The Far Oasis

by Jeffrey Ford

In their exquisite self-centeredness our ancestors believed that they were alone in the universe. At the same time, they had convinced themselves that earth was the blue apple of God's eye and the sole reason for all of creation. This two-headed fallacy caused humanity both delusions of grandeur and a paranoiac sense of loneliness. Although we eventually achieved the ability of space travel at speeds exceeding that of light and discovered a proliferation of planets along with the near-infinite diversification of species inhabiting them, we could never flee far enough to escape those ingrained disabilities of ego and the angst of isolation, but carried them with us like ghostly stowaways to the most remote corners of the universe. The drama caused by the tension between these two psychological conditions born of the same impulse played itself out on a million far-flung stages. As a historian, I can tell you that in studying the history of mankind, this is, though it dons a multitude of disguises, the sole phenomenon one studies. At least a thousand instances come readily to mind, but allow me to apprise you of a single case, and it will be for you like a mirror. One glance and you will be assured that you are not alone in your willful loneliness.

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The celestial city of Aldebaran had pirouetted through the limitless vacuum for centuries, and its population, whose original purpose was to find a habitable world to colonize, had grown so at home in the star-studded blackness of space that the group mind could not conceive of leaving its clear domed vessel for the natural atmosphere and sunlight of any planet, no matter how blue. The citizens of Aldebaran had done well, not only in maintaining their systems, both mechanical and organic, but also in maintaining their society. To their credit, they remembered the concept of love, and kept it alive all the long years they aimlessly drifted.

In order to ensure survival it was absolutely necessary that their laws be strict. Those of the original population who had written the precepts for the city knew the dangers of allowing chaos to get a foothold in a closed system. Justice on Aldebaran was humane, but it was also swift and given a place of utmost importance. When a citizen too egregiously violated the code, he or she was viewed as a plague virus and banished, with the greatest expediency, to the surface of the closest habitable planet. The citizens viewed this punishment in the same manner that their ancient earth ancestors did consignment to Hell.

Somewhere in the fifth century of the history of Aldebaran, a little less than halfway to its annihilation in the maw of a black hole, there lived within the city a man named Honis Sikes. He was just one of a hundred other agricultural workers who tilled the soil that lay between the boundary of the dome and the structural complex that was the city at its center. He was a hard worker, and although he was by nature shy, he was well known for his expertise at a popular strategy game played with corn kernels on a board that carried a labyrinthine design. The name of this entertainment was Maize. In his time away from the fields, he designed boards for this game and recorded some of the more interesting points of strategy from famous games he remembered having played or seen. There were very few players who had ever beaten him, and the lucky ones who did never repeated the feat. In this fact, he enjoyed a modest notoriety all throughout Aldebaran.

Once when he was playing in the city park, a large group of onlookers present, he called for his next opponent and a young woman stepped up to the table. She was carrying a board of her own making, and when she placed it down on the table for all to see, the crowd gasped at the complexity of the design. Sikes smiled at her, for the only thing he wanted more than to be admired for his play at Maize was a real challenge. The game began and right from the very start, the young woman took the lead. Play was heated and corn kernels came and went from the labyrinth so fast that many of the onlookers couldn't follow what was happening. Near the end, when it looked like Sikes was about to lose, he put into effect a secret strategy that rapidly depleted the woman's store and closed down the labyrinth around her. He had trapped her only remaining viable pieces, causing them to (in the parlance of the game) rot.

Sikes knew that he had met a formidable opponent, but it was not until after he was finished playing the game that he noticed how beautiful she was. Her hair was long and light, the color of the beams from the artificial growth lamps that were positioned throughout the fields. Her face was unusual in that it was not as pale as that of the predominance of citizens but still held the tone of some ancient earth ethnicity. The eyes also were startling in their exotic almond shape and deep green color, like the fabled wandering star, Karjeet. He quickly packed up his board and pieces and followed her out of the park. On the street that ran past the entrance to the underground generators and gravity replicators, he caught up to her.

"Hello," he called.

She turned, her hair whipping in a bright wave over her left shoulder, and he knew he would never forget the sight of it. As he approached, he felt weak, but held himself together and inquired as to her name.

"Methina," she said.

They exchanged some comments about the game. He told her about his job in the fields, and she said to him that everyone who played Maize knew about him. She volunteered that she was a laborer in the fission plant.

"And can you tell me that strategy you used at the end of the game?" she asked, smiling.

"That is my secret," he said. "It must be begun in the second move of the game or it will not work. I call it the Winner's Conceit."

They walked on a way down the street together, conversing and when they came to the place where their intended paths diverged, Sikes, who had always been very shy with women, very much a loner, screwed up his courage and asked if she would join him on the upcoming holiday when the city governors allowed the gravity replicators to be turned way down and everyone gained, for an hour's time, something akin to the power of flight. To this she agreed, told him where and when to meet her, and then turned away, leaving him standing on the corner. It took a few moments for her acceptance to sink in, and when it did, he dropped his board and box of pieces, his kernels scattering everywhere.

On the day of the holiday, they met as agreed upon at the outdoor cafe in the center of town. Methina wore a long, white dress that billowed around her, and when she leaped and swept through the skies above the city she embodied for Sikes the ancient concept of an angel. It was a custom of good luck that one must jump upward from the smaller buildings to the tallest, Shiva Tower, and from there kick off and ascend to touch the inner apex of the dome. This they each did, encouraged and applauded by the other. Methina and Sikes held hands and performed midair somersaults together. They flew, laughing, arms flapping, like earth birds above the fields.

After the gravity replicators had been restored to their standard settings and the city lights had been turned down to the merest glow, the two found themselves alone in a clearing of a small thicket of woods, an island of green out in the golden wheat field. They lay on the ground while above, way out past the clear boundary of the dome, a spiraled galaxy turned slowly like a milky pinwheel in a cosmic breeze. Pieces of space debris occasionally collided with the invisible force field surrounding Aldebaran and these shards of creation disintegrated in showers of orange sparks.

The two Maize players had long since lost interest in using their tongues for speech and were now twining them heatedly; their bodies locked in a tight embrace. Off came their clothes. But just at the moment of fruition, Sikes panting like a robot worker suffering a power surge, Methina put her palms against his chest and held him back.

"First, you must give me the secret of the Winner's Conceit," she whispered.

He, who had imagined himself taking the technique smugly to the grave, who had long daydreamed of future generations puzzling over the riddle of the move, spewed forth the strategy with its placement of kernels, its series of moves and when to perform them with each of the basic types of labyrinths. "You must distract the opponent," he grunted, "by letting her take the lead, clouding her mind with the Winner's Conceit."

"All right," she said and removed her palms, but it was too late. Sikes lurched inelegantly forward once with bad aim, his kernels scattering everywhere.

She dressed quickly and left him there on the ground weeping, for now it had become clear to him that he had squandered the treasure of his secret and never so much as entered the labyrinth.

In the days that followed, Sikes could not return to Maize. The game was finished for him. When he would try to force himself to contemplate strategies he had been assiduously building in his mind for months, they were crowded out by the image of Methina's beauty and the somatic memory of her naked body. He did not know where she lived, but she had told him that she worked at the fission plant. One afternoon he left the fields early without telling his superiors and went to wait for her outside the plant's entrance.

He watched the workers exit, filled with the excitement that he would again see her. But she never materialized. Going down into the plant, he found the office and gave her name, inquiring as to what shift she worked. Since the secretary was a devotee of Maize and was impressed to be speaking with Sikes, she told him that there was no one with that name among the workers. Methina had lied to him. For a moment he felt lost, but then reassured himself with the thought that Aldebaran was an island from which there was no escape.

He began looking for her everywhere in the city, at the cafe, in the museums, along the shore of the lake. He had forsaken his job in the fields, dodging calls from his superiors. With each passing day, he succumbed more and more to a growing sense of melancholy. He began to believe that she had been merely a figment of his imagination generated by his own loneliness until, one day on the observation deck of Shiva Tower, he ran into Porleman, another aficionado of the game.

