A Dry, Quiet War
by 
Tony Daniel 
    



I cannot tell you what it meant to me to see the two suns of Ferro set behind 
the dry mountain east of my home. I had been away twelve billion years. I passed 
my cabin, to the pump well and, taking a metal cup from where it hung from a 
set-pin, I worked the handle three times. At first it creaked, and I believed it 
was rusted tight, but then it loosened, and within fifteen pulls, I had a cup of 
water.
Someone had kept the pump up. Someone had seen to the house and the land while I 
was away at the war. For me, it had been fifteen years; I wasn't sure how long 
it had been for Ferro. The water was tinged red and tasted of iron. Good. I 
drank it down in a long draught, then put the cup back onto its hanger. When the 
big sun, Hemingway, set, a slight breeze kicked up. Then Fitzgerald went down 
and a cold, cloudless night spanked down onto the plateau. I shivered a little, 
adjusted my internals, and stood motionless, waiting for the last of twilight to 
pass, and the stars ­­ my stars ­­ to come out. Steiner, the planet that is 
Ferro's evening star, was the first to emerge, low in the west, methane blue. 
Then the constellations. Ngal. Gilgamesh. The Big Snake, half-coiled over the 
southwestern horizon. There was no moon tonight. There was never a moon on 
Ferro, and that was right.
After a time, I walked to the house, climbed up the porch and the house 
recognized me and turned on the lights. I went inside. The place was dusty, the 
furniture covered with sheets, but there were no signs of rats or jinjas, and 
all seemed in repair. I sighed, blinked, tried to feel something. Too early, 
probably. I started to take a covering from a chair, then let it be. I went to 
the kitchen and checked the cupboard. An old malt whisky bottle, some dry 
cereal, some spices. The spices had been my mother's, and I seldom used them 
before I left for the end of time. I considered that the whisky might be 
perfectly aged by now. But, as the saying goes on Ferro, we like a bit of food 
with our drink, so I left the house and took the road to town, to Heidel. 
It was a five mile walk, and though I could have enhanced and covered the ground 
in ten minutes or so, I walked at a regular pace under my homeworld stars. The 
road was dirt, of course, and my pant legs were dusted red when I stopped under 
the outside light of Thredmartin's Pub. I took a last breath of cold air, then 
went inside to the warm.
It was a good night at Thredmartin's. There were men and women gathered around 
the fire hearth, usas and splices in the cold corners. The regulars were at the 
bar, a couple of whom I recognized ­­ so old now, wizened like stored apples in 
a barrel. I looked around for a particular face, but she was not there. A 
jukebox sputtered some core-cloud deak and the air was thick with smoke and 
conversation. Or was, until I walked in. Nobody turned to face me. Most of them 
couldn't have seen me. But a signal passed and conversation fell to quiet 
murmur. Somebody quickly killed the jukebox. 
I blinked up an internals menu into my peripheral vision and adjusted to the 
room's temperature. Then I went to the edge of the bar. The room got even more 
quiet.
The bartender, old Thredmartin himself, reluctantly came over to me. 
"What can I do for you, sir?" he asked me.
I looked over him, to the selection of bottles, tubes and cans on display behind 
him. "I don't see it," I said.
"Eh?" He glanced back over his shoulder, then quickly returned to peering at me. 

"Bone's Barley," I said. 
"We don't have any more of that," Thredmartin said, with a suspicious tone. 
"Why not?"
"The man who made it died."
"How long ago?"
"Twenty years, more or less. I don't see what business of­­"
"What about his son?"
Thredmartin backed up a step. Then another. "Henry," he whispered. "Henry Bone."
"Just give me the best that you do have, Peter Thredmartin," I said. "In fact, 
I'd like to buy everybody a round on me."
"Henry Bone! Why, you looked to me like a bad 'un indeed when you walked in 
here. I took you for one of them glims, I did," Thredmartin said. I did not know 
what he was talking about. Then he smiled an old devil's crooked smile. "Your 
money's no good here, Henry Bone. I do happen to have a couple of bottles of 
your old dad's whisky stowed away in back. Drinks are on the house."
And so I returned to my world, and for most of those I'd left behind it seemed 
as if I'd never really gone. My neighbors hadn't changed much in the twenty 
years local that had passed, and, of course, they had no conception of what had 
happened to me. They only knew that I'd been to the war ­­ the Big War at the 
End of Time ­­ and evidently everything turned out okay, for here I was, back in 
my own time and my own place. I planted Ferro's desert barley, brought in peat 
from the mountain bogs, bred the biomass that would extract the minerals from my 
hard ground water, and got ready for making whisky once again. Most of the 
inhabitants of Ferro were divided between whisky families and beer families. 
Bones were distillers, never brewers, since the Settlement, ten generations 
before.
It wasn't until she called upon me that I heard the first hints of the troubles 
that had come. Her name was Alinda Bexter, but since we played together under 
the floorplanks of her father's hotel, I had always called her Bex. When I left 
for the war, she was twenty, and I twenty-one. I still recognized her at forty, 
five years older than I was now, as she came walking down the road to my house, 
a week after I returned. She was taller than most women on Ferro, and she might 
be mistaken for a usa-human splice anywhere else. She was rangy and she wore a 
khaki dress that whipped in the dry wind as she walked down the road. I stood on 
the porch, waiting for her, wondering what she would say.
"Well, this is a load off of me," she said. She was wearing a brimmed hat. It 
had ribbon to tie under her chin, but Bex had not done that. She held her hand 
on it to keep it from blowing from her head. "This damn ranch has been one big 
thankless task."
"So it was you who kept it up," I said.
"Just kept it from falling apart as fast as it would have otherwise," she 
replied. We stood and looked at one another for a moment. Her eyes were green. 
Now I had seen an ocean, and I could understand the kind of green they were.
"Well then," I finally said. "Come on in."



I offered her some sweetcake I'd fried up, and some beer that my neighbor, Shin, 
had brought by, both of which she declined. We sat in the living room, on 
furniture covered with the white sheets I had yet to remove. Bex and I took it 
slow, getting to know each other again. She ran her father's place now. For 
years, the only way to get to Heidel was by freighter, but we had finally gotten 
a node on the Flash, and, even though Ferro was still a backwater planet, there 
were more strangers passing through than there ever had been ­­ usually en route 
to other places. But they sometimes stayed a night or two in the Bexter Hotel. 
Its reputation was spreading, Bex claimed, and I believed her. Even when she was 
young, she had been shrewd but honest, a combination you don't often find in an 
inn-keeper. She was a quiet woman ­­ that is, until she got to know you well ­­ 
and some most likely thought her conceited. I got the feeling that she hadn't 
let down her reserve for a long time. When I knew her before, Bex did not have 
many close friends, but for the ones she had, such as me, she poured out her 
thoughts, and her heart. I found that she hadn't changed much in that way. 
"Did you marry?" I asked her, after hearing about the hotel and her father's bad 
health.
"No," she said. "No, I very nearly did, but then I did not. Did you?"
"No. Who was it?"
"Rall Kenton."
"Rall Kenton? Rall Kenton whose parents run the hops market?" He was a 
quarter-splice, a tall man on a world of tall men. Yet, when I knew him, his 
long shadow had been deceptive. There was no spark or force in him. "I can't see 
that, Bex."
"Tom Kenton died ten years ago," she said. "Marjorie retired, and Rall owned the 
business until just last year. Rall did all right; you'd be surprised. Something 
about his father's passing gave him a backbone. Too much of one, maybe."
"What happened?"
"He died," she said. "He died, too, just as I thought you had." Now she told me 
she would like a beer after all, and I went to get her a bottle of Shin's ale. 
When I returned, I could tell that she'd been crying a little. 
"The glims killed Rall," said Bex, before I could ask her about him. "That's 
their name for themselves, anyway. Humans, repons, kaliwaks and I don't know 
what else. They passed through last year and stayed for a week in Heidel. Very 
bad. They made my father give over the whole hotel to them, and then they had a 
... trial, they called it. Every house was called and made to pay a tithe. The 
glims decided how much. Rall refused to pay. He brought along a pistol ­­ Lord 
knows where he got it ­­ and tried to shoot one of them. They just laughed and 
took it from him." Now the tears started again. 
"And then they hauled him out into the street in front of the hotel." Bex took a 
moment and got control of herself. "They burnt him up with a p-gun. Burned his 
legs off first, then his arms, then the rest of him after they'd let him lie 
there awhile. There wasn't a trace of him after that; we couldn't even bury 
him."
I couldn't take her to me, hold her, not after she'd told me about Rall. Needing 
something to do, I took some tangled banwood from the tinder box and struggled 
to get a fire going from the burnt-down coals in my hearth. I blew into the 
fireplace and only got a nose full of ashes for my trouble. "Didn't anybody 
fight?" I asked. 
"Not after that. We just waited them out. Or they got bored. I don't know. It 
was bad for everybody, not just Rall." Bex shook her head, sighed, then saw the 
trouble I was having and bent down to help me. She was much better at it than I, 
and the fire was soon ablaze. We sat back down and watched it flicker.
"Sounds like war-ghosts," I said.
"The glims?"
"Soldiers who don't go home after the war. The fighting gets into them and they 
don't want to give it up, or can't. Sometimes they have ... modifications that 
won't let them give it up. They wander the timeways ­­ and since they don't 
belong to the time they show up in, they're hard to kill. In the early times, 
where people don't know about the war, or have only heard rumors of it, they had 
lots of names. Vampires. Hagamonsters. Zombies."
"What can you do?"
I put my arm around her. It had been so long. She tensed up, then breathed 
deeply, serenely. 
"Hope they don't come back," I said. "They are bad ones. Not the worst, but 
bad."
We were quiet for a while, and the wind, blowing over the chimney's top, made 
the flue moan as if it were a big stone flute.
"Did you love him, Bex?" I asked. "Rall?"
She didn't even hesitate in her answer this time. "Of course not, Henry Bone. 
How could you ever think such a thing? I was waiting to catch up with you. Now 
tell me about the future."
And so I drew away from her for a while, and told her ­­ part of it at least. 
About how there is not enough dark matter to pull the cosmos back together 
again, not enough mass to undulate in eternal cycle. Instead, there is an end, 
and all the stars are either dead or dying, and all that there is is nothing but 
dim night. I told her about the twilight armies gathered there, culled from all 
times, all places. Creatures, presences, machines, weapons fighting galaxy to 
galaxy, system to system, fighting until the critical point is reached, when 
entropy flows no more, but pools, pools in endless, stagnant pools of nothing. 
No light. No heat. No effect. And the universe is dead, and so those who remain 
... inherit the dark field. They win.
"And did you win?" she asked me. "If that's the word for it."
The suns were going down. Instead of answering, I went outside to the woodpile 
and brought in enough banwood to fuel the fire for the night. I thought maybe 
she would forget what she'd asked me ­­ but not Bex.
"How does the war end, Henry?"
"You must never ask me that," I spoke the words carefully, making sure I was 
giving away nothing in my reply. "Every time a returning soldier tells that 
answer, he changes everything. Then he has two choices. He can either go away, 
leave his own time, and go back to fight again. Or he can stay, and it will all 
mean nothing, what he did. Not just who won and who lost, but all the things he 
did in the war spin off into nothing." 
Bex thought about this for a while. "What could it matter? What in God's name 
could be worth fighting for?" she finally asked. "Time ends. Nothing matters 
after that. What could it possibly matter who won ... who wins?"
"It means you can go back home," I said. "After it's over."
"I don't understand."
I shook my head and was silent. I had said enough. There was no way to tell her 
more, in any case ­­ not without changing things. And no way to say what it was 
that had brought those forces together at the end of everything. And what the 
hell do I know, even now? All I know is what I was told and what I was trained 
to do. If we don't fight at the end, there won't be a beginning. For there to be 
people, there has to be a war to fight at the end of things. We live in that 
kind of universe, and not another, they told me. They told me, and then I told 
myself. And I did what I had to do so that it would be over and I could go home, 
come back. 
"Bex, I never forgot you," I said. She came to sit with me by the fire. We 
didn't touch at first, but I felt her next to me, breathed the flush of her skin 
as the fire warmed her. Then she ran her hand along my arm, felt the bumps from 
the operational enhancements.
"What have they done to you?" she whispered.
Unbidden the old words of the skyfallers' scream, the words that were yet to be, 
surfaced in my mind. 
    They sucked down my heart
    to a little black hole
    You cannot stab me.
    They wrote down my brain
    on a hard knot of space, 
    You cannot turn me.
    Icicle spike 
    from the eye of a star 
    I've come to kill you.
I almost spoke them, from sheer habit. But I did not. The war was over. Bex was 
here, and I knew it was over. I was going to feel something, once again, 
something besides guile, hate and rage. I didn't yet, that was true, but I could 
feel the possibility.
"I don't really breathe any more, Bex; I pretend to so I won't put people off," 
I told her. "It's been so long, I can't even remember what it was like to have 
to."
Bex kissed me then. At first, I didn't remember how to do that either. And then 
I did. I added wood to the fire, then ran my hand along Bex's neck and shoulder. 
Her skin had the health of youth still, but years in the sun and wind had made a 
supple leather of it, tanned and grained fine. We took the sheet from the couch 
and pulled it near to the warmth, and she drew me down to her on it, to her neck 
and breasts. 
"Did they leave enough of you for me?" she whispered.
I had not known until now. "Yes," I answered, "There's enough." I found my way 
inside her, and we made love slowly, in a way that might seem sad to any others 
but us, for there were memories and years of longing that flowed from us, around 
us, like amber just at the melting point, and we were inside and there was 
nothing but this present with all of what was, and what would be, already 
passed. No time. Finally, only Bex and no time between us.
We fell asleep on the old couch, and it was dim half-morning when we awoke, with 
Fitzgerald yet to rise in the west and the fire a bed of coals as red as the 
sky.



Two months later, I was in Thredmartin's when Bex came in with an evil look on 
her face. We had taken getting back together slow and easy up till then, but the 
more time we spent around each other, the more we understood that nothing basic 
had changed. Bex kept coming to the ranch and I took to spending a couple of 
nights a week in a room her father made up for me at the hotel. Furly Bexter was 
an old style McKinnonite. Men and women were to live separately and only meet 
for business and copulation. But he liked me well enough, and when I insisted on 
paying for my room, he found a loophole somewhere in the Tracts of McKinnon 
about cohabitation being all right in hotels and hostels.
"The glims are back," Bex said, sitting down at my table. I was in a dark corner 
of the pub. I left the fire for those who could not adjust their own internals 
to keep them warm. "They've taken over the top floor of the hotel. What should 
we do?"
I took a draw of beer ­­ Thredmartin's own thick porter ­­ and looked at her. 
She was visibly shivering, probably more from agitation than fright. 
"How many of them are there?" I asked.
"Six. And something else, some splice I've never seen, however many that makes."
I took another sip of beer. "Let it be," I said. "They'll get tired, and they'll 
move on."
"What?" Bex's voice was full of astonishment. "What are you saying?"
"You don't want a war here, Bex," I replied. "You have no idea how bad it can 
get."
"They killed Rall. They took our money."
"Money." My voice sounded many years away, even to me.
"It's muscle and worry and care. You know how hard people work on Ferro. And for 
those ... things ... to come in and take it. We cannot let them­­"
" ­­ Bex," I said. "I am not going to do anything."
She said nothing; she put a hand on her forehead as if she had a sickening 
fever, stared at me for a moment, then looked away.
One of the glims chose that moment to come into Thredmartin's. It was a 
halandana, a splice ­­ human and jan ­­ from up-time and a couple of possible 
universes over. It was nearly seven feet tall, with a two-foot-long neck, and 
stooped to enter Thredmartin's entrance. Without stopping it went to the bar and 
demanded morphine. 
Thredmartin was at the bar. He pulled out a dusty rubber, little used, and 
before he could get out an injector, the halandana reached over, took the entire 
rubber and put it in the pocket of the long gray coat it wore. Thredmartin 
started to speak, then shook his head and found a spray shooter. He slapped it 
on the bar, and started to walk away. The halandana's hand shot out and pushed 
the old man. Thredmartin stumbled to his knees.
I felt the fingers of my hands clawing, clenching. Let them loosen; let them go. 

Thredmartin rose slowly to one knee. Bex was up, around the bar, and over to 
him, steadying his shoulder. The glim watched this for a moment, then took its 
drug and shooter to a table, where it got itself ready for an injection. 
I looked at it closely now. It was female, but that did not mean much in 
halandana splices. I could see it phase around the edges with dead, gray flames. 
I clicked in wideband overspace and I could see through the halandana to the 
chair it was sitting in and the unpainted wood of the wall behind it. And I saw 
more, in the spaces between spaces. The halandana was keyed in to a websquad; it 
wasn't really an individual anymore. Its fate was tied to that of its unit 
commander. So the war-ghosts ­­ the glims ­­ were a renegade squad, most likely, 
with a single leader calling the shots. For a moment, the halandana glanced in 
my direction, maybe feeling my gaze somewhere outside of local time, and I 
banded down to human normal. It quickly went back to what it was doing. Bex made 
sure Thredmartin was all right, then came back over to my table.
"We're not even in its time line," I said. "It doesn't think of us as really 
being alive."
"Oh God," Bex said. "This is just like before."
I got up and walked out. It was the only solution. I could not say anything to 
Bex. She would not understand. I understood ­­ not acting was the rational, the 
only, way ­­ but not my way. Not until now. 
I enhanced my legs and loped along the road to my house. But when I got there, I 
kept running, running off into the red sands of Ferro's outback. The night came 
down, and, as the planet turned, I ran along the length of the Big Snake, bright 
and hard to the southwest, and then under blue glow of Steiner, when she rose in 
the moonless, trackless night. I ran for miles and miles, as fast as a jaguar, 
but never tiring. How could I tire when parts of me stretched off into 
dimensions of utter stillness, utter rest? Could Bex see me for what I was, she 
would not see a man, but a kind of colonial creature, a mash of life pressed 
into the niches and faultlines of existence like so much grit and lichen. A 
human is anchored with only his heart and his mind; sever those, and he floats 
away, floats away. What was I? A medusa fish in an ocean of time. A tight clump 
of nothing, disguised as a man. Something else? 
Something damned hard to kill, that was certain. And so were the glims. When I 
returned to my house in the starbright night, I half-expected to find Bex, but 
she was not there. And so I rattled about for a while, powered down for an hour 
at dawn and rested on a living room chair, dreaming in one part of my mind, 
completely alert in another. The next day, Bex still did not come, and I began 
to fear something had happened to her. I walked part-way into Heidel, then cut 
off the road and stole around the outskirts, to a mound of shattered, volcanic 
rocks ­­ the tailings of some early prospector's pit ­­ not far from the town's 
edge. There I stepped up my vision and hearing, and made a long sweep of main 
street. Nothing. Far, far too quiet, even for Heidel.
I worked out the parabolic to the Bexter Hotel, and after a small adjustment, 
heard Bex's voice, then her father's. I was too far away to make out the words, 
but my quantitatives gave it a positive i.d. So Bex was all right, at least for 
the moment. I made my way back home, and put in a good day's work making whisky.
The next morning ­­ it was the quarteryear's double dawn, with both suns rising 
in the east nearly together ­­ Bex came to me. I brought her inside and, in the 
moted sunlight of my family's living room, where I now took my rest, when I 
rested, Bex told me that the glims had taken her father.
"He held back some old Midnight Livet down in the cellar, and didn't deliver it 
when they called for room service." Bex rubbed her left fist with her right 
fingers, expertly, almost mechanically, as she'd kneaded a thousand balls of 
bread dough. "How do they know these things? How do they know, Henry?"
"They can see around things," I said. "Some of them can, anyway."
"So they read our thoughts? What do we have left?"
"No, no. They can't see in there, at least I'm sure they can't see in your old 
man's McKinnonite nut lump of a brain. But they probably saw the whisky down 
there in the cellar, all right. A door isn't a very solid thing for a warghost 
out of its own time and place."
Bex gave her hand a final squeeze, spread it out upon her lap. She stared down 
at the lines of her palm, then looked up at me. "If you won't fight, then you 
have to tell me how to fight them," she said. "I won't let them kill my father."
"Maybe they won't."
"I can't take that chance."
Her eyes were blazing green, as the suns came full through the window. Her face 
was bright-lit and shadowed, as if by the steady coals of a fire. You have loved 
this woman a long time, I thought. You have to tell her something that will be 
of use. But what could possibly be of use against a creature that had survived 
­­ will survive that great and final war ­­ and so must survive now? You can't 
kill the future. That's how the old sergeants would explain battle fate to the 
recruits. If you are meant to be there, they'd say, then nothing can hurt you. 
And if you're not, then you'll just fade, so you might as well go out fighting. 
"You can only irritate them," I finally said to Bex. "There's a way to do it 
with the Flash. Talk to that technician, what's his name­­"
"Jurven Dvorak."
"Tell Dvorak to strobe the local interrupt, fifty, sixty tetracycles. It'll cut 
off all traffic, but it will be like a wasp nest to them, and they won't want to 
get close enough to turn it off. Maybe they'll leave. Dvorak better stay near 
the node after that, too."
"All right," Bex said. "Is that all?"
"Yes," I said. I rubbed my temples, felt the vague pain of a headache, which 
quickly receded as my internals rushed more blood to my scalp. "Yes, that's it."
Later that day, I heard the crackle of random quantum tunnel spray, as split, 
unseived particles decided their spin, charm and color without guidance from the 
world of gravity and cause. It was an angry buzz, like the hum of an insect 
caught between screen and windowpane, tremendously irritating to listen to for 
hours on end, if you were unlucky enough to be sensitive to the effect. I put up 
with it, hoping against hope that it would be enough to drive off the glims.
Bex arrived in the early evening, leading her father, who was ragged and 
half-crazed from two days without light or water. The glims had locked him in a 
cleaning closet, in the hotel, where he'd sat cramped and doubled over. After 
the buzz started, Bex opened the lock and dragged the old man from the closet 
where they were holding him. It was almost as if the glims had forgotten the 
whole affair.
"Maybe," I said. "We can hope."
She wanted me to put the old man up at my house, in case the glims suddenly 
remembered. Old Furly Bexter didn't like the idea. He rattled on about something 
in McKinnon's "Letter to the Canadians," but I said yes, he could stay. Bex left 
me with her father in the shrouds of my living room.
Some time that night, the quantum buzz stopped. And in the early morning, I saw 
them ­­ five of them ­­ stalking along the road, kicking before them the 
cowering, stumbling form of Jurven Dvorak. I waited for them on the porch. Furly 
Bexter was asleep in my parents' bedroom. He was exhausted from his ordeal, and 
I expected him to stay that way for a while. 
When they came into the yard, Dvorak ran to the pump and held to the handle, as 
if it were a branch suspending him over a bottomless chasm. And for him it was. 
They'd broken his mind and given him a dream of dying. Soon to be replaced by 
reality, I suspected, and no pumphandle hope of salvation. 
Their leader ­­ or the one who did the talking ­­ was human-looking. I'd have to 
band out to make a full i.d., and I didn't want to give anything away for the 
moment. He saved me the trouble by telling me himself.
"My name's Marek," he said. "Come from a D-line, not far down-time from here."
I nodded, squinting into the red brightness reflected off my hardpan yard.
"We're just here for a good time," the human continued. "What you want to spoil 
that for?"
I didn't say anything for a moment. One of Marek's gang spat into the dryness of 
my dirt.
"Go ahead and have it," I said.
"All right," Marek said. He turned to Dvorak, then pulled out a weapon ­­ not 
really a weapon though, for it is the tool of behind-the-lines enforcers, prison 
interrogators, confession extractors. It's called an algorithmic truncheon, a 
trunch, in the parlance. A trunch, used at full load, will strip the myelin 
sheath from axons and dendrites; it will burn up a man's nerves as if they were 
fuses. It is a way to kill with horrible pain. Marek walked over and touched the 
trunch to the leg of Dvorak, as if he were lighting a bonfire.
The Flash technician began to shiver, and then to seethe, like a teapot coming 
to boil. The motion traveled up his legs, into his chest, out his arms. His neck 
began to writhe, as if the corded muscles were so many snakes. Then Dvorak's 
brain burned, as a teapot will when all the water has run out and there is 
nothing but flame against hot metal. And then Dvorak screamed. He screamed for a 
long, long time. And then he died, crumpled and spent, on the ground in front of 
my house.
"I don't know you," Marek said, standing over Dvorak's body and looking up at 
me. "I know what you are, but I can't get a read on who you are, and that 
worries me," he said. He kicked at one of the Flash tech's twisted arms. "But 
now you know me."
"Get off my land," I said. I looked at him without heat. Maybe I felt nothing 
inside, either. That uncertainty had been my companion for a long time, my grim 
companion. Marek studied me for a moment. If I kept his attention, he might not 
look around me, look inside the house, to find his other fun, Furly Bexter, 
half-dead from Marek's amusements. Marek turned to the others.
"We're going," he said to them. "We've done what we came for." They turned 
around and left by the road on which they'd come, the only road there was. After 
a while, I took Dvorak's body to a low hill and dug him a grave there. I set up 
a sandstone marker, and since I knew Dvorak came from Catholic people, I 
scratched into the stone the sign of the cross. Jesus, from the Milky Way. 
Another glim. Hard to kill.
It took old man Bexter only a week or so to fully recover; I should have known 
by knowing Bex that he was made of a tougher grit. He began to putter around the 
house, helping me out where he could, although I ran a tidy one-man operation, 
and he was more in the way than anything. Bex risked a trip out once that week. 
Her father again insisted he was going back into town, but Bex told him the 
glims were looking for him. So far, she'd managed to convince them that she had 
no idea where he'd gotten to.
I was running low on food and supplies, and had to go into town the following 
Firstday. I picked up a good backpack load at the mercantile and some chemicals 
for treating the peat at the druggist, then risked a quick look-in on Bex. A 
sign on the desk told all that they could find her at Thredmartin's, taking her 
lunch, should they want her. I walked across the street, set my load down just 
inside Thredmartin's door, in the cloakroom, then passed through the entrance 
into the afternoon dank of the pub.
I immediately sensed glims all around, and hunched myself in, both mentally and 
physically. I saw Bex in her usual corner, and walked toward her across the 
room. As I stepped beside a table in the pub's middle, a glim ­­ it was the 
halandana ­­ stuck out a long, hairy leg. Almost, I tripped ­­ and in that 
instant, I almost did the natural thing and cast about for some hold that was 
not present in the three-dimensional world ­­ but I did not. I caught myself, 
came to a dead stop, then carefully walked around the glim's outstretched leg. 
"Mind if I sit down?" I said as I reached Bex's table. She nodded toward a free 
chair. She was finishing a beer, and an empty glass stood beside it. Thredmartin 
usually had the tables clear as soon as the last drop left a mug. Bex was 
drinking fast. Why? Working up her courage, perhaps.
I lowered myself into the chair, and for a long time, neither of us said 
anything to the other. Bex finished her beer. Thredmartin appeared, looked 
curiously at the two empty mugs. Bex signaled for another, and I ordered my own 
whisky. 
"How's the ranch," she finally asked me. Her face was flush and her lips 
trembled slightly. She was angry, I decided. At me, at the situation. It was 
understandable. Completely understandable.
"Fine," I said. "The ranch is fine."
"Good."
Again a long silence. Thredmartin returned with our drinks. Bex sighed and, for 
a moment, I thought she would speak, but she did not. Instead, she reached under 
the table and touched my hand. I opened my palm, and she put her hand into mine. 
I felt the tension in her, the bonework of her hand as she squeezed tightly. I 
felt her fear and worry. I felt her love. 
And then Marek came into the pub looking for her. He stalked across the room and 
stood in front of our table. He looked hard at me, then at Bex, and then he 
swept an arm across the table and sent Bex's beer and my whisky flying toward 
the wall. The beer mug broke, but I quickly reached out and caught my tumbler of 
scotch in midair without spilling a drop. Of course no ordinary human could have 
done it. 
Bex noticed Marek looking at me strangely and spoke with a loud voice that got 
his attention. "What do you want? You looking for me at the hotel."
"Your sign says you're open," Marek said in a reasonable, ugly voice. "I rang 
for room service. Repeatedly."
"Sorry," Bex said. "Just let me settle up and I'll be right there."
"Be right there now," Marek said, pushing the table from in front of her. Again, 
I caught my drink, held it on a knee while I remained sitting. Bex started up 
from her chair and stood facing Marek. She looked him in the eyes. "I'll be 
there directly," she said.
Without warning, Marek reached out and grabbed her by the chin. He didn't seem 
to be pressing hard, but I knew he must have her in painful grip. He pulled Bex 
toward him. Still, she stared him in the eyes. Slowly, I rose from my chair, 
setting my tumbler of whisky down on the warm seat where I had been. 
Marek glanced over at me. Our eyes met, and at that close distance, he could 
plainly see the enhancements under my corneas. I could see his. 
"Let go of her," I said. 
He did not let go of Bex.
"Who the hell are you?" he asked. "That you tell me what to do?"
"I'm just a grunt, same as you," I said. "Let go of her."
The halandana had risen from its chair and was soon standing behind Marek. 
It-she growled mean and low. A combat schematic of how to handle the situation 
iconed up into the corner of my vision. The halandana was a green figure, Marek 
was red, Bex was a faded rose. I blinked once to enlarge it. Studied it in a 
fractional second. Blinked again to close it down. Marek let go of Bex. 
She stumbled back, hurt and mad, rubbing her chin. 
"I don't think we've got a grunt here," Marek said, perhaps to the halandana, to 
himself, but looking at me. "I think we've got us a genuine skyfalling space 
marine."
The halandana's growl grew deeper and louder, filling ultra and subsonic 
frequencies. 
"How many systems'd you take out, skyfaller?" Marek asked. "A couple of galaxies 
worth?" The halandana made to advance on me, but Marek put out his hand to stop 
it. "Where do you get off? This ain't nothing but small potatoes next to what 
you've done."
In that moment, I spread out, stretched a bit in ways that Bex could not see, 
but that Marek could ­­ to some extent at least. I encompassed him, all of him, 
and did a thorough i.d. on both him and the halandana. I ran the data through 
some trans-d personnel files tucked into a swirl in n-space I'd never expected 
to access again. Marek Lambrois. Corporal of a back line military police platoon 
assigned to the local cluster in a couple of possible worlds, deserters all in a 
couple of others. He was aggression enhanced by trans-weblink anti-alg coding. 
The squad's fighting profile was notched to the top level at all times. They 
were bastards who were now pre-programmed bastards. Marek was right about being 
small potatoes. He and his gang were nothing but mean-ass grunts, small-time 
goons for some of the non-aligned contingency troops.
"What the hell?" Marek said. He noticed my analytics, but it was too fast for 
him to get a good glimpse of me. But he did understand something in that moment, 
something it didn't take enhancement to figure out. And in that moment, 
everything was changed, had I but seen. Had I but seen.
"You're some bigwig, ain't you, skyfaller? Somebody that matters to the 
outcome," Marek said. "This is your actual and you don't want to fuck yourself 
up-time so you won't fight." He smiled crookedly. A diagonal of teeth, straight 
and narrow, showed whitely.
"Don't count on it," I said. 
"You won't," he said, this time with more confidence. "I don't know what I was 
worrying about. I can do anything I want here."
"Well," I said. "Well." And then I said nothing. 
"Get on over there and round me up some grub," Marek said to Bex. "I'll be 
waiting for it in room forty-five, little lady."
"I'd rather­­"
"Do it," I said. The words were harsh and did not sound like my voice. But they 
were my words, and, after a moment, I remembered the voice. It was mine. From 
far, far in the future. Bex gasped at their hardness, but took a step forward, 
moved to obey. 
"Bex," I said, more softly. "Just get the man some food." I turned to Marek. "If 
you hurt her, I don't care about anything. Do you understand? Nothing will 
matter to me."
Marek's smiled widened into a grin. He reached over, slowly, so that I could 
think about it, and patted my cheek. Then he deliberately slapped me, hard. Hard 
enough to turn my head. Hard enough to draw a trickle of blood from my lip. It 
didn't hurt very much, of course. Of course it didn't hurt.
"Don't you worry, skyfaller," he said. "I know exactly where I stand now." He 
turned and left, and the halandana, its drugs unfinished on the table where it 
had sat, trailed out after him. 
Bex looked at me. I tried to meet her gaze, but did not. I did not look down, 
but stared off into Thredmartin's darkness. She reached over and wiped the blood 
from my chin with her little finger.
"I guess I'd better go," she said. 
I did not reply. She shook her head sadly, and walked in front of me. I kept my 
eyes fixed, far away from this place, this time, and her passing was a swirl of 
air, a red-brown swish of hair, and Bex was gone. Gone.
    They sucked down my heart
    to a little black hole
    You cannot stab me.



"Colonel Bone, we've done the prelims on sector 1168 and there are fifty-six 
class one civilizations along with two-hundred seventy rationals in stage one or 
two development."
"Fifty six. Two hundred seventy. Ah. Me."
"Colonel, sir, we can evac over half of them within thirty-six hours local."
"And have to defend them in the transcendent. Chaos neutral. Guaranteed forty 
percent casualties for us."
"Yes, sir. But what about the civs at least. We can save a few."
    They wrote down my brain
    on a hard knot of space.
    You cannot turn me.
"Unacceptable, soldier."
"Sir?"
"Unacceptable."
"Yes, sir."



All dead. All those millions of dead people. But it was the end of time, and 
they had to die, so that they ­­ so that we all, all in time ­­ could live. But 
they didn't know, those civilizations. Those people. It was the end of time, but 
you loved life all the same, and you died the same hard way as always. For 
nothing. It would be for nothing. Outside, the wind had kicked up. The sky was 
red with Ferro's dust, and a storm was brewing for the evening. I coated my 
sclera with a hard and glassy membrane, and, unblinking, I stalked home with my 
supplies through a fierce and growing wind.
That night, on the curtains of dust and thin rain, on the heave of the storm, 
Bex came to my house. Her clothes were torn and her face was bruised. She said 
nothing, as I closed the door behind her, led her into the kitchen, and began to 
treat her wounds. She said nothing as her worried father sat at my kitchen table 
and watched, and wrung his hands, and watched because there wasn't anything he 
could do. 
"Did that man..." Her father said. the old man's voice broke. "Did he?"
"I tried to take the thing, the trunch, from him. He'd left it lying on the 
table by the door." Bex spoke in a hollow voice. "I thought that nobody was 
going to do anything, not even Henry, so I had to. I had to." Her facial bruises 
were superficial. But she held her legs stiffly together, and clasped her hands 
to her stomach. There was vomit on her dress. "The trunch had some kind of alarm 
set on it," Bex said. "So he caught me."
"Bex, are you hurting?," I said to her. She looked down, then carefully spread 
her legs. "He caught me and then he used the trunch on me. Not full strength. 
Said he didn't want to do permanent damage. Said he wanted to save me for 
later." Her voice sounded far away. She covered her face with her hands. "He put 
it in me," she said. 
Then she breathed deeply, raggedly, and made herself look at me. "Well," she 
said. "So." 
I put her into my bed, and he sat in the chair beside it, standing watch for who 
knew what? He could not defend his daughter, but he must try, as surely as the 
suns rose, now growing farther apart, over the hard pack of my homeworld desert.
Everything was changed.
"Bex," I said to her, and touched her forehead. Touched her fine, brown skin. 
"Bex, in the future, we won. I won, my command won it. Really, really big. 
That's why we're here. That's why we're all here." 
Bex's eyes were closed. I could not tell if she'd already fallen asleep. I hoped 
she had. 
"I have to take care of some business, and then I'll do it again," I said in a 
whisper. "I'll just have to go back up-time and do it again."
Between the first and second rising, I'd reached Heidel, and as Hemingway burned 
red through the storm's dusty leavings, I stood in the shadows of the entrance 
foyer of the Bexter Hotel. There I waited.
The halandana was the first up ­­ like me, they never really slept ­­ and it 
came down from its room looking, no doubt, to go out and get another rubber of 
its drug. Instead, it found me. I didn't waste time with the creature. With a 
quick twist in n-space, I pulled it down to the present, down to a local 
concentration of hate and lust and stupidity that I could kill with a quick 
thrust into its throat. But I let it live; I showed it myself, all of me spread 
out and huge, and I let it fear.
"Go and get Marek Lambrois," I told it. "Tell him Colonel Bone wants to see him. 
Colonel Henry Bone of the 8th Sky and Light."
"Bone," said the halandana. "I thought­­"
I reached out and grabbed the creature's long neck. This was the halandana weak 
point, and this halandana had a ceramic implant as protection. I clicked up the 
power in my forearm a level and crushed the collar as I might a tea cup. The 
halandana's neck carapace shattered to platelets and shards, outlined in fine 
cracks under its skin.
"Don't think," I said. "Tell Marek Lambrois to come into the street and I will 
let him live."
This was untrue, of course, but hope never dies, I'd discovered, even in the 
hardest of soldiers. But perhaps I'd underestimated Marek. Sometimes I still 
wonder.
He stumbled out, still partly asleep, onto the street. Last night had evidently 
been a hard and long one. His eyes were a red no detox nano could fully clean 
up. His skin was the color of paste.
"You have something on me," I said. "I cannot abide that."
"Colonel Bone," he began. "If I'd knowed it was you­­"
"Too late for that."
"It's never too late, that's what you taught us all when you turned that 
offensive around out on the Husk and gave the Chaos the what-for. I'll just be 
going. I'll take the gang with me. It's to no purpose, our staying now."
"You knew enough yesterday ­­ enough to leave." I felt the rage, the old rage 
that was to be, once again. "Why did you do that to her?" I asked. "Why did you 
­­ "
And then I looked into his eyes and saw it there. The quiet desire ­­ beaten 
down by synthesized emotions, but now triumphant, sadly triumphant. The desire 
to finally, finally die. Marek was not the unthinking brute I'd taken him for 
after all. Too bad for him.
I took a step toward Marek. His instincts made him reach down, go for the 
trunch. But it was a useless weapon on me. I don't have myelin sheaths on my 
nerves. I don't have nerves anymore; I have wiring. Marek realized this was so 
almost instantly. He dropped the trunch, then turned and ran. I caught him. He 
tried to fight, but there was never any question of him beating me. That would 
be absurd. I'm Colonel Bone of the Skyfalling 8th. I kill so that there might be 
life. Nobody beats me. It is my fate, and yours, too. 
I caught him by the shoulder, and I looped my other arm around his neck and 
reined him to me ­­ not enough to snap anything. Just enough to calm him down. 
He was strong, but had no finesse. 
Like I said, glims are hard to kill. They're the same as snails in shells in a 
way, and the trick is to draw them out ­­ way out. Which is what I did with 
Marek. As I held him physically, I caught hold of him, all of him, over there, 
in the place I can't tell you about, can't describe. The way you do this is by 
holding a glim still and causing him great suffering, so that they can't 
withdraw into the deep places. That's what vampire stakes and Roman crosses are 
all about. 
And like I told Bex, glims are bad ones, all right. Bad, but not the worse. I am 
the worse.
    Icicle spike 
    from the eye of a star 
    I've come to kill you.
I sharpened my nails. Then I plunged them into Marek's stomach, through the 
skin, into the twist of his guts. I reached around there and caught hold of 
something, a piece of intestine. I pulled it out. This I tied to the porch of 
the Bexter Hotel.
Marek tried to untie himself and pull away. He was staring at his insides, 
rolled out, raw and exposed, and thinking ­­ I don't know what. I haven't died. 
I don't know what is like to die. He moaned sickly. His hands fumbled uselessly 
in the grease and phlegm that coated his very own self. There was no undoing the 
knots I'd tied, no pushing himself back in. 
I picked him up, and, as he whimpered, I walked down the street with him. His 
guts trailed out behind us, like a pink ribbon. After I'd gotten about twenty 
feet, I figure this was all he had in him. I dropped him into the street. 
Hemingway was in the northeast and Fitzgerald directly east. They both shone at 
different angles on Marek's crumple, and cast crazy, mazy shadows down the 
length of the street. 
"Colonel Bone," he said. I was tired of his talking. "Colonel­­"
I reached into his mouth, past his gnashing teeth, and pulled out his tongue. He 
reached for it as I extracted it, so I handed it to him. Blood and drool flowed 
from his mouth and colored the red ground even redder about him. Then, one by 
one, I broke his arms and legs, then I broke each of the vertebrae in his 
backbone, moving up his spinal column with quick pinches. It didn't take long. 
This is what I did in the world that people can see. In the twists of other 
times and spaces, I did similar things, horrible, irrevocable things, to the 
man. I killed him. I killed him in such a way that he would never come to life 
again, not in any possible place, not in any possible time. I wiped Marek 
Lambrois from existence. Thoroughly. And with his death, the other glims died, 
like lights going out, lights ceasing to exist, bulb, filament and all. Or like 
the quick loss of all sensation after a brain is snuffed out. 
Irrevocably gone from this time line, and that was what mattered. Keeping this 
possible future uncertain, balanced on the fulcrum of chaos and necessity. 
Keeping it free, so that I could go back and do my work. 
I left Marek lying there, in the main street of Heidel. Others could do the 
mopping up; that wasn't my job. As I left town, on the way back to my house and 
my life there, I saw that I wasn't alone in the dawn-lit town. Some had business 
out at this hour, and they had watched. Others had heard the commotion and come 
to windows and porches see what it was. Now they knew. They knew what I was, 
what I was to be. I walked alone down the road, and found Bex and her father 
both sound asleep in my room. 
I stroked her fine hair. She groaned, turned in her sleep. I pulled my covers up 
to her chin. Forty years old, and as beautiful as a child. Safe in my bed. Bex. 
Bex, I will miss you. Always, always, Bex.
I went to the living room, to the shroud-covered furniture. I sat down in what 
had been my father's chair. I sipped a cup of my father's best barley malt 
whisky. I sat, and as the suns of Ferro rose in the hard iron sky, I faded into 
the distant, dying future. 



© Tony Daniel 1996, 1998
This story first appeared in Asimov's in 1996 and was reprinted in The Year's 
Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (edited by Gardner Dozois; St 
Martin's Press).