Future Crime synopsis' [030-066-4.0]

By: 16 authors

Category: Fiction Science Fiction

Synopsis:

Have you ever been robbed, directly or by some
hightech snafu or manipulation?  Are you positive you could plan the
perfect crime (even though you'd never carry it out)?  Or do you think
that given all the clues you could solve any crime, outsmart any
criminal?  Well, here's your chance to match your wits with the pros
who took up the challenge of creating and solving crimes that have not
yet occurred.
They run the gamut from low-tech to high, from activities against
entire societies to one-on-one, completely personal crimes.  Let
sixteen master sleuths take you along on their crime beats.



FUTURE CRIMES

EDITED BY

Martin H. Greenberg and John Heifers

DAW BOOKS, INC.

DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER

375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM

SHEILA E. GILBERT

PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1999 by Tekno Books and Ed German All Rights Reserved Cover
art by Peter Gudynas DAW Book Collectors No.  1133

DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Putnam Inc.

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this
book may have been stolen property and reported as "unsold and
destroyed" to the publisher.  In such case neither the author nor the
publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

First Printing, October 1999

iDAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED VS.  PAT OFF.
AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

--MARCA REGISTRADA

HECHO EN U.S.A.

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction 1999 by John Heifers Pein Bek Longpela Telimpon 1999 by
Alan Dean Foster The Mojave Two-Step 1999 by Norman Partridge
Shakespeare Minus One 1999 by Barbara Paul Good Repair 1999 by Craig
Shaw Gardner The Kidnapping of Roni Tahr 1999 by Alan Rodgers In
Memoriam 1999 by Mike Stotter Sleep that Burns 1999 by Jerry Sykes The
Death of Winston Foster 1999 by R. Davis Glory Hand in the Soft City
1999 by Jay Bonansinga The Crime of Transfiguration 1999 by Will Murray
Pia and the King of Siam 1999 by Janet Berliner The Serpent Was More
Subtle 1999 by Tom Piccirilli Tinker's Last Case 1999 by Ron Goulart
All the Unlived Moments 1999 by Gary Braunbeck The White City 1999 by
Alan Brennert Setting Free the Daughters of Earth 1999 by Peter
Crowther

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

PEIN BEK LONGPELA TELIMPON

Alan Dean Foster 3

THE MOJAVE TWO-STEP

Norman Partridge 23

SHAKESPEARE MINUS ONE

Barbara Paul 40

GOOD REPAIR

Craig Shaw Gardner 62

THE KIDNAPPING OF RON!  TAHR

Alan To tigers 75

IN MEMORIAM

Mike Stotter 100

SLEEP THAT BURNS

Jerry Sykes 114

THE DEATH OF WINSTON FOSTER

R. Davis 134

GLORY HAND IN THE SOFT CITY

Jay Bonansinga 146

THE CRIME OF TRANSFIGURATION

Will Murray 165

viii Contents

PIA AND THE KING OF SIAM

Janer Berliner 182

THE SERPENT WAS MORE SUBTLE

Tom Piccirilli 202

TINKER'S LAST CASE

Ron Goulart 220

ALL THE UNLIVED MOMENTS

Gary Braunbeck 238

THE WHITE CITY

Alan Brennert 264

SETTING FREE THE DAUGHTERS OF EARTH

Peter Crowther 276

INTRODUCTION

by John Heifers

Warning: the following introduction is not for the faint of heart.

Having said that, let's talk about crime.

If one looks up the definition of crime in any dictionary, a variation
of the following will often be found: "An act or omission of a
forbidden act or omission of a duty governed by law which makes the
offender liable to be punished by that law."  Even that specific
language cannot even begin to cover the gamut of crimes that man is
capable of committing against his fellow man.  Ever since Cain picked
up a rock or piece of wood or clenched his fist, and with malice
aforethought, struck down his brother Abel (for those who prefer to
uphold the evolutionary side of history, just imagine a caveman
coveting his neighbor's mate or dwelling, and picking up his club
before going to pay that neighbor a visit, with the same result),
humans have been plotting to commit crimes against nature, against
humanity, and, in several cases, crimes against our very souls.
For it is the invasive nature of most crimes that shock us, an assault
of our homes, of our privacy, of our very bodies, shattering the
peaceful, tranquil world that we once knew.  Even if we just witness a
2 John Heifers crime, there is an overwhelming feeling of having been
invaded, that nothing is safe anymore, that there is nowhere to run,
nowhere to hide.  And when the crime is senseless, such as the
occasional rash of mass public shootings that seem to crop up at least
once a year (and repeating at an alarmingly rapid rate), then the crime
is even more horrifying, because we stop to look around us and wonder:
who's going to snap next, and will I be in the same room with him or
her when they go?
Of course, with the advance of technology, crime has become easier to
commit.  Clubs and rocks have given way to pistols and hunting rifles,
and nowadays, who's going to argue with a bullet?  Complicated con
games are being replaced by computers, with which it is possible to rob
thousands of people without ever seeing their faces.  As life grows
more complicated with each day, it will be easier to let things,
information and such, slip through the cracks.  And there will always
be enterprising people who will use those found things for their own
benefit.
When we first came up with the idea for this book, we were curious as
to the types of stories we would receive, whether they would be full of
high-tech gadgetry and victimless crimes, or if the writers we asked to
contribute still thought that crimes would be committed face-to-face,
one person against another.  We were pleasantly (or perhaps
unpleasantly would be a better choice) surprised to discover an
intriguing mix of both the high tech and low tech, from the thieves who
score an unusual haul in Norman Partridge's story to a deadly culture
clash as envisioned by Alan Dean Foster.  No matter how futuristic the
society, and how technologically advanced the law enforcement,
somewhere, sometime, someone will always be committing a crime.

PEIN BEK LONGPELA

TELIMPON

by Alan Dean Foster

Alan Dean Foster was born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles.
He has a bachelor's degree in Political Science and a Master of Fine
Arts in Cinema from UCLA.  He has traveled extensively around the
world, from Australia to Papua New Guinea.  He has also written fiction
in just about every genre, and is known for his excellent movie
novelizations.  Currently, he lives in Prescott, Arizona, with his
wife, assorted dogs, cats, fish, javelina, and other animals, where he
is working on several new novels and media projects.
WAHGI first heard the muffled screams and angry curses as he was
rummaging through the dumpster.
Not that this was unusual.  Late at night in Boroko there were frequent
fights between men who had blown their weekly paycheck on cheap beer
staggering drunkenly out of illegal pubs, between tired whores and
their customers, between predatory taxi drivers battling over fares
with irate passengers unable to pay--even the chickens that clucked and
pecked then- way across the central square around which the rundown
shops were situated were usually in rotten mood.

But this encounter was different.

Instead of trade pidgin, the combatants were spewing an inarticulate
mush of proper English, Strine, and several foreign tongues Wahgi did
not recognize.  That was notable.  After four pm, the few tourists who
braved the square in search of artifacts, Sepik River wood carvings,
and illegal bird-of-paradise plumes were usually gone.  After five,
when the last Europeanowned stores padlocked their security screens for
the night, only local people were left.  To hear European tongues this
late at night suggested goings-on that were far from normal.
Like everyone he knew, Wahgi was intensely curious about the wonderful
things white people carried around with them.  He was among the first
of his tribe to come down from the Highlands into the capital in search
of work to help support his family.  Highland people learned quickly,
and it did not take a village Big Man to realize that these wonderful
objects could | only be obtained with a pocketful of money.  Yams :
were not accepted currency in the stores, and only rarely would a
sympathetic checker, perhaps not long down from the Highlands himself,
accept a pig.  If anyone had told Wahgi a year ago that it was better
to .
possess a fistful of brightly colored paper than a stockade full of
pigs, he would have scratched at his arse grass and looked upon them as
if they had taken leave :

of their senses.

But the fact that the Highland people had only ;
made contact with western civilization in the 1930s did not mean that
they were irredeemably ignorant.  , Only isolated.
What bad thing could possibly happen to him if he just went to see what
was going on?  Certainly he wasn't having much luck rifling the
contents of the smelly dumpster.  Stretching himself to his full five
foot five, he boosted himself up and out and followed the sounds of
dissension.  Scattered among the shouts and curses like corn seeds
between rows of sweet potatoes was much grunting and snorting.  It
reminded him of rutting pigs crammed into a pen too small for them.
There were four men fighting in the dark covered access way that ran
between the Ha Chin dry goods store and the niuspepa shop.  Even though
he couldn't read, Wahgi liked to go into the niuspepa shop to look at
the pictures in the glossy magazines, especially the ones that showed
women of all colors in skimpy clothing.
That is, he did until the shop manager chased him out, realizing that
the hick Highlander had no money.
Concealing himself in a corner near the back alley that intersected the
access way he watched the fight in silence.  Even though he could see
no longpela naips, or machetes as they were called in the Aussie
stores, he could tell that the fight was serious.  Though he couldn't
see which of the four men was wounded, fresh blood, black and wet, was
running on the cracked concrete, mixing with the betel nut juice
stains.  He wondered what they were fighting about, here too late at
night in an unlit passage in a poor shopping area like Boroko.
Then he saw the suitcase.  It was much smaller than the ones the ground
crews unloaded from the planes at the airport.  Too small to hold much
of anything in the way of clothing, which is what he knew white people
usually carried in their baggage.  The small suitcase lay off to one
side, propped against the grill of iron bars that protected the
niuspepa store.  Was it worth four men fighting over?  If so, it might
be full of something valuable.  Maybe, he thought excitedly, money
paper.
He gauged his chances.  The men were wholly occupied with one another.
In the village he had been a good hunter, bringing back tree kangaroos,
monitor lizards, rats, hombills, and crowned pigeons.  Like all Huli
Highlanders he was small and stocky.  If they saw him, would they
forget about their own fight and come after him?  Though new to Port
Moresby, he was confident he knew the hidden places of Boroko better
than any European.

Besides, he hadn't eaten since yesterday.

Waiting until he thought the moment just right, he slid out of the
shadows and along the wall, keeping low.  Providentially, the suitcase
had a handle fastened to the top.  He was a little surprised to find
that the case was made of metal instead of the soft fabrics and
leathers he was used to seeing at the airport, but it was not
particularly heavy.  Small in stature the Huli might be, but every man
had muscle as dense as the stump of a mahogany tree.
Gripping the suitcase in a fist of iron, he slipped back the way he had
come, keeping the black iron security bars against his spine.  None of
the combantants noticed him.  As soon as he reached the alley, he
turned and ran.  That was something else Highlanders were good at.
He did not stop until he was halfway to the suburb of Koki, where he
shared a shack of salvaged wood and tin with two other young men from
the village.
Like all the buildings in Koki, it was built on stilts out over the
water.  It was not a bad place for poor people to live.  No one could
sneak up on you unless they had a good, quiet boat, and the tide
provided the services the nonexistent sewage system could not.
Pausing on the Ela Beach road beneath the harsh yellow lights of a
British Petroleum station, he settled down beneath a hibiscus bush to
inspect his prize.

Even to his country eyes the case looked expensive.

Though small, the lock proved resistant to his probing.

But only momentarily.

One of the night attendants at the station was another Huli, not from
Wahgi's village but a man he knew casually.  Though suspicious, the
attendant lent him the hammer and heavy screwdriver his fellow clan
member requested.  He knew Wahgi wouldn't run off with them.  That
would have put the attendant in deep trouble with the station's
owners, which would have turned into a payback situation against
Wahgi's village.
Every Highlander treated the ancient tradition of payback with extreme
respect, and Wahgi was no exception.
Modern as it was, the lock eventually yielded to Wahgi's strength,
persistence, and single-minded determination.
After returning the tools, he went back into the bush to examine the
case's contents.  In these he was both disappointed and puzzled.
The case contained a number of small electronic devices that were as
alien to Wahgi as if they had fallen from the moon.  He knew what a
radio was, and a television, and an airplane, because he had seen them
up close, but otherwise his knowledge of contemporary twenty-first
century technology was lamentably scant.  Another section of the case
was full of paper, but to his disgust and disappointment none of it was
money.  Though colorful, the papers were much too big to be currency;
PNG, Aussie, or otherwise.  He did not know what they were.  Perhaps
his roommates Gembogi and Kuikui might know, though they had spent
little more time in Mosby than had he.
He was philosophical about his theft.  The contents might be worthless,
but the case itself was certainly worth something, even with a broken
lock.  Leaving it under the fragrantly flowering bush, he went once
more into the station, this time to beg a length of used twine from his
fellow Huli kinsman.  With the lock broken, he needed something to
secure the case.

When he returned, something inside was beeping persistently.

Slowly and with commendable caution, he opened the case.  The noise was
coming from one of the small electronic gadgets.  Gingerly hefting the
rectangular shape, he turned it over in his hands.  It was about the
size of two packs of cigarettes.  On its front were a large number of
illuminated buttons above which a small yellow light was blinking.
This he eyed in astonishment, wondering how anyone could manufacture
so small a bulb.
Could the device hurt him?  He knew he should find a way to stop the
beeping, or he might draw unwanted attention to himself.  The Mosby
police were not gentle with thieves, especially those who stole from
visiting Europeans.  He had seen how buttons could turn a radio on and
off.  Perhaps one of the buttons on the box could do the same to the
insistent beeping sound.
Experimentally, he began pushing them one after another.  Each time he
depressed a button, it responded with an electronic chirp, but the
continuous beeping never stopped--until he pushed one of the buttons
near the bottom.  Not only did the nerve wracking beeping cease, but
the yellow light turned to green.
"Stavros, Stavros .. . was 1st mit ihnen los?  Sprechen she ,
dammit!"
Wahgi almost dropped the device.  Then he realized what it was: some
kind of telephone, but unlike any he had ever seen before.  For one
thing, it was infinitely smaller than the ones that were fixed in the
public boxes.  For another, it was attached to nothing.

From it issued a voice that was as clear as it was unintelligible.

"Stavros!"  The tone was angry and insistent.
Maybe, he thought, there might be a reward for such a unique and
therefore probably expensive telephone.

Could he make the irate individual on the other end understand him?

Leaning toward the device without knowing where to direct his voice, he
said in his best rudimentary English, "Hello.  Good morning.  How are
you?  Yupela want ok me?"
This resulted in a long silence from the tiny telephone, and Wahgi
wondered if he had somehow broken it by speaking into it.  Then the
voice returned, no longer irate but obviously confused.  Confused and
curious.

"Ya?  Stavros?  So you are now speaking English?  Warum--why?"

Stavros, Wahgi decided, must be the name of one of the four men who he
had seen fighting.  The owner of the case, or at least its keeper.  And
like the man on the other end of the line, he had spoken English-as
well as other things.

"I no--I am not Stavros," he informed the telephone.

"I am Wahgi."
There followed another extended pause that was broken by a stream of
furious foreign syllables that the Huli decided he would not have been
able to follow even if he had understood the alien tongue.  Then
another interlude, after which a new voice spoke.  It was much more
controlled, much calmer than its predecessor, and its English was far
better.  To Wahgi it sounded like American English, not Aussie or
British, but he could not be certain.  Sometimes it seemed to him that
there were as many varieties of English as there were languages in
Papua New Guinea.

"To whom am I speaking, please?  You said that your name was Wahgi?"

"Yes."  Wahgi was relieved to be talking to someone whom he could
understand, and who might be able to understand him in return.  But he
suspected the person on the other end would have little or no knowledge
of pidgin.
"Wahgi," the voice inquired in a sweetly reasonable tone, "where are
you?"

"In Mosby--Port Moresby.  The capital."

The voice faded, as if its owner was momentarily speaking to someone
close to him.  In the same room.

Perhaps.

"At least that fits."  Louder, and obviously to Wahgi, it added, "Look
at the bottom of the phone you are holding.  There should be a word, or
words, there.  What does it say?"
Wahgi found the single word easily, "I see what you are talking about,
but I do not know the word."  He added apologetically, "I cannot
read."

"How many words?  Can you count?"

Of course he could count!  Did the other man think he was
empty-headed?

"Just one."

"How many letters in the word?"

"Six."

A murmur of voices could be heard over the phone.

"Good," the other man said.

"Now, Wahgi, this is very important.  Where did you find this
telephone?"

The Huli considered, then decided to plunge ahead.

How else was he to find out what the case and phone might be worth, or
how big a reward he ought to ask for?

"In a small suitcase."

The man's tone changed ever so slightly, but no so slightly that Wahgi
failed to pick up on it.

"Two men should have been watching this case and its contents.

Do you know where they are?"
Wahgi looked up as a pair of fruit bats with four foot wingspans
settled into the tree alongside his resting place.  On the busy road,
cars and taxis whizzed past without stopping.
"Yes.  When I left them, they were fighting with two other men.  In
Boroko."  He thought rapidly.

"I took the suitcase for safekeeping."

"That was very clever of you, Wahgi.  Very clever indeed.  And I know
that the case--it's called a briefcase, by the way--is safe with you.
Now, my friends and I would like to have it back.  If you will tell us
where you are, we will send other men to take it off your hands."

"It is not heavy," the Huli replied with unconscious irony.

"Will I get a reward?"
More muttering on the other end, a few violent words in that strange
alien tongue that were overridden by still louder words from the
English speaker, and then the voice was back on the line.
"We'll be glad to give you a reward, Wahgi.  So long as you return the
briefcase in good condition."  Anxiety crept unbidden into the man's
voice.

"It is in good condition, isn't it?"

The Huli decided to be honest.

"I broke the lock.

To make certain the contents were okay," he lied easily.

Rather than upset him, this seemed to amuse the other man.

"That's all right, Wahgi.  The lock is not important.  There should be
some papers in the briefcase.
Papers with colored printing on them and brightly colored borders.  Are
they still there--in good condition?"

"Oh, yes," Wahgi assured him readily.

"They have not been harmed at all."

Softer mutterings from behind the speaker.

"That's just fine, Wahgi.  Now, what would you like for a reward?"
Large numbers being foreign to traditional Huli culture, Wahgi stalled
for time.  What was larger than twenty?  What was the briefcase, and
more importantly, the pretty papers it held, worth to the man on the
strange telephone?
"What is your name, and what is the name of your village?"  How much
should he ask for?  He thought tensely.  He had heard many numbers on
the televisions in the pubs.  Which one would be suitable?

For the second time, the other man sounded amused.

"My name is Eric Werner von Maltzan, Wahgi, and I am speaking to you
from the village of Zurich."

"Zurich.  I do not know that village.  Is it in Australia?"

Australia was the only country Wahgi knew beyond Papua New Guinea.

"A little farther," von Maltzan told him.

"About your reward?"

Wahgi had decided.

"I want a million kina."
"Million" was a term he had heard during sports programs, and it had
sounded pretty big to him.  Would it be too much?  Were the telephone
and the papers worth more?  Having dealt in pigs, he knew how to
bargain.

You did not need a big education for that.

His request certainly had an effect on the other man, and those Wahgi
believed to be in the room or hut with him.  He could hear them
arguing in their strange tongues.  Crossing his legs under him and
watching the flying foxes spit pits from the fruit they were peeling
and eating, he waited patiently.  With the lateness of the hour,
traffic on the nearby main road was becoming infrequent.

Eventually von Maltzan came back on line.

"That's about four hundred and fifty thousand American dollars, Wahgi.
That's a great deal of money."
Wahgi did not know if it was, but decided to take the other man's word
for it.  After all, he reasoned, if von Maltzan knew about briefcases
and telephones and colored papers, he should know something about
money.

"That is the reward I want."

Again von Maltzan could be heard arguing with other men.

"All right, Wahgi.  You'll get your reward.

Now, here's what I want you to do.  Go to the airport.
Not the public terminal.  The private one next to it.  In the main
building you'll find..  .."

"No."

The other man hesitated.

"What's that?"

"No.  I do not know what time it is in Zurich village, but it is very
late here, and I am very tired.  I am going home, to talk with my
friends.  Can you call me on this telephone later tonight?"

"Yes, but..  .."

"Then that is what I want you to do."  He started to put the phone back
in the briefcase.

Entirely composed up to now, von Maltzan's voice began to crack.

"No, Wahgi, nein!  Don't do that!  It's vital that you .. . I" The Huli
was pleased to discover that despite its tiny size, lack of a
connecting cord, and strange appearance, the telephone still operated
very much like the other telephones he had seen in use around the city.
When he found the button that turned it off, he was delighted.  The
beeping that had so startled him at first and had precipitated the
conversation resumed immediately.  It continued until Wahgi found
another button that turned it off for good.  Satisfied, he put the
device back in the briefcase and tied it up with the length of twine.
Then he resumed his hike back to Koki, dashing across the two lanes of
highway.
Gembogi and Kuikui were lying on their torn, bedbug-infested, salvaged
mattresses when he arrived.
Kuikui lit the single kerosene lantern and put his machete down as soon
as he saw who was standing in the doorway.

"Where have you been, Wahgi?  We were worried about you."

"Wake Gembogi.  I have something show you both."
As the three men sat in a circle on the floor, Wahgi undid the twine
and triumphantly showed them the contents of the case.

"This is called a 'briefcase,"

" he explained with the air of a new schoolteacher.

Not to be outdone, Kuikui added "Brief means 'small' in English."

"That makes sense.  And this," he held up the satellite phone, "is a
telephone."

A doubtful Gembogi took it and held it closer to the lantern.

"It doesn't look like a phone."
"It is.  I used it to talk to a man in a village called Zurich.  He
promised me a reward for finding the briefcase."

That caught his friends' attention.

"How big a reward?"

Kuikui asked.

"A million kina."

Gembogi burst out laughing.

"Wanem!  A million kina?  For a briefcase and a bunch of papers?"

Kuikui was less skeptical.

"Wahgi may be telling the truth.  You know how peculiar Europeans are
about their papers and things.  I have seen them in the bank, fussing
over them like women over shells."
"A million kina.  We could buy car with that."  Gembogi sounded
wistful.

"Many cars."  Kuikui was more economically learned than both of them.

"Then we agree on the amount?"  Wahgi's gaze traveled from one man to
another.  They had shared privation and insults, hunger and spiteful
taunts from the more sophisticated townsfolk.  Now they would share in
his reward.
Gembogi was shaking his head.  He was the youngest of the three who had
come down from the Highlands to seek work in the city.
"I can't believe this.  I just can't believe it.  It's too good to be
true.  Of course we agree on the amount," he added as an
afterthought.

Kuikui urged his friend.

"Call this man back.  Tell him we have discussed your proposal and we
are all agreed."

"Yes, call him back," Gembogi said excitedly.

"I can't."  Wahgi picked up the phone.
"I don't know how to use this.  But I think he will be calling me."  So
saying, he pressed the button that had successfully shut off the
beeping.  It recommenced instantly, as if it had never stopped.
"Now watch."  Exaggerating his movements for maximum effect, the Huli
pressed the button he had used to activate the device previously.

"This is Eric Werner von Maltzan calling for Wahgi.

Eric Werner von Maltzan of Zurich calling for Wahgi of Port Moresby,

PNG."

"See?"  Proud of his newly acquired technical skill, Wahgi responded.
"I am here, pren Eric.  With two of my friends.  How will you get my
reward to me?"

"Just leave everything to me, Wahgi.  I will take care of..  .."

"Just a moment."  It was Kuikui.  He was staring at the open doorway
and frowning.

"I thought I heard something."

"We should be careful."  Gembogi kept his voice down as the older man
blew out the lantern.

"A million kina is a lot of money."

"Yes.  Wait here."  Picking up his machete, Kuikui moved purposefully
toward the open doorway.  His friends waited in the darkness.

"What is it?"  The voice on the phone sounded more anxious than ever.

"What's going on?"

"Probably nothing, pren Eric."  Wahgi spoke in a whisper.

"Just some noise outside.  My friend Kuikui went to check on..  .."
The staccato burst of sound splintered in the Huli's eardrums.  He had
heard that sound before, once during a riot and again during a military
parade.  It was the sound of a gun going off.  An automatic gun that
could fire many shots without stopping.  Gembogi sprang for his machete
while Wahgi grabbed the briefcase and stumbled toward the rear of the
shack.

The voice on the phone never stopped talking.

"Wahgi!  What was that?  It sounded like an uzi!"
"We are being shot at!"  Clutching the phone in one hand and the
briefcase in the other, Wahgi pushed up against the back wall of the
shanty.  Outside were plank walkways and below, the sewage-saturated
part of the harbor that surged back and forth beneath Koki.

"In the briefcase!"  the voice on the phone told him.

"A plastic egg the size of a man's fist!  Put it next to the phone."
Fumbling among the devices and papers, Wahgi found the object described
and did as he was told.  An electronic tone sounded from the phone, in
response to which a red light appeared on the side of the container.

"I did what you told me to," he stammered into the phone.

"What do I do now?"
"Run, jump, get away, Wahgi--and throw it at the people with the
guns!"
"Kuikui, Gembogi, run away!"  he shouted.  There was no reply as he
tossed the container onto the floor and pushed through the flimsy rear
wall of the shack.

As he did so, three men burst through the doorway.

Two were tall and European while the third was Melanesian, but no
Highlander.  A slim, fine-featured coastal man, Wahgi saw in the glow
of the lights they carried, probably from down near Milne Bay.
As he fell toward the outriggers moored below, the sun seemed to come
out behind him.  It was a sun full of thunder, as the shack, the wooden
planks on which it sat, and a portion of the surrounding walkways
erupted in a ball of white-hot flame.  Screams filled the air as other
shanty dwellers explosively roused from their sleep staggered out of
their thrown-together homes to gape at the fireball rising in their
midst.
Wahgi landed hard in an open outrigger, twisting his ankle and hitting
his jaw on the side of the narrow craft.  But there was nothing wrong
with the rest of him.  Carefully placing the briefcase in the bottom of
the boat, he untied it and began stroking toward shore, toward Ela
Beach.  As he paddled, the phone jabbered frantically at him.  He
ignored it, occasionally looking back over his shoulder.  Where the
shack had been was a flame-lined hole in the above-water walkway.
The supporting stilts had been blown off right down to the water. There
was no sign of his temporary home, of the other two men who had lived
there, or of the three heavily armed intruders who had burst in on
him.
They had not paused to talk or to ask questions, Wahgi reflected.  They
had simply shot their way in.
He was sorry for Gembogi and Kuikui, and angry at what had happened to
them, but he now knew one thing for certain: the briefcase and its
contents were unquestionably worth a million kina.

Maybe two million, based on what had just happened.

Safely ashore on the narrow city beach, he abandoned the outrigger to
the vagaries of the harbor currents.
Exhausted and out of breath, his left ankle throbbing, he threw himself
down under a coconut palm and opened the briefcase.

"..  . are you there, Wahgi!  Can you hear .. . ?"

"What happened?"  he asked von Maltzan.

"What did you do?"

"Those gunmen were after the briefcase," the foreigner explained.  He
did not need to do that.  Of course the gunmen were after the
briefcase.  Did he still think Wahgi was stupid?
"I used the phone to activate the grenade you threw at them.  Where are
you?  Are you all right?"

"Yes, I am all right.  But my friends are not."

"I'm sorry.  Now will you listen to me and not hang up anymore?  If you
do, I won't be able to help you."
"Never mind that."  Tasting wet saltiness in his mouth, Wahgi felt of
his teeth.  One was missing, knocked out when he had hit the side of
the outrigger, and blood was trickling over his lip and down his
chin.

To a Huli it was nothing more than an inconvenience.

"I want my reward."

"Yes, yes, of course, but..  .."

"I want it left for me in a paper-wrapped package at the main airport
cargo pickup counter, with my name on it.  By tomorrow morning."
"It'll be there, Wahgi.  No problem.  But please, do one thing for me.
Leave this phone on in case you run into trouble again.  That way I can
help you.  Keep it close at all times.  Other people want what is in
the briefcase, and as you have seen this morning...."

"It is night here."

"All right, all right.  As you have seen this night, these others are
willing to kill to get it."

"I will not turn the phone off again," Wahgi promised.

"Good!  Tomorrow morning, at the Jackson's Airpoil cargo counter.  Look
for your package."
The voice went away, but the green light remained on.  Wahgi surmised
that it indicated the line was still open to him if he needed to use
it.  Looking around, he sought and found a picnic bench across the
street from the Ela Beach hotel.  In an emergency, he could run in that
direction.  Port Moresby hotels always had guards on duty around the
clock.  They would not interfere in a fight to help him, but their
presence might well discourage an attacker from using a gun in the
presence of armed witnesses.
Stretching out on the warm sand beneath the table, he felt he had done
all that he could until morning.
Dreaming of a million kina and sorrowing for his dead kinsmen, he fell
into a deep and placid sleep.
Parker put the silencer to the side of the sleeping man's head and
pulled the trigger once.  There was a soft phut followed by the sound
of bone splintering.

Blood spurted briefly, quickly dropped to a trickle.

Unscrewing the silencer, he placed it and the gun back in their
respective jacket holsters.
"Poor dumb black fella he murmured emotionlessly to his companion as
the other man picked up the briefcase.

"Never had a clue what he was dealing with."

McMurray murmured something into the telephone in the briefcase before
turning it off and closing the case.
"Probably thought he was safe, he did.  Wouldn't have understood if
you'd taken the time to try explaining it to him."  After a quick look
around to ensure that they had not been observed at work they headed
for the car parked in the nearby beach lot.
"Tracked the phone's location via satellite search from Zurich and its
internal GPS pinpointed it for us.  There was never any place for the
sorry bugger to hide."
"Not as long as he left the phone on sending out its signal."  Parker
opened the door on the driver's side and slid behind the wheel, nodding
at the briefcase as he did so.

"The bonds still in there?"

His colleague nodded.
"Doesn't look like they've been touched.  A hundred and sixty million
Swiss francs worth of convertible paper."  His eyes gleamed.

"It's bloody tempting, you know."

"Now, mate, none o' that."  The engine on the rented car coughed to
life.
"You know they'd send blokes like us after us if we were to try and
disappear with that."

"It was just a thought, Eddie."

"Well blow it out your arse.  Let's get back to the hotel.  First
Qantas out of this shithole tomorrow, we're on it."
Gembogi watched the men drive away.  When he was sure they had left, he
ran to the picnic table.  He saw instantly that Wahgi was dead.  The
car had stopped at the petrol station across the street and he hurried
across the road toward it.  While one of the men pumped fuel, he
slipped inside the station and in a frantic, hushed stream of words
began relating what had happened to the silent attendant.  The man was
a Huli and therefore, however distant, a kinsman.
The knock at the hotel door the following morning prompted McMurray to
grab his pistol and station himself flat against the wall to one side
of the portal.
Nodding to his partner, Parker approached cautiously and without a word
put his eye to the peephole set in the door.  The tiny fresnel lens
showed a small black woman clad entirely in white standing on the other
side.  She was holding an empty laundry basket.
"What is it?"  Making a disgusted face, Parker whispered to his
colleague.
"It's a maid."  Nodding sourly, McMurray put his automatic pistol back
in its shoulder holster.

The woman on the other side responded matter-of factly

"You are checking out this morning, sir.  We have a big tour group
coming in, and I need to take away your dirty linen."

"But we're not ready to ... oh, all right!"  He unlatched the door.

"But be bloody quick about it!"  To McMurray he muttered, "We don't
need any of the help complaining to management that we're keeping them
from their job."  Curtly, he pulled the door inward.
The maid entered in.  Calling her diminutive would have nattered her.
She was maybe four foot six, but perfectly formed.  Cradling her
basket, she headed toward the beds as Parker closed the door behind
her, enjoying the sight of her compact ass twitching from side to side
beneath the tight white maid's uniform.
A dozen very short, very muscular men burst through the half-open door
like circus midgets shot from a single cannon.  They had wild kinky
hair that spread out from the sides of their heads, skin dark as
bittersweet chocolate, and builds like pocket linebackers.
They also wielded knives and machetes like the exploded components of a
berserk threshing machine.

Parker was hacked to bits before he could react.

McMurray went down with his hand on the stock of his machine pistol,
before he could find the trigger.  A fire-hardened bamboo arrow caught
him in the throat and went completely through his neck.  A foot of it
emerged from the back.  He had time enough to marvel at the incongruity
of it.  A bloody great arrow!  In this day and age!
"Who .. . ?"  he gasped before the blood welling up in his throat
choked off any further speech.
He did not recognize the young man who came forward to stand over him.
It was doubtful he would have made the connection even had he seen his
face the night before.
"You killed my friends.  Wahgi and Kuikui."  He gestured at the
watching coterie of small but ferocious men who filled the room.  The
maid had left to stand watch outside.
"This is payback for what you did to them.  A friend who worked at the
petrol station where you stopped last night after doing your killing
owed my village some old payback.  We got on his motorbike and followed
you here.  Madani, who works for the hotel, is Enga, not Huli, so we
now owe her tribe big payback.  For compensation we will give her
village ten pigs for her help this morning in sneaking us into the
hotel."
"Ten .. . pigs .. . ?"  McMurray choked.  He was fast bleeding to
death.
He did not get the opportunity to do so.  The oldest man in the group;
short, white-haired, but straight as an arrow, approached and with a
single swing of his bloody machete, cut the European's head half off.
He apologized to his companions for not making a better job of it.  He
was not as strong in the arms as he used to be, he explained.
As they were making preparations to leave, something began beeping
within the briefcase.  Opening it, Gembogi removed the strange
telephone.  Remembering how Wahgi had used it, he pushed the
appropriate button.

"Parker?"  a voice inquired.

"You should be leaving with the case in an hour or so.  Don't leave any
tracks.
I know you're not in London or New York, but there's no reason to make
things easy for the local police, no matter how primitive they might
be, verstehen?  You never know--one of them might even know how to
spell Interpol.  I'll be expecting you tomorrow at the airport."  The
voice paused briefly.

"Parker, are you there?"

"It looks valuable."  Curious, the wiry elder examined the phone.

"Who said that?"  The voice on the other end became alarmed.

"Parker, who's in there with you and McMurray?"
"What should we do with it?"  Another man was using a bedsheet to wipe
blood from his machete.

"It may be valuable, but it killed Wahgi and Kuikui."

Raising his arm and ignoring the sudden stream of frantic babble that
spouted from the device, Gembogi brought his own blade down sharply.
State-of the-art it might be, but the satellite phone was no match for
a honed machete.  It splintered into fragments of metal and plastic.

As they were about to leave, Gembogi picked up the briefcase.

"And this, what should we do with this?

Destroy it also?"

The old man regarded it narrowly.
"It killed Wahgi and Kuikui, too--but you said it was worth a million
kina?"  The young man nodded.
"Then we will keep it, and hide it until we can understand how to make
it work for us.  Just like we are learning, to make other things from
the outside world work for us."  Turning, he shook his woolly white
head as he walked toward the door.
"These white people make many magical things work for them, but between
you and me, man to man, I will still take a good machete over a device
that talks through the air any day."

by Norman Partridge

Norman Partridge was awarded the Bram Stoker Award for best short story
collection for Mr.  Fox and Other Tales.  Since then he's released two
more collections and three novels, the most recent being Ten Ounce
Siesta.  He also edited It Came From the Drive-in, an anthology that
paid homage to the B movies of the 1950s.  He currently lives in
California.
THE desert, just past midnight.  A lone truck on a scorched black
licorice strip, two men--Anshutes and Coker--inside.
Outside it's one hundred and twenty-five degrees under a fat December
moon.  Frosty weather in the twilight days of global warning .  : . and
just in time for the holiday season.
Sure, driving across the desert was a risk, even in such balmy weather.
Not many people owned cars anymore, and those who did avoided the wide
white lonesome.  Even road cops were smart enough to leave the Mojave
alone.  It was too hot and too empty, and it could make you as crazy as
a scorpion on a sizzling hot skillet.  If you broke down out here, you
ended up
cooked to a beautiful golden brown--just like Tiny Tim's Christmas
goose.
But that wasn't going to happen to Coker.  He was going to spend New
Year's Eve in Las Vegas.  The town that Frank and Dean and Sammy had
built all those years ago was still the place he wanted to be.

Hell on earth outside, air-conditioned splendor within.

If you had the long green, Vegas gave you everything a growing boy
could desire.  AC to the max, frosty martinis .. . maybe even a woman
with blue eyes that sparkled like icebergs.
Let the swells fly into town in air-conditioned jets, Coker figured.
He'd take the hard road.  The dangerous road.  The real gambler's road.
He'd ride that scorched highway straight down the thermometer into
double digits, and the AC would frost everything but his dreams.  A
little business, a couple lucky rolls of the dice, and his life would
change for good .. . then he'd leave town with a jet of his own.  Slice
it up like an Eskimo Pie, and that was cool, any way you figured it.
It was all part of the gamble called life.  Like always, Lady Luck was
rolling the dice.  Rattling the bones for Coker and for his partner,
too, even though Anshutes would never admit to believing in any airy
jazz like that.

Coker believed it.  Lady Luck was calling him now.

Just up the road in Vegas, she waited for him like a queen.  God knew
he'd dreamed about her long enough, imagining those iceberg eyes that
sparkled like diamonds flashing just for him.
All his life, he'd been waiting for the Lady to give him a sign.  Coker
knew it was coming soon.  Maybe with the next blink of his eyes.  Or
maybe the one after that.

Yeah.  That was the way it was.  It had to be.

Really, it was the only explanation.
Check it out.  Just two days ago Coker and Anshutes had been on foot.
Broiling in Bakersfield with maybe a gallon of water between them,
seven bucks, and Anshutes'357 Magnum .. . which was down to three
shells.  But with that .357 they'd managed to steal five hundred and
seventy-two bucks, a shotgun, and an icecream truck tanked with enough
juice to get them all the way to Vegas.  Plus they still had the Magnum
.. .

and those three shells.

Now if that wasn't luck, what was?
One-handing the steering wheel, Coker gave the ice cream truck a little
juice.  Doing seventy on the straightaway, and the electric engine
purred quieter than a kitten.  The rig wasn't much more than a pickup
with a refrigeration unit mounted on the back, but it did all right.
Coker's only complaint was the lack of air-conditioning.  Not that many
automobiles had AC anymore .. . these days, the licensing fees for
luxuries which negatively impacted the sorry remains of the ozone layer
cost more than the cars.  But why anyone who could afford the major
bucks for a freon licensed vehicle would forgo the pleasure of AC,
Coker didn't know.
The only guy who had the answer was the owner of the ice cream truck.
If he was still alive .. . and Coker kind of doubted that he was.
Because Anshutes had excavated the poor bastard's bridgework with the
butt of his .357 Magnum, emptied the guy's wallet, and left him tied to
a telephone pole on the outskirts of Bakersfield.  By now, the ice
cream man was either cooked like the ubiquitous Christmas goose or in a
hospital somewhere sucking milkshakes through a straw.
Coker's left hand rested on the side view mirror, desert air blasting
over his knuckles.  Best to forget about the ice cream man.  His
thoughts returned to the Lady.
Like always, those thoughts had a way of sliding over his tongue, no
matter how dry it was.  Like always, they had a way of parting his
chapped lips and finding Anshutes's perennially sunburned ear.

"Know where I'm heading after Vegas?"  Coker asked.

"No," Anshutes said.

"But I'm sure you're gonna tell me."

Coker smiled.
"There's this place called Lake Louise, see?  It's up north, in Canada.
Fifty years ago it used to be a ski resort.  Now the only skiing they
do is on the water.  They've got palm trees, papayas and mangoes, and
girls with skin the color of cocoa butter.
Days it's usually about thirty-five Celsius, which is ninety-five
degrees American.  Some nights it gets as low as sixty."

Anshutes chuckled.

"Sounds like you'll have to buy a coat."
"Go ahead and laugh.  I'm talking double-digit degrees, partner. Sixty.
Six-oh.  And girls with skin like cocoa butter.  If that's not a big
slice of paradise, I don't know what is."
"Get real, amigo.  A guy with your record isn't exactly a prime
candidate for immigration.  And our dollar isn't worth shit up north,
anyway."

"Drop some luck into that equation."

"Oh, no.  Here we go again--" "Seriously.  I can feel it in my bones.
Something big is just ahead, waiting for us.  I'm gonna take my cut
from the ice cream job and hit the tables.  I'm not walking away until
I have a million bucks in my pocket."

"Even God isn't that lucky."  Anshutes snorted.

"And luck had nothing to do with this, anyway.  Planning did.  And hard
work.  And a little help from a357 Magnum."

"So what are you gonna do with your money?"

Coker asked sarcastically.

"Bury it in the ground?"

"Depends on how much we get."
"The way I figure it, we're looking at something large.  Forty grand,
maybe fifty."
"Well, maybe thirty."  Anshutes gnawed on it a minute, doing some quick
calculations.
"I figure the Push Ups will go for about fifty a pop.  We got five
cases of those.  The Fudgsicles'll be about sixty-five.  Figure
seventy-five for the Drumsticks.  And the Eskimo Pies--" "A hundred
each, easy," Coker said.
"Maybe even a hundred and twenty-five.  And don't forget--we've got ten
cases."

"You sound pretty sure about the whole thing."

"That's because I believe in luck," Coker said.
"Like the song says, she's a lady.  And she's smiling on us.  Right
now.  Tonight.  And she's gonna keep on smiling for a long, long
time."

Coker smiled, too.  Screw Anshutes if he wanted to be all sour.

"You know what we ought to do?"  Coker said.

"We ought to pull over and celebrate a little.

Have us a couple of Eskimo Pies.  Toast Lady Luck, enjoy the moment.
Live a little--" "I've lived a lot," Anshutes said.
"And I plan to live a lot longer.  I'm not going to play the fool with
my money.  I'm not going to blow it on some pipe dream.  I'm going to
play it smart."
"Hey, relax.  All I'm saying is--" "No," Anshutes said, and then he
really went verbal.
"You've said enough.  We're in this to make some real money for a
change.  And we're not gonna make it by pulling over to the side of the
road, and we're not gonna make it by toasting Lady Luck with an Eskimo
Pie in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and we're not going to make it
by blowing our swag in some casino...."

Anshutes went on like that.

Coker swallowed hard.

He'd had just about enough.

"I'm pulling over," he said.
"I'm going to have an Eskimo Pie, and you're goddamn well going to have
one with me if you know what's good for you."

"The hell I am!"  Ansutes yanked his pistol.

"You goddamn fool!  You take your foot off the brake right now, or
I'll--"
Suddenly, Anshutes' complaints caught in his throat like a chicken
bone.  Ahead on the road, Coker saw the cause of his partner's
distress.  Beneath the ripe moon, knee-deep in heat waves that
shimmered up from the asphalt, a big man wearing a ten-gallon cowboy
hat walked the yellow center line of the highway.
He only had one arm, and he was carrying a woman piggyback--her arms
wrapped around his neck, her long slim legs scissored around his waist.
But the woman wasn't slowing the big guy down.  His pace was brisk, and
it was one hundred and twenty-five degrees and the rangy bastard didn't
even look like he'd broken a sweat-Coker honked the horn, but the
cowboy didn't seem to notice.

"Don't hit him!"  Anshutes yelled.

"You'll wreck the truck!"

Anshutes closed his eyes as Coker hit the brakes.

Tires screamed as the ice cream truck veered right and bounded along
the shoulder of the road.  Gravel rattled in the wheel wells and
slapped against the undercarriage like gunfire, and Coker downshifted
from fourth gear to third, from third to second, ice cream visions
dancing in his head, visions of Drumsticks and Push Ups bashing around
in the refrigeration unit, visions of broken Fudgsicles and mashed
Eskimo Pies..  ..

Visions of Lady Luck turning her back..  ..

The electric engine whined as he shifted from second to first and
yanked the emergency brake.  The truck seized up like a gutshot horse,
and the only thing that prevented Coker from doing a header through the
windshield was his seat belt.
Coker unbuckled his belt.  Anshutes set his pistol on the seat and
fumbled with his seat belt.  Coker grabbed the .357 and was out of the
cab before his partner could complain.
The hot asphalt was like sponge cake beneath Coker's boots as he
hurried after the man in the ten-gallon hat.  The cowboy didn't turn.
Neither did the woman who rode him.  In fact, the woman didn't move at
all, and as Coker got closer, he noticed a rope around her back.  She
was tied to the cowboy.  Coker figured she was dead.
That was bad news.  Two strangers.  One alive, one dead.  Snake eyes. A
jinxed roll if ever he saw one.

Bad enough that the cowboy had nearly killed him.

But if he'd put the jinx on Coker's luck-Coker aimed at the ripe moon
and busted a round.

"Turn around, cowboy," he yelled.

"Unless you want it in the back."
The cowboy turned double-quick, like some marching band marionette. The
one-armed man's face was lost under the brim of his ten-gallon hat, but
moonlight splashed across his torso and gleamed against his right
hand.

Which was wrapped around a pistol.

"Shit!"  Coker spit the word fast and fired another shot.  The bullet
caught the cowboy in the chest, but the big man didn't even stumble. He
didn't return fire, either .. . and Coker wasn't going to give him the
chance.
Coker fired again, dead center, and this time the bullet made a sound
like a marble rattling around in a tin can.
The cowboy's chest lit up.  Neon rattlesnakes slithered across it.
Golden broncos bucked over his bulging pecs.  Glowing Gila monsters
hissed and spread their jaws.

Three broncos galloped into place.

The cowboy's chest sprung open like the batwings on an old-fashioned
saloon.

Silver dollars rained down on the highway.

And the cowboy kept on coming.  Coker couldn't even move now.  Couldn't
breathe.  Oh man, this wasn't a jinx after all.  This was the moment
he'd been waiting for.  This was the omen to end all omens.  All of it
happening in the blink of an eye.
One more blink, and he'd see things clearly.  One more blink and the
future would turn up like a Blackjack dealt for high stakes-But Coker
couldn't blink.  He couldn't even move-Anshutes could.  He stepped past
his partner, scooped up a silver dollar as it rolled along the
highway's center line.  The cowboy kept on coming, heading for Anshutes
now, but Anshutes didn't twitch.  He waited until the big man was
within spitting distance, and then he slipped the coin between the
determined line of the advancing cowboy's lips.

Immediately, the cowboy's gun hand swept in an upward arc.

Then he stopped cold.
Anshutes scooped a handful of silver dollars off the road and tossed
them at Coker.

"Guess you've never heard of a one-armed bandit," he said.

Coker's jaw dropped quicker than a bar of soap in a queer bathhouse.
Anshutes sighed.  Christ, being partnered up with this starry-eyed fool
was something else.

"The cowboy here's a robot," Anshutes explained.

"Comes from a casino called Johnny Ringo's, named after the gangster
who owns the place.  Ringo himself came up with the concept for an
ambulating slot machine, hired some ex-Disney imagineers to design the
things.  They walk around his joint twenty-four hours a day.  You'd be
surprised how many idiots feed dollars into them.  I guess they all
think they're lucky .. .

just like you."

"This thing's a robot!"  Coker asked.

"That's what I said."

"Why'd it stop moving?"

"

"Cause I fed it a dollar, genius."  Anshutes pointed at the machine's
lone arm, which was raised in the air.
"The Cogwheel Kid here can't do anything until I make my play.  I have
to pull his arm to set him in motion again.  Then those neon wheels
will spin, and either he'll cough up some dough or start walking,
looking for another mark.  Unless, of course, your bullets dug a hole
in his motherboard, in which case who knows what the hell he'll do."
Coker blinked several times but said nothing.  To Anshutes, he looked
like some stupid fish that had just figured out it lived in a tank.
Blink-blink-blinking, checking out the big bad pet shop world that
lurked beyond the glass.

"It's an omen," Coker said finally.

"A sign--" "Uh-uh, buddy.  It's called the Mojave Two-Step."

"The Mojave what?"

"The Mojave Two-Step."  Anshutes sighed.

"Here's what happened.  This little lady crossed Johnny Ringo.

Who knows what the hell she did, but it was bad enough that he wanted
to kill her good and slow.  So he tied her to one of his walking slots,
and he pointed the damn thing west and turned it loose.  It's happened
before.  Just a couple months ago, one of these things trudged into
Barstow with a dead midget tied to its back.  Leastways, folks thought
it was a midget.  A couple weeks under the Mojave sun is liable to
shrink anyone down to size."

"Jesus!"  Coker said.

"How does Ringo get away with it?"
"He's rich, idiot.  And that means you don't mess with him, or anything
to do with him, or he'll kill you the same way he killed this girl--"
Right on cue, the girl groaned.  Annoyed, Anshutes grabbed her chin and
got a look at her.  Blue eyes, cold as glaciers.  Surprisingly, she
wasn't even sunburned.
Anshutes huffed another sigh.  There wasn't any mystery to it, really.
They weren't that far from Vegas.
Twenty, maybe thirty miles.  Could be that Ringo had turned the robot
loose after dark, that the girl hadn't even been in the sun yet.  Of
course, if that was the case it would make sense to assume that the
robot had followed the highway, taking the most direct route.
Anshutes didn't know what kind of directional devices Ringo had built
into his walking slots, but he supposed it was possible.  There wasn't
anything between Vegas and Barstow.  Nobody traveled the desert highway
unless they absolutely had to.  Even if the robot stuck to the road, it
was an odds on cinch that the girl would wind up dead before she
encountered another human being.
The girl glanced at Anshutes, and it was like that one glance told her
exactly what kind of guy he was.

So she turned her gaze on Coker.

"Help me," she whispered.

"This is too weird," Coker said.

"A woman riding a slot machine ... a slot machine that paid off on the
road to Vegas.  It is an omen.  Or a miracle!  Like Lady Luck come to
life .. . like Lady Luck in the flesh--" "Like Lady Luck personified."
Anshutes dropped a hand on his partner's shoulder.
"Now you listen to me, boy--what we've got here is a little Vegas whore
riding a walking scrap heap.  She doesn't have anything to do with
luck, and she isn't our business.  Our business is over there in that
truck.  Our business is a load of ice cream.  Our business is getting
that ice cream to Vegas before it melts."
Coker's eyes flashed angrily, and Anshutes nearly laughed.  Seeing his
partner go badass was like watching a goldfish imitate a shark.

"You'd better back down, boy," Anshutes warned.

Coker ignored him.  He untied the young woman's wrists and feet.  He
pulled her off of the Cogwheel Kid's back and cradled her in his arms,
and then he started toward the ice cream truck.

Anshutes cleared his throat.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"Even if she's not Lady Luck, this lady's hurting," Coker said.

"I think she deserves an ice cream.  Hell, maybe she deserves two.
Maybe I'll let her eat her fill."

Anshutes didn't answer.

Not with words, anyway.
He raised the sawed-off shotgun he'd stolen from the ice cream man, and
he cocked both barrels.

Coker said, "You think you're pretty cool, don't you?"

"Cooler than Santa's ass," Anshutes said.

"And you'll shoot me if I give the lady an ice cream?"

"Only way she gets any ice cream is if she pay for it."

Coker turned around.

"How about if I pay for it?"
"I don't care who pays.  You, the little whore, Lady Luck, or Jesus
Christ.  As long as I get the money."

"That's fine."  Coker smiled.

"You'll find your money on the road, asshole."

"What?"

"The jackpot.  The money I shot out of the slot machine.

It's all yours."

"You're crazy."
"Maybe.  But I'm gonna buy me a shitload of ice cream, and this little
lady's gonna eat it."
Coker set the girl down at the side of the road, peeling off his shirt
and rolling it into a pillow for her head.  Then he walked over to the
truck and opened the refrigerated compartment.

"No Eskimo Pies," Anshutes said.

"Let's get that straight."

"I'm getting what I paid for," Coker said.

Anshutes shook his head.  What a moron.  Ponying up fistfuls of silver
dollars, just so some little Vegas whore could lick a Push Up.  If that
was the way Coker wanted it, that was fine.  In the meantime, Anshutes
would make himself some money, and Lady Luck wouldn't have jack to do
with it.  Hell, for once hard work wouldn't have jack to do with it,
either.  For once, all Anshutes had to do to make some money was bend
over and pick it up.
Silver dollars gleamed in the moonlight.  Anshutes put down the
shotgun.  Not that he was taking any chances--he made sure that the
weapon was within reach as he got down to work, filling his pockets
with coins.
Behind him, he heard the sound of the refrigerator compartment door
slamming closed.  Coker.  Jesus, what an idiot.  Believing that some
Vegas slut was Lady Luck.  Personified.
Anshutes had told the kid a thousand times that luck was an illusion.
Now he realized that he could have explained it a million times, and he
still wouldn't have made a dent.  The kid might as well be deaf.  He
just wouldn't listen-Anshutes listened.  He heard everything.
The sound of silver dollars jingling in his pocket, like the sound of
happiness.

But wait .. . there was another sound, too.

A quiet hum, hardly audible.

The sound of an electric engine accelerating.

Anshutes turned around fast, dropping coins on the roadway.  The ice
cream truck was coming fast.  The shotgun was right there on the double
yellow line.  He made a grab for it.
Before he touched the gun, the ice cream truck's bumper cracked his
skull like a hard-boiled egg.

Kim felt better now.

A couple of Eskimo Pies could do that for a girl.

"Want another?"  the guy asked.

"Sure," Kim said.

"I could probably eat a whole box."

"I guess it's like they say: a walk in the desert does wonders for the
appetite."
The guy smiled and walked over to the ice cream truck.  She watched
him.  He was kind of cute.  Not as cute as Johnny Ringo, of course, but
Johnny definitely had his down side.
She sat in the dirt and finished her third pie.  You had to eat the
suckers fast or else they'd melt right in your hand.  It was
funny--she'd left Vegas worse than flat broke, owing Johnny twenty
grand, and now she had three hundred bucks worth of ice cream in her
belly.  Things were looking up.  She kind of felt like a safe deposit
box on legs.  Kind of a funny feeling.  Kind of like she didn't know
whether she should laugh or cry.

The guy handed her another Eskimo Pie.

"Thanks--" she said, and she said it with a blank that he was sure to
fill in.

"Coker," he said.

"My first name's Dennis, but I don't like it much."
"It's a nice name," Kim said.  Which was a lie, but there was no sense
hurting the poor guy's feelings.

"Thanks, Dennis."

"My pleasure.  You've had a hell of a hard time."

She smiled.  Yeah.  That was one way of putting it.

"So you're heading for Vegas," she said.

Coker nodded.

"Me and my buddy .. . well, we ended up with this truckload of ice
cream.  We wanted a place where we could sell it without much trouble
from the law."

"Vegas is definitely the place."

"You lived there a while?"
She smiled.  She guess you could call what she'd done in Vegas living.
If you were imaginative enough.

"Kim?"  he prodded.

"You okay?"
"Yeah," she said.  Man, it was tough.  She should have been happy .. .
because the guy had saved her life.  She should have been sad .. .
because Johnny Ringo had tried to kill her.  But she couldn't seem to
hold onto any one emotion.

She had to get a grip.

"You ever been to Vegas?"  she asked.

"No," the guy said.

"Going there was my partner's idea."

"It's a tough place."

"I don't care how tough it is."  He laughed.
"As long as it's the kind of place you can sell an ice cream bar for a
hundred bucks, I'm there."

She nodded.  Ice cream was worth a lot in Vegas.

But other things came pretty cheap.
"It's a rich town," she said, because saying that was really like
saying nothing.
"It's full of rich men and women.  I read somewhere that the entire
budget for law enforcement in the United States is about a third of
what it costs to power Vegas' air-conditioners for a month."

"Wow.  That's amazing."

"Not really.  Vegas is a desert.  It's an empty place.
Everything that's there, someone put it there.  Only the rich can
afford a place like that.  They come and go as they please, jetting in
and out in their fancy planes.  Everybody else--they're pretty much
stuck there.  That's what happened to me.  I was a dancer.  I made
pretty good money that way.  But every dime I made was already spent on
my apartment, or AC, or water or food.  I kept waiting for my lucky
break, but it never came.  I just couldn't get ahead.  Before I knew
it, I got behind.  And then I got in trouble with my boss--" "Johnny
Ringo?"