"Where have you been, Sikes?" asked the thin, horse faced man.

"I'm out of the Maize," he said.

"Just in time," said Porleman. "There is a new champion, a woman, who is hacking through the ranks of players with what appears to me to be that famous tactic of yours."

"You've seen her?" asked Sikes.

"She crushed me the other day over at the Provident Club. She's taking on all opponents. No one has been able to stand up to her."

Sikes stood, hidden down an alley, across the street from the Provident Club. He waited patiently for hours until the city lights had been dimmed and the players and fans began to file out and head home to their apartments. Finally, he saw Methina, if that was her real name, exit the club and head down the street. She walked alone through the shadows cast by the buildings. The governors had opted for a windy night and the breeze machines had been set at three-quarter speed. With a stealth born of his desire, he snuck quietly up behind her and grabbed her by the shoulder. She gave a sharp cry and turned quickly, her hair whipping over her left shoulder as it had the day he had met her.

"Sikes," she said, and seemed relieved it was not something more threatening. "Good to see you again."

"You tricked me," he said. "You stole my move."

She shook her head and laughed softly. "I had my own strategy," she said, "and beat you with it. You were too foolish to see that the game extends beyond the boundaries of the board. I broke no rules."

"I don't care," said Sikes, "have the strategy. What I want is to see you again. I haven't been able to think of anything but you," he said.

"Feel free to think of me," she said, "but I have as little interest in you as I might a single kernel on the twenty-ninth space of a spiral labyrinth riddled with rot."

"What about the holiday?" he asked. "The clearing in the trees?"

"You, Sikes, were a victim of the Winner's Conceit," she said. "Good night." She turned to leave.

He could not let her go and employed a new intuitive strategy, one devoid of intellect and logic. His only goal was to touch her again. He put his hands around the soft flesh of her throat and held on with all his strength until her arms stopped flailing and she slumped, lifeless, against him. When the city lights were brought up again hours later, the citizens on their way to work found him in the same spot, clutching her to him in a vise-like embrace. The security officers were called out, and the game closed down around him.

Honis Sikes was found guilty and sentenced to banishment. On the day of his sentencing, he begged the magistrate that he simply be executed on Aldebaran and not be sent out into space to some nameless planet. The good man on the bench felt the horror of Sikes's situation and, never having had to banish someone from the city before, had a hard time refusing him. But in the end, after consulting with the other magistrates, they all concluded that his crime was too heinous and if their ancestors insisted on one thing that would ensure the perpetuation of the celestial city, it was the upholding of the law as it was written.

The probe that was to be Sikes's new island in the void for what would end up being the next four hundred years was not much larger than he was. Inside was a suspended animation chamber called a cocoon, for the process that was used to preserve human life on long space flights was one borrowed from the chrysalis stage of earth caterpillars. Those insects wrapped themselves in a cocoon and then through their own organic chemistry were broken down into a liquid state only to be reformed from that mucous later into the guise of a butterfly. Through the use of technology and inorganic chemistry, so was the case with the body of the traveler in this device. Sikes's bone and muscle, flesh and blood, would again cohere out of the liquid sleep, the only difference being he would not come forth a resplendent winged creature but merely the same old Sikes.

Along with the criminal were stowed a microwave rifle with rechargeable pack, a knife, a handheld fire starter, a single set of clothing and a heavy coat. There was also a small six-by-six cube sealed in a bag that, when released, would draw in the ambient water vapor and grow to become a modest box-like shelter with a door and a window. The prisoner was allowed to request a personal belonging and Sikes requested his favorite labyrinth board and set of kernels. All of this was done with the mind that, surely, the outcast had little chance for survival on an alien world. Still, it eased the consciences of the people of Aldebaran and was in keeping with their humane philosophy.

Sikes was stuffed, screaming for the mercy of death, into the cocoon cylinder of his temporary space tomb. In minutes he was deep in the liquid sleep, his physical being sloshing back and forth within as the small vessel was wheeled to the launch pad in the underground of the city. The controls had been set so that the probe would wander through the universe until its sensors, acute spectrographs that used a technique called light dissection, picked up signs of a habitable planet. Then the navigational devices would take over; the single rocket would fire and send him to his new home.

Criminal probe #87659 was shot into the absolute zero of space in the wake of the turning city, a gleaming chrome kernel cast into a game without boundaries. One would think that Sikes's mind might be a complete blank, but no. There was, even in that suspended state, a dim sort of consciousness; a psychedelic inner realm of intermittent ghost life and insect memory, like pieces of a shattered mirror taking wing.

Then Time was a maniac scattering dust and miles had no meaning until, suddenly, for what easily could pass for an eternity, those shards of the shattered mirror flew together like pieces of a puzzle, assembling themselves, and Sikes awoke, reformed from the chemical soup that was himself into Sikes. The panel of the cocoon slid open, the door of the probe drew back, and he beheld his prison. He gasped frantically, trying to recall the process of respiration, and once he did, he screamed from the pain of the sunlight in his eyes. For the first hour on his new world, he lay where he was, dizzy and nauseous. These ill affects soon passed, and though he was weak, he managed to crawl out of the probe and on to the burning sands.

He found the clothes where, four centuries earlier, they had told him they would be. Dressing quickly with shaking hands, he finally got his feet into the heavy boots that protected them somewhat from the searing heat of the red desert. He looked into the sky and saw that the sun was at midday. What he was unsure of was how long a day would be. Scanning the flat terrain, he saw no signs of life, not even the merest scrap of vegetation. His mind was still cloudy from the liquid sleep, but he managed to make a plan. He would retrieve the rifle and knife and shelter cube from the probe, pack the smaller items in the sack they had sent with him, and strike out in one direction. As long as his strength held out he would search, but if he did not find a more inviting landscape in his travels before he became too weak to continue, he would turn the rifle on himself and end his misery.

"Habitable planet, indeed," he said aloud as he struck out due west from the probe. He went only a few yards before remembering the Maize board and pieces, and because of the comfort of their being a link to his previous life, he returned to fetch them.

Walking on a planet with a yellow sky above him and not the reassuring scoop of the dome was frightening at first. He felt very much as if he had died and gone, a spirit, to another realm as in the religious earth myths of old. Then he remembered more clearly his reason for being there, and he thought back through the thousands and thousands of miles and hours to Aldebaran and the image of Methina. Now, with so much distance on her murder, he wondered what he had been thinking to have done something so unspeakable. The why of things was totally lost to his memory, but try as he might he could not forget the feel of her body and the long, bright wave of her hair.

Sikes journeyed far. His mouth was parched and perspiration rolled off him and evaporated before hitting the sand. He halted, wondering if it was time to use the rifle, and that is when he saw in the heat rippled distance the definite outline of what he believed to be trees, a wide swath of them sprouting from the unforgiving sand. He made his way toward them, and at first they seemed to be receding as he approached. Eventually, he closed his eyes against the brightness of the day and doggedly continued to put one foot in front of the other. When he stopped to take a rest some time later, he opened his eyes and beheld before him an enchanted scene like something from a child's picture book of long ago.

He found himself standing on the edge of a forest whose trees were straight, blue-trunked giants topped with silver leaves. A little way in beyond them, he saw a meadow of long violet grass blowing in a wind that seemed only to exist within the boundary of the trees. Rushing forward, he ran in under the canopy of silver leaves and the second he was beneath their shade, he felt the heat in the soles of his boots subside and a breeze against his face. He had not yet thought about what reason there was to survive, but for the first time he had an inkling that it might be possible.

As it was, Sikes did survive, for within the borders of the roughly three-hundred-acre oasis he had stumbled upon there were three good-sized lakes, fruit-bearing trees, and wildlife in all its various and intricate forms. Surrounding his living prison was a vast sea of impassable red desert. This place was just large enough for him to feel comfortable in. Aldebaran had been no more than an island in a forbidding void, and so he was used to a life within definite boundaries. He thought of the oasis as a large Maize board, and as he went through his quiet days there he dreamed of strategies that would allow him to outsmart his crafty opponents, Boredom and Death.

He set up his camp next to one of the lakes. The water vaporabsorbing structure they had sent with him only partially inflated, since the climate of that area was so very dry. Still, there was enough room for him to lie down inside and to store his belongings. The water in the lake was not only clean and satisfied his thirst, but it was composed of some other element than hydrogen and oxygen that gave it a sweet flavor.

The first thing that Sikes became aware of was the length of the days and nights. They were not too different from the artificial ones that had been imposed on Aldebaran. The night always seemed a little longer than the day, if that was possible, and there was, with regularity, the hulking presence of a large ringed planet in the southern sky. The star that was the sun of this world burned much whiter and hotter than his childhood learning implant had said earth's sun had, but it also appeared somewhat farther away.

Sikes surmised that the entire desert must have at one time been a forest, but because of some climate change or erosion the sands had overtaken the flora and dried up the rivers and streams. Only in rare places like the oasis, where the water most likely came up from deep in the ground, were there pockets of life, miniatures of how things had once been on a grand scale. He also knew that somewhere on the planet, not further away than birds would want to migrate, there must have been a different terrain, since there were flocks of different types of small winged creatures that infested the trees for a week of two and then were gone.

In addition to the strange life-forms of armored insects, large stupid fish with pig-like faces he caught with his hands, and chittering little things that were a cross between lizards and chipmunks, there was a species of larger animal with which he shared the oasis. He was surprised at their number, what with the surrounding hostile environment and the long time they must have existed within the boundary of three hundred acres. They were disconcertingly bipedal, going almost upright with the same basic body form of two arms, two legs, a torso, and head, as humans have. They were covered with long hair of various different shades, yet they were not human at all, not even primate.

The flesh of these creatures was soft, almost like plant meat, and they were so lacking in intelligence it seemed to Sikes that even the fish of the lakes were more cognizant. Hairy, walking asparagus was how he thought of them. At night, he heard their callsthe sound of a sickly old woman wheezing. They were, luckily, not aggressive. In fact, Sikes could walk right up to them and blow their brains out with the rifle. He found them an excellent source of sustenance, but found he could not cook them without first removing the head. Once they were dead, their eyes gave the illusion that all had finally become clear to them. Sikes killed them indiscriminately, sometimes for food and sometimes for sport to counteract boredom.

So this then became Sikes's life, the existence of the castaway. He had conceived of all manner of diversions in order to try to retain his sanity. At night he studied the stars, trying to determine what quadrant of space his planet resided in. During the day he hunted, practicing with the rifle so often that his aim was perfection itself. He replaced the kernels of corn from his Maize box with pebbles and played against himself every afternoon before the sun set. With nothing but time on his hands, what amazing strategies he came up with. The least of them made the Winner's Conceit look like the tactic of a dim-witted child. The kernels of corn he planted in four neat rows and watered consistently everyday. On the morning that he first saw the small green sprouts poking through the soil, he felt a sense of accomplishment like none he had experienced in his entire life.

Once he had established his presence in the oasis, he went on half-day journeys of exploration. The landscape of the entire expanse was fairly uniform in its composition. There were groves of the silver-leafed trees, small clearings and meadows of violet grass, and then the three lakes. Only in one spot at the northernmost extent of the oasis were there outcroppings of rock that jutted up from the soil in small hills. There were caves carved by erosion into the faces of these stony eruptions, and it was here where the two-legged creaturesthe Geets, as he had come to call them, after the inventor of Maizelived. On a particularly tedious afternoon, he sat a little way off from the colony of them and took target practice, drilling young and old alike with blasts from the rifle.

There were changes in season, but they were minor ripples in the natural routine of the land. They came every few weeks it seemed, and he could note them by transformations in the leaves of the blue-trunked trees. In one season the silver leaves shone at night, in another they dropped off, in the next the ones that had dropped off disintegrated into a kind of fuzz that blew on the breeze all over the oasis. Then the leaves sprouted and grew again, and this cycle continued without fail.

The only other marker of the change in season was that with each permutation of the leaves, the Geets would give birth to a new brood of young. He could not tell if there were male and female Geets, for they all had two womanly breasts, nor what their mating procedure was, but it was a certainty that, although they were short-lived, they were incredibly prolific. "I may very well utterly deplete the capacity of this rifle before all is said and done," thought Sikes after putting a neat hole through the head of one a hundred yards away. Soon after this, he noticed that they had begun to flee when they knew he was nearby.

The corn had apparently retained its distant genetic memory of earth, because it ignored the seasons of the new planet and grew at its own slow speed. Sikes lavished attention on the stalks as if they were his children, and eventually silky-topped ears began to sprout. He looked forward to a meal of orange-eyed pink bird stuffed with corn. Every morning he checked the progress of the precious fruit, and then one day he discovered that some of the ears were missing. He knew immediately, from the footprints in the soil, that the Geets had come at night and stolen from him.

That night he did not go to sleep but kept himself awake by designing in his mind a new Maize board he would carve out with his knife on a section of blue bark. This kept him well awake and so entranced he did not hear the first stirrings in the corn stalks outside his shelter. When the noise finally became clear to him, he grabbed the rifle and crept outside. Up in the sky, the ringed planet lightened the night with its reflected glow. He moved cautiously around the corner of the rows and saw before him a good-sized Geet, reaching for a second ear of corn. He brought the rifle up to aim and pressed the wave generator button at the side. The creature heard the subtle click and, startled, turned to look. By then, Sikes had his finger on the trigger, but he did not fire. The Geet clumsily plucked the second ear of corn and lumbered away into the night with it.

Back in the shelter, Sikes lay on the floor, the same scene repeatedly playing in his mind's eye. He saw the Geet turn to look at him, and when it did, its long blonde hair whipped in a wave over its left shoulder, just as Methina's had back on Aldebaran a lifetime before. Since he had begun his struggle to survive, he had not allowed himself to think of her once, but now the memory of their night together came flooding back to him. In his mind he again touched the soft skin of her legs and stomach, and his loneliness became a momentary pain in his chest that nearly killed him. It was also in that moment that his most incredible and diabolical strategy of all was born. He would later come to call it the Lover's Conceit.

In the next ten days, Sikes mercilessly murdered all of the Geets he could find whose hair was not the same color as the beams of the growth lights positioned in the fields of Aldebaran. The extent of the killing sickened him, but he would not stop. By the time his rampage was over, there were very few of the Geets left living in the caves at the north of the oasis. To these chosen blonde creatures, he brought all but an armful of the corn he had grown. Although they fled when he arrived with it, he watched from a blind as they later snuck out of the forest and feasted on his offering. When the silver leaves fell from the trees, there were now many more young with hair the color of Methina's. Even the babies with lighter hair, but not the exact shade, he murdered.

The microwave rifle was rarely given a chance to cool down in the seasons that followed. Sikes no longer thought of it as an instrument of death but now as a tool of creation. After the blonde color was achieved, he began to select for a lack of body hair. This process took the equivalent of two full earth years and many Geet generations , but Sikes was patient and focused. The days passed more quickly now and he was never bored. He had a purpose that, for him, bordered on the religious.

In the years that followed, he selected for nakedness, skin tone, the shape of the eye, weight and height. The Geet populations dwindled as they grew more and more to resemble Methina. He knew he could never hope, in the span of his life, to achieve her intelligence and personality in them, but something had changed in their ability to think for they had become increasingly difficult to hunt. They seemed to know when he was coming, and they abandoned the caves altogether a year or two after he had created a brood whose soft flesh was the color of weak tea. Although he had nearly forgotten Aldebaran, the image of Methina remained crystal clear in his mind, and like a depraved sculptor whose medium was an innocent species, he carefully carved his way toward his concept of perfection.

The silver leaves fell, turned to ghosts, and were resurrected so many times that the new blue-barked Maize board, chipped and cracked in half, had twice been replaced. I need not describe at length the horrors Sikes's experiment had visited upon those poor creatures throughout this long age of slaughter, but one day when he was out in the woods searching for their new hiding place, he saw, at a distance one of the adults of the species. She must have heard him approaching and froze in a crouch. He looked through the telescopic sight of the rifle and nearly lost his breath. There, two hundred yards away, stood, for all intents and purposes, Methina. He was an old man now, wrinkled, stoop-shouldered, bald and bad in the knees, but the sight of her made his passion stir. The only work left to be done was to produce eyes the color green of the fabled wandering star, Karjeet.

He continued to grow corn, and had increased his yearly output by ten times what the first crop had yielded. Besides having been a main staple of his diet, the Geets loved the taste of it more fervently with each altered generation, and he would use it as a lure to draw them into the open. This is what he was doing one day, hiding in a blind behind a fallen tree fifty yards from a pile of corn, when he heard something behind him. He turned quickly only to catch the sight of Methina charging at him. She opened her mouth to display a row of sharp teeth, an item of anatomy he had not before seen in the Geets. Lunging for his rifle, he inadvertently knocked it out of his reach. She lunged for him, pinned him to the ground and sunk her fangs into his shoulder. Even with the pain, having her lying on top of him confused his thinking, mixing desire in equal parts with fear. At the last moment, before she could disengage and go for his neck, he reached for his knife and cut her throat.

As he knelt over the beautiful body he had created, he shook his head, wondering how he had managed to overlook the Geets' increasing aggression. He remembered how, not a few days earlier, he had witnessed a pack of his special Methinas attack and eat an imperfect one with throwback hair on its face that he had wounded in the arm with a bad shot. So immured had he become to the death of the lesser Geets that at the time it had not struck him as anything worth noting. But now he saw that as they approached perfection, they were becoming more dangerous. He then heard others in the woods around him and fled back to his camp by the southern lake.

The color of Karjeet eluded him, but he continued to try to render it. More incidents of the Methinas aggression had taken place, but now he kept the rifle perpetually with him and turned on. He hated to have to shoot some perfectly good specimens, whose eye color was now tending toward that of a ripe lime, not perfect but moving in the right direction. As he went about his gruesome work, he began to have more and more memories from his days on Aldebaran.

One night, after playing what he considered to be perhaps the most perfect game of Maize against himself, he fell asleep in the structure and dreamed of flying above the spires of the bottled city with Methina. They stood atop Shiva Tower, and when it was his turn to leap up to touch the inner dome, he did not ascend but halfway. With each subsequent jump he made, he flapped his arms harder and felt, within, as though he were approaching some kind of total climax. She stood on the observation deck beneath him and yelled louder and louder with each successive thrust that took him closer to his goal. Just as the tip of his finger was about to touch the center of the inner dome, he awoke.

The glow of the ringed planet shone in the one small window above where he slept on the floor. He became immediately aware that he was not alone in the structure. He cleared his eyes and saw the gleam of their hair and the shadowed curves and soft contours of their naked bodies.

"Methina," he said and held out his arms.

As she came toward him, the final move of the Lover's Conceit, she smiled sharply in her myriad forms.

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There you have it, one kernel of human history to serve as an example of the whole twisted game. The planet that Sikes had been stranded on is now called Fereshin, and the oasis that held him captive still exists. The Geets are still there and yet more changes have been wrought in them, leading on from the work he had accomplished. There are those who still bear a strong resemblance to Methina, and irony of ironies, their eyes are now the exact green of Karjeet. This development came not directly from Sikes but from their acquired cannibalism of those born differently without their selected beauty. Some chemical in the heart, I believe.

Sikes's unnatural stress on the species moved them to a sharper level of cognizance. The Methinas, who became violently ill from the consumption of his flesh, now had the wherewithal to remember never to devour another like Sikes again. His looks had become imprinted upon their newly vibrant minds, and in their eating of the ugly others of their species, they avoided those Geets who carried any of his physical traits. Follow the progression of this practice over generations. Now, if you were to travel to Fereshin and the far oasis in the red desert, you would find it predominantly populated with a multitude of Sikes and Methinas, like a single couple trapped in a labyrinth of mirrors.

The End