chronicle (P.O. Box 4175, New York, N.Y. 10163-4175; subscription rate: $21 for one year) was also used as a reference source throughout.

Table of Contents

Title Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION - Summation: 1984

Salvador – Lucius Shepard

Promises To Keep – Jack McDevitt

Bloodchild – Octavia E. Butler

Blued Moon – Connie Willis

A Message to the King of Brobdingnag – Richard Cowper

The Affair – Robert Silverberg

Press Enter – John Varley

New Rose Hotel – William Gibson

The Map – Gene Wolfe

Interlocking Pieces – Molly Gloss

Trojan Horse – Michael Swanwick

Bad Medicine – Jack Dann

At the Embassy Club – Elizabeth A. Lynn

Pursuit of Excellence – Rena Yount

The Kindly Isle – Frederik Pohl

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Rock On – Pat Cadigan

Sunken Gardens – Bruce Sterling

Trinity – Nancy Kress

The Trouble with the Cotton People – Ursula K. Le Guin

Twilight Time – Lewis Shiner

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Black Coral – Lucius Shepard

Friend – James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel

Foreign Skins – Tanith Lee

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Company in the Wings – R. A. Lafferty

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A Cabin on the Coast – Gene Wolfe

The Lucky Strike – Kim Stanley Robinson

BOOKS BY GARDNER DOZOIS

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Copyright Page

INTRODUCTION

Summation: 1984

In spite of its ominous literary associations, 1984 proved to be a rather quiet year for SF. There were no major scandals like 1983’s infamous Great Timescape Fiasco, no SF lines driven into oblivion by corporate greed and shortsightedness, no major editorial shakeups … but if you looked closely enough, in the right places, you could see the foundations of the genre’s future for the next decade or so being quietly laid down.

After the bitter hard winter of the recent recession in the publishing industry, there were some signs this year of an at least momentary thaw. Most promising were the creation of new SF lines, or the creative blossoming of older ones.

Bluejay Books has already survived for a good deal longer than skeptics were saying it would at the end of 1983. Bluejay had its first full year of operation in 1984, turning out, under the editorship of Jim Frenkel, an ambitious program of hardcovers and trade paperbacks, including this anthology and last year’s First Annual Collection. Major novels by Jack Dann, Joan D. Vinge, Vernor Vinge, K.W. Jeter, and others appeared from Bluejay in 1984; upcoming in 1985 are books by Connie Willis, Nancy Kress, and John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly, among others, and, if they continue to do so well, Bluejay Books could well become one of the major SF book lines of the ’80s. Even more impressive in some ways has been the success of the resurrected Ace Specials line, edited by Terry Carr. The new line of Specials—all first novels, by writers such as William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, Howard Waldrop, Carter Scholz, and Glenn Hartcourt—were probably the most talked-about and favorably-reviewed books of the year, with Gibson and Robinson’s debuts in particular generating an unusual amount of acclaim; coming up are more Specials, from Michael Swanwick and others. Meanwhile, the regular Ace/Berkley lines, under the editorship of senior editor Susan Allison and new Ace editor Ginjer Buchanan, also continued to turn out first-rate and often offbeat work by authors such as James P. Blaylock, Jody Scott, Damon Knight, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others. Tor expanded at a terrific rate this year, and under the editorship of new senior editor Beth Meacham and a number of consulting editors—David Hartwell, Terry Carr, Ben Bova—are putting together an ambitious program of SF and fantasy, with upcoming books by James Tiptree, Jr., Gregory Benford, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Lucius Shepard, among others. New publisher Baen Books, helmed by Jim Baen and Betsy Mitchell, turned out its first SF titles in 1984, beginning with a strong first novel by Lewis Shiner. Bantam now has one of the strongest and most consistent SF lines it’s had in years, put together by editor Lou Aronica, who had strong titles out this year by Samuel R. Delany, R.A. MacAvoy, David Brin, and David R. Palmer. Arbor House’s new SF line lost Robert Silverberg as editor late in 1983, but he was replaced in mid-1984 by David Hartwell, who took over there as Director of Science Fiction while continuing to work on a consulting basis for Tor; upcoming from Arbor House in 1985 are novels by Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear, Michael Bishop, and Roger Zelazny, among others. Meanwhile, Robert Silverberg is creating a new SF hardcover line for new publisher Donald I. Fine Books. Warner Books is creating yet another new SF paperback line, Questar, helmed by a staff of four editors. Avon is expanding its SF line under editor John Douglas. The new George Zebrowski-edited line of classic reprints for Crown is selling well. And the DAW and Del Rey lines remain enormously successful commercial propositions, with Del Rey in particular dominating last year’s nationwide bestseller lists.

Advances are slowly coming up again for many authors, sales are generally up, and expansion is in the air. Tor is now putting out six titles a month, Avon is going to two titles a month, as is Warner, DAW has gone up to eight titles a month, and Ace/Berkley is now putting out fifteen titles a month. The success of Waldenbooks’ Otherworlds Club, a retail book-buyers club which has started selling small-press editions by mail-order, has given a much-needed shot in the arm to the small SF and fantasy specialty publishers—and those small-press publishers themselves are becoming an ever-more important part of the SF scene, bringing out many of the marginal but important books that the more timid corporate publishers refuse to take a chance on … and doing well with them, for the most part.

In other words, we are enjoying another mini-boom, a (so far) scaled-down version of the Big SF Boom of the late ’70s. After living through the bleak days of the recent recession, I feel a residual wariness about throwing my hat in the air and declaring that Happy Days Are Here Again, wondering how good things are going to get this time around and (much more importantly) for how many of us. And for how long—one really bad sales year, for instance, would probably be frost enough to shrivel many of these hopeful new buds. Nevertheless, wariness having been given a nod, it’s hard to deny that (for the moment at least) things are looking considerably better for the field than they were a couple of years ago.

One of the things that makes me the most hopeful is the recent heavy influx of talented new writers.

As I explained in last year’s anthology, new talent seems to enter the SF world in waves, discrete generational groupings, usually at five-to-ten-year intervals. Now, at the beginning of the ’80s, we are clearly in the process of assimilating yet another generational wave of hot new writers, and in the years to come you will be hearing a whole lot more about writers such as William Gibson, Michael Swanwick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear, Pat Cadigan, John Kessel, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, Connie Willis, James Patrick Kelly, Leigh Kennedy, Nancy Kress, John M. Ford, Tim Powers, David Brin, and Pat Murphy … to name just some of the most prominent of those on the leading edge of this massive generational wave.

Not all of these writers are of the same aesthetic school or movement, by any means. Many of them don’t even much like each other’s work, and the last time I listed in print the writers of the “‘80s generation,” some of them protested bitterly at being lumped in with the others. (About the closest thing here to a self-willed aesthetic “school” would be that group of writers, purveyors of bizarre hard-edged high-tech stuff, who have on occasion been referred to as “cyberpunks”—Sterling, Gibson, Shiner, Cadigan, Bear.) Nevertheless, they are the “’80s generation” in SF, or part of it, and as such, whether they like it or not, the similarities in goals and aesthetics between them are much stronger and more noticable than the (admittedly real) differences. For one thing, they are all ambitious writers, not satisfied to keep turning out the Same Old Stuff. Once again it is a time for literary risk-taking, and once again those who take them are admirable … and that makes it an exciting time for SF as a genre.

You have to be a little crazy to try to do good work in SF, a field where indifferent, run-of-the-mill, lowest-common-denominator work is often not only tolerated but actively rewarded … and where good work is often not only ignored, but, in many cases, greeted with outright hostility. About the only thing that has saved SF, kept it evolving, is the constant influx of new young writers, writers young and enthusiastic enough to actually work harder than they need to work for the same kind of money they’d have gotten for producing a formula space opera. Eventually, many of them burn out, wear themselves smooth, get tired and cynical, and opt for the easier way. But SF has so far been lucky in always having a new generation of writers waiting to snatch up the torch (with naive enthusiasm, of course) as the previous generation lets it slip from numbed hands. As long as this remains true, as long as there are talented new writers coming along, then SF as a genre will probably endure, and quite possibly prosper.

The short-fiction market was somewhat weaker overall in 1984 than 1983, producing fewer really first-rate stories. There are so many stories published every year, though, that a certain percentage of them are bound to be good—and indeed, some excellent stuff did appear in 1984, although you perhaps had to sift through a higher percentage of chaff to get at it than you did last year. Sales seemed to also be down somewhat across the board for most of the genre SF magazines, particularly newsstand sales … it should be noted, however, that if things didn’t look quite as rosy in the magazine market this year as last, neither did they look anywhere near as black as they had in 1981 or 1982. Most of the major SF magazines, seem to be in moderately good health, and even those for which the deathwatch has been started are by no means certain to fail. New markets are also promised for the coming year, although it’s probable that, as always, some of these will prove to be illusionary.

Omni’s circulation seemed as high as ever this year, but its impact on the short-fiction scene was somewhat diminished. It had been announced at the end of 1983 that Omni was going to allot a larger percentage of each issue to fiction in 1984, publishing both more stories per issue and longer stories—but instead the publishers cut the space allocated for fiction almost in half, reportedly to make room for more pages of advertising. This meant that Omni published only about half its usual number of stories this year, and I know from stories seen in manuscript that fiction editor Ellen Datlow was forced to leave in inventory several excellent stories that normally would have been published in 1984; a few of the larger, novella-length stories in inventory may never see print in Omni at all. This is a disappointing and short-sighted policy for a magazine that already had far too high a proportion of advertisements, and it is to be hoped that they will think better of it in the future. In spite of cutbacks, Omni published excellent stories this year by Michael Swanwick, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Elizabeth A. Lynn, and others.

The Best of Omni Science Fiction, an anthology in magazine form, has been discontinued in favor of a series of retrospective “Best of Omni” book anthologies.

The genre magazine market—as opposed to Omni, which is not an SF magazine per se—was somewhat weak overall this year, with most of the good stuff concentrated in one or two markets. In fact, if you read Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction this year, you probably caught about 80% of the really first-rate work produced in the American magazine market.

Circulation was down slightly at Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine—from the 130,000 copy-per-issue range to about the 110,000 copy-per-issue range—although as far as literary quality is concerned, IASFM had one of its best years ever, dominating the Nebula nomination lists in the novella and novelet categories. Editor Shawna McCarthy won a well-deserved Best Editor Hugo in Los Angeles last year, and deserves to win another one this year. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is perhaps still more consistent in literary quality than IASFM—lASFM’s quality can vary widely from story to story, including a few things much worse than anything you’re likely to find in F&SF—but issue for issue IASFM published more really excellent stories this year than F&SF, the first time any genre magazine has accomplished that feat in a decade or more. Major stories by Octavia E. Butler, John Varley, Jack Dann, Nancy Kress, Frederik Pohl, Connie Willis, Jack McDevitt, Lewis Shiner, John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly, Marta Randall and Lucius Shepard appeared in IASFM this year, as well as much good work by other hands.

Analog, IASFM’s sister magazine, had a particularly dull year in 1984. I’ve said this before, other years, but for the most part I find the stuff that Analog publishes at shorter lengths to be gray, dull, and overly familiar. You rarely see anything in Analog anymore that pushes at the boundaries of the stereotypical “Analog story”—last year’s Nebula-winning “Blood Music” was a rare exception, and I wish editor Stanley Schmidt would loosen up and take a few more such chances with what’s become an overly restrictive editorial formula. It seems to me that much stuff that’s appearing elsewhere—Swanwick’s “Trojan Horse,” for instance, from this year’s Omni, or Varley’s PRESS ENTER, from IASFM—could legitimately fall within Analog’s purview, without changing it into a freaky custardheaded New Wave publication, and that the magazine would be much the better for having its horizons broadened in that fashion. There was little of really first-rate quality in Analog this year, although solid work by Charles Harness, Ben Bova, Timothy Zahn, Bob Buckley, Charles Sheffield, Eric G. Iverson, and others, did appear.

As always, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction remained the most dependable read in SF, as it has been for the past thirty years, maintaining an incredible consistency of quality while other magazines rise and fall and fluctuate around it. There have been long stretches when F&SF was the only refuge in the genre for quality short fiction, and it’s frightening to imagine what shape the SF short-story would be in today if F&SF had never existed. They perhaps published fewer important stories this year than last, but “fewer” is a relative term—major work by Gene Wolfe, Lucius Shepard, Richard Cowper, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jack Dann, Bruce Sterling, Terence M. Green, Lewis Shiner, M. Sargent Mackay, Molly Gloss, Pat Cadigan, and many others did appear in F&SF in 1984. (As usual, alas, F&SF remains hard to find on many newsstands, so I’ll include their subscription address: Mercury Press, Inc., Box 56, Cornwall, Connecticut 06753; annual subscription—12 issues—$17.50)

The overall quality of the fiction was also down somewhat at Amazing this year, although they did publish first-rate novellas by Avram Davidson and Gerald Pearce, and good work by Keith Roberts, Phyllis Eisenstein, Michael Swanwick, and Somtow Sucharitkul. Although he published fewer major stories this year than last, editor George Scithers has for the most part been doing a pretty good job of renovating Amazing—unfortunately, it looks more than ever as if the effort may have been in vain. Amazing’s circulation remains disastrously low: about 11,000 copies per issue, by far the lowest circulation of all the digest-sized magazines, and even beginning to edge down into the range where it would be rivaled for circulation by the major semiprozines, like Locus. Circulation even seems to be down slightly from last year, as far as I can tell. Scithers has specifically denied last year’s rumor that he had been guaranteed three years of sponsorship by TSR Hobbies, Amazing’s new owner, saying that there is no specified time period involved in TSR’s backing of the magazine. Which makes the question of how long a financially-ailing TSR will be willing to carry Amazing as a money-losing proposition even more germane; certainly if the circulation remains at its present level, the magazine cannot long survive. Amazing’s only real hope for survival is to bring its subscription rate up dramatically, as The Twilight Zone Magazine managed to do in 1983 by offering discount subscriptions through Publisher’s Clearing House. Scithers says that “we are finally getting our act together as regards subscriptions,” and that a big push to bring the subscription rate up will begin in 1985. Amazing may also be given some much-needed help by Steven Spielberg’s new NBC— TV series Amazing Stories; the rental fee paid to the magazine for use of the title will help somewhat, but much more important is the publicity boost and increase in name recognition (which will hopefully translate into a boost in sales) that Amazing could receive if the television series is a hit. Amazing deserves to survive, and I hope things work out for them. (Since Amazing is also hard to find on most newsstands, I’ll give their subscription address as well: Dragon Publishing, P.O. Box 72089, Chicago, Illinois 60690; $9 for 6 issues—one year—or $16 for 12 issues—two years.)

After the well-publicized exchange of unpleasantries between editor T.E.D. Klein and myself in the pages of Science Fiction Chronicle over my evaluation of The Twilight Zone Magazine in last year’s Summation, there’s no way I will be able to believably defend myself against charges of bias this year. Nevertheless, whether Ted believes it or not, I do wish TZ well, and did carefully read every story in every issue this year, as I did the year before. Unfortunately, the news I have to report this year is not too much better than last year’s. Although some interesting work by Steven Millhauser, Oliver Lowenbruck, Cezarija Abartis, John Brizzolara and others did appear in TZ this year, the magazine published nothing of really first-rate quality in 1984, and the overall quality was up only slightly over 1983. Most of the stories TZ published in 1984 were mediocre at best, and the worst of them were among the worst stories published by any professional SF/fantasy magazine this year; the best things in many of this year’s issues were the review/nostalgia columns by Gahan Wilson and Ron Goulart. TZ remains a magazine of enormous potential that has never realized much of that potential in any reliable way. TZ also remained bi-monthly in 1984, in spite of rumors in 1983 that it was about to go back on a monthly schedule.

The British SF magazine Interzone continued to survive for another year, with the help of a grant from the Arts Council of Great Britian and an intensified subscription drive, although it did lose a few more of its many editors—it’s down to a mere four editors now, from a former high of seven. Interzone is an uneven magazine. It publishes a fair amount of failed experimentation, much of it rather tired stuff reminiscent of the New Worlds stories of the late ’60s (nothing dates more quickly than yesterday’s avant-gardism)—but it also provides a home for some offbeat and innovative material that might otherwise not have seen professional print at all, and for that reason it deserves your support. Good stuff by Scott Bradfield, Keith Roberts, Bruce Sterling, M. John Harrison, and others appeared in Interzone in 1984, but the magazine’s kingpiece this year was a brilliant and disturbing novella by Geoff Ryman—if all the work in Interzone came up to this high standard, the magazine would indeed be a force to reckon with in the SF world. (Interzone is flat-out impossible to find on newsstands in this country, and sometimes unfindable even in SF specialty bookstores; American subscriptions can be obtained from Scott Bradfield, 145 E. 18th street, Apt. 5, Costa Mesa, California 92627; $13 for a one-year subscription, First Class Mail.)

A new large-format slick version of Weird Tales was promised throughout 1984, but seems to have fallen into limbo. Was the first issue published? I’ve spoken with someone who claims to have actually received the first issue of the new Weird Tales, but by my deadline here I was unable to locate a copy of the magazine, and don’t know whether it was distributed generally or not. Even if it was, there seems to be some question as to whether Weird Tales will continue to exist. The well-publicized battle between Gil Lamont and Forrest J. Ackerman over which one of them was really the fiction editor of Weird Tales, fought out through the pages of the major newszines earlier in 1984, has only added to the confusion. Watch the newszines for possible future clarifications on the state of this market.

Promised for 1985 is a new large-format SF magazine called L. Ron Hubbard’s To The Stars Science Fiction Magazine. Terry Carr is slated to be the fiction editor.

Short SF continued to appear in many magazines outside genre boundaries, from Rolling Stone to Redbook, with Penthouse and Playboy in particular using SF with a moderate degree of regularity (thanks to fiction editors Kathy Green and Alice K. Turner, respectively). Especially noteworthy was the special SF issue of The Missouri Review, which featured good stories by Connie Willis, Michael Bishop, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Carter Scholz, and an interesting critical article by Algis Budrys. (I have no idea if this issue is still available, but if you want to write to ask, their address is: The Missouri Review, Department of English, 231 Arts and Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65211.)

The semiprozine market continued to shrink and collapse in 1984, with the death of The Fantasy Gamer and Gameplay, and the death stillborn of FTL. There was still no sign this year of Spectrum Stories, which probably should be considered to be nonexistent. On the brighter side, the World Fantasy Award-winning semiprozine Shayol may not be quite as dead as last reported; at the least, there will be one more issue, scheduled for 1985. The best of 1984’s crop of semiprozines was undoubtedly Stuart David Schiff’s Whispers 21—22, a double-issue which featured strong work by Alan Ryan, Fritz Leiber, Susan Casper, Al Sarrantonio, Dennis Etchison, and others. (Subscription address: 70 Highland Avenue, Binghamton, New York 13905; 2 double-issues for $10.95.) After its strong debut issue in 1983, I was somewhat disappointed by the 1984 issues of Scott Edelman’s semiprozine The Last Wave. Some interesting material still appeared here—an operetta version of Frankenstein by Tom Disch, a play by Parke Godwin, an odd novella by Richard Wilson—but much of the stuff in The Last Wave this year was failed experimentation of a type wearily familiar to any experienced magazine editor, including a workshop-joke type story about vaginas falling out of the sky, by a writer whose work is usually quite good. Let’s hope that this highly-promising magazine can shake itelf out of the doldrums in 1985, and offer us some more substantial fare. (Subscription address: P.O. Box 3206, Grand Central Station, New York, New York 10163; $8 for 4 quarterly issues.) Last year, a reader took me to task for not mentioning more of the semiprozines in this Summation, but the fact is that—in my opinion, anyway—the fiction in most of the rest of the semiprozines only occasionally comes up to the level of quality of the best semiprozines, such as Whispers and Shayol. Fantasy Book, for instance, is a well-intentioned magazine with lots of promise, but it has yet to reliably upgrade the overall quality of its fiction to a really acceptable level. Much the same could be said about Weirdbook, in spite of its high reputation in fantasy/horror circles, and about the British Fantasy Tales. A lot of earnest effort and loving care goes into the production of these magazines, but the hard fact is that much of the fiction they publish is, by professional standards, mediocre … although in fairness it should be said that all three magazines (especially Weirdbook—note, for instance, the Stephen King story in the most recent issue) will occasionally publish a good professional-level story. (Subscription addresses: Fantasy Book, P.O. Box 60126, Pasadena, California 91106, $12 for 4 issues; Weird-book, Box 149, Amherst Branch, Buffalo, New York 14226-0149, 7 issues for $22.50; Fantasy Tales, Stephen Jones, 130 Park View, Wembley, Middlesex, HA9 6JU, England, Great Britain, $11 for 3 issues.) There are a lot of other, even more obscure semiprozines, but for the most part the path of kindness is not to mention them at all.

The original anthology market was in a little bit better health this year, thanks to a number of interesting one-shot anthologies, although still far from the vitality of its glory days, when ten or more original SF anthology series were published yearly. Terry Carr’s Universe 14 (Doubleday) was very good, one of the best Universe volumes in recent years. Usually original anthology series decline in quality after several years of publication, as the editors burn out or become jaded, but Carr seems instead to have gotten his second wind, and in fact the five most recent editions of Universe have in many ways been the best of the entire series. Universe 14 contains major stories by Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, and Molly Gloss, and interesting stuff by Pat Murphy, Carter Scholz, Gregory Benford, and others. The only other edition of an annual original SF anthology series available in 1984 was George R.R. Martin’s The John W. Campbell Awards, Volume 5 (Bluejay), the resurrected version of his old New Voices series, brought back to life after several years in limbo. Although there’s nothing really major in this year’s volume, there is solid, intelligent work here from C.J. Cherryh, Jack L. Chalker, Carter Scholz, and others, and I’m glad to see this anthology series back on the scene again. Two new original anthology series have been promised for 1985: Far Frontiers, from Baen Books, edited by Jim Baen and Jerry Pournelle, and the first issue of the L. Ron Hubbard-sponsored Writers of the Future series. The best one-shot anthology of the year, and one of the best in several years, was undoubtedly Michael Bishop’s enormous Light Years and Dark (Berkley). This is a big, meaty book, containing a rich diversity of material, both reprint and original, including 40 stories (18 of them original), 4 poems, 3 short—and very funny—parodies of other SF writers by John Sladek, and—somewhat oddly—an autobiographical fanzine article by James Tiptree, Jr.; among the original stories are major pieces by Gene Wolfe, Pat Cadigan, Kate Wilhelm, John Kessel, Ian Watson, Michael Swanwick, M. John Harrison, and others. The stories in Susan Shwartz’s Habitats (DAW) feature some intriguing speculative material, but are for the most part indifferently executed, several of them coming off more as and-now-let-us-visit-the-Great-Steam-Grommet-Works travelogs of future societies than as stories; Ian Watson contributes the best story here by far, although there is also interesting stuff by Shariann Lewitt and Tanith Lee. Damon Knight may well be correct that many of the writers in his anthology The Clarion Awards (Doubleday) will turn out to be Big Name Professionals in the future, but unfortunately many of the stories they have contributed to this volume, at this point in time, prove to be no more than promising journeyman work when considered on their own merits as fiction. By far the best SF stories here are contributed by Lucius Shepard and Rena Yount, although there are also good mainstream stories by Lois Wickstrom and Jan Herschel. Tomorrow’s Voices (Dial), by “the editors of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine,” is a very dissapointing anthology, all the more so because IASFM itself has recently been featuring some very good stories indeed; the material here, however, is decidedly minor, and frequently awful. There were two good “High Fantasy” anthologies this year. Maxim Jakubowski’s Beyond Lands of Never (Unicorn), is a British anthology of stories that feature an odd mix of High Fantasy and British New Wave; sometimes this works very well (as in “Draco, Draco”), sometimes not so well (as in “Caves,” probably the year’s grossest story)—best stories here are by Tanith Lee, Rob Chilson, Robert Holdstock, David Langford, and Jakubowski himself. Terry Windling and Mark Alan Arnold’s Elsewhere III (Ace) is a mixed reprint and original anthology, featuring good new fantasy stories by Steve Rasnic Tem, Robin McKinley, Tanith Lee, Esther M. Friesner, Pat Murphy, and Patricia A. McKillip, among others. Sadly, Elsewhere III will be the final volume in this worthwhile new series, which is being killed because of poor sales; I’ll be sorry to see it go. I’ve never understood why High Fantasy anthologies don’t sell much better than they do, considering all the thousands upon thousands of people who flock to buy fantasy novels. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress (DAW) is yet another collection of sword & sorcery tales exploring (mostly) the theme of Amazon Warriors, a theme I am frankly starting to get a little tired of; Pat Murphy and Emma Bull probably have the best work here, although nothing is really outstanding. The horror anthology market was still healthy in 1984, although the horror novel has been going through a mini-recession of late. As usual, the best of the year’s horror anthologies was edited by Charles L. Grant—in this instance, Grant’s Shadows 7 (Doubleday), the latest edition in this award-winning series; it features first-rate work by Tanith Lee, Michael Cassutt, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Susan Casper, and Alan Ryan, among others. Alan Ryan’s Night Visions 1 (Dark Harvest) features only three authors—Charles L. Grant, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Tanith Lee—but presents us with several different stories by each of them (7 by Grant, 7 by Tem, 4 by Lee), an intriguing idea that gives us a good sampling of an individual author’s range—it works particularly well here with the versatile and chameleonic Tanith Lee, whose stories demonstrate a wide variety of styles and attacks; it’ll be interesting to see how future volumes in this projected series turn out. J.N. Williamson’s Masques (Maclay) was the most dissappointing anthology of the three. There’s some interesting work here—primarily by Gene Wolfe and Robert R. McCammon—but Williamson seems to lack the touch for modern horror demonstrated by editors like Grant and Schiff; the stories here tend to veer toward the Grand Guignol, so much so that some of them eventually come to seem silly rather than scary.

Promising short fiction debuts were made this year by Molly Gloss, Geoff Ryman, Rena Yount, M. Sargent Mackay, Ian McDonald, Elissa Malcohn, and Jennifer Swift.

As I stated in last year’s anthology, I have reluctantly given up the attempt to read and review every new SF and fantasy novel published during the year. There are just too many of them now—just to read them all, let alone review them, would be a full-time job, leaving no time to do the very extensive reading at shorter lengths that editing this anthology demands, let alone time for my own writing. So instead I’ll limit myself to commenting that of the novels I did read this year, I was most impressed by: Neuromancer, William Gibson (Ace Special); The Wild Shore, Kim Stanley Robinson (Ace Special); The Man Who Melted, Jack Dann (Bluejay Books); Them Bones, Howard Waldrop (Ace Special); Green Eyes, Lucius Shepard (Ace Special); Frontera, Lewis Shiner (Baen Books); The Man in the Tree, Damon Knight (Berkley); Heechee Rendezvous, Frederik Pohl (Del Rey); Across the Sea of Suns, Gregory Benford (Timescape); Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Samuel R. Delany (Bantam); World’s End, Joan D. Vinge (Bluejay Books); Clay’s Ark, Octavia E. Butler (St. Martin’s Press); The Digging Leviathan, James P. Blaylock (Ace); The Infinity Concerto, Greg Bear (Berkley); Icehenge, Kim Stanley Robinson (Ace); and Cards of Grief, Jane Yolen (Berkley).

Other novels that have gotten a lot of attention and acclaim this year include: Demon, John Varley (Berkley); West of Eden, Harry Harrison (Bantam); Dr. Adder, K.W. Jeter (Bluejay Books); Damiano, Damiano’s Lute, and Raphael, all by R.A. MacAvoy (and all from Bantam); The Businessman, Thomas M. Disch (Harper & Row); The Final Encyclopedia, Gordon R. Dickson (Tor); Emergence, David R. Palmer (Bantam); The Peace War, Vernor Vinge (Bluejay Books); Fuzzies and Other People, H. Beam Piper (Ace); The Practice Effect, David Brin (Bantam); I, Vampire, Jody Scott (Ace); The Integral Trees, Larry Niven (Ballantine); Job: A Comedy of Justice, Robert A. Heinlein (Del Rey); and The Talisman, Stephen King and Peter Straub (Viking).

It’s interesting to note that in a year which saw the publication of novels by some of the very biggest names in the genre, most of the critical attention was focused on novels by new and relatively-new writers, and that those were the books that seemed to generate the most enthusiasm among the readership.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it is also worth pointing out again here just how many extraordinary novels were available this year only from “small press” publishers: R.A. Lafferty’s Half A Sky (sequel to his 1971 historic fantasy The Flame is Green), from Corroboree Press; Michael Bishop’s Who Made Stevie Crye, from Arkham House; Gene Wolfe’s Free Live Free, from Zeising, and Philip K. Dick’s The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, also from Zeising. The Dick novel is not SF or fantasy, but will almost undoubtedly be of strong interest to anyone who’s a fan of Dick’s work (more heretofore unpublished mainstream Dick novels are coming up from Dragon Press and Academy Chicago; Dick fans should also notice the recent string of Dick reissues from Bluejay). Ads for all of these small presses, and more, can usually be found in Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle; some of these books may also be available by mail through the Waldenbooks’ Otherworlds SF Club. Similarly, we should also point out here that Robert Silverberg published two historical novels in 1984—Gilgamesh the King (Arbor House) and Lord of Darkness (Bantam)—that rank among his best work at novel length.

The year’s best short-story collections were: Extra(ordinary) People, Joanna Russ (St. Martin’s Press); One Winter in Eden, Michael Bishop (Arkham House); The Wolfe Archipelago, Gene Wolfe (Zeising); Tamastara, or The Indian Nights, Tanith Lee (DAW); The Years of the City, Frederik Pohl (Timescape); The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Robert Silverberg (Arbor House); and Ringing Changes, R.A. Lafferty (Ace). Also worthwhile were: The Ghost Light, Fritz Leiber (Berkley); Rhialto the Marvellous, Jack Vance (Baen Books); Viriconium Nights, M. John Harrison (Ace); Phoenix in the Ashes, Joan D. Vinge (Bluejay Books); The Fire When It Comes, Parke Godwin (Doubleday); Pohlstars, Frederik Pohl (Del Rey); Red Dreams, Dennis Etchison (Scream/Press); Past Times, Poul Anderson (Tor); In a Lonely Place, Karl Edward Wagner (Scream/Press); Daughter of Regals, Stephen R. Donaldson (Del Rey); Signs and Portents, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (Dream/Press); and a paperback reprint of Kate Wilhelm’s Listen, Listen, from Berkley.

Worth a special note are the three collections of heretofore unpublished R.A. Lafferty stories, from Chris Drumm: Heart of Stone, Dear and Other Stories; Snake In His Bosom and Other Stories; and The Man Who Made Models and Other Stories. These are cheap-looking, poorly-produced mimeographed booklets, and the contents, for the most part, will be of interest only to Lafferty completists … on the other hand, there are some good undiscovered Lafferty stories here (one of them appears in this anthology), and at the price ($2 per booklet), you can hardly go wrong—especially as the chances are good that these booklets will be collector’s items someday, when Lafferty is critically re-evaluated, as he is bound to be, as perhaps the most original short-story writer of the last twenty years. (Since these booklets are completely unavailable even in SF specialty bookstores—unlike some of the items from more prominent specialty publishers listed above—I’m going to list the mailing address for them: Chris Drumm, P.O. Box 445, Polk City, Iowa 50226.)

It’s also worth noting that once again this year many of the year’s best short-story collections came from “small press” publishers. Many of these books would have been brought out by “mainline” publishers a few years ago, but these days most mainline publishers, ruled as they are by the short-sighted “bottom-line” dictates of corporate publishing, refuse to print short-story collections or anthologies … thus cutting much of the SF audience off from easy access to that most quintessential form of SF, the short story (and at a time when much evolutionary new work is being done at shorter lengths). There are exceptions (or partial exceptions) to this, but for the most part the rule still holds; let’s hope the situation loosens up some in years to come. Also note that once again many of these collections (all four of the Laffertys, both Pohls, the Vance, the Russ, the Wagner, the Leiber, the Lee, the Harrison, the Etchison, the Yarbro) contain heretofore unpublished stories, stories for which—presumably—no first magazine publication could be obtained … in spite of the fact that again this year I heard more than one magazine editor complaining about a dearth of good material. I can understand that some of this material—the Russ or the Harrison stories, for instance—might be too experimental for timid genre editors, but how to explain why the Pohl stories (good stuff smack-dab in the center of the field) went begging, or why there were good unpublished stories around by giants of fantasy such as Vance, Leiber, Donaldson, and Lee at a time when a couple of fantasy-oriented magazines are floundering because of their inability to attract the huge fantasy audience that buys millions of fantasy books per year … many of them by people like Vance, Leiber, Donaldson, and Lee. Someone is just not thinking here, that’s plain.

The reprint anthology market was weak again this year, perhaps even weaker than last year. The best reprint anthologies of 1984 (counting Bishop’s Light Years and Dark as an original anthology for these purposes) probably were: The Best of Universe (Doubleday), edited by Terry Carr; Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space (Bluejay Books), edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles Waugh; The First Omni Book of Science Fiction and The Second Omni Book of Science Fiction (Zebra), edited by Ellen Datlow; and 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories (Doubleday), edited by Asimov, Carr and Greenberg. Noted without comment is Magicats! (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. Also interesting was Burning With A Vision (Owlswick Press), edited by Robert Frazier, a collection of SF poetry.

The SF-oriented nonfiction/SF reference book field produced some varied and interestingly offbeat material in 1984. The Faces of Science Fiction (Bluejay), by Patti Perret, is a fascinating rogue’s gallery of photographs of major SF writers. Wonder’s Child (Bluejay), by Jack Williamson, is the autobiography of one of the longest-practicing of all SF writers, and Age of Wonders (Walker), by David Hartwell, is an intriguing, idiosyncratic, and often controversial look at SF by the premier SF book editor of the ‘70s. I also enjoyed Yesterday’s Tomorrows (Simon & Schuster), by Corn and Horrigan, a nostalgic look at The Future as seen from the perspective of (mostly) the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. The best reference book of the year was undoubtedly the updated Index to the Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections, 1977—1983 (G.K. Hall), compiled by William Contento. Like the movie, The Dune Encyclopedia (Berkley), compiled by Willis E. McNelly, was disappointing, and Omni’s ScreenflightslScreen Fantasies (Doubleday), edited by Danny Peary, told me a lot more than I wanted to know about a large number of mostly mediocre SF movies; this may be personal bias, though. There were several new critical books about Philip K. Dick, with more yet to come: Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words (Fragments West), by Gregg Rickman, and The Novels of Philip K. Dick (University Microfilms Research Press), by Kim Stanley Robinson. Castles (Bantam Hardcover) was an interesting book of fantasy-related art by British painter Alan Lee.

1984 was another year of Big Blockbuster SF Movies, many of which turned out to be disappointing. SF fans have been whining for years now about how wonderful it would be if Hollywood would make a faithful adaption of a major SF novel, instead of ruining it by the intrusion of anomalous aesthetic material. Well, 1984 saw the release of two extremely faithful film adaptations of famous SF novels—Frank Herbert’s Dune and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010—and in both cases the movies probably would have been a lot better as movies if they’d been a little less faithful to the original books. The movie version of Dune makes this particularly clear—Herbert gets away with stuff on the printed page which does not play at all well on the screen. The film’s portrayal of Baron Harkonnen, for instance, is quite faithful to Herbert’s characterization, but when we can see the Baron, the pitiless eye of the camera makes it quite plain how ludicrous that characterization is, and the Baron’s every appearance elicited fits of giggling from the audience. The device of having the audience “hear” the character’s thoughts at key points, a favorite narrative trick of Herbert’s, also plays very poorly on-screen. The major problem with Dune, though, is its director. Arty director David Lynch seemed an odd choice for Dune anyway, like having Alain Resnais direct Spartacus. The film he’s created, although visually interesting, is pretentious, stuffy, and dull—poorly paced and edited, filled with stilted dialogue (right out of Herbert’s novel, for the most part), wooden performances, and expository lumps so poorly digested that voiceover narration is required to explain what it is we’re seeing. 2010 is a much better movie, but it also pays a certain price for its fidelity to its model—most of the faults and disappointments of the movie are also the faults of Clarke’s novel, from which they have been slavishly copied. Neither the book nor the movie function as really satisfactory sequels to Kubrick’s 2001, both failing rather cravenly to actually come to grips with the ultimate philosophical implications of the earlier film. In fact, 2010 the movie is more successful as a movie than Clarke’s book is as a novel—the film version, for instance, puts into the storyline a good deal of humor and suspense that are missing from the novel, and Roy Scheider’s Heywood Floyd is considerably more complex, interesting, and human than Clarke’s. Turning elsewhere, the anxiously-awaited Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom turned out to be a dumb and ham-handed movie vastly inferior to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Gremlins was distasteful and shamelessly manipulative, and Star Trek III: The Search For Spock was okay but lackluster. Starman was a cross between ET and Mork and Mindy, totally familiar, but redeemed by good performances by Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen. The Last Starfighter was silly, but had a few good moments. The Philadelphia Experiment wasn’t bad as long as you ignored the goofy plot-logic, the absurd “science,” and the lousy special effects. A strange little film called Repo Man became an underground cult classic, something a bigger-budgeted production called Buckaroo Banzai set out rather self-consciously to do but couldn’t quite accomplish. The best fantasy movies of the year were comedies: Ghostbusters and Splash, both funny, stylish, and surprisingly intelligent (particularly Ghostbusters). About the year’s other SF/fantasy movies—Streets of Fire, The Terminator, Firestarter, Conan the Destroyer, Supergirl, Runaway, and a horde of slasher movies—the less said the better.

The 42nd World Science Fiction Convention, L.A. Con II, was held in Anaheim, California over the Labor Day weekend, and drew an estimated attendance of 9,280, making it the largest Worldcon in history. The consensus from most attendees I talked to was that L.A.con, while well-run, was somewhat dull … on the other hand, it did succeed in making a considerable profit, unlike last year’s Worldcon, ConStellation, which disastrously ended up more than $44,000 in debt. The 1984 Hugo Awards, presented at L.A. Con II, were: Best Novel, Startide Rising, by David Brin; Best Novella, “Cascade Point,” by Timothy Zahn; Best Novelette, “Blood Music,” by Greg Bear; Best Short Story, “Speech Sounds,” by Octavia E. Butler; Best Non-Fiction, The Encyclopedia of SF & Fantasy, Vol. III, by Donald H. Tuck; Best Professional Editor, Shawna McCarthy; Best Professional Artist, Michael Whelan; Best Dramatic Presentation, Return of the Jedi; Best Semi-Prozine, Locus; Best Fanzine, File 770; Best Fan Writer, Mike Glyer; Best Fan Artist, Alexis Gilliland; plus the John W. Campbell Award to R.A. MacAvoy.

The 1983 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California on April 28th, were: Best Novel, Startide Rising, by David Brin; Best Novella, “Hardfought,” by Greg Bear; Best Novelette, “Blood Music,” by Greg Bear; Best Short Story, “The Peacemaker,” by Gardner Dozois; plus a Grand Master Award to Andre Norton.

The 1984 World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Tenth Annual World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa, Canada on October 14th, were: Best Novel, The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford; Best Novella, “Black Air,” by Kim Stanley Robinson; Best Short Story, “Elle Est Trois (La Mort),” by Tanith Lee; Best Anthology/Collection, High Spirits, by Robertson Davies; Best Artist, Stephen Gervais; Special Award (Professional), Ian & Betty Ballantine, Joy Chant, and George Sharp for The High Kings; Special Award (Non-Professional), Stephen Jones and David A. Sutton for Fantasy Tales; Special Convention Award, Donald M. Grant; plus (in a somewhat unusual move) five (shamefully overdue) Life Achievement Awards to L. Sprague De Camp, Jack Vance, Richard Matheson, E. Hoffman Price, and Donald A. Wandrei.

The 1983 John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner was The Citadel of the Autarch, by Gene Wolfe.

The second Philip K. Dick Memorial Award was won by The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers.

Dead in 1984 were: A. BERTRAM CHANDLER, 72, author of the well-known story “Giant Killer,” as well as a large number of SF novels, many of them in the popular “Rim Worlds” series; CHARLES G. FINNEY, 78, author of the classic novel The Circus of Dr. Lao; WALTER TEVIS, 56, well-known novelist, author of The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Mockingbird; RICHARD BRAUTIGAN, 49, author and poet, whose Trout Fishing in America and other works often straddled the borderland between fantasy and surrealism; J.B. PRIESTLEY, internationally-known author and playwright, many of whose plays and novels contained SF elements; TRUMAN CAPOTE, 59, famous and controversial author of In Cold Blood; EDWARD LLEWELLYN-THOMAS, 66, who wrote five SF novels under the name “Edward LLewellyn,” the most recent of which was Search And Destroy; JOHN NEWTON CHANCE, 72, who wrote SF as “John Lymington”; PAUL DARCY BOLES, 68, novelist and short-story writer who occasionally wrote fantasy; MANUEL MUJICA LAINEZ, 73, Argentinean writer, author of The Wandering Unicorn; JANE ROBERTS BUTT, 55, as “Jane Roberts” a well-known occult writer, author of the “Seth” books, as well as a few SF novels; KAREN EMDEN, 40, literary agent with the Virginia Kidd Agency, and daughter of agent Virginia Kidd; TOM RAINBOW, 30, science columnist for Issac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine; JOHNNY WEISSMULLER, 79, an actor best known for his screen portrayals of Tarzan and Jungle Jim; FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT, director and filmmaker, best known by the SF audience for his directing of Fahrenheit 451, and for his starring role in Close Encounters of the Third Kind; BYRON HASKIN, 85, special effects pioneer and director of the SF movies War of the Worlds and The Conquest of Space; WALTER PIDGEON, 87, actor, best known to SF fans for his role as Dr. Morbius in Forbidden Planet; OSKAR WERNER, actor, star of Fahrenheit 451; RICHARD BASEHART, 70, best known for his starring role in the TV series “Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea;” ROLLY BESTER, 66, actress and advertising executive, wife of SF writer Alfred Bester; BEVERLY ANN HERBERT, wife of SF writer Frank Herbert; SALLY S. GREENBERG, wife of SF anthologist Martin H. Greenberg; CYLVIA MARGULIES, 75, wife of the late editor Leo Margulies; WILLIAM L. CRAWFORD, 73, SF small press pioneer; DAN McPHAIL, 68, publisher of the first SF newszine, Science Fiction News; CHARLES HANSEN, 69, longtime Denver fan; BERESFORD SMITH, 51, longtime convention fan; BILL FESSELMEYER, 36, & SHERRY FESSELMEYER, 34, active Kansas City fans; TIM DANIELS, 29, fan and founder of the Amber Society; and JACK McKNIGHT, longtime Philadelphia fan and member of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, designer and manufacturer of the first Hugo Awards, a personal friend.

LUCIUS SHEPARD

Salvador

I had heard of Lucius Shepard before 1984—he had previously published two stories in 1983, one in Universe and one in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—but as 1984 progressed, it became difficult to avoid hearing about him. Suddenly, Shepard was appearing all over the genre magazine and anthology market, bringing out one memorable story after another, in one of those sudden explosive outbursts of talent so characteristic of SF. Partway through the year, his powerful first novel Green Eyes (a very strange mixture of SF, voodoo/zombie horror fantasy, and Southern Gothic) appeared, to good critical response, throwing more fuel on the fire. By the end of 1984, Shepard had become one of the three or four most talked-about young writers of the year, and had received Nebula nominations for nine different works of fiction (five of them in the same award category!). Not bad for one year’s work …

Shepard was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, “raised hell in high school and hallucinated for a year and a half at the University of North Carolina,” then dropped out to travel widely in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean, living for some time abroad. He “beat his brains out” for a long time as a rock musician for several rock’n’roll bands that “nearly made it,” but has given that up, claiming that “the resultant brain damage has left me handicapped to the extent that I am only fit now for writing science fiction.” He has become a frequent contributor to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and has also sold to Omni, Universe, and The Clarion Awards. His story “Solitario’s Eyes” was a finalist for last year’s World Fantasy Award. Upcoming are two new novels: The Weeping Woman, from Berkley, and Foreign Devils, from Tor Books. He is currently working on a new novel, tentatively entitled Psiderweb. He lives—for the moment, at least—in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

In the harrowing story that follows, he shows us that we do learn even from the experience of war—the only question is, learn what?

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

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

“Playin’ my ass!” DT would say. “You just actin’ natural.”

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

“He collects trophies,” Moody had said. “And not just ears like they done in ’Nam.”

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

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

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

“Dead,” said the medic.

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

“I know a little,” Dantzler volunteered.

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

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

“Que sabor!” he said, exhaling a billow; he smiled and nodded, wanting to be friends.

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

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

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

“Ricardo Quu,” said the kid.

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

“Gracias, no.” The kid waved the joint and grinned.

“Dude’s named for a godamn cigarette,” said Dt disparagingly, as if this were the height of insanity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The chickenshit infantry should take ’em,” the D.I. had said. “You bastards are brave already. You’re born killers, right?”

“Right, sir!” they had shouted.

“What are you?”

“Born killers, sir!”

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

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

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

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

“What’s Sukias?” asked Moody.

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

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

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

“Don’t they got no Heaven?”

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

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

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

“Maybe they just like it,” said Moody. “Maybe somebody dyin’ just give ’em an excuse to drink it.”

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

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

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

“Yeah,” said Dantzler, forcing a smile. “Sure did.”

DT grunted with laughter. “You know I’m right, don’tcha man?”

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

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

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

“It ain’t reasonable,” he said. “Be easier to go through the passes.”

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

As LeDoux popped the ampules, DT talked to him.

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

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

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

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

Dantzler mumbled his assent, but was not enthused.

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

To Dantzler’s shame, he did understand.

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

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

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

“Moody!” he shouted. “DT!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s your name?” asked a girl’s voice behind him.

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

“Don’t be afraid,” she said, and patted the ground, inviting him to sit beside her.

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

“What’s your name?” she repeated.

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

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

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

“This is true?” she said, incredulous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DT heard Dantzler’s footfalls and glanced up. “Waste him!” he shouted, pointing at Moody.

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

“Waste him, man!” screamed DT. “He killed LeDoux!”

“Please,” said Moody to the knife. “I don’t want to.”

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

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

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

“O.K.,” said Moody. With an apologetic look, he sprang to his feet and charged Dantzler, swinging the knife.

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

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

“Pop a few,” Dantzler suggested mildly.

“Yeah. Good thinkin’, man.” DT fumbled for his dispenser.

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

DT popped an ampule with a flourish, as if making a toast, and inhaled. “Ain’t you gon’ to do some, man?”

“I don’t need them,” said Dantzler. “I’m fine.”

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

“How many you think they was?” asked DT.

“How many what?”

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

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

“Beats me,” he said. “But I guess there’s less than there used to be.”

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

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

“What you doin’, man?” DT was more disbelieving than enraged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry,” said Dantzler. “I haven’t been feeling so hot.”

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

“I don’t know.”

“Jeanine’s here, man. Y‘know, she’s still crazy ’bout you, talks ’bout you alla time. She don’t go out with nobody.”

Dantzler was unable to think of anything to say.

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

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

“I’ll be there,” he said.

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

Of course, some things beggared explanation.

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

JACK McDEVITT

Promises To Keep

New author Jack McDevitt is a frequent contributor to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and has also sold stories to Universe, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and Chess Life. An ex-naval officer, ex-English teacher, and former customs inspector, he is currently the regional training officer for the Chicago Customs Region. He lives in Woodridge, Illinois with his wife and three children, and is currently at work on his first novel, tentatively entitled The Iron Star. His story “Cryptic” was in our First Annual Collection, and was also a Nebula Award finalist last year.

Here he takes us across the solar system to the moons of Jupiter, to the desolate frozen snowscapes of Callisto, for a very human drama played out against the cold inhuman immensity of space …

I received a Christmas card last week from Ed Iseminger. The illustration was a rendering of the celebrated Christmas Eve telecast from Callisto: a lander stands serenely on a rubble-strewn plain, spilling warm yellow light through its windows. Needle-point peaks rise behind it, and the rim of a crater curves across the foreground. An enormous belted crescent dominates the sky.

In one window, someone has hung a wreath.

It is a moment preserved, a tableau literally created by Cathie Perth, extracted from her prop bag. Somewhere here, locked away among insurance papers and the deed to the house, is the tape of the original telecast, but I’ve never played it. In fact, I’ve seen it only once, on the night of the transmission. But I know the words, Cathie’s words, read by Victor Landolfi in his rich baritone, blending the timeless values of the season with the spectral snows of another world. They appear in schoolbooks now, and on marble.

Inside the card, in large, block, defiant letters, Iseminger had printed “SEPTEMBER!” It is a word with which he hopes to conquer a world. Sometimes, at night, when the snow sparkles under the hard cold stars (the way it did on Callisto), I think about him, and his quest. And I am very afraid.

I can almost see Cathie’s footprints on the frozen surface. It was a good time, and I wish there were a way to step into the picture, to toast the holidays once more with Victor Landolfi, to hold onto Cathie Perth (and not let go!), and somehow to save us all. It was the end of innocence, a final meeting place for old friends.

We made the Christmas tape over a period of about five days. Cathie took literally hours of visuals, but Callisto is a place of rock and ice and deadening sameness: there is little to soften the effect of cosmic indifference. Which is why all those shots of towering peaks and tumbled boulders were taken at long range, and in half-light. Things not quite seen, she said, are always charming.

Her biggest problem had been persuading Landolfi to do the voice-over. Victor was tall, lean, ascetic. He was equipped with laser eyes and a huge black mustache. His world was built solely of subatomic particles, and driven by electromagnetics. Those who did not share his passions excited his contempt; which meant that he understood the utility of Cathie’s public relations function at the same time that he deplored its necessity. To participate was to compromise one’s integrity. His sense of delicacy, however, prevented his expressing that view to Cathie: he begged off rather on the press of time, winked apologetically, and straightened his mustache. “Sawyer will read it for you,” he said, waving me impatiently into the conversation.

Cathie sneered, and stared irritably out a window (it was the one with the wreath) at Jupiter, heavy in the fragile sky. We knew, by then, that it had a definable surface, that the big planet was a world sea of liquid hydrogen, wrapped around a rocky core. “It must be frustrating,” she said, “to know you’ll never see it.” Her tone was casual, almost frivolous, but Landolfi was not easily baited.

“Do you really think,” he asked, with the patience of the superior being (Landolfi had no illusions about his capabilities), “that these little pieces of theater will make any difference? Yes, Catherine, of course it’s frustrating. Especially when one realizes that we have the technology to put vehicles down there … .”

“And scoop out some hydrogen,” Cathie added.

He shrugged. “It may happen someday.”

“Victor, it never will if we don’t sell the Program. This is the last shot. These ships are old, and nobody’s going to build any new ones. Unless things change radically at home.”

Landolfi closed his eyes. I knew what he was thinking: Cathie Perth was an outsider, an ex-television journalist who had probably slept her way on board. She played bridge, knew the film library by heart, read John Donne (for style, she said), and showed no interest whatever in the scientific accomplishments of the mission. We’d made far-reaching discoveries in the fields of plate tectonics, planetary climatology, and a dozen other disciplines. We’d narrowed the creation date down inside a range of a few million years. And we finally understood how it had happened! But Cathie’s televised reports had de-emphasized the implications, and virtually ignored the mechanics of such things. Instead, while a global audience watched, Marjorie Aubuchon peered inspirationally out of a cargo lock at Ganymede (much in the fashion that Cortez must have looked at the Pacific on that first bright morning), her shoulder flag patch resplendent in the sunlight. And while the camera moved in for a close-up (her features were illuminated by a lamp Cathie had placed for the occasion in her helmet), Herman Selma solemnly intoned Cathie’s comments on breaking the umbilical.

That was her style: brooding alien vistas reduced to human terms. In one of her best-known sequences, there had been no narration whatever: two spacesuited figures, obviously male and female, stood together in the shadow of the monumental Cadmus Ice Fracture on Europa, beneath three moons.

“Cathie,” Landolfi said, with his eyes still shut, “I don’t wish to be offensive: but do you really care? For the Program, that is? When we get home, you will write a book, you will be famous, you will be at the top of your profession. Are you really concerned with where the Program will be in twenty years?”

It was a fair question: Cathie’d made no secret of her hopes for a Pulitzer. And she stood to get it, no matter what happened after this mission. Moreover, although she’d tried to conceal her opinions, we’d been together a long time by then, almost three years, and we could hardly misunderstand the dark view she took of people who voluntarily imprisoned themselves for substantial portions of their lives to go ‘rock-collecting.’

“No,” she said. “I’m not, because there won’t be a Program in twenty years.” She looked around at each of us, weighing the effect of her words. Iseminger, a blond giant with a reddish beard, allowed a smile of lazy tolerance to soften his granite features. “We’re in the same class as the pyramids,” she continued, in a tone that was unemotional and irritatingly condescending. “We’re a hell of an expensive operation, and for what? Do you think the taxpayers give a good goddam about the weather on Jupiter? There’s nothing out here but gas and boulders. Playthings for eggheads!”

I sat and thought about it while she smiled sweetly, and Victor smoldered. I had not heard the solar system ever before described in quite those terms; I’d heard people call it vast, awesome, magnificent, serene, stuff like that. But never boring

In the end, Landolfi read his lines. He did it, he said, to end the distraction.

Cathie was clearly pleased with the result. She spent three days editing the tapes, commenting frequently (and with good-natured malice) on the resonance and tonal qualities of the voice-over. She finished on the morning of the 24th (ship time, of course), and transmitted the report to Greenswallow for relay to Houston. “It’ll make the evening newscasts,” she said with satisfaction.

It was our third Christmas out. Except for a couple of experiments-in-progress, we were finished on Callisto and, in fact, in the Jovian system. Everybody was feeling good about that, and we passed an uneventful afternoon, playing bridge and talking about what we’d do when we got back. (Cathie had described a deserted beach near Tillamook, Oregon, where she’d grown up. “It would be nice to walk on it again, under a blue sky,” she said. Landolfi had startled everyone at that point: he looked up from the computer console at which he’d been working, and his eyes grew very distant. “I think,” he said, “when the time comes, I would like very much to walk with you … .”)

For the most part, Victor kept busy that afternoon with his hobby: he was designing a fusion engine that would be capable, he thought, of carrying ships to Jupiter within a few weeks, and, possibly, would eventually open the stars to direct exploration. But I watched him: he turned away periodically from the display screen, to glance at Cathie. Yes (I thought), she would indeed be lovely against the rocks and the spume, her black hair free in the wind.

Just before dinner, we watched the transmission of Cathie’s tape. It was very strong, and when it was finished we sat silently looking at one another. By then, Herman Selma and Esther Crowley had joined us. (Although two landers were down, Cathie had been careful to give the impression in her report that there had only been one. When I asked why, she said, “In a place like this, one lander is the Spirit of Man. Two landers is just two landers.”) We toasted Victor, and we toasted Cathie. Almost everyone, it turned out, had brought down a bottle for the occasion. We sang and laughed, and somebody turned up the music. We’d long since discovered the effect of low-gravity dancing in cramped quarters, and I guess we made the most of it.

Marj Aubuchon, overhead in the linkup, called to wish us season’s greetings, and called again later to tell us that the telecast, according to Houston, had been “well-received.” That was government talk, of course, and it meant only that no one in authority could find anything to object to. Actually, somebody high up had considerable confidence in her: in order to promote the illusion of spontaneity, the tapes were being broadcast directly to the commercial networks.

Cathie, who by then had had a little too much to drink, gloated openly. “It’s the best we’ve done,” she said. “Nobody’ll ever do it better.”

We shared that sentiment. Landolfi raised his glass, winked at Cathie, and drained it.

We had to cut the evening short, because a lander’s life-support system isn’t designed to handle six people. (For that matter, neither was an Athena’s.) But before we broke it up, Cathie surprised us all by proposing a final toast: “To Frank Steinitz,” she said quietly. “And his crew.”

Steinitz: there was a name, as they say, to conjure with. He had led the first deep-space mission, five Athenas to Saturn, fifteen years before. It had been the first attempt to capture the public imagination for a dying program: an investigation of a peculiar object filmed by a Voyager on Iapetus. But nothing much had come of it, and the mission had taken almost seven years. Steinitz and his people had begun as heroes, but in the end they’d become symbols of futility. The press had portrayed them mercilessly as personifications of outworn virtues. Someone had compared them to the Japanese soldiers found as late as the 1970s on Pacific islands, still defending a world long since vanished.

The Steinitz group bore permanent reminders of their folly: prolonged weightlessness had loosened ligaments and tendons, and weakened muscles. Several had developed heart problems, and all suffered from assorted neuroses. As one syndicated columnist had observed, they walked like a bunch of retired big-league catchers.

“That’s a good way to end the evening,” said Selma, beaming benevolently.

Landolfi looked puzzled. “Cathie,” he rumbled, “you’ve questioned Steinitz’s good sense any number of times. And ours, by the way. Isn’t it a little hypocritical to drink to him?”

“I’m not impressed by his intelligence,” she said, ignoring the obvious parallel. “But he and his people went all the way out to Saturn in those damned things—” she waved in the general direction of the three Athenas orbiting overhead in linkup “—hanging onto baling wire and wing struts. I have to admire that.”

“Hell,” I said, feeling the effects a little myself, “we’ve got the same ships he had.”

“Yes, you do,” said Cathie pointedly.

I had trouble sleeping that night. For a long time, I lay listening to Landolfi’s soft snore, and the electronic fidgeting of the operations computer. Cathie was bundled inside a gray blanket, barely visible in her padded chair.

She was right, of course. I knew that rubber boots would never again cross that white landscape, which had waited a billion years for us. The peaks glowed in the reflection of the giant planet: fragile crystalline beauty, on a world of terrifying stillness. Except for an occasional incoming rock, nothing more would ever happen here. Callisto’s entire history was encapsuled within twelve days.

Pity there hadn’t been something to those early notions about Venusian rain forests and canals on Mars. The Program might have had easier going had Burroughs or Bradbury been right. My God: how many grim surprises had disrupted fictional voyages to Mars? But the truth had been far worse than anything Wells or the others had ever committed to paper: the red planet was so dull that we hadn’t even gone there.

Instead, we’d lumbered out to the giants. In ships that drained our lives and our health.

We could have done better; our ships could have been better. The computer beside which Landolfi slept contained his design for the fusion engine. And at JPL, an Army team had demonstrated that artificial gravity was possible: a real gravity field, not the pathetic fraction created on the Athenas by spinning the inner hull. There were other possibilities as well: infrared ranging could be adapted to replace our elderly scanning system; new alloys were under development. But it would cost billions to build a second-generation vehicle. And unless there were an incentive, unless Cathie Perth carried off a miracle, it would not happen.

Immediately overhead, a bright new star glittered, moving visibly (though slowly) from west to east. That was the linkup, three ships connected nose to nose by umbilicals and a magnetic docking system. Like the Saturn mission, we were a multiple vehicle operation. We were more flexible that way, and we had a safety factor: two ships would be adequate to get the nine-man mission home. Conditions might become a little stuffy, but we’d make it.

I watched it drift through the icy starfield.

Cathie had pulled the plug on the Christmas lights. But it struck me that Callisto would only have one Christmas, so I put them back on.

Victor was on board Tolstoi when we lost it. No one ever really knew precisely what happened. We’d begun our long fall toward Jupiter, gaining the acceleration which we’d need on the flight home. Cathie, Herman Selma (the mission commander), and I were riding Greenswallow. The ships had separated, and would not rejoin until we’d rounded Jupiter, and settled into our course for home. (The Athenas are really individually-powered modular units which travel, except when maneuvering, as a single vessel. They’re connected bow-to-bow by electromagnets. Coils of segmented tubing, called “umbilicals” even though the term does not accurately describe their function, provide ready access among the forward areas of the ships. As many as six Athenas can be linked in this fashion, although only five have ever been built. The resulting structure would resemble a wheel.)

Between Callisto and Ganymede, we hit something: a drifting cloud of fine particles, a belt of granular material stretched so thin it never appeared on the LGD, before or after. Cathie later called it a cosmic sandbar; Iseminger thought it an unformed moon. It didn’t matter: whatever it was, the mission plowed into it at almost 50,000 kilometers per hour. Alarms clattered, and red lamps blinked on.

In those first moments, I thought the ship was going to come apart. Herman was thrown across a bank of consoles and through an open hatch. I couldn’t see Cathie, but a quick burst of profanity came from her direction. Things were being ripped off the hull. Deep within her walls, Greenswallow sighed. The lights dipped, came back, and went out. Emergency lamps cut in, and something big glanced off the side of the ship. More alarms howled, and I waited for the clamor of the throaty klaxon which would warn of a holing, and which consequently would be the last sound I could expect to hear in this life.

The sudden deceleration snapped my head back on the pads. (The collision had occurred at the worst possible time: Greenswallow was caught in the middle of an attitude alignment. We were flying backwards.)

The exterior monitors were blank: that meant the cameras were gone.

Cathie’s voice: “Rob, you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Can you see Herman?”

My angle was bad, and I was pinned in my chair. “No. He’s back in cargo.”

“Is there any way you can close the hatch?”

“Herman’s in there,” I protested, thinking she’d misunderstood.

“If something tears a hole out back there, we’re all going to go. Keeping the door open won’t help him.”

I hesitated. Sealing up seemed to be the wrong thing to do. (Of course, the fact that the hatch had been open in the first place constituted a safety violation.) “It’s on your console,” I told her. “Hit the numerics on your upper right.”

“Which one?”

“Hit them all.” She was seated at the status board, and I could see a row of red lights: several other hatches were open. They should have closed automatically when the first alarms sounded.

We got hit again, this time in front. Greenswallow trembled, and loose pieces of metal rattled around inside the walls like broken teeth.

“Rob,” she said. “I don’t think it’s working.”

The baleful lights still glowed across the top of her board.

It lasted about three minutes.

When it was over, we hurried back to look at Herman. We were no longer rotating, and gravity had consequently dropped to zero. Selma, gasping, pale, his skin damp, was floating grotesquely over a pallet of ore-sample cannisters. We got him to a couch and applied compresses. His eyes rolled shut, opened, closed again. “Inside,” he said, gently fingering an area just off his sternum. “I think I’ve been chewed up a little.” He raised his head slightly. “What kind of shape are we in?”

I left Cathie with him. Then I restored power, put on a suit and went outside.

The hull was a disaster: antennas were down, housings scored, lenses shattered. The lander was gone, ripped from its web. The port cargo area had buckled, and an auxiliary hatch was sprung. On the bow, the magnetic dock was hammered into slag. Travel between the ships was going to be a little tougher.

Greenswallow looked as if she had been sandblasted. I scraped particles out of her jet nozzles, replaced cable, and bolted down mounts. I caught a glimpse of Amity’s lights, sliding diagonally across the sky. As were the constellations.

“Cathie,” I said. “I see Mac. But I think we’re tumbling.”

“Okay.”

Iseminger was also on board Amity. And, fortunately, Marj Aubuchon, our surgeon. Herman’s voice broke in, thick with effort. “Rob, we got no radio contact with anyone. Any sign of Victor?”

Ganymede was close enough that its craters lay exposed in harsh solar light. Halfway round the sky, the Pleiades glittered. Tolstoi’s green and red running lights should have been visible among, or near, the six silver stars. But the sky was empty. I stood a long time and looked, wondering how many other navigators on other oceans had sought lost friends in that constellation. What had they called it in antiquity? The rainy Pleiades … . “Only Amity,” I said.

I tore out some cable and lobbed it in the general direction of Ganymede. Jupiter’s enormous arc was pushing above the maintenance pods, spraying October light across the wreckage. I improvised a couple of antennas, replaced some black boxes, and then decided to correct the tumble, if I could.

“Try it now,” I said.

Cathie acknowledged.

Two of the jets were useless. I went inside for spares, and replaced the faulty units. While I was finishing up, Cathie came back on. “Rob,” she said, “radio’s working, more or less. We have no long-range transmit, though.”

“Okay. I’m not going to try to do anything about that right now.”

“Are you almost finished?”

“Why?”

“Something occurred to me. Maybe the cloud, whatever that damned thing was that we passed through: maybe it’s U-shaped.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I needed something to worry about.”

“Maybe you should come back inside.”

“Soon as I can. How’s the patient doing?”

“Out,” she said. “He was a little delirious when he was talking to you. Anyhow, I’m worried: I think something’s broken internally. He never got his color back, and he’s beginning to bring up blood. Rob, we need Marj.”

“You hear anything from Amity yet?”

“Just a carrier wave.” She did not mention Tolstoi. “How bad is it out there?”

From where I was tethered, about halfway back on the buckled beam, I could see a crack in the main plates that appeared to run the length of the port tube. I climbed out onto the exhaust assembly, and pointed my flashlight into the combustion chamber. Something glittered where the reflection should have been subdued. I got in and looked: silicon. Sand, and steel, had fused in the white heat of passage. The exhaust was blocked.

Cathie came back on. “What about it, Rob?” she asked. “Any serious problems?”

“Cathie,” I said, “Greenswallow’s going to Pluto.”

Herman thought I was Landolfi: he kept assuring me that everything was going to be okay. His pulse was weak and rapid, and he alternated between sweating and shivering. Cathie had got a blanket under him and buckled him down so he wouldn’t hurt himself. She bunched some pillows under his feet, and held a damp compress to his head.

“That’s not going to help much. Raising his legs, I mean.”

She looked at me, momentarily puzzled. “Oh,” she said. “Not enough gravity.”

I nodded.

“Oh, Rob.” Her eyes swept the cases and cannisters, all neatly tagged, silicates from Pasiphae, sulfur from Himalia, assorted carbon compounds from Callisto. We had evidence now that Io had formed elsewhere in the solar system, and been well along in middle age when it was captured. We’d all but eliminated the possibility that life existed in Jupiter’s atmosphere. We understood why rings formed around gas giants, and we had a new clue to the cause of terrestrial ice ages. And I could see that Cathie was thinking about trading lives to satisfy the curiosity of a few academics. “We don’t belong out here,” she said, softly. “Not in these primitive shells.”

I said nothing.

“I got a question for you,” she continued. “We’re not going to find Tolstoi, right?”

“Is that your question?”

“No. I wish it were. But the LGD can’t see them. That means they’re just not there.” Her eyes filled with tears, but she shook her head impatiently. “And we can’t steer this thing. Can Amity carry six people?”

“It might have to.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“Food and water would be tight. Especially since we’re running out of time, and wouldn’t be able to transfer much over. If any. So we’d all be a little thinner when we got back. But yes, I think we could survive.”

We stared at one another, and then she turned away. I became conscious of the ship: the throb of power deep in her bulkheads (power now permanently bridled by conditions in the combustion chambers), the soft amber glow of the navigation lamps in the cockpit.

McGuire’s nasal voice, from Amity, broke the uneasy silence. “Herman, you okay?”

Cathie looked at me, and I nodded. “Mac,” she said, “this is Perth. Herman’s hurt. We need Marj.”

“Okay,” he said. “How bad?”

“We don’t know. Internal injuries, looks like. He appears to be in shock.”

We heard him talking to someone else. Then he came back. “We’re on our way. I’ll put Marj on in a minute; maybe she can help from here. How’s the ship?”

“Not good: the dock’s gone, and the engine might as well be.”

He asked me to be specific. “If we try a burn, the rear end’ll fall off.”

McGuire delivered a soft, venomous epithet. And then: “Do what you can for Herman. Marj’ll be right here.”

Cathie was looking at me strangely. “He’s worried,” she said.

“Yes. He’s in charge now … .”

“Rob, you say you think we’ll be okay. What’s the problem?”

“We might,” I said, “run a little short of air.”

Greenswallow continued her plunge toward Jupiter at a steadily increasing rate and a sharp angle of approach: we would pass within about 60,000 kilometers, and then drop completely out of the plane of the solar system. We appeared to be heading in the general direction of the Southern Cross.

Cathie worked on Herman. His breathing steadied, and he slipped in and out of his delirium. We sat beside him, not talking much. After awhile, Cathie asked, “What happens now?”

“In a few hours,” I said, “we’ll reach our insertion point. By then, we have to be ready to change course.” She frowned, and I shrugged. “That’s it,” I said. “It’s all the time we have to get over to Amity. If we don’t make the insertion on time, Amity won’t have the fuel to throw a U-turn later.”

“Rob, how are we going to get Herman over there?”

That was an uncomfortable question. The prospect of jamming him down into a suit was less than appealing, but there was no other way. “We’ll just have to float him over,” I said. “Marj won’t like it much.”

“Neither will Herman.”

“You wanted a little high drama,” I said, unnecessarily. “The next show should be a barnburner.”

Her mouth tightened, and she turned away from me.

One of the TV cameras had picked up the approach of Amity. Some of her lights were out, and she too looked a bit bent. The Athena is a homely vessel in the best of times, whale-shaped and snub-nosed, with a midship flare that suggests middle-age spread. But I was glad to see her.

Cathie snuffled at the monitor, and blew her nose. “Your Program’s dead, Rob.” Her eyes blazed momentarily, like a dying fire into which one has flung a few drops of water. “We’re leaving three of our people out here; and if you’re right about the air, we’ll get home with a shipload of defectives, or worse. Won’t that look good on the six o’clock news?” She gazed vacantly at Amity’s image. “I’d hoped,” she said, “that if things went well, Victor would have lived to see a ship carry his fusion engine. And maybe his name, as well. Ain’t gonna happen, though. Not ever.”

I had not allowed myself to think about the oxygen problem we were going to face. The Athenas recycle their air supply: the converters in a single ship can maintain a crew of three, or even four, indefinitely. But six?

I was not looking forward to the ride home.

A few minutes later, a tiny figure detached itself from the shadow of the Athena and started across: Marj Aubuchon on a maintenance sled. McGuire’s voice erupted from the ship’s speakers. “Rob, we’ve taken a long look at your engines, and we agree with your assessment. The damage complicates things.” Mac had a talent for understatement. It derived, not from a sophisticated sense of humor, bur from a genuine conviction of his own inferiority. He preferred to solve problems by denying their existence. He was the only one of the original nine who could have been accurately described as passive: other people’s opinions carried great weight with him. His prime value to the mission was his grasp of Athena systems. But he’d been a reluctant crewman, a man who periodically reminded us that he wanted only to retire to his farm in Indiana. He wouldn’t have been along at all except that one guy died and somebody else came down with an unexpected (but thoroughly earned) disease. Now, with Selma incapacitated and Landolfi gone, McGuire was in command. It must have been disconcerting for him. “We’ve got about five hours,” he continued. “Don’t let Marj get involved in major surgery. She’s already been complaining to me that it doesn’t sound as if it’ll be possible to move him. We have no alternative. She knows that, but you know how she is. Okay?”

One of the monitors had picked him up. He looked rumpled, and nervous. Not an attitude to elicit confidence. “Mac,” said Cathie, “we may kill him trying to get him over there.”

“You’ll kill him if you don’t,” he snapped. “Get your personal stuff together, and bring it with you. You won’t be going back.”

“What about trying to transfer some food?” I asked.

“We can’t dock,” he said. “And there isn’t time to float it across.”

“Mac,” said Cathie, “is Amity going to be able to support six people?” I listened to McGuire breathing. He turned away to issue some trivial instructions to Iseminger. When he came back he said, simply and tonelessly, “Probably not.” And then, coldbloodedly (I thought), “How’s Herman doing?”

Maybe it was my imagination. Certainly there was nothing malicious in his tone, but Cathie caught it too, and turned sharply round. “McGuire is a son-of-a-bitch,” she hissed. I don’t know whether Mac heard it.

Marjorie Aubuchon was short, blond, and irritable. When I relayed McGuire’s concerns about time, she said, “God knows, that’s all I’ve heard for the last half-hour.” She observed that McGuire was a jerk, and bent over Herman. The blood was pink and frothy on his lips. After a few minutes she said, to no one in particular, “Probably a punctured lung.” She waved Cathie over, and began filling a hypo; I went for a walk.

At sea, there’s a long tradition of sentiment between mariners and their ships. Enlisted men identify with them, engineers baby them, and captains go down with them. No similar attitude has developed in space flight. We’ve never had an Endeavour, or a Golden Hind. Always, off Earth, it has been the mission, rather than the ship. Friendship VII and Apollo XI were far more than vehicles. I’m not sure why that is; maybe it reflects Cathie’s view that travel between the worlds is still in its Kon-Tiki phase: the voyage itself is of such epic proportions that everything else is overwhelmed.

But I’d lived almost three years on Greenswallow. It was a long time to be confined to her narrow spaces. Nevertheless, she was shield and provider against that enormous abyss, and I discovered (while standing in the doorway of my cabin) a previously unfelt affection for her.

A few clothes were scattered round the room, a shirt was hung over my terminal, and two pictures were mounted on the plastic wall. One was a Casnavan print of a covered bridge in New Hampshire; the other was a telecopy of an editorial cartoon that had appeared in the Washington Post. The biggest human problem we had, of course, was sheer boredom. And Cathie had tried to capture the dimensions of the difficulty by showing crewmembers filling the long days on the outbound journey with bridge. (“It would be nice,” Cathie’s narrator had said at one point, “if we could take everybody out to an Italian restaurant now and then.”) The Post cartoon had appeared several days later: it depicted four astronauts holding cards. (We could recognize Selma, Landolfi, and Marj. The fourth, whose back was turned, was exceedingly feminine, and appeared to be Esther Crowley.) An enormous bloodshot eye is looking in through one window; a tentacle and a UFO are visible through another. The “Selma” character, his glasses characteristically down on his nose, is examining his hand, and delivering the caption: Dummy looks out the window and checks the alien.

I packed the New Hampshire bridge, and left the cartoon. If someone comes by, in 20 million years or so, he might need a laugh. I went up to the cockpit with my bag.

McGuire checked with me to see how we were progressing. “Fine,” I told him. I was still sitting there four hours later when Cathie appeared behind me.

“Rob,” she said, “we’re ready to move him.” She smiled wearily. “Marj says he should be okay if we can get him over there without breaking anything else.”

We cut the spin on the inner module to about point-oh-five. Then we lifted Herman onto a stretcher, and carried him carefully down to the airlock.

Cathie stared straight ahead, saying nothing. Her fine-boned cheeks were pale, and her eyes seemed focused far away. These, I thought, were her first moments to herself, unhampered by other duties. The impact of events was taking hold.

Marj called McGuire and told him we were starting over, and that she would need a sizable pair of shears when we got there to cut Herman’s suit open. “Please have them ready,” she said. “We may be in a hurry.”

I had laid out his suit earlier: we pulled it up over his legs. That was easy, but the rest of it was slow, frustrating work. “We need a special kind of unit for this,” Marj said. “Probably a large bag, without arms or legs. If we’re ever dumb enough to do anything like this again, I’ll recommend it.”

McGuire urged us to hurry.

Once or twice, Cathie’s eyes met mine. Something passed between us, but I was too distracted to define it. Then we were securing his helmet, and adjusting the oxygen mixture.

“I think we’re okay,” Marj observed, her hand pressed against Selma’s chest. “Let’s get him over there … .”

I opened the inner airlock, and pulled my own helmet into place. Then we guided Herman in, and secured him to Greenswallow’s maintenance sled. (The sled was little more than a toolshed with jet nozzles.) I recovered my bag and stowed it on board.

“I’d better get my stuff,” Cathie said. “You can get Herman over all right?”

“Of course,” said Marj. “Amity’s sled is secured outside the lock. Use that.”

She hesitated in the open hatchway, raised her left hand, and spread the fingers wide. Her eyes grew very round, and she formed two syllables that I was desperately slow to understand: in fact, I don’t think I translated the gesture, the word, until we were halfway across to Amity, and the lock was irrevocably closed behind us.

“Good-bye.”

Cathie’s green eyes sparkled with barely controlled emotion across a dozen or so monitors. Her black hair, which had been tied back earlier, now framed her angular features and fell to her shoulders. It was precisely in that partial state of disarray that tends to be most appealing. She looked as if she’d been crying, but her jaw was set, and she stood erect. Beneath the gray tunic, her breast rose and fell.

“What the hell are you doing, Perth?” demanded McGuire. He looked tired, almost ill. He’d gained weight since we’d left the Cape, his hair had whitened and retreated, his flesh had grown blotchy, and he’d developed jowls. The contrast with his dapper image in the mission photo was sobering. “Get moving!” he said, striving to keep his voice from rising. “We’re not going to make our burn!”

“I’m staying where I am,” she said. “I couldn’t make it over there now anyway. I wouldn’t even have time to put on the suit.”

McGuire’s puffy eyelids slid slowly closed. “Why?” he asked.

She looked out of the cluster of screens, a segmented Cathie, a group-Cathie. “Your ship won’t support six people, Mac.”

“Dammit!” His voice was a harsh rasp. “It would have just meant we’d cut down activity. Sleep a lot.” He waved a hand in front of his eyes, as though his vision were blurred. “Cathie, we’ve lost you. There’s no way we can get you back!”

“I know.”

No one said anything. Iseminger stared at her.

“Is Herman okay?” she asked.

“Marj is still working on him,” I said. “She thinks we got him across okay.”

“Good.”

A series of yellow lamps blinked on across the pilot’s console. We had two minutes. “Damn,” I said, suddenly aware of another danger: Amity was rotating, turning toward its new course. Would Greenswallow even survive the ignition? I looked at McGuire, who understood. His fingers flicked over press pads, and rows of numbers flashed across the navigation monitor. I could see muscles working in Cathie’s jaws; she looked down at Mac’s station as though she could read the result.

“It’s all right,” he said. “She’ll be clear.”

“Cathie …” Iseminger’s voice was almost strangled. “If I’d known you intended anything like this …”

“I know, Ed.” Her tone was gentle, a lover’s voice, perhaps. Her eyes were wet: she smiled anyway, full face, up close.

Deep in the systems, pumps began to whine. “I wish,” said Iseminger, absolutely without expression, “that we could do something.”

She turned her back, strode with unbearable grace across the command center, away from us, and passed into the shadowy interior of the cockpit. Another camera picked her up there, and we got a profile: she was achingly lovely in the soft glow of the navigation lamps.

“There is something … you can do,” she said. “Build Landolfi’s engine. And come back for me.”

For a brief moment, I thought Mac was going to abort the burn. But he sat frozen, fists clenched, and did the right thing, which is to say, nothing. It struck me that McGuire was incapable of intervening.

And I knew also that the woman in the cockpit was terrified of what she had done. It had been a good performance, but she’d utterly failed to conceal the fear that looked out of her eyes. And I realized with shock that she’d acted, not to prolong her life, but to save the Program. I watched her face as Amity’s engines ignited, and we began to draw away. Like McGuire, she seemed paralyzed, as though the nature of the calamity which she’d embraced was just becoming clear to her. Then it—she—was gone.

“What happened to the picture?” snapped Iseminger.

“She turned it off,” I said. “I don’t think she wants us to see her just now.”

He glared at me, and spoke to Mac. “Why the hell,” he demanded, “couldn’t he have brought her back with him?” His fists were knotted.

“I didn’t know,” I said. “How could I know?” And I wondered, how could I not?

When the burn ended, the distance between the two ships had opened to only a few kilometers. But it was a gulf, I thought, wider than any across which men had before looked at each other.

Iseminger called her name relentlessly. (We knew she could hear us.) But we got only the carrier wave.

Then her voice crackled across the command center. “Good,” she said. “Excellent. Check the recorders: make sure you got everything on tape.” Her image was back. She was in full light again, tying up her hair. Her eyes were hooded, and her lips pursed thoughtfully. “Rob,” she continued, “fade it out during Ed’s response, when he’s calling my name. Probably, you’ll want to reduce the background noise at that point. Cut all the business about who’s responsible. We want a sacrifice, not an oversight.”

“My God, Cathie,” I said. I stared at her, trying to understand. “What have you done?”

She took a deep breath. “I meant what I said. I have enough food to get by here for eight years or so. More if I stretch it. And plenty of fresh air. Well, relatively fresh. I’m better off than any of us would be if six people were trying to survive on Amity.”

“Cathie!” howled McGuire. He sounded in physical agony. “Cathie, we didn’t know for sure about life support. The converters might have kept up. There might have been enough air! It was just an estimate!”

“This is a hell of a time to tell me,” she said. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. Listen, I’ll be fine. I’ve got books to read, and maybe one to write. My long-range communications are kaput, Rob knows that, so you’ll have to come back for the book, too.” She smiled. “You’ll like it, Mac.” The command center got very still. “And on nights when things really get boring, I can play bridge with the computer.”

McGuire shook his head. “You’re sure you’ll be all right? You seemed pretty upset a few minutes ago.”

She looked at me and winked.

“The first Cathie was staged, Mac,” I said.

“I give up,” McGuire sighed. “Why?” He swiveled round to face the image on his screen. “Why would you do that?”

“That young woman,” she replied, “was committing an act of uncommon valor, as they say in the Marines. And she had to be vulnerable.” And compellingly lovely, I thought. In those last moments, I was realizing what it might mean to love Cathie Perth. “This Cathie,” she grinned, “is doing the only sensible thing. And taking a sabbatical as well. Do what you can to get the ship built. I’ll be waiting. Come if you can.” She paused. “Somebody should suggest they name it after Victor.”

This is the fifth Christmas since that one on Callisto. It’s a long time by any human measure. We drifted out of radio contact during the first week. There was some talk of broadcasting instructions to her for repairing her long-range transmission equipment. But she’d have to go outside to do it, so the idea was prudently tabled.

She was right about that tape. In my lifetime, I’ve never seen people so singlemindedly aroused. It created a global surge of sympathy and demands for action that seem to grow in intensity with each passing year. Funded partially by contributions and technical assistance from abroad, NASA has been pushing the construction of the fusion vessel that Victor Landolfi dreamed of.

Iseminger was assigned to help with the computer systems, and he’s kept me informed of progress. The most recent public estimates had anticipated a spring launch. But that single word September in Iseminger’s card suggests that one more obstacle has been encountered; and it means still another year before we can hope to reach her.

We broadcast to her on a regular basis. I volunteered to help, and I sit sometimes and talk to her for hours. She gets a regular schedule of news, entertainment, sports, whatever. And, if she’s listening, she knows that we’re coming.

And she also knows that her wish that the fusion ship be named for Victor Landolfi has been disregarded. The rescue vehicle will be the Catherine Perth.

If she’s listening: we have no way of knowing. And I worry a lot. Can a human being survive six years of absolute solitude? Iseminger was here for a few days last summer, and he tells me he is confident. “She’s a tough lady,” he said, any number of times. “Nothing bothers her. She even gave us a little theater at the end.”

And that’s what scares me: Cathie’s theatrical technique. I’ve thought about it, on the long ride home, and here. I kept a copy of the complete tape of that final conversation, despite McGuire’s instructions to the contrary, and I’ve watched it a few times. It’s locked downstairs in a file cabinet now, and I don’t look at it anymore. I’m afraid to. There are two Cathie Perths on the recording: the frightened, courageous one who galvanized a global public; and our Cathie, preoccupied with her job, flexible, almost indifferent to her situation. A survivor.

And, God help me, I can’t tell which one was staged.

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

Bloodchild

Here’s as powerful a story as you’re likely to see this (or any other) year: strange, grotesque, disturbing … and ultimately moving.

Octavia E. Butler sold her first novel in 1976, and has subsequently emerged as one of the foremost writers of her generation. Her critically-acclaimed novels include Patternmaster, Mind of my Mind, Survivor, Kindred, and Wild Seed. Her most recent novel was Clay’s Ark. In 1984, she won a Hugo Award for her short story “Speech Sounds.” She is currently at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled Exogenesis. Born in Pasadena, California, she now lives and works in Los Angeles.

My last night of childhood began with a visit home. T‘Gatoi’s sisters had given us two sterile eggs. T’Gatoi gave one to my mother, brother, and sisters. She insisted that I eat the other one alone. It didn’t matter. There was still enough to leave everyone feeling good. Almost everyone. My mother wouldn’t take any. She sat, watching everyone drifting and dreaming without her. Most of the time she watched me.

I lay against T’Gatoi’s long, velvet underside, sipping from my egg now and then, wondering why my mother denied herself such a harmless pleasure. Less of her hair would be gray if she indulged now and then. The eggs prolonged life, prolonged vigor. My father, who had never refused one in his life, had lived more than twice as long as he should have. And toward the end of his life, when he should have been slowing down, he had married my mother and fathered four children.

But my mother seemed content to age before she had to. I saw her turn away as several of T‘Gatoi’s limbs secured me closer. T’Gatoi liked our body heat, and took advantage of it whenever she could. When I was little and at home more, my mother used to try to tell me how to behave with T’Gatoi—how to be respectful and always obedient because T’Gatoi was the Tlic government official in charge of the Preserve, and thus the most important of her kind to deal directly with Terrans. It was an honor, my mother said, that such a person had chosen to come into the family. My mother was at her most formal and severe when she was lying.

I had no idea why she was lying, or even what she was lying about. It was an honor to have T‘Gatoi in the family, but it was hardly a novelty. T’Gatoi and my mother had been friends all my mother’s life, and T’Gatoi was not interested in being honored in the house she considered her second home. She simply came in, climbed onto one of her special couches and called me over to keep her warm. It was impossible to be formal with her while lying against her and hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny.

“You’re better,” she said this time, probing me with six or seven of her limbs. “You’re gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous.” The probing changed subtly, became a series of caresses.

“He’s still too thin,” my mother said sharply.

T’Gatoi lifted her head and perhaps a meter of her body off the couch as though she were sitting up. She looked at my mother and my mother, her face lined and old-looking, turned away.

“Lien, I would like you to have what’s left of Gan’s egg.”

“The eggs are for the children,” my mother said.

“They are for the family. Please take it.”

Unwillingly obedient, my mother took it from me and put it to her mouth. There were only a few drops left in the now-shrunken, elastic shell, but she squeezed them out, swallowed them, and after a few moments some of the lines of tension began to smooth from her face.

“It’s good,” she whispered. “Sometimes I forget how good it is.”

“You should take more,” T’Gatoi said. “Why are you in such a hurry to be old?”

My mother said nothing.

“I like being able to come here,” T’Gatoi said. “This place is a refuge because of you, yet you won’t take care of yourself.”

T’Gatoi was hounded on the outside. Her people wanted more of us made available. Only she and her political faction stood between us and the hordes who did not understand why there was a Preserve—why any Terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, in some way made available to them. Or they did understand, but in their desperation, they did not care. She parceled us out to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for their political support. Thus, we were necessities, status symbols, and an independent people. She oversaw the joining of families, putting an end to the final remnants of the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit impatient Tlic. I had lived outside with her. I had seen the desperate eagerness in the way some people looked at me. It was a little frightening to know that only she stood between us and that desperation that could so easily swallow us. My mother would look at her sometimes and say to me, “Take care of her.” And I would remember that she too had been outside, had seen.

Now T’Gatoi used four of her limbs to push me away from her onto the floor. “Go on, Gan,” she said. “Sit down there with your sisters and enjoy not being sober. You had most of the egg. Lien, come warm me.”

My mother hesitated for no reason that I could see. One of my earliest memories is of my mother stretched alongside T‘Gatoi, talking about things I could not understand, picking me up from the floor and laughing as she sat me on one of T’Gatoi’s segments. She ate her share of eggs then. I wondered when she had stopped, and why.

She lay down now against T’Gatoi, and the whole left row of T’Gatoi’s limbs closed around her, holding her loosely, but securely. I had always found it comfortable to lie that way but, except for my older sister, no one else in the family liked it. They said it made them feel caged.

T’Gatoi meant to cage my mother. Once she had, she moved her tail slightly, then spoke. “Not enough egg, Lien. You should have taken it when it was passed to you. You need it badly now.”

T’Gatoi’s tail moved once more, its whip motion so swift I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been watching for it. Her sting drew only a single drop of blood from my mother’s bare leg.

My mother cried out—probably in surprise. Being stung doesn’t hurt. Then she sighed and I could see her body relax. She moved languidly into a more comfortable position within the cage of T’Gatoi’s limbs. “Why did you do that?” she asked, sounding half asleep.

“I could not watch you sitting and suffering any longer.”

My mother managed to move her shoulders in a small shrug. “Tomorrow,” she said.

“Yes. Tomorrow you will resume your suffering—if you must. But for now, just for now, lie here and warm me and let me ease your way a little.”

“He’s still mine, you know,” my mother said suddenly. “Nothing can buy him from me.” Sober, she wouldn’t have permitted herself to refer to such things.

“Nothing,” T’Gatoi agreed, humoring her.

“Did you think I would sell him for eggs? For long life? My son?”

“Not for anything,” T’Gatoi said stroking my mother’s shoulders, toying with her long, graying hair.

I would like to have touched my mother, shared that moment with her. She would take my hand if I touched her now. Freed by the egg and the sting, she would smile and perhaps say things long held in. But tomorrow, she would remember all this as a humiliation. I did not want to be part of a remembered humiliation. Best just to be still and know she loved me under all the duty and pride and pain.

“Xuan Hoa, take off her shoes,” T’Gatoi said. “In a little while I’ll sting her again and she can sleep.”

My older sister obeyed, swaying drunkenly as she stood up. When she had finished, she sat down beside me and took my hand. We had always been a unit, she and I.

My mother put the back of her head against T’Gatoi’s underside and tried from that impossible angle to look up into the broad, round face. “You’re going to sting me again?”

“Yes, Lien.”

“I’ll sleep until tomorrow noon.”

“Good. You need it. When did you sleep last?”

My mother made a wordless sound of annoyance. “I should have stepped on you when you were small enough,” she muttered.

It was an old joke between them. They had grown up together, sort of, though T‘Gatoi had not, in my mother’s lifetime, been small enough for any Terran to step on. She was nearly three times my mother’s present age, yet would still be young when my mother died of age. But T’Gatoi and my mother had met as T’Gatoi was coming into a period of rapid development—a kind of Tlic adolescence. My mother was only a child, but for a while they developed at the same rate and had no better friends than each other.

T‘Gatoi had even introduced my mother to the man who became my father. My parents, pleased with each other in spite of their very different ages, married as T’Gatoi was going into her family’s business—politics. She and my mother saw each other less. But sometimes before my older sister was born, my mother promised T‘Gatoi one of her children. She would have to give one of us to someone, and she preferred T’Gatoi to some stranger.

Years passed. T‘Gatoi traveled and increased her influence. The Preserve was hers by the time she came back to my mother to collect what she probably saw as her just reward for her hard work. My older sister took an instant liking to her and wanted to be chosen, but my mother was just coming to term with me and T’Gatoi liked the idea of choosing an infant and watching and taking part in all the phases of development. I’m told I was first caged within T‘Gatoi’s many limbs only three minutes after my birth. A few days later, I was given my first taste of egg. I tell Terrans that when they ask whether I was ever afraid of her. And I tell it to Tlic when T’Gatoi suggests a young Terran child for them and they, anxious and ignorant, demand an adolescent. Even my brother who had somehow grown up to fear and distrust the Tlic could probably have gone smoothly into one of their families if he had been adopted early enough. Sometimes, I think for his sake he should have been. I looked at him, stretched out on the floor across the room, his eyes open, but glazed as he dreamed his egg dream. No matter what he felt toward the Tlic, he always demanded his share of egg.

“Lien, can you stand up?” T’Gatoi asked suddenly.

“Stand?” my mother said. “I thought I was going to sleep.”

“Later. Something sounds wrong outside.” The cage was abruptly gone.

“What?”

“Up, Lien!”

My mother recognized her tone and got up just in time to avoid being dumped on the floor. T’Gatoi whipped her three meters of body off her couch, toward the door, and out at full speed. She had bones—ribs, a long spine, a skull, four sets of limbbones per segment. But when she moved that way, twisting, hurling herself into controlled falls, landing running, she seemed not only boneless, but aquatic—something swimming through the air as though it were water. I loved watching her move.

I left my sister and started to follow her out the door, though I wasn’t very steady on my own feet. It would have been better to sit and dream, better yet to find a girl and share a waking dream with her. Back when the Tlic saw us as not much more than convenient big warm-blooded animals, they would pen several of us together, male and female, and feed us only eggs. That way they could be sure of getting another generation of us no matter how we tried to hold out. We were lucky that didn’t go on long. A few generations of it and we would have been little more than conveninent big animals.

“Hold the door open, Gan,” T’Gatoi said. “And tell the family to stay back.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“N’Tlic.”

I shrank back against the door. “Here? Alone?”

“He was trying to reach a call box, I suppose.” She carried the man past me, unconscious, folded like a coat over some of her limbs. He looked young—my brother’s age perhaps—and he was thinner than he should have been. What T’Gatoi would have called dangerously thin.

“Gan, go to the call box,” she said. She put the man on the floor and began stripping off his clothing.

I did not move.

After a moment, she looked up at me, her sudden stillness a sign of deep impatience.

“Send Qui” I told her. “I’ll stay here. Maybe I can help.”

She let her limbs begin to move again, lifting the man and pulling his shirt over his head. “You don’t want to see this,” she said. “It will be hard. I can’t help this man the way his Tlic could.”

“I know. But send Qui. He won’t want to be of any help here. I’m at least willing to try.”

She looked at my brother—older, bigger, stronger, certainly more able to help her here. He was sitting up now, braced against the wall, staring at the man on the floor with undisguised fear and revulsion. Even she could see that he would be useless.

“Qui, go!” she said.

He didn’t argue. He stood up, swayed briefly, then steadied, frightened sober.

“This man’s name is Bram Lomas,” she told him, reading from the man’s arm band. I fingered my own arm band in sympathy. “He needs T’Khotgif Teh. Do you hear?”

“Bram Lomas, T’Khotgif Teh,” my brother said. “I’m going.” He edged around Lomas and ran out the door.

Lomas began to regain consciousness. He only moaned at first and clutched spasmodically at a pair of T’Gatoi’s limbs. My younger sister, finally awake from her egg dream, came close to look at him, until my mother pulled her back.

T’Gatoi removed the man’s shoes, then his pants, all the while leaving him two of her limbs to grip. Except for the final few, all her limbs were equally dexterous. “I want no argument from you this time, Gan,” she said.

I straightened. “What shall I do?”

“Go out and slaughter an animal that is at least half your size.”

“Slaughter? But I’ve never—”

She knocked me across the room. Her tail was an efficient weapon whether she exposed the sting or not.

I got up, feeling stupid for having ignored her warning, and went into the kitchen. Maybe I could kill something with a knife or an ax. My mother raised a few Terran animals for the table and several thousand local ones for their fur. T‘Gatoi would probably prefer something local. An achti, perhaps. Some of those were the right size, though they had about three times as many teeth as I did and a real love of using them. My mother, Hoa, and Qui could kill them with knives. I had never killed one at all, had never slaughtered any animal. I had spent most of my time with T’Gatoi while my brother and sisters were learning the family business. T’Gatoi had been right. I should have been the one to go to the call box. At least I could do that.

I went to the corner cabinet where my mother kept her larger house and garden tools. At the back of the cabinet there was a pipe that carried off waste water from the kitchen—except that it didn’t any more. My father had rerouted the waste water before I was born. Now the pipe could be turned so that one half slid around the other and a rifle could be stored inside. This wasn’t our only gun, but it was our most easily accessible one. I would have to use it to shoot one of the biggest of the achti. Then T‘Gatoi would probably confiscate it. Firearms were illegal in the Preserve. There had been incidents right after the Preserve was established—Terrans shooting Tlic, shooting N’Tlic. This was before the joining of families began, before everyone had a personal stake in keeping the peace. No one had shot a Tlic in my lifetime or my mother’s, but the law still stood—for our protection, we were told. There were stories of whole Terran families wiped out in reprisal back during the assassinations.

I went out to the cages and shot the biggest achti I could find. It was a handsome breeding male and my mother would not be pleased to see me bring it in. But it was the right size, and I was in a hurry.

I put the achti’s long, warm body over my shoulder—glad that some of the weight I’d gained was muscle—and took it to the kitchen. There, I put the gun back in its hiding place. If T’Gatoi noticed the achti’s wounds and demanded the gun, I would give it to her. Otherwise, let it stay where my father wanted it.

I turned to take the achti to her, then hesitated. For several seconds, I stood in front of the closed door wondering why I was suddenly afraid. I knew what was going to happen. I hadn’t seen it before but T’Gatoi had shown me diagrams, and drawings. She had made sure I knew the truth as soon as I was old enough to understand it.

Yet I did not want to go into that room. I wasted a little time chosing a knife from the carved, wooden box in which my mother kept them. T’Gatoi might want one, I told myself, for the tough, heavily furred hide of the achti.

“Gan!” T’Gatoi called, her voice harsh with urgency.

I swallowed. I had not imagined a simple moving of the feet could be so difficult. I realized I was trembling and that shamed me. Shame impelled me through the door.

I put the achti down near T’Gatoi and saw that Lomas was unconscious again. She, Lomas, and I were alone in the room, my mother and sisters probably sent out so they would not have to watch. I envied them.

But my mother came back into the room as T’Gatoi seized the achti. Ignoring the knife I offered her, she extended claws from several of her limbs and slit the achti from throat to anus. She looked at me, her yellow eyes intent. “Hold this man’s shoulders, Gan.”

I stared at Lomas in panic, realizing that I did not want to touch him, let alone hold him. This would not be like shooting an animal. Not as quick, not as merciful, and, I hoped, not as final, but there was nothing I wanted less than to be part of it.

My mother came forward. “Gan, you hold his right side,” she said. “I’ll hold his left.” And if he came to, he would throw her off without realizing he had done it. She was a tiny woman. She often wondered aloud how she had produced, as she said, such “huge” children.

“Never mind,” I told her, taking the man’s shoulders. “I’ll do it.”

She hovered nearby.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t shame you. You don’t have to stay and watch.”

She looked at me uncertainly, then touched my face in a rare caress. Finally, she went back to her bedroom.

T’Gatoi lowered her head in relief. “Thank you, Gan,” she said with courtesy more Terran than Tlic. “That one … she is always finding new ways for me to make her suffer.”

Lomas began to groan and make choked sounds. I had hoped he would stay unconscious. T’Gatoi put her face near his so that he focused on her.

“I’ve stung you as much as I dare for now,” she told him. “When this is over, I’ll sting you to sleep and you won’t hurt any more.”

“Please,” the man begged. “Wait …”

“There’s no more time, Bram. I’ll sting you as soon as it’s over. When T’Khotgif arrives she’ll give you eggs to help you heal. It will be over soon.”

“T’Khotgif!” the man shouted, straining against my hands.

“Soon, Bram.” T’Gatoi glanced at me, then placed a claw against his abdomen slightly to the right of the middle, just below the last rib. There was movement on the right side—tiny, seemingly random pulsations moving his brown flesh, creating a concavity here, a convexity there, over and over until I could see the rhythm of it and knew where the next pulse would be.

Lomas’s entire body stiffened under T’Gatoi’s claw, though she merely rested it against him as she wound the rear section of her body around her legs. He might break my grip, but he would not break hers. He wept helplessly as she used his pants to tie his hands, then pushed his hands above his head so that I could kneel on the cloth between them and pin them in place. She rolled up his shirt and gave it to him to bite down on.

And she opened him.

His body convulsed with the first cut. He almost tore himself away from me. The sounds he made … I had never heard such sounds come from anything human. T’Gatoi seemed to pay no attention as she lengthened and deepened the cut, now and then pausing to lick away blood. His blood vessels contracted, reacting to the chemistry of her saliva, and the bleeding slowed.

I felt as though I were helping her torture him, helping her consume him. I knew I would vomit soon, didn’t know why I hadn’t already. I couldn’t possibly last until she was finished.

She found the first grub. It was fat and deep red with his blood—both inside and out. It had already eaten its own egg case, but apparently had not yet begun to eat its host. At this stage, it would eat any flesh except its mother’s. Let alone, it would have gone on excreting the poisons that had both sickened and alerted Lomas. Eventually it would have begun to eat. By the time it ate its way out of Lomas’s flesh, Lomas would be dead or dying—and unable to take revenge on the thing that was killing him. There was always a grace period between the time the host sickened and the time the grubs began to eat him.

T’Gatoi picked up the writhing grub carefully, and looked at it, somehow ignoring the terrible groans of the man.

Abruptly, the man lost consciousness.

“Good,” T’Gatoi looked down at him. “I wish you Terrans could do that at will.” She felt nothing. And the thing she held …

It was limbless and boneless at this stage, perhaps fifteen centimeters long and two thick, blind and slimy with blood. It was like a large worm. T’Gatoi put it into the belly of the achti, and it began at once to burrow. It would stay there and eat as long as there was anything to eat.

Probing through Lomas’ flesh, she found two more, one of them smaller and more vigorous. “A male!” she said happily. He would be dead before I would. He would be through his metamorphosis and screwing everything that would hold still before his sisters even had limbs. He was the only one to make a serious effort to bite T’Gatoi as she placed him in the achti.

Paler worms oozed to visibility in Lomas’s flesh. I closed my eyes. It was worse than finding something dead, rotting, and filled with tiny animal grubs. And it was far worse than any drawing or diagram.

“Ah, there are more,” T’Gatoi said, plucking out two long, thick grubs. You may have to kill another animal, Gan. Everything lives inside you Terrans.”

I had been told all my life that this was a good and necessary thing Tlic and Terran did together—a kind of birth. I had believed it until now. I knew birth was painful and bloody, no matter what. But this was something else, something worse. And I wasn’t ready to see it. Maybe I never would be. Yet I couldn’t not see it. Closing my eyes didn’t help.

T’Gatoi found a grub still eating its egg case. The remains of the case were still wired into a blood vessel by their own little tube or hook or whatever. That was the way the grubs were anchored and the way they fed. They took only bood until they were ready to emerge. Then they ate their stretched, elastic egg cases. Then they ate their hosts.

T’Gatoi bit away the egg case, licked away the blood. Did she like the taste? Did childhood habits die hard—or not die at all?

The whole procedure was wrong, alien. I wouldn’t have thought anything about her could seem alien to me.

“One more, I think,” she said. “Perhaps two. A good family. In a host animal these days, we would be happy to find one or two alive.” She glanced at me. “Go outside, Gan, and empty your stomach. Go now while the man is unconscious.”

I staggered out, barely made it. Beneath the tree just beyond the front door, I vomited until there was nothing left to bring up. Finally, I stood shaking, tears streaming down my face. I did not know why I was crying, but I could not stop. I went farther from the house to avoid being seen. Every time I closed my eyes I saw red worms crawling over redder human flesh.

There was a car coming toward the house. Since Terrans were forbidden motorized vehicles except for certain farm equipment, I knew this must be Lomas’s Tlic with Qui and perhaps a Terran doctor. I wiped my face on my shirt, struggled for control.

“Gan,” Qui called as the car stopped. “What happened?” He crawled out of the low, round, Tlic-convenient car door. Another Terran crawled out the other side and went into the house without speaking to me. The doctor. With his help and a few eggs, Lomas might make it.

“T’Khotgif Teh?” I said.

The Tlic driver surged out of her car, reared up half her length before me. She was paler and smaller than T’Gatoi—probably born from the body of an animal. Tlic from Terran bodies were always larger as well as more numerous.

“Six young,” I told her. “Maybe seven alive. At least one male.”

“Lomas?” she said harshly. I liked her for the question and the concern in her voice when she asked it. The last coherent thing he had said was her name.

“He’s alive,” I said.

She surged away to the house without another word.

“She’s been sick,” my brother said, watching her go. “When I called, I could hear people telling her she wasn’t well enough to go out even for this.”

I said nothing. I had extended courtesy to the Tlic. Now I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I hoped he would go in—out of curiosity if nothing else.

“Finally found out more than you wanted to know, eh?”

I looked at him.

“Don’t give me one of her looks,” he said. “You’re not her. You’re just her property.”

One of her looks. Had I picked up even an ability to imitate her expressions?

“What’d you do, puke?” He sniffed the air. “So now you know what you’re in for.”

I walked away from him. He and I had been close when we were kids. He would let me follow him around when I was home and sometimes T‘Gatoi would let me bring him along when she took me into the city. But something had happened when he reached adolescence. I never knew what. He began keeping out of T’Gatoi’s way. Then he began running away—until he realized there was no “away.” Not in the Preserve. Certainly not outside. After that he concentrated on getting his share of every egg that came into the house, and on looking out for me in a way that made me all but hate him—a way that clearly said, as along as I was all right, he was safe from the Tlic.

“How was it, really?” he demanded, following me.

“I killed an achti. The young ate it.”

“You didn’t run out of the house and puke because they ate an achti.”

“I had … never seen a person cut open before.” That was true, and enough for him to know. I couldn’t talk about the other. Not with him.

“Oh,” he said. He glanced at me as though he wanted to say more, but he kept quiet.

We walked, not really headed anywhere. Toward the back, toward the cages, toward the fields.

“Did he say anything?” Qui asked. “Lomas, I mean.”

Who else would he mean? “He said, ‘T’Khotgif.’”

Qui shuddered. “If she had done that to me, she’d be the last person I’d call for.”

“You’d call for her. Her sting would ease your pain without killing the grubs in you.”

“You think I’d care if they died?”

No. Of course he wouldn’t. Would I?

“Shit!” He drew a deep breath. “I’ve seen what they do. You think this thing with Lomas was bad? It was nothing”

I didn’t argue. He didn’t know what he was talking about.

“I saw them eat a man,” he said.

I turned to face him. “You’re lying!”

“I saw them eat a man.” He paused. “It was when I was little. I had been to the Hartmund house and I was on my way home. Halfway here, I saw a man and a Tlic and the man was N’Tlic. The gound was hilly. I was able to hide from them and watch. The Tlic wouldn’t open the man because she had nothing to feed the grubs. The man couldn’t go any farther and there were no houses around. He was in so much pain he told her to kill him. He begged her to kill him. Finally, she did. She cut his throat. One swipe of one claw. I saw the grubs eat their way out, then burrow in again, still eating.”

His words made me see Lomas’s flesh again, parasitized, crawling. “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I whispered.

He looked startled, as though he’d forgotten I was listening. “I don’t know.”

“You started to run away not long after that, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Stupid. Running inside the Preserve. Running in a cage.”

I shook my head, said what I should have said to him long ago. “She wouldn’t take you, Qui. You don’t have to worry.”

“She would … if anything happened to you.”

“No. She’d take Xuan Hoa. Hoa … wants it.” She wouldn’t if she had stayed to watch Lomas.

“They don’t take women,” he said with contempt.

“They do sometimes.” I glanced at him. “Actually, they prefer women. You should be around them when they talk among themselves. They say women have more body fat to protect the grubs. But they usually take men to leave the women free to bear their own young.”

“To provide the next generation of host animals,” he said, switching from contempt to bitterness.

“It’s more than that!” I countered. Was it?

“If it were going to happen to me, I’d want to believe it was more, too.”

“It is more!” I felt like a kid. Stupid argument.

“Did you think so while T’Gatoi was picking worms out of that guy’s guts?”

“It’s not supposed to happen that way.”

“Sure it is. You weren’t supposed to see it, that’ all. And his Tlic was supposed to do it. She could sting him unconscious and the operation wouldn’t have been as painful. But she’d still open him, pick out the grubs, and if she missed even one, it would poison him and eat him from the inside out.”

There was actually a time when my mother told me to show respect for Qui because he was my older brother. I walked away, hating him. In his way, he was gloating. He was safe and I wasn’t. I could have hit him, but I didn’t think I would be able to stand it when he refused to hit back, when he looked at me with contempt and pity.

He wouldn’t let me get away. Longer-legged, he swung ahead of me and made me feel as though I were following him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I strode on, sick and furious.

“Look, it probably won’t be that bad with you. T’Gatoi likes you. She’ll be careful.”

I turned back toward the house, almost running from him.

“Has she done it to you yet?” he asked, keeping up easily. “I mean, you’re about the right age for implantation. Has she—”

I hit him. I didn’t know I was going to do it, but I think I meant to kill him. If he hadn’t been bigger and stronger, I think I would have.

He tried to hold me off, but in the end, had to defend himself. He only hit me a couple of times. That was plenty. I don’t remember going down, but when I came to, he was gone. It was worth the pain to be rid of him.

I got up and walked slowly toward the house. The back was dark. No one was in the kitchen. My mother and sisters were sleeping in their bedrooms—or pretending to.

Once I was in the kitchen, I could hear voices—Tlic and Terran from the next room. I couldn’t make out what they were saying—didn’t want to make it out.

I sat down at my mother’s table, waiting for quiet. The table was smooth and worn, heavy and well-crafted. My father had made it for her just before he died. I remembered hanging around underfoot when he built it. He didn’t mind. Now I sat leaning on it, missing him. I could have talked to him. He had done it three times in his long life. Three clutches of eggs, three times being opened and sewed up. How had he done it? How did anyone do it?

I got up, took the rifle from its hiding place, and sat down again with it. It needed cleaning, oiling.

All I did was load it.

“Gan?”

She made a lot of little clicking sounds when she walked on bare floor, each limb clicking in succession as it touched down. Waves of little clicks.

She came to the table, raised the front half of her body above it, and surged onto it. Sometimes she moved so smoothly she seemed to flow like water itself. She coiled herself into a small hill in the middle of the table and looked at me.

“That was bad,” she said softly. “You should not have seen it. It need not be that way.”

“I know.”

“T’Khotgif—Ch’Khotgif now—she will die of her disease. She will not live to raise her children. But her sister will provide for them, and for Bram Lomas.” Sterile sister. One fertile female in every lot. One to keep the family going. That sister owed Lomas more than she could ever repay.

“He’ll live then?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if he would do it again.”

“No one would ask him to do that again.”

I looked into the yellow eyes, wondering how much I saw and understood there, and how much I only imagined. “No one ever asks us,” I said. “You never asked me.”

She moved her head slightly. “What’s the matter with your face?” “Nothing. Nothing important.” Human eyes probably wouldn’t have noticed the swelling in the darkness. The only light was from one of the moons, shining through a window across the room.

“Did you use the rifle to shoot the achti?”

“Yes.”

“And do you mean to use it to shoot me?”

I stared at her, outlined in moonlight—coiled, graceful body. “What does Terran blood taste like to you?”

She said nothing.

“What are you?” I whispered. “What are we to you?”

She lay still, rested her head on her topmost coil. “You know me as no other does,” she said softly. “You must decide.”

“That’s what happened to my face,” I told her.

“What?”

“Qui goaded me into deciding to do something. It didn’t turn out very well.” I moved the gun slightly, brought the barrel up diagonally under my own chin. “At least it was a decision I made.”

“As this will be.”

“Ask me, Gatoi.”

“For my children’s lives?”

She would say something like that. She knew how to manipulate people, Terran and Tlic. But not this time.

“I don’t want to be a host animal,” I said. “Not even yours.”

It took her a long time to answer. “We use almost no host animals these days,” she said. “You know that.”

“You use us.”

“We do. We wait long years for you and teach you and join our families to yours.” She moved restlessly. “You know you aren’t animals to us.”

I stared at her, saying nothing.

“The animals we once used began killing most of our eggs after implantation long before your ancestors arrived,” she said softly. “You know these things, Gan. Because your people arrived, we are relearning what it means to be a healthy, thriving people. And your ancestors, fleeing from their homeworld, from their own kind who would have killed or enslaved them—they survived because of us. We saw them as people and gave them the Preserve when they still tried to kill us as worms.

At the word “Worms” I jumped. I couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t help noticing it.

“I see,” she said quietly. “Would you really rather die than bear my young, Gan?”

I didn’t answer.

“Shall I go to Xuan Hoa?”

“Yes!” Hoa wanted it. Let her have it. She hadn’t had to watch Lomas. She’d be proud … Not terrified.

T’Gatoi flowed off the table onto the floor, startling me almost too much.

“I’ll sleep in Hoa’s room tonight,” she said. “And sometime tonight or in the morning, I’ll tell her.”

This was going too fast. My sister. Hoa had had almost as much to do with raising me as my mother. I was still close to her—not like Qui. She could want T’Gatoi and still love me.

“Wait! Gatoi!”

She looked back, then raised nearly half her length off the floor and turned it to face me. “These are adult things, Gan. This is my life, my family!”

“But she’s … my sister.”

“I have done what you demanded. I have asked you!”

“But—”’

“It will be easier for Hoa. She has always expected to carry other lives inside her.”

Human lives. Human young who would someday drink at her breasts, not at her veins.

I shook my head. “Don’t do it to her, Gatoi.” I was not Qui. It seemed I could become him, though, with no effort at all. I could make Xuan Hoa my shield. Would it be easier to know that red worms were growing in her flesh instead of mine?

“Don’t do it to Hoa,” I repeated.

She stared at me, utterly still.

I looked away, then back at her. “Do it to me.”

I lowered the gun from my throat and she leaned forward to take it.

“No,” I told her.

“It’s the law,” she said.

“Leave it for the family. One of them might use it to save my life someday.”

She grasped the rifle barrel, but I wouldn’t let go. I was pulled into a standing position over her.

“Leave it here!” I repeated. “If we’re not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner.”

It was clearly hard for her to let go of the rifle. A shudder went through her and she made a hissing sound of distress. It occurred to me that she was afraid. She was old enough to have seen what guns could do to people. Now her young and this gun would be together in the same house. She did not know about our other guns. In this dispute, they did not matter.

“I will implant the first egg tonight,” she said as I put the gun away. “Do you hear, Gan?”

Why else had I been given a whole egg to eat while the rest of the family was left to share one? Why else had my mother kept looking at me as though I were going away from her, going where she could not follow? Did T’Gatoi imagine I hadn’t known?

“I hear.”

“Now!” I let her push me out of the kitchen, then walked ahead of her toward my bedroom. The sudden urgency in her voice sounded real. “You would have done it to Hoa tonight!” I accused.

“I must do it to someone tonight.”

I stopped in spite of her urgency and stood in her way. “Don’t you care who?”

She flowed around me and into my bedroom. I found her waiting on the couch we shared. There was nothing in Hoa’s room that she could have used. She would have done it to Hoa on the floor. The thought of her doing it to Hoa at all disturbed me in a different way now, and I was suddenly angry.

Yet I undressed and lay down beside her. I knew what to do, what to expect. I had been told all my life. I felt the familiar sting, narcotic, mildly pleasant. Then the blind probing of her ovipositor. The puncture was painless, easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine. I held on to a pair of her limbs until I remembered Lomas holding her that way. Then I let go, moved inadvertently, and hurt her. She gave a low cry of pain and I expected to be caged at once within her limbs. When I wasn’t, I held on to her again, feeling oddly ashamed.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

She rubbed my shoulders with four of her limbs.

“Do you care?” I asked. “Do you care that it’s me?”

She did not answer for some time. Finally, “You were the one making choices tonight, Gan. I made mine long ago.”

“Would you have gone to Hoa?”

“Yes. How could I put my children into the care of one who hates them?”

“It wasn’t … hate.”

“I know what it was.”

“I was afraid.”

Silence.

“I still am.” I could admit it to her here, now.

“But you came to me … to save Hoa.”

“Yes.” I leaned my forehead against her. She was cool velvet, deceptively soft. “And to keep you for myself,” I said. It was so. I didn’t understand it, but it was so.

She made a soft hum of contentment. “I couldn’t believe I had made such a mistake with you,” she said. “I chose you. I believed you had grown to choose me.”

“I had, but …”

“Lomas.”

“Yes.”

“I have never known a Terran to see a birth and take it well. Qui has seen one, hasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Terrans should be protected from seeing.”

I didn’t like the sound of that—and I doubted that it was possible. “Not protected,” I said. “Shown. Shown when we’re young kids, and shown more than once. Gatoi, no Terran ever sees a birth that goes right. All we see is N’Tlic—pain and terror and maybe death.”

She looked down at me. “It is a private thing. It has always been a private thing.”

Her tone kept me from insisting—that and the knowledge that if she changed her mind, I might be the first public example. But I had planted the thought in her mind. Chances were it would grow, and eventually she would experiment.

“You won’t see it again,” she said. “I don’t want you thinking any more about shooting me.”

The small amount of fluid that came into me with her egg relaxed me as completely as a sterile egg would have, so that I could remember the rifle in my hands and my feelings of fear and revulsion, anger and despair. I could remember the feelings without reviving them. I could talk about them.

“I wouldn’t have shot you,” I said. “Not you.” She had been taken from my father’s flesh when he was my age.

“You could have,” she insisted.

“Not you.” She stood between us and her own people, protecting, interweaving.

“Would you have destroyed yourself?”

I moved carefully, uncomfortably. “I could have done that. I nearly did. That’s Qui’s ‘away.’ I wonder if he knows.”

“What?”

I did not answer.

“You will live now.”

“Yes.” Take care of her, my mother used to say. Yes.

“I’m healthy and young,” she said. “I won’t leave you as Lomas was left—alone, N’Tlic. I’ll take care of you.”

CONNIE WILLIS

Blued Moon

Connie Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado, with a husband, a fifteen-year-old daughter, and a bulldog. She first attracted attention as a writer in the late ’70s with a number of outstanding stories for the now-defunct magazine Galileo, and in the subsequent few years has made a large name for herself very fast indeed. In 1982, she won two Nebula Awards, one for her superb novelette “Fire Watch,” and one for her poignant short story “A Letter from the Clearys;” a few months later, “Fire Watch” went on to win her a Hugo Award as well. Her short fiction has appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Berkley Showcase, The Twilight Zone Magazine, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Her first novel, written in collaboration with Cynthia Felice, was Water Witch. She is currently working on her first solo novel, tentatively entitled The Three Bears. Her most recent book is Fire Watch, a collection of her short fiction, in which the story that follows also appears. Her story “The Sidon in the Mirror” was in our First Annual Collection.

The typical Willis story is poignant, sensitive, quietly-told … but here, in a change of pace, she instead presents us with what I take to be a highly-successful attempt to reproduce one of the old Screwball Comedies of the ’40s (the kind of movie that always starred Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn) in written form: the very funny story of things that happen only once in a blued moon …

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Mowen Chemical today announced implementation of an innovative waste emissions installation at its experimental facility in Chugwater, Wyoming. According to project directors Bradley McAfee and Lynn Saunders, nonutilizable hydrocarbonaceous substances will be propulsively transferred to stratospheric altitudinal locations, where photochemical decomposition will result in triatomic allotropism and formation of benign bicarbonaceous precipitates. Preliminary predictive databasing indicates positive ozonation yields without statistically significant shifts in lateral ecosystem equilibria.

“Do you suppose Walter Hunt would have invented the safety pin if he had known that punk rockers would stick them through their cheeks?” Mr. Mowen said. He was looking gloomily out the window at the distant 600-foot-high smokestacks.

“I don’t know, Mr. Mowen,” Janice said. She sighed. “Do you want me to tell them to wait again?”

The sigh was supposed to mean, It’s after four o’clock and it’s getting dark, and you’ve already asked Research to wait three times, and when are you going to make up your mind? but Mr. Mowen ignored it.

“On the other hand,” he said. “What about diapers? And all those babies that would have been stuck with straight pins if it hadn’t been for the safety pin?”

“It is supposed to help restore the ozone layer, Mr. Mowen,” Janice said. “And according to Research, there won’t be any harmful side effects.”

“You shoot a bunch of hydrocarbons into the stratosphere, and there won’t be any harmful side effects. According to Research.” Mr. Mowen swivelled his chair around to look at Janice, nearly knocking over the picture of his daughter Sally that sat on his desk. “I stuck Sally once. With a safety pin. She screamed for an hour. How’s that for a harmful side effect? And what about the stuff that’s left over after all this ozone is formed? Bicarbonate of soda, Research says. Perfectly harmless. How do they know that? Have they ever dumped bicarbonate of soda on people before? Call Research …” he started to say, but Janice had already picked up the phone and tapped the number. She didn’t even sigh. “Call Research and ask them to figure out what effect a bicarbonate of soda rain would have.”

“Yes, Mr. Mowen,” Janice said. She put the phone up to her ear and listened for a moment. “Mr. Mowen …” she said hesitantly.

“I suppose Research says it’ll neutralize the sulfuric acid that’s killing the statues and sweeten and deodorize at the same time.”

“No, sir,” Janice said. “Research says they’ve already started the temperature-differential kilns, and you should be seeing something in a few minutes. They say they couldn’t wait any longer.”

Mr. Mowen whipped back around in his chair to look out the window. The picture of Sally teetered again, and Mr. Mowen wondered if she were home from college yet. Nothing was coming out of the smokestacks. He couldn’t see the candlestick-base kilns through the maze of fast-food places and trailer parks. A McDonald’s sign directly in front of the smokestacks blinked on suddenly, and Mr. Mowen jumped. The smokestacks themselves remained silent and still except for their blinding strobe aircraft lights. He could see sagebrush-covered hills in the space between the stacks, and the whole scene, except for the McDonald’s sign, looked unbelievably serene and harmless.

“Research says the kilns are fired to full capacity,” Janice said, holding the phone against her chest.

Mr. Mowen braced himself for the coming explosion. There was a low rumbling like distant fire, then a puff of whitish smoke, and finally a deep, whooshing sound like one of Janice’s sighs, and two columns of blue shot straight up into the darkening sky.

“Why is it blue?” Mr. Mowen said.

“I already asked,” Janice said. “Research says visible spectrum diffraction is occurring because of the point eight micron radii of the hydrocarbons being propelled …”

“That sounds like that damned press release,” Mr. Mowen said. “Tell them to speak English.”

After a minute of talking into the phone, she said, “It’s the same effect that causes the sunsets after a volcanic eruption. Scattering. Research wants to know what staff members you’d like to have at the press conference tomorrow.”

“The directors of the project,” Mr. Mowen said grumpily, “and anyone over at Research who can speak English.”

Janice looked at the press release. “Bradley McAfee and Lynn Saunders are the directors,” she said.

“Why does the name McAfee sound familiar?”

“He’s Ulric Henry’s roommate. The company linguist you hired to …”

“I know why I hired him. Invite Henry, too. And try to get Sally as soon as she gets home. Tell her that I expect her there; and tell her to dress up.” He looked at his watch. “Well,” he said. “It’s been going five minutes, and there haven’t been any harmful side effects yet.”

The phone rang. Mr. Mowen jumped. “I knew it was too good to last,” he said. “Who is it? The EPA?”

“No,” Janice said, and sighed. “It’s your ex-wife.”

“I’m shut of that,” Brad said when Ulric came in the door. He was sitting in the dark, the green glow of the monitor lighting his face. He tapped at the terminal keys for a minute more and then turned around. “All done. Slicker’n goose grease.”

Ulric turned on the light. “The waste-emissions project?” he said. “Nope. We turned that on this afternoon. Works prettier than a spotted pony. No, I been spending the last hour erasing my fiancee Lynn’s name from the project records.”

“Won’t Lynn object to that?” Ulric said, fairly calmly, mostly because he did not have a very clear idea of which one Lynn was. He never could tell Brad’s fiancees apart. They all sounded exactly the same.

“She won’t hear tell of it till it’s too late,” Brad said. “She’s on her way to Cheyenne to catch a plane back east. Her mother’s all het up about getting a divorce. Caught her husband Adam ‘n’ Evin’.”

If there was anything harder to put up with than Brad’s rottenness, it was his incredibly good luck. While Ulric was sure Brad was low enough to engineer a sudden family crisis to get Lynn out of Chugwater, he was just as sure that he had had no need to. It was a lucky coincidence that Lynn’s mother was getting a divorce just now, and lucky coincidences were Brad’s specialty. How else could he have kept three fiancees from ever meeting each other in the small confines of Chugwater and Mowen Chemical?

“Lynn?” Ulric said. “Which one is that? The redhead in programming?”

“Nope, that’s Sue. Lynn’s little and yellow-haired and smart as a whip about chemical engineering. Kind of a dodunk about everythin’ else.”

“Dodunk,” Ulric said to himself. He should make a note to look that up. It probably meant “one so foolish as to associate with Brad McAfee.” That definitely included him. He had agreed to room with Brad because he was so surprised at being hired that it had not occurred to him to ask for an apartment of his own.

He had graduated with an English degree that everyone had told him was worse than useless in Wyoming, and which he very soon found out was. In desperation, he had applied for a factory job at Mowen Chemical and been hired on as company linguist at an amazing salary for reasons that had not yet become clear, though he had been at Mowen for over three months. What had become clear was that Brad McAfee was, to use his own colorful language, a thimblerigger, a pigeon plucker, a hornswoggler. He was steadily working his way toward the boss’s daughter and the ownership of Mowen Chemical, leaving a trail of young women behind him who all apparently believed that a man who pronounced fiancee “fee-an-see” couldn’t possibly have more than one. It was an interesting linguistic phenomenon.

At first Ulric had been taken in by Brad’s homespun talk, too, even though it didn’t seem to match his sophisticated abilities on the computer. Then one day he had gotten up early and caught Brad working on a program called “Project Sally.”

“I’m gonna be the president of Mowen Chemical in two shakes of a sheep’s tail,” Brad had said. “This little dingclinker is my master plan. What do you think of it?”

What Ulric thought of it could not be expressed in words. It outlined a plan for getting close to Sally Mowen and impressing her father based almost entirely on the seduction and abandonment of young women in key positions at Mowen Chemical. Three-quarters of the way down he saw Lynn’s name.

“What if Mr. Mowen gets hold of this program?” Ulric had said finally.

“Not a look-in chance that that’d happen. I got this program locked up tighter than a hog’s eye. And if anybody else tried to copy it, they’d be sorrier than a coon romancin’ a polecat.”

Since then Ulric had put in six requests for an apartment, all of which had been turned down “due to restrictive areal housing availability,” which Ulric supposed meant there weren’t any empty apartments in Chugwater. All of the turndowns were initialed by Mr. Mowen’s secretary, and there were moments when Ulric thought that Mr. Mowen knew about “Project Sally” after all and had hired Ulric to keep Brad away from his daughter.

“According to my program, it’s time to go to work on Sally,” Brad said now. “Tomorrow at this press conference. I’m enough of a rumbustigator with this waste-emissions project to dazzlefy Old Man Mowen. Sally’s going to be there. I got my fiancee Gail in publicity to invite her.”

“I’m going to be there, too,” Ulric said belligerently.

“Now, that’s right lucky,” Brad said. “You can do a little honeyfuggling for me. Work on old Sally while I give Pappy Mowen the glad hand. Do you know what she looks like?”

“I have no intention of honeyfuggling Sally Mowen for you,” Ulric said, and wondered again where Brad managed to pick up all these slang expressions. He had caught Brad watching Judy Canova movies on TV a couple of times, but some of these words weren’t even in Mencken. He probably had a computer program that generated them. “In fact, I intend to tell her you’re engaged to more than one person already.”

“Boy, you’re sure wadgetty,” Brad said. “And you know why? Because you don’t have a gal of your own. Tell you what, you pick out one of mine, and I’ll give her to you. How about Sue?”

Ulric walked over to the window. “I don’t want her,” he said.

“I bet you don’t even know which one she is,” Brad said.

I don’t, Ulric thought. They all sound exactly alike. They use “interface” as a verb and “support” as an adjective. One of them had called for Brad and when Ulric told her he was over at Research, she had said, “Sorry. My wetware’s nonfunctional this morning.” Ulric felt as if he were living in a foreign country.

“What difference does it make?” Ulric said angrily. “Not one of them speaks English, which is probably why they’re all dumb enough to think they’re engaged to you.”

“How about if I get you a gal who speaks English and you honeyfuggle Sally Mowen for me?” Brad said. He turned to the terminal and began typing furiously. “What exactly do you want?”

Ulric clenched his fists and looked out the window. The dead cottonwood under the window had a kite or something caught in its branches. He debated climbing down the tree and walking over to Mr. Mowen’s office to demand an apartment.

“Makes no never mind,” Brad said when he didn’t answer. “I’ve heard you oratin’ often enough on the subject.” He typed a minute more and hit the print button. “There,” he said.

Ulric turned around.

Brad read from the monitor, “‘Wanted: Young woman who can generate enthusiasm for the Queen’s English, needs to use correct grammar and syntax, no gobbledygook, no slang, respect for the language. Signed, Ulric Henry.’ What do you think of that? It’s the spittin’ image of the way you talk.”

“I can find my own ‘gals,’” Ulric said. He yanked the sheet of paper as it was still coming out of the printer, ripping over half the sheet in a long ragged diagonal. Now it read, “Wanted: Young woman who can generate language. Ulric H”

“I’ll swap you horses,” Brad said. “If this don’t rope you in a nice little filly, I’ll give you Lynn when she gets back. It’ll cheer her up, after getting her name taken off the project and all. What do you think of that?”

Ulric put the scrap of paper down carefully on the table, trying to resist the impulse to wad it up and cram it down Brad’s throat. He slammed the window up. There was a sudden burst of chilly wind, and the paper on the table balanced uneasily and then drifted onto the windowsill.

“What if Lynn misses her plane in Cheyenne?” Ulric said. “What if she comes back here and runs into one of your other fiancees?”

“No chance on the map,” Brad said cheerfully. “I got me a program for that, too.” He tore the rest of the paper out of the printer and wadded it up. “Two of my fiancees come callin’ at the same time, they have to come up in the elevators, and there’s only two of them. They work on the same signals, so I made me up a program that stops the elevators between floors if my security code gets read in more than once in an hour. It makes an override beep go off on my terminal, too, so’s I can soft-shoe the first gal down the back stairs.” He stood up. “I gotta go over to Research and check on the waste-emissions project again. You better find yourself a gal right quick. You’re givin’ me the flit-flats with all this unfriendly talk.”

He grabbed his coat off the back of the chair and went out. He slammed the door, perhaps because he had the flit-flats, and the resultant breeze hit the scrap of paper on the windowsill and sailed it neatly out the window.

“Flit-flats,” Ulric mumbled to himself, and tried to call Mowen’s office. The line was busy.

Sally Mowen called her father as soon as she got home. “Hi, Janice,” she said. “Is Dad there?”

“He just left,” Janice said. “But I have a feeling he might stop by Research. He’s worried about the new stratospheric waste-emissions project.”

“I’ll walk over and meet him.”

“Your father said to tell you there’s a press conference tomorrow at eleven. Are you at your terminal?”

“Yes,” Sally said, and flicked the power on.

“I’ll send the press releases for you so you’ll know what’s going on.”

Sally was going to say that she had already received an invitation to the press conference and the accompanying PR material from someone named Gail, but changed her mind when she saw what was being printed out on the printer. “You didn’t send me the press releases,” she said. “You sent me a bio on somebody named Ulric Henry. Who’s he?”

“I did?” Janice said, sounding flustered. “I’ll try it again.”

Sally held up the tail of the printout sheet as it came rolling out of the computer. “Now I’ve got a picture of him.” The picture showed a dark-haired young man with an expression somewhere between dismay and displeasure. I’ll bet someone just told him she thought they could have a viable relationship, Sally thought. “Who is he?”

Janice sighed, a quick, flustered kind of sigh. “I didn’t mean to send that to you. He’s the company linguist. I think your father invited him to the press conference to write press releases.”

I thought the press releases were already done and you were sending them to me, Sally thought, but she said, “When did my father hire a linguist?”

“Last summer,” Janice said, sounding even more flustered. “How’s school?”

“Fine,” Sally said. “And no, I’m not getting married. I’m not even having a viable relationship, whatever that is.”

“Your mother called today. She’s in Cheyenne at a NOW rally,” Janice said, which sounded like a non sequitur, but wasn’t. With a mother like Sally’s, it was no wonder her father worried himself sick over who Sally might marry. Sometimes Sally worried, too. Viable relationship.

“How did Charlotte sound?” Sally said. “No, wait. I already know. Look, don’t worry about the press conference stuff. I already know all about it. Gail Somebody in publicity sent me an invitation. That’s why I came home for Thanksgiving a day early.”

“She did?” Janice said. “Your father didn’t mention it. He probably forgot. He’s been a little worried about this project,” she said, which must be the understatement of the year, Sally thought, if he’d managed to rattle Janice. “So you haven’t met anyone nice?”

“No,” Sally said. “Yes. I’ll tell you tomorrow.” She hung up. They’re all nice, she thought. That isn’t the problem. They’re nice, but they’re incoherent. A viable relationship. What on earth was that? And what was “respecting your personal space?” Or “fulfilling each other’s socioeconomic needs?” I have no idea what they are talking about, Sally thought. I have been going out with a bunch of foreigners.

She put her coat and her hat back on and started down in the elevator to find her father. Poor man. He knew what it was like to be married to someone who didn’t speak English. She could imagine what the conversation with her mother had been like. All sisters and sexist pigs. She hadn’t been speaking ERA very long. The last time she called, she had been speaking EST and the time before that California. It was no wonder Sally’s father had hired a secretary that communicated almost entirely through sighs, and that Sally had majored in English.

Tomorrow at the press conference would be dreadful. She would be surrounded by nice young men who spoke Big Business or Computer or Bachelor on the Make, and she would not understand a word they said.

It suddenly occurred to her that the company linguist, Ulric something, might speak English, and she punched in her security code all over again and went back up in the elevator to get the printout with his address on it. She decided to go through the oriental gardens to get to Research instead of taking the car. She told herself it was shorter, which was true, but she was really thinking that if she went through them, she would go past the housing unit where Ulric Henry lived.

The oriental gardens had originally been designed as a shortcut through the maze of fast-food places that had sprung up around Mowen Chemical, making it impossible to get anywhere quickly. Her father had purposely stuck Mowen Chemical on the outskirts of Chugwater so the plant wouldn’t disturb the natives, trying to make the original buildings and housing blend in to the Wyoming landscape. The natives had promptly disturbed Mowen Chemical, so that by the time they built the Research complex and computer center, the only land not covered with Kentucky Fried Chickens and Arbys was in the older part of town and very far from the original buildings. Mr. Mowen had given up trying not to disturb the natives. He had built the oriental gardens so that at least people could get from home to work and back again without being run over by the Chugwaterians. Actually, he had intended just to put in a brick path that would wind through the original Mowen buildings and connect them with the new ones, but at the time Charlotte had been speaking Zen. She had insisted on bonsais and a curving bridge over the irrigation ditch. Before the landscaping was finished, she had switched to an Anti-Watt dialect that had put an end to the marriage and sent Sally flying off east to school. During that same period her mother had campaigned to save the dead cottonwood she was standing under now, picketing her husband’s office with signs that read, “Tree Murderer!”

Sally stood under the dead cottonwood tree, counting the windows so she could figure out which was Ulric Henry’s apartment. There were three windows on the sixth floor with lights in all three, and the middle window was open for some unknown reason, but it would require an incredible coincidence to have Ulric Henry come and stand at one of the windows while Sally was standing there so she could shout up to him, “Do you speak English?”

I wasn’t looking for him anyway, she told herself stubbornly. I’m on my way to meet my father, and I stopped to look at the moon. My, it certainly is a peculiar blue color tonight. She stood a few minutes longer under the tree, pretending to look at the moon, but it was getting very cold, the moon did not seem to be getting any bluer, and even if it were, it did not seem like an adequate reason for freezing to death, so she pulled her hat down farther over her ears and walked past the bonsais and over the curved bridge towards Research.

As soon as she was across the bridge, Ulric Henry came to the middle window and shut it. The movement of pulling the window shut made a little breeze. The torn piece of printout paper that had been resting on the ledge fluttered to a place closer to the edge and then went over, drifting down in the bluish moonlight past the kite, and coming to rest on the second lowest branch of the cottonwood tree.

Wednesday morning Mr. Mowen got up early so he could get some work done at the office before the press conference. Sally wasn’t up yet, so he put the coffee on and went into the bathroom to shave. He plugged his electric razor into the outlet above the sink, and the light over the mirror promptly went out. He took the cord out of the outlet and unscrewed the blackened bulb. Then he pattered into the kitchen in his bare feet to look for another light bulb.

He put the burned-out bulb gently in the wastebasket next to the sink and began opening cupboards. He picked up the syrup bottle to look behind it. The lid was not screwed on tightly, and the syrup bottle dropped with a thud onto its side and began oozing syrup all over the cupboard. Mr. Mowen grabbed a paper towel, which tore in a ragged, useless diagonal, and tried to mop it up. He knocked the salt shaker over into the pool of syrup. He grabbed the other half of the paper towel and turned on the hot water faucet to wet it. The water came out in a steaming blast.

Mr. Mowen jumped sideways to get out of the path of the boiling water and knocked over the wastebasket. The light bulb bounced out and smashed onto the kitchen floor. Mr. Mowen stepped on a large ragged piece. He tore off more paper towels to stanch the blood and limped back to the bathroom, walking on the side of his bleeding foot, to get a bandaid.

He had forgotten about the light in the bathroom being burned out. Mr. Mowen felt his way to the medicine cabinet, knocking the shampoo and a box of Q-Tips into the sink before he found the bandaids. The shampoo lid wasn’t screwed on tightly either. He took the metal box of bandaids back to the kitchen.

It was bent, and Mr. Mowen got a dent in his thumb trying to pry the lid off. As he was pushing on it, the lid suddenly sprang free, spraying bandaids all over the kitchen floor. Mr. Mowen picked one up, being careful to avoid the pieces of light bulb, ripped the end off the wrapper, and pulled on the orange string. The string came out. Mr. Mowen looked at the string for a long minute and then tried to open the bandaid from the back.

When Sally came into the kitchen, Mr. Mowen was sitting on a kitchen chair sucking his bleeding thumb and holding a piece of paper towel to his other foot. “What happened?” she said.

“I cut myself on a broken light bulb,” Mr. Mowen said. “It went out while I was trying to shave.”

She grabbed for a piece of paper towelling. It tore off cleanly at the perforation, and Sally wrapped Mr. Mowen’s thumb in it. “You know better than to try to pick up a broken light bulb,” she said. “You should have gotten a broom.”

“I did not try to pick up the light bulb,” he said. “I cut my thumb on a bandaid. I cut my feet on the light bulb.”

“Oh, I see,” Sally said. “Don’t you know better than to try to pick up a light bulb with your feet?”

“This isn’t funny,” Mr. Mowen said indignantly. “I am in a lot of pain.”

“I know it isn’t funny,” Sally said. She picked a bandaid up off the floor, tore off the end, and pulled the string neatly along the edge of the wrapping. “Are you going to be able to make it to your press conference?”

“Of course I’m going to be able to make it. And I expect you to be there, too.”

“I will,” Sally said, peeling another bandaid and applying it to the bottom of his foot. “I’m going to leave as soon as I get this mess cleaned up so I can walk over. Or would you like me to drive you?”

“I can drive myself,” Mr. Mowen said, starting to get up.

“You stay right there until I get your slippers,” Sally said, and darted out of the kitchen. The phone rang. “I’ll get it.” Sally called from the bedroom. “You don’t budge out of that chair.”

Mr. Mowen picked a bandaid up off the floor, tore the end off of it, and peeled the string along the side, which made him feel considerably better. My luck must be starting to change, he thought. “Who’s on the phone?” he said cheerfully, as Sally came back into the kitchen carrying his slippers and the phone.

She plugged the phone cord into the wall and handed him the receiver. “It’s Mother,” she said. “She wants to talk to the sexist pig.”

Ulric was getting dressed for the press conference when the phone rang. He let Brad answer it. When he walked into the living room, Brad was hanging up the phone.

“Lynn missed her plane,” Brad said.

Ulric looked up hopefully. “She did?”

“Yes. She’s taking one out this afternoon. While she was shooting the breeze, she let fall she’d signed her name on the press release that was sent out on the computer.”

“And Mowen’s already read it,” Ulric said. “So he’ll know you stole the project away from her.” He was in no mood to mince words. He had lain awake most of the night trying to decide what to say to Sally Mowen. What if he told her about “Project Sally” and she looked blankly at him and said, “Sorry. My wetware is inoperable.”?

“I didn’t steal the project,” Brad said amiably. “I just sort of skyugled it away from her when she wasn’t looking. And I already got it back. I called Gail as soon as Lynn hung up and asked her to take Lynn’s name off the press releases before Old Man Mowen saw them. It was right lucky, Lynn missing her plane and all.”

Ulric put his down parka on over his sports coat.

“Are you heading for the press conference?” Brad said. “Wait till I rig myself out, and I’ll ride over with you.”

“I’m walking,” Ulric said, and opened the door.

The phone rang. Brad answered it. “No, I wasn’t watching the morning movie,” Brad said, “but I’d take it big if you’d let me gander a guess anyway. I’ll say the movie is Carolina Cannonball and the jackpot is six hundred and fifty-one dollars. That’s right? Well, bust my buttons. That was a right lucky guess.”

Ulric slammed the door behind him.

When Mr. Mowen still wasn’t in the office by ten, Janice called him at home. She got a busy signal. She sighed, waited a minute, and tried again. The line was still busy. Before she could hang up, the phone flashed an incoming call. She punched the button. “Mr. Mowen’s office,” she said.

“Hi,” the voice on the phone said. “This is Gail over in publicity. The press releases contain an inoperable statement. You haven’t sent any out, have you?”

I tried, Janice thought with a little sigh. “No,” she said.

“Good. I wanted to confirm non-release before I effected the deletion.”

“What deletion?” Janice said. She tried to call up the press release but got a picture of Ulric Henry instead.

“The release catalogs Lynn Saunders as co-designer of the project.”

“I thought she was co-designer.”

“Oh, no,” Gail said. “My fiance Brad McAfee designed the whole project. I’m glad the number of printouts is non-significant.”

After Gail hung up, Janice tried Mr. Mowen again. The line was still busy. Janice called up the company directory on her terminal, got a resume on Ulric Henry instead, and called the Chugwater operator on the phone. The operator gave her Lynn Saunders’s number. Janice called Lynn and got her roommate.

“She’s not here,” the roommate said. “She had to leave for back east as soon as she was done with the waste-emissions thing. Her mother was doing head trips on her. She was really bummed out by it.”

“Do you have a number where I could reach her?” Janice asked.

“I sure don’t,” the roommate said. “She wasn’t with it at all when she left. Her fiance might have a number.”

“Her fiance?”

“Yeah. Brad McAfee.”

“I think if she calls you’d better have her call me. Priority.” Janice hung up the phone. She called up the company directory on her terminal again and got the press release for the new emissions project. Lynn’s name was nowhere on it. She sighed, an odd, angry sigh, and tried Mr. Mowen’s number again. It was still busy.

On Sally’s way past Ulric Henry’s housing unit, she noticed something fluttering high up in the dead cottonwood tree. The remains of a kite were tangled at the very top, and just out of reach, on the second lowest branch, there was a piece of white paper. She tried a couple of halfhearted jumps, swiping at the paper with her hand, but she succeeded only in blowing the paper farther out of reach. If she could get the paper down, she could take it up to Ulric Henry’s apartment and ask him if it had fallen out of his window. She looked around for a stick and then stood still, feeling foolish. There was no more reason to go after the paper than to attempt to get the ruined kite down, she told herself, but even as she thought that, she was measuring the height of the branches to see if she could get a foot up and reach the paper from there. One branch wouldn’t do it, but two might. There was no one in the gardens. This is ridiculous, she told herself, and swung up into the crotch of the tree.

She climbed swiftly up to the third branch, stretched out across it, and reached for the paper. Her fingers did not quite reach, so she straightened up again, hanging onto the trunk to get her balance, and made a kind of down-sweeping lunge toward the piece of paper. She lost her balance and nearly missed the branch, and the wind she had created by her sudden movement blew the paper all the way to the end of the branch, where it teetered precariously but did not fall off.

Someone was coming across the curving bridge. She blew a couple of times on the paper and then stopped. She was going to have to go out on the branch. Maybe the paper is blank, she thought. I can hardly take a blank piece of paper to Ulric Henry, but she was already testing the weight of the branch with her hand. It seemed firm enough, and she began to edge out onto the dead branch, holding onto the trunk until the last possible moment and then dropping into an inching crawl that brought her directly over the sidewalk. From there she was able to reach the paper easily.

The paper was part of a printout from a computer, torn raggedly at an angle. It read, “Wanted: Young woman who can generate language. Ulric H.” The ge in “language” was missing, but otherwise the message made perfect sense, which she would have thought was peculiar if she had not been so surprised at the message. Her area of special study was language generation. She had spent all last week in class doing it, using all the rules of linguistic change on existing words: generalization and specialization of meaning, change in part of speech, shortening, and prepositional verb clustering to create a new-sounding language. It had been almost impossible to do at first, but by the end of the week, she had greeted her professor with, “Good aft. I readed up my book taskings,” without even thinking about it. She could certainly do the same thing with Ulric Henry, whom she had been wanting to meet anyway.

She had forgotten about the man she had seen coming across the bridge. He was almost to the tree now. In approximately ten more steps he would look up and see her crouched there like an insane vulture. How will I explain this to my father if anyone sees me? she thought, and put a cautious foot behind her. She was still wondering when the branch gave way.

Mr. Mowen did not leave for the press conference until a quarter to eleven. He had still been on the phone with Charlotte when Sally left, and when he had asked Charlotte to wait a minute so he could tell Sally to wait and he’d drive her over, Charlotte had called him a sexist tyrant and accused him of stifling Sally’s dominant traits by repressive male psychological intimidation. Mr. Mowen had had no idea what she was talking about.

Sally had swept up the glass and put a new light bulb in the bathroom before she left, but Mr. Mowen had decided not to tempt fate. He had shaved with a disposable razor instead. Leaning over to get a piece of toilet paper to put on the cut on his chin, he had cracked his head on the medicine cabinet door. After that, he had sat very still on the edge of the tub for nearly half an hour, wishing Sally were home so she could help him get dressed.

At the end of the half hour, Mr. Mowen decided that stress was the cause of the series of coincidences that had plagued him all morning (Charlotte had spoken Biofeedback for a couple of weeks) and that if he just relaxed, everything would be all right. He took several deep, calming breaths and stood up. The medicine cabinet was still open.

By moving very carefully and looking for hazards everywhere, Mr. Mowen managed to get dressed and out to the car. He had not been able to find any socks that matched, and the elevator had taken him all the way to the roof, but Mr. Mowen breathed deeply and calmly each time, and he was even beginning to feel relaxed by the time he opened the door to the car.

He got into the car and shut the door. It caught the tail of his coat. He opened the door again and leaned over to pull the coat out of the way. One of his gloves fell out of his pocket onto the ground. He leaned over farther to rescue the glove and cracked his head on the armrest of the door.

He took a deep, rather ragged breath, snagged the glove, and pulled the door shut. He took the keys out of his pocket and inserted the car key in the ignition. The key chain snapped open and scattered the rest of his keys all over the floor of the front seat. When he bent over to pick them up, being very careful not to hit his head on the steering wheel, his other glove fell out of his pocket. He left the keys where they were and straightened up again, watching out for the turn signals and the sun visor. He turned the key with its still dangling key chain. The car wouldn’t start.

Very slowly and carefully he got out of the car and went back up to the apartment to call Janice and tell her to cancel the press conference. The phone was busy.

Ulric didn’t see the young woman until she was nearly on top of him. He had been walking with his head down and his hands jammed into the pockets of his parka, thinking about the press conference. He had left the apartment without his watch and walked very rapidly over to Research. He had been over an hour early, and no one had been there except one of Brad’s fiancees whose name he couldn’t remember. She had said, “Your biological clock is nonfunctional. Your biorhythms must be low today,” and he had told her they were, even though he had no idea what they were talking about.

He had walked back across the oriental gardens, feeling desperate. He was not sure he could stand the press conference, even to warn Sally Mowen. Maybe he should forget about going and walk all over Chugwater instead, grabbing young women by the arm and saying, “Do you speak English?”

While he was considering this idea, there was a loud snap overhead, and the young woman fell on him. He tried to get his hands out of his pockets to catch her, but it took him a moment to realize that he was under the cottonwood tree and that the snap was the sound of a branch breaking, so he didn’t succeed. He did get one hand out of his pocket and he did take one bracing step back, but it wasn’t enough. She landed on him full force, and they rolled off the sidewalk and onto the leaves. When they came to a stop, Ulric was on top of her, with one arm under her and the other one flung above her head. Her wool hat had come off and her hair was spread out nicely against the frost-rimed leaves. His hand was tangled in her hair. She was looking up at him as if she knew him. It did not even occur to him to ask her if she spoke English.

After awhile it did occur to him that he was going to be late to the press conference. The hell with the press conference, he thought. The hell with Sally Mowen, and kissed her again. After a few more minutes of that, his arm began to go numb, and he disengaged his hand from her hair and put his weight on it to pull himself up.

She didn’t move, even when he got onto his knees beside her and extended a hand to help her up. She lay there, looking up at him as if she were thinking hard about something. Then she seemed to come to a decision because she took his hand and let him pull her up. She pointed above and behind him. “The moon blues,” she said.

“What?” he said. He wondered if the branch had cracked her on the head.

She was still pointing. “The moon blues,” she said again. “It blued up some last dark, but now it blues moreishly.”

He turned to look in the direction she was pointing, and sure enough, the three-quarters moon was a bright blue in the morning sky, which explained what she was talking about, but not the way she was talking. “Are you all right?” he said. “You’re not hurt, are you?” She shook her head. You never ask someone with a concussion if they are all right, he thought. “Does your head hurt?”

She shook her head again. Maybe she wasn’t hurt. Maybe she was a foreign exchange consultant in Reserch. “Where are you from?” he said.

She looked surprised. “I falled down of the tree. You catched me with your face.” She brushed the cottonwood leaves out of her hair and put her wool hat back on.

She understood everything he said, and she was definitely speaking English words even though the effect wasn’t much like English. You catched me with your face. Irregular verb into regular. The moon blues. Adjective becomes verb. Those were both ways language evolved. “What were you doing in the tree?” he said, so she would talk some more.

“I hidinged in the tree for cause people point you with their faces when you English oddishly.”

English oddishly. “You’re generating language, aren’t you?” Ulric said. “Do you know Brad McAfee?”

She looked blank, and a little surprised, the way Brad had probably told her to when he put her up to this. He wondered which one of Brad’s fiancees this was. Probably the one in programming. They had had to come up with all this generated language somewhere. “I’m late for a press conference,” he said sharply, “as you well know. I’ve got to talk to Sally Mowen.” He didn’t put out his hand to help her up. “You can go tell Brad his little honeyfuggling scheme didn’t work.”

She stood up without his help and walked across the sidewalk, past the fallen branch. She knelt down and picked up a scrap of paper and looked at it for a long time. He considered yanking it out of her hand and looking at it since it was probably Brad’s language generation program, but he didn’t. She folded it and put it in her pocket.

“You can tell him your kissing me didn’t work,” he said, which was a lie. He wanted to kiss her again as he said it, and that made him angrier than ever. Brad had probably told her he was wadgetty, that what he needed was a half hour in the leaves with her. “I’m still going to tell Sally.”

She looked at him from the other side of the sidewalk.

“And don’t get any ideas about trying to stop me.” He was shouting now. “Because they won’t work.”

His anger got him over the curving bridge. Then it occurred to him that even if she was one of Brad’s fiancees, even if she had been hired to kiss him in the leaves and keep him from going to the press conference, he was in love with her, and he went tearing back, but she was nowhere in sight.

At a little after eleven Janice got a call from Gail in publicity. “Where is Mr. Mowen? He hasn’t shown up, and my media credibility is effectively nonfunctional.”

“I’ll try to call him at home,” Janice said. She put Gail on hold and dialed Mr. Mowen’s apartment. The line was busy. When she punched up the hold button to tell Gail that, the line went dead. Janice tried to call her back. The line was busy.

She typed in the code for a priority that would override whatever was on Mr. Mowen’s home terminal. After the code, she typed, “Call Janice at office.” She looked at it for a minute, then back-erased and typed, “Press conference. Research. Eleven a.m.,” and pressed RUN. The screen clicked once and displayed the preliminary test results of side effects on the waste-emissions project. At the bottom of the screen, she read, “Tangential consequences statistically negligible.”

“You want to bet?” Janice said.

She called programming. “There’s something wrong with my terminal,” she said to the woman on the line.

“This is Sue in peripherals rectification. Is your problem in implementation or hardware?”

She sounded just like Gail in publicity. “You wouldn’t know Brad McAfee, would you?” she said.

“He’s my fiance.” Sue said. “Why?”

Janice sighed. “I keep getting readouts that have nothing to do with what I punch in,” Janice said.

“Oh, then you want hardware repair. The number’s in your terminal directory,” she said, and hung up.

Janice called up the terminal directory. At first nothing happened. Then the screen clicked once and displayed something titled, “Project Sally.” Janice noticed Lynn Saunders’s name three-quarters of the way down the screen, and Sally Mowen’s at the bottom. She started at the top and read it all the way through. Then she typed in PRINT and read it again as it came rolling out of the printer. When it was done, she tore off the sheet carefully, put it in a file folder, and put the file folder in her desk.

“I found your glove in the elevator,” Sally said when she came in. She looked terrible, as if the experience of finding Mr. Mowen’s glove had been too much for her. “Is the press conference over?”

“I didn’t go,” Mr. Mowen said. “I was afraid I’d run into a tree. Could you drive me over to the office? I told Janice I’d be there by nine and it’s two-thirty.”

“Tree?” Sally said. “I fell out of a tree today. On a linguist.”

Mr. Mowen put on his overcoat and fished around in the pockets. “I’ve lost my other glove,” he said. “That makes fifty-eight instances of bad luck I’ve had already this morning, and I’ve been sitting stock still for the last two hours. I made a list. The pencil broke, and the eraser, and I erased a hole right through the paper, and I didn’t even count those.” He put the single glove in his coat pocket.

Sally opened the door for him, and they went down the hall to the elevator. “I never should have said that about the moon,” she said. “I should have said hello. Just a simple hello. So what if the note said he wanted someone who could generate language? That didn’t mean I had to do it right then, before I even told him who I was.”

Mr. Mowen punched his security code into the elevator. The REJECT light came on. “Fifty-nine,” Mr. Mowen said. “That’s too many coincidences to just be a coincidence. And all bad. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone was trying to kill me.”

Sally punched in her security code. The elevator slid open. “I’ve been walking around for hours, trying to figure out how I could have been so stupid,” Sally said. “He was on his way to meet me. At the press conference. He had something to tell me. If I’d just stood up after I fell on him and said, ‘Hello, I’m Sally Mowen, and I’ve found this note. Do you really want someone who can generate language?” but, oh no, I have to say, ‘The moon blues.’ I should have just kept kissing him and never said anything. But, oh, no, I couldn’t let well enough alone.”

Mr. Mowen let Sally push the floor button in the elevator so no more warning lights would flash on. He also let her open the door of the apartment building. On the way out to the car, he stepped in some gum.

“Sixty. If I didn’t know better, I’d say your mother was behind this,” Mr. Mowen said. “She’s coming up here this afternoon. To see if I’m minimizing your self-realization potential with my chauvinistic role expectations. That should count for a dozen bad coincidences all by itself.” He got in the car, hunching far back in the seat so he wouldn’t crack his head on the sun visor. He peered out the window at the gray sky. “Maybe there’ll be a blizzard and she won’t be able to get up from Cheyenne.”

Sally reached for something under the driver’s seat. “Here’s your other glove,” she said, handed it over to him, and started the car. “That note was torn in half. Why didn’t I think about the words that were missing instead of deciding the message was all there? He probably wanted somebody who could generate electricity and speak a foreign language. Just because I liked his picture and I thought he might speak English I had to go and make a complete fool out of myself.”

It started to snow halfway to the office. Sally turned on the windshield wipers. “With my luck,” Mr. Mowen said, “there’ll be a blizzard, and I’ll be snowed in with Charlotte.” He looked out the side window at the smokestacks. They were shooting another wavery blue blast into the air. “It’s the waste-emissions project. Somehow it’s causing all these damn coincidences.”

Sally said, “I look and look for someone who speaks decent English, and when I finally meet him, what do I say? ‘You catched me with your face.’ And now he thinks somebody named Brad McAfee put me up to it to keep him from getting to a press conference, and he’ll never speak to me again. Stupid! How could I have been so stupid?”

“I never should have let them start the project without more testing,” Mr. Mowen said. “What if we’re putting too much ozone into the ozone layer? What if this bicarbonate of soda fallout is doing something to people’s digestion? No measureable side effects, they said. Well, how do you measure bad luck? By the fatality rates?”

Sally had pulled into a parking space directly in front of Mr. Mowen’s office. It was snowing hard now. Mr. Mowen pulled on the glove Sally had handed him. He fished in his pocket for the other one. “Sixty-one,” he said. “Sally, will you go in with me? I’ll never get the elevator to work.”

Sally walked with him into the building. On the way up in the elevator, she said, “If you’re so convinced the waste-emissions project is causing your bad luck, why don’t you tell Research to turn it off?”

“They’d never believe me. Whoever heard of coincidences as a side effect of trash?”

They went into the outer office. Janice said, “Hello!” as if they had returned from an arctic expedition. Mr. Mowen said, “Thanks, Sally. I think I can make it from here.” He patted her on the shoulder. “Why don’t you go explain what happened to this young man and tell him you’re sorry?”

“I don’t think that would work,” Sally said. She kissed him on the cheek. “We’re in bad shape, aren’t we?”

Mr. Mowen turned to Janice. “Get me Research, and don’t let my wife in,” he said, went into his office, and shut the door. There was a crash and the muffled sound of Mr. Mowen swearing.

Janice sighed. “This young man of yours,” she said to Sally. “His name wouldn’t be Brad McAfee, would it?”

“No,” Sally said, “but he thinks it is.” On the way to the elevator she stopped and picked up Mr. Mowen’s glove and put it in her pocket.

After Mr. Mowen’s secretary hung up, Sue called Brad. She wasn’t sure what the connection was between Brad and Mr. Mowen’s secretary’s terminal not working, but she thought she’d better let him know that Mr. Mowen’s secretary knew his name.

There was no answer. She tried again at lunch and again on her afternoon break. The third time the line was busy. At a quarter of three her supervisor came in and told Sue she could leave early since heavy snow was predicted for rush hour. Sue tried Brad’s number one more time to make sure he was there. It was still busy.

It was a good thing she was getting off early. She had only worn a sweater to work, and it was already snowing so hard she could hardly see out the window. She had worn sandals, too. Somebody had left a pair of bright blue moon boots in the coatroom, so she pulled those on over her sandals and went out to the parking lot. She wiped the snow off the windshield with the sleeve of her sweater, and started over to Brad’s apartment.

“You didn’t meander on over to the press conference,” Brad said when Ulric came in.

“No,” Ulric said. He didn’t take off his coat.

“Old Man Mowen didn’t either. Which was right lucky, because I got to jaw with all those reporters instead of him. Where did you go off to? You look colder than an otter on a snowslide.”

“I was with the ‘gal’ you found for me. The one you had jump me so I wouldn’t go to the press conference and ruin your chances with Sally Mowen.”

Brad was sitting at his terminal. “Sally wasn’t there, which turned out to be right lucky because I met this reporter name of Jill who …” He turned around and looked at Ulric. “What gal are you talking about?”

“The one you had conveniently fall out of a tree on me. I take it she was one of your spare fiancees. What did you do? Make her climb out of the apartment window?”

“Now let me get this straight. Some gal fell out of that old cottonwood on top of you? And you think I did it?”

“Well, if you didn’t, it was an amazing coincidence that the branch broke just as I was passing under it and an even more amazing coincidence that she generated language, which was just what that printout you came up with read. But the most amazing coincidence of all is the punch in the nose you’re going to get right now.”

“Now, don’t get so dudfoozled. I didn’t drop no gal on you, and if I’m lyin’, let me be kicked to death by grasshoppers. If I was going to do something like that, I’d have gotten you one who could speak good English, like you wanted, not … what did you say she did? Generated language?”

“You expect me to believe it’s all some kind of coincidence?” Ulric shouted. “What kind of … of … dodunk do you take me for?”

“I’ll admit it is a pretty seldom thing to have happen,” Brad said thoughtfully. “This morning I found me a hundred dollar bill on the way to the press conference. Then I meet this reporter Jill and we get to talking and we have a whole lot in common like her favorite movie is Lay that Rifle Down with Judy Canova in it, and then it turns out she’s Sally Mowen’s roommate last year in college.”

The phone rang. Brad picked it up. “Well, ginger peachy. Come on over. It’s the big housing unit next to the orental gardens. Apartment 6B.” He hung up the phone. “Now that’s just what I been talking about. That was that gal reporter on the phone. I asked her to come over so’s I could honeyfuggle her into introducing me to Sally, and she says she can’t ’cause she’s gotta catch a plane outta Cheyenne. But now she says the highway’s closed, and she’s stuck here in Chugwater. Now that kind of good luck doesn’t happen once in a blue moon.”

“What?” Ulric said, and unclenched his fists for the first time since he’d come into the room. He went over to look out the window. He couldn’t see the moon that had been in the sky earlier. He supposed it had long since set, and anyway it was starting to snow. “The moon blues,” he said softly to himself.

“Since she is coming over here, maybe you should skedaddle so as not to spoil this run of good luck I am having.”

Ulric pulled Collected American Slang out of the bookcase and looked up, “moon, blue” in the index. The entry read, “Once in a blue moon: rare, as an unusual coincidence, orig. rare as a blue moon; based on the rare occurrence of a blue-tinted moon from aerosol particulates in upper atmosphere; see Superstitions.” He looked out the window again. The smokestacks sent another blast up through the gray clouds.

“Brad,” he said, “is your waste-emissions project putting aerosols into the upper atmosphere?”

“That’s the whole idea,” Brad said. “Now I don’t mean to be bodacious, but that gal reporter’s going to be coming up here any minute.”

Ulric looked up “Superstitions.” The entry for “moon, blue” read, “Once in a blue moon; folk saying attrib. SE America; local superstition linked occurrence of blue moon and unusual coincidental happenings; origin unknown.”

He shut the book. “Unusual coincidental happenings,” he said. “Branches breaking, people falling on people, people finding hundred dollar bills. All of those are coincidental happenings.” He looked up at Brad. “You wouldn’t happen to know how that saying got started, would you?”

“Bodacious? It probably was made up by some feller who was waiting on a gal and this other guy wouldn’t hotfoot it out of there so’s they could be alone.”

Ulric opened the book again. “But if the coincidences were bad ones, they would be dangerous, wouldn’t they? Somebody might get hurt.”

Brad took the book out of his hands and shoved Ulric out the door. “Now git!” he said. “You’re givin’ me the flit-flats again.”

“We’ve got to tell Mr. Mowen. We’ve got to shut it off,” Ulric said, but Brad had already shut the door.

“Hello, Janice,” Charlotte said. “Still an oppressed female in a dehumanizing male-dominated job, I see.”

Janice hung up the phone. “Hello, Charlotte,” she said. “Is it snowing yet?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said, and took off her coat. It had a red button pinned to the lapel. It read, “NOW … or else!” “We just heard on the radio they’ve closed the highway. Where’s your reactionary chauvinist employer?”

“Mr. Mowen is busy,” Janice said, and stood up in case she needed to flatten herself against Mr. Mowen’s door to keep Charlotte out.

“I have no desire to see that last fortress of sadistic male dominance,” Charlotte said. She took off her gloves and rubbed her hands together. “We practically froze on the way up. Lynn Saunders rode back up with me. Her mother isn’t getting a divorce after all. Her bid for independence crumbled at the first sign of societal disapproval, I’m afraid. Lynn had a message on her terminal to call you, but she couldn’t get through. She said for me to tell you she’d be over as soon as she checks in with her fiance.”

“Brad McAfee,” Janice said.

“Yes,” Charlotte said. She sat down in the chair opposite Janice’s desk and took off her boots. “I had to listen to her sing his praises all the way from Cheyenne. Poor brainwashed victim of male oppressionist propaganda. I tried to tell her she was only playing into the hands of the entrenched male socio-sexual establishment by getting engaged, but she wouldn’t listen.” She stopped massaging her stockinged foot. “What do you mean, he’s busy? Tell that arrogant sexist pig I’m here and I want to see him.”

Janice sat back down and took the file folder with “Project Sally” in it out of her desk drawer. “Charlotte,” she said, “before I do that, I was wondering if you’d give me your opinion of something.”

Charlotte padded over to the desk in her stockinged feet. “Certainly,” she said. “What is it?”

Sally wiped the snow off the back window with her bare hands and got in the car. She had forgotten about the side mirror. It was caked with snow. She rolled down the window and swiped at it with her hand. The snow landed in her lap. She shivered and rolled the window back up, and then sat there a minute, waiting for the defroster to work and blowing on her cold, wet hands. She had lost her gloves somewhere.

No air at all was coming out of the defroster. She rubbed a small space clean so she could see to pull out of the parking space and edged forward. At the last minute she saw the ghostlike form of a man through the heavy curtain of snow and stamped on the brake. The motor died. The man she had almost hit came around to the window and motioned to her to roll the window down. It was Ulric.

She rolled the window down. More snow fell in her lap. “I was afraid I’d never see you again,” Ulric said.

“I …” Sally said, but he waved her silent with his hand.

“I haven’t got much time. I’m sorry I shouted at you this morning. I thought … anyway, now I know that isn’t true, that it was a lot of coincidences that … anyway I’ve got to go do somehing right now that can’t wait, but I want you to wait right here for me. Will you do that?”

She nodded.

He shivered and stuck his hands in his pockets. “You’ll freeze to death out here. Do you know where the housing unit by the oriental gardens is? I live on the sixth floor, apartment B. I want you to wait for me there. Will you do that? Do you have a piece of paper?”

Sally dug in her pocket and pulled out the folded scrap of paper with, “Wanted: Young woman,” on it. She looked at it a minute and then handed it to Ulric. He didn’t even unfold it. He scribbled some numbers on it and handed it back to her.

“This is my security code,” he said. “You have to use it for the elevator. My roommate will let you into the apartment.” He stopped and looked hard at her. “On second thought, you’d better wait for me in the hall. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He bent and kissed her through the window. “I don’t want to lose you again.”

“I …” Sally said, but he had already disappeared into the snow. Sally rolled the window up. The windshield was covered with snow again. She put her hand up to the defroster. There was still no air coming out. She turned on the windshield wipers. Nothing happened.

Gail didn’t get back to her office until after two. Reporters had hung around after the press conference asking her questions about Mr. Mowen’s absence and the waste-emissions project. When she did make it back to the office, they began calling, and she didn’t get started on her press conference publicity releases until nearly three. She almost immediately ran into a problem. Her notes mentioned particulates, and she knew Brad had said what kind, but she hadn’t written it down. She couldn’t let the report go without specifying which particulates or the press would jump to all kinds of alarming conclusions. She called Brad. The line was busy. She stuffed everything into a large manila envelope and started over to his apartment to ask him.

“Did you get Research yet?” Mr. Mowen said when Janice came into his office.

“No, sir,” Janice said. “The line is still busy. Ulric Henry is here to see you.”

Mr. Mowen pushed against his desk and stood up. The movement knocked over Sally’s picture and a pencilholder full of pencils. “You might as well send him in. With my luck, he’s probably found out why I hired him and is here to quit.”

Janice went out, and Mr. Mowen tried to gather up the pencils that had scattered all over his desk and get them back in the pencilholder. One rolled toward the edge, and Mr. Mowen leaned over the desk to catch it. Sally’s picture fell over again. When Mr. Mowen looked up, Ulric Henry was watching him. He reached for the last pencil and knocked the receiver off the phone with his elbow.

“How long has it been like this?” Ulric said.

Mr. Mowen straightened up. “It started this morning. I’m not sure I’m going to live through the day.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Ulric said, and took a deep breath. “Look, Mr. Mowen, I know you hired me to be a linguist, and I probably don’t have any business interfering with Research, but I think I know why all these things are happening to you.”

I hired you to marry Sally and be vice-president in charge of saying what you mean, Mr. Mowen thought, and you can interfere in anything you like if you can stop the ridiculous things that have been happening to me all day.

Ulric pointed out the window. “You can’t see it out there because of the snow, but the moon is blue. It’s been blue ever since you turned on your waste-emissions project. ‘Once in a blue moon’ is an old saying used to describe rare occurrences. I think the saying may have gotten started because the number of coincidences increased every time there was a blue moon. I think it may have something to do with the particulates in the stratosphere doing something to the laws of probability. Your waste-emissions project is pumping particulates into the stratosphere right now. I think these coincidences are a side effect.”

“I knew it,” Mr. Mowen said. “It’s Walter Hunt and the safety pin all over again. I’m going to call Research.” He reached for the phone. The receiver cord caught on the edge of the desk. When he yanked it, the phone went clattering over the edge, taking the pencilholder and Sally’s picture with it. “Will you call Research for me?”

“Sure,” Ulric said. He punched in the number and then handed the receiver to Mr. Mowen.

Mr. Mowen thundered, “Turn off the waste-emissions project. Now. And get everyone connected with the project over here immediately.” He hung up the phone and peered out the window. “Okay. They’ve turned it off,” he said, turning back to Ulric. “Now what?”

“I don’t know,” Ulric said from the floor where he was picking up pencils. “I suppose as soon as the moon starts to lose its blue color, the laws of probability will go back to normal. Or maybe they’ll rebalance themselves, and you’ll have all good luck for a day or two.” He put the pencilholder back on the desk and picked up Sally’s picture.

“I hope it changes before my ex-wife gets back,” Mr. Mowen said. “She’s been here once already, but Janice got rid of her. I knew she was a side effect of some kind.”

Ulric didn’t say anything. He was looking at the picture of Sally.

“That’s my daughter,” Mr. Mowen said. “She’s an English major.”

Ulric stood the picture on the desk. It fell over, knocking the pencilholder onto the floor again. Ulric dived for the pencils.

“Never mind about the pencils,” Mr. Mowen said. “I’ll pick them up after the moon gets back to normal. She’s home for Thanksgiving vacation. You might run into her. Her area of special study is language generation.”

Ulric straightened up and cracked his head on the desk. “Language generation,” he said, and walked out of the office.

Mr. Mowen went out to tell Janice to send the Research people in as soon as they got there. One of Ulric’s gloves was lying on the floor next to Janice’s desk. Mr. Mowen picked it up. “I hope he’s right about putting a stop to these coincidences by turning off the stacks,” he said. “I think this thing is catching.”

Lynn called Brad as soon as Charlotte dropped her off. Maybe he knew why Mr. Mowen’s secretary wanted to see her. The line was busy. She took off her parka, put her suitcase in the bedroom, and then tried again. It was still busy. She put her parka back on, pulled on a pair of red mittens, and started across the oriental gardens to Brad’s apartment.

“Are those nincompoops from Research here?” Mr. Mowen asked Janice.

“Yes, sir. All but Brad McAfee. His line is busy.”

“Well, put an override on his terminal. And send them in.”

“Yes, sir,” Janice said. She went back to her desk and called up a directory on her terminal. To her surprise, she got it. She wrote down Brad’s code and punched in an override. The computer printed ERROR. I knew it was too good to last, Janice thought. She punched the code again. This time the computer printed OVERRIDE IN PLACE. Janice thought a minute, then decided that whatever the override was, it couldn’t be more important than Mr. Mowen’s. She punched the code for a priority override and typed, “Mr. Mowen wants to see you immediately.” The computer immediately confirmed it.

Exhilarated by her success, Janice called Brad’s number again. He answered the phone. “Mr. Mowen would like to see you immediately,” she said.

“I’ll be there faster than blue blazes,” Brad said, and hung up.

Janice went in and told Mr. Mowen Brad McAfee was on the way. Then she herded the Research people into his office. When Mr. Mowen stood up to greet them, he didn’t knock over anything, but one of the Research people managed to knock over the pencils again. Janice helped him pick them up.

When she got back to her desk she remembered that she had superseded an override on Brad’s terminal. She wondered what it was. Maybe Charlotte had gone to his apartment and poisoned him and then put an override on so he couldn’t call for help. It was a comforting thought somehow, but the override might be something important, and now that she had gotten him on the phone there was really no reason to leave the priority override in place. Janice sighed and typed in a cancellation. The computer immediately confirmed it.

Jill opened the door to Brad’s apartment building and stood there for a minute trying to get her breath. She was supposed to have driven back to Cheyenne tonight, and she had barely made it across Chugwater. Her car had slid sideways in the street and gotten stuck, and she had finally left it there and come over here to see if Brad could help her put her chains on. She fished clumsily in her purse for the numbers Brad had written down for her so she could use the elevator. She should have taken her gloves off.

A young woman with no gloves on pushed open the door and headed for one of the two elevators, punched some numbers, and disappeared into the nearer elevator. The doors shut. She should have gone up with her. Jill fished some more and came up with several folded scraps of paper. She tried to unfold the first one, gave up, and balanced them all on one hand while she tried to pull her other glove off with her teeth.

The outside door opened, and a gust of snowy air blew the papers out of her hand and out the door. She dived for them, but they whirled away in the snow. The man who had opened the door was already in the other elevator. The doors slid shut. Oh, for heaven’s sake.

She looked around for a phone so she could call Brad and tell him she was stranded down here. There was one on the far wall. The first elevator was on its way down, between four and three. The second one was on six. She walked over to the phone, took both her gloves off and jammed them in her coat pocket, and picked up the phone.

A young woman in a parka and red mittens came in the front door, but she didn’t go over to the elevators. She stood in the middle of the lobby brushing snow off her coat. Jill rummaged through her purse for a quarter. There was no change in her wallet, but she thought there might be a couple of dimes in the bottom of her purse. The second elevator’s doors slid open, and the mittened woman hurried in.

She found a quarter in the bottom of her purse and dialed Brad. The line was busy. The first elevator was on six now. The second one was down in the parking garage. She dialed Brad’s number again.

The second elevator’s doors slid open. “Wait!” she said, and dropped the phone. The receiver hit her purse and knocked its contents all over the floor. The outside door opened again, and snow whirled in. “Push the hold button,” said the middle-aged woman who had just come in from outside. She had a red “NOW … or else!” button pinned to her coat, and she was clutching a folder to her chest. She knelt down and picked up a comb, two pencils, and Jill’s checkbook.

“Thank you,” she said gratefully.

“We sisters have to stick together,” the woman said grimly. She stood up and handed the things to Jill. They got into the elevator. The woman with the mittens was holding the door. There was another young woman inside, wearing a sweater and blue moon boots.

“Six please,” Jill said breathlessly, trying to jam everything back into her purse. “Thanks for waiting. I’m just not all together today.” The doors started to close.

“Wait!” a voice said, and a young woman in a suit and high heels, with a large manila envelope under her arm, squeezed in just as the door shut. “Six please,” she said. “The wind chill factor out there has to be twenty below. I don’t know where my head was to try to come over and see Brad in weather like this.”

“Brad?” the young woman in the red mittens said.

“Brad?” Jill said.

“Brad?” the young woman in the blue moon boots said.

“Brad McAfee,” the woman with the “NOW … or else!” button said grimly.

“Yes,” the young woman in high heels said, surprised. “Do you all know him? He’s my fiance.”

Sally punched in her security code, stepped in the elevator, and pushed the button for the sixth floor. “Ulric, I want to explain what happened this morning,” she said as soon as the door closed. She had practiced her speech all the way over to Ulric’s housing unit. It had taken her forever to get here. The windshield wipers were frozen and two cars had slid sideways in the snow and created a traffic jam. She had had to park the car and trudge through the snow across the oriental gardens, but she still hadn’t thought of what to say.

“My name is Sally Mowen, and I don’t generate language.” That was out of the question. She couldn’t tell him who she was. The minute he heard she was the boss’s daughter, he would stop listening.

“I speak English, but I read your note, and it said you wanted someone who could generate language.” No good. He would ask, “What note?” and she would haul it out of her pocket, and he would say, “Where did you find this?” and she would have to explain what she was doing up in the tree. She might also have to explain how she knew he was Ulric Henry and what she was doing with his file and his picture, and he would never believe it was all a coincidence.

Number six blinked on, and the door of the elevator opened. “I can’t,” Sally thought, and pushed the lobby button. Halfway down she decided to say what she should have said in the first place. She pushed six again.

“Ulric, I love you,” she recited. “Ulric, I love you.” Six blinked. The door opened. “Ulric,” she said. He was standing in front of the elevator, glaring at her.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” he said. “Like ‘I withspeak myself?’ That’s a nice example of Germanic compounding. But of course you know that. Language generation is your area of special study, isn’t that right, Sally?”

“Ulric,” Sally said. She took a step forward and put her hand on the elevator door so it wouldn’t close.

“You were home for Thanksgiving vacation and you were afraid you’d get out of practice, is that it? So you thought you’d jump out of a tree on the company linguist just to keep your hand in.”

“If you’d shut up a minute, I’d explain,” Sally said.

“No, that’s not right,” Ulric said. “It should be ‘quiet up’ or maybe ‘mouth-close you.’ More compounding.”

“Why did I ever think I could talk to you?” Sally said. “Why did I ever waste my time trying to generate language for you?”

“For me?” Ulric said. “Why in the hell did you think I wanted you to generate language?”

“Because … oh, forget it,” Sally said. She punched the lobby button. The door started to shut. Ulric stuck his hand in the closing doors and then snatched them free and pressed the hold button. Nothing happened. He jammed in four numbers and pressed the hold button again. It gave an odd click and began beeping, but the doors opened again.

“Damn it,” Ulric said. “Now you’ve made me punch in Brad’s security code, and I’ve set off his stupid override.”

“That’s right,” Sally said, jamming her hands in her pockets. “Blame everything on me. I suppose I’m the one who left that note in the tree saying you wanted somebody who could generate language?”

The beeping stopped. “What note?” Ulric said, and let go of the hold button.

Sally pulled her hand out of her pocket to press the lobby button again. A piece of paper fell out of her pocket. Ulric stepped inside as the doors started to close and picked up the piece of paper. After a minute, he said, “Look, I think I can explain how all this happened.”

“You’d better make it snappy,” Sally said. “I’m getting out when we get to the lobby.”

As soon as Janice hung up the phone Brad grabbed his coat. He had a good idea of what Old Man Mowen wanted him for. After Ulric had left, Brad had gotten a call from Time. They’d talkified for over half an hour about a photographer and a four-page layout on the waste-emissions project. He figured they’d call Old Man Mowen and tell him about the article, too, and sure enough, his terminal had started beeping an override before he even hung up. It stopped as he turned toward the terminal, and the screen went blank, and then it started beeping again, double-quick, and sure enough, it was his pappy-in-law to be. Before he could even begin reading the message, Janice called. He told her he’d be there faster than blue blazes, grabbed his coat, and started out the door.

One of the elevators was on six and just starting down. The other one was on five and coming up. He punched his security code in and put his arm in the sleeve of his overcoat. The lining tore, and his arm went down inside it. He wrestled it free and tried to pull the lining back up to where it belonged. It tore some more.

“Well, dadfetch it!” he said loudly. The elevator door opened. Brad got in, still trying to get his arm in the sleeve. The door closed behind him.

The panel in the door started beeping. That meant an override. Maybe Mowen was trying to call him back. He pushed the DOOR OPEN button, but nothing happened. The elevator started down. “Dagnab it all,” he said.

“Hi, Brad,” Lynn said. He turned around.

“You look a mite wadgetty,” Sue said. “Doesn’t he, Jill?”

“Right peaked,” Jill said.

“Maybe he’s got the flit-flats,” Gail said.

Charlotte didn’t say anything. She clutched the file folder to her chest and growled. Overhead, the lights flickered, and the elevator ground to a halt.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Mowen Chemical today announced temporary finalization of its pyrolitic stratospheric waste-emissions program pending implementation of an environmental impact verification process. Lynn Saunders, director of the project, indicated that facilities will be temporarily deactivated during reorientation of predictive assessment criteria. In an unrelated communication, P. B. Mowen, president of Mowen Chemical, announced the upcoming nuptials of his daughter Sally Mowen and Ulric Henry, vice-president in charge of language effectiveness documentation.

RICHARD COWPER

A Message to the King of Brobdingnag

English writer Richard Cowper—the pseudonym of John Middleton Murry, Jr.—is perhaps best known in the United States for his lyrical Post-Holocaust novella “Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” a Nebula and Hugo finalist that was later expanded into the novel The Road to Corlay. A sequel, A Dream of Kinship, appeared in 1981. Cowper is also the author of the novels The Twilight of Briareus, Clone, and Time Out of Mind, and of the collections The Custodians and Out There Where the Big Ships Go. His most recent book is The Tithonian Factor, a collection.

Here Cowper takes us down a road to worldwide Armageddon (a road paved, of course, like many such, with only the best of intentions), and shows us a frighteningly possible kind of global catastrophe, one which could happen tomorrow—or today.

Last night I dreamed I was a child again, watching my father grafting yet another shoot onto the apple tree in our kitchen garden. He had his back to me, and though I called out to him, he would not turn round and acknowledge me. True, it was only a dream, but if the finger is to be pointed at anyone, should it not be pointed at my father? I wonder what he would say to that if he were alive. Would he pass the buck on to his father—and so down the line forever and ever? Sometimes I think that there are no identifiable beginnings, only ends. And that surely is what we have here—the last full stop, the ultimate quietus. Unless, of course, you still believe in miracles.

Dad’s life ambition was to produce one single tree that carried as many different varieties of fruit as he could induce it to adopt. Two years before his death in 1981, he had four kinds of apple, three kinds of pear, and two different sorts of plum all producing fruit on the same tree. That summer a photographer from the local paper came round and took a picture of him beside his remarkable creation. They printed it over the caption: “Local Plant Wizard Displays the Fruits of His Skill.” In the article that accompanied the picture, my father was quoted as saying: “If we work with her and not against her, she’ll provide us all with another Garden of Eden.” The “her” he referred to was, of course, “Mother Nature.”

When my father had his heart attack I was twenty-five years old and eighteen months into my first paid research job with Biotek. As soon as I heard the news I drove down to Chelmsford from Lincolnshire and went straight to the hospital. My mother and sister were already there. Dad was lying back with his eyes closed, looking gray and shriveled among the pillows. He was wired up to a monitor that was winking away steadily in a corner. A gurney with two gas cylinders was standing beside the bed, and a face mask lay ready to hand. Mother had just begun telling me in a strained whisper how it happened, when Dad opened his eyes. “Hello, Dad,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

“Is that you, Clive?” His voice was so weak I barely recognized it.

“That’s right,” I said. “Who did you think it was?”

“What are you doing here, Son?”

“I’ve come to see how you are.”

“It’s that bad, is it?”

“Oh, they’ll have you out of here in next to no time,” I said. “They need the beds.”

He managed a faint smile. “How are things up in Grantham?”

“Busy as ever.”

“No messages for the king, yet?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Just give me a year or two.”

At which point a nurse came in, followed by a couple of doctors, and we were ushered out of the room.

“What did he mean about a message for the king?” asked my sister as I was driving her home.

“It’s a sort of private joke,” I told her. “Something out of Gulliver’s Travels.”

“Go on.”

“I can’t remember it offhand,” I said. “I’ll look it up when we get back.”

While she was putting the kettle on, I went into Dad’s cubbyhole of a study, hunted out his ancient copy of Gulliver’s Travels, and, after some searching, found the passage I was looking for. I carried the book through into the kitchen. “Here we are, Lou,” I said. “It’s where the King of Brobdingnag is talking to Gulliver.” And I read out: He gave it for his opinion that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before; would deserve better of Mankind, and do more essential service for his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

Lou was just pouring out the tea when the phone rang. It was Mother. Would we come back to hospital straightaway? Dad had just had another attack. As luck would have it, we got snarled up in the rush-hour traffic, and by the time we arrived, it was all over.

The funeral took place five days later. As we trailed along the puddled path behind the coffin, the sun came out. A few minutes later, a brilliant rainbow had unfurled itself above the distant Roding. I remember how I chose to see it as a sort of omen—a message of hope for the future—as though Dad had somehow contrived to send me a benign blessing from wherever he was now. The wish was both father and mother to the thought.

As soon as I could decently do so, I went back to work. Driving north through the flat, lush Cambridgeshire landscape, I found myself recalling a host of incidents from my childhood—long walks with my father through the summer fields and beside the slow, reedy East Anglian rivers; walks during which he had taught me the names of the birds and the flowers and the trees and had talked to me about his mysterious “Mother Nature.” I remembered him poignantly as a man of great gentleness and compassion, and I was only slightly consoled by recalling how happy he had been when the news of my Open Scholarship had come through. That evening we had sat side by side, drinking to my future in glasses of his homemade wine and watching a documentary on the television about the ravages of the drought in Ethiopia. In my mind’s eye I can still see those seemingly interminable lines of articulated skeletons wandering from nowhere to nowhere along a sort of crazy-paved highway of baked mud in a dried-up riverbed, while all around them wheeled the ominous shadows of the ever-present vultures. It was then that I noticed Dad was weeping. Now, recalling the shock I experienced, I think it was that grief of his as much as my own feelings of impotent horror at the pictures on the screen that made me decide how my own life would be spent.

After the film ended, he went out into his study, brought back his tattered old copy of Gulliver’s Travels, and read me out the bit I’d read to Lou. We talked for hours, ranging back and forth across the world. In our imaginations the sterile desert bloomed; the granaries of Asia, Africa, and South America overflowed; and the specter of Famine was banished forever from the face of the earth. As we were tottering off to our beds in the small hours, Dad paused on the stairs, peered down at me owlishly over the banisters, and said: “One of these days, Clive, we’ll write our own postscript to Gulliver. We’ll call it ‘A Message to the King of Brobdingnag.’ All it’ll say is: ‘Your Majesty’s sacred mission is finally accomplished. Over and out.’

I giggled tipsily and saluted. “Message received and understood, Dad,” I responded. “Over and out.”

Almost twelve months to the day after Dad’s death, I attended a three-day international conference at Cambridge that was being arranged under the aegis of UNIDO. For the afternoon of the second day the organizers had laid on an inspection trip to the A.R.C.’s plant-breeding institute. After lunch we piled into a fleet of coaches and were driven off. By chance I found myself sitting next to a young woman whose identity badge proclaimed her to be “Dr. N. E. Sheran.” I introduced myself and asked her what her specialty was. She told me she was a microbiologist. “And where are you from?” I said.

“I’m from Sussex.”

“With Professor Dawlish?”

She nodded.

“Hey! Are you researching nitrogen fixers?”

“We’re researching lots of things.”

“It’s those nifs I’m really interested in,” I told her. “What’s the point of developing high-yield strains of cereals if none of the Third World countries can afford the fertilizers to reap the benefit?”

She smiled. “So maybe we should all be researching ways of producing cheaper fertilizers.”

We spent that afternoon on a conducted tour of the trial plots and in listening to an account of the P.I.B.’s latest colchicine experiments. I was very impressed. By cutting the twelve years it takes to produce a genuinely new variety down to eight years, they seemed to have stolen half a march on the inexorable Malthusian progression, which decrees that the mouths to be fed will forever outstrip the production of the wherewithal to feed them on.

As we rode back to Cambridge, I expatiated on this theme to Dr. Sheran. “A world population headed for over 6 billion by the year 2000 means we’ve got to increase food production by at least 50 percent just to keep starvation down to its present level. What we need are shortcuts.”

“Or efficient birth control,” she suggested mildly.

“That’s bound to come with the rise in the standard of living.”

“But to achieve that you’ll have to increase your food production by at least 100 percent. Do you really think it’s possible?”

“To make two ears of corn grow where only one grew before?” I said. “Of course it’s possible.”

“In twenty years?”

“Improving the species is only one aspect of it,” I said. “Improving your methods of agriculture—better irrigation, soil conservation, cheaper fertilizers—they’re all vital. It has to be a broad-front operation. But it can be done. It must be.”

“You know, you sound exactly like my father,” she remarked with a smile.

“To me I sound just like my father,” I told her.

That evening we both attended a film show sponsored by I.C.I., and after it we ended up in the hotel bar. By then I’d discovered that her first name was Natasha. Now, under further questioning, she told me that her mother was Russian and her father Eurasian. “An F_2 hybrid!” I exclaimed rapturously. “That’s really exciting. Are you married?”

She shook her head.

“But you’re going to be?”

“Am I?”

“You’re not telling me there isn’t a bloke swanning around in the background?” I protested. “I mean—well, you’re really something special, Natasha. You’re far and away the most fantastic microbiologist I’ve ever laid eyes on. And an F_2 hybrid into the bargain!”

I wasn’t lying, either. She had the sort of looks of one or two of the girls I’d occasionally seen dangling from the arms of well-heeled Tory twits in the lounge bar of “The Marquis of Crantham”—sweet peaches growing in an orchard on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. I couldn’t believe my luck.

Adroitly she changed the subject to what I was doing at Biotek. I told her how I was trying to isolate improved strains of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria Rhizobia and induce them to cooperate with cereals. I said I believed that the answer lay in getting Rhizobium genes into cereals so that the plants would be persuaded to form root nodules and hence create their own soluble nitrates. I added that I also had a hunch that somewhere in the world a strain of wild grain already existed that had succeeded in solving the problem for itself. If only we could track it down and then maybe exploit the P.B.I. colchicine techniques to improve its yield, we’d have the battle more than half-won.

We talked and talked, bouncing ideas back and forth, until eventually I became aware that the lights were being turned off in the lounge. I glanced at my watch, saw to my astonishment that it was long after midnight, and realized that I’d just passed the most exciting and enjoyable three hours of my life.

I spent the final morning of that conference in Natasha’s company and succeeded in convincing her that her afternoon would be more profitably passed with me in a boat on the river than in attending an illustrated lecture on reafforestation programs in the Kashmir. As soon as we were afloat, I picked up where I’d left off the night before. I cross-questioned her about her line of research at Sussex and learned that for the past year she’d been working on the insertion of nif genes into chloroplast DNA. The aim of the exercise was to persuade the host plant to fix nitrogen directly in its leaves. I found the idea appealing as an idea, but it seemed a terribly long shot, and I told her so.

“No longer than yours,” she retorted. “No one’s anywhere near to interpreting the DNA code that allows Rhizobium to cooperate with its hosts.”

“Well, if you ever happen to find it out, promise me you’ll let me know,” I said. “I really could do with some help.”

“Do you mean that?”

Something in the tone of her voice brought me up short. I stared at her. “Yes, I do mean it,” I said. “I really do. Why do you ask?”

“I just wondered.”

I suppose I must have sensed that there was something else underlying her seemingly casual question, but I also knew that I lacked the subtlety to elicit it without appearing unbearably nosy. I tucked it away in the back of my mind, and that evening, when we were halfway through our second drink, I contrived to revert to it in a roundabout sort of way. Thus it was that I discovered she was even then in the painful process of extricating herself from a pretty intense relationship with one of her Sussex colleagues.

“Does that mean you’re looking around for a change of scene?” I suggested ingenuously.

“It might have its attractions,” she agreed. “Always providing I could find something in my own specialized field. Last month I got as far as writing off for application forms for a post with Unilever, but then I changed my mind.”

At that point my own mind went into accelerated overdrive. I whipped out my diary and a pen and handed them across to her. “Jot down your address and phone number,” I told her. “When I get back to Grantham I’ll have a word with our Big White Chief. I’m pretty sure there may be something coming up at Biotek in the very near future.”

“Really?” she said, scribbling down the information. “What sort of ‘something’?”

“There’ve been rumors floating around the department for months,” I told her. “The one thing I am sure is that they’re stepping up our genetic research funding. That’s bound to mean taking on some more bodies. Why shouldn’t one of them be a gorgeous Ph.D. microbiologist specializing in DNA transfer? I bet we’d pay you more than you get at Sussex.”

“No takers on that,” she said with a grin, and handed back my diary and my pen.

Thinking about it over these past months, I believe I’ve succeeded in isolating five distinct episodes in my life that have led me directly to this particular point. Maybe “episodes” isn’t quite the right word, but it will have to do. The first was, of course, Dad—his inspiration, his encouragement, and above all his belief in me. Without that, I might never have got started in science at all. The second was my discovery of Natie at that UNIDO conference in Cambridge in ’82. The third, unquestionably, was my meeting with Dr. Sancharez at Ayacucho.

What got Natie and me out to South America in the summer of ‘88 was largely a series of flukes, starting with the take-over of Biotek by Monagri in ’86. When that happened Natie and I were distinctly apprehensive about what it might entail, but in the space of eighteen months we’d both been upgraded, and my Rhizobium project had been singled out for special encouragement—thanks largely to the promising field trials with GX3.

Being a U.S.-based multinational, Monagri had all sorts of Third World links that were completely beyond the scope of Biotek’s largely U.K./European operation. Futhermore, they believed strongly in what they liked to think of as “multinational cross-fertilization.” When the GX3 reports filtered through to Los Angeles and were fed into the computer, what came out was, I presume, a recommendation that Dr. Clive Woodhouse be flown out to South America to scatter some of his intellectual pollen around sundry outposts of the far-flung Monagrian empire. Fortunately, Dr. Woodhouse was now in a position to stipulate that his colleague Dr. Sheran should accompany him, and on May 3, 1988, Natie and I found ourselves descending the gangway of a transcontinental jet at Sao Paulo on the first leg of a journey that was to take us to five countries in three and a half weeks. The supreme irony is that Ayacucho didn’t even feature on our itinerary!

We were supposed to spend two days at Cajamarca in Peru, fly on to Quito in Ecuador for a further four days, and then return home by way of Bogota. What happened was that somewhere about halfway between La Paz and Lima, the private company jet that was ferrying us around developed engine trouble and had to make an emergency landing at Ayacucho. I managed to put through a phone call to the Monagri people at Cajamarca, and explained what had happened. They said they’d get back to us as soon as possible. We checked into the airport hotel and then wandered out to take a look at the town. When we returned to the hotel a couple of hours later, we were met by a lean, leather-faced, gray-haired man who introduced himself in excellent American English as Dr. Jaime Sancharez and informed us regretfully that our plane would have to remain grounded for at least twenty-four hours. In the meantime, he trusted that we would do him the inestimable honor of being the guests of himself and his wife at the Botanical Institute, which was situated a mere thirty minutes’ drive outside the town.

We never did discover precisely what Dr. Sancharez’s link with Monagri amounted to—he referred vaguely to some departmental funding connection via the University of Lima—but he told us that over the past ten years he had sent more than fifty species of wild plants and seeds to the N.S.S. lab in Colorado, and that he spent at least four months of each year on field trips up in the mountains. His real enthusiasm was reserved for the potato, of which he contended he had personally identified no fewer than eighty-three different kinds, seven of them previously unknown varieties.

We passed that afternoon examining his collection, and then he took us on a personally conducted tour of the steeply terraced gardens of the institute, which were perched on the hillside high above the town. After that we risked heart failure by plunging into a deep pool that was fed by a mountain stream. Later we sat on the Sancharez’s terrace, sipping tall glasses of iced sangria while we watched the sun go down, and chatted about our experiences in Bolivia and Brazil. Then, over a truly excellent dinner, we told him somthing about our present line of research at Biotek and explained how it had led directly to our being there enjoying his hospitality. As we were on the point of retiring to bed, there came a phone call from our pilot at the airport to say that the plane had been repaired and that we were now free to continue our journey.

Early next morning Dr. Sancharez drove us back into Ayacucho. We exchanged addresses, promised to keep in touch, and half an hour later were airborne once more and on our way to Cajamarca.

When we got back to the U.K. at the beginning of June, I wrote to Dr. Sancharez and his wife thanking them for having been so kind to us, and, that done, prepared to let the whole episode slip from my mind. It was briefly recalled when the photographs we had taken on our trip were developed, and among them I found one of Natie swimming naked as a naiad in the mountain pool and another of Dr. and Señora Sancharez standing with their arms about each other, smiling at us on their terrace.

Five months later, out of the blue, I received an airmail letter from Peru. Inside I found a hastily scribbled note together with a small, sealed plastic packet containing half a dozen seeds. All the note said was: “I found these growing in a high valley off the Apurimac. They could be worth trying—J.S.”

I examined the seeds under the microscope and discovered them to be some primitive variety of maize. They were far smaller than any I had ever seen, and I wondered what could possibly have led Dr. Sancharez to suppose they might interest me—nothing in his note gave me the slightest clue—but I handed them over to our chief horticulturist and asked her to do her best by them. Three weeks later, she told me that five out of the six had germinated.

It was some days before I got around to taking a look at them for myself, and what I saw did not cause me to change my opinion. By then I had written back to Dr. Sancharez thanking him for his sample and asking him what it was that had led him to suppose the seeds might be anything out of the ordinary. By the time I received his reply I had already discovered the answer for myself. All five plants had begun to develop unmistakable signs of N_2 tubercles on their roots!

But it was when I received Dr. Sancharez’s second letter that I was really rocked back on my heels. Having described in some detail the general area in which he had discovered the plants, he concluded: “The altitude was a good five hundred meters higher than any where I have ever found wild maize before, which to me suggests an exceptionally short life cycle. The soil was very poor—low—grade loess. My guess is that these plants may have acquired not only a symbiotic N_2 Rhizobium, but also maybe a species of cooperative bacterium that acts as a phosphate accumulator. Is this possible, do you think?”

Sancharez was certainly right about the length of the life cycle. The plants matured at three months. By February ’89 we had collected sufficient seed to risk our first limited trials. From that second crop Natie succeeded in extracting a hitherto unknown motile flagellate bacterium that appeared to flourish in and around the N_2 nodules and seemed to possess precisely those characteristics that Sancharez had suspected. We named it Phosphomonas sancharezii in his honor and crossed our fingers. For the first time since December, Natie and I began to talk—though only between ourselves and very, very guardedly—of a real breakthrough.

For the next three years we worked flat-out at transferring the nif genes from the wild maize to our high-yielding strains. Our first real success came with GX14. The colchine-crossed progeny had a four-month cycle, bred true to three generations, and carried a yield of anything up to four times that of the wild stock. Meanwhile, Natie and her colleagues were forging ahead, adapting and culturing P. sancharezii. In two years they had succeeded in persuading it to work in harmony with both wheat and rice. When the results of those first Grantham cereal field trials came in, they showed increased yields of from 30 to 50 percent right across the board, and no adverse side effects! Natie and I were on top of the world: 1992 was our golden year, and I see it now as the fourth of my five particular episodes.

It was also the year when she and I finally regularized our relationship by getting married. We’d put off doing it before, partly from inertia and partly because of the tax situation. Now she suddenly decided that she’d like to start a family. I pointed out that if things went according to plan, we’d soon find ourselves rushing around the world supervising our tropical field trials. But she had quite made up her mind that Science could spare her to Nature for a year or two, and once I’d realized just how strongly she felt about it, I discovered that I rather fancied the idea of becoming a father. Anyway, it didn’t happen straightaway.

By this time Monagri was totally convinced that in P. sancharezii we were onto an out-and-out all-time winner. They dropped the security shutters while they set about feverishly devising the best means of exploiting our discovery to maximum financial advantage. Yet even with that holdup, I estimated that it would take us at least ten more years before we could expect to see any significant advance in our campaign against the ancient enemy world hunger. Fortunately, we were still free to press ahead with GX14.

The results of the first tropical field trials were frankly disappointing—yields were on average less than half those we had been obtaining in the U.K.—but even so, GX14 proved itself conclusively capable of flourishing in soils that were notably deficient in both nitrates and phosphates. I estimated that it could eventually increase the Third World’s agrarian potential by anything up to 10 percent. And there was still our vastly improved strain of P. sancharezii to come!

In April ‘93 Natie finally achieved her ambition of getting herself pregnant. We set off on our annual holiday in the third week of June, driving down to a villa we’d rented on the Côte d’Azur. On our way we called in to see Mother at Chelmsford, broke the good news about the baby, and then set off to catch the night ferry from Dover. As we approached the northern end of the Dartford tunnel, we were waved down at a police checkpoint and asked to show our identity cards and work permits. I noticed that all the patrolmen were carrying guns. They opened the trunk of the car and poked around among our suitcases. I asked one of them what they were looking for, but all he said was, “We’ll tell you if we find it.” Then they slammed the trunk shut and waved us on.

As we drove up the ramp on the far side of the tunnel, we saw more armed police, a fire engine, and the burned-out shells of two container trucks that had been dragged aside into a lay-by. On the concrete wall beside them was a crudely daubed sign of a sickle and clenched fist of the Right to Work Movement. I switched on the car radio, hoping to pick up a local newscast, but all I could find was the usual Muzak pap. The highjacking of a couple of foreign juggernauts probably didn’t rate even a solitary news flash anymore.

But that incident, slight as it was, started Natie and me talking in a way we hadn’t really talked to each other for years. I think it dawned on both of us at the same time how insulated our lives had become. All our closest friends were in the same highly specialized field as ourselves; we were earning far more money that we knew what to do with; neither of us had any strong political allegiance (we voted S.D.P.); and yet, without either of us ever actually saying it, there was no doubt that we both believed we were somehow intrinsically superior to practically everyone else in the world. After all, we knew what we were doing and we knew why we were doing it. It’s easy to say we were both smug and self-righteous and perfectly happy to be so. But I don’t honestly think that we were altogether to blame. Look on us, if you like, as the refined product of our social conditioning, highly specialized cells, pampered, flattered, and richly rewarded for our successes. We could hardly have been expected to probe all the ethical subtleties of our situation when we knew that what we were engaged upon was the practical realization of one of mankind’s few truly altruistic dreams.

But during that holiday we discussed it more than once. And it was always Natie who brought the subject up. Maybe it was something to do with her being pregnant. I remember us lying side by side after we’d made love one afternoon, and suddenly she came out with: “Do you sometimes think we’re playing at being God?”

“What on earth are you talking about?” I said.

“I’m not sure myself,” she admitted. “It’s just a feeling.”

“You don’t believe in God, do you, Natie?”

She didn’t answer straightaway, so I repeated my question.

“I don’t know if I do or not,” she said at last. “But now and again I think I’d like to. I’d like to feel safe.”

“You mean you don’t feel safe?”

“I can’t explain it exactly,” she said, “but just occasionally I get a sort of uncomfortable feeling that the bottom could drop right out of the world and I could fall through. And I know that if that happens, I’ll just go on falling and falling forever.”

I felt her give a sudden shiver. “Did you remember to take your vitamins this morning?” I asked.

“You don’t know what I’ve been talking about, do you?” she said. “Go on. Admit it.”

I started to protest, then caught sight of her sideways on. My imagination switched into an altogether different and more exciting gear. I don’t remember her ever reverting to the subject of God

In September I was informed in strict confidence that all the necessary arrangements had been made for three simultaneous tropical field trials of P. sancharezii. One was to take place in Brazil, another in Zimbabwe, and the third in Northern Queensland. Given the choice of which I’d attend in person, I opted for Queensland simply because I knew Sam Wallace and I’d never been to Australia before. Since the baby was due at the end of January, Natie elected to stay at home.

I flew into Darwin on December 3rd and within an hour was airborne again, heading east over the Arnhem Land Reserve to Nhulunbuy on the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria. At Nhulunbuy a company helicopter was waiting to ferry me down to the experimental Queensland Station near Arrowsmith.

We reached our destination shortly before six o’clock in the evening and circled briefly over the rice paddies before setting down on the outfield of the station’s cricket ground. I was greeted by Sam Wallace, who was O.i.C. of the Queensland Station, and an Indian colleague of his whom he introduced as “Ami.” Sam took me over to the bungalow that was to be my home for the next week, and then the three of us went across to the main lab, where I was shown the current field plan and the rice paddy charts.

Two small feeder streams ran down into the valley from the densely wooded hills behind. At the top of the valley an earth dam had been constructed to provide a fallback reservoir in the unlikely event of a prolonged drought. The single outlet from this artificial lake supplied the irrigation network through a main artery and an ingeniously engineered system of capilliary channels that were in turn controlled by a series of manually operated sluice gates.

Sam pointed out two plots on the chart, one at the bottom of the paddy ladder and one about halfway up. “Those are your best bets,” he said. “The upper one’s Balinese J. hybrid, and the lower one’s a variety of Sumatra long-grain. They’re both well established, and they’re both good Azospirillum cooperators, so nitrogen starvation won’t be a problem.”

“Whatever you say, Sam,” I said. “You’re the man in charge.”

“That’s settled, then,” he said. “C7 and D5. Now let’s go and open up some beers.”

Early the next morning, without any undue ceremony, I loaded up a pressure spray with a 500-to-1 dilute culture of Phosphomonas sancharezii and handed it over to one of Sam’s assistants. Then I pulled on a pair of borrowed waders and followed Sam and Ami up the track to plot C7.

The plants were well in flower, and the N_2-fixing alga Anabaena was clearly visible as a green scum on the surface of the water. I nodded to Sam and gave a thumbs-up sign to the boy who was working the spray. He waded out into the center of the plot, switched on the motor of the sprayer, and began laying down a fine mist of P. sancharezii across the surface of the paddy. It took him about ten minutes. Then we made our way down to the lower plot and repeated the operation. There was just sufficient culture solution for a comprehensive treatment of both paddies. After it was done we strolled back down the hill in the warm sunshine for a well-earned breakfast.

Over our meal I talked to Sam and Ami about the other elements of the test program and told them what it was we were aiming for. They both looked a bit skeptical when I said I was anticipating anything up to a 50 percent increase in gross crop yield. “It sounds like black magic to me,” said Sam. “Hell, we were over the the moon when we got 8 percent with our first Sumatra cross. And we were supplementing with phosphate.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, and held up my crossed fingers, “but if we’re right—and I think we are right, Sam—this one looks like the breakthrough we’ve all been praying for since the days of the Reverend Thomas Malthus.”

After breakfast I sent off a prearranged coded message via the radiophone to our office in Brisbane, letting Monagri know that everything had gone according to plan. I followed this up with a cable to Natie telling her I’d arrived safely and that things were looking good. Then, still feeling the effects of jetlag, I strolled off up the valley to relax beside the lake at the back of the dam.

A couple of hours later, as I was making my way down again, I saw Ami running up the track toward me. The sun was pretty fierce by then, and I remember wondering what on earth he could be in such a tearing hurry about in that heat. “Come,” he gasped. “Come quick, Clive! We are in bad trouble!”

“Trouble?” I said. “What sort of trouble?”

“The alga. The alga on the paddy.”

“What about it?”

“It has gone crazy.”

I stared at him. I just couldn’t focus mentally on what he was saying. “Gone crazy?” I repeated vaguely. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ll soon see,” he panted. “Sam thinks your culture’s triggered off a reproductive explosion in the Anabaena. We’ve shut off the sluices to try and contain it.”

Almost without my realizing it, I found I was sprinting back down the path. When I reached a point that allowed me a view across the paddy fields, I stopped dead in my tracks. The two plots that we’d treated with P. sancharezii where now completely covered over with a vivid, lettuce-green carpet of algae bloom. Half a dozen men with face masks and backpack sprays were wading to and fro through the scum, laying down a smoky mist that I guessed must be a biocide. “Christ Almighty,” I whispered. “Who’d have believed it?”

I found Sam in the lab, bent over a microscope. He looked up as I entered, and beckoned me forward to see for myself. I watched with a sort of horrified fascination as the Anabaena cells guzzled the nutrients that the foraging P. sancharezii bacteria provided, then grew fat and divided and multiplied with an almost unbelievable rapidity. The microscopic predatory organisms that should have prevented this from occuring were seemingly rendered powerless by the algae’s newfound capacity to monopolize the entire supply of phosphorus. I felt a chilly sweat break out all across my back. “Jesus Christ, Sam,” I muttered. “Do you realize what might have happened if … ?”

“Don’t I just,” he said grimly. “I’ve radioed to Nhulunbuy for fifty drums of biocide and a spray chopper. As it is, there’s still no guarantee we’ve got it cordoned off. It was at least two hours after the treatment before we closed off the main sluice. But I’ve had a five-man crew out working downstream for the past hour or so. Let’s go and see how they’re making out.”

The sun beat down on us like a hammer as we set off along the riverside track below the compound. By now there was only a thread of water trickling in the bottom of the channel, and the mud was drying out and starting to steam. Some of the grass along the bank that had caught the biocide spray drift was already beginning to wilt. “How long can you keep the channel dry?” I asked.

“For about twelve hours, give or take a couple. After that the lake’ll spill over the sluice gate. Still, maybe that’s twelve hours more than we deserve. We can count ourselves lucky the monsoon’s late. There hasn’t been any rain to speak of up in the hills for over a week.”

We discovered plenty of traces of the rogue Anabaena, but it was obvious that the biocide had already done its work. I found that the clenched fist in my stomach was beginning to relax. Then I suddenly remembered the other two tropical trials and let out a strangled yelp. Sam asked what was up. When I told him, he gave a sort of grunt and said: “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I already radioed Brisbane and L.A. on your behalf. You weren’t around to ask, and it seemed prudent.”

“Sam—” I began, and then couldn’t seem to find the words I wanted.

He winked at me. “That’s O.K., chum,” he said. “I guess you’d have done the same for me in similar circumstances.”

At about three in the afternoon, two helicopters appeared, one equipped for aerial spraying and the other loaded with extra drums of poison. Within minutes of its arrival, the sprayer was in the air again, clattering back and forth over the rice paddies and along the now dry irrigation channel below the station. By the time the sun was low over the western hills, there couldn’t have been an inch of the ground that hadn’t been treated at least three times over. We had seen the work of a dozen years virtually destroyed in a single afternoon.

That evening I asked Sam how long he thought it would be before he could have the station operating again. “I’m not even thinking about it,” he said. “Ask me the same question in a week’s time and maybe I’ll have an answer. Right now all I’m concerned with is 100 percent sterilization. But I’ll tell you something, Clive, when I get around to writing up my report on this little malfunction, I’ll make damned sure one copy gets to Canberra and another to the United Nations.”

“But what about your contract?” Doesn’t Monagri stipulate—”

“I don’t give a whore’s fuck about my contract! If we don’t blow the lid right off this one, they’ll only go and try it again somewhere else. Where d’you think we’d be now if I hadn’t just happened to take a stroll up to the paddies when I did?”

“I know. I know,” I said. “When I saw what had happened, my heart damn near stopped. I had a sort of nightmare vision of the whole valley vanishing under a spew of green slime. I don’t think I’ve ever been more scared in my life. You deserve a gold medal.”

“Maybe I do at that,” he said thoughtfully. “If I have done it.”

“Christ!” I exclaimed. “If you haven’t, what else can we do?”

“We can spray, and spray, and then we can spray some more,” he said. “Even if it means killing off every single living green thing from here down to the gulf. What we’ve cooked up here is an insatiable algal-bacterial cancer. Unless we manage to cut it out completely and utterly right here and now, we might as well get down on our knees and say amen.”

“But surely we have cut it out.”

“I hope so,” he said. “I really do. But I’ll be a whole lot easier in my mind if by this time tomorrow we haven’t found a solitary trace of rogue alga within five miles of this place. Now I’m off to bed, and my advice to you is to do the same. We’ve got a pretty nail-biting twenty-four hours ahead of us.”

I did as he suggested, but it was a long time before I got to sleep. I lay and stared up at the ceiling, going over and over in my mind the twists and turns of the trail that had brought me to this point. And then I found myself thinking about Natie and the baby, and for the first time since I was a small child, I found myself praying.

I was awakened by the cough and clatter of a helicopter starting up. I leaped out of bed, dragged on some clothes, and ran outside just in time to see one of the machines lift and head off down the valley toward the coast. Ami was making his way back toward the compound. I shouted to him. He waved his arm and turned in my direction. “Ah, good morning, Clive.”

“Let’s hope you’re right,” I said. “I didn’t sleep too well last night.”

“Nor me,” he agreed.

“Was that Sam I saw going off?”

“Yes, he has gone to reconnoiter downstream. The lake started to spill over at about four this morning. That was later than we had expected.”

“And how are the paddies?”

“They seem to be clear, thank God. But we shall go over them once more just to be doubly sure. Would you like some coffee?”

“Wouldn’t I just,” I said.

We sat on the veranda of the cookhouse, sipping scalding black coffee and talking over the events of the previous day. Long, slim fingers of silvery light thrust themselves abruptly through a band of clouds low down on the eastern horizon, showing where the sun was about to rise. “I expect you are very disappointed by what has happened,” he said. “All those years of hard work gone up the spout.”

“D’you know, I hadn’t even begun to think of that side of it,” I said. “But I daresay it’ll hit me soon enough. At this moment every hope I have is riding on Sam and those drums of biotoxin.”

“Yes, indeed,” he murmured. “Has it not struck you as strange, Clive, that you experienced no such side effects in your trials at home?”

“That’s what tropical trials are all about,” I said. “And I don’t mind telling you I still wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. It really was such a beautiful piece of applied biotechnology, Ami—a truly sweet equation. It should have been worth a couple of dozen Nobel prizes any day. Jesus, I’ll bet our overlords are feeling pretty sick right now.”

“You are forgetting that Monagri is into phosphates, too,” he observed with a wry smile.

After we’d drunk our coffee we went up to take another look at the paddies. They were truly a dismal sight. The water had all been diverted into the main channel, and the drying plots lay shrouded under a sort of graveyard quilting of yellowy gray cobweb. The effect was curiously alien—sinister. I surveyed it for a few minutes, then walked the hundred or so yards across to the arterial channel and peered down into the stream. Almost at once I saw a splodge of blue-green algal bloom about the size of a dinner plate sailing down the center of the channel. Another followed it, and then a third. I shouted to Ami. He hurried over, saw what had alarmed me, and smiled reassuringly. “Oh, that is perfectly innocent, Clive. It is coming down from the reservoir. When we shut off the main sluice, the water level rose. Now it is spilling over. That is just surface alga. It has been coming down like that since early this morning.”

I gazed down at a fresh lump that was trundling cheerfully along. “Have you been up there to check?” I asked.

“No,” he admitted. “But what is the point? The alga could never move upstream against the current. So how could the lake be infected?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’ve just got a heavy attack of the jitters. But I’m going up to take a look. Just for my own piece of mind, you understand. Will you come with me?”

He shook his head. “I have promised Sam I will organize the respraying of the paddies. I will see you at breakfast.”

I set off up the track beside the stream. In one place a thick clot of algal bloom had piled up against some invisible obstruction. When I saw that it was pieces of this mass that the current was prizing loose and launching down the channel, I breathed more easily. Ami was right. Our problem, if it still existed, lay down at the far end of the valley where Sam was investigating. But having come this far I did not turn back.

The tallest of the trees that covered the hills were already catching the early sunlight as I started to plod my way up the face slope of the dam. A single invisible bird was making a strange, sad, two-noted call—lo-ee, lo-ee, lo-ee—on and on in the depths of the forest, but that apart, there was only the noise of the stream to break the silence.

And then I saw the lake!

The sensation I experienced at that moment was purely physical. I felt exactly as if my stomach had been ripped open and all my intestines were spilling out around my ankles. I remember that I lifted my hands and began pushing childishly at the air in front of my face as though by so doing I could make the vision go away, not be. Above all, I wanted to wake myself up out of my nightmare.

Where, the day before, there had been a few small islands of water hyacinth floating serenely on a cloud-dappled,sky-blue mirror, now, except for one small patch of clear water close to the mouth of the sluice, the surface was completely covered in a dense, mantling bloom of Anabaena. All across its seething skin little bubbles of gas were constantly forming and breaking. They seemed to wink at me like a billion tiny, bright, incurious eyes.

I stood as though I had been nailed to the ground, staring out across that evil broth with a feeling of such horror in my heart that I can’t even begin to express it. And then I threw back my head and gave a sort of wild-animal howl of terror and anguish. Startled a pair of ducks rose clattering from the slime, circled once above the nearby trees, and then flew off toward the south.

As I watched them grow small and vanish in the distance, I suddenly realized what must have happened, what was going to happen again, and what would surely go on happening unless some miracle could be found to prevent it. Just one small shred of rogue alga clinging to the foot of one of those birds would have been enough. Doubling itself every fifteen minutes in the warm waters of the lake, knowing nothing but its own insatiable appetite to feed and to grow, in twenty-four hours or maybe even less it would have engulfed the whole surface.

Then I saw that in places it had already begun to expand outward across the margin of reed and grass that separated the lake from the nearby trees. The sight unlocked my rigor. I turned my back on the sickening scene and fled away down the path toward the distant station. And all the way down my mind was filled with an appalling vision of those two birds planing down through the calm air somewhere far away, and rinsing off their trailing ribbons of slime into some quiet marsh or stream whose waters were just beginning to feel the first mothering warmth of the morning sun.

The events of the next twenty-four hours are still a sort of hazy chaos in my memory. I remember the expression of Ami’s face as I blurted out what I had discovered, I remember helping to load up a truck with half a dozen drums of biocide and ordering two of the men to drive up to the top of the lake and pour the stuff straight into the feeder streams, then to start hand-spraying wherever they found signs of the alga spreading under the trees. I remember a white-faced Sam returning an hour later with the grim news that they’d found unmistakable evidence of Anabaena on a quite different stream over three miles away. And I remember most vividly how he swore and banged his fists against his forehead when I told him what I suspected about the birds.

He gave immediate orders for the helicopter’s tanks to be refilled and told the pilot to douse any patch of open water he could find between us and the gulf, because “if ever it finds its way down to the sea, we haven’t got a hope in hell of holding it!” Then he took me with him into the radio room, and we spent the next four hours pleading desperately for help from the government, from the army, from Monagri, from anyone we thought we might persuade to take us seriously.

That evening Sam summoned a council of war in the main lab. By then four more helicopters had flown in, together with a fuel-supply tanker and just about enough biocide to transform the whole valley into a sterile desert. A map of the surrounding district was projected onto a screen. Sam divided it up into half a dozen operation areas and detailed off the pilots. These men, all of whom worked for state agricultural combines, couldn’t seem to grasp just how desperate the situation was. One of them asked Sam what he was so scared of. “Hell, we’re talking about that stuff that grows on the top of duck ponds, aren’t we?”

Sam agreed that we were, more or less.

“And that’s dangerous?”

Sam nodded. “I could be wrong,” he said. “I hope to God I am wrong. But what I think we’ve got here is something that could make all the atom bombs in the world look about as dangerous as a cold in the head. Unless we wipe this stuff out absolutely, totally and completely, here and now, within the next couple of days, then in a month’s time I’ll lay you odds there won’t be anything left that you’d recognize as Queensland—no forests, no rivers, no fields, no sea, no animals, nothing. Just a blanket of blue-green scum over everything. And after us it’ll be the turn of the rest of the world.”

“Jesus,” breathed his questioner, visibly shaken. “How the hell did this thing start?”

Sam glanced across at me. “I guess you’d have to say it’s a direct result of doing the wrong deed for the right reasons,” he said. “The point is, are we going to be able to stop it?”

All next day from sunup to sundown, the helicopters droned up and down and back and forth across the valley, laying down a dense mist of biocide. No longer was it a question of selecting targets. This was an obliteration attack designed to wipe out every last trace of Anabaena across an area of some four miles by five of hinterland. While it was in progress, Sam contacted Canberra, reported on what was happening, and demanded to speak directly with the prime minister. Somehow he managed it, though I never discovered exactly how. Nor do I know for certain what he said—Sam’s own account of their conversation was not particularly coherent—but I do know that he did his utmost to persuade Prime Minister Brownlee that, should all else fail, he must order an immediate and total evacuation of the whole Arnhem peninsula and then drop a thermonuclear bomb on it. The plea was turned down flat. At the time I thought Sam was just trying to give the ultimate emphasis to his point. Which simply goes to show that even I still could not bring myself to face up to the true nature of the situation.

I don’t think I slept at all that night. At first light I joined Sam and Ami in the radio room and listened to the helicopter pilots calling in their dawn reports. As they patrolled farther and farther out and the ring of red crosses finally petered out on Sam’s map, Ami and I looked at one another with an unspoken question in our eyes. Neither of us cared to tempt fate by saying that it looked as if the operation had succeeded. Sam further extended the perimeter of the search by three miles, and still there was nothing. When the final report came in “all clear,” Ami said: “Someone is going to have to say it. We’ve won, haven’t we, Sam?”

Sam gazed down abstractedly at the map on the table and began hatching in a grid of scarlet lines across the blue triangle that represented the lake. “Maybe we have,” he said. “But with cancer it’s always the secondaries you can never be quite sure of. If Clive hadn’t spotted those bloody ducks yesterday, I think I’d have to agree with you. As it is … .” And he left the sentence unfinished.

The helicopters, their mission completed, returned to the station. Over breakfast the pilots confirmed their reports. Anabaena—and just about everything else, too—had been wiped out. Sam told them they had done a first-rate job, and then followed this up with the news that they were going to have to go out and spray it all over again. They took it better than I had expected, but then I didn’t know what they were being paid.

In the afternoon I flew with Sam down to the coast. We found the shore littered with dead fish and seabirds, innocent victims of the tons of poison we’d poured into the water. But there was no sign of live Anabaena anywhere. We flew south as far as Bickerton, then swung inland. It was all clear. “Go on, you’ve got to admit it now, Sam,” I said. “You’ve won.”

He turned toward me and was, I know, on the point of agreeing with me, when the radio crackled. “Sam? Sam? Ami here.”

“Go ahead, Ami.”

“We’ve just had a report in from Nhulunbuy, Sam. They say there’s Anabaena in Arnhem Bay!”

“Arnhem Bay! Sweet Mother of Christ! Are they sure?”

“The pilot of the mail plane from Darwin reported it. He went down and took a close look. He says its covering both rivers and spreading along about five miles of the south shore.”

If ever I’ve seen death in a man’s face, I saw it in Sam’s at that moment. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then drew in a deep breath and said: “We’ll be with you inside fifteen minutes, Ami. Get Mike to put out that total-panic call to Darwin. And get hold of Bill Rawlings. Hold him till I get there. See you, boy.”

“Where’s Arnhem Bay, Sam?” I said.

“Over on the far side of the peninsula. All of forty bloody miles from here!”

We looked at one another, and then, lost for words, we looked away.

All that happened four months ago. Perhaps if we had been believed, then it might still have been prevented. But by the time the Australian government was at last convinced that we had not all gone stark raving mad, it was much too late. Carried by the southern equatorial current, the alga was already well on its way to the Indian Ocean. When I flew back to England three days before Christmas, I could see the green stain spread right out across the Timor Sea. The bitterest irony of all is that when Sam and I flew down to Canberra and made our last desperate and ineffectual appeal for a hydrogen bomb to be dropped on Arnhem Land, there were no fewer than four nuclear subs on exercise in the Coral Sea, each one capable of sterilizing the whole of Queensland twenty times over. As Sam said to me that night while we were doing our best to drink ourselves into oblivion in the airport bar: “There’s one gulf in the human imagination that’s deeper than the Mariana Trench. Although men are prepared to insult Nature, to abuse her, even to rape her, they just can’t conceive the possibility that she isn’t immortal. But why in God’s name should you and I have been the ones chosen to prove them wrong?”

I don’t know if he was expecting me to supply an answer. I don’t even know if there is an answer. All I know for sure is what I’ve written down here.

Since then, every one of his predictions has come true. For the past six weeks the atmospheric sulfur count has been climbing steadily, and the last satellite scan I saw a week ago showed infestation well out into the Pacific and as far south as Madagascar. We have passed a sentence of death on the biosphere, and there is no court of appeal. It is only a question of time—or God. Fifty years from now, all trace of Anabaena and Phosphomonas sancharezii will have vanished as though they had never been: in destroying the world, it will destroy itself, too. Ultimately, inevitably, the planet Earth will become indistinguishable from any other sterile satellite trailing its lifeless way through the empty corridors of space until the end of time.

As for “that most Pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever Suffered to crawl upon the face of the Earth”—which was how the King of Brobdingnag finally summed us up—my own rough estimate is that we have about a year left. So it will be somewhere around Cissie’s first and last birthday that I’ll be in a position to send Dad’s message back: “Your Majesty’s sacred mission is finally accomplished. Over and out.”

ROBERT SILVERBERG

The Affair

Absence makes the heart grow fonder? Well … perhaps. But in the sly and elegant story that follows, Robert Silverberg portrays a love affair for which absence is an absolute necessity …

One of the most prolific authors alive, Robert Silverberg can lay claim to more than 450 fiction and nonfiction books and over 3,000 magazine pieces. Within SF, Silverberg rose to his greatest prominence during the late ‘60s and early ’70s, winning four Nebula Awards and a Hugo Award, publishing dozens of major novels and anthologies—1973’s Dying Inside in particular is widely considered to be one of the best novels of the ’70s—and editing New Dimensions, perhaps the most influential original anthology series of its time. In 1980, after four years of self-imposed “retirement,” Silverberg started writing again, and the first of his new novels, Lord Valentine’s Castle, became a nationwide bestseller. Silverberg’s other books include The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrach in the Furnace, Lord of Darkness (a historical novel), and Valentine Pontifex, the sequel to Lord Valentine’s Castle. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, and The Best of Robert Silverberg. His most recent books are Gilgamesh the King, a historical novel, and At The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, a collection. His story “Multiples” was in our First Annual Collection. Silverberg lives in Oakland, California.

He found her by accident, the way it usually happens, after he had more or less given up searching. For years, he had been sending out impulses like messages in bottles; random waves of telepathic energy; hello, hello, hello, one forlorn SOS after another from the desert isle of the soul on which he was a castaway. Occasionally, messages came back; but all they amounted to was lunacy, strident nonsense, static, spiritual noise, gabble up and down the mind band. There were, he knew, a good many like him out there—a boy in Topeka, an old woman in Buenos Aires, another one in Fort Lauderdale, someone of indeterminate sex in Manitoba and plenty of others, each alone, each lonely. He fell into short-lived contact with them, because they were, after all, people of his special kind. But they tended to be cranky, warped, weird, often simply crazy, all of them deformed by their bizarre gift, and they could not give him what he wanted, which was communion, harmony, the marriage of true minds. Then one Thursday afternoon, when he was absent-mindedly broadcasting his identity wave—not in any way purposefully trolling the seas of perception but only humming, so to speak—he felt a sudden startling click as of perfectly machined parts locking into place. Out of the grayness in his mind an unmistakably warm, eager image blossomed, a dazzling giant yellow flower unfolding on the limb of a gnarled, spiny cactus, and the image translated itself instantly into Hi, there. Where’ve you been all my life?

He hesitated to send an answering signal, because he knew that he had found what he was looking for and he was aware of how much of a threat that was to the fabric of the life he had constructed for himself. He was 37 years old, stable, settled. He had a wife who tried her best to be wonderful for him, never knowing quite what it was that she lacked but seeking to compensate for it anyway, and two small, pleasing children, who had not inherited his abnormality, and a comfortable house in the hills east of San Francisco and a comfortable job as an analyst for one of the big brokerage houses. It was not the life he had imagined in his old romantic fantasies, but it was not a bad life, either, and it was his life, familiar and in its way rewarding; and he knew he was about to rip an irreparable hole in it. So he hesitated. And then he transmitted an image as vivid as the one he had received: a solitary white gull soaring in enormous sweeps over the broad blue breast of the Pacific.

The reply came at once: the same gull, joined by a second one that swooped out of a cloudless sky and flew tirelessly at its side. He knew that if he responded to that, there could be no turning back; but that was all right. With uncharacteristic recklessness, he switched to the verbal mode.

—OK. Who are you?

—Laurel Hammett. I’m in Phoenix. I read you clearly. This is better than the telephone.

—Cheaper, too. Chris Maitland. San Francisco.

—That’s far enough away, I guess.

He didn’t understand, then, what she meant by that. But he let the point pass.

—You’re the first one I’ve found who sends images, Laurel.

—I found one once, eight years ago, in Boston. But he was crazy. Most of us are crazy, Chris.

—I’m not crazy.

—Oh, I know! Oh, God, I know!

So that was the beginning. He got very little work done that afternoon. He was supposed to be preparing a report on oil-royalty trusts, and after 15 minutes of zinging interchanges with her, he actually did beg off; she broke contact with a dazzling series of visuals, many of them cryptic, snowflakes and geometrical diagrams and fields of blazing red poppies. Depletion percentages and windfall-profits-tax recapture were impossible to deal with while those brilliant pictures burned in his mind. Although he had promised not to reach toward her again until tomorrow—judicious self-denial, she observed, is the fuel of love—he finally did sent out a flicker of abashed energy and drew from her a mingling of irritation and delight. For five minutes, they told each other it was best to go slow, to let it develop gradually, and again they vowed to keep mental silence until the next day. But when he was crossing the Bay Bridge a couple of hours later, heading for home, she tickled him suddenly with a quick flash of her presence and gave him a wondrous view of the Arizona sunset, harsh chocolate-brown hills under a purple-and-gold sky. That evening, he felt shamefully and transparently adulterous, as if he had come home flushed and rumpled, with lipstick on his shirt. He pretended to be edgy and wearied by some fictitious episode of office politics and helped himself to two drinks before dinner and was more than usually curious about the details of his wife’s day—the little suburban crises, the small challenges, the tiny triumphs. Jan was playful, amiable, almost kittenish. That told him she had not seen through him to the betrayal within, however blatant it seemed to him. She was no actress; there was nothing devious about her.

The transformation of their marriage that had taken place that afternoon saddened him, yet not deeply, because it was an inevitable one. He and Jan were not really of the same species. He had loved her as well and as honestly as was possible for him, but what he had really wanted was someone of his kind, with whom he could join mind and soul as well as body, and it was only because he had not been able to find her that he had settled for Jan. And now he had found her. Where that would lead, and what it meant for Jan and him, he had no idea yet. Possibly he would be able to go on sharing with her the part of his life that they were able to share, while secretly he got from the other woman those things that Jan had never been able to give him; possibly. When they went to bed, he turned to her with abrupt, passionate ferocity, as he had not for a long time, but even so, he could not help wondering what Laurel was doing now, in her bed a thousand miles to the east, and with whom.

During the morning commute, Laurel came to him with stunning images of desert landscapes, eroded geological strata, mysterious dark mesas, distant flame-colored sandstone walls. He sent her Pacific surf, cypresses bending to the wind, tide pools swarming with anemones and red starfish. Then, timidly, he sent her a kiss and had one from her in return; and then, as he was crossing the toll plaza of the bridge, she shifted to words.

—What do you do?

—Securities analyst. I read reports and make forecasts.

—Sounds terribly dull. Is it?

—If it is, I don’t let myself notice. It’s OK work. What about you?

—I’m a potter. I’m a very good one. You’d like my stuff.

—Where can I see it?

—There’s a gallery in Santa Fe. And one in Tucson. And, of course, Phoenix. But you mustn’t come to Phoenix.

—Are you married?

There was a pause.

—Yes. But that isn’t why you mustn’t come here.

—I’m married, too.

—I thought you were. You feel like a married sort of man.

—Oh? I do?

—That isn’t an insult. You have a very stable vibe, do you know what I mean?

—I think so. Do you have children?

—No. Do you?

—Two. Little girls. How long have you been married, Laurel?

—Six years.

—Nine.

—We must be about the same age.

—I’m thirty-seven.

—I’m thirty-four.

—Close enough. Do you want to know my sign?

—Not really.

She laughed and sent him a complex, awesome image: the entire wheel of the zodiac, which flowered into the shape of the Aztec calendar stone, which became the glowing rose window of a Gothic cathedral. An undercurrent of warmth and love and amusement rode with it. Then she was gone, leaving him on the bridge in a silence so sharp it rang like iron.

He did not reach toward her but drove on into the city in a mellow haze, wondering what she looked like. Her mental “voice” sounded to him like that of a tall, clear-eyed, straight-backed woman with long brown hair, but he knew better than to put much faith in that; he had played the same game with people’s telephone voices and he had always been wrong. For all he knew, Laurel was squat and greasy. He doubted that; he saw no way that she could be ugly. But why, then, was she so determined not to have him come to Phoenix? Perhaps she was an invalid; perhaps she was painfully shy; perhaps she feared the intrusion of any sort of reality into their long-distance romance.

At lunchtime, he tuned himself to her wave length and sent her an image of the first page of the report he had written last week on Exxon. She replied with a glimpse of a tall, olive-hued porcelain jar of a form both elegant and sturdy. Her work in exchange for his; he liked that. Everything was going to be perfect.

A week later, he went out to Salt Lake City for a couple of days to do some field research on a mining company headquartered there. He took an early-morning flight, had lunch with three earnest young Mormon executives overflowing with joy at the bounty of God as manifested by the mineral wealth of the Overthrust Belt in Wyoming, spent the afternoon leafing through geologists’ survey sheets and had dinner alone at his hotel. Afterward, he put in his obligatory call to Jan, worked up his notes of the day’s conferences and watched TV for an hour, hoping it would make him drowsy. Maitland didn’t mind these business trips, but he slept badly when he slept alone, and any sort of time-zone change, even a trifling one like this, disrupted his internal clock. He was still wide-awake when he got into bed about 11.

He thought of Laurel. He felt very near to her, out here in this spacious, mountain-ringed city with the wide, bland streets. Probably Salt Lake City was not significantly closer to Phoenix than San Francisco was, but he regarded both Utah and Arizona as the true wild West, while his own suburban and manicured part of California, paradoxically, did not seem Western to him at all. Somewhere due south of here, just on the far side of all these cliffs and canyons, was the unknown woman he loved.

As though on cue, she was in his mind:

—Lonely?

—You bet.

—I’ve been thinking of you all day. Poor Chris, sitting around with those businessmen, talking all that depletion gibberish.

—I’m a businessman, too.

—You’re different. You’re a businessman outside and a freak inside.

—Don’t say that.

—It’s what we are, Chris. Face it. Flukes, anomalies, sports, changelings

—Please stop, Laurel. Please.

—I’m sorry.

A silence. He thought she was gone, taking flight at his rebuke. But then:

—Are you very lonely?

—Very. Dull, empty city; dull, empty bed.

—You’re in it.

—But you aren’t.

—Is that what you want? Right now?

—I wish we could, Laurel.

—Let’s try this.

He felt a sudden astounding intensifying of her mental signal, as if she had leaped the hundreds of miles and lay curled against him here. There was a sense of physical proximity, of warmth, even the light perfume of her skin, and into his mind swept an image so acutely clear that it eclipsed for him the drab realities of his room: the shore of a tropical ocean, fine pink sand, gentle pale-green water, a dense line of heavy-crowned palms.

—Go on, Chris. Into the water.

He waded into the calm wavelets until the delicate sandy bottom was far below his dangling feet and he floated effortlessly in an all-encompassing warmth, in an amniotic bath of placid, soothing fluid. Placid but not motionless, for he felt, as he drifted, tiny convulsive quivers about him, an electric oceanic caress, pulsations of the water against his bare skin, intimate, tender, searching. He began to tingle. As he moved farther out from shore, so far now that the land was gone and the world was all warm water to the horizon, the pressure of those rhythmic pulsations became more forceful, deeply pleasurable: The ocean was a giant hand lightly squeezing him. He trembled and made soft sighing sounds that grew steadily more vehement and closed his eyes and let ecstasy overwhelm him in the ocean’s benignly insistent grip. Then he grunted and his heart thumped and his body went rigid and then lax, and moments later he sat up, blinking, astonished, eerily tranquil.

—I didn’t think anything like that was possible.

—For us, anything’s possible. Even sex across seven hundred miles. I wasn’t sure it would work, but I guess it did, didn’t it? Did you like it?

—Do you need an answer, Laurel?

—I feel so happy.

—How did you do it? What was the trick?

—No trick. Just the usual trick, Chris, a little more intense than usual. I hated the idea that you were all alone, horny, unable to sleep.

—It was absolutely marvelous.

—And now we’re lovers. Even though we’ve never met.

—No. Not altogether lovers, not yet. Let me try to do it to you, Laurel. It’s only fair.

—Later, OK? Not now.

—I want to.

—It takes a lot of energy. You ought to get some sleep, and I can wait. Just lie there and glow and don’t worry about me. You can try it with me another time.

—An hour? Two hours?

—Whenever you want. But not now. Rest now. Enjoy. Good night, love.

—Good night, Laurel.

He was alone. He lay staring up into the darkness, stunned. He had been unfaithful to Jan three times before, not bad for nine years, and always the same innocuous pattern: a business trip far from home, a couple of solitary nights, then an official dinner with some woman executive, too many drinks, the usual half-serious banter turning serious, a blurry one-night stand, remorse in the morning and never any follow-up. Meaningless, fragmentary stuff. But this—this long-distance event with a woman he had never even seen—seemed infinitely more explosive. For he had the power and Jan did not and Laurel did; and Jan’s mind was closed to his and his to hers, and they could only stagger around blindly trying to find each other, while he and Laurel could unite at will in a communion whose richness was unknown to ordinary humans. He wondered if he could go on living with Jan at all now. He felt no less love for her than before, and powerful ties of affection and sharing held him to her; but yet—even so——

In guilt and confusion, Maitland drifted off into sleep. It was still dark when he woke—3:13 A.M., said the clock on the dresser—and he felt different guilt, different confusion, for it was of Laurel now that he thought. He had taken pleasure from her, and then he had collapsed into postorgasmic stupor. Never mind that she had told him to do just that. He felt, and always had, a peculiarly puritanical obligation to give pleasure for pleasure, and unpaid debts were troublesome to him. Taking a deep breath, he sent strands of consciousness through the night toward the south, over the fire-hued mountains of central Utah, over the silent splendor of the Grand Canyon, down past the palm trees into torrid Phoenix, and touched Laurel’s warm, sleepy mind.

—Hnhh.

—It’s me. I want to, now.

—A!! right. Yes.

The image she had chosen was a warm sea, the great mother, the all-encompassing womb. He, reaching unhesitatingly for a male equivalent, sent her a vision of himself coming forth on a hot, dry summer day into a quiet landscape of grassy hills as round as tawny breasts. Cradled in his arms he held her gleaming porcelain jar, the one she had shown him. He bent, tipping it, pouring forth from it an enormous snake, long and powerful but not in any way frightening, that flowed like a dark rivulet across the land, seeking her, finding, gliding up across her thighs, her belly. Too obvious? Too coarsely phallic? He wavered for a moment but only a moment, for he heard her moan and whimper, and she reached with her mind for the serpent as it seemed he was withdrawing it; he drove back his qualms and gave her all the energy at his command, seizing the initiative as he sensed her complete surrender. Her signal shivered and lost focus. Her breathing grew ragged and hoarse, and then into his mind came a quick, surprising sound, a strange, low growling that terminated in a swift, sharp gasp.

—Oh, love. Oh. Oh. Thank you.

—It wasn’t scary?

—Scare me like that as often as you want, Chris.

He smiled across the darkness of the miles. All was well. A fair exchange: symbol for symbol, metaphor for metaphor, delight for delight.

—Sleep well, Laurel.

—You too, love. Mmm.

This time, Jan knew that something had happened while he was away. He saw it on her face, which meant that she saw it on his; but she voiced no suspicions, and when they made love the first night of his return, it was as good as ever. Was it possible, he wondered, to be bigamous, to take part with Laurel in a literally superhuman oneness while remaining Jan’s devoted husband and companion? He would, at any rate, try. Laurel had shared his soul as no one ever had and Jan never could, yet she was a phantom, faceless, remote, scarcely real; and Jan, cut off from him as most humans are from all others, nevertheless was his wife, his partner, his bedmate, the mother of his children. He would try.

So he took the office gossip home to her as always and went out with her twice a week to the restaurants they loved and sat beside her at night watching cassettes of operas and movies and Shakespeare, and on weekends they did their weekend things, boating on the bay and tennis and picnics in the park and dinner with their friends, and everything was fine. Everything was very fine. And yet he managed to do the other thing, too, as often as he could. Just as he had successfully hidden from Jan the enigmatic secret mechanism within his mind that he did not dare reveal to anyone not of his sort, so, too, now did he hide the second marriage, rich and strange, that that mechanism had brought him.

His lovemaking with Laurel had to be furtive, of course, a thing of stolen moments. She could hardly draw him into that warm, voluptuous ocean while he lay beside Jan. But there were the business trips—he was careful not to increase their frequency, which would have been suspicious, but she came to him every night while he was away—and there was the occasional Saturday afternoon when he lay drowsing in the sun of the garden and found that whispering transparent surf beckoning to him, and once she enlivened a lunchtime for him on a working day. He roused the snake within his soul as often as he dared; and nearly always she accepted it, though there were times when she told him no, not now, the moment was wrong. They had elaborate signals to indicate a clear coast. And for the ordinary conversation of the day, there were no limits; they popped into each other’s consciousness a thousand times a day, quick, flickering interchanges, a joke, a bit of news, a job triumphantly accomplished, an image of beauty too potent to withhold. As he was crossing the bridge, entering his office, reaching for the telephone, unfolding a napkin—suddenly, there she was, often for the briefest flare of contact, a tag touch and gone. He loved that. He loved her. It was a marriage.

He snooped in Mountain Bell directories at the library and found her telephone number, which he hardly needed, and her address, which at least confirmed that she really did exist in tangible, actual Phoenix. He manufactured a trip to Albuquerque to appraise the earnings prospects of a small electronics company and slipped off up the freeway to Santa Fe to visit the gallery that showed her pottery: eight or ten superb pieces, sleek, wondrously skilled. He bought one of the smaller ones. “You don’t have any information about the artist, do you?” he asked the proprietor, trying to be casual, heart pounding, hoping to be shown a photograph.

The proprietor thought there might be a press release in the files and rummaged for it. “She lives down Phoenix way,” she said. “Comes up here once or twice a year with her new work. I think it’s museum quality, don’t you?” But she could not find the press release. When Laurel flashed into his mind that night back in Albuquerque, he did not tell her he owned one of her jars or that he had been researching her. But he wondered desperately what she looked like. He played with the idea of visiting Phoenix and somehow getting to meet her without telling her who he was. So long as he kept his mind sheathed, she would never know, he thought. But it seemed sneaky and treacherous; and it might be dangerous, too. She had told him often enough not to come to her city.

In the fourth month of their relationship, he could no longer control his curiosity. She sent him a view of her studio, amazingly neat, the clay, the wheels, the kiln, the little bowls of pigment and glaze all fastidiously in their proper places.

—You left one thing out, Laurel.

—What’s that?

—The potter herself. You didn’t show me her.

—Oh, Chris.

—What’s the matter? Aren’t you ever curious about what I look like? We’ve been all over each other’s minds and bodies for months and I still don’t have any idea what you look like. That’s absurd.

—It’s so much more abstract and pure this way.

—Wonderful. Abstract love! I want to see you.

—I have to confess. I want to see you, too.

—Here, then. Now.

He sent her, before she could demur, a mental snapshot of his face, trying not to retouch and enhance it. The nose a trifle too long, the cleft chin absurdly Hollywood, the dark hair thinning a bit at the part line. Not a perfect face but good enough, pleasant, honest, nothing to apologize for, he thought. It brought silence.

—Well? Am I remotely what you expected?

—Exactly, Chris. Steady-looking, strong, decent—no surprise at all. I like your face. I’m very pleased.

—Your turn.

—You’!! promise not to be disappointed?

—Stop being silly.

—All right.

She flared in his mind, not just her face but all of her, long-legged, broad-shouldered, a woman of physical presence and strength, with straightforward open features, wide-set brown eyes, a good smile, a blunt nose, conspicuous cheekbones. She was not far from the woman he had imagined, and one aspect, the dark, thick, straight hair falling past her shoulders, was amazingly as he had thought.

—You’re beautiful.

—No, not really. But I’m OK.

—Are you an Indian?

—I must have sent you a good picture, then. I’m half. My mother was Navaho.

—You learned your pottery from her?

—No, dopey. Navahos make rugs. Pueblos make pottery. I learned mine in New York, Greenwich Village. I studied with Hideki Shinoda.

—Doesn’t sound Pueblo.

—Isn’t. Little Japanese man with marvelous hands.

—I’m glad we did this, Laurel.

—So am I.

But seeing her in the eye of his mind, while gratifying one curiosity, had only intensified another. He wanted to meet her. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to hold her.

Snake. Ocean. They were practiced lovers now, a year of constant mental communion behind them. She came to him as a starfish, thousands of tiny suction-cup feet and a startling devouring mouth, and at another time as a moist, voluptuous mass of warm, smooth white clay and as a whirlpool and as a great, coy, lighthearted amoeba; and he manifested himself to her as a flash flood roaring down a red-rock canyon and as a glistening vine coiling through a tropic night and as a spaceship plunging in eternal free fall between worlds. All of these were effective, for they needed only to touch each other with their minds to bring pleasure; and each new access of ingenuity brought an abstract pleasure of its own. But even so, they tended often to revert to the original modes, snake and ocean, ocean and snake, the way one might return to a familiar and modest hotel where one had spent a joyous weekend at the beginning of an affair, and somehow it was always best that way.

Their skill at pleasuring each other struck them both as extraordinary. They liked to tell each other that the kind of lovemaking they had invented and of which they were perhaps the sole practitioners in the history of humanity was infinitely superior to the old-fashioned type, which was so blatant, so obvious, so coarse, so messy. Even so, even as he said things like that, he knew he was lying. He wanted her skin against his skin, her breath on his breath.

She was no longer so coy about her life outside their relationship. Maitland knew now that her husband was an artist from Chicago, not very successful, a little envious of her career. She showed him some of his work, unremarkable abstract-expressionist stuff. Maitland was jealous of the fact that this man—Tim, his name was—shared her bed and enjoyed her proximity, but he realized that he had no jealousy of the marriage itself. It was all right that she was married. Maitland had no wish to live with her. He wanted to go on living with Jan, to play tennis with her and go to restaurants with her and even to make love with her; what he wanted from Laurel was just what he was getting from her, that cool, amused, intelligent voice in his mind, and now and then the strange ecstasy that her playful spirit was able to kindle in his loins across such great distances. That much was true. Yet also he wanted to be her lover in the old, blatant, obvious, coarse, messy way, at least once, once at least. Because he knew it was a perilous subject, he stayed away from it as long as he could, but at last it broke into the open one night in Seattle, late, after the snake had returned to its jar and the lapping waves had retreated and he lay sweaty and alone in his hotel-room bed.

—When are we finally going to meet?

—Please, Chris.

—I think it’s time to discuss it. You told me a couple of times, early on, that I must never come to Phoenix. OK. But couldn’t we get together somewhere else? Tucson, San Diego, the Grand Canyon?

—It isn’t the place that matters.

—What is it, then?

—Being close. Being too close.

—I don’t understand. We’re so close already.

—I mean physically close. Not emotionally, not even sexually. I just mean that if we came within close range of each other, we’d do bad things to each other.

—That’s crazy, Laurel.

—Have you ever been close to another telepath? As close as ten feet, say?

—I don’t think so.

—You’d know it if you had. When you and I talk long-distance, it’s just like talking on the phone, right, plus pictures? We tell each other only what we want to tell each other, and nothing else gets through. It’s not like that close up.

—Oh?

—There’s a kind of radiation, an aura. We broadcast all sorts of stuff automatically. All that foul, stinking, nasty cesspool stuff that’s at the bottom of everybody’s mind, the crazy prehistoric garbage that’s in us. It comes swarming out like a shriek.

—How do you know that?

—I’ve experienced it.

—Oh. Boston, years ago?

—Yes. Yes. I told you, I did this once before.

—But he was crazy, you said.

—In a way. But the craziness isn’t what brought the other stuff up. I felt it once another time, too, and she wasn’t crazy. It’s unavoidable.

—I want to see you.

—Don’t you think I want to see you, too, Chris? But we can’t risk it. Suppose we met and the garbage got out and we hated each other ever afterward?

—We could control it.

—Maybe. Maybe not.

—Or else we could make allowances for it. Bring ourselves to understand that this stuff, whatever it is that you say is there, is normal, just the gunk of the mind, nothing personal, nothing that we ought to take seriously.

—I’m scared. Let’s not try.

He let the issue drop. When it came up again, four months later, it was Laurel who revived it. She had been thinking about his idea of controlling the sinister emanation, throttling it back, shielding each other. Possibly it could be done. The temptation to meet him in the flesh, she said, was overwhelming. Perhaps they could get together and suppress all telepathic contact, meet just like ordinary humans having a little illicit rendezvous, keep their minds rigidly walled off and that way at last consummate the intimacy that had joined their souls for a year and a half.

—I’d love to, Laurel.

—But promise me this. Swear it to me. When we do get together, if we can’t hold back the bad stuff, if we feel it coming out, that we go away from each other instantly. That we don’t negotiate, we don’t try to work it out, we don’t look for angles—we just split, fast, if either of us says we have to. Swear?

—I swear.

He flew to Denver and spent a fidgety hour and a half having cocktails in the lounge at the Brown Palace Hotel. Her flight from Phoenix was supposed to have landed only half an hour after his, and he wondered if she had backed out at the last minute. He got up to call the airport when he saw her come in, unmistakably her, taller than he expected, a big, handsome woman in black jeans and a sheepskin wrap. There were flecks of melting snow in her hair.

He sensed an aura.

It wasn’t loathsome, it wasn’t hideous, but it was there, a kind of dull, whining, grinding thing, as of improperly oiled machinery in use three blocks away. Even as he detected it, he felt it diminish until it was barely perceptible. He struggled to rein in whatever output he might be giving off himself.

She saw him and came straight toward him, smiling nervously, cheeks rigid, eyes worried.

“Chris.”

He took her hand in his. “You’re cold, Laurel.”

“It’s snowing. That’s why I’m late. I haven’t seen snow in years.”

“Can I get you a drink?”

“No. Yes. Yes, please. Scotch on the rocks.”

“Are you picking up anything bad?”

“No,” she said. “Not really. There was just a little twinge when I walked in—a kind of squeak in my mind.”

“I felt it, too. But then it faded.”

“I’m fighting to keep it damped down. I want this to work.”

“So do I. We mustn’t use the power at all today.”

“We don’t need to. The old snake can have the day off. Are you scared?”

“A little.”

“Me, too.” She gulped her drink. “Oh, Chris.”

“Is it hard work, keeping the power damped down?”

“Yes. It really is.”

“For me, too. But we have to.”

“Yes,” she said. “Do you have a room yet?”

He nodded.

“Let’s go upstairs, then.”

Like any unfaithful husband having his first rendezvous with a new lover, he walked stiffly and somberly through the lobby, convinced that everyone was staring at them. That was ridiculous, he knew; they were more truly married, in their way, than anybody else in Denver. But yet—but yet——

They were silent in the elevator. As they approached their floor, the aura of her burst forth again, briefly, a fast, sour vibration in his bones, and then it was gone altogether, shut off as though by a switch. He worked at holding his down, too. She smiled at him. He winked. “To the left,” he said. They went into the room. Heavy snowflakes splashed against the window; the wide bed was turned down. She was trembling. “Come on,” he said. “I love you. You know that. Everything’s all right.”

They kissed and undressed. Her body was lean, athletic, with small, high breasts, a flat belly, a dark appendectomy scar. He drew her toward the bed. It seemed strange, almost perverse, to be doing things in this antiquated fleshly way, no snake, no ocean, no meeting of the minds. He was afraid for a moment that in the excitement of their coupling, they would lose control of their mental barriers and let their inner selves come flooding out, fierce, intense, a contact too powerful to handle at such short range. But there was no loss of control. He kept the power locked behind the walls of his skull; she did the same; there were only the tiniest leakages of current. But there was no excitement, either, in their lovemaking. He ran his hands over her breasts and trapped her nipples between his fingers and gently parted her thighs with his knee and pressed himself against her as though he had not been with a woman in a year, but the excitement seemed to be all in his head, not in his nerve endings. Even when she ran her lips down his chest and belly and teased him for a moment and then took him fiercely and suddenly into her mouth, it was the idea that they were finally doing this, rather than what they were actually doing, that resonated within him. They sighed a little and moaned a little and finally he slipped into her, admiring the tightness of her and the rhythms of her hips and all that, but nevertheless, it was as though this had happened between them a thousand times before: He moved, she moved, they did all the standard things and traveled along to the standard result. Not enough was real between them; that was the trouble. He knew her better than he had ever known anyone, yet in some ways he knew her not at all, and that was what had spoiled things. That and holding so much in check. He wished he could look into her mind now. But that was forbidden and probably unwise, too; he guessed that she was annoyed with him for having insisted on this foolish and foredoomed meeting, that she held him responsible for having spoiled things between them, and he did not want to see those thoughts in her mind.

When it was over, they whispered to each other and stroked each other and gave each other little nibbling kisses, and he pretended it had been marvelous, but his real impulse was to pull away and light a cigarette and stare out the window at the snow, and he wasn’t even a smoker. It was simply the way he felt. It had been only a mechanical thing, only a hotel-room screw, not remotely anything like snake and ocean: a joining of flesh of the sort that a pair of rabbits might have accomplished, or a pair of apes, without content, without fire, without joy. He and she knew an ever so much better way of doing it.

He took care to hide his disappointment.

“I’m so glad I came here, Chris,” she said, smiling, kissing him, taking care to hide her disappointment, too, he guessed. He knew that if he entered her mind, he would find it bleak and ashen. But, of course, he could not do that. “I wish I could stay the night,” she said. “My plane’s at nine. We could have dinner downstairs, though.”

“Is it a terrible strain, keeping the power back?”

“It isn’t easy.”

“No. It isn’t.”

“I’m so glad we did this, Chris.”

“Are you?”

“Yes. Yes. Of course.”

They had an early dinner. The snow had stopped by the time he saw her to her cab. So: You fly up to Denver for a couple of hours of lust and steak, you fly back home, and that’s that. He had a brandy in the lounge and went to his room. For a long while, he lay staring at the ceiling, sure that she would come to him with the ocean and make amends for the unsatisfactory thing they had done that afternoon. She did not. He wondered if he ought to send her the snake as she dozed on her plane and did not want to. He felt timid about any sort of contact with her now. It had all been a terrible mistake, he knew. Not because of that emanation from the dirty depths of the psyche that she had so feared but only because it had been so anticlimatic, so meaningless. He waited for a sending from her, some bright little flash out of Arizona. She must surely be home now. Nothing came. He went on waiting, not daring to reach toward her, and finally he fell asleep.

Jan said nothing to him about the Denver trip. He was moody and strange, but she let him be. When the silence out of Phoenix continued into the next day and the next, he grew even more grim and skulked about wrapped in black isolation. Gradually, it occurred to him that he was not going to hear from Laurel again, that they had broken something in that hotel room in Denver and that it was irreparable, and, oddly, the knowledge of that gave him some ease: If he did not expect to hear from her, he did not have to lament her silence. A week, two, three and nothing. So it was over. That hollow little grunting hour had ruined it.

Somehow he picked up the rhythms of his life: work, home, wife, kids, friends, tennis, dinner. He did an extensive analysis of Southwestern electric utilities that brought him a commendation from on high, and he felt only a mild twinge of anguish while doing his discussion of the prospects for Arizona Public Service as reflected in the municipal growth of the city of Phoenix. He missed the little tickle in his mind immensely, but he was encapsulating it, containing it, and after a fashion, he was healing.

One day a month and a half later, he found himself idly scanning the mind-noise band again, as he had not done for a long while, just to see who else was out there. He picked up the loony babble out of Fort Lauderdale and the epicene static from Manitoba, and then he encountered someone new, a bright, clear signal as intense as Laurel’s, and for a dazzled instant a sudden fantasy of a new relationship blossomed in him, but then he heard the nonsense syllables, the slow, firm, strong-willed stream of gibberish. There were no replacements for Laurel.

Two months later, in Chicago, where he had been sent to do a survey of natural-gas companies, he began talking to a youngish woman at the Art Institute, and by easy stages some chatter about Monet and Sisley turned into a dinner invitation and a night in his hotel room. That was all right. Certainly, it was simpler and easier and less depressing than Denver. But it was a bore, it was empty and foolish, and he regretted it deeply by breakfast time, even while he was taking down her number and promising to call the next time he was in the Midwest. Maitland saw the post-Laurel pattern of his life closing about him now: the Christmas bonus, the trip to Hawaii with Jan, braces for the kids, the new house five years from now, the occasional quickie romance in far-off hotel rooms. That was all right. That was the original bargain he had made, long ago, entering adult life: not much ecstasy, not much grief.

On the long flight home that day, he thought without rancor or distress about his year and a half with Laurel and told himself that the important thing was not that it had ended but that it had happened at all. He felt peaceful and accepting and was almost tempted to reach out to Laurel to thank her for her love and wish her well. But he was afraid—afraid that if he touched her mind in any way, she would pull away, timid, fearful of contact in the wake of that inexplicably sundering day in Denver. She was close by now, he knew, for the captain had just told them that they were passing over the Grand Canyon. Maitland did not lean to the window, as everyone else was doing, to look down. He sat back, eyes closed, tired, calm.

And felt warmth, heard the lapping of surf, saw in the center of his mind the vast ocean in which Laurel had so many times engulfed him. Really? Was it happening? He let himself slide into it. A little flustered, he hid himself behind a facade of newspapers, the Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal. His face grew flushed. His breathing became rougher. Ah. Ah. It was happening, yes, she had reached to him, she had made the gesture at last. Tears of gratitude and relief came to him, and he let her sweep him off to a sharp and pounding fulfillment five miles above Arizona.

—Hello, Chris.

—Laurel.

—Did you mind? I felt you near me and I couldn’t hold back anymore. I know you don’t want to hear from me, but——

—What gave you that idea?

—I thought—it seemed to me——

—No. I thought you were the one who wanted to break it up.

—I? I missed you so much, Chris. But I was sure you’d pull away.

—So was I, about you.

—Silly.

—Laurel. Laurel. I’m so glad you took the chance, then.

—So am I.

—Let me have the snake, Chris.

—Yes. Yes.

He stepped out into the tawny sunbaked hills with the heavy porcelain jar and tipped it and let the snake glide toward her. It was all right after all. They had made mistakes, but they were the mistakes of too much love, and they had survived them. It was going to be all right: snake and ocean, ocean and snake, now and always.

JOHN VARLEY

Press Enter

Even now, in the middle of the ’80s, some writers are still producing cautionary tracts about how—if we don’t watch out—computers will Take Over. Of course, it’s really much too late: our complex modern society could no more do without computers now than it could do without electricity. Computers have already Taken Over.

In fact, as the chilling story that follows shows, that statement may be even truer than we thought …

John Varley appeared on the SF scene in 1975, and by the end of 1976—in what was a meteoric rise to prominence even for a field known for meteoric rises—was already being recognized as one of the hottest new writers of the ’70s. His first novel, Ophiuchi Hotline, was published in 1977, and by 1979 he had won both the Nebula and Hugo Award for his brilliant novella “The Persistence of Vision.” Varley is probably best known for the three books of his popular “Gaea” trilogy—Titan, Wizard, and Demon—although many critics consider his collection The Persistence of Vision to be among the most important and influential single-author collections of the decade. Varley’s other books include the novel Millennium and the collection Picnic on Nearside. His most recent book is Demon, the concluding novel of the “Gaea” trilogy. Varley lives in Eugene, Oregon.

“This is a recording. Please do not hang up until—”

I slammed the phone down so hard it fell onto the floor. Then I stood there, dripping wet and shaking with anger. Eventually, the phone started to make that buzzing noise they make when a receiver is off the hook. It’s twenty times as loud as any sound a phone can normally make, and I always wondered why. As though it was such a terrible disaster: “Emergency! Your telephone is off the hook!!!”

Phone answering machines are one of the small annoyances of life. Confess, do you really like talking to a machine? But what had just happened to me was more than a petty irritation. I had just been called by an automatic dialing machine.

They’re fairly new. I’d been getting about two or three such calls a month. Most of them come from insurance companies. They give you a two-minute spiel and then a number to call if you are interested. (I called back, once, to give them a piece of my mind, and was put on hold, complete with Muzak.) They use lists. I don’t know where they get them.

I went back to the bathroom, wiped water droplets from the plastic cover of the library book, and carefully lowered myself back into the water. It was too cool. I ran more hot water and was just getting my blood pressure back to normal when the phone rang again.

So I sat there through fifteen rings, trying to ignore it.

Did you ever try to read with the phone ringing?

On the sixteenth ring I got up. I dried off, put on a robe, walked slowly and deliberately into the living room. I stared at the phone for a while.

On the fiftieth ring I picked it up.

“This is a recording. Please do not hang up until the message has been completed. This call originates from the house of your next-door neighbor, Charles Kluge. It will repeat every ten minutes. Mister Kluge knows he has not been the best of neighbors, and apologizes in advance for the inconvenience. He requests that you go immediately to his house. The key is under the mat. Go inside and do what needs to be done. There will be a reward for your services. Thank you.”

Click. Dial tone.

I’m not a hasty man. Ten minutes later, when the phone rang again, I was still sitting there thinking it over. I picked up the receiver and listened carefully.

It was the same message. As before, it was not Kluge’s voice. It was something synthesized, with all the human warmth of a Speak’n’Spell.

I heard it out again, and cradled the receiver when it was done.

I thought about calling the police. Charles Kluge had lived next door to me for ten years. In that time I may have had a dozen conversations with him, none lasting longer than a minute. I owed him nothing.

I thought about ignoring it. I was still thinking about that when the phone rang again. I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes. I lifted the receiver and put it right back down.

I could disconnect the phone. It wouldn’t change my life radically. But in the end I got dressed and went out the front door, turned left, and walked toward Kluge’s property.

My neighbor across the street, Hal Lanier, was out mowing the lawn. He waved to me, and I waved back. It was about seven in the evening of a wonderful August day. The shadows were long. There was the smell of cut grass in the air. I’ve always liked that smell. About time to cut my own lawn, I thought.

It was a thought Kluge had never entertained. His lawn was brown and knee-high and choked with weeds.

I rang the bell. When nobody came I knocked. Then I sighed, looked under the mat, and used the key I found there to open the door.

“Kluge?” I called out as I stuck my head in.

I went along the short hallway, tentatively, as people do when unsure of their welcome. The drapes were drawn, as always, so it was dark in there, but in what had once been the living room ten television screens gave more than enough light for me to see Kluge. He sat in a chair in front of a table, with his face pressed into a computer keyboard and the side of his head blown away.

Hal Lanier operates a computer for the L.A.P.D., so I told him what I had found and he called the police. We waited together for the first car to arrive. Hal kept asking if I’d touched anything, and I kept telling him no, except for the front door knob.

An ambulance arrived without the siren. Soon there were police all over, and neighbors standing out in their yards or talking in front of Kluge’s house. Crews from some of the television stations arrived in time to get pictures of the body, wrapped in a plastic sheet, being carried out. Men and women came and went. I assumed they were doing all the standard police things, taking fingerprints, collecting evidence. I would have gone home, but had been told to stick around.

Finally I was brought in to see Detective Osborne, who was in charge of the case. I was led into Kluge’s living room. All the television screens were still turned on. I shook hands with Osborne. He looked me over before he said anything. He was a short guy, balding. He seemed very tired until he looked at me. Then, though nothing really changed in his face, he didn’t look tired at all.

“You’re Victor Apfel?” he asked. I told him I was. He gestured at the room. “Mister Apfel, can you tell if anything has been taken from this room?”

I took another look around, approaching it as a puzzle.

There was a fireplace and there were curtains over the windows. There was a rug on the floor. Other than those items, there was nothing else you would expect to find in a living room.

All the walls were lined with tables, leaving a narrow aisle down the middle. On the tables were monitor screens, keyboards, disc drives—all the glossy bric-a-brac of the new age. They were interconnected by thick cables and cords. Beneath the tables were still more computers, and boxes full of electronic items. Above the tables were shelves that reached the ceiling and were stuffed with boxes of tapes, discs, cartridges … there was a word for it which I couldn’t recall just then. It was software.

“There’s no furniture, is there? Other than that …”

He was looking confused.

“You mean there was furniture here before?”

“How I would I know?” Then I realized what the misunderstanding was. “Oh. You thought I’d been here before. The first time I ever set foot in this room was about an hour ago.”

He frowned, and I didn’t like that much.

“The medical examiner says the guy had been dead about three hours. How come you came over when you did, Victor?”

I didn’t like him using my first name, but didn’t see what I could do about it. And I knew I had to tell him about the phone call.

He looked dubious. But there was one easy way to check it out, and we did that. Hal and Osborne and I and several others trooped over to my house. My phone was ringing as we entered.

Osborne picked it up and listened. He got a very sour expression on his face. As the night wore on, it just got worse and worse.

We waited ten minutes for the phone to ring again. Osborne spent the time examining everything in my living room. I was glad when the phone rang again. They made a recording of the message, and we went back to Kluge’s house.

Osborne went into the back yard to see Kluge’s forest of antennas. He looked impressed.

“Mrs. Madison down the street thinks he was trying to contact Martians,” Hal said, with a laugh. “Me, I just thought he was stealing HBO.” There were three parabolic dishes. There were six tall masts, and some of those things you see on telephone company buildings for transmitting microwaves.

Osborne took me to the living room again. He asked me to describe what I had seen. I didn’t know what good that would do, but I tried.

“He was sitting in that chair, which was here in front of this table. I saw the gun on the floor. His hand was hanging down toward it.”

“You think it was suicide?”

“Yes, I guess I did think that.” I waited for him to comment, but he didn’t. “Is that what you think?”

He sighed. “There wasn’t any note.”

“They don’t always leave notes,” Hal pointed out.

“No, but they do often enough that my nose starts to twitch when they don’t.” He shrugged. “It’s probably nothing.”

“That phone call,” I said. “That might be a kind of suicide note.”

Osborne nodded. “Was there anything else you noticed?”

I went to the table and looked at the keyboard. It was made by Texas Instruments, model TI-99/4A. There was a large bloodstain on the right side of it, where his head had been resting.

“Just that he was sitting in front of this machine.” I touched a key, and the monitor screen behind the keyboard immediately filled with words. I quickly drew my hand back, then stared at the message there.

PROGRAM NAME: GOODBYE REAL WORLD

DATE: 8/20

CONTENTS: LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT; MISC. FEATURES PROGRAMMER: “CHARLES KLUGE”

TO RUN

PRESS ENTER

The black square at the end flashed on and off. Later I learned it was called a cursor.

Everyone gathered around. Hal, the computer expert, explained how many computers went blank after ten minutes of no activity, so the words wouldn’t be burned into the television screen. This one had been green until I touched it, then displayed black letters on a blue background.

“Has this console been checked out for prints?” Osborne asked. Nobody seemed to know, so Osborne took a pencil and used the eraser to press the ENTER key.

The screen cleared, stayed blue for a moment, then filled with little ovoid shapes that started at the top of the screen and descended like rain. There were hundreds of them in many colors.

“Those are pills,” one of the cops said, in amazement. “Look, that’s gotta be a Quaalude. There’s a Nembutal.” Other cops pointed out other pills. I recognized the distinctive red stripe around the center of a white capsule that had to be a Dilantin. I had been taking them every day for years.

Finally the pills stopped falling, and the damn thing started to play music to us. “Nearer My God To Thee,” in three-part harmony.

A few people laughed. I don’t think any of us thought it was funny—it was creepy as hell listening to that eerie dirge—but it sounded like it had been scored for pennywhistle, calliope, and kazoo. What could you do but laugh?

As the music played, a little figure composed entirely of squares entered from the left of the screen and jerked spastically toward the center. It was like one of those human figures from a video game, but not as detailed. You had to use your imagination to believe it was a man.

A shape appeared in the middle of the screen. The “man” stopped in front of it. He bent in the middle, and something that might have been a chair appeared under him.

“What’s that supposed to be?”

“A computer. Isn’t it?”

It must have been, because the little man extended his arms, which jerked up and down like Liberace at the piano. He was typing. The words appeared above him.

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE I MISSED SOMETHING. I SIT HERE, NIGHT AND DAY, A SPIDER IN THE CENTER OF A COAXIAL WEB, MASTER OF ALL I SURVEY … AND IT IS NOT ENOUGH. THERE MUST BE MORE.

ENTER YOUR NAME HERE

“Jesus Christ,” Hal said. “I don’t believe it. An interactive suicide note.”

“Come on, we’ve got to see the rest of this.”

I was nearest the keyboard, so I leaned over and typed my name. But when I looked up, what I had typed was VICT9R.

“How do you back this up?” I asked.

“Just enter it,” Osborne said. He reached around me and pressed enter.

DO YOU EVER GET THAT FEELING, VICT9R? YOU HAVE WORKED ALL YOUR LIFE TO BE THE BEST THERE IS AT WHAT YOU DO, AND ONE DAY YOU WAKE UP TO WONDER WHY YOU ARE DOING IT? THAT IS WHAT HAPPENED TO ME.

DO YOU WANT TO HEAR MORE, VICT9R? Y/N

The message rambled from that point. Kluge seemed to be aware of it, apologetic about it, because at the end of each forty or fifty-word paragraph the reader was given the Y/N option.

I kept glancing from the screen to the keyboard, remembering Kluge slumped across it. I thought about him sitting here alone, writing this.

He said he was despondent. He didn’t feel like he could go on. He was taking too many pills (more of them rained down the screen at this point), and he had no further goal. He had done everthing he set out to do. We didn’t understand what he meant by that. He said he no longer existed. We thought that was a figure of speech.

ARE YOU A COP, VICT9R? IF YOU ARE NOT, A COP WILL BE HERE SOON. SO TO YOU OR THE COP: I WAS NOT SELLING NARCOTICS. THE DRUGS IN MY BEDROOM WERE FOR MY OWN PERSONAL USE. I USED A LOT OF THEM. AND NOW I WILL NOT NEED THEM ANYMORE.

PRESS ENTER

Osborne did, and a printer across the room began to chatter, scaring the hell out of all of us. I could see the carriage zipping back and forth, printing in both directions, when Hal pointed at the screen and shouted.

“Look! Look at that!”

The compugraphic man was standing again. He faced us. He had something that had to be a gun in his hand, which he now pointed at his head.

“Don’t do it!” Hal yelled.

The little man didn’t listen. There was a denatured gunshot sound, and the little man fell on his back. A line of red dripped down the screen. Then the green background turned to blue, the printer shut off, and there was nothing left but the little black corpse lying on its back and the word **DONE** at the bottom of the screen.

I took a deep breath, and glanced at Osborne. It would be an understatement to say he did not look happy.

“What’s this about drugs in the bedroom?” he said.

We watched Osborne pulling out drawers in dressers and bedside tables. He didn’t find anything. He looked under the bed, and in the closet. Like all the other rooms in the house, this one was full of computers. Holes had been knocked in walls for the thick sheaves of cables.

I had been standing near a big cardboard drum, one of several in the room. It was about thirty gallon capacity, the kind you ship things in. The lid was loose, so I lifted it. I sort of wished I hadn’t.

“Osborne,” I said. “You’d better look at this.”

The drum was lined with a heavy-duty garbage bag. And it was two-thirds full of Quaaludes.

They pried the lids off the rest of the drums. We found drums of amphetamines, of Nembutals, of Valium. All sorts of things.

With the discovery of the drugs a lot more police returned to the scene. With them came the television camera crews.

In all the activity no one seemed concerned about me, so I slipped back to my own house and locked the door. From time to time I peeked out the curtains. I saw reporters interviewing the neighbors. Hal was there, and seemed to be having a good time. Twice crews knocked on my door, but I didn’t answer. Eventually they went away.

I ran a hot bath and soaked in it for about an hour. Then I turned the heat up as high as it would go and got in bed, under the blankets.

I shivered all night.

Osborne came over about nine the next morning. I let him in. Hal followed, looking very unhappy. I realized they had been up all night. I poured coffee for them.

“You’d better read this first,” Osborne said, and handed me the sheet of computer printout. I unfolded it, got out my glasses, and started to read.

It was in that awful dot-matrix printing. My policy is to throw any such trash into the fireplace, un-read, but I made an exception this time.

It was Kluge’s will. Some probate court was going to have a lot of fun with it.

He stated again that he didn’t exist, so he could have no relatives. He had decided to give all his worldly property to somebody who deserved it.

But who was deserving? Kluge wondered. Well, not Mr. and Mrs. Perkins, four houses down the street. They were child abusers. He cited court records in Buffalo and Miami, and a pending case locally.

Mrs. Radnor and Mrs. Polonski, who lived across the street from each other five houses down, were gossips.

The Anderson’s oldest son was a car thief.

Marian Flores cheated on her high school algebra tests.

There was a guy nearby who was diddling the city on a freeway construction project. There was one wife in the neighborhood who made out with door-to-door salesmen, and two having affairs with men other than their husbands. There was a teenage boy who got his girlfriend pregnant, dropped her, and bragged about it to his friends.

There were no fewer than nineteen couples in the immediate area who had not reported income to the IRS, or who had padded their deductions.

Kluge’s neighbors in back had a dog that barked all night.

Well, I could vouch for the dog. He’d kept me awake often enough. But the rest of it was crazy! For one thing, where did a guy with two hundred gallons of illegal narcotics get the right to judge his neighbors so harshly? I mean, the child abusers were one thing, but was it right to tar a whole family because their son stole cars? And for another … how did he know some of this stuff?

But there was more. Specifically, four philandering husbands. One was Harold “Hal” Lanier, who for three years had been seeing a woman named Toni Jones, a co-worker at the L.A.P.D. Data Processing facility. She was pressuring him for a divorce; he was “waiting for the right time to tell his wife.”

I glanced up at Hal. His red face was all the confirmation I needed.

Then it hit me. What had Kluge found out about me?

I hurried down the page, searching for my name. I found it in the last paragraph.

“ … for thirty years Mr. Apfel has been paying for a mistake he did not even make. I won’t go so far as to nominate him for sainthood, but by default—if for no other reason—I hereby leave all deed and title to my real property and the structure thereon to Victor Apfel.”

I looked at Osborne, and those tired eyes were weighing me.

“But I don’t want it!”

“Do you think this is the reward Kluge mentioned in the phone call?”

“It must be,” I said. “What else could it be?”

Osborne sighed, and sat back in his chair. “At least he didn’t try to leave you the drugs. Are you still saying you didn’t know the guy?”

“Are you accusing me of something?”

He spread his hands. “Mister Apfel, I’m simply asking a question.

You’re never one hundred percent sure in a suicide. Maybe it was a murder. If it was, you can see that, so far, you’re the only one we know of that’s gained by it.”

“He was almost a stranger to me.”

He nodded, tapping his copy of the computer printout. I looked back at my own, wishing it would go away.

“What’s this … mistake you didn’t make?”

I was afraid that would be the next question.

“I was a prisoner of war in North Korea,” I said.

Osborne chewed that over for a while.

“They brainwash you?”

“Yes.” I hit the arm of my chair, and suddenly had to be up and moving. The room was getting cold. “No. I don’t … there’s been a lot of confusion about that word. Did they ‘brainwash’ me? Yes. Did they succeed? Did I offer a confession of my war crimes and denounce the U.S. Government? No.”

Once more, I felt myself being inspected by those deceptively tired eyes.

“You still seem to have … strong feelings about it.”

“It’s not something you forget.”

“Is there anything you want to say about it?”

“It’s just that it was all so … no. No, I have nothing further to say. Not to you, not to anybody.”

“I’m going to have to ask you more questions about Kluge’s death.”

“I think I’ll have my lawyer present for those.” Christ. Now I am going to have to get a lawyer. I didn’t know where to begin.

Osborne just nodded again. He got up and went to the door.

“I was ready to write this one down as a suicide,” he said. “The only thing that bothered me was there was no note. Now we’ve got a note.” He gestured in the direction of Kluge’s house, and started to look angry.

“This guy not only writes a note, he programs the fucking thing into his computer, complete with special effects straight out of Pac-Man.

“Now, I know people do crazy things. I’ve seen enough of them. But when I heard the computer playing a hymn, that’s when I knew this was murder. Tell you the truth, Mr. Apfel, I don’t think you did it. There must be two dozen motives for murder in that printout. Maybe he was blackmailing people around here. Maybe that’s how he bought all those machines. And people with that amount of drugs usually die violently. I’ve got a lot of work to do on this one, and I’ll find who did it.” He mumbled something about not leaving town, and that he’d see me later, and left.

“Vic …” Hal said. I looked at him.

“About that printout,” he finally said. “I’d appreciate it … well, they said they’d keep it confidential. If you know what I mean.” He had eyes like a basset hound. I’d never noticed that before.

“Hal, if you’ll just go home, you have nothing to worry about from me.”

He nodded, and scuttled for the door.

“I don’t think any of that will get out,” he said.

It all did, of course.

It probably would have even without the letters that began arriving a few days after Kluge’s death, all postmarked Trenton, New Jersey, all computer-generated from a machine no one was ever able to trace. The letters detailed the matters Kluge had mentioned in his will.

I didn’t know about any of that at the time. I spent the rest of the day after Hal’s departure lying in my bed, under the electric blanket. I couldn’t get my feet warm. I got up only to soak in the tub or to make a sandwich.

Reporters knocked on the door but I didn’t answer. On the second day I called a criminal lawyer—Martin Abrams, the first in the book—and retained him. He told me they’d probably call me down to the police station for questioning. I told him I wouldn’t go, popped two Dilantin, and sprinted for the bed.

A couple of times I heard sirens in the neighborhood. Once I heard a shouted argument down the street. I resisted the temptation to look. I’ll admit I was a little curious, but you know what happened to the cat.

I kept waiting for Osborne to return, but he didn’t. The days turned into a week. Only two things of interest happened in that time.

The first was a knock on my door. This was two days after Kluge’s death. I looked through the curtains and saw a silver Ferrari parked at the curb. I couldn’t see who was on the porch, so I asked who it was.

“My name’s Lisa Foo,” she said. “You asked me to drop by.”

“I certainly don’t remember it.”

“Isn’t this Charles Kluge’s house?”

“That’s next door.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

I decided I ought to warn her Kluge was dead, so I opened the door. She turned around and smiled at me. It was blinding.

Where does one start in describing Lisa Foo? Remember when newspapers used to run editorial cartoons of Hirohito and Tojo, when the Times used the word “Jap” without embarrassment? Little guys with faces wide as footballs, ears like jug handles, thick glasses, two big rabbity buck teeth, and pencil-thin moustaches …

Leaving out only the moustache, she was a dead ringer for a cartoon Tojo. She had the glasses, and the ears, and the teeth. But her teeth had braces, like piano keys wrapped in barbed wire. And she was five-eight or five-nine and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten. I’d have said a hundred, but added five pounds each for her breasts, so improbably large on her scrawny frame that all I could read of the message on her T-shirt was “POCK LIVE.” It was only when she turned sideways that I saw the esses before and after.

She thrust out a slender hand.

“Looks like I’m going to be your neighbor for a while,” she said. “At least until we get that dragon’s lair next door straightened out.” If she had an accent, it was San Fernando Valley.

“That’s nice.”

“Did you know him? Kluge, I mean. Or at least that’s what he called himself.”

“You don’t think that was his name?”

“I doubt it. ‘Klug’ means clever in German. And it’s hacker slang for being tricky. And he sure was a tricky bugger. Definitely some glitches in the wetware.” She tapped the side of her head meaningfully. “Viruses and phantoms and demons jumping out every time they try to key in, Software rot, bit buckets overflowing onto the floor …”

She babbled on in that vein for a time. It might as well have been Swahili.

“Did you say there were demons in his computers?”

“That’s right.”

“Sounds like they need an exorcist.”

She jerked her thumb at her chest and showed me another half-acre of teeth.

“That’s me. Listen, I gotta go. Drop in and see me anytime.”

The second interesting event of the week happened the next day. My bank statement arrived. There were three deposits listed. The first was the regular check from the V.A., for $487.00. The second was for $392.54, interest on the money my parents had left me fifteen years ago.

The third deposit had come in on the twentieth, the day Charles Kluge died. It was for $700,083.04.

A few days later Hal Lanier dropped by.

“Boy, what a week,” he said. Then he flopped down on the couch and told me all about it.

There had been a second death on the block. The letters had stirred up a lot of trouble, especially with the police going house to house questioning everyone. Some people had confessed to things when they were sure the cops were closing in on them. The woman who used to entertain salesmen while her husband was at work had admitted her infidelity, and the guy had shot her. He was in the County Jail. That was the worst incident, but there had been others, from fistfights to rocks thrown through windows. According to Hal, the IRS was thinking of setting up a branch office in the neighborhood, so many people were being audited.

I thought about the seven hundred thousand and eighty-three dollars.

And four cents.

I didn’t say anything, but my feet were getting cold.

“I suppose you want to know about me and Betty,” he said, at last. I didn’t. I didn’t want to hear any of this, but I tried for a sympathetic expression.

“That’s all over,” he said, with a satisfied sigh. “Between me and Toni, I mean. I told Betty all about it. It was real bad for a few days, but I think our marriage is stronger for it now.” He was quiet for a moment, basking in the warmth of it all. I had kept a straight face under worse provocation, so I trust I did well enough then.

He wanted to tell me all they’d learned about Kluge, and he wanted to invite me over for dinner, but I begged off on both, telling him my war wounds were giving me hell. I just about had him to the door when Osborne knocked on it. There was nothing to do but let him in. Hal stuck around, too.

I offered Osborne coffee, which he gratefully accepted. He looked different. I wasn’t sure what it was at first. Same old tired expression … no, it wasn’t. Most of that weary look had been either an act or a cop’s built-in cynicism. Today it was genuine. The tiredness had moved from his face to his shoulders, to his hands, to the way he walked and the way he slumped in the chair. There was a sour aura of defeat around him.

“Am I still a suspect?” I asked.

“You mean should you call your lawyer? I’d say don’t bother. I checked you out pretty good. That will ain’t gonna hold up, so your motive is pretty half-assed. Way I figure it, every coke dealer in the Marina had a better reason to snuff Kluge than you.” He sighed. “I got a couple questions. You can answer them or not.”

“Give it a try.”

“You remember any unusual visitors he had? People coming and going at night?”

“The only visitors I ever recall were deliveries. Post office. Federal Express, freight companies … that sort of thing. I suppose the drugs could have come in any of those shipments.”

“That’s what we figure, too. There’s no way he was dealing nickel and dime bags. He must have been a middle man. Ship it in, ship it out.” He brooded about that for a while, and sipped his coffee.

“So are you making any progress?” I asked.

“You want to know the truth? The case is going in the toilet. We’ve got too many motives, and not a one of them that works. As far as we can tell, nobody on the block had the slightest idea Kluge had all that information. We’ve checked bank accounts and we can’t find evidence of blackmail. So the neighbors are pretty much out of the picture. Though if he were alive, most people around here would like to kill him now.”

“Damn straight,” Hal said.

Osborne slapped his thigh. “If the bastard was alive, I’d kill him,” he said. “But I’m beginning to think he never was alive.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If I hadn’t seen the goddamn body …” He sat up a little straighter. “He said he didn’t exist. Well, he practically didn’t. PG&E never heard of him. He’s hooked up to their lines and a meter reader came by every month, but they never billed him for a single kilowatt. Same with the phone company. He had a whole exchange in that house that was made by the phone company, and delivered by them, and installed by them, but they have no record of him. We talked to the guy who hooked it all up. He turned in his records, and the computer swallowed them. Kluge didn’t have a bank account anywhere in California, and apparently he didn’t need one. We’ve tracked down a hundred companies that sold things to him, shipped them out, and then either marked his account paid or forgot they ever sold him anything. Some of them have check numbers and account numbers in their books, for accounts or even banks that don’t exist.”

He leaned back in his chair, simmering at the perfidy of it all.

“The only guy we’ve found who ever heard of him was the guy who delivered his groceries once a month. Little store down on Sepulveda. They don’t have a computer, just paper receipts. He paid by check. Wells Fargo accepted them and the checks never bounced. But Wells Fargo never heard of him.”

I thought it over. He seemed to expect something of me at this point, so I made a stab at it.

“He was doing all this by computers?”

“That’s right. Now, the grocery store scam I understand, almost. But more often than not, Kluge got right into the basic programming of the computers and wiped himself out. The power company was never paid, by check or any other way, because as far as they were concerned, they weren’t selling him anything.

“No government agency has ever heard of him. We’ve checked him with everybody from the post office to the CIA.”

“Kluge was probably an alias, right?” I offered.

“Yeah. But the FBI doesn’t have his fingerprints. We’ll find out who he was, eventually. But it doesn’t get us any closer to whether or not he was murdered.”

He admitted there was pressure to simply close the felony part of the case, label it suicide, and forget it. But Osborne would not believe it. Naturally, the civil side would go on for some time, as they attempted to track down all Kluge’s deceptions.

“It’s all up to the dragon lady,” Osborne said. Hal snorted.

“Fat chance,” Hal said, and muttered something about boat people.

“That girl? She’s still over there? Who is she?”

“She’s some sort of giant brain from Cal Tech. We called out there and told them we were having problems, and she’s what they sent.” It was clear from Osborne’s face what he thought of any help she might provide.

I finally managed to get rid of them. As they went down the walk I looked over at Kluge’s house. Sure enough, Lisa Foo’s silver Ferrari was sitting in his driveway.

I had no business going over there. I knew that better than anyone.

So I set about preparing my evening meal. I made a tuna casserole—which is not as bland as it sounds, the way I make it—put it in the oven and went out to the garden to pick the makings for a salad. I was slicing cherry tomatoes and thinking about chilling a bottle of wine when it occurred to me that I had enough for two.

Since I never do anything hastily, I sat down and thought it over for a while. What finally decided me was my feet. For the first time in a week, they were warm. So I went to Kluge’s house.

The front door was standing open. There was no screen. Funny how disturbing that can look, the dwelling wide open and unguarded. I stood on the porch and leaned in, but all I could see was the hallway.

“Miss Foo?” I called. There was no answer.

The last time I’d been here I had found a dead man. I hurried in.

Lisa Foo was sitting on a piano bench before a computer console. She was in profile, her back very straight, her brown legs in lotus position, her fingers poised at the keys as words sprayed rapidly onto the screen in front of her. She looked up and flashed her teeth at me.

“Somebody told me your name was Victor Apfel,” she said.

“Yes. Uh, the door was open …”

“It’s hot,” she said, reasonably, pinching the fabric of her shirt near her neck and lifting it up and down like you do when you’re sweaty. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing, really.” I came into the dimness, and stumbled on something. It was a cardboard box, the large flat kind used for delivering a jumbo pizza.

“I was just fixing dinner, and it looks like there’s plenty for two, so I was wondering if you …” I trailed off, as I had just noticed something else. I had thought she was wearing shorts. In fact, all she had on was the shirt and a pair of pink bikini underpants. This did not seem to make her uneasy.

“ … would you like to join me for dinner?”

Her smile grew even broader.

“I’d love to,” she said. She effortlessly unwound her legs and bounced to her feet, then brushed past me, trailing the smells of persipration and sweet soap. “Be with you in a minute.”

I looked around the room again but my mind kept coming back to her. She liked Pepsi with her pizza; there were dozens of empty cans. There was a deep scar on her knee and upper thigh. The ashtrays were empty … and the long muscles of her calves bunched strongly as she walked. Kluge must have smoked, but Lisa didn’t, and she had fine, downy hairs in the small of her back just visible in the green computer light. I heard water running in the bathroom sink, looked at a yellow notepad covered with the kind of penmanship I hadn’t seen in decades, and smelled soap and remembered tawny brown skin and an easy stride.

She appeared in the hall, wearing cut-off jeans, sandals, and a new T-shirt. The old one had advertised BURROUGHS OFFICE SYSTEMS. This one featured Mickey Mouse and Snow White’s Castle and smelled of fresh bleached cotton. Mickey’s ears were laid back on the upper slopes of her incongruous breasts.

I followed her out the door. Tinkerbell twinkled in pixie dust from the back of her shirt.

“I like this kitchen,” she said.

You don’t really look at a place until someone says something like that.

The kitchen was a time capsule. It could have been lifted bodily from an issue of Life in the early fifties. There was the hump-shouldered Frigidaire, of a vintage when that word had been a generic term, like kleenex or coke. The counter tops were yellow tile, the sort that’s only found in bathrooms these days. There wasn’t an ounce of Formica in the place. Instead of a dishwasher I had a wire rack and a double sink. There was no electric can opener, Cuisinart, trash compacter, or microwave oven. The newest thing in the whole room was a fifteen-year-old blender.

I’m good with my hands. I like to repair things.

“This bread is terrific,” she said.

I had baked it myself. I watched her mop her plate with a crust, and she asked if she might have seconds.

I understand cleaning one’s plate with bread is bad manners. Not that I cared; I do it myself. And other than that, her manners were impeccable. She polished off three helpings of my casserole and when she was done the plate hardly needed washing. I had a sense of ravenous appetite barely held in check.

She settled back in her chair and I re-filled her glass with white wine.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some more peas?”

“I’d bust.” She patted her stomach contentedly. “Thank you so much, Mister Apfel. I haven’t had a home-cooked meal in ages.”

“You can call me Victor.”

“I just love American food.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing. I mean, not like Chinese or … you are American, aren’t you?” She just smiled. “What I mean—”

“I know what you meant, Victor. I’m a citizen, but not native-born. Would you excuse me for a moment? I know it’s impolite to jump right up, but with these braces I find I have to brush instantly after eating.”

I could hear her as I cleared the table. I ran water in the sink and started doing the dishes. Before long she joined me, grabbed a dish towel, and began drying the things in the rack, over my protests.

“You live alone here?” she asked.

“Yes. Have ever since my parents died.”

“Ever married? If it’s none of my business, just say so.”

“That’s all right. No, I never married.”

“You do pretty good for not having a woman around.”

“I’ve had a lot of practice. Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Where are you from? Taiwan?”

“I have a knack for languages. Back home, I spoke pidgin American, but when I got here I cleaned up my act. I also speak rotten French, illiterate Chinese in four or five varieties, gutter Vietnamese, and enough Thai to holler, ‘Me wanna see American Consul, pretty-damn-quick, you!’”

I laughed. When she said it, her accent was thick.

“I been here eight years now. You figured out where home is?”

“Vietnam?” I ventured.

“The sidewalks of Saigon, fer shure. Or Ho Chi Minh’s Shitty, as the pajama-heads re-named it, may their dinks rot off and their butts be filled with jagged punjee-sticks. Pardon my French.”

She ducked her head in embarrassment. What had started out light had turned hot very quickly. I sensed a hurt at least as deep as my own, and we both backed off from it.

“I took you for a Japanese,” I said.

“Yeah, ain’t it a pisser? I’ll tell you about it some day. Victor, is that a laundry room through that door there? With an electric washer?”

“That’s right.”

“Would it be too much trouble if I did a load?”

It was no trouble at all. She had seven pairs of faded jeans, some with the legs cut away, and about two dozen T-shirts. It could have been a load of boys’ clothing except for the frilly underwear.

We went into the back yard to sit in the last rays of the setting sun, then she had to see my garden. I’m quite proud of it. When I’m well, I spend four or five hours a day working out there, year-round, usually in the morning hours. You can do that in southern California. I have a small greenhouse I built myself.

She loved it, though it was not in its best shape. I had spent most of the week in bed or in the tub. As a result, weeds were sprouting here and there.

“We had a garden when I was little,” she said. “And I spent two years in a rice paddy.”

“That must be a lot different than this.”

“Damn straight. Put me off rice for years.”

She discovered an infestation of aphids, so we squatted down to pick them off. She had that double-jointed Asian peasant’s way of sitting that I remembered so well and could never imitate. Her fingers were long and narrow, and soon the tips of them were green from squashed bugs.

We talked about this and that. I don’t remember quite how it came up, but I told her I had fought in Korea. I learned she was twenty-five. It turned out we had the same birthday, so some months back I had been exactly twice her age.

The only time Kluge’s name came up was when she mentioned how she liked to cook. She hadn’t been able to at Kluge’s house.

“He has a freezer in the garage full of frozen dinners,” she said. “He had one plate, one fork, one spoon, and one glass. He’s got the best microwave oven on the market. And that’s it, man. Ain’t nothing else in his kitchen at all.” She shook her head, and executed an aphid. “He was one weird dude.”

When her laundry was done it was late evening, almost dark. She loaded it into my wicker basket and we took it out to the clothesline. It got to be a game. I would shake out a T-shirt and study the picture or message there. Sometimes I got it, and sometimes I didn’t. There were pictures of rock groups, a map of Los Angeles, Star Trek tie-ins … a little of everything.

“What’s the L5 Society?” I asked her.

“Guys that want to build these great big farms in space. I asked ’em if they were gonna grow rice, and they said they didn’t think it was the best crop for zero gee, so I bought the shirt.”

“How many of these things do you have?”

“Wow, it’s gotta be four or five hundred. I usually wear ’em two or three times and then put them away.”

I picked up another shirt, and a bra fell out. It wasn’t the kind of bra girls wore when I was growing up. It was very sheer, though somehow functional at the same time.

“You like, Yank?” Her accent was very thick. “You oughtta see my sister!”

I glanced at her, and her face fell.

“I’m sorry, Victor,” she said. “You don’t have to blush.” She took the bra from me and clipped it to the line.

She must have mis-read my face. True, I had been embarrassed, but I was also pleased in some strange way. It had been a long time since anybody had called me anything but Victor or Mr. Apfel.

The next day’s mail brought a letter from a law firm in Chicago. It was about the seven hundred thousand dollars. The money had come from a Delaware holding company which had been set up in 1933 to provide for me in my old age. My mother and father were listed as the founders. Certain long-term investments had matured, resulting in my recent windfall. The amount in my bank was after taxes.

It was ridiculous on the face of it. My parents had never had that kind of money. I didn’t want it. I would have given it back if I could find out who Kluge had stolen it from.

I decided that, if I wasn’t in jail this time next year, I’d give it all to some charity. Save the Whales, maybe, or the L5 Society.

I spent the morning in the garden. Later I walked to the market and bought some fresh ground beef and pork. I was feeling good as I pulled my purchases home in my fold-up wire basket. When I passed the silver Ferrari I smiled.

She hadn’t come to get her laundry. I took it off the line and folded it, then knocked on Kluge’s door.

“It’s me. Victor.”

“Come on in, Yank.”

She was where she had been before, but decently dressed this time. She smiled at me, then hit her forehead when she saw the laundry basket. She hurried to take it from me.

“I’m sorry, Victor. I meant to get this—”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It was no trouble. And it gives me the chance to ask if you’d like to dine with me again.”

Something happened to her face which she covered quickly. Perhaps she didn’t like “American” food as much as she professed to. Or maybe it was the cook.

“Sure, Victor, I’d love to. Let me take care of this. And why don’t you open those drapes? It’s like a tomb in here.”

She hurried away. I glanced at the screen she had been using. It was blank, but for one word: intercourse-p. I assumed it was a typo.

I pulled the drapes open in time to see Osborne’s car park at the curb. Then Lisa was back, wearing a new T-shirt. This one said A CHANGE OF HOBBIT, and had a picture of a squat, hairy-footed creature. She glanced out the window and saw Osborne coming up the walk.

“I say, Watson,” she said. “It’s Lestrade of the Yard. Do show him in.”

That wasn’t nice of her. He gave me a suspicious glance as he entered. I burst out laughing. Lisa sat on the piano bench, poker-faced. She slumped indolently, one arm resting near the keyboard.

“Well, Apfel,” Osborne started. “We’ve finally found out who Kluge really was.”

“Patrick William Gavin,” Lisa said.

Quite a time went by before Osborne was able to close his mouth. Then he opened it right up again.

“How the hell did you find that out?”

She lazily caressed the keyboard beside her.

“Well, of course I got it when it came into your office this morning. There’s a little stoolie program tucked away in your computer that whispers in my ear every time the name Kluge is mentioned. But I didn’t need that. I figured it out five days ago.”

“Then why the … why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask me.”

They glared at each other for a while. I had no idea what events had led up to this moment, but it was quite clear they didn’t like each other even a little bit. Lisa was on top just now, and seemed to be enjoying it. Then she glanced at her screen, looked surprised, and quickly tapped a key. The word that had been there vanished. She gave me an inscrutable glance, then faced Osborne again.

“If you recall, you brought me in because all your own guys were getting was a lot of crashes. This system was brain-damaged when I got here, practically catatonic. Most of it was down and your guys couldn’t get it up.” She had to grin at that.

“You decided I couldn’t do any worse than your guys were doing. So you asked me to try and break Kluge’s codes without frying the system. Well, I did it. All you had to do was come by and interface and I would have downloaded N tons of wallpaper right in your lap.”

Osborne listened quietly. Maybe he even knew he had made a mistake.

“What did you get? Can I see it now?”

She nodded, and pressed a few keys. Words started to fill her screen, and one close to Osborne. I got up and read Lisa’s terminal.

It was a brief bio of Kluge/Gavin. He was about my age, but while I was getting shot at in a foreign land, he was cutting a swath through the infant computer industry. He had been there from the ground up, working at many of the top research facilities. It surprised me that it had taken over a week to identify him.

“I compiled this anecdotally,” Lisa said, as we read. “The first thing you have to realize about Gavin is that he exists nowhere in any computerized information system. So I called people all over the country—interesting phone system he’s got, by the way; it generates a new number for each call, and you can’t call back or trace it—and started asking who the top people were in the fifties and sixties. I got a lot of names. After that, it was a matter of finding out who no longer existed in the files. He faked his death in 1967. I located one account of it in a newspaper file. Everybody I talked to who had known him knew of his death. There is a paper birth certificate in Florida. That’s the only other evidence I found of him. He was the only guy so many people in the field knew who left no mark on the world. That seemed conclusive to me.”

Osborne finished reading, then looked up.

“All right, Ms. Foo. What else have you found out?”

“I’ve broken some of his codes. I had a piece of luck, getting into a basic rape-and-plunder program he’d written to attack other people’s programs, and I’ve managed to use it against a few of his own. I’ve unlocked a file of passwords with notes on where they came from. And I’ve learned a few of his tricks. But it’s the tip of the iceberg.”

She waved a hand at the silent metal brains in the room.

“What I haven’t gotten across to anyone is just what this is. This is the most devious electronic weapon ever devised. It’s armored like a battleship. It has to be; there’s a lot of very slick programs out there that grab an invader and hang on like a terrier. If they ever got this far Kluge could deflect them. But usually they never even knew they’d been burgled. Kluge’d come in like a cruise missile, low and fast and twisty. And he’d route his attack through a dozen cut-offs.

“He had a lot of advantages. Big systems these days are heavily protected. People use passwords and very sophisticated codes. But Kluge helped invent most of them. You need a damn good lock to keep out a locksmith. He helped install a lot of the major systems. He left informants behind, hidden in the software. If the codes were changed, the computer itself would send the information to a safe system that Kluge could tap later. It’s like you buy the biggest, meanest, best-trained watchdog you can. And that night, the guy who trained the dog comes in, pats him on the head, and robs you blind.”

There was a lot more in that vein. I’m afraid that when Lisa began talking about computers, ninety percent of my head shut off.

“I’d like to know something, Osborne,” Lisa said.

“What would that be?”

“What is my status here? Am I supposed to be solving your crime for you, or just trying to get this system back to where a competent user can deal with it?”

Osborne thought it over.

“What worries me,” she added, “is that I’m poking around in a lot of restricted data banks. I’m worried about somebody knocking on the door and handcuffing me. You ought to be worried, too. Some of these agencies wouldn’t like a homicide cop looking into their affairs.”

Osborne bridled at that. Maybe that’s what she intended.

“What do I have to do?” he snarled. “Beg you to stay?”

“No. I just want your authorization. You don’t have to put it in writing. Just say you’re behind me.”

“Look. As far as L.A. County and the State of California are concerned, this house doesn’t exist. There is no lot here. It doesn’t appear in the assessor’s records. This place is in a legal limbo. If anybody can authorize you to use this stuff, it’s me, because I believe a murder was committed in it. So you just keep doing what you’ve been doing.”

“That’s not much of a commitment,” she mused.

“It’s all you’re going to get. Now, what else have you got?”

She turned to her keyboard and typed for a while. Pretty soon a printer started, and Lisa leaned back. I glanced at her screen. It said: osculate posterior-p. I remembered that osculate meant kiss. Well, these people have their own language. Lisa looked up at me and grinned.

“Not you,” she said, quietly. “Him.”

I hadn’t the faintest notion of what she was talking about.

Osborne got his printout and was ready to leave. Again, he couldn’t resist turning at the door for final orders.

“If you find anything to indicate he didn’t commit suicide, let me know.”

“Okay. He didn’t commit suicide.”

Osborne didn’t understand for a moment.

“I want proof.”

“Well, I have it, but you probably can’t use it. He didn’t write that ridiculous suicide note.”

“How do you know that?”

“I knew that my first day here. I had the computer list the program. Then I compared it to Kluge’s style. No way he could have written it. It’s tighter’n a bug’s ass. Not a spare line in it. Kluge didn’t pick his alias for nothing. You know what it means?”

“Clever,” I said.

“Literally. But it means … a Rube Goldberg device. Something overly complex. Something that works, but for the wrong reason. You ‘kluge around’ bugs in a program. It’s the hacker’s vaseline.”

“So?” Osborne wanted to know.

“So Kluge’s programs were really crocked. They were full of bells and whistles he never bothered to clean out. He was a genius, and his programs worked, but you wonder why they did. Routines so bletcherous they’d make your skin crawl. Real crufty bagbiters. But good programming’s so rare, even his diddles were better than most people’s super-moby hacks.”

I suspect Osborne understood about as much of that as I did.

“So you base your opinion on his programming style.”

“Yeah. Unfortunately, it’s gonna be ten years or so before that’s admissable in court, like graphology or fingerprints. But if you know anything about programming you can look at it and see it. Somebody else wrote that suicide note—somebody damn good, by the way. That program called up his last will and testament as a sub-routine. And he definitely did write that. It’s got his fingerprints all over it. He spent the last five years spying on the neighbors as a hobby. He tapped into military records, school records, work records, tax files and bank accounts. And he turned every telephone for three blocks into a listening device. He was one hell of a snoop.”

“Did he mention anywhere why he did that?” Osborne asked.

“I think he was more than half crazy. Possibly he was suicidal. He sure wasn’t doing himself any good with all those pills he took. But he was preparing himself for death, and Victor was the only one he found worthy of leaving it all to. I’d have believed he committed suicide if not for that note. But he didn’t write it. I’ll swear to that.”

We eventually got rid of him, and I went home to fix the dinner. Lisa joined me when it was ready. Once more she had a huge appetite.

I fixed lemonade and we sat on my small patio and watched evening gather around us.

I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating. I sat up, thinking it out, and I didn’t like my conclusions. So I put on my robe and slippers and went over to Kluge’s.

The front door was open again. I knocked anyway. Lisa stuck her head around the corner.

“Victor? Is something wrong?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “May I come in?”

She gestured, and I followed her into the living room. An open can of Pepsi sat beside her console. Her eyes were red as she sat on her bench.

“What’s up?” she said, and yawned.

“You should be asleep, for one thing,” I said.

She shrugged, and nodded.

“Yeah. I can’t seem to get in the right phase. Just now I’m in day mode. But Victor, I’m used to working odd hours, and long hours, and you didn’t come over here to lecture me about that, did you?”

“No. You say Kluge was murdered.”

“He didn’t write his suicide note. That seems to leave murder.”

“I was wondering why someone would kill him. He never left the house, so it was for something he did here with his computers. And now you’re … well, I don’t know what you’re doing, frankly, but you seem to be poking into the same things. Isn’t there a danger the same people will come after you?”

“People?” She raised an eyebrow.

I felt helpless. My fears were not well-formed enough to make sense.

“I don’t know … you mentioned agencies …”

“You notice how impressed Osborne was with that? You think there’s some kind of conspiracy Kluge tumbled to, or you think the CIA killed him because he found out too much about something, or—”

“I don’t know, Lisa. But I’m worried the same thing could happen to you.”

Surprisingly, she smiled at me.

“Thank you so much, Victor. I wasn’t going to admit it to Osborne, but I’ve been worried about that, too.”

“Well, what are you going to do?”

“I want to stay here and keep working. So I gave some thought to what I could do to protect myself. I decided there wasn’t anything.”

“Surely there’s something.”

“Well, I got a gun, if that’s what you mean. But think about it. Kluge was offed in the middle of the day. Nobody saw anybody enter or leave the house. So I asked myself, who can walk into a house in broad daylight, shoot Kluge, program that suicide note, and walk away, leaving no traces he’d ever been there?”

“Somebody very good.”

“Goddam good. So good there’s not much chance one little gook’s gonna be able to stop him if he decides to waste her.”

She shocked me, both by her words and by her apparent lack of concern for her own fate. But she had said she was worried.

“Then you have to stop this. Get out of here.”

“I won’t be pushed around that way,” she said. There was a tone of finality to it. I thought of things I might say, and rejected them all.

“You could at least … lock your front door,” I concluded, lamely.

She laughed, and kissed my cheek.

“I’ll do that, Yank. And I appreciate your concern. I really do.”

I watched her close the door behind me, listened to her lock it, then trudged through the moonlight toward my house. Halfway there I stopped. I could suggest she stay in my spare bedroom. I could offer to stay with her at Kluge’s.

No, I decided. She would probably take that the wrong way.

I was back in bed before I realized, with a touch of chagrin and more than a little disgust at myself, that she had every reason to take it the wrong way.

And me exactly twice her age.

I spent the morning in the garden, planning the evening’s menu. I have always liked to cook, but dinner with Lisa had rapidly become the high point of my day. Not only that, I was already taking it for granted. So it hit me hard, around noon, when I looked out the front and saw her car gone.

I hurried to Kluge’s front door. It was standing open. I made a quick search of the house. I found nothing until the master bedroom, where her clothes were stacked neatly on the floor.

Shivering, I pounded on the Lanier’s front door. Betty answered, and immediately saw my agitation.

“The girl at Kluge’s house,” I said. “I’m afraid something’s wrong. Maybe we’d better call the police.”

“What happened?” Betty asked, looking over my shoulder. “Did she call you? I see she’s not back yet.”

“Back?”

“I saw her drive away about an hour ago. That’s quite a car she has.” Feeling like a fool, I tried to make nothing of it, but I caught a look in Betty’s eye. I think she’d have liked to pat me on the head. It made me furious.

But she’d left her clothes, so surely she was coming back.

I kept telling myself that, then went to run a bath, as hot as I could stand it.

When I answered the door she was standing there with a grocery bag in each arm and her usual blinding smile on her face.

“I wanted to do this yesterday but I forgot until you came over, and I know I should have asked first, but then I wanted to surprise you, so I just went to get one or two items you didn’t have in your garden and a couple of things that weren’t in your spice rack …”

She kept talking as we unloaded the bags in the kitchen. I said nothing. She was wearing a new T-shirt. Thee was a big V, and under it a picture of a screw, followed by a hyphen and a small case “p.” I thought it over as she babbled on. V, screw-p. I was determined not to ask what it meant.

“Do you like Vietnamese cooking?”

I looked at her, and finally realized she was very nervous.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had it. But I like Chinese, and Japanese, and Indian. I like to try new things.” The last part was a lie, but not as bad as it might have been. I do try new recipes, and my tastes in food are catholic. I didn’t expect to have much trouble with southeast Asian cuisine.

“Well, when I get through you still won’t know,” she laughed. “My momma was half-Chinese. So what you’re gonna get here is a mongrel meal.” She glanced up, saw my face, and laughed.

“I forgot. You’ve been to Asia. No, Yank, I ain’t gonna serve any dog meat.”

There was only one intolerable thing, and that was the chopsticks. I used them for as long as I could, then put them aside and got a fork.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Chopsticks happen to be a problem for me.”

“You use them very well.”

“I had plenty of time to learn how.”

It was very good, and I told her so. Each dish was a revelation, not quite like anything I had ever had. Toward the end, I broke down halfway.

“Does the V stand for victory?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“Beethoven? Churchill? World War Two?”

She just smiled.

“Think of it as a challenge, Yank.”

“Do I frighten you, Victor?”

“You did at first.”

“It’s my face, isn’t it?”

“It’s a generalized phobia of Orientals. I suppose I’m a racist. Not because I want to be.”

She nodded slowly, there in the dark. We were on the patio again, but the sun had gone down a long time ago. I can’t recall what we had talked about for all those hours. It had kept us busy, anyway.

“I have the same problem,” she said.

“Fear of Orientals?” I had meant it as a joke.

“Of Cambodians.” She let me take that in for a while, then went on. “When Saigon fell, I fled to Cambodia. It took me two years with stops when the Khmer Rouge put me in labor camps. I’m lucky to be alive, really.”

“I thought they called it Kampuchea now.”

She spat. I’m not even sure she was aware she had done it.

“It’s the People’s Republic of Syphilitic Dogs. The North Koreans treated you very badly, didn’t they, Victor?”

“That’s right.”

“Koreans are pus suckers.” I must have looked surprised, because she chuckled.

“You Americans feel so guilty about racism. As if you had invented it and nobody else—except maybe the South Africans and the Nazis—had ever practiced it as heinously as you. And you can’t tell one yellow face from another, so you think of the yellow races as one homogeneous block. When in fact Orientals are among the most racist peoples on the earth. The Vietnamese have hated the Cambodians for a thousand years. The Chinese hate the Japanese. The Koreans hate everybody. And everybody hates the ‘ethnic Chinese.’ The Chinese are the Jews of the east.”

“I’ve heard that.”

She nodded, lost in her own thoughts.

“And I hate all Cambodians,” she said, at last. “Like you, I don’t wish to. Most of the people who suffered in the camps were Cambodians. It was the genocidal leaders, the Pol Pot scum, who I should hate.” She looked at me. “But sometimes we don’t get a lot of choice about things like that, do we, Yank?”

The next day I visited her at noon. It had cooled down, but was still warm in her dark den. She had not changed her shirt.

She told me a few things about computers. When she let me try some things on the keyboard I quickly got lost. We decided I needn’t plan on a career as a computer programmer.

One of the things she showed me was called a telephone modem, whereby she could reach other computers all over the world. She “interfaced” with someone at Stanford who she had never met, and who she knew only as “Bubble Sorter.” They typed things back and forth at each other.

At the end, Bubble Sorter wrote “bye-p.” Lisa typed T.

“What’s T?” I asked.

“True. Means yes, but yes would be too straightforward for a hacker.”

“You told me what a byte is. What’s a byep?”

She looked up at me seriously.

“It’s a question. Add p to a word, and make it a question. So bye-p means Bubble Sorter was asking if I wanted to log out. Sign off.”

I thought that over.

“So how would you translate ‘osculate posterior-p’?”

“‘You wanna kiss my ass?’ But remember, that was for Osborne.”

I looked at her T-shirt again, then up to her eyes, which were quite serious and serene. She waited, hands folded in her lap.

Intercourse-p.

“Yes,” I said. “I would.”

She put her glasses on the table and pulled her shirt over her head.

We made love in Kluge’s big waterbed.

I had a certain amount of performance anxiety—it had been a long, long time. After that, I was so caught up in the touch and smell and taste of her that I went a little crazy. She didn’t seem to mind.

At last we were done, and bathed in sweat. She rolled over, stood, and went to the window. She opened it, and a breath of air blew over me. Then she put one knee on the bed, leaned over me, and got a pack of cigarettes from the bedside table. She lit one.

“I hope you’re not allergic to smoke,” she said.

“No. My father smoked. But I didn’t know you did.”

“Only afterwards,” she said, with a quick smile. She took a deep drag. “Everybody in Saigon smoked, I think.” She stretched out on her back beside me and we lay like that, soaking wet, holding hands. She opened her legs so one of her bare feet touched mine. It seemed enough contact. I watched the smoke rise from her right hand.

“I haven’t felt warm in thirty years,” I said. “I’ve been hot, but I’ve never been warm. I feel warm now.”

“Tell me about it,” she said.

So I did, as much as I could, wondering if it would work this time. At thirty years remove, my story does not sound so horrible. We’ve seen so much in that time. There were people in jails at that very moment, enduring conditions as bad as any I encountered. The paraphernalia of oppression is still pretty much the same. Nothing physical happened to me that would account for thirty years lived as a recluse.

“I was badly injured,” I told her. “My skull was fractured. I still have … problems from that. Korea can get very cold, and I was never warm enough. But it was the other stuff. What they call brainwashing now.

“We didn’t know what it was. We couldn’t understand that even after a man had told them all he knew they’d keep on at us. Keeping us awake. Disorienting us. Some guys signed confessions, made up all sorts of stuff, but even that wasn’t enough. They’d just keep on at you.

“I never did figure it out. I guess I couldn’t understand an evil that big. But when they were sending us back and some of the prisoners wouldn’t go … they really didn’t want to go, they really believed …”

I had to pause there. Lisa sat up, moved quietly to the end of the bed, and began massaging my feet.

“We got a taste of what the Vietnam guys got, later. Only for us it was reversed. The G.I.’s were heroes, and the prisoners were …”

“You didn’t break,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“No, I didn’t.”

“That would be worse.”

I looked at her. She had my foot pressed against her flat belly, holding me by the heel while her other hand massaged my toes.

“The country was shocked,” I said. “They didn’t understand what brainwashing was. I tried telling people how it was. I thought they were looking at me funny. After a while, I stopped talking about it. And I didn’t have anything else to talk about.

“A few years back the Army changed its policy. Now they don’t expect you to withstand psychological conditioning. It’s understood you can say anything or sign anything.”

She just looked at me, kept massaging my foot, and nodded slowly. Finally she spoke.

“Cambodia was hot,” she said. “I kept telling myself when I finally got to the U.S. I’d live in Maine or someplace, where it snowed. And I did go to Cambridge, but I found out I didn’t like snow.”

She told me about it. The last I heard, a million people had died over there. It was a whole country frothing at the mouth and snapping at anything that moved. Or like one of those sharks you read about that, when its guts are ripped out, bends in a circle and starts devouring itself.

She told me about being forced to build a pyramid of severed heads. Twenty of them working all day in the hot sun finally got it ten feet high before it collapsed. If any of them stopped working, their own heads were added to the pile.

“It didn’t mean anything to me. It was just another job. I was pretty crazy by then. I didn’t start to come out of it until I got across the Thai border.”

That she had survived it at all seemed a miracle. She had gone through more horror than I could imagine. And she had come through it in much better shape. It made me feel small. When I was her age, I was well on my way to building the prison I have lived in ever since. I told her that.

“Part of it is preparation,” she said, wryly. “What you expect out of life, what your life has been so far. You said it yourself. Korea was new to you. I’m not saying I was ready for Cambodia, but my life up to that point hadn’t been what you’d call sheltered. I hope you haven’t been thinking I made a living in the streets by selling apples.”

She kept rubbing my feet, staring off into scenes I could not see.

“How old were you when your mother died?”

“She was killed during Tet, 1968. I was ten.”

“By the Viet Cong?”

“Who knows? Lot of bullets flying, lot of grenades being thrown.”

She sighed, dropped my foot, and sat there, a scrawny Buddha without a robe.

“You ready to do it again, Yank?”

“I don’t think I can, Lisa. I’m an old man.”

She moved over me and lowered herself with her chin just below my sternum, settling her breasts in the most delicious place possible.

“We’ll see,” she said, and giggled. “There’s an alternative sex act I’m pretty good at, and I’m pretty sure it would make you a young man again. But I haven’t been able to do it for about a year on account of these.” She tapped her braces. “It’d be sort of like sticking it in a buzz saw. So now I do this instead. I call it ‘touring the silicone valley.’” She started moving her body up and down, just a few inches at a time. She blinked innocently a couple of times, then laughed.

“At last, I can see you,” she said. “I’m awfully myopic.”

I let her do that for a while, then lifted my head.

“Did you say silicone?”

“Uh-huh. You didn’t think they were real, did you?”

I confessed that I had.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy with anything I ever bought. Not even the car.”

“Why did you?”

“Does it bother you?”

It didn’t, and I told her so. But I couldn’t conceal my curiosity.

“Because it was safe to. In Saigon I was always angry that I never developed. I could have made a good living as a prostitute, but I was always too tall, too skinny, and too ugly. Then in Cambodia I was lucky. I managed to pass for a boy some of the time. If not for that I’d have been raped a lot more than I was. And in Thailand I knew I’d get to the West one way or another, and when I got there, I’d get the best car there was, eat anything I wanted any time I wanted to, and purchase the best tits money could buy. You can’t imagine what the West looks like from the camps. A place where you can buy tits!”

She looked down between them, then back at my face.

“Looks like it was a good investment,” she said.

“They do seem to work okay,” I had to admit.

We agreed that she would spend the nights at my house. There were certain things she had to do at Kluge’s, involving equipment that had to be physically loaded, but many things she could do with a remote terminal and an armload of software. So we selected one of Kluge’s best computers and about a dozen peripherals and installed her at a cafeteria table in my bedroom.

I guess we both knew it wasn’t much protection if the people who got Kluge decided to get her. But I know I felt better about it, and I think she did, too.

The second day she was there a delivery van pulled up outside, and two guys starting unloading a king-size waterbed. She laughed and laughed when she saw my face.

“Listen, you’re not using Kluge’s computers to—”

“Relax, Yank. How’d you think I could afford a Ferrari?”

“I’ve been curious.”

“If you’re really good at writing software you can make a lot of money. I own my own company. But every hacker picks up tricks here and there. I used to run a few Kluge scams, myself.”

“But not anymore?”

She shrugged. “Once a thief, always a thief, Victor. I told you I couldn’t make ends meet selling my bod.”

Lisa didn’t need much sleep.

We got up at seven, and I made breakfast every morning. Then we would spend an hour or two working in the garden. She would go to Kluge’s and I’d bring her a sandwich at noon, then drop in on her several times during the day. That was for my own peace of mind; I never stayed more than a minute. Sometime during the afternoon I would shop or do household chores, then at seven one of us would cook dinner. We alternated. I taught her “American” cooking, and she taught me a little of everything. She complained about the lack of vital ingredients in American markets. No dogs, of course, but she claimed to know great ways of preparing monkey, snake, and rat. I never knew how hard she was pulling my leg, and didn’t ask.

After dinner she stayed at my house. We would talk, make love, bathe. She loved my tub. It is about the only alteration I have made in the house, and my only real luxury. I put it in—having to expand the bathroom to do so—in 1975, and never regretted it. We would soak for twenty minutes or an hour, turning the jets and bubblers on and off, washing each other; giggling like kids. Once we used bubble bath and made a mountain of suds four feet high, then destroyed it, splashing water all over the place. Most nights she let me wash her long black hair.

She didn’t have any bad habits—or at least none that clashed with mine. She was neat and clean, changing her clothes twice a day and never so much as leaving a dirty glass on the sink. She never left a mess in the bathroom. Two glasses of wine was her limit.

I felt like Lazarus.

Osborne came by three times in the next two weeks. Lisa met him at Kluge’s and gave him what she had learned. It was getting to be quite a list.

“Kluge once had an account in a New York bank with nine trillion dollars in it,” she told me after one of Osborne’s visits. “I think he did it just to see if he could. He left it in for one day, took the interest and fed it to a bank in the Bahamas, then destroyed the principal. Which never existed anyway.”

In return, Osborne told her what was new on the murder investigation—which was nothing—and on the status of Kluge’s property, which was chaotic. Various agencies had sent people out to look the place over. Some FBI men came, wanting to take over the investigation. Lisa, when talking about computers, had the power to cloud men’s minds. She did it first by explaining exactly what she was doing, in terms so abstruse that no one could understand her. Sometimes that was enough. If it wasn’t, if they started to get tough, she just moved out of the driver’s seat and let them try to handle Kluge’s contraption. She let them watch in horror as dragons leaped out of nowhere and ate up all the data on a disc, then printed “You Stupid Putz!” on the screen.

“I’m cheating them,” she confessed to me. “I’m giving them stuff I know they’re gonna step in, because I already stepped in it myself. I’ve lost about forty percent of the data Kluge had stored away. But the others lose a hundred percent. You ought to see their faces when Kluge drops a logic bomb into their work. That second guy threw a three thousand dollar printer clear across the room. Then tried to bribe me to be quiet about it.”

When some federal agency sent out an expert from Stanford, and he seemed perfectly content to destroy everything in sight in the firm belief that he was bound to get it right sooner or later, Lisa showed him how Kluge entered the IRS main computer in Washington and neglected to mention how Kluge had gotten out. The guy tangled with some watchdog program. During his struggles, it seemed he had erased all the tax records from the letter S down into the W’s. Lisa let him think that for half an hour.

“I thought he was having a heart attack,” she told me. “All the blood drained out of his face and he couldn’t talk. So I showed him where I had—with my usual foresight—arranged for that data to be recorded, told him how to put it back where he found it, and how to pacify the watchdog. He couldn’t get out of that house fast enough. Pretty soon he’s gonna realize you can’t destroy that much information with anything short of dynamite because of the backups and the limits of how much can be running at any one time. But I don’t think he’ll be back.”

“It sounds like a very fancy video game,” I said.

“It is, in a way. But it’s more like Dungeons and Dragons. It’s an endless series of closed rooms with dangers on the other side. You don’t dare take it a step at a time. You take it a hundredth of a step at a time. Your questions are like, ‘Now this isn’t a question, but if it entered my mind to ask this question—which I’m not about to do—concerning what might happen if I looked at this door here—and I’m not touching it, I’m not even in the next room—what do you suppose you might do?’ And the program crunches on that, decides if you fulfilled the conditions for getting a great big cream pie in the face, then either throws it or allows as how it might just move from step A to step A Prime. Then you say, ‘Well, maybe I am looking at that door.’ And sometimes the program says ‘You looked, you looked, you dirty crook!’ And the fireworks start.”

Silly as all that sounds, it was very close to the best explanation she was ever able to give me about what she was doing.

“Are you telling everything, Lisa?” I asked her.

“Well, not everything. I didn’t mention the four cents.”

Four cents? Oh my god.

“Lisa, I didn’t want that, I didn’t ask for it, I wish he’d never—”

“Calm down, Yank. It’s going to be all right.”

“He kept records of all that, didn’t he?”

“That’s what I spend most of my time doing. Decoding his records.”

“How long have you known?”

“About the seven hundred thousand dollars? It was in the first disc I cracked.”

“I just want to give it back.”

She thought that over, and shook her head.

“Victor, it’d be more dangerous to get rid of it now than it would be to keep it. It was imaginary money at first. But now it’s got a history. The IRS thinks it knows where it came from. The taxes are paid on it. The State of Delaware is convinced that a legally chartered corporation disbursed it. An Illinois law firm has been paid for handling it. Your bank has been paying you interest on it. I’m not saying it would be impossible to go back and wipe all that out, but I wouldn’t like to try. I’m good, but I don’t have Kluge’s touch.”

“How could he do all that? You say it was imaginary money. That’s not the way I thought money worked. He could just pull it out of thin air?”

Lisa patted the top of her computer console, and smiled at me.

“This is money, Yank,” she said, and her eyes glittered.

At night she worked by candlelight so she wouldn’t disturb me. That turned out to be my downfall. She typed by touch, and needed the candle only to locate software.

So that’s how I’d go to sleep every night, looking at her slender body bathed in the glow of the candle. I was always reminded of melting butter dripping down a roasted ear of corn. Golden light on golden skin.

Ugly, she had called herself. Skinny. It was true she was thin. I could see her ribs when she sat with her back impossibly straight, her tummy sucked in, her chin up. She worked in the nude these days, sitting in lotus position. For long periods she would not move, her hands lying on her thighs, then she would poise, as if to pound the keys. But her touch was light, almost silent. It looked more like yoga than programming. She said she went into a meditative state for her best work.

I had expected a bony angularity, all sharp elbows and knees. She wasn’t like that. I had guessed her weight ten pounds too low, and still didn’t know where she put it. But she was soft and rounded, and strong beneath.

No one was ever going to call her face glamorous. Few would even go so far as to call her pretty. The braces did that, I think. They caught the eye and held it, drawing attention to that unsightly jumble.

But her skin was wonderful. She had scars. Not as many as I had expected. She seemed to heal quickly, and well.

I thought she was beautiful.

I had just completed my nightly survey when my eye was caught by the candle. I looked at it, then tried to look away.

Candles do that sometimes. I don’t know why. In still air, with the flame perfectly vertical, they begin to flicker. The flame leaps up then squats down, up and down, up and down, brighter and brighter in regular rhythm, two or three beats to the second—

—and I tried to call out to her, wishing the candle would stop its regular flickering, but already I couldn’t speak—

—I could only gasp, and I tried once more, as hard as I could, to yell, to scream, to tell her not to worry, and felt the nausea building …

I tasted blood. I took an experimental breath, did not find the smells of vomit, urine, feces. The overhead lights were on.

Lisa was on her hands and knees leaning over me, her face very close. A tear dropped on my forehead. I was on the carpet, on my back.

“Victor, can you hear me?”

I nodded. There was a spoon in my mouth. I spit it out.

“What happened? Are you going to be all right?”

I nodded again, and struggled to speak.

“You just lie there. The ambulance is on its way.”

“No. Don’t need it.”

“Well, it’s on its way. You just take it easy and—”

“Help me up.”

“Not yet. You’re not ready.”

She was right. I tried to sit up, and fell back quickly. I took deep breaths for a while. Then the doorbell, rang.

She stood up and started to the door. I just managed to get my hand around her ankle. Then she was leaning over me again, her eyes as wide as they would go.

“What is it? What’s wrong now?”

“Get some clothes on,” I told her. She looked down at herself, surprised.

“Oh. Right.”

She got rid of the ambulance crew. Lisa was a lot calmer after she made coffee and we were sitting at the kitchen table. It was one o’clock, and I was still pretty rocky. But it hadn’t been a bad one.

I went to the bathroom and got the bottle of Dilantin I’d hidden when she moved in. I let her see me take one.

“I forgot to do this today,” I told her.

“It’s because you hid them. That was stupid.”

“I know.” There must have been something else I could have said. It didn’t please me to see her look hurt. But she was hurt because I wasn’t defending myself against her attack, and that was a bit too complicated for me to dope out just after a grand mal.

“You can move out if you want to,” I said. I was in rare form.

So was she. She reached across the table and shook me by the shoulders. She glared at me.

“I won’t take a lot more of that kind of shit,” she said, and I nodded, and began to cry.

She let me do it. I think that was probably best. She could have babied me, but I do a pretty good job of that myself.

“How long has this been going on?” she finally said. “Is that why you’ve stayed in your house for thirty years?”

I shrugged. “I guess it’s part of it. When I got back they operated, but it just made it worse.”

“Okay. I’m mad at you because you didn’t tell me about it, so I didn’t know what to do. I want to stay, but you’ll have to tell me how. Then I won’t be mad anymore.”

I could have blown the whole thing right there. I’m amazed I didn’t. Through the years I’d developed very good methods for doing things like that. But I pulled through when I saw her face. She really did want to stay. I didn’t know why, but it was enough.

“The spoon was a mistake,” I said. “If there’s time, and if you can do it without risking your fingers, you could jam a piece of cloth in there. Part of a sheet, or something. But nothing hard.” I explored my mouth with a finger. “I think I broke a tooth.”

“Serves you right,” she said. I looked at her, and smiled, then we were both laughing. She came around the table and kissed me, then sat on my knee.

“The biggest danger is drowning. During the first part of the seizure, all my muscles go rigid. That doesn’t last long. Then they all start contracting and relaxing at random. It’s very strong.”

“I know. I watched, and I tried to hold you.”

“Don’t do that. Get me on my side. Stay behind me, and watch out for flailing arms. Get a pillow under my head if you can. Keep me away from things I could injure myself on.” I looked her square in the eye. “I want to emphasize this. Just try to do all those things. If I’m getting too violent, it’s better you stand off to the side. Better for both of us. If I knock you out, you won’t be able to help me if I start strangling on vomit.”

I kept looking at her eyes. She must have read my mind, because she smiled slightly.

“Sorry, Yank. I am not freaked out. I mean, like, it’s totally gross, you know, and it barfs me out to the max, you could—”

“—gag me with a spoon, I know. Okay, right, I know I was dumb. And that’s about it. I might bite my tongue or the inside of my cheek. Don’t worry about it. There is one more thing.”

She waited, and I wondered how much to tell her. There wasn’t a lot she could do, but if I died on her I didn’t want her to feel it was her fault.

“Sometimes I have to go to the hospital. Sometimes one seizure will follow another. If that keeps up for too long, I won’t breathe, and my brain will die of oxygen starvation.”

“That only takes about five minutes,” she said, alarmed.

“I know. It’s only a problem if I start having them frequently, so we could plan for it if I do. But if I don’t come out of one, start having another right on the heels of the first, or if you can’t detect any breathing for three or four minutes, you’d better call an ambulance.”

“Three or four minutes? You’d be dead before they got here.”

“It’s that or live in a hospital. I don’t like hospitals.”

“Neither do I.”

The next day she took me for a ride in her Ferrari. I was nervous about it, wondering if she was going to do crazy things. If anything, she was too slow. People behind her kept honking. I could tell she hadn’t been driving long from the exaggerated attention she put into every movement.

“A Ferrari is wasted on me, I’m afraid,” she confessed at one point. “I never drive it faster than fifty-five.”

We went to an interior decorator in Beverly Hills and she bought a low-watt gooseneck lamp at an outrageous price.

I had a hard time getting to sleep that night. I suppose I was afraid of having another seizure, though Lisa’s new lamp wasn’t going to set it off.

Funny about seizures. When I first started having them, everyone called them fits. Then, gradually, it was seizures, until fits began to sound dirty.

I guess it’s a sign of growing old, when the language changes on you. There were rafts of new words. A lot of them were for things that didn’t even exist when I was growing up. Like software. I always visualized a limp wrench.

“What got you interested in computers, Lisa?” I asked her.

She didn’t move. Her concentration when sitting at the machine was pretty damn good. I rolled onto my back and tried to sleep.

“It’s where the power is, Yank.” I looked up. She had turned to face me.

“Did you pick it all up since you got to America?”

“I had a head start. I didn’t tell you about my Captain, did I?”

“I don’t think you did.”

“He was strange. I knew that. I was about fourteen. He was an American, and he took an interest in me. He got me a nice apartment in Saigon. And he put me in school.”

She was studying me, looking for a reaction. I didn’t give her one.

“He was surely a pedophile, and probably had homosexual tendencies, since I looked so much like a skinny little boy.”

Again the wait. This time she smiled.

“He was good to me. I learned to read well. From there on, anything is possible.”

“I didn’t actually ask you about your Captain. I asked why you got interested in computers.”

“That’s right. You did.”

“Is it just a living?”

“It started that way. It’s the future, Victor.”

“God knows I’ve read that enough times.”

“It’s true. It’s already here. It’s power, if you know how to use it. You’ve seen what Kluge was able to do. You can make money with one of these things. I don’t mean earn it, I mean make it, like if you had a printing press. Remember Osborne mentioned that Kluge’s house didn’t exist? Did you think what that means?”

“That he wiped it out of the memory banks.”

“That was the first step. But the lot exists in the county plat books, wouldn’t you think? I mean, this country hasn’t entirely given up paper.”

“So the county really does have a record of that house.”

“No. That page was torn out of the records.”

“I don’t get it. Kluge never left the house.”

“Oldest way in the world, friend. Kluge looked through the L.A.P.D. files until he found a guy known as Sammy. He sent him a cashier’s check for a thousand dollars, along with a letter saying he could earn twice that if he’d go to the hall of records and do something. Sammy didn’t bite, and neither did McGee, or Molly Unger. But Little Billy Phipps did, and he got a check just like the letter said, and he and Kluge had a wonderful business relationship for many years. Little Billy drives a new Cadillac now, and hasn’t the faintest notion who Kluge was or where he lived. It didn’t matter to Kluge how much he spent. He just pulled it out of thin air.”

I thought that over for a while. I guess it’s true that with enough money you can do just about anything, and Kluge had all the money in the world.

“Did you tell Osborne about Little Billy?”

“I erased that disc, just like I erased your seven hundred thousand. You never know when you might need somebody like Little Billy.”

“You’re not afraid of getting into trouble over it?”

“Life is risk, Victor. I’m keeping the best stuff for myself. Not because I intend to use it, but because if I ever needed it badly and didn’t have it, I’d feel like such a fool.”

She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, which made them practically disappear.

“Tell me something, Yank. Kluge picked you out of all your neighbors because you’d been a Boy Scout for thirty years. How do you react to what I’m doing?”

“You’re cheerfully amoral, and you’re a survivor, and you’re basically decent. And I pity anybody who gets in your way.”

She grinned, stretched, and stood up.

“‘Cheerfully amoral.’ I like that.” She sat beside me, making a great sloshing in the bed. “You want to be amoral again?”

“In a little bit.” She started rubbing my chest. “So you got into computers because they were the wave of the future. Don’t you ever worry about them … I don’t know, I guess it sounds corny … do you think they’ll take over?”

“Everybody thinks that until they start to use them,” she said. “You’ve got to realize just how stupid they are. Without programming they are good for nothing, literally. Now, what I do believe is that the people who run the computers will take over. They already have. That’s why I study them.”

“I guess that’s not what I meant. Maybe I can’t say it right.”

She frowned. “Kluge was looking into something. He’d been eavesdropping in artificial intelligence labs, and reading a lot of neurological research. I think he was trying to find a common thread.”

“Between human brains and computers?”

“Not quite. He was thinking of computers and neurons. Brain cells.” She pointed to her computer. “That thing, or any other computer, is light-years away from being a human brain. It can’t generalize, or infer, or categorize, or invent. With good programming it can appear to do some of those things, but it’s an illusion.

“There’s an old speculation about what would happen if we finally built a computer with as many transistors as the human brain has neurons. Would there be a self-awareness? I think that’s baloney. A transistor isn’t a neuron, and a quintillion of them aren’t any better than a dozen.

“So Kluge—who seems to have felt the same way—started looking into the possible similarities between a neuron and an 8-bit computer. That’s why he had all that consumer junk sitting around his house, those Trash-80’s and Atari’s and TI’s and Sinclair’s, for chrissake. He was used to much more powerful instruments. He ate up the home units like candy.”

“What did he find out?”

“Nothing, it looks like. An 8-bit unit is more complex than a neuron, and no computer is in the same galaxy as an organic brain. But see, the words get tricky. I said an Atari is more complex than a neuron, but it’s hard to really compare them. It’s like comparing a direction with a distance, or a color with a mass. The units are different. Except for one similarity.”

“What’s that?”

“The connections. Again, it’s different, but the concept of networking is the same. A neuron is connected to a lot of others. There are trillions of them, and the way messages pulse through them determines what we are and what we think and what we remember. And with that computer I can reach a million others. It’s bigger than the human brain, really, because the information in that network is more than all humanity could cope with in a million years. It reaches from Pioneer Ten, out beyond the orbit of Pluto, right into every living room that has a telephone in it. With that computer you can tap tons of data that has been collected but nobody’s even had the time to look at.

“That’s what Kluge was interested in. The old ‘critical mass computer’ idea, the computer that becomes aware, but with a new angle. Maybe it wouldn’t be the size of the computer, but the number of computers. There used to be thousands of them. Now there’s millions. They’re putting them in cars. In wristwatches. Every home has several, from the simple timer on a microwave oven up to a video game or home terminal. Kluge was trying to find out if critical mass could be reached that way.”

“What did he think?”

“I don’t know. He was just getting started.” She glanced down at me. “But you know what, Yank? I think you’ve reached critical mass while I wasn’t looking.”

“I think you’re right.” I reached for her.

Lisa liked to cuddle. I didn’t, at first, after fifty years of sleeping alone. But I got to like it pretty quickly.

That’s what we were doing when we resumed the conversation we had been having. We just lay in each others’ arms and talked about things. Nobody had mentioned love yet, but I knew I loved her. I didn’t know what to do about it, but I would think of something.

“Critical mass,” I said. She nuzzled my neck, and yawned.

“What about it?”

“What would it be like? It seems like it would be such a vast intelligence. So quick, so omniscient. God-like.”

“Could be.”

“Wouldn’t it … run our lives? I guess I’m asking the same questions I started off with. Would it take over?”

She thought about it for a long time.

“I wonder if there would be anything to take over. I mean, why should it care? How could we figure what its concerns would be? Would it want to be worshipped, for instance? I doubt it. Would it want to ‘rationalize all human behavior, to eliminate all emotion,’ as I’m sure some sci-fi film computer must have told some damsel in distress in the ’fifties.

“You can use a work like awareness, but what does it mean? An amoeba must be aware. Plants probably are. There may be a level of awareness in a neuron. Even in an integrated circuit chip. We don’t even know what our own awareness really is. We’ve never been able to shine a light on it, dissect it, figure out where it comes from or where it goes when we’re dead. To apply human values to a thing like this hypothetical computer-net consciousness would be pretty stupid. But I don’t see how it could interact with human awareness at all. It might not even notice us, any more than we notice cells in our bodies, or neutrinos passing through us, or the vibrations of the atoms in the air around us.”

So she had to explain what a neutrino was. One thing I always provided her with was an ignorant audience. And after that, I pretty much forgot about our mythical hyper-computer.

“What about your Captain?” I asked, much later.

“Do you really want to know, Yank?” she mumbled, sleepily.

“I’m not afraid to know.”

She sat up and reached for her cigarettes. I had come to know she sometimes smoked them in times of stress. She had told me she smoked after making love, but that first time had been the only time. The lighter flared in the dark. I heard her exhale.

“My Major, actually. He got a promotion. Do you want to know his name?”

“Lisa, I don’t want to know any of it if you don’t want to tell it. But if you do, what I want to know is did he stand by you.”

“He didn’t marry me, if that’s what you mean. When he knew he had to go, he said he would, but I talked him out of it. Maybe it was the most noble thing I ever did. Maybe it was the most stupid.

“It’s no accident I look Japanese. My grandmother was raped in ’42 by a Jap soldier of the occupation. She was Chinese, living in Hanoi. My mother was born there. They went south after Dien Bien Phu. My grandmother died. My mother had it hard. Being Chinese was tough enough, but being half Chinese and half Japanese was worse. My father was half French and half Annamese. Another bad combination. I never knew him. But I’m sort of a capsule history of Vietnam.”

The end of her cigarette glowed brighter once more.

“I’ve got one grandfather’s face and the other grandfather’s height. With tits by Goodyear. About all I missed was some American genes, but I was working on that for my children.

“When Saigon was falling I tried to get to the American Embassy. Didn’t make it. You know the rest, until I got to Thailand, and when I finally got Americans to notice me, it turned out my Major was still looking for me. He sponsored me over here, and I made it in time to watch him die of cancer. Two months I had with him, all of it in the hospital.”

“My god.” I had a horrible thought. “That wasn’t the war, too, was it? I mean, the story of your life—”

“—is the rape of Asia. No, Victor. Not that war, anyway. But he was one of those guys who got to see atom bombs up close, out in Nevada. He was too Regular Army to complain about it, but I think he knew that’s what killed him.”

“Did you love him?”

“What do you want me to say? He got me out of hell.”

Again the cigarette flared, and I saw her stub it out.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t love him. He knew that. I’ve never loved anybody. He was very dear, very special to me. I would have done almost anything for him. He was fatherly to me.” I felt her looking at me in the dark. “Aren’t you going to ask how old he was?”

“Fiftyish,” I said.

“On the nose. Can I ask you something?”

“I guess it’s your turn.”

“How many girls have you had since you got back from Korea?”

I held up my hand and pretended to count on my fingers.

“One,” I said, at last.

“How many before you went?”

“One. We broke up before I left for the war.”

“How many in Korea?”

“Nine. All at Madame Park’s jolly little whorehouse in Pusan.”

“So you’ve made love to one white and ten Asians. I bet none of the others were as tall as me.”

“Korean girls have fatter cheeks, too. But they all had your eyes.”

She nuzzled against my chest, took a deep breath, and sighed.

“We’re a hell of a pair, aren’t we?”

I hugged her, and her breath came again, hot on my chest. I wondered how I’d lived so long without such a simple miracle as that.

“Yes. I think we really are.”

Osborne came by again about a week later. He seemed subdued. He listened to the things Lisa had decided to give him without much interest. He took the printout she handed him, and promised to turn it over to the departments that handled those things. But he didn’t get up to leave.

“I thought I ought to tell you, Apfel,” he said, at last. “The Gavin case has been closed.”

I had to think a moment to remember Kluge’s real name had been Gavin.

“The coroner ruled suicide a long time ago. I was able to keep the case open quite a while on the strength of my suspicions.” He nodded toward Lisa. “And on what she said about the suicide note. But there was just no evidence at all.”

“It probably happened quickly,” Lisa said. “Somebody caught him, tracked him back—it can be done; Kluge was lucky for a long time—and did him the same day.”

“You don’t think it was suicide?” I asked Osborne.

“No. But whoever did it is home free unless something new turns up.”

“I’ll tell you if it does,” Lisa said.

“That’s something else,” Osborne said. “I can’t authorize you to work over there any more. The county’s taken possession of house and contents.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lisa said, softly.

There was a short silence as she leaned over to shake a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table. She lit it, exhaled, and leaned back beside me, giving Osborne her most inscrutable look. He sighed.

“I’d hate to play poker with you, lady,” he said. “What do you mean, ‘Don’t worry about it’?”

“I bought the house four days ago. And its contents. If anything turns up that would help you re-open the murder investigation, I will let you know.”

Osborne was too defeated to get angry. He studied her quietly for a while.

“I’d like to know how you swung that.”

“I did nothing illegal. You’re free to check it out. I paid good cash money for it. The house came onto the market. I got a good price at the Sheriff’s sale.”

“How’d you like it if I put my best men on the transaction? See if they can dig up some funny money? Maybe fraud. How about I get the F.B.I. in to look it all over?”

She gave him a cool look.

“You’re welcome to. Frankly, Detective Osborne, I could have stolen that house, Griffith Park, and the Harbor Freeway and I don’t think you could have caught me.”

“So where does that leave me?”

“Just where you were. With a closed case, and a promise from me.”

“I don’t like you having all that stuff, if it can do the things you say it can do.”

“I didn’t expect you would. But that’s not your department, is it? The county owned it for a while, through simple confiscation. They didn’t know what they had, and they let it go.”

“Maybe I can get the Fraud detail out here to confiscate your software. There’s criminal evidence on it.”

“You could try that,” she agreed.

They stared at each other for a while. Lisa won. Osborne rubbed his eyes and nodded. Then he heaved himself to his feet and slumped to the door.

Lisa stubbed out her cigarette. We listened to him going down the walk.

“I’m surprised he gave up so easy,” I said. “Or did he? Do you think he’ll try a raid?”

“It’s not likely. He knows the score.”

“Maybe you could tell it to me.”

“For one thing, it’s not his department, and he knows it.”

“Why did you buy the house?”

“You ought to ask how.”

I looked at her closely. There was a gleam of amusement behind the poker face.

“Lisa. What did you do?”

“That’s what Osborne asked himself. He got the right answer, because he understands Kluge’s machines. And he knows how things get done. It was no accident that house going on the market, and no accident I was the only bidder. I used one of Kluge’s pet councilmen.”

“You bribed him?”

She laughed, and kissed me.

“I think I finally managed to shock you, Yank. That’s gotta be the biggest difference between me and a native-born American. Average citizens don’t spend much on bribes over here. In Saigon, everybody bribes.”

“Did you bribe him?”

“Nothing so indelicate. One has to go in the back door over here. Several entirely legal campaign contributions appeared in the accounts of a State Senator, who mentioned a certain situation to someone, who happened to be in the position to do legally what I happened to want done.” She looked at me askance. “Of course I bribed him, Victor. You’d be amazed to know how cheaply. Does that bother you?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I don’t like bribery.”

“I’m indifferent to it. It happens, like gravity. It may not be admirable, but it gets things done.”

“I assume you covered yourself.”

“Reasonably well. You’re never entirely covered with a bribe, because of the human element. The councilman might geek if they got him in front of a grand jury. But they won’t, because Osborne won’t pursue it. That’s the second reason he walked out of here without a fight. He knows how the world wobbles, he knows what kind of force I now possess, and he knows he can’t fight it.”

There was a long silence after that. I had a lot to think about, and I didn’t feel good about most of it. At one point Lisa reached for the pack of cigarettes, then changed her mind. She waited for me to work it out.

“It is a terrific force, isn’t it,” I finally said.

“It’s frightening,” she agreed. “Don’t think it doesn’t scare me. Don’t think I haven’t had fantasies of being superwoman. Power is an awful temptation, and it’s not easy to reject. There’s so much I could do.”

“Will you?”

“I’m not talking about stealing things, or getting rich.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“This is political power. But I don’t know how to wield it … it sounds corny, but to use it for good. I’ve seen so much evil come from good intentions. I don’t think I’m wise enough to do any good. And the chances of getting torn up like Kluge did are large. But I’m not wise enough to walk away from it. I’m still a street urchin from Saigon, Yank. I’m smart enough not to use it unless I have to. But I can’t give it away, and I can’t destroy it. Is that stupid?”

I didn’t have a good answer for that one. But I had a bad feeling.

My doubts had another week to work on me. I didn’t come to any great moral conclusions. Lisa knew of some crimes, and she wasn’t reporting them to the authorities. That didn’t bother me much. She had at her fingertips the means to commit more crimes, and that bothered me a lot. Yet I really didn’t think she planned to do anything. She was smart enough to use the things she had only in a defensive way—but with Lisa that could cover a lot of ground.

When she didn’t show up for dinner one evening, I went over to Kluge’s and found her busy in the living room. A nine-foot section of shelving had been cleared. The discs and tapes were stacked on a table. She had a big plastic garbage can and a magnet the size of a softball. I watched her wave a tape near the magnet, then toss it in the garbage can, which was almost full. She glanced up, did the same operation with a handful of discs, then took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.

“Feel any better now, Victor?” she asked.

“What do you mean? I feel fine.”

“No you don’t. And I haven’t felt right, either. It hurts me to do it, but I have to. You want to go get the other trash can?”

I did, and helped her pull more software from the shelves.

“You’re not going to wipe it all, are you?”

“No. I’m wiping records, and … something else.”

“Are you going to tell me what?”

“There are things it’s better not to know,” she said, darkly.

I finally managed to convince her to talk over dinner. She had said little, just eating and shaking her head. But she gave in.

“Rather dreary, actually,” she said. “I’ve been probing around some delicate places the last couple days. These are places Kluge visited at will, but they scare the hell out of me. Dirty places. Places where they know things I thought I’d like to find out.”

She shivered, and seemed reluctant to go on.

“Are you talking about military computers? The CIA?”

“The CIA is where it starts. It’s the easiest. I’ve looked around at NORAD—that’s the guys who get to fight the next war. It makes me shiver to see how easy Kluge got in there. He cobbled up a way to start World War Three, just as an exercise. That’s one of the things we just erased. The last two days I was nibbling around the edges of the big boys. The Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security … something. DIA and NSA. Each of them is bigger than the CIA. Something knew I was there. Some watchdog program. As soon as I realized that I got out quick, and I’ve spent the last five hours being sure it didn’t follow me. And now I’m sure, and I’ve destroyed all that, too.”

“You think they’re the ones who killed Kluge?”

“They’re surely the best candidates. He had tons of their stuff. I know he helped design the biggest installations at NSA, and he’d been poking around in there for years. One false step is all it would take.”

“Did you get it all? I mean, are you sure?”

“I’m sure they didn’t track me. I’m not sure I’ve destroyed all the records. I’m going back now to take a last look.”

“I’ll go with you.”

We worked until well after midnight. Lisa would review a tape or a disc, and if she was in any doubt, toss it to me for the magnetic treatment. At one point, simply because she was unsure, she took the magnet and passed it in front of an entire shelf of software.

It was amazing to think about it. With that one wipe she had randomized billions of bits of information. Some of it might not exist anywhere else in the world. I found myself confronted by even harder questions. Did she have the right to do it? Didn’t knowledge exist for everyone? But I confess I had little trouble quelling my protests. Mostly I was happy to see it go. The old reactionary in me found it easier to believe There Are Things We Are Not Meant To Know.

We were almost through when her monitor screen began to malfunction. It actually gave off a few hisses and pops, so Lisa stood back from it for a moment, then the screen started to flicker. I stared at it for a while. It seemed to me there was an image trying to form in the screen. Something three-dimensional. Just as I was starting to get a picture of it I happened to glance at Lisa, and she was looking at me. Her face was flickering. She came to me and put her hands over my eyes.

“Victor, you shouldn’t look at that.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. And when I said it, it was, but as soon as I had the words out I knew it wasn’t. And that is the last thing I remembered for a long time.

I’m told it was a very bad two weeks. I remember very little of it. I was was kept under a high dosage of drugs, and my few lucid periods were always followed by a fresh seizure.

The first thing I recall clearly was looking up at Doctor Stuart’s face. I was in a hospital bed. I later learned it was in Cedars-Sinai, not the Veteran’s Hospital. Lisa had paid for a private room.

Stuart put me through the usual questions. I was able to answer them, though I was very tired. When he was satisfied as to my condition he finally began to answer some of my questions. I learned how long I had been there, and how it had happened.

“You went into consecutive seizures,” he confirmed. “I don’t know why, frankly. You haven’t been prone to them for a decade. I was thinking you were well under control. But nothing is ever really stable, I guess.”

“So Lisa got me here in time.”

“She did more than that. She didn’t want to level with me at first. It seems after the first seizure she witnessed she read everything she could find. From that day, she had a syringe and a solution of Valium handy. When she saw you couldn’t breathe she injected you with 100 milligrams, and there’s no doubt it saved your life.”

Stuart and I had known each other a long time. He knew I had no prescription for Valium, though we had talked about it the last time I was hospitalized. Since I lived alone, there would be no one to inject me if I got in trouble.

He was more interested in results than anything else, and what Lisa did had the desired result. I was still alive.

He wouldn’t let me have any visitors that day. I protested, but soon was asleep. The next day she came. She wore a new T-shirt. This one had a picture of a robot wearing a gown and mortarboard, and said “Class of 11111000000.” It turns out that was 1984 in binary notation.

She had a big smile and said “Hi, Yank!” and as she sat on the bed I started to shake. She looked alarmed and asked if she should call the doctor.

“It’s not that,” I managed to say.“I’d like it if you just held me.”

She took off her shoes and got under the covers with me. She held me tightly. At some point a nurse came in and tired to shoo her out. Lisa gave her profanities in Vietnamese, Chinese, and a few startling ones in English, and the nurse left. I saw Doctor Stuart glance in later.

I felt much better when I finally stopped crying. Lisa’s eyes were wet, too.

“I’ve been here every day,” she said. “You look awful, Victor.”

“I feel a lot better.”

“Well, you look better than you did. But your doctor says you’d better stick around another couple of days, just to make sure.”

“I think he’s right.”

“I’m planning a big dinner for when you get back. You think we should invite the neighbors?”

I didn’t say anything for a while. There were so many things we hadn’t faced. Just how long could it go on between us? How long before I got sour about being so useless? How long before she got tired of being with an old man? I don’t know just when I had started to think of Lisa as a permanent part of my life. And I wondered how I could have thought that.

“Do you want to spend more years waiting in hospitals for a man to die?”

“What do you want, Victor? I’ll marry you if you want me to. Or I’ll live with you in sin. I prefer sin, myself, but if it’ll make you happy—”

“I don’t know why you want to saddle yourself with an epileptic old fart.”

“Because I love you.”

It was the first time she had said it. I could have gone on questioning—bringing up her Major again, for instance—but I had no urge to. I’m very glad I didn’t. So I changed the subject.

“Did you get the job finished?”

She knew which job I was talking about. She lowered her voice and put her mouth close to my ear.

“Let’s don’t be specific about it here, Victor. I don’t trust any place I haven’t swept for bugs. But, to put your mind at ease, I did finish, and it’s been a quiet couple of weeks. No one is any wiser, and I’ll never meddle in things like that again.”

I felt a lot better. I was also exhausted. I tried to conceal my yawns, but she sensed it was time to go. She gave me one more kiss, promising many more to come, and left me.

It was the last time I ever saw her.

At about ten o’clock that evening Lisa went into Kluge’s kitchen with a screwdriver and some other tools and got to work on the microwave oven.

The manufacturers of those appliances are very careful to insure they can’t be turned on with the door open, as they emit lethal radiation. But with simple tools and a good brain it is possible to circumvent the safety interlocks. Lisa had no trouble with them. About ten minutes after she entered the kitchen she put her head in the oven and turned it on.

It is impossible to say how long she held her head in there. It was long enough to turn her eyeballs to the consistency of boiled eggs. At some point she lost voluntary muscle control and fell to the floor, pulling the microwave down with her. It shorted out, and a fire started.

The fire set off the sophisticated burglar alarm she had installed a month before. Betty Lanier saw the flames and called the fire department as Hal ran across the street and into the burning kitchen. He dragged what was left of Lisa out onto the grass. When he saw what the fire had done to her upper body, and in particular her breasts, he threw up.

She was rushed to the hospital. The doctors there amputated one arm and cut away the frightful masses of vulcanized silicone, pulled all her teeth, and didn’t know what to do about the eyes. They put her on a respirator.

It was an orderly who first noticed the blackened and bloody T-shirt they had cut away from her. Some of the message was unreadable, but it began, “I can’t go on this way anymore …”

There is no other way I could have told all that. I discovered it piecemeal, starting with the disturbed look on Doctor Stuart’s face when Lisa didn’t show up the next day. He wouldn’t tell me anything, and I had another seizure shortly after.

The next week is a blur. I remember being released from the hospital, but I don’t remember the trip home. Betty was very good to me. They gave me a tranquilizer called Tranxene, and it was even better. I ate them like candy. I wandered in a drugged haze, eating only when Betty insisted, sleeping sitting up in my chair, coming awake not knowing where or who I was. I returned to the prison camp many times. Once I recall helping Lisa stack severed heads.

When I saw myself in the mirror, there was a vague smile on my face. It was Tranxene, caressing my frontal lobes. I knew that if I was to live much longer, me and Tranxene would have to become very good friends.

I eventually became capable of something that passed for rational thought. I was helped along somewhat by a visit from Osborne. I was trying, at that time, to find reasons to live, and wondered if he had any.

“I’m very sorry,” he started off. I said nothing. “This is on my own time,” he went on. “The department doesn’t know I’m here.”

“Was it suicide?” I asked him.

“I brought along a copy of the … the note. She ordered it from a shirt company in Westwood, three days before the … accident.”

He handed it to me, and I read it. I was mentioned, though not by name. I was “the man I love.” She said she couldn’t cope with my problems. It was a short note. You can’t get too much on a T-shirt. I read it through five times, then handed it back to him.

“She told you Kluge didn’t write his note. I tell you she didn’t write this.”

He nodded reluctantly. I felt a vast calm, with a howling nightmare just below it. Praise Tranxene.

“Can you back that up?”

“She saw me in the hospital shortly before she died. She was full of life and hope. You say she ordered the shirt three days before. I would have felt that. And that note is pathetic. Lisa was never pathetic.”

He nodded again.

“Some things I want to tell you. There was no signs of a struggle. Mrs. Lanier is sure no one came in the front. The crime lab went over the whole place and we’re sure no one was in there with her. I’d stake my life on the fact that no one entered or left that house. Now, I don’t believe it was suicide, either, but do you have any suggestions?”

“The NSA,” I said.

I explained about the last things she had done while I was still there. I told him of her fear of the government spy agencies. That was all I had.

“Well, I guess they’re the ones who could do a thing like that, if anyone could. But I’ll tell you, I have a hard time swallowing it. I don’t know why, for one thing. Maybe you believe those people kill like you and I’d swat a fly.” His look make it into a question.

“I don’t know what I believe.”

“I’m not saying they wouldn’t kill for national security, or some such shit. But they’d have taken the computers, too. They wouldn’t have left her alone, they wouldn’t even have let her near that stuff after they killed Kluge.”

“What you’re saying makes sense.”

He muttered on about it for quite some time. Eventually I offered him some wine. He accepted thankfully. I considered joining him—it would be a quick way to die—but did not. He drank the whole bottle, and was comfortably drunk when he suggested we go next door and look it over one more time. I was planning on visiting Lisa the next day, and knew I had to start somewhere building myself up for that, so I agreed to go with him.

We inspected the kitchen. The fire had blackened the counters and melted some linoleum, but not much else. Water had made a mess of the place. There was a brown stain on the floor which I was able to look at with no emotion.

So we went back to the living room, and one of the computers was turned on. There was a short message on the screen.

IF YOU WISH TO KNOW MORE

PRESS ENTER

“Don’t do it,” I told him. But he did. He stood, blinking solemnly, as the words wiped themselves out and a new message appeared.

YOU LOOKED

The screen started to flicker and I was in my car, in darkness, with a pill in my mouth and another in my hand. I spit out the pill, and sat for a moment, listening to the old engine ticking over. In my other hand was the plastic pill bottle. I felt very tired, but opened the car door and shut off the engine. I felt my way to the garage door and opened it. The air outside was fresh and sweet. I looked down at the pill bottle and hurried into the bathroom.

When I got through what had to be done there were a dozen pills floating in the toilet that hadn’t even dissolved. There were the wasted shells of many more, and a lot of other stuff I won’t bother to describe. I counted the pills in the bottle, remembered how many there had been, and wondered if I would make it.

I went over to Kluge’s house and could not find Osborne. I was getting tired, but I made it back to my house and stretched out on the couch to see if I would live or die.

The next day I found the story in the paper. Osborne had gone home and blown out the back of his head with his revolver. It was not a big story. It happens to cops all the time. He didn’t leave a note.

I got on the bus and rode out to the hospital and spent three hours trying to get in to see Lisa. I wasn’t able to do it. I was not a relative and the doctors were quite firm about her having no visitors. When I got angry they were as gentle as possible. It was then I learned the extent of her injuries. Hal had kept the worst from me. None of it would have mattered, but the doctors swore there was nothing left in her head. So I went home.

She died two days later.

She had left a will, to my surprise. I got the house and contents. I picked up the phone as soon as I learned of it, and called a garbage company. While they were on the way I went for the last time into Kluge’s house.

The same computer was still on, and it gave the same message.

PRESS ENTER

I cautiously located the power switch, and turned it off. I had the garbage people strip the place to the bare walls.

I went over my own house very carefully, looking for anything that was even the first cousin to a computer. I threw out the radio. I sold the car, and the refrigerator, and the stove, and the blender, and the electric clock. I drained the waterbed and threw out the heater.

Then I bought the best propane stove on the market, and hunted a long time before I found an old icebox. I had the garage stacked to the ceiling with firewood. I had the chimney cleaned. It would be getting cold soon.

One day I took the bus to Pasadena and established the Lisa Foo Memorial Scholarship fund for Vietnamese refugees and their children. I endowed it with seven hundred thousand eighty-three dollars and four cents. I told them it could be used for any field of study except computer science. I could tell they thought me eccentric.

And I really thought I was safe, until the phone rang.

I thought it over for a long time before answering it. In the end, I knew it would just keep on going until I did. So I picked it up.

For a few seconds there was a dial tone, but I was not fooled. I kept holding it to my ear, and finally the tone turned off. There was just silence. I listened intently. I heard some of those far-off musical tones that live in phone wires. Echoes of conversations taking place a thousand miles away. And something infinitely more distant and cool.

I do not know what they have incubated out there at the NSA. I don’t know if they did it on purpose, or if it just happened, or if it even has anything to do with them, in the end. But I know it’s out there, because I heard its soul breathing on the wires. I spoke very carefully.

“I do not wish to know any more,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone anything. Kluge, Lisa, and Osborne all committed suicide. I am just a lonely man, and I won’t cause you any trouble.”

There was a click, and a dial tone.

Getting the phone taken out was easy. Getting them to remove all the wires was a little harder, since once a place is wired they expect it to be wired forever. They grumbled, but when I started pulling them out myself, they relented, though they warned me it was going to cost.

PG&E was harder. They actually seemed to believe there was a regulation requiring each house to be hooked up to the grid. They were willing to shut off my power—though hardly pleased about it—but they just weren’t going to take the wires away from my house. I went up on the roof with an axe and demolished four feet of eaves as they gaped at me. Then they coiled up their wires and went home.

I threw out all my lamps, all things electrical. With hammer, chisel, and handsaw I went to work on the drywall just above the baseboards.

As I stripped the house of wiring I wondered many times why I was doing it. Why was it worth it? I couldn’t have very many more years before a final seizure finished me off. Those years were not going to be a lot of fun.

Lisa had been a survivor. She would have known why I was doing this. She had once said I was a survivor, too. I survived the camp. I survived the death of my mother and father and managed to fashion a solitary life. Lisa survived the death of just about everything. No survivor expects to live through it all. But while she was alive, she would have worked to stay alive.

And that’s what I did. I got all the wires out of the walls, went over the house with a magnet to see if I had missed any metal, then spent a week cleaning up, fixing the holes I had knocked in the walls, ceiling, and attic. I was amused trying to picture the real-estate agent selling this house after I was gone.

It’s a great little house, folks. No electricity …

Now I live quietly, as before.

I work in my garden during most of the daylight hours. I’ve expanded it considerably, and even have things growing in the front yard now.

I live by candlelight, and kerosene lamp. I grow most of what I eat. It took a long time to taper off the Tranxene and the Dilantin, but I did it, and now take the seizures as they come. I’ve usually got bruises to show for it.

In the middle of a vast city I have cut myself off. I am not part of the network growing faster than I can conceive. I don’t even know if it’s dangerous, to ordinary people. It noticed me, and Kluge, and Osborne. And Lisa. It brushed against our minds like I would brush away a mosquito, never noticing I had crushed it. Only I survived.

But I wonder.

It would be very hard …

Lisa told me how it can get in through the wiring. There’s something called a carrier wave that can move over wires carrying household current. That’s why the electricity had to go.

I need water for my garden. There’s just not enough rain here in southern California, and I don’t know how else I could get the water.

Do you think it could come through the pipes?

WILLIAM GIBSON

New Rose Hotel

Speaking of meteoric rises to prominence, as I was in the last story introduction, William Gibson’s own ascent into the public eye has described an arc as clean and tight and high as any in SF history. Gibson sold his first story in 1977 to the now-defunct semiprozine Unearth, but it was seen by practically no one, and Gibson’s name remained generally unknown until 1981, when he sold a taut and vivid story called “Johnny Mnemonic” to Omni. “Johnny Mnemonic” was a Nebula finalist that year, and he followed it up in 1982 with another and even more compelling Omni story called “Burning Chrome,” which was also a Nebula finalist … and all at once Gibson was very much A Writer To Watch. He solidified his growing reputation last year with the publication of his remarkable first novel Neuromancer, one of the most critically-acclaimed and widely talked-about debut novels in a decade or more. Gibson’s stories have also appeared in Universe, Modern Stories, and Interzone. Upcoming are two new novels: Count Zero, set in “the same universe as Neuromancer,” from Ace, and The Log of the Mustang Sally, from Arbor House. Born in South Carolina, Gibson now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and family.

Here he takes us on a typically fast-paced and hard-edged tour through the decadent high-tech underworld of the future, with a cast of characters in search of that elusive Edge that can make all the difference between success and failure—and between life and death.

Seven rented nights in this coffin, Sandii. New Rose Hotel. How I want you now. Sometimes I hit you. Replay it so slow and sweet and mean, I can almost feet it. Sometimes I take your little automatic out of my bag, run my thumb down smooth, cheap chrome. Chinese .22, its bore no wider than the dilated pupils of your vanished eyes.

Fox is dead now, Sandii.

Fox told me to forget you.

I remember Fox leaning against the padded bar in the dark lounge of some Singapore hotel, Bencoolen Street, his hands describing different spheres of influence, internal rivalries, the arc of a particular career, a point of weakness he had discovered in the armor of some think tank. Fox was point man in the skull wars, a middleman for corporate crossovers. He was a soldier in the secret skirmishes of the zaibatsus, the multinational corporations that control entire economies.

I see Fox grinning, talking fast, dismissing my ventures into intercorporate espionage with a shake of his head. The Edge, he said, have to find that Edge. He made you hear the capital E. The Edge was Fox’s grail, that essential fraction of sheer human talent, nontransferable, locked in the skulls of the world’s hottest research scientists.

You can’t put Edge down on paper, Fox said, can’t punch Edge into a diskette.

The money was in corporate defectors.

Fox was smooth, the severity of his dark, French suits offset by a boyish forelock that wouldn’t stay in place. I never liked the way the effect was ruined when he stepped back from the bar, his left shoulder skewed at an angle no Paris tailor could conceal. Someone had run him over with a taxi in Berne, and nobody quite knew how to put him together again.

I guess I went with him because he said he was after that Edge.

And somewhere out there, on our way to find the Edge, I found you, Sandii.

The New Rose Hotel is a coffin rack on the ragged fringes of Narita International. Plastic capsules a meter high and three long, stacked like surplus Godzilla teeth in a concrete lot off the main road to the airport. Each capsule has a television mounted flush with the ceiling. I spend whole days watching Japanese game shows and old movies. Sometimes I have your gun in my hand.

Sometimes I can hear the jets, laced into holding patterns over Narita. I close my eyes and imagine the sharp, white contrails fading, losing definition.

You walked into a bar in Yokohama, the first time I saw you. Eurasian, half gaijin, long-hipped and fluid in a Chinese knock-off of some Tokyo designer’s original. Dark European eyes, Asian cheekbones. I remember you dumping your purse out on the bed, later, in some hotel room, pawing through your makeup. A crumpled wad of New Yen, dilapidated address book held together with rubber bands, a Mitsubishi bank chip, Japanese passport with a gold chrysanthemum stamped on the cover, and the Chinese .22.

You told me your story. Your father had been an executive in Tokyo, but now he was disgraced, disowned, cast down by Hosaka, the biggest zaibatsu of all. That night your mother was Dutch, and I listened as you spun out those summers in Amsterdam for me, the pigeons in Dam Square like a soft, brown carpet.

I never asked what your father might have done to earn his disgrace. I watched you dress; watched the swing of your dark, straight hair, how it cut the air.

Now Hosaka hunts me.

The coffins of New Rose are racked in recycled scaffolding, steel pipes under bright enamel. Paint flakes away when I climb the ladder, falls with each step as I follow the catwalk. My left hand counts off the coffin hatches, their multilingual decals warning of fines levied for the loss of a key.

I look up as the jets rise out of Narita, passage home, distant now as any moon.

Fox was quick to see how we could use you, but not sharp enough to credit you with ambition. But then he never lay all night with you on the beach at Kamakura, never listened to your nightmares, never heard an entire imagined childhood shift under those stars, shift and roll over, your child’s mouth opening to reveal some fresh past, and always the one, you swore, that was really and finally the truth.

I didn’t care, holding your hips while the sand cooled against your skin.

Once you left me, ran back to that beach saying you’d forgotten our key. I found it in the door and went after you, to find you ankle deep in surf, your smooth back rigid, trembling; your eyes far away. You couldn’t talk. Shivering. Gone. Shaking for different futures and better pasts.

Sandii, you left me here.

You left me all your things.

This gun. Your makeup, all the shadows and blushes capped in plastic. Your Cray microcomputer, a gift from Fox, with a shopping list you entered. Sometimes I play that back, watching each item cross the little silver screen.

A freezer. A fermenter. An incubator. An electrophoresis system with integrated agarose cell and transilluminator. A tissue embedder. A high-performance liquid chromatograph. A flow cytometer. A spectrophotometer. Four gross of borosilicate scintillation vials. A microcentrifuge. And one DNA synthesizer, with in-built computer. Plus software.

Expensive, Sandii, but then Hosaka was footing our bills. Later you made them pay even more, but you were already gone.

Hiroshi drew up that list for you. In bed, probably. Hiroshi Yomiuri. Maas Biolabs GmbH had him. Hosaka wanted him.

He was hot. Edge and lots of it. Fox followed genetic engineers the way a fan follows players in a favorite game. Fox wanted Hiroshi so bad he could taste it.

He’d sent me up to Frankfurt three times before you turned up, just to have a look-see at Hiroshi. Not to make a pass or even to give him a wink and a nod. Just to watch.

Hiroshi showed all the signs of having settled in. He’d found a German girl with a taste for conservative loden and riding boots polished the shade of a fresh chestnut. He’d bought a renovated townhouse on just the right square. He’d taken up fencing and given up kendo.

And everywhere the Maas security teams, smooth and heavy, a rich, clear syrup of surveillance. I came back and told Fox we’d never touch him.

You touched him for us, Sandii. You touched him just right.

Our Hosaka contacts were like specialized cells protecting the parent organism. We were mutagens, Fox and I, dubious agents adrift on the dark side of the intercorporate sea.

When we had you in place in Vienna, we offered them Hiroshi. They didn’t even blink. Dead calm in an L.A. hotel room. They said they had to think about it.

Fox spoke the name of Hosaka’s primary competitor in the gene game, let it fall out naked, broke the protocol forbidding the use of proper names.

They had to think about it, they said.

Fox gave them three days.

I took you to Barcelona a week before I took you to Vienna. I remember you with your hair tucked back into a gray beret, your high Mongol cheekbones reflected in the windows of ancient shops. Strolling down the Ramblas to the Phoenician harbor, past the glass-roofed Mercado selling oranges out of Africa.

The old Ritz, warm in our room, dark, with all the soft weight of Europe pulled over us like a quilt. I could enter you in your sleep. You were always ready. Seeing your lips in a soft, round O of surprise, your face about to sink into the thick, white pillow—archaic linen of the Ritz. Inside you I imagined all that neon, the crowds surging around Shinjuku Station, wired electric night. You moved that way, rhythm of a new age, dreamy and far from any nation’s soil.

When we flew to Vienna, I installed you in Hiroshi’s wife’s favorite hotel. Quiet, solid, the lobby tiled like a marble chessboard, with brass elevators smelling of lemon oil and small cigars. It was easy to imagine her there, the highlights on her riding boots reflected in polished marble, but we knew she wouldn’t be coming along, not this trip.

She was off to some Rhineland spa, and Hiroshi was in Vienna for a conference. When Maas security flowed in to scan the hotel, you were out of sight.

Hiroshi arrived an hour later, alone.

Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who’s come here to identify the planet’s dominant form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged.

The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form.

Not the Edge lecture again, I said.

Maas isn’t like that, he said, ignoring me.

Maas was small, fast, ruthless. An atavism. Maas was all Edge.

I remember Fox talking about the nature of Hiroshi’s Edge. Radioactive nucleases, monoclonal antibodies, something to do with the linkage of proteins, nucleotides … Hot, Fox called them, hot proteins. Highspeed links. He said Hiroshi was a freak, the kind who shatters paradigms, inverts a whole field of science, brings on the violent revision of an entire body of knowledge. Basic patents, he said, his throat tight with the sheer wealth of it, with the high, thin smell of tax-free millions that clung to those two words.

Hosaka wanted Hiroshi, but his Edge was radical enough to worry them. They wanted him to work in isolation.

I went to Marrakech, to the old city, the Medina. I found a heroin lab that had been converted to the extraction of pheromones. I bought it, with Hosaka’s money.

I walked the marketplace at Djemaa-el-Fna with a sweating Portuguese businessman, discussing fluorescent lighting and the installation of ventilated specimen cages. Beyond the city walls, the high Atlas. Djemaa-el-Fna was thick with jugglers, dancers, storytellers, small boys turning lathes with their feet, legless beggars with wooden bowls under animated holograms advertising French software.

We strolled past bales of raw wool and plastic tubs of Chinese microchips. I hinted that my employers planned to manufacture synthetic beta-endorphin. Always try to give them something they understand.

Sandii, I remember you in Harajuku, sometimes. Close my eyes in this coffin and I can see you there—all the glitter, crystal maze of the boutiques, the smell of new clothes. I see your cheekbones ride past chrome racks of Paris leathers. Sometimes I hold your hand.

We thought we’d found you, Sandii, but really you’d found us. Now I know you were looking for us or for someone like us. Fox was delighted, grinning over our find: such a pretty new tool, bright as any scalpel. Just the thing to help us sever a stubborn Edge, like Hiroshi’s, from the jealous parent-body of Maas Biolabs.

You must have been searching a long time, looking for a way out, all those nights down Shinjuku. Nights you carefully cut from the scattered deck of your past.

My own past had gone down years before, lost with all hands, no trace. I understood Fox’s late-night habit of emptying his wallet, shuffling through his identification. He’d lay the pieces out in different patterns, rearrange them, wait for a picture to form. I knew what he was looking for. You did the same thing with your childhoods.

In New Rose, tonight, I choose from your deck of pasts.

I choose the original version, the famous Yokohama hotel-room text, recited to me that first night in bed. I choose the disgraced father, Hosaka executive. Hosaka. How perfect. And the Dutch mother, the summers in Amsterdam, the soft blanket of pigeons in the Dam Square afternoon.

I came in out of the heat of Marrakech into Hilton air conditioning. Wet shirt clinging cold to the small of my back while I read the message you’d relayed through Fox. You were in all the way; Hiroshi would leave his wife. It wasn’t difficult for you to communicate with us, even through the clear, tight film of Maas security; you’d shown Hiroshi the perfect little place for coffee and kipferl. Your favorite waiter was white haired, kindly, walked with a limp, and worked for us. You left your messages under the linen napkin.

All day today I watched a small helicopter cut a tight grid above this country of mine, the land of my exile, the New Rose Hotel. Watched from my hatch as its patient shadow crossed the grease-stained concrete. Close. Very close.

I left Marrakech for Berlin. I met with a Welshman in a bar and began to arrange for Hiroshi’s disappearance.

It would be a complicated business, intricate as the brass gears and sliding mirrors of Victorian stage magic, but the desired effect was simple enough. Hiroshi would step behind a hydrogen-cell Mercedes and vanish. The dozen Maas agents who followed him constantly would swarm around the van like ants; the Maas security apparatus would harden around his point of departure like epoxy.

They know how to do business promptly in Berlin. I was even able to arrange a last night with you. I kept it secret from Fox; he might not have approved. Now I’ve forgotten the town’s name. I knew it for an hour on the autobahn, under a gray Rhenish sky, and forgot it in your arms.

The rain began, sometime toward morning. Our room had a single window, high and narrow, where I stood and watched the rain fur the river with silver needles. Sound of your breathing. The river flowed beneath low, stone arches. The street was empty. Europe was a dead museum.

I’d already booked your flight to Marrakech, out of Orly, under your newest name. You’d be on your way when I pulled the final string and dropped Hiroshi out of sight.

You’d left your purse on the dark, old bureau. While you slept I went through your things, removing anything that might clash with the new cover I’d bought for you in Berlin. I took the Chinese .22, your microcomputer, and your bank chip. I took a new passport, Dutch, from my bag, a Swiss bank chip in the same name, and tucked them into your purse.

My hand brushed something flat. I drew it out, held the thing, a diskette. No labels.

It lay there in the palm of my hand, all that death. Latent, coded, waiting.

I stood there and watched you breathe, watched your breasts rise and fall. Saw your lips slightly parted, and in the jut and fullness of your lower lip, the faintest suggestion of bruising.

I put the diskette back into your purse. When I lay down beside you, you rolled against me, waking, on your breath all the electric night of a new Asia, the future rising in you like a bright fluid, washing me of everything but the moment. That was your magic, that you lived outside of history, all now.

And you knew how to take me there.

For the very last time, you took me.

While I was shaving, I heard you empty your makeup into my bag. I’m Dutch now, you said, I’ll want a new look.

Dr. Hiroshi Yomiuri went missing in Vienna, in a quiet street of Singerstrasse, two blocks from his wife’s favorite hotel. On a clear afternoon in October, in the presence of a dozen expert witnesses, Dr. Yomiuri vanished.

He stepped through a looking glass. Somewhere, offstage, the oiled play of Victorian clockwork.

I sat in a hotel room in Geneva and took the Welshman’s call. It was done, Hiroshi down my rabbit hole and headed for Marrakech. I poured myself a drink and thought about your legs.

Fox and I met in Narita a day later, in a sushi bar in the JAL terminal. He’d just stepped off an Air Maroc jet, exhausted and triumphant.

Loves it there, he said, meaning Hiroshi. Loves her, he said, meaning you.

I smiled. You’d promised to meet me in Shinjuku in a month.

Your cheap, little gun in the New Rose Hotel. The chrome is starting to peel. The machining is clumsy, blurry Chinese stamped into rough steel. The grips are red plastic, molded with a dragon on either side. Like a child’s toy.

Fox ate sushi in the JAL terminal, high on what we’d done. The shoulder had been giving him trouble, but he said he didn’t care. Money now for better doctors. Money now for everything.

Somehow it didn’t seem very important to me, the money we’d gotten from Hosaka. Not that I doubted our new wealth, but that last night with you had left me convinced that it all came to us naturally, in the new order of things, as a function of who and what we were.

Poor Fox. With his blue oxford shirts crisper than ever, his Paris suits darker and richer. Sitting there in JAL, dabbing sushi into a little rectangular tray of green horseradish, he had less than a week to live.

Dark now, and the coffin racks of New Rose are lit all night by floodlights, high on painted metal masts. Nothing here seems to serve its original purpose. Everything is surplus, recycled, even the coffins. Forty years ago these plastic capsules were stacked in Tokyo or Yokohama, a modern convenience for traveling businessmen. Maybe your father slept in one. When the scaffolding was new, it rose around the shell of some mirrored tower on the Ginza, swarmed over by crews of builders.

The breeze tonight brings the rattle of a pachinko parlor, the smell of stewed vegetables from the pushcarts across the road.

I spread crab-flavored krill paste on orange rice crackers. I can hear the planes.

Those last few days in Tokyo, Fox and I had adjoining suites on the fifty-third floor of the Hyatt. No contact with Hosaka. They paid us, then erased us from official corporate memory.

But Fox couldn’t let go. Hiroshi was his baby, his pet project. He’d developed a proprietary, almost fatherly, interest in Hiroshi. He loved him for his Edge. So Fox had me keep in touch with my Portuguese businessman in the Medina, who was willing to keep a very partial eye on Hiroshi’s lab for us.

When he phoned, he’d phone from a stall in Djemaa-el-Fna, with a background of wailing vendors and Atlas panpipes. Someone was moving security into Marakech, he told us. Fox nodded. Hosaka.

After less than a dozen calls, I saw the change in Fox, a tension, a look of abstraction. I’d find him at the window, staring down fifty-three floors into the Imperial gardens, lost in something he wouldn’t talk about.

Ask him for a more detailed description, he said, after one particular call. He thought a man our contact had seen entering Hiroshi’s lab might be Moenner, Hosaka’s leading gene man.

That was Moenner, he said, after the next call. Another call and he thought he’d identified Chedanne, who headed Hosaka’s protein team. Neither had been seen outside the corporate arcology in over two years.

By then it was obvious that Hosaka’s leading researchers were pooling quietly in the Medina, the black executive Lears whispering into the Marrakech airport on carbon-fiber wings. Fox shook his head. He was a professional, a specialist, and he saw the sudden accumulation of all that prime Hosaka Edge in the Medina as a drastic failure in the zaibatsu’s tradecraft.

Christ, he said, pouring himself a Black Label, they’ve got their whole bio section in there right now. One bomb. He shook his head. One grenade in the right place at the right time …

I reminded him of the saturation techniques Hosaka security was obviously employing. Hosaka had lines to the heart of the Diet, and their massive infiltration of agents into Marrakech could only be taking place with the knowledge and cooperation of the Moroccan government.

Hang it up, I said. It’s over. You’ve sold them Hiroshi. Now forget him.

I know what it is, he said. I know. I saw it once before.

He said that there was a certain wild factor in lab work. The edge of Edge, he called it. When a researcher develops a breakthrough, others sometimes find it impossible to duplicate the first researcher’s results. This was even more likely with Hiroshi, whose work went against the conceptual grain of his field. The answer, often, was to. fly the breakthrough boy from lab to corporate lab for a ritual laying on of hands. A few pointless adjustments in the equipment, and the process would work. Crazy thing, he said, nobody knows why it works that way, but it does. He grinned.

But they’re taking a chance, he said. Bastards told us they wanted to isolate Hiroshi, keep him away from their central research thrust. Balls. Bet your ass there’s some kind of power struggle going on in Hosaka research. Somebody big’s flying his favorites in and rubbing them all over Hiroshi for luck. When Hiroshi shoots the legs out from under genetic engineering, the Medina crowd’s going to be ready.

He drank his scotch and shrugged.

Go to bed, he said. You’re right, it’s over.

I did go to bed, but the phone woke me. Marrakech again, the white static of a satellite link, a rush of frightened Portuguese.

Hosaka didn’t freeze our credit, they caused it to evaporate. Fairy gold. One minute we were millionaires in the world’s hardest currency, and the next we were paupers. I woke Fox.

Sandii, he said. She sold out. Maas security turned her in Vienna. Sweet Jesus.

I watched him slit his battered suitcase apart with a Swiss army knife. He had three gold bars glued in there with contact cement. Soft plates, each one proofed and stamped by the treasury of some extinct African government.

I should’ve seen it, he said, his voice flat.

I said no. I think I said your name.

Forget her, he said. Hosaka wants us dead. They’ll assume we crossed them. Get on the phone and check our credit.

Our credit was gone. They denied that either of us had ever had an account.

Haul ass, Fox said.

We ran. Out a service door, into Tokyo traffic, and down into Shinjuku. That was when I understood for the first time the real extent of Hosaka’s reach.

Every door was closed. People we’d done business with for two years saw us coming, and I’d see steel shutters slam behind their eyes. We’d get out before they had a chance to reach for the phone. The surface tension of the underworld had been tripled, and everywhere we’d meet that same taut membrane and be thrown back. No chance to sink, to get out of sight.

Hosaka let us run for most of that first day. Then they sent someone to break Fox’s back a second time.

I didn’t see them do it, but I saw him fall. We were in a Ginza department store an hour before closing, and I saw his arc off that polished mezzanine, down into all the wares of the new Asia.

They missed me somehow, and I just kept running. Fox took the gold with him, but I had a hundred New Yen in my pocket. I ran. All the way to the New Rose Hotel.

Now it’s time.

Come with me, Sandii. Hear the neon humming on the road to Narita International. A few late moths trace stop-motion circles around the floodlights that shine on New Rose.

And the funny thing, Sandii, is how sometimes you just don’t seem real to me. Fox once said you were ectoplasm, a ghost called up by the extremes of economics. Ghost of the new century, congealing on a thousand beds in the world’s Hyatts, the world’s Hiltons.

Now I’ve got your gun in my hand, jacket pocket, and my hand seems so far away. Disconnected.

I remember my Portuguese business friend forgetting his English, trying to get it across in four languages I barely understood, and I thought he was telling me that the Medina was burning. Not the Medina. The brains of Hosaka’s best research people. Plague, he was whispering, my businessman, plague and fever and death.

Smart Fox, he put it together on the run. I didn’t even have to mention finding the diskette in your bag in Germany.

Someone had reprogrammed the DNA synthesizer, he said. The thing was there for the overnight construction of just the right macromolecule. With its in-built computer and its custom software. Expensive, Sandii. But not as expensive as you turned out to be for Hosaka.

I hope you got a good price from Maas.

The diskette in my hand. Rain on the river. I knew, but I couldn’t face it. I put the code for that meningial virus back into your purse and lay down beside you.

So Moenner died, along with other Hosaka researchers. Including Hiroshi. Chedanne suffered permanent brain damage.

Hiroshi hadn’t worried about contamination. The proteins he punched for were harmless. So the synthesizer hummed to itself all night long, building a virus to the specifications of Maas Biolabs GmbH.

Maas. Small, fast, ruthless. All Edge.

The airport road is a long, straight shot. Keep to the shadows. And I was shouting at that Portuguese voice, I made him tell me what happened to the girl, to Hiroshi’s woman. Vanished, he said. The whir of Victorian clockwork.

So Fox had to fall, fall with his three pathetic plates of gold, and snap his spine for the last time. On the floor of a Ginza department store, every shopper staring in the instant before they screamed.

I just can’t hate you, baby.

And Hosaka’s helicopter is back, no lights at all, hunting on infrared, feeling for body heat. A muffled whine as it turns, a kilometer away, swinging back toward us, toward New Rose. Too fast a shadow, against the glow of Narita.

It’s alright, baby. Only please come here. Hold my hand.

GENE WOLFE

The Map

Gene Wolfe is perceived by many critics to be one of the best—perhaps the best—SF and fantasy writers working today. His tetralogy The Book of the New Sun—consisting of The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch—is being hailed as a masterpiece, quite probably the standard against which all subsequent science-fantasy books of the ‘80s will be judged; ultimately, it may prove to be as influential as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. The Shadow of the Torturer won the World Fantasy Award. The Claw of the Conciliator won the Nebula Award. Wolfe also won a Nebula Award for his story “The Death of Doctor Island.” His other books include Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and The Devil in a Forest. His short fiction—including some of the best stories of the ’70s—has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories and Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days. His most recent books are Free Live Free, a novel, and The Wolfe Archipelago, a collection. His story “The Cat” was in our First Annual Collection. Wolfe lives in Barrington, Illinois with his wife and family.

Here—in a story set in the strange and evocative universe of The Book of the New Sun—he takes us to the far, far future … to a time when the sun has grown old and red and dim, the moon has grown green with forests, and old Urth groans under the almost insupportable weight of her own unnumbered years … takes us for a journey down the fabled river Gyoll, through the unimaginably vast and ancient ruins of the dying city Nessus, for a tale of temptation, greed, and mystery.

On the night before, he had forgotten all his plans and fought, half blinded by his blood after Laetus broke the ewer over his head. Perhaps that was for the best.

And yet if they had not taken his knife while he slept, he might have killed them both.

“Master Gurloes will be angry.” That was what they used to say to terrify one another into doing well. Severian would have been angry too, to be sure, and Severian had beaten him more than once. He spat out clotted blood. Beaten him worse than Laetus and Syntyche had last night. Severian had been captain of apprentices in the year before his own.

Now Severian was the Autarch, Severian was the law, and murderers died under the law’s hand.

Someone was pounding at the hatch. He spat again, this time into the slop jar, and shouted in the direction of the vent. It let in enough light for him to see the impression Syntyche had left in her bunk as she lay face to the bulkhead, feigning sleep. He smoothed it with his hands.

For a moment he groped for his clothes and his knife, but the knife was gone. He chuckled and rocked back on his own narrow bunk, pushing both legs into his trousers together.

More pounding; the boat rocked beneath him as the stranger searched for another way into the cabin. He spat a third time, and from habit reached up to draw the bolt that was back already. “Hatch sticks! Come on down, you catamite, I’m not coming up.”

The stranger lifted it and clambered down the steep steps.

“‘Ware deck beams.”

He stooped as he turned about, and he was tall enough that he had to. “You’re Captain Eata?”

“Sit on the other bunk. Nobody’s using it any more. What do you want?”

“But you are Eata?”

“We’ll talk about that later, maybe. After you tell me what you want.”

“A guide.”

Eata was feeling the cut on his head and did not answer.

“I was told that you are an intelligent man.”

“Not by a friend.”

“I need a man with a boat to take me down Gyoll. To tell me what I need to know concerning the ruins. They said you knew it as well as any man alive.”

“An asimi,” Eata said. “One asimi for each day. And you’ll have to help me handle her—my deckhand and I had a little argument last night.”

“Shall we say six orichalks? It should only take a day, and I—” Eata was not listening. He had seen the broken lock on his sea chest, and he was laughing. “The key’s in my pocket!” He gripped the younger, taller man by the knee. “My pants were on the floor!” In his mirth, he nearly choked on the words.

In the flat lands that Gyoll itself had made, Gyoll had little current; but the wind was in the east, and Eata’s boat heeled a bit under the pressure of her wide gaffsail. The old sun, well above the tallest towers now, painted the sail’s black image on the oily water.

“What do you do, Captain?” the stranger asked. “How do you live?”

“By doing whatever pays. Cargo to the delta and fish to the city, mostly.”

“It’s a nice boat. Did you build it?”

“No,” Eata said. “Bought it. Not fast like you’re used to.” His head still hurt, and he leaned on the tiller with one hand pressed to his temple.

“Yes, I’ve sailed a bit on a lake we have up north.”

“Wasn’t asking,” Eata told him.

“I don’t think I ever gave you my name. It’s Simulatio.”

“And a good one too, I’ve no doubt.”

The stranger turned away for a moment, tinkering with the jibsheet winch to keep Eata from seeing the blood rising in his cheeks. “When will we reach the deserted parts of the city?”

“About nones, if this wind holds.”

“I didn’t know it would take so long.”

“You should have hired me farther down.” Eata chuckled. “And that’ll be just the beginning of the dead parts. You might want to go farther yet.”

The stranger turned back to look at him. “It’s very large, isn’t it?”

“Bigger than you can imagine. This part—where people live—is just a sort of border on it.”

“Do you know a place where three broad streets come together?”

“Half a dozen, maybe more.”

“The southernmost, I would think.”

“I can take you to the farthest south I know,” Eata said. “I’m not saying that’s the farthest south there is.”

“We’ll start there then.”

“Be night by the time we get there,” Eata told him. “The next day will be another asimi.”

The stranger nodded. “We’re not even to the ruined part yet?”

Eata gestured. “See those clothes? Washing on a line. People here have enough to eat, so they can have two or three shirts, maybe. Farther south you won’t see that—a person with only one shirt or one shift doesn’t wash it much, but you’ll see cooksmoke. Farther still, and you won’t even see that. That’s the dead city, and people there don’t light any fires because of what the smoke might bring down on them. Omophagists is what my old teacher called them. It means those that have their meat raw.”

The stranger stared across the water at the lines and their rags. The wind ruffled his hair, and the tattered shirts and skirts waved at him like crowds of poor, shy children who feared he would not wave back. At last he said, “Even if the Autarch won’t protect them, they could band together and protect each other.”

“It’s each other they’re afraid of. They live—such as they do live—by sieving the old city, a finer screen every year. Every man steals from his neighbor when he can and kills him if he makes a good find. It doesn’t have to be much. A knife with a silver handle—that would be a good find.”

After a moment, the stranger looked down at the silver mountings of his dagger.

“I believe we might take a bit of a closer reach here,” Eata told him. “There’s a meander coming up.” The stranger heaved at the windlass, and the boom crept back.

To starboard, a high-pooped thalamegus made its way up the river, glittering in the sunlight like a scarab, all gilding and lapis lazuli. The wind was fair for it now, and as they watched (Eata with one eye to their own sail) the lateen yards dipped on its stubby masts, then lifted again trailing wide triangles of roseate silk. The long sweeps shrunk and vanished.

“They’ve been down seeing the sights,” Eata told the stranger. “It’s safe enough by day, if you’ve got a couple of young fellows with swords aboard and rowers you can trust.”

“What is that up there?” The stranger pointed beyond the thalamegus to a hill crowned with spires. “It looks out of place.”

“They call it the Old Citadel,” Eata said. “I don’t know much about it.”

“Is that where the Autarch comes from?”

“So some say.”

Urth was looking the sun nearly full in the face now, and the wind had died to a mere whisper. The patched brown mainsail flapped, then filled, then flapped again.

The stranger sat on the gunnel for a moment, his booted feet hanging over the side and almost touching the smooth water, then swung them back onto the deck again as though he were fearful of falling overboard. “You can almost imagine them going up, can’t you?” he said. “Just taking off with a silver shout and leaving this world behind.”

“No,” Eata told him. “I can’t.”

“That’s what they’re supposed to do, at the end of time. I read about it someplace.”

“Paper’s dangerous,” Eata said. “It’s killed a lot more men than steel.”

Their boat was moving hardly faster than the sluggish current. A flyer passed overhead as swiftly and silently as a dart from the hand of a giant and vanished into a white summer cloud, only to reappear shrunk nearly to invisibility, one additional spark among the day-dimmed stars. The brown sail crept across the stranger’s view of the Old Citadel to the northeast. Despite the shade it gave him, he was sweating. He unlaced his cordwain jerkin.

That night on deck, he laced it again as tightly as he could. It was cold already, and he knew without being told that it would soon be colder still. “Perhaps I should have a blanket,” he said.

Eata shook his head. “You’d only fall asleep. Walk up and down and wave your arms. That’ll keep you warm and awake too. I’ll come up and relieve you at the next watch.”

The stranger nodded absently and looked up at the orangish lantern Eata had hoisted to the masthead. “They’ll know we’re out here.”

“If they didn’t, I wouldn’t bother to set a watch. But if we didn’t have that, some big carrack would run us under for sure and never feel the difference. Don’t you go putting it out—believe me, we’re a lot safer with it high and bright. If it should go out of itself, you let it down and get it lit again as handsomely as ever you can. If you can’t get it lit, call me. If you see another vessel, particularly a big one, blow the conch.” Eata waved toward the spiraled shell beside the binnacle.

The stranger nodded again. “Their boats won’t have lights, of course.”

“No, nor masts neither. Besides, it could happen that two or three swim out. If you see a face in the water that stares at the light and disappears, it’s a manatee. Don’t worry about it. But if you see anything that swims like a man, call me.”

“I will,” the stranger said. He watched as Eata opened the hatch and descended to the tiny cabin.

Two boarding pikes lay in the bow, their grounding irons lost in the inky shadow beneath the overhang of the half-deck, their heads thrusting past the jib-boom mountings. He climbed down and got one, then scrambled onto the deck again. The pike was three ells long, with an ugly spike head and a sharp hook intended to cut rigging. He flourished it as he walked the circle of the little deck, up, down, right, left, his movements the awkward ones of a man recalling a skill learned in youth.

The curve of Lune lay just visible in the east, sending streamers of virescence toward him in a silent flood, spumed and uncanny. Silhouetted against that moss-green light, the city on the eastern bank seemed less dead than sleeping. Its towers were black, but their sightless windows, thus illuminated from behind, appeared to betray a faint radiance, as though hecatonchires roved the gloomy corridors and deserted rooms, their thousand fingers smeared with noctoluscence to light their way.

He looked to the west just in time to see a pair of gleaming eyes sink into the water with a scarcely perceptible splash. For the space of a dozen breaths he stared at the spot, but there was nothing more to see. He dashed to starboard again, to what was now the eastern side of the anchored boat, imagining that some devious adversary had swum under or around it to take him by surprise; Gyoll slipped past unruffled.

To port, the shadow of the hull lay long across the glassy river, though he could easily have touched the water with his hands. No skiff or shallop launched from the silent shore.

Downriver, the ruined city appeared to stretch away to infinity, as though Urth were a level plain occupying the whole of space, and the whole of Urth were filled with crumbling walls and tilted pillars. A night bird circled overhead, swooped at the water, and did not rise.

Upriver, the cookfires and grease lamps of living Nessus lent no glow to the sky. The river seemed the only living thing in a city of death; and for an instant the stranger was seized by the conviction that cold Gyoll itself was dead, that the sodden sticks and bits of excrement it carried were somehow swimming, that they were outward bound on some unending voyage to dissolution.

He was about to turn away when he noticed what appeared to be a human form drifting toward him with a scarcely discernible motion. He watched it fascinated and unbelieving, as sparrows are said to watch the golden snake called soporor.

It came nearer. In the green moonlight, its hair looked colorless, its skin berylline. He saw that it was in fact human, and that it floated face downward.

One outstretched hand touched the floating anchor cable as if it wished to climb aboard. Momentarily, the hemp retarded the stiff fingers, and the corpse performed a slow pirouette, like the half turn of a thrown knife seen by an ephemerid, or the tumbling of a derelict through the abyss that separates the worlds. Clambering down into the bow, he tried to grapple it with his pike; it was just out of reach.

He waited, horrified and impatient. At last he was able to draw it nearer and slide the hook under one arm. The corpse rolled over easily, far more easily than he had anticipated, its face pressed below the dark surface by the weight of the lifted arm, then bobbing up when that arm lay in the water once more.

It was a woman, naked and not long dead. Her staring eyes still showed traces of kohl; her teeth gleamed faintly through half-parted lips. He tried to judge her as he had judged the women whose compliance he had secured for coins, to weigh her breasts with his eyes and applaud or condemn the roundness of her belly; he discovered that he could not do so, that in the way he sought to see her she was beyond his sight, unreachable as the unborn, unreachable as his mother had been when he had once, as a boy, happened upon her bathing.

Eata’s touch on his shoulder make him spin around.

“My watch.”

“This—” he began, and could say nothing more. He pointed.

“I’ll fend it off,” Eata told him. “You get some sleep. Take the other bunk. No one’s using it.”

He handed Eata the pike and went below, hardly knowing what he did and nearly crushing his fingers beneath the hatch.

A candle guttered in a dish on the broken chest, and he realized that Eata had not slept. One of the narrow bunks was rumpled. He took the other, tying triple knots in the thong that held his burse to his belt, loosening his jerkin, swinging his booted feet onto the hard, thin mattress, and pulling up a blanket of surprisingly soft merino. A puff of his breath extinguished the yellow candle flame, and he closed his eyes.

The dead woman floated in the dark. He pushed her away, turning his thoughts to pleasant things: the room where he had slept as a boy, the hawk and the harrier he had left behind. The mountain meads of his father’s estate rose before him, dotted with poppies and wild indigo, with fern and purple-flowered clover. When had he ridden across them last? He could not remember. Lilacs nodded their honey-charged panicles.

Sniffing, he sat up, nearly braining himself on the deck beams. A faint perfume languished between the mingled stinks of bilge and candle. When he buried his face in the blanket, he was certain of it. Just before sleep came, he heard a man’s faint, hoarse sobbing overhead.

He had the last watch, when the ruins dropped from the angry face of the sun like a frayed mask. By night he had seen towers; now he saw that those towers were half fallen and leprous with saplings and rank green vines. As he had been told, there was no smoke. He would have been willing to stake all he had that there were no people either.

Eata came on deck carrying bread, dried meat, and steaming mate. “You owe me another asimi,” Eata said.

He untied the knots and took it out. “The last one you’ll be getting. Or will you charge me for another day, if you can’t return me to the place where I boarded your boat by tomorrow morning?”

Eata shook his head.

“The last, then. This spot where three streets meet—is it on the eastern side? Over there?”

Eata nodded. “See that jetty? Straight in from there for half a league. We’ll be at the jetty before primesong.”

Together they turned the little capstan that drew up the anchor. The stranger broke out the jib while Eata heaved at the mainsail halyards.

The sea breeze had arrived, raucously announced by a flock of black-and-white gulls riding it inland in hope of offal. Close hauled, the boat showed such heels that the stranger feared they would ram the disintegrating jetty. He picked up a pike to use as a boat hook.

At what seemed the last possible moment, Eata swung the rudder abeam and shot her bow into the wind. “That was well done,” the stranger said.

“Oh, I can sail. I can fight too, if I have to.” Eata paused. “I’ll go with you, if you want me.”

The stranger shook his head.

“I didn’t think you would, but it was worth a try. You understand that you may be killed in there?”

“I doubt it.”

“Well, I don’t. Take that pike—you may need it. I’ll wait for you till nones, understand? No later. When your shadow’s around your feet, I’ll be gone. If you’re still alive walk north, sticking as near the water as you can. If you see a vessel, wave. Hail them.” For a moment Eata hesitated, seemingly lost in thought. “Hold up a coin, the biggest you’ve got. That works sometimes.”

“I’ll be back before you go,” the stranger said. “But this pike must have cost you nearly an asimi. You’ll have to replace it if I don’t bring it back.”

“Not that much,” Eata said.

“When I come back, I’ll give you an asimi. We’ll call it rent for the pike.”

“And maybe I’ll stay a bit longer in the hope of getting it, eh?”

The stranger nodded. “And perhaps you will. But I’ll be back before nones.”

When he had vaulted ashore, he watched Eata put out, then turned to study the city before him.

Two score strides brought him to the first ruined building. The streets were narrow here, and made more narrow still by the debris that half choked them. Blue cornflowers and pale bindweed grew from this rubbish and from the great, cracked blocks of gritty pavement. There was no sound but the distant keening of the gulls, and the air seemed purer than it had on the river. When he felt certain Eata had not followed him and that no one was watching him, he sat on a fallen stone and took out the map. He had wrapped it in oiled vellum, and the slight wetting the packet had received had not penetrated.

For most of the time he had possessed the map, he had not dared to look at it. Now as he studied it at leisure in the brilliant sunlight, his excitement was embittered by an irrational guilt.

Those spidery streets might—or might not—be the very streets that stretched before him. That wandering line of blue might be a stream or canal, or Gyoll itself. The map presented an accumulation of detail, and yet it was detail of a sort that did nothing to confirm or deny location. He committed as much of it to memory as he could, all the while wondering what feature or turning might prove of value, what name of street or structure might have survived where there was no one left to recall it, what thing of masonry or metal might yet retain its former shape, if any did. For an instant it seemed to him that it was not the treasure that was lost, but he himself.

As he refolded the cracked paper and wrapped it again, he speculated (as he had so many times) about the precious thing that had been thus laboriously hidden by the men to whom the stars had been as so many isles. Left to its own devices, his imagination ran to childish coffers crammed with gold. His intellect recognized these fancies for what they were and rejected them, but could propose in their stead only a dozen dim improbabilities, rumors of the secret knowledge and frightful weapons of ancient times. Life and mastery without limit.

He stood and studied the deserted buildings to make certain he had not been seen. A fox sat atop the highest heap of rubble, its red coat fiery in the sunshine, its eyes bright as jet beads. Suddenly afraid of any eyes, he threw the pike at it. It vanished, and the pike rattled down the farther side out of sight. He climbed over the mound and searched among the flourishing beggar ticks and lion’s teeth, but the pike had vanished too.

It took him a long time to reach the area where three streets met, and longer still to find their intersection. He had somehow veered south, and he wasted a watch in the search. Another was spent amid buzzing insects in convincing himself that it was not the intersection on his map, which showed avenues of equal width running southwest, southeast, and north. At last he took out the map again, comparing its faded inks to the desolate reality. Here were indeed three streets, but one was wider than the others and ran due east. This was not the place.

He was returning to the boat when the omophagists rushed him—men the color of dust, wild eyed and clothed in rags. In thac first moment they seemed innumerable. When he had grappled with one and killed him, he realized that only four remained.

Four were still far too many. He fled, one hand pressed to his bleeding side. He had always been a good runner, but he ran now as never before, leaping every obstacle, seeming almost to fly. The ruins raced and reeled around him. Missiles whizzed past his head.

He had nearly reached the river before they caught him. Mud slid from under his boot, he fell to one knee, and they were all around him. One must have torn his silver-mounted dagger from the dead man’s ribs. He watched it slash at his own throat now with the stunned incredulity of a householder who finds himself savaged by his own bandog, and he threw up his arms as much to shut out the sight as to counter the blow.

His forearm turned to ice as the steel bit in. Desperately, he rolled away, and saw the gray figure who wielded his dagger felled by the cudgel of another. A third dove for the dagger, and the two struggled.

Someone screamed; he looked to one side to see the fourth, who had his pike, impaled upon Eata’s.

The inn where he had stayed was near the river. Because he had walked some distance south searching for Eata’s boat, he had forgotten that. The inn was the Cygnet; he had forgotten that, too.

“Toss one of those loafers the line,” Eata called. “He’ll tie us up for an aes.”

He found he could not throw well with his left arm, but one of the loungers dove for the coil and caught it. “I’ve some luggage,” he called as the man heaved at the line. “Perhaps you’d carry it up to the Cygnet for me.”

Eata jumped into the bow. “The optimate’s name is Simulatio,” he told the lounger. “He stayed there three nights back. Inform the innkeeper. Tell him the optimate wishes the room he had before.”

“I hate to leave,” the stranger said. “But I won’t be going south again until I’ve healed.” He was picking at the knots that bound his burse.

“If you’re wise, you won’t go at all.”

The lounger threw the stranger’s bags onto the warf and leaped up after them.

“I want to give you something.” The stranger took out a chrisos. “Perhaps you could come back at the next moon and see if I’m well enough to go.”

“I won’t take your yellow boy,” Eata said. “You owe me an asimi for pike rent. I’ll take that.”

“But you will come back?”

“For an asimi a day? Of course I will. So would any other boatman.”

The stranger hesitated while he looked at Eata, and Eata at him. “I think I can trust you,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t want to go into those ruins with anyone else.”

“I know,” Eata told him. “That’s why I’m going to give you some advice. Walk away from the river a couple of streets, and you’ll find a goldsmith’s. It’s the sign of the Osela. That’s a golden bird.”

“I know what it is.”

“Yes, you would. Fold up your map—” He laughed. “You shouldn’t flinch like that. If you’re going to deal with people like me, you’re going to have to learn to govern your face.”

“I didn’t think you knew about it.”

“It’s in your boot,” Eata told him softly.

‘You spied on me!“

“Sometime when you took it out? No. But once when you sat on the gunnel, you jerked your feet away from the water; and when you slept, you kept your boots on. A boatman might have done that, but you? Not unless you had something more than your feet in them.”

“I see.”

Eata looked away, his eyes tracing the slow, immutable flow of great Gyoll to the southwest. “I knew a man who had one of those maps,” he said. “A man can spend half his life looking, and never find a thing. Maybe it’s under the sea now. Maybe someone found it long ago. Maybe it was never there at all. You understand? And he can’t trust anyone, not his friend, not even his woman.”

“And if his friend and his woman took it from him,” the stranger said, “one might kill the other to have the whole of it. Yes, I see how it is. That isn’t the map I have, if that’s what you’re thinking. I found this one between the pages of an old book.”

“I was hoping it was mine,” Eata told him. “You said you understood, but you don’t. I let them take it. I wanted them to have it, so they’d leave me alone. So I wouldn’t end up like the men we fought with yesterday. I got drunk, let them see the key, let them see me lock the map in my chest.”

“But you woke,” the stranger said.

Eata turned to face him, suddenly angry. “That fool Laetus broke the lock! I thought …”

“You don’t have to tell me about it.”

“He and Syntyche were younger than I. I only thought they’d waste their lives looking, the way I’d wasted mine, and Maxellindis’s too. I didn’t think he’d kill Syntyche.”

“He killed her,” the stranger said. “You didn’t. You didn’t make the two of them steal, either. You’re not the Increate, and you can’t take the responsibility for what others do.”

“But I can advise them,” Eata said. “And I’d advise you to burn your map, but I know you won’t. So fold it up instead, put your seal on it, and take it to that goldsmith I told you about. He’s an honest old fellow, and for an orichalk he’ll lock it in his strongroom. Go home then till you’re better. If you’re wise you’ll never come back to claim it.”

The stranger shook his head. “I’m going to stay at the inn here. I’ve money enough. And I still owe you an asimi. Pike rent, we called it. Here it is.”

Eata took the silver coin and tossed it up. It was bright, newly minted, with Severian’s profile stamped deep and sharp on one side. In the reddish sunlight, it might have been a coal of fire.

“You knot the strings of that burse,” Eata said. “Then knot them over again, all for fear I’ll get into it when you sleep. Let me tell you something. If I come back for you, I’ll have every brass aes before we’re done. You’ll take your money out, all of it, and give it to me, bit by bit.”

He flung the asimi high over the water. For a final instant it shone, before it was quenched in dark Gyoll forever. “I’m not coming back,” Eata said.

“It’s a good map,” the stranger told him. “Look.” He drew it from the top of his boot and began to unwrap it, clumsily because he could not use both hands. When he saw Eata’s face, he stopped, thrust his map into his pocket, and clambered onto the half deck.

Weak from loss of blood and stiff with wounds, he could not get up to the wharf without help. One of the remaining loungers extended a hand, and he took it. At every moment he expected to feel a pike plunged into his back; there was only Eata’s mocking laughter.

When he had both feet on the wiiarf, he turned toward the boat once more. Eata called, “Would you cast me off, please, Optimate?”

The stranger pointed, and the lounger who had helped him up untied the mooring line.

Eata pushed the boat away from the warf and heaved the boom about to catch what wind there was.

“You’ll come back for me!” the stranger shouted. “Because I’ll let you come with me! Because I’ll give you a share!”

Slowly and almost hesitantly, the old brown sail filled. The rigging grew taut, and the little cargo boat began to gather way. Eata did not look around, but his hand shook as it gripped the tiller.

MOLLY GLOSS

Interlocking Pieces

Here’s a story by new writer Molly Gloss in which the human cost of a sophisticated new medical technology is spelled out with subtlety, compassion, and grace …

Molly Gloss was born in Portland, Oregon, and lives there still with her husband, an eight-year-old son, and a twelve-year-old niece. She has sold several stories to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and has also appeared in Universe.

For Teo, there was never a question of abandoning the effort. After the last refusal—the East European Minister of Health sent her his personal explanation and regrets—it became a matter of patience and readiness and rather careful timing.

A uniformed policeman had been posted beside her door for reasons, apparently, of protocol. At eight-thirty, when he went down the corridor to the public lavatory, Teo was dressed and waiting, and she walked out past the nurses’ station. It stood empty. The robo-nurse was still making the eight-o’clock rounds of the wing’s seventy or eighty rooms. The organic nurse, just come on duty, was leaning over the vid displays in the alcove behind the station, familiarizing herself with the day’s new admissions.

Because it was the nearest point of escape, Teo used the staircase. But the complex skill of descending stairs had lately deserted her, so she stepped down like a child, one leg at a time, grimly clutching the metal bannister with both hands. After a couple of floors she went in again to find a public data terminal in a ward that was too busy to notice her.

They had not told her even the donor’s name, and a straightforward computer request met a built-in resistance: DATA RESTRICTED***KEY IN PHYSICIAN IDENT CODE. So she asked the machine for the names of organ donors on contract with the regional Ministry of Health, then a list of the hospital’s terminal patients, the causes and projected times of their deaths, and the postmortem neurosurgeries scheduled for the next morning. And, finally, the names of patients about whom information was media-restricted. Teo’s own name appeared on the last list. She should have been ready for that but found she was not, and she sat staring until the letters grew unfamiliar, assumed strange juxtapositions, became detached and meaningless—the name of a stranger.

The computer scanned and compared the lists for her, extrapolated from the known data, and delivered only one name. She did not ask for hard copy. She looked at the vid display a moment, maybe longer than a moment, and then punched it off and sat staring at the blank screen.

Perhaps not consciously, she had expected a woman. The name, a man’s name, threw her off balance a little. She would have liked a little time to get used to the sound of it, the sound it made in her head and on her lips. She would have liked to know the name before she knew the man. But he would be dead in the morning. So she spoke it once, only once. Out loud. With exactness and with care. “Dhavir Stahl,” she said. And then went to a pneumo-tube and rode up.

In the tube there were at first several others, finally only one. Not European, perhaps North African, a man with eyebrows in a thick straight line across a beetled brow. He watched her sidelong—clearly recognized her—and he wore a physician’s ID badge. In a workplace as large as this one the rumor apparatus would be well established. He would know of her admission, maybe even the surgery that had been scheduled. Would, at the very least, see the incongruity of a VIP patient, street-dressed and unaccompanied, riding up in the public pneumo-tube. So Teo stood imperiously beside him with hands cupped together behind her back and eyes focused on the smooth center seam of the door while she waited for him to speak, or not. When the tube opened at the seventy-eighth floor he started out, then half turned toward her, made a stiff little bow, and said, “Good health, Madame Minister,” and finally exited. If he reported straightaway to security, she might have five minutes, or ten, before they reasoned out where she had gone. And standing alone now in the pneumo-tube, she began to feel the first sour leaking of despair—what could be said, learned, shared in that little time?

There was a vid map beside the portal on the ninety-first floor. She searched it until she found the room and the straightest route, then went deliberately down the endless corridors, past the little tableaux of sickness framed where a door here or there stood open, and finally to Stahl’s door, closed, where there was no special feel of death, only the numbered code posted alongside the name to denote a life that was ending.

She would have waited. She wanted to wait, to gather up a few dangling threads, reweave a place or two that had lately worn through. But the physician in the pneumo-tube had stolen that possibility. So she took in a thin new breath and touched one thumb to the admit disk. The door hushed aside, waited for her, closed behind her. She stood just inside, stood very straight, with her hands open beside her thighs.

The man whose name was Dhavir Stahl was fitting together the pieces of a masters-level holoplex, sitting cross-legged, bare-kneed, on his bed, with the scaffolding of the puzzle in front of him on the bed table and its thousands of tiny elements jumbled around him on the sheets. He looked at Teo from under the ledge of his eyebrows while he worked. He had that vaguely anxious quality all East Europeans seem to carry about their eyes. But his mouth was good, a wide mouth with creases lapping around its corners, showing the places where his smile would fit. And he worked silently, patiently.

“I … would speak with you,” Teo said.

He was tolerant, even faintly apologetic. “Did you look at the file, or just the door code? I’ve already turned down offers from a priest and a psychiatrist and, this morning, from somebody in narcotics. I just don’t seem to need any deathbed comforting.”

“I am Teo.”

“What is that? One of the research divisions?”

“My name.”

His mouth moved, a near smile, perhaps embarrassment.

“They hadn’t told you my name, then.”

And finally he took it in. His face seemed to tighten, all of it pulling back toward his scalp as the skin shrinks from the skull of a corpse, so that his mouth was too wide and there was no space for smiling. Or too much.

“They … seem to have a good many arbitrary rules,” Teo said. “They refused me this meeting, your name even. And you mine, it appears. I could not—I had a need to know.”

She waited raggedly through a very long silence. Her palms were faintly damp, but she continued to hold them open beside her legs. Finally Dhavir Stahl moved, straightened a little, perhaps took a breath. But his eyes stayed with Teo.

“You look healthy,” he said. It seemed a question.

She made a slight gesture with one shoulder, a sort of shrugging off. “I have … lost a couple of motor skills.” And in a moment, because he continued to wait, she added, “The cerebellum is evidently quite diseased. They first told me I would die. Then they said no, maybe not, and they sent me here. ‘The state of the art,’ or something to that effect.”

He had not moved his eyes from her. One of his hands lightly touched the framework of the puzzle as a blind man would touch a new face, but he never took his eyes from Teo. Finally she could not bear that, and her own eyes skipped out to the window and the dark sheets of rain flapping beneath the overcast.

“You are … not what I expected,” he said. When her eyes came round to him again, he made that near smile and forced air from his mouth—not a laugh, a hard sound of bleak amusement. “Don’t ask! God, I don’t know what I expected.” He let go the puzzle and looked away finally, looked down at his hands, then out to the blank vid screen on the wall, the aseptic toilet in the corner. When he lifted his face to her again, his eyes were very dark, very bright. She thought he might weep, or that she would. But he said only, “You are Asian.” He was not quite asking it.

“Yes.”

“Pakistani?”

“Nepalese.”

He nodded without surprise or interest. “Do you climb?”

She lifted her shoulders again, shrugging. “We are not all Sherpa bearers,” she said with a prickly edge of impatience. There was no change at his mouth, but he fell silent and looked away from her. Belatedly she felt she might have shown more tolerance. Her head began to ache a little from a point at the base of the skull. She would have liked to knead the muscles along her shoulders. But she waited, standing erect and stiff and dismal, with her hands hanging, while the time they had went away quickly and ill used.

Finally Dhavir Stahl raised his arms, made a loose, meaningless gesture in the air, then combed back his hair with the fingers of both hands. His hair and his hands seemed very fine. “Why did you come?” he said, and his eyelashes drew closed, shielding him as he spoke.

There were answers that would have hurt him again. She sorted through for one that would not. “To befriend you,” she said, and saw his eyes open slowly. In a moment he sighed. It was a small sound, dry and sliding, the sound a bare foot makes in sand. He looked at the puzzle, touched an element lying loose on the bed, turned it round with a fingertip. And round.

Without looking toward her, he said, “Their computer has me dead at four-oh-seven-fourteen. They’ve told you that, I guess. There’s a two percent chance of miscalculation. Two or three, I forget. So anyway, by four-thirty—” His mouth was drawn out thin.

“They would have given you another artificial heart.”

He lifted his face, nearly smiled again. “They told you that? Yes. Another one. I wore out my own and one of theirs.” He did not explain or justify. He simply raised his shoulders, perhaps shrugging, and said, “That’s enough.” He was looking toward her, but his eyes saw only inward. She waited for him. Finally he stirred, turned his hands palms up, studied them.

“Did they—I wasn’t expecting a woman. Men and women move differently. I didn’t think they’d give a man’s cerebellum to a woman.” He glanced at Teo, at her body. “And you’re small. I’m, what, twenty kilos heavier, half a meter taller? I’d think you’d have some trouble getting used to … the way I move. Or anyway the way my brain tells my body to move.” He was already looking at his hands again, rubbing them against one another with a slight papery sound.

“They told me I would adapt to it,” Teo said. “Or the … new cerebellum could be retaught.”

His eyes skipped up to her as if she had startled or frightened him. His mouth moved too, sliding out wide to show the sharp edge of his teeth. “They didn’t tell me that,” he said from a rigid grin.

It was a moment before she was able to find a reason for his agitation. “It won’t—They said it wouldn’t … reduce the donor’s … sense of self.”

After a while, after quite a while, he said, “What word did they use? They wouldn’t have said ‘reduce.’ Maybe ‘correct’ or ‘edit out.’” His eyes slid sideways, away from her, then back again. His mouth was still tight, grimacing, shaping a smile that wasn’t there. “They were at least frank about it. They said the cerebellum only runs the automatic motor functions, the skilled body movements. They said they would have expected—no, they said they would have liked—a transplanted cerebellum to be mechanical. A part, like a lung or a kidney. The ‘mind’ ought to be all in the forebrain. They told me there wouldn’t be any donor consciousness, none at all, if they could figure out how to stop it.”

In the silence after, as if speaking had dressed the wound, his mouth began to heal. In a moment he was able to drop his eyes from Teo. He sat with his long, narrow hands cupped on his knees and stared at the scaffolding of his puzzle. She could hear his breath sliding in and out, a contained and careful sound. Finally he selected an element from among the thousands around him on the bed, turned it solemnly in his hands, turned it again, then reached to fit it into the puzzle, deftly finding a place for it among the multitude of interlocking pieces. He did not look at Teo. But in a moment he said, “You don’t look scared. I’d be scared if they were putting bits of somebody else inside my head.” He slurred the words a little at the end and jumped his eyes white-edged to Teo.

She made a motion to open her hands, to shrug, but then, irresistibly, turned her palms in, chafed them harshly against her pants legs. She chose a word from among several possible. “Yes,” she said. And felt it was she who now wore the armored faceplate with its stiff and fearful grin.

Dhavir’s eyes came up to her again with something like surprise, and certainly with tenderness. And then Teo felt the door behind her, its cushioned quiet sliding sideways, and there were three security people there, diminishing the size of the room with their small crowd, their turbulence. The first one extended her hand but did not quite touch Teo’s arm. “Minister Teo,” she said. Formal. Irritated.

Dhavir seemed not to register the address. Maybe he would remember it later, maybe not, and Teo thought probably it wouldn’t matter. They watched each other silently, Teo standing carefully erect with her hands, the hands that no longer brushed teeth nor wrote cursive script, the hands she had learned to distrust, hanging open beside her thighs, and Dhavir sitting crosslegged amid his puzzle, with his forearms resting across those frail, naked knees. Teo waited. The security person touched her elbow, drew her firmly toward the door, and then finally Dhavir spoke her name. “Teo,” he said. And she pulled her arm free, turned to stand on the door threshold, facing him.

“I run lopsided,” he said, as if he apologized for more than that. “I throw my heels out or something.” There were creases beside his mouth and his eyes, but he did not smile.

In a moment, with infinite, excruciating care, Teo opened her hands palms outward, lifted them in a gesture of dismissal. “I believe I can live with that,” she said.

MICHAEL SWANWICK

Trojan Horse

One of the most popular and respected of all the decade’s new writers, Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980 with two strong and compelling stories, “The Feast of St. Janis” and “Ginungagap,” both of which were Nebula Award finalists that year. Since then, he has gone on to become a frequent contributor to Omni, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Amazing; his stories have also appeared in Penthouse, Universe, High Times, TriQuarterly, and New Dimensions, among other places. His powerful story “Mummer Kiss” was a Nebula Award finalist in 1981, and his story “The Man Who Met Picasso” was a finalist for the 1982 World Fantasy Award. He has also been a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. His fast-paced and evocative first novel, In The Drift, was published early this year as part of the resurrected Ace Specials line. He is currently at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled Vacuum Flowers. Born in Schenectady, New York, Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife Marianne and their young son Sean.

In “Trojan Horse”—a vivid and hard-edged tale of technology and identity, and computer-age intrigue—he suggests that if indeed we don’t know ourselves as well as others know us, that may be because we’re not really who we think we are at all …

“It’s all inside my head,” Elin said wonderingly. It was true. A chimney swift flew overhead and she could feel its passage through her mind. A firefly landed on her knee. It pulsed cold fire, then spread its wings and was gone, and that was a part of her too.

“Please try not to talk too much.” The wetware tech tightened a cinch on the table, adjusted a bone inductor. His red and green facepaint loomed over her, receded. “This will go much faster if you cooperate.”

Elin’s head felt light and airy. It was huge. It contained all of Magritte, from the uppermost terrace down to the trellis farms that circled the inner lake. Even the blue and white earth that hovered just over one rock wall. They were all within her. They were all, she realized, only a model, the picture her mind assembled from sensory input. The exterior universe—the real universe—lay beyond.

“I feel giddy.”

“Contrast high.” The tech’s voice was neutral, disinterested. “This is a very different mode of perception from what you’re used to—you’re stoned on the novelty.”

A catwalk leading into the nearest farm rattled within Elin’s mind as a woman in agricultural blues strode by, gourd-collecting bag swinging from her hip. It was night outside the crater, but biological day within, and the agtechs had activated tiers of arc lights at the cores of the farms. Filtered by greenery, the light was soft and watery.

“I could live like this forever.”

“Believe me, you’d get bored.” A rose petal fell on her cheek, and the tech brushed it off. He turned to the two lawyers standing silently by. “Are the legal preliminaries over now?”

The lawyer in orangeface nodded. The one in purple said, “Can’t her original personality be restored at all?”

Drawing a briefcase from his pocket, the wetware tech threw out a holographic diagram before the witnesses. The air filled with intricate three-dimensional tracery, red and green lines interweaving and intermeshing.

“We’ve mapped the current personality.” He reached out to touch several junctions. “You will note that here, here and here, we have what are laughingly referred to as impossible emotional syllogisms. Any one of these renders the subject incapable of survival.”

A thin waterfall dropped from the dome condensors to a misty pool at the topmost terrace, a bright razor-slash through reality. At the edge of the next terrace it fell again.

“A straight yes or no answer will suffice.”

The tech frowned. “In theory yes. In practical terms it’s hopeless. Remember, her personality was never recorded. The accident almost completely randomized her emotional structure—technically she’s not even human. Given a decade or two of extremely delicate memory probing, we could maybe construct a facsimile. But it would only resemble the original; it could never be the primary Elin Donnelly.”

Elin could dimly make out the equipment for five more waterfalls, but they were not in operation at the moment. She wondered why.

“Well then, go ahead and do it. I wash my hands of this whole mess.”

The tech bent over Elin to reposition a bone inductor. “This won’t hurt a bit,” he promised. “Just pretend that you’re at the dentist’s, having your teeth replaced.”

She ceased to exist.

The new Elin Donnelly gawked at everything—desk workers in their open-air offices, a blacksnake sunning itself by the path, the stone stairs cut into the terrace walls. Her lawyer led her through a stand of saplings no higher than she, and into a meadow.

Butterflies scattered at their approach. Her gaze went from them to a small cave in the cliffs ahead, then up to the stars, as jumpy and random as their flight.

“—so you’ll be stuck on the Moon for almost month, if you want to collect your settlement. I.G. Feuchtwaren will carry your expenses until then, drawing against their final liability. Got that?”

And then—suddenly, jarringly—Elin could focus again. She took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I—okay.”

“Good.” The attorney canceled her legal wetware, yanking the skull plugs and briskly wrapping them around her briefcase. “Then let’s have a drink—it’s been a long day.”

They had arrived at the cave. “Hey, Hans!” the lawyer shouted. “Give us some service here, will you?”

A small man with the roguish face of a comic-opera troll popped into the open, work terminal in hand. “One minute,” he said. “I’m on direct flex time—got to wrap up what I’m working on first.”

“Okay.” The lawyer sat down on the grass. Elin watched, fascinated, as the woman toweled the paint from her face, and a new pattern of fine red and black lines, permanently tattooed into the skin, emerged from beneath.

“Hey!” Elin said. “You’re a Jesuit.”

“You expected IGF to ship you a lawyer from Earth-orbit?” She stuck out a hand. “Donna Landis, S.J. I’m the client-overseer for the Star Maker project, but I’m also available for spiritual guidance. Mass is at nine Sunday mornings.”

Elin leaned against the cliff, grapevines rustling under her back. Already she missed the blissed-out feeling of a few minutes before. “Actually, I’m an agnostic.”

“You were. Things may have changed.” Landis put the towel down, unfolded a mirror. “How do you like your new look?”

Elin studied her reflection. Blue paint surrounded her eyes, narrowing to a point at the bridge of her nose, swooping down in a long curve to the outside. It was like a large blue moth, or a pair of hawk wings. There was something magical about it, something glamorous. Something very unlike her.

“I feel like a raccoon,” she said. “This idiot mask.”

“Best get used to it. You’ll be wearing it a lot.”

“But what’s the point?” Elin was surprised by her own irritation. “So I’ve got a new personality; it’s still me in here. I don’t feel any weird compulsion to run amok with a knife or walk out an airlock without a suit. Nothing to warn the citizenry about, certainly.”

“Listen,” Landis said. “Right now you’re like a puppy tripping over its own paws because they’re too big for it. You’re a stranger to yourself—you’re going to feel angry when you don’t expect to, get sentimental over surprising things. You can’t control your emotions until you learn what they are. And until then, the rest of us deserve—”

“What’ll you have?” Hans was back, his forehead smudged black where he had incompletely wiped off his facepaint.

“A little warning. Oh, I don’t know, Hans. Whatever you have on tap.”

“That’ll be Chanty. And you?” he asked Elin.

“What’s good?”

He laughed. “There’s no such thing as a good Lunar wine. The air’s too moist. And even if it weren’t, it takes a good century to develop an adequate vineyard. But the Chanty is your basic, drinkable glug.”

“I’ll take that, then.”

“Good. I’ll bring a mug for your friend, too.”

“My friend?” She turned and for a dizzy instant saw a giant striding through the trees, towering over them, pushing them apart with two enormous hands. Then she remembered the size of the saplings and the man shrank to human stature.

He grinned, joined them. “Hi. Remember me?”

He was a tall man, built like a spacejack, lean and angular. An untidy mass of black curls framed a face that was not quite handsome, but carried an intense freight of will.

“I’m afraid …”

“Tory Shostokovich. I reprogrammed you.”

She studied his face. Those eyes. They were fierce almost to the point of mania, but there was sadness there too, and—she might be making this up—a hint of pleading, like a little boy who wants something so desperately he dare not ask for it. She could lose herself in analyzing the nuances of those eyes. “Yes,” she said at last, “I remember you now.”

“I’m pleased.” He nodded to the Jesuit. “Father Landis.”

She eyed him skeptically. “You don’t seem your usual morose self, Shostokovich. Is anything wrong?”

“No, it’s just a special kind of morning.” He smiled at some private joke. “So I thought I’d drop by and get acquainted with my former patient.” He glanced down at the ground, fleetingly shy, and then his eyes were bright and audacious again.

How charming, Elin thought. She hoped he wasn’t too shy. And then had to glance away herself, the thought was so unlike her. “So you’re a wetware surgeon,” she said inanely.

Hans distributed mugs of wine, then retreated to the cave’s mouth. He sat down, workboard in lap, and patched in the skull-plugs. His face went stiff as the wetware took hold.

“Actually,” Tory said, “I very rarely work as a wetsurgeon. An accident like yours is rare—maybe once, twice a year. Mostly I work in wetware development. Currently I’m on the Star Maker project.”

“I’ve heard that name before. Just what is it anyway?”

Tory didn’t answer immediately. He stared down into the lake, a cool breeze from above ruffling his curls. Elin caught her breath. I hardly know this man, she thought wildly. He pointed to the island in the center of the lake, a thin, stony finger that was originally the crater’s thrust cone.

“God lives on that island,” he said.

Elin laughed. “If only He’d had a sense of direction!” And then wanted to bite her tongue as she realized that he was not joking.

“You’re being cute, Shostokovich,” Landis warned. She swigged down a mouthful of wine. “]eez, that’s vile stuff.”

Tory rubbed the back of his neck ruefully. “Mea culpa. Well, let me give you a little background. Most people think of wetware as being software for people. But that’s too simplistic, because with machines you start out blank—with a clean slate—and with people, there’s some ten million years of mental programming already crammed into their heads.

“So to date we’ve been working with the natural wetware. We counterfeit surface traits—patience, alertness, creativity—and package them like so many boxes of bonemeal. But the human mind is vast and unmapped, and it’s time to move into the interior, for some basic research.

“That’s the Star Maker project. It’s an exploration of the basic substructural programming of the mind. We’ve redefined the overstructure programs into an integrated system capable of essence-programming, in one-to-one congruence with the inherent substructure of the universe.

“What jargonistic rot!” Landis gestured at Elin’s stoneware mug. “Drink up. The Star Maker is a piece of experimental theology that IGF dreamed up. As Tory said, it’s basic research into the nature of the mind. The Vatican Synod is providing funding so we can keep an eye on it.”

“Nipping heresy in the bud,” Tory said sourly.

“That’s a good part of it. This set of wetware will supposedly reshape a human mind into God. Bad theology, but there it is. They want to computer-model the infinite. Anyway, the specs were drawn up, and it was tried out on—what was the name of the test subject?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Tory said.

“Coral something-or-other.”

Tory sat, legs wide, staring into his mug of Chanty. There were hard lines on his face, etched by who knew what experiences? I don’t believe in love at first sight, Elin thought. Then again, who knew what she might believe in anymore? It was a chilling thought, and she retreated from it.

“So did this Coral become God?”

“Patience. Anyway, the volunteer was plugged in, wiped, reprogrammed, and interviewed. Nothing useful.”

“In one hour,” Tory said, “we learned more about the structure and composition of the universe than in all of history to date.”

“It was deranged gibberish.” She tapped Elin’s knee. “We interviewed her, and then canceled the wetware. And what do you think happened?”

“I’ve never been big on rhetorical questions.” Elin didn’t take her eyes off of Tory.

“She didn’t come down. She was stuck there.”

“Stuck?”

Tory plucked a blade of grass, let it fall. “What happened was that we had rewired her to absolute consciousness. She was not only aware of all her mental functions, but in control of them—right down to the involuntary reflexes. Which also put her in charge of her own metaprogrammer.”

“‘Metaprogrammer’ is just a buzzword for the buncle of reflexes the brain uses to make changes in itself,” Landis threw in.

“Yeah. What we didn’t take into account, though, was that she’d like being God. When we tried deprogramming her, she overrode our instructions and reprogrammed herself back up.”

“The poor woman,” Elin said. And yet—what a glorious experience, to be God! Something within her thrilled to it. It would almost be worth the price.

“Which leaves us with a woman who thinks she’s God,” Landis said. “I’m just glad we were able to hush it up. If word got out to some of those religious illiterates back on Earth—”

“Listen,” Tory said. “I didn’t really come here to talk shop. I wanted to invite my former patient on a grand tour of the Steam Grommet Works.”

Elin looked at him blankly. “Steam …”

He swept an arm to take in all of Magritte, the green pillars and gray cliffs alike. There was something proprietary in his gesture.

“You two might need a chaperone,” Landis said suspiciously. “I think I’ll tag along to keep you out of trouble.”

Elin smiled sweetly. “Fuck off,” she said.

Ivy covered Tory’s geodesic trellis hut. He gently began removing her jumpsuit, and a holotape sprang into being, surrounding them with ruby reds and cobalt blues that coalesced into stained glass patterns. Elin pulled back and clapped her hands. “It’s Chartres,” she cried delighted. “The Cathedral at Chartres!”

“Mmmm” Tory teased her down onto the grass floor.

The north rose swelled, all angels and doves, kings and prophets, with lilies surrounding the central rosette. Deep and powerful, infused with gloomy light, it lap-dissolved into the lancet of Sainte Anne.

The holotape panned down the north transept to the choir, to the apse, and then up into the ambulatory. Swiftly it cut to the wounded Christ and the Beasts of Revelation in the dark spaces of the west rose. The outer circle—the instruments of the Passion—closed about them.

Elin gasped.

The tape moved down the nave, brightening, briefly pausing at the Vendôme chapel. Until finally the oldest window, the Notre Dame de la Belle Verriere, blazed in a frenzy of raw glory. A breeze rattled the ivy and two leaves fell through the hologram to tap against their skin, and slide to the ground.

The Belle Verriere faded in the darkening light, and the colors ran and were washed away by a noiseless gust of rain.

Elin let herself melt into the grass, drained and lazy, not caring if she never moved again. Beside her Tory chuckled, playfully tickled her ribs. “Do you love me? Hey? Tell me you love me.”

“Stop!” She grabbed his arms and bit him in the side—a small, nipping bite, more threat than harm—ran a tongue over his left nipple. “Hey, listen, I hit the sack with you a half-hour after we met. What do you want?”

“Want?” He broke her hold, rolled over on top of her, pinioning her wrists above her head. “I want you to know—” And suddenly he was absolutely serious, his eyes unblinking and glittery-hard. “—that I love you. Without doubt or qualification. I love you more than words could ever say.”

“Tory,” she said. “Things like that take time.” The wind had died down. Not a blade of grass stirred.

“No they don’t.” It was embarrassing looking into those eyes; she refused to look away. “I feel it. I know it. I love every way, shape and part of you. I love you beyond time and barrier and possibility. We were meant to be lovers, fated for it, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that could ever keep us apart.” His voice was low and steady. Elin didn’t know if she was thrilled or scared out of her wits.

“Tory, I don’t know—”

“Then wait,” he said. “It’ll come.”

Lying sleepless beside Tory that night, Elin thought back to her accident. And because it was a matter of stored memory, the images were crisp and undamaged.

It happened at the end of her shift on Wheel Laboratory 19, Henry Ford Orbital Industrial Park.

Holding theta lab flush against the hub cylinder, Elin injected ferrous glass into a molten copper alloy. Simultaneously, she plunged gamma lab a half-kilometer to the end of its arm, taking it from fractional Greenwich normal to a full nine gravities. Epsilon began crawling up its spindly arm. Waldoing sample wafers from the quick-freeze molds in omicron, she started making measurements.

Elin felt an instant’s boredom, and the workboard readjusted her wetware, jacking up her attentiveness so that she leaned over the readouts in cool, detached fascination.

The workboard warned her that the interfacing program was about to shut off. Her fingers danced across the board, damping down reactions, putting the labs to bed. The wetware went quiescent.

With a shiver, Elin was herself again. She grabbed a towel and wiped off her facepaint. Then she leaned back and transluced the wall—her replacement was late. Corporation regs gave her fifty percent of his missed-time fines if she turned him in. It was easy money, and so she waited.

Stretching, she felt the gold wetware wires dangling from the back of her skull. She lazily put off yanking them.

Earth bloomed underfoot, slowly crept upward. New Detroit and New Chicago rose from the floor. Bright industrial satellites gleamed to every side of the twin residential cylinders.

A bit of motion caught Elin’s eye, and she swiveled to follow a load of cargo drifting by. It was a jumble of containers lashed together by nonmagnetic tape and shot into an orbit calculated to avoid the laser cables and power transmission beams that interlaced the Park.

A man was riding the cargo, feet braced against a green carton, hauling on a rope slipped through the lashings. He saw her and waved. She could imagine his grin through the mirrored helmet.

The old Elin snorted disdainfully. She started to look away and almost missed seeing it happen.

In leaning back that fraction more, the cargo-hopper had put too much strain on the lashings. A faulty rivet popped, and the cargo began to slide. Brightly colored cartons drifted apart, and the man went tumbling end-over-end away.

One end of the lashing was still connected to the anchor carton, and the free end writhed like a wounded snake. A bright bit of metal—the failed rivet—broke free and flew toward the juncture of the wheel lab’s hub and spokes.

The old Elin was still hooting with scornful laughter when the rivet struck the lab, crashing into a nest of wiring that should not have been exposed.

Two wires short-circuited, sending a massive power transient surging up through the workboard. Circuits fused and melted. The board went haywire.

And a microjolt of electricity leaped up two gold wires, hopelessly scrambling the wetware through Elin’s skull.

An hour later, when her replacement finally showed, she was curled into a ball, rocking back and forth in her chair. She was alternating between hysterical gusts of laughter and dark, gleeful screams.

Morning came, and after a sleepy, romantic breakfast, Tory plugged into his briefcase and went to work. Elin wandered off to do some thinking.

There was no getting around the fact that she was not the metallurgist from Wheel Lab 19, not any more. That woman was alien to her now. They might share memories, experiences—but she no longer understood that woman, her emotions, her actions.

At a second-terrace cafe crowded with off-shift biotechs, Elin rented a table and briefcase. She sat down to try to trace the original owner of her personality.

As she’d suspected, her new persona was copied from that of a real human being; creating a personality from scratch was still beyond the abilities of even the best wetware techs. And she found that duplication of personality was illegal—which meant that the original owner was dead.

But while she could trace herself back to IGF’s inventory bank, she could go no further. The personality had been chosen by computer, and when she querried it, it referred her to the Privacy Act of 2037.

“I think I’ve exhausted all the resources of self-discovery available to me,” she told the Pierrot when he came to collect his tip. “And I’ve still got half the morning left to kill.”

He glanced at her powder-blue facepaint, and smiled politely.

“It’s selective black.”

“Hah?” Elin turned away from the lake, found that an agtech with a long-handled net had come up behind her.

“The algae—it absorbs light into the infrared. Makes the lake a great thermal sink.” The woman dipped her net into the water, seined up a load of dark green scum, and dumped it into a nearby trough. Water drained through the porous bottom.

“Oh.” There were a few patches of weeds on the island, where drifting soil had settled. “It’s funny. I never used to be very touristy. More the contemplative type. Now I’ve always got to be doing something, you know?”

The agtech dumped more algae into the trough. “I couldn’t say.” She tapped her forehead. “It’s the wetware. If you want to talk shop, that’s fine. Otherwise, I can’t.”

“I see.” Elin dabbed a toe in the warm water. “Well—why not? Let’s talk shop.”

Someone was moving at the far edge of the island. Elin craned her neck to see. The agtech went on methodically dipping her net into the lake as God walked into view.

“The lake tempers the climate, see. By day it works by evaporative cooling. Absorbs the heat, loses it to evaporation, radiates it out the dome roof via the condensors.”

Coral was cute as a button.

A bowl of vegetables had been left near the waterline. She squatted, considered it. Her orange jumpsuit nicely complemented her cafe-au-lait skin. She was so small and delicate that Elin felt ungainly by contrast, an awkward if amiable giant.

“We also use passive heat pumps to move the excess heat down to a liquid storage cavern below the lake.”

Coral picked up a carrot. Her features were finely chiseled, but her almond eyes were remote and unfocused. Even white teeth nipped at the food.

“At night we pump the heat back up, let the lake radiate it out to keep the crater warm.”

On closer examination—Elin had to squint to see so fine—the face was as smooth and lineless as an idiot’s. There was nothing there; no emotion, no purpose, no detectable intellect.

“That’s why the number of waterfalls in operation varies.”

Now Coral sat down on the rocks. Her feet and knees were dirty. She did not move. Elin wanted to shy a rock at her, to see if she would react.

“Keeping the crater tempered is a regular balancing act,” the agtech said.

“Oh, shut up.” Elin took out her briefcase and called Father Landis. “I’m bored,” she said, when the hologram had stabilized.

Landis barely glanced up from her work. “So get a job,” she snapped.

Magritte had begun as a mining colony, back when it was still profitable to process the undifferentiated melange soil. The miners were gone now, and the crater owned by a consortium of operations that were legally debarred from locating Earthside.

From the fifteenth terrace Elin stared down at patchwork clusters of open-air labories and offices, some separated by stretches of undeveloped meadow, others crammed together in the hope of synergistic effect. Germ warfare coporations mingled with nuclear-waste engineeering firms. The Mid-Asian Population Control Project had half a terrace to itself, and it swarmed with guards. There were a few off-Swiss banking operations.

“You realize,” Tory said, “that I’m not going to be at all happy about this development.” His face impassive in red and green, he watched a rigger bolt together a cot and wire in the surgical equipment.

“You hired me yourself,” Elin reminded him.

“Yes, but I’m wired into professional mode at the moment.” The rigger packed up his tools, walked off. “Looks like we’re ready.”

“Good.” Elin flung herself down on the cot, and folded her hands across her chest. “Hey, I feel like I should be holding a lily.”

“I’m hooking you into the project intercom so you don’t get too bored between episodes.” The air about her flickered, and a clutch of images overlaid her vision. Ghosts walked through the air, stared at her from deep within the ground. “Now we’ll shut off the external senses.” The world went away, but the illosory people remained, each within a separate hexagonal field of vision. It was like seeing through the eyes of a fly.

There was a sudden, overwhelming sense of Tory’s presence, and a sourceless voice said, “This will take a minute. Amuse yourself by calling up a few friends.” Then he was gone.

Elin floated, free of body or sensation. She idly riffled through the images, stopping at a chubby little man drawing a black line across his forehead. Hello, Hans, she thought.

He looked up and winked. “How’s it hanging, kid?”

Not so bad. What’re you up to?

“I’m the black box monitor this shift.” He added an orange starburst to the band, surveyed it critically in a mirror. “I sit here with my finger on the button—” one hand disappeared below his terminal—“and if I get the word I push. That sets off explosives in the condensor units and blows the dome. Pfffft. Out goes the air.”

She considered it: A sudden volcano of oxygen spouting up and across the Lunar plains. Human bodies thrown up from the surface, scattering, bursting under explosive decompression.

That’s grotesque, Hans.

“Oh, it’s safe. The button won’t work unless I’m wetwired into my job.”

Even so.

“Just a precaution; a lot of the research that goes on here wouldn’t be allowed without this kind of security. Relax—I haven’t lost a dome yet.”

The intercom cut out, and again Elin felt Tory’s presence. “We’re trying a series of Trojan Horse programs this time—inserting you into the desired mental states instead of making you the states. We’ve encapsulated your surface identity and routed the experimental programs through a secondary level. So with this series, rather than identifying with the programs, you’ll perceive them all indirectly.”

Tory, you have got to be the most jargon-ridden human being in existence. How about repeating that in English?

“I’ll show you.”

Suddenly Elin was englobed in a sphere of branching crimson lines, dark and dull, that throbbed slowly. Lacy and organic, it looked the way she imaged the veins in her forehead to be like when she had a headache.

“That was anger,” Tory said. “Your mind shunted it off into visual imagery because it didn’t identify the anger with itself.”

That’s what you’re going to do then—program me into the God-state so that I can see it but not experience it?

“Ultimately. Though I doubt you’ll be able to come up with visuals. More likely, you’ll feel that you’re in the presence of God.” He withdrew for a moment, leaving her more than alone, almost nonexistent. Then he was back. “We start slowly, though. The first session runs you up to the basic metaprogramming level, integrates all your mental processes and puts you in low-level control of them. The nontechnical term for this is ‘making the Christ.’ Don’t fool around with anything you see or sense.” His voice faded away, and then everything changed.

She was in the presence of someone wonderful.

Elin felt that someone near at hand, and struggled to open her eyes. Existence opened, and people began appearing before her.

“Careful,” Tory said. “You’ve switched on the intercom again.”

I want to see!

“There’s nobody to see. That’s just your own mind. But if you want, you can keep the intercom on.”

Oh. It was disappointing. She was surrounded by love, by a crazily happy sense that the Universe was holy, by wisdom deeper than the world. By all rights, it had to come from a source greater than herself.

Reason was not strong enough to override emotion. She riffled through the intercom, bringing up image after image and discarding them all, searching. When she had run through the project staff, she began hungrily scanning the crater’s public monitors.

Agtechs in the trellis-farms were harvesting strawberries and snow peas. Elin could taste them on her tongue. Somebody was seining up algae from the inner lake, and she felt the weight of the net in calloused hands. Not far from where she lay, a couple was making love in a grove of saplings and she …

Tory, I don’t think I can take this. It’s too intense.

“You’re the one who wanted to be a test pilot.”

Dammit, Tory—!

Donna Landis materialized on the intercom. “She’s right, Shostokovich. You haven’t buffered her enough.”

“It didn’t seem wise to risk dissociative effects by cranking her ego up too high—”

“Who’s paying for all this, hah?”

Tory grumbled something inaudible, and dissolved the world.

Elin floated in blackness. She felt good. She had needed this break from the tensions and pressures of her new personality. Taking the position had been the right move, even if it did momentarily displease Tory.

Tory … She smiled mentally. He was exasperating at times, but still she was coming to rely on having him around. She was beginning to think she might be in love with him.

A lesser love, perhaps. Not the God-love. Not the love that is the Christ.

Well, maybe so. Still, on a human level, Tory filled needs in her she hadn’t known existed. It was too much effort to think about, though. Her thoughts drifted away into a wordless, luxurious reveling in the bodiless state, free from distractions, carefree and disconnected.

Nothing is disconnected. All the Universe is a vast net of intermeshing programs. Elin was amused at herself. That had sounded like something Tory would say. She’d have to watch it; she might love the man, but she didn’t want to end up talking like him.

You worry needlessly. The thoughts of God are not your own.

Elin started. She searched through her mind for an open intercom channel, and didn’t find one. Hello, she thought. Who said that?

The answer came to her not in words, but in a sourceless assertion of identity. It was cool, emotionless, something she could not describe even to herself, but by the same token absolute and undeniable.

It was God.

Then Tory was back and the voice, the presence, was gone. Tory? she thought, I think I just had a religious experience.

“That’s very common under sensory deprivation—the mind clears out a few old programs. Nothing to worry about. Now relax for a jiff while I plug you back in—how does that feel?”

The Presence was back again, but not nearly so strongly as before; she could resist the urge to chase after it. That’s fine, Tory, but listen, I really think—

“Let’s leave analysis to those who have been programmed for it, shall we?”

The lovers strolled aimlessly through a meadow, grass brushing up against their waists. Biological night was coming; the agtechs flicked the daylight off and on twice in warning.

“It was real, Tory. She talked with me; I’m not making it up.”

Tory ran a hand through his dark, curly hair, looking abstracted. “Well. Assuming that my professional opinion was wrong—and I’ll admit that the program is a bit egocentric—I still don’t think we need stoop to mysticism for an explanation.”

To the far side of Magritte, a waterfall abruptly shut off. The stream of water scattered, dissolving in the air. “I thought you said she was God.”

“I only said that to bait Landis. I don’t mean that she’s literally God, just godlike. Her thought processes are a million years more efficiently organized than ours. God is just a convenient metaphor.”

“Um. So what’s your explanation?”

“There’s a terminal on the island—the things are everywhere. She probably programmed it to cut into the intercom without the channels seeming to be open.”

“Could she do that?”

“Why not? She has that million-year edge on us—and she used to be a wetware tech; all wetware techs are closet computer hacks.” He did not look at her, had not looked at her for some time.

“Hey.” She reached out to take his hand. “What’s wrong with you tonight?”

“Me?” He did not meet her eyes. “Don’t mind me, I’m just sulking because you took the job. I’ll get over it.”

“What’s wrong with the job?”

“Nothing. I’m just being moody.”

She guided his arm around her waist, pressed up against him. “Well, don’t be. I have to have work to do. My boredom threshold is very low.”

“I know that.” He finally turned to face her, smiled sadly. “I do love you, you know.”

“Well … maybe I love you too.”

His smile banished all sadness from his face, like a sudden wind that breaks apart the clouds. “Say it again.” His hands reached out to touch her shoulders, her neck, her face. “One more time, with feeling.”

“Will not!” Laughing, she tried to break away from him, but he would not let go, and they fell in a tangle to the ground. “Beast!” They rolled over and over in the grass. “Brute!” She hammered at his chest, tore open his jumpsuit, tried to bite his neck.

Tory looked embarrassed, tried to pull away. “Hey, not out here! Somebody could be watching.”

The agtechs switched off the arc lamps, plunging Magritte into darkness.

Tory reached up to touch Elin’s face. They made love.

Physically it was no different from things she had done countless times before with lovers and friends and the occasional stranger. But she was committing herself now, letting Tory past her defenses, laying herself open to pain and hurt. Trusting him. He was a part of her now. And everything was transformed, made new and wonderful.

Until they were right at the brink of orgasm, the both of them, and half delirious she could let herself go, murmuring, “I love you, love you, God I love you …” And just as she climaxed, Tory stiffened and arced his head back, and in a voice that was wrenched from the depths of passion, whispered, “Coral …”

Half-blind with fury, Elin strode through a cluster of huts glowing softly from the holotapes within—diffuse, scattered rainbow patterns unreadable outside their fields of focus. She’d left Tory behind, bewildered, two terraces above.

She came to a particular hut and, because she had to talk to somebody, rapped on the lintel.

Father Landis stuck her head out the doorway, blinked sleepily. “Oh, it’s you, Donnelly. What do you want?”

To her absolute horror, Elin broke into tears.

Landis ducked back inside, re-emerged zipping up her jumpsuit. She cuddled Elin in her arms, made soothing noises, listened to her story.

“Coral,” Landis said. “Ahhhh. Suddenly everything falls into place.”

“Well, I wish you’d tell me, then!” She tried to blink away the angry tears. Her face felt red and raw and ugly; the wetware paint was all smeared.

“Patience, child.” Landis sat down cross-legged beside the hut, patted the ground beside her. “Sit here and pretend that I’m your Mommy, and I’ll tell you a story.”

“Hey, I didn’t come here—”

“Who are you to criticize the latest techniques in spiritual nurturing, hey?” Landis chided gently. “Sit.”

Elin did so. Landis put an arm about her shoulder.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Coral—I forget her last name. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, she was bright and emotional and ambitious and frivolous and just-like-you in every way.” She rocked Elin gently as she spoke.

“Coral was a happy little girl, and she laughed and played and one day she fell in love. Just like that!” She snapped her fingers. “I imagine you know how she felt.”

“This is kind of embarrassing.”

“Hush. Well, she was very lucky, for as much as she loved him, he loved her a hundred times back, and for as much as he loved her, she loved him a thousand times back. And so it went. I think they overdid it a bit, but that’s just my personal opinion.

“Now Coral lived in Magritte and worked as a wetware tech. She was an ambitious one, too—they’re the worst kind. She came up with a scheme to reprogram people so they could live outside the programs that run them in their everyday lives. Mind you, people are more than the sum of their programming, but what did she know about free will? She hadn’t had any religious training, after all. So she and her boyfriend wrote up a proposal, and applied for funding, and together they ran the new program through her skull. And when it was all done, she thought she was God. Only she wasn’t Coral anymore—not so’s you’d recognize her.”

She paused to give Elin a hug. “Be strong, kid, here comes the rough part. Well, her boyfriend was broken-hearted. He didn’t want to eat, and he didn’t want to play with his friends. He was a real shit to work with. But then he got an idea.

“You see, anyone who works with experimental wetware has her personality permanently recorded in case there’s an accident and it needs to be restored. And if that person dies or becomes God, the personality rights revert to IGF. They’re sneaky like that.

“Well. Tory—did I mention his name was Tory?—thought to himself: What if somebody were to come here for a new personality? Happens about twice a year. Bound to get worse in the future. And Magritte is the only place this kind of work can be done. The personality bank is random-accessed by computer, so there’s be a chance of his getting Coral back, just as good as new. Only not a very good chance, because there’s lots of garbage stuffed into the personality bank.

“And then he had a bad thought. But you mustn’t blame him for it. He was working from a faulty set of moral precepts. Suppose, he thought, he rigged the computer so that instead of choosing randomly, it would give Coral’s personality to the very first little girl who came along? And that was what he did.” Landis lapsed into silence.

Elin wiped back a sniffle. “How does the story end?”

“I’m still waiting on that one.”

“Oh.” Elin pulled herself together and stood. Landis followed.

“Listen. Remember what I told you about being a puppy tripping over its paws? Well, you’ve just stubbed your toes and they hurt. But you’ll get over it. People do.”

“Today we make a Buddha,” Tory said. Elin fixed him with a cold stare, said nothing, even though he was in green and red, immune. “This is a higher-level program, integrating all your mental functions and putting them under your conscious control. So it’s especially important that you keep your hands to yourself, okay?”

“Rot in hell, you cancer.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Elin did not respond, and after a puzzled silence Tory continued: “I’m leaving your sensorium operative, so when I switch you over, I want you to pay attention to your surround. Okay?”

The second Trojan Horse came on. Everything changed.

It wasn’t a physical change, not one that could be seen with the eyes. It was more as if the names for everything had gone away. A knee-tall oak grew nearby, very much like the one she had crushed accidentally in New Detroit when she had lost her virginity many years ago. And it meant nothing to her. It was only wood growing out of the ground. A mole poked its head out of its burrow, nose crinkling, pink eyes weak. It was just a small, biological machine. “Whooh,” she said involuntarily. “This is cold.”

“Bother you?”

Elin studied him, and there was nothing there. Only a human being, as much an object as the oak, and no more. She felt nothing toward or against him. “No,” she said.

“We’re getting a good recording.” The words meant nothing: they were clumsy, devoid of content.

In the grass around her, Elin saw a gray flickering, as if it were all subtly on fire. Logically she knew the flickering was the firing of nerves in the rods and cones of her eyes, but emotionally it was something else: It was Time. A gray fire that destroyed the world constantly, eating it away and remaking it again and again.

And it didn’t matter.

A great calmness wrapped itself around Elin, an intelligent detachment, cold and impersonal. She found herself identifying with it, realizing that existence was simply not important. It was all things, objects.

She could not see Tory’s back, was no longer willing to assume it even existed. She could look up and see the near side of the Earth. The far side might well not exist, and if it didn’t, well that didn’t matter either.

She stripped away the world, ignored the externalities. I never realized how dependent I am on sensory input, she thought. And if you ignored it—

—there was the Void. It had no shape or color or position, but it was what underlay the bright interplay of colors that was constantly being destroyed by the gray fires of time. She contemplated the raw stuff of existence.

“Please don’t monkey around with your programming,” Tory said.

The body was unimportant too; it was only the focal point for her senses. Ignore them, and you could ignore it. Elin could feel herself fading in the presence of the Void. It had no material existence, no real being. But neither had the world she had always taken for granted—it was but an echo, a ghost, an image reflected in water.

It was like being a program in a machine and realizing it for the first time.

Landis’ voice flooded her. “Donnelly, for God’s sake, keep your fingers off the experiment!” The thing was, the underlying nothingness was real—if “real” had any meaning. If meaning had meaning. But beyond real and beyond meaning, there is what is. And she had found it.

“Donnelly, you’re treading on dangerous ground. You’ve—” Landis’s voice was a distraction, and she shut it off. Elin felt the desire to merge with what was; one simply had to stop the desire for it, she realized, and it was done.

But on this realization, horror collapsed upon her. Flames ran up her mind; they seared and burned and crisped, and there were snakes among them, great slimy things with disgusting mouths and needle-sharp fangs.

She recoiled in panic, and they were upon her. The flames were drawn up into her lungs, and hot maggots wallowed through her brain tissues. She fled through a mind that writhed in agony, turning things on and off.

Until abruptly she was back in her body, and nothing pursued her. She shivered, and her body responded. It felt wonderful.

“Well, that worked at least,” Tory said.

“What—” her voice croaked. She cleared her throat and tried again. “What happened?”

“Just what we’d hoped for—when your mind was threatened with extinction, it protected itself by reprogramming back down to a normal state. Apparently keeping your ego cranked up high works.”

Elin realized that her eyes were still closed; she opened them now and convulsively closed her hand around the edge of the cot. It was solid and real to the touch. So good.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” Tory said. “Just now, though, I think you need to rest.” He touched a bone inductor and Elin fell into blackness.

Floating again, every metaphorical nerve on edge, Elin found herself hypersensitive to outside influences, preternaturally aware, even suggestible. Still, she suspected more than sensed Coral’s presence. Go away, she thought. This is my mind now.

I am here and I am always. You have set foot in my country, and are dimly aware of my presence. When you have climbed into the mountains you will truly know me; and then you will be as I.

Everyone tells me what I’m going to do, Elin thought angrily. Don’t I get any say in this?

The thought was almost amused: You are only a program caught in a universal web of programming. You will do as your program dictates. To be free of the program is to be God.

Despite her anger, despite her hurt, despite the cold trickle of fear she tried to keep to the background, Elin was curious. What’s it like? she couldn’t help asking.

It is freedom. The universe is a bubble infinitely large, and we who are God are the film on its outside. We interact and we program. We make the stars shine and the willows grow. We program what you will want for lunch. The programming flows through us and we alter it and maintain the universe.

Elin pounced on this last statement. Haven’t done a very good job of it, have you?

We do not tamper. When you are one with us, you will understand.

This was, Elin realized, the kind of question-and-answer session Coral must have gone through as part of the Star Maker project. She searched for a question that no one else would have asked, one that would be hers alone. And after some thought, she found it.

Do you still—personally—love Tory Shostokovich?

There was a slight pause, then—The kind of love you mean is characteristic of lower-order programming. Not of program-free intelligence.

A moment later Tory cancelled all programming, and she floated to the surface, leaving God behind. But even before then she was acutely aware that she had not received a straight answer.

“Elin, we’ve got to talk.”

She was patched into the outside monitors, staring across Mare Imbrium. It was a straight visual program; she could feel the wetwire leads dangling down her neck, the warm humid air of Magritte against her skin. “Nothing to talk about,” she said.

“Dammit, yes there is! I’m not about to lose you again because of a misunderstanding, a—a matter of semantics.”

The thing about Outside was its airless clarity. Rocks and shadows were so preternaturally sharp. From a sensor on the crater’s seaward slope, she stared off into Mare Imbrium; it was monotonous, but in a comforting sort of way. A little like when she had made a Buddha. There was no meaning out there, nothing to impose itself between her and the surface.

“I don’t know how you found out about Coral,” Tory said, “and I guess it doesn’t matter. I always figured you’d find out sooner or later. That’s not important. What matters is that I love you—”

“Oh, hush up!”

“—and that you love me. You can’t pretend you don’t.”

Elin felt her nails dig into her palms. “Sure I can.” She hopscotched down the crater to the surface. There the mass driver stood, a thin monorail stretching kilometers into the Imbrium, its gentle slope all but imperceptible.

“You’re identifying with the woman who used to be Elin Donnelly. There’s nothing wrong with that; speaking as a wetsurgeon, it’s a healthy sign. But it’s something you’ve got to grow out of.”

“Listen, Shostokovich, tinkering around with my emotions doesn’t change who I am. I’m not your dead lady-friend, and I’m not about to take her place. So why don’t you just go away and stop jerking me around, huh?”

Tiny repair robots prowled the mass driver’s length, stopping occasionally for a spot-weld. Blue sparks sputtered soundlessly over the surface.

“You’re not the old Elin Donnelly either, and I think you know it. Bodies are transient, memories are nothing. Your spontaneity and grace, your quiet strength, your impatience—the small lacks and presences of you I’ve known and loved for years—are what make you yourself. The name doesn’t matter, nor the past. You are who you are, and I love you for it.”

“Yeah, well, what I am does not love you, buster.”

One of the repairbots slowly fell off the driver. It hit, bounced, struggled to regain its treads, then scooted back toward its work.

Tory’s voice was almost regretful. “You do, though. You can’t hide that from me. I know you as your lover and your wetsurgeon. You’ve let me become a part of you, and no matter how angry you might temporarily be, you’ll come back to me.”

Elin could feel her body trembling with rage. “Yeah, well if that’s true, then why tell me? Hah? Why not just go back to your hut and wait for me to come crawling?”

“Because I want you to quit your job.”

“Say what?”

“I don’t want you to become God. It was a mistake the last time, and I’m afraid it won’t be any better with the new programs. If you go up into God and can’t get down this time, you’ll do it the next. And the next. I’ll spend my life here waiting for you, recreating you, losing you. Can’t you see it—year after year, replaying the same tired old tape?” Tory’s voice fell to a whisper. “I don’t think I could take it even once more.”

“If you know me as well as you say, then I guess you know my answer,” Elin said coldly.

She waited until Tory’s footsteps moved away, fading, defeat echoing after. Only then did Elin realize that her sensor had been scanning the same empty bit of Magritte’s slope for the last five minutes.

It was time for the final Trojan Horse. “Today we make a God,” Tory said. “This is a total conscious integration of the mind in an optimal efficiency pattern. Close your eyes and count to three.”

One. The hell of it, Elin realized, was that Tory was right. She stil loved him. He was the one man she wanted and was empty without.

Two. Worse, she didn’t know how long she could go on without coming back to him—and, good God, would that be humiliating!

She was either cursed or blessed; cursed perhaps for the agonies and humiliations she would willingly undergo for the sake of this one rather manipulative human being. Or maybe blessed in that at least there was someone who could move her so, deserving or not. Many went through their lives without.

Three. She opened her eyes.

Nothing was any different. Magritte was as ordinary, as mundane as ever, and she felt no special reaction to it one way or another. Certainly she did not feel the presence of God.

“I don’t think this is working,” she tried to say. The words did not come. From the corner of her eye, she saw Tory wiping clean his facepaint, shucking off his jumpsuit. But when she tried to sit up, she found herself paralyzed.

What is this maniac doing?

Tory’s face loomed over her. His hair was a tangled mess; her fingers itched to run a comb through it. “Forgive me, love.” He kissed her forehead lightly, her lips ever so gently. Then he was out of her field of vision, stretching out on the grass beside the cot.

Elin stared up at the dome roof, thinking: No. She heard him strap the bond inductors to his body, one by one, and then a sharp click as he switched on a recorder. The programming began to flow into him.

A long wait—perhaps twenty seconds viewed objectively—as the wetware was loaded. Another click as the recorder shut off. A moment of silence, and then—

Tory gasped. One arm flew up into her field of vision, swooped down out of it, and he began choking. Elin struggled against her paralysis, could not move. Something broke noisily, a piece of equipment by the sound of it, and the choking and gasping continued. He began thrashing wildly.

Tory, Tory, what’s happening to you?

“It’s just a grand mal seizure,” Landis said. “Nothing we can’t cope with, nothing we weren’t prepared for.” She touched Elin’s shoulder reassuringly, called back to the crowd huddling about Tory, “Hey! One of you loopheads—somebody there know any programming? Get the lady out of this.”

A tech scurried up, made a few simple adjustments with her machinery. The others—still gathering, Landis had been only the third on the scene—were trying to hold Tory still, to fit a bone inductor against his neck. There was a sudden gabble of comment, and Tory flopped convulsively. Then a collective sigh as his muscles eased and his spasms ceased.

“There,” the tech said, and Elin scrabbled off the couch.

She pushed through the people (and a small voice in the back of her head marveled: A crowd! How strange,) and knelt before Tory, cradling his head in her arms.

He shivered, eyes wide and unblinking. “Tory, what’s the matter?”

He turned those terrible eyes on her. “Nichevo.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Landis said. “Or maybe ‘it doesn’t matter,’ is a better translation.”

A wetware tech had taken control, shoving the crowd back. He reported to Landis, his mouth moving calmly under the interplay of green and red. “Looks like a flaw in the programming philosophy. We were guessing that bringing the ego along would make God such an unpleasant experience that the subject would let us deprogram without interfering—now we know better.”

Elin stroked Tory’s forehead. His muscles clenched, then loosened, as a medtech reprogrammed the body respondes. “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?” she demanded.

“Take a look,” Landis said, and patched her into the intercom. In her mind’s eye, Elin could see dozens of wetware techs submitting program after program. A branching wetware diagram filled one channel, and as she watched minor changes would occur as programs took hold, then be unmade as Tory’s mind rejected them. “We’ve got an imagery tap of his Weltanschauung coming up,” some nameless tech reported.

Something horrible appeared on a blank channel.

Elin could only take an instant’s exposure before her mind reflexively shut the channel down, but that instant was more than enough. She stood in a room infinitely large and cluttered in all dimensions with great noisome machines. They were tended by malevolent demons who shrieked and cackled and were machines themselves, and they generated pain and madness.

The disgust and revulsion she felt could not be put into words—no more than could the actual experience of what she had seen. And yet— she knew this much about wetware techniques—it was only a rough approximation, a cartoon, of what was going through Tory’s head.

Elin’s body trembled with shock, and by slow degrees she realized that she had retreated to the surface world. Tory’s head was cradled in her arms. A wetware tech standing nearby looked stunned, her face gray.

Elin gathered herself together, said as gently as she could, “Tory, what is that you’re seeing?”

Tory turned his stark, haunted eyes on her, and it took an effort of will not to flinch. Then he spoke, shockingly calmly.

“It is—what is. Reality. The universe is a damned cold machine, and all of us only programs within it. We perform the actions we have no choice but to perform, and then we fade into nothingness. It’s a cruel and noisy place.”

“I don’t understand—didn’t you always say that we were just programs? Wasn’t that what you always believed?”

“Yes, but now I experience it.”

Elin noticed that her hand was slowly stroking his hair; she did not try to stop it. “Then come down, Tory. Let them deprogram you.”

He did not look away. “Nichevo,” he said.

The tech, recovered from her shock, reached toward a piece of equipment. Landis batted her hand away. “Hold it right there, techie! Just what do you think you’re doing?”

The woman looked impatient. “He left instructions that if the experiment turned out badly, I was to pull the terminator switch.”

“That’s what I thought. There’ll be no mercy killings while I’m on the job, Mac.”

“I don’t understand.” The tech backed away, puzzled. “Surely you don’t want him to suffer.”

Landis was gathering herself for a withering reply when the intercom cut them all off. A flash of red shot through the sensorium, along with the smell of bitter almond, a prickle of static electricity, the taste of kimchi. “Emergency! We’ve got an emergency!” A black and white face materialized in Elin’s mind. “Emergency!”

Landis flipped into the circuit. “What’s the problem? Show us.”

“You’re not going to believe this.” The face disappeared, was replaced by a wide-angle shot of the lake.

The greenish-black water was calm and stagnant. The thrust-cone island, with its scattered grass and weeds, slumbered.

And God walked upon the water.

They gawked, all of them. Coral walked across the lake, her pace determined but not hurried, her face serene. The pink soles of her bare feet only just touched the surface.

I didn’t believe her, Elin thought wildly. She saw Father Landis begin to cross herself, her mouth hanging open, eyes wide in disbelief. Halfway through her gesture, the Jesuitical wetware took hold. Her mouth snapped shut, and her face became cold and controlled. She pulled herself up straight.

“Hans,” the priest said, “push the button.”

“No!” Elin shrieked, but it was too late. Still hooked into the intercom, she saw the funny little man briskly, efficiently obey.

For an instant, nothing happened. Then bright glints of light appeared at all of the condensor units, harsh and actinic. Steam and smoke gushed from the machinery, and a fraction of a second later, there was an ear-slapping gout of sound.

Bits of the sky were blown away.

Elin turned, twisted, fell. She scrambled across the ground, and threw her arms around Tory.

The air was in turmoil. The holes in the dome roof—small at first—grew as more of the dome flaked away, subjected to stresses it was designed not to take. An uncanny whistling grew to a screech, then a scream, and then there was an all-encompassing whoomph and the dome shattered.

Elin was flung upward, torn away from Tory, painfully flung high and away. All the crater was in motion, the rocks tearing out of the floor, the trees splintering upward, the lake exploding into steam.

The screaming died—the air was gone. Elin’s ears rang furiously, and her skin stung everywhere. Pressure grew within her, the desire of her blood to mate with the vacuum, and Elin realized that she was about to die.

A quiet voice said: This must not be.

Time stopped.

Elin hung suspended between Moon and death. The shards and fragments of an instant past crystallized and shifted. The world became … not misty, actually, but apositional. Both it and she grew tentative, possibilities rather than actual things.

Come be God with me now, Coral said, but not to Elin.

Tory’s presence flooded the soupy uncertainty, a vast and powerful thing, but wrong somehow, twisted. But even as Elin felt this, there was a change within him, a sloughing off of identity, and he seemed to straighten, to heal.

All around, the world began to grow more numinous, more real. Elin felt tugged in five directions at once. Tory’s presence swelled briefly, then dwindled, became a spark, less than a spark, nothing.

Yes.

With a roaring of waters and a shattering of rocks, with an audible thump, the world returned.

Elin unsteadily climbed down the last flight of stone stairs from the terraces to the lakefront. She passed by two guards at the foot of the stairs, their facepaint as hastily applied as their programming, several more on the way to the nearest trellis farm. They were everywhere since the incident.

She found the ladder up into the farm and began climbing. It was biological night, and the agtechs were long gone.

Hand over hand she climbed, as far and high as she could, until she was afraid she would miss a rung and tumble off. Then she swung onto a ledge, wedging herself between strawberry and yam planters. She looked down on the island, and though she was dizzyingly high, she was only a third of the way up.

“Now what the hell am I doing here?” she mumbled to herself. She swung her legs back and forth, answered her own question: “Being piss-ass drunk.” She cackled. There was something she didn’t have to share with Coral. She was capable of getting absolutely blitzed, and walking away from the bar before it hit her. It was something metabolic.

Below, Tory and Coral sat quietly on their monkey-island. They did not touch, did not make love or hold hands or even glance one at the other—they just sat. Being Gods.

Elin squinted down at the two. “Like to upchuck all over you,” she muttered. Then she squeezed her eyes and fists tight, drawing tears and pain. Dammit, Tory!

Blinking hard, she looked away from the island, down into the jet-black waters of the lake. The brighter stars were reflected there. A slight breeze rippled the water, making them twinkle and blink, as if lodged in a Terran sky. They floated lightly on the surface, swarmed and coalesced, and formed Tory’s face in the lake. He smiled warmly, invitingly.

A hand closed around her arm, and she looked up into the stern face of a security guard. “You’re drunk, Ms,” he said, “and you’re endangering property.”

She looked where he pointed, at a young yam plant she had squashed when she sat down, and began to laugh. Smoothly, professionally, the guard rolled up her sleeve, clamped a plastic bracelet around her wrist. “Time to go,” he said.

By the time the guard had walked Elin up four terraces, she was nearly sober. A steady trickle of her blood wound through the bracelet, was returned to her body cleansed of alcohol. Sacrilegious waste of wine, in her opinion.

In another twenty steps, the bracelet fell off her wrist. The guard snapped it neatly from the air, disappeared. Despair closed in on her again. Tory, my love! And since there was no hope of sleep, she kept on trudging up the terraces, back toward Hans’s rathskeller, for another bellyful of wine.

There was a small crowd seated about the rock that served Hans as a table, lit by a circle of hologram-generated fairy-lights. Father Landis was there, and drinking heavily. “Tomorrow I file my report,” she announced. “The Synod is pulling out of this, withdrawing funding.”

Hans sighed, took a long swig of his own wine, winced at its taste. “I guess that’s it for the Star Maker project, huh?”

Landis crossed her fingers. “Pray God.” Elin, standing just outside the circle, stood silently, listening.

“I don’t ever want to hear that name again,” a tech grumbled.

“You mustn’t confuse God with what you’ve just seen,” Landis admonished.

“Hey,” Hans said. “She moved time backwards or something. I saw it. This place exploded—doesn’t that prove something?”

Landis grinned, reached out to ruffle his hair. “Sometimes I worry about you, Hans. You have an awfully small concept of God.” Several of the drinkers laughed.

He blushed, said, “No, really.”

“Well, I’ll try to keep this—” she leaned forward, rapped her mug against the rock, “fill this up again, hey?—keep it simple. We had analysts crawl up and down Coral’s description of the universe, and did you know there was no place in it anywhere for such things as mercy, hope, faith? No, we got an amalgam of substrates, supraprograms, and selfmetaediting physics. Now what makes God superior is not just intellect—we’ve all known some damn clever bastards. And it’s not power, or I could buy an atomic device on the black market and start my own religion.

“No, by definition God is my moral superior. Now I myself am but indifferent honest—but to Coral moral considerations don’t even exist. Get it?”

Only Elin noticed the haunted, hopeless light in Landis’ eyes, or realized that she was spinning words effortlessly, without conscious control. That deep within, the woman was caught in a private crisis of faith.

“Yeah, I guess.” Hans scratched his head. “I’d still like to know just what happened between her and Tory there at the end.”

“I can answer that,” a wetware tech said. The others turned to face her, and she smirked, the center of attention. “What the hell, they plant the censor blocks in us all tomorrow—this is probably my only chance to talk about it.

“We reviewed all the tapes, and found that the original problem stemmed from a basic design flaw. Shostokovich should never have brought his ego along. The God-state is very ego-threatening; he couldn’t accept it. His mind twisted it, denied it, made it into a thing of horror. Because to accept it would mean giving up his identity.” She paused for emphasis.

“Now we don’t understand the why or how of what happened. But what was done is very clearly recorded. Coral came along and stripped away his identity.”

“Hogwash.” Landis was on her feet, belligerant and unsteady. “After all that happened, you can’t say they don’t have any identity! Look at the mess that Coral made to join Tory to her—that wasn’t the work of an unfeeling, identity-free creature.”

“Our measurements showed no trace of identity at all,” the tech said in a miffed tone.

“Measurements! Well, isn’t that just scientific as all get-out?” The priest’s face was flushed with drunken anger. “Have any of you clowns given any thought to just what we’ve created here? This gestalt being is still young—a new-born infant. Someday it’s going to grow up. What happens to us all when it decides to leave the island, hey? I—” She stopped, her voice trailing away. The drinkers were silent, had drawn away from her.

“’Scuse me,” she muttered. “Too much wine.” And sat.

“Well.” Hans cleared his throat, quirked a smile. “Anybody for refills?”

The crowd came back to life, a little too boisterous, too noisily, determinedly cheerful. Watching from the fringes, outside the circle of light, Elin had a sudden dark fantasy, a waking nightmare.

A desk-tech glanced her way. He had Tory’s eyes. When he looked away, Tory smiled out of another’s face. The drinkers shifted restlessly, chattering and laughing, like dancers pantomiming a party in some light opera, and the eyes danced with them. They flitted from person to person, materializing now here, now there, surfacing whenever an individual chanced to look her way. A quiet voice said, “We were fated to be lovers.”

Go away, go away, go away, Elin thought furiously, and the hallucination ceased.

After a moment spent composing herself, Elin quietly slipped around to where Landis sat. “I’m leaving in the morning,” she said. The new persona had taken; they would not remove her facepaint until just before the lift up, but that was mere formality. She was cleared to leave.

Landis looked up, and for an instant the woman’s doubt and suffering were writ plain on her face. Then the mask was back, and she smiled. “Just stay away from experimental religion, hey kid?” They hugged briefly. “And remember what I told you about stubbing your toes.”

There was one final temptation to be faced. Sitting in the hut, Tory’s terminal in her lap, Elin let the soothing green light of its alphanumerics wash over her. She thought of Tory. Of his lean body under hers in the pale blue Earthlight. “We were meant to be lovers,” he’d said. She thought of life without him.

The terminal was the only artifact Tory had left behind that held any sense of his spirit. It had been his plaything, his diary and his toolbox, and its memory still held the Trojan Horse programs he had been working with when he was—transformed.

One of those programs would make her a God.

She stared up through the ivy at the domed sky. Only a few stars were visible between the black silhouetted leaves, and these winked off and on with the small movements of breathing. She thought back to Coral’s assertion that Elin would soon join her, merging into the unselfed autistic state that only Tory’s meddling had spared her.

“God always keeps her promises,” Tory said quietly.

Elin started, looked down, and saw that the grass to the far side of the hut was moving, flowing. Swiftly it formed the familiar, half-amused, half-embittered features of her lover, continued to flow until all of his head and part of his torso rose up from the floor.

She was not half so startled as she would have liked to be. Of course the earlier manifestations of Tory had been real, not phantoms thrown up by her grief. They were simply not her style.

Still, Elin rose to her feet apprehensively. “What do you want from me?”

The loam-and-grass figure beckoned. “Come. It is time you join us.”

“I am not a program,” Elin whispered convulsively. She backed away from the thing. “I can make my own decisions!”

She turned and plunged outside, into the fresh, cleansing night air. It braced her, cleared her head, returned to her some measure of control.

A tangle of honeysuckle vines on the next terrace wall up moved softly. Slowly, gently, they became another manifestation, of Coral this time, with blossoms for the pupils of her eyes. But she spoke with Tory’s voice.

“You would not enjoy Godhood,” he said, “but the being you become will.”

“Give me time to think!” she cried. She wheeled and strode rapidly away. Out of the residential cluster, through a scattering of boulders, and into a dark meadow.

There was a quiet kind of peace here, and Elin wrapped it about her. She needed that peace, for she had to decide between her humanity and Tory. It should have been an easy choice, but—the pain of being without!

Elin stared up at the Earth; it was a world full of pain. If she could reach out and shake all the human misery loose, it would flood all of Creation, extinguishing the stars and poisoning the space between.

There was, if not comfort, then a kind of cold perspective in that, in realizing that she was not alone, that she was merely another member of the commonality of pain. It was the heritage of her race. And yet—somehow—people kept on going.

If they could do it, so could she.

Some slight noise made her look back at the boulder field. Tory’s face was appearing on each of the stones, every face slightly different, so that he gazed upon her with a dozen expressions of love. Elin shivered at how alien he had become. “Your need is greater than your fear,” he said, the words bouncing back and forth between faces. “No matter what you think now, by morning you will be part of us.”

Elin did not reply immediately. There was something in her hand—Tory’s terminal. It was small, and weighed hardly at all. She had brought it along without thinking.

A small, bleak cry came from overhead, then several others. Nighthawks were feeding on insects near the dome roof. They were too far, too fast, and too dark to be visible from here. “Can you understand that? I

“The price is too high,” she said at last. “Can you understand that? I won’t give up my humanity for you.”

She hefted the terminal in her hand, then threw it as far and as hard as she could. She did not hear it fall.

Elin turned and walked away.

Behind her, the rocks smiled knowingly.

JACK DANN

Bad Medicine

“Magic is alive,” declares one line of a well-known poem by Leonard Cohen, and it certainly is alive and afoot in the taut and scary story that follows, which explores the Old Ways and unknown forces which still exist everywhere on the periphery of our brightly-lit and tidily-rational modern world …

One of the most respected writer/editors of his generation, Jack Dann began writing in 1970 and first established his reputation with the critically acclaimed novella “Junction,” which was a Nebula finalist in 1973; he has been a Nebula finalist six more times since then, and a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. His short fiction has appeared in Omni, Orbit, Playboy, Penthouse, New Dimensions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Shadows, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Berkley Showcase, and elsewhere. His books include the novels Starhiker and Junction, and Timetipping, a collection of his short fiction. As an anthologist, he edited one of the most famous anthologies of the ’70s, Wandering Stars, a collection of fantasy and SF on Jewish themes; his other anthologies include More Wandering Stars, Immortal, Faster Than Light (co-edited with George Zebrowski), and several anthologies co-edited with Gardner Dozois: Future Power, Aliens!, Unicorns!, and Magicats! His most recent book is the critically-acclaimed novel The Man Who Melted, widely hailed as one of the most powerful and compelling novels of 1984. He is currently at work on a new novel, Counting Coup. Upcoming are two more anthologies co-edited with Gardner Dozois, Bestiary! and Mermaids!, both from Ace. His story “Blind Shemmy,” a Nebula finalist, was in our First Annual Edition.

Stephen was trapped in the sweaty darkness and eagles were devouring him, tearing off pieces of flesh and flapping their wings, blasting him with waves of wet searing air.

He woke up coughing, pushing his way out of the dream and into the secure and familiar darkness of his bedroom. His wife Helen stirred beside him, then turned over, pushing her rump against him. He looked over at the digital clock on the nightstand: it was five-thirty in the morning.

He sat up in bed. He had a long drive ahead of him, and he was nervous about going. That was why he had slept fitfully during the night. It was a relief to be awake, to be going. The morning darkness made everything seem unreal now that he was sitting up in bed, already removed from the security of everything he knew and loved. He felt like a ghost in his own house.

Who the hell would have thought that he, of all people, would be getting into this kind of stuff? Into religion, and Indian religion at that … as if his own wouldn’t do. Christ, being a Jew was hard enough. Well, he thought, if I hadn’t met John, then it probably would have been something else. He was looking for something … some kind of meaning, something that rang true. An authentic religious experience. He’d smoked the pipe with John, who rented the furnished room under Stephen’s real estate office, smoked it out of curiosity, or perhaps just to do something he could talk about. But when he smoked that pipe in the woods with John, he felt … something, something that breathed power and truth. It was as if Stephen could somehow feel everything the earth felt … he couldn’t verbalize it. He still couldn’t say if he really believed. But he was willing to believe.

He smiled to himself. He was a realtor turned mystic.

“Steve?” Helen mumbled, then, as if finding her voice, she said, “What are you doing up at this hour?”

“I told you, I’m going with John to that guy’s vision-quest ceremony.”

“Oh, Jesus … why don’t you just take us to the Temple? The kids would like that. It is Saturday.”

“We’ve been over this a million times,” Stephen said. “I know how you feel, but this is something I want to do. Please try to understand. Think of it as a passing phase, male menopause, something like that.”

She reached toward him, but he was too geared up to make love. His mind was on the ceremonies, on the vision-quest and the sweat-lodge. Some guy was going to sit naked on top of a hill without eating or drinking for four days … just to have a vision. Screaming for a vision, they called it. And he, Stephen, was going to sit in a sweat-lodge … if he could survive it.

He wished he could just make love to Helen and make everything right. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t turn himself on and off.

She drew away from him; he knew she was hurt and angry. “First it was all that Zen-Buddhism business at the college,” she said, “and then that pseudo-Jungian philosopher, that self-styled guru, what was his name?”

Stephen winced, and shook his head. “I don’t remember … .”

“And then there was the Transcendental Meditation kick, and that goddamn EST, which you dragged me into. Christ, that was the worst. They wouldn’t even let you go to the bathroom during those stupid meetings. And now it’s something else. Do you really believe in all this Indian business?”

“I don’t know what I believe in.”

“And I don’t know why I converted … you don’t seem to want to have anything to do with your own religion.”

“We did it for the family,” Stephen said lamely. Helen had always been a religious woman; she knew that God existed. Perhaps He’d made Himself known to her in the operating room, amidst all the cancer and broken bones and smashed skulls. She was an operating-room nurse. She had told him that it didn’t matter whether she was Christian or Jewish. God was God. But Stephen shouldn’t have asked her to convert. Now he had a responsibility to her which he couldn’t live up to. He was a hypocrite … and now Helen had nothing. She wasn’t comfortable in the synagogue without him; it was a foreign place to her.

“I did it for you,” she said softly. She always looked the best to Stephen in the morning, her thick long black hair framing her childlike face. “I don’t know what you think you can find with those Indians. I think you’re getting into something dangerous. You’re not an Indian.”

“Just bear with me a little bit longer,” Stephen said. “I feel I have to do this.” He kissed her and stood up. “Go back to sleep, I’ll be back tonight and we’ll talk about it.”

“I’ll be here,” Helen said, yawning. She’d been on call all last night and had only slept for a few hours. “I do love you … I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for … .”

John was waiting for him on the metal steps which led up to Stephen’s real estate office. He was wearing a woolen shirt over a torn white teeshirt, faded dungarees, worn boots, and a vest with lines of bright beads worked in geometrical patterns. He was in his early sixties, and he wore his coarse white hair long in the Indian fashion. His face was craggy and deeply-lined. That face looked as cracked and baked as the earth itself, as if it were some undecipherable roadmap of the man’s past. On his lap he held a soft white and blue rolled-up blanket. Inside the blanket, protected, was his ancient pipe and an eagle’s wing.

The morning light was gray, and the air was still full of the night’s dampness.

John stood up when he saw Stephen, but he paused, looking at the sky as if something was written there that he couldn’t read. Then he got into the car and said, “I stopped being wrong today.” Stephen looked perplexed. “You know,” John continued, and then he raised his hand to his mouth as if he were drinking from an invisible bottle. “Gonna lay off the booze. Gonna stay straight … I figure I owe it to Sam, the guy we’re going to see, to help him out with his ceremony.”

Stephen got onto Route Seventeen easily; there was hardly any traffic at this time of the morning, especially on a Saturday. Those who were going to the Catskills for the week-end had already left last night or would be leaving later today. The light fog and slanting morning sunshine gave the mountains a dreamlike appearance, as if they’d been painted by Maxfield Parrish.

John kept his window open, even though there was a chill in the air. The breeze made Stephen uncomfortable, but he didn’t say anything to John. John seemed to be looking for something, for he kept leaning forward to look upwards out of the windshield. “What are you looking for?” Stephen asked.

“Eagles.”

“What?” Stephen asked.

“When I became a medicine man,” John explained, “I was given the gift of eagles.”

“I didn’t know you were a medicine man.”

“A sweat-lodge man can also be a medicine man … and vice versa. But I’m a good sweat-lodge man; that’s probably why Sam wants me to help him out with his sweat.”

“You never talked about being a medicine man,” Stephen said. He wasn’t going to give John the chance to change the subject so easily.

“I haven’t been a medicine man for a while. Booze and medicine don’t mix.”

“What did you do when you were a medicine man?” Stephen asked.

“Same things I do now, mostly … except for the drinking. I used to help people out.”

“How do you mean?”

“Just help out.”

“Like a doctor or a minister?”

John laughed at that. “Maybe like both.”

“What do the eagles have to do with it?” Stephen asked.

“They’re my medicine.”

“You’re talking in circles.”

John chuckled, then said, “I always went on binges. My downfall was always the booze and the broads, but then I’d pray my ass off and try to be right again and sooner or later the eagles would come back, I’d look up and there’d always be one or two just circling around, way the hell up, and, man, those eagles would keep me on the straight path, keep me good, until I just couldn’t stand being right and I’d go and get messed up and leave all my responsibilities behind, and I’d lose the eagles again. I haven’t had them for a couple of years now, since I’ve been on the booze. And I’ve been paying for that, you’d better believe it. Now I’m right again, I think maybe they’ll come back.”

“I still don’t understand,” Stephen said. “Are you telling me that wherever you go, there are eagles flying around … even in the city?”

“I’ve seen them in the city … once. It was my first time in New York, and I was scared shitless of all those cars and concrete and people. One of the people I was with … we went to do some politics and ceremonies … pointed up to the sky, and sure as shit there was an eagle making a circle. I wasn’t afraid to be in that city anymore … I mean I was no more afraid than the next guy.”

“No disrespect,” Stephen said, “but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Maybe when we do the sweat … maybe one will fly into the sweat lodge and bite your pecker off,” John said. “Then would you believe?”

Stephen laughed. “Yes, then I’d believe.”

They reached the outskirts of Binghamton in the early afternoon. It was a clear sunny day, dry, with the softest touch of fall. Stephen turned onto a rough road flanked by white cement gas stations, and they drove uphill, over a bridge that overlooked an automobile graveyard, and followed the turns as the road narrowed.

“I’ve been here before,” John said, “so I’ll remember the house.”

“Is it your friend’s house?” Stephen asked.

“Sam’s parents own it. It’s a farm, and Sam is sort of living there now.”

“How do you come to know him?”

“Sam came to learn some things from me when I was living in South Dakota,” John said. “He was hoping to become a medicine man.”

“Is he?”

“Never quite came around that way. Like most of us, he got sidetracked. Fell in with some kinds of people.”

“What do you mean?” Stephen asked, slowing down for a turn. There were trees thick on both sides of the road. This was good country, gnarly and wild, and, although close to the city, thinly populated.

“He got medicine things mixed up with human things,” John said. “All the people he was with were blaming everything on bad medicine instead of on themselves. When anything had happened, they thought that somebody had done something to them.”

“What do you mean?” Stephen asked nervously, remembering what Helen had said to him this morning … that they were dangerous. Maybe he was getting in over his head.

“They blamed everything on sorcery.”

“Sorcery? Do you believe in that?” Stephen was a non-believer, but just the idea that magic could be real, that there was more than just getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, excited him.

“Sorcery’s real,” John said flatly, quietly. “Medicine is just there, it can be used in good ways or bad ways. But I think that Sam just got himself messed up. He came out west for a sun dance, and stayed with me for almost a year. He started to become a pretty good sweat-lodge man, but he wanted to go too fast, he wasn’t ready to be a healer, and I thought he should work and learn from someone younger for a while. So I sent him to Virginia, where a Sioux guy I know lives … Joseph Whiteshirt. He’s a young medicine man with a good talent. Anyway, Sam needed to study in a different place. Different places have different medicine, different powers. Well … he ended up screwing the guy’s wife and almost got himself a knife in the belly for that. Was a lot of bad blood between Sam and Whiteshirt … maybe some bad medicine, too. Anyway, Whiteshirt blamed me for what happened with Sam and his wife. He thought I put Sam up to it or something. Everybody got sick … I guess I was responsible. When they needed help, I was drinking and didn’t have any power to help anybody, including myself. But that’s no excuse … .”

“So where’s this Whiteshirt now?” Stephen asked. Christ, he was getting into something over his head.

“He’s at Sam’s … so is his wife, they got back together.”

“What?”

“There’s still a lot of bad blood,” John said, “but Whiteshirt has to help Sam out on his vision-quest whether he likes Sam or not … if he’s a real medicine man. Maybe doing some ceremonies together will help them all out.”

“What about you?” Stephen asked. He was nervous about this whole thing now, but he couldn’t back out. He knew it was foolish, but it was a matter of male pride. Helen would have laughed at the idea of him still being macho, here in the quiche-eating eighties, but there it was.

“Maybe it’ll help me out, too,” John said, smiling faintly. “But then again maybe the ceremonies won’t change Sam and Whiteshirt and the other people mixed up in this, maybe their hearts will stay hard. You sure you still want to go along? If you’re nervous, you can drop me at the house. I’ll get back. No trouble.

“I came to do a sweat and I’m going to do it,” Stephen said.

John laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t let you die in there … . You’d better start slowing down now,” he said as Stephen came to another sharp curve in the road.

On Stephen’s side of the car were hayfields stretching back to smooth, fir-covered hills. The fields were still green, but beginning to brown. An old cannibalized mowing machine was rusting in the middle of one of the fields. On the other side of the road, on John’s side, were a few modern, expensive houses owned by executives who worked in town, but they were outnumbered by farms and the everpresent country shacks, their front yards littered with old car hulks and ancient appliances, their porches filled with mildewed mattresses and torn couches and broken cabinets.

“There’s the house,” John said, pointing. It was red clapboard, set about fifty feet from the road. Behind it on higher ground was a dilapidated red barn and several storage sheds. The sheds were unpainted, and one was caving in.

Stephen pulled into the driveway, behind a green Ford truck, which had a poster in the rear-view window proclaiming that it was an Official Indian Car. On the back of the truck was painted AKWESASNE in large block letters.

“What does that mean?” Stephen asked.

“It’s a Mohawk reservation, not far from here,” John said. “It got invaded, you might say, by white folk … poachers, and the Indian people had it out with the state police. Sam was there, so was Whiteshirt. But there ain’t no more poachers.”

“What about you?” Stephen asked.

“I was home getting blind.” Then, after a beat, John said. “There might be people here who are really against me … do you still want to come?”

“Christ, I’m already here.” Stephen hoped he would not regret it.

“Anyway, you don’t believe in any of that superstitious nonsense like we were talking about, do you?” John asked, grinning, his demeanor suddenly changed, as if he had just put on a mask, or taken one off.

“You’re crazy,” Stephen said. Yet he felt a chill run down the back of his neck … or perhaps it was just sweat.

They crossed the road and cut across a field, passing the rusting mowing machine. On the western edge of the field was woodland. They walked through the woods, which opened up into a clearing. A man in his late twenties with jet-black shoulder-length hair waved at them as they approached.

Stephen knew it was too late to turn back now.

“Steve, this is Sam Starts-to-Dance,” John said.

He doesn’t look like an Indian, Stephen thought as he shook hands with Sam. Sam’s features were fine and thin, almost nordic; but he wore a beaded shirt and a headband … and he did have that black hair.

“I’m glad you came,” Sam said to John, as they all walked over the stones of a dry riverbed onto a well-worn path that wound up a gentle incline. “I didn’t think you were going to make it.”

“I told you I’d be here,” John said flatly.

“We got the sweat-lodge ready,” Sam said, “and the women went and got the meat; they’re preparing it now. Are you going to take flesh?”

“Didn’t Whiteshirt take flesh?” John asked. He stopped walking just before they reached the crest of the hill.

“He said he thought it was proper for you to do that.”

John nodded. “That’s good … how are things going? Still bad blood?”

“Whiteshirt’s doing what he’s supposed to,” Sam said. “He’s helping me to do this thing. But it feels very bad between us. Most of the people that were with him in Virginia have left. He’s got new people, too many Wannabees.”

“What’s that?” Stephen asked.

But John laughed. “A Wannabee is a white who wants to be an Indian.” Stephen felt his face grow hot. “Don’t worry about that,” John said.

“Anyway,” Sam said, “I hear that there’s some bad stuff going down there at Whiteshirt’s place.”

“Is he back together with Janet?” John asked.

“Yeah, she’s here with him. She’s taking care of the other women.”

“Well … that’s good.”

“She did a lot of sweats, and vision-quested, and the spirits told her to stay with Whiteshirt and help him out. That’s what she says. But it’s over between us. Even though she says she doesn’t love Whiteshirt, what we did was wrong. It was my fault, and you were right, it was a human thing.”

“Happens,” John said. “Maybe it can be put behind all of you.”

“But I still think something’s going on.”

“Bad blood doesn’t mean there has to be bad medicine,” John said.

Sam didn’t say anything; he looked down at the ground. Then he said, “Janet told me some things … that Whiteshirt blames you for what happened. He thinks you sent me to him to bring him trouble.”

“Why would he think that?” John asked.

“He says the spirits told him that you were using bad medicine on him because you’d lost your power … because you’d stopped being a medicine man. He thinks you’re a witch.” After an awkward pause, Sam said, “I think Whiteshirt’s jealous of you.”

“Why?”

“Because most people come to see you when they have problems, even when you’re drinking … most traditional Indian people don’t have much respect for Whiteshirt. They call him a white man’s medicine man.”

“Maybe we’ll talk about it,” John said, “or pray about it.”

“I think you should be very careful, anyway,” Sam said. “Whiteshirt’s changed. He’s not the man you used to know.”

“I’ll think right about him until I see otherwise.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” Sam said. “It’s going to be right for me now, I can feel it.”

“Well, we’re soon going to find out,” John said; and then he turned to Stephen and asked, “You know how Sam got his name?” John had put on another one of his masks and switched moods. “He touched a rock in the sweat-lodge once and jumped around so much that he got a new name.”

“It certainly beats being called Sam Smith,” Sam said, and then he went on ahead to let everyone know John was here and going to take flesh.

“Sam likes you, I can tell,” John said.

“How can you tell that?” Stephen asked, distracted. He was uneasy about all this. Sam and John talked about magic as if it were a given. They didn’t even question it!

“You think he’d talk like that if he didn’t?” John asked. “You can feel right about Sam.”

“What’s this taking flesh business?” Stephen asked. If it’s what I think it is, then I will have to leave, he told himself. It was almost a relief to think about leaving … to have a valid excuse.

“You got that bad face on again,” John said. “You don’t have to come along on this, I told you. If you’re worried and—”

“Just tell me about this flesh business. What do you do, cut somebody up?” Although he’d committed himself to trying to find God or something inside the burning steam of the sweat-lodge, Stephen would not stand by and watch someone get mutilated.

“It’s a ceremony,” John said. “It’s a kind of prayer, a gift … the only thing we really have to give of our own is our flesh. That’s the only thing that’s really ours. So everyone who wants to make a gift for Sam, that he should have a good vision-quest and find what he’s looking for, everyone gives a little of himself. I usually take flesh off the arm, with a needle. I don’t carve out steaks, if that’s what you think.”

“Are you going to do this to yourself, too?”

“I might have Whiteshirt take my flesh after Sam’s vision-quest is over … if everything is okay. But not now, people might think I was following my ego and not my heart. After the vision-quest is a good time to do that; also, there’ll be lots of food, Indian food … a good time. You’ll see … maybe I’ll even take flesh from you.”

“The hell you will!” Stephen said, and they walked down the hill toward the ceremonial grounds below. Stephen glanced up at the sky; there were certainly enough birds flapping around up there. Maybe some of those were John’s eagles, swooping around, waiting for John to get to be a medicine man again.

Maybe they weren’t, either.

John introduced Stephen to several people, one of whom was white: a young guy with shoulder-length dirty-blond hair who was wearing a headband, faded dungarees, and a teeshirt. He asked Stephen if he wanted to smoke his pipe. Stephen politely declined and sat down under a large oak to watch John take flesh from the men and women standing around him.

Although he felt awkward and out of his depth, Stephen could not help but be awed by this place. It seemed to be completely secluded, a grotto. The sun filtered through trees, giving the place a dusty, soft quality, and the blanket of leaves on the ground made Stephen feel somehow secure here … and it seemed quiet, even though children were running around, shouting, playing games, and men and women and adolescents were all busy doing something: attending the large fire, which would heat the rocks for the sweat-lodge; tearing pieces of cloth; carrying stones and blankets; or just sitting around talking in huddled groups, passing pipes back and forth.

But sitting under that tree, feeling the cool dampness of the ground, smelling grass and sage and the burning of the fire, Stephen felt as he had when he smoked the pipe with John.

He watched John as he talked to a young woman wearing a sleeveless flower-patterned blouse. She had curly reddish hair and looked Mexican. She held John’s pipe in both hands upon her lap and stared at it. Her mouth moved. She must be praying, Stephen thought. Then John began making lines down her arm with a razorblade. He gave her a yellow piece of cloth to hold in her palm; and with a needle began to remove tiny pieces of her flesh. She didn’t flinch as John cut her, and Stephen noticed that she had scar-lines from previous cuttings … neat little indentations, pieces of flesh removed. They made Stephen think of tatoos.

To Stephen’s right, about thirty feet away from him, was the sweat-lodge, a small, squat, round frame of willow shoots covered with old blankets. A dark-skinned woman with wiry hair pulled back from her face was piling up blankets and tarpaulins beside the lodge. About ten feet east of the sweat-lodge several men were attending a large, crackling fire, which had been prepared in a special way under the supervision of a scowling heavy-set man. Rocks for the sweat-lodge had been placed on the fire, and the heavy-set man squinted at them, as if he was reading the entrails of some sacred beast.

“These rocks should be just about ready now,” one of the men shouted to John, who nodded.

Stephen just looked at the sweat-lodge nervously and wondered how the hell anybody was going to fit in there. It was so small.

The woman who had been piling up the blankets said something to the heavy-set man and walked over to Stephen. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall; she had a dark, flat face, high cheekbones, dark large almond eyes, and a thin mouth. She was missing a tooth, but there was a feral beauty about her; it was as if she, like John, had come from the earth. She carried a different map etched across her face, but the lines were there, even though she looked to be only in her mid-thirties. There were laugh lines and worry-lines on that face, which looked like it had never been touched by make-up. There was also a smell to her, the smell of the fire mixed with perspiration, a perfume like grass and mud, sweet and sour. “You came with John, didn’t you?” she asked.

“Yes … although I feel like a fish out of water.”

She chuckled. “I’m Janet, Joe Whiteshirt’s woman. This is a good place, been some good ceremonies here, good feelings, before … before a lot of things turned sour and people’s hearts became hard to each other. But John is a good man … and so was … is Joe. Maybe Sam’s vision-quest will bring them close again. I know Sam told you about … us. He liked you.”

“That’s what John told me,” Stephen said, “but you couldn’t prove anything by me. He hasn’t said anything to me—he was talking to John.”

“Before a vision-quest is a quiet time, you’re not supposed to talk much or mingle around. A vision-quest is dangerous. Sam’s getting ready. Sometimes people who go up on the hill don’t come back … people have been known to just disappear.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Yes,” Janet said, “I do.”

More bullshit, Stephen thought with a sudden flash of renewed skepticism, but he kept his mouth shut about that. “Why do they do it, then?” he asked almost embarrassedly.

“We go to have a vision, sometimes find a name … the spirits give us things there … medicine. You find out who your spirits are, where you came from. Hasn’t John told you anything about this?”

“A little,” Stephen said. “I guess I never felt right about asking.”

“I can see why he likes you. I once heard John tell Joe that we’re like trees, all of us. But when you look at a tree you only see the trunk and branches and leaves, but deep down in the roots is where we take our life from, that’s where the dreams and visions are … that’s where our life comes from. That’s why we vision-quest … to go back to the roots … and don’t you worry while you’re in the sweat, no matter how hot it gets,” she said, changing the subject. She gave him a sprig of sage, pressed it into his hand. “Use this in the sweat-lodge, it’ll help you breathe easier. You breathe through it like this”—and she showed him—“so you won’t feel the heat so bad. It really helps.”

“Thanks,” Stephen said, feeling awkward.

“Everyone will take care of you,” Janet continued. “No matter what’s between John and Joe, neither one will let any harm come to you.” But she averted her eyes from his when she said that, as if she wanted to believe it, but somehow couldn’t.

“Which one is your husband?” Stephen asked. He was on edge—soon he would be in the sweat-lodge with them all, helpless.

“The big one, tending the rocks on the fire.”

Stephen looked towards the fire and saw Whiteshirt, the same heavyset man he had seen before. Whiteshirt had a large belly and huge arms. His black hair was long, and for an instant, when their eyes met, Stephen felt a chill feather up his spine. The man seemed to be looking right through him.

“Those rocks have to be hot for the sweat-lodge; they glow like coals,” Janet said.

Then there was a loud crack, and something hit the tree just above Stephen. Stephen and Janet jumped away from the tree.

“It’s those damn river rocks,” Janet said apologetically. “They explode sometimes like that. The next time, if there is a next time, we’re going to bring our own rocks.”

But Stephen had the uneasy feeling that Whiteshirt had somehow willed that rock to explode … as surely and as certainly as if he had fired a warning shot from a pistol.

The women brought out bowls of raw heart and raw liver. Everyone took a piece, even the children. When it was Stephen’s turn, John said, “Eat just a little. It’s good for you, give you strength.” Then John bit down on a large piece of raw liver.

Stephen ate a piece of the chewy, slippery meat quickly, not knowing whether he was eating heart or liver, hoping he wouldn’t gag. God knows what kind of germs are crawling around on this meat, he thought. He wondered if he’d get sick on it, or develop worms … .

It was time to go into the sweat. The willow-stick skeleton of the lodge had been covered with old blankets and large tarpaulins.

John and Stephen took off their clothes behind a tree and left them in a pile. Stephen hadn’t brought a towel or blanket for himself, but John got one for him. They walked around the sweat-lodge, careful not to walk between the altar and the lodge. The altar was a mound of dirt set back from the opening of the sweat-lodge; the ceremonial pipes were propped against it. John told Stephen to wait, that Janet—who was keeping the door, as he called it—would tell him when to enter. Then John crawled in through the low, narrow opening, and said, “Pila miya, thank you.” Whiteshirt crawled in after him, but not before giving Stephen a look of pure hatred, as if he hated Stephen just because he was with John. But the others would no doubt interpret it as simply Whiteshirt’s dislike for honkies. Two young whites and two Indians, who looked like brothers, followed Whiteshirt into the sweat-lodge.

Stephen stood back, feeling anxious and also foolish wrapped in a blanket and holding the sprig of sage that Janet had given him. He didn’t want to sweat … not with Whiteshirt in there.

Sam walked over to Stephen and said, “Come on, your turn next.” Then he smiled and said, “Don’t worry, it’ll be a good sweat, good ceremony. Jim and George, they’re brothers, they know some old songs, and John, he’s one of the best sweat-lodge men around. He says you and he are a lot alike.” Sam laughed. “Both fucked up.”

Stephen forced a smile and crawled into the sweat-lodge, trying not to crawl on his blanket and trying to keep it around his waist. Sage and sweetgrass had been scattered over the earthen floor, and their smell was overpowering. He already felt claustrophobic, even though the door of the lodge was still open, letting in some light. But he felt locked in—the blankets and tarpaulins and willow sticks of the sweat-lodge might as well have been made of steel. He could hear the women standing and chatting outside. They would listen to the prayers and watch for the eagles to dive out of the sky into the top of the sweat-lodge.

“Did John ever tell you about his eagles?” Sam asked Stephen in a whisper. He was sitting on John’s right. “Those eagles can really be something. We’ve had them right here inside the sweat-lodge … .”

What the hell am I doing here? Stephen asked himself as he grunted something back to Sam. He sat back against one of the willows, but the sweat-lodge was so small that he couldn’t sit up straight. He looked at John, who looked back at him, but didn’t say a word; then he looked at Whiteshirt, who was gazing into the pit in the center of the sweat-lodge, where the rocks would be placed. Everyone sat with his legs crossed, but even then, toes were almost touching the pit. Stephen would have to watch himself, lest he burn his feet.

There was a tension in here, palpable, growing stronger. Stephen felt a pressure on his eyes, and he looked up. He caught Whiteshirt glowering at him. Whiteshirt averted his eyes and stared once again into the pit.

But Stephen was certain that Whiteshirt was going to make trouble … for all of them. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. It was too late to get out now.

“Okay,” John said, “let me have a small rock,” and Janet handed in a glowing coal on the end of a shovel. John used a forked stick to push it into the hole. He asked for his pipe, which he purified over the coal. He sprinkled sweetgrass on the rock, and the sweetgrass sparkled like fireflies.

John passed the pipe around, and everyone made a prayer. Stephen just asked that he get out of here alive. Then John asked for more rocks, and Janet brought in a shovelful. John took a large rock and placed it in the center of the hole with his stick, and said “Ho Tunkashila,” which everyone repeated … everyone except Whiteshirt, who seemed to be praying on his own, as if he had to purify the lodge himself, as if John was making them impure. But John ignored Whiteshirt and scraped the rocks from the shovel. Stephen could feel the heat already, and then John said, “Okay, close the door,” and everything was darkness, except for the reddish glowing rocks. Every bit of light was blotted out, for the women outside stamped down the blankets wherever the men saw any light.

“Aha,” John said, “we thank the rock people, the rock nation, for these good rocks which are sacred, we pray they will not break and kill us in the darkness. It is from your sacred breath, the breath of life, that we inhale, that our people will live. Oh, rocks, you have no eyes, no ears, and you cannot walk, yet you are life itself, as we are.”

Then John explained the ceremony. He talked about how the Inipi, the sweat-bath, was probably the oldest ceremony in Indian religion. “The steam brings friends and families and even enemies together. It heals. It is the strongest medicine. The sweat is a way to make ourselves pure, and it gives us much of our power. No matter what the ceremony—sun-dance or vision-quest—we do this first. It binds us. Even though Sam here is going to vision-quest alone on the hill, we all sweat with him now. We pray together and suffer together. We’ll help him now, and he’ll remember when he’s alone on the hill tonight facing the dreams and spirits.” Everyone agreed, and there was much yeaing in the darkness. Only Whiteshirt was silent.

John prayed to the Grandfathers and the Four Directions. He prayed to Wakan-Tanka, he prayed for the two-leggeds and four-leggeds and wingeds and everything else on the earth, but he also seemed to be talking to God as if He were a presence in the sweat-lodge. He prayed for everyone in the sweat-lodge, for Stephen who he said was walking a different path, yet they were all walking together … whatever the hell that meant, Stephen thought.

But in the blackness, you couldn’t tell if you were cramped in a small space, or whether you were somehow suspended in eternity. Stephen felt as if everything was being pushed up right against him, yet paradoxically, he had no sense of breadth or width or height here. He felt dizzy. He could hear the others beside him … he could smell them. It was already getting too hot. It was difficult to breathe. He stared at the glowing rocks, and heard the water swishing in the bucket as John stirred it with the dipper … and he felt Whiteshirt’s glowering presence, even though he couldn’t see him in the dark. He felt that same pressure against his eyes and knew that Whiteshirt was watching him.

It was then that Stephen realized how frightened he was.

John prayed, but Whiteshirt was praying louder, trying to drown him out.

John poured a dipperful of water onto the rocks.

It was as if a gun had been fired. Suddenly, Stephen couldn’t breathe. He was screaming, bending forward to get away from the searing steam. Everyone was shouting, “Hi-ye, Pilamaya, thank you, thank you,” and Stephen found himself shouting, too, but he didn’t know what he was saying.

He had to get out of here. He was going to die. He pressed the sage to his mouth, but it was still like breathing fire. He didn’t know where he was; it was as if part of his mind knew, but another part was soaring, taking him miles into darkness, from where he might not return.

Another retort, as more water was poured on the rocks. This time, though, it didn’t seem so bad. Stephen heard the brothers singing. The melody was strange and harsh and ancient; through what seemed to be a hole in Stephen’s consciousness, he could hear John’s prayers for them all.

“If anybody has to eliminate, that’s okay,” John said. “This is a place to get purified, to get out all the evil, to get all the garbage picked up from the world outside out of your system.”

Stephen started coughing. He couldn’t get his breath, but he heard Whiteshirt say, “The evil’s right here, inside the sweat-lodge.”

“Well, if it is, then we’ll just have to burn it right out,” John said in an even, cutting voice.

Whiteshirt laughed at that. “Don’t worry, John … if you get burned, I’ll take over the ceremony for you.”

After a pause, John said, “We came here to pray, remember? And to sweat.” Then he poured water on the rocks.

Stephen felt the pain as a searing wave. He pressed his blanket to his face, trying to breathe, trying to find respite from the rising heat. After a few seconds, he could breathe again. He removed the blanket from his face and stared into the darkness. He could swear that he could see something flickering in the blackness. John would have called them spirits.

Sam handed Stephen a bucket to cool him off, and automatically Stephen ran his hands through his hair. It was hot to the touch, as if on fire. He splashed water on his face. I’m not going to last, he thought. John had told them all that if anyone had to get out to say, “All my relatives,” and the door would be opened for them.

Stephen would try a little longer.

More rocks were brought in, glowing red, and Stephen burned in the darkness. But he thought he was beginning to understand something about this ceremony, that if he was going to pray—and he really wasn’t sure if there was anyone or anything to pray to—he had to do it like this. Prayers had to be somehow earned. You had to go through the pain and sit with your ass in the mud like an animal.

He felt the mud beneath him. He was part of the earth. He was connected.

As the steam exploded again, Stephen thought of Helen and his children, and he started crying for them, for the pain he had caused them … and he hallucinated that he was not drenched in sweat, but in blood.

John told everyone not to wrap their towels and blankets around themselves, but to let the steam sink into their bodies. “The pain is good,” he said as he ladled more water on the rocks. Stephen heard the hiss of steam and felt the hot blast burn over him.

“The pain is only good if it comes from the spirits,” Whiteshirt said loudly, belligerently. “Only the spirits can burn away bad medicine … only they can drive a witch out of the sweat-lodge … .”

John began to pray, as if nothing had been said, as if nothing had gone sour. “Oh, Grandfather, Wakan-Tanka, we’re sending you a voice. Please hear us … pity us for we are weak. Give us the strength and wisdom so that our hearts may soften.”

Whiteshirt began praying, too. But he was praying as if he was fighting. He was mocking. He was accusing. He was trying to drown out John.

But John didn’t raise his voice.

The tension was electrifying the steaming, boiling darkness.

Then John decreed that the first round was over and called for the door to be opened. Janet, who looked distraught, pulled the blankets and tarpaulins away from the sweat-lodge … letting in the blessed light and air and a cool, chilling breeze.

John explained that this was going to be a “hot” round. He also told everyone that this was going to be a “spirit round,” and that anyone could ask the spirits for help, or ask them to answer questions, but they’d better be sure they really wanted an answer.

Then Whiteshirt said, “Just as long as it’s really the spirits that’s doing the talking.”

John ignored the remark, as he had the others, and called for the “door” to be closed. Once again the women draped the blankets and tarpulins over the lodge and it was pitch-dark inside.

Maybe John hadn’t ignored Whiteshirt’s remark, after all, for he ladled enough water onto the rocks to melt iron. Stephen buried himself in his blanket to escape the burning steam, and everyone shouted thanks.

Stephen gagged and coughed. For an instant, everything went blank. Then Stephen found himself praying and crying for his family, for every family, for everyone. He was praying and crying because of the heat and the pain. He believed in the spirits flickering all around him, and yet at the same time he disbelieved. Part of his mind seemed to shrink back, and he was left with the part that believed what was happening to him, He was in the center, he was praying for his own, for himself—for his family … and for the trees and the rocks and birds and animals and every other goddamned thing in the world. Words were things. They could do things. They could help or harm. Magic was real.

And praying was something that was as practical as cooking food.

Then he caught himself … he was thinking crazy.

His lungs were raw, but he wasn’t coughing. He saw things in the darkness; maybe they were words or spirits or just something like the patterns you see behind your eyes when you press them hard with your palms.

One part of him saw the trails of spirits. Another part dismissed them. He was fighting with himself, believing and disbelieving, and just trying to breathe … to stay alive so he could get out and know that he had done it.

The spirits flickered in the dark and left trails like particles in a cloud chamber.

John poured more water onto the rocks, and everyone screamed with pain. Time seemed to slow down for Stephen, contracting hours and events into instants. In these flashing beads of time were buried hours of mistakes and cruelty, all the memories of his life. He screamed out against himself, for everything wrong he had done, for his failures as a man, as a father and a son and a husband, and he saw blood … he was breathing it … he was tasting it … it was the very steam itself … it was the rocks, which were of the same stuff, coagulated.

Then the questions began.

Everyone had a question for the spirits, and John seemed to be talking, but it wasn’t quite his voice. It was somehow shrill, and it certainly wasn’t John’s personality. He was laughing at almost everything; he was cutting, witty, nasty. But always laughing … and Stephen began to believe that it really wasn’t John who was speaking. He heard different voices, yet he didn’t hear what the spirits were telling the individual people in the sweat-lodge. The words seemed mostly garbled, except for a phrase or sentence here or there. John had told them that usually happened … that you only heard what you were meant to hear … what was important for you. This was a private place, even with the others sitting and groaning and sweating beside you.

But when it came to Stephen’s turn, he didn’t ask the spirits any questions. Once the spirits gave you an answer, you had to follow what they told you to do, and Stephen wasn’t taking any chances. John, however, asked for him. He seemed to appear in the middle of those spirit voices, and he asked that Stephen be helped to find himself with his family. The spirits thought that was funnier than hell, and it gave Stephen a chill to hear those laughing voices and see those flickerings in the dark. He wondered what had happened to John. He felt naked and alone. Vulnerable.

Did John just disappear? Or was he just talking funny … of course, that was it.

It was … and it wasn’t. Something else seemed strange in Stephen’s mind. Even if the flickerings and the voices were phony, he found that he somehow didn’t care. It was real even if it wasn’t. That felt true, but it didn’t make a bit of sense. Still …

Then it was Whiteshirt’s turn. Stephen had blanked everyone else out, just as John had told him to do. But he was going to listen now. He supposed everyone felt the same way because the tension returned to the darkness like a storm.

It was then that Stephen saw the coal move in the pit. Whiteshirt picked up the glowing coal, hot as it was, and put it in his mouth. It illuminated his face in red, as if that face was hanging in the darkness, disconnected. It was as if Whiteshirt had become a spirit himself … or maybe the spirits were inside him. Whiteshirt turned toward John and grinned; the coal was clenched between his teeth, its glow illuminated the hatred and frustration and sickness on his face. Whiteshirt was making a funny keening noise as if the spirits were speaking through him.

It’s a trick! Stephen thought. It’s got to be … .

Then the coal moved toward John, as if Whiteshirt were embracing him. John screamed, an animal scream of pure agony, and the smell of burning flesh pervaded the sweat-lodge.

“Open the door, for Christ’s sake,” Sam shouted. “All my relatives. Goddammit, open the door!”

The women pulled down the blankets and tarpaulins from the willow framework of the sweat-lodge. The light was blinding. Everyone was silent, stunned. John had fallen forward. Blood oozed from large ugly gashes in his back. It wasn’t the glowing coal that had burned and cracked John’s flesh; the coal was just a symbol of Whiteshirt’s power. It was the heat that had torn him open … the heat contained in Whiteshirt’s burning heart.

John groaned and sat up, shaking his head as if warding off something invisible. Whiteshirt stared at him in hard satisfaction. He didn’t say a word, but his wife, Janet, applied sage moistened with her spittle to the gashes in John’s back. John flinched every time she touched him.

“You were wrong to do this thing,” she said to her husband.

“I didn’t do it,” Whiteshirt said flatly. “It was the spirits.”

“You were wrong,” Janet said again, and Stephen could see in her face how much she hated this man … or perhaps the intensity of her hatred was fueled by love and guilt.

“This can’t go on,” Sam said. “I’ll vision-quest another time. I need to pray about all this … let’s forget it all for now.”

“No,” said John, a quaver in his voice, “we’re going to do the last round … and you’re going to keep your promise to the spirits and make your vision-quest. Today. But first there’s something between Joe Whiteshirt and me that has to be finished. Everybody, get out of the sweat-lodge. We’re going to let the spirits decide about this bad thing that has come between us.”

“The spirits already decided,” Whiteshirt said. “They made their mark on your back. Do you want them to burn you again?

“That was you, Joe,” John said. “So you are using medicine to get what you want. But you won’t get it. Nobody will follow you … you’re a witch, not a medicine man.” John spoke in low, even tones, as if he were simply reciting facts. But he was trembling, exposing his rage and humiliation … and perhaps his fear.

“This time you’ll die,” Whiteshirt said. “That will be proof enough.”

“We’ll see … .”

“You’re not going to do this thing,” Janet said to Whirtshirt, but it was already as good as done because the men were leaving the sweat-lodge.

“What’s going on?” Stephen asked John, but John wouldn’t answer him. He just nodded his head, indicating that Stephen should get out with the others.

When everyone was out, John said “Close it up.” The blankets and tarps were thrown back on the lodge, and one of the men handed in a shovelful of glowing rocks. Janet had refused to act as keeper of the door.

John asked for another shovelful … enough for two rounds.

“More rocks aren’t going to help you,” Whiteshirt said.

John didn’t answer. He was praying in Sioux.

Stephen tried to approach Sam and Janet and ask them to try and stop John and Whiteshirt from sweating. Sam just shook his head, and Janet gently told him not to interfere in matters he didn’t understand. So Stephen went back to the sweat-lodge and stood with the others. An older woman in a cotton print housedress stood beside him. Every once in a while, she would nervously look up at the sky, as if watching for eagles … waiting. Even the children were quiet. Everyone was listening, waiting to hear what was going to happen inside the sweat-lodge. There was a communal sense that what was about to happen was out of human control. The next few minutes would, indeed, be decided by the spirits.

“Close the door,” John said, and the keeper of the door closed the last opening of the sweat-lodge with a tarp.

Stephen could hear John stirring the water with the aluminum ladle. Then there was a hissing of steam as John poured some water on the rocks. Both men prayed in Sioux. Once again Whiteshirt prayed louder than John, drowning him out. But then he switched to English. He called John a witch … a spy for the white world. He blamed John for what had happened between Sam and Janet. He blamed John for sending Sam with a disease … bad medicine, a disease that had afflicted everyone at Whiteshirt’s camp. But now the spirits were going to put things to right. He called them down from the heavens to destroy his enemy.

Whiteshirt worked himself into a frenzy.

When Whiteshirt paused to catch his breath, John said, “Okay, we will let the spirits decide. We’ll make this a short round.” Then there was an ear-splitting cracking sound like an explosion inside the sweat-lodge. Everyone outside jumped back. John must have thrown most of the bucket onto those rocks. And right after that there was another explosion.

“You bastard,” Whiteshirt screamed. “You’re going to die for this.”

But now John was praying … it was his turn to scream for the spirits. “Oh, Grandfather, Wakan-Tanka, Tunkashila, send down the eagle to guard the sacred pipe and the life of the People. Send Wakinyan-Tanka, the great thunderbird to scourge out the evil.” He intoned, “Send us the one that has wings, but no shape. Send us the one that has an eye of lightning. Send us the one that has no head, yet has a beak filled with the teeth of the wolf. Send us the winged one to devour whatever is bad inside us, just as it devours its own young.”

Stephen listened, his hands resting on the outside of the sweat-lodge. He heard a flapping noise like the working of wings. It sounded as if there was a huge bellows inside the sweat-lodge. The noise grew louder. Something was beating against the inside of the sweat-lodge. Stephen could hear and feel it slapping against the blankets and tarpaulins. It was as if a great bird was trapped in there with John and Whiteshirt, and it was thrashing its wings, beating to get out of the darkness … to find the cold blue of the upper air.

But that’s impossible, Stephen thought, even as he felt the sweat-lodge shake.

There was scuffling inside … and screaming.

Then there was sudden silence.

Stephen pressed the side of his face against the rough canvas of the sweat-lodge to hear better, but all he could hear was his own heart beating in his throat … a tiny trapped eagle.

“Open the door,” John said in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper. “It’s over … .”

They quickly pulled the tarpaulins and blankets away from the willow frame of the sweat-lodge … and found John sitting by himself. He blinked in the bright sunlight. His pipe rested on his lap. He didn’t seem to notice that he was sitting stark naked, his blanket underneath him. He looked pale and drawn, as if he had just sweated away part of his life. The dead coal that had been in Whiteshirt’s mouth lay in the dirt before him. It was all that was left of Whiteshirt.

“Do you believe in the eagles now?” John asked Stephen.

Stephen could only shrug. It was all some sort of a trick, he told himself, even though the hairs on the back of his neck were still standing up. Whiteshirt couldn’t have just disappeared … he had to have sneaked away somehow.

John smiled weakly. “Next time, maybe the eagles will bite your pecker off.” Then he raised his head and gazed into the sky. He was still smiling.

Stephen looked uneasily upward at the eagles circling high overhead, and he thought about Helen and his children and the blood he had tasted inside the sweat-lodge. There wouldn’t be a next time, he told himself, He was certain of that. He was ready to go home.

Perhaps John understood, because he started laughing like a spirit.

ELIZABETH A. LYNN

At the Embassy Club

Born in New York City, Elizabeth A. Lynn now lives and works in San Francisco. Lynn made her first sale in 1977, and rapidly established herself as one of the most popular and respected writers of her generation. Her first novel was A Different Light, published in 1978. It was followed by the three volumes of the popular “Chronicles of Tornor” fantasy trilogy—The Watchtower, The Dancers of Arun, and The Northern Girl—and, in 1981, by a complex and sweeping SF novel, The Sardonyx Net. Her short fiction has been collected in The Woman Who Loved the Moon and Other Stories. In 1980 she won two World Fantasy Awards, one for her novel The Watchtower, and one for her short story “The Woman Who Loved the Moon.” Her most recent novel is The Silver Horse.

Here she takes us to a strange alien world for a passionate tale of cross-cultural misunderstanding, mutual suspicion, racial hatred—and love.

The story was first told to me in a bar on Nexus where people like to talk about things that happen to other people. I had gone there looking for a Starcaptain named Ikoro, who, rumor had it, had spent six months as a slave on Chabad. I didn’t find him. But I bought some drinks, and that was when I first heard about the navigator on Tanderai who fell in love with a high-caste Tanderani.

It was a grim tale, and as it turned out, the engineer who told me the story got it wrong. But I never went back to correct her.

The second time I heard it, I was at the Embassy Club in Selikka, on Tanderai. I was sitting and drinking with the first assistant secretary to the ambassador. He was buying the drinks. I had been sent to interview the new ambassador, and the f.a.s. had been assigned to keep me entertained until the ambassador could find the time to see me.

He was an excellent host. We took an aerial tour of the city, and he pointed out the principal mansions (white stone towers behind high gates), parks (many flowers, and trees like giant feathers), and bazaars. We dined at a very discreet restaurant: Eating takes place in private on Tanderai, and though there must have been other patrons, we never saw them. After dinner the f.a.s. suggested drinks at the Embassy Club. I was surprised. No embassy club in the Living Worlds presents much in the way of nightlife. But it was my first night on Tanderai and a little too soon to go out and soak up local color. I wasn’t sure I could recognize it even if I could find it.

The Embassy Club on Tanderai is an agreeable place. There is no public lounge: Patrons sit in screened booths and push a button (it rings a chime) to summon a waiter. The booths look onto an interior court that contains a fountain and a magnificently tended garden. We both wore masks. I’d bought three panohi—an unembellished mask with eye-holes—on the ship from Nexus. The one I wore was of black-and-blue-patterned silk and covered my nose and forehead. The first assistant secretary’s mask was more elaborate. It was red, with two pearls in the lower left-hand corner, near his ear, and concealed all of his nose and his cheekbones, forming a beak over his nose that shadowed his mouth. In it, with his white Tanderai robe flowing to his feet, he looked like an elegant, alien predator.

Everyone on Tanderai, I had been told, high caste to low caste, politicians to street thieves, wears a mask, except Starcaptains, who wear anything they please, and even they will not walk maskless through Selikkan streets at midday. The custom originated with the early colonists; over three hundred years it had changed from being a practical defense against the sun into a delicate social mechanism. Wealth, caste, and even political allegiances can be reflected in one’s mask. To keep myself from asking stupid questions that the f.a.s. would have heard before—thus embarrassing both of us—I said, “I once heard a story about Tanderai in a bar.”

His lips curved. “I bet I know which.”

“Do you? It was the one about the navigator and the girl.”

“Was it a Hyper bar?”

“As a matter of fact, it was.”

“They like to tell that story in Hyper bars, and they always say the man was a navigator.” He pushed the button to signal the waiter. “Another?”

“Sure.” We were drinking a frothy white liqueur called bissea. It tasted like milk, except for the kick. “Not true?” I asked, after the waiter brought the drinks and we were alone in our booth.

“Not that part of it. He was actually an embassy staff member.”

“Did you know him?”

The f.a.s. nodded. “He was first assistant secretary to the ambassador when I was a lowly com-clerk.”

I wondered how many questions he would answer. “When did it happen?”

“Seven years ago. Just after the Federation embassy was established here. As you can imagine, it was a tricky situation.”

“And did it happen the way—?” I paused hopefully.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” the f.a.s. said. “I’ll even tell you the man’s name—no, better not. Let’s call him Ned.” He smiled. He had white, very even teeth, which gave his face an even stronger look of the predator.

“Ned had been on Tanderai for a year, since the opening of the embassy. He thought it was long enough. He was young but not inexperienced in the service. He had been born on Enchanter, trained on Nexus, and had been second assistant secretary on New Jerusalem. He had a gift for languages and spoke good high-caste Tandri. He liked Tanderai food. He attended Tanderai dances because he enjoyed them. He knew enough to avert his eyes when the grandmothers, who are the true rulers of Tanderai, go through the streets in their sedan chairs.

“He understood the masks and how important they are on Tanderai. He wore one; everyone he knew wore one, at the embassy, at parties, in the streets, everywhere, even in bed.

“One evening Ned went, in his capacity as first assistant secretary, to pay a call on a high-caste Tanderahi. Old Rakakurri—even his fellow Tanderahis admitted it—was a problem. He was the titular head of his family, respected for his name, which was ancient, and for his wealth, which was considerable. But he was ultraconservative and believed that all embassy staff members, the ambassador included, were cultureless, rootless barbarians. The Federation did not want to encourage such views, and so Ned—instead of the ambassador himself or his secretary, Ned’s boss, who was, everyone knew, a Very Important Man—was sent to make the visit.

“Ned arrived at the home of this Tanderai aristocrat at the arranged time, wearing an unassuming blue panohi and carrying the traditional visitor’s gift, a flower. He was welcomed by the thukri, the official household greeter, and shown to the inside court.

“He strolled through the garden. It was winter, the lushest time of the Tanderai year, and the plants were rich with blossoms. He admired the graceful storied tower of the house and the pure lines of the fountain. The tower’s six balconies overlooked the garden. They were stone, covered with trimmed ivy. The ground-floor chambers were, Ned knew, the common rooms: kitchens, dining chambers, and ballroom. The second floor held libraries and music rooms, and the top four floors were the living quarters. Magnificently ferocious gargoyles leered from the corners of the topmost story, to warn the casual glance away from the Women’s Court. But Ned did not know that.

“He was gazing at the topmost story of the house when he saw her. She was leaning on the balcony railing. Her youthful skin was smooth amber, her hair was as black as night, her black eyes gleamed like pearls, her lips were like rose petals, her nose—” The first assistant secretary smiled slyly. “Suffice it to say that Ned stood in the inner court staring like a fool and talking to himself in reams of very bad poetry. Remember, he had never before seen a Tanderai woman’s face. For a moment he could not look away from the stunning perfection of her profile.”

The f.a.s. drank. I waited what seemed like a reasonable amount of time and then said, “Did she see him?”

The f.a.s. nodded. “She looked directly at him; he saw her panicked start and heard her quick steps on the stone. Even then Ned did not realize what he had done. He actually opened his mouth to call to her. But old Rakakurri entered the garden, and Ned perforce turned from a man consumed by passion into a diplomat.

“He said all the right things and left as soon as he could. It was still light, though evening, and normally he would have gone home to eat. He did not. He returned to the embassy, where a com-clerk he knew happened to be working late. Ned asked him to locate a file. It was one he had skimmed earlier. Now Ned read it through, and when he had finished he knew who his amber-skinned beauty was.

“She was Suniya Rakakurri, old Rakakurri’s sixteen-year-old daughter. Ned thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He was thirty and had been in love before, but it didn’t matter. He was smitten. He wanted to throw Tanderai custom to the winds, to storm into her father’s house and demand to meet her. But he knew—he was not a fool—that such behavior would immediately get him passage to Nexus and probably dismissal from the service.

“So he did nothing, except to hint to his Tanderai friends that he was finding his work dull and that if it did not seem forward of him to ask, he wouldn’t mind the opportunity to attend a few parties.

“For all their love of privacy, Tanderai aristocrats are high-spirited folk. They like to give parties. Since Ned was known to enjoy Tanderai music—he could even play respectably on the simlei, a flute—and could dance, he was of course invited to them. At each gathering he inquired politely as to the presence of any of the children of old Rakakurri, suggesting, without saying so, that he had diplomatic reasons for his questions.

“He met old Rakakurri’s heir, an engaging young Tanderahi named Inani, with whom he formed a friendship, and several of Inani’s younger siblings.

“Eventually at a large ball given by one of the city’s most prominent high-caste families, Inani said casually to him, with a gesture toward the women’s side of the ballroom, ‘Ned, come meet my youngest sister! This is her first ball. Her name is Suniya, and she’s never met an offworlder.’

“That was his beloved. Ned trembled. Inani brought Suniya to him. He bowed. She wore a gauzy, green mask like the wings of a butterfly, through which her dark eyes gleamed. She was tiny, a sylph, and her voice was soft and delicate as the chiming of bells. Ned danced with her twice. At the end of the second dance he risked everything and said to her, ‘May I see you again?’ As he said it, his voice broke like a boy’s.

“Suniya knew a handsome stranger when she saw one. She considered her father’s reaction, but after all, her brother had introduced them. She tipped her masked face to him and said. ‘Yes.’

“The next day Ned appeared at the embassy to find a package waiting for him. It contained a brief note suggesting that he walk in the Pavilion of a Thousand Flowers that afternoon at a certain time. It also contained a blue panohi, ordinary enough, except that two diamonds had been set at the outer corner of the left eye.

“Ned touched the mask to his lips. He worked like a madman all morning, and at the time named in the note he walked, wearing the diamond-studded mask, through the arched gate of the Pavilion of a Thousand Flowers.

“Suniya was there. They ambled through the pavilion with her hand on his arm, and whatever they said to each other seemed good to them both. After an hour, which seemed like minutes to poor Ned, Suniya murmured that she had to leave but that she would be at the home of a certain Tanderai family that night, a small gathering; could he come? Ned recognized the name as that of someone he knew, a liberal aristocrat who would not mind a surprise guest from the embassy. He promised her that he would.

“He did go to the gathering, and he wore the diamond-studded mask. Suniya was delighted: She thought Ned was the most wonderful person she had ever met. They met every day for a month, they strolled in the parks, they danced, they talked. He told her tales of other worlds. Suniya, who had never been past the gates of the city she had been born in, drank them in. She told him of her family, her brothers and sisters, her father, who was, she said sadly, quite strict, and her grandmother, the family’s true head, the puissant, inaccessible Chiyasathi Rakakurri. Inani, who thought his father’s attitude toward offworlders too parochial, saw no harm in this. Perhaps he was wrong. But he saw his little sister bloom like a rose when Ned entered the room, and he could not say to her, ‘You should not see so much of him.’

“No one knows how old Rakakurri came to hear of their romance. Perhaps a servant let something slip. Perhaps Inani was careless. Suniya herself may have been indiscreet. But one day Ned arrived at the Pavilion of a Thousand Flowers to find, instead of Suniya, a formal messenger from the Rakakurri household, who handed him a letter. Thinking it a note from Suniya, Ned tore it open.

“It was a stiff missive from Papa Rakakurri, informing him that Suniya would not be walking in the park with him now or anytime. She was not, the letter said, interested in continuing her acquaintance with a dishra kukri.

“Ned realized at once what had happened. Old Rakakurri had been misinformed. Someone had gossiped. With the letter in his fist, Ned marched to the Rakakurri mansion, determined to explain to Suniya’s father that his intentions were entirely honorable. He loved Suniya; he wanted to marry her. He arrived at the house and asked the thukri to inform old Rakakurri that the first assistant secretary from the Federation embassy desired to speak with him. The thukri did not bother to enter the house. He merely explained that Rakakurri had already commanded that Ned not be admitted.

“Undaunted, Ned went to the embassy and wrote a letter to old Rakakurri. It was returned to him, unopened. He tried again to gain entrance to the house. This time Inani came to the door.

“‘I am sorry,’ he said, laughing, as Tanderai do when they are embarrassed, ‘but my father does not want you here.’

“‘If I could just speak to him—’ said Ned. Inani shook his head. ‘Then let me see Suniya, just for a moment.’ He did not want Suniya to think that he had abandoned her or ceased to love her.

“But Inani simply stepped back and began to close the door. Ned put his foot in the crack. ‘Is she all right?’ he demanded, suddenly frightened. The colonists on Tanderai had been isolated for three hundred years, and though they seemed decent enough, he had heard stories … . He could tell nothing from Inani’s face, because he could not see it.

“‘Tell me she’s all right!’ But Inani would not answer. They wrestled for a moment over the doorknob, then Ned realized that he was behaving like an idiot, and he left peaceably.

“He wrote letters to old Rakakurri, to Inani, to Suniya. They were returned. He went to parties: Suniya was never there. Inani and the other Rakakurri children avoided him. He did not know what to do. He tried to bribe Rakakurri’s servants to let him in the house, and though they cheerfully took his dakras, he did not get into the house. He began to drink more than was good for him and to laugh too loudly at balls. After a while he stopped receiving party invitations from his high-caste Tanderai friends.

“Word came to the ambassador that his first assistant secretary was in trouble over a Tanderai girl. Normally he would have left such a situation to his secretary, but he was on Nexus, enjoying a rare vacation. So the ambassador tried. He called Ned into his office and Spoke To Him. Ned stopped going out and spent most of his waking hours at the embassy, and when he went home, he did not drink. But he lost weight steadily.

“One day Ned arrived home to find Skumijee, his servant, gone. Ned was annoyed but not surprised; he knew that his luck had turned bad and that sooner or later something would happen to him—his house would burn, or he would fall sick and be ordered to leave Tanderai—and he assumed that Skumijee had recognized the ill luck and had decided not to be around it. He called a few times, and then he walked into his bedroom to do what he did every day when he got home, which was to lie on his bed for hours and stare blankly at the ceiling.

“There was a woman in his bedroom. She was sitting on his bed with her back to him, and he assumed that she was a thief. But her robe was high-caste silk, with flowers embroidered on the sleeves. He thought then that she was a duvrani, a woman from the Court of Joy, hired for him by some well-meaning, insensitive acquaintance.

“He started to order her out of the bedroom, when she turned her face toward him. She had Suniya’s glowing eyes and streaming blue-black hair. But across her delicate features, like a barbaric ornament, lay two diamond-shaped scars, one on each cheek. Ned had seen such scars before. They were made by the heated blade of a ritual knife and are the mark of complete dishonor.

“Horrified, he drew back as the woman said his name and stretched her arms to him.” The first assistant secretary paused to drink.

“Another one?” he said, gesturing to my empty glass. He smiled when I shook my head no.

“The woman was Suniya, of course. Old Rakakurri was more conservative than even his children had thought. Scarring is a not uncommon punishment among the lower castes, but an aristocrat should not take the dulti to his youngest and most naive daughter. It must be done by a shaman. Those who have been branded are forbidden to wear masks. They are called ekukri, the faceless ones, and they live—they must—in the outermost circles of the city nearest the walls, and work in butcher shops and sewage plants and mortuaries, handling offal and the dead.”

His voice was somber. I sighed. That was how I had heard it, less well told, except in the version I had heard, the poor lover had walked into his bedroom to find the girl’s still-warm corpse.

“So what happened to him?” I asked. “You said that he was first assistant secretary; I assume that he resigned or was transferred elsewhere.”

The f.a.s.’s smile broadened. He shook his head. “Neither. Ned was impulsive but not a fool, and he was a diplomat. He comforted Suniya in all the ways he knew, and then he went to the secretary, his boss, who, although he was a Very Important Man, was not a fool either.

“He told the secretary Everything. The secretary listened, and when he had finished, commented that though Ned was not a fool he had been doing his almighty best to behave like one. ‘Why didn’t you come to me sooner?’ he said. ‘Bring your girl to me.’ Ned brought Suniya through the city night to his house. She walked proudly, spine straight, scorning tears. The secretary bowed deeply.

“They talked through the night. The next morning Ned presented himself at old Rakakurri’s house with a request written on the ambassador’s personal and private stationery, bearing the ambassador’s seal. It was elaborately couched in diplomatic language, and it said that the ambassador wished Ned to be admitted to the presence of the one person in the house whose word was law even to Rakakurri: his mother, Chiyasathi Rakakurri.

“Old Rakakurri fumed. But he could not forbid the request, not if his mother chose to honor it. She did. She was old enough to believe that even tradition should be subordinate to her will, and besides, she had never met an offworld barbarian, and she was curious. She received Ned in the garden. The thukri stood behind her, holding a bare curved knife as a reminder to the dishra kukri of her position.

“She sat on an embroidered mat; she was wearing silken robes, a red mask, and a great jeweled headdress. All Ned could see of her was her black eyes and her hands, which were as soft and delicate as a young girl’s.

“He said—Suniya had told him what to say—‘O most august lady, I bring you loving greetings from your miserable granddaughter Suniya.’

“Chiyasathi Rakakurri said, frowning at Ned, ‘What have you, a barbarian, to do with my granddaughter, and why is she miserable?’

“And Ned took a deep breath and told her Everything. Chiyasathi Rakakurri listened and was angered and deeply grieved. Her excitable son had neglected to consult either her or the shaman about her granddaughter’s transgression. Such behavior was unfilial and untraditional. It was also, she reflected, stupid. She wondered what the barbarian thought he could do about it.

“But she was not a woman to display her emotions like goods at a fair. She studied Ned blandly and said—Suniya had warned that she would—‘Suniya has been wronged, but my granddaughter is now ekukri. There is nothing to be done.’

“Ned bowed low to her and said softly, ‘O grandmother of my beloved, but what if there is?’

“The next week Ned was gone from the embassy, taking, the secretary let it be known, some overdue leave. He went to Enchanter—he had, after all, been born there—and Suniya went with him.”

“Enchanter,” I repeated. The Enchanter labs specialize in medical transformations. If you want to change your smile or sex, they can do that; if you want to look like an elephant, or a tiger, or your own mother, they can do that. “Of course. Were they married then?”

“Later,” said the f.a.s. “When they came back to Tanderai.”

“How did old Rakakurri take it?”

The f.a.s. shrugged. “He was furious. But Chiyasathi Rakakurri had given the lovers her permission. Not only that, she deposed Rakakurri as titular head of the family. Inani has that honor now. The barbarians, she said, had more sense than her son did.”

He looked at his watch. “But come.” He rose. I followed him as he weaved his way expertly around the booths, glad that I had not accepted that third drink.

We entered another booth. It was large enough for four, and there were two people in it already. The f.a.s. made introductions. The ambassador rose and shook my hand. He was lean, not tall, with steady, gray eyes. Enchanteans tend to be beautiful, and his mask—a simple blue panohi, with two diamonds set at the left-hand corner—did not conceal his good looks.

“A pleasure,” he said cordially. “May I present my wife, Suniya?”

Her skin was flawless amber. Her eyes and hair were black. Her lips were rose petals. She smiled and stretched out a hand; I stammered and bowed over it. We sat for a time, and then the ambassador said he would see me in the morning for the interview, the f.a.s. would tell me the time, and was he keeping me entertained? I said yes.

The f.a.s. and I said our good-byes and went back to our booth, and I bought the f.a.s. a drink.

“Did she look like that before?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said the f.a.s. “I was only a clerk. I never met her.”

“That’s one hell of a mask,” I said. And we drank bissea while I meditated upon love and masks and the skills of the Enchanter labs and upon the two diamonds—like scars made by a knife—set, one on the left, one on the right side, of Suniya Rakakurri’s perfect face.

RENA YOUNT

Pursuit of Excellence

Most people want the best for their children, to give them every possible advantage in life, and to be able to boast that “my kids are better off than I was” has been a point of special pride for generations of Americans. But, as the following powerful story by new writer Rena Yount demonstrates, the pursuit of excellence often has a price, and that price is sometimes more than we ought to be willing to pay …

Rena Yount is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, and is currently a data librarian in Washington, D.C. Although she has published articles on topics ranging from women-owned businesses to music to zookeeping, and co-authored two resource books on health care and housing for community organizers, “Pursuit of Excellence” was her first professional fiction sale.

It was a late summer afternoon, and the city of Washington lay quiet in a warm light rain. A minibus hissed over wet pavement, gliding driverless through the traffic loop at Calvert Street, past the towers and multilevel malls, the pedwalks where shoppers rode with their bright umbrellas. Evelyn Barr sat by a bus window: a slender woman in her thirties, with wide cheekbones and a pointed chin.

She was tired. She worked days as a chemist and most evenings as a waitress. She would just have time, today, to stop by home and make sure everything was all right before heading on to her second job. But she watched the rain-blurred mosaic of the passing city with an almost proprietary sense of satisfaction. It was a smoother, cleaner, brighter city than it had been when she moved into it fifteen years before. Make better people, she thought, and they will put the rest of the world in order.

My daughter will be one of them, she thought, the familiar tingle of anticipation coming warm and strong. The time was getting close at last.

As she let herself into her apartment, she called, “Randy?”

“In here, Mom,” her nine-year-old answered. She went into his room to give him a kiss. His terminal was on and covered with graphs. “Homework?” she asked.

“Yeah. I want to get done before Dad gets home so he can help me with my model satellite.”

“Good thinking,” she said. She ruffled his hair. It was dark, like hers, but curly and unruly, while hers was straight and fine. He had her brown eyes, and her dimples when he smiled.

“Did you lay out your clothes to wash?” she asked.

“Uh-huh. Then I put them in the washer with the other stuff. Then I washed them. It seemed like a good idea. They’re in the dryer now.”

“Wonderful!” she said. “Now I’ll have time for a cup of coffee before I go.”

He looked up at her sideways. “Can I have some too?”

“Coffee? Now, you know that’s not for children. It’d keep you awake all night.”

“Just a little? I did the laundry.”

“Well—just a little. With milk.”

She hung up her raincoat and went into the kitchen to check the freezer. She and her husband Michael cooked on the weekends and froze portions for dinner during the week. Usually Michael would be home on nights when she worked, but sometimes his own job as production manager for a small publisher kept him late. Randy had had to mature more quickly than a lot of kids; they counted on him to take care of himself when he had to, and to help with work around the apartment.

“What would you like for dinner?” she called to him. “Chicken casserole or nut loaf?”

“Which one did I cut up the mushrooms for?” he asked.

“Nut loaf,” she said.

“I want that one.”

“Fine,” she said, smiling. She began making a salad. The kitchen was small, like all the rooms in their apartment; housing was expensive. But it was neat and well organized, an easy place to work. She moved quickly from sink to counter, rinsing and chopping lettuce and green peppers. Randy called from his room. “Guess what I got for homework.”

She set one oven compartment on Thaw/Cook and started the timer. “What?” she asked.

“I get to be president this week.”

“Of the class?”

“No, silly. Of Skolania. That’s the country our class gets to be, for simulation. Come and look.”

“Just a minute.” She put Michael’s dinner in another compartment and set the controls. As she went into Randy’s room she said, “Now, your dinner will be ready in half an hour, so listen for the bell. And don’t forget to start Dad’s at eight, because he’ll be home at eight-thirty and he’ll be hungry. It’s all set—just push ‘Start.’”

“Look at this,” Randy said.

“And there’s salad in the refrigerator. Are you listening?”

“Sure. Eight o’clock. In the refrigerator. I’ll remember. Look here.”

He was standing before his terminal. There was a stool for him to sit on, but he rarely used it. He preferred to bounce from foot to foot, jiggling, his slim body full of energy.

“Okay,” she said, perching on the stool. “I’m looking.”

“See, for this project we have five variables. There’s population—that’s how many people you have. And there’s money for agriculture—that’s how much you spend for seeds and tractors and stuff. Then there’s money for defense, to buy planes and everything, and workers for agriculture, and workers for defense. And if you’re president you have to mess around with all of those so they come out right. Only Kenny Blake was president last week, and boy, did he leave everything in a mess.”

Evelyn smiled. Even kids blamed the previous administration.

“See, if you put more money in for agriculture, you get more soybeans.” He moved a control, and little rows of green soybean plants ran up one side of the screen. “For a while. But then you don’t get any more unless you put more workers in too. To use all the tractors and junk. But that means less workers for defense.” Sure enough, little blue figures with rifles were disappearing from the DEFENSE graph as he turned a knob. “And Botania, that’s the other fourth-grade class, they might start a war. I mean, maybe they won’t, but they might. Mary Sue’s in that class, and she loves to start wars. But, see, if you don’t get enough soybeans then people will starve. Only, you know what?”

“What?” she asked.

He leaned close to the stool and whispered to her. A secret. “I hate soybeans.”

Suddenly he was bouncing up and down, twirling knobs, yelling, “Yukh! Die, soybeans! Down with soybeans!” Evelyn laughed. Little green plants blipped off the screen by the dozen, the population chart began to glow a warning red, and then a yellow neon flashing began: FAMINE. FAMINE.

Randy giggled, looking at her sideways. “I wouldn’t really do that,” he explained.

“I’m sure you wouldn’t.”

“I just like to hear what the vice-president’s going to say.” He flicked a switch, and a voice began. It was deep, grave, adult. “Mr. President, I must direct your attention to a matter of the utmost seriousness. Famine has now reached the following levels—”

Randy cut off the voice, giggling again. “He sounds just like a news announcer.”

He punched BREAK and CLS, wiping the screen. Then he pushed RUN and started over, this time in earnest.

Evelyn watched him for a few minutes as he stood, frowning a little, absorbed in the balance he was seeking on the screen. She remembered when school had been like that for her: a challenge and an adventure. She remembered discovering chemistry when she was not much older than Randy. She had loved it even then. How enthralled she had been by the orderly mystery of the world’s workings. What a grand kingdom science had seemed to her then; what dreams she had had of the work she would do someday. She had set her heart on being a discoverer, a creator—back when she still thought someone like her could be a real scientist. Watching Randy, her heart ached with pity and loss. Too late, too late, for Randy and for her. A generation ago, she would have been so proud of this boy.

The Augustus, where Evelyn worked evenings, was a small, discreetly inconspicuous restaurant near the Capitol. It was elegantly furnished in dark wood and leather. Evelyn changed into her uniform and began laying out silverware in preparation for the dinner rush. A busboy, passing her, whispered, “Watch out for Jordan; he’s in a real mood tonight.”

Evelyn nodded. Jordan, the owner, was touchy and harsh with the staff. Perhaps he felt their contempt for one of the bioengineered who had not made anything of himself. But it was undoubtedly because of Jordan that the Augustus had developed its particular clientele.

There was not any one thing to set them apart, yet it was impossible to walk into the restaurant and not recognize that almost everyone there was engineered. Their height was part of it, the healthy vigor and perfect proportions, and the ease of those born to prosperity. Each was striking. Some were the slender, flawless blonds so popular when bioengineering began. But it had not taken long for more exotic looks to catch on. The senator at the table nearest Evelyn was massively built, with a regal African face and blue-black skin. She wondered if his parents were black. The woman across from him looked like an Incan princess, gold jangling from her wrists and ears. In the corner sat a young woman, a federal judge, with the perfect oval face and delicate figure of a woman in a seventeenth-century Chinese painting. Her skin, like that of ladies in such paintings, was dead white.

Evelyn had come to dislike her own face in the mirror. A crowd of norms on the street looked to her like a rough sketch of humanity, with their splotchy complexions and brownish hair, their bodies lumpy, slouched, unfinished. The people in the restaurant were as elegant and vivid as portraits in stained glass.

She went to wait on a man with sand-pale skin and a wiry mane of golden hair. She thought of ancient walls carved with winged lions when she saw his face: beaked nose, deep lines curving down around the full lips, fierce upswept brows. He looked up to give his order, and his eyes were blood-red.

She walked back toward the kitchen, disturbed by those eyes. They gave him a mad look. There was more and more experimentation going on with appearance, and probably with other things as well. Not everyone would be stopped by the official limits on bioengineering. The engineered were mostly the children of the powerful, and they gathered more power by their own abilities. Where there was power enough, rules would bend.

Waitresses are invisible people. In her work Evelyn heard bits of talk about corporate dealings and government policy centers, universities, publishing, research—all the places where the engineered naturally concentrated. She knew what it meant when a name was mentioned, and someone said, “A five?” and someone else nodded: one of the five percent, one of us.

She and Michael had argued for a long time about engineering their child’s appearance. “All this money to engineer high intelligence, good health—I can see that,” Michael said. “It’s not that important how she looks.” Evelyn said, “She has to be recognized as one of them. It’ll make a difference in whether she forms the relationships she’ll need, whether she really belongs.” He shook his head in disapproval and disbelief. “You make it sound like some kind of exclusive club.”

“It is!” she said. “The most exclusive club that’s ever existed. Members recognize each other instantly, across a room. They give jobs to each other and marry each other and have kids like themselves, or better. The engineered are different from us, Michael. They know it. The difference gets bigger all the time. We can push our daughter across the line before it’s too late … .”

Evelyn picked up a drink for the red-eyed man, soup for the senator and the princess. She thought of Michael in his production department, supervising other norms. He rarely had direct contact with the engineered writers and editors. Maybe he really did not understand what was happening. Maybe he was too much of an idealist to want to.

But he had to understand. He must not stand in the way of the child.

When she got back to her apartment after work, Michael was stretched out in a chair in the living room, half asleep. He got up to kiss her, and took her raincoat.

“Thanks, dear,” she said. “How’s Randy?”

“Fast asleep. We almost finished his satellite.”

She smiled. “I’m surprised he let you stop at ‘almost.’”

She slipped into Randy’s room, whispered the light on low, and looked down at him. His dark hair curled over his forehead; his arms were flung above his head in sleep.

When she came back out, Michael had fixed her a drink. While she sat and sipped it, he told her about the new graphics designer at his office. She watched him across the tiny living room: a lanky man with receding hair and a homely, gentle face. She thought, I really am lucky. The five years of their marriage had been hard, with the extra work and constant saving. But Michael had taken it cheerfully. And he was wonderful with Randy.

When she finished her drink, she reached automatically for the shelf near her chair and got out the chart.

Michael shook his head with a touch of exasperation. “Hey—we won’t get any farther on that tonight.”

“But there are so many decisions to make.”

“After we talk to the geneticist. It’s nearly midnight, anyway, and we’re getting up early. Do you want to be late for your first appointment?”

She thought with a flash of sympathy, He’ll be so glad when this is all over and the baby’s really on its way. And he was right; she should go to bed. After all the preliminary steps—the Applications Review Board, the interviews with social workers—they had finally been assigned to the geneticist who would do their engineering. They would be meeting the geneticist for the first time in the morning, and she wanted to be fresh for that interview. Still, she couldn’t resist opening the chart and running her fingers down it lovingly.

SEX. Female. She had one son. And Michael considered Randy his own, so there was no quarrel.

SOMA-TYPE. Height, build, pigmentation. Hair, skin, eyes. With so many possibilities, how would they ever choose?

INTELLIGENCE. As high as possible, she thought fervently. The highest. So her daughter would never be held back in the work she wanted to do, never meet the helpless, pitying looks of people trying uselessly to explain.

ASSERTIVENESS. There she quarreled with Michael. She wanted high assertiveness—someone who could hold her own. Michael argued for moderation, saying that it made for a happier person. He had teased her gently: “Our daughter doesn’t have to be a world-shaker.” She had frowned and shaken her head.

SPECIAL TALENTS, RESISTANCES, TOLERANCES …

She sighed, laid the chart aside and smiled at Michael. “All right, I’m coming. But this weekend …”

He threw up his hands in mock dismay. “I concede! This weekend, we’ll have it out. Now come on and get some sleep.”

It was forty minutes by tubetrain from Washington to New York, half an hour by bus and pedwalk to the towering building that was the East Coast headquarters of the Federal Population and Genetics Commission. They entered from the elevated walkways on the third level and almost immediately got lost. They asked directions twice, wandering through waiting rooms full of plastic benches, past signs that said “GENETICS RATING APPEALS RM 476-A” and “ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION REGISTRANTS APPLY 1:30-5 PM.”

Finally they found the elevators that would take them up to the Genetic Surgery Division. As they waited, it seemed to Evelyn that people glanced at them with a mixture of envy and resentment. Some were probably people with genetic defects, who would not be allowed to have their own children at all. And most people could not afford actual gene surgery, even if they qualified. But we’ve earned it, Evelyn thought. We’ve worked long and hard for our chance.

On the twenty-second floor, a receptionist directed them to a small carpeted waiting room. Evelyn sat down and tried to calm herself. After a few minutes a woman walked up to the receptionist’s desk. She was remarkably tall, with heavy blond hair pulled into a loose knot at the back of her neck. Her face could only have been created by a Greek sculptor or a bioengineer. She had the classic straight line of forehead and nose, the small bowed mouth, the strong graceful curve from cheek to chin. She beckoned them over and smiled down at them. “I’m Dr. Morland, your geneticist. Please come with me.” Her eyes were gray. Of course, Evelyn thought. Gray-eyed Athena, divinely tall …

They followed her into a roomy office. Evelyn looked around at the tall windows, the bookshelves, the charts of the double-helix DNA molecule on the wall. Here we are, she thought. It’s beginning.

Dr. Morland congratulated them on their decision to have an engineered child. “You two have excellent genetic ratings, and I’m sure that this child will be rewarding both for you and for our society as a whole. Now—since this is your first appointment, let me review the options open to you.”

What Morland told them was familiar to Evelyn from Commission publications, until she heard with dismay that prices for most alterations were going up again. She was frantically trying to recalculate costs in her head when Morland reached “intelligence.”

“You can choose an IQ range up to approximately one hundred fifty on the Hoffman scale,” she said. “That’s equivalent to two hundred on the old scale.” On the old scale two hundred had been the top, the outer limit. The Hoffman scale just kept going. “The cost for IQ will depend on whether—”

“Excuse me.” Evelyn sat up very straight. “I thought that engineering could take the IQ up as high as Hoffman one eighty with no trouble.”

Dr. Morland paused. “It can be done, although not without trouble. Nothing involving intelligence is simple. The policy of the Commission is not to aim for more than forty points over the higher of the parents’ IQs. Larger gaps tend to produce serious problems in adjustment between parents and child.”

“You mean we have no choice? That’s a legal limit?”

“It isn’t a matter of law. However, it’s a firm Commission policy, growing out of our experience. After all, Hoffman one fifty is quite a high IQ.”

“But there are already engineered who are higher—and they’re having kids now, and their kids can go up another forty points. I don’t want my daughter left behind before she even starts.”

“Of course not. But that isn’t the case.” Morland smiled her serene, Greek-goddess smile. “First of all, not all the engineered want children brighter than they are. Also, at this point no one can go much beyond one eighty. No single gene controls intelligence. We have to work with a whole series of genes that influence the formation of brain cells, the keenness of certain types of perception, and so on. Those same genes also affect other characteristics, so in trying to increase intelligence, we could produce bad side effects. We don’t know enough yet to go too far. Your child will be near the top of the range. She should have every chance to excel in any field she enters.”

She paused a moment. Evelyn was sick with resentment.

Morland went on. “The cost of altering intelligence will depend on whether both of you contribute genes. The alternative is to use one gamete from one of you, and the other from an engineered donor who has some of the qualities you want, such as high intelligence. Then we simply have to assure dominance of those qualities by repressing the appropriate genes on your gamete. That’s relatively simple. The amount of actual gene surgery—removing some of your genes and inserting others in the chromosomes—is greatly reduced.”

She paused, looking from one to the other. Evelyn, her stomach still tight with anger, said nothing.

“We want it to be our own child,” Michael said.

Morland nodded. “Many people feel that way.”

“It’s going to be rough, though,” Michael went on. “With these new prices, I’m not sure we can afford all the alterations we had in mind.”

She nodded again. “It’s too bad, but prices do go up. I see by your preliminary chart that you aren’t interested in special tolerances or talents—music and so forth. That’s good, since those are quite expensive. As for the rest, you’ll have to balance your priorities against what you can afford. I see you have down soma-typing, for instance. That’s fairly simple, and not so expensive in itself. Still, you might want to save money there and put it toward intelligence.”

Michael nodded. “That’s probably what we’ll have to do. The intelligence is the most important thing, after all.”

“That’s true. Now—this is the complete schedule of rates. This chart also shows interrelations between various qualities, so you can see the implications of your choices. You’ll need to complete these forms … .”

Evelyn was staring from Morland to Michael, her face gone rigid. Were they going to pretend that appearance was not important? Michael had promised! She had worked so hard to convince him! And Morland—did she think, because they were norms, it did not matter if their child got second-class treatment?

Michael was on his feet, shaking hands across the desk. “Thank you for your time.”

“Certainly. I’ll look forward to seeing you again.”

Evelyn forced herself to nod and smile politely. Five years, she thought. Scrimping and driving themselves. Now they were trying to steal her daughter’s future.

She was silent while they made their way through the huge building to the sunlit plaza. As they walked out, Michael said, “The price rise is a real shame. But now at least we have a better idea just how much we can do.”

“You mean how little,” Evelyn said.

Michael looked at her, startled. “Hey, come on—it’s not that bad.”

“It’s not? No soma-typing, and limited intelligence—”

“Wait a minute. I wouldn’t call Hoffman one fifty limited.”

“Oh, it’s not—for a norm.” Evelyn turned away and walked blindly into the plaza. She stopped before a fountain that sent a dozen jets of water foaming high into the air. All around her, people went briskly about their business, their footsteps clicking on the pavement. Michael came up beside her and took her arm.

“Hon, listen. I know you have your expectations all set—but I think you’re overreacting. The doctor’s right. She’ll still be near the top.”

“When the top is already Hoffman one eighty? Do you think thirty IQ points are a slight margin? And the top will keep going up.”

“All right. Maybe it will. But you know, there’s something to what the geneticist said about the gap between parents and child. I keep thinking of Anna Holden and her son. Remember when he left?”

Anna Holden had lived in their complex for a while: a dowdy, middle-aged woman, pouring her family trust fund into the child of her dreams. She brooded over him constantly, and raged and cried when he went beyond her. “My own son, not even sixteen, and he won’t tell me a thing. All day at school, all night in that lab—I’m sorry I had it fixed up for him. He won’t even talk to me. My own child, my son.” What could he say to her? One night she stood screaming down the hall: “Come back here! Come back, you hear me?” Her son strode away, his back straight, his long hair swinging. He had the face of a young Comanche. “I’m your mother,” Anna yelled. He paused and turned, giving her a look of measureless contempt. “You?”

Evelyn shook her head, pushing the memory away. “Anna was neurotic—always clinging to him. It’s no wonder he wanted to get away.” She found herself irrationally angry that Michael had even brought the incident up. She thought, My daughter will never hate me. She calmed herself and went on. “The problem is that you’re still thinking in our terms. An IQ of Hoffman one fifty would be outstanding for us. For the engineered, it’s only moderate.”

“Then moderate may have to do, Evelyn. Do you think we’d be able to fight Commission policy? Do you?”

Evelyn shrugged, not wanting to answer. No, the policy would not yield, not for a couple of norms. She stared at the glittering fountain, and her sense of defeat gradually gave way to a grim determination.

“All right, Michael,” she said. “She won’t be as smart as some. But she’ll be one of the engineered. She’ll have a fighting chance to do whatever she wants with her life. We just have to give her what she needs to make the most of her chance. She has to have the soma-typing.”

Michael came around in front of her and looked into her eyes. His plain face was intent and troubled. “Listen. I know how you feel about this. And I was willing to go along, before the price rise. But it isn’t that important, Evelyn—it just isn’t.”

She tried to interrupt, but he hurried on. “I want the best for my children—you know that. I want them to have every chance I can give them. I want them to be happy. I want them to contribute something to the world, and take pride in themselves. Those are the things that matter. If she isn’t so beautiful that she doesn’t even look human, that won’t be a tragedy. I’d rather she looked like you.”

There was a note of pleading in his voice. He wanted her to yield gracefully, so they would not have to fight—with each other or with circumstances. After their long struggle, he did not want his sourness at the end.

She understood. Sympathy warred with her rising anger, so that her voice came out rough. “Do you think I’ve waited all these years to have a child who’ll be sort of engineered? Who’ll be on the edges, talked past, ignored? Do you know what it would do to her, to give her engineered intelligence but not make her really one of them? To be held back, looked down on, kept from using what’s in her—nothing’s worse than that. Nothing could be crueler.”

Michael looked away, silenced by her outburst. After a moment he said, “I just don’t see how we could do it. With these new prices—I went over our savings just last night. We’ll have to take out a loan even without soma-typing. If we want that too, we’d have to work another year, maybe more, and the way the costs keep going up—”

“I’m thirty-six now. We can’t afford a host mother. We have to do it soon.

“well, there you are.”

“Oh, no. We’ll get a bigger loan.”

“What makes you think we can? Our savings will be gone after this, and we won’t have much in the way of collateral.”

We’ll find a bank that’ll give us the money, she thought. Or something. Whatever they had to do. There had to be a way.

After a moment of her grim silence, Michael said, “I’m sorry. I know how much this child means to you.”

She patted his arm. “It’s not your fault.” But she rankled inside. It was his child too, wasn’t it?

Evelyn was back at the lab by early afternoon. She worked in a rambling, sunny building whose long halls were permeated by a faint medicinal smell compounded by many chemicals. No matter what her mood, entering that building always gave her a secret lift of excitement. The lab was a world leader in biochemical research. That fact still held magic for Evelyn. She worked under Dr. Lin, an engineered biochemist who was designing microorganisms to manufacture cheap, high-quality protein. It was the kind of work Evelyn loved above all others: the merging of discipline and creativity, the reshaping of life itself. She had dreamed of doing that kind of work when she was a student. The engineered had already been moving in everywhere; no one had understood then just what a difference that made.

Evelyn entered Dr. Lin’s work area, passed the closed shelves by the door where various cultures were growing and went to the table at the rear of the room. Wilson, on night shift, had been scheduled to set up a Kjeldahl analysis to test the amount of protein in several strains. Evelyn glanced at the flasks on the burner and stopped. “Damn,” she said under her breath. She checked each flask. There was no crystallization, nothing to measure. She looked them all over again. Wilson must have left out the catalyst. Of all the stupid times to mess up a routine procedure—She went back to her desk and called Dr. Lin.

Lin came in to look, though there was nothing he could do but fume. Evelyn, checking nutrient levels in the cultures near the lab door, could hear his irritated grumbling. “How could anyone be so careless?”

One of the other researchers had followed him in. He shrugged. “It’s bound to happen sometimes. People run these tests over and over, and sometimes they’ll slip up.”

“Did he have to slip on this one? It’ll set back my whole schedule. It’ll take two weeks to culture enough of some of these strains for another analysis.”

“Well, it’s your own fault, really. If it was that important, you shouldn’t have left it for the night shift, when the regular supervisors aren’t around. You can’t leave important work to norms.”

There was a split second of realization, of stillness, before Evelyn straightened up and walked away.

Later that afternoon, she worked out a new schedule for comparative protein tests, to cut the time loss as much as possible. Dr. Lin stopped by as she was hanging up her lab coat and getting ready to leave.

“Thanks for doing the new schedule,” he said. “If you’d been here, this mistake never would have happened. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Seeing the apology in his eyes, she was torn between gratitude and resentment. “You’re the best assistant in the whole section,” he said. “You’re really a very able chemist. If it weren’t for bioengineering—”

“I know.”

There was a small silence. She smiled stiffly and left.

Evelyn was off work at the restaurant that night, but Michael would be late again. In the living room, after dinner, she called banks. The evening applications clerks regarded her with bland courtesy from the view screen. She had a neat sheet of figures before her in Michael’s handwriting; he had done the most recent view of their savings and prospects. She gave the clerks account numbers and balances, income, lists of collateral, credit reference numbers. They punched it all into their terminals, applied their credit equations and politely told her where her upper limit would fall on their standard loan policy charts. Since her loan request was substantially above the limit, they offered her appointments with their loan officers for an individual review of her case. Evelyn set up three appointments. But she knew with a sinking in her stomach that Michael was right. They would not get a loan big enough to cover soma-typing.

She sat with her chin in her hand, thinking. The apartment was quiet, except for tiny clicks from the dining alcove, where Randy was putting together a puzzle. Where else could she turn? She thought of her sister in Arizona. Evelyn had made her some small loans for graduate school, but they hardly even kept in touch anymore.

“Hey, Mom,” Randy called.

“What is it?”

“You want to see my puzzle? I’m almost done.”

“Not right now, Randy.”

“But I’m almost done, I got it all figured out.”

“Not now. I’ll look at it later.”

“But Mom—”

“Randy,” she said sharply, “leave me alone. I’m busy.”

He fell silent. She put a hand over her eyes, thinking, What am I going to do? Then she punched call numbers for Arizona. The screen flickered and cleared, and there was her sister, nervous and vaguely apologetic as always. When Evelyn brought up the question of a loan, she looked distressed and began to run on about troubles at the irrigation project. Her designs had been off because of the water needs of the new hybrids, and her supervisor was furious; her husband Warren was facing a shake-up in his department; when the new design programs were installed she might not have a job at all. She really did not see how they could make a loan right then.

Anyway, she added hesitantly, sometimes she wasn’t sure that all this engineering was such a good idea after all.

“Oh, come on,” Evelyn said, startled into impatience. “Where would we be without it? Who do you think has pulled off most of the breakthroughs of the last twenty years? Industry, transportation, cleaning up the environment, the cities—”

“No more slums in Washington?” her sister asked. Evelyn did not answer. “There are some out here,” her sister went on. “And people unemployed—you should see them. What good is an automated factory to the people who used to work there?”

So that’s it, Evelyn thought. The human race is remaking itself, and she’s worried about losing her job. Aloud, she said, “Things take time. You can’t do everything at once.”

“No—I know that. It’s just that the things that do get done seem to be mostly for the people at the top. And the distance between the top and the bottom just gets bigger … .”

Evelyn listened a few minutes longer, then cut the conversation off. She should not have expected her sister to understand, she thought wearily. If she understood, she’d be saving for an engineered child of her own.

Her sister was out and the banks were out. Where else was there, where else …

A crash from the kitchen made her jump. “Randy?” she called.

“It’s okay, it’s not anything,” he said. She got up and went to look. Randy was down on his knees, brushing together pieces of the blue-glass serving bowl. He looked up at her, scared.

“Randy! What are you doing? You broke our best bowl! You know you’re not supposed to get into that cupboard.”

“I was gonna make something in it. For when Dad gets home—for a surprise.” His voice trembled.

“I don’t care what you were going to do, you’re not allowed—and stop that. You’ll cut your hands, scraping it up that way. Get me the broom.”

He brought the broom and she swept up the pieces. “I’m sorry, Mom,” Randy said.

“Well, you ought to be. I don’t have time for this kind of thing, Randy. I have things to do.”

She knelt and ran her hand over the floor tiles, feeling for any slivers she had missed.

“Are you going to have the new baby soon?” Randy asked in a small voice.

“As soon as we can manage,” Evelyn said irritably.

“Costs a lot of money to have an engineered baby, doesn’t it?”

“It certainly does.”

“Is it really exciting?”

Evelyn looked up. Randy was plucking studiously at a towel that hung by the sink. Children, she thought. The times they pick to need reassurance.

“Come over here, Randy,” she said. Still kneeling, she put her arm around his waist as he came up. His eyes were large and brown—so like her own. “Sure, it’s exciting. But norm babies are too. Having an engineered baby is a good thing to do, because people like that can help us solve a lot of the world’s problems. Raising a baby is a lot of work, though. We’ll need you to help us.”

“Won’t she be smarter than me and everything?”

“Someday she will. For a long time she’ll be your little sister, and you’ll have to help her. Someday she’ll be smarter than all of us. But she’ll still be ours.”

When she had put Randy to bed, she came back to sit in the living room and think about money. She did not know where to turn. The tiny apartment, the crampedness that had never bothered her before, seemed to close in on her. She felt trapped and alone. Michael was tired, and he did not understand, and he was not going to try anymore. Even if she found someplace to borrow the money, she would have to convince him all over again that soma-typing mattered. She rubbed at her eyes in weary frustration. This child was the most important event in her life, but the decisions were still half his, and he could block her. In a flash of anger she thought, I ought to just leave. Then I could make my own choices.

She was shocked by the thought. Leave Michael? After five years of happy marriage? Besides, added a coolly rational part of her mind, if she left she would lose half the savings. She would never be able to pay for the surgery.

She stood up abruptly. Nonsense, nonsense. Michael was a good, kind man. Somehow they would work this all out.

The next morning was Saturday. Michael, with Randy helping, began cooking chicken and chopping vegetables for the next week’s meals. Evelyn could hear them talking in the kitchen while she spread out the family financial records on the desk in the bedroom. She did not doubt that Michael had been thorough, but in her restlessness she had to see for herself. She began going over Michael’s figures, checking the price increases against their savings and projected incomes.

Half an hour later, she called Michael. Her voice was strained. He came to the bedroom door, a paring knife in his hand, Randy close behind. “What is it, hon?”

“Michael, we have six thousand dollars more in savings than you put down here.”

He stared at her blankly for a few seconds. Then he frowned. “You know what that’s for.”

“We can replace it later,” she said, her voice rising. “We need it now. What are you trying to do?”

Michael touched Randy’s shoulder. “You go on and finish peeling the potatoes. Be careful with the knife, like I showed you. Your mother and I have to talk.” Randy looked from one to the other. Then he left.

Michael closed the door. He came over to the side of the bed near the desk and slowly sat down. “We’re going to have a second child,” he said. “But we already have one. No matter what we’ve done without, we’ve always put a little something aside for Randy’s education, so he would have that much security. That isn’t going to change now.”

“You’re telling me that? You’ve decided what my son needs, and you weren’t even going to discuss it with me?”

Michael’s face darkened. “He’s my son too.”

“Oh, I know you love Randy. That’s not the point. He won’t need the money for years, and by then we can replace it.”

“We shouldn’t be replacing it. We should be adding to it. It’s not going to be much in any event, with costs the way they are. We won’t be able to add much after the girl is born, with all the tests and psychologists and special schools—”

“So you just decided, you just decided all by yourself—”

Evelyn’s voice was rising, but Michael shouted over her. “What do you mean, I decided? It never occurred to me you’d want to use Randy’s money.”

“It’s too late for Randy. Whatever it costs, we have to make this child—”

“Right, right. We have to make her one of the masters of the earth.” He waved his hand in dismissal, but she flared back at him.

“You say that and you think it’s just an expression. But it’s real. They are the masters of the earth—the new human beings. Can’t you understand that? Whatever’s worth running, they run—politics, business, education—”

“Is that all that matters to you? Randy’s a person too. We can’t take everything away from him—”

“Then we’ll use a donor. If we use an engineered donor’s genes instead of yours, it’ll be cheaper, and we can afford everything.”

“Instead of my genes? When you’ve already had a child, and I haven’t? Oh, no. How about using a donor instead of your genes?”

“No. No.”

“Why not? The child would still be yours, more than Randy is mine—out of your own body, and with you from birth.”

“No.” Evelyn shook her head slowly back and forth. “I have to have my daughter.”

Michael laughed with a bitterness that shocked her. “Of course. You have to have your daughter. The new you that can do all the things you can’t. Do you really think you can live through a child?”

Evelyn’s face went cold. When she answered, her voice shook. “I don’t care what you say. She’s going to have the chance I didn’t. And she’ll be my daughter.”

“Mine too, believe me. So—no donors.”

“Then we’ll have to use Randy’s money.”

“No.”

Evelyn closed her hands and eyes tightly for a moment, then tried once more.

“Michael, listen. Randy is my son, my first child. He’ll always be special to me, even more just because he is a norm, because he’s like us. But we can’t afford to pretend. He’s only a norm.”

Michael stared. “So anything this other child needs—pretty hair, anything—is more important than Randy.”

“She is! She’s more important than any of us.”

“My God, Evelyn. What are you saying? A family can’t live that way. If that’s the way it’s going to be, I don’t want an engineered child at all!”

“Then don’t have one!” She jumped to her feet. “You don’t deserve one!” He was just like all the other sheep. What had ever made her think she wanted his genes in a child of hers?

But Michael’s anger suddenly dissolved, and he sat shaking his head. “Evelyn, Evelyn, look what’s happening. We’ve waited for this for so long. We can’t let it set us against each other.”

She watched his homely face, twisted with concern, and felt a flood of contempt. It was the same contempt she felt for her own face in the mirror. Weak, she thought. The engineered are right to look down on people like him.

Michael came toward her, fumbling for her hands. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

Evelyn did not meet his eyes. A thought had occurred to her, simple and cool as first light. She could get most of the savings from him in exchange for custody of Randy.

Again she recoiled from her own thoughts, shocked and ashamed. To give up Randy, to sell him—Still, the small cool thoughts unfolded. She could afford it then—her child, using her genes and sperm from a donor. It would be cheaper. And better.

“We can work it out,” Michael was saying. “We’re both upset right now, that’s all. I didn’t mean to deceive you about Randy’s money, I really didn’t.”

“I know,” she said. “We’re both tired.” Never to see Randy again. Oh, the stab of loss at the thought. And yet, underneath, so deep she could almost ignore it, there ran a treacherous current of relief. Never again to be wrenched by pity and regret. No more to see his face, the mirror of her own: her own failure confirmed in the eyes of her son.

Michael’s hands were warm and tight around hers. He was her husband; he was a good man. Once more he said, “We’ll work it all out.”

She tried to smile. Still, she did not meet his eyes. “Of course we will,” she said. But she knew already that they would not work it out.

FREDERIK POHL

The Kindly Isle

A seminal figure whose career spans almost the entire development of modern SF, Frederik Pohl has been one of the genre’s major shaping forces—as writer, editor, agent, and anthologist—for nearly fifty years. Pohl first broke into the professional SF world in 1939 as the nineteen-year-old editor of two SF magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. He went on to found SF’s first continuing original anthology series (the famous Star series, lasting from 1953 to 1960), was the editor of the Galaxy group of magazines from 1960 to 1969 (during which time Galaxy’s sister magazine, Worlds of If, won three consecutive Best Professional Magazine Hugos), and later served as consulting SF editor for Bantam, where he was responsible for the publishing of controversial works such as Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. He was SF’s first important literary agent, and, as such, played a vital role in encouraging publishing houses like Ballantine to develop the first category science-fiction lines. As a writer, he first came to prominence with a series of novels written in collaboration with the late C. M. Kornbluth—including the classic The Space Merchants—and has since become one of the genre’s most popular and respected authors. He has several times won Nebula and Hugo Awards, as well as the American Book Award and the French Prix Apollo. His novel Gateway (a Nebula and Hugo winner) is widely considered to be one of the best SF novels of the seventies. His many other books include the novels Man Plus, Wolfbane (with C. M. Kornbluth), Jem, and The Cool War, and the collections The Gold at the Starbow’s End, In the Problem Pit, and The Best of Frederik Pohl. His most recent books are Heechee Rendezvous, a novel, and the collections The Years of the City and Pohlstars.

Here’s a wise and gentle new story by Pohl, in which he takes us to a friendly island paradise which is perhaps a little too good to be true …

I

The place they called the Starlight Casino was full of people, a tour group by their looks. I had a few minutes before my appointment with Mr. Kavilan, and sometimes you got useful bits of knowledge from people who had just been through the shops, the hotels, the restaurants, the beaches. Not this time, though. They were an incoming group, and ill-tempered. Their calves under the hems of the bright shorts were hairy ivory or bald, and all they wanted to talk about was lost luggage, unsatisfactory rooms, moldy towels and desk clerks who gave them the wrong keys. There were a surly couple of dozen of them clustered around a placatory tour representative in a white skirt and frilly green blouse. She was fine. It was gently, “We’ll find it,” to this one and sweetly, “I’ll talk to the maid myself,” to another, and I made a note of the name on her badge. Deirdre. It was worth remembering. Saints are highly valued in the hotel business. Then, when the bell captain came smiling into the room to tell me that Mr. Kavilan was waiting for me—and didn’t have his hand out for a tip—I almost asked for his name, too. It was a promising beginning. If the island was really as “kindly” as they claimed, that would be a significant plus on my checklist.

Personnel was not my most urgent concern, though. My present task was only to check out the physical and financial aspects of a specific project. I entered the lobby and looked around for my real-estate agent—and was surprised when the beachcomber type by the breezeway stretched out his hand. “Mr. Wenright? I’m Dick Kavilan.”

He was not what I expected. I knew that R.T. Kavilan was supposed to be older than I, and I took my twenty-year retirement from government service eight years ago. This man did not seem that old. His hair was blond and full, and he had an all-around-the-face blond beard that surrounded a pink nose, bronzed cheeks and bright blue eyes. He didn’t think of himself as old, either, because all he had on was white ducks and sandals. He wore no shirt at all, and his body was as lean and tanned as his face. I had dressed for the tropics, too, but not in the same way: white shoes and calf-length white socks, pressed white shorts and a maroon T-shirt with the golden insignia of our Maui hotel over the heart. I understood what he meant when he glanced at my shoes and said, “We’re informal here—I hope you don’t mind.” Formal he certainly was not.

He was, however, effortlessly efficient. He pulled his open Saab out of the cramped hotel lot, found a gap in the traffic, greeted two friends along the road and said to me, “It’ll be slow going through Port, but once we get outside it’s only twenty minutes to Keytown”—all at once.

“I’ve got all day,” I said.

He nodded, taking occasional glances at me to judge what kind of a customer I was going to be. “I thought,” he offered, “that you might want to make just a preliminary inspection this morning. Then there’s a good restaurant in Keytown. We can have lunch and talk—what’s the matter?” I was craning my neck at a couple we had just passed along the road, a woman who looked like a hotel guest and a dark, elderly man. “Did you see somebody you wanted to talk to?”

We took a corner and I straightened up. “Not exactly,” I said. Somebody I had once wanted to talk to? No. That wasn’t right, either. Somebody I should have wanted to talk to once, but hadn’t, really? Especially about such subjects as Retroviridae and the substantia nigra?

“If it was the man in the straw hat,” said Kavilan, “that was Professor Michaelis. He the one?”

“I never heard of a Professor Michaelis,” I said, wishing it were not a lie.

In the eight years since I took the hotel job I’ve visited more than my share of the world’s beauty spots—Pago-Pago and the Costa Brava, Martinique and Lesbos, Bermuda, Kauai, Barbados, Tahiti. This was not the most breathtaking, but it surely was pretty enough to suit any tourist who ever lived. The beaches were golden and the water crystal. There were thousand-foot forested peaks, and even a halfway decent waterfall just off the road. In a lot of the world’s finest places there turns out to be a hidden worm in the mangosteen—bribe-hungry officials, or revolutions simmering off in the bush, or devastating storms. According to Dick Kavilan, the island had none of those. “Then why did the Dutchmen give up?” I asked. It was a key question. A Rotterdam syndicate was supposed to have sunk fourteen million dollars into the hotel project I had come to inspect—and walked away when it was three-quarters built.

“They just ran out of money, Mr. Wenright.”

“Call me Jerry, please,” I said. That was what the preliminary report had indicated. Probably true. Tropical islands were a bottomless pit for the money of optimistic cold-country investors. If Marge had lived and we had done what we planned, we might have gone bust ourselves in Puerto Rico … if she had lived.

“Then, Jerry,” he grinned, turning into a rutted dirt road I hadn’t even seen, “we’re here.” He stopped the car and got out to unlock a chain-link gate that had not been unlocked recently. Nor had the road recently been driven. Palm fronds buried most of it and vines had reclaimed large patches.

Kavilan got back in the car, panting—he was not all that youthful, after all—and wiped rust off his hands with a bandanna. “Before we put up that fence,” he said, “people would drive in or bring boats up to the beach at night and load them with anything they could carry. Toilets. Furniture. Windows, frames and all. They ripped up the carpets where they found any, and where there wasn’t anything portable they broke into the walls for copper piping.”

“So there isn’t fourteen million dollars left in it,” I essayed.

He let the grin broaden. “Look now, bargain later, Jerry. There’s plenty left for you to see.”

There was, and he left me alone to see it. He was never so far away that I couldn’t call a question to him, but he didn’t hang himself around my neck, either. I didn’t need to ask many questions. It was obvious that what Kavilan (and the finders’ reports) had said was true. The place had been looted, all right. It was capricious, with some sections apparently hardly touched. Some were hit hard. Paintings that had been screwed to the wall had been ripped loose—real oils, I saw from one that had been ruined and left. A marble dolphin fountain had been broken off and carted a few steps away—then left shattered on the walk.

I had come prepared with a set of builder’s plans, and they showed me that there were to have been four hundred guest rooms, a dozen major function areas, bars and restaurants, an arcade of shops in the basement, a huge wine cellar under even that, two pools, a sauna—those were just the sections where principal construction had gone well along before the Dutchmen walked away. I saw as much of it as I could in two hours. When my watch said eleven-thirty I sat down on an intact stone balustrade overlooking the gentle breakers on the beach and waited for Kavilan to join me. “What about water availability?” I asked.

“A problem, Jerry,” he agreed. “You’ll need to lay a mile and a quarter of new mains to connect with the highway pipes, and then when you get the water it’ll be expensive.”

I wrinkled my nose. “What’s that smell?”

He laughed. “Those are some of the dear departed on the island, I’m afraid, and that’s another problem. Let’s move on before we lose our taste for lunch.”

Kavilan was as candid as I could have hoped, and a lot more so than I would have been in his place. It was an island custom, he said, to entomb their dead aboveground instead of burying them. Unfortunately the marble boxes were seldom watertight. The seepage I had smelled was a very big minus to the project, but Kavilan shook his head when I said so. He reached into the hip pocket of his jeans, unfolded a sweatproof wallet and took out a typed, three-page list.

I said he was candid. The list included all the things I would have asked him about:

Relocation of cemetery

$350,000

New water mains, 1.77 miles

680,000

(10-inch)

790,000

(12-inch)

Paving access road, 0.8 miles

290,000

But it also included:

Lien, Windward Isles Const. Co.

1,300,000

(Settlement est.

605,000)

Damage judgment, Sun/Sea Petro.

2,600,000

(Settlement est.

350,000)

Injunction, N.A. Trades Council

(Est. cost to vacate

18,000)

The total on the three-page list, taking the estimated figures at face value, came to over three million dollars. Half the items on it I hadn’t even expected.

The first course was coming and I didn’t want to ruin a good lunch with business, so I looked for permission, then pocketed the paper as the conch salad arrived. Kavilan was right. It was good. The greens were fresh, the chunks of meat chewed easily, the dressing was oil and vinegar but with some unusual additions that made it special. Mustard was easy to pick out, and a brush of garlic, but there were others. I thought of getting this chef’s name, too.

And thought it again when I found that the escalope of veal was as good as the conch. The wine was even better, but I handled it sparingly. I didn’t know Dick Kavilan well enough to let myself be made gullible by adding a lot of wine to a fine meal, a pretty restaurant and a magnificent view of a sun-drenched bay. We chatted socially until the demitasses came. How long had he been on the island? Only two years, he said, surprising me. When he added that he’d been in real estate in Michigan before that, I connected the name. “Sellman and Kavilan,” I said. “You put together the package on the Upper Peninsula for us.” It was a really big, solid firm. Not the kind you take early retirement from.

“That’s right,” he said. “I liked Michigan. But then I came down here with some friends who had a boat—I’m a widower, my boys are grown—and then I only went back to Michigan long enough to sell out.”

“Then there really is a lure of the islands.”

“Why, that’s what you’re here to find out, Jerry,” he said, the grin back again. “How about you? Married?”

“I’m a widower too,” I said, and touched my buttoned pocket. “Are these costs solid?”

“You’ll want to check them out for yourself, but, yes, I think so. Some are firm bids. The others are fairly conservative estimates.” He waved to the waiter, who produced cigars. Cuban Perfectos. When we were both puffing, he said, “My people will put in writing that if the aggregate costs go more than twenty percent over the list we’ll pay one-third of the excess as forfeit.” Now, that was an interesting offer! I didn’t agree to it, not even a nod, but at that point Kavilan didn’t expect me to. “When the Dutchman went bust,” he added, “that list added up to better than nine million.”

No wonder he went bust! “How come there’s a six-million-dollar difference?”

He waved his cigar. “That was seven years ago. I guess people were meaner then. Or maybe the waiting wore the creditors down. Well. What’s your pleasure for this afternoon, Jerry? Another look at the site, or back to the Port?”

“Port, I think,” I said reluctantly.

The idea of spending an afternoon on the telephone and visiting government offices seemed like a terrible waste of a fine day, but that was what they paid me for.

It kept me busy. As far as I could check, the things Kavilan had told me were all true, and checking was surprisingly easy. The government records clerks were helpful, even when they had to pull out dusty files, and all the people who said they’d return my calls did. It wasn’t such a bad day. But then it wasn’t the days that were bad.

I put off going to bed as long as I could, with a long, late dinner, choosing carefully between the local lobster and what the headwaiter promised would be first-rate prime rib. He was right; the beef was perfect. Then I put a quarter into every fifth slot machine in the hotel casino as long as my quarters held out; but when the light by my bed was out and my head was on the pillow the pain moved in. There was a soft Caribbean moon in the window and the sound of palms rustling in the breeze. They didn’t help. The only question was whether I would cry myself to sleep. I still did that, after eight years, about one night in three, and this was a night I did.

II

I thought if I had an early breakfast I’d have the dining room to myself, so I could do some serious thinking about Val Michaelis. I was wrong. The tour group had a trip in a glass-bottomed boat that morning and the room was crowded; the hostess apologetically seated me with a young woman I had seen before. We’d crossed paths in the casino as we each got rid of our cups of quarters. Hair to her shoulders, no makeup—I’d thought at first she was a young girl, but in the daylight that was revised by a decade or so. She was civil—civilly silent, except for a “Good morning” and now and then a “May I have the marmalade?”—and she didn’t blow smoke in my face until we were both onto our second cups of coffee. If the rest of her tour had been as well-schooled as she it would have been a pleasant meal. Some of them were all right, but the table for two next to us was planning a negligence suit over a missing garment bag, and the two tables for four behind us were exchanging loud ironies about the bugs they’d seen, or thought they had seen, in their rooms. When she got up she left with a red-haired man and his wife—one of the more obnoxious couples present, I thought, and felt sorry for her.

Kavilan had given me the gate key, and the bell captain found me a car rental. I drove back to the hotel site. This time I took a notebook, a hammer, a Polaroid and my Swiss Army knife.

Fortunately the wind was the other way this morning and the aromatic reminders of mortality were bothering some other part of the shoreline. Before going in I walked around the fence from the outside, snapping pictures of the unfinished buildings from several angles. Funny thing. Pushing my way through some overgrown vines I found a section of the fence where the links had been carefully severed with bolt-cutters. The cuts were not fresh, and the links had been rubbed brighter than the rest of the fence; somebody had been getting through anyway, no doubt to pick up a few souvenirs missed by his predecessors. The vines had not grown back, so it had been used fairly recently. I made a note to have Kavilan fix that right away; I didn’t want my inventory made obsolete as soon as I was off the island.

One wing had barely been begun. The foundations were half full of rain water, but tapping with the hammer suggested the cementwork was sound, and a part where pouring had not been finished showed good iron-bar reinforcement. In the finished wing, the vandalism was appalling but fairly superficial in all but a dozen rooms. A quarter of a million dollars would finish it up, plus furnishings. Some of the pool tiles were cracked—deliberately, it seemed—but most of the fountains would be all right once cleaned up. The garden lighting fixtures were a total writeoff.

The main building had been the most complete and also the most looted and trashed. It might take half a million dollars to fix the damage, I thought, adding up the pages in my notebook. But it was much more than a half-million-dollar building. There were no single rooms there, only guest suites, every one with its own balcony overlooking the blue bay. There was a space for a ballroom, a space for a casino, a pretty, trellised balcony for a top-floor bar—the design was faultless. So was what existed of the workmanship. I couldn’t find the wine cellar, but the shop level just under the lobby was a pleasant surprise. Some of the shop windows had been broken, but the glass had been swept away and it was the only large area of the hotel without at least one or two piles of human feces. If all the vandals had been as thoughful as the ones in the shopping corridor, there might have been no need to put up the fence.

About noon I drove down to a little general store—“Li Tsung’s Supermarket,” it called itself—and got materials for a sandwich lunch. I spent the whole day there, and by the time I was heading back to the hotel I had just about made up my mind: the site was a bargain, taken by itself.

Remained to check out the other factors.

My title in the company is Assistant International Vice President for Finance. I was a financial officer when I worked at the government labs, and money is what I know. You don’t really know about money unless you know how to put a dollar value on all the things your money buys, though, so I can’t spend all my time with the financial reports and the computer. When I recommend an acquisition I have to know what comes with it.

So, besides checking out the hotel site and the facts that Kavilan had given me, I explored the whole island. I drove the road from the site to the airport three times—once in sunlight, once in rain and once late at night—counting up potholes and difficult turns to make sure it would serve for a courtesy van. Hotel guests don’t want to spend all their time in their hotels. They want other things to go to, so I checked out each of the island’s fourteen other beaches. They want entertainment at night, so I visited three discos and five other casinos—briefly—and observed, without visiting, the three-story verandahed building demurely set behind high walls and a wrought-iron gate that was the island’s officially licensed house of prostitution. I even signed up for the all-island guided bus tour to check for historical curiosities and points of interest and I did not, even once, open the slim, flimsy telephone directory to see if there was a listing for Valdos E. Michaelis, Ph.D.

The young woman from the second morning’s breakfast was on the same tour bus and once again she was alone. Or wanted to be alone. Halfway around the island we stopped for complimentary drinks, and when I got back on the bus she was right behind me. “Do you mind if I sit here?” she asked.

“Of course not,” I said politely, and didn’t ask why. I didn’t have to. I’d seen the college kid in the tank top and cutoffs earnestly whispering in her ear for the last hour, and just before we stopped for drinks he gave up whispering and started bullying.

I had decided I didn’t like the college kid either, so that was a bond. The fact that we were both loners and not predatory about trying to change that was another. Each time the bus stopped for a photo opportunity we two grabbed quick puffs on our cigarettes instead of snapping pictures—smokers are an endangered species, and that’s a special bond these days—so it was pretty natural that when I saw her alone again at breakfast the next morning I asked to join her. And when she looked envious at what I told her I was going to do that day, I invited her along.

Among the many things that Marge’s death has made me miss is someone to share adventures with—little adventures, the kind my job keeps requiring of me, like chartering a boat to check out the hotel site from the sea. If Marge had lived to take these trips with me I would be certain I had the very best job in the world. Well, it is the best job in the world, anyway; it’s the world that isn’t as good any more.

The Esmeralda was a sport-fishing boat that doubled as a way for tourists to get out on the wet part of the world for fun. It was a thirty-footer, with a 200-horsepower outboard motor and a cabin that contained a V-shaped double berth up forward, and a toilet and galley amidships. It also came with a captain named Ildo, who was in fact the whole crew. His name was Spanish, he said he was Dutch, his color was assorted and his accent was broad Islands. When I asked him how business was he said, “Aw, slow, mon, but when it comes January—” he said “Johnerary”—

“it’ll be good.” And he said it grinning to show he believed it, but the grin faded. I knew why. He was looking at my face, and wondering why his charter this day didn’t seem to be enjoying himself.

I was trying, though. The Esmeralda was a lot too much like the other charter boat, the Princess Peta, for me to be at ease, but I really was doing my best to keep that other boat out of my mind. It occurred to me to wonder if, somewhere in my subconscious, I had decided to invite this Edna Buckner along so that I would have company to distract me on the Esmeralda. It then occurred to me that, if that was the reason, my subconscious was a pretty big idiot. Being alone on the boat would have been bad. Being with a rather nice-looking woman was worse.

The bay was glassy, but when we passed the headland light we were out in the swell of the ocean. I went back to see how my guest was managing. Even out past shelter the sea was gentle enough, but as we were traveling parallel to the waves there was some roll. It didn’t seem to bother Edna Buckner at all. As she turned toward me she looked nineteen years again, and I suddenly realized why. She was enjoying herself. I didn’t want to spoil that for her, and so I sat down beside her, as affable and charming as I knew how to be.

She wasn’t nineteen. She was forty-one and, she let me know without exactly saying, unmarried, at least at the moment. She wasn’t exactly traveling alone; she was the odd corner of a threesome with her sister and brother-in-law. They (she let me know, again without actually saying) had decided on the trip in the hope that it would ease some marital difficulties—and then damaged that project’s chance of success by inviting a third party. “They were just sorry for me,” said Edna, without explaining.

Going over the tour group in my mind, I realized I knew which couple she was traveling with. “The man with red hair,” I guessed, and she nodded.

“And with the disposition to match. You should have heard him in the restaurant last night, complaining because Lucille’s lobster was bigger than his.” Actually, I had. “I will say,” she added, “that he was in a better mood this morning. He even apologized, and he can be a charmer when he chooses. But I wish the trip were over. I’ve had enough fighting to last me the rest of my life.”

She paused and looked at me speculatively for a moment. She was swaying slightly in the roll of the boat, rather nicely as a matter of fact. I started to open my mouth to change the subject but she shook her head. “Do you mind letting your shipmates tell you their troubles, Jerry?”

I happen to be a pretty closed-up person—more so since what happened to Marge. I didn’t know whether I minded or not; there were not very many people who had offered to weep on my shoulder in the past eight years. She didn’t wait for an answer, but went on with a rush: “I know it’s no fun to listen to other people’s problems, but I kind of need to say it out loud. Bert was an alcoholic—my husband. Ex-husband. He beat me about once a week, for ten years. It took me all that time to make up my mind to leave him and so, when you think about it, I seem to be about ten years behind the rest of the world, trying to learn how to be a grown-up woman.”

It obviously cost her something to say that. For a moment I thought she was going to cry, but she smiled instead. “So if I’m a little peculiar, that’s why,” she said, “and thank you for this trip. I can feel myself getting less peculiar every minute!”

Money’s my game, not interpersonal relationships, and I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to react to this unexpected intimacy. Fortunately, my arm did. I leaned forward and put it around her shoulder for a quick, firm hug. “Maybe we’ll both get less peculiar,” I said, and just then Ildo called from the wheel:

“Mon? We’re comin’ up on you-ah bay!”

The hotel site looked even more beautiful from the water than it had from the land. There was a pale half-moon of beach that reached from one hill on the south to another at the northern end, and a white collar of breaking wavelets all its length. The water was crystal. When Ildo dropped anchor I could follow the line all twenty-odd feet to the rippled sand bottom. The only ugliness was the chain-link fence that marched around the building site itself.

The bay was not quite perfect. It was rather shallow from point to point, so that wind-surfing hotel guests who ventured more than a hundred yards out might find themselves aburptly in stronger seas. But that was a minor problem. Very few tourists would be able to stay on the boards long enough to go a hundred yards in any direction at all. The ones who might get out where they would be endangered would have the skills to handle it. And there was plenty of marine life for snorkelers and scuba-divers to look at. Ildo showed us places in under the rocky headlands where lobsters could be caught. “Plenty now,” he explained. “Oh, mon, six year ago was bad. No lobster never, but they all come back now.

The hotel, I observed, had been intelligently sited. It wasn’t dead center in the arc of the bay, but enough around the curve toward the northern end so that every one of the four hundred private balconies would get plenty of sun: extra work for the air-conditioners, but satisfied guests. The buildings were high enough above the water to be safe from any likely storm surf—and anyway, I had already established, storms almost never struck the island from the west. And there was a rocky outcrop on the beach just at the hotel itself. That was where the dock would go, with plenty of water for sport-fishing boats—there were plenty of sailfish, tuna and everything else within half an hour’s sail, Ildo said. The dock could even handle a fair-sized private yacht without serious dredging.

While I was putting all this in my notebook, Edna had borrowed mask and flippers from Ildo’s adequate supply and was considerately staying out of my way. It wasn’t just politeness. She was obviously enjoying herself.

I, on the other hand, was itchily nervous. Ildo assured me there was nothing to be nervous about; she was a strong swimmer, there were no sharks or barracuda likely to bother her, she wasn’t so far from the boat that one of us couldn’t have jumped in after her at any time. It didn’t help. I couldn’t focus on the buildings through the finder of the Polaroid for more than a couple of seconds without taking a quick look to make sure she was all right.

Actually there were other reasons for looking at her. She was at home in the water and looked good in it. Edna was not in the least like Marge—tall where Marge had been tiny, hair much darker than Marge’s maple-syrup head. And of course a good deal younger than Marge had been even when I let her die.

It struck me as surprising that Edna was the first woman in years I had been able to look at without wishing she were Marge. And even more surprising that I could think of the death of my wife without that quick rush of pain and horror. When Edna noticed that I had put my camera and notebook away she swam back to the boat and let me help her aboard. “God,” she said, grinning, “I needed that.” And then she waved to the northern headland and said, “I just realized that the other side of that hill must be where my old neighbor lives.”

I said, “I didn’t know you had friends on the island.”

“Just one, Jerry. Not a friend, exactly. Sort of an honorary uncle. He used to live next door to my parents’ house in Maryland, and we kept in touch—in fact, he’s the one that made me want to come here, in his letters. Val Michaelis.”

III

Ildo offered us grilled lobsters for lunch. While he took the skiff and a face mask off to get the raw materials and Edna retreated to the cabin to change, I splashed ashore. He had brought the Esmeralda close in, and I could catch a glimpse of Edna’s face in the porthole as she smiled out at me, but I wasn’t thinking about her. I was thinking about something not attractive at all, called “bacteriological warfare.”

Actually the kind of warfare we dealt with at the labs wasn’t bacteriological. Bacteria are too easy to kill with broad-spectrum antibiotics. If you want to make a large number of people sick and want them to stay sick long enough to be no further problem, what you want is a virus.

That was the job Val Michaelis had walked away from.

I had walked away from the same place not long after him, and likely for very similar reasons—I didn’t like what was happening there. But there was a difference. I’m an orderly person. I had put in for my twenty-year retirement and left with the consent, if not the blessing, of the establishment. Val Michaelis simply left. When he didn’t return to the labs from vacation, his assistant went looking for him at his house. When the house turned up empty, others had begun to look. But by then Michaelis had had three weeks to get lost in. The search was pretty thorough, but he was never found. After a few years, no doubt, the steam had gone out of it, as new lines of research outmoded most of what he had been working on. That was a nasty enough business. I wasn’t a need-to-knower and all I ever knew of it was an occasional slip. That was more than I wanted, though. Now and then I would spend an hour or two in the public library to make sure I’d got the words right, and try to figure how to put them together, and I think I had at least the right general idea. There are these things called oncoviruses, a whole family of them. One kind seems to cause leukemia. A couple of others don’t seem to bother anybody but mice. But another kind, what they called “type D,” likes monkeys, apes and human beings; and that was what Michaelis was working on. At first I thought he was trying to produce a weapon that would cause cancer and that didn’t seem sensible—cancers take too long to develop to be much help on a battlefield. Then I caught another phrase: “substantia nigra.” The library told me that that was a small, dark mass of cells way inside the brain. The substantia nigra’s A9 cells control the physical things you learn to do automatically, like touch-typing or riding a bike; and near them are the A10 cells, which do something to control emotions. None of that helped me much, either, until I heard one more word:

Schizophrenia.

I left the library that day convinced that I was helping people develop a virus that would turn normal people into psychotics.

Later on—long after Val had gone AWOL and I’d gone my own way—some of the work was declassified, and the open literature confirmed part, and corrected part. There was still a pretty big question of whether I understood all I was reading, but it seemed that what the oncovirus D might do was to mess up some dopamine cells in and around the substantia nigra, producing a condition that was not psychotic exactly, but angry, tense, irresponsible—the sort of thing you hear about in kids that have burned their brains out with amphetamines. And the virus wouldn’t reproduce in any mammals but primates. They couldn’t infect any insects at all. Without rats or mice or mosquitoes or lice to carry it, how do you spread that kind of disease? True, they could have looked for a vector among, say, the monotremes or the marsupials—but how are you going to introduce a herd of sick platypuses into the Kremlin?

Later on, I am sure, they found meaner and easier bugs; but that was the one Michaelis and I had run away from. And nobody had seen Val Michaelis again—until I did, from Dick Kavilan’s Saab.

Of course, Michaelis had more reason to quit than I did, and far more reason to hide. I only made up the payrolls and audited the bills. He did the molecular biology that turned laboratory cultures into killers.

The lobsters were delicious, split and broiled over a driftwood fire. Ildo had brought salad greens and beer from Port, and plates to eat it all on. China plates, not paper, and that was decent of him—he wasn’t going to litter the beauty of the beach.

While we were picking the last of the meat out of the shells Edna was watching me. I was doing my best to do justice to the lunch, but I don’t suppose I was succeeding. Strange sensation. I wasn’t unhappy. I wasn’t unaware of the taste of the lobster, or the pleasure of Edna’s company, or the charm of the beach. I was very nearly happy, in a sort of basic, background way, but there were nastinesses just outside that gentle sphere of happiness, and they were nagging at me. I had felt like that before, time and again, in fact; most often when Marge and I were planning what to do with my retirement, and it all seemed rosy except for the constant sting of knowing the job I would have to finish first. The job was part of it now, or Val Michaelis was, and so was the way Marge died, and the two of them were spoiling what should have been perfection. Edna didn’t miss what was going on, she simply diagnosed it wrong. “I guess I shouldn’t have dumped my troubles on you, Jerry,” she said, as Ildo picked up the plates and buried the ashes of the fire.

“Oh, no,” I said. “No, it’s not that—I’m glad you told me.” I was, though I couldn’t have said why, exactly; it was not a habit of mine to want that kind of intimacy from another person, because I didn’t want to offer them any of mine. I said, “It’s Val Michaelis.”

She nodded. “He’s in some kind of trouble? I thought it was strange that he’d bury himself here.”

“Some kind,” I agreed. “Or was. Maybe it’s all over now.” And then I made my decision. “I’d like to go see him.”

“Oh,” said Edna, “I don’t know if he’s still on the island.”

“Why not?”

“He said he was leaving. He’s been planning to for some time—he only stayed on to see us. What’s this, Friday? The last time I saw him was Tuesday, and he was packing up then. He may be gone.”

And he was. When Ildo deposited us at the Keytown dock and the taxi took us to the apartments where Michaelis had lived, the door of his place was unlocked. The rented furniture was there, but the closets were empty, and so were the bureau drawers, and of an occupant the only sign remaining was an envelope addressed to Edna:

I thought I’d better leave while Gerald was still wrestling with his conscience. If you see him, thank him for the use of his space—and I hope we’ll meet again in a couple of years.

Edna looked up at me in puzzlement. “Do you know what that part about your space means?”

I gave the note back to her and watched her fold it up and put it in her bag. I thought of asking her to burn it, but that would just make it more important to her. I wanted her to forget it. I said, “No,” which was somewhat true. I didn’t know. And I surely didn’t want to guess.

By the time we were back on the boat I was able to be cheerful again, at least on the surface. When we docked at our own hotel Edna went on ahead to change, while I sent Ildo happily off with a big tip. He was, Edna had said, a pretty sweet man. He was not alone in that; nearly everyone I’d met on the island was as kindly as the island claimed; and it hurt me to think of Val Michaelis going on with his work in this gentle place.

We had agreed to meet for a drink before dinner—we had taken it for granted that we were going to have dinner together—and when I came to Edna’s room to pick her up she invited me in. “The Starlight Casino is pretty noisy, Jerry, and I’ve got this perfectly beautiful balcony to use up. Can you drink gin and tonic?”

“My very favorite,” I said. That wasn’t true. I didn’t much like the taste of quinine water, or of gin, either, but sitting on a warm sunset balcony with Edna was a lot more attractive than listening to rockabilly music in the bar.

But I wasn’t good company. Seeing Edna off by herself in the bay had set off one set of memories, Val Michaelis’s note had triggered another. I didn’t welcome either train of thought, because they were intruders; I was feeling almost happy, almost at peace—and those two old pains kept coming in to remind me of misery and fear. I did my best. Edna had set out glasses, bottles, a bucket of ice, a plate of things to nibble on, and the descending sun was perfect. “This is really nice, Marge,” I said, accepting a refill of my glass … and only heard myself when I saw the look on her face.

“I mean Edna,” I said.

She touched my hand when she gave the glass back to me. “I think that’s a compliment, Jerry,” she said sweetly.

I thought that over. “I guess it is,” I said. “You know, I’ve never done that before. Called someone else by my wife’s name, I mean. Of course, I haven’t often been in the sort of situation where—” I stopped there, because it didn’t seem right to define what I thought the present “situation” was.

She started to speak, hesitated, took a tiny sip of her drink, started again, stopped and finally laughed—at herself, I realized. “Jerry,” she said, “you can tell me to mind my own business if you want to, because I know I ought to. But you told me your wife died eight years ago. Are you saying you’ve never had a private drink with a woman since then?”

“Well, no—it has happened now and then,” I said, and then added honestly, “but not very often. You see—”

I stopped and swallowed. The expression on her face was changing, the smile softening. She reached out to touch my hand.

And then I found myself telling her the whole thing.

Not the whole whole thing. I did not tell her what the surfboard looked like, with the ragged half-moon gap in the side, and I didn’t tell her what Marge’s body had looked like—what was left of it—when at last they found it near the shore, eight days later. But I told her the rest. Turning in my retirement papers. The trip to California to see her folks. The boat. The surfboard. Marge paddling around in the swell, just before the breaker, while I watched from the boat. “I went down below for just a minute,” I said, “and when I came back on deck she was gone. I could still see the surfboard, but she wasn’t there. I hadn’t heard a thing, although she must have—”

“Oh, Jerry,” said Edna.

“It has to do with water temperatures,” I explained, “and with the increase in the seal population. The great white sharks didn’t used to come up that far north along the coast, but the water’s a little warmer, and there are more seals. That’s what they live on. Seals, and other things. And from a shark’s view underwater, you see, a person lying on a surboard, with his arms and legs paddling over the side, looks a lot like a seal … .”

I saw to my surprise she was weeping. I shouldn’t have been surprised. As I reached forward and put my arms around her, I discovered that I was weeping, too.

That was the biggest surprise of all. I’d done a lot of weeping in eight years, but never once in the presence of another human being, not even the shrinks I’d gone to see. And when the weeping stopped and the kissing began I found that it didn’t seem wrong at all. It seemed very right, and a long, long time overdue.

IV

My remaining business with Dick Kavilan didn’t take long. By the time Edna’s tour group was scheduled to go home, I was ready, too.

The two of us decided not to wait for the bus to the airport. We went early, by taxi, beating the tours to the check-in desk. By the time the first of them arrived we were already sitting at the tiny bar, sipping farewell piña coladas. Only it was not going to be a farewell, not when I had discovered she lived only a few miles from the house I had kept all these years as home base.

When the tour buses began to arrive I could not resist preening my forethought a little. “That’s going to be a really ugly scene, trying to check in all at once,” I said wisely.

But really it wasn’t. There were all the ingredients for a bad time, more than three hundred tired tourists trying to get seat assignments from a single airline clerk. But they didn’t jostle. They didn’t snarl, at her or each other. The tiny terminal was steamy with human bodies, but it almost seemed they didn’t even sweat. They were singing and smiling—even Edna’s sister and brother-in-law. They waved up at us, and it looked like their marriage had a good shot at lasting a while longer, after all.

A sudden gabble from the line of passengers told us what the little callboard confirmed a moment later. Our airplane had arrived from the States. Edna started to collect her bag, her sack of duty-free rum, her boots and fur-collared coat for the landing at Dulles, her little carry-on with the cigarettes and the book to read on the flight, her last-minute souvenir T-shirt … “Hold on,” I said. “We’ve got an hour yet. They’ve got to disembark the arrivals and muck out the plane—you didn’t think we’d leave on time, did you?”

So there was time for another piña colada, and while we were drinking them the newcomers began to straggle off the DC-10. The noise level in the terminal jumped fifteen decibels, and most of it was meal complaints, family arguments and clamor over lost luggage. The departing crowd gazed at their fretful replacements good-humoredly.

And all of a sudden that other unpleasant train of thought bit down hard. There was a healing magic on the island, and the thought of Val Michaelis doing the sort of thing he was trained to do here was more than I could bear. I hadn’t turned Michaelis in, because I thought he was a decent man. But damaging these kind, gentle people was indecent.

I put down my half-finished drink, stood up and dropped a bill on the table. “Edna,” I said, “I just realized there’s something I have to do. I’m afraid I’m going to miss this flight. I’ll call you in Maryland when I get back—I’m sorry.”

And I really was. Very. But that did not stop me from heading for the phone.

The men from the NSA were there the next morning. Evidently they hadn’t waited for a straight-through flight. Maybe they’d chartered one, or caught a light flight to a nearby island.

But they hadn’t wasted any time.

They could have thanked me for calling them, I thought. They didn’t. They invited me out to their car for privacy—it was about as much of an “invitation” as a draft notice is, and as difficult to decline—while I answered their questions. Then they pulled out of the hotel lot and drove those thirty-mile-an-hour island roads at sixty. We managed not to hit any of the cows and people along the way. We did, I think score one hen. The driver didn’t even slow down to look.

I was not in the least surprised. I didn’t know the driver, but the other man was Joe Mooney. Now he was a full field investigator, but he had been a junior security officer at the labs when Michaelis walked away. He was a mean little man with a high opinion of himself; he had always thought that the rules he enforced on the people he surveilled didn’t have to apply to him. He proved it. He turned around in the front seat, arm across the back, so he could look at me while ostensibly talking to his partner at the wheel: “You know what Michaelis was working on? Some kind of a bug to drive the Russians nuts.”

“Mooney, watch it!” his partner snapped.

“Oh, it’s all right. Old Jerry knows all about it, and he’s cleared—or used to be.”

“It wasn’t a bug,” I said. “It was a virus. It wouldn’t drive them crazy. It would work on the brain to make them irritable and nasty—a kind of personality change, like some people get after a stroke. And he didn’t just try. He succeeded.”

“And then he ran.”

“And then he ran, yes.”

“Only it didn’t work,” grinned Mooney, “because they couldn’t find a way to spread it. And now what we have to worry about, we have to worry that while he was down here he figured out how to make it work and’s looking for a buyer. Like a Russian buyer.”

Well, I could have argued all of that. But the only part I answered, as we stopped to unlock the chain-link gate, was the last part. And all I said was, “I don’t think so.”

Mooney laughed out loud. “You always were a googoo,” he said. “You sure Michaelis didn’t stick you with some of the stuff in reverse?”

I hadn’t been able to find the entrance of the wine cellar, but that pair of NSA men had no trouble at all. They realized at once that there had to be a delivery system to the main dining room—I hadn’t thought of that. So that’s where they went, and found a small elevator shaft that went two stories down. There wasn’t any elevator, but there were ropes and Mooney’s partner climbed down while Mooney and I went back to the shopping floor. About two minutes after we got there a painters’ scaffold at the end of the hall went over with a crash, and the NSA man pushed his way out of the door it had concealed. Mooney gave me a contemptuous look. “Fire stairs,” he explained. “They had to be there. There has to be another entrance, too—outside, so they can deliver the wine by truck.”

He was right again. From the inside it was easy to spot, even though we had only flashlights to see what we were doing. When Mooney pushed it open we got a flood of tropical light coming, and a terrible smell to go with it. For a moment I wondered if the graveyard wind had shifted again, but it was only a pile of garbage—rotted garbage—long-gone lobster shells and sweepings from the mall and trash of all kinds. It wasn’t surprising no one had found the entrance from outside; the stink was discouraging.

No matter what else I was, I was still a man paid to do a job by his company. So while the NSA team was prodding and peering and taking flash pictures, I was looking at the cellar. It was large enough to handle all the wines a first-class sommelier might want to store; the walls were solid, and the temperature good. With that outside door kept closed, it would be no problem to keep any vintage safely resting here. The Dutchman shouldn’t have given up so easily, just because he was faced with a lot of lawsuits—but maybe, as Dick Kavilan had said, people were meaner then.

I blinked when Joe Mooney poked his flashlight in my face. “What are you daydreaming about?” he demanded.

I pushed his hand away. “Have you seen everything you need?” I asked.

He looked around. There wasn’t a whole lot to see, really. Along one wall there were large glass tanks—empty, except for a scummy inch or two of liquid at the bottom of some of them, fishy smelling and unappetizing. There were smaller tanks on the floor, and marks on the rubber tile to show where other things had been that now were gone. “He took everything that matters out,” he grumbled. “Son of a bitch! He got clean away.”

“We’ll find him,” his partner said.

“Damn right, but what was he doing here? Trying out his stuff on the natives?” Mooney looked at me searchingly. “What do you think, Wenright? Have you heard of any cases of epidemic craziness on the island?”

I shrugged. “I did my part when I called you,” I said. “Now all I want is to go home.”

But it wasn’t quite true. There was something else I wanted, and that was to know if there was any chance at all that what I was beginning to suspect might be true.

The next day I was on the home-bound jet, taking a drink from the stew in the first-class section and still trying to convince myself that what I believed was possible. The people were meaner then. It wasn’t just an offhand remark of Kavilan’s; the hotel manager told me as I was checking out that it was true, yes, a few years ago he had a lot of trouble with help, but lately everybody seemed a lot friendlier. Val Michaelis was a decent man. I’d always believed that, in the face of the indecencies of his work at the labs … having left, would he go on performing indecencies?

Could it be that Michaelis had in fact found a different kind of virus? One that worked on different parts of the brain, for different purposes? That made people happier and more gentle, instead of suspicious, paranoid, and dangerous?

I was neither biologist nor brain anatomist to guess if that could be true. But I had the evidence of my eyes. Something had changed the isle from mean, litigious, grasping—from the normal state of the rest of the world—to what I had seen around me. It had even worked on me. It was not just Edna Buckner’s sweet self, sweet though she was, that had let me discharge eight years of guilt and horror in one night. And right here on this plane, the grinning tour groups in the back and even the older, more sedate first-class passengers around me testified that something had happened to them … .

Not all the first-class passengers.

Just across the aisle from me one couple was busy berating the stewardess. They didn’t like their appetizer.

“Langouste salad, you call it?” snapped the man. “I call it poison. Didn’t you ever hear of allergy? Jesus, we’ve been spending the whole week trying to keep them from pushing those damned lobsters on us everywhere we went … .”

Lobsters.

Lobsters were neither mammal nor insects. And the particular strains of Retroviridae that wouldn’t reproduce in either, I remember, had done just fine in crustaceans.

Like lobsters.

V

The NSA team caught up with me again six months later, in my office. I was just getting ready to leave, to pick Edna up for the drive down to Chesapeake Bay, where the company was considering the acquisition of an elderly and declining hotel. I told them I was in a hurry.

“This is official business,” Mooney’s partner growled, but Mooney shook his head.

“We won’t keep you long, Wenright. Michaelis has been reported in the States. Have you heard anything from him?”

“Where in the States?”

“None of your business,” he snapped, and then shrugged, “Maryland.”

I said, “That would be pretty foolish of him, wouldn’t it?” He didn’t respond, just looked at me. “No,” I said, “I haven’t heard anything at all.”

He obviously had not expected anything more. He gave me a routinely nasty look, the whatever-it-is-you’re-up-to-you-won’t-get-away-with-it kind, and stood up to go. His partner gave me the routinely unpleasant warning: “We’ll be watching you,” he said.

I laughed. “I’m sure you will. And don’t you think Michaelis will figure that out, too?”

That night I told Edna about the interview, though I wasn’t supposed to. I didn’t care about that, having already told her so much that I wasn’t supposed to about Michaelis’s work and my suspicions. There was a lot of laws that said I should have kept my mouth shut, and I had broken all of them.

She nibbled at her salad, nodding. We were dining in the hotel’s open-air restaurant; it was late spring, and nearly as warm as it had been back on the island. “I hope he gets away,” she said.

“I hope more than that. I hope he lives and prospers with his work.”

She giggled. “Johnny Happyseed,” she said.

I shook my head slightly, because the maitre d’ was approaching and I didn’t want him to hear. He was a plump young man with visions of a career at the Plaza, and he knew what I was there for. He was desperately anxious to make my report favorable. The hotel itself was fine. It was the top management that was incompetent, and if we bought it out there would be changes—as he knew. Whether he would be one of the changes I didn’t yet know.

So when he asked, “Is everything satisfactory, Mr. Wenright?” he was asking about more than the meal. I hadn’t been there long enough to have made up my mind—and certainly wouldn’t have told him if I had. I only smiled, and he pressed on: “This is really a delightful old hotel, Mr. Wenright, with all sorts of marvelous historical associations. And it’s been kept up very well, as you’ll see. Of course, some improvements are always in order—but we get a first-class clientele, especially in the softshell crab season. Congressmen. Senators. Diplomats. Every year we get a series of seminars with Pentagon people—”

Edna dropped her fork.

I didn’t, but I was glad to have him distracted by the necessity of clapping his hands so that a busboy could rush up at once with a fresh one. Then I said, “Tell me, isn’t it true that the crabbing has been very poor lately? Some sort of disease among the shellfish?”

“Yes, that’s true, Mr. Wenright,” he admitted, but added eagerly, “I’m sure they’ll come back.”

I said, “I absolutely guarantee it.” He left chuckling, and wondering if he’d missed the point of the joke.

I looked at Edna. She looked at me. We both nodded.

But all either of us said, after quite a while, was Edna’s, “I wonder what kind of seafood they eat in Moscow?”

PAT CADIGAN

Rock On

Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and now lives in Overland Park, Kansas, where she works for Hallmark Cards. One of the best new writers in SF, Cadigan made her first professional sale in 1980, to New Dimensions, and soon became a frequent contributor to Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Shadows, among other markets. She is the co-editor, along with husband Arnie Fenner, of Shayol, perhaps the best of the semiprozines; it was honored with a World Fantasy Award in the “Special Achievement, Non-Professional” category in 1981. She has also served as a World Fantasy Award judge, and as Chairwoman of the Nebula Award Jury. She is currently at work on her first novel, tentatively entitled Captives. Her story “Nearly Departed” was in our First Annual Collection.

In the vivid and compassionate story that follows, she demonstrates the truth of the old adage “rock ‘n’ roll never forgets” … even if you want it to.

Rain woke me. I thought, shit, here I am, Lady Rain-in-the-Face, because that’s where it was hitting, right in the old face. Sat up and saw I was still on Newbury Street. See beautiful downtown Boston. Was Newbury Street downtown? In the middle of the night, did it matter? No, it did not. And not a soul in sight. Like everybody said, let’s get Gina drunk and while she’s passed out, we’ll all move to Vermont. Do I love New England? A great place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit here.

I smeared my hair out of my eyes and wondered if anyone was looking for me now. Hey, anybody shy a forty-year-old rock ‘n’ roll sinner?

I scuttled into the doorway of one of those quaint old buildings where there was a shop with the entrance below ground level. A little awning kept the rain off but pissed water down in a maddening beat. Wrung the water out of my wrap-pants and my hair and just sat being damp. Cold, too, I guess, but didn’t feel that so much.

Sat a long time with my chin on my knees: you know, it made me feel like a kid again. When I started nodding my head, I began to pick up on something. Just primal but I tap into that amazing well. Man-O-War, if you could see me now. By the time the blueboys found me, I was rocking pretty good.

And that was the punchline. I’d never tried to get up and leave, but if I had, I’d have found I was locked into place in a sticky field. Made to catch the b&e kids in the act until the blueboys could get around to coming out and getting them. I’d been sitting in a trap and digging it. The story of my life.

They were nice to me. Led me, read me, dried me out. Fined me a hundred, sent me on my way in time for breakfast.

Awful time to see and be seen, righteous awful. For the first three hours after you get up, people can tell whether you’ve got a broken heart or not. The solution is, either you get up real early so your camouflage is in place by the time everybody else is out, or don’t go to bed. Don’t go to bed ought to work all the time, but it doesn’t. Sometimes when you don’t go to bed, people can see whether you’ve got a broken heart all day long. I schlepped it, searching for an uncrowded breakfast bar and not looking at anyone who was looking at me. But I had this urge to stop random pedestrians and say, Yeah, yeah, it’s true, but it was rock ‘n’ roll broke my poor old heart, not a person, don’t cry for me or I’ll pop your chocks.

I went around and up and down and all over until I found Tremont Street. It had been the pounder with that group from the Detroit Crater—the name was gone but the malady lingered on—anyway, him, he’d been the one told me Tremont had the best breakfast bars in the world, especially when you were coming off a bottle-drunk you couldn’t remember.

When the c’muters cleared out some, I found a space at a Greek hole-in-the-wall. We shut down 10:30 A.M. sharp, get the hell out when you’re done, counter service only, take it or shake it. I like a place with Attitude. I folded a seat down and asked for coffee and a feta cheese omelette. Came with home fries from the home fries mountain in corner of the grill (no microwave gar-bazhe, hoo-ray). They shot my retinas before they even brought my coffee, and while I was pouring the cream, they checked my credit. Was that badass? It was badass. Did I care? I did not. No waste, no machines when a human could do it, and real food, none of this edible polyester that slips clear through you so you can stay looking like a famine victim, my deah.

They came in when I was half-finished with the omelette. Went all night by the look and sound of them, but I didn’t check their faces for broken hearts. Made me nervous but I thought, well, they’re tired; who’s going to notice this old lady? Nobody.

Wrong again. I became visible to them right after they got their retinas shot. Seventeen-year-old boy with tattooed cheeks and a forked tongue leaned forward and hissed like a snake.

“Sssssssinner.”

The other four with him perked right up. “Where?” “Whose?” “In here?”

“Rock ‘n’ roll ssssssinner.”

The lady identified me. She bore much resemblance to nobody at all, and if she had a heart it wasn’t even sprained a little. With a sinner, she was probably Madame Magnifica. “Gina,” she said, with all confidence.

My left eye tic’d. Oh, please. Feta cheese on my knees. What the hell, I thought, I’ll nod, they’ll nod, I’ll eat, I’ll go. And then somebody whispered the word, reward.

I dropped my fork and ran.

Safe enough, I figured. Were they all going to chase me before they got their Greek breakfasts? No, they were not. They sent the lady after me.

She was much the younger, and she tackled me in the middle of a crosswalk when the light changed. A car hopped over us, its undercarriage just ruffling the top of her hard copper hair.

“Just come back and finish your omelette. Or we’ll buy you another.”

“No.”

She yanked me up and pulled me out of the street. “Come on.” People were staring but Tremont’s full of theatres. You see that here, live theatre, you can still get it. She put a bring-along on my wrist and brought me along, back to the breakfast bar, where they’d sold the rest of my omelette at a discount to a bum. The lady and her group made room for me among themselves and bought me another cup of coffee.

“How can you eat and drink with a forked tongue?” I asked Tattooed Cheeks. He showed me. A little appliance underneath, like a zipper. The Featherweight to the left of the big boy on the lady’s other side leaned over and frowned at me.

“Give us one good reason why we shouldn’t turn you in for Man-O-War’s reward.”

I shook my head. “I’m through. This sinner’s been absolved.”

“You’re legally bound by contract,” said the lady. “But we could c’noodle something. Buy Man-O-War out, sue on your behalf for nonfulfillment. We’re Misbegotten. Oley.” She pointed at herself. “Pidge.” That was the silent type next to her. “Percy.” The big boy. “Krait.” Mr. Tongue. “Gus.” Featherweight. “We’ll take care of you.”

I shook my head again. “If you’re going to turn me in, turn me in and collect. The credit ought to buy you the best sinner ever there was.”

“We can be good to you.”

“I don’t have it any more. It’s gone. All my rock ‘n’ roll sins have been forgiven.”

“Untrue,” said the big boy. Automatically, I started to picture on him and shut it down hard. “Man-O-War would have thrown you out if it were gone. You wouldn’t have run.”

“I didn’t want to tell him. Leave me alone. I just want to go and sin no more, see? Play with yourselves, I’m not helping.” I grabbed the counter with both hands and held on. So what were they going to do, pop me one and carry me off?

As a matter of fact, they did.

In the beginning, I thought, and the echo effect was stupendous. In the beginning … the beginning … the beginning …

In the beginning, the sinner was not human. I know because I’m old enough to remember.

They were all there, little more than phantoms. Misbegotten. Where do they get those names? I’m old enough to remember. Oingo-Boingo and Bow-Wow-Wow. Forty, did I say? Oooh, just a little past, a little close to a lot. Old rockers never die, they just keep rocking on. I never saw The Who, Moon was dead before I was born. But I remember, barely old enough to stand, rocking in my mother’s arms while thousands screamed and clapped and danced in their seats. Start me up … if you start me up, I’ll never stop … 763 Strings did a rendition for elevator and dentist’s office, I remember that, too. And that wasn’t the worst of it.

They hung on the memories, pulling more from me, turning me inside out. Are you experienced? Only a record of my father’s because he’d died, too, before my parents even met and nobody else ever dared ask that question. Are you experienced? … Well, I am.

(Well, I am.)

Five against one and I couldn’t push them away. Only, can you call it rape when you know you’re going to like it? Well, if I couldn’t get away, then I’d give them the ride of their lives. Jerkin’ Crocus didn’t kill me but she sure came near … .

The big boy faded in first, big and wild and too much badass to him. I reached out, held him tight, showing him. The beat from the night in the rain, I gave it to him, fed it to his heart and made him live it. Then came the lady, putting down the bass theme. She jittered, but mostly in the right places.

Now the Krait, and he was, slithering around the sound, in and out. Never mind the tattooed cheeks, he wasn’t just flash for the fools. He knew; you wouldn’t have thought it, but he knew.

Featherweight and the silent type, melody and first harmony. Bad. Featherweight was a disaster, didn’t know where to go or what to do when he got there, but he was pitching ahead like the S.S. Suicide.

Christ. If they had to rape me, couldn’t they have provided someone upright? The other four kept on, refusing to lose it, and I would have to make the best of it for all of us. Derivative, unoriginal—Featherweight did not rock. It was a crime, but all I could do was take them and shake them. Rock gods in the hands of an angry sinner.

They were never better. Small change getting a glimpse of what it was like to be big bucks. Hadn’t been for Featherweight, they might have gotten all the way there. More groups now than ever there was, all of them sure that if they just got the right sinner with them, they’d rock the moon down out of the sky.

We maybe vibrated it a little before we were done. Poor old Featherweight.

I gave them better than they deserved, and they knew that, too. So when I begged out, they showed me respect at last and went. Their techies were gentle with me, taking the plugs from my head, my poor old throbbing abused broken-hearted sinning head, and covered up the sockets. I had to sleep and they let me. I hear the man say, “That’s a take, righteously. We’ll rush it into distribution. Where in hell did you find that sinner?”

“Synthesizer,” I muttered, already asleep. “The actual word, my boy, is synthesizer.”

Crazy old dreams. I was back with Man-O-War in the big CA, leaving him again, and it was mostly as it happened, but you know dreams. His living room was half outdoors, half indoors, the walls all busted out. You know dreams; I didn’t think it was strange.

Man-O-War was mostly undressed, like he’d forgotten to finish. Oh, that never happened. Man-O-War forget a sequin or a bead? He loved to act it out, just like the Krait.

“No more,” I was saying, and he was saying, “But you don’t know anything else, you shitting?” Nobody in the big CA kids, they all shit; loose juice.

“Your contract goes another two and I get the option, I always get the option. And you love it, Gina, you know that, you’re no good without it.”

And then it was flashback time and I was in the pod with all my sockets plugged, rocking Man-O-War through the wires, giving him the meat and bone that made him Man-O-War and the machines picking it up, sound and vision so all the tube-babies all around the world could play it on their screens whenever they wanted. Forget the road, forget the shows, too much trouble, and it wasn’t like the tapes, not as exciting, even with the biggest FX, lasers, spaceships, explosions, no good. And the tapes weren’t as good as the stuff in the head, rock ‘n’ roll visions straight from the brain. No hours of set-up and hours more doctoring in the lab. But you had to get everyone in the group dreaming the same way. You needed a synthesis, and for that you got a synthesizer, not the old kind, the musical instrument, but something—somebody—to channel your group through, to bump up their music and their tube-fed little souls, to rock them and roll them the way they couldn’t do themselves. And anyone could be a rock ‘n’ roll hero then. Anyone!

In the end, they didn’t have to play instruments unless they really wanted to, and why bother? Let the synthesizer take their imaginings and boost them up to Mount Olympus.

Synthesizer. Synner. Sinner.

Not just anyone can do that, sin for rock ‘n’ roll. I can.

But it’s not the same as jumping all night to some bar band nobody knows yet … Man-O-War and his blown-out living room came back, and he said, “You rocked the walls right out of my house. I’ll never let you go.”

And I said, “I’m gone.”

Then I was out, going fast at first because I thought he’d be hot behind me. But I must have lost him and then somebody grabbed my ankle.

Featherweight had a tray, like he was Mr. Nursie-Angel-of-Mercy. Nudged the foot of the bed with his knee, and it sat me up slow. She rises from the grave, you can’t keep a good sinner down.

“Here.” He set the tray over my lap, pulled up a chair. Some kind of thick soup in a bowl he’d given me, with veg wafers to break up and put in. “Thought you’d want something soft and easy.” He put his left foot up on his right leg and had a good look at it. “I never been rocked like that before.”

“You don’t have it, no matter who rocks you ever in this world. Cut and run, go into management. The big Big Money’s in management.”

He snacked on his thumbnail. “Can you always tell?”

“If the Stones came back tomorrow, you couldn’t even tap your toes.”

“What if you took my place?”

“I’m a sinner, not a clown. You can’t sin and do the dance. It’s been tried.”

“You could do it. If anyone could.”

“No.”

His stringy cornsilk fell over his face and he tossed it back. “Eat your soup. They want to go again shortly.”

“No.” I touched my lower lip, thickened to sausage size. “I won’t sin for Man-O-War and I won’t sin for you. You want to pop me one again, go to. Shake a socket loose, give me aphasia.”

So he left and came back with a whole bunch of them, techies and do-kids, and they poured the soup down my throat and gave me a poke and carried me out to the pod so I could make Misbegotten this year’s firestorm.

I knew as soon as the first tape got out, Man-O-War would pick up the scent. They were already starting the machine to get me away from him. And they kept me good in the room—where their old sinner had done penance, the lady told me. Their old sinner came to see me, too. I thought, poison dripping from his fangs, death threats. But he was just a guy about my age with a lot of hair to hide his sockets (I never bothered, didn’t care if they showed). Just came to pay his respects, how’d I ever learn to rock the way I did?

Fool.

They kept me good in the room. Drunks when I wanted them and a poke to get sober again, a poke for vitamins, a poke to lose the bad dreams. Poke, poke, pig in a poke. I had tracks like the old B&O, and they didn’t even know what I meant by that. They lost Featherweight, got themselves someone a little more righteous, someone who could go with it and work out, sixteen-year-old snip girl with a face like a praying mantis. But she rocked and they rocked and we all rocked until Man-O-War came to take me home.

Strutted into my room in full plumage with his hair all fanned out (hiding the sockets) and said, “Did you want to press charges, Gina darling?”

Well, they fought it out over my bed. When Misbegotten said I was theirs now, Man-O-War smiled and said, “Yeah, and I bought you. You’re all mine now, you and your sinner. My sinner.” That was truth. Man-O-War had his conglomerate start to buy Misbegotten right after the first tape came out. Deal all done by the time we’d finished the third one and they never knew. Conglomerates buy and sell all the time. Everybody was in trouble but Man-O-War. And me, he said. He made them all leave and sat down on my bed to re-lay claim to me.

“Gina.” Ever see honey poured over the edge of a saw-tooth blade? Ever hear it? He couldn’t sing without hurting someone bad and he couldn’t dance, but inside, he rocked. If I rocked him.

“I don’t want to be a sinner, not for you or anyone.”

“It’ll all look different when I get you back to Cee-Ay.”

“I want to go to a cheesy bar and boogie my brains till they leak out the sockets.”

“No more, darling. That was why you came here, wasn’t it? But all the bars are gone and all the bands. Last call was years ago, it’s all up here now. All up here.” He tapped his temple. “You’re an old lady, no matter how much I spend keeping your bod young. And don’t I give you everything? And didn’t you say I had it?”

“It’s not the same. It wasn’t meant to be put on a tube for people to watch.”

“But it’s not as though rock ‘n’ roll is dead, lover.”

“You’re killing it.”

“Not me. You’re trying to bury it alive. But I’ll keep you going for a long, long time.”

“I’ll get away again. You’ll either rock ’n’ roll on your own or give it up, but you won’t be taking it out of me any more. This ain’t my way, it ain’t my time. Like the man said, ‘I don’t live today.’”

Man-O-War grinned. “And like the other man said, ‘Rock ‘n’ roll never forgets.’”

He called in his do-kids and took me home.

BRUCE STERLING

Sunken Gardens

One of the major new talents to enter SF in recent years, Bruce Sterling sold his first SF story in 1976, and has since sold stories to Universe, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Last Dangerous Visions, Lone Star Universe, and elsewhere. He has attracted special acclaim in the last few years for a series of stories set in his exotic Shaper/Mechanist future, a complex and disturbing future where warring political factions struggle to control the shape of human destiny, and the nature of humanity itself. His acclaimed Shaper/Mechanist story “Swarm” was both a Hugo and Nebula finalist in 1982; “Spider Rose,” another story sharing the same background, was also a Hugo finalist that year. His story “Cicada Queen,” a Nebula finalist last year, was in our First Annual Collection. His novels include Involution Ocean and The Artificial Kid. Upcoming from Arbor House is a big new novel set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe, Schismatrix. Sterling was born in Brownsville, Texas, and now lives in Austin, where he is a member of the well-known Turkey City Writers Workshop.

Terraforming is a familiar concept in SF, but in the darkly fascinating story that follows—another of the Shaper/Mechanist stories—we are taken to witness a bizarre terraforming contest between competing ecosystems, a literal battle of worlds, in which the stakes are life itself …

Mirasol’s crawler loped across the badlands of the Mare Hadriacum, under a tormented Martian sky. At the limits of the troposphere, jet streams twisted, dirty streaks across pale lilac. Mirasol watched the winds through the fretted glass of the control bay. Her altered brain suggested one pattern after another: nests of snakes, nets of dark eels, maps of black arteries. Since morning the crawler had been descending steadily into the Hellas Basin, and the air pressure was rising. Mars lay like a feverish patient under this thick blanket of air, sweating buried ice.

On the horizon thunderheads rose with explosive speed below the constant scrawl of the jet streams.

The basin was strange to Mirasol. Her faction, the Patternists, had been assigned to a redemption camp in northern Syrtis Major. There, two-hundred-mile-an-hour surface winds were common, and their pressurized camp had been buried three times by advancing dunes.

It had taken her eight days of constant travel to reach the equator.

From high overhead, the Regal faction had helped her navigate. Their orbiting city-state, Terraforming-Kluster, was a nexus of monitor satellites. The Regals showed by their helpfulness that they had her under close surveillance.

The crawler lurched as its six picklike feet scrabbled down the slopes of a deflation pit. Mirasol suddenly saw her own face reflected in the glass, pale and taut, her dark eyes dreamily self-absorbed. It was a bare face, with the anonymous beauty of the genetically Reshaped. She rubbed her eyes with nail-bitten fingers.

To the west, far overhead, a gout of airborne topsoil surged aside and revealed the Ladder, the mighty anchor cable of the Terraforming-Kluster.

Above the winds the cable faded from sight, vanishing below the metallic glitter of the Kluster, swinging aloofly in orbit.

Mirasol stared at the orbiting city with an uneasy mix of envy, fear, and reverence. She had never been so close to the Kluster before, or to the all-important Ladder that linked it to the Martian surface. Like most of her faction’s younger generation, she had never been into space. The Regals had carefully kept her faction quarantined in the Syrtis redemption camp.

Life had not come easily to Mars. For one hundred years the Regals of Terraforming-Kluster had bombarded the Martian surface with giant chunks of ice. This act of planetary engineering was the most ambitious, arrogant, and successful of all the works of man in space.

The shattering impacts had torn huge craters in the Martian crust, blasting tons of dust and steam into Mars’s threadbare sheet of air. As the temperature rose, buried oceans of Martian permafrost roared forth, leaving networks of twisted badlands and vast expanses of damp mud, smooth and sterile as a television. On these great playas and on the frost-caked walls of channels, cliffs, and calderas, transplanted lichen had clung and leapt into devouring life. In the plains of Eridania, in the twisted megacanyons of the Coprates Basin, in the damp and icy regions of the dwindling poles, vast clawing thickets of its sinister growth lay upon the land—massive disaster areas for the inorganic.

As the terraforming project had grown, so had the power of Terraforming-Kluster.

As a neutral point in humanity’s factional wars, T-K was crucial to financiers and bankers of every sect. Even the alien Investors, those star-traveling reptiles of enormous wealth, found T-K useful, and favored it with their patronage.

And as T-K’s citizens, the Regals, increased their power, smaller factions faltered and fell under their sway. Mars was dotted with bankrupt factions, financially captured and transported to the Martian surface by the T-K plutocrats.

Having failed in space, the refugees took Regal charity as ecologists of the sunken gardens. Dozens of factions were quarantined in cheerless redemption camps, isolated from one another, their lives pared to a grim frugality.

And the visionary Regals made good use of their power. The factions found themselves trapped in the arcane bioaesthetics of Posthumanist philosophy, subverted constantly by Regal broadcasts, Regal teaching, Regal culture. With time even the stubbornest faction would be broken down and digested into the cultural bloodstream of T-K. Faction members would be allowed to leave their redemption camp and travel up the Ladder.

But first they would have to prove themselves. The Patternists had awaited their chance for years. It had come at last in the Ibis Crater competition, an ecological struggle of the factions that would prove the victors’ right to Regal status. Six factions had sent their champions to the ancient Ibis Crater, each one armed with its group’s strongest biotechnologies. It would be a war of the sunken gardens, with the Ladder as the prize.

Mirasol’s crawler followed a gully through a chaotic terrain of rocky permafrost that had collapsed in karsts and sinkholes. After two hours, the gully ended abruptly. Before Mirasol rose a mountain range of massive slabs and boulders, some with the glassy sheen of impact melt, others scabbed over with lichen.

As the crawler started up the slope, the sun came out, and Mirasol saw the crater’s outer rim jigsawed in the green of lichen and the glaring white of snow.

The oxygen readings were rising steadily. Warm, moist air was drooling from within the crater’s lip, leaving a spittle of ice. A half-million-ton asteroid from the rings of Saturn had fallen here at fifteen kilometers a second. But for two centuries rain, creeping glaciers, and lichen had gnawed at the crater’s rim, and the wound’s raw edges had slumped and scarred.

The crawler worked its way up the striated channel of an empty glacier bed. A cold alpine wind keened down the channel, where flourishing patches of lichen clung to exposed veins of ice.

Some rocks were striped with sediment from the ancient Martian seas, and the impact had peeled them up and thrown them on their backs.

It was winter, the season for pruning the sunken gardens. The treacherous rubble of the crater’s rim was cemented with frozen mud. The crawler found the glacier’s root and clawed its way up the ice face. The raw slope was striped with winter snow and storm-blown summer dust, stacked in hundreds of red-and-white layers. With the years the stripes had warped and rippled in the glacier’s flow.

Mirasol reached the crest. The crawler ran spiderlike along the crater’s snowy rim. Below, in a bowl-shaped crater eight kilometers deep, lay a seething ocean of air.

Mirasol stared. Within this gigantic airsump, twenty kilometers across, a broken ring of majestic rain clouds trailed their dark skirts, like duchesses in quadrille, about the ballroom floor of a lens-shaped sea.

Thick forests of green and yellow mangroves rimmed the shallow water and had overrun the shattered islands at its center. Pinpoints of brilliant scarlet ibis spattered the trees. A flock of them suddenly spread kitelike wings and took to the air, spreading across the crater in uncounted millions. Mirasol was appalled by the crudity and daring of this ecological concept, its crass and primal vitality.

This was what she had come to destroy. The thought filled her with sadness.

Then she remembered the years she had spent flattering her Regal teachers, collaborating with them in the destruction of her own culture. When the chance at the Ladder came, she had been chosen. She put her sadness away, remembering her ambitions and her rivals.

The history of mankind in space had been a long epic of ambitions and rivalries. From the very first, space colonies had struggled for self-sufficiency and had soon broken their ties with the exhausted Earth. The independent life-support systems had given them the mentality of city-states. Strange ideologies had bloomed in the hothouse atmosphere of the o’neills, and breakaway groups were common.

Space was too vast to police. Pioneer elites burst forth, defying anyone to stop their pursuit of aberrant technologies. Quite suddenly the march of science had become an insane, headlong scramble. New sciences and technologies had shattered whole societies in waves of future shock.

The shattered cultures coalesced into factions, so thoroughly alienated from one another that they were called humanity only for lack of a better term. The Shapers, for instance, had seized control of their own genetics, abandoning mankind in a burst of artificial evolution. Their rivals, the Mechanists, had replaced flesh with advanced prosthetics.

Mirasol’s own group, the Patternists, were a breakaway Shaper faction.

The Patternists specialized in cerebral asymmetry. With grossly expanded right-brain hemispheres, they were highly intuitive, given to metaphors, parallels, and sudden cognitive leaps. Their inventive minds and quick, unpredictable genius had given them a competitive edge at first. But with these advantages had come grave weaknesses: autism, fugue states, and paranoia. Patterns grew out of control and became grotesque webs of fantasy.

With these handicaps their colony had faltered. Patternist industries went into decline, outpaced by industrial rivals. Competition had grown much fiercer. The Shaper and Mechanist cartels had turned commercial action into a kind of endemic warfare. The Patternist gamble had failed, and the day came when their entire habitat was bought out from around them by Regal plutocrats. In a way it was a kindness. The Regals were suave and proud of their ability to assimilate refugees and failures.

The Regals themselves had started as dissidents and defectors. Their Posthumanist philosophy had given them the moral power and the bland assurance to dominate and absorb factions from the fringes of humanity. And they had the support of the Investors, who had vast wealth and the secret techniques of star travel.

The crawler’s radar alerted Mirasol to the presence of a landcraft from a rival faction. Leaning forward in her pilot’s couch, she put the craft’s image on screen. It was a lumpy sphere, balanced uneasily on four long, spindly legs. Silhouetted against the horizon, it moved with a strange, wobbling speed along the opposite lip of the crater, then disappeared down the outward slope.

Mirasol wondered if it had been cheating. She was tempted to try some cheating herself—to dump a few frozen packets of aerobic bacteria or a few dozen capsules of insect eggs down the slope—but she feared the orbiting monitors of the T-K supervisors. Too much was at stake—not only her own career but that of her entire faction, huddled bankrupt and despairing in their cold redemption camp. It was said that T-K’s ruler, the posthuman being they called the Lobster King, would himself watch the contest. To fail before his black, abstracted gaze would be a horror.

On the crater’s outside slope, below her, a second rival craft appeared, lurching and slithering with insane, aggressive grace. The craft’s long, supple body moved with a sidewinder’s looping and coiling, holding aloft a massive, shining head, like a faceted mirror ball.

Both rivals were converging on the rendezvous camp, where the six contestants would receive their final briefing from the Regal Adviser. Mirasol hurried forward.

When the camp first flashed into sight on her screen, Mirasol was shocked. The place was huge and absurdly elaborate: a drug dream of paneled geodesics and colored minarets, sprawling in the lichenous desert like an abandoned chandelier. This was a camp for Regals.

Here the arbiters and sophists of the BioArts would stay and judge the crater as the newly planted ecosystems struggled among themselves for supremacy.

The camp’s air locks were surrounded with shining green thickets of lichen, where the growth feasted on escaped humidity. Mirasol drove her crawler through the yawning air lock and into a garage. Inside the garage, robot mechanics were scrubbing and polishing the coiled, hundred-meter length of the snake craft and the gleaming black abdomen of an eight-legged crawler. The black crawler was crouched with its periscoped head sunk downward, as if ready to pounce. Its swollen belly was marked with a red hourglass and the corporate logos of its faction.

The garage smelled of dust and grease overlaid with floral perfumes. Mirasol left the mechanics to their work and walked stiffly down a long corridor, stretching the kinks out of her back and shoulders. A latticework door sprang apart into filaments and resealed itself behind her.

She was in a dining room that clinked and rattled with the high-pitched, repetitive sound of Regal music. Its walls were paneled with tall display screens showing startlingly beautiful garden panoramas. A pulpy-looking servo, whose organometallic casing and squat, smiling head had a swollen and almost diseased look, showed her to a chair.

Mirasol sat, denting the heavy, white tablecloth with her knees. There were seven places at the table. The Regal Adviser’s tall chair was at the table’s head. Mirasol’s assigned position gave her a sharp idea of her own status. She sat at the far end of the table, on the Adviser’s left.

Two of her rivals had already taken their places. One was a tall, red-haired Shaper with long, thin arms, whose sharp face and bright, worried eyes gave him a querulous, birdlike look. The other was a sullen, feral-looking Mechanist with prosthetic hands and a paramilitary tunic marked at the shoulders with a red hourglass.

Mirasol studied her two rivals with silent, sidelong glances. Like her, they were both young. The Regals favored the young, and they encouraged captive factions to expand their populations widely.

This strategy cleverly subverted the old guard of each faction in a tidal wave of their own children, indoctrinated from birth by Regals.

The birdlike man, obviously uncomfortable with his place directly at the Adviser’s right, looked as if he wanted to speak but dared not. The piratical Mech sat staring at his artificial hands, his ears stoppered with headphones.

Each place setting had a squeezebulb of liqueur. Regals, who were used to weightlessness in orbit, used these bulbs by habit, and their presence here was both a privilege and a humiliation.

The door fluttered open again, and two more rivals burst in, almost as if they had raced. The first was a flabby-looking Mech, still not used to gravity, whose sagging limbs were supported by an extraskeletal framework. The second was a severely mutated Shaper whose elbowed legs terminated in grasping hands. The pedal hands were gemmed with heavy rings that clicked against each other as she waddled across the parquet floor.

The woman with the strange legs took her place across from the birdlike man. They began to converse haltingly in a language that none of the others could follow. The man in the framework, gasping audibly, lay in obvious pain in the chair across from Mirasol. His plastic eyeballs looked as blank as chips of glass. His sufferings in the pull of gravity showed that he was new to Mars, and his place in the competition meant that his faction was powerful. Mirasol despised him.

Mirasol felt a nightmarish sense of entrapment. Everything about her competitors seemed to proclaim their sickly unfitness for survival.

They had a haunted, hungry look, like starving men in a lifeboat who wait with secret eagerness for the first to die.

She caught a glimpse of herself reflected in the bowl of a spoon and saw with a flash of insight how she must appear to the others. Her intuitive right brain was swollen beyond human bounds, distorting her skull. Her face had the blank prettiness of her genetic heritage, but she could feel the bleak strain of her expression. Her body looked shapeless under her quilted pilot’s vest and dun-drab, general-issue blouse and trousers. Her fingertips were raw from biting. She saw in herself the fey, defeated look of her faction’s older generation, those who had tried and failed in the great world of space, and she hated herself for it.

They were still waiting for the sixth competitor when the plonking music reached a sudden crescendo and the Regal Adviser arrived. Her name was Arkadya Sorienti, Incorporated. She was a member of T-K’s ruling oligarchy, and she swayed through the bursting door with the careful steps of a woman not used to gravity.

She wore the Investor-style clothing of a high-ranking diplomat. The Regals were proud of their diplomatic ties with the alien Investors, since Investor patronage proved their own vast wealth. The Sorienti’s knee-high boots had false, birdlike toes, scaled like Investor hide. She wore a heavy skirt of gold cords braided with jewels, and a stiff, wrist-length formal jacket with embroidered cuffs. A heavy collar formed an arching, multicolored frill behind her head. Her blond hair was set in an interlaced style as complex as computer wiring. The skin of her bare legs had a shiny, glossy look, as if freshly enameled. Her eyelids gleamed with soft, reptilian pastels.

One of her corporate ladyship’s two body-servos helped her to her seat. The Sorienti leaned forward brightly, interlacing small, pretty hands so crusted with rings and bracelets that they resembled gleaming gauntlets.

“I hope the five of you have enjoyed this chance for an informal talk,” she said sweetly, just as if such a thing were possible. “I’m sorry I was delayed. Our sixth participant will not be joining us.”

There was no explanation. The Regals never publicized any action of theirs that might be construed as a punishment. The looks of the competitors, alternately stricken and calculating, showed that they were imagining the worst.

The two squat servos circulated around the table, dishing out courses of food from trays balanced on their flabby heads. The competitors picked uneasily at their plates.

The display screen behind the Adviser flicked into a schematic diagram of the Ibis Crater. “Please notice the revised boundary lines,” the Sorienti said. “I hope that each of you will avoid trespassing—not merely physically but biologically as well.” She looked at them seriously. “Some of you may plan to use herbicides. This is permissible, but the spreading of spray beyond your sector’s boundaries is considered crass. Bacteriological establishment is a subtle art. The spreading of tailored disease organisms is an aesthetic distortion. Please remember that your activities here are a disruption of what should ideally be natural processes. Therefore the period of biotic seeding will last only twelve hours. Thereafter, the new complexity level will be allowed to stabilize itself without any other interference at all. Avoid self-aggrandizement, and confine yourselves to a primal role, as catalysts.”

The Sorienti’s speech was formal and ceremonial. Mirasol studied the display screen, noting with much satisfaction that her territory had been expanded.

Seen from overhead, the crater’s roundness was deeply marred.

Mirasol’s sector, the southern one, showed the long, flattened scar of a major landslide, where the crater wall had slumped and flowed into the pit. The simple ecosystem had recovered quickly, and mangroves festooned the rubble’s lowest slopes. Its upper slopes were gnawed by lichens and glaciers.

The sixth sector had been erased, and Mirasol’s share was almost twenty square kilometers of new land.

It would give her faction’s ecosystem more room to take root before the deadly struggle began in earnest.

This was not the first such competition. The Regals had held them for decades as an objective test of the skills of rival factions. It helped the Regals’ divide-and-conquer policy, to set the factions against one another.

And in the centuries to come, as Mars grew more hospitable to life, the gardens would surge from their craters and spread across the surface. Mars would become a warring jungle of separate creations. For the Regals the competitions were closely studied simulations of the future.

And the competitions gave the factions motives for their work. With the garden wars to spur them, the ecological sciences had advanced enormously. Already, with the progress of science and taste, many of the oldest craters had become ecoaesthetic embarrassments.

The Ibis Crater had been an early, crude experiment. The faction that had created it was long gone, and its primitive creation was now considered tasteless.

Each gardening faction camped beside its own crater, struggling to bring it to life. Some craters were still raw and smoking. But the competitions were a shortcut up the Ladder. The competitors’ philosophies and talents, made into flesh, would carry out a proxy struggle for supremacy. The sine-wave curves of growth, the rallies and declines of expansion and extinction, would scroll across the monitors of the Regal judges like stock-market reports. This complex struggle would be weighed in each of its aspects: technological, philosophical, biological, and aesthetic. The winners would abandon their camps to take on Regal wealth and power. They would roam T-K’s jeweled corridors and revel in its perquisites: extended life spans, corporate titles, cosmopolitan tolerance, and the interstellar patronage of the Investors.

When red dawn broke over the landscape, the five were poised around the Ibis Crater, awaiting the signal. The day was calm, with only a distant nexus of jet streams marring the sky. Mirasol watched pink-stained sunlight creep down the inside slope of the crater’s western wall. In the mangrove thickets birds were beginning to stir.

Mirasol waited tensely. She had taken a position on the upper slopes of the landslide’s raw debris. Radar showed her rivals spaced along the interior slopes: to her left, the hourglass crawler and the jewel-headed snake; to her right, a mantislike crawler and the globe on stilts.

The signal came, sudden as lightning: A meteor of ice shot from orbit and left a shock-wave cloud plume of ablated steam. Mirasol charged forward.

The Patternists’ strategy was to concentrate on the upper slopes and the landslide’s rubble, a marginal niche where they hoped to excel. Their cold crater in Syrtis Major had given them some expertise in alpine species, and they hoped to exploit this strength. The landslide’s long slope, far above sea level, was to be their power base. The crawler lurched downslope, blasting out a fine spray of lichenophagous bacteria.

Suddenly the air was full of birds. Across the crater, the globe on stilts had rushed down to the waterline and was laying waste the mangroves. Fine wisps of smoke showed the slicing beam of a heavy laser.

Burst after burst of birds took wing, peeling from their nests to wheel and dip in terror. At first, their frenzied cries came as a high-pitched whisper. Then, as the fear spread, the screeching echoed and reechoed, building to a mindless surf of pain. In the crater’s dawn-warmed air, the scarlet motes hung in their millions, swirling and coalescing like drops of blood in free fall.

Mirasol scattered the seeds of alpine rock crops. The crawler picked its way down the talus, spraying fertilizer into cracks and crevices. She pried up boulders and released a scattering of invertebrates: nematodes, mites, sowbugs, altered millipedes. She splattered the rocks with gelatin to feed them until the mosses and ferns took hold.

The cries of the birds were appalling. Downslope the other factions were thrashing in the muck at sea level, wreaking havoc, destroying the mangroves so that their own creations could take hold. The great snake looped and ducked through the canopy, knotting itself, ripping up swathes of mangroves by the roots. As Mirasol watched, the top of its faceted head burst open and released a cloud of bats.

The mantis crawler was methodically marching along the borders of its sector, its saw-edged arms reducing everything before it into kindling. The hourglass crawler had slashed through its territory, leaving a muddy network of fire zones. Behind it rose a wall of smoke.

It was a daring ploy. Sterilizing the sector by fire might give the new biome a slight advantage. Even a small boost could be crucial as exponential rates of growth took hold. But the Ibis Crater was a closed system. The use of fire required great care. There was only so much air within the bowl.

Mirasol worked grimly. Insects were next. They were often neglected in favor of massive sea beasts or flashy predators, but in terms of biomass, gram by gram, insects could overwhelm. She blasted a carton downslope to the shore, where it melted, releasing aquatic termites. She shoved aside flat shelves of rock, planting egg cases below their sun-warmed surfaces. She released a cloud of leaf-eating midges, their tiny bodies packed with bacteria. Within the crawler’s belly, rack after automatic rack was thawed and fired through nozzles, dropped through spiracles or planted in the holes jabbed by picklike feet.

Each faction was releasing a potential world. Near the water’s edge, the mantis had released a pair of things like giant black sail planes. They were swooping through the clouds of ibis, opening great sieved mouths. On the islands in the center of the crater’s lake, scaled walruses clambered on the rocks, blowing steam. The stilt ball was laying out an orchard in the mangroves’ wreckage. The snake had taken to the water, its faceted head leaving a wake of V-waves.

In the hourglass sector, smoke continued to rise. The fires were spreading, and the spider ran frantically along its network of zones. Mirasol watched the movement of the smoke as she released a horde of marmots and rock squirrels.

A mistake had been made. As the smoky air gushed upward in the feeble Martian gravity, a fierce valley wind of cold air from the heights flowed downward to fill the vacuum. The mangroves burned fiercely. Shattered networks of flaming branches were flying into the air.

The spider charged into the flames, smashing and trampling. Mirasol laughed, imagining demerits piling up in the judges’ data banks. Her talus slopes were safe from fire. There was nothing to burn.

The ibis flock had formed a great wheeling ring above the shore. Within their scattered ranks flitted the dark shapes of airborne predators. The long plume of steam from the meteor had begun to twist and break. A sullen wind was building up.

Fire had broken out in the snake’s sector. The snake was swimming in the sea’s muddy waters, surrounded by bales of bright-green kelp. Before its pilot noticed, fire was already roaring through a great piled heap of the wreckage it had left on shore. There were no windbreaks left. Air poured down the denuded slope. The smoke column guttered and twisted, its black clouds alive with sparks.

A flock of ibis plunged into the cloud. Only a handful emerged; some of them were flaming visibly. Mirasol began to know fear. As smoke rose to the crater’s rim, it cooled and started to fall outward and downward. A vertical whirlwind was forming, a torus of hot smoke and cold wind.

The crawler scattered seed-packed hay for pygmy mountain goats. Just before her an ibis fell from the sky with a dark squirming shape, all claws and teeth, clinging to its neck. She rushed forward and crushed the predator, then stopped and stared distractedly across the crater.

Fires were spreading with unnatural speed. Small puffs of smoke rose from a dozen places, striking large heaps of wood with uncanny precision. Her altered brain searched for a pattern. The fires springing up in the mantis sector were well beyond the reach of any falling debris.

In the spider’s zone, flames had leapt the firebreaks without leaving a mark. The pattern felt wrong to her, eerily wrong, as if the destruction had a force all its own, a raging synergy that fed upon itself.

The pattern spread into a devouring crescent. Mirasol felt the dread of lost control—the sweating fear an orbiter feels at the hiss of escaping air or the way a suicide feels at the first bright gush of blood.

Within an hour the garden sprawled beneath a hurricane of hot decay. The dense columns of smoke had flattened like thunderheads at the limits of the garden’s sunken troposphere. Slowly a spark-shot gray haze, dripping ash like rain, began to ring the crater. Screaming birds circled beneath the foul torus, falling by tens and scores and hundreds. Their bodies littered the garden’s sea, their bright plumage blurred with ash in a steel-gray sump.

The landcraft of the others continued to fight the flames, smashing unharmed through the fire’s charred borderlands. Their efforts were useless, a pathetic ritual before the disaster.

Even the fire’s malicious purity had grown tired and tainted. The oxygen was failing. The flames were dimmer and spread more slowly, releasing a dark nastiness of half-combusted smoke.

Where it spread, nothing that breathed could live. Even the flames were killed as the smoke billowed along the crater’s crushed and smoldering slopes.

Mirasol watched a group of striped gazelles struggle up the barren slopes of the talus in search of air. Their dark eyes, fresh from the laboratory, rolled in timeless animal fear. Their coats were scorched, their flanks heaved, their mouths dripped foam. One by one they collapsed in convulsions, kicking at the lifeless Martian rock as they slid and fell. It was a vile sight, the image of a blighted spring.

An oblique flash of red downslope to her left attracted her attention. A large red animal was skulking among the rocks. She turned the crawler and picked her way toward it, wincing as a dark surf of poisoned smoke broke across the fretted glass.

She spotted the animal as it broke from cover. It was a scorched and gasping creature like a great red ape. She dashed forward and seized it in the crawler’s arms. Held aloft, it clawed and kicked, hammering the crawler’s arms with a smoldering branch. In revulsion and pity, she crushed it. Its bodice of tight-sewn ibis feathers tore, revealing blood-slicked human flesh.

Using the crawler’s grips, she tugged at a heavy tuft of feathers on its head. The tight-fitting mask ripped free, and the dead man’s head slumped forward. She rolled it back, revealing a face tattooed with stars.

The ornithopter sculled above the burned-out garden, its long red wings beating with dreamlike fluidity. Mirasol watched the Sorienti’s painted face as her corporate ladyship stared into the shining viewscreen.

The ornithopter’s powerful cameras cast image after image onto the tabletop screen, lighting the Regal’s face. The tabletop was littered with the Sorienti’s elegant knickknacks: an inhaler case, a half-empty jeweled squeezebulb, lorgnette binoculars, a stack of tape cassettes.

“An unprecedented case,” her ladyship murmured. “It was not a total dieback after all but merely the extinction of everything with lungs. There must be strong survivorship among the lower orders: fish, insects, annelids. Now that the rain’s settled the ash, you can see the vegetation making a strong comeback. Your own section seems almost undamaged.”

“Yes,” Mirasol said. “The natives were unable to reach it with torches before the fire storm had smothered itself.”

The Sorienti leaned back into the tasseled arms of her couch. “I wish you wouldn’t mention them so loudly, even between ourselves.”

“No one would believe me.”

“The others never saw them,” the Regal said. “They were too busy fighting the flames.” She hesitated briefly. “You were wise to confide in me first.”

Mirasol locked eyes with her new patroness, then looked away. “There was no one else to tell. They’d have said I built a pattern out of nothing but my own fears.”

“You have your faction to think of,” the Sorienti said with an air of sympathy. “With such a bright future ahead of them, they don’t need a renewed reputation for paranoid fantasies.”

She studied the screen. “The Patternists are winners by default. It certainly makes an interesting case study. If the new garden grows tiresome we can have the whole crater sterilized from orbit. Some other faction can start again with a clean slate.”

“Don’t let them build too close to the edge,” Mirasol said.

Her corporate ladyship watched her attentively, tilting her head.

“I have no proof,” Mirasol said, “but I can see the pattern behind it all. The natives had to come from somewhere. The colony that stocked the crater must have been destroyed in that huge landslide. Was that your work? Did your people kill them?”

The Sorienti smiled. “You’re very bright, my dear. You will do well, up the Ladder. And you can keep secrets. Your office as my secretary suits you very well.”

“They were destroyed from orbit,” Mirasol said. “Why else would they hide from us? You tried to annihilate them.”

“It was a long time ago,” the Regal said. “In the early days, when things were shakier. They were researching the secret of star flight, techniques only the Investors know. Rumor says they reached success at last, in their redemption camp. After that, there was no choice.”

“Then they were killed for the Investors’ profit,” Mirasol said. She stood up quickly and walked around the cabin, her new jeweled skirt clattering around her knees. “So that the aliens could go on toying with us, hiding their secret, selling us trinkets.”

The Regal folded her hands with a clicking of rings and bracelets. “Our Lobster King is wise,” she said. “If humanity’s efforts turned to the stars, what would become of terraforming? Why should we trade the power of creation itself to become like the Investors?”

“But think of the people,” Mirasol said. “Think of them losing their technologies, degenerating into human beings. A handful of savages, eating bird meat. Think of the fear they felt for generations, the way they burned their own home and killed themselves when they saw us come to smash and destroy their world. Aren’t you filled with horror?”

“For humans?” the Sorienti said. “No!”

“But can’t you see? You’ve given this planet life as an art form, as an enormous game. You force us to play in it, and those people were killed for it! Can’t you see how that blights everything?”

“Our game is reality,” the Regal said. She gestured at the viewscreen. “You can’t deny the savage beauty of destruction.”

“You defend this catastrophe?”

The Regal shrugged. “If life worked perfectly, how could things evolve? Aren’t we posthuman? Things grow; things die. In time the cosmos kills us all. The cosmos has no meaning, and its emptiness is absolute. That’s pure terror, but it’s also pure freedom. Only our ambitions and our creations can fill it.”

“And that justifies your actions?”

“We act for life,” the Regal said. “Our ambitions have become this world’s natural laws. We blunder because life blunders. We go on because life must go on. When you’ve taken the long view, from orbit—when the power we wield is in your own hands—then you can judge us.” She smiled. “You will be judging yourself. You’ll be Regal.”

“But what about your captive factions? Your agents, who do your will? Once we had our own ambitions. We failed, and now you isolate us, indoctrinate us, make us into rumors. We must have something of our own. Now we have nothing.”

“That’s not so. You have what we’ve given you. You have the Ladder.”

The vision stung Mirasol: power, light, the hint of justice, this world with its sins and sadness shrunk to a bright arena far below. “Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, we do.”

NANCY KRESS

Trinity

People have been searching for God for thousands of years, perhaps from the very beginnings of the human species, but until now it hasn’t occurred to anyone that it might be possible to use the sophisticated tools of modern high technology as an aid to that search.

That thought does occur to the characters in the fascinating story that follows; what doesn’t occur to them is that if you look hard enough for something, you just might be unlucky enough to find it …

Born in Buffalo, Nancy Kress now lives in Brockport, New York. She began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-seventies, and has since become a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine; she has also appeared in Omni, Universe, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and elsewhere. Her first novel, The Prince of Morning Bells, appeared in 1981. Her most recent novel was last year’s well-received The Golden Grove. Upcoming are a novel, The White Pipes, and a collection of her short fiction, Trinity, both from Bluejay books.

“Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief!”

—Mark 9:24

At first I didn’t recognize Devrie.

Devrie—I didn’t recognize Devrie. Astonished at myself, I studied the wasted figure standing in the middle of the bare reception room: arms like wires, clavicle sharply outlined, head shaved; dressed in that ugly long tent of light-weight gray. God knew what her legs looked like under it. Then she smiled, and it was Devrie.

“You look like shit.”

“Hello, Seena. Come on in.”

“I am in.”

“Barely. It’s not catching, you know.”

“Stupidity fortunately isn’t,” I said and closed the door behind me. The small room was too hot; Devrie would need the heat, of course, with almost no fat left to insulate her bones and organs. Next to her I felt huge, although I am not. Huge, hairy, sloppy-breasted.

“Thank you for not wearing bright colors. They do affect me.”

“Anything for a sister,” I said, mocking the old childhood formula, the old sentiment. But Devrie was too quick to think it was only mockery; in that, at least, she had not changed. She clutched my arm and her fingers felt like chains, or talons.

“You found him. Seena, you found him.”

“I found him.”

“Tell me,” she whispered.

“Sit down first, before you fall over. God, Devrie, don’t you eat at all?”

“Tell me,” she said. So I did.

Devrie Caroline Konig had admitted herself to the Institute of the Biological Hope on the Caribbean island of Dominica eleven months ago, in late November of 2017, when her age was 23 years and 4 months. I am precise about this because it is all I can be sure of. I need the precision. The Institute of the Biological Hope is not precise; it is a mongrel, part research laboratory in brain sciences, part monastery, part school for training in the discipline of the mind. That made my baby sister guinea pig, postulant, freshman. She had always been those things, but, until now, sequentially. Apparently so had many other people, for when eccentric Nobel Prize winner James Arthur Bohentin had founded his Institute, he had been able to fund it, although precariously. But in that it did not differ from most private scientific research centers.

Or most monasteries.

I wanted Devrie out of the Institute of the Biological Hope.

“It’s located on Dominica,” I had said sensibly—what an ass I had been—to an unwasted Devrie a year ago, “because the research procedures there fall outside United States laws concerning the safety of research subjects. Doesn’t that tell you something, Devrie? Doesn’t that at least give you pause? In New York, it would be illegal to do to anyone what Bohentin does to his people.”

“Do you know him?” she had asked.

“I have met him. Once.”

“What is he like?”

“Like stone.”

Devrie shrugged, and smiled. “All the participants in the Institute are willing. Eager.”

“That doesn’t make it ethical for Bohentin to destroy them. Ethical or legal.”

“It’s legal on Dominica. And in thinking you know better than the participants what they should risk their own lives for, aren’t you playing God?”

“Better me than some untrained fanatic who offers himself up like an exalted Viking hero, expecting Valhalla.”

“You’re an intellectual snob, Seena.”

“I never denied it.”

“Are you sure you aren’t really objecting not to the Institute’s dangers but to its purpose? Isn’t the ‘Hope’ part what really bothers you?”

“I don’t think scientific method and pseudo-religious mush mix, no. I never did. I don’t think it leads to a perception of God.”

“The holotank tapes indicate it leads to a perception of something the brain hasn’t encountered before,” Devrie said, and for a moment I was silent.

I was once, almost, a biologist. I was aware of the legitimate studies that formed the basis for Bohentin’s megalomania: the brain wave changes that accompany anorexia nervosa, sensory deprivation, biological feedback, and neurotransmitter stimulants. I have read the historical accounts, some merely pathetic but some disturbingly not, of the Christian mystics who achieved rapture through the mortification of the flesh and the Eastern mystics who achieved anesthesia through the control of the mind, of the faith healers who succeeded, of the carcinomas shrunk through trained will. I knew of the research of focused clairvoyance during orgasm, and of what happens when neurotransmitter number and speed are increased chemically.

And I knew all that was known about the twin trance.

Fifteen years earlier, as a doctoral student in biology, I had spent one summer replicating Sunderwirth’s pioneering study of drug-enhanced telepathy in identical twins. My results were positive, except that within six months all eight of my research subjects had died. So had Sunder-wirth’s. Twin-trance research became the cloning controversy of the new decade, with the same panicky cycle of public outcry, legal restrictions, religious misunderstandings, fear, and demagoguery. When I received the phone call that the last of my subjects was dead—cardiac arrest, no history of heart disease, forty-three Goddamn years old—I locked myself in my apartment, with the lights off and my father’s papers clutched in my hand, for three days. Then I resigned from the neurology department and became an entomologist. There is no pain in classifying dead insects.

“There is something there,” Devrie had repeated. She was holding the letter sent to our father, who someone at the Institute had not heard was dead. “It says the holotank tapes—”

“So there’s something there,” I said. “So the tanks are picking up some strange radiation. Why call it ‘God’?”

“Why not call it God?”

“Why not call it Rover? Even if I grant you that the tape pattern looks like a presence—which I don’t—you have no way of knowing that Bohentin’s phantom isn’t, say, some totally ungodlike alien being.”

“But neither do I know that it is.”

“Devrie—”

She had smiled and put her hands on my shoulders. She had—has, has always had—a very sweet smile. “Seena. Think. If the Institute can prove rationally that God exists—can prove it to the intellectual mind, the doubting Thomases who need something concrete to study … faith that doesn’t need to be taken on faith …”

She wore her mystical face, a glowing softness that made me want to shake the silliness out of her. Instead I made some clever riposte, some sarcasm I no longer remember, and reached out to ruffle her hair. Big-sisterly, patronizing, thinking I could deflate her rapturous interest with the pin-prick of ridicule. God, I was an ass. It hurts to remember how big an ass I was.

A month and a half later Devrie committed herself and half her considerable inheritance to the Institute of the Biological Hope.

“Tell me,” Devrie whispered. The Institute had no windows; outside I had seen grass, palm trees, butterflies floating in the sunshine, but inside here in the bare gray room there was nowhere to look but at her face.

“He’s a student in a Master’s program at a third-rate college in New Hampshire. He was adopted when he was two, nearly three, in March of 1997. Before that he was in a government-run children’s home. In Boston, of course. The adopting family, as far as I can discover, never was told he was anything but one more toddler given up by somebody for adoption.”

“Wait a minute,” Devrie said. “I need … a minute.”

She had turned paler, and her hands trembled. I had recited the information as if it were no more than an exhibit listing at my museum. Of course she was rattled. I wanted her rattled. I wanted her out.

Lowering herself to the floor, Devrie sat cross-legged and closed her eyes. Concentration spread over her face, but a concentration so serene it barely deserved that name. Her breathing slowed, her color freshened, and when she opened her eyes, they had the rested energy of a person who has just slept eight hours in mountain air. Her face even looked plumper, and an EEG, I guessed, would show damn near alpha waves. In her year at the Institute she must have mastered quite an array of biofeedback techniques to do that, so fast and with such a malnourished body.

“Very impressive,” I said sourly.

“Seena—have you seen him?”

“No. All this is from sealed records.”

“How did you get into the records?”

“Medical and governmental friends.”

“Who?”

“What do you care, as long as I found out what you wanted to know?”

She was silent. I knew she would never ask me if I had obtained her information legally or illegally; it would not occur to her to ask. Devrie, being Devrie, would assume it had all been generously offered by my modest museum connections and our dead father’s immodest research connections. She would be wrong.

“How old is he now?”

“Twenty-four years last month. They must have used your two-month tissue sample.”

“Do you think Daddy knew where the … baby went?”

“Yes. Look at the timing—the child was normal and healthy, yet he wasn’t adopted until he was nearly three. The researchers kept track of him, all right; they kept all six clones in a government-controlled home where they could monitor their development as long as humanely possible. The same-sex clones were released for adoption after a year, but they hung onto the cross-sex ones until they reached an age where they would become harder to adopt. They undoubtedly wanted to study them as long as they could. And even after the kids were released for adoption, the researchers held off publishing until all six were placed and the records sealed. Dad’s group didn’t publish until April, 1998, remember. By the time the storm broke, the babies were out of its path, and anonymous.”

“And the last,” Devrie said.

“And the last,” I agreed, although of course the researchers hadn’t foreseen that. So few in the scientific community had foreseen that. Offense against God and man, Satan’s work, natter natter. Watching my father’s suddenly stooped shoulders and stricken eyes, I had thought how ugly public revulsion could be and had nobly resolved—how had I thought of it then? So long ago—resolved to snatch the banner of pure science from my fallen father’s hand. Another time that I had been an ass. Five years later, when it had been my turn to feel the ugly scorching of public revulsion, I had broken, left neurological research, and fled down the road that led to the Museum of Natural History, where I was the curator of ants fossilized in amber and moths pinned securely under permaplex.

“The other four clones,” Devrie said, “the ones from that university in California that published almost simultaneously with Daddy—”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even try to ask. It was hard enough in Cambridge.”

“Me,” Devrie said wonderingly. “He’s me.”

“Oh, for—Devrie, he’s your twin. No more than that. No—actually less than that. He shares your genetic material exactly as an identical twin would, except for the Y chromosome, but he shares none of the congenital or environmental influences that shaped your personality. There’s no mystical replication of spirit in cloning. He’s merely a twin who got born eleven months late!”

She looked at me with luminous amusement. I didn’t like the look. On that fleshless face, the skin stretched so taut that the delicate bones beneath were as visible as the veins of a moth wing, her amusement looked ironic. Yet Devrie was never ironic. Gentle, passionate, trusting, a little stupid, she was not capable of irony. It was beyond her, just as it was beyond her to wonder why I, who had fought her entering the Institute of the Biological Hope, had brought her this information now. Her amusement was one-layered, and trusting.

God’s fools, the Middle Ages had called them.

“Devrie,” I said, and heard my own voice unexpectedly break, “leave here. It’s physically not safe. What are you down to, ten percent body fat? Eight? Look at yourself, you can’t hold body heat, your palms are dry, you can’t move quickly without getting dizzy. Hypotension. What’s your heartbeat? Do you still menstruate? It’s insane.”

She went on smiling at me. God’s fools don’t need menstruation. “Come with me, Seena. I want to show you the Institute.”

“I don’t want to see it.”

“Yes. This visit you should see it.”

“Why this visit?”

“Because you are going to help me get my clone to come here, aren’t you? Or else why did you go to all the trouble of locating him?”

I didn’t answer. She still didn’t see it.

Devrie said, “‘Anything for a sister.’ But you were always more like a mother to me than a sister.” She took my hand and pulled herself off the floor. So had I pulled her up to take her first steps, the day after our mother died in a plane crash at Orly. Now Devrie’s hand felt cold. I imprisoned it and counted the pulse.

“Bradycardia.”

But she wasn’t listening.

The Institute was a shock. I had anticipated the laboratories: monotonous gray walls, dim light, heavy soundproofing, minimal fixtures in the ones used for sensory dampening; high-contrast textures and colors, strobe lights, quite good sound equipment in those for sensory arousal. There was much that Devrie, as subject rather than researcher, didn’t have authority to show me, but I deduced much from what I did see. The dormitories, divided by sex, were on the sensory-dampening side. The subjects slept in small cells, ascetic and chaste, that reminded me of an abandoned Carmelite convent I had once toured in Belgium. That was the shock: the physical plant felt scientific, but the atmosphere did not.

There hung in the gray corridors a wordless peace, a feeling so palpable I could feel it clogging my lungs. No. “Peace” was the wrong word. Say “peace” and the picture is pastoral, lazy sunshine and dreaming woods. This was not like that at all. The research subjects—students? postulants? —lounged in the corridors outside closed labs, waiting for the next step in their routine. Both men and women were anorectic, both wore gray bodysuits or caftans, both were fined down to an otherworldly ethereality when seen from a distance and a malnourished asexuality when seen up close. They talked among themselves in low voices, sitting with backs against the wall or stretched full-length on the carpeted floor, and on all their faces I saw the same luminous patience, the same certainty of being very near to something exciting that they nonetheless could wait for calmly, as long as necessary.

“They look,” I said to Devrie, “as if they’re waiting to take an exam they already know they’ll ace.”

She smiled. “Do you think so? I always think of us as travelers waiting for a plane, boarding passes stamped for Eternity.”

She was actually serious. But she didn’t in fact wear the same expression as the others; hers was far more intense. If they were travelers, she wanted to pilot.

The lab door opened and the students brought themselves to their feet. Despite their languid movements, they looked sharp: sharp protruding clavicles, bony chins, angular unpadded elbows that could chisel stone.

“This is my hour for biofeedback manipulation of drug effects,” Devrie said. “Please come watch.”

“I’d sooner watch you whip yourself in a twelfth-century monastery.”

Devrie’s eyes widened, then again lightened with that luminous amusement. “It’s for the same end, isn’t it? But they had such unsystematic means. Poor struggling God-searchers. I wonder how many of them made it.”

I wanted to strike her. “Devrie—”

“If not biofeedback, what would you like to see?”

“You out of here.”

“What else?”

There was only one thing: the holotanks. I struggled with the temptation, and lost. The two tanks stood in the middle of a roomy lab carpeted with thick gray matting and completely enclosed in a Faraday cage. That Devrie had a key to the lab was my first clue that my errand for her had been known, and discussed, by someone higher in the Institute. Research subjects do not carry keys to the most delicate brain-perception equipment in the world. For this equipment Bohentin had received his Nobel.

The two tanks, independent systems, stood as high as my shoulder. The ones I had used fifteen years ago had been smaller. Each of these was a cube, opaque on its bottom half, which held the sensing apparatus, computerized simulators, and recording equipment; clear on its top half, which was filled with the transparent fluid out of whose molecules the simulations would form. A separate sim would form for each subject, as the machine sorted and mapped all the electromagnetic radiation received and processed by each brain. All that each brain perceived, not only the visuals; the holograph equipment was capable of picking up all wavelengths that the brain did, and of displaying their brain-processed analogues as three-dimensional images floating in a clear womb. When all other possible sources of radiation were filtered out except for the emanations from the two subjects themselves, what the sims showed was what kinds of activity were coming from—and hence going on in—the other’s brain. That was why it worked best with identical twins in twin trance: no structural brain differences to adjust for. In a rawer version of this holotank, a rawer version of myself had pionered the recording of twin trances. The UCIC, we had called it then: What you see, I see.

What I had seen was eight autopsy reports.

“We’re so close,” Devrie said. “Mona and Marlene—” she waved a hand toward the corridor but Mona and Marlene, whichever two they had been, had gone—“had taken KX3, that’s the drug that—”

“I know what it is,” I said, too harshly. KX3 reacts with one of the hormones overproduced in an anorectic body. The combination is readily absorbed by body fat, but in a body without fat, much of it is absorbed by the brain.

Devrie continued, her hand tight on my arm. “Mona and Marlene were controlling the neural reactions with biofeedback, pushing the twin trance higher and higher, working it. Dr. Bohentin was monitoring the holotanks. The sims were incredibly detailed—everything each twin perceived in the perceptions of the other, in all wavelengths. Mona and Marlene forced their neurotransmission level even higher and then, in the tanks—” Devrie’s face glowed, the mystic-rapture look—“a completely third sim formed. Completely separate. A third presence.”

I stared at her.

“It was recorded in both tanks. It was shadowy, yes, but it was there. A third presence that can’t be perceived except through another human’s electromagnetic presence, and then only with every drug and trained reaction and arousal mode and the twin trance all pushing the brain into a supraheightened state. A third presence!”

“Isotropic radiation. Bohentin fluffed the pre-screening program and the computer hadn’t cleared the background microradiation—” I said, but even as I spoke I knew how stupid that was. Bohentin didn’t make mistakes like that, and isotropic radiation simulates nowhere close to the way a presence does. Devrie didn’t even bother to answer me.

This, then, was what the rumors had been about, the rumors leaking for the last year out of the Institute and through the scientific community, mostly still scoffed at, not yet picked up by the popular press. This. A verifiable, replicable third presence being picked up by holography. Against all reason, a long shiver went over me from neck to that cold place at the base of the spine.

“There’s more,” Devrie said feverishly. “They felt it. Mona and Marlene. Both said afterwards that they could feel it, a huge presence filled with light, but they couldn’t quite reach it. Damn—they couldn’t reach it, Seena! They weren’t playing off each other enough, weren’t close enough. Weren’t, despite the twin trance, melded enough.”

“Sex,” I said.

“They tried it. The subjects are all basically heterosexual. They inhibit.”

“So go find some homosexual God-yearning anorectic incestuous twins!”

Devrie looked at me straight. “I need him. Here. He is me.”

I exploded, right there in the holotank lab. No one came running in to find out if the shouting was dangerous to the tanks, which was my second clue that the Institute knew very well why Devrie had brought me there. “Damn it to hell, he’s a human being, not some chemical you can just order up because you need it for an experiment! You don’t have the right to expect him to come here, you didn’t even have the right to tell anyone that he exists, but that didn’t stop you, did it? There are still anti-bioengineering groups out there in the real world, religious split-brains who—how dare you put him in any danger? How dare you even presume he’d be interested in this insane mush?”

“He’ll come,” Devrie said. She had not changed expression.

“How the hell do you know?”

“He’s me. And I want God. He will, too.”

I scowled at her. A fragment of one of her poems, a thing she had written when she was fifteen, came to me: “Two human species/Never one—/One aching for God/One never.” But she had been fifteen then. I had assumed that the sentiment, as adolescent as the poetry, would pass.

I said, “What does Bohentin think of this idea of importing your clone?”

For the first time she hesitated. Bohentin, then, was dubious. “He thinks it’s rather a long shot.”

“You could phrase it that way.”

“But I know he’ll want to come. Some things you just know, Seena, beyond rationality. And besides—” she hesitated again, and then went on, “I have left half my inheritance from Daddy, and the income on the trust from Mummy.”

“Devrie. God, Devrie—you’d buy him?”

For the first time she looked angry. “The money would be just to get him here, to see what is involved. Once he sees, he’ll want this as much as I do, at any price! What price can you put on God? I’m not ‘buying’ his life—I’m offering him the way to find life. What good is breathing, existing, if there’s no purpose to it? Don’t you realize how many centuries, in how many ways, people have looked for that light-filled presence and never been able to be sure? And now we’re almost there, Seena, I’ve seen it for myself—almost there. With verifiable, scientifically controlled means. Not subjective faith this time—scientific data, the same as for any other actual phenomenon. This research stands now where research into the atom stood fifty years ago. Can you touch a quark? But it’s there! And my clone can be a part of it, can be it, how can you talk about the money buying him under circumstances like that!”

I said slowly, “How do you know that whatever you’re so close to is God?” But that was sophomoric, of course, and she was ready for it. She smiled warmly.

“What does it matter what we call it? Pick another label if it will make you more comfortable.”

I took a piece of paper from my pocket. “His name is Keith Torellen. He lives in Indian Falls, New Hampshire. Address and mailnet number here. Good luck, Devrie.” I turned to go.

“Seena! I can’t go!”

She couldn’t, of course. That was the point. She barely had the strength in that starved, drug-battered body to get through the day, let alone to New Hampshire. She needed the sensory-controlled environment, the artificial heat, the chemical monitoring. “Then send someone from the Institute. Perhaps Bohentin will go.”

“Bohentin!” she said, and I knew that was impossible; Bohentin had to remain officially ignorant of this sort of recruiting. Too many U.S. laws were involved. In addition, Bohentin had no persuasive skills; people as persons and not neurologies did not interest him. They were too far above chemicals and too far below God.

Devrie looked at me with a kind of level fury. “This is really why you found him, isn’t it? So I would have to stop the drug program long enough to leave here and go get him. You think that once I’ve gone back out into the world either the build-up effects in the brain will be interrupted or else the spell will be broken and I’ll have doubts about coming back here!”

“Will you listen to yourself? ‘Out into the world.’ You sound like some archaic nun in a cloistered order!”

“You always did ridicule anything you couldn’t understand,” Devrie said icily, turned her back on me, and stared at the empty holotanks. She didn’t turn when I left the lab, closing the door behind me. She was still facing the tanks, her spiny back rigid, the piece of paper with Keith Torellen’s address clutched in fingers delicate as glass.

In New York the museum simmered with excitement. An unexpected endowment had enabled us to buy the contents of a small, very old museum located in a part of Madagascar not completely destroyed by the African Horror. Crate after crate of moths began arriving in New York, some of them collected in the days when naturalists-gentlemen shot jungle moths from the trees using dust shot. Some species had been extinct since the Horror and thus were rare; some were the brief mutations from the bad years afterward and thus were even rarer. The museum staff uncrated and exclaimed.

“Look at this one,” said a young man, holding it out to me. Not on my own staff, he was one of the specialists on loan to us—DeFabio or DeFazio, something like that. He was very handsome. I looked at the moth he showed me, all pale wings outstretched and pinned to black silk. “A perfect Thysania Africana. Perfect.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to loan us the whole exhibit, in a few years.”

“Yes,” I said again. He heard the tone in my voice and glanced up quickly. But not quickly enough—my face was all professional interest when his gaze reached it. Still, the professional interest had not fooled him; he had heard the perfunctory note. Frowning, he turned back to the moths.

By day I directed the museum efficiently enough. But in the evenings, home alone in my apartment, I found myself wandering from room to room, touching objects, unable to settle to work at the oversize teak desk that had been my father’s, to the reports and journals that had not. His had dealt with the living, mine with the ancient dead—but I had known that for years. The fogginess of my evenings bothered me.

“Faith should not mean fogginess.”

Who had said that? Father, of course, to Devrie, when she had joined the dying Catholic Church. She had been thirteen years old. Skinny, defiant, she had stood clutching a black rosary from God knows where, daring him from scared dark eyes to forbid her. Of course he had not, thinking, I suppose, that Heaven, like any other childhood fever, was best left alone to burn out its course.

Devrie had been received into the Church in an overdecorated chapel, wearing an overdecorated dress of white lace and carrying a candle. Three years later she had left, dressed in a magenta body suit and holding the keys to Father’s safe, which his executor had left unlocked after the funeral. The will had, of course, made me Devrie’s guardian. In the three years Devrie had been going to Mass, I had discovered that I was sterile, divorced my second husband, finished my work in entomology, accepted my first position with a museum, and entered a drastically premature menopause.

That is not a flip nor random list.

After the funeral, I sat in the dark in my father’s study, in his maroon leather chair and at his teak desk. Both felt oversize. All the lights were off. Outside it rained; I heard the steady beat of water on the window, and the wind. The dark room was cold. In my palm I held one of my father’s research awards, a small abstract sculpture of a double helix, done by Harold Landau himself. It was very heavy. I couldn’t think what Landau had used, to make it so heavy. I couldn’t think, with all the noise from the rain. My father was dead, and I would never bear a child.

Devrie came into the room, leaving the lights off but bringing with her an incandescent rectangle from the doorway. At sixteen she was lovely, with long brown hair in the masses of curls again newly fashionable. She sat on a low stool beside me, all that hair falling around her, her face white in the gloom. She had been crying.

“He’s gone. He’s really gone. I don’t believe it yet.”

“No.”

She peered at me. Something in my face, or my voice, must have alerted her; when she spoke again it was in that voice people use when they think your grief is understandably greater than theirs. A smooth dark voice, like a wave.

“You still have me, Seena. We still have each other.”

I said nothing.

“I’ve always thought of you more as my mother than my sister, anyway. You took the place of Mother. You’ve been a mother to at least me.”

She smiled and squeezed my hand. I looked at her face—so young, so pretty—and I wanted to hit her. I didn’t want to be her mother; I wanted to be her. All her choices lay ahead of her, and it seemed to me that self-indulgent night as if mine were finished. I could have struck her.

“Seena—”

“Leave me alone! Can’t you ever leave me alone? All my life you’ve been dragging behind me; why don’t you die and finally leave me alone!”

We make ourselves pay for small sins more than large ones. The more trivial the thrust, the longer we’re haunted by memory of the wound.

I believe that.

Indian Falls was out of another time: slow, quiet, safe. The Avis counter at the airport rented not personal guards but cars, and the only shiny store on Main Street sold wilderness equipment. I suspected that the small state college, like the town, traded mostly on trees and trails. That Keith Torellen was trying to take an academic degree here told me more about his adopting family than if I had hired a professional information service.

The house where he lived was shabby, paint peeling and steps none too sturdy. I climbed them slowly, thinking once again what I wanted to find out.

Devrie would answer none of my messages on the mailnet. Nor would she accept my phone calls. She was shutting me out, in retaliation for my refusing to fetch Torellen for her. But Devrie would discover that she could not shut me out as easily as that; we were sisters. I wanted to know if she had contacted Torellen herself, or had sent someone from the Institute to do so.

If neither, then my visit here would be brief and anonymous; I would leave Keith Torellen to his protected ignorance and shabby town. But if he had seen Devrie, I wanted to discover if and what he had agreed to do for her. It might even be possible that he could be of use in convincing Devrie of the stupidity of what she was doing. If he could be used for that, I would use him.

Something else: I was curious. This boy was my brother—nephew? no, brother—as well as the result of my father’s rational mind. Curiosity prickled over me. I rang the bell.

It was answered by the landlady, who said that Keith was not home, would not be home until late, was “in rehearsal.”

“Rehearsal?”

“Over to the college. He’s a student and they’re putting on a play.”

I said nothing, thinking.

“I don’t remember the name of the play,” the landlady said. She was a large woman in a faded garment, dress or robe. “But Keith says it’s going to be real good. It starts this weekend.” She laughed. “But you probably already know all that! George, my husband George, he says I’m forever telling people things they already know!”

“How would I know?”

She winked at me. “Don’t you think I got eyes? Sister, or cousin? No, let me guess—older sister. Too much alike for cousins.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“Not sister!” She clapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes shiny with amusement. “You’re checking up on him, ain’t you? You’re his mother! I should of seen it right off!”

I turned to negotiate the porch steps.

“They rehearse in the new building, Mrs. Torellen,” she called after me. “Just ask anybody you see to point you in the right direction.”

“Thank you,” I said carefully.

Rehearsal was nearly over. Evidently it was a dress rehearsal; the actors were in period costume and the director did not interrupt. I did not recognize the period or the play. Devrie had been interested in theater: I was not. Quietly I took a seat in the darkened back row and waited for the pretending to end.

Despite wig and greasepaint, I had no troule picking out Keith Torellen. He moved like Devrie: quick, light movements, slightly pigeon-toed. He had her height and, given the differences of a male body, her slenderness. Sitting a theater’s length away, I might have been seeing a male Devrie.

But seen up close, his face was mine.

Despite the landlady, it was a shock. He came toward me across the theater lobby, from where I had sent for him, and I saw the moment he too struck the resemblance. He stopped dead, and we stared at each other. Take Devrie’s genes, spread them over a face with the greater bone surface, larger features, and coarser skin texture of a man—and the result was my face. Keith had scrubbed off his make-up and removed his wig, exposing brown curly hair the same shade Devrie’s had been. But his face was mine.

A strange emotion, unnamed and hot, seared through me.

“Who are you? Who the hell are you?”

So no one had come from the Institute after all. Not Devrie, not anyone.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” he said; it was almost a whisper. “One of my real family?”

Still gripped by the unexpected force of emotion, still dumb, I said nothing. Keith took one step toward me. Suspicion played over his face—Devrie would not have been suspicious—and vanished, replaced by a slow painful flush of color.

“You are. You are one. Are you … are you my mother?”

I put out a hand against a stone post. The lobby was all stone and glass. Why were all theater lobbies stone and glass? Architects had so little damn imagination, so little sense of the bizarre.

“No! I am not your mother!”

He touched my arm. “Hey, are you okay? You don’t look good. Do you need to sit down?”

His concern was unexpected, and touching. I thought that he shared Devrie’s genetic personality and that Devrie had always been hypersensitive to the body. But this was not Devrie. His hand on my arm was stronger, firmer, warmer than Devrie’s. I felt giddy, disoriented. This was not Devrie.

“A mistake,” I said unsteadily. “This was a mistake. I should not have come. I’m sorry. My name is Dr. Seena Konig and I am a … relative of yours, but I think this now is a mistake. I have your address and I promise that I’ll write you about your family, but now I think I should go.” Write some benign lie, leave him in ignorance. This was a mistake.

But he looked stricken, and his hand tightened on my arm. “You can’t! I’ve been searching for my biological family for two years! You can’t just go!”

We were beginning to attract attention in the theater lobby. Hurrying students eyed us sideways. I thought irrelevantly how different they looked from the “students” at the Institute, and with that thought regained my composure. This was a student, a boy—“you can’t!” a boyish protest, and boyish panic in his voice—and not the man-Devrie-me he had seemed a foolish moment ago. He was nearly twenty years my junior. I smiled at him and removed his hand from my arm.

“Is there somewhere we can have coffee?”

“Yes. Dr … .”

“Seena,” I said. “Call me Seena.”

Over coffee, I made him talk first. He watched me anxiously over the rim of his cup, as if I might vanish, and I listened to the words behind the words. His adopting family was the kind that hoped to visit the Grand Canyon but not Europe, go to movies but not opera, aspire to college but not to graduate work, buy wilderness equipment but not wilderness. Ordinary people. Not religious, not rich, not unusual. Keith was the only child. He loved them.

“But at the same time I never really felt I belonged,” he said, and looked away from me. It was the most personal thing he had knowingly revealed, and I saw that he regretted it. Devrie would not have. More private, then, and less trusting. And I sensed in him a grittiness, a tougher awareness of the world’s hardness, than Devrie had ever had—or needed to have. I made my decision. Having disturbed him thus far, I owed him truth—but not the whole truth.

“Now you tell me,” Keith said, pushing away his cup. “Who were my parents? Our parents? Are you my sister?”

“Yes.”

“Our parents?”

“Both are dead. Our father was Dr. Richard Konig. He was a scientist. He—” But Keith recognized the name. His readings in biology or history must have been more extensive than I would have expected. His eyes widened, and I suddenly wished I had been more oblique.

“Richard Konig. He’s one of those scientists that were involved in that bioengineering scandal—”

“How did you learn about that? It’s all over and done with. Years ago.”

“Journalism class. We studied how the press handled it, especially the sensationalism surrounding the cloning thing twenty years—”

I saw the moment it hit him. He groped for his coffee cup, clutched the handle, didn’t raise it. It was empty anyway. And then what I said next shocked me as much as anything I have ever done.

“It was Devrie,” I said, and heard my own vicious pleasure, “Devrie was the one who wanted me to tell you!”

But of course he didn’t know who Devrie was. He went on staring at me, panic in his young eyes, and I sat frozen. That tone I heard in my own voice when I said “Devrie,” that vicious pleasure that it was she and not I who was hurting him …

“Cloning,” Keith said. “Konig was in trouble for claiming to have done illegal cloning. Of humans.” His voice held so much dread that I fought off my own dread and tried to hold myself steady to his need.

“It’s illegal now, but not then. And the public badly misunderstood. All that sensationalism—you were right to use that word, Keith—covered up the fact that there is nothing abnormal about producing a fetus from another diploid cell. In the womb, identical twins—”

“AmI a clone?”

“Keith—”

“Am I a clone?”

Carefully I studied him. This was not what I had intended, but although the fear was still in his eyes, the panic had gone. And curiosity—Devrie’s curiosity, and her eagerness—they were there as well. This boy would not strike me, nor stalk out of the restaurant, nor go into psychic shock.

“Yes. You are.”

He sat quietly, his gaze turned inward. A long moment passed in silence.

“Your cell?”

“No. My—our sister’s. Our sister Devrie.”

Another long silence. He did not panic. Then he said softly, “Tell me.”

Devrie’s phrase.

“There isn’t much to tell, Keith. If you’ve seen the media accounts, you know the story, and also what was made of it. The issue then becomes how you feel about what you saw. Do you believe that cloning is meddling with things man should best leave alone?”

“No. I don’t.”

I let out my breath, although I hadn’t known I’d been holding it. “It’s actually no more than delayed twinning, followed by surrogate implantation. A zygote—”

“I know all that,” he said with some harshness, and held up his hand to silence me. I didn’t think he knew that he did it. The harshness did not sound like Devrie. To my ears, it sounded like myself. He sat thinking, remote and troubled, and I did not try to touch him.

Finally he said, “Do my parents know?”

He meant his adoptive parents. “No.”

“Why are you telling me now? Why did you come?”

“Devrie asked me to.”

“She needs something, right? A kidney? Something like that?”

I had not foreseen that question. He did not move in a class where spare organs were easily purchasable. “No. Not a kidney, not any kind of biological donation.” A voice in my mind jeered at that, but I was not going to give him any clues that would lead to Devrie. “She just wanted me to find you.”

“Why didn’t she find me herself? She’s my age, right?”

“Yes. She’s ill just now and couldn’t come.”

“Is she dying?”

“No!”

Again he sat quietly, finally saying, “No one could tell me anything. For two years I’ve been searching for my mother, and not one of the adoptee-search agencies could find a single trace. Not one. Now I see why. Who covered the trail so well?”

“My father.”

“I want to meet Devrie.”

I said evenly, “That might not be possible.”

“Why not?”

“She’s in a foreign hospital. Out of the country. I’m sorry.”

“When does she come home?”

“No one is sure.”

“What disease does she have?”

She’s sick for God, I thought, but aloud I said, not thinking it through, “A brain disease.”

Instantly I saw my own cruelty. Keith paled, and I cried, “No, no, nothing you could have as well! Truly, Keith, it’s not—she took a bad fall. From her hunter.”

“Her hunter,” he said. For the first time, his gaze flickered over my clothing and jewelry. But would he even recognize how expensive they were? I doubted it. He wore a synthetic, deep-pile jacket with a tear at one shoulder and a cheap wool hat, dark blue, shapeless with age. From long experience I recognized his gaze: uneasy, furtive, the expression of a man glimpsing the financial gulf between what he had assumed were equals. But it wouldn’t matter. Adopted children have no legal claim on the estates of their biological parents. I had checked.

Keith said uneasily, “Do you have a picture of Devrie?”

“No,” I lied.

“Why did she want you to find me? You still haven’t said.”

I shrugged. “The same reason, I suppose, that you looked for your biological family. The pull of blood.”

“Then she wants me to write to her.”

“Write to me instead.”

He frowned. “Why? Why not to Devrie?”

What to say to that? I hadn’t bargained on so much intensity from him. “Write in care of me, and I’ll forward it to Devrie.”

“Why not to her directly?”

“Her doctors might not think it advisable,” I said coldly, and he backed off—either from the mention of doctors or from the coldness.

“Then give me your address, Seena. Please.”

I did. I could see no harm in his writing me. It might even be pleasant. Coming home from the museum, another wintry day among the exhibits, to find on the mailnet a letter I could answer when and how I chose, without being taken by surprise. I liked the idea.

But no more difficult questions now. I stood. “I have to leave, Keith.”

He looked alarmed. “So soon?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“I have to return to work.”

He stood, too. He was taller than Devrie. “Seena,” he said, all earnestness, “just a few more questions. How did you find me?”

“Medical connections.”

“Yours?”

“Our father’s. I’m not a scientist.” Evidently his journalism class had not studied twin-trance sensationalism.

“What do you do?”

“Museum curator. Arthropods.”

“What does Devrie do?”

“She’s too ill to work. I must go, Keith.”

“One more. Do I look like Devrie as well as you?”

“It would be wise, Keith, if you were careful whom you spoke with about all of this. I hadn’t intended to say so much.”

“I’m not going to tell my parents. Not about being—not about all of it.”

“I think that’s best, yes.”

“Do I look like Devrie as well as you?”

A little of my first, strange emotion returned with his intensity. “A little, yes. But more like me. Sex variance is a tricky thing.”

Unexpectedly, he held my coat for me. As I slipped into it, he said from behind, “Thank you, Seena,” and let his hands rest on my shoulders.

I did not turn around. I felt my face flame, and self-disgust flooded through me, followed by a desire to laugh. It was all so transparent. This man was an attractive stranger, was Devrie, was youth, was myself, was the work not of my father’s loins but of his mind. Of course I was aroused by him. Freud outlasts cloning: a note for a research study, I told myself grimly, and inwardly I did laugh.

But that didn’t help either.

In New York, winter came early. Cold winds whipped whitecaps on harbor and river, and the trees in the Park stood bare even before October had ended. The crumbling outer boroughs of the shrinking city crumbled a little more and talked of the days when New York had been important. Manhattan battened down for snow, hired the seasonal increases in personal guards, and talked of Albuquerque. Each night museum security hunted up and evicted the drifters trying to sleep behind exhibits, drifters as chilled and pale as the moths under permaplex, and, it seemed to me, as detached from the blood of their own age. All of New York seemed detached to me that October, and cold. Often I stood in front of the cases of Noctuidae, staring at them for so long that my staff began to glance at each other covertly. I would catch their glances when I jerked free of my trance. No one asked me about it.

Still no message came from Devrie. When I contacted the Institute on the mailnet, she did not call back.

No letter came from Keith Torellen.

Then one night, after I had worked late and was hurrying through the chilly gloom toward my building, he was there, bulking from the shadows so quickly that the guard I had taken for the walk from the museum sprang forward in attack position.

“No! It’s all right! I know him!”

The guard retreated, without expression. Keith stared after him, and then at me, his face unreadable.

“Keith, what are you doing here? Come inside!”

He followed me into the lobby without a word. Nor did he say anything during the metal scanning and ID procedure. I took him up to my apartment, studying him in the elevator. He wore the same jacket and cheap wool hat as in Indian Falls, his hair wanted cutting, and the tip of his nose was red from waiting in the cold. How long had he waited there? He badly needed a shave.

In the apartment he scanned the rugs, the paintings, my grandmother’s ridiculously ornate, ugly silver, and turned his back on them to face me.

“Seena. I want to know where Devrie is.”

“Why? Keith, what has happened?”

“Nothing has happened,” he said, removing his jacket but not laying it anywhere. “Only that I’ve left school and spent two days hitching here. It’s no good, Seena. To say that cloning is just like twinning: it’s no good. I want to see Devrie.”

His voice was hard. Bulking in my living room, unshaven, that hat pulled down over his ears, he looked older and less malleable than the last time I had seen him. Alarm—not physical fear, I was not afraid of him, but a subtler and deeper fear—sounded through me.

“Why do you want to see Devrie?”

“Because she cheated me.”

“Of what, for God’s sake?”

“Can I have a drink? Or a smoke?”

I poured him a Scotch. If he drank, he might talk. I had to know what he wanted, why such a desperate air clung to him, how to keep him from Devrie. I had never seen her like this. She was strong-willed, but always with a blitheness, a trust that eventually her will would prevail. Desperate forcefulness of the sort in Keith’s manner was not her style. But of course Devrie had always had silent money to back her will; perhaps money could buy trust as well as style.

Keith drank off his Scotch and held out his glass for another. “It was freezing out there. They wouldn’t let me in the lobby to wait for you.”

“Of course not.”

“You didn’t tell me your family was rich.”

I was a little taken aback at his bluntness, but at the same time it pleased me; I don’t know why.

“You didn’t ask.”

“That’s shit, Seena.”

“Keith. Why are you here?”

“I told you. I want to see Devrie.”

“What is it you’ve decided she cheated you of? Money?”

He looked so honestly surprised that again I was startled, this time by his resemblance to Devrie. She too would not have thought of financial considerations first, if there were emotional ones possible. One moment Keith was Devrie, one moment he was not. Now he scowled with sudden anger.

“Is that what you think—that fortune hunting brought me hitching from New Hampshire? God, Seena, I didn’t even know how much you had until this very—I still don’t know!”

I said levelly, “Then what is it you’re feeling so cheated of?”

Now he was rattled. Again that quick, half-furtive scan of my apartment, pausing a millisecond too long at the Caravaggio, subtly lit by its frame. When his gaze returned to mine it was troubled, a little defensive. Ready to justify. Of course I had put him on the defensive deliberately, but the calculation of my trick did not prepare me for the staggering naivete of his explanation. Once more it was Devrie complete, reducing the impersonal greatness of science to a personal and emotional loss.

“Ever since I knew that I was adopted, at five or six years old, I wondered about my biological family. Nothing strange in that—I think all adoptees do. I used to make up stories, kid stuff, about how they were really royalty, or lunar colonists, or survivors of the African Horror. Exotic things. I thought especially about my mother, imagining this whole scene of her holding me once before she released me for adoption, crying over me, loving me so much she could barely let me go but had to for some reason. Sentimental shit.” He laughed, trying to make light of what was not, and drank off his Scotch to avoid my gaze.

“But Devrie—the fact of her—destroyed all that. I never had a mother who hated to give me up. I never had a mother at all. What I had was a cell cut from Devrie’s fingertip or someplace, something discardable, and she doesn’t even know what I look like. But she’s damn well going to.”

“Why?” I said evenly. “What could you expect to gain from her knowing what you look like?”

But he didn’t answer me directly. “That first moment I saw you, Seena, in the theater at school, I thought you were my mother.”

“I know you did.”

“And you hated the idea. Why?”

I thought of the child I would never bear, the marriage, like so many other things of sweet promise, gone sour. But self-pity is a fool’s game. “None of your business.”

“Isn’t it? Didn’t you hate the idea because of the way I was made? Coldly. An experiment. Weren’t you a little bit insulted at being called the mother of a discardable cell from Devrie’s fingertip?”

“What the hell have you been reading? An experiment—what is any child but an experiment? A random egg, a random sperm. Don’t talk like one of those anti-science religious split-brains!”

He studied me levelly. Then he said, “Is Devrie religious? Is that why you’re so afraid of her?”

I got to my feet, and pointed at the sideboard. “Help yourself to another drink if you wish. I want to wash my hands. I’ve been handling specimens all afternoon.” Stupid, clumsy lie—nobody would believe such a lie.

In the bathroom I leaned against the closed door, shut my eyes, and willed myself to calm. Why should I be so disturbed by the angry lashing-out of a confused boy? I was handy to lash out against; my father, whom Keith was really angry at, was not. It was all so predictable, so earnestly adolescent, that even over the hurting in my chest I smiled. But the smile, which should have reduced Keith’s ranting to the tantrum of a child—there, there, when you grow up you’ll find out that no one really knows who he is—did not diminish Keith. His losses were real—mother, father, natural place in the natural sequence of life and birth. And suddenly, with a clutch at the pit of my stomach, I knew why I had told him all that I had about his origins. It was not from any ethic of fidelity to “the truth.” I had told him he was a clone because I, too, had had real losses—research, marriage, motherhood—and Devrie could never have shared them with me. Luminous, mystical Devrie, too occupied with God to be much hurt by man. Leave me alone! Can’t you ever leave me alone! All my life you’ve been dragging behind me—why don’t you die and finally leave me alone! And Devrie had smiled tolerantly, patted my head, and left me alone, closing the door softly so as not to disturb my grief. My words had not hurt her. I could not hurt her.

But I could hurt Keith—the other Devrie—and I had. That was why he disturbed me all out of proportion. That was the bond. My face, my pain, my fault.

Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. But what nonsense. I was not a believer, and the comforts of superstitious absolution could not touch me. What shit. Like all nonbelievers, I stood alone.

It came to me then that there was something absurd in thinking all this while leaning against a bathroom door. Grimly absurd, but absurd. The toilet as confessional. I ran the cold water, splashed some on my face, and left. How long had I left Keith alone in the living room?

When I returned, he was standing by the mailnet. He had punched in the command to replay my outgoing postal messages, and displayed on the monitor was Devrie’s address at the Institute of the Biological Hope.

“What is it?” Keith said. “A hospital?”

I didn’t answer him.

“I can find out, Seena. Knowing this much, I can find out. Tell me.”

Tell me. “Not a hospital. It’s a research laboratory. Devrie is a voluntary subject.”

“Research on what? I will find out, Seena.”

“Brain perception.”

“Perception of what?”

“Perception of God,” I said, torn among weariness, anger, and a sudden gritty exasperation, irritating as sand. Why not just leave him to Devrie’s persuasions, and her to mystic starvation? But I knew I would not. I still, despite all of it, wanted her out of there.

Keith frowned. “What do you mean, ‘perception of God’?”

I told him. I made it sound as ridiculous as possible, and as dangerous. I described the anorexia, the massive use of largely untested drugs that would have made the Institute illegal in the United States, the skepticism of most of the scientific community, the psychoses and death that had followed twin-trance research fifteen years earlier. Keith did not remember that—he had been eight years old—and I did not tell him that I had been one of the researchers. I did not tell him about the tapes of the shadowy third presence in Bohentin’s holotanks. In every way I could, with every verbal subtlety at my use, I made the Institute sound crackpot, and dangerous, and ugly. As I spoke, I watched Keith’s face, and sometimes it was mine, and sometimes the expression altered it into Devrie’s. I saw bewilderment at her having chosen to enter the Institute, but not what I had hoped to see. Not scorn, not disgust.

When I had finished, he said, “But why did she think that I might want to enter such a place as a twin subject?”

I had saved this for last. “Money. She’d buy you.”

His hand, holding his third Scotch, went rigid. “Buy me.”

“It’s the most accurate way to put it.”

“What the hell made her think—” he mastered himself, not without effort. Not all the discussion of bodily risk had affected him as much as this mention of Devrie’s money. He had a poor man’s touchy pride. “She thinks of me as something to be bought.”

I was carefully quiet.

“Damn her,” he said. “Damn her.” Then, roughly, “And I was actually considering—”

I caught my breath. “Considering the Institute? After what I’ve just told you? How in hell could you? And you said, I remember, that your background was not religious!”

“It’s not. But I … I’ve wondered.” And in the sudden turn of his head away from me so that I wouldn’t see the sudden rapt hopelessness in his eyes, in the defiant set of his shoulders, I read more than in his banal words, and more than he could know. Devrie’s look, Devrie’s wishfulness, feeding on air. The weariness and anger, checked before, flooded me again and I lashed out at him.

“Then go ahead and fly to Dominica to enter the Institute yourself!”

He said nothing. But from something—his expression as he stared into his glass, the shifting of his body—I suddenly knew that he could not afford the trip.

I said, “So you fancy yourself as a believer?”

“No. A believer manque.” From the way he said it, I knew that he had said it before, perhaps often, and that the phrase stirred some hidden place in his imagination.

“What is wrong with you,” I said, “with people like you, that the human world is not enough?”

“What is wrong with people like you, that it is?” he said, and this time he laughed and raised his eyebrows in a little mockery that shut me out from this place beyond reason, this glittering escape. I knew then that somehow or other, sometime or other, despite all I had said, Keith would go to Dominica.

I poured him another Scotch. As deftly as I could, I led the conversation into other, lighter directions. I asked about his childhood. At first stiffly, then more easily as time and Scotch loosened him, he talked about growing up in the Berkshire Hills. He became more lighthearted, and under my interest turned both shrewd and funny, with a keen sense of humor. His thick brown hair fell over his forehead. I laughed with him, and broke out a bottle of good port. He talked about amateur plays he had acted in; his enthusiasm increased as his coherence decreased. Enthusiasm, humor, thick brown hair. I smoothed the hair back from his forehead. Far into the night I pulled the drapes back from the window and we stood together and looked at the lights of the dying city ten stories below. Fog rolled in from the sea. Keith insisted we open the doors and stand on the balcony; he had never smelled fog tinged with the ocean. We smelled the night, and drank some more, and talked, and laughed.

And then I led him again to the sofa.

“Seena?” Keith said. He covered my hand, laid upon his thigh, with his own, and turned his head to look at me questioningly. I leaned forward and touched my lips to his, barely in contact, for a long moment. He drew back, and his hand tried to lift mine. I tightened my fingers.

“Seena, no …”

“Why not?” I put my mouth back on his, very lightly. He had to draw back to answer, and I could feel that he did not want to draw back. Under my lips he frowned slightly; still, despite his drunkenness—so much more than mine—he groped for the word.

“Incest …”

“No. We two have never shared a womb.”

He frowned again, under my mouth. I drew back to smile at him, and shifted my hand. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Keith. Not in New York. But even if it did—I am not your sister, not really. You said so yourself—remember? Not a family. Just … here.”

“Not family,” he repeated, and I saw in his eyes the second before he closed them the flash of pain, the greed of a young man’s desire, and even the crafty evasions of the good port. Then his arms closed around me.

He was very strong, and more than a little violent. I guessed from what confusions the violence flowed but still I enjoyed it, that overwhelming rush from that beautiful male-Devrie body. I wanted him to be violent with me, as long as I knew there was no real danger. No real danger, no real brother, no real child. Keith was not my child but Devrie was my child-sister, and I had to stop her from destroying herself, no matter how … didn’t I? “The pull of blood.” But this was necessary, was justified … was a necessary gamble. For Devrie.

So I told myself. Then I stopped telling myself anything at all, and surrendered to the warm tides of pleasure.

But at dawn I woke and thought—with Keith sleeping heavily across me and the sky cold at the window—what the hell am I doing?

When I came out of the shower, Keith was sitting rigidly against the pillows. Sitting next to him on the very edge of the bed, I pulled a sheet around my nakedness and reached for his hand. He snatched it away.

“Keith. It’s all right. Truly it is.”

“You’re my sister.”

“But nothing will come of it. No child, no repetitions. It’s not all that uncommon, dear heart.”

“It is where I come from.”

“Yes. I know. But not here.”

He didn’t answer, his face troubled.

“Do you want breakfast?”

“No. No, thank you.”

I could feel his need to get away from me; it was almost palpable. Snatching my bodysuit off the floor, I went into the kitchen, which was chilly. The servant would not arrive for another hour. I turned up the heat, pulled on my bodysuit—standing on the cold floor first on one foot and then on the other, like some extinct species of water fowl—and made coffee. Through the handle of one cup I stuck two folded large bills. He came into the kitchen, dressed even to the torn jacket.

“Coffee.”

“Thanks.”

His fingers closed on the handle of the cup, and his eyes widened. Pure, naked shock, uncushioned by any defenses whatsoever: the whole soul, betrayed, pinned in the eyes.

“Oh God, no, Keith—how can you even think so? It’s for the trip back to Indian Falls! A gift!”

An endless pause, while we stared at each other. Then he said, very low, “I’m sorry. I should have … seen what it’s for.” But his cup trembled in his hand, and a few drops sloshed onto the floor. It was those few drops that undid me, flooding me with shame. Keith had a right to his shock, and to the anguish in his/my/Devrie’s face. She wanted him for her mystic purposes, I for their prevention. Fanatic and saboteur, we were both better defended against each other than Keith, without money nor religion nor years, was against either of us. If I could have seen any other way than the gamble I had taken … but I could not. Nonetheless, I was ashamed.

“Keith. I’m sorry.”

“Why did we? Why did we?”

I could have said: we didn’t; I did. But that might have made it worse for him. He was male, and so young.

Impulsively I blurted, “Don’t go to Dominica!” But of course he was beyond listening to me now. His face closed. He set down the coffee cup and looked at me from eyes much harder than they had been a minute ago. Was he thinking that because of our night together I expected to influence him directly? I was not that young. He could not foresee that I was trying to guess much farther ahead than that, for which I could not blame him. I could not blame him for anything. But I did regret how clumsily I had handled the money. That had been stupid.

Nonetheless, when he left a few moments later, the handle of the coffee cup was bare. He had taken the money.

The Madagascar exhibits were complete. They opened to much press interest, and there were both favorable reviews and celebrations. I could not bring myself to feel that it mattered. Ten times a day I went through the deadening exercise of willing an interest that had deserted me, and when I looked at the moths, ashy white wings outstretched forever, I could feel my body recoil in a way I could not name.

The image of the moths went home with me. One night in November I actually thought I heard wings beating against the window where I had stood with Keith. I yanked open the drapes and then the doors, but of course there was nothing there. For a long time I stared at the nothingness, smelling the fog, before typing yet another message, urgent-priority personal, to Devrie. The mailnet did not bring any answer.

I contacted the mailnet computer at the college at Indian Falls. My fingers trembled as they typed a request to leave an urgent-priority personal message for a student, Keith Torellen. The mailnet typed back:

TORELLEN, KEITH ROBERT. 64830016. ON MEDICAL LEAVE OF ABSENCE. TIME OF LEAVE: INDEFINITE. NO FORWARDING MAILNET NUMBER. END.

The sound came again at the window. Whirling, I scanned the dark glass, but there was nothing there, no moths, no wings, just the lights of the decaying city flung randomly across the blackness and the sound, faint and very far away, of a siren wailing out somebody else’s disaster.

I shivered. Putting on a sweater and turning up the heat made me no warmer. Then the mail slot chimed softly and I turned in time to see the letter fall fom the pneumatic tube from the lobby, the apartment house sticker clearly visible, assuring me that it had been processed and found free of both poison and explosives. Also visible was the envelope’s logo: INSTITUTE OF THE BIOLOGICAL HOPE, all the O’s radiant golden suns. But Devrie never wrote paper mail. She preferred the mailnet.

The note was from Keith, not Devrie. A short note, scrawled on a torn scrap of paper in nearly indecipherable handwriting. I had seen Keith’s handwriting in Indian Falls, across his student notebooks; this was a wildly out-of-control version of it, almost psychotic in the variations of spacing and letter formation that signal identity. I guessed that he had written the note under the influence of a drug, or several drugs, his mind racing much faster than he could write. There was neither punctuation nor paragraphing.

Dear Seena Im going to do it I have to know my parents are angry but I have to know I have to all the confusion is gone Seena Keith

There was a word crossed out between “gone” and “Seena,” scratched out with erratic lines of ink. I held the paper up to the light, tilting it this way and that. The crossed-out word was “mother.” all the confusion is gone mother

Mother.

Slowly I let out the breath I had not known I was holding. The first emotion was pity, for Keith, even though I had intended this. We had done a job on him, Devrie and I. Mother, sister, self. And when he and Devrie artificially drove upward the number and speed of the neurotransmitters in the brain, generated the twin trance, and then Keith’s pre-cloning Freudian-still mind reached for Devrie to add sexual energy to all the other brain energies fueling Bohentin’s holotanks—

Mother. Sister. Self.

All was fair in love and war. A voice inside my head jeered: And which is this? But I was ready for the voice. This was both. I didn’t think it would be long before Devrie left the Institute to storm to New York.

It was nearly another month, in which the snow began to fall and the city to deck itself in the tired gilt fallacies of Christmas. I felt fine. Humming, I catalogued the Madagascar moths, remounting the best specimens in exhibit cases and sealing them under permaplex, where their fragile wings and delicate antennae could lie safe. The mutant strains had the thinnest wings, unnaturally tenuous and up to twenty-five centimeters each, all of pale ivory, as if a ghostly delicacy were the natural evolutionary response to the glowing landscape of nuclear genocide. I catalogued each carefully.

“Why?” Devrie said. “Why?”

“You look like hell.”

“Why?”

“I think you already know,” I said. She sagged on my white velvet sofa, alone, the PGs that I suspected acted as much as nurses as guards dismissed from the apartment. Tears of anger and exhaustion collected in her sunken eye sockets but did not fall. Only with effort was she keeping herself in a sitting position, and the effort was costing her energy she did not have. Her skin, except for two red spots of fury high on each cheekbone, was the color of old eggs. Looking at her, I had to keep my hands twisted in my lap to keep myself from weeping.

“Are you telling me you planned it, Seena? Are you telling me you located Keith and slept with him because you knew that would make him impotent with me?”

“Of course not. I know sexuality isn’t that simple. So do you.”

“But you gambled on it. You gambled that it would be one way to ruin the experiment.”

“I gambled that it would … complicate Keith’s responses.”

“Complicate them past the point where he knew who the hell he was with!”

“He’d be able to know if you weren’t making him glow out of his mind with neurotransmitter kickers! He’s not stupid. But he’s not ready for whatever mystic hoops you’ve tried to make him jump through—if anybody ever can be said to be ready for that!—and no, I’m not surprised that he can’t handle libidinal energies on top of all the other artificial energies you’re racing through his brain. Something was bound to snap.”

“You caused it, Seena. As cold-bloodedly as that.”

A sudden shiver of memory brought the feel of Keith’s hands on my breasts. No, not as cold-bloodedly as that. No. But I could not say so to Devrie.

“I trusted you,” she said. “‘Anything for a sister’—Cod!”

“You were right to trust me. To trust me to get you out of that place before you’re dead.”

“Listen to yourself! Smug, all-knowing, self-righteous … do you know how close we were at the Institute? Do you have any idea what you’ve destroyed?”

I laughed coldly. I couldn’t help it. “If contact with God can be destroyed because one confused kid can’t get it up, what does that say about God?”

Devrie stared at me. A long moment passed, and in the moment the two red spots on her cheeks faded and her eyes narrowed. “Why, Seena?”

“I told you. I wanted you safe, out of there. And you are.”

“No. No. There’s something else, something more going on here. Going on with you.”

“Don’t make it more complicated than it is, Devrie. You’re my sister, and my only family. Is it so odd that I would try to protect you?”

“Keith is your brother.”

“Well, then, protect both of you. Whatever derails that experiment protects Keith, too.”

She said softly, “Did you want him so much?”

We stared at each other across the living room, sisters, I standing by the mailnet and she supported by the sofa, needing its support, weak and implacable as any legendary martyr to the faith. Her weakness hurt me in some nameless place; as a child Devrie’s body had been so strong. The hurt twisted in me, so that I answered her with truth. “Not so much. Not at first, not until we … no, that’s not true. I wanted him. But that was not the reason, Devrie—it was not a rationalization for lust, nor any lapse in self-control.”

She went on staring at me, until I turned to the sideboard and poured myself a Scotch. My hand trembled.

Behind me Devrie said, “Not lust. And not protection either. Something else, Seena. You’re afraid.”

I turned, smiling tightly. “Of you?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“This is your theory, not mine.”

She closed her eyes. The tears, shining all this time over her anger, finally fell. Head flung back against the pale sofa, arms limp at her side, she looked the picture of desolation, and so weak that I was frightened. I brought her a glass of milk from the kitchen and held it to her mouth, and I was a little surprised when she drank it off without protest.

“Devrie. You can’t go on like this. In this physical state.”

“No,” she agreed, in a voice so firm and prompt that I was startled further. It was the voice of decision, not surrender. She straightened herself on the sofa. Even Bohentin says I can’t go on like this. I weigh less than he wants, and I’m right at the edge of not having the physical resources to control the twin trance. I’m having racking withdrawal symptoms even being on this trip, and at this very minute there is a doctor sitting at Father’s desk in your study, in case I need him. Also, I’ve had my lawyers make over most of my remaining inheritance to Keith. I don’t think you knew that. What’s left has all been transferred to a bank on Dominica, and if I die it goes to the Institute. You won’t be able to touch it, nor touch Keith’s portion either, not even if I die. And I will die, Seena, soon, if I don’t start eating and stop taking the program’s drugs. I’ll just burn out body and brain both. You’ve guessed that I’m close to that, but you haven’t guessed how close. Now I’m telling you. I can’t handle the stresses of the twin trance much longer.”

I just went on holding her glass, arm extended, unable to move.

“You gambled that you could destroy one component in the chain of my experiment at the Institute by confusing my twin sexually. Well, you won. Now I’m making a gamble. I’m gambling my life that you can undo what you did with Keith, and without his knowing that I made you. You said he’s not stupid and his impotency comes from being unable to handle the drug program; perhaps you’re partly right. But he is me—me, Seena—and I know you’ve thought I was stupid all my life, because I wanted things you don’t understand. Now Keith wants them, too—it was inevitable that he would—and you’re going to undo whatever is standing in his way. I had to fight myself free all my life of your bullying, but Keith doesn’t have that kind of time. Because if you don’t undo what you caused, I’m going to go ahead with the twin trance anyway—the twin trance, Seena—without the sexual component and without letting Bohentin know just how much greater the strain is in trance than he thinks it is. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t have a twin, and neither do the doctors. But I know, and if I push it much farther I’m going to eventually die at it. Soon eventually. When I do, all your scheming to get me out of there really will have failed and you’ll be alone with whatever it is you’re so afraid of. But I don’t think you’ll let that happen.

“I think that instead you’ll undo what you did to Keith, so that the experiment can have one last real chance. And in return, after that one chance, I’ll agree to come home, to Boston or here to New York, for one year.

“That’s my gamble.”

She was looking at me from eyes empty of all tears, a Devrie I had not ever seen before. She meant it, every demented word, and she would do it. I wanted to scream at her, to scream a jumble of suicide and moral blackmail and warped perceptions and outrage, but the words that came out of my mouth came out in a whisper.

“What in God’s name is worth that?”

Shockingly, she laughed, a laugh of more power than her wasted frame could have contained. Her face glowed, and the glow looked both exalted and insane. “You said it, Seena—in God’s name. To finally know. To know, beyond the fogginess of faith, that we’re not alone in the universe … . Faith should not mean fogginess.” She laughed again, this time defensively, as if she knew how she sounded to me. “You’ll do it, Seena.” It was not a question. She took my hand.

“You would kill yourself?”

“No. I would die trying to reach God. It’s not the same thing.”

“I never bullied you, Devrie.”

She dropped my hand. “All my life, Seena. And on into now. But all of your bullying and your scorn would look rather stupid, wouldn’t it, if there really can be proved to exist a rational basis for what you laughed at all those years!”

We looked at each other, sisters, across the abyss of the pale sofa, and then suddenly away. Neither of us dared speak.

My plane landed on Dominica by night. Devrie had gone two days before me, returning with her doctor and guards on the same day she had left, as I had on my previous visit. I had never seen the island at night. The tropical greenery, lush with that faintly menacing suggestion of plant life gone wild, seemed to close in on me. The velvety darkness seemed to smell of ginger, and flowers, and the sea—all too strong, too blandly sensual, like an overdone perfume ad. At the hotel it was better; my room was on the second floor, above the dark foliage, and did not face the sea. Nonetheless, I stayed inside all that evening, all that darkness, until I could go the next day to the Institute of the Biological Hope.

“Hello, Seena.”

“Keith. You look—”

“Rotten,” he finished, and waited. He did not smile. Although he had lost some weight, he was nowhere near as skeletal as Devrie, and it gave me a pang I did not analyze to see his still-healthy body in the small gray room where last I had seen hers. His head was shaved, and without the curling brown hair he looked sterner, prematurely middle-aged. That, too, gave me a strange emotion, although it was not why he looked rotten. The worst was his eyes. Red-veined, watery, the sockets already a little sunken, they held the sheen of a man who was not forgiving somebody for something. Me? Himself? Devrie? I had lain awake all night, schooling myself for this insane interview, and still I did not know what to say. What does one say to persuade a man to sexual potency with one’s sister so that her life might be saved? I felt ridiculous, and frightened, and—I suddenly realized the name of my strange emotion—humiliated. How could I even start to slog toward what I was supposed to reach?

“How goes the Great Experiment?”

“Not as you described it,” he said, and we were there already. I looked at him evenly.

“You can’t understand why I presented the Institute in the worst possible light.”

“I can understand that.”

“Then you can’t understand why I bedded you, knowing about Bohentin’s experiment.”

“I can also understand that.”

Something was wrong. Keith answered me easily, without restraint, but with conflict gritty beneath his voice, like sand beneath blowing grass. I stepped closer, and he flinched. But his expression did not change.

“Keith. What is this about? What am I doing here? Devrie said you couldn’t … that you were impotent with her, confused enough about who and what …” I trailed off. He still had not changed expression.

I said quietly, “It was a simplistic idea in the first place. Only someone as simplistic as Devrie …” Only someone as simplistic as Devrie would think you could straighten out impotency by talking about it for a few hours. I turned to go, and I had gotten as far as laying my hand on the doorknob before Keith grasped my arm. Back to him, I squeezed my eyes shut. What in God would I have done if he had not stopped me?

“It’s not what Devrie thinks!” With my back to him, not able to see his middle-aged baldness but only to hear the anguish in his voice, he again seemed young, uncertain, the boy I had bought coffee for in Indian Falls. I kept my back to him, and my voice carefully toneless.

“What is it, then, Keith? If not what Devrie thinks?”

“I don’t know!”

“But you do know what it’s not? It’s not being confused about who is your sister and who your mother and whom you’re willing to have sex with in front of a room full of researchers?”

“No.” His voice had gone hard again, but his hand stayed on my arm. “At first, yes. The first time. But, Seena—I felt it. Almost. I almost felt the presence, and then all the rest of the confusion—it didn’t seem as important anymore. Not the confusion between you and Devrie.”

I whirled to face him. “You mean God doesn’t care whom you fuck if it gets you closer to fucking with Him.”

He looked at me hard then—at me, not at his own self-absorption. His reddened eyes widened a little. “Why, Seena—you care. You told me the brother-sister thing didn’t matter anymore—but you care.”

Did I? I didn’t even know anymore. I said, “But, then, I’m not deluding myself that it’s all for the old Kingdom and the Glory.”

“Glory,” he repeated musingly, and finally let go of my arm. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“Keith. This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“Where do you want to get?” he said in the same musing tone. “Where did any of you, starting with your father, want to get with me? Glory … glory.”

Standing this close to him, seeing close up the pupils of his eyes and smelling close up the odor of his sweat, I finally realized what I should have seen all along: he was glowing. He was of course constantly on Bohentin’s program of neurotransmitter manipulation, but the same chemicals that made the experiments possible also raised the threshold of both frankness and suggestibility. I guessed it must be a little like the looseness of being drunk, and I wondered if perhaps Bohentin might have deliberately raised the dosage before letting this inteview take place. But no, Bohentin wouldn’t be aware of the bargain Devrie and I had struck; she would not have told him. The whole bizarre situation was hers alone, and Keith’s drugged musings a fortunate side-effect I would have to capitalize on.

“Where do you think my father wanted to get with you?” I asked him gently.

“Immortality. Godhead. The man who created Adam without Eve.” He was becoming maudlin. “Hardly ‘the man,’” I pointed out. “My father was only one of a team of researchers. And the same results were being obtained independently in California.”

“Results. I am a ‘result.’ What do you think he wanted, Seena?”

“Scientific knowledge of cell development. An objective truth.”

“That’s all Devrie wants.”

“To compare bioengineering to some mystic quest—”

“Ah, but if the mystic quest is given a laboratory answer? Then it, too, becomes a scientific truth. You really hate that idea, don’t you, Seena? You hate science validating anything you define as non-science.”

I said stiffly, “That’s rather an oversimplification.”

“Then what do you hate?”

“I hate the risk to human bodies and human minds. To Devrie. To you.”

“How nice of you to include me,” he said, smiling. “And what do you think Devrie wants?”

“Sensation. Romantic religious emotion. To be all roiled up inside with delicious esoterica.”

He considered this. “Maybe.”

“And is this what you want as well, Keith? You’ve asked what everyone else wants. What do you want?”

“I want to feel at home in the universe. As if I belonged in it. And I never have.”

He said this simply, without self-consciousness, and the words themselves were predictable enough for his age—even banal. There was nothing in the words that could account for my eyes suddenly filling with tears. “And ‘scientifically’ reaching God would do that for you?”

“How do I know until I try it? Don’t cry, Seena.”

“I’m not!”

“All right,” he agreed softly. “You’re not crying.” Then he added, without changing tone, “I am more like you than like Devrie.”

“How so?”

“I think that Devrie has always felt that she belongs in the universe. She only wants to find the … the coziest corner of it to curl up in. Like a cat. The coziest corner to curl up in is God’s lap. Aren’t you surprised that I should be more like you than like the person I was cloned from?”

“No,” I said. “Harder upbringing than Devrie’s. I told you that first day: cloning is only delayed twinning.”

He threw back his head and laughed, a sound that chilled my spine. Whatever his conflict was, we were moving closer.

“Oh no, Seena. You’re so wrong. It’s more than delayed twinning, all right. You can’t buy a real twin. You either have one or you don’t. But you can buy yourself a clone. Bought, paid for, kept on the books along with all the rest of the glassware and holotanks and electron microscopes. You said so yourself, in your apartment, when you first told me about Devrie and the Institute. ‘Money. She’d buy you.’ And you were right, of course. Your father bought me, and she did, and you did. But of course you two women couldn’t have bought if I hadn’t been selling.”

He was smiling still. Stupid—we had both been stupid, Devrie and I, we had both been looking in the wrong place, misled by our separate blinders-on training in the laboratory brain. My training had been scientific, hers humanistic, and so I looked at Freud and she looked at Oedipus, and we were equally stupid. How did the world look to a man who did not deal in laboratory brains, a man raised in a grittier world in which limits were not what the mind was capable of but what the bank book would stand? “Your genes are too expensive for you to claim except as a beggar; your sisters are too expensive for you to claim except as a beggar; God is too expensive for you to claim except as a beggar.” To a less romantic man it would not have mattered, but a less romantic man would not have come to the Institute. What dark humiliations and resentments did Keith feel when he looked at Devrie, the self who was buyer and not bought?

Change the light you shine onto a mind, and you see different neural patterns, different corridors, different forests of trees grown in soil you could not have imagined. Run that soil through your fingers and you discover different pebbles, different sand, different leaf mold from the decay of old growths. Devrie and I had been hacking through the wrong forest.

Not Oedipus, but Marx.

Quick lines of attack came to me. Say: Keith it’s a job like any other with high-hazard pay why can’t you look at it like that a very dangerous and well-paid job for which you’ve been hired by just one more eccentric member of the monied class. Say: You’re entitled to the wealth you’re our biological brother damn it consider it rationally as a kinship entitlement. Say: Don’t be so nicey-nice it’s a tough world out there and if Devrie’s giving it away take it don’t be an impractical chump.

I said none of that. Instead I heard myself saying, coolly and with a calm cruelty, “You’re quite right. You were bought by Devrie, and she is now using her own purchase for her own ends. You’re a piece of equipment bought and paid for. Unfortunately, there’s no money in the account. It has all been a grand sham.”

Keith jerked me to face him with such violence that my neck cracked. “What are you saying?”

The words came as smoothly, as plausibly, as if I had rehearsed them. I didn’t even consciously plan them: how can you plan a lie you do not know you will need? I slashed through this forest blind, but the ground held under my feet.

“Devrie told me that she has signed over most of her inheritance to you. What she didn’t know, because I haven’t yet told her, is that she doesn’t have control of her inheritance any longer. It’s not hers. I control it. I had her declared mentally incompetent on the grounds of violent suicidal tendencies and had myself made her legal guardian. She no longer has the legal right to control her fortune. A doctor observed her when she came to visit me in New York. So the transfer of her fortune to you is invalid.”

“The lawyers who gave me the papers to sign—”

“Will learn about the New York action this week,” I said smoothly. How much inheritance law did Keith know? Probably very little. Neither did I, and I invented furiously; it only needed to sound plausible. “The New York courts only handed down their decision recently, and Dominican judicial machinery, like everything else in the tropics, moves slowly. But the ruling will hold, Keith. Devrie does not control her own money, and you’re a pauper again. But I have something for you. Here. An airline ticket back to Indian Falls. You’re a free man. Poor, but free. The ticket is in your name, and there’s a check inside it—that’s from me. You’ve earned it, for at least trying to aid poor Devrie. But now you’re going to have to leave her to me. I’m now her legal guardian.”

I held the ticket out to him. It was wrapped in its airline folder; my own name as passenger was hidden. Keith stared at it, and then at me.

I said softly, “I’m sorry you were cheated. Devrie didn’t mean to. But she has no money, now, to offer you. You can go. Devrie’s my burden now.”

His voice sounded strangled. “To remove from the Institute?”

“I never made any secret of wanting her out. Although the legal papers for that will take a little time to filter through the Dominican courts. She wouldn’t go except by force, so force is what I’ll get. Here.”

I thrust the ticket folder at him. He made no move to take it, and I saw from the hardening of his face—my face, Devrie’s face—the moment when Devrie shifted forests in his mind. Now she was without money, without legal control of her life, about to be torn from the passion she loved most. The helpless underdog. The orphaned woman, poor and cast out, in need of protection from the powerful who had seized her fortune.

Not Marx, but Cervantes.

“You would do that? To your own sister?”

Anything for a sister. I said bitterly, “Of course I would.”

“She’s not mentally incompetent!”

“Isn’t she?”

“No!”

I shrugged. “The courts say she is.”

Keith studied me, resolve hardening around him. I thought of certain shining crystals, that will harden around any stray piece of grit. Now that I was succeeding in convincing him, my lies hurt—or perhaps what hurt was how easily he believed them.

“Are you sure, Seena,” he said, “that you aren’t just trying a grab for Devrie’s fortune?”

I shrugged again, and tried to make my voice toneless. “I want her out of here. I don’t want her to die.”

“Die? What makes you think she would die?”

“She looks—”

“She’s nowhere near dying,” Keith said angrily—his anger a release, so much that it hardly mattered at what. “Don’t you think I can tell in twin trance what her exact physical state is? And don’t you know how much control the trance gives each twin over the bodily processes of the other? Don’t you even know that? Devrie isn’t anywhere near dying. And I’d pull her out of trance if she were.” He paused, looking hard at me. “Keep your ticket, Seena.”

I repeatedly mechanically, “You can leave now. There’s no money.” Devrie had lied to me.

“That wouldn’t leave her with any protection at all, would it?” he said levelly. When he grasped the doorknob to leave, the tendons in his wrist stood out clearly, strong and taut. I did not try to stop his going.

Devrie had lied to me. With her lie, she had blackmailed me into yet another lie to Keith. The twin trance granted control, in some unspecified way, to each twin’s body; the trance I had pioneered might have resulted in eight deaths unknowingly inflicted on each other out of who knows what dark forests in eight fumbling minds. Lies, blackmail, death, more lies.

Out of these lies they were going to make scientific truth. Through these forests they were going to search for God.

“Final clearance check of holotanks,” an assistant said formally. “Faraday cage?”

“Optimum.”

“External radiation?”

“Cleared,” said the man seated at the console of the first tank.

“Cleared,” said the woman seated at the console of the second.

“Microradiation?”

“Cleared.”

“Cleared.”

“Personnel radiation, Class A?”

“Cleared.”

“Cleared.”

On it went, the whole tedious and crucial procedure, until both tanks had been cleared and focused, the fluid adjusted, tested, adjusted again, tested again. Bohentin listened patiently, without expression, but I, standing to the side of him and behind the tanks, saw the nerve at the base of his neck and just below the hairline pulse in some irregular rhythm of its own. Each time the nerve pulsed, the skin rose slightly from under his collar. I kept my eyes on that syncopated crawling of flesh, and felt tension prickle over my own skin like heat.

Three-quarters of the lab, the portion where the holotanks and other machinery stood, was softly dark, lit mostly from the glow of console dials and the indirect track lighting focused on the tanks. Standing in the gloom were Bohentin, five other scientists, two medical doctors—and me. Bohentin had fought my being allowed there, but in the end he had had to give in. I had known too many threatening words not in generalities but in specifics: reporters’ names, drug names, cloning details, twin trance tragedy, anorexia symptoms, bioengineering amendment. He was not a man who much noticed either public opinion or relatives’ threats, but no one else outside his Institute knew so many so specific words—some people knew some of the words, but only I had them all. In the end he had focused on me his cold, brilliant eyes, and given permission for me to witness the experiment that involved my sister.

I was going to hold Devrie to her bargain. I was not going to believe anything she told me without witnessing it for myself.

Half the morning passed in technical preparation. Somewhere Devrie and Keith, the human components of this costly detection circuit, were separately being brought to the apex of brain activity. Drugs, biofeedback, tactile and auditory and kinaesthetic stimulation—all carefully calculated for the maximum increase of both the number of neurotransmitters firing signals through the synapses of the brain and of the speed at which the signals raced. The more rapid the transmission through certain pathways, the more intense both perception and feeling. Some neurotransmitters, under this pressure, would alter molecular structure into natural hallucinogens; that reaction had to be controlled. Meanwhile other drugs, other biofeedback techniques, would depress the body’s natural enzymes designed to either reabsorb excess transmitters or to reduce the rate at which they fired. The number and speed of neurotransmitters in Keith’s and Devrie’s brains would mount, and mount, and mount, all natural chemical barriers removed. The two of them would enter the lab with their whole brains—rational cortex, emotional limbic, right and left brain functions—simultaneously aroused to an unimaginable degree. Simultaneously. They would be feeling as great a “rush” as a falling skydiver, as great a glow as a cocaine user, as great a mental clarity and receptivity as a da Vinci whose brush is guided by all the integrated visions of his unconscious mind. They would be white-hot.

Then they would hit each other with the twin trance.

The quarter of the lab which Keith and Devrie would use was softly and indirectly lit, though brighter than the rest. It consisted of a raised, luxuriantly padded platform, walls and textured pillows in a pink whose component wavelengths had been carefully calculated, temperature in a complex gradient producing precise convection flows over the skin. The man and woman in that womb-colored, flesh-stimulating environment would be able to see us observers standing in the gloom behind the holotanks only as vague shapes. When the two doors opened and Devrie and Keith moved onto the platform, I knew that they would not even try to distinguish who stood in the lab. Looking at their faces, that looked only at each other, I felt my heart clutch.

They were naked except for the soft helmets that both attached hundreds of needles to nerve clumps just below the skin and also held the earphones through which Bohentin controlled the music that swelled the cathedrals of their skulls. “Cathedrals”—from their faces, transfigured to the ravished ecstasy found in paintings of medieval saints, that was the right word. But here the ecstasy was controlled, understood, and I saw with a sudden rush of pain at old memories that I could recognize the exact moment when Keith and Devrie locked onto each other with the twin trance. I recognized it, with my own more bitter hyperclarity, in their eyes, as I recognized the cast of concentration that came over their features, and the intensity of their absorption. The twin trance. They clutched each other’s hands, faces inches apart, and suddenly I had to look away.

Each holotank held two whorls of shifting colors, the outlines clearer and the textures more sharply delineated than any previous holographs in the history of science. Keith’s and Devrie’s perceptions of each other’s presence. The whorls went on clarifying themselves, separating into distinct and mappable layers, as on the platform Keith and Devrie remained frozen, all their energies focused on the telepathic trance. Seconds passed, and then minutes. And still, despite the clarity of the holographs in the tank, a clarity that fifteen years earlier I would have given my right hand for, I sensed that Keith and Devrie were holding back, were deliberately confining their unimaginable perceptiveness to each other’s radiant energy, in the same way that water is confined behind a dam to build power.

But how could I be sensing that? From a subliminal “reading” of the mapped perceptions in the holotanks? Or from something else?

More minutes passed. Keith and Devrie stayed frozen, facing each other, and over her skeletal body and his stronger one a flush began to spread, rosy and slow, like heat tide rising.

“Jesus H. Christ,” said one of the medical doctors, so low that only I, standing directly behind her, could have heard. It was not a curse, nor a prayer, but some third possibility, unnameable.

Keith put one hand on Devrie’s thigh. She shuddered. He drew her down to the cushions on the platform and they began to caress each other, not frenzied, not in the exploring way of lovers but with a deliberation I have never experienced outside a research lab, a slow care that implied that worlds of interpretation hung on each movement. Yet the effect was not of coldness nor detachment but of intense involvement, of tremendous energy joyously used, of creating each other’s bodies right then, there under each other’s hands. They were working, and oblivious to all but their work. But if it was a kind of creative work, it was also a kind of primal innocent eroticism, and, watching, I felt my own heat begin to rise. “Innocent”—but if innocence is unknowingness, there was nothing innocent about it at all. Keith and Devrie knew and controlled each heartbeat,and I felt the exact moment when they let their sexual energies, added to all the other neural energies, burst the dam and flood outward in wave after wave, expanding the scope of each brain’s perceptions, inundating the artificially walled world.

A third whorl formed in each holotank.

It formed suddenly: one second nothing, the next brightness. But then it wavered, faded a bit. After a few moments it brightened slightly, a diffused golden haze, before again fading. On the platform Keith gasped, and I guessed he was having to shift his attention between perceiving the third source of radiation and keeping up the erotic version of the twin trance. His biofeedback techniques were less experienced than Devrie’s, and the male erection more fragile. But then he caught the rhythm, and the holograph brightened.

It seemed to me that the room brightened as well, although no additional lights came on and the consoles glowed no brighter. Sweat poured off the researchers. Bohentin leaned forward, his neck muscle tautening toward the platform as if it were his will and not Keith/Devrie’s that strained to perceive that third presence recorded in the tank. I thought, stupidly, of mythical intermediaries: Merlyn never made king, Moses never reaching the Promised Land. Intermediaries—and then it became impossible to think of anything at all.

Devrie shuddered and cried out. Keith’s orgasm came a moment later, and with it a final roil of neural activity so strong the two primary whorls in each holotank swelled to fill the tank and inundate the third. At the moment of breakthrough Keith screamed, and in memory it seems as if the scream was what tore through the last curtain—that is nonsense. How loud would microbes have to scream to attract the attention of giants? How loud does a knock on the door have to be to pull a sleeper from the alien world of dreams?

The doctor beside me fell to her knees. The third presence—or some part of it—swirled all around us, racing along our own unprepared synapses and neurons, and what swirled and raced was astonishment. A golden, majestic astonishment. We had finally attracted Its attention, finally knocked with enough neural force to be just barely heard—and It was astonished that we could, or did, exist. The slow rise of that powerful astonishment within the shielded lab was like the slow swinging around of the head of a great beast to regard some butterfly it has barely glimpsed from the corner of one eye. But this was no beast. As Its attention swung toward us, pain exploded in my skull—the pain of sound too loud, lights too bright, charge too high. My brain was burning on overload. There came one more flash of insight—wordless, pattern without end—and the sound of screaming. Then, abruptly, the energy vanished.

Bohentin, on all fours, crawled toward the holotanks. The doctor lay slumped on the floor; the other doctor had already reached the platform and its two crumpled figures. Someone was crying, someone else shouting. I rose, fell, dragged myself to the side of the platform and then could not climb it. I could not climb the platform. Hanging with two hands on the edge, hearing the voice crying as my own, I watched the doctor bend shakily to Keith, roll him off Devrie to bend over her, turn back to Keith.

Bohentin cried, “The tapes are intact!”

“Oh God oh God oh God oh God oh God,” someone moaned, until abruptly she stopped. I grasped the flesh-colored padding on top of the platform and pulled myself up onto it.

Devrie lay unconscious, pulse erratic, face cast in perfect bliss. The doctor breathed into Keith’s mouth—what strength could the doctor himself have !eft?—and pushed on the naked chest. Breathe, push, breathe, push. The whole length of Keith’s body shuddered; the doctor rocked back on his heels; Keith breathed.

“It’s all on tape!” Bohentin cried. “It’s all on tape!”

“God damn you to hell,” I whispered to Devrie’s blissful face. “It didn’t even know we were there!”

Her eyes opened. I had to lean close to hear her answer.

“But now … we know He … is there.”

She was too weak to smile. I looked away from her, away from that face, out into the tumultuous emptiness of the lab, anywhere.

They will try again.

Devrie has been asleep, fed by glucose solution through an IV, for fourteen hours. I sit near her bed, frowned at by the nurse, who can see my expression as I stare at my sister. Somewhere in another bed Keith is sleeping yet again. His rest is more fitful than Devrie’s; she sinks into sleep as into warm water, but he cannot. Like me, he is afraid of drowning.

An hour ago he came into Devrie’s room and grasped my hand. “How could It—He—It not have been aware that we existed? Not even have known?”

I didn’t answer him.

“You felt it too, Seena, didn’t you? The others say they could, so you must have too. It … created us in some way. No, that’s wrong. How could It create us and not know?”

I said wearily, “Do we always know what we’ve created?” and Keith glanced at me sharply. But I had not been referring to my father’s work in cloning.

“Keith. What’s a Thysania Africana?”

“A what?”

“Think of us,” I said, “as just one more biological side-effect. One type of being acts, and another type of being comes into existence. Man stages something like the African Horror, and in doing so he creates whole new species of moths and doesn’t even discover they exist until long afterward. If man can do it, why not God? And why should He be any more aware of it than we are?”

Keith didn’t like that. He scowled at me, and then looked at Devrie’s sleeping face: Devrie’s sleeping bliss.

“Because she is a fool,” I said savagely, “and so are you. You won’t leave it alone, will you? Having been noticed by It once, you’ll try to be noticed by It again. Even though she promised me otherwise, and even if it kills you both.”

Keith looked at me a long time, seeing clearly—finally—the nature of the abyss between us, and its dimensions. But I already knew neither of us could cross. When at last he spoke, his voice held so much compassion that I hated him. “Seena. Seena, love. There’s no more doubt now, don’t you see? Now rational belief is no harder than rational doubt. Why are you so afraid to even believe?”

I left the room. In the corridor I leaned against the wall, palms spread flat against the tile, and closed my eyes. It seemed to me that I could hear wings, pale and fragile, beating against glass.

They will try again. For the sake of sure knowledge that the universe is not empty, Keith and Devrie and all the others like their type of being will go on pushing their human brains against that biological window. For the sake of sure knowledge: belief founded on experiment and not on faith. And the Other: being/alien/God? It, too, may choose to initiate contact, if It can and now that It knows we are here. Perhaps it will seek to know us, and even beyond the laboratory Devrie and Keith may find any moment of heightened arousal subtly invaded by a shadowy Third. Will they sense It, hovering just beyond consciousness, if they argue fiercely or race a sailboat in rough water or make love? How much arousal will it take, now, for them to sense those huge wings beating on the other side of the window?

And windows can be broken.

Tomorrow I will fly back to New York. To my museum, to my exhibits, to my moths under permaplex, to my empty apartment, where I will keep the heavy drapes drawn tightly across the glass.

For—oh Cod—all the rest of my life.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Trouble with the Cotton People

Ursula K. Le Guin was possibly the most talked-about SF writer of the seventies—rivaled for that position only by Robert Silverberg, James Tiptree, Jr., and Philip K. Dick—and is probably one of the best-known and most universally respected SF writers in the world today. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade, and shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre; it won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as did Le Guin’s monumental novel The Dispossessed, a few years later. She has also won two other Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award for her short fiction, and the National Book Award for Children’s Literature for the novel The Farthest Shore, part of her acclaimed “Earthsea” trilogy. Her other novels include Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon’s World, The Beginning Place, and the other two Earthsea novels, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. She has had three collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, and The Compass Rose. Her latest book is Always Coming Home, a multivoiced, multimedia novel (told by many different characters, and featuring illustrations, music, and even recipes, as well as prose narrative), upcoming from Harper & Row.

Here—in a story which also appears as part of Always Coming Home—she gives us a fascinating and evocative look into another kind of lifestyle, in another and Newer World.

Written by Grey Bull of the Obsidian of Telina-na, as part of an offering to his heyimas.

When I was a young man there was trouble with the people who send us cotton from the South in trade for our wines. We were putting good wines on the train to Sed every spring and autumn, clear Ganais and dark Berrena, Mes from Ounmalin and the Sweet Betebbes they like down there, all good wines, selected because they travel well, and shipped in the best oak and redwood casks. But they had begun sending us short-staple, seedy cotton, full of tares, in short-weight bales. Then one year they sent half in bales and the rest stuff already woven—some of it fair sheeting weight, but some of it sleazy, or worse.

That year was the first I went to Sed, with my teacher in the Cloth Art, Soaring of the Obsidian of Kastoha-na. We went down with the wine, and stayed at the inn at Sed, a wonderful place for seafood and general comfort. She and the Wine Art people had an argument with the foreigners, but it got nowhere, because the people who had brought the cotton to Sed said they were just middlemen—they hadn’t sent the lousy cotton, they just loaded and unloaded it and sailed the ships that carried it and took the wine back South. The only person there, they said, who was actually from the cotton people, wasn’t able to speak any language anybody else spoke. Soaring dragged him over to the Sed Exchange, but he acted as if he’d never heard of TOK; and when she tried to get a message through the Exchange to the place the cotton came from, nobody answered.

The Wine Art people were glad she was there, since they would have taken the sleazy without question and sent all the good wine they had brought in return. She advised them to send two-thirds the usual shipment, and no Sweet Betebbes in it at all, and to take the rest back home and wait to hear from the cotton people. She refused to load the sleazy stuff onto the train, so they put it back into the ships. The ship people said they didn’t care, so long as they got their usual share of the wine from us for doing the shipping. Soaring wanted to cut that amount, too, to induce the ship people to pay attention to the quality of their cargo; but the other Valley traders said that was unfair, or unwise; so we gave the sailors a half-carload, as usual—all Sweet Betebbes.

When we came home there was discussion among the Cloth and Wine Arts and the Finders Lodge and the councils and interested people of several towns, and some of us said: “Nobody from the Valley has been to that place where the cotton comes from for forty or fifty years. Maybe some people from here should go there, and talk with those people.” The others agreed with that.

So after waiting a while to see if the cotton people would send a message on the Exchange when they got their sleazy back and less wine than usual, we set out, four of us: myself, because I wanted to go, and knew something about cotton and fabrics; and three Finders Lodge people, two who had done a lot of trading and had been across the Inland Sea more than once, and one who wanted to keep up the Finders’ maps of the places we were going. They were named Patience, Peregrine, and Gold. We were all men and all young. I was the youngest. I had come inland the year before with a Blue Clay girl, but when I said I was going to the end of the Inland Sea she said I was crazy and irresponsible, and put my books and bedding out on the landing. So I left from my mothers’ house.

I had been busy learning with the Cloth Art and had not given much thought to joining the Finders Lodge, but the trip to Sed had made me want to travel more, and I knew I had a gift for trading. I saw no reason to be ashamed of it. I have never cared much what people say. So I went as a novice of that Lodge, both a traveller and a trader.

In the books I read and the stories I heard as a kid, the Finders were always travellers, not traders, and they were generally on snowy peaks in the Range of Light singing to the bears or getting toes frozen off or rescuing each other from chasms. The Finders I was with appeared not to favor that style of travel. We took a comfortable single-car down the line to Sed, and stayed at the inn there again, eating like ducks in a slug patch, while we asked around about ships and boats.

Nobody was sailing South. We could get a ship going across to the East coast, to Rekwit, some time in the month; or as soon as we liked, a boat would take us across the Gate to the Falares Islands. From either Rekwit or the Falares we could try to find a coaster going South, or else go on foot down the inner side of the mountains. The Finders decided the chances were better on the West side, and that we should cross the Gate.

I was sorry when I saw the boat.

It was about ten feet long with a little farting engine and one sail. The tidal currents run in and out the Gate at fifty miles an hour, they say, and the winds the same.

The boat’s people were skinny and white with fishy eyes: Falares Islanders. They talked enough TOK that we could understand one another. They had been in Sed to trade fish for grain and brandy. They sailed those little boats way out west of the Gate, out on the open ocean, fishing. They were always saying, “Ho, ha, go out to big waves, ha, yes?” and slapping my back while I was throwing up over the edge of the boat.

A north wind was coming up, and by the time we were out in the middle of the water of the Gate the waves were getting very steep and hard, like bright little cliffs. The boat climbed up and dropped down and jerked and slapped. Then the low fog that had been lying over the Inland Sea, which I had taken for distant land, blew and faded away in a few moments, and there a hundred miles to the east of us was the Range of Light, the far glitter of the peaks of snow.

Underneath the boat there, Patience told me, the bottom of the sea was all buildings. In the old times outside the world the Gate was farther west and narrower, and all its shores and the countries inland were covered with houses. I have heard the same thing told in the Madrone Lodge since then, and there’s the song about the old souls. It is no doubt true, but I had no wish at the time to go down and verify it, though the harder the wind blew the likelier it seemed that we were about to do that. I was too bewildered, however, to be really frightened. With no earth to be seen but those tiny white sawteeth half over the world’s curve, and the hard bright sun and wind and water, it was a good deal like being dead already, I thought.

When the next day we finally got ashore onto one of the Falares Islands, the first thing I felt was lust. I got a big, long hard-on, and couldn’t turn my mind from it. The Falares women all looked beautiful, and I had such rape desires that I was really worried. I got alone, with some difficulty, and masturbated, but it didn’t help. Finally I told Peregrine about it, and he was decent enough not to laugh. He said it had to do with the sea. We talk about living on the coast—being chaste—and coming inland—when you stop being chaste—and all that may be reversal language. Sex is always turning things around and upside down. He said he didn’t know why being on the sea and then coming ashore had that particular effect, but he had noticed it himself. I said I felt as if I’d come back to life with a vengeance. At any rate, a couple of days eating what the Falares people eat cured me. All the women began to look like seaweed, and all I wanted was to go on somewhere else, even on a boat.

They weren’t doing any sailing down the inland coast at that time of the year, but were all going out on the ocean for the big fish. But they were generous people, and some of them said they would take us along the inland coast as far as a place they called Tuburhuny, where one of them had family living. We had to get off the island somehow, so we accepted, although we weren’t sure where Tuburhuny was. The Falares people chart the seas, but not the lands, and none of our place names seemed to fit with theirs. But anything on the South Peninsula suited us.

When we sailed south the weather was quiet and the waves low. The fog never lifted. We passed a few rocks and islands, and around midday, passing a long, low one, the Falares people said, “City.” We couldn’t see much of it in the fog; it looked like bare rock and some yerba buena and beach grass and a couple of tall, slender towers or masts supported by guywires. The Falares people carried on about it: “You touch, you die!” and they acted out electrocution or asphyxiation or getting struck by lightning. I never heard any such thing about the Cities, but I had never seen one before, or since. Whether it was true, or they were having one of their little jokes with us, or they are superstitious, I don’t know. They are certainly rather under-educated and out of touch, on those islands in the fog; they never use the Exchange at Sed, as if it too were dangerous. They are timid people, except on water.

Tuburhuny turned out to be called Gohop on our maps, a little town a short way south of the northern tip of the Peninsula on the inland side. It was sheltered from the everlasting fog of the Gate. Avocadoes grew all over town, and they were just coming ripe when we were there. How the people there could stay thin, I don’t know, but they were thin, and whitish, like the Falares people; but not quite so much out on the edge of things. They were glad to talk to travellers, and helped Gold plan our trip on his maps. They had no boats going out any distance, and said none came by their little port regularly, so we set off south on foot.

The Peninsular Range between the ocean and the Inland Sea is so buckled up by earthquakes and subsidences and so deeply scored by faults and rifts that walking the length of it is like crossing a forest by climbing up every tree you come to and then back down. There was usually no way round. Sometimes we could walk along the beaches, but in many places there wasn’t any beach—the mountains dropped sheer into the sea. So we would plod up and up, clear to the ridge, and from there we saw the ocean to our right and the sea to our left and ahead and behind the land falling away in fold after fold forever. As we went farther south there were more long, narrow sounds and inlets in the faults, and it was hard to know whether we were following the main ridge or had got onto a hogback between two rifts, in which case we would end up on a headland staring at the water, and would have to go back ten or fifteen miles and start over. Nobody knew how old the maps we had were; they were from the Exchange, some time or other, but they were out of date. Mostly there was nobody to ask directions of but sheep. The human people lived down in the canyons with the water and the trees. They weren’t used to strangers, and we were careful not to alarm them.

In that part of the world the young men, late adolescents and older, often form groups and go out and live a hunting life, like our Bay Lodge, but less responsibly. The bands are allowed to fight each other, and to raid each other and any town except the one they came from, taking tools or food or animals or whatever they want. Those raids lead to killings, of course, sometimes; and some of the men never come back and settle down, but stay out in the hills as forest-living people, and some of them are crazy and kill for the sake of killing. The townspeople make a lot of fuss about these wild men of theirs, and live in fear of them; and so the four of us, young men and strangers, had to behave with notable propriety and good manners even at a distance, so as not to be mistaken for marauders or murderers.

Once they saw we were harmless they were generous and talkative, giving us anything they thought we wanted. Most of their towns were small, pleasant places with wood-beamed adobe houses stuccoed white, shaded by avocado trees. They all stayed in town all year, because in a summer house a family would not be safe from the bands of young men; but they said they used to go to summer houses, and it’s only in the last couple of generations that the young men have got irresponsible. They seemed to me foolish to let such an imbalance occur and continue, but perhaps they had some reason for it. The different peoples of those many canyons speak several different languages, but their towns and way of life were pretty much all alike. There were always people in the towns who could use TOK, so we could converse. At one of their Exchanges we sent messages to the Wakwaha Exchange to tell the Finders and our households that all was well with us, so far.

Towards the inner base of the Peninsula the ridges flatten down into a hot, sandy country, not lived in by human people, which runs two full days’ walk to the southwest coasts of the Inland Sea. The beaches are broad and low, with seamarshes and dunes and brackish, boggy lakes inland for miles; farther south, steep, desolate mountains run between east and west. The Inland Sea along that coast is very shallow, crowded with sandbars and islands, and on those islands is where they grow the cotton.

The cotton people call themselves Usudegd. There are a lot of them, some thousands, living on the islands and at places on the coast where rivers come down from the mountains—they have salt water everywhere, but not much fresh. The sea is warm there, and it’s warm country, though nothing like so hot, they say, as across those desolate mountains on the shores of the Omorn Sea. There are some severely poisoned areas in their country, but since it’s so dry the stuff stays put in the ground, and they know where not to go.

Across the Inland Sea in the northeast the cotton people look up to the tallest peak of the Range of Light, which we call South Mountain and they call Old Lion Mountain. Usually all one can see is the murk from the volcanoes south of it. It is important in their thoughts, but they never go to it. They say it is sacred, and its paths are not to be walked. But what about the Gongon people, who live all around South Mountain? That sort of idea is typical of the cotton people. They are not reasonable about some things.

It is my opinion that people who have too much to do with the sea, and use boats a great deal, have their minds affected by it.

At any rate, their towns are different from the towns of the Peninsular peoples. The cotton people dig in and build underground, with only a couple of feet of wall aboveground for windows, like a heyimas. The roof is a low dome covered with sod, so from any distance you don’t see a town, but a patch of hummocks. In among the roofs are all kinds of shrubs, trees, and vines they have down there; palm, avocado, big orange and lemon and grapefruit trees, carob and date, the same kinds of eucalyptus we have, and some I never saw before, are some of their trees. The vines flower splendidly. The trees make shade aboveground and the houses stay cool underground; the arrangement looks odd, but is reasonable. They have no problems draining their houses, as we do our heyimas, because it’s so dry there; though when it rains sometimes it rains hard, and they get flooded out, they said.

Their sacred places are some distance outside the towns, and are artificial mountains, hillocks with ritual paths round and round them, and beautiful small buildings or enclosures on top. We didn’t mess with any of that. Patience said it was best to keep clear out of foreigners’ sacred places until invited into them. He said one reason he liked the Amaranth people, with whom he had stayed several times, was that they had no sacred places at all. People tend to get testy about those places.

But the cotton people were already testy. Although they hadn’t replied or sent any message on the Exchange, they were angry that we had sent back their woven goods and hadn’t sent the usual amount of wine, and right away we were in trouble there. All we had to do was say we had come from the Valley of the Na and the hornets began to buzz.

We had to get into one of their boats, flat things that felt very unsafe, and go out to the most important island. As soon as we got on the water, though it was entirely calm and smooth, I got sick again. I have a very delicate sense of balance and the unsteadiness of boats affects my inner ear. The cotton people had no understanding of this at all. The Falares Islanders had made jokes about it, but the cotton people were contemptuous and rude.

We passed many large islands, and the cotton people kept pointing and saying, “Cotton, cotton. See the cotton? Everybody knows we grow the best cotton. People as far north as Crater Lake know it! Look at that cotton,” and so on. The cotton fields were not very impressive at that time of year, but we nodded and smiled and behaved with admiration and propriety, agreeing with everything they said.

After coasting a flat island miles long we turned northeast and landed on a small island with a good view of the mountains, all the south end of the Range of Light and the bare, raw Havil Range in the south. The whole island was a town, hundreds of hummock roofs, some of them turfed, others naked sand, and trees and bushes in patterns among the hummocks, and flowerbeds, also in patterns, with little paths between and through. They are strong on paths, down there, but you have to know which ones are to be walked on.

We had been travelling all that day and thirty days before it, and it was sunset by the time we landed on this island, but they hardly stopped to give us dinner before they took us straight into the town council meeting. And there they hardly said anything polite or appropriate about our having come all that way to talk with them before they started saying, “Where’s the Sweet Betebbes?” and, “Why did you send our goods back? Do we not have an agreement, made sixty years ago? Every year since then it had been honored and renewed, until this year! Why have you of the Wally broken your word?” They spoke good TOK, but they always said Wally for Valley, and whine for wine.

Patience knew what he was doing when he took his middle name. He listened to them endlessly and remained alert, yet never frowned, or nodded, or shook his head. Peregrine, Gold, and I imitated him as well as we could.

After a great many of them had said their say, a little woman stood up, and a little man beside her. They both had twisted bodies and humped backs, and looked both young and old. One of them said, “Let our guests have a word now,” and the other said, “Let the Whine People speak.” They had authority, those little twins. The others all shut up like clams.

Patience let there be silence for some while before he spoke, and when he spoke his voice was grave and soft, so that they had to stay quiet to hear what he said. He was cautious and polite. He said a lot about the fitness of the agreement and its admirable age and convenience, and the unsurpassed quality of Usudegd cotton, known to be the best cotton from Crater Lake to the Omorn Break, from the Ocean Coast to the Range of Heaven—he got fairly eloquent in here—and then he quieted down again and spoke a little sadly about how Time blunts the keenest knife and changes the meaning of words and the thoughts in human minds, so that finally the firmest knot must be re-tied, and the sincerest word spoken once again. And then he sat down.

There was a silence. I thought he had awakened reason in them and they would agree at once. I was very young. The same woman who had talked the most before got up and said, “Why didn’t you send forty barrels of Sweet Betebbes wine like always before?”

I saw that the difficult part was only beginning. Patience had to answer that question and also say why we had sent back their woven goods. For a long time he didn’t. He kept talking in metaphors and images, and skirting around the issues; and after a while the little twisty twins began answering him the same way. And then, before anything that meant much had been said, it was so late that they called the meeting off for the night, and finally took us to an empty house where we could get some sleep. There was no heating, and one tiny electric light. The beds stood up on legs, and were lumpy.

It went on like that for three more days. Even Patience said he hadn’t expected them to go on arguing, and that probably the reason they argued so much was that they were ashamed of something. If so, it was our part not to shame them further. So we could not say anything about the poor quality of the raw cotton for the last several years, or even about the sleazy they had tried to foist off on us. We just stayed calm and sad and said that indeed we regretted not shipping the sweet wine which we grew especially for them, but said nothing about why we had not shipped it. And sure enough, little by little it came out that they had had a lot of bad things happen in the last five years: a cottonleaf virus mutation that was hard to control, and three years of drought, and a set of unusually severe earthquakes that had drowned some of their islands and left the water on others brackish or saline. All these things they seemed to consider their own fault, things to be ashamed of. “We have walked in the wrong paths!” they kept saying.

Patience, and Peregrine who also spoke for us, never said anything about these troubles of theirs, but began talking about troubles we had had in the Valley. They had to exaggerate a good deal, because things had been going particularly well for the winemakers, and the fourth and fifth years before had been great vintages of both Ganais and Fetuli; but in any kind of farming there are always troubles enough to talk about. And the more they told or invented about unseasonable frosts and unsuccessful fermentations, the more the cotton people went on about their own troubles, until they had told everything. They seemed relieved, then, and they gave us a much nicer house to stay in, well lighted and warm, with little paths all over the roof marked out with white shells and fumo balls. And at last they began to renegotiate the contract. It had taken Patience seven days to get them to do that. When we got down to it at last, it was very simple. The terms were about the same as they had been, with more room for negotiation each year through the Exchange. Nothing was said about why they hadn’t used the Exchange to explain their behavior earlier. They were still touchy and unreasonable if you said the wrong thing. We said that we would accept short-staple cotton until they had the long staple in quantity again, and we would send a double quantity of Sweet Betebbes with the spring shipment; however, underweight bales would be refused, and we did not want woven goods, since we preferred to make our own. There was trouble on this point. The women with the thirst for Sweet Betebbes got poisonous about it, and went on for hours about the quality and beauty of the fabrics of Usudegd. But by now Patience and the little twisty twins were friends of the heart; and the contract at last was spoken for cotton in the bale only, no fabrics.

After speaking the contract we stayed on nine days more, for politeness, and because Patience and the twins were drinking together. Gold was busy with his maps and notes, and Peregrine, a person whom everybody everywhere liked, was always talking with townspeople or going off in boats with them to other islands. The boats were little better than bundles of tule reeds. I generally hung around with some young women who were weavers there. They had some fine mechanical looms, solar powered, that I made notes on for my teacher Soaring, and also they were kind and friendly. Patience warned me that it’s better not to have a relation of sex with people in foreign countries until you know a good deal about their customs and expectations concerning commitment, marriage, contraception, techniques, and so on. So I just flirted and did some kissing. The cotton women kissed with their mouths wide open, which is surprising if you aren’t expecting it, and disagreeably wet, but very voluptuous; which was trying, under the circumstances.

Peregrine came back from another island one day with a queer expression. He said, “We’ve been fooled, Patience!”

Patience just waited, as usual.

Peregrine explained: he had met, in a town on one of the northernmost islands, some of the sailors of the ships that had brought the cotton to Sed and taken our wine back—the same people who had explained that they were just sailors and knew nothing about the cotton people and didn’t even speak their language. There they were living in that cotton town and speaking the language like natives, which they were. They were sailors by art or trade, and hadn’t wanted to get into trouble with us by arguing about the sleazy goods or the contract. They hadn’t told anybody except the people on their own island about their private supply of Sweet Betebbes, either. They laughed like crazy about it when they met him, Peregrine said. They told him that the man they had told us was one of the cotton people was the only one that wasn’t—he was a poor halfwit who had wandered in from the desert, and couldn’t speak much of any language.

Patience was silent long enough that I believed he was angry, but then he began to laugh, and we all laughed. He said, “Go see if that crew will take us back north by sea!”

But I suggested that we go home by land.

We left a few days later. It took us two months to go along the eastern coast of the Inland Sea to Rekwit, from which we sailed across to Tatselots in a great storm, but all that journey is another story, which I may tell later.

Since we went down there, there hasn’t been any more trouble with the cotton people, and they have always sent us good, long-staple cotton. They are not an unreasonable people, except in making little paths everywhere and being ashamed to admit they have had troubles.

LEWIS SHINER

Twilight Time

In recent years, there has been a wave of nostalgia for the fifties and early sixties, fueled mostly by movies like American Graffiti, Grease, The Buddy Holly Story, Porky’s, and a score of others, and bv TV shows like Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. But these nostalgia-trips seldom dwell on the darker side of that era: McCarthyism, cold war paranoia, Monster Movies, horror comics, and that curious Flying Saucer mania that could sweep through small towns with the force of a religious conversion.

Here Lewis Shiner takes an unflinching look at just those very things, and then takes us along on a journey to a past that might not be quite the way you remember it—with good reason.

Lewis Shiner is widely regarded as one of the most exciting new SF writers of the eighties. His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, Oui, Shayol, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and elsewhere. His first novel, Frontera, appeared in 1984, to good critical response. He served on the 1984 Nebula Award Jury, and is also a member (along with Howard Waldrop, Bruce Sterling, Leigh Kennedy, and others) of the well-known Turkey City Writers Workshop. Shiner lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife Edith.

I

The part of the machine they strapped me to looked too much like an electric chair. A sudden, violent urge to resist came over me as the two proctors buckled me down and fastened the electrodes to my scalp.

Not that it would have done me much good. The machine and I were in a steel cage and the cage was in the middle of a maximum security prison.

“Okay?” Thornberg asked me. His thinning hair was damp with sweat and a patch of it glistened on his forehead.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

He turned some switches. I couldn’t hear anything happen, but then, this wasn’t I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and sparks weren’t supposed to be climbing the bars of the cage.

Then a jolt of power hit me and I couldn’t even open my mouth to tell Thornberg to cut the thing off. My eyes filmed over and I started to see images in the mist. A distant, calmer part of my brain realized that Thornberg had cut in the encephalograph tapes.

We’d been working on them for weeks, refining the images detail by detail, and now all the pieces came together. Not just the steep hills and narrow streets of the town, not just the gym and the crepe-paper streamers and Buddy Holly singing, but the whole era, the flying saucer movies, the cars like rocket ships, rolled-up blue jeans and flannel shirts and PF Flyer tennis shoes, yo-yos, the candy wagon at noon recess, William Lundigan and Tom Corbett and Johnny Horton. They all melted together, the world events and the TV shows, the facts and the fiction and the imaginings, and for just one second they made a coherent, tangible universe.

And then I kicked and threw out my arms because I was falling.

II

I fell the way I did in dreams, trying to jerk myself awake, but the fall went on and on. I opened my eyes and saw a quiet blue, as if the sky had turned to water and I was drifting down through it. I hit on my hands and knees and felt the dirt under my fingers turn hard and grainy, felt the sun burn into my back.

Off to the left sat a line of low, gray-green hills. The ground where I crouched was covered with tough bull-head weeds and the sky overhead was the clear, hot blue of an Arizona summer.

The San Carlos Mountains, I thought. He did it. I’m back.

From the angle of the sun it looked to be late afternoon. I’d landed outside the city, as planned, to avoid materializing inside a crowd or a solid wall.

I sucked the good clean air into my lungs and danced a couple of steps across the sand. All I wanted was to get into town and make sure the rest of it was there, that it was all really happening.

I found the highway a few hundred yards to the south. LeeAnn was a tight feeling in my chest as I headed for town at a fast walk.

My eyes were so full of the mountains and the open sky that I didn’t notice the thing in the road until I was almost on top of it.

The pavement was not just broken, but scarred, but by a huge, melted trench. Something had boiled the asphalt up in two knee-high waves and left it frozen in mid-air. The sand around it looked like a giant tire track in icy mud, a jagged surface of glassy whites and browns.

The strangest part was that for a couple of seconds I didn’t realize that anything was wrong. My memories had become such a hash that the San Carlos Reservation had turned into a desert from a Sunday afternoon Science Fiction Theater and any minute I expected to see Caltiki or a giant scorpion come over the nearest rise.

I knelt to touch the asphalt ridge. Nothing in the real 1961, the one in the history books, could do this to a road.

A distant rumbling made me look up. A truck was coming out of the east, and it was swollen with all the outlandish bumps and curves of the middle fifties. I jogged toward it, waving one arm, and it pulled up beside me.

The driver was an aging Apache in faded jeans and a T-shirt. “Ya-ta-hey, friend,” he said. “Goin’ in to Globe?”

“Yeah,” I said, out of breath. “But I need to tell you. The road’s … torn up, just ahead.”

“Got the road again, did they? Damn gover’ment. Always got to do their tests on Indian land. You want a lift?”

“Yeah,” I said, “Yeah, I do. Thanks.”

I got in and he threw the truck in gear with a sound like a bag of cans rolling downhill. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen a gearshift on the steering column.

“My name’s Big Charlie,” he said,

“Travis,” I said. The cab of the truck smelled like Wildroot Creme Oil, and a magazine photo of Marilyn Monroe stared at me from the open glove compartment. A rabbit’s foot hung off the keys in the ignition and I had to remind myself that life was cheap in the sixties, even the lives of seals and leopards and rabbits.

A hysterical DJ on the radio was shouting, “K-Z-O-W, kay-ZOW! Rockin’ and rollin’ Gila County with Ozzie and Harriet’s favorite son …” The voice drowned in an ocean of reverb and out of it swam the sweet tenor of Ricky Nelson, singing “Travelin’ Man.”

Somehow the music made it all real and I had to look into the wind to keep the water out of my eyes. Up ahead of us in Globe was a 15-year-old kid who was listening to the same song, starting to get ready for his end-of-the-school-year dance. At that dance he was going to meet a girl named LeeAnn Patterson and fall in love with her. And he was never going to get over her.

Never.

Big Charlie eased the pickup off the road and found a place to cross the strip of melted glass. When the song finished the radio erupted in a flare of tumpets. “This is Saturday, May the 27th, and this is Kay-Zowzowzow NEWS!” Big Charlie turned the volume down with an automatic flip of the wrist, but I didn’t care. The date was right, and I could have rattled off the headlines as well as the DJ could. Thornberg had made me do my homework.

Khrushchev and Kennedy were headed for test-ban talks in Vienna. Freedom Riders were being jailed in Mississippi, and the Communists were stepping up their assault on Laos. Eichmann was on trial in Jerusalem, and Alan Shepard was still being honored for his space flight of three weeks before.

On the local scene, six teenagers were dead over in Stafford, part of the rising Memorial Day Death Toll. Rumors were going around about a strike against Kennicot Copper, whose strip mines employed about half of Globe’s work force.

Eddie Sachs was going to be in the pole position when they ran the 500 on Tuesday. The Angels had taken the Tigers, and the Giants had edged the Cubs in 13.

A decade of peace and quiet and short hair was winding down; a time when people knew their place and stayed in it. For ten years nobody had wanted anything but a new car and a bigger TV set, but now all that was about to change. In a little over a year the Cuban missile crisis would send thousands of people into their back yards to dig bomb shelters, and the “advisors” would start pouring into Southeast Asia. In another year the president would be dead.

All that I knew. What I didn’t know was why there was a huge melted scar across the desert.

Suddenly the truck’s brakes squealed and I jerked back to attention. My eyes focused on the road ahead and saw a little boy straddling the white line, waving frantically.

The truck slewed to the left and stopped dead. A girl of 12 or 13 stood up from a patch of mesquite and stared at us like she wanted to run away. She had a good six years on the boy, but when he ran back to her it seemed to calm her down.

“Hey,” Big Charlie shouted, leaning out his window. “What do you kids think you’re doing?”

The boy was tugging on the girl’s arm, saying, “It’s okay! They’re both okay, I’m sure, I’m really sure!”

The boy pulled her gently toward the driver’s window of the truck. “Can you help us, mister?”

“What’s wrong? What’s the big idea of standing out there in the middle of the road like that? You could have got killed.”

The boy backed away from Charlie’s anger and the girl stepped in. “We … we were running away from home.” She looked down at the boy as if she needed confirmation, and if I hadn’t known before that she was lying, I knew it then. “We … changed our minds. Can you take us back, mister? Just as far as town? Please?”

Charlie thought it over for a minute and seemed to come up with the same answer I did. Whatever they’d done probably wasn’t that serious, and they were bound to be better off in town than hitchhiking in the middle of the desert.

“In the back,” he said. “And watch what you’re doing!”

They scrambled over the side of the pickup, their sneakers banging on the side walls. I turned to look at them as we pulled away and they were huddled by the tailgate, arms around each other, their eyes squeezed shut.

What were they running from? I wondered, They looked like they hadn’t eaten in a couple of days, and their clothes were torn and dirty.

And what in God’s name had the boy meant when he said we were “okay?”

Don’t worry about it, I told myself. Don’t get involved. You haven’t got time to get mixed up in somebody else’s problems. You’re not going to be here that long.

We passed Glen’s Market at the foot of Skyline Drive, the one with the heavy wooden screen door that said “Rainbo is good bread” and the rich smells of doughnuts and bubble gum and citrus fruit.

“Where do you want off?” Big Charlie asked me.

“Downtown, anywhere.” The highway had curved past Globe’s three motels and now the grade school was coming up on the right. The Toastmaster Cafe, and its big Wurlitzer juke box with the colored tube of bubbles around the side, was just across the street. Overhead was the concrete walkway used to get from one to the other. It seemed a lot closer to the ground than it used to, even though I’d tried to prepare myself for things being smaller than I remembered.

Number 207 on the Toastmaster’s Wurlitzer was “True Love Ways” by Buddy Holly.

I could almost hear those thick, syrupy violins, and the hollow moan of King Curtis’s saxophone as we turned the corner and pulled up in front of Upton’s.

“This okay?” Big Charlie asked.

“Fine.” I was thinking about the smell of pencil shavings and the one piece of gum that was always stuck in the drain of the water fountain at the high school across the street. I got out of the truck. “I really appreciate it.”

“Not to worry,” Big Charlie said, and the pickup rattled away down Main Street.

The counter inside Upton’s swung out in a wide U, dotted with red plastic-covered stools. The chrome and the white linoleum made it look more like an operating room than a place to eat, but it passed for atmosphere at the time.

“Help you?” said the kid behind the counter.

His name was Curtis and he lived up the street from my parents’ house. He was a lot younger than I remembered him and he could have done with a shampoo. It was all I could do not to call him by name and order a Suicide. The Suicide was Curtis’s own invention, and he made it by playing the chrome spigots behind the counter like they were piano keys.

“Just coffee,” I said.

Five of the tables along the south wall were occupied, two of them by clean-cut families at dinner. Dinner tonight was a hamburger or the 89¢ Daily Special: fried chicken, three vegetables, tea or coffee. The women’s dresses hung to mid-calf and most of the male children had flat-top haircuts that showed a strip of close-shaven skull in the middle. Everybody seemed to be smoking.

A woman around the corner from me had bought the Jackie Kennedy look all the way, down to the red pill-box hat and the upswept hair. Two seats away from her a kid in a T-shirt and a leather jacket was flipping noisily through the metal-edged pages in the juke box console.

I paid a nickel for a copy of the Arizona Record out of a wooden box by the door. There was nothing in it about melted scars in the desert, just weddings and graduations and church announcements.

When I looked up, the two kids from the highway were sitting next to me. The girl was getting some stares. Her face was streaked with dirt and her shirt was thin enough to make it obvious that she should have been wearing a training bra or something under it.

“My name’s Carolyn,” she said. “This is Jeremy.” She put her arm around the boy, who smiled and picked at his fingernails.

“I’m Travis. Is he your brother?”

“Yes,” the girl said, at the same time that the boy said, “No.”

I shook my head. “This isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

“What do you want to know for, anyway?” the girl asked.

“I don’t really care. You’re following me, remember?”

Curtis was standing by the brand-new Seeburg box in the corner. He must have gotten tired of waiting for the kid in the motorcycle jacket to make up his mind. He pushed some buttons, a record dropped, and the room filled with violins. The bass thumped, a stick touched a cymbal, and Ray Charles started singing “Georgia.”

“Why do you keep doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“Rubbing your hair that way. Like it feels funny.”

I jerked my hand away from my ragged prison haircut. Ray was singing about his dreams. “The road,” he sang, “leads back to you …”

I knew he was talking to me. My road had brought me back here, to see Curtis standing in front of the juke box, to the music hanging changeless in the air, to LeeAnn. Even if Brother Ray and Hoagy Carmichael had never imagined a road made of Thornberg’s anti-particles.

“Stop that,” the girl said, and for a second I thought she was talking to me. Then I saw that Jeremy was chewing on the ridge of flesh between his thumb and forefinger, staring down at the countertop. Blood was starting to trickle out of the front of his mouth. The sight of it put the music out of my head and left me scared and confused.

I hadn’t looked at him closely before, but now that I did I saw scabs all over his arms and spots of dried, chocolate-colored blood on his T-shirt. His eyes were rolling back in his head and he looked like he was going to go backwards off the stool.

Carolyn slapped him across the mouth, knocking his hand away. He started to moan, louder than the juke box, loud enough to turn heads across the room.

“I have to get him out of here,” the girl said, pulling him to his feet.

“He needs a doctor,” I said. “Let me …”

“No,” she hissed. “Stay out of it.”

I flinched from the anger in her voice and she ran for the door, tugging Jeremy after her. They were halfway across the floor when the door swung open.

A man in loose slacks and a sport shirt stood in the doorway, staring at them. The little boy looked like he’d just seen the giant wasp in Monster from Green Hell. His jaw dropped open and started to shake. I could see the scream building from all the way across the room.

Before he could cut loose with it, Carolyn dragged him past the man and out onto the street. The man stood there for a second with a puzzled half-smile on his face, then shrugged and looked around for a seat.

When my stomach started jumping I thought at first that I was just reacting to all the confusion. Then I remembered what Thornberg had said about phase-shifting, and I knew I only had about a minute before the charge that had sent me back wore off.

I left a quarter on the counter and went to the men’s room in back. The smell of the deodorant cake in the urinal almost made me sick as I leaned against the wall. I felt drunk and dizzy and there seemed to be two of everything. Then the floor went out from under me and I was falling again.

I sailed back up toward the future like a fish on the end of a line.

III

I spent two days in debriefing. Thornberg got to ask the questions, but there was always a proctor or two around, taping every sound, every gesture I made.

From Thornberg’s end everything had looked fine. One second I’d been there, the next I’d just winked out. I was gone a little over an hour, then I popped back in, dizzy but conscious, and all my signs had been good.

Thornberg’s excitement showed me for the first time how personally he was involved. He seemed frankly envious, and I suddenly realized that he didn’t just want the experiment to work, he wanted to be able to go back himself.

I was too caught up in my own questions to worry very long about Thornberg. My common sense told me everything that had happened to me had been real, but my rational mind was still having trouble. Who were those two kids, and what were they running from? What could have torn up the highway that way?”

The proctors liked it a lot less than I did. “We’ve been through the government files,” one of them said on the second day. “No experiments on the San Carlos Reservation. Nothing even in development that could have caused it.”

“So how do you explain it?” Thornberg asked.

“Hallucination,” the proctor said. “The whole experience was completely subjective and internal.”

“No,” Thornberg said. “Out of the question. We saw his body disappear.”

The proctor stood up. “I think we’d better suspend this whole thing until this is cleared up.”

“No!” Thornberg got between the proctor and the door. “We’ve got to have more data. We have to send him back again.”

The proctor shook his head. The gesture didn’t put the slightest wrinkle in his maroon double-knit uniform.

“You can’t stop me, you know,” Thornberg said. “You’ll have to get an executive order.”

“I’ll get it,” the proctor said, and stepped around him.

When the door was closed Thornberg turned to me. “Then we send you back first. Now.”

IV

I landed in the same place I’d been, leaning against the dingy walls of the rest room for support. My head cleared, and the last two days could have been no more than a fever dream caused by bad coffee on an empty stomach.

I started back into the restaurant. The juke box was playing “Sink the Bismarck” by Johnny Horton. Horton was a big local favorite and he’d died just a few months before, in a car crash in Texas.

The man in the sport shirt, the one that had scared Jeremy so badly, was sitting in a booth with a cheeseburger. I stood for a second in the shadows of the hallway and watched him. He looked ordinary to me—short, curly hair, no sideburns, no facial hair. His shirt was one of those short-sleeved African prints in muted oranges and blues that wanted to be loud but couldn’t quite bring it off. Sunglasses peeked out of the shirt pocket.

He looked like a tourist. But why would there be any tourists in Globe, Arizona, in 1961?

And then I saw his fingers.

His right hand was tucked under his left elbow and the fingers were moving in short, precise gestures against his side. I’d seen hands move like that before, keying data into a computer by touch.

Cut it out, I told myself. So the guy’s got a nervous habit. It’s none of your business.

I picked up my copy of the newspaper from the counter and tore off the masthead, including the date. If the proctors wanted some proof, I’d try to oblige. I folded the strip of newsprint and put it in my back pocket, dropping the rest of the paper in the trash.

Once on the street I saw men all around me in short-sleeved shirts buttoned to the neck. Long, rectangular cars covered with chrome and sharp angles cruised the streets like patient sharks. TV sets blinked at me from the window of the furniture store, their screens cramped and nearly circular. I stopped and watched a toothpaste ad with an invisible shield in it and remembered the craze for secret ingredients.

That 15-year-old kid across town had a theory about secret ingredients. He believed they were codes, and that aliens from space were using them to take over the Earth. GL70: Town Secure. AT-7: Send More Saucers. He dreamed at night about great domed ships gliding over the desert.

I thought about the scar in the highway and the man in the restaurant and got another chill. This one turned my whole body cold, as if my heart had started pumping ice water.

My feet carried me down the street and stopped in front of the National News Stand. The door was locked, but through the window I could see the lines of comics: Sea Devils and Showcase and Rip Hunter, Time Master. My father had made me stop buying Rip Hunter because it was ruining my sense of reality; every time Rip and his crew went back in time they found aliens there, tampering with human history.

Aliens.

A spin rack by the door was full of science-fiction paperbacks. The short, fat Ace doubles were crammed in next to the taller Ballantines with the weird, abstract covers. Right at the top, in a pocket all to itself, was Ruppelt’s Report on Unidentified Flying Objeets.

Flying Saucers.

Further back, where I could barely see it in the dimness of the store, was the rack of men’s magazines. When the old man with the cigar that ran the place wasn’t paying attention I used to go back and thumb through them, but I never found quite what I was looking for.

The store was like an unassembled Revell model kit of my childhood. All the pieces were there, the superheroes and the aliens and the unobtainable women, and if I could just fit them together the right way I might be able to make sense of it. In a lifetime I might have done it, but I only had another hour.

I felt too much like an aging delinquent in the T-shirt I was wearing, so I bought a fresh shirt at the dime store across the street and changed in their rest room. I thought for a second about time paradoxes as I threw the old one away, then decided to hell with it.

The dime store clock said seven-thirty and the dance should have started at seven. Enough of a crowd should have accumulated for me to become another faceless parent in the background. I started uphill toward the high school and was sweating by the time I got there. But that was okay. You could still sweat in 1961, and your clothes could still wrinkle.

All the doors to the gym were open and Japanese lanterns hung over the doors. From across the asphalt playground I could hear the heavy, thumping bass of “Little Darlin’” by the Diamonds.

I went inside. A banner across the far end of the gym read “Look for a Star” in crude, glittering letters. Across thirty years I remembered the sappy lyrics to the song that had been forced on us as our theme. Four-pointed stars, sprayed with gold paint, dangled from the girders, and the lanterns over the punch bowls had Saturn rings stapled to them.

Most of the teachers were standing in a clump. I recognized Mrs. Smith’s hooked nose and long jaw; she’d cried when she found the drawing of her as a witch. Mr. Miller, next to her, was still wearing the goatee that he would be forced to shave off the next fall because it made him look “like a beatnik.”

About half the kids in my class were already there. Bobby Arias, class president, and Myron Cessarini, track star and sex symbol, were quietly breaking hearts at their own end of the gym. Over by the opposite wall was Marsha Something-or-other, the one that threw up all over the floor in sixth grade, with the wings on her glasses and waxen skin.

But no sign of LeeAnn or the 15-year-old Travis. I went outside to get away from the heat and the close, sweat-sock smell of the place. Coals of cigarettes glowed where a few of the adults were taking advantage of the growing darkness. I sniffed the clean air and tried to think of reasons why I didn’t want to stay right where I was for the rest of my life.

Lots of reasons. Racism. Sexism. People throwing trash on highways and dumping sewage in the creeks and not even knowing it was wrong. No sex. Not on TV, not in the movies, especially not in real life. Nice girls didn’t. Curfews. Dress codes. Gas-guzzling cars.

Still, I thought. Still …

Somebody was tugging at my sleeve.

“Hey, mister,” said a little boy’s voice. “Hey.”

I winced at the sound of it. “What are you following me for? What do you want from me?”

“We need help,” Carolyn said. “If they catch us they’ll kill us.”

“Who will?”

“Them,” Jeremy said.

He wasn’t pointing at anybody. Giant ants? I wondered. “I don’t understand. What is it you want me to do?”

The girl shrugged and turned her face away from me. I could see the tears glistening in her eyes. Jeremy sat crosslegged on the asphalt in front of me and reached out to hold onto one of Carolyn’s ankles. With my back to the wall of the gym I felt hemmed in by them, emotionally and physically.

Some obscure sense of guilt kept me asking questions. “What’s wrong with Jeremy? What happened in that restaurant?”

“My father says he has some kind of eppa … eppa …”

“Epilepsy?”

“Yeah. And he gets it whenever he gets too close to them.”

“Was that one of them in the restaurant?”

“Yes.”

Fingers moving against his side, empty-eyed, sunglasses. Reporting on me? “Who are they?”

The girl shook her head. For a second I saw past her hollow eyes and dirty brown hair, had just a glimpse of the woman she might be if she hung on long enough. “You won’t believe me,” she said. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

“I’m starting to think that anyway.”

“What if I said they were from space? What would you say then?” In the last of the light her eyes had a hard gray sheen.

Oh God, I thought. Invaders from Mars. What’s happening to my past?

“See?” she said. “I warned you.”

“What about your parents? Can’t they help you?”

“My father …” She stopped, swallowed, started again. “My father was all I had. They killed him. Jeremy’s parents too. He’s from California and they had him in one of their ships but he got away. That’s where he got the … epilepsy. From what they did to him. My father … my father and me found him wandering around San Carlos and brought him back to the store.”

That told me where I’d seen her before. Her father ran a rock shop out on the edge of the Apache reservation. My folks had taken me out there once to see the peridots, the green crystals that only turned up in extinct volcanic craters around San Carlos and somewhere in South America. I’d noticed her because I’d just gotten to the age where I was noticing girls, but we had shied away from actually speaking to each other.

She was wearing a big peridot ring, probably her father’s, on the index finger of her right hand. “If they killed your father,” I said, “why didn’t you call the police?”

“I did. But when the policeman came, he was … one of them. Jeremy ran off into the desert and I ran after him. Now they’re looking for both of us.”

No matter how uncomfortable I felt, I had to believe that her story was just a fantasy. I had to make myself believe it. But even if I’d been sure she was hallucinating, what could I do for her? She needed a family and a psychiatrist and I couldn’t be either one in the time I had left. I took some money out of my wallet.

“Look,” I said. “Here’s twenty bucks. Go take a bus to Phoenix or somewhere. Call an aunt or a grandfather or somebody you know you can trust and get them to help you out. Okay?”

She knew she’d lost me. I could see it in her eyes. She wadded up the bill and held it in her fist. “They know who you are,” she said.

“What?”

“They saw us with you. They’ll be looking for you, now, too.”

My heart slowed back to something like normal. “That’s okay. I’ll risk it.”

I watched them until they faded into the darkness. “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins was playing in the gym and I wanted to go in and listen to it. I wanted to forget what the girl had told me and see what I’d come to see and get out of there.

I took about two steps before my stomach cramped, driving me back against the wall of the gym.

“No,” I whispered, “Not yet. Not now. Please.”

I was wasting my breath. In less than a minute the dizziness came over me and everything fell away.

V

The proctors weren’t too happy about my coming back in a different shirt. They didn’t much care for the newspaper masthead either, but they had their executive order and they decided it was all academic anyhow.

They threw me in my cell and refused to let me talk to Thornberg. This time the proctors debriefed me, and I told them as little as I thought I could get away with. One of them might have been the one that had threatened me after the last trip, but I couldn’t be sure. Between the uniforms and the dark glasses they had an unnerving similarity.

Dark glasses, I thought. Sunglasses. I remembered fingers moving against a bright sport shirt.

Cut it out, I thought. You’re letting your imagination go crazy. Don’t get sucked into somebody else’s fantasy.

Finally they left me alone and I wondered if the experiment was really over. Thornberg would probably not live through the disappointment. To have worked so hard and then lose it all, to never get to use his own machine …

And what about me? I thought. To have gotten so close to seeing LeeAnn only to miss her by a few seconds?

Memories came rushing back, out of control. The first time we’d made love, in the back of my parents’ Chevy II station wagon with the seat folded down. Our first winter at Arizona State, LeeAnn in a miniskirt and rag coat that hung to her ankles, wrapped in yards of fake fur. Politics and marches, graduation and marriage, the underground newspaper in Phoenix in the late sixties. Our first house, LeeAnn’s thirtieth birthday, the flowers and the cheap red wine …

And then the day the Proctors’ Amendment passed the House. Politics and marches again, me reluctant at first, but LeeAnn outraged and dedicated, young again in the space of a few days. The first victories, Colorado voting against ratification, Texas leaning our way. People starting to wonder if the proctors really would be better than their local police, even in Houston.

And then one by one we were getting killed or crippled or lost in the basements of jails. They told me the day they arrested me that LeeAnn had died trying to construct a bomb, a bomb, for God’s sake, when she had never even touched any kind of weapon …

I never got a trial, because the Proctors were now the Law. No charges, no lawyers, just a cell and a lot of memories.

Time moved on.

As much as I hated the proctors, I knew better than to blame them. They hadn’t elected themselves; the citizens of the United States had listened to their televisions and voted them in, so it was their fault too. But mostly it was time’s fault. Time had passed. Times had changed. So I sat in a jail cell and thought about what it had been like to be 15 years old, before I had any idea of what time could do.

That was where Thornberg found me. He needed somebody with a memory of a specific time and place that was so strong that his machines could focus on it and follow the time lines back to it. Because it was dangerous, his funding agency had sent him to the prisons to look for volunteers, and when he saw how I tested out he wanted me. I don’t think the proctors had taken him seriously until the first test had worked, and once it did they seemed to panic.

What were they afraid of? What did they have to lose? Were they afraid I was going to escape through a hole in time?

Or were they afraid I was going to learn something they didn’t want anybody to know?

I was still thinking about it late that night when I heard my cell door open. It was Thornberg.

“How did you get in here?” I whispered.

“Never mind. The question is, do you want to go again? Tonight? Right now?”

We headed straight for the lab and I changed into my traveling clothes. Thornberg was nervous, talking the whole time he was strapping me in.

“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is how you can have a past that’s not the same as my past. Why does yours have tracks in the desert and flying saucers?”

“How should I know?” I said. “Maybe everybody’s past is different. People never remember things the same way as anybody else. Maybe they are different. What are those waves your machine uses?”

“Retrograde probability waves.”

“Retrograde because they move backwards in time, right? But couldn’t they branch off, just like regular probability waves? Your machine uses my brain waves to sort through all those probabilities, so it would have to take me to whatever I thought the past was, right?”

Thornberg was interested. He’d gone back to his console, but he wasn’t reaching for the controls. “If that’s true, why is there no record of your melted track in the desert?”

“The different pasts all lead to the same place, the present. I guess there could be other pasts that lead to other presents, that ‘Many Worlds’ theory you were telling me about. In my past the proctors don’t want any record of the mess their spaceships made, so they just covered it up. In yours, you never knew of any spaceships. But they lead to the same thing, with the proctors in power.”

“You have a lot of imagination.”

“Yeah. I do. Imagine this, then. Suppose I changed something? Made it so my past hooked on to a different future? Just like switching a train onto another track. You said every decision we make creates a whole new universe.”

“No,” Thornberg said. “Out of the question! Do you have any idea of the risk? At the end of the hour you’d be pulled back here anyway.”

Or into another future, I thought, but I didn’t say it. “All right. Calm down. If we’re going to do this we’d better get started.”

Thornberg just stared at me for a few seconds, and I could see how frightened he was. My only question was whether he was afraid for me or afraid I’d go off into some other future and leave him stuck in this one.

I never got the answer because his hand snaked out and started pushing the buttons.

VI

Seeing myself walk into the gym was as immediate as a glance in the mirror and as distant as looking at an old photograph. I wanted to go over to myself and say, straighten up for God’s sake, and turn your collar down. But even so I could see myself through my 15-year-old eyes and know that the slouch and the clothes and the haircut were the only ways I could say the things I didn’t have words for then.

The kid had three-inch cuffs in his blue jeans, and the light jacket he wore over his T-shirt wasn’t red, like James Dean’s jacket in Rebel Without a Cause, but only because a red jacket would have been somebody else’s uniform and not his own. His hair was too long for a flat top and not long enough for a DA, but five minutes didn’t go by without him running a comb through it at least a couple of times.

Somebody put “Twilight Time” by the Platters on the record player. The overhead lights went out and two deep blue spots swept over the dancers. Martin and Dickie, the kid’s best friends, were off to his left, talking behind their hands and bumping each other with their shoulders. The kid just stood there and stared into the crowd around the bleachers, and at the few daring couples out on the gym floor, intently, like he was trying to find somebody.

So was I.

Tony Williams sang, about falling in love all over again, “as I did then.”

And she walked in.

For thirty years I’d been haunted by this memory. Strongly enough to get me out of prison, to send me back in Thornberg’s machine, and now I was standing just across a high school gym from her, and she was just a girl. Just a 15-year-old girl. Skinny and shy and awkward, her first night in a new town, talked into coming to this dance by her mother and the principal of the school, both of them afraid she would go all summer without making any friends.

And then her mother said something to her that made her laugh and her head dropped down and the long red hair fell over her face and it wasn’t just a girl anymore, it was LeeAnn, and I felt like somebody had just put a fist into my throat.

I turned my back on her and stood in the doorway, letting the hot night air work on my eyes until I could see again.

Something moved, just out of the range of the lanterns. Carolyn and the boy again, I thought. I didn’t want to see them, didn’t even want to think about them anymore. Hadn’t I done enough? What more did they want from me?

I was turning back to look at LeeAnn when a flash of color across the gym distracted me. The man from Upton’s, the one in the sport shirt, darted through the crowd, fingers working against his left side.

A voice behind me said, “Come outside and we’ll talk.” The delivery was as deep and smooth as a TV announcer’s.

I turned. Two of them filled the doorway, tall, nondescript, their eyes and mouths so hard it looked like their facial nerves had been cut. They would have made terrific proctors.

Admit it, I told myself. You want to believe it. If the proctors come from out there somewhere, that lets you off the hook. It lets everybody off. Sure TV rots people’s brains and fast food makes people fat and gives them heart attacks, but it’s not our fault. We’re just being manipulated by creatures of vastly superior technology.

“Outside,” one of them said. “Let’s go.”

But suppose you really did want to take over the world. Where would you start? Level Washington with your laser cannons? Why not just take over a few ad agencies? Tell people they want to buy lots of polyester, throw your weight behind mindless situation comedies. In a few years people don’t care what they watch, or what they eat, or what they wear, and after a while they don’t care about anything else either. You’ve got everything, without having to fire a shot.

Except maybe a few in the desert, just to keep in practice.

“What do you want from me?” I asked, letting them maneuver me out onto the playground. “What’s going on?”

The one in the lead showed me a pistol. It looked a lot like a squirt gun I used to have except that the end of the barrel was hollow and the thing had a heavy, chromed sense of menace about it. “The Others want to talk to you.”

“Others? What Others?”

“They’re waiting in the ship. Outside town.”

Either this is real, I thought, or it isn’t. If I could bring back a shirt and a piece of newspaper then it was probably real, or at least real enough to get me killed.

I decided to be scared.

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s talk. What do you want to talk about?”

“Over there,” said the one with the gun.

I was just looking to see where he was pointing when a wailing noise came out of the darkness. It sounded like it had been building up inside something that wasn’t strong enough to hold it and it had just blown its way free.

Jeremy.

“What’s that?” hissed the one with the pistol.

“It’s that kid, I think,” said the other one.

“Well, shut him up, for God’s sake.”

The second alien disappeared into the shadows just as Jeremy screamed. The one with the gun looked around involuntarily and I went for him.

We hit the asphalt and rolled. I felt one knee tear out of my pants, just like in the old days. The alien was bigger and stronger than I was and he came out on top. He was pounding at me with his left hand, trying to get the gun around to use it on me. I grabbed his right wrist with both hands and yanked his elbow down into the pavement. The gun rattled in his grip and I slammed the elbow again. This time the gun came loose and skittered away into the darkness.

With both hands free he really opened up on me. I tried to cover up, but I didn’t have enough hands, and he got a good one into my ribs. I whited out for a second and he started on my face and head.

I started to think I should have let him keep the gun. That way it would at least have been quick. In a few more seconds he was going to kill me with his bare hands anyway.

Just like they’d killed LeeAnn.

I went a little berserk, but all it got me was a knee in the gut. I was finished.

A sound whipped through the air above me. I saw a flash of pink light and then the alien fell off of me.

I rolled onto my side and pulled my knees up to my chest. I was still fighting for breath when my eyes cleared enough to see Carolyn a few feet away, still holding the gun straight out in front of her, a stunned look on her face. Jeremy sounded like pieces of his throat were coming loose, and a shadow flashed in the corner of my vision.

“Carolyn,” I said, and she came unstuck, firing the pistol again. I saw the second alien fall as Jeremy’s scream cut off in mid-air.

I got onto my hands and knees. In the distance, like some kind of cosmic soundtrack, I could hear Brenda Lee singing “I’m Sorry” in the gym. The music echoed flatly off the asphalt.

“You okay, mister?” Carolyn asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.” For once I was glad to see her.

A hand laser, I thought. A junior version of something on their ship that had cut that line through the desert. Like it or not, the aliens were as real as anything else in this version of 1961. Whether this was really my past or just some kind of metaphor, the aliens were a part of it.

Jeremy staggered over and threw his arms around Carolyn’s waist. Even in the dimness of the playground I could see that her eyes were dry and clear. She looked at the gun in her hand. “This changes things,” she said. “This changes everything.”

The words echoed in my mind. I thought of Thornberg and his Many Worlds. The smallest thing, he’d said, can change the entire universe. In time.

“Back at the dance,” I said. “There’s more of … them.” I couldn’t bring myself to say “aliens.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “We’ll take care of it.”

“Take care of it? But you’re just …” I tried to stand up and didn’t make it.

Gently she pushed Jeremy aside and knelt down next to me. “You’re hurt,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do to help anyway.” She took the peridot ring off her index finger and slipped it onto the little finger of my left hand. “Here,” she said. “This is for the twenty dollars you gave me. We’ll use it to find some people to help us. To fight. To change things. They’re just getting started and it’s not too late. We can change things.”

She stood up, started to walk away, and then looked back over her shoulder.

“You’ll see,” she said.

She was gone.

I lay there a while and looked at the stars. I hadn’t seen that many stars in a night sky in a long time. When I tried to stand up again I made it, and got to the drinking fountain behind the baseball diamond.

The same piece of gum was in the drain. I smiled and cleaned myself up as best I could.

I stayed in the shadows just outside the door of the gym and watched for a while. I couldn’t see the third alien.

She did it, I thought. She did it and she’s going to keep on doing it. And if she’s very lucky and very strong, maybe …

No, I told myself. Don’t even think about it. Don’t get your hopes up. She’s just a girl and this may still turn out to be only a dream.

LeeAnn was standing at the punchbowl, talking to a kid in rolled-up jeans and a tan jacket. The record player hissed and then Buddy Holly started “True Love Ways” and the strings answered him, high and rich, infinitely sad.

The kid shuffled his feet and jerked his head at the dance floor. LeeAnn nodded and they walked into the crowd. He took her awkwardly in his arms and they slowly moved away until I couldn’t see them anymore.

VII

I came back to some kind of deserted warehouse. The cage was gone. So was the jail and so were the proctors.

After the first couple of days I didn’t have much trouble finding my way around. Most of my friends were still the same, and they told me they were used to my being a little quiet and disoriented. They told me I’d been that way off and on since my wife LeeAnn died in a car wreck two years before.

Thirty years were missing out of my new life, and I spent a lot of time at my computer, calling up history texts and old magazines and doing a little detective work on the side. I learned about a scientist named Thornberg at NASA, but he never answered the letter I wrote him.

The past and the future invent each other; Thornberg taught me that, and the past I invented has given me a future without LeeAnn. But somewhere in this new future of mine there should be a woman named Carolyn, born in Arizona in the late forties, maybe a year or two younger than me. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say to her when I find her, or whether she’ll even believe me, but I think she’ll recognize her ring.

LeeAnn is dead and Buddy Holly is dead, but people are walking the streets, free to make their own mistakes again. The sky overhead is filled with ships building a strange and wonderful future, and, in time, anything seems possible.

LUCIUS SHEPARD

Black Coral

Here’s another riveting story by Lucius Shepard, whose “Salvador” appears elsewhere in this book—the gritty and compelling tale of a very Ugly American who has a strange confrontation with some ancient and otherworldly forces on a tiny Caribbean Island …

The bearded young man who didn’t give a damn about anyone (or so he’d just shouted—whereupon the bartender had grabbed his scaling knife and said, “Dat bein de way of it, you can do your drinkin elsewhere!”) came staggering out of the bar and shielded his eyes against the afternoon glare. Violet afterimages flared and fizzled under his lids. He eased down the rickety stair, holding onto the rail, and stepped into the street, still blinking. And then, as he adjusted to the brightness, a ragged man with freckled cocoa-colored skin and a prophet’s beard swung into view, blocking out the sun.

“Hot enough de sun duppy be writhin in de street, ain’t it, Mr. Prince?”

Prince choked. Christ! That damned St. Cecilia rum was eating holes in his stomach! He reeled. The rum backed up into his throat and the sun blinded him again, but he squinted and made out old Spurgeon James, grinning, rotten teeth angled like untended tombstones, holding an empty Coke bottle whose mouth was crusted with flies.

“Gotta go,” said Prince, lurching off.

“You got work for me, Mr. Prince?”

Prince kept walking.

Old Spurgeon would lean on his shovel all day, reminisce about “de back time,” and offer advice (“Dat might go easier with de barrow, now.”) while Prince sweated like a donkey and lifted concrete blocks. Work! Still, for entertainment’s sake alone he’d be worth more than most of the black bastards on the island. And the ladinos! (“De dommed Sponnish!”) They’d work until they had enough to get drunk, play sick, then vanish with your best tools. Prince spotted a rooster pecking at a mango rind by the roadside, elected him representative of the island’s work force, and kicked; but the rooster flapped up, squabbling, lit on an overturned dinghy, and gave an assertive cluck.

“Wait dere a moment, Mr. Prince!”

Prince quickened his pace. If Spurgeon latched on, he’d never let loose. And today, January 18, marked the tenth anniversary of his departure from Viet Nam. He didn’t want any company.

The yellow dirt road rippled in a heat haze which made the houses—rows of weathered shanties set on pilings against the storm tides—appear to be dancing on thin rubbery legs. Their tin roofs were buckled, pitched at every angle, showing patches of rustlike scabs. That one—teetering on splayed pilings over a dirt front yard, the shutter hung by a single hinge, gray flour-sack curtain belling inward—it always reminded him of a cranky old hen on her roost trying grimly to hatch a nonexistent egg. He’d seen a photograph of it taken seventy years before, and it had looked equally dejected and bedraggled then. Well, almost. There had been a spodilla tree overspreading the roof.

“Givin out a warnin, Mr. Prince! Best you listen!”

Spurgeon, rags tattering in the breeze, stumbled toward him and nearly fell. He waved his arms to regain his balance, like a drunken ant, toppled sideways, and fetched up against a palm trunk, hugging it for support. Prince, in dizzy sympathy with the sight, tottered backward and caught himself on some shanty steps, for a second going eye to eye with Spurgeon. The old man’s mouth worked, and a strand of spittle eeled out onto his beard.

Prince pushed off from the steps. Stupidity! That was why nothing changed for the better on Guanoja Menor (derived from the Spanish guano and hoja, a fair translation being Lesser Leaf-shaped Piece of Bird Shit), why unemployable drunks hounded you in the street, why the rum poisoned you, why the shanties crashed from their perches in the least of storms. Unwavering stupidity! The islanders built outhouses on piers over the shallows where they bathed and fished the banks with no thought for conservation, then wondered why they stank and went hungry. They cut off their fingers to win bets that they wouldn’t; they smoked black coral and inhaled gasoline fumes for escape; they fought with conch shells, wrapping their hands around the inner volute of the shell so it fit like a spiky boxing glove. And when the nearly as stupid ladinos had come from the Honduran mainland, they’d been able to steal and swindle half the land on the island.

Prince had learned from their example.

“Mr. Prince!”

Spurgeon again, weaving after him, his palm outstretched. Angrily, Prince dug out a coin and threw it at his feet.

“Dass so nice, dass so kind of you!” Spurgeon spat on the coin. But he stooped for it, and, in stooping, lost his balance and fell, smashing his Coke bottle on a stone. There went fifty centavos. There went two glasses of rum. The old man rolled in the street, too drunk to stand, smearing himself with yellow dirt. “Even de sick dog gots teeth,” he croaked. “Just you remember dat, Mr. Prince!”

Prince couldn’t keep from laughing.

Meachem’s Landing, the town (“a quaint seaport, steeped in pirate legend,” prattled the guidebook), lay along the curve of a bay inset between two scrub-thatched hills and served as the island capital. At midpoint of the bay stood the government office, a low white stucco building with sliding glass doors like a cheap motel. Three prosperous-looking Spanish men were sitting on oil drums in its shade, talking to a soldier wearing blue fatigues. As Prince passed, an offshore breeze kicked up and blew scents of rotted coconut, papaya, and creosote in from the customs dock, a concrete strip stretching one hundred yards or so into the glittering cobalt reach of the water.

There was a vacancy about the scene, a lethargy uniformly affecting its every element. Cocals twitched the ends of their fronds, leaning in over tin roofs; a pariah dog sniffed at a dried lobster claw in the dust; ghost crabs scuttered under the shanties. It seemed to Prince that the tide of event had withdrawn, leaving the bottom dwellers exposed, creating a lull before some culminative action. And he remembered how it had been the same on bright afternoons in Saigon when passersby stopped and listened to the whine of an incoming rocket, how the plastic flags on the Hondas parked in front of the bars snapped in the wind, how a prostitute’s monkey had screamed in its cage on hearing the distant crump and everyone had laughed with relief. He felt less irritable, remembering, more at rights with the commemorative nature of the day.

Beyond the government office, past the tiny public square and its dusty-leaved acacia, propped against the cement wall of the general store, clinging to it like a gaudy barnacle, was a shanty whose walls and trim had been painted crimson and bright blue and pink and quarantine yellow. Itchy-sounding reggae leaked from the closed shutter. Ghetto Liquors. He tramped heavily on the stair, letting them know within that the drunkest mother on the island, Neal His Bloody Majesty Prince, was about to integrate their little rainbow paradise, and pushed into the hot, dark room.

“Service!” he said, kicking the counter.

“What you want?”

Rudy Welcomes stirred behind the bar. A slash of light from a split seam in the roof jiggled on his shaved skull.

“St. Cecilia!” Prince leaned on the bar, reconnoitering. Two men sat at a rear table, their hair in spiky dreadlocks, wraiths materializing from the dark. The darkness was picked out by the purplish glow of black lights illuminating four Jimi Hendrix posters. Though of island stock, Rudy was American-born and, like Prince, a child of the sixties and a veteran. He said that the lights and posters put him in mind of a brothel on Tu Do Street, where he had won the money with which to establish Ghetto Liquors; and Prince, recalling similar brothels, found that the lights provided an excellent frame of reference for the thoughtful, reminiscent stages of his drunk. The eerie purple radiance escaping the slender black cannisters seemed the crystallized expression of war, and he fancied the color emblematic of evil energies and sluggish tropical demons.

“So this your big day for drinkin.” Rudy slid a pint bottle along the bar and resettled on his stool. “Don’t you be startin that war buddy crap with me, now. I ain’t in the mood.”

“Shucks, Rudy!” Prince adopted a southern accent. “You know I ain’t war buddies with no nigger.”

Rudy stiffened but let it pass; he gave a disaffected grunt. “Don’t know why not, man. You could pass yourself Way your hair’s gotten all crispy and your skin’s gone dark. See here?”

He laid his hand on Prince’s to compare the color, but Prince knocked it aside and stared, challenging.

“Damn! Seem like Clint Eastwood done wandered into town!” Rudy shook his head in disgust and moved off along the bar to change the record. The two men at the rear drifted across the room and whispered with him, casting sly looks at Prince.

Prince basked in the tension. It further fleshed out his frame of reference. Confident that he’d established dominance, he took a table beside the shutter, relaxed, and sipped his rum. Through a gap in the boards he saw a girl stringing up colored lights on the shanty opposite the bar. His private holiday had this year coincided with Independence Day, always celebrated upon the third Friday in January. Stalls would sprout in the public square, offering strips of roast turtle and games of chance. Contending music would blare from the bars—reggae and salsa. Prince enjoyed watching street dancers lose their way in the mishmash of rhythms. It emphasized the fact that neither the Spanish nor the islanders could cope with the other’s presence and further emphasized that they were celebrating two different events—on the day that Queen Victoria had granted the islands their freedom, the Honduran military had sailed in and established governance.

More stupidity.

The rum was sitting easier on his stomach. Prince mellowed and went with the purple lights, seeing twisted black branches in them, seeing the twilit jungle in Lang Biang, and he heard the hiss of the walkie-talkie and Leon’s stagy whisper, “Hey, Prince! I got a funny shadow in that bombax tree …” He had turned his scope on the tree, following the course of the serpentine limbs through the grainy, empurpling air. And then the stutter of automatic fire, and he could hear Leon’s screams in the air and carrying over the radio …

“Got somethin for help you celebrate, Mr. Prince.”

A thin hawk-faced man wearing frayed shorts dropped into the chair next to him, his dreadlocks wriggling. George Ebanks.

Prince gripped the rum bottle, angry, ready to strike, but George thrust out a bristling something—a branch of black coral.

“Dis de upful stuff, Mr. Prince,” he said. “Rife with de island’s secret.” He pulled out a knife and whittled at the branch. Curly black shavings fell onto the table. “You just scrapes de color off and dass what you smokes.”

The branch intrigued Prince; it was dead black, unshining, hard to tell where each stalk ended and the room’s darkness began. He’d heard the stories. Old Spurgeon said it drove you crazy. And even older John Anderson McCrae had said, “De coral so black dat when you smokes it de color will rush into your eyes and allow you vision of de spirit world. And will allow dem sight of you.”

“What’s it do?” he asked, tempted.

“It make you more a part of things. Dass all, Mr. Prince. Don’t fret. We goin to smoke it with you.”

Rudy and the third man—wiry, short Jubert Cox—sidled up behind George’s shoulder, and Rudy winked at Prince. George loaded the knife blade with black shavings and tamped them into a hash pipe, then lit it, drawing hard until the hollows of his cheeks reflected a violet-red coal. He handed the pipe across, a wisp of smoke curling from his tight-lipped smile, and watched Prince toke it down.

The smoke tasted vile. It had a mustiness he associated with the thousands of dead polyps (was it thousands per lungful or merely hundreds?) he’d just inhaled, but it was so cool that he did not concern himself with taste and noticed only the coolness.

Cold black stone lined his throat.

The coolness spread to his arms and legs, weighting them down, and he imagined it questing with black tendrils through veins and arteries, finding out secret passages unknown even to his blood. Drifty stuff

… and dizzying. He wasn’t sure if he was sweating or not, but he was a little nauseous. And he didn’t seem to be inhaling anymore. Not really. The smoke seemed to be issuing of its own volition from the pipe stem, a silken rope, a cold strangler’s cord tying a labyrinthine knot throughout his body …

“Take but a trifle, don’t it, Mr. Prince?” Jubert giggled.

Rudy lifted the pipe from his numbed fingers.

… and involving the fissures of his brain in an intricate design, binding his thoughts into a coralline structure. The bright gaps in the shutter planking dwindled, receded, until they were golden straws adrift in the blackness, then golden pinpricks, then gone. And though he was initially fascinated by this production of the drug, as it progressed Prince became worried that he was going blind.

“Wuh …” His tongue wouldn’t work. His flesh was choked with black dust, distant from him, and the coolness had deepened to a penetrating chill. And as a faint radiance suffused the dark, he imagined that the process of the drug had been reversed, that now he was flowing up the pipe stem into the heart of the violet-red coal.

“Oh, dis de upful stuff all right, Mr. Prince,” said George, from afar. “Dat what grows down to de root of de island.”

Rippling kelp beds faded in from the blackness, illuminated by a violet glow, and Prince saw that he was passing above them toward a dim wall (the reef?) at whose base thousands upon thousands of witchy fires burned, flickering, ranging in color from indigo to violet-white, all clinging (he saw, drawing near) to the stalks and branches of black coral—a bristling jungle of coral, stalks twenty and thirty feet high, and more. The fires were smaller than candle flames and did not seem as much presences as they did peepholes into a cold furnace behind the reef. Maybe they were some sort of copepod, bioluminescent and half alive. He descended among the stalks, moving along the channels between them. Barracuda, sleek triggerfish … There! A grouper—four hundred pounds if it was a ounce—angelfish and rays … bones showed in negative through their luminous flesh. Schools of smaller fish darted as one, stopped, darted again, into and out of the black branches. The place had a strange kinetic geometry, as if it were the innards of an organic machine whose creatures performed its functions by maneuvering in precise patterns through its interstices, and in which the violet fires served as the insane, empowering thoughts within an inky skull. Beautiful! Thomas de Quincey Land. A jeweled shade, an occulted paradise. Then, rising into the murk above him, an immense stalk—a shadowy, sinister Christmas tree poxed with flickering decorations. Sharks circled its upper reaches, cast in silhouette by the glow. Several of the fires detached from a branch and drifted toward him, eddying like slow moths.

“Dey just markin you, Mr. Prince. Don’t be troubled.”

Where was George’s voice coming from? It sounded right inside his ear. Oh, well … . He wasn’t troubled. The fires were weird, lovely. One drifted to within a foot of his eyes, hovering there, its violet-tipped edges shifting, not with the randomness of flame but with a flowing, patterned movement, a complex pulse; its center was an iridescent white. Must not be copepods.

It drifted closer.

Very lovely. A wash of violet spread from its edges in and was absorbed by the whiteness.

It brushed against his left eye.

Prince’s vision went haywire, spinning. He had a glimpse of the sentinel sharks, a blurred impression of the latticework of shadow on the reef wall, then darkness. The cold touch, brief as it had been, a split second, had burned him, chilled him, as if a hypodermic had ever so slightly pricked the humor and flooded him with an icy serum, leaving him shuddering.

“Dey bound him!” George?

“Be watchful down dere, Mr. Prince.” Jubert.

The shutter banged open, and bright, sweet, warming sunlight poured in. He realized he had fallen. His legs were entangled in an unyielding something that must be the chair.

“You just had a little fit, man. Happens sometimes the first time. You gonna be fine.”

They pulled him up and helped him out onto the landing and down the stair. He tripped and fell the last three steps, weak and drunk, still shivering, fuddled by the sunlight.

Rudy pressed the rum bottle into his hands. “Keep in the sun for a while, man. Get your strength back.”

“Oh, Mr. Prince!” A skinny black arm waved from the window of the gaudy box on stilts, and he heard smothered giggles. “You got work for me, Mr. Prince?”

Severe physical punishment was called for! Nobody was going to get away with bad-tripping him!

Prince drank, warmed himself, and plotted his revenge on the steps of the dilapidated Hotel Captain Henry. (The hotel was named for Henry Meachem, the pirate whose crews had interbred with Carib and Jamaican women, thereby populating the island, and whose treasure was the focal point of many tall tales.) A scrawny, just-delivered bitch growled at him from the doorway. Between growls she worried her inflamed teats, a nasty sucking that turned Prince’s saliva thick and ropy. He gave old Mike, the hotel flunky, twenty-five centavos to chase her off, but afterward old Mike wanted more.

“I be a bitch, mon! I strip de shadow from your back!” He danced around Prince, flicking puny left jabs. Filthy, wearing colorless rags and a grease-stained baseball cap, flecks of egg yolk clotting his iron-gray whiskers.

Prince flipped him another coin and watched as he ran off to bury it. The stories said that Mike had been a miser, had gone mad when he’d discovered all his money eaten by mice and insects. But Roblie Meachem, owner of the hotel, said, “He just come home to us one mornin. Didn’t have no recollection of his name, so we call him Mike after my cousin in Miami.” Still, the stories persisted. It was the island way. (“Say de thing long enough and it be so.”) And perhaps the stories had done some good for old Mike, effecting a primitive psychotherapy and giving him a legend to inhabit. Mike returned from his hiding place and sat beside the steps, drawing circles in the dust with his finger and rubbing them out, mumbling, as if he couldn’t get them right.

Prince flung his empty bottle over a shanty roof, caring not where it fell. The clarity of his thoughts annoyed him; the coral had sobered him somewhat, and he needed to regain his lost momentum. If Rita Steedly weren’t home, well, he’d be within a half mile of his own bar, the Sea Breeze; but if she were … Her husband, an ecologist working for the government, would be off island until evening, and Prince felt certain that a go-round with Rita would reorient him and reinstitute the mean drunken process which the coral had interrupted.

Vultures perched on the pilings of Rita Steedly’s dock, making them look like carved ebony posts. Not an uncommon sight on the island, but one Prince considered appropriate as to the owner’s nature, more so when the largest of them flapped up and landed with a crunch in a palm top overlooking the sun deck where she lay. The house was blue stucco on concrete pilings standing in a palm grove. Between the trunks, the enclosed waters of the reef glittered in bands and swirls of aquamarine, lavender, and green according to the varying depth and bottom. Sea grape grew close by the house, and the point of land beyond it gave out into mangrove radicle.

As he topped the stairs, Rita propped herself on her elbows, pushed back her sunglasses, and weakly murmured, “Neal,” as if summoning her lover to a deathbed embrace. Then she collapsed again upon the blanket, the exhausted motion of a pale dead frond. Her body glistened with oils and sweat, and her bikini top was unhooked and had slipped partway off.

Prince mixed a rum and papaya juice from the serving cart by the stair. “Just smoked some black coral with the boys down at Ghetto Liquors.” He looked back at her over his shoulder and grinned. “De spirits tol’ me dat I must purify myself wit de body of a woman fore de moon is high.”

“I thought your eyes were very yellow today. You should know better.” She sat up; the bikini top dropped down onto her arms. She lifted a coil of hair which had stuck to her breasts, patting it into place behind her ear. “There isn’t anything on this island that’s healthy anymore. Even the fruit’s poisoned! Did I tell you about the fruit?”

She had. Her little girl’s voice grated on Prince, but he found her earnestness amusing, attractive for its perversity. Her obsession with health seemed no less a product of trauma than did his own violent disposition.

“It was just purple lights and mild discomfort,” he said, sitting beside her. “But a headache and a drowsy sensation would be a good buzz to those black hicks. They tried to mess with my mind, but …” He leaned over and kissed her. “I made good my escape and came straightaway.”

“Jerry said he saw purple lights, too.” A grackle holding a cigarette butt in its beak hopped up on the railing, and Rita shooed it off.

“He smoked it?”

“He smokes it all the time. He wanted me to try it, but I’m not poisoning myself any more than I have to with this … this garbage heap.” She checked his eyes. “They’re getting as bad as everyone else’s. Still, they aren’t as bad as the people’s in Arkansas. They were so yellow they almost glowed in the dark. Like phosphorescent urine!” She shuddered dramatically, sighed, and stared glumly up into the palms. “God! I hate this place!”

Prince dragged her down to face him. “You’re a twitch,” he said.

“I’m not!” she said angrily, but fingered loose the buttons of his shirt as she talked. “Everything’s polluted down here. Dying. And it’s worse in the States. You can see the wasting in people’s faces if you know how to look for it. I’ve tried to talk Jerry into leaving, but he says he’s committed. Maybe I’ll leave him. Maybe I’ll go to Peru. I’ve heard good things about Peru.”

“You’ll see the wasting in their faces,” said Prince.

Her arms slid around his back, and her eyes opened and closed, opened and closed, the eyes of a doll whose head you manipulated. Barely seeing him, seeing something else in his place, some bad sign or ugly rumor.

As his own eyes closed, as he stopped thinking, he gazed out past her head to the glowing, many-colored sea and saw in the pale sky along the horizon a flash of the way it had been after a burn-off: the full-bore immensity and silence of the light; the clear, innocent air over paddies and palms blackened like matchsticks; and how they’d moved through the dead land, crunching the scorched, brittle stalks underfoot, unafraid, because every snake within miles was now just a shadow in the cinders.

Drunk, blind, old John Anderson McCrae was telling stories at the Sea Breeze, and Prince wandered out onto the beach for some peace and quiet. The wind brought fragments of the creaky voice. “ … dat cross were studded with emeralds … and sapphires …” The story about Meachem’s gold cross (supposedly buried off the west end of the island) was John’s masterpiece, told only at great expense to the listener. He told how Meachem’s ghost appeared each time his treasure was threatened, huge, a constellation made of the island stars. “ … and de round end of his peg leg were de moon shine down …” Of course, Meachem had had two sound legs, but the knowledge didn’t trouble John. “A mon’s ghost may suffer injury every bit as de mon,” he’d say; and then, to any further challenge, “Well, de truth may be lackin in it, bit it capture de spirit of de truth.” And he’d laugh, spray his rummy breath in the tourists’ faces, and repeat his commonplace pun. And they would pay him more because they thought he was cute, colorful, and beneath them.

White cumulus swelled from the horizon, and the stars blazed overhead so bright and jittery they seemed to have a pulse in common with the rattle of the Sea Breeze’s generator. The reef crashed and hissed. Prince screwed his glass into the sand and settled back against a palm trunk, angled so he could see the deck of the bar. Benches and tables were built around coconut palms which grew up through the deck; orange lights in the form of plastic palms were mounted on the trunks. Not an unpleasant place to sit and watch the sea.

But the interior of the Sea Breeze bordered on the monstrous: lamps made of transparent-skinned blowfish with bulbs in their stomachs; treasure maps and T-shirts for sale; a giant jukebox glowing red and purple like the crown jewels in a protective cage of two-by-fours; garish pirate murals on the walls; and skull-and-crossbones pennants hanging from the thatched roof. The bar had been built and painted to simulate a treasure chest with its lid ajar. Three Carib skulls sat on shelves over the bottles, with red bulbs in their jaws which winked on and off for birthdays and other celebrations. It was his temple to the stupidity of Guanoja Menor; and, being his first acquisition, memorialized a commitment he had made to the grotesque heart of acquisition itself.

A burst of laughter, shouts of “Watch out!” and “Good luck!” and old John appeared at the railing, groping his way along until he found the stair and stumbled down onto the beach. He weaved back and forth, poking the air with his cane, and sprawled in the sand at Prince’s feet. A withered brown dummy stuffed into rags and flung overboard. He sat up, cocking his head. “Who’s dere?” The lights from the Sea Breeze reflected off his cataracts; they looked like raw silver nuggets embedded in his skull.

“Me, John.”

“Is dat you, Mr. Prince? Well, God bless you!” John patted the sand, feeling for his cane, then clutched it and pointed out to sea. “Look, Mr. Prince. Dere where de Miss Faye go turtlin off to de Chinchorro Bank.”

Prince saw the riding lights moving toward the horizon, the indigo light rocking on the mast head, then wondered how in the hell … The indigo light swooped at him, darting across miles of wind and water in an instant, into his eyes. His vision went purple, normalized, purpled again, as if the thing were a police flasher going around and around in his head.

And it was cold.

Searing, immobilizing cold.

“Ain’t dis a fine night, Mr. Prince? No matter how blind a mon gets, he can recognize a fine night!”

With a tremendous effort Prince clawed at the sand, but old John continued talking.

“Dey say de island take hold of a mon. Now dat hold be gentle cause de island bear no ill against dem dat dwell upon it in de lawful way. But dose dat lords it over de island, comes a night dere rule is done.”

Prince wanted badly to scream because that might release the cold trapped inside him; but he could not even strain. The cold possessed him. He yearned after John’s words, not listening but stretching out toward them with his wish. They issued from the soft tropic air like the ends of warm brown ropes dangling just beyond his frozen grasp.

“Dis island poor! And de people fools! But I know you hear de sayin dat even de sick dog gots teeth. Well, dis island gots teeth dat grows down to the center of things. De Carib say dat dere’s a spirit from before de back time locked into de island’s root, and de Baptist say dat de island be a fountainhead of de Holy Spirit. But no matter what de truth, de people have each been granted a portion of dat spirit. And dat spirit legion now!”

The light behind Prince’s eyes whirled so fast he could no longer distinguish periods of normal vision, and everything he saw had a purplish cast. He heard his entire agony as a tiny, scratchy sound deep in his throat. He toppled on his side and saw out over the bumpy sand, out to a point of land where wild palms, in silhouette against a vivid purple sky, shook their fronds like plumed African dancers, writhing up, ecstatic.

“Dat spirit have drove off de English! And one day it will drive de Sponnish home! It slow, but it certain. And dat is why we celebrate dis night … Cause on dis very night all dose not of de spirit and de law must come to judgment.”

John’s shoes scraped on the sand.

“Well, I’ll be along now, Mr. Prince. God bless you.”

Even when his head had cleared and the cold dissipated, Prince couldn’t work it out. If Jerry Steedly smoked this stuff all the time, then he must be having an abnormal reaction. A flashback. The thing to do would be to overpower the drug with depressants. But how could old John have seen the turtling boat? Maybe it never happened? Maybe the coral simply twitched reality a bit, and everything since Ghetto Liquors had been a real-life fantasy of amazing exactitude. He finished his drink, had another, steadied himself, and then hailed the jitney when it passed on its way to town, on his way to see Rudy and Jubert and George.

Vengeance would be the best antidote of all for this black sediment within him.

Independence Day.

The shanties dripped with colored lights, and the dirt road glowed orange, crisscrossed by dancers and drunks who collided and fell. Skinny black casualties lay underneath the shanties, striped by light shining down through the floorboards. Young women danced in the bar windows; older, fatter women, their hair in turbans, glowering, stood beside tubs of lobster salad and tables laden with coconut bread and pastries. The night was raucous, blaring, hooting, shouting. All the dogs were in hiding.

Prince stuffed himself on the rich food, drank, and then went from bar to bar asking questions of men who pawed his shirt, rolled their eyes, and passed out for an answer. He could find no trace of Rudy or George, but he tracked Jubert down in a shanty bar whose sole designation as a bar was a cardboard sign, tacked on a palm tree beside it, which read “Frenly Club No Riot.” Prince lured him outside with the promise of marijuana, and Jubert, stupidly drunk, followed to a clearing behind the bar where dirt trails crossed, a patch of ground bounded by two other shanties and banana trees. Prince smiled a smile of good fellowship, kicked him in the groin and the stomach, and broke Jubert’s jaw with the heel of his hand.

“Short cut draw blood,” said Prince. “Ain’t dat right. You don’t trick with de mighty.”

He nudged Jubert’s jaw with his toe.

Jubert groaned; blood welled from his mouth, puddling black in the moonlight.

“Come back at me and I’ll kill you,” said Prince.

He sat cross-legged beside Jubert. Moonlight saturated the clearing, and the tattered banana leaves looked made of gray-green silk. Their trunks showed bone white. A plastic curtain in a shanty window glowed with mystic roses, lit by the oil lamp inside. Jukebox reggae chip-chipped at the soft night, distant laughter …

He let the clearing come together around him. The moon brightened as though a film had washed from its face; the light tingled his shoulders. Everything—shanties, palms, banana trees, and bushes—sharpened, loomed, grew more encircling. He felt a measure of hilarity on seeing himself as he’d been in the jungle of Lang Biang, freakishly alert. It conjured up cliched movie images. Prince, the veteran maddened by memory and distanced by trauma, compelled to relive his nightmares and hunt down these measly offenders in the derelict town. The violent American legend. The war-torn Prince of the cinema. He chuckled. His life, he knew, was devoid of such thematic material.

He was free of compulsion.

Thousands of tiny shake-hands lizards were slithering under the banana trees, running over the sandy soil on their hind legs. He could see the disturbance in the weeds. A hibiscus blossom nodded from behind a shanty, an exotic lure dangling out of the darkness, and the shadows beneath the palms were deep and restless … not like the shadows in Lang Biang, still and green, high in the vaulted trees. Spirits had lived in those trees, so the stories said, demon-things with iron beaks who’d chew your soul into rags. Once he had shot one. It had been (they told him) only a large fruit bat, deranged, probably by some chemical poison, driven to fly at him in broad daylight. But he had seen a demon with an iron beak sail from a green shadow and fired. Nearly every round must have hit, because all they’d found had been scraps of bloody, leathery wing. Afterward they called him Deadeye and described how he’d bounced the bat along through the air with bursts of unbelievable accuracy.

He wasn’t afraid of spirits.

“How you doin, Jube?” Prince asked.

Jubert was staring at him, wide-eyed.

Clouds swept across the moon, and the clearing went dark, then brightened.

“Dere’s big vultures up dere, Jubert, flyin cross de moon and screamin your name.”

Prince was a little afraid of the drug, but less afraid of the islanders—nowhere near as afraid as Jubert was of him right now. Prince had been much more afraid, had cried and soiled himself; but he’d always emptied his gun into the shadows and stayed stoned and alert for eleven months. Fear, he’d learned, had its own continuum of right actions. He could handle it.

Jubert made a gurgling noise.

“Got a question, Jube?” Prince leaned over, solicitous.

A sudden gust of wind sent a dead frond crashing down, and the sound scared Jubert. He tried to lift his head and passed out from the pain.

Somebody shouted, “Listen to dat boy sing! Oh, he slick, mon!” and turned up the jukebox. The tinny music broke Prince’s mood. Everything looked scattered. The moonlight showed the grime and slovenliness of the place, the sprinkles of chicken droppings and the empty crab shells. He’d lost most of his enthusiasm for hunting down Rudy and George, and he decided to head for Maud Price’s place, the Golden Dream. Sooner or later someone stopped in at the Dream. It was the island’s gambling center, and because it was an anomaly among the shanties, with their two stucco rooms lit by naked light bulbs, drinking there conferred a certain prestige.

He thought about telling them in the bar about Jubert, but decided no and left him for someone else to rob.

Rudy and George hadn’t been in, said Maud, smacking down a bottle on the counter. Bar flies buzzed up from the spills and orbited her like haywire electrons. Then she went back to chopping fish heads, scaling and filleting them. Monstrously fat and jet black, bloody smears on her white dress. The record player at her elbow ground out warped Freddie Fender tunes.

Prince spotted Jerry Steedly (who didn’t seem glad to see Prince) sitting at a table along the wall, joined him, and told him about the black coral.

“Everybody sees the same things,” said Steedly, uninterested. “The reef, the fires …”

“What about flashbacks? Is that typical?”

“It happens. I wouldn’t worry about it.” Steedly checked his watch. He was in his forties, fifteen years older than Rita, a gangly Arkansas hick whose brush-cut red hair was going gray.

“I’m not worried,” said Prince. “It was fine except for the fires or whatever they were. I thought they were copepods at first, but I guess they were just part of the trip.”

“The islanders think they’re spirits.” Steedly glanced toward the door, nervous, then looked at Prince, dead serious, as if he were considering a deep question. He kicked back in his chair and leaned against the wall, decided, half smiling. “Know what I think they are? Aliens.”

Prince made a show of staring goggle-eyed, gave a dumb laugh, and drank.

“No shit, Neal. Parasites. Actually, copepods might not be so far off. They’re not intelligent. They’re reef dwellers from the next continuum over. The coral opens the perceptual gates or lets them see the gates that are already there, and … Wham! They latch right on. They induce a low-grade telepathy in human hosts. Among other things.”

Steedly scraped back his chair and pointed at the adjoining room where people thronged, waving cards and money, shouting, losers threatening winners. “I gotta go lose some money, Neal. You take it easy.”

“Are you trying to mess me around?” Prince asked with mild incredulity.

“Nope. It’s just a theory of mine. They exhibit colonial behavior like a lot of small crustaceans. But they may be spirits. Maybe spirits aren’t anything more than vague animal things slopping over from another world and setting their hooks in your soul, infecting you, dwelling in you. Who knows? I wouldn’t worry about it, though.”

He walked away.

“Say hi to Rita for me,” Prince called.

Steedly turned, struggling with himself, but he smiled.

“Hey, Neal,” he said. “It’s not over.”

Prince nursed his rum, cocked an eye toward the door whenever anyone entered (the place was rapidly filling), and watched Maud gutting fish. A light-bulb sun dangled inches over her head, and he imagined her with a necklace of skeletons, reaching down into a bucketful of little silver-scaled men. The thunk of her knife punctuated the babble around him. He drowsed. Idly, he began listening to the conversation of three men at the next table, resting his head against the wall. If he nodded out, Maud would wake him.

“De mon ain’t got good sense, always spittin and fumin!”

“He harsh, mon! Dere’s no denyin.”

“Harsh? De mon worse den dat. Now de way Arlie tell it …” Arlie? He wondered if they meant Arlie Brooks, who tended bar at the Sea Breeze.

“ … dat Mary Ebanks bled to death …”

“Dey say dat de stain where she bled still shine at night on de floor of de Sea Breeze!”

Maybe it was Arlie.

“Dat be fool duppy talk, mon!”

“Well, never mind dat! He never shot her. Dat was Eusebio Conejo from over at Sandy Bay. But de mon might have saved her with his knowledge of wounds if he had not run off at de gunshot!”

“Ain’t he de one dat stole dat gold cross from old Byrum Waters?”

“Correct! Told him dat gold have gone bad and dass why it so black. And Byrum, not mindful of de ways of gold, didn’t know dat was only tarnish!”

“Dat was de treasure lost by old Meachem? Am I right?”

“Correct! De Carib watched him bury it and when he gone dey move it into de hills. And den when Byrum found it he told his American friend. Hah! And dat friend become a wealthy mon and old Byrum go to de ground wrapped in a blanket!”

That was his cross! That was him they were talking about! Outraged, Prince came up out of his stupor and opened his eyes.

Then he sat very still.

The music, the shouts from the back room, the conversations had died, been sheared away without the least whisper or cough remaining, and the room had gone black … except the ceiling. And it brimmed, seethed with purple fire: swirls of indigo and royal purple and violet-white, a pattern similar to the enclosed waters of the reef, as if it, too, signaled varying depths and bottoms; incandescent-looking, though, a rectangle of violent, shifting light, like a corpse’s first glimpse of sky when his coffin is opened up in Hell … and cold.

Prince ducked, expecting they would swoop at him, pin him against the freezing darkness. But they did not. One by one the fires separated from the blazing ceiling and flowed down over the walls, settling on the creases and edges of things, outlining them in points of flickering radiance. Their procession seemed almost ordered, stately, and Prince thought of a congregation filing into their allotted pews preparatory to some great function. They illuminated the rumples in ragged shirts (and the ragged ends, as well) and the wrinkles in faces. They traced the shapes of glasses, bottles, tables, spiderwebs, the electric fan, light bulbs and their cords. They glowed nebular in the liquor, they became the smoldering ends of cigarettes, they mapped the spills on the counter and turned them into miniature phosphorescent seas. And when they had all taken their places, their design complete, Prince sat dumbstruck in the midst of an incredibly detailed constellation, one composed of ghostly purple stars against an ebony sky—the constellation of a tropic barroom, of Maud Price’s Golden Dream.

He laughed, a venturing laugh; it sounded forced even to his own ears. There was no door, he noticed, no window outlined in purple fire. He touched the wall behind him for reassurance and jerked his hand away: it was freezing. Nothing moved other than the flickering, no sound. The blackness held him fast to his chair as though it were a swamp sucking him under.

“I hurt bad, mon! It hurt inside my head!” A bleary and distressed voice. Jubert’s voice!

“Mon, I hurt you bad myself and you slip me de black coral!”

“Dass de truth!”

“De mon had de right to take action!”

Other voices tumbled forth in argument, most of them drunken, sodden, and seeming to issue from starry brooms and chairs and glassware. Many of them took his side in the matter of Jubert’s beating—that, he realized, was the topic under discussion. And he was winning! But still other voices blurted out, accusing him.

“He took dat fat Yankee tourist down to print old Mrs. Ebanks with her camera, and Mrs. Ebanks shamed by it!”

“No, mon! I not dat shamed! Let not dat be against him!”

“He pay me for de three barracuda and take de five!”

“He knock me down when I tell him how he favor dat cousin of mine dat live in Ceiba!”

“He beat me …”

“He cheat me …”

“He curse me …”

The voices argued points of accuracy, mitigating circumstances, and accused each other of exaggeration. Their logic was faulty and stupidly conceived. It had the feel of malicious, drunken gossip, as if a group of islanders were loitering on some dusty street and disputing the truth of a tall tale. But in this case it was his tale they disputed; for though Prince did not recognize all the voices, he did recognize his crimes, his prideful excesses, his slurs and petty slights. Had it not been so cold, he might have been amused, because the general consensus appeared to be that he was no worse or better than any of his accusers and therefore merited no outrageous judgment.

But then a wheezy voice, the expression of a dulled, ancient sensibility, said, “I found dat gold cross in a cave up on Hermit’s Ridge …”

Prince panicked, sprang for the door, forgetting there was none, scrabbled at the stony surface, fell, and crawled along, probing for an exit. Byrum’s voice harrowed him.

“And I come to him and say, ‘Mr. Prince, I got dis terrible pain in de chest. Can’t you give me money? I know dat your money come from meltin down de gold cross.’ And he say, ‘Byrum, I don’t care jack-shit about your chest!’ And den he show me de door!”

Prince collapsed in a corner, eyes fixed on the starry record player from which the old man’s voice came. No one argued against Byrum. When he had finished there was a silence.

“The bastard’s been sleeping with my wife,” said a twangy American voice.

“Jerry!” Prince yelled. “Where are you?”

A constellate bottle of rum was the source of the voice. “Right here, you son …”

“Dere’s to be no talkin with de mon before judgment!”

“Dass right! De spirits make dat clear!”

“These damn things aren’t spirits …”

“If dey ain’t den why Byrum Waters in de Dream tonight?”

“De mon can’t hear de voices of de spirits cause he not of de island hisself!”

“Byrum’s not here! I’ve told you people so many times I’m sick of it! These things induce telepathy in humans. That means you can hear each others’ minds, that your thoughts resonate and amplify each others’, maybe even tap into some kind of collective unconscious. That’s how …”

“I believe somebody done pelt a rock at de mon’s head! He crazy!”

The matter of the purple fires was tabled, and the voices discussed Prince’s affair with Rita Steedly (“Dere’s no proof de mon been messin with your wife!”), reaching a majority opinion of guilty on what seemed to Prince shaky evidence indeed. The chill in the room had begun to affect him, and though he noticed that unfamiliar voices had joined the dialog—British voices whose speech was laden with archaisms, guttural Carib voices—he did not wonder at them. He was far more concerned by the trembling of his muscles and the slow, flabby rhythm of his heart; he hugged his knees and buried his head in them for warmth. And so he hardly registered the verdict announced in Byrum Waters’s cracked whisper (“De island never cast you out, Mr. Prince”) nor did he even hear the resultant argument (“Dat all you goin to tell him?” “De mon have a right to hear his fate!”) except as a stupid hypnotic round which dazed him further and increased the chill, then turned into ghostly laughter. And he did not notice for quite a while that the chill had lessened, that the light filtering through his lids was yellow, and that the laughter was not voiced by spectral fires but by ragged drunks packed closely around him, sweating, howling, and slopping their drinks on his feet. Their gap-toothed mouths opened wider and wider in his dimming sight, as if he were falling into the jaws of ancient animals who had waited in their jungle centuries for such as he. Fat moths danced around them in the yellow air.

Prince pushed feebly at the floor, trying to stand. They laughed louder, and he felt his own lips twitch in a smile, an involuntary reaction to all the good humor in the room.

“Oh, damn!” Maud slammed the flat of her hand down on the counter, starting up the bar flies and hiccuping Freddie Fender’s wail. Her smile was fierce and malefic. “How you like dat, Mr. Prince? You one of us now!”

He must’ve passed out. They must’ve dumped him in the street like a sack of manure! His head swam as he pulled himself up by the window ledge; his hip pocket clinked on the stucco wall … rum bottle. He fumbled it out, swallowed, gagged, but felt it strengthen him. The town was dead, lightless, and winded. He reeled against the doorway of the Dream and saw the moldering shanties swing down beneath running banks of moonlit cloud. Peaked and eerie, witches’ hats, the sharp jut of folded black wings. He couldn’t think.

Dizzy, he staggered between the shanties and fell on all fours in the shallows, then soaked his head in the wavelets lapping the shingle. There were slippery things under his hands. No telling what … hog guts, kelp. He sat on a piling and let the wind shiver him and straighten him out. Home. Better than fighting off the rabid dog at the Hotel Captain Henry, better than passing out again right here. Two and a half miles across island, no more than an hour even in his condition. But watch out for the purple fires! He laughed. The silence gulped it up. If this were just the drug doing tricks … God! You could make a fortune selling it in the States.

“You scrapes off de color and dass what you smokes,” he sang, calypso style. “De black coral takes, boom-boom, just one toke.”

He giggled. But what the hell were those purple fires?

Duppies? Aliens? How bout the purple souls of the niggers? The niggers’ stinging purple souls!

He took another drink. “Better ration it, pilgrim,” he said to the dark road in his best John Wayne. “Or you’ll never reach the fort alive!”

And like John Wayne, he’d be back, he’d chew out the bullet with his teeth and brand himself clean with a red-hot knife and blow holes in the bad guys.

Oh, yeah!

But suppose they were spirits? Aliens? Not hallucinations?

So what!

“I one of dem, now!” he shouted.

He breezed the first two miles. The road wound through the brush-covered hills at an easy grade. Stars shone in the west, but the moon had gone behind the clouds and the darkness was as thick as mud. He wished he’d brought his flashlight … That had been the first thing which had attracted him to the island: how the people carried flashlights to show their paths in the hills, along the beaches, in the towns after the generators had been shut down. And when a ignorant, flashlightless stranger came by, they’d shine a path from your feet to theirs and ask, “How de night?”

“Beautiful,” he replied; or, “Fine, just fine.” And it had been. He’d loved everything about the island—the stories, the musical cadences of island speech, the sea grape trees with their funny, round, leathery leaves, and the glowing, many-colored sea. He’d seen that the island operated along an ingenious and flexible principle, one capable of accommodating any contrary and eventually absorbing it through a process of calm acceptance. He’d envied the islanders their peaceful, unhurried lives. But that had been before Viet Nam. During the war something inside him had gone irreversibly stone-cold sober, screwed up his natural high, and when he returned their idyllic lives had seemed despicable, listless, a bacterial culture shifting on its slide.

Every now and then he saw the peak of a thatched roof in silhouette against the stars, strands of barbed wire hemming in a few acres of scrub and bananas. He stayed dead center in the road, away from the deepest shadow, sang old Stones and Dylan, and fueled himself with hits of rum. It had been a good decision to head back, because a norther was definitely brewing. The wind rushed cold in his face, spitting rain. Storms blew up quickly at this time of year, but he could make it home and secure his house before the worst of the rains.

Something crashed in the brush. Prince jumped away from the sound, looking wildly about for the danger. The tufted hillock on his right suddenly sprouted horns against the starlight and charged at him, bellowing, passing so raw and close that he could hear the breath articulated in the huge red throat. Christ! It had sounded more like a demon’s bellow than a cow’s, which it was. Prince lost his balance and sprawled in the dirt, shaking. The damned thing lowed again, crunching off through a thicket. He started to get up. But the rum, the adrenaline, all the poisons of his day-long exertions roiled around in him, and his stomach emptied, spewing out liquor and lobster salad and coconut bread. Afterward he felt better—weaker, yet not on the verge of as great a weakness as before. He tore off his fouled shirt and slung it into a bush.

The bush was a blaze of purple fires.

They hung on twig ends and leaf tips and marked the twisting course of branches, outlining them as they had done at Maud’s. But at the center of this tracery the fires clustered together in a globe—a wicked, violet-white sun extruding spidery filaments and generating forked, leafy electricities.

Prince backed away. The fires flickered in the bush, unmoving. Maybe the drug had finished its run, maybe now that he’d burned most of it out the fires could no longer affect him as they had previously. But then a cold, cold prickle shifted along his spine and he knew—oh, God!—he knew for a certainty there were fires on his back, playing hide-and-seek where he could never find them. He beat at his shoulderblades, like a man putting out flames, and the cold stuck to his fingertips. He held them up before his eyes. They flickered, pulsing from indigo to violet-white. He shook them so hard that his joints cracked, but the fires spread over his hands, encasing his forearms in a lurid glare.

In blind panic Prince staggered off the road, fell, scrambled up, and ran, holding his glowing arms stiff out in front of him. He tumbled down an embankment and came to his feet, running. He saw that the fires had spread above his elbows and felt the chill margin inching upward. His arms lit the brush around him, as if they were the wavering beams of tinted flashlights. Vines whipped out of the dark, the lengths of a black serpent coiled everywhere, lashed into a frenzy by the purple light. Dead fronds clawed his face with sharp papery fingers. He was so afraid, so empty of everything but fear, that when a palm trunk loomed ahead he ran straight into it, embracing it with his shining arms.

There were hard fragments in his mouth, blood, more blood flowing into his eyes. He spat and probed his mouth, wincing as he touched the torn gums. Three teeth missing, maybe four. He hugged the palm trunk and hauled himself up. This was the grove near his house! He could see the lights of St. Mark’s Key between the trunks, white seas driving in over the reef. Leaning on the palms as he went, he made his way to the water’s edge. The wind-driven rain slashed at his split forehead. Christ! It was swollen big as an onion! The wet sand sucked off one of his tennis shoes, but he left it.

He washed his mouth and his forehead in the stinging salt water, then slogged toward the house, fumbling for his key. Damn! It had been in his shirt. But it was all right. He’d built the house Hawaiian style, with wooden slats on every side to admit the breeze; it would be easy to break in. He could barely see the roof peak against the toiling darkness of the palms and the hills behind, and he banged his shins on the porch. Distant lightning flashed, and he found the stair and spotted the conch shell lying on the top step. He wrapped his hand inside it, punched a head-sized hole in the door slats, and leaned on the door, exhausted by the effort. He was just about to reach in for the latch when the darkness within—visible against the lesser darkness of night as a coil of dead, unshining emptiness—squeezed from the hole like black toothpaste and tried to encircle him.

Prince tottered backward off the porch and landed on his side; he dragged himself away a few feet, stopped, and looked up at the house. The blackness was growing out into the night, encysting him in a thicket of coral branches so dense that he could see between them only glints of the lightning bolts striking down beyond the reef. “Please,” he said, lifting his hand in supplication. And something broke in him, some grimly held thing whose residue was tears. The wind’s howl and the booming reef came as a single ominous vowel, roaring, rising in pitch.

The house seemed to inhale the blackness, to suck it slithering back inside, and for a moment Prince thought it was over. But then violet beams lanced from the open slats, as if the fuming heart of a reactor had been uncovered within. The beach bloomed in livid daylight—a no-man’s -land littered with dead fish, half-buried conchs, rusted cans, and driftwood logs like the broken, corroded limbs of iron statues. Inky palms thrashed and shivered. Rotting coconuts cast shadows on the sand. And then the light swarmed up from the house, scattering into a myriad fiery splinters and settling on palm tops, on the prows of dinghies, on the reef, on tin roofs set among the palms, and on sea grape and cashew trees, where they burned. The ghosts of candles illuminating a sacred shore, haunting the dark interior of a church whose anthem was wind, whose litany was thunder, and upon whose walls feathered shadows leapt and lightnings crawled.

Prince got to his knees, watching, waiting, not really afraid any longer, but gone into fear. Like a sparrow in a serpent’s gaze, he saw everything of his devourer, knew with great clarity that these were the island people, all of them who had ever lived, and that they were possessed of some otherworldly vitality—though whether spirit or alien or both, he could not determine—and that they had taken their accustomed places, their ritual stands. Byrum Waters hovering in the cashew tree he had planted as a boy; John Anderson McCrae flitting above the reef where he and his father had swung lanterns to lure ships in onto the rocks; Maud Price ghosting over the grave of her infant child hidden in the weeds behind a shanty. But then he doubted his knowledge and wondered if they were not telling him this, advising him of the island’s consensus, for he heard the mutter of a vast conversation becoming distinct, outvoicing the wind.

He stood, searching for an avenue of escape, not in the least hopeful of finding one, but choosing to exercise a final option. Everywhere he turned the world pitched and tossed as if troubled by his sight, and only the flickering purple fires held constant. “Oh, my God!” he screamed, almost singing it in an ecstasy of fear, realizing that the precise moment for which they’d gathered had arrived.

As one, from every corner of the shore, they darted into his eyes. Before the cold overcame him, Prince heard island voices in his head. The ranted (“Lessee how you rank with de spirit, now! Boog man!”). They instructed (“Best you not struggle against de spirit. Be more merciful dat way”). They insulted, rambled, and construed illogics. For a few seconds he tried to follow the thread of their discourse, thinking if he could understand and comply, then they might stop. But when he could not understand he clawed his face in frustration. The voices rose to a chorus, to a mob howling separately for his attention, then swelled into a roar greater than the wind’s but equally single-minded and bent on his annihilation. He dropped onto his hands and knees, sensing the beginning of a terrifying dissolution, as if he were being poured out into a shimmering violet-red bowl. And he saw the film of fire coating his chest and arms, saw his own horrid glare reflected on the broken seashells and mucky sand, shifting from violet-red into violet-white and brightening, growing whiter and whiter until it became a white darkness in which he lost all track of being.

The bearded old man wandered into Meachem’s Landing early Sunday morning after the storm. He stopped for a while beside the stone bench in the public square where the sentry, a man even older than himself, was leaning on his deer rifle, asleep. When the voices bubbled up in his thoughts—he pictured his thoughts as a soup with bubbles boiling up and popping, and the voices coming from the pops—and yammered at him (“No, no! Dat ain’t de mon!” “Keep walkin, old fool!”). It was a chorus, a clamor which caused his head to throb; he continued on. The street was littered with palm husks and fronds and broken bottles buried in the mud that showed only their glittering edges. The voices warned him these were sharp and would cut him (“Make it hurtful like dem gashes on your face”), and he stepped around them. He wanted to do what they told him because … It just seemed the way of things.

The glint of a rain-filled pothole caught his eye, and he knelt by it, looking at his reflection. Bits of seaweed clung to his crispy gray hair, and he picked them out, laying them carefully in the mud. The pattern in which they lay seemed familiar. He drew a rectangle around them with his finger and it seemed even more familiar, but the voices told him to forget about it and keep going. One voice advised him to wash his cuts in the pothole. The water smelled bad, however, and other voices warned him away. They grew in number and volume, driving him along the street until he followed their instructions and sat down on the steps of a shanty painted all the colors of the rainbow. Footsteps sounded inside the shanty, and a black bald-headed man wearing shorts came out and stretched himself on the landing.

“Damn!” he said. “Just look what come home to us this mornin. Hey, Lizabeth!”

A pretty woman joined him, yawning, and stopped mid yawn when she saw the old man.

“Oh, Lord! Dat poor creature!”

She went back inside and reappeared shortly carrying a towel and a basin, squatted beside him, and began dabbing at his wounds. It seemed such a kind, a human thing to be so treated, and the old man kissed her soapy fingers.

“De mon a caution!” Lizabeth gave him a playful smack. “I know dass why he in such a state. See de way de skin’s all tore on his forehead dere? Must be he been fighting with de conchs over some other mon’s woman.”

“Could be,” said the bald man. “How bout that? You a fool for the ladies?”

The old man nodded. He heard a chorus of affirming voice. (“Oh, dass it!” “De mon cootin and cootin until he half crazy, den he coot with de wrong woman!” “Must have been grazed with de conch and left for dead.”)

“Lord, yes!” said Lizabeth. “Dis mon goin to trouble all de ladies, goin to be kissin after dem and huggin dem …”

“Can’t you talk?” asked the bald man.

He thought he could, but there were so many voices, so many words to choose from … maybe later. No.

“Well, I guess we’d better get you a name. How bout Bill? I got a good friend up in Boston’s named Bill.”

That suited the old man fine. He liked being associated with the bald man’s good friend.

“Tell you what, Bill.” The bald man reached inside the door and handed him a broom. “You sweep off the steps and pick up what you see needs pickin, and we’ll pass you out some beans and bread after a while. How’s that sound?”

It sounded good, and Bill began sweeping at once, taking meticulous care with each step. The voices died to a murmurous purr in his thoughts. He beat the broom against the pilings and dust fell onto it from the floorboards; he beat it until no more would fall. He was happy to be among people again because … (“Don’t be thinkin bout de back time, mon! Dat all gone.” “You just get on with your clean dere, Bill. Everything goin to work out in de end.” “Dass it, mon! You goin to clean dis whole town before you through!” “Don’t vex with de mon! He doin his work!”) And he was! He picked up everything within fifty feet of the shanty and chased off a ghost crab, smoothing over the delicate slashes its legs made in the sand.

By the time Bill had cleaned for a half hour he felt so at home, so content and enwrapped in his place and purpose, that when the old woman next door came out to toss her slops into the street, he scampered up her stairs, threw his arms around her, and kissed her full on the mouth. Then he stood grinning, at attention with his broom.

Startled at first, the woman put her hands on her hips and looked him up and down, shaking her head in dismay.

“My God,” she said sorrowfully. “Dis de best we can do for dis poor mon? Dis de best thing de island can make of itself?”

Bill didn’t understand. The voices chattered, irritated; they didn’t seem angry at him, though, and he kept on smiling. Once again the woman shook her head and sighed, but after a few seconds Bill’s smile encouraged her to smile in return.

“I guess if dis de worst of it,” she said, “den better must come.” She patted Bill on the shoulder and turned to the door. “Everybody!” she called. “Quickly now! Come see dis lovin soul dat de storm have let fall on Rudy Welcomes’s door!”

JAMES PATRICK KELLY and JOHN KESSEL

Friend

Born in Mineola, New York, James Patrick Kelly now lives in Durham, New Hampshire. Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and has since become a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine; his stories have also appeared in Universe, Galaxy, Amazing, Analog, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and elsewhere. His first solo novel, Planet of Whispers, came out in 1984, and he was also a member of that year’s Nebula Award Jury.

Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is an assistant professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University. Kessel too made his first sale in 1975, and has since also become a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine; his stories have also appeared in Galileo, New Dimensions, The Twilight Zone Magazine, The Berkley Showcase, and elsewhere, In 1983, Kessel won a Nebula Award for his brilliant novella “Another Orphan,” which was also a Hugo finalist that year. Kessel’s story “Hearts Do Not in Eyes Shine” was in our First Annual Collection.

Together, Kelly and Kessel form a potent collaborative team. They have collaborated on several short stories, and have written a collaborative novel, tentatively entitled The Escapist, upcoming from Bluejay Books.

In the following story of intrigue, romance, and sly social manipulation, set in the claustrophobically close milieu of an interstellar passenger ship in deep space, they prove once again that everyone needs a Friend. The question is—for what?

When I was a Friend I wore a sleek uniform of gray and blue. In those days the collar was styled high and tight at the neck, fastened across the throat with a gold chain. While the uniform was a sign of great power, the chain also had its symbolism. During a starcrossing, a Friend has sole responsibility for the safety of his passengers; no one, not the ship’s crew, its captain, nor even the president of IPT, may interfere. Once the crossing is done, though, every Friend must answer to the corporation that pays him. I loved putting on that uniform.

The Le Corbusier departed Blue, first world of the Farben system, on the nineteenth of Sixmonth, 2251, and was due in Brown orbit on Eightmonth the first. From Brown we would make the ten-month starcrossing to the Sol system and work our way Earthward from Titan. On the insystem hop we had booked our full complement of sixty first-class crossers and about half the second-class space down in the freezers.

I still have the boarding roster for that crossing. Some of the names are familiar; only a few of our trillion-plus citizens are suited by reasons of wealth and temperament to the rigors of a first-class starcrossing. For instance, I had Dr. Fen, the brain specialist; the Roderick Harpers; Brenda Gayfeather, who had tried to vamp me when she was thirteen; the Quills, that most notorious of Cerean group marriages; the journalist Rudi Limin, who later committed one of history’s most spectacular suicides; old Simon Bortl, the Kasrash man; and Ori and her bodyguard. There were also nine members of the Imperial Motessier Dance Company in hop from Blue to Brown. All crammed into the living module, abrading each other like coins in a miser’s fist.

It is the Friend’s job to keep these coins from losing value in transit. He must be a social director, psychologist, and policeman. The insystem hoppers are the easiest—none are with you longer than a month. All you have to do is keep the hoppers from bothering the starcrossers headed for another system. No hitchhiking. Affairs to be terminated cleanly and without repercussions at the next planetfall. Afterward comes the more subtle task of keeping the starcrossers happy—or at least sane—during a voyage that can last anywhere from eight months to two and a half years. For most of that time the ship is cut off from outside communication by its space-time warp. You try to help the crossers cope with problems caused by the isolation, or by claustrophobia, or sexual misadventure, or most often by the universal arrogance of the rich. If a crosser goes out of control you have a last resort: banishment to second-class passage in the freezers. One out of every twenty stiffs does not survive the thaw. God help if you send the commissar down and he doesn’t answer his wake-up call.

There were two others who made that trip. Two old acquaintances, two who were responsible for my great loss. One was Leila Jahiz, at that time the prime dancer with the Motessier. Leila was not a classic beauty; her eyes were too big, her mouth too wide. But she was one of the most striking women I’ve ever known. And she was an exceptional dancer, perhaps the best I’ve ever seen. The other crosser was Phillip Goodson. For citizens of the home system, the name alone will suffice. At that time he was still vice-president of IPT and was returning with a contract to develop an industrial spaceport in Blue orbit. Goodson had been senior Friend when I was in training. Some call him a genius. He is a man of great privilege and no honor. I hated him.

Leila and Goodson met for the first time in the Corbu’s lounge during the orientation mixer. She and I had been reminiscing; I had known her before I became a Friend. Once I had taken a class from her in free-fall dancing. Conversation bubbled out of her without pause, and at least on the subject of the dance she was fascinating. I was dangerously close to forgetting myself in my pleasure at seeing her again.

Goodson split away from his flock of admirers and favored me with a polite nod on his way to the refreshment terminal. I watched him punch out the code for Soar. He took three caps from the access bin, broke one under his nose and pocketed the others.

Leila noticed that my attention had wandered. She touched my arm and asked to be introduced.

“Phillip,” I called. “Have a minute?”

“Hello, Jake.” Goodson’s handshake was dry and firm. “It’s been a long time.”

“Phillip, this is Leila Jahiz. Leila is the prime dancer with the Motessier Company.”

“I saw you perform last week at the Festival.” Goodson took Leila’s hand in both of his. “You’re a talent, Leila Jahiz. You make the rest of them look like drunks.”

“Thank you, Phillip.” She leaned forward impulsively and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m glad you noticed me.”

Goodson rubbed his cheek with his forefinger, then smiled and touched the finger to his lips. “So. What else can I say that you want to hear?”

“You’re on the board of directors of Dance Terra. Tell me about Marl Gustav.”

“You know something about me, then?” His features hardened; he looked like a man preparing to do business. “You haven’t been getting your information from Jake, I hope.”

“I’m a dancer, Phillip. Gustav is the greatest dancer and you know him.”

“Hmm. Marl Gustav is an impossible man. Listens to no one. Tries to quit at least once a year. But as you say, he is very good.”

“We’d better let you go,” I said. “Brenda is watching us as if we were assassins.”

Goodson turned his back to me. “Brenda? She’s harmless. By the way, Jake, she was telling me that you two are old friends.”

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s been nice meeting you, Phillip,” said Leila. “You’re nothing at all like what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“A stuffy man. Superior. A little of that ‘I’ve-seen-it-all’ weariness that all Terran bureaucrats seem to have.”

“I try not to believe anything that comes to me secondhand.” Goodson popped another Soar under his nose. “You’re right about Brenda, however. She looks a little green in this light; perhaps she’s ill. I’d better go back; won’t you join us? I’d like to hear more about your dancing, Leila. Will you perform for us?”

“I’m afraid not—my contract. But there’s no reason why we couldn’t try some free-floating in the pod.”

“I’d like that.” Goodson slipped an arm around her waist. “Coming, Jake?”

“No.”

“A Friend is always on duty,” Goodson murmured as he guided Leila away.

After the mixer I retired to my rooms to program dinner and arrange seating. I put the obvious choices at my own table: Goodson between Brenda and Leila, Simon Bortl next to Ori. I knew Ori’s bodyguard would be hovering over us the entire meal, testing her food, but there was no way around him. I checked to see how many had signed up for my free-fall dance class after dinner. I tried to handicap Goodman’s chances of seducing Leila. In my bedroom, I lay down to rest before what promised to be a busy evening.

Because space is at a premium on a starcrosser, the normal sleepers are not much bigger than a groundside closet, about two and a half meters cubed. As the Corbu’s Friend, I had the luxury of three rooms and a bath with water instead of ultrasonics. I felt comfortable there, and with exception of my bedroom, rarely allowed passengers to invade my private domain.

I was nearly asleep when Leila called and asked if she could stop in. I made an exception for her.

As a practicum before my training as a Friend, I served as a counselor in the free clinic at Chasson University on Brown. Leila was a wreck when she came to the clinic. She was an apprentice with Motessier, the youngest dancer ever to earn that privilege. She was a small-town teenager lost in the city; her nightmares were of crowds and incessant noise. She was having an affair with a callow young dancer whose abilities just barely kept him in the company. Nobody really wanted Leila to be a dancer but Leila; even her lover was full of carping, “constructive” criticism. She was an uneasy combination of egotism and self-doubt. The first time I saw her in the clinic’s drab waiting room, all I saw was a nervous girl on the brink of exhaustion. I had no intention of falling in love with her.

A Friend is taught to reserve his feelings—but I was not then a Friend. As a member of the psychology department at Chasson, I was permitted to have human failings. I failed with a vengeance. Perhaps it was that I suffered from some of the same problems as Leila: an excess of talent and a deficiency of self-image. Our first counseling session was intense, and it was only a short step from that intensity to passion. To my credit, I did not forget my responsibilities as a counselor. Our affair made it easier for Leila to end her relationship with the dancer, and the confidence she gained from my support carried over to her work with the Motessier Company. Helping her helped me to decide to become a Friend. When my appointment to the academy came I saw that the best thing for us was to part.

I had followed her career from a distance, but seeing her again in person troubled me. I was not prepared for the strength of the attraction I still felt for her. And I was actually upset by Goodson’s interest in Leila.

My musings were interrupted by the door chime. “Thanks for seeing me, Jake.” Leila smiled.

“My pleasure.” I brought her into my tiny lounge. “What’s the problem?”

“No problem, really,” Leila said. “I just thought, as an old friend, you might give me your opinion on something. You always were good with advice.”

“Certainly. Would you like something to drink? A trank?”

She looked at me queerly. “No, thank you, Jake. I’m wondering what I should do about my dancing.”

I relaxed in my good chair and tried a trank myself. “You looked fine to me on Blue.”

“I did, didn’t I? That’s what I’m coming to realize more and more. I feel better than I’ve ever felt. Sometimes it’s absolutely effortless, yet I know I’m pushing my body as hard as I can; it’s like magic when it feels that way. I’m wasting myself in the Motessier. Aren’t I?”

“If you feel that way there must be something to it. I’ve never seen anyone dance better.”

“You’re an amateur. Still, I think I need to go to Earth. If I’m ever going to make it any bigger than here, I’m going to have to do it soon. I can’t dance this well forever.”

I could tell what she was leading up to. “Costs credits to get to Earth.”

“That’s why I came to you. You know IPT. Do you know of any way I can arrange a passage?”

“I would think you could get a sponsor in the system who would put up the money for a second-class passage. And aren’t there school and government sponsors on Earth?”

“They’re more interested in technical candidates right now. And I don’t want to take the chance of being frozen.” She looked worried, depressed. “Nothing you could do, Jake?”

I touched her hand. “You really need this so badly?”

She looked me in the eyes for a second. “I’m stuck, huh?”

I had had this same conversation so many times before. “I can’t think of anything. It’s a question a Friend runs into, and I haven’t heard a good answer yet. If you think of a way, I’ll help you any way I can.”

“You think I ought forget about Earth and stay with the company?”

“It’s an excellent company. Goodson even says so. I think you should achieve whatever it’s in your power to achieve. That’s the way I’ve always felt about your dancing. And about you.”

We both stood. She threw her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek.

“Thanks, Jake,” she said.

After she left, I sat fingering the chain at my collar. The whole visit was too simpleminded. She wanted something and she hadn’t gotten it yet. But at least I had kept my own feelings under control, despite the youthful openness she still had about her.

After dinner there was free-fall dancing in the pod. Of course, this was not the art of a professional dancer, but a simpler recreation well within the abilities of most starcrossers. Leila might disparage it with the slang, “free-floating,” but for most, the experience of weightlessness within the crystal walls of the pod is an ecstatic one. Free-fall dancing has been called the purest of the arts of human motion. It is possibly the most expressive act the body is capable of. To know motion as effortless as thought, to streak through a universe swirling with stars—it is no wonder that even the inexperienced dancer soon becomes addicted.

On the starcrossing, free-fall dancing helps to reduce the claustrophobic anxiety common to passengers. And it is a relatively cheap form of recreation, since a dancepod is required anyway for all IPT long-haul crews according to union contract. But the dance is not an unmixed blessing for the Friend. Midair collisions are common and serious accidents can occur to test his negotiating talents. Once I had to send the Proxian ambassador to the freezer for attacking a clumsy dancer who had accidentally kicked his teeth in. Luckily, the thaw was perfect.

I didn’t get to dance at all that night. I spent my evening teaching the handful of beginners their basic skills. When it came to the starcrossing, I would need to vist the pod often, but at that point I didn’t miss the opportunity much.

Goodson also spent his evening quietly, entertaining his stable of hangers-on. It was obvious now that Brenda and Leila were competing for his attention. I began to worry more and more about Leila’s visit to me; it was clear that somewhere in the back of her mind she had the idea of hitchhiking. She didn’t seem the type to collect celebrity blowoffs just for the sexual thrill.

Leila danced only once that night; she and Goodson did a popular pattern called the soul-search. Each partner free-forms while keeping eyes locked on the other’s face. Well done, it is an attractive exercise. But although technically the two of them danced well, the combination of their styles was jarring. People reveal themselves by their choice and execution of pattern just as surely as they are revealed by their gene maps, their voiceprints, their sexual preferences. It looked like a poor match to me.

After a few hours the party began to break up. I didn’t realize that Leila and Goodson had left until I saw Brenda talking to Rudi Limin. It was quite late, and despite the wide-spectrum anti-hi I’d taken, I was feeling the effects of the party. I sat down heavily next to them. Limin was practically stupefied with drugs; he had the face of a statue. Brenda was in only slightly better shape.

“Nice party,” she said.

“How are you feeling?” I asked. Limin put his head down on his arms.

Brenda patted him on the head. “That’s the way I feel, too.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Things like this happen to me all the time.”

“Things like what?”

“You know, to him she’s dirt. She’s off at Brown, you know. Sure, he can have her now, but will he care when she’s gone? I ask you.”

I shrugged and smiled. I was inclined to agree with her, and saw that part of my job on the insystem hop was going to be keeping Brenda happy. Goodson was proving to be as great a challenge as I’d expected.

Brenda shook her head sadly. “It’ll be two months of hell.”

I made a quick decision. I put my hand over hers, comfortingly. “Doesn’t have to be,” I said. “But what you need now is sleep, Brenda. I’m going to close this party soon, anyway.”

She was crying now. Tears did not become her.

“Rotten party. Will you come?”

I could join Brenda later, if I decided she needed it. Though a Friend should be impersonal, there were provisions for his fraternization with passengers if it could be justified as therapeutic. Anything in the line of duty. “Brenda—” I hesitated. “Not tonight.”

Brenda pushed Limin away from her and got up. “Good night, then,” she said curtly.

Limin roused himself from the depths long enough to mumble, “Don’t understand, you know. I just don’t understand women very well. Otherwise, I’m all right.”

I closed the party and headed them all back to their sleepers. Then I took another anti-hi and went to Surveillance to see that they stayed there. First I checked the freezer to see if any of the stiffs were going bad. They were all right that night.

Then I made the rounds through the monitors to see that every sleeper was occupied. They were: our sexual lottery was off to fine start.

I finished my day watching Leila and Goodson blow each other off. I don’t remember feeling good or bad about it. It seemed just another part of the job.

Two weeks into the insystem hop the Quills started a civil war. Helen Quill was ejected from her sleeper by the other members of her marriage for riding in the same elevator as Bortl, the billionaire. For reasons that the Cereans are unable or unwilling to explain, this was a serious breach of morals, although Helen was standing in the back of the car and Bortl walked on just as the doors closed. Helen demanded, in her turn, to be off-loaded on Brown to await a starcrossing with more congenial company. This the other Quills forbade. They had carried their argument and a small gallery of spectators to the lounge by the time I heard about it. This was the kind of problem I loved to handle: the issues may not be clear but the antagonists are, and the Friend must call upon his abilities as a quick study of character, a levelheaded thinker, and a mercurial negotiator. I had to threaten to send them all down to the freezer before they would settle down. I told Helen she could make the crossing in the guest sleeper, designed for just such a situation, and persuaded them all to defer any other decisions until we reached Brown. About a week later Helen became lonely, the others relented, and there was a very satisfactory reconciliation.

In the meantime, I had dealt with Brenda’s spiteful reaction to the pairing of Goodson and Leila by paying her conspicious attention in public and visiting her on two separate occasions in her sleeper, making sure that the other passengers were aware of this. As I had expected, Brenda was not so much interested in me as in saving face, and a brief affair with the Friend offered her an acceptable means. I watched for Leila’s and Goodson’s reactions, but neither seemed to care. As the crossing progressed I was buried under a landslide of opinion, gossip, and pure fabrication about the two of them. The community of crossers is small, and boredom is its greatest enemy.

I was waiting in the lounge before my lunch shift, sprawled in the conversation pit with Ginny Morgan. Ginny was one of the soloists with Leila’s company. She was playing the ingenue, dropping unsubtle hints that she was interested in me, since Brenda had apparently proved that I was fair game. I was not above teasing her. She asked me whether the captain would ever call me to account for my crimes.

“The captain is a woman named Alma Fothered,” I told her. “Very dour. She wants nothing to do with us. She and the crew stay in the command module. For all they care, you’re a sack of grain. There’s nothing for them down here but the dancepod.”

“Then what do you do?”

“I make sure that everybody has a good time.”

“Can’t people have a good time by themselves?”

“No.”

She leaned over to whisper to me. “Jake, is it true that crossings drive some people crazy?”

I winced in infinite pain. She giggled. “The crossings have nothing to do with it. People drive people crazy, and unless you hold up your end of this conversation, you’ll be responsible when I go over the edge. You’ve got me teetering on the brink.”

“Ha. Maybe I’ll push you,” she said impatiently, all of sixteen years old. “Don’t change the subject. All my friends who’ve traveled, they all say the real strain doesn’t start until you go FTL, in the actual crossing.”

“Believe me, Ginny, the actual crossing isn’t any different than this, only longer. You dancers will be off-loaded long before you have a chance to go any crazier than you already are.”

“Well, some of us will, anyway.”

“O.K., I’ll bite. What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t heard? I thought that Friends were supposed to keep up with all the crossers’ gossip.”

I could see what was coming and I didn’t like it. But I would not let Ginny know what I was thinking. “Let’s have a teasing contest, Ginny, just you and me. I think I’ll win.”

She gave up without a fight. “Goodson has offered to pay Leila’s way to Earth and personally introduce her to Gustav.”

“And who started this rumor?”

“I heard it from Leila. I thought IPT didn’t allow hitchhiking.”

“We don’t. When did Leila tell you this?”

“Uhh … she didn’t exactly tell me. I overheard her telling Ottin, the dance master. It’s all right with me if she wants to screw her way across the galaxy. As soon as she goes, I’ll get a shot at prime.”

I smiled at her precious ego. “Tell you what, Ginny. Tonight you sit at my table.” I took some pleasure at the momentary look of disappointment that crossed her face.

“I’m more interested in your bed.”

She really had no aptitude for polite conversation.

After lunch I went to Surveillance and found Leila in her room. I called her; she did not look guilty. I didn’t want to see her in my rooms, so we agreed to meet in the guest sleeper.

Long before IPT monopolized the starcrossing industry, it was the first carrier to ban hitchhiking. The premium on space aboard the ships made it impossible to protect wealthy crossers from insystem hoppers, a small but steady percentage of whom were hitchhikers looking to beg a starcrossing. Hitchhikers have their reasons—some of them quite touching—and they seem to have a knack of picking those crossers most susceptible to their wiles. So IPT banned hitchhiking, mostly to cut down on lawsuits and grab more of the profitable starcrossing market. Other carriers called this elitist. Then the media got into it and everyone knew about hitchhiking. Someone named Bob 46 was the first crazy hitchhiker to blow himself and several bystanding crossers into cold space. Soon another crosser evened things a bit by poisoning an overeager hitchhiker. He was acquitted; the Friend was cashiered. Then came hostage-taking, and then a group of five disgruntled hitchhikers tried to hijack a ship. After that, hitchhiking became a crime almost everywhere; there was a harsh Vagrant Solicitation regulation in IPT’s charter.

And still it was a problem.

“You’ve heard, haven’t you?” Leila was full of energy; she almost bounced into the tiny room.

“I’ve heard a rumor that Goodson has offered to pay your way to Earth.”

“Isn’t that wonderful, Jake?”

I sat on the all-gravity bed that folded down from the wall. She sat next to me. “Do you seriously think he will do it?” I asked her.

She became more serious. “I’m not a child anymore. I think I can tell when somebody is telling me the truth.”

“You realize that even if he does pay your way he’s leaving you open to a charge of hitchhiking?” It was difficult for me to be so blunt; it was not my job to be her friend, yet I could not let her walk into such a situation without giving her the benefit of my knowledge of Goodson. “Once he gets what he wants from you, he could simply turn around and report a violation of the regulation, and you’d be out on your ear at Brown. Subject to civil charges as well.”

She was very close; I had not been so close to her in a long time.

“Dear Jake, I know you only want to look out for me. I’ll always appreciate what you’ve done. But I just don’t read him that way. He’s an IPT exec; he doesn’t have to worry about the rules. If he doesn’t report me, who would? Ottin says he would make no trouble about my Motessier contract. The other dancers—the women anyway—would only see it as an opportunity for themselves.” She paused, and I felt her hand on my back. “Would you report it?”

I turned to her, held her shoulders in my hands so I could look into her face. For some reason I was on the verge of tears. She was too open.

“No,” I said.

She embraced me, and I held her tightly, feeling the strength in her arms and mine. She would not leave until she had given herself to me, and I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t try to stop her. It was the first time that I ever broke the rules of Friendship. This was not the political coupling that I had had with Brenda: I wanted Leila, my feelings were involved, and for an hour there were no other passengers aboard the Le Corbusier.

I lay beside her, listening to her soft breathing. Her body was relaxed, without the taut-wire strength of the dancer I knew her to be. I whispered a plea that she not tell anyone about our meeting. She left some minutes before I did. I knew I was on shaky ground, but it didn’t matter. Despite my broken vows, despite the fact that I had lost myself with Leila, as I waited in the darkness until the viewer showed the corridor outside was empty, I can remember feeling nothing but triumph.

I went to Goodson’s sleeper and leaned on the call button until he appeared.

“What?” His eyes were bleary and he was wearing a sleepgown. “I’m napping.”

“I have to come in, Goodson.”

He blinked and stepped out of the doorway. The ceiling shimmered on. Goodson folded up his bed to make room for the two of us on the cushioned deck. He sat cross-legged in front of the computer terminal and gazed blankly at the console.

“So you’ve heard a rumor?” His voice rasped.

“Is it true?”

“Some are, some aren’t.”

“Don’t play games, Phillip. Hitchhiking is illegal.”

Goodson was punching out a code on the keyboard; he miscued and jabbed at the erase button. “Quite right. But this is hardly a case of hitchhiking. Leila is going to win a grant from Dance Terra. She’ll be our visiting artist next year. Don’t tell her; I want it to be a surprise.”

“Dance Terra? Isn’t there supposed to be a competition? And a committee; I know there’s a committee.”

Goodson smiled. “A committee appointed by the board of directors.”

“She’ll hate you when she finds out.” I felt some dismay—but I had my position to consider. “All right. I won’t make trouble over this if you agree to take all responsibility back in IPT City. I just want to be sure of your intentions. But I will say this: if you go through with it, there’ll be hell to pay on crossings for years to come. For you especially; you’ll be mobbed the moment you board a ship. And think of the press if Leila is a success.”

“But no one will know but Leila and I. And of course you, Jake.” The computer buzzed, indicating that it had accepted Goodson’s program for new clothes. He stripped off the sleepgown and stuffed it into the access bin for recycling. A second buzz; the lid rolled back. Inside the bin was a crisp suit of gray and blue with a gold chain to close the collar.

“I like to wear this once in a while. I get nostalgic for the simpler days when I was a Friend.”

I mastered my surprise. “You’ve already disrupted this passage,” I said. “If the others see you in that, you will seriously undermine my authority.”

He began to put the suit on. “Your authority … yes. Is your authority a matter of a uniform?”

“You know, you have a reputation for doing this. You enjoy testing onduty Friends. I can accept that—as long as you take that uniform off. The uniform is a symbol, and symbols are important. You were a Friend once. I can’t believe that it means nothing to you now.”

Goodson fastened the chain. “You Friends are all alike. You think.you have the most glamorous job in space. Jake, Jake, there’s no duty or honor in being a Friend. It’s a sham to sweeten the lousiest job in IPT. It means nothing, nothing at all. And I think you know it.”

There was a hard silence. My mind raced, trying to catch the realization that had flashed by as he spoke: Goodson was trying too hard. Why would he go to such lengths to make trouble?

“You resent me, don’t you, Jake?” he continued. “You disliked me years ago, and now, because of this woman, you resent me. Maybe you can hide your feelings from the crossers, but not from another Friend.”

“I detest the way you’re using Leila to support your own ego. But my feelings are irrelevant. I just need to know what you are going to do about her.”

His eyebrows arched. “She’s much more important to you than I am, isn’t she? More important than your job, perhaps? To me she’s nothing; she had nothing to give. That’s why I can do what I want with her, for no better reason than because it pleases me.” He turned to the computer and punched out a transfer of funds to IPT Reservations on Brown. Leila’s fare had been paid by the Magic Lamp Institute. “My emergency fund,” Goodson said.

I rose to go. As I reached the door he directed a parting shot.

“What you really want, old friend, is to blow her off yourself. Isn’t that it?”

No, Goodson, I said to myself, I already have. The door slid shut behind me. I retreated to Surveillance and switched on all the monitors. I loathed Goodson. He could not have made things more difficult for me if he had taken this trip to do exactly that. And that was what I realized: the problems were not merely a result of the natural antipathy I felt for Goodson, and his testing was not just the habit that gossip among Friends made it out to be. It had to be a formal test by IPT. Goodson was going to file a report on me when we reached Earth, I was sure, and everything he had done was in the service of that test. Dumping Brenda on me. Wearing that uniform. Defaming Friendship. Seducing Leila into hitchhiking.

And Leila, Leila the fool, was making it even more difficult, despite all the warnings I had given her, by walking right into it.

It would be another week before we reached Brown. Before then Goodson would expect me to file a hitchhiking complaint against Leila. But perhaps I could hold out longer than he, for I couldn’t believe he would leave the reservation for Leila on the books as the starcrossing approached and he tired of her. A vice-president would know the importance of the Vagrant Solicitation regulation.

For the next few days I avoided both Goodson and Leila as best I could without giving offense. I was alone with Leila only once; we sat down to lunch by ourselves in the commons. She asked me right away what was bothering me. I would have liked to tell her what a fool Goodson was making of her, how he was not going to keep his promise, but I was too much a Friend. In the corporation’s eyes it was none of my business. I did not want to bring my own feelings into the conversation. She couldn’t help but know how I felt.

To the passengers I remained the calm Friend, but daily, and later hourly, I was checking IPT Reservations, waiting for Goodson to cancel Leila’s booking. From moment to moment I expected the gossip to bring me news that Leila had been rejected by Goodson and was secluded in her room in tears. Instead, on the night before we reached Brown orbit, I heard different news.

It was a well-kept secret right until the last day. The rumors of a public sex display in the dancepod started just as we began the final approach sequence. Although only a few were invited to attend this spectacle, all were soon discussing it with great anticipation. I had the right to call it off, but no reasons except my own. Public sexual intercourse is an accepted practice on most planets. Nevertheless, despite its acceptance, for most people public sex is something that someone else does.

Goodson himself invited me to attend. When I turned him down he smiled and told me to enjoy it anyway.

It started with Leila dancing. She launched herself from the observation platform at the entrance of the pod. She wore one of those long gossamer gowns designed specifically for free-fall dance. It trailed behind her like the contrail of a flyer knifing through the dusk. She rose to the top of the pod, caromed off a wall, and begin to spin. Her dress was a vortex of white. A streak of it flew off and fluttered across the pod. She broke out of rotation with a flourish and swooped to the opposite wall, leaving another wisp of white behind her.

She played among the floating pieces of her costume, weaving intricate patterns with her body and looking always toward Goodson. Eventually he stood amid scattered applause from the spectators.

I turned them off. I knew they were expecting me to watch, but I fooled them. I let them get whatever satisfaction they could get from one another.

How could I love Leila? I had seen no vulnerability in her face as she waited for Goodson; only coarseness, cheapness, and a stupid refusal to see him for what he was. I still felt sorry for her, but that was not enough. I saw that neither of them would stop until my career was wrecked.

I sat in Surveillance, staring at the dark screen, wondering if the show was still going on. Late, late into the sleep period, I filed a hitchhiking complaint against Leila. I felt as if I had broken the surface of a deep black pond after an eternity of panicky suffocation. I felt released from every constraint. When the monitors showed everyone asleep, I went to the pod and danced my own free-fall dance, along among the stars.

When we arrived in Brown orbit the next day, there was an urgent message from Reservations. They were submitting a revised exit roster for my confirmation. Jahiz, Leila, SHA223-44-7907, was now on it. I could still have withdrawn the complaint, but I didn’t. I simply confirmed and took the message to Goodson’s sleeper.

“Jake,” he said as the door slid open. “We missed you last night. Come in.”

He offered his hand in greeting. I pushed the message into it and stepped past him into the sleeper. He glanced at it, frowned, and tossed it across the little room at me. The sheet fluttered to the deck between us.

“You not going to confirm, are you?”

“I already have.”

“Then there’s nothing I can do.”

“No.”

He stood staring, waiting. Suddenly I was very angry.

“Aren’t you satisfied yet, you son of a bitch! How can you stand to live with yourself? You say being a Friend is merde—but what do you call the kind of work you’re doing? Well, I’ve shown you what a Friend is. I’ve passed your test.”

“Test? What test?”

I wanted to punch his complacent face in. “Don’t treat me like a fool, Phillip. You’ve been testing my performance from the moment we left Blue orbit. Why else would you draw Leila into this hitchhiking attempt? You admitted yourself that you didn’t care about her.”

He looked at me skeptically, and then his expression changed to something like awe.

“You reported her.”

“Yes. Of couurse I did. It’s my job.”

He sat down on the bed, silent for a moment. When he spoke again, he had regained some of his cynicism. “You’re an amazing man, Jake. But if you think this upsets me, you’re wrong. There was no test. The deal I offered Leila was on the level. She’s an ambitious woman trying to trade sex for an opportunity—for a little consideration. But what you said the other day about this causing trouble for IPT was right. I should have been more discreet.

“You’ve saved me some embarrassment. Thank you.”

I was stunned. “But …”

“Now if you would do me one more favor. I’m sure that you don’t want any trouble off-loading passengers, and I’ll have to arrange a reconciliation with Brenda. I think you ought to be the one to pass this information on to Leila.”

“She’ll want to see you.”

“Which I will surely refuse to do,” he said. “You can explain to her that her misfortune was not my doing. Tell her about this ‘test.’”

Everything was crumbling. “You used me just like you used Leila!” “If you will allow me to make an observation, this problem might not have arisen if you didn’t love this woman as much as you do. Very un-Friendlike. And your ego is colossal. To think that I would take the time and trouble to concoct some test just for you … .”

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I hit him and he fell back against the wall. Instead of fighting back, he rubbed his chin amusedly.

“If I were the Friend on this crossing, I’d put you into the freezer for that.”

The members of the Motessier Company were giving Leila a send-off party. I tucked the message into my pocket and joined them. The party had a prickly edge to it, as if everyone were trying to avoid saying the wrong thing. I drew Leila away on the pretense of some last-minute paper work.

As we walked down the corridor to my suite, I said, “They seem to resent you.”

“Yes.” She nodded thoughtfully. “I can’t understand it, really. I mean, I understand the professional jealousy. They would all love to perform with Dance Terra. But I thought I had at least a few friends in there. I thought they might be happy for me despite themselves.” She chuckled humorlessly. “I guess they disapprove of my methods.”

We entered my rooms.

“Leila, there’s something … I have bad news for you. You’re going to have to off-load with the other dancers on Brown.”

She sat down, her face pale but composed.

“I want to see Phillip.”

“He doesn’t want to see you.”

She seemed to shrink a little. “He told me it was all arranged.”

“I’m sorry. He had no say in the matter. Your ticket was purchased in violation of the Vagrant Solicitation regulation.”

“Hitchhiking? But that means someone had to report me.”

I prayed she would let it go at that. “Anyone aboard could have.”

“God. Goddamnit! You know who it was? Rudi Limin. He wanted me, I could tell.”

“It could have been anyone, Leila.”

She seemed dazed. “You said that Phillip didn’t want to see me. I don’t understand. How can he not see me?”

“He said no.”

“Why?”

“He said you were using him.”

“Using him.” She looked at me as if she didn’t quite understand what I was getting at. “Of course I was using him. I still don’t get it. I know he didn’t think that I loved him. I told him that.”

“Maybe … maybe he was hurt.” I felt empty inside.

She shook her head, and her composure started to break. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes and overflowed. She hunched forward and would not let me see her face.

“Jake. Jake, do you know how old I am?” Her voice was choked.

“Twenty-eight. I’m ready now, right now. I wanted to take my chance when it still meant something. This is wrong, so wrong!” She looked up at me. “Please let me see him. He can still do something. He can give me credits for the next crossing.”

“He’ll humiliate you.”

“I don’t care about that.”

I put my arms around her; her face smelled like tears. “I can’t let you do it,” I said.

She caught her breath and looked deep within me. I could not be sure then what she had guessed; I still don’t know.

The crossing from Brown to Titan was relatively uneventful. Though I chafed under Goodson’s unflinching gaze, I did a professional job of managing the affairs of the passengers. It was only when we returned to IPT City that the trouble began, when Goodson reported charges of unFriendly behavior to the company. I fought the action bitterly, but in the ensuing investigation the suspicion that I had fraternized with the passengers unprofessionally were borne out by an affidavit obtained from Leila on Brown, and a psychoprobe to which I had no choice but to submit. I was cashiered.

I have since then painfully created an entirely new career for myself, forming Brotherhood Incorporated—for I saw that a discipline analogous to Friendship might prove very useful in Earthside industry. Brotherhood has been quite successful. I can now afford to pay for a starcrossing on my own, if I should choose to make one. I do not so choose. I cannot forget.

And Leila … she finally did make it to Earth. Ten years have gone by, and I don’t know how she managed it, but she got her chance. She applied and was accepted by Dance Terra—as a member of the corps de ballet. She is thirty-eight now, and although she is not the dancer I remember, she is still magnificent.

I went tonight to her first performance. When I saw her dance, weightless within the crystal sphere, I could scarcely bear my loss—of my position as a Friend, I mean.

TANITH LEE

Foreign Skins

One of the best-known and most prolific of modern fantasists, Tanith Lee has well over a dozen books to her credit, including (among many others) The Birthgrave, Drinking Sapphire Wine, Don’t Bite the Sun, Night’s Master, The Storm Lord, Sung in Shadow, Volkhavaar, and Anackire. Her short story “Elle Est Trois (La Mort)” won a World Fantasy Award in 1984; her sly and brilliant collection of retold folk-tales, Red As Blood, was also a finalist for the World Fantasy Award that year, in the Best Collection Category. Her story “Nunc Dimittis,” another World Fantasy Award finalist, was in our First Annual Collection. Her most recent book is Tamastara, or the Indian Nights, a collection of tales with Indian motifs, from which the following story is taken.

In “Foreign Skins,” Lee takes us to the colonial British India of the nineteenth century, to witness what happens when a stiff and proper British family is brought into contact with something wise and strange, beautiful and terrifying, compassionate and inimical—and very, very old.

I

After the summer rains, the road up to the bungalow was for a while a river of red mud. As the mud dried, drowned things came to light: rats, a long-tailed bird, a mongoose.

“There was also the body of an old woman,” said the man, uncaringly at his breakfast in the veranda. “A corpse some of them made a whole lot of fuss about.”

“David,” said the woman.

The man, her husband, glanced at her in silent though exaggerated inquiry. “What about David?”

“He’s listening, dear.”

“Let him listen.”

“But Chaver, dear—”

“Death’s a fact. Isn’t it, old chap?” Across the table, the eight-year-old boy, pale still despite the heat of a mighty sun, nodded. “That’s right,” said the man. “My God, Evelyn. He’s got to get used to it. He’ll see it all round him in this place.”

“Yes,” said Evelyn, and she touched her napkin to her lips.

“What was I saying?” the man she had called Chaver asked them. When they could not or would not tell him, he shook out his paper, somewhat late as it always was up here, and began to read, dismissing them.

That evening, as the stars were lit across the sky and grasshoppers whirred in the bushes, a woman came up the garden’s impeccable path, between the orange trees, and halted by the rhododendron under the veranda. Dark as the dusk, making no movement, she stood there for some while, until the doors of the dining room were opened. Then the thick amber lamplight fell on her and there was shouting.

“What in God’s name is all this noise?” demanded Chaver Finlay, striding up to the doors in his punctilious dinner jacket.

“A beggar woman,” said the house servant who had shouted. “I tell her, she must go.”

The man looked. He saw the woman by the ghostly rhododendron tree, in the light a creature of darkness, which folded its hands and bowed to him, and said in perfect English, “Lord, I seek shelter. I lost my home in the rains, and all I possess. I have been wandering a great time.” She was clad, he saw, in a piece of filthy sackcloth, probably come on at the wayside. Under the rag, she appeared supple and beautiful. Her hair was plaited into a black snake-tail that fell behind her. Her face was a fine one, with a delicately rimmed Asiatic mouth, the nose somewhat long but slenderly shaped, her eyes large and wide-spaced. On her wide low forehead, suggestive of intelligence and calm, there was no mark of caste. Nor did she have any jewelry, even to a glass bangle or a silver stud in the nostril.

“Well,” said Chaver Finlay, who was rather fascinated by these women. “Well. Go to the kitchen. Tell them I said you get food. And see if Asha can’t find you something to wear.”

“The Lord is very kind.”

He liked, the man, to be called “lord,” as they so often called him, in their own tongue or his. Tall and well-made, deeply tanned, hair and eyes black as the hair and eyes of any native, he found himself now, as often, stimulated by the contact of this world, so unlike his beginnings, so appealing to his spirit—or what he took to be his spirit. His work, which had to do with local government, was dry and uninspiring. He saw little connection between the work and the people, who continually intrigued him, that the work was ideally meant to serve.

Sitting at dinner, too, he compared Evelyn irresistibly and without quite knowing he did so, to the indigenous womanhood. Alas, poor Evelyn. How utterly unlike. Unlike to such an extent that it was almost a joke, Thin, but without any of the angular, heroic grace of the village woman. Fair, and suffering for her fairness, burned a dreadful pink that was not becoming, even when heavily powdered. The alien sun was not kind to Evelyn. It seemed to have bled out the color of her eyes which once, in a cooler clime, had enchanted him for two whole months. And the boy … the boy seemed set to go the same way. “Eat up your meat, David,” the man said absently. Milksop. Could he have bred a milksop? Little and thin and pale, if not yet burnt. The blue eyes were so rarely raised to meet his father’s, the father did not quite remember how they looked. Of course, Evelyn had spent a lot of time with the boy, and there were no other boys nearby for him to play with, to get some sense and some backbone thumped into him. Except the native children. But that was out of the question.

When the meal was over, the servant brought the decanter and glass and a box of cigarettes. Applying the lighter deftly, the servant said, “That woman is outside. She wishes to come in and speak to the Sahib, but I have said—”

“Whatever you said, go and tell her she may.”

Evelyn lifted her sandy eyebrows. She got a word of explanation, before the vagabond entered.

Finlay had a desire to draw in a great breath of pleasure at her apparition. Asha had obviously given of her best, an outfit of singing green and saffron, which the stranger wore as if it were her own. Even the black, black hair had been oiled before rebraiding and the oil’s somber perfume seemed to glow inside his nostrils like the whiskey on his palate.

She gave him again the obeisance, her eyes unlowered, huge black coals with all the lamplight held in them in two little golden beads.

“I have come only to thank you,” she said.

Finlay lounged a fraction. “But you’d thank me more if you could stay.”

She said nothing, and the other woman in the room gave a quick sharp rustle, like something in undergrowth. Finlay did not look at either of them. He refilled his glass.

“I assume you’d like to, because you told me you lost everything in the flood. Even your … Mother, would it have been?” There was a silence. When he looked up again, the dark ghost shook her head slowly. “It’s just,” he said, “an old woman was found about half a mile down the road, dead in the mud. Without clothing. The body was badly decomposed,” Evelyn made a verbal noise this time, “and rather curiously—but of course, the kites had got there, too, by then—” Evelyn’s noise was louder. “I merely thought, two strangers in these parts might have been traveling together.”

“No, lord.”

Finlay smiled, basking in that word.

“Well then, if we kept you, what could you do?”

“Really,” said Evelyn. “I don’t think—”

“Now, now,” he said, all velvet, “we can’t turn the homeless away, can we?” And she became once more dumb, only a pity it wasn’t permanent. His dark ghost meanwhile had turned her eyes aside. She had fixed them, those lenses of coal and gold, on his son. Ah, yes. The surest way to the father’s good graces, through his male offspring. As for David, he looked quite mesmerized, the little brute. “My son,” said Chaver Finlay to the woman, “is something of a dunce. At languages, particularly. Our dialects round here fox him, don’t they, old chap? On the other hand, your English is excellent, and I heard you exchanging words with my man, out there, in a splendid version of local lingo. Perhaps you might be helpful in this way. Do you think you could teach the boy something?” (And I’m sure you could teach him a great deal. Only he’s a touch young for that. I, though … ) He only felt Evelyn on this occasion, her loud protests were mute, a sort of vibration. Evelyn did not like the new schoolteacher. But David did. His small pallid face was full of expectation. And Chaver liked her a lot.

“If you wish,” she said, “I will try.” She went on looking at David, and then slowly she smiled at him. Chaver Finlay would have preferred to have that smile himself, instead of its being wasted on the brat. But never mind. She would smile at the man soon enough. He offered her board and lodging now, and a small sum in annas, which she accepted as if it neither insulted nor amazed her, nor mattered, part of the Eastern Act, as he sometimes termed it.

“Come up to the house after breakfast, about nine o’clock. All right? My wife will see David’s in proper order for you. What are we to call you?”

That brought her eyes back to him. She regarded him for some moments, as if considering. Why, she’s inventing a name for herself, he thought. Are you that notorious, my beauty? And he resolved to check this tomorrow in the official offices, which was an oddly exciting idea, and would make a nice change from memoranda on irrigation and outbreaks of fever.

Then she said the name, and he missed it and had to ask her to repeat what she had said, as if testing her.

“Agnini,” she told him, with no trace of reluctance.

“Oh,” he said, teasingly, “then will you keep lightning from striking the house, O daughter of Fire? That should be worth a pa’i or so more.”

II

He was a lonely child, lonely not so much for companionship as for peace. His mother was alternately irritated by him, or fussing him, calling him “Davy” when they were alone together, a strange intimacy he had come to find repellent. But then, she also referred to his father as “Daddy.” He was afraid of his father, of course. Mostly, these feelings were instinctive. Only when he had got out on to the withered lawn, able to lie hidden in a bush and watch a bird or small animal, or just the sky, did he discover quietness. Sometimes, taken up for a ride on his father’s horse (terrified), he had noticed the native children herding cattle, fighting or playing in the floury dust. They seemed as unlike himself as the free things which darted through the trees. Although he had left it less than a year before, he was forgetting Europe. The spot it occupied in his memory was a sort of sheet of whiteness, foggy, like an English winter sky. His mother sheltered him from this other sky as if it would hurt him, as, sure enough, once or twice it had hurt her, making her very sick so he was frightened and cried. “For heaven’s sake, David, don’t snivel!” his father said. The big tanned hand had caught itself back from a hard slap. It was clearly wrong to thrash one’s son for concern at his mother’s health. Punishment was reserved for deserving causes, failure at lessons, or lies to cover such failures or others that promised trouble. David was not a clever liar. He was not clever at anything. He had never asked as yet, What am I? Where do I fit in this unwieldy, unfriendly scheme of things? But because he did not seem cut out for life, obscurely he blamed himself. Everyone else managed. The fault must be in him.

When he saw sinuous motion coming through the orange trees, he watched it surreptitiously. Since it is possible to be in love at any age, David was in love with the adult person who had named itself Agnini. And since he loved her, he was rather afraid of her, and afraid, intuitively, of being disappointed in her.

Evelyn, who had left him there after breakfast, had admonished her child in various ways. She herself did not want to confront the native woman. To Evelyn’s eyes, Agnini was equally ugly and a threat. Thus the white wife ran to organize a bridge afternoon, abandoning matters to the wishes of the husband now already gone off to the male world of work, and to his allotted governess. Over the cards, Evelyn was prepared to say, gaily, “Guess what, suddenly we have an ayah! Oh of course it’s silly, so we know whose notion it is, don’t we? Chaver’s. You know what he is.” And they did know what he was, too, some of them. The ladies of the area much admired Mr. Chaver Finlay, who, stray as he would, was still Evelyn’s lawful property. Not that he had strayed much with his own kind, she thought. No, it was elsewhere that Chaver’s black eyes turned, after the black-eyed foreign women of this other planet, India. The little boy looked up as Agnini’s cool shade fell upon him. “Greetings,” she said to him in Hindi. Pleased that he understood, he said in English, shyly, “Hallo.” And then Agnini laughed. Her teeth were as white as forgotten English snow. Entranced, David let her take his hand and lead him off the veranda, away to the shrubs and trees of the garden. Here, in his domain, which had long spelled release and relief, which he did not mind sharing with her since it seemed hers already, they sat down. In English, without preliminary, Agnini began to tell him a story. David listened, and as he listened he watched her. In the slanting sunlight she was like a shadow, and as she spoke she made lovely, luminous gesticulations with her hands and neck and head, swaying slightly like a flower on a stalk. Now and then, in the way of the story, she would say, “Attend, O Beloved.” And each time he would start very slightly, as if his mind had wandered, though it had not. It was grand to be told stories, though how it would help him master the ghastly chaos of another language he did not know.

“Attend, O Beloved,” Agnini said.

David attended.

His blue eyes were wide. These eyes were so far the only beauty he had, the only sign he might grow up into a handsome man, his mother’s lightness of complexion and his father’s coarse, effective looks, refined into something much better.

“‘Come,’ said the god,” said Agnini, “‘come, be valorous, and descend into the city of the wise and wicked ones. Who shall hurt thee there, seeing thou hast my protection? Thou shalt behold marvels. And maybe thou mayest recover what the shape-changer stole.’”

Evelyn, who had sneaked out after all, in spurious search of a dead rose bush, paused to eavesdrop. Useless, she thought with satisfaction. What good is it to sit there like a monkey and chatter at the boy in Hindi, when he can’t speak three words of it?

“Two weeks. She’s not teaching him anything. She simply lives off our fare, like a parasite. Like they all do, given a ha’p’orth of encouragement.”

“What does she do with him all day, then?” Finlay inquired lazily.

“She tells him fairy stories, I believe. Or rather, heathen myths. Only yesterday I heard him singing—howling is more like it—some perfectly grim sort of chant about Krishna, or Vishnu. Or somebody.”

“Oh? Singing it in English, do you mean?”

“No of course—” Evelyn paused, “not,” she added lamely. “Oh, it was in some dialect or other, but he’d learnt it off parrot fashion. He didn’t understand it, which was probably just as well. You know, dear, I’m very concerned about David’s religious—”

“Just a minute,” Finlay said. He got up from his desk, where Evelyn had disturbed him over a hunting journal and a pile of untouched paperwork lugged home for show from the offices. He walked past his wife, one and a quarter feet the taller, and went out on to the veranda. David, a small uncamouflaged white figure in his shirt and shorts, was pottering among the tamarisks. At his father’s shout, the boy jumped as if at a shot, and turned a frightened face toward the house. The man beckoned vigorously, and the child came quickly with the forced speed of total helpless unwillingness. When he had almost reached the steps Finlay barked at him: “Jaldi, bebkuf! Bhagio!”

“Jee, Pitaji, mai bhagta hu—” said David, and broke into a trot. Then faltered and stopped dead.

“Well I’ll be damned,” said Chaver Finlay. He stood staring at his son, an evil grin splitting his face and revealing the unattractive teeth less strong than the rest of him. “What did you just say?”

“You—you told me to run, and I said I would—”

“In Hindi.”

“Y—yes. I—I think … so.”

“Don’t think so, you did. Accent quite decent, too. Well done,” said Finlay, delighted at it all. In Hindi once more, plus a heavy dose of the local dialect, he added to David, “And did she teach it thee?”

“Yes, father,” David said in English. It was a fact, he was never more uncertain than when his father seemed pleased by him. It happened so seldom.

And sure enough, Finlay scowled. “God damn you, boy! Answer as you’re supposed to.”

Evelyn shuddered at the blasphemies, retreating to the wall of the house. David replied again, rapidly, in the other words and syntax which were coming to seem quite familiar.

Chaver laughed. He turned on Evelyn, laughing in her face. “You see, Cold Comfort, our Aggi’s worth her weight in rupees. If she can get the little owl to learn something—my God. I’ll go over to their quarters and tell her she’s done a good job. By God, I will.”

Evelyn had continued to shrink away and had now shrunk right back into her husband’s study. She watched him stride off through the brassy film of late day and into the dark of the peepul trees that hid the servants’ dwellings from the bungalow.

The other side of those trees, almost instantly, he came on her who had named herself Agnini. She sat by a brown wall on a little faded mat of Asha’s, cleaning her hair in the old way, by rubbing it with rice, then combing it through and through. He stood and watched her, leaning on a tree and hidden from the house, feeling his own power course through him, his blood stirring in the broad light and open as it rarely did now in an airless night bedroom.

Although she had acknowledged him politely, Agnini continued with her task. He took this as a kind of flirting.

“I came to congratulate you,” he said at last. “We’d better give you a raise, Lady of Fires. David starts to speak tolerable native talk.”

She nodded, a small bow, replied otherwise not at all. Finlay inhaled the scents of the earth and the tree, and the wholesome savage aroma of her hair with the rice rubbed through it. His investigations had offered no clue. There were no rumors of a female criminal at large in the area, or anywhere near it. Maybe they would come. Then he might say to her, Ah, Agnini-who-is-not. Now I know you. That game could be fun to play. For the moment he contented himself with, “But your husband, surely, must be pining for you.”

She did stop her combing then, looking at him stilly. It was an odd look, and he was not sure he cared for it. Presently she said something that did not really sound like Hindi, and which he could not understand.

He guessed. “Dead? Is he? But he’ll be back, won’t he? He’ll reincarnate, and fast, I’d think, to get with you again. Or are you a Mussulman woman, only one life and away to paradise? No, you’re not that. Thank God. The times I’ve come out on a fine evening and been confronted by a row of their men’s holy bums stuck up, faces at the other end to Mecca—”

Agnini rose. The movement was remarkable, like a dancer’s, yet even more fluid—the word mellifluous came to mind. Even to Chaver Finlay’s mind. Yes, flowing honey. But she had given him the obeisance, turned and gone in, flowingly stooping at the low doorway. Dismissed, the man stood and wondered, angry and tickled. Yes, yes, honey and fire, it would be a pleasure to have a rough wooing with this one, who seemed not to notice him as male flesh. And he had the sudden image of a darkness before him, redolent with the perfumes of night, and eyes and lips and strong hands on him holding him to insistent deeds of darkness, all awash with smoky hair and the elixir of a foreign skin.

III

“Is it dead?” asked David, staring at the little rumpled creature on the lawn.

“Yes. Oh, come away at once. I’ll send them to clear it. Don’t be so ghoulish, Davy.”

David did not know what this English word “ghoulish” meant, but knew better than to ask at such a moment. Obviously it was bad, obviously he was guilty of it. He walked quickly off to escape culpability and his mother as one, and sat down under a tamarisk. He watched Evelyn emit an exasperated sigh, and scurry in the other direction to find a servant. David was close to tears. The little animal was so beautifully made, so complex, the tiny pointed face, and the wonderful squirrelish tail, and all these marvels wasted now in death. It was of a category he had been inclined to call, in the plural, mongeese, since it was mongoose in the singular, and a plural goose became geese not gooses. The error had last summer earned him a light stinging cuff from his father’s riding glove.

Soon, sitting under the tamarisk, he was able to watch one of the men come and sweep up and take away the mongoose who did not become geese in the plural, and would now become nothing at all except compost. David, unseen, gave in and wept. He wept with a breaking heart for all the sadness and cruelty of a world he scarcely knew, this land of giants.

Then, relaxed, lying face down on the grass, he fell asleep. He woke once to hear the muttering of servants close by in a tongue he could now follow by means that were so simple they were inexplicable. What did these people say? Talk of the mongoose. Young and glossy, it had had no mark upon it. Of what had it died? No, not a touch, or an ill-wish, even, but the mere concentration of inimical presence. A presence not to be fought with, only to be bowed down to, and so, nature in revolt, an ultimate bowing down in death. After all, even the cobras kept out of the garden now, overawed, though of course they would come, if desired. But there was no need. One was careful. One did what was wanted. Even the Goan cook, a Catholic to the tips of his moustache, was courteous. And in turn, courtesy was given. Her purposes were otherwise: the male child. It seemed the lawless magic of the very young, or the bewildered anguish of the very young, this had drawn her here.

Me? Are they talking about me? But about who else then? Is it—?

The noon sun beat on the drumskin of the garden, dark-red behind his eyelids, and the voices melted away and he curled on his side and slept again, dreamless, which might mean only that he did not recall his dreams.

When he woke the sun had moved a little, burning on the linked arms of the peepul trees. A yard off Agnini sat, braiding her hair. David rolled over and lay watching her, smiling sleepily, for she had come to find him and she was beautiful and he loved her much.

“Beloved,” said Agnini, “tonight I must leave thee.”

David’s entire body altered with distress.

“When wilt thou return?” he asked her, using the fluent fast speech, the inner tongue that was the core of her teaching.

“Return I do not,” said Agnini.

“Not come back? Not ever?” he whispered, in English now.

“No, Beloved. Never to thee.”

“Why must you go?” he cried, his pain too large yet for further crying, the adult pain of loss. “Did I do something to make you angry with—”

“The doing is not thine, Beloved. Nor yet. This night, another than thee will anger me. Then shall I go away.”

In English still, though she had kept to the other tongue, he cried out: “Can’t I—couldn’t I—please don’t—” and fell silent. For neither did English have, it seemed, the sentences he needed. To tell her the nameless hell that was his existence, and which she had filled in moments with motes of light and notes of joy. That if the motes and notes of light were to be taken from him, now he had touched them, he could not bear it. That, though he knew none of those mighty, emotive phrases by which poets describe the deepest human despair, and the self-annihilation the deepest human despair invites humanity to embrace, yet that was all which remained of him if she were gone. He gazed at her, and though he did not realize it, his eyes told her everything that he or words could not. If perhaps even she had needed to be told such things.

In the garden there was now no noise at all. Beasts and birds slept in the last of the great heat of midday, and men slept or lay vanquished. The grass itself, the leaves on the trees, did not move. Even the wind slept somewhere, high in the hills, under the river, under a stone. There came then the great coolness of that great heat, which is not coolness but only the accepting of the heat, and therefore comfort in it. This David felt, and he sighed. There had come to him also the acceptance of pain, the finish of that business the doctrine of Jesus Christ conceives of as a kicking against tearing barbs, and the doctrine of the Bhagavad-Gita as the blown and scattered ships of broken thought.

“Yes,” said Agnini, as though she had read such sensations from him, “thou art brave, and thou shalt be wise, strong and blessed. Come, I will show thee truths.”

When she rose, David got up. She held out to him her beautiful hand that was like a somber, articulated flower. She led him away.

It seemed they went out of the garden, and on to the road, white and iron-hard now, and then they walked toward the open uplands, where David was forbidden ever to go alone. But David made no protest, did not even worry over this departure. The comforting envelopment of the heat was so intense, time itself seemed to have stopped. They might travel as they pleased, he and this woman that he loved as a mother and as an abstract dream of future love, and as a spirit. No one would come after them, or could find them. No one would ever know.

And a considerable distance seemed to hurry by them, under his enclosed shoes that he must wear against snakes, and under her bare feet, their darkness powdered with white dust.

So they were up in the hills where all was unfamiliar, being rocks and pitiless brown slopes, and an endless blue horizon beyond.

“Dost thou recall,” Agnini said, “the story I told thee first, of the young student, and the serpent that stole from him, vanishing into the earth, and of how the man pursued the serpent, when Indra had opened for him the way?”

David nodded. Glancing down, he saw a slender rupture in the ground.

“See,” she said, “the serpent’s way to the city of his kind.”

“But snakes don’t have cities!”

“Thou hast forgotten the story, O Beloved.”

He looked up at her, and watched her, the gentle movements of her hands, her body swaying like a stem in water. He remembered then the story, which was of the Nagas, that fabulous race of Serpent-People, demons, nearly gods, and of their tricks upon men, and their several cities underground.

David kneeled down by the hole. “Does it really go all the way into a city, Agnini?”

She smiled, and touched his blond skull.

“I have said, I will show thee truths. Thou art not afraid?”

“Not—if you’ll be there too.”

“I am here and shall be there. And now,” she said, “I open the way.”

And she spat. Her spit, like a bright star, went shooting straight as an arrow into the hole. At which, the rockside crumbled and fell inward to a yawning nothingness, and he was drawn softly down with it.

IV

He had not slept, or lost consciousness, yet he seemed to be waking up. There was a darkness, but not as one thinks of blindness; he was not afraid. He was standing, too, so he had not actually fallen, though he had thought he fell, slowly and easily, down into this place. And he was alone. Nevertheless, he believed he knew exactly what he must do next, and this, in a life of uncertainties, was such a reassuring conviction he obeyed it.

As he walked forward, another conviction began to come. If I go on, he thought, thinking in English still, something will happen. But he was not alarmed. It was only right and proper to go on. To go on was essential, like breathing. He went on, and the thing duly happened. At first he did not know what it was. It was as if he began to stretch, very pleasant and natural, and then as he stretched he threw off and cast something away from him, like the sheet on the bed. And then it was more as if he broke through water. Ah, he thought. That’s better. Much. But then the feeling started once more, more imperative and more pleasant and more urgent, and he began to run through the serene darkness, his arms spread out, with no notion of obstacles, and met the feeling head-on and ran through it, and this time it was like jumping through a hoop of crackling paper.

Now I shall be free of bonds, he thought. They will drop behind me.

And once again he passed through the invisible barriers, and then once again, and again, and there was almost a pain each time now, but a pain that was good and clean.

“Thus,” he thought, “thou art no more, and yet thou art.” He thought in Hindi now, or in the older language that was Hindi and was not, which Agnini had taught him. He raised his arms over his head and felt strength and fiery courage, and laughed aloud. And it was no longer the laughter of a child. He looked about him then, and by the light of a vague warm glow that was coming in ahead of him, he glimpsed the pale sloughed garments that he had shed, five or six or seven times, on the rocky floor. They were the skins he had cast, the empty bodies of boyhood, adolescence and youth. All these deaths that are the sum of life, the endless reincarnation of self.

As he advanced toward the light, the one who had been David Finlay, eight years of age, was a man. And the man was tall and strong as though from two decades of faultless excercise, repose and nourishment, beneath the mighty sun which had deeply tanned him and bleached his fair hair to a golden banner. While under the crown of the golden hair the man’s brain, innocent and educated, understood everything, and was made by it amused, and reverent. So he walked out of the tunnel into the light.

The opening was the shore of a lake, or an enormous cistern, under arching rock like a dove-gray sky. Light came from the rock, and from the water, which was crystalline, and out of which grew huge crimson lotuses, standing on their stalks well clear of the surface, like inverted parasols. Across the water, through the lotus forest, he saw the flash and glitter of the towers and walls of the underground city.

Though he had no intermediary memories of his own life after the age of eight, for he had had no life, yet his adult brain was equipped with adult knowledge. He was able to gauge the distance from shore to city as a little less than half a mile, and to predict he could swim it, too. He knew his stamina and abilities, none of which he had himself built up or learned, but which had evolved for him in the casting of the skins—making him what he could be, would be. With a joyous, reckless control, qualities never his till now, he dived in a graceful powerful swoop into the water, cleaving it, passing through its silken undertones, and coming up again with the crimson lotuses brushing his forehead and eyelids.

He swam, without effort, along the natural lanes among the flowers. The water gleamed, and seemed to do him good, like that of a mineral spring. The shining city of the Nagas came nearer and nearer through sparkling showers of waterdrops. Presently, his fingers brushed a flight of great steps, brilliant with colored painting, which went up to a platform. Here there was a wall, crowded with exquisite and complex carvings. In the wall there was an opening crowned by a horseshoe shape, and without doors. The way was barred only by pillars of red sandstone.

He drew himself from the lake, shook away the water and was instantly dry. As he climbed the marble toward the walls and their opening, he heard the sound of the city for the first time. It was a wonderful sound, of music mingled with action, and seemed imbued by energy and interest. Cities of men did not have this sound.

When he reached the platform, he saw that the seven sandstone pillars rose far up over his head, and each was roped by a serpent, living and golden, every one of which stared at him from its topaz eyes.

He made an obeisance to each of the seven. He had no right here, save the right of invitation, the rights of love and magic. The serpents were each large enough to crush him, but none had made a hostile move, only watched him as he approached.

He was perhaps nine strides from the opening they guarded, able to glimpse through it the extraordinary masonry of the city, when the serpents altered their positions on the pillars. Then each came sliding down. As they touched the marble of the platform they were changed. So he saw the Nagas as the carvings often show them. Upright on their tails of golden plates, sinuous as rope, they were from the waist upward almost men. The man-part was dark-complexioned, the musculature formidable, and hung at breast and arms with gold and huge polished gems. The dark faces smiled, as in the carvings they do, but cruelly, stilly, the long mouths closed. And the large eyes, black and bright as certain of the jewels they wore, were without any white. Each head was cased in a diadem or helmet of gold, and behind head and shoulders there rose, like phantom wings or the plumed lily of the fleur-de-lis, a triplex black and gold formation of serpents, hoods spread wide in the rage display of a striking cobra.

It was the snake-man of the central seventh pillar who spoke, and as he did so his double tongue, slick black as a sloe, flickered in his mouth.

“Thou standst by a city of the Serpent-People, of the limitless realm of the Great King Takshak. Thy kind is unwelcome here. What seekest thou?”

“A woman of thy people, known to me.”

The snake-men glared from their wicked eyes.

“Art a fool, thou. What is thy name, Fool, and who thy fool’s protector, that thou darest so seek one of our race, naked and unarmed, among the thrice-weaponed, the crushers, the venom-toothed, the shape-changers, we?”

He now knew that the name “Agnini” would be of no use here—it was a game she had played, an English anagram of her merely racial name, Nagini. He knew also that his own English name was useless, as the English concept of God was useless. But whom in the Indian pantheon could he claim?

Before he could speak and maybe blunder, a woman’s voice came from within the gateway.

“Canst thou not see, Cunning Ones, which Guardian he has? He is the Lord Darvinda, of the Kashatriya. His Patron is therefore Indra Vajri, whose wrath we have felt before. Let him by, my gentle brothers. He is here at my request.”

Then the man-snakes turned away and flung themselves in corkscrews round the pillars, and became all snake again. There, between the seventh and sixth of them, stood the Nagini who had been hired for annas to teach a white child dialects.

She wore a crimson drapery sewn with gold discs. Her arms and throat and ankles were ringed with silver and soft gold, and clasps of gold and red coral and redder rubies were woven like fires in her hair. On her forehead was a star that seemed to have fallen out of heaven, and in her ears two more. Her breasts were bare, but for two white flowers. The palms of her hands were hennaed, and her fingernails paler than pearls.

She was so beautiful he could not immediately speak to her, but he greeted her with respect. He was not ashamed to stand before her naked. He had never learned that shame, though in his other life his mother had tried hard to teach it to him.

Inside the gate were two litters draped with gorgeous fabrics. It seemed men, her servants, bore them. But these too would be capable of the forms of snakes, or half-snakes, just as they were capable of putting on the form of mortals. His Nagini, also, was a serpent.

They rode side by side through the strange, busy, musical streets of the snake city.

“Why didst thou place me among the Kashatriya?” he asked. “I have no caste.”

“All men have caste,” she said, “of the soul, which never changes. And thou art Kashatriya. A Warrior.”

“But I was a coward,” he said.

“Who knows better than the warrior,” she said, smiling, “the terror of battle, the loss of comrades, pain of wounds and death? This may make afraid, after many lives; thou hast lived often. Yet also thou art and shall be brave.”

On every side there went up narrow painted towers and wide painted porticos, and pillars, and ascending, diminishing pyramidal slopes of stone, all blossomed with sculptures and burning with precious metal and enamel. Although there was a natural light throughout the city, every palace and temple seemed lit by lamps, and the colors of the windows and the colossal porches fell over them in slow and glorious lightings. Now and then a chariot would fly by, drawn by white horses, or red or black, with jewelry hoofs, and the charioteer braced forward, some lord standing and proud behind him. Palanquils also passed, hung with bells, and elegant pedestrians walked in a dance of gesture and conversation. In one place there was a smooth turf where riders played a fierce match with curved sticks and a golden ball. All these had taken human shape to suit their activities. But elsewhere snakes lay coiled along the ledges like heavy syrup, communing with each other mysteriously.

A river cut through the city. On its banks the steep ghats, lit by torches that shone in the water, climbed to the doors of magnificent houses. To one of these the litters were taken.

At the threshold, the Nagini kneeled, bidding her visitor be welcome, her hair sweeping the petals strewn on the floor.

He became in her house a prince. Bathed and anointed, he was dressed in the finest muslin and silk, garments such as the masters of the serpent race put on when they had taken the shape of men. There were ornaments, too, like the jewels he had once seen in a museum, behind thick glass. These things felt curious to him, yet not unfitting. All the rooms through which he was conducted were sumptuous, but it was in a chamber of golden walls and screens of pierced marble that he sat down on cushions and ate wild and delicious foods, lightly spiced and pretty as mosaic.

Behind a curtain clear as thin smoke, musicians coaxed the strings of the sarod, and the bilancojel fluted like a bird. Then his hostess returned and seemed to light the room more brightly. They sat and drank wine, and played chess, which in his former life he had never learned, but which his adult brain knew well. When each had beaten the other once, the board was removed and they played a lighter contest, which was appropriately the business of snakes and ladders.

But though he had gained a name, that her servants used and that she used as if it had always been his, her name he did not hear. And so perforce fell back on calling her Agnini.

The city, too, was nameless. It had neither night nor day, and Darvinda sensed that time was of a different order on the earth, miles up over their heads. At last he stayed Agnini’s hand on the board, and said to her, “Why then am I here?”

“As my guest,” she said, “if thou wilt. But there is another matter, also, a thing of choice which I shall tell thee of, and which thou mayest then accept or decline to undertake.”

“And if declined?”

“Then thou shall depart when rested, an honored traveler who has rejoiced my house.”

“And if accepted?”

“To accept is to aid me.”

“Then where is my choice?”

“Hush, my lord. Promise nothing till you are informed.”

Then she did tell him, and if not everything, enough.

It was an edict of their Great King that sometimes some of his people must leave their cities, and wander the world of men above. So with Agnini and the prince who was her husband. And whether in punishment for some fault, or due only to the Inescapable, they were separated, these two, and their quests became different, and of different duration, so that when Agnini’s tasks were done and she might return to her own country, her lord had some while yet to spend in exile. Thus she returned alone to wait for him. And she was content to wait, for she loved him—they had been created for each other—and in the manner of the supernatural beings they were, for hundreds of mortal years they had remained together. This small absence of, perhaps a century, could be borne. But then, another in the city claimed her, by the rights only of lust and vacancy. And since he was a prince, and since the Nagas were as they were, and her lord far off, and no kindred to intervene, she could not deny this unwanted companion. Her only recourse had been to escape once more above, and to wander the alien earth, homeless and desolate.

She did not have to tell him, Darvinda saw what he had been chosen to do. At once his mind, his senses, laid before him a panorama of skills which he perceived as his own. His surprise was mild, as was his excitement at them. Like the new clothes, his man’s body had come to fit him swiftly and well; the cast skins of his childhood and his weakness were foreign to him now he had outstripped them. So, he understood also that he had courage and confidence and need no longer be afraid of his fear.

Nevertheless, he considered. To be used by Agnini flattered him, and pleased him. She had given him a great deal, when he was a terrified little boy. The chance to repay her gifts was to be wished for. Yet he was aware of other things, shadows moving inside the substance of what she had said.

“It seems to me now,” he said then, “that I am strong and versed in combat. In any battle thine enemy may suggest, it appears I may attempt to match him. But it seems to me too, he is mighty. Can I prevail? If I go down before thy foe, what of thee thereafter? Will it go worse for thee?”

Agnini kneeled by him, smiling up at him, black-eyed as the nights of earth.

“Yes, thou mayest fall in the battle, dear lord. But if I swear that, even falling, even slain, he cannot triumph over thee, nor then over myself, wilt thou heed my words?”

“But thou sayest I may die in this.”

“This I do say. Thou mayest die. Yet shalt thou be the victor, and I through thee.”

What man of the world of men would not have flung her gifts and her words together back in her face? He said, “Die yet prevail? Well, I trust thee. Through thee I know the soul does not perish, and through thee I know love exists, lessons no other gave me. So then, I will do it. When will he come?”

Agnini touched his hands with her forehead; then rose.

“Already, Darvinda, he is here.”

He felt no alarm even at that. Rather he felt a surge of power and ferocity, the sword edge of the many-faceted Kshatram, the essence of the Warrior caste of which he now, bemusedly, humbly and gladly, reckoned himself an adjunct.

It was as if he had cried out: Let him come in!

The doors were pulled wide and the enemy strode through.

He had come as a demon, maybe to appall, or else it was merely his jest. For though he wore a man’s form, yet he had kept the scales of the snake as his armoring, and in his wide mouth the white serpent’s teeth showed like tusks, gilded by ready venom. His eyes were not a man’s eyes, but blood-red and terrible. Only his hair was truly that of a man, long and black, falling far below his waist. Behind him walked an albino ape with cold pink eyes of its own, simpering with malice, that carried its master’s arms with a showy and martyred struggle.

“Yes,” said the enemy, “look thou long at me, O mortal thing. Look at my skin which thou canst not pierce, and at my fangs which shall rend and poison thee. Stare into my eyes, red as the fire which shall burn thy corpse on the ghats, and my hair black as the River of the City which shall drink thine ashes. I am Rupanag. Or, thou mayest name me only Death, since I am thine.”

“Greetings,” said Darvinda. “Where wilt thou fight?”

“Below, on the bank above the water, where all may see. Or art bashful? Shall we set to in some dark place where none may witness thee?”

“Let me get arms, and we will meet below, where thou desirest, on the bank.”

“She will arm thee,” said Rupanag. “And arm thee well. Which is good. For soon everything of thine shall be everything of mine. And it is good too that we fight on the bank, the handier for the place where thy dead body shall be burned.”

“Dost thou fence always thus?” asked Darvinda, “with thy tongue?”

But Rupanag laughed, and was gone, and on the platforms below, beside the river, there was a noise of gathering and eagerness.

As Darvinda left the doors of Agnini’s palace, a beggarwoman plucked at his wrist. Her eyes were bright as the lamps and torches that flamed in the river below: This city had no true beggars. “Do not fight,” she said. “Thou shalt be sorely harmed.”

“Greater harm to another, if I do not.”

Massed crowds stood on the ghats, their finery ablaze. As he went down between them to the platform Rupanag had selected, a sneering youth caught at Darvinda’s elbow. “Do not fight. Thou shalt be put to shame.”

“Thou shamest thyself to boast of it.”

And as he reached the broad platform and stepped out on to it, a little girl child, no older than he had been before, ran to Darvinda holding in both hands garlands of marigolds, and pointed at his heart. And the child said, in a woman’s voice, “Fight not, Darvinda. For thou shalt die.”

But, “There is no death,” he said, and took one of the garlands and put it on his neck with the collar of gold and precious stones. The child smiled and vanished in the crowd.

And then Rupanag came and filled the horizon.

At once the platform of marble was altered. It had grown as wide as a desert, and the crowd was no longer to be seen, nor the palaces or their lights, nor the reflecting river. Even Rupanag was miles off, although his immanence made him perfectly visible still.

Darvinda beheld Rupanag take from the pale ape with the pale eyes a colossal bow, bend and string it, and set to its lip an arrow large as a spear, which suddenly the bow spat out. The arrow came like a bird of prey, high and sheer, and the air was filled by the sound of its cry. At the last instant Darvinda leapt aside, flinging up his shield to deflect the missile. But the great arrow carried half the shield away with it, plunging on into the platform until only the quivering flight remained above ground. Then Darvinda took up the bow Angini had given him, strung it, set an arrow to the string and let it fly. No sooner was the arrow in the air than it too, swollen with the warrior power of the Kshatram, grew great and terrible. But Rupanag had snatched another arrow and discharged it. Like a falcon on a pigeon this second arrow stooped, and met Darvinda’s arrow at the center of the marble plain. There was a crash like thunder and a flash of fire, and splinters hurtled downward in a rain. Neither arrow had survived the impact.

As the last smoldering fragments hit the plain, the surface of it shook. Rupanag was running, his bounds eating up the illusory or actual miles in seconds. He loomed like an angry cloud, blotting out the light. But Darvinda moved to meet him, and either his own state enlarged, or the image of his enemy shrank. They met as two lions meet, springing forward, and the sword that each had drawn rang on the other’s with a searing moan.

“Why,” said Rupanag, “thou fightest as one crippled, but thy crippling is to come.”

But for all that, Darvinda’s blows made him skip and spin and keep busy to get out of the way of them. There seemed no hope of penetrating the scaly dermis; Darvinda’s aim, then, was to bruise and stun, and to break if possible. So his sword smote down and down again. And all the while the blade of Rupanag hurtled toward him and away. Sometimes the impact was accepted on the half of Darvinda’s ruined shield, all the arrow had left him. Sometimes the impact was avoided. But now and again, the point of the sword ripped home. Darvinda’s red blood lay on his golden flesh and mingled with the red jewels of Agnini’s gift.

“Thou hast garnets under thy skin, and rubies,” cried Rupanag. “I find gems for thee brighter than those she gave thee. Yet alas, thou findest none for me.”

But on and on they strove, and there came at length a blow between the swords that broke them, and they burst in pieces, like a firework, just as the arrows had been burst.

Rupanag fell back, and flung away his sword hilt with a snarl. Then he jumped straight upward, turned in the air, came down upon his hands and so folded into a reeling living wheel, which rolled itself at Darvinda and caught him fast.

They fought then only with their bodies’ strength, with hands and limbs and feet. And as they wrestled, all the time Rupanag grinned and gnashed his serpent’s fangs, striving to bring them where they could close and inject a poison richer than that of seventy cobras into his adversary’s veins.

But Darvinda had not loosed hold of the hilt of his own wrecked sword. Presently, as they struggled, he dashed this hilt with all his might against the beautiful ghastly teeth of Rupanag, and smashed the uppermost of the great biting fangs.

Rupanag screamed, and in that moment of his anguish, galvanized by enormous agony, he thrust his foot against Darvinda’s breast and seizing the yellow hair in his hands he whirled him high. And as Darvinda fell down again across Rupanag’s shoulders, Rupanag snapped his spine like a reed.

So the combat ended, and the city came back, and the ghats with the torches burning, and the palaces and crowds beside the river. And all who looked saw Darvinda lying on the marble among the blood and the marigolds, slain in the way that men most often kill snakes.

The Serpent-People did this much for Darvinda, they wrapped him in a white shroud and left him ready on the platform for Agnini to honor with the death-fire. He had fought well and given them a show, for though they seemed far off, they had stood close and watching all the while. But he was a foreigner, neither of their race nor their kind, and mortal.

Rupanag went away to be cleansed and tended, to pray and sacrifice, and change his shape. He came back as a bridegroom behind a concourse of chariots and horses and musicians and colored lamps, though the ape-slave did not go with him; it was a female, and jealous, and had run to chatter on the tops of the city, like one mad. The conqueror stalked into Agnini’s palace. After which the doors were closed.

So he sat down in the room of golden walls and Agnini’s handmaidens served him. He frowned at her, for she too wore white, as if to indicate a widow’s death. As a man, Rupanag was tall and well-made, his eyes and hair black as ebony. But when he smiled now, he kept his mouth shut, for his teeth, in whatever form he took, had been forever spoiled.

“Well, I will eat, and drink wine,” said Rupanag.

“Do so, Lord,” said Agnini.

“Then I will go with thee to some chamber where thou shalt pleasure me.”

“Perhaps not so.”

“Why, who is there to prevent me now?”

“Listen,” said Agnini, “thou shalt hear the doors fly open before him.”

All this Darvinda saw and heard, in a detached way, as he drifted about in the air. Incorporeal, it seemed, he could see and hear anything he wished, and more than one thing at once. Nor did he see with eyes, nor did he hear with ears. Nor did he, exactly, see or hear.

There had been a time of quietness after death. Then curiosity had made him voyage through the atmosphere. Now some other thing drew him back to the platform. His death had not been a death, but only one more shedding of a skin. And returning, he was drawn down and in, and was once more clothed in body, thrusting his way from an envelope of torn flesh and severed spine, and lastly from the polite shroud, to stand upright and whole on the ghats above the river.

This, it seemed, was Agnini’s magic still, but it was true and sure as she had told him. Carelessly he stripped from the flaccid skin and the rattling bones, which had been himself, the garments she had given him, and put them on. If any observed him now they made no sign. And when he turned toward the palace, no one came to warn or mock at him.

Every door flew open with a bang in front of Darvinda. When he reached the golden room and entered it, Rupanag, who had been sitting upright with a look of horror, started to his feet. On this occasion no words were exchanged. The serpent prince grasped platters from the tables and hurled them, and as they came they seemed altered to knives and lances, but Darvinda stepped from their path, and they passed him by, each with a rushing shriek.

When he reached Rupanag, Darvinda had only to put out his hands and lay hold on him. Rupanag had by this time drawn a long dagger, but in striking it turned on a jewel at Darvinda’s hip. It was no longer the hour of Rupanag’s triumph. And Darvinda took the dagger from his enemy’s hand as a man takes a leaf from a bush, and drove it through Rupanag’s armorless skin into the furious heart.

So Rupanag ended, and his man’s body sprawled among the feast and the flowers.

“But even an immortal has a soul which cannot die,” said Agnini. “See.”

And at his foot Darvinda saw lying a serpent’s egg, and out of the egg at that instant came frantically wriggling a little brown venomless snake, newborn and bewildered, and it crawled away over the floor.

“So he must remain awhile,” said Agnini. “A little brown snake, dwelling in the lowliest crevices of the Naga city. For he died in lust and rage, and lust and rage were the cause. And they that die so deluded descend to the lowest way. But thou, lord, who died in the action of nobleness for another, aspiring to nothing more, thou art a man again, thy daylight path before thee.”

Then she murmured softly, “And thou hast freed me.”

There were other rooms to which her servants conducted him. Here he underwent a second time rituals of bathing and purification, and then, in a silent courtyard before a shrine of the god Indra, the Wielder of the Thunderbolt, Darvinda made his offerings, as was proper. And only in hanging the garland about the throat of the god did Darvinda pause a moment, a little embarrassed that once, long ago, he had thought him only a disreputable idol (his mother’s term) before realizing all gods were one and one many, and that they have a multitude of names. He begged Indra’s pardon, but from courtesy and gratitude, which are not fear.

And then there was yet one more room, hung with silks like running rivers, perfumed with incenses, with blue collyrium and smoky sandalwood, with oils and flowers. The light there was low and subtle. When Agnini had entered the golden room she had brought a kind of sunrise into it. But here, entering the dark, she was like a moon of darkness, furled in a night of blackest hair.

He kneeled to her, and placed his hand upon her foot, where the rings glimmered. His body was a man’s, and his desires also were those of a man. He knew quite well that he had won her, and better yet, that she would give herself. For there was love between them.

But when he drew her to him, her smiling eyes were sad. And he remembered all the rest of what she had told him. Of her husband, the prince for whom she had been created, her lord who was bound to wander still, and for whose sake—rather than accept another—she had returned to the bitter exile of the human earth.

So he stepped away from her, though his whole body burned and reviled him. And then the fires passed into a wonderful coolness, a sort of joy, because such a look of happiness had been born in her face. She seemed younger than the youngest child. Her soul was dancing, and took his dancing with it. And there came in those moments, after all, a communion of love, if not of the love of the flesh.

When the summit of that marveling shared tumult had passed with no words at all, she spoke to him.

“Because of this final benefit thou has rendered me, I may greet my lord, running to meet him at the first sound of his footstep, without debasement or deception. And for this, I promise thee one further gift. Valor and strength thou shalt have, beauty and favor, fortune and sweetness all thy days, but also a perfect and enduring love shall be thine, a love even as the love of demons and gods. Remember me, lord, but once, when thou hast found her.”

The darkness moved and flickered. It was so real it could not be possible it should pass. But the lovely moon, the somber moon of the woman’s face, swam on its night of hair. The walls of the room were fading. The towers and the lights beyond had lost their shape and shine.

Already the dream was ebbing away. It would soon be forgotten. There was a coldness at his back. Throat too dry, and eyes gritty from sleep, and feet sore from walking, raising his head, confused—to see the trees over the distant garden wall—The small boy stumbled down the dusty road, and through the swarming dusk, without music … .

V

Evelyn was hysterical, to the point of madness. Chaver Finlay stood and poured himself scotch, waiting until the cries had died, or paused for breath.

“And that’s why dinner is late, I take it?” he then said.

“Oh, Chaver!” she wailed, reminiscent of the jackals he had heard on the road. But one threw a stone at them, and Evelyn was not so easy to be rid of. She wilted before him, soiled by hours of tears and squawking in broiling weather, her hair practically on end and her faded eyes starting from her head. “All morning, all afternoon! All day, and not a trace of him. The servants looked everywhere. I had them all out—and then he came wandering in after sunset. I couldn’t get a thing out of him. Just something about falling asleep in the hills. Oh, Chaver, he can’t have got all that way by himself.”

“No of course he can’t. Not on foot.” The man drank. He said, “A surprising sort of adventure for our delicate little pet.” His air of contemptuous approval did nothing to help.

Evelyn began to sob. “It’s that woman,” she sniveled. “That—that—” No epithet was both vile and polite enough to be utilized. “She took him off somewhere. I know it. You know what they are. Extraordinary things happen here in this awful country. Anything might have been done to him.”

“But I take it it wasn’t?” Chaver finished the whisky. “Where is he now?”

“I sent him straight to bed.”

“I see. Well, he’ll keep, then. I’ll go and have a word with Agnini.”

“Oh, no—Chaver—no—”

“Why not? You seem to think she’s at the bottom of the mystery.”

“No, you mustn’t—”

“Don’t tell me,” said Chaver, casting after all the stone, and unerringly, “what I may and must not do.”

As he crossed the night garden with quick eager strides, between bushes that flickered tonight with fireflies, he saw his quarry almost by instinct, shadow in shade, under an orange tree near the wall. The spot was secluded, an invitation. He walked up to her, quite hidden from the bungalow and the servants’ area, and said, “What’s been going on, then? Thinking of abducting my son, maybe, and your accomplices never turned up? Too scared. As you should have been.” She said nothing, and even in the dark her eyes glowed, as if they too held fireflies, or stars. He chuckled, roughly, to demonstrate it might all be a joke. “That’s what the memsahib thinks, anyway. Taking my son and heir away to sell for immoral practices. But I don’t think you’d do that, Aggi. Murdering an old woman now, that’s more your line.” Again he waited, and she said nothing. He put out one hand and let it fall on her shoulder, which was bare. He palmed her shoulder, liking the texture of her, as he had known he would. What she had on was a little puzzling. It was nothing of Asha’s lending anymore, rather some piece of cloth taken up from somewhere and casually wound on her, and as casually, perhaps, unwound. “You did kill her, did you? The men said there was something wrong with the body. They said, it was hollow, like an empty sack, but full of mud that had been washed in and then hardened. It looked like an ordinary corpse to me.” He moved his hand downward. “But you’re all alive, aren’t you? No, don’t move away. After all, I could give you some trouble, Aggi, if I wanted to. If I reported that corpse to the authorities, and mentioned we’d had a stray wandering around here. Come on, Aggi. I’ll talk Hindi-cindy to you, if you like.” He had both hands on her now, and pressed close to her, to let her learn his readiness. “You know you want to, Aggi. You pray doing it, don’t you, everywhere, on every bloody temple. You’re full of it, you darkies—” The sound came from her mouth, close by his ear, and turned his pounding heart to stone and the heat in his groin to ice. Before he could think, Finlay had jumped away from her, and gone on stumbling backwards until he collided with another of the orange trees. His reaction was out of all proportion to what she had done. Yet it had not seemed to be: She had hissed at him. There was nothing catlike in it, nor anything human. It was the exhalation of the hunting cobra. And the sinuous shape of her against him, the weave of her head scarcely seen in the night gloom, these things had seemed snakelike too. In that split second, there between his hands and grappled to his torso—something cool and evil and untender rustled and swayed, and the great jaws gaped, the long teeth glinted, readying to deliver the paralyzing and deadly bite … .

“For God’s sake,” he said hoarsely. But out of the black of his invisible foreign garden, her woman’s voice came back at him, speaking rapidly in English, and then in Hindi, so he did not quite follow it all.

“Do what you wish,” she said. “Tell whom you wish. My wandering is done. I go elsewhere. Thou canst not harm me, thou man. And that which thy slaves found on the road, that was only mine, no other’s. The shed skin of my mortal youth and age, gone from me now I am young again, and free. But thou. Go woo thy pink-eyed wife. And for thy son—go thou and lie in the dirt at his feet, for that is thy place. Thou shalt see the sun rise in him, soul and body, while thy tiny strengths wither like old leaves. Thy way is darkness. Remember me, once, in the long and lampless night of thy life.”

With his shoulders to the slender orange tree, his ears ringing and his intestines crawling, Chaver Finlay heard then something that made it seem as if a bundle of light material had been thrown down into the grass. It would take him months to erase the impression he had that the shadow of the woman vanished, while, about the height of his boot top, something whispered away like a river through the bushes, and all the fireflies winked out.

However, it took only half an hour to push the matter temporarily from his forebrain, with the admitted help of the whisky decanter and cigarette box. And only three minutes more to reach his son’s bedroom.

“Get up, David,” the man said in a cold, penetrating and level voice, as his hand shook like a terrier at the scruff of the boy’s neck. “Get up. We have some business.”

In the semi-dark, a drift of light coming in from beyond, where Evelyn stood whimpering, the boy seemed luminous in his pale pajamas.

“You’ve been damned disobedient,” said the man. “You know that, don’t you? Going off and scaring your mother. Telling lies. All right. You’ll take your punishment. Drop your trousers and lean over the chair.”

And then, after a moment, over the noise the woman was making, came the noise of a leather belt being applied to naked eight-year-old flesh. And the man panting at the work. But no other sound.

Outside, the woman wrung her hands, suffering every pain that the boy received, as if she herself bore it for him. Such chastisements drew them closer, a mother and son, both victims of the man. And it was a dreadful beating for a little boy. She was concerned he did not scream or weep. The former, lighter beatings had always caused him to cry out—would Chaver be able to stop, without this signal of acknowledgment?

In the end, the man did stop, tiring, and abruptly aware he had gone too far. Defensively he said, “All right. You’ve been brave, I’ll give you that. Lie down now. Go on, lie down.” And then, loudly, violently, as if to a savage dog, “Lie down!”

Not properly grasping what was amiss, the woman heard fear in her husband’s voice. Startled, on a reflex, she ran forward and pushed the bedroom door fully open, so the light sluiced in and filled the room.

Her son, David, stood at the center of the room, in the light, clad merely in the unbuttoned pajama top and the blood that trickled down his legs. His fair hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, but from the unfathomed day’s exposure to the sun, she saw his body had acquired at last a deepening tan. He was less than half the height of the man, his father, yet the child seemed to dominate the entire scene. His mouth was firmly closed, his eyes tearless and wide.

“Davy,” the woman said, under her breath. “Oh, do as Daddy tells you, Davy.”

But it did not matter anymore that she called him “Davy.” The dream had ebbed away, he had forgotten it. Nonetheless, brain and heart and spirit, it had bathed him through; nameless and unremembered, yet it had recolored everything, and the dye was permanent. Now he knew himself, and what he might become, nor would he ever doubt, nor doubt the daylight path stretched before him and could not be missed. Whatever shadows scattered that path, he would pay them no heed. They were nothing now, compared to what would be his, in the golden future only years, days, moments away. And though the blood ran and the man panted and though “Davy, Davy,” the woman muttered, there was even another name, a secret name, nothing would ever touch.

Less than half the man’s height, the boy looked up. Chaver Finlay, who had not recalled the aspect of his child’s eyes, now met it, blue as a jewel and falling like the blow of a seven-foot sword across his recoiling adult mind.

Pushing past his wife, the man went away, laughing coarsely. There was nothing to do save laugh, since his consciousness could not admit what all the rest of him already saw and shouted at. Though he did sense he had beaten his son for the very last time in his life.

R. A. LAFFERTY

Company in the Wings

Ever have the uneasy feeling that someone is looking over your shoulder? Well, maybe they are, all the unborn multitude that surrounds us: Natty Bumppo, Moll Flanders, Casper Gutman, Snuffy Smith, Richard Nixon …

Richard Nixon? Well, read on … and the following sly and funny story will explain all (or nearly all), and make you master of a million unknown realms … if you are that one in a million who can remember what you see, and if you can come up with the necessary passage-penny …

R. A. Lafferty started writing in 1960, and throughout the subsequent twenty-four years he has turned out a seemingly endless string of mad and marvelous tall tales, including some of the freshest and funniest short stories ever published. In 1973 he won the Hugo Award for one of them, “Eurema’s Dam.” His books include Past Master, The Devil Is Dead, The Reefs of Earth, Okla Hannali, The Fall of Rome, Arrive at Easterwine, The Flame Is Green, Annals of Klepsis, and the collections Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, Four Stories, and Golden Gate and Other Stories. His most recent books are the collections Ringing Changes, Heart of Stone, Dear, Snake in His Bosom, and The Man Who Made Models, and the novel Half A Sky. His story “Golden Gate” was in our First Annual Collection.

I

Ahoy! and Oho, and it’s who’s for the ferry?

(The briar’s in bud and the sun going down):

And I’ll row ye so quick and I’ll row ye so steady,

And ’tis but a penny to Twickenham Town.

Twickenham Ferry—Theophile Marzials

Waking from full pleasure, coming out of vast worlds into the narrow reality, feeling them all slip away, and grasping to hold the pieces of them while their continents dissolved and their mountains toppled, holding to just one phrase that might be the key to their reconstruction, to one word even (obolus was the word)—coming full awake then with all of it lost—

Fairbridge O’Boyle had been the “morning fool” before, waking empty from exciting dreams that he could not hold on to. But there was a difference this time. He did not awake in bed, but standing and clothed. He did not know how he had spent the night, save that it had been elsewhere and that it had been pleasurable.

He was in his own room, but he knew that he had just come into it. And where had he come from? There was no key to it, unless that odd word “obolus” might be the key. It seemed more like a dream-distortion of his own name O’Boyle though. Or unless his friend Simon Frakes was the key, the skeleton key to fit the lock. Simon was very like a key in the metallic thinness of him.

And he was very like a skeleton. It always seemed as though Simon had put his flesh on carelessly and could sluff it off at any time. It was hard to believe in him when he wasn’t present: and the aroma of the pleasurable and lost night did have a certain tang of Simon to it.

“It seems to me, Simon,” Fairbridge had said to him once, “as if I had discovered you, as if you would disappear if I cast you out of my mind.”

“Don’t do it, Fairbridge. You’re playing with smoke,” Simon had protested with near excitement. “I’d rather you didn’t try that experiment. It might be painful for both of us. Keep me in the back of your mind somewhere. Even keep me forgotten there. But don’t cast me out.”

This was a funny conversation for a morning fool to be remembering now, but all conversations with his friend Simon had been a little bit odd. Simple Simon Frakes, so Fairbridge used to call him sometimes; but has anyone really understood the profundity of the mythos of Simple Simon? Simplicity is a much more complex thing than its opposite, duplicity. Simplicity is the gathering of everything together into entity. Duplicity is only the wanton scattering of the pieces again.

Morning fools really do think in such terms. Then the morning fool Fairbridge undressed and went to bed, but set the clock for only two hours hence. He was a late morning fool this day, and it would soon be afternoon. And there was another of the fabulous lectures to enjoy that afternoon.

The man who was giving the lectures was Simon Frakes, with his grin that was a two-line caricature, and with his puzzling, ironic way of talking. He was giving the inaugural series of the Trefoil Lectures, and he was making a shambles of them.

Simon’s presentation, “The Validity of Imagined Creatures,” had caused many second thoughts among his listeners. To imagine, he said, is to make images, and images may be remarkably solid. If they come out of a lively imagination they will be live images. And Simon demonstrated with a bit of stage trickery. He made a live image, that of a suddenly loquacious young girl. There was a certain nervousness that ran through all of them who watched him do this. It was only dispelled when he unmade the image again. But an uneasy feeling had begun to grow. What if there really was a grain of truth in his thesis?

His lecture, “The Tertiary Limbus,” had caused further unease. To the Limbus Patrum and the Limbus Infantum he added the Limbus Nundum Natorum. None of his listeners believed in Limbo. They didn’t believe in the limbo of the Fathers, nor in the limbo of the Infants who died before reaching reason; but it was spooky to think that there might be a third limbo, the limbo of those not yet born.

His talk, “The Multitude in the Wings,” had caused some to question his sanity, and others to question their own. It was a creepy rhapsody that set up resonances in even the dullest of minds. It wasn’t a possible thing, but all the hearers seemed vaguely to remember encounter with that multitude. It struck a chord, and the chord sang and rattled in their heads. Something would have to be done about this disquieting man.

(This day, Fairbridge O’Boyle had had his second awakening, to the clock, had risen and dressed, and had gone to Simon’s latest sortie.)

This sortie, “The Creative Imagination”, questioned a fundamental thought process. Simon began to cause a real alarm, and the falsetto chorus was raised against him. He was either kidding, or the world itself had for a long while been kidding all the people in it. And all the good and uneasy people seemed to hold Fairbridge O’Boyle responsible for the unorthodoxies of his friend Simon.

“But the difficulty with all such arguments is that they cannot be proved,” Fairbridge argued over coffee with his friend Simon after the lecture, and after the little tempest that followed it had scattered for a while.

“Oh, but I proved it to you last night, Fairbridge,” Simon said easily. “Have you forgotten the proof?”

“Worse than that, Simon: I’ve forgotten last night. I’ve meant to ask you whether we were together last night.”

“Together, yes, except for a few times you deserted me for greener folk. Let us ride the same horse to another country then. Say what you consider proof and I will furnish it.”

“The things would have to be experienced literally for proof.”

“Then we will literally experience them. Get your hat.”

“Where are we going?”

“Oh, to one of the purlieus of the limbi. Man, don’t hang back! The crossing-over is always one of the shining things, and it never grows old. The crossing itself is worth almost everything. And then it’s to arrive at the second greatest adventure of them all, and you don’t even have to die to achieve it. There are one billion oysters that are yours for the opening, and every one of them is a world. Pick one!”

“How? How?”

“Oh, here’s maybe the easiest of a billion ways.”

Simon Frakes drew a five-line diagram on a piece of paper. Then he plucked it off the paper and it was solid in his hand.

“What is it?” Fairbridge shrilled.

“It’s just a gadget. The name of it is the ‘obolus’.”

“But that’s the word I hung on to. It’s the name of an old coin.”

“Who says a coin can’t be a pentagram? Yes, it is a coin. It’s the passage-penny.”

“Could I do that?” Fairbridge demanded.

“You could if you remembered it, Fairbridge, but you probably won’t. You’ve seen it done before, and you’ve forgotten it completely.”

Simon’s grin was a two-line caricature. Then Simon faded out and only the grin remained. “Come along,” the grin said, and it moved off. Remembering it as something that had happened before, Fairbridge O’Boyle, stumbling and hurrying, followed the grin out of the door and down the now darkening Oswald Lane on the second greatest adventure of them all.

Oswald Lane is two hundred years old and only two hundred and twenty yards long. Its locations are all numbered and listed and taxed. There are only a certain number of doors there, and only a certain number of persons living behind them. There is not room for an entire unknown world to exist there, surely not room for millions of such worlds.

Fairbridge followed Simon Frakes (or Simon’s grin, and a bit more of him by then) through a door where there had never been a door before. One shining moment that could not be measured in time! It was the crossing-over itself that was worth almost everything! It was unforgettable, of course, and incomparable. Whoever has crossed-over can never be the same again. Ah, but everybody in the world has crossed-over at least once, one way or the other.

Everybody in these new worlds had not necessarily crossed-over though. Fairbridge and Simon were into new worlds then, without the moment itself being at all dismal. They were into a large room that was itself an elusive world; and there was no room for so large a room in all of Oswald Lane.

It was a joke, of course. It was one of the happy, enduring jokes that couldn’t be spoiled. Fairbridge laughed with delight. A billion choices there were, but there couldn’t be a more apt choice than this one.

One couldn’t take in all that room at once. It was a detailed world of too many dimensions, yet the pattern that Fairbridge O’Boyle got was one of delightful scantiness. How to example it? What thing to take of the many for its mark?

In that realm, a chair might have front legs but no back legs, you see. If it were in a certain perspective where the back legs couldn’t be seen, what need to have them? The room did not have four walls all at one time. It had sometimes two walls and sometimes three. However could you see all four walls at one time?

If one thing hid another, it was not necessary for the hidden thing to be. A person seen in profile had no need of another side of his face. Time enough to have it when it would be visible. If you looked fast enough you could catch that world and its people unlined and abridged, but you had to look fast.

“What is it, Simon?” Fairbridge asked. “Not that it matters. It’s amazing. Are they all so tricky and happy?”

“It’s one of the pseudo-bucolic sets. Ah, there are countless ones much more tricky and much happier, but this is an easy one for beginners, and you remain persistently a beginner.”

“Papa says for you to come in,” said a girl that Fairbridge had always known and with a name that he would never remember. “Grandpa says to give the young jackanapes some pop-skull. Great-grandpa says that you look like a peddler. Are you?”

Did she really speak? Or were her words lettered in a cartoonist’s balloon over her head? No matter. In her pleasant and unsubstantial way she spoke. This was glad simplicity itself, which is integrated and total simultaneous being. And the pop-skull was joltingly excellent. There was a curious lack that wasn’t felt as a lack.

“Do you know that this pop-skull is only half a bottle?” Fairbridge asked. “Not in the sense that it’s only half full, but there’s no back to the bottle. I turn it around, and then there’s a back but no front.” He looked at the world in new amazement. This world was too staged a thing to be real.

“Why, this is the archetype!” he cried. “The frame we are in here, what did Simon call it? Shall we call it pseudo-bucolic social satire?”

“Yes, let’s do,” the girl agreed. “It’s fun to call things by names like that.”

Dionysus was there, but as a clown. But he had appeared a dozen times as a comic-strip clown with his real identity unknown. This was like a barn dance, but it was a world as well as a barn, and there were tens of thousands of folks here—Cousin Claude the country clown and Cousin Clarence the city dude, Clarabelle and Clarissa and five thousand other cousins, scampers and gaffers and gawkers of all ages and sexes, patch-pants’ d and white-bearded and coon-crazy and merry.

They drank mountain-dew and green-fog and panther-sweat and golden-moonshine. There was round-singing and ballad-singing and country-singing; and Fairbridge became drunk with it all. There were jokes and bejangles and stories, the rich originals of them all. Did you know that some of the oldest jokes in the world haven’t been told in the world yet?

And anomalous intrusions? Whatever would we do without the wonderful anomalous intrusions? Old trains were running through the room, hooting and screaming; and with red-hot pieces falling off them. And many of these trains were never to appear on ordinary earth. And the father of the scanty-clad girl (there was no back to her dress, or to her, unless she turned around, and then there was no front to either), the father came with a shot-gun that was like an elephant gun.

“All right, young jig-snapper,” the old father said. “You have jazzed my daughter. Now we have the marrying.”

“This is a primordial village psychic module. You know that, don’t you?” Fairbridge said to the outrageous but not really outraged father. After all, Fairbridge O’Boyle was a professor.

“Yes, I suppose it is,” the father agreed. “Are you ready for the ceremony?”

“And the shot-gun motif is absolutely primordial,” Fairbridge continued. “I didn’t realize that before.”

“The shot-gun is prime,” the father said, “but it blasts.” And he blasted the back-side of Fairbridge clear off with it. Oh well, it wouldn’t show unless Fairbridge turned around. He might as well join these merry people in their attributes.

“Simon, you say that there are millions of such universes and all different?” Fairbridge gasped, and he was now filled with the enormity of the idea.

“Everything that is is,” Simon said simply. “Come, we’ll visit more of them.”

“Drop back any time,” the girl said. “There’s always some of us home.”

They visited dozens, hundreds of universes. They had, in fact, been visiting countless of them simultaneously, and Fairbridge found himself to be hundreds of involved persons, and all of them himself. This was hilarity, this was transcendence. Some of these worlds were incredibly urbane and sophisticated, even though the people of them were barefooted—till you happened to look at their feet. Then, somehow and momentarily, they acquired hasty shoes. You could catch them unshod for a bare instant. Some of the worlds were bucolic in a way that even that first module world couldn’t be. Some were angelic, some were rowdy, some were mind-bursting with their very intellectuality. Some had a wit with such bite that they snapped whole members off one. Simon Frakes and Fairbridge O’Boyle crowded whole lifetimes into that evening and night. These were the multitudes beyond count, the absolutely unforgettable things.

And Fairbridge woke in the morning, standing and clothed, a morning fool with the manifold memories of the past night slipping away from him forever.

II

What bridge and what ferry, what bright ford, is this it?

What half-penny passage so open to get!

If miss you this crossing, forever you’ll miss it

To worlds in the wings all unbornable yet.

Cocytus Crossing—Benny B–Flat

That evening, Simon Frakes lectured again to all the learned folks:

“Please understand one thing: all imagined things have reality. They are not because we imagine them. We imagine them because they are. Imagination is only the encounter with their reality. From the Olympian gods to Boob McNutt, all are persons. To imagine the non-existing is an impossibility. All are with the billions in that limbus. All are entities in the psychic pool. I speak literally.

“All are real: Kate Fennigate, Moll Flanders, Dirk Stroeve, Ester Jack, Audifax O’Hanlon, Percy Gryce, Virginia Carvel, Count Mosco, Dinah Shadd, Octavia Beaupree, Richard Nixon, Flagman Thiel, Gil Blas, Red Hanrahan, Handy Andy, Sebastian Marchman, Gippo Nolan, Mildred Rogers, Isolde, Deirdre, Frank Couperwood, Sir Kid Rackrent, Jasper Petulengro, Cy Slocum, Lucy Dashwood, Hairbreadth Harry, Julien Sorel, Felix Kennaston, Harold Teen, Matthew Bramble, Abe Kibble, Horatio Maltravers, Constance Povey, Joe Calash, Widow Wadman, Genevieve Rod, Polly Peachum, J. Hartford Oakdale, Nat Buntline, Meg Marsh, Gavin Dishart, Casper Gutman, all are real.”

“You mean, of course,” said David Dean, who was one of those responsible for the lectures, “that they are real in the sense that they bear a verisimilitude to inner reality, that their expression rings true, that they are valid imaginative creatures.”

“No, I don’t believe that I mean anything like that at all,” Simon said. “You miss my point. I say that all the entities in the psychic pool are real

(is there any other way to say ‘real’?)—that they are beings as much as you are a being, that those we know are only those recognized by chance, and that the others are no less real. All are real: Barney Google, Jurgis Rudkus, Bounder J. Roundheels, Morgan Penwolf, Madonna Zilia, Wolf Larsen, Hippolyte Schinner, Cliff Sutherland, Abu Kir and Abu Sir (they are a pair), Madame Verdurin, Arabella Allen, Andy Gump, Elmer Tuggle, Lorelei Lee—”

“Will you come to your point, Simon!” Fairbridge O’Boyle suggested. The listeners were beginning to look at each other uneasily.

“I am on my point completely,” Simon maintained. “One cannot give too many instances: Salvation Yeo, Horseshoe Robinson, David Harum, Florence Udley, Gregers Werle, Daisy Buchanan, Delphine de Nucingen, Paul Bunyan, Becky Sharp, George Bungle, Daisy Bell, Whiskey Johnny, Casey Jones, Althea Pontifex, every person in song, story, picture, play, dream, or delirium is real. Wing Biddlebaum, Happy Hooligan, Snuffy Smith, Lady Sarah Macgreggor, Peter Canavan, Colley Cibber, Enoch Oates.”

“Are there many more of these?” asked Robert Stokes, who was one of the listeners and who seemed to be developing a nervous condition.

“Billions of them,” said Simon.

“Is it necessary to name them all?”

“Apparently it is. I tell you that there is a multitude in the wings, and you do not believe me. Long John Silver, Major Hoople, Madame Lazonga, Auguste Dupin, Jenny Blanchard, Jeff Peters, Barnacle Bill—these are real.”

“You are saying that every human type is already in theoretical existence and waiting to be recognized?” ventured Robert Stokes.

“No, Robert. My words seem to convey nothing to you,” Simon lamented. “I am saying that every possible being is in actual existence always. I am saying that, though only a fraction of them are born physically into the world (that part is accidental and unimportant and can often be had for the asking), many others are made manifest by the thing known loosely as folk-lore. I am saying that these, and the myriad others not made known to you at all, are no less real.”

But Simon Frakes was not able to convince his listeners. He named another hundred, and then another thousand, instances. The audience became restive: and that was strange, because the subject was an interesting one.

Benny B–Flat visited Simon Frakes and Fairbridge O’Boyle late one evening. Benny was a song writer.

“Now, gentlemen and professors,” Benny said to them, “I have a small hatchet of my own to grind. I have heard about this new frolic and I will not beat around the boscage. I believe that there is something in it for me. You talk about this psychic sea where all possible persons and gadgets already exist. And you say that the new things in the world are only old things taken out of that sea, and that we create nothing. Gentlemen, I am looking for the dipper to dip into that sea. Where can I find it?”

“Here, if you are to find it anywhere,” Simon said. “What do you want to dip out?”

“Tunes, tunes. I am a tune-smith. We grind them up and we distort them, but first we have to have them. If all possible tunes are already in existence, then who has custody of them?”

“Oh, Fiddle-Foot Jones and ten thousand others,” Simon said.

“Can you arrange for me to meet them?” Benny asked. “And what is the tariff?”

“I can arrange it, Benny B–F,” said Simon, “and the only tariff is the little passage coin that we make ourselves. For the smart ones it’s easy.”

“I’m smart. And these out-of-the-world tunes, how will they be?”

“Familiar, Benny, as though you had known them forever: yet new and successful. They will serve your purpose. You believe, and others doubt. Here! I draw five lines on a sheet of paper. Not any five lines. These five lines. Then I pluck the drawing off the paper and make it real. It doesn’t look like a coin, but you use it as a passage coin. Can you do that?”

“I got it, Cy,” Benny B-Flat said. “You just have to show Benny a thing once. There are folks who wouldn’t even know that this thing is a key or a coin. They wouldn’t know where to look for the river or the door that it fits. I’m glad I’m not one of the slow folks. I’ve got it now, and thanks.”

“Ah but, Benny, there’s a catch,” Simon warned. “You’ll remember it only if you’re one person in a million.”

“I’m one in a million,” said Benny B–Flat. But Fairbridge O’Boyle wasn’t one in a million. Fairbridge was an ordinary man who now worried because he woke up every morning standing and clothed and with his hat on his head. He woke with residue of unremembered pleasure and with frustration of loss. He worried because he didn’t know where he spent his nights.

“I ought to have a wife,” he moaned. “I bet she’d find out where I spend my nights.” But he felt more and more that Simon Frakes was involved in the mystery.

“Simon,” he said to his wispy friend. “I go somewhere at night. I see something. And then I forget. But it gnaws me. What do I do at night?”

“Fairbridge, you cross a river you don’t believe is there. You visit the multitudes which you swear do not exist. Amnesia of the visits is often the price of the visits. Once more I show you a device, and perhaps it will stick with you. There is a Greek name for it, and a child’s name for it, and these are the lines of it. See how simply they’re drawn! Five lines, that’s all. You should be able to retain them, but they have a slippery quality. Do you remember who used them when you were a child?”

“No. Nobody used them. I have never seen lines like those before.”

“But you have seen them. You have seen them and used them every evening for the last ten days. And you saw them when you were a child. In every group of children there is one who knows them. It is appointed that there should be one such child in every group. One day you played the game of ‘Disappear’, and he used the device and disappeared. And later he took you all with him on the passage over that river, on the bright crossing to the ‘billion worlds’. But later you forgot about it. And in most cases, the child who was the adept also forgot about it.”

“What’s the name of the river, Simon?”

“Cocytus, of course.”

“But that’s a mythological river.”

“Mythology is one trick to avoid complete forgetting.”

“What is the name of the device, or the lines?”

“Obolus, of course.”

“But that’s the name of an ancient and almost mythological coin. It’s the word I wake up in the morning remembering when everything else has slid away. And it’s myself, O’Boyle. But what is it all, Simon? What is the connection?”

“It is only the making of an image solid, Fairbridge, ‘imaginint’ in the true sense. Draw the lines on the paper. Then pluck them off in your hand. But with this thing you can cross the river to the worlds beyond the horizon.”

“This time I’ll remember, Simon. We’ll visit a hundred universes, and I’ll remember, remember, remember.”

Fairbridge O’Boyle did visit many more than a hundred universes with Simon Frakes that night. He swore that he’d remember them all. And he didn’t. He woke at dawn, standing and clothed and oblivious, a morning fool.

Simon Frakes was giving the last of his lectures. His pleasant grin had taken on a look of futility. He hadn’t been able to communicate with his listeners well, and whose was the fault of that?

“If I haven’t convinced you by now, then it may be hopeless,” Simon told his hearers. “‘If you will not believe me, neither will you believe one risen from the dead’ is one of your own scripture sayings. For my own case I can only say ‘If you will not believe me, neither will you believe one who is not yet born’. Every possible thought has already been thought out, every riddle has been unriddled, every epigram spoken. You have only to tap them. They have been in existence for millennia.”

“Have you been born, Mr. Frakes?” Professor Dodgson asked quickly.

“No, of course not. Do I look as if I’d been born?”

“And where in space is this limbus of yours?” demanded Robert Stokes. “Just where is this teeming limbo of the unborn where everything already exists?”

“It is fragmented. It is protean. It is everywhere,” said Simon. “Through a door and across a river. And there it is.”

“Then why can’t we visit it? That would be the only proof.”

“A dozen of you here present have visited it, Robert. And you yourself have done so several times. But you are not fully convinced. And you forget.”

“You are saying that this psychic sea is a sort of common human memory?” Robert fumbled. “But you cannot mean that it is real in the same sense that—”

Simon Frakes swore a resounding oath from the limbus. It had never been heard in the world before. But it had a familiar ring to it, and it would catch on.

“I thought a series of lectures by a man unborn would be interesting to you,” Simon said finally, his near-anger having passed. “I intended no more than a friendly visit from my country to yours, and I am sorry if it has gone amiss.”

“You speak as if you were one of them,” said David Dean. “Your lectures have been interesting, though perhaps not very informative. We are of that adulterous generation. We need a sign.”

“Oh very well,” Simon sighed, “but the sign will not convince you.”

Simon Frakes stood there with his grin that was a caricature as a cartoonist might have drawn it. He was there. Then only his grin was there, mocking them in the empty air.

“I’m sure that I know that grin from somewhere,” Professor Dodgson mumbled. “Ah, but memory is a cat-like thing. It creeps away soft-footed, and is gone.”

“If you do not believe this, then you will not believe anything,” said the grin of Simon Frakes. Then the grin itself vanished, and that was the last that anyone ever saw of Simon Frakes in that neighborhood.

“We are undone,” said David Dean. “We engaged a common trickster, a stage magician, to give the first series of the Trefoil Lectures. I doubt if we will be able to continue them under that name. To disappear from a lecture platform into thin air! How corny can you get! How could you have been taken in by that charlatan, Fairbridge?”

“I taken in? I did not engage him, though he did become my friend.”

“You certainly did engage him,” said Robert Stokes. “We three are the selection committee. I didn’t engage him. And David didn’t.”

“I didn’t either,” Fairbridge argued, “but somehow we agreed that Simon Frakes was our man. We accepted him before we ever saw him. We selected him, I now believe, before we even knew that there was such a man. And it appears that there wasn’t.”

One evening, Fairbridge O’Boyle walked down Oswald Lane knocking at all the doors, trying to find something that he had lost. Just what it was, he had forgotten, but he missed it mightily. But it is hard to phrase the questions about that emptiness he felt.

The people in Oswald Lane all knew Fairbridge. They knew him as a young professor and timeless eccentric. But they were not able to help him. They did not have either barn or cavern or river or contingent worlds behind their doors. They did not have multitude upon multitude, nor any primordial stuff at all.

Well, had they any unborn persons there? Yes, one lady said: it should be born in September.

“That isn’t quite what I meant,” Fairbridge stumbled. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I’m glad,” the lady said, “we’ve wanted one for so long.”

But these were the people behind the regular doors that were numbered and listed. Where were the other doors? Fairbridge couldn’t find the doors he sought: he couldn’t find any of the doors that oughtn’t to be there. And he couldn’t remember what should be behind those doors if he found them.

So the good-will mission of Simon Frakes had been without effect. Nobody had understood what he was trying to tell them, not even his friend Fairbridge O’Boyle. And nobody knows how to visit the myriad and interesting and valid worlds of the unborn, the company waiting in the wings.

Except that in every group of children there is one who knows. He will do the trick, and the other children will wonder a little. And after a while they will forget to wonder. After a little while, even the child who knew how to do it will forget all about it. And except for that—

—and except for Benny B–Flat—Benny had to be shown a thing only once. He is an opportunist who is not likely to forget anything to his advantage.

He still goes and listens to Fiddle-Foot Jones and a thousand others in a thousand worlds. He brings back the tunes that serve his purpose, so he stands high in his profession. His loot is on all the jukes, and they have what is necessary for good tunes:

They sound familiar. And they are out of this world.

GENE WOLFE

A Cabin on the Coast

Here’s another brilliant story by Gene Wolfe, whose “The Map” appears earlier in this book. In that story, Wolfe took us through time to an almost unimaginably distant future Earth; here, the story instead takes place in our own familiar everyday world, but confronts us with a Power old and cold and strange, one as chameleonic as it is implacable …

It might have been a child’s drawing of a ship. He blinked, and blinked again. There were masts and sails, surely. One stack, perhaps another. If the ship were really there at all. He went back to his father’s beach cottage, climbed the five wooden steps, wiped his feet on the coco mat.

Lissy was still in bed, but awake, sitting up now. It must have been the squeaking of the steps, he thought. Aloud he said, “Sleep good?”

He crossed the room and kissed her. She caressed him and said, “You shouldn’t go swimming without a suit, dear wonderful swimmer. How was the Pacific?”

“Peaceful. Cold. It’s too early for people to be up, and there’s nobody within a mile of here anyway.”

“Get into bed, then. How about the fish?”

“Salt water makes the sheets sticky. The fish have seen them before.” He went to the corner, where a showerhead poked from the wall. The beach cottage—Lissy called it a cabin—had running water of the sometimes and rusty variety.

“They might bite ’em off. Sharks, you know. Little ones.”

“Castrating woman.” The shower coughed, doused him with icy spray, coughed again.

“You look worried.”

“No.”

“Is it your dad?”

He shook his head, then thrust it under the spray, fingers combing his dark curly hair.

“You think he’ll come out here? Today?”

He withdrew, considering. “If he’s back from Washington, and he knows we’re here.”

“But he couldn’t know, could he?”

He turned off the shower and grabbed a towel, already damp and a trifle sandy. “I don’t see how.”

“Only he might guess.” Lissy was no longer smiling. “Where else could we go? Hey, what did we do with my underwear?”

“Your place. Your folks’. Any motel.”

She swung long golden legs out of bed, still holding the sheet across her lap. Her breasts were nearly perfect hemispheres, except for the tender protrusions of their pink nipples. He decided he had never seen breasts like that. He sat down on the bed beside her. “I love you very much,” he said. “You know that?”

It made her smile again. “Does that mean you’re coming back to bed?” “If you want me to.”

“I want a swimming lesson. What will people say if I tell them I came here and didn’t go swimming?”

He grinned at her. “That it’s that time of the month.”

“You know what you are? You’re filthy!” She pushed him. “Absolutely filthy! I’m going to bite your ears off.” Tangled in the sheet, they fell off the bed together. “There they are!”

“There what are?”

“My bra and stuff. We must have kicked them under the bed. Where are our bags?”

“Still in the trunk. I never carried them in.”

“Would you get mine? My swimsuit’s in it.”

“Sure,” he said.

“And put on some pants!”

“My suit’s in my bag, too.” He found his trousers and got the keys to the Triumph. Outside the sun was higher, the chill of the fall morning nearly gone. He looked for the ship and saw it. Then it winked out like a star.

That evening they made a fire of driftwood and roasted the big greasy Italian sausages he had brought from town, making giant hot dogs by clamping them in French bread. He had brought red supermarket wine, too; they chilled it in the Pacific. “I never ate this much in my life,” Lissy said.

“You haven’t eaten anything yet.”

“I know, but just looking at this sandwich would make me full if I wasn’t so hungry.” She bit off the end. “Cuff tough woof.”

“What?”

“Castrating woman. That’s what you called me this morning, Tim. Now this is a castrating woman.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

“You sound like my mother. Give me some wine. You’re hogging it.”

He handed the bottle over. “It isn’t bad, if you don’t object to a complete lack of character.”

“I sleep with you, don’t I?”

“I have character, it’s just all rotten.”

“You said you wanted to get married.”

“Let’s go. You can finish that thing in the car.”

“You drank half the bottle. You’re too high to drive.”

“Bullshoot.”

Lissy giggled. “You just said bullshoot. Now that’s character!”

He stood up. “Come on, let’s go. It’s only five hundred miles to Reno. We can get married there in the morning.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“If you are.”

“Sit down.”

“You were testing me,” he said. “That’s not fair, now is it?”

“You’ve been so worried all day. I wanted to see if it was about me—if you thought you’d made a terrible mistake.”

“We’ve made a mistake,” he said. “I was trying to fix it just now.”

“You think your dad is going to make it rough for you—”

“Us.”

“—for us because it might hurt him in the next election.”

He shook his head. “Not that. All right, maybe partly that. But he means it, too. You don’t understand him.”

“I’ve got a father myself.”

“Not like mine. Ryan was almost grown up before he left Ireland. Taught by nuns and all that. Besides, I’ve got six older brothers and two sisters. You’re the oldest kid. Ryan’s probably at least fifteen years older than your folks.”

“Is that really his name? Ryan Neal?”

“His full name is Timothy Ryan Neal, the same as mine. I’m Timothy, Jr. He used Ryan when he went into politics because there was another Tim Neal around then, and we’ve always called me Tim to get away from the Junior.”

“I’m going to call him Tim again, like the nuns must have when he was young. Big Tim. You’re Little Tim.”

“O.K. with me. I don’t know if Big Tim is going to like it.”

Something was moving, it seemed, out where the sun had set. Something darker against the dark horizon.

“What made you Junior anyway? Usually it’s the oldest boy.”

“He didn’t want it, and would never let Mother do it. But she wanted to, and I was born during the Democratic convention that year.”

“He had to go, of course.”

“Yeah, he had to go, Lissy. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand politics at all. They hoped I’d hold off for a few days, and what the hell, Mother’d had eight with no problems. Anyway, he was used to it—he was the youngest of seven boys himself. So she got to call me what she wanted.”

“But then she died.” The words sounded thin and lonely against the pounding of the surf.

“Not because of that.”

Lissy upended the wine bottle; he saw her throat pulse three times. “Will I die because of that, Little Tim?”

“I don’t think so.” He tried to think of something gracious and comforting. “If we decide we want children, that’s the risk I have to take.”

“You have to take? Bullshoot.”

“That both of us have to take. Do you think it was easy for Ryan, raising nine kids by himself?”

“You love him, don’t you?”

“Sure I love him. He’s my father.”

“And now you think you might be ruining things for him. For my sake.”

“That’s not why I want us to be married, Lissy.”

She was staring into the flames; he was not certain she had even heard him. “Well, now I know why his pictures look so grim. So gaunt.”

He stood up again. “If you’re through eating …”

“You want to go back to the cabin? You can screw me right here on the beach—there’s nobody here but us.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Then why go in there and look at the walls? Out here we’ve got the fire and the ocean. The moon ought to be up pretty soon.”

“It would be warmer.”

“With just that dinky little kerosene stove? I’d rather sit here by the fire. In a minute I’m going to send you off to get me some more wood. You can run up to the cabin and get a shirt, too, if you want to.”

“I’m O.K.”

“Traditional roles. Big Tim must have told you all about them. The woman has the babies and keeps the home fires burning. You’re not going to end up looking like him, though, are you, Little Tim?”

“I suppose so. He used to look just like me.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “He had his picture taken just after he got into politics. He was running for ward committeeman, and he had a poster made. We’ve still got the picture, and it looks like me with a high collar and a funny hat.”

“She knew, didn’t she?” Lissy said. For a moment he did not understand what she meant. “Now go and get some more wood. Only don’t wear yourself out, because when you come back we’re going to take care of that little thing that’s bothering you, and we’re going to spend the night on the beach.”

When he came back she was asleep, but he woke her carrying her up to the beach cottage.

Next morning he woke up alone. He got up and showered and shaved, supposing that she had taken the car into town to get something for breakfast. He had filled the coffeepot and put it on before he looked out the shoreside window and saw the Triumph still waiting near the road.

There was nothing to be alarmed about, of course. She had awakened before he had and gone out for an early dip. He had done the same thing himself the morning before. The little patches of green cloth that were her bathing suit were hanging over the back of a rickety chair, but then they were still damp from last night. Who would want to put on a damp, clammy suit? She had gone in naked, just as he had.

He looked out the other window, wanting to see her splashing in the surf, waiting for him. The ship was there, closer now, rolling like a derelict. No smoke came from its clumsy funnel and no sails were set, but dark banners hung from its rigging. Then there was no ship, only wheeling gulls and the empty ocean. He called her name, but no one answered.

He put on his trunks and a jacket and went outside. A wind had smoothed the sand. The tide had come, obliterating their fire, reclaiming the driftwood he had gathered.

For two hours he walked up and down the beach, calling, telling himself there was nothing wrong. When he forced himself not to think of Lissy dead, he could only think of the headlines, the ninety seconds of ten o’clock news, how Ryan would look, how Pat—all his brothers—would look at him. And when he turned his mind from that, Lissy was dead again, her pale hair snarled with kelp as she rolled in the surf, green crabs feeding from her arms.

He got into the Triumph and drove to town. In the little brick station he sat beside the desk of a fat cop and told his story.

The fat cop said, “Kid, I can see why you want us to keep it quiet.”

Tim said nothing. There was a paperweight on the desk—a baseball of white glass.

“You probably think we’re out to get you, but we’re not. Tomorrow we’ll put out a missing persons report, but we don’t have to say anything about you or the senator in it, and we won’t.”

“Tomorrow?”

“We got to wait twenty-four hours, in case she should show up. That’s the law. But kid—” The fat cop glanced at his notes.

“Tim.”

“Right. Tim. She ain’t going to show up. You got to get yourself used to that.”

“She could be …” Without wanting to, he let it trail away.

“Where? You think she snuck off and went home? She could walk out to the road and hitch, but you say her stuff’s still there. Kidnapped? Nobody could have pulled her out of bed without waking you up. Did you kill her?”

“No!” Tears he could not hold back were streaming down his cheeks.

“Right. I’ve talked to you and I don’t think you did. But you’re the only one that could have. If her body washes up, we’ll have to look into that.”

Tim’s hands tightened on the wooden arms of the chair. The fat cop pushed a box of tissues across the desk.

“Unless it washes up, though, it’s just a missing person, O.K.? But she’s dead, kid, and you’re going to have to get used to it. Let me tell you what happened.” He cleared his throat.

“She got up while you were still asleep, probably about when it started to get light. She did just what you thought she did—went out for a nice refreshing swim before you woke up. She went out too far, and probably she got a cramp. The ocean’s cold as hell now. Maybe she yelled, but if she did she was too far out, and the waves covered it up. People think drowners holler like fire sirens, but they don’t—they don’t have that much air. Sometimes they don’t make any noise at all.”

Tim stared at the gleaming paperweight.

“The current here runs along the coast—you probably know that. Nobody ought to go swimming without somebody around, but sometimes it seems like everybody does it. We lose a dozen or so a year. In maybe four or five cases we find them. That’s all.”

The beach cottage looked abandoned when he returned. He parked the Triumph and went inside and found the stove still burning, his coffee perked to tar. He took the pot outside, dumped the coffee, scrubbed the pot with beach sand and rinsed it with salt water. The ship, which had been invisible through the window of the cottage, was almost plain when he stood waist-deep. He heaved the coffeepot back to the shore and swam out some distance, but when he straightened up in the water, the ship was gone.

Back inside he made fresh coffee and packed Lissy’s things in her suitcase. When that was done, he drove into town again. Ryan was still in Washington, but Tim told his secretary where he was. “Just in case anybody reports me missing,” he said.

She laughed. “It must be pretty cold for swimming.”

“I like it,” he told her. “I want to have at least one more long swim.”

“All right, Tim. When he calls, I’ll let him know. Have a good time.”

“Wish me luck,” he said, and hung up. He got a hamburger and more coffee at a Jack-in-the-Box and went back to the cottage and walked a long way along the beach.

He had intended to sleep that night, but he did not. From time to time he got up and looked out the window at the ship, sometimes visible by moonlight, sometimes only a dark presence in the lower night sky. When the first light of dawn came, he put on his trunks and went into the water.

For a mile or more, as well as he could estimate the distance, he could not see it. Then it was abruptly close, the long oars like the legs of a water spider, the funnel belching sparks against the still-dim sky, sparks that seemed to become new stars.

He swam faster then, knowing that if the ship vanished he would turn back and save himself, knowing, too, that if it only retreated before him, retreated forever, he would drown. It disappeared behind a cobalt wave, reappeared. He sprinted and grasped at the sea-slick shaft of an oar, and it was like touching a living being. Quite suddenly he stood on the deck, with no memory of how he came there.

Bare feet pattered on the planks, but he saw no crew. A dark flag lettered with strange script flapped aft, and some vague recollection of a tour of a naval ship with his father years before made him touch his forehead. There was a sound that might have been laughter or many other things. The captain’s chair would be aft, too, he thought. He went there, bracing himself against the wild roll, and found a door.

Inside, something black crouched upon a dais. “I’ve come for Lissy,” Tim said.

There was no reply, but a question hung in the air. He answered it almost without intending to. “I’m Timothy Ryan Neal, and I’ve come for Lissy. Give her back to me.”

A light, it seemed, dissolved the blackness. Cross-legged on the dais, a slender man in tweeds sucked at a long clay pipe. “It’s Irish, are ye?” he asked.

“American,” Tim said.

“With such a name? I don’t believe ye. Where’s yer feathers?”

“I want her back,” Tim said again.

“An’ if ye don’t get her?”

“Then I’ll tear this ship apart. You’ll have to kill me or take me, too.”

“Spoken like a true son of the ould sod,” said the man in tweeds. He scratched a kitchen match on the sole of his boot and lit his pipe. “Sit down, will ye? I don’t fancy lookin’ up like that. It hurts me neck. Sit down, and ’tis possible we can strike an agreement.”

“This is crazy,” Tim said. “The whole thing is crazy.”

“It is that,” the man in tweeds replied. “An’ there’s much, much more comin’. Ye’d best brace for it, Tim me lad. Now sit down.”

There was a stout wooden chair behind Tim where the door had been. He sat. “Are you about to tell me you’re a leprechaun? I warn you, I won’t believe it.”

“Me? One o’ them scamperin’, thievin’, cobblin’ little misers? I’d shoot meself. Me name’s Daniel O‘Donoghue, King o’ Connaught. Do ye believe that, now?”

“No,” Tim said.

“What would ye believe, then?”

“That this is—some way, somehow—what people call a saucer. That you and your crew are from a planet of another sun.”

Daniel laughed. “‘Tis a close encounter you’re havin’, is it? Would ye like to see me as a tiny green man wi’ horns like a snail’s? I can do that, too.”

“Don’t bother.”

“All right, I won’t, though ‘tis a good shape. A man can take it and be whatever he wants, one o’ the People o’ Peace or a bit o’ a man from Mars. I’ve used it for both, and there’s nothin’ better.”

“You took Lissy,” Tim said.

“And how would ye be knowin’ that?”

“I thought she’d drowned.”

“Did ye now?”

“And that this ship—or whatever it is—was just a sign, an omen. I talked to a policeman and he as good as told me, but I didn’t really think about what he said until last night, when I was trying to sleep.”

“Is it a dream yer havin’? Did ye ever think of that?”

“If it’s a dream, it’s still real,” Tim said doggedly. “And anyway, I saw your ship when I was awake, yesterday and the day before.”

“Or yer dreamin’ now ye did. But go on wi’ it.”

“He said Lissy couldn’t have been abducted because I was in the same bed, and that she’d gone out for a swim in the morning and drowned. But she could have been abducted, if she had gone out for the swim first. If someone had come for her with a boat. And she wouldn’t have drowned, because she didn’t swim good enough to drown. She was afraid of the water. We went in yesterday, and even with me there, she would hardly go in over her knees. So it was you.”

“Yer right, ye know,” Daniel said. He formed a little steeple of his fingers. “‘Twas us.”

Tim was recalling stories that had been read to him when he was a child. “Fairies steal babies, don’t they? And brides. Is that why you do it? So we’ll think that’s who you are?”

“Bless ye, ‘tis true,” Daniel told him. “’Tis the Fair Folk we are. The jinn o’ the desert, too, and the saucer riders ye say ye credit, and forty score more. Would ye be likin’ to see me wi’ me goatskin breeches and me panpipe?” He chuckled. “Have ye never wondered why we’re so much alike the world over? Or thought that we don’t always know just which shape’s the best for a place, so the naiads and the dryads might as well be the ladies o’ the Deeny Shee? Do ye know what the folk o’ the Barb’ry Coast call the hell that’s under their sea?”

Tim shook his head.

“Why, ’tis Domdaniel. I wonder why that is, now. Tim, ye say ye want this girl.”

“That’s right.”

“An’ ye say there’ll be trouble and plenty for us if ye don’t have her. But let me tell ye now that if ye don’t get her, wi’ our blessin’ to boot, ye’ll drown—hold your tongue, can’t ye, for ’tis worse than that—if ye don’t get her wi’ our blessin’, ‘twill be seen that ye were drownin’ now. Do ye take me meaning?”

“I think so. Close enough.”

“Ah, that’s good, that is. Now here’s me offer. Do ye remember how things stood before we took her?”

“Of course.”

“They’ll stand so again, if ye but do what I tell ye. ‘Tis yerself that will remember, Tim Neal, but she’ll remember nothin’. An’ the truth of it is, there’ll be nothin’ to remember, for it’ll all be gone, every stick of it. This policeman ye spoke wi’, for instance. Ye’ve me word that ye will not have done it.”

“What do I have to do?” Tim asked.

“Service. Serve us. Do whatever we ask of ye. We’d sooner have a broth of a girl like yer Lissy than a great hulk of a lad like yerself, but then, too, we’d sooner be havin’ one that’s willin’, for the unwillin’ girls are everywhere—I don’t doubt but ye’ve seen it yerself. A hundred years, that’s all we ask of ye. ’Tis short enough, like Doyle’s wife. Will ye do it?”

“And everything will be the same, at the end, as it was before you took Lissy?”

“Not everythin’, I didn’t say that. Ye’ll remember, don’t ye remember me sayin’ so? But for her and all the country round, why ’twill be the same.”

“All right,” Tim said. “I’ll do it.”

“’Tis a brave lad ye are. Now I’ll tell ye what I’ll do. I said a hundred years, to which ye agreed—”

Tim nodded.

“—but I’ll have no unwillin’ hands about me boat, nor no ungrateful ones neither. I’ll make it twenty. How’s that? Sure and I couldn’t say fairer, could I?”

Daniel’s figure was beginning to waver and fade; the image of the dark mass Tim had seen first hung about it like a cloud.

“Lay yerself on yer belly, for I must put me foot upon yer head. Then the deal’s done.”

The salt ocean was in his mouth and his eyes. His lungs burst for breath. He revolved in the blue chasm of water, tried to swim, at last exploded gasping into the air.

The king had said he would remember, but the years were fading already. Drudging, dancing, buying, spying, prying, waylaying, and betraying when he walked in the world of men. Serving something that he had never wholly understood. Sailing foggy seas that were sometimes of this earth. Floating among the constellations. The years and the slaps and the kicks were all fading, and with them (and he rejoiced in it) the days when he had begged.

He lifted an arm, trying to regain his old stroke, and found that he was very tired. Perhaps he had never really rested in all those years. Certainly, he could not recall resting. Where was he? He paddled listlessly, not knowing if he were swimming away from land, if he were in the center of an ocean. A wave elevated him, a long, slow swell of blue under the gray sky. A glory—the rising or perhaps the setting sun—shone to his right. He swam toward it, caught sight of a low coast.

He crawled onto the sand and lay there for a time, his back struck by drops of spray like rain. Near his eyes, the beach seemed nearly black. There were bits of charcoal, fragments of half-burned wood. He raised his head, pushing away the earth, and saw an empty bottle of greenish glass nearly buried in the wet sand.

When he was able at last to rise, his limbs were stiff and cold. The dawnlight had become daylight, but there was no warmth in it. The beach cottage stood only about a hundred yards away, one window golden with sunshine that had entered from the other side, the walls in shadow. The red Triumph gleamed beside the road.

At the top of a small dune he turned and looked back out to sea. A black freighter with a red and white stack was visible a mile or two out, but it was only a freighter. For a moment he felt a kind of regret, a longing for a part of his life that he had hated but that was now gone forever. I will never be able to tell her what happened, he thought. And then: Yes, I will, if only I let her think I’m just making it up. And then: No wonder so many people tell so many stories. Good-bye to all that.

The step creaked under his weight, and he wiped the sand from his feet on the coco mat. Lissy was in bed. When she heard the door open she sat up, then drew up the sheet to cover her breasts.

“Big Tim,” she said. “You did come. Tim and I were hoping you would.”

When he did not answer, she added, “He’s out having a swim, I think. He should be around in a minute.”

And when he still said nothing: “We’re—Tim and I—we’re going to be married.”

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

The Lucky Strike

History is a mutable thing, and each moment that passes has the potential to birth a thousand alternate worlds. The changes that produce those alternate worlds don’t always have to be big ones, like Lee winning at Gettysburg, or Wellington losing the Battle of Waterloo. Sometimes—as the suspenseful and passionate story that follows amply demonstrates—the largest of destinies can turn on the very smallest of details … with far-reaching and sobering effects.

Kim Stanley Robinson, an alumnus of the Clarion Writers Workshop, sold his first story to Damon Knight’s Orbit 18 in 1976. He subsequently placed stories in Orbit 19 and Orbit 21, and in the last few years has gone on to become a frequent contributor to Universe and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His quietly evocative story “Venice Drowned” was one of the best stories of 1981, and was a Nebula Award finalist; his novella “To Leave a Mark” was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1982. His brilliant story “Black Air” was both a Nebula and Hugo finalist in 1984, and went on to win the World Fantasy Award that year. “Black Air” was in our First Annual Collection. His excellent novel The Wild Shore was published in 1984 as the first title in the resurrected Ace Specials line, and was one of the most critically-acclaimed novels of the year. Two other Robinson books appeared in 1984: his second novel, Icehenge, and a critical book, The Novels of Philip K. Dick. Upcoming is a new novel, The Memory of Whiteness, from Tor Books. Robinson lives in Davis, California.

War breeds strange pastimes. In July of 1945 on Tinian Island in the North Pacific, Captain Frank January had taken to piling pebble cairns on the crown of Mount Lasso—one pebble for each B-29 takeoff, one cairn for each mission. The largest cairn had four hundred stones in it. It was a mindless pastime, but so was poker. The men of the 509th had played a million hands of poker, sitting in the shade of a palm around an upturned crate sweating in their skivvies, swearing and betting all their pay and cigarettes, playing hand after hand after hand, until the cards got so soft and dog-eared you could have used them for toilet paper. Captain January had gotten sick of it, and after he lit out for the hilltop a few times some of his crewmates started trailing him. When their pilot Jim Fitch joined them it became a official pastime, like throwing flares into the compound or going hunting for stray Japs. What Captain January thought of the development he didn’t say. The others grouped near Captain Fitch, who passed around his battered flask. “Hey, January,” Fitch called. “Come have a shot.”

January wandered over and took the flask. Fitch laughed at his pebble. “Practising your bombing up here, eh, Professor?”

“Yah,” January said sullenly. Anyone who read more than the funnies was Professor to Fitch. Thirstily January knocked back some rum. He could drink it any way he pleased up here, out from under the eye of the group psychiatrist. He passed the flask on to Lieutenant Matthews, their navigator.

“That’s why he’s the best,” Matthews joked. “Always practising.”

Fitch laughed. “He’s best because I make him be best, right, Professor?”

January frowned. Fitch was a bulky youth, thick-featured, pig-eyed—a thug, in January’s opinion. The rest of the crew were all in their mid-twenties like Fitch, and they liked the captain’s bossy roughhouse style. January, who was thirty-seven, didn’t go for it. He wandered away, back to the cairn he had been building. From Mount Lasso they had an overview of the whole island, from the harbor at Wall Street to the north field in Harlem. January had observed hundreds of B-29s roar off the four parallel runways of the north field and head for Japan. The last quartet of this particular mission buzzed across the width of the island, and January dropped four more pebbles, aiming for crevices in the pile. One of them stuck nicely.

“There they are!” said Matthews. “They’re on the taxiing strip.”

January located the 509th’s first plane. Today, the first of August, there was something more interesting to watch than the usual Superfortress parade. Word was out that General Le May wanted to take the 509th’s mission away from it. Their commander Colonel Tibbets had gone and bitched to Le May in person, and the general had agreed the mission was theirs, but on one condition: one of the general’s men was to make a test flight with the 509th, to make sure they were fit for combat over Japan. The general’s man had arrived, and now he was down there in the strike plane, with Tibbets and the whole first team. January sidled back to his mates to view the takeoff with them.

“Why don’t the strike plane have a name, though?” Haddock was saying.

Fitch said, “Lewis won’t give it a name because it’s not his plane, and he knows it.” The others laughed. Lewis and his crew were naturally unpopular, being Tibbets’ favorites.

“What do you think he’ll do to the general’s man?” Matthews asked.

The others laughed at the very idea. “He’ll kill an engine at takeoff, I bet you anything,” Fitch said. He pointed at the wrecked B-29s that marked the end of every runway, planes whose engines had given out on takeoff. “He’ll want to show that he wouldn’t go down if it happened to him.”

“Course he wouldn’t!” Matthews said.

“You hope,” January said under his breath.

“They let those Wright engines out too soon,” Haddock said seriously. “They keep busting under the takeoff load.”

“Won’t matter to the old bull,” Matthews said. Then they all started in about Tibbets’ flying ability, even Fitch. They all thought Tibbets was the greatest. January, on the other hand, liked Tibbets even less than he liked Fitch. That had started right after he was assigned to the 509th. He had been told he was part of the most important group in the war, and then given a leave. In Vicksburg a couple of fliers just back from England had bought him a lot of whiskies, and since January had spent several months stationed near London they had talked for a good long time and gotten pretty drunk. The two were really curious about what January was up to now, but he had stayed vague on it and kept returning the talk to the blitz. He had been seeing an English nurse, for instance, whose flat had been bombed, family and neighbors killed … . But they had really wanted to know. So he had told them he was onto something special, and they had flipped out their badges and told him they were Army Intelligence, and that if he ever broke security like that again he’d be transferred to Alaska. It was a dirty trick. January had gone back to Wendover and told Tibbets so to his face, and Tibbets had turned red and threatened him some more. January despised him for that. The upshot was that January was effectively out of the war, because Tibbets really played his favorites. January wasn’t sure he really minded, but during their year’s training he had bombed better than ever, as a way of showing the old bull he was wrong to write January off. Every time their eyes had met it was clear what was going on. But Tibbets never backed off no matter how precise January’s bombing got. Just thinking about it was enough to cause January to line up a pebble over an ant and drop it.

“Will you cut that out?” Fitch complained. “I swear you must hang from the ceiling when you take a shit so you can practice aiming for the toilet.” The men laughed.

“Don’t I bunk over you?” January asked. Then he pointed. “They’re going.”

Tibbets’ plane had taxied to runway Baker. Fitch passed the flask around again. The tropical sun beat on them, and the ocean surrounding the island blazed white. January put up a sweaty hand to aid the bill of his baseball cap.

The four props cut in hard, and the sleek Superfortress quickly trundled up to speed and roared down Baker. Three-quarters of the way down the strip the outside right prop feathered.

“Yow!” Fitch crowed. “I told you he’d do it!”

The plane nosed off the ground and slewed right, then pulled back on course to cheers from the four young men around January. January pointed again. “He’s cut number three, too.”

The inside right prop feathered, and now the plane was pulled up by the left wing only, while the two right props windmilled uselessly. “Holy smoke!” Haddock cried. “Ain’t the old bull something?”

They whooped to see the plane’s power, and Tibbets’ nervy arrogance.

“By God, Le May’s man will remember this flight,” Fitch hooted. “Why, look at that! He’s banking!”

Apparently taking off on two engines wasn’t enough for Tibbets; he banked the plane right until it was standing on its dead wing, and it curved back toward Tinian.

Then the inside left engine feathered.

Wars tears at the imagination. For three years Frank January had kept his imagination trapped, refusing to give it any play whatsoever. The dangers threatening him, the effects of the bombs, the fate of the other participants in the war, he had refused to think about any of it. But the war tore at his control. That English nurse’s flat. The missions over the Ruhr. The bomber just below him blown apart by flak. And then there had been a year in Utah, and the vise-like grip that he had once kept on his imagination had slipped away.

So when he saw the number two prop feather, his heart gave a little jump against his sternum and helplessly he was up there with Ferebee, the first team bombardier. He would be looking over the pilots’ shoulders … .

“Only one engine?” Fitch said.

“That one’s for real,” January said harshly. Despite himself he saw the panic in the cockpit, the frantic rush to power the two right engines. The plane was dropping fast and Tibbets leveled it off, leaving them on a course back toward the island. The two right props spun, blurred to a shimmer. January held his breath. They needed more lift; Tibbets was trying to pull it over the island. Maybe he was trying for the short runway on the south half of the island.

But Tinian was too tall, the plane too heavy. It roared right into the jungle above the beach, where 42nd Street met their East River. It exploded in a bloom of fire. By the time the sound of the explosion struck them they knew no one in the plane had survived.

Black smoke towered into white sky. In the shocked silence on Mount Lasso insects buzzed and creaked. The air left January’s lungs with a gulp. He had been with Ferebee there at the end, he had heard the desperate shouts, seen the last green rush, been stunned by the dentist-drill-all-over pain of the impact.

“Oh my God,” Fitch was saying. “Oh my God.” Matthews was sitting. January picked up the flask, tossed it at Fitch.

“C-come on,” he stuttered. He hadn’t stuttered since he was sixteen. He led the others in a rush down the hill. When they got to Broadway a jeep careened toward them and skidded to a halt. It was Colonel Scholes, the old bull’s exec. “What happened?”

Fitch told him.

“Those damned Wrights,” Scholes said as the men piled in. This time one had failed at just the wrong moment; some welder stateside had kept flame to metal a second less than usual—or something equally minor, equally trivial—and that had made all the difference.

They left the jeep at 42nd and Broadway and hiked east over a narrow track to the shore. A fairly large circle of trees was burning. The fire trucks were already there.

Scholes stood besides January, his expression bleak. “That was the whole first team,” he said.

“I know,” said January. He was still in shock, in imagination crushed, incinerated, destroyed. Once as a kid he had tied sheets to his arms and waist, jumped off the roof and landed right on his chest; this felt like that had. He had no way of knowing what would come of this crash, but he had a suspicion that he had indeed smacked into something hard.

Scholes shook his head. A half-hour had passed, the fire was nearly out. January’s four mates were over chattering with the Seabees. “He was going to name the plane after his mother,” Scholes said to the ground. “He told me that just this morning. He was going to call it Enola Gay.”

At night the jungle breathed, and its hot wet breath washed over the 509th’s compound. January stood in the doorway of his Quonset barracks hoping for a real breeze. No poker tonight. Voices were hushed, faces solemn. Some of the men had helped box up the dead crew’s gear. Now most lay on their bunks. January gave up on the breeze, climbed onto his top bunk to stare at the ceiling.

He observed the corrugated arch over him. Cricketsong sawed through his thoughts. Below him a rapid conversation was being carried on in guilty undertones, Fitch at its center. “January is the best bombardier left,” he said. “And I’m as good as Lewis was.”

“But so is Sweeney,” Matthews said. “And he’s in with Scholes.”

They were figuring out who would take over the strike. January scowled. Tibbets and the rest were less than twelve hours dead, and they were squabbling over who would replace them.

January grabbed a shirt, rolled off his bunk, put the shirt on.

“Hey, Professor,” Fitch said. “Where you going?”

“Out.”

Though midnight was near it was still sweltering. Crickets shut up as he walked by, started again behind him. He lit a cigarette. In the dark the MPs patrolling their fenced-in compound were like pairs of walking armbands. The 509th, prisoners in their own army. Fliers from other groups had taken to throwing rocks over the fence. Forcefully January expelled smoke, as if he could expel his disgust with it. They were only kids, he told himself. Their minds had been shaped in the war, by the war, and for the war. They knew you couldn’t mourn the dead for long; carry around a load like that and your own engines might fail. That was all right with January. It was an attitude that Tibbets had helped to form, so it was what he deserved. Tibbets would want to be forgotten in favor of the mission, all he had lived for was to drop the gimmick on the Japs, he was oblivious to anything else, men, wife, family, anything.

So it wasn’t the lack of feeling in his mates that bothered January. And it was natural of them to want to fly the strike they had been training a year for. Natural, that is, if you were a kid with a mind shaped by fanatics like Tibbets, shaped to take orders and never imagine consequences. But January was not a kid, and he wasn’t going to let men like Tibbets do a thing to his mind. And the gimmick … the gimmick was not natural. A chemical bomb of some sort, he guessed. Against the Geneva Convention. He stubbed his cigarette against the sole of his sneaker, tossed the butt over the fence. The tropical night breathed over him. He had a headache.

For months now he had been sure he would never fly a strike. The dislike Tibbets and he had exchanged in their looks (January was acutely aware of looks) had been real and strong. Tibbets had understood that January’s record of pinpoint accuracy in the runs over the Salton Sea had been a way of showing contempt, a way of saying you can’t get rid of me even though you hate me and I hate you. The record had forced Tibbets to keep January on one of the four second-string teams, but with the fuss they were making over the gimmick January had figured that would be far enough down the ladder to keep him out of things.

Now he wasn’t so sure. Tibbets was dead. He lit another cigarette, found his hand shaking. The Camel tasted bitter. He threw it over the fence at a receding armband, and regretted it instantly. A waste. He went back inside.

Before climbing onto his bunk he got a paperback out of his footlocker. “Hey, Professor, what you reading now?” Fitch said, grinning.

January showed him the blue cover. Winter’s Tale, by an Isak Dinesen. Fitch examined the little wartime edition. “Pretty racy, eh?”

“You bet,” January said heavily. “This guy puts sex on every page.” He climbed onto his bunk, opened the book. The stories were strange, hard to follow. The voices below bothered him. He concentrated harder.

As a boy on the farm in Arkansas, January had read everything he could lay his hands on. On Saturday afternoons he would race his father down the muddy lane to the mailbox (his father was a reader too), grab the Saturday Evening Post and run off to devour every word of it. That meant he had another week with nothing new to read, but he couldn’t help it. His favorites were the Hornblower stories, but anything would do. It was a way off the farm, a way into the world. He had become a man who could slip between the covers of a book whenever he chose.

But not on this night.

The next day the chaplain gave a memorial service, and on the morning after that Colonel Scholes looked in the door of their hut right after mess. “Briefing at eleven,” he announced. His face was haggard. “Be there early.” He looked at Fitch with bloodshot eyes, crooked a finger. “Fitch, January, Matthews—come with me.”

January put on his shoes. The rest of the men sat on their bunks and watched them wordlessly. January followed Fitch and Matthews out of the hut.

“I’ve spent most of the night on the radio with General Le May,” Scholes said. He looked them each in the eye. “We’ve decided you’re to be the first crew to make a strike.”

Fitch was nodding, as if he had expected it.

“Think you can do it?” Scholes said.

“Of course,” Fitch replied. Watching him January understood why they had chosen him to replace Tibbets: Fitch was like the old bull, he had that same ruthlessness. The young bull.

“Yes, sir,” Matthews said.

Scholes was looking at him. “Sure,” January said, not wanting to think about it. “Sure.” His heart was pounding directly on his sternum. But Fitch and Matthews looked serious as owls, so he wasn’t going to stick out by looking odd. It was big news, after all; anyone would be taken aback by it. Nevertheless, January made an effort to nod.

“Okay,” Scholes said. “McDonald will be flying with you as co-pilot.” Fitch frowned. “I’ve got to go tell those British officers that Le May doesn’t want them on the strike with you. See you at the briefing.”

“Yes, sir.”

As soon as Scholes was around the corner Fitch swung a fist at the sky. “Yow!” Matthews cried. He and Fitch shook hands. “We did it!” Matthews took January’s hand and wrung it, his face plastered with a goofy grin. “We did it!”

“Somebody did it, anyway,” January said.

“Ah, Frank,” Matthews said. “Show some spunk. You’re always so cool.”

“Old Professor Stoneface,” Fitch said, glancing at January with a trace of amused contempt. “Come on, let’s get to the briefing.”

The briefing hut, one of the longer Quonsets, was completely surrounded by MPs holding carbines. “Gosh,” Matthews said, subdued by the sight. Inside it was already smoky. The walls were covered by the usual maps of Japan. Two blackboards at the front were draped with sheets. Captain Shepard, the naval officer who worked with the scientists on the gimmick, was in back with his assistant Lieutenant Stone, winding a reel of film onto a projector. Dr. Nelson, the group psychiatrist, was already seated on a front bench near the wall. Tibbets had recently sicced the psychiatrist on the group—another one of his great ideas, like the spies in the bar. The man’s questions had struck January as stupid. He hadn’t even been able to figure out that Easterly was a flake, something that was clear to anybody who flew with him, or even played him in a single round of poker. January slid onto a bench beside his mates.

The two Brits entered, looking furious in their stiff-upper-lip way. They sat on the bench behind January. Sweeney’s and Easterly’s crew filed in, followed by the other men, and soon the room was full. Fitch and the rest pulled out Lucky Strikes and lit up; since they had named the plane only January had stuck with Camels.

Scholes came in with several men January didn’t recognize, and went to the front. The chatter died, and all the smoke plumes ribboned steadily into the air.

Scholes nodded, and two intelligence officers took the sheets off the blackboards, revealing aerial reconnaisance photos.

“Men,” Scholes said, “these are the target cities.”

Someone cleared his throat.

“In order of priority they are Hiroshima, Kokura, and Nagasaki. There will be three weather scouts: Straight Flush to Hiroshima, Strange Cargo to Kokura, and Full House to Nagasaki. The Great Artiste and Number 91 will be accompanying the mission to take photos. And Lucky Strike will fly the bomb.”

There were rustles, coughs. Men turned to look at January and his mates, and they all sat up straight. Sweeney stretched back to shake Fitch’s hand, and there were some quick laughs. Fitch grinned.

“Now listen up,” Scholes went on. “The weapon we are going to deliver was successfully tested stateside a couple of weeks ago. And now we’ve got orders to drop it on the enemy.” He paused to let that sink in. “I’ll let Captain Shepard tell you more.”

Shepard walked to the blackboard slowly, savoring his entrance. His forehead was shiny with sweat, and January realized he was excited or nervous. He wondered what the shrink would make of that.

“I’m going to come right to the point,” Shepard said. “The bomb you are going to drop is something new in history. We think it will knock out everything within four miles.”

Now the room was completely still. January noticed that he could see a great deal of his nose, eyebrows, and cheeks; it was as if he were receding back into his body, like a fox into its hole. He kept his gaze rigidly on Shepard, steadfastly ignoring the feeling. Shepard pulled a sheet back over a blackboard while someone else turned down the lights.

“This is a film of the only test we have made,” Shepard said. The film started, caught, started again. A wavery cone of bright cigarette smoke speared the length of the room, and on the sheet sprang a dead gray landscape: a lot of sky, a smooth desert floor, hills in the distance. The projector went click-click-click-click, click-click-click-click. “The bomb is on top of the tower,” Shepard said, and January focused on the pin-like object sticking out of the desert floor, off against the hills. It was between eight and ten miles from the camera, he judged; he had gotten good at calculating distances. He was still distracted by his face.

Click-click-click-click, click—then the screen went white for a second, filling even their room with light. When the picture returned the desert floor was filled with a white bloom of fire. The fireball coalesced and then quite suddenly it leaped off the earth all the way into the stratosphere by God, like a tracer bullet leaving a machine-gun, trailing a whitish pillar of smoke behind it. The pillar gushed up and a growing ball of smoke billowed outward, capping the pillar. January calculated the size of the cloud, but was sure he got it wrong. There it stood. The picture flickered, and then the screen went white again, as if the camera had melted or that part of the world had come apart. But the flapping from the projector told them it was the end of the film.

January felt the air suck in and out of his open mouth. The lights came on in the smoky room and for a second he panicked, he struggled to shove his features into an accepted pattern, the shrink would be looking around at them all—and then he glanced around and realized he needn’t have worried, that he wasn’t alone. Faces were bloodless, eyes were blinky or bug-eyed with shock, mouths hung open or were clamped whitely shut. For a few moments they all had to acknowledge what they were doing. January, scaring himself, felt an urge to say, “Play it again, will you?” Fitch was pulling his curled black hair off his thug’s forehead uneasily. Beyond him January saw that one of the Limeys had already reconsidered how mad he was about missing the flight. Now he looked sick. Someone let out a long whew, another whistled. January looked to the front again, where the shrink watched them, undisturbed.

Shepard said, “It’s big, all right. And no one knows what will happen when it’s dropped from the air. But the mushroom cloud you saw will go to at least thirty thousand feet, probably sixty. And the flash you saw at the beginning was hotter than the sun.”

Hotter than the sun. More licked lips, hard swallows, readjusted baseball caps. One of the intelligence officers passed out tinted goggles like welder’s glasses. January took his and twiddled the opacity dial.

Scholes said, “You’re the hottest thing in the armed forces, now. So no talking, even among yourselves.” He took a deep breath. “Let’s do it the way Colonel Tibbets would have wanted us to. He picked every one of you because you were the best, and now’s the time to show he was right. So—so let’s make the old man proud.”

The briefing was over. Men filed out into the sudden sunlight. Into the heat and glare. Captain Shepard approached Fitch. “Stone and I will be flying with you to take care of the bomb,” he said.

Fitch nodded. “Do you know how many strikes we’ll fly?”

“As many as it takes to make them quit.” Shepard stared hard at all of them. “But it will only take one.”

War breeds strange dreams. That night January writhed over his sheets in the hot wet vegetable darkness, in that frightening half-sleep when you sometimes know you are dreaming but can do nothing about it, and he dreamed he was walking …

… walking through the streets when suddenly the sun swoops down, the sun touches down and everything is instantly darkness and smoke and silence, a deaf roaring. Walls of fire. His head hurts and in the middle of his vision is a bluewhite blur as if God’s camera went off in his face. Ah—the sun fell, he thinks. His arm is burned. Blinking is painful. People stumbling by, mouths open, horribly burned—

He is a priest, he can feel the clerical collar, and the wounded ask him for help. He points to his ears, tries to touch them but can’t. Pall of black smoke over everything, the city has fallen into the streets. Ah, it’s the end of the world. In a park he finds shade and cleared ground. People crouch under bushes like frightened animals. Where the park meets the river red and black figures crowd into steaming water. A figure gestures from a copse of bamboo. He enters it, finds five or six faceless soldiers huddling. Their eyes have melted, their mouths are holes. Deafness spares him their words. The sighted soldier mimes drinking. The soldiers are thirsty. He nods and goes to the river in search of a container. Bodies float downstream.

Hours pass as he hunts fruitlessly for a bucket. He pulls people from the rubble. He hears a bird screeching and he realizes that his deafness is the roar of the city burning, a roar like the blood in his ears but he is not deaf, he only thought he was deaf because there are no human cries. The people are suffering in silence. Through the dusky night he stumbles back to the river, pain crashing through his head. In a field men are pulling potatoes out of the ground that have been baked well enough to eat. He shares one with them. At the river everyone is dead—

—and he struggled out of the nightmare drenched in rank sweat, the taste of dirt in his mouth, his stomach knotted with horror. He sat up and the wet rough sheet clung to his skin. His heart felt crushed between lungs desperate for air. The flowery rotting jungle smell filled him and images from the dream flashed before him so vividly that in the dim hut he saw nothing else. He grabbed his cigarettes and jumped off the bunk, hurried out into the compound. Trembling he lit up, started pacing around. For a moment he worried that the idiot psychiatrist might see him, but then he dismissed the idea. Nelson would be asleep. They were all asleep. He shook his head, looked down at his right arm and almost dropped his cigarette—but it was just his stove scar, an old scar, he’d had it most of his life, since the day he’d pulled the frypan off the stove and onto his arm, burning it with oil. He could still remember the round O of fear that his mother’s mouth had made as she rushed in to see what was wrong. Just an old burn scar, he thought, let’s not go overboard here. He pulled his sleeve down.

For the rest of the night he tried to walk it off, cigarette after cigarette. The dome of the sky lightened until all the compound and the jungle beyond it was visible. He was forced by the light of day to walk back into his hut and lie down as if nothing had happened.

Two days later Scholes ordered them to take one of Le May’s men over Rota for a test run. This new lieutenant colonel ordered Fitch not to play with the engines on takeoff. They flew a perfect run. January put the dummy gimmick right on the aiming point just as he had so often in the Salton Sea, and Fitch powered the plane down into the violent bank that started their 150-degree turn and flight for safety. Back on Tinian the lieutenant colonel congratulated them and shook each of their hands. January smiled with the rest, palms cool, heart steady. It was as if his body were a shell, something he could manipulate from without, like a bombsight. He ate well, he chatted as much as he ever had, and when the psychiatrist ran him to earth for some questions he was friendly and seemed open.

“Hello, doc.”

“How do you feel about all this, Frank?”

“Just like I always have, sir. Fine.”

“Eating well?”

“Better than ever.”

“Sleeping well?”

“As well as I can in this humidity. I got used to Utah, I’m afraid.” Dr. Nelson laughed. Actually January had hardly slept since his dream. He was afraid of sleep. Couldn’t the man see that?

“And how do you feel about being part of the crew chosen to make the first strike?”

“Well, it was the right choice, I reckon. We’re the b—the best crew left.”

“Do you feel sorry about Tibbets’ crew’s accident?”

“Yes, sir, I do.” You better believe it.

After the jokes and firm handshakes that ended the interview January walked out into the blaze of the tropical noon and lit a cigarette. He allowed himself to feel how much he despised the psychiatrist and his blind profession at the same time he was waving good-bye to the man. Ounce brain. Why couldn’t he have seen? Whatever happened it would be his fault … . With a rush of smoke out of him January realized how painfully easy it was to fool someone if you wanted to. All action was no more than a mask that could be perfectly manipulated from somewhere else. And all the while in that somewhere else January lived in a click-click-click of film, in the silent roaring of a dream, struggling against images he couldn’t dispel. The heat of the tropical sun—ninety-three million miles away, wasn’t it?—pulsed painfully on the back of his neck.

As he watched the pyschiatrist collar their tail-gunner Kochenski, he thought of walking up to the man and saying I quit. I don’t want to do this. In imagination he saw the look that would form in the man’s eye, in Fitch’s eye, in Tibbets’ eye, and his mind recoiled from the idea. He felt too much contempt for them. He wouldn’t for anything give them a means to despise him, a reason to call him coward. Stubbornly he banished the whole complex of thought. Easier to go along with it.

And so a couple of disjointed days later, just after midnight of August 9th, he found himself preparing for the strike. Around him Fitch and Matthews and Haddock were doing the same. How odd were the everyday motions of getting dressed when you were off to demolish a city, to end a hundred thousand lives! January found himself examining his hands, his boots, the cracks in the linoleum. He put on his survival vest, checked the pockets abstractedly for fish-hooks, water kit, first aid package, emergency rations. Then the parachute harness, and his coveralls over it all. Tying his bootlaces took minutes; he couldn’t do it when watching his fingers so closely.

“Come on, Professor!” Fitch’s voice was tight. “The big day is here.” He followed the others into the night. A cool wind was blowing. The chaplain said a prayer for them. They took jeeps down Broadway to runway Able. Lucky Strike stood in a circle of spotlights and men, half of them with cameras, the rest with reporter’s pads. They surrounded the crew; it reminded January of a Hollywood premiere. Eventually he escaped up the hatch and into the plane. Others followed. Half an hour passed before Fitch joined them, grinning like a movie star. They started the engines, and January was thankful for their vibrating, thought-smothering roar. They taxied away from the Hollywood scene and January felt relief for a moment, until he remembered where they were going. On runway Able the engines pitched up to their twenty-three hundred rpm whine, and looking out the clear windscreen he saw the runway paintmarks move by ever faster. Fitch kept them on the runway till Tinian had run out from under them, then quickly pulled up. They were on their way.

When they got to altitude January climbed past Fitch and McDonald to the bombardier’s seat and placed his parachute on it. He leaned back. The roar of the four engines packed around him like cotton batting. He was on the flight, nothing to be done about it now. The heavy vibration was a comfort, he liked the feel of it there in the nose of the plane. A drowsy, sad acceptance hummed through him.

Against his closed eyelids flashed a black eyeless face and he jerked awake, heart racing. He was on the flight, no way out. Now he realized how easy it would have been to get out of it. He could have just said he didn’t want to. The simplicity of it appalled him. Who gave a damn what the psychiatrist or Tibbets or anyone else thought, compared to this? Now there was no way out. It was a comfort, in a way. Now he could stop worrying, stop thinking he had any choice.

Sitting there with his knees bracketing the bombsight January dozed, and as he dozed he daydreamed his way out. He could climb the step to Fitch and McDonald and declare he had been secretly promoted to Major and ordered to re-direct the mission. They were to go to Tokyo and drop the bomb in the bay. The Jap war cabinet had been told to watch this demonstration of the new weapon, and when they saw that fireball boil the bay and bounce into heaven they’d run and sign surrender papers as fast as they could write, kamikazes or not. They weren’t crazy, after all. No need to murder a whole city. It was such a good plan that the generals back home were no doubt changing the mission at this very minute, desperately radioing their instructions to Tinian, only to find out it was too late … so that when they returned to Tinian January would become a hero for guessing what the generals really wanted, and for risking all to do it. It would be like one of the Hornblower stories in the Saturday Evening Post.

Once again January jerked awake. The drowsy pleasure of the fantasy was replaced with desperate scorn. There wasn’t a chance in hell that he could convince Fitch and the rest that he had secret orders superseding theirs. And he couldn’t go up there and wave his pistol around and order them to drop the bomb in Tokyo Bay, because he was the one who had to actually drop it, and he couldn’t be down in front dropping the bomb and up ordering the others around at the same time. Pipe dreams.

Time swept on, slow as a second hand. January’s thoughts, however, matched the spin of the props; desperately they cast about, now this way now that, like an animal caught by the leg in a trap. The crew was silent. The clouds below were a white scree on the black ocean. January’s knee vibrated against the squat stand of the bombsight. He was the one who had to drop the bomb. No matter where his thoughts lunged they were brought up short by that. He was the one, not Fitch or the crew, not Le May, not the generals and scientists back home, not Truman and his advisors. Truman—suddenly January hated him. Roosevelt would have done it differently. If only Roosevelt had lived! The grief that had filled January when he learned of Roosevelt’s death reverberated through him again, more strongly than ever. It was unfair to have worked so hard and then not see the war’s end. And FDR would have ended it differently. Back at the start of it all he had declared that civilian centers were never to be bombed, and if he had lived, if, if, if. But he hadn’t. And now it was smiling bastard Harry Truman, ordering him, Frank January, to drop the sun on two hundred thousand women and children. Once his father had taken him to see the Browns play before twenty thousand, a giant crowd—“I never voted for you,” January whispered viciously, and jerked to realize he had spoken aloud. Luckily his microphone was off. And Roosevelt would have done it differently, he would have.

The bombsight rose before him, spearing the black sky and blocking some of the hundreds of little cruciform stars. Lucky Strike ground on toward Iwo Jima, minute by minute flying four miles closer to their target. January leaned forward and put his face in the cool headrest of the bombsight, hoping that its grasp might hold his thoughts as well as his forehead. It worked surprisingly well.

His earphones crackled and he sat up. “Captain January.” It was Shepard. “We’re going to arm the bomb now, want to watch?”

“Sure thing.” He shook his head, surprised at his own duplicity. Stepping up between the pilots, he moved stiffly to the roomy cabin behind the cockpit. Matthews was at his desk taking a navigational fix on the radio signals from Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and Haddock stood beside him. At the back of the compartment was a small circular hatch, below the larger tunnel leading to the rear of the plane. January opened it, sat down and swung himself feet first through the hole.

The bomb bay was unheated, and the cold air felt good. He stood facing the bomb. Stone was sitting on the floor of the bay; Shepard was laid out under the bomb, reaching into it. On a rubber pad next to Stone were tools, plates, several cylindrical blocks. Shepard pulled back, sat up, sucked a scraped knuckle. He shook his head ruefully: “I don’t dare wear gloves with this one.”

“I’d be just as happy myself if you didn’t let something slip,” January joked nervously. The two men laughed.

“Nothing can blow till I change those green wires to the red ones,” Stone said.

“Give me the wrench,” Shepard said. Stone handed it to him, and he stretched under the bomb again. After some awkward wrenching inside it he lifted out a cylindrical plug. “Breech plug,” he said, and set it on the mat.

January found his skin goose-pimpling in the cold air. Stone handed Shepard one of the blocks. Shepard extended under the bomb again. “Red ends toward the breech.” “I know.” Watching them January was reminded of auto mechanics on the oily floor of a garage, working under a car. He had spent a few years doing that himself, after his family moved to Vicksburg. Hiroshima was a river town. One time a flat-bed truck carrying bags of cement powder down Fourth Street hill had lost its brakes and careened into the intersection with River Road, where despite the driver’s efforts to turn it smashed into a passing car. Frank had been out in the yard playing, had heard the crash and saw the cement dust rising. He had been one of the first there. The woman and child in the passenger seat of the model T had been killed. The woman driving was okay. They were from Chicago. A group of folks subdued the driver of the truck, who kept trying to help at the Model T, though he had a bad cut on his head and was covered with white dust.

“Okay, let’s tighten the breech plug.” Stone gave Shepard the wrench. “Sixteen turns exactly,” Shepard said. He was sweating even in the bay’s chill, and he paused to wipe his forehead. “Let’s hope we don’t get hit by lightning.” He put the wrench down and shifted onto his knees, picked up a circular plate. Hubcap, January thought. Stone connected wires, then helped Shepard install two more plates. Good old American know-how, January thought, goose-pimples rippling across his skin like cat’s-paws over water. There was Shepard, a scientist, putting together a bomb like he was an auto mechanic changing oil and plugs. January felt a tight rush of rage at the scientists who had designed the bomb. They had worked on it for over a year down there in New Mexico, had none of them in all that time ever stopped to think what they were doing?

But none of them had to drop it. January turned to hide his face from Shepard, stepped down the bay. The bomb looked like a big long trashcan, with fins at one end and little antennae at the other. Just a bomb, he thought, damn it, it’s just another bomb.

Shepard stood and patted the bomb gently. “We’ve got a live one now.” Never a thought about what it would do. January hurried by the man, afraid that hatred would crack his shell and give him away. The pistol strapped to his belt caught on the hatchway and he imagined shooting Shepard—shooting Fitch and McDonald and plunging the controls forward so that Lucky Strike tilted and spun down into the sea like a spent tracer bullet, like a plane broken by flak, following the arc of all human ambition. Nobody would ever know what had happened to them, and their trashcan would be dumped at the bottom of the Pacific where it belonged. He could even shoot everyone and parachute out, and perhaps be rescued by one of the Superdumbos following them … .

The thought passed and remembering it January squinted with disgust. But another part of him agreed that it was a possibility. It could be done. It would solve his problem. His fingers explored his holster snap.

“Want some coffee?” Matthews asked.

“Sure,” January said, and took his hand from the gun to reach for the cup. He sipped: hot. He watched Matthews and Benton tune the loran equipment. As the beeps came in Matthews took a straightedge and drew lines from Okinawa and Iwo Jima on his map table. He tapped a finger on the intersection. “They’ve taken the art out of navigation,” he said to January. “They might as well stop making the navigator’s dome,” thumbing up at the little plexiglass bubble over them.

“Good old American know-how,” January said.

Matthews nodded. With two fingers he measured the distance between their position and Iwo Jima. Benton measured with a ruler.

“Rendezvous at five thirty-five, eh?” Matthews said. They were to rendezvous with the two trailing planes over Iwo.

Benton disagreed: “I’d say five-fifty.”

“What? Check again, guy, we’re not in no tugboat here.”

“The wind—”

“Yah, the wind. Frank, you want to add a bet to the pool?”

“Five thirty-six,” January said promptly.

They laughed. “See, he’s got more confidence in me,” Matthews said with a dopey grin.

January recalled his plan to shoot the crew and tip the plane into the sea, and he pursed his lips, repelled. Not for anything would he be able to shoot these men, who, if not friends, were at least companions. They passed for friends. They meant no harm.

Shepard and Stone climbed into the cabin. Matthews offered them coffee. “The gimmick’s ready to kick their ass, eh?” Shepard nodded and drank.

January moved forward, past Haddock’s console. Another plan that wouldn’t work. What to do? All the flight engineer’s dials and gauges showed conditions were normal. Maybe he could sabotage something? Cut a line somewhere?

Fitch looked back at him and said, “When are we due over Iwo?”

“Five forty, Matthews says.”

“He better be right.”

A thug. In peacetime Fitch would be hanging around a pool table giving the cops trouble. He was perfect for war. Tibbets had chosen his men well—most of them, anyway. Moving back past Haddock January stopped to stare at the group of men in the navigation cabin. They joked, drank coffee. They were all a bit like Fitch: young toughs, capable and thoughtless. They were having a good time, an adventure. That was January’s dominant impression of his companions in the 509th; despite all the bitching and the occasional moments of overmastering fear, they were having a good time. His mind spun forward and he saw what these young men would grow up to be like as clearly as if they stood before him in businessmen’s suits, prosperous and balding. They would be tough and capable and thoughtless, and as the years passed and the great war receded in time they would look back on it with ever-increasing nostalgia, for they would be the survivors and not the dead. Every year of this war would feel like ten in their memories, so that the war would always remain the central experience of their lives—a time when history lay palpable in their hands, when each of their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and others told them what to do—so that as more years passed and the survivors aged, bodies falling apart, lives in one rut or another, they would unconsciously push harder and harder to thrust the world into war again, thinking somewhere inside themselves that if they could only return to world war then they would magically be again as they were in the last one—young, and free, and happy. And by that time they would hold the positions of power, they would be capable of doing it.

So there would be more wars, January saw. He heard it in Matthews’ laughter, saw it in their excited eyes. “There’s Iwo, and it’s five thirty-one. Pay up! I win!” And in future wars they’d have more bombs like the gimmick, hundreds of them no doubt. He saw more planes, more young crews like this one, flying to Moscow no doubt or to wherever, fireballs in every capital, why not? And to what end? To what end? So that the old men could hope to become magically young again. Nothing more sane than that.

They were over Iwo Jima. Three more hours to Japan. Voices from The Great Artiste and Number 91 crackled on the radio. Rendezvous accomplished, the three planes flew northwest, toward Shikoku, the first Japanese island in their path. January went aft to use the toilet. “You okay, Frank?” Matthews asked. “Sure. Terrible coffee, though.” “Ain’t it always.” January tugged at his baseball cap and hurried away. Kochenski and the other gunners were playing poker. When he was done he returned forward. Matthews sat on the stool before his maps, readying his equipment for the constant monitoring of drift that would now be required. Haddock and Benton were also busy at their stations. January maneuvered between the pilots down into the nose. “Good shooting,” Matthews called after him.

Forward it seemed quieter. January got settled, put his headphones on and leaned forward to look out the ribbed plexiglass.

Dawn had turned the whole vault of the sky pink. Slowly the radiant shade shifted through lavender to blue, pulse by pulse a different color. The ocean below was a glittering blue plane, marbled by a pattern of puffy pink cloud. The sky above was a vast dome, darker above than on the horizon. January had always thought that dawn was the time when you could see most clearly how big the earth was, and how high above it they flew. It seemed they flew at the very upper edge of the atmosphere, and January saw how thin it was, how it was just a skin of air really, so that even if you flew up to its top the earth still extended away infinitely in every direction. The coffee had warmed January, he was sweating. Sunlight blinked off the plexiglass. His watch said six. Plane and hemisphere of blue were split down the middle by the bombsight. His earphones crackled and he listened in to the reports from the lead planes flying over the target cities. Kokura, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, all of them had six-tenths cloud cover. Maybe they would have to cancel the whole mission because of weather. “We’ll look at Hiroshima first,” Fitch said. January peered down at the fields of miniature clouds with renewed interest. His parachute slipped under him. Readjusting it he imagined putting it on, sneaking back to the central escape hatch under the navigator’s cabin, opening the hatch … he could be out of the plane and gone before anyone noticed. Leave it up to them. They could bomb or not but it wouldn’t be January’s doing. He could float down onto the world like a puff of dandelion, feel cool air rush around him, watch the silk canopy dome hang over him like a miniature sky, a private world.

An eyeless black face. January shuddered; it was as though the nightmare could return any time. If he jumped nothing would change, the bomb would still fall—would he feel any better, floating on his Inland Sea? Sure, one part of him shouted; maybe, another conceded; the rest of him saw that face … .

Earphones crackled. Shepard said, “Lieutenant Stone has now armed the bomb, and I can tell you all what we are carrying. Aboard with us is the world’s first atomic bomb.”

Not exactly, January thought. Whistles squeaked in his earphones. The first one went off in New Mexico. Splitting atoms: January had heard the term before. Tremendous energy in every atom, Einstein had said. Break one, and—he had seen the result on film. Shepard was talking about radiation, which brought back more to January. Energy released in the form of X-rays. Killed by X-rays! It would be against the Geneva Convention if they had thought of it.

Fitch cut in. “When the bomb is dropped Lieutenant Benton will record our reaction to what we see. This recording is being made for history, so watch your language.” Watch your language! January choked back a laugh. Don’t curse or blaspheme God at the sight of the first atomic bomb incinerating a city and all its inhabitants with X-rays!

Six twenty. January found his hands clenched together on the headrest of the bombsight. He felt as if he had a fever. In the harsh wash of morning light the skin on the backs of his hands appeared slightly translucent. The whorls in the skin looked like the delicate patterning of waves on the sea’s surface. His hands were made of atoms. Atoms were the smallest building block of matter, it took billions of them to make those tense, trembling hands. Split one atom and you had the fireball. That meant that the energy contained in even one hand … he turned up a palm to look at the lines and the mottled flesh under the transparent skin. A person was a bomb that could blow up the world. January felt that latent power stir in him, pulsing with every hard heart-knock. What beings they were, and in what a blue expanse of a world!—And here they spun on to drop a bomb and kill a hundred thousand of these astonishing beings.

When a fox or raccoon is caught by the leg in a trap, it lunges until the leg is frayed, twisted, perhaps broken, and only then does the animal’s pain and exhaustion force it to quit. Now in the same way January wanted to quit. His mind hurt. His plans to escape were so much crap—stupid, useless. Better to quit. He tried to stop thinking, but it was hopeless. How could he stop? As long as he was conscious he would be thinking. The mind struggles longer in its traps than any fox.

Lucky Strike tilted up and began the long climb to bombing altitude. On the horizon the clouds lay over a green island. Japan. Surely it had gotten hotter, the heater must be broken, he thought. Don’t think. Every few minutes Matthews gave Fitch small course adjustments. “Two seventy-five, now. That’s it.” To escape the moment January recalled his childhood. Following a mule and plow. Moving to Vicksburg (rivers). For a while there in Vicksburg, since his stutter made it hard to gain friends, he had played a game with himself. He had passed the time by imagining that everything he did was vitally important and determined the fate of the world. If he crossed a road in front of a certain car, for instance, then the car wouldn’t make it through the next intersection before a truck hit it, and so the man driving would be killed and wouldn’t be able to invent the flying boat that would save President Wilson from kidnappers—so he had to wait for that car because everything afterward depended on it. Oh damn it, he thought, damn it, think of something different. The last Hornblower story he had read—how would he get out of this? The round O of his mother’s face as she ran in and saw his arm—The Mississippi, mud-brown behind its levees—Abruptly he shook his head, face twisted in frustration and despair, aware at last that no possible avenue of memory would serve as an escape for him now, for now there was no part of his life that did not apply to the situation he was in, and no matter where he cast his mind it was going to shore up against the hour facing him.

Less than an hour. They were at thirty thousand feet, bombing altitude. Fitch gave him altimeter readings to dial into the bombsight. Matthews gave him windspeeds. Sweat got in his eye and he blinked furiously. The sun rose behind them like an atomic bomb, glinting off every corner and edge of the Plexiglas, illuminating his bubble compartment with a fierce glare. Broken plans jumbled together in his mind, his breath was short, his throat dry. Uselessly and repeatedly he damned the scientists, damned Truman. Damned the Japanese for causing the whole mess in the first place, damned yellow killers, they had brought this on themselves. Remember Pearl. American men had died under bombs when no war had been declared; they had started it and now it was coming back to them with a vengeance. And they deserved it. And an invasion of Japan would take years, cost millions of lives—end it now, end it, they deserved it, they deserved it steaming river full of charcoal people silently dying damned stubborn race of maniacs!

“There’s Honshu,” Fitch said, and January returned to the world of the plane. They were over the Inland Sea. Soon they would pass the secondary target Kokura, a bit to the south. Seven thirty. The island was draped more heavily than the sea by clouds, and again January’s heart leaped with the idea that weather would cancel the mission. But they did deserve it. It was a mission like any other mission. He had dropped bombs on Africa, Sicily, Italy, all Germany … . He leaned forward to take a look through the sight. Under the X of the crosshairs was the sea, but at the lead edge of the sight was land. Honshu. At two hundred and thirty miles an hour that gave them about a half hour to Hiroshima. Maybe less. He wondered if his heart could beat so hard for that long.

Fitch said, “Matthews, I’m giving over guidance to you. Just tell us what to do.”

“Bear south two degrees,” was all Matthews said. At last their voices had taken on a touch of awareness, even fear.

“January, are you ready?” Fitch asked.

“I’m just waiting,” January said. He sat up, so Fitch could see the back of his head. The bombsight stood between his legs. A switch on its side would start the bombing sequence; the bomb would not leave the plane immediately upon the flick of the switch, but would drop after a fifteen-second radio tone warned the following planes. The sight was adjusted accordingly.

“Adjust to a heading of two sixty-five,” Matthews said. “We’re coming in directly upwind.” This was to make any side-drift adjustments for the bomb unnecessary. “January, dial it down to two hundred and thirty-one miles per hour.”

“Two thirty-one.”

Fitch said, “Everyone but January and Matthews, get your goggles on.”

January took the darkened goggles from the floor. One needed to protect one’s eyes or they might melt. He put them on, put his forehead on the headrest. They were in the way. He took them off. When he looked through the sight again there was land under the crosshairs. He checked his watch. Eight o’clock. Up and reading the papers, drinking tea.

“Ten minutes to AP,” Matthews said. The aiming point was Aioi Bridge, a T-shaped bridge in the middle of the delta-straddling city. Easy to recognize.

“There’s a lot of cloud down there,” Fitch noted. “Are you going to be able to see?”

“I won’t be sure until we try it,” January said.

“We can make another pass and use radar if we need to,” Matthews said.

Fitch said, “Don’t drop it unless you’re sure, January.”

“Yes, sir.”

Through the sight a grouping of rooftops and gray roads was just visible between broken clouds. Around it green forest. “All right,” Matthews exclaimed, “here we go! Keep it right on this heading, Captain! January, we’ll stay at two thirty-one.”

“And same heading,” Fitch said. “January, she’s all yours. Everyone make sure your goggles are on. And be ready for the turn.”

January’s world contracted to the view through the bombsight. A stippled field of cloud and forest. Over a small range of hills and into Hiroshima’s watershed. The broad river was mud brown, the land pale hazy green, the growing network of roads flat gray. Now the tiny rectangular shapes of buildings covered almost all the land, and swimming into the sight came the city proper, narrow islands thrusting into a dark blue bay. Under the crosshairs the city moved island by island, cloud by cloud. January had stopped breathing, his fingers were rigid as stone on the switch. And there was Aioi Bridge. It slid right under the crosshairs, a tiny T right in a gap in the clouds. January’s fingers crushed the switch. Deliberately he took a breath, held it. Clouds swam under the crosshairs, then the next island. “Almost there,” he said calmly into his microphone. “Steady.” Now that he was committed his heart was humming like the Wrights. He counted to ten. Now flowing under the crosshairs were clouds alternating with green forest, leaden roads. “I’ve turned the switch, but I’m not getting a tone!” he croaked into the mike. His right hand held the switch firmly in place. Fitch was shouting something—Matthews’ voice cracked across it-“Flipping it b-back and forth,” January shouted, shielding the bombsight with his body from the eyes of the pilots. “But still—wait a second—”

He pushed the switch down. A low hum filled his ears. “That’s it! It started!”

“But where will it land?” Matthews cried.

“Hold steady!” January shouted.

Lucky Strike shuddered and lofted up ten or twenty feet. January twisted to look down and there was the bomb, flying just below the plane. Then with a wobble it fell away.

The plane banked right and dove so hard that the centrifugal force threw January against the plexiglass. Several thousand feet lower Fitch leveled it out and they hurtled north.

“Do you see anything?” Fitch cried.

From the tailgun Kochenski gasped “Nothing.” January struggled upright. He reached for the welder’s goggles, but they were no longer on his head. He couldn’t find them. “How long has it been?” he said.

“Thirty seconds,” Matthews replied.

January clamped his eyes shut.

The blood in his eyelids lit up red, then white.

On the earphones a clutter of voices: “Oh my God. Oh my God.” The plane bounced and tumbled, metallically shrieking. January pressed himself off the plexiglass. “Nother shockwave!” Kockenski yelled. The plane rocked again, bounced out of control, this is it, January thought, end of the world, I guess that solves my problem.

He opened his eyes and found he could still see. The engines still roared, the props spun. “Those were the shockwaves from the bomb,” Fitch called. “We’re okay now. Look at that! Will you look at that sonofabitch go!”

January looked. The cloud layer below had burst apart, and a black column of smoke billowed up from a core of red fire. Already the top of the column was at their height. Exclamations of shock clattered painfully in January’s ears. He stared at the fiery base of the cloud, at the scores of fires feeding into it. Suddenly he could see past the cloud, and his fingernails cut into his palms. Through a gap in the clouds he saw it clearly, the delta, the six rivers, there off to the left of the tower of smoke: the city of Hiroshima, untouched.

“We missed!” Kockenski yelled. “We missed it!”

January turned-to hide his face from the pilots; on it was a grin like a rictus. He sat back in his seat and let the relief fill him.

Then it was back to it. “God damn it!” Fitch shouted down at him. McDonald was trying to restrain him. “January, get up here!”

“Yes, sir.” Now there was a new set of problems.

January stood and turned, legs weak. His right fingertips throbbed painfully. The men were crowded forward to look out the plexiglass. January looked with them.

The mushroom cloud was forming. It roiled out as if it might continue to extend forever, fed by the inferno and the black stalk below it. It looked about two miles wide, and half a mile tall, and it extended well above the height they flew at, dwarfing their plane entirely. “Do you think we’ll all be sterile?” Matthews said.

“I can taste the radiation,” McDonald declared. “Can you? It tastes like lead.”

Bursts of flame shot up into the cloud from below, giving a purplish tint to the stalk. There it stood: lifelike, malignant, sixty thousand feet tall. One bomb. January shoved past the pilots into the navigation cabin, overwhelmed.

“Should I start recording everyone’s reactions, Captain?” asked Benton.

“To hell with that,” Fitch said, following January back. But Shepard got there first, descending quickly from the navigation dome. He rushed across the cabin, caught January on the shoulder, “You bastard!” he screamed as January stumbled back. “You lost your nerve, coward!”

January went for Shepard, happy to have a target at last, but Fitch cut in and grabbed him by the collar, pulled him around until they were face to face—

“Is that right?” Fitch cried, as angry as Shepard. “Did you screw up on purpose?”

“No,” January grunted, and knocked Fitch’s hands away from his neck. He swung and smacked Fitch on the mouth, caught him solid. Fitch staggered back, recovered, and no doubt would have beaten January up, but Matthews and Benton and Stone leaped in and held him back, shouting for order. “Shut up! Shut up!” McDonald screamed from the cockpit, and for a moment it was bedlam, but Fitch let himself be restrained, and soon only McDonald’s shouts for quiet were heard. January retreated to between the pilot seats, right hand on his pistol holster.

“The city was in the crosshairs when I flipped the switch,” he said. “But the first couple of times I flipped it nothing happened—”

“That’s a lie!” Shepard shouted. “There was nothing wrong with the switch, I checked it myself. Besides, the bomb exploded miles beyond Hiroshima, look for yourself! That’s minutes.” He wiped spit from his chin and pointed at January. “You did it.”

“You don’t know that,” January said. But he could see the men had been convinced by Shepard, and he took a step back. “You just get me to a board of inquiry, quick. And leave me alone till then. If you touch me again,” glaring venomously at Fitch and then Shepard, “I’ll shoot you.” He turned and hopped down to his seat, feeling exposed and vunerable, like a treed raccoon.

“They’ll shoot you for this,” Shepard screamed after him. “Disobeying orders—treason—” Matthews and Stone were shutting him up.

“Let’s get out of here,” he heard McDonald say. “I can taste the lead, can’t you?”

January looked out the plexiglass. The giant cloud still burned and roiled. One atom … . Well, they had really done it to that forest. He almost laughed but stopped himself, afraid of hysteria. Through a break in the clouds he got a clear view of Hiroshima for the first time. It lay spread over its islands like a map, unharmed. Well, that was that. The inferno at the base of the mushroom cloud was eight or ten miles around the shore of the bay, and a mile or two inland. A certain patch of forest would be gone, destroyed—utterly blasted from the face of the earth. The Japs would be able to go out and investigate the damage. And if they were told it was a demonstration, a warning—and if they acted fast—well, they had their chance. Maybe it would work.

The release of tension made January feel sick. Then he recalled Shepard’s words and he knew that whether his plan worked or not he was still in trouble. In trouble! It was worse than that. Bitterly he cursed the Japanese, he even wished for a moment that he had dropped it on them. Wearily he let his despair empty him.

A long while later he sat up straight. Once again he was a trapped animal. He began lunging for escape, casting about for plans. One alternative after another. All during the long grim flight home he considered it, mind spinning at the speed of the props and beyond. And when they came down on Tinian he had a plan. It was a long shot, he reckoned, but it was the best he could do.

The briefing hut was surrounded by MPs again. January stumbled from the truck with the rest and walked inside. He was more than ever aware of the looks given him, and they were hard, accusatory. He was too tired to care. He hadn’t slept in more than thirty-six hours, and had slept very little since the last time he had been in the hut, a week before. Now the room quivered with the lack of engine vibration to stabilize it, and the silence roared. It was all he could do to hold on to the bare essentials of his plan. The glares of Fitch and Shepard, the hurt incomprehension of Matthews, they had to be thrust out of his focus. Thankfully he lit a cigarette.

In a clamor of question and argument the others described the strike. Then the haggard Scholes and an intelligence officer led them through the bombing run. January’s plan made it necessary to hold to his story: “ … and when the AP was under the crosshairs I pushed down the switch, but got no signal. I flipped it up and down repeatedly until the tone kicked in. At that point there was still fifteen seconds to the release.”

“Was there anything that may have caused the tone to start when it did?”

“Not that I noticed immediately, but—”

“It’s impossible,” Shepard interrupted, face red. “I checked the switch before we flew and there was nothing wrong with it. Besides, the drop occurred over a minute—”

“Captain Shepard,” Scholes said. “We’ll hear from you presently.”

“But he’s obviously lying—”

“Captain Shepard! It’s not at all obvious. Don’t speak unless questioned.”

“Anyway,” January said, hoping to shift the questions away from the issue of the long delay, “I noticed something about the bomb when it was falling that could explain why it stuck. I need to discuss it with one of the scientists familiar with the bomb’s design.”

“What was that?” Scholes asked suspiciously.

January hesitated. “There’s going to be an inquiry, right?”

Scholes frowned. “This is the inquiry, Captain January. Tell us what you saw.”

“But there will be some proceeding beyond this one?”

“It looks like there’s going to be a court-martial, yes, Captain.”

“That’s what I thought. I don’t want to talk to anyone but my counsel, and some scientist familiar with the bomb.”

“I’m a scientist familiar with the bomb,” Shepard burst out. “You could tell me if you really had anything, you—”

“I said I need a scientist!” January exclaimed, rising to face the scarlet Shepard across the table. “Not a G-God damned mechanic.” Shepard started to shout, others joined in and the room rang with argument. While Scholes restored order January sat down, and he refused to be drawn out again.

“I’ll see you’re assigned counsel, and initiate the court-martial,” Scholes said, clearly at a loss. “Meanwhile you are under arrest, on suspicion of disobeying orders in combat.” January nodded, and Scholes gave him over to MPs.

“One last thing,” January said, fighting exhaustion. “Tell General Le May that if the Japs are told this drop was a warning, it might have the same effect as—”

“I told you!” Shepard shouted. “I told you he did it on purpose!”

Men around Shepard restrained him. But he had convinced most of them, and even Matthews stared at him with surprised anger.

January shook his head wearily. He had the dull feeling that his plan, while it had succeeded so far, was ultimately not a good one. “Just trying to make the best of it.” It took all of his remaining will to force his legs to carry him in a dignified manner out of the hut.

His cell was an empty NCO’s office. MPs brought his meals. For the first couple of days he did little but sleep. On the third day he glanced out the office’s barred window, and saw a tractor pulling a tarpaulin-draped trolley out of the compound, followed by jeeps filled with MPs. It looked like a military funeral. January rushed to the door and banged on it until one of the young MPs came.

“What’s that they’re doing out there?” January demanded.

Eyes cold and mouth twisted, the MP said, “They’re making another strike. They’re going to do it right this time.”

“No!” January cried. “No!” He rushed the MP, who knocked him back and locked the door. “No!” He beat the door until his hands hurt, cursing wildly. “You don’t need to do it, it isn’t necessary.” Shell shattered at last, he collapsed on the bed and wept. Now everything he had done would be rendered meaningless. He had sacrificed himself for nothing.

A day or two after that the MPs led in a colonel, an iron-haired man who stood stiffly and crushed January’s hand when he shook it. His eyes were a pale, icy blue.

“I am Colonel Dray,” he said. “I have been ordered to defend you in court-martial.” January could feel the dislike pouring from the man. “To do that I’m going to need every fact you have, so let’s get started.”

“I’m not talking to anybody until I’ve seen an atomic scientist.”

“I am your defense counsel—”

“I don’t care who you are,” January said. “Your defense of me depends on you getting one of the scientists here. The higher up he is, the better. And I want to speak to him alone.”

“I will have to be present.”

So he would do it. But now January’s counsel, too, was an enemy.

“Naturally,” January said. “You’re my counsel. But no one else. Our atomic secrecy may depend on it.”

“You saw evidence of sabotage?”

“Not one word more until that scientist is here.”

Angrily the colonel nodded and left.

Late the next day the colonel returned with another man. “This is Dr. Forest.”

“I helped develop the bomb,” Forest said. He had a crew-cut and dressed in fatigues, and to January he looked more Army than the colonel. Suspiciously he stared back and forth at the two men.

“You’ll vouch for this man’s identity on your word as an officer?” he asked Dray.

“Of course,” the colonel said stiffly, offended.

“So,” Dr. Forest said. “You had some trouble getting it off when you wanted to. Tell me what you saw.”

“I saw nothing,” January said harshly. He took a deep breath; it was time to commit himself. “I want you to take a message back to the scientists. You folks have been working on this thing for years, and you must have had time to consider how the bomb should have been used. You know we could have convinced the Japs to surrender by showing them a demonstration—”

“Wait a minute,” Forest said. “You’re saying you didn’t see anything? There wasn’t a malfunction?”

“That’s right,” January said, and cleared his throat. “It wasn’t necessary, do you understand?”

Forest was looking at Colonel Dray. Dray gave him a disgusted shrug. “He told he he saw evidence of sabotage.”

“I want you to go back and ask the scientists to intercede for me,” January said, raising his voice to get the man’s attention. “I haven’t got a chance in that court-martial. But if the scientists defend me then maybe they’ll let me live, see? I don’t want to get shot for doing something every one of you scientists would have done.”

Dr. Forest had backed away. Color rising, he said, “What makes you think that’s what we would have done? Don’t you think we considered it? Don’t you think men better qualified than you made the decision?” He waved a hand—“God damn it—what made you think you were competent to decide something as important as that!”

January was appalled at the man’s reaction; in his plan it had gone differently. Angrily he jabbed a finger at Forest. “Because I was the man doing it, Doctor Forest. You take even one step back from that and suddenly you can pretend it’s not your doing. Fine for you, but I was there.”

At every word the man’s color was rising. It looked like he might pop a vein in his neck. January tried once more. “Have you ever tried to imagine what one of your bombs would do to a city full of people?”

“I’ve had enough!” the man exploded. He turned to Dray. “I’m under no obligation to keep what I’ve heard here confidential. You can be sure it will be used as evidence in Captain January’s court-martial.” He turned and gave January a look of such blazing hatred that January understood it. For these men to admit he was right would mean admitting that they were wrong—that every one of them was responsible for his part in the construction of the weapon January had refused to use. Understanding that, January knew he was doomed.

The bang of Dr. Forest’s departure still shook the little office. January sat on his cot, got out a smoke. Under Colonel Dray’s cold gaze he lit one shakily, took a drag. He looked up at the colonel, shrugged. “It was my best chance,” he explained. That did something—for the first and only time the cold disdain in the colonel’s eyes shifted to a little hard, lawyerly gleam of respect.

The court-martial lasted two days. The verdict was guilty of disobeying orders in combat, and of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The sentence was death by firing squad.

For most of his remaining days January rarely spoke, drawing ever further behind the mask that had hidden him for so long. A clergyman came to see him, but it was the 509th’s chaplain, the one who had said the prayer blessing the Lucky Strike’s missison before they took off. Angrily January sent him packing.

Later, however, a young Catholic priest dropped by. His name was Patrick Getty. He was a little pudgy man, bespectacled and, it seemed, somewhat afraid of January. January let the man talk to him. When he returned the next day January talked back a bit, and on the day after that he talked some more. It became a habit.

Usually January talked about his childhood. He talked of plowing mucky black bottom land behind a mule. Of running down the lane to the mailbox. Of reading books by the light of the moon after he had been ordered to sleep, and of being beaten by his mother for it with a high-heeled shoe. He told the priest the story of the time his arm had been burnt, and about the car crash at the bottom of Fourth Street. “It’s the truck driver’s face I remember, do you see, Father?”

“Yes,” the young priest said. “Yes.”

And he told him about the game he had played in which every action he took tipped the balance of world affairs. “When I remembered that game I thought it was dumb. Step on a sidewalk crack and cause an earthquake—you know, it’s stupid. Kids are like that.” The priest nodded. “But now I’ve been thinking that if everybody were to live their whole lives like that, thinking that every move they made really was important, then … it might make a difference.” He waved a hand vaguely, expelled cigarette smoke. “You’re accountable for what you do.”

“Yes,” the priest said. “Yes, you are.”

“And if you’re given orders to do something wrong, you’re still accountable, right? The orders don’t change it.”

“That’s right.”

“Hmph.” January smoked a while. “So they say, anyway. But look what happens.” He waved at the office. “I’m like the guy in a story I read—he thought everything in books was true, and after reading a bunch of westerns he tried to rob a train. They tossed him in jail.” He laughed shortly. “Books are full of crap.”

“Not all of them,” the priest said. “Besides, you weren’t trying to rob a train.”

They laughed at the notion. “Did you read that story?”

“No.”

“It was the strangest book—there were two stories in it, and they alternated chapter by chapter, but they didn’t have a thing to do with each other! I didn’t get it.”

“ … Maybe the writer was trying to say that everything connects to everything else.”

“Maybe. But it’s a funny way to say it.”

“I like it.”

And so they passed the time, talking.

So it was the priest who was the one to come by and tell January that his request for a Presidential pardon had been refused. Getty said awkwardly, “It seems the President approves the sentence.”

“That bastard,” January said weakly. He sat on his cot.

Time passed. It was another hot, humid day.

“Well,” the priest said. “Let me give you some better news. Given your situation I don’t think telling you matters, though I’ve been told not to. The second mission—you know there was a second strike?”

“Yes.”

“Well, they missed too.”

“What?” January cried, and bounced to his feet. “You’re kidding!”

“No. They flew to Kokura, but found it covered by clouds. It was the same over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, so they flew back to Kokura and tried to drop the bomb using radar to guide it, but apparently there was a—a genuine equipment failure this time, and the bomb fell on an island.”

January was hopping up and down, mouth hanging open, “So we n never—”

“We never dropped an atom bomb on a Japanese city. That’s right.” Getty grinned. “And get this—I heard this from my superior—they sent a message to the Japanese government telling them that the two explosions were warnings, and that if they didn’t surrender by September first we would drop bombs on Kyoto and Tokyo, and then wherever else we had to. Word is that the Emperor went to Hiroshima to survey the damage, and when he saw it he ordered the Cabinet to surrender. So … .”

“So it worked,” January said. He hopped around, “It worked, it worked!”

“Yes.”

“Just like I said it would!” he cried, and hopping before the priest he laughed.

Getty was jumping around a little too, and the sight of the priest bouncing was too much for January. He sat on his cot and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.

“So—” he sobered quickly. “So Truman’s going to shoot me anyway, eh?”

“Yes,” the priest said unhappily. “I guess that’s right.”

This time January’s laugh was bitter. “He’s a bastard, all right. And proud of being a bastard, which makes it worse.” He shook his head. “If Roosevelt had lived … .”

“It would have been different,” Getty finished. “Yes. Maybe so. But he didn’t.” He sat beside January. “Cigarette?” He held out a pack, and January noticed the white wartime wrapper. He frowned.

“You haven’t got a Camel?”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Oh well. That’s all right.” January took one of the Lucky Strikes, lit up. “That’s awfully good news.” He breathed out. “I never believed Truman would pardon me anyway, so mostly you’ve brought good news. Ha. They missed. You have no idea how much better that makes me feel.”

“I think I do.”

January smoked the cigarette.

“ … So I’m a good American after all. I am a good American,” he insisted, “no matter what Truman says.”

“Yes,” Getty replied, and coughed. “You’re better than Truman any day.”

“Better watch what you say, Father.” He looked into the eyes behind the glasses, and the expression he saw there gave him pause. Since the drop every look directed at him had been filled with contempt. He’d seen it so often during the court-martial that he’d learned to stop looking; and now he had to teach himself to see again. The priest looked at him as if he were … as if he were some kind of hero. That wasn’t exactly right. But seeing it … .

January would not live to see the years that followed, so he would never know what came of his action. He had given up casting his mind forward and imagining possibilities, because there was no point to it. His planning was ended. In any case he would not have been able to imagine the course of the post-war years. That the world would quickly become an armed camp pitched on the edge of atomic war, he might have predicted. But he never would have guessed that so many people would join a January Society. He would never know of the effect the Society had on Dewey during the Korean crisis, never know of the Society’s successful campaign for the test ban treaty, and never learn that thanks in part to the Society and its allies, a treaty would be signed by the great powers that would reduce the number of atomic bombs year by year, until there were none left.

Frank January would never know any of that. But in that moment on his cot looking into the eyes of young Patrick Getty, he guessed an inkling of it—he felt, just for an instant, the impact on history.

And with that he relaxed. In his last week everyone who met him carried away the same impression, that of a calm, quiet man, angry at Truman and others, but in a withdrawn, matter-of-fact way. Patrick Getty, a strong force in the January Society ever after, said January was talkative for some time after he learned of the missed attack on Kokura. Then he became quieter and quieter, as the day approached. On the morning that they woke him at dawn to march him out to a hastily constructed execution shed, his MPs shook his hand. The priest was with him as he smoked a final cigarette, and they prepared to put the hood over his head. January looked at him calmly. “They load one of the guns with a blank cartridge, right?”

“Yes,” Getty said.

“So each man in the squad can imagine he may not have shot me?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

A tight, unhumorous smile was January’s last expression. He threw down the cigarette, ground it out, poked the priest in the arm. “But I know.” Then the mask slipped back into place for good, making the hood redundant, and with a firm step January went to the wall. One might have said he was at peace.

Acknowledgement is made for permission to print the following material:

“Salvador,” by Lucius Shepard. Copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction, April 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Promises To Keep,” by Jack McDevitt. Copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Bloodchild,” by Octavia E. Butler. Copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Blued Moon,” by Connie Willis. Copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“A Message To The King Of Brobdingnag,” by Richard Cowper. Copyright © 1984 by Colin Murry. First published in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction, May 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Georges Borchardt Inc.

“The Affair by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1984 by Agberg, Ltd. First published in Playboy, June 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author and Agberg, Ltd.

PRESS ENTER by John Varley. Copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“New Rose Hotel,” by William Gibson. Copyright © 1984 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. First published in Omni, July 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Map,” by Gene Wolfe. Copyright © 1984 by Gene Wolfe. First published in Light Years And Dark (Berkley). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

“Interlocking Pieces,” by Molly Gloss. Copyright © 1984 by Terry Carr. First published in Universe 14 (Doubleday). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

“Trojan Horse,” by Michael Swanwick. Copyright © 1984 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. First published in Omni, December 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

“Bad Medicine,” by Jack Dann. Copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“At The Embassy Club,” by Elizabeth A. Lynn. Copyright © 1984 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. First published in Omni, June 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Pursuit Of Excellence,” by Rena Yount. Copyright © 1984 by Rena Yount. First published in The Clarion Awards (Doubleday). Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Kindly Isle,” by Frederik Pohl. Copyright © 1984 by Frederik Pohl. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Rock On,” by Pat Cadigan. Copyright © 1984 by Pat Cadigan. First published in Light Years And Dark (Berkley). Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Sunken Gardens,” by Bruce Sterling. Copyright © 1984 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. First published in Omni, June 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Trinity,” by Nancy Kress. Copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Trouble With The Cotton People,” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright © 1984 by The Curators Of The University Of Missouri. First published in The Missouri Review, Vol. VII, No. 2. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

“Twilight Time,” by Lewis Shiner. Copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Black Coral,” by Lucius Shepard. Copyright © 1984 by Terry Carr. First published in Universe 14 (Doubleday). Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Friend,” by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. Copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc. First Published in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction, January 1984. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

“Foreign Skins,” by Tanith Lee. Copyright @ 1984 by Tanith Lee. First published in Tamastara (DAW), by Tanith Lee. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Company In The Wings,” by R. A. Lafferty. Copyright © 1984 by R. A. Lafferty. First published in Heart Of Stone, Dear (Chris Drumm), by R. A. Lafferty. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

“A Cabin On The Coast by Gene Wolfe. Copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction, February 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

“The Lucky Strike,” by Kim Stanley Robinson. Copyright © 1984 by Terry Carr. First published in Universe 14 (Doubleday). Reprinted by permission of the author.

BOOKS BY GARDNER DOZOIS

Strangers (novel)

The Visible Man (collection)

Nightmare Blue (novel—with George Alec Effinger)

A Day in the Life (anthology)

Another World (anthology)

Beyond the Golden Age (anthology)

Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year,

Sixth Annual Collection (anthology)

Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year,

Seventh Annual Collection (anthology)

Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year,

Eighth Annual Collection (anthology)

Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year,

Ninth Annual Collection (anthology)

Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year,

Tenth Annual Collection (anthology)

The Year’s Best Science Fiction,

First Annual Collection (anthology)

Future Power (anthology—with Jack Dann)

Aliens! (anthology—with Jack Dann)

Unicorns! (anthology—with Jack Dann)

Magicats! (anthology—with Jack Dann)

The Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr. (critical chapbook)

The Year’s Best Science Fiction,

Second Annual Collection (anthology)

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

1984

Cezarija Abartis, “The Rocking Horse,” Twilight Zone, September/ October

Jim Aikin, “Statues,” IASFM, November

Brian Aldiss, “The Gods in Flight,” IASFM, Mid-December

Isaac Asimov, “Writing Time,” IASFM, July

Scott Baker, “Still Life with Scorpion,” IASFM, May

Greg Benford, “Me/Days,” Universe 14

Michael Bishop, “Dog’s Lives,” The Missouri Review, vol. VII, No. 2

——, “With a Little Help from Her Friends,” F&SF, February

Ben Bova, “Floodtide,” Analog, March

——, “Out of Time,” Omni, November

Scott Bradfield, “Unmistakably the Finest,” Interzone, No. 8

Joseph Payne Brennan, “Mrs. Clendon’s Place,” Shadows 7

David Brin, “Cyclops,” IASFM, March

John Brizzolara, “Borderland,” Twilight Zone, November/December

Edward Bryant, “Armageddon Between Sets,” F&SF, September

——, “Dancing Chickens,” Light Years and Dark

——, “Party Time,” Westercon 37 Program Book

Bob Buckley, “Peace in the Valley,” Analog, August

Pat Cadigan, “Another One Hits the Road,” F&SF, January

——, “Variation on a Man,” Omni, January

C. A. Cador and Marc Laidlaw, “Kelpie,” Fantasy Book, March Lillian Stewart Carl, “The Rim of the Wheel,” IASFM, February Susan Casper, “The Haunting,” Shadows 7

——, “Mama,” F&SF, August

——, “Shadowman,” Whispers, No. 21—23

Michael Cassut, “A Star Is Born,” IASFM, July

——, “Stillwater, 1896,” Shadows 7

Daphne Castell, “Close of Night,” IASFM, May

Jack Chalker, “In the Dowaii Chambers,” John W. Campbell Awards, Vol. 5

C. J. Cherryh, “Companions,” John W. Campbell Awards, Vol. 5

Rob Chilson, “The Last of His Breed,” Beyond Lands of Never

J. Brian Clarke, “The Expediter,” Analog, February

Michael Conner, “Five Mercies,” F&SF, March

Jim Cort, “Pookas,” Twilight Zone, May/June

Ronald Anthony Cross, “Moon Madness,” IASFM, October

John Dalmas, “Gullikksen and the 500-Pound Hallucination,” Analog, February

Jack Dann, “The Black Horn,” F&SF, November

__, and Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick, “Virgin Territory,” Penthouse, March

__ and Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick, “Afternoon at Schrafft’s,” Amazing, March

Avram Davidson, “The House Surgis Sword,” Amazing, September

__, “Young Doctor Eszterhazy,” Amazing, November

Joseph H. Delaney, “Dragon’s Tooth,” Analog, Mid-December

Bradley Denton, “The Music of the Spheres,” F&SF, March

Philip K. Dick, “Strange Memories of Death,” Interzone, No. 8

Stephen R. Donaldson, “Daughter of Regals,” Daughter of Regals

, “Ser Visal’s Tale,” Daughter of Regals

Gardner Dozois, “Dinner Party,” Light Years and Dark

__, “Morning Child,” Omni, January

George Alec Effinger, “Mars Needs Beatniks,” IASFM, January

__, “White Hats,” IASFM, April

Phyllis Eisenstein, “The Amethyst Phial,” F&SF, February

Nancy Etchemendy, “Clotaire’s Balloon,” F&SF, November

Dennis Etchison, “Somebody Like You,” Masques

John M. Ford, “Heat of Fusion,” IASFM, September

Esther M. Friesner, “Simpson’s Lesser Sphynx,” Elsewhere III

Mary Gentle, “Anukazi’s Daughter,” Tomorrow’s Voices

Molly Gloss, “Joining,” F&SF, June

, “Seaborne,” F&SF, December

Charles L. Grant, “A Voice Not Heard,” IASFM, September

__, “Friends in Dark Places,” Night Visions 1

Terence M. Green, “Barking Dogs,” F&SF, May

Parke Godwin, “Cold Journey in the Dark,” The Last Wave, Vol. 3

Lisa Goldstein, “Ever After,” IASFM, December

Charles L. Harness, “Summer Solstice,” Analog, June

M. John Harrison, “The Lords of Misrule,” Light Years and Dark

, “The Luck in the Head,” Interzone, No. 9

Jan Herschel, “Geometry,” The Clarion Awards

Nina Kiriki Hoffman, “Lost Lives,” The Clarion Awards

Robert Holdstock, “The Boy Who Jumped the Rapids,” Beyond Lands of Never

Eric G. Iverson, “Hindsight,” Analog, Mid-December

Maxim Jakubowski, “Oblique Strategies,” Beyond Lands of Never

Lawrence M. Janifer, “The Samaritan Rule,” Analog, March

Gregg Keizer, “What Seen but the Wolf,” IASFM, February

James Patrick Kelly, “Crow,” IASFM, September

——, “The Empty World,” IASFM, December

——, “Saint Theresa of the Aliens,” IASFM, June

and John Kessel, “Freedom Beach,” F&SF, August

John Kessel, “The Big Dream,” IASFM, April

——, “The Lecturer,” Light Years and Dark

James Killus, “Sun Smoke,” IASFM, June

Stephen King, “Gramma,” Weirdbook 19

——, “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” Redbook, May

Damon Knight, “The Time Exchange,” Playboy, August

Marc Laidlaw, “Buzzy Gone Blue,” IASFM, May

R. A. Lafferty, “And Some in Velvet Gowns,” Ringing Changes

——, “I’ll See It Done and Then I’ll Die,” The Man Who Made Models

——, “The Man Who Made Models,” The Man Who Made Models

——, “The Stranger from Beyond the Sky,” (poem) F&SF, March

——, “Unique Adventure Gone,” Snake in His Bosom

David Langford, “In the Place of Power,” Beyond Lands of Never

J. A. Lawrence, “Some Are Born Great,” Amazing, July

Rand B. Lee, “End Cruise,” IASFM, November

Tanith Lee, “Bite-Me-Not or, Fleur de Feu,” IASFM, October

——, “Draco, Draco,” Beyond Lands of Never

——, “Three Days,” Shadows 7

——, “The Tree: A Winter’s Tale,” Night Visions 1

——, “Under the Hand of Chance,” Tamastara

——, “The Vampire Lover,” Night Visions 1

Ursula K. Le Guin, “May’s Lion,” The Little Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 1— 2

——, “The Visionary,” Omni, October

Fritz Leiber, “Black Has Its Charms,” Whispers, No. 21—23

——, “The Ghost Light,” The Ghost Light

Bob Leman, “The Pilgrimage of Clifford M.,” F&SF, May

Oliver Lowenbruck, “Coming Soon To A Theater Near You,” Twilight Zone, March/April

Elissa Malcohn, “Lazuli,” IASFM, November

Barry Malzberg, “Bedside Manner,” F&SF, November

M. Sargent Mackay, “Demon Lover,” F&SF, June

Robert R. McCammon, “Night Crawlers,” Masques

Jack McDevitt, “Translations from the Colosian,” IASFM, September

Ian McDonald, “The Catherine Wheel,” IASFM, January

Patricia A. McKillip, “A Matter of Music,” Elsewhere III

Robin McKinley, “The Stagman,” Elsewhere III

Cooper McLaughlin, “The Smyler,” F&SF, July

Steven Millhauser, “Cathay,” Twilight Zone, July/August

Richard Mueller, “Dem Bones, Dem Bones Gonna Rise Again,” F&SF, November

Pat Murphy, “Art in the War Zone,” Universe 14

——, “On the Dark Side of the Station Where the Train Never Stops,” Elsewhere III

O. Niemand, “Two Bits,” F&SF, June

Gerald Pearce, “In the Summer Marshes,” Amazing, September

Frederik Pohl, “The Blister,” F&SF, September

——, “Second-Hand Sky,” The Years of the City

Keith Roberts, “Kite Cadet,” Interzone, No. 6

__, “Kitemaster,” Amazing, January

Kim Stanley Robinson, “Ridge Running,” F&SF, January

Joanna Russ, “Bodies,” Extra(ordinary) People

Alan Ryan, “The Bones Wizard,” Whispers, No. 21—23 , “Bundoran, Co. Donegal,” Whispers, No. 21—23

Geoff Ryman, “The Unconquered Country,” Interzone, No. 7

Carter Scholz, “At the Shore,” The Missouri Review, Vol. VII, No. 2

__, “The Menagerie of Babel,” Universe 14

Charles Sheffield, “The Dominus Demonstration,” Analog, April

Lucius Shepard, “A Traveler’s Tale,” IASFM, July

——, “The Etheric Transmitter,” The Clarion Awards

——, “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” F&SF, December

——, “The Night of White Bhairab,” F&SF, October

——, “Reaper,” IASFM, December

Lewis Shiner, “Deserted Cities of the Heart,” Omni, February

——, “Til Human Voices Wake Us,” F&SF, May

Robert Silverberg, “Tourist Trade,” Playboy, December

Bruce Sterling, “Telliamed,” F&SF, September

Michael Swanwick, “Marrow Death,” IASFM, Mid-December

——, “When the Music’s Over,” Light Years and Dark

Jennifer Swift, “The Children’s Teeth Are Set on Edge,” IASFM, April

Somtow Sucharitkul, “The Shattered Horse,” Amazing, May

John Alfred Taylor, “Princeps Tenebarum” (poem), Elsewhere III

Steve Rasnic Tem, “Harvest Child,” Elsewhere III

Robert Thurston, “The Fire at Sarah Siddons,” IASFM, August

Lisa Tuttle, “The Cure,” Light Years and Dark

Jack Vance, “Fader’s Waft,” Rhialto the Marvelous

Eric Vinicoff and Marcia Martin, “The Weighter,” Analog, October

Ian Watson, “The Bloomsday Revolution,” Light Years and Dark

——, “Ghost Lecturer,” IASFM, March

——, “We Remember Babylon,” Habitats

Howard Waldrop, “Helpless, Helpless,” Light Years and Dark

Andrew Weiner, “The Alien Station,” IASFM, October

Lois Wickstrom, “Vines,” The Clarion Awards

Kate Wilhelm, “Strangeness, Charm and Spin,” Light Years and Dark

Connie Willis, “Cash Crop,” The Missouri Review, Vol. VII, No. 2

Gene Wolfe, “Redbeard,” Masques

Thomas Wylde, “The Oncology of Hope,” IASFM, September

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, “Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin’,” Shadows 7

Jane Yolen, “Salvage,” IASFM, May

Timothy Zahn, “Bête Noire,” Analog, March

Roger Zelazny, “Itself Surprized,” Omni, August

——, “Mana from Heaven,” More Magic

ABOUT THE EDITOR

GARDNER DOZOIS was born and raised in Salem, Massachusetts, and now lives in Philadelphia. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, including the novel Strangers, which was a Hugo and Nebula finalist, and The Visible Man, a collection of his short fiction; he also edits the annual series The Year’s Best Science Fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Penthouse, Omni, and most of the leading SF magazines and anthologies. His story “The Peacemaker” won the Nebula Award as Best Short Story of 1983, and he has many times been a finalist for other Hugo and Nebula awards. His critical work has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Starship, Thrust, Science Fiction Chronicle, Writing and Selling Science Fiction and Science Fiction Writers, and he is the author of the critical chapbook The Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr. He has been a Judge for the World Fantasy Award and has served several times on the Nebula Award Jury; he was Chairman of the 1983 and 1984 Juries. His most recent books are The Year’s Best Science Fiction Stories, First Annual Collection, and Magicats!, an anthology edited in collaboration with Jack Dann. Upcoming are three more anthologies edited with Jack Dann, Bestiary!, Sorcerers! and Mermaids!. Dozois is currently at work on another novel, Nottamun Town.

THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION SECOND ANNUAL COLLECTION.

Copyright © 1985 by Gardner Dozois.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

eISBN 9781466807310

First eBook Edition : January 2012