"You know about him?"

Coker nodded at the one-armed bandit.

"I've heard of the Mojave Two-Step."

Kim swallowed hard.

"You never want to dance that one," she said.

"I'm here to tell you."

The guy looked down at the road, kind of embarrassed.

Like he wanted to know her story, but was too shy to ask for the
details.

"Well, maybe your luck's due to change," he said.

"It happened to me.  Or it's going to happen.  It's like I can see it
coming."

"Like a dream?"

"Or an omen."

Kim smiled.

"I like that word."

"Me too.  It's kind of like a dream, only stronger."

"I used to have this dream," Kim said.

"When I first came to Vegas.  That I was going to hit it big.

That I'd live in a penthouse suite with the AC set at sixty-eight
degrees.  That the sun would never touch my skin and I'd be white as a
pearl."
The guy didn't say anything.  Still shy.  Kim had forgotten about that
particular emotion.  She hadn't run across it much in the last few
years.  Not with Johnny Ringo, and not with any of his friends.  Not
even with the two-legged slots that followed her around the casino
night after night until she fed them dollars just so they'd leave her
alone.
In Vegas, everyone wanted something.  At least the walking slots came a
lot cheaper than their flesh-and blood counterparts.
Funny.  She didn't feel good about it, but she didn't exactly feel bad,
either.

That's just the way it was in Vegas.

It was a rich man's town.

Or a rich woman's.

Kim finished her Eskimo Pie.  She liked what the guy (what was his name
again?) had said about omens.

That they were dreams, only stronger.

She stared at the ice cream truck.

She thought: it's not often you get a second chance.

"You want another?"  the guy asked.

She laughed.

"Just one more?"
Of course, he thought she was talking about an Eskimo Pie, when that
really wasn't what she wanted at all.

He went after the ice cream.  She watched him go.

Past the dead guy on the highway.

Past the second chance that lay there on the yellow line.

Kim really didn't have a choice.

She had to pick it up.

She heard the freezer door close.  Watched the guy (Dennis, that was
his name) step from behind the truck.
He was all right about it.  He kind of smiled when he saw the shotgun,
like he already understood.

"I'm sorry, Dennis," she said.

"But dreams die hard.  Especially strong ones."

"Yeah," he said.

"Yeah."
Coker stood in the middle of the road, eating an Eskimo Pie, listening
to "Pop Goes the Weasel."
The ice cream truck was gone from view, but he could still hear its
little song.  That meant she was up ahead somewhere, playing the
tape.
Maybe she was playing it for him.  The music drifted through the night
like a sweet connection.  Coker listened to the song while he finished
his Eskimo Pie.
Anshutes couldn't stand the music the truck made.  He wouldn't let
Coker play it at all.

Well, Anshutes didn't have a say in anything anymore.

Coker stared at his ex-partner.  The big man lay dead on the highway
like roadkill of old, his pockets stuffed with silver dollars.
Coker turned them out, filling his own pockets with the coins.  Then he
walked over to the one-armed bandit.
The Cogwheel Kid was primed for action--Anshutes' coin between his
lips, his lone robotic arm held high in the air.  Coker pulled the slot
machine's arm.
Ribbons of neon danced across the one-armed bandit's chest.  Bucking
broncos, charging buffaloes, jackalopes that laughed in the desert
night.

After a while, the neon locked up.

Two tittering jackalopes with a snorting buffalo between them.

Hardly a jackpot.

Coker smiled as the neon flickered out.  Losing wasn't a big surprise,
really.  After all.  Lady Luck was gone.  She was up ahead, driving an
ice cream truck, heading for the land of dreams.
The Cogwheel Kid started walking.  He headed east, toward Vegas,
looking for another mark.

Coker jumped on the robot's back and held on tight.

He smiled, remembering the look of her frosty blue eyes.  Lady Luck
with a shotgun.  He should have hated her.  But he was surprised to
find that he couldn't do that.

She was chasing a dream, the same way he was.

He couldn't help hoping she'd catch it.

The same way he hoped he'd catch her.

If he was lucky.

by Barbara Paul

Barbara Paul has a Ph.D. in Theater History and Criticism and taught at
the University of Pittsburgh until the late '70s when she became a
fulltime writer.  She has written five science-fiction novels and
sixteen mysteries, six of which are in the Marian Larch series.  Her
latest book is Jack Be Quick and Other Crime Stories.
"TACKY," Milo said, the expression on his face suggesting someone had
just handed him a dead fish.
"You're his friend, LaB oz  Can't you tell him how shamelessly
exhibitionistic he's being?"

"No one tells Gil anything," LaB oz said mildly.

"That could be his trouble.  I really don't want to be here tonight.
These little divertissements were intended for one's private amusement.
One doesn't invite an audience."
LaB oz didn't answer.  Milo had a habit of displaying an elegant
disdain for the philistine gropings of the not-truly-gifted, but this
time LaB oz thought he was right.  Gil's inviting an audience to a
Minus One was like asking someone over to watch you paste stamps into
an album.

But Gil was no glib social mingler, and he'd never

forgiven Milo.  Milo had been there the year before when Gil's father
drowned; but instead of jumping in the water after him or calling for
help, Milo had stood there helplessly flapping his hands as the older
man went under.  Expecting constructive action from Milo in a time of
crisis was perhaps a trifle unrealistic, but Gil had avoided the other
man for an entire year.  So why tonight's invitation?
They rode the funicular up to the hilltop home that Gil inherited from
his father, along with one other passenger, a Eurasian woman older than
the two young men.  Her name was Shalimar, appropriately exotic, and
she lived in the Andaman Islands.  She'd never met Gil.

"I feel I know him, though," she said amiably.

"I was a friend of his father's."

"Ah," said LaB oz "then you've been here before."

"No, this is my first visit.  Gil's father was guest in my house."
"I'm afraid it won't be a scintillating visit," Milo said with a
sniff.

"Gil has some Minus One play he wants us to look at."

Her eyebrows went up.

"I thought it was a Virtual Reality game."

"Good heavens, no!"  Milo shuddered theatrically.
"It's a Minus One.  At least we won't have to harness ourselves into
all that cumbersome VR gear.  We just have to concentrate on staying
awake.  Here we are," he said as the funicular door slid open, "and
here's our genial host waiting to greet us."
Irony tipping over into sarcasm: Gil looked anything but genial, his
face pinched and his eyes hard.  He spoke first to the guest he didn't
know.

"Shalimar-at last.  I'm glad you could come."

"It was time we met."  She looked closely at his face.

"Are you ill?"

"I was, but I'm well now."  Gil turned to LaB oz

"Welcome back, old friend.  I hope your journey was a pleasant one."

"Very pleasant.  But it's good to be home."

Milo stared at LaB oz

"You didn't tell me you'd been away."
"Hello, Milo," Gil said casually.  He offered a hand to Shalimar,
chatting easily with the woman who had been the last love of his
father's life.  Gil led them to a reception room where two other guests
were waiting.
LaB oz was astonished to see them both.  Gil introduced Shalimar first
to Phoebe, outspoken and determined Phoebe--to whom Gil had once been
married.
The other guest was Theodore Kimmel, an older man and business
competitor against whom Gil's father had once brought criminal charges
of fraud and grand theft.  The charges had been dropped: insufficient
evidence.

LaB oz went over and exchanged a light kiss with Phoebe.

"Surprised to see me here?"  she asked with a smile.

He nodded.

"I recall a very angry young woman proclaiming she'd never set foot
under the same roof as Gil again.  Ever."

"I said a lot of things," she answered ruefully.

"But Gil can't get to me anymore.  He kept saying it was important for
me to be here.  Do you know what this is all about?"

"I'm as much in the dark as you are."

Across the room, Theodore Kimmel was talking to Gil but staring
pointedly at Shalimar.

"I've changed my mind.  I'll stay."

Gil's mouth twisted wryly.

"Whatever it takes."

"Why did you insist I come?"

"I thought it was time we buried the hatchet, Kimmel.

Don't you?"

"No, I don't," the older man said bluntly.

"I don't trust you, Gil.  There's too much of your father in you.
He was a hasty man, quick to pass judgment.  And I suspect you're just
like him."

"But that's what I'm trying to avoid--hasty judgment."

"How?  By laying out a little home entertainment for a captive
audience?"
"Yes, Gil, do tell us what this is all about," Milo drawled in his most
bored tone.

"We're all just dying of curiosity."

Gil smiled, his pinched face looking more strained than ever.
"Very well.  I've asked you all here to help me celebrate the
anniversary of a very special day.  I want you to cast your minds back
exactly one year.  Think back to the day that a man who was a strong
swimmer somehow managed to fall off a yawl riding at anchor .. . and
never rose to the surface."

Today?  LaB oz thought in dismay.  This is the day?

Gil's face looked more strained than ever.

"Welcome to my father's death day party."

The private theater in the hilltop house could accommodate an audience
of forty, but tonight thirty five of the seats would remain empty.
Shalimar and Kimmel sat together talking quietly, an island of calm one
generation removed from the maneuverings of their intense young host
and his contemporaries.

"This is morbid, Gil," Phoebe said.

"Unwholesome."

"Hardly that," he answered sharply.

"I wish to commemorate my father's passing with a performance of his
favorite play.  What's morbid about that?"  He drew LaB oz aside.
"I'll need your help later on.  Will you run the stage console for
me?"

"Of course.  Just tell me when."

"Later.  Just sit and watch for now."

LaB oz took a seat in the audience with the others.

Gil activated the console.  The overhead lights dimmed, and on the
stage the setting for the first scene flicked into existence.  A
hologram projection of a battlement at night, wisps of fog drifting
across the stage.  Holographic images of actors dressed as old-time
soldiers, speaking briefly.  Changing of the guard.
"For this relief much thanks," one of them said.  " Tis bitter cold,
and I am sick at heart."
The staging was good, and the audience watched attentively as the ghost
made its first, mute appearance.
LaB oz felt the other actors' fear as tangibly as if he were one of
them.  More words, a throbbing in the air.
The battlement setting flicked out, and a new scene took its place: a
court chamber, with the king and queen and their numerous followers.  A
brightly lighted, busy scene; LaB oz counted thirty actors on the
stage. All holograms--except one: Gil was off to one side, dressed in
the black of the mourning prince, his thin face averted from the
corrupt celebration of corrupt life going on around him.
LaB oz tensed, wanting Gil to do well even though it was only a private
entertainment.  And Gil did very well, creating a convincing picture of
a royal heir cheated out of his throne, a grieving son still shocked by
his mother's hasty remarriage.  Gil made only one mistake,
inadvertently walking through the hologram of one of the courtiers.

At the end of the scene, Gil paused the projection.

"Interesting," Kimmel remarked.
"Is it just coincidence that you chose a play about the son of a man
who died under questionable circumstances?  That son was out for
revenge."

Milo said, "Have you cast your guests in the play?

Let's see now.  Shalimar must be Queen Gertrude, Phoebe is Ophelia--"
Gil laughed.
"No, not at all.  I thought it might be entertaining if we all took
turns playing the lead role.

Everybody likes to be the star."

The audience greeted that with three Oh-nos and one Tacky.

"It's a man's role," Phoebe objected.

"Women have played it before," Gil said.
"This way you all get to choose the scene you want to play.  We can
skip the others."
"I have no intention of playing that homicidal ma mac Milo announced
indignantly.

"He kills five people!"

Gil looked amused.
"Well, I could dial out Rosencrantz and Guildenstem.  You could play
both those roles at once."  The stooges.

"I'll play," Shalimar said unexpectedly.

"Truth is.

I've always had a yen to do that advice-to-the players bit."

"Excellent!"  Gil exclaimed.
"Step right up.  LaB oz will you run the console now?  I want to see
this from out front."
Shalimar joined him on the stage, where he fitted the button into her
ear that would feed her her lines.
Gil handed her a long black cloak to wear over her shimmering green
gown and took a seat in the audience.

LaB oz started the scene.

"Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you," Shalimar
declaimed in a strong contralto that was somehow different from her
normal speaking voice, "trippingly on the tongue."
The console had a reverse switch, should a player blow his lines and
need to start over.  LaB oz didn't have to touch it.  Shalimar
performed with such authority that he guessed she was used to speaking
in public. Shalimar moved easily through the scene, not at all
self-conscious about being on display.  At last LaB oz pressed the hold
button and joined the applause that greeted the conclusion of the
scene.

"Impressive, Shalimar!"  Gil's voice soared over the applause.

"Quite professional.  My father would have enjoyed that--he always did
like watching the faces people put on when they appear in public."

She shot him a quick look.

"A dubious compliment at best.  Leading up to what?"

He spread his hands.

"Whatever you will.  Name it, it's yours.  That's what you're used to,
aren't you?"

His voice rose.

"The rest of you don't know, but we have a V.I.P in our midst. 
Shalimar is a member of the Andamanese Governing Council--a leader, a
politician.  A manipulator of lives."  Pause.
"Ah, Kimmel--your open and honest face tells me you already knew
Shalimar was a national councilwoman.  She told you."

Kimmel mimicked Gil's own hand-spreading gesture.

"This is something new," Phoebe remarked to Gil.

"You used to try to disguise your rudeness."  Milo snickered.

But Gil's attention was back on Shalimar.

"Do we get an encore?"

"I think not."  She handed her stage cape to LaB oz and took her
seat.

"How disappointing," Gil mock-groaned.

"Remember the man we are honoring.  You do remember dear old dad, don't
you?  The clown who was willing to keep your bed warm, for whenever you
felt like using it?  Or him."

Oh-ho from Milo.

Gil ignored him.

"He turned to you for help, Shalimar.

He was at the lowest point of his life and he went looking for you. Why
didn't you help?"

Shalimar took her time answering.

"That was between your father and me, Gil.  This is no place to--"
"What better?  A stage, an audience--" "Oh, this is de trap," Milo
moaned.
"Honestly, Gil, there's only so much melodrama one can take in a single
evening!  If you're fixated on your father's sex life, then that's your
problem.  But for heaven's sake, leave the rest of us out of it!"

Gil raised an eyebrow and slowly clapped his hands.

"Ver-y good, Milo.  Nothing like a little accusatory Freudianism to
discredit me and make yourself look good.  But that's your style, isn't
it?  Puff yourself up at the other guy's expense."

Milo stood up.

"I want to go home."

"Not yet," Gil said curtly.

"Shalimar.  When my father returned from the Andamans, he was depressed
to the point of being near-suicidal.  He walked around in a trank-haze
for three weeks.  His judgment was off, his reactions were slow--he
should never have taken the yawl out.  But he wouldn't have been in a
drug stupor if he'd come home in anything like a normal frame of mind.
What happened, Shalimar?  What did you do to him?"
Milo decided he wanted to hear the answer to that one and sat back
down.

Shalimar's eyes were wide.

"You're blaming me for your father's death?"
"You contributed.  What went wrong?  He went to the Andamans with such
high hopes."

"High hopes," she repeated.

"He came to me hoping for a lifeline.  He was already close to a
breakdown.
Just one business reversal too many.  It finally got to him."  She slid
a quick sideways glance at Kimmel.
"He came to the Andamans wanting me to make everything right for him. I
couldn't do it.  He asked for too much."

"You couldn't?"  Gil asked.

"Or wouldn't?"

"Probably couldn't," Kimmel interposed.

"Your father could be a demanding SOB."
Shalimar said, "Gil, I hadn't seen your father for two years.  Then he
showed up unannounced, expecting me to put my own life on hold
to--well, I did what I could, but obviously it wasn't enough.  I'm
sorry.  He and I were close once.  But I didn't create your father's
problems."
"You merely aggravated them.  He came to you looking for relief from
pain, and you sent him away with more pain."

Milo abruptly began singing.

"Happy death day to you .. . happy death day to you..  .."

"Shut up, Milo," Phoebe snapped.

"Gil, stop this.

Stop it right now."

Gil blew her a sardonic kiss.

"We're just getting started."

Shalimar and Kimmel consulted briefly, stood up.

"We're leaving."

"How?  No funicular for another hour.  And you wouldn't want to miss
Milo's sterling performance, would you?"

Milo was back on his feet.

"What?"

"Your turn, Milo.  Time to put yourself on the line.

You can't just lie back and pass judgment all your life, you know."
"Who says I can't?  I refuse to take part in this puerile exhibition.
The whole thing's absurd."
"Which scene do you prefer?"  Gil went on as if the other man hadn't
spoken.
"Would you like me to choose for you?  How about the
get-theetoa-nunnery scene?  You can cavort with Ophelia."

"You might as well do it, Milo," Phoebe said with a sigh.

"He's not going to stop this until he's ready."

Milo was pondering.

"One scene?  And then you'll stop badgering me?"

"One scene," Gil promised.

"In that case, I must have a proper costume.  That black thing you
wrapped around Shalimar just won't do."

Gil nodded.

"There's a costume room backstage.

LaB oz

"Hurry it up, will you?"  Kimmel said in disgust as he and Shalimar sat
back down.

"Keerist."

"He's mad, you know," Milo whispered to LaB oz

"Utterly mad."

LaB oz opened the door to the costume room and watched as Milo selected
a broad-brimmed hat with a white plume, hip boots, and a buckle-on
sword.

"Don't forget a cape," LaB oz said dryly.

"Oh--right."  Milo chose a Dracula cape, black velvet with scarlet silk
lining.

"Eyepatch?"

Milo considered.

"No, I don't want to overdo."

His musketeer appearance brought a burst of laughter from the four in
the audience.

"Soft you now--the fair Ophelia!"  Milo bellowed, demanding silence.

The scene had barely gotten underway when it became clear that Gil had
pulled a fast one.  The holo production he'd chosen presented the
nunnery scene as blatant in its sexual teasing.  The button in Milo's
ear was giving him stage directions as well as lines:
Grasp your codpiece with both hands.  As a result Milo moved through
the scene with a perpetually startled look on his face.
His surprise also kept him a consistent few beats behind the set tempo
of the scene.  Ophelia would react to unsaid lines; then Milo would
lunge for her only to find she'd already crossed to the other side of
the stage.  Not once were hero and heroine in sync.  By the end of the
scene, Milo was so frustrated that he pulled his sword and ran Ophelia
through.
With tears in his eyes from laughing, LaB oz almost missed the cut-off
at the end of the scene.  Milo tore off his costume and stormed back to
his seat in the small auditorium.

"For this comic relief, much thanks," Shalimar said, still laughing.

"So glad you were amused," Milo said through clenched teeth.

Gil stood up.

"Thank you, Milo.  That was exactly the break in tension we needed.
And," he faced the others, "I take full credit.  I chose the man and
the scene.  How else could it have worked out?  Did you expect him to
do it right?"

"Oh, Gil," Phoebe said in irritation.

"Milo doesn't do things at all," Gil plowed on.
"Milo talks.  He talks and talks and talks.  But if it's action you
want, you'd better look elsewhere.  He can't be counted on to act even
when he sees a man drowning right before his eyes."

All the color had drained out of Milo's face.

"Gil .. . don't.  You know I can't swim."
"You could have slipped on a scuba mask and tied a line around your
middle.  Hell, you could have yelled for help--you weren't that far
from shore.

What were you doing on my father's yawl in the first place?"

"Well, I ran into him at the Yacht Club and he invited me aboard-"You
wangled an invitation.  My father barely knew you.  He was so tranked
up he didn't know what he was doing.  Was he easy to take advantage of,
Milo?

And perhaps it was easy to give him a little shove?

Over the side of the boat, maybe?"
"Gill"  LaB oz heard the shock in his own voice.  He jumped down from
the stage.

"Do you know what you just said?"

The others were staring.

"You're accusing Milo of murder?"  Shalimar asked incredulously.

Phoebe was on her feet.
"Gil, that's dumb.  Milo's no killer.  Why would he want to kill your
father?"

Gil shrugged.

"Paid to?"
Everyone started talking at once--everyone except Milo.  He sat there
pale and shaken, speechless for the first time in his life.

"Look at him, Gil," LaB oz urged.

"You've done him a terrible injustice."

Gil stood in front of the stage and spread his arms.

"Intermission.  Bar's behind the last row."  He led the way.  The
others exchanged a look, shrugged, and followed.

All but Milo, who sat slumped in his seat.

"Gil must be losing his mind," Phoebe said to LaB oz low.

"Does he really think his father was murdered?"

LaB oz took a long swallow of his drink.
"If he does, this is the first I've heard of it.  I can't convince
myself he really means it.  At least, not the part about Milo."

"I know."  Just then, Phoebe saw Gil approaching;

without a word she turned her back and walked away.

"Good thing I wasn't hoping for a reconciliation," Gil said wryly.

LaB oz do you mind being stuck backstage with the console?  I do need
to watch from out front."
"I don't mind that," LaB oz said, "but I'm not too happy with the
direction things are taking."

Phoebe was sitting with Milo, trying to cheer him up.

"I hope you're familiar with the laws governing false accusation,"
Shalimar said to Gil as she drifted back to her seat.

"I didn't accuse," Gil answered her.

"I suggested."

A grunt came from the bar, where Kinunel was helping himself.

"No, accusation is up front and straightforward.  Innuendo is more your
style.  Just like your father."

"He accused you," Gil pointed out.

"Fraud and grand theft."
"Because he knew I was on the point of bringing charges against him.
Anyway, we settled that one out of court."

"Why don't you tell us what was going on?"

Kimmel laughed humorlessly.
"Justify myself to you?  No, thank you.  I see you inherited your
father's arrogance along with everything else."

A look of sadness passed over Gil's face.

"You really did hate him, didn't you?  It wasn't just business--it was
personal between you two.  Why?  I know he wasn't perfect, but he was a
good man, Kimmel.
You speak of him as if he were a monster.  And you must know he was
nothing of the kind."

Kimmel studied the face of his old foe's son for a long time.

"Some men are one thing at home, another in business.  That's the most
I can say."
Gil nodded, recognizing the remark as the closest Kimmel could come to
conceding the point.
"Since you won't enlighten us in one area, how about entertaining us in
another?  Take the stage.  Show us a thing or two."

One corner of Kimmel's mouth turned up.

"That's so transparent a ploy that I think I'll let you get away with
it.  All right, I'll be your next guinea pig.  Do your damndest."

Gil smiled.

"Pick your scene."

The older man thought a minute.

"I think it's called the closet scene.  The one where our hero has it
out with his mother."

"How very Oedipal," murmured Milo, beginning to recover.

LaB oz helped Kimmel into costume.

"Why did you choose that scene?"

The other man grinned.

"It was the only one I could remember."

Oddly, he threw himself into the performance like an enthusiastic
amateur: "Now, Mother, what's the matter?"  The scene was a long one,
building in intensity.
Kimmel was clearly out of his element, so he took the pragmatic
approach of a man used to problem solving as a strategy for living. LaB
oz watched fascinated as Kimmel worked at getting the rhythm right, at
pitching his voice to the best level for that size auditorium.  At
using his body language to best effect.  The man was teaching himself
acting.  By scene's end he was still the amateur--but a less awkward
one, now at least adequate as a performer.  When Kimmel pantomimed
dragging Polonius's hologram corpse off the stage, LaB oz could almost
believe it was happening.

The others were equally impressed.

"You missed your calling," Shalimar said dryly.

"Or did you?"

Kimmel stood watching Gil, waiting.

"I've just understood something," the younger man said.

"He was afraid of you .. . my father was afraid of you.  If you take
that kind of concentration into everything you doA then he had reason
to be.  Did you work that hard at stealing Ferrence from him?"
Ferrence Transportation.  A company that Operated short-distance air
shuttles between major cities, a steady but unspectacular earner.
"He had the same chance at a takeover as I did," Kimmel said with a
shrug.
"He spent eleven years acquiring Ferrence stock-a little here, a little
there.  Eleven years, Kimmel.  And you came along and stole it right
out from under his nose.  I don't know how you did it and I don't even
care.  But, Kimmel, you took something my father wanted only because he
wanted it."

"Bullshit."

"Is it?  You'd never dabbled in transportation before and you haven't
expanded since.  The one thing that made Ferrence attractive was my
father's interest in it.  You sent my father into a depression he never
recovered from, and you did it out of spite.  Just spite.

Nothing else."

Kimmel made a sound of exasperation.
"Your sainted father played dirty himself often enough."  He waved
toward the stage.
"Where do you think the money for your expensive toys came from?
Probably from some company he stole from me."

"So the two of you just kept sticking it to each other."

The other man showed his teeth.

"As often and as hard as we could."

Now it was Gil's turn to sound exasperated.
"Wouldn't it have solved a helluva lot of problems if you'd just formed
a partnership?"

Kimmel threw his head back and laughed in open delight.

"My God, I didn't know they still made 'em that naive!  Don't you
understand, you young idiot?  It was what kept both of us going."  He
snorted.

"A

partnership!"

Gil reddened.

"Then why did you pay Milo to kill him?"

Two feminine voices raised in immediate protest.

Milo shouted: "I don't even know this man!  I never saw him before
tonight!"
Kimmel just raised his arms in a gesture of hopelessness and headed
toward the costume room.

LaB oz went down to the edge of the stage and spoke to Gil.

"You're going to get yourself sued if you go on saying things like
that."

Gil shook his head.

"The question had to be asked."

"But why now?  Why wait a whole year?"

Gil nodded toward Shalimar.
"This is the first time the councilwoman has left the Andamans since he
died.  And since she's a contributor .. ."

She stared at him.

"What a presumptuous puppy you are."
"I wish / were in the Andamans," Milo proclaimed in understandable ill
temper.
"You truly are impossible, Gil.  You insist I come here and then you
accuse me of murder--I must say that's not my idea of a good time.
When's the next funicular due?"

"Relax, Milo.  We're almost finished."

Shalimar gestured toward LaB oz

"What about your Horatio?  Is he next?"

LaB oz doesn't perform,"- Gil said.

"He had nothing to do with my father's death."

"And all the rest of us did," Phoebe said neutrally, slowly getting to
her feet.

"So you saved me until last, Gil.  How flattering."

"Have you had time to make your choice?"
"It's obvious, isn't it?  The gravedigger scene.  The only appropriate
conclusion to a death day party.  Besides, that's what this play-acting
is all about, isn't it?

You're digging someone's grave?"

A silence followed.

"When you're ready," Gil finally said.

"No costume," Phoebe announced.
"Just the auditory feed."  LaB oz fitted the button in her ear, and she
took her place center stage.

"Start."

A graveyard flicked into view.  The gravedigger sang a little song.
Phoebe: "Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that 'a sings in
grave-making?"  Phoebe didn't move at all, ignoring the stage
directions murmuring in her ear and speaking all her lines from the
spot where she'd positioned herself.  The holo figures in the scene
moved across her, spoke to an empty place in the stage.

"Alas, poor Daddy!  I knew him, Gil," Phoebe was saying.

"A fellow of no jest whatsoever."
In the wings, LaB oz felt a chill.  Kimmel, now changed back into his
own clothes, said, "What's going on?"

"I'm not sure."

Phoebe intoned: "He hath borne grudges a thousand times against me."

"He helped you!"  Gil shouted from the audience.

"My gorge rises at it," she said coldly.
LaB oz groped for the volume dial, turned off the sound.  Silent images
moved back and forth over the stage, Phoebe immobile in their midst.

"He saved the festival for you, Phoebe," Gil said heatedly.

"How can you be so thankless?"
It was hard to read Phoebe's expression with the projected images
moving over her face.
"And do we simply ignore the fact that he was the reason the festival
almost closed in the first place?"

"That's not true."

"What festival?"  Kimmel asked LaB oz

"Local music festival.  Phoebe was in charge a couple of years ago."

"Gil, it is true," Phoebe was saying.
"He knew you and I were on the verge of splitting and he wanted to
obligate me to the family, to keep me from embarrassing his little boy.
He bought up all our debts and then had his agent call them in.  Just
so he could step in at the eleventh hour with his big bankroll and play
the rescuing hero."

"That's preposterous."

"And it didn't work.  I left anyway.  That sort of highhanded
interference was so typical of your father.

And Gil--you were growing more like him every day."

A holographic funeral procession entered in phantom silence from
upstage right, then started crossing slowly and majestically to the
grave.
"For God's sake, somebody turn that thing off!"  Milo's voice called
out shrilly.
LaB oz took care of it.  The graveyard and its spectral figures
vanished; a white, harsh light flooded the stage.  Kimmel walked out
from the wings and faced Gil.
"You need to learn how to listen, Gil.  You've idealized your father to
the point of unrecognizability."

Gil made a dismissive gesture.

"You have to paint him a villain to justify your own actions.  Phoebe,
do you know what he did when I told him you'd gone?  He threw up.
That's how much he wanted you to stay."
"That was never the question, Gil.  Of course he wanted me to stay.  A
disgruntled ex-spouse is always a vulnerable spot."
"He was so upset he couldn't think straight."  Gil spoke slowly and
with emphasis.
"He couldn't protect himself in the clinches.  His defenses were
down."

Phoebe eyed him suspiciously.

"Now you're saying I am responsible for his death?"

"You are responsible."

"Are you out of your mind?  Do you think / got Milo to push him
overboard?"

"/ can't stand it!"  Milo roared.

Shalimar stood up.
"Gil, you've accused everyone here except LaB oz  Do you have any idea
what you're talking about?"

Milo was pounding the back of the seat in front of him.

"I--did--not--push him overboard!  / did not push him."

Gil looked at him a long moment--and then said:

"No, of course you didn't, Milo.  I never for one minute thought you
did."  Five startled faces turned toward him.
"Sit down, all of you .. . please.  1*11 try to explain."  He stood
with his back to the stage facing them when they were all seated.
LaB oz I apologize for dragging you through all this.  I just needed
one friendly face to look at."

LaB oz smiled, nodded.

"As for the rest of you," Gil went on, "I apologize for nothing.  I
accused each of you in turn because I wanted you to face your own roles
in my father's death.  Oh, there was no murder in the legal sense-he
really did lose his footing and fall overboard, just as the
investigators said.  He cracked his head on the anchor chain ... a
gruesome way to die.  But it wasn't murder.  It was an accident."

Phoebe was frowning.

"Then why .. . ?
"Because you four did kill him, you know.  At least, the four of you
created a set of circumstances that resulted in a man's death.  That
was not your intention--but you contributed, in various ways and in
varying degrees."

Kimmel snorted.

"Finger pointing."

"You started it, Kimmel," Gil said.

"If it weren't for that stupid, vicious rivalry between the two of you
... all my life I heard Gotta get Kimmel.  That was the atmosphere I
grew up in."  He turned to Phoebe.

"It was too rich an atmosphere for my loving wife."

"Too noxious an atmosphere," she corrected.

"Tell me something.  Did you leave me--or did you leave my father?"

"What difference does it make?  You were becoming indistinguishable."

He nodded.

"So you walked out just as the Ferrence Transportation deal was coming
to a head.  You threw him off-balance at a time he needed to be
especially sharp.  And so he lost out to Kimmel.  I don't know why
Ferrence was so important to him.  But he was crushed at losing it."
Gil paused, gathered his thoughts.
"Phoebe, you knew how much that deal meant to him.  You timed your
departure to coincide with the final stages of the negotiations.  You
chose a moment to leave that would hurt him most."

Phoebe actually smiled.

"Tit for tat."
"So one reason my father is dead is that his old enemy defeated him in
what was more than just another contest.  Another reason is that that
defeat was made possible by his own son's wife.  Phoebe and Kimmel--you
two started him on his downhill slide.  The other two of you had a
chance to stop that slide--but you didn't."

"He demanded too much," Shalimar said sharply.

"I'm sure he did."  Gil answered unhappily.
"He expected one hundred percent from everybody.  But the fact remains,
the third reason my father is dead is that Shalimar did not throw him
the lifeline he was looking for.  So he came back from the Andamans and
doped himself to the gills."

Milo began to squirm.

"Yes, Milo, you're last.  I think I know what happened on the yawt. You
just froze, didn't you?  You saw a man drowning, but you couldn't
move--you were paralyzed."  Milo was nodding wordlessly.
"You didn't mean to let him drown.  You just didn't know what to do.
The last reason my father is dead is that Milo is the kind of man he
is."

There was a long silence.  Eventually Kimmel cleared his throat.

"You've overlooked the main reason your father is dead.  He himself
contributed.  He let these things defeat him because he was the kind of
man he was.  If we were responsible for his death, so was he."

Gil threw up his hands in frustration.

"But his death could have been prevented!  If any one of you had acted
differently, he'd still be alive.  If Kimmel had left Ferrence alone,
or Phoebe had waited one more week before leaving ... if Shalimar had
taken a leave of absence from her duties or if Milo had conquered his
fear of water ... if any one thing had happened differently--ah, if,
if, if!  But no, you all did what you did, and my father is dead
because of it.  Maybe he should have handled his setbacks better--I
know he was flawed.  He was just a man.  But he deserved better from
all of you.  He deserved better."
No one seemed inclined to argue the point, or to concede it, either.
They were all feeling the strain of the past couple of hours; they'd
gone as far as they could go.  Shalimar stood up, brisk and all
business.

"When does the next funicular get here?"

LaB oz looked at his wrist.
"Ten minutes."  Without another word, Shalimar turned and started
out.

"Wait--I'm coming, too," Milo hurried after her.

Phoebe got to her feet slowly.
"What an incredible evening.  All this .. . just to say Shame on you?
Goodbye.

Gil.  Let's not meet again."

She was gone.

Gil's pinched face did a poor job of hiding his feelings.

LaB oz dropped a friendly hand on his shoulder:

Hang in there.  Gil looked at Kimmel.

"I suppose you stayed to tell me what a fool I've been."
"No.  I stayed to tell you why your father wanted Ferrence
Transportation so badly."  The man looked troubled.
"He wanted it for you.  My spies told me he wanted to make you
independent of him, and for his own reasons he'd decided Ferrence was
the best way to make it happen.  The minute I heard that, I knew I had
to get Ferrence away from him."  Kimmel rubbed the bridge of his
nose.
"It never occurred to me he'd go to pieces.  It was just another move
in the game as far as I was concerned."

Gil was surprised but recovered quickly.

"That time it wasn't a game."
"I realize that now.  He didn't crack up overnight, not him--it must
have been building for a long time.

But Ferrence was the trigger."  He broke off, thinking.

"You want to know something?  Nothing has been as much fun since your
father died.  He was a rotten, underhanded son of a bitch--and I miss
him.  Maybe I should have left Ferrence alone.  You were right about
one thing.  He deserved better."

Gil swallowed.

"Well."

Kimmel made up his mind to something, stood up.

"Gil, come see me.  We can talk.  We'll talk about Ferrence.
I could never be partners with your father, but .. . don't get me
wrong, I still think my picture of him is more accurate than yours. Yet
maybe there's a chance you can still be your own man after all." He
paused.
"It's time we both laid his ghost to rest.  I'm not promising anything,
but it won't hurt to talk."

Kimmel nodded to both young men and turned to go.

"Come tomorrow," he growled back over his shoulder, and left.

Gil and LaB oz took their drinks out onto the balcony.

They leaned against the railing and looked down at the lights on the
river that ran past the base of the hill.  The funicular had come and
gone, carrying the four murderers back to their own lives.

"Kimmel!"  Gil said in bemusement.

"What an unpredictable man.  No wonder my father was afraid of him."

"He's crafty," LaB oz said lazily.

"I hope you're taking fifteen lawyers with you tomorrow."  LaB oz loved
Gil's place; looking down from the hilltop on the world below always
made him want to write something.
"Did you notice how they all revealed something essential about
themselves when they were acting out their scenes?"  Gil asked.
"Shalimar's authority and self-possession.  Milo's ultimate
uselessness.  Kimmel's flexibility and his determination.  Phoebe's ..
. Phoebe's immovable ness

"The play's still the thing," LaB oz murmured.

"They say."
"At least I got through to one of them.  Not the one I expected, but
one anyway."

"Oh?  Which one did you think?"

"Phoebe.  I thought that now, after he's been dead a year - .  well.
There was never any chance of reaching Milo, and Shalimar was an
unknown quantity.  But Kimmel--I never thought he'd be the one to
listen."
Neither of them spoke for a few minutes.  Then LaB oz asked, "Is it
safe to say The rest is silence now?"

Gil smiled.

"I think so.  Yes, it is."

The funeral was over.

by Craig Shaw Gardner
Craig Shaw Gardner is the author of more than twenty novels, including
the Ebenezum trilogy, and his more recent Dragon Circle series, which
includes the novels Dragon Sleeping, Dragon Waking, and Dragon Burning.
He has also written novelizations of several movies, including Batman
and Batman Returns.

DON NY  Are you sure you're all right?"

It made him smile.  She only called him Donny when she was worried
about him.
"Sure, Amy, I'm fine.  I finally finished the project, and I think I'm
going to enjoy a little down time."
That is, he would as soon as he attended to whatever was going wrong in
his office.  He could hear that annoying error message all over his
apartment.
"Well, you're a big boy now."  Her image smiled at him as she pulled
the long, dark hair out of her face.

The crystal display on the portable phone didn't do her justice.

"You sure you don't want me to come over?"
He paused before he answered.  It was tempting.  If he wasn't so
tired-"No, I think I'll just check the Web and get some
sleep.  We're still on for the weekend?  We'll have plenty of time,
then."

Her image winked at him.

"We'll always have time."
He always liked it when she said that.  They said their good nights. He
really shouldn't neglect her like this.  If only there wasn't so much
to do.
He flipped off the phone and strode back into his office' System
error," the soothing female voice, not so different from Amy's, really,
said over and over again.

"System error."

"Yeah, yeah."  He looked to the explanation on the wall-sized screen.
What the hell?  Whatever was wrong with the system, it extended to the
screen, which seemed to be printing letters and numbers on top of one
another until they were nothing but a white blur.
Well, he had saved all his work before talking to Amy, so no problem
there.  He hit reset.

He jumped at the scream.

"SUPER STIMS.  LIVING LIFE TO THE

FULLEST!"

The shout was followed by the blare of Mariachi horns, speedily playing
the Super Stims jingle.  He took a deep breath, doing his best to still
his heart.
The ad-mailers had found some new way around the suppression fields.
You always needed another upgrade All of it was a game in a way, the
technology of the ad and anti-ad programs leapfrogging over each other
constantly.  The ad programs had gotten pretty devious, able to attach
themselves to micro files viruses, anti-viruses; just about anything.
Who knew how this latest one had snaked its way in.  He wondered if
that alone was enough to screw up the system.

The ad program cut off as abruptly as it had begun.

The horns stopped mid-blare.  That was odd.  Usually it took a quarter
of an hour for you to purge the things from your system, by which time
the jingle would be permanently embedded in your head.
The view screens had returned to default settings, showing views of
the streets immediately around the apartment complex.  When he couldn't
get out, he liked to scan through the observation cameras; over a dozen
different views of the surrounding streets.  This late at night, there
wasn't much out there; just the occasional vehicle cloaked in a
security shield, guaranteed to mask vehicle, occupant, and whatever
weapons might have been brought along for Personal Security.
He got his second shock of the night.  There was actually somebody out
there walking, all alone on the streets at this time of night.  Don
swore under his breath.  The man was dressed all in black.  He shuffled
down the street, his head down, eyes nearly closed, as if lost in his
own private world.  This guy was either heavily armed and dangerous, or
he was crazy and dangerous.
Whichever it was, Don had the feeling he'd find out soon.  Three
individuals with shaved heads sauntered down the street only half a
block behind the lone man.
Rather than hair, the three all sported neon implants, each of the
three favoring a different color, yellow, red, and blue.  The bright
strands on their skulls strobed slowly at first, but faster and faster
as they approached the man alone, as if the neon quickened with their
adrenaline.

"Hey!"  Red Neon called.

"We found ourselves a ghost!"

The man alone looked up, pulled from his private thoughts.

"What?  Leave me alone."

Yellow Neon cackled.

"What do you know?  A talking ghost!"

"Shame he won't be talking for long," Red Neon added.

The gang thought it was hilarious.  Don realized that all three of them
were holding knives.
They moved in to have their fun.  From the way the blades glowed in the
darkness, Don could tell the punks all held Battery Blades, the latest
rage in street

65

weapons, designed to both cut and stun.  After all, with its high water
content, blood was an excellent conductor.
It looked like they were going to kill him.  These same cameras fed
directly to the building's security system.  They'd been at it for a
while now.  Where were the police?
Knives flashed in the neon glow.  The way the three huddled around
their fallen victim, Don couldn't see much of anything.  But he could
certainly hear.
The victim somehow broke free of the others.  He slipped once, maybe on
his own blood, but kept from falling.  He pushed past the punks and
lurched straight toward Don's viewpoint.  The punks were only a step
behind.  One raised his knife above his head and plunged it forward,
the lighted blade flashing in a downward arc straight into the victim's
back.
The camera was covered by spurting blood.  As the blood ran down the
screen, it formed into red letters against the black background:

"REMEMBER!  IF YOU GO OUT BY YOURSELF,

YOU ONLY HAVE YOURSELF TO

BLAME!"

This wasn't even real!  It was a god damned PSA.

The ad stims were everywhere.  Don jabbed at the reset button.

All his screens went blank.  There wasn't even an
This was ridiculous.  There were supposed to be safeguards against this
kind of system failure.  Something, or someone, was messing with him.

A chime sounded.

"Don, you have company."
It was the voice of the doorbell.  The doorbell?  He hardly recognized
it.  Who besides Amy ever used the doorbell?  And after he had entered
her handprint ID, even she had bypassed the system.
Don scanned the console on his armrest, pressing the button to show the
view outside his apartment.
Somehow, that camera was still working; a view of the hallway outside
flashed on his largest screen.

A man in a blue uniform smiled up at the camera.

"Service."

"Service?"  Don demanded.

"Service for what?"

"Basic Systems Error.  The whole building's down.

I've been monitoring the individual units; that's how I knew you were
still up, trying to access your system.

Bet you're not having much luck."

"Well," Don answered a bit reluctantly.

"Yeah."

"Well, it's a bit of luck for us, actually--the fact you're up this
late.  If we don't get to each of these units individually, and soon,
the whole place could fry."
"I'm sorry, but--" "We think it's a stealth obsolescence program."  The
serviceman wasn't going to give Don time to object.
"We got news of it this afternoon.  We have to purge each subsystem
individually.  It's a real hands-on experience.

If we don't do it now, your whole system might have to be replaced."

Stealth obsolescence?  Don had heard of that sort of thing when he'd
been out browsing, some of the big conglomerates trying to goose their
profits, but he hadn't really paid it any attention.  Rumors of that
sort were so paranoid, he generally ignored them.  Like a lot on the
Web, paranoia was a great way to waste your time.
But this was beyond paranoia.  This was screwing up his place, messing
with his system.

He stared hard at the image of the serviceman.

"I

assume you have some identification?  And a work order?"

The repairman laughed.
"What was I thinking about, this time of night, too?"  He placed his
hand on the apartment palm-reader as he read from his digital
clipboard"Securiteam Member Jason Taylor here to check and clean Unit
21B-Rear, occupant Donald Winslow.  Authorization Code B79988-"

The screen went blank.  That signal was gone, too.

Don guessed he'd better open the door while he still had electricity.
But not before he took some precautions of his own.
He walked quickly into the bedroom and pulled the revolver from the
back of his sock drawer.  The gun, a Smith and Wesson .38, had been in
his family for generations.  What had his father always told him?  A
man had to protect his home, He tucked the gun into the back of his
jeans, and pulled on a loose fitting sweater to hide the bulge.
Only when he felt his weapon was secure, and hidden, did he move to the
front door.
The identigrid was flashing on the inside of the door.  Half the
security guard's information had made it here before this system, too.
had frozen:

JASON TAYLOR, SECURITEAM AUTHORIZED.

PALM PRINT.  OK.  RETINAL SCAN--the read-out stopped, followed by a
whole bunch of garbage.

You had to take some chances in life.  Don opened the door.

The repairman smiled at him.  He had a very faint scar that ran from
his cheekbone down across his chin;
the sort of thing low-res cameras didn't pick up.  It made him look
somewhat more dangerous than his video image.

"All right.  I was about to give up on you, Mr.  Winslow.

Can I call you Don?  Everybody calls me Jace."

He pushed past Don, into the apartment.

"Now we can really get to work."

Don felt like he was already losing control here.

"Just what is it exactly that you have to do?"
"I've got to get at the heart of your system.  Once I see just what
you've got, we can figure out what to do.  Where's your primary?"

Don pointed toward his office.

"You're a bachelor, right?  Mrs.  Mac Shea down in 21C-front?  She has
her primary operating out of her kitchen.  Some women are like that,
huh?"  He glanced back at Don as he reached the office door.

"You know her, right?"

Actually, Don didn't really know any of his neighbors.
What with so many people plugged into home offices, the building's
occupants kept wildly different hours.  You certainly didn't talk to
anybody out on the streets these days, and it was impolite to make eye
contact on the elevators.  He had seen two or three middle-aged women
in the hallways.  He guessed Mrs.

Mac Shea had to be one of them.

The repairman stepped into Don's office and looked around.
"Pretty up-to-date for this building."  He walked over to the main
access panel and opened a pouch at his belt.
"Well, Mrs.  Mac Shea--actually, she asked me to call her Julia--sweet
old broad, she could barely tolerate what we had to do."  He pulled the
smallest electric screwdriver Don had ever seen from his pouch and
rapidly went about freeing the panel.
"Fooling with her kitchen was like cutting out her heart, I guess.  I
had to call in one of the other techs to take her and sit her in the
bedroom until she calmed down."

He pulled the panel free and looked inside.

"You, though, a guy living alone like you--I guess you live alone?"  He
glanced back at Don, who didn't give him an answer one way or the
other.  This guy was here to fix a problem, not learn Don's life
story.

Jace nodded for him.

"Yeah.  You go into enough apartments, after a while you can tell.
Well, Don, being a bachelor, living alone, you're not going to get
emotionally involved in the same way.  At least I hope not.  The
stealth program gets worse with time.  If we can catch it in the early
stages, though .. ."  Jace shrugged.
"Look at it this way.  The less time I'm here, the less problems you're
going to have."
The repairman took a small flashlight from his pack and shone it into
the innards of Don's primary control panel.  He grunted in approval.
"Your system has some built-in safeguards.  It'll make my job easier."
He pulled out a small set of wire cutters.
What now?  Don didn't like this at all.  Ever since his system had
started shutting down, Don had felt like he was losing control.

"Look," be began.

"Why don't you let me handle some of that?  I actually know what's
inside there pretty well.  I personally customized--" Jace shook the
wire cutters at Don.

"Don't worry," he chided with that same smile.

"I'm not going to mess with anything I can't easily replace."
He flicked the light he had in his left hand on and off and on again,
making clicking sounds with his tongue as he examined the computer's
innards.
"I do like to talk.  You wouldn't think so, but it helps me to focus on
my work.  Say, you wouldn't happen to have something to drink around
here, would you?  A can of soda or something?  This troubleshooting can
be thirsty work."
Something to drink?  Don supposed that would be polite, but he felt as
if he were fixed to the spot.  As long as Don stood here and watched
the repairman, he was able to maintain some illusion of control.  He
didn't want to leave Jace alone with the apartment's primary system.
"Ah, hell!"  Jace exclaimed as he thrust the wire cutters into the
enclosed darkness.

"It's late at night.

I've been working for fourteen hours straight.  Why don't you make that
a beer?"
"A beer?"  What was he talking about?  How could he drink while he was
repairing sensitive electronics?
"I'm sorry--" "Whoops!"  Jace called.  He shook his head as he looked
at Don.
"See what you made me do?  I meant to get the next one over, but when
you distracted me--" He laughed.
"We'll just have to fix that."  He looked at the wire-cutters still in
his hand.

"In the wrong hands, this could kill someone."

Now Don was starting to get annoyed.
"What do you mean, I distracted you?  I'm not the one who barged into
someone's home in the middle of the night--" "Now, now, Don," Jace
interrupted.

"I'm here to help you.  It pays to be nice to me, you know."

Where did this repairman get off?
"You're paid to fix the damn thing.  Why don't you do that and get out
of here!"

Jace sighed.

"You're not going to get emotional on me, too?  Remember how I told you
about Mrs.  Mac Shea

Do you want me to have to call someone to calm you down, too?"

Don stared at the repairman.  Could they do something like that?  In
his own apartment?  Don did want to protect his system.  He had to calm
down.  So Jace didn't have very good people skills.  Don should be able
to put up with his obnoxious behavior for a few more minutes.  It was
worth it to fix the system, and get the repairman out of here.
Jace pulled out some kind of small gray cube with a digital display.
Don figured it had to be some sort of diagnostic device.  The repairman
put both his hands back in the control box.  For a moment, he didn't
speak.
"There.  I've hooked it back together.  You won't even know you had a
problem.  Fourteen hours on the job, you can get a little shaky."  He
pulled out the small cube.

"What have we got here?  Donny boy!

You really like those X-rated files, don't you?"

"What?"  Don exploded.

"What are you--" "Not that I'm judging you, Don," the repairman
continued.
"A bachelor's got to have a little fun, right?  But maybe we can talk
about that some other time.  I'm on the clock here, in more ways than
one.

He reached into his pack again.

"Now we'd better do what I came here for."
He pulled a curved, segmented tube that came to a point at one end. It
looked to Don like a wasp cast in metal.
"This baby here will detect any foreign programs or unauthorized
codes," Jace said, "and then it will obliterate them."  He flicked a
small switch on the instrument's side.  It made a noise like a
dentist's drill.
He plunged it into the open darkness.  Another sound came out of the
control box, like metal grinding metal.

"Is that thing safe in there?"  Don asked.

The repairman winced slightly at the noise, but he kept on smiling.
"Oh, it shouldn't damage anything that's supposed to be in here, so
long as I'm careful.
It will purge anything that's not supposed to be in here.  though,
software or hardware.  So how about that beer?"
This was going too far.  First this guy looks at his personal files,
then he wants to start drinking.
"Look," Don said firmly, "I never agreed to get you a beer- In fact, I
don't think it's a very good--" "Some of those files, Don," Jace
interrupted smoothly, "they have to do with bondage, don't they?
Some messy forms of discipline, too.  I, of course, only take an
academic interest in that sort of thing, but if your mother was to find
out ..."

"My mother?"  Don took a step towards the repairman.

"I think it's time for you to get out of there."
"Oh, Don.  I'll be done in just another minute."  The noise from inside
the control box changed again, this time to a high whine that made
Don's teeth ache.
Something popped inside the controls.  Sparks shot out past Jace's
arms.

The repairman coughed as he waved smoke from his face.

"Oops.  Another little accident."  His brow furrowed as he peered into
the darkness.

"This one might be a little more serious."

Don took a step forward.

"What have you done?"

The repairman froze him with a single glance.
"You don't understand, Don.  You wanted to stop my work back there.  I
can't listen to that sort of thing.  It makes me nervous."  He smiled
again.

"I make mistakes."

Don really had had enough of this.

"You're not going to make any more mistakes here."

Jace shook his head.
"Oh, Don, Don.  This has to be done now.  Do you want me to have to
call in the cavalry?  I thought you'd be so much more reasonable than
Mrs.  Mac Shea  You know women, how they get so emotional."
Don took a deep breath.  Maybe punching a repairman wasn't the best
course of action.  If this was almost over, he could get this character
out of his life forever.

"How long did you say this was going to take?"

Jace glanced back at the open control grid.
"Not long at all.  I'd say, Don, that I'm almost done with you."  He
poked the wasplike instrument back into the hole.  For the moment, it
hardly made any noise at all.

"Poor Mrs.  Mac Shea Jace continued as he worked.

"She got so very upset.  Just because I was a little clumsy with a
couple of her family heirlooms.
Hey, pottery was meant to be broken, right?  She got worse than you,
demanding that I leave before I could finish.  Well, I had to get her
out of the way, didn't I?
We actually had to bring in two of my buddies.  They took her right out
of the kitchen and into her bedroom."

He glanced up at Dan and winked.

"They were able to keep her occupied until I finished my work."

Don stared at the other man.

"Are you threatening me?"

Jace shook his head.

"Don, you surprise me.  Actually, I was threatening you when I said I'd
talk to your mother.  She's so frail and sensitive these days, isn't
she?  It was a shame about the disappearance of your father.  Learning
about the filth her son's involved in, well, it might just about kill
her, wouldn't you say?"

"That's it!"  Don shouted.

"That's enough!  I want you out of here!"

The repairman looked mildly surprised.

"No can do, Don.  But if you keep interrupting me like this, I may have
to call in some of my boys."  The smile was back.
"They may have to be a little rougher with you than they were with poor
Mrs.  Mac Shea

Don rushed toward him.

"Oh, Don."  Jace held the wire-cutters before him.

"These cut a lot more than just wires.

Don pulled the gun.

"Get out of here!"

"What?"  Jace acted like people pulled guns on him every day.

"How can I leave before my job is done?

That wouldn't be professional at all."

His lack of fear only made Don more angry.

"Get out of here, or I'll kill you!"

The repairman shook his head firmly.

"I will not leave before I'm done, with you, your system, or your
family.  You knew that, Donny, from the moment I walked in here."
Don walked forward slowly, the gun aimed between the repairman's
eyes.

"Move, or I'll kill you."

The smile was gone from Jace's face at last.
"Sir, I have to warn you that shooting repair personnel could void your
service contract."  He waited a beat before waving the wire-cutters.
"Of course, I could always kill you first."  He glanced back at the
control panel.
"And then I'll call up your mother and tell her how you died."  He
giggled" Of course, I'll make up the more interesting details."
The repairman thought that was hilarious.  He laughed until tears
rolled down his cheeks.

"Enough!"  Don screamed.

The repairman agreed at last.  He jumped up with a yell and lunged for
Don.
Don shot him at point blank range.  The repairman spasmed, the
wire-cutters missing Don's ear by an inch.  One bullet in the head, and
he was dead.
"Whoo!"  Don cheered, throwing the gun down on his chair.  What a
rush.
The repairman was the first to go, gone from the floor without even a
drop of blood left behind.  The room reestablished itself in under a
minute.  Besides the faint smell of burnt cordite, you wouldn't even
know he fired a gun.
Damn, those new holographies were good.  The bullet had punched a hole
in the console.  He supposed he shouldn't use a real weapon in these
things, but, heck, a gun gave it a real feeling of danger.  And the way
he'd juiced up that program, it had almost gotten away from him.
Almost, but not quite.  That was the important thing, to be back in
control.
Besides, it didn't look like the bullet had hit anything vital.  The
new diagnostic repair program should fix it up in no time.  And these
repairs would be made behind the scenes, the way it should be.

Don took a deep breath.

Not a bad night at all; just about the best one he'd had.  He could do
it all over again.

The phone rang, right on cue.

"Donny?"  Amy asked.

"Are you sure you're all right?"

He held up his end of the conversation, but something didn't feel
right.  Even though he said the words, he didn't really feel them.
After what had just happened, he needed to challenge himself.

Maybe if he made Amy a blonde.

THE KIDNAPPING OF

RONITAHR

by Alan Rodgers
Alan Rodgers' short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as
Miskatonic University, Tales from the Great Turtle, Masques #3, and The
Conspiracy Files.  His first published short story, "The Boy Who Came
Back from the Dead" won the Horror Writers Association's Stoker Award
for Best Novelette.  He lives in Hollywood, California.
LONG before the trial, before the spectacle, before the kidnapping and
the apprehension--before all of that there was a comet in the sky.
Some folks called it the Wise Kings' Star, and said it was the
harbinger of the Second Coming.  Other folks called it the Wishing
Star, and said it was the candle of our dreams.

The scientists were uniformly less romantic.

"It's a menace," they said.
"An interplanetary body in an orbit that will intersect the
Earth--catastrophically."
The reporters who translated that into English said it meant that we
were all about to die.
"This is how the dinosaurs became extinct," Ted Koppel said on
Nightline.

"A comet--or perhaps it

was a meteor of enormous size--hit ground in Yucatan, remaking our
geography, and shattering the world.  Weather patterns went into
eclipse for centuries and whole ecologies collapsed.  Could this be the
fate that awaits us in the coming weeks?  Will mankind go the way of
the Tyrannosaur?"

His guests went on to bolster all of the most frightful speculations.

"We have ten weeks," said Dr.  Ken Roman of the Institute for Psychical
Research in Tuskegee, Alabama.

"The comet's orbit, of course, is relentless;

there's no chance that it could turn away.  Could we turn it away?  All
the nuclear force that we possess, concentrated into a solitary
Gotterdammening, might well disperse it--but it might just as well
transform the icy menace into a fiery nuclear holocaust, descending on
the Earth."
The dirty-looking man beside him--an apocalyptic lyricist who'd written
three eerily prophetic numbers released on a grange rock album the year
before-gave a little laugh.

"

"Some say the world will end in fire,"

" he said, quoting Frost.  "

"Some say in ice.  From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those
who favor fire.  But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough
of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great.  And would
suffice."

"

Ted gave a little laugh, because Ted Koppel is a literate man who
recognized the quote; the other members of the panel looked at the
grange poet as though he'd grown wings and commenced to fly.

"Frost," said the lyricist.

"If you don't know him, you should."
At twenty minutes of the hour, newsmen broke into the panel to report
the announcement everyone expected:
There'd been a big meeting in the secret halls of the United Nations
Security Council, and the big powers had agreed to send up all of their
thermonuclear munitions under the control of an American shuttle
pilot.  The technical setup of the mission would take five weeks, at a
minimum, but that still left plenty of time on the outside if something
went impossibly wrong.
After the news interruption, the panel was a bevy of relief.
Everything's going to be okay, someone said, the cavalry's come over
the hill.
And they all believed that for a moment that went on till the camera
lights went down.

Believed it through the evening, past dawn into the day.

But at 10:27 am that next morning, Washington time, one of the
astronomers who'd been watching through the night panicked.

And called Reuters.

By noon the hysteria had found us all, consuming us forever.
REUTERS--Astronomers who ask not to be identified report that the
Earth-bound comet popularly known as the Wishing Star--one of the
largest ice and-gravel objects ever observed in the solar system-has
begun to accelerate out of its orbit.

Astronomers and others were at a loss to explain the acceleration.

"Heavenly bodies don't pick up and soar out of their orbits," the
scientist said.

"It can't happen.  And it doesn't.  But we're observing it."

The unnamed scientist refused to speculate on causes.

"You want me to talk about woo-woo stuff?"  he asked.

"I'm not going to do it.  Call it a frightening anomaly-because the
thing is still moving toward the Earth.
Much, much faster, now.  It will impact somewhere in the next
forty-eight hours if it continues at this rate."
They tried to get a shuttle up in time, but there was none in adequate
repair to launch on such short notice--NASA's engineers were still hard
at work on the 0 rings when the Wishing Star sped through the
moon's orbital circumference.  NORAD did what it could, sending three
volleys of ICBMs up through the atmosphere to smash the comet--but the
only smashing came when the missiles themselves shattered lifeless and
dead against the comet's crystalline facade.

"What happened to the warheads?"  Ted asked on Nightline.

"Those missiles should have blasted bright enough to light the dark
side of the moon."
This was the Nightline deathwatch show; it started early at 10 pm,
Eastern, and was scheduled to run through impact (and the presumed end
of the world) at 2:37 am.
No one had an answer, of course, as to why the NORAD missiles did not
detonate.  No more than they had a notion why or how a comet could
accelerate toward the Earth.
But at seven minutes after one in the morning, the newsmen had more
news.

"Ted, we've got a bulletin.  It's big."

"Go ahead, Pete, break in.  What's up?"
"The comet is decelerating into orbit around the Earth.  And the
astronomers have gotten a good look at the impact spots where the NORAD
missiles died-they say that the comet isn't a comet."

"Isn't a comet?"  Ted asked, sounding puzzled and confused.

"Well then what the devil is it?"

"They say it looks to be some sort of a spaceship, sheathed in ice."

The engineers in the repair bay managed to solve their 0-ring problem
somewhere after four o'clock that morning.  The lift-prep team went
directly into action--fueling, rolling out, and setting up the shuttle.
They cut corners that weren't safe to cut;~and it's a wonder no one
died in the launch that followed.  But no one did, and in retrospect
the prep crew did the only thing they could, given the emergency; and
some folks will try to tell you that they cut their corners prudently
at that Regardless At 6:03 am Eastern the shuttle Defiance took off
from Canaveral, bound toward the bright new artificial moon that hung
above our world.

At 6:32 the Defiance eased into an orbit alongside the Wishing Star.

At 6:37 the shuttle crew began trying to hail the crew of the vast
icebound spaceship--by radio; with flares.  By maneuvering about the
alien craft, looking for a portal that might offer entry.

But they found no response.

At length they attempted to breach the alien craft themselves,
space-walking about the spaceship's icy surface for hours and hours,
looking for some sign of life.

But there was none.

Then they attempted to force an entry, clearing the icy capsule away
until they could pry at the hull with their hammers and their bars.

To no avail.

Nothing that the crew of the shuttle Defiance attempted to do to the
alien vessel had any effect at all--and none of it prompted reaction,
either.
In the end, their commanders down in Houston ordered them back home to
Edwards Air force Base.

And then the world began to wait.

It didn't have to wait for long.
Forty-eight hours after the Defiance touched down at Edwards, a tiny
craft of alien design emerged from an aperture in the great icebound
vessel, and slowly slowly slowly it descended.
It didn't bother to slow and burn through orbit; the aliens descended
on a plume of force made of fire, dust, and miracles--technologies that
no one knew or could imagine let them descend vertically toward
Washington.

Washington, D.C.

The unearthly craft descended exactly at the thick of things, toward
Pennsylvania Avenue at rush hour, where a thousand thousand cars and
trucks and buses braced at one another, pushing traffic toward escape
at low velocity.
When the alien shuttle hung a dozen yards above the ground, it
hesitated, as though waiting for the traffic to disperse.

And after a while the traffic did disperse.

And the alien module descended to the pavement.

And a portal opened, releasing a ramp.

As Roni Tahr emerged.
That was the first moment that anyone in the world--anyone on our
world--caught sight of Roni Tahr.  Till that moment, no human man or
woman had ever seen him or heard tell of him; and while there are those
who claim they always knew he was to walk among us there isn't any
realistic cause to take them seriously.

The alien shuttle opened, and Roni Tahr emerged;

some people mark that moment as the dawning of the age.
He didn't look human, Roni Tahr.  But he didn't look so alien then,
either.

A child on the sidewalk gasped at the sight of Roni Tahr.

"He's beautiful."  the child said.
"Is he a person, Mommy?  A people person, like you and me and Daddy
are?"

His mother hesitated, but she knew the answer all the same.

"Of course he is, Patrick," the mother said.
"Never let yourself think otherwise--a person is a person no matter who
they are."

Roni Tahr heard all of that, and smiled at the .  woman.

"We come in peace," he said.

"We come to know your world, and cherish it and you."

She was wrong, of course.  There were doubters then, and there are
doubters now; even her own son had doubted till she'd set him
straight.
But for all that she was wrong, still she spoke a fundamental truth:
none could see Roni Tahr without that same stirring of the heart.  To
see him truly is a spiritual wonder; and while it's true that there are
those whose hearts breed hatred deeper than the sea, it's also true
that those folks see and love him, too, no matter how they find the
rage to loathe him equally or more.
By the time Roni Tahr reached the sidewalk, there were television
cameras focused on him, watching; a crowd had already begun to line the
streets that led from the landing site on Pennsylvania Avenue to the
White House.

Four other aliens--assistants, disciples, or bodyguards;

no one is certain--four other aliens followed Roni Tahr to the White
House from his landing craft.
Their names were Ileja, Kure, Orogarn, and Mathos, but little more is
known of them.
"They're having a parade.  Mommy," the little boy called, And in a way
it was like a parade: the crowd pulled away from the street to line the
sidewalk, just as it might line a parade route; despite the hour,
traffic cleared from Pennsylvania Avenue in both directions, as far as
the eye could see.
Roni Tahr and his four shadowy companions strode easily toward the
White House, waving to the onlookers, taking in the welcome and the joy
that held the city---till they reached the White House gates, and found
their way barred by three dozen of the Secret Service.

"I'm sorry, sir," the senior agent said, hat in hand, shamefaced.

"We can't allow you to proceed."

Roni Tahr frowned, and nodded sadly.

"I understand," he said.

"Duty calls us all."

His English was remarkable: utterly unaccented in any way, but colored
by a lilt that brought exotic circumstance to mind, a sound that warmed
the heart and filled it with all possibility and prospects for the
age.
And then the President himself arrived at the gate, followed by his
minions.
"Sam," he called, "That isn't necessary, Sam.  I'd like to greet these
gentlemen myself."
The President smiled the facile homespun and half sincere smile that
was his trademark, and now the Secret Service stood aside.
We know this about the President's meeting with Roni Tahr, because
there were witnesses:
We know that the President escorted Roni Tahr and his companions into
the White House, and showed him many things: the Oval Office; the
famous halls and meeting places.  Offices of great officers and
small;

map rooms, situation rooms.

The president's own quarters, ultimately.
We know that they broke bread together, and went on to share a meal, We
know that their conversation ran long and genial, into the night.
Till finally near midnight the President and Roni Tahr dismissed the
aides who'd dined with them, and the President led Roni Tahr into a
secure and solitary room, where the two of them spoke privately at
length and in substance about the future of the world--and so many
things beyond it.
No one knows for certain what was said within those walls, for the room
was impossibly secure, and there were no witnesses but the President
himself and Roni Tahr.
But there are records from the White House purser that suggest the
general form of their discussion: At three o'clock in the morning the
President had his valet bring them coffee; at half past four he woke
the chef to bring them cognac and fine Dominican cigars.
At five, Roni Tahr rejoined his companions, and the five of them left
the White House in a Presidential limousine that took them across the
street and through the gathered crowd to the Hotel Washington.
There they took possession of an extensive suite of rooms two floors
below the Penthouse, where they rested undisturbed seven hours, seven
minutes, and seven seconds.
Undisturbed because a thousand Marines and Secret Service men stood
guard in the corridor outside their suite.
When Roni Tahr emerged at last, three Secret Servicemen led him to a
room where a dozen junior agents had set up operations to screen their
calls.
"You're going to need help, sir," the senior agent said, "to weed
through the mass of folks who want to talk to you.  Some of them--I
think you'll want to talk to some of them.  You've come to Earth to
meet us, haven't you?  There are people here you'll want to see, places
that you'll want to go.  But you can't deal with all of them
yourself--there are just too many folks who want to talk to you."

"There is no need," said Roni Tahr.

"We will contact those we must--they have no need to seek us out."
Roni Tahr was as good as his word, of course.  When he appeared on the
news, he came to us deliberately, in the hour and on the segment of his
own choosing;
when he spoke to Sam Donaldson on the White House lawn it was at his
own instigation--indeed, he took Donaldson and his camera crew entirely
off guard, for though they had tried mightily to reach him, their
effort had gone unavailing.
When Roni Tahr appeared before the United Nations, that, too, came at
his own moment, at his own direction; he came unheralded and
unannounced into the Security Council, and regardless of the sentries
who sought to bar his way.  And then he stood before the captains of
the world and spoke peace, without waiting to hear what they might say
in turn.

He didn't give them orders, instructions, or directions;

he greeted them and offered him his observations of those first days
upon our world.
He told them things about our world we always knew but never dared
admit to ourselves.
In those first days of the age, Roni Tahr spoke to each of the news
organizations, answering their questions, basking in their curiosity.
The talk shows all lamented that he would not speak to them, but that
hardly gave them pause, in the end--for they were much freer to speak
of him when they did not know him than they ever could have been had
they interviewed the alien directly.
As on the talk shows and the nets, we all shouted furiously at one
another, each of us certain that we and we alone knew the nature of the
creature who had come to walk among us.

We each came to our own conclusions, in the end.

And who could say if that was accident or design?

No one could--or should.

Cameras followed Roni Tahr and his disciples everywhere; we all watched
him hours and hours every day.  Telephoto lenses and directional
microphones allowed all of us to hang for hours on his every word, live
on CSpan 4; no one could ever say we did not know great Roni Tahr
before his disappearance.
We saw him spend long hours--whole days at a time--taking in our world,
one neighborhood at a time; we all saw him walk the benighted streets
of Washington, till the cameramen grew weary and the Secret Service on
the street wearied of its charge?
Watching people on the streets; gazing up into the shattered windows of
the towering apartment-project buildings.
And who ever could forget the sight of Roni Tahr when the child fell
from her decrepit bicycle to wound her brow against the pavement?  That
great slight and powerful alien frame stooping to lift the child in his
arms.  Whispering sweet comforts to the child as he carried her to her
home, up the stairs, through the hall where vermin scattered noisome in
their wake;
into her apartment where her mother grieved and cried and worried at
the wound as she tended to her child.
The cameras caught all of that, and no one who has seen those tapes
ever will forget them.
What days those were!  All the nation's scandals and disgraces; the
turpitudes of nations and the ignominy of regions vast and small; the
wars that plagued the world with battle, pestilence, and slaughter--all
those things grew small before the eye, and vanished from the mind; in
an hour a day, a week those things all vanished from the earth for
inattention as surely as they'd vanished from our hearts.

As the world watched Roni Tahr.

Now here at last there was Peace in Our Time, because the things that
set us against ourselves had made themselves too petty to contemplate.
For an hour, a day, a week as we watched Roni Tahr explore our world,
the world was as it always should have been.
And then, a week and a day after he'd come to us, the bastards
kidnapped Roni Tahr.
And changed the world forever in ways that not even Roni Tahr could
ever have foreseen.
No camera saw the kidnappers perform their vile work.  No witnesses
described them; not one onlooker saw anything untoward.  Even to this
day the kidnapping of Roni Tahr remains a mystery: how did the
xenophobic zealots find their way into the Hotel Washington?  How could
they begin to make their way into the suites the aliens occupied, past
a good thousand Marines and Secret Service men?
And how in all the worlds there ever were or will he did they sneak
Roni Tahr and his four companions out of their quarters without
attracting the attention of the police, the guards, the soldiers--for
God's sake, how could they ever have got past the hundreds of reporters
and cameramen who waited inside and outside the hotel?
No one imagines an answer to that question.  There are no answers to
he had.
But we know this much: we know that the hotel steward entered the alien
suite at six forty-five in the morning, Washington time, to set out
clean towels, prepare the aliens' breakfast, and generally make ready
for the new day And what he found inside that suite was chaos of the
highest order.
Furniture crushed, broken, scattered hither and yon about the suite;
bullet holes and bloodstains in and on the walls; deep stains and
singes in the carpet.
And the whole place reeked--not the outre foetor we all recognize from
our encounters with the aliens, but something nastier- More feral, and
endlessly more primal: the suit stank of burned and rotting human
flesh.
Stank powerfully--overwhelmingly, in fact; the odor was so vile and so
forceful that from the moment that the steward opened the door to the
suite, no one in the hall could mistake it.

Within five minutes the stink had found its way throughout the hotel.

The ransom note demanded seven billion in gold bullion.  The sheer size
of the demand made many certain that the kidnappers had the help and
sanctuary of a hostile power--or perhaps a jealous one?

One paper accused the French.  Three others blamed the Chinese.

Some folks knew it had to be the KGB, but the KGB itself found that as
amusing as anyone could.

The FBI certainly could have vouched for them.

The FBI plunged directly into the investigation, and took assistance
everywhere it came to them--and the KGB, uneasy as it was about the
kidnapping, offered more assistance than even the historic record would
suggest.  The American intelligence agencies; the Korean and Japanese
services; military and civilian operatives from all around the globe
offered what assistance-they could render.
In the end, in fact, it was the KGB that led the Americans to the
kidnappers' door.

But it took them a long, long time to do it--days and days.

Weeks.

Seventeen days, to be precise.

Seventeen days, ten hours, thirty-nine minutes.  And seven seconds.
Roni Tahr himself is the only one of the aliens ever recovered.  The
others remain missing to this day-their fates and circumstances are
mysteries to all of us- Likely, in the end, they'll be enigmas when
they write the histories as well.
We have detailed audiovisual records of Roni Tahr's weeks in
captivity.
This is an amazing fact.  And a painful one: we have a record because
one of one of Roni Tahr's warders wore a wire for the KGB.

Wore a data cube recorder, more specifically.

All through Roni Tahr's captivity, he rested in sight of the agents of
our authority--and, sadly, beyond our grasp.  The KGB mole in the
xenophobe cell was a deep, long-term plant; he had damn little desire
to blow his cover, even for the sake of Roni Tahr; and in any case had
less opportunity than desire.
In a very real sense, the heat surrounding the search for Roni Tahr
imprisoned his captors even as they imprisoned him.
"Where am I?"  Roni Tahr rasped as he woke.  He blinked his unearthly
eyes vertically open, shut, open;

he swallowed three times, openmouthed.

"I have your breakfast," his keeper said.
This man's name was Eli, and he spoke English with an accent that
suggested the Near East, but could just as well have marked him as an
Eastern European or a speaker of High German.

"Who are you?"  Roni Tahr asked.

"What am I doing here?"

Eli smiled.

"I am Eli," he said, proudly.

"You are my guest."

A beat.  Another.
"As your guest, then," Roni Tahr responded, "I would take my leave.
Will you bring me to my companions?  My duty calls."

Eli laughed derisively.

"So/owner might be a better word," he said.
"You are not free to leave.  It is possible you may never leave this
room."  He frowned.

"Alive."

Blink.  Swallow.  Blink.

"I see."

Eli nodded.

"I knew you would," he said.

In those first hours the FBI's search was fitful and uncertain.  The
monetary demand drew it to question representatives of hostile foreign
powers--for only a nation state could spend funds into the billions
without making its guilt obvious to all and sundry; and who else had
the resources to attempt the impossible?
There were folks who said (quite credibly) that the aliens themselves
had to have had a hand in the disappearance.
Terrestrial technologies, after all, don't admit the disappearance of
five persons and an unknown (but presumably large) number of
abductors--not from ultra secure quarters like those on the impregnable
Emissaries' Quarters of the semi-penultimate floor of the Hotel
Washington.
There simply is no earthly way anyone could kidnap five aliens from
those quarters, the argument went, undetected by the thousands of
prying eyes, pacing sentries, and soldiers standing watch.
But everyone who saw Roni Tahr knew that there were ways among the
stars beyond our ken; unearthly and extraterrestrial ways that
frightful things could happen before the watchful gaze of thousands.
Never mind the details; no one had them.  But we all knew, all the
same.
Someone's in league with the aliens, the whisper went, to kidnap Roni
Tahr.

And the answer came: but Roni Tahr is an alien.

And the universe is vast enough for menace--and opposition, too.
No one had an answer for that last.  It brought the terror to each
heart that considered it; it told us everything the feared to know, and
assured us of the worst angels of our destiny.

"They're balking at the ransom," Eli said an hour before noon.

"If they refuse, alien, you die."

Blink.

"Then I will die," said Roni Tahr.

Eli nodded.

"You show a brave face, alien.  I admire that in men."  Smile.

"But you are not a man."

Nod.

"No," said Roni Tahr.

"I am not a man.  And you are not a Tahr.  Is this a concern?  We
speak; you hear.

I understand.  Who is a man?  What is a Tahr?"

Eli gave a little laugh.
"Yes," he said, pleased.  And then he caught himself, for it was him
whose body kept the cube.

"You are not a man, and you will die."

"Indeed," said Roni Tahr.
"Death comes for all of us in time; the ends of all our days are
constant as the dictates of the logic of biology," Eli gave his
prisoner a puzzled look.

"English," he said.

"You're talking nonsense."

Roni Tahr shook his head.

"No," he said, "I never would.  I meant to tell you only this:
everything that God makes will die, returning to the Creator as the
breath you draw returns to the sky.  Nothing lives immutably
forever--because any family that could not change to face the
challenges around it would surely die forever."

Eli still didn't follow, but he wearied of the attempt to understand.

"Whatever," he said.
"I will now prepare your lunch.  Lie there quietly and I will leave you
unbound."

"And if I attempt escape?"

Eli laughed.
"There is no escape.  You will be civil, or you will not.  It does not
much concern me."

"I see," said Roni Tahr.  And hesitated.

"What does concern you, Eli?  What brings us to this time, this
circumstance?  How come you to this place and time?"

Eli smiled.

"I am none of your concern," he said.

"Remember that and we will both live longer lives."

The FBI began its search with embassies and safe houses, targeting
known hostiles--particularly the ones who were well financed.  The
Libyans; the Sudanese.
Iran.  Myanmar, reflexively hostile to the West for decades and now
possessed of real wealth from the pillage of its rain forests.  Serbia,
which found itself awash in Uranium money that year.
It took three and a half days for the FBI to raid and search every
known safe house in metropolitan Washington; another two for it to
finish all of those in the northeast and upper south.
Searching the embassies was another matter, since embassies -are
technically the territory of the foreign nationa whose envoys they
house.  On the face of things our government pays great respect to that
sovereignty, and expects the same regard in turn--but the Feds have
ways to search the embassies, mark my word.

They used them that week.  They had used them before.

And they surely will again.
By noon of the seventh day after the kidnapping of Roni Tahr, the FBI
had searched every hostile embassy in Washington, and many of the
embassies of friendly powers.  Twice agents had been caught in the
act--and sent to the FBI for burglary prosecution.

Amazing, that.  The FBI can be as slick as its reputation.

But none of those searches, however slick or well conceived they may
have been, none of those searches revealed anything of any value, much
less a hint as to the whereabouts of Roni Tahr.
The search turned fitful after that.  Agents were assigned to
investigate the mob, the Cuban--some were even sent to watch madmen
like the Unabomber in their prisons.
As the FBI spun its wheels on the eleventh and twelfth days of the
search.
Till some genius in accounting had an inspiration at the commissary
during lunch.
"You know, Marv."  he said to the administrator beside him, "there's
only one power in the world with the resources to pull off something
like the disappearance of this alien."

"Who's that, Steve?"

"Us."

A laugh.

"You and me?  Don't joke.  It's serious out there.

The aliens in orbit are getting anxious at us."

"No, no--us, the U.S. The Americans.  Our country.
We could have done that--lots of our government could have done that.
So could some of the contractors, big ones like the guys who work for

JPL."

"You're out of your mind, Steve," his companion told him.
And that would have been the end of it for days, or weeks, or maybe no
one ever would have realized what'd happened to Roni Tahr and his
companions.
These men were just accountants, after all.  They had no real business
with the investigation.
Except for the fact that one of the investigation's lead managers--a
hostile and frustrated man named Johnson Smith--was standing in the
commissary line behind the two accountants.

And heard the exchange.

And chewed it for three hours as he reviewed reports of severed leads
and pointless burglaries.
Till it came to him that the accountant, Steve Wrightson, had a
point.

Someone with serious resources had stolen away with the aliens.

Resources that Johnson Smith didn't know to name, because until that
day he'd never had a need to know about anything of the sort.

As he picked up his phone.

And dialed one of his associates.

"Roberts," he said.

"We need a liaison to the Black Budget people.  Can you arrange that
for me?"

"Sure," Roberts said.

"What're you looking for?"

A sigh.

"Anything.  Everything.  We need a fishing expedition.
Somebody's behind the technology that abducted Tahr--somebody who works
for us."

"You're kidding."

"I'm not.  You think the Libyans could have done this?  Seriously? They
couldn't.  The Russians?  We get better cooperation from them than we
get from the CIA.  Who else is there--the Chinese?  Next year,
maybe--ten years from now, maybe.  But they honestly don't have the
technical capacity right now.  I can tell you that for certain."
Eli found Roni Tahr examining the joints in the walls when he returned
with their lunch.

"Thought I told you to lie on the bed."  he asked.

"What exactly do you think you're doing?"

"Exploring my prison."

"Won't do you any good," he said.

"Solid concrete.

Lined with lead; reinforced with steel.  They can't find you in this
place."

"I see."

"Hell.  I'm sure you do."  Eli set the plates on the card table at the
center of the room.

"Eat up," he said.

"Ham sandwiches.  You'll like them."

Blink.  Swallow.  Blink.

"Flesh?"

EU smiled.

"Pig meat.  On bread.  With mayonnaise."

"Unfortunate."

Eli shrugged.

"Eat it or don't.  I won't care."

"I will eat."
Eli laughed when he saw Roni Tahr lift the sandwich and begin to pick
at it so gingerly; chuckled at the sight of the alien's disgust as he
masticated the bread and meat.

"You are such a fraud," he said.

"Walking around the world like you were the Second Coming.  But when
you're hungry, you eat, just like anybody else.  Even when you're
disgusted with yourself."

The alien stopped in mid-chew.

Set his sandwich down.  And uttered something in an alien tongue that
sounded like a curse.

"Who are you, Eli?"  he asked.

Eli smiled.

"I am your keeper, Roni Tahr.  Nothing more; nothing less."

A smile.

"I have never come to you before."

Eli laughed.

"I could have told you that," he said.

"It isn't what I meant."

"Say, then."

Another laugh.
"No, there isn't any point.  Except that you're still a goddamn
fraud."

Blink.  Swallow.  Blink.

It took Johnson Smith most of three days to get the clearances he
needed to even start questioning the Black Budget types.
When he finally did get the authorization and the clearances he
needed--directly from cop.gov, because the President was watching the
investigation closely-he got damned little in the way of cooperation.
Black Budget types have a habit of not answering questions;

it makes them hell to deal with when it comes to an investigation.

"I need to know.  damn it," Johnson Smith told the nameless major from
the Mars project.
"The President needs to know.  Who've you got working on the kind of
equipment that could have got the aliens out of that hotel unseen?"

Silence.

"Nobody," the major lied More silence.

"We aren't working on anything like that."

Johnson Smith sighed.

"You're lying to me," he said.

"What've you got?

Who have you got?"

"Nothing.  I told you that, didn't I?"
It went like that all day, for hours and hours--none of them would
answer a straight question, and it didn't do a bit of good to ask the
questions at right angles to the point.
At 9 pm, Johnson Smith finally gave up, and resigned himself to heading
home to bed.

And then his phone rang.

"Is this line secure?"  a scrambled, muffled voice asked.

Johnson Smith hesitated.

"Very secure," he said.

"Upgrade went in through EOF yesterday."

Pause.

"Good."

Pause.

"What can I do for you?"

"I understand you're looking for the Houdini stuff."

"What?"

"The transport guys.  Teleport.  Vanishment."

Johnson Smith closed his eyes, trying to imagine.

"I

don't know what I'm looking for," he said.

"I can see what happened.  And I've got a hunch what kind of person
did it."

"How's that?"

"Crazy xenophobe.  Somebody who hates--aliens.

Aliens are new, here--I guess I'm looking for a hater."

Silence.

"Yeah, that's him."

"Who?"

Silence.

"Who?"

"I have come to you in peace and with good will," Roni Tahr said.

"There is no fraud.  I have only come to know and love you."

"Bull spit."

"Bull .. . ?"

"You're lying to me."

Roni Tahr shook his half-inhuman head.

"I do not lie," he said.

"I cannot."

"All right, so let's say you aren't lying.  Tell me this:

What the hell are you trying to accomplish, wandering around the world
as if you were some kind of a messiah?"
As Roni Tahr finally came upon a word he understood, and his eyes went
wide.
"Messiah .. . ?"  "Savior.  Augur--prophesier.  A holy man, for God's
sake--if you were a man instead of an alien."

The alien closed his eyes.  Shook his head.  Moaned.

"Oh, no," he said.

"That is not what I meant."

Opened his eyes, and looked away.

"That is not it.

At all."
They found the xenophobe sleeper in his office, in the Pentagon; they
raided his home at the same hour, and found more than enough evidence
to convict him.

Souvenirs.  From Orogam and Kure.

Bits of anatomy--things they couldn't live without.
Couldn't?  Who could say?  They were aliens, and their nature was more
uncertain than the wind.
They took the sleeper--whose name was Ron Thomason, and who had been a
ranking civilian on a DIA project that's still subject to serious
classification--they took the sleeper to a small, dark room in the
basement of a safe house in Langley.
And they asked him many, many things, Asked hard, and long, using every
technique they could legally apply.

And quite a few that might've got the questioners prosecuted.

If they'd left their marks behind.  If anyone could have proven
anything at all.
But all the same, in the end they could only go so far: there was no
way any man in our government's employ could bring himself to commit
the kind of torment that will always bring an answer from a man.
"Maybe we ought to loan him to our new friends in the KGB," somebody
joked.

"God, remember what they did in Lebanon?"

And everyone in the room laughed a long rude laugh, except for Ron
Thomason, who lay strapped to the padded examination table in the
center of the room, turgid and unmoving, staring at the ceiling.
And that was an odd coincidence.  Because at that moment word came down
from the secure line in the house above that there was a call for
Johnson Smith.
And when he answered it, he found himself speaking to the third-ranking
director of the KGB.

"Johnson Smith," he said.

"We have a locus for you."
"If you aren't here to act out the Second Coming," asked Eli, "what the
devil do you think you are trying to accomplish?"

"We only wish to know you," Roni Tahr responded.

"To know you and to love you."

Eli sneered.

"And doesn't it occur to you that your presence just might have an
effect of its own?"

"We come in peace," said Roni Tahr.

"We mean no harm."

"You're turning us into a world of mind-numbed idiots!"

Blink.  Swallow.  Blink.

"I never could," said Roni Tahr.

"I never would."
"What do you think it does to people, having you show up here, acting
like an angel?  You think they can make their own decisions in any
sensible way with some half-divine watching over their shoulders?
Protecting them from harm?"

Pause, "You are mad, Eli.  No evil comes of kindness."

"I'm not," Eli said.
"I've seen them.  They're already losing all their passion for the
world, their will to thrive.  They need a challenge, alien.  And the
fact that you are here to comfort them removes it."

"Show me," the alien insisted.

"How could that ever be?"

"Damn you," Eli said.

"I will!"
And Eli grabbed the alien by the wrist, and dragged him to the
kitchen.
Stepped onto the ladder at the far corner of the kitchen--and started
to climb.
At the top of the ladder there was a portal secured by a
wheel-lock--the sort of lock they use on battleships, and tanks, The
kind of lock they use in the construction of bomb shelters.
For they were in a bomb shelter--a deep shelter designed to withstand
the force of many megatons of thermonuclear force; a place intended to
take a direct hit on Washington-As Eli opened the hatch, to lead Roni
Tahr out into the world and show him the ennui of the earth---he opened
the hatch into the face of six FBI SWAT agents.
And another dozen from the KGB, Nobody's sure who started shooting
first.  Was it Igor, who'd spent six years in Lebanon during the civil
war?  Was it Leroy Watkins, who'd stood inches from the hatch as it
opened into his face?
Some people say that it was Johnson Smith, who'd got in so far over his
head that he was high-strung and overwrought, beyond the exercise of
his best judgment.
Others still clam that it was Eli himself, surprised and caught off
guard, who started shooting first.  The EMTs who dragged Eli and Roni
Tahr from the tunnel found a pistol in his hand--but there's no record
of that pistol in the data cube and the general wisdom is that it was a
drop gun, the sort of unmarked and untraceable weapon law enforcement
personnel carry to cover themselves for occasions just like these.
Whoever started the shooting, the outcome was straightforward: a dozen
and a half FBI and KGB agents dressed in SWAT armor fired down into
that shelter.
And in a matter of some moments both Eli and Roni Tahr lay on the floor
in seeping bloody heaps of flesh.

And how the world grieved and mourned that hour!

As the EMTs descended into the miles-deep tunnels, and came out in a
concrete courtyard just off the Washington Mall, bearing stretchers
soaked with blood and unearthly ichor, and the children in the crowd
wailed, and a woman screamed in despair for she knew that she could not
go on.
"Roni Tahr," she shouted, "Roni Tahr awake, awake.  The world is lost
without you!"

And then the strangest thing began to happen.

As the woman forced her shrieking screaming hysterical way through the
soldiers and the guards and the FBI types pressed around the corpse; as
she cast herself upon the shattered alien corpse-As she embraced Roni
Tahr and screamed that all life on earth was lost without him, the
alien began to stir.

And Roni Tahr woke to see the broken woman mourn him.

And he said, "No, no, no, this is not what I meant, this is not what I
meant."
And he tore away the straps that had fasted his seemingly lifeless form
to that stretcher.

And stood.

And lifted the woman roughly by the arms, and shouted to her.

"You could never be more wrong," he said.

"I am not here to save you.  I never could!  I could destroy you
without intending, don't you see?"

And the woman wept, and she kissed his bloodstained cheek.

"No, Roni Tahr," she said.

"We believe in you."

As Roni Tahr screamed and shoved her from him, roughly.

"You must not!"  he shouted.

"You may not!"

The woman, shaken but none the worse for wear, shook her head.

"We always will," she said.

"Then I will stop you," said the alien.

As he seized the M16 from the arms of the Marine beside him.
And fired and fired and fired into the crowd, until the entire Mall ran
red with blood.

by Mike Stotter

Having written five pulp western fiction novels and two children's
historical nonfiction novels, Mike Stotter has now turned his hand to
the crime and thriller genre.  Having written for Mystery Scene and The
Mystery Review he now also edits Shots--a British magazine for crime
and mystery.  What spare time he has is spent writing western and
mystery short stories.  He lives in Essex and is married with three
sons eating him out of house and home.

DOWN here he was a ghost.

Among the nickering computer screens and background hiss, the soft
tap-tap of keypads and the crackling static of loudspeakers Jerry Lane
was no one.  Just one more number in the army of workers.
Yet another fruitless day stuck in the bowels of hell and nothing to
show for it was coming to an end.
Lately he'd been growing resentful of his recent promotion to the
Biometrics Information Corporation, considering it a bad move.  He'd
taken umbrage at his wife's interference in obtaining the move.  A move
he didn't want in the first place.  His career in the Criminal
Intelligence Section had been an enjoyable time.

The B.I. section was for dead-headed, keyboard tapping drongos.

He looked up at the clock--another five minutes and he could log off
and get home.  He began closing down his workstation, feeling his
muscles at the back of his neck tense as they always did when finishing
for the day.  The act of turning off the monitor was like the final
turn of the screw before all the tension could disperse.
He had actually made it into his jacket when the monitor screen sprang
to life.

"Card gone active.  Card gone active," the speaker boomed.

"Ah, shit!"

Lane threw off his jacket and went back to his workstation.

"Details," he ordered.
The screen flashed up a large-scale quadrant map where a tiny red speck
oscillated in its center.
"Mile End Gate, Citizen 246317216 using smart card at credit facility."
The computer announced.

Smartcard?  The citizen was well behind the times.

Lane ordered an enhancement of the street plan.  The computer showed
him the junction of Mile End Road and Burdett Road.  It was just on the
limits of the Outer City; any further and Lane would need to call for
armed backup.  But this was one he could handle himself.  This
particular citizen had slipped out of his grasp on two previous
occasions.  Lane had programmed the computer to download a tracking
device into the smart card the next time it was used, so maybe he could
get lucky this time.  Happy to be actually doing something, he ordered
up a patrol car as he strapped on his webbing belt.

So what if I get caught?

All he could think of was getting something extra to eat and drink;
getting back to the safety and comfort of his hideout and shutting out
the rest of the world.  He knew that he shouldn't have used his card,
102 Mike Sutler but there was no other way, no other legal way, of
getting those extra rations.  The center had provided his one meal for
the day, but his stomach growled in protest.  Now he wished he hadn't
left home, A stupid row with his parents and now look at him.

No home, no parents, no comforts, no love.

What they fought about was long forgotten, only the fact remained that
they didn't want him back and had even relocated.  For the last eight
months he had had to fend for himself.
The sky darkened dramatically, and a few spots of rain splattered down
on to his unprotected head.  A jagged fork of lightning lit up the
street for a split second He began to count: one, two, three, four,
five ... the crash of thunder rolled and echoed against the buildings.
ian Palmer wondered who taught him to do that to count the seconds
between the thunder and lightning to guess the distance of the storm.
He hunched his shoulders against the sudden tropical downpour and
protected his food against his body.
The rain fell harder, driving people off the street to scuttle for
shelter.  With no protection, ian was soaked through within minutes.
The rain plastered his hair against his head, ran down his collar, and
seeped through his cheap footwear.  He turned down a side alley away
from the cars and people, finding himself a little bit of protection
within a shop doorway.
A car stopped at the mouth of the alley.  It was too narrow for it to
get down, so it pulled up a couple of yards farther on, and stood
idling for a minute before shutting down.  But ian was too busy to
notice; he had popped the can and was drinking the water like he'd
spent a week in a desert.

"ID card."

The voice came out of nowhere.
ian almost dropped the can, but instincts got the better of him.  His
other reaction was slow.

"ID card," the voice repeated.

Playing for time, the youngster rumbled in his pocket then tried a
sudden break, but the man was ready for him.  With his arms trapped
against his body, he was shoved back hard against the door.

"One more stupid move like that .. ."

Defeated, ian brought out his ID card and held it for inspection.
"You think I'm going to do all this standing out in the rain and
getting pissed on?"  Jerry Lane took ian by the arm and frog-marched
him over to his patrol car and threw him in the back.  The locks went
on automatically.
From the driver's seat Lane turned around and demanded ian's smart card
The boy handed it over.  It was fed into the computer console and both
waited for the results to come spilling out.

As they were waiting Lane said, "A few questions for you, citizen."

"Depends on what questions."
The answer came with an attitude.  It never ceased to amaze Lane that
his job could arouse so much animosity.

Lane said, "I'm with Biometrics, not the law."

"Same difference."
"Believe what you want."  He leaned over the console, checking out the
name.
"Citizen Palmer.  I'm not going to go into the whys and whatfors for
you."

"Cops, Biometrics Cops, what's the difference?"

Lane held his breath for a beat, then said, "You've not been at the
facility for five months--why?"

Palmer shrugged.

"You know we'd come out and get you.  What's the problem?"

Again the shrug.

"Aw, cut the crappy tough guy image, son.  You aren't old enough to
shave yet, so let's have some answers."

ian made eye contact with Lane for the first time.

What he saw was a pale-faced older man, who was probably around his
father's age, with hard gray eyes 104 Mike Staffer that seemed to bore
into his very soul.  His hair was regulation length, and his mouth had
a down turn which made him look sour.
ian quietly said, "I didn't feel so good when I come out of there last
time."
Lane was suddenly struck with ian's childlike quality.  The simplicity
of truth.
"You go there, get your vitamin shots, a medical, you're fed, and then
you're freed- That's it."

The console beeped.  Lane tore off the strip of printout and read it.

"Hmm," "What's 'hmm'?"
"I've got to take you in.  Smartcards are no longer valid.  You need to
go through a biometrics reprogram."

ian sank back in the seat.

"Hey, don't get all worked up.  It's not as bad as you think."

"Have you had it done?"

"
"Course," he said easily.  In explanation he added, "You don't get to
be my age without having entered the program."
He stood by the large picture window and looked out over the cityscape.
Night was taking over the city, and the lights from the tower blocks
started to blink on.  Every now and then he would catch a brief glimpse
of firelight out beyond the city walls.  Then the white beam of light
from the watchtowers would blind him for a second before passing on.

"What's the matter with you tonight, Jer?"

His wife always called him Jer.  She was the only one he allowed to do
that.

"Nothing."

"Jer, I know there's something wrong.  Whenever you got something on
your mind, you stare out of the window.  Like you're the guardian of
the city."
Dani Lane moved up behind him and draped her arms around his neck; her
fingers followed a lazy circle over his chest.

"Not really," he insisted.

"Is it something at work?"
Lane knew she wouldn't give up, so he turned around to face her.  He
slipped his arms around her waist and drew her closer into him saying,
"Okay, okay.  There was this citizen pickup a couple of days back.  We
talked on the way into the facility."

Dani smiled.

"And?"

"He was frightened to go back into the program."

"So what?  I bet there are citizens out there in the same situation.
What makes him any different?"

"He couldn't remember his date of birth."

She shrugged.

"So?"

"Well, it's not the type of thing you forget, is it?"
"Suppose not."  She kissed him on the mouth and broke free of his
embrace.  She moved across to a small table and helped herself to a cup
of tea.  It smelted of lemon.
Lane followed her and retrieved his drink, "Or about the Year of the
Storm.  The year that changed all our lives when solar storms shut down
all the computers.

It knocked the Millennium bug into a cocked-hat."

Dani lifted the cup to her lips, eyeing him above the rim.  She knew
all this and didn't need a lecture.

"You're going somewhere with this?"

Now it was his turn to smile.

"And he knew nothing about the City."

"What about it?"
"Why the walls went back up after hundreds of years."  Lane crossed to
an easy chair and lowered himself into it.
"In fact, he was quite ignorant about a lot of things that you and I
take for granted."

"Why has this affected you?  What's so special about the boy?"

Lane said, "He's perhaps the fifth or sixth citizen I've picked up in
the last eight weeks who seems to have trouble with his memory."

"A coincidence?"  Dani suggested.

Lane shook his head.

"Then what?"

*"I don't know," he replied honestly.

"It might be something, or it might be nothing."

"That's the old policeman in you coming out, Jer," she said softly.

"You're not in that line of work anymore.

You're with BIC, remember?"

"Yeah, no need to remind me."

"You're still not bitter that I got Dad to get you out of that dead-end
job, are you?"
Ah, not the same old argument, he thought.  She always threw that up
into his face at every opportunity.
It was Burke Foster, his father-in-law, who had been instrumental in
getting him out of the police force and landing him the job at BIC.

"No," he said.

"Perhaps curiosity gets the better of me sometimes."

"You know what curiosity did, don't you?"

"Yeah, but I've got a feeling in my bones about this."  He crossed over
to the window again but leaned against the glass, his back to the
City.

"What if someone, somewhere, is monkeying around with us?"

"In what way?"  Dani sat upright, paying attention.
"Say that they could adjust people's memories.  Like they can do with
our own biometrics."

She blinked and looked at him.

"That's a touch melodramatic, isn't it?"
"Is it?  Just think about it for a minute.  If we can put our own DNA,
eye-dentification, fingerprints, geometry, and whatever else into a
computer system, what's stopping the computer putting something into
our biological system?"

She said, "So that they can control our thoughts, you reckon?"

"No, not control--more like deselect them."

"Okay, but what does whoever get out of this?"

Lane shrugged.

"I don't know- Don't know even if I'm right."

Dani slowly shook her head.

"Jer, you're reading too much into this."

About five minutes later Lane said, "Have you thought any more about
having another child?"

His change of tack threw her.  She stumbled for words.

"I still think it's too soon."

He shook his head.

"What has it been--nine months?"

She nodded.

"Then it's time to move on.  To try again."

She refused to look at him.

He said, "Dani, are you listening to me?  What's the problem of trying
for another child?"

"I ... I can't."

"How long are you going to keep this up?  You aren't the only one who's
hurting."

"Later, Jer.  Later," she said through her tears.

He knelt down in front of her and took her face in both hands, lifting
it up.  He looked into her eyes.  He could see the hurt, the anxiety
and the fear of a second and final failure in them.  Even being the
daughter of one of the top directors of BIC didn't allow her the
privilege of trying for a third child.  The rule was set in concrete.
Two children per couple in any partnership.
Having lost their first child during pregnancy, he knew Dani's fear of
another miscarriage, thus ending her chance of having children.

He said, "Don't leave it too late."

And wiped away the tears with his fingertips.
In the basement office Lane threw his jacket over the back of his
chair.  He looked at the monitor for messages, then asked Rosi, the
shift leader, if there'd been any calls.

"Quiet as the old proverbial," came the reply.

Lane thanked him and dropped into his chair.  He had had a troubled
night's sleep in which his dreams were haunted by images of zombie like
citizens wandering aimlessly in the streets; of babies lying in the
gutter, their mouths opened in silent screams; and always at the
periphery of the dream, a figure dressed in long robes, his face hidden
by a hooded cowl, shouting words that were snatched away by the wind,
never reaching the citizens below.
The dream's images stayed with him into the waking hours.  They haunted
him over breakfast, which he couldn't finish, and during the drive into
work.
Lane said to Rosi, "That's good--I've got a batch of inputting to
finish, then a couple of follow-up interviews, so don't be surprised if
I'm not around this afternoon."
"No worries," Rosi replied, then switched his attention back to the
monitor screens.
For the next three hours Lane set about feeding data into his PC;
cross-referencing his information into the mainframe computer, then
waiting for the results.
Lane had the data down loaded to his recorder, removed the mini-disk,
and slipped it into his pocket.
What started out as a half-baked idea at the back of his mind had now
turned into a substantiated reason to carry out an investigation.  At
the same time, he didn't want to explain his actions to his supervisor
before he could corroborate his evidence.
Lane followed the same routine over four days, and on the fifth
considered he had gathered enough of the information he needed.  He
told Rosi that he was going out on the streets to carry out his
investigation and received a barely audible answer.  Lane smiled; that
was the beauty of working with Rosi.  The man had his mind on other
things, so he could get away with whatever he wanted to do.  He took
his patrol car and headed out of the city.
He went back to Mile End Gate and cruised around for a while.  The
image of ian Palmer's face was imprinted on his mind's eye.  Lane
slowed down whenever he saw a teenager, but after an hour he had found
no sign of him.  It was almost midday, the office hadn't been in touch
with him, and he was hungry.  Lane pulled into a supermarket car park
that was virtually empty, maybe ten cars, and sat there for a moment
getting his thoughts together.
Then he saw ian Palmer exiting the store with a gang of other boys.
Obviously, he was just one of the gang; the leader walked in front, his
exaggerated swaggering walk and animated expression marked him out.
Palmer walked alongside a pasty-faced youth some six inches taller.
Lane stayed behind the wheel, his hands gripping it so tight his
knuckles showed white.  When the group were a few yards off.  Lane got
out of the car.
The gang came toward him.  The leader noticed Lane leaning casually
against the patrol car, arms folded across his chest, his eyes staring
intently at Palmer.  He stopped a yard or so away.  The others bundled
to a halt behind him.

Lane said, "I want to speak to Citizen Palmer."

The leader gave a lopsided grin.

"Palmer?"

Lane jabbed a finger at ian.

Palmer said to the leader, "Male?"

"He don't have anything to do with you, cop," said the leader.

"In the car, Palmer."

The boy made no move.  Lane remained against the car, his muscles
coiled tight as springs, and repeated his order.

"What d'you want?"  Palmer asked.

"Some questions and forms that the center forgot to get done," Lane
lied.

As Palmer moved to comply Male put out an arm to bar his way.

Lane moved in quickly.  He grabbed Male's wrist and jerked it violently
away, spinning the youth around.  An ankle sweep had him face down on
the ground in seconds.

"Into the car.  Palmer," he said over his shoulder.

Male was sweating.  Lane felt like kicking him in the ribs but didn't.
He waited until Palmer was in the passenger seat before taking his foot
off the leader's back.
"Okay, Male," he said, "you showed you're the boss but to the wrong
person.  You remember my face.  Go on take a good look.  The next time
we meet I may not be so nice.  You may not get to keep your
kneecaps."
Lane released his wristlock and walked around to the driver's side.  By
the time he got into the car, he found himself shaking.  Sweat leaked
from every pore.

He sped away from the parking area.

Lane parked up outside a derelict building that fifty years ago had
been a famous department store.  Now the windows were gone, and the
building had been taken over by an army of citizens without their own
assigned residences.  There was nothing but blackened stumps where an
avenue of trees once gave the street a countrified feeling.  Litter
blew across the surface, stirred by a hot wind blowing in from the
south.  The air grew heavy, and both passengers silently thanked the
car's air-conditioning.

"I want to tell you something, ian."  Lane began.

"Well, quite a lot of things really."  He'd already explained that he
had lied to him earlier, that what he wanted was to talk to him.

ian was unsure.

"What things?"
By the time Lane had finished talking, it was late in the afternoon.
His voice was dry and hoarse, his hunger forgotten.  He couldn't be
sure how much ian had taken in, but the youngster had sat and listened
to everything Lane had said.  At the end of it Lane put in the
mini-disk into the on-board computer and pressed the play button.
ian watched the screen and learned much more in fifteen minutes than in
the whole of his lifetime- Lane watched him.  The teenager's face
seemed to have added lines that hadn't been present moments before.
Lane thought he might have pushed him just that bit too far, but ian's
eyes were bright and alert.
The disk finished and Lane switched on the car's communication.
Listened for a minute: calls about track-downs, ID abuse at a
supermarket, a computer blackout, and more of the usual calls.  He
switched it off.
They sat there, listening to the car's air-conditioner humming in the
background, both silent and lost deep in their own thoughts.

Finally ian said, "Why?"

"Because I thought you had a right to know."

There was a long pause.

"What do you want me to do with all this?"

Lane shrugged.

"Tell others, tell Male--let them know what happened, what's
happening."

"And what about you?"

Lane looked away and said a moment later, "Don't have to worry about
me, I'll be okay."
"I got to think about this- It's all ... well, just too much to take
in."

"It's a beginning."

They were waiting for him when he got back home.
Dani was standing by the window; Burke Foster was leaning up against
the breakfast bar, and the two security men stood close to him.

Dani turned around as the door opened.

Lane stepped into the room and felt a sudden sinking sensation in his
stomach.

"You didn't think you'd get away with it, did you?"

said Foster.
Lane walked into the room, ignoring the question, and headed over to
his wife.

"You okay?"  he asked.

She nodded her head but couldn't force herself to look at him.

"You should be worried about yourself," said Foster.

"Not really."

"Don't be so arrogant!"

"Don't preach to me about arrogance!"
The security guards made to move in, but Foster waved them off.  He
signaled to one to leave the room.

To Lane he said, "How you could compromise my daughter?"

"She had nothing to do with it."

"You put her at risk."

Lane admitted to himself that obviously there had been risks but felt
that he was in a position not to exactly stop what was going on but to
minimize what he considered the misuse of biometric technology.
He said to Foster, "The risks were mine alone.  No one, no government
or power has the right to do what you and your biometrics henchmen have
been doing."

"That's such a narrow-minded view, Jerry."

"At least I can use my mind.  What about all those people you've robbed
of their past--their heritage?"

Foster rubbed a hand over his face.

"What gives you the right to decide to play God?  Everything we've done
has been for a reason--a very good reason."
Lane certainly knew some of the things the Biometrics Information
Corporation had been doing.  That over the last three years they had
been systematically erasing the memories of those living in the outer
city.
The computer and electrical collapse brought about by the solar flares
at the beginning of the century had given BIC the opportunity to bring
about a massive change in society.  Those not selected to be involved
in the rebirth had been ostracized outside the city walls and gradually
had been brought to the centers to be given vaccines.  The Corporation
had defiled their minds.  Another freedom stripped from the less
fortunate.  And in the meantime those living within London's city walls
benefited from BICs technological advances.  He had proof in the data
stored in the mini disk
The security guard came back into the room carrying the mini-disk that
Lane thought he had hidden.
He waved it in the air, silently goading Lane, before handing it over
to Foster.
Lane's shoulders slumped in resignation as though the discovery of the
disk had drained him of the fight.

Foster turned the disk over and over in his hands.

"What you have here is far more dangerous than anything we have done.
The whole infrastructure of our society could have been undermined and
set us back a hundred years or more.  I'm only too glad that Dani had
the sense to contact me."  He saw the couple exchange looks.
"That's right Lane, she told me of her fears; Rosi did, too, and this
disk confirms everything."

Lane said, "You'll do whatever you'll need to do."

Foster moved away from the breakfast bar saying, "There's no way we can
overlook this.  You realize that, don't you?"
Lane wasn't in a position to make ultimatums.  He had ruined himself
for a worthwhile cause but still had some dignity left.
"You'll leave Dani out of this.  She wasn't involved.  I'm the one
who's to be punished.

not her," he demanded.

Foster silently nodded his consent.  It Lane had him labeled as a
plutocrat, then at least he could be magnanimous to his own flesh and
blood.
Lane walked over to Dani and put a hand on her shoulder.  She flinched
away from him.  Untouched by Dani's rejection.  Lane looked out over
the landscape and inside his heart was reassured that whatever Foster
had in store for him, ian Palmer was out there, Everything wasn't
lost.

by Jerry Sykes

Jerry Sykes's short stories have appeared in a number of magazines and
anthologies including Cemetery Dance, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
and The Year's 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories.  He is the editor
of Mean Time, a collection of crime stories set around the end of the
millennium.  In 1998 he was awarded the Crime Writers' Association Gold
Dagger for Short Story of the Year.
MY first assignment as a cop had been to herd rubber neckers away from
the broken suicides that lay at the foot of the Millennium Ferris
Wheel.  Twenty years on and I was still herding people away, only this
time the wheel was on its side and the people were the vagrants who
made their home in the giant rusted cage that was all that was left of
the wheel.
It was a hot evening, and the sun burned a moving red spectrum on the
glass towers of the City making it look like they were on fire.  I
drove slowly along the embankment to Millennium Park, windows open, the
acrid smell of the Thames in my nostrils, and looked out over the
river.  It was low tide, and I could see beachcombers down by the
water.  On either side of the river, barely a hundred feet wide at
this time of year, people moved in slow motion, eyes scanning the baked
mud, twists of wood, and metal breaking the surface like the bones of a
desiccated corpse.  Many of the searchers carried Hessian sacks on
their shoulders, others huddled their findings to their chests,
distrustful of their neighbors.

I backed the shuttle up to the gate and killed the engine.

The Ferris Wheel, with a span of over five hundred feet, had once been
the centerpiece of the Millennium Festival, visible from Blackheath to
Primrose Hill, when the night sky would be filled with the cries of the
innocent rolling through scrolled neon and into new worlds limited only
by their imaginations.  The structure had long since been formally
abandoned, and lowered on to its side to prevent further suicides, and
was now a makeshift shelter to the constant flow of vagrants that
ghosted through London.  The top and sides of the wheel were covered
with an urgent tapestry of plastic sheets, blankets, and tarpaulins;
inside, the wheel was divided into separate dwellings by more
tarpaulins and blankets.
My remit as a shuttle operator was to move these vagrants out to
holding camps until they could be allocated government support through
the Realignment Bill.  Twice a week I would come down to the park and
herd fifty of them into the shuttle and ship them out.  It was a
never-ending cycle, not least because the process of realignment took
so long, many people would often drift away from the camps and make
their own way back to where they had come from before they could be
processed.
Across the street a group of vagrants climbed over the embankment wall;
they had the staccato movements and the jaundiced look of donors.

I turned to Denny.

"Anyone for the slab?"

He looked at me with flat eyes.

"Man, I need a hit tonight or that last interest hike's gonna blow me
outta the water.  I'm gonna end up out here with these fuckin'
meltdowns."  He jerked his thumb out of the window.
Denny was a freelance agent for the NHS and it was his job to find
people willing to part with one of their kidneys--for a price, the
right price.  More than fifty percent of the people in this country
between the ages of forty and fifty suffer from kidney damage, a direct
legacy of the drug culture at the close of the millennium; more than
fifty percent of the people in this country between the ages of forty
and fifty can afford to buy a new kidney.

A seller's market.

But such was the lack of post-op care afforded donors, many didn't live
long enough to enjoy their windfall and soon ended up in the morgue on
the slab.

"Let's see what we can do," I said.

We climbed out of the shuttle.
Around the edge of the wheel each dwelling had its own entrance; the
dwellings on the inside were reached by a communal entrance in front.
Denny headed for the main entrance; I turned to go clockwise around the
wheel.
I walked slowly, pulling aside makeshift curtains to get a look at the
occupants, barking commands for people to get on the shuttle, trying to
keep the mix right; I didn't want a load of juice heads and runners.
Every now and then I could hear Denny shouting at someone, and the
occasional thump of metal on flesh from within the wheel.  Denny was
the kind of guy who liked to throw his weight around.  He was a
qualified paramedic, but he chose to ride shotgun with me because he
got to beat up on people.
A third of the way around the wheel I came across an old guy I had seen
many times before.
"Hey, Wally, how you doin'?"  I squatted down beside the small fire. He
was cooking some eggs on the lid of an old paint tin.
He looked up at me, eyes swimming with a milky discoloration.  His
face bore the lines of someone who had learned to live with pain at an
early age.
"You gonna come for the ride?"  I said.  Wally had been a regular
passenger on the shuttle for a long time, but for a variety of reasons
he had never been processed, the latest being that he was just too
fuckin' old.  But sometimes he liked to tag along and make out like old
times.

He poked at the eggs with a long handled fork.

"Where you headed?"
"Does it matter?"  I said He snorted, and his head wobbled around on
his shoulders.
My legs were cramping, and I stood up.  I took a pack of cigarettes out
of my jacket and tossed one on the ground next to Wally.  He picked it
up and lit it from the coals of the fire.
"Maybe I'll give it a miss this time, huh?"  Feathers of smoke drifted
from his mouth as he spoke.
"One of these days I'm gonna come at you wi' this," I said, slapping
the gun on my hip.

"Then maybe you ain't got no choice."  I smiled at him.

I moved on, walking between broken belongings that lay scattered on the
parched grass.  It took me twenty minutes to walk around the wheel and
when I returned to the shuttle it was already full.  Denny was twisted
'round in his seat, shouting at someone in back.
"--and for the last time, no fuckin' jugs of booze in the Medibag,
okay?"

I climbed into the driver's seat.

"What's going' on?"

I said, looking in the rearview mirror.

"These fuckin' guys are fiends, man.  They wanna use my Medibag to cool
their juice.  You believe that?"

He sighed and shook his head.

I stifled a laugh.  On the last trip out, someone had used Denny's
Medibag, the icebox he used for transporting kidneys, to keep their Jug
of beer cold.  The next kidney to occupy the bag had become
contaminated and worthless.  It had cost Denny his month's rent; he
relied on those little extras to meet his bills.
"Any troublemakers?"  I asked.  Normally, when confronted with Denny,
people will just get on the shuttle as if under hypnosis, rarely is
there any trouble.
But occasionally he will find some reason for stomping some poor guy's
head.

"Just go," he said, his eyes beaming straight ahead.

I hit the ignition and we moved slowly out of the park.  A light rain
had begun to fall, and the vagrants moving through the mist looked like
after-images of the people they had once been.  Clouds of smoke curling
out of slits in the tarpaulins glowed blue in the twilight.

We drove upriver and crossed the Thames at Westminster Bridge.

It was now four years since my son had been killed.
Eleven months into his National Service, Cal was pulling down extra
hours to try to wind up early so he could get back to college with a
running start on his final year.  The extra workload was no hardship;
for the whole of his time he had been stationed at a center for people
with Alzheimer's and he had gotten to know a lot of the patients as
friends, often staying late and trying to follow the scant logic of
their conversations.
But the extra hours meant late nights, and late nights meant running
risks out on the street.
He was killed by a single bullet from the gun of a juice head out on
his stag night.
Once Virtual Reality had faded into the mainstream and become just
another tired thread in the cultural fabric of the world, for a few
dark souls a new frontier in entertainment was needed.  And this time,
the kill had to be for real.  Guys like Billy Hendry were quick to fit!
the gap in the market; his White Hunter had been one of the first
organized trips into the cold heart of the professional killer.  For a
price, you could take your pick of game: Cal--young, white,
male--cheap at ten thousand.
The shooter had been easy to track down; a security camera by the ATM
that Cal had been using at the time of his death had caught the murder
on videotape:
the jeep pulling up to the curb, the pistol appearing through the open
window, the face twisted in cruel intensity as it drew a bead on the
back of Cal's head... .
Together with a patrol cop I pulled the Juicehead from his bed and
executed him in his own back yard.
In the morning, the cop had called the church and canceled the
wedding.
After six months the official investigation was wound up.  Our life
savings and the services of a bounty hunter fueled our hopes and
frustration and anger for another two months, but the bounty hunter
could only come up with one sure thing: Billy Hendry had disappeared.
Soon after, Jolie walked out on me.  She said that in shadow my profile
was the same as that of Cal, and as her world was now full of shadows
.. .
Last I heard she was running computer security for a telecommunications
group up near Liverpool.
Some nights I watch the video from the security camera until I drift
into a troubled sleep that burns images from the tape deep into my
mind, so that every action, every thought, every memory is controlled
by them.
The following morning I wake to static filling the screen and white
noise filling my ears.
At nine I pulled into a service station to refuel and grab a bite to
eat.  Denny was asleep and I had to dig him in the ribs.

"You comin' in?"  I asked him.

tt!  better get these fuckers sorted first," he said, nodding to the
rear of the shuttle.  He rubbed at his face with the palms of his
hands.

"I'll get you some coffee."

The restaurant was quiet, the only other customer a young kid in dark
green overalls up at the counter.
His eyes were molded to the rear end of the waitress, sharply defined
by her tight uniform.  I walked to the rear and took a booth against
the window.  I held my hand up to the glass and saw Denny leading a
group from the shuttle toward the back of the restaurant where the
kitchen staff would hand out G-rations.  He had his hand on the butt of
his gun and his eyes flitted anxiously over the group.
I ordered coffee for two and lamb chops and reflected on Denny's
suitability for the job.  Realistically, the post was little more than
that of driver's gopher, but with his medical credentials and his
blood lust he had turned the shuttle into a carrier for his freelance
kidney trading.  Not that it bothered me; he always gave me a slice of
his fee, and I enjoyed having to put my foot down when the temperature
alarm on his Medibag showed red.
After a few minutes Denny came in through the back and slid into the
booth opposite me.  A crooked grin hung on his face like a broken
mask.

"You okay?"  I said.

"Those dogs out back?"  He looked toward the back door, as if expecting
the dogs to walk in at any moment.
"Those dogs--they were eating some guy's head this morning.  You
believe that?"

"Eating someone's head?"  I said, raising my eyebrows.

"The guy out back, the chef, guy out having a smoke?"

"The dogs were eating the chef's head?"

"Hey, you wanna hear this, slap the wise guy, okay?"

"Okay, go on."  I forked some lamb chop into my mouth.

Denny shuffled in his seat, looked over at the back door once more.
"You know the estate out back of here?  Quarter mile or so?"  I
nodded.
"Well, the other day they found this old guy out there that'd been
dead for seventeen months.  Seventeen months.  You believe that?
Imagine, so little presence, so little life .. ."  He held his thumb
and forefinger together and tapped out the words slowly in the air. "..
. no one cares, no one knows, no one gives a fuck when you're dead." 
His eyes drifted into the distance for a moment before snapping back.
"Anyway, right after they found him, they threw out all this shitty old
furniture, hundred years old, most of it.  Stuck it in the garbage
room.
And it drives the dogs fuckin' wild.  They're jumpin' around, going
crazy, trying to get in the garbage, kicking up a tornado.  Somehow
they eventually get in and they're going mad chewing on the mattress,
ripping it apart.  No one knows what the fuck's happening, what's
sending all these mutts crazy.  There a sudden doggy craze in duck
feathers or what?"  He picked up his coffee and took a sip.
"Anyhow, the caretaker eventually manages to chase the hounds away.
Shoots in the air or something', I don't know.  And he's curious, you
know, he wants to know what's happening, what turned the dogs on like
that.  So he takes what's left of the mattress for a DNA scan."  Denny
leaned over the table conspiratorially.

"Now get this."  His eyes flicked momentarily to the back door again.

"Turns out when they took the guy's body outta there, or what was left
of it, part of his head got left behind on the mattress."  He jabbed
his finger on the table.
"That's what the dogs were going wild over.  Flesh, human flesh.
Fuckin' wild about it."  He leaned back on the seat, a big grin slapped
across his face.

"You ready to order now?"  I asked him.

It was another two hours before we hit the holding camp.
The camps were originally built as low-cost housing projects for the
dispossessed in the '80s and '90s, but the standards were such that
within ten years they began to fall apart.  Coupled with the general
migration of businesses and family homes to the new green areas, the
projects were eventually abandoned and now served solely as holding
camps.
At the entrance to the camp was a low redbrick building with a flat
roof, the control center.  I left Denny to unload the shuttle while I
let myself into the center and logged in the vagrants.
Denny was leaning against the wall waiting for me when I stepped back
outside.  A plastic cigarette poked out from between his lips, I nodded
to the pad of donor release forms stuffed in his pocket.

"You got someone lined up?"  I said.

"Some old guy.  Lives over by the school."  The cigarette bobbed in his
mouth.
"Old guy?"  I said.  The kidneys of most people over fifty were usually
shot to fuck by years of additives and expellants; even on the black
market they were difficult to shift.

He took the cigarette out of his mouth.

"There's some desperate people out there."

I raised my eyebrows.

"You're tellin' me."

I looked at my watch: almost eleven.

"It's getting late," I said" Where do we find this guy?"

Denny gestured for me to follow him, and we went into the camp.

We walked across a gravel car park painted silver by a hawk moon, our
footsteps counterpoint to the random noises of the camp at night.  The
car park led to a sheltered walkway with doors hidden in darkness on
our right.  Shadows moved across the edge of my vision, and
occasionally I would catch a glimpse of a face, a slice of skin pale in
the moonlight.
I followed Denny along the walkway until we came to a dark green door;
a pale light shone through the peephole.  Denny took out his notebook
and checked the number.
"This is the place," he said.  He rapped his knuckles on the door.  A
cool breeze blew along the walkway and I could smell burned food and
urine.

I turned away to avoid the smell, and that's when I saw him.

A group of men had emerged from a stairwell at the end of the walkway,
no more than fifty feet away.
They threaded themselves between abandoned cars and headed for the
opposite corner of the square.
They shuffled over the gravel car park, their footsteps a continuous
growling noise.  As they passed beneath a streetlamp, each face was
washed in pale orange, and there he was.  There was no mistaking the
twist of the nose or the eyes that burned with the fear of a trapped
animal.

Billy Hendry, the man who had arranged the killing of my son.

I stepped off the walkway and headed toward the group.  At first no one
seemed to notice me, but then I made the mistake of calling out, "Hey!
Wait!," and my voice was like a gunshot in the still air.  The group
fragmented and ran in all directions.
Hendry cut loose for the stairwell he had appeared from, I knew that
just beyond was an old strip mall and a group of tenement blocks that
was like a three dimensional maze.  If he reached that, I would lose
him for certain.

I took off after him.

As I ran, the only sounds I could hear were the rasping of my breath
and the violent crunch of my boots on the gravel.  I reached the
entrance to the mall with Hendry still in my sights, fifty feet
ahead.
And then he fell; in the darkness he tripped and went flying,
stretching out his hand to break his fall and skidding across the
tarmac.  I heard him cry out in pain.

And then I made a mistake.

I slowed to watch him, thinking he was trapped.  I slowed to a jog--and
then he was up and running again, limping slightly but having lost none
of his pace.
Seconds later the ringing sounds of his footsteps disappeared into the
maze and into the night air.

I had lost him.

I bent over, my hands on my knees, and breathed deeply.  The air seemed
to burn in my chest; perspiration ran into my eyes.  I stood up and
looked around, walked toward the mall.  The beating of my heart echoed
from the buildings around me.
I came to the point where he had fallen and lowered myself to one knee
and peered at the ground.  I could just make out .. . what?  I took out
my pen line torch and shone it over the ground.  Drops of blood
appeared like rubies in the dust.
I stood and looked around again.  I thought about going into the maze,
but the chances of finding Hendry--if it was Hendry, I had only
glimpsed the man briefly; the speed with which he had taken off
suggested he was guilty of something, but was it Hendry?
I looked at the ground in front of me, drawing circles with the torch
beam around the drops of blood.
I took a handkerchief from my jacket and placed it carefully over the
blood; tiny red flowers bloomed in the cotton.  I then took a plastic
evidence bag from my jacket and dropped the handkerchief into the
bag.

I put the bag in my pocket and headed back to the camp.

Denny was sitting in the cab of the shuttle when I reached the car
park.  A solitary lamp burned above the control center, and all I could
see were his hands nipping the top of the Zippo.  I knocked on the
glass.  He lowered the window and peered down at me, his face deep in
shadow.

"What the fuck happened to you?"  snapped Denny.

"I saw--" "I lost him.  That old guy, remember?  He was watching us
from upstairs.  I heard him rattling the window when you scooted.  He
musta thought we were the goon squad or something', scared the shit
outta him--" "Denny--"
"--the fuck's going' on?"  He leaned out of the window and glared down
at me.  The ridge of muscle along his jawline pulsed violently.

I took a deep breath.

"I saw him.  Hendry--" "You saw Hendry?  Why-Why didn't you say?  I
coulda--" "I'm tellin' you now," I said, keeping my voice level.

"Okay?"

Denny withdrew into the cab.  I heard a rustling sound, and then his
Zippo flared, splashing his face with white light.  He lit a cigarette
and smoke drifted from his nostrils.
"Hendry.  He was in that bunch of vagrants across the way.  When we
were waiting for the old guy?"  I pointed vaguely in the direction of
the stairwell.
"Scaring the shit outta him," muttered Denny, still rankling from my
knocking him back' Hey lose the fuckin' attitude, okay?  I'm talkin'
'bout the guy that whacked my son, not some fuckin' meltdown that
pissed in your pocket."

"Hey, I didn't mean--" I pushed his objection aside.

"I chased him into the maze, but..."  Thoughts ran away from me.
"Anyway, look."  I took the bag containing the handkerchief out of my
pocket.

Denny looked at the bag and then up at me.

"What?  You get a nosebleed or something'?"
"It's Hendry's.  The blood.  I was chasing him and he tripped over a
curb or something."  I suddenly felt uncomfortable and lifted the bag
for a closer look as if I might be able to recognize the blood.

"I'm not sure it was him, though."

"Hey, he ran.  Sounds guilty to me," Denny reasoned.
"So would a whole pile of other people."  I put the bag back in my
pocket.

"I'm gonna run a DNA scan on it, anyway."

Denny climbed out of the cab, and we walked over to the control center.
I swiped my ID card and pushed through the wooden door into the lobby.
A heavyset man in a gray uniform with a dark complexion was sitting
behind the console reading a paperback.  Reflections from the monitors
before him danced across his glasses, as if he were playing scenes from
the book on them.  He looked up as we approached.

"Still here?  Thought you'd be long gone by now."

He delivered the words one at a time; it was a wonder anyone ever let
him finish what he was saying.
"We ran into a bit of trouble.  We need to head on up to the
Datacenter, check something out.  Okay if we go on through?"

The guard's eyes flicked to a monitor, back again.

"Sure," he said, and rolled his huge shoulders.
He buzzed us through the main door.  It opened onto a short corridor
with two further doors on either side.  A large metal door stood at the
far end- As we walked through the corridor, the sign on the door
gradually came into focus: TRANSIT LABORATORY--AUTHORIZED

PERSONNEL ONLY.

We reached the door, and I gave it a gentle push with the palm of my
hand.  It was locked.  I knew the guard was watching us on a monitor,
so I turned to the camera above the door and gave him the finger.  I
heard a soft click, and when I pushed the door again, it was open.
Another corridor stretched before us.  I walked on, looking at the sign
on each door.  I could hear Denny breathing heavily behind me and his
footsteps clipping the tile floor.
We came to a door marked DNA SCANNER and stopped.  I squeezed the
plastic bag containing the handkerchief in my pocket and then knocked.
After a few moments there was the sound of soft footsteps behind the
door and then it was slowly opened- A man about my height, six two,
with thinning red hair stood there, white lab coat wrapped around his
shoulders.
He looked us up and down through half-moon glasses on the end of his
nose.  I felt my DNA twitch.
"Yes?"  He kept one hand on the doorknob and the other on the frame,
blocking our entrance.

"Blon."  I held up my ID card.

"Detective Bion.

We've come to run a scan on some blood?"

"I know who you are."  His voice sounded weary.

Denny looked at me, at the technician, shrugged.

"So now we all know each other, what are we waiting for?"

The technician looked at his watch.

"Hey, don't you worry 'bout the time.  We got all night," said Denny
and gently but forcefully pushed the door open.
The technician sighed and stepped back.  He seemed to deflate as if his
skeleton had crumbled, leaving only tired flesh.

I followed Denny into the lab.

It was a small room, ten by ten, with computer hardware floor to
ceiling on three walls; on the fourth wall a solitary window overlooked
the camp.  In the glass I could see my reflection: a face drawn by
shadows, pale and cold.  One eye seemed to be twitching, but I could
feel no movement in my face.

The technician pulled himself up to his full height.

"Detective Blon, this is not a private lab, and we are not here to
service your private actions.  You are in breach of everything you have
ever learned in the force and you know it."  He held my stare.
A minute passed, our eyes locked.  I felt every muscle in my body
tense.

Eventually his eyes flicked away.

"You think you got him this time?"  he said.  There was genuine concern
in his voice.
I shrugged and handed him the evidence bag.  He disappeared through a
door next to a large glass case.
Inside the case were rows of bottles of blood in deepening shades of
red.
"You better hope this is the real thing," said Denny, "or you're gonna
get yourself a reputation."  He pulled himself up on to a desk and
leaned back with his head under the extractor fan and the cool pulse
of the air.

"You gotta take this guy out.  And soon.  You understand?"

I knew what he meant.  This was not the first time I had been to the
lab with a blood sample.  But I had to be sure I had the right man.
That way it wouldn't matter when I killed him, shot him in the back.
That was something Victims' Rights allowed me to do, administer my own
punishment.  Damn, it even encouraged me to do it, go right out and
shoot the guy in the back of the head and not feel like a coward.
It took the technician ninety minutes to run the scan.  I was watching
shadows shifting around in the camp when he came back into the room.
Denny still had his head under the extractor fan.
The technician was trying to hide a smile and not having much
success.

"We got him?"  I said.  My heart thumped deep in my chest.

"Ninety-eight percent match.  I ran it twice, just to be sure.  I
didn't wanna fuck up and have you coming back here in a couple of weeks
with another dirty handkerchief."
The camp covered two square miles and held an average of
twenty-six-hundred vagrants at any one time.  Finding Hendry was not
going to be easy, and there was always the possibility he had already
left the camp- It was not a prison, people were free to move on as they
pleased.
With only the two of us, there was no point in being too systematic
about the search.  We took off in opposite directions.
Cold blue moonlight threw the camp into dark relief as I made my way to
the first tenement, in my right hand I carried my pistol, in my left a
heavy duty torch.
The building seemed to shift in the darkness as I approached, and the
splintered glass of the broken windows looked like burned-out stars
captured in wooden frames.  Occasionally I heard signs of life: a
barking cough, the death rattle of the bronchitic; feral screams
dragged from the deepest of sleeps; angry calls to silence.

I hoped that somewhere among the grumbling mess of people was Hendry.

Denny had still been pissed off with me for losing him the kidney, and
I had had to agree to rush him a couple of thousand for helping me out,
more if we caught the guy.  But he was under threat of death himself
not to shoot him.  That was my gig.
The stairwell smelled of stale alcohol and decaying flesh, and I was
reminded of the dogs behind the diner on the freeway.  I hurried up the
stairs.
At the top of the building were two doors, with tribal markings slashed
across them in red and green.
The one on my right was open.  I lifted my gun and followed the torch
beam into the room.
The concrete floor was covered with the tools of the dead and the
defeated: cigarette butts, broken vials, cracked needles.  The bundle
of rags against the far wall were probably vagrants.  I crossed the
room and kicked the first one on the foot; gently, I didn't want to
break it off.
A hand appeared from beneath the rags and dragged them to one side.  I
shone the torch into a face that twisted to look up at me, blinked in
the strange light.  The eyes were sunk deep into the skull and the
mouth hung loose, saliva spooling from the corner.

I moved the beam off the face.

"Go back to sleep," I said.
I lifted the blankets from the other two mounds in the room and saw
identical faces, a single mask that took on the contours rent by the
latest hurt.

I walked back down the stairs with heavy steps.

I searched on through the night, tired, pointing my torch into faces
until ghosts swam before my eyes and I could no longer trust what I was
seeing.  Occasionally I caught glimpses of running shadows in the
distance and at first I thought they were cops, but my mind was so
tired and twisted they could just as well have been the shadows of
clouds scooting across the moon.
I was heading back to the main block, ready to call it a night, when my
radio squawked into life.
"Denny, you still around?  I thought you'd--" "Get your fuckin' ass
down to the dark block," Denny snapped.

"Now!"

"Wha-What's happening?"  My mind wheeled.

"I've got the fucker."

A cold wave passed through me.

"Hendry?  You found him--?"

"Just get the fuck over here fast, or you ain't gonna get the pleasure
of the pop."

My legs were already rolling.

"You shot him?"

Anger welled in me.

"Denny--" "Relax.  I just--I just settled him down a little, that's
all.  I ain't gonna deprive you."
I clipped the radio back on my belt and started running toward the dark
block.
Denny was standing in the open doorway.  A bare lightbulb burned
directly above him, turning his hair into a halo.  His hands hung loose
at his sides, thick veins cording his forearms.  I was panting by the
time I reached him and took a moment to calm my breathing.

nodded at Denny.

He pointed into the building.

"Through that door, second on the right."

I followed his directions.  My legs felt weak, and my face was glazed
with sweat.  The floor was swimming with urine and I reached my arms
out to the walls to steady myself and felt something sticky.  I looked
up.
Angry finger paintings in blood covered the wall on my right.  I
followed the trail, ending in the room where Denny had directed me.
The pale early morning sun burned through the grime on the windows and
picked out a hunched figure against the far wall.  He was sitting with
his knees drawn up, his head resting on his knees.  A trail of blood
led from the door.  The man's clothes were ragged and dirty; the soles
of his shoes napped loose like grotesque tongues.  The small of feces
assaulted my nostrils and I found myself gagging.  I crossed to open
the window.  It was rusted shut, so I popped it with the butt of my
gun.  Shards of glass rattled on the floor at my feet.
The man stirred and raised his head, and I saw the full extent of
Denny's handiwork; a quick death would be a relief to this man.  A deep
cut ran from above the left eye down to the jawline; it had sliced
through a nerve and the upper lid twitched as if shot through with
electricity.  Beads of blood as dark as leeches clung to the cut.  The
eyes were as dead as glass marbles.

His jaw was broken, the right side of his mouth hanging loose.

The man's head fell back on to his arms.

I flashed on video images from deep memory.

I moved closer, careful not to slip in the blood.  I knelt in front of
the man and put my gun against his forehead and pushed his head back,
cracking it against the wall.
The face of a stranger leaped out at me, and my senses froze, unable to
deal with the information.  A stranger.  A complete stranger.  All I
could think of was why had Denny led me to a stranger?  For a brief
moment I had been blinded by the mask of injuries, but the more I
looked at the man before me, the more I couldn't understand what Denny
had done.
But in the end it didn't matter; all that mattered was that Hendry was
still out there.

I pulled my radio from my belt and called for a paramedic.

The freeway was quiet heading south, and I was able to run on cruise
control.  It had turned eight, the sun was burning a track in the sky,
and the tarmac shimmered before my eyes.  Denny was asleep in the
back, and I could hear him snoring gently.  The fact that he had
almost just beaten a man to death didn't seem to have jagged his
rhythm.
We must have been an hour out of the camp when I noticed the red light
on Denny's Medibag.  I remembered Denny telling the juice heads to
leave the bag alone and I could only assume that despite his warning
one of them had managed to hide their juice in the bag on the trip out
and had left it switched on.
I shouted at Denny to take a look, but he just rolled over in his
sleep, dreams of torture playing across his eyelids.
The light was still on, and Denny was still asleep twenty minutes later
when I pulled into the service station.  I drove over to the far side
of the car park and stopped next to a green Bullet van.
I climbed down from my seat and opened the rear door.  I pulled myself
into the back and walked over to the Medibag.  Normally, Denny keeps it
locked, but when I flipped the lid it opened.  A cold mist crept over
the edges and began to spread across the floor of the shuttle.  I waved
it away with my hand and knelt down to take a better look.  There was
something in there.  It looked like a sheet of paper all crumpled up.

I reached in to lift the paper out, and there it was.

A human heart.

Deep blue and covered with a fur of frost but still a human heart.

I fell forward on to my knees, a burning pulse beating in my head.  I
could do nothing but stare into the box, at the cold air swirling
around the heart, as if pumped by the organ itself.
I still had the sheet of paper in my hand.  I lifted it and read.  It
was a printout from a DNA scan, the information identical to the one
the technician had shown me back at the Datacenter, identifying the
blood as belonging to Hendry.
I didn't understand.  Was the heart Hendry's?  It didn't make sense.
How .. . ?

I looked at the sheet of paper again for some sign;

spidery handwriting near the bottom; blood was smeared across most of
it but I could make out the tail end: "..  . now that his heart is
still, we may be at rest."  It was signed Jolie.

Jolie.

She must have hacked into the DNA database and put a trip on it so that
when anyone accessed the records of Hendry, she would know immediately.
I flashed on running shadows--telecommunications security turned bounty
hunters?  And Jolie--had she cut out the heart of the man who had
killed her son?  I screwed my eyes tight, but images of Jolie scooping
a knife in a man's chest still burned on my retina.
I stared at the heart for a long time, the distant rhythmic sounds of
traffic on the freeway calming me.
The whole mad spiral of events that had led to my being here, from the
shooting of Cal to the bloody heart in my hands, played out in a
continuous violent loop in my head, over and over..  ..
Eventually I picked up the heart and wrapped it in the sheet of paper.
I jumped down from the shuttle and walked across to the far side of the
car park where a chain link fence separated me from the yard.  I
listened carefully but for a long time I could only hear the sound of
my own breathing.
When I heard the sound of the dogs fighting over scraps behind the
building I drew back my arm and threw the heart as hard as I could
toward the noise.
The frozen heart shattered on hitting the ground, splinters of viscera
already melting on the hot tarmac.

THE DEATH OF

WINSTON FOSTER

by R. Davis

R. Davis currently resides in Green Bay, Wisconsin, with his very
patient wife Monica and his beautiful daughter Morgan Storm.  He holds
a BA in English from the University of Wisconsin, and writes both
fiction and poetry.  His current projects include a book-length
manuscript of poems entitled In the Absence of Language and several
novel projects that may never see the light of day.
"..  . so if you've found yourself dreaming of killing your abusive
husband, take it as a sign that a significant part of you has already
done the deed.  It is unfortunate that the dream itself is not nearly
as gratifying or effective as actually doing him in ..."

--Maxwell Centouro, 2075 ad

THERE are good days and bad days when you make your living as a police
detective.  Most of them, including this one, were bad.  I made an
effort to think about the good days as I steered my air car to the home
of a recently--very recently--widowed lady by the name of Francis
Foster.  She knew I was coming, and from
the tone of her voice when I'd called, she had already heard the news.
Her husband was dead.
I'd spent the first part of my morning at the scene of the accident,
which didn't get my day off to a flying start.  Her husband, Winston
Foster, had been killed on his way to the office by a hypertrain
traveling at 380 miles per hour.  When it hit Foster's car, it had
spread his body like raspberry jam down the tracks and into the ditch.
He'd been initially identified by a fingerprint scan from his left
hand, which was attached to his left arm, which wasn't attached to
anything at all.  The arm had been found among the weeds in the ditch
by a rookie cop who'd promptly thrown up at the sight.
The problem, and the reason I was involved at all, was that there are
numerous safety systems built into a car to prevent just such an
occurrence.  I had been assigned the rather grim task of breaking the
news to Mrs.  Foster, as well as investigating what--if any-reasons
might exist for the accident.  All in all, it was building up to be a
banner bad day.
I arrived at her home, parked the air car on the pad, and walked to her
door.  The house was beautiful.
Maroon colored plasi-bricks lined the walkways and flawless ivy crawled
up the chimney.  I palmed the touch pad next to the door.  A
feminine-computer voice said, "Identify please."
Yep, I thought, definitely wealthy to afford this kind of security
system.

"Bridges, Jacob R.," I said.

"Detective 1st class, Omaha Police Department."

The pleasant, if slightly metallic, voice responded, "Please wait."

I stood there for a moment while the computer ran a check against my
hand print and did a voice analysis.

Finally, "Identity confirmed.  Please stand by."

"Please come in, detective," Mrs.  Foster said over the security
speaker.  Her voice automatically triggered the door locks.
I stepped through the doorway, and heard her say, "Come to the dining
room please.  Straight down the hallway on your right."
I followed her directions to the dining room and saw her standing,
dry-eyed, next to the mahogany dining table.  We stood there looking at
each other, and I could see that she'd been crying earlier even if she
wasn't now.  She had a look of concentration in her large brown eyes as
she absently fingered an overripe plum from the fruit basket on the
table.  A slight smile lingered around the corners of her mouth.  I
could tell she was assessing me, and I was suddenly reminded of a wild
animal testing the air for signs of danger.

"Mrs.  Foster, I'm Detective Bridges, Omaha P.D-."

I said, extending my hand.

"Yes, I know," she said.

"The security system said so, and I recognize your voice from your call
earlier, of course."

"I see," I said.

"Mrs.  Foster, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but--" She held up a
hand.
"I know.  Winston died in a hypertrain accident at approximately 8:13
this mo ming Her voice seemed rote, as though she were hypnotized or in
a trance.

I nodded, having expected this.  Still, I was curious.

"How did you find out?"  I asked.
"Oh, there's no mystery there, detective.  I know because I killed
him."

I stood there, my jaw hanging somewhere between my belt and my knees.

"I beg your pardon?"  I asked.
"I said I killed him," she repeated, sounding vaguely annoyed Trying to
catch up, and assuming that this was her grief talking, I said, "How
did you do that, Mrs.

Foster?"

She waved her hands at me in exasperation.
"Listen, detective.  Why don't we get down to brass tacks?  This isn't
me feeling guilty or upset that he's dead.  I don't.

In fact, I'm relieved.

"The simple fact is that I killed him.  Unfortunately, my confession
is null and void because I could be grief-stricken right now.  I don't
have my attorney present.  I couldn't possibly know what I'm saying.
All of which leads me to ask you something- Do you want to hear the
story, or just take me downtown and have me released within the day?"
A lot of detective work depends on instinct and intuition.  Trusting
your gut feelings.  At that moment, my gut had a sinking feeling in it
that made me want to sit down and put my head between my knees.  I took
a deep breath and made an effort to control myself.
I could tell she was serious, but I could also tell she was scared.  I
shook my head in bewilderment.
How in the world, I thought, do you kill someone with a hypertrain? She
must be delusional.
"Okay, Mrs.  Foster, why don't you tell me the whole story?"  I
asked.

"I'm a Ms.  now," she said.

"You may, if you choose, call me Fran."

"All right, Fran.  I'll listen to what you have to say," I said.

"One condition," she said.
"After you've heard my story, you'll have to decide whether or not you
want to arrest me.  That means I want as fair a hearing from you as
possible--meaning no interruptions, no questions, and," she pointed at
me and tugged her earlobe, "no recordings.  I know that police have a
recording chip built in.  If you understand what you hear, you file a
report that clears me.  If you don't, I'll come with you and confess
for real."
She was one gutsy lady, I had to give her that.  And I was intrigued.
I'd only heard of one other case of a car hitting a hypertrain, and
that was because the driver had smashed into it on purpose.  Normally,
the automatic braking system would stop the vehicle before it even
tapped the blocking bar to the tracks.  If she really had kit ted him,
how had she done it?  Still, I couldn't promise the moon.
"Just a second, Fran.  I'll agree to everything you said, but I can't
promise not to arrest you.  I'm a cop, not a judge, remember?  But
I'll listen to your story, and we'll go from there.  And I have a
condition, too," I added.
She looked at me suspiciously, and I realized that Frannie Foster knew
all the rules of the game.  She knew I had to file a report on what I'd
learned.  She also knew that sometimes, given a good enough reason, a
cop would lie.

"What's that?"  she asked.

I smiled at her.
"Call me Jacob," I said.  I thought a soft touch interview would draw
her out.  If I scared her, she'd probably just freeze on me, and then
I'd be stuck.

She nodded.

"I'll get us some coffee," she said, and turned away, heading for the
kitchen area.

"I gave the servant the day off."

I took the opportunity to really assess her.  The vision chip I use
told me she was 5.531 feet tall and weighed 110.223 pounds in her
current clothing.  She was small, almost tiny compared to me.  She
carried herself in a defensive manner, as though at any moment she
expected to be tackled.  She was also, I thought, quite pretty.  I
really couldn't picture her plotting murder.  But it's always the ones
you least suspect, As she reentered the room, backing through the
swinging partition between the kitchen and the dining room and holding
a tray with two coffee cups on it, I attempted to ask a question.
Pulling out my palm top I said, "Fran, could I ask about Mr.--" She
turned so quickly that she nearly spilled the coffee.
"I said 'no questions," and I meant it," she snapped, "Whoa, hold on a
minute!"  I said.
"You're going to have to give me a break here.  First, I'm a cop, and
that's part of my job.  If I'm going to understand everything, I need
some background."

Her shoulders sagged a little.

"You're right, of course," she said.
"I'm sorry, Jacob.  It's just, well, I need to do this in my own way,"
She smiled ruefully and shrugged, "Ask your questions, then, but
please be brief.  I don't really know if I have the strength to tell
this twice."
"No problem.  I just wanted to clarify the events of this morning. Sort
of set the end in sight, so I can see where we're going."

She shrugged again, and said, "Okay."

"Why don't you start by telling me a little about your husband?  What
was he like?"  I asked.
She didn't say anything for nearly a full minute, but I waited.  I
didn't want to set her off again.  I wanted her story, but I wanted it
coherent.  Her eyes were cast down and to the left, body language that
told me she was remembering something.
Softly, so soft that her voice had changed almost entirely, she said,
"Big."

"I beg your pardon?"  I asked.

"He was big.  A big man, very strong.  Very smart.

He was an investment banker."

I knew all that, of course, from the crime scene and arm scan this
morning as well as the preliminary computer report I'd run on Mr.
Foster.  Still, it was a start.
"Did he say anything to you this morning before he left?  Something to
make you angry?"

"No," she giggled a little under her breath.

"He told me to take out the garbage."  She was still remembering, not
looking at me directly.

"I guess I did," she said.

Wanting to catch her in this reflective mood, I quietly asked, "Did you
really kill your husband, Fran?"

"Oh, yes.  Detective Jacob Bridges.  I killed him in self-defense."

For the second time that morning, I sat there dumbfounded.
Self-defense?  How the hell do you kill someone in self-defense with a
hypertrain?  She laughed again, lightly, and waited for my reply.
Finally, I said, "Self-defense, huh?  I guess you'll have to explain
that one to me."

"I know," she said.

"And that's the story I'm going to tell you.  The story you need to
hear."

"Well, then, I guess I'm done asking questions.  At least for now."

"Very well," she said, "then I can begin."
Her eyes went down-left again, and we both ignored the coffee.  Her
soft melodic voice was the only sound in the room.  She said, "It all
goes back to an anonymous e-mail I received last summer.  It said that
the person knew I was an abused wife, and if I wanted to get out of the
situation, I should come to a secure virtual chat to hear this man
speak.
"Winston would've killed me if he'd known.  But I went anyway.  By
then, I was so desperate for a way out that I would've done anything at
all.  The one time I went to the police, he beat the hell out of me. Of
course, he knew a judge, so the matter just 'disappeared' from the
official records."  She laughed bitterly.

"Still, I thought maybe this chat was my last hope.  So I went."

I nodded, and said, "I understand what you must've been feeling.  My
sister was abused.  It only ended when my father died.  What happened
at the chat?"

I asked.

"My whole life changed," she said.
"I sat in the fourteenth row of the dark auditorium and wondered what I
was doing.  I stopped there by accident really, or maybe it was
curiosity.  Hope was not something I was feeling.  Mostly, I was afraid
that my husband would come home while I was online and plug in to see
what I was doing.

"The speaker was a blond man, in his early thirties.

He was dressed in a cream-colored sweater and blue jeans.  I remember
because he seemed so confident and relaxed.  His voice wasn't deep, but
he spoke well.

I thought he sounded like a minister.

"

"Ladies," he said, "my name is Maxwell Centouro.

I am here to help you, and if you listen to me, your troubles--at
least those with your husbands--will soon be over.

"

"My father was an alcoholic and an abuser.  On the last night of his
wretched life, he beat my mother for the very last time.  Because he
killed her.  And I killed him.

"

"What I didn't know at the time was this: I should have done it in such
a way as to leave no doubt that it was an accident.  But I didn't.
Instead, I got sent to prison for seven long years.  But while I was
there, I made one vow to myself.  When I got out, I would teach
others--women like yourselves, whose husbands hurt them--how to escape
the situation."

"

"I remember thinking at the time that it was like a dream- Winston
would never allow me to escape.
Never allow me to leave him.  Still, I listened.  It seemed I had no
choice."

"

"You can't rely on the law, ladies.  My mother tried that.  And he
won't get better if you just do the right thing.  All he will do is get
worse and worse.  Because he likes hurting you.  And I'm here today to
teach you how to stop him."

"

"I remember how silent it was in that room.  All around me the women
were completely quiet, though a few of them cried softly to themselves
as Maxwell talked.  They sounded like wounded animals.  I probably
would have left then, but I was already hooked.  I felt hope again.
"Winston hit me all the time, and every time it got worse.  I would've
left but for one thing.  Something so small that Winston had already
forgotten it, I'm sure.
Two weeks before I came to this lecture, Winston had beat me with a
belt in this very room.  Not far from where you're sitting, Jacob.
"And as I lay on the floor, crying and begging for him to stop, he
stood over me with that damn belt in his hand and he smiled.  He was
enjoying my misery.
I realized then that I'd do anything to be free of that smile for the
rest of my life.
"I learned a lot that day.  I learned that it must 142 R. Clans appear
to be an accident, and just in case, to document the abuse.  I also
learned four techniques that Maxwell said would 'take care of your
husband permanently."
The best one for me, or rather for Winston, was number three.  Maxwell
called it: For the man who has a daily pattern.  It was perfect.
"You see, Jacob, Winston had a pattern.  Was a man in love with
patterns.  If I let him fall behind schedule for any reason, his wrath
was terrifying.  So I planned a way to use it against him.
"It took me six months to figure it out.  To find the 'hole' in his
pattern where an accident could happen.
It took me another three months of online study to figure out how to
make the accident happen.  During this time, I documented as much as I
could about what Winston was doing to me.  I took pictures and wrote
everything down.  My biggest fear was that he would find them."

I finally interrupted.

"Hold on a minute.  Do you still have those pictures and stuff?"

"Yes," she said.

"I do.  Maxwell taught us very well.

But I thought we'd agreed on no more questions?"

"You're right," I said.
"Sorry, go ahead."  I noticed when she spoke her voice automatically
lowered in tone.  Another body language sign of submission.
She continued, "Of course, he beat me during those months.  But in some
ways it was worth it.  For the first time in nine long years I had a
secret.  Something Winston didn't know.  I think, maybe, that a mad
little part of me was in love with the very idea of secrecy.
Of having something to myself.  I hid the pictures and letters under
the grill vent of the refrigerator.  And I watched Winston.
"Each day, I learned more about his schedule.  Finally, I spotted the
hole.  He insisted on driving to work.  In that ridiculous 'classic'
car of his, rather than take an air car or use the city train.  Every
morning at 8:04 sharp, Winston left for work.  Not at 8:05, and not at
8:03.  As I said, he was really stuck on his schedule.
"The hypertrain crosses the tracks at 8:13.  I know because I timed it
every damn day for a month.  I told Winston 1 wanted to lose some
weight, so I left the house right at 8:00 to bicycle down there and
check the time.  It was hell, Jacob, to get on the bike and pedal like
crazy in order to get there and be away before Winston drove by.
"Always, the train got there at 8:13.  So, just like Winston, the ran
on time.  I just needed to get him there at the right time.  And he
needed to be distracted, just enough to take his mind off the train and
his car.  It wasn't that difficult really.  Once I figured it out, I
was surprised that I hadn't thought of it sooner."  Her voice trailed
off, and she looked at me.

"Jacob, do you ever feel that way?"  she asked.

"Yeah, Fran, sometimes I do.  Like now, except I don't have all the
answers yet.  How did you do it?"
"I set his watch back.  His big, fancy watch that could tell him right
down to the second what time it was."

I knew the watch, having seen it that morning.

"Okay, but what made him crash?"
"Simple.  Last night, while he slept, I went out to the garage to
accomplish two things that I learned.

You see, what I studied online during those months was mechanics.

"Classic Vehicle Maintenance 101' was the actual course title," she
said.

I looked at her with some admiration.

"You shorted the automatic braking system, didn't you?"  I asked.

She smiled proudly for a moment, and nodded.

"Yes I did.  It was really easy.  All the older cars had the system
wired in as an after-market product.  It wasn't something that the
manufacturers put in back then."

"What was the second thing?"  I asked.

"You said two things'."
"Oh, yes.  The distraction.  His 'classic' car is--was-air-cooled.  I
sprayed mace into the vents on the front of his windshield, and on his
hood.  When it pulls air 144 R. Doris in from the outside, I guessed
that it would pull the spray in, too."
"But how could you know he would turn on the air inside the car?"  I
objected.
"I couldn't.  I took a gamble that it would be another hot day, and it
paid off.  I estimated that as soon as he was out of the driveway, he
would turn on the air.  It takes about seven minutes to cycle the air
system into full operation.  I guessed that the spray would hit him
about sixty seconds before he crossed the tracks.  I assume it did."
I sat there for a few minutes, saying nothing.  It was stunning how
she'd worked it out.  Essentially, she'd made his eyes water just
seconds before he would cross the tracks.  The tracks were at the
bottom of a steep hill and surrounded by a ditch on either side.
Even if the spray hadn't worked, he probably would have crashed with no
brakes at that speed.  Had he left at his normal time, the train would
have been there and gone before him.  I had to admire it.

I looked at her, and could see the desperate hope on her face.

"Can I see those pictures, please?"  I asked.
"Sure," she said, and rose to go get them.  When she returned, she
tossed me a large envelope.  Inside were pictures of her bruised body.
In one photo, I could see welt marks on her ribs from a strap or a belt
of some kind.  In another, there were cigar shaped burns on the inside
of her thighs.  I shuddered.  It was enough.

Smiling at her, I said, "Sorry about your husband, Fran."

"Yes," she said, "thank you."  This time her smile was real.

"It's a shame he had to go that way, but at least he felt no pain."

"You're a generous woman, Fran.  He deserved far worse than what he
got."

"I know," she said, "but accidents happen."

I left the home of Francis Foster, and got back in my air car.  As the
auto drive engaged, I reported in to the station that I was headed home
for lunch, and that I would report in later.  I listened to her story
on my ear chip as the traffic flew by.
The air car landed on the roof pad of the apartment building where I
lived.  Walking down the steps, I erased the recording I'd made of
Fran's story.  I believed her, Foster was an abuser of the highest
order, and I'd promised her no recordings.  I entered my apartment and
tossed my coat on the kitchen table.

I ordered up a sandwich and a beer from the auto chef

While it was synthesizing my lunch, I turned on my computer system.
Grabbing my meal, I sat down at my console and plugged myself in
through the neural jack on the back of my skull.  Entering virtual
reality has always been a pleasant escape for me.
Soaring over numerous sites, I activated my security program, and
located the chat "room" where I spent most of my spare time.  I chose
my persona, this time a distinguished-looking gentleman with gray hair
at his temples, dressed in an immaculate three-piece suit.  I stepped
in, and looked out into the room.  It was, in actuality, an auditorium.
Filled with women.
There are good days and bad days when you make your living as a police
detective.  Today had turned out pretty well.
I stepped out onto the auditorium stage, and said, "Ladies, my name is
Maxwell Centouro.  I am here to help you, and if you listen to me, your
troubles--at least those with your husbands--will soon be over..  .."

GLORY HAND IN THE

SOFT CITY

by Jay Bonansinga

Jay Bonansinga is the author of the novels The Black Mariah, Sick, The
Killer's Game, Head Case, and Bloodhound.  His short fiction and
articles have appeared in Grue, Filmfax, Cemetery Dance, and It Came
From the Drive-in.  He lives in Evanston, Illinois, with his wife and
son.
I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I still had my right
hand.

It threw me for a moment.

I lay there in a cold sweat, my heart thumping.  I brought my stump up
in front of my face, waving invisible fingers back and forth.  I could
feel the twinges of phantom pain, the sharp aching in the knuckles that
weren't there anymore, and the hot, itchy sensations like sunburn
tingling in the heart of my nonexistent palm.
"What's'matter, Glory?"  The hooker lying next to me was stirring
awake, gazing up at me through heavy lidded eyes.  She called herself
Porsche, and her hair had that bizarre coppery color of
laboratory-grown follicles.  Earlier in the evening we had humped for
twenty minutes, until I had climaxed my routine one and-a-half fluid
ounces of sterile semen and Porsche

had fallen fast asleep.  I hadn't had the heart to boot her out.

Now I was telling her I was fine.
"You're sweating," she insisted, sitting up, reaching for her box of
synth-cigs.

"Nightmares."

"You're shitting me.  You're still sleeping natural?"

Porsche lit a syn-stick, sucking a mouthful of pale blue smoke.

"I sleep like a baby since I got the alpha implant put in.  Word to the
wise, Robert: Get an alpha implant."
"Already tried it--didn't work," I said, flexing my non fingers
concentrating on the ghostly feelings.  The heat, the tingling: They
were my first true neural sensations since I had lost the hand in a
nasty kendo fight with a couple of trans genic Sikhs in a juice den
last month.  I was on a missing person case that had gotten me mixed up
with the Indo-Burmese Chimera Triad, and I was trying to fight my way
out. It took a pair of emergency techs working nonstop just to save my
hand's nerve network and get the thing frozen before the cells shut
down.  They told me they could probably save the hand and restore the
nerves, but I was devastated.  My pipeline to true bio-touch had been
inexorably threatened.
That's when I started thinking about checking out of the private
investigation game.
"When do you get that back?"  The prostitute nodded toward my stump,
toward the cap of surgical mesh and the network of medical tattoos
drawn around my wrist for calibration during the reattachment.
I told her next Thursday, and then I glanced across the shadows of my
measly little studio flat.  The cracked plastic calendar was hanging by
the autoclave, the digital face reading Friday, March 7, 2053, and I
realized I had only six days left until my biological hand was done.
And then I realized my right hand was all I had left in the world.  The
rest of my body had been grafted and treated so many times, there
wasn't much left with a decent nerve ending.  Like most of the regular
army, I had lost ninety percent of the skin on my arms and legs during
the war in Pakistan.
All those new viruses mingling, nasty hybrids surfacing everywhere.  Of
course, the plague years got the rest of me.  My left hand, much of my
torso, and a good portion of my left shoulder had atrophied during the
Hanta plague in '24; and most of it had to be reseeded with test tube
tissue.  Even my ass had ninety percent lab-flesh on it.

But nobody was smart enough to see the shutdown coming.

They called it Miller's Syndrome: the gradual atrophy of the nerve
endings due to some faulty connection between laboratory grown skin and
the natural subcutaneous fascia.  In English: The world went numb. Four
out of five survivors of the new plagues experienced the deadening
effects within a year of being treated.  I got it myself.  After my
discharge, I started going numb.  And even throughout my years as a
beat cop, I felt the nerve endings closing down.
Of course, I was lucky.  I had fared a lot better than most of the poor
schmucks creeping around the Hard City nowadays.  Most folks born after
the turn of the twenty-first had a hundred percent reworked tissue, and
the closest thing to a real neural sensation for them was jacking into
a nerve-net box and letting some virtual Hindu mama jerk them off.  I,
on the other hand, possessed .. . well .. . the other hand.  I was one
of the small percentage of old timers who still owned a biological
hand.  A stretch of skin with its original nerve bundle intact.

And right now I wanted it back.

"Ouch!"  I jerked back against the fiber steel headboard with a start.
My unseen fingers were shrieking.

The invisible heat was erupting.

"What is it, honey?"  Porsche had managed to slip out of bed and climb
into her said.  Now she was standing a few feet away, nervously
puffing her cig.

"I dunno--I can--I can feel--OUCH!"  I convulsed against the wall.

My phantom hand was going up in flames.
"Should I buzz somebody?"  Porsche was gawking at me, chewing her
lip.
"No--I'm just--I can feel the--" I climbed out of bed and turned on the
halogens.  With my numb left hand I managed to pull on my leather pants
and guide my feet into my boots.  The heat was like a cymbal crashing
in my brain.  I took a few deep breaths, then walked over to the
window, I looked out through the gray ozone filter.

My invisible hand throbbed.

The Hard City was shimmering in the toxic darkness, the sodium-bright
residential blocks glowing sickly silver.
At this hour the streets were still humming, the threads of directional
lasers still stitching through the haze, looking like cat's cradles.
Off in the distance, I could see the blue names on the horizon, the
Microsoft farms growing bio-circuits twenty-four hours a day.  They
owned everything.  Even me: my skin, my organs.  Either Microsoft or
Dupont.  They owned the patents on everything.
I started to say, "I think it's just a twitch or something--" Then it
hit me.
The phantom pain could be a signal from some remote transmission.  A
warning.  Something happening to my physical band.  My own flesh and
blood.

A distress call.

"I gotta go check on something," I muttered, beading for the closet.
"At this hour?"  Porsche looked like an apparition, standing there in
her coppery hair and re-gen silk.
"Help yourself to some coffee, whatever you want," I said, pulling on
my ozone jacket, shades, and gloves.  There was an advisory tonight,
and I didn't want to jeopardize my preoperative site.
I walked over to the door, paused and added, "Make yourself at home,
Porsche, I'll be back in a flash."

"But what about--?"

I had already shut the door in her face and was halfway to the
elevator.
The handi-cab skimmed along the slotted macadam of the Hard City the
sound of air circulators rattling in unison with the aging motor.  I
was sitting in back, my ghost-hand screaming at me, the pain constant
now.  I could barely see through the safe shades tonight.  There were
several atmospheric advisories on the RT, and the air outside the
shields was the color of pewter.  Every few moments the belly of the
cab would thump over another magnetic terminal, clocking the distance
to the Brooksfield industrial park.

A moment later I saw the flames.

A quarter mile away, the salmon-colored smoke rose in a dense curtain
above the smooth gray walls of the Re-Gen Center.  Panic squeezed my
heart.  Tendrils of lights were cutting through the haze, reflecting
off mirrored windows all around me, the whine of sirens seeping through
the cab's welded joints.  I blinked the sting from my eyes, then I
rubbed the cab's grimy side-shield as the maelstrom loomed ahead of
me.

I recognized one of the squad cars pulling up behind a fire wagon.

"Program stop!  Right here!"  I ordered the cab over to the
sidetrack.
The cab rattled to a halt, and I snicked open the door with my
money-chit.
"Jesus Criminy, Glory--whaddya doing here?"  The voice bellowed behind
me as I climbed out of the handi-cab.  I whirled around and saw the
behemoth coming at me.  A pituitary case named Zander, he was an old
watch commander from my former precinct.
He was built like a freight barge, with half a dozen chins and beady
little eyes set deep in his fleshy face like two little raisins.  He
wore a safe suit under his flak vest.

"How'd you know about this so fast?"

"What happened, Zanny?"  I couldn't take my eyes off the burning
building.

"How'd you know about this?"

"What happened here?"

"Answer my question, Glory."

I told him it was hard to explain .. . but I felt it.  I felt the
fire.
"You what?"  The fat man was staring at me now, his eyes contracting
into tiny black diamonds.

I looked at him.

"My hand's in there, Zanny, I gotta go make sure it's okay," I started
walking toward the fire scene, toward the giant burning monolith.  The
building was as wide as a city block, as high as the clouds, with
thirty-inch thick walls carved out of super-slate and artificial
mortar.
Another wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, the Re-Gen Center was a
place where amputated limbs and cancerous organs could be given another
chance, cleansed through hyper-radiation, reconstructed through genetic
engineering.  My hand was in there somewhere, in its final stages of
regeneration, and now the top floors were blazing bright liquid
silver.
Goddamn idiots had too many alkaline metals stored in the vaults again.
These magnesium fires could burn through Fort Knox.  I could feel the
dry heat on my face as I approached, my phantom hand tingling.

Then a steel-vice grip was on my shoulder, yanking me backward.

"Easy does it, sweetheart," Zander growled at me, spinning me around.
And there might have been a scintilla of sympathy in his tiny cinder
eyes, I'm not sure.  Two other plainclothes cops were approaching us,
the pink glow refracting off their mirrored shades.

"Lemme go, Zanny!"

"You don't get it--" "Let go!"
I tried to wriggle free, but his grip was like a channel lock on my
neck, so I just gave him a sharp nudge to the rib cage, trying to shove
him off me, but it must have triggered his goons because they were on
me in a blink, driving rock-hard fists into my kidney, then a few
knuckle-balls to my gut, their genetically enhanced hands like
sledgehammers.  They snapped my feet out from under me, and I just
folded up like a paper doll, the ground coming up and smacking me in
the side of my face.
Zander leaned down close enough for me to smell the beans on his
breath.

"Bad news.  Glory," he was saying.

"The fire's a diversionary thing."
"--what?--" "Whole thing's a boost job."  His big meaty face was
glowing magenta-pink, melting before my eyes.

I managed to utter, "What are you telling me?"

"I'm telling you the place was knocked over.  Scumbags pinched a buncha
organs, extremities, and whatnot."
Everything was going dark, and I got one last question out: "My
hand--?"

Zander sighed.

"Sorry, sweetheart .. . they got it.

They got your paw."

I shivered suddenly, adrenaline coursing through me.  I tried to stand
up, tried to yell, tried to grab for Zander's sidearm.  I didn't even
notice the other cop coming toward me.  His fist came out of nowhere.

Tagged me square across the bridge of my nose.

It was like a switch being turned off.
I woke up in a holding cell.  They brought me some food, and I got my
bearings.  And then I started pacing, and I must have paced the length
of that cell for hours, thinking.
I just couldn't figure out why some second-story man would risk life
and limb to get himself a natural hand?  Sure, there was a healthy
black market for natural organs, but nowadays test-tube extremities
were being farmed everywhere, and they worked a lot better than the
originals.  All you needed was a plastic scaffold that mimicked the
shape of a hand--and a few cells to "seed" it with--and pretty soon the
cells assembled, and the plastic degraded, and voila!  You got a brand
new hand, stronger and more dexterous than the original.  It just
didn't make any kind of sense that a local cat would try to boost
one.

Funny thing was, I had no idea how close I was to the answer.

Around five o'clock that night, Zander showed up and sprang me.
"Dicks ain't exactly supposed to brief 'civvies' on law enforcement
matters," Zander grumbled as he led me through a narrow corridor toward
the processing bay.  He was chewing a stinky cheroot, and the brown
smoke swirled around his huge head as he walked.
The "civvies" reference was definitely a dig.  Cops hated ex-cops.  But
for some reason--be it pity, amusement, or what-have-you--Zander had a
soft spot for yours truly.

"I'll tell ya this much," he went on.

"We've already recovered ninety-five percent of the organs."
"Ninety-five percent?"  I gave him a sidelong glance as we strode
through pools of halogen.

"That's what I said.  Glory."

I tried to control my emotions.

"My hand's been recovered?"

"No, sir, I didn't say that."

"My hand's in the five percent?"

"Yes sir, unfortunately, yes."

"Where's my hand?"

"Go home.  Glory," he said, pausing by the gigantic exit door,
punching out a code on the keyboard.

I stood there, gaping at him.

"Do they know who cribbed it?"

"I said go home."

"Has it been fenced yet?"
The door hissed open.  Zander turned to me and grasped a handful of my
collar and very softly, very patiently, asked me to vacate the
premises.

I knew it was the last time his request would be soft or patient.

I waited two days.
Pacing the length of my place, zoned out on rest rex flexing fingers
which were once attached but were now noisy ghosts, sputtering,
tingling, sparking, I could feel my sanity--what was left of
it--denaturing into something primal.  Something black and poisonous.
I've been known to have a temper--I won't lie--but now a new kind of
rage was coursing through me with each twinge of phantom pain.

I had to do something.

On the second evening, I jacked into the net, trying to scare up some
of my own leads.  I threw out some cockamaimie call for bone marrow
cells as bait, and started sorting through all the fences working
angles on hot tissue.  Process of elimination got it down to a single
shit bird
Georgie Quine was a small-time scrounger.  Specialized in hot molecules
copped from in die labs, research schools, and the like- He lived under
a co-op down near the hover station; I decided to take a chance and pay
him a visit.
By the time I got down there, the night air had turned gelid, the city
a rancid melange like too many perfume counters clashing.  The clouds
were faded black muslin, cracked and veined with yellow age and
pollution" Who dat?"  The blurred image of Georgie Quine was
flickering on the rez-box moments after I pushed the toggle.

"It's Glory," I told him.

"Glory?"  the pallid face on the screen crackled at me.

"What's the panic?"

"Got questions need answers."

"No can do, Brother.  Sick as a dog."

I told him he'd better get well quick or I'd make him terminally ill.
A minute later the door seal hissed, and the little stick figure poked
his wan face out the crack.

"I got the blue lung.  Glory," he wheezed.

"Chrissake, I can't hardly take in a breath."
"All I want to know is who stuck the Re-Gen Center, and don't give me
any noise about you not knowing anything."

The junkie sucked his sallow cheek for a moment.

Dressed in gray feather and a moleskin mask, he was a couple of years
away from the incinerator, his skinny body riddled with genetic
dissonance.  He had one good laboratory eye left, which flashed and
sputtered like a dying lightbulb as he replied.

"You didn't hear this from me, okay?  All right?"

I grabbed him with my jacked-up lab-hand and slammed him hard against
the jamb, hard enough to rattle his brain.  Made his eye flash tilt. My
phantom hand was cold now and twinging with filaments of pain, and I
was losing control.

"I'm on a goddamn schedule!"  I barked at him.

"Tell me who did the goddamn job and you can keep your teeth in your
skull!"
"Stains, Stains did the job.  Stains did it, Rupert Stains, that's the
guy."
I blinked, incredulous, Rupert Stains was a major player in the biotech
arena, a genetic designer with more awards than the head of Rotary.
Rupert Stains was also a boy-wonder who had made designer-in residence
at Big Softie before his thirtieth birthday.
Word was.  Stains had started to decline in recent years, contracting
an especially virulent form of Miller's syndrome.  But who the hell
needs natural tissue when you're rich, right?  Word was.  Stains had
replaced every major organ and every square centimeter of his flesh
with the finest tissue money could buy.
His delicate little physique was trimmer than ever, his handsome mug
more handsome than his press pictures.
But rumors were also rampant that Stains had gone completely bug-fuck
loony.  Maybe it was the loss of all that feeling, or maybe it was just
the natural course of a genius intellect.  Regardless, it made no kind
of sense that a guy like Stains would do a BE job on a re-gen lab.  He
had a family, according to news reports, and was not the type of guy to
get caught with his pants down.
"Stains was behind the job?"  I finally managed to ask, clutching at
Quine's throat.
"No, no, amigo, no--Stains did the thing.  Along with Hawkhurst and
Black Jimmy."
"You're telling me Stains did this thing himself with a couple of
second-floor men?"

Quine's eye pulsed.

"My hand to the almighty."  He glanced at my stump.

"No offense intended."

"They still in the Hard City

Quine swallowed dryly.

"Cops already got two of 'em.  Glory, I swear to you, they're coming
down hard on everybody.  Nobody's moving a thing--" "Who's left?"  I
tightened my grip.  It looked as though Quine's eyeball was about to
pop out.
"Stains--Stains is still running--somewhere north of Blackchappel--" I
started slamming the back of his head against the jamb, a thin membrane
of scarlet drawing down over my vision.

"They took one of the naturals!  A hand!

A right hand!  Where the fuck is it?!"

The words wheezed out of Quine's turkey neck:

"--Stains has it--" I hurled the little hoodlum to the floor of the
foyer, cracking his skull against the wall.  His eyeball flickered and
strobed.
I turned and started toward the north, the vapor lights going red and
hazey1 barely heard Quine's slurred speech behind me, a sickly bird
singing one last tune.
"Better hurry.  Glory .. . Stains has already been to the transplant
team..  .."

The words were barely audible as I began to run.

Blackchappel was a vast graveyard of decaying, oxidized quonset huts
buried in hard pack like fossilized dinosaurs, their metal spines
gleaming in the sodium wash.  The air was hotter around here.  Toxic.
Veined with static electricity.  Handi-cabs wouldn't run this far, and
the cops rarely bothered patrolling the place.  But as I approached the
east bridge on foot, breathing mask-filtered air, lenses down, heart
hammering, I saw the commotion a hundred yards away, out by the ancient
switchyard.
Zander and his posse--three squad cruisers in all-inching along the
edge of the tracks.
My invisible fingers were fuses now, lit and crackling hotly, the pain
making me crazy, and I started trotting along the shadowy footpath,
staying low, moving toward the switchyard, toward those slow-moving
cruisers.  I was all jigged up on hate and adrenalin, and I was
clenching my phantom hand, tasting hot magnesium on my tongue.
Ahead of me, the cruisers jerked to a halt, one by one, their doors
springing open, the shadowy figures of Zander and his men piling out,
guns raised, infra reds snapped on, search-strobes sweeping the cobalt
haze in front of them.  And my heart was jittering wildly in my chest
as I realized, all at once, just exactly what was going on.

One of the quonset huts a quarter kilometer away was lit up inside.

An underground clinic.
Rupert Stains was in there--I was sure of it now-my missing hand
growing on his arm.
The revelation coursed through me like nitro, all the tiles in the
puzzle-box clicking in place in my brain: the son of a bitch in that
silver warehouse, richer than God, taking the last vestige of sensation
from me, taking my hand, my touch, taking it from me and assimilating
it like a worm growing segments.
And now the rage was erupting in me, all the pain, all the longing,
longing to feel something, longing to touch, and before I knew what was
happening, I was running full bore toward that god damned quonset hut
with my gun drawn.

Two hundred meters ahead of me the doors to the quonset burst open.

I fumbled the safety off, and I ran as fast as my lab-legs would carry
me.
Zander and his men were already fanning out when they saw me
approaching.  Zander did a sort of comical double-take, his infra reds
whirling toward me, a glint of sodium light catching his eyepiece and
blossoming.

Almost fell on his big fat ass.

"Glory!"  His rasp filtered through the pox mask.

"What the fuck--?"

He couldn't finish his thought because things were happening very
quickly now.
A hundred meters ahead of me, the shadows were disgorging three
figures, and I sprinted toward them, ignoring the cops off to my right,
ignoring the pain in my chest, ignoring Zanny's warning calls, ignoring
everything but the three men fleeing the hot house, and I fixed my iris
on the smallest of the three.  The little one was dressed in leathers,
jackboots, and old flying ace goggles.  He had broken off from the
group and was hightailing it toward the East Sprawl Bridge.

Stains.

I fixed my sights on the bridge and made a beeline, the first tracer
shots popping behind me.  Zander's plasma-pellets buzzing over my head,
buzzing white hot making the darkness nicker and crackle.  I stayed
low, my gun raised, aimed straight ahead at the little millionaire
racing across the bridge fifty meters away.
Stains was heading toward the far gates, toward the luminous threads of
blue laser-light demarcating the outskirts, and as he approached the
end of the line, he swam through a pool of chrome-yellow arc light, and
I got a momentary glimpse of his right arm .. .
and the pale, pink fingers clutching the tiny vintage Walther PPK
handgun.

My right hand.

I was about to shriek at the top of my lungs when I saw him skid to a
halt, then spin around with the Walther raised, then the four silver
norettes sparking from the barrel.  I dove to the ground just as the
dumb bells sizzled above my left shoulder, striking the bridge behind
me, chewing through the ancient teflon span.
Behind me, pandemonium erupted, the sounds of angry cop voices, and
more sirens coming from the distance, and Zander's men firing off
high-V slugs, and I managed to rise to a crouch in a hail of gunfire
and squeeze off half a dozen smart-slugs with my stupid left hand.  The
heat seekers arced out into the darkness and pinwheeled every which
way, but it was too late:
Stains had crossed over into the Soft City--a vast restricted area
where super bacteria had broken down the cells in the concrete, metal,
and glass, and now everything was literally soft and waxy--and nobody,
I mean nobody, was reckless enough to chase him into that quagmire.

Except me.

I crossed the far threshold and plunged into the indigo fog, the blue
terminal lasers vibrating all around me, and I descended a steep slope
of ashes into the wasteland, my boots sinking ankle deep into the
detritus, and I kept the gun raised in case Stains was waiting to
ambush me, but I knew I was doomed.
My right hand--its natural nerves intact--was far too fast.  My right
hand was a killer.  I could never outshoot my own right hand.
The only thing I had going for me was the searing rage pumping through
my veins.
A building rose out of the mist--some sort of gothic ruin from some
twentieth-century train station--and I caught a fleeting glimpse of the
millionaire ducking behind a rotting rampart twenty meters away, and I
started firing wildly, sapphire flames barking out of my gun, and the
smart-bullets curled around the side of the building, puffing through
steel girders: needles through pudding.
And then my gun was empty, and I started toward the building, awkwardly
reloading a magazine with my left hand and right stump, my brain
fizzing, overloading, a cognitive tape-loop parroting; Why?  Why would
this son of a bitch with more money than God risk everything for a
little taste of the natural touch, a little bit of feeling?

Why?

I was approaching the building when the adjacent wall erupted in my
face.
The little rich man was bursting through the softened mortar like a toy
through a vacuform.
Gunfire exploded all around me as I dove for cover behind a fossilized
train engine, and I felt the heat on the top of my skull as the
fireworks display swirled over my head, piercing the softened iron of
the Sky Chief and I opened my mouth and wailed through my mask, my
voice drowned in a hurricane of fire, and I finally managed to look up.
Stains was running away across an old decaying trestle.

Then I saw the world go haywire.

It happened so quickly I barely had time to focus, my eyes flash-blind
and blurry, and I blinked and blinked because I couldn't believe what I
was seeing:
The ancient iron of the trestle turning all rubbery under Stains like a
Salvador Dali nightmare.
Then the walkway dipped and flexed and stretched down into the darkness
of the gorge like taffy, and Stains went with it, screaming all the
way, his voice drowned by the sound of a gargantuan metal spring
uncoiling.

The bridge finally snapped, and Stains landed hard on a slag heap.

I made my way over to the edge of the gorge and looked down.  I could
see Stains lying semiconscious down there, half buried in the metal
mush, and I saw something else that pressed down on my heart, made my
blood vibrate in my veins, and made my phantom fingers tingle, and even
as the sounds of Zander and his men were approaching behind me on the
poison winds, I kept staring at that horrible still-life down in the
rotting shadows.
My right hand was down there, all pale and pink, still attached to
Stains' arm, still gripping the Walther

PPK.

It took three days for the boys and girls in the fifth precinct to sort
out the whole mess.  I was on Zander's shit-list for meddling; but
considering my personal interests, I don't think he really blamed me.
At the end of the week, they moved Stains to the federal clinic in
Eastminster for the transplant.
I showed up early on Friday morning for the big show, and they ran me
through the pre-op procedures.
They propped my stump, got me dressed in surgical robes, started drips,
and made me wait forever in a sterile green-tiled room in the bowels of
the building.
It was well into the afternoon when I finally buzzed for the nurse. Her
face flickered across the screen above me, and I told her I was tired
of waiting and I wanted to know just where the hell they were keeping
my hand.
She told me the other patient was still with the clinic psychologist,
and there would be a slight delay.

"What delay?"  I asked.

"I'm not sure, sir.  Would you like me to call the psychologist?"
"What the hell's going on?"  I felt a strange twinge, something
feathery on my phantom fingers.
"Sir, it'll just be a few more minutes--" "This guy's a goddamn thief,
he stole my hand, and you've got him seeing a shrink?"

"Sir, if you'd just--" "I want to know what the hell's going on!"

She sighed, her image flickering for a moment, and then she said,
"Look, I'm not supposed to do this, but I think under the circumstances
.. ."
She reached down and flipped a switch, and the picture on the screen
changed.
The new image was of another room, a stark little lounge in another
wing of the building.  A table in the center, a couple of chairs, the
Venetian blinds drawn.
Stains was sitting at the table, dressed in hospital robes.  Standing
behind him were the shrink and a couple of armed guards.
Across the table sat a little girl in a cotton jumper and pigtails. She
was Stains' little girl; I had seen pictures of her on the Web-news.
She couldn't have been more than six years old, and she was clutching a
little stuffed turtle with one hand, holding her daddy's hand with the
other.

Her daddy's hot hand.

My hand.
I gazed at the screen, my throat drying up, filling with sawdust, my
eyes welling, elephants standing on my chest.  It was as though I was a
ghost caught in some other dimension watching my shadow-self, and I
felt the moist warmth of the child's touch on my phantom fingers, and I
watched the screen, transfixed, as the millionaire held his daughter's
delicate little hand one last time.
And then it occurred to me: This was why Stains had gone to all the
trouble.

To hold his little girl's hand just once.

To feel her touch.
I stared at the screen for as long as I could tolerate the intimacy,
memorizing every movement, every gesture, every quiet exchange between
the child and the man, and I realized it was my hand that was doing the
holding, my hand.  God help me, it was my own flesh and blood in there.
When I finally looked away, I was fighting the tears.

"Nurse!"  My voice was like metal tearing apart.

"Nurse!  Nurse!"

The screen nickered, and the nurse's placid face came back on.

"What is it?"

"Changed my mind."

"Pardon me?"

"The operation," I said.

"I changed my mind, I don't want to go through with it."

There was a beat of silence.

"You what?"

"I said I don't want to do the transplant anymore.

Is that all right with you?"

There was more silence, and then the nurse finally shook her head.

"I'll get Doctor Burgess on the line.

He'll want to know about this right away."

The screen went black.

And I turned away and let the tears come.

Lately the nights seem to have grown more silent in my little cubicle-
The ticking of the air filters above me, the distant muffled drone of
the city outside my windows, and the slow, steady pulse of my own heart
are the only sounds.  I prefer it this way.  I haven't seen Porsche for
weeks.  Haven't been in the mood for that noise for a while now.  Got
too much thinking to do.
I read a lot.  Started a diary last week, but I forget to write in it
sometimes.  Mostly I just lie on my contour couch and stare at the hepa
niters embedded in the ceiling, clocking endlessly in the darkness,
silent sentinels tirelessly guarding against some lethal strain of mush
floating into my space.
Funny thing is, I've never been this happy, going through the motions
each day, playing detective, then coming home each night, alone.

So much quiet time.

164 lay Bonwisinga I can feel her touch every few days.  It's fading
now, but it's still there.  It'll always be there.  That warm, moist,
powdery touch against my ghost-fingers.  The sweet, delicate hand of a
little girl nestled in my own phantom palm.  She'll always be there.

Always.

THE CRIME OF

TRANSFIGURATION

by Will Murray
Will Murray is a professional psychic and the author of nearly fifty
pseudonymous novels in the long-running Destroyer, Doc Savage, and
Executioner series.  Other short fiction by him is found in Miskatonic
University, The UFO Files, and 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories.
THE Chairwoman of the Virtual World Bank vanished on 6/6/66, at 6:66 pm
Uniform Global Time, from her 66th floor office at 666 6th Avenue in
New NYC.  It was the exact minute she wiped her desk system clean,
eradicating all ID and health care files, V-money accounts--insuring
that, from an economic and political sense, she no longer existed--or
could exist--in Beta society.
An FBI team was on site by 11:45 UGT the next morning, vacuuming up
latent prints and executing a full systems sift.

"Wiped clean," the technician pronounced gloomily.

FBI Special Agent in Charge Gill Murrillo turned to the fingerprint
expert.

"Now give me the bad news."

The print-tech finished scanning the office windows

and hit the Sort Function key.

"Processing," the RID chirped.

"Latents match prints found at the prior crime scenes," he chanted.

"Readout: Unknown Alpha Person."

Mumllo lifted his voice.

"Okay.  Wrap it up, everybody.

I'm calling in a Divination Team."

The D-Team were air-dropped onto the roof so their distinctive sky-blue
jumpsuits and yin-yang shoulder patches wouldn't create a public
relations problem with the more militant super-Betas.  It was led by a
Native American who identified herself in a honeyed contralto voice:
Dawn/ Fawn O'Leary."
That made her an Alpha-Beta.  Mumllo eyed her holotag ID and asked,
"Which one am I talking to?"
"Dawn is my Beta name; in Alpha, I'm Fawn.  I'm presently in an Alpha
state, so I would appreciate it if you would still your mind until
we've completed our Alpha sweep to avoid sensory leakage."
Munillo watched as the team went to work.  One took a turn around the
room absorbed in what looked like a FIDbox, except the readout cycled
through the major and minor arcana of a digital tarot deck.  Another
dropped into a Theta trance and began describing what she saw in her
mind's eye while another D-teamer drew the described face on a tablet
with an old-fashioned grease pencil  Fawn O'Leary psychometrized the
desktop system, caressing it like an ethereal harpist.

After twenty minutes, the D-team conferred briefly.

"She's not dead," Fawn reported.

"Nor kidnapped.

We feel she left of her own free will."

Mumllo nodded.

"That fits the pattern to date."
"She's still on our side of the Rockies, but I sense her ultimate
destination is Alphaside," Mumllo grabbed his hand phone

"I'll inform the Director."

"There's more.  She underwent a sudden spiritual emergency."  Her voice
darkened.

"It was induced."

Murrillo disconnected.

"What do you mean-induced?"

"The person with whom she was meeting induced a spontaneous spiritual
crisis.  This was not a conversion, chakra blow-open, or a typical
psychic breakthrough.
Her temporal lobes were artificially overstimulated.  I would classify
it as a high-level transfiguration of some hitherto-undocumented
type."

"Don't tell me she's not re claimable  .."

"If you capture her, you will find her Beta brain functions have been
nuked.  She won't be able to balance a checkbook or drive a light car
She will be in a permanent state of bliss, and exhibit other outward
signs of Williams Syndrome.  And she will be operationally psychic. You
might as well let her go Alphaside; she's no longer of any use to Beta
society."

"And she's too psychic to be easily caught .. ."

Murrillo growled.

"Who the hell could have done this?"

Fawn presented the tablet to Murrillo.  It showed a rather goa
tish-looking bearded male face.

"Look familiar?"

"Except for the thick eyebrows, that's the face the other teams
conjured up."

"I'd appreciate a more respectful choice of words."

"Sorry.  Anything else?"

"I picked up a name clairaudiently.  Mel Drum."

"That helps.  Nobody got a name before."

"I read him as an unlicensed psychic.  He also has an agenda."

"Go ahead."

"He's trying to crash the economy."

"If this keeps up, he'll succeed," Murrillo growled.

"Okay.  Stand by with your team.  I gotta get instructions."

FBI Director Silverglate took the news in silence.

"We have to find this Alpha terrorist, Mr.  Director.

We have a face, a name, and a pattern.  And we know
he's targeting high-level banking officials.  But we don't know
why."

"With under grounded Alphas, there is no why," the Director snapped.

"Maybe he takes "Money is the Root of AH Evil' literally.  Maybe he has
a stash of old currency and thinks if V-money is discredited, he can
cash in at pre-Schism rates.  Motives don't matter.
We have to find this individual.  Squirt your data to Central
Processing."
"Done, sir.  They show no such person.  He's an Alpha
illegal--virtually untraceable."

The Director cleared his throat.

"If you can't find the perpetrator, then it is your job to identify his
next victim.  Can you work with the D-Team onsite?"

"If I have to..  .."

"That's a politically correct answer.  This won't appear on your
permanent record, if that's your wish."

"It is," Murrillo admitted.

"Go to it.  Just don't lose another one."

"Yes, sir."  Murrillo snapped off.  He found Fawn.

"Fawn--" "I'm Dawn now."  Her voice had a professional edge to it.
"I need you in Alpha.  You are now under my operational direction.
We've been tasked to identify the next victim."

"Easier assigned than carried out."

The D-Team took two hours.  Murrillo didn't watch this time.  It always
gave him a weird feeling to watch Alpha-state people at work.  Like a
vague memory was stirring, haunting, half-remembered.  He had taken
St.
John's Won at Harvard--a lot of people were doing SJW at the close of
the Second Millennium--and had experienced lucid dreaming.  That was as
far as his flirtation with Alpha had gone, but the memories lingered.
When Agent O'Leary found him drinking coffee flavored herbal tea in the
hard beam-secured corridor, she had that mellow lift to her voice that
told him she was back in Alpha.
"Our man is blocking us.  He's got his walls up and my belief is that
he's not consciously preselected his next victim precisely to thwart
us."

"That means he knows FBI has off-the-books divination teams."

Fawn shrugged.

"It's an open secret."

"Who works pre cognitively on your team?"
"I do.  But you know how it goes.  Given ninety percent psychic
reliability factors drop to twenty or thirty when you go pre cog  Time
is not recognizable in Alpha, so I might pick up on victim five or six,
instead of four.  Assuming I catch the correct timeline."
"Okay, okay.  Spare me the quantum quasi-physics lesson.  If we're
blocked, we're blocked.  We're just going to have to go public."

Fawn lifted a quelling hand.

"There is another way."

"Name it."

"There's a man who used to do this kind of work.

A legend."

"A super-psychic?"
"He is psychic, but that's not his forte.  He used to work with the
police, but after the Schism, he went underground.  Not wanting to give
up his Beta life, he didn't care to go full Alpha.  So he dropped out
of sight."  Her dark brows knit together.
"Funny, he should pop into my head.  I haven't thought of him in
years."

Murrillo raised an impatient eyebrow.

"So?"

"He's an astrologer.  One of the best."

"Astrology is not a sanctioned procedure.  You know that."

"You know as well as I do it's a valid operational system."

"I don't want to hear this, O'Leary," Murrillo growled.

"Then I must prepare myself."  She turned to go.

* * * Former Virtual World Bank President Loris Rainer turned up in
Day-OH.  No one could figure out how she got so far so fast without ID
cards or personal transportation.  She was found wandering the campus
of the University of Dayton by campus security police, and placed under
protective custody for being an unregistered Alpha Person.

SAC Murrillo made the jump to Day-OH in twenty minutes flat.

"Has she talked?"  he asked the special agent in charge.

"Actually, she's singing."

If it was singing, it was aphonetic.  Loris was emitting a high,
keening sound that made Murrillo's feet lift off the floor as if
walking over vibrating glass.  The cell doors split open.  He stepped
in--quickly retreating with his hands pressuring his ears.

He returned to the cell wearing a white-noise headset.

Loris Rainer sang on without acknowledging his presence.  This was not
the same woman whose face Gil had seen at televised news conferences.
Her coiled black hair hung in wispy ringlets, lips a shocking natural
pink.  But her eyes sparkled.  Gone was that Beta steel that could
wither investment bankers with a glance.

There was something wrong.  Her left temple was .. .

"Christ," Murrillo muttered.  He reached out to touch her left temple.
Quieting, Loris brushed back the loose tendrils for him.

The area over her ear was a long bulging ridge.

Murrillo shifted her chin to expose the opposite temple.
It, too, looked as if her brain had swelled to force the bony skull
outward in two matched ridges that precisely corresponded to the
psychically-sensitive temporal lobes of the brain.  A vein pulsed
visibly.

"What happened to you, Ms.  Rainer?"

Her smile was radiant.

"Something wonderful."

"Who did you meet last night in your office?"

"God."

"Was it an illegal confidential consultant?  What was his name?  What
did he do to you?"

She raised a hand and Gil withdrew from the powerful energy field.

"Don't you know that you are part of something greater?  We all are..
.."
There was no getting through to her.  A neuro biologist examined her
with a portaPETscanner and reported:

"Both lobes look like they've doubled in size.

But they're undamaged."

"She's operating?"

"She lives in Alpha now.  And that singing?  It's not her.  It's coming
through her from the Other Side."

"What is it?"

"Angels.  Demons pretending to be angels.  No way to know.  I don't
like to think about the Other Side.
I'm a lapsed Catholic.  It never made sense to me when they called it
the Afterlife, and it makes even less sense now that we've established
contact."

Murrillo looked at Loris Rainer and shook his brushcut head.

"Why people with everything going for them dabble in this stuff never
fails to baffle me."
Director Silverglate listened to Murrillo's report and hesitated only a
moment.

"I'm declaring a Blue Moon Situational Condition," he said.

"That means anything goes."

Murrillo swallowed.

"Anything?"

"Just don't put it in your report."

Dawn O'Leary had some good news when Gil paged her.
"I have the name of the probable next victim.  I couldn't get it in
Alpha, so I dropped into a Theta trance and threw my consciousness
forward to--" "Just give me the name, O'Leary."
"Carla Braun.  Another banking official.  I picked up a sunburst
pattern around her.  That's the corporate logo of--" "--Astoria Ban
Corp Murrillo finished.
"And you picked up the previous victim.  Been missing since the middle
of August."

"Oh."

"This is why I hate Alpha .. ."

"I was in Theta, sir."

"For your information, O'Leary, Braun was the second of what are now
three violently spiritually transfigured victims."

"Should I be privy to that information?"

"No choice now.  I've been sanctioned to resort to any means necessary
to find this perpetrator.  What was that astrologer's name?"

"He's known as Smith."

"Can you find him for me?"
"He's a Capricorn Sun by reputation.  That means he's always at work.
Since we know exactly what his work is, it's just a matter of--" "Just
do it."
It looked like any number of licensed sex parlors catering to the
clients with a more Kundalini bent than normally found in the Chelsea
District of lower Manhattan.
The building was a nine-story brick tomb.  The original bricks had long
since been re mineralized to prevent crumbling; otherwise it was
strictly Second Millennium.

The window holo sign said Tantric Sex in lavender script.

"You sure about this?"  Murrillo asked Dawn O'Leary as they paused
outside the entrance.

"It's a known front for confidential consulting."

Gil spat.

"Call it what it is: damned fortune telling."

Dawn indicated a red-lit hematite statue in a window.

A nude woman had an equally-nude bearded man in a painful hammerlock.

"That's Shirley MacLaine getting the best of the Amazing Randi," she
said dryly.
Murrillo pushed his way in, ignoring the Entry Scanner and the hostess,
and announced: "FBI.  This establishment is hereby federalized under
Section Four of the Spiritual Privacy Act of 2012."
Several holo-clad females scampered for the back rooms as a matronly
woman with aluminized hair emerged from behind a beaded curtain and
threw out her ample chest.

"Not again!  Why don't you people just put us on retainer?"

Murrillo swallowed his surprise.
"If you cooperate, we won't interfere with business.  I'm looking for a
rogue astrologer named Smith," The woman called over her shoulder.

"Smitty!  It's for you!"

Smith looked like a typical pre-Schism holdover-droopy mustache, gold
pirate earring, and a bluish M tattooed on the back of one hairy hand.
A stale contraband Lucky Strike hung off his lower lip.  Eyeing
Murrillo, Smith asked, "Leo Sun?"

Gil flinched at the direct hit.

"Ever see this man?"

Smith took the grease pencil suspect drawing.

"No, but I guarantee you he's an eighth house person.

Heavy-duty Scorpio influences.  Death is written all over his face."

"All we have to go on is the name Mel or Melvin Drum.  Help us find him
and you won't be charged with Contributing to the Undermining of Free
Will, and other violations of the Spiritual Privacy Act."

"Deal, But I gotta have something in return."  He smiled broadly.

"Pizza.  A real one.  Red onions and red peppers."
When the pizza was laid out before him.  Smith sprinkled it liberally
with a white crystalline substance from a pocket tube.

Murrillo paled.

"Is that .. . salt?"
"My blood pressure medicine," Smith explained, lifting a wedge to his
mouth.

Dawn stepped in.

"There have been three victims, all high-level banking executives, and
all spiritually transfigured against their will in an identical
manner."

Smith snapped impatient fingers.

"Dates.  I need birthdates."
Three butts cooled in an ashtray after Smith finished running charts on
a pocket system.  He consulted a battered blue book entitled, Ephemeris
of the Years 2000-3000.

"The next one will disappear in two weeks," he announced.

"How do you know that?"  Murrillo demanded.
"He's doing this on the full and new moons.  It's a pattern.  The next
victim goes on the next new moon.
That means you have a clock running and a head's up on when the alarm
will ring."

"We'd prefer to find the perpetrator before then."

"Good luck," Smitty said dryly, reaching for the last cold slice of
heavily-salted pizza.

"Don't you ever think about your HDL count?"

Dawn wondered.

"Cholesterol," said Smitty, "is voodoo."  He continued.

"All three victims had chart warning indicators for massive psychic
breakthroughs--Scorpio moons, Pluto going over the ascendant, a heavily
aspected Uranus.

They were super-Alphas just waiting to happen.

Especially under the present Neptune transit.  If it wasn't this Mel
Drum, it would have been something else.  He's just shooting fish in a
barrel."

"Karmic bullshit," snapped Gil.

"Welcome to the harsh world of natal astrology, where your life has
been charted for you," Smith said archly.
"Based on his facial features, I want to say your perp is a
Capricorn."

"You can tell that by his face?"  Dawn asked.

Smith grinned mischievously.
"Takes one to know one.  Note the coarse hair and heavy brows.  But
these cold cobra eyes mark a Scorpio moon, ascendant and probably a
Hock of other Scorpionic planets.  Scorps merge with their environment
like chameleons.  He'll be as tough to find as a rainbow during a lunar
eclipse.

Makes me thank my lucky stars my moon's in Virgo.

It's a very sane moon."

Gil interrupted, "Can you or can't you ID the next victim?"

Smith frowned darkly.
"My money's on Richard Castle.  He's got an afflicted Neptune, not to
mention a cluster fuck of planets--that's a stellium to you
civilians--in his twelfth house, the house of secrets.  Pluto's dead on
his natal moon, so however it happens, he's looking to get hammered by
the next new full one.

Sit on him, and see."

"I get Friday Farrell as next," Dawn said.  Gil looked at her.
"It just came to me," she explained Smith said, "She's the Taurus?  You
can sit on her, too, but you'll be wasting your time.  Taurus is about
as psychic as a brick."  He clapped the Ephemeris shut.

"That's it?"  Gil asked.

Smith's voice turned brittle.
"I just saved you a barrel of work, and all it cost you was a pizza.
You can leave my tip with the hostess."

"Tell me, how is it you never went over the Rockies, Smith?"

Smith's mustache frowned.
"Three reasons: Alpha doesn't believe in pizza, nicotine, or time.  I
live on pizza and cigarettes, and astrology is all about timing."

Gil frowned.

"We'll be in touch."
"Not if I see you coming."  Smith's smoky laugh followed them out of
the building.
Roberta Chung took no chances.  Not in business, not in love.  She
booked a room whenever the call of Kundalini stirred her hormones.  She
had been only four when America split into two polar opposites-the
materialistic Beta and the spiritual Alphas--and although the Schism
was largely nonviolent, America discovered Alpha and Beta could not
coexist unless everyone was psychic, or no one was.  Beta was where
money could be made, so she left Los-CAL at 22, not abandoning
Alpha-state pleasures, merely compartmentalizing them.  Thus, the
hotel room in New-NJ, and the anonymous call to a Tantric Sex
Practitioner.
He came wearing apricot and smelling of apricots, She wore a holo-veil
to ensure confidentiality.  They assumed facing lotus positions on the
floormat, and began rubbing scented pheromones on each other's pliant
skin in preparation for a luxurious six hours of transcendent sexual
bliss.
Fifty minutes but only seven orgasms in, she felt the Kundalini energy
building at the base of her spine and stopped breathing to heighten the
effect.  Her nameless lover produced from nowhere a silver something
resembling an old-fashioned laser pointer and touched the lambent blue
end to her left temple .. . and the Universe cracked open in a dazzling
bloom of transcendent light.

The light was alive, it was love, it was everything.

And nothing else mattered.  Not love, not sex.  Not even money.

Dawn O'Leary took the call at her office monitor.

"Murrillo here."  His voice was raw.
"We just lost Chung to a Kundalini breakthrough.  She's under police
guard, wearing only her birthday suit and a spuckled smile."
"Impossible.  I foresaw Friday--" "And that twice-damned Smith promised
us Richard Castle."
"I don't understand.  Smith is the best astrologer this side of--"
"Screw the moon, stars, and planets.  We're down to a small handful of
candidate victims.  Continue monitoring them.  It's a matter of a month
or so before we catch this madman in the act."
"Or we lose our top bankers.  Global markets have been off seventeen
percent on rumors- We can't keep the lid on this much longer."
"Stay mind linked with Friday Farrell until further notice," snapped
Murrillo.

"I'd like to check back with Smith."

"Do it on your own time.  I don't trust that nicotine sucking
stargazer."  The monitor screen imploded into a gray void.
Dawn settled back into her chair, popped 0.3 milligrams of
prescription-strength St.  John's Wort and slipped into an Alpha
trance.
Punching up a mande la screen-saver, she focused on it.  The lines
blurred, and she fell into its field.  She was Fawn now.
As Fawn, she cast her mind back to the interview with Smith.  His
tattoo surfaced on the placid pond of her still mind.  She had noted it
only in passing.  A feminine M. A first name?  An old girlfriend's
initial?
Concentrating, she brought the exact contours to mind.  An M with an
extra loop.  It resembled the glyph for Virgo--no, for Scorpio.  They
were similar, she recalled.
Fawn clearly visualized a tail instead of a closed loop.  Odd.  Why
would a Capricorn have the glyph of Scorpio tattooed to his hand?

Fawn popped out of Alpha.  She punched up a number.

"Tantric Sex," a thin voice said.

"Is Smith available?"

"Out today.  Would you like an appointment?"

"No.  I would like his address."

"We do not provide personal information."

"This is an FBI request."

"Sorry."

"Give me his first name, then."

"As far as we know.  Smith is his first name."

Fawn changed tactics.

"Would you know his sign?"
"We do not give out confidential information, either," the woman said
frostily.
Frowning, Fawn disconnected.  Touching her throat mike she said: "Birth
Records check."

The system beeped.

"Name?"
"Smith.  First Name Unknown.  Global."  Then she settled back in her
chair as every living Smith born in Beta territory was sorted and
displayed in long, tedious chains of text.  It was going to be a long
day .. .
Gil Murrillo was making explanations to the Director of the FBI.  The
Director was having none of it.

"No more astrological hunches.  Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir."
"And have that Smith picked up.  Nobody makes the Bureau look
spuckle-faced.  Clear?"

"Clear."  Murrillo disconnected.  The handset chirped instantly.

"Murrillo."
"Dawn here.  I have something.  Remember the name I received
clairaudiently--Mel Drum?"

"Yeah."

"Global search turns up a Meldrum Smith, born October 27, 2011 at 7:48
UGT, Bo-MA."

"So?"

"A man born at that time would be a Scorpio Sun, with his moon,
ascendant, Mercury, and Venus all in Scorpio.  In short, a
super-Scorpio.  Those conjunctions are very rare."
"Forget it.  The Director has instructed me to abandon all astrological
investigations."
"Listen!  The astrological profile Smith described fits this Meldrum
Smith.  He could be our spiritual terrorist."

"Is he locatable?"

"Yes and no.  Gil, I think our Smith is Meldrum Smith."
"That's crazy.  Dawn!  He's a damn Alpha holdover, clinging to the last
century like a kid with his blankie.

And didn't Smith claim he was Capricorn with a Virgo moon?"

"We have only his word on that.  Just hear me out.
He could have lied about his chartA lot of astrologers guard their
planetary picture jealously.  But Smith volunteered the information.  I
think he's a quadruple Scorpio passing as a Capricorn.  This side of
the Rockieswho would know differently?  And his demeanor is extremely
Scorpionic."

"What about the suspect sketch your people came up with?"

"They're never perfect.  You know that.  And Smith's mustache might be
the remnants of a shaven beard.  Think about it.  We know our terrorist
doesn't preselect his victims in order to foil pre cog scans.
When we consulted Smith, we fell into his hands.  He pointed us where
he didn't want us looking.  It's classic misdirection."

"Too much of a coincidence," Murrillo snapped.

"We just happened to consult the one Betaside guy who's our man?"

"Maybe it wasn't a coincidence," Dawn said levelly.

"I thought it was odd his name just popped into my head when this all
started.  Maybe it didn't.  Maybe Smith planted the thought in my mind.
It's a given our man is monitoring all operations against him.  If he
intuited the existence of FBI D-teams, he'd know it was only a matter
of time before we found him, one way or another.  So he drew us to
him."

"I don't buy it."  The harshness left Murrillo's voice.

"But the Director wants Smith picked up for practicing an illegal
system of divination, and being a smug jerk.  I'll let you audit the
interrogation, okay?"

Dawn's voice climbed to a shrill note.

"Gil.  Don't treat this as a routine pickup.  I have a strong feeling
about--" The sudden catch in Dawn's voice was like a sob.

When it came back, her voice was hushed and thick with fear.

"Gill  I think I'm being remotely viewed.  I sense a presence.  It's ..
. why am I smelling apricots?"

"Apricots!  The odor of apricots was all over Roberta Chung."

"Gill  Gill"  The line went dead.
An FBI light car whisked Gil Murrillo to Dawn/ Fawn O'Leary's co-opt
overlooking Hudson River.  His override card defeated all building
security lockouts until O'Leary's door fell open before him.

Polypistol in hand, he eased his way in.

"Fawn?
Dawn?  Either of you here?"  Silence came back.  He inched forward,
every sense keyed up.
FBI SAC Gil Murrillo found Dawn/ Fawn O'Leary seated at her desk
system. Her head came up at his approach.  She smiled gloriously--a
radiant, beatific smile.  Her entire being seemed to glow, as if her
auric field were becoming palpable.

"Hello..  .."  Her voice was dreamy.

"Agent O'Leary, what happened to you?  Talk to me, Dawn."

"I'm Fawn.  I'm Fawn forever..  .."

"Was it Smith?  Tell me.  Who did this to you?"

Her hands came up, open, inviting, almost eager.

Carefully bolstering his poly pistol Murrillo approached.
Her hands took his.  They were strangely cool to the touch, her
obsidian eyes luminous.

"Just talk to me, Fawn," he coaxed.

Gil Murrillo never had a solid hunch or psychic flash in his entire
life.  But in the moment Fawn's hands clutched his in a grip that was
warm and loving, yet as unshakable as steel, a strange fluttering
touched his left temporal lobe--and his gut grew cold with fear.

"Nothing will hurt you again," Fawn promised.

"Ever."
The hand wielding the stainless steel beam pointer was hairy and
masculine.  Murrillo caught a momentary glimpse of a faded bluish
tattoo.  A letter M-but with an extra fillip.  A loop that stuck out
like a barbed tail.
Perhaps it was an old subconscious memory.  Maybe it was a true psychic
insight.  But in that flash of knowing Gil Murrillo understood with
perfect knowledge that he was looking at a dual symbol: The ancient
glyph of Scorpio--which also stood for a man's name: Meldrum.

A familiar husky male voice said, "Astrology is timing.

It's all timing."
A coolness touched Gil's temple and a cold blue light flashed.  It
pierced his skull, illuminated his brain, interpenetrating his soul. In
the next exquisite moment he saw a greater, whiter light.  Even though
he had never seen it before, Gil recognized the light.
It was God, the Universe, everything.  His ego, his mind, his
individuality melted into a warm oneness that was utter bliss.

Gil Murrillo was one with God, and God was pure, perfect Alpha.

by Janet Berliner
In her twenty-five years as a writer, editor, and publishing
consultant, Janet Berliner has worked with such authors as Peter S.
Beagle, David Copperfield, Michael Crichton, and Joyce Carol Oates.
Among her most recent books are the anthology David Copperfield's
Beyond Imagination, which she created and edited, and Children of the
Dusk, the final book of The Madagascar Manifesto, a three-book series
co authored with George Guthridge.  Currently Janet divides her time
between Las Vegas, where she lives and works, and Grenada, West Indies,
where her heart is.
IN order to more completely answer the dichotomy of her present and her
future, Pia took a trip into her past.  Borrowing from Peter, promising
herself that she would repay Paul later, she ordered the archival tape
of her grandmother's memories.
When the tape arrived, she delighted her understudy by taking two days
of her allotted personal time off from the Company's musical production
of Hamlet.  Headset in place, she entered her grandmother's archival
experience and toured her life, her world, her stomping grounds,
starting in East Berlin, as it was called then, in the early sixties.
She was eight years old, standing with her bicycle at the Brandenburger
Turm.  This was her weekly pilgrimage to the Wall which rose menacingly
between her and her best friend.  Daniel, who had escaped the East the
year before.

"Danny," she called out.

"Are you there?"  His voice rose thinly into the crisp autumn day.
"I'm here, Rachel.  I'll come and see you next week.  We have a pass to
come through."

"Mutti says bring coffee," she called out.

"Next week, then."
She wheeled the bike down the boulevard, away from the monument,
playing their game, hers and Danny's.  Looking for litter was a foolish
game at best, and one they could never win, but they'd always played it
anyway.
Sometimes they found a small branch that had detached itself from one
of the linden trees that lined the boulevard; the occasional stray
leaf.  That was it.
Nothing else ever disturbed the street's antisepsis.  Not even one
small piece of debris..  ..
Briefly, Pia removed the headphones.  She had expected to feel
discomfort in the mind of someone she'd never known, in a time and
country she'd seen only in old movies.  Instead, she felt more
comfortable than she did in her own skin.  It was a puzzlement, she
thought, quoting the King of Siam.  Her mother and grandmother had
parted ways long before she was born.  Her mother fitted perfectly into
the late nineties.  Judgementalism was the order of the day, a perfect
environment for her.  But not for Pia, who had never quite managed to
fit the mold, and apparently not for her grandmother.

She replaced the headset and fast-forwarded it.

She was nineteen, sitting in a theater, watching her friend Tanya play
Anna in The King and I. "/ want to play Anna, too, one day," she told
the Herr Direktor

of Tanya's Company later, when her friend introduced her to him.

"You're not the type," he said.
"You will be Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, perhaps, but not Anna.
Never Anna."  She buried the dream deep down in her soul.  Every once
in a while she disinterred it and looked at it, letting it grow,
deciding that she not only wanted to play Anna, she wanted to do so in
the grand ballroom of the Schloss Charlottenburg, the castle across the
street from the Reichstag.  The fact that the castle was in West Berlin
only added to the grandiose quality of her fantasy.  No one she knew
had ever danced in the West, let alone at the Schloss.  She'd only
heard about the castle and the ballroom from people who'd seen it in
the days when the old people were given passes once a year to cross the
border.
Pia was enchanted.  She, too, adored Anna and wanted to play her; she,
too, had been told that Nellie Forbush was more her style.  Returning
to the tape, she experienced her grandmother's escape to West Berlin.
She saw the luxury and the decadence and smelled the dog droppings in
the less-than-pristine streets.  Then, frightened, she heard the
announcement that the Wall had tumbled.
"They" had taken over the West and it was now without light and heat.
The shops on the Kurfurstendam stood empty and the streets were
clean.
Then the parties began, the farewell bashes for the forty-somethings,
the ones who were being sent away.  Somewhere.
Pia removed the headset and took something to help her sleep- She awoke
in the middle of the night and returned to her grandmother's life.  She
escaped with her from Berlin, arrived with her in New York, journeyed
with her to San Francisco and a new life, in the Haight.  The
going-away parties hadn't yet started in America.  The streets were
filled with musicians and clowns and mimes, people openly smoked all
manner of things, including cigarettes, and everyone talked of flower
children and behaved like it was still the Age of Aquarius.  She
experienced her grandmother's joyous reunion with her friend Tanya, a
grown woman now and performing in Jesus Christ, Superstar.  Pia had
never seen the show before, though she'd heard of it in the coffee
shops, before the Juicers took over.  Heard that it was banned at the
turn of the century, when she was just a little girl and the Clinton
fiasco allowed the Moral Majority to take hold of the country.
Pia loved the show.  She loved her grandmother for their shared
passions for old musicals and old movies.
Were her grandmother alive, she'd have embraced her and taken care of
her, the way they used to take care of elderly people in the olden
days.
Discarding the headset, she was beset by a deep sense of longing. There
had to be something out there for her, something better than what she
had now.  This thing she had--this excuse for a life--was hardly worth
clinging to.
Throwing on a coat to shield herself from San Francisco's wind, Pia
headed for Sacramento.  She notified the courts that she would be there
first thing in the morning, spent the evening walking around the ruins
of the old city, and was at the courthouse when it opened.  At nine
o'clock sharp, she was called before the judge.
Leaning against his desk to steady herself, she took the document that
had been prepared for her and began to read.
"Just sign on the bottom line."  The judge's voice was rasping,
metallic, his eyes expressionless.

"That's it?"  she said.

"What did you expect?  A song and dance routine?

You know the regulations."

Yes, she knew the regulations, Pia thought.  Ending her marriage was
simply a matter of sending in an application and coming here to take
care of the mechanics.  She wanted the divorce, but there was
something obscene about the lack of intricacy.  Ten years with one
person deserved more than that.  Even Max, with his impassioned highs
and suicidal lows, deserved more than that.

"On the bottom line," the judge repeated.  He held out a pen.

"Your full name."
If you only had a heart.  Tin Woodsman, you'd understand, Pia thought.
But she wasn't Dorothy, and Sacramento circa 2031 was hardly Oz.
Pushing back the strand of hair that had loosened itself from her neat
chignon, she took the pen and signed her name.  Olympia Hoffman.
Carefully.  As if neatness counted.  Feeling nothing.  A mandatory year
of lectures, counseling, red tape, before they'd granted a marriage
license.  Now this inglorious sixty-second procedure.  It was like
instant surgery--tidy and efficient while it was happening, to fool you
into forgetting that the pain would come later, during recovery.

"Next."

Pia moved out of the way.  She knew she should leave; she was providing
no function being there.  But she stood and watched the next person in
line, a man with the trim body and controlled movements of an athlete.
She timed him through the process.  Thirty seconds for the judge to
check the list on the monitor to his right; a fifteen-second
paper-shuffling pause; another fifteen seconds and it was over.

"Next."

"And to whom do you belong?"  The athlete, smiling, had stopped at her
side.

Pia glanced at the judge.  He was staring right at her.

"To Them," she said, wondering as she gave the requisite answer why she
didn't feel uncomfortable under his scrutiny.  It was like that with
all of Their messengers.  They were enforcers, yet they carried with
them a sense of familiarity that made their actions palatable.

"Next."

She was leaving the building now, moving across the square and heading
toward the bus station.  The athlete was still with her, making an
effort to tone down his long stride to match her slower pace.

"Name's Jim," he said.

"You headed to San Francisco?"

he asked.

She didn't answer.  Jim, John, Joe, she thought.

Who cares?

"Me, too.  I mean, I also live in San Francisco," he said.  Taking her
silence for assent, he helped her board the bus.

"Isn't it wonderful how They make everything simple for us?"

"Yes.  They're wonderful," Pia said.  Out of earshot of the judge, she
felt relatively safe in allowing a touch of sarcasm to filter into her
words.  They.  The rule makers she thought.  Hidden away, attending to
the greater design of the world and insisting that she and everyone
else fit into Their pattern.

"Let's celebrate when we get back," the athlete said.

Pia shook her head.  He looked puzzled.  Hurt.  As if his daily ration
of protein had been arbitrarily denied him.  They trained his body but
not his instincts, Pia thought.  A modicum of sensitivity would have
told him she was in no mood for what he had in mind.
"You're not supposed to be alone this afternoon or tonight- You know
the rules."
"I won't be alone," Pia said, wishing he would scout the bus for
another candidate.
He had taken the seat next to hers.  Now he removed his hand from her
arm where it had rested possessively.
"We have the rest of the day off," he said, making one last-ditch
attempt to change her mind.

"Sorry."

"Too bad.  You have a good body.  Another time, huh?"

"Yes.  Another time."

Pia was consciously sidestepping the rules again.  By Their tights,
she was committing a crime and could be punished--whatever that meant.
It was all very well for Them to sit around like fat cats, doing what
They wanted and issuing directives to everyone else, she thought.
Handing out lollipops for obedience to Their rules without ever denning
the punishments for what They denned as crimes.  By her lights, this
directive was pure insanity.  The idea of forcing herself to spend her
few hours before Liz's going-away-party with this stranger was
intolerable.  Nor was she lying, when she said she wouldn't be alone,
at least not entirely.  Rick was waiting for her at home.  She'd be
spending the time in Paris and in his cafe in Casablanca.  Thinking
about him made her heart beat faster.  For a few sweet hours she would
be lisa.
Apparently accepting defeat, the athlete mumbled and took a seat next
to a more likely candidate.  Pia watched him go, in some small way
envious of his easy acceptance of the system, he and the others who
felt at home with Their mandates.  Then she thought about the sweet
hours of solitude she had just bought herself and smiled.  Her
defiances were small ones, to be sure, but they pleased her.  She
thought briefly about not showing up at the party.  That would be a
larger defiance, and one that might provide her with a great deal of
satisfaction, if she got away with it.  If not, the worst that could
happen was .. . what?  She had never been caught, so she didn't know
the answer.
The idea of staying at home alone all evening was almost sensually
tempting, but Pia dismissed it- If she was going to try it, she would
have to choose another night, another party.  Tonight she would surely
be missed; she was the entertainment.  At least, she thought, she was
dancing Coppelia.  Though she preferred musical comedies, she had an
affinity for Delibes' music and Offenbach's doll.  Besides, she wanted
to see Liz, to wish her , .. what?

Deliberately, Pia ceased to think about the party.

She left the bus a few stops early, resisted the temptation to see if
Jim was watching her through the bus window or, worse yet, had followed
her out of the bus.  She had the creepy feeling that he was trailing
her as she walked the rest of the way to her apartment, but she did not
look back.
Nearing the building, Pia gave thanks to Max for having agreed to move
out until she could find somewhere else to live, and to Them for
lifting the ban on an increasing number of musical comedies.  She
adored Swan Lake, of course, and Giselle and Coppelia, but she'd been
passionately in love with musical comedy ever since she'd seen her
first one.  She let herself into her apartment.  In one fluid movement,
she kicked the door shut behind her, pushed the button to start the
video cassette, and removed her coat.  As she settled into her favorite
chair, she remembered the way her husband--ex-husband--complained about
its being out of sync with the decor of the room.  She still didn't
know whether it had become her favorite before or after his comment,
she thought.
Deliberately emptying her mind of everything except what was happening
on the screen in front of her, she commanded Rick to divert her. Within
seconds, she was captivated by a world that never failed her. Paddle
fans.  Rick's cafe.  North African intrigue.
That was her reality.  Not performing Coppelia or living with Max
Hoffman .. .

A blinking light on Pia's wall demanded her attention.

She ignored it as long as she could before picking up the telephone.

"Olympia?"  her sister asked.

"You sound so far away."
"Only mentally.  I was watching--" "Don't tell me.  Let me guess.  The
King and I or Casablanca, which is it?  Don't you ever get tired of
that stuff?  I mean, it's all right in its place, but you take it too
seriously.  I think that's why you couldn't make it with a real man
like Hoff.  Sometimes I think
you just married him because you wanted your last name to be
Hoffman."

There was no need to say anything, Pia thought.

Nothing short of a firing squad could stop Mira once she started on her
favorite topic, and the truth was that one of the reasons she had
married Hoff was because she wanted to be Olympia Hoffman.
"I remember those nightmares you were having when you met Hoff," Mira
went on.
"You began to believe that Dr.  Coppelius was going to come for you so
that he could chop you into little pieces..  .."
Pia stopped listening to her sister.  She didn't want to think about
the dreams ever again, and especially not tonight when she was dancing
Coppetia at Liz's farewell party.  It had all begun after she'd danced
the role at several parties in a row, night after night the same dream.
Dr.  Coppelius searching for her.  Wanting to destroy her so that he
could shape another, more obedient, doll.  And then she'd met Max
Hoffman.  She hadn't even liked him very much but she'd kept thinking
about Offenbach's Hoffmann and wondering what might have happened to
Coppelia if he'd succeeded in spiriting her away.  Dr.  Coppetiust
might never have found her..  ..

"Pia?  Are you listening to me?"

She tuned back in.

"I'm listening, Mira."

"If you're having those dreams again, I'll come over- You're not
supposed to be alone today anyway."

"I'm not alone."  Pia said nothing about the dreams.

They had never really stopped, but it didn't seem to matter anymore.
They were as much a part of her life as getting up in the morning.
"You mean you have someone with you?"  Mira's relief was apparent.  Her
voice rose several decibels.
"I'm so glad.  I won't disturb you.  - .  ," The telephone light went
out, and Pia smiled.  Mira would be happy for a while, believing her
sister was following orders.  It made her so uncomfortable to think
that she was related to someone who habitually questioned Their
wisdom.
Changing her position slightly, Pia returned to the world she
preferred.  Eventually she would have to think about Their reality but
not now.  Not while she had an hour of solitude left.
The figure in the trenchcoat became a dot on the rain-soaked Casablanca
runway and Pia started to cry.
For a while, she let her tears flow freely.  Then, wondering how she'd
have made it through the years without Bogart's help, she replaced her
worn Casablanca cassette in her collection and took out The King and I.
The catharsis was over, and she needed Anna.
Fingering the cassette lovingly, Pia thought about what it must have
been like to play Anna at that premiere performance sixty years ago.
She balanced the cassette on high.  Delicately.  Like a glass of
champagne.
Taking the hem of her skirt in her other hand, she waltzed around her
small living room until, out of breath, she fell abruptly back onto the
sofa.  Dammit, she thought.  If she could afford a holograph machine,
she'd know what it felt like to be a woman like Anna.

Proud.  Magnificently proud.  Unafraid even of the King of Siam.

If she couldn't have a holograph machine, Pia told herself, the least
she could do was to keep expanding her collection.  The party tonight
was her one shot at acquiring a complete Valentine collection.  Liz
would have no need of antiquated musicals where she was going, or of
anything else for that matter.  Besides, it would be her last chance to
see her mentor before she was taken away.
Poor Liz, Pia thought.  So what if she was turning sixty tonight.  She
was healthy and happy and deserved to stay.  At forty, Pia still had
twenty years to think about where it was They took you.  To a better
world, They said.
Pia remained unconvinced.  As far as she was concerned, Liz would
cease to exist.  Like all of the others They had sent away since the
new system began.  Her parents; her friends' parents; her neighbors.
She had tried to believe there was a place where they gathered, that if
she only knew where to go, she could see them all again.  Alive.
Smiling.  For a while, she'd even agreed with Mira that they'd
undergone some magical process and were living forever like the heroes
and heroines in her cassette world.
Her sister had kept right on believing, but for Pia the delusion had
been short-lived.  If she could only see one of Them, one of the
lawmakers, she thought, she'd learn the truth about the old people--and
about so many other things.  Truth was something you could read in
people's eyes, like fear and love.  If Their way was the only one that
precluded chaos, why wouldn't They show themselves?  How could she
trust edicts from rulers who told her they were the creators and
orderers of her universe, yet refused to walk at her side?  She
couldn't.  Nor could she believe in Their messengers--those strangers
who blindly enforced Their rules and carried that aura of familiarity
that comforted her into doing Their bidding.
Reluctantly, Pia packed her costume and dressed for the party.  She
chose her clothes carefully and made herself up with great attention to
detail, hoping that seeing the finished product would lighten her mood.
It did, but only temporarily.  Once she was at the party, her
depression returned.  It was triggered by the sure knowledge that she
was going to lose out on the Valentine collection.  At least three
other people in the room wanted those cassettes, and they were all
better qualified than she.  The first two requirements were no problem:
she was there, and she wanted it.
Coveted it.  Probably more than the others did.  Her problem lay in the
third regulation; her acceptance level of Them and Their system.  It
was down again.

Way down.  She had measured it on Liz's machine.

"Are you all right?"  Liz asked.  She put her arms around Pia and
hugged her.
"I'll be okay," Pia said, wondering at the lack of fear in her friend's
eyes.

"You're the one..  .."

"They're going to love me there," Liz said.
"Look at me, Pia.  I've lost thirty pounds."  She executed a graceful
pirouette, her face as expectant as Coppelia come to life in the toy
shop and her body as fragile again as the young woman who'd first
taught Pia the role.
That was when two strangers appeared.  As they moved closer to her, she
saw that one of them was Jim.  That Jim.  The one in the courthouse, on
the bus, and probably on the street dogging her trail.  He looked
different, better, in his formal evening attire.
If he recognized her, he did not show it.  She watched him move easily
toward Liz and turned her attention to the other stranger, who was
passing among the guests like a dancer floating lightly across thin
ice.
Spallanzini come to claim his creation, Pia thought, not realizing
until the tall, slender figure came closer that it was a woman.  She
wore a black jumpsuit, and her dark hair was drawn tightly into a
dancer's bun.
Her face was pale, translucent, as if her skin had never touched the
sun.
Because the light was dim, it took Pia a while to realize that the
woman's careful progress was inspired by the enormous crystal bowl of
cut fruit that she was carrying, balancing its fragility as if she held
a slice of a rainbow.

Drawn to her, Pia took a step toward the stranger.

Before she had time to say anything, the woman placed her gift on a
table and turned around to face Pia.

"And to whom do you belong?"  she said, using the standard greeting.

Pia began the required response but stopped.  Saying "To Them" had
always been as natural as breathing.

Now the words stuck in her throat.

"What's your name?"  the woman continued as if the traditional
exchange had been completed.  She looked fragile up close, like a piece
of Dresden china.
Pia looked across the room at Liz, glowing with her regained delicacy
of motion.

"Your name?"  the woman asked again.

Suddenly she knew who the woman was.  Why she was there.  With the
knowledge came an urgent need to do something, anything, that was an
act of defiance against Them.
"Would you believe me if I told you my name was Liz?"  Pia said,
"You're too young to be Liz."

"Have you come to take her away?  Are you one of Them?"

"I'm a messenger."

"Is she going to die?"

The woman's expression didn't change.

"There's no need to be afraid for her," she said.

"As long as she obeys the rules--" "All of her needs will be
satisfied," Pia said, finishing the litany.  The words fit
comfortably.

"Satisfy my needs.  Take me.  Look at her.  Her spirit is young.

Mine's not."

"I can't take you."

"Why not?  Did anyone instinct you not to take me?

You could come back later for Liz."

The woman put her arm around Pia's shoulder.  She smelled of lavender
and lemons.

"Do you really want to go?"

"I don't want to stay.  I want to go where there's noise and laughter
and tumult," Pia said.  It was something she had once said to her
mother, so many years ago that she had thought the memory erased.  Her
mother had responded with a rare moment of gentleness by telling her a
story, one she had recognized as fact, though it was presented as
fiction.  It wasn't the story itself that had stayed with her; it was
the setting.
She had often wondered since if such places really existed, somewhere
out there beyond the boundaries that she was forbidden to cross.
"I want to go to a casino," Pia said now.  She rolled the words around
on her tongue, as if she were savoring a taste so subtle that the
flavor would escape her the moment she swallowed.
The woman nodded.  She looked almost as if she'd been expecting the
request.

"Is there still such a place?"  Pia asked.

Again the woman nodded.

"Are you telling me it's possible for me to go there?"

"It can be arranged, in special cases."

"Special?  In what way?"

The woman didn't answer.

"How long would I be allowed to stay?"  Pia went on.

"You'd be given money.  When that runs out--" "Will They come for me
then, to punish me?"

"A messenger will come for you."

"To take me to Them?"
Releasing Pia's shoulders, the woman reached out and stroked her
cheek.
"Patience, child," she said, as if she were promising Pia that she
would be grown up soon enough and then she'd know everything.

"Who are you?"

The woman smiled and took Pia's hand.

"I am whoever you want me to be," she said.

"Come.  It's time to leave."
She led Pia through the guests.  They moved aside without question,
thinking only that Pia was leaving to warm up for her performance.  Liz
disengaged herself from Jim and waved, blowing a kiss instead of her
usual "See you later" farewell, and Pia waved back, wondering if her
mentor would wait all night for a messenger who had already come and
gone.
Noise and laughter and tumult, Pia thought, looking around the casino.
It was hard to remember that there had ever been anything else in her
life; no one talked about Them here, or about obedience and order.
She
had a clear picture of following the woman through Liz's front door,
and then a series of fuzzy ones: crossing the California border into
Nevada; barreling along the ET.  Highway toward Area 51; a sign that
read, You are entering Last Chance, Nevada', a sense that she was
playing a role in a tape soon to be archived.
She had no idea how long she'd been here, but nothing seemed as real to
her as this place of no clocks and noise and laughter and tumult.
They'd lied to her, to everyone.  There was a world of lights and
warmth, a world where everyone was her family.

Even the security man bending over her now was her friend.

He was undoubtedly the ugliest man she'd ever seen, but the sight of
him had amused her when she'd arrived.  She'd watched him storming the
aisles between machines, masquerading as authority in his white linen
suit and dark sunglasses.  Whispering "Play it, Sam" to her trim image
in the mirror behind the roulette wheel, she'd imagined Sydney
Greenstreet somewhere close by, in a smoke-filled room, sweating
beneath a huge wooden fan.
"No bare feet in here," the security man said now, his practiced voice
soft and low.
Pia watched the traces of a smile hover around the corners of the man's
mouth as he lowered his skinhead toward her, his breath making contact
with the ash piled around her cigarette butts.  As he bent over her,
his body declared her in violation of his domain because her purse was
empty.
How long has it been, Pia wondered, pushing her toes back into their
leather shackles and pulling her shoulders closer to her knees to
protect the pile of useless Keno tickets she had gathered on her
skirt;
how many hours, days, weeks of too many cigarettes and no sleep.  She
sank deeper into the red vinyl chair, though she knew her body would
adhere her thighs to the plastic surface.
The man straightened up.  His mouth was moving, but Pia couldn't hear
what he was saying above the clatter of coins and the shouts of
gamblers.  Mesmerized, she watched his manicured index finger
reprimanding her; the nail's quick was a half-moon in a sky of mirrors
and imitation gaslight stars.
Forcing her eyes away, Pia concentrated on the numbers lighting up the
Keno board.  They danced into view to the music of coins forced between
metal lips by little old ladies drunk with the joy of stuffing the
slots of their one-armed lovers.  Crap shooters screamed their delight
as a red-headed roller won them yet another pile of chips.  Pia had won
with her earlier, laughed with her as she punctuated each new roll with
a toss of her head, kissing the dice that had been warmed at her
breast.
In the Keno lounge, the numbers kept coming.  Pia watched the little
white balls being blown out of their container and into two long arms
that held the winners.
Ten balls on each side.  Twenty numbers, and only one of them hers.
Crumpling her useless Keno ticket in her sweating fist, she cursed
whoever had installed the equipment and the Chinese for being the first
to play games with numbers.  She swore at the digits themselves, and
more than anything she cursed the lifeless balls as they lay silent in
their silver cage.
How long, Pia thought again.  How long had she been winning a little,
losing more?  She ripped her thighs off the vinyl seat and walked
toward the Keno counter.
"Same card?"  the Keno marker asked.  Pia nodded and pushed the
crumpled paper at the girl.  She couldn't change her numbers now.  Not
when she had only one coin left.  If her old numbers came up, she'd
never forgive herself, she thought, forgetting that if she didn't win
now, she wouldn't have a chance at regret.  She'd be broke and facing
the next bend in the road she'd chosen without any concept of its
destination.

The flash of the electronic camera recorded the empty Keno board.

"Number twenty-three," the Keno girl called out in a board voice.  It
was one of Pia's numbers.
"I go off duty in half an hour," the security man whispered, leaning
over her again.
Pia nodded mechanically as she checked her card against the numbers on
the lit board.  One more and she'd get her money back.  She'd be able
to play again.

"Last number--fifty-eight."

"No.  It can't be the last number," Pia said, without realizing that
she was shouting.

The whirling stopped.

"I have three out of eight.  I should get something for that," Pia said
to the white balls that lay lifeless once more in their metal prison.

"Same card?"

Pia fumbled in her pockets, hoping for a forgotten coin.  Her fingers
came up empty- She shook her head and turned away, feeling her body in
revolt against its broken regimen.
Seeking the order and quiet she'd abandoned, Pia made for the ladies'
room.  There she inspected herself in the mirror for the first time
since she'd entered the casino.  To her amazement, she looked no
different.
Behind her, she could see a middle-aged matron sleeping in a
pink-and-white chair that faced discreetly away from the toilets, and
overhead she could see the speaker that was piping in "As Time Goes By"
from the bar.
The ladies' room door opened.  Like the voice of an old lover, the
casino called out to her.  If you had just one coin, you could try one
more spin of the wheel, one last roll of the dice, another Keno
ticket.
Leaning over the sink to splash her face with cold water, Pia caught
sight of an ashtray overflowing with coins.  It lay on the stained
counter, beckoning to her.
Dreamily, she put out her hand and caressed the money with her
fingertips, the way she had done to her cassette collection on Liz's
birthday.

"Can I help you?"

Pia pulled her hand away and smiled, hoping the attendant would think
she'd been making a contribution.
The woman came closer.  There was something familiar about her--a scent
of lavender and lemons.

Pia tied into the casino.  They couldn't send for her.

Not yet.  She wasn't ready.  Opening her bag, she tore at its lining.
One more coin, she begged; one spin of the wheel.

She found nothing.

At the roulette table next to her, the croupier's eyes promised her a
winner.  He poised his fingers above the wheel, and she dropped to her
knees to search the coarse weave of the carpet under his table for the
careless droppings of a winner.

"Sixty," the croupier announced.

He was teasing her, she thought.  Amusing himself while he waited.  He
had to be--there were only thirty six numbers on the wheel.

The whirr of the wheel began again.

"Sixty."  She heard the click of his Lucite marker She sat perfectly
still and waited, knowing she had run out of time.  Then soft pink
fingers lifted her up the length of an immaculate white linen suit, and
the security man crooked his arm.

"And to whom do you belong?"  he asked, removing his dark glasses.

Desperately afraid, hoping to save herself, Pia began the required
response.  It was no use.  She had come too far to retract now.
"To myself," she said quietly, with as much dignity as she could
muster.
To her amazement, the man bowed his head slightly, as if acknowledging
that she had said the right thing.  She watched the gaslights reflect
off his bald head.

"Who are you?"  she said, when he stood erect once more.

"Are you one of Their messengers?  One of Them?"
He smiled and she noticed the fine wrinkles around his eyes.  He's not
ugly after all, she thought.  The woman's words came back to her: "I
am whoever you want me to be."  He's the King of Siam, she decided,
waiting for the messenger to answer.

"I'm a dreamer like you," he said.

"Aren't you a messenger?"

"Yes.  We're all dreamers.  Rebels."

Slowly, Pia was beginning to understand.

"How old are you?"  she asked.

"Sixty-five.  I have ten more years of apprenticeship to serve."

"Before you become one of Them?"  The man nodded.

Pia looked back at the casino; it was the antithesis of everything she
had left behind, yet it was neither better nor worse.

"What happens to me now?"  she asked.

"If you wish, you may become one of us."
"One of Them, or a messenger?  An enforcer of the rules I've always
detested?"

He looked amused at her anger.

"Most people prefer narrow boundaries.  Strict rules," he said.

"It makes life easier for them."

She started to protest.
"Isn't it wonderful how They make everything simple for us," the
athlete's voice echoed back at her.
"What about those of us who'd prefer the challenge of a less simple
life?  What about those of us who'd rather control our own
destinies?"
He gestured at the casino but said nothing, as if the answer to Pia's
question only counted if she found it for herself.

"Is that why They let me come here?"  she asked.

"To show me that making choices results in chaos?  I don't believe it.
There has to be something in between."

"I'm giving you a choice now," the man said.

"You can go back to California and conform.  You can stay here and try
to make it as one of the have-nots, or you can come with me."

"And do what?"

"Try to make as many people as possible happy while you help us search
for the road in between."
He crooked his arm and waited.  Once again, he was bowing slightly,
waiting for her decision.
It was there again, Pia thought, that comfortable sense of familiarity
that she had always felt around the messengers and enforcers.  That was
when, suddenly, she knew.  The man read her face and smiled as she slid
her arm through the triangle of his elbow.
She should have known when he'd said he was a rebel and a dreamer. They
were the ones like her, the ones who survived despite the rules and the
rule-makers, or perhaps even because of the restrictions.
"Would there be any need for rebels and dreamers if things were
perfect?"  Pia asked as, together, she and the King of Siam moved
toward the door marked EXIT.  If she was right, she thought, she'd at
least be trying to find a middle path between rigidity and decadence, a
moderate road that allowed room for both leaders and followers.  And if
she was wrong .. .
She looked up at the tall man at her side.  Even if she was wrong, she
thought, she was leaving with the King of Siam.  If nothing else, she
was playing Anna at last.

by Tom Piccirilli

Tom Piccirilli is the author of Dark Father, Hexes, Shards, and The
Dead Past.  He is the assistant editor of Pirate Writings magazine and
reviews books for Mystery Scene and Mystery News.  His short fiction
has sold to Hot Blood 6 and 7, 700 Wicked Little Witch, 365 Scary
Stories, Deathrealm, Hardboiled, Terminal Fright, and others.  A
collection of five intertwined stories entitled Pentacle was recently
published by Pirate Writings Press.  All of the stories therein have
made the Honorable Mention list of Datlow and Windling's Year's Best
Fantasy and Horror.
A furious, burning wind tearing east off the desert sand-blasted the
windows as the hydrocephalic kid, heaving his immense head forward out
of the foam lined cranial clamps, pressed his cracked lips to the glass
and whimpered, "From the Well."
Schaffer's team had done a good job remaking Jeffy Grant's bedroom and
bringing it up to hospital specs-blindingly white, sterile, and packed
with whining equipment that looked impressive and didn't do anything at
all.  Even in the strictly-regulated antiseptic
environment, the new chief deprogrammer and his medical assistants
stank of nervous sweat, bile, and single malt scotch.  I didn't much
blame them.
Sandra Grant quieted her son and resettled him into the angled platform
that served as his bed.  He couldn't lie flat or the shunts wouldn't
drain properly; if he tried to turn over, the shards of his damaged
skull would stab inward and kill him.  She smoothed his cherubic cheek
and stared down for another minute before letting Schaffer's team
return to study their patient and pretend they were deeply involved
with curing him.
She dipped her face into her hands, and I spotted the barely noticeable
surgical scars on the back of her neck, like faint love scratches made
in the early mo ming
She appeared to be only in her mid-fifties, but ductile derma-polymers
hadn't even been used in the last twenty years.  She must've been among
one of the first trial groups to undergo the expensive, painful process
before the new transplantation techniques were developed to rebuke
infirmity and old age.  I could tell the most recent procedures had
fixed up a couple of earlier botched facial alterations.
She had to be at least ninety now, and I admired the will it would've
taken her to suffer a synthetic uterus implant so she could bear more
children at that stage of her life.  Being married to a millionaire
husband had its advantages, even if Fredrik Grant proved to be stupid
enough to hire an idiot like Schaffer.
Her hair, once blonde like the few remaining wisps hanging above her
son's ears, had converted to a tangy saffron.  Her eyes were brown and
angry and fertile, but they'd probably been replaced at least twice by
now.  A crucifix dangled around her throat, shedding a reflected drop
of light against the ceiling, but I could see by the ingrained grime
that she'd just started wearing it again.  She'd put it on out of a
willfulness to hold tightly to something--even a lost God--from an 204
age before the coming of the Tenfew, Children of the Well.

Jeffy clapped and giggled, pointing.

"Mom, from the Few, from the Well."
Sandra Grant turned to me, her face so filled with the conflicts of the
earth that I saw somebody else there for a second, familiar to me.

"That's all he says.

Maybe it's all any of them can say, dancing and splashing, trying to
drown themselves or whatever it is they think they're doing."  She
smiled at him as he watched the dust swirling and pecking at the
glass.
"But at least he still calls me Mom.  I suppose that means he
recognizes me, somewhere, and wants to share what he's found." Mahogany
eyes she hadn't been born with narrowed and hardened.
"Cultist maniacs.  They did this to my child.  They're doing this to
everyone's children.  They destroyed my son."
Technically, they hadn't, so far as the boy's current state went.
Schaffer had introduced the streamlined viral infection when they'd
retrieved Jeffy from the Tenfew.  It had been meant to re comprise his
personality, memory, and everything else that makes up a normal
fourteen-year-old kid.  Instead the modified virus had shattered his
central nervous system and gutted his mind.  A flawed,
self-perpetuating neural-nanotech interface had blitzkrieged through
the tender convoluted matter of his brain and continued to breed,
swelling first the cerebrum, destroying the thalamus, the temporal
lobe, followed closely by the cerebellum, causing massive organic
damage.  His head was now four times larger than normal, full of
microscopic machinery and viruses, with shunts in front, back, and
along the sides to drain off fluid and nanotech waste.

It didn't help.

He sat up gaping in the direction of the Citadel, still smiling with
only about a tenth of his intellect left.  That remaining portion
couldn't recall his name or how to tie his shoes or what it meant to be
depressed for being a hydrocephalic incapable of lying flat on his
back without killing himself.  He did remember the Tenfew, though, and
the power of water and rebirth; nothing they did could challenge or
change that, and so nothing they did could ever make him anything less
than happy.
Schaffer, the former chief deprogrammer who'd led the assault on the
Citadel and created the deprogramming bug, a man known to botch jobs
but who had a genius for shifting blame, was no longer a member of his
own team.  I suspected he was also no longer among the living.

"What's your name?"  Sandra Grant asked.

I started to answer but stopped short, almost gurgling.

"Will..  .."

My tongue felt too sleek in my mouth, and freezing sweat erupted and
rolled on my upper lip and crawled over my chest.  It was just as
terrifying to remember your own name as it was to forget it.  My
forehead heated with the molten millennia, and I drove the heel of my
hand against my brow, digging.

I knew myself.

I cleared my throat and tried once more, but couldn't get my tongue
around the taste of sweetness.
It had been so long since I'd spoken my real name that it took a while
to find it, but then I remembered who I was, and what I had done, and
had to do again.

I whispered, "Seth."

She didn't hear me, "Is something the matter?"
The acknowledgment of my true nature staggered me, and I reached out to
keep from stumbling.  Wind bucked madly outside and the oak rafters
moaned.
The surge of myself made me powerful for an instant, and then intensely
sad and lonely.  The time had come again.

"My name is Will Gardner."

"You seemed .. . distracted .. . or..  .."

"Not at all."

She led me into the study where her husband Fredrik Grant sat sipping
wine and grimacing through the 206 Tom PicciriW
windows at the Citadel glowing in the distance.  The room, like the man
himself and the ten thousand desert acres he owned, seemed to breathe
the very law of survival.  Dry and primitive, with an air of savagery
tempered by objective.  Dozens of rifles with convertible magna-fire,
mini-frag launchers, and laser rangefinder digital compass assembly
stock lined the walls, old style and new collapsibles, set beside
medals representing successful wars fought around the globe.
After leaving the military, he'd formed his own private regiment of
nearly two hundred men, remnants of armies, mercenaries, and death
squads from several nations.  Scattered over his land were towers and
tunnels and units latched deep into cliff dwellings.  He patrolled the
school system and sent his men out as far as Durango and Picotown,
waiting for the Tenfew to preach their message in university
dormitories, airports, funeral homes.  Black vans and buses rolled out
among the cities and returned to the complex, one after the other,
depositing new believers in the Tenfew Citadel.  Dozens of them daily,
perhaps more.  They'd go on to become priests, acolytes, nuns, the
dancers in their veils and robes, and those who lived continuously in
grotesque fountains and pools--brothers and sisters of the well.
An ex-Marine Colonel with a cracked Militia father, Grant had learned
early to dig in deep and gather as many guns to him as he could.  But
it hadn't helped him save his children, and the realization had broken
him as surely as if he'd stepped on a Bouncing Betty or butterfly
fragmentation mine.  He was old but still had strength, and although
they'd never get rid of all the scar tissue, if he kept taking care of
himself, he could add another two or three decades to his already
aching hundred years.  He'd had skeletal transplants to stave off the
osteoporosis.

"Hello, Will," he said.

"Hello, Fred."
There were a number of framed photos of Jeffy piled on his desk,
facing outward, as if Grant meant to use them to lure me into his
vengeance against the Children of the Well.  Alongside were pictures of
his daughter, Elaine.  Both teenagers were blond and blue eyed smiling
with only a hint of the world's ancient concerns in their faces, so
young that I could feel the ashes stirring thickly in my veins.
He said, "You were right when you warned me off Schaffer.  The
ineffectual cretin ruined the entire assault and failed to get Elaine
out.  You've already seen what his unrealistic promises did to
Jeffy."

"I'm sorry."

"The government doesn't realize what maniacs these Tenfew cultists are.
I don't give a damn if they are a recognized religion sanctioned by the
world order."  He leaned back, as if to drawn me in further toward him,
so that the photographs of his children would be inches from my nose. 
The padded flesh around his eyes fell in on itself.
"I've watched them grow these last fifty years.  Runaways, the hungry,
the damned, they snatch whoever they can and absorb the numbers.  I
remember when the Tenfew were just a small gathering in a hut, digging
a well where there was no water."

"But there was."

"Yes," he admitted, "and now there's a honeycomb city of one hundred
thousand nestled between those cliffs.  I need you to prepare and lead
the next mission."
He continued on for a while, but I could no longer quite connect myself
to the man I had been five minutes ago.  In the much larger truth, that
small segment had already drifted into the overwhelming ocean of my
name and duty.
"I lost six men bringing Jeffy out.  Schaffer planned it too damn
poorly."

"You were foolish to go in with force."

"They had my children," he groaned, his rage so much a part of him that
it barely slipped into his voice, He talked about love and murder and
failed predawn raids.  At one point I cackled, because I like to
laugh, and he reared away, startled and turning for a moment, before
telling me more.
"Omega and Beta squads each had transmission, but not all the cameras
worked."

"Show me the film."

He keyed the pad at his desk and the 3-D Silicon graphics ONYX
workstation came alive, giving a fairly accurate modeling and
simulation of what had occurred that night Schaffer had attacked the
Few.
That scene filled the room until we were inside it, and we sat watching
them come down in front of us through the cliffs, gazing over the
compound, four of them stupid enough to break radio silence and whisper
in awe at the Citadel.  Grant growled and looked like he wanted to
stand up and kick Schaffer in the face.
Beta squad made a couple of crude comments on the beautiful fountain
dancers, translucent girls who lay naked rolling in the pools washing
their pigment off, splashing and arching their backs in joy for the
Well, giggling, some making love.  Omega team mimicked the chants and
songs they heard.  Somewhere inside myself the assassin I'd been grew
disgusted with their performance.
Soon Schaffer clambered into the complex, cut the throats of two
unarmed, smiling acolytes, and used the weapon subsystem M78
close-combat optic to sight the next objective.  We could see the
wavering shades of green come through on the thermal scope as he
crawled and propped the rifle in the dirt, utilizing infrared pointer
illuminators to weed out the chest cavities of two Tenfew priests
wandering past lost deep in prayer.  The squads ran rampant through the
waterfall dormitories until they hauled the non resisting Jeffy Grant
out of the geyser where he hummed to himself, and dragged him from the
foaming room.  Omega team led, carrying the boy, while Beta squad
followed and set off a few poorly-placed and improperly timed
charges.
Six cameras went dead at that moment, and Schaffer and the other five
men dragged Jeffy from the Children of the Well, never turning back to
check on what had happened to the others.

The scene ended and we sat in silence, sipping wine.

The ethereal glow of the Citadel slid into the room, igniting the
darkness with a haze.

"I'll get you the best, not mercenary filth like these," Grant said.

"How many men will you need?"

"None."

"What?"

"I'm going alone."

"It's impossible.  You'll never get Elaine out by yourself.  There're
too many of them, and they toil on that abomination of a temple day and
night.  You'll need point men, a backup team..  .."  He drifted off,
unable to finish, realizing he sounded as inane as any other frightened
old man.  I got a vague and distanced sense of heartache.  Wearily, he
asked, "Can you do it before the month is out?"

"I'll leave within the hour."

He shook his head and threw his glass at the wall, and fell back in his
chair without a word, hardly breathing.  Sandra Grant appeared in the
doorway and he told her, "Show, Mr.  Gardner out."
His hands were soft and weak and trembling, like those of a keeper of
sheep.  I knew he hadn't been the one who ordered Schaffer's death.
Mrs.  Grant led me down the hall and past Jeffy's room, the machines
louder than before because the staff had turned up the volume to make
up for the fact they couldn't do anything for him.  When I shook hands
with her, I recognized her angry clench, full of conflict and
resolution, thick with the world and full of responsibility and
choices, and realized that she would have the strength to murder her
son.

"Thank you, Seth," she said.

Four paths ran into the city of the Tenfew, like four rivers churning
among the cliffs, choked with pilgrims
seeking salvation and sanctuary.  The black vans and buses eased
forward, lined up by the dozen while a sea of people roamed in the
dust.  Others drove up in overheated cars packed and strapped with
goods, ready to turn over all their possessions to the Well.  I walked
among them, filing past the aides and acolytes, the bleached-bone pale
nuns who carried huge earthen jugs of water, letting the thirsty drink
and washing the faces and backs of the severely sunburned.
Organization meant nothing, though symbolism still did.  Carved into
the cliffs for all to see were the gods of the Tenfew, Children of the
Well.
Every deity of the pantheon appeared happy and weak.  Ten beings who
ruled the earth and sky and moon, most of them slack-jawed,
hollow-eyed, so horribly thin and bent they looked as though any child
of the Crusades could beat them to death.  Only the first two and the
last mattered, the rest were aspects and scarecrows: man with his
unbearably stony glare, and woman stooped as if listening to
whispers.
And at the end, the other man, trailing out of step behind the rest,
jigging a mischievous jig and seeming much weaker than any of them
despite his being the evil one.
The temple stood thirty stories, and they worked on it the way the Jews
had slaved in Egypt, except they did it smiling.  I couldn't tell what
it represented, if anything.  Somebody had become much more aesthetic,
or simply gone insane across the years.  Unlike the building of the
pyramids or Stonehenge or the heads of Easter Island, this had nothing
to do with the calendar or position of the stars, not even with ego.
Maybe we were all losing our touch.
It didn't take long to find the blood on the stones and steel, where
mishaps had occurred and kids had been crushed.  It didn't slow the
fervor of the devoted.
Like all temples, this one was alive, and its hunger continued to
grow.
I had power but didn't know what it might be-perhaps only memory,
perhaps chance.
I looked for guards, weapons, sentries, automated or human, and saw
nothing.  Maybe Schaffer's men had simply blown themselves up with one
of their last charges.  The pale, wet priests wore sopping robes and
vestments, and ushered the pilgrims into the fountains where they
bathed in the cooling shadows of the towers and obelisks of the
Citadel.  Nuns danced in the water among corpses of the drowned that
tumbled and heaved in the pools.  Maybe they'd finally found the means
of building a religion capable of crossing the horrifying barrier
between life and death--or maybe they'd simply forgotten just who was
still alive and who was already dead.
The hymns grew deafening along with the gut-shot wailing of the wind. I
felt comfortable in the sun, listening to their familiar rhetoric,
appeals, and litanies.
They sang and prayed to the Well, danced and preached and pontificated
to the Well, called up and called down and called over the Well, but
after three hours of searching the insane city I still couldn't find
the damn thing.
Eventually a girl who could have been Elaine Grant, if it mattered
anymore, with a beatific smile so wide and empty it had almost worn out
at the edges of her mouth, approached and brought me a jug.

"Drink from the Well."

"Elaine Grant?"

She nodded happily.

"Drink."  She kept nodding at nothing and the sway of her soaked hair
as she brushed it behind her ears reminded me of her brother.

"It is from the Well."

"Where are the labs?"
"Labs?"  Her mouth couldn't completely close, her sublime grin holding
it open like that of a fish.

"Drink from the Well."

"Where is the Well?"

"Drink."

"Is there a Well?"

"Drink."

"Where do you draw your water?"

"From the Well."

"Elaine, most other gods allow for light conversation.

Consider that point."

I grabbed the jug, took a sip, and could taste the high nutrient
content and sweet recombinant DNA agents immediately trying to change
my genomes at the first base pair, I chuckled and shook my head-they
were going all out this time, no fooling around.
All eighty thousand genes abruptly started shifting sequences in the
three billion chemical base pairs that make up human genome DNA,
altering the long protein strands from the beginning to end.  The
Children of the Well weren't waiting tens of thousands of years the way
they had changed humanity before with the introduction of each new
faith.  Asians, the Middle Eastern faiths, Mayans, Africans, Native
Americans, Egyptians, even the lost Anasazi and Incas and Roanoke
Settlement--with each new belief came a little more dabbling into
genetics, and a slightly altered new human race.
I allowed the virus to run its course and could feel the changes the
Tenfew were attempting to effect: an enlarging of the thalamus in the
diencephalon, which would function as a tighter link between the psyche
and the soma-body.  Greater conduction of neural axon impulses: the
water had to be nutrient-heavy because these people wouldn't care much
for eating.  A modification from twelve pairs of nerves on the
undersurface of the brain to fifteen.  Less muscle tone in specific
areas of the body, especially the face.  It was difficult to frown or
look pensive.  Tear ducts shrank-less crying, less ability to show fear
or sadness.  I'd been wrong: Schaffer's nanotech virus hadn't destroyed
Jeffy Grant's intelligence.  The Children of the Well had already
stolen most of it.
"Nice touch," I whispered, and the assassin's hands snapped shut and
shattered the jug.  What bitter tricks.

"Is there a garden?"  I asked her.

She wanted to look angry about the broken jug but couldn't pull it off
with the weakened muscles of her blissful visage, so she pointed to the
east and strode off.  It was just as well she never saw home again; her
mother would be doomed to another killing.  I walked east through the
complex, finally catching the scent of fruit among the dust, and
followed until I found the garden.
Twined with Creosote Bush and Desert Willows, draped with limbs of
Joshua and Smoke Trees and Screwbean Mesquite, they'd refashioned Eden.
Colors exploded from every direction with blooms of Freesia and
Belladonna, the Mariposa Lilies and brilliant Ghost Flowers.  Clusters
of fine, tiny, barbed spines hid among the ropes and tendrils of
plants, sap drooling across branches.  Numerous erect stems with
bright, red-to-orange blossoms and white leaves flowed into the brush
and trees.  I slipped between the bushes, careful of the Saguaro Cacti
and Crucifixion Thorns, and heard laughter.
At last, the Well.  Dozens of people gathered in a much larger pool,
the young and ancient and the naked dead stewed together in the
frothing mix.  They swam and drowned and made love in the water, one
huge clot of roiling bodies.  I pressed my way among the throng,
plunged in, and could feel the cold currents sweeping up from the
depths.  Vibrations of machinery thrummed in my ears and on the edge of
memory.  The Tenfew's filtration system and reticulation pipes had to
be perfect in order to clean out the corpses.  The man I'd been had a
background in underwater demolitions and enjoyed the feel of slicing
through the water.  It took two minutes to fully oxygenate my lungs,
and then I dove and kicked for the bottom.
At least one of the entry ports would back flush as part of the
filtration system.  The drowned were dragged down in a long train, the
subtle undertow drawing them as they spun and waved and shimmied into
the darkness.  I followed the dead, as I usually did, and descended to
about a hundred feet, the effective three atmospheres starting to drive
into my skull, my chest burning, and allowed the distillation to draw
me into the pipe.  If I could hold out another ninety seconds, I'd be
at the heart of the labs, where the Tenfew would still be experimenting
with humanity and god after all these millennia.  If I couldn't hold
out, I'd have to start all over again inside another man.  The thought
didn't please me or the assassin I'd been.
Carcasses tightened around me as the piping grew smaller, and my breath
bubbled between my lips in agony.  Death and life grew even more into
one as mouths brushed my own for a moment, and were tugged away.
With an enormous roar and splashing purge, I came free into a much
wider funnel and came up for breath inside a large tank where the
debris was divided into separate streams that whirled along.  Bodies
wove past me like fish trapped in towing nets of a trawler.
I flopped out of the filtration tanks and fell on my face sucking
sterile air.  This was the distillation center of a much cleaner
religion.  The labs would be directly next door, as they had been since
the crypts of Egypt when they'd studied and catalogued brains before
embalming and mummifying the dead.
I struggled to the door and found it locked with a simple keypad
numerical combination.  They could never remember if the 666 was the
number of the savior or the serpent, or if there was any difference.
There wasn't.  I slid into the lab and found their computers and
machines whirring and droning as loudly and emptily as those machines
in Jeffy Grant's bedroom.
Schematics, readouts, and charts on the social, genealogical, ethnic,
and theological evolution of the world filled the screens.  I called up
diagrams and scales on the growth of the Tenfew, their architectural
plans, new government order, history, the eager spread of the racial
virus, the presumed rise of beautiful island cities.  They still had no
reason for the temple, they just liked it.  In a caustic glowing red
one computer spat all Epidemiological records for food, air, and
water-borne and sexually-transmitted diseases: cholera, meningitis,
hemorrhagic fever, AIDS, influenza, transmissible spongiform
encephalopathy, yellow fever, and Western Equine Encephalitis.  They'd
found a cure to all major diseases and most of the smaller ones as
well, but would have to allow the vaccinations out step by step over
the next century.  In creating the vaccines, they'd also stumbled onto
and mutated other infections, including the bubonic and pneumonic forms
of our old friend Yersinia pest is the Black Plague.
All samples were kept in the black box room, a separate hyper-insulated
lab used for storing hot zone samples.  Using the automatoid robotic
arms and skeletal pl asti-steel claws, I enabled the controls, cracked
open the protective seals in the chamber, and stared through the window
at the now lethal air in the black box the same way Jeffy Grant had
stared at the dust.

I brought my lips to the glass, for the hell of it.

She entered.
Her hair was wet, as it had been on that first day of the world.  She
turned and peered at me, and I watched as our entire history welled in
her eyes.  It staggered her as it had done me, and she reached for my
hand as she always did.  I took her in my arms and felt the blood tide
beneath her flesh, and knew my wife.
For a moment I had no idea what to call her.  She hadn't gone by her
name since her sheep herding son had been murdered by his brother.  The
queen of these new gods was known as Katha, I recalled, or maybe it was
Hatha or Latha, and I didn't find them to be any worse than Hera or
Freya or Isis, but none quite as lovely as Sequana or Ninmah.

"Hello."  J said.

"Oh.  Hello, Seth."
She would hope to kill me now, as I pressed my cheek to nuzzle her
neck--she usually made a halfhearted attempt before sobbing beneath the
abject weight of the sorrow that had befallen us.  I waited, but she
merely held me as we slowly swayed together.

"So, what do you think?"  she asked.

"Pretty hokey^ The Tenfew?  Children of the Well?
About the worst you've come up with yet.  You don't even have a holy
book this time."

"It gets more difficult."

"Yes, I know."

We looked to the lab door because this was his cue.

and always had been.
He entered with a young man following at his side, an adolescent who
didn't smile insanely and whose hair was dry.  His son, no doubt, or
perhaps mine.  The Fruiteater had difficulty in ever forgoing the past
or learning from it.  He still looked the way he had when I'd first met
him, just as all his sons had looked through the ages.  I, too, always
looked like Seth, and the sons of Seth, and the sons of Adam, and we
were all exactly the same.
Even his rage had worn as thin as a leaf, and when he grimaced at me it
seemed more like a child trying to hold in a laugh.

"You're a liar," he said.

"An assassin, a deceiver."  The puerile words came to him by rote,
without meaning or intent or fear of what was going to happen next.

"You've always been a beguile r."

We'd said these sentences many times in many ways, but at least I
hadn't tired of them yet.

"I simply offered you a choice.  You took it.  You made it."

He held a collapsible rifle with magna-fire that he'd taken off of one
of the lost team members, the laser rangefinder aimed at my heart.  I
took a step toward him, and he spoke with such a monotone that it
sounded like the voice of emptiness itself.

"Stop, no closer."

"Stop?  You actually said that to me?"  For a man with the knowledge of
all humanity under his tongue, who'd been able to build empires and
cure murder and find water where there was none, he wasn't very bright
anymore.

"Don't take another step."

"You get more foolish every time I see you."
I've rarely pulled the trick on him, but it had to be done again.  I
moved in fast and low.  and he pulled the trigger and shot the assassin
Will Gardner and blew out the entire chest cavity.  I sighed inside his
son and reached out and disarmed him and threw the rifle across the
room.  He had a puzzled expression on his face like he was having a
difficult time remembering the last time this scene unfolded in this
fashion.

He'd grown so forgetful.

"Don't you understand?  This is complete bliss," he argued, because
like all men and gods he was doomed by his own conceit.
"They do have a choice, they've always had a choice, and they choose to
be at peace with us.  They are my children."
"They're mine as well, and most of them don't even make love anymore.
Soon none of them will.  You've doomed them to stagnation.  You've
damned them with harmony and serenity."

"You don't have the right."

"Yes.  I do.  I'm the only one who does I had been the serpent, Loki,
Coyote, that same genetic component embedded in all men and mischief
makers who stepped out of line and lived by their own set of values,
leaving a barren, blank-faced world behind, teaching them how to dance,
to fight, to cause trouble and garner their own will.

"I opened their eyes.  I opened your eyes."

"You tricked my wife."

"She's my wife, too, and I saved her."

What he lacked in verve he made up for in patience.
He'd become as drowned by his antiquity as any of the corpses that had
bobbed beside me in the pipe.
"Have the offspring of Seth done so much better with the world? They've
brought it to the edge of ruin."
"I know, they botched it, too, but at least they came by their triumphs
honestly.  They may have made the wrong choices, but at least they were
genuine."
"Genuine?  Using organ donors to prolong their lives and viral
nano-infections that can alter their personal traits?  Men who cut
throats in the darkness?"
I thought about it.  In the early days, in the garden, back when First
Man and Monster Slayer strode the earth before the face of the Great
Spirit, and Adam slumbered naked without knowing he was naked, things
had been much simpler.  He refused to remember that we existed in all
men, and always would.  I'd forever rise against him with whispers to
his wife, my wife, because that was our fate, and the fate of the
world.

"Don't you understand yet?"  I said.

"You always invite me in."

I reached for the door of the black box hot zone.

It lacked the subtlety I'd been known for, but I didn't have much
choice.
"Oh, God, what are you doing?"  he said.  He still called on God, even
now as the purveyor of new races and deities, and I didn't know what to
make of that.

"No.  No, you're insane."

"Maybe."

"You'll destroy the world."

"Not all of it.  Anybody who struggles hard enough to survive will
live.  They'll have the choice to fight or to die.  That's what I'm
supposed to do."
I gave him credit because he lunged for me then and tightened his hands
around my throat.  I respected him more in that moment than ever before
in our endless lives.  His hands were my hands, and it was like staring
into my own furious eyes as we wrestled and spun across the floor in
the cool room where the earth might be saved or doomed.

I called to her.

"Open it."

"No!"  he shrieked, just as he had after they'd tasted the fruit.

She moved forward shakily, always so beautiful and unsure, but
listening to me because she listened to her heart.  She unlocked the
door to the black box, and gripped the handle.

I gasped, "You know that it's the right choice to make."

"No, I'm not sure I do know that, Seth.  I'm not certain of anything
anymore."
"Don't!"  he screamed at her, as he forever would though she never
listened.  He chewed his lips until they bled.

"I'll still be here," he hissed at me as we pressed nose to nose.

"Even if only a handful of people survive in a world of murdered
children, I'll be inside one of them."

"So will I."

Her knuckles turned white, then blue, as she clutched the handle of the
hot box.  In the warm glow of the past and the burning, needy fate of
the future that would befall us again, groping for what lay ahead and
hoping it would be like that day in the garden before the Lord God
tempted me too boldly, when I dripped the venom of love upon my wife,
we could feel earth and heaven about to tilt in a new direction.

He tightened his hold on my throat, on his own throat.

Our lives and souls set in our duty, I wondered which of us would crawl
on our bellies in the dust next time, and which would stand and whisper
warm words of temptation to our beautiful love, and taste the sweetness
of her sugar-smeared lips in the next unbearable Eden.

by Ron Goulart

The work of Ron Goulart has its roots in many genres.  His science
fiction has elements of mystery, his mysteries have elements of
fantasy, and almost everything is infused with wit.  Under numerous
pseudonyms he has written dozens of novels, short stories,
novelizations, and comic strips, including recent nonfiction in The Big
Book of Noir.

THE dog started complaining even before he was completely unpacked.

"Quit goosing me with that crowbar," he requested in his piping voice
as he spit out twists of plaz excelsior.
"You might as well stay in the crate.  Tinker," suggested Jack Bowers,
setting the crowbar down on his lucite desk next to the packing
container.

"You're obviously far from repaired."

"And you.  Jack, are still a dim bulb said Tinker/ 236-HMX, poking his
chrome-plated nose over the edge of the partially opened neo wood
crate.
"My quick wits and gift for sparkling repartee are innate qualities of
this particular model of Forensic Computerbot/Compact Police hound
Format."
"Sparkling repartee is one thing.  Tinker, and wiseass insults are
something else again."

"Suppose we get down to business."  suggested the robot dog.

"I was languishing in the Stemwinder Electronics International Repair
Shop in the benighted Pasadena Sector of Greater Los Angeles for nigh
on to a full trapping week.  If I know you, the detective agency is on
the brink of being in the toilet by now."

"Actually, Jack Bowers, Hollywood Detectives, Inc.

has been thriving while you were getting overhauled."

"Hooey," said Tinker.

"If you go more than another couple of days without me on the staff,
you'll have to sign up for the SoCal Dole."  Giving an impatient snarl,
the chrome-plated little got lifted his silvery right forepaw.
A thin beam of purplish light emanated from the paw.  When it touched
the neo wood slats, they swiftly disintegrated into sooty powder.

"I told them to deactivate that disintegrator of yours."

Tinker hopped free of the confines of the packing crate, booted it with
a glittering hind foot, and sent it sliding free off the desktop and
onto the paisley thermocarpet, along with Jack's electro pen and three
fax memos

"Sounder minds prevailed."

"When I pay $7,400 for a complete tune-up and overhaul, I expect those
half wits at SEI to follow the instructions that--" "Being a shade
wiser than you, kiddo, they had the good sense to consult me before
performing any sacriligious acts upon my person."  The dog hopped off
the desk and landed in Jack's chair.

"What sort of caseload has been piling up in my absence?"

Jack eyed his forensic got.

"Did they at least repair your built-in cameras?"

"Sure, all fixed and shipshape.  You got a surveillance job for me,
boss?"  The metallic hound curled up into a comfortable sprawl on the
private investigator's cushion.

"Yeah, a couple of adultery cases," Jack told him.

"Plus a possible industrial spying thing.  I've been handling that and
Reisberson's working on one of the fooling around cases, but--"
"Reisberson?"  Tinker produced a derisive noise.
"It's a real pity they can't send humans to repair shops.  There's a
lad who is in serious need of an overhaul."
Resting his backside against the desk edge, Jack said, "Apparently they
didn't adjust your snide gear either."

"Truth is never snide," Tinker pointed out.

"Okay, here's how we ... Oops!  What time is it anyway?"  He held his
left forepaw up to his ear, consulting his voxwatch.
"Holy shit, three minutes after eleven am.  All your distractions
nearly made me miss my favorite vidwall show."
"Nope, no, not at all.  You aren't going to watch that henceforward,"
he informed the dog.
"Those half wits at the repair shop were also supposed to curb your
admiration for her broadcasts."
"They did, sure, but it wasn't tough modifying their adjustments."
Rising up on the chair on his hind legs, Tinker pointed his right
forepaw at the wall opposite.

The vast vidwall screen came to life.

A thickset man in his fifties, clad in a pale yellow bizsuit was
smiling behind a large rubberoid desk.
"..  . though I control Stemwinder Electronics International, the
Waterworks Potable Water Company, Latin American Sweatshops, Inc."
Total Multimedia, and other monopolies and trusts too numerous to list,
I am still humble and awed in the presence of certain exceptional
talents," he was saying.
"That's right, folks, Erie Trafalgar is a simple fan like you when it
comes to the lady I'm about to introduce.  Here she is, Polly Bowers,
Hollywood Detective."
The plump tycoon vanished.  Now on the immense screen appeared a sunlit
bedroom.  There was a large, unmade floating oval bed in the
shades-of-blue room's exact center.  From an arched doorway a very
pretty naked red-haired young woman came hurrying in.

"Jesus," observed Jack, "it gets worse and worse."

"Hey, Polly's got an impressive figure.  She may as well display it."
Tinker rested his metal chin on the desk top, let his plaz tongue
loll.

"Not to 3,500.000 viewers."

"3,700,000, according to E-Variety."

Polly halted beside the bed, catching her breath.

"I

stayed in the darn sonic shower too long," she apologized.

"I got to woolgathering, you know, and .. ."

She shrugged her bare shoulders.

"That's why I'm late."
Smiling, she located a pair of all-season sin silk panties among the
tangle of bedding and started slipping them on.
"Oh, and don't let me forget to make the required dippy disclaimer."
She undulated as the underwear reached her hips.
"I'm compelled to inform you that I'm Polly Bowers, Hollywood
Detective, and that I have absolutely no connection with Jack Bowers,
Hollywood Detective."  She gave an exasperated shake of her head as she
plucked a one-size-fits-all bra off the bed.
"As if anybody would confuse my top-of-the-line detective agency with
that rundown pest hole operated, barely, by that doddering old coot to
whom I ..."  Frowning, bra only partially in place, she glanced off
camera.

"Huh?  What?"

Polly shrugged and put on the bra.

"Yeah, okay," she said resignedly.

"My darn producer reminds me that, even though I'm speaking God's
truth, I'm to refrain, for legal reasons, from mentioning that my
erstwhile husband is an inept private eye or a superannuated old
fogy."

Jack said, "Being forty-two doesn't put me in the old fogy category."

"You're forty-six, chief," reminded the robot dog.

"That still isn't old."

"Polly's twenty-eight, so to a kid like that, you seem--"

"She's thirty-one."

"You've never been able to prove that."
Polly had pulled on a pair of skin fit crimson slax and was wandering
around her bedroom in search of a suitable singlet.
"Lots of you have called in asking about the next issue of Polly
Bowers' Mystery Magazine," she was saying.
"Well, I'm happy to announce that the latest multimedia edition will be
out next week, coming to you from dear Erie Trafalgar's Stranglehold
House division.  And, yep, for the thousands of you who've been
demanding it, there will be another installment of my ongoing memoir, /
Married A Nitwit But Had The Good Sense Not To Renew Our 3-Year
Marriage Contract And Instead Founded My Own Detective Agency And Am A
Huge Success Today And Happy As A Clam To Boot.  You'll also find
fiction, puzzles, recipes and .. . Hold it, folks."  She frowned off
camera.

"Huh?  What?"

"She's not supposed to call me a nitwit," said Jack.
Polly said, "My producer reminds me that I was conned into agreeing not
to call Jack Bowers a nitwit on my show anymore.  So what's left?  Can
I call him a dumbbell, a schmuck, a moron, a buffoon, jerk?"
Eyes narrowing slightly, she glanced again toward the unseen
producer.
"Goof?  That's it?  That's all I'm allowed to use?  Goof?  Well, okay.
I can use nitwit in my magazine but not on the air.  But a nitwit by
any other name .. ."  Bending from the waist, she picked up a
candy-striped singlet from the floor.
"You'd better," Jack told the robot dog, "get in touch with my
attorneys."
"Already did.  They say you can't afford any more lawsuits.  We still
owe them for the last one."

"Shit," observed the private eye.

On the wall his former wife was pulling on the singlet over her head.
"Before I show you the interview I did with the GLA DA," she said, "I
want to make an important announcement."
"She'd better not call me anything else."  Jack left the desk and
eased closer to the vidwall.
"Every one of you out there in Greater Los Angeles has been living in
abject fear over the past two weeks," Polly said, sitting on the edge
of her floating bed and crossing her long legs.
"I'm referring, of course, to the latest serial killer to emerge in our
area.

The one the media's dubbed The Malibu Sheer.

You've no way of knowing if this maniac, who strikes at random, will
come stalking you next.  Will you be found sliced neatly into three
portions with a lazrod?"

She uncrossed her legs and stood.

"I'm concerned for you and for every citizen of Greater LA.  So,
without in any way implying any criticism of the wonderful SoCal State
Police or the GLA Homicide Squad, I am volunteering to go to work on
the case."  Smiling, Polly spread her hands wide.
"I'll be doing this as a community service, not charging anyone my
usual impressive fee- From the moment I go off the air this morning,
I'll be putting the entire resources of Polly Bowers, Hollywood
Detective, to work on cracking this case.
And I'll bet you that you won't see a certain senile private op daring
to make a similar offer on ... Huh?  What?"

Jack turned off the wall.

"That's sufficient Polly for one day, Tinker."

The dog hopped up atop the desk.

"Suppose," he suggested, "we take up the challenge?"
"What challenge?"  He moved over to one of the tinted vie windows of
his tower office.
"How many challenges have come your way today so far?"  inquired the
dog.
"I mean the gauntlet that your ex-wife just tossed in your puss.  What
say we go after the Malibu Slicer?"
Jack stood watching the hazy morning outside, the towers and the
nickering sky cars going by.

"I'd enjoy beating Polly in a contest," he said after a moment.

"But can I do it?"

Tinker chuckled.

"With me back on the job, boss," he assured him, "it'll be a cinch."
Tinker, after scanning the menu screen on his side of the small, round
restaurant table, said, "The clonedveat on sawdust-rye sounds tasty.  I
think I'll try that and a side order of--" "You can't eat," reminded
Jack from his side of the table.

"You're a robot."

"I can simulate eating, however, chief."  He nodded up at the hovering
android waitress.
"The cloned-veal san, hon, and the mouse-gene-lettuce tossed salad and
a mug of simulated cafe blanco."

"What kind of sugasub?"  inquired the pretty blonde mechanism.

"Suga .. . suga .. . sub ... up ... bup .. . wang!"
The robot dog, who was sitting in an adjustable hi chair reached out
his left forepaw and slipped it inside the andy's sin silk blouse.

"Voxbox on the fritz, sweetheart," he told her.

"Fix it in a jiffy.  Voila."^ "Oh, thanks," she said, smiling.

"That feels lots better."

"You can extract your paw now," suggested the detective.
"If I hadn't been sidetracked into the gumshoe trade," observed Tinker
as he withdrew his silvery forepaw, "I would've made a great healer.
Got the touch."

The healed android waitress asked Jack, "And what'll you have, sir?"

"What's the catch of the day?"

"Cloned-abalone, sir, with synthetic polenta on the side."

"Fine."  He made a go-away-now gesture.
The dog watched her walk away from their table on the second level of
Natural Nat's in the New Westwood Sector of GLA.

"Her backside needs realigning," he said.

"How did your morning's interviews go, boss?"

k "Where'd you acquire the ability to repair androids?"

"Little knack I taught myself," answered Tinker.

"It may come in handy when I go into business on my own, sahib."

"How're you planning to do that?  I own you."

"Just kidding."  The robot dog made a tinny chuckling noise.

"While you were out pumping informants and stool pigeons, I hooked
myself up with the SoCal State Police main computer and read everything
they have on the Malibu Slicer."
"I assume you did that discreetly.  The state cops don't take kindly
to--" "Do you honestly believe that any dimwit cop is going to tumble
to the deft intrusion maneuvers that I practice?"

"Okay, spare me the sales pitch.  What'd you find out?"

"Want me to print out my concise, pithy, and informative summation of
all I've learned about the case to date?"  Tinker touched a slot on his
chrome plated side.

"Verbally for now."  Jack glanced around the restaurant.

As yet there were no patrons at the tables nearest to them.

"And in a low, confidential tone of voice, huh?"

Tinker produced a raspberry sound with his plaz tongue.
"As you know, the killer was dubbed the Malibu Slicer because the first
two victims resided in that tacky paradise.  The next chopped-up
victim, however, lived in the Old Westwood Sector, and the one after
that was based in the Pasadena Sector.  So far, there doesn't seem to
be a discernable geographic pattern to the slayings.  The information
the SoCal cops have made public contains a minimum of bullshit,"
reported the dog.
"I haven't uncovered any indication that they know a hell of a lot more
than they're telling the media."
Jack leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table top, "Okay, they
can't link the locations--how about the victims?"

Tinker hesitated.

"They can't, no."

Jack leaned farther forward.

"But you can?"

"I'm still working on it," Tinker answered finally.

"That's interesting," said the private investigator.
"One of my informants this morning hinted that the whole serial killer
idea is a diversion."

Tinker nodded his silvery head.

"Been done before," he agreed.
"Kill a bunch of people, make it look like the handiwork of a
certifiable loon.  And out of all the victims, there're maybe only one
or two you really wanted knocked off."
"That's what I'm thinking about.  Have you dug up anything that--" "I'm
still burrowing, boss."

Jack leaned back.

"Maybe you shouldn't have sent out that press release this morning," he
told the dog.

"That's going to irritate both the law and Polly."

"We're doing this for publicity," reminded Tinker.
"The first step in going after publicity is to alert the populace as to
what you're up to.  If that annoys anybody, well, tough taffy."  When
he shrugged his shoulders, they made a faint ratcheting sound.
"But annoying Polly might--" "What an interesting coincidence."  The
dog cocked his head to the left.
Polly Bowers, fully dressed in an orange sin silk lunch suit was
striding across the see-through floor toward them.  Clutched in her
tanned right hand was a single sheet of buff-colored recycle paper.

"Listen, you .."  She halted beside the table, taking a deep breath.

"I'm trying to remember what I can call you in public without having
those doddering shysters who represent you sue my ass."

"Goof," supplied Tinker, "That's allowed, as are sap and moron."

"Listen, you goof," said Jack's former spouse, "what's the big idea of
challenging me?"  She slapped the sheet of paper down on the table
over his menu screen

It was a small newspaper titled The Nitwit News.

He asked, "What the hell is this?"
"My computer prints this out for me every morning, sap," explained
Polly, angry.
"It sums up what you've been up to during the previous twenty-four
hours.
Usually it's a dinky little thing and one can stuff all the news about
a nonentity like you .. ."  She paused, glanced at Tinker.

"Am I allowed nonentity?"

"Perfectly acceptable," replied the dog.
"You can stuff all the news about a nonentity like you in a gnat's
butt.  But today, no, today you hand out your insipid press release and
have the temerity to--" "Actually, Polly, it was Tinker who--"
"Typical, passing the buck yet again," she accused.
"The point is that only someone suffering from severe delusions would
dare pit his dinky little pathetic detective agency against mine and
claim he's going to beat me to the solution of the Slicer case.  I've
already got it nearly solved now."

"So don't worry, then, Polly."

"It exasperates me when a pitiful shamus like you sticks his snoot in
my business," continued his onetime wife.
"Just make sure, Jack, that you don't get underfoot and screw up my
investigation."

"We are no longer wed," he reminded her.

"As I understand SoCal law, Polly, I am therefore no longer obliged to
listen to your hectoring and fish-wifery.  Begone, shoo."

She snatched up the copy of The Nitwit News.

"You better move fast on this, moron," she told him.

"Because I'm within a day of clearing the whole mess up."

She turned on her heel and went walking away.
"Say what you will about her," commented Tinker, ^her rear end is still
in great shape."
The voxbox in the rattling elevator wheezed when it announced, "Lower
Depths, last stop, coming up."
Through the dirt-blurred plaz walls of the descending car.  Jack could
see the shadowy streets of the Ground Level Sector of Greater Los
Angeles.  The neo metal pillars that held up the pedramps were scrawled
with curses and protests; scraps and tatters were abundant on the
rutted pavements.  Near the gutted remains of an overturned land car
two wild mutt dogs were having a snarling fight over what looked to be
somebody's arm.

The cage came to a thumping, thunking landing.

"You sure you want to get out here, pal?"  inquired the dangling
voxbox.

"I can run you back up to Level Ten."

"That's okay."  He absently patted the stun gun in his shoulder
holster.

"This is a business call."

"I'd hate to be in your business," wheezed the elevator as the door
shimmied open.

"You ought to do something about that wheeze."

He stepped out into the hot, gray afternoon.
"No kidding?  Hell, I've been on the repair waiting list for nearly
five months."
Easing around a sprawled cyborg whose left foot was missing.  Jack
started for his destination.
On the next corner three skinny teens were, roughly, dismantling a
Salvation Army robot.  It kept saying, in a squeaky voice, "Bless you,
my children.  Bless you, my children."
The skinniest of the youths, wearing a ragged overall suit, eyed
Jack.

"We're collecting for charity, asshole.

Let's have a contribution."

"What a shame.  I left my Bam card at the office."

The detective yanked out his stun gun set it on the lowest setting with
a nudge of his thumb and shot the thin young man.

"Son of a bitch," remarked one of his companions.

The stun gunned youth lost the use of his legs and fell down.
"Hey, that's no fair," he muttered as his head bonked against the
broad metal chest of the fallen SA got.

"If there's no objection, I'll continue on my way."

"You've crippled Oskar for life," accused the lean youth in the
sequinned overcoat.
"Nope, only for an hour."  Keeping his stun gun in the open, the
detective moved along.
TeaHouse 23 was in middle of the next block, scrunched between a
defunct ponic farmers market and a MedCal Free Crematorium.
"Out of the way."  A battered land hearse was pulled up to the curb and
two black-enameled robots were worrying a body out of the rear of the
vehicle.
Jack stepped aside, waiting until they'd carried the gaunt dead woman
inside the cremation facility.

One of her shoes fell off as they were hauling her.

A neo leather pump, it bounced on the paving.
After it fell into the gutter.  Jack approached the door of TeaHouse
23.

The metallic door inquired, "Yeah?"

"I have an appointment with Willis."

"You're alluding to Mr.  Marryat?"

"That Willis, yeah."

"Hold it, while we confirm."

Roughly a minute later the door jerked open inward.

There were ten small square tables in the little tearoom.

All were occupied, and at six of those customers were having their
fortunes told by a variety of mystics and seers.

Walking through the room, Jack pushed through a curtained doorway.

"You must really be up the creek, Jack."  A lean, bearded man was
sitting in a plaz armchair near the far wall.
"I need some psi help on a case, Willis," he admitted, sitting in a
rubberoid rocker.
On the wall behind the bearded man were mounted six small monitor
screens.  Without looking back at them, Marryat said, "Screen five."

A very fuzzy image formed on that screen.

"What is it, Willis?"

"What the hell does it look like?"

Narrowing his eyes.  Jack leaned forward.

"Give me a hint."

"Sweet Christ, it's a projection from my brain."
"I know that, what I'm trying to convey is that it's too blurry for me
to--" Marryat frowned, turning to get a look at the screen.
"That is a lousy picture, isn't it?  Must be the spell of sinusitis
I've been suffering through is futzing up my--" "You could simply tell
me what it was supposed to be."

"That's never as impressive, though."

"Even so."

Marryat sighed, facing Jack again.

"A corpse sliced in three."

Jack studied the image.

"Now that you tell me, yeah, I can sort of make that out."

The screen went blank.

"The picture was to point out that I've already sensed what case you're
worried about."

"It's been on all the Newz vidwall broadcasts today.

You don't have to be psychic to--" "You're on to something," cut in
Marryat.
"You want to see if I can confirm your suspicions by extrasensory
means."

Jack nodded.

"I've got Tinker working on this with me, handling the tech stuff," be
told the psychic.

"What I'm starting to suspect is ... what's the matter?"

Marryat was pressing his hands to his stomach, bent far forward.

"Something," he murmured.

"What?"

The bearded man shook his head.

"Lost it."
After a moment Jack said, "The cops seem to think that the Malibu
Slicer is just one more goofy pattern killer.  I've got a hunch, based
on what's coming in from various informants, that this whole chain of
killings has a definite rational purpose."

Marryat leaned back, closed his eyes.

"What I believe," continued Jack, "is that somebody wants to kill one
or maybe two people and that they invented a serial murderer to cover
the--" "Back off."  The psychic sat up straight, eyes opening.

"That's a warning?"

Marryat said, "I'm not getting anything clear.  Jack.

But I keep seeing the door of your office."

"And?"

"There's a funeral wreath hanging on it."

"C'mon, nobody uses funeral wreaths anymore.

That's an archaic--" "It's a symbol."

"Does that mean my hunch is right?"

"That would be how I ..."  Marryat suddenly doubled up again.

"Don't do that, Jack.  No, don't."
"Do what?"  He popped free of his chair, put a hand on the psychic's
narrow shoulder, Breathing shallowly through his open mouth, Marryat
said, "It wouldn't be a good idea.  You're in enough danger already."

"Exactly which idea are you talking about?"

"I'm getting the strong impression that you've been thinking about
attempting a copycat killing of your own," said Marryat slowly.
"The Malibu Slicer would be blamed and you'd be rid of a serious
rival."

Frowning, Jack shook his head.

"Nope, I'd never do anything like that," he assured the psychic.
"Kill Polly and rig it to look like the Sheer did it because she was
getting too close to solving the case."  He sat again in the rocker.

"Although it's an intriguing idea, isn't it?"

The rain had begun at dusk.  By eight it was falling heavily all
across Greater Los Angeles.
As he guided his sky car toward the Sherman Oaks Sector, Jack, alone,
replayed the voxmail message that had been waiting for him when he'd
returned to his underground beach condo a half hour ago.

"I want to call a temporary truce," Polly's voice had proposed.

"I've dug up something strange that concerns both of us.  Might be a
good idea if we worked on this Sheer business together.  Come over to
my place as soon as you can."
The message had been logged in at 6:39 pm.  When he'd tried to pix
phone his one-time wife, a phonebot had told him there was a temporary
lapse in service.
Dropping down through the rainy night, Jack said to himself, "She
must've come up with something exceedingly strange to prompt her to
suggest a collaboration."
The sky car set down on the landing lot behind Polly's cottage.  Lights
were showing at most of the windows but, for some reason all the
simulated shrubbery that surrounded the neo wood house was snapping off
and on.

Jack sprinted through the hard-falling rain to the front door.

The door was open about three inches.

Frowning, he called out, "Polly?  It's me."

Nothing from inside.
He eased out his stun gun shoved the door fully open with his knee and
then, after a ten second wait, dived across the threshold.

"Jesus," he said, lowering the gun and hugging himself.

He had to fight to start breathing again, fight to keep from being
sick.
Polly's remains, in three sections, were scattered over the living
room's floor.

"Pretty gruesome, huh?"

He pivoted to his right, gun swinging up again.

"I

thought you were stowed at the office.  Reisberson was supposed to
check you into the equipment locker when you got back from--" "Boss,
please, use the old coco."  Tinker was sitting in a high back black
armchair.
"In a battle of wits, would you actually put your money on yours truly
or on a pea-brain like Reisberson?"

Jack tried not to look at what was left of his ex wife

He started shivering, his head was filling with zigzags of pain.

"How the hell did you get here?"  he asked the robot dog.

"Did you get a look at the Sheer or see--" "Sit down, boss."
Jack, very unsteady, attempted to walk further into the room and reach
the chair that Tinker had nodded at.  His legs weren't working very
well anymore.
"Shit," he said, slowly trudging along the edge of the carpeting,
working his way toward the plaz chair.

"Don't step in the blood," cautioned the dog.

"Listen, you tin plated little putz, Polly and I didn't exactly like
one another, but you can't--" "Didn't like her?"  Tinker chuckled.
"It went way beyond that, boss.  I mean, doing this to her indicates a
deep-rooted hatred and--" Jack stopped beside the chair, stared across
at the robot.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Sit down, will you recommended the dog.

"I'll explain the setup."

Jack remained standing.

"Who really killed her?"

The dog said, "You need some back story first."

"Skip that, just--" "First off, I'm resigning," Tinker informed him.

"Not that it'll matter to you, but--" "You can't resign.  I own you.
You're nothing more than a gifted appliance.  Tinker."
"Once perhaps, but I've been improving myself," he told the
detective.
"Did a good job, too- Well, for example, just look at how I solved the
Malibu Slicer case."

"Solved it?  Then who killed Polly?"

"You did.  Aren't you paying attention?"
Jack sat, eyeing the silvery robot animal" You suggesting that I'm
going to be framed for this?"

"For all the murders actually," amplified Tinker.

"Trafalgar and I decided somebody had to take the fall, play the patsy,
and so forth.  You're perfect for the frame.  Erie suggested we play it
the other way, make it look like Polly did you in and then made a
voxmail confession."  He shook his glittering metallic head.
"Naw, I told the tycoon.  Jack fits better.  He's a washed-up private
eye, got a violent temper, hates and envies his successful former mate.
And just today he got into a near brawl with her at Natural Nat's
restaurant."

"How does Erie Trafalgar fit into this mess?"

"He's behind the Malibu Sheer killings, dim bulb said Tinker.
"Geeze, I figured that out even before I met you for lunch, boss.  The
cops were too dumb to spot this, but I figured out that two of the
victims, in different and not obvious ways, stood in the way of a new
takeover Trafalgar's planning.  So he cooked up this Slicer business
and--" "You dropped in on him and told him what you knew," said Jake.

"Rather than telling me or the police."

"Bingo," said Tinker.
"You couldn't pay me anything, neither could the cops.  With the money
I'm getting from Erie, I'll be setting up my own detective agency in
Greater LA.  Tinker & Associates.  This is my last case as a stooge.
From now on I'm the boss and not a flunky."
"But you're not supposed to have any ambitions like that.  You're a
robot, and they--" "You really don't attend to me," said the dog.

"I've been telling you that I'm not your ordinary dogbot anymore."

Jack still kept himself from looking at what was left of his former
wife.

"What's to stop Trafalgar from arranging an accident for you?"

"He would've tried that had I not informed the gink that there are
several copies of the dossier I whipped up about his activities in the
case," explained the robot dog.
"So cleverly hidden electronically that he and all his goons'll never
find them.  But if I don't perform certain tasks each and every day,
those several copies will find their way to the minions of the law."

Jack started to stand up.

"You killed Polly, didn't you?"

"Wasn't that difficult," said Tinker.

"And the method that Trafalgar and his toadies worked out for the other
killings is a cinch to imitate.  Cops, trust me, won't be able to tell
the difference."

Jack lunged for the dog.

"You're not going to--" "Sit."  A thin beam of yellowish light shot out
of Tinker's right eye.  It hit him in the left knee.

He cried out in pain, tottered back, sat.

"Lowest setting," explained the dog.

"You can still talk, but you can't walk at all."

"How are you going to convince the police that I--" "Oh, you're going
to be long gone when they get here, a suicide," Tinker said.
"What's going to clinch it, in addition to the clues I'll plant is the
voxmail confession you're going to send to the SoCal State Police right
before you do away with yourself."
"You're not going to be able to force me to make a confession. Tinker,"
Jack assured the robot dog.

"And there goes your half wit plan."

Tinker sighed.
"It looks like you're going to keep underestimating me right up to the
bitter end," he said in a flawless imitation of Jack's voice.

by Gary A. Braunheck

Gary A. Braunbeck writes poetically dark suspense and horror fiction,
rich in detail and scope Recent stories have appeared in Robert Block's
Psychos, Once Upon a Crime, and The Conspiracy Files.  His occasional
foray into the mystery genre is no less accomplished, having appeared
in anthologies such as Danger in D.C. and Cat Crimes Takes a Vacation.
His recent short story collection, Things Left Behind, received
excellent critical notice.  He lives in Columbus, Ohio.

"Secret of my universe: imagining God without human immortality."

--Camus, Notebook IV, January 1942September I found the guy outside one
of the downtown VR cult temples just like the thin-voiced tipster said
I would.
He was around thirty-two, thirty-three years old, dressed in clothes at
least two sizes too small for the cold December dusk.  There were
blisters on his forehead, face, and neck.  One look in his eyes told me
that his mind--or what might be left of it--was still lost somewhere in
cyberspace, floating without direction
down corridors formed wherever electricity runs with intelligence;
billowing, coursing, glittering, humming, a Borgesian library filled
with volumes he'd never understand, lost in a 3D city; intimate,
immense, firm, liquid, recognizable and unrecognizable at once.

The Twenty-First Century Schizoid Man, in the flesh.

I gently placed one of my hands on his shoulder.
My other hand firmly clasped the butt of my tranquilizer pistol, just
in case.

"You okay?"

He turned slowly toward me, his eyes glassy, uncomprehending.

"Who've you, mister?"

"A friend.  I'm here to help you."

"D-d-did ... did he ever find that girl?"

"Who?"

"John Wayne?"

He seemed so much like a child, lost, lonely, frightened.
A lot of VR cultists end up like this.  Sometimes I wondered if the
mass-suicides of religious cults in the past were really such a
tragedy, after all.  At least then the cultists--sad, odd, damaged
people who turned to manufactured religions and plasticine gods-were
released, were freed forever from the Machiavellian will- and
mind-benders who turned them into semi-ignorant, unquestioning,
shuffling .  Worse, though, were the families who hired me and my
partner to get their kids back and deprogram them.  They always thought
that familial love and compassion would break through the
brainwashing--and don't try to PC my ass, because brainwashing is the
only thing to call it--but then they find out all too soon that you
don't need surgical equipment to perform some lobotomies.  Seven times
out of ten the kids wound up in private institutions; at least one of
the other three are dumped at state-run facilities where they're snowed
on lithium for six months, spoon-fed first-year graduate school
psychobabble, then put out on the streets to join the other modern
ghosts, adorned in rags, living in shadows, extending their hands for
some 240 Gary A. Braunbeck change if you can spare it, and wondering
in some part of their mind why the god they had worshiped from the
altar of their computer monitor has abandoned them.
"That's my car over there.  C'mon, I'll take you someplace safe and
warm.  You can eat."
", .. 'kay .. ."  His voice and gestures seemed even more childlike as
he started toward my hover car
"How - .  how come your car don't got no wheels?"  He seemed genuinely
mystified, as if he'd never seen a hover-car before.  We were nineteen
years into the twenty-first century and hover-cars had been in use for
the last five.  Okay, so they weren't exactly commonplace yet, but
there were more than enough in the air at any given time that, unless
you'd been on Mars since 2014, you'd have seen at least a couple.

"It flies."

His eyes grew wide, awed.

"Really?"

I smiled at him.
"Sure thing.  Why don't you get in ... uh ... what's your name?  Mine's
Carl."

"Mine's Jimmy Waggoner."

"Get in.  Jimmy Waggoner."
He did.  I locked his door from outside (the passenger side door cannot
be opened from within), then took my place behind the controls, and
soon we were airborne, gliding smoothly and quickly over the
cityscape.
Jimmy looked out the window and down on the world he was no longer a
part of.

"This is soooooooooo neat!"

"Glad you like it."
"Uh-huh, I really do.  This is the best birthday present I ever got,
ever!"

"It your birthday today, Jimmy?  December eighteenth?"

"Uh-huh.  Mommy says I was her "Christmas Baby."
She let me watch The Searchers on tape and then she gave me some pizza
money."

Something cold and ugly crept up my back.

"How, uh .. . how old are you today.  Jimmy?"

"I'm seven," he said proudly, pointing to his chest.

Then he saw his hand---the thick hair on his arms---felt the beard on
his face---and before I could I activate the autopilot and stop him
from doing so, he grabbed the rearview mirror and turned it toward
himself, getting a good look at his face.

"That ain't me!"  he cried, his voice breaking.

"Where'd I go, mister?  Where'd I go?"
I had to sedate him a few seconds later.  If I hadn't, we would have
crashed.

Jimmy was one strong child.

I put the hover-car down in a clearing right smack in the middle of a
patch of woodland that surrounds three quarters of our safe-house.  A
long time ago Parsons and I agreed that the more remote our workplace,
the better.  This area was nearly impossible to get to by standard
automobile, and if anyone ever did manage to get this far, there was
only one road leading to the house.  Even without the hidden security
cameras that lined the final stretch of that road, we'd see them coming
from three miles away.

I radioed in for a medical team to bring a stretcher.

Parsons got on the horn and asked me if I'd managed to get any
information from the kid--and kid is how I thought of Jimmy, his age be
damned.

"Just enough to give me the creeps," I replied.

Jimmy was still out of it from the tranquilizer shot I'd given him
earlier, and as I stared at his peaceful, sleeping form, I figured it
was probably for the best.
I didn't know which VR cult this kid had belonged to--there were dozens
that had temples in this part of the country--but what I did know was
that none of them were in the habit of simply dumping their 242 Gary
A. Snmnbeck converts in the street and then calling the likes of us to
come and clean up the mess.
The VR cult phenomenon didn't really get going until 2003, though it
had its genesis back in the mid1990s.
Back in the '90s, personal VR equipment was bulky, clumsy to use, and
expensive--forget that virtual reality itself on the net was more of a
curiosity than anything else, and most of the VR worlds were fairly
crude by today's standards.  Then there were the computers and servers
themselves; the '90s saw the beginnings of the ISDN proliferation, the
introduction of NFSnet--God bless fiber-optic cable--but even those
couldn't manage a transfer rate faster than 2Gb/ sec.  Then, around
2002, slowly but surely, the faceless Powers-That-Be began giving
people a taste of the Next Big Thing, and like lemmings to the sea they
lined up.
Now.--Christ, now you were in the dark ages if your system functioned
under 1000 MIPS and transferred less than four million polygons sec The
power required for color- and illumination-rendered, realtime,
user-controlled animation of (and interaction with) complex, evolving,
three-dimensional scenes and beings was widely available.  The VR
equipment needed to function in these worlds was streamlined into
little more than a pair of thin black gloves, a lightweight pair of
headphones, and some slightly oversized black glasses with a small pair
of sensory clips; one for your nose (to evoke smell) and one that you
tucked into the corner of your mouth (to evoke taste).  In a world
overrun with people, where personal space was moving its way up the
endangered species list, VR worlds and servers offered people the
chance to "get away from it all" without leaving the confines of their
computer terminal.
Problem was, when you give an apple-pie American something with endless
possibilities, they find a quick way to either pervert or trivialize
it.  It wasn't long before "cyber-diets" were all the rage--Lose Weight
Fast!  Slim Down for Summer!  Log in, and we'll give your senses the
illusion of being fed.  3D interactive kiddie porn.  Sites where you
could virtually torture your enemies.
Oh, yeah--and the gods of cyberspace.  Any nutcase with a religious
manifesto could buy space and set up a virtual temple to beckon
worshipers.  Create-ADeity, online twenty-four hours a day for your
salvation, can I get a witness.  Some of the bigger ersatz
religions--Mansonism, Gargoylists, Apostles of the Central Motion,
Vonnegutionism (my personal favorite, they used a cat's cradle as their
symbol), the Resurrected Peoples' Temple, and the Church of the One
Hundred-and-Eightieth Second--were granted licenses to set up their own
servers--and because of that.  Parsons and me would always have jobs. 
There would always be lost souls like Jimmy.  First get them hooked on
the net, alienate them from the world they know, then draw them into
your virtual fold, blur the lines between the person they are on the
net and the person they are oft the net until you trap them forever in
the spaceless space between, imprison them in the consensual loci.
I was snapped from my reverie by the medical team, who gently loaded
Jimmy onto the stretcher and into the ambulance.  I signaled them I
would walk to the house.
I had a feeling that walk was going to be the last quiet time I'd have
for a while.
Jimmy was still asleep in the recovery area when Parsons met me outside
the computer room.

"You say he thinks he's seven?"

"Yes.  You should have seen him flip out when he finally got a look at
himself."

"Did he give you any indication what cult he belonged to?"

"None."

"So where does that leave us?"

"We know his name.  Let's run it through and see if any bells go
off."

"You just love talking in tough-guy cliches, don't you?"

I grinned.

"Watched too many Clint Eastwood movies when I was a kid."

Parsons laughed.

"You were never a kid."

"I feel so good about myself now."
I liked Parsons a lot.  A former VR cult member himself, there was no
scam, no form of reasoning so out there, no logic so convoluted, that
he couldn't work his way through it to awaken what lay at a subject's
core.  In the six years we'd been working together, I'd only seen him
lose two subjects--one to suicide after her family took her away too
soon, the other to law school.

Parsons hates that joke, too.

One of our latest residents, Cindy (she wouldn't yet tell us her last
name, even though we already knew what it was), age seventeen,
approached Parsons and asked him about Jimmy.

"I saw them bring him in downstairs," she said.

Parsons put a reassuring hand on her arm.

"You don't need to worry about him, Cindy; Jimmy'll be fine."

"You don't know him, do you?"  I asked'I don't think--I mean, I don't
know.  Something about him seems familiar, I guess."  She thought about
it for a second, then shrugged and said, "I guess not.

Sorry."

Parsons looked at his watch.

"Shouldn't you be helping with dinner preparation in the kitchen?"

"Omigosh, I forgot all about it."  She hurried away toward the
elevator.

I stared after her.

"She seems a lot friendlier than she did last week."

"I know," whispered Parsons.

"Amazing how fast she's progressed, don't you think?"

We looked at each other.

"Think she'll try it tonight?"  I asked.

"Not tonight, but definitely before Christmas."

"I'll double outside security."

"You do that."

Escape attempts are commonplace here during the first three weeks; week
one, they fight us tooth-and nail because they see us as the evil ones
who took them away from salvation and home; week two, they loosen up a
bit, then decide to play along, hoping to give us a false sense of
accomplishment; week three, they try to run for it.  Cindy was a Third
Weeker.  Time to try.
We parted after that.  Parsons going off to a scheduled session with
some twelve-year-old from Indiana we snatched from the Resurrected
Peoples' Temple.  I went into the computer room to run down Jimmy's
name.
One of the things I've learned over the years is that you must take
nothing for granted when tracking down a subject's past.  Not that we
have to do it all that often; usually the family provides us with more
than enough information to go on.  There have been, however, a handful
of burn-out cases that have simply stumbled into our hands.  These
always take extra effort, but I rarely mind.
At least with Jimmy Waggoner I had a name--and a possible temple
affiliation.
Cindy of the No-Last-Name-Given had been snatched from the Church of
the One-Hundredand-Eightieth Second, who believed that they and they
alone postponed the end of the world because they and they alone owned
the last three minutes of existence.  Their literature even claimed
that these last three minutes were a physical object, one that their
Most Holy Timekeeper, Brother Tick-Tock (I'm not kidding) kept safely
hidden away, watched over by the One and True God of All Moments, Lord
Relativity.
I doubted that Cindy actually knew Jimmy, but at this stage anything
was worth a shot.  I fed all the information into the system, sat back,
and waited.
It took about thirty minutes.  I'd guessed about Jimmy having come from
the tri-state area; most VR cults are localized religions and recruit
their members close to home as a rule.
I'd almost nodded off when the computer cleared its throat (a way file
I installed as a signal) and the words MATCH FOUND appeared on the
screen.  I rubbed my eyes and pressed the mouse button---and there it
was.

All the information on Jimmy Waggoner that there was to be found.

Only thing was, it came from the last place I'd expected.

The Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Parsons looked up at me from behind his desk.

"Don't bother to knock."

I shoved the printouts in his face.
"James Edgar Waggoner, born December 19, 1986.  Disappeared on his
birthday, 1993, on his way to a pizza parlor half a block from his
home.  It's all there, his kindergarten and first grade report cards,
school pictures, health records, dental charts, all of it."

Parsons scanned the printouts, all the time shaking his head.

"Dear God in Heaven."

"Do you have the medical report yet?"

"Um .. . yeah, yes .. . it's right here.  "He landed" it to me but I
didn't take it.

"Why don't you just give me the Readers' Digest version?"  I said.

He put down the printouts and rubbed his eyes.
"Those marks on his face and neck?  There were identical marks on his
chest, forearms, and thighs."

"Burns?"

"No.  Medical adhesive irritation."

"In English."

"That guy's been hooked up to both an EKG and EEG for a very long
time.  Plus, there was an unusually high trace of muscle relaxants in
his system."

"muscle relaxants?"

"That, and about a half-dozen different types of hypno-therapeutic
medications."

We stared at each other.

'"Any traces of hallucinogenic?"

"Good old-fashioned Lucy-in-the-Sky-with-Diamonds."

I felt my gut go numb.
"So whoever took him has .. . has--" "--has kept him more or less
snowed out of his skull for a good while, especially the last year or
so," said Parsons.
"Tests indicate definite brain damage, but we're not yet sure of the
extent."

"..  . Jesus .. ."

"I'll second that.  You got an address on his family?"

I nodded my head.

"The father died a couple of years ago.  Coronary.  His mother still
lives in town at the same house."
"You suppose she stayed there because she believed he'd come back some
day?"
"Seeing as how it was the father who petitioned for the declaration of
death, my guess is probably."

"Need anything to take with you?"

"A photograph of the way he looks now."

"I'll take it myself."

I stood staring out at I-don't-know-what.

"You okay, Cart?"

"Twenty-six years," I whispered.

"What the hell were they doing with him for twenty-six years?"

"I've got a better question."

"What's that?"

"One minute the kid's seven years old and off to buy a
birthday-in-December slice of pizza, the next-wham!--he finds himself
in a thirty-three year-old body and doesn't know how he got there.  How
do you explain to someone that they've been robbed of over one-third
of their life and will never get that time back?"

Joyce Waggoner was fifty-seven but looked seventy.

Still, she carried herself with the kind of hard-won dignity which,
with the passage of time and accumulation of burdens, becomes a sad
sort of grace.
Her reaction to the news that her son was still alive was curiously
subdued.  I supposed (and rightly so, as it turned out), that she'd
been scammed countless times over the years by dozens of so-called
"cult busters" who, for a nominal fee, promise quick results, I assured
her that I was not after any money, and even went so far as to give her
the name and number of our contact on the police force.  She told me to
wait while she made the call, but then she did the damnedest thing--she
stopped on her way to the phone, looked at me, smiled, and asked if I'd
like some fresh coffee.
"It's really no trouble," she said in a voice as thin as tissue
paper.

"I usually have myself some coffee about this time of day."

"That would be very kind of you," I replied, suddenly feeling like a
welcomed guest.
She first made the coffee, then called Sherwood, our police contact,
who assured her that Parsons and I were on the level and could be
trusted.
"May I see that photograph again?"  she asked when she came in with the
coffee.  I handed it to her and spent several moments adding cream and
sugar to my cup while she examined the picture Parsons had taken not
two hours ago.

"I guess it could be him," she whispered, then looked up at me.

"I'm sorry if I don't seem overjoyed at your news, but I've been duped
by a lot of people over the years who claim to've had news of Jimmy's
whereabouts."

"I understand."

She looked up at the mantel.  There were only three framed photographs
there: one showed Jimmy as a newborn, still swaddled in his hospital
blanket; the next, in the center, was a picture of herself with her
late husband that had apparently been taken shortly before his death;
and the last, at the far end of the mantel, was of Jimmy, taken on his
fifth birthday.  I raged at the emptiness up there, for all the
photographs that should have been present but hadn't been and now never
would be--Jimmy graduating from grade school, his high school senior
picture, college graduation, all the moments in between, silly moments
with Mom and Dad, maybe a picture of himself with his prom date, both
of them looking embarrassed as Mom stood in tears while Dad recorded
the Historic Moment on film ... all the empty spaces where precious
memories should have been, filled only with a thin layer of dust and a
heavy one of regret.  Even with the smell of air-freshener and what I
suspected was freshly-shampooed carpeting in the air, there was a smell
underneath everything that had to be grief.

It had been clogging my nostrils since I'd come into the house.

"He was watching The Searchers," she said.

"You know, that John Wayne movie?"

"Yes, I've seen it many times."
"It was his father's favorite movie, you know.  Anyway, he was watching
it while I was making some last minute arrangements for his surprise
party later that afternoon and ... you have to understand.  Jimmy was
always the sort of child who liked being kept in suspense.
I guess that way he always had something to look forward to.  So, about
two-thirds of the way through the movie--and boy, was he immersed in
the story--he had to use the bathroom, so he put the tape on "pause"
and did his business, and about the time he was coming out of the
bathroom his father was coming in the back door with Jimmy's birthday
present--his own VCR.  Well, I didn't want Jimmy to see it, so I gave
him a couple of dollars and told him to walk up to Louie's Pizza and
get himself a couple of slices.  Louie's--it's been gone for a lot of
years now-it was right at the end of our block, so Jimmy didn't have to
cross the street or anything like that, and he loved Louie's pizza.  So
he said, "Okay.  I'll have it when I watch the rest of the movie," and
he took off.

That's .  - .  that's the last we ever saw of him."

"Mrs.  Waggoner, I have to ask this question: in the weeks, days, or
hours before Jimmy disappeared, do you remember seeing any--" "Yes."

The immediacy of her answer surprised me.

She saw my surprise and laughed.
"I didn't mean to stun you, but the police and FBI must have asked me
that about a thousand times.  Yes, there was a man I saw walking
through the neighborhood that I didn't recognize and, yes.  Jimmy once
told me about this man trying to talk to him."

"Did you contact the police?"

"You bet your ass we did.  My husband had several friends on the force,
and for several weeks afterward I noticed more frequent patrols through
our area.  After Jimmy was taken, my husband started buying all sorts
of guns, most of them from his friends on the force-old pieces of
evidence, no serial numbers, like that.
At one point, he had two guns in every room in our house.  After he
died, I got rid of most of them."
"How much time elapsed between Jimmy telling you about this man and his
disappearing?"

"About five months."

"Did this man say anything to Jimmy that might--" "I'm way ahead of
you."  She reached into the breast pocket of her blouse and removed a
small, age browned business card, "He gave this to Jimmy."
She handed me the card.  It was a sketch of a man meant to resemble
Jesus, his face turned heavenward, his arms parted wide, a clock in the
center of his chest.

The time on the clock was three minutes until twelve.

The logo for the Church of the One-Hundred-and Eightieth Second.

She stared at me.

"You recognize it, don't you?"

"Yes."  And I did something then that I'd never done before.

I told her everything.
This is not SOP with me, understand.  Usually Parsons and I try to feed
the information to the families in bits and pieces so as to make the
sordid whole a bit easier to swallow, but this woman, this good,
graceful, lonely woman had moved something in me, and I felt she
deserved nothing more than the whole truth.
She listened stone-faced, the only sign of her grief and rage the way
her folded hands balled slowly into white-knuckled fists.
I finished telling her everything, then poured myself some more coffee
while the news set in.  I still couldn't get that
underneath-things-smell out of my nose.
"The police checked it out, that card, but that church, they denied
that any of their 'apostles' had given it to Jimmy.  I guess they've
got thousands of those cards floating all around; anyone can get their
hands on them."

"Can I keep this?"  I asked.

"Don't see why not."  She stared off in the distance for a minute, then
shook herself from her reverie, looked at me, and smiled.  She looked
like someone had stuck a gun in her back and told her to act natural.
"I still have that damn VCR we got for him," she said.  Her voice was
so tight I thought the words might shatter like glass before they
exited her throat.
"Still wrapped up in birthday paper.  They don't even make the damn
things anymore.  Still got that tape of The Searchers, too."

I reached over and took hold of one of her hands.

It was like gripping a piece of granite" At least that'll give him
something to look forward to."
She nodded, and for the first time I saw the tears forming in her
eyes.

"I don't so much mind what they robbed me of," she said.

"Seeing him grow up, mature, riding a bike for the first time ... I
don't mind that so much.  But for him ... I very much mind what those
fuckers robbed him of.  Childhood ends all too soon anyway, but to be
... to be stripped of it like that, to have it expunged, to never, ever
experience it... that's worse than simply robbing a boy of his
childhood.  It's a hideous form of rape in a way, isn't it?"

"We'll get them for this, Mrs.  Waggoner.  I swear it."

She wiped her eyes, looked at me, and tried to smile.

"I don't doubt it for a minute."

I readied myself to leave and take her back to the safe-house.  To my
surprise, she didn't want to come along.
"I, uh .. . I don't exactly look my best right now," she said, "I want
to clean up a bit, put on a good dress, you know."

"Of course.  I'll have someone come for you later this afternoon."

"Around five would be wonderful."  She took my hand and kissed me once
on the cheek.
"Thank you, Carl.  I don't know what kind of a life my son and I will
have from here on, but at least we'll have one.

Together."

I smiled at her as best I could and nodded, then quickly trotted out to
the hover-car and took off.

I didn't want her to see how badly I was shaking.

Something had clicked into place while she was speaking to me.
And when she'd craned to kiss my cheek, that under-neath-things-smell
was on her.

And I recognized it for what it was.

And the implications scared the hell out of me.

"Detective Sherwood."

"Ian, it's me."

"Carl.  How goes the spirit-saving business?"

Usually I'd have had a snappy reply, but not today.  Sherwood sensed
something in my silence and asked: "Okay, you're in no mood for
jokes.

How serious is it?"

"It may just be my imagination running wild with me--" "You don't have
an imagination, pal."
"Everyone's complimenting me today, first Parsons, now you.  I feel
giddy."

"There you are."

"Look, Ian, this might be damned serious.  I need you to get your hands
on some phone records for me, can you do that?"

"I'll need a couple of good reasons."

I listed three.

Now it was Sherwood's turn to be silent.

"Still there, Ian?"

"Uh .. . yeah, yes, I'm just .. . wow."

"Like I said, it might just be my imagination, but if it isn't--" "--if
it isn't, a lot of people are going to be in deep sewage."

"I figured."

"How far back do you want me to check?"

"Start with a week ago, going through today."

"I'll dispatch some plainclothes in an unmarked car to keep an eye on
the place."

"Tell them not to apprehend, just follow."

"So now you're my boss?"

"Please, Ian?  This one feels bad."

He sighed in resignation.

"That last name was

WA-O-G-ON-ER?"

"Must've been your junior-high spelling bee champ."

"National finalist."

"You're kidding?"

"I'm kidding .. . but then I'm the one with the sense of humor."

"I gotta get new friends."

"No one but us'd have you.  Call me back in an hour and I'll let you
know."

"Cindy?"

She looked up from the dishes, surprised to see me.

"Yes?"

"I want you to tell me about the place where Brother Tick-Took takes
all new apostles."

She stared.

"That's private.  Sacred."
I came toward her.  There must have been something in my eyes, because
she turned slightly pale and backed up a few paces.
"You listen to me, Cindy.  That boy who came in here today, Jimmy, you
know him, don't you?"

"I don't know, like I said."

I had her backed to the wall.

"Tell me about Lord Relativity, then."

This caught her off-guard, but at the same time seemed to perk her up a
bit.
"He is the One and True God of AH Moments, available to His followers
online at all times."

"And what does He say to His followers?"

"Nothing.  We simply log on and become One with His Presence."

"You .. . you feet him, then?"

"Yes, his thoughts and the beating of his heart.
Lord Relativity was inspired by Jesus.  It was in His Seventh Year that
he became aware of His greatness, and in His thirty-third year, he
falls into the ashes of cyberspace and emerges reborn."

"Reborn.  At age seven?"

"Yes.  Praise His name and the realization of the New World He promises
all."

I grabbed her by the shoulders.

"Where does Brother Tick-Tock initiate the new apostles, Cindy?"

"That's a secret, I told you."

"Then try this: Unless you tell me where this sacred place is, I think
someone is going to try and kill Brother Tick-Tock before the day is
over."
"No!  Without Brother Tick-Tock to guide us, to interpret what Lord
Relativity thinks in His Cyber Palace, we will be lost and--" I slapped
her.  I couldn't help it.

I didn't know how much time might be left.

"Dammit, girl, tell me!"

"CARL!"

I turned to see Parsons standing in the kitchen doorway.

He looked livid.

"How dare you strike her like that!"

"I don't have time for your subtleties, my friend.

Have you talked with Jimmy yet?"

"A little."

"There's a huge hole in his memory, right?"

"Yes."

"One that you're going to have to use hypnosis to fill in?"

"Probably."

"Let me save you a little guesswork.  You've got the latest incarnation
of Lord Relativity up there."

Cindy gasped.

Parsons tilted his head, looking confused.
"How do you know--what do you mean the latest incarnation of--" "Get on
the horn and see if any seven-year-old boys have disappeared in the
last three days, then call Detective Sherwood and tell him to get a
squad over to the address Cindy is about to tell us."  I glared at
her.

"Well?"

"How can that man be Lord Relativity.  He exists only in cyberspace,
where all intellect and electricity meet to form a new consciousness
and--" I drew back to slap her again, "Because Brother Tick-Tock and
the elders of the church have been kidnapping little boys, drugging
them, then hooking them up to medical equipment which is tied into the
church's mainframe server so that followers like you can get online
and commune with Lord Relativity.  I have no idea how many times they
might have done it, or how often your precious lord rises like a
phoenix from the ashes of cyberspace, but I do know that Brother
Tick-Tock may be dead soon, and if you don't tell me where the sacred
initiation site is, it'll be your fault."
Parsons must have heard it in my voice, because he did not contradict
what I said.  We try never to use threats with people here, but if what
I suspected was true, there was no time.
"Are you telling me the truth?"  whispered Cindy, looking so scared and
broken I almost took her in my arms.

"Yes, Cindy, I am."

She gave me the address.
On my way to the address Cindy had given, I put the hover-car on
autopilot while I tidied myself up and removed the detective's shield
and ID from the glove compartment--a gift from Sherwood at the police
department.  Sometimes I had to impersonate a detective in order to
gain access to certain people.
Thus far I'd never been called on it, and Sherwood had always promised
to take care of any problems that might arise should I get busted.

I hoped he was a man of his word.

My phone beeped, and, the car still on auto, I answer edIt was
Sherwood.

"You nailed it, my friend," he said.

"One call to the church, two from.  All within the last twenty
hours."

"Your plainclothes boys there?"

"They are, but I don't think anyone's there."

"I'm listening."

"Right after you left, she called the local precinct and was connected
to the Records Division."
"Unlisted phone numbers, legal name changes, private addresses, and the
like?"

"Two cigars for you."

"Parsons called you, right?"
"I've got two cars on the way, and as soon as I hang up, I'm on the way
my own self."

"Good-bye, then."

I broke the connection and landed right in front of the upscale condo
and went inside to find the security guard unconscious at his desk.
Not bothering to remove my gloves, I checked the computer for Roger
Buchanan's (a.k.a. Brother TickTock's) apartment number, then grabbed
the first elevator.

The ride to the twentieth-floor penthouse seemed to take forever.

When the door opened, I came out with my gun drawn.  Across from me
stood the door to Brother Tick-Tock's personal initiation space where,
I suspected, he'd seduced both boys and girls into the fold.

The door was open.

I nudged it farther with my foot, then slipped in, my gun in front of
me.

There was no sound.

I went from room to room, until at last I came to a large set of oak
doors that had to lead into an office.
I opened them slowly and quietly, Brother Tick-Tock sat in a plush
chair behind his desk, a small splotch of blood staining the center of
his shirt.

I could still smell the shot in the air.

Not unlike the dying aroma of gunpowder that I'd sniffed in Joyce
Waggoner's sad and hollow home.
I walked over, very slowly, to the person sitting in the chair on the
other side of the desk.
Joyce Waggoner was still holding the gun, an automatic with silencer
attachment.
There was no doubt in my mind that it was one of the untraceable
weapons her husband had bought.
It took a moment for her to register my presence, and when she did,
she simply shrugged and smiled.

"He didn't deserve to live, not after all he's done."

I stepped behind the desk and felt for a pulse.

Brother Tick-Tock was still very much alive.

1 came back around and took the automatic from her hands.

"You called in the tip, didn't you?"

"Yes."  She lifted up her open handbag.  It was stuffed to bursting
with platinum credit chips.  The smallest one I saw was a thousand.

"Jimmy got away from them somehow," she said.

"I was so stunned to see him, to know that he was alive, that I just
... I just held him a lot last night.
Made cocoa.  But then I got mad.  I called the church and told them
that I knew they'd taken my son from me and I was going to make them
pay.  They called me back, Brother Tick-Tock himself here.  I hung up
on him and he called right back.  He offered ... he offered me a lot of
money to keep quiet.  I don't have a lot of money to live on anymore,
you see, and Jimmy, well, he's going to require a lot of care and .. .
and .. ."

"So you said yes to a deal?"

"Yes, But then it occurred to me that they might try to ... to take
Jimmy back when they came with the money."
"So you took him to the VR temple downtown and called us to come get
him?"
"I wanted him to be safe, somewhere they wouldn't dare try getting to
him."
"How many men from the church showed up at your house with the
money?"
"Only two.  One of them slapped me, threatened to hurt me if I didn't
tell them where Jimmy was."

"So you killed them both?  Shot them?"

"How did you know?"

"I caught a whiff of gunpowder on you when you kissed me goodbye."

"I thought you seemed awfully sharp."

"Where are the bodies?"

"In the cellar.  I have no idea how I'm going to get rid of them ...
of course, I guess that's all moot now anyway, isn't it?"

Brother Tick-Took moaned but did not regain full consciousness.

Then I heard another sound.

A whimper; very small, very thin.

Behind a door to the left of the desk.
Not taking my eyes off Mrs.  Waggoner, I backed toward the door and
kicked it open with my foot.
On a bed not four feet away lay a small boy, dressed in winter clothes,
who was tied to the bedposts and all-too-obviously drugged.

I looked at the child.

Then Mrs.  Waggoner.

Then Brother Tick-Took.

And I thought then of Jimmy, of the childhood he'd been robbed of, of
the dust on Mrs.  Waggoner's mantel, of the hysteria that the parents
of this new boy must be feeling, and a last thought, unbidden, came to
me: How many times had Brother Tick-Tock done this?  How many
seven-year-old boys had he kidnapped, drugged, then hooked up to the
church's computer so the followers could log on to see the Reborn Lord
Relativity?

In this age gods, like their followers, can be easily manufactured.

I stepped into the room and saw all of the children's toys that
littered the floor--balls to bounce, fire trucks, tiny robots, puzzles;
a kiddie's paradise.

Then I saw the bank of monitors from the corner of my eye.

I turned to face them.
There were eighteen in all, most of them showing very small rooms with
very small occupants on medium-sized beds.

None of the children were alone.

I will not describe the depravities these children were being
subjected to by their roommates.  I had to turn away for a moment
before I threw up.
I saw a second door, set between two bookcases on the far side of the
room.  I walked very slowly over to the door and pushed it open.  A
winding stone staircase led downward.
On autopilot myself, I picked up one of the small bouncing balls, a
blue one, and tossed it down the stairs.
I turned back toward the monitors and stared at the one in the
center.

It showed a stone archway where a stone staircase ended.

I waited, forgetting to breathe.
A few seconds later, the blue ball bounced from the stairs onto the
monitor screen.
I stared again at the empty, glassy eyes of the children on the other
monitors, wondering if they knew their degradations were being
recorded.

I had been wrong about what was really going on.

In my worst moments, I'd never imagined that I'd ever encountered
anything as unspeakable as this.
I knelt down for a moment and pulled open a set of drawers under the
monitors.
Hundreds upon hundreds of digital video disks were stored there,
identified only by labels such as:
LARRY, age 6, blonde; Little Boy Blue; Jessica, age 4, brunette; Little
Miss Muffet.
So all of this, all of it--the church, the temple, the cyber-crusades
of Lord Relativity and Brother Ticklock--all it was an elaborate front
for a child pornography ring.
Then I noticed a label on one of the disks: ONE USE ONLY; red and
noisy.

There were at least twenty more with the same label.

ONE USE ONLY: New cyberspeak for snuff movie.
All of this flashed through my mind in a second, and, knowing that
Sherwood and his men would be here any minute, I made a decision that I
knew would change the man I was for the rest of my life.

I came back into the office.

"Mrs.  Waggoner?  You with me?"

"Of course."

"Don't ask questions, just listen and answer 'yes' or 'no," all
right?"

"Yes."

"Do you have a heart condition of any sort?"

She looked at me, puzzled.

"No .. . ?"
"Do you have any sort of condition that might endanger your life should
you suffer a form of body trauma?"

"No."

I exhaled, nodded my head, made sure my gloves were still firmly
covering my hands, then took her gun from her hands and shot her in the
shoulder.

She fell off the chair with a shriek.

I stood over her.
"Listen to me, Joyce, listen very carefully.  You came here to confront
Buchanan about what he had done.  You were out of your head with
anger--that's why you knocked out the security guard downstairs.  You
came up here and the two of you argued."
I picked up her handbag and slammed it against the side of Brother
Tick-Tock's head.
"He came at you and you hit him in the head with your purse."  I jumped
back over to her and punched her in the nose.
"He hit you in the face and you went down right where you are--don't
move.  Still with me?"

"..  . yes .. ."  she said through a haze of pain.

"Good."  I went behind the desk and began opening the drawers, hoping
to find a concealed weapon of some sort.  I did, second drawer on the
left, in a metal box that was unlocked.  I removed the pistol and
shoved it through my belt under my coat, then pressed Joyce's gun into
Tick-Tock's hand.
"He went for his gun and shot you in the shoulder," I hauled
Ticklock's limp form from his chair, Joyce's gun still in his hand, and
threw him on the floor beside her.

"He came around after you went down and you kicked him in the balls."

I kicked Tick-Took in the balls.
"He went down, and the two of you struggled with the gun."  I placed
her hands on the pistol as well.
"You shot him twice, once in the chest, and then--" I put the gun up to
Tick-Tock's face and pulled the trigger.  Blood spattered Joyce's face
and clothes and my gloves.  I dropped their hands and the gun, then
quickly removed my gloves and shoved them in my pockets.
"You killed him in self-defense, Joyce.  I came in here just in time to
see the end of it, understand?"

"..  . yes .. ."

"Can you remember all that?"

"Yes."  She was recovering from the pain somewhat.

This was one tough lady.
"I'll get rid of the bodies in your cellar later, don't worry about
that, I hate to admit it, but I've got friends who have experience in
that area."  I scooped up her purse and removed all the credit chips,
shoving them into my pockets.  There was still enough junk
inside--medicine bottles, makeup, checkbook, etcetera--to give it some
good weight.

"You're going to keep this money, Joyce, because you'll need it."

I heard the elevator bell.

She looked up at me, then at Brother Tick-Tock's body.

"Why did you do this?"

"Because you're right, he didn't deserve to live .. .

and every little boy deserves to see whether or not John Wayne rescues
Natalie Wood."
She smiled at me, and as Sherwood and his men came running from the
elevator, I went into the small room to untie the little boy whose
childhood would not be stolen from him for the sake of false gods and
their followers.
I held the child in my arms, and in the darkness I wept, thinking, /
can feel you breathe like the ocean, your life burning bright, all the
unlived moments before you; may that fire be your friend and the sea
rock you gently.
I don't do as much fieldwork these days; that I leave to Sherwood, who
retired from the force a few years ago and came to work with us. Mostly
I trace cybertrails, gather info, make calls.  Every once in a while
I'll go on an assignment with Sherwood, but my conscience always
manages to get in the way.

When at last it all becomes personal, you're no good in the field.

And I am a murderer whose greatest guilt is that he feels no remorse
for his crime.
Jimmy and his mother are doing fine.  I stop by their home frequently,
and I'm glad to report it's a happy home.

Happy enough.

Joyce now has the mantel filled with photos of her and Jimmy.  It looks
like a family has lived their whole life there.
Jimmy loves his VCR.  We have now watched The Searchers twenty-six
times.  He never gets tired of it.

Come to think of it, neither do I. Amen to that, pilgrim.

by Alan Brennert
Alan Brennert is a Nebula award-winning author who has also worked in
the television and film industries.  He was a contributing writer and
producer of the The New Twilight Zone television series.  His work has
also appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and other
magazines.  He lives in California.
I'VE never seen his face; his real face.  Sometimes he wears one of
those malleable Fun Flesh masks, the kind kids wear on Halloween, its
features molded into the likenesses of people I recognize vaguely if at
all;
Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Albert Fish.  So long ago, such
distant infamy.  Sometimes he wears white robes and a squared-off hood,
a ghostly evocation of someone he calls "Zodiac"--like all his heroes,
a psychopath dead two centuries or more--and when I look through the
ragged eye holes of the hood, I see clear, blue, intelligent eyes; eyes
that even seem for a moment warm, and friendly.  And that's when I'm
most afraid.  That I'll never leave this place alive.
Today my captor is a dapper man in what looks like a nineteenth-century
business suit--dark wool pants, vest, jacket, a derby hat atop a
mustached face, a black doctor's bag swinging from one hand.  He
stands in the open doorway of my brightly-lit cell; smiles at me, as I
lie immobile on my cot.
"Good morning."  Cheerful.  Hail-fellow-well-met, I think they used to
call it.

"Sleep well?"

Sleep?  I sleep only when I can no longer stay awake, when my
exhaustion is greater than the torments of my body.  Sometimes only a
few minutes;
sometimes close to an hour; rarely longer, before the pain wakes me
again.  But sleep well?  I offer up an obscenity to him, and he laughs
what anyone else might take for a good-natured laugh.

"Can't say I blame you, old man," he says, approaching.

Even if the mag straps binding me here were to suddenly fail, I doubt
I'd have the strength to attack him; he's seen to that.  Above me the
ceiling is a jigsaw of video images barely three molecules thick,
dozens of angles and amplifications, all of the same depressing
subject: my own wasting, emaciated body.
Here a view of my swollen, nearly useless feet; there a shot of sunken
cheeks and shadowed eyes.  How long have I been here, like this?  Four
weeks?  Five?  There's no telling.  No windows, no sunlight, no way to
measure the passage of days except in escalating degrees of pain.
He is at my side now; he smells like apples, isn't that strange?  Above
us I can see the crown of his hat reflected in one of the video
fragments.

"Breakfast?"

He opens his little black bag, takes out a syringe, presses it against
my arm; with a hiss a nutrient solution penetrates my skin, finds its
way into my bloodstream.
Electrolytes, amino acids, saline .. . just enough to keep me alive and
conscious, in delicate equilibrium between life and death..  ..

Another smile.

"Do you know who I am today?"
I don't know.  I don't care.  I close my eyes as he tells me about
somebody named H. H. Holmes, a nineteenth-century physician whose
Victorian home in Chicago was a house of horrors--many of his victims
266 Alan Bremen were lodgers in Holmes' mansion, dying in sealed rooms
pumped full of poison gas, bodies dumped like so much laundry down long
metal chutes and laid open like crayfish on dissecting slabs in the
basement.
"Many of them were tourists," he says, reaching again into his medical
bag.
"This was 1893; Chicago was hosting the World Columbian Exposition what
was once known as a "World's Fair."  Interesting to think of these
hapless travelers as they rode the world's first Ferris Wheel, or
watched a demonstration of Electricity, or marveled at the sparkling
collection of buildings known as the "White City' marveling at the
future!  And when they return to their rented rooms, why, the future is
waiting for them there, too, though not one that the Utopian architects
of the Fair could possibly have anticipated..  .."
He changes the fluid in his syringe with a casual dexterity that makes
me wonder if he, like Holmes, is a doctor.  Another jolt of injection;
this time it is almost certainly not nutrients but the opposite,
genetically engineered organisms designed to slowly eat away at
specifically targeted organs pancreas, liver, spleen.  Or nannites that
even now cluster inside the veins of my heart, deconstructing them
slowly, stripping away cell by cell the inner layer, the connective
tissue, the smooth muscle .. . even as other nannites work to keep my
mind clear and unclouded, alert and aware of all that's happening to
me.  He explained as much to me early on, a bright darkness in his eyes
as he detailed the microscopic tortures he's devised.
The cloud of pain which envelops me seems suddenly to grow sharper;
stronger.  As much as I don't want to, I cry out.  My captor smiles an
anaconda smile; starts to turn away.

"Kill me," I say, and he stops, looks back, eyes wide and innocent.

"But I have," he says, laughing, and then he's gone.
As the door slides shut, the mag straps automatically let go, and I'm
free to move about the cell to use the toilet, to pace the length of
my ten by twenty foot cage.  My feet are so swollen now that it's all I
can manage to stagger to the bare commode squatting obscenely in the
middle of the cell.  Once, early on, I tried to outwit him--sleeping on
the floor, hoping to evade the electromagnetic field which paralyzes
most of my motor functions as I lay on the cot--only to discover that
the field worked equally well no matter where I came to rest in this
torture cell.
I sit on the toilet, voiding myself, knowing he is watching, knowing he
derives pleasure from my humiliation and loss of privacy.  Above me the
video fragments mirror my movements--a tremor in my leg; the small
movement of my rib cage as I take shallow breaths--recording them for
my persecutor's future enjoyment.  And I think of this record outliving
me, the last mark I will leave on this world .. . and I start to cry.
Tears of grief, and shame, and helpless anger.

He enjoys this, too, I know .. . but I just can't stop myself.

I was a teacher.  History; junior college.  I think now that's why he
chose me--someone who had at least a nodding acquaintance with the
past, someone who could appreciate what was happening to him.  Perhaps
he was one of my old students, though he denies this.
I was chosen, he claims, entirely at random--"within certain logistical
parameters," including location, access, predictability of daily
movements.
It was that predictability which no doubt made me such an appealing
target.  Spring Quarter, April: Nine o'clock to ten-thirty, Delacroix
Hall, first floor, Nineteenth-Century European History; ten-thirty, up
to the second floor, Interactive Study Group until noon, then lunch,
either in the commissary or a restaurant somewhere on State Street; one
o'clock, Gower Hall, TwentiethCentury American History until
two-thirty, followed by Twenty-first Century until four, back to
Delacroix 268 Alan Brennert for another Interactive Study Group until
five, and then home.
I never saw his face then, either.  I was on one of the quiet, shaded
paths between Delacroix and Gower after my four o'clock study group
when I felt the press of a blunt object in the small of my back,
followed by a tingling sensation, followed by oblivion, A neural
suppressor, I imagine, shutting down the higher brain functions while
handing over most motor control to him.  If anyone saw us leave campus,
all they would have glimpsed was the two of us walking together toward
the parking structure his arm, perhaps, draped across my shoulders in
what appeared to be good fellowship but was in fact gentle guidance of
my usurped body.  And when I regained consciousness..  ..
I was here.  In this windowless box, soundproofed, white walls neither
cold nor warm to the touch, hidden nanovids refracting and reflecting
my image above me.
Am I above ground?  Below?  I'd guess below, a converted cellar
perhaps, but I have no way of knowing for sure.  In the middle of a
city like Dr.  Holmes' murder castle or in some rural corner far from
urban sprawl?  I have no idea.
I yelled for help.  I yelled to be set free.  I yelled until I was
hoarse, until my hands were bloodied from pounding away at the steel
door .. . and as I sank onto the cot, rubbing my bruised and battered
hands, experiencing the first taste of pain in my captivity .. .
the door slid open.  I jumped to my feet, managing no more than two
steps before the mag kicked in and I fell back onto the cot,
helpless.
Then my captor appeared, towering above me ... his Zodiac hood
forbidding, frightening.  The only parts of me I could move, obviously
by his design, were my eyes and my mouth.

"Who are you?  Why are you doing this?"

He squatted down beside me, his voice muffled by the fabric of the
hood.

"You're the history teacher," he said.

"What comes to mind?"
"Please ... I have a family--" "Parents, brother, no wife, no
children.  Does the name Edward Gem mean anything to you?  Kenneth
Bianchi, Cleo Green, Heinrich Pommerencke?"

"No.  I don't--" "Albert De Salvo  Fritz Haarmann?  Coral Watts?"

"Who the hell are you, why am I--" "You may not know the names, but
perhaps you'll recognize the handiwork."  Above us the video fragments
shattered and reformed into a horrifying collage of death, torture,
mutilation.  Men, women, children, the sovereignty of their bodies
violated by monsters the likes of which I could barely comprehend;
though the implications for me were becoming clear.
"No," I said, my voice hoarse, "Jesus, you can't be-- I mean, things
like this don't happen anymore--" "How do you know they don't?"
"Look," fighting to stay calm, to be rational, "it's not the twentieth
century, for God's sake, you can't get away with this--" I thought I
saw a smile in those clear blue eyes.

"Murder is not extinct in your White City."

At the time I had no inkling of what he meant by that.
"No, of course not, but--the last serial murderer in the U.S. was,
what, fifty years ago--?"

"Forty-three," he corrected me.

"Theodore McCoy, killed and mutilated three women in Seattle,
Washington;
Tacoma; San Francisco."  Voice calm, collected, as though he were a
student in my classroom, pleased to offer up an answer to a question
from his professor.
Before I could point out the obvious, he beat me to it: "By examining
the bodies of the three women-the pattern of mutilation, means of
death, probable instruments--and comparing it to neural signatures of
other known serial killers, FBI and local authorities were able to
construct a neural profile of the killer.
Signature tracking of the area yielded three close matches, one of whom
turned out to be McCoy."
Maybe he wanted me to talk him out of it; maybe 270 Alan Bremen I was
supposed to play the role of teacher, or conscience.

"Yes.  Right," I said.

"And that was before gene scan  Today you can't even dispose of a
single body without being found out, much less commit multiple murders
without being--" I felt a jolt in my arm.  He had pulled a syringe from
his robes and injected me with what turned out to be the first of his
tiny agents.  He stood.

His eyes seemed to smile again.

"We'll see," he said, turning away, the door sliding open, and once
again I was alone.  Even as the mag straps let go, I felt a sharp stab
in my chest.  I cried out--my pain, soon to become my only companion in
this cell, mirrored above me.  And so it began.
It will end soon.  I know that for certain.  The small intruders in my
system are thriving, multiplying, feasting on blood and bone; my body
feels less and less my own, more and more merely a landscape on which
the designs of others are forcibly writ.  Soon this fragile biosphere
will burst, the last battlements of flesh will be overwhelmed, and I
will die.
I look back on my forty-odd years of life, and I try to visualize every
woman I ever made love to.  Julia, Colleen, Laurie, Mikaela.  I try to
block out the pain and conjure again the feel of their lips, the brush
of their skin against mine.  Chandra, Brianne, Mei ... I could have
married Mei, why didn't I?  Could have had a son, a daughter, something
that would have outlived me; I might not even be here if I had, my life
not so proscribed and easily usurped, or at the least I'd be here
thinking of someone I love, knowing I had lived a genuine life and not
.. . whatever it is I have lived.  Oh, God .. . Mei.  Tears well in my
eyes, I repeat her name over and over, wishing my words back in time,
and for a moment I seem to be there, some quiet night at home with her,
whispering to my younger self: Marry her, you idiot!  For God's sake
ask her, ask her now!  But the young me doesn't hear or if he does
doesn't believe, I lose sight of him amid the wrong turns and blind
alleys of his future, my past .. . and I find myself once again here,
alone, with tears in my eyes and a lover's name dying on my breath.
The door opens.  To my surprise the mag straps do not activate, but I'm
too weak even to sit up; it's all I can do just to turn my head and
look up at my captor as he enters.  His mask today is a clown's face,
garish crescents of red and white around nose, mouth, cheeks.  I've
seen this one before.  The leering face of some long-dead psychotic who
killed by night, and made balloon animals for ailing children by day.
What the hell did he call himself?

"Pogo"?

For the first time, he sits down on the cot beside me.  I wish
desperately that I had the strength to reach up, to claw at him,
wrestle him to the ground .. . but my body fails me, as he knew it
would.  He takes a small notebook from a pocket..  . places it beside
me.
I look at it, then at him" What  An effort to force out even one
word.

He produces a pen from another pocket; folds it into one of my hands.

"In case there's anything you want to say.  To ... whomever."  I must
look incredulous, because he laughs and says, "I'm serious.  There's
nothing you can tell them that can hurt me, after all;
you have no idea where you are, you've never seen my face.  I have
nothing to lose.  Go on."  He pushes the notebook closer to me, then
stands up.  Smiles impishly.

"Have I ever lied to you?"

In moments he's left again.  It takes an enormous effort just to roll
over on my side; I reach for the notebook, open it.  Blank pages stare
out at me, beckoning with the promise of a last good-bye, apology,
declaration of love--anything I wish, to whomever I wish.
Mei?  Long married, mother of three .. . and not in a million years
will I give this madman her name and address (assuming he doesn't
already have them).
Who, then?  I think of my father, my mother, regretting the years of
unease and distance between us.  My captor already knows their names,
where they live .. .
but the thought of giving him an excuse to contact them is too
horrifying, I can't risk it.
And besides: I know why he's offered me this.  Not for me, but for him:
a grisly souvenir, a memento mori--a reminder of my own impending
death, written in my own hand.  His leering interest in whatever I
might say rendering it unclean; worthless.  I hurl the notebook away
from me; it just barely makes it halfway across the room, where it
falls open, its empty pages reflected in the video fragments above.
Something satisfying about this: pages and screens staring blankly at
one another, offering nothing for voyeuristic eyes.
As if in response to my action, something wet and cold seems to break
loose inside me, and I scream as I realize that it is my life itself
which has finally ruptured--whatever years I had left to me stolen by
this ridiculous anachronism, this monster out of time.
"Bastard!"  Where do I get the strength to shout, the breath to curse
him?
"Bastard!"  The video images seem to recede from me, as I at long last
make my escape from this place.
"I'm your last victim!"  I cry out, even as the walls of the cell seem
to bend and constrict into a tube, a dark tunnel with no beginning and
no end.  He's succeeded in killing me, but I can take bleak comfort in
knowing he won't kill another;
that in this White City he reviles, no one can kill repeatedly and
remain at large--and that someday death will come for him as it now
comes for me.  But oh, how beautiful it is!  A light sings at the
farthest end of the tunnel, a light I seem to ride like a wave; I am no
longer flesh, nothing so perishable, I am photons riding a solar wind,
riding backward into the blinding warmth of the sun, its bright
beckoning disk growing larger with each thousandth of a second..  ..
Until... I suddenly begin to slow.  The sun becomes less perceptibly
bigger; a hundredth of a second more, and it ceases to grow larger at
all.  I've .. . stopped.
The sun now starts to move away from me, or me from it, the solar wind
reversing direction; I find myself hurled away from its warmth and
light and, voiceless, I try to scream in protest, begging to go back,
to go--home?  I drop below c and feel myself growing heavier, photons
reverting to gross flesh, thought changing to voice.  Take me back,
take me back, as the walls of the tunnel close in around me, and the
sun, long set, gives me over to the night.
The light returns slowly.  Not as bright as before-but just as warm,
and just as welcome.  My eyes open, but I have to shield them against
the glare.  I'm staring into ... the sky?
And then I notice ... the pain.  Or rather, the lack of it.  Impossible
as it seems, nothing hurts inside; and I know, as only someone who has
experienced it can know, that nothing is inside , .. that I am alone in
my own body once again.
I sit up; look around me.  Trees, grass, a ribbon of concrete threading
through shady arbors.  My briefcase lies on the ground not three feet
away, ungraded term papers scattered around it.  With a start I realize
where I am.
On campus.  That building over there--my God, it's Gower Hall!  I jump
to my feet, my heart pounding.
Jesus--can it be?  Am I really here?  I roll back the sleeves of my
jacket; my shirt.  My skin is unbroken, unscarred.  I take a deep
breath of air and hold it.  My lungs are strong; my heart races.  My
God, I am-I'm alive.

I break into laughter--relieved, delighted laughter.

Was the nightmare only that--a dream, a delusion?  It seemed so
real--so hideously, perversely real.  But clearly it wasn't.  I think
suddenly of Mei, of my parents, of all the paths I am free to take
again, the blind alleys I newly dedicate myself to avoid.  Another
chance: I have another chance!
I pick up my briefcase, shuffle the fallen papers back into it, snap it
closed.  I fairly well jaunt along the path; I feel like breaking into
dance, or song.  As a compromise I start humming, which turns again
into laughter.  A short distance from Gower Hall I pause at an
automated kiosk offering free copies of the college paper.  I press the
screen, opting for hard copy rather than audio or electronic.  A copy
slides out, and I eagerly scan the masthead, looking for the
date--April 2nd, wasn't it?--that will serve as the final confirmation
that my nightmare was just that.

The date on the paper ... is May 14th.

My heart skips a beat.  I drop the paper to the ground.

I feel the press of a blunt object in the small of my back.

The scream dies in my throat as my body seizes up and I find myself
quickly paralyzed.  This time, however, he doesn't shut down all of my
higher brain functions.
Trapped inside a body which no longer responds to my wishes, I can see
him out of the corner of my eye as he steps up beside me--feel him as
he drapes a friendly arm across my shoulders.

"Good morning."  His eyes are bright, warm, and friendly.

"Feeling better?"  Better.  Yes.  Amazing what nannites can do, isn't
it?  Heal as well as hurt.  Reclaim that which seemed .. , forever
lost..  ..
My legs begin to move of their own accord.  I can't stop them.  Can't
do anything.
I was right, and I was wrong.  Wrong in thinking that he'll be caught;
that his pattern of murder--the bodies and depredations and choice of
victims--creating a profile that will eventually, inevitably, lead the
authorities to him.  That won't happen.  He's found a way around it, a
way to kill and kill and never, ever get caught, never betray
himself.
I'm your last victim, I told him.  That much was right.  Last .. . and
only.  Now and forever.
I try to scream, but, in a touch of characteristic irony, he's rewired
my neurals so that any expression of fear or panic turns into a smile,
or a laugh.
"Yes," he says, smiling, patting me on the back, "good to see you,
too."  He ushers me into the parking structure.  I laugh again.  And
again.  And again.  My laughter fills the parking garage, and my
companion, ever amiable, laughs with me.

SETTING FREE THE

DAUGHTERS OF EARTH

by Peter Crowther

Peter Crowther is the editor or co editor of nine anthologies and the
coauthor (with James Lovegrove) of the novel Escardy Gap.  Since the
early 1990s, he has sold some seventy short stories and poems to a wide
variety of magazines and chapbooks on both sides of the Atlantic.  He
has also recently added two chapbooks.  Forest Plains and Fugue on a
G-String, to his credits.  His review columns and critical essays on
the fields of fantasy, horror, and science fiction appear regularly in
Interzone and the Hellnotes internet magazine.
He was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Horror Writers'
Association.  He lives in Harrogate, England, with his wife and two
sons.

"Oaths are but words, and words but wind," --Samuel Butler

THE addict hunkered down beneath the bridge, leaned into the support,
and blew warm air into his cupped hands.  His breath came out like
steam, pooled around his hands, and then drifted slowly up against the
blackened stonework of the bridge, weaving its way through the
filigreed metalwork of the railings

to mingle with the exhaust fumes of the occasional overhead traffic.

Somewhere off in the distance, beyond the towering Residential Blocks
that littered the Edge, sirens sounded--maybe a traffic accident,
another Midtown thruway littered with fallen debris.  The addict knew
it had to be Midtown because the Prowlcars didn't come out here
often--hadn't come out here regularly for a long time, long before the
addict had become hooked.
He looked over his shoulder, surveying the litter strewn dry canal
bottom whose bank he now crouched upon, and stared out into the night,
watching the pirouetting light beams scratch the sky around the
Business Blocks, where the surrounding blackness was already lightened
by the glow of life, a glow that never went out.  Not like the old
days, the days he had heard folks talk about around the occasional
fires here on the Edge, days when work stopped on an evening, slowed
down on a weekend, that mythical pause in commercial motion when all
but the most essential services ceased for a day.

Sunday, it had been called.

The seventh day.  A day of rest.

But Sunday had long gone.

Now time was marked strictly by the Julian calendar, a five-digit
identification that did not recognize individual days or their
characteristics.
His mother, before she died, had told him all about Sunday, and about
the other days, information passed down to her by her mother who had
had it passed down to her by her mother!
About how his mother's great-grandfather, in that long-ago mythical
time before the addict was born, would go out for A Drink on Friday,
the sixth day, with his friends.
And about how, on a Thursday--which had been the day before Friday--the
two of them, his mother's great-grandparents, would sometimes go out to
see a moving picture show ... in the days before TAP came in.  And
about how some folks had gone to Church on Sunday, That was long gone,
too.
And she had told him about how the different months used to have
different characteristics.

Months?  he had asked.

His mother had smiled and ruffled his hair.  Months had been groups of
four weeks, sometimes four and a half, which occurred at different
times of the year.
The seasons, his mother had called them, speaking their names
reverently .. . though she had never known them herself.
The addict could remember their names--summer, winter, autumn,
spring--but not their order.  It didn't matter.
The seasons, his mother had explained, had been differentiated by the
weather.  Sometimes it was hot.
Sometimes it was cold.  And sometimes it was getting close to being one
or the other, but not quite there yet.
One season, his mother had been told, the sun shone and people got out
of doors, walking around or lying on the grass, drinking in the
sunshine, feeling it recharge their bodies.
Then, in another season, folks started to wrap up more, had started to
wear more clothes, and the trees had started losing their leaves.
And still another one, the one after that one, snow would fall out of
the sky.  Snow .. . even the word had a magical resonance to it.  In
reality it was rain, frozen into tiny white cereal flakes of coldness,
that fluttered down and lay on the ground, blown by the wind into banks
and drifts of white against buildings and fences.  The addict did not
know snow.  But he hoped that, one day, he would see it ... watch it
falling from the sky.
And then, last of all, she had told him about how, after all the
coldness and the snow, the temperature would ease off and plants would
start to sprout new shoots, the trees would grow new leaves, and people
would rummage through closets and wardrobes and old chests in the
hallway, sifting through piles of clothing until they found the light
stuff, the stuff with hardly any sleeves or hardly any pants legs .. .
getting ready for the heat.

But that had gone, too.  All gone.

Everything was gone.

The snow, the wind, the heat.

No days.  No seasons.  No weather.  No beliefs.

People worked.  And people TAPped.

And that was it.
For those who did not work, those lost souls who had drifted out into
the dead areas of the Edge, on the periphery of the dome-covered Cities
that now covered the inhospitable world, a brief nomadic existence was
on offer .. . brief because they invariably drifted out of the domes,
pulled by the lure of the open land glimpsed through the murky
Plexiglas.  Then there was only lingering death.  But there was a sense
of the way things used to be ... if you were interested and if you
could be bothered to look for it.

On this night, as it was with every night, the addict looked.

Still crouched down, the addict carefully stepped out from beneath the
bridge and breathed in, fighting off the urge to cough.
Once free of the overhang, he looked up and saw a sky bus negotiating
the tight corner of Vicar Lane and The Headrow, a handful of empty
emotionless faces staring out of the fluorescent-lit interior and down
into the gloom of the streets and the darkened buildings.  The bus
stopped against a loading platform and a stooped figure carefully
stepped down.  The addict imagined he could hear the sibilant rush of
the pneumatic doors--ssssshhhht--opening and closing, and then the bus
moved off into the stream of intermittent traffic, steam jets pumping
from its rear and its underside.
The stooped figure watched the bus for a minute and then turned away,
lugging what looked like two huge mall bags limping onto the railed
walkway that traversed the residential block.
The addict watched the figure go and then allowed his eyes to drift
down the building, floor by floor, until he was staring straight at a
man sitting on the stone ann guard of the bridge.  The addict was about
to duck out of sight, but it was clear that the man was not interested
in him.  The man wasn't interested in anything at all, save the current
running from the box in his lap--the addict assumed that was where the
box was although he couldn't actually see it--and up the wires to the
terminal bolts grafted into his temples.
The man was a TAPper or a Frankie, oblivious of everyone and everything
while his bolts were being fed, thrusting whatever particular images
and sensations made up his own particular pleasure.
A cab passed overhead, its underside light sweeping the bridge and then
the ground before returning to the bridge and fixing momentarily on the
man.  An airhorn sounded--horrrk!--as the cab wheeled left and passed
over the addict, moving toward the dense forest of residential blocks
closer to the dome edge.
The addict turned to watch it go, watched its tail lights blinking,
and, just for a second, before the cab turned again to move along Boar
Lane, he saw the distant reflection of its headlights in the Plexiglas
between two blocks on the corner of Boar Lane and Commercial Street.
Then the glass was dull again, unseen, just a wall of darkness at the
end of Commercial Street.
He looked back at the bridge and saw the man shaking, watched him near
the end of his hit.  The man would be in heaven for a few hours now,
swirling down the blissful aftermath of the hit until reality crowded
in again and he would have to seek out another supply.
The addict shrugged his coat up on his shoulders and scrambled up the
side of the embankment onto the walkway.  Everyone had his or her way
of dealing with life in the domes, particularly those who lived on the
Edge .  , .  his or her way of escaping the way things really were.
But some methods of cerebral escape were considered to be even more
heinous than the artificial stimuli that could be scored for a few
credits from any street corner or in the shadowed recesses of the
second-cellar bars in Downtown.  Of these--of all the recreational
drugs openly tolerated (and even encouraged) by an increasingly
dependent society--one and only one was completely forbidden.  And this
was the substance favored by the addict.
The penalty for being caught with his particular tipple was
termination.

No questions, no excuses, no trial.  Just lights out, and goodbye.

He shrugged his shoulders and stared along the walkway.
The sound of the city was stronger up here, so strong that the addict
could barely hear the man on the bridge coming to the end of his hit.
But he could still hear it just a little, and he hurried his step to
get out of range.

The air smelted of smoke, cold, and fuel.

The puddles on the walkway and the rain-slicked ledges of the buildings
were all rainbow-hued, the constant drizzle of fuel particles having
eaten into the surface to come out with the water and swirl in eddies
of various shapes and colors.  The addict looked up into the darkness.
He couldn't see the dome's ceiling, let alone the sky beyond, but he
could feel the gentle drizzle from the sprinkler system, drifting down
over the town.
Now and again, when the system broke down, the authorities would send
rain ships circling the building tops.  He had seen one once, coming
down onto the dock at the filling station across town, its bulbous
tanks gleaming in the fluorescent lights, its contents spread across
the streets.
With crops grown outside the dome in separate covered areas and all
water for domestic use fed into the city, rain was something the
population didn't actually need any longer.  The official line was that
the daily spraying was a token gesture to simpler times: the consensus,
however, was that the nightly downpours were used to quell
disenchantment and insurrection.
Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly low and particularly bold,
the addict thought about leaving the city.
Sometimes, at night, lying in his cot, wrapped up in his coats, he
dreamed of the deadly open spaces beyond the Plexiglas.
He dreamed of dusty roads winding between grassy hills, and of clouds
silently drifting across an endless blue sky.
He dreamed of wooden shacks and picket-fenced garden areas, of clear
lakes and a vast ocean lapping a sandy shoreline.  He even dreamed of
gleaming, brightly-colored automobiles humming along rolling highways,
attached to the roads themselves instead of flying around the
building-sides, and he dreamed of panting trains hammering along a
ribbon of track that snaked between frozen-rain-topped mountains .. .
and grass .. , and forests.

He dreamed these dreams because of his addiction.

And his addiction was a direct result of those dreams.

A voice spoke from the darkness.

The addict stopped and squinted into the gloom beneath the canopy of a
block entrance, his hands out of his pockets and ready for
confrontation.
"I said, you need anything?"  the voice said, the words accompanied by
a thick waft of smoke pouring out into the street, "Uh-uh," the addict
lied.  He did not want to detail his problem without first seeing the
identity of the person asking the question.  There were too many
dummy-dealers out in the darkened streets.  Prowlers looking to pull
you in for few hours ... to spend some time in the Prowlhouses.  In
there, amidst the old tried and tested methods of persuasion, the
Prowlers could find out all they wanted to know.
A man stepped out of the entrance, the darkness peeling away from him
like a cellophane covering.  The man took a deep draw on his pipette
and, throwing his head back, blew out more smoke, making a circle of
his mouth at the end to cause smoke rings, which shimmered and then
dissipated.

"What you need?"  the man asked.

The addict took a step back.

"I said I don't need anything."

The man nodded.  He removed the pipette from his mouth, wound it up
until the bowl was fixed into the center and then placed a shiny clip
around the stem He dropped the apparatus into an already bulging pocket
in his ankle-length coat and said, "Everybody need something."

"Not me."

The man nodded but carried on.

"You want uppers or downers?  You want head games?"

He leaned forward, and the addict shuffled back some more.
"I not hurt you," the man said, "just looking see you been fitted .. .
see if you a TAPper."
The addict subconsciously lifted a hand to the skin of his left temple
and then dropped the arm to his side.

"Well, I haven't," he said.

"There's no such thing as Total Audience Participation.  It's a con."

The man nodded, not wanting to get into a conversation.

Maybe not even knowing what this guy was talking about.
"Just looking, too, see you Prowler," he added, although he had clearly
decided that such was not the case.

The addict raised his arms in supplication.

"Do I look like a Prowler?"  he asked.
The man considered this and then said, '^Everybody look like
Prowler."

The addict relaxed.

"Well, I'm not," he said.

"I can see."  The man leant back against the wall.

"So, maybe you need smoke, little weed maybe."

"No," said the addict.

"Glue capsules?  DNA droppers, wood-burners, shark fins

"Never use 'em," said the addict.

"How's 'bout some dream boats--got new supply in this week, help you
sleep for month, sleep so long you wake up starving.  Got some LDs,
too--keep you going for not her month, never need to sleep, laugh all
time."

"Don't need to go Long Distance," the addict said.

"And I get all the sleep I need.  Every night.  Like a baby."

The man gave out a raucous laugh.

"Ain't nobody sleep like baby, man," he said.

"Well, I do."

"Okay," the man said with a carefree shrug.

"You don't need nothing, I might 'swell go."

"Wait."  The addict looked back along the path.  A limo-car was passing
overhead, a couple of levels up, its headlight beams splaying the
embankment where he had just been.  The TAPper from the bridge had
gone.  Maybe he had fallen or even jumped, his head filled with
ejaculation thoughts, his mind convinced that he would survive the drop
... or maybe hoping that he wouldn't.
"Hey, listen," the man was saying, "I got places--" "Okay," the addict
said.

"Show me."

"Show you?  Show you what?"

He shrugged.

"Everything.  I want to see it all."

Now it was the man's turn to be suspicious.

"You sure you not Prowler?"  He drew the word out, emphasizing the two
syllables, "prow" and "lurrr."
The addict shook his head and stepped closer to the man.  He could
smell the man's dirt now, could smell his sweat and the smoke on his
clothes, the piss stains on his plastic coverall pants, the oil and
grime in his matted hair .. . which the addict now saw was gathered
into two small pigtails resting on the upturned collar of his coat,
each one tethered with a tiny length of tubing.  He had stepped so
close that he was touching the man, could feel the man's body up
against his own, could feel the man's hand trapped against his own
stomach.

"I just want to be sure before I make a decision."

"Yeah?"

The addict nodded.

"Call it window-shopping.  I don't know what I want until I see it." He
looked into the man's face, stared into the hooded squinting eyes.

"You can understand that," he said.

The man waited for a few seconds, watching the addict, and then
straightened up.  He lifted his right arm, pulling it up between them,
and showed a long bladed stiletto tube-knife, a capsule already loaded
into the see-through trigger guard.  He smiled and nipped the safety. A
sheath unfurled along the blade and the guard slid into the handle. The
addict's eyes were wide open.

"Had be sure," the man said.

"You coming on strong."
The addict nodded and gave a shrug, watching the man drop the
tube-knife into his coat pocket, heard it clunk against the pipette.
"Okay," the man said, unfastening the toggle catches down the front of
his coat, "take look."  He pulled the two flaps open.

"Take good look."

Somewhere behind him in the night, the addict heard air horns- They
sounded like he imagined humpbacked whales might sound, or dolphins,
swimming lazily beneath a dark sky, not fully knowing where they were
going or even where they had been .. .

only that they were.

It was a sound of exhilaration and of simply being.
But it was also something else.  It was a fanfare for the contents of
the man's coast, each item held into place against the lining by
carefully sewn straps and inlaid pockets.  It was true, the addict
thought, his eyes jumping from one attachment to the next.  You really
could get anything here, here in this shadowed entrance to a seedy
residential block, with the rain falling in a thin spray.  He allowed
his eyes to wander, drinking in the sights inside the man's coat in the
passing overhead glare of a limo cab
There were gaudily-colored packets, shining phials and glow-in-the-dark
tubes, and alongside them, against the man's right armpit--the
smell!--were electrical bolt-leads with cushioned clamps; and long,
winding pipettes and smoking bulbs; long-nosed syringes and dum-dum
needle-heads; speed-dipped nipple pins testosterone pustules, and a
whole array of penile and labia adornments and sex embellishments.
Against the other armpit were sublimated chest pads toe-capsules for a
guaranteed slow climb, and heavy-duty army surplus amphetamine
suppositories for the instant peak.
Down around the man's upper thighs an array of bottles hung suspended
from his plastic coveralls by the slimmest of threads, their contents
like the sweets of old, varying colors and shapes and sizes .. .
sunshine yellows, one label proclaimed; meadow greens boasted another;
blue downs said a third, all in the same shaky writing.
Some were cylindrical capsules, mostly for anal or vaginal insertion,
and of the oral varieties some were flat and circular while others were
square or cuboid to delay movement into the stomach.
A sewer-cover rattled over to the right of them and steam bellowed from
the depths beneath.  At the same time, a distant siren wailed and
someone howled to the night, the aggression of the single drawn-out cry
quickly dissipating into a deep-throated sob of anguish.

The cry was abruptly cut off.

"You see something?"  the man asked.
The addict turned back from looking along the deserted walkway and
shook his head.

"Just a little jumpy," he said.

The man shook his head in exasperation.
"No, I mean you see something?"  He let go of one side of his opened
coat and pointed to the rows of bottles and packets and artificial
stimulants.

"You see something here!"

"No," the addict said sadly.

"You have nothing I need."

The man grunted and fastened his coat.

"What you need, then?  I get it for you.  What you need?"

The addict stared at the shadowed outline of the man's head, wondering
if it were safe to tell him.  He looked back along the walkway, saw a
news broadcast and share information feeding its was silently around
one of the Residential Blocks, and breathed in deeply.

Looking back, he said, "Pages."

The man took a step back against the doorway.

"You said," the addict reminded the man.

"You said you could get me what I needed.  Well, I need pages."
The man moved quickly out of the doorway and stood in front of the
addict on the walkway, his face now exposed to the dim light, his eyes
wide open.

"You mad," the man said.

"No pages."  He waved his hands to underline the statement.

"No pages," he said again, to underline the underline.

"You said."  The addict reached into his back pocket with one hand and
pulled out a thick wad of credit notes.  With the other, he reached
down between his legs, flipped open the Velcro prosthetic flap on his
left upper thigh and produced an old Prowler gun, its greased-up
snub-nose coated in talcum powder.

The man raised his hands.

"Prowler!"  he whispered.

"No, I'm not a Prowler," the addict said.

The man pointed.

"Prowler gun."

"Yes, it is a Prowler gun, but I'm not a Prowler."^ He waved the
credits, wafting them in front of the man's face.
"I will pay you," he said, spreading the words out so that the man
would be able to understand.

"Pages bad."

"Yes, pages are dangerous," the addict agreed.
"If you get caught.  We will not get caught."  He pushed the wad of
notes back into his coat pocket and pulled out three forties.  He
reached out and stuffed these inside the lapel of the man's coat.  Then
he slipped the gun into his other pocket, raised both hands to show
that they were completely empty.

"I pay you well."

The man was clearly considering his chances .. .
wondering whether to break for it, to run a zigzag path along the
walkway, risking being shot in the back for--how much?  he pulled the
notes from his lapel and looked .. . 120 credits--when maybe he could
get more.  Maybe much more.
"You come," he said at last, pocketing the credits as he turned and
started to walk.

The addict followed.

In all his days and nights of wandering the City, the addict had never
been this way.  It was as though the way was a special secret way, one
which could only be traversed at a certain time on a certain day.
There was a strange sentience to the darkened walkways, and the pair
moved carefully and slowly, feeling the dank silent doorways and the
hooded windows sightlessly following their passage.  The addict
listened for signs of movement amidst the shadows but heard only the
sound of his feet and those of his guide, occasionally echoing on
girders, and occasionally thudding on stone nagging or rotting
boardwalks.
The man led the addict into parts of Downtown that he had not realized
existed, and it was not until they had been walking for several
minutes that the addict noticed that the sounds of the city had
disappeared.
He halted for a moment, and the man in front stopped also, turning to
look at him through the gloom.

"Okay?"  he whispered.

"Listen," said the addict.

The man cocked his head to one side and then to the other.

"Don't hear nothing."  he said.

"That's right," said the addict.

"No sounds."

"Good," came the response.

"No," the addict said.

"There are no sounds of anything."

The man appeared to consider this.

"Good," he said again and, turning sharply, he resumed the trek.

Along they went, then down twisting narrow steps that led to a thin
walkway along a culvert, its sides curving steeply to meet below a
silent stretch of still water.
They walked along the side, trailing their left hands across the wall
as they passed, leaning slightly to avoid the feeling of falling ... or
of wanting to jump.  Beneath a curved stone bridge, they came to more
steps, this time going up.  The man ran up the steps two at a time, his
coat-tails wafting behind him, and the addict followed, pleased to be
leaving the culvert behind.
At the top of the steps they turned sharp right along a narrow street
between what appeared to be warehouses.
The road here was cobbled and uneven, its surface shiny with water and
slick with something else.

Now there was a smell.

The addict breathed in deeply.
The scent of decay and oldness was at once repellent and attractive. He
thought it might be like the smell of the sea.
At the end of the street they turned left, the man glancing over his
shoulder to make sure the addict was still there.  The addict suspected
that the man could not care less either way, and, as they continued, he
half-expected the man to make a break for it.  He wondered what he
would do if that happened.  He had absolutely no idea where they
were.
A little way along another street, that sloped gently downhill, the man
stopped and moved to the side where he stopped and pressed his back
against the wall.

"Are we there yet?"  the addict asked, pausing for breath.

"Where?"  the man asked.

The addict shrugged.

"Wherever it is that we're going."
The man did not respond.  Instead, he backed along the wall until he
reached a section of boarding.  He backed onto the boarding and began
to tap with his knuckles, beating out a discordant rhythm that seemed
to go on and on.  After a few seconds, the addict thought that the man
was simply playing for time .. .

that the rapping was a nervous tic ... but then he stopped.

The addict sensed that they were now waiting for something.

He listened.

Then, there it was ... a distant and faint rapping, a faraway
syncopated melody of hand on wood.  It came from behind the boarding.

The man rapped again.  And waited.

A sudden litany of noise sounded, and stopped.
The man stepped aside and waved for the addict to join him against the
wall.  As he stepped forward, the addict heard a faint scratching rasp,
metal on metal, from behind the door.  He leaned back against the wall
and waited, hardly daring to breathe.
At the far end of the alley a figure appeared, seeming to step straight
out of the wall itself.  Without moving his back from the wall, the
addict craned forward to see if he could discern some kind of door but
the wall seemed to go on right to the end of the street.
The figure jogged noiselessly across the street, where it disappeared
momentarily, folding itself into the shadows.  Then it reemerged and
jogged to the end of the street, its bulbous head darting first one way
and then the other, checking the street that crossed the end of the
alley for any signs of movement.  The figure came back and stood for a
few seconds looking down at the addict and the dealer.  Then, with a
short wave of an arm, it backed up into the shadows.

"Is he waving at us?"  the addict whispered.

The dealer shook his head and pointed down the alley, away from the
waving figure.
The addict looked around and saw a second figure, its head as huge and
unwieldy as the first, stepping back into the shadows.  The wave had
clearly been some kind of signal, perhaps confirming that the streets
were clear of Prowlers, and the addict waited quietly for further
developments.  He did not have long to wait The rasping noise came
again, louder this time as though whoever or whatever was making it no
longer felt such a need for stealth.  The noise grew louder still until
it stopped with a dull thud.  Then came a metallic jingle and the sound
of keys being inserted and turned to give a solid thunk.
The dealer stepped away from the wall and held out his hand to the
addict.

"Credits," he said.

"Give to me."
Momentarily wrong-footed by the sudden use of the preposition, the
addict pulled out his wad of notes without thinking and peeled off
five, The dealer took them, gave them a quick flick and shook his
head.

"More."

"How much more?"  the addict asked.

"I haven't even seen anything yet."

The wood paneled boarding began to rise.
"Many pages in there," the dealer hissed, nodding to the rising
boarding.

"Give ten like others."

"Which others?  You brought other people here?"

"No," the dealer snapped.

"Like other notes."  He patted his coat pocket.

"Forties!"  The addict made a quick mental calculation.

"That's more than five hundred credits," he said.
The other man thrust the notes he already had into his pocket and then
jabbed his empty hand out again.

"Yeah, right.  Give."

The addict counted off the forties and placed them in the dealer's
hand.  The man thrust his payment into his coat pocket and ran off down
the street, his steps echoing through the gloom.
Turning around, the addict watched as the boarding reached the top of
the surrounding brick and stonework and stopped.  The addict frowned.
There had only been a wall behind the boarding.  He was about to turn
and shout to one of the shadowy figures at either end of the street
when the wall shimmered and another figure stepped through it and out
onto the pavement.
Before he stepped out of the shadows, the addict transferred the old
Prowler gun from his pocket to the prosthetic flap on his upper
thigh.
The new figure wore plastic coveralls and a large bulbous helmet.
Holding the gun steady, its muzzle pointing straight at him, the figure
lilted its free arm and flicked a button on the helmet.  Amidst a blur
of crackling static, a deep male voice said, "Who was he?"

"Who?"

"Your friend.  The guy ran off?"

The addict shrugged.

"Dealer.  He brought me here.

I asked him."

"Why'd you do that?"

"I wanted something he didn't have."

"What was that?"

"Pages," the addict said.

"I need some pages," "You carrying?"

The addict shook his head.

"Lemme check."
The addict lifted his hands and fell forward against the wall while the
man frisked him.

"Okay," the man said.  He turned slightly and looked up the street.

"Hill ... see anything?  That other guy gone?"  he said.  The addict
looked up at the figure at the top end of the street and saw it walking
down towards them.  Clearly, they were communicating by some sort of
shortwave system.
The figure with the weapon turned to the other end of the street.  The
deep voice said, "How 'bout you Brooks?  Things look okay?"
The addict turned and saw the third figure walking toward them from the
lower end.  It waved an arm.

"Seems you okay," the deep voice said.

The addict nodded, fighting back his excitement.

"I

am.  I just need some pages."
The man hefted the weapon onto his shoulder and said, "Okay.  Walk
through the wall."  He raised an arm and pointed.

"Merry .. . switch it on.  Our guest is coming through."

The addict stepped up to the wall, hesitated and then stepped forward.
There was a brief blurring and the addict was inside .. . in another
world.

He looked ahead and he looked upward.

He looked to the left and he looked to the right.

He even looked down.

And he breathed in the smell.
Around him and above him and below him were metal gantries, walkways
similar to the one on which he now stood, stretching forward and
crisscrossing each other, layer upon layer, tier upon tier, with each
one traversed by silent people, men and women, each dressed in a
similar garb of green and white, sweater and pants.  To either side of
them, be they up or down or to left or right, set back behind
protective rails, were huge piles of paper sheets, littered with
colored marking cards jutting out sometimes at angles and sometimes
straight ahead or at 90 degrees to one side.
Each pile was held in place by what appeared to be plastic sidings,
their sides a graffiti mosaic of scribbled writing and accompanying
numbers, the numbers occasionally crossed through and new numbers
scribbled alongside.

"Anything in particular you have in mind?"

The first man had followed the addict through the wall and was standing
just behind him to the left.  He had removed his helmet and was
standing with his weapon propped against his right shoulder.

The addict shook his head, unable to speak.

He breathed in again, closed his eyes, and analyzed the smell.
It was simply paper, aging paper, and maybe the sweet underlying waft
of metal and oil and wood and plaster.

But it was more than that to the addict, much more.

The smell was an olfactory amalgam of words and phrases, knowledge and
ideas, dialogue and thoughts.
It was the largest collection of history the addict had ever seen,
larger even than he had ever dreamed about, dreamed about in the
quietest moments of the loneliest days and nights huddled tightly in
his cot.
Here were snippets of stories and articles, sections of treatises and
criticisms, chapters of opinion and belief.
Vowels and consonants, prefixes and suffixes, prepositions and adverbs,
nouns and adjectives..  ..
The accumulated smell of the words came at him in a tumult, soared up
his nostrils into his brain in a flood of imagined images.
The vast emptiness of space .. . the swirling cold depths of the oceans
... the ancient monuments long forgotten to today's diluted version of
humankind.
Though he had not yet stepped forward to glance at even one of the
millions--perhaps billions--of pages torn from the old books, the
addict knew it was all here: Dickens, Homer, Tolstoy, Shakespeare ..
.
Melville, Bradbury, Updike, King.  The great literary minds of every
century in the planet's history gathered together under the one
roof--he looked up again and saw that it was a composite of roofs, d
cavernous coverings that had, at one time, protected perhaps a whole
range of warehouses.

"Wow!"  he said, unable to think of anything else.

"Quite a collection," the man ventured.
"Quite a collection," the addict agreed.  He pushed his tongue against
the back bicuspid on the right and swallowed the fractured enamel. Then
he bit down on the tiny microchip button, felt the brief tingle of
vibration of the homing signal.

The man stepped forward and looked at him, frowning.

"You okay?"
The addict swallowed and smiled, thumped his chest as though he had
indigestion, eyebrows raised in apology.

"It always gets people, the first look," said the man.

nodding that he understood.

"Hey, I'm fine.  Absolutely fine."

"So, what's your poison?"  The man smiled and nodded to the walkway
straight ahead of them.
"That way is mostly twentieth-century literature.  Same for the next
two tiers down.  Most come at twenty credits a page, six for one
hundred- You buy more, we can do a deal."

"Right," the addict said.

"A deal.  We'll definitely have to do a deal."
"The next three tiers up are nonfiction, philosophy, science, religion.
The two after that have classical works, including poetry, and sheet
music."

"Sheet music?"

The man shrugged.
"The words and notes to the old songs?  I dunno.  Not my bag.  Not any
of it," The addict looked puzzled.

"You don't .. . you don't use any of this stuff?"

"Nan."  The man shook his head vehemently to emphasize the point.
"Don't see the attraction.  Just words and stuff.  Doesn't mean
anything."

The addict nodded and smiled.

"The daughters of earth."

"Say again?"

" t!  am not so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the
daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven."  Doctor
Johnson said that, almost three hundred years ago."
"Yeah, right."  The man frowned momentarily, and then his face
lightened.

"You like all this stuff, huh?"

He turned back and walked to the rail, leaned on it and looked down.
"Yes, I like all this stuff."  He scanned the myriad pages before
him.
"Must've taken a long time," he said, "stripping all these pages out of
the original books."
"Sure did.  Not many books left after the wars, and a lot of folks who,
like you, feel they need to drink it all in."  The man moved up
alongside the addict and leaned over the rail.
"When you have one book and maybe a thousand customers, you gotta think
of ways to satisfy the demand."

"Sure," the addict agreed.

"Could have sold the whole book for maybe fifty credits, which is
pretty much all anyone can afford, Maybe one hundred for the more
popular ones--the ones folks remembered reading--but the supply isn't
infinite.  The demand is infinite, but not the supply.

You know what I mean?"

"I surely do," the addict said.

"So we strip 'em out."

The addict tried not to let the man see him wince.
"That way, six hundred-page book gives three hundred sheets; three
hundred sheets at twenty credits apiece gives--" "Six thou."
"Right.  Six thousand credits.  Against, what?  Against fifty or one
hundred."

"It's a case of simple economics," the addict said.

"Commerce."

"You got it in one."

"It's not a new concept."

"Say again?"

"They used to do it in the old days, the dealers, guys like you."  He
turned around and leaned back against the rail.

"They see the demand and feed it.

Used to be that way with comic books."

The man frowned.

"They the ones with pictures?"
"They're the ones," the addict said, smiling, jabbing a finger at the
man.
"Superhero stuff, stuff like Superman, Batman, all that stuff.  So few
of them survived the Second World War, they became collectors'
items--we're talking, what?  Two hundred years ago?

Two fifty?"

The man shrugged.

"No idea."

"No, well, folks bought them for crazy prices, squirreled them away in
protective bags.  Each time one was sold at such and such a price, the
dealer whacked it up the next time he got a copy of that mag."

"You know a lot about this stuff."

He shrugged.

"It's a hobby."

"Everyone needs a hobby," the man said, pointing to the two bolts fixed
into the skin of his temples.  He gave a big grin.
The addict returned the grin, and said, "Then it was books.  First
editions, signed limited editions ... all that stuff.  At first, it was
just the signature that made the limiteds special.  Then they came with
extra chapters, special introductions, special after words
"Then folks got tired of that and turned their attention to the old
paperbacks."  The addict whistled and waved his hand as though he'd
burned his fingers.

"Those were crazy days."

"Hey .. . you weren't there?  You couldn't have been."
"No, I wasn't there.  But I've spoken with people who have spoken with
people who knew people who knew people .. . you know what I mean?  Time
marches on."

The man shuffled side to side impatiently.

"Ain't that the truth."

The addict ignored him and carried on.

"Condition was always a big thing, but then, when all the great
condition books and magazines had been bought or had simply
deteriorated into a lesser condition, the prices for those went through
the roof."  He paused, nodding.  "
"Course, you have to remember that people had different levels of
spending power then.  It wasn't governed by the State the way it is
now."
"Right," the man said, his voice indicating that he didn't really
follow what this guy was going on about.
"Yeah, and then the shit really hit the fan after the wars.  Every
country--and I mean every country-decimated.  Billions wiped out over
the space of the first eight, nine years, and billions more over the
next fifty or so.  The new global State didn't want folks looking to
the old books and the old ways, didn't want them making themselves
dissatisfied .. . questioning the status quo.  So they took steps to
remedy the situation.

They got rid of whatever books they could find."

"That the Blanking?"
"Yes, that was the Blanking."  He turned and looked at the piles of
pages towering the aisles, a cityscape of white monoliths, and he
dreamed of a life which could be long enough to read them all.
"Have you ever wondered," the addict said, his voice low, "if it hurts
them?"

"What?"

He looked over his shoulder and nodded at the piles.

"If tearing out the pages hurts the books."

There was a silence.  Then the man said, "Look, I don't know what
you're talking about, mister.  What say you just tell me which part
you're--" "I'm interested in all of it," the addict said.

"Well, okay, just tell me what you want."

The microchip in his mouth buzzed once and then again.

It was time.

Turning around from the rail, the addict smiled and said, "I want it
all."

The man frowned, gave a half-smile, not understanding.

"You want it--"
The addict kicked out once and sent the man's helmet skittering along
the gantry, where it spun and swirled a few times, taking it closer and
closer to the edge until it disappeared over the side- The next kick
took the man in the crotch, like the next kick and the one after it,
each one delivered by the addict in quick succession with alternate
feet.
The addict pulled his hand back, flexed the fingers into a right angle,
and plunged the hand forward into the man's chest, a single Jab.  There
was a dull crunch and the man coughed.  He coughed again, dropped his
weapon, and fell to his knees.  The next cough brought up what looked
like food and some pieces of splintered bone.
Lifting the weapon from the floor, the addict brought the butt down on
the top of the man's head.

The man was dead even before he fell face forward.

He wiped the blood in a long smear along the man's plastic coveralls
and, after a quick inspection, flicked off the safety guard.  The
barrel hummed quietly.
He turned to the rail and quickly scanned the gantries in front of him.
Nobody seemed to have noticed the scuffle.  But he was still going to
have to move quickly.  He backed along the gantry until his back was
against the wall.  He was a little more sheltered here, safe from a
casual glance by one of the people tending the stacks of paper.  He
crouched down to make his presence still harder to detect and turned to
face the wall through which he had stepped just minutes earlier.
It was a simple destabilized molecular sheet.  Although the outside had
been treated to give the appearance of brickwork, the inside bore no
such illusion--just a flat expanse grafted onto the real brickwork at
either side.  Fixed to the wall at the right was a small panel with
four buttons.  There was no writing on the panel.

The addict duck-walked to the panel and studied it.

Four buttons.  Two red, one green, one black.

He shook his head.  What was he thinking about?

The color coding could mean anything, and time was already against
him.

As if on cue, he heard a metallic voice talking through static.

The addict moved to the side of the rail and cautiously looked over.
Just a few feet below, on a protruding stanchion, was the helmet.  The
voice was coming from inside.  The addict knew it was asking about
him.
He shuffled back to the panel, took a deep breath and pressed the green
button.

Nothing happened.

He pressed one of the red buttons.
He almost dropped the weapon when the siren started.  It whooped and
wailed, so loud he could feel its vibrations in the metallic gantry
beneath his feet.
Somewhere behind him he could hear the sound of shouting voices, almost
lost beneath the siren.

He pressed the black button.

The wall shimmered and became translucent.  He could see shapes
standing beyond it, outside on the street.

Then he pressed the other red button.

The siren stopped.
But the voices continued.  And now he could feel other vibrations .. .
running feet.
He span around as the first shape came through the wall, crouched down,
gun at the ready.  The shape looked down at him, just a glance, the
black visored helmet nodding once, and then it moved forward, further
along the gantry.
A second shape appeared, then a third and a fourth, each of them moving
quickly to the side, computerized laser rifles primed and already
sweeping the tiered gantry system for signs of movement.

A fifth shape handed the addict a telephonic headset.

A sixth dropped a rope and grapple at his feet and then moved
forward.
The addict slipped the headset on.  Immediately there were voices,
voices shouting instructions ... to get the ones on the ground first;
the others had a long way to go.  To watch out for anyone moving toward
wall panels which could mean self-destruct instructions.

Then one voice said, "You okay.  Reader One?"

He nodded, looking up at the shapes.  He couldn't tell which one was
asking the question.

"Then get down to ground level," the voice said.

"Main office must be down there.  They'll be aiming to get rid of it
all.  And when they do that, they'll do it from the ground."

The addict looked at the rail.

"We must preserve the pages," the voice added.

"Jesus Christ, I have never seen so many as this."

There was a pause and, turning back, the addict caught sight of a black
shape standing just inside the wall, staring up and down, shaking its
head.  The figure fitted the grapple onto the rail and tossed the rope
over the side; then it turned to face him and waved a hand.

"Go," the voice said.

The addict shouldered the strapped weapon and rolled over the edge,
allowing his hands to slide down the rope as it swirled beneath his
interlocked legs and feet.
Already the sound of the lasers was deafening, drowning out the voices
from the headset.  But it wasn't deafening enough to drown out the
screams.
Or maybe it was just that he knew they were there ... could imagine
what they sounded like.

He allowed himself to slide down.

As he passed each gantry tier, he slowed and stared at the piles.
So many sheets of paper.  So many pages.  So many millions and billions
and trillions of words.
A shot hit the metal alongside him and he braced himself, expecting
the man to get a better aim, trying to spin himself around and jam one
foot onto the gantry to steady himself enough to be able to train his
own weapon.
Halfway around, already swinging the rifle up to let off a few hopeful
shots, the addict saw an overalled man burst apart as one of the lasers
hit him from behind.  The arm that bounced against the gantry to his
side still held its weapon.
Through the smoke, covering his face against the smell of burned flesh,
the addict saw the black shapes swinging across the gantries up above,
ropes attached to the roof by suction pads.  It was almost balletic. If
it were a TAPped presentation, there would probably be music piped over
the top of all the noise .. . the sounds of people shouting, people
screaming.

People dying.

He let go of the rifle and felt it swing by his side as he let himself
slide down to the floor.
He landed awkwardly, a few feet in front of a man in an overall
punching the ammunition clip on his rifle.
The man's head raised to look at him and the addict could see the eyes
.. . just for a second.

They were filled with fear and with anger.

Then the head dropped down again as he de clipped and then pressed it
home again.

The addict lifted his weapon and fired.  Twice.

The shots sent the man flying back along the corridor, bouncing against
the gantry supports before skidding to a halt alongside the rear
wall.

The addict crouched and followed.

The place was a maze of metal and smoke.
"How you doing.  Reader One?"  a tinny voice asked in his headset.  It
was not the voice he had heard earlier.

"On the ground," the addict shouted into the mouth mike

"See anything?"
Something touched the top of his head, and he fell forward, spinning,
bringing his weapon around.  On the floor, his knees bent up against
the gantry, he saw a sheet of paper flutter, side to side, until it
landed, slithering beneath one of the supports.

When he looked up, he saw the rest of them.

The air was filled with sheets of paper, their surfaces covered in the
spidery blackness of type.  Some of them were burning, leaving tiny
trails of smoke as they descended.
He grabbed at a sheet and shook out the flames, glancing at the words
between the blackened edges of the page.  It wasn't something he
recognized, but the simple commitment of thoughts to paper, of the
recording of opinions or beliefs or even complete fiction filled him
with awe.  The way it always did They had always hoped that one day
they would find a stash like this one.  They had hoped but had never
dared believe.
He looked around and saw the black figures swinging down onto the
ground level now.  As he looked up the tiers, he saw other black
figures on the edges of the gantry, their weapons readied but nobody to
fire at.  Several of these figures were already giving the all-clear.
It took them sixteen days to move all of the pages, filling the
cavernous interior holds of the stripped down water carriers, delivery
modules, and old sky buses before lifting off shakily into the sky to
carry the pages to a hundred safe-houses scattered around the city.
Watchers were placed at street corners, upper-story windows and on
rooftops for two square miles of the warehouse, each fitted with a
mouth mike and a "lights out" implant in a rear tooth to be used in the
event of capture.  The operation went smoothly thanks to the fact that
the warehouse was in a sector that nobody ever visited anymore.  During
the repeated pick ups, the addict realized just how much of the city
had fallen into disuse.  It was this fact that most depressed him .. .
perhaps even more than the criminalization of reading: the fact that
the city was somehow being run down beneath their very eyes .. . turned
into something else.

This was why the organization had been necessary.

The People's Literation Society, a middle ground between the
authorities which sought to suppress literature and the entrepreneurial
pushers who sought to benefit from the suppression.  If asked, the
addict would have found it difficult to say who he despised the most.
The first drop took place during a busy lunch period, from an old
delivery module that skirted the monolithic towers of the business
district three times before its load was dispatched.  Then the module
slipped into and amidst the tiered traffic flows until it was gone. Two
Prowlcars arrived minutes later, by which time the module was safely
"home" and already being dismantled, its telltale livery being replaced
or restructured or redesigned.  The addict estimated they "set free"
more than half a million pages of around three hundred to four hundred
words a page.
The sheets released on that first drop fell from the air onto the dirty
streets and walkways of the city like confetti.
A TAPper propped against a building side outside a recreation brothel
stooped to pick a sheet that had brushed his bare legs.  As he lifted
it for a closer look, another sheet landed to take its place.  The
sheet contained pages 69 and 70 of The House at Pooh Corner.  The
TAPper frowned and studied the words, wondering just what, exactly, a
"tigger" might be.  When he got to the end, he wanted to know more
about Piglet and about the blue braces of Christopher Robin (whoever he
was).  The boy scratched at the rash around his cheek-studs and watched
another sheet flutter down toward him.  Maybe that one would provide
some answers ... or maybe he would have to search around--even ask
around--until he found other sheets..  ..
A man wearing a banker's sarong picked up a sheet containing pages 175
and 176 of John Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur, glanced around
nervously and then sc rumpled the paper into his waist-pouch.  Seconds
later he was lost in the crowds watching the pages rain down upon the
city, heading home where he could read in safety.  He felt gloriously
excited.  A few steps farther along, he stopped and grabbed a fistful
of sheets which he thrust after the first one..  ..
An old woman, bald and bearded, watched a sheet flutter through the
gloom of the lower levels, watched it waft to and fro, easing itself
finally onto a ledge just a few feet away from her.  Maintaining her
muttered conversation with herself, she abandoned the metal mall cart
containing her entire life's belongings and retrieved the sheet--pages
85 and 86 of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World--and, returning quickly
to her possessions, slipped it beneath a makeshift pillow whose stink
of urine and sour breath she no longer noticed.  The world had come
back to her, suddenly, contained on a simple sheet of paper- The
streets had been opened.
"What came first?"  she asked a passing Hostess, reading from the paper
and wagging her finger to the heavens.
"The chicken or the 'idea' chicken?"  The Hostess pushed her to one
side and moved quickly to an elevator platform: she obviously didn't
know the answer any more than the old bearded hobo woman.
But as she stepped onto the platform and pulled the gate across, the
Hostess went over what the old woman had said..  ..
High above the streets, two men leaned on the protective rails outside
a middle-level nicotine store, watching.

"Snow," the addict said.

"It's snowing."

"It's snowing seeds," the man beside him answered, nodding.

"The seeds will find accommodating soil, and they will be nurtured.
They will find warmth and care and they will form roots and grow .. .
grow into knowledge and curiosity and emotion."  He pointed to a young
man walking determinedly through the fluttering sheets without
stopping.
"Some, like him, will ignore what's happening.  They will turn a blind
eye-but only at first.  Eventually even they will want-need--to know
more.  Those with a two-page sheet from Moby-Dick will want other
sheets, more story .. . the same with those who have read--lived-brief
moments from Dracula or Oliver Twist or The Wind in the Willows.  They
will want to read and to live other moments."

"And what if they can't find them?"  the addict asked.

The other man shrugged.
"Then they will construct their own stories inspired by the tastes they
have received today.  Thus has it ever been, thus will it ever be."  He
stared out across the city, turning his face to the gently wafting
pages.

"There can be no turning back.  Not now."

"God, but I hope you're right," the addict said.

The man beside him smiled and said, in a loud, proud voice:

"
"Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words
among mankind.
Be through my lips to un wakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy!  0,
Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

"

"Ah, Shelley," the addict said, nodding as he suddenly remembered the
old order of the seasons.

"Famous last words?"

His friend shook his head.

"Prophetic first ones."

The sirens, when they began, did not sound frightening.

They sounded afraid.