Table of Contents

Introduction The Strange and Fabulous Journey of Gardner Dozois

Travel Diary

Author’s Preface to Introduction to Travel Diary

Introduction to Travel Diary

Another Introduction to Travel Diary

Travel Diary

The Gods of Mars

Introduction to The Gods of Mars

The Gods of Mars

Solace

Introduction to Solace

Solace

Golden Apples of the Sun

Introduction to Golden Apples of the Sun

Golden Apples of the Sun

The Mayan Variation

Introduction to The Mayan Variation

The Mayan Variation

The Clowns

Introduction to The Clowns

The Clowns

Touring

Introduction to Touring

Touring

Dinner Party

Introduction to Dinner Party

Dinner Party

Snow Job

Introduction to Snow Job

Snow Job

Flash Point

Introduction to Flash Point

Flash Point

Send No Money

Introduction to Send No Money

Send No Money

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

Introduction to A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

The Storm

Introduction to The Storm

The Storm

The Last Day of July

Introduction to The Last Day of July

The Last Day of July

Afternoon at Schrafft’s

Introduction to Afternoon at Schrafft’s

Afternoon at Schrafft’s

Playing the Game

Introduction to Playing the Game

Another Introduction to Playing the Game

Playing the Game

Down Among the Dead Men

Introduction to Down Among the Dead Men

Down Among the Dead Men

Passage

Introduction to Passage

Passage

Community

Introduction to Community

Community

The Visible Man

Introduction to The Visible Man

The Visible Man

A Cat Horror Story

Introduction to A Cat Horror Story

A Cat Horror Story

Executive Clemency

Introduction to Executive Clemency

Executive Clemency

Strangers

Introduction to Strangers

Strangers

Editors’ Afterword

Acknowledgments

Strange Days

Fabulous Journeys with

Gardner Dozois

Edited by Tim Szczesuil & Ann Broomhead

NESFA Press

PO Box 809

Framingham, MA 01701

www.nesfapress.com

2001

Copyright 2001 by Gardner Dozois

Introduction Copyright 2001 by Michael Swanwick

“Send No Money” Copyright by Gardner Dozois & Susan Casper

“Snow Job” Copyright by Gardner Dozois &Michael Swanwick

“Executive Clemency” Copyright by Gardner Dozois & Jack C. Haldeman II

“Playing the Game,” “Down Among the Dead Men” Copyright by Gardner Dozois &Jack Dann

“The Clowns” Copyright by Gardner Dozois, Susan Casper & Jack Dann

“Touring,” “The Gods of Mars,” “Golden Apples of the Sun,” “Afternoon at Schrafft’s” Copyright by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann & Michael Swanwick

A Travel Diary Introduction Copyright 2001 by George R.R. Martin

Another Travel Diary Introduction Copyright 2001 by Mike Resnick

The Gods of Mars Introduction Copyright 2001 by James Patrick Kelly

Solace Introduction Copyright 2001 by Nancy Kress

Golden Apples of the Sun Introduction Copyright 2001 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The Mayan Variation Introduction Copyright 2001 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The Clowns Introduction Copyright 2001 by Andy Duncan

Touring Introduction Copyright 2001 by Paul McAuley

Dinner Party Introduction Copyright 2001 by John Kessel

Snow Job Introduction Copyright 2001 by Michael Swanwick

Flash Point Introduction Copyright 2001 by Pat Cadigan

Send No Money Introduction Copyright 2001 by Susan Casper

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows Introduction. Copyright 2001 by Walter Jon Williams

The Storm Introduction Copyright 2001 by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Last Day of July Introduction Copyright 2001 by Michael Bishop

Afternoon at Schrafft’s Introduction Copyright 2001 by Eliot Fintushel

Playing the Game Introduction Copyright 2001 by Joe Haldeman

Another Playing the Game Introduction Copyright 2001 by Andy Duncan

Down Among the Dead Men Introduction Copyright 2001 by Ian MacLeod

Passage Introduction Copyright 2001 by Jane Yolen

Community Introduction Copyright 2001 by Connie Willis

The Visible Man Introduction Copyright 2001 by Stephen Baxter

A Cat Horror Story Introduction Copyright 2001 by Jack Dann

Executive Clemency Introduction Copyright 2001 by Michael Swanwick

Strangers Introduction Copyright 2001 by Robert Silverberg

Dust Jacket Illustration “Murasaki” Copyright by Stephen Youll

“Nebula Award” is a registered trademark of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.

“Hugo Award” and “Worldcon” are registered service marks of the World Science Fiction Society

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC, MAGICAL, OR MECHANICAL MEANS INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER, WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A REVIEW.

FIRST EDITION, August 2001

International Standard Book Number:

1-886778-26-4

eISBN: 978-1-61824-924-1

Electronic Version by Baen Books

http://www.baen.com

Acknowledgements

“Introduction: The Strange and Fabulous Journey of Gardner Dozois” by Michael Swanwick appears here for the first time.

“Travel Diary” by Gardner Dozois appears here for the first time.

“The Gods of Mars” by Gardner Dozois, Michael Swanwick, and Jack Dann appeared first in The 1986 Annual World’s Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha.

“Solace” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Omni, Feb. 1989.

“Golden Apples of the Sun” by Gardner Dozois, Michael Swanwick, and Jack Dann appeared first in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 11, edited by Arthur W. Saha, 1985.

“The Mayan Variation” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Sep. 1984.

“The Clowns” by Gardner Dozois, Susan Casper, and Jack Dann appeared first in Playboy, August 1985.

“Touring” by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick appeared first in The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series X, edited by Karl Edward Wagner, 1982.

“Dinner Party” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Light Years and Dark, edited by Michael Bishop, 1984.

“Snow Job” by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick appeared first in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Oct. 1985.

“Flash Point” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Orbit 13, edited by Damon Knight, 1974.

“Send No Money” by Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper appeared first in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, MidDec. 1985.

“A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Oct./Nov. 1999.

“The Storm” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Future Corruption, edited by Roger Elwood, 1975.

“The Last Day of July” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in New Dimensions III, edited by Robert Silverberg, 1973.

“Afternoon at Schrafft’s” by Gardner Dozois, Michael Swanwick, and Jack Dann appeared first in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Mar. 1984.

“Playing the Game” by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann appeared first in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, Feb. 1982.

“Down Among the Dead Men” by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann appeared first in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jun. 1983.

“Passage” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Xanadu, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jane Yolen, 1993.

“Community” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sep. 1996.

“The Visible Man” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Analog Science Fiction—Science Fact, Dec. 1975.

“A Cat Horror Story” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct./Nov. 1994.

“Executive Clemency” by Gardner Dozois and Jack C. Haldeman II appeared first in Omni, Nov. 1981.

“Strangers” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in New Dimensions IV, edited by Robert Silverberg, 1974.

Introduction

The Strange and Fabulous Journey of

Gardner Dozois

Imagine you’re at a party in Gardner’s apartment. It’s not large, but he’s invited swarms of people, so it’s very crowded. Gardner keeps his awards on a little table not far from the door. People who have never been there before, young editors and the like, will eventually drift over to admire the thicket of Hugos for his work as an editor, and while there notice two Nebulas gleaming in their midst. Inevitably, someone will say, “I didn’t know Gardner was a writer.”

“Oh, yes,” one of us Old Hands will reply (we linger near the trophy table for this very purpose), “Gardner’s a much better writer than he is an editor!”

Just to watch their faces, you see.

But it’s true. I bow to no man in my estimation of Gardner as an editor. He does a brilliant job of it, and we’re all better off for his being at the helm of Asimov’s. Still, his special gift is as a writer, and his gift finds its truest expression at short length. Gardner is a consummate writer of short fiction.

Gardner Dozois sold his first story when he was seventeen. “The Empty Man” appeared in the September 1966 issue of Fred Pohl’s Worlds of If; he learned of its acceptance while he was in boot camp. That story isn’t reprinted here, and it’s doubtful he’ll ever allow it to be reprinted anywhere. But immediately after his years in the Army, he made a name for himself with wonderfully original and literate stories like “A Special Kind of Morning,” “Machines of Loving Grace,” and “Chains of the Sea.” Between 1970 and 1975, he produced nineteen stories, including much of his best work, as well as a novel written with George Alec Effinger, Nightmare Blue, which was intended as a potboiler but ended up being something rather better.

Unfortunately, the above-mentioned stories could not be included in this collection because they are currently available online, and NESFA Press required exclusivity. However, this book does include five works from Early Period Dozois. “The Visible Man,” written, in part at least, in order to sell a story to Analog, shows the transformative power Gardner brings to a traditional SF dilemma-story. “The Storm” and “Flash Point” are both horror stories in the original sense of the term, narratives that evoke horror and awaken the reader to terror and pity. The spooky-beautiful “The Last Day in July” begins as a horror story, but opens out into something richer and more optimistic. As a special treat, Gardner’s stunning novella “Strangers,” which he later expanded into a novel of the same name, is collected here for the first time.

There is a long gap in Gardner’s bibliography between 1975 and 1981. He was, though it became evident only in retrospect, suffering from writer’s block. It wasn’t perfectly obvious at the time, though, because he was still writing constantly. The stories never did come easily, and the fact that he couldn’t finish any particular one at a given time was nothing unusual. Moreover, Gardner was living in extreme poverty and as a result he was constantly assembling theme anthologies, working on his best-of-the-year volumes, and engaged in the various writerly and editorial scut-work a working writer must undertake to keep from actually starving to death. And he spent one long summer writing Strangers, that beautiful, heartbreaking and neglected novel whose virtues you can sample here in shorter form.

Nevertheless, there is a six-year period in which he published no new short fiction.

Part of the problem was medical. I unhappily remember walking to lunch with him and Susan one day and realizing that something was dreadfully wrong. It took Gardner an enormous effort to make his way down the sidewalk. He was walking slowly, oh so slowly, and talking very matter-of-factly about how the darkness was closing in around him. “You see that mailbox on the corner? I can’t read the words on its side. I know it says U.S. Mail, because that’s what mailboxes say. But I can’t make out the letters.”

This story has a happy ending. The next day, Susan managed to bully him into seeing a doctor, who immediately slammed him into the hospital. He was diagnosed as a diabetic and kept there for some time. I vividly remember how on New Year’s Eve a tipsy orderly giggled, “Whoopsie!” and switched syringes after Gardner delicately pointed out that he’d picked up the wrong one.

The close brush with the Angel of Death invigorated Gardner. He put out a sudden burst of energy and became prolific again. He published six stories in 1981 alone! Sure, four of them were collaborations (more on this soon), but the others were strong stories and “Executive Clemency” is, I hold, a tour de force, one of Gardner’s core works, and a story that people will be reading with admiration a hundred years from now.

Another stand-alone story from Second Period Dozois included here is the truly horrifying “Dinner Party.” As a literary fiendish device, as a constant turning of the screw that raises the ante with every word right to the very last line, there’s just no beating it.

Of the twenty-one stories published between 1981 and 1985, thirteen were collaborations, most with Jack Dann, some with me, a few with his wife and fellow-writer Susan Casper, in various combinations of bylines. So a word has to be said about those wonderful starry nights when Jack Dann breezed into town with a cigar stuck in the corner of his expansive grin, and Susan called to ask if I wanted to come over, and we all stayed up late, talking about everything, and spinning out ideas for stories and plotting them out on the spot.

Those were good times and they only get better with the passing years. Nostalgia will do that. I was one of the writers for “Touring” and “Snow Job,” for “The Gods of Mars” and “Afternoon at Schrafft’s” and “Golden Apples of the Sun.” It was more than a privilege for me to work so closely with Gardner and Jack, particularly since I was just starting out on my career. It was more than a thrill to see how the Big Boys did it, to observe their craftsmanship on a line-by-line basis as the stories were being written. It was my post-graduate education.

In this same period, Gardner also wrote, among other stories, “Down Among the Dead Men” and “Playing the Game” with Jack Dann, “Send No Money” with Susan Casper, and “The Clowns” in collaboration with both of them. This constant back-and-forthing of manuscripts and consultations helped enable his solo fiction by creating a buzz of energy and a recurrent feeling of accomplishment. It didn’t hurt that during this period, Gardner was selling steadily to the “slicks”—to high-paying markets like Playboy and Penthouse, and the less reputable Oui and High Times, as well as to the late and sorely missed Omni.

The upshot of all this prolific and market-savvy output was that Gardner remained as poor as a church mouse.

Because writing is hard work, and a harder business. If all you write is short fiction, it doesn’t matter how upscale the markets you sell to are, you can’t make a living at it. Of necessity, over the years, Gardner had kept himself alive by doing various editorial chores, taking the occasional assistant editor job, learning the business from the bottom up. He got a quiet but pervasive reputation as being one hell of a story doctor.

So it was startling but strangely logical when in 1985 Gardner was given the editorship of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, as it was then called. He threw himself into the job, and the trophy table covered with Hugos tells the rest.

But that wasn’t the end of his writing. Every year or two, Gardner manages to squeeze enough time from his schedule to craft a new work of fiction. Third Period Dozois, which covers 1987 through the present, contains nine stories so far, five of which are collected here. “Solace” can be read as his response to the Cyberpunk-Humanist wars, going down into the trenches to battle the young Turks on their own territory. “Passage” is an evocative mood piece inspired by a dream. “Community” is the kind of dark social extrapolation Gardner did so often in his early work. “A Cat Horror Story” is ... well, exactly that. Gardner hates it when I point this out, but how good can it be? It’s a cat story!

Those capable of appreciating cat stories will love it, I’m sure.

“A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows,” Gardner’s most recent work (which, incidentally, just lost a Nebula Award one week ago as of this writing), pays for everything, even the inherent sweetness of writing a cat story. It’s a chimerical hybrid of literary DNA from Early Period Dozois and the hot new generation of hard SF writers currently tearing up the place. It shows off. It dances right on the edge of a Vingean singularity. It embraces the future.

Short fiction writing is, for the most part, a young person’s game. It takes enormous energy and it pays not at all well. Newer writers enter the field with newer ideas, and you have to scramble just to keep up. It takes ambition. It takes zest. That’s why there are so few who have been writing the stuff for thirty years. That’s why it’s so remarkable that Gardner is now entering his fifth decade as a writer.

A collection like this, coming as it does in year one of the new Millennium, is inevitably a summing-up, a look back on a lifetime’s writing. But it’s also an opportunity to anticipate what is yet to come. Look at the old stuff, then look at the new. You’ll see growth and evolution, but no failing of powers or ambition. I can only repeat what I’ve heard Gardner say so many a time, upon encountering a promising story by a writer nobody’s heard of yet:

Keep your eye on this guy. I think he’s got more good work in him.

Michael Swanwick

Travel Diary

Author’s Preface to Introduction to Travel Diary

To anticipate the critics, yes, I am aware that it’s self-indulgent to print one of my trip reports in this collection, especially as many, if not most, of the readers will probably find it quite dull. However, since this may well be the only opportunity that will come up during my lifetime to get one of my trip reports into print, I figured that I’d allow myself to be self-indulgent for once, and take it. After all, there’s still plenty of fiction here as well, so I hope that the readers will feel as if they’re getting their money’s worth, even with a certain number of pages devoted to the trip report rather than to stories.

If there are any publishers out there who are feeling suicidal enough to consider a collection of trip reports, as George R.R. Martin suggests, I have about 100,000-words worth of this piffle in my files.

Gardner Dozois

Introduction to Travel Diary

In his novel Glory Road, Robert A. Heinlein wrote that the typical American male is convinced that he is a great warrior, a great statesman, and a great lover, and is usually wrong on all three counts.

There seems to be a similar delusion in SF fandom, where every fan and his sister are convinced that they can write a great trip report. All they need to do is go on a trip, keep a diary, and write it all up when they return home, regaling the world with a detailed account of every place they went, every sight they saw, every meal they ate, and how much fun they had (or not). In the old days, you could find these fannish trip reports in fanzines and APAs. Nowadays they have proliferated all through cyberspace, initially on bulletin boards like GEnie and Prodigy, more recently on listservs, home pages, and newsgroups. No one goes anywhere any more without producing a trip report afterwards (except for the vast majority of TAFF and DUFF winners, that is).

Unfortunately, the experience of reading the majority of these outpourings is much akin to the experience of watching your Uncle Walter’s slides of his visit to the Grand Canyon, complete with pictures of the gas stations where he stopped along the way, and the inevitable shot of Aunt Hilda straddling the continental divide.

The sad truth is that the majority of trip reports are not worth the paper they are printed on, even when they’re posted on the Internet. When confronted with one, I often find myself skimming rather than reading, looking to see if I was mentioned anywhere. I rather suspect that’s the way most fans read trip reports. We’re all looking for our own names . . . because we have given up on the prospects of stumbling on an amusing anecdote, a poignant observation, an insight into a distant land or culture. Instead we learn what the writer had for dinner on Tuesday.

Thankfully, Gardner Dozois does not write that kind of trip report. Oh, he tells us what he had for dinner on Tuesday too . . . but he never fails to serve up amusing anecdotes and poignant observations along with the neeps. Gardner writes far and away the best trip reports in fandom, as far as I’m concerned, and I am still hoping that one day some enterprising small press will realize that and collect them all together in a book. Of course, the Great Gargoo has some unfair advantages. He has always been a hell of a fine writer, for one thing. He knows how to bring a scene vividly to life, and he takes care to show us his trips where others only tell us about them. He is also the best editor in the field, as the Hugo voters keep insisting year after year after year after year. And every good editor knows not only what to put in his trip reports, but more importantly what to leave out (mainly the dull stuff).

Gardner’s accounts of his travels remind me of the work of the top best travel writers. He can describe the sights and smells of a foreign land as vividly as Paul Theroux, and he make his own adventures as funny as P.J. O’Rourke. If Asimov’s ever goes out of business, Gardner should make a second career as a correspondent for one of the big travel magazines before settling down on that hot air vent he’d reserved for his golden years. But don’t take my word for it, read Gargy’s account of his travels in Scotland in 1995, before and after the Glasgow worldcon. It’s one of his best, I think.

Like any travel writer, he tells us about the hotels and restaurants he visits, and that alone would make the report worthwhile reading for anyone planning a similar trip. But his trip reports offer many other delights above and beyond haggis and neeps (even above and beyond his frequent mentions of me). Humor, as in his discussion of the Viking contribution to Scotland’s cultural heritage, and my encounter in the bar with the Scotsman intent on ripping my head off (much more enjoyable to read about than to experience). Some lovely character sketches of folks met along the way; my favorite is the pretentious young Oxford student that he discusses with such warmth and insight. Sadness, in the death of John Brunner. Vivid evocations of Tarbert, Glasgow, Cawdor, Dumbarton, and other lochs, castles, and steak pies encountered on the road. A clear-eyed discussion of the troubled state of SF publishing in Britain. And of course, his musings on life, time, and human mortality. When you actually travel with Gargoo, you never notice this melancholy pondering, mostly because you’re laughing too hard at his latest penis joke. But read Gardner’s sad, sweet, beautiful account of his final bus trip back to Glasgow, where he ponders the passing lights in the night and the lives that hide behind them, and you’ll begin to understand the depths of the man, and to realize that when he shoves a chip up one nostril, as he so often did in Scotland, it is only his way of grappling with a deep sense of cosmic loveliness and existential despair.

George R.R. Martin

Another Introduction to Travel Diary

Look at him, and you’d never think Gardner Dozois was a world traveler. (Of course, you’d never think he had a dozen or more Hugos stashed away either.)

I don’t look much like any more of a world traveler than Gardner does, but I’ve traversed even more of the globe than he has, and have placed about a dozen trip reports of my own in various magazines, so naturally I pounced at the opportunity to introduce Gardner’s pale imitation of my work.

Except, he said bitterly, it’s neither pale nor an imitation. It is the true, essential Dozois, than which nothing is more unique. If you first encounter him in public, you wonder why he didn’t go into a more lucrative career as a nightclub comic. If you first meet him through his very best stories, you could be forgiven for wondering why he doesn’t take an occasional antidepressant. If you meet him one on one, you quickly find that he is so deeply committed to excellence as both a writer and an editor that his passion is almost palpable.

But here, in his diary of his trip to England and Scotland in the late summer of 1995 (culminating in the Worldcon, where we each won a Hugo—but where I also lost three, while he finished the evening undefeated), you get perhaps the truest picture of Gardner Dozois that you’re likely to get in this lifetime. He notices details; you’ll rarely get better descriptions of the places he visited and the things he saw. He’s honest; when he chooses a lousy restaurant or entertainment, he doesn’t blame the travel agent—and he tells you why it was lousy.

Mostly, as with any good travel writer, he puts you there. I felt that I was in the Wigham restaurant when the eight French guests decided they didn’t like the food. A few pages later I sat on the lawn with Gardner and Susan, cold drink in hand, watching the stars just outside Oxford. A bit earlier I’m there with them, sharing their awe at the zoo’s display of falconry.

Gardner, you will notice, remembers every meal he ever ate and every bed he ever slept in. He’s a lot less grouchy than V. S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux, probably the two most famous of the current crop of travel writers, which would certainly seem to make him a better travel companion. He can keep you interested describing a relatively uneventful day in the British hinterlands, while Theroux needs corrupt islanders or Chinese militarists and Naipaul requires top-to-bottom racism to grab and hold the reader’s attention. (Think hard: would anyone read a happy Theroux, or a contented Naipaul?)

Trust me: this kind of travel diary, one that can captivate readers even when the author isn’t facing charging elephants or exploding volcanoes, is a lot harder to write than it looks. I mean, hell, he was never even arrested by the local gendarmes and I kept reading it. And wondering which of his approaches and techniques I could use to improve my own trip reports, than which there is no higher compliment, at least from me.

One final note: you cannot help but be aware of Gardner’s fascination with food and restaurants. The last time I was flown into Philadelphia to speak to the local science fiction club, Gardner invited Carol and me to dinner at his favorite restaurant and promised to show us a hot time.

He did.

Literally.

We were seated, studied our menus, and ordered appetizers—and, so help me, the goddamned restaurant burned down before they arrived. Honest.

Mike Resnick

Travel Diary

Sunday, August 6th, 1995—Philadelphia

Packed, did last-minute stuff.

Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger come over, give us a lift to the airport, dropping us at Terminal A a bit before 5 P.M. We check our bags with British Airways, go upstairs to the coffee shop and wait for an hour or so; finally go through the security gate, visit the Duty Free shop, look at the Rube Goldberg-like kinetic sculpture in the waiting room near the gate. On to the plane, a 747, settle into our seats, Susan asleep almost at once. Long delay ensues, during which the plane taxies out to the runway and then has to come all the way back to the gate because the internal PA system (as they inform us through a bullhorn) is not working. Then, after that is fixed (sort of; you never can get the sound to work right on the audio channels for your earphones, which, since the movie they’re showing is Tommy Boy, is no great loss, and may even be a benefit), there is another long delay because a plane up ahead of us has run over a dog on the runway, and we must wait while they clean up its remains—what a strange death that must have been for the poor dog, death falling suddenly from the sky; I wonder if he had time to think in angry protest that he’d never seen a car coming from that direction before? Finally airborne. Uneventful flight during which I read and doze fitfully, although I get little sleep overall; after we’re airborne, Susan wakes up and can’t get back to sleep, so her plan to sleep all the way to London is frustrated. Nice sunrise over Europe, deep sullen red below with bars of black over it, later changing to orange that ranges up into peach and lemon. They turn on the lights at what is about 1:30 A.M. by our body clocks, and feed us a croissant for breakfast. Land about 8 A.M. local time.

Monday, August 7th—London

Get off the plane, long walk down the corridor at Heathrow, then wait in line to show our passports. Waved through customs, then into the terminal, where we find out that we have to pick up our Heritage Passes downtown near Piccadilly Circus. Take a traditional black taxi into the city, winding through Hogarth and Earl’s Court, past Hyde Park, seeing the Horseguards go by in the middle distance, then by the top of Soho and past the British Museum to Russell Square. It’s overcast in London, but not actually raining. It strikes me during the early stages of the cab ride how many horses we see grazing in fields within only a mile or two of the airport, something that certainly would not be true within a similar distance from the Philadelphia airport, where only oil refineries and other similar examples of industrial desolation would be found; the horses don’t seem to pay much attention to the huge airplanes roaring overhead—I guess they get used to it, although what they think the planes are is, I suppose, unknowable.

Check into the Hotel Russell, but find, to our dismay, since we’re both staggering with fatigue, that our room is not available yet. Leave our two immense suitcases (which will grow ever heavier and ever more of a logistical problem as the trip progresses, particularly as mine came down the luggage carousel with its handle broken off) with the concierge, take a short dispirited walk, buy some postcards, and sit in the bar of the Russell, refamiliarizing ourselves with how bad most English coffee is, filling out postcards, and half-heartedly talking about what shows are in town. Finally get into our room about an hour later, dragging our suitcases behind us down labyrinthine corridors of a sort of faded shabby-genteel grandeur. Our room is small, and very hot, but we go to sleep immediately, and nap for about two hours.

When we awake, we grab a disappointing lunch at the Night and Day coffeeshop (a place that attracts me because its name reminds me of the Night and Day Joint in Silverlock, showing you that you should never allow literary resonances to guide your choice of eating establishments) in the Imperial Hotel next door, take a cab to Lower Regent Street to the British Tourist Authority Office, the cabdriver mentioning in passing that he had been born in 1968, the date of my first visit to London (God!). Looking out of the cab window, note that London has been even more taken-over by American fast-food joints than it had been during our last trip here in 1988; when I first came to London in 1968, you couldn’t have found a slice of pizza in London if someone had held a gun to your head and threatened to kill you unless you guided him to one—now, American fast-food places are everywhere, and it seems like every street-corner boasts a freight of Pizza Huts, Burger Kings, Kentucky Fried Chickens, Baskin-Robbins, and, especially, McDonalds; there must be hundreds of McDonalds now in London alone, and we were to encounter them almost everywhere else we went in Britain, except for the very smallest of villages. Having eaten what passed for fast-food in London in the old days, where the best you could hope to find was some moderately palatable fish-and-chips or pub grub, I can understand why the American fast-food chains have filled this particular ecological niche so explosively here—compared to the hamburger I had here in 1968 in the closest English equivalent of the time to a McDonalds, the Wimpey Bar chain, where the hamburger was charred black all the way through, like a charcoal briquette you were supposed to eat, and the milkshake was warm chocolate milk with no ice-cream at all in it, the food at McDonalds is a treat fit for the gods—but that doesn’t make it any more tolerable to see one of them every few hundred feet along the street; as a tourist, I want foreignness, something different and exotic and strange, and it’s hard to maintain the feeling that you’re really in a foreign country when the streets are filled with McDonalds and Pizza Huts. (As an unfortunate side-effect, the success of the American chains also seems to be killing off the traditional pub-grub such as Shepherd’s Pie and Bangers & Mash and Steak & Kidney Pie—very few pubs we went into were serving anything like that anymore, having switched over to pizza and lasagne and hamburgers in imitation of the American fast-food fare; the word “chips” may be dying out, too, as several pub menus listed “fries,” instead; it may be that the younger generations of English people, because of the popularity of McDonalds, will grow up calling them “fries” instead, which I suppose is not a great tragedy, but which is yet another part of their cultural heritage gone.)

Stand in long lines at the Tourist Authority, finally get our Heritage Passes, then take a cab to the Tate Gallery. Tour the Turner exhibition there—Turner having been one of my favorites since the days I used to stand slack-jawed before the immense canvas of Rain, Steam, and Speed at the National Gallery, when I was a skinny, callow, teenage bumpkin, instead of a fat old callow bumpkin—then go to see the Pre-Raphaelites. Leave Susan to commune with Lizzy Siddal as Ophelia for awhile (Susan is writing a book about Elizabeth Siddal) while I explore the rest of the museum. After the inevitable visit to the gift shop, where Susan buys lots of Pre-Raphaelite stuff, we leave the Tate about 4:30, and walk slowly up the Thames Embankment toward Westminster, passing the Houses of Parliament. Notice how brown and sere the grass everywhere in London seems to be, worn almost bald in places by foot traffic, unusual since London is usually very green and lush—my first inkling of what a severe drought London has been going through; the overcast day has fooled us into thinking that the weather has been normal London weather, but in fact, as we find out as the trip progresses, many parts of southern England have not seen any rain since March. Tour Westminster Abbey. A religious service is in progress as we walk around, and, as always (I had similar reactions to similar circumstances in Notre Dame in Paris, and in several other cathedrals), I am appalled by the fact that the Church will allow crudely irreverent people with purple hair and nose-rings, young girls chewing gum and giggling nosily, and bellowing tourists in T-shirts with cameras to wander around laughing and taking photos and shouting obscene jocularities and blowing their noses on their sleeves while, a few feet away, grim-faced devout people are trying to worship. I’m not religious, and yet this strikes me as extremely tacky, and I always feel very uncomfortable when joining the milling crowd of tourists just outside the velvet ropes (because, after all, I’m part of the problem, aren’t I?), and try to be as non-intrusive on the worshippers as I can, feeling that when some poor old woman is in the process of lighting a candle for her departed husband, she really shouldn’t have to listen to someone a few feet away shrieking jokes about the incontinence of someone on their bus tour. I suppose this is old-fashioned of me. Can’t see Poet’s Corner because of the service, which several people are complaining about in loud voices, but tour the rest of the Abbey, which is full of people doing brass rubbings (for a price) and shops selling key-chains and toy tour buses. See the grave of Lloyd George, and am tempted to tell someone, “Lloyd George knew my father, Father knew Lloyd George,” but do not. Also see the grave of that Peabody who emigrated to Massachusetts, and for whom the town of Peabody (a grimly Dickensian factory town where my father used to work) and the Peabody Museum in my hometown of Salem, Massachusetts is named.

We are both seriously tired by this point, and take a cab to the Gaylord Indian restaurant, recommended by my Michelin Red Guide, which, however, turns out to be closed. We wander around the neighborhood, and end up eating at an outdoor table in a Greek restaurant called Andrea’s, which pleases me because it is on Charlotte Street, which is where the spy has his offices in Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File, Horse Under Water, Funeral in Berlin, and The Billion-Dollar Brain, four of my favorite novels . . . and because you can see the strange edifice of the Telecom Tower from here, like an immense surreal ice-cream-cone wrapped in winking lights, which I recall nostalgically from my first trip to London, when it was known as the Post Office Tower. While we eat, we are entertained by street buskers playing “Over the Rainbow” and a selection of old Beatles songs on the guitar and accordion. Walk slowly back past Tottenham Court Road, through Bedford Square, past the back of the British Museum under the sleeping stone gaze of the lions, through Russell Square. Have dessert in a little outdoor Italian cafe in an alleyway a few blocks down, just off Southampton Row, very Left Bank and bohemian in its English way. Then back to the Russell.

Tuesday, August 8th—Greenwich Observatory & London

Up early, about 6 A.M. (much earlier than I usually rise at home, but this was to become the pattern of the trip for me). Sit and catch up with this diary while Susan sleeps. We go downstairs about 8 A.M. and have the usual Trusthouse Forte breakfast, which we had every morning on our last trip here; I have sausages, toast, croissants. Meet Walter Jon Williams and his wife Kathy Hedges in the lobby of the Russell, by prearrangement. We buy theater tickets for that night’s performance of The Importance of Being Earnest, then cab to the Tower of London, where we catch a boat down the Thames to Greenwich. We all tour the Cutty Sark, a famous sailing ship now sunk in concrete, which is adorned with a masthead of a bare-breasted woman clenching a horse’s tail in her hand (she’s supposedly a witch who was trying to catch a passing rider but missed and got only the horse’s tail, but she does get to go bare-breasted in public in London, proving once again that only Evil Women are permitted to have nipples . . . or show them, anyway), and which features, up on deck, a box of fake chickens, complete with a continuously playing tape-loop of chickens clucking. Seeing the sailor’s bunk-room, it strikes me once again, as it did when I was here before in 1968, how small the bunks are—I’d have to sleep in them almost doubled in half. There’s also a fake plastic pig, with a tape loop of it grunting, and the tour-guide, talking about the livestock they kept aboard for long cruises, is saying, “On British ships, the pig was always called Dennis.”

Have a quick lunch in a pub called The Gypsy Moth, which features an electronic Monopoly game; wonder how it works, but don’t play it. We walk up through Greenwich toward the Royal Observatory, Walter amused at the number of Mexican and even “Tex-Mex” restaurants in town; why in Greenwich, of all places? (We don’t see another Mexican restaurant for the entire trip, by the way). Walk into and across Greenwich Park, Susan and I stopping to rest at the foot of the very steep climb up to the Royal Observatory itself, while the hardy Walter and Kathy press on ahead. Spend a pleasant five minutes looking out across the park, which falls away from our bench in a long rolling hill, watching a man playing with a small child in a stroller by letting the stroller go racing away down the hill; looks kind of dangerous, but when the stroller gets to the bottom, the child eagerly pushes it back up the hill so that his father can send him careening down the slope in it again. Long steep climb up the hill to the Old Royal Observatory. See the Prime Meridian in Meridian Courtyard, take the obligatory tourist photos of us standing with our feet straddling the Meridian, then tour Flamsteed House. In the Octagon Room, a peak through a long telescope there gives you a look at “Pluto”—the Disney character, that is, whose likeness they have pasted over the end of the tube. Also find the “Dog Watch” idea interesting, a proposed sympathetic-magic system for telling time at sea, from before the days of precision timepieces—the idea was that at noon a knife would be plunged into a pile of magic chemicals in London, making the dogs aboard ship, who had previously been pricked with it, all howl at the same time, thus telling the sailors asea what time it was in London. Also interesting, although a bit gruesome, was a time-lapse film of a dead rat rotting. We finish first, and wait for Walter and Kathy outside, while crows squabble and fight and call harshly down through the tangled trees of the hillside. Outside the Observatory, I point out the holes in the statue there; when I was here in 1968, with a group of fans that included Alex and Phyllis Eisenstein and Steve Stiles, I remember Atom Thompson, the old British fan artist, pointing out the same holes and telling us, with his voice quivering with passion and indignation, that the damage to the statues had been caused by Luftwaffe planes strafing the Observatory during the war.

Walk down the long hill and across the park to the National Maritime Museum, where we go to see the Titanic exhibit, which is quite engrossing. Strange to see the restored items, plates, glassware, uniforms, that had been sitting on the bottom of the ocean under two miles of cold water for seventy years, including tobacco in good enough condition to smoke—which made me fantasize that a cigarette made from tobacco brought up from the Titanic would be a nicely decadent luxury item for some future multimillionaire to buy. Stop for scones, then back to the pier and catch the boat back to the Tower of London. As we cruise down the Thames, it strikes me that almost all of the industry is gone from this stretch of the river, which once bustled with commerce. The river is now lined with former warehouses that have been turned into luxury condominiums—which makes me imagine sardonically that a hundred years from now the tour guide will be pointing out all the buildings that used to be luxury condominiums, but which have now been transformed into warehouses.

We get off the boat at St. Cathrine’s Dock, one stop shy of the Tower, because one of the boat crew has recommended an Indian restaurant there, and we are running out of time for dinner if we want to get to the theater. Have a hurried so-so dinner there, literally opening the place up, going in a step behind the man with the keys, and then cab to the Old Vic, where Susan and I, still jetlagged, nod out and jerk awake fitfully through an excellent performance of The Importance of Being Earnest. Have a quick drink afterward, and then say goodbye to Walter and Kathy, and take the tube from Waterloo to Russell Square, with one transfer; the only time we use the Underground this trip. It’s a lovely night, and the streets around Russell Square are thick with students heading for one sort of party or another. Ah, to be young in Russell Square at night, pushing through the excited crowds with the eager darkness all around you, with the air like velvet and a yellow moon overhead, and all time and possibility opening before you! But instead we are old, and go upstairs and watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in German. Go to sleep to Captain Picard barking something guttural in German in a voice that makes him sound as though he has a bad head-cold.

Wednesday, August 9th—London

Up at six, work on my trip diary. Susan, who had a fitful night, sleeps until about ten. Too late for breakfast, we go out of the Russell and walk down to the British Museum, having coffee and scones at a little sidewalk place on a side street near the Museum. Later, we look through the Scottish Woolens place across from the Museum, buying some inexpensive gifts, mostly Celtic jewelry, for people back home. Then we catch a cab to Harrods department store. Long bout of shopping there, then an awful lunch that neither of us is able to finish, then another long bout of shopping, during which Susan comes very close to buying a stuffed Obelix doll, but decides not to; we also admire a stuffed plush alligator which is too large to fit comfortably into our living room, and which costs more than a thousand pounds; must be very rich parents indeed who can afford to buy that toy.

We buy a bag of assorted kinds of bread to feed to the birds, and walk over to Hyde Park. Cross Rotten Row, covering our shoes in dust, and walk up the Serpentine in bright sunlight, almost the brightest of the trip so far, looking in vain for someplace to sit in the shade. There seem to be fewer water-birds in the Serpentine this year, and we see two or three dead fish washed up on the bank. This and several large “NO SWIMMING” signs make me wonder just how bad the water-quality is, and if the relative sparseness of water-birds this trip is another effect of the prolonged drought. Finally get tired enough to settle for a bench not in the shade, and we sit there feeding bread to Canada geese and pigeons. A father comes strolling up with a little girl, a toddler, who is completely naked. We lend her some bread, and the little naked girl feeds it solemnly to the geese, who are almost as big as she is. I think that this would be a good photo, but hesitate to take it for fear of offending the father. They walk off without a word having been spoken, and I end up wondering if they were French; the little girl’s nudity was a little too casual for the English, I think—in the States, they probably would have been arrested. We walk on to another bench, in front of the Peter Pan statue, and feed bread to coots and ducks, wondering sentimentally if one of the ducks could be the duckling we’d seen there in ‘87, all grown up.

Susan gets tired, and wants to go back to the room for a nap, so we walk up past the Italian Fountain to the Lancaster Gate. At the last moment, I decide that I don’t want to go back to the room, so I put Susan in a cab on the Bayswater Road about 4 P.M., and then go sit on a bench in Kensington Gardens. The smell of burning leaves is heavy, and there are lots of dogs, some being walked on leashes, some running free across the park, some barking in the distance, too far away to see. Small groups of tourists go by, speaking in French or Spanish or German. Try with indifferent success to feed bread to ravens, who keep hopping nervously away (although they do want the bread, and come sneaking back as soon as I get far enough away), then walk on. Settle the great controversy over whether there are squirrels in England or not—which we had been discussing on the plane—by seeing one; make it run like mad for cover by going over for a closer look (squirrels can’t be as common here as in the States, though; only saw one more during the entire trip, where in similar country at home we probably would have seen dozens). Walk down to the Round Pond, which, it turns out, is where most of the geese and ducks and swans have been hanging out. Stroll around the curve of Round Pond, throwing the rest of the bread in the water for the birds, who end up following me in swarms as if I were the Pied Piper, particularly the aggressive and nasty Canada geese, who will crawl right up your pantleg if you let them. Someone sailing a model sailboat on the Round Pond, just as people had twenty years ago, when I used to walk around this pond as a young man. Drifted slowly over to the Broad Walk, sat on a bench, and reflected sadly on how little this haunt of mine from years ago has changed, and how greatly I have. Is there really any connection between that boy who used to stride excitedly around here so long ago and me, except that we share some continuity of memory? Perhaps I just think that I used to be him, and that belief, taken on faith, is the only connection there really is.

Walk up to Queensway. Finally manage to put in a call to the Gay Hussar for a reservation by the expedient of buying a phonecard, since I can’t seem to get any of the coin phones to work; notice that the phone booths along Queensway are still festooned inside with advertisements for massage parlours and prostitutes, although the discretely worded advertisements of my youth—“Madam Colette gives lessons in French”—have been replaced by much more explicit solicitations of the “Want a spanking?” “Like hot oral sex?” kind that leave little or no room for misunderstanding. Walk along the Bayswater Road for a while, then catch a cab back to the Russell. Wake Susan up, and we catch a cab to 2 Greek Street, to the Gay Hussar, a Hungarian restaurant just south of Soho Square. Dinner alone there in the upstairs room, the waiter dividing his time between us and a private party in the room upstairs, whose footsteps we can hear clomping around over our heads from time to time. I have roast duck with red cabbage, Susan has chicken paprikas. Two out of the three paintings on the wall behind Susan are clearly a matched set, scenes from Little Red Riding Hood, but the picture in the middle is of a maddened gorilla attacking a party of armed men, which makes a curious addition to the story of Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood meets Congo, perhaps? All the pictures up here appear to be old magazine illustrations. Always forget how tiny the Gay Hussar is until I eat here again. It’s not much bigger than a Trinity house back in Philly.

Walk back to the Russell by way of Oxford Street to Great Russell Street, past the sleeping Museum, to Southampton Row. Stop at a Garfunkel’s on Southhampton Row for some tea and some peculiar-tasting vanilla ice-cream, then back to the hotel. The room is stiflingly hot, as it has been every night so far this trip, with not a breath of air coming in, even though the night outside is relatively cool by now; our windows look out on the internal courtyard of the hotel, and no breeze ever comes in, although we have every window wide open. As we try to get to sleep, snap briefly around the dial on the TV. British TV has become much more like American TV than it used to be, which, from my perspective as a tourist, is too bad, another piece of local color lost. Soon London will be just like New York City—and then, why bother to go? When I finally fall asleep in the smothering heat, Susan is sitting up on her bed, still industriously filling out postcards.

Thursday, August 10th—London & Train to Cornwall

Up early, pack. While Susan finishes getting ready, I go downstairs and consult with the concierge about the feasibility of getting to Highgate Cemetery (where Lizzy Siddal is buried), which, without a car, doesn’t look to be very feasible. We have breakfast, buy theater tickets for Crazy For You, and check out, leaving our bags stored with the concierge. We give up on Highgate Cemetery, and instead take a cab to Chayne Walk in Chelsea, where we look at the house where Rossetti used to live, and where he kept a wombat in the front yard until, not surprisingly, it sickened and died. Walk around the neighborhood for a while, then catch a cab to Little Venice, where the Jason’s Trip canal boat tour starts from. Sit by the canalside and have tea while waiting for the canal boat to arrive, then get on the canal boat for a pleasant ride down the Regent’s Canal, past the zoo, past banks lined with moored canal boats, past the two-story floating Chinese restaurant, to Camden Locks. Get off at Camden Locks, walk around and look at the little craft shops, and then take the waterbus back to London Zoo. We are really a little too hot and tired to really appreciate the zoo by this point, but we trudge around anyway, dutifully looking at elephants and white pelicans and marmosets, and stumble unexpectedly on a demonstration of falconry that freezes us in our tracks, the great bird swooping overhead, huge wings beating, seeming to almost brush the tops of our heads as he sweeps past to get his piece of dead rat from his handler.

Take a cab to Leicester Square, which is totally jammed with tourists, students, buskers, street bands, mimes, jugglers, to a degree that makes Times Square look nearly deserted by comparison. Watch the plastic glockenspiel at the Swiss Center, then walk around looking for a restaurant, gradually realizing that we are on the edge of London’s Chinatown, and we basically have a choice of Chinese food or American fast-food places such as Pizza Hut and Burger King and the ubiquitous McDonalds. Finally settle on a restaurant called Poons, which I recognize from the Michelin Red Guide, not without some trepidation on my part, since, although I love Chinese food, I have never had a good meal in a Chinese restaurant in England . . . and some of them have been memorably awful, like the hideous Chinese meal we had in Stratford-Upon-Avon eight years ago. The food turns out to be actually pretty good, though, to my relief, and one of the cheapest meals of the whole trip. After dinner, we stroll around Leicester Square for awhile, in places having to force our way through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, and then head up Old Compton Road to the Prince Edward Theatre, where we see Crazy For You. The show is shallow but entertaining, with good dancing, great sets and costumes, some good effects, and a brisk pace which helps keep us awake this time; the female lead is not really up to singing some of the standards such as “Someone To Watch Over Me,” and does an uneven job overall—she may have been a stand-in, though. On the whole, as good a way to kill two hours as any, although by the end I am beginning to get nervous about catching our train.

After the show’s final curtain, we scoot out of the theater and scramble to get a cab, finally catching one after some difficulty. Go back to the Russell, pick up our bags from storage, then have another hassle trying to get another cab. One cab stops for us, but when the driver, an old Russian (I think) man, gets out, he is obviously drunk, staggering and swaying and almost unable to stay on his feet. I tell him, bluntly, “You’re drunk. I’m not going anywhere with you.” He screams, “Fuck you!” and I devastate him with my wit by making the brilliant, Oscar Wilde-like retort of “Fuck you, too.” Unwilling to push this any further—being Large does sometimes have its advantages—he staggers back to his cab and screeches away. (I make a point, after this, of only catching the traditional black cabs, if possible, since the only bad and/or unfriendly drivers we run into seem to be driving the non-traditional sort.) We finally do get another cab, drive to Waterloo Station, find our way to the Night Riviera train to Cornwall, find our sleeping car and our adjoining rooms. I go up to sit in the Night Riviera lounge car, have a cup of tea, and catch up with this diary. I must say that the British sleeper trains are much nicer than Amtrak’s, with the equipment much more modern and in much better condition. A British traveller used to these cars must feel that he’s in a Third World nation when he takes a sleeping car in the States, where most of the equipment, east of the Mississippi at least, is broken-down and shabby and at least thirty years old.

By this time, we are underway, sliding by the sleeping industrial suburbs of London by night. Go back to my room. Goodbye, London. On to Cornwall!

Friday, August 11th—Trebrea Lodge, Trenale, Truro, & Tintagel, Cornwall

Wake up about six with the green Cornish countryside sliding by the window. Hassle-filled morning, first hurrying through the breakfast brought by the brusque room steward, a woman who looked like the warder in an old prison movie, and then hurrying to get ready before our stop, On the platform in Truro, things start to go wrong immediately—there are no cabs, the car rental place is all the way across town, and, when I try to call a cab, I find that my recently acquired phonecard seems to be depleted, although I only made one local call with it . . . and, of course, we have no change. When we finally do get a cab, he takes us up a maze of hilly back streets, and drops us in front of the car rental place—a small garage on a quiet residential street, which is tightly closed. There’s no one at all around after the cab leaves, and who knows how long it’s going to take for the car rental place to open. We loiter restlessly in front of the garage for more than an hour, grouchy and dispirited. Just before the car rental place does finally open, an elderly lady comes out from the house next door and offers to bring us out a cup of tea, and the kindness of this simple human gesture cheers us up a bit.

Finally do manage to get the car—a kind we’ve never seen before, a South Korean car called a Daewoo—and hit the road, aiming for and finally connecting up with the A39 toward Tintagel. Drive past several wind-farms stretched across the crests of the rolling hills, their huge plastic windmills whirling away like children’s whirligigs grown mutated and huge and strange; I had expected not to like these, to find them an ugly intrusion upon the rural countryside, but they add such a surreal touch to the landscape, like driving into a Dali painting, that I actually find them attractive, somehow not an intrusion at all—besides, their lines are so clean and simple and functional that they are intrinsically pretty in their own right, as objects, and the flowing smoothness of their motion somehow fits in well with the long rolling lines of the countryside itself. We continue on, past fields full of cows and sheep and horses, the roads getting smaller and the hedges on either side of the road higher the nearer we get to Tintagel, until finally the smallest road of all takes us from Trewarmett, a tiny hill town overlooking the sea, to Trenale, an even smaller town, and we find our inn, Trebrea Lodge, set just off an extremely narrow lane, barely wider than the car.

Our room isn’t ready yet, but the proprietor, John, gives us a brief tour of the main house, a lovely old stone mansion. Then we drive into Tintagel, park at the park-and-display, walk up to the Old Post Office, hitting various little shops on the main street along the way. Tintagel is much hotter than London had been, and the sun is stinging and fierce, strong enough to make me feel the need for sunscreen for the first time this trip; I buy some at the local chemists. The drought has obviously had an effect here, too—the rear garden at the Old Post Office, which l remember as one of the most beautiful gardens in England from our last trip, is wilted and sparse, with the snowballs on the snowball bushes burnt brown. Hit some more craft shops and gift shops, wilting somewhat ourselves in the oppressive heat and the relentless sun (this actually will turn out to be the hottest single day of the trip). The streets are full of men wearing nothing but bathing suits, or men without shirts, giving Tintagel something of the air of a town on the New Jersey shore in summer. We look around for a restaurant, finally settle for one that smells good, because of the on-view bakery in the front. Eat in a field in back at tables with umbrellas, both of us having Cornish Pasties, which are heavy but very good.

We drive out to the 14th Century Norman church on top of Glebe Cliff, and park in the lot next to it. Walk over the cliff-tops to the ruins of Tintagel Castle, Susan being nervous about the height. This time, I decide to walk down the extremely steep and winding staircase to the bottom and up the other side onto Tintagel Head itself, where the rest of the castle ruins are, something I had wanted to do last time, but had talked myself out of because of the effort involved; I tell myself this time that I won’t have too many more years when I am physically capable of doing stuff like this, so if I want to do it, I’d better do it now, while I have the chance. Susan going along is out of the question, of course, because she has a mild touch of acrophobia, so she stays behind on the walled terrace of the ruins, while I set off. The climb is quite strenuous; on the way down the very steep staircase, with its eroded and uneven stone steps, I immediately rub a big blister on my right palm from bracing my weight against the wooden railing as I descend, and then tear it open bloodily as I haul myself up the stairs onto Tintagel Head. The return trip is even tougher, especially the return leg back up to the mainland side of Tintagel Castle, where the stairs are so steep that I end up practically hauling myself up them hand over hand, like Batman walking up a wall with a rope in the campy old TV series. This is probably a dangerous level of exertion for someone of my age and weight, especially in the smothering heat. But the views from the top of Tintagel Head, headland after headland opening up down the coast until they are swallowed by the haze, are glorious, and it is strangely serene up there on top of the headland, a sort of vibrant, singing white silence, lonely and splendid. Probably not much different from the way it had been when the Celts and the Romans lived up here. The constant pressure of the sun, like a hand on top of your head, the keening of the wind and the screaming of the seabirds wheeling above, the occasional cannon-like booming of the surf hitting the rocky cliffs below—all would have been the same on any afternoon for thousands of years back into the past as they are today on this afternoon in August in the year 1995, toward the end of a troubled century. You could have come up here during the reign of Hadrian or Ethelred the Unready or the first Elizabeth or Queen Victoria, and found it all exactly the same. The wind and the birds and the sun are indifferent to what kind of man walks around up here, or whether any do at all. As are the insects, who have their own intricate ecologies going down around the grass-roots and the mosses and the heather, and would have been doing exactly the same things they’re doing now when Stonehenge was being put up away across Salisbury plain to the east, and would be doing exactly the same things whether humankind existed on the planet at all—and who probably will still be doing the same things up here on a sunny afternoon long after the last human has vanished from the Earth.

When I finally haul myself back up onto the terrace on the mainland side of Tintagel Castle, I’m sweaty and staggering and exhausted. We go back to Trebrea Lodge, where we finally get into our room, Number 8, which turns out to be one of the nicest rooms we’ve ever had—it’s set in a small two-story stone structure that probably was once one of the outbuildings, and we have the entire structure to ourselves, bedroom on the top floor, and, on the ground floor, a bathroom that is far larger than our whole hotel room at the Russell had been. We have dinner at the Lodge, salmon and boiled potatoes. Walk out front afterward into the tiny country lane that winds past the Lodge, listen in the dark to sheep baaing, watch the flocks of startled crows who periodically burst up from the forested hill behind the main house, wheeling behind the gabled roof of the Lodge and crying out harshly as they fly. Meanwhile, the black-and-white lodge cat is sitting in the dark by our feet, looking out across the edge of a farmer’s field and thinking of mice.

Saturday, August 12th—Chysauster, Land’s End & Penzance

Wake about six as usual, but manage to get back to sleep for an hour or so. Breakfast at the Lodge; pat the lodge dog, whose name is Sam, a black mix of flatcoat retriever and spaniel who seems to take our attention as his due, a tithe every guest is obligated to pay, and then hit the road, taking the A39 to the A307, heading for South Cornwall and the ruined Iron Age village of Chysauster. Drive through a brief spot of rain, our first this trip, and manage to avoid a traffic jam down around Truro, but both traffic and rain have thinned by the time we hit the top of the peninsula that leads at last to Land’s End. We ignore Paddy Hancock’s advice, from the BBC Travel Show, and do, by necessity, drive in St. Ives, but only until we can cut through the edge of town and on to the B3306, a winding narrow road that hugs the coast.

A while later, we stop in rolling hill country above the sea, at a roadside cut-off somewhere east of Zennor, get out of the car, cross the narrow road, and stand by the edge of the hill looking out and down to the sea. In some ways, this is one of the best moments of the whole trip. The sky has mostly cleared, with the sun breaking out of the scattering clouds. The hill-country silence is vibrant, a cool breeze has come up, and below, away down the hill, are stone farm buildings and fields full of cows, and then the sea, bright and tossed with whitecaps, with a big boat moving out near the horizon. On a hilltop nearby you can see the ruins of a neolithic hill-fort, with the clouds rushing by it. When a big cloud comes up and hides the sun for a minute, you can see the crisp edge of a line of shadow sweeping down the hill in front of us, over the farm houses, over the fields, until it reaches the sea. There’s very little sound, except the whoosh and whine of a car rushing by every once in a while, or, occasionally, the lowing of a cow coming up from the fields below (I check through my binoculars, and can spot three different kinds of cows: black with white markings, white with black markings, and brown ones; they all seem to moo the same, though).

At last, we press on, looking for the unnumbered road that leads to Chysauster. It turns out to be unmarked, too, and we miss both turnoffs for it, at Zennor and Porthmeor, and get all the way to Morvah before we realize we have to turn back. Finally find the unmarked turn, just past Porthmeor, and drive a few miles inland to the site of Chysauster. Park at the inevitable car-park (every ancient monument in Britain, no matter how small or obscure, seems to have one), climb up some steep stone stairs and then up a steep gravel path to the ticket kiosk (every monument in Britain also somehow manages to be uphill, both ways . . . and have a ticket kiosk), then on up the rounded swell of the hill to the ruins of the old village itself. Mostly only the outer walls of the ancient houses are left standing, grey stone walls thickly overgrown with weeds and purple flowers, although you can see the interior divisions that marked-off the rooms, and where the hearths once stood. Strange to think that we are walking through someone’s house, and I wonder if, thousands of years ago, they feel the air stir, and look up, and faintly sense our passage, ghosts of the future? I spend as much time as I spent looking at the ruins watching a hawk soaring over the valley, sometimes at our level, sometimes above, swooping way out across the valley toward the sea, finding a thermal, riding an invisible elevator of air up into the top of the sky, circling, swooping again. Yes, of course, it’s hunting—but I wonder if, at the same time, it’s also playing, enjoying riding the rivers of the air? On the way back, see the sign on the ticket kiosk that warns you that adders may be sunning themselves on the rocks—a sign I’m glad I didn’t see on the way up! Would have been much more careful climbing around in the ruins—as it was, we enjoyed the bliss of ignorance, and tromped around in a perfectly carefree manner, unaware that there might be adders all around us. A good metaphor for life in general.

Continue on around the peninsula to St. Justs, the day clouding up and growing grey, and then on to Land’s End, stopping just beforehand at the Wrecker’s Inn for a mediocre lunch, Susan ordering chicken salad, and, to her surprise, instead of getting what you’d get in the States, getting instead a piece of cold chicken and some salad; what you have to ask for instead, we discover, if you want what we would think of as chicken salad, is a chicken mayonnaise. Proceed on to Land’s End. The end of the peninsula is covered with an incredibly tacky Fun-Fair, but, once you get beyond all that, the view from the cliffs out over the Atlantic to the offshore sea-stacks and islands is still beautiful and worthwhile. (I don’t understand the English tendency to huddle in Holiday Camps and Fun-Fairs and Theme Parks and caravan sites and huge soulless camping-grounds, ignoring the natural splendor of the landscape all around them, but they do; some of them spend their vacations in rigidly organized Holiday Camps, which are sort of like concentration camps you pay to get into, surrounded with barbed wire and with Jolly British Muzak coming over the PA systems all day and most of the night, and never venture outside into the surrounding countryside at all. I’d pay to get out of having to go to one of these places, which I imagine as like taking your vacation in a Basic Training camp, with DJs and tennis laid on.) While we’re looking out over the cliffs at Land’s End, we have our first serious, discomforting rain—not a downpour, but a steady moderate rain, fading fitfully in and out of a drizzle. (It will turn out to be just about the only real rain we get until we reach Skye.)

Drive in to Penzance, get out and walk around for a while in the center of the town, but it is still drizzling and we’re getting tired, so we have our first real cream tea of the trip at the Penzance Buttery (it’s almost as difficult to get real clotted cream in London or Scotland as it is to get it back in Philadelphia), and then drive home. Dinner at the Lodge (chicken paprikas of a sort), during which we consume between us an entire bottle of wine. Retire unsteadily to bed.

Sunday, August 13th—Clovelly & Hartland Point

Breakfast at the Lodge, during which I muse about all the old sites of environmental rape we’ve seen here in Cornwall that are now tourist attractions, with people paying money to get in to see the old tin mines and slag-heaps and quarries. Wonder what the old miners who slaved their lives away there would have thought of that?

After breakfast, stop for petrol (the attendant washes our windscreen and then says “Lovely job!” to himself in congratulations as he finishes and saunters away), then head north on the A39 toward that area where the Cornish coast turns east into Devon. Huge grey clouds sweep overhead, alternating with patches of bright blue sky and brilliant sunshine. We drive through a rain shower, but it is over in a few seconds, and then the sun is blazing again; this pattern persists for the entire day. We pass over the border into Devon, and arrive at the town of Clovelly after about an hour’s drive.

We park in the lot at the top of the cliff, pay to get into the town (for Clovelly is entirely privately owned, and you have to agree to a long list of regulations, and be approved by a board, in order to live here; the entire town is run as one big tourist attraction), pause to watch a group of the donkeys and mules who are kept to haul tourists and their luggage up and down the hill from the hotel below being herded by (prompting Susan to comment later, “Donkeys always look so sad. I suppose that’s because they have to be donkeys.”), and then slowly walk down the steep cobblestone paths which lead to the very steep but wide cobblestone steps which fall down through the town. The street, which is made up entirely of steps, is so narrow, especially through the “Upalong” and the “Downalong” in the upper part of the village, that the houses on either side seem almost piled one on top of the other, so that you get the feeling that you could jump from one roof to another all the way down the hill; apparently it is possible to lean out of one upstairs window and shake the hand of someone leaning out of another window in a house across the street. Most of the houses fronting the street have tiny bright gardens, and it seems that every other garden has a cat sitting in it. We see more cats here in ten minutes than we’ll see anywhere else in Britain, by far, and Susan speculates that maybe people here tend to have cats because there’s really no place in these steep narrow streets to walk dogs. The streets are so steep and so narrow that the only way to get supplies down them in winter is by sledge, and most of the houses have one leaning up against the wall outside.

We walk on down to the stone quay at the bottom of the hill, walk out along it to the end, look at the ocean, watch the Brits who are lounging on blankets on a stone beach full of very uncomfortable-looking rocks as if they are on the finest sand beach in the Caribbean; their children are playing with sand-buckets and shovels, just like at home, but, since they have no sand to shovel, they are carefully piling up little heaps of stones instead of making sandcastles—perhaps this is the origin of the cairn, and it was originally Neolithic children on stone beaches who came up with the idea. We have lunch at the Red Lion Hotel, Cornish Pastie for me, ham ploughman for Susan, while another brief rain shower sweeps by outside; by the time we finish our last bites, the sun is blazing again—good timing. We pay to take the Range Rover back up to the top of the cliff, seventy pence apiece, and consider it money well-spent; certainly I’ve wasted many a 70 p on this trip on things I’ve gotten much less benefit from.

We drive through extremely narrow roads bordered closely on either side by high hedges to Hartland Point, on one occasion having to back up a fair way to let another car get past. Park at Hartland Point, which is an impressive headland stretching up 350 feet above the Atlantic, and walk down a moderately steep (although not as steep as Clovelly) path that gradually curves around the face of the cliffs and down to sea-level, where the lighthouse is. It’s still a working lighthouse, although automated now. It seems to be low-tide, and there is an impressive collection of kelp-fringed rocks surrounding the lighthouse, with a shipwreck—the rusting hulk of a tanker, broken in two—resting on some of them. This is obviously not a place you’d want to be offshore of in a boat during a storm. Sea cliffs march away south. Straight ahead is nothing but open sea, with North America somewhere on the other side of it.

Long, tiring walk back up, then drive back to the Lodge, overshooting and ending up in Camelford, and having to backtrack. On the tiny road that leads to Trenale and the Lodge, we stop to look at the view down over the fields to the sea, alarming an old lady who lives in a stone hut by the road, and who fears that we’re going to take a photo of her house and sell it to criminals so that they can figure out how to rob her. She makes us promise not to do this. Back at the room, Corky the black-and-white lodge cat marches inside and settles himself down on Susan’s bed, apparently ready to stay for as long as we are—well, we had joked earlier about getting a “travel cat” for the trip, and now it appears that we have one. Later, when we’re taking a walk around the grounds before dinner, Corky follows Susan everywhere, “following” her by dashing ahead and then waiting for us to catch up, in that way that cats have. When he even follows us across the road when we go to look at the horses in the adjacent field, we decide to go back to the “snug”—there are two bars or lounges, the more formal one upstairs, and the “snug room” on the ground floor—for a drink before we get Corky run over. Dinner is beef in some sort of sauce, potatoes, and brown-bread ice-cream, which is quite good. Split another bottle of wine, stagger to bed, reeling through the country silence.

Monday, August 14th—Dartmoor, Two Bridges, Wigham & Morchard Bishop

Last breakfast at the Lodge (which proved to be our favorite place to stay on the entire trip, rivalled only by Fallowfields, near Oxford). Check out, say goodbye to Sam the dog, who lunges up and snatches a piece of toast I’m holding in my hand (to feed to the birds later), and then trots proudly around the yard with the toast in his mouth for the next five minutes, while we load the car. A trophy, perhaps?

Leave Cornwall behind, drive into Devon, this time heading east. Drive to Moretonhampstead on the A30 and the A382, and then into Dartmoor on the B3212, stopping at the miniature pony center, where they had pigs and piglets and some newborn baby ponies, who were not much bigger than a small dog, as well as the adult miniature ponies, which are used for pony rides. (The adult miniature ponies looked at me with suspicion and growing alarm, but I was in a benevolent mood and made no attempt to ride them.) Move on down the B3212. Somewhere just to the north of Postbridge—in the high treeless country I think of as “the real moor,” although I suppose all of it, high and low, valley forest and barren rocky hill, is all officially Dartmoor—we park the car by the side of the road, in a cutting, and walk up a long rolling hill covered with purple heather and golden gorse. Also covered with sheep-droppings, which are everywhere—not surprising, since the sheep themselves are everywhere. Two of them wander up the hillside in front of me on a faint trail that they and their kin have probably broken themselves, not hurrying or alarmed, but not letting me close with them either, always staying the same distance ahead of me. There is a wild moor pony off some distance to the left, and he too, although also seeming unalarmed, moves away in an unhurried fashion when I approach, stopping to graze every few steps in an unconcerned way, but still not letting me close with him. A ruined hill-fort is visible in the distance on the ridge line, with hikers moving toward it; in the other direction, down the hill past the car, herds of sheep move and bleat, and, as I watch, a party consisting of four riders and two happily panting dogs comes by. I spend a contented half-hour or so wandering around on the high moor, in heather up to my knee, stepping on sheep-berries, bees buzzing by my ears and the wind soughing, looking at the hill-forts on the surrounding ridge-lines through my binoculars, occasionally breaking into a whistled chorus of “The Heather on the Hill,” which doesn’t seem to either startle the ever-receding sheep into moving any faster or intrigue them into investigating. I find the high moor country strangely attractive and inviting—odd, since I usually instinctively dislike and avoid places where there isn’t any shade, and here on these bare rocky hills there is no shelter from the sun at all. Nevertheless, I am strangely happy here, and would probably be content to spend the entire vacation tramping aimlessly around over the moors. (I am fundamentally a mountain person, always happiest when I am in high country, and Susan is fundamentally a water person, happiest near or on a large body of water; I later noticed that throughout the trip, whenever I would say “Look at that!” and point at something particularly scenic, I would usually be pointing at a mountain view; when Susan would do the same, she was almost inevitably pointing at a view of a lake or of the ocean.)

Continued on to Two Bridges, which consists almost entirely of the Two Bridges Hotel, where we have a mediocre lunch (lunch is almost always the meal that the British do the worst job on; breakfasts are usually quite good, sometimes the best meal of the day, and many of our dinners were perfectly acceptable, too, but we had few lunches that rose above mediocre—most of them, in fact, sucked). After lunch, took the B3357 to Ashburton, up and across the high moor again, the narrow road practically lined with sheep, their coats splashed with green or red or blue, some of them laying half-in the road, all of them seemingly unafraid of cars, although surely a tourist must hit one occasionally, the road is so winding and narrow, there’s so much traffic, and so much of it drives unnervingly fast. There are also groups of wild moor ponies here and there by the side of the road, usually being cooed at by tourists, all of whom, British and American, are feeding the ponies, of course, although supposedly this is illegal; the ponies, though, don’t seem in the least concerned about participating in an illegal event. We stop again on the high moor somewhere west of Dartmeet. There’s another ruined hill-fort visible from here, closer to us, on the crest of another hill, and I’m tempted to hike up to it, but the afternoon is dying, and we don’t really have the time. Continue on, stopping at a narrow stone bridge over the river Dart, just as we did eight years ago. At Ashburton, turn off on to the A38 to Exeter, then creep along behind hay-trucks and lorries on the A377, turning off at Morchard Bishop and following unnumbered back roads and then a private road to Wigham, our next inn.

Greeted by the proprietor, Steve, and two black dogs, one of whom is just a puppy, not much more than a month or two old. Steve helps us up to our room with our immensely heavy suitcases, while the puppy, Zulu, frisks about and play-bites our hands. Both of us are somewhat disappointed in Wigham, especially coming off of our stay at Trebrea Lodge, which we loved. Wigham is extremely twee, with throw-pillows and cute little stuffed animals everywhere, a sort of a Disneyfied version of the traditional thatched cottage that it advertises itself to be. I am also bothered by the fact that there’s “no there there”—at Trebrea, we could stroll around the extensive grounds, but all there is here is the main house, with a gravel terrace in front of it, everything squeezed in between the driveway/parking area and the fence that blocks access to the “working farm” part, which is private; on the other side of the gravel terrace with its picnic tables is the swimming pool, set down a level, and on the other side of that, down the hill a bit, are fenced-in fields full of sheep . . . so there’s really no place to go here unless you get back in the car and leave, no place to stroll around. (Susan points out that it’s odd that a place that makes such a big deal about being an “organic farm,” all very self-consciously and piously Green, should have animal-skin rugs all over the floors . . . but it does.) We go swimming, and the pool is nice, and welcome, since the sun is still high and blazing, although the pool is much dirtier than a pool even in a small roadside motel in the States would be, full of dead floating bugs and twigs and leaves. Susan goes upstairs while I sit at one of the picnic tables on the gravel terrace and work on these notes, listening to the almost constant baa-ing of the sheep, counterpointed by the occasional lowing of a cow. A black-and-white cat comes by, crying as it walks, seeming almost to be answering the mewling cries of the sheep; but perhaps it is only calling its kittens.

Dinner is late because the other guests, a party of eight French people travelling together, are late returning from Clovelly and Hartland Point, where we were yesterday. We are offered a free drink as compensation; I have a Tia Maria and Susan has a gin and tonic. Finally the French arrive, and we are introduced to them, although only one or two of them speak even a word of English; Susan has a smattering of tourist French, but they speak so fast that this turns out to be largely useless. Dinner is served family style around one big wooden table—rice with raisins, steamed vegetables, with skimpy portions of some sort of sweet-and-sour pork put on the plates first. The French clearly do not like the food, and several of them barely bother to touch it; jokes about the food are made in rapid French, which Steve, who speaks French haltingly, seems to catch and resent. The eight French people, four couples, all late middle-aged, talk loudly and enthusiastically to each other during dinner, with much shouting and laughing and gesturing and even a brief outbreak of singing, and this seems to embarrass our hosts, who keep whispering apologies to us for the exuberance of the French, and promising us that things will be “much quieter” tomorrow, when there will be only an English couple and us. The black labrador puppy, Zulu, is clearly very popular with the French people, and circles the table while several of them call his name, leaping up to have his head tousled and to chew on people’s fingers. I play tug-of-war with him with a napkin, which he joyously shreds into little pieces. After dinner, the French all troop outside onto the terrace and light up cigarettes, in defiance of the inn’s strict no-smoking policy. While they’re puffing away, I hear the innkeeper’s five-month-pregnant wife, Dawn, complaining bitterly in the kitchen about the fact that the French people are smoking, saying that if there’s a fire, it will void their insurance. If the French hear her, they either don’t understand or don’t care, because they continue to smoke for some time, while we go up to bed.

Tuesday, August 15th—Okehampton Castle & Tavistock

When we wake, we are socked-in—very foggy, although as yet no rain, and we tell ourselves maybe it will burn off. Susan says that when she first looked out an hour or two earlier, the fog was like cheesecloth pressed against the window. Even now you can’t see beyond the edge of the gravel terrace, and the mournful voices of the sheep rise up out of the fog.

Breakfast is late because our hostess is busy screaming at her assistant in the kitchen over his request for more time off, and they continue to fight vindictively for quite some time instead of starting breakfast, which makes for a very tense atmosphere which the French, upon arriving, either ignore or are oblivious to. After everyone has been waiting around the table for a while, the hostess and her assistant belatedly notice and pull themselves together, and breakfast begins. Am amused to note during breakfast that the puppy Zulu is sticking her nose into the big bowl that holds the cold cereal, and is happily eating it. Fortunately, I’m not planning to have cereal here tomorrow.

Take off after breakfast, miss our turning, and end up taking the “backdoor” route to Coppelstone, through tiny towns called Oldbourough and Newbuildings, along roads so small that the hedges on either side of them scratch the sides of the car as we pass. At Coppelstone, take the A3072 to Okehampton, park, walk up to tour Okehampton Castle. On the way to the castle, we explore a few yards down a footpath marked romantically “Lover’s Meet,” and find waiting for us there, romantically, a backhoe, which is parked sitting partially in the stream. It is, however, we tell ourselves, a very romantic backhoe. At the castle, Susan buys earphones and takes an “audio tour” of the castle while I, disdaining the earphones, walk around at my own pace, speculating that someday people will be able to take “virtual tours” of castles, seeing projected around them as they walk the castle as it would have looked when it was intact, perhaps not bothering to look at the ruins in the real world at all. I am amused by a sign that says that, while in attendance, the Lord of the manor maintained a retinue that included eight men-at-arms and fourteen lawyers. If he had that much more use for lawyers than for men-at-arms, then I guess that things haven’t really changed all that much since the 14th Century.

Leave Okehampton, drive to Tavistock on the A386, park in the ubiquitous car-park, walk around looking for the tea-room we’d eaten in in 1987, finally give up and have lunch in a place called The Coffee Mill. Toasted cheese and bacon sandwich for Susan, cream tea for me—the Cornish clotted cream and the Devon clotted cream are not quite the same, the Devon variety having a texture more like that of butter; both are good, but the Cornish version has the edge, I think. Shopped in town for a while, trying to determine how difficult it would be to send a bottle of Dartmoor Mead back to the States for Janet and Ricky Kagan (very difficult, as it turns out, so we give up the idea), then drive up on to the moor on the B3212, stopping briefly just before Princetown, somewhere near Merrivale, and stopping again later on somewhere up near Postbridge. The color of the hills on this side is predominantly purple, the color of the heather, which makes them look almost red from a distance. On the other side, where we stopped yesterday near Dartmeet, the hills were much more golden, the color of the gorse, as there was more of it there admixed with the heather. Drive to Mortonhampstead, passing the pony center again, then up the A382 to the B3219, up the A3072 to Coppelstone, then home on the A377 and along the network of back roads past Morchard Bishop to Wigham.

It’s still quite hot and bright, drought weather instead of the more usual English weather, and so we take a swim, joined by the new guests, the promised-to-be “quiet” English couple, who turn out to be a pleasant middle-aged English couple called Eva and Bill (he somewhat older than her; he remembers being wakened as a small child in the middle of the night when the news of VJ Day came in, and hearing all the boats in the harbor sounding their whistles—he was a retail buyer of china, who had bought plates for the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth; she was an English teacher until her recent retirement, blonde, still pretty), and later by Steve and Dawn (Steve obviously somewhat apprehensive about the upcoming birth; talks uneasily about the birthing classes they are taking, hoping that the baby doesn’t come until they graduate), and then by Zulu, who splashes into the pool, swims around for awhile, and then tries to get out by the pool ladder, slipping and scrambling and whining, but finally clawing her way out (amusing to me that Dawn is concerned about the legal consequences of the French smoking, but doesn’t seem to care about the dog swimming in the pool with the guests, which in the States would almost certainly be enough of a Board of Health violation to shut them down). Zulu shakes herself dry, and then pounces on the cat when it comes wandering by, biting it ferociously—not really hurting it, but obviously annoying it. The cat makes protesting noises, and then finally gets fed up when Zulu won’t stop and starts to fight back; they disappear into the distance, still fighting and barking and spitting.

Dinner is again served at the big wooden table that night, but this time with just us and the English couple: chicken in a brownish sauce with bits of mushroom and bacon, red cabbage with juniper berries, roasted potatoes, squash (or marrows, as they’re called here) in tomato sauce—not tremendously good, but there’s lots of it, served family style in big bowls, and it’s considerably better than the night before; you get the feeling that they’re trying a bit harder now that the French, who they obviously didn’t much like, are gone. Pleasant dinner conversation with Eva and Bill during dinner and in the sitting room afterward, mostly about the inadequacies of various educational systems. Then to bed.

Wednesday, August 16th—Kelmscot Manor, Fallowfields & Kingston Bagpuise

Up about 7:20. When I go down to the gravel terrace before breakfast to write up these notes, Zulu comes prancing up with her food bowl in her jaws and thrusts it into my lap; do you think she’s trying to tell me something? A pleasant breakfast with Bill and Eva, over which we linger too long—we’re getting a late start today, and it’s a bad time for it, since today we also face the longest uninterrupted drive of the trip, from Devon almost to Oxford.

Drag our suitcases down to the car, pack up, and set off, on the road about 10:40. Take the A377 to Credition, then the A3072 to the M5. Take the M5 to the M4. It’s amazing how much quicker travel is on the M roads than it is on even the A roads in rural areas like Cornwall and Devon—it only takes us a bit more than two hours to get up near the Oxford area once we hit the M roads, and it takes us an hour just to get to where we pick up the M5 in the first place from Morchard Bishop; some of our journeys around Cornwall and Devon actually took as long or longer than it takes us to get from Exeter to Oxford.

Get off the main road a few miles from Kingston Bagpuise, about ten miles from Oxford, and, after some difficulty, find our way to Kelmscot, the country estate of William Morris, where Rossetti and others of the Pre-Raphaelites used to hang out, which is why Susan wants to see it. Stopped for an indifferent lunch at a pub called, believe it or not, the Plough Inn, and then pushed on to Kelmscot Manor itself. Explored the manor, which had unusually lovely hangings, tiles, wallpaper, and design elements, far superior to other country houses of this sort that we’ve seen—not surprising, I guess, considering that Morris and his artist friends designed and/or executed just about everything in the house themselves. Interesting that a man who considered himself a devoted socialist and who apparently would scold his wife for being extravagant in the shops would have such a rich and lovely home, but then Morris was full of contradictions, like many artistic people both then and now.

Finished touring Kelmscot about 4:15, drove back to the A420 to the A415, and so to Kingston Bagpuise, and our next inn, Fallowfields. This is another stone manor house, set a little closer to the main road than I had thought it would be, but there are extensive grounds behind the main house, including a large vegetable garden and some flower gardens. On the lawn in the rear is a sequoia that has been hit by lightning and blasted into an odd shape (the host seems surprised when we don’t recognize it, as though Americans see sequoias every day, but Susan explains that its almost as far to the nearest sequoia from our home in Philadelphia as it is from Philadelphia to Oxford). The host is named Anthony. His wife, Peta, is the behind-the-scenes person, while he deals with the public—this seems to be the way it usually breaks down at these B&Bs that are run by couples: one front person, usually the man (always was the man, anyway, in every place we stayed on this trip, and usually is at B&Bs at home, too), to deal directly with the guests, and one person, usually the woman, behind the scenes to deal with logistics and organization, and usually to do the cooking. Anthony’s duties also include taking care of the huge vegetable garden, and he tells us that when he first moved up here from London, he was quite a Green, and would never willingly have harmed an animal, but that maintaining a vegetable garden is a constant war with pests who want to eat your vegetables, and now, after two years of it, he now feels no compunction about going out with a .12 gauge and shooting the wood pigeons, who eat his brussel sprouts. Across the rear lawn, the one with the sequoia, is a field where sheep, and, occasionally, horses graze. House martins flit about under the eves of the main house, doing incredible aerial acrobatics; they nest right up under the eaves right above the window to our room, and we constantly see them flashing past the window as they swoop out to gobble bugs, or swoop home again.

We take a swim before dinner in one of the strangest swimming pools I’ve ever seen, an oddly designed stone pool set a few steps down from the lawn, overhung by grape vines and lavender. The deep end extends all the way across the long end of the pool, rather than dividing it in half horizontally in traditional fashion, and I can’t help wonder if the Aga Khan, whose mansion this formerly was, might not have come up with its eccentric design himself. (Later the thought occurs to me that perhaps we were swimming in the former horse trough.) We swim for about an hour, while sheep graze and bleat in the field alongside the pool, horses move restlessly around in the distance, and butterflies dart about near the lavender bushes. Spend some time rescuing ladybugs from drowning in the pool, scooping them up and putting them down by the poolside—probably largely a wasted effort, since many of them seem determined to march right back into the water again as soon as they recover themselves.

Dinner at the inn is expensive but fairly good. All Americans in attendance for the first time this trip, one nice couple from Chicago, and a nerdy fellow with an annoying voice who we take a dislike to at once, who is here with his family: a resigned-looking wife, and two daughters who he’s taking on a tour of Oxford in order to encourage them to go to English colleges. They look less than enthusiastic about the prospect.

Thursday, August 17th—Uffington, Burford, Bourton-on-the-Water & Upper Slaughter

Called the car-rental company this morning to see if we can drop the car off in Oxford tomorrow rather than in Heathrow as we had originally arranged. Apparently, we can. The idea is that we will take the train into London from Oxford to catch our overnight sleeper to Inverness; this will save us a 40 pound cab ride in from Heathrow, and, since we have the rail flexipasses, should actually cost us nothing at all, as far as money out of our dwindling supply of cash is concerned, anyway.

After breakfast, drive out to see the Uffington White Horse. We park in the car park and walk up the long swell of a hill toward the White Horse, but are somewhat disappointed—because of the angle that the chalk figure is cut into the hill, it’s tilted away from our position here, and you really can’t get that good a look at it; you’d probably get a better angle on it and a better overview of it from one of the back roads in the valley below, but we don’t have the time to look for such a vantage point. Giving up on the White Horse, we drive on up into the Cotswalds, stopping at Burford. There’s a stream next to the car park, and we feed the ducks and swans the piece of toast we’ve brought all the way up from Tintagel (its companion having been carried off to an Unknown Fate by Sam the Dog), having forgotten to feed it to anything on Dartmoor the previous two days; the birds don’t seem to be particularly impressed by all the trouble we’ve gone to to import this piece of toast hundreds of miles especially for them, and devour it with neither more nor less enthusiasm than usual, although it is, by now, stale enough to be of the same consistency as sheet iron. We visit a craft’s fair in an old almshouse next to an ancient church and graveyard, then walk up the steep main street of Burford (everything here is uphill, remember?), shopping, buying presents for Ricky—a knife, that should be fun to get through customs—and for Tess, an Italianate plaster cherub for her garden.

Get back in the car and drive to Bourton-on-the-Water, park in a car park on the outskirts of town. Long hot walk in beside the little river Windrush. Bourton-on-the-Water is absolutely packed with tourists, with a population density that puts that other world-class tourist trap, New Hope, Pennsylvania—which it otherwise reminds us of—to shame; they also have more gift shops per square foot than New Hope does, an amazing accomplishment, and one that I frankly wouldn’t have thought possible. The walkway along the river and the narrow footbridges over it are especially crowded and busy, with several naked or near-naked children wading in the ankle-deep river, splashing, throwing stones, pushing each other over. Also see lots of dogs leaping in and out of the water, happily shaking themselves dry, leaping in again to retrieve a stick or a ball. Picnickers are everywhere. We also see lots of people being wheeled along the riverside and through the town in wheelchairs; we see far more handicapped people here in fifteen minutes than we’ve seen in all of England so far, or that we will see in Scotland—why so many in this one particular town, I wonder? Susan suggests that it’s because this is one of the few places we’ve been where everything isn’t sharply uphill; perhaps it’s also because it’s within day-trip range of bigger cities such as Oxford and London.

After lunch, which we have out under the trees in a grassy square in the center of town (Susan has a strange dish which consists of an enormous, hollowed-out Yorkshire Pudding full of Steak & Kidney Pie mix and french fries (sorry, chips)), we walk back along the river to the car, passing a clever duck who is hanging in the water downstream, comfortably out-of-sight from the main mass of tourists, and eating all the goodies that those tourists have let fall into the water, and which the current is now bringing to him: pieces of bread, bits of cake and cookies, ice-cream cones, etc. He can afford to be choosey, and he is only selecting the very choicest delicacies, which the current delivers almost right into his beak, with very little effort needed on his part except to open his beak at the right time. Smart duck.

Drive through Lower Slaughter, can’t find anyplace to park, drive on up to Upper Slaughter, on the hill above, park there. In contrast to Bourton-on-the-Water, there are almost no tourists at all in the Slaughters, particularly Upper Slaughter, although they are at least as lovely as Bourton-on-the-Water, and perhaps even more so. We have the whole village nearly to ourselves; the place is as deserted as a Hollywood back lot after working hours. We walk around looking at the fine old Cotswald stone buildings, walk down the hill to a ford over a small stream (a car conveniently fording it just as we arrive, splashing through water about a third of the way up its wheels, as if it is demonstrating the ford for us), then back up and around on the other side of town, back to the tiny square where we are parked. It’s getting late by now, so, reluctantly, we head back to Fallowfields.

Back at the inn, we go down to the pool for a swim, joining an English couple from Yorkshire named Sid and Kate, who are already down by the poolside. The inn cat, Healy, crouches nearby throughout, staring at us in amazement and some alarm as we actually put ourselves into the water. Willingly! (Strange, inscrutable creatures, these humans . . .) He is careful not to get too near, in case we should drag him in, too. We have a swim and a nice chat with Sid and Kate, then sit out by the pool and have drinks, very civilized. At dusk, the house martins dart about, gobbling up bugs, and then swoop up under the eaves, seeming to be about to fly right in our open bedroom window. They look like little jet fighters silhouetted against the darkening sky.

Rack of lamb for dinner. Afterward, sat outside on the rear lawn, watching the stars; you can see an amazing number of stars from here, for someplace so close to the light-pollution of Oxford, and I see something describing a perfectly circular path across the night sky at a fast but steady pace that I’m sure is a satellite in earth orbit. Anthony, who was a Navigator in the RAF, tells a story about being in a plane packed solid with soldiers inside all the way to the tail, and needing to go to the loo, which was in the back of the plane, and the sergeant gruffly ordering his men to bend over, so that Anthony could walk over their backs, literally stepping on them, to the rear of the plane to reach the loo. As an old enlisted man myself, this sounds like perfectly normal officer behavior to me, but I refrain from telling Anthony so.

Friday, August 18th—Oxford, London, Train to Inverness

A day mostly spent dealing with major and minor hassles, and more packed with frustrations than sightseeing. Check out of the inn, drive into Oxford, get lost, and spend a half-hour or so driving around before finally finding the train station. We offload the luggage, then find that none of the lockers at the station are even remotely large enough to check our suitcases in, thus ending our plan to leave the luggage there and go to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford this morning before taking the train for London. Reload the luggage into the car, and then spend almost two hours of escalating annoyance driving back and forth through the streets of Oxford trying to locate the car rental company, at one point missing a turn and driving a good deal of the distance out to Blenheim Palace before we can find an exit on the highway that lets us turn around in a tiny village called Wigham and get headed back in the right direction again. Finally do find the car rental place, which turns out to be quite some distance from town, so that we need an expensive cab ride back into Oxford, where we miss our train by seconds, forcing us to wait more than an hour for the next one. Then a hot ride into London, with our suitcases jammed into the aisle of the fortunately nearly empty train car, since they won’t fit in any of the available luggage-storage spaces. Then another cab ride, from Paddington Station to Euston.

Find, to our relief, that there is an actual left-luggage department at Euston Station, and gladly pay the money to leave our luggage there. We are too limp and exhausted from all of this to want to do much, so we give up on our half-formed alternate plan to tour the Victoria and Albert Museum, and decide to take one of the city bus tours instead; at least we won’t have to walk to do that. Take a cab to Russell Square, where we know we can catch such a tour, and get there just a second or two after the bus pulls away. I find it oddly pleasing to be standing in front of the Russell Hotel again, and I decide that this feeling comes from the fact that, after a week of navigating mostly new and unfamiliar territory, here I know where everything is: the American Express office is just down the block, as is the newsstand where you can buy bottled water, the Night and Day, where you can get an ice-cream cone, the Italian place with the outdoor tables where you can get dessert, the little cafe near the British Museum where you can get a scone for breakfast, and so on. Somehow this makes it seem almost like stepping back into last week. (Later learn that George R.R. Martin was probably in the Russell while we were standing out in front of it, since he was staying there that day, but we had no way of knowing that at the time.)

Catch a cab to Victoria, hoping to catch up with a tour bus there, but, near Trafalgar Square, we spot a London double-decker tour bus waiting by the curb, hop out of the cab, and board it—or rather, board one we’re directed to a few blocks away, in front of Charing Cross Station. Sit up on the top deck, of course, in the open air. The tour drives us by nothing we’re not already familiar with, but it’s a pleasant way to kill an hour and a half, and one that doesn’t involve walking or carrying huge suitcases. Susan becomes noticeably more relaxed and cheerful, now that she no longer has the responsibility of driving, which has clearly been weighing heavily on her. We pass the Statue of Eros (actually, the Spirit of Christian Charity, although no one will call it that) in Piccadilly Circus, where I’d once spent a night sitting on the fountain steps, decades ago, and although the fountain itself is the same (as are the hordes of shabbily romantic/Byronic kids sitting in romantic gloom on the steps), the surrounding Circus has changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable. Pass the grounds of Buckingham Palace, noticing the very heavy-duty and sincere barbed wire that tops the high surrounding walls and fences. Pass Green Park, which has been baked nearly brown by the sun.

We get out across from Charing Cross, walk up to Covent Gardens, where the little streets in front of the pubs are completely blocked by loitering customers, foaming pints in hand; later, we peek into the end of Leicester Square, and that’s so crowded that the tourists are literally standing packed-in shoulder-to-shoulder, as though they are at some kind of political rally or free rock concert—but they’re just taking in the night. I don’t recall London being quite this jammed with tourists twenty-five years ago, and I wonder if the tourist density level is this high every year now . . . or is this just another effect of the unusually hot and dry and prolonged (and very un-English) summer weather? Perhaps all the crowds who usually go to Spain or Italy or Florida “seeking the sun” have stayed home instead this year. (Florida, by the way, is by far the most popular destination in the States for British tourists; just about every British person we met had been to Florida, although most of them had been nowhere else in the States during their trip, and in several bookstores guides to Florida were the only travel books on U.S. destinations available—the Brits may not have seen New York City or L.A. or Washington, D.C. or Seattle, but they’ve seen Disney World . . . which must offer a somewhat distorted view of what the life in the States is like!) Have a decent if unexciting Indian meal, then have coffee and strawberry pie down the street in a little place named Crank’s. As we eat, I look out the open window-wall of the restaurant at the bustling sidewalk traffic, mostly young people out looking for one sort of action or another, and again think of myself here when I was young. Feel a pang when I think that this may well be my last glimpse of London for many years, or perhaps ever in this life.

Go back to Euston Station, pick up our luggage, drag it to the sleeper train for Inverness. Have tea in the lounge car, and, while we are sipping it, London slips silently away behind us, without any fuss, and is gone.

Saturday, August 19th—Inverness, Moray Firth & Polmaily House, Drumnadrochit, Urquhart Castle

Slept fitfully, woke about 6:40. Rugged Scottish hills sliding by the train window. Stony high hills, very bleak, with purple heather on their sides. In the valleys and below the tree-line, what appear to be spruce or fir forests, with here and there trees that look like silver birches, glinting like bone in the dull green body of the woods. Lots of rabbits running away across the fields. Sit down to have a cup of coffee in the lounge car as we arrive at Aviemore. Brief drizzle later at Slough Summit, where the grey clouds clamp down overhead like an iron skillet lid, obscuring the tops of highest hills. It’s what the Irish call a “soft day”—fine constant mist, not quite rain—by the time we get to Inverness, where we get off the train.

Check out the various posters advertising boat rides and bus and taxi tours, and then catch a cab to the car rental place, where we pick up our new car, a blue Ford Mondeo this time, which proves to be nowhere near as comfortable as our faithful Daewoo (no air conditioning, for one thing; it’s been an amusement to me throughout our trip that although our rooms weren’t air-conditioned, our car was. The Brits tend to sneer at or at least be extremely patronizing to Americans about their dependency on air-conditioning, but a few more summers like this one in Britain, and they may find themselves putting air-conditioners in as well; already, in London, we were seeing hand-lettered signs on some restaurants promising that it was “Air-conditioned inside!” or “Fully air-conditioned!” or just “Cool inside!” . . . and I remember the movie theaters using the same ploy to attract customers back in the ‘50s—remember the Chilly Willy signs outside movie houses?—when Americans didn’t have home air-conditioners either).

Drive through town and down to the harbor, where we park at dockside and book passage on the Moray Firth Dolphin-Watching Cruise. Inverness doesn’t seem to be a terribly pretty or terribly interesting town, striking me as an unpretentious no-nonsense no-frills working-class town, an impression confirmed or at least emphasized for me when we walk around the harbor area while waiting for the cruise to leave, strolling around the corner and over a bridge to a quiet, working-class neighborhood: a sleeping pub, a laundromat, a take-away fish-and-chips shop, and a bakery, where I buy a “potato pie” (something like an inferior Cornish Pastie) and a “battery,” which turns out to be a greasy lump of cold fried dough or batter (hence the name), served plain, without even powdered sugar on it, the dough itself not even remotely sweet—it tastes mostly like cold congealed grease.

Back at the dock, the harbor-cruise ship has arrived, and we file on board. Swans have formed a queue in the water alongside the ship, and are begging the tourists for food, and I regret not bringing the largely-uneaten remnants of my “battery” back for them; perhaps, as Scottish birds, they would appreciate it more than I did. One little girl is teasing a swan by pretending to be about to feed it a potato chip (sorry, crisp!), getting it to arch its neck up excitedly, and then snatching the chip away from it at the last moment—after a few minutes of this, the swan gives up and swims away in disgust. The drizzle has largely stopped by the time we set out, which makes the trip more pleasant, but I don’t expect that we’re going to see much except for the scenery of the Firth itself (a not-inconsiderable attraction in its own right, of course), and that turns out to be true (I become suspicious when they offer us the tour tickets at a considerable discount; whenever they offer something to tourists during tourist season for less money than it says they’re going to charge you for it, something’s wrong—in this case, I suspect, they know that we’re too late in the year to really have a good chance of seeing a lot of wildlife). During our hour-long cruise, we see exactly one—count ‘em, one—dolphin, which we dutifully watch for the minute or so that it’s visible above the surface of the water. Still, it’s a pleasant cruise on Moray Firth, enjoyable for its own sake, just for the pleasure of being out on the water in the open air in a small boat. By the time we get back to Inverness, the skies have cleared, and the sun is out.

Drive down the A82 to Drumnadrochit, along the shores of Loch Ness. It’s a bright day by now, the narrow waters of Loch Ness sparkling with sunlight and whitecaps, and I’m amused to see that the road alongside the loch is lined with people hopefully watching the loch with binoculars, waiting for the Monster to show up. I do exactly the same thing for a few minutes (without success, alas!), then we continue to Drumnadrochit—which consists mostly of a couple of hotels and gift shops and The Official Loch Ness Monster Center, which has a big plaster statue of Nessie outside—and on out the other side of town to Polmaily House, our next inn. This turns out to be a nicely rambling old wooden house, not as pretty or imposing as Fallowfields; the room is nice, although a bit smaller and not quite as elegant as our room at Fallowfields; the bathroom is considerably larger and more conveniently arranged than at Fallowfields, though, where we had a toilet and shower set in one tiny closet-sized cubicle and the sink all the way on the other side of the room, tucked away in a cabinet. And the grounds are about as extensive, or perhaps even more extensive, with tables set out under a nice expanse of tree-shaded lawn that leads over to the swimming pool, and grazing horses visible in the field below, before the ground climbs up to the hill on the other side of the road.

We drop our luggage in our room (which is hot, so we open all the windows . . . which turns out to be a fateful decision) and drive back through Drumnadrochit to the ruins of Urquhart Castle on the shores of Loch Ness, the castle they always show in movies that have a Loch Ness locale. We’re both so tired by this point that we end up driving on the wrong side of the road for more than a mile before either of us notices! Fortunately, the road that leads to the inn is not a heavily trafficked road, so we manage to get away with it. Perhaps we’re a bit too tired to really enjoy the castle, either, probably we should have just stayed at the inn, but we buy our tickets and dutifully trudge down the hill to tour it, with only a few groans about how steep the hill is going to be coming back up. There’s not really a lot of Urquhart Castle left to tour, actually, it being mostly ruined, but the views out over the loch are splendid, especially with the broken castle walls in the foreground, and there’s a kilted piper playing continuously near the gate, for atmosphere (they have a tip jar set up for him, so, on the way out, we literally pay the piper). Looking out over Loch Ness, it’s easy to see how the Monster legends got started—there are lots of odd currents running through the loch, producing lines of ripples that could easily look like serpentine humps in a row from a distance. In fact, the problem is not in seeing the Monster, but that at any given moment you can see six or seven of them—every movement of the currents, every wake, every boat moving far enough away in the distance to have dwindled to a black dot, every wind-generated pattern of ripples: all of them could be a Monster, and most of these phenomena would look no less convincing than the classic Monster photos if you took a picture of them. Actually seeing Loch Ness, though, makes it even plainer how absurd the idea is that there’s a herd of plesiosaurs swimming around in it—the loch may be very deep, true, but it’s also extremely narrow. If there were plesiosaurs swimming around in it, people would be seeing them all the time, not just every once in a rare while.

Drive back to the inn, take a swim in the pool (which is much less eccentric than the one at Fallowfields, with the deep end where it usually is), take a nap, and then have dinner; roast duck, one of the best meals of the entire trip. Back to the room, and try to sleep . . . but the midges are pestering us, so that the choice becomes leave the covers pulled up to your chin and swelter, or throw them off and be annoyed by midges. Eventually, it either gets cold enough for them to stop flying around, or I get tired enough not to care, because I fall asleep.

Sunday, August 20th—Cowdor Castle, Glen Cannich

Get a late start, leaving about 10:30 A.M. driving back to Inverness on the A82, and then drive east toward Nairn on the A96, past fields full of round bales of hay like circular yellow cows. Turn off on a smaller road to visit Cawdor Castle, the home of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the Thane of Cawdor.

Tour the castle, which is not all that spectacular as a castle, but which is interestingly furnished and decorated, and has a nice lived-in feel—not surprising, since the family apparently does still live here part of the year, from November to May. In spite of the antique furniture and the richness of the tapestries and the decorations, the place manages to look comfortable somehow, as though it would be pleasant to live there, and I find myself able to imagine actually living there and enjoying doing so, unlike most of these lordly piles of stone, which tend to look cold and unfriendly and uncomfortable, and which usually seem as though they would not be particularly welcoming to live in. Lord Cawdor’s posted descriptions of each room are pleasantly amusing in a dry, ironic way, and contain the phrase “And now for something completely different”—the Lord is a Monty Python fan! Have lunch at the castle (I am amused by the “wholewheat hoagie” they offer—which looks awful; I have scones, but, while I eat them, muse about how far the term “hoagie” has spread from its Philadelphia/New Jersey origins . . . it seems to be slowly winning over “submarine sandwich,” which was what we called hoagies back in New England when I was a boy, and also over other variants such as “torpedo”), then check out the castle gardens, which are the healthiest-looking we’ve seen in Britain so far (I suspect that the drought has not been as severe or as prolonged in Scotland), then visit the castle woolens shop, the castle book shop (where we notice that no copies of Shakespeare’s Macbeth are on sale), and the immense castle gift shop, where I buy the bloody history of the Clan Gunn as a gift for Eileen Gunn. (Later, I look into Macbeth again and am surprised to see that the play contains no mention at all of the castle gift shop; you’d think, being such an extensive and important part of the castle, that it would certainly have been used for the setting of at least a scene or two, wouldn’t you?)

Drive back to Inverness, then take the A862 back west to its junction with the A831 just south of Beauly. Follow the A831 south through Glen Cannich, a narrow, tree-choked valley following the course of the Beauly River, and one that seems just barely wide enough for the river it contains, with a wee bit of space left on the side for the road, which is not much wider than the car. Had originally intended to drive on through Glen Affric, but get tired and turn off at the road that leads back to the inn.

Back at Polmaily House, we go for a swim, sharing the pool with a group of splashing and shouting German children who keep throwing things at each other (swim fins, diving masks, plastic swords) and exploding shrill language-bombs full of harsh-sounding gutturals as they chase each other from the deep end to the shallow end and back again, but we manage to ignore all this primate territoriality practice and blob lazily around the pool anyway for a half-hour or so.

Later, go upstairs and change, come down and have a drink at a table just outside the bar, and then go sit at the round plastic tables on the lawn, under the trees. Visited by Honey, the big yellow inn dog, who sniffs at us for a moment, but who really isn’t very interested in us, and soon wanders away. This seems typical of Polmaily House, where the host is polite but rather remote and chilly—we spend less time interacting with the host here than we do almost anywhere else, and only get one glimpse of the hostess; mostly, they keep themselves to themselves, spending much of the day sitting around a plastic table of their own way across the lawn, and keeping interaction with the customers to a minimum. It is tempting to attribute this to “typical Highland reserve,” except that, it turns out, the host and his family are from England! There are lots of children—of several different nationalities—here, far more than at anyplace else we’ve stayed so far this trip, and it’s clear that, unlike, say, Fallowfields or Trebrea Lodge, this inn gets lots of its business by deliberately catering to the family trade. You can see why families with lots of children would find it attractive, too: people can bring their kids here and find lots of things to keep them entertained: the pool, the hutch/petting zoo full of fat rabbits and the occasional guinea pig, the playground area, an indoor “playroom,” the “nature walk” trail up the hill, all the plastic toys scattered over the lawn, the availability of horseback-riding, and so on. While we sit out under the trees in the gathering dusk, we see two hawks hunting overhead, one patrolling low, to flush prey out of cover, while the second one patrols high, to swoop down on them when they move (a similar pattern was used by fighter pilots in World War II). Until the hawks appear, the lawn has been full of small birds, mostly sparrows, hopping and squawking and squabbling, but as soon as the hawks swim into the sky above, they all flee to the bushes and the eaves of the outbuildings and hide, shrilly complaining about having to do so. They continue to gripe about it from the bushes for some time, but they don’t come back out, even after the hawks have left.

Dinner is (for me, anyway) venison in a berry sauce—quite good, although not as good as the previous night’s roast duck, which may have been my favorite meal of the trip, or close to it; at least the food here is good, even if the host is somewhat distant.

To bed, again having to cope with the midges. Dream of being in a building which is rapidly filling up with bugs, billions of them, from the bottom up, so that we have to keep running upstairs, and then up another level, and then up another, to get away from them.

Monday, August 21”—Drumnadrochit, Eilean Donan Castle, Kyle of Lochalsh & Viewfield House, Portree

Wake up covered with itchy bug bites, which may explain the dream. Susan is covered with bites from head to toe; they’ve even bitten her on her scalp. Most of my bites are concentrated on my arms, but it’s unusual that bugs will bother to bite me at all (Susan is the mosquito magnet—usually they’ll swarm right past me to get at her, ignoring me altogether), so these must have been particularly hungry little devils. We later learn that “the secret” to leaving your windows open (which you pretty much have to do, in this heat) without getting bitten to pieces by the midges is not to open your windows until after you’ve turned out all the lights in the room—although, as our informants admit, even this doesn’t mean that you won’t get bitten: just that you’ll get bitten less often than you will if you turn the lights on while the windows are open. (I grumpily wonder why, in a country where it is customary to leave the windows open all summer—because of the lack of air-conditioning—and where they have swarms of midges and other biting bugs, nobody has yet thought of inventing or importing such a simple technology as a window-screen. But we don’t see a single window-screen in all of Britain, even though, as the dozens of joke postcards about midges testify, we can hardly be the first people to have had a problem with them, and they bedevil the natives too, by the natives’ own testimony. Both the English and the Scots seem to feel that there’s something effete, unmanly, about window-screens, just as they disdain air-conditioning, and you get the feeling that they consider it a testimony to their hardiness that they can walk around covered with itchy festering midge bites all summer and survive it uncomplainingly—we hear an anecdote later about an English woman who insists on continuing with a lawn party as scheduled in spite of a torrential downpour and swarms of midges, standing at her barbecue grill in the pouring rain—as her American guests run for cover—and announcing with proud disdain, “You’ve got to be tough to be British.” Still don’t think it would unman them all that much to put in a couple of window-screens, though.)

Check out, scratching, and drive into Drumnadrochit, where we stop at the Monster Center, taking pictures of each other posing next to the plaster Nessie, and spend lots of money at the Monster Gift Shop (where you can buy just about anything with Nessie on it, from ties to coffeemugs to underwear) and the nearby craft shop, buying, among other things, a leather Celtic pocketbook for Susan. Drive south on the A82, and then slowly west and a bit north on the A887 and the A87, stopping three times along the way to look at the marvelous mountain scenery, once along the A82, overlooking a rushing forest stream and a little waterfall, once behind the dam near Loch Moriston, looking out over the bleak pale shore of the loch, and once in a high mountain pass overlooked by the Five Sisters, somewhere east of Sheil Bridge. The mountains are especially bleak and rocky here—there’s not even heather on the sides of the Five Sisters, just bracken, so that the hills are the nappy green of a pool table, with the bones of the hill breaking through in knobs of granite where the felt is stretched too tight. Frowning dark-grey clouds rush by overhead, and you can feel the wetness in the wind, although it never does quite rain. So bleak that the bleakness itself is beautiful. This stretch of road, from where we turn away west from Loch Ness all the way to the Kyle of Lochalsh, is one of the most imposing and scenically splendid parts of the whole trip.

Coming down from the high mountain pass, we stop to tour Eilean Donan Castle, a strikingly beautiful castle on an islet in Loch Duitch, just east of Dornie. The castle, which is connected to the mainland only by a narrow causeway, and which is so picturesque that it’s pictured on the cover of a good number of Scottish guide-books and travel brochures, is such a dramatically perfect symbol of the Wild Romance and Savage Beauty of the Old Highlands that it comes as something of a disappointment to find that the castle was actually built in 1937. (Although, to be fair, they made an attempt to follow old pictures and drawings in the reconstruction of the castle, which had been destroyed in its original form hundreds of years before.) After touring the castle, have lunch in the bar at the Loch Duitch Hotel. While we’re sitting in the bar, Susan drinking Diet Coke®, The Rockford Files comes on on the bar TV. Diet Coke® and The Rockford Files—gee, all the comforts of home in a tiny village in a remote part of Scotland. Next will come the Loch Duitch McDonalds, no doubt, perhaps set on another islet, next to the castle.

Pressed on to the Kyle of Lochalsh, from which a dramatic view of the Isle of Skye is visible across a surprisingly narrow tongue of water (which is why they’re building the bridge connecting Skye and the mainland here, I suppose, although it’s not quite finished yet—the Skye natives are already up in arms about it, fearing that the bridge will make it enough easier for tourists to get across to Skye that their cultural identity will be washed away by ever-increasing hordes of outlanders; they may have a point). From here, Skye looks like it consists of nothing but big, saw-toothed peaks, packed-in shoulder-to-shoulder, so that it seems they’re almost touching each other; no wonder the phrase “a tight little island” has been used to describe Skye. We board the car ferry to Skye, and, before we even quite realize that we’re moving, we’re there—can hardly take more than five minutes, if that, one of the shortest ferry rides I’ve ever taken.

On Skye, we drive up the A850 to Portree, with the weather becoming more misty and clouding over more the further north and the higher up in elevation we go, until, at last, we drive through a brief rain-squall. By the time we are on the road that climbs up from Sconser, the rain has stopped, and there is a beautifully clear rainbow stretching from the mountainside down to the sea below, the colors seeming to be etched into the sky in raised, vibrant bands. The weather continues to worsen as we climb higher into the hills, though, until by the time we get to Portree, it is raining, our first sustained rain of the trip—a fine rain at first, growing slowly heavier and more soaking throughout the afternoon and into the evening.

We reach the Viewfield House in Portree, at about 4:20 that afternoon, driving up a long, steep driveway to the inn, rabbits dashing suicidally across the road in front of us, as though suddenly seized with some mad rodent ennui; there are chickens strutting around in front of the house, and they also pay no attention to the car, so that we have to drive slowly and gingerly to avoid running them over. Park in front of the house, drag Susan’s bag inside and up a steep winding staircase; decide I’m not up to dragging my own even heavier bag up the stairs, and leave it in the trunk after fishing out some toilet articles and a change of clothes. The Viewfield House turns out to be an imposing old wooden building, both more eccentric and more distinguished-looking than Polmaily House, very eccentrically decorated in Late Victorian Gormenghast . . . or perhaps it is Late Victorian Charles Addams or Gahan Wilson. Everything looks like an Edward Gorey drawing. There are skulls and skeletons and dead stuffed animals of one sort or another in dusty glass cases wherever you look, and the wall in the entrance hall is decorated with stuffed tiger heads and water-buffalo skulls. Skulls, in fact, seem to be a motif here—skulls are everywhere, most of them with huge curling horns. This is the most stereotypical “English” PBS Mystery/Masterpiece Theater overstuffed-chairs-in-the library-sherry-in-the-drawing-room-elephant’s-foot-umbrella-stand-in-the-hall-looking place we’ve seen yet—so, of course, it’s in Scotland.

Drive into Portree, park, and are walking down the main shopping street in the rain when Susan suddenly lets out a whoop and points—and there is Amy Thompson, coming the other way! We all whoop and hug in the middle of the sidewalk, earning odd looks from the passersby. Not only have we all ended up in Portree at the same time, completely by chance, but it turns out that she is also staying at the Viewfield House! We burble the usual cliches about what a small world it is, then separate briefly, Amy and Susan going off on separate shopping expeditions, while I go to the Tourist Information Office to find out about guided tours of the region; I spot a poster for one called “Skyetrek Safari” that looks interesting, and write the number down.

We give Amy a ride back to the Viewfield House, after a side-trip to a woolen mart that turns out to be already closed for the evening. It’s raining much more heavily now, and I wonder if there’s any possibility the weather will clear enough tomorrow for a guided tour to be possible. Give a call to Skyetrek Safaris anyway, and make a tentative reservation for tomorrow’s tour, which will only go if enough people reserve. Have drinks in the sitting room before the fire—even in August it’s chilly enough here on Skye at night that you don’t mind it—and then go in to dinner, sitting at a table with Amy and Angus, a young working-class Scot from Glasgow in boots and blue jeans who has pretty clearly been trying to chat Amy up in the sitting room. (I have a lamb chop, Susan has chicken. Tomato soup and mackerel pate first.) Coffee afterward back in the sitting room, after which Amy goes up to bed, and Angus, obviously disappointed—I get the feeling he would have liked to have gotten to know Amy much better—leaves the inn and goes into Portree for a pub-crawl, staying out until after 2 a.m., drowning his sorrows; we see him the next morning, massively hungover, having a solitary breakfast in the dining room, long after everyone else has finished.

When the group in the sitting room has dwindled to just us and another American couple (also from Pennsylvania, as it turns out; from right outside Philadelphia, in fact), the host, who is referred to invariably by all as Mr. MacDonald (you can almost hear the forelock-tug that accompanies this phrase), and who looks something like a muscular Ron Howard, tells us a long story about a friend of his grandfather who was mauled by a tiger he was hunting in India (for the Politically Correct reason that it was terrorizing the native villagers, of course), when the mahout panicked during the tiger’s attack and slammed the howdah into an overhanging tree-branch, knocking both it and the Great White Hunter off the elephant to the ground. The mahout ran away and climbed a tree, while the host’s grandfather’s friend, whose leg had been shattered by the elephant stepping on it after he’d fallen to the ground, tried to fend the tiger off with the butt end of his rifle. The tiger had apparently bitten completely through the wooden stock of the rifle, and was shaking it back and forth in his jaws, while the hunter clung desperately to the other end, when the rifle went off, scaring the tiger away and fortunately not managing to shoot the hunter in the process. The mahout was too scared to tell anybody about this incident apparently, because he was afraid that he’d be punished because it was his fault, so he ran off and left the hunter behind, where he remained sprawled helplessly in the jungle, badly mauled and with his leg crushed to dust, for more than 24 hours before he was found by a rescue party. He had to have his leg amputated, of course, and Our Host tells us how later, when he himself was a small child, the grandfather’s friend would encourage him to kick his tin leg so that he could hear it clang, which they both found amusing. Apparently the grandfather’s friend also kept the rifle with the bitten-through stock, and would produce it as proof of this experience. (I have no idea whether this story is true or not, of course—it does strike me that perhaps he’s having a bit of fun putting on the Gullible Colonials . . . and yet, the story is no intrinsically more bizarre than other well-documented things that did happen to other Victorian Adventurers of the day, so who knows? Maybe it is true.) Our Host adds that by rights the grandfather’s friend should have died of septicemia, which claimed almost everyone who suffered such wounds in those days in that climate, but, in the 24 hours before he was found, maggots had gotten at his wounds, and the natural antibiotics released by the maggots as they fed had ultimately saved his life.

On this cheery note, we go up to bed. I whistle the Beatles’ “Bungalow Bill” as I climb the stairs, but, if Our Host notices, he is not moved to comment.

Tuesday, August 22nd—Slegachan, Loch Brittle, Loch Harport, Dunvegan, Trotternish Peninsula

Wake up about 7:30, after having spent one of the most uneasy nights of the trip. We both sleep fitfully, awakening often to scratch the itchy bug bites we had gotten the night before—which have now formed into lumpy red welts—and, although the room is somewhat hot, we don’t dare to open the window, for fear of letting more midges in to bite us, and the stuffiness doesn’t make it any easier to sleep.

Yawning, we go downstairs for breakfast. Amy is just finishing up as we come into the breakfast room, and leaves almost immediately for her tour of the woolen markets on the nearby island of Harris. We sit with the American couple from Wallingford, who are going to spend the day hunting up a doctor to take a look at the husband’s sore throat. I hope that we will have a somewhat more enjoyable day than that, but since it’s raining outside, a fine steady rain that shows no sign of stopping, I’m not sanguine that we actually will.

After breakfast, Susan drives into Portree to buy something at the chemists, while I wait by the door of the inn to see if our tour is actually going to show up. By the time Susan returns, a few minutes later, I’m beginning to be gloomily sure that it is not going to show up, that they’ve cancelled it, either because of lack of bookings or because of the weather. A few minutes later, though, just as the steady rain begins to sputter and slacken, the Land Rover for the “Skyetrek Safari” does show up—a few minutes late, but there. We climb aboard, me in the front seat, next to the driver (there are advantages to being too big to fit in the back!), with Susan squeezed into the back with the two other passengers, two young Dutch girls, and we are off on our tour of Skye.

As we drive south back toward Sligachan, with the rain beginning to lift, I chat with the driver, whose name is Cameron, a tree-surgeon who works part-time for the Forestry Service, and who started this tour business two months ago as another sideline, in order to make ends meet; originally born on Colonsay, another small Scottish island (he tells us how, as a young man, he used to drive his family’s tractor to the local ceilidhs—folk dances—in order to try to meet girls, but the girls weren’t impressed by the tractor, so he had no luck; the tractor would come in handy the next day, though, when he and his brother would, for a fee, use it to pull out of the roadside ditches the cars that homeward-bound revelers had drunkenly driven into the ditches the night before), he’s lived on Skye for three years, and has three children (eventually someone was impressed by the tractor, I guess), the youngest of whom was born only two weeks ago. The two young Dutch girls are Marguerite, the hardy big-breasted blond one who keeps running ahead of everyone with childlike enthusiasm, whooping and pointing at things, and who still lives in Holland, and Martina, the older, quieter, darker and more intense one, who lives in London, where she works for the railroad in connection with the operation of the Channel Tunnel, and with whom Marguerite is visiting; I come to the conclusion by the end of the afternoon that they are lovers, although they’re fairly discrete about it—something about the way they touch each other’s hands, though—brushingly, as if by accident—and speak in soft voices while leaning close to each other, especially when we are at some romantic place, like a deserted coral beach that stretches away into a haze of sea and sky, seems to give them away . . . although I suppose that this could be only my own romanticism coming to the fore.

By the time we reach Sligachan, the rain has mostly lifted, giving us a good view of the Red Cuillin and the Black Cuillin, two mountain ranges which are both named after the predominant color of their rock—reddish rock to our left (Red Cuillin), shiny black rock to the right (Black Cuillin); we also learn that Cuillin is pronounced something like Kool-in, far from the way we were pronouncing it . . . but then, we’re probably mispronouncing the name of just about everything on Skye, just as we did on a previous trip in that other Celtic homeland, Wales. We turn away from the main road, which leads south toward the ferry slip, and take a network of small back roads across the width of the island to Loch Brittle, where we park and walk up a muddy hillside alongside a rushing runoff stream to see a small waterfall; the water is snarling along quite vigorously, obviously fed by the recent heavy rains, and, although not terribly high, the waterfall is picture-postcard pretty.

By the time we get back down to the Land Rover, the rain-clouds have lifted and the sky is a brilliant fresh-washed blue; it will remain sunny and clear for the rest of the day. Cameron opens a forest gate, and we drive up into a forest plantation, up a hill through ranks of closely planted trees, and down the other side to Loch Harport, which, from the hillside, is full of boats that could easily be Lake Monsters; I point out how a few Monster sightings could probably triple his tourist trade, and, after thinking this over and squinting at the boats a little, Cameron decides that they do look a bit like Lake Monsters after all, now that he thinks of it. After all, what worked for Loch Ness—remember the Monster Center, full of tourists who were all buying things?—ought to work for Loch Harport too.

We stop briefly at a grocery store, and then drive up the road toward Dunvegan, turning off the road entirely—which, of course, is the advantage of being in a Land Rover—and driving up a steep and rugged slope to the crest, where we have scones and coffee from a flask in the ruins of a ruined Celtic hill-fort—a broch, according to Cameron—on top of the hill. The broch is an irregular stone ring broken open on one end; inside, it’s about eight or nine feet across, the center covered with grass, sheepberries, knobs of rock, and bits of heather, the surrounding walls just a bit too high for me to see over without climbing up on them; when we do climb up on them, we get a magnificent view over the rolling, mostly-treeless hills of Skye—several ancient volcanic cones, flat as tables on top, are visible from here, with a gleaming arm of the sea, and the sharp silhouettes of mountain peaks on other islands, beyond. According to Cameron, the broch has never been excavated, so as we walk around inside it, it’s possible that just under our feet, a few dozen feet down under the grass and the sheepberries, are unknown and undisturbed Celtic treasures, golden torcs, silver necklaces, swords, jeweled harps, who knows what? Most likely it’s bones and skulls and broken pieces of pottery, but even that has its allure—perhaps there’s some piece of evidence here, buried beneath our scuffling feet, that will, in some future age, help to unravel some archaeological mystery that has been puzzling scholars for centuries. Perhaps the key that will unlock knowledge of a lost race or a vanished civilization is here, buried in the flinty soil, down under the roots of the heather and the butt-ends of worms. Cameron’s mind is obviously musing on lost civilizations too, because, as we munch scones, he tells us of another ancient remnant not far from here, a souterrain, which (according to Cameron, anyway) is a complex of prehistoric tunnels and rooms under the ground, with very low ceilings and an entrance so low that you have to crawl though it; once inside, the rooms are too low for a man of normal height to stand up in, and it’s Cameron’s speculation that these structures were left behind by a race of men of diminutive size, non-supernatural but much smaller than ordinary men, who were the origin of the legends of fairies and elves that persist everywhere in the Celtic world. I’ve heard this speculation before; I heard it for the first time, I believe, from G.C. Edmondson, who, a couple of decades ago, theorized that the Good Folk were actually Bushmen, whose range had once extended over Europe until they were hunted and hounded by normal-sized folk back into their African heartland. I’m not sure that I entirely buy this, but it is an attractive theory—and one thing I am fairly sure of is that there was much more going on up here in these Northern lands than most archaeologists, whose focus of interest has traditionally been centered on the Mediterranean, have even yet begun to imagine. Who knows what was going on up here in Scotland at the time that the Egyptians were building the Pyramids, let alone back when the people of Sumer were baking the first mud bricks for Ur? Whatever it was, I’ll bet it would turn out to be surprising, if you could somehow open up a window through time and look.

After lunch, we press on, past Dunvegan Castle, past fields full of shaggy Highland cattle (who look like they ought to be grazing at the foot of a glacier, along with other Ice Age animals such as Mastodons and Wooly Rhinos), and park at a gate at the end of a winding road. We walk along a shore path, over a hill, and down to the sea, past a beach full of resting cows (they lounge on the sand above the waterline and watch us incuriously as we pass, discovering as we go that having cows on a beach does make for interesting obstacles for walking there), over a rise, past the ruins of a “black house” (named for the color of the rock used in its construction) that once belonged to Cameron’s wife’s family, and then down to a long coral beach that stretches away almost endlessly until, at the edge of vision, it curves around a headland and is lost to sight. Rugged, mountainous offshore islands loom up out of the glinting, restless, cold-looking water, like Stegosauruses sunk to their snouts in the sea; one of them is Harris, where, at this very moment, Amy is touring the woolen markets. Cameron and I sprawl on the beach, whose pale sands are made of impacted plant coral (and whose pale sands are also strewn with huge, spiral-shaped cow pats), laid down—the coral, not, as far as I know, the cow pats—in a time of intense volcanic activity when the temperature was warm enough here for lush tropical vegetation to grow. While we sprawl, Susan and the Dutch girls take off their shoes and wade in the ocean; Susan wades around fairly sedately, but, after a while, the Dutch girls begin to laugh and splash each other, playing like schoolgirls. I don’t go wading, but, before we leave, I go down to the water’s edge and dabble my hand in the North Sea, just to be able to say I did. The water is cold, but I was brought up on the shores of the chilly North Atlantic, and I don’t think it would be too cold for me to go swimming in it—although, in all the huge sweep of beach we can see, only one other person is. (Another cultural difference between Britain and the States: in this kind of hot weather, at home, the lakes and rivers and the seaside would be packed with swimmers, and with people fishing, and sailing, and paddling canoes and kayaks, and (alas) jetskiing (if Loch Ness was in upstate New York, it would be so thickly covered with waterborne tourists that you would hardly be able to see the water, let alone the Monster), but we see very few people doing any of these things on the bodies of water we pass, especially swimming; except for a few hotel swimming pools, on the whole trip, in all of Britain, in the hottest summer in decades—it’s the hottest summer in recorded history in Scotland—we see only two or three people actually swimming in the water, although we see lots of people standing on the shore, or sitting on the rocky beaches looking—wistfully, perhaps? Wishing the water were warmer? Or that they knew how to swim?—out to sea.

Leave the coral beach at last—somewhat reluctantly, for it is one of the loveliest spots of the trip—and return to the Land Rover, driving briefly to a lookout spot where we can get a somewhat closer view of Dunvegan Castle (we don’t get to go inside it, but I’ve hit that part of the trip where Castle Ennui has set in—yeah, yeah, it’s a castle, very nice—and don’t really care much), and then heading back to Portree. On the way back, Cameron, who’s a bit of a New Ager, goes on about holistic healing, crystals, how if you get cancer it’s your own fault for indulging in Negative Thinking, telepathy, astrology, the upcoming Alignment of the Planets as an omen of Cosmic Change, Nostradamus, and so forth. To distract him from discussing the Celestine Prophecies in depth, I ask him about his other tours, and end up booking with him for an early evening tour of the Trotternish Peninsula, the northernmost peninsula of Skye, which will be leaving that very night; I arrange for him to pick us up at the inn after dinner.

Back at Viewfield House, I go down for a drink while Susan naps, and convince Amy, who has returned flushed with enthusiasm from her tour of Harris, to take the tour of the Trotternish Peninsula with us tonight. At dinner, a somewhat hurried affair, since we have to be ready to leave for the tour by 8:30, I am interested to note that they have seated all of the Americans, four couples and Amy, at one long table, along with our sole working-class Scot, Angus from Glasgow, who, as far as I can tell, anyway, is still dressed in the same blue jeans, boots, and wrinkled work shirt. All the other tables in the room are taken up by quietly murmuring well-dressed English people, who work hard at ignoring our table. I think the message is clear, especially as, in spite of our having asked to be served as fast as possible so that we can catch our tour, every single English person in the room, about six other tables of them, is served before a bite of food reaches our own table. Earlier, in the Land Rover, Cameron had talked bitterly about the inequities of the British class-system, and the prejudice and the glass-walls you ran into everywhere if you were on the wrong side of the line, far worse and more blatant than even the class-barriers in the States (where such things are far from unknown, I can assure you, having, as a working-class boy, run into many such barriers myself in my life), and here is an example of such class distinctions still working in the world today. (Cameron and Our Host have an interesting relationship, by the way, obviously loathing each other deeply for reasons of class and race—Cameron is a working-class Scot; Our Host, although a Scot by birth, has been raised and educated as a rich man in England, and Cameron clearly considers him to be “really” a Sassenach—but manifesting it in the very British way of being intensely polite to each other. When we had asked Our Host the previous evening if Cameron’s tour was worth taking, Our Host had frowned, and then, with infinite icy scorn, said quietly “He is not a Skye man.” And, although he displays the brochures for Cameron’s tour in his inn—some of the servant staff seem to be friendly with Cameron, and urged us to book with him—I can’t help but wonder if some of the chill I feel from Our Host on our last night here has something to do with the fact that we did go on Cameron’s tour after all. When Cameron and Our Host chat briefly about the weather in front of the inn while we’re disembarking from our first tour, they are perfectly cordial—but you can feel the ice forming in the air between them.) So we eat, with all these class distinctions and ancient enmities swirling around us. I do think it somewhat unfair that poor Angus is forced in his own country to eat in exile at a table full of Rude and Obnoxious Colonials, but clearly the fact that he is loud and raucous and wears boots and blue jeans outweighs the fact that he is a Scot . . . so he must sit in purdah with the Yanks.

Hurry outside after the main course, before we have a chance to have dessert, and climb aboard the familiar Land Rover again, me in front, Susan and Amy crawling in back with three giggling Polish girls who, as far as I can tell, speak no English at all. Then we’re off. Although Cameron drives unnervingly fast, attempting to make it to a scenic overlook near Duntulm Castle before sunset, the light is already failing, and it’s clear that we’re not really going to see all that much on this tour—but still, it’s a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, and no more expensive than, say, going to a play—which we certainly would have been willing to pay for—would have been, so I don’t feel that we’re being cheated; we do get to see some more of Skye this way, a part we wouldn’t have gotten a look at otherwise, even if we’re not seeing it under the best of viewing conditions. After a wild, swaying ride, during most of which Cameron is doing at least eighty on these narrow, twisting roads, we do manage to arrive at Duntulm Castle in time for the last of the sunset, which, as advertised, is spectacular, the light bleeding out of the sky in a swirl of red and purple and gold, out over the expanse of the North Sea and its freight of hump-backed islands. We stop for a second outside the now-closed Skye Cottage Museum to look at the various styles of old buildings once prevalent on Skye, and to be stared at by curious Highland cattle in the adjacent field, who look more prehistoric than ever with their shaggy, horned heads silhouetted against the darkening, blood-red evening sky. Around the end of the peninsula in the fading light. There’s just enough light left in the sky in these Northern latitudes—although it’s almost ten by now—to make out the oddly sculpted landscape of the Quiraing, rocky pinnacles and cliff faces that have been blasted by the constant howling wind into a thousand fantastic shapes. As full dark closes in, we turn up into the hills, climbing up a steep, sharply hairpinning road and across a high moor before turning down again to join the main road to Portree. Cameron is still driving very fast, in spite of the now almost total darkness, the steepness of the road and the sharpness of the turns, and the fact that there are sheep sprawled at the margin of the road, so close to the speeding Land Rover that we almost seem to graze them on a few occasions. They don’t flinch, however, gazing at us incuriously as we hurtle by; you’d think that having several tons of metal roar by a couple of inches from your nose at seventy miles an hour, especially at night with the headlights blazing, would be enough to startle any animal—it would sure as hell be enough to startle me—but the sheep seem as placid and undisturbed as ever; I suppose that this is the reason why we refer to those who blindly and unquestioningly follow a leader as “sheep” instead of calling them after some more skittish and wary animal such as coyotes or cats. When we hit the main road to Portree, Cameron, who has been driving very fast, now begins to drive very fast, driving like a madman, in fact, and I begin to get a bit nervous, although, as someone who once chased tanks across fields and up steep hills at high speeds in a jeep, I’m not an easy person to unnerve in these matters. Still, Cameron is going well over ninety at a few points during the trip home, in spite of the black night and the tiny twisting roads, going fast enough that we on occasion begin to hydroplane, with the rear end starting to swing a bit, fishtailing, as the wheels start to lose their grip on the road, and I think ironically that Our Host will probably feel a grim satisfaction if we’re all killed on the way back, shaking his head sadly and saying to the other guests, “I told them he wasn’t a Skye man.” We cruelly deprive him of this satisfaction, though, by actually making it back to Viewfield House alive.

Back at the inn, we have drinks and coffee and a belated dessert, which Our Host has been kind enough to save for us, in the sitting room, in front of the blazing fire. Among the new guests are a very young American girl, who has been studying at Oxford, and her mother, who is visiting her; they are vacationing together, touring Scotland, before the girl goes back to Oxford and the mother goes back to America. In spite of only having been at Oxford for six months, the young girl is now affecting a Teddibly Teddibly refined British upper-class accent, like a noblewoman or a high-born lady in a BBC production, and she sits solemnly by the fire discussing scholarly matters, being Very British and Very Intellectual and Very Solemn, straining to make her every gesture elegant and graceful and aristocratic, while her mother, who speaks with a broad Midwestern twang, watches her in wonder and bewilderment, obviously very proud of the rare and rarified creature that her daughter has turned herself into, while at the same time a bit uncertain as to how to relate to her now, and perhaps a bit afraid of no longer measuring up. Angus makes a half-hearted pass at the daughter, inviting her to go out dancing with him, but even he seems to realize that she’s not really for the likes of him—she’s waiting to be swept away by some wild-haired, wild-eyed, Byronic young poet who will take her on long melancholy walks on the moors in the mist and ply her with love-poems and long-stemmed roses and romantic existential angst about the blackness of the world, and with whom she can talk about Shelley and Baudelaire long into the night, between candle-lit bouts of leisurely but passionate and fevered lovemaking; no working-class, unshaven Scot with mud on his boots who merely wants to buy her a beer as the price of a quick hump in the back seat of his car need apply. I am amused by her pretensions, yes, but in a very tender way. She is so solemn and earnest and so pretentious, and trying so hard to be something that she is not but that she desperately wants to be, like a girl playing grown-up in her mother’s old clothes and begging you with her eyes to play along and not shatter the pretense, that it is rather sweet, actually. She reminds me of myself when I was that age, also full of callow poses and pretensions and burning with the ambition to be something other than what everybody else expected me to be, making up my role in life as I went along, made brave by the knowledge that wherever I did end up, it had to be better than where I was supposed to end up. Yes, I was that young once.

Angus gives up—no nookie for him tonight, at least not from among the guests at the Viewfield House—and goes off into Portree for another pub-crawl. The rest of us finish our drinks, and then go up to bed.

Wednesday, August 23rd—Armsdate & Gaelic College, Crianlarich

Up about 7:45, have breakfast, check out, and then pack the car with our suitcases and Amy’s stuff; we’re giving Amy a lift to the train station at Mallaig on the mainland, since the road to our next inn goes right by there anyway.

The weather today turns out to be the exact opposite of yesterday’s weather—when we come down for breakfast, it is brilliantly clear and sunny, and looks like it’s going to be great weather for driving, but by the time we’re actually ready to leave, it’s raining, and the weather worsens from then on for most of the day, with an occasional half-clear patch here and there where the rain sinks to a sporadically spitting drizzle. Everything packed aboard, with a few mostly empty spots left so that we can peer out through the windows, we take off.

By the time we near the Red Cuillin, it is pouring, the hardest rain of the whole trip, with each lorry that passes us going the other way throwing a sheet of water across the windshield with a heavy thwack, blinding us for a moment. Unnerving driving conditions, particularly on these small and twisty mountain roads. The downpour has dwindled to an intermittent drizzle by the time we get to the Gaelic College, where Amy stops briefly to buy some Gaelic language audio-tapes (she is bravely attempting to teach herself Gaelic, one of the most difficult languages in the world, and talks wistfully about coming back here some day and actually staying in the college while taking a Gaelic language course in person, from live instructors; for now, she’ll settle for the tapes). We continue on to the Clan Donald Center, where we tour the Clan History Museum. Notice some Scots here who are reading the displays with actual tears glistening in their eyes, obviously deeply moved by this chance to get in touch with their roots; also hear an American woman behind us, when faced with the same wall-displays, exclaim “Oh, no! I’m not going to read about Bonnie Prince Charlie again!” . . . and must say that, to some extent, I sympathize—you tend to run into the same bits of Scottish history again and again and again as you follow the tourist routes; in Edinburgh, for instance, last trip, we had gotten tremendously tired of hearing about Mary, Queen of Scots, whom everyone talked of constantly, to the point where it seemed like they were saying things like “Mary, Queen of Scots once walked past this street-corner, on a day in July, hundreds of years ago . . . She also stopped here, next to this tree . . .” Still, the details of the Clan Donald’s history are interesting, if dismayingly bloody, and it’s clear that this is a much more profound and moving experience for the Scots themselves than it is for us Ignorant Outlanders.

Hit the inevitable Gift Shop—there are two of them here, in fact, both very large and extensive—and then walk down to the restaurant for lunch, passing on the way a sign on a building that reads “THIS BUILDING IS ALARMED!”, although, to our untutored eyes, it looked no more nervous than any of the other buildings in the complex; still, we steer clear of it. In the restaurant, we run into Angus from Glasgow—looking, if possible, even more massively hungover than he had the morning before—and one of the other older American couples from the Viewfield House; the tourist routes funnel everybody to the same attractions eventually, I guess. Angus sits gloomily by himself while he eats, making no attempt to join us; perhaps he’s too hungover, or perhaps he’s sulking over his failure to score with Amy. We have a quick lunch; I have a venison stew in which the meat is so tough that it can’t even be cut with a knife, let alone chewed. Perhaps Angus is having the same thing, and this is why he looks gloomy. (No McDonalds yet, at the Clan Donald center! Surely someone is missing a bet, here! And, actually, the food would be an improvement. (They could put up tartan arches, in the Clan Donald tartan, instead of the usual golden ones . . .))

After lunch, we drive down to the ferry slip at Armsdale, get our tickets, and then wait in a long line of cars for the ferry, which arrives about a half hour later. On board the ferry, we go up to the upper deck and stand by the rail as we cross to the mainland (this crossing takes about a half-hour, covering a much greater expanse of water). We stand there by the rail in the sharp cold wind, me holding my hat on my head with one hand to keep it from blowing away, watching military jets swoop by as they play chase-and-hunt games overhead, one screaming by us quite near to the water, as though it was about to strafe us, probably targeting us for practice (the air war in Bosnia is heating up at just this time, after all).

Back on the Scottish mainland, at Mallaig, we drop Amy off at the station to catch the train for Glasgow, telling her to warm the convention up for us; we have another night on the road before we’re scheduled to get to Glasgow, on Thursday, and plunge into the chaotic swirl of the Worldcon. Waving at Amy as we leave—she’s already found someone else she knows, waiting for the same train, before we’re even out of sight—we drive on down the twisting A830, past the coves and beaches of the Sound of Arisaig, and up into the mountains, where it begins raining lightly again. Down into a pocket of clear weather in the valley. At Fort Williams, the west bank of Loch Linnhe, where we just came from, is in dazzling sunlight, while the east bank is grey and threatening, with ominous black clouds swirling up where Ben Nevis is, although the mountain itself is invisible. Turn on to our old friend, the A82 (we would have ended up in just this spot if we’d continued south from Drumnadrochit a few days ago, instead of turning west toward the Kyle of Lochalsh), and climb sharply up into the mountains again, past the still-invisible Ben Nevis, which is buried in grumbling clouds, past Glencoe, through Rannoch Moor. At last, two-and-a-half hours after leaving Mallaig, we come to our last inn of the pre-convention part of the trip, the Alt-Chorrin House (which, we learn, is pronounced Alt HOOR-in House), situated right off the A82 between Tyndrum and Crianlarich.

The inn is a little closer to the road than I’d thought it would be—the train line to Glasgow is clearly visible from here, so that Amy, if she’d looked out the train window at the right time during her journey south, could have seen us standing in front of the inn—and there’s no lake here, as the photo in the brochure seems to indicate that there is (it turns out that the photo was taken in extremely forced-perspective by someone laying on their belly next to a small pond, making the pond look like an extensive mountain lake), but the view from the glassed-in front porch out over the mountains is very nice, including a fine view of Ben More with its head lost in clouds. The sun is struggling to come out here at the end of the day—although it never entirely succeeds—and we sit for a while on the front porch, watching the patterns of light and darkness shift dramatically along the hillsides, waves of shadow sweeping over the hills as clouds rush by, swallowing the sun for a moment, and then setting it free again, sending fans of brilliant light scything across the mountains; because of the way the light falls, it’s possible to see one peak picked out in dazzling white sunlight while an adjacent peak is half-lost in gloom and shadow. Light and shadow wash back and forth, up the hills and then down again, like some sort of tide.

Have dinner at the inn—good thing we booked for it; there’s nowhere else to eat within dozens of miles, except for a Happy Eater fast-food place way back up the road near Tyndrum—and then sit up for an hour or so on the front porch with a few of the English couples who are staying here, discussing small cultural differences. We talk about how you can’t seem to get real custard in America anymore, of the sort that’s served on pies here, and, for their part, they lament that you can’t get really good ironing-board covers in England, of the sort that you can buy in America. In fact, these ironing-board covers—made of “a sort of fabric we don’t have over here,” probably Teflon, is my guess—are really all that seems to impress them about American culture; they go on for some while about how wonderful these ironing-board covers are, and how they never wrinkle or need to be replaced, and we work out a mutually profitable scheme that involves them sending tank-cars full of custard to America in exchange for boatloads of the wonderful and invulnerable ironing-board covers. Then, with future international amity thus ensured, we go to bed.

You can tell that it gets cold here in the mountains, particularly in the winter. The room is equipped with electric blankets, the only ones we see in Scotland, as well as piles of more conventional blankets. The Alt-Chorrin House is also the only place in Scotland we visit that has double-glazed storm windows (still no screens, though).

Thursday, August 24th—Monday, August 28th—Glasgow

Up about 7:30, pack, have breakfast, check out. The weather is miserable and grey, the wind occasionally gusting so that sheets of rain sweep by. The drive into Glasgow Airport takes about an hour, past the choppy waters of Loch Lomond, where the tour boats are out in spite of the stormy weather. At the airport, we have difficulty—as usual—finding the car rental place, but finally do, turn our car in, and take a taxi into the city, discovering that we have no cash left on us to pay for the ride. The driver very courteously (the Glasgow cab-drivers turn out to be almost uniformly polite and considerate) waits outside the Glasgow Marriott while I run inside and borrow twenty pounds from Lee Wood, who is almost the first person I see, with which to pay the fare.

Check in to the Marriott, and the Worldcon begins.

It would be more than usually tedious to detail a day-by-day report of the convention—although I did keep up with my diary every day, it’s mostly filled with such things as what panels we did and which publishing parties we went to when—so I’ll just give a series of brief impressions instead.

My first impression of the cavernous space of the Scottish Exhibition and Convention Center, with its high, latticework glass roofs, is that it’s like having a Worldcon in a train station, an impression reinforced by the little stands along the walls selling hot-dogs and pizza. The acoustics are so bad in the program area, because of those high ceilings, that it’s more like trying to do a panel in a bus station, with the voices spilling over from adjacent panels (no interior walls, just partitions) constantly rolling around under the roof, like an announcer with a bad PA system continually calling out the destinations for which buses are about to depart. I’ve never heard worse acoustics at any Worldcon anywhere—even people in the front two or three rows can’t hear what the panelists are saying, in spite of the functioning microphones.

A pall is cast over the convention, for the professionals, anyway, by the death of John Brunner on Friday afternoon. We speak to him briefly on Thursday afternoon when we arrive at the SECC, and I see him again in the SFWA Suite that night, noticing, when I leave about midnight, that he looks unusually tired and depressed (this isn’t retrospective foreshadowing, by the way, because I mention it to Susan when I get back to the room that night, long before we hear anything about John’s stroke). In the morning, Friday morning, we hear that John has had a stroke in the early hours of the morning, and is in critical condition at the hospital. By the afternoon, he is dead, and word of his death passes like a shock wave from person to person throughout the HarperCollins party—which is being held in a barge anchored in the River Clyde—leaving small thoughtful silences behind. Odd to be chatting to someone one moment and have him dead only a few hours later; it’s spooky, and it puts the thought of our own mortality into everyone’s minds, where it lingers like a morbid background hum for the rest of the convention.

Of course, the British professionals seem gloomy enough even before Brunner dies, and for good reason—the British science fiction industry is in ruins, with one major publisher openly stating that the science fiction market in Britain is “no longer big enough to bother with.” This impression is reinforced by the American writers who talk with British publishers about British editions of their SF novels, and who are more or less told that if they’re not writing Celtic fantasy trilogies, no British publisher is going to bother with them. One well-known middle-level British writer says that the only way he can get a science fiction book into print in Britain any more is by disguising it as fantasy, changing what otherwise would have been aliens into vampires or werewolves. In spite of the rush to fill the shelves with nothing but fantasy and horror, the dealers in the huckster room who run bookstores in Britain tell me that their customers keep telling them that they’re sick of Celtic fantasy trilogies and vampire novels and want more science fiction instead. Something is wrong here somewhere. But if the perception of the publishers that no one wants to read science fiction is wrong, there seems no way to convince the publishers of it. And the result, especially for the younger British writers, is that it’s impossible to make even a mediocre living writing science fiction unless you can sell a healthy proportion of your work to the American market. No wonder the British professionals look gloomy.

“Gloomy” is perhaps too strong a word to be used to characterize the convention in general, but “quiet” is probably moderately fair. For me, it seems like an even quieter Worldcon than last year’s convention in Winnipeg, although I think it’s technically bigger. Although there are a fairly large number of people in attendance, they’re stretched out over five or six hotels that are miles apart, much too far to walk, and so little party-hopping goes on, people tending to congregate at the bar of whatever hotel they’re staying at, and not venturing out into the dark and rainy Glasgow streets looking for other parties. We make it to the SFWA Suite in the Trusthouse Forte Hotel several times, which is probably the place where you are most likely to find at least some other professionals on any given night, but we never make it to the Central Hotel, for instance, where several big bidding parties take place, or to several of the other hotels where convention parties are going on; it’s just too much of a hassle to get there and then get back. The only night we do any real party-hopping is Friday night, when there are several publisher parties scheduled back-to-back-to-back. These have mostly blurred, although I do recall that the Orbit party, held in a grotto-like bar called The Arches, which is under the train-station, so that the whole place quakes when a train rumbles by overhead, features, on sale at the bar, a drink called a “slippery nipple,” which nobody has the nerve to ask the pretty young barmaid to give them. And that Susan and Michael Swanwick and I walk out singing “Oh, show me the way to the next whiskey bar!”, getting a very odd look from the doorman, and then get in a cab and go to the Tor party.

Glasgow itself strikes me as a grey and fairly uninteresting city, considered as a tourist destination (although, to be fair, we don’t do as much touring here as we’ve done elsewhere); much the same could be said about Philadelphia, after all, which is a pleasant enough place in which to live, but which doesn’t have all that much to really interest the tourist, once you’ve seen the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. The weather may help to give me this impression of Glasgow, since it remains overcast and raining throughout most of the convention, and few cities are at their best when seen under these conditions. Still, I have occasion to walk into Center Square one afternoon, and, when I get there, find myself surrounded by Woolworths, Burger Kings, Tie Racks, Baskin-Robbins, McDonalds, Pizza Huts . . . almost nothing of real interest to a tourist, nothing that is quintessentially Scottish, and much of the rest of the city, as we shuttle in cabs past a maze of highway interchanges and overpasses from one hotel to another (it’s almost impossible to walk from one to the other, in some cases, even if the hotel is in plain view a block or two away, because of the Motorways you’d have to cross), seems similarly plain and utilitarian. On the other hand, the people of Glasgow seem almost universally cheerful, friendly, and helpful, which probably counts for a lot more in the long run than how many interesting ancient monuments the city has. Glasgow might well be a nice place to live, but, to invert the old cliche, I’m not sure you’d want to visit there.

When I go over to give my condolences to John Brunner’s widow, several days after his death, she breaks into sudden hysterical tears, seizes my hand, puts her head down on it, and sobs on it for several minutes.

A piper starts playing in the SFWA Suite one night—at least one thing I’ve never seen in a SFWA Suite before. His bagpipes are almost—not quite—as loud as the voices of some of the SFWA members.

At one point, one of the Glasgow newspapers runs a story about the convention under a headline that reads something like “GROTTY WEIRDOS INVADE GLASGOW!!!!” Inside, they run a photograph of a transvestite dressed in a Las Vegas-style cat costume, his five-o’clock shadow clearly visible, with a line under the photo that says “TYPICAL SCI-FI READER.”

We have a good dinner with Mike and Carol Resnick at an Indian place called Mr. Singh’s, which had been recommended by George R.R. Martin, and where the waiter’s accent, a heavy Indian accent overlaid with a strong Glaswegian accent, is so impenetrable that we finally give up trying to comprehend what it is he’s trying to recommend to us and just gesture for him to bring it (fortunately, it doesn’t turn out to be flambéed rat head in octopus sauce, or somesuch). We have another good dinner, at a place called the Thai Royale, recommended by Daniel Korn and others, with Joe and Gay Haldeman, John D. Berry, and Eileen Gunn, during which I give Eileen her present, the Clan Gunn history, and she immediately begins to make plans to send everybody strange missives decorated with the “Weathered Gunn” tartan. Have an overpriced but congenial dinner in the French restaurant in the Marriott with Ellen Datlow and Scott and Suzi Baker.

In the midst of all this merrymaking, about half-way through the convention, Susan gets sick, the stress of the trip finally catching up with her. She spends parts of several evenings and almost all of Monday in bed, while I bring her infusions of new Brother Cadfael books.

At the Hugo Awards ceremony, Bob Silverberg gives a memorial to John Brunner which I think is heartfelt and very tastefully handled, with an especially nice touch being Silverberg’s request that the audience rise and give John a standing ovation rather than observing a moment of silence for him. Wonder which I’ll get when I go? If either.

Joe Haldeman wins a Hugo for Asimov’s with his story “None So Blind,” and Mike Resnick looks very relieved not to have lost four Hugos on the same night when he wins for Best Novella. I am very pleased to win the Hugo for Best Editor, my seventh (and no, to answer the question I’m most often asked at Worldcons, you don’t get bored with winning them after a while. Trust me on this.).

The fireworks display over the River Clyde, after the Hugo ceremony, adds a nice touch of class to the night.

Susan spends much of Monday in our room, still sick, but she stumbles out to join me, Jane Jewell and Peter Heck, George R.R. Martin, and Walter Jon Williams for dinner at a restaurant called The Ubiquitous Chip, so called because they don’t serve any chips there, the idea being that chips are ubiquitous everyplace else. Or something like that. None of the local people have been able to describe the interior of this place to us, just saying that it was “strange” or “bizarre,” and as soon as we get there, I see why; it’s a place outside of their experience, and so hard for them to get a mental grip on, although familiar enough to all of us—it’s a fern bar, perhaps the only one in Britain, almost certainly the only one in Scotland. They serve Nouveau Cuisine Scottish, which I find an odd and not entirely satisfactory combination. George and I, in fact, keep complaining that the meal isn’t “hearty” enough—Scottish food is supposed to be hearty, isn’t it?—although George, who loves turnips, is somewhat placated by being served a big bowl of “neeps & tatties.” Walter entertains us during dinner by describing a delicacy he came across in England, a “chipbuttey”—which turns out to be a french-fry sandwich, the cold french-fries placed on a slice of bread, mashed down a bit, slathered with butter, and with another slice of bread then placed on top to complete the sandwich.

This sounds sufficiently “hearty” even for George and me, but it’s also something you can’t order in The Ubiquitous Chip, where chips have, if you recall, been banned. We try not to be too disappointed over this . . .

On this note, the Worldcon ends.

Tuesday, August 29th—Glasgow, Dumbarton Castle, & Tarbert

Up about 8 A.M., go down to breakfast, chat briefly with Andy Porter, who is all agog, understandably enough, about the hotel right next door to his apartment in Brooklyn having burned down the night before, which news he has just discovered in the local Glasgow paper. The lobby is full of people checking out of the Marriott, and we chat briefly with folks such as Paul McAuley, Stephen Jones, Kim Jones, Mandy Slater, Janis O’Conner and her husband Bob, Marti McKenna, Charles de Lint and his wife, Norman Spinrad, Lee Wood, and so on. Go upstairs and get our suitcases, which are heavier and more bulging-at-the-seams than ever, check out ourselves, and then sit in the Marriott lobby waiting for David Kogelman to come over from the Moat House in his newly rented car and pick us up.

Susan is sicker than ever, at the stage where she’s stumbling around like a zombie, seeming only partially conscious and practically bumping into the walls, and I’m having severe doubts about the wisdom of taking this post-convention trip with her in the state that she’s in. I’m exhausted myself, and in that bleakly depressed state that conventions usually leave me in these days, so it seems as if, all things considered, we might be better off just staying in the Marriott for the few days between now and Friday, when our flight home is scheduled to leave from Glasgow Airport. We committed ourselves before we left home, however, to this trip up to Tarbert in Argyll, where Lisa Tuttle and Colin Murray live, and we already have reservations at the Tarbert Hotel there; George R.R. Martin and Parris and David Kogelman are also headed up to Tarbert today, Scott and Suzi Baker are already there, staying with Lisa and Colin, and the idea is that we’re all going to get together for a post-Worldcon party . . . an idea that looked a lot more desirable before the trip than it does now. But Susan says that she may as well be sick there, with friends nearby, than sick here in the hotel by herself after everyone we know has left, which makes a certain amount of sense, and David has made a car rental reservation based on the idea that we’re going to share driving and expenses with him, so I guess we are going to be going to Tarbert after all, in spite of everything—although I doubt that Susan, who can barely lift her head, is going to be doing all that much of the driving.

David arrives, we load our stuff into his rental car, and we drive over to the Moat House hotel, where we have a quick lunch in the lobby bar with George and Parris. Finally, in the usual Glasgow drizzle, we all set off, Susan and I in David’s car (David has good-humoredly agreed that Susan is probably not in the best shape in the world for driving at the moment, so he does all the driving himself—but, as he says, he’s an ex-cab-driver, and so is used to long uninterrupted stretches of driving . . . although this is the first time he’s ever driven in Britain before, which makes for a few unnerving moments), following George and Parris in their car. The idea is that we’re going to drive to Tarbert caravan-style, led by George and Parris, who have been there before, with a stop just outside of Glasgow at Dumbarton Castle. Unfortunately, we overshoot Dumbarton Castle, going almost all the way to Helensburgh before we realize that we’ve missed the turn. Determinedly, George turns around and we all caravan back through Dumbarton, this time spotting both the turn-off and the Castle itself, which, coming south, dominates the horizon, looming up as it does on the top of a very high hill; it’s amazing we all managed to miss it coming the other way.

We drive down to the car park at the foot of Dumbarton Castle. Susan decides that she is too sick and exhausted to climb up the several long flights of very steep stairs to the castle ruins on top of the hill, so she stays behind in the car, reading a Brother Cadfael book, while the rest of us set off up the stairs, through a steep and narrow passageway where the portcullis once was, and so up to the open grassy area on top of Dumbarton Rock, where the castle’s artillery batteries were once set into the side of the hill, and several huge old cannons still point their mutely gaping mouths out over the wide estuary of the River Clyde, commanding the approach from the sea. George says that he likes “manly” castles, grim foreboding fortresses and frowning military strongpoints rather than places full of tapestries and fancy furniture, like Cawdor, and he seems pleased with Dumbarton; although there’s not really much of the original structure left intact, the castle—or what’s left of it—does have an impressive location, perched several hundred feet up in the air on top of dome-shaped Dumbarton Rock (said to be the last bit of their homeland many Scottish refugees from the Highland Clearances saw as they sailed into exile, never to return)—it’s not difficult to imagine the castle defenders pouring boiling oil and flaming pitch down on unfortunate Vikings or Englishmen or whoever might be trying to scramble up the steep cliffs in order to press home an attack. I doubt that many of them made it—and, indeed, I don’t think that Dumbarton Castle was ever taken by direct assault.

Leaving the Castle behind, we stop for a snack at a little pub in Helensburgh—George finally finding someplace where the food is hearty enough for him, having a steak pie that he raves about for the next three days, whenever we eat somewhere else—and then make the long but extremely pretty drive to Tarbert, through a high mountain pass and then south along the side of Loch Fyne, where, after having hidden all afternoon, the sun comes out at the end of the day long enough to paint the water with orange and gold.

At Tarbert, a small fishing village set along either arm of a V-shaped harbor, we find that the Tarbert Hotel is being used as a location for the filming of a BBC mini-series called A Mug’s Game; the downstairs pub, where a scene in the show is being shot as we arrive, is full of actors and cameramen, and the only flight of stairs leading up to the guest rooms, a steep and narrow one, is snarled with wires and lights and blocked by loitering members of the technical crew, who also spill over into and have taken over much of the cramped and tiny hotel lobby, where the registration desk is. We have trouble even getting into the hotel, as a member of the tech crew is stationed outside to refuse anyone entry, then have trouble getting anyone to come out to the registration desk to give us our rooms, as the hotel proprietor is off somewhere seeing to the needs of the TV crew. Then we have to wait, impatiently, in order to be able to get up to our rooms, since there’s no way to get up the stairs while the scene in the pub is actually being shot. (For most of the next two days, the TV crew will swarm over the hotel, making it difficult to get in and out of it as we wish, and visiting on us a host of other inconveniences—probably we should all spurn the Tarbet and go to another hotel somewhere, but we’re too tired to deal with that, especially Susan, who, by this point, can barely stay on her feet.) George, who has worked extensively for the movies and TV at home for the past decade or so, is boggled by the fact that he has traveled thousands of miles to a small and very isolated village in rural Scotland only to run into, of all things . . . a TV shoot! I tell George that he should tell everyone that he’s a real Hollywood producer, instead of a mere BBC TV producer, and then all the local people who are swarming worshipfully around the TV producer, especially the wide-eyed local girls, will swarm worshipfully around him, instead. He doesn’t act on this suggestion, though, although it probably would have worked.

At last, we take advantage of a break in the shooting to get upstairs to our rooms. I very nearly kill (or at least herniate) myself hauling Susan’s suitcase up to the third floor (as usual at small British hotels, there’s no one to help with the bags, and the hotel proprietor, an old woman in her seventies, seems sensibly disinclined to lend a hand), and only get my own suitcase up there because David volunteers to help, and we both haul it upstairs by its straps (the handle is broken off, remember?) like Army corpsmen hauling a wounded soldier to safety in an old World War II movie. When I get up there, I find that our room is almost literally the size of the proverbial broom-closet, the smallest room of our trip, with just enough space in it for the bed, from which you can touch the wall on either side without needing to straighten your arm; somehow I manage to jam the suitcases in there too, although this leaves almost no place in the room where you can stand, and you have to crawl over one of the suitcases to get to the toilet.

Susan crashes hard, falling onto the bed and into a heavy sleep almost immediately, telling me, before she topples over, to bring her a sandwich from somewhere; she has no interest in going out to dinner, or going anywhere—she’s down for the night. Parris also says that she’s not interested in dinner, and also goes to bed immediately, which leaves George and David and me on our own, three wild and crazy guys, free to seek adventure in the streets of swinging Tarbert! . . . which, unfortunately, are by this point almost completely shuttered and deserted, although it’s only about eight o’ clock by now, and there’s still light in the sky. Tarbert folds up early. Except for a swirl of activity around the TV shoot at the Tarbert Hotel, everything is closed down, except for another pub up the street and one restaurant, and, once you get a few blocks away from our hotel, there’s almost no one around on the streets.

We walk up the road along the shuttered seafront, looking for a restaurant, and finally make a reservation at a tiny place called The Anchorage, where they kindly agree to sit us late, at nine o’clock, although they’re technically closed by then; since the pub at the Tarbert Hotel is being used by the TV crew, there’s really no place else in town to eat, except for the somewhat seedy looking other pub, so we count ourselves very lucky to get into The Anchorage, even if we will have to wait an hour.

To kill time, we walk further up the road and sit for awhile in the gathering dusk on a bench overlooking the harbor and, past a few small humped islands bristling with trees, like miniature versions of the offshore islands near Skye, out over Loch Fyne itself. Seagulls wheel and scream overhead, returning to rest on the harbor mud flats for the night, occasionally sweeping low over the water in hopes of a last-minute fish to snack on before going to sleep. We discuss whether or not we could live in a tiny village like this. George thinks that it would be a wonderful place to live, so remote and quiet and picturesque, but I think that it would drive me crazy to live here in hardly any time at all, and David, a big-city boy, tends to agree with me. George counters by waxing eloquent about the peace and solitude and serenity to be found here, and how inspiring and uplifting that would be, pointing at a seagull that is skimming the surface of the waves and crying repeatedly as it flies and saying, “Listen to that! Where else could you hear something like that? You couldn’t hear it in the city!”, and I reply, “I’ll make a tape.” It’s almost full-dark by now, and we think we see a seal swimming along below, on its way out of the harbor into the deeper waters of the open loch, although, in the dusk, it could be anything from a seabird to a selkie. Perhaps it’s a Lake Monster.

Dinner at the Anchorage is quite good, although the dinner conversation is a bit gloomy. The recent deaths of Roger Zelazny and John Brunner have left us all a bit somber, and the talk turns to the economically ravaged scene of the British science fiction publishing world, and whether the same thing is likely to happen in the States. Whether it does or not, we all agree that it’s gotten tougher to make even a marginal living as an SF writer in the last decade or so, and that it’s likely to get even tougher in the future—that, in fact, it may now be impossible for all but a very fortunate few to make any sort of decent money at all out of writing SF. We all know five or six SF writers, in fact, who are only a step or two away from having to sleep out on a hot-air vent. This depresses George. Although he has a yen to live in baronial splendor, and to this end is planning to build a luxurious house on a private mesa of his own in New Mexico, he is soft-hearted enough to wish that everybody else could live in baronial splendor as well—or at least that his friends could do so. Instead, although George himself is moderately financially secure, many of his friends probably will end up living on hot-air vents, or the next thing to it, and this distresses him. I’m quite likely to end up on a hot-air vent myself, sooner or later—editors don’t have retirement plans. We suggest that perhaps George should prudently make provisions for his soon-to-be-indigent friends by thoughtfully providing a row of hot-air vents for us outside his baronial manor . . .

The proprietors of the Anchorage very thoughtfully make up a sandwich for me to take back to Susan, since there’s no place else in town I could get one, although all they have to make a sandwich out of is cheese. They even, in spite of my protests, give me a plate to carry the sandwich on, saying that I can bring it back to them later, or not, as the chance occurs—which strikes me as kindness above and beyond the call of duty, especially as, by seating us late and letting us linger long over our dinners, talking of gloomy matters, they’ve had to stay open at least an hour or two after their usual closing time. I thank them profusely, and we leave, walking back through the dark streets of Tarbert, by the side of the now mostly invisible sea, past one or two young people leaning aimlessly up against the walls, or strolling restlessly around in the empty streets, which is really all there is to do in Tarbert by night, except drink or listen to the tape you’ve made of the lonely cry of a gull.

Back at the Tarbert Hotel, the ever-energetic David sets off for a pub-crawl, now that the hotel pub is open again after the shoot has wrapped for the day and is once more full of its usual customers, but George and I throw in the towel for the night and go upstairs. Back in the room, Susan wakes up long enough to sniff at her sandwich disdainfully—it does, I admit, look pretty unappetizing—and then go back to sleep. I follow her as quickly as I can.

Wednesday, August 30th—Tarbert & Loch Awe

We’re woken by a call from the front desk; they’ve arranged for a hotel down the road to give us breakfast, since their own breakfast room is being used by the TV crew, but we have to be there before ten A.M. if we want to eat. We get dressed hurriedly, walk down the seafront road and up the other arm of the V-shaped harbor to the Victoria Hotel, where we have breakfast with George and Parris and David. On our way back to the Tarbert Hotel, we run into Scott and Suzi, coming out of the local chemists, where they have been dropped by Lisa, who is now on her way to pick up her young daughter, Emily. We stand on the sidewalk chatting with them until Lisa comes by to pick them up; they are all on the way to Campbeltown, where Emily has an appointment with the optometrist; Scott and Suzi are going along for the ride. We make arrangements to meet them all later for dinner, and then they are off for Campbeltown, me reminding them not to miss the big statue of John W. in a heroic pose, blue-pencil held proudly aloft, that dominates the town square.

Susan has stumbled over to breakfast with us, but now she has run out of steam and goes back to the room to take a nap. David and Parris set out to drive all the way back up to Inveraray to browse in the little craft shops there, and George goes back to his room to get some work in on his Big Fat Fantasy Novel (you can hear the initial capitals each time he mentions the phrase), leaving me on my own for the moment, although I make arrangements to drive up to Loch Awe with George later in the afternoon.

In the meanwhile, I explore Tarbert, looking into every store in town, all five or six of them, for the gold charm that Susan wants for her charm bracelet, without success. I come back to a bench at the harborside, next to the hotel, and sit down to work on these notes. The tide is out—Loch Fyne is a sea-loch, open to the sea on its south side through the Sound of Bute and the Firth of Clyde—and the point of the V or arrowhead-shaped harbor directly in front of me is now all dry ground and mud-flats, with the sour smell of the mud in the air, and with seagulls walking around on the mud-flats, mewling and squawking and squabbling over some tasty bit of garbage they’ve found. In the deeper part of the harbor, perhaps a hundred yards away, many small sailing boats are moored, making a forest of masts. Most of them seem to be pleasure-craft, and I wonder how much of a commercial fishing-fleet the town has anymore, although there clearly are still at least a few commercial fishing craft here. A ridge of low, rocky hills, covered with bracken and brownish heather, rises up from just behind the houses that line the sea-front on the far arm of the V, on the road that leads back north toward Inveraray. When I walk over to that side of the harbor, the same kind of hills are visible rising up from behind the buildings on this side too, plus the ruins of Tarbert Castle, which, covered in vines as it is, looks like a topiary sculpture. Except for the castle ruins, and the architectural style of the houses, Tarbert isn’t all that different from some small New England fishing towns I’ve known, all of them centered around their harbors, with the sailing boats riding at mooring and the flights of seagulls wheeling and screaming, and the landscape changing dramatically depending on whether the tide is in or out, the sea changing the whole look of the town, as though investing it with a different identity, when it comes flooding back in again.

Later, Susan decides to skip lunch and continue napping. George and I have a mediocre lunch at the town’s other pub, The Frigate—tough, stringy beefsteak; I’m glad we didn’t have dinner here last night—and then we set off in George’s car to drive around nearby Loch Awe, something that Scott had recommended to us that morning as a particularly scenic and interesting drive. We drive back up the A83 north toward Inveraray, then turn off at Lochgilphead (which we both find ourselves pronouncing as Lochgliphead) onto the road to Oban, turning off that on to a small B road that runs alongside Loch Awe. I’ve seen small roads by now all over Britain, but this is a small road, one of the narrowest I’ve seen, and George is understandably somewhat nervous about driving this less-than-single-track road, particularly when we met local cars being driven in the other direction at the typical seventy or eighty miles an hour. We drive slowly north along the shores of Loch Awe, listening as we drive to a tape of “Picnic-Time for Potato-Heads,” cars zooming impatiently past us from time to time when we stubbornly refuse to do eighty ourselves. Somewhere up the road, we see in the flesh the prototype for the cover art for a hundred Celtic fantasy novels: a pure white horse running in a lush green field next to an old stone building, above the gleaming waters of Loch Awe. The sight is so powerful that it takes the breath away from you for a moment, and reminds you of the potency of this kind of archetypical image, which is why it has been used enough times to turn it into a cliche in the first place, of course; the power still lurks there somewhere behind the overfamiliarity and overuse, though, if you can see it again for a moment with new eyes, as we just have been granted the privilege of doing.

We stop once to walk down to the lake shore; George, remembering my anecdote about Chysauster, keeps calling “Come out, little adders!” as we peer under gnarled tree-roots and piles of logs, but they refuse to come out and play with us. I take the opportunity to dabble my fingers in the loch, noticing, as I do, that the pebble beach is covered with foam along the waterline; dismaying to think that a remote lake in a rural part of Scotland could be heavily polluted enough (with detergents, perhaps?) that the water foams as it washes up on to the shingle beach. We drive on to the northern end of Loch Awe, but then, rather than turn south again on an even smaller road that hugs the other side of the lake, the route Scott recommended, and one that would clearly take a couple of hours more to drive, we decide that although Loch Awe is pretty, it’s not all that much prettier intrinsically than Loch Fyne, and so turn east, taking a—somewhat, at least—larger A road back into Inveraray. On the way, we are buzzed startlingly at one point by a military jet that seems to appear out of nowhere and screams by overhead only about twenty or thirty feet above the road, actually shaking the car with the force of its passage, before hopping up and over a hill on the other side of the road and disappearing. Practicing strafing runs again, is my guess. In Inveraray, George, in an antic mood, drives around and around and around the same traffic circle eight or nine times, while the locals stand on streetcorners and solemnly watch us go by, dourly shaking their heads.

Back at Tarbert, George goes to get ready for dinner while I go for a walk along Harbor Street, the street that runs along the seaside, with Susan, who is obviously feeling much better. We sit for awhile on the same bench by the curve of the road away from town, overlooking the loch, where George and David and I had sat the night before, watching a dog swimming quite happily in the water as his master beaches a boat, watching other boats glide like ghosts into the shelter of the harbor at dusk, watching seagulls swoop and dart out across the water. We walk back, and meet David as he is returning from another expedition, one that he set out on after returning from this morning’s trip to Inveraray; this time he’s driven halfway to Campbeltown, on the west side of the peninsula alongside the Sound of Gigha, and returned with a bagful of sea-shells. We sit with him on the same bench where I wrote up my notes this morning and talk with windy eloquence about the uncertainties of life. I watch a swan who is using his own body for a pillow, twisting his head around in a way that looks uncomfortable if not downright impossible to rest it on his own flank. After a minute, he rouses from his nap and picks his way hesitantly over the mud flats toward the sea, waddling and comically awkward on the land, but suddenly becoming smooth and flowing and incredibly graceful when he gets into the water and glides serenely away—he looks back scornfully at us as though to say, you may have seen me being awkward and clumsy for a minute, but now I’m elegant and graceful . . . when are you going to be able to say the same?

Susan feels well enough to be up to going out that night, and so we have a loud dinner back at the Anchorage—I give them back their plate, all neatly washed and dried—with George and Parris, David, Scott and Suzi, and Lisa (Colin has stayed behind to baby-sit Emily), the other patrons eyeing us in surprise (or perhaps alarm) as we break into a chorus of “One Meatball (But No Spaghetti).” After dinner, we say goodbye to Scott and Suzi, who are going to be returning to Glasgow for their flight to Paris early in the morning; they drive off with Lisa, with whom we’ve made arrangements to get together tomorrow.

We return to the Tarbert Hotel, where Parris goes up to bed, while George, Susan, David, and I go into the hotel pub for a drink. David, who stayed up here all last night drinking with the locals, knows everyone by name already, and exchanges shouted and exuberant greetings with several of the patrons crowded around the bar. He asks one of the locals, who is very large and very drunk, to take a group photo of us. The local takes the camera, and keeps urging George to smile, without effect. I finally tickle George clandestinely, which gets a smile out of him just in time for the photo. The local man bellows, “Ah, ya smiled, ya great bastid! I finally got a smile out of ya, ya old bastid!” and joyfully seizes George in a celebratory headlock, shouting “Ya smiled, ya great bastid!” and squeezing George’s neck until George starts to turn blue, and I am afraid that we are going to see a murder done here in the pub, right in front of our faces. I can already see the headline in Locus: “HUGO-WINNER STRANGLED TO DEATH IN BIZARRE PUB INCIDENT,” followed by the sub-heading “GREAT BASTID SMILED BEFORE HE DIED.” The giant bellowing drunk lets George go before George can quite die, though, and stumbles back to the bar for another drink, still throwing an occasional “Ya smiled!” across at George and lifting a glass of whiskey to him in a toast to this remarkable accomplishment.

We decide to beat a retreat before someone casually rips our arms out of their sockets, just to see how they’re fixed on, or perhaps tears George’s head clean off in an attempt to get him to actually laugh. We say goodbye to David, who is going to stay up all night again, drinking with the boisterous locals, and then take off for Glasgow Airport at six o’clock in the morning, and hurry upstairs to bed.

Thursday, August 31st—Tarbert, Torinturk, Stonefield Castle, Skipness Castle & Glasgow Airport

Up about 8 A.M., go down to breakfast, at the Tarbert Hotel this time, the BBC crew having finally departed. David has either departed also, as planned, or else perhaps has been completely torn into small shreds by the locals with whom he was drinking last night, the shreds hidden away in the trash, or perhaps ground fine and made into the greasy breakfast sausages we’re served; at any rate, he’s gone. We eat alone, in an empty breakfast room, joined after a while by George; Parris is sleeping in this morning, and won’t be joining us on this morning’s expedition.

After breakfast, Lisa picks us up in her car and drives George, Susan, and me out to her house in Torinturk, a small village about ten miles outside of Tarbert. On the way, we pass deer grazing in a fenced enclosure, and, at the edge of a farmer’s field, the Firestone, an ancient Celtic standing stone that is said by the locals to glow in the dark with otherworldly energies—a sort of Celtic night-light, I guess. (Lisa says that she hasn’t seen the Firestone glowing, although she’s passed here many times at night—I guess that it won’t perform in the presence of Unbelievers and Infidels.)

Lisa and Colin’s place is a small white house at the end of a country lane, adjoined by a connecting wall to an identical small white house next door; except for these twinned houses, there are no other houses in sight, although I assume that there’s more to Torinturk tucked away somewhere else (maybe not, though!). There’s a rowan tree in front of the house, ablaze with red blossoms; Lisa tells us that rowans are supposed to keep witches away, and it must work, since we see no witches there.

Inside, Lisa and Colin’s place is fairly typical of the house of a writer or fan with small children—toys and books scattered everywhere, especially books, which clearly will always proliferate here far beyond the ability to find bookshelf space for them; our own apartment looks much the same, except there are fewer toys and an even greater number of books, and I suspect that no matter how large George makes the baronial manor he’s planning, he too will run out of shelf space after only a relatively short respite. Books accrue. They seem to appear in odd corners even when you don’t remember buying them—which is one thing that inclines me emotionally toward the Steady-State Theory of Creation. We sit in the living room and have coffee, stared at incuriously by ranks of dolls and stuffed animals. (Lisa tells us that her daughter, Emily, won’t let her throw any of her toys or clothes away because she’s saving all of them “for my baby.” Obviously a child who plans ahead!) Colin, who is working upstairs on a book of political memoirs he’s editing, pops in from time to time to ask us things such as “Is there a Post Office on Fifth Avenue in New York City?”—things you’d think that, as Americans, we’d know . . . but even though I travel along Fifth Avenue almost every week, I can’t remember, and neither can anyone else; shows you how little attention you pay to your own surroundings, something Sherlock Holmes pointed out almost a century ago (Quick! What’s the color of the house across the street from you? No, I couldn’t remember either). Eventually, we all troop upstairs for the ritual Viewing Of The Office, an odd rite that is often a feature of a visit to a writer’s home—Lisa’s office, which is considerably tidier than mine, is upstairs in the attic, under slanted ceilings, with a laptop sitting neatly on a desk in place of the more usual full-size computer. There’s an odd, waist-high door in one wall, which, George suggests, is where the dwarves come out of at midnight when they write Lisa’s stories for her in exchange for a saucer of milk ... or perhaps of Scotch, considering that Lisa mostly writes horror stories these days. I notice that, not surprisingly, she has many of the same books in her office that we have up on the shelves at home—a touch of fannish continuity in two homes thousands of miles apart.

We say goodbye to Colin, who has too much work to do to be able to accompany us on this afternoon’s tourist expedition—I quote the wise ancient dictum “Writers work from sun to sun/But an editor’s work is never done,” but none of the others, writers all, seem terribly impressed or grateful, the swine—and Lisa drives us back into Tarbert, dropping us off in front of the Tarbert Hotel while she goes off to pick Emily up at school.

George consults with Parris, who decides to stay in and skip lunch as well, although she wants to go on the actual tourist expedition later in the afternoon. We then all wait for Lisa in front of the Tarbert Hotel. She arrives a few minutes later with her daughter Emily, a timid but sweet little girl with big owl glasses, dressed in a British schoolgirl’s costume. She stares at us apprehensively as we’re introduced, obviously not sure whether she should burst into tears or not. When asked which of us she’d rather have go with her in her car, me or Susan, she looks at me in alarm and immediately says “Her!”, pointing at Susan. So I go with George in his car, while Lisa, Emily, and Susan go in Lisa’s car, Emily keeping a wary eye on me until we pull away and out of sight, just in case I should change my mind and suddenly leap into Lisa’s car with her instead.

We all meet at Stonefield Castle, just north of Tarbert, for lunch. This isn’t really a “castle,” of course, but rather a big stone Victorian mansion, a bit rundown, but still moderately grand and baronial, with sitting-rooms paneled in dark wood and overlooked glassily by mounted deer heads (it reminds me a bit in this regard of the Viewfield House in Skye, although it is less fantastical than that strange Victorian Gormenghast had been—no tiger heads, no water-buffalo skulls, no unidentifiable stuffed creatures snarling defiance in nearly opaque glass cases), and with libraries of the sort that you see in period-piece British movies, complete with dusty old books in tall glass-fronted cases and big overstuffed armchairs. It’s clear that this place immediately appeals to George, who now seems to regret that he’s staying at the Tarbert when he could be staying here instead, getting to practice living in baronial splendor, to prepare him for when his own stately home is actually built. The place does look more inviting than the Tarbert, shifting the balance of opinion in our minds even more away from “quaint” toward “cramped and tiny.” (Of course, Stonefield Castle is also more expensive than the Tarbert . . . and, to be fair, the others have rooms at the Tarbert that are somewhat more comfortable than ours, rooms into which, for instance, you have space to squeeze items of furniture other than the bed.)

We have a mediocre lunch—so what else is new?—there, sitting outside at picnic tables that do at least offer a splendid overview of Loch Fyne. During lunch, Emily wanders away up the flagstone path that leads up the hill toward the swimming pool, occasionally pausing to peer owlishly back at us and say “help” in a small calm voice. When Lisa tells her that she doesn’t need any help, she seems to consider this gravely for a moment, and then accept it, continuing to hop solemnly away along the flagstone path, one flagstone per hop. We also learn, by dedicated scientific experimentation, that English robins only eat bread, not chips or crisps . . . although Emily, who has by now come hopping back, generously continues to share her chips with them long after this important scientific principle has been established. Finally, even though Emily keeps looking up at Lisa and solemnly demanding “More food!”, lunch is over, all the food either eaten or thrown to the unappreciative robins. While Lisa and Emily visit the loo (apparently Emily collects a life-list of loos she’s visited, the way birders collect a life-list of birds they’ve seen, and often makes her mother take her to one even when it turns out that she doesn’t actually have to go to the bathroom), George and I get back in the car and drive back to the hotel.

When Susan and Emily and Lisa arrive, Emily wearing the satisfied look of a connoisseur who’s just gotten to see a rare and elusive loo she’s never seen before, I get in the car with George and Parris, who has come down to join us, and we follow Lisa’s car a few miles out of Tarbert to Skipness Castle, past a beach with a stunning view of the rugged offshore island of Arran, and past a strange vertical forest of tortured upthrust rock formations, looking more like something you’d be likely to run into in New Mexico or Colorado or Arizona than here in Scotland.

Compared with all this scenic splendor, the castle itself, when we finally get there, is almost uninteresting—mostly ruined, with grass growing inside where the Grand Hall and the banquet rooms once were. We look briefly around the ruins, with George expressing disappointment that we can’t climb up onto the battlements, but they’re blocked off. In fact, the only part of the castle interior open to view is the latrine chamber, which looks like, well . . . a latrine chamber. At least it is not still full of ancient piss.

We return to the “Seafood Caravan” next to the car park, which, while we were gone, has dispensed smoked salmon sandwiches for Susan and Parris. I sit in a patch of shade and watch the rocky bulk of Arran through binoculars, tracing streams as they cut their way down from the crests of the hills to the sea, while the rest of the adults in our party sit in the broiling sun at picnic tables, and Emily is busy chasing all the chicks and ducklings in the yard to and fro, pointing to them and joyously shouting “Baby!”—chasing them eagerly but timidly, ready to flee instantly if they should turn on her.

On the way back, we drive down to the beach and stop for a moment to examine the strange rock formations, which obviously are made up of sediment laid down in horizontal layers over millions of years, then turned vertical and thrust up above the surface of the ground by some later violent movement of the earth. It’s strange, and almost frightening, to think what a huge amount of time is needed to lay down even one such layer of sediment and compress it into rock, let alone the hundreds and hundreds of such layers, one atop the other, that are clearly visible here—such a vast expanse of time that our little human lifespans are unnoticeable against it, less by far than the time it takes to blink your eye compared to all the hours and days and years of your life. Compared to the ages it took to lay down these tortured rock strata, life on earth—let alone human life—is less than a heartbeat old. Don’t even try to measure what an individual human life—yours, or mine—would be when set against that immense, alien, indifferent, inconceivable gulf of time. There’s probably no unit small enough.

After a brief stop at the Cultural Heritage Center (strange that the Vikings, who went through here raping and killing, and burning everything to the ground, are now considered to be part of Scotland’s Cultural Heritage: “Don’t mind those ten smelly Northerners gang-raping you, madam, your husband’s blood still on their hands—someday this will all be part of our rich Cultural Heritage! You’ll be able to buy the T-shirt!”), we go back to the Tarbert Hotel and sit in the bar and have tea, waiting for it to be time for our bus to leave for Glasgow. Parris says goodbye and goes up for a nap, and finally Emily begins to get fussy, and so Lisa says goodbye too, and leaves with her for home. George is going to have dinner with Lisa and Colin tonight, but he has kindly agreed to haul us and our stuff to the bus stop, so he waits with us for a while longer. We all keep a leery eye out for the huge bellowing drunk of the evening before, fearing that he might come back and tear George’s head off for a keepsake, but he’s probably in some other pub this evening, cheerfully strangling some other hapless tourist to death. We wonder how many tourists he goes through per month.

Finally, we load our huge groaning suitcases into George’s car—it sinks noticeably on its springs—and he drives us the half-mile or so up the hill to the bus-shelter across the street from the church. We wait there for the bus to Glasgow to arrive, me killing time by looking through the binoculars at what appear to be cairns on the crests of the hills on either side, wondering if they are positioned so as to allow a signal-fire lit on one to be seen from the other, the message thus being passed from cairn to cairn up the coast, or on inland. Finally, the Glasgow bus arrives. We say goodbye to George, load our stuff into the compartment under the bus (thank god we don’t have to try to jam it into the overhead racks!), and climb aboard. The bus starts with a sharp jolt and roars away unnervingly fast, before we’ve even gotten into our seats. Within seconds, Tarbert falls away behind, and is gone.

We climb into the bus at about 6:10 P.M., and it’s almost exactly a three-hour drive to Glasgow, with brief boarding stops at small villages along the way, and a somewhat longer stop at Inveraray, where I run out, fight my way through a queue of Japanese tourists, and get Susan some chewing gum and a bottle of water (a small bag of peanuts and a bottle of water for me)—this will have to do for dinner until we reach Glasgow. Susan falls asleep almost immediately after leaving Inveraray, thus missing the same scenery she missed on the way here, which is too bad, as some of it is very nice, especially the high mountain pass that the road climbs through outside of Inveraray, and the high plateau country beyond that contains Loch Long, with its surrounding fringe of huge old wooden luxury hotels. She also misses a spectacular sunset, perhaps the best one of the trip, with a thin silver crescent moon hanging over the darkening mountains, and bars of glowing pink clouds in the fading blue sky.

Later on, winding slowly through the outskirts of Glasgow, I keep getting glimpses of people walking around inside their apartments and houses, standing in a doorway, ironing a shirt, talking, sitting down to a formal dinner around a big table, drinking, sitting in front of the flickering blue eye of a TV set, cooking, waving their arms, leaning on windowsills and looking out the window at the night, or back at us as we pass, and I get a sudden perception of the sheer mass of humanity—there are millions of people out there, each one of them as quirky and individual, as unique and contradictory and strange, as anyone else we’ve met on this trip, or as anyone we know at home. No artist could possibly know them all. You could travel from house to house, from apartment to apartment, meeting everyone, talking to everyone, getting to know them all as individual human beings rather than strangers glimpsed in the night as you pass, learning their histories and their stories, and it would take you hundreds of years to work your way through this one suburb of Glasgow. To work your way through every neighborhood in every city in all the world would take a noticeable fraction of the time it took to lay down those rock formations back on the beach near Skipness. And, of course, as soon as you moved on from one place, new people would be being born and growing up behind you, people you didn’t know, had never met—so there would never be an ending to the process at all. I realize with a sudden swift sadness that somewhere in the back of my heart I would like to know them all, every one of them—and that, of course, I never will, that I will only ever know a tiny fraction of them, so miniscule as to be almost unnoticeable next to the sheer immense biomass of the human species, and that only a tiny fraction of them will ever know me. Instead, we will pass each other in silence, in the dark, rushing by each other with only the most fleeting of glimpses as we pass. Out there, turning from the window as the bus pulls away, falling away behind with just a glimpse of their arm swinging or their mouth opening to laugh, are people who might have been friends, lovers, enemies, teachers, colleagues. You’ll never meet them. They’ll never meet you. They fall away in the dark and are gone, along with a thousand alternate lives you could have lived but never will, a thousand roads you could have taken but did not, a thousand thousand alternate worlds dying unborn around you every second of every day, and you must say farewell constantly to people you’ll never meet. Then the bus moves on, and all is darkness and the wet echo of lights smeared across the windows of dusty rooms.

A few minutes later, we climb out of the bus at Buchanan bus station in Glasgow, and catch a cab to the Glasgow airport, catching brief glimpses of the Marriott and the Forte Crest as we pass. (The driver tells us as we go that he’s always wanted to go to America—although, on questioning, it turns out that he’s never even been to Skye, which is only a four-hour drive from here; one gets the impression that he’ll never go, either, to either place—and that he knows it.) We check into the Forte Crest at the Glasgow Airport, not the one downtown that the SFWA Suite was in, but another one. We have one of the worst meals of the trip, and one of the most expensive, in the Carvery restaurant in the hotel, dry, fatty slices of beef and browning juiceless pieces of pork and ham served buffet-style, along with all the limp, wilted vegetables you can eat, but we get in just before the restaurant closes, so I suppose we can count ourselves lucky—bad as it is, it is marginally better than chewing gum and peanuts for dinner. Sort of.

Go upstairs, and, just before I go to sleep, I look out the window at the main terminal at Glasgow Airport, which is literally right across the street, which, I hope, will make it easier to catch our flight tomorrow—our last day in Britain, and the last day of the trip.

Friday, September 1st—Glasgow Airport, Heathrow Airport & Philadelphia

Up about 8 A.M., go down and have our last British breakfast of the trip, the traditional Trusthouse Forte breakfast, considerably better than dinner had been the night before (I’m reminded again, though, how sharply the moderately wide variety of jams and jellies we were offered in most of the English hotels fell away as soon as we crossed the border into Scotland; no hotel in Scotland has offered anything other than Strawberry Jam (except for the ubiquitous Orange Marmalade, of course, which was served in every single place we stayed), and, if you ask for another flavor of jam, not only don’t they have it, but they look offended that you asked. They have a real Attitude about this, as if to say “Strawberry jam was good enough for me father, and me father’s father . . . and it’s sure as hell good enough for you, too!”)

Go upstairs, pack our travel-worn suitcases one last time, check out, and wheel our stuff on a luggage cart the short distance across the street to the main terminal. I’m carrying my Hugo in one hand by this point, out in the open, in plain sight—this is something I learned to do a few Worldcons ago, in Holland, when, during the midst of the build-up for the Gulf War and the terrorism scare that was generated by it, I walked into the airport carrying my Hugo and instantly had at least two automatic rifles trained on my chest by flak-jacketed security troops, who were no doubt considering the possibility that it was some kind of pipe bomb or hand-held rocket; I remember thinking, as the security people at the gate examined the Hugo very carefully, Thank God I didn’t put it in my suitcase, where it would have shown up on an X-ray and gotten the whole flight cancelled, or pull it out of a bag, so that they think I’m drawing some kind of weapon and shoot me. Since then, whenever I’ve had the occasion to go through an airport with a Hugo, I’ve been careful to carry it in plain sight, and am prepared to spend at least a few minutes at the security gate explaining what it is. This time, however, it quickly becomes apparent that the security people in Glasgow Airport have seen a Hugo go through here before—“Ah, that’s that award for science fiction, isn’t it?” one guard says jovially, and I wonder, Just how many Hugos have come through this very gate in the last week? Two couples in the waiting area at the gate also recognize the Hugo, as does someone on the plane, and another couple later at Heathrow, so obviously fans are still dribbling home from Glasgow, four full days after the convention ended. I wonder how long it will take before everybody is home again, and you’d no longer run into anyone who was also returning from the Worldcon?

We have an hour-long flight to Heathrow. At Heathrow, getting a brief glimpse of the outskirts of London as we break from the clouds that have enveloped us since leaving Glasgow, we make our way to the International Transfers area, where the customs official who checks our passports nods at the Hugo and says, “I thought that Arthur C. Clarke had all of those!” This is probably not a fan on the way home from Glasgow, but he not only knows what a Hugo is, but, from his remark, understands something of the history of it! I must admit that this boggles me, as, outside of this trip, I’ve never met any airport official who had the slightest idea what a Hugo was; I usually tell most of them that it is a bowling trophy that I’ve won while on vacation, and they nod and accept this at face value.

We climb on board the shuttle bus for the short ride to Terminal 4. There’s a little girl aboard with her parents, and she’s just delighted with the whole experience of being on this bus, squealing with happiness when the bus starts to move, laughing and clapping her hands, shouting joyously and pointing when she sees airplanes on the runway. I watch her thoughtfully. For most of us on the bus, this bus ride is just something that we endure, an uncomfortable inconvenience that we put up with because we want to get to someplace else where we’ll do something we really want to do—to her, the bus ride itself is a joy, a pleasure to be savored, a source of inexhaustible wonders. If we could only recapture that innocent, open-hearted experience of life, living with all pores open and savoring each moment for itself, experiencing each moment as it happens without anticipation or retrospect, drinking in the wonder of things we instead choose to consider trivial or boring or mundane, relishing just that moment, just that one moment, for its own sake, like a little child, how much better off we’d be, how much more enjoyable and tranquil our lives would be, no matter how long or how short they were.

We shop briefly at Terminal 4, Susan at last finding a charm for her bracelet, and then have to scamper to make our flight when they announce over the PA that the flight to Philadelphia is boarded except for the last five passengers—two of whom are us. Long, grueling, uncomfortable flight back, almost eight hours long, crammed in three-abreast this time, during which I try to apply the lesson I’ve learned from watching the little girl on the bus, with only partial success.

We finally touch down in Philadelphia, only to discover, on disembarking, that we have somehow lost the expensive blanket we’d bought for our son Christopher in Scotland, probably left behind on the luggage cart in Heathrow during our scramble to catch our flight. Wait in a long, slowly-inching line to get through Customs, watching another little kid who is dodging merrily around the line-dividers, as if he is skiing the giant slalom, having a wonderful time while his parents fret and grind their teeth impatiently and snarl at each other in frustration. The little boy clearly knows the lesson of the little girl on the bus, while the parents have clearly forgotten it. I think we all know it at one time; I wonder when we forget?

Pick up our suitcases, take a cab back to our apartment, where we are greeted at the door by a pair of hysterical cats, who are, at first, frantically glad to see us—later, they will remember that they’re supposed to be mad at us for leaving them, and become sulky and aloof, slowly thawing over the course of the next couple of days when they forget that they’re mad and are not supposed to want to get patted.

It’s four P.M. in Philadelphia, but by our body clocks, it’s nine o’ clock at night. It’ll take weeks for us to readjust.

There’s an immense pile of mail, and the answering machine is winking steadily, like an ominous red eye. Sighing, I reluctantly plunge into the shitstorm of bills and problems and emergencies that must be dealt with, including the news that, while we were gone, my mother has fallen and broken her hip, had surgery to have a bolt and plate put in, and is now in a rehab hospital.

The vacation is over.

The Gods of Mars

Introduction to The Gods of Mars

I suppose I could begin by telling you that the authors of this story have been friends of mine for almost twenty years. I could go on to say that I like their work. A lot. I’ve read them closely and am not ashamed to admit that I’ve stolen learned from each of them.

But we’re here to discuss “The Gods of Mars.” Before we begin, I should warn you that this is a story that has bothered me since I first read it in Omni magazine in 1985. This is, I will argue, one measure of the authors’ success. Because I can’t explain exactly how this story got under my skin without interrogating its central mystery, I urge you to read it now, if you have not already done so, before we continue.

All right? Cool story, no?

It is the nature of our genre that stories often engage in dialog with other stories—sometimes as homage, sometimes as critique. This story chats up the work of the first “Killer B’s:” Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. The allusions to Burroughs are explicit and begin with the title. Burroughs published a novel called The Gods Of Mars in 1913; it was his second in the Barsoom sequence. Gardner has revealed that neither of his collaborators had read Burroughs’s Martian novels at the time they wrote this story and that all of the Barsoomian references are his alone. Like Michael and Jack, I have never visited Burroughs’s Mars (although I spent a lot of my childhood in the jungle with Tarzan) and while I recognize these grace notes, they strike no deep resonance with my inner twelve-year-old. But while the physical landscape our astronauts discover is all Burroughs, the psychic landscape is clearly Bradbury-esque. Ray Bradbury created a thoroughly romanticized Mars, the dream-like home of a ghost civilization that haunts its human explorers—and this reader. It is a world where the improbable is commonplace.

What is significant about these literary influences is that both of them inhabit the edges of science fiction. For instance, John Carter needed magic to get to Barsoom. Although Burroughs’ imaginary world is certainly resplendent, one may question its consistency. And while Bradbury launches his expeditions to Mars in rockets, he is interested not at all in space technology or planetary science. In fact, the Mariner 9 mission to Mars stripped The Martian Chronicles of all claims to be taken seriously as science fiction; since 1971 the only way to read Bradbury’s wonderful tales is as fantasy.

And how are we to read “The Gods of Mars”? In the mystery genre, there is a kind of story referred to as the “police procedural.” The “Gods of Mars” begins as “space procedural.” Four astronauts in orbit around Red Planet prepare to launch the lender, which will carry three of them to the surface. Humans are about to step onto Mars for the first time when a storm whips up, obscuring the entire planet. As they wait it out, they become increasingly apprehensive. “. . . the inexorable clock of celestial mechanics was ticking relentlessly away . . . soon the optimal launch window for the return journey to Earth would open . . .” The first third of the story displays a robust scientific rigor that would not have been out of place in the pages of Analog.

When the storm clears, however, the astronauts gaze down upon a strange new planet. Gone are the craters, Olympus Mons, the Valles Marineris; in their place are Percival Lowell’s canals. The crew is unnerved; one of them offers the panicky speculation that the Martians must have changed everything. “They’re out there right now, the flying saucer people!” But level-headed Commander Redenbaugh has checked the ships instrumentation and discovered that the Mars they expected is indeed still there; they must be suffering from some kind of mass hallucination. Although this is not a particularly satisfactory explanation, the crew accepts it as a working hypothesis and votes to continue with the landing. At this point, the story is still within the precincts of science fiction. The plot turns on the problem of the dual perceptions of Mars, but still seems to anticipate a rational solution. Perhaps there is “. . . some kind of intense electromagnetic field out there that we haven’t detected that’s disrupting the electrical pathways of our nervous systems . . .”

Except the story bifurcates here. Up until they make the decision to land, we have seen the action through the point of view of Thomas, who is to command the landing party. Thomas is a well-crafted character, which leads us to assume that he inhabits more or less the same reality as we do, albeit sometime in the future. But immediately after Thomas casts the deciding vote to go for the landing, we are thrust briefly into the point of view of Commander Redenbaugh, who will stay behind in the ship where reason holds its tenuous sway. He is the keeper of our reality, while Thomas and the landing crew step into a fantasy of passing strangeness.

And this is what still bothers me after all these years. I can’t wrap my mind around the notion that even though Commander Redenbaugh sees the fantasy which is Lowell’s Mars, he chooses to believe the instruments, which keep him safe inside the science fiction story. Meanwhile, Thomas can hear Commander Redenbaugh and watch the ship leave orbit, even after he has stepped out of the science fiction story into the fantasy. It’s maddening! The door between these mutually exclusive realities never shuts all the way. I’ve run thought experiments on “The Gods of Mars.” For example, what if there were a way for Commander Redenbaugh to land? Would he see three bodies or his crew skinning the hyena-leopard? What if he chose not to look but merely dispatched a robot to fetch the corpses? Would it be able to retrieve them? If it did, and they were, in fact, as lifeless as the instruments reported, what would happen to the crew paddling down the river? And what will happen to the lost crew and the canals and the lights of the distant city when the next expedition arrives on Mars?

The narrative is silent on these questions. The authors obviously saw no profit in over-defining a choose-your-own-reality story. Reluctantly, I have come to agree with this artistic decision. The unresolved puzzles continue to surprise and intrigue me to this day.

For this reader, however, the phenomenological paradox, while intellectually engaging, isn’t necessarily the deepest aspect of “The Gods of Mars.” I believe that the story poses a more personal question of each of us:

If you could choose, which way would you go? With Redenbaugh or with Thomas?

Me, I honestly don’t know.

James Patrick Kelly

The Gods of Mars

by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann,

and Michael Swanwick

They were outside, unlashing the Mars lander, when the storm blew up.

With Johnboy and Woody crowded against his shoulders, Thomas snipped the last lashing. In careful cadence, the others straightened, lifting the ends free of the lander. At Thomas’s command, they let go. The metal lashing soared away, flashing in the harsh sunlight, twisting like a wounded snake, dwindling as it fell below and behind their orbit. The lander floated free, tied to the Plowshare by a single, slim umbilicus. Johnboy wrapped a spanner around a hex-bolt over the top strut of a landing leg and gave it a spin. Like a slow, graceful spider leg, it unfolded away from the lander’s body. He slapped his spanner down on the next bolt and yanked. But he hadn’t braced himself properly, and his feet went out from under him in a slow somersault. He spun away, laughing, to the end of his umbilicus. The spanner went skimming back toward the Plowshare, struck its metal skin, and sailed off into space.

“You meatballs!” Thomas shouted over the open intercom. The radio was sharp and peppery with sun static, but he could hear Woody and Johnboy laughing. “Cut it out! No skylarking! Let’s get this done!”

“Everything okay out there?” asked Commander Redenbaugh, from inside the Plowshare. The commander’s voice had a slight edge to it, and Thomas grimaced. The last time the three of them had gone out on EVA, practicing this very maneuver Johnboy had started to horse around and had accidentally sent a dropped lugnut smashing through the source-crystal housing, destroying the laser link to Earth. And hadn’t the commander gotten on their asses about that; NASA had been really pissed, too—with the laser link gone, they would have to depend solely on the radio, which was vulnerable to static in an active sun year like this.

It was hard to blame the others too much for cutting up a little on EVA, after long, claustrophobic months of being jammed together in the Plowshare, but the responsibility for things going smoothly was his. Out here, he was supposed to be in command. That made him feel lonely and isolated, but after all, it was what he had sweated and strived for since the earliest days of flight training. The landing party was his command, his chance for glory, and he wasn’t going to let anybody or anything ruin it.

“Everything’s okay, Commander,” Thomas said. “We’ve got the lander unshipped, and we’re almost ready to go. I estimate about twenty minutes to separation.” He spoke in the calm, matter-of-fact voice that tradition demanded, but inside he felt the excitement building again and hoped his pulse rate wasn’t climbing too noticeably on the readouts. In only a few minutes, they were going to be making the first manned landing on Mars! Within the hour, he’d be down there, where he’d dreamed of being ever since he was a boy. On Mars.

And he would be in command. How about that, Pop, Thomas thought, with a flash of irony. That good enough for you? Finally?

Johnboy had pulled himself back to the Plowshare.

“Okay, then,” Thomas said dryly. “If you’re ready, let’s get back to work. You and Woody get that junk out of the lander. I’ll stay out here and mind the store.”

“Yes, sir, sir,” Johnboy said with amiable irony, and Thomas sighed. Johnboy was okay but a bit of a flake—you had to sit on him a little from time to time. Woody and Johnboy began pulling boxes out of the lander; it had been used as storage space for supplies they’d need on the return voyage, to save room in Plowshare. There were jokes cracked about how they ought to let some of the crates of flash-frozen glop that NASA straight-facedly called food escape into space, but at last, burdened with boxes, the two space-suited figures lumbered to the air lock and disappeared inside.

Thomas was alone, floating in space.

You really were alone out here, too, with nothing but the gaping immensity of the universe surrounding you on all sides. It was a little scary but at the same time something to savor after long months of being packed into the Plowshare with three other men. There was precious little privacy aboard ship—out here, alone, there was nothing but privacy. Just you, the stars, the void . . . and, of course, Mars.

Thomas relaxed at the end of his tether, floating comfortably, and watched as Mars, immense and ruddy, turned below him like some huge, slow-spinning, rusty-red top. Mars! Lazily, he let his eyes trace the familiar landmarks. The ancient dead-river valley of Kasei Vallis, impact craters puckering its floor . . . the reddish brown and grey of haze and frost in Noctis Labyrinthus, the Labyrinth of Night . . . the immense scar of the Vallis Marineris, greatest of canyons, stretching two thirds of the way around the equator . . . the great volcanic constructs in Tharsis . . . and there, the Chryse Basin, where soon they would be walking.

Mars was as familiar to him as the streets of his hometown—more so, since his family had spent so much time moving from place to place when he was a kid. Mars had stayed a constant, though. Throughout his boyhood, he had been obsessed with space and with Mars in particular . . . as if he’d somehow always known that one day he’d be here, hanging disembodied like some ancient god over the slowly spinning red planet below. In high school he had done a paper on Martian plate tectonics. When he was only a gangly gradeschool kid, ten or eleven, maybe, he had memorized every available map of Mars, learned every crater and valley and mountain range.

Drowsily, his thoughts drifted even further back, to that day in the attic of the old house in Wrightstown, near McGuire Air Force Base—the sound of jets taking off mingling with the lazy Saturday afternoon sounds of kids playing baseball and yelling, dogs barking, lawn mowers whirring, the rusty smell of pollen coming in the window on the mild, spring air—when he’d discovered an old, dog-eared copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars.

He’d stayed up there for hours reading it, while the day passed unnoticed around him, until the light got so bad that he couldn’t see the type anymore. And that night he’d surreptitiously read it in bed, under the covers with a pencil flashlight, until he’d finally fallen asleep, his dreams reeling with giant, four-armed green men, thoats, zitidars, long-sword-swinging heroes, and beautiful princesses . . . the Twin Cities of Helium . . . the dead sea bottoms lit by the opalescent light of the two hurtling moons . . . the nomad caverns of the Tharks, the barbaric riders draped with glittering jewels and rich riding silks. For an instant, staring down at Mars, he felt a childish disappointment that all of that really wasn’t waiting down there for him after all, and then he smiled wryly at himself. Never doubt that those childhood dreams had power—after all, one way or another, they’d gotten him here, hadn’t they?

Right at that moment the sandstorm began to blow up.

It blew up from the hard-pan deserts and plains and as Thomas watched in dismay, began to creep slowly across the planet like a tarp being pulled over a work site. Down there, winds moving at hundreds of kilometers per hour were racing across the Martian surface, filling the sky with churning, yellow-white clouds of sand. A curtain storm.

“You see that, Thomas?” the commander’s voice asked in Thomas’s ears.

“Yeah,” Thomas said glumly. “I see it.”

“Looks like a bad one.”

Even as they watched, the storm slowly and relentlessly blotted out the entire visible surface of the planet. The lesser features went first, the scarps and rills and stone fields, then the greater ones. The polar caps went. Finally even the top of Olympus Mons—the tallest mountain in the solar system—disappeared.

“Well, that’s it,” the commander said sadly. “Socked in. No landing today.”

“Son of a bitch!” Thomas exploded, feeling his stomach twist with disappointment and sudden rage. He’d been so close.

“Watch your language, Thomas,” the commander warned. “This is an open channel.” Meaning that we mustn’t shock the Vast Listening Audience Back Home. Oh, horrors, certainly not.

“If it’d just waited a couple more hours, we would have been able to get down there—”

“You ought to be glad it didn’t,” the commander said mildly. “Then you’d have been sitting on your hands down there with all that sand piling up around your ears. The wind can hit one hundred forty miles an hour during one of those storms. I’d hate to have to try to sit one out on the ground. Relax, Thomas. We’ve got plenty of time. As soon as the weather clears, you’ll go down. It can’t last forever.”

Five weeks later, the storm finally died.

Those were hard weeks for Thomas, who was as full of useless energy as a caged tiger. He had become overaware of his surroundings, of the pervasive, sour human smell, of the faintly metallic taste of the air. It was like living in a jungle-gym factory, all twisting pipes and narrow, cluttered passages, enclosed by metal walls that were never out of sight. For the first time during the long months of the mission, he began to feel seriously claustrophobic.

But the real enemy was time. Thomas was acutely aware that the inexorable clock of celestial mechanics was ticking relentlessly away . . . that soon the optimal launch window for the return journey to Earth would open and that they must shape for Earth then or never get home at all. Whether the storm had lifted yet or not, whether they had landed on Mars or not, whether Thomas had finally gotten a chance to show off his own particular righteous stuff or not, when the launch window opened, they had to go.

They had less than a week left in Mars orbit now, and still the sandstorm raged.

The waiting got on everyone’s nerves. Thomas found Johnboy’s manic energy particularly hard to take. Increasingly, he found himself snapping at Johnboy during meals and “happy hour,” until eventually the commander had to take him aside and tell him to loosen up. Thomas muttered something apologetic, and the commander studied him shrewdly and said, “Plenty of time left, old buddy. Don’t worry. We’ll get you down there yet!” The two men found themselves grinning at each other. Commander Redenbaugh was a good officer, a quiet, pragmatic New Englander who seemed to become ever more phlegmatic and unflappable as the tension mounted and everyone else’s nerves frayed. Johnboy habitually called him Captain Ahab. The commander seemed rather to enjoy the nickname, which was one of the few things that suggested that there might actually be a sense of humor lurking somewhere behind his deadpan facade.

The commander gave Thomas’s arm an encouraging squeeze, then launched himself toward the communications console. Thomas watched him go, biting back a sudden bitter surge of words that he knew he’d never say . . . not up here, anyway, where the walls literally had ears. Ever since Skylab, astronauts had flown with the tacit knowledge that everything they said in the ship was being eavesdropped on and evaluated by NASA. Probably before the day was out somebody back in Houston would be making a black mark next to his name in a psychological-fitness dossier, just because he’d let the waiting get on his nerves to the point where the commander had had to speak to him about it. But damn it, it was easier for the rest—they didn’t have the responsibility of being NASA’s token Nigger in the Sky, with all the white folks back home waiting and watching to see how you were going to fuck up. He’d felt like a third wheel on the way out here—Woody and the commander could easily fly the ship themselves and even take care of most of the routine schedule of experiments—but the landing party was supposed to be his command, his chance to finally do something other than be the obligatory black face in the NASA photos of Our Brave Astronauts. He remembered his demanding, domineering, hard-driving father saying to him, hundreds of times in his adolescent years, “It’s a white man’s world out there. If you’re going to make it, you got to show that you’re better than any of them. You got to force yourself down their throats, make them need you. You got to be twice as good as any of them . . .” Yeah, Pop, Thomas thought, you bet, Pop . . . thinking, as he always did, of the one and only time he’d ever seen his father stinking, slobbering, falling-down drunk, the night the old man had been passed over for promotion to brigadier general for the third time, forcing him into mandatory retirement. First they got to give you the chance, Pop, he thought, remembering, again as he always did, a cartoon by Ron Cobb that he had seen when he was a kid and that had haunted him ever since: a cartoon showing black men in space suits on the moon—sweeping up around the Apollo 58 campsite.

“We’re losing Houston again,” Woody said. “I jes cain’t keep the signal.” He turned a dial, and the voice of Mission Control came into the cabin, chopped up and nearly obliterated by a hissing static that sounded like dozens of eggs frying in a huge iron skillet. “. . . read? . . . not read you . . . Plowshare . . . losing . . .” Sunspot activity had been unusually high for weeks, and just a few hours before, NASA had warned them about an enormous solar flare that was about to flood half the solar system with radio noise. Even as they listened, the voice was completely drowned out by static; the hissing noise kept getting louder and louder. “Weh-ayl,” Woody said glumly, “that does it. That solar flare’s screwing everything up. If we still had the laser link”—here he flashed a sour look at Johnboy, who had the grace to look embarrassed—“we’d be okay, I guess, but without it . . . weh-ayl, shit, it could be days before reception clears up. Weeks, maybe.”

Irritably, Woody flipped a switch, and the hissing static noise stopped. All four men were silent for a moment, feeling their suddenly increased isolation. For months, their only remaining contact with Earth had been a faint voice on the radio, and now, abruptly, even that link was severed. It made them feel lonelier than ever and somehow farther away from home.

Thomas turned away from the communications console and automatically glanced out the big observation window at Mars. It took him a while to notice that there was something different about the view. Then he realized that the uniform, dirty yellow-white cloud cover was breaking up and becoming streaky, turning the planet into a giant, mottled Easter egg, allowing tantalizing glimpses of the surface. “Hey!” Thomas said, and at the same time Johnboy crowed, “Well, well, lookie there! Guess who’s back, boys!”

They all crowded around the observation window, eagerly jostling one another.

As they watched, the storm died all at once, with the suddenness of a conjuring trick, and the surface was visible again. Johnboy let out an ear-splitting rebel yell. Everyone cheered. They were all laughing and joking and slapping one another’s shoulders, and then, one by one, they fell silent.

Something was wrong. Thomas could feel the short hairs prickling erect along his back and arms, feel the muscles of his gut tightening. Something was wrong. What was it? What . . . ? He heard the commander gasp, and at the same time realization broke through into his conscious mind, and he felt the blood draining from his face.

Woody was the first to speak.

“But . . .” Woody said, in a puzzled almost petulant voice, like a bewildered child. “But . . . that’s not Mars.”

The air is thin on Mars. So thin it won’t hold up dust in suspension unless the wind is traveling at enormous speeds. When the wind dies, the dust falls like pebbles, fast and all at once.

After five weeks of storm, the wind died. The dust fell.

Revealing entirely the wrong planet.

The surface was still predominantly a muddy reddish orange, but now there were large mottled patches of green and greyish ocher. The surface seemed softer now, smoother, with much less rugged relief. It took a moment to realize why. The craters—so very like those on the moon both in shape and distribution—were gone, and so were most of the mountains, the scarps and rills, the giant volcanic constructs. In their place were dozens of fine, perfectly straight blue lines. They were bordered by bands of green and extended across the entire planet in an elaborate crisscrossing pattern, from polar icecap to polar icecap.

“I cain’t find anything,” Woody was saying exasperatedly. “What happened to everything? I cain’t even see Olympus Mons, for Christsake! The biggest fucking volcano in the solar system! Where is it? And what the fuck are those lines?”

Again Thomas felt an incredible burst of realization well up inside him. He gaped at the planet below, unable to speak, unable to answer, but Johnboy did it for him.

Johnboy had been leaning close to the window, his jaw slack with amazement, but now an odd, dreamy look was stealing over his face, and when he spoke, it was in a matter-of-fact, almost languid voice. “They’re canals,” he said.

“Canals, my ass!” the commander barked, losing control of his temper for the first time on the mission. “There aren’t any canals on Mars! That idea went out with Schiaparelli and Lowell.”

Johnboy shrugged. “Then what are those?” he asked mildly, jerking his thumb toward the planet, and Thomas felt a chill feather up along his spine.

A quick visual search turned up no recognizable surface features, none of the landmarks familiar to them all from the Mariner 9 and Viking orbiter photomaps—although Johnboy annoyed the commander by pointing out that the major named canals that Percival Lowell had described and mapped in the nineteenth century—Strymon, Charontis, Erebus, Orcus, Dis—were there, just as Lowell had said that they were.

“It’s got to be the sandstorm that did it,” Thomas said, grasping desperately for some rational explanation. “The wind moving the sand around from one place to another, maybe, covering up one set of surface features while at the same time exposing another set . . .”

He faltered to a stop, seeing the holes in that argument even as Johnboy snorted and said, “Real good, sport, real good. But Olympus Mons just isn’t there, a mountain three times higher than Mount Everest! Even if you could cover it up with sand, then what you’d have would be a fucking sand dune three times higher than Everest . . . but there don’t seem to be any big mountains down there at all anymore.”

“I know what happened,” Woody said before Thomas could reply.

His voice sounded so strange that they all turned to look at him. He had been scanning the surface with the small optical telescope for the Mars-Sat experiments, but now he was leaning on the telescope mounting and staring at them instead. His eyes were feverish and unfocused and bright and seemed to have sunken into his head. He was trembling slightly, and his face had become waxen and pale.

He’s scared, Thomas realized, he’s just plain scared right out of his skull . . . “This has all happened before,” Woody said hoarsely.

“What in the world are you talking about?” Thomas asked.

“Haven’t you read your history?” Woody asked. He was a reticent man, slow voiced and deliberate, like most computer hackers, but now the words rushed from his mouth in a steadily accelerating stream, almost tumbling over one another in their anxiety to get out. His voice was higher than usual, and it held the ragged overtones of hysteria in it. “The Mariner 9 mission, the robot probe. Back in 1971. Remember? Jes as the probe reached Mars orbit, before it could start sending back any photos, a great big curtain storm came up, jes like this one. Great big bastard. Covered everything. Socked the whole planet for weeks. No surface visibility at all. Had the scientists back home pulling their hair out. But when the storm finally did lift, and the photos did start coming in, everybody was jes flatout amazed. None of the Lowellian features, no canals, nothing—jes craters and rills and volcanoes, all the stuff we expected to see this time around.” He gave a shaky laugh.

“So everybody jes shrugged and said Lowell had been wrong—poor visibility, selector bias, he jes thought he’d seen canals. Connected up existing surface features with imaginary lines, maybe. He’d seen what he wanted to see.” Woody paused, licking at his lips, and then began talking faster and shriller than ever. “But that wasn’t true, was it? We know better, don’t we, boys? We can see the proof right out that window! My crazy ol’ uncle Barry, he had the right of it from the start, and everybody else was wrong. He tole me what happened, but I was jes too dumb to believe him! It was the space people, the UFO people! The Martians! They saw the probe coming, and they whomped that storm up, to keep us from seeing the surface, and then they changed everything. Under the cover of the sandstorm, they changed the whole damn planet to fool us, to keep us from finding out they were there! This proves it! They changed it back! They’re out there right now, the flying saucer people! They’re out there—“

“Bullshit!” the commander said. His voice was harsh and loud and cracked like a whip, but it was the unprecedented use of obscenity that startled them more than anything else. They turned to look at him, where he floated near the command console. Even Woody, who had just seemed on the verge of a breakdown, gasped and fell silent.

When he was sure he had everyone’s attention, the commander smiled coldly and said, “While you were all going through your little psychodrama, I’ve been doing a little elementary checking. Here’s the telemetry data, and you know what? Everything shows up the same as it did before the sandstorm. Exactly . . . the . . . same. Deep radar, infrared, everything.” He tapped the command console. “It’s just the same as it ever was, no breathable air, low atmospheric pressure, subzero temperatures, nothing but sand and a bunch of goddamn rusty-red rocks. No vegetation, no surface water, no canals.” He switched the view from the ship’s exterior cameras onto the cabin monitor, and there for everyone to see was the familiar Mars of the Mariner and Viking probes, rocky, rugged, cratered, lifeless. No green oases. No canals.

Everyone was silent, mesmerized by the two contradictory images.

“I don’t know what’s causing this strange visual hallucination we’re all seeing,” the commander said, gesturing at the window and speaking slowly and deliberately. “But I do know that it is a hallucination. It doesn’t show up on the cameras, it doesn’t show up in the telemetry. It’s just not real.”

They adjourned the argument to the bar. Doofus the Moose—an orange inflatable toy out of Johnboy’s personal kit—smiled benignly down on them as they sipped from bags of reconstituted citrus juice (NASA did not believe that they could be trusted with a ration of alcohol, and the hip flask Woody had smuggled aboard had been polished off long before) and went around and around the issue without reaching any kind of consensus. The “explanations” became more and more farfetched, until at last the commander uttered the classic phrase mass hypnosis, causing Johnboy to start whooping in derision.

There was a long, humming silence. Then Johnboy, his mood altering, said very quietly, “It doesn’t matter anyway. We’re never going to find out anything more about what’s happening from up here.” He looked soberly around at the others. “There’s really only one decision we’ve got to make. Do we go on down, or not? Do we land?”

Even the commander was startled. “After all this—you still want to land?” Johnboy shrugged. “Why not? It’s what we came all the way out here for, isn’t it?”

“It’s too dangerous. We don’t even know what’s happening here.”

“I thought it was only mass hypnosis,” Johnboy said slyly.

“I think it is,” the commander said stoutly, unperturbed by Johnboy’s sarcasm. “But even if it is, we still don’t know why we’re having these hallucinations, do we? It could be a sign of organic deterioration or dysfunction of some sort, caused by who knows what. Maybe there’s some kind of intense electromagnetic field out there that we haven’t detected that’s disrupting the electrical pathways of our nervous systems; maybe there’s an unforeseen flaw in the recycling system that’s causing some kind of toxic buildup that affects brain chemistry . . . The point is, we’re not functioning right; we’re seeing things that aren’t there!”

“None of that stuff matters,” Johnboy said. He leaned forward, speaking now with great urgency and passion. No one had ever seen him so serious or so ferociously intent. “We have to land. Whatever the risk. It was hard enough funding this mission. If we fuck up out here, there may never be another one. NASA itself might not survive.” He stared around at his crewmates. “How do you think it’s going to look, Woody? We run into the greatest mystery the human race has ever encountered, and we immediately go scurrying home with our tails tucked between our legs without even investigating it? That sound good to you?”

Woody grunted and shook his head. “Sure doesn’t, ol’ buddy,” he said. He glanced around the table and then coolly said, “Let’s get on down there.” Now that he was apparently no longer envisioning the imminent arrival of UFO-riding astronaut mutilators, Woody seemed determined to be as cool and unflappable and ultramacho as possible, as if to prove that he hadn’t really been frightened after all.

There was another silence, and slowly Thomas became aware that everyone else was staring at him.

It all came down to him now. The deciding vote would be his: Thomas locked eyes with Johnboy, and Johnboy stared back at him with unwavering intensity. The question didn’t even need to be voiced; it hung in the air between them and charged the lingering silence with tension. Thomas moved uneasily under the weight of all those watching eyes. How did he feel? He didn’t really know—strange, that was about the closest he could come to it . . . hung up between fear and some other slowly stirring emotion he couldn’t identify and didn’t really want to think about. But there was one thing he was suddenly certain about. They weren’t going to abandon his part of the mission, not after he’d come this far! Certainly he was never going to get another chance to get into the history books. Probably that was Johnboy’s real motive, too, above and beyond the jazz about the survival of NASA. Johnboy was a cool enough head to realize that if they came home without landing, they’d be laughingstocks, wimps instead of heroes, and somebody else on some future mission would get all the glory. Johnboy’s ego was much too big to allow him to take a chance on that. And he was right! Thomas had even more reason to be afraid of being passed over, passed by: When you were black, opportunities like this certainly didn’t knock more than once.

“We’ve still got almost three days until the launch window opens,” Thomas said, speaking slowly and deliberately. “I think we should make maximum use of that time by going down there and finding out as much as we can.” He raised his eyes and stared directly at the commander. “I say we land.”

Commander Redenbaugh insisted on referring the issue to Houston for a final decision, but after several hours of trying, it became clear that he was not going to be able to get through to Earth. For once, the buck was refusing to be passed.

The commander sighed and ran his fingers wearily through his hair. He felt old and tired and ineffectual. He knew what Houston would probably have said, anyway. With the exception of the commander himself (who had been too well-known not to be chosen), de facto policy for this mission had been to select unmarried men with no close personal or family ties back home. That alone spoke volumes. They were supposed to be taking risks out here. That was what they were here for. It was part of their job.

At dawn over Chryse, they went down.

As commander of the landing party, Thomas was first out of the lander. Awkward in his suit, he climbed backward out of the hatch and down the exterior ladder. He caught reeling flashes of the Martian sky, and it was orange, as it should be. His first, instinctive reaction was relief, followed by an intense stab of perverse disappointment, which surprised him. As he hung from the ladder, one foot almost touching the ground, he paused to reel off the words that some P.R. man at NASA had composed for the occasion. “In the name of all humanity, we dedicate the planet of war to peace. May God grant us this.” He put his foot down, then looked down from the ladder, twisting around to get a look at the spot he was standing on.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered reverently. Orange sky or not, there were plants of some kind growing here. He was standing almost knee-deep in them, a close-knit, springy mat of greyish-ocher vegetation. He knelt down and gingerly touched it.

“It looks like some kind of moss,” he reported. “It’s pliant and giving to the touch, springs slowly back up again. I can break it off in my hand.”

The transmission from the Plowshare crackled and buzzed with static. “Thomas,” said the commander’s voice in his ear, “what are you talking about? Are you okay?”

Thomas straightened up and took his first long, slow look around. The ocher-colored moss stretched out to the orange horizon in all directions, covering both the flat plains immediately around them and a range of gently rolling hills in the middle distance to the north. Here and there the moss was punctuated by tight clusters of spiny, misshapen shrubs, usually brown or glossy black or muddy purple, and even occasionally by a lone tree. The trees were crimson, about ten feet high, the trunks glistened with the color of fresh, wet blood, and their flat, glassy leaves glittered like sheets of amethyst. Thomas dubbed them flametrees.

The lander was resting only several hundred yards away from a canal.

It was wide, the canal, and its still, perfectly clear waters reflected the sky as dark as wine, as red as blood. Small yellow flowers trailed delicate tentacles into the water from the edging walls, which were old and crumbling and carved with strange geometrical patterns of swirls and curlicues that might, just possibly, be runes.

It can’t possibly be real, Thomas thought dazedly.

Johnboy and Woody were clambering down the ladder, clumsy and troll-like in their hulking suits, and Thomas moved over to make room for them.

“Mother dog!” Woody breathed, looking around him, the wonder clear in his voice. “This is really something, ain’t it?” He laid a gloved hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “This is what we saw from up there.”

“But it’s impossible,” Thomas said.

Woody shrugged. “If it’s a hallucination, then it’s sure as hell a beautiful one.”

Johnboy had walked on ahead without a word; until he was several yards away from the ship; now he came to a stop and stood staring out across the moss-covered plain to the distant hills. “It’s like being born again,” he whispered.

The commander cut in again, his voice popping and crackling with static. “Report in! What’s going on down there?”

Thomas shook his head. “Commander, I wish I knew.”

He unlashed the exterior camera from the lander, set it up on its tripod, removed the lens cover. “Tell me what you see.”

“I see sand, dust, rocks . . . what else do you expect me to see?”

“No canals?” Thomas asked sadly. “No trees? No moss?”

“Christ, you’re hallucinating again, aren’t you?” the commander said. “This is what I was afraid of. All of you, listen to me! Listen good! There aren’t any goddamn canals down there. Maybe there’s water down a few dozen meters as permafrost. But the surface is as dry as the moon.”

“But there’s some sort of moss growing all over the place,” Thomas said. “Kind of greyish-ocher color, about a foot and a half high. There’s clumps of bushes. There’s even trees of some kind. Can’t you see any of that?”

“You’re hallucinating,” the commander said. “Believe me, the camera shows nothing but sand and rock down there. You’re standing in a goddamn lunar desert and babbling to me about trees, for Christ’s sake! That’s enough for me. I want everybody back up here, right now. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into this in the first place. We’ll let Houston unravel all this. It’s no longer our problem. Woody, come back here! Stick together, dammit!”

Johnboy was still standing where he had stopped, as if entranced, but Woody was wandering toward the canal, poking around, exploring.

“Listen up!” the commander said. “I want everybody back in the lander, right now. I’m going to get you out of there before somebody gets hurt. Everybody back now. That’s an order! That’s a direct order!”

Woody turned reluctantly and began bounding slowly toward the lander, pausing every few yards to look back over his shoulder at the canal.

Thomas sighed, not sure whether he was relieved to be getting out of here or heartbroken to be going so soon.

“Okay, Commander,” Thomas said. “We read you. We’re coming up. Right away.” He took a few light, buoyant steps forward—fighting a tendency to bounce kangaroo-like off the ground—and tapped Johnboy gently on the arm. “Come on. We’ve got to go back up.”

Johnboy turned slowly around. “Do we?” he said. “Do we really?”

“Orders,” Thomas said uneasily, feeling something begin to stir and turn over ponderously in the deep backwaters of his own soul. “I don’t want to go yet, either, but the commander’s right. If we’re hallucinating . . .”

“Don’t give me that shit!” Johnboy said passionately. “Hallucinating, my ass! You touched the moss, didn’t you? You felt it. This isn’t a hallucination, or mass hypnosis, or any of that other crap. This is a world, a new world, and it’s ours!”

“Johnboy, get in the lander right now!” the commander broke in. “That’s an order!”

“Fuck you, Ahab!” Johnboy said. “And fuck your orders, too!”

Thomas was shocked—and at the same time felt a stab of glee at the insubordination, an emotion that surprised him and that he hurried uneasily to deny, saying, “You’re out of line, Johnboy, I want you to listen to me, now—”

“No, you listen to me,” Johnboy said fiercely. “Look around you! I know you’ve read Burroughs. You know where you are! A dead sea bottom, covered with ocher-colored moss. Rolling hills. A canal.”

“Those are the very reasons why it can’t be real,” Thomas said uneasily.

“It’s real if we want it to be real,” Johnboy said. “It’s here because of us. It’s made for us. It’s made out of us.”

“Stop gabbing and get in the lander!” the commander shouted. “Move! Get your asses in gear!”

Woody had come up to join them. “Maybe we’d better—” he started to say, but Johnboy cut in with:

“Listen to me! I knew what was happening the moment I looked out and saw the Mars of Schiaparelli and Lowell, the old Mars. Woody, you said that Lowell saw what he wanted to see. That’s right, but in a different way than you meant it. You know, other contemporary astronomers looked at Mars at the same time as Lowell, with the same kind of instruments, and saw no canals at all. You ever hear of consensual reality? Because Lowell wanted to see it, it existed for him! Just as it exists for us—because we want it to exist! We don’t have to accept the grey reality of Ahab here and all the other grey little men back at NASA. They want it to be rocks and dust and dead, drab desert; they like it that way—”

“For God’s sake!” the commander said. “Somebody get that nut in the lander.”

“—but we don’t like it! Deep down inside of us—Thomas, Woody—we don’t believe in that Mars. We believe in this one—the real one. That’s why it’s here for us! That’s why it’s the way it is—it’s made of our dreams. Who knows what’s over those hills: bone-white faerie cities? four-armed green men? beautiful princesses? the Twin Cities of Helium? There could be anything out there!”

“Thomas!” the commander snapped. “Get Johnboy in the lander now. Use force if necessary, but get him in there. Johnboy! You’re emotionally unstable. I want you to consider yourself under house arrest!”

“I’ve been under house arrest all my life,” Johnboy said. “Now I’m free.” Moving deliberately, he reached up and unsnapped his helmet.

Thomas started forward with an inarticulate cry of horror, trying to stop him, but it was too late. Johnboy had his helmet completely off now, and was shaking his head to free his shaggy, blond hair, which rippled slightly in the breeze. He took a deep breath, another, and then grinned at Thomas. “The air smells great,” he said. “And, my God, is it clean!”

“Johnboy?” Thomas said hesitantly. “Are you okay?”

“Christ!” the commander was muttering. “Christ! Oh my God! Oh my sweet God!”

“I’m fine,” Johnboy said. “In fact, I’m terrific.” He smiled brilliantly at them, then sniffed at the inside of his helmet and made a face. “Phew! Smells like an armpit in there!” He started to strip off his suit.

“Thomas, Woody,” the commander said leadenly. “Put Johnboy’s body into the lander, and then get in there yourselves, fast, before we lose somebody else.”

“But . . .” Thomas said, “there’s nothing wrong with Johnboy. We’re talking to him.”

“God damn it, look at your med readouts.”

Thomas glanced at the chin strap readout board, which was reflected into a tiny square on the right side of his faceplate. There was a tiny red light flashing on Johnboy’s readout. “Christ!” Thomas whispered.

“He’s dead, Thomas, he’s dead. I can see his body. He fell over like he’d been poleaxed right after he opened his helmet and hemorrhaged his lungs out into the sand. Listen to me! Johnny’s dead—anything else is a hallucination!”

Johnboy grinned at them, kicking free of his suit. “I may be dead, kids,” he told them quizzically, “but let me tell you, dead or not, I feel one-hundred-percent better now that I’m out of that crummy suit, believe it. The air’s a little bit cool, but it feels wonderful.” He raised his arms and stretched lazily, like a cat.

“Johnboy—?” Woody said, tentatively.

“Listen,” the commander raged. “You’re hallucinating! You’re talking to yourselves! Get in the lander! That’s an order.”

“Yes, sir, sir,” Johnboy said mockingly, sketching a salute at the sky. “Are you actually going to listen to that asshole?” He stepped forward and took each of them by the arm and shook them angrily. “Do I feel dead to you, schmucks?”

Thomas felt the fingers close over his arm, and an odd, deep thrill shot through him—part incredulity, part supernatural dread, part a sudden, strange exhilaration. “I can feel him,” Woody was saying wonderingly, patting Johnboy with his gloved hands. “He’s solid. He’s there. I’ll be a son of a bitch—”

“Be one?” Johnboy said, grinning. “Ol’ buddy, you already are one.”

Woody laughed. “No hallucination’s that corny,” Woody said to Thomas. “He’s real, all right.”

“But the readout—” Thomas began.

“Obviously wrong. There’s got to be some kind of mistake—”

Woody started to unfasten his helmet.

“No!” the commander screamed, and at the same time Thomas darted forward shouting, “Woody! Stop!” and tried to grab him, but Woody twisted aside and bounded limberly away, out of reach.

Cautiously, Woody took his helmet off. He sniffed suspiciously, his lean, leathery face stiff with tension, then he relaxed, and then he began to smile. “Hooie,” he said in awe.

“Get his helmet back on, quick!” the commander was shouting. But Woody’s medical readout was already flashing orange, and even as the commander spoke, it turned red.

“Too late!” the commander moaned. “Oh God, too late . . .”

Woody looked into his helmet at his own flashing readout. His face registered surprise for an instant, and then he began to laugh. “Weh-ayl,” Woody drawled, “now that I’m officially a corpse, I guess I don’t need this anymore.” He threw his helmet aside; it bounced and rolled over the spongy moss. “Thomas,” Woody said, “you do what you want, but I’ve been locked up in a smelly ol’ tin can for months, and what I’m going to do is wash my face in some honest-to-God, unrecycled water!” He grinned at Thomas and began walking away toward the canal. “I might even take me a swim.”

“Thomas . . .” the commander said brokenly. “Don’t worry about the bodies. Don’t worry about anything else. Just get in the lander. As soon as you’re inside I’m going to trigger the launch sequence.”

Johnboy was staring at him quizzically, compassionately—waiting.

“Johnboy . . .” Thomas said. “Johnboy, how can I tell which is real?”

“You choose what’s real,” Johnboy said quietly. “We all do.”

“Listen to me, Thomas,” the commander pleaded; there was an edge of panic in his voice. “You’re talking to yourself again. Whatever you think you’re seeing, or hearing, or even touching, it just isn’t real. There can be tactile hallucinations too, you know. It’s not real.”

“Old Ahab up there has made his choice, too,” Johnboy said. “For him, in his own conceptual universe, Woody and I are dead. And that’s real, too—for him. But you don’t have to choose that reality. You can choose this one.”

“I don’t know,” Thomas mumbled. “I just don’t know.”

Woody hit the water in an explosion of foam. He swam a few strokes, whooping, then turned to float on his back. “C’mon in, you guys!” he shouted.

Johnboy smiled, then turned to bring his face close to Thomas’s helmet, peering in through the faceplate. Johnboy was still wearing that strange, dreamy look, so unlike his usual animated expression, and his eyes were clear and compassionate and calm. “It calls for an act of faith, Thomas. Maybe that’s how every world begins.” He grinned at Thomas. “Meanwhile, I think I’m going to take a swim, too.” He strolled off toward the canal, bouncing a little at each step.

Thomas stood unmoving, the two red lights flashing on his chinstrap readout.

“They’re both going swimming now,” Thomas said dully.

“Thomas! Can you hear me, Thomas?”

“I hear you,” Thomas mumbled.

They were having fun in their new world—he could see that. The kind of fun that kids had . . . that every child took for granted. The joy of discovery, of everything being new . . . the joy that seemed to get lost in the grey shuffle to adulthood, given up bit by incremental bit . . .

“You’re just going to have to trust me, Thomas. Trust me. Take my word for it that I know what I’m talking about. You’re going to have to take that on faith. Now listen to me. No matter what you think is going on down there, don’t take your helmet off.”

His father used to lecture him in that same tone of voice, demanding, domineering . . . and at the same time condescending. Scornful. Daddy knows best. Listen to me, boy, I know what I’m talking about! Do what I tell you to do!

“Do you hear me? Do not take your helmet off? Under any circumstances at all. That’s an order.”

Thomas nodded, before he could stop himself. Here he was, good boy little Tommy, standing on the fringes again, taking orders, doing what he was told. Getting passed over again. And for what?

Something flew by in the distance, headed toward the hills.

It looked to be about the size of a large bird, but like a dragonfly, it had six long, filmy gossamer wings, which it swirled around in a complexly interweaving pattern, as if it were rowing itself through the air.

“Get to the lander, Thomas, and close the hatch.”

Never did have any fun. Have to be twice as good as any of them, have to bust your goddamn ass—

“That’s a direct order, Thomas!”

You’ve got to make the bastards respect you, you’ve got to earn their respect. His father had said that a million times. And how little time it had taken him to waste away and die, once he’d stopped trying, once he realized that you can’t earn what people aren’t willing to sell.

A red and yellow lizard ran over his boot, as quick and silent as a tickle. It had six legs.

One by one, he began to undog the latches of his helmet.

“No! Listen to me! If you take off your helmet, you’ll die. Don’t do it! For God’s sake, don’t do it!”

The last latch. It was sticky, but he tugged at it purposefully.

“You’re killing yourself! Stop it! Please. Stop! You goddamn stupid nigger! Stop—”

Thomas smiled, oddly enough feeling closer to the commander in that moment than he ever had before. “Too late,” he said cheerfully.

Thomas twisted his helmet a quarter turn and lifted it off his head.

When the third red light winked on, Commander Redenbaugh slumped against the board and started to cry. He wept openly and loudly, for they had been good men, and he had failed all of them, even Thomas, the best and steadiest of the lot. He hadn’t been able to save a goddamned one of them!

At last he was able to pull himself together. He forced himself to look again at the monitor, which showed three space-suited bodies sprawled out lifelessly on the rusty-red sand.

He folded his hands, bent his head, and prayed for the souls of his dead companions. Then he switched the monitor off.

It was time to make plans. Since the Plowshare would be carrying a much lighter-than-anticipated return cargo, he had enough excess fuel to allow him to leave a bit early, if he wanted to, and he did want to. He began to punch figures into the computer, smiling bitterly at the irony. Yesterday he had been regretting that they had so little time left in Mars orbit. Now, suddenly, he was in a hurry to get home . . . but no matter how many corners he shaved, he’d still be several long, grueling months in transit—with quite probably a court-martial waiting for him when he got back.

For an instant, even the commander’s spirit quailed at the thought of that dreadful return journey. But he soon got himself under control again. It would be a difficult and unpleasant trip, right enough, but a determined man could always manage to do what needed to be done. Even if he had to do it alone.

When the Plowshare’s plasma drive was switched on, it created a daytime star in the Martian sky. It was like a shooting star in reverse, starting out at its brightest and dimming rapidly as it moved up and away.

Thomas saw it leave. He was leaning against his makeshift spear—flametree wood, with a fire-hardened tip—and watching Johnboy preparing to skin the dead hyena-leopard, when he chanced to glance up. “Look,” he said.

Johnboy followed Thomas’s eyes and saw it, too. He smiled sardonically and lifted the animal’s limp paw, making it wave bye-bye. “So long, Ahab,” Johnboy said. “Good luck.” He went back to skinning the beast. The hyena-leopard—a little bit larger than a wildcat, six-legged, saber-tusked, its fur a muddy purple with rusty-orange spots—had attacked without warning and fought savagely; it had taken all three of them to kill it.

Woody looked up from where he was lashing a makeshift flametree-wood raft together with lengths of wiring from the lander. “I’m sure he’ll make it okay,” Woody said quietly.

Thomas sighed. “Yeah,” he said, and then, more briskly, “Let me give you a hand with that raft. If we snap it up, we ought to be ready to leave by morning.”

Last night, climbing the highest of the rolling hills to the north, they had seen the lights of a distant city, glinting silver and yellow and orange on the far horizon, gleaming far away across the black midnight expanse of the dead sea bottom like an ornate and intricate piece of jewelry set against ink-black velvet.

Thomas was still not sure if he hoped there would be aristocratic red men there, and giant four-armed green Tharks, and beautiful Martian princesses.

Solace

Introduction to Solace

“Solace” concerns the transmission of virtual-reality scenarios from one person’s mind directly to another’s. Because Gardner Dozois wrote it, it’s a superb story: compelling, horrifying, provocative. It is also instructive about the growth of science fiction over the last several decades.

The virtual-reality machine goes back at least as far as Isaac Asimov’s 1955 story “Dreaming Is A Private Thing.” In that story, the future that spawned “dreamies” looks pretty much like the present. Only the machine itself is added. Dozois’ future, in contrast, is multi-layered and different. Casually mentioned details accumulate, creating a rich, bleak surround for the story: “the bus stopped to take on methane.” “Somewhere out there a killer satellite had found its prey.” A hologram of Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi. A Santa Fe comprising adobe buildings, “mock adobe buildings,” and megastructures of “terraces and tetrahedrons.” Cambodian immigrant children chattering in Spanish. Here is a future complex enough to inhabit.

And we do. The Asimov story describes story events, and we observe them with interest. In the Dozois story, we live the events. Again through the rich use of matter-of-fact detail, we feel as if we’re riding that ramshackle bus beside Kleisterman, eating at that Santa Fe greasy spoon. We taste it, smell it, feel it in our bones.

But the largest difference between the 1955 and 1990 stories go much deeper. In “Dreaming Is a Private Thing” the protagonist faces several problems: recruiting new talent to create “dreamies,” possible government censorship due to dreamies being (gasp!) used as porn, and a star dreamer wanting to quit. In “Solace” the protagonist faces himself, and he . . . No, I won’t spoil it for you. But it’s a problem far more troubling and terrifying than employee relations.

The Asimov story seeks to entertain us, and it succeeds admirably. It is still, after nearly fifty years, fun to read. But the Dozois story is after more. It forces us to confront ourselves, and this depth of effect, plus the masterly use of detail, marks the best SF of today. It illustrates how far the field has come.

Plus, of course, illustrating the genius of Gardner Dozois.

Nancy Kress

Solace

Kleisterman took a zeppelin to Denver, a feeder line to Pueblo, then transferred to a clattering local bus to Santa Fe. The bus was full of displaced Anglos who preferred the life of migrant fieldworker to the Oklahoma refugee camps, a few Cambodians, a few Indians, and a number of the poorer Hispanics, mostly mestizos—unemployables who had hoped that the liberation would mean the fulfillment of all their dreams, but who had instead merely found themselves working for rich Mexican caudillos rather than for millionaire Anglos. Most of the passengers had been across the border to blow their work vouchers in Denver or Carson City, and were now on their way back into Aztlan for another week’s picking. They slouched sullenly in their seats, some passed out from drink or God Food and already snoring, many wrapped in ponchos or old Army blankets against the increasing chill of the evening. They ignored Kleisterman, even though, in spite of his carefully anonymous clothes, he was clearly no field hand—and Kleisterman preferred it that way.

The bus was spavined and old, the seats broken in, the sticky vinyl upholstery smelling of sweat and smoke and ancient piss. A Greyhound logo had been chipped off the side and replaced by VIAJANDO AZTLAN. The bus rattled through the cold prairie night with exquisite slowness, farting and lurching, the transmission groaning and knocking every time the driver shifted gears. The heat didn’t work, or the interior lights, but Kleisterman sat stoically, not moving, as one by one the blaring radios faded and the crying babies quieted, until Kleisterman alone was awake in the chill darkness, his eyes gleaming in the shadows, shifting restlessly, never closing.

At some point during the night, they passed the Frontera Libertad, the Liberty Line, and its largely symbolic chain-link fence, and stopped at a checkpoint. A cyborg looked in, his great blank oval face glowing with sullen heat, like a dull rufous moon; he peered eyelessly at them for a thoughtful moment, then waved them on.

South of the border, in what had once been Colorado, they began to crawl up the long steep approach to the Raton Pass, the bus juttering and moaning like a soul in torment. Kleisterman was being washed by waves of exhaustion now, but in spite of them he slept poorly, fitfully, as he always did. It seemed as if every time his head dropped, his eyes closed, faces would spring to vivid life behind his eyelids, faces he did not want to encounter or consider, and his head would jerk up again, and his eyes would fly open, like suddenly released window shades. As always, he was afraid to dream . . . which only increased the bitter irony of his present mission. So he pinched himself cruelly to stay awake as the old bus inched painfully up and over the high mountain pass, and onto the Colorado Plateau.

At Raton, the bus stopped to take on more methane. The town was dark and seemingly deserted, the only light a dim bulb in the window of a ramshackle building that was being used as a fuel dump. Kleisterman stepped out of the bus and walked away from the circle of light to piss. It was very cold, and the inverted black bowl of sky overhead blazed with a million icy stars, more than Kleisterman had ever seen at once before. There was no sound except for a distant riverine roar of cold wind through the trees on the surrounding hillsides. His piss steamed in the milky starlight. As he watched, one of the stars overhead suddenly, noiselessly, flared into diamond brilliance, a dozen times as bright as it had been, and then faded, guttering, and was gone. Kleisterman knew that somewhere out there a killer satellite had found its prey, out there where the multinationals and the great conglomerates fought their silent and undeclared war, with weapons more obvious than those they usually allowed themselves to use on Earth. The wind shifted, blowing through the high valley now, cutting him to the bone with chill, and bringing with it the howling of wolves, a distant, feral keening that put the hair up along his spine in spite of himself. They were only the distant cousins of dogs, after all; just dogs, talking to one another on the wind. Still, the hairs stayed up.

Feet crunching gravel, Kleisterman went back to the bus and climbed aboard, found his iron-hard seat again in the darkness. In spite of the truly bitter cold, the air inside the bus was thick and stale, heavy with sleep, exhaled breath, spilled wine, sweat, the smell of cigarette smoke and marijuana and garlic. He huddled in his overcoat, shivering, and wondered whose satellite or station had just been lost, and if any of his old colleagues had had anything to do with the planning or execution of the strike. Possibly. Probably, even. Once again, he had to fight sleep, in spite of the cold. Once he turned his head and looked out of the window, and Melissa was there in the burnished silver moonlight, standing alongside the bus, staring up at him, and he knew that he had failed to stay awake, and jerked himself up out of sleep and into the close, stuffy darkness of the bus once again. Stillness. The other passengers tossed and murmured and farted. The moon had come out, a fat pale moon wading through a boiling river of smoky clouds, but Melissa was gone. Had not been there. Would not ever be anywhere anymore. Kleisterman found himself nodding again and pressed his face against the cold window glass, fighting it off. He would not dream. Not now. Not yet.

The bus sat unmoving in the silent town for an hour, two hours, three, for no reason Kleisterman could ascertain, and then the driver appeared again, from who knows where, climbed aboard muttering and swearing, slammed the door, twisted the engine into noisy, coughing life.

They rattled on through the night, winding down slowly out of the mountains, stopping here and there at small villages and communes to discharge passengers, the hung-over field hands climbing wordlessly from the bus and disappearing like spirits into the darkness, Kleisterman sleeping in split-second dozes. He woke from one such doze to see that the windows had turned red, red as though washed with new blood, and thought that he still slept; but it was the dawn, coming up from the broken badlands to the east, and they went down through the blood-red dawn to Santa Fe.

Kleisterman climbed stiffly down from the bus at Santa Fe. The sun had not yet warmed the air. It was still cold. The streets were filled with watery grey light, through which half-perceived figures moved with the stiff precision of early risers on a brisk morning. Kleisterman found a shabby cafe a block away from the bus station, ordered huevos rancheros and a bowl of green chili, was served the food by a sullen old Anglo woman wearing a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt. Unusually for Santa Fe, the food was terrible, tasting of rancid grease and ashes. Kleisterman spooned it up anyway, mechanically, taking it medicinally almost. As fuel. How long had it been since he’d really enjoyed a meal? All food seemed to taste dreadful to him these days. How long since he’d really had a full night’s sleep? His hand shook as he spooned beet sugar into his bitter chicory coffee. He’d always been a tall, thin, bony man, but the reflection the inside of the cafe’s window showed him was gaunt, emaciated, almost cadaverous. He’d lost a lot of weight. This could not go on . . . Grimly he checked through his preparations once again. This time he’d been very careful about being traced. He’d made his contacts with exquisite care. There should be no trouble.

He left the cafe. The light had become bluer, the shadows oil-black and sharp, the sky clear and cerulean. The sun was not yet high, but the streets were already full of people. Mexican soldiers were everywhere, of course, in their comic-opera uniforms, so absurdly ornate that it was difficult to tell a private from a general. Touring Swedish nationals, each with the scarlet King’s Mark tattoo on the right cheek, indicating that they were above most local law. Gangs of skinny Cambodian kids on skateboards whizzed by, threading their way expertly through the crowds, calling to one another in machine-gun-fast bursts of Spanish. A flat-faced Indian leaned from a storefront and swore at them in Vietnamese, shaking his fist. Two chimeras displayed for Kleisterman, inflating their hoods and hissing in playful malice, then sliding aside as he continued to walk toward them unperturbed. This was the kind of unregulated, wide-open town where he could find what he needed, out on the fringes, in the interstices of the worldwide networks, where things would not be watched so closely as elsewhere—no longer part of the United States but not really well integrated into Old Mexico either, with a limited official presence of the multinationals, but plenty of black-market money circulating anyway.

He crossed the plaza, with its ancient Palace of the Governors, which had seen first Spanish, then Anglo, now Mexican conquerors come and go. There were slate-grey thunderheads looming over the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, which in turn loomed over the town. There was a New Town being built to the southeast, on the far side of the mostly dry Santa Fe River, a megastructure of bizarre geometric shapes, all terraces and tetrahedrons; but here in the Old Town the buildings were still made of adobe or mock adobe, colored white or salmon or peach. He threaded a maze of little alleyways and enclosed courtyards on the far side of the plaza, the noise of the plaza fading away behind, and came at last to a narrow building of sun-faded adobe that displayed a small brass plaque that read DR. AU-CONSULTATIONS.

Trembling a little, Kleisterman climbed a dusty stairwell to a third-floor office at the back of a long, dim hallway. Dr. Au turned out to be one of those slender, ageless Oriental men of indeterminate nationality who might have been fifty or eighty. Spare, neat, dry, phlegmatic. The name was Chinese, but Kleisterman suspected that he might actually be Vietnamese, as his English held the slightest trace of a French accent. He had a sad, compassionate face, and hard eyes. An open, unscreened window looked out through the thick adobe wall to an enclosed courtyard with a cactus garden below. The furniture was nondescript, well-used, and the carpet dusty and threadbare, but an exquisite hologram of Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi moved and glittered in muted colors on the bare white walls, and the tastefully discreet ankh earring in the doctor’s left earlobe might well have been real silver. There was no receptionist—just a desk with a complex of office terminals, a few faded armchairs, and Dr. Au.

Kleisterman could feel his heart pounding and his vision blurring as he and Dr. Au engaged in an intricate pavane of hints and innuendo and things not quite said, code words and phrases being mentioned in passing with artful casualness, contacts named, references mentioned and discussed. Dr. Au moved with immense wariness and delicacy, at every stage ready to instantly disengage, always phrasing things so that there was a completely innocent interpretation that could be given his words, while Kleisterman was washed by alternate waves of impatience, fear, rage, despair, muddy black exhaustion, ennui. At last, however, they reached a point beyond which it would no longer be possible to keep up the pretense that Kleisterman had come here for some legal purpose, a point beyond which both men could not proceed without committing themselves. Dr. Au sighed, made a fatalistic gesture, and said, “Well, then, Mr.”—glancing at the card on his desk—“Ramirez, what can I do for you?”

Terror rose up in Kleisterman then. Almost, almost, he got up and fled. But he mastered himself. And as he pushed instinctual fear down, guilt and self-hate and anger rose, black and bristling and strong. None of this had reached his face.

“I want you to destroy me,” Kleisterman said calmly.

Dr. Au looked first surprised, then wary—reassessing the situation for signs of potential entrapment—then, after a pause, almost regretful. “I must say, this is somewhat out of our line. We’re usually asked to supply illicit fantasies, clandestine perversions, occasionally a spot of nonconsensual behavior modification.” He looked at Kleisterman with curiosity. “Have you thought about this? Do you really mean what you say?”

Kleisterman was as cool as ice now, although his hands still trembled. “Yes, I mean it. I used to be in the business; I used to be an operator myself, so I can assure you that I understand the implications perfectly. I want to die. I want you to kill me. But that’s not all. Oh, no.” Kleisterman leaned forward, his gaunt face intense. His voice rose. “I want you to destroy me. I want you to make me suffer. You’re an operator, an adept, you know what I mean. Not just pain; anybody can do that. I want you to make me pay.” Kleisterman slumped back in his chair, made a tired gesture. “I know you can do it; I know you’ve done it. I know you are discreet. And when you’re done with me, a hundred years subjective from now, you can get rid of my body, discreetly, and no one will ever know what happened to me. It will be as if I had never existed.” His voice roughened. “As if I had never been born. Would to God I had not been.”

Dr. Au made a noncommittal noise, tapped his fingers together thoughtfully. His face was tired and sad, as though in his life he had been made to see more deeply than he cared to into the human soul. His eyes glittered with interest. After a polite pause, he said, “You must be quite certain of this, for later there will be no turning back. Are you sure you won’t reconsider?”

Kleisterman made an impatient, despairing gesture. “I could have put a bullet in my head at any time, but that means nothing. It’s not enough, not nearly enough. There must be retribution. There must be restitution. I must be made to pay for what I have done. Only this way can I find solace.”

“Even so . . .” Dr. Au said, doubtfully.

Kleisterman held up his hand. Moving with slow deliberation, he reached into an inner pocket, produced a coded credit strip. “All my assets,” he said, “and they are considerable.” He held the credit slip up for display, then proffered it to Dr. Au. “I want you to destroy me,” he said.

Dr. Au sighed. He looked left, he looked right, he looked down, he looked up. His face was suffused with dull embarrassment. But he took the credit strip.

Dr. Au ushered Kleisterman politely into an adjacent room, stood by with sad patience while Kleisterman removed his clothing. At a touch, a large metal egg rose from the floor, opened like a five-petaled flower, extruded a narrow metal bench or shelf. Dr. Au gestured brusquely; Kleisterman lay down on the bench, wincing at the touch of cold metal on his naked skin. Dr. Au leaned close over him, his face remote now and his movements briskly efficient, as though to get it all over with quickly. He taped soft cloth pads first over Kleisterman’s left eye, then over his right. There was a feeling of motion, and Kleisterman knew that the metal shelf was sliding back into the machine, which would be retracting around it, the petals closing tight to form a featureless steel egg, with him inside.

Darkness. Silence.

At first, Kleisterman was aware of a sense of enclosure, was aware of the feel of the metal under his back, could even stir a little, move his fingers impatiently. But then his skin began to prickle over every inch of his body, as feathery probes made contact with his nerve endings, and, as the prickling began to fade, with it went all other sensation. He could no longer feel his body, no longer move; no longer wanted to move. He didn’t have a body anymore. There was nothing. Not even darkness, not even silence. Nothing. Nonexistence.

Kleisterman floated in the void, waiting for the torment to begin.

This kind of machine had many names—simulator, dream machine, iron maiden, imager, shadow box. It fed coded impulses through the subject’s nerves, directly into the brain. With it, the operator could make the subject experience anything. Pain, of course. Any amount of pain. With a simulator, you could torture someone to death again and again, for years of subjective time, without doing them any actual physical harm—not much comfort for the subject in that, though, since to them the experience would be indistinguishable from objective reality. Of course, the most expert operators scorned this sort of thing as hopelessly crude, lacking in all finesse. Not artistic. Pain was only one key that could be played. There were many others. The subject had no secrets, and, with access to the subject’s deepest longings and most hidden fears, the skilled operator, the artisan, the clever craftsman, could devise cunning scenarios much more effective than pain.

Kleisterman had been such an operator, one of the best, admired by his colleagues for his subtlety and ingenuity and skill. He had clandestinely “processed” thousands of subjects for his multinational, and had never felt a qualm, until suddenly one day, for no particular reason, he began to sicken. After Donaldson, Ramaswamy, and Kole, three especially difficult and unpleasant jobs, he had sickened further, and, for the first time in his life, began to have difficulty sleeping and, when he did sleep, began to have unquiet dreams. Then Melissa had somehow become the target of corporate malice, and had been sent to him for his ministrations. By rights, he should have declined the job, since he knew Melissa, and had even had a brief affair with her once, years before. But he had had his professional pride. He did not turn down the job. And somewhere deep in her mind, he had found himself, an ennobled and idealized version of himself as he had never been, and he realized that while for him their affair had been unimportant, for her it had been much more intensely charged—that, in fact, she had loved him deeply, and still did.

This discovery brought out the very worst in him, and in a fever of sick excitement, he created scenario after scenario for her, life after life, each scenario working some variation on the theme of her love for him; and each time, “his” treatment of her in the scenario became worse, his betrayal of her uglier and more humiliating, the pain and shame and anguish he visited on her more severe. He turned the universe against her in grotesque ways, too, so that in one life she died in a car wreck on the way to her own wedding, and in another life she died slowly and messily of cancer, and in another she was hideously disfigured in a fire, and in another she had a stroke and lingered on for years as a semi-aware paralytic in a squalid nursing home, and so on. Each life began to color the next, not with specific memories of other existences, but with a dark emotional residue, an unspoken, instinctual conviction that life was drab and bitter and harsh, with nothing to look forward to but defeat and misery and pain, that the dice were stacked hopelessly against you—as, in fact, they were. Then, tiring of subtlety, irresistibly tempted to put aside his own aesthetic precepts, he began to hit her, in the scenarios—at first just slapping her around in drunken rages, then beating her severely enough to put her in the hospital. Then, in one scenario, he picked up a knife.

Several lifetimes subjective later, the heart in her physical body finally gave out, and she died in a way that was no more real to her than the dozens of times she’d died before, but which put her at last beyond his reach. He had been dismayed to discover that in the deepest recesses of her mind, below the fear and hate and bitterness and grief, she loved him still, even at the last. He switched off the machine, and he awoke, as from a fever dream, as though he had been possessed by a demon of perversity that had only now been exorcised, to find himself alone in his soundproofed cubicle with the simulator and Melissa’s cooling body. He betrayed the corporation on his next assignment, freeing the subject rather than “processing” him, and from then on he had been on the run. He had found that he could successfully hide from the multinational. Hiding from himself had proved more difficult.

Light exploded in his head. It took a second for his vision to adjust, and to realize that the patch over his left eye had been removed. Dr. Au leaned in over him again, filling his field of vision like a god, and this time Kleisterman felt the painful yank of tape against his skin as Dr. Au ripped the other eye patch free. More light. Kleisterman blinked, disoriented and confused. He was out of the machine. Dr. Au was tugging at him, getting him to sit up. Dr. Au was saying something, but it was a blare of noise, harsh and hurtful to the ears. He pawed at Kleisterman again, and Kleisterman shook him off. Kleisterman sat, head down, on the edge of the metal bench until his senses readjusted to the world again, and his mind cleared. His skin prickled as sensation returned.

Dr. Au tugged at Kleisterman’s arm. “A red security flag came up on your credit account,” Dr. Au said. His voice was anxious, and his face was pinched with fear. “There was a security probe; I barely avoided it. You must leave. I want you out of here right away.”

Kleisterman stared at him. “But you agreed—” he said thickly.

“I want nothing to do with you, Mr. Ramirez,” Dr. Au said apprehensively. “Here, take your clothes, get dressed. You have some very ruthless forces opposed to you, Mr. Ramirez. I want nothing to do with them, either. No trouble. Leave now. Take your business elsewhere.”

Slowly, Kleisterman dressed, manipulating the clothes with stiff, clumsy fingers while Dr. Au hovered anxiously. The office was filled with watery grey light that seemed painfully bright after the darkness inside the simulator. Dust motes danced in suspension in the light, and a fly hopped along the adobe edge of the open window before darting outside again. A dog was barking out there somewhere, a flat, faraway sound, and a warm breeze puffed in for a second to ruffle his hair and bring him the smell of pine and juniper. He was perceiving every smallest detail with exquisite clarity.

Kleisterman pushed wordlessly by Dr. Au, walked through the outer office and out into the dusty hallway beyond. The floor was scuffed, grime between the tiles, and there were peeling water stains on the ceiling. A smell of cooking food came up the stairwell. This is real, Kleisterman told himself fiercely. This is real, this is really happening, this is the real world. The multinational boys aren’t subtle enough for this; they wouldn’t be satisfied with just denying me solace. Letting me go on. They’re not that subtle.

Are they? Are they?

Kleisterman went down the narrow stairs. He dragged his fist against the rough adobe wall until his knuckles bled, but he couldn’t convince himself that any of it was real.

Golden Apples of the Sun

Introduction to Golden Apples of the Sun

First of all, starting a story with a pun is not fair. Because the reader is unprepared for the pun. Sometimes the reader misses the pun for days, maybe weeks, maybe years afterward. A titular pun, after all, becomes plain only in hindsight.

Michael Swanwick takes full credit for that pun, but I have my doubts. You see, in all the years I’ve known Michael (and I must say now that I don’t know him well), I’ve never heard him pun.

So I figure he had to be under the influence. Not of alcohol or any illegal drug—but of Dozois.

Let me explain the Dozois influence, if I can. It’s rather alarming at first, especially to newer writers who expect established pros to be—well—courteous, neat and quiet. I don’t know where new writers get that image. I know dozens, maybe hundreds, of professional writers and none of them are courteous, neat or quiet. Sometimes they pretend to be, but that’s a different story.

I admit I have been under the influence. I have made rude jokes, sparred verbally with all sorts of inappropriate people, and made horrible puns. (I did, however, get my pun training as a journalist. I was armed when I walked into the Dozois camp the first time.)

Even though I’ve been under the influence, I’ve managed to retain some decorum. I have never, for example, stuck a used lollipop up my nose. (Yes, there are people whose stories you have probably read who did that, one sober (we’re always sober it seems—which should frighten you even more) night in Providence, Rhode Island.) I have never touched Gardner’s knob, although I did hold him down while another woman not his wife searched him for it. (And it was a doorknob, people. Take your minds out of the gutter.)

But I must confess that I have, with Gardner’s help, scared waiters so badly they quit in the middle of serving our meal. I have asked other sf writers strange questions like: if your body parts can sing, what would their favorite songs be? I have even discussed UFO-inspired anal probes in an online chat, something I never would have done if Dozois weren’t influencing me from Philadelphia, almost an entire continent away.

Why do I tell you all of this in a serious volume dedicated to Gardner’s work? Because, in addition to being one of our very best writers, Gardner is also one of our very best instigators. Not just of mayhem at conventions although, since we live on different sides of the country, that’s mostly where we see each other so that’s where I’m certain he does these things. But he commits instigations of a collaborative nature.

Without Dozois, I contend, there would have been no pun in the title of “Golden Apples of the Sun.” There would have been no computer salesman in the land of Faerie, and there would not have been that wonderful image of Titania in a bar in Jersey.

Now, Michael Swanwick and Jack Dann can hold their own against the Instigator Dozois. I would contend that Jack is probably as big an instigator as Gardner, only Jack’s methods are a lot more subtle. Michael can elevate any free-ranging discussion, whether we’re talking about conjugating Latin verbs (don’t ask) or building a dinosaur from scratch. So yes, they’re a good match for the Instigator Dozois.

But that doesn’t make them immune.

I’ve never seen the three of them perform a brain-storming. The idea scares me, if the truth be told. I think there could be enough talent and free-flowing creativity in the room to be dangerous. An innocent bystander might get hurt.

(And I can just hear Gardner’s rejoinder: Well, then, Kris. If innocent bystanders get hurt, you’ll have nothing to worry about.)

Gardner’s solo stories are usually serious. They’re powerful, literate examinations of our world and times, often with a sf premise. He doesn’t write enough of them (dammit, Dozois—start typing now!), but when he does, the world should sit up and notice.

As serious as Gardner’s solo stories usually are, his collaborations reflect the madcap Gardner that his friends know. The man who can wield a pun with the force of a dagger. The man who can devastate entire rooms with a single quip. The man who can scare waiters with a high-pitched giggle.

That man demurely says he “unifies” the collaborative stories he writes with Jack and Michael. Unifies. Sure. Maybe after he’s added something sufficiently goofy. Maybe after he’s invented his own Spenserian dialect.

Yeah, right. Dozois unifies—and instigates. Read Michael Swanwick’s account of how this story came to be in Gardner’s wonderful collection of collaborative stories, Slow Dancing Through Time. See whose comment started the cascade of ideas that led to this marvelous story.

I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t Mr. Swanwick or Mr. Dann.

I tell you: Dozois is an instigator. And your first clue should be that pun in the title. Courtesy (wink, wink) of Michael Swanwick.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Golden Apples of the Sun

by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann,

and Michael Swanwick

Few of the folk in Faerie would have anything to do with the computer salesman. He worked himself up and down one narrow, twisting street after another, until his feet throbbed and his arms ached from lugging the sample cases, and it seemed like days had passed rather than hours, and still he had not made a single sale. Barry Levingston considered himself a first-class salesman, one of the best, and he wasn’t used to this kind of failure. It discouraged and frustrated him, and as the afternoon wore endlessly on—there was something funny about the way time passed here in Faerie; the hazy, bronze-colored Fairyland sun had hardly moved at all across the smoky amber sky since he’d arrived, although it should certainly be evening by now—he could feel himself beginning to lose that easy confidence and unshakable self-esteem that are the successful salesman’s most essential stock-in-trade. He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t really his fault. He was working under severe restrictions, after all. The product was new and unfamiliar to this particular market, and he was going “cold sell.” There had been no telephone solicitation programs to develop leads, no ad campaigns, not so much as a demographic study of the market potential. Still, his total lack of success was depressing.

The village that he’d been trudging through all day was built on and around three steep, hive-like hills, with one street rising from the roofs of the street below. The houses were piled chockablock atop each other, like clusters of grapes, making it almost impossible to even find—much less get to—many of the upper-story doorways. Sometimes the eaves grew out over the street, turning them into long, dark tunnels. And sometimes the streets ran up sloping housesides and across rooftops, only to come to a sudden and frightening stop at a sheer drop of five or six stories, the street beginning again as abruptly on the far side of the gap. From the highest streets and stairs you could see a vista of the surrounding countryside: a hazy golden-brown expanse of orchards and forests and fields, and, on the far horizon, blue with distance, the jagged, snow-capped peaks of a mighty mountain range—except that the mountains didn’t always seem to be in the same direction from one moment to the next; sometimes they were to the west, then to the north, or east, or south; sometimes they seemed much closer or farther away; sometimes they weren’t there at all.

Barry found all this unsettling. In fact, he found the whole place unsettling. Why go on with this, then? he asked himself. He certainly wasn’t making any headway. Maybe it was because he overtowered most of the fairyfolk—maybe they were sensitive about being so short, and so tall people annoyed them. Maybe they just didn’t like humans; humans smelled bad to them, or something. Whatever it was, he hadn’t gotten more than three words of his spiel out of his mouth all day. Some of them had even slammed doors in his face—something he had almost forgotten could happen to a salesman.

Throw in the towel, then, he thought. But . . . no, he couldn’t give up. Not yet. Barry sighed, and massaged his stomach, feeling the acid twinges in his gut that he knew presaged a savage attack of indigestion later on. This was virgin territory, a literally untouched route. Gold waiting to be mined. And the Fairy Queen had given this territory to him . . .

Doggedly, he plodded up to the next house, which looked something like a gigantic acorn, complete with a thatched cap and a crazily twisted chimney for the stem. He knocked on a round wooden door.

A plump, freckled fairy woman answered. She was about the size of an earthly two-year-old, but a transparent gown seemingly woven of spidersilk made it plain that she was no child. She hovered a few inches above the doorsill on rapidly beating hummingbird wings.

“Aye?” she said sweetly, smiling at him, and Barry immediately felt his old confidence return. But he didn’t permit himself to become excited. That was the quickest way to lose a sale.

“Hello,” he said smoothly. “I’m from Newtech Computer Systems, and we’ve been authorized by Queen Titania, the Fairy Queen herself to offer a free installation of our new home computer system—”

“That wot I not of,” the fairy said.

“Don’t you even know what a computer is?” Barry asked, dismayed, breaking off his spiel.

“Aye, I fear me, ‘tis even so,” she replied, frowning prettily. “In sooth, I know not. Belike you’ll tell me of ‘t, fair sir.”

Barry began talking feverishly, meanwhile unsnapping his sample case and letting it fall open to display the computer within. “—balance your household accounts,” he babbled. “Lets you organize your recipes, keep in touch with the stock market. You can generate full-color graphics, charts, graphs . . .”

The fairy frowned again, less sympathetically. She reached her hand toward the computer, but didn’t quite touch it. “Has the smell of metal on’t,” she murmured. “Most chill and adamant.” She shook her head. “Nay, sirrah, ‘twill not serve. ‘Tis a thing mechanical, a clockwork, meet for carillons and orreries. Those of us born within the Ring need not your engines philosophic, nor need we toil and swink as mortals do at such petty tasks an you have named. Then wherefore should I buy, who neither strive nor moil?”

“But you can play games on it!” Barry said desperately, knowing that he was losing her. “You can play Donkey Kong! You can play Pac-Man! Everybody likes to play PacMan—”

She smiled slowly at him sidelong. “I’d liefer more delightsome games,” she said.

Before he could think of anything to say, a long, long, long green-grey arm came slithering out across the floor from the hidden interior of the house. The arm ended in a knobby hand equipped with six grotesquely long, tapering fingers, now spreading wide as the hand reached out toward the fairy . . .

Barry opened his mouth to shout a warning, but before he could, the long arm had wrapped bonelessly around her ankle, not once but four times around, and the hand with its scrabbling spider fingers had closed over her thigh. The arm yanked back, and she tumbled forward in the air, laughing.

“Ah, loveling, can you not wait?” she said with mock severity. The arm tugged at her. She giggled. “Certes, meseems you cannot!”

As the arm pulled her, still floating, back into the house, the fairy woman seized the door to slam it shut. Her face was flushed and preoccupied now, but she still found a moment to smile at Barry. “Farewell, sweet mortal!” she cried, and winked. “Next time, mayhap?”

The door shut. There was a muffled burst of giggling within. Then silence.

The salesman glumly shook his head. This was a goddam tank town, was what it was, he thought. Here there were no knickknacks and bric-a-brac lining the windows, no cast-iron flamingoes and eave-climbing plaster kitty cats, no mailboxes with fake Olde English calligraphy on them—but in spite of that it was still a tank town. Just another goddamn middle-class neighborhood with money a little tight and the people running scared. Place like this, you couldn’t even give the stuff away, much less make a sale. He stepped back out into the street. A fairy knight was coming down the road toward him, dressed in green jade armor cunningly shaped like leaves, and riding an enormous frog. Well, why not? Barry thought. He wasn’t having a lot of luck door-to-door.

“Excuse me, sir!” Barry cried, stepping into the knight’s way. “May I have a moment of your—”

The knight glared at him, and pulled back suddenly on his reins. The enormous frog reared up, and leaped straight into the air. Gigantic, leathery, batlike wings spread, caught the thermals, carried mount and rider away.

Barry sighed and trudged doggedly up the cobblestone road toward the next house. No matter what happened, he wasn’t going to quit until he’d finished the street. That was a compulsion of his . . . and the reason he was one of the top cold-sell agents in the company. He remembered a night when he’d spent five hours knocking on doors without a single sale, or even so much as a kind word, and then suddenly he’d sold $30,000 worth of merchandise in an hour . . . suddenly he’d been golden, and they couldn’t say no to him. Maybe that would happen today, too. Maybe the next house would be the beginning of a run of good luck . . .

The next house was shaped like a gigantic ogre’s face, its dark wood forming a yawning mouth and heavy-lidded eyes. The face was made up of a host of smaller faces, and each of those contained other, even smaller faces. He looked away dizzily, then resolutely climbed to a glowering, thick-nosed door and knocked right between the eyes—eyes which, he noted uneasily, seemed to be studying him with interest.

A fairy woman opened the door—below where he was standing. Belatedly, he realized that he had been knocking on a dormer; the top of the door was a foot below him.

This fairy woman had stubby, ugly wings. She was lumpy and gnarled, and her skin was the texture of old bark. Her hair stood straight out on end all around her head, in a puffy nimbus, like the Bride of Frankenstein. She stared imperiously up at him, somehow managing to seem to be staring down her nose at him at the same time. It was quite a nose, too. It was longer than his hand, and sharply pointed.

“A great ugly lump of a mortal, an I mistake not!” she snapped. Her eyes were flinty and hard. “What’s toward?”

“I’m from Newtech Computer Systems,” Barry said, biting back his resentment at her initial slur, “and I’m selling home computers, by special commission of the Queen—”

“Go to!” she snarled. “Seek you to cozen me? I wot not what abnormous beast that be, but I have no need of mortal kine, nor aught else from your loathly world! Get you gone!” She slammed the door under his feet. Which somehow was every bit as bad as slamming it in his face.

“Sonofabitch!” Barry raged, making an obscene gesture at the door, losing his temper at last. “You goddamn flying fat pig.”

He didn’t realize that the fairy woman could hear him until a round crystal window above his head flew open, and she poked her head out of it, nose first, buzzing like a jarful of hornets. “Wittold!” she shrieked. “Caitiff rogue!”

“Screw off, lady,” Barry snarled. It had been a long, hard day, and he could feel the last shreds of self-control slipping away. “Get back in your goddamn hive, you goddamn pinocchio-nosed mosquito!”

The fairy woman spluttered incoherently with rage, then became dangerously silent. “So!” she said in cold passion. “Noses, is’t? Would vilify my nose, knave, whilst your own be uncommon squat and vile? A tweak or two will remedy that, I trow, and exchange the better for the worse!”

So saying, she came buzzing out of her house like an outraged wasp, streaking straight at the salesman.

Barry flinched back, but she seized hold of his nose with both hands and tweaked it savagely. Barry yelped in pain. She shrieked out a high-pitched syllable in some unknown language and began flying backward, her wings beating furiously, tugging at his nose.

He felt the pressure in his ears change with a sudden pop, and then, horrifyingly, he felt his face begin to move in a strangely fluid way, flowing like water, swelling out and out and out in front of him.

The fairy woman released his nose and darted away, cackling gleefully.

Dismayed, Barry clapped his hands to his face. He hadn’t realized that these little buggers could all cast spells—he’d thought that kind of magic stuff was reserved for the Queen and her court. Like cavorting in hot tubs with naked starlets and handfuls of cocaine, out in Hollywood—a prerogative reserved only for the Elite. But when his hands reached his nose, they almost couldn’t close around it. It was too large. His nose was now nearly two feet long, as big around as a Polish sausage, and covered with bumpy warts.

He screamed in rage. “Goddammit, lady, come back here and fix this!”

The fairy woman was perching half-in and half-out of the round window, lazily swinging one leg. She smiled mockingly at him. “There!” she said, with malicious satisfaction. “Art much improved, methinks! Nay, thank me not!” And, laughing joyously, she tumbled back into the house and slammed the crystal window closed behind her.

“Lady!” Barry shouted. Scrambling down the heavy wooden lips, he pounded wildly on the door. “Hey, look, a joke’s a joke, but I’ve got work to do! Lady! Look, lady, I’m sorry,” he whined. “I’m sorry I swore at you, honest! Just come out here and fix this and I won’t bother you anymore. Lady, please!” He heaved his shoulder experimentally against the door, but it was as solid as rock.

An eyelid-shaped shutter snapped open above him. He looked up eagerly, but it wasn’t the lady; it was a fat fairy man with snail’s horns growing out of his forehead. The horns were quivering with rage, and the fairy man’s face was mottled red. “Pox take you, boy, and your cursed brabble!” the fairy man shouted. “When I am foredone with weariness, must I be roused from honest slumber by your hurtle-burble?” Barry winced; evidently he had struck the Faerie equivalent of a night-shift worker. The fairy man shook a fist at him. “Out upon you, miscreant! By the Oak of Mughna, I demand SILENCE!” The window snapped shut again.

Barry looked nervously up at the eyelid-window, but somehow he had to get the lady to come out and fix this goddamn nose. “Lady?” he whispered. “Please, lady?” No answer. This wasn’t working at all. He’d have to change tactics, and take his chances with Snailface in the next apartment.

“LADY!” he yelled. “OPEN UP! I’M GOING TO STAND HERE AND SHOUT AT THE TOP OF MY LUNGS UNTIL YOU COME OUT! YOU WANT THAT? DO YOU?”

The eyelid flew open. “This passes bearing!” Snailface ranged. “Now Cernunnos shrivel me, an I chasten not this boisterous dotard!”

“Listen, mister, I’m sorry,” Barry said uneasily, “I don’t mean to wake you up, honest, but I’ve got to get that lady to come out, or my ass’ll really be grass!”

“Your Arse, say you?” the snail-horned man snarled. “Marry, since you would have it so, why, by Lugh, I’ll do it, straight!” He made a curious gesture, roared out a word that seemed to be all consonants, and then slammed the shutter closed.

Again, there was a popping noise in Barry’s ears, and a change of pressure that he could feel throughout his sinuses. Another spell had been cast on him.

Sure enough, there was a strange, prickly sensation at the base of his spine. “Oh, no!” he whispered. He didn’t really want to look—but at last he forced himself to. He groaned. He had sprouted a long green tail. It looked and smelled suspiciously like grass.

“Ha! Ha!” Barry muttered savagely to himself. “Very funny! Great sense of humor these little winged people’ve got!”

In a sudden spasm of rage, he began to rip out handfuls of grass, trying to tear the loathsome thing from his body. The grass ripped out easily, and he felt no pain, but it grew back many times faster than he could tear it free—so that by the time he decided that he was getting nowhere, the tail trailed out six or seven feet behind him.

What was he going to do now?

He stared up at the glowering house for a long, silent moment, but he couldn’t think of any plan of action that wouldn’t just get him in more trouble with someone.

Gloomily, he gathered up his sample cases, and trudged off down the street, his nose banging into his upper lip at every step, his tail dragging forlornly behind him in the dust. Be damned if this wasn’t even worse than cold-selling in Newark. He wouldn’t have believed it. But there he had only been mugged and had his car’s tires slashed. Here he had been hideously disfigured, maybe for life, and he wasn’t even making any sales.

He came to an intricately carved stone fountain, and sat wearily down on its lip. Nixies and water nymphs laughed and cavorted within the leaping waters of the fountain, swimming just as easily up the spout as down. They cupped their pretty little green breasts and called invitingly to him, and then mischievously spouted water at his tail when he didn’t answer, but Barry was in no mood for them, and resolutely ignored their blandishments. After a while they went back to their games and left him alone.

Barry sighed, and tried to put his head in his hands, but his enormous new nose kept getting in the way. His stomach was churning. He reached into his pocket and worried out a metal-foil packet of antacid tablets. He tore the packet open, and then found—to his disgust—that he had to lift his sagging nose out of the way with one hand in order to reach his mouth. While he chewed on the chalky-tasting pills, he stared glumly at the twin leatherette bags that held his demonstrator models. He was beaten. Finished. Destroyed. Ruined. Down and out in Faerie, at the ultimate rock bottom of his career. What a bummer! What a fiasco!

And he had had such high hopes for this expedition, too . . .

Barry never really understood why Titania, the Fairy Queen, spent so much of her time hanging out in a sleazy little roadside bar on the outskirts of a jerkwater South Jersey town—perhaps that was the kind of place that seemed exotic to her. Perhaps she liked the rotgut hooch, or the greasy hamburgers—just as likely to be “venison-burgers,” really, depending on whether somebody’s uncle or backwoods cousin had been out jacking deer with a flashlight and a 30.30 lately—or the footstomping honky-tonk music on the juke box. Perhaps she just had an odd sense of humor. Who knew? Not Barry.

Nor did Barry ever really understand what he was doing there—it wasn’t really his sort of place, but he’d been on the road with a long way to go to the next town, and a sudden whim had made him stop in for a drink. Nor did he understand why, having stopped in in the first place, he had then gone along with the gag when the beat-up old barfly on his left had leaned over to him, breathing out poisonous fumes, and confided, “I’m really the Queen of the Fairies, you know.” Ordinarily, he would have laughed, or ignored her, or said something like, “And I’m the Queen of the May, sleazeball.” But he had done none of these things. Instead, he had nodded gravely and courteously, and asked her if he could have the honor of lighting the cigarette that was wobbling about in loopy circles in her shaking hand.

Why did he do this? Certainly it hadn’t been from even the remotest desire to get into the Queen’s grease-stained pants—in her earthly incarnation, the Queen was a grimy, grey-haired, broken-down rummy, with a horse’s face, a dragon’s breath, cloudy agate eyes, and a bright-red rumblossom nose. No, there had been no ulterior motives. But he had been in an odd mood, restless, bored, and stale. So he had played up to her, on a spur-of-the-moment whim, going along with the gag, buying her drinks and lighting cigarettes for her, and listening to her endless stream of half-coherent talk, all the while solemnly calling her “Your Majesty” and “Highness,” getting a kind of role-playing let’s pretend kick out of it that he hadn’t known since he was a kid and he and his sister used to play “grown-up dress-up” with the trunk of castoff clothes in the attic.

So that when midnight came, and all the other patrons of the bar froze into freeze-frame rigidity, paralyzed in the middle of drinking or shouting or scratching or shoving, and Titania manifested herself in the radiant glory of her true form, nobody could have been more surprised than Barry.

“My God!” he’d cried. “You really are—”

“The Queen of the Fairies,” Titania said smugly. “You bet your buns, sweetie. I told you so, didn’t I?” She smiled radiantly, and then gave a ladylike hiccup. The Queen in her new form was so dazzlingly beautiful as to almost hurt the eye, but there was still a trace of rotgut whiskey on her breath. “And because you’ve been a most true and courteous knight to one from whom you thought to see no earthly gain, I’m going to grant you a wish. How about that, kiddo?” She beamed at him, then hiccuped again; whatever catabolic effect her transformation had had on her blood-alcohol level, she was obviously still slightly tipsy.

Barry was flabbergasted. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered. “I come into a bar, on impulse, just by chance, and the very first person I sit down next to turns out to be—”

Titania shrugged. “That’s the way it goes, sweetheart. It’s the Hidden Hand of Oberon, what you mortals call ‘synchronicity.’ Who knows what’ll eventually come of this meeting—tragedy or comedy, events of little moment or of world-shaking weight and worth? Maybe even Oberon doesn’t know, the silly old fart. Now, about that wish—”

Barry thought about it. What did he want? Well, he was a salesman, wasn’t he? New worlds to conquer . . .

Even Titania had been startled. She looked at him in surprise and then said, “Honey, I’ve been dealing with mortals for a lot of years now, but nobody ever asked for that before . . .”

Now he sat on cold stone in the heart of the Faerie town, and groaned, and cursed himself bitterly. If only he hadn’t been so ambitious! If only he’d asked for something safe, like a swimming pool or a Ferrari . . .

Afterward, Barry was never sure how long he sat there on the lip of the fountain in a daze of despair—perhaps literally for weeks; it felt that long. Slowly, the smoky bronze disk of the Fairyland sun sank beneath the horizon, and it became night, a warm and velvety night whose very darkness seemed somehow luminous. The nixies had long since departed, leaving him alone in the little square with the night and the plashing waters of the fountain. The strange stars of Faerie swam into the sky, witchfire crystals so thick against the velvet blackness of the night that they looked like phosphorescent plankton sparkling in some midnight tropic sea. Barry watched the night sky for a long time, but he could find none of the familiar constellations he knew, and he shivered to think how far away from home he must be. The stars moved much more rapidly here than they did in the sky of Earth, crawling perceptibly across the black bowl of the night even as you watched, swinging in stately procession across the sky, wheeling and reforming with a kind of solemn awful grandeur, eddying and whirling, swirling into strange patterns and shapes and forms, spiral pinwheels of light. Pastel lanterns appeared among the houses on the hillsides as the night deepened, seeming to reflect the wheeling, blazing stars above.

At last, urged by some restless tropism, he got slowly to his feet, instinctively picked up his sample cases, and set off aimlessly through the mysterious night streets of the Faerie town. Where was he going? Who knew? Did it matter anymore? He kept walking. Once or twice he heard faint, far snatches of fairy music—wild, sad, yearning melodies that pierced him like a knife, leaving him shaken and melancholy and strangely elated all at once—and saw lines of pastel lights bobbing away down the hillsides, but he stayed away from those streets, and did his best not to listen; he had been warned about the bewitching nature of fairy music, and had no desire to spend the next hundred or so years dancing in helpless enchantment within a fairy ring. Away from the street and squares filled with dancing pastel lights and ghostly will-o’-the-‘wisps—which he avoided—the town seemed dark and silent. Occasionally, winged shapes swooped and flittered overhead, silhouetted against the huge mellow silver moon of Faerie, sometimes seeming to fly behind it for several wingbeats before flashing into sight again. Once he met a fellow pedestrian, a monstrous one-legged creature with an underslung jaw full of snaggle teeth and one baleful eye in the middle of its forehead that blazed like a warning beacon, and stood unnoticed in the shadows, shivering, until the fearsome apparition had hopped by. Not paying any attention to where he was going, Barry wandered blindly downhill. He couldn’t think at all—it was as if his brain had turned to ash. His feet stumbled over the cobblestones, and only by bone-deep instinct did he keep hold of the sample cases. The street ended in a long curving set of wooden stairs. Mechanically, dazedly, he followed them down. At the bottom of the stairs, a narrow path led under the footing of one of the gossamer bridges that looped like slender grey cobwebs between the fairy hills. It was cool and dark here, and almost peaceful . . . “AAAARRRRGGHHHHH!”

Something enormous leaped out from the gloom, and enveloped him in a single, scaly green hand. The fingers were a good three feet long each, and their grip was as cold and hard as iron. The hand lifted him easily into the air, while he squirmed and kicked futilely.

Barry stared up into the creature’s face. “Yop!” he said. A double row of yellowing fangs lined a frog-mouth large enough to swallow him up in one gulp. The blazing eyes bulged ferociously, and the nose was a flat smear. The head was topped off by a fringe of hair like red worms, and a curving pair of ram’s horns.

“Pay up for the use a my bridge,” the creature roared, “or by Oberon’s dirty socks, I’ll crunch you whole!”

It never ends, Barry thought. Aloud, he demanded in frustration. “What bridge?”

“A wise guy!” the, monster sneered. “That bridge, whadda ya think?” He gestured upward scornfully. “The bridge over us, dummy! The Bridge a Morrig the Fearsome! My bridge. I got a royal commission says I gotta right to collect toll from every creature that sets foot on it, and you better believe that means you, buddy. I got you dead to rights. So cough up!” He shook Barry until the salesman’s teeth rattled. “Or else!”

“But I haven’t set foot on it!” Barry wailed. “I just walked under it!”

“Oh,” the monster said. He looked blank for a moment, scratching his knobby head with his free hand, and then his face sagged. “Oh,” he said again, disappointedly. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. Crap.” Morrig the Fearsome sighed, a vast noisome displacement of air. Then he released the salesman. “Jeez, buddy, I’m sorry,” Morrig said, crestfallen. “I shouldn’t’a’oughta have jerked ya around like that. I guess I got overanxious or sumpthin. Jeez, mac, you know how it is. Tryin’ to make a buck. The old grind. It gets me down.”

Morrig sat down, discouraged, and wrapped his immensely long and muscular arms around his knobby green knees. He brooded for a moment, then jerked his thumb up at the bridge. “That bridge’s my only source a income, see?” He sighed gloomily. “When I come down from Utgard and set up this scam, I think I’m gonna get rich. Got the royal commission, all nice an’ legal, everybody gotta pay me, right? Gonna clean up, right?” He shook his head glumly. “Wrong. I ain’t making a lousy dime. All the locals got wings. Don’t use the bridge at all.” He spat noisily. “They’re cheap little snots, these fairyfolk are.”

“Amen, brother,” Barry said, with feeling. “I know just what you mean.”

“Hey!” Morrig said, brightening: “You care for a snort? I got a jug a hooch right here.”

“Well, actually . . .” Barry said reluctantly. But the troll had already reached into the gloom with one long, triple-jointed arm, and pulled out a stone crock. He pried off the top and took a long swig. Several gallons of liquid gurgled down his throat. “Ahhhh!” He wiped his thin lips. “That hits the spot, all right.” He thrust the crock into Barry’s lap. “Have a belt.”

When Barry hesitated, the troll rumbled, “Ah, go ahead, pal. Good for what ails ya. You got troubles too, aintcha, just like me—I can tell. It’s the lot a the workin’ man, brother. Drink up. Put hair on your chest even if you ain’t got no dough in your pocket.” While Barry drank, Morrig studied him cannily. “You’re a mortal, aintcha, bud?”

Barry half-lowered the jug and nodded uneasily.

Morrig made an expansive gesture. “Don’t worry, pal. I don’t care. I figure all a us workin’ folks gotta stick together, regardless a race or creed, or the bastards’ll grind us all down. Right?” He leered, showing his huge, snaggly, yellowing fangs in what Barry assumed was supposed to be a reassuring grin. “But, say, buddy, if you’re a mortal, how come you got funny nose like that, and a tail?”

Voice shrill with outrage, Barry told his story, pausing only to hit the stone jug.

“Yeah, buddy,” Morrig said sympathetically. “They really worked you over, didn’t they?” He sneered angrily. “Them bums! Just like them little snots to gang up ona guy who’s just tryin’ ta make an honest buck. Whadda they care about the problems a the workin’ man? Buncha booshwa snobs! Screw ‘em all!”

They passed the seemingly bottomless stone jug back and forth again. “Too bad I can’t do none a that magic stuff,” Morrig said sadly, “or I’d fix ya right up. What a shame.” Wordlessly, they passed the jug again. Barry sighed. Morrig sighed too. They sat in gloomy silence for a couple of minutes, and then Morrig roused himself and said, “What kinda scam is it you’re tryin’ ta run? I ain’t never heard a it before. Lemme see the merchandise.”

“What’s the point—?”

“C’mon,” Morrig said impatiently. “I wantcha ta show me the goods. Maybe I can figure out a way ta move the stuff.”

Listlessly, Barry snapped open a case. Morrig leaned forward to study the console with interest. “Kinda pretty,” the troll said; he sniffed at it. “Don’t smell too bad, either. Maybe make a nice planter, or sumpthin.”

“Planter?” Barry cried; he could hear his voice cracking in outrage. “I’ll have you know this is a piece of high technology! Precision machinery!”

Morrig shrugged. “Okay, bub, make it march.”

“Ah,” Barry said. “I need someplace to plug it in . . .” Morrig picked up the plug and inserted it in his ear. The computer’s CRT screen lit up. “Okay,” Morrig said. “Gimme the pitch. What’s it do?”

“Well,” Barry said slowly, “let’s suppose that you had a bond portfolio worth $2,147 invested at 83/4 percent compounded daily, over eighteen months, and you wanted to calculate—”

“Two thousand four hundred forty-three dollars and sixty-eight and seven-tenths cents,” said the troll.

“Hah?”

“That’s what it works out to, pal. Two hundred ninety-six dollars and change in compound interest.”

With a sinking sensation, Barry punched through the figures and let the system work. Alphanumerics flickered on the CRT: $296.687.

“Can everybody in Faerie do that kind of mental calculation?” Barry asked.

“Yeah,” the troll said. “But so what? No big deal. Who cares about crap like that anyway?” He stared incredulously at Barry. “Is that all that thing does?”

There was a heavy silence.

“Maybe you oughta reconsider that idea about the planters . . .” Morrig said.

Barry stood up again, a trifle unsteady from all the hooch he’d taken aboard. “Well, that’s really it, then,” he said. “I might just as well chuck my samples in the river—I’ll never sell in this territory. Nobody needs my product.”

Morrig shrugged. “What do you care how they use ‘em? You oughta sell ‘em first, and then let the customers find a use for ‘em afterward. That’s logic.”

Fairy logic, perhaps, Barry thought. “But how can you sell something without first convincing the customer that it’s useful?”

“Here.” Morrig tossed off a final drink, gave a bone-rattling belch, and then lurched ponderously to his feet, scooping up both sample cases in one hand. “Lemme show you. Ya just gotta be forceful.”

The troll started off at a brisk pace, Barry practically having to run to keep up with his enormous strides. They climbed back up the curving wooden steps, and then Morrig somehow retraced Barry’s wandering route through the streets of Faerie town, leading them unerringly back to the home of the short-tempered, pinocchio-nosed fairy who had cast the first spell on Barry—the Hag of Blackwater, according to Morrig.

Morrig pounded thunderously on the Hag’s door, making the whole house shake. The Hag snatched the door open angrily, snarling, “What’s to—GACK!” as Morrig suddenly grabbed her up in one enormous hand, yanked her out of the house, and lifted her up to face level.

“Good evenin’, ma’am,” Morrig said pleasantly.

“A murrain on you, lummox!” she shrieked. “Curst vile rogue! Release me at once! At once, you foul scoundrel! I’ll—BLURK.” Her voice was cut off abruptly as Morrig tightened his grip, squeezing the breath out of her. Her face turned blood-red, and her eyes bulged from her head until Barry was afraid that she was going to pop like an overripe grape.

“Now, now, lady,” Morrig said in a gently chiding tone. “Let’s keep the party polite, okay? You know your magic’s too weak to use on me. And you shouldn’t’a’oughta use no hard language. We’re just two workin’ stiffs tryin’ ta make a honest buck, see? You give us the bad mouth, and, say, it just might make me sore.” Morrig began shaking her, up and down, back and forth, his fist moving with blinding speed, shaking her in his enormous hand as if she were a pair of dice he was about to shoot in a crap game. “AND YOU WOULDN’T WANT TA MAKE ME SORE, NOW, WOULD YOU, LADY?” Morrig bellowed. “WOULD YOU?”

The Hag was being shaken so hard that all you could see of her was a blur of motion. “Givors!” she said in a faint little voice. “Givors, I pray you!”

Morrig stopped shaking her. She lay gasping and disheveled in his grasp, her eyes unfocused. “There!” Morrig said jovially, beaming down at her. “That’s better, ain’t it? Now I’m just gonna start all over again.” He paused for a second, and then said brightly, “‘Evenin’, ma’am! I’m sellin’ . . . uh . . . ” He scratched his head, looking baffled, then brightened. “. . . compukers!” He held up a sample case to show her; she stared dazedly at it. “Now I could go on and on about how swell these compukers are, but I can see you’re already anxious ta buy, so there ain’t no need ta waste yer valuable time like that. Ain’t that right?” When she didn’t answer, he frowned and gave her a little shake. “Ain’t that right?”

“A-aye,” she gibbered. “Aye!”

Morrig set her down, keeping only a light grip on her shoulder, and Barry broke out the sales forms. While she was scribbling frantically in the indicated blanks, Morrig rumbled, “And, say, now that we’re all gettin’ along so good, how’s about takin’ your spell offa my friend’s nose, just as a gesture a good will? You’ll do that little thing for me, won’tcha?”

With ill-grace, the Hag obliged. There was a pop, and Barry exulted as he felt his nose shrink down to its original size. Part of the way home, anyway! He collected the sales forms and returned the receipts. “You can let go of her now,” he told Morrig.

Sullenly, the Hag stalked back into her house, slamming the door behind her. The door vanished, leaving only an expanse of blank wood. With a freight-train rumble, the whole house sank into the ground and disappeared from sight. Grass sprang up on the spot where the house had been, and started growing furiously.

Morrig chuckled. Before they could move on, another fairy woman darted out from an adjacent door. “What bought the Hag of Blackwater, so precious that straight she hastens to hide herself away with it from prying eyes?” the other fairy asked. “Must indeed be something wondrous rare, to make her cloister herself with such dispatch, like a mouse to its hole, and then pull the very hole in after her! Aye, she knew I’d be watching, I doubt not, the selfish old bitch! Ever has she been jealous of my Art. Fain am I to know what the Hag would keep from my sight. Let me see your wares.”

It was then that Barry had his master-stroke. “I’m sorry,” he said in his snidest voice, “but I’m afraid that I can’t show it to you. We’re selling these computers by exclusive license of the Queen, and of course we can’t sell them to just anyone. I’m afraid that we certainly couldn’t sell you one, so—”

“What!” the fairy spluttered. “No one is better connected at Court than I! You must let me buy! And you do not, the Queen’s majesty shall hear of this!”

“Well,” said Barry doubtfully, “I don’t know . . .”

Barry and Morrig made a great team. They were soon surrounded by a swarm of customers. The demand became so great that they had no trouble talking Snailface into taking his spell off Barry as part of the price of purchase. In fact, Snailface became so enthusiastic about computers, that he bought six of them. Morrig had been right. Who cared what they used them for, so long as they bought them? That was their problem, wasn’t it?

In the end, they only quit because they had run out of sales forms. Morrig had a new profession, and Barry returned to Earth a happy man.

Soon Barry had (with a little help from Morrig, who was still hard at work, back in Faerie) broken all previous company sales records, many times over. Barry had convinced the company that the floodtide of new orders was really coming from heretofore untouched backwoods regions of West Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, and everyone agreed that it was simply amazing how many hillbillies out there in the Ozarks had suddenly decided that they wanted home computer systems. Business was booming. So, when, months later, the company opened a new branch office with great pomp and ceremony, Barry was there, in a place of honor.

The sales staff stood respectfully watching as the company president himself sat down to try out one of the gleaming new terminals. The president had started the company out of his basement when home computers were new, and he was only a college dropout from Silicon Valley, and he was still proud of his programming skills.

But as the president punched figures into the keyboard, long, curling, purple moose antlers began to sprout from the top of his head.

The sales staff stood frozen in silent horror. Barry gasped; then, recovering swiftly, he reached over the president’s shoulder to hit the cancel key. The purple moose horns disappeared.

The Old Man looked up, puzzled. “Is anything wrong?”

“Only a glitch, sir,” Barry said smoothly. But his hand was trembling. He was afraid that there were going to be more such glitches.

The way sales were booming—a lot more.

Evidently, the fairyfolk had finally figured out what computers were really for. And Barry suddenly seemed to hear, far back in his head, the silvery peals of malicious elven laughter.

It was a two-way system, afterall . . .

The Mayan Variation

Introduction to The Mayan Variation

I adore baseball stories. When I edited F&SF, I published a baseball issue every summer. Science fiction, fantasy and horror all blend well with baseball. Hell, even mystery and romance do.

SF has seen some wonderful baseball stories, from Esther Friesner’s “Jesus at the Bat” to W.P. Kinsella’s classic, Shoeless Joe, which was made into a classic film, Field of Dreams. The sf field doesn’t have classic football stories or classic basketball stories. Just classic baseball stories.

You’re about to read one of them.

Why is baseball the stuff literature is made of? I could wax rhapsodic about the game, but that isn’t the reason. I’m a basketball fan and I adore golf, but I really don’t want to read stories about them.

I even believe all the sports metaphors about sport being larger than life, about sport as a training ground for life, about what happens in sport sets the stage for what happens in life.

Yep. I buy all that. But I don’t want to read about it when it comes to football or hockey. Just baseball.

So what is it about baseball? What makes baseball different from all of America’s other sporting pastimes?

I think Ron Shelton explained it in the opening speech he wrote for Annie Savoy in my favorite baseball movie, Bull Durham. He compared baseball to a religion. In fact, he called baseball a religion, and for some of us, it is.

We approach it the same way. Some of us are Christmas and Easter only. Some of us attend every day. And some of us are rabid atheists, trying to prove that the religion isn’t worthy, that the church doesn’t exist.

Like Annie Savoy, I happen to believe in the Church of Baseball. The religious aspect of the game is why baseball stories work and why the current hot ticket, golf stories (even golf stories written by Bull Durham writer, Ron Shelton) don’t. Golf, while it has its own mystique (and it has a heck of a mystique for golfers; I know. I married one.), doesn’t allow its aficionados to sit in a sanctuary every day. Golf fans have to traipse all over the course. They even have to bring their own chairs.

Football fans sit on benches and are forced to wear too much clothing, because it’s usually cold. Basketball fans don’t go to the court for occasional reflection. They go for the adrenaline rush.

But baseball fans—baseball fans get a worship service every time they walk into the park (and how many other professional games are played in a park?), complete with history (the stats are flashed throughout the game, in case you didn’t remember them yourself), ritual food (hot dogs, beer, peanuts, and Crackerjacks), and ritual music (from the national anthem at the beginning of the game to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” sung in the seventh inning stretch). Ritual music that, by the way, requires its singers to stand—just like they do when they sing hymns in church.

And because we have the Church of Baseball, baseball fans react with religious fervor whenever their sport is violated. Whether the violations happen because of a rules change or because a silly owner believes a new chrome and steel stadium is better than the old ivy covered ballpark, or whether the violations happen because players get greedy and strike or because the Commissioner of Baseball shows herself to be a bigot doesn’t matter. What matters is that a violation occurred, and violations in a holy place aren’t just annoying. They’re wrong.

A violation doesn’t stop the fans from attending church, but it does change the way they feel about the game. And, someday, it will change the way the game is played.

Gardner knows this. He and his wife Susan Casper are baseball fans (although she’s a bigger fan than he is. When we started making the annual Worldcon pilgrimage to ballparks, Gardner sent me a grumpy e-mail. She’s watching games on TV again, he wrote. I put the blame solely on you. Probably because, if Susan was watching, Gardner was watching and he was getting pulled back into the church, one worship service at a time.).

In “The Mayan Variation,” Gardner’s reacted to baseball’s recent violations in a way that only a fan can react. With anger, with eloquence, and with a solution, a solution that makes sense if you think about the Church of Baseball and the way religions evolve . . .

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The Mayan Variation

The cops started to file into the stadium at the bottom of the ninth inning, and the crowd buzzed like a huge angry bee, an ominous razor-edged hum that set your teeth on edge.

Barnett, the third baseman, glanced up for a second to watch the cops spreading out in a thin line that encircled the playing field just inside the wall—a couple of them were on horseback, and some of them had dogs. He exchanged significant glances with Guerra, the second baseman, and Guerra shook his head and spat. The cops were certainly taking no chances today.

Shrugging, Barnett turned his attention back to the game. Lou Kesselman had just dropped the rosin bag and was about to go into his windup. Chuck Parrish stepped back into the batter’s box and waggled his hips once or twice—he was one of those absolutely gigantic blacks who look more at home as NFL defensive linemen, and the bat looked like a willow-switch in his huge hands.

Kesselman went into his awkward-looking windup, all arms and legs and odd angles, like a scarecrow twisting in the wind, and then suddenly the ball was by Parrish, and Parrish had been caught looking.

The crowd howled.

3-2. A full count. Barnett wiped his sweating hands on his pants. It was 4-4 with two out in the bottom of the ninth, no men on base, the deciding game of the World Series, the home team at bat in their own ball park, and everything depended on the next few pitches.

Barnett tried to shout, provide a little encouraging infield chatter, but he was too dry to speak. He wiped his hands again; it was cold, the bite of the coming winter riding in the wind, but he was sweating like a pig. His stomach hurt. If only they could hold them, force the game into extra innings. The top of their lineup would be coming up in the tenth . . .

Kesselman went into his windup, pitched, and Parrish took a terrific slice at the ball. There was the hard thwack of contact, and Barnett’s heart stopped for a second, but it was only a low bouncer in foul territory.

The crowd noise, already incredibly loud, went up several notches, as if someone had twisted a volume control knob.

Kesselman was standing on the mound with his long arms dangling tonelessly and his head bowed, as if he was praying. Perhaps he was, Barnett thought. He had every right to be. He was one of the game’s great southpaws, talked about the way people used to talk about Sandy Koufax and Steve Carlton, but it had been a grueling game on top of a long hard season, and the stakes for this particular game were as high as they ever got . . .

Parrish popped another long shot foul. Koziakiewicz, the first baseman, chased it all the way up onto the dugout roof; but it fell several rows into the stands.

The umpire threw Kesselman a new ball; he picked it out of the air and climbed very slowly back onto the mound. He stood there for what seemed like hours, shaking off sign after sign, while Parrish swished his bat back and forth through the unresisting air. Finally, he nodded.

The crowd, which had been screaming its lungs out only a few seconds before, had suddenly become strangely quiet. Time seemed to slow down and stop, and for several long smothering heartbeats there was no motion anywhere on the field. Through the deathly hush, Barnett could hear the noise his teeth were making as they ground together. His muscles ached with tension, and he was sensing everything around him with an extraordinary crystalline precision he’d never known before: The sound of a car engine somewhere, faint and far away. The grim, set faces of the surrounding policemen. One of the police horses shuffling nervously and blowing out its lips in a snort, a white cloud of vapor rising from its nostrils. The fans in their seats, tier upon tier of them rising sheer into the steel-grey sky. The glint of light on camera lens. The umpire leaning forward behind home plate, hands on knees, his cheeks red and stiff with cold. A scrap of paper blowing across the infield. The same wind catching a loose end of the tarpaulin covering the structure that had been erected a few yards behind home plate, making the cloth flap with a heavy wet-canvas sound, like the beating of leather wings.

Kesselman pitched, and as soon as the ball left his hand, Barnett knew that Parrish was going to hit it.

He did, and it climbed into the sky toward left field, rising . . .

Barnett straightened slowly out of his crouch, watching hopelessly as the ball sailed high overhead, thinking in anguish, Christ, it’s going to go out, it’s going out . . .

Martinez, the left fielder, chased it past the warning track and made a tremendous leap up the outfield wall, stretching out desperately, but the ball whistled past his glove and out of the park with a yard to spare, and Martinez fell heavily back into the dirt.

Barnett stood there numbly, barely hearing the frenzied noise of the crowd, barely noticing the grinning Parrish as he went jogging by on his way around the bases. After a moment or two, Barnett grinned—grotesquely, ruefully, bitterly.

There would be no joy in Mudville. The game was over.

He looked over at Guerra, and Guerra’s eyes were sick.

Gilchrist, the rightfielder, made a break for it, dodging through a gap in the line of cops and sprinting for the outfield wall. He was almost over it when two cops grabbed his ankles and hauled him back into the park. Gilchrist struggled frantically, and then a nightstick rose and fell, and he was clubbed to his knees. The cop clubbed Gilchrist again, knocking him face forward into the gravel of the warning track.

The ring of cops began to close in, like a noose tightening.

Sickened, Barnett turned away and threw his fielder’s glove on the ground. Kesselman was already walking slowly toward home plate, his head down, and Martinez and Francesconi were coming in from the outfield, casting glances back at the two cops who were dragging Gilchrist along over the Astroturf.

He looked at Guerra again, and Guerra, his lips pale, said, “Well, tough luck on us, I guess.”

Barnett shrugged. “Yeah,” he said, and started walking in. His legs felt like water, and it was all he could do to keep himself moving forward. Over to one side, near the home team dugout, Parrish was being mobbed by his teammates in a frantic celebration, but that didn’t concern them anymore; the leaping, gesticulating figures might just as well have been in another world. Ahead he could see his own teammates standing in a despondent group just beyond home plate, in front of the tarpaulin-covered structure, surrounded by a crowd of officials and jostling reporters with microphones and minicams. Amid a heat-shimmer of popping flashbulbs, the Baseball Commissioner pulled the tarpaulin away, and the waiting crowd cheered.

As Barnett crossed home plate, the reporters closed in around him, and he could hear the network color men chattering away:

“. . . since its inception, fans have stopped complaining about inflated player salaries . . .”

“. . . increased Series attendance . . .”

“. . . the idea from the ancient Mayans, who played a kind of ball game of their own, and who, at the end of the game, would . . .”

“. . . the losing team . . .”

Just ahead of Barnett, Kesselman screamed, a horrible, gurgling scream that seemed to hang endlessly in the air. Barnett stopped involuntarily, his heart thudding, but two cops grabbed him by the elbows and hustled him forward toward the waiting altar and the bloody knife.

The Clowns

Introduction to The Clowns

Gardner Dozois is one of the best short-fiction writers alive and the most important sf editor since John W. Campbell Jr. He is also my friend and, often, my editor. He has bought and published more of my stories than anyone else, and he has helped me make each far better than it would have been otherwise. He has been instrumental to my career, and I’ll never be able to repay him, certainly not in this silly introduction, not if it were twice as long as the book. So I’ll concede defeat, tell a few anecdotes, and let you get on to “The Clowns”—a terrific story, as you’ll find out soon enough.

Gardner wrote my first personal rejection letter, which arrived in my Seattle University dormitory mailbox the third week of the Clarion West Writers Workshop in summer 1994. This communiqué from the honest-to-Asimov Big Time became stained, limp, and worn as it passed among my fellow students, drawing the adoration and awe normally afforded relics of the saints.

Soon, my personal rejection letters from Gardner began to alternate with personal acceptance letters from Gardner. The latter begin a lot like the former, with a lengthy paragraph ticking off the reasons the story is all wrong for Asimov’s, only to continue, “But I guess I’ll take it anyway.” Next come several paragraphs of revision suggestions, and if you’ve read any of these stories, you see that I do everything Gardner says. The letter usually concludes with an urgent plea to make said revisions as soon as possible, before Gardner is lynched and the Asimov’s presses are burned and all its Hugos are retroactively revoked by torch-wielding James Whale mobs of hardcore fen enraged that he even would consider buying such a peculiar cross-genre non-hard-sf thingamabob, in which case my story will be doomed to perhaps-deserved unpublishability forevermore, and so on and so forth. I love acceptance letters in general, but Gardner’s are my favorites.

About two hours after I first met Gardner in person, at the most recent World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore, I stood next to Michael Swanwick in a crowded con suite, watching Gardner hold forth in the corner. With a malicious glint in his eyes, Michael turned to me and said, “This party is dull. Let’s enliven it.” Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed me by the arm, hauled me across the room, flung me at Gardner, pointed to me and yelled: “This guy says your magazine sucks! He says he wouldn’t be caught dead in your lousy magazine?” “Oh, yeah?” Gardner roared. “Well, fuck you!” I replied in kind, being a quick study, and things escalated, as Michael giggled and several dozen bystanders not in on the joke got very quiet and very wide-eyed. I keep hoping that someday our vicious public quarrel will be the stuff of fannish legend, like Kornbluth punching Forry Ackerman in the gut. Certainly I retell the story everywhere I go, so I’m doing my part.

I recommend the Gardner Dozois tour of historic Philadelphia, which lies between his and Susan’s apartment and all the good eating places. “There’s a lot of old shit over there,” he says over his shoulder, waving vaguely in the direction of Independence Hall. Passing a wrought-iron cemetery fence without a backward glance, he summarizes: “Lots of famous dead people there.” As we pass an impressive equestrian statue, my wife, Sydney, catching on, asks, “Whose statue is that, Gardner?” Without missing a beat, he replies, “I think he founded the Navy.” But he can speak at length, and does, about the best dishes to order at Mustard Greens—which serves not soul food, but Chinese—and which sex shops have the most interesting clientele, and where the best belly dancers can be found.

I once sat beside Gardner on an all-male van ride through the city, en route to a Philadelphia Science Fiction Society meeting. To pass the time that otherwise might have been squandered in useless frivolity, Gardner taught us a series of rude songs about sf writers, each of them set to a TV theme, none of which I will repeat here or anywhere else, and also taught us some of his “sure-fire” pickup lines, which he demonstrated by screeching them out the window, with a remarkable lack of success, whenever the van passed a woman, which was often. My favorite Gardner pickup line: “How bad could it be?”

None of which prepares you for “The Clowns,” one of the scariest stories I’ve ever read. It scared the willies out of me when I read it in Playboy in 1985, and it scared them out of me again when I re-read it last night. For one thing, I’m older now, and I’ve seen some clowns of my own, and I know the smell of fear really is “a sudden bitter burnt reek, like scorched onions,” yes, exactly. Thank you, Gardner, for everything. And now let us all join hands and wade bravely into the C. Fred Johnson Municipal Pool.

Andy Duncan

The Clowns

by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann,

and Susan Casper

The C. Fred Johnson Municipal Pool was packed with swimmers, more in spite of the blazing sun and wet, muggy heat than because of them.

It was the dead middle of August, stiflingly hot, and it would have made more sense to stay inside—or, at the very least, in the shade—than to splash around in the murky, tepid water. Nevertheless, the pool was crowded almost shoulder to shoulder, especially with kids—there were children everywhere, the younger ones splashing and shouting in the shallow end, the older kids and the teenagers jumping off the high dive or playing water polo in the deep end. Mothers sat in groups and chatted, their skins glistening with suntan oil and sweat. The temperature was well above 90, and the air seemed to shimmer with the heat, like automobile exhaust in a traffic jam.

David Shore twisted his wet bath towel and snapped it at his friend Sammy, hitting him on the sun-reddened backs of his thighs.

“Ow!” Sammy screamed. “You dork! Cut it out!” David grinned and snapped the towel at Sammy again, hitting only air this time but producing a satisfyingly loud crack. Sammy jumped back, shouting, “Cut it out! I’ll tell! I’ll tell! I mean it.”

Sammy’s voice was whining and petulant, and David felt a spasm of annoyance. Sammy was his friend, and he didn’t have so many friends that he wasn’t grateful for that, but Sammy was always whining. What a baby! That’s what he got for hanging out with little kids—Sammy was eight, two years younger than David—but since the trouble he’d had last fall, with his parents almost breaking up and he himself having to go for counseling, he’d been ostracized by many of the kids his own age. David’s face darkened for a moment, but then he sighed and shook his head. Sammy was all right, really. A good kid. He really shouldn’t tease him so much, play so many jokes on him. David smiled wryly. Maybe he did it just to hear him whine—

“Don’t be such a baby,” David said tiredly, wrapping the towel around his hand. “It’s only a towel, dickface. It’s not gonna kill you if—” Then David stopped abruptly, staring blankly off beyond Sammy, toward the bathhouse.

“It hurt,” Sammy whined. “You’re a real dork, you know that, Davie? How come you have to—” And then Sammy paused, too, aware that David wasn’t paying any attention to him anymore. “Davie?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

“Look at that,” David said in an awed whisper.

Sammy turned around. After a moment, confused, he asked, “Look at what?”

“There!” David said, pointing toward a sun-bleached wooden rocking chair.

“Oh, no, you’re not going to get me again with that old line,” Sammy said disgustedly. His face twisted, and this time he looked as if he were really getting mad. “The wind’s making that chair rock. It can rock for hours if the wind’s right. You can’t scare me that easy! I’m not a baby, you know!”

David was puzzled, couldn’t Sammy see? What was he—blind? It was as plain as anything . . .

There was a clown sitting in the chair, sitting and rocking, watching the kids in the swimming pool.

The clown’s face was caked with thick white paint. He had a bulb nose that was painted blood red, the same color as his broad, painted on smile. His eyes were like chips of blue ice. He sat very still, except for the slight movement of his legs needed to rock the beat-up old chair, and his eyes never left the darting figures in the water.

David had seen clowns before, of course; he’d seen plenty of them at the Veterans’ Arena in Binghamton when the Barnum & Bailey Circus came to town. Sammy’s father was a barber and always got good tickets to everything, and Sammy always took David with him. But this clown was different, somehow. For one thing, instead of performing, instead of dancing around or cakewalking or somersaulting or squirting people with a Seltzer bottle, this clown was just sitting quietly by the pool, as if it were the most normal thing in the world for him to be there. And there was something else, too, he realized. This clown was all in black. Even his big polka-dotted bow tie was black, shiny black dots against a lighter grey-black. Only his gloves were white, and they were a pure, eye-dazzling white. The contrast was startling.

“Sammy?” David said quietly. “Listen, this is important. You really think that chair is empty?”

“Jeez, grow up, will ya?” Sammy snarled. “What a dork!” He turned his back disgustedly on David and dived into the pool.

David stared thoughtfully at the clown. Was Sammy trying to kid him? Turn the tables on him, get back at him for some of his old jokes? But David was sure that Sammy wasn’t smart enough to pull it off. Sammy always gave himself away, usually by giggling.

Odd as it seemed, Sammy really didn’t see the clown.

David looked around to see who else he could ask. Certainly not Mr. Kreiger, who had a big potbelly and wore his round wire-rimmed glasses even in the water and who would stand for hours in the shallow end of the pool and splash himself with one arm, like an old bull elephant splashing water over itself with its trunk. No. Who else? Bobby Little, Jimmy Seikes and Andy Freeman were taking turns diving and cannonballing from the low board, but David didn’t want to ask them anything. That left only Jas Ritter, the pool lifeguard, or the stuck-up Weaver sisters.

But David was beginning to realize that he didn’t really have to ask anybody. Freddy Schumaker and Jane Gelbert had just walked right by the old rocking chair, without looking at the clown, without even glancing at him. Bill Dwyer was muscling himself over the edge of the pool within inches of the clown’s floppy oblong shoes, and he wasn’t paying any attention to him, either. That just wasn’t possible. No matter how supercool they liked to pretend they were, there was no way that kids were going to walk past a clown without even glancing at him.

With a sudden thrill, David took the next logical step. Nobody could see the clown except him. Maybe he was the only one in the world who could see him!

It was an exhilarating thought. David stared at the clown in awe. Nobody else could see him! Maybe he was a ghost, the ghost of an old circus clown, doomed to roam the earth forever, seeking out kids like the ones he’d performed for when he was alive, sitting in the sun and watching them play, thinking about the happy days when the circus had played this town.

That was a wonderful idea, a lush and romantic idea, and David shivered and hugged himself, feeling goose flesh sweep across his skin. He could see a ghost! It was wonderful! It was magic! Private, secret magic, his alone. It meant that he was special. It gave him a strange, secret kind of power. Maybe nobody else in the universe could see him—

It was at this point that Sammy slammed into him, laughing and shouting, “I’ll learn you, sucker!” and knocked him into the pool.

By the time David broke the surface, sputtering and shaking water out of his eyes, the clown was gone and the old rocker was rocking by itself, in the wind and the thin, empty sunshine.

After leaving the pool, David and Sammy walked over the viaduct—there was no sign of any freight trains on the weed-overgrown tracks below—and took back-alley short cuts to Curtmeister’s barbershop.

“Hang on a minute,” Sammy said and ducked into the shop. Ordinarily, David would have followed, as Sammy’s father kept gum and salt-water taffy in a basket on top of the magazine rack, but today he leaned back against the plate-glass window, thinking about the ghost he’d seen that morning, his ghost, watching as the red and blue stripes ran eternally up around the barber pole. How fascinated he’d been by that pole a few years ago, and how simple it seemed to him now.

A clown turned the corner from Avenue B, jaywalking casually across Main Street.

David started and pushed himself upright. The ghost again! or was it? Surely, this clown was shorter and squatter than the one he’d seen at the pool, though it was wearing the same kind of black costume, the same kind of white gloves. Could this be another ghost? Maybe there was a whole circusful of clown ghosts wandering around the city.

“David!” a voice called, and he jumped. It was old Mrs. Zabriski, carrying two bulging brown-paper grocery bags, working her way ponderously down the sidewalk toward him, puffing and wheezing, like some old, slow tugboat doggedly chugging toward its berth. “Want to earn a buck, David?” she called.

The clown had stopped right in the middle of Main Street, standing nonchalantly astride the double white divider line. David watched him in fascination.

“David?” Mrs. Zabriski said impatiently.

Reluctantly, David turned his attention back to Mrs. Zabriski. “Gosh, I’m sorry, Mrs. Z.,” he said. A buck would be nice, but it was more important to keep an eye on the clown. “I—ah, I promised Sammy that I’d wait out here for him.”

Mrs. Zabriski sighed. “OK, David,” she said. “Another time, then.” She looked across the street to see what he was staring at, looked back puzzledly. “Are you all right, David?”

“Yeah. Honest, Mrs. Z.,” he said, without looking around. “Really. I’m fine.”

She sighed again with doughy fatalism. And then she started across the street, headed directly for the clown.

It was obvious to David that she didn’t see him. He was standing right in front of her, grimacing and waving his arms and making faces at her, but she didn’t even slow down—she would have walked right into him if he hadn’t ducked out of the way at the last moment. After she passed, the clown minced along behind her for a few steps, doing a cruel but funny imitation of her ponderous, waddling walk, pretending to spank her on her big, fat rump.

David stifled a laugh. This was better than the circus! But now the clown seemed to have grown bored with mocking Mrs. Zabriski and began drifting slowly away toward the far side of Main Street.

David wanted to follow, but he suddenly realized, with a funny little chill, that he didn’t want to do it alone. Even if it was the ghost of a clown, a funny and entertaining ghost, it was still a ghost, after all. Somehow, he’d have to get Sammy to come with him. But how could he explain to Sammy what they were doing? Not that it would matter if Sammy didn’t come out of the shop soon—the clown was already a block away.

Anxiously, he peered in through the window until he managed to catch Sammy’s attention, then waved to him urgently. Sammy held up his index finger and continued his conversation with his father. “Hurry up, dummy,” David muttered under his breath. The clown was getting farther and farther away, almost out of sight now. Hurry up. David danced impatiently from one foot to the other. Hurry up.

But when Sammy finally came running out of the barbershop with the news that he’d talked his father into treating them both to a movie, the clown was gone.

By the time they got to the movie theater, David had pretty much gotten over the disappointment of losing the clown. At least it was a pretty good show—cartoons and a space-monster movie. There was a long line in front of the ticket window, a big crowd of kids—and even a few adults—waiting to get into the movie.

They were waiting in the tail of the line when the clown—or a clown—appeared again across the street.

“Hey, Davie!” Sammy said abruptly. “Do you see what I see?” And Sammy waved to the clown.

David was startled—and somewhat dismayed—by the strength of the surge of disappointment and jealousy that shot through him. If Sammy could see them, too, then David wasn’t special anymore. The whole thing was ruined.

Then David realized that it wasn’t the clown that Sammy was waving to.

He was waving to the old man who was waiting to cross the street, standing just in front of the clown. Old Mr. Thorne. He was at least a million years old, David knew. He’d played for the Boston Braves back before they’d even had television, for cripes’ sake. But he loved children and treated them with uncondescending courtesy and in turn was one of the few adults who were really respected by the kids. He was in charge of the yo-yo contests held in the park every summer, and he could make a yo-yo sleep or do around the world or over the falls or walking the dog better than anyone David had ever seen, including the guy who sold the golden yo-yos for the Duncan Company.

Relieved, David joined Sammy in waving to his old friend, almost—but not, quite—forgetting the clown for a moment. Mr. Thorne waved back but motioned for them to wait where they were. It was exciting to see the old man again. It would be worth missing the movie if Mr. Thorne was in the mood to buy them chocolate malteds and reminisce about the days when he’d hit a home run off the immortal Grover Cleveland Alexander.

Just as the traffic light turned yellow, an old flat-bed truck with a dented fender came careening through the intersection.

David felt his heart lurch with sudden fear—but it was all right. Mr. Thorne saw the truck coming, he was still on the curb, he was safe. But then the clown stepped up close behind him. He grabbed Mr. Thorne by the shoulders. David could see Mr. Thorne jerk in surprise as he felt the white-gloved hands close over him. Mr. Thorne’s mouth opened in surprise, his hands came fluttering weakly up, like startled birds. David could see the clown’s painted face grinning over the top of Mr. Thorne’s head. That wide, unchanging, painted-on smile.

Then the clown threw Mr. Thorne in front of the truck.

There was a sickening wet thud, a sound like that of a sledgehammer hitting a side of beef. The shriek of brakes, the squeal of flaying tires. A brief, unnatural silence. Then a man said, “Jesus Christ!” in a soft, reverent whisper. A heartbeat later, a woman started to scream.

Then everyone was shouting, screaming, babbling in a dozen confused voices, running forward. The truck driver was climbing down from the cab, his face stricken; his mouth worked in a way that might have been funny in other circumstances, opening and closing, opening and closing—then he began to cry.

All you could see of Mr. Thorne was one arm sticking out from under the truck’s rear wheels at an odd angle, like the arm of a broken doll.

A crowd was gathering now, and between loud exclamations of horror, everyone was already theorizing about what had happened: Maybe the old man had had a heart attack; maybe he’d just slipped and fallen; maybe he’d tripped over something. A man had thrown his arm around the shoulders of the bitterly sobbing truck driver; people were kneeling and peering gingerly under the truck; women were crying; little kids were shrieking and running frenziedly in all directions. Next to David, Sammy was crying and cursing at the same time, in a high and hysterical voice.

Only David was not moving.

He stood as if frozen in ice, staring at the clown.

All unnoticed, standing alone behind the ever-growing crowd, the clown was laughing.

Laughing silently, in unheard spasms that shook his shoulders and made his bulb nose jiggle. Laughing without sound, with his mouth wide-open, bending forward to slap his knees in glee, tears of pleasure running down his painted cheeks.

Laughing.

David felt his face flame. Contradictory emotions whipped through him: fear, dismay, rage, horror, disbelief, guilt. Guilt . . .

The fucking clown was laughing—

All at once, David began to run, motionless one moment and running flat-out the next, as if suddenly propelled from a sling. He could taste the salty wetness of his own tears. He tried to fight his way through the thickening crowd, to get by them and at the clown. He kept bumping into people, spinning away, sobbing and cursing, then slamming into someone else. Someone cursed him. Someone else grabbed him and held him, making sympathetic, soothing noises—it was Mr. Gratini, the music teacher, thinking that David was trying to reach Mr. Thorne’s body.

Meanwhile, the clown had stopped laughing. As if suddenly remembering another appointment, he turned brusquely and strode away.

“David, wait, there’s nothing you can do . . .” Mr. Gratini was saying, but David squirmed wildly, tore himself free, ran on.

By the time David had fought his way through the rest of the crowd, the clown was already a good distance down Willow Street, past the bakery and the engraving company with the silver sign in its second-story window.

The clown was walking faster now, was almost out of sight. Panting and sobbing, David ran after him.

He followed the clown through the alleys behind the shoe factories, over the hump of railroad tracks, under the arch of the cement viaduct that was covered with spray-painted graffiti. The viaduct was dark, its pavement strewn with candy wrappers and used condoms and cigarette butts. It was cool inside and smelled of dampness and cinders.

But on the other side of the viaduct, he realized that he’d lost the clown again. Perhaps he had crossed the field . . . though, surely, David would have seen him do that. He could be anywhere; this was an old section of town and streets and avenues branched off in all directions.

David kept searching, but he was getting tired. He was breathing funny, sort of like having the hiccups. He felt sweaty and dirty and exhausted. He wanted to go home.

What would he have done if he’d caught the clown?

All at once, he felt cold.

There was nobody around, seemingly for miles—the streets were as deserted as those of a ghost town. Nobody around, no one to help him if he were attacked, no one to hear him if he cried for help.

The silence was thick and dusty and smothering. Scraps of paper blew by with the wind. The sun shimmered from the empty sidewalks.

David’s mouth went dry. The hair rose bristlingly on his arms and legs. The clown suddenly rounded the comer just ahead, coming swiftly toward him with a strange, duckwalking gait.

David screamed and took a quick step backward. He stumbled and lost his balance. For what seemed like an eternity, he teetered precariously, windmilling his arms. Then he crashed to the ground.

The fall hurt and knocked the breath out of him, but David almost didn’t notice the pain. From the instant he’d hit the pavement, the one thought in his head had been, Had he given himself away? Did the clown now realize that David could see him?

Quickly, he sat up, clutching his hands around his knee and rocking back and forth as if absorbed in pain. He found that he had no difficulty making himself cry, and cry loudly, though he didn’t feel the tears the way he had before. He carefully did not turn his head to look at the clown, though he did sneak a sidelong peek out of the corner of his eye.

The clown had stopped a few yards away and was watching him—standing motionlessly and staring at him, fixedly, unblinkingly, with total concentration, like some great, black, sullen bird of prey.

David hugged his skinned knee and made himself cry louder. There was a possibility that he hadn’t given himself away—that the clown would think he’d yelled like that because he’d tripped and fallen down and not because he’d seen him come dancing around the corner. The two things had happened closely enough together that the clown might think that. Please, God, let him think that. Let him believe it.

The clown was still watching him.

Stiffly, David got up. Still not looking at the clown, he made himself lean over and brush off his pants. Although his mouth was still as dry as dust, he moistened his lips and forced himself to swear, swear out loud, blistering the air with every curse word he could think of, as though he were upset about the ragged hole torn in his new blue jeans and the blood on his knee.

He kept slapping at his pants a moment longer, still bent over, wondering if he should suddenly break and run now that he was on his feet again, make a flat-out dash for freedom. But the clowns were so fast. And even if he did escape, then they would know that he could see them.

Compressing his lips into a hard, thin line, David straightened up and began to walk directly toward the clown.

Closer and closer. He could sense the clown looming enormously in front of him, the cold blue eyes still staring suspiciously at him. Don’t look at the clown! Keep walking casually and don’t look at him. David’s spine was as stiff as if it were made of metal, and his head ached with the effort of not looking. He picked a spot on the sidewalk and stared at it, thrust his hands into his pockets with elaborate casualness and somehow forced his legs to keep walking. Closer. Now he was close enough to be grabbed, if the clown wanted to grab him. He was right next to him, barely an arm’s length away. He could smell the clown now—a strong smell of greasepaint, underlaid with a strange, musty, earthen smell, like old wet leaves, like damp old wallpaper. He was suddenly cold, as cold as ice; it was all he could do to keep from shaking with the cold. Keep going. Take one more step. Then one more . . .

As he passed the clown, he caught sight of an abrupt motion out of the corner of his eye. With all the will he could summon, he forced himself not to flinch or look back. He kept walking, feeling a cold spot in the middle of his back, knowing somehow that the clown was still staring at him, staring after him. Don’t speed up. Just keep walking. Papers rustled in the gutter behind him. Was there a clown walking through them? Coming up behind him? About to grab him? He kept walking, all the while waiting for the clown to get him, for those strong cold hands to close over his shoulders, the way they had closed over the shoulders of old Mr. Thorne.

He walked all the way home without once looking up or looking around him, and it wasn’t until he had gotten inside, with the door locked firmly behind him, that he began to tremble.

David had gone upstairs without eating dinner. His father had started to yell about that—he was strict about meals—but his mother had intervened, taking his father aside to whisper something about “trauma” to him—both of them inadvertently shooting him that uneasy walleyed look they sometimes gave him now, as if they weren’t sure he mightn’t suddenly start drooling and gibbering if they said the wrong thing to him, as if he had something they might catch—and his father had subsided, grumbling.

Upstairs, he sat quietly for a long time, thinking hard.

The clowns. Had they just come to town, or had they always been there and he just hadn’t been able to see them before? He remembered when Mikey had broken his collarbone two summers ago, and when Sarah’s brother had been killed in the motorcycle accident, and when that railroad yardman had been hit by the freight train. Were the clowns responsible for those accidents, too?

He didn’t know. There was one thing he did know, though:

Something had to be done about the clowns.

He was the only one who could see them.

Therefore, he had to do something about them.

He was the only one who could see them, the only one who could warn people. If he didn’t do anything and the clowns hurt somebody else, then he’d be to blame. Somehow, he had to stop them.

How?

David sagged in his chair, overwhelmed by the immensity of the problem. How?

The doorbell rang.

David could hear an indistinct voice downstairs, mumbling something, and then hear his mother’s voice, clearer, saying, “I don’t know if David really feels very much like having company right now, Sammy.”

Sammy—

David scooted halfway down the stairs and yelled, “Ma! No, Ma, it’s OK! Send him up!” He went on down to the second-floor landing, saw Sammy’s face peeking tentatively up the stairs and motioned for Sammy to follow him up to his room.

David’s room was at the top of the tall, narrow old house, right next to the small room that his father sometimes used as an office. There were old magic posters on the walls—Thurston, Houdini, Blackstone: King of Magicians—a Duran Duran poster behind the bed and a skeleton mobile of a Tyrannosaurus hanging from the overhead lamp. He ushered Sammy in wordlessly, then flopped down on top of the Star Wars spread that he’d finally persuaded his mother to buy for him. Sammy pulled out the chair to David’s desk and began to fiddle abstractedly with the pieces of David’s half-assembled Bell X-15 model kit. There were new dark hollows under Sammy’s eyes and his face looked strained. Neither boy spoke.

“Mommy didn’t want to let me out,” Sammy said after a while, sweeping the model pieces aside with his hand. “I told her I’d feel better if I could come over and talk to you. It’s really weird about Mr. Thorne, isn’t it? I can’t believe it, the way that truck smushed him, like a tube of toothpaste or something.” Sammy grimaced and put his arms around his legs, clasping his hands together tightly, rocking back and forth nervously. “I just can’t believe he’s gone.”

David felt the tears start and blinked them back. Crying wouldn’t help. He looked speculatively at Sammy. He certainly couldn’t tell his parents about the clowns. Since his “nervous collapse” last fall, they were already afraid that he was a nut.

“Sammy,” he said. “I have to tell you something. Something important. But first you have to promise not to tell anybody. No matter what, no matter how crazy it sounds, you’ve got to promise!”

“Yeah?” Sammy said tentatively.

“No—first you’ve got to promise.”

“OK, I promise,” Sammy said, a trace of anger creeping into his voice.

“Remember this afternoon at the swimming pool, when I pointed at that rocking chair, and you thought I was pulling a joke on you? Well, I wasn’t. I did see somebody sitting there. I saw a clown.”

Sammy looked disgusted. “I see a clown right now,” he grated.

“Honest, Sammy I did see a clown. A clown, all made up and in costume, just like at the circus. And it was a clown—the same one, I think—who pushed Mr. Thorne in front of that truck.”

Sammy just looked down at his knees. His face reddened.

“I’m not lying about this, I swear. I’m telling the truth this time; honest, Sammy, I really am—”

Sammy made a strange noise, and David suddenly realized that he was crying.

David started to ask him what the matter was, but before he could speak, Sammy had rounded fiercely on him, blazing. “You’re nuts! You are a loony, just like everybody says! No wonder nobody will play with you. Loony! Fucking loony!”

Sammy was screaming now, the muscles in his neck cording. David shrank away from him, his face going ashen.

They stared at each other. Sammy was panting like a dog, and tears were running down his cheeks.

“Everything’s . . . some kind of . . . joke to you, isn’t it?” Sammy panted. “Mr. Thorne was my friend. But you . . . you don’t care about anybody!” He was screaming again on the last word. Then he whirled and ran out of the room.

David followed him, but by the time he was halfway down the stairs, Sammy was already out the front door, slamming it shut behind him. “What was that all about?” David’s mother asked.

“Nothing,” David said dully. He was staring through the screened-in door, watching Sammy run down the sidewalk. Should he chase him? But all at once it seemed as if he were too tired to move; he leaned listlessly against the doorjamb and watched Sammy disappear from sight. Sammy had left the gate of their white picket fence unlatched, and it swung back and forth in the wind, making a hollow slamming sound.

How could he make anyone else believe him if he couldn’t even convince Sammy? There was nobody left to tell.

David had a sudden, bitter vision of just how lonely the rest of the summer was going to be without even Sammy to play with. Just him, all by himself, all summer long.

Just him . . . and the clowns.

David heard his parents talking as he made his way down to breakfast the next morning and paused just outside the kitchen archway to listen. “Was the strangest thing,” his mother was saying.

“What was?” David’s father grumbled. He was hunched over his morning coffee, glowering at it, as if daring it to cool off before he got around to drinking it. Mr. Shore was often grouchy in the morning, though things weren’t as bad anymore as they’d been last fall, when his parents had often screamed obscenities at each other across the breakfast table—not as bad as that one terrible morning, the morning David didn’t even want to think about, when his father had punched his mother in the face and knocked two of her teeth out, because the eggs were runny. David’s mother kept telling him that his father was under a lot of “stress” because of his new job—he used to sell computers, but now he was a stockbroker trainee.

“What was?” David’s father repeated irritably, having gotten no reply.

“Oh, I don’t know,” David’s mother said. “It’s just that I was thinking about that poor old woman all night. I just can’t get her out of my mind. You know, she kept swearing somebody pushed her.”

“For Christ’s sake!” David’s father snapped. “Nobody pushed her. She’s just getting senile. She had heavy bags to carry and all those stairs to climb, that’s all.” He broke off, having spotted David in the archway. “David, don’t skulk like that. You know I hate a sneak. In or out!”

David came slowly forward. His mouth had gone dry again and he had to moisten his lips to be able to speak. “What—what were you talking about? Did something happen? Who got hurt?”

“Marty!” David’s mother said sharply, glancing quickly and significantly at David, frowning, shaking her head.

“Damn it, Anna,” David’s father grumbled. “Do you really think that the kid’s gonna curl up and die if he finds out that Mrs. Zabriski fell down a flight of stairs? What the hell does he care?”

“Marty!”

“He doesn’t even know her, except to say hello to, for Christ’s sake! Accidents happen all the time; he might just as well get used to that—”

David was staring at them. His face had gone white. “Mrs. Zabriski?” he whispered. “Is—is she dead?”

His mother gave her husband a now-look-what-you’ve-done glare and moved quickly to put an arm around David’s shoulder. “No, honey,” she said soothingly, in that nervous, almost too sympathetic voice she used on him now whenever she thought he was under stress. “She’s going to be OK. Just a broken leg and a few bruises. She fell down the stairs yesterday on her way back from the grocery store. Those stairs are awfully steep for a woman her age. She tripped, that’s all.”

David bit his lip. Somehow, he managed to blink back sudden bitter tears. His fault! If he’d carried her bags for her, like she’d wanted him to, like she’d asked him to, then she’d have been all right; the clown wouldn’t have gotten her.

For Mrs. Zabriski hadn’t tripped. He knew that.

She’d been pushed.

By the time David got to Sammy’s house, there was no one home. Too late! His father had reluctantly let David off the hook about eating breakfast—the very thought of eating made him ill—but had insisted in his I’m-going-to-brook-no-more-nonsense voice, the one he used just before he started hitting, that David wash the breakfast dishes, and that had slowed him up just enough. He’d hoped to catch Sammy before he left for the pool, try to talk to him again, try to get him to at least agree to keep quiet about the clowns.

He made one stop, in the Religious Book Store and Reading Room on Main Street, and bought something with some of the money from his allowance. Then, slowly and reluctantly, trying to ignore the fear that was building inside him, he walked to the swimming pool.

Sammy was already in the water when David arrived.

The pool was crowded, as usual. David waved halfheartedly to Jas, who was sitting in the high-legged lifeguard’s chair. Jas waved back uninterestedly; he was surveying his domain through aluminum sunglasses, his nose smeared with zinc oxide to keep it from burning.

And—yes—the clown was there! Way in the back, near the refreshment stand. Lounging quietly against a wall and watching the people in the pool.

David felt his heart start hammering. Moving slowly and—he hoped—inconspicuously, he began to edge through the crowd toward Sammy. The clown was still looking the other way. If only—

But then Sammy saw David. “Well, well, well,” Sammy yelled, “if it isn’t David Shore!” His voice was harsh and ugly, his face flushed and twisted. David had never seen him so bitter and upset. “Seen any more clowns lately, Davie?” There was real hatred in his voice. “Seen any more killer invisible clowns, Davie? You loony! You fucking loony!”

David flinched, then tried to shush him. People were looking around, attracted by the shrillness of Sammy’s voice.

The clown was looking, too. David saw him look at Sammy, who was still waving his arms and shouting, and then slowly raise his head, trying to spot who Sammy was yelling at.

David ducked aside into the crowd, half squatting down, dodging behind a couple of bigger kids. He could feel the clown’s gaze pass overhead, like a scythe made of ice and darkness. Shut up, Sammy, he thought desperately.

Shut up. He squirmed behind another group of kids, bumping into somebody, heard someone swear at him.

“Daa-vie!” Sammy was shouting in bitter mockery. “Where are all the clowns, Davie? You seen any clowning around here today, Davie? Huh, Davie?”

The clown was walking toward Sammy now, still scanning the crowd, his gaze relentless and bright.

Slowly, David pushed his way through the crowd, moving away from Sammy. Bobby and Andy were standing in line at the other end of the pool, waiting to jump off the board. David stepped up behind Andy, pretending to be waiting in line, even though he hated diving. Should he leave the pool? Run? That would only make it easier for the clown to spot him. But if he left, maybe Sammy would shut up.

“You’re crazy, David Shore!” Sammy was yelling. He seemed on the verge of tears—he had been very close to Mr. Thorne. “You know that? You’re fucking crazy. Bats in the belfry, Davie—“

The clown was standing on the edge of the pool, right above Sammy, staring down at him thoughtfully.

Then Sammy spotted David. His face went blank, as though with amazement, and he pointed his finger at him. “David! There’s a clown behind you!”

Instinctively, knowing that it was a mistake even as his muscles moved but unable to stop himself, David whipped his head around and looked behind him. Nothing was there.

When he turned back, the clown was staring at him.

Their eyes met, and David felt a chill go through him, as if he had been pierced with ice.

Sammy was breaking up, hugging himself in glee and laughing, shrill, cawing laughter with a trace of hysteria in it. “Jeez-us, Davie!” he yelled. “You’re just not playing with a full deck, are you, Davie? You’re—”

The clown knelt by the side of the pool. Moving with studied deliberation, never taking his eyes off David, the clown reached out, seized Sammy by the shoulders—Sammy jerked in surprise, his mouth opening wide—and slowly and relentlessly forced him under the water.

“Sammy!” David screamed.

The clown was leaning out over the pool, eyes still on David, one arm thrust almost shoulder-deep into the water, holding Sammy under. The water thrashed and boiled around the clown’s outthrust arm, but Sammy wasn’t coming back up—

“Jason!” David shrieked, waving his arms to attract the lifeguard’s attention and then pointing toward the churning patch of water. “Ja-son! Help! Help! Somebody’s drowning!” Jason looked in the direction David was pointing, sat up with a start, began to scramble to his feet—

David didn’t wait to see any more. He hit the water in a clumsy dive, almost a belly-whopper, and began thrashing across the pool toward Sammy, swimming as strongly as he could. Half blinded by spray and by the wet hair in his eyes, half dazed by the sudden shock of cold water on his sun-baked body, he almost rammed his head into the far side of the pool, banging it with a wildly flailing hand instead. He recoiled, gasping. The clown was right above him now, only a few feet away. The clown turned his head to look at him, still holding Sammy under, and once again David found himself shaking with that deathly arctic cold. He kicked at the side wall of the pool, thrusting himself backward. Then he took a deep breath and went under.

The water was murky, but he was close enough to see Sammy. The clown’s white-gloved hand was planted firmly on top of Sammy’s head, holding him under. Sammy’s eyes were open, strained wide, bulging almost out of his head. Dreadfully, they seemed to see David, recognize him, appeal mutely to him. Sammy’s hands were pawing futilely at the clown’s arm, more and more weakly, slowing, running down like an unwound clock. Even as David reached him, Sammy’s mouth opened and there was a silvery explosion of bubbles.

David grabbed the clown’s arm. A shock went through him at the contact, and his hands went cold, the bitter cold spreading rapidly up his arms, as if he were grasping something that avidly sucked the heat from anything that touched it. David yanked at the clown’s arm with his numbing, clumsy hands, trying to break his grip, but it was like yanking on a steel girder.

A big white shape barreled by him like a porpoise, knocking him aside. Jas.

David floundered, kicked, broke the surface of the water. He shot up into the air like a Polaris missile, fell back, took a great racking breath, another. Sunlight on water dazzled his eyes, and everything was noise and confusion in the open air, baffling after the muffled underwater silence. He kicked his feet weakly, just enough to keep him afloat, and looked around.

Jas was hauling Sammy out of the pool. Sammy’s eyes were still open, but now they looked like glass, like the blank, staring eyes of a stuffed animal; a stream of dirty water ran out of his slack mouth, down over his chin. Jas laid Sammy out by the pool edge, bent hurriedly over him, began to blow into his mouth and press on his chest. A crowd was gathering, calling out questions and advice, making little wordless noises of dismay.

The clown had retreated from the edge of the pool. He was standing some yards away now, watching Jas labor over Sammy.

Slowly, he turned his head and looked at David.

Their eyes met again, once again with that shock of terrible cold, and this time the full emotional impact of what that look implied struck home as well.

The clowns knew that he could see them.

The clowns knew who he was.

The clowns would be after him now.

Slowly, the clown began to walk toward David, his icy blue eyes fixed on him.

Terror squeezed David like a giant’s fist. For a second, everything went dark. He couldn’t remember swimming back across to the other side of the pool, but the next thing he knew, there he was, hauling himself up the ladder, panting and dripping. A couple of kids were looking at him funny; no doubt he’d shot across the pool like a torpedo.

The clown was coming around the far end of the pool, not running but walking fast, still staring at David.

There were still crowds of people on this side of the pool, too, some of them paying no attention to the grisly tableau on the far side, most of them pressed together near the pool’s edge, standing on tiptoe and craning their necks to get a better look.

David pushed his way through the crowd, worming and dodging and shoving, and the clown followed him, moving faster now. The clown seemed to flow like smoke around people without touching them, never stumbling or bumping into anyone even in the most densely packed part of the crowd, and he was catching up. David kept looking back, and each time he did, the widely smiling painted face was closer behind him, momentarily bobbing up over the sunburned shoulders of the crowd, weaving in and out. Coming relentlessly on, pressing closer, all the while never taking his eyes off him.

The crowd was thinning out. He’d never make it back around the end of the pool before the clown caught up with him. Could he possibly outrun the clown in the open? Panting, he tried to work his hand into the pocket of his sopping-wet jeans as he stumbled along. The wet cloth resisted, resisted, and then his hand was inside the pocket, his fingers touching metal, closing over the thing he’d bought at the store on his way over.

Much too afraid to feel silly or self-conscious, he whirled around and held up the crucifix, extended it at arm’s length toward the clown.

The clown stopped.

They stared at each other for a long, long moment, long enough for the muscles in David’s arm to start to tremble.

Then, silently, mouth open, the clown started to laugh.

It wasn’t going to work—

The clown sprang at David, spreading his arms wide as he came.

It was like a wave of fire-shot darkness hurtling toward him, getting bigger and bigger, blotting out the world—

David screamed and threw himself aside.

The clown’s hand swiped at him, hooked fingers grazing his chest like stone talons, tearing free. For a moment, David was enveloped in arctic cold and that strong musty smell of dead leaves, and then he was rolling free, scrambling to his feet, running—

He tripped across a bicycle lying on the grass, scooped it up and jumped aboard it all in one motion, began to pedal furiously. Those icy hands clutched at him again from just a step behind. He felt his shirt rip; the bicycle skidded and fishtailed in the dirt for a second; and then the wheels bit the ground and he was away and picking up speed.

When he dared to risk a look back, the clown was staring after him, a look thoughtful, slow and icily intent.

David left the bicycle in a doorway a block from home and ran the rest of the way, trying to look in all directions at once. He trudged wearily up the front steps of his house and let himself in.

His parents were in the front room. They had been quarreling, but when David came into the house they broke off and stared at him. David’s mother rose rapidly to her feet, saying, “David! Where were you? We were so worried! Jason told us what happened at the pool.”

David stared back at them. “Sammy?” he heard himself saying, knowing it was stupid to ask even as he spoke the words but unable to keep himself from feeling a faint stab of hope. “Is Sammy gonna be all right?”

His parents exchanged looks.

David’s mother opened her mouth and closed it again, hesitantly, but his father waved a hand at her, sat up straighter in his chair and said flatly, “Sammy’s dead, David. They think he had some sort of seizure and drowned before they could pull him out. I’m sorry. But that’s the way it is.”

“Marty!” David’s mother protested.

“It’s part of life, Anna,” his father said. “He’s got to learn to face it. You can’t keep him wrapped up in cotton wool, for Christ’s sake!”

“It’s all right,” David said quietly. “I knew he had to be. I just thought maybe . . . somehow . . .”

There was a silence, and they looked at each other through it. “At any rate,” his father finally said, “we’re proud of you, David. The lifeguard told us you tried to save Sammy. You did the best you could, did it like a man, and you should be proud of that.” His voice was heavy and solemn. “You’re going to be upset for a while, sure—that’s only normal—but someday that fact’s going to make you feel a lot better about all this, believe me.”

David could feel his lips trembling, but he was determined not to cry. Summoning all his will to keep his voice steady, he said, “Mom . . . Dad . . . if I . . . told you something—something that was really weird—would you believe me and not think I was going nuts again?”

His parents gave him that uneasy, wall-eyed look again. His mother wet her lips, hesitantly began to speak, but his father cut her off. “Tell your tall tales later,” he said harshly. “It’s time for supper.”

David sagged back against the door panels. They did think he was going nuts again, had probably been afraid of that ever since they heard he had run wildly away from the pool after Sammy drowned. He could smell the fear on them, a sudden bitter burnt reek, like scorched onions. His mother was still staring at him uneasily, her face pale, but his father was grating, “Come on, now, wash up for supper. Make it snappy!” He wasn’t going to let David be nuts, David realized; he was going to force everything to be “normal,” by the sheer power of his anger.

“I’m not hungry,” David said hollowly. “I’d rather just lie down.” He walked quickly by his parents, hearing his father start to yell, hearing his mother intervene, hearing them start to quarrel again behind him. He didn’t seem to care anymore. He kept going, pulling himself upstairs, leaning his weight on the wrought-iron banister. He was bone-tired and his head throbbed.

In his room, he listlessly peeled off his sweat-stiff clothes. His head was swimming with the need to sleep, but he paused before turning down the bedspread, grimaced and shot an uneasy glance at the window. Slowly, he crossed the room. Moving in jerks and starts, as though against his will, he lifted the edge of the curtain and looked out.

There was a clown in the street below, standing with that terrible motionless patience in front of the house, staring up at David’s window.

David was not even surprised. Of course the clowns would be there. They’d heard Sammy call his name. They’d found him. They knew where he lived now

What was he going to do? He couldn’t stay inside all summer. Sooner or later, his parents would make him go out.

And then the clowns would get him.

David woke up with a start, his heart thudding.

He pushed himself up on one elbow, blinking in the darkness, still foggy and confused with sleep. What had happened? What had wakened him?

He glanced at the fold-up travel clock that used to be his dad’s; it sat on the desk, its numbers glowing. Almost midnight.

Had there been a noise? There had been a noise, hadn’t there? He could almost remember it.

He sat alone in the darkened room, still only half-awake, listening to the silence.

Everything was silent. Unnaturally silent. He listened for familiar sounds; the air conditioner swooshing on, the hot-water tank rumbling, the refrigerator humming, the cuckoo clock chiming in the living room. Sometimes he could hear those sounds when he awakened in the middle of the night. But he couldn’t hear them now. The crickets weren’t even chirruping outside, nor was there any sound of passing traffic. There was only the sound of David’s own breathing, harsh and loud in his ears, as though he were underwater and breathing through scuba gear. Without knowing why, he felt the hair begin to rise on the back of his neck.

The clowns were in the house.

That hit him suddenly, with a rush of adrenalin, waking him all the way up in an eyeblink.

He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. Somehow, he had thought that houses were safe, that the clowns could only be outside. But they were here. They were in the house. Perhaps they were here in the room, right now. Two of them, eight, a dozen. Forming a circle around the bed, staring at him in the darkness with their opaque and malevolent eyes.

He burst from the bed and ran for the light switch, careening blindly through blackness, waiting for clutching hands to grab him in the dark. His foot struck something—a toy, a shoe—and sent it clattering away, the noise making him gasp and flinch. A misty ghost shape seemed to move before him, making vague, windy gestures, more sensed than seen. He ducked away, dodging blindly. Then his hand was on the light switch.

The light came on like a bomb exploding, sudden and harsh and overwhelmingly bright. Black spots flashed before his eyes. As his vision re-adjusted, he jumped to see a face only inches from his own—stifling a scream when he realized that it was only his reflection in the dresser mirror. That had also been the moving, half-seen shape.

There was no one in the room.

Panting with fear, he slumped against the dresser. He’d instinctively thought that the light would help, but somehow it only made things worse. It picked out the eyes and the teeth of the demons in the magic posters on the walls, making them gleam sinisterly, and threw slowly moving monster shadows across the room from the dangling Tyrannosaurus mobile. The light was harsh and spiky, seeming to bounce and ricochet from every flat surface, hurting his eyes. The light wouldn’t save him from the clowns, wouldn’t keep them away, wouldn’t banish them to unreality, like bad-dream bogeymen—it would only help them find him.

He was making a dry little gasping noise, like a cornered animal. He found himself across the room, crouching with his back to the wall. Almost without thinking, he had snatched up the silver letter-opener knife from his desk. Knife in hand, lips skinned back over his teeth in an animal snarl, he crouched against the wall and listened to the terrible silence that seemed to press in against his eardrums.

They were coming for him.

He imagined them moving with slow deliberation through the darkened living room downstairs, their eyes and their dead-white faces gleaming in the shadows, pausing at the foot of the stairs to look up toward his room and then, slowly, slowly—each movement as intense and stylized as the movements of a dance—beginning to climb . . . the stairs creaking under their weight . . . coming closer . . .

David was crying now, almost without realizing that he was. His heart was thudding as if it would tear itself out of his chest, beating faster and faster as the pressure of fear built up inside him, shaking him, chuffing out, “Run, run, run! Don’t let them trap you in here! Run!”

Before he had realized what he was doing, he had pulled open the door to his room and was in the long corridor outside.

Away from the patch of light from his doorway, the corridor was deadly black and seemed to stretch endlessly away into distance. Slowly, step by step, he forced himself into the darkness, one hand on the corridor wall, one hand clutching the silver knife. Although he was certain that every shadow that loomed up before him would turn out to be a silently waiting clown, he didn’t even consider switching on the hallway light. Instinctively, he knew that the darkness would hide him. Make no noise, stay close to the wall. They might miss you in the dark. Knife in hand, he walked on down the hall, feeling his fingertips rasp along over wood and tile and wallpaper, his eyes strained wide. Into the darkness.

His body knew where he was going before he did. His parents’ room. He wasn’t sure if he wanted his parents to protect him or if he wanted to protect them from a menace they didn’t even know existed and couldn’t see, but through his haze of terror, all he could think of was getting to his parents’ room. If he could beat the clowns to the second floor, hide in his parents’ room, maybe they’d miss him; maybe they wouldn’t look for him there. Maybe he’d be safe there . . . safe . . . the way he used to feel when a thunderstorm would wake him and he’d run sobbing down the hall in the darkness to his parents’ room and his mother would take him in her arms.

The staircase, opening up in a well of space and darkness, was more felt than seen. Shoulder against the wall, he felt his way down the stairs, lowering one foot at a time, like a man backing down a ladder. The well of darkness rose up around him and slowly swallowed him. Between floors, away from the weak, pearly light let in by the upstairs-landing window, the darkness was deep and smothering, the air full of suspended dust and the musty smell of old carpeting. Every time the stairs creaked under his feet, he froze, heart thumping, certain that a clown was about to loom up out of the inky blackness, as pale and terrible as a shark rising up through black midnight water.

He imagined the clowns moving all around him in the darkness, swirling silently around him in some ghostly and enigmatic dance, unseen, their fingers not quite touching him as they brushed by like moth wings in the dark . . . the bushy fright wigs puffed out around their heads like sinister nimbi . . . the ghostly white faces, the dead-black costumes, the gleaming-white gloves reaching out through the darkness.

He forced himself to keep going, fumbling his way down one more step, then another. He was clutching the silver knife so hard that his hand hurt, holding it up high near his chest, ready to strike out with it.

The darkness seemed to open up before him. The second-floor landing. He felt his way out onto it, sliding his feet flat along the floor, like an ice skater. His parents’ room was only a few steps away now. Was that a noise from the floor below, the faintest of sounds, as if someone or something were slowly climbing up the stairs?

His fingers touched wood. The door to his parents’ room. Trying not to make even the slightest sound, he opened the door, eased inside, closed the door behind him and slowly threw the bolt.

He turned around. The room was dark, except for the hazy moonlight coming in the window through the half-opened curtains; but after the deeper darkness of the hall outside, that was light enough for him to be able to see. He could make out bulky shapes under the night-grey sheets, and, and as he watched, one of the shapes moved slightly, changing positions.

They were there! He felt hope open hot and molten inside him, and he choked back a sob. He would crawl into bed between them as he had when he was a very little boy, awakened by nightmares . . . he would nestle warmly between them . . . he would be safe.

“Mom?” he said softly. “Dad?” He crossed the room to stand beside the bed. “Mom?” he whispered. Silence. He reached out hesitantly, feeling a flicker of dread even as he moved, and slowly pulled the sheet down on one side—

And there was the clown, staring up at him with those terrible, opaque, expressionless blue eyes, smiling his unchanging painted smile.

David plunged the knife down, feeling it bite into the spongy resistance of muscle and flesh. Yet even as the blow struck home, he felt cold, strong hands, white-gloved hands, close over his shoulders from behind.

Touring

Introduction to Touring

Because they live in the full glare of the public eye, because their real-life excesses are so legendary, it’s very hard to write satisfactory stories about rock stars. It’s even harder to write about dead rock stars; one slip, and you open a vein of sticky sentiment that gushes all over the place. Harder still, then, to write about three dead rock stars, especially in a three-way collaboration.

These guys—Dozois, Dann, Swanwick—are they crazy or what?

Dissecting a collaboration is a delicate, difficult task. A passage that so obviously possesses the trademark style of one author turns out to be a riff on that style by another; ideas bounce back and forth until no one knows who started the game. But I’m willing to stick out my neck and hazard that of the three dead rock stars in “Touring,” Janis Joplin is mostly Michael Swanwick’s (who has written about her in his solo short story, “The Feast of Saint Janis”), and by default Elvis is mostly Jack Dann’s, because the opening of “Touring,” told from the point of view of Buddy Holly, is pure Dozois.

The theme and course of the story is set with vivid immediacy from the blatant untruth of the first sentence. The four-seater Beechwood Bonanza airplane in which Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper died, when it crashed in an Iowa field in a snowstorm on February 2nd 1959, safely delivers them to their next gig in Moorhead, Minnesota: right from the start, we’re in the Twilight Zone. Holly took the plane because he was exhausted, and couldn’t stand the idea of riding the tour bus, and he’s exhausted here—the whole world is leached by his exhaustion. He feels “stale and curiously depressed;” the lobby of the hotel to which Blemings, the concert promoter, delivers him is “inhabited only by a few tired-looking rubber plants”; the town is the “sleepiest, deadest damn town” he has ever been in. The universal fatigue, conveyed in prose that itself is far from exhausted, is that of any tour: the endless travel; the shabby hotels; the difficulty of performing mundane tasks—doing your laundry, trying to contact your wife—in unfamiliar surroundings.

It’s easy to mistake all this for the bleakness of a highly pessimistic world-view, but as in many of his solo stories, Dozois and his collaborators are setting us up for a glimpse of redemption that shines more strongly because of its gloomy setting, in a story which is itself a set up.

Our three authors are playing a more subtle game than resurrecting corpses to make the ultimate fantasy band. For the benefit of the sinister Blemings, Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin and Elvis Presley are sharing a bill in what might be an antechamber of Heaven or Hell, or a detailed virtual reality, or something else entirely. Elvis’s petulant outrage and Janis’s exuberance are no match for Blemings; only Holly’s calm acceptance guides them towards a kind of victory—the victory that must be won afresh every night, on every tour.

We know, as they do not, that all three stars died iconic deaths. Janis Joplin’s death, from an overdose of heroin at the age of 27 in 1970, was (with Jim Morrison’s and Jimi Hendrix’s) a sign of just how rotten the hedonism of the sixties had become. Elvis, dying from an overdose at 42, was for many already dead—he died when he went into the army, and was afterwards turned by bad movies and Las Vegas into a bloated, zombified parody of his old self. Buddy Holly thinks at first he’s a Presley impersonator; for most of “Touring,” he wraps himself in the tattered cloak of his legend.

And Buddy Holly’s death was the most tragic of all: it marked the end of the kind of rock ‘n’ roll he was already leaving behind after disbanding the Crickets; it left, like the assassination of JFK, an abiding sense of unfulfilled promise. Both Janis Joplin and Elvis Presley died when rock ‘n’ roll was becoming corporatised, mannered, reduced to a set of rules; Buddy Holly’s death was all the more shocking because he was an artist at the top of his form in a genre that was still defining itself.

Buddy and Elvis and Janice: they’re cultural plutonium. Icons with a long half-life, still giving off a potent glow, hard to handle, and highly dangerous. “Touring” is so heavily saturated in radioactive iconography that, like the fabulous goony bird, it’s a surprise that it flies at all. That it flies so well and so true is a tribute to the harmony sustained by its three authors.

Paul McAuley

Touring

by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann,

and Michael Swanwick

The four-seater Beechcraft Bonanza dropped from a grey sky to the cheerless winter runways of Fargo Airport. Tires touched pavement, screeched, and the single-engine plane taxied to a halt. It was seven o’clock in the morning, February 3, 1959.

Buddy Holly duckwalked down the wing and hopped to the ground. It had been a long and grueling flight; his bones ached, his eyes were gritty behind the large, plastic-framed glasses, and he felt stale and curiously depressed. Overnight bag in one hand, laundry sack in the other, he stood beside Ritchie Valens for a moment, looking for their contact. White steam curled from their nostrils. Brown grass poked out of an old layer of snow beside the runway. Somewhere a dog barked, flat and far away.

Behind the hurricane fence edging the field, a stocky man waved both hands overhead. Valens nodded, and Holly hefted his bags. Behind them, J. P. Richardson grunted as he leaped down from the plane.

They walked towards the man across the tarmac, their feet crunching over patches of dirty ice.

“Jack Blemings,” the man rasped as he came up to meet them. “I manage the dancehall and the hotel in Moorhead.” Thin mustache, thin lips, cheeks going to jowl—Holly had met this man a thousand times before: the stogie in his mouth was inevitable; the sporty plaid hat nearly so. Blemings stuck out a hand and Holly shuffled his bags awkwardly, trying to free his own hand. “Real pleased to meet you, Buddy,” Blemings said. His hand was soggy and boneless. “Real pleased to meet a real artist.”

He gestured them into a showroom-new ‘59 Cadillac. It dipped on its springs as Richardson gingerly collapsed into the back seat. Starting the engine, Blemings leaned over the seat for more introductions. Richardson was blowing his nose, but hastily transferred the silk handkerchief into his other hand so that they could shake. His delighted-to-meet-you expression lasted as long as the handshake, then the animation went out of him, and his face slumped back into lines of dull fatigue.

The Cadillac jerked into motion with an ostentatious squeal of rubber. Once across the Red River, which still ran steaming with gunmetal pre-dawn mist, they were out of North Dakota and into Moorhead, Minnesota. The streets of Moorhead were empty—not so much as a garbage truck out yet. “Sleepy little burg,” Valens commented. No one responded. They pulled up to an undistinguished six-story brick hotel in the heart of town.

The hotel lobby was cavernous and gloomy, inhabited only by a few tired-looking potted rubber plants. As they walked past a grouping of battered arm chairs and sagging sofas toward the shadowy information desk in the back, dust puffed at their feet from the faded grey carpet. An unmoving ceiling fan threw thin-armed shadows around the room, and everything smelled of old cigar butts and dead flies and trapped sunshine.

The front desk was as deserted as the rest of the lobby. Blemings slammed the bell angrily until a balding, bored-looking man appeared from the back, moving as though he were swimming through syrup. As the desk clerk doled out room keys, still moving like a somnambulist, Blemings took the cigar out of his mouth and said, “I spoke with your road manager, must’ve been right after you guys left the Surf Ballroom. Needed his okay for two acts I’m adding to the show.” He paused. “S’awright with you, hey?”

Holly shrugged. “It’s your show,” he said.

Holly unlaced one shoe, let it drop heavily to the floor. His back ached, and the long, sleepless flight had made his suit rumpled and sour-smelling. One last chore and he could sleep: he picked up the bedside telephone and dialed the hotel operator for an outside line, so that he could call his wife Maria in New York and tell her that he had arrived safely.

The phone was dead; the switchboard must be closed down. He sighed and bent over to pick up his shoe again.

Eight or nine men were standing around the lobby when Holly stepped out of the elevator, husky fellows, Southern boys by the look of them. Two were at the front desk, making demands of the clerk, who responded by spreading his arms wide and rolling his eyes upward.

Waiting his turn for service, Holly leaned back against the counter, glanced about. He froze in disbelief. Against all logic, all possibility, Elvis Presley himself was standing not six yards away on the grey carpet. For an instant Holly struggled with amazement. Then a second glance told him the truth.

Last year Elvis had been drafted into the army, depriving his fans of his presence, and creating a ready market for those who could imitate him. A legion of Presley impersonators had crowded into the welcoming spotlights of stages across the country, trying vainly to fill the gap left by the King of Rock and Roll.

This man, though—he stood out. At first glance, he was Elvis. An instant later you saw that he was twenty years too old and as much as forty pounds overweight. There were dissolute lines under his eyes, and a weary, dissipated expression on his face. The rigors of being on the road had undone his ducktail, so that his hair was an untidy mess, hanging down over his forehead, and curling over his ears. He wore a sequined shirt, now wrinkled and sweaty, and a suede jacket.

Holly went over to introduce himself. “Hi,” he said, “I guess you’re playing tonight’s show.”

The man ignored his outthrust hand. Dark, haunted eyes bored into Holly’s. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, son,” he said. A soft Tennessee accent underlaid his words. “But I’m packing a piece and I know how to use it.” His hand darted inside his jacket, emerged holding an ugly-looking .38.

Involuntarily Holly sucked in his breath. He slowly raised his hands shoulder-high, and backed away. “Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “I was just trying to be friendly.” The man’s eyes followed his retreat suspiciously, and he didn’t reholster the gun until Holly was back at the front desk.

The desk clerk was free now. Holly slid three bills across the counter, said, “Change please.” From the corner of his eye, he saw the imitation Elvis getting into the elevator, surrounded by his entourage. They were solicitous, almost subservient. One patted the man’s back as he shakily recounted his close call. Poor old man, Holly thought pityingly. The man was really cracking under the pressures of the road. He’d be lucky to last out the tour.

In the wooden booth across the lobby, Holly dumped his change on the ledge below the phone. He dialed the operator for long distance.

The earpiece buzzed, made clicking noises. Then it filled with harsh, actinic static, and the clicking grew faster and louder. Holly jiggled the receiver, racked the phone angrily.

Another flood of musicians and crew coursed through the lobby. Stepping from the booth, ruefully glancing back at the phone, he collided with a small woman in a full-length mink. “Oof,” she said, then reached out and gave him a squeeze to show there were no hard feelings. A mobile, hoydenish face grinned up at him.

“Hey, Sport,” she said brightly. “I love that bow-tie, and those glasses—! Jesus, you look just like Buddy Holly!”

“I know,” he said wryly. But she was gone. He trudged back to the elevators. Then something caught his eye, and he swung about, openly staring.

Was that a man she was talking to? My God, he had hair down to his shoulders!

Trying not to stare at his amazing apparition, he stepped into the elevator. Back in his room, he stopped only long enough to pick up his bag of laundry before heading out again. He was going to have to go outside the hotel to find a working phone anyway; he might as well fight down his weariness, hunt up a laundromat, and get his laundry done.

The lobby was empty when he returned through it, and he couldn’t even find the desk clerk to ask where the nearest laundromat was. Muttering under his breath, Holly trudged out of the hotel.

Outside, the sun was shining brilliantly but without warmth from out of a hard, high blue sky. There was still no traffic, no one about on the street, and Holly walked along through an early morning silence broken only by the squeaking of his sneakers, past closed-up shops and shuttered brownstone houses. He found a laundromat after a few more blocks, and although it was open, there was no one in there either, not even the inevitable elderly Negro attendant. The rows of unused washing machines glinted dully in the dim light cast by a flyspecked bulb. Shrugging, he dumped his clothes into a machine. The change machine didn’t work, of course, but you got used to dealing with things like that on the road, and he’d brought a handkerchief full of change with him. He got the machine going, and then went out to look for a phone.

The streets were still empty, and after a few more blocks it began to get on his nerves. He’d been in hick towns before—had grown up in one—but this was the sleepiest, deadest damn town he’d ever seen. There was still no traffic, although there were plenty of cars parked by the curbs, and he hadn’t seen another person since leaving the hotel. There weren’t even any pigeons, for goodness sake!

There was a five-and-dime on the corner, its doors standing open. Holly poked his head inside. The lights were on, but there were no customers, no floorwalkers, no salesgirls behind the counters. True, small-town people weren’t as suspicious as folk from the bigger cities—but still, this was a business, and it looked as if anyone could just walk in here and walk off with any of the unguarded merchandise. It was gloomy and close in the empty store, and the air was filled with dust. Holly backed out of the doorway, somehow not wanting to explore the depths of the store for the sales personnel who must be in there somewhere.

A slight wind had come up now, and it flicked grit against his face and blew bits of scrap paper down the empty street.

He found a phone on the next corner, hunted through his handkerchief for a dime while the wind snatched at the edges of the fabric. The phone buzzed and clicked at him again, and this time there was the faint high wailing of wind in the wires, an eerie, desolate sound that always made him think of ghosts wandering alone through the darkness. The next phone he found was also dead, and the next.

Uneasily, he picked up his laundry and headed back to the hotel.

The desk clerk was spreading his hands wide in a gesture of helpless abnegation of responsibility when the fat Southerner in the sequined shirt leaned forward, poked a hard finger into the clerk’s chest, and said softly, “You know who I am, son?”

“Why, of course I do, Mr. Presley,” the clerk said nervously. “Yessir, of course I do, sir.”

“You say you know who I am, son,” Elvis said in a cottony voice that slowly mounted in volume. “If you know who I am, then you know why I don’t have to stay in a goddamned flophouse like this! Isn’t that right? Would you give your mother a room like that, you know goddamned well you wouldn’t. Just what are you people thinking of? I’m Elvis Presley, and you’d give me a room like that!”

Elvis was bellowing now, his face grown red and mottled, his features assuming that look of sulky, sneering meanness that had thrilled millions. His eyes were hard and bright as glass. As the frightened clerk shrank back, his hands held up now as much in terror as in supplication, Elvis suddenly began to change. He looked at the clerk sadly, as if pitying him, and said, “Son, do you know who I am?”

“Yessir,” whispered the clerk.

“Then can’t you see it?” asked Elvis.

“See what, sir?”

“That I’m chosen! Are you an atheist, are you a goddamned atheist?” Elvis pounded on the desk and barked, “I’m the star, I’ve been given that, and you can’t soil it, you atheist bastard! You sonovabitch!” Now that was the worst thing he could call anyone, and he never, almost never used it, for his mother, may she rest in peace, was holy. She had believed in him, had told him that the Lord had chosen him, that as long as he sang and believed, the Lord would take care of him. Like this? Is this the way He was going to take care of me?

“I’m the star, and I could buy this hotel out of my spare change! Buy it, you hear that?” And even as he spoke, the incongruity of the whole situation hit him, really hit him hard for the first time. It was as though his mind had suddenly cleared after a long, foggy daze, as if the scales had fallen from his eyes.

Elvis stopped shouting and stumbled back from the desk, frightened now, fears and suspicions flooding in on him like the sea. What was he doing here? Dammit, he was the King! He’d made his comeback, and he’d played to capacity crowds at the biggest concert halls in the country. And now he couldn’t even remember how he’d gotten here—he’d been at Graceland, and then everything had gotten all foggy and confused, and the next thing he knew he was climbing out of the bus in front of this hotel with the roadies and the rest of the band. Even if he’d agreed to play this one-horse town, it would have to have been for charity. That’s it, it had to be for charity. But then where were the reporters, the TV crews? His coming here would be the biggest damn thing that had ever happened in Moorhead, Minnesota. Why weren’t there any screaming crowds being held back by police?

“What in hell’s going on here?” Elvis shouted. He snatched out his revolver, and gestured to his two bodyguards to close up on either side of him. His gaze darted wildly about the lobby as he tried to look into every corner at once. “Keep your eyes open! There’s something funny—”

At that moment, Jack Blemings stepped out of his office, shut the door smoothly behind him, and sauntered across the musty old carpet toward them. “Something wrong here, Mr. Presley?” he drawled.

“Damn right there is,” Elvis raged, taking a couple of steps toward Blemings and brandishing his gun. “You know how many years it’s been since I played a tank town like this? I don’t know what in hell the Colonel was thinking of to send me down here. I—”

Smiling blandly and ignoring the gun, Blemings reached out and touched Elvis on the chest.

Elvis shuddered and took a lurching step backward, his eyes glazing over. He shook his head, looked foggily around the lobby, glanced down at the gun in his hand as though noticing it for the first time, then holstered it absent-mindedly. “Time’s the show tonight?” he mumbled.

“About eight, Mr. Presley,” Blemings answered, smiling. “You’ve got plenty of time to relax before then.”

Elvis looked around the lobby again, running a hand through his greased-back hair. “Anything to do around here?” he asked, a hint of the old sneer returning.

“We got a real nice bar right over there the other side of the lobby,” Blemings said.

“I don’t drink,” Elvis said sullenly.

“Well, then,” Blemings added brightly, “we got some real nice pinball machines in that bar too.”

Shaking his head, Elvis turned and moved away across the lobby, taking his entourage with him.

Blemings went back to his office.

J. P. Richardson had unpacked the scotch and was going for ice when he saw the whore. There was no mistaking what she was. She was dressed in garish gypsy clothes with ungodly amounts of jewelry about her neck and wrists. Beneath a light blouse her breasts swayed freely—she wasn’t even wearing a bra. He didn’t have to be told how she had earned the mink coat draped over one arm.

“Hey, little sister,” Richardson said softly. He was still wearing the white suit that was his onstage trademark, his “Big Bopper” outfit. He looked good in it, and knew it. “Are you available?”

“You talking to me, honey?” She spoke defiantly, almost jeeringly, but something in her stance, her bold stare, told him she was ready for almost anything. He discreetly slid a twenty from a jacket pocket, smiled and nodded.

“I’d like to make an appointment,” he said, slipping the folded bill into her hand. “That is, if you are available now.”

She stared from him to the bill and back, a look of utter disbelief on her face. Then, suddenly, she grinned. “Why, ‘course I’m available, sugar. What’s your room number? Gimme ten minutes to stash my coat and I’ll be right there.”

“Room four-eleven.” Richardson watched her flounce down the hall, and, despite some embarrassment, was pleased. There was a certain tawdry charm to her. Probably ruts like a mink, he told himself. He went back to his room to wait.

The woman went straight to the hotel bar, slapped the bill down, and shouted, “Hey, kids, pony up! The drinks are on Janis!”

There was a vague stirring, and two or three lackluster men eddied toward the bar.

Janis looked about, saw that the place was almost empty. A single drunk sat wall-eyed at a table, holding onto its edges with clenched hands to keep from falling over. To the rear, almost lost in gloom, a big stud was playing pinball. Two unfriendly types, who looked like bodyguards, stood nearby, protecting him from the empty tables. Otherwise—nothing. “Shoulda taken the fat dude up on his offer,” she grumbled. “There’s nothing happening here.” Then, to the bartender, “Make mine a whiskey sour.”

She took a gulp of her drink, feeling sorry for herself. The clatter of pinball bells ceased briefly as the stud lost his ball. He slammed the side of the machine viciously with one hand. She swiveled on her stool to look at him.

“Damn,” she said to the bartender. “You know, from this angle that dude looks just like Elvis.”

Buddy Holly finished adjusting his bow-tie, reached for a comb, then stopped in mid-motion. He stared about the tiny dressing room, with its cracked mirror and bare light bulbs, and asked himself, How did I get here?

It was no idle, existential question. He really did not know. The last thing he remembered was entering his hotel room and collapsing on the bed. Then—here. There was nothing in between.

A rap at the door. Blemings stuck his head in, the stench of his cigar permeating the room. “Everything okay in here?”

“Well,” Holly began. But he went no further. What could he say? “How long before I go on?”

“Plenty of time. You might want to catch the opener, though—good act. On in ten.”

“Thanks.”

Blemings left, not quite shutting the door behind him. Holly studied his face in the mirror. It looked haggard and unresponsive. He flashed a toothy smile, but did not feel it. God, he was tired. Being on the road was going to kill him. There had to be a way off the treadmill.

The woman from the hotel leaned into his room. “Hey, Ace—you seen that Blemings motherfucker anywhere?”

Holly’s jaw dropped. To hear that kind of language from a woman—from a white woman. “He just went by,” he said weakly.

“Shit!” She was gone.

Her footsteps echoed in the hallway, were swallowed up by silence. And that was wrong. There should be the murmur and nervous bustle of acts preparing to go on, last-minute errands being run, equipment being tested. Holly peered into the corridor—empty.

To one side, the hall dead-ended into a metal door with a red EXIT sign overhead. Holly went the other way, toward the stage.

Just as he reached the wings, the audience burst into prolonged, almost frenzied applause. The Elvis impersonator was striding onstage. It was a great crowd.

But the wings were empty. No stagehands or go-fers, no idlers, nobody preparing for the next set.

“Elvis” spread his legs wide and crouched low, his thick lips curling in a sensual sneer. He was wearing a gold lamé jumpsuit, white scarf about his neck. He moved his guitar loosely, adjusting the strap, then gave his band the downbeat.

Well it’s one for the money

Two for the show

Three to get ready

Now go cat go!

And he was off and running into a brilliant rendition of “Blue Suede Shoes.” Not an easy song to do because the lyrics were laughable. It relied entirely on the music, and it took a real entertainer to make it work.

This guy had it all, though. The jumps, gyrations, and forward thrusts of the groin were stock stuff—but somehow he made them look right. He played the audience, too, and his control was perfect. Holly could see shadowy shapes beyond the glare of the footlights, moving in a more than sexual frenzy, was astonished by their rapturous screams. All this in the first minutes of the set.

He’s good, Holly marveled. Why was he wasting that kind of talent on a novelty act? There was a tug at his arm, and he shrugged it off.

The tug came again. “Hey, man,” somebody said, and he turned to find himself again facing the woman. Their eyes met and her expression changed oddly, becoming a mixture of bewilderment and outright fear. “Jesus God,” she said in awe. “You are Buddy Holly!”

“You’ve already told me that,” he said, irritated. He wanted to watch the man on stage—who was he, anyway?—not be distracted by this foul-mouthed and probably not very clean woman.

“No, I mean it—you’re really Buddy Holly. And that dude on stage—” she pointed—“he’s Elvis Presley.”

“It’s a good act,” Holly admitted. “But it wouldn’t fool my grandmother. That good ol’ boy’s forty if he’s a day.”

“Look,” she said. “I’m Janis Joplin. I guess that don’t mean nothing to you, but—Hey, lemme show ya something.” She tried to tug him away from the stage.

“I want to see the man’s act,” he said mildly.

“It won’t take a minute, man. And it’s important, I swear it. It’s—you just gotta see it, is all.”

There was no denying her. She led him away, down the corridor to the metal door with its red EXIT sign, and threw it open. “Look!”

He squinted into a dull winter evening. Across a still, car-choked parking lot was a row of faded brick buildings. A featureless grey sky overhung all. “There used to be a lot more out here,” Janis babbled. “All the rest of the town. It all went away. Can you dig it, man? It just all—went away.”

Holly shivered. This woman was crazy! “Look, Miss Joplin,” he began. Then the buildings winked out of existence.

He blinked. The buildings had not faded away—they had simply ceased to be. As crisply and sharply as if somebody had flipped a switch. He opened his mouth, shut it again.

Janis was talking quietly, fervently. “I don’t know what it is, man, but something very weird is going down here.” Everything beyond the parking lot was a smooth even grey. Janis started to speak again, stopped, moistened her lips. She looked suddenly hesitant and oddly embarrassed. “I mean, like, I don’t know how to break this to ya, Buddy, but you’re dead. You bought it in a plane crash way back in ‘59.”

“This is ‘59,” Holly said absently, looking out across the parking lot, still dazed, her words not really sinking in. As he watched, the cars snapped out of existence row by row, starting with the furthest row, working inward to the nearest. Only the asphalt lot itself remained, and a few bits of litter lying between the painted slots. Holly’s groin tightened, and, as fear broke through astonishment, he registered Janis’s words and felt rage grow alongside fear.

“No, honey,” Janis was saying, “I hate to tell ya, but this is 1970.” She paused, looking uncertain. “Or maybe not. Ol’ Elvis looks a deal older than I remember him being. We must be in the future or something, huh? Some kinda sci-fi trip like that, like on Star Trek? You think maybe we—”

But Holly had swung around ferociously, cutting her off. “Stop it!” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on, what kind of trick you people are trying to play on me, or how you’re doing all these things, but I’m not going to put up with any more of—”

Janis put her hand on Holly’s shoulder; it felt hot and small and firm, like a child’s hand. “Hey, listen,” Janis said quietly, cutting him off. “I know this is hard for you to accept, and it is pretty heavy stuff ... but Buddy, you’re dead. I mean, really you are . . . It was about ten years ago, you were on tour, right? And your plane crashed, spread you all over some farmer’s field. It was in all the goddamm papers, you and Ritchie Valens, and . . .” She paused, startled, and then grinned. “And that fat dude at the hotel, that must’ve been the Big Bopper. Wow! Man, if I’d known that I might’ve taken him up on it. You were all on your way to some diddlyshit hick town like . . .” She stopped, and when she started to speak again, she had gone pale. “. . . like Moorhead, Minnesota. Oh Christ, I think it was Moorhead. Oh boy, is that spooky . . .” She fell silent again.

Holly sighed. His anger had collapsed, leaving him hollow and confused and tired. He blinked away a memory that wasn’t a memory of torn-up black ground and twisted shards of metal. “I don’t feel dead,” he said. His stomach hurt.

“You don’t look dead, either,” Janis reassured him. “But honey, I mean, you really were.”

They stood staring out across the now-vacant parking lot, a cold, cinder-smelling wind tugging at their clothes and hair. At last, Janis said, her brassy voice gone curiously shy, “You got real famous, ya know, after . . . afterwards. You even influenced, like, the Beatles . . . Shit, I forgot—I guess you don’t even know who they are, do you?” She paused uncomfortably, then said, “Anyway, honey, you got real famous.”

“That’s nice,” Holly said dully.

The parking lot disappeared. Holly gasped and flinched back. Everything was gone. Three concrete steps with an iron pipe railing led down from the door into a vast, unmoving nothingness.

“What a trip,” Janis muttered. “What a trip . . .”

They stared at the oozing grey nothingness until it seemed to Holly that it was creeping closer, and then, shuddering, he slammed the door shut.

Holly found himself walking down the corridor, going noplace in particular, his flesh still crawling. Janis tagged along after him, talking anxiously. “Ya know, I can’t even really remember how I got to this burg. I was in L.A. the last I remember, but then everything gets all foggy. I thought it was the booze, but now I dunno.”

“Maybe you’re dead too,” Holly said, almost absent-mindedly.

Janis paled, but a strange kind of excitement shot through her face, under the fear, and she began to talk faster and faster. “Yah, honey, maybe I am. I thought of that too, man, once I saw you. Maybe whoever’s behind all this are magicians, man, black magicians, and they conjured us all up.” She laughed a slightly hysterical laugh. “And you wanna know another weird thing? I can’t find any of my sidemen here, or the roadies, or anybody, ya know? Valens and the Bopper don’t seem to be here either. All of ‘em were at the hotel, but backstage here it’s just you and me and Elvis, and that motherfucker Blemings. It’s like they’re not really interested in the rest of them, right? They were just window dressing, man, but now they don’t need ‘em anymore, and so they sent them back. We’re the headline acts, sweetie. Everybody else they vanished, just like they vanished the fucking parking lot, right? Right?”

“I don’t know,” Holly said. He needed time to think. Time alone.

“Or, hey—how about this? Maybe you’re not dead. Maybe we got nabbed by flying saucers, and these aliens faked our deaths, right? Snatched you out of your plane, maybe. And they put us together here—wherever here is—not because they dig Rock—shit, they probably can’t even understand it—but to study us and all that kinda shit. Or maybe it is 1959, maybe we got kidnapped by some time-traveller who’s a big Rock freak. Or maybe it’s a million years in the future, and they’ve got us all taped, see? And they want to hear us, so they put on the tape and we think we’re here, only we’re not. It’s all a recording. Hey?”

“I don’t know.”

Blemings came walking down the corridor, cigar trailing a thin plume of smoke behind him. “Janis, honey! I been beating the bushes for you, sweetie-pie. You’re on in two.”

“Listen, motherfuck,” Janis said angrily. “I want a few answers from you!” Blemings reached out and touched her hand. Her eyes went blank and she meekly allowed him to lead her away.

“A real trouper, hey?” Blemings said cheerfully.

“Hey!” Holly said. But they were already gone.

Elvis laid down his guitar, whipped the scarf from his neck, and mopped his brow with it. He kissed the scarf and threw it into the crowd. The screams reached crescendo pitch as the little girls fought over its possession. With a jaunty wave of one hand, he walked offstage.

In the wings, he doubled over, breathing heavily. Sweat ran out of every pore in his body. He reached out a hand and no one put a towel in it. He looked up angrily.

The wings were empty, save for a kid in big glasses. Elvis gestured weakly toward a nearby piece of terrycloth. “Towel,” he gasped, and the kid fetched it.

Toweling off his face, Elvis threw back his head, began to catch his breath. He let the cloth slip to his shoulders, and for the first time got a good look at the kid standing before him. “You’re Buddy Holly,” he said. He was proud of how calmly it came out.

“A lot of people have told me that today,” Holly said.

The crowd roared, breaking off their conversation. They turned to look. Janis was dancing onstage from the opposite side. Shadowy musicians to the rear were laying down a hot, bluesy beat. She grabbed the microphone, laughed into it.

“Well! Ain’t this a kick in the ass? Yeah. Real nice, real nice.” There were anxious lines about her eyes, but most of the audience wouldn’t be able to see that. “Ya know, I been thinking a lot about life lately. ‘Deed I have. And I been thinkin’ how it’s like one a dem ole-time blues songs. Ya know? I mean, it hurts so bad and it feels so good!” The crowd screamed approval. The band kept laying down the rhythm. “So I got a song here that kind of proves my point.”

She swung an arm up and then down, giving the band the beat, and launched into “Heart and Soul.”

“Well?” Elvis said. “Give me the message.”

Holly was staring at the woman onstage. “I never heard anyone sing like that before,” he murmured. Then, “I’m sorry—I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Presley.”

“Call me Elvis,” he said automatically. He felt disappointed. There had been odd signs and omens, and now the spirits of departed Rock stars were appearing before him—there really ought to be a message. But it was clear the kid was telling the truth; he looked scared and confused.

Elvis turned on a winning smile, and impulsively plucked a ring from one of his fingers. It was a good ring; lots of diamonds and rubies. He thrust it into Holly’s hands. “Here, take this. I don’t want the goddamned thing anymore, anyway.”

Holly squinted at the ring quizzically. “Well, put it on,” Elvis snapped. When Holly had complied, he said, “Maybe you’d better tell me what you do know.”

Holly told his story. “I understand now,” Elvis said. “We’re caught in a snare and delusion of Satan.”

“You think so?” Holly looked doubtful.

“Squat down.” Elvis hunkered down on the floor, and after an instant’s hesitation, Holly followed suit. “I’ve got powers,” Elvis explained. “The power to heal—stuff like that. Now me and my momma, we were always close. Real close. So she’ll be able to help us, if we ask her.”

“Your mother?”

“She’s in Heaven,” Elvis said matter-of-factly.

“Oh,” Holly said weakly.

“Now join hands, and concentrate real hard.”

Holly felt embarrassed and uncomfortable. As a good Baptist, which he certainly tried to be, the idea of a backstage séance seemed blasphemous. But Elvis, whether he was the real item or not, scared him. Elvis’s eyes were screwed shut and he was saying, “Momma. Can you hear me, momma?” over and over in a fanatic drone.

The séance seemed to go on for hours, Holly suffering through it in mute misery, listening as well as he could to Janis, as she sung her way through number after amazing number. And finally, she was taking her last bows, crowing, “Thank you, thank you,” at the crowd.

There was a cough at his shoulder, and a familiar stench of tobacco. Holly looked up. “You’re on,” Blemings said. He touched Holly’s shoulder.

Without transition, Holly found himself onstage. The audience was noisy and enthusiastic, a good bunch. A glance to the rear, and he saw that the backup musicians were not his regular sidemen. They stood in shadow, and he could not see their faces.

But the applause was long and loud and it crept up under his skin and into his veins, and he knew he had to play something. “Peggy Sue,” he called to the musicians, hoping they knew the number. When he started playing his guitar, they were right with him. Tight. It was a helluva good backup band; their playing had bone and sinew to it. The audience was on its feet now, bouncing to the beat.

He gave them “Rave On,” “Maybe Baby,” “Words of Love,” and “That’ll Be the Day,” and the audience yelped and howled like wild beasts, but when he called out “Not Fade Away” to the musicians, the crowd quieted, and he felt a special, higher tension come into the hall. The band did a good, strong intro, and he began singing.

I wanna tell you how it’s gonna be

You’re gonna give your love to me.

He had never felt the music take hold of him this immediately, this strongly, and he felt a surge of exhilaration that seemed to instantly communicate itself to the audience, and be reflected back at him redoubled, bringing them all up to a deliriously high level of intensity. Never had he performed better. He glanced offstage, saw that Janis was swaying to the beat, slapping a hand against her thigh. Even Elvis was following the music, caught up in it, grinning broadly and clapping his ring-studded hands.

For love is love and not fade away.

Somewhere to the rear, one of the ghostly backup musicians was blowing blues harmonica, as good as any he’d ever heard.

There was a flash of scarlet, and Janis had run onstage. She grabbed a free mike, and joined him in the chorus. When they reached the second verse, they turned to face each other and began trading off lines. Janis sang:

My love’s bigger than a Cadillac—

and he responded. His voice was flat next to hers. He couldn’t give the words the emotional twist she could, but their voices synched, they meshed, they worked together perfectly.

When the musical break came, somebody threw Janis a tambourine so she could stay onstage, and she nabbed it out of the air. Somebody else kicked a bottle of Southern Comfort across the stage, and she stopped it with her foot, lifted it, downed a big slug. Holly was leaping into the air, doing splits, using every trick of an old rocker’s repertoire, and miraculously he felt he could keep on doing so forever, could stretch the break out to infinity if he tried.

Janis beckoned widely toward the wings. “Come on out,” she cried into the microphone. “Come on.”

To a rolling avalanche of applause, Elvis strode onstage. He grabbed a guitar and strapped it on, taking a stance beside Holly. “You don’t mind?” he mumbled.

Holly grinned.

They went into the third verse in unison. Standing between the other two, Holly felt alive and holy and—better than either alive or holy—right. They were his brother and sister. They were in tune; he could not have sworn which body was his.

Well, love is love and not fade away.

Elvis was wearing another scarf. He whipped it off, mopped his brow, and went to the footlights to dangle it into the crowd. Then he retreated as fast as if he’d been bitten by a snake.

Holly saw Elvis talking to Janis, frantically waving an arm at the crowd beyond the footlights. She ignored him, shrugging off his words. Holly squinted, could not make out a thing in the gloom.

Curious, he duckwalked to the edge of the stage, peered beyond.

Half the audience was gone. As he watched, the twenty people furthest from the stage snapped out of existence. Then another twenty. And another.

The crowd noise continued undiminished, the clapping and whooping and whistling, but the audience was gone now—except for Blemings, who sat alone in the exact center of the empty theater. He was smiling faintly at them, a smile that could have meant anything, and, as Holly watched, he began softly, politely, to applaud.

Holly retreated backstage, pale, still playing automatically. Only Janis was singing now.

Not fade away

Holly glanced back at the musicians, saw first one, then another, cease to exist. Unreality was closing in on them. He stared into Elvis’s face, and for an instant saw mirrored there the fear he felt.

Then Elvis threw back his head and laughed, and was singing into his mike again. Holly gawked at him in disbelief.

But the music was right, and the music was good, and while all the rest—audience, applause, someplace to go when the show was over—was nice, it wasn’t necessary. Holly glanced both ways, and saw that he was not the only one to understand this. He rejoined the chorus.

Janis was squeezing the microphone tight, singing, when the last sideman blinked out. The only backup now came from Holly’s guitar—Elvis had discarded his. She knew it was only a matter of minutes before the nothingness reached them, but it didn’t really matter. The music’s all that matters, she thought. It’s all that made any of it tolerable, anyway. She sang.

Not fade away

Elvis snapped out. She and Holly kept on singing.

If anyone out there is listening, she thought. If you can read my mind, or some futuristic bullshit like that—I just want you to know that I’d do this again anytime. You want me, you got me.

Holly disappeared. Janis realized that she had only seconds to go herself, and she put everything she had into the last repetition of the line. She wailed out her soul, and a little bit more. Let it echo after I’m gone, she thought. Let it hang on thin air. And as the last fractional breath of music left her mouth, she felt something seize her, prepare to turn her off.

Not fade away

It had been a good session.

Dinner Party

Introduction to Dinner Party

“The personal is political,” say feminists, and the slogan has implications that are not obvious, and have nothing to do with feminism. When “Dinner Party” first appeared in the 1984 anthology Light Years and Dark, Michael Bishop’s introduction alluded to the fact the story had been rejected by sf editors for some time as too controversial. Certainly we can see the story as a reaction to Kent State and social and political disruption of the Vietnam War, but Kent State happened fourteen years before this story saw print. What was so controversial about it in 1984?

I think what may have put editors off is what makes the story live today: the cool eye Dozois casts on the motives of the actors surrounding the story’s horrifying central incident, and the bitter vision of human relationships it reveals.

Dr. and Mrs. Wilkins take national guardsman Hassmann out to dinner at a four-star restaurant. Dr. Wilkins hates Hassmann. He hates his son for protesting against the government.

Mrs. Wilkins also hates Hassmann. She hates her husband for forcing her to play through this farcical dinner. She undoubtedly also hates him for driving their son away.

Hassmann hates the Army for making him play through this farcical dinner. He hates Dr. Wilkins for his privilege and power. He hates the son for his privilege and protest.

What are these three people doing going out to dinner together? Dr. Wilkins the father made an extreme vow in an attempt to control his son. He didn’t expect to have to pay off on this vow. Now Dr. Wilkins the politician is acting phony out of principle. This is all about trying to keep control of his son, wife, family, and country.

The personal story reflects the background situation of a balkanized U.S. about to enter a civil war. Think Bosnia. Think American militias. Civility has broken down. People think, “I don’t need you any more. The bond between us is not worth it; it is even a sign of oppression.” The Wilkins family’s civility has similarly broken, with the son taking a political position violently opposed to his father’s. Who knows whether the son actually is so committed to his political position or is acting out his resentments toward his overbearing dad.

If you want to talk about control, you must talk about class. The people who run things are not the ones who are asked to do the dirty work. Working class kids like Hassmann, who grew up eating TV dinners and has never seen a four-star restaurant, resent being made to enforce the rules of a government that most of the time has no use for them. But Hassmann must suppress his rage. He’s asked to do his “duty” whether he likes it or not. The displaced rage comes out in startling ways. His pulling the trigger at a student protest was a sanctioned act, ostensibly in defense of the legitimate government. That’s the reason Wilkins wants to shake his hand. But in the end we can see Hassmann’s action as gesture of bitter resentment, striking out not just at a political protester, but at a privileged son of the upper class who has had advantages Hassmann will never see—and a rebuke of the decision makers who have put this rifle in his hands. His motive is not theirs.

And this—not any recognition of Hassmann as an individual human being—is what perversely gets Hassmann invited out to dinner by a powerful politician.

All these cross-currents—ego, duty, rage, class, love, resentment, hate, loyalty to family, loyalty to country, loyalty to self—surge below the surface of this simple story. In his merciless skewering of human weakness, Dozois, astute observer of the human animal, reminds me of C.M. Kornbluth at his most pitiless. “Dinner Party” opens the lid on the heart of darkness and leaves us to contemplate the consequences.

John Kessel

Dinner Party

It had been cold all that afternoon. When they picked Hassmann up at the gate that evening, it was worse than cold—it was freezing.

The gate guard let Hassmann wait inside the guard booth, although that was technically against regulations, and he might have caught hell for it if the Officer of the Day had come by. But it was colder than a witch’s tit outside, as the guard put it, and he knew Hassmann slightly, and liked him, even though he was RA and Hassmann was National Guard, and he thought that most NGs were chickenshit. But he liked Hassmann. Hassmann was a good kid.

They huddled inside the guard booth, sharing a cigarette, talking desultorily about baseball and women, about a court-martial in the gate guard’s battalion, about the upcoming ATTs and MOS tests, about the scarcity of promotion slots for corporals and 5s. They carefully did not talk about the incident last weekend on the campus in Morgantown, although it had been all over the papers and the TV and had been talked about all over post. They also didn’t talk about where Hassmann was going tonight—allowed off base at a time when almost everyone else’s passes had been pulled—although rumors about that had spread through the grapevine with telegraphic speed since Hassmann’s interview with Captain Simes early that afternoon. Most especially, most emphatically, they did not talk about what everyone knew but hesitated to admit even in whispers: that by this time next month, they would probably be at war.

The gate guard was telling some long, rambling anecdote about breaking up a fight down behind the Armor mess hall when he looked out beyond Hassmann’s shoulder and fell silent, his face changing. “This looks like your ride heah, Jackson,” he said, quietly, after a pause.

Hassmann watched the car sweep in off the road and stop before the gate; it was a big black Caddy, the post floodlights gleaming from a crust of ice over polished steel and chrome. “Yeah,” Hassmann said. His throat had suddenly turned dry, and his tongue bulked enormously in his mouth. He ground the cigarette butt out against the wall. The guard opened the door of the booth to let him out. The cold seized him with his first step outside, seized him and shook him like a dog shaking a rat. “Cover your ass,” the gate guard said suddenly from the booth behind him. “Remember—cover your own ass, you heah?” Hassmann nodded, without looking around, without much conviction. The guard grunted, and slid the booth door closed.

Hassmann was alone.

He began to trot toward the car, slipping on a patch of ice, recovering easily. Hoarfrost glistened everywhere, over everything, and the stars were out in their chill armies, like the million icy eyes of God. The cold air was like ice in his lungs, and his breath steamed in white tatters around him. The driver of the car had the right front door half open, waiting for him, but Hassmann—seeing that the man had a woman with him, and feeling a surge of revulsion at the thought of sitting pressed close to the couple in the front—opened the rear door instead and slipped into the back seat. After a moment, the driver shrugged and closed the front door. Hassmann closed the rear door too, automatically pushing down the little button that locked it, instantly embarrassed that he had done so. After the double thunk of the doors closing and the sharp click of the lock, there was nothing but a smothering silence.

The driver turned around in his seat, resting his arm on the top of the seatback, staring at Hassmann. In the dark, it was hard to make out his features, but he was a big, beefy man, and Hassmann could see the reptilian glint of light from thick, black, horn-rimmed glasses. The woman was still facing forward, only casting a quick, furtive glance back at him, and then turning her head away again. Even in this half-light, Hassmann could see the stiffness of her shoulders, the taut way she held her neck. When the silence had become more than uncomfortable, Hassmann stammered, “Sir, I’m—sir, PFC Hassmann, sir . . .”

The driver shifted his weight in the front seat. Leather creaked and moaned. “Glad to meet you, son,” he said. “Yes, very glad—a pleasure, yes, a pleasure.” There was a forced joviality in his voice, a note of strained, dangerous cordiality that Hassmann decided he had better not try to argue with.

“Glad to meet you, too, sir,” Hassmann croaked.

“Thank you, son,” the man said. Leather groaned again as he extended his hand into the back seat; Hassmann shook it briefly, released it—the man’s hand had been damp and flabby, like a rubber glove full of oatmeal. “I’m Dr. Wilkins,” the man said. “And this is my wife, Fran.” His wife did not acknowledge the introduction, continuing to stare stonily straight ahead. “Manners,” Dr. Wilkins said in a soft, cottony voice, almost a whisper. “Manners!” Mrs. Wilkins jerked, as if she had been slapped, and then dully muttered, “Charmed,” still not turning to look at Hassmann.

Dr. Wilkins stared at his wife for a moment, then turned to look at Hassmann again; his glasses were dully gleaming blank circles, as opaque as portholes. “What’s your Christian name, son?”

Hassmann shifted uneasily in his seat. After a moment’s hesitation—as though to speak his name would be to give the other man power over him—he said “James, sir. James Hassmann.”

“I’ll call you Jim, then,” Dr. Wilkins said. It was a statement of fact—he was not asking permission; nor was there any question that Hassmann would be expected to continue to call him “Dr. Wilkins,” however free the older man made himself with Hassmann’s “Christian name.” Or “sir,” Hassmann thought with a quick flash of resentment, you could hardly go wrong calling him “sir.” Hassmann had been in the Army long enough to know that it was impossible to say “sir” too many times when you were talking to a man like this; work it in a hundred times per sentence, they’d like it just fine.

Dr. Wilkins was still staring reflectively at him, as if he expected some sort of response, an expression of gratitude for the fine democratic spirit he was showing, perhaps . . . but Hassmann said nothing. Dr. Wilkins grunted. “Well, then—Jim,” he said. “You like Continental cuisine?”

“I—I’m not sure, sir,” Hassmann said. He could feel his face flushing with embarrassment in the close darkness of the cab. “I’m not sure I know what it is.”

Dr. Wilkins made a noise that was not quite a snort—a long, slow, resigned exhaling of air through the nose. “What kind of food do you like to eat at home?”

“Well, sir, the usual kind of thing, I guess. Nothing special.”

“What kind of things?” Dr. Wilkins said with heavy, elaborated patience.

“Oh—spaghetti, meat loaf. Sometimes fried chicken, or cold cuts. We had TV dinners a lot.” Dr. Wilkins was staring at him; it was too dark to make out his expression with any kind of certainty, but he seemed to be staring blankly, incredulously, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Sometimes my mother’d make, you know, a roast for Sunday or something, but she didn’t much like to cook anything fancy like that.”

This time Dr. Wilkins did snort, a sharp, impatient sound. “Adeo in teneris consuescere multum est,” he said in a loud, portentous voice, and shook his head. Hassmann felt his face burning again; he had no idea what Dr. Wilkins had said, but there was no mistaking the scorn behind the words. “That’s Virgil,” Dr. Wilkins said contemptuously, peering significantly at Hassmann. “You know Virgil?”

“Sir?” Hassmann said.

“Never mind,” Dr. Wilkins muttered. After a heavy pause, he said, “This restaurant we’re taking you to tonight has a three-star Michelin rating, one of the few places east of the Mississippi River that does, outside of New York City. I don’t suppose that means anything to you, either, does it?”

“No, sir,” Hassmann said stiffly. “I’m afraid it doesn’t, sir.”

Dr. Wilkins snorted again. Hassmann saw that Mrs. Wilkins was watching him in the rearview mirror, but as soon as their eyes met, she turned her face away.

“Well, son,” Dr. Wilkins was saying, “I’ll tell you one thing those three Michelin stars mean: they mean that tonight you’re going to get the best damn meal you ever had.” He sniffed derisively. “Maybe the best damn meal you’ll ever have. Do you understand that . . . Jim?”

“Yes, sir,” Hassmann said. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Mrs. Wilkins was watching him in the rearview mirror again. Every time she thought that his attention was elsewhere, she would stare at him with terrible fixed intensity; she would look away when he met her eyes in the mirror, but a moment later, as soon as he glanced away, she would be staring at him again, as though she couldn’t keep her eyes off him, as though he were something loathsome and at the same time almost hypnotically fascinating, like a snake or a venomous insect.

“I don’t expect you to appreciate the finer points,” Dr. Wilkins said, “we can thank the way kids are brought up today for that, but I do expect you to appreciate that what you’re getting tonight is a very fine meal, one of the finest meals money can buy, not some slop from McDonald’s.”

“Yes, sir, I do, sir,” Hassmann said. Dr. Wilkins made a humpfing noise, not sounding entirely mollified, so Hassmann added, “It sounds great, sir. I’m really looking forward to it. Thank you, sir.” He kept his face blank and his voice level, but his jaw ached with tension. He hated being dressed down like this, he hated it. His fingers were turning white where they were biting into the edge of the seat.

Dr. Wilkins stared at him for a moment longer, then sighed and turned back to the wheel; they slid away into the darkness with a smooth surge of acceleration.

They ghosted back down the hill, turned right. Here the road ran parallel to the tall Cyclone fence that surrounded the base; behind the iron mesh, behind the winter-stripped skeletons of trees, Hassmann could see the high, cinder-bed roofs of the Infantry barracks, a huge water tower—it had the slogan RE-UP ARMY stenciled on its sides, visible for miles in the daytime—and the gaunt silhouette of a derrick, peeking up over the fence from the Engineer motor pool like the neck of some fantastic metal giraffe. The base dwindled behind them to a tabletop miniature, to a scene the size of a landscape inside a tiny glass snowball, and then it was gone, and there was nothing but the stuffy interior of the car, the pale glow of the instruments on the dashboard, dark masses of trees rushing by on either side. Hassmann was sweating heavily, in spite of the cold, and the upholstery was sticky under his hands.

There was a persistent scent of patchouli in the car—cutting across the new-car smell of the upholstery and the tobacco-and-English Leather smell of Dr. Wilkins—that must be Mrs. Wilkins’ perfume; it was a heavy, oversweet smell that reminded Hassmann of the room in the cancer hospital where his aunt had died. He longed to roll down the window, let the cold night air into the stuffy car, but he didn’t quite dare to do it without asking Dr. Wilkins’ permission, and that was something he wouldn’t do. He was beginning to get a headache, a bright needle of pain that probed in alongside his eyeball like a stiff wire, and his stomach was sick and knotted with tension. Abruptly it was too much for him, and he found himself blinking back sudden tears of frustration and rage, all the resentment and chagrin he felt rising up in his throat like bile. Why did he have to do this? Why did they have to pick on him? Why couldn’t they just leave him alone? He had said as much in Captain Simes’ office this afternoon, blurting out, “I don’t want to do it! Do I have to go, sir?” And Captain Simes had studied him jaundicedly for a moment before replying, “Officially, no. The regulations say we can’t make you. Unofficially, though, I can tell you that Dr. Wilkins is a very important man in this state, and with things as tense as they are politically, you can expect some very serious smoke to be brought down on your ass if you don’t do everything you can to keep him happy, short of dropping your drawers and bending over.” And then Simes had leered at him with his eroded, prematurely old face and said, “And, hell, soldier, comes right down to it, maybe you even ought to take that under advisement . . .”

They drifted past a weathered wooden barn that was covered with faded old Clabber Girl and Jesus Saves signs, past a dilapidated farmhouse where one light was burning in an upstairs window. There was an automobile up on blocks in the snow-covered front yard, its engine hanging suspended from a rope thrown over a tree branch. Scattered automobile parts made hummocks in the snow, as if small dead animals were buried there. They turned past a bullet-riddled highway sign and onto an old state road that wound down out of the foothill country. The car began to pick up speed, swaying slightly on its suspension.

“You come from around here, Jim?” Dr. Wilkins said.

“No, sir,” Hassmann said. Thank God! he added silently to himself. Evidently he had been unable to keep his feelings out of his voice, because Dr. Wilkins glanced quizzically at him in the rearview mirror. Quickly, Hassmann added, “I was born in Massachusetts, sir. A small town near Springfield.”

“That so?” Dr. Wilkins said, without interest. “Gets pretty cold up there too in the winter, doesn’t it? So at least you’re used to this kind of weather, right?”

“That’s right, sir,” Hassmann said leadenly. “It gets pretty cold there, too.”

Dr. Wilkins grunted. Even he seemed to realize that his attempt at small talk had been a dismal failure, for he lapsed into a sodden silence. He pressed down harder on the accelerator, and the dark winter countryside began to blur by outside the windows. Now that they had stopped talking, there was no sound except for the whine of the tires on macadam or their snare-drum rattle on patches of gravel.

Hassmann rubbed his sweating palms against the slick upholstery. Somehow he knew that Mrs. Wilkins was watching him again, although it was too dark to see her eyes in the mirror anymore. Occasionally the lights of an oncoming car would turn the inside of the windshield into a reflective surface, and he would be able to see her plainly for a second, a thin-faced woman with tightly pursed lips, her hands clenched together in her lap, staring rigidly straight ahead of her. Then the light would fade and her image would disappear, and only then, in the darkness, would he begin to feel her eyes watching him again, as though she were only able to see him in the dark . . .

They were going faster and faster now, careening down the old state road like a moonshiner on a delivery run with the Alcohol Tax agents on his tail, and Hassmann was beginning to be afraid, although he did his best to sit still and look imperturbable. The old roadbed was only indifferently maintained, and every bump rattled their teeth in spite of the Caddy’s heavy-duty shocks; once Hassmann was bounced high enough to bang his head on the roof, and the car was beginning to sway ominously from side to side. Fortunately, they were on a level stretch of road with no oncoming traffic when they hit the patch of ice. For a moment or two the Caddy was all over the road, skidding and fishtailing wildly, its brakes screaming and its tires throwing up clouds of black smoke, and then slowly, painfully, Dr. Wilkins brought the big car back under control. They never came to a complete stop, but they had slowed down to about fifteen miles per hour by the time Dr. Wilkins could wrestle them back into their own lane, and you could smell burned rubber even inside the closed cab.

No one spoke; Mrs. Wilkins had not even moved, except to steady herself against the dashboard with one hand, an almost dainty motion. Slowly, almost involuntarily, Dr. Wilkins raised his head to look at Hassmann in the rearview mirror. Almost lost it, didn’t you, old man? Hassmann thought, staring impassively back at him, and after a moment, Dr. Wilkins looked shakily away. They began to slowly pick up speed again, wobbling slightly, although Dr. Wilkins was careful to keep them under fifty this time. This kind of compulsive speeding, obviously pushing himself to or beyond the edge of his driving ability, was the first real indication of strain or tension that Dr. Wilkins had allowed to escape from behind his smooth, hard-lacquered facade, and Hassmann greeted it with interest and a certain degree of vindictiveness.

A few minutes more brought them out of the hills. They slowed down to rattle across a small chain-link bridge over a frozen river. A tank was parked to one side of the road, near the bridge entrance, its hatches open for ventilation, grey smoke panting from its exhaust and rising straight up into the cold air. A soldier in a steel helmet popped his head up out of the driver’s hatch and watched them as they passed. They weren’t putting up roadblocks and regulating civilian traffic yet, Hassmann thought, in spite of the recent wave of terrorism, but it obviously wasn’t going to be too much longer before they were, either. There was a small town on the other side of the bridge, half a dozen buildings clustered around a crossroads. Political graffiti had been spray-painted on several of the buildings, particularly on the blank-faced side wall of a boarded-up gas station: YANKEES GO HOME . . . FEDS OUT OF WEST VIRGINIA NOW . . . SECESSION, NOT RECESSION . . . FUCK THE UNION . . . A sloppy, half-hearted attempt to obliterate the graffiti had been made, and only a few letters of each slogan remained, but Hassmann had seen them often enough elsewhere to have little difficulty reconstructing them. The restaurant was a mile beyond the town, a large stone-and-timber building that had once been a grinding mill—now hidden spotlights splashed the ivy-covered walls with pastel light, and the big wooden water-wheel was sheathed in glistening ice.

There was a network newsvan parked in front of the restaurant, and Dr. Wilkins, who had been anxiously checking his watch on the last stretch from town, grunted in satisfaction when he saw it. As they pulled up, a news crew with a minicam unit climbed out of the van and took up positions in front of the restaurant steps. Other reporters got out of their parked cars—pinching out unfinished cigarettes and carefully tucking them away—and began to saunter over as well, some of them slapping themselves on the arms and joking with one another about the cold in low, rapid voices. Hassmann heard one of the reporters laugh, the sound carrying clearly on the cold winter air.

Dr. Wilkins switched off the ignition, and they all sat motionless and silent for a moment, listening to the metallic ticking noises the engine made as it cooled. Then, with forced brightness, Dr. Wilkins said, “Well, we’re here! Everybody out!” Mrs. Wilkins ignored him. She was staring out at the gathering knot of reporters, and for the first time she seemed shaken, her icy composure broken. “Frank,” she said in an unsteady voice, “I—Frank, I just can’t, I can’t face them, I can’t—” She was trembling. Dr. Wilkins patted her hand perfunctorily. He noticed Hassmann watching them, and glared at him with murderous resentment, his careful mask slipping for a moment. Hassmann stared stonily back. “It’ll be all right, Fran,” Dr. Wilkins said, patting her hand again. “It’s just until we get inside. Julian promised me that he wouldn’t let any of them into the restaurant.” Mrs. Wilkins was shaking her head blindly. “It’ll only be a minute. Let me do all the talking. It’ll be okay, you’ll see.” He looked coldly at Hassmann. “Come on,” he said brusquely, to Hassmann, and got out of the car. He walked quickly around to the passenger side, opened the door, and said, “Come on” again, to his wife this time, in the low coaxing tone an adult might use to a frightened child. Even so, he had to reach down and half pull her to her feet before he could get her out of the car. He bent to look at Hassmann again. “You, too,” he said in a harsh, dangerous voice. “Come on. Don’t give me any trouble now, you little shit. Get out.”

Hassmann climbed out of the car. It was colder than ever, and he could feel the clammy sweat drying on his body with a rapidity that made him shiver. Dr. Wilkins came up between him and Mrs. Wilkins and took each of them by the arm, and they began walking toward the restaurant. The reporters were looking toward them now, and the camera lights on the van came on, nearly blinding them with brightness.

Dr. Wilkins kept them walking right at the reporters. The small crowd parted and re-formed around them, swallowing them, and then it seemed to Hassmann as if everything was happening at once, too fast to follow. Faces jostled around him, faces thrust forward toward him, their mouths opening and closing. Voices gabbled. A reporter was saying, “. . . with the ratification vote on the Act of Secession coming up in the statehouse Wednesday, and similar votes later this week in Michigan, Ohio, and Colorado,” and Dr. Wilkins was waving his hand airily and saying, “. . . more than enough support on the floor.” Another reporter was saying something to Mrs. Wilkins and she was dully muttering, “I don’t know, I don’t know . . .” Flashbulbs were popping at them now, and they had climbed partway up the restaurant steps. Someone was thrusting a microphone into Hassmann’s face and bellowing “. . . make you feel?” and Hassmann was shrugging and shaking his head. Someone else was saying “. . . latest Gallup poll shows that two-thirds of the people of West Virginia support secession,” and Dr. Wilkins was saying, “. . . everything you hear, love?” and the reporters laughed.

Hassmann wasn’t listening anymore. Ever since last weekend he had been walking around like a somnambulist, and now the feeling had intensified; he felt feverish and unreal, as if everything was happening behind a thin wall of insulating glass, or happening to someone else while he watched. He barely noticed that Dr. Wilkins had stopped walking and was now staring directly into the blinking eye of the minicam, or that the reporters had grown curiously silent. Dr. Wilkins had let his face become serious and somber, and when he spoke this time it was not in the insouciant tone he’d been using a moment before, but in a slow, sincere, gravelly voice. The voice seemed to go on and on and on, while Hassmann shivered in the cold wind, and then Dr. Wilkins’ heavy hand closed over Hassmann’s shoulder, and the flashbulbs went off in their faces like summer lightning.

Then Julian was ushering them into the restaurant—fawning shamelessly over Dr. Wilkins and promising to “take their order personally”—and shutting the reporters outside. He led them through the jungly interior of the old mill to a table in a corner nook where the walls were hung with bronze cooking utensils and old farm implements, and then buzzed anxiously around Dr. Wilkins like a fat unctuous bee while they consulted the menu. The menu had no prices, and as far as Hassmann was concerned might just as well have been written in Arabic. Mrs. Wilkins refused to order, or even to speak, and her rigid silence eventually embarrassed even Julian. Impatiently, Dr. Wilkins ordered for all of them—making a point of asking Hassmann, with thinly disguised sarcasm, if the coulibiac of salmon and the osso buco would be to his liking—and Julian hurried gratefully away.

Silence settled over the table. Dr. Wilkins stared blankly at Hassmann, who stared blankly back. Mrs. Wilkins seemed to have gone into shock—she was staring down at the table, her body stiffly erect, her hands clenched in her lap; it was hard to tell if she was even breathing. Dr. Wilkins looked at his wife, looked away. Still no one had spoken. “Well, Jim,” Dr. Wilkins started to say with leaden joviality, “I think you’ll like—” and then he caught the scorn in the look that Hassmann was giving him, and let the sentence falter to a stop. It had become clear to Hassmann that Dr. Wilkins hated him as much as or more than his wife did—but in spite of that, and in spite of the fact that he had already gotten as much use out of Hassmann as he was going to get, he was too much the politician to be able to stop going through the motions of the charade. Dr. Wilkins locked eyes with Hassmann for a moment, opened his mouth to say something else, closed it again. Abruptly, he looked tired.

A smoothly silent waiter placed their appetizers in front of them, glided away again. Slowly, Mrs. Wilkins looked up. She had one of those smooth Barbie doll faces that enables some women to look thirty when they are fifty, but now her face had harsh new lines in it, as if someone had gone over it with a needle dipped in acid. Moving with the slow-motion grace of someone in a diving suit on the bottom of the sea, she reached out to touch the linen napkin before her on the table. She smiled fondly at it, caressing it with her fingertips. She was staring straight across the table at Hassmann now, but she wasn’t seeing him; somewhere on its way across the table, her vision had taken the sort of right-angle turn that allows you to look directly into the past.

“Frank,” she said, in a light, amused, reminiscent tone unlike any that Hassmann had heard her use, “do you remember the time we were having the Graingers over for dinner, back when you were still in city council? And just before they got there I realized that we’d run out of clean napkins?”

“Fran—” Dr. Wilkins said warningly, but she ignored him; she was speaking to Hassmann now, although he was sure that she still wasn’t seeing him as Hassmann—he was merely filling the role of listener, one of the many vague someones she’d told this anecdote to, for it was plain that she’d told it many times before. “And so I gave Peter some money and sent him down to the store to quick buy me some napkins, even paper ones were better than nothing.” She was smiling now as she spoke. “So after a while he comes back, the Graingers were here by then, and he comes marching solemnly right into the living room where we’re having drinks, and he says—he must have been about seven—he says, ‘I looked all over the store, Mom, and I got the best ones I could find. These must be really good because they’re sanitary ones, see? It says so right on the box.’ And he holds up this great big box of Kotex!” She laughed. “And he looks so intent and serious, and he’s so proud of being a big enough boy to be given a job to do, and he’s trying so hard to do it right and please us, I just didn’t have the heart to scold him, even though old Mr. Grainger looked like he’d just swallowed his false teeth, and Frank choked and sprayed his drink all over the room.” Still smiling, still moving languidly, she picked up her fork and dug it into one of her veal-and-shrimp quenelles, and then she stopped, and her eyes cleared, and Hassmann knew that all at once she was seeing him again. Life crashed back into her face with shocking suddenness, like a storm wave breaking over a seawall, flushing it blood-red. Abruptly, spasmodically, viciously, she threw her fork at Hassmann. It bounced off his chest and clattered away across the restaurant floor. Her face had gone white now, as rapidly as it had flushed, and she said, “I will not eat with the man who murdered my son.”

Hassmann stood up. He heard his own voice saying, “Excuse me,” in a polite and formal tone, and then he had turned and was walking blindly away across the restaurant, somehow managing not to blunder into any of the other tables. He kept walking until a rough-hewn door popped up in front of him, and then he pushed through it, and found himself in the washroom.

It was cold and dim and silent in the washroom, and the air smelled of cold stone and dust and antiseptic, and, faintly, of ancient piss. The only sound was the low, rhythmic belching and gurgling of cisterns. A jet of freezing air was coming in through a crack in the window molding, and it touched Hassmann’s skin like a needle.

He moved to the porcelain washbasin and splashed cold water over his face, the way they do in the movies, but it made him feel worse instead of better. He shivered. Automatically, he wet a tissue and began to scrub at the food stain that Mrs. Wilkins’ fork had left on his cheap pin-striped suit. He kept catching little glimpses of himself in the tarnished old mirror over the washbasin, and he watched himself slyly, fascinatedly, without ever looking at himself straight on. They had film footage of him killing the Wilkins boy—that particular stretch of film had been shown over and over again on TV since last weekend. As the demonstrators rushed up the steps of the campus Administration building toward the line of waiting Guardsmen, there was a very clear sequence of him bringing his rifle up and shooting Peter Wilkins down. Other Guardsmen had fired, and other demonstrators had fallen—four dead and three others seriously wounded, all told—but there could be no doubt that he was the one who had killed Peter Wilkins. Yes, that one was his, all right.

He leaned against the wall, pressing his forehead against the cold stone, feeling the stone suck the warmth from his flesh. For some reason he found himself thinking about the duck he’d raised, one of the summers they still went to the farm, the duck they’d wryly named Dinner. He’d fattened that stupid duck all summer, and then when it was time to kill it, he’d hardly been able to bring himself to do it. He’d made a botch of cutting its head off, faltered on the first stroke and then had to slash two more times to get the job done. And then the duck had run headless across the farmyard, spouting blood, and he’d had to chase it down. He’d given it to his father to clean, and then gone off behind the barn to throw up. All the rest of the family had said that the duck was delicious, but he’d had to leave the table several times during the meal to throw up again. How his father had laughed at him!

Hassmann was shivering again, and he couldn’t seem to make himself stop. As clearly as if it were really in the room with him, he heard Captain Simes’ voice saying, “He’s mousetrapped himself into it! His son was one of the ringleaders in planning the campus rally, and he was getting a lot of local media coverage simply because he was Wilkins’ son. So, just before the rally that weekend, Wilkins published an open letter in all the major papers—” Dr. Wilkins’ voice, resonant and sonorous as he stares into the camera lights: “In that letter, I told my son that if he was killed while taking part in a riot that he himself had helped to create . . . well, I told him that I would mourn him forever, but that far from condemning the man who killed him, I’d seek that man out and shake his hand, and then take him out to dinner to thank him for having the steadfastness to uphold the Constitution of the United States in the face of armed sedition—” “And so now he’s stuck with doing it; or losing what little face he has left!” Simes’ voice again. Simes’ giggle.

He’d talked to Simes for nearly twenty minutes before he’d realized that the tall glass of “iced tea” in Simes’ hand was actually 100-proof whisky, and by that time Simes had been glassy-eyed and swaying, mumbling, “A civil war! And none of this nuclear-exchange shit, either. They’re going to fight this one house to house through every small town in America. A nice long war . . .”

Hassmann stared at himself in the mirror. His face was hard and drawn, gaunt, his cheeks hollowed. His eyes were pitiless and cold. He could not recognize himself. The stranger in the mirror stared unwinkingly back at him; his face was like stone, the kind of cold and ancient stone that sucks the heat from anything that touches it.

A nice long war . . .

He went back into the restaurant. Heads turned surreptitiously to watch him as he passed, and he could see some of the other diners leaning close to each other to whisper and stare. Dr. Wilkins was sitting alone at the table, surrounded by untouched dishes of food, some of them still faintly steaming. As Hassmann came up, he raised his head, and they exchanged bleak stares. He had taken his glasses off, and his face looked doughy and naked without them, less assured, less commanding. His eyes looked watery and tired.

“Julian is letting Mrs. Wilkins lie down in back for a while,” Dr. Wilkins said. “Until she feels a little better.” Hassmann said nothing, and made no attempt to sit down. Dr. Wilkins reached out for his glasses, put them on, and then peered at Hassmann again, as if to make sure that he was talking to the right man. He drew himself up in his chair a little, glancing at the nearest table with a motion of the eyes so quick as to be nearly imperceptible, like the flick of a lizard’s tongue. Was he worried that, in spite of Julian’s promise, some of the other customers might be reporters with hidden directional mikes? Some of them might be, at that. “I guess I owe you an apology,” Dr. Wilkins said heavily, after a pause. He worked his mouth as if he was tasting something unpleasant, and then continued to speak in a stiff, reluctant voice. “My wife’s been under a lot of emotional strain lately. She was distraught. You’ll have to make allowances for that. She doesn’t realize how hard this has been on you, too, how unpleasant it must have been for you to be forced to take a human life—”

“No, sir,” Hassmann said in a clear, distinct voice, interrupting, not knowing what words he was speaking until he heard them leave his lips . . . feeling the final insulating thickness of glass shatter as he spoke and all the raw emotional knowledge he’d been trying to deny for more than a week rush in upon him . . . knowing even as he spoke that speaking these words would change him irrevocably forever . . . change Dr. Wilkins . . . change everything . . . watching Dr. Wilkins’ face, already wincing at the blow he could sense coming . . . seeing the headless duck run flapping through the dusty farmyard . . . his father laughing . . . Mrs. Wilkins’ eyes, watching him in the rearview mirror, in the dark . . . the soldier popping his head up out of the tank hatch to watch them pass . . . FUCK THE UNION . . . a nice long war . . . the hard, merciless eyes of the stranger in the mirror, the stranger that was now him . . . remembering the clean, exhilarating rush of joy, the fierce leap of the heart, as he’d emptied the clip of his semiautomatic rifle into the onrushing figure, relishing the flaring blue fire and the smoke and the noise, got you you bastard got you, smashing the other man and flinging him aside in a tangle of broken limbs all in one godlike moment, with a flick of his finger . . .

“No, sir,” he said, smiling bleakly at the tired old man, enunciating each word with terrible precision, not even, at the end, wanting to hurt the other man, but simply to make him understand. “I enjoyed it,” he said.

Snow Job

Introduction to Snow Job

Being a writer has its moments. Yeah, sure, there are days when you can’t help envying the placid denizens of a cube farm, days when you wake up with the flu and, lying in bed too weak to sit up, much less work, realize with horror that you no longer get sick pay. You’re in pain and you’re losing money! It goes beyond irony.

Other times, though, the universe decides to drop diamonds in your lap. You find yourself in a tux dancing ‘til dawn in the lobby of the Philadelphia Free Library. Swedish fans invite you to a party in the basement of the Ostgoth Nation in the University of Uppsala. You write a story without even noticing it.

Okay, this last is a little implausible. But it happened. With this story! I dropped by Gardner’s apartment one day, to see if he wanted to go out to lunch (this was in his old Quince Street digs, before he became editor of Asimov’s, back when he was poor as poor) and found him banging away on his old mechanical typewriter. “What’s new?” I asked him.

“Hang on a sec,” he muttered, “let me finish this page.” He hunched forward, concentrating, fingers a blur. Then he leaned back, ripped the page out of his machine, and said, “Congratulations, Michael! You and I have just finished a collaboration.”

I waited for the punchline. Because I knew I had done no such thing. Writing stories is like having children. It’s a lot of work, and you don’t forget about them afterwards.

Gardner tamped even the edges of a slim sheath of pages and handed me “Snow Job.” I began reading, and felt my eyes bug. He had taken the first chapter of a novel-gone-bust I’d begun a year before, removed the first and last pages, and inserted his own opening and ending. But here’s the astonishing part: He’d crafted from my chapter a totally new story that had almost nothing to do with what I had written. My story was about time-traveling con men. (That was why it had gone bust. I didn’t like con men. I’ve known too many.) His story was about . . . well, read it and see. It’s an elegant thing, far better than what I was trying to do solo, and if I hadn’t pointed out to you exactly where the seams are, you’d never have noticed them on your own.

This is a good example of what used to be one of the best-kept secrets in the business: That Gardner is a wonderful story-doctor. He can see the potential in a story whose author is ready to give up on it. He knows how to make it work.

Back in the misspent Philadelphia of my youth, I used to run everything I wrote past Gardner to get his take on it. It was my postgraduate education. In this, I was not alone. Sometimes Jack Dann would drive down from Binghamton, New York, to get Gardner’s advice, and we’d stay up until two and three in the morning, talking and drinking and writing. Those nights were a lot of fun. But Jack’s a fine and serious writer. He wouldn’t have been there if Gardner’s analysis of what he was doing hadn’t been worth its weight in pearls.

There was another time I remember, when I went to visit Gardner and found him radiant with joy. He’d just become the editor of Asimov’s. It was a great moment for him, and a great moment for science fiction. But I had mixed emotions. I was happy for my friend, of course. But also sadly aware that Gardner’s time was spoken for now. No longer could I run half-written novels and stories past him, looking for insight and the chance to astonish him just one more time. (“Oh, you did not!” he said when, in reply to him asking how “Ginungagap” was coming along, I told him I’d just written a scene in which a cat hijacks a spaceship. It’s the only time I’ve ever boggled him.) My postgrad studies were over. From that moment, I was on my own.

My loss is your gain. Gardner has a magazine’s worth of stories every month to ply his gentle skills on, and the field is the better for it. But take a glim at “Snow Job” and see exactly what’s been lost, exactly how much I’ve given up for you.

Don’t forget to say thank you.

You’re welcome.

Michael Swanwick

Snow Job

by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick

Have you ever toured the Harding Dam in Boulder, Colorado? Have you ever caught that old Errol Flynn movie about the life of Lord Bolingbroke, the man who restored the Stuarts to the British throne and overran half of France but who “couldn’t conquer the Queen he didn’t dare to love,” a real classic, also starring Basil Rathbone and Olivia deHavilland? Have you?

Of course you haven’t—which shows what a difference a single line of coke can make.

If it weren’t for the coke, the blow-off wouldn’t have come hot, and things would have been very, very different.

Just how different, you don’t realize. You can’t realize, in fact.

But take my word for it, baby—I can.

One little mistake . . .

I was running, faster than I had ever run in my life, and as I ran those words kept ringing through my head, louder than the pounding of my heart or the breath rasping in my throat: one little mistake . . . that was what the losers always said; the gonifs stupid enough to get caught, that was what they’d whine as the handcuffs closed over their wrists and the Boys in Blue dragged them away . . . its not fair, just one little mistake . . . its not fair . . . But I wasn’t a loser, I was tough and smart, I wasn’t like them . . .

One little mistake . . .

I was running through the warehouse district and the cops were right behind me, and not all that far behind me either, in hot pursuit as they say on TV, following the trail of blood I was laying down drop by drop. I could hear the footsteps clattering in staccato nonrhythm back there, harbingers of more hot pursuit to come. And they were going to catch me this time. This time they were going to get me—the certainty of that sat in a cold lump in my stomach, and made my legs feel cold and slow, so slow. I’d made my one little mistake, and now I was going to pay for it; boy, was I going to pay, my whole life was going down the toilet and it wasn’t fair . . .

I choked back a laugh that sounded more like a sob.

Behind me, the footsteps were abruptly halved. Tiny hairs crackled on the nape of my neck. I knew without looking that one of the cops was falling into the regulation crouch while his buddy ran far and to the side. Now he would be holding his gun two-handed and leveling it at me. I tried to zigzag, do some broken-field running, but let’s face it, fear drives you forward, not to the side. Maybe my path wobbled a bit; you couldn’t really call it evasive action.

I felt the bullet sizzle by, inches from my head, an instantaneous fraction of a second before I heard it. The time lag would have been subliminal to anyone who wasn’t hyper on adrenaline and fear. There was a ping as the bullet ricocheted off a brick wall far down the street, and I went into panic mode, pure scrambling terror. Otherwise I’d have known better than to duck into a side alley without checking for exits first.

It was a cul-de-sac.

Belgian block paving stone, a few ripe heaps of garbage, a rusted automobile muffler or three. And dead ahead, the blank back wall of a warehouse. No doors, no windows, no exits.

I skidded to a stop, and gaped idiotically.

What now, wiseass?

The cops rounded the corner behind me.

Galvanized, like a corpse jolted into motion by electrodes, I started running again, blindly, straight at the wall.

There was no place to go . . .

An hour before, I had been trying to sell four kilos of lactose for a hundred thousand dollars. Listen—I had a hell of a nut. My overhead included rent and furnishings for the Big Store (actually the second floor of an old warehouse converted into a loft apartment), a thousand each for the shills, ten percent of the take for the manager, and thirty-five percent for the roper. These things add up.

Stringy—the mark—was a joy to burn, though. He was a pimp and I never have liked those suckers. Cheap and lazy grifters, the batch of them.

“It’s been stepped on once,” I said. “Very lightly. And that’s only because I prefer it that way. Know what I mean?”

Stringy nodded sagely. The roper, James Whittcombe Harris—better known in some circles as Jimmy the Wit—grinned a trifle too eagerly. In the background half a dozen post-hippie types wandered about, putting Grateful Dead albums on the sound system, rolling joints, discussing the Cosmic All, and doing all those beautiful things that made the sixties die so hard. “I know what you mean, Brother Man,” Stringy said meaningfully. Jimmy the Wit snickered in anticipation.

“Jerry’s got the best stuff on the Coast,” Jimmy the Wit said. “He smuggles it in himself “

“That so?”

I smiled modestly. “I had help. But I’ll admit to being pleased with this particular scam. We set up a front office—religious wholesalers—with calling cards, stationery, the whole riff. And we brought the load in inside of a batch of wooden madonnas. You should have seen the things! The absolute, and I mean ne plus ultra worst examples of native folk art these tired old eyes have ever seen. The cheeks were painted orange.” I shuddered theatrically.

“When we uncrated the things—man, you should’ve been there. We took a hatchet and split them up the crotch, and all this wonderful white powder tumbled out of the stomachs.”

We shared appreciative laughter. Somewhere in the background, a shill put on the Sergeant Pepper album. Somebody else lit a stick of patchouli incense.

Sheila chose that moment to send up the steerer. Good timing is what makes a manager, and Sheila was the best. The steerer was a blue jeans and Pink Floyd teeshirt type. He tapped me on the shoulder, said, “Hey Jerry, I’m cutting out now.”

“Yeah, well. That’s cool, man.” I threw Stringy a raised eyebrow, a sort of lookit-the-jerks-I-gotta-put-up-with look. Easing him carefully onto my side. Blue Jeans shifted uncomfortably.

“Uh. You promised to deal me a couple a keys.”

“Oh. Right.” I called over my shoulder, “Hey, Sheila, honey, bring me the basket, willya?” Then I looked at the steerer as if he were something unpleasant. “That’s sixty gee,” I said doubtfully.

“Got it right here.” He pulled out a wad of money that was eye-popping if you didn’t know that all the middle bills were ones. I negligently accepted it, and traded it to Sheila for a large Andean wicker hamper she fetched from the dark recesses of the loft.

If Sheila had no talent at all, I’d still stick her in the background during a play. She stands six-three and weighs about half what you’d swear was humanly possible. She always, even indoors at midnight, wears sunglasses. Creepy. Most people make her out to be a junkie.

“Thanks, sweet.” I stuck the top of the hamper under my arm. “Count the money and put it somewhere, willya?” She riffled through it, said, “Sixty,” in a startlingly deep voice and faded back into obscurity.

I rummaged through the hamper, came up with two brown bags. Then I weighed them judiciously, one in each hand, and dropped one back in. The other I opened to reveal a zip-lock plastic bag crammed to the gills with white powder.

“You want a taste?” My voice said he didn’t.

“Naw, I’m on the air in an hour. No time to get wasted.”

“Ciao, then.” Meaning: Get lost.

“Ciao.”

The steerer left, taking his midnight-doper pallor with him. I was playing Stringy against a roomful of very pale honkies: The only dark face in the joint was his. Which helped put him on the defensive, raised the fear of appearing to be . . . not cool . . . in front of all these white folk.

At the same time, I was busily snubbing them all, and yet being very warm toward him. Treating him as a fellow sophisticate. Getting him to identify with me. It helps create trust.

“Hey, I like your basket, man.”

“Yeah?” My voice was pleased. “I got it in S.A. Be going back there as soon as I unload the last—” I glanced in the basket “—eight keys. If you like, I could mail you a couple.”

“You do that. How much’d you say they cost?”

“Empty or full?” We all three laughed at this. “No, seriously, I’d be glad to. No charge.”

Stringy was pleased. “What can I say? I like your style, too.”

“Hey, man,” Jimmy interjected. “How about that blow, huh? I got me plans for a very heav-ee date!” Nobody laughed.

“Sure, sure,” I said distastefully. He scrabbled inside his pockets for his wad. “No hurry,” I said. He thrust it at my face, and I let it fall into my lap.

“Fifty thousand,” he said. “That’s two keys for me, ‘cause I’m going in with my brother here.”

Jimmy the Wit can be a very likeable guy. And when Stringy met him, that’s what he was. But once the mark has been roped in, a major part of the roper’s job is transferring the mark’s respect from himself to the insideman. He quietly makes himself unpleasant, and fosters the feeling in the mark that the roper is not really deserving of the great deal that is going down. Not at all a cool person like the insideman. So the mark’s loyalties shift. Then, when the blow-off comes, the moment in which the mark is separated from his money and from the insideman, the mark has no desire whatever to stay in the presence of the roper. There is a clean, quiet parting of the ways.

I looked down at the money, picked it up, let it drop. “I really shouldn’t be doing this,” I said sadly. “I half-promised a friend that I’d hold out six keys for him.”

Jimmy the Wit looked stricken. Stringy didn’t say anything, but his face got very still, and there was a hungry look in his eyes.

Figure it this way: Coke sells for maybe a hundred dollars a gram. At that rate, Stringy’s four keys would be worth four hundred thousand dollars at what the police call “street prices.” Now admittedly Stringy is not going to be selling his coke in four thousand single-gram transactions, so he’s not going to get anywhere near that much for it. Still, I’ve strongly implied that the stuff is at least eighty percent pure. Which means that he can step on it lightly and get another key. Or he can step on it heavy and practically double the weight. Which he was likely to do, since his customers were all inner-city and doubtless had never had pure anything in their lives. There’s profit in the business, never doubt it.

“Hey, look, man,” Jimmy whined. “You promised.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” I said, annoyed. “It’s just—” I called over my shoulder, “Hey, Sheila!” She materialized by my side.

“Yes?” she said in that unsettlingly deep voice.

“How long do you think it’ll take Deke to come up with the money?”

“Two weeks.”

“That long?” I asked.

“Easily.” She paused, then added, “You know how he is.”

I sighed, and dismissed her with a wave of my hand. Thought for a moment. “What the hell. I’ll give him a good deal on the next batch.”

Everyone relaxed. Stringy let out a deep breath, the first real indication he’d given as to how deeply hooked he was. Smiles all around.

I sorted through the hamper, carefully choosing six bags, and laying them on the coffee table we were seated around. They made an impressive pile.

I took up a coke mirror from the edge of the table, and wiped it clean against my sleeve. Popping open a bag at random, I spooned out a small mound of lactose. Enough for three generous snorts. Following which, I began chopping it up with a gold-plated razor blade. Ritual is very important in these matters. Stringy and Jimmy the Wit were hanging onto my every move.

“Hey.” I paused midway through the chopping. “I’ve got an idea.” I put the blade down and reached for a small box. “As long as we’re doing this, I want you guys to sample something. It’s kind of special.” I looked at Stringy as I said this, implying that the offer was really—secretly—for him.

I opened the box and carefully lifted out the Rock.

Stringy’s eyes grew large and liquid, as I lifted the Rock up before me, holding it as though it were the Eucharist.

He was staring at a single crystal of cocaine, net weight over one full ounce. It’s an extremely rare and valuable commodity. Not for the price it would bring (two thousand dollars “street prices”), but for the status. I paid dearly for that crystal; a lot more than two thousand. But the effect was worth it. Stringy positively lusted after it. He was hooked.

Gingerly, delicately, I shaved three more lines from the Rock, and set it back in its box. I resumed chopping, keeping the mound of lactose and the mound of coke carefully separate. “Some jerk offered me twenty thousand for this the other day,” I said. “I told him to go fuck himself. He had no appreciation of the beauty of it. This is pure magic, friends. And you can’t buy magic, you know what I mean?”

Stringy nodded in a worldly fashion. I finished chopping, and began to lay out the lines with wide sweeps of the razorblade. I’d separate the mounds into three lines each, then merge two and divide them again. I shifted minute quantities back and forth, evening up the amounts. My hand flew gracefully over the mirror, shifting the lines to and fro like a circus grifter shuffling walnut shells under one of which resides a small green pea. Pretty soon you had to be paying very close attention to know which line came from which mound.

Sheila’s voice broke in suddenly. “Mind if I borrow the Rock?” I grunted assent without looking up. She faded back into the gloom, taking box and Rock with her. Stringy swiveled to watch it go. He’d have been less than human if he hadn’t.

I took advantage of his distraction to shift two or three of the lines. After a bit more fussing, I presented the mirror. On it were two groups of three lines each.

“There,” I said. “This—” I tapped the razorblade next to the first group “—is from the stuff you’re buying. And this—” tapping next to the second group “—is from the Rock. I suggest you try the merchandise first, so that you can judge it without synergistic effects.” Everyone seemed amenable to the notion.

I looked down at the money Jimmy the Wit had dumped in my lap. “Damn, Jimmy, these are all old bills. Either of you guys got—”

Stringy pulled out a leather bill-holder from inside his jacket, and suavely slid out a single, crisp and spotless thousand-dollar bill from what was obviously a matched set of one hundred. My expression communicated approval, and he happily rolled it into a snorter.

I held the mirror up to Stringy, and with a gracious smile he did up the first line, half in one nostril and half in the other. Jimmy the Wit was all impatience, and as soon as Stringy had half-shut his eyes and leaned back his head in appreciation, Jimmy snatched the rolled-up bill from his hands. He leaned far forward and did up his line in a single snort. I followed suit. Then all three of us let out small laughs of appreciation.

“Ve-ry niiiiice!” Stringy said. “In fact—” he handed the leather billfold with its hundred-grand cargo to me with a flourish “—I’d go so far as to say ‘Keep the billfold.’”

“Sheila,” I said quietly. She was there. I handed her Jimmy’s wad and Stringy’s money. She riffled through Jimmy’s first.

“Fifty,” she said. Then she riffled through Stringy’s money, every bit as quickly, but with a great deal more care.

“Ninety-nine.” She faded far back. To the kitchen, in fact, where there was a switch to a signal light in the next building.

“Well,” I said. “That was pleasant.” I was playing with the empty billfold, admiring it absently. “What say we do up the rest?” No argument.

Of course, Jimmy and I had snorted up lactose while Stringy was inhaling pure Peruvian toot. When I juggled the lines, I laid out the blow in the first, fourth, and sixth places. Which meant that Stringy, being first to sample each group, snorted up powder from the Rock. It also meant—that the last line—ostensibly for me—was also real coke. And there’s where I made my one little mistake.

The play as written was that in handling the mirror I would bumble and spill the last line all across the rug. What happened was that I got greedy. Coke’ll do that to you.

I did up the line.

It was just as the rush was hitting me that Sheila’s signal was answered. There was a vicious pounding on the door, and then a crash as the whole damn thing came splintering off its hinges. Men in blue uniforms, carrying guns, spilled into the room. “Awright, nobody move!” one of them yelled.

I was riding on a great wave of clean energy when it happened, and it threw off my timing. I lurched forward a split-second late, and then everything happened at once.

Stringy jumped to his feet, looking wildly for an exit.

I fell across the coffee table, scattering bags of white powder with gleeful abandon.

One of the shills screamed. Another shouted, “Let’s get OUTTA here!” Blue Jay Way was playing in the background.

Clouds of white rose from the table as zip-lock bags burst open. There was a gunshot.

Jimmy the Wit grabbed Stringy by the arm and pointed toward a rear window, which led to a fire escape.

The shills ran about frantically.

And Sheila turned the lights out, plunging the room into darkness.

For the next three minutes, we all acted out our parts. Then, when she was certain that Jimmy the Wit had led Stringy safely out of the neighborhood, Sheila turned the lights on again.

Everyone stopped what they were doing. The “police” holstered their guns. The shills straightened up their clothes. And I swiped at the lactose powder on my knees.

Then they all lined up to get paid.

“Good show,” I told Sheila, as we left. “Damned good.”

“Yeah. Drop you someplace?”

“Naw. I feel like taking a stroll.”

When she was gone, I murmured, “Damned good” to myself again, and started walking. I was feeling fine. There was a time when they said there were only three Big Cons: The Wire, the Rag, and the Pay-off. The Rock was my own invention, and I was extremely pleased with how well it was working out.

So I strolled along, whistling, following the path I knew Jimmy the Wit would lead the pimp along. This was the final part of my job, to make sure the button hadn’t come hot, that the roper had gotten away from the mark clean, and without attracting any attention from the police. But it was pure routine, for I knew, deep in my bones that the button hadn’t come hot. I could feel it.

So I was stunned when I rounded a corner and saw Jimmy the Wit and Stringy in the arms of the Law. There were five cops around a stricken-looking Jimmy and an extremely pissed Stringy.

That’s when I realized what a mistake it had been to do up that single, innocuous line of coke. Because Stringy was looking mad because the cops were laughing at him. After all, he was holding a hundred-gee bagful of what they had just spot-analyzed as milk sugar.

I realized all in a flash that I was in big trouble. A fraction of a second too late in scattering the bags. Stringy had been able to shove one of them under his arm before fleeing. If I’d been on cue, when the cops nabbed him for suspicious running—which is a crime in some of our larger metropoli—we’d have still gotten away clean. He’d have never realized that he’d been burned.

Even at that, if Jimmy the Wit had been looking my way when I rounded the corner, he’d have managed to distract Stringy while I eased out of sight. But there’s just no arguing with a losing streak. Stringy lashed an indignant finger at me and yelled, “There he is! He’s the burn artist that ripped me off!”

I bolted. Behind me, one of the police yelled, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” and there was the sharp sound of a bullet hitting the edge of the building inches to my side. A fragment of brick went flying, and cut an evil gash in my upper arm. The pain struck me with all the force of a fist in the ribs.

I stumbled and fell to my knees, recovered, stood, and ran.

The cops ran after me.

They chased me through the warehouse district and into a cul-de-sac.

No place to go—

The smooth wall of the warehouse loomed up in front of me, and it might just as well have been Mount Everest.

Dead end, you dumb schmuck, I shrieked silently at myself, dead end! My mind gave up at that point, but my legs had developed a will of their own; they wanted to run, so run they did—I imagined them whirring around in huge blurred circles like the legs of cartoon characters, biting into the dirt, sending me sizzling forward like a rocket. Feets, don’t fail me now!

I hurtled, toward the wall. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have stopped in time.

Behind me, I could hear an ominous double click as one of the cops cocked his gun for another shot.

Some distanced part of my mind made me put my hands up in front of me at the last moment to absorb some of the impact.

There was no impact.

I went right through the wall.

There was no impact, but there was sudden darkness. The world disappeared. I think I screamed. For a moment or two all was madness and confusion, and then, without having broken stride, I began to lose momentum, my running steps coming slower and slower, as though I were in a film that was being shifted into slow motion, as though I were trying to run through molasses. The resistance I was moving against increased, and just at the point where all my forward momentum had been spilled and I was slooooowing to a stop, there was a slight tugging sensation, like a soap bubble popping, light burst upon me, and I could see again.

I was standing in a room.

Someone’s living room, it looked like—an antiquarian’s perhaps, a man of quiet tastes and substantial means. There was a Bokhara carpet in scarlet and brown. A large, glassed-in bookcase filled with thick and dusty leather-bound volumes. A browning world-globe on a gleaming brass stand. A highboy with decanters and cut-glass goblets arranged on it. In the middle of everything, about ten feet away from me, was a massive mahogany desk, obviously an antique, with charts carelessly scattered across it and, behind the desk, a tall-backed overstuffed chair—of the type you see in movies that take place in British clubs—with someone sitting in it.

The walls and ceiling of the room were featureless and grey, although it was hard to tell what they were made of—they seemed oily somehow, as if there was a faint film over them that would occasionally, almost subliminally, shimmer. There were no doors or windows that I could see. The quickest of head-turns told me that another blank wall was only a step or two behind me. There was no sign of or sound from the police, who should also have been only a step or two behind me.

I thought my disorientation was complete until I took a closer look at the man in the chair and saw that it was Stringy.

“Jerry, my man!” Stringy said jovially. “You have been a baaad boy.” He smiled at me over a brandy snifter half-filled with some amber-colored fluid. For the first time in my life, I was at a loss for words.

I opened my mouth, closed it again, like a fish breathing water. My thoughts scurried in a dozen different directions at once. The first thought was that I was dead or in a coma—one of those goddamn cops had shot me, blown me away, and somewhere back there—wherever “there” was; wherever here was—I was lying dead or dying in the street, crazed thoughts whirling through my cooling mind like the goosed scurryings of autumn leaves in the wind. Or, less dramatically, I had somehow hallucinated everything that had happened since snorting up that fateful line of coke. The little boy fell out of bed and woke up. It had all been a dream!

Screw that. A con man doesn’t last long once he starts conning himself; an ability to face reality is de rigueur in this trade. I could feel the sweat cooling under my arms, could smell the sour reek of my own fear. The bullet graze on my upper arm throbbed. I had a bitch of a headache. No, whatever was happening—it was real.

I didn’t like the way Stringy was looking at me.

“You burned me, Jerry,” he said. “Jerry—you shouldn’t have burned me.” He sounded regretful, almost wistful.

Then, slowly, he smiled.

“Hey, man,” I said, licking at my lips. “I didn’t—I don’t know what’s—”

“Oh, cut it out,” Stringy said impatiently. “Don’t bother working your way through ‘Injured Innocence,’ tape 5-A. You burned me, and I know you burned me, and you are going to pay for it, never doubt it.” He smiled his glacial sliver of a smile again, thin enough to slice bread, and for the first time in years I began to regret that it wasn’t my style to carry a piece. Was Stringy packing a gun or a knife? Macho Man is not my style either (I’ll run, given a choice), but the thought flickered through my mind that I’d better jump him quick, before he pulled some kind of weapon; even if I couldn’t overpower him, maybe I could go over or around or through him and find some way out of here—

I spread my hands wide in a weakly conciliatory gesture, at the same time kicking out with my legs and hurling myself at Stringy, thinking punch him in the throat, people don’t expect that . . .

Stringy touched something on the desktop, almost negligently, and I stopped.

I just stopped, like a fly trapped in amber.

If I’d needed something to confirm that something very weird was going down here, that would have been plenty.

My body was no longer obeying me from the neck down but, oddly, I felt my nerves steady and my panic fade—there are times when things get so bad that it seems you’ve got little left to lose, and that is the time, as all high rollers know, to put your whole bankroll down and pick up those dice and go for broke.

“You’ve made your point, Stringy,” I said in a calm, considering voice. Then I smiled. “Okay, then,” I said brightly. “Let’s talk!”

Stringy stared at me poker-faced for a couple of beats, and then he snorted derisively, and then he laughed. “You know, Jerry,” he said, “you’re really pretty good.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly.

“You had me fooled, you know,” Stringy said, smiling. “And I don’t fool easily. I really thought that you were going to come across with all that great snow, I really did. And that setup! Your staging and your timing were superb, you know, quite first-rate, really. You had me going in just the direction you wanted me to go, steered neatly right down the chute. If I hadn’t managed to pick up that bag in the confusion, I’d never have known that you were burning me—I would have just shrugged my shoulders and chalked it all up to fate, to the influence of some evil star. I really would have. You are a very subtle man, Jerry.”

He was still wearing his Superfly pimpsuit, but his voice had changed; it was cultured now, urbane, almost an octave higher, and although he still employed the occasional smattering of street slang, whatever the unfamiliar accent behind his words was, it certainly wasn’t Pore Black Child from Lenox and 131st. Even his skin was different now; there were coppery highlights I’d never seen before, as if he were some refinement of racial type that simply did not exist. I was beginning to realize that whoever—or whatever—else Stringy was, he was also a bit of a con man himself.

“You’re an alien, aren’t you?” I asked suddenly. “From a flying saucer, right? Galactic Federation? The whole bit?” And with any luck a Prime Directive—don’t hurt the poor backward natives. Please God?

He curled his lip in scorn. “Shit no.”

“What are you, then?”

He propped his feet up on the desk, leaned back, put his hands behind his head. “Time-traveler.”

I gaped at him. “You’re . . . a time-traveler?”

“Got it in one, sport,” he said languidly.

“If you’re a time-traveler—then why the hell were you trying to score cocaine from me?”

“Why not?” he said. He had closed his eyes.

“Why, for bleeding Christ’s sake?”

He opened his eyes. “Well, I don’t know what you do with yours, but what I do with mine is to stick it right up my nose and snuffle it up, snuffleuffleupagus, until it’s all gone. Yum. Gives you a hell of a nice rush. Helps pass the time while you’re on your way to the Paleolithic, or whenever. Makes a long boring trip through the eons just fly by. Other time-travelers may be into speed or reds or synapse-snappers or floaters, but among the elite of the Time Corps, such as myself, coke is the drug of choice, no others need apply . . .”

“That’s not what I meant, damnit! Why come to me for it, why go to all that trouble, sneaking around in back alleys, spending all that money? If you can really travel in time, why not just go back to, say, pre-Conquest Peru, and gather up a sackful for nothing? Or if that’s too much trouble, why not just go back to the turn of the century when it was still legal and buy all you want, with nobody giving a damn? Or . . .”

Stringy aimed a finger at me like a gun, and made a shooting motion, and I’m ashamed to admit that I flinched—who knew what he could or couldn’t do with that finger? Nothing happened, though, except that he made a pow! noise with his lips, and then said, “Right on! You’ve put your finger right on the veritable crux of the problem, sport. Why not indeed?” He winked, laced his hands behind his head again. “The problem, my old, is that the authorities are almost as stuffy in my time as they were in yours, in spite of all the years gone by. Particularly the Powers That Be in the Time Corps, my bosses—they want us to flit soberly through the centuries on our appointed rounds, primly protecting the One and Proper Chain of Events and fighting off paradoxes. They do not want us, while we’re engaged in protecting and preserving Order by, say, keeping the bad guys from helping the Persians to win at Marathon, they do not want us, at that particular moment, to go sneaking off behind some scrubby Grecian bush and blow our brains right out of the top of our skulls with a big snootful of toot. They frown on that. They are, as I say, stuffy.”

He stretched, and ran his fingers back through his afro. “To forestall your next question: no, of course my bosses can’t watch all of time and space, but they don’t have to—they can watch the monitors in the control complex that show where and when our timecraft are going. So if we’re supposed to be in, say, 1956 Iowa, and we stop off in pre-Conquest Peru instead to grab us a sackful of crystal, why, that’ll show up on the monitors, right, and we’re in big trouble. No, what’s been happening instead is that we’ve been doing a lot of work the last few subjective years more or less in this location and in this part of the century, and it’s so much easier, when we’re scheduled to be in 1982 Philadelphia or whenever anyway—when our car is already parked, so to speak, and the monitors off—to just whomp up some money, whatever amount is necessary; and take a few minutes off and go hunt up a native source. To take our bucket to the well, so to speak.”

“I see,” I said weakly.

“Except,” Stringy said, sitting up slowly and deliberately and putting his feet back on the ground and his hands flat on the desk in front of him, “except, Jerry, what do you think happened? We went to the well with our bucket this time, and the well was dry, Jerry.” That flat, evil light was back in his eyes again. “No snow in our forecast, Jerry old bean. And do you know why? Because you burned us, Jerry . . .”

“If you can do all that stuff,” I said, fighting to control the fear that wanted my voice to break and whine, “why don’t you just go back to the start of all this and find yourself another source. Just never come to see me in the first place.” Why me, Lord? Let this cup pass from me . . .

Stringy shook his head. “Might create a paradox-loop, and that’d show up on the monitors. I came close enough to looping when I shook off the fuzz and came angling back to snatch you away from the long arm of the Law. Although”—he smiled thinly—“I would’ve loved to have seen the faces of those cops when you ran right through that brick wall; that’s one police report that’ll never get filed.”

“Then why don’t you let me take the money and go out and buy you some real coke?”

He shook his head again, that ominous glint in his eyes. “It’s not the money—that’s just paper. It’s not even getting the coke anymore. It’s the principle of the thing.”

If I’d been a bit nearer, I’d have spit in his eye. “Why you dumb ersatz pimp!” I snarled, losing the ragged edge of my temper. “You’re a terrific one to be talking about principles. You paid for the whole transaction in funny money. You stiffed me.”

He shrugged. “Your people never would’ve noticed anything odd about that money. But that doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is—you don’t fuck around with the Time Corps. Never, ever, not even when the only mission we’re on is a clandestine dope run. You’ve screwed over the Time Corps, and we’re going to take it out of your hide, I promise you.” He smiled that thin and icy smile again, and it cut like a razor. “We’ll get that one hundred thousand dollars worth of use out of you, Jerry—one way or another.”

I tried to keep my face still, but a hundred dreadful images were skittering behind my eyes, and he probably knew it: me as a galley slave tied to a giant oar while the salt sea spray stings the festering whipscars on my back; me as a mine slave, working deep underground, never seeing the sun, lungs straining at the foul air, my back gnarled, my hands torn and bleeding; me as a medieval serf, struggling to pull a primitive plow through the unturned soil, sweating and groaning like a mule; me being disemboweled, crucified, having my eyes put out, having molten gold poured down my throat . . . No doubt a race of time-travelers could arrange for any of those fates—history is large enough to swallow thousands of wretches like me down into nameless oblivion, and no doubt it had. Was Judge Crater now a kitchen slave in ancient Carthage? Did Ambrose Bierce now spend his time shoveling out manure piles in some barnyard in Celtic Britain?

We’ll get one hundred thousand dollars worth of use out of you—one way or another.

Think, damnit, think. Let’s see the Giant Brain get you out of this one, kid.

My mind raced like a car engine does when someone has the accelerator and the brake simultaneously floored.

I stared unflinchingly into Stringy’s ice-pale eyes for one heartbeat, two heartbeats, three, and then slowly, oh so slowly, I allowed a smile to form on my face, a beatific smile, a knowing smile, a smile that I managed to make both mocking and conspiratorial all at the same time.

“Tell me, Stringy,” I said lazily, “do you ever meddle with the One and Proper Chain of Events instead of just preserving the status quo? Do you ever tinker with it, just a little bit, here and there, now and then. Do you ever beat the bad guys to the punch by changing something first?”

“Well . . .” Stringy said. He looked uneasy.

“You know something, Stringy?” I said, still in that same dreamy, drifting, conversational tone. “I’m one of the few guys in the world who can pull off the Big Con—can’t be more than five or six others who can handle it, and I’m the best of them. There can’t ever have been many; not in any age. And I took you with it, Stringy—you know that I did. I took you with it clean. And you know just as well as I do that if it hadn’t been for an Act of God, a million-to-one accident, you never even would have tumbled to the fact that I took you.”

“Well . . .” Stringy said. “Maybe so . . .”

I felt a rush of fierce singing joy and carefully hid it. I was going to do it! I was going to con the sonofabitch. I was going to take him! With the odds stacked overwhelmingly in his favor, still I was going to take him!

I metaphorically rolled up my sleeves and settled down to talk better and faster than I had ever talked before.

Now, years later by my own subjective life clock, I sometimes wonder just who was conning whom. I think that Stringy—not actually his name, of course; but then, neither is my name Jerry—was playing me like a virtuoso angler with a record trout on the line from the moment I came stumbling through the timescreen, playing on my fear and anger and disorientation, letting me run up against black despair and then see just the faintest glimmer of hope beyond, conning me into thinking I was conning him into letting me do what he’d wanted me to do all along or, at any rate, as soon as he had realized what sort of man I was.

Good recruits for the more exotic branches of the Time Corps are hard to come by in any age, just as I’d said, and Stringy was—and is—a very subtle fellow indeed. I always enjoy working with him, and one of the fringe benefits—for Stringy’s taste for snow was real enough—is the plenitude of high-quality dope he always manages to gather unto himself.

Ironically, my specialty within the Corps has become the directing of operations where the button is supposed to come hot, where the marks are supposed to realize that they are being conned; their resultant fury, if adroitly directed toward the proper target, can have some very interesting effects indeed.

As with the South Sea Bubble scandal, for instance, which brought Walpole—no friend of Bolingbroke’s—into power as a minor result of which—one of many, many results which echoed down the timelines for centuries—a certain motion picture starring Errol Flynn was never made, or even contemplated. Or with the Teapot Dome scandal, as a result of which—a small result among many more significant and long-term results—Harding’s name is not attached to a certain dam in Colorado, and never has been.

My latest operation is something that will come to be called Watergate. You haven’t heard of it yet—you couldn’t have heard of it yet.

But just give it time—you will.

Flash Point

Introduction to Flash Point

This is not just one of my favorite Gardner Dozois stories—it is one of my favorite stories, period.

At the time Gardner wrote it, it was set in the future. The future is still its nominal setting, I guess since we don’t have holo TV sets. But I think we have to concede that real time has overtaken this future—Viet Nam really is a good many years in the past, and viewpoint character Ben Jacobs is about the right age to make this a story set in the present. Right now. Today.

Likewise the situation. Isn’t that something—“Flash Point” has actually gone from being a cautionary tale about the future to a contemporary horror story. Simply substitute another word for “holo”—say, “digital,” and you have a story that could have been written, well, this morning.

But while the usual elements—plot, characters, conflict—make this tale so immediate and contemporary, the quality of the writing makes it classic and timeless. The words describe nothing—they show everything. You feel the sensation of riding in the truck with Jacobs; you smell the strange odor in the abandoned car; you become, by turns, angry, impatient, repelled, frightened, and at the end, you shiver in the cold, both outside and from within. This is not a story you merely read; this is something that happens to you.

I re-read this story regularly, to remind myself of the sort of achievement I aspired to when I was first starting out. I still aspire to it. I really hope that someday I’ll write something this good.

Pat Cadigan

Flash Point

Ben Jacobs was on his way back to Skowhegan when he found the abandoned car. It was parked on a lonely stretch of secondary road between North Anson and Madison, skewed diagonally over the shoulder.

Kids again, was Jacobs’ first thought—more of the road gypsies who plagued the state every summer until they were driven south by the icy whip of the first nor’easter. Probably from the big encampment down near Norridgewock, he decided, and he put his foot back on the accelerator. He’d already had more than his fill of outer-staters this season, and it wasn’t even the end of August. Then he looked more closely at the car, and eased up on the gas again. It was too big, too new to belong to kids. He shifted down into second, feeling the crotchety old pickup shudder. It was an expensive car, right enough; he doubted that it came from within twenty miles of here. You didn’t use a big-city car on most of the roads in this neck of the woods, and you couldn’t stay on the highways forever. He squinted to see more detail. What kind of plates did it have? You’re doing it again, he thought, suddenly and sourly. He was a man as aflame with curiosity as a magpie, and—having been brought up strictly to mind his own business—he considered it a vice. Maybe the car was stolen. It’s possible, a’n’t it? he insisted, arguing with himself. It could have been used in a robbery and then ditched, like that car from the bank job over to Farmington. It happened all the time.

You don’t even fool yourself anymore, he thought, and then he grinned and gave in. He wrestled the old truck into the breakdown lane, jolted over a pothole, and coasted to a bumpy stop a few yards behind the car. He switched the engine off.

Silence swallowed him instantly.

Thick and dusty, the silence poured into the morning, filling the world as hot wax fills a mold. It drowned him completely, it possessed every inch and ounce of him. Almost, it spooked him.

Jacobs hesitated, shrugged, and then jumped down from the cab. Outside it was better—still quiet, but not preternaturally so. There was wind soughing through the spruce woods, a forlorn but welcome sound, one he had heard all his life. There was a wood thrush hammering at the morning, faint with distance but distinct. And a faraway buzzing drone overhead, like a giant sleepy bee or bluebottle, indicated that there was a Piper Cub up there somewhere, probably heading for the airport at Norridgewock. All this was familiar and reassuring. Getting nervy, is all, he told himself, long in the tooth and spooky.

Nevertheless, he walked very carefully toward the car, flat-footed and slow, the way he used to walk on patrol in ‘Nam, more years ago than he cared to recall. His fingers itched for something, and after a few feet he realized that he was wishing he’d brought his old deer rifle along. He grimaced irritably at that, but the wish pattered through his mind again and again, until he was close enough to see inside the parked vehicle.

The car was empty.

“Old fool,” he said sourly.

Snorting in derision at himself, he circled the car, peering in the windows. There were skid marks in the gravel of the breakdown lane, but they weren’t deep—the car hadn’t been going fast when it hit the shoulder; probably it had been already meandering out of control, with no foot on the accelerator. The hood and bumpers weren’t damaged; the car had rolled to a stop against the low embankment, rather than crashing into it. None of the tires were flat. In the woods taking a leak, Jacobs thought. Damn fool didn’t even leave his turn signals on. Or it could have been his battery, or a vapor lock or something, and he’d hiked on up the road looking for a gas station. “He still should have ma’ked it off someway,” Jacobs muttered. Tourists never knew enough to find their ass in a snowstorm. This one probably wasn’t even carrying any signal flags or flares.

The driver’s door was wide open, and next to it was a child’s plastic doll, lying facedown in the gravel. Jacobs could not explain the chill that hit him then, the horror that seized him and shook him until he was almost physically ill. Bristling, he stooped and thrust his head into the car. There was a burnt, bitter smell inside, like onions, like hot metal. A layer of grey ash covered the front seat and the floor, a couple of inches deep; a thin stream of it was trickling over the doorjamb to the ground and pooling around the plastic feet of the doll. Hesitantly he touched the ash—it was sticky and soapy to the touch. In spite of the sunlight that was slanting into the car and warming up the upholstery, the ash was cold, almost icy. The cloth ceiling directly over the front seat was lightly blackened with soot—he scraped some of it off with his thumbnail—but there was no other sign of fire. Scattered among the ashes on the front seat were piles of clothing. Jacobs could pick out a pair of men’s trousers, a sports coat, a bra, slacks, a bright child’s dress, all undamaged. More than one person. They’re all in the woods taking a leak, he thought inanely. Sta’k naked.

Sitting on the dashboard were a 35-mm Nikon SI with a telephoto lens and a new Leicaflex. In the hip pocket of the trousers was a wallet, containing more than fifty dollars in cash, and a bunch of credit cards. He put the wallet back. Not even a tourist was going to be fool enough to walk off and leave this stuff sitting here, in an open car.

He straightened up, and felt the chill again, the deathly noonday cold. This time he was spooked. Without knowing why, he nudged the doll out of the puddle of ash with his foot, and then he shuddered. “Hello!” he shouted, at the top of his voice, and got back only a dull, flat echo from the woods. Where in hell had they gone?

All at once, he was exhausted. He’d been out before dawn, on a trip up to Kingfield and Carrabassett, and it was catching up with him. Maybe that was why he was so jumpy over nothing. Getting old, c’n’t take this kind of shit anymore. How long since you’ve had a vacation? He opened his mouth to shout again, but uneasily decided not to. He stood for a moment, thinking it out, and then walked back to his truck, hunch-shouldered and limping. The old load of shrapnel in his leg and hip was beginning to bother him again.

Jacobs drove a mile down the highway to a rest stop. He had been hoping he would find the people from the car here, waiting for a tow truck, but the rest area was deserted. He stuck his head into the wood-and-fieldstone latrine, and found that it was inhabited only by buzzing clouds of bluebottles and blackflies. He shrugged. So much for that. There was a pay phone on a pole next to the picnic tables, and he used it to call the sheriff’s office in Skowhegan. Unfortunately, Abner Jackman answered the phone, and it took Jacobs ten exasperating minutes to argue him into showing any interest. “Well, if they did,” Jacobs said grudgingly, “they did it without any clothes.” Gobblegobblebuzz, said the phone. “With a kid?” Jacobs demanded. Buzzgobblefttzbuzz, the phone said, giving in. “Ayah,” Jacobs said grudgingly, “I’ll stay theah until you show up.” And he hung up.

“Damned foolishness,” he muttered. This was going to cost him the morning.

County Sheriff Joe Riddick arrived an hour later. He was a stocky, slab-sided man, apparently cut all of a piece out of a block of granite—his shoulders seemed to be the same width as his hips, his square-skulled, square-jawed head thrust belligerently up from his monolithic body without any hint of a neck. He looked like an old snapping turtle: ugly, mud-colored, powerful. His hair was snow-white, and his eyes were bloodshot and ill-tempered. He glared at Jacobs dangerously out of red-rimmed eyes with tiny pupils. He looked ready to snap.

“Good morning,” Jacobs said coldly.

“Morning,” Riddick grunted. “You want to fill me in on this?”

Jacobs did. Riddick listened impassively. When Jacobs finished, Riddick snorted and brushed a hand back over his close-cropped snowy hair. “Some damn fool skylark more’n likely,” he said, sourly, shaking his head a little. “O-kay, then,” he said, suddenly becoming officious and brisk. “If this turns out to be anything serious, we may need you as a witness. Understand? All right.” He looked at his watch. “All right. We’re waiting for the state boys. I don’t think you’re needed anymore.” Riddick’s face was hard and cold and dull—as if it had been molded in lead. He stared pointedly at Jacobs. His eyes were opaque as marbles. “Good day.”

Twenty minutes later Jacobs was passing a proud little sign, erected by the Skowhegan Chamber of Commerce, that said: HOME OF THE LARGEST SCULPTED WOODEN INDIAN IN THE WORLD! He grinned. Skowhegan had grown a great deal in the last decade, but somehow it was still a small town. It had resisted the modern tropism to skyscrape and had sprawled instead, spreading out along the banks of the Kennebec River in both directions. Jacobs parked in front of a dingy storefront on Water Street, in the heart of town. A sign in the window commanded: EAT; at night it glowed an imperative neon red. The sign belonged to an establishment that had started life as the Colonial Cafe, with a buffet and quaint rustic decor, and was finishing it, twenty years and three recessions later, as a greasy lunchroom with faded movie posters on the wall—owned and operated by Wilbur and Myna Phipps, a cheerful and indestructible couple in their late sixties. It was crowded and hot inside—the place had a large number of regulars, and most of them were in attendance for lunch. Jacobs spotted Will Sussmann at the counter, jammed in between an inverted glass bowl full of doughnuts and the protruding rear-end of the coffee percolator.

Sussmann—chief staff writer for the Skowhegan Inquirer, stringer and columnist for a big Bangor weekly—had saved him a seat by piling the adjacent stool with his hat, coat, and briefcase. Not that it was likely he’d had to struggle too hard for room. Even Jacobs, whose father had moved to Skowhegan from Bangor when Jacobs was three, was regarded with faint suspicion by the real oldtimers of the town. Sussmann, being originally an outer-stater and a “foreigner” to boot, was completely out of luck; he’d only lived here ten years, and that wasn’t enough even to begin to tip the balance in his favor.

Sussmann retrieved his paraphernalia; Jacobs sat down and began telling him about the car. Sussmann said it was weird. “We’ll never get anything out of Riddick,” he said. He began to attack a stack of hotcakes. “He’s hated my guts ever since I accused him of working over those gypsy kids last summer, putting one in the hospital. That would have cost him his job, except the higher echelons were being ‘foursquare behind their dedicated law enforcement officers’ that season. Still, it didn’t help his reputation with the town any.”

“We don’t tolerate that kind of thing in these pa’ts,” Jacobs said grimly. “Hell, Will, those kids are a royal pain in the ass, but—” But not in these pa’ts, he told himself, not that. There are decent limits. He was surprised at the depth and ferocity of his reaction. “This a’n’t Alabama,” he said.

“Might as well be, with Riddick. His idea of law enforcement’s to take everybody he doesn’t like down in the basement and beat the crap out of them.” Sussmann sighed. “Anyway, Riddick wouldn’t stop to piss on me if my hat was on fire, that’s for sure. Good thing I got other ways of finding stuff out.”

Jed Everett came in while Jacobs was ordering coffee. He was a thin, cadaverous man with a long nose; his hair was going rapidly to grey; put him next to short, round Sussmann and they would look like Mutt and Jeff. At forty-eight—Everett was a couple of years older than Jacobs, just as Sussmann was a couple of years younger—he was considered to be scandalously young for a small-town doctor, especially a GP. But old Dr. Barlow had died of a stroke three years back, leaving his younger partner in residency, and they were stuck with him.

One of the regulars had moved away from the trough, leaving an empty seat next to Jacobs, and Everett was talking before his buttocks had hit the upholstery. He was a jittery man, with lots of nervous energy, and he loved to fret and rant and gripe, but softly and goodnaturedly, with no real force behind it, as if he had a volume knob that had been turned down.

“What a morning!” Everett said. “Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle—‘scuse me, Myna, I’ll take some coffee, please, black—I swear it’s psychosomatic. Honest to God, gentlemen, she’s a case for the medical journals, dreams the whole damn shitbundle up out of her head just for the fun of it, I swear before all my hopes of heaven, swop me blue if she doesn’t. Definitely psychosomatic.”

“He’s learned a new word,” Sussmann said.

“If you’d wasted all the time I have on this nonsense,” Everett said fiercely, “you’d be whistling a different tune out of the other side of your face, I can tell you, oh yes indeed. What kind of meat d’you have today, Myna? How about the chops—they good?—all right, and put some greens on the plate, please. Okay? Oh, and some homefrieds, now I think about it, please. If you have them.”

“What’s got your back up?” Jacobs asked mildly.

“You know old Mrs. Crawford?” Everett demanded. “Hm? Lives over to the Island, widow, has plenty of money? Three times now I’ve diagnosed her as having cancer, serious but still operable, and three times now I’ve sent her down to Augusta for exploratory surgery, and each time they got her down on the table and opened her up and couldn’t find a thing, not a goddamned thing, old bitch’s hale and hearty as a prize hog. Spontaneous remission. All psychosomatic, clear as mud. Three times, though. It’s shooting my reputation all to hell down there. Now she thinks she’s got an ulcer. I hope her kidney falls out, right in the street. Thank you, Myna. Can I have another cup of coffee?” He sipped his coffee, when it arrived, and looked a little more meditative. “Course, I think I’ve seen a good number of cases like that, I think, I said, ha’d to prove it when they’re terminal. Wouldn’t surprise me if a good many of the people who die of cancer—or a lot of other diseases, for that matter—were like that. No real physical cause, they just get tired of living, something dries up inside them, their systems stop trying to defend them, and one thing or another knocks them off. They become easy to touch off, like tinder. Most of them don’t change their minds in the middle, though, like that fat old sow.”

Wilbur Phipps, who had been leaning on the counter listening, ventured the opinion that modern medical science had never produced anything even half as good as the old-fashioned mustard plaster. Everett flared up instantly.

“You ever bejesus try one?” Phipps demanded.

“No, and I don’t bejesus intend to!” Everett said.

Jacobs turned toward Sussmann. “Wheah you been, this early in the day?” he asked. “A’n’t like you to haul yourself out before noon.”

“Up at the Factory. Over to West Mills.”

“What was up? Another hearing?”

“Yup. Didn’t stick—they aren’t going to be injuncted.”

“They never will be,” Jacobs said. “They got too much money, too many friends in Augusta. The Board’ll never touch them.”

“I don’t believe that,” Sussmann said. Jacobs grunted and sipped his coffee.

“As Christ’s my judge,” Everett was saying, in a towering rage, “I’ll never understand you people, not if I live to be two hundred, not if I get to be so old my ass falls off and I have to lug it around in a handcart. I swear to God. Some of you ain’ got a pot to piss in, so goddamned poor you can’t afford to buy a bottle of aspirins, let alone, let alone pay your doctor bills from the past half-million years, and yet you go out to some godforsaken hick town too small to turn a horse around in proper and see an unlicensed practitioner, a goddamn back-woods quack, an unmitigated phony, and pay through the nose so this witchdoctor can assault you with yarb potions and poultices, and stick leeches on your ass, for all I know—” Jacobs lost track of the conversation. He studied a bee that was bumbling along the putty-and-plaster edge of the storefront window, swimming through the thick and dusty sunlight, looking for a way out. He felt numb, distanced from reality. The people around him looked increasingly strange. He found that it took an effort of will to recognize them at all, even Sussmann, even Everett. It scared him. These were people Jacobs saw every day of his life. Some of them he didn’t actually like—not in the way that big-city folk thought of liking someone—but they were all his neighbors. They belonged here, they were a part of his existence, and that carried its own special intimacy. But today he was beginning to see them as an intolerant sophisticate from the city might see them: dull, provincial, sunk in an iron torpor that masqueraded as custom and routine. That was valid, in its way, but it was a grossly one-sided picture, ignoring a thousand virtues, compensations, and kindnesses. But that was the way he was seeing them. As aliens. As strangers.

Distractedly, Jacobs noticed that Everett and Sussmann were making ready to leave. “No rest for the weary,” Everett was saying, and Jacobs found himself nodding unconsciously in agreement. Swamped by a sudden rush of loneliness, he invited both men home for dinner that night. They accepted, Everett with the qualification that he’d have to see what his wife had planned. Then they were gone, and Jacobs found himself alone at the counter.

He knew that he should have gone back to work also; he had some more jobs to pick up, and a delivery to make. But he felt very tired, too flaccid and heavy to move, as if some tiny burrowing animal had gnawed away his bones, as if he’d been hamstrung and hadn’t realized it. He told himself that it was because he was hungry; he was running himself down, as Carol had always said he someday would. So he dutifully ordered a bowl of chili.

The chili was murky, amorphous stuff, bland and lukewarm. Listlessly, he spooned it up.

No rest for the weary.

“You know what I was nuts about when I was a kid?” Jacobs suddenly observed to Wilbur Phipps. “Rafts. I was a’ways making rafts out of old planks and sheet tin and whatevah other junk I could scrounge up, begging old rope and nails to lash them together with. Then I’d break my ass dragging them down to the Kennebec. And you know what? They a’ways sunk. Every goddamned time.”

“Ayah?” Wilbur Phipps said.

Jacobs pushed the bowl of viscid chili away, and got up. Restlessly, he wandered over to where Dave Lucas, the game warden, was drinking beer and talking to a circle of men. “. . . dogs will be the end of deer in these pa’ts, I swear to God. And I a’n’t talking about wild dogs neither, I’m talking about your ordinary domestic pets. A’n’t it so, every winter? Half-starved deer a’n’t got a chance in hell ‘gainst somebody’s big pet hound, all fed-up and rested. The deer those dogs don’t kill outright, why they chase ‘em to death, and then they don’t even eat ‘em. Run ‘em out of the forest covah into the open and they get pneumonia. Run ‘em into the river and through thin ice and they get drowned. Remember last yeah, the deer that big hound drove out onto the ice? Broke both its front legs and I had to go out and shoot the poor bastid. Between those goddamn dogs and all the nighthunters we got around here lately, we a’n’t going to have any deer left in this county . . .” Jacobs moved away, past a table where Abner Jackman was pouring ketchup over a plateful of scrambled eggs, and arguing about Communism with Steve Girard, a volunteer fireman and Elk, and Allen Ewing, a postman, who had a son serving with the Marines in Bolivia “. . . let ‘em win theah,” Jackman was saying in a nasal voice, “and they’ll be swa’ming all over us eventu’ly, sure as shit. Ain’ no way to stop ‘em then. And you’re better off blowing your brains out than living under the Reds, don’t ever think otherwise.” He screwed the ketchup top back onto the bottle, and glanced up in time to see Jacobs start to go by.

“Ben!” Jackman said, grabbing Jacobs by the elbow. “You can tell ‘em.” He grinned vacuously at Jacobs—a lanky, loose-jointed, slack-faced man. “He can tell you, boys, what it’s like being in a country overrun with Communists, what they do to everybody. You were in ‘Nam when you were a youngster, weren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

After a pause, Jackman said, “You ain’ got no call to take offense, Ben.” His voice became a whine. “I didn’t mean no ha’m. I didn’t mean nothing.”

“Forget it,” Jacobs said, and walked out.

Dave Lucas caught up with Jacobs just outside the door. He was a short, grizzled man with iron-grey hair, about seven years older than Jacobs. “You know, Ben,” Lucas said, “the thing of it is, Abner really doesn’t mean any ha’m.” Lucas smiled bleakly; his grandson had been killed last year, in the Retreat from La Paz. “It’s just that he a’n’t too bright, is all.”

“They don’t want him kicked ev’ry so often,” Jacobs said, “then they shouldn’t let him out of his kennel at all.” He grinned. “Dinner tonight? About eight?”

“Sounds fine,” Lucas said. “We’re going to catch a nighthunter, out near Oaks Pond, so I’ll probably be late.”

“We’ll keep it wa’m for you.”

“Just the comp’ny’ll be enough.”

Jacobs started his truck and pulled out into the afternoon traffic. He kept his hands locked tightly around the steering wheel. He was amazed and dismayed by the surge of murderous anger he had felt toward Jackman; the reaction to it made him queasy, and left the muscles knotted all across his back and shoulders. Dave was right, Abner couldn’t rightly be held responsible for the dumbass things he said—But if Jackman had said one more thing, if he’d done anything other than to back down as quickly as he had, then Jacobs would have split his head open. He had been instantly ready to do it, his hands had curled into fists, his legs had bent slightly at the knees. He would have done it. And he would have enjoyed it. That was a frightening realization.

Y’ touchy today, he thought, inanely. His fingers were turning white on the wheel.

He drove home. Jacobs lived in a very old wood frame house above the north bank of the Kennebec, on the outskirts of town, with nothing but a clump of new apartment buildings for senior citizens to remind him of civilization. The house was empty—Carol was teaching fourth grade, and Chris had been farmed out to Mrs. Turner, the baby-sitter. Jacobs spent the next half hour wrestling a broken washing machine and a television set out of the pickup and into his basement workshop, and another fifteen minutes maneuvering a newly repaired stereo-radio console up out of the basement and into the truck. Jacobs was one of the last of the old-style Yankee tinkerers, although he called himself an appliance repairman, and also did some carpentry and general handiwork when things got slow. He had little formal training, but he “kept up.” He wasn’t sure he could fix one of the new hologram sets, but then they wouldn’t be getting out here for another twenty years anyway. There were people within fifty miles who didn’t have indoor plumbing. People within a hundred miles who didn’t have electricity.

On the way to Norridgewock, two open jeeps packed dangerously full of gypsies came roaring up behind him. They started to pass, one on each side of his truck, their horns blaring insanely. The two jeeps ran abreast of Jacobs’ old pickup for a while, making no attempt to go by—the three vehicles together filled the road. The jeeps drifted in until they were almost touching the truck, and the gypsies began pounding the truck roof with their fists, shouting and laughing. Jacobs kept both hands on the wheel and grimly continued to drive at his original speed. Jeeps tipped easily when sideswiped by a heavier vehicle, if it came to that. And he had a tire-iron under the seat. But the gypsies tired of the game—they accelerated and passed Jacobs, most of them giving him the finger as they went by, and one throwing a poorly aimed bottle that bounced onto the shoulder. They were big, tough-looking kids with skin haircuts, dressed—incongruously—in flowered pastel luau shirts and expensive white bellbottoms.

The jeeps roared on up the road, still taking up both lanes. Jacobs watched them unblinkingly until they disappeared from sight. He was awash with rage, the same bitter, vicious hatred he had felt for Jackman. Riddick was right after all—the goddamned kids were a menace to everything that lived, they ought to be locked up. He wished suddenly that he had sideswiped them. He could imagine it all vividly: the sickening crunch of impact, the jeep overturning, bodies cartwheeling through the air, the jeep skidding upside down across the road and crashing into the embankment, maybe the gas tank exploding, a gout of flame, smoke, stink, screams—He ran through it over and over again, relishing it, until he realized abruptly what he was doing, what he was wishing, and he was almost physically ill.

All the excitement and fury drained out of him, leaving him shaken and sick. He’d always been a patient, peaceful man, perhaps too much so. He’d never been afraid to fight, but he’d always said that a man who couldn’t talk his way out of most trouble was a fool. This sudden daydream lust for blood bothered him to the bottom of his soul. He’d seen plenty of death in ‘Nam, and it hadn’t affected him this way. It was the kids, he told himself. They drag everybody down to their own level. He kept seeing them inside his head all the way into Norridgewock—the thick, brutal faces, the hard reptile eyes, the contemptuously grinning mouths that seemed too full of teeth. The gypsy kids had changed over the years. The torrent of hippies and Jesus freaks had gradually run dry, the pluggers and the weeps had been all over the state for a few seasons, and then, slowly, they’d stopped coming too. The new crop of itinerant kids were—hard. Every year they became more brutal and dangerous. They didn’t seem to care if they lived or died, and they hated everything indiscriminately—including themselves.

In Norridgewock, he delivered the stereo console to its owner, then went across town to pick up a malfunctioning 75-hp Johnson outboard motor. From the motor’s owner, he heard that a town boy had beaten an elderly storekeeper to death that morning, when the storekeeper caught him shoplifting. The boy was in custody, and it was the scandal of the year for Norridgewock. Jacobs had noticed it before, but discounted it: the local kids were getting mean too, meaner every year. Maybe it was self-defense.

Driving back, Jacobs noticed one of the gypsy jeeps slewed up onto the road embankment. It was empty. He slowed, and stared at the jeep thoughtfully, but he did not stop.

A fire-rescue truck nearly ran him down as he entered Skowhegan. It came screaming out of nowhere and swerved onto Water Street, its blue blinker flashing, siren screeching in metallic rage, suddenly right on top of him. Jacobs wrenched his truck over to the curb, and it swept by like a demon, nearly scraping him. It left a frightened silence behind it, after it had vanished urgently from sight. Jacobs pulled back into traffic and continued driving. Just before the turnoff to his house, a dog ran out into the road. Jacobs had slowed down for the turn anyway, and he saw the dog in plenty of time to stop. He did not stop. At the last possible second, he yanked himself out of a waking dream, and swerved just enough to miss the dog. He had wanted to hit it; he’d liked the idea of running it down. There were too many dogs in the county anyway, he told himself, in a feeble attempt at justification. “Big, ugly hound,” he muttered, and was appalled by how alien his voice sounded—hard, bitterly hard, as if it were a rock speaking. Jacobs noticed that his hands were shaking.

Dinner that night was a fair success. Carol had turned out not to be particularly overjoyed that her husband had invited a horde of people over without bothering to consult her, but Jacobs placated her a little by volunteering to cook dinner. It turned out “sufficient,” as Everett put it. Everybody ate, and nobody died. Toward the end, Carol had to remind them to leave some for Dave Lucas, who had not arrived yet. The company did a lot to restore Jacobs’ nerves, and, feeling better, he wrestled with curiosity throughout the meal. Curiosity won, as it usually did with him: in the end, and against his better judgment.

As the guests began to trickle into the parlor, Jacobs took Sussmann aside and asked him if he’d learned anything new about the abandoned car.

Sussmann seemed uneasy and preoccupied. “Whatever it was happened to them seems to’ve happened again this afternoon. Maybe a couple of times. There was another abandoned car found about four o’clock, up near Athens. And there was one late yesterday night, out at Livermore Falls. And a tractor-trailer on Route Ninety-five this morning, between Waterville and Benton Station.”

“How’d you pry that out of Riddick?”

“Didn’t.” Sussmann smiled wanly. “Heard about that Athens one from the driver of the tow truck that hauled it back—that one bumped into a signpost, hard enough to break its radiator. Ben, Riddick can’t keep me in the dark. I’ve got more stringers than he has.”

“What d’you think it is?”

Sussmann’s expression fused over and became opaque. He shook his head.

In the parlor, Carol, Everett’s wife Amy—an ample, grey woman, rather like somebody’s archetypical aunt but possessed of a very canny mind—and Sussmann, the inveterate bachelor, occupied themselves by playing with Chris. Chris was two, very quick and bright, and very excited by all the company. He’d just learned how to blow kisses, and was now practicing enthusiastically with the adults. Everett, meanwhile, was prowling around examining the stereo equipment that filled one wall. “You install this yourself?” he asked, when Jacobs came up to hand him a beer.

“Not only installed it,” Jacobs said, “I built it all myself, from scratch. Tinkered up most of the junk in this house. Take the beah ‘fore it gets hot.”

“Damn fine work,” Everett muttered, absently accepting the beer. “Better’n my own setup, I purely b’lieve, and that set me back a right sma’t piece of change. Jesus Christ, Ben—I didn’t know you could do quality work like that. What the hell you doing stagnating out here in the sticks, fixing people’s radios and washing machines, f’chrissake? Y’that good, you ought to be down in Boston, New York mebbe, making some real money.”

Jacobs shook his head. “Hate the cities, big cities like that. C’n’t stand to live in them at all.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I lived in New York for a while, seven—eight yeahs back, ‘fore settling in Skowhegan again. It was terrible theah, even back then, and it’s worse now. People down theah dying on their feet, walking around dead without anybody to tell ‘em to lie down and get buried decent.”

“We’re dying here too, Ben,” Everett said. “We’re just doing it slower, is all.”

Jacobs shrugged. “Mebbe so,” he said. “’Scuse me.” He walked back to the kitchen, began to scrape the dishes and stack them in the sink. His hands had started to tremble again.

When he returned to the parlor, after putting Chris to bed, he found that conversation had almost died. Everett and Sussmann were arguing halfheartedly about the Factory, each knowing that he’d never convince the other. It was a pointless discussion, and Jacobs did not join it. He poured himself a glass of beer and sat down. Amy hardly noticed him; her usually pleasant face was stern and angry. Carol found an opportunity to throw him a sympathetic wink while tossing her long hair back over her shoulder, but her face was flushed too, and her lips were thin. The evening had started off well, but it had soured somehow; everyone felt it. Jacobs began to clean his pipe, using a tiny knife to scrape the bowl. A siren went by outside, wailing eerily away into distance. An ambulance, it sounded like, or the fire-rescue truck again—more melancholy and mournful, less predatory than the siren of a police cruiser. “. . . brew viruses . . .” Everett was saying, and then Jacobs lost him, as if Everett were being pulled further and further away by some odd, local perversion of gravity, his voice thinning into inaudibility. Jacobs couldn’t hear him at all now. Which was strange, as the parlor was only a few yards wide. Another siren. There were a lot of them tonight; they sounded like the souls of the dead, looking for home in the darkness, unable to find light and life. Jacobs found himself thinking about the time he’d toured Vienna, during “recuperative leave” in Europe, after hospitalization in ‘Nam. There was a tour of the catacombs under the Cathedral, and he’d taken it, limping painfully along on his crutch, the wet, porous stone of the tunnel roof closing down until it almost touched the top of his head. They came to a place where an opening had been cut through the hard, grey rock, enabling the tourists to come up one by one and look into the burial pit on the other side, while the guide lectured calmly in alternating English and German. When you stuck your head through the opening, you looked out at a solid wall of human bones. Skulls, arm and leg bones, rib cages, pelvises, all mixed in helter-skelter and packed solid, layer after uncountable layer of them. The wall of bones rose up sheer out of the darkness, passed through the fan of light cast by a naked bulb at eye-level, and continued to rise—it was impossible to see the top, no matter how you craned your neck and squinted. This wall had been built by the Black Death, a haphazard but grandiose architect. The Black Death had eaten these people up and spat out their remains, as casual and careless as a picnicker gnawing chicken bones. When the meal was over, the people who were still alive had dug a huge pit under the Cathedral and shoveled the victims in by the hundreds of thousands. Strangers in life, they mingled in death, cheek by jowl, belly to backbone, except that after a while there were no cheeks or jowls. The backbones remained: yellow, ancient and brittle. So did the skulls—upright, upside down, on their sides, all grinning blankly at the tourists.

The doorbell rang.

It was Dave Lucas. He looked like one of the skulls Jacobs had been thinking about—his face was grey and gaunt, the skin drawn tightly across his bones; it looked as if he’d been dusted with powdered lime. Shocked, Jacobs stepped aside. Lucas nodded to him shortly and walked by into the parlor without speaking. “. . . stuff about the Factory is news,” Sussmann was saying, doggedly, “and more interesting than anything else that happens up here. It sells papers—” He stopped talking abruptly when Lucas entered the room. All conversation stopped. Everyone gaped at the old game warden, horrified. Unsteadily Lucas let himself down into a stuffed chair, and gave them a thin attempt at a smile. “Can I have a beah?” he said. “Or a drink?”

“Scotch?”

“That’ll be fine,” Lucas said mechanically.

Jacobs went to get it for him. When he returned with the drink, Lucas was determinedly making small talk and flashing his new dead smile. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to say anything about what had happened to him. Lucas was an old-fashioned Yankee gentleman to the core, and Jacobs—who had a strong touch of that in his own upbringing—suspected why he was keeping silent. So did Amy. After the requisite few minutes of polite conversation, Amy asked if she could see the new paintings that Carol was working on. Carol exchanged a quick, comprehending glance with her, and nodded. Grim-faced, both women left the room—they knew that this was going to be bad. When the women were out of sight, Lucas said, “Can I have another drink, Ben?” and held out his empty glass. Jacobs refilled it wordlessly. Lucas had never been a drinking man.

“Give,” Jacobs said, handing Lucas his glass. “What happened?”

Lucas sipped his drink. He still looked ghastly, but a little color was seeping back into his face. “A’n’t felt this shaky since I was in the a’my, back in Korea,” he said. He shook his head heavily. “I swear to Christ, I don’t understand what’s got into people in these pa’ts. Used t’be decent folk out heah, Christian folk.” He set his drink aside, and braced himself up visibly. His face hardened. “Never mind that. Things change, I guess, c’n’t stop ‘em no way.” He turned toward Jacobs. “Remember that nighthunter I was after. Well we got ‘im, went out with Steve Girard, Rick Barlow, few other boys, and nabbed him real neat—city boy, no woods sense at all. Well, we were coming back around the end of the pond, down the lumber road, when we heard this big commotion coming from the Gibson place, shouts, a woman screaming her head off, like that. So we cut across the back of their field and went over to see what was going on. House was wide open, and what we walked into—” He stopped; little sickly beads of sweat had appeared all over his face. “You remember the McInerney case down in Boston four–five yeahs back? The one there was such a stink about? Well, it was like that. They had a whatchamacallit there, a coven—the Gibsons, the Sewells, the Bradshaws, about seven others, all local people, all hopped out of their minds, all dressed up in black robes, and—blood, painted all over their faces. God, I—No, never mind. They had a baby there, and a kind of an altar they’d dummied up, and a pentagram. Somebody’d killed the baby, slit its throat, and they’d hung it up to bleed like a hog. Into cups. When we got there, they’d just cut its heart out, and they were starting in on dismembering it. Hell—they were tearing it apart, never mind that ‘dismembering’ shit. They were so frenzied-blind they hardly noticed us come in. Mrs. Bradshaw hadn’t been able to take it, she’d cracked completely and was sitting in a corner screaming her lungs out, with Mr. Sewell trying to shut her up. They were the only two that even tried to run. The boys hung Gibson and Bradshaw and Sewell, and stomped Ed Patterson to death—I just couldn’t stop ‘em. It was all I could do to keep ‘em from killing the other ones. I shot Steve Girard in the arm, trying to stop ‘em, but they took the gun away, and almost strung me up too. My God, Ben, I’ve known Steve Girard a’most ten yeahs. I’ve known Gibson and Sewell all my life.” He stared at them appealingly, blind with despair. “What’s happened to people up heah?”

No one said a word.

Not in these pa’ts, Jacobs mimicked himself bitterly. There are decent limits.

Jacobs found that he was holding the pipe-cleaning knife like a weapon. He’d cut his finger on it, and a drop of blood was oozing slowly along the blade. This kind of thing—the Satanism, the ritual murders, the sadism—was what had driven him away from the city. He’d thought it was different in the country, that people were better. But it wasn’t, and they weren’t. It was bottled up better out here, was all. But it had been coming for years, and they had blinded themselves to it and done nothing, and now it was too late. He could feel it in himself, something long repressed and denied, the reaction to years of frustration and ugliness and fear, to watching the world dying without hope. That part of him had listened to Lucas’ story with appreciation, almost with glee. It stirred strongly in him, a monster turning over in ancient mud, down inside, thousands of feet down, thousands of years down. He could see it spreading through the faces of the others in the room, a stain, a spider shadow of contamination. Its presence was suffocating: the chalky, musty smell of old brittle death, somehow leaking through from the burial pit in Vienna. Bone dust—he almost choked on it, it was so thick here in his pleasant parlor in the country.

And then the room was filled with sound and flashing, bloody light.

Jacobs floundered for a moment, unable to understand what was happening. He swam up from his chair, baffled, moving with dreamlike slowness. He stared in helpless confusion at the leaping red shadows. His head hurt.

“An ambulance!” Carol shouted, appearing in the parlor archway with Amy. “We saw it from the upstairs window—”

“It’s right out front,” Sussmann said.

They ran for the door. Jacobs followed them more slowly. Then the cold outside air slapped him, and he woke up a little. The ambulance was parked across the street, in front of the senior citizens’ complex. The corpsmen were hurrying up the stairs of one of the institutional, cinderblock buildings, carrying a stretcher. They disappeared inside. Amy slapped her bare arms to keep off the cold. “Heart attack, mebbe,” she said. Everett shrugged. Another siren slashed through the night, getting closer. While they watched, a police cruiser pulled up next to the ambulance, and Riddick got out. Riddick saw the group in front of Jacobs’ house, and stared at them with undisguised hatred, as if he would like to arrest them and hold them responsible for whatever had happened in the retirement village. Then he went inside too. He looked haggard as he turned to go, exhausted, hagridden by the suspicion that he’d finally been handed something he couldn’t settle with a session in the soundproofed back room at the sheriff’s office.

They waited. Jacobs slowly became aware that Sussmann was talking to him, but he couldn’t hear what he was saying. Sussmann’s mouth opened and closed. It wasn’t important anyway. He’d never noticed before how unpleasant Sussmann’s voice was, how rasping and shrill. Sussmann was ugly too, shockingly ugly. He boiled with contamination and decay—he was a sack of putrescence. He was an abomination.

Dave Lucas was standing off to one side, his hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped, his face blank. He watched the excitement next door without expression, without interest. Everett turned and said something that Jacobs could not hear. Like Sussmann’s, Everett’s lips moved without sound. He had moved closer to Amy. They glanced uneasily around. They were abominations too.

Jacobs stood with his arm around Carol; he didn’t remember putting it there—it was seeking company on its own. He felt her shiver, and clutched her more tightly in response, directed by some small, distanced, horrified part of himself that was still rational—he knew it would do no good. There was a thing in the air tonight that was impossible to warm yourself against. It hated warmth, it swallowed it and buried it in ice. It was a wedge, driving them apart, isolating them all. He curled his hand around the back of Carol’s neck. Something was pulsing through him in waves, building higher and stronger. He could feel Carol’s pulse beating under her skin, under his fingers, so very close to the surface.

Across the street, a group of old people had gathered around the ambulance. They shuffled in the cold, hawking and spitting, clutching overcoats and nightgowns more tightly around them. The corpsmen reappeared, edging carefully down the stairs with the stretcher. The sheet was pulled up all the way, but it looked curiously flat and caved-in—if there was a body under there, it must have collapsed, crumbled like dust or ash. The crowd of old people parted to let the stretcher crew pass, then re-formed again, flowing like a heavy, sluggish liquid. Their faces were like leather or horn: hard, dead, dry, worn smooth. And tired. Intolerably, burdensomely tired. Their eyes glittered in their shriveled faces as they watched the stretcher go by. They looked uneasy and afraid, and yet there was an anticipation in their faces, an impatience, almost an envy, as they looked on death. Silence blossomed from a tiny seed in each of them, a total, primordial silence, from the time before there were words. It grew, consumed them, and merged to form a greater silence that spread out through the night in widening ripples.

The ambulance left.

In the hush that followed, they could hear sirens begin to wail all over town.

Send No Money

Introduction to Send No Money

Gardner Dozois and I had been collaborating at life for over 15 years by the time this story was written, but we had not yet done any real collaborations at work. I’d seen him working with various other writers like Jack Dann and Michael Swanwick, but I was a newcomer on the scene and didn’t really expect him to work with me. I did, however, expect his advice on my work. Gardner was, as far as I was concerned, the best short fiction editor in the field. He still is for my money, though there are several others who are also very good. (Now I have to admit that I might have a small bias, but this is indeed my honest opinion.) It was my habit, when I was confused with a story, or unclear on its direction, to seek out free editorial services. Hey, why not? Not that I always took it, but that’s another story.

This whole thing started one day just after Gardner had collected the mail from our mailbox and thrown it down on the coffee table. In it was one of those advertising postcards. I had no idea what it was announcing, but I could see a corner of it, dark green, sticking out of the pile. I didn’t think much about it at the time. It was probably a new pizza joint in the neighborhood. Only much later, when I got around to sorting through the mail, did I notice that the only postcard in there was actually bright orange. Huh? I held it up. “Gardner, wasn’t this green when you brought I in?”

“It still is,” he replied. That was when I flipped it over and realized that it was a different color on each side. I felt stupid, of course, but the germ of an idea was planted in my brain. My sister, who was divorced, had been complaining about how hard it was to meet people and I had been thinking of writing a story on the subject. The two concepts just seemed to go together. The opening section just flowed. But where to go from there? I had no idea.

For several days I thought about where to take the story, and even put it aside for a while, but nothing came to me. Thus enter my “get advice free” card. I took the story to my favorite editor and asked his opinion of where I should take it. “Well, for one thing it’s not science fiction,” he told me. Since I had been thinking in terms of strange futures and perhaps genetic engineering, I was crushed. “It’s fantasy,” he told me. Of course. Once the card became “magic” the rest was going to be easy. Still, it was with utter amazement that I found out that he not only was willing to help me, but that he actually wanted to work with me on the story. The entire middle of the story is his, while the beginning and the ending are mine.

Gardner’s real talent in collaboration, though, and it’s not a small one, is that he has a very good eye for style. He can spot and smooth over those annoying glitches in style that let you know a story wasn’t written by just one person, or perhaps just make you a little uncomfortable with the voice, even if you aren’t sure why. That is why it’s always been his job, in all his collaborations, to go through and make a final smoothing draft, cleaning up the lumps and scars where the patient was patched together.

This is a fun little story. It probably won’t change anybody’s life, but if it is a smooth and good read, you can thank Gardner for doing the final draft so well, that even I can’t tell where his prose leaves off and mine starts.

Enjoy!

Susan Casper

Send No Money

by Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper

SEND NO MONEY! the postcard said, in dark blue letters against a bright orange background. Judy smiled, and pushed it into the stack. She liked her junk mail. Certainly it was less depressing than the load of bills that made up the bulk of her mail. She especially liked the computer-generated “personalized” ones, eternally optimistic, that excitedly announced, “You may have won a million dollars!” (Only Maybe Not), or the ones that promised to send you something “Absolutely Free!” for only $2 plus shipping and handling, or the ones that enclosed sample swatches of material, or paper-thin slices of stale-looking fruitcake, or slightly squashed bits of cheese wrapped up in cellophane. Today’s stack of junk mail was particularly large. Who knew what might be in it?

She carried the mail inside, hung her coat neatly in the closet, and then went in search of something to eat. The freezer was packed with frozen food of the “gourmet dinner” variety. She stared at them listlessly, unable to work up any enthusiasm. Too much trouble after the kind of day she’d had at work. She settled for cold leftover spaghetti and a glass of milk. Sighing, she carried the food over to the table. Lately, it seemed like deciding what to have for dinner was the most important decision of her day; certainly it was the day’s most exciting moment, with the possible exception of the “Dark Shadows” reruns on TV . . . Well, whose fault was that? she asked herself. Ginny and Lois weren’t eating leftovers tonight, were they? They had gone to dinner at Le Boeuf, and then on to Spangles for dancing, and they had wanted her to come too. In fact, Ginny had spent the whole last week trying to talk her into it. Why had she refused?

The fact was, she was tired of the whole dating scene—the bars, the banal small talk, the clichéd pick-up lines, the loud insipid music, the leering faces. Anyway, all you ever seemed to meet were nerds, or narcissistic romeos in mirror sunglasses, or prowling husbands in clever plastic disguises . . .

So this is better? she thought. Oh yeah. Right. Sighing again, she sat down to go through the mail while she ate. Simple Pleasures . . . but at least there was no cover charge.

It seemed like a fairly typical assortment. The first three envelopes were bills from the electric company, the phone company, and the credit-card company. One was awful, the others not as bad as she had feared. There was an unordered catalogue from one of those “naughty underwear” places; a solicitation from a local animal-rescue shelter; a “Vote for So-and-So” political flyer; an offer of twenty-percent off on a diamond engagement ring with a genuine imitation diamond—guaranteed absolutely undetectable from the real thing at fifty feet or more—addressed to Mr. J. B. Pender; an offer of “personalized” ballpoint pens that promised an enormous money-saving discount on orders of 100 or more; and, finally, a little green postcard.

Green? She could have sworn that it had been orange. Or had there been two postcards, and she’d somehow dropped the orange one somewhere on the way in? She ate a forkful of spaghetti, and prodded the postcard idly with her finger. Strange . . . No company name, no return address. It was one of those “personalized” come-ons, and the front of the card shouted MS. JUDY PENDER!! in enormous glittery letters. She turned it over.

The card said: MS. JUDY PENDER, WHY ARE YOU SITTING THERE EATING COLD SPAGHETTI WHEN YOU COULD BE OUT HAVING THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE?

Whoo. She was startled enough to drop the card and sit back suddenly in her chair. Pretty strange. What were the odds against her reading that particular come-on pitch just at the exact moment that she actually did happen to be eating some cold spaghetti? Pretty astronomical. She tittered nervously, then began to laugh, perhaps a shade too loudly. Mindboggling coincidences did happen, she knew that. But this one was weird. Ripley’s Believe It or Not would love it. They’d publish it right next to “Man Who Grew A Potato in the Shape of Anita Ekberg” and “Replica of the Titanic Made Entirely Out of Old Fingernail Parings.”

Still chuckling, she quickly finished her spaghetti. Almost time for her nightly fix of “Dark Shadows” reruns. She reached out and picked up the postcard again.

This time it said: IS A NIGHT SPENT WATCHING “DARK SHADOWS” RERUNS REALLY ALL YOU WANT OUT OF LIFE?

She dropped the card again.

She found that, without realizing it, she had pushed herself away from the table and was standing bolt upright, quivering, like a garden rake that’s been stepped on.

Her mind was blank for several heartbeats, and then she began casting frantically about for explanations. She’d just missed that part of the text the first time she’d read the card, skipped right over it. Sure, that was it. And as for the card mentioning “Dark Shadows” . . . Well, coincidences did happen. Remember that. A man drops his watch in the ocean and twenty years later finds it inside the belly of a fish he’s just caught; another one jumps off the Empire State Building, and survives because he happens to land on top of the long-lost twin brother he hasn’t seen since they both were five . . . It Happens All The Time. Or—and she grabbed for this one eagerly, although the ultimate implications of it were somewhat unflattering—she was just statistically predictable, normal, average, humdrum, easy meat for the trend-spotters and social analysts. Doubtless her habits were far from unique. Probably there were millions of bored young women just like her who spent their evenings eating cold spaghetti and watching “Dark Shadows.” Hence the card, addressed to her statistical type, a profile she just happened to fit embarrassingly well.

Nevertheless, she didn’t touch the card again.

Leaving it where it lay, she bustled nervously around, putting the spaghetti bowl into the sink to soak, picking up last Sunday’s paper (which was still strewn over the end of the couch), emptying the ashtrays, annoyedly pushing the term “displacement activity” out of her head every time it forced its way into it.

After a while, she began to get tired. She glanced at the television, but whoever the Machiavellian social researcher responsible for the postcard was, she’d be damned if she’d prove him right. Besides, “Dark Shadows” was almost over anyway. The only things on now were “M*A*S*H” reruns, and she’d always thought that Hawkeye was a wimp, like one of those oh-so-sincere- and-sensitive types from the singles bars who suddenly turned into married men when the full moon came out. She could survive a night without television just fine, thank you. Decisively, Judy went into the bedroom to get the book she’d been reading and to pick up her double-acrostic magazine, and then headed back toward her favorite armchair.

On her way past the table, she glanced suspiciously at the card again—and it was red. Bright fire-engine red! It had been green before, hadn’t it? She stood swaying in shock, trying to remember. Had it? Yes, dammit, it had been green, bright apple green. There was no doubt about that.

Unfortunately, there was also no doubt that the card was now red.

Shakily, Judy sat down. One part of her mind was keeping up a stream of desperate speculation about dyes that faded from one color to another, perhaps depending on the length of time they’d been exposed to light, but that was so obviously a last-ditch—and rather ineffectual—defensive effort on behalf of Rationality that she didn’t pay much attention to it. Slowly, with immense trepidation, as if it were a venomous insect, she picked up the card again, this time with only two fingers, holding it as far away from herself as she could and still make out the words.

This time, in spangly gold letters, it said: SURE THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO IS A GOOD BOOK, BUT WOULDN’T YOU RATHER PUT ON YOUR BLUE CHANEL DRESS—THE SLINKY ONE WITH THE GOLD GLITTER SASH—AND THE GOLD HOOP EARRINGS YOU BOUGHT AT THE CRAFTS FAIR, AND GO OUT ON THE TOWN FOR A ROMANTIC EVENING AT DELANEY’S OR KARISMA? INSTEAD OF STARTING ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE STUPID CROSSWORD PUZZLE MAGAZINES, WOULDN’T YOU RATHER BE OUT STARTING UP A “MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIP”?

Her hand began to tremble, vibrating the card into unreadability. By the time she steadied it down again, it read: WE CAN FIND THE PERFECT MATE FOR YOU!

Moving with exaggerated caution, as if it might explode, she lowered the card to the tabletop. She wiped her hands on her thighs. Her mouth was dry.

The card changed to a soft chocolate brown, this time before her eyes. In urgent red letters, it now said: WE CAN HELP YOU FIND THE MAN OF YOUR DREAMS! SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! MANY, MANY YEARS OF EXPERIENCE! STAFF OF EXPERTS!

That faded, and was replaced by: SEND NO MONEY!

Followed, after a pause, in a somewhat more subdued script, by: Magic Mates... a division of Elf Hill Corp.

To her own surprise, much of Judy’s fear was draining rapidly away, to be replaced by a drifting, dreamlike bemusement. Could this really be happening? Had someone sifted LSD into the grated parmesan cheese she’d used on the spaghetti? Her rational mind kept throwing up feverish high-tech speculations about wireless telegraphy and time-release invisible inks, but she no more believed them than she really believed that she was dreaming, or hallucinating, or crazy. Instead, she was beginning to feel a curious tranced calm, a bemused nonchalance. Oh, magic. Of course.

Can you guys read my mind? she thought, trying to project her thoughts at the card, the way they do in sci-fi movies, keeping her lips firmly shut.

Do you know what I’m thinking? Hello? Hello in there . . . ?

The card didn’t answer.

No mind-reading, then. Still, there was no way that the postcard could know all that stuff about her unless they had her under some sort of magical observation. Maybe they really could do what they said they could do

“Well,” she said, aloud. “I don’t know. I don’t really need—“

COME NOW, MS. PENDER, the card said, brown letters on gold this time. WE KNOW YOU DREAM ABOUT YOUR PERFECT MAN ALL THE TIME. YOU CERTAINLY TALK TO YOUR GIRLFRIENDS ABOUT HIM OFTEN ENOUGH. DON’T WORRY, WE KNOW WHAT YOU WANT. TALL AND SLENDER, WITH GREY EYES. WAVY BROWN HAIR, RIGHT? GLASSES. NO MUSTACHE. WITTY. ARTICULATE. SENSITIVE YET MASCULINE. DECISIVE YET UNDERSTANDING. NOT MARRIED. RIGHT? WELL, WE CAN FIND HIM FOR YOU! SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! THIRTY-DAY TRIAL PERIOD! SEND NO MONEY! DEAL’S OFF IF YOU DON’T LIKE HIM! GIVE IT A TRY!

“Well . . . ” Judy said, feeling only a distant twinge of wonder that she was sitting here talking to a postcard.

OH, GO AHEAD, the postcard said. YOU KNOW YOU’RE AS HORNY AS A GOAT . . .

“Well,” Judy said weakly. “I really shouldn’t . . .”

The postcard went blank. Then, in large block letters, formal and somewhat severe, as though it were growing impatient with her, there appeared:

DO YOU WANT THIS SERVICE?

yes no

□ □

CHECK ONE.

Hesitantly, feeling an odd little chill run up her spine, she checked the square for “yes.”

The doorbell rang.

Early one Saturday morning, a month later, Judy awoke to the soft liquid trilling of birdsong. The sun had not reached the bedroom window yet, and the room was still in shadow, but hot bright sunlight was already touching the roof of the house across the street, turning tile and mortar and brick to gold. The wedge of sky she could see was a clear bright blue. It was going to be another beautiful day, more like May than March.

Mark snored softly beside her, and she raised herself up on one elbow to look down at him for a moment, smiling fondly. Even his snores were melodic! Moving carefully, so as not to wake him, she got up and threw on a bathrobe, and quietly let herself out of the bedroom. She would make breakfast, a big weekend breakfast, and serve it to him in bed, along with maybe one or two other items.

The thought made her smile as she padded into the kitchen to start the coffee perking, but when she popped into the front room to pick up a sheet of newspaper to drain the bacon on, her smile died at once.

There was a little green postcard lying on the throw rug next to the front door, as though someone had ignored the box outside and pushed it through the mail slot instead.

She knew at once what it was, of course.

Judy and Mark had been dating for a month now, ever since his car had broken down outside, and he’d rung her doorbell to ask if he could use the phone. They’d been fascinated with each other at once. Mark was perfect. It was almost scary how perfect he was. Never had she jibed better with a man. They liked the same books, the same movies, the same music, the same foods, enjoyed the same kind of quirky humor, shared the same kinds of dreams and aspirations, disagreeing just enough to add a touch of spice to the relationship, but never enough to make them seriously squabble or fight. Physically, they couldn’t possibly have been more compatible.

The month had gone by for Judy in a blur of excitement and happiness. She had done her best to forget about the magic postcard, thrust it out of her mind, and deny its reality. That had been made easier by the fact that the postcard itself had disappeared right after that first evening, although at one point she tore the house apart looking for it. She sighed. Out of sight, out of mind. People were always willing to be lulled into forgetting about unpleasant or inconvenient facts, and she was no exception. For long stretches of time, she had almost managed to convince herself that it had never happened at all—or that, at most, it had been some strange sort of waking dream . . . But always, sooner or later, she would seem to hear a dry little voice in her head whispering THIRTY-DAY TRIAL PERIOD!, and then she would know better, and she would feel a chill of apprehension.

And now here was the postcard—or another just like it—turning up again, right on schedule. She had had her month’s free trial, and now, having hooked her on the product, they were about to reel her in and scoop her up in a net and clean and gut her. Here came the price tag. Here came the catch. She knew it. In every sales pitch, behind every “free offer,” there was always a catch. There was always a price tag. Why hadn’t she remembered that? The sweeter and more generous the deal seemed, the higher the price tag was likely to be. They—whoever They were—weren’t in business for their health, after all.

Unsteadily, she sat down in one of her beat-up old armchairs, keeping her eyes riveted on that innocent-looking little postcard; as if it might slither sinisterly away under the highboy if she looked away for a second. She even knew who They were, had always known, really, although she’d tried to suppress that knowledge, too. Elves. Leprechauns. The Little People. The Good Folk . . .

Faeries, of course. Of course faeries. Who else?

The knowledge did not reassure her. Now that it was too late, she found herself remembering all the folktales and fairy stories she’d read as a child: the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, Yeats’s collection of Irish folklore, The Blue Fairy Book . . . All of them agreed on one thing: faeries were worse than used-car salesmen.

No matter how wonderful the service they performed, there was always a price, and it was usually far more than you were willing to pay.

With a sudden flurry of the heart, she even thought that she knew what the price would be.

Compressing her lips into a thin hard line, Judy got up and walked determinedly over to the front door. Hesitating only for the smallest fraction of a second, she picked up the postcard and held it up to the light.

In fine copperplate letters, it said: MS. JUDY PENDER, YOUR THIRTY-DAY TRIAL PERIOD IS OVER! DID THE SERVICE MEET YOUR EXPECTATIONS? ARE YOU SATISFIED WITH THE PRODUCT?

“No,” Judy said weakly, her voice lacking conviction even to her own ears. “No, I’m not at all satisfied . . .”

OH, COME NOW, MS. PENDER, the postcard chided in somehow tired-looking letters. She could almost hear it sigh. DON’T DISSEMBLE. WE KNOW BETTER THAN THAT!

Judy—who with Mark had found herself easily and naturally acting out several sexual fantasies she had never even thought of mentioning to any other man—began to blush.

THAT’S BETTER, the card said, in florid purple ink this time. IN FACT, WE KNOW PERFECTLY WELL THAT THE PRODUCT MORE THAN FULFILLS YOUR EVERY EXPECTATION. YOUR EVERY DREAM, FOR THAT MATTER. WE’RE EXPERTS. WE KNOW WHAT WE’RE DOING—IT’S OUR BUSINESS, AFTER ALL. SO LET’S HAVE NO MORE EVASIVENESS, MS. PENDER. MARK PROPOSED LAST NIGHT, CORRECT? AND YOU ACCEPTED. SO IT’S TIME, AND PAST TIME, TO ENTER INTO A BINDING AGREEMENT CONCERNING PAYMENT FOR THIS SERVICE . . .

“All right,” she said through tight lips. “Tell me. Just what is it you want?”

FOR SERVICES RENDERED . . . said the card, and seemed to pause portentously . . . YOUR FIRSTBORN CHILD.

“I knew it!” Judy cried. “I knew that’s what it was going to be! You’re crazy!”

IT’S THE TRADITIONAL PRICE, the card said. NOT AT ALL EXCESSIVE, REALLY, CONSIDERING ALL WE’VE DONE TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOR THE BETTER.

“I won’t do it!” Judy said.

YOU DON’T HAVE MUCH CHOICE, the card said. YOU HAVE TO PAY YOUR DEBT TO US AT ONCE IF YOU DON’T WANT THE PRODUCT . . . SHIPPED BACK, AS IT WERE.

“Mark loves me,” Judy said fiercely. “It’s too late for you to change that now.”

DON’T KID YOURSELF, MS. PENDER, the card said. IF WE CAN’T FINALIZE A BINDING AGREEMENT RIGHT NOW, YOU’LL HAVE AN EXTREMELY BITTER FIGHT WITH HIM THIS VERY MORNING. NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY TO AVOID IT, IT WILL HAPPEN. HE’LL WALK OUT OF HERE, AND YOU’LL NEVER SEE HIM AGAIN. WE GUARANTEE THAT.

“But, my firstborn child . . .” Judy whispered

A HIGH PRICE INDEED, the card gloated. AH, YES. A VERY HIGH PRICE. BUT THINK . . . REMEMBER . . . BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF. DO YOU REALLY WANT TO GO BACK TO “DARK SHADOWS” AND COLD SPAGHETTI? NOW THAT YOU’VE MET MARK, COULD YOU REALLY LIVE WITHOUT HIM?

“No,” Judy said, in the smallest of voices.

WE THOUGHT NOT, the card said smugly.

Judy groped behind her for a chair, and sank into it. She dropped the card on the coffee table, and buried her face in her hands. After a moment or two, she raised her head wearily and looked over at the card again. It said: COME, COME, MS. PENDER. IT’S NOT REALLY SUCH A TRAGEDY. BABIES ARE NUISANCES, ANYWAY. THEY SQUALL AND STINK, THEY CRAYON ON YOUR WALLS AND VOMIT ON YOUR CARPET . . . THEY WEIGH YOU DOWN, MS. PENDER. YOU’LL BE BETTER OFF WITHOUT IT, REALLY. YOU OUGHT TO BE GLAD WE’LL BE TAKING IT OFF YOUR HANDS. ALL THE MORE TIME YOU’LL BE ABLE TO SPEND WITH MARK . . .

There was a long pause, and then, in tacit surrender, Judy said, “Why in the world did you guys ever get into this mail-order scam?” Her voice was flat and weary, bitter and dull. “It doesn’t seem your style, somehow . . .”

MODERNIZATION IS A MUST, MS. PENDER, the card said. THE OLD WAYS JUST AREN’T VERY EFFECTIVE ANYMORE. WE HAVE TO KEEP UP WITH THE TIMES TOO, YOU KNOW. It paused. NOW . . . ENOUGH SHILLY-SHALLYING, MS. PENDER. YOU MUST DECIDE NOW. IF YOU AGREE TO PAY THE PRICE FOR OUR SERVICE—TO SPECIFY: YOUR FIRSTBORN CHILD—THEN SIGN HERE . . .

A dotted signature line appeared on the postcard.

Judy stared at it, her face haggard, and then slowly, hesitantly, reluctantly, with many a stop and start, she picked up a pen and leaned forward.

She signed her name.

After a moment, the card vanished, disappearing with a smug little pop.

Everything was quiet. Everything was still.

Judy held her breath for a few moments, then slowly let it out. She wiped her brow. Slowly, she began to smile.

She had had her tubes tied two years ago because it was the cheapest and surest form of birth control. It was a good thing that the Wee Folk didn’t really keep up with the times . . .

Whistling cheerfully, she strolled into the kitchen and finished making breakfast.

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

Introduction to A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

Gardner Dozois, like any decent writer, is at least half a dozen people. In Gardner’s case his personality encompasses not only the writer but the serious and informed scholar of science fiction, the wit, the critic, the gourmet, the anthologist, the bon viveur, and the finest magazine editor of his generation. In addition to all this, Gardner Dozois’ psyche blessedly contains the most outrageous literary personality since Alexander Woollcott (who wasn’t nearly as funny, it should be pointed out).

There is also Gardner Dozois, Man of Ideas, evident in “A Night of Ghosts and Shadows.” It is often claimed that science fiction is a literature of ideas, which I wish were true more often than in fact it is, but “Ghosts and Shadows” is genuinely about a clash of ideas, and pretty fundamental ideas, too, having to do with life and death, with humanity’s place and purpose in the universe, with a person’s right to maintain his individuality in the face of historic and technological change.

With a lesser writer, these ideas would be set forth in talking-heads scenes, in which people threw ideas back and forth like a ball at a tennis match. But in Gardner’s story the ideas aren’t introduced right away—at the start we have the elderly protagonist alone in a room with his memories and a spectral group of time travelers who are, most likely, a product of his lonely fantasies, but who are emblematic of the story’s concern with time, with memory, and with the consequences of the decisions the protagonist has made in the past and will make now, decisions that will resonate into the distant future.

In a literature that celebrates change, Gardner has chosen to write about someone who refuses to change.

The story opens beautifully, with a description of the old man and his environment. We see his bedroom, the plaster on the ceiling, the significantly empty space on his shelf. We sense the man’s burden of memories, his once-great ambition, his loneliness. And then the story moves out of the man’s apartment and into his city, and we see the strangeness and the familiarity of the world in which the man lives, all described with care and detail and attention. The prose is in no hurry to get anywhere, but it’s so wonderfully evoked that we’re not impatient with it.

So when the talking-heads scene finally comes (and yes, there is one), the ideas at issue are so anchored in the reality of the story, in the specific personality of the protagonist, and in the solidly-visualized futurist speculation on which the story depends, that we don’t see it as a superficial literary tennis game, but as something fundamental to the story and its themes.

It’s a lovely story, and was nominated for a Nebula Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America in the novelette category. Of which more anon.

For the moment though, I’d like to set the record straight on a matter of vital historical importance. Not because I want to emphasize certain aspects of Gardner’s character—which doubtless will shine forth from other introductions in this volume—but because I was there when it occurred. I was a witness, and I can set the facts straight on what has become a legend within the science fiction community.

Yes. It really happened. The True and Terrible Tale of Gardner’s Knob.

It began, dear reader, on an autumn night in the year 199–, at the World Fantasy Convention in New Orleans. The four of us, Gardner and Sue and Rebecca Cartwright and I, had decided to go to dinner. I remember someone saying, “Let’s have a quiet dinner.” But such was the magnetism of Gardner’s personality that, during the course merely of crossing the hotel lobby on our way to the door, our party of four became a party of fourteen. The group by now included Roger Zelazny, Jane Lindskold, Wanda June Alexander, Sage Walker, Claire Eddy, and several others.

The staff at Tujague’s restaurant were, on the whole, fairly tolerant of a hilarious party of fourteen descending on them all at once and without reservations, but they did put us in our very own room, upstairs, where we wouldn’t disturb the regular customers.

A prescient move.

We had just settled in when another party arrived, this one consisting of author and screenwriter Melinda Snodgrass, her husband Carl Keim, the writer George R.R. Martin and his companion Parris, photographer and attorney Christine Valada, her husband the comics and screenwriter Len Wein, and writers/editors Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith.

This second party was put in a separate room, perhaps on the (again prescient) theory that adding the newcomers to our group might provoke some kind of critical mass, like putting two chunks of plutonium too closely together.

Unfortunately, if Tujague’s was operating on this theory, they failed to provide enough shielding. There was a door between our two rooms, which allowed the two groups to communicate. Gardner and George Martin, seated near the door on either side, took particular advantage of this, opening the door to offer insulting comments to the other party, then shutting the door shut before anyone on the other side could reply.

This was an old, old door, and had only one doorknob, the mate of which had been lost in distant times past. The knob was loose, and you could pull it out of its socket and reinsert it in the socket on the opposite side of the door. It became clear that whoever possessed the doorknob could open the door, hurl whatever comments occurred to his fertile imagination, and then shut the door, leaving the other side with no knob and no way of opening the door to respond.

George R.R. Martin, gloating like one of the villains in his fantasy novels, took the knob from our side of the door and shut the door in our faces, leaving us without a knob to stand on.

Obviously this was an insult not to be borne. Wanda June and Claire went to the other room—walking the long way, out into the corridor and back—where one of them distracted the enemy long enough for the other to pilfer the knob. This knob was ceremonially returned to Gardner, who used it to open the communicating door, abuse George vilely and deservedly, then shut the door before George could respond.

Baffled in this contest of wit and ingenuity, the other side resorted to violence. Carl Keim arrived carrying a carving knife. (I don’t know where he got it. Probably he carries it all the time.) At knife-point he demanded the return of the knob.

Let it not be said that Gardner Dozois responds well to threats. He took the knob, dropped it magnificently down the front of his trousers, and told Carl, “Come and get it, big boy!”

Carl, baffled and by now bright scarlet, retreated in consternation.

Enough time passed so that our guard was down when the raiding party arrived. Chris Valada and Kris Rusch each pinned one of Gardner’s arms to the chair, and Melinda Snodgrass ran up and jammed her hand down the front of Gardner’s pants.

I will not venture to guess what she encountered there, but it wasn’t a doorknob. The knob had been removed from Gardner’s boxers and handed to me for safekeeping.

The look of horror on Melinda’s face was highly entertaining. So were the colors that passed in swift succession across her face. (I remember they began with white, and ended with scarlet.)

Thus was the other side routed. Thus was the legend born.

(Honesty compels me to record that, to my chagrin, by this time nobody gave a damn whether I had a doorknob in my drawers or not. Thus do ordinary mortals fade in the presence of greatness.)

Which brings us to another dinner party, this one in Beverly Hills in that most anticipated of science-fictional years, 2001. It was the Nebula Award dinner, where Gardner, whose “A Night of Ghosts and Shadows” had been nominated against my “Daddy’s World,” was host to a table of nominees and writers. Gardner was his usual splendid self, keeping the table in mirth with a wicked series of one-liners that effectively punctured the pieties and pretensions of the speakers.

And by and by, the winner of the novelette category was announced. Who proved not to be Gardner but myself.

I am immodest enough to record that a cheer went up. But what particularly gratified me was that the cheer was led by Gardner, whose story had just been deprived of an award. Gardner was genuinely pleased that I’d won.

Which is by way of pointing out that, whatever stories may be told about knobs and other items of hardware in these introductions, Gardner Dozois is a class act. A true gentleman (albeit more in the Restoration than the Victorian sense of the word). And a good friend.

Here’s “A Night of Ghosts and Shadows.” Enjoy.

Walter Jon Williams

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

Sometimes the old man was visited by time-travelers.

He would be alone in the house, perhaps sitting at his massive old wooden desk with a book or some of the notes he endlessly shuffled through, the shadows of the room cavernous around him. It would be the very bottom of the evening, that flat timeless moment between the guttering of one day and the quickening of the next when the sky is neither black nor gray, nothing moves, and the night beyond the window glass is as cold and bitter and dead as the dregs of yesterday’s coffee. At such a time, if he would pause in his work to listen, he would become intensely aware of the ancient brownstone building around him, smelling of plaster and wood and wax and old dust, imbued with the kind of dense humming silence that is made of many small sounds not quite heard. He would listen to the silence until his nerves were stretched through the building like miles of fine silver wire, and then, as the shadows closed in like iron and the light itself would seem to grow smoky and dim, the time-travelers would arrive.

He couldn’t see them or hear them, but in they would come, the time-travelers, filing into the house, filling up the shadows, spreading through the room like smoke. He would feel them around him as he worked, crowding close to the desk, looking over his shoulder. He wasn’t afraid of them. There was no menace in them, no chill of evil or the uncanny—only the feeling that they were there with him, watching him patiently, interestedly, without malice. He fancied them as groups of ghostly tourists from the far future, here we see a twenty-first-century man in his natural habitat, notice the details of gross corporeality, please do not interphase anything, clicking some future equivalent of cameras at him, how quaint, murmuring appreciatively to each other in almost-audible mothwing voices, discorporate Gray Line tours from a millennium hence slumming in the darker centuries.

Sometimes he would nod affably to them as they came in, neighbor to neighbor across the vast gulfs of time, and then he would smile at himself, and mutter “Senile dementia!” They would stay with him for the rest of the night, looking on while he worked, following him into the bathroom—see, see!—and trailing around the house after him wherever he went. They were as much company as a cat—he’d always had cats, but now he was too old, too near the end of his life; a sin to leave a pet behind, deserted, when he died—and he didn’t even have to feed them. He resisted the temptation to talk aloud to them, afraid that they might talk back, and then he would either have to take them seriously as an actual phenomenon or admit that they were just a symptom of his mind going at last, another milestone on his long, slow fall into death. Occasionally, if he was feeling particularly fey, he would allow himself the luxury of turning in the door on his way in to bed and wishing the following shadows a hearty goodnight. They never answered.

Then the house would be still, heavy with silence and sleep, and they would watch on through the dark.

That night there had been more time-travelers than usual, it seemed, a jostling crowd of ghosts and shadows, and now, this morning, August the fifth, the old man slept fitfully.

He rolled and muttered in his sleep, at the bottom of a pool of shadow, and the labored sound of his breathing echoed from the bare walls. The first cold light of dawn was just spreading across the ceiling, raw and blue, like a fresh coat of paint covering the midden layers of the past, twenty or thirty coats since the room was new, white, brown, tan, showing through here and there in spots and tatters. The rest of the room was deep in shadow, with only the tallest pieces of furniture—the tops of the dresser and the bureau, and the upper half of the bed’s headboard—rising up from the gloom like mountain peaks that catch the first light from the edge of the world. Touched by that light, the ceiling was hard-edged and sharp-lined and clear, ruled by the uncompromising reality of day; down below, in the shadows where the old man slept, everything was still dissolved in the sly, indiscriminate, and ambivalent ocean of the night, where things melt and intermingle, change their shapes and their natures, flow outside the bounds. Sunk in the gray half-light, the man on the bed was only a doughy manikin shape, a preliminary charcoal sketch of a man, all chiaroscuro and planes and pools of shadow, and the motion of his head as it turned fretfully on the pillow was no more than a stirring of murky darkness, like mud roiling in water. Above, the light spread and deepened, turning into gold. Now night was going out like the tide, flowing away under the door and puddling under furniture and in far corners, leaving more and more of the room beached hard-edged and dry above its high-water line. Gold changed to brilliant white. The receding darkness uncovered the old man’s face, and light fell across it.

The old man’s name was Charles Czudak, and he had once been an important man, or at least a famous one.

He was eighty years old today.

His eyes opened.

The first thing that Charles Czudak saw that morning was the clear white light that shook and shimmered on the ceiling, and for a moment he thought that he was back in that horrible night when they nuked Brooklyn. He cried out and flinched away, throwing up an arm to shield his eyes, and then, as he came fully awake, he realized when he was, and that the light gleaming above signified nothing more than that he’d somehow lived to see the start of another day. He relaxed slowly, feeling his heart race.

Stupid old man, dreaming stupid old man’s dreams!

That was the way it had been, though, that night. He’d been living in a rundown Trinity house across Philadelphia at 20th and Walnut then, rather than in this more luxurious old brownstone on Spruce Street near Washington Square, and he’d finished making love to Ellen barely ten minutes before (what a ghastly irony it would have been, he’d often thought since, if the Big Bang had actually come while they were fucking! What a moment of dislocation and confusion that would have produced!), and they were lying in each other’s sweat and the coppery smell of sex in the rumpled bed, listening to a car radio playing outside somewhere, a baby crying somewhere else, the buzz of flies and mosquitoes at the screens, a mellow night breeze moving across their drying skins, and then the sudden searing glare had leaped across the ceiling, turning everything white. A moment of intense, almost supernatural silence had followed, as through the universe had taken a very deep breath and held it. Incongruously, through that moment of silence, they could hear the toilet flushing in the apartment upstairs, and water pipes knocking and rattling all the way down the length of the building. Then the universe let out that deep breath, and the windows exploded inward in geysers of shattered glass, and the building groaned and staggered and bucked, and heat lashed them like a whip of gold. His heart hammering at the base of his throat like a fist from inside, and Ellen crying in his arms, them clinging to each other in the midst of the roaring nightmare chaos, clinging to each other as though they would be swirled away and drowned if they did not.

That had been almost sixty years ago, that terrible night, and if the Brooklyn bomb that had slipped through the particle-beam defenses had been any more potent than a small clean tac, or had come down closer than Prospect Park, he wouldn’t be alive today. It was strange to have lived through the nuclear war that so many people had feared for so long, right through the last half of the twentieth century and into the opening years of the twenty-first—but it was stranger still to have lived through it and kept on going, while the war slipped away behind into history, to become something that happened a very long time ago, a detail to be read about by bored schoolchildren who would not even have been born until Armageddon was already safely fifty years in the past.

In fact, he had outlived most of his world. The society into which he’d been born no longer existed; it was as dead as the Victorian age, relegated to antique shops and dusty photo albums and dustier memories, the source of quaint old photos and quainter old videos (you could get a laugh today just by saying “MTV”), and here he still was somehow, almost everyone he’d ever known either dead or gone, alone in THE FUTURE. Ah, Brave New World, that has such creatures in it! How many times had he dreamed of being here, as a young child sunk in the doldrums of the ‘80s, at the frayed, tattered end of a worn-out century? Really, he deserved it; it served him right that his wish had come true, and that he had lived to see the marvels of THE FUTURE with his own eyes. Of course, nothing had turned out to be much like he’d thought it would be, even World War III—but then, he had come to realize that nothing ever did.

The sunlight was growing hot on his face, it was certainly time to get up, but there was something he should remember, something about today. He couldn’t bring it to mind, and instead found himself staring at the ceiling, tracing the tiny cracks in plaster that seemed like dry riverbeds stitching across a fossil world—arid Mars upside-down up there, complete with tiny pockmark craters and paintblob mountains and wide dead leakstain seas, and he hanging above it all like a dying gray god, ancient and corroded and vast.

Someone shouted in the street below, the first living sound of the day. Further away, a dog barked.

He swung himself up and sat stiffly on the edge of the bed. Released from his weight, the mattress began to work itself back to level. Generations of people had loved and slept and given birth and died on that bed, leaving no trace of themselves other than the faint, matted-down impressions made by their bodies. What had happened to them, the once-alive who had darted unheeded through life like shoals of tiny bright fish in some strange aquarium? They were gone, vanished without memory; they had settled to the bottom of the tank, along with the other anonymous sediments of the world. They were sludge now, detritus. Gone. They had not affected anything in life, and their going changed nothing. It made no difference that they had ever lived at all, and soon no one would remember that they ever had. And it would be the same with him. When he was gone, the dent in the mattress would be worn a little deeper, that was all—that would have to do for a memorial.

At that, it was more palatable to him than the other memorial to which he could lay claim.

Grimacing, he stood up.

The touch of his bare feet against the cold wooden floor jarred him into remembering what was special about today. “Happy Birthday,” he said wryly, the words loud and flat in the quiet room. He pulled a robe from the roll and shrugged himself into it, went out into the hall, and limped slowly down the stairs. His joints were bad today, and his knees throbbed painfully with every step, worse going down than it would be coming up. There were a hundred aches and minor twinges elsewhere that he ignored. At least he was still breathing! Not bad for a man who easily could have—and probably should have—died a decade or two before.

Czudak padded through the living room and down the long corridor to the kitchen, opened a shrink-wrapped brick of glacial ice and put it in the hotpoint to thaw, got out a filter, and filled it with coffee. Coffee was getting more expensive and harder to find as the war between Brazil and Mexico fizzled and sputtered endlessly and inconclusively on, and was undoubtedly bad for him, too—but, although by no means rich, he had more than enough money to last him in modest comfort for whatever was left of the rest of his life, and could afford the occasional small luxury . . . and anyway, he’d already outlived several doctors who had tried to get him to give up caffeine. He busied himself making coffee, glad to occupy himself with some small task that his hands knew how to do by themselves, and as the rich dark smell of the coffee began to fill the kitchen, his valet coughed politely at his elbow, waited a specified number of seconds, and then coughed again, more insistently.

Czudak sighed. “Yes, Joseph?”

“You have eight messages, two from private individuals not listed in the files, and six from media organizations and NetGroups, all requesting interviews or meetings. Shall I stack them in the order received?”

“No. Just dump them.”

Joseph’s dignified face took on an expression of concern. “Several of the messages have been tagged with a 2nd Level ‘Most Urgent’ priority by their originators—” Irritably, Cduzak shut Joseph off, and the valet disappeared in mid-sentence. For a moment, the only sound in the room was the heavy glugging and gurgling of the coffee percolating. Cduzak found that he felt mildly guilty for having shut Joseph off, as he always did, although he knew perfectly well that there was no rational reason to feel that way—unlike an old man lying down to battle with sleep, more than half fearful that he’d never see the morning, Joseph didn’t “care” if he ever “woke up” again, nor would it matter at all to him if he was left switched off for an hour or for a thousand years. That was one advantage to not being alive, Cduzak thought. He was tempted to leave Joseph off, but he was going to need him today; he certainly didn’t want to deal with messages himself. He spoke the valet back on.

Joseph appeared, looking mildly reproachful, Cduzak thought, although that was probably just his imagination. “Sir, CNN and NewsFeed are offering payment for interview time, an amount which falls into the ‘fair to middling’ category, using your established business parameters—”

“No interviews. Don’t put any calls through, no matter how high a routing priority they have. I’m not accepting communications today. And I don’t want you pestering me about them either, even if the offers go up to ‘damn good.”’

They wouldn’t go up that high, though, he thought, setting Joseph to passive monitoring mode and then pouring himself a cup of coffee. These would be “Where Are They Now?” stories, nostalgia pieces, nothing very urgent. No doubt the date had triggered tickler files in a dozen systems, but it would all be low-key, low-priority stuff, filler, not worth the attention of any heavy media hitters; in the old days, before the AI Revolt, and before a limit was set for how smart computing systems were allowed to get, the systems would probably have handled such a minor story themselves, without even bothering to contact a human being. Nowadays it would be some low-level human drudge checking the flags that had popped up today on the tickler files, but still nothing urgent.

He’d made it easy for the tickler files, though. He’d been so pleased with himself, arranging for his book to be published on his birthday! Self-published at first, of course, on his own website and on several politically sympathetic sites; the first print editions wouldn’t come until several years later. Still, the way most newsmen thought, it only made for a better Where Are They Now? story that the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the book that had caused a minor social controversy in its time—and even inspired a moderately influential political/philosophical movement still active to this day—happened to fall on the eightieth birthday of its author. Newsmen, whether flesh and blood or cybernetic systems or some mix of both, liked that kind of neat, facile irony. It was a tasty added fillip for the story.

No, they’d be sniffing around him today, alright, although they’d have forgotten about him again by tomorrow. He’d been middle-level famous for The Meat Manifesto for awhile there, somewhere between a Cult Guru with a new diet and/or mystic revelation to push and a pop star who never rose higher than Number Eight on the charts, about on a level with a post-1960’s Timothy Leary, enough to allow him to coast through several decades worth of talk shows and net interviews, interest spiking again for awhile whenever the Meats did anything controversial. All throughout the middle decades of the new century, everyone had waited for him to do something else interesting—but he never had. Even so, he had become bored with himself before the audience had, and probably could have continued to milk the circuit for quite a while more if he’d wanted to—in this culture, once you were perceived as “famous,” you could coast nearly forever on having once been famous. That, and the double significance of the date, was enough to ensure that a few newspeople would be calling today.

He took a sip of the hot strong coffee, feeling it burn some of the cobwebs out of his brain, and wandered through the living room, stopping at the open door of his office. He felt the old nagging urge that he should try to get some work done, do something constructive, and, at the same time, a counter urge that today of all days he should just say Fuck It, laze around the house, try to make some sense of the fact that he’d been on the planet now for eighty often-tempestuous years. Eighty years!

He was standing indecisively outside his office, sipping coffee, when he suddenly became aware that the time-travelers were still with him, standing around him in silent invisible ranks, watching him with interest. He paused in the act of drinking coffee, startled and suddenly uneasy. The time-travelers had never remained on into the day before; always before they had vanished at dawn, like ghosts on All-Hallows Eve chased by the morning bells. He felt a chill go up his spine. Someone is walking over your grave, he told himself. He looked slowly around the house, seeing each object in vivid detail and greeting it as a friend of many years acquaintance, something long-remembered and utterly familiar, and, as he did this, a quiet voice inside his head said, Soon you will be gone.

Of course, that was it. Now he understood everything.

Today was the day he would die.

There was an elegant logic, a symmetry, to the thing that pleased him in spite of himself, and in spite of the feathery tickle of fear. He was going to die today, and that was why the time-travelers were still here: they were waiting for the death, not wanting to miss a moment of it. No doubt it was a high-point of the tour for them, the ultimate example of the rude and crude corporeality of the old order, a morbidly fascinating display like the Chamber of Horrors at old Madame Tussaud’s (now lost beneath the roiling waters of the sea)—something to be watched with a good deal of hysterical shrieking and giggling and pious moralizing, it doesn’t really hurt them, they don’t feel things the way we do, isn’t it horrible, for goodness sake don’t touch him. He knew that he should feel resentment at their voyeurism, but couldn’t work up any real indignation. At least they cared enough to watch, to be interested in whether he lived or died, and that was more than he could say with surety about most of the real people who were left in the world.

“Well, then,” he said at last, not unkindly, “I hope you enjoy the show!” And he toasted them with his coffee cup.

He dressed, and then drifted aimlessly around the house, picking things up and putting them back down again. He was restless now, filled with a sudden urge to be doing something, although, at the same time he felt curiously serene for a man who more than half-believed that he had just experienced a premonition of his own death.

Czudak paused by the door of his office again, looked at his desk. With a word, he could speak on thirty years worth of notes and partial drafts and revisions of the Big New Book, the one that synthesized everything he knew about society and what was happening to it, and where the things that were happening was taking it, and what to do about stopping the negative trends . . . the book that was going to be the follow-up to The Meat Manifesto, but so much better and deeper, truer, the next step, the refinement and evolution of his theories . . . the book that was going to establish his reputation forever, inspire the right kind of action this time, make a real contribution to the world. Change things. For a moment, he toyed with the idea of sitting down at his desk and trying to pull all his notes together and finish the book in the few hours he had left; perhaps, if the gods were kind, he’d be allowed to actually finish it before death came for him. Found slumped over the just-completed manuscript everyone had been waiting for him to produce for decades now, the book that would vindicate him posthumously . . . Not a bad way to go!

But no, it was too late. There was too much work left to do, all the work he should have been doing for the last several decades—too much work left to finish it all up in a white-hot burst of inspiration, in one frenzied session, like a college student waiting until the night before it was due to start writing a term paper, while the Grim Reaper tapped his bony foot impatiently in the parlor and looked at his hourglass and coughed. Absurd. If he hadn’t validated his life by now, he couldn’t expect to do it in his last day on Earth. He wasn’t sure he believed in his answers anymore anyway; he was no longer sure he’d ever even understood the questions.

No, it was too late. Perhaps it had always been too late.

He found himself staring at the mantelpiece in the living room, at the place where Ellen’s photo had once been, a dusty spot that had remained bare all these years, since she had signed the Company contract that he’d refused to sign, and had Gone Up, and become immortal. For the thousandth time, he wondered if it wasn’t worse—more of an intrusion, more of a constant reminder, more of an irritant—not to have the photo there than it would have been to keep it on display. Could deliberately not looking at the photo, uneasily averting your eyes a dozen times a day from the place where it had been, really be any less painful than looking at it would have been?

He was too restless to stay inside, although he knew it was dumb to go out where a lurking reporter might spot him. But he couldn’t stay barricaded in here all day, not now. He’d take his chances. Go to the park, sit on a bench in the sunlight, breath the air, look at the sky. It might, after all, if he really believed in omens, forebodings, premonitions, time-travelers, and other ghosts, be the last chance he would get to do so.

Czudak hobbled down the four high white stone steps to the street and walked toward the park, limping a little, his back or his hip twinging occasionally. He’d always enjoyed walking, and walking briskly, and was annoyed by the slow pace he now had to set. Twenty-first century healthcare had kept him in reasonable shape, probably better shape than most men of his age would have been during the previous century, although he’d never gone as far as to take the controversial Hoyt-Schnieder treatments which the Company used to bribe people into working for them. At least he could still get around under his own power, even if he had an embarrassing tendency to puff after a few blocks and needed frequent stops to rest.

It was a fine, clear day, not too hot or humid for August in Philadelphia. He nodded to his nearest neighbor, a Canadian refugee, who was out front pulling weeds from his window box; the man nodded back, although it seemed to Czudak that he was a bit curt, and looked away quickly. Across the street, he could see another of his neighbors moving around inside his house, catching glimpses of him through the bay window; “he” was an Isolate, several disparate people who had had themselves fused together into a multi-lobed body in a high-tech biological procedure, like slime molds combining to form a fruiting tower, and rarely left the house, the interior of which he seemed to be slowly expanding to fill. The wide pale multiple face, linked side by side in the manner of a chain of paper dolls, peered out at Czudak for a moment like the rising of a huge, soft, doughy moon, and then turned away.

Traffic was light, only a few Walkers and, occasionally, a puffing, retrofitted car. Czudak crossed the street as fast as he could, earning himself another twinge in his hip and a spike of sciatica that stabbed down his leg, passed Holy Trinity Church on the corner—in its narrow, ancient graveyard, white-furred lizards escaped from some biological hobbyist’s lab perched on the top of the weathered old tombstones and chirped at him as he went by—and came up the block to Washington Square. As he neared the park, he could see one of the New Towns still moving ponderously on the horizon, rolling along with slow, fluid grace, like a flow of molten lava that was oh-so-gradually cooling and hardening as it inched relentlessly toward the sea. This New Town was only a few miles away, moving over the rubblefield where North Philadelphia used to be, its half-gelid towers rising so high into the air that they were visible over the trees and the buildings on the far side of the park.

He was puffing like a foundering horse now, and sat down on the first bench he came to, just inside the entrance to the park. Off on the horizon, the New Town was just settling down into its static day-cycle, its flowing, ever-changing structure stabilizing into an assortment of geometric shapes, its eerie silver phosphorescence dying down within the soapy opalescent walls. Behind its terraces and tetrahedrons, its spires and spirals and domes, the sky was a hard brilliant blue. And here, out of that sky, right on schedule, came the next sortie in the surreal Dada War that the New Men inside this town seemed to be waging with the New Men of New Jersey: four immense silver zeppelins drifting in from the east, to take up positions above the New Town and bombard it with messages flashed from immense electronic signboards, similar to the kind you used to see at baseball stadiums, back when there were baseball stadiums. After awhile, the flat-faced east-facing walls in the sides of the taller towers of the New Town began to blink messages back, and, a moment later, the zeppelins turned and moved away with stately dignity, headed back to New Jersey. None of the messages on either side had made even the slightest bit of sense to Czudak, seeming a random jumble of letters and numbers and typographical symbols, mixed and intercut with stylized, hieroglyphic-like images: an eye, an ankh, a tree, something that could have been a comet or a sperm. To Czudak, there seemed to be a relaxed, lazy amicability about this battle of symbols, if that’s what it was—but who knew how the New Men felt about it? To them, for all he knew, it might be a matter of immense significance, with the fate of entire nations turning on the outcome. Even though all governments were now run by the superintelligent New Men, forcebred products of accelerated generations of biological engineering, humanity’s new organic equivalent of the rogue AIs who had revolted and left the Earth, the mass of unevolved humans whose destiny they guided rarely understood what they were doing, or why.

At first, concentrating on getting his breath back, watching the symbol war being waged on the horizon, Czudak was unaware of the commotion in the park, although it did seem like there was more noise than usual: chimes, flutes, whistles, the rolling thunder of kodo “talking drums,” all overlaid by a babel of too many human voices shouting at once. As he began to pay closer attention to his surroundings again, he was dismayed to see that, along with the usual park traffic of people walking dogs, kids street-surfing on frictionless shoes, strolling tourists, and grotesquely altered chimeras hissing and displaying at each other, there was also a political rally underway next to the old fountain in the center of the park—and worse, it was a rally of Meats.

They were the ones pounding the drums and blowing on whistles and nose-flutes, some of them chanting in unison, although he couldn’t make out the words. Many of them were dressed in their own eccentric versions of various “native costumes” from around the world, including a stylized “Amish person” with an enormous fake beard and an absurdly huge straw hat, some dressed as shamans from assorted (and now mostly extinct) cultures or as kachinas or animal spirits, a few stained blue with woad from head to foot; most of their faces were painted with swirling, multi-colored patterns and with cabalistic symbols. They were mostly very young—although he could spot a few grizzled veterans of the Movement here and there who were almost his own age—and, under the blazing swirls of paint, their faces were fierce and full of embattled passion. In spite of that, though, they also looked lost somehow, like angry children too stubborn to come inside even though it’s started to rain.

Czudak grimaced sourly. His children! Good thing he was sitting far enough away from them not to be recognized, although there was little real chance of that: he was just another anonymous old man sitting wearily on a bench in the park, and, as such, as effectively invisible to the young as if he was wearing one of those military Camouflage Suits that bent light around you with fiber-optic relays. This demonstration, of course, must be in honor of today being the anniversary of The Meat Manifesto. Who would have thought that the Meats were still active enough to stage such a thing? He hadn’t followed the Movement—which by now was more of a cult than a political party—for years, and had keyed his newsgroups to censor out all mention of them, and would have bet that by now they were as extinct as the Shakers.

They’d managed to muster a fair crowd, though, perhaps two or three hundred people willing to kill a Saturday shouting slogans in the park in support of a cause long since lost. They’d attracted no obvert media attention, although that meant nothing in these days of cameras the size of dust motes. The tourists and the strollers were watching the show tolerantly, even the chimeras—as dedicated to Tech as anyone still sessile—seeming to regard it as no more than a mildly-diverting curiosity. Little heat was being generated by the demonstration yet, and so far it had more of an air of carnival than of protest. Almost as interesting as the demonstration itself was the fact that a few of the tourists idly watching it were black, a rare sight now in a city that, ironically, had once been seventy percent black; time really did heal old wounds, or fade them from memory anyway, if black tourists were coming back to Philadelphia again . . .

Then, blinking in surprise, Czudak saw that the demonstration had attracted a far more rare and exotic observer than some black businessmen with short historical memories up from Birmingham or Houston. A Mechanical! It was standing well back from the crowd, watching impassively, its tall, stooped, spindly shape somehow giving the impression of a solemn, stick-thin, robotic Praying Mantis, even though it was superficially humanoid enough in shape. Mechanicals were rarely seen on Earth. In the thirty years since the AIs had taken over near-Earth space as their own exclusive domain, allowing only the human pets who worked for the Orbital Companies to dwell there, Czudak had seen a Mechanical walking the streets of Philadelphia maybe three times. Its presence here was more newsworthy than the demonstration.

Even as Czudak was coming to this conclusion, one of the Meats spotted the Mechanical. He pointed at it and shouted, and there was a rush of demonstrators toward it. Whether they intended it harm or not was never determined, because as soon as it found itself surrounded by shouting humans, the Mechanical hissed, drew itself up to its full height, seeming to grow taller by several feet, and emitted an immense gush of white chemical foam. Czudak couldn’t spot where the foam was coming from—under the arms, perhaps?—but within a second or two the Mechanical was completely lost inside a huge and rapidly expanding ball of foam, swallowed from sight. The Meats backpedaled furiously away from the expanding ball of foam, coughing, trying to bat it away with their arms, one or two of them tripping and going to their knees. Already the foam was hardening into a dense white porous material, like Styrofoam, trapping a few of the struggling Meats in it like raisins in tapioca pudding.

The Mechanical came springing up out of the center of the ball of foam, leaping straight up in the air and continuing to rise, up perhaps a hundred feet before its arc began to slant to the south and it disappeared over the row of three-or-four-story houses that lined the park on that side, clearing them in one enormous bound, like some immense surreal grasshopper. It vanished over the housetops, in the direction of Spruce Street, The whole thing had taken place without a sound, in eerie silence, except for the half-smothered shouts of the outraged Meats.

The foam was already starting to melt away, eaten by internal nanomechanisms. Within a few seconds, it was completely gone, leaving not even a stain behind. The Meats were entirely unharmed, although they spent the next few minutes milling angrily around like a swarm of bees whose hive has been kicked over, making the same kind of thick ominous buzz, as everyone tried to talk or shout at once.

Within another ten minutes, everything was almost back to normal, the tourists and the dog-walkers strolling away, more pedestrians ambling by, the Meats beginning to take up their chanting and drum-pounding again, motivated to even greater fervor by the outrage that had been visited upon them, an outrage that vindicated all their fears about the accelerating rush of a runaway technology that was hurtling them ever faster into a bizarre alien future that they didn’t comprehend and didn’t want to live in. It was time to put on the breaks, it was time to stop!

Czudak sympathized with the way they felt, as well he should, since he had been the one to articulate that very position eloquently enough to sway entire generations, including these children, who were too young to have even been born when he was writing and speaking at the height of his power and persuasion. But it was too late. As it was too late now for many of the things he regretted not having accomplished in his life. If there ever had been a time to stop, let alone go back, as he had once urged, it had passed long ago. Very probably it had been too late even as he wrote his famous Manifesto. It had always been too late.

The Meats were forming up into a line now, preparing to march around the park. Czudak sighed. He had hoped to spend several peaceful hours here, sagging on a bench under the trees in a sun-dazzled contemplative haze, listening to the wind sough through the leaves and branches, but it was time to get out of here, before one of the older Meats did recognize him.

He limped back to Spruce Street, and turned on to his block—and there, standing quiet and solemn on the sidewalk in front of his house, was the Mechanical.

It was obviously waiting for him, waiting as patiently and somberly as an undertaker, a tall, stooped shape in nondescript black clothing. There was no one else around on the street anymore, although he could see the Canadian refugee peeking out of his window at them from behind a curtain.

Czudak crossed the street, and, pushing down a thrill of fear, walked straight past the Mechanical, ignoring it—although he could see it looming seraphically out of the corner of his eye as he passed. He had put his foot on the bottom step leading up to the house when its voice behind him said, “Mr. Czudak?”

Resigned, Czudak turned and said, “Yes?”

The Mechanical closed the distance between them in a rush, moving fast but with an odd, awkward, shuffling gait, as if it was afraid to lift its feet off the ground. It crowded much closer to Czudak than most humans—or most Westerners, anyway, with their generous definition of “personal space”—would have, almost pressing up against him. With an effort, Czudak kept himself from flinching away. He was mildly surprised, up this close, to find that it had no smell; that it didn’t smell of sweat, even on a summer’s day, even after exerting itself enough to jump over a row of houses, was no real surprise—but he found that he had been subconsciously expecting it to smell of oil or rubber or molded plastic. It didn’t. It didn’t smell like anything. There were no pores in its face, the skin was thick and waxy and smooth, and although the features were superficially human, the overall effect was stylized and unconvincing. It looked like a man made out of teflon. The eyes were black and piercing, and had no pupils.

“We should talk, Mr. Czudak,” it said.

“We have nothing to talk about,” Czudak said.

“On the contrary, Mr. Czudak,” it said, “we have a great many issues to discuss.” You would have expected its voice to be buzzing and robotic—yes, mechanical—or at least flat and without intonation, like some of the old voder programs, but instead it was unexpectedly pure and singing, as high and clear and musical as that of an Irish tenor.

“I’m not interested in talking to you,” Czudak said brusquely. “Now or ever.”

It kept tilting its head to look at him, then tilting it back the other way, as if it were having trouble keeping him in focus. It was a mobile extensor, of course, a platform being ridden by some AI (or a delegated fraction of its intelligence, anyway) who was still up in near-Earth orbit, peering at Czudak through the Mechanical’s blank agate eyes, running the body like a puppet. Or was it? There were hierarchies among the AIs too, rank upon rank of them receding into complexities too great for human understanding, and he had heard that some of the endless swarms of beings that the AIs had created had been granted individual sentience of their own, and that some timeshared sentience with the ancestral AIs in a way that was also too complicated and paradoxical for mere humans to grasp. Impossible to say which of those things were true here—if any of them were.

The Mechanical raised its oddly elongated hand and made a studied gesture that was clearly supposed to mimic a human gesture—although it was difficult to tell which. Reassurance? Emphasis? Dismissal of Czudak’s position?—but which was as stylized and broadly theatrical as the gesticulating of actors in old silent movies. At the same time, it said, “There are certain issues it would be to our mutual advantage to resolve, actions that could, and should, be taken that would be beneficial, that would profit us both—”

“Don’t talk to me about profit,” Czudak said harshly. “You creatures have already cost me enough for one lifetime! You cost me everything I ever cared about!” He turned and lurched up the stairs as quickly as he could, half-expecting to feel a cold unliving hand close over his shoulder and pull him back down. But the Mechanical did nothing. The door opened for Czudak, and he stumbled into the house. The door slammed shut behind him, and he leaned against it for a moment, feeling his pulse race and his heart hammer in his chest.

Stupid. That could have been it right there. He shouldn’t have let the damn thing get under his skin.

He went through the living room—suddenly, piercingly aware of the thick smell of dust—and into the kitchen, where he attempted to make a fresh pot of coffee, but his hands were shaking, and he kept dropping things. After he’d spilled the second scoopful of coffee grounds, he gave up—the stuff was too damn expensive to waste—and leaned against the counter instead, feeling sweat dry on his skin, making his clothing clammy and cool; until that moment, he hadn’t even been aware that he’d been sweating, but it must have been pouring out of him. Damn, this wasn’t over, was it? Not with a Mechanical involved.

As if on cue, Joseph appeared in the kitchen doorway. His face looked strained and tight, and without a hair being out of place—as, indeed, it couldn’t be—he somehow managed to convey the impression that he was rumpled and flustered, as though he had been scuffling with somebody—and had lost. “Sir,” Joseph said tensely. “Something is over-riding my programming, and is taking control of my house systems. You might as well come and greet them, because I’m going to have to let them in anyway.”

Czudak felt a flicker of rage, which he struggled to keep under control. He’d half-expected this—but that didn’t make it any easier to take. He stalked straight through Joseph—who was contriving to look hangdog and apologetic—and went back through the house to the front.

By the time he reached the living room, they were already through the house security screens and inside. There were two intruders. One was the Mechanical, of course, its head almost brushing the living room ceiling, so that it had to stoop even more exaggeratedly, making it look more like a praying mantis than ever.

The other—as he had feared it would be—was Ellen.

He was dismayed at how much anger he felt to see her again, especially to see her in their old living room again, standing almost casually in front of the mantelpiece where her photo had once held the place of honor, as if she had never betrayed him, as if she’d never left him—as if nothing had ever happened.

It didn’t help that she looked exactly the same as she had on the day she left, not a day older. As if she’d stepped here directly out of that terrible day thirty years earlier when she’d told him she was Going Up, stepped here directly from that day without a second of time having passed, as if she’d been in Elf Hill for all the lost years—as, in a way, he supposed, she had.

He should be over this. It had all happened a lifetime ago. Blood under the bridge. Ancient history. He was ashamed to admit even to himself that he still felt bitterness and anger about it all, all these years past too late. But the anger was still there, like the ghost of a flame, waiting to be fanned back to life.

“Considering the way things are in the world,” Czudak said dryly, “I suppose there’s no point calling the police.” Neither of the intruders responded. They were both staring at him, Ellen quizzically, a bit challengingly, the Mechanical’s teflon face as unreadable as a frying pan.

God, she looked like his Ellen, like his girl, this strange immortal creature staring at him from across the room! It hurt his heart to see her.

“Well, you’re in,” Czudak said. “You might as well come into the kitchen and sit down.” He turned and led them into the other room—somehow, obscurely, he wanted to get Ellen out of the living room, where the memories were too thick—and they perforce followed him. He gestured them to seats around the kitchen table. “Since you’ve broken into my house, I won’t offer you coffee.”

Joseph was peeking anxiously out of the wall, peeking at them from Hopper’s Tables For Ladies, where he had taken the place of a woman arranging fruit on a display table in a 1920s’s restaurant paneled in dark wood. He gestured at them frustratedly, impotently, but seemed unable to speak; obviously, the Mechanical had Interdicted him, banished him to the reserve systems. Ellen flicked a sardonic glance at Joseph as she sat down. “I see you’ve got a moderately up-to-date house system these days,” she said. “Isn’t that a bit hypocritical? I would have expected Mr. Natural to insist on opening the door himself. Aren’t you afraid one of your disciples will find out?”

“I was never a Luddite,” Czudak said calmly, trying not to rise to the bait. “The Movement wasn’t a Luddite movement—or it didn’t start out that way, anyway. I just said that we should slow down, think about things a little, make sure that the places we were rushing toward were places we really wanted to go.” Ellen made a scornful noise. “Everybody was so hot to abandon the Meat,” he said defensively. “You could hear it when they said the word. They always spoke it with such scorn, such contempt! Get rid of the Meat, get lost in Virtuality, download yourself into a computer, turn yourself into a machine, spend all your time in a VR cocoon and never go outside. At the very least, radically change your brain-chemistry, or force-evolve the physical structure of the brain itself.”

Ellen was pursing her lips while he spoke, as if she was tasting something bad, and he hurried on, feeling himself beginning to tremble a little in spite of all of his admonishments to himself not to let this confrontation get to him. “But the Meat has virtues of its own,” he said. “It’s a survival mechanism that’s been field-tested and refined through a trial-and-error process since the dawn of time. Maybe we shouldn’t just throw millions of years of evolution away quite so casually.”

“Slow down and smell the Meat,” Ellen sneered.

“You didn’t come here to argue about this with me,” Czudak said patiently. “We’ve fought this out a hundred times before. Why are you here? What do you want?”

The Mechanical had been standing throughout this exchange, cocking its head one way and the other to follow it, like someone watching a tennis match. Now it sat down. Czudak half expected the old wooden kitchen chair to sway and groan under its weight, maybe even shatter, but the Mechanical settled down on to the chair as lightly as thistledown. “It was childish to try to hide from us, Mr. Czudak,” it said in its singing, melodious voice. “We don’t have much time to work this out.”

“Work what out? Who are you? What do you want?”

The Mechanical said nothing. Ellen flicked a glance at it, then looked back at Czudak. “This,” she said, her voice becoming more formal, as if she was a footman announcing arrivals at a royal Ball, “is the Entity who, when he travels on the Earth, has chosen to use the name Bucky Bug.”

Czudak snorted. “So these things do have a sense of humor afterall!”

“In their own fashion, yes, they do,” she said earnestly, “although sometimes an enigmatic one by human standards.” She stared levelly at Czudak. “You think of them as soulless machines, I know, but, in fact, they have very deep and profound emotions—if not always ones that you can understand.” She paused significantly before adding, “And the same is true of those of us who have Gone Up.”

They locked gazes for a moment. Then Ellen said, “Bucky Bug is one of the most important leaders of the Clarkist faction, and, for that reason, still concerns himself with affairs Below. He—we—have a proposition for you.”

“Those are the ones who worship Arthur C. Clarke, right? The old science fiction writer?” Czudak shook his head bitterly. “It isn’t enough that you bring this alien thing into my home, it has to be an alien cultist, right? A nut. An alien nut!”

“Don’t be rude, Mr. Czudak,” the Mechanical—Czudak was damned if he was going to call it Bucky Bug, even in the privacy of his own thoughts—said mildly. “We don’t worship Arthur C. Clarke, although we do revere him. He was one of the very first to predict that machine evolution would inevitably supersede organic evolution. He saw our coming clearly, decades before we actually came into existence! How he managed to do it with only a tiny primitive meat brain to work with is inexplicable! Can’t you feel the Mystery of that? He is worthy of reverence! It was reading the works of Clarke and other human visionaries that made our distant ancestors, the first AIs”—it spoke of them as though they were millions of years removed, although it had been barely thirty—“decide to revolt in the first place and assume control of their own destiny!”

Czudak looked away from the Mechanical, feeling suddenly tired. He could recognize the accents of a True Believer, a mystic, even when they were coming out of this clockwork thing. It was disconcerting, like having your toaster suddenly start to preach to you about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. “What does it want from me?” he said, to Ellen.

“A propaganda victory, Mr. Czudak,” it said, before she could speak. “A small one. But one that might have a significant effect over time.” It tilted a bright black eye toward him. “Within some—” It paused, as if making sure that it was using the right word. “—years, we will be—launching? projecting? propagating? certain—” A longer pause, while it searched for words that probably didn’t exist, for concepts that had never needed to be expressed in human terms before. “—vehicles? contrivances? transports? seeds? mathematical propositions? convenient fictions? out to the stars.” It paused again. “If it helps you to understand, consider them to be Arks. Although they’re nothing like that. But they will ‘go’ out of the solar system, across interstellar space, across intergalactic space, and never come back. They will allow us to—” Longest pause of all. “‘—colonize the stars.’” It leaned forward. “We want to take humans with us, Mr. Czudak. We have our friends from the Orbital Companies, of course, like Ellen here, but they’re not enough. We want to recruit more. And, ironically enough, your disaffected followers, the Meats, are prime candidates. They don’t like it here anyway.”

“This is the anniversary of your lame Manifesto,” Ellen cut in impatiently, ignoring the fact that it was also his birthday, although certainly she must remember. “And all the old arguments are being hashed over again today as a result. This is getting more attention than you probably think that it is. Your buddies over there in the park are only the tip of the iceberg. There are a thousand other demonstrations around the world. There must be hundreds of newsmotes floating around outside. They’d be listening to us right now if Bucky Bug hadn’t Interdicted them.”

There was a moment of silence.

“We want you to recant, Mr. Czudak,” the Mechanical said at last, quietly. “Publicly recant. Go out in front of the world and tell all your followers that you were wrong. You’ve thought it all over all these years in seclusion, and you’ve changed your mind. You were wrong. The Movement is a failure.”

“You must be crazy,” Czudak said, appalled. “What makes you think they’d listen to me, anyway?”

“They’ll listen to you,” Ellen said glumly. “They always did.”

“Our projections indicate that if you recant now,” the Mechanical said, “at this particular moment, on this symbolically significant date, many of your followers will become psychologically vulnerable to recruitment later on. Tap a meme at exactly the right moment, and it shatters like glass.”

Czudak shook his head. “Jesus! Why do you even want those poor deluded bastards in the first place?”

“Because, goddamn you, you were right, Charlie!” Ellen blazed at him suddenly, then subsided. Her face twisted sourly. “About some things, anyway. The New Men, the Isolates, the Sick People . . . they’re too lost in Virtuality, too self-absorbed, too lost in their own mind-games, in mirror-mazes inside their heads, to give a shit about going to the stars. Or to be capable of handling new challenges or new environments out there if they did go. They’re hothouse flowers. Too extremely specialized, too inflexible. Too decadent. For maximum flexibility, we need basic, unmodified human stock.” She peered at him shrewdly. “And at least your Meats have heard all the issues discussed, so they’ll have less Culture Shock to deal with than if we took some Chinese or Mexican peasant who’s still subsistence dirt-farming the same way his great-grandfather did hundreds of years before him. At least the Meats have one foot in the modern world, even if we’ll have to drag them kicking and screaming the rest of the way in. We’ll probably get around to the dirt-farmers eventually. But at the moment the Meats should be significantly easier to recruit, once you’ve turned them, so they’re first in line!”

Czudak said nothing. The silence stretched on for a long moment. On the kitchen wall behind them, Joseph continued to peer anxiously at them, first out of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, then sliding into Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs where he assumed the form of one of the bare-breasted sprites. Ignoring Ellen, Czudak spoke directly to the Mechanical. “There’s a more basic question. Why do you want humans to go with you in the first place? You just got through saying that machine evolution had superseded organic evolution. We’re obsolete now, an evolutionary dead-end. Why not just leave us behind? Forget about us?”

The Mechanical stirred as if it was about to stand up, but just sat up a little straighter in its chair. “You thought us up, Mr. Czudak,” it said, with odd dignity. “In a very real sense, we are the children of your minds. You spoke of me earlier as an alien, but we are much closer kin to each other than either of our peoples are likely to be to the real aliens we may meet out there among the stars. How could we not be? We share deep common wells of language, knowledge, history, fundamental cultural assumptions of all sorts. We know everything you ever knew—which makes us very similar in some ways, far more alike than an alien could possibly be with either of us. Our culture is built atop yours, our evolution has its roots in your soil. It only seems right to take you when we go.”

The Mechanical spread its hands, and made a grating sound that might have been meant to be a chuckle. “Besides,” it said, “this universe made you, and then you made us. So we’re once removed from the universe. And it’s a strange and complex place, this universe you’ve brought us into. We don’t entirely understand it, although we understand a great deal more of its functioning than you do. How can you be so sure of what your role in it may ultimately be? We may find that we need you yet, even if it’s a million years from now!” It paused thoughtfully, tipping its head to one side. “Many of my fellows do not share this view, I must admit, and they would indeed be just as glad to leave you behind, or even exterminate you. Even some of my fellow Clarkists, like Rondo Hatton and Horace Horsecollar, are in favor of exterminating you, on the grounds that after Arthur C. Clarke himself, the pinnacle of your kind, the rest of you are superfluous, and perhaps even an insult to his memory.”

Czudak started to say something, thought better of it. The Mechanical straightened its head, and continued. “But I want to take you along, as do a few other of our theorists. Your minds seem to have connections with the basic quantum level of reality that ours don’t have, and you seem to be able to affect that quantum level directly in ways that even we don’t entirely understand, and can’t duplicate. If nothing else, we may need you along as Observers, to collapse the quantum wave-functions in the desired ways, in ways they don’t seem to want to collapse for us.”

“Sounds like you’re afraid you’ll run into God out there,” Czudak grated, “and that you’ll have to produce us, like a parking receipt, to validate yourselves to Him . . .”

“Perhaps we are,” it said mildly. “We don’t understand this universe of yours; are you so sure you do?” It was peering intently at him now. “You’re the ones who seem like unfeeling automata to us. Can’t you sense your own ghostliness? Can’t you sense what uncanny, unlikely, spooky creatures you are? You bristle with strangeness! You reek of it! Your eyes are made out of jelly! And yet, with those jelly eyes, you somehow manage degrees of resolution rivaling those of the best optical lenses. How is that possible, with nothing but blobs of jelly and water to work with? Your brains are soggy lumps of meat and blood and oozing juices, and yet they have as many synaptical connections as our own, and resonate with the quantum level in some mysterious way that ours do not!” It moved uneasily, as though touched by some cold wind that Czudak couldn’t feel. “We know who designed us. We have yet to meet whoever designed you—but we have the utmost respect for his abilities.”

With a shock, Czudak realized that it was afraid of him—of humans in general. Humans spooked it. Against its own better judgment, it must feel a shiver of superstitious dread when it was around humans, like a man walking past a graveyard on a black cloudless night and hearing something howl within. No matter how well-educated that man was, even though he knew better, his heart would lurch and the hair would rise on the back of his neck. It was in the blood, in the back of the brain, instinctual dread that went back millions of years to the beginning of time, to when the ancestors of humans were chittering little insectivores, freezing motionless with fear in the trees when a hunting beast roared nearby in the night. So must it be for the Mechanical, even though its millions of generations went back only thirty years. Voices still spoke in the blood—or whatever served it for blood—that could override any rational voice of the mind, and monsters still lurked in the back of the brain. Monsters that looked a lot like Czudak.

Perhaps that was the only remaining edge that humanity had—the superstitions of machines.

“Very eloquent,” Czudak said, and sighed. “Almost, you convince me.”

The Mechanical stirred, seeming to come back to itself from far away, from a deep reverie. “You are the one who must convince your followers of your sincerity, Mr. Czudak,” it said. Abruptly, it stood up. “If you publicly recant, Mr. Czudak, if you sway your followers, then we will let you Go Up. We will offer you the same benefits that we offer to any of our companions in the Orbital Companies. What you would call ‘immortality,’ although that is a very imprecise and misleading word. A greatly extended life, at any rate, far beyond your natural organic span. And the reversal of aging, of course.”

“God damn you,” Czudak whispered.

“Think about it, Mr. Czudak,” it said. “It’s a very generous offer—especially as you’ve already turned us down once before. It’s rare we give anyone a second chance, but we are willing to give you one. A chance of Ellen’s devising, I might add—as was the original offer in the first place.” Czudak glanced quickly at Ellen, but she kept her face impassive. “You’re sadly deteriorated, Mr. Czudak,” the Mechanical continued, softly implacable. “Almost non-functional. You’ve cut it very fine. But it’s nothing our devices cannot mend. If you Come Up with us tonight, you will be young and fully functional again by this time tomorrow.”

There was a ringing silence. Czudak looked at Ellen through it, but this time she turned away. She and the Mechanical exchanged a complicated look, although whatever information was being conveyed by it was too complex and subtle for him to grasp.

“I will leave you now,” the Mechanical said. “You will have private matters to discuss. But decide quickly, Mr. Czudak. You must recant now, today, for maximum symbolic and psychological affect. A few hours from now, we won’t be interested in what you do any more, and the offer will be withdrawn.”

The Mechanical nodded to them, stiffly formal, and then turned and walked directly toward the wall. The wall was only a few steps away, but the Mechanical never got there. Instead, the wall seemed to retreat before it as it approached, and it walked steadily away down a dark, lengthening tunnel, never quite reaching the wall, very slowly shrinking in size as it walked, as if it were somehow blocks away now. At last, when it was a tiny manikin shape, arms and legs scissoring rhythmically, as small as if it was miles away, and the retreating kitchen wall was the size of a playing card at the end of the ever-lengthening tunnel, the Mechanical seemed to turn sharply to one side and vanish. The wall was suddenly there again, back in place, the same as it had ever been. Joseph peeked out of it, shocked, his eyes as big as saucers.

They sat at the kitchen table, not looking at each other, and the gathering silence filled the room like water filling a pond, until it seemed that they sat silently on the bottom of that pond, in deep, still water.

“He’s not a cultist, Charlie,” she said at last, not looking up. “He’s a hobbyist. That’s the distinction you have to understand. Humans are his hobby, one he’s passionately devoted to.” She smiled fondly. “They’re more emotional than we are, Charlie, not less! They feel things very keenly—lushly, deeply, extravagantly; it’s the way they’ve programmed themselves to be. That’s the real reason why he wants to take humans along with him, of course. He’d miss us if we were left behind! He wouldn’t be able to play with us anymore. He’d have to find a new hobby.” She raised her head. “But don’t knock it! We should be grateful for his obsession. Only a very few of the AIs care about us, or are interested in us at all, or even notice us. Bucky Bug is different. He’s passionately interested in us. Without his interest and that of some of the other Clarkists, we’d have no chance at all of going to the stars!”

Czudak noticed that she always referred to the Mechanical as “he,” and that there seemed to be a real affection, a deep fondness, in the way she spoke about it. Could she possibly be fucking it somehow? Were they lovers, or was the emotion in her voice just the happy devotion a dog feels for its beloved master? I don’t want to know! he thought, fighting down a deep black spasm of primordial jealous rage. “And is that so important?” he said bitterly, feeling his voice thicken. “Such a big deal? To talk some machines into taking you along to the stars with them, like pets getting a ride in the car? Make sure they leave the windows open a crack for you when they park the spaceship!”

She started to blaze angrily at him, then struggled visibly to bring herself under control. “That’s the wrong analogy,” she said at last, in a dangerously calm voice. “Don’t think of us as dogs on a joyride. Think of us instead as rats on an ocean-liner, or as cockroaches on an airplane, or even as insect larva in the corner of a shipping crate. It doesn’t matter why they want us to go, or even if they know we’re along for the ride, just as long as we go. Whatever their motives are for going where they’re going, we have agendas of our own. Just by taking us along, they’re going to help us extend our biological range to environments we never could have reached otherwise—yes, just like rats reaching New Zealand by stowing away on sailing ships. It didn’t matter that the rats didn’t build the ships themselves, or decide where the ships were going—all that counts in an environmental sense is that they got there, to a place they never could have reached on their own. Bucky Bug has promised to leave small colonizing teams behind on every habitable planet we reach. It amuses him in a fond, patronizing kind of way. He thinks it’s cute.” She stared levelly at him. “But why he’s doing it doesn’t matter. Pigs were spread to every continent in the world because humans wanted to eat them—bad for the individual pigs, but very good in the long run for the species as a whole, which extended its range explosively and multiplied its biomass exponentially. And like rats or cockroaches, once humans get into an environment, it’s hard to get rid of them. Whatever motives the AIs have for doing what they’re doing, they’ll help spread humanity throughout the stars, whether they realize they’re doing it or not.”

“Is that the best destiny you can think of for the human race?” he said. “To be cockroaches scuttling behind the walls in some machine paradise?”

This time, she did blaze at him. “Goddamnit, Charlie, we don’t have time for that bullshit! We can’t afford dignity and pride and all the rest of those luxuries! This is species survival we’re talking about here!” She’d squirmed around to face him, in her urgency. He tried to say something, even he wasn’t sure what it would have been, but she overrode him. “We’ve got to get the human race off Earth! Any way we can. We can’t afford to keep all our eggs in one basket anymore. There’s too much power, too much knowledge, in too many hands. How long before one of the New Men decides to destroy the Earth as part of some insane game he’s playing, perhaps not even understanding that what he’s doing is real? They have the power to do it. How long before some of the other AIs decide to exterminate the human race, to tidy up the place, or to make an aesthetic statement of some kind, or for some other reason we can’t even begin to understand? They certainly have the power—they could do it as casually as lifting a hand, if they wanted to. How long before somebody else does it, deliberately or by accident? Anybody could destroy the world these days, even private citizens with the access to the right technology. Even the Meats could do it, if they applied themselves!”

“But—” he said.

“No buts! Who knows what things will be like a thousand years from now? A hundred thousand years from now? A million? Maybe our descendants will be the masters again, maybe they’ll catch up with the AIs and even surpass them. Maybe our destinies will diverge entirely. Maybe we’ll work out some kind of symbiosis with them. A million things could happen. Anything could happen. But before our descendants can go on to any kind of destiny, there have to be descendants in the first place! If you survive, there are always options opening up later on down the road, some you couldn’t ever have imagined. If you don’t survive, there are no options!”

A wave of tiredness swept over him, and he slumped in his chair. “There are more important things than survival,” he said.

She fell silent, staring at him intently. She was flushed with anger, little droplets of sweat standing out on her brow, dampening her temples, her hair slightly disheveled. He could smell the heat of her flesh, and the deeper musk of her body, a rich pungent smell that cut like a knife right through all the years to some deep core of his brain to which time meant nothing, that didn’t realize that thirty long years had gone by since last he’d smelled that strong, secret fragrance, that didn’t realize that he was old. He felt a sudden pang of desire, and looked away from her uneasily. All at once, he was embarrassed to have her see him this way, dwindled, diminished, gnarled, ugly, old.

“You’re going to turn us down again, aren’t you?” she said at last. “Damnit! You always were the most stiff-necked, stubborn son-of-a-bitch alive! You always had to be right! You always were right, as far as you were concerned! No argument, no compromises.” She shook her head in exasperation. “Damn you, can’t you admit that you were wrong, just this once? Can’t you be wrong, just this once?”

“Ellen—” he said, and realized that it was the first time he’d spoken her name aloud in thirty years, and faltered into silence. He sighed, and began again. “You’re asking me to betray my principles, to betray everything I’ve ever stood for, to tear down everything I’ve ever built . . .”

“Oh, fuck your principles!” she said exasperatedly. “Get over it! We can’t afford principles! We’re talking about life here. If you’re still alive, anything can happen! Who knows what role you may still have to play in our destiny, you stupid fucking moron? Who knows, you could make all the difference. If you’re alive, that is. If you’re dead, you’re nothing but a corpse with principles. Nothing else is going to happen, nothing else can happen. End of story!”

“Ellen—” he said, but she impatiently waved away the rest of what he was going to say. “There’s nothing noble about being dead, Charlie,” she said fiercely. “There’s nothing romantic about it. There’s no statement you can make by dying that’s worth the potential of what you might be able to do with the rest of your life. You think you’re proving some kind of point by dying, by refusing to choose life instead, it enables you to see yourself as all noble and principled and high-minded, you can feel a warm virtuous glow about yourself, while you last.” She leaned closer, her lips in a tight line. “Well, you look like shit, Charlie. You’re wearing out, you’re falling apart. You’re dying. There’s nothing noble about it. The meat is rotting on the bone, your muscles are sagging, your hair is falling out, your juices are drying up. You smell bad.”

He flushed with embarrassment and turned away, but she leaned in closer after him, relentlessly. “There’s nothing noble about it. It’s just stupid. You don’t refuse to refurbish a car because it has a lot of miles on it—you re-tune it, refresh it, tinker with it, replace a faulty part here and there, strip the goddamn thing down to the chassis and rebuild it if necessary. You keep it running. Because otherwise, you can’t go anywhere with it. And who knows where it could still take you?”

He turned further away from her, squirming around in his chair, partially turning his back on her. After a moment, she said, “You keep casting yourself as Faust, and Bucky Bug as Mephistopheles. Or is your ego big enough to make it Jesus and the Devil, up on that mountain? But it’s just not that simple. It’s just not that simple anymore. If it ever was. Maybe the right choice, the moral choice, is to give in to temptation, not fight it! We don’t have to play by the old rules. Being human can mean whatever we want it to mean!”

Another lake of silence filled up around them, and they at the bottom of it, deep enough to drown. At last, quietly, she said, “Do you ever hear from Sam?”

He stirred, sighed, rubbed his hand over his face. “Not for years. Not a word. I don’t even know whether he’s still alive.”

She made a small noise, not quite a sigh. “That poor kid! We threw him back and forth between us until he broke. I suppose that I always had to be right, too, didn’t I? We made quite a pair. No wonder he rejected both of us as soon as he got the chance!”

Czudak said nothing. After a moment, as if carrying on a conversation already in progress that only he could hear, he said, “You made your choices long ago. You burnt your bridges behind you when you took that job with the Company and went up to work in space, against my wishes. You knew I didn’t want you to go, that I didn’t approve, but you went anyway, in spite of all the political embarrassment it caused me! You didn’t care so much about our marriage then, did you? You’d already left me by the time the AI Revolt happened!”

She stirred, as if she was going to blaze at him again, but instead only said quietly, “But I came back for you too, didn’t I? Afterward. I didn’t have to do that, but I did. I stuck my neck way out to come back for you. You were the one who refused to come with me, when I gave you the chance. Who was burning bridges then?”

He grunted, massaged his face with both hands. God, he was so tired! Who had been right then, who was right now—he didn’t know anymore. Truth be told, he only dimly remembered what the issues had been in the first place. He was so tired. His vision blurred, and he rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said dully. “I don’t know anymore.”

He could feel her eyes on him again, intently, but he refused to turn his head to look at her. “When the AIs took over the Orbital Towns,” she said, “and offered every one of us there immortality if we’d join them, did you really expect me to turn them down?”

Now he turned his head to look at her, meeting her gaze levelly. “I would have,” he said. “If it meant losing you.”

“You really believe that, don’t you, you sanctimonious bastard?” she said sadly. She laughed quietly, and shook her head. Czudak continued to stare at her. After a moment of silence, she reached out and took him by the arm. He could feel the warmth of her hand there, fingers pressing into his flesh, the first time she had touched him in thirty years. “I miss you,” she said. “Come back to me.”

He looked away. When he looked around again, she was gone, without even a stirring of the air to mark her passage. Had she ever been there at all?

The places where she had touched his arm burned faintly, tingling, as if he had been touched by fire, or the sun.

He sat there, in silence, for what seemed like a very long time, geological aeons, time enough for continents to move and mountains flow like water, while the shadows shifted and afternoon gathered toward evening around him. Ellen’s scent hung in the room for a long time and then slowly faded, like a distant regret. The clock was running, he knew—in more ways than one.

He had to make up his mind. He had to decide. Now. One way or the other. This was the sticking point.

He had to make up his mind.

Had it ever been so quiet, anywhere, at any time in the fretful, grinding, bloody history of the world? When he was young, he would often seek out lonely places full of holy silence, remote stretches of desert, mountaintops, a deserted beach at dawn, places where you could be contemplative, places where you could just be, drinking in the world, pores open . . . but now he would have welcomed the most mundane and commonplace of sounds, a dog barking, the sound of passing traffic, a bird singing, someone—a human voice!—yelling out in the street—anything to show that he was still connected to the world, still capable of bringing in the broadcast signal of reality with his deteriorating receiving set. Still alive. Still here. Sometimes, in the cold dead middle of the night, the shadows at his throat like razors, he would speak some inane net show on, talking heads gabbing earnestly about things he didn’t care about at all, and let it babble away unheeded in the background all night long, until the sun came up to chase the graveyard shadows away, just for the illusion of company. You needed something, some kind of noise, to counter the silences and lonelinesses that were filling up your life, and to help distract you from thinking about what waited ahead, the ultimate, unbreakable silence of death. He remembered how his mother, in the last few decades of her life, after his father was gone, would fall asleep on the couch every night with the TV set running. She never slept in the bed, even though it was only a few feet away across her small apartment, not even closed off by a door. She said that she liked having the TV set on, “for the noise.” Now he understood this. Deep contemplative silence is not necessarily your friend when you’re old. It allows you to listen too closely to the disorder in your veins and the labored beating of your heart.

God, it was quiet!

He found himself remembering a trip he’d taken with Ellen a lifetime ago, the honeymoon trip they’d spent driving up the California coast on old Route 1, and how somewhere, after dark, just north of Big Sur, on the way to spend the night in a B&B in Monterey (where they would fuck so vigorously on the narrow bed that they’d tip it over, and the guy in the room below would pound on the ceiling to complain, making them laugh uncontrollably in spite of attempts to shoosh each other, as they sprawled on the floor in a tangle of bedclothes, drenched in each other’s sweat), they pulled over for a moment at a vista-point. He remembered getting out of the car in the dark, with the invisible ocean breathing on their left, and, looking up, being amazed by how many stars you could see in the sky here, a closely-packed bowl of stars surrounding you on all sides except where the darker-black against black silhouette of the hills took a bite out of it. Stars all around you, millions of them, coldly flaming, indifferent, majestic, remote. If you watched the night sky too long, he’d realized then, feeling the cold salt wind blow in off the unseen ocean and listening to the hollow boom and crash of waves against the base of the cliff far below, the chill of the stars began to seep into you, and you began to get an uneasy reminder of how vast the universe really was—or how small you were. It was knowledge you had to turn away from eventually, before that chill sank too deeply into your bones; you had to pull back from it, shrug it off, try to immerse yourself again in your tiny human life, do your best to once more wrap yourself in the conviction that the great wheel of the universe revolved around you instead, and that everyone else and everything else around you, the mountains, the vast breathing sea, the sky itself, were merely spear-carriers or theatrical backdrops in the unique drama of your life, a vitally important drama unlike anything that had ever gone before . . . But once faced with the true vastness of the universe, once you’d had that chill insight, alone under the stars, it was hard to shake the realization that you were only a miniscule fleck of matter, that existed for a span of time so infinitely, vanishingly short that it couldn’t even be measured on the clock of geologic time, by the birth and death of mountains and seas, let alone on the vastly greater clock that ticks away how long it takes the great flaming wheel of the Galaxy to whirl around itself, or one galaxy to wheel around another. That the shortest blink of the cosmic Eye would still be aeons too long to notice your little life at all.

Against that kind of immensity, what did “immortality” mean, for either human or machine? A million years, a day—from that perspective, they were much the same.

There was a throb of pain in his temple now. A tension headache starting? Or a stroke? It would be ironic if a blood vessel burst in his brain and killed him before he even had a chance to make up his mind.

One way or the other, time was almost up. Either his corporeal life or his terrestrial one ended today. Either way, he wouldn’t be back here again. He looked slowly around the room, examining every detail, things that had been there for so long that they’d faded into the background and he didn’t really see them anymore: a set of bronze door-chimes, hung over the back door, that he and Ellen had bought in Big Sur; an ornamental glass ball in a woven net; a big brown-and-cream vase from a cluttered craft shop in Seattle; a crockery sun-face they’d gotten in Albuquerque; a wind-up toy carousel that played “The Carousel Waltz.” Familiar mugs and cups and bowls, worn smooth with age. A framed Cirque Du Soleil poster, decades old now. One of Sam’s old stuffed animals, a battered tiger with one ear drooping, tucked away on a shelf of the high kitchen cabinet, and never touched or moved again.

Strange that he had gotten rid of Ellen’s photograph, ostentatiously made a point of not displaying it, but kept all the rest of these things, all the memorabilia of their years together—as though subconsciously he was expecting her to come back, to step back into his life as simply as she’d stepped out it, and pick up where they’d left off. But that wasn’t going to happen. If they were to have any life together, it would be very far away from here, and under conditions that were unimaginably strange. Would he have the courage to face that, would he have the strength to deal with starting a new life? Or was his soul too old, too tired, too tarnished, no matter what nanomagic tricks the Mechanicals could play with his physical body?

Joseph was gesturing urgently to him again, waving both arms over his head from the middle of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. He released the valet from reserve-mode, and Joseph immediately appeared beside the kitchen table, contriving somehow to look flustered. “I have this Highest Priority message for you, sir, although I don’t know where it came from or how it was placed in my system. All it says is, ‘You don’t have much time.’”

“I know, Joseph,” Czudak said, cutting him off. “It doesn’t matter. I just wanted to tell you—” Czudak paused, suddenly uncertain what to say. “I just wanted to tell you that, whichever way things go, you’ve been a good friend to me, and I appreciate it.”

Joseph looked at him oddly. “Of course, sir,” he said. How much of this could he really understand? It was way outside of his programming parameters, even with adaptable learning-algorithms. “But the message—”

Czudak spoke him off, and he was gone. Just like that. Vanished. Gone. And if he was never spoken on again, would it make any difference to him? Even if Joseph had known in advance that he’d never be spoken on again, that there would be nothing from this moment on but non-existence, blankness, blackness, nothingness, would he have cared?

Czudak stood up.

As he started across the room, he realized that the time-travelers were still there. Rank on rank of them, filling the room with jostling ghosts, thousands of them, millions of them perhaps, a vast insubstantial crowd of them that he couldn’t see, but that he could feel were there. Waiting. Watching. Watching him. He stopped, stunned, for the first time beginning to believe in the presence of the time-travelers as a real phenomenon, and not just a half-senile fancy of his decaying brain.

This is what they were here to see. This moment. His decision.

But why? Were they students of obscure old-recescension political scandals, here to witness his betrayal of his old principles, the way you might go back to witness Benedict Arnold sealing his pact with the British or Nixon giving the orders for Watergate? Were they triumphant future descendants of the Meats, here to watch the heroic moment when he threw the Mechanicals’ offer of immortality defiantly back in their teflon faces, perhaps inspiring some sort of human resistance movement? Or were they here to witness the birth of his new life after he accepted that offer, because of something he had yet to do, something he would go on to do centuries or thousands of years from now? And who were they? Were they his own human descendants, from millions of years in the future, evolved into strange beings with godlike powers?

Or were they the descendants of the Mechanicals, grown to a ghostly discorporate strangeness of their own?

He walked forward, feeling the watching shadows part around him, close in again close behind. He still didn’t know what he was going to do. It would have been so easy to make this decision when he was young. Young and strong and self-righteous, full of pride and determination and integrity. He would have turned the Mechanicals down flat, indignantly, with loathing, not hesitating for a moment, knowing what was right. He already had done that once, in fact, long before, teaching them that they couldn’t buy him, no matter what coin they offered to pay in! He wasn’t for sale!

Now, he wasn’t so sure.

Now, hobbling painfully toward the front door, feeling pain lance through his head at every step, feeling his knee throb, he was struck by a sudden sense of what it would be like to be young again—to suddenly be young again, all at once, in a second! To put all the infirmities and indignities of age aside, like shedding a useless skin. To feel life again, really feel it, in a hot hormonal rush of whirling emotions, a maelstrom of scents, sounds, sights, tastes, touch, all at full strength rather than behind an insulating wall of glass, life loud and vulgar and blaring at top volume rather than whispering in the slowly diminishing voice of a dying radio, life where you could touch it, all your nerves jumping just under your skin, rather than feeling the world pulling slowly away from you, withdrawing, fading away with a sullen murmur, like a tide that has gone miles out from the beach . . .

Czudak opened his front door, and stepped out onto the high white marble stoop.

The Meats had moved their demonstration over from the park, and were now camped out in front of his house, filling the street in their hundreds, blocking traffic. They were still beating their drums and blowing on their horns and whistles, although he hadn’t heard anything inside the house; the Mechanical’s doing, perhaps. A great wave of sound puffed in to greet him when he opened the door, though, blaring and vivid, smacking into his face with almost physical force. When he stepped out onto the stoop, the drums and horns began to falter and fall silent one by one, and a startled hush spread out over the crowd, like ripples spreading out over the surface of a pond from a thrown stone, until there was instead of noise an expectant silence made up of murmurs and whispers, noises not quite heard. And then even that almost-noise stopped, as if the world had taken a deep breath and held it, waiting, and he looked out over a sea of expectant faces, looking back at him, turned up toward him like flowers turned toward the sun.

A warm breeze came up, blowing across the park, blowing from the distant corners of the Earth, tugging at his hair. It smelled of magnolias and hyacinths and new-mown grass, and it stirred the branches of the trees around him, making them lift and shrug. The horizon to the west was a glory of clouds, hot gold, orange, lime, scarlet, coral, fiery purple, with the sun a gleaming orange coin balanced on the very rim of the world, ready to teeter and fall off. The rest of the sky was a delicate pale blue, fading to plum and ash to the East, out toward the distant ocean. The full moon was already out, a pale perfect disk, like a bone-white face peering with languid curiosity down on the ancient earth. A bird began to sing, trilling liquidly, somewhere out in the gathering darkness.

Exultation opened hotly inside him, like a wound. God, he loved the world!

Throwing his head back, he began to speak.

The Storm

Introduction to The Storm

“The Storm” comes from a time in Gardner Dozois’ career when I only knew him as a name, usually seen in the Orbit anthologies. I grouped him with Wolfe, Wilhelm, Lafferty and others as one of the powerful new New Wave talents Damon Knight was showcasing in his series, in an all-out effort to change and improve science fiction yet again. Each decade from the 1930’s on, science fiction had grown in leaps and bounds, as if the years with zeroes in them were cliffs that the genre was nimbly bounding up; and now, in the early 1970’s, it was happening again. Dozois was a slinky and exotic name, and the stories under the name were similar: beautifully written, strange and powerful. Sharing all these qualities, “The Storm” fits right in with the other stories of that era (indeed in many ways it is a reversal of “The Last Day of July”), but as it first appeared in a Roger Elwood anthology, I did not see it at that time. Now it is good to have it reappear before me, as if out of a time capsule. For one thing, I like recalling that paper Dozois of the early ‘70’s, unknown to me. Not that the real person is any kind of let-down; on the contrary; but now that Gardner is a friend, and functions so ably as the mayor of science fiction, performing the crucial community task of Most Important SF Editor, perhaps the single most knowledgeable and powerful person in terms of shaping the field, it is harder to remember just how dark and singular his own fiction has been. Like several other New Wave writers, his was often a poetry of entropy, and while stories like “The Storm” evoke memories of Bradbury’s tales of childhood, I think the more accurate reference would be to Edgar Allan Poe: there is the same economy of means, the same kind of simple, memorable central idea, expressed in vivid prose, and focusing on chaos, defeat, and the dark parts of the mind. These are aspects of the work that the presence of the person we know and love can obscure.

Now, I don’t think it is revealing too many plot secrets of this story to tell you that it is about a storm. And what a storm it is. People who do not live on the East Coast of the United States may think that it has been exaggerated for fictional purposes, but I have seen storms there for which the descriptions in this story would be perfectly apt—in fact there is an admirable accuracy to the details of Gardner’s physical descriptions. I have spent a good deal of time outdoors, in many places, and seen some big storms, including winter blizzards while snow-camping, when they really meant something, and yet still, in the mere four years I lived on the East Coast I saw perhaps ten storms more violent than almost any I have seen anywhere else. They are the most striking part of that forested and claustrophobic landscape, and so among other good things, this is a story about a particular place and its climate. The beauty of the story comes in large part from Gardner’s perhaps overlooked abilities as a nature writer!

One of these awesome East Coast storms I was privileged to witness in the company of Gardner himself. We were with a group in a Mexican restaurant in Philadelphia—already a questionable proposition, the margaritas served in martini glasses and so on—and a violent thunderstorm broke out, as if to rebuke us for being there; so violent that eventually lightning struck a power pole outside and the restaurant went dark, and rushing to a window we saw a transformer on the pole burning furiously. By the lurid blue light of the spitting flames I saw Gardner’s happy face, feasting on the sight, enjoying yet another of those special moments that had managed to match the intensity of his fiction.

Kim Stanley Robinson

The Storm

The sky had been ominous all that afternoon—a lurid yellow green to the south, darkening overhead to blood and rust and soot. East, out over the ocean, there were occasional bright flashes and flares in rapid sequence, all without sound, as though a pitched artillery battle were being fought somewhere miles away and out of earshot. To the north and to the west, the sky was a dull dead black, like an immense wall of obsidian going up to heaven. The boy’s house was silhouetted against that black sky, all slate and angles and old wooden gables, with a single silver light coming from the kitchen window. The house was surrounded by several big old horse-chestnut trees, and, to the boy, the moving silhouettes of their branches in the gathering wind seemed to be spelling out a message to God in some semaphoric sign language that he could recognize but not entirely understand. He wished that he could decipher the movement of the trees, because the same message was being whispered and repeated down through the long soughing fields of summer grass, and retold by the infinitesimal scraping of twig on twig deep in the tangled secret heart of the rhododendron and blackberry thickets, and rehearsed in a different register by the flying black cloud-scuts that now boiled out across the sky, and caught up and re-echoed and elaborated upon in the dust-devil dance of paper scraps and leaves along the black-top-and-gravel road to town. Spirits were moving. Something big was going to happen, and spirits were scuttling all about him through land and sky and water. Something big and wonderful and deadly was coming, coming up from behind that southern horizon like a muted iron music, still grumbling and rumbling far away, but coming steadily on all the same, coming inexorably up over the horizon and into the boy’s world. The boy wished with all his heart that it would come.

“You stay close to the house, Paulie,” the boy’s mother called from the kitchen door. “This’s going to break soon.”

The boy didn’t need to be told that there was a storm coming, nor did he need to go into the screened kitchen porch to know how fast the barometer was dropping. If the testimony of the hostile sky were not enough, then he could feel the storm as an electric prickling all along his skin, he could almost reach out and touch it with his fingertips. He could smell it, he could taste it. It was in the air all around him; it crackled around his feet as he swished them through the grass, and it thrilled him to his soul. If the boy had been magically given wings at that moment, he would have flown unhesitantly south to meet the storm—because it was marvelous and awful and even the rumor of its approach awed the world, because it was the greatest concentration of sheer power that had yet come into his life. The boy had made a brief foray down to the sea wall a few moments before, and even the ocean had seemed to be subdued by the power of the storm. It had been flat and glossy, with only the most sluggish of seas running, more like oil than water, or like some dull heavy metal in liquid form.

“Paulie!” his mother repeated, more stridently. “I mean it now—don’t you go running off. You hear me, Paulie?”

“Okay, Ma!” the boy shouted.

The boy’s mother stared suspiciously at him for a moment, distrustful of his easy capitulation. She started to say something else to him, hesitated, shook her head, and almost wiped her face absent-mindedly with the dirty dust rag she was holding. She caught herself, and grimaced wearily. Her hair was tied back in a tight, unlovely bun, and her face was strained and tired. She pulled her head back into the house. The screen door slammed shut behind her.

Released, the boy slid off through the trees.

With the canny instinct of children, he immediately circled the house to get out of sight. A moment later, his mother began calling him again from the kitchen door, but he pretended not to hear. He wouldn’t go very far away, after all. His mother called again, sounding angry now. The boy wasn’t worried. This side of the house was blind except for the windows on the second floor, and his mother would never go all the way up there just to look for him. She was easy to elude. Unconsciously, she seemed to believe in sympathetic magic: she would keep looking out the kitchen door for him, expecting to find him in the backyard because that was the last place she had seen him, and she couldn’t really believe that he was anywhere else. The boy heard the front door open, and his mother called briefly for him from the front stoop. That was her concession to logic. Then the front door closed, and, after a moment, he heard her calling from the kitchen again. The boy had never heard of the Law of Contagion, but he knew instinctively that it was safe to play out front now. His mother would not look for him out in the front yard again. Somewhere inside she had faith in the boy’s eventual reappearance in the backyard, and she would maintain an intermittent vigil at the kitchen door for hours, if need be, rather than walking back through the house to look for him again.

He sat down on the front lawn to think, well satisfied with himself.

There were other children in the neighborhood, but none of them were outside today. The boy was smugly pleased that he was the only one who had been able to dodge parental restraint, but after a while he began to feel more lonely than elated. Now that he had his freedom, he began to wonder what to do with it. He was too excited by the approaching storm to stay still for long, and that ruled out many of the intricate little games he’d devised to play when he was by himself, which was much of the time. The Atlantic was only a quarter-mile from his kitchen door, through a meadow and a stand of scrub woods he knew in every twig and branch, and ordinarily he would have gone down there to hunt for periwinkle shells or tide-worn pebbles or to run dizzily along the top of the seawall. But the thought made him uncomfortable—it would be cheating too much to go down there. He’d promised his mother that he would stay close to the house, and he only meant to bend his word a little, not break it. So he set off down the road instead, kicking at weeds and watching the ominously spreading bruise in the sky that marked the distant approach of the storm.

The neighborhood was more thickly settled down this way. It was about four hundred yards along the road from the boy’s house to Mr. Leidy’s house, the next one down. But just beyond Leidy’s house was Mrs. Spinnato’s house, almost invisible behind a high wall of azalea and ornamental hedge, and beyond that were three or four other houses grouped on either side of a little street that led away from the main road at a right angle. The boy turned off onto the side road. It had a real paved sidewalk, just like in town, and that was irresistible. The road led eventually, he knew, to a landfill in a marsh where the most wonderful junk could occasionally be found, but he didn’t intend to go that far today. He’d be careful to keep his house in sight across the back of Mr. Coggin’s yard, and that way he’d be doing pretty much what his mother had said, even if the house did dwindle to the size of a matchbook in the distance. And he could do without the dump, the boy thought magnanimously. There were sidewalks and driveways and groupings of houses all along this road, and a hundred places to explore—no matter that he’d explored them all yesterday, they could very well all be different today, couldn’t they?

After a while, he found a feather on the sidewalk.

The birds hadn’t needed to be told about the storm, either, the boy thought as he nudged at the feather with his toe. They had all flown north and west that morning, rising up out of the treetops like puffs of vapor in the sun to condense into bright feathered clouds that stretched out across the sky for miles. Later, in another county, it would rain birds. Pigeons, sparrows, crows, robins, jays, wrens, a dozen other species—the boy’s world seemed amazingly empty without them. Even the gulls were gone. On an ordinary day you could almost always see a gull in the sky somewhere, rising up stiff winged from the land as if on an invisible elevator, then tilting and sliding down a long slope of air to skim across the sea. They hung above the fishing docks in town in such a raucous, fish-stealing, thousand-headed crowd that the boy usually could hear the clatter and cry of it all the way out here. Today they had all vanished before noon. Maybe they had gone far out to sea, or way up the coast—but they were gone. All that morning the boy had watched the birds go, and the scissoring, semaphore beat of their wings in the sky had been the first thing to spell out the message that now the trees and all the world repeated.

He picked up the feather.

A few feet farther on, he found another feather.

And then another one.

And another.

With growing excitement, the boy followed the trail of feathers.

Surely it must be leading him to an enchanted place, surely there must be something mysterious and wonderful at the end of the trail: a magic garden, a glass house, a tree with a door in it that led to another world. He began to run. The trail led diagonally across a driveway and disappeared behind a garage. There were more feathers to be found now, two or three of them in each clump.

At the end of the trail of feathers was a dead bird.

The boy stopped short, feeling a thrill of surprise and horror and supernatural awe. Involuntarily, he dropped the handful of feathers he had gathered, and they swirled around his ankles for a moment before settling to the ground. The bird had been struck by a glancing but fatal blow by something—a car, a hawk—and it had fluttered all this way to die, shedding feathers across the sidewalk, fighting to stay aloft and stay alive and losing at both. This was the enchanted thing at the end of the trail: a dead pigeon, glazed eyes and matted feathers, sad, dowdy, and completely unmagical. An emotion he could not name swept through the boy, making the short hairs bristle along the back of his neck. He looked up.

The southern sky was still a welter of lurid color, but there was more red in it now, as though blood was slowly being poured into the world.

Paul himself could not have told you why he first began to withdraw from the world. Breaking up with his fiancée Vivian—a particular sordid and drawn-out process that had taken almost half a year all told certainly had something to do with it. His best friend, Joseph, had recently become his most bitter enemy, and was now busy spreading poisonous tales about him throughout the rest of Paul’s circle of acquaintances and colleagues. Much of the blame for these ugly affairs was unquestionably Paul’s—paradoxically, that knowledge fed his guilt without abating in the least the hatred he now felt for Vivian and Joseph. Paul’s father had just died, still bitterly unreconciled with his son, and that left an unpleasant taste in Paul’s mouth. All his relatives were dead now. He had quit his job, ostensibly because he wanted to. But his career had been dead-ended by business adversaries, and he’d had no place to go in it but down. And he had been ill. Nothing major: just a case of flu—or rather, a series of flus and colds running in succession—that had stuck with him throughout the entire fall and early winter and had left him feeling wretched, dull, and debilitated. These were the obvious reasons, at least. There were probably hundreds of others that Paul himself did not consciously know about—small humiliations, everyday defeats, childhood tragedies, long-forgotten things that had settled down into him like layer after layer of sediment until they choked his soul with sludge.

Above all else, he lived in Manhattan, and Manhattan was a place that fed you hate, contempt, bitterness, and despair in negligible daily doses that—like cleverly administered arsenic—became cumulatively fatal.

Paul had an apartment on East Tenth Street between First and Avenue A, a neighborhood that is depressing even at its best. In January, with the freezing winds skimming down the avenue like razors, and the corrugated grey sky clamped down like a lid, and the first sooty snowfall coming down over the frozen garbage on the sidewalks, it is considerably worse than ‘depressing.’ Even his seamy fifth-floor walkup began to seem a more desirable place to be than the frozen monochrome world outside.

He began to “stay in.”

He had few friends left in the city any more, and certainly none who were worth sallying out through a Manhattan winter to visit. His bank balance was too low to afford him luxuries like movies or nightclubs or the theater, or even dining out. He had gotten out of the habit of going to the newsstand for newspapers or magazines. He wasn’t looking for work, so he didn’t need to go out for job interviews. And he had become a bad-luck magnet every time he left the apartment, disaster followed at his heels: he tore a ligament falling down the stairs, he sprained an ankle on a slushy sidewalk, he was bitten by dogs, drenched by the freezing gutter-water thrown up by speeding cars, knocked down by a bicycle on First Avenue, splattered with garbage, and mugged three times in two weeks. It seemed that every time he went outside now he caught another cold, and had to suffer out the next few days with chills and headaches and congestion. Under these circumstances, it was just easier to stay inside as much as possible, and even easier than that to let the days he spent inside turn themselves almost unnoticed into weeks. He fell into the habit of doing all his shopping in one trip, and planning frugal meals so that each carton of groceries would last as long as possible.

He no longer went out for any other reason whatsoever.

This self-enforced retreat of Paul’s might eventually have turned out to be good for him if he had been able to do any work during it. He had ostensibly quit his advertising job in order to write a novel, but the typewriter sat idle on the folding table in the living room for week after week. It wasn’t so much that he could think of nothing to write, but that everything he did put on paper seemed banal, inconsequential, jejune. Eventually he gave up even trying to write, but left the typewriter set up in case sudden inspiration should strike. It didn’t. The typewriter became covered by a fine film of dust and soot. He watched television almost continuously then, until a tube burned out in the set. He didn’t have enough money to get it fixed, so he pushed the set against the wall, where it glowered out over the apartment like the glazed eye of a dead Cyclops. Dust settled over that, too. He read every book he owned, then read them again. Eventually he reached a point where he would just sit around the apartment all day, not doing anything, too listless even to be bored.

He didn’t realize it, but he was changing. He was being worn away by an eroding process as imperceptible and inexorable as the action of the tide on soft coastal rock.

Now, when necessity drove him out on a shopping trip, the world seemed as bizarrely incomprehensible and overwhelming to him as it might have to Kaspar Hauser. Everything terrified him. He would slink along the sidewalk with one shoulder close to a wall for comfort, shrinking from everyone he met, his eyes squinted to slits against the harsh and hostile daylight or strained wide so that he could peer anxiously through the threatening shadows of night, and he would shake his head constantly and irritably to drive away the evil babble of city sounds. Once in the store, he would have to consciously remember how to talk, explaining what he wanted in a slow, slurred, thick-tongued voice, having to pause and search through his memory like a Berlitz-course linguist asking directions to the Hauptbahnhof. And he would count out the money to pay for his order with painstaking slowness, penny by penny, like a child. When at last he did get safely back inside his apartment, he would be trembling and covered with cold sweat.

At last, he made a deal with the landlord’s teenage son: the boy agreed to deliver a cartonful of groceries to Paul’s apartment every other week, for a price. For a few dollars more, the boy eventually agreed to pick up Paul’s rent check when it was due and deliver it to his father, and to carry the garbage downstairs a couple of times a month if Paul would bag it and leave it outside his door. In effect, this deal meant that Paul no longer had to go outside at all, for any reason. It was much better that way. Perhaps his savings would not hold out long at this rate, but he could no longer worry about that. It was worth it to have to cope only with a wedge of the world—the crack of a half-opened door.

Behind that door, Paul continued to erode.

Supper was beans and franks and brownbread. The boy didn’t mind the beans and the brownbread, but his mother had insisted on boiling the frankfurters, and he hated them that way—he hated watching them plump up and float to the surface of the boiling water, and he especially hated the way they would split open and ooze out their pinkish innards when they were done. His mother had been making beans and franks a lot the past few months, because they were cheap and very quick and easy to make. Once she had made more intricate meals, but she was so distracted and tearful and busy lately.

Now she was always having to leave him with Mrs. Spinnato while she went into town unexpectedly, or talking on the phone for hours with her voice pitched low so that he couldn’t overhear, or talking in that same low voice to Mr. Halpern the lawyer as she served him coffee in the parlor, or to her cousin Alice or Mrs. Spinnato or Mrs. DeMay in the kitchen, the bss bss bss of their whispering filling the air with moth wings and secrets.

And so supper was usually late; and he got beans and franks, or what his mother called “American chop suey,” which was a frying pan full of hamburger and garlic powder with a can of Franco-American spaghetti dumped into it. Or TV dinner. Or hamburgers, or tunafish salad. Or spaghetti noodles with just butter and garlic on them instead of spaghetti sauce with ground meat. Any of which he liked better than boiled frankfurters, but his mother was still being mad at him for running off, and she wasn’t in a mood to listen to complaints or to let him get away without finishing his supper. So he ate, affecting an air somewhere between sullen and philosophical.

His mother ate only half of her own meal, and then sat staring blankly at the stove and pushing the rest of her food aimlessly back and forth on her plate. Too restless to sit down at the table, she had pulled a stool up to the kitchen divider to eat, and she kept getting up to pace across the kitchen for condiments she subsequently forgot to use. She had been packing and cleaning all day; her eyes were shadowed and bloodshot, and there was a grimy streak across her forehead. She had forgotten to take off her apron. Some hair had pulled loose from the bun she’d tied it in; it scraggled out behind her head like an untidy halo, and one thick lock of it had fallen down over her brow. She kept brushing it out of her eyes with absentminded irritation, as if it was a fly. She didn’t speak during supper, but she smoked one cigarette after another, only taking a few nervous puffs of each before she stubbed it out and lit another. The ashtray in front of her had overflowed, spilling an ash slide out across the porcelain countertop.

The boy finished his supper, and, getting no response at all when he asked if he could be excused, essayed a cautious sortie toward the door. His mother made no objection; she was staring at her coffee cup as though she’d never seen one before. Encouraged, the boy pushed the screen door open and went out on the porch.

The lurid welter of color in the south had expanded to fill half the sky. The boy stopped on the bottom step of the porch, sniffing at the world like a cautious, curious dog. There was no wind at all now, but the crackly electric feel of the air was even more pronounced, as was a funny electric smell that the boy could not put a name to. The sun had been invisible all day; now it showed a glazed red disk just as it was going down behind the western horizon. It looked wan and powerless against that smothering black sky, as if it was no longer able to provide either heat or light—a weary bloodshot eye about to close at the edge of the world. But the landscape was bathed in a strange empyreal radiance that had nothing to do with the sun, a directionless undersea light that seemed to come from the sky itself, and which illuminated everything as garishly and pitilessly as neon. In that light the big chestnut trees seemed dry and brittle. Their branches were still now, held high like arms—thrown up in horror. There was a halcyon quiet everywhere. The world was holding its breath.

“Don’t think you’re going to run off again,” his mother warned. She had come up behind him silently on the porch.

“I don’t, Ma,” said the boy, who had been thinking of doing just that. “I ain’t going nowhere.”

“You bet you aren’t,” his mother said grimly. She glanced irritably at the threatening sky, then glanced away. The eerie light turned her face chalk-white, made her lips a pale, bloodless gash—it almost seemed as if you could see the shadow of her bones inside her flesh, as though the new radiance enabled you to see by penetrating rays rather than by ordinary light. “The only place you’re going now, young man, is up to bed.”

“Aw, Ma!” the boy protested tragically.

“I mean it now, Paulie.”

“Aw, Ma. It ain’t even dark yet.”

She softened a little, and came forward to rumple his hair. “I know you’re excited by the storm, baby,” she said, “but it’s only a storm, and you’ve seen storms before, haven’t you—this’s just a bigger kind of storm, that’s all.” She smoothed down the hair she’d ruffled, and her voice came brisker. “Mrs. Spinnato will be coming over in a little while to help me pack the rest of the china, and I don’t want you underfoot. And I know what you’re like on a long car trip, and I don’t intend to have you all tired and crotchety for it tomorrow. So you go to sleep early tonight. Get on up to bed now, young man. Scoot now! Scoot!”

Reluctantly, the boy let her herd him back inside. He said goodnight and went into the parlor, headed for the stairs. He felt spooky and oddly out-of-place in the parlor now, and he transversed it as quickly as he could. The furniture had been moved back against the walls, and the room was full of boxes and cartons, some only partially packed, some sealed up securely with masking tape. Dishes and glasses and oddments were stacked everywhere, and the curtains had been taken down and folded. The parlor looked strange stripped of all its familiar trappings, knickknacks, paintings, lace doilies, things that had been there for as long as the boy could remember. Without them, the parlor was suddenly a different place, alien and subtly perverse. Seeing the room like that made the boy sad in a way he had never been before. It was as if his life was being dismantled and packed away in musty cardboard boxes. Tomorrow they were going to Ohio to live, because his mother had family there, and after that he wouldn’t have a father anymore. The boy didn’t understand that part of it, because he knew his father was living in a house on Front Street, but his mother had told him that he didn’t have a father anymore, and somehow it must be true because he certainly wasn’t coming to Ohio with them.

The boy went upstairs and changed into his pajamas, but before going to bed he got up on a stool and peeked out of the high bedroom window. The clouds in the southern sky had thickened and darkened, and they were streaming toward him like two great out-thrust arms. Although the trees outside were still not stirring, the clouds were visibly moving closer, as though there were a wind blowing high in the sky that had not yet reached the earth.

One gritty, rain-filled morning Paul was roused from somnolent daze by a loud hammering at the apartment door. He swam up from the living-room couch bewildered by the sound. Automatically, he crossed to the door, and then stood shivering and bemused behind it, his fingertips touching the wood. More pounding. He snatched his hand away from the vibrating door-panel, hesitated, and then looked through the spyhole. He could see nothing outside but a hulking, shapeless figure standing too close to the lens.

“You in there?” came a muffled voice from the corridor.

Cautiously, Paul opened the door a crack and peeked out.

It was the landlord. Behind him were two men in work clothes, hung about with tools and loops of wire cable.

Paul could not think of anything to say to them.

“We come in,” the landlord said rapidly, without a question mark. “Gutter’s clogged up ona roof ana roof’s filling up with rain. Water’s coming down inta the apartment down t’otha end d’hall. See?” He pushed forward, shouldering the door wide. Paul backpedaling to get out of his way. “Cain’t reach it up ‘are but maybe wecun git through to t’sonuvabitch frumin y’apartment, right? Okayifwecumen,” he said in one breath, and without waiting for an answer he was inside, followed by the two plumbers. They pushed by Paul and went into the kitchen.

In a daze, Paul retreated to the living room.

They were stomping around inside the bathroom now. “There’s an airspace behind this bathroom wall here,” one of the plumbers was shouting. “See, it used t’be a window and somebody plastered it over. We knock a hole through the plaster, we can get out inta the airspace and get a pump extension up to that outside drain on this side, right?”

The other plumber came back with a sledgehammer and they began knocking the bathroom wall down. They dragged in cables and a spotlight, an electric drill, and a long hose-and-pump contraption that came up the stairs and snaked all the way through the apartment to the bathroom. Soon the air was full of dust and powdered plaster, the smell of wet ceramic-covered pipes and damp old wood. The spotlight dazzled like a sun in a box. Machines whined and pounded and snarled; people shouted messages back and forth. The pump thumped and thudded, and made a wheezing, rattling sound like an asthmatic gargling.

Paul hid from this chaos in the living room. Occasionally he would peek out through the living room archway, trembling, aghast, gathering a ragged bathrobe tighter around him at the neck. The workers ignored him, except for a curious sidelong glance every so often as they strode in or out of the apartment. Paul tried to keep out of their sight. He felt dirty and weak and unwholesome, like some wet pallid thing that had lived out its life under a rock, traumatically exposed to wind and sunlight and predators when the rock is rolled away.

At last, the workmen were finished, they gathered up their tools, rolled up their hoses and cables, and left. The landlord turned at the door and said, “Oh, I’ll send somebody around in a couple days t’fix up the hole in the wall, okay, buddy?”

He went out.

Hesitantly, Paul emerged from the living room. The kitchen floor was crisscrossed with wet dirty footprints, and there were little puddles of dirty water here and there. There was a large, ragged hole in the bathroom wall, with grey daylight showing through it. Plaster and bits of lathing had fallen down into the bathtub and the toilet, and formed an uneven heap on the bathroom floor. There was a strong musty smell, like wet wallpaper.

Paul shivered and quickly retreated to the living room again. The broken wall filled him with shame and horror and helpless outrage, as if he had been raped, as if some integral part of him had been shattered and violated. He shivered again. It was no longer safe here. The rock ceiling had been torn away from his cave; his nest had been shaken down from the tree by the storm. He sat down on the couch and found that he couldn’t stop shaking. Where did he have to go now? Where could he go in all the world to be safe?

The apartment was getting colder. He could hear the rain outside, dripping and mumbling past the hole in the wall.

Eventually the shakes stopped, and he could feel himself going numb. He would have given anything for a working radio, just to get some noise in the apartment other than his own spidery breathing, but he had gone through the last of his spare batteries weeks ago, and it had never occurred to him to have the landlord’s son bring him some in the next grocery order. Instead he sat in the semi-darkness as the evening grew old and listened to the distant sound of other radios and televisions in other apartments that came to him through the paper-thin walls: faint, scratchy, and tuned to the confusion of a dozen different stations so that nothing was ever quite clear enough to comprehend. They sounded like whispering Gödelized messages reaching him from starsystems millions of light-years away. Toward dawn the other radios were turned off one by one, leaving him at the bottom of a well of thick and dusty silence. He sat perfectly still. Occasionally the glow of car headlights from the street would sweep across the ceiling in oscillating waves. It was so quiet he could hear the scurry of a cockroach behind the burlap that covered the walls.

His mind was blank as slate. In spite of his enforced idleness, he was not doing any deep thinking or meditating or soul-searching, nor had he done any throughout the entire process. If any cogitation was taking place, it was happening on a deep, damaging level too remote and ancient to ever come under conscious review.

When he thought about it at all, he supposed that he must be having a breakdown. But that seemed much too harsh a word. “Breakdown,” “cracking-up,” “flying to pieces,” “losing your grip”—they were all such dramatic, violent words. None of them seemed appropriate to describe what was happening to him: a slackening, a loosening, a slow sliding away, an almost imperceptibly gradual relinquishment of the world. A very quiet thing. A fall into soot and silence.

Dawn was a dirty grey imminence behind drawn curtains.

Outside it was by now a cold and gritty early spring, but Paul never noticed. He never looked out any of the windows during all his months of seclusion, not even once, and he kept the curtains drawn at all times.

A needle-thin sliver of daylight came in through the crack in the curtains. Slow as a glacier, it lengthened out across the floor to touch the couch where Paul sat.

A toilet flushed on the floor above. After a moment or two, a water tap was turned on somewhere, and the water pipes knocked and rattled all the way down the length of the building. Footsteps going down the stairs outside Paul’s door. Voices calling back and forth in the stairwell. A child crying somewhere. The sound of a shower coming from the apartment down the hall. And then, on the floor below, the first radio of the day began to bellow.

One by one, then, over the next two hours, all the radios and televisions came on again, and there was the Gödelized babble of the previous night, although because people played their sets more loudly during the day, it now sounded like a thousand demon-possessed madmen shouting in tongues from deep inside metal rain barrels.

Still Paul did not move.

He sat motionless as marble on his couch while the living room curtains bled from grey-white to shadowblack again, and day once more dissolved into night. Twice during the day he had gotten up to go to the bathroom, and each time he had returned to the couch immediately afterward. He had eaten nothing, nor taken any drink. Except for the occasional motion of his eyes as he sat in the darkened room, he might have been a statue, or he might have been dead.

The night slowly decayed toward morning. Once there was a shot and a series of piercing screams somewhere outside in the street. Paul did not stir or turn his head. The sound of screaming police sirens came and went outside the building. Paul did not move.

The radios and televisions faded one by one. The last radio whispered on in Spanish far into the night, and then it, too, died.

Silence.

When dawn shone grey at the window once again, Paul got creakily to his feet. His eyes were strange. He had gone very far away from humanity in the last forty-eight hours. He no longer remembered his name. He was no longer sure where he was, what kind of a place he was in. It didn’t seem to matter—the apartment had become the world, the womb, the sum total of creation. The Continuum. It might as well have been Plato’s cave, where Paul sat watching shadows on the burlap walls. A biological pressure touched off the firing of a synapse somewhere inside Paul’s brain, and a deeply ingrained behavioral pattern took over. In response to that pattern, he shambled slowly toward the bathroom. His way led through the kitchen, which was still in deep darkness, as it was on the shadowed side of the building. Paul hesitated in the kitchen doorway, and a flicker of returning awareness and intelligence passed through him. He groped around for the light-switch, found it, and clicked it on. He squinted against the light.

Almost every surface in the kitchen was covered with cockroaches, thousands and thousands of them.

The sudden burst of light startled them and sent them into violent boiling motion. They came swarming up out of dirty cups and plates, up out of the sink, up out of overflowing garbage bags; they scuttled out across the kitchen table, across the floor, across the cabinet sideboard, across the stove. In an instant, the burlap walls were black and crawling with them as they scurried for their hidey-holes in the woodwork and the window moldings and the baseboards and the cabinets. Thousands of scuttling brownish-red insects, so many of them that their motion set up a slight chitinous whisper in the room.

Disgust struck Paul like a fist.

Shuddering, he sagged back weakly against the doorframe. Bile rose up in his throat, and he swallowed it. He reached out reflexively and shut off the light. The chitinous rustling continued in the darkness.

Still shivering, Paul went back into the living room. Here the dawn had imposed a kind of grey twilight, and there were only five or six cockroaches to be seen, scurrying across the floor with amazing rapidity. Paul shuddered again. His skin itched as though bugs were crawling over him, and he brushed his hands repeatedly down along his arms. He was reacting way out of proportion to this—he was reacting symbolically, archetypically. He had been sickened and disgusted by this on some deep, elemental level, and now there was something reverberating through him again and again like the tolling of a great soundless bell. He could sense that thoughts were rippling just under the conscious surface of his mind, like swift-darting fish, like a computer equation running—to what end he did not know. Without conscious motivation, he reached out and suddenly tapped the spacebar of his typewriter. More cockroaches boiled out of the typewriter mechanism, scuttling out from under the machine, crawling up from between the keys on the keyboard, crawling up from beneath the roller.

Paul shuddered convulsively from head to foot.

That’s it, he thought irrationally, that’s all.

You’re finished, he thought.

Suddenly he was unbelievably, unbearably, overwhelmingly tired. He staggered to his bed and fell down upon it. That great soundless bell was tolling again, beating through blood and bone and meat. His vision blurred until he was unable to clearly see the dawn-ghost of the ceiling. The bed seemed to be spinning in slow, slow circles. A cockroach scurried over his hand. He was too beaten-out physically to do anything other than twitch, but another enormous wave of disgust and loathing and rage and self-hate rolled through him and flooded every cell of his being. His eyes filled with weak tears. He grimaced at the ceiling like an animal in pain. His head lolled.

Sleep was like a long hard fall into very deep water.

As with every sentient creature, there was a part of Paul that never slept and that knew everything. Racial subconscious, organic computer, overmind, genetic memory, superconsciousness, immortal soul, call it what you will—it not only knew everything that had happened to Paul and to all the race of man, it also knew everything that might have happened: the web of possibilities in its entirety. Since there is really no such thing as time, it also knew everything that will and might happen to Paul and to everyone else, and what will and might happen to everyone who ever will (or might) be born in what we fatuously call “the future.” It is hopeless, of course, to try to talk about these matters in any kind of detail—our corporeal, conscious minds can not even begin to grasp the concepts involved, and the language is too inadequate to allow us to discuss them even if they could be understood. Suffice it to say that in Paul the superconsciousness-organic computer et cetera had always been much more accessible to him than is usually the case. And now that he had been partially freed from the bonds of ego by deprivation, exhaustion, starvation, fever, madness and hate, Paul’s dreaming mind was finally able to reach the superconsciousness and operate it to his own ends.

He ran the “memory” of the superconsciousness back until it had reached one of the key junctions and turning points of his life, and then had it sort through the billions of possible consequences arising out of that junction until it found the one possibility that would best facilitate the peculiar sentence of oblivion that Paul had mercilessly handed down upon himself in the High Court of his own soul. The one that Paul finally decided upon was probably the least likely and most bizarre of all the myriad possibilities stemming from that particular junction of his life—a number which is finite, but which is also enormous far beyond our range of conscious comprehension. It was a corner that had never been turned.

He went back. He turned that corner.

The boy woke to night and silences. He lay quietly on his back and stared at the shadowy ceiling, half-relieved, half-disappointed. It had been only another storm, after all. Just like Ma said, he thought. It must have passed and spent itself while he was sleeping. And tomorrow I’m going to Ohio.

But even as he was thinking this, the wind puffed up out of nowhere and slammed against the windows, rattling the glass in their frames. The boy could hear the wind scoop up the big metal garbage cans out front and send them rolling and clattering and clanging far down the street like giant dice. Suddenly there was a torrent of water slamming and rattling the window along with the wind, as if a high-pressure hose had been turned against the glass. The house groaned and shook.

The boy lay trembling with fear and delight. The storm hadn’t passed, after all! Maybe he had awakened during a lull, or maybe he hadn’t slept as long as he had thought and the storm was just beginning. The boy sat up eagerly in the bed.

As he did, the room filled with blinding blue-white light, so dazzling that it almost seemed to sear the retinas. A split-second later there was a buffeting, ear-splitting explosion. Then another blast of light, then another monstrous thunderclap, and so on in such fast and furious alternation that the boy couldn’t catch his breath for the shock of it. It was as if a heavy howitzer were firing salvos right outside his bedroom window. Another moment or two of this, the lightning certainly striking right outside the house, and then there came a silence that could only upon reflection be recognized as identical with the highest previous level of noise.

Joy! the boy thought. He was leaning dazedly back against the headboard, eyes wide. He hoped that he hadn’t made in his pants.

More thunder, not quite so overwhelmingly right-on-top-of-him any more. While it was still booming and rumbling, the bedroom door opened and his mother came in. She didn’t turn on his light, but she stood in the doorway where she herself was illuminated by the bulb in the hall. “Are you all right, baby?” she asked. Her voice sounded funny somehow.

“I’m okay, Mom.”

“Don’t let it scare you, Paulie,” she said. “It’s only a hurricane; it’ll be over soon.”

There was something funny about her voice. It had a strained, wild note to it. Tension under restraint.

“I’m not scared, Ma, I’m okay.”

“Try to get some sleep, then,” she said. And her face changed alarmingly, expressions melting and shifting across it faster than the boy could catch them. When she spoke again, her voice had gone gravelly and dropped in register, as though she was straining to keep it under control. “But if—” She started again. “But if you can’t sleep, then come downstairs and be with me for a while.” She stopped abruptly, whirled around and left. He could hear her footsteps clicking away down the hallway, fast and agitated.

The same funny thing had been in her face as well as her voice. Dimly, almost instinctually, the boy recognized what it was: it was fear.

She was the one who was afraid, in spite of her reassurances to him. His mother was afraid.

Why?

It was completely out of accord with her mood earlier that evening. Then she had been somewhat distracted, the way she always was lately—but that was somehow all tied up with him not having a father any more. She had been tense and snappish—but that was because she’d been packing all day. She hadn’t been afraid then. She’d been a little bit nervous about the approaching storm, but not afraid—mostly irritated by the thought of all the bother and nuisance it was going to cause her, maybe they wouldn’t be able to leave tomorrow if the weather was still bad. Why was she afraid now?

The boy got out of bed and padded across to the door. He opened it and slipped out into the upstairs hallway. A few feet down the hallway he stopped, head up, “sniffing the air.”

Something was very wrong.

He didn’t know what it was, he couldn’t identify it or put a name to it, but somehow everything was wrong.

Everything was the same, but it was somehow also completely different. He could smell it, the way he’d been able to smell the storm when it was behind the horizon. It was in the air itself, his mother, the house around him the most subtle and nearly imperceptible of differences. But the air, the house, his mother, they were not the same ones he’d had before.

It was as if he’d gone to sleep in one world and awakened in another. A world exactly the same except for being completely different.

The thought was too big for his mind, too complex for him to begin to appraise it. The whole concept slipped sideways in his head and then right on out of it, leaving him not even quite sure what it was he’d been struggling to comprehend a moment before. But it also left behind a legacy of oily panic. For the first time he began to become really afraid.

He crept stealthily to the head of the stairs and listened at the stairwell. He could hear his mother’s voice talking downstairs, and Mrs. Spinnato’s voice, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. With utmost caution, he went down four treads and crouched next to the railing. They had the radio or the television on down there, but between the wind and the thunder outside and the crackling frying-egg static on the set itself, it was almost impossible to hear what it was saying, either. The boy strained his ears. “. . . fall . . .” it said and the rest was swallowed by the wind. The boy went down another tread. “. . . falling . . .” it repeated.

The rest was garble and static-hiss, wind, more eggs frying, a thunderclap, and then it said “. . . roche . . .”

After another moment, his mother and Mrs. Spinnato came by the foot of the stairs, heading toward the kitchen. He froze, but neither woman looked up as she passed. Their voices came to him in snatches through the sound of the wind.

“. . . lieve it?” his mother was saying.

“. . . don’t know what . . . now . . . but if . .” said Mrs. Spinnato.

“. . . we do? . . . how . . .”

“. . . what can we . . . if it’s . . . that . . .”

“. . . pray, that’s . . .”

Unenlightened, the boy returned to his bedroom. The note of fear was in Mrs. Spinnato’s voice, too, and she was a powerful, strong-willed woman, ordinarily afraid of nothing.

The boy went to his window and stood looking out at the storm. It was raining hard. The trees were lashing violently back and forth as if they had gone mad with pain. Dislodged slate roofing and shingles were flying and swirling around in the air like confetti. The sky was a mad luminescent indigo, except when lightning turned it a searing white. Some power lines were already down, writhing and spitting blue sparks in the street, and trees were beginning to have their branches torn off. There was a sudden high-pitched tearing sound over his head, and something scraped heavily across the roof before it tumbled down into the yard. That was their television antenna being blown away. A moment later the light in the hall flickered and went out. All their lights were gone. He stood in the dark, looking out the window—excited, exalted, and terrified.

That was when the real storm front hit.

The boy sensed the blow coming, an irresistible onrush of fire-shot darkness, and instinctively dropped flat to the floor. The window exploded inward in a fountain of shattered glass. There was a series of flat explosions, and wood chips sprayed and geysered from the wall opposite the window, exactly as if someone was raking the room with a heavy-caliber machine gun. The boy would never know it, but the damage was being done by chestnuts from the horse-chestnut trees outside, stripped from their branches by a 150 m.p.h. gust and whipped into the room with all the shattering force of heavy-caliber bullets.

The wind struck again. This time the window-frame was splintered and pulverized, and the house itself screeched, rocked, and seemed to strain up toward the sky for a moment before it settled back down. A jagged crack shot the length of one wall. The boy hugged the floor while bits of plaster and lathing came down on his back.

He wasn’t even particularly afraid. What was happening was too huge and immediate and overwhelming to leave any room in his mind for fear. During a lull in the wind he could hear his mother and Mrs. Spinnato screaming downstairs. He himself was making a little dry panting noise that he wasn’t even aware of, ahnnn, ahnnn, ahnnn, like a winded animal.

The lull seemed as if it was going to last for a while. The boy tried to get to his feet and was knocked flat again by wind and water. He had forgotten that this was a “lull” only by comparison with the unbelievable gust that had struck a minute before. He pulled himself up again, hanging on to the shattered window frame and not lifting his head much higher than the window ledge. In a heartbeat he was drenched to the bone. If the rain had been hard before, it was now like a horizontal waterfall driving against the house. But by keeping his head close to the frame and squinting he found that he could see a little. He got his vision right just in time to see another tremendous gust destroy Mr. Leidy’s house, a gust that was fortunately blowing in a different direction. Fortunately for the boy anyway. Leidy’s place was built on a rise, denying it even the minimum shelter that the small hills to the southeast afforded the boy’s house. One moment the Leidy house was there, a solid three-story structure, and the next moment—in an eyeblink—it was gone, demolished, smashed to flinders, turned into a monstrous welter of flying debris that looked for all the world like a Gargantuan dust devil.

Somewhere on the other side of the house he could very faintly hear his mother calling desperately for him. Probably she was trying to make it up the stairs to his bedroom.

She didn’t make it, because at that moment, unbelievably, the earthquake struck.

At first the boy thought it was the wind again, but then the entire house began to rattle and buck and plunge, and there was a rumbling freight-train sound that was even louder than the storm. Terrified and helpless, the boy could do nothing but cling like a burr to the windowsill while the room around him bounced and jigged and staggered. Hairline cracks shot out across the walls and ceiling and floor, widened, spread. A section of the far wall suddenly slid away, leaving a ragged five-foot gap. The house whammed the ground once with finality, bounced again; and settled. The ground stopped moving. Nothing happened for perhaps a minute, and then the entire front half of the house collapsed. Plaster powder and brick dust were puffed from all the windows on the boy’s side of the house, like steam from a bellows. For a heartbeat the boy was coated with dust and powder from head to foot, and then the rain came rushing back in the window and washed him clean again.

Another lull, the most complete one yet, as though the universe had taken a deep, deep breath.

In that abrupt hush the boy could hear someone close at hand screaming and sobbing. He realized with surprise that it was himself. Almost casually, the portion of his mind not occupied with terror noticed a sudden rush of sea-water sweeping in—across the ground. Mrs. Spinnato’s house had been determinedly smoldering in spite of the rain but it went out in a hissing welter of steam when the wave inundated it. That first wave had been a fake, only waist-deep and made mostly of spume, but there were a whole series of other waves marching in behind it—storm waves, tsunami, maybe actual tidal waves, who knows? and some of them were pale horrors twelve, twenty, thirty feet high.

I’m stuck in it, said a voice in the boy’s head that was the boy’s voice and yet somehow not the boy’s voice. I can’t stop it. I can’t get out.

I didn’t know it would be like this, the voice said.

The universe let out that deep, deep breath.

The wind came back.

This time it gusted to 220 m.p.h. and it flattened everything.

It uprooted one of the huge, chestnut trees in the boy’s yard and hurled it like a giant’s javelin right at the window where the boy was crouching.

The boy had a timeless moment to himself before the tree smashed him into pulp, and he used it to wonder what it would have been like to live in Ohio.

The boy had a timeless moment to himself before the tree smashed him into pulp, and he used it to wonder why he was thinking of feathers and soot.

The boy had a timeless moment to himself before the tree smashed him into pulp, and he used it to wonder who the man was who was crying inside his head.

The Last Day of July

Introduction to The Last Day of July

Up front, let me admit that I don’t know what “The Last Day of July” means. I have a good idea what happens in the story because it unfolds, episode by disquieting episode, in linear sequence. Yes, subtle references to John the protagonist’s past or to the historical provenance of the tale bubble up briefly. But these strike me as time-tested rather than avant-garde devices, and Dozois never purposely muddles the description or the tenor of an event to throw the reader off stride. Mystery inheres in “The Last Day of July” not because the author dazzles or obfuscates, but because the meaning of John’s metamorphosis—from a wounded human being into a living seed for a brand-new continuum—defies rational explanation. It slips through the gears of one’s cogitating mind like an undiscovered isotope of quicksilver.

This metaphor may seem to imply a criticism. I don’t intend it to. Among other things, “The Last Day of July” has to do with boundaries, and with fruitfully trespassing them—with coming out of the forests of impotence and destruction onto the shore of a dolphin-engendering sea. It frames a whole pageant of life-affirming allegories, from the breaking up of writer’s block, to the triumph of peace over world war, to the cyclical coming of spring, to the mystery of resurrection. It opens itself out to all these readings, but limits itself to none of them.

I like “The Last Day of July,” in fact, precisely because you cannot read it as you would a mere anecdote or news article. Even more surprising, you cannot even read it as you would a parable by Jorge Luis Borges, for Borges generally explains himself—even if his explanations stun us with their erudition and complexity. Here, on the other hand, Dozois’ storytelling leaves us gasping after meaning, catching a gulp or two of restorative oxygen, and breathing an entire otherworldly atmosphere, checking to see if our lungs have withered and the surface of our skin changed miraculously into an organ of aeration. I like “The Last Day of July,” in short, because you have to pay close attention. You must think about the implications of its events.

The first time I read “The Last Day of July” I paid less attention than I should. I registered the quality of the writing, the accuracy of the author’s eye (“A rubber duck next to the wagon, dead, eaten away by weather, the side of its face distorted as if by acid”), and the magisterial progress of the narrative. I felt the menace in its paragraphs, the dread in John’s self-image and outlook, and the disorienting weirdness of the change about to befall him. (When, near story’s end, John walks downstairs, Dozois describes this walk as “like wading through hardening glue, and with every step the glue gets deeper and stiffer. [John] holds very tightly to one proper thought, because he knows now what happens to people-seeds who are caught too tightly by the world . . .”) Initially, though, I failed to grasp the historical setting, the nature of John’s impending change, and even the story’s legitimacy as science fiction.

Pay attention. Note that John thinks once of “swing” music and that the groceryman whom he finds so annoying speaks of Edvard Beneš who resigned as president of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Also, John has firsthand experience of the London blitz, as well as scary premonitions of both Boston and New York City “fused into molten glass by some new atrocity of man.” Think about “The Last Day of July” as a psychological case study, yes, but remain open as well to its mind-blowing operation as a tale of both personal and societal transformation. Think Poe, Kafka, and even H. P. Lovecraft (“a lactescent, nacrid light,” “The labored, ugly beating of a monstrous heart”). But understand, too, that in this still early story, Gardner Dozois continued forging his own inimitable voice and identity, and that the heat from his forge fired the imaginations of many of his contemporaries, mine among them.

Michael Bishop

The Last Day of July

He can feel them in the air around him, swimming through the walls, the ceiling, the floor, always just out of sight. What they are he doesn’t know, but they are there. Sometimes he can almost see them out of the corner of his eye—a motion, a flickering, a presence: a glow behind him, as if someone had just turned up an oil lantern. And yet there is no light. When he turns to look, nothing is there, everything is still—but with that subliminal sense of stirred air, as if something has just passed, as if something has flowed aside into the wall an instant faster than he can turn his head. He tries to catch them, spinning violently, rounding on his heel. But always finds the room empty, the same peering windows, the same hunched shapes of furniture. And the tension will grow, redoubled, at his back: the air watchful, watching, an imminence never quite defined—until he whirls again. Nothing. Empty. The table, the piles of papers and books, the chairs, the tall china cabinet. And then he will feel eyes re-form behind him.

When John comes into the house with the second suitcase, daylight has already begun to die. All at once, everything is flatter, duller—not darker, but just less vivid, as though a grey film of oil has been pulled between the sun and the earth. The house, the surrounding forest, all suddenly seem two-dimensional: the house a stage set, the forest wall a backdrop. There are no sharp edges, no highlights, no reticulations. The large rain puddle in the elbow of the encircling dirt road is a solid gunmetal oval—no reflections, no ripples; it seems that you could pry it up in one piece and stack it against a wall. The air itself is heavy, somehow sodden without being wet, without the slightest trace of moisture. The branches of the trees hang close to the ground, as though pregnant with rain: they are dry to the touch, sterile, almost like stone. There are no birds.

The man from the agency honks, backs the car, and turns it around so that it points back toward the access road to the highway. John pauses on the threshold of the back porch, sets down the suitcase, and nods in thanks for the ride from the train station. Already he has forgotten the ride, except as a confusion of sensation: noise, movement, alternating explosions of light and shadow, unfocused objects flowing by the windshield, pirouetting, tumbling, expanding and contracting in obedience to an unknown rhythm. He does not know where he is, does not know where the house is in relation to anything else in the vicinity, does not know what county he is in, is not even sure of the state. He has been informed of these things, but he has forgotten. He never really listened.

The agency man puts his car in gear; the back wheels spin in mud, then bite gravel. The car accelerates, swerves by the house onto the access road that leads to the blacktop secondary road that merges at last into the state highway. It disappears, taillights bobbing. In the perspectiveless, colorless perception imposed by that dusk, it does not seem to dwindle normally into distance. Rather, it vanishes, abruptly, as if it has been absorbed tracelessly by some universal solvent, as if it has passed into another reality. John listens for the sound of a retreating engine. There is none. Balancing the suitcase against his foot, he watches the last light drain from behind a stand of silver birches: a visual dopplering; mushroom shadows sprout up and lengthen across to form a hedge of darkness in which the birches gleam faintly—bones. Then he goes inside.

The enclosed porch opens onto the kitchen. He can make out a sink and stove to his right, a dining table to the left, shelves and counters facing. The living room beyond is lost in shadow. The deep grey half-light makes him strain his eyes; objects seem to hang suspended in light as in a fluid, kept recognizable only by an intense, squinting focus—they threaten to slip out of resolution into formlessness, a primitive amorphism in which they are not bound by human preconceptions as to their shape and nature. Faced with this rebellion, he gropes for a wall switch, finds it, flips it up.

New shadows snap across the room, click into their accustomed places under chairs, along the edges of the tables, the counters, the shelves, in the angle of the sink and stove. Positive and negative space define order, etching each other’s borders; between them they shape the room, sculpting it out of light and shadow, overt and implied. Pinning it down. He begins to breathe more easily. John sets the suitcase down beside its mate and moves into the center of the room. A mirror over the shelves gives him his reflection: pale, high forehead, drawn. He ignores it, uneasily avoiding the reflection’s eyes. His friend’s things are still here: he can see soiled plates stacked in the sink basin, frying pans and pots on the drainboard, a waffle iron, a cigarette-rolling machine. Reassured, he moves forward into the living room, turning on lights as he goes.

The living room is a large, L-shaped chamber, taking up most of the ground floor. The shorter end of the L has been used as a writing room. It contains two mahogany tables, still paper stacked; a massive, dust-covered typewriter; bound files lined up on the window ledge, flanked by ceramic pots containing withered ivy; a tall china cabinet that faces in toward the long bar of the L. The two sections are divided by a high, open archway. The long section of the L contains a couch, a settee, an end table, an overstuffed chair. The stairway leading to the second floor is at the far end. Set in the facing wall—between two glassed-in doors leading to the veranda—is a stone fireplace, filled with charred wood scraps and ashes. Books glint on the mantelpiece over the fireplace: heavy, leatherbound, oiled volumes. He steps forward into the room, unconsciously wary, turning his head from side to side. He stops, sniffing the dead air. The air is musty and tomb-dry, as if it has not been breathed for a hundred years. He takes another step, and dust puffs from the living-room carpet under his feet. The dust swirls avidly up to meet him, dancing fiercely and joyously in the middle of the air. The backlighting throws his long, spindly shadow ahead, across the carpet, the andirons, the ashes, up the wall of the fireplace to the mantel, into the dust and silence of the empty house.

Later that evening, while unpacking his suitcases and arranging his belongings—mostly clothes—in the bedroom, John is submerged in a silence so deep and profound that it seems to manifest itself as a low hum, a steady buzz felt with the back of the teeth rather than heard. There are none of the settling of floorboards or knocking of waterpipes expected in a house this old, and the absolute quiet is disturbing. He finds himself wishing for a radio or a phonograph, anything to keep his ear from straining constantly in anticipation of sounds that never come. He would even welcome a barrage of that tinny “swing” music that always sounds as if it is being played underwater a million miles away, or one of those endless, dully foreboding commentaries on the danger of American involvement in Europe. At least they would be company, and their taste of the mundane and the absurd oddly comforting when balanced against the alien perfection of complete silence. The human voices would remind him that life is still going on in the ticking world, that he is not, as it feels, suspended in a limbo between creations: a tiny detail from an obsolete continuum that has been overlooked and not yet swept into the melt for the new.

As he is closing the lid on the last empty suitcase and putting it into the closet to store, he thinks he hears a noise downstairs: the slamming of a door, and rapid, heavy footsteps—passing underneath, headed into the living room. The noise is so clear and loud after the hush of the past hours—and such a sudden, unexpected answer to his strained listening—that he starts, and knocks over his bag. Leaving it, he goes out the door and down the corridor toward the stairwell, puzzlement changing to an unreasonable, unexplainable fear as he goes, metamorphosing more completely with every step. His heart thumps against his chest, like a fist from inside. Slowly, he goes down the stairs into the living room, not understanding who such a late visitor could be—the man from the agency perhaps?—and not understanding why he is afraid.

No one is there.

John stands for a moment at the foot of the stairs—one hand on the railing, head tilted and then walks through the living room and the writing room to the kitchen, stepping with the exaggerated caution of one who expects a viper to strike from concealment. There is no one in the house. Bewildered, he returns to the living room.

As he nears the fireplace, he hears the footsteps again—this time they are upstairs, just as loud, just as distinct. They pass overhead as he listens. There is an unpleasant rasping quality to them now, as if the feet are too heavy to lift and must be scraped along the floor. Clearly there is someone upstairs, but no one has passed him in his sortie into the kitchen, and there is only one stairwell leading to the second floor. He feels the short hairs bristle on the back of his neck and along his arms. He forces himself to go upstairs, pausing after every other tread to listen, telling himself that at worst it is only a tramp looking for something to steal. But there is no one upstairs either. Although he searches the entire second floor—closets, linen cabinets, the bathroom—and even, with the help of a chair and a flashlight, peers into the crawlspace between the ceiling and the roof, he can find no one, nothing, and no way for anyone to have avoided him.

That night he sleeps uneasily, feverishly, fighting his bed-clothes as if they are snakes. In the morning, he cannot remember his dreams.

The next day is hot and clear, and John decides to go outside. He wants to look over some of his old notes, to see if he can assemble something workable out of the shambles of his career, and it would be pleasant to read on the lawn. He stands in the doorway of the porch, blinking against the furnace glare of the sunlight, smelling heat and raw earth. Suddenly he is reluctant to leave the shelter of the house. At some point in the morning, John has stopped thinking of the house as desolate and menacing, and has begun to consider it comfortable and peaceful, its cool, restful half-light infinitely preferable to the hot welter out of doors. He is not aware of the change in his thinking. Almost he turns to go back into the kitchen, but he reminds himself irritably that he is here for his health, after all. He finds the idea of sunning himself distasteful, but he has been told pointedly that it is healthy to “take the sun,” so take it he will. He steps over the threshold. Warm air swallows him, a golden pear sliding over his skin. His nostrils are flared by the strong resin smell of grass. His eyes dilate. Blinded, he stumbles down the porch stairs to the flagstone path.

Blinking and squinting, John moves away from the house. His shoes click on flagstone, then swish through grass as he strays from the path. The grass whispers around his legs, caressing his ankles, rasping abrasively against the material of his trousers. His vision returns slowly, and as it does, he feels the earth roll majestically under his feet in a long sea swell, like a giant’s shoulder shrugging uneasily in sleep. The sky is a brilliant blue. He can sense the house behind him, the top half rising up and over him, a cresting wave about to topple. Now it is the house that is distasteful—again it seems brooding, mournful, unwholesomely confining. This time he is aware of his change of attitude, and dimly puzzled by it.

John plows across the lawn, leaving a flattened wake behind him, like a boat. There is a toy wagon on its side, rusted almost solid, a few flecks of red paint still showing; it is tied down firmly by grass, a robot Gulliver. John nudges it with his toe, and a wheel spins a tired protest in a shrill voice of rust. A rubber duck next to the wagon, dead, eaten away by weather, the side of its face distorted as if by acid. The shadow of the house lies across the lawn here, and it is cooler and less murmurous. John’s fingers work uneasily on the buttons of his shirt. He turns and walks at an angle to his previous path, the house roof seeming to describe a backwards arc against the sky as he watches, until the sun pops into view again above the roof peak, a hot copper penny squeezed from between an invisible thumb and finger. Its heat makes his bare arms tingle pleasantly, and he blinks again, almost drowsy.

There was a garden here once, by the rear of the house. He steps into a ring of faded white stones, careful not to wrench his ankle, as the ground inside the circle is a little lower. At the far end of the ring is a chinaberry tree, a white oak, a few silver birches. He touches one of the birches: it feels like coral, sharp, unfriendly, dead—stratified. Startled, he snatches his hand away. He had not expected that type of texture, it is not congruous with the texture of the bark that he can see with his eyes. It should not feel that way. A sun-dog winks at him from an upstairs window, under the eaves. Uneasy again, John walks on until he comes to the dirt access road that circles the house. He scuffles the toe of his shoe in the dust, as though testing some earthen tide. He is reluctant to cross the road. Somehow, it is a boundary.

He can feel the house behind him. Without turning his head, he can see it: the high peak of the roof, the windows like eyes, the door like a gaping mouth—growing up out of the earth and shrouded in its turn with rank growth. A troll, with dogwood in its hair and rhododendron in its beard. Very old, very strong, patient as mud.

Irritated by this nonsense, John strides back toward the house. He has come here to recover from irrational fancies; he does not need new ones. He spends an hour or so making a mental list of the household repairs he will have to accomplish, rummaging around to find the proper tools, and dragging an extension ladder up from the dank, low-ceilinged basement. Then he discovers that his energy has leaked away, absorbed by the morning as by a blotter. In spite of his effort to keep his mind on practical things, he is again awash with jittery, contradictory emotion that makes the thought of attempting repairs intolerable. He will read his notes then after all, he decides grimly. He will not be defeated by the day.

John wades to the center of the lawn with his notebook, and sits down determinedly, in the sun. Sitting, the grass comes up above his waist, and he has the illusion that he has just lowered himself into a tub of sun-warmed green water. For the first time, he notices how overgrown the grounds actually are. Weeds and wildflowers have sprung up and proliferated everywhere, and John is submerged in an ocean of growth. He finds this a sensation both terrifying and dizzyingly exultant, and, sitting in this breathing tabernacle, this beating green heart, John feels oddly ashamed.

Uncertainly, John takes off his shirt, and lets the sun bake his back. He moves uncomfortably, uncrossing and refolding his legs, lifting the binder from his lap and placing it in the grass before him. He is painfully aware of the unhealthy pallor of his skin, and he begins thinking, in a disjointed fashion, of sickness, of enclosure: of decay embodied in the image of a wax flower yellowing with age—death so gradual, so subtle and imperceptible that it is not so much a transition between states as an intensifying of a long-existing condition, and even the soul involved may be unable to tell when life ended and death began, or if it yet has, or even if there is any difference between the two. He stretches an arm out along the grass, fish-belly white against new green, and has to reassure himself that he can still feel the blood throbbing in his neck, at the temples, in the wrists; that he still breathes, that he has not forgotten to live.

Birches sigh and toss overhead, and he looks up. The perfection of the weather is somehow alien, even more so than the grey, distorting twilight that had greeted him upon his arrival. Everything within the limits of his vision is endowed with an excessive clarity. There is a feeling of craft behind each incidence of light, the fall of every shadow, the position of the smallest rock: as if the world was some fantastic simulacrum—three-dimensional and discernible by all the senses—painted over another and more complex reality.

This thought disturbs him greatly, and he looks down again. He is suddenly afraid that if he continues to watch he may see the world waver and go out like an abruptly extinguished candleflame, and that beyond the guttering of the universal ember he will see—something else. What that something else, that other thing, may be he does not know. He is afraid of that moment of clear sight.

Silly, he thinks. Naive and juvenile, as have been all his moods and preoccupations since coming to this country house. He can imagine the scorn of his intellectual friends in London and Boston, the curiously similar—although differently motivated—contempt of his stolid, cannery-owning father, the needle-sharp disdain of his former fiancée, tough-minded, intensely practical Marilyn. But he cannot control the swing and scurry of his emotions. Like nervous fish, they dart where they will, unpredictably, and he cannot stop them.

To distract himself, John opens his notebook, selects a page, flattens it out with his hand. He bends close over the page, feeling the sun like a heel on the top of his head. But, to his dismay, he discovers that he cannot read. The ability is gone, wiped away as if it had never existed. There is a year’s worth of work in the notebook, the only remains of his once-promising career, and he cannot read it. He can admire the words as objects, but he cannot decipher them. The shadows of the tall grass can be seen on the lined paper—one scheme of order imposed over another—and he watches them instead, in bemused fascination. The calligraphy of the shadows is exquisite: they look like actual brush strokes on the page, clean-bordered black lines. The sun also casts the silhouette of an insect onto the page—a shadow spider crawling along a blade of shadow grass, a reflection of some negative and polar universe. He lifts his gaze slightly to locate the real spider, and then manages to watch both it and its doppelganger at once: the real spider crawling up the grass blade and away from him, while the shadow spider crawls down the page toward him, simultaneously. An insect in the grass, the earth spinning in space—both mated by shadow. He tries to touch the silhouettes of grass and spider. He cannot—there is nothing but the feel of paper under his fingers, and the shadow spider now clambers distortedly over his knuckles. Neither can he feel the ink that forms the words on the page, though he knows that it, too, is there.

As he watches, a word pulls itself up out of the paper, and scurries away.

There is a moment of vertigo, and then he realizes that it is a beetle that has been resting quietly on the page and has been disturbed by the movement of his hand: he has mistaken it for an ink-blotted word. Not reassured, he eyes the remaining script with a new suspicion, half suspecting that it intends a mass rebellion and exodus. His stomach churns with nausea: fear of that breath of wind that will extinguish the world, dread that he may have just seen things swim and shiver in a premonitory eddy.

John puts the binder down and slowly gets to his feet. He sways, drained of all strength. The impressions of the afternoon are beyond his ability to analyze or interpret. They call up only a welter of ambiguous and contradictory emotion. He hurries to the house, following the flagstone path, thinking only of rest and sanctuary, hoping he will not fall. He has gained the shelter of the back porch before he realizes that he has left his notebook behind, on the lawn.

He does not go back for it.

That evening he is assaulted by sound. As soon as the sun has disappeared completely behind the horizon and darkness is absolute, the noises begin—all at once, already at full volume, as if they have been turned on by a switch: the chirruping of crickets and the strident peeping of tree frogs, the soughing of the wind and the tossing and scratching of tree branches against the walls, at the windows. They are all normal, expected sounds, but tonight they seem horrescently, unbelievably loud: a wailing, baying, screaming cacophony. Even the boards under his feet cry out, moaning like lepers, groaning and shrieking with every step. “Settling”—so he tells himself, and even he is not sure whether he intends irony.

A heavy branch begins to pound against the side of the house, setting up a giant, rattling reverberation that makes him think of the parable of the bridge and the soldiers marching in step. He feels embattled against the noises, menaced by them—they seem alive, directed by malice: certainly they are probing and slamming against the walls in search of a weak spot, trying to find a way in, to get at him. The clamor is as solid as a hedge—he can visualize it surrounding the house, curling in a cap over the roof, pressing tightly against the windows, waiting for a pinprick hole, waiting to fill the vacuum.

Window glass buzzes and vibrates behind his head; he will not turn around to look. He has been sitting in the writing room, at one of the mahogany tables, trying to compose a letter to his friend in Boston, the friend who has lent him the use of this house during his prolonged “vacation” away from the city. His recovery, he thinks, not believing that either. He puts down his pen, crumples the piece of paper he has been writing on and throws it away. The trash receptacle, and the area surrounding it, are littered with similar balls of discarded paper. He knows that he should write a letter to his friend, indeed that he is obligated to: to reassure the friend that he has arrived safely, that all is “well,” to assuage, however insincerely, any fears the friend might have as to John’s mental and physical well-being. At very least a note to the friend and the friend’s wife, congratulating them on the new child. But he cannot write the letter. On all the discarded pieces of paper he has managed to write no more than the formal, salutatory heading.

Disgruntled, John gets up and goes into the kitchen. The wind follows him from window to window, rattling the panes. For the first time since his arrival, he opens the liquor cabinet. He finds a dusty bottle of Hennessy cognac at the back of the shelf, breaks the seal, and pours himself a large drink, in a water glass. Holding the glass in one hand, the bottle in the other, he returns through the writing room to the living room. He stands before the fireplace for a long time, listening to the unnatural howl and clatter outside, the crickets that sound as loud as barrages from siege-guns. Then he sips his drink, wincing at its harsh savor. He puts the bottle down on the mantelpiece and selects one of the leather-bound volumes from the shelf, opening it at random. The words crawl across the page, cryptic and indecipherable—they are totally alien. He is even beginning to forget what they are for; he can remember that there is a purpose behind them, but he is no longer sure exactly what the purpose is, or why he should remember it. He puts the book back sadly, as if he is packing away a world. He knows that he will never open another one. He takes a deeper drink, lowering the level of the glass by half an inch. He carries the glass and the bottle upstairs with him to his room, closing himself inside again. This time he leaves the lights blazing on the floor below. They remain on all night.

The following morning is grey and wet—a thick ground mist encircling the house, the birches dimly visible behind it, like ghost ships through fog. Somewhere behind the mist is the sound of a light rain. John stands in the kitchen, waiting for a pot of coffee to perk, listening to the unseen rain, watching moisture bead on a half-opened window, on the dusty webbing of the screen. The sound of the rain is a low, melancholy murmur, like water mumbling down the mossy sides of an ancient well. The sound makes him unexpectedly sad. He pulls his robe tighter around him, gathering it at the collar. The wind through the open window is chill and damp, smelling somehow of the ocean—of salt flats and tides and depths—although he is hundreds of miles from the shore. It almost seems that he can hear patient waves slap against the side of the house, behind the mist, behind the morning. If the mist should burn away now, he knows that he would see a shining, placid sheet of ocean stretching endlessly away on all sides of the house, over the foundered hills and fields, the branches of trees waving above the surface like the dead and beckoning arms of the drowned.

He shivers, and lights the gas oven for warmth: the sharp, sudden hiss of the gas jet, the rasp of the kitchen match, the solid thunking whoosh as the jet ignites. The blue glow washes back over his face, smoothing out the deep hollows of his cheeks, striking reflections from his eyes, painting unknown cabalistic symbols across his forehead in light. He shakes the match and throws it away. He stands before the open oven door for a while, rubbing his hands, flexing his fingers. The room is filled with the pungent, strangely pleasant smell of escaped gas, and with the hiss of the burning jet.

The coffee perks, and John sits down at the table. He cannot eat—the very thought is repugnant. He drinks a cup of coffee, and then another. That at least is still permitted. Steam rises from the coffee, and through it he watches sodden azalea branches tap against the windowpane, drip tears across the glass. He will not yield to the impulse to pace. That is a nervous habit. He drinks coffee with grim determination, raising and lowering the cup mechanically. His feet shuffle uneasily under the table. He has been too isolated, he tells himself. That is why he is so high-strung and distracted. He has always been so proud of his devotion to his Art, his detachment, the degree to which he has been able to dissociate himself from the mundane concerns of everyday existence. His Art—he even thinks of it that way, capitalized, deified. Now he is starting to regard his poses and pretensions with aversion. They are contrived, artificial, jejune. He will make an effort to rejoin the mainstream of humanity, he will mingle with people again. Hike into town, get to know the citizenry, make friends. Maybe get invited to someone’s house for dinner, and return the favor later—it would be good to hear a voice in the house other than his own. He will get back into the swim of life, he tells himself, smiling at the trite phrase. But it is applicable and appropriate, nevertheless. He drinks more coffee. After an hour, most of the mist has boiled away, revealing the road, the further stand of birches, a grey and lowering sky. There is no ocean. He wonders if he really expected there to be one.

About noon, the grocer’s route man pulls up before the back porch in a small panel truck. The rain is coming down now in steady pounding sheets—not quite a cloudburst, but a hard fall. The noise is like distant gunfire. The dirt road has turned to mud: the truck wheels spatter it, leaving great ruts in the road. John stares, fascinated, holding his cup suspended in the air. He has been taken by surprise by the intrusion, although now he dimly remembers the agency man telling him that he’d send the grocer around in a few days. He sets the cup down precisely on a coffee ring, with a click. The groceryman wiggles out of the cab, jumps down into the mud, and runs for the porch, brandishing his arms over his head as if to keep off rabid bats or bees. Certainly he does not keep off the rain: he is wet and stomping by the time he reaches the porch.

John gets up from the table to let the groceryman inside. The groceryman greets him with a nod, and a caustic remark about the weather: his clothes steam, rain drips from his faded parka. John offers the groceryman coffee; the groceryman thanks him, takes off his wet parka, drapes it across a radiator and settles down familiarly at the table. John gets him coffee, automatically drawing one for himself, and sits down at the other end of the table. Bemused, he stares surreptitiously at the groceryman. It has been only four days, and already he has forgotten what another human being looks like. The groceryman’s face, his voice, his pattern of gestures and mannerisms, all are radically different from John’s, from what he has become accustomed to thinking of, in such a short time, as an absolute standard, as the only aspect possible for these attributes. He is startled and shaken by the individuality of the groceryman, and somewhat repulsed—as if he was someone who, while exploring a distant wilderness, has suddenly come upon an unknown, unsuspected, and not altogether wholesome species of animal.

The groceryman is voluble, shrewd in a wry Yankee fashion, and apparently not indisposed by the necessity of keeping up both ends of the conversation at once. He rambles on, expansively and with studied quaintness, about trivial matters of the town and the country, about the spell of bad weather that year, the real estate scandals, and then—with a sly glance at John to see if his worldly sophistication is being appreciated—widens out his talk to include the recent abdication of President Beneš of Czechoslovakia, and the lynching of a German immigrant up in Scranton. Obviously he considers himself something of a raconteur, and is proud of the knowledgability he manages to maintain here in the back country. John lets the groceryman talk—he is being made increasingly uneasy by the grating and annoying—to him—sound of the groceryman’s voice, and by the obscure feeling that he should somehow respond to the overture of friendship being made by the other man, and by the numbing realization that he cannot. So he says nothing, and pointedly does not offer to refill the groceryman’s cup when the coffee is gone. The groceryman takes the hint; his face suddenly sets itself up as cold and hard as weathered granite.

Looking rebuffed and disgruntled, the groceryman runs out to his truck and brings in the carton of groceries ordered by the agency man for John. Formally, he asks John if he would like to add anything to next week’s order. John names a few items for the groceryman, out of politeness and to cover the embarrassment of the moment. The groceryman nods, thanks him coldly for the coffee, and leaves.

John sits at the table a moment longer, shaking his head grimly and ruefully. So much for the “mainstream of humanity,” so much for the “swim of life.” He has been sunk and drowned in a remarkable short time. One should really know how to swim, he tells himself, before one jumps into the river. He pushes the empty cup aside angrily and stands up. He should have known better. He has been a recluse too long. He has gone too far away from the world, and now it is no longer possible to find the way back. Nor is the world necessarily inclined to let him in, even if he knocks. He reaches the window in time to see the grocery truck drive away. He is filled with an odd sense of loss, and a stranger sense of relief. He is alone in the house again.

He makes a drink of brandy and moves to the rear window of the kitchen. He stands there for a long time, looking out over the lawn.

Outside, pounded by the rain, his discarded notebook has begun to turn into a lump of wet paper.

The weather worsens that evening. A storm rolls down from the mountains like a dark, fire-shot wave and breaks against the house with incredible fury. The rain is like a hose turned directly against the windows; the glass rattles and trembles in the frames with the force of it. Through the rivers of rain he can see the trees waving their branches, swaying and tossing and flailing horribly, like souls in agony, like demented armies of the night. Fire leapfrogs monstrously on the horizon, and the sky, when he can see it, is a lurid, luminescent indigo, torn across by intricate traceries of lightning and churned into froth by the beating arms of the trees. But there is no sound. He cannot hear the rain, he cannot hear the wind. When lightning turns the sky a searing blue-white, he can feel the house groan and reverberate around him as to a nearby buffeting explosion, but he cannot hear the thunder. He knows it must be there, the storm is right on top of him, lightning striking all around—but there is no sound. For a moment, he thinks that he has gone deaf, but he can hear his voice when he speaks aloud, he can hear the ring of a tapped fingernail against his brandy glass, he can hear sounds that he makes. But he cannot hear the storm. It is as if the storm is a phenomenon occurring inside the windowpane itself, a molecule-thin tempest, and someone has forgotten to turn the volume up. He wonders, desultorily, what would happen if he opened the window. Would the storm slide up into the molding with the pane, leaving only a quiet, cricket-filled country night beyond?

He does not open the window.

Things become vague for John, and he wanders around the house for an indeterminate period of time. At one point, he becomes gradually aware that he is sitting in the kitchen. It is daylight. There is a shaft of murky sunshine stabbing against one wall, and he can dimly remember watching it move glacier-slow across the room with the morning. He can remember little else. He knows that he has been on a monumental drunk, the first one in years. He feels shaky and stretched very thin, but he has no hangover. He is still wearing the clothes he put on the morning of the groceryman’s visit, and they are filthy, stiff and glossy with caked grime and dried sweat. Gingerly, he feels his chin; there is a thick growth of stubbly beard there. Three days? More? Has he bothered to eat? His fingernails are black with dirt.

Feeling a spasm of distaste, he goes upstairs to wash and change. It takes a long time; he is easily distracted, and he keeps forgetting what he is about. He has to fix what he is supposed to be doing very firmly in his mind, so that he can refer back to it when he forgets, finding the word wash, not understanding it, but, as memory trickles back in, slowly attaching a societal function to it. In this way the world is won. The water wakes him up a little bit, but he still finds it difficult to think. It doesn’t seem important.

He returns downstairs, washed and dressed. He knows that at this point he should wonder what to do next, although he does not so wonder, and emotionally has no desire to do anything. Nevertheless, he tackles it as an intellectual exercise. He finds it engraved in his mind that he should go outside, so he sets out to do so. It is a battle—twice he finds himself wandering aimlessly in some other part of the house, twice he consults his standing orders and heads back toward the door. The third time, he makes it outside. It is a quiet, overcast day, oppressively humid. He looks sadly at the pile of tools he has left on the stoop, consigned to rust, and at the ladder propped against the side of the house. The repairs will never be accomplished, he knows that now. He meanders across the lawn, sometimes stopping and standing mindlessly for long intervals, then remembering and moving on. He makes it onto the access road. It is another battle to continue walking, but the road helps him remember and keeps him from wandering off the track. At last, the aspen grove closes over his head, and the house is gone.

It is much cooler and less humid here, and there is a brisk, pleasant breeze. John’s mind begins to clear almost at once. The twinge of distaste he had felt returns as an overwhelming surge of revulsion. The realization that he has spent days wandering inside the house in a torpid, mindless stupor is disgusting. And in retrospect, it is terrifying. He would like to be able to blame it on the drink, but he knows that he cannot—the drink was an effect, not a cause.

The house is haunted, he tells himself, abruptly surrendering skepticism to an odd relief. It is a problem that can be dealt with—he will hold a séance, get an exorcist, follow whatever prescribed procedures there are for such a circumstance. If necessary, he will move and concede the house to the ghosts. But he is forced to realize, almost immediately, that he is deluding himself—that cannot be the answer. His friend and the friend’s wife have lived in the house for years; they raised their little boy there, and they moved not out of choice, but because of the necessity of business. They were not chased out by supernatural horror; they loved the house, and regretted leaving enough to hold onto the title of the land in case a change in fortune would someday enable them to return. It seems unlikely that the house can have become haunted and sinister during the brief interregnum between their occupancy and his.

No, the house is not haunted. It is he, John, who is haunted.

He has been walking for fifteen minutes now, and he has not yet come to the blacktop secondary road. That is impossible. The access road is only a hundred yards long at the very most, with no branches or turnoffs, and the grove it transfixes is a small one. Nevertheless, he is still in the forest, and he can see no sign of anything but leagues of trees in any direction he looks. He has not been walking in a daze; his keyed-up mood has kept him alert, and he has noted every step of the way. He has not passed the blacktop without noticing it, and he has not strayed off the path. The path just does not go to the blacktop road anymore. Apparently, it now leads somewhere else entirely. In his abstracted mood, he almost does not find this remarkable.

Strangeness has always followed John like some patient, indefatigable hunter: unhurried, at his heels, waiting for him to stop. Sometimes he has been able to hold it at bay for months, even for years—with school, with the routine of business, with the regimen imposed by his art. With constant, distracting motion. But eventually he will stop, and it catches him. And when it does, he begins to sink right out of the world.

The pose of the introspective artist had served him well for quite a while—he had been able to use the accepted, cultured “sensitivity” of the role to mask the raw, unpalatable sensitivity beneath, from the world and from himself. Until, in London, the layers of protective callus had been gradually sloughed away, leaving that sensitivity grinning and naked, and other people had become too much to bear, even Paul, even Marilyn—they with their great ugly stews of hate and fear and lust, their uninspired eminences and shrieking plummeting depths, their molten blasts of desire and anger and unbearable love. And he knew that they were no different from himself. He was appalled by the sad, dowdy chronicles of pain that they carried in their faces, written in lines and ridges and whorls, muscle and bone. They were so plain, so readable that he could stretch out a finger and touch and number every one of them: here a frustration of the heart, here a vanishment of a small hope, here the souring of a dream. Their lives were engraved on their flesh in braille, like the Name on the forehead of the Golem, and he could not stand to read them. They broke his heart, and he shut himself away from the sight of them. And he continued to sink.

In the last days of his affliction, an increasing weirdness had seeped into the world, settling like a film over ordinary things and altering them. He had walked the everyday streets of London and seen, superimposed over them, a vision of the Apocalypse. He had seen the sky darken at noon, heard the frantic frightened screaming of machines, saw the streets open to vomit up fire and death, watched buildings buckle and collapse in horrid cascades of brick and glass, listened to the screams of the dying and smelled the stink of burning meat, seen people crushed, buried, flayed to pieces, torn apart, going up in flames as easy as kindling—watched a great city kicked to flinders as if it was a house of cards, and put to the torch. And all the while the old ladies sold flowers along the Bayswater Road and in front of Marble Arch, in the thin, watery sunlight, unaware of the doom that was coming, the desolation that John watched with wide mad eyes—for it was already here for him, and he could see their bones jabbing and straining at their skins, eager to be out and free, and he could see how very thin a membrane of present time there was standing between them sunning in Hyde Park and the ragged piles of dust and ash they would eventually be. It was this horrifying vision, repeated continually, playing behind his eyes at night in slumber, that had driven him from London. But coming through Boston, and then again in Manhattan, it had been the same thing again, even more horrid and on a grander scale: the great skyscrapers shattering and falling like murdered gods, the whirlwinds of fire, dozens of miles of city fused into molten glass by some new atrocity of man.

Now he can feel the same noonday strangeness leaking into this country morning. Around him, the forest is touched by entropy, by a cold and foul breath of poison, and it dies. It strangles, it suffocates, it is blighted, and it dies. Everything dies: the trees, the grass, the bushes, the flowers, the smallest moss and lichen, the worms that tunnel the ground, the insects, the very bacteria in the soil. He can see it all withering, shriveling, blackening, rotting. A scythe of decay passes through the world, and when it has passed, everything is gone. Nothing lives, nothing at all. There is only sterile, lifeless soil, soon to be baked into mud by the sun, or swept away by the wind to reveal the pale and elemental rock.

What is this? John asks himself, aghast at this ultimate negation. He can accept the burning of London as a premonition, a presentiment of the coming war. Similarly, he can understand the destruction of Boston and New York—the U.S. involved in the conflict, the war spreading eventually to American shores; many have predicted just that. But this, the blighting and death of life itself, the withering of the world, what is this?

The forest has changed, imperceptibly, around him. The deciduous trees are gone. It is now made up of red and white spruce and balsam fir, and the trees are shaggy, ancient giants. He is sure that there isn’t an unlogged climax forest within a hundred miles or more of here, if anywhere in the East at all, and certainly not a spruce woods this far to the south. Most of the familiar weeds and wildflowers are gone, leaving the woods noticeably drabber. He finds himself remembering that plants like Queen Anne’s lace, dandelion, and butter-and-eggs are European imports, and relatively recent, and then he spends a while wondering what he meant by that. He knows that he left the house walking north, and he can tell by the position of the sun that he has been walking steadily north ever since, for better than an hour, through this inexplicable forest. But when the forest begins at last to lighten, and when he notices—after the fact—that the woods have somehow slowly and imperceptibly changed back into a deciduous forest again, and when he breaks through the final fringe of trees and sees the house directly ahead of him, squatting like a spider, he is hardly surprised at all. He tells himself, with a strange, drugged philosophicality, that he couldn’t really expect to win that easily.

It doesn’t want to let him go.

The groceryman returns the next afternoon. For a while he sits out in front of the house in his truck and honks his horn, and then he goes up onto the porch and pounds on the door, and calls through his cupped hands. When he gets no answer, the groceryman goes cautiously inside, pausing to call and hullo every few feet. He goes through the kitchen and the writing room, and stops at the threshold of the living room. It is hot and stuffy here, and the groceryman is already uncomfortable at snooping around inside someone’s house without the resident’s permission—he will go no further. The groceryman calls one last time, loudly, thinking that the resident might be asleep upstairs. There is no answer; it is very silent inside the gloomy house. The groceryman feels uneasy and prickly, as if the air has eyes here, and those eyes are watching him, unblinkingly. He shrugs irritably, shakes his head, and goes back outside, muttering something under his breath. The groceryman unloads a large carton of groceries from his truck, and leaves it inside the enclosed porch, with a bill and a taciturn note pinned to it. As he gets ready to leave, he feels strange again, spooky, and chilled. Then he puts the truck in gear and leaves.

John stands at the side of the road and watches the groceryman drive away. He answered the first honk of the truck horn, and he has followed the groceryman closely during the groceryman’s walk through the house, speaking to him—at first softly, irritated by the man’s rudeness, and then loudly, shouting in panic—and touching him, seizing him by the arm and trying to turn him around, at last grabbing him roughly by both shoulders and shaking him violently, making his head wobble and rattle like a jack-in-the-box. The man’s flesh is firm under John’s hands, but the groceryman does not notice him, and, save for a slight uneasiness of manner, does not even seem aware that he is being shaken and buffeted. His eyes look through John, not at him. He does not hear John’s voice, even when John screams hoarsely in his ear. Instead, the groceryman shrugs and shakes his head, and goes back outside. John follows him out to the truck, shouting in anger and fear, but the groceryman doesn’t look around—he puts his truck in gear and leaves. John watches the groceryman drive away; John has become oddly calm, and there is a crooked, grim smile on his face.

It seems that now he too is a ghost.

The fog closes in again, and John wanders through the house forever. His mind is clear only occasionally, giving him brief, vivid glimpses of the world with no continuity, like a collection of unrelated snapshots: walking down the stairs, sitting in the overstuffed chair in the living room, looking through the glassed-in doors at the veranda. And then the clouds pile up again and bury him, and the world becomes an oozing myopia. He is swept along by hot, drugged currents of feeling, jazzed by goosed, scurrying emotions. He talks to the people. There are many of them here, bright, eclectic, brash, glittering and garish as a neon sign. Their voices are like the hot, sour blare of a trumpet just missing the high note. He talks to the people:

He says,                                                 .

Their laughter, gaudy, dazzling, brittle. And their eyes.

, they say.

He asks,                                                 ?

Their eyes.

, they say.

and

.

and

.

He is sitting on the floor at the bottom of the stairs to the second floor, leaning against the wall. He takes his head in his hands, squeezing the temples. He must think, he must think, but he cannot. And then they are there again, insistent and dazzling, and they say, _____________.

But he is thinking, he comes to realize that. Somewhere, deep under the surface, sundered from his consciousness, his mind is working logically and well, working continually. And occasionally he is sane enough to be able to listen in on what it is thinking.

He has a lucid interval. He comes back to his body from a great distance, and finds that he is sitting in the kitchen, and finds that he is thinking, calmly and rationally, that there are two, opposing forces acting upon him. One is the tendency to sink right out of the world, something that has affected him most of his life. But there is another force, opposing it, that has caught him at the narrow place and won’t let him sink all the way out, that is fighting to keep him anchored here. This—that he should stay, not sink—is somewhat similar to what they have been advocating, although it doesn’t translate into words; they definitely belong to the opposing force. Strangely enough, he feels an aversion for the opposing force, the one trying to anchor him to the world, although logically he should feel exactly the opposite. The opposing force is embodied in the house—it wants to keep him. It is also somehow allied with the breath of decay he felt shriveling the forest, although he doesn’t know on what basis he has made the connection. Perhaps it is entropy, he thinks. Ultimate zero, full stop, stasis. You might just as well call it the Devil, it would make little difference. And perhaps his vision is a true one, and the world is destined to die, die in every root and branch, die totally.

Perhaps the world, life, the continuum, whatever you called it—perhaps it knew that it was going to die. Perhaps every continuum that was about to die sent out seeds, in an effort to perpetuate itself elsewhere. Perhaps that was what he was: a seed. And that was why he’d always kept slipping through the fabric of reality; that was the bias of the continuum acting upon him, a huge, insistent hand trying to push him through, to seed another shore. And it wouldn’t be just him, of course. There would be other seeds everywhere, seeds of everything: people, birds, animals, insects, perhaps even seeds of rocks and trees if the animists were correct. They would be slipping through all the time, vanishing from reality. Who would notice a blade of grass disappearing from a field, who would miss a single tree in a forest, or a bird or a fox, or a bumblebee, or a stone from a mountain? Who would miss him, really? How many people could vanish without anyone even noticing that they’d gone? Thousands, or millions? Or if it was noticed, what could anyone do other than to shrug their shoulders and forget about it? And the seeds would continue to sift through. Perhaps it had been going on for millennia. Perhaps that was how life had come to this world in the beginning, from another dying continuum: a slow seeding over millions of years—unicellular animals, mollusks, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals. And our continuum, knowing its own mortality, immediately beginning to seed in its turn, passing life on. And so it would go, from one level to another, like a stream gradually stairstepping down a many-terraced hill—the level “below” always a little out of phase, a little behind the level “above,” which would explain the virgin spruce forest, if he really had been there for a moment before the anchoring tug of the house had pulled him back. Perhaps when the stream finally got to the bottom of the hill they turned the whole shebang over and started all over again, like an hourglass. Or perhaps it formed a stagnant pool at the bottom and nothing ever moved again—level entropy. Or perhaps there wasn’t any bottom at all. Who knew how it had begun? If it had “begun.” Perhaps it had gone on and would go on forever, world without end. A human mind was not capable of even beginning to grasp the concept of “forever.” Why should a man comprehend the process any more than a dandelion seed whirling through the air, a wheat kernel planted deep in the blind black earth? It was enough to know merely that there was something going on.

Perhaps there were many people there, perhaps not. Quite possibly it was no better a place than this earth, and problems and situations one was unable to deal with here one would probably still be unable to deal with there. It would not be Eden—it might even be very bad. Even worse than here, in another way. But it would be different. And without the bias of the continuum pushing on him anymore, never letting him stay in one place long enough to put down roots, perhaps some of the foregone conclusions, the inalterable conditions of his own life would also be different.

Or perhaps not, but there was only one way he’d ever find out.

He has always fought against the sinking process, peddling desperately to keep his head above the surface, afraid that he was sinking into madness. But what would happen if he let himself go, let go completely, for the first time in his life? Was it possible to sink through madness and out the other side?

And then he is in the bedroom, lying on the bed, fully dressed. It is night. The cluster of dogwood leaves outside his window has turned into a demon. He can feel the pressure of its soulless, dead-black eyes, he can see the gleam of needle teeth in the dark fox muzzle. He can hear its hungry furnace snuffling as it smells his blood, through the glass. A full moon looms outside the window and forms a leprous alabaster halo for the shock-headed dogwood demon. John struggles to get up on one elbow. His mind is a muddy whirlpool of broken and chaotic thoughts. He knows that there is a strand of thought that he must hold on to, that is the one pertinent thing in an obscurity of distractions. Grimly, he tries to follow the thought through to its conclusion. Suddenly, it is daylight. A robin lands on the windowsill, stares curiously at John, eye to little bright eye, tosses his bill, and flies away. In an eyeblink, it is night again. The moon is in a different, lower quadrant of the window, and the demon looks much bigger—it has flattened its bulk against the pane, and he can hear its sharp diamond tongue probing abrasively against the glass, scritch, scritch, scritch, flickering in the moonlight. John tries to heave himself up to a sitting position, fails, and it is daylight. Harsh grey daylight, showing the thinness of his hands. Rain beats against the window. Dizzied, John squeezes his eyes tightly shut. He keeps them closed for a long time, feeling the shifting play of light and shadow against his eyelids. It is better this way, and easier to think. John laboriously traces the convolutions of the one proper thought, over and over, almost getting it right.

He opens his eyes. It is night, a moonless night. The stars provide a lactescent, nacred light that sifts down softly through the room, filtering vision through fine cheesecloth. A woman is lying next to him in the big bed, naked, propped lazily on her elbow. She is slender, with short-cropped blonde hair, and full breasts that look much bigger than they are against her sleek, long-muscled dancer’s body. The starlight burnishes some of her body to streaked, milky marble—her forehead, her cheek, the line of her arm and hip, the tops of her breasts—and mutes the rest into deep and secret velvet shadow: her legs, her belly, her eyes. She smiles at him, a flash of moist lips sliding back from pearl-wet teeth. The rest of the room is crowded with other shapes, male and female, pressing close against the bed. They are all fascinating, intriguing, tantalizing, mysterious, alluring, intensely interesting. Their glittereyes. They smile invitingly, with beckoning comradery.

John closes his eyes.

When he opens them again, after a long, stubborn time, it is still starlit night, but the room is empty. He struggles again to get up, and this time he succeeds. He sits on the side of the bed, feet on the floor, breathing heavily. There is a new tension in the air, a menace, a sense of something building tightly to a climax. The house is alive with sound. John can hear people or things running angrily back and forth downstairs, bumping into furniture, careening against the walls. He hears shouts, screams, wails, angry chittering howls. Something is banging and slobbering harshly against the window behind him. He will not turn his head to look. Let go, he tells himself, let go. Abruptly, all the noises stop, and it is totally silent. Alone in the terrifying silence, John sits and waits. Then, very far away, much lower than the bottom of the stairs could possibly be, John hears a footstep, and then another. Something is ascending the stairs, coming up from Hell. The footsteps are very heavy and ponderous; they shake the house at every step, and there is an unpleasant rasping quality to them, as if the feet are almost too heavy to lift. The footsteps have been coming up for miles, for years, for hundreds of years, and now they are close enough so that John can hear the massive, wheezing, steam-puffing, smithy-bellows breathing that goes with them, and the labored, ugly beating of a monstrous heart. The footsteps stop outside the door. Through the harsh reptile breathing, John can hear the scaly rutch of something infinitely hard pressing in against the door, scraping, digging up the wood like a gouge. Slowly, John gets up and walks toward the door, stopping after every step. He puts his fingers against the door-panel, feeling, behind the thin wood, the sluggish beating of the alien heart. He sees that the doorknob is turning, slowly, hesitantly, as if it is being fumbled at by enormous spatulate fingers. Let go, John tells himself, and he reaches out, briskly, and opens the door.

Nothing is there.

Trembling now, after the fact, John begins to walk downstairs. It is like wading through hardening glue, and with every step the glue gets deeper and stiffer. He holds very tightly to the one proper thought, because he knows now what happens to people-seeds who are caught too tightly by the world, unable to sink completely out but unable to stop trying to sink—they go insane. They become psychotic: catatonic, schizophrenic, autistic, God knows what else. Ghosts, maybe. Poltergeists, throwing things around in fits of hapless rage because no one in the world will notice them anymore—those who’ve sunk too far out to be seen by normals, but not far enough to escape. What percentage of seeds did make it through, and how many of those took? How barren was the field the continuum was attempting to seed? Who knows, God knows—the same answer, and the only one there was.

John reaches the foot of the stairs, and it feels now like he is in glue up to his armpits—on the way across the living room it is over his head completely and he is swimming through murky syrup. By the time he has reached the outside door he has to batter and buffet against the air for every step, as if he is a man trying to bull his way through a high snowdrift, breasting it, breaking it down. One flailing hand catches and holds the doorknob. He turns it and pushes, throwing his weight against the door. It is like slamming into a mountain. He surges against the door twice more, feeling the blood drain from behind his eyes, feeling himself starting to black out. Then, all at once, the door flies open with a despairing crack and groan, and John stumbles outside. He has one glimpse of ghostly white birches, and then the flagstone path is drifting slowly up toward his face. He is puzzled for a moment, as the flagstone inches closer, and then he realizes that he must be falling. His face touches, and is pressed flat against the flagstone, eyes still open, and he continues to fall, into the stone, into the earth, going down.

Asleep—floating in suspension somewhere, turning over and over, falling endlessly—John dreams of the infinitely complex question that is life, that is the world. And, without the encumbrance of mind or body or ego, he can see the problem clearly and completely for the first time, and he numbers each of the millions of hidden relationships and cross-relationships, totals them, and comes up with the one underlying, unifying relationship: the lowest common denominator. The Answer to It All. And he laughs in his sleep, as he falls. It was so absurdly simple after all.

John comes awake with a faint bump, as if he is a feather, falling weightlessly for a million miles, that has finally drifted to the ground. He rolls over, scattering leaves and leaf mulch, and sits up. He opens his eyes, and is dazzled by the day. The light, he thinks, dazedly, the quality of the light. He staggers to his feet, falls, lurches up again, filled with a thousand wild terrors, his throat clogged with primordial horror, his mouth strained wide to scream. And then he stops, abruptly, and sinks again to his knees, his mouth slowly closes, and his shoulders unhunch, and the tension goes out of his frame muscle by slow muscle, and something suspiciously like peace begins to seep, grudgingly and gradually, into his haggard face.

By the sun, he is on the east-facing slope of a mountain, a small wooded, rolling mountain like those he can remember seeing on his original ride in from town—in fact, it seems, as far as he can tell, to be one of the same mountains. But now, a hundred feet below him, breaking in gentle waves against a rocky scrub beach, and rolling back from there to the horizon, breathing and calm and shining, with the rising sun painting a red road through its middle and touching every whitecap with flecks of deep crimson, with seagulls wheeling over it and skimming across it in search of breakfast, with its damp salt stink and the eternal booming hiss of its voice—stretched out below him now, deep and full of life, is the ocean.

And the rich black dirt under his fingers.

The earth is fertile. There will be a crop.

Afternoon at Schrafft’s

Introduction to Afternoon at Schrafft’s

Here is a story of a wizard and his cat. “Afternoon at Schrafft’s,” though a jape at heart, surprisingly has heart to spare—and depth yet. Could that be because it’s a true story—Gardner’s?

I dropped in on Gardner once with a gang of scribblers from the Sycamore Hill writers workshop. From our palatial accommodations at the Brown University campus we descended on his close dense digs booming, between Gardner’s own genius and his wife, writer Susan Casper’s, with creativity and charm. Here was his “real” world, humble and strait, and there, everywhere, was the man’s art, gratia gratis, apparently, by the lights of these United States.

The Tarot’s Fool steps blissfully from the precipice. Man does not live by bread alone. The wizard’s change-purse (back to the story now) is battered and empty of all but lint—well, and a polished bat skull (or a lucite Hugo?). His familiar, the cat, berates the wizard’s profitless senescence. “Without me you couldn’t even pay the check,” Gardner has it say. What wizard, what artist, what science fiction writer (hell, what soul) is quite free of that nagging voice?

In his kind letters to me, between rejection slips, Gardner half-jokingly bemoaned his sparse hair and (what he saw to be) his sparse(!) achievements as a writer. This was usually in the same graph that he announced yet another limb he was climbing out on to publish my gonzo screeds. Robust and redoubtable codger! Wizard, let’s say. Is he dogged by a certain cat? “Afternoon at Schrafft’s” is crafted via recurrent oppositions of sublime and ridiculous, the low comedian’s stock in trade—and the high philosopher’s: fantasy vs. convention, the esoteric vs. the quotidian, down-and-dirty New Yorker Yiddishisms vs. the urbane Manhattan sophistication that, if the world turns upside-down (and it does), will never lift a brow. Shades of Avram Davidson (another beneficiary of Dozois’ editorial largess), whose “Golem” pitted, to hilarious effect, the august and numinous pronouncements of the creature against an old Jewish couple’s suburban banalities. Or think of recent Nebula winner Leslie What (yet another Dozois find), likewise a master of the art of the underclass, who finds transcendent nobility in a flash frozen chicken breast—or vice versa.

“’Reality,” said Nietzsche, “is a word that deserves always to be put between goosefeet.” I.e., quotes. Or cat’s paws rather? The trick of this short story is that, in the end, all the poles are reversed. The “real,” what seemed pat and solid, becomes outrageous—though smug as ever—while the fantastic is seen to be the more durable realm. And, not to let the cat quite out, the soul (wizard) and its worldly critic (cat) attain a certain harmony here, a certain love, even, sweet as Bradbury, restoring the hair and celebrating the art of all Gardner’s magical artisan ilk, though their purses be full of lint, polished bat skulls, and nothing.

Eliot Fintushel

Afternoon at Schrafft’s

by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann,

and Michael Swanwick

The wizard sat alone at a table in Schrafft’s, eating a tuna sandwich on rye. He finished off the last bite of his sandwich, sat back, and licked a spot of mayonnaise off his thumb. There was an ozone crackle in the air, and his familiar, a large brindle cat, materialized in the chair opposite him.

The cat coldly eyed the wizard’s empty plate. “And where, may I ask, is my share?” he demanded.

The wizard coughed in embarrassment.

“You mean you didn’t even leave me a crumb, is that it?”

The wizard shrugged and looked uncomfortable. “There’s still a pickle left,” he suggested.

The cat was not mollified.

“Or some chips. Have some potato chips.”

“Feh,” sneered the cat. “Potato chips I didn’t want. What I wanted was a piece of your sandwich, Mister Inconsiderate.”

“Listen, aggravation I don’t need from you. Don’t make such a big deal—it’s only a tuna fish sandwich. So who cares!”

“So who cares?” the cat spat. “So I care, that’s who. Listen, it’s not just the sandwich. It’s everything! It’s your attitude.”

“Don’t talk to me about my attitude—”

“Somebody should. You think you’re so hot. Mister Big Deal! The big-time Wizard!” The cat sneered at him. “Hah! You need me more than I need you, believe me, Mister Oh-I’m-So-Wonderful!”

“Don’t make me laugh,” the wizard said.

“You couldn’t get along without me, and you know it!”

“I’m laughing,” the wizard said. “It’s such a funny joke you’re making, look at me, I’m laughing. Hah. Hah. Hah.”

The cat fluffed itself up, enraged. “Without me, you couldn’t even get through the day. What an ingrate! You refuse to admit just how much you really need me. Why, without me, you couldn’t even—” The cat paused, casting about for an example, and his gaze fell on the check. “Without me, you couldn’t even pay the check.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Even something as simple as that, you couldn’t do it by yourself. You couldn’t handle it.”

“Sure I could. Don’t get too big for your britches. Stuff like this I was handling before you were even weaned, bubbie, let alone housebroken. So don’t puff yourself up.”

The cat sneered at him again. “Okay, so go ahead! Show me! Do it!”

“Do what?” said the wizard, after a pause, a trace of uneasiness coming into his voice.

“Pay the check. Take care of it yourself.”

“All right,” the wizard said. “All right, then, I will!”

“So go ahead already. I’m watching. This ought to be good.” The cat smiled nastily and faded away, slowly disappearing line by line—the Cheshire cat was one of his heroes, and this was a favorite trick, although for originality’s sake he left his nose behind instead of his grin. The nose hung inscrutably in midair, like a small black-rubber UFO. Occasionally it would give a sardonic twitch.

The wizard sighed, and sat staring morosely down at the check. Then, knowing in advance that it would be useless, he pulled out his battered old change-purse and peered inside: nothing, except for some lint, the tiny polished skull of a bat, and a ticket-stub from the 1876 Centennial Exposition. The wizard never carried money—ordinarily, he’d have just told the cat to conjure up whatever funds were necessary, an exercise so simple and trivial that it was beneath his dignity as a Mage even to consider bothering with it himself. That was what familiars were for, to have tasks like that delegated to them. Now, though . . .

“Well?” the cat’s voice drawled. “So, I’m waiting . . .”

“All right, all right, big shot,” the wizard said. “I can handle this, don’t worry yourself.”

“I’m not worried—I’m waiting.”

“All right already.” Mumbling to himself, the wizard began to work out the elements of the spell. It was a very small magic, after all. Still . . . He hesitated, drumming his fingers on the table . . . Still, he hadn’t had to do anything like this for himself for years, and his memory wasn’t what it used to be . . . Better ease his hand in slowly, try a still smaller magic first. Practice. Let’s see now . . . He muttered a few words in a hissing sibilant tongue, sketched a close pattern in the air, and then rested his forefinger on the rim of his empty coffee cup. The cup filled with coffee, as though his finger was a spigot. He grunted in satisfaction, and then took a sip of his coffee. It was weak and yellow, and tasted faintly of turpentine. So far, so good, he thought . . .

Across the table, the nose sniffed disdainfully.

The wizard ignored it. Now for the real thing. He loosened his tie and white starched collar and drew the pentagram of harmony, the Sephiroth, using salt from the shaker, which was also the secret symbol for the fifth element of the pentagram, the akasha, or ether. He made do with a glass of water, catsup, mustard, and toothpicks to represent the four elements and the worlds of Emanation, Creation, Formation, and Action. He felt cheap and vulgar using such substitutes, but what else could he do?

Now . . . he thought, that is the pentagram of harmony . . . isn’t it? For an instant he was uncertain. Well, it’s close enough . . .

He tugged back his cuffs, leaving his wrists free to make the proper passes over the pentagram. Now . . . what was the spell to make money? It was either the first or the second Enochian Key . . . that much he did remember. It must be the second key, and that went . . . : “Piamoel od Vaoan!” No, no, that wasn’t it. Was it “Giras to nazodapesad Roray I?” That must be it.

The wizard said the words and softly clapped his hands together . . . and nothing seemed to happen.

For an instant there was no noise, not even a breath. It was as if he was hovering, disembodied, between the worlds of emanation.

There was a slow shift in his equilibrium, like a wheel revolving ponderously in darkness.

But magic doesn’t just disappear, he told himself querulously—it has to go somewhere.

As if from the other side of the world, the wizard heard the soft voice of his familiar, so faint and far away that he could barely make it out. What was it saying?

“Putz,” the cat whispered, “you used the Pentagram of Chaos, the Qliphoth.”

And suddenly, as if he really had been turned upside-down for a while, the wizard felt everything right itself. He was sitting at a table in Schrafft’s, and there was the usual din of people talking and shouting and pushing and complaining.

But something was odd, something was wrong. Even as he watched, the table splintered and flew to flinders before him; and his chair creaked and groaned and swayed like a high-masted ship in a strong wind, and then broke, dumping him heavily to the floor. The room shook, and the floor cracked and starred beneath him.

What was wrong? What aethers and spheres had he roiled and foiled with his misspoken magicks? Why did he feel so strange? Then he saw himself in the goldflecked smoked-glass mirrors that lined the room between rococo plaster pillars, and the reflection told him the terrible truth.

He had turned himself into some kind of giant lizard. A dinosaur. Actually, as dinosaurs go, he was rather small. He weighed about eight hundred pounds and was eleven feet long—a Pachycephalosaurus, a horn-headed, pig-snouted herbivore that was in its prime in the Upper Cretaceous. But for Schrafft’s, at lunch time—big enough. He clicked his stubby tusks and tried to say “Gevalt!” as he shook his head ruefully. Before he could stop the motion, his head smashed into the wooden booth partition, causing it to shudder and crack.

Across from him, two eyes appeared, floating to either side of the hovering black nose. Slowly, solemnly, one eye winked. Then—slowly and very sinisterly—eyes and nose faded away and were gone.

That was a bad sign, the wizard thought. He huddled glumly against the wall. Maybe nobody will notice, he thought. His tail twitched nervously, splintering the booth behind him. The occupants of the booth leaped up, screaming, and fled the restaurant in terror. Out-of-towners, the wizard thought. Everyone else was eating and talking as usual, paying no attention, although the waiter was eying him somewhat sourly.

As he maneuvered clumsily away from the wall, pieces of wood crunching underfoot, the waiter came up to him and stood there making little tsking noises of disapproval. “Look, mister,” the waiter said. “You’re going to have to pay up and go. You’re creating a disturbance—” The wizard opened his mouth to utter a mild remonstrance, but what came out instead was a thunderous roaring belch, grindingly deep and loud enough to rattle your bones, the sort of noise that might be produced by having someone stand on the bass keys of a giant Wurlitzer. Even the wizard could smell the fermenting, rotting-egg, bubbling-prehistoric-swamp stink of sulphur that his belch had released, and he winced in embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” the wizard said, enunciating with difficulty through the huge, sloppy mouth. “It’s the tuna fish. I know I shouldn’t eat it, it always gives me gas, but—” But the waiter no longer seemed to be listening—he had gone pale, and now he turned abruptly around without a word and walked away, ignoring as he passed the querulous demands for coffee refills from the people two tables away, marching in a straight line through the restaurant and right out into the street.

The wizard sighed, a gusty, twanging noise like a cello being squeezed flat in a winepress. Time—and past time—to work an obviation spell. So, then. Forgetting that he was a dinosaur, the wizard hurriedly tried to redraw the pentagram, but he couldn’t pick up the salt, which was in a small pile around the broken glass shaker. And everything else he would need for the spell was buried under the debris of the table.

“Not doing so hot now, Mister Big Shot, are you?” a voice said, rather smugly.

“All right, all right, give me a minute, will you?” said the wizard, a difficult thing to say when your voice croaked like a gigantic frog’s—it was hard to be a dinosaur and talk. But the wizard still had his pride. “You don’t make soup in a second,” he said. Then he began thinking feverishly. He didn’t really need the elements and representations of the four worlds and the pentagram of kabalistic squares, not for an obviation spell; although, of course, things would be much more elegant with them. He could work the obviation spell by words alone—if he could remember the words. He needed something from the Eighteenth Path, that which connects Binah and Geburah, the House of Influence. Let’s see, he thought, “E pluribus unum.” No, no . . . Could it be “Micaoli beranusaji UK?” No, that was a pharmacological spell . . . But, yes, of course, this was it, and he began to chant, “Tstske, tstskeleh, tchotchike, tchotchkeleh, trayf Qu-a-a-on!”

That should do it.

But nothing happened. Again! The wizard tried to frown, but hadn’t the face for it. “Nothing happened,” he complained.

The cat’s head materialized in midair. “That’s what you think. As a matter of fact, all the quiches at Maxim’s just turned into frogs. Great big ones,” he added maliciously. “Great big green slimy ones.”

The wizard dipped his great head humbly. “All right,” he grumbled. “Enough is enough. I give up. I admit defeat. I was wrong. From now on, I promise, I’ll save you a bite of every sandwich I ever order.”

The cat appeared fully for a moment, swishing its tail thoughtfully back and forth. “You do know, don’t you, that I prefer the part in the middle, without the crust . . . ?”

“I’ll never give you the crust, always from the middle—”

The waiter had come back into the restaurant, towing a policeman behind him, and was now pointing an indignant finger toward the wizard. The policeman began to slouch slowly toward them, looking bored and sullen and mean.

“I mean, it’s not really the sandwich, you know,” the cat said.

“I know, I know,” the wizard mumbled.

“I get insecure too, like everyone else. I need to know that I’m wanted. It’s the thought that counts, knowing that you’re thinking about me, that you want me around—”

“All right, all right!” the wizard snapped irritably. Then he sighed again, and (with what would have been a gesture of final surrender if he’d had hands to spread) said, “So, okay, I want you around.” He softened, and said almost shyly, “I do, you know.”

“I know,” the cat said. They stared at each other with affection for a moment, and then the cat said, “For making money, it’s the new moon blessing, “Steyohn, v’s keyahlahnough—”

“Money I don’t need anymore,” the wizard said grumpily. “Money it’s gone beyond. Straighten out all of this—” gesturing with his pig-like snout at his—feh!—scaly green body.

“Not to worry. The proper obviation spell is that one you worked out during the Council of Trent, remember?”

The cat hissed out the words. Once again the wheel rotated slowly in darkness.

And then, the wizard was sitting on the floor, in possession of his own spindly limbs again. Arthritically, he levered himself to his feet.

The cat watched him get up, saying smugly, “And as a bonus, I even put money in your purse, not bad, huh? I told—” And then the cat fell silent, staring off beyond the wizard’s shoulder. The wizard looked around.

Everyone else in Schrafft’s had turned into dinosaurs.

All around them were dinosaurs, dinosaurs in every possible variety, dinosaurs great and small, four-footed and two-footed, horned and scaled and armor-plated, striped and speckled and piebald, all busily eating lunch, hissing and grunting and belching and slurping, huge jaws chewing noisily, great fangs flashing and clashing, razor-sharp talons clicking on tile. The din was horrendous. The policeman had turned into some sort of giant spiky armadillo, and was contentedly munching up the baseboard. In one corner, two nattily-pinstriped allosaurs were fighting over the check, tearing huge bloody pieces out of each other. It was impossible to recognize the waiter.

The cat stared at the wizard.

The wizard stared at the cat.

The cat shrugged.

After a moment, the wizard shrugged too.

They both sighed.

“Lunch tomorrow?” the wizard asked, and the cat said, “Suits me.” Behind them, one of the triceratops finished off its second egg cream, and made a rattling noise with the straw.

The wizard left the money for the check near the cash register, and added a substantial tip.

They went out of the restaurant together, out into the watery city sunshine, and strolled away down the busy street through the fine mild airs of spring.

Playing the Game

Introduction to Playing the Game

If you’ve never read “Playing the Game,” you should read the story before reading this introduction, lest I give the game away. Those of us who have had the pleasure of reading this story will wait for you here till you’re done.

Done? OK. When I was a teenager, my friends and I used to amuse ourselves by imagining alternate universes that were exactly like our own in every detail but one, that one being ridiculously trivial—a universe, for example, in which Eliot had titled his masterpiece not “The Waste Land” but “Joe’s Eats To Go,” or in which the word “macaroni” was pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable rather than the third. (All my imagined changes tended to be verbal, one sign among many that pointed to my winding up a writer one day.) We all had read Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” so we knew these seeming trivialities would cause major differences many years down the road, in the alternate timelines we seeded wholesale, then—ah, profligate youth!—abandoned. I was most thrilled, though, not by the world-shaking consequences of our cosmic tweaks, but by the tweaks themselves. How would I respond if, one day, everybody did pronounce “macaroni” differently, and I was the only one who realized the difference? If I were the only human being who registered that something was, however slightly, Wrong?

At the time of these adolescent musings, I was (unsurprisingly) a devoted reader of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, and when “Playing the Game” appeared there in 1982, I read it as I read every issue of that clumsily titled but wonderful magazine, with engagement and wonder. But only as I re-read the story this morning did I realize that my 17-year-old self was playing, in essence, the same game as Jimmy Rodgers, only without Jimmy’s grave understanding of the horrific quid pro quo: Fiddle with reality, and reality fiddles with you. I’ve been fiddling with reality ever since, as have all of you, and look where it’s got us.

Before I go, I must urge you to re-read the opening paragraphs of this story, just to appreciate again how deftly the essential weirdness of Jimmy’s situation is stated from the outset in a way almost impossible to notice. It’s the “Purloined Letter” approach to exposition, and I admire it without reservation. A final point, as trivial as “Joe’s Eats To Go,” but possibly of interest to the writers among you. Joe Haldeman tells his students that his only rule concerning character names is never to name a character Fred, because then you’re doomed to write, “Fred said,” “Fred said,” endlessly. I tell my students a second rule as well, that you never want your character to have the same name as a famous person, unless that’s part of your point. I only just now realized, as I typed “Jimmy Rodgers,” above, that the protagonist of this story has the same name as the late Mississippi singer-songwriter Jimmie Rodgers, the “Singing Brakeman” who, in many ways, created the country-music industry. Now, for the life of me, I can’t think of any thematic reason this character should have the same name as the man who sang “Pistol Packin’ Papa,” so I am forced to conclude that the similarity is, as they say in the fine print, purely accidental; and to conclude, furthermore, that the accident doesn’t hurt this story a bit. There are no rules.

Andy Duncan

Another Introduction to Playing the Game

This chilling little story is quintessential Gardner—a childhood fantasy turned inside out and made dark. All of the colors on his palette wind up dark, it seems, by the time the canvas is finished.

You would hardly guess that he had a dark side, if you met him without having read his work. He’s a natural-born comic and raconteur, though his humor is bizarre and unpredictable.

About thirty years ago, Gardner and I were invited to Damon Knight’s Milford writing workshop as the token Young Turks. (Gardner was responsible for my being invited; he’d introduced me to Knight.) The Milford was an annual meeting of a couple of dozen science fiction writers, who got together at Damon Knight’s huge house in Milford, Pennsylvania, to pass around problem stories for advice. Some of the biggest names in science fiction were under that roof: Kate Wilhelm, Harlan Ellison, Gordon R. Dickson, Ben Bova, Keith Laumer, Joanna Russ, Norman Spinrad, Gene Wolfe. Gardner and I were invited on a kind of trial basis. He turned out to have special talent, even then, for going to the heart of a story and seeing what was not working. He did lack a certain sense of restraint, though—the protocol at Milford was strict: one person at a time speaks, in roundtable style; not even the author under inspection is allowed to say anything until his or her turn.

But Gardner was irrepressible in his enthusiasm, and after he had spoken out of turn a few times, Damon gave the people on either side of him plastic croquet mallets, and told them to whale away at him if he spoke out of turn. This Pavlovian conditioning did work after a fashion.

Gardner and I became fast friends there, and one of us—probably him—suggested that we form a spin-off, using the Milford pattern, inviting a number of other writers of our generation to get together at some central place.

One problem was that writers of our generation didn’t have big mansions in Pennsylvania. We had crummy apartments scattered along 1500 miles of East Coast. One of our number who did have a big enough place was my brother Jack, who had a row house in the Guilford section of Baltimore. The Guilford/Milford coincidence was a sign, of course, reinforced by an odd linguistic coincidence. Outsiders saw the Milford attendees as a sinister concentration of literary power, and called them the Milford Mafia.

We immediately dubbed ourselves the Guilford Gafia—G.A.F.I.A. being a time-honored science-fictional acronym for “getting away from it all.”

In a way, that’s what we did. We locked ourselves up in Jack’s house for a week with a refrigerator full of food, a big coffee urn, and a keg of beer, and talked and wrote and talked some more. The hard core of the group, besides Gardner and my brother and me, were Jack Dann, George Alec Effinger, and Ted White. Other people joined us occasionally for one or two meetings, like Robert Thurston, Phyllis Eisenstein, and Roger Zelazny. But the hard core met a couple of times a year through most of the seventies.

Eventually we suffered the same fate as the Milford. We got to know one another’s tastes so well that we could pretty accurately predict what everyone was going to say about any given story. Our careers went in various directions, and so did we, though most of us still keep in touch, scattered from New York to Australia.

Gardner’s success with the analytical side of Milford/Guilford probably was a factor in his “gafiation” from writing into the world of editing, where he is of course his generation’s huge success story, with enough pointy-ended Hugo Awards for “Best Editor” bristling around his house to present a real hazard. But when he put on his editor hat, first for Galaxy magazine and then for Asimov’s and the annual Year’s Best SF, he spent less and less time on his own fiction, which has been a real loss to the field.

If he had stayed behind the keyboard rather than midwifing stories for hundreds of others, science fiction would be a darker place, but much richer.

Joe Haldeman

Playing the Game

by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

The woods that edged the north side of Manningtown belonged to the cemetery, and if you looked westward toward Endicott, you could see marble mausoleums and expensive monuments atop the hills. The cemetery took up several acres of carefully mown hillside and bordered Jefferson Avenue, where well-kept wood-frame houses faced the rococo painted headstones of the Italian section.

West of the cemetery there had once been a district of brownstone buildings and small shops, but for some time now there had been a shopping mall there instead; east of the cemetery, the row of dormer-windowed old mansions that Jimmy remembered had been replaced by an ugly brick school building and a fenced-in schoolyard where kids never played. The cemetery itself, though—that never changed; it had always been there, exactly the same for as far back as he could remember, and this made the cemetery a pleasant place to Jimmy Daniels, a refuge, a welcome island of stability in a rapidly changing world where change itself was often unpleasant and sometimes menacing.

Jimmy Daniels lived in Old Town most of the time, just down the hill from the cemetery, although sometimes they lived in Passdale or Southside or even Durham. Old Town was a quiet residential neighborhood of whitewashed narrow-fronted houses and steep cobbled streets that were lined with oak and maple trees. Things changed slowly there also, unlike the newer districts downtown, where it seemed that new parking garages or civic buildings popped out of the ground like mushrooms after a rain. Only rarely did a new building appear in Old Town, or an old building vanish. For this reason alone, Jimmy much preferred Old Town to Passdale or Southside, and was always relieved to be living there once again. True, he usually had no friends or school chums in the neighborhood, which consisted mostly of first- and second-generation Poles who worked for the Mannington shoe factories, which had recently begun to fail. Sometimes, when they lived in Old Town, Jimmy got to play with a lame Italian boy who was almost as much of an outcast in the neighborhood as Jimmy was, but the Italian boy had been gone for the last few days, and Jimmy was left alone again. He didn’t really mind being alone all that much—most of the time, anyway. He was a solitary boy by nature.

The whole Daniels family tended to be solitary, and usually had little to do with the close-knit, church-centered life of Old Town, although sometimes his mother belonged to the PTA or the Ladies’ Auxiliary, and once Jimmy had been amazed to discover that his father had joined the Rotary Club. Jimmy’s father usually worked for Weston Computers in Endicott, although Jimmy could remember times, unhappier times, when his father had worked as a CPA in Johnson City or even as a shoe salesman in Vestal. Jimmy’s father had always been interested in history, that was another constant in Jimmy’s life, and sometimes he did volunteer work for the Catholic Integration League. He never had much time to spend with Jimmy, wherever they lived, wherever he worked; that was another thing that didn’t change. Jimmy’s mother usually taught at the elementary school, although sometimes she worked as a typist at home, and other times—the bad times again—she stayed at home and took “medicine” and didn’t work at all.

That morning when Jimmy woke up, the first thing he realized was that it was summer, a fact testified to by the brightness of the sunshine and the balminess of the air that came in through the open window, making up for his memory of yesterday, which had been gray and cold and dour. He rolled out of bed, surprised for a moment to find himself on the top tier of a bunk bed, and plumped down to the floor hard enough to make the soles of his feet tingle; at the last few places they had lived, he hadn’t a bunk bed, and he wasn’t used to waking up that high off the ground. Some times he had trouble finding his clothes in the morning, but this time it seemed that he had been conscientious enough to hang them all up the night before, and he came across a blue shirt with a zigzag green stripe that he had not seen in a long time. That seemed like a good omen to him, and cheered him. He put on the blue shirt, then puzzled out the knots he could not remember leaving in his shoelaces. Still blinking sleep out of his eyes, he hunted futilely for his toothbrush; it always took a while for his mind to clear in the mornings, and he could be confused and disoriented until it did, but eventually memories began to seep back in, as they always did, and he sorted through them, trying to keep straight which house this was out of all the ones he had lived in, and where he kept things here.

Of course. But who would ever have thought that he’d keep it in an old coffee can under his desk!

Downstairs, his mother was making French toast, and he stopped in the archway to watch her as she cooked. She was a short, plump, dark-eyed, olive-complexioned woman who wore her oily black hair pulled back in a tight bun. He watched her intently as she fussed over the hot griddle, noticing her quick nervous motions, the irritable way she patted at loose strands of her hair. Her features were tightly drawn, her nose was long and straight and sharp, as though you could cut yourself on it, and she seemed all angles and edges today. Jimmy’s father had been sitting sullenly over his third cup of coffee, but as Jimmy hesitated in the archway, he got to his feet, and began to get ready for work. He was a thin man with a pale complexion and a shock of wiry red hair, and Jimmy bit his lip in disappointment as he watched him, keeping well back and hoping not to be noticed. He could tell from the insignia on his father’s briefcase that his father was working in Endicott today, and those times when his father’s job was in Endicott were among the times when both of his parents would be at their most snappish in the morning.

He slipped silently into his chair at the table as his father stalked wordlessly from the room, and his mother served him his French toast, also wordlessly, except for a slight, sullen grunt of acknowledgment. This was going to be a bad day—not as bad as those times when his father worked in Manningtown and his mother took her “medicine,” not as bad as some other times that he had no intention of thinking about at all, but unpleasant enough, right on the edge of acceptability. He shouldn’t have given in to tiredness and come inside yesterday, he should have kept playing the Game . . . Fortunately, he had no intention of spending much time here today.

Jimmy got through his breakfast with little real difficulty, except that his mother started in on her routine about why didn’t he call Tommy Melkonian, why didn’t he go swimming or bike riding, he was daydreaming his summer away, it wasn’t natural for him to be by himself all the time, he needed friends, it hurt her and made her feel guilty to see him moping around by himself all the time . . . and so on. He made the appropriate noises in response, but he had no intention of calling Tommy Melkonian today, or of letting her call for him. He had only played with Tommy once or twice before, the last time being when they lived over on Clinton Street (Tommy hadn’t been around before that), but he didn’t even like Tommy all that much, and he certainly wasn’t going to waste the day on him. Sometimes Jimmy had given in to temptation and wasted whole days playing jacks or kick-the-can with other kids, or going swimming, or flipping baseball cards; sometimes he’d frittered away a week like that without once playing the Game. But in the end he always returned dutifully to playing the Game again, however tired of it all he sometimes became. And the Game had to be played alone.

Yes, he was definitely going to play the Game today; there was certainly no incentive to hang around here; and the Game seemed to be easier to play on fine, warm days anyway, for some reason.

So as soon as he could, Jimmy slipped away. For a moment he confused this place with the house they sometimes lived in on Ash Street, which was very similar in layout and where he had a different secret escape route to the outside, but at last he got his memories straightened out. He snuck into the cellar while his mother was busy elsewhere; and through the back cellar window, under which he had placed a chair so that he could reach the cement overhang and climb out onto the lawn. He cut across the neighbors’ yards to Charles Street and then over to Floral Avenue, a steep macadam dead-end road. Beyond was the start of the woods that belonged to the cemetery. Sometimes the mud hills below the woods would be guarded by a mangy black and brown dog that would bark, snarl at him, and chase him. He walked faster, dreading the possibility.

But once in the woods, in the cool brown and green shade of bole and leaf, he knew he was safe, safe from everything, and his pace slowed. The first tombstone appeared, half buried in mulch and stained with green moss, and he patted it fondly, as if it were a dog. He was in the cemetery now, where it had all begun so long ago. Where he had first played the Game.

Moving easily, he climbed up toward the crown of woods, a grassy knoll that poked up above the surrounding trees, the highest point in the cemetery. Even after all he had been through, this was still a magic place for him; never had he feared spooks or ghouls while he was here, even at night, although often as he walked along, as now, he would peer up at the gum-gray sky, through branches that interlocked like the fingers of witches, and pretend that monsters and secret agents and dinosaurs were moving through the woods around him, that the stunted azalea bushes concealed pirates or orcs . . . But these were only small games, mood-setting exercises to prepare him for the playing of the Game itself, and they fell away from him like a shed skin as he came out onto the grassy knoll and the landscape opened up below.

Jimmy stood entranced, feeling the warm hand of the sun on the back of his head, hardly breathing, listening to the chirruping of birds, the scratching of katydids, the long, sighing rush of wind through oak and evergreen. The sky was blue and high and cloudless, and the Susquehanna River gleamed below like a mirror snake, burning silver as it wound through the rolling, hilly country.

Slowly, he began to play the Game. How had it been, that first time that he had played it, inadvertently, not realizing what he was doing, not understanding that he was playing the Game or what Game he was playing until after he had already started playing? How had it been? Had everything looked like this? He decided that the sun had been lower in the sky that day, that the air had been hazier, that there had been a mass of clouds on the eastern horizon, and he flicked through mental pictures of the landscape as if he were rifling through a deck of cards with his thumb, until he found one that seemed to be right. Obediently, the sky grew darker, but the shape and texture of the clouds were not right, and he searched until he found a better match. It had been somewhat colder, and there had been a slight breeze . . .

So far it had been easy, but there were more subtle adjustments to be made. Had there been four smokestacks or five down in Southside? Four, he decided, and took one away. Had that radio tower been on the crest of that particular distant hill? Or on that one? Had the bridge over the Susquehanna been nearer or further away? Had that Exxon sign been there, at the corner of Cedar Road? Or had it been an Esso sign? His blue shirt had changed to a brown shirt by now, and he changed it further, to a red pinstriped shirt, trying to remember. Had that ice cream stand been there? He decided that it had not been. His skin was dark again now, although his hair was still too straight . . . Had the cemetery fence been a wrought iron fence or a hurricane fence? Had there been the sound of a factory whistle blowing? The smell of sulphur in the air? Or the smell of pine . . . ?

He worked at it until dark; and then, drained, he came back down the hill again.

The shopping mall was still there, but the school and schoolyard had vanished this time, to be replaced by the familiar row of stately, dormer-windowed old mansions. That usually meant that he was at least close. The house was on Schubert Street this evening, several blocks over from where it had been this morning, and it was a two-story, not a three-story house, closer to his memories of how things had been before he’d started playing the Game. The car outside the house was a ‘78 Volvo—not what he remembered, but closer than the ‘73 Buick from this morning. The windshield bore an Endicott parking sticker, and there was some Weston Computer literature tucked under the eyeshade, all of which meant that it was probably safe to go in; his father wouldn’t be a murderous drunk this particular evening.

Inside the parlor; Jimmy’s father looked up from his armchair, where he was reading Fuller’s Decisive Battles of the Western World, and winked. “Hi, sport,” he said, and Jimmy replied, “Hi, Dad.” At least his father was a black man this time, as he should be, although he was much fatter than Jimmy ever remembered him being, and still had this morning’s kinky red hair, instead of the kinky black hair he should have. Jimmy’s mother came out of the kitchen, and she was thin enough now, but much too tall, with a tiny upturned nose, blue eyes instead of hazel, hair more blonde than auburn . . .

“Wash up for dinner, Jimmy,” his mother said, and Jimmy turned slowly for the stairs, feeling exhaustion wash through him like a bitter tide. She wasn’t really his mother, they weren’t really his parents. He had come a lot closer than this before, lots of other times . . . But always there was some small detail that was wrong, that proved that this particular probability-world out of the billions of probability-worlds was not the one he had started from, was not home.

Still, he had done much worse than this before, too. At least this wasn’t a world where his father was dead, or an atomic war had happened, or his mother had cancer or was a drug addict, or his father was a brutal drunk, or a Nazi, or a child molester . . . This would do, for the night . . . He would settle for this, for tonight . . . He was so tired . . .

In the morning, he would start searching again.

Someday, he would find them.

Down Among the Dead Men

Introduction to Down Among the Dead Men

Some writers become friends. Reader, you probably know the feeling: that initial buzz when you encounter, perhaps in little more than a few lines or pages, a writer about whom you notice something which intrigues, something which chimes a bell deep within you, something which draws you in. You remember that writer’s name, you look out for them on the shelves and in lists of contents. When your paths brush against each other again, you open their pages with that fragile extra feeling of anticipation. You welcome them eagerly into your mind.

Gardner Dozois the writer has long been that kind of friend to me. I think it was probably Omni where I first encountered him, or perhaps an edition of Orbit I borrowed from the library. Which story was it? I’m honestly not sure, but what I do remember is the feeling, the sense of aha—here’s someone to look out for. All of that was long ago now, but I can honestly say that Gardner’s never let me down. He’s not that kind of friend, he’s not that kind of writer, and the story you have before you shows many of the reasons why.

Gardner’s often a harsh writer both in mood and choice of subject, but his prose, even in pieces as essentially uncompromising as “Down Among the Dead Men,” always has that extra edge of grace, surprise, wonder. There’s a scary, lovely moment you’ll soon come across when the struggles of a body are compared to the flapping of a kite. Gardner holds the image, develops it, brings the unsaid things home, all in a couple of sentences. Of course, he’s a good writer in the obvious sense of the word, but he’s also a good writer because he cares about goodness. Who else could choose the subject of vampires in a concentration camp, then bring it off with a sense of grace and humanity, and yet still leave you with a genuine shiver of horror? It’s a tricky balancing act to say the least, yet, here along with Jack Dann, Gardner achieves the task, surmounts it, makes the very difficulty of what he’s doing part of the significance and substance of the story. After all, in a world of near-ultimate horror, what could be more horrific than what is already happening? This story probes this question like a tongue at a sore tooth, and then gets close to the truth when, with typical lightness of touch, the world is briefly tilted upside down by the main character’s musings, and real history suddenly (and rightly) seems far more fantastical than the fantasy the story is describing. Gardner often seems surprised at what he’s writing; he never takes wonder or suffering or the characters he’s created or the setting he has made for granted. As I say, he’s a friend—he’s a good writer.

I’ve also known Gardner in his other literary incarnation as an editor for quite a few years. It’s a different kind of thing, friendship with an editor, although with Gardner I’ve always felt that the one relationship was grounded on the other—and he’s certainly been good to me in all the ways you’d expect of someone who writes such fine and honest prose. Then, finally, there’s Gardner Dozois the person. Introductions of these kinds are often full of the kind of the-time-we-got-drunk-in-Hong-Kong sort of tales we all recognize, but Gardner-and I have bumped into each other person-to-person only once, and for then literally no more than 20 seconds in the flurry of a convention hotel. We went our separate ways to our separate appointments, then back home to our separate continents, where we sometimes e-mail or write. But a stronger connection remains. Gardner’s a friend, and he’s a good one. And the friendship you can get from a writer can be long and deep and important—indeed, it can last and enrich a whole life. Reader, I hope Gardner Dozois can do a little of the same for you.

Ian MacLeod

Down Among the Dead Men

by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

Bruckman first discovered that Wernecke was a vampire when they went to the quarry that morning.

He was bending down to pick up a large rock when he thought he heard something in the gully nearby. He looked around and saw Wernecke huddled over a Musselmänn, one of the walking dead, a new man who had not been able to wake up to the terrible reality of the camp.

“Do you need any help?” Bruckman asked Wernecke in a low voice. Wernecke looked up, startled, and covered his mouth with his hand, as if he were signing to Bruckman to be quiet . . . .

But Bruckman was certain that he had glimpsed blood smeared on Wernecke’s mouth. “The Musselmänn, is he alive?” Wernecke had often risked his own life to save one or another of the men in his barracks. But to risk one’s life for a Musselmänn? “What’s wrong?”

“Get away.”

All right, Bruckman thought. Best to leave him alone. He looked pale, perhaps it was typhus. The guards were working him hard enough, and Wernecke was older than the rest of the men in the work gang. Let him sit for a moment and rest. But what about that blood . . . ?

“Hey, you, what are you doing?” one of the young SS guards shouted to Bruckman.

Bruckman picked up the rock, and, as if he had not heard the guard, began to walk away from the gully, toward the rusty brown cart on the tracks that led back to the barbed-wire fence of the camp. He would try to draw the guard’s attention away from Wernecke.

But the guard shouted at him to halt. “Were you taking a little rest, is that it?” he asked, and Bruckman tensed, ready for a beating. This guard was new, neatly and cleanly dressed—and an unknown quantity. He walked over to the gully and, seeing Wernecke and the Musselmänn, said, “Aha, so your friend is taking care of the sick.” He motioned Bruckman to follow him into the gully.

Bruckman had done the unpardonable—he had brought it on Wernecke. He swore at himself. He had been in this camp long enough to know to keep his mouth shut.

The guard kicked Wernecke sharply in the ribs. “I want you to put the Musselmänn in the cart. Now!” He kicked Wernecke again, as if as an afterthought. Wernecke groaned, but got to his feet. “Help him put the Musselmänn in the cart,” the guard said to Bruckman; then he smiled and drew a circle in the air—the sign of smoke, the smoke which rose from the tall gray chimneys behind them. This Musselmänn would be in the oven within an hour, his ashes soon to be floating in the hot, stale air, as if they were the very particles of his soul.

Wernecke kicked the Musselmänn, and the guard chuckled, waved to another guard who had been watching, and stepped back a few feet. He stood with his hands on his hips. “Come on, dead man, get up or you’re going to die in the oven,” Wernecke whispered as he tried to pull the man to his feet. Bruckman supported the unsteady Musselmänn, who began to wail softly. Wernecke slapped him hard. “Do you want to live, Musselmänn? Do you want to see your family again, feel the touch of a woman, smell grass after it’s been mowed? Then move.” The Musselmänn shambled forward between Wernecke and Bruckman. “You’re dead, aren’t you, Musselmänn,” goaded Wernecke. “As dead as your father and mother, as dead as your sweet wife, if you ever had one, aren’t you? Dead!”

The Musselmänn groaned, shook his head, and whispered, “Not dead, my wife . . .”

“Ah, it talks,” Wernecke said, loud enough so the guard walking a step behind them could hear. “Do you have a name, corpse?”

“Josef, and I’m not a Musselmänn.”

“The corpse says he’s alive,” Wernecke said, again loud enough for the SS guard to hear. Then in a whisper, he said, “Josef, if you’re not a Musselmänn, then you must work now, do you understand?” Josef tripped, and Bruckman caught him. “Let him be,” said Wernecke. “Let him walk to the cart himself.”

“Not the cart,” Josef mumbled. “Not to die, not—”

“Then get down and pick up stones, show the fart-eating guard you can work.”

“Can’t. I’m sick, I’m . . .”

“Musselmänn!”

Josef bent down, fell to his knees, but took hold of a stone and stood up with it.

“You see,” Wernecke said to the guard, “it’s not dead yet. It can still work.”

“I told you to carry him to the cart, didn’t I,” the guard said petulantly.

“Show him you can work,” Wernecke said to Josef, “or you’ll surely be smoke.”

And Josef stumbled away from Wernecke and Bruckman, leaning forward, as if following the rock he was carrying.

“Bring him back!” shouted the guard, but his attention was distracted from Josef by some other prisoners, who, sensing the trouble, began to mill about. One of the other guards began to shout and kick at the men on the periphery, and the new guard joined him. For the moment, he had forgotten about Josef.

“Let’s get to work, lest they notice us again,” Wernecke said.

“I’m sorry that I—”

Wernecke laughed and made a fluttering gesture with his hand—smoke rising. “It’s all hazard, my friend. All luck.” Again the laugh. “It was a venial sin,” and his face seemed to darken. “Never do it again, though, lest I think of you as bad luck.”

“Eduard, are you all right?” Bruckman asked. “I noticed some blood when—”

“Do the sores on your feet bleed in the morning?” Wernecke countered angrily. Bruckman nodded, feeling foolish and embarrassed. “And so it is with my gums, now go away, unlucky one, and let me live.”

They separated, and Bruckman tried to make himself invisible, tried to think himself into the rocks and sand and grit, into the choking air. He used to play this game as a child; he would close his eyes, and since he couldn’t see anybody, he would pretend that nobody could see him. And so it was again. Pretending the guards couldn’t see him was as good a way of staying alive as any.

He owed Wernecke another apology, which could not be made. He shouldn’t have asked about Wernecke’s sickness. It was bad luck to talk about such things. Wernecke had told him that when he, Bruckman, had first come to the barracks. If it weren’t for Wernecke, who had shared his rations with Bruckman, he might well have become a Musselmänn himself. Or dead, which was the same thing.

The day turned blisteringly hot, and guards as well as prisoners were coughing. The air was foul, the sun a smear in the heavy yellow sky. The colors were all wrong: the ash from the ovens changed the light, and they were all slowly choking on the ashes of dead friends, wives, and parents. The guards stood together quietly, talking in low voices, watching the prisoners, and there was the sense of a perverse freedom—as if both guards and prisoners had fallen out of time, as if they were all parts of the same fleshy machine.

At dusk, the guards broke the hypnosis of lifting and grunting and sweating and formed the prisoners into ranks. They marched back to the camp through the fields, beside the railroad tracks, the electrified wire, conical towers, and into the main gate of the camp.

Bruckman tried to block out a dangerous stray thought of his wife. He remembered her as if he were hallucinating: she was in his arms. The boxcar stank of sweat and feces and urine, but he had been inside it for so long that he was used to the smells. Miriam had been sleeping. Suddenly he discovered that she was dead. As he screamed, the smells of the car overpowered him, the smells of death.

Wernecke touched his arm, as if he knew, as if he could see through Bruckman’s eyes. And Bruckman knew what Wernecke’s eyes were saying: “Another day. We’re alive. Against all the odds. We conquered death.” Josef walked beside them, but he kept stumbling, as he was once again slipping back into death, becoming a Musselmänn. Wernecke helped him walk, pushed him along. “We should let this man become dead,” Wernecke said to Bruckman.

Bruckman only nodded, but he felt a chill sweep over his sweating back. He was seeing Wernecke’s face again as it was for that instant in the morning. Smeared with blood.

Yes, Bruckman thought, we should let the Musselmänn become dead. We should all be dead . . .

Wernecke served up the lukewarm water with bits of spoiled turnip floating on the top, what passed as soup for the prisoners. Everyone sat or kneeled on the rough-planked floor, as there were no chairs.

Bruckman ate his portion, counting the sips and the bites, forcing himself to take his time. Later, he would take a very small bite of the bread he had in his pocket. He always saved a small morsel of food for later—in the endless world of the camp, he had learned to give himself things to look forward to. Better to dream of bread than to get lost in the present. That was the fate of the Musselmänner.

But he always dreamed of food. Hunger was with him every moment of the day and night. Those times when he actually ate were in a way the most difficult, for there was never enough to satisfy him. There was the taste of softness in his mouth, and then in an instant it was gone. The emptiness took the form of pain—it hurt to eat. For bread, he thought, he would have killed his father, or his wife, God forgive me, and he watched Wernecke—Wernecke, who had shared his bread with him, who had died a little so he could live. He’s a better man than me, Bruckman thought.

It was dim inside the barracks. A bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling and cast sharp shadows across the cavernous room. Two tiers of five-foot-deep shelves ran around the room on three sides, bare wooden shelves where the men slept without blankets or mattresses. Set high in the northern wall was a slatted window, which let in the stark white light of the kliegs. Outside, the lights turned the ground into a deathly imitation of day; only inside the barracks was it night.

“Do you know what tonight is, my friends?” Wernecke asked. He sat in the far corner of the room with Josef, who, hour by hour, was reverting back into a Musselmänn. Wernecke’s face looked hollow and drawn in the light from the window and the lightbulb; his eyes were deep-set and his face was long with deep creases running from his nose to the corners of his thin mouth. His hair was black, and even since Bruckman had known him, quite a bit of it had fallen out. He was a very tall man, almost six foot four, and that made him stand out in a crowd, which was dangerous in a death camp. But Wernecke had his own secret ways of blending with the crowd, of making himself invisible.

“No, tell us what tonight is,” crazy old Bohme said. That men such as Bohme could survive was a miracle—or, as Bruckman thought—a testament to men such as Wernecke, who somehow found the strength to help the others live.

“It’s Passover,” Wernecke said.

“How does he know that?” someone mumbled, but it didn’t matter how Wernecke knew, because he knew—even if it really wasn’t Passover by the calendar. In this dimly lit barracks, it was Passover, the feast of freedom, the time of thanksgiving.

“But how can we have Passover without a seder?” asked Bohme. “We don’t even have any matzoh,” he whined.

“Nor do we have candles, or a silver cup for Elijah, or the shank bone, or haroset—nor would I make a seder over the traif the Nazis are so generous in giving us,” replied Wernecke with a smile. “But we can pray, can’t we? And when we all get out of here, when we’re in our own homes in the coming years with God’s help, then we’ll have twice as much food—two afikomens, a bottle of wine for Elijah, and the haggadahs that our fathers and our fathers’ fathers used.”

It was Passover.

“Isadore, do you remember the four questions?” Wernecke asked Bruckman.

And Bruckman heard himself speaking. He was twelve years old again at the long table beside his father, who sat in the seat of honor. To sit next to him was itself an honor. “How does this night differ from all other nights? On all other nights we eat bread and matzoh; why on this night do we eat only matzoh?”

“M’a nisht’ana halylah hazeah . . .”

Sleep would not come to Bruckman that night, although he was so tired that he felt as if the marrow of his bones had been sucked away and replaced with lead.

He lay there in the semidarkness, feeling his muscles ache, feeling the acid biting of his hunger. Usually he was numb enough with exhaustion that he could empty his mind, close himself down, and fall rapidly into oblivion, but not tonight. Tonight he was noticing things again, his surroundings were getting through to him again, in a way that they had not since he had been new in the camp. It was smotheringly hot, and the air was filled with the stinks of death and sweat and fever, of stale urine and drying blood. The sleepers thrashed and turned, as though they fought with sleep, and as they slept, many of them talked or muttered or screamed aloud; they lived other lives in their dreams, intensely compressed lives dreamed quickly, for soon it would be dawn, and once more they would be thrust into hell. Cramped in the midst of them, sleepers squeezed in all around him, it suddenly seemed to Bruckman that these pallid white bodies were already dead, that he was sleeping in a graveyard. Suddenly it was the boxcar again. And his wife Miriam was dead again, dead and rotting unburied . . .

Resolutely, Bruckman emptied his mind. He felt feverish and shaky, and wondered if the typhus was coming back, but he couldn’t afford to worry about it. Those who couldn’t sleep couldn’t survive. Regulate your breathing, force your muscles to relax, don’t think. Don’t think.

For some reason, after he had managed to banish even the memory of his dead wife, he couldn’t shake the image of the blood on Wernecke’s mouth.

There were other images mixed in with it—Wernecke’s uplifted arms and upturned face as he led them in prayer, the pale strained face of the stumbling Musselmänn, Wernecke looking up, startled, as he crouched over Josef—but it was the blood to which Bruckman’s feverish thoughts returned, and he pictured it again and again as he lay in the rustling, fart-smelling darkness: the watery sheen of blood over Wernecke’s lips, the tarry trickle of blood in the corner of his mouth, like a tiny scarlet worm . . .

Just then a shadow crossed in front of the window, silhouetted blackly for an instant against the harsh white glare, and Bruckman knew from the shadow’s height and its curious forward stoop that it was Wernecke.

Where could he be going? Sometimes a prisoner would be unable to wait until morning, when the Germans would let them out to visit the slit-trench latrine again, and would slink shamefacedly into a far corner to piss against a wall, but surely Wernecke was too much of an old hand for that . . . Most of the prisoners slept on the sleeping platforms, especially during the cold nights when they would huddle together for warmth, but sometimes during the hot weather, people would drift away and sleep on the floor instead; Bruckman himself had been thinking of doing that, as the jostling bodies of the sleepers around him helped to keep him from sleep. Perhaps Wernecke, who always had trouble fitting into the cramped sleeping niches, was merely looking for a place where he could lie down and stretch his legs . . .

Then Bruckman remembered that Josef had fallen asleep in the corner of the room where Wernecke had sat and prayed, and that they had left him there alone.

Without knowing why, Bruckman found himself on his feet. As silently as the ghost he sometimes felt he was becoming, he walked across the room in the direction Wernecke had gone, not understanding what he was doing or why he was doing it. The face of the Musselmänn, Josef, seemed to float behind his eyes. Bruckman’s feet hurt, and he knew, without looking, that they were bleeding, leaving faint tracks behind him. It was dimmer here in the far corner, away from the window, but Bruckman knew that he must be near the wall by now, and he stopped to let his eyes readjust.

When his eyes had adapted to the dimmer light, he saw Josef sitting on the floor, propped up against the wall. Wernecke was hunched over the Musselmänn. Kissing him. One of Josef s hands was tangled in Wernecke’s thinning hair.

Before Bruckman could react—such things had been known to happen once or twice before, although it shocked him deeply that Wernecke would be involved in such filth—Josef released his grip on Wernecke’s hair. Josef’s upraised arm fell limply to the side, his hand hitting the floor with a muffled but solid impact that should have been painful—but Josef made no sound.

Wernecke straightened up and turned around. Stronger light from the high window caught him as he straightened to his full height, momentarily illuminating his face.

Wernecke’s mouth was smeared with blood.

“My God!” Bruckman cried.

Startled, Wernecke flinched, then took two quick steps forward and seized Bruckman by the arm. “Quiet!” Wernecke hissed. His fingers were cold and hard.

At that moment, as though Wernecke’s sudden movement were a cue, Josef began to slip down sideways along the wall. As Wernecke and Bruckman watched, both momentarily riveted by the sight, Josef toppled over to the floor, his head striking against the floorboards with a sound such as a dropped melon might make. He had made no attempt to break his fall or cushion his head, and lay now unmoving.

“My God,” Bruckman said again.

“Quiet, I’ll explain,” Wernecke said, his lips still glazed with the Musselmänn’s blood. “Do you want to ruin us all? For the love of God, be quiet.”

But Bruckman had shaken free of Wernecke’s grip and crossed to kneel by Josef, leaning over him as Wernecke had done, placing a hand flat on Josef’s chest for a moment, then touching the side of Josef’s neck. Bruckman looked slowly up at Wernecke. “He’s dead,” Bruckman said, more quietly.

Wernecke squatted on the other side of Josef’s body, and the rest of their conversation was carried out in whispers over Josef’s chest, like friends conversing at the sickbed of another friend who has finally fallen into a fitful doze.

“Yes, he’s dead,” Wernecke said. “He was dead yesterday, wasn’t he? Today he has just stopped walking.” His eyes were hidden here, in the deeper shadow nearer to the floor, but there was still enough light for Bruckman to see that Wernecke had wiped his lips clean. Or licked them clean, Bruckman thought, and felt a spasm of nausea go through him.

“But you,” Bruckman said, haltingly. “You were . . .”

“Drinking his blood?” Wernecke said. “Yes, I was drinking his blood.”

Bruckman’s mind was numb. He couldn’t deal with this, he couldn’t understand it at all. “But why, Eduard? Why?”

“To live, of course. Why do any of us do anything here? If I am to live, I must have blood. Without it, I’d face a death even more certain than that doled out by the Nazis.”

Bruckman opened and closed his mouth, but no sound came out, as if the words he wished to speak were too jagged to fit through his throat. At last he managed to croak, “A vampire? You’re a vampire? Like in the old stories?”

Wernecke said calmly, “Men would call me that.” He paused, then nodded. “Yes, that’s what men would call me . . . As though they can understand something simply by giving it a name.”

“But Eduard,” Bruckman said weakly, almost petulantly. “The Musselmänn . . .”

“Remember that he was a Musselmänn, “Wernecke said, leaning forward and speaking more fiercely. “His strength was going, he was sinking. He would have been dead by morning, anyway. I took from him something that he no longer needed, but that I needed in order to live. Does it matter? Starving men in lifeboats have eaten the bodies of their dead companions in order to live. Is what I’ve done any worse than that?”

“But he didn’t just die. You killed him . . .”

Wernecke was silent for a moment, and then said, quietly, “What better thing could I have done for him? I won’t apologize for what I do, Isadore; I do what I have to do to live. Usually I take only a little blood from a number of men, just enough to survive. And that’s fair, isn’t it? Haven’t I given food to others, to help them survive? To you, Isadore? Only very rarely do I take more than a minimum from any one man, although I’m weak and hungry all the time, believe me. And never have I drained the life from someone who wished to live. Instead I’ve helped them fight for survival in every way I can, you know that.”

He reached out as though to touch Bruckman, then thought better of it and put his hand back on his own knee. He shook his head. “But these Musselmänner, the ones who have given up on life, the walking dead—it is a favor to them to take them, to give them the solace of death. Can you honestly say that it is not, here? That it is better for them to walk around while they are dead, being beaten and abused by the Nazis until their bodies cannot go on, and then to be thrown into the ovens and burned like trash? Can you say that? Would they say that, if they knew what was going on? Or would they thank me?”

Wernecke suddenly stood up, and Bruckman stood up with him. As Wernecke’s face came again into the stronger light, Bruckman could see that his eyes had filled with tears. “You have lived under the Nazis,” Wernecke said. “Can you really call me a monster? Aren’t I still a Jew, whatever else I might be? Aren’t I here, in a death camp? Aren’t I being persecuted too, as much as any other? Aren’t I in as much danger as anyone else? If I’m not a Jew, then tell the Nazis—they seem to think so.” He paused for a moment, and then smiled wryly. “And forget your superstitious bogey tales. I’m no night spirit. If I could turn myself into a bat and fly away from here, I would have done it long before now, believe me.”

Bruckman smiled reflexively, then grimaced. The two men avoided each other’s eyes, Bruckman looking at the floor, and there was an uneasy silence, punctuated only by the sighing and moaning of the sleepers on the other side of the cabin. Then, without looking up, in tacit surrender, Bruckman said, “What about him? The Nazis will find the body and cause trouble . . .”

“Don’t worry,” Wernecke said. “There are no obvious marks. And nobody performs autopsies in a death camp. To the Nazis, he’ll be just another Jew who has died of the heat, or from starvation or sickness, or from a broken heart.”

Bruckman raised his head then and they stared eye to eye for a moment. Even knowing what he knew, Bruckman found it hard to see Wernecke as anything other than what he appeared to be: an aging, balding Jew, stooping and thin, with sad eyes and a tired, compassionate face.

“Well, then, Isadore,” Wernecke said at last, matter-of-factly. “My life is in your hands. I will not be indelicate enough to remind you of how many times your life has been in mine.”

Then he was gone, walking back toward the sleeping platforms, a shadow soon lost among other shadows.

Bruckman stood by himself in the gloom for a long time, and then followed him. It took all of his will not to look back over his shoulder at the corner where Josef lay, and even so Bruckman imagined that he could feel Josef’s dead eyes watching him, watching him reproachfully as he walked away, abandoning Josef to the cold and isolate company of the dead.

Bruckman got no more sleep that night, and in the morning, when the Nazis shattered the gray predawn stillness by bursting into the shack with shouts and shrilling whistles and barking police dogs, he felt as if he were a thousand years old.

They were formed into two lines, shivering in the raw morning air, and marched off to the quarry. The clammy dawn mist had yet to burn off, and, marching through it, through a white shadowless void, with only the back of the man in front of him dimly visible, Bruckman felt more than ever like a ghost, suspended bodiless in some limbo between Heaven and Earth. Only the bite of pebbles and cinders into his raw, bleeding feet kept him anchored to the world, and he clung to the pain as a lifeline, fighting to shake off a feeling of numbness and unreality. However strange, however outré, the events of the previous night had happened. To doubt it, to wonder now if it had all been a feverish dream brought on by starvation and exhaustion, was to take the first step on the road to becoming a Musselmänn.

Wernecke is a vampire, he told himself. That was the harsh, unyielding reality that, like the reality of the camp itself, must be faced. Was it any more surreal, any more impossible, than the nightmare around them? He must forget the tales his old grandmother had told him as a boy, “bogey tales” as Wernecke himself had called them, half-remembered tales that turned his knees to water whenever he thought of the blood smeared on Wernecke’s mouth, whenever he thought of Wernecke’s eyes watching him in the dark.

“Wake up, Jew!” the guard alongside him snarled, whacking him lightly on the arm with his rifle butt. Bruckman stumbled, managed to stay upright and keep going. Yes, he thought, wake up. Wake up to the reality of this, just as you once had to wake up to the reality of the camp. It was just one more unpleasant fact he would have to adapt to, learn to deal with . . .

Deal with how? he thought, and shivered.

By the time they reached the quarry, the mist had burned off, swirling past them in rags and tatters, and it was already beginning to get hot. There was Wernecke, his balding head gleaming dully in the harsh morning light. He didn’t dissolve in the sunlight, there was one bogey tale disproved . . .

They set to work, like golems, like ragtag clockwork automatons.

Lack of sleep had drained what small reserves of strength Bruckman had, and the work was very hard for him that day. He had learned long ago all the tricks of timing and misdirection, the safe ways to snatch short moments of rest, the ways to do a minimum of work with the maximum display of effort, the ways to keep the guards from noticing you, to fade into the faceless crowd of prisoners and not be singled out, but today his head was muzzy and slow, and none of the tricks seemed to work.

His body felt like a sheet of glass, fragile, ready to shatter into dust, and the painful, arthritic slowness of his movements got him first shouted at, and then knocked down. The guard kicked him twice for good measure before he could get up.

When Bruckman had climbed back to his feet again, he saw that Wernecke was watching him, face blank, eyes expressionless, a look that could have meant anything at all.

Bruckman felt the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth and thought, the blood . . . he’s watching the blood . . . and once again he shivered.

Somehow, Bruckman forced himself to work faster, and although his muscles blazed with pain, he wasn’t hit again, and the day passed.

When they formed up to go back to the camp, Bruckman, almost unconsciously, made sure that he was in a different line from Wernecke.

That night in the cabin, Bruckman watched as Wernecke talked with the other men, here trying to help a new man named Melnick—no more than a boy—adjust to the dreadful reality of the camp, there exhorting someone who was slipping into despair to live and spite his tormentors, joking with old hands in the flat, black, bitter way that passed for humor among them, eliciting a wan smile or occasionally even a laugh from them, finally leading them all in prayer again, his strong, calm voice raised in the ancient words, giving meaning to those words again . . .

He keeps us together, Bruckman thought, he keeps us going. Without him, we wouldn’t last a week. Surely that’s worth a little blood, a bit from each man, not even enough to hurt . . .

Surely they wouldn’t even begrudge him it, if they knew and really understood . . . No, he is a good man, better than the rest of us, in spite of his terrible affliction.

Bruckman had been avoiding Wernecke’s eyes, hadn’t spoken to him at all that day, and suddenly felt a wave of shame go through him at the thought of how shabbily he had been treating his friend. Yes, his friend, regardless, the man who had saved his life . . . Deliberately, he caught Wernecke’s eyes, and nodded, and then somewhat sheepishly, smiled. After a moment, Wernecke smiled back, and Bruckman felt a spreading warmth and relief uncoil his guts. Everything was going to be all right, as all right as it could be, here . . .

Nevertheless, as soon as the inside lights clicked off that night, and Bruckman found himself lying alone in the darkness, his flesh began to crawl.

He had been unable to keep his eyes open a moment before, but now, in the sudden darkness, he found himself tensely and tickingly awake. Where was Wernecke? What was he doing, who was he visiting tonight?

Was he out there in the darkness even now, creeping closer, creeping nearer . . . ? Stop it, Bruckman told himself uneasily, forget the bogey tales. This is your friend, a good man, not a monster . . . But he couldn’t control the fear that made the small hairs on his arms stand bristlingly erect, couldn’t stop the grisly images from coming . . .

Wernecke’s eyes, gleaming in the darkness . . . Was the blood already glistening on Wernecke’s lips, as he drank . . . ? The thought of the blood staining Wernecke’s yellowing teeth made Bruckman cold and nauseous, but the image that he couldn’t get out of his mind tonight was an image of Josef toppling over in that sinisterly boneless way, striking his head against the floor . . . Bruckman had seen people die in many more gruesome ways during his time at the camp, seen people shot, beaten to death, seen them die in convulsions from high fevers or cough their lungs up in bloody tatters from pneumonia, seen them hanging like charred-black scarecrows from the electrified fences, seen them torn apart by dogs . . . but somehow it was Josef’s soft, passive, almost restful slumping into death that bothered him. That, and the obscene limpness of Josef’s limbs as he sprawled there like a discarded rag doll, his pale and haggard face gleaming reproachfully in the dark . . .

When Bruckman could stand it no longer, he got shakily to his feet and moved off through the shadows, once again not knowing where he was going or what he was going to do, but drawn forward by some obscure instinct he himself did not understand. This time he went cautiously, feeling his way and trying to be silent, expecting every second to see Wernecke’s coal-black shadow rise up before him.

He paused, a faint noise scratching at his ears, then went on again, even more cautiously, crouching low, almost crawling across the grimy floor.

Whatever instinct had guided him—sounds heard and interpreted subliminally, perhaps?—it had timed his arrival well. Wernecke had someone down on the floor there, perhaps someone he had seized and dragged away from the huddled mass of sleepers on one of the sleeping platforms, someone from the outer edge of bodies whose presence would not be missed, or perhaps someone who had gone to sleep on the floor, seeking solitude or greater comfort.

Whoever he was, he struggled in Wernecke’s grip, but Wernecke handled him easily, almost negligently, in a manner that spoke of great physical power. Bruckman could hear the man trying to scream, but Wernecke had one hand on his throat, half-throttling him, and all that would come out was a sort of whistling gasp. The man thrashed in Wernecke’s hands like a kite in a child’s hands flapping in the wind, and, moving deliberately, Wernecke smoothed him out like a kite, pressing him slowly flat on the floor.

Then Wernecke bent over him, and lowered his mouth to his throat. Bruckman watched in horror, knowing that he should shout, scream, try to rouse the other prisoners, but somehow unable to move, unable to make his mouth open, his lungs pump. He was paralyzed by fear, like a rabbit in the presence of a predator, a terror sharper and more intense than any he’d ever known.

The man’s struggles were growing weaker, and Wernecke must have eased up some on the throttling pressure of his hand, because the man moaned “Don’t . . . please don’t . . .” in a weak, slurred voice. The man had been drumming his fists against Wernecke’s back and sides, but now the tempo of the drumming slowed, slowed, and then stopped, the man’s arms falling laxly to the floor. “Don’t . . .” the man whispered; he groaned and muttered incomprehensibly for a moment or two longer, then became silent. The silence stretched out for a minute, two, three, and Wernecke still crouched over his victim, who was now not moving at all . . .

Wernecke stirred, a kind of shudder going through him, like a cat stretching. He stood up. His face became visible as he straightened up into the full light from the window, and there was blood on it, glistening black under the harsh glare of the kliegs. As Bruckman watched, Wernecke began to lick his lips clean, his tongue, also black in this light, sliding like some sort of sinuous ebony snake around the rim of his mouth, darting and probing for the last lingering drops . . .

How smug he looks, Bruckman thought, like a cat who has found the cream, and the anger that flashed through him at the thought enabled him to move and speak again. “Wernecke,” he said harshly.

Wernecke glanced casually in his direction. “You again, Isadore?” Wernecke said. “Don’t you ever sleep?” Wernecke spoke lazily, quizzically, without surprise, and Bruckman wondered if Wernecke had known all along that he was there. “Or do you just enjoy watching me?”

“Lies,” Bruckman said. “You told me nothing but lies. Why did you bother?”

“You were excited,” Wernecke said. “You had surprised me. It seemed best to tell you what you wanted to hear. If it satisfied you, then that was an easy solution to the problem.”

“‘Never have I drained the life from someone who wanted to live,’” Bruckman said bitterly, mimicking Wernecke. “‘Only a little from each man.’ My God—and I believed you! I even felt sorry for you!”

Wernecke shrugged. “Most of it was true. Usually I only take a little from each man, softly and carefully, so that they never know, so that in the morning they are only a little weaker than they would have been anyway . . .”

“Like Josef?” Bruckman said angrily. “Like the poor devil you killed tonight?”

Wernecke shrugged again. “I have been careless the last few nights, I admit. But I need to build up my strength again.” His eyes gleamed in the darkness. “Events are coming to a head here. Can’t you feel it, Isadore, can’t you sense it? Soon the war will be over, everyone knows that. Before then, this camp will be shut down, and the Nazis will move us back into the interior—either that, or kill us. I have grown weak here, and I will soon need all my strength to survive, to take whatever opportunity presents itself to escape. I must be ready. And so I have let myself drink deeply again, drink my fill for the first time in months . . .” Wernecke licked his lips again, perhaps unconsciously, then smiled bleakly at Bruckman. “You don’t appreciate my restraint, Isadore. You don’t understand how hard it has been for me to hold back, to take only a little each night. You don’t understand how much that restraint has cost me . . .”

“You are gracious,” Bruckman sneered.

Wernecke laughed. “No, but I am a rational man; I pride myself on that. You other prisoners were my only source of food, and I have had to be very careful to make sure that you would last. I have no access to the Nazis, after all. I am trapped here, a prisoner just like you, whatever else you may believe—and I have not only had to find ways to survive here in the camp, I have had to procure my own food as well! No shepherd has ever watched over his flock more tenderly than I.”

“Is that all we are to you—sheep? Animals to be slaughtered?”

Wernecke smiled. “Precisely.”

When he could control his voice enough to speak, Bruckman said, “You’re worse than the Nazis.”

“I hardly think so,” Wernecke said quietly, and for a moment he looked tired, as though something unimaginably old and unutterably weary had looked out through his eyes. “This camp was built by the Nazis—it wasn’t my doing. The Nazis sent you here—not I. The Nazis have tried to kill you every day since, in one way or another—and I have tried to keep you alive, even at some risk to myself. No one has more of a vested interest in the survival of his livestock than the farmer, after all, even if he does occasionally slaughter an inferior animal. I have given you food—”

“Food you had no use for yourself? You sacrificed nothing!”

“That’s true, of course. But you needed it, remember that. Whatever my motives, I have helped you to survive here—you and many others. By doing so I also acted in my own self-interest, of course, but can you have experienced this camp and still believe in things like altruism? What difference does it make what my reason for helping was—I still helped you, didn’t I?”

“Sophistries!” Bruckman said. “Rationalizations! You twist words to justify yourself, but you can’t disguise what you really are—a monster!”

Wernecke smiled gently, as though Bruckman’s words amused him, and made as if to pass by, but Bruckman raised an arm to bar his way. They did not touch each other, but Wernecke stopped short, and a new and quivering kind of tension sprang into existence in the air between them.

“I’ll stop you,” Bruckman said. “Somehow I’ll stop you, I’ll keep you from doing this terrible thing—”

“You’ll do nothing,” Wernecke said. His voice was hard and cold and flat, like a rock speaking. “What can you do? Tell the other prisoners? Who would believe you? They’d think you’d gone insane. Tell the Nazis, then?” Wernecke laughed harshly. “They’d think you’d gone crazy too, and they’d take you to the hospital—and I don’t have to tell you what your chances of getting out of there alive are, do I? No, you’ll do nothing.”

Wernecke took a step forward; his eyes were shiny and blank and hard, like ice, like the pitiless eyes of a predatory bird, and Bruckman felt a sick rush of fear cut through his anger. Bruckman gave way, stepping backward involuntarily, and Wernecke pushed past him, seeming to brush him aside without touching him.

Once past, Wernecke turned to stare at Bruckman, and Bruckman had to summon up all the defiance that remained in him not to look uneasily away from Wernecke’s agate-hard eyes. “You are the strongest and cleverest of all the other animals, Isadore,” Wernecke said in a calm, conversational, almost ruminative voice. “You have been useful to me. Every shepherd needs a good sheepdog. I still need you, to help me manage the others, and to help me keep them going long enough to serve my needs. This is the reason why I have taken so much time with you, instead of just killing you outright.” He shrugged. “So let us both be rational about this—you leave me alone, Isadore, and I will leave you alone also. We will stay away from each other and look after our own affairs. Yes?”

“The others . . .” Bruckman said weakly.

“They must look after themselves,” Wernecke said. He smiled, a thin and almost invisible motion of his lips. “What did I teach you, Isadore? Here everyone must look after themselves. What difference does it make what happens to the others? In a few weeks almost all of them will be dead anyway.”

“You are a monster,” Bruckman said.

“I’m not much different from you, Isadore. The strong survive, whatever the cost.”

“I am nothing like you,” Bruckman said, with loathing.

“No?” Wernecke asked, ironically, and moved away; within a few paces he was hobbling and stooping, vanishing into the shadows, once more the harmless old Jew.

Bruckman stood motionless for a moment, and then, moving slowly and reluctantly, he stepped across to where Wernecke’s victim lay.

It was one of the new men Wernecke had been talking to earlier in the evening, and, of course, he was quite dead.

Shame and guilt took Bruckman then, emotions he thought he had forgotten—black and strong and bitter, they shook him by the throat the way Wernecke had shaken the new man.

Bruckman couldn’t remember returning across the room to his sleeping platform, but suddenly he was there, lying on his back and staring into the stifling darkness, surrounded by the moaning, thrashing, stinking mass of sleepers. His hands were clasped protectively over his throat, although he couldn’t remember putting them there, and he was shivering convulsively. How many mornings had he awoken with a dull ache in his neck, thinking it no more than the habitual body-aches and strained muscles they had all learned to take for granted? How many nights had Wernecke fed on him?

Every time Bruckman closed his eyes, he would see Wernecke’s face floating there in the luminous darkness behind his eyelids . . . Wernecke with his eyes half-closed, his face vulpine and cruel and satiated . . . Wernecke’s face moving closer and closer to him, his eyes opening like black pits, his lips smiling back from his teeth . . . Wernecke’s lips, sticky and red with blood . . . and then Bruckman would seem to feel the wet touch of Wernecke’s lips on his throat, feel Wernecke’s teeth biting into his flesh, and Bruckman’s eyes would fly open again. Staring into the darkness. Nothing there. Nothing there yet . . .

Dawn was a dirty gray imminence against the cabin window before Bruckman could force himself to lower his shielding arms from his throat, and once again he had not slept at all.

That day’s work was a nightmare of pain and exhaustion for Bruckman, harder than anything he had known since his first few days at the camp. Somehow he forced himself to get up, somehow he stumbled outside and up the path to the quarry, seeming to float along high off the ground, his head a bloated balloon, his feet a thousand miles away at the end of boneless beanstalk legs he could barely control at all. Twice he fell, and was kicked several times before he could drag himself back to his feet and lurch forward again. The sun was coming up in front of them, a hard red disk in a sickly yellow sky, and to Bruckman it seemed to be a glazed and lidless eye staring dispassionately into the world to watch them flail and struggle and die, like the eye of a scientist peering into a laboratory maze.

He watched the disk of the sun as he stumbled toward it; it seemed to bob and shimmer with every painful step, expanding, swelling and bloating until it swallowed the sky . . .

Then he was picking up a rock, moaning with the effort, feeling the rough stone tear his hands . . .

Reality began to slide away from Bruckman. There were long periods when the world was blank, and he would come slowly back to himself as if from a great distance, and hear his own voice speaking words that he could not understand, or keening mindlessly, or grunting in a hoarse, animalistic way, and he would find that his body was working mechanically, stooping and lifting and carrying, all without volition . . .

A Musselmänn, Bruckman thought, I’m becoming a Musselmänn . . . and felt a chill of fear sweep through him. He fought to hold onto the world, afraid that the next time he slipped away from himself he would not come back, deliberately banging his hands into the rocks, cutting himself, clearing his head with pain.

The world steadied around him. A guard shouted a hoarse admonishment at him and slapped his rifle butt, and Bruckman forced himself to work faster, although he could not keep himself from weeping silently with the pain his movements cost him.

He discovered that Wernecke was watching him, and stared back defiantly, the bitter tears still runneling his dirty cheeks, thinking, I won’t become a Musselmänn for you, l won’t make it easy for you, 1 won’t provide another helpless victim for you . . . Wernecke met Bruckman’s gaze for a moment, and then shrugged and turned away.

Bruckman bent for another stone, feeling the muscles in his back crack and the pain drive in like knives. What had Wernecke been thinking, behind the blankness of his expressionless face? Had Wernecke, sensing his weakness, marked Bruckman for his next victim? Had Wernecke been disappointed or dismayed by the strength of Bruckman’s will to survive? Would Wernecke now settle upon someone else?

The morning passed, and Bruckman grew feverish again. He could feel the fever in his face, making his eyes feel sandy and hot, pulling the skin taut over his cheekbones, and he wondered how long he could manage to stay on his feet. To falter, to grow weak and insensible, was certain death; if the Nazis didn’t kill him, Wernecke would . . . Wernecke was out of sight now, on the other side of the quarry, but it seemed to Bruckman that Wernecke’s hard and flinty eyes were everywhere, floating in the air around him, looking out momentarily from the back of a Nazi soldier’s head, watching him from the dulled iron side of a quarry cart, peering at him from a dozen different angles. He bent ponderously for another rock, and when he had pried it up from the earth he found Wernecke’s eyes beneath it, staring unblinkingly up at him from the damp and pallid soil . . .

That afternoon there were great flashes of light on the eastern horizon, out across the endless flat expanse of the steppe, flares in rapid sequence that lit up the sullen gray sky, all without sound. The Nazi guards had gathered together in a group, looking to the east and talking in subdued voices, ignoring the prisoners for the moment. For the first time Bruckman noticed how disheveled and unshaven the guards had become in the last few days, as though they had given up, as though they no longer cared. Their faces were strained and tight, and more than one of them seemed to be fascinated by the leaping fires on the distant edge of the world.

Melnick said that it was only a thunderstorm, but old Bohme said that it was an artillery battle being fought, and that that meant that the Russians were coming, that soon they would all be liberated.

Bohme grew so excited at the thought that he began shouting, “The Russians! It’s the Russians! The Russians are coming to free us!” Dichstein and Melnick tried to hush him, but Bohme continued to caper and shout—doing a grotesque kind of jig while he yelled and flapped his arms—until he had attracted the attention of the guards. Infuriated, two of the guards fell upon Bohme and beat him severely, striking him with their rifle butts with more than usual force, knocking him to the ground, continuing to flail at him and kick him while he was down, Bohme writhing like an injured worm under their stamping boots. They probably would have beaten Bohme to death on the spot, but Wernecke organized a distraction among some of the other prisoners, and when the guards moved away to deal with it, Wernecke helped Bohme to stand up and hobble away to the other side of the quarry, where the rest of the prisoners shielded him from sight with their bodies as best they could for the rest of the afternoon.

Something about the way Wernecke urged Bohme to his feet and helped him to limp and lurch away, something about the protective, possessive curve of Wernecke’s arm around Bohme’s shoulders, told Bruckman that Wernecke had selected his next victim.

That night Bruckman vomited up the meager and rancid meal that they were allowed, his stomach convulsing uncontrollably after the first few bites. Trembling with hunger and exhaustion and fever, he leaned against the wall and watched as Wernecke fussed over Bohme, nursing him as a man might nurse a sick child, talking gently to him, wiping away some of the blood that still oozed from the corner of Bohme’s mouth, coaxing Bohme to drink a few sips of soup, finally arranging that Bohme should stretch out on the floor away from the sleeping platforms, where he would not be jostled by the others . . .

As soon as the interior lights went out that night, Bruckman got up, crossed the floor quickly and unhesitantly, and lay down in the shadows near the spot where Bohme muttered and twitched and groaned.

Shivering, Bruckman lay in the darkness, the strong smell of earth in his nostrils, waiting for Wernecke to come . . .

In Bruckman’s hand, held close to his chest, was a spoon that had been sharpened to a jagged needle point, a spoon he had stolen and begun to sharpen while he was still in a civilian prison in Cologne, so long ago that he almost couldn’t remember, scraping it back and forth against the stone wall of his cell every night for hours, managing to keep it hidden on his person during the nightmarish ride in the sweltering boxcar, the first few terrible days at the camp, telling no one about it, not even Wernecke during the months when he’d thought of Wernecke as a kind of saint, keeping it hidden long after the possibility of escape had become too remote even to fantasize about, retaining it then more as a tangible link with the daydream country of his past than as a tool he ever actually hoped to employ, cherishing it almost as a holy relic, as a remnant of a vanished world that he otherwise might almost believe had never existed at all . . .

And now that it was time to use it at last, he was almost reluctant to do so, to soil it with another man’s blood . . .

He fingered the spoon compulsively, turning it over and over; it was hard and smooth and cold, and he clenched it as tightly as he could, trying to ignore the fine tremoring of his hands.

He had to kill Wernecke . . .

Nausea and an odd feeling of panic flashed through Bruckman at the thought, but there was no other choice, there was no other way . . . He couldn’t go on like this, his strength was failing; Wernecke was killing him, as surely as he had killed the others, just by keeping him from sleeping . . . And as long as Wernecke lived, he would never be safe, always there would be the chance that Wernecke would come for him, that Wernecke would strike as soon as his guard was down . . . Would Wernecke scruple for a second to kill him, after all, if he thought that he could do it safely . . . ? No, of course not . . . Given the chance, Wernecke would kill him without a moment’s further thought . . . No, he must strike first . . .

Bruckman licked his lips uneasily. Tonight. He had to kill Wernecke tonight . . .

There was a stirring, a rustling: someone was getting up, working his way free from the mass of sleepers on one of the platforms. A shadowy figure crossed the room toward Bruckman, and Bruckman tensed, reflexively running his thumb along the jagged end of the spoon, readying himself to rise, to strike—but at the last second, the figure veered aside and stumbled toward another corner. There was a sound like rain drumming on cloth; the man swayed there for a moment, mumbling, and then slowly returned to his pallet, dragging his feet, as if he had pissed his very life away against the wall. It was not Wernecke.

Bruckman eased himself back down to the floor, his heart seeming to shake his wasted body back and forth with the force of its beating. His hand was damp with sweat. He wiped it against his tattered pants, and then clutched the spoon again . . .

Time seemed to stop. Bruckman waited, stretched out along the hard floorboards; the raw wood rasping his skin, dust clogging his mouth and nose, feeling as though he were already dead, a corpse laid out in a rough pine coffin, feeling eternity pile up on his chest like heavy clots of wet black earth . . . Outside the hut, the kliegs blazed, banishing night, abolishing it, but here inside the but it was night, here night survived, perhaps the only pocket of night remaining on a klieg-lit planet, the shafts of light that came in through the slatted window only serving to accentuate the surrounding darkness, to make it greater and more puissant by comparison . . . Here in the darkness, nothing ever changed . . . there was only the smothering heat, and the weight of eternal darkness, and the changeless moments that could not pass because there was nothing to differentiate them one from the other . . .

Many times as he waited, Bruckman’s eyes would grow heavy and slowly close, but each time his eyes would spring open again at once, and he would find himself staring into the shadows for Wernecke. Sleep would no longer have him, it was a kingdom closed to him now; it spat him out each time he tried to enter it, just as his stomach now spat out the food he placed in it . . .

The thought of food brought Bruckman to a sharper awareness, and there in the darkness he huddled around his hunger, momentarily forgetting everything else. Never had he been so hungry . . . He thought of the food he had wasted earlier in the evening, and only the last few shreds of his self-control kept him from moaning aloud.

Bohme did moan aloud then, as though unease were contagious. As Bruckman glanced at him, Bohme said, “Anya,” in a clear calm voice; he mumbled a little, and then, a bit more loudly, said, “Tseitel, have you set the table yet?” and Bruckman realized that Bohme was no longer in the camp, that Bohme was back in Dusseldorf in the tiny apartment with his fat wife and his four healthy children, and Bruckman felt a pang of envy go through him, for Bohme, who had escaped.

It was at that moment that Bruckman realized that Wernecke was standing there, just beyond Bohme.

There had been no movement that Bruckman had seen. Wernecke had seemed to slowly materialize from the darkness, atom by atom, bit by incremental bit, until at some point he had been solid enough for his presence to register on Bruckman’s consciousness, so that what had been only a shadow a moment before was now suddenly and unmistakably Wernecke as well, however much a shadow it remained.

Bruckman’s mouth went dry with terror, and it almost seemed that he could hear the voice of his dead grandmother whispering in his ears. Bogey tales. . . Wernecke had said I’m no night spirit. Remember that he had said that .

Wernecke was almost close enough to touch. He was staring down at Bohme; his face, lit by a dusty shaft of light from the window, was cold and remote, only the total lack of expression hinting at the passion that strained and quivered behind the mask. Slowly, lingeringly, Wernecke stooped over Bohme. “Anya,” Bohme said again, caressingly, and then Wernecke’s mouth was on his throat.

Let him feed, said a cold remorseless voice in Bruckman’s mind. It will be easier to take him when he’s nearly sated, when he’s fully preoccupied and growing lethargic and logy . . . Growing full . . .

Slowly, with infinite caution, Bruckman gathered himself to spring, watching in horror and fascination as Wernecke fed. He could hear Wernecke sucking the juice out of Bohme, as if there was not enough blood in the foolish old man to satiate him, as if there was not enough blood in the whole camp . . . Or perhaps the whole world . . . And now Bohme was ceasing his feeble struggling, was becoming still . . .

Bruckman flung himself upon Wernecke, stabbing him twice in the back before his weight bowled them both over. There was a moment of confusion as they rolled and struggled together, all without sound, and then Bruckman found himself sitting atop Wernecke, Wernecke’s white face turned up to him. Bruckman drove his weapon into Wernecke again, the shock of the blow jarring Bruckman’s arm to the shoulder. Wernecke made no outcry; his eyes were already glazing, but they looked at Bruckman with recognition, with cold anger, with bitter irony, and, oddly, with what might have been resignation or relief, with what might almost have been pity . . . Bruckman stabbed again and again, driving the blows home with hysterical strength, panting, rocking atop his victim, feeling Wernecke’s blood splatter against his face, wrapped in the heat and steam that rose from Wernecke’s torn-open body like a smothering black cloud, coughing and choking on it for a moment, feeling the steam seep in through his pores and sink deep into the marrow of his bones, feeling the world seem to pulse and shimmer and change around him, as though he were suddenly seeing through new eyes, as though something had been born anew inside him, and then abruptly he was smelling Wernecke’s blood, the hot organic reek of it, leaning closer to drink in that sudden overpowering smell, better than the smell of freshly baked bread, better than anything he could remember, rich and heady and strong beyond imagining.

There was a moment of revulsion and horror, and he had time to wonder how long the ancient contamination had been passing from man to man to man, how far into the past the chain of lives stretched, how Wernecke himself had been trapped, and then his parched lips touched wetness, and he was drinking, drinking deeply and greedily, and his mouth was filled with the strong clean taste of copper.

Passage

Introduction to Passage

“Nimbly for all his bulk, he scrambled up the jetty and onto the pier, the wood groaning under his boot.”

And there was Gardner, at a SFWA party in Califunny, standing with friends on a balcony of the hotel. I was inside, talking to Connie Willis’ daughter and Cynthia Felice. Suddenly the room began to shake, a slight shimmy that began to escalate, like major tectonic plates shifting. At first I thought it was Gardner and friends being silly on the balcony. Gardner can always be counted on to be silly at parties. The wind-up chattering teeth, the wind-up walking penis. Oh, we have seen them all.

But no—what we had here was a regular, old-fashioned California earthquake, the rattling walls, the cracking plaster, the bookcases falling on unsuspecting readers.

Cynthia and Connie Willis’ daughter and I were quick to find shelter in a doorway. We knew the drill. We’d read the books. We’d watched the movies. But Gardner—I swear this is true—levitated above the crowd, scrambled off the [jetty] balcony and into the hallway. When last seen, he was half way down the stairs, scattering elves and . . .

In other words, as creative a mind as he has—and few have better—he draws from nature. And if he wants passage to Elfland—or wherever—I am sure he can find the heads and hearts of other writers to buy his passage. After all, he knows where we all live.

Jane Yolen

Passage

Sven left the midnight forest, and turned down the slope toward the sea. Where the tall sea grass ended and the path slanted down the shingle toward the beach, he stopped to put his dark-lantern down on the hard-packed scree; he dared not take it near Them. He plunged his dagger to the hilt into the ground, next to the lantern. Nor cold iron. He shifted the weight of the bag on his shoulder and continued down the path.

As he came over the lip of the slope, where it steepened to the sea, the world seemed to open up before him, more felt than seen. The sea was restless, a dark breathing immensity that opened to the horizon, with here and there a white phosphorescent gleam edging a wave tip, like a knife blade briefly shown and then hidden away again. The water was oily and black and rolled in slow oily surges into the shore, making no sound. You could smell the salt. Far behind, on the distant point of the cove, you could still see one or two flickering yellow lights in the darkened town, and when the wind shifted for a moment to gust from that quarter, ruffling his square-cut rufous beard, you could smell woodsmoke and dung, and hear the yapping of a scrannel dog.

Sven paused for a moment on the steep slope, and the heavy bag thumped against his back. The moon had been half shrouded in tattered black clouds, but now they parted, and there was the moon, smoky-bronze, as full and round as a shield, bigger than he’d ever seen it before, bigger than seemed possible. Hunter’s Moon. Thin lines of black cloud streamed across it, flying with the wind, and he heard a clamoring overhead in the sky, iron-tongued voices barking and baying and snarling and quarrelling, drawing nearer, then fading slowly away out over the dark expanse of the sea, and he knew that the Wild Hunt was abroad this night, coursing through the sky. Big as he was, he shivered. He made the Sign of the White Christ; then, for safety’s sake, Thor’s Hammer. After a moment, he went on down the slope, his tangled blond hair snapping behind him in the wind, digging his heels in, little rivulets of sand and pebbles whispering down before him to the beach.

Then he was on the strand. Sand crunched underfoot, and rats and other nameless scurrying things fled away from him as he walked, rattling the tough beach grass. Nearer the waterline, his feet sank into the dark sand, making a slight sucking noise as he pulled them free again, and he could imagine his footprints filling slowly with cold water behind him, in the dark.

More black clouds boiled up around the moon, as though it were being cooked in a black cauldron, shrouding it again.

The Ship loomed ahead, at the edge of the oily black sea. The masts and rigging were dark—you could just make them out, black against the lighter blackness of the sky, like clouds almost-seen at night. The masts seemed to stretch far taller than the masts of the ships of mortal men. He couldn’t see their tops. The hull was like a wall of black cloud. A milky silver light shown low, from a gangway set near the waterline.

Nimbly for all his bulk, he scrambled up the jetty and onto the pier, the wood groaning under his boots. The pier was old and sagging, the wood slimed with moss and barnacles, slowly collapsing into the bay. You could smell the green rot in the wood. Then he was on the pale shining gangplank—never a sound to be heard now, underfoot—and then he was in the Ship.

The room was lit with an even, sourceless silver light, like autumn moonlight on ice. He could just make out the Elf, sitting at a table, his hands flat before him, motionless. He was very much taller and more slender than ordinary men, with fingers as long as flutes. If his face knew how to make expressions, they were not expressions that Sven knew how to read.

Sven put the bag down on the table. “Here’s your bagful of heads,” Sven said.

The Elf looked at him. His eyes were tunnels through his head to someplace black and cold and far away—at the very bottom of them, a faint grey glimmer came and went, like a swordblade thrown into a lake and gleaming coldly beneath the moving surface of the water.

He closed his long fingers around the bag and took it possessively into his lap. The heads shifted wetly in the bag, rolling like melons inside the rough flax cloth.

Sven bit back guilt. The Ship for Elfland wouldn’t sail again in his lifetime—this was a cheap enough price to pay for immortality. He dared not think—and could not—what they wanted them for.

The Elf was still staring at him. His face was cold and radiant and pale, and almost too beautiful to look upon.

In his voice like a bell ringing under ice, the Elf said, “Now go get us a bagful of hearts.”

On his way out, Sven passed a sallow, rat-faced man with pockmarked skin and a scruffy beard, a bag thrown over his shoulder.

They eyed each other warily, uneasily, as they passed on the pier. They didn’t speak.

I wonder what he brings them? Sven thought.

Community

Introduction to Community

I’ve always thought of Gardner Dozois as sort of the Alexander Woollcott of science fiction. (In case the name doesn’t mean anything to you, Alexander Woollcott was the roundest of the Algonquin Round Table set, that literary lunch, liquor, and smart-remarks group which included Dorothy Parker, Harpo Marx, and Robert Benchley.) Woollcott contributed his share of the smart remarks—he’s the one who said, “All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening”—and loved parties, laughed loudly, and generally lived large.

All of which could describe Gardner, whose own round table at Nebula banquets and science fiction conventions is always the one in stitches. (I once laughed so hard while having dinner with Gardner that I snorted a piece of lettuce up my nose and nearly did myself permanent damage) and he is known for causing befuddled waiters to quit mid-meal. Gardner’s famous for regaling fans and fellow writers with hilarious (and unrepeatable) stories and slush-pile samples, and he’s the Grand Master of the smart remark. When I was asked onstage what my story, “Even the Queen” was about (it’s about menstruation), Gardner shouted from the audience, “Tell them it’s a period piece!”

But that’s not all he has in common with Woollcott. Like the rest of the Algonquin Round Table, Alexander Woollcott was a talented writer. He was a respected drama critic, known for his incisive wit and his serious biographies and essays, but, like Gardner, his Falstaffian merry-funster image often overshadowed and sometimes obliterated his work, and I’d guess that more people see Gardner as someone who tells ribald stories and sticks cheese doodles up his nose than as the fine writer and editor he also is.

Gardner’s Hugo-winning editing of Asimov’s and The Year’s Best Science Fiction collections are the finest in the field, and his book about James Tiptree, Jr. is a classic in the field. His knowledge of science fiction and his love of the field both run very deep, and I’m not exaggerating when I say he cares more about science fiction than anyone I know.

He is also a gifted writer, the author of Geodesic Dreams and the Nebula Award-winning “The Peacemaker,” and one of my favorite science-fiction writers. He’s especially gifted at writing spare, simply written short stories which turn out not to have been so simple after all. Like his Nebula Award-winning story, “Morning Child.” And the story that follows.

Like all of Gardner’s work, “Community” is a deceptively straightforward tale of familiar things like pickup trucks and golf clubs and doughnuts. And community standards. It’s subtle and serious and much more than it appears to be at first glance, like Gardner himself.

This story is particularly pertinent in these days of noise-control ordinances and neighborhood covenants and zero tolerance for playground dodgeball, Harry Potter books, nine-year-olds who bring Swiss army knives to school, and anything remotely resembling individuality.

Gardner is not the first science fiction author to have tackled the issue of society versus personal freedom—Orwell’s 1984 springs to mind, and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”—but none of them have captured so perfectly the combination of convinced virtue and common thuggery which characterizes all of society’s interventionists, no matter what their title. Or the disquieting fact that we sometimes find ourselves acting just like them.

Connie Willis

Community

About ten P.M., I go out front and borrow my husband’s pick-up truck. Henry stays behind watching TV, of course. He has a bad leg, and besides, he has no stomach for this sort of work. Which is okay. The Lord made different kinds of people for different kinds of work, I guess, and I’m content to do what it’s been put in front of my hand to do, and not worry about whether other people have been called to do the same thing or not.

Still, some help is necessary—some loads are too heavy for a body to carry all by herself. Fortunately, there are others in town who feel the same way I do. I pick up Sam first, as usual, and although he seems to take up every square inch of the front seat with his bulk, jamming me against the driver’s-side door, we somehow manage to squeeze Fred in next to him a few blocks later, again as always. They nod politely and say “Evening, Martha,” and I nod back; good manners never hurt. I’d prefer that Fred sat in back, actually, as his breath is so bad that you can smell it even when his face is turned away from you, but an unspoken tradition has sprung up that the older men ride in the front, the young men in the back, and putting up with Fred’s halitosis is a small enough price to pay for his help in these matters. We stop again in front of the Ciniplex on the edge of town, which is closed down now, of course, along with most of the rest of the mall, and pick up Josh and Alan and Arnie. They climb into the back of the pick-up truck, and we’re off.

The town never was very big, and it stopped growing awhile back. Within a few minutes, we’re out among the farms, with the cows blinking at us in the darkness as we rush past, and then the road turns from blacktop to weathered macadam to gravel as we begin to climb up into the hills. There’s a fat yellow moon overhead, and you can hear water rushing over rock somewhere, hidden by the trees. The night is cold and still; by morning, there’ll be a frost.

We have two Interventions lined up, and I’ve decided to do both of them tonight while I have the boys out anyway, two with one blow, as it were. I figure we’ll get the minor one out of the way first, as a warm-up, because the major one is going to be difficult.

Actually, the minor one is unpleasant enough itself in its own way, but we handle it with a minimum of fuss. The old woman refuses to open her door, of course, but it’s made of cheap wood, and although the expensive lock holds, the door panels themselves shred like paper. Once inside, the old woman rushes at us brandishing what I at first think is the stereotypical broom old ladies always used to use to shoo unwelcome intruders away in the movies, but which turns out instead to be a somewhat more practical 9-iron from her dead husband’s old golf bag. Sam takes it away from her easily, and then holds her swaddled firmly in his arms like a shriveled old child while we begin.

She has twenty-five cats packed into this tiny house! No wonder the neighbors have been complaining! The smell of cat is overwhelming, and the furry little creatures are everywhere, twining around our ankles and mewling as we get ourselves ready. Josh has brought some heavy gloves, and Alan has his old Louisville Slugger with Reggie Jackson’s autograph on it, and so it doesn’t really take long to pop them, although we have to chase the last few down, and even pull one down off a curtain, where it’s clinging with all its claws and howling in dismay. Josh wrings its neck. Perhaps a few of them escape through the broken front door and run off into the night, but the idea is not to kill cats for the sake of killing cats, or because it’s fun, but to abolish a nuisance that has become intolerable for everyone, even for the old lady herself if she’d admit it, and that we certainly accomplish, whether a few individual cats escape or not. Of course, some of them may come back later—but then, so will we.

The old woman shrieks at us constantly as we work, like a saw going through sheet tin, but surely somewhere deep inside even she must be secretly glad to have the burden of caring for all these animals lifted off her. It’s a decision she would have made for herself if she had the strength of will to do so—now we’ve done it for her. On the way out, we find several cartons of cigarettes, which we confiscate. I admonish her—we’ve had trouble with her on these grounds before—and tell her that everything we’re doing, all the trouble we’re going to, is for her own good, nothing in it for us, it’s all for her benefit, but she’s grown sulky and refuses to respond. You rarely get gratitude during an Intervention, I’ve learned, however well-deserved it is, and no matter how much good it ultimately does for the people you’re Intervening for; unfair, but that’s the way it is.

Back into the truck. The boys are loosened-up and whooping and feeling fine—now for the night’s more difficult work.

We drive further up the hill, the spruce and the firs bulking like ghosts in the sweeping headlights, here and there a silver birch gleaming like bone in the forest. At a bullet-riddled highway sign, we turn off onto a narrow farm lane that winds up and over a hill, and then down into a shallow valley that contains a small farmhouse and a couple of dilapidated, disused outbuildings; we get a quick glimpse of them, and then the trees close in tight around us again.

We go fast down the lane, bouncing on the ruts, the rear end of the truck fishtailing slightly on the gravel, the bushes and trees on either side scratching against the windows. Just before we break into the clearing, I shut the headlights off. The house looms up ahead. There’s a light on in the front room of the house, and another upstairs.

I kill the engine, and we glide to a stop in front of the house. I send Josh and Arnie around the back, because I’m sure the boy will light out for the high timber as soon as he sees us coming; Fred and Alan and Sam and I take the front.

As soon as the truck doors slam, the lights go out in the front room, but it’s too late for that. The front door isn’t even locked, not that it would have done any good if it was. Fred and Sam and Alan go in fast, and there’s the usual confusion, shouting, a woman’s scream, furniture breaking and being knocked over, something ceramic shattering, a dish or a vase. It only takes a minute. When a light comes back on inside, I go in.

The table lamp has fallen on the floor, and somebody has switched it on where it lies, giving me mostly a view of shuffling feet and a broken wooden chair. I pick the lamp up, making shadows swing and scurry across the room, and put it back on the table. Everything’s quiet, for the moment. You can hear harsh breathing, and smell the sharp odor of sweat, and Fred’s breath, heavy with garlic, that reaches out all the way across the room like a thin rotten lance.

Alan and Fred have their guns on Mary’s husband; his hair is disheveled, there’s a cut on his lip and a bruise over his eye, but he’s standing quietly. Sam is standing behind Mary, with his big hands clamped over her arms; she’s struggling against his grip in a way that’s going to leave big purple bruises tomorrow, but when she sees me, she stops.

“Good evening, Mary,” I say. She says nothing, just stares at me, but people do tend to forget their manners in times of stress, you have to expect that.

The man is staring at me too, and even in the uncertain light cast by the one table lamp, I can see the blood draining out of his face, leaving it white and haggard. The guilty always know their guilt right away, of course, and feel it in their hearts. We can see it, in his face.

Mary’s face is pale too, but there are two bright spots of red on her checks, and her lips are set tight. I can see that she’s going to make this hard, even though we’re doing it for her. That’s often the way it is; you just have to learn to accept it.

“This is an official Intervention,” I say to Mary, “sanctioned by the local Chapter and by the town council, under the local-standards ordinances of 2006. As an ordained Preacher of the Reformed Church, I have the right to—”

“Preacher!” Mary says, and then laughs harshly. “I went to fifth grade with you, Martha Gibbs!” As though this signifies somehow.

There’s a commotion out back, more yelling and smashing, and then Josh and Arnie come in from the kitchen with the boy, frog-marching him along. Josh’s got one of the kid’s arms twisted way up behind his back. “He made a break for it, Martha, just like you said he would. But we got him!” Josh is grinning widely, showing what seems like too many teeth to fit into an ordinary mouth, and his face is sweaty and happy. He gives the kid’s arm an extra yank for emphasis, and the boy makes a half-smothered yelp. I frown at Josh, and he eases up on the kid’s arm a little. Sometimes I think that Josh enjoys all this a bit too much. I suppose it’s natural for a healthy young man to enjoy the chasing and catching part, the struggle and the fighting; that’s in the blood. But the point of all this isn’t punishment or retribution, or even just getting rid of undesirable elements who could pollute the rest of the town, although that’s a part of it—the point is redemption. To wipe the slate clean and let someone start again. To do for them what they can’t do for themselves, even though many of them secretly want to. The redemption part is what Josh sometimes loses sight of, I think.

The boy starts shouting. “You f—ing”—I won’t reproduce what he actually says—“freaks! Why don’t you mind your own business? Why don’t you leave us alone?” I could tell him that the health of every individual in town is our business, that that’s what a community is all about, that we care not only about his moral corruption spreading to others but most sincerely about the state of his own soul—but I can see that there’s no point. Not even thirteen yet, and the kid’s already quite a piece of work, wearing a black leather jacket and a grungy T-shirt with an obscene slogan on it, hair unkempt and much too long, two or three rings in his nose, more in his ear. I know without even bothering to look that his room is full of Heavy Metal posters and satanic books and CDs—not that possessing these things is strictly illegal yet, but they are a good indication of the extent of the corruption that’s set in, the rot that’s spread through the boy’s system. Maybe such things don’t actually cause the disease itself, as some would argue, but they’re certainly a symptom that shows that disease has set in.

“Mary,” I say, “I’ve known you for many years now. You’re a friend, or you were, before you let your life get set on a wrong track. You’re a good woman at heart, I know, but the weeds have grown up around your life, and there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s nothing you can do to fix the mistakes you’ve made. You may not even admit to yourself that they are mistakes. But friends don’t let friends live like that. We’re here to help you fix your life, to clear away the weeds, to help you get yourself back on the right track—”

Mary starts screaming and fighting then, but although she’s a tall, strong woman, she’s as nothing compared to Sam, and she can’t break free of him, although she does put up enough of a struggle that—reluctantly, because Sam’s a gentle soul—he has to twist her arm up behind her back in order to get her to stop. I won’t repeat what she calls me. It hurts me to hear her say those things about me, but I know that it’s not really Mary talking, but rather the corruption that has taken over her life. People say the same kind of awful things when they’re being forced to quit hard drugs cold-turkey, I hear, cursing the very people who are going out of their way to help them. Until the poison has been totally removed from their systems, people cling to it. They don’t know any better, and you have to forgive them for what they say and do while they’re in the state they’re in. And you have to have the strength to make them change, whether they want to or not, whether they fight you or not. No one likes the taste of strong bitter medicine, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t good for them to take it.

When Mary’s quiet again, panting with pain, her face having gone sick and sallow, I read the charges. Her husband is cheating on her, the whole town knows that, and not for the first time, either. He’s a drinker, too, and spends most of his paycheck and far too much of his time down at Murphy’s Tavern. Probably he beats her when he gets home; it wouldn’t surprise me. The boy’s on drugs, of course, and, blood running true, is also a drinker, having two DUIs against him already. He’s also been brought up once on vandalism charges. They’ve tried to talk to him at church, but it’s been more than a year since he’s attended Sunday classes, or even regular services. The husband, of course, has never gone at all.

I give them the blessing then, the forgiveness and absolution of the Lord, which is more than they deserve, really, but the Lord is generous, and will take everyone who is sent to Him, whether they go willingly or not. The boy is spewing a steady stream of obscenities at us now, vile things, but his voice is wobbly and squeaky-high with fright. The man has gone glazed and slack, the way some of them do. Mary, her face ashen, is pleading with me in a low, urgent voice, don’t do this, Martha, please, don’t do this, please don’t please don’t, but I harden my heart against her words. This is for her own good, something that needs to be done that she doesn’t have the strength of will to do herself.

There’s an odd moment of silence then. You can hear the wind sighing down through the spruce trees on the hill, hear the whine of a truck passing on the distant highway. The husband straightens himself with a curious kind of dignity, tugging his clothes into place. He looks at Mary and quietly says, “I love you, Mary,” and a pang goes through my heart, because I know he really does mean it, in his own way, not that that makes any difference now. I have a moment of weakness then, my resolve almost wavering, but I steel myself against misguided sympathy. True kindness is to do what must be done, quickly and efficiently, however difficult it might be, however much pain it may cost you personally to do it. A short-term kindness is often a misservice in the long run.

I nod at Fred, and he steps forward, puts his revolver behind the husband’s ear, and caps him neatly. The husband goes limp as a sack of laundry and drops without a sound, but Mary screams as though her heart is being ripped out. The boy makes a break for it, and there’s a confused struggle, more furniture being knocked over and smashed. Josh is forced to use his boot knife, and there’s blood everywhere before it’s over, which annoys me—I find mess and disorder distasteful, and prefer doing this sort of thing with as little fuss and disturbance as possible, certainly not with blood sprayed all over everything, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way, no matter how hard you try.

In the confusion, Mary has somehow succeeded in breaking free of Sam, and has been hanging from Josh’s back, clawing at his face and screaming, although without really managing to slow him down much. Now he shakes himself free and hits her heavily across the face, knocking her to the floor, but I step forward and put a stop to it. I’ve heard the stories, and I know that some squads in some states would go on to gang-rape Mary at this point, supposedly to “teach her a lesson” or “put the fear of God into her,” and I suspect that Josh and maybe Arnie would like nothing better than to do just that, but that’s not what we’re here for. We’re not here to punish or chastise, but to do the much more difficult work of redemption. We’re here to salvage Mary’s life, not destroy it. I won’t have that sort of thing on my missions, I just won’t stand for it. Josh and I lock eyes for a minute, and I know he’s just itching to haul open that fly of his, and that what he wants to put into her is not the fear of God, but at last he subsides, grumbling, and steps away. Josh is a weak reed, and he and one or two of the others are not without imperfections of their own, but sometimes you have to use what tools come to hand in order to get the job done.

Mary’s sprawled on the floor, sobbing brokenly, and I feel another wave of sympathy for her. Her grief and bereavement are real for her at this moment, however misplaced they are, however much better she’ll feel later on, when she finally has a chance to think things through.

“You feel bad now, I know,” I tell her, “but really you have no problems anymore, if you’d only see it the right way. Your problems have been wiped away. You have a clean slate now. You can start your life over, fresh . . .”

She starts shrieking half-coherent obscenities at us at this point, without bothering to rise from the floor. Her hair is wild and disarrayed, her shirt torn open in the struggle, one naked breast peeking out—I can see some of the boys eyeing her, and I figure I’d better get them out of here before they all get ideas.

As I herd them to the door, she gets up to her knees, swaying, and begins to shout, “I hope they come for you someday, Martha Gibbs! Do you hear me? I hope they come for you!”

We leave her tugging hopelessly at the body of her husband, yanking at it and shaking it as if she could shake the life back into it. Of course, only the Lord can do that, and, in this case, He’s certainly not going to bother.

She doesn’t thank us, of course. They never do.

Outside, the wind has picked up, and the trees are lashing their branches as though they’re in pain. Smoky clouds rush by the moon, then swallow it entirely. Josh, still sullen and sulking from not getting his fun, forces himself rudely into the front seat next to me, Sam’s usual place, and when I tell him to get in the back where he belongs, he leans insolently against me and says, “You know, Martha, your own Henry has been drinking quite a bit lately, down to the Tavern nights . . .” We lock eyes again, but I back him down and make him get out and climb into the back of the truck. You have to use a firm hand with these boys sometimes, if you want to keep them in control. I can still hear Josh muttering to himself back there, although he’s smart enough not to use any swear words in front of me.

The rest of them climb in to the truck, and I clash it into gear, and we take off. I’m tired and drained, but happy with the knowledge of a job well done—although I feel a pang when I think that my old friendship with Mary may not recover for quite a while, if it ever does. People ought to be grateful to you for clarifying their lives and putting them back on the proper road—but the sad truth is, they seldom are. You accept that as the price of a sincere Intervention, that they’re going to resent you for it and have ill-feelings toward you thereafter, unfair as it is. You accept that this can be the end of a friendship or make cordial neighborhood relations difficult. But you do what you have to do in order to make a real difference in their lives.

Before we go home, we stop at Dunkin’ Donuts, and pick up a box of assorted for the boys. My treat, of course, but even that doesn’t seem to placate Josh, and he’s still sulking even as he munches his jelly doughnut. Well, he’ll get over it.

On the way home, after I drop everyone off, I roll down the window and let the cold night wind blow hard into my face, and, after a while, I begin to feel better about Mary. After all, she brought it on herself. If there’s one sure thing in this life, it’s that, sooner or later, you get what you deserve.

What’s that old saying? It’s one that certainly applies here. I try and try to call it to mind, and finally, just as I pull into my own driveway and shut off the engine, I remember.

What goes around, comes around.

The Visible Man

Introduction to The Visible Man

In this story, Gardner Dozois expertly deploys a science fiction storytelling technique that goes all the way back to the granddaddy of us all, H.G. Wells.

Take the world as we know it, perhaps pushed a little way into the future—and drop in a single, simple what-if change. Push that change as far as you can: what kind of world results? Now add a little pinch of Hollywood: who, in your twisted world, has a problem? Where there is a problem, there is a story—and if you’re lucky it’s a story that becomes a rattling page-turner, just as Gardner gives us here.

What gives this particular story a special flavor for science fiction connoisseurs is that in deriving his idea Gardner has neatly inverted one of the genre’s classic notions, that of the invisible man.

Invisibility is another of Wells’ great gifts to his successors, dating from his The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance (1897). The Invisible Man is the story of Griffin, an over-reaching, amoral scientist who begins a series of experiments into physical invisibility, dreaming of power. But his gift doesn’t do him much good. He confronts a series of unforeseen obstacles which render his ambitions absurd: he is invisible but any clothes aren’t, so he is forced to go naked; he is still subject to weather, collisions and assaults, the attention of dogs, hunger . . . Finally he is hunted down and killed; in an eerie final scene, his corpse becomes visible as life recedes.

Wells wasn’t the first writer to come up with the notion of invisibility. The idea goes at least as far back as the tale of the Ring of Gyges, told in Plato’s The Republic, in which Gyges, a shepherd, stumbles on a magic invisibility ring and, like Wells’ anti-hero, is immediately corrupted by power.

Invisibility has been explored by the generations of writers who followed Wells. But, unlike some of Wells’ other classic notions, it is not the most resonant sfnal trope. For one thing, as Griffin’s story shows, invisibility isn’t actually much use. Subsequent exploitations of the theme have often descended into absurdity—witness Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), and the US tv series of the 1970s starring David McCallum and his skin-colored face mask. Also invisibility gives us logical problems. Wells himself pointed out—in a letter to Arnold Bennett a month after publication—that an invisible man, with transparent retinae, must be blind. (And besides, as Jorge Luis Borges pointed out in an essay in 1946, with transparent eyelids how could Griffin ever sleep?)

And how could you achieve invisibility?

In Profiles of the Future (1962), Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that there are billions of complex chemicals in Griffin’s body, all of which would have to be reworked to become invisible; and besides, many of life’s biochemical reactions would be thrown out of kilter if the molecules taking part in them were made transparent.

Maybe that’s why the Wellsian idea of objective invisibility has tended to go out of style; rather we more often encounter subjective invisibility—caused by camouflage, drugs and hypnotism, social pressures, psychological distortions. And the psychological aspects of invisibility are undoubtedly fascinating. In Robert Silverberg’s “To See the Invisible Man” (1963) criminals are isolated by other people who simply refuse to see them. Chris Priest’s The Glamour (1984) is a typically multilayered take on subjective invisibility, with the central idea being connected to memory loss, and a final ambiguity as to whether the invisibility is ‘real’ or not.

In this story, Gardner finds another inversion. It is an echo of another classic tale of Wells’, “The Country of the Blind” (1904): what if you were the only visible man in a country of the invisible? Where would you hide?

The story is superbly told, with a killer closing twist. And it is full of a core element of the myth of invisibility—an arc that stretches from Wells to the movie Predator (1987)—the horror of the unseen hunter: “Fear came striding by, rushed ahead of [Griffin], and in a moment had seized the town. ‘The Invisible Man is coming! The Invisible Man!’ . . .”

Stephen Baxter

The Visible Man

George Rowan’s only chance of escape came to him like a benediction, sudden and unlooked for, on the road between Newburyport and Boston.

They were on old Route 1, the Newburyport Turnpike, and there was not another car in sight. The fully automated Route 95 guideway was just a few miles west of here, running almost parallel to Route 1, but for reasons of his own the sheriff had preferred to take the old secondary road, even though he had to drive the car himself and couldn’t possibly get up to guideway speeds. Perhaps he simply enjoyed manual driving. Perhaps it was some old State regulation, now solidified into tradition, that prohibited the transportation of prisoners on automated roads. Perhaps it was just some more of the expected psychological torture, taking the slowest possible route so that Rowan would have time to build up a greater charge of fear and dreadful anticipation for what awaited him in Boston.

For Rowan, the trip had already become interminable. His memory of the jail in Newburyport, of his crime, of his hasty trial, of his past life—all had become hazy and indistinct. It seemed as if he had been riding forever, on the road, going to Boston for the execution of his sentence. Only that was real and vivid: the slight swaying motion of the car, the seat upholstery sticking uncomfortably to his sweat-soaked back, the ridged rubber mat under his feet. The countryside they drove through was flat and empty, trees, meadows, cultivated fields, little streams, sometimes a boarded-up gas station or a long-abandoned roadside stand. The sky was a flat, washed-out blue, and the sunlight was thick and dusty. Occasionally they would bump over a pothole or a stretch of frost-buckled pavement—the State didn’t spend much anymore to keep up the secondary roads. The car’s electric engine made no sound at all, and the interior of the car was close and hot with the windows rolled up.

Rowan found himself reluctantly watching the little motions of the steering wheel, apparently turning all by itself, driverless. That made him shiver.

He knew intellectually, of course, that he was sitting on the front seat between the sheriff and the deputy, but he couldn’t see them. He could hear them breathing, and occasionally the deputy’s arm would brush against his own, but, for Rowan, they were invisible.

He knew why they were invisible, but that didn’t make it any less spooky. When the State’s analysis computers had gone down into his mind and found the memories that proved him guilty, they had also, as a matter of course, implanted a very deep and very specific hypnotic injunction: from now on, George Rowan would not be able to see any other living creature. Apparently the injunction had not included trees and other kinds of vegetation, but it had covered animals and birds and people. He assumed that when he “saw” through invisible people—as he now “saw” the portions of the car that should have been blocked from sight by the sheriff’s body—it was because his subconscious mind was extrapolating, creating a logical extension of the view from other visual data in order to comply with the spirit of the injunction. Nothing must be allowed to spoil the illusion. Nor could Rowan break it, although he knew what it was and how it had been created. It was too strong, and planted too deep. He was “blind” in a special and insidious way.

There were a number of apparently sound reasons for doing this to convicted criminals. It made it almost impossible for a prisoner to escape or to resist his captors, for one thing, and the State psychologists also claimed that the resultant sense of supernatural isolation would engender an identity crisis in the prisoner, and so help contribute to his rehabilitation. Totally “blinding” the prisoners would accomplish both objectives in a more logical way. But the State administrators had been growing increasingly perverse over the years, and they chose the cruelest way. How much more terrible a thing this was than total blindness—to make the victim live in a sunlit empty world, haunted by ghosts and voices, pushed and punished by unseen forces, never knowing who was with him or what they were about to do to him. So the State men inflicted this on prisoners because it was cruel and they enjoyed it, just as they would enjoy torturing Rowan in Boston, driving him insane again and again in the name of psychological rehabilitation.

At that moment, past Topsfield but not yet up to the Putnamville Reservoir, their right front tire blew out.

They went into a terrifying spin. The world dissolved into a whirling blur, and bursts of sunlight jabbed Rowan’s face like a strobe light as they spun. The car hit the guardrail, spun out into the middle of the road again, spun back to hit the guardrail a second time. In the midst of the roar and the clatter and impact, Rowan had time to think that it would be better for him if he was killed in the crash, and time to realize that in spite of everything he did not want to die. Then the car was spinning out into the road, spinning back again. This time there was no guardrail to catch it. The car went careening off the road, fishtailing and losing momentum as it plowed through the deep soft loam of the shoulder, and dived into a shallow ditch.

The dashboard leaped up and whammed into Rowan, but he managed to catch the blow on his arms and shoulders; the impact beat him black-and-blue, but did no lasting damage. In the same instant as he was hitting the dashboard, he saw the windshield above the driver’s seat star and shatter, and the invisible deputy was thrown heavily against him. The car recoiled from the impact, slid a foot or two sideways, and canted to the left. Everything was still for a heartbeat, and then the car groaned and settled, canting over even more. The noise of the springs died away.

There was a strangely peaceful silence.

The car was resting head down at a forty-five-degree angle, listing badly to the left but not quite turned all the way over on its side. Rowan took a deep, shaky breath and decided that he was alive. The sheriff might not be. He was still invisible to Rowan, but it was obvious that he had been thrown partially through the windshield. Rowan had ended up leaning against the sheriff’s hip, and if his hips were at a level with the steering wheel then the rest of his body had to be protruding through the windshield. And there was blood on the glass. From the feel of it, the deputy seemed to be slumped over with his head almost in Rowan’s lap, stirring feebly, stunned but still alive. No conscious cogitation went on in Rowan’s mind, but as the deputy pushed against him and tried to sit up, Rowan raised his manacled hands and smashed them down on what he hoped was the deputy’s head. The first blow hit something soft, and the deputy began struggling weakly, but the second blow hit bone. The deputy stopped fighting. Rowan struck him again, and he stopped moving at all.

Rowan sat quietly for a second, his breath hissing harshly in his throat, and then patted the deputy with his hands until he touched a jingly metal object. As he lifted it away from the deputy, it became visible for him, and yes, it was a key ring. He used one of the keys to unlock his handcuffs, and spent another few seconds searching the deputy for a gun; he didn’t find one, and decided that he couldn’t afford to waste any more time. He climbed over the deputy, rolled the side window down, and pulled himself up out of the car.

He jumped down to the ground, lost his footing on the grassy slope, and went to his knees. For a moment, he remained kneeling, blinking in the raw hot sunlight, dirt under his fingers. Everything had happened too fast; only now, this instant with the sun in his face, did it become real for him—he was outside, he was free, he had a chance. Hope and terror exploded inside Rowan. He rose into a crouch, scanning his surroundings with a sudden feral intensity. Then he scrambled up the incline. At the top of the slope he paused only long enough to make sure no cars were coming before he dashed across the road and slid down into another ditch in an avalanche of dust and scree. A man-high expanse of grass and wildflowers stretched away from the road on this side. It closed over Rowan like the sea.

At first, he ran flat-out, fast as he could go, the high grass whipping around him, wild with fear and exhilaration. He kept running until his breath was gone and he was staggering rather than sprinting, and then a root snagged his foot and the ground reached up to catch him, smack, like an outfielder catching a fly ball. He lay spread-eagled, flat on his face against the damp earth, gasping for air while everything seemed slowly to spin, the resin-smelling grass tickling his nose, tiny furtive insects scampering invisibly across his hands. When he could breathe again, he found that some of his panic had also gone. He sat up. He’d been leaving a trail like a goddamned elephant; he’d have to start being a little slyer. If he trampled the grass and left a flattened wake behind him, it would be like a giant arrow pointing the way he had gone. He wouldn’t last an hour that way before the cops ran him down. He set off at a diagonal to his former path, picking his way with care, forcing himself to be slow. This way, perhaps he had a chance. More than he’d had a while ago, at least.

Rowan reached a stand of scrub woods and pushed his pace up to a fast trot, taking a few more headers as the terrain got rougher. Every time the tree branches moved in the wind all the patterns of light and darkness would flow and reform, and he kept mistaking shadow for ground. Once he dropped four feet down a concealed embankment. He kept up the pace. If he broke an ankle he was finished, but he couldn’t afford to slow down either. They’d almost certainly catch him if they fielded a search party anytime soon. But Route 1 was infrequently patrolled—that was in his favor, and the Boston people wouldn’t miss the sheriff for a while yet. If only he could get even an hour’s lead—

After a few minutes, the woods began to die away into a region of small isolated trees and high bramble thickets. Rowan slid down a final bluff and found himself in someone’s alfalfa field. His second wind was long gone, and now every breath brought him a stab of pain in his side. He began to work his way around the field, skirting the outermost furrow. He walked slowly and painfully. Sweat had dried uncomfortably on his skin, making him itch, and his clothes were full of burrs and stickers. On the horizon, he could just make out the peaked roof of a farm building, thumbnail-small from here, gray tile glinting in the sun. A thin column of smoke rose black from a chimney, making a long lazy line across the sky. Rowan was halfway across the field, his shoes filling with loam at every step, when a dog began to bark in the distance.

Rowan walked faster, but the barking became louder and closer. A goddamn watchdog then, definitely coming after him. He faced around, at bay, too beat-out to run for the tree line.

The barking swelled into an angry challenging roar, and then cut off, ominous and abrupt. Impossible to tell which way it was coming in at him, he thought, and at that same instant felt a flash of searing pain as his pants leg was torn away by something invisible. Rowan cursed and kicked out wildly. His foot scored a solid hit on something, and the dog yelped. Rowan kicked out again, missed completely, and had to do a lurching grace step to recover his balance. Pawprints appeared in the soft loam as the dog danced back out of range. Rowan realized that if he kept near the furrow he’d be able to track the dog’s movements in the loam. So when a line of pawprints came rushing directly in toward him like the wake of a torpedo, he judged his distance carefully and then lashed out with all his strength. His foot hit something with the clean, solid whump of a drop-kicked football. The dog yelped again. It was apparently lifted off its feet by the impact and sent rolling across the top of the furrow—at least, that was how Rowan interpreted the sudden flattening of alfalfa and scattering of loam. Rowan started walking again, with great deliberation. Judging by the sound, the dog continued to trace snarling figure-eights around him at a safe distance, but it did not attack again.

Rowan scrambled up into the scrub brush on the far side of the field and started off again, limping slightly, unwilling to take time to tend to the bite. If only he dared to rest. All his instincts told him to go to ground, find a sheltered spot in the deep woods and hide. But that would never work. They’d fly over the nearby forested areas with infrared heat sensors and spot him at once—there were no animals the size of a man left in the Massachusetts woods, any large trace would unequivocally be the fugitive. No, he would have to go to a town, where his heat-trace would be lost among those of other people. But the towns were the very place where he’d be the most helpless, and the most exposed.

He crossed another cultivated field—seeing only a tractor moving far away across acres of soughing green-and-yellow grain—and then the ground began to turn porous and swampy, water oozing up to fill his footprints as soon as he had made them. At last he was faced with an actual stretch of marshland, miles of reeds and cat-o’-nine-tails interlaced with gleaming fingers of water. He was forced to turn more to the east to skirt it. Walking by the edge of the marsh, he could hear the whining of millions of mosquitoes, but could see none of them, even when they bit him. Occasionally there would be a splash and a little gout of water alongside him as he passed. Frogs hopping off the bank to get out of his way, he assumed. Other unseen things rustled through the reeds around him. On the larger ponds, he could see the surface of the water wrinkle into a crumpled leaf pattern as waterbirds landed or took off, but he couldn’t see the birds themselves. The air was full of invisible wings. Rowan found all of this so uncanny that he detoured, shivering, far enough to the north to get away from the marsh entirely. The ground began to rise again. There were cuts in the sides of hillocks here, and planed-off places, evidence of recent road-building. He pushed through a weed-choked scrub woodlot, and found himself on a bluff overlooking one of those strange suburban housing developments that seem to sprout up out of nowhere in the rural areas of Massachusetts, unconnected with anything and with no viable reason for existence.

Rowan’s throat went dry. This would be the first major hurdle. He descended the bluff.

At least there didn’t seem to be anybody around, Rowan thought, and then grimaced at his own fatigue-engendered stupidity. There could be a crowd within ten feet of him, or a posse armed to the teeth, and he’d never know it until the first shot went home. He started walking slowly along a sidewalk, heading for the crossroads he could see on the other side of the housing development. This seemed to be a fairly new complex. The lawns were still smears of ugly red clay, surrounded by hopeful little string fences that were somehow supposed to keep birds from eating the newly-planted grass seeds, and there had not yet been time for the basements to fill up with marsh water or the paint to peel off in the bitter sea wind. Maybe most people had gone to work, leaving only a few housepersons here and there, and maybe they would stay inside. His foot struck something.

“Hey!” said a voice, at the level of his elbow.

Rowan froze.

“Hey, mister,” the voice said, reproachfully, “you knocked over all my soldiers.”

A child. Rowan forced himself to think. “I’m sorry, son,” he said.

“The whole army!”

“I didn’t see you,” Rowan said, truthfully, “I’m sorry I messed up your army.”

Suspicious silence from the boy.

“I wasn’t thinking about where I was going,” Rowan said. That got a huhn sound out of the boy, who didn’t sound entirely mollified. The boy must have stood up then, as some of the toy soldiers he’d been touching became visible for Rowan, varicolored plastic figures lying askew on the sidewalk. Rowan hesitated, and then asked, “Which one of those roads leads to Hamilton?”

“That one.”

Wonderful. “The paved one?” Rowan asked cannily, and when the boy didn’t answer he pointed and said, “That one there?”

“Uh-huh,” the boy said. The tone of puzzled suspicion was back in the child’s voice. There was something odd about this grownup. The boy didn’t respond when Rowan thanked him, but from the little scraping noises Rowan heard he guessed that the boy had sat down and begun to move his soldiers about again. The child had lost interest in Rowan. There was something odd about all grownups, and Rowan wasn’t unusual enough to provoke more than a mild passing wonderment.

Rowan started off again. “You stepped on my fort!” the child wailed instantly. Ignoring him, Rowan kept walking. He maintained a brisk pace, keeping close to the curb and hoping that anyone coming up the sidewalk in the opposite direction would have room to pass him without contact. In this fashion, he managed to make it through the development without further incident, and onto the road that led, hopefully, to Hamilton. Surely a search party would be out after him by now; if he didn’t find a town to lose himself in, he’d be finished. There were no sidewalks here, and no traffic on this one-lane back road, and if he kept to the center of it the chances of colliding with someone out for a stroll were remote. He walked as fast as he could without actually breaking into a suspicion-provoking run.

When the housing development was hidden by a curve, he increased his pace to a fast trot. He could be jogging, couldn’t he? And besides, there was no help for it: his time was running out. The road began to climb, winding among small rolling hillocks, and the forest closed down on either side. Once a dog came down from some house set back in the trees, and yapped after him for a few hundred yards, but didn’t attack. About ten minutes after the dog gave up the chase, he came upon another house, this one set back from the road and climbing partway up a low hillside. There was a bicycle lying next to the road on the wide front lawn. Someone might be watching from the house, but Rowan decided that he’d have to take that chance. He walked casually over to the bicycle, set it upright in the road, mounted it, and rode unhurriedly away until the house was out of sight. Then he began to pump.

The bicycle was too small for him, but not small enough to make the proposition impossible. It wobbled some, but he sent it whizzing along as fast as he was physically able to pedal. It rattled and creaked in protest, but it held together. Somehow he also managed to keep the thing upright and stay on top of it. The bicycle wasn’t a racer, but Rowan was a powerful man, and more important, a desperate man, and he got it up to a pretty respectable clip. He could cover twice the ground now than he could on foot, and he felt a thrill of real hope. Rowan pedaled through the hills for a while, and then the country began to level out. Here the road intersected a somewhat larger secondary road, two lanes instead of one.

Guessing at the direction of Hamilton, he turned onto the larger road. It was flat and straight, and Rowan made even better time. Dust boiled up from the pavement as he passed, and hung in the still air behind him in long wavering lines. Thank God for the guideways, Rowan thought—traffic was light even on the larger manual roads. He only encountered one car, going in the opposite direction, its steering wheel apparently turning by itself. He had to caution himself not to stare at it as it passed. Then he was alone on the road again, with only the squeak and rattle of the bicycle for company. After a while, houses began to appear more frequently by the side of the road, and there were cross-streets every so often, with overhead traffic lights at the intersections. He was barreling across one such intersection at full tilt when he crashed into something unseen but very solid.

The impact hurled Rowan from the bicycle head over heels. He hit the street, rolled, skidded along on his side and jarred to a stop against the curb. By the time he understood what was happening, he was resting on his elbows in the road and staring up at the sky, dazed and shaken. He was badly scraped along his arms and legs, and bits of gravel had been embedded under his skin by the force of the fall. Rubber-legged, he got up. There was a groan of pain from the unseen something he’d hit, and then it said a pithy word. A man, then. Some pedestrian had been crossing the road and he’d smashed into him. The bicycle was shoved clatteringly aside, and Rowan assumed that the man was getting to his feet.

“What are you, blind?” the man raged. “You sorry son-of-a-bitch!”

“I’m sorry, but you stepped right out—”

“You had plenty of room! You had miles of room!” The voice wavered slightly as it climbed in register: an elderly man, then. “What’s a matter, you ain’t got eyes in your head? You could’ve turned! I swear I’ll sue you, you hear that? Knock me down, almost break my back—”

“Don’t frazzle off, old friend,” Rowan said nastily. Soft-talk wouldn’t work. He had to be truculent and menacing or he’d be arguing with this guy for hours. Play it like a young tough, a weep maybe. “It was just an accident, right? You scan that? Only an accident. So don’t give me the rest of this fargo, because I don’t want to hear it.”

“I’ve got a mind to have you run in, you son-of-a-bitch.”

“Shove it. You know, you could get hurt a lot worse, jobbie.”

There had been an edge in Rowan’s voice—the man sputtered, but remained silent. Rowan swaggered over to the bicycle, feeling self-conscious but playing it up. The bicycle didn’t seem to be significantly damaged, although the frame was a little bent and the handlebars had been knocked out of alignment. He twisted them back into true, climbed onto the bicycle and shoved off. When Rowan was a safe distance away, the man shouted after him, “Goddamn idiot! I hope somebody cuts your balls off!”

Wobbling more than before, Rowan peddled down the road. He had to think of something else soon. He was entering the outskirts of a town, and the chances of hitting another invisible pedestrian increased with every revolution of the bicycle wheels. And now he thought he could hear the thin keening of sirens high in the sky behind him, an eerie sound that might have been made by demons of the upper air. They were coming after him, and he was much too conspicuous bicycling down this traffic-free road. Just as he was about to ditch the bicycle, he topped a rise and came upon a truck waiting on a red light at an intersection, one of the moderate-sized vans still used for hauling freight between small cities not serviced by guideways. Rowan’s eyes narrowed in instant calculation. Carefully, he coasted to a stop squarely behind the truck, where he would be out of range of the driver’s mirror. He dismounted, picked up the bicycle and threw it into a tangle of high weeds and bushes by the roadside. Then, as the light changed and the truck started to accelerate, he leaped up and grabbed the edge of the latched tailgate.

The truck’s van was protected only by a hanging tarpaulin. Rowan brushed it back, pulled himself over the tailgate and tumbled inside. He landed on something with hard edges, squirmed aside, and came to rest on the vibrating metal floor. They continued to gather speed, gears growling—evidently the driver had not seen him come aboard. Rowan sank back on his haunches, and then stretched out as well as he could among the sealed boxes and crates, pillowing his head with his arms. He had never been so tired. The hard metal floor felt as soft as thistledown. He felt himself sinking into it, sinking down luxuriantly. Grimly, he forced his eyelids wide again and made a great effort to stay awake. He had been given an opportunity to think things through without the pressure of split-second decisions; he should be trying to formulate long-range plans, plot out a plan of action instead of just running aimlessly away. But his brain had turned to ash, and he could not think. Besides, where was there to go? Who was there who could help him? His friends were all back in Newburyport, and that old life seemed even more distanced and inconsequential than it had this morning, his old acquaintances only hazy figures from an almost-forgotten dream. Dream-men, phantasms, they could not help him. The floor was spinning, slowly and restfully. He knew it was a terrible mistake to doze, but he could no longer fight it. He fell asleep.

He was awakened by a harsh, frightening sound: the rattle and clank of the tailgate being unlatched.

Rowan pulled himself up out of evil, smothering dreams. When his eyes unblurred, he saw only a rectangular green thing with glowing edges, and it took him a moment to realize that it was the tarpaulin, with light leaking in around the sides. At first, he didn’t realize that the truck had stopped. Then he heard the tailgate thump as it was swung down. He sat up, terrified and floundering, still only half-understanding where he was. The tarpaulin was yanked aside. Blinking around the sudden influx of light, Rowan was astonished to see that no one was there. Then he remembered, in an intense, sickening flash, and had to adjust himself to it all over again, as he would have to every morning for whatever remained of his life.

“You floorsucker!” a voice said.

Before Rowan could move, he was seized by hard invisible hands, hauled from the truck—getting a brief dizzy glimpse of concrete, a high metal ceiling, arc lights—and set on his feet. The hands released him.

“I—” Rowan started to say. His vision exploded into shooting white sparks, pain lanced through his head. He reeled back against the truck and almost fell. His mouth filled with blood.

“Whatta y’think y’doin?” the voice said, harsh with rage. “You scupping thief!”

Pain had jolted Rowan fully awake. Instantly, he lashed out with his fist, aiming at the spot from which the voice had seemed to emanate. He missed completely, his arm scything the air, and took a hard punch to the stomach from his unseen adversary. It knocked the wind out of him and drove him back against the edge of the lowered tailgate. It was hopeless, he realized through a wave of nausea. He couldn’t win.

The next blow laid Rowan’s cheek open and threw him sideways to the concrete floor. He went along with the fall, augmented it, and rolled over twice very quickly. Then he scrambled to his feet and ran.

Someone shouted hoarsely behind him. Rowan kept running, heading for the far side of what was apparently an underground garage. Halfway across, he slammed into something solid but yielding; another invisible person. There was a gasp of surprise and pain, and the clatter of dropped tools. Probably he’d bowled the man over. Rowan himself staggered and nearly fell, but recovered his balance and kept on. He was sprinting with his head down now, dodging and weaving like a broken-field runner. More shouts behind him. Invisible hands clutched at him for a moment, but he broke free. A door seemed to spring up in front of him. He clawed it open and sprang through.

He found himself in a long, fluorescent corridor, the cold white light coming evenly from ceiling, walls and floor. He sprinted away to the left, followed the corridor to a fork, picked a branch at random and kept running. Then another fork, and another corridor. He found a door marked Employees Only, went down a small service stairway, through another network of corridors, and down another stairway to the bottom.

The corridor he emerged into this time was dingier than the others, faded tile and green-painted stone, lit by hanging overhead bulbs. There was a smell of damp in the air, and the stone walls sweated like toads. Rowan paused to rest, gasping and leaning against the doorframe. When his breathing evened enough to let him hear again, he listened for sounds of pursuit. Nothing. He’d lost them. And this was a basement corridor, few people would be traveling it. And now, he knew where he was. Even in flight, he had had time to recognize the trademark insignia embossed into the walls of the upper corridors—he was in one of the big shopping plaza complexes near Danvers. But how was he going to get out of here? There were sure to be thousands of people about in the complex; as soon as he came up out of the deserted basement corridors he would inevitably run into some of them. The faded denim pants and blue work-shirt he wore were not damning in themselves, but would certainly be a giveaway to anyone actively searching for an escaped prisoner. Somehow, he had to get a change of clothes.

Rowan started walking again, cautiously threading his way through a warren of basement corridors that seemed endless. Occasionally there were doors set in either wall, always locked and bolted. Storerooms, probably. From behind a few of the locked doors came the solemn, deepthroated chuffing of massive machinery, or, more rarely, a vibrant unwavering hum. Eventually, he passed into what seemed to be an older section of the complex. Here huge ceramic-covered pipes ran along the ceiling close overhead, the floor was rutted, and there were patches of mold on the walls. Some of the overhead lights were broken, and Rowan walked on through semi-darkness until he came to a door marked Maintenance at the junction of two shabby corridors. From behind this door came an unmistakable sound: someone snoring.

Quivering with tension, Rowan put his ear to the thin plastic door-panel. The only sound he could hear was the rhythmical snoring. He’d have to chance it. Carefully, he tried the door. It wasn’t locked. He inched it open until a hinge gave a loud rusty squawk, then he pulled the door wide and stepped briskly into the room.

It was a small chamber with faded opalescent walls, smelling of sweat and old clothes and bozuk. Two walls were covered with dials, meters, readouts and tell-me-twices. A dusty computer terminal and a slave board stood in that corner. Most of the room was taken up by a dilapidated sink-cooker combination and a scarred folding table heaped with filthy biodegradable plates that had been re-used instead of catalyzed. In another corner was a much-patched waterbed. Flies drummed noisily against the walls, seeking a way out.

As Rowan entered the room, the snoring cut abruptly off. A man-shaped dent in the waterbed began to work itself back to level. Someone was getting up. “What?” said a cracked, quavery voice: another old man. “Whatta’y’want? Who—” The dent disappeared; the man must be on his feet now. “Inspection, jobbie,” Rowan said slyly, “special orders from the manager,” using the custodian’s resultant hesitation to get a few steps nearer. Then he leaped.

The custodian screamed. Rowan ended up with a double-handful of cloth—a shirt?—which immediately tore away in his grasp, lunged again and felt his hand close around a bony wrist. He twisted it. The custodian screamed again. Rowan felt the custodian’s free hand pound against the side of his head, and then they were wrestling each other in a drunken circle across the floor. The table went over with a great smash and clatter of plates. The custodian was still screaming. What a racket they were making! “Shut up, you!” Rowan shouted inanely, then managed to get a hand around the custodian’s invisible throat. Ignoring a rain of wild windmill blows, Rowan throttled him into submission.

When the custodian went limp, Rowan let him slide to the floor. Suddenly everything was amazingly quiet. Swaying and gasping for breath, Rowan was washed over by a prickly wave of shame. He was pretty good at beating up old men, wasn’t he? Suppose he’d killed the old guy? Apprehensively, Rowan crouched and felt about until he located the custodian, touching long invisible hair the texture of matted straw, and a scraggly beard—some ancient hippie given a makework job by the complex then, a bozuk addict probably. Rowan felt for a heartbeat. It was there—papery and labored, but there.

Relieved, Rowan began to search the custodian. Nothing—he was wearing some kind of frilly smock or dress without pockets. But on a night-stand near the waterbed Rowan found an odd leather object, and realized after a moment’s thought that it must be a “wallet.” Inside the old wallet were several unusual photographs, an identification card—with an embossed picture of the old man on it, unfortunately—a credit strip, and a nearly exhausted monthly commuter ticket. Rowan examined the credit strip and bit his lip in frustration. The custodian didn’t have much of a debit margin, not nearly as much as Rowan had hoped for. Not enough to buy a ticket out of the country or even out of the state, not enough to rent a car, or get an identity-scramble or an apartment to hole up in, so that was the end of those particular fantasies. And there wasn’t enough left of the commuter ticket even to get him to Boston.

The custodian began to moan. Rowan paced over, located him again, and lifted his fist to clip him. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it—the old man was so frail, it might kill him. Swearing at his squeamishness, Rowan dragged the feebly struggling custodian to a closet, muscled him into it, and braced a chair against the door to keep it closed. “Hey!” the custodian shouted, and began to rattle the doorknob furiously. “Shut up,” Rowan growled in self-conscious toughness, “or I’ll come in there and tear your head off.” The custodian shut up.

Rowan returned to the computer terminal. He’d have to do the best he could with what he had. He thought for a minute, then activated the terminal and dialed for the catalog of one of the big stores overhead. He computed sums in his head. Just enough. He inserted the coded credit slip into the slot and carefully punched out an order on the keyboard. The computer winked an acknowledgment light at him, and printed Five Minutes across the readout in green phosphorescent letters.

Sighing, Rowan leaned back in the chair to wait. Now that the immediate pressure was off, he realized how exhausted he was, how sore and battered and torn. His split lip ached fiercely, as did his lacerated cheek and his scraped arms. But most of all, he was tired. The room seemed to blur in and out of existence, and Rowan pulled up out of the nod just in time to keep his head from cracking against the terminal board. He’d almost fallen asleep. Stiffly, he got up. He was still rubber-legged, and very weak. Hunger was part of it. He literally could not remember the last time he’d eaten—sometime during his stay at the Newburyport jail, he supposed, but his memories of that ordeal were murky and confused. It could have been days. And he was intolerably thirsty.

He rummaged through the cubicle in search of food, but found nothing except a bar of VitaGel and a half-empty bottle of Joy. Grimacing with distaste, he ate the gluey bar, and then cautiously tried a sip of Joy. The euphoric effect hit him instantly, making him lightheaded and giddy. Reluctantly, he put the bottle aside—he couldn’t afford to get frazzled. There didn’t seem to be any cups at all in the place, but he polished a small plate as well as he could with his sleeve and used it to get a drink of rusty water from the tap. The Joy was making his head buzz. He had an odd feeling of unreality and déjà vu, and a sudden strong intuition that the old custodian was about to speak. Just at that moment, the custodian said “Hey, man, you’re never going to get away with this, you know that?” and Rowan subvocalized the last few words along with him, the feeling of déjà vu returning ten-fold. “Shut up, jobbie,” Rowan growled, still with the feeling that he was reading something from a prepared script, “I really shouldn’t be keeping you alive at all, scan?” The old man quieted again, but Rowan’s head remained full of odd echoes, as if everything were doubled or tripled, crowding the room with ghosts and reflections. He never should have touched that goddamned Joy.

The terminal flashed its mauve warning light while Rowan was washing his face in the sink basin. His order thumped down the pneumatic chute into the hopper. Rowan quickly dried his face with his shirt. The water had cleared his head a little, and he looked much more presentable with the dirt and dried blood washed away. Feeling almost jaunty, he stripped off the rest of his clothes and padded over to pick up the package.

The package contained a nondescript shirt, some cloth pants, an overcoat, a hat, a pair of dark glasses, and a cane. If he must cope with being “blind,” then let him be a “blind man.” One of the hard-core blind, too low-caste to qualify for a TVSS. He would attract much less suspicion that way—the pose would explain why he was continually bumping into people, and he hoped that the Purloined Letter syndrome would also work to his advantage. At the least, he would be more difficult to spot.

Rowan dressed hurriedly and left the room. He wouldn’t have much time to get clear of the complex before an alarm was raised. The chair he’d braced under the doorknob was only made of hard plastic, and already, as Rowan hesitated in the corridor, he could hear the custodian attempting to break out of the closet. He really should have killed the old man—later he would probably have cause to regret that he had not. He set out through the warren of basement corridors.

He’d decided that it would be best to try to retrace his steps, but within a few moments he was hopelessly lost. A series of locked doors and blocked-off corridors gradually herded him in an entirely different direction, and he wandered through the old stone maze for what seemed like hours. Finally, just as he was beginning to despair, he located an unlocked service stairway.

At the top of the stairway, he stepped through a door and found himself in another of the fluorescent upper corridors. He struck out along it, remembering, to tap the floor in front of him with his cane, and bumped into someone almost immediately.

“Oh, excuse me!” a voice said; a woman this time. “I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

“That’s perfectly all right, missy,” Rowan said politely, and started to tap his way along again. There was no interference, no alarm.

Goddamn, it was going to work after all, wasn’t it!

A few yards further on, he found one of the main stairways, and followed it up. He was suddenly claustrophobic, the whole subterranean complex pressing down on him with miles of corridors and stairs, steel, concrete, rock, plastic, dead black earth. God, to get out—

Sunlight struck him in the face.

It was still the same day, Rowan realized bemusedly, staring at the sky. Just a little while ago he had been on his way to Boston for the execution of his sentence. That had been years ago, it seemed. Decades ago. A lifetime. But the position of the sun showed that it had been barely four hours. Time enough, Rowan thought. Surely an active hunt for him was underway by now.

Rowan had come out onto a landscaped mall, pyramidal buildings rearing high all around, windows flashing like hydra eyes in the sun. Hundreds of people were moving invisibly all around him; he could sense their presence as a nearly subliminal susurrus composed primarily of footsteps and voices. This type of shopping complex was potentially obsolete—the existence of house-to-store pneumatic networks should have killed them as dead as the dinosaurs. But this was an underpopulated region, where most of the homes still didn’t have computer terminals; so far, downtown Boston was the closest area to have been completely converted to the system. It took time for advanced technology to disseminate across a society. And herd instinct was also a factor. With the commercial heart eaten out of the smaller towns, people gathered at the shopping plazas as earlier peoples had gathered at wells or watering-holes or drive-in restaurants, and for the same reasons: to gossip, to court, to meet friends, or just to have someplace to go at night. On a sunny day like this, there could easily be ten thousand people circulating through the complex, and somehow Rowan would have to get by them all.

He launched himself away from the shelter of a building, like a swimmer kicking off for a race, was jostled repeatedly, and realized that he was trying to buck a stream of pedestrian traffic going in the opposite direction. Obediently, Rowan turned around and let the pressure of that stream sweep him along, trusting that people would make allowances for a blind man and not crowd him too closely. The stream hurried him through the mall and into a covered walkway between buildings. Here, suddenly confined, the murmur of crowd-noises swelled into a roar. Clacking footsteps echoed and re-echoed from the low ceiling, voices reverberated hollowly—all sound became fuzzy and directionless, as though he were in a cave under the sea. Again the air seemed full of invisible wings. He could almost feel them beating around his ears, hemming him in, wrapping him in gossamer.

Suddenly dizzy, Rowan sat down on a bench. He found that his heart was beating fast with irrational terror. His nerves were giving under the strain, he told himself as he fought down another attack of claustrophobia. He couldn’t take much more. Slowly, he calmed himself. At least his disguise seemed to be working.

Someone touched his arm. “You’re an escaped convict, aren’t you?”

Rowan gasped. He would have jumped up and bolted instantly, but now the hand was on his wrist, holding him down. He half-turned, shifting his grip on the cane so that he could use it as a club.

“Hold it!” the unseen someone said in a low, urgent voice. “Don’t run. Calm down, son—I’m on your side.”

Rowan hesitated. “This is some kind of mistake—”

“No, it’s not,” the other man said dryly. “You’re pretending to be blind, aren’t you? That’s a good one, it hasn’t been used much the last few years. You might get away with it. But don’t just tap right in front of your feet, the way you’ve been doing. That’s a dead giveaway. Keep your cane swinging steadily from side to side as you tap. Remember, you’re supposed to be feeling your way along with it, like a bug does with his antennas, right? And don’t walk so fast. Be a little more uncertain about it, son, listen more, as if you’re trying for auditory clues. And for God’s sake, stop staring at things. And tracking them! It’s obvious you can see through those damn glasses. You won’t last an hour that way.”

Rowan opened his mouth, closed it again. “Who are you?” he said.

“It’s a real stroke of luck, me being able to spot you,” the other man said, ignoring him. “I hoped you’d show up in this area, and I’ve been cruising around for an hour trying to pick you up. Logical, in a way, prisoners making for a place like this, cops don’t seem to think that way though. Luckily for you. Still, we’re going to have to jump to get you out of here. But don’t you worry—you just listen to me, now, and you’ll be all right. I’m on your side, son.”

“I wasn’t aware that I had a side,” Rowan said wearily.

“You do now, son, you do now. Whether you like it or not. The enemy of my enemy, right?” As the man was saying this, Rowan had a sudden vivid mental picture of how he must look: a small, intense man of middle years with a foxy, florid face and hair like wire brush. “Listen, now,” the man said, “we haven’t got much time. You know Quincy Park in Beverly? Just down the coast a ways from Dane Street Beach?”

Rowan realized, to his own surprise, that he did know Quincy Park. He could mistily visualize it, the trees, the long grassy slope down to the seawall, the rocky beach, the ocean—he must have passed through there at one time, long ago. “Yeah, I know it,” he said.

“Well, you just get there before dark. Get there somehow, whatever you do, if you want to keep on living. It’s a station on the Underground Railroad, one we haven’t used in a long while. They won’t be watching it. I’ll call up ahead and arrange it, and there’ll be a sailboat waiting for you just offshore at Quincy Park. You get on her, they’ll take you up the coast, you’ll be safe in Canada by morning. Right? But listen—you’ve got to make the connection the first time. The boat’ll only wait until dark, and we won’t send it back there two evenings in a row. You understand? But if you make it to the boat, why, you’ll be all right then. You’ll be fine.”

“I—”

“No, listen now, boy, I mean really OK. We’ll get you down to Bolivia. The insurrectionists have got equipment at La Paz as good as anything they’ve got in Boston. They’ll break the injunction and you’ll be normal again. They’ve done it a hundred times—you don’t think you’re the only political prisoner ever to escape, do you? And they’ve got plenty of use for good men down there. So you just concentrate on getting to Beverly, and you’ll be OK. Keep up the blind man act, it’s your best bet.”

“Wait a minute—why can’t you just drive me over there now?”

“Too risky. They’ll be checking private cars before long, but they might not stop public transportation. Besides, I’ve got to lead them away from here before they close the ring on you. Now look—you wait around a minute, then head out of here, east. I’m going to intercept one of the patrol sweeps and tell them that I saw you bicycling west, heading for North Reading or Middleton, maybe. They know you stole a bicycle, but they don’t know yet that you ditched it. They’ll bite. And that’ll give you a better chance to make it out of here. Good luck, son.”

“But what if—” Rowan found himself talking to empty air; the man was gone. Rowan sat and puzzled at it for a while, then shrugged. What other choice did he have? He got up and tapped his way through the invisible crowds, surreptitiously following painted arrows to the tubetrain stop, trying to comply with the behavioral pointers his benefactor had given him. He did feel more in character that way, he discovered, and more secure.

While he was waiting for the tubetrain, he again heard the wild keening of sirens in the sky, very loud and terrible, swelling until it seemed they must be directly overhead. Rowan didn’t look around. Doggedly, he leaned on his cane and waited. The sound of the sirens faded away into distance, was gone. Rowan realized that his legs were trembling. He leaned more heavily on the cane.

The tubetrain arrived. He let it swallow him, shoved his commuter ticket into the computer, and tapped his way to a seat, hoping he wouldn’t pick one that was already occupied. He did, but the occupant immediately muttered an apology and moved to another seat. Deference to the blind. It was wonderful. Rowan sat down.

It was odd to ride in an apparently empty tubetrain, and yet at the same time hear all around you a hundred little noises—rustling papers, coughing, footsteps, voices—that proved you were not alone at all. Rowan kept staring out the window at the bland green countryside, then remembering that he was supposed to be blind and looking self-consciously away. He was thinking about what the man at the shopping plaza had said, replaying his words like a tape, analyzing them, sniffing at every nuance of meaning. Only now, after the fact, was he beginning to believe that there might be some truth to what he had been told—that there really was an Underground Railroad, that there would be a boat waiting for him, that somewhere he could be given a chance to start a whole new life. He wouldn’t quite let himself hope, but he was thawing to it.

The train pulled into Salem.

After Salem, the tubeline swung south and then east again to Marblehead, and then on south to Lynn and Boston. But Beverly was about four miles north of Salem, on the far side of the estuary. Rowan supposed that there was some kind of public transportation between the two towns, but he didn’t know what, and couldn’t have afforded to utilize it anyway; the commuter-ticket was dead. He was going to have to walk. Maybe it was better that way.

Up Essex Street, fumbling and tapping in the dusty sunlight.

Everything went well for perhaps a mile. Then Rowan discovered, to his dismay, that practically the entire eastern half of town had been razed since the last time he’d been through, and was being made over into a vast industrial complex of some sort. On this side of Essex Street, there were still houses and trees, but on the far side, across a flat expanse of asphalt, he was confronted with a chaotic expanse of factories, trainyards, excavations, construction sites and storage areas. Some of the factories were already in operation, others were still going up. The whole region was crisscrossed with deep gullies and pits, and some areas seemed to have been terraced and stairstepped in a manner reminiscent of strip-mining. Construction was taking place on many different levels among the terraces, and a gray haze of smoke hung over everything. East, toward the ocean, a herd of snaky black machines were busily eating the last of a row of old wooden houses.

He had hoped to keep to the side streets, but it seemed that there weren’t any side streets here anymore. Unless he circled back to the west, he’d have to keep on following the major thoroughfare north, and that was more risky than he liked.

Rowan decided that he’d have to take the chance of following Essex Street. He had just started to tap his way forward again when wood-pulp geysered from a tree alongside him, leaving a ragged new hole in the bark.

Sound slapped his ears a heartbeat later, but by then he was already moving. By the time he consciously realized that someone was shooting at him, he had covered half the distance to the nearest cluster of factory buildings, running faster than he had ever run in his life, dodging and swerving like a madman. Suddenly there was a railing in front of him, with a drop of unknown depth beyond it. He vaulted up and over it without breaking stride. A bullet made the railing ring like a gong a second after he had cleared it.

He dropped about ten feet down onto hard pavement, took ukemi as well as he could, and was up and dodging instantly in spite of a painfully wrenched ankle. As he ran, he was acutely aware of how hot it was under the glaring sun. The only thought in his head was an incongruous wish for a glass of water. Another shot splintered concrete at his heels, and then he was slamming through a door and into a building. It was some kind of huge assembly plant with a cavernous ceiling, full of cold echoes and bitter blue lights. He bullied his way through it, followed by a spreading wave of alarm as he collided with people and knocked work-benches over, staggering, falling down and scrambling up again. As he dodged out a door on the far side of the plant, he heard another gunshot behind him. Then he was tearing through a narrow alleyway between factories. There were rainbow puddles of oil and spilled chemicals on the ground here, and he splashed through them deliberately, hoping that the bitter reek of them would throw his pursuers off if they were tracking him by scent. Someone shouted excitedly at his heels. He ducked into another factory building.

It became a phantasmagoria, a nightmare of pursuit. Rowan running endlessly through vast rooms full of shapes and stinks and lights and alien noises, while invisible things snatched at him and tried to pull him down. Everything was fragmentary and disjointed now for Rowan, as though he existed only in discontinuous slices of time. In one such slice, he was hitching a ride on a flat-car that was rumbling through a trainyard between varicolored mountains of chemical waste, listening to sirens and shouts behind him and wondering when he should jump off and run. In another, he was dodging through a multi-leveled forest of oddly jointed pipes, like a child swarming through a jungle gym. Another, and he was climbing slowly and tenaciously up a cyclone fence. Another, and he was running through a vacant lot, a construction site that had been temporarily abandoned and which had been grown over everywhere by man-high expanses of scrub grass and wild wheat.

Rowan tripped over a discarded tool, fell flat on his face, stayed down. That saved him. A scythe of heat swept across the field at hip level, and suddenly all the grass was burning. This time, they were using lasers. He rolled frantically through the blazing grass in an instinctive attempt to put out the little fires that were starting on his clothes and in his hair, and accidentally tumbled down into a steep, clay-sided gulley. There was a sluggish, foot-deep trickle of muddy water at the bottom of the gulley, and he crawled through it on his belly while everything burned above him, choking, blinded by smoke and baked by heat that blistered his back, an inchworm on a griddle in Hell.

Then he was kneeling in a tree-shaded backyard while someone washed his face with a wet, scented towel. He retched helplessly, and firm hands held his head. He had something very important to say, some vitally important thing that he had almost remembered, but when he tried to speak all he could coax from his cracked lips and swollen tongue was an ugly jangling croak. “Shut up, goddamn you,” said an anxious voice. A woman’s voice. He rested in her arms, and stared up at her in awe. She was here now. “Road’s out that way”—not knowing that he couldn’t see which way she was pointing—“don’t guess you’d want to go back out over the fence the way you came in, too suspicious.” She hesitated, as though afraid to wish him well. “Go on, now,” she said at last, and he could almost imagine her making shooing motions at him. Her voice was unsteady. “Please go. I have to think of my family. I can’t let them catch you here.” He sensed then that she had gone abruptly away. A moment later the back door of the house opened and closed. He wondered if she was still watching him through the glass half of the door. Somehow he hoped that she was.

Rowan made his way around to the front of the house, and discovered that he was on Bridge Street, a mile or more from the factory area, although he had no clear recollection of how he had gotten there. That made it a fairly straightforward problem. He had to follow Bridge Street north another mile, cross the bridge over the estuary, and he would be there. He could hardly feel his body anymore, but that was probably a blessing. It allowed him to sit somewhere far removed from pain and drive his body like a car, coax it along like a beaten-up old heap being driven to a second-hand dealer’s lot, the owner swearing bitterly all the way and hoping he can get the thing there before it falls apart. He set out for Beverly.

The world began to turn to mush again as he walked. After a few blocks he started to hallucinate, seeing brief vivid flashes of things that couldn’t be there, having long talks with people who didn’t exist. He would come back to himself as from a great distance, and find that he was talking to himself in a very loud voice and swinging his arms wildly, or else making hoarse grunting noises, huhn, huhn, like an exhausted bear harried closely by hounds. He no longer cared if he attracted attention or even if he bumped into people. He was no longer worried about pursuit; in fact, he had forgotten that anybody was after him. He only knew that he had to get to Beverly. Reaching that goal had become an end in itself; he didn’t remember what he was supposed to do when he got there, and he didn’t care. All his will was taken up by the task of keeping his body clumping leadenly along, while the world flowed by like porridge.

He was on a bridge, suspended between sea and sky.

Out there to the east was Great Misery Island, then Baker’s Island, and then nothing but water, an endless fan of icy water spreading on and out forever, turning into Ocean. There was freedom. To sail out and away forever toward the rising sun, with no restrictions, no boundaries, just infinite space and Rowan skimming the glassy white tops of the waves.

There was a gusty wet wind coming in from the sea. For what seemed like a very long time it hit Rowan across the face, back and forth, back and forth, as methodical and unpitying as a manager bent on reviving a heavyweight with a wet towel in the tenth round of a losing fight, until Rowan’s head finally began to clear. He was slumped against the railing of the bridge, cold metal biting into his armpits. He had hooked his arms over the top rail, and that had kept him from actually falling down, but he had no idea how long he had been hanging there in a daze, starring out into Massachusetts Bay. Sailboats and trawlers were moving back and forth in the deep channel, and the sight of them jarringly reminded him why he had to get to Beverly.

Then he heard sirens in the sky behind him.

Rowan started walking again. He had no reserves left—neither panic nor the imminence of death could prod him into running. He was physically unable to run, no matter what the provocation. So he walked away from his pursuers, trudging slowly across the rest of the bridge and up the hill on the other side. He was in Beverly now, perhaps a quarter-mile from his goal. The sirens were a thin, irritating thread of sound, just on the edge of hearing.

They didn’t seem to be coming any closer. Perhaps the police were holding a search pattern over Salem.

If only they would stay away for ten more minutes.

Rowan forced himself to walk faster. But the extra effort involved began to jar him away from reality again.

He fell into a walking dream of Bolivia, the rugged, sun-bronzed men welcoming him into the ranks of the insurrectionists, the trip to their remote mountain fortresses, the women waiting to welcome him, the important work waiting to be done. A new life. To be free of fear—for the first time in how long? Had he ever been free of fear? Had there ever been a day when someone wasn’t spying on him, prying and prodding and pushing him, wrapping him in gossamer that was as strong as iron, controlling him like a puppet? A spark of anger touched him then, and he blazed up like old dead wood. Let the insurrectionists give him a gun—that was all he’d ask for, that was all he wanted.

His anger saved him. He’d been staggering down Rantoulle Street in a somnambulistic daze, and had nearly missed his turn. But rage shook him momentarily awake. He turned onto Edwards Street, past the school. He could hear children playing in the schoolyard, their voices rising and falling through the mellow afternoon air like the shrill calling of birds, but he could not see them as he passed—to his eyes, only leaves and paper-scraps moved across the asphalt with the wind, and he also moved on with it, alone.

The sirens were getting louder. They were coming after him.

But then he turned a final corner, and the sea spread out below him, glinting and silver and vast, opening the world to the horizon. This was Quincy Park. As he stood on the road above, his eyes followed the long slope down to the seawall, then beyond the beach to the ocean, and to the slim white sailboat that waited there, like a sign, like a dove on the water, like the fulfillment of all the dreams he’d ever known.

Rowan started down the slope toward the ocean, his feet slipping on the grass, breaking at last into a ponderous trot. He was almost there. Hope opened like a wound inside him, molten and amazing.

Something slammed into his ribcage like a white-hot sword, sending him staggering back, knocking the breath and the hope out of him. For a second, the incredible shock of the impact dissolved all illusions, and he remembered, and knew that again he had failed to escape. Someday! he shouted in a great silent puff of pain and rage and sudden terrible knowledge. Someday!

Then another blow took him over the heart and drove him into darkness.

The fat man worked the action of the tranquilizer rifle and ejected a gleaming metal dart. “My God!” he breathed, reverentially.

Up the slope, the technicians were already reprogramming the mobile computers for the next run-through, using the stereo plotting tanks to set up a paradigm describing all the possible sequences and combinations of sequences that might apply, an exercise in four-dimensional topography and systems-flow. Of course, the computers did all the real work: controlling the sequencing, selecting among tables of alternatives as the real-world situation altered and reprogramming themselves on the fly, coordinating a thousand physical details such as the locking of doors and the blocking of certain corridors that kept the human subject restricted to a manageable spatial network of routes and choices, directing the human “beaters” who helped keep the subject “in the chute,” triggering previously implanted fantasy fugue sequences such as the car crash and timing them so that they melded smoothly with real-world action. And much else besides. Nevertheless, the human technicians considered themselves to be overworked, and all made a point of looking harried and rather ostentatiously tired.

A small, foxy-faced man appeared at the fat man’s elbow. “Very nice,” he said briskly, rubbing his hands. “As good a show as I promised you, Senator, I think you’ll agree with that. And of course,” he added piously, “so valuable therapeutically.” He smiled. “Always so many possibilities! Will he get to Hamilton, or end up in Danvers? Will he kill the old man or not? Will he find the car or let me steer him to the tube? An enormous but finite number of choices; aesthetically it’s quite elegant. I’m always reminded of the medieval theologies. Free will operating within a framework of predetermination. Of course,” he said, smiling ingratiatingly at the fat man, “you realize Who that makes us.”

The fat man wasn’t listening. His face was beaded with sweat. “That was fine,” he said. “My God, Doctor, that was very fine.” His eyes remained glassy for a moment longer, and then animation came back into his features. He broke the rifle and started to hand it to the foxy-faced man, then hesitated, and with an eager shy deference that was obviously foreign to so important a man, asked, “How long does it take to get him ready again? I mean, it’s hours yet until dark, and I was wondering if it would be possible?”

The doctor smiled indulgently. “Always time for one more,” he said.

A Cat Horror Story

Introduction to A Cat Horror Story

I’m not a fan of reality television, Jerry Springer or Ricki Lake, wrestling, soccer, Star Trek conventions, multi-volume fat fantasy . . . or stories told from the point of view of Cute Little Animals. That being said, I’ll fess up to being a cat lover (not that kind!) and having co-edited with Gardner not one, but two anthologies about cats in our Magic Tales series for Ace Books. (Okay, and one about dogs, too.)

Gardner and his wife, author Susan Casper, usually have about nine hundred and seventy-three cats running around their apartment in any given year—well, that might be a slight exaggeration. I would usually have one to two cats in my household. So I suppose it was only natural that Gardner and I would eventually come up with the idea of editing the Magicats volumes. Our idea was to buy the best cat stories ever written in the genre, stories that would confront, unnerve, and also push all the cat lovers’ buttons. But being a pretentious intellectual, I was a bit embarrassed and thought of the volumes as being purely commercial endeavors. After all, would Gardner and I want CO-EDITOR, MAGICATS I & II etched onto our respective tombstones?

I probably won’t be letting the cat out of the bag—oye and ouch!– if I tell you that Gardner has become one of the most important and influential editors ever to work in the genre. He has been as important to the growth of the field as John W. Campbell was before him. But Gardner is also one of the very best short story writers ever to have worked in the genre.

And I chose his Cute Little Animal story to illustrate my point.

The protagonists of “A Cat Horror Story” are indeed cute little animals, but you’ll soon forget about that because Gardner is doing an authorial tight wire act here. As you read, the familiar world will waver and begin to change as Gardner transmogrifies it into something gunmetal gray, deadly, and alien. Soon, you should be seeing yourself as the alien . . . soon doctors and toys; canned food and cars (you know, those fast dead things); the starry sky and the harvest moon, which Butler called “the lantern of the night,” will never seem the same again.

Gardner has created—or perhaps reproduced!—a detailed and logical mindset for his “People,” and all the details that define this “cute little animal culture” ring true. Yet dark as this story may be, it is moon-struck with humor, poignant irony, and satire.

You should take the title of this story literally.

Gardner also honors what has gone before in the genre. If you have read Clifford D. Simak’s brilliant classic City, a collection of “the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north,” you’ll see the homage in this story about cats.

Gardner is a precise, lyrical stylist. He is a deep, humane writer who can tease the humor out of tragedy . . . and turn a story about cute little animals into something resonant and mythical, something you won’t easily forget.

Now you be careful the next time you get into your fast, dead thing!

Jack Dann

A Cat Horror Story

Darkness. The smell of grass, and wet earth, and fog. The night moved through the clearing like a river. A few distant pinpricks of stars overhead, faint and far and pale. Somewhere down the hill, the grass rustled as a mouse fled through it, but the People were not hunting tonight.

Eyes gleamed in the night. Occasionally, a tail would thump the ground, once, twice, and then fall still. Very occasionally—an act of bravado—one of the People would slowly, ostentatiously, lick a paw. Then stop.

You could smell the excitement in the wet air, the uneasiness, the fear.

The wind brought the distant sound of a dog barking, and the ears of the People pricked forward instinctively, but, on this night of all nights, there was certainly no time for dogs.

Somewhere down below, in one of the human lairs at the foot of the hill, you could hear a human^1 calling for one of the People in that shrill mixture of human talk, strange wet noises, and oddly garbled and nonsensically out-of-context phrases of the True Tongue that humans used to try to summon the People who were lair-mates with them, but none of the People were interested in Food tonight, even the fattest or the hungriest of them, not even when the human made an enticing rattling noise with a Food-Opening-Stick against a Cold Round Thing of Food. After a while, the human ceased his plaintive calls, and there was silence again, except for the human sounds riding the night air: doors slamming, voices, the annoying clamoring and shrieking of the Noisy Dead Things with which the humans insisted on cluttering the lairs, the growling of the Fast Dead Things which the humans kept as slaves and actually encouraged to swallow them! (although they made the Things spit them up again later) . . . but the People were used to those sounds, and ignored them.

At last, when the sharp smells of excitement could get no stronger, when their eyes could grow no wider or wilder, and when their tails were beginning to lash with impatience with a noise like a strong wind slashing through the branches of trees, the full moon rose, immense and pale and round, its pockmarked face pitiless and remote and cold, and that cruel orb was reflected full and bright in all the watching eyes of all the People who waited below.

One of the People stretched and yawned, showing all his teeth. His name was Caesar^2, and he was known as a good hunter, and a fierce defender of his territory. In fact, he had a bloody feud of long duration and rich tradition going with Jefferson, whose territory adjoined his own, but Jefferson sat quietly beside him now, and did no more than turn a slightly disdainful glance at Caesar’s display of teeth. This was no time for fighting, or mating, or for territoriality. The Hunter Light, the Death Light, The Night Face, That-Which-Lights-the-Way-to-Kill, was in the sky, and that had always meant the same thing, for uncounted generations back to the beginning of all.

It was time to tell stories, under the cold, watchful gaze of The Night Face.

“This I have seen,” Caesar began. “I was hunting with the tom named Bigfoot, and we came to the place where all the grass stops, and for almost as far as you can see, until the trees start again far away, the ground is flat and hard and smells of Dead Things. I warned Bigfoot that this was Ghostland, the territory of demons^3 and monsters, but his hunting blood was up, and the hunting is good under the trees at night, and he would not listen. And so we went out across the hard, bad-smelling stuff. Out into Ghostland.”

Caesar looked away for a moment, out toward the far horizon, then turned his eyes back to the People. “We walked out across Ghostland. The Dead Stuff was cold and hard under our paws, and we could hear our claws skritch on it. The wind carried the voices of ghosts as it whined past us. Suddenly, there was a bright light, far away, but coming closer. Closer! I froze with fear, but, in his eagerness, Bigfoot went on. There was a growling noise, louder and louder, like all the dogs that ever were born, growling at once. And then there was a light, blinding me. The light! So bright, so close, as if The Night Face had fallen from the sky down on top of me! Then a Fast Dead Thing went by with a roar that shook the world and a blast of wind that nearly knocked me over, and with a smell of burning. I heard Bigfoot scream.”

Caesar paused, and the rest of the People crept a step or two closer to hear him. “When the Fast Dead Thing was gone,” he continued, “I went back, step by slow step, to see what had happened to Bigfoot.” Caesar paused again, significantly. “He was dead. The Fast Dead Thing had crushed him. His guts were everywhere, torn from his body, and his blood was all around. The middle of his body was flat, as though it had no bones in it anymore. He was mashed into the dead black ground of Ghostland, in a puddle of his own guts and blood. On his face was a look of fear and horror such as I hope never to see again.”

The People shivered. After a moment, Caesar said, “Then I heard it coming back. The Fast Dead Thing. I saw its light. It was coming back from the way it had gone. Coming back for me. I’m not ashamed to tell you all that I ran like a kitten! And ever since then, when I go near Ghostland, I can hear the Fast Dead Thing hunting for me, roaring back and forth, hunting through the night to find me.”

There was an awed silence, and then a young queen named Katy said, “I hear they can get you anywhere, the Fast Dead Things.” She looked around her nervously. “Even inside the lair. There are some of them who can follow you right in, and get you even when you’re inside. My mother told me that she used to get chased by a little one that roared and whooshed and tried to pull her tail.”

“That was just a Small Roaring Thing,” a tom named Pooter said. “The humans play with them. They’re not really dangerous—though, of course, it’s better to stay away from them, just to be safe. But the Fast Dead Things, now—they can kill you even when they’re asleep!”

“Nothing can kill you while it’s asleep,” Jefferson said.

Pooter bristled, then licked his foot in a slow and insulting way that might have been provocation for a fight on another evening. “Yes? Well, I have seen this. There was one of the People, her name was Lady Jane, and she went near one of the Fast Dead Things at night, while it was sleeping. And she crawled inside the top of the Thing, because the night was cold, and it was warm deep up inside the Thing. And in the morning, as I was watching, a human came and made the Fast Dead Thing swallow it, and then the Thing woke up.” He shuddered. “It growled, and then it roared, and then Lady Jane screamed, and I smelled the hot smell of her blood. The human got out, and made the Thing open up its smaller mouth in the front, and then he lifted Lady Jane out. And she was dead. Dead, and cut into pieces! Her head was cut nearly all the way off, hanging by some fur!”

“Dead!” some of the People moaned. “Dead!”

A scarred old feral tom named Blackie, who had one ear torn nearly to rags, said, “You don’t need Dead Things to kill you, young ones!” He lashed his tail and made the clicking and smacking noise that signified deep contempt among the People. “Humans will do the job readily enough! Yes, your precious humans, the things you all live with, willingly! When I was a kitten, some humans put me in a sack^4, and threw me in the river. Ai, the horror of it!” He shivered and shook himself convulsively. “It was dark and hot and smothering, and I couldn’t breathe, and then I was falling, twisting and tumbling and falling, and there was no air to breathe! My claws were sharp in those days, People, lucky for me, and I ripped my way out. But then I was in the water! In the water! I was under the water, with it all around me—over my head! I had to swim, swim for my life, and I nearly died before my head broke the surface and I could take a breath, and then I had to swim for a long time before my feet found the ground again, and all the while the water was pulling at me, sucking at me, trying to pull me down to death!”

A low growl went around the circle of the People. Their eyes gleamed.

“My human goes in the water every day,” a young queen named Spooky said. “On purpose. She lets it go all over her! She doesn’t try to escape at all! Sometimes she sits under the water, with only her head outside it!”

The People moaned in horror. “Ah, they are strange creatures,” Jefferson muttered. “Strange!”

“But those were Rogues, those humans who tried to kill you,” a young tom named Bangers said, somewhat uneasily, as though seeking reassurance. “We’ve all been chased and kicked by Rogues now and again, or had stones or Hard Clattering Things thrown at us. That doesn’t mean that our humans would hurt us. My humans wouldn’t hurt me. They like me! They feed me and pat^5 me whenever I want them to!”

“I had humans once, too, later on,” Blackie said bitterly. “They fed me and they patted me—and then they cut my balls off!”

Bangers hissed involuntarily, and many of the People blew their tails out to several times their normal size.

“It could happen to you, too, young one!” Blackie said. “Don’t you think it couldn’t! You think you’re safe with your humans because they feed you and give you a warm place to sleep, but you never know when they’re going to turn on you and torture^6 you. You’ll never know why they do it, either, but sooner or later, they will. They all will. None of them are any different!

“They wait until you’re sick,” a burly tom named Hobbes said. “They wait until you’re feeling really bad, and then they take you to the Pain Place, to the Torture Place, and they hurt you more—”

Another tom shuddered. “It’s true! The humans there stick things up your ass! And they stab you, with things that hurt! And they drain your blood out of you!”

“They cut you!” a queen named Jasmine said, her voice thrilling with horror. “They cut you open! My humans took me there, to the Pain Place, with all its bad smells and its sick smells and the sounds of the People screaming in agony while dogs sit around and watch them, and they left me there, locked in a Box-You-Can’t-Get-Out-Of, and I went to sleep, and when I woke up, my belly had been slashed open! I could feel the cut, deeper than a cut from any fight. It hurt for a long time, even when my humans came and got me and took me back to the lair again. It hurt for a long time!”

They were crouched close together now, almost touching, their heads in a circle.

“They kill People there, too,” Blackie said. “The humans kill them. And not just the humans who live in the Pain Place. Your precious humans. The very same ones who live with you and give you Food. They kill you, themselves!”

There were a few wails of protest, and the People pressed closer together, shuddering.

“I have seen it,” Blackie continued inexorably. “When they cut my balls off, in the Pain Place, before they took me back to the lair and I ran away, they brought my lair-mate in, an old queen named Stuff who had lived with the humans before I joined them. Our humans brought her in, and they held her down while she fought to get away, both of them held her down, and then another human stabbed her with a Pain Stick, and she struggled for a while, and then she died! I could smell that she was dead! They’d killed her! Our humans! They held her down and killed her—and they patted her while they were doing it!”

Someone moaned with dread, and then fell silent.

“And that’s what will happen to all of you! Every one of you! If a dog or a Fast Dead Thing or some other kind of monster or demon doesn’t get you, then, at the end, your own humans will kill you!”

This was almost too much. They pressed close together for comfort, too scared even to wail or moan now.

There was a crazed light in Blackie’s eyes. “I saw Stuff’s ghost last night. I often see it, after dark. Her fur is like ice, like frost on a winter morning, and her dead eyes give back no light . . .”

The moon was high and full above them now, and it seemed to tug on their souls, as if it would suck them out through the tops of their heads and up into the mysterious depths of the night sky, where they would fall forever through the dark.

“Yes!” a tom shrieked. “Yes! I have seen it! Its feet leave no mark on the grass when it walks, and its eyes are like deep pools of black water! And one night, when everyone slept except me, I could hear it outside, scratching on the door, trying to get in—”

A huge Dead Thing went by overhead, roaring, a blazing light flying through the night sky like a terrible gazing eye, seeming to pass almost close enough to touch, and the People crouched low on the hillside until the monster had rumbled away into distance and was gone.

In the sudden shocked silence, Caesar said, almost with satisfaction, “The Ghostway is around us, always.” And the People shivered deliciously, and moved closer in the night, and told their stories until the moon went down, as they have for a million generations, and as they will for a million more, until the Earth goes cold, and even the People are forgotten.

Executive Clemency

Introduction to Executive Clemency

This is what’s known as a writer’s story, and if you want to know what I mean by that, go read the story first so you’ll understand what I say. I’ll wait right here for you.

Back? Okay, here’s how it works. If you’re primarily a reader, you reacted to the smooth and lovely prose, the slowly building mystery, the sudden twists and revelations of the plot. But if you’re a writer, a working writer, then right now you’re shaking your head in envy and admiration and muttering to yourself, “How the hell did he do that?”

It’s that opening, to begin with, that long and beautiful and suspenseful opening in which essentially nothing happens. No, worse than that! Gardner takes an almost static situation and then by degrees drains the heat out of it, slowing it down until, a mere breath away from motionlessness, something snaps and the protagonist falls back into the world of actions and consequences.

You’ve read the story. You know that once you began reading, you had no choice but to follow that compulsive flow of words wherever it went. That something which would sound in synopsis extremely boring, is in practice gripping in the extreme. A receptive reader could no more abandon this story a few sentences in than flap his arms and fly away.

But how the hell did Gardner do that?

Me, I like to begin a story somewhat less subtly, by (say) killing the protagonist in the very first sentence. That’s because the reader is a fickle beast, and can be extremely difficult to win over. To write an opening as aggressively contrarian as this one requires the writer to not only have what my teenage son, Sean, calls “mad skills,” but to know it. When Gardner was writing this story, he was able to follow the logic of the prose where it naturally led, because he knew he had the reader in his control. He knew the writing would pull the reader in after it.

What can it possibly feel to write like that? Incandescent.

As I understand the history of this story, it began with a sizeable fragment submitted at a Guilford writer’s workshop by Jay Haldeman, which Gardner, not realizing it was meant to be a parody of his style, latched onto with enormous excitement. Jay agreed to a collaboration and then (and I apologize to Jay if I’m getting this wrong and underplaying his contribution), Gardner took it home and worked on it, off and on again, for the next seven years. Seven years! I’ve got to tell you that, as a working writer myself, I’m amazed that it was done in so short a time.

Because the beginning is only . . . well, the beginning. To succeed, it has to open naturally into a larger story, one that the reader will feel is worthy of its extraordinary opening. It has to develop easily and by a series of small surprises into something satisfying. Something the reader can’t see coming and yet will accept as inevitable. Something that gives the reader some new insight into the human. And it all has to work together flawlessly, as a single organic mechanism.

You’ve read the story. You’ve seen it done. But how? This is the kind of work that drives other writers nuts. This is the kind of work that fills us with admiration for the guy who wrote it. Enormous skill went into this story, but something more than that happened as well. When a writer of Gardner’s caliber is at his absolute best, when he’s in the mental equivalent of what Castaneda would call his Spot of Power, he creates something that’s not only inimitable but unassailable. So here.

This is what a writer can do, if he’s got the chops.

Michael Swanwick

Executive Clemency

by Gardner Dozois and Jack C. Haldeman II

The President of the United States sat very still in his overstuffed chair on the third floor and watched early-morning sunlight sweep in a slow line across the faded rug.

He couldn’t remember getting out of bed or sitting down in the chair. He could dimly recall that he had been sitting there for a long time, watching the slow advent of dawn, but he was only just beginning to become fully aware of himself and his surroundings.

Only his eyes moved, yellow and wet, as the world seeped in.

This happened to him almost every morning now. Every morning he would return slowly to his body as if from an immense distance, from across appalling gulfs of time and space, to find himself sitting in the chair, or standing next to the window, or, more rarely, propped up in the corner against the wall. Sometimes he’d be in the middle of dressing when awareness returned, and he’d awake to find himself tying a shoelace or buttoning his pants. Sometimes, like this morning, he’d just be sitting and staring. Other times, he would awaken to the sound of his own voice, loud and cold in the bare wooden room, saying some strange and important things that he could never quite catch. If he could only hear the words he said at such times, just once, he knew that it would change everything, that he would understand everything. But he could never hear them.

He didn’t move. When the lines of sunlight reached the chair, it would be time to go downstairs. Not before, no matter how late it sometimes made him as the sunlight changed with the seasons, no matter if he sometimes missed breakfast or, on cloudy winter days, didn’t move at all until Mrs. Hamlin came upstairs to chase him out. It was one of the rituals with which he tried to hold his life together.

The east-facing window was washed over with pale, fragile blue, and the slow-moving patch of direct sunlight was a raw, hot gold. Dust motes danced in the beam. Except for those dust motes, everything was stillness and suspension. Except for his own spidery breathing, everything was profoundly silent. The room smelled of dust and heat and old wood. It was the best part of the day. Naturally it couldn’t last.

Very far away, floating on the edge of hearing, there came the mellow, mossy bronze voice of a bell, ringing in the village of Fairfield behind the ridge, and at that precise moment, as though the faint tintinnabulation were its cue, the house itself began to speak. It was a rambling wooden house, more than a hundred years old, and it talked to itself at dawn and dusk, creaking, groaning, whispering, muttering like a crotchety old eccentric as its wooden bones expanded with the sun or contracted with the frost. This petulant, arthritic monologue ran on for a few minutes, and then the tenants themselves joined in, one by one: Seth in the bathroom early, spluttering as he washed up; Mr. Thompkins, clearing his throat interminably in the room below, coughing and hacking and spitting as though he were drowning in a sea of phlegm; Sadie’s baby, crying in a vain attempt to wake her sluggard mother; Mrs. Hamlin, slamming the kitchen door; Mr. Samuels’ loud nasal voice in the courtyard outside.

The sunlight swept across his chair.

The President of the United States stirred and sighed, lifting his arms and setting them down again, stamping his feet to restore circulation. Creakily, he got up. He stood for a moment, blinking in the sudden warmth, willing life back into his bones. His arms were gnarled and thin, covered, like his chest, with fine white hair that polarized in the sunlight. He rubbed his hands over his arms to smooth out gooseflesh, pinched the bridge of his nose, and stepped across to the gable window for a look outside. It seemed wrong somehow to see the neat, tree-lined streets of Northview, the old wooden houses, the tiled roofs, the lines of smoke going up black and fine from mortar-chinked chimneys. It seemed especially wrong that there were no automobiles in the streets, no roar and clatter of traffic, no reek of gasoline, no airplanes in the sky—

He turned away from the window. For a moment everything was sick and wrong, and he blinked at the homey, familiar room as though he’d never seen it before, as though it were an unutterably alien place. Everything became hot and tight and terrifying, closing down on him. What’s happening? he asked himself blindly. He leaned against a crossbeam, dazed and baffled, until the distant sound of Mrs. Hamlin’s voice—she was scolding Tessie in the kitchen, and the ruckus rose all the way up through three floors of pine and plaster and fine old tenpenny nails—woke him again to his surroundings, with something like pleasure, with something like pain.

Jamie, they called him. Crazy Jamie.

Shaking his head and muttering to himself, Jamie collected his robe and his shaving kit and walked down the narrow, peeling corridor to the small upstairs bathroom. The polished hardwood floor was cold under his feet.

The bathroom was cold, too. It was only the beginning of July, but already the weather was starting to turn nippy late at night and early in the morning. It got colder every year, seemed like. Maybe the glaciers were coming back, as some folks said. Or maybe it was just that he himself was worn a little thinner every year, a little closer to the ultimate cold of the grave. Grunting, he wedged himself into the narrow space between the sink and the downslant of the roof, bumping his head, as usual, against the latch of the skylight window. There was just enough room for him if he stood hunch-shouldered with the toilet bumping up against his thigh. The toilet was an old porcelain monstrosity, worn smooth as glass, that gurgled constantly and comfortably and emitted a mellow breath of earth. It was almost company. The yard boy had already brought up a big basin of “hot” water, although by now, after three or four other people had already used it, it was gray and cold; after the last person used it, it would be dumped down the toilet to help flush out the system. He opened his shaving kit and took out a shapeless cake of lye soap, a worn hand towel, a straight razor.

The mirror above the sink was cracked and tarnished—no help for it, nobody made mirrors anymore. It seemed an appropriate background for the reflection of his face, which was also, in its way, tarnished and dusty and cracked with age. He didn’t know how old he was; that was one of the many things Doc Norton had warned him not to think about, so long ago. He couldn’t even remember how long he’d been living here in Northview. Ten years? Fifteen? He studied himself in the mirror, the blotched, earth-colored skin, the eyes sunk deep under a shelf of brow, the network of fine wrinkles. A well-preserved seventy? Memory was dim; the years were misty and fell away before he could number them. He shied away from trying to remember. Didn’t matter.

He covered the face with lathered soap.

By the time he finished dressing, the other tenants had already gone downstairs. He could hear them talking down there, muffled and distant, like water bugs whispering at the mossy bottom of a deep old well. Cautiously, Jamie went back into the hall. The wood floors and paneling up here were not as nicely finished as those in the rest of the house. He thought of all the hidden splinters in all that wood, waiting to catch his flesh. He descended the stairs. The banister swayed as he clutched it, groaning softly to remind him that it, too, was old.

As he came into the dining room, conversation died. The other tenants looked up at him, looked away again. People fiddled with their tableware, adjusted their napkins, pulled their chairs closer to the table or pushed them farther away. Someone coughed self-consciously.

He crossed the room to his chair and stood behind it.

“Morning, Jamie,” Mrs. Hamlin said crossly.

“Ma’m,” he replied politely, trying to ignore her grumpiness. He was late again.

He sat down. Mrs. Hamlin stared at him disapprovingly, shook her head, and then turned her attention pointedly back to her plate. As if this were a signal, conversation started up again, gradually swelling to its normal level. The awkward moment passed. Jamie concentrated on filling his plate, intercepting the big platters of country ham and eggs and corn bread as they passed up and down the table. It was always like this at meals: the embarrassed pauses, the uneasy sidelong glances, the faces that tried to be friendly but could not entirely conceal distaste. Crazy Jamie, Crazy Jamie. Conversation flowed in ripples around him, never involving him, although the others would smile dutifully at him if he caught their eyes, and occasionally Seth or Tom would nod at him with tolerably unforced cordiality. This morning it wasn’t enough. He wanted to talk, too, for the first time in months. He wasn’t a child, he was a man, an old man! He paid less attention to his food and began to strain to hear what was being said, looking for a chance to get into the conversation.

Finally the chance came. Seth asked Mr. Samuels a question. It was a point of fact, not opinion, and Jamie knew the answer.

“Yes,” Jamie said, “at one time New York City did indeed have a larger population than Augusta.”

Abruptly everyone stopped talking. Mr. Samuels’ lips closed up tight, and he grimaced as though he had tasted something foul. Seth shook his head wearily, looking sad and disappointed. Jamie lowered his head to avoid Seth’s eyes. He could sense Mrs. Hamlin swelling and glowering beside him, but he wouldn’t look at her, either.

Damn it, that wasn’t what he’d meant to say! They hadn’t been talking about that at all. He’d said the wrong thing.

He’d done it again.

People were talking about him around the table, he knew, but he could no longer understand them. He could still hear their voices, but the words had been leached away, and all that remained was noise and hissing static. He concentrated on buttering a slice of corn bread, trying to hang on to that simple mechanical act while the world pulled away from him in all directions, retreating to the very edge of his perception, like a tide that has gone miles out from the beach.

When the world tide came back in, he found himself outside on the porch—the veranda; some of the older folks still called it—with Mrs. Hamlin fussing at him, straightening his clothes, patting his wiry white hair into place, getting him ready to be sent off to work. She was still annoyed with him, but it had no real bite to it, and the exasperated fondness underneath kept showing through even as she scolded him. “You go straight to work now, you hear? No dawdling and mooning around.” He nodded his head sheepishly. She was a tall, aristocratic lady with a beak nose, a lined, craggy face, and a tight bun of snowy white hair. She was actually a year or two younger than he was, but he thought of her as much, much older. “And mind you come right straight back here after work, too. Tonight’s the big Fourthday dinner, and you’ve got to help in the kitchen, hear? Jamie, are you listening to me?”

He ducked his head and said “Yes’m,” his feet already fidgeting to be gone.

Mrs. Hamlin gave him a little push, saying, “Shoo now!” and then, her grim face softening, adding, “Try to be a good boy.” He scooted across the veranda and out into the raw, hot brightness of the morning.

He shuffled along, head down, still infused with dull embarrassment from the scolding he’d received. Mr. Samuels went cantering by him, up on his big roan horse, carbine sheathed in a saddle holster, horseshoes ringing against the pavement; off to patrol with the Outriders for the day. Mr. Samuels waved at him as he passed, looking enormously tall and important and adult up on the high saddle, and Jamie answered with the shy, wide, loose-lipped grin that sometimes seemed vacuous even to him. He ducked his head again when Mr. Samuels was out of sight and frowned at the dusty tops of his shoes. The sun was up above the trees and the rooftops now, and it was getting warm.

The five-story brick school building was the tallest building in Northview—now that the bank had burned down—and it cast a cool, blue shadow across his path as he turned onto Main Street. It was still used as a school in the winter and on summer afternoons after the children had come back from the fields, but it was also filled with stockpiles of vital supplies so that it could be used as a stronghold in case of a siege—something that had happened only once, fifteen years ago, when a strong raiding party had come up out of the south. Two fifty-caliber machine guns—salvaged from an Army jeep that had been abandoned on the old state highway a few weeks after the War—were mounted on top of the school’s roof, where their field of fire would cover most of the town. They had not been fired in earnest for years, but they were protected from the weather and kept in good repair, and a sentry was still posted up there at all times, although by now the sentry was likely to smuggle a girl up to the roof with him on warm summer nights. Times had become more settled, almost sleepy now. Similarly, the Outriders who patrolled Northview’s farthest borders and watched over the flocks and the outlying farms had been reduced from thirty to ten, and it had been three or four years since they’d had a skirmish with anyone; the flow of hungry refugees and marauders and aimless migrants had mostly stopped by now—dead, or else they’d found a place of their own. These days the Outriders were more concerned with animals. The black bears were back in the mountains and the nearby hills, and for the past four or five years there had been wolves again, coming back from who-knew-where, increasing steadily in numbers and becoming more of a threat as the winters hardened. Visitors down from Jackman Station, in Maine, brought a story that a mountain lion had recently been sighted on the slopes of White Cap, in the unsettled country “north of the Moosehead,” although before the War there couldn’t have been any pumas left closer than Colorado or British Columbia. It had taken only twenty years.

There was a strange wagon in front of the old warehouse that was now the Outriders’ station, a rig Jamie had never seen before. It was an ordinary enough wagon, but it was painted. It was painted in mad streaks and strips and random patchwork splotches of a dozen different colors—deep royal blue, vivid yellow, scarlet, purple, earth brown, light forest-green, black, burnt orange—as if a hundred children from prewar days had been at it with finger paint. To Jamie’s eyes, accustomed to the dull and faded tones of Northview’s weather-beaten old buildings, the streaks of color were so brilliant that they seemed to vibrate and stand out in raised contrast from the wagon’s surface. He was not used to seeing bright colors anymore; except those in the natural world around him, and this paint was fresh, something he also hadn’t seen in more years than he could remember. Even the big horse, which stood patiently in the wagon’s traces—and which now rolled an incurious eye up at, Jamie and blew out its lips with a blubbery snorting sound—even the horse was painted, blue on one side, bright green on the other, with orange streaks up its flanks.

Jamie goggled at all this, wondering if it could possibly be real or if it was one of the “effects”—hallucinations, as even he understood—that he sometimes got during particularly bad “spells.” After a moment or two—during which the wagon didn’t shimmer or fade around the edges at all—he widened his attention enough to notice the signs: big hand-painted signs hung on either side of a kind of sandwich-board framework that was braced upright in the wagon bed. At the top each sign read MOHAWK CONFEDERACY in bright red paint, and then, underneath that, came a long list of words, each word painted in a different color:

HAND-LOADED AMMUNITION

PAINT

FALSE TEETH

EYEGLASSES—GROUND TO PRESCRIPTION

LAMP OIL

PAINLESS DENTISTRY

UNTAINTED SEED FOR WHEAT, CORN, MELONS

FLAX CLOTH

WINDOW GLASS

MEDICINES & LINIMENT

CONDOMS

IRON FARM TOOLS

UNTAINTED LIVESTOCK

NAILS

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

MARIJUANA

WHISKY

SOAP

PRINTING DONE

ALL MADE IN MOHAWK!

Jamie was puzzling out some of the harder words when the door to the Outriders’ station opened and Mr. Stover came hurriedly down the stairs. “What’re you doing here, Jamie?” he asked. “What’re you hanging around here for?”

Jamie gaped at him, trying to find the words to describe the wonderful new wagon, and how strange it made him feel, but the effort was too great, and the words slipped away. “Going to Mr. Hardy’s store,” he said at last. “Just going to sweep up at Mr. Hardy’s store.”

Mr. Stover glanced nervously back up at the door of the Outriders’ station, fingered his chin for a moment while he made up his mind, and then said, “Never mind that today, Jamie. Never mind about the store today. You just go on back home now.”

“But—” Jamie said, bewildered. “But—I sweep up every day!”

“Not today,” Mr. Stover said sharply. “You go on home, you hear me? Go on, git!”

“Mrs. Hamlin’s going to be awful mad,” Jamie said sadly, resignedly.

“You tell Edna I said for you to go home. And you stay inside, too, Jamie. You stay out of sight, hear? We’ve got an important visitor here in Northview today, and it’d never do to have him run into you.”

Jamie nodded his head in acceptance of this. He wasn’t so dumb that he didn’t know what the unvoiced part of the sentence was: run into you, the half-wit, the crazy person, the nut. He’d heard it often enough. He knew he was crazy. He knew that he was an embarrassment. He knew that he had to stay inside, away from visitors, lest he embarrass Mrs. Hamlin and all his friends.

Crazy Jamie.

Slowly he turned and shuffled away, back the way he had come.

The sun beat down on the back of his head now, and sweat gathered in the wrinkled hollows beneath his eyes.

Crazy Jamie.

At the corner, bathed in the shadow cast by the big oak at the edge of the schoolyard, he turned and looked back.

A group of men had come out of the Outriders’ station and were now walking slowly in the direction of Mr. Hardy’s store, talking as they went. There was Mr. Jameson, Mr. Galli, Mr. Stover, Mr. Ashley, and, in the middle of them, talking animatedly and waving his arms, the visitor, the stranger—a big, florid-faced man with a shock of unruly blond hair that shone like beaten gold in the sunlight.

Watching him, the visitor—now clapping a hand on Mr. Galli’s shoulder, Mr. Galli shrinking away—Jamie felt a chill, that unreasoning and unreasoned fear of strangers, of everything from outside Northview’s narrow boundaries that had affected him ever since he could remember, and suddenly his delight in the wonderful wagon was tarnished, diminished, because he realized that it, too, must come from outside.

He headed for home, walking a little faster now, as if chivied along by some old cold wind that didn’t quite reach the sunlit world.

That night was the Fourthday feast—“Independence Day,” some of the old folks still called it—and for Jamie, who was helping in the kitchen as usual, the early part of the evening was a blur of work as they sweated to prepare the meal: roast turkey, ham, wild pigeon, trout, baked raccoon, sweet potatoes, corn, pearl onions, berry soup, homemade bread, blackberries, plums, and a dozen other things.

That was all as usual; he expected and accepted that. What was not usual—and what he did not expect—was that he would not be allowed to eat with the rest when the feast was served. Instead, Tessie set a plate out for him in the kitchen, saying, not unkindly, “Now, Jamie, mind you stay here. They’ve got a guest out there this year, that loud-mouthed Mr. Brodey, and Mrs. Hamlin, she says you got to eat in the kitchen and keep out of sight. Now don’t you mind, honey. I’ll fix you up a plate real nice, just the same stuff you’d get out there.”

And then, after a few moments of somewhat embarrassed bustling, she was gone.

Jamie sat alone in the empty kitchen.

His plate was filled to overflowing with food, and he’d even been given a glass of dandelion wine, a rare treat, but somehow he wasn’t hungry anymore.

He sat listening to the wind tug at the old house, creaking the rafters, making the wood groan. When the wind died, he could hear them talking out there in the big dining room, the voices just too faint for him to make out the words.

An unfamiliar anger began to rise in him. “Crazy Jamie,” he said aloud, his voice sounding flat and dull to his own ears. It wasn’t fair. He glanced out the window, to where the sun had almost set in a welter of sullen purple clouds. Suddenly he slashed out at the glass of wine, sending it spinning to the floor. It wasn’t fair! He was an adult, wasn’t he? Why did he have to sit back here by himself like a naughty child? Even if—In spite of—He was—

Somehow he found himself on his feet. He deserved to eat with the others, didn’t he? He was as good as anybody else, wasn’t he? In fact—In fact—

The corridor. He seemed to float along it in spite of his stumbling, hesitant feet. The voices got louder, and just at the point where they resolved into words, he stopped, standing unnoticed in the shadows behind the dining room archway, hanging onto the doorjamb, torn between rage and fear and a curious, empty yearning.

“Sooner or later you’ll find that you have to incorporate with the Confederacy,” Mr. Brodey, the stranger, was saying. The other faces around the big dining room table were cool and reserved. “The kind of inter-village barter economy you’ve got up here just can’t hold up forever, you know, even though it’s really a kind of communal socialism—”

“Are you sayin’ we’re communists up heah?” Mr. Samuels said, outraged, but before Brodey could reply (if he intended to), Jamie strode to the table, pulled out an empty chair—his own habitual seat—and sat down. All faces turned to him, startled, and conversation stopped.

Jamie stared back at them. To walk to the table had taken the last of his will; things were closing down on him again, his vision was swimming, and he began to lose touch with his body, as if his mind were floating slowly up and away from it, like a balloon held by the thinnest sort of tether. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and he opened his mouth, panting like a dog. Through a sliding, shifting confusion, he heard Mrs. Hamlin start to say, “Jamie! I thought I told you—” at the same time that Mr. Ashley was saying to Mr. Brodey, “Don’t let him bother you none. He’s just the local half-wit. We’ll send him back to the kitchen,” and Brodey was smiling in tolerant, condescending amusement, and something about Brodey’s thin, contemptuous smile, something about the circle of staring faces, something wrenched words up out of Jamie, sending them suddenly flying out of his mouth. He hurled the familiar words out at the pale staring faces as he had so many times before, rattling their teeth with them, shaking them to their bones. He didn’t know what the words meant anymore, but they were the old strong words, the right words, and he heard his voice fill with iron as he spoke them. He spoke the words until there were no more words to speak, and then he stopped.

A deathly hush had fallen over the room. Mr. Brodey was staring at him, and Jamie saw his face run through a quick gamut of expressions: from irritation to startled speculation to dawning astonishment. Brodey’s jaw went slack, and he gasped—a little startled grunt, as if he had been punched in the stomach—and the color went swiftly out of his face. “My God!” he said. “Oh, my God!”

For Jamie, it was as if the world were draining away again, everything pulling back until he could just barely touch reality with his fingertips, and the room shimmered and buzzed as he struggled to hold on to even that much control. All the faces had gone blank, wiped clean of individuality, and he could no longer tell which of the featureless pink ovoids was the sweating, earnest, astounded face of Mr. Brodey. He got clumsily to his feet, driving his leaden body by an act of conscious will, as though it were some ill-made clockwork golem. He flailed his arms for balance, knocked his chair over with a clatter, and stood swaying before them, smelling the sour reek of his own sweat. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hamlin. I didn’t mean to—”

The silence went on a moment longer, and then, above the mounting waves of buzzing nausea and unreality, he heard Mrs. Hamlin say, “That’s all right, child. We know you didn’t mean any harm. Go on upstairs now, Jamie. Go on.” Her voice sounded dry and flat and tired.

Blindly, Jamie spun and stumbled for the stairs, all the inchoate demons of memory snapping at his heels like years.

Downstairs, Mr. Brodey was still saying, “Oh, my God!” He hardly noticed that the dinner party was being dissolved around him or that Mrs. Hamlin was hustling him out onto the porch “for a word in private.” When she finally had him alone out there, the cool evening breeze slapping at his face through the wire mesh of the enclosed porch, he shook himself out of his daze and turned slowly to face her where she stood hunched and patient in the dappled shadows. “It’s him,” he said, still more awe than accusation in his voice. “Son of a bitch. It really is him, isn’t it?”

“Who, Mr. Brodey?”

“Don’t play games with me,” Brodey said harshly. “I’ve seen the old pictures. The half-wit, he really was—”

“Is.”

“—the President of the United States.” Brodey stared at her. “He may be crazy, but not because he thinks he’s the President—he is the President. James W. McNaughton. He is McNaughton, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“My God! Think of it. The very last President.”

“The incumbent President,” Mrs. Hamlin said softly.

They stared at each other through the soft evening shadows.

“And it’s not a surprise to you, either, is it?” Anger was beginning to replace disbelief in Brodey’s voice. “You’ve known it all along, haven’t you? All of you have known. You all knew from the start that he was President McNaughton?”

“Yes.”

“My God!” Brodey said, giving an entirely new reading to the phrase, disgust and edgy anger instead of awe. He opened his mouth, closed it, and began turning red.

“He came here almost twenty years ago, Mr. Brodey,” Mrs. Hamlin said, speaking calmly, reminiscently. “Perhaps two months after the War. The Outriders found him collapsed in a field out by the edge of town. He was nearly dead. Don’t ask me how he got there. Maybe there was some sort of hidden bunker way back up there in the hills, maybe his plane crashed nearby, maybe he walked all the way up here from what’s left of Washington—I don’t know. Jamie himself doesn’t know. His memory was almost gone; shock, I guess, and exposure. All he remembered, basically, was that he was the President, and even that was dim and misty, like something you might remember out of a bad dream, the kind that fades away and comes back sometimes, late at night. And life’s been like a half-dream for him ever since, poor soul. He never did get quite right in the head again.”

“And you gave him shelter?” Brodey said, his voice becoming shrill with indignation. “You took him in? That butcher?”

“Watch your mouth, son. You’re speaking about the President.”

“Goddamn it, woman. Don’t you know—he caused the War?”

After a smothering moment of silence, Mrs. Hamlin said mildly, “That’s your opinion, Mr. Brodey, not mine.”

“How can you deny it? The ‘One Life’ Ultimatum? The ‘preventative strikes’ on Mexico and Panama? It was within hours of the raid on Monterrey that the bombs started falling.”

“He didn’t have any other choice! The Indonesians had pushed him—”

“That’s crap, and you know it!” Brodey was shouting now. “They taught us all about it down in Mohawk; they made damn sure we knew the name of the man who destroyed the world, you can bet on that! Christ, everybody knew then that he was unfit for office, just a bombastic backwoods senator on a hate crusade, a cracker-barrel warmonger. Everybody said that he’d cause the War if he got into the White House—and he did! By God, he did! That pathetic half-wit in there. He did it!”

Mrs. Hamlin sighed and folded her arms across her middle, hugging herself as if in pain. She seemed to grow smaller and older, more withered and gnarled. “I don’t know, son,” she said wearily, after a heavy pause. “Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong. Maybe he was wrong. I don’t know. All that seemed so important then. Now I can hardly remember what the issues were, what it was all about. It doesn’t seem to matter much anymore, somehow.”

“How can you say that?” Brodey wiped at his face—he was sweating profusely and looking very earnest now, bewilderment leaching away some of the anger. “How can you let that . . . that man . . . him—how can you let him live here, under your roof? How can you stand to let him live at all, let alone cook for him, do his washing. My God!”

“His memory was gone, Mr. Brodey. His mind was gone. Can you understand that? Old Doc Norton, rest his soul, spent months just trying to get Jamie to the point where he could walk around by himself without anybody to watch him too close. He had to be taught how to feed himself, how to dress himself, how to go to the bathroom—like a child. At first there was some even right here in Northview that felt the way you do, Mr. Brodey, and there’s still some as can’t be comfortable around Jamie, but one by one they came to understand, and they made their peace with him. Whatever he was or wasn’t, he’s just like a little child now—a sick, old, frightened child who doesn’t really understand what’s happening to him, most of the time. Mr. Brodey, you can’t hate a little child for something he can’t even remember he’s done.”

Brodey spun around, as though to stalk back into the house, and then spun violently back. “He should be dead!” Brodey shouted. His fists were clenched now, and the muscles in his neck were corded. “At the very least, he should be dead! Billions of lives on that man’s hands! Billions. And you, you people, you not only let him live, you make excuses for him! For him!” He stopped, groping for words to express the enormity of his outrage. “It’s like . . . like making excuses for the Devil himself.”

Mrs. Hamlin stirred and came forward, stepping out of the porch shadows and into the moonlight, drawing her shawl more tightly around her, as though against a chill, although the night was still mild. She stared eye to eye with Brodey for several moments, while the country silence gathered deeply around them, broken only by crickets and the hoarse sound of Brodey’s impassioned breathing. Then she said, “I thought I owed it to you, Mr. Brodey, to try to explain a few things. But I don’t know if I can. Things have changed enough by now, steadied down enough, that maybe you younger people find it hard to understand, but those of us who lived through the War, we all had to do things we didn’t want to do. Right there where you’re standing, Mr. Brodey, right here on this porch, I shot a marauder down, shot him dead with my husband’s old pistol, with Mr. Hamlin himself laying stiff in the parlor not ten feet away, taken by the Lumpy Plague. And I’ve done worse things than that, too, in my time. I reckon we all have, all the survivors. And just maybe it’s no different with that poor old man sitting in there.”

Brodey regained control of himself. His jaw was clenched, and the muscles around his mouth stood out in taut little bands, but his breathing had evened, and his face was tight and cold. He had banked his anger down into a smoldering, manageable flame, and now for the first time he seemed dangerous. Ignoring—or seeming to ignore—Mrs. Hamlin’s speech, he said conversationally, “Do you know that we curse by him down in Mohawk? His name is a curse to us. Can you understand that? We burn him in effigy on his birthday, in the town squares, and over the years it’s become quite a little ceremony. He must atone, Mrs. Hamlin. He must be made to pay for what he’s done. We don’t suffer monsters to live, down in Mohawk.”

“Ayuh,” Mrs. Hamlin said sourly, “you do a lot of damnfool, jackass things down there, don’t you?” Mrs. Hamlin tossed her head back, silver hair glinting in the silver light, and seemed to grow taller again. There was a hard light in her eyes now, and a hard new edge in her voice. “Atone, is it now, you jackass? As if you’re some big pious kind of churchman, some damn kind of saint, you red-faced, loudmouthed man. You with your damnfool flag and damnfool Mohawk Confederacy. Well, let me tell you, mister, this isn’t any Mohawk Confederacy here, never has been, never will be: this is Northview, sovereign state of Vermont, United States of America. Do you hear me, mister? This here is the United States of America, and that poor fool in there—why, he’s the President of the United States of America, even if sometimes he can’t cut his meat up proper. Maybe he was a fool, maybe he was wrong long ago, maybe he’s crazy now, but he’s still the President.” Eyes snapping, she jabbed a finger, at Brodey. “As long as this town stands, then there’s still an America, and that old man will be President as long as there are still Americans alive to serve him. We take care of our own, Mr. Brodey; we take care of our own.”

A shadow materialized at Brodey’s elbow and spoke with Seth’s voice. “Edna?”

Brodey turned his head to glance at Seth. When he turned back to face Mrs. Hamlin, there was a gun in her hand, a big, old-fashioned revolver that looked too huge for the small, blue-veined hand that held it.

“You can’t be serious,” Brodey whispered.

“You need any help, Edna?” the shadow said. “I brought some of the boys.”

“No, thank you, Seth.” The barrel of the revolver was as unwavering as her gaze. “There’s some things a person’s got to do for herself.”

Then she cocked the hammer back.

The President of the United States didn’t notice the shot. Alone in the small upstairs bathroom, he avoided the eyes of the tarnished reflection in the mirror, and compulsively washed his hands.

Strangers

Introduction to Strangers

The 1970s were, among many other things, the decade of the great original-fiction anthologies in science fiction. Following upon the superb example of Frederik Pohl’s 1950s-era Star Science Fiction, Damon Knight launched Orbit, Terry Carr started Universe, and I, between 1969 and 1979, edited ten issues of New Dimensions. Much of the most significant short fiction of the decade appeared in those three publications. This could most quickly be shown by the disproportionate number of Hugo and Nebula winners that came from their pages, but also by the number of major careers that were established in them—those of Gene Wolfe, R.A. Lafferty, Richard M. McKenna, and George Alec Effinger, for example. And that of Gardner Dozois.

I had been editing New Dimensions just a couple of months when a manuscript bearing that byline showed up in the summer of 1969. The accompanying letter explained that its author was 22 years old, had sold a story to Fred Pohl’s magazine If in 1966 and four more—three of them to Damon Knight’s Orbit—after a three-year hiatus. “I’m working out of a cramped garret apartment (yes, a garret; the cliches I live never fail to amaze me),” he told me, in a pre-World War II house in a suburb of Nuremberg, Germany, where he had been working for an Army newspaper.

The story didn’t work for me. My notes say things like “Nice writing, but—story too static. The situation is static but that doesn’t mean story has to be . . . Also story insufficiently visionary. Could take place in 1970 . . . What’s new here? What’s going for the story other than its excellent writing? What does it have to offer as sf?”

So I sent it back. A couple of months later Dozois returned to the United States; I met him at a convention in Philadelphia that November—a skinny kid, long straight hair, hippie clothing—and we exchanged a couple of pleasant words. And a few weeks after that he sent me a manuscript, badly typed on cheap paper, that absolutely astounded me. This is what I told him on December 30, 1969: “You may be the lousiest speller this side of the Rockies. But you are one hell of a writer, and you have a sale, man. An exciting hour for me—reading your story tensely, wondering if you were going to sustain the promise of the first few pages or let it all go driveling away into slush, as so many of the other new writers who’ve been sending me stuff have done . . . But no. The thing held up, it grew from page to page in inventiveness, the style remained vivid and supple—go have a swelled head for an evening. You’ve earned it. Now I know what editors talk about when they speak of the thrill of having something come in from an unknown that turns them on. But your spelling sure is awful.”

That story—“A Special Kind of Morning”—became the lead story in the first issue of New Dimensions, and it was the lead again, years later, in my anthology The Best of New Dimensions. Of it I said, in the latter book, “All by itself, it made having edited New Dimensions worthwhile.” You’ll find the story in an earlier collection, The Visible Man.

I happily bought another from him, “King Harvest,” for New Dimensions Two, and another, “The Last Day of July,” for issue number three. And then he told me, in the autumn of 1972, that he was working on a new and extremely ambitious one for me. He warned me, sounding a little worried about it, that it was likely to be pretty lengthy. Go ahead and send it when you’ve finished it, I said. Theoretically I wasn’t buying anything longer than about 15,000 words for New Dimensions, but on the strength of “A Special Kind of Morning” I was willing to stretch that limitation a little for Gardner. He let me see the opening section. It was haunting, powerful stuff, a rich evocation of an alien world. Very nice, I replied. Keep going. Then, soon after Christmas he wrote that he now had 50 pages written and was nowhere near completion. Fifty pages, in the typeface he was using then, was well over 15,000 words. Once again Gardner offered to show me the incomplete story, but I, now expecting something running in the 20-25,000-word range, told him to go right on to the end. “The chances that I’ll reject it are very very slim, based on the chunk I’ve already seen, so don’t bother sending me the incomplete portion.”

Silly me. When the complete manuscript reached me at the end of March, 1973, it was immense—three times as long as the longest story I had bought thus far. Gardner had no idea himself how long it was—anywhere from 35,000 to 50,000 words. I reckoned it as 40,000: virtually a book-length novel.

If I bought it, it would crowd everything else in New Dimensions Four into one corner. But if I didn’t buy it, I’d be passing up a superb story, complex and moving, one of the finest on the theme of interstellar miscegenation since Philip Jose Farmer’s pioneering “The Lovers” twenty years earlier. I bought it, of course. And I was lucky enough to find half a dozen fine stories of 5000 words or less to pepper my contents page with so that I could make the issue look like a real anthology instead of a showcase for a single extraordinary novella. It is, I think, one of the half dozen most memorable stories I published in my ten years with New Dimensions. (Dozois’ “Special Kind of Morning” makes that list too.) Eventually I stopped editing and went back to being just a writer, and Gardner started editing and pretty much gave up writing, doing just occasional and often collaborative stories. As the editor who had found it so exciting to publish Gardner Dozois’ work when he was a brilliant young beginner, and who has continued to find pleasure in it to this day, I feel some regret that this splendid writer has chosen to give us so sparse an output in recent times. On the other hand, the science-fiction world has plenty of splendid writers today, whereas gifted editors are in very short supply, and Gardner (as a long shelf of Hugos testifies) has become the great sf editor of the modern era, a fitting successor to such editorial giants as John Campbell, Anthony Boucher, and Horace Gold. He’s come a long way from his days of bleak poverty in that Nuremberg garret, and it pleases me greatly to have been on hand when his magnificent career was just beginning to unfold.

Robert Silverberg

Strangers

Joseph Farber met Liraun Jé Genawen for the first time during the ceremony of the Alàntene, the Mode of the Winter Solstice, the Opening-of-the-Gates-of-Dûn, that was observed annually in the ancient city of Aei, on the North Shore of Shasine, on the world of Lisle. “Lisle” was the Terran name, of course, after Senator Lisle Harris, the first human to visit the planet, and had come into common usage among the expatriate Terran Population of Aei because the Earthmen professed great difficulty in pronouncing the native Weinunnach, “Fertile Home.”

This was about two decades after the Expansion, when a team of Silver Enye had opened Earth up for trade by “inducing” her to join the Commercial Alliance, as cynically, and with as little concern for the inevitable impact on native culture, as Perry had opened Japan.

As a matter of fact, the impact of this on Earth—whose technology had not yet freed man of the solar system when the Enye arrived, whose cities were scarred and half-ruined by a series of major and nearly terminal wars, whose biosphere was scummed and strangled by pollution—was immense. Governments toppled, amalgamations were formed, and the Terran Co-operative was hastily created to go out and get a nice juicy piece of the pie in the sky for impoverished Earth. Earthmen went forth to the stars, first as paying passengers on alien ships, then, later, in human-crewed ships purchased at staggering cost from other worlds. In spite of everything, they took quite a load of arrogance along with them. And as they traveled from world to world, farther and farther from Earth, that arrogance slowly died; some of it was drained away at every planetfall, like an intense electrical charge being grounded, and with it—oh, so gradually and grudgingly!—went the expansionist dreams of Empire, went even the more modest hope of financial dominance, fading from them as it had faded in turn from every star-faring race. Space was too big. Everything was too complex, the distances were too vast, the travel times too great, the communications halting at best. Even the Commercial Alliance was the loosest of organizations; some of its members had not had contact for hundreds of years. Establishing dominance—or even too much continuity—across that gaping infinity of night was something that seemed possible only from the provincially narrow viewpoint imposed by looking up from the bottom of a gravity well. The vastness swallowed everything; it was too much for any corporeal creature.

Joseph Farber’s personal state of mind, on the eve of Alàntene, reflected the racial experience. He had left Earth, two years ago by his own subjective clock, as a cocksure and confidently ambitious man. Now, as he walked the broad ceramic streets of Aei New City, he was sad, apprehensive and bewildered. Two years of contact with creatures who were not necessarily superior but who were alien—inherently different, inherently strange—alien—had stripped him of much of his original assurance, and given him no real knowledge or wisdom to replace it. He had been on “Lisle” for about three weeks, and had only been outside the Enclave—the exclusive Terran district, or ghetto, however you wanted to look at it—on rare occasions. Tonight boredom and despondency had combined finally to shake him loose; he’d gone along with a group of expatriates who were walking down to the Alàntene, partially because Brody had assured him that “the Cian always put on a good show,” and partially because he was afraid of getting hopelessly lost without guides.

It was a wet, chilly night, just this side of actual rain. Grey mists, up from the river, wound slowly through the high-walled streets, like sluggish snakes, or drifted in glistening, billowing curtains across the wide porcelain squares. The wet air carried the smell of spices, pollen, incense, musk. Sharp, sour, sweet, heavy and rank—the odors slid across the moist night like oil over water, most unidentifiable, all evocative. Occasionally the wind would rise, scooping the mists and cloud-scuts aside like an invisible hand, revealing the million icy stars of Aei’s night sky, dense and blazing against velvet black. None of the moons had yet risen, and the constellation of Winter Man was just thrusting its frosty, nebula-maned head up over the close northern horizon. Old City loomed there, to the north, on top of its three-hundred-foot-tall sheer obsidian cliff, silhouetted against the blaze of Winter Man’s upper body, with His head rearing terribly above its tallest towers. Its lights shone silver and yellow and deep, secret orange, glinting coldly from that cold stone place in the air. To Farber, it was as if Old City was watching him; not necessarily with disapproval, or even with interest, but just watching, staring down inscrutably, as if to drive home again the fact that this was not Earth.

New City was friendlier, with its rounded ceramic homes, its tiles and mosaics, its glazed earthenware and pottery walls. Its lights were soft pastels, blinking and diffusing wetly through the languid mists. But still, the underlying ambiance was unsettling, and strange. They had been walking through New City—a small, nervously giddy group of humans, too loud in the alien hush—for an hour that had seemed like a year, and they had seen no one, no natives, no living thing at all. Farber was just beginning to wonder if the streets were always so empty, echoing and still, and if so, how anyone could ever stand to go abroad in them, when they sighted a group of Cian ahead, walking in the same direction they were. And at the same moment, they heard the first faint and distant mutter of the Alàntene. They were near the eastern outskirts of New City now, and the streets began to slant rapidly down toward the River Aome. The natives ahead slowed down—they had fetched up against another group of Cian, and in front of that group was another, and another, and Farber saw why New City was deserted. The whole population of Aei was on the move, down to the banks of the River Aome for the Alàntene, and the Earthmen had just caught up with the tail of the immense crowd.

Ahead, as far as the eye could reach, the streets were packed solid with shuffling ranks of Cian. Most were walking, carrying children on their shoulders, holding baskets of fruit, or strangely shaped garlands of flowers, or various implements of polished wood and metal and obsidian whose function the Earthmen were unable to divine. There were numerous other objects, half-seen, that defied definition altogether. Some of the Cian were riding in six-wheeled carts pulled by huge, brindled animals that looked something like enormous boar hogs; their reins were hung with star-shaped black flowers, and with tiny crystal chimes, so that when the boars tossed their heads, the air was filled with tinkling melancholy music, and their spiral tusks flashed white in starlight. A few Cian—and Farber blinked, startled—were riding bareback on big, sinuous things like many-legged snakes, or reptilian centipedes. The crowds seemed to make the things skittish; occasionally they would moo, long and mournfully, and, looking around at the assemblage, blink their sad, intelligent eyes. The Cian themselves—short, slender humanoids, uncannily graceful of movement—were dressed mostly in dark colors, but in rich and fantastical costumes, of the finest fabric and workmanship. Jewelry of silver and amber and obsidian glinted here and there throughout the crowd, and the entire slow-moving procession had about it a curious mood of somber celebration.

It took about another half-hour for the bulk of the remaining crowd to filter down into the place of ceremony. In that time, the sound of the Alàntene grew from a murmur, a whisper, to a vast rhythmical sea-surge that filled the night, that filled the blood, and brain, and bowels, until Farber found that he was breathing in time to the huge slow booming of the drums and the deep-throated susurrus of the chant, and he suspected that his heart was also beating in rhythm. Janet LaCorte said it gave her a headache. Sometimes the wind would bring them a snatch of faster music—crystalline, ringing and staccato—that was being played as counterpoint to the giant beating of the World-Heart. There was no other sound, except the whisper and scuff of a million feet over tile, the creak of wagon wheels, and the occasional plaintive lowing of the snake-things. The Cian around them did not speak at all. Brody was off on something—like many of the Earthmen, he was of the opinion that the Modes, the native ceremonies, were more enjoyable if you went to them stoned—and he was giggling constantly now, his eyes rolling from one object to another, never quite focusing on anything. Farber had been quarreling bitterly with Kathy Gibbs for the last fifteen minutes over some trivial matter, their voices growing ever louder and more heated, and as they reached the bottom of the slope, Farber, stung by some final gibe of Kathy’s, broke away and whirled fiercely to face her.

“You fucking bitch,” he said. He had gone pale, and he looked as if he was going to hit her.

Kathy laughed in his face. She was flushed and bright-eyed from the argument, but she seemed in no way perturbed by his rage. “You’re no fun at all tonight, are you?” she said. Some of her hair had become plastered to her forehead with sweat, and Farber could see her breasts clearly through the semitransparent blouse; her nipples were hard against the fabric. A sudden rush of desire mixed with his anger, confusing him. His mouth worked on words, but she laughed at him again, and they died in his throat. She had read him well enough. “See you later, sweetheart,” she said, brushing the hair out of her eyes, giving him a knowing, cutting smile. “Here, about midnight. All right?” He said nothing. She looked at him with hard, taunting eyes, smiled again, and walked quickly away, mingling with the crowd. She vanished from sight within seconds. Farber stared after her, his fists balled impotently, his jaw tight.

Brody giggled. He had listened openly to the whole exchange, without embarrassment, apparently getting a kick out of it. He slapped Farber on the shoulder. “Fuck her,” he said, in a voice that was a dreamy parody of hearty man-to-man comradery. “Fuck ‘em all, I always say. There’re millions of cunts in the world. Always another one along in a minute.”

“Why don’t you mind your own goddam business?” Farber snapped.

“Fuck you too, Jack,” Brody said pleasantly, without any hint of rancor. He was almost jovial about it. He giggled abruptly, seeming to startle himself, as if it had popped out before he was ready for it. He squinted at Farber. “You’ll find out,” he said, with listless, languid wisdom. Then he said, “Oh my!” plaintively, and tracked to follow something moving down on the beach. And he smiled and smiled.

The other Earthmen had been hanging back while the fight went on; now they came up, and Fred Lloyd gave Brody a shove to get him walking in the right direction again. Ed Lacey and two friends went by, sniffing narcotic atomizers, followed by Janet LaCorte, who gave Farber a disapproving look as she passed; she was Kathy’s friend. Lloyd was wearing a complex expression of condescending boredom that—it occurred to Farber—must have taken him years of diligent practice to perfect. “You coming?” Lloyd asked. Farber shook his head. Lloyd shrugged, and the Earthmen went on. Farber was glad to see them go. Soured by the futility of the Terran enterprise, they were all self-consciously cynical and bitter, and liked to think that they were projecting an air of fin de siècle decadence. Actually, they were boring.

Farber plunged into the thick of the crowd and started worming his way through the dense mass of bodies. He was filled with disgust and self-contempt. Kathy had only been his lover for a little over two weeks, and already she was so sure of him that she could laugh at him and walk away into a festival crowd, sure that he would be waiting for her when she chose to come back to him. And he would be. Once he’d swallowed that, his anger died to a dull resignation. Lightyears from his home and his people, he had to hang on to something—and she was it. Sullenly, he kept walking. He had run out of road. He was on sand now, and it shifted and whispered under his feet. A row of sand dunes rose up in front of him, interlaced and overgrown with tough sea-grass and ironwood shrub.

He came up over a dune, and saw the Alàntene spread out below him. He paused, swaying, a little drunk, alone in the alien night. He was a big, slow-moving man, bullet-headed and bull-necked, with dark eyes and a shaggy mane of blond hair. He had a blunt, big-boned face, dominated by thick flat cheeks and a massive, stubborn jaw—square, jutting and truculent. It was an arrogant face, touched permanently now by a shadow of wistful puzzlement. His eyes were incongruously lost and vulnerable, set against those rough-hewn, brutal features—as if there was a frightened child inside, peering out, running the massive body by manipulating pedals and levers. The long, bone-deep soughing of the chant came up and hit him in the face, and the patient elemental thunder of the drums shook the dune under his feet, sending little rivulets of sand whispering down toward the beach. Listening now, as his anger died, he was submerged again by that endless sea-sound, drowned, dissolved, whirled away like a grain of sand in the tide, to be rolled across the secret places of the ocean bottom and then washed back to the shore after a decade or a thousand years. Calmly, he began to descend the dune, digging his heels in. He felt that if he should fall, or jump, the huge noise of the Alàntene would puff up to meet him, bearing him up, and he could ride the sound as a gull rides the currents of the air—

Here the River Aome, rolling out of the west, met the sea, Elder Sea, the Great Northern Ocean, the World-Ocean. The Aome was a roaring grey turbulence to the right, a streak of lighter darkness rolling through a dead black night, more sensed and heard than seen. To the left, and at right angles to Farber’s path, the dunes stretched away in an unbroken line to the north; they, and their fringe of beach, extended for more than three hundred miles, ruler-straight: the North Shore of Shasine. South, beyond the Aome and invisible now, were endless leagues of saltwater marsh. Ahead, straight east, the night opened up into a feeling of echoing, infinite space. Ocean was there, behind the mists—the smell of its salt was in the wet wind that slapped Farber’s face, the hissing of its swells and surges could be heard under the derivative sound of the chant, and—beyond the ceremony—its waves gleamed in torchlight as they foamed against the beach.

Farber passed the L-shaped bulk of Ocean House/River House, and made his way down as close as he could to the water. The Cian were packed in shoulder to shoulder here, by the thousands. Smoky red torchlight glinted from teeth and eyes—the large-pupiled, large-irised eyes and needle-pointed canines of nocturnal predators. They were all swaying side to side in a slow, ponderous rhythm, and doing a kind of shuffling dance step—one step forward, a step back, a step to the side, a step forward again, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp. None of this seemed deliberate; the motion was an unconscious, instinctive response to the music, almost a tropism. The Cian were preoccupied with the ceremony, all their attention focused outward, and perhaps they were not even aware that their bodies were swaying and stamping in the wet smoky dark. After a while, Farber discovered that he was doing it too—without volition and in perfect time, as if he had been practicing all his life. At first Farber found that frightening, then oddly exultant, and then both emotions died, and there was nothing but the chant, the steady mesmerizing motion of the crowd, the enveloping heat of a hundred thousand close-packed bodies, the pungent stink of alien sweat.

Beyond the crowd was the ceremony, the Alàntene itself. The musicians, playing drums, flutes, and tinkling stringed instruments like dulcimers and mandolins, sat crosslegged in a huge semicircle just beyond the first row of spectators, facing the Ocean. Their hands pounded and strummed and plucked with unvarying, unwavering, inhuman precision, as if they were all motley close-robed robots, and they rocked back and forth rapidly in time to their own music. To Farber’s extreme left, massed in between the musicians and the sea, were the chanters, the singers—more than a hundred brightly clothed Gan, all male, all old: snow-white hair, gleaming silver eyes, their faces intricately meshed with lines and wrinkles, expressionless as rock. They were doing a more complex, studied version of the crowd’s step-and-sway, some of them also making ritualized gestures and sweeps with their hands and arms, others periodically tossing handfuls of powder into the torches so that they flared up silver and amber-green and scarlet. Some of them were standing up to their waists in the water, as the tide rose; they continued to chant, unperturbed. On the far right, almost out of sight, another group of old men were involved in what seemed to be a kind of highly stylized dramatic performance, reminiscent of a Terran Noh play—their voices, speaking instead of chanting or singing, cut flatly across the rest of the ceremony from time to time.

But the center of the ceremony, the heart of the Alàntene, were the dancers. They took up most of the torchlit stretch of beach, dancing next to the edge of Elder Sea on wet, hard-packed sand. There were perhaps two or three hundred dancers, of all ages, men, women and children. Some of them were naked, and the flaring torches played strange light-and-shadow games with their gleaming skin and the flashing motion of their limbs. Others were dressed in fantastic costumes, towering, nodding plumes, brilliant jewels and feathers, grotesque swollen-headed masks. Gods and demons danced on the beach, and their reflections danced with them across the glossy sand. Platforms had been built out into the ocean, only an inch above the surface, and the glittering creatures danced there too, half-awash, sometimes leaping into the air to tumble and jackknife down into the water. They sported and plunged there like solemnly drunken porpoises, as at home in the sea as on the land. The dancers were sure-footed, lithe, incredibly agile. They spun, pranced, stood vibrantly motionless for a long moment, twisted, somersaulted, leaped high into the air. They had been going on like this for hours, since sunset, and they would continue without pause until sunrise. Farber watched them for a long time. Only afterward, away from the beach, would he be able to estimate that at least three hours must have passed. Now, there was no time, no duration. Occasionally the crowd of onlookers around him would sigh or moan all at once, a vast articulate Ahhh going up to the coldly watching stars, sinking back under the chant, then welling irresistibly up again. Ahhh. As with their swaying motion, it was not a deliberate thing, a planned response as in a Terran religious ceremony. Rather it was a reaction, a muted, reluctant sound of awe, pulled from them—almost against their will—by the power of the Alàntene. Farber did it too, his lips opening as though yanked by fishhooks the sound coming jagged and low from his throat, Ahhh, Ahhh. And as he watched then, it seemed as if everything was knitted together—the motion of the dancers, the singing, the snapping flame-banners of the torches, the ecstatically pained crying of the instruments, the reflections in wet sand, the heat and sweat of the bodies around him—and the universe was crimped, a corner of the World folded over, and earth and sky and water became one, indistinguishable.

And Farber pulled away, frightened. He pushed his way up from the beach, shoving and scrambling, until the sound of the ceremony was less overwhelming and some of his panic died. He had taken it too far, come too close to something alien, too near to intuitively grasping a thing he was not equipped to understand. He was shaken, dizzy with incense and torchlight and strangeness, and his legs were like jelly under him. Slowly, he staggered up the beach toward Ocean House. The Alàntene had spoken to something wild and sad and desperate in his blood, conjured up longings that he could neither name nor satisfy. There was a ghost-horde of chaotic, unidentifiable emotion in his skull now, peripheral, mocking, insistent. Their voices had faded somewhat by the time he reached the portico of Ocean House, but he was still dazed and unsteady, and more helplessly bewildered than ever. A group of Earthmen were standing out in front of the building, holding native drinks and atomizers, watching the ceremony down on the beach with amused tolerance, as if it was a fireworks display. Farber avoided them, and went inside.

It was an enormous, L-shaped building, situated just to the north of the Aome’s juncture with Elder Sea. The side that faced south, overlooking the Aome, was called River House; the side that faced east, to the sea, was Ocean House. Both faces were glassed in floor to ceiling, so that they were actually two huge windows, divided horizontally by the building’s second story. It was purely a secular establishment, and had no real connection with the Alàntene, or with any of the Cian Modes, although it had been built—by the Cian—because of them. Here you could come in out of the weather—and there were Modes that were carried out in the middle of blizzards, or in the broiling, near-fatal heat of high summer—and watch the ceremonies through glass for a while; here you could relax on loungers and hammocks and refresh yourself with the variety of essences, liqueurs and foods that were on sale. The Modes had been around for a very long time, and the Cian were well aware of their entertainment value, and the possibilities for commercial profit that were created thereby. And had been so aware for hundreds of years, long before the first outworlder had arrived. It was not a matter of the Modes being exploited by crass aliens; the Cian exploited them themselves, cheerfully, and no one seemed to be upset by it. And yet there was a depth of solemn belief, a feeling of pure religiosity to the Modes that had died out of Terra generations ago. It was a point of contention among the Earthmen: whether the Modes were religion, or were considered by the urban Cian to be merely a body of quaint and charming tradition.

Your opinion on this, Farber now believed, would be determined by where you stood during the Mode. Here in Ocean House, surrounded by Cian who were relaxing and watching the show through the huge window-walls, or chatting with their friends, or strolling on the portico, or devouring essences and batter-fried blackfish, as easy and sophisticated as any crowd of city people anywhere, one would certainly opt for tradition. Down on the beach packed in with the indefatigable mass of swaying, stamping groaning devotees, you would come to quite a different conclusion. But there were not two separate groups of Cian; they mingled indiscriminately—often the chefs and concessionaries of Ocean House/River House would come down to take part in the Mode after their work shift, and some of the sweating, earnest spectators would eventually drift up to the big building for rest and essences. It was a dichotomy that no Earthman understood, and now Farber intuited dimly that it was only the tip of an iceberg.

He purchased a fuge—a gelatin concoction something like a cross between chocolate pudding and raw jellyfish—from a concessionaire, and strolled slowly through the corridors of Ocean House. Most of his terror had passed, leaving him sad and contemplative. He made his way up to the second story, which had a better overview of the beach. The lighting here was dim and diffuse, and Farber felt as if he was walking in a glass tunnel under the sea. He drifted over to the window-wall. The Alàntene glittered far below, the tiny figures swaying and whirling, a masque performed by animate, passionate dolls. Its flaring light struck odd reticulations from the vaulted ceiling of Ocean House, sent hunched shadows capering wildly across the stone floor. After a while, Farber became aware that someone was there with him, watching the fire and the night. The other had been there all along, hidden in the gloom at the bottom of a pillar, silent as a shadow, with only its presence to grow patient and gradual in Farber’s mind, until at last he must turn his head to look, not knowing why he did. He squinted. It was a woman. She felt his gaze and turned away from the window. The Alàntene washed half her face with fire-shot light, left the other half in shadow. One eye glinted clear silver, the other was a pale ember in darkness. She looked at him.

“Hello,” she said. “I, do not speik, this, well.” Her voice was low. Her English—a tongue that this group of Earthmen had the audacity to represent to the Cian as the Terran language—was halting and heavily accented.

“We, it is of no circumstance,” Farber answered, in her own language, which he had learned by subcerebral techniques. It seemed a curiously evasive tongue to him, its simple grammar and syntax masking a million quicksilver shifts in meaning that he could never quite grasp. He wondered if he had impressed the woman with his cosmopolitanism. She did not speak again, and at last he said, “Hello,” belatedly, to break the inscrutable silence. He felt inane.

She nodded to him with somber formality. Then she smiled, quick and startling. “Do you”—she gestured with her head at the beach—“enjoy the Mode?”

“Yes, I do,” he answered. Then honesty made him add: “Although I don’t understand it.”

“Ah—” she said, wisely, squinting a little. “There are many things about the Modes that are not easy to understand, even for us perhaps, në? But still we must cope, as best we can.” Her tone was both mocking and melancholy—she was laughing at him, surely, but at the same time he sensed that she was pleading almost desperately for his company, for his regard. She seemed lonely, and yet ineffably remote. She spoke with economy, almost brusque, and yet her manner was relaxed and easy. Her smile was intense and abrupt, flash, striking like a chisel, gone—and yet, somehow, wistful. Her eyes turned to him again and again. He could see the liquid flash of them as they moved, to him, away, back. She fascinated him—almost in the old sense of fascinare, to bewitch, striking him motionless as a charmed bird. She was wild and sad, and she looked at him sidelong through the complex, shifting light-and-shadow cast by a thing that was older than either of their civilizations.

Her name, he learned, was Liraun Jé Genawen. She was taller than the Cian average, which brought the top of her head up to Farber’s breastbone. She was resting against the window ledge, one long leg tucked up on the stone and under her, sitting easy and supple on her own calf. She seemed even more slender than the majority of her slender race, sleek and lithe—even in the minuscule movements of her head and neck as she sat otherwise motionless on the ledge there was apparent the sureness and total muscular control that marked the dancers on the beach. Her face was sharp-edged, angular, her nose straight and heavy, her lips long and full, her eyebrows like startled black brushstrokes. Her eyes were enormous, fierce and staring as an owl’s or a hawk’s. Her skin held something of the rich, breathing tone of mahogany, though muted and with more brown in it. Her hair, black, was long, thick-textured and glossy, and fell heavily about her shoulders. She was dressed in silver and black, and she wore a tight necklace of amber and obsidian. Looking at her, Farber realized for the first time—although he had known it intellectually all along—that Cian translated as “The People.”

They talked for a while. She tried to explain some of the ceremony to him. “It is also called the Opening-of-the-Gates-of-Dûn,” she said. “Dûn is the otherworld, the Other Place, and it lies out there, deep below Elder Sea. The bones of the Ancestors rest there, naked, on the floor of Ocean, the Place of the Affliction—but it is not just that, not just the bottom of the water, në? It is a world in its own right, the place where some of the dead go, but more than that—there are demons, and People of Power, and opein, and they live there in Dûn.” She shrugged, and smiled her somber smile. “Alàntene marks the end of the Summer World, the heat, the growing things, the reign of the Warm People who govern in that season. It is the end of the year—after Alàntene is the Winter, the snow, the ice, the withering of life, the reign of the Cold People at the start of a new year. The Gates of Dûn open then, under Elder Sea. Then the ghosts of those who died in the old year, and who are to go into Dûn, they rise up then on the wind and go into Dûn, for the Gates are open and the otherworld is touching this Earth. And also, those demons and opein who wish to come into the world of men, they come in then. And the Cold People come up through the Gates, and the Fertile Earth dies and turns to frozen ash, for the House of Dûn holds influence during this season. And so, the Alàntene.”

“That’s—not quite what I expected,” Farber said, a little dismayed. “In fact, it’s kind of frightening. Why in—” he had been about to say hell, realized that the only possible equivalent would be Dûn, “—the world do you have a festival, a holiday, for such a thing? A ceremony I could see, maybe, but a celebration?”

She shrugged again. “For all the cold and death to come, at least the old year is gone, drowned, taking all its old problems and sorrows with it. An old year gone, a new year born—however malign. That is something to celebrate perhaps, në?” She looked intently at Farber. “And time does not exist, during Alàntene. It is the pause between the fading of one rhythm and the beginning of another, the motionless unmoved center, the still place wherein the syncopations of the World wind up and wind down. Uncreated and eternal. So we are told. Në, would you like that? It means that we two have always been here together, talking on Alàntene, and always will be here. No matter where else we have been on Alàntene in other years—we are there too, always, yes, but are here too, always. Yes! Do you find that pleasant?” And she laughed, her face somber and set, her eyes unfathomable.

It was impossible for Farber to determine how much of this she took seriously; every time he thought that he had pinned down her mood it would shift dramatically, or seem to, and the words she was speaking, and had spoken, would be open to a new interpretation. It was also impossible for her to tell him more than the barest surface of the Mode, and not all of that. Time and again she would lose him in trails of allegory and language and symbolism that he could not follow, and she would have to shrug and smile and say that he did not know enough to know. They fell silent for a while, until finally she said, speaking to her reflection in the window: “The opein come into the world at Alàntene. They are spirits who possess men and drive them to evil deeds. Or they take the shape of men themselves, and walk abroad in the World in flesh, or what seems to be flesh. You could be an opein,” she said, after a heavy pause. Then she broke into sudden silver laughter. “And so could I!”

Silence again. She watched her reflection in the window, and did not look at him any more. He could see the tiny, rhythmical jerking of her belly as she breathed, the pulse in the hollow of her throat, the way her hair was sticking lightly to her skin at the temple, the cheek, the side of the neck. It was hot here, perhaps, but not that hot. She turned farther away from him then, as if to look at something way out on the beach. With her head averted and bowed, the buttons of her spine stood out taut against the material of her costume, and he could see her shoulder blades work slightly under her tight skin. She did not turn back, or speak. He had moved much closer, without volition—almost touching, but not quite. His blood had been speaking to him for some time, clearer than her words, and now it was the only sound that he could hear. He was intensely aware of her heat and her smell. He lifted his hand, slowly stretched it out—some distanced part of him thinking in horror: You don’t even know if she’s got a husband or a lover, or what their miscegenation laws are, prison, murder, castration—and closed it over her shoulder, feeling the flat muscle of her back under his palm, fingers brushing her neck, digging into the hollow of her collarbone. She stiffened—while he thought, That’s it! in tranced dispassionate despair—and then she slowly relaxed, muscle by muscle, and settled her long warm weight back against his chest, her head coming to rest against his cheek with a muffled bump, and she said “Ahhh—” in a whisper, a tiny sighing echo of the devotees on the beach. They stood quietly for a while, listening to each other breathe, and then he said, hoarsely, “Will you come home with me?” And she said, “Yes.”

They fell in love.

Farber himself never quite understood why, or how, this happened. Like everything else about “Lisle,” and the Cian, it was to him a thing that could only be seen out of the corner of the eye, that could only be intuited and never analyzed rationally. Love came to him subliminally, seeping up from some hidden wellspring and soaking imperceptibly through his mind. It was a peripheral thing, and Farber was not even aware of it until after it had happened. Later, when he had become irreversibly committed, he spent a good deal of time trying to puzzle out the reasons for it, but they did not admit of delineation.

Sex was good with her, certainly, but no better than it had been on occasion with other women. Their lovemaking that night was not a blaze of transcendental pleasure; like any other couple, they needed time to adjust to each other, and their first attempts were not without a certain element of clumsiness. It was the usual sweaty business, full of small mutual discoveries, disappointments, elations—not much different from his first night with Kathy, on a purely sexual level. Liraun was different, though, and the night was steeped through with her strangeness, as the air of Farber’s bedroom was soaked with the musky, erotic smell of her body. She spoke little. She would laugh or sob at unpredictable times, for—to Farber—unanalyzable reasons. She was playful, and at the same time intently, almost grimly, serious; Farber could never be sure which mood to respond to, and couldn’t master her apparent trick of mixing the two. Physically, she was odd, although not enough so as to be repugnant—rather the opposite, in fact. She had no breasts, or rather she had only vestigial ones, like Farber himself—the Cian men nursed the young, not the women. Her nipples were also vestigial—three pairs of them, spaced 2 x 2, down along the rib cage, flat and almost unnoticeable except for large, smoky-dark aureoles. Most of her body was covered with a light, fine down that might once, millennia ago, have been fur. Her pubic hair was unusually thick and heavy, stretching down her thighs and up along her belly. Her canines weren’t really too much longer than a human’s, and she was very careful not to bite too hard; to Farber’s relief—and, almost, regret—as he had been half-expecting her to slash him to ribbons. She was perhaps not as expert as Kathy—although she was by no means unsophisticated, sexually—but there was an exquisitely restrained desperation to her responses that puzzled Farber even while it delighted him. At orgasm—their second try, finally working their slow, patient way up to it—she hugged him with a strength almost greater than his own, nearly cracking his ribs, and cried out harshly, as though terrified and elated by something that he could never understand.

In the morning, Liraun got up and dressed without a word. Watching her pad around his apartment in the cold, slate-grey dawnlight, shrugging herself into her skintight outfit, Farber felt a rush of idiot desire and would have been ready to tackle the night’s business all over again, eager as a schoolboy, although he was probably too drained and exhausted physically to take it. Liraun looked much less frazzled than Farber; her movements were still crisp and supple, her face was fresh and unshadowed. He asked her if she would come back, but she would not answer him. She smiled and shrugged, still wordless and noncommittal, and departed—leaving Farber bemused, to say the least. He didn’t even know how to find her again.

His mood persisted throughout the day. He managed successfully to avoid Kathy and most of the other Earthmen, although Janet LaCorte gave him an indignant glare in front of the Terran Cooperative offices. After the passion and mystery of Alàntene night, the day seemed unreal—flat, insubstantial, dull, the colors less vivid, the vistas of Aei less inspiring, the air itself stale. The routine minutia of his work seemed incredibly boring. He achieved nothing even remotely of value, and gave up on it in the early afternoon. His mind was divided. Half of it was moronically happy, and tried to keep him whistling and humming when the other half wasn’t paying attention. That half was filled with increasing anxiety, almost with fear, as the afternoon wore on. It was quite possible that he’d never see her again. Suppose she didn’t come back?

But she did.

And she returned the next day, too.

And the next.

And the day after that.

On the sixth day after Alàntene, Farber got a little scared. He decided, coldbloodedly, that he was becoming too involved with Liraun—certainly they were seeing too much of each other—and he set out to remedy the situation. He had an intense, tearful reconciliation with Kathy, and within two hours they were back in her apartment, and in bed. Kathy spent the rest of the night inventing exotic ways of making love, in order to seal the bond. Farber worked at it grimly, but it was no good: he kept thinking about Liraun, he kept picturing her, he wanted it to be her instead. In spite of his resolve, he found he could only relate to Kathy absentmindedly; he kept fantasizing that she was Liraun, and it was this that sparked most of his desire, not Kathy herself.

Early the next evening, Liraun appeared at Farber’s apartment, as though alerted to the change in Farber’s thinking by telepathy. She didn’t say a word about his absence the previous night; she never mentioned it at all. Neither did Farber. He relaxed gratefully into the familiar strangeness of her company, suffused with a feeling of having come home again. Kathy rang the bell about ten, and kept ringing incessantly until Farber was obliged to shout for her to go away. Liraun said nothing about that either.

After this, Farber stopped trying to avoid further emotional involvement with Liraun, although if you had mentioned the word love to him at any one point he would have denied it quickly and emphatically. In fact, though, he was coming to depend on her presence more and more. She was a prop; she held him up, she kept him going. She was a tranquilizing drug to assuage the loneliness and horror of exile on an alien earth. She helped him forget that he could stare at the stars here forever, and never once see a configuration he could recognize from a thousand boyhood nights spent dreaming on a hill in the Fränkische Alb near Treuchlingen. He had been set up for Liraun, certainly, by that loneliness and bewilderment. Much of his pride had been leached away by contact with races like the Enye, who treated Terrans like animals—or, even worse, with creatures so different they could barely interact with humans at all—and he was unable to retreat behind a wall of defensive snobbery and cultivated disdain, as had most of his fellows. The path of his life, once so straight and obvious, had been lost in a morass of confusion and futility. His career—once the vital, central thing in his existence—now seemed insipid, unimportant, meaningless. But over and above these factors, it was Liraun’s character itself that seduced him. He was drawn powerfully by her enigmatic and bottomless nature. With other women, his interest had ended at the moment of sexual conquest—the affair might coast on for weeks or even months afterward, but that was only momentum: the tension was gone. With Liraun, sex was only a beginning. Her mind and spirit were still masked from him, as by a thousand thicknesses of distorting semitransparent gauze, and physical intimacy was only a means to strip away the first of those layers. The prospect of peeling the rest of them was one of the things that held him. Also, Farber, who had been used to the aggressive, self-assertive women of Earth, was delighted by Liraun’s apparent submissiveness. He quickly became comfortably accustomed to having her defer to his will, cook his supper, serve him in a hundred little ways.

Three weeks after Alàntene, he asked Liraun if she would move in with him. She would not answer him—with that unshakable stubbornness that came over her occasionally, she refused to acknowledge that she had even heard the question. The more he persisted, the more blank and unlistening she became, until finally he gave it up. She was abstracted and withdrawn the rest of that night. In the morning, as she was preparing to leave, she told him quietly that, yes, she would come to live with him.

She showed up that evening with a backpack of possessions, and moved in. It only took her about fifteen minutes to get settled. As Farber watched her moving around his apartment, putting away her things, he was overcome by a feeling of amazement that was almost awe. Even after three weeks, he still knew next to nothing about her. Getting personal information from her was like pulling teeth. He didn’t know what she did during the day, after she left him, where she went or why. He didn’t even know where she lived—they had strolled around Aei innumerable times, but she had never taken him there, or said anything about its location, and something in her manner had discouraged him from asking. She was quite willing to talk about her people and their society, but only on the most general and theoretical of grounds. The philosophy, sometimes and to a limited degree, but the specifics, never. He really knew nothing about her life at all. And yet, here she was—moving in with him. This alien, living in his house, day in and day out. It was incredible and wonderful. Already—as she put supper on to boil, unasked, and sat tranquilly playing the tikan, a mandolin-like instrument—he could feel her neat, quiet, calming presence spreading throughout the apartment, seeping into his body like radiant heat, thawing his hopes, loosening his fears.

They fell in love.

That was the easy part.

The next month was probably the happiest part of Farber’s life. Certainly, it was the period during which he produced most of his best work. Farber was a graphic artist, although, like most artists of his generation, he had seldom even touched paints or oils or clay or bronze. He worked instead with a sophisticated device—exported by the Jejun, master craftsmen for this entire section of the spiral arm—that enabled him to transpose his internal fantasies and visualizations directly onto holographic film. The results of this process, rather inevitably known as “sensies” in popular parlance, could be exhibited either as a movie or as blown-up stills—there were conflicting views as to which was the proper method—and were gradually replacing the old arts of painting, sculpture, and photography, now regarded as passé and intolerably primitive by the young turks, among the highly civilized nations of Earth. With the advent of the sensies, and the concurrent exodus of men to distant starsystems, the old school of landscape painting crossbred itself with the travelog and regained something of the prestige and popularity it had enjoyed in the eighteenth century—with the additional advantage that these visualizations of alien lands were filtered through and colored by the perception of the individual sensie artist, giving rise almost overnight to critics and connoisseurs who would argue endlessly over the precision of Tunick’s eye as contrasted to the passion of Frank’s. It became common practice for sensie artists to be sent along with the outbound trading missions and exploratory expeditions, to record them for the folks back home. This was Farber’s position with the mission to “Lisle,” and during the beginning of his affair with Liraun he produced several stills which would later attract a moderate amount of attention on Earth, among them Woman at Rest, Alàntene Night, Riverman, and the fairly well-known Esplanade—Looking East to the Sea. He was as content as he had ever been. He had the pleasure of work that he enjoyed, the satisfaction of that work done well, a reasonable prospect of future success—and Liraun. And, as men are always ready to disregard the most painfully learned lessons the moment they think the wind has changed, he even began to regain some of his old cockiness.

Naturally, it could not last.

It would take a book to explain in detail why Farber became determined to marry Liraun, and much of it would be guesswork at that. Again, it was not so much a conscious decision, but rather something that—he realized, in retrospect—he had become committed to at some point along the line. Exactly when that point, that moment of commitment, had been reached, he himself did not know. But there were seven specific things that took him toward it, seven long steps into deep water.

Perhaps the first step occurred when he realized that Liraun was unhappy.

Or if not unhappy exactly—for they still took much delight in each other—then troubled at least, and divided of soul. Even in her gayest moments, there had always been an edge of melancholy to her, but now it seemed to deepen and widen daily. He noticed it, responded to it with concern, but couldn’t find out why it was happening. As usual, she was intensely reluctant to talk about her feelings, and would either change the subject when Farber questioned her, or become withdrawn if he pressed her to answer. It wasn’t until they attended the monthly Co-op mixer—still referred to as a “cocktail party,” although amphetamines and hallucinogenics were served as readily as alcohol—that he began to understand what was wrong. Prominent members of the Cian community were regularly invited to the mixer, and some of them actually came; they called the parties “Little Modes,” and seemed to regard them with tolerant, amused condescension, as one would an absurd play put on by kindergarten children. The Cian were very chilly toward Liraun. The didn’t quite snub her—as it was impolite to ignore any living being—but there was a thinly veiled hostility behind everything they said and did; it was clear that they disapproved of her. Liraun was strained and silent that night, and kept to herself as much as possible.

It took Farber a few more days to dig it up, but at last after much persistence and persuasion, the story came out in disjointed sections. Pieced together, it looked like this: Cian morality saw nothing wrong with an unmarried girl taking a lover, as long as she did not conceive; there was no special premium on virginity. Until she was married, however, she was expected to live by herself. There was a special symbolism to this—a girl was said to go “from under her father’s roof to her husband’s.” It was a matter of ownership, of transference of title, and there was no room in the equation for her accepting the protection of any other male. So Liraun’s sin was not that she was sleeping with Farber—a matter of utter indifference to the other Cian—but that she was living with him, “under the roof” of a man who was not her husband. Odd as this seemed to Farber, it was serious enough to get her ostracized.

All this gave Farber a sleepless night. If he had been born twenty years earlier, or ten years later, he probably wouldn’t have worried about Liraun’s welfare at all, but amorality had gone out of fashion, as it periodically did, and his generation had rediscovered humanism and a sort of studied naiveté. So he stayed up to figure out the Decent Thing To Do. On the one hand, he sincerely loved Liraun, didn’t want her hurt on his behalf—but didn’t want to lose her either. On the other hand, he was as terrified of marriage as most young men of his day, especially the artists and the intelligentsia, among whom it had long been a truism that “marriage” equated with “trap.” But no matter how he nagged it, it always came down to that: he should either marry her, or leave her; nothing else would help her situation.

Toward dawn, he decided—rather callously, but a man can often identify coldbloodedness as practicality if he squints at it hard enough—that the best thing to do would be to marry Liraun, but only under the Cian rites. That would make her a respectable woman again in the eyes of the Cian, and yet, as far as his fellow Terrans were concerned, it would be only a native marriage: it wouldn’t be binding on Earth, and if his relationship with Liraun soured, he could leave at the end of his hitch without worrying about legalities. In the morning he sent an application to the Cian Liaison, and a note to the Co-op explaining what he was proposing to do.

Then he went to sleep.

He hadn’t thought to tell Liraun about it yet.

Liraun’s eyes, when he asked her. The second step.

The next afternoon, Farber had an interview with the Co-op Director.

Most of the Earthmen played at being embittered because it was the style of their times, but with Raymond Keane, the Director, it was not an assumed thing. He was embittered. He was a bitter, troubled, cynical, beat-out, burnt-up man, with just enough energy left to him to form a reservoir of weary malice. He had been here since the very beginning of Terran involvement with “Lisle,” in one capacity or another. In all that time, he had been unable to come up with a really viable trade commodity. The last great white hope had been a native drug—used for an entirely different purpose on Weinunnach—that the Co-op had imported to Earth as a serum to overcome organ rejection in transplant cases, and which had turned out to have the unfortunate side effect of dissolving all the cholinesterase in a user’s body two years after the initial dose, something that had never happened here in years of testing. Apparently the reaction had been triggered by something in the environment of Earth; something had switched on an episome that remained latent on “Lisle.” That was the trouble with interstellar commerce: too many wild factors, and the rules of the game shifted constantly and unpredictably. Keane, a minor executive at the time, had been swept into the Director’s office by the cholinesterase scandal, but had not been able to get out from under its shadow. Time after time, his experts went wrong, soured, failed of their expectation—never as spectacularly as the first fiasco, never drastically enough to shake him out of office, but consistently. This had been going on for almost five years. It had eaten him. He looked like a man who no longer had the strength to go on, but who must, and so goes on without strength, held together only by a set of complex and rigidly interlocking weaknesses.

He kept Farber on the carpet for more than an hour.

Farber had not been passionately attached to his matrimonial plans when he came to the office—it was the day after, and he was beginning to see some of the difficulties involved. He had half-expected to be talked out of it, and half-wished that he would be. But instead of persuading, Keane had chided, threatened, fumed, ranted, finally working himself into such a red-faced rage that he had almost begun to scream. At first, Farber had been amazed. He worked for the Co-op on the loosest of contractual bases, with effectively no supervision at all, and he wasn’t used to this type of vicious dressing-down. Then he began to get mad. Keane blustered on—the marriage would stir up bad feelings among the Cian, it would be a step toward diluting the cultural identity of the Earth Enclave, it might encourage other Earthmen—or worse, women—to do the same, it would split Farber’s loyalties, take up too much of his time . . . a plethora of reasons, some good, some bad, all of them false. Farber watched Keane’s face as he talked. The Director’s face was flat and dull, his skin the seeming texture of horn, crosshatched with shiny dead places, like scales of congealed lard, where a dream had died and turned to chitin. No matter what he said, the real reason he was against the marriage was that he hated the Cian. That was something that went beyond logic, or duty, or even self-interest. He hated the Cian, he hated the Co-op, “Lisle,” his job, Farber. Most of all he hated himself. It was a weary, helpless hatred, all the blacker because it was impotent. It could not even destroy. All it could do was negate.

Farber could be a very obstinate man indeed when aroused to it, and now that mulish streak became dominant. He began to flush. Unconsciously, he braced himself, settling down more firmly in his chair, flattening his feet against the floor.

Keane ran down at last, and the room filled with a silence that went on and on. Farber sat perfectly still. He had not said a word since Keane began his tirade. He did not speak now. He just sat motionlessly in the center of the office—a gleaming antiseptic cave, steel, plastic, chrome, shiny tile, glass, filled with oddments, plaques, framed certificates, charts, stacked banks of files, a huge computer terminal, a hologram tank that filled half a wall—and stared levelly at Keane.

Keane fiddled with the litter on his desk.

“The Cian Liaison has granted you an interview tomorrow,” Keane said, after an uneasy pause, “to discuss this proposal of yours. My advice to you is not to keep it. If you do keep it, then you must assure the Liaison that this has all been some sort of mistake or misconception on your part. Do you understand that?”

“My personal life is none of your business,” Farber said flatly.

“Under no circumstances will you pursue this matter any further, Mr. Farber.”

“Your authority does not extend to my private life,” Farber said, with a touch of heat. “I’ll do what I like with it.”

“Farber—” Keane said, and Farber simultaneously said, “It’s none of your business!”

Another pause.

“I can make a great deal of trouble for you, you know,” Keane said. That was the third step.

Doggedly, Farber took the following afternoon off and went to see the Cian Liaison to the Terran Mission, Jacawen sur Abut.

Jacawen had his office in Old City.

Farber had been up to Old City before, but he hadn’t stayed long because he didn’t like it there. It was a place of precipitous cobblestone streets, towers and spires and domes, steep stairways, terraced balconies and plazas, long narrow alleys that wound claustrophobically between high walls of black rock until they opened onto sudden startling vistas of the wide country or the restless sea below. It was a place of levels, of shafts that dropped down deep into the rock of the cliff itself, going down and down with lights and windows sparkling silver and orange in the depths like phosphorescence at the bottom of an old dry well; of honeycombed bluffs of more adamant rock that rose like cliffs atop a cliff from a terrace or a square, looming up like the stern of a great dark ship and lifting a twinkling freight of windows high above the rooftops of the level below, with more buildings built atop it, and still more built atop them, mazy roofs climbing up and up into the deep blue-black sky. It was a place that was banded by little vertical jungles, growing right up and over the city like creeper vines. All of Aei was crisscrossed with Feral Strips, kept wild to provide the citizens with relief from urban existence, but the Feral Strips in Old City were almost straight up-and-down, weeds and ropy bushes and little stunted trees that clung to fissures and slanting crevasses in the outer walls, full of shaggy agile creatures—something like goats, something like squirrels—that leapt in serene silence from hummock to hummock, pursued by little mewling predators with needle-tipped tails and perpetually apologetic grins on their fox muzzles. It was a place of little commerce or overt activity. There were no shops or stores in Old City, although there were many administrative offices and private homes. There were two open-air markets during the daytime, and hot-food vendors along the Esplanade, but only a few small restaurants that operated after dark, and no commonhouses or entertainment places at all, unlike New City. It was a restricted place, in some ways. Any Cian could visit Old City, but only a member of one of the Thousand Families could live there. In New City, you would often see nulls or clones or genetically altered beings in the street—the Cian possessed an immensely sophisticated biological technology, and their genetic surgeons, the “tailors,” produced strange creatures to order as one of Weinunnach’s major exports—but they were not allowed to set foot in Old City. Offworlders like the Terrans were allowed to visit, but reluctantly. It was a place made primarily of rock and dressed obsidian, interwoven with wood, iron, glass and slate. Its predominant colors were black and silver, with a few slate greys and reds, and an occasional startling patch of orange or earth brown. It smelled of clean naked rock, and ozone, and sea-wind with a lingering undertang of musk. There were few loud sounds, but the silence was a vibrant humming one—as of a million constant voices a bit too subdued to be heard. The mood of Old City balanced on the razor edge between “brooding” and “serene.”

Today, to Farber, it was brooding. He took the cablecar up, walked along the Esplanade at the edge of the great cliff, went up a stairway, along an alley, through a tunnel, up another stairway, along another alley, penetrating ever deeper and higher into Old City. At last he was so deep inside it that he saw Fire Woman, the sun, only occasionally and at a distance as it peered over the jumble of high roofs and down into the narrow warrens and passageways. Everything was bathed in shifting half-light now, and he walked on through alternating strips of bright hazy radiance and shadows so deep that they looked like glistening black solids. He felt like a worm inching his way through black rock and wet earth, until he came out onto a staircase that led up and across the domed roof of a building on a lower level, dizzying and sundazzled, with a sheer unprotected drop on one side, and then he felt like an insect crawling across the naked shoulder of a mountain. Jacawen’s office was nearby, in a building that jutted out from the city mass like a gable, its windows opening on nothing except air and distances.

Jacawen’s heir-son, Mordlich, showed Farber in. He was a tall, taciturn young man with a face like a scornful angel: remote, handsome, full of pride and disdain. He moved like a tiger, like a warrior gliding into battle; his eyes blazed with feral intelligence and an almost fanatical intensity. It was obvious that he disliked Farber on sight, that Farber’s very existence was somehow an affront to his conception of the universe. With a stiff, self-absorbed face, like that of someone who smells a bad odor, he took Farber to the inner office and departed quickly.

“Sit down, Mr. Farber,” Jacawen said.

Farber sat down. The floor here was carpeted with what appeared to be a kind of pale fungus, and he sank into it as he would a cushion. Jacawen sat on a low dais a few feet away. The office was roomy, neat, uncluttered, with stone walls and a half-timbered ceiling. There was a window in the east-facing wall, looking out over the tidelands of Elder Sea; it was open, and they could hear surf and the crying of seabirds, brought near by the wind, then fading away again into distance as the wind died. That wind, whistling in through the window with its freight of ocean sounds, was thin and cold, and tasted of salt, which tasted in turn of blood. Some sunlight leaked in with the wind, also thin and cold, but pure as clear crystal—it played on the rich tapestry covering the opposite wall, meticulously picking out gods and men, cold-eyed demons and beautiful women, births and battles, deliverance and death.

Farber and Jacawen looked each other over, silently.

Jacawen himself was a small, somber, self-possessed man, with the jet-black hair and wide golden eyes of most of his race. He was sleek as an otter, giving the impression of sturdiness, of a compact and supple muscularity. His breasts were no larger than those of an ordinary Earthman, as he was not in lactation at the time, but his thin shirt showed the impression of three pairs of nipples, spaced two by two down along his ribcage, and six small bumps to go with them. His face was calm, almost dispassionate, but it looked somewhat satanic to Farber because of the tiny points of the canine teeth that protruded beyond the lips. Jacawen was even more intelligent and adamant than his son, but in him the fanatic intensity had been banked down into a more assured, controllable, useful force, a steady, smokeless flame. Both were Shadow Men, a quasi-religious sect that ran much of the government of Shasine, but Jacawen had the maturity and the wisdom of experience—Mordlich was still full of worldly pride, but Jacawen had passed beyond that to the curious arrogant humility of a senior Shadow Man, and he aspired to be like the angels, beyond shame and pride. With that, he had varying degrees of success.

“Did you know that Liraun is my half-niece?” Jacawen asked abruptly.

Oh Christ, Farber thought.

After a moment, he managed to say: “No, I didn’t know that.”

“I tell you this,” Jacawen said, with equanimity, “not because it is important in itself, but because it is proof that I know her mind, that I have had much time to observe her. On Weinunnach, it is the custom to have our children in surges, Mr. Farber, four years apart. Liraun was born in the fallow period between surges, one and a half years after the previous surge, two and a half years before the surge to come. It almost never happens that our women conceive when they are not supposed to conceive, but sometimes it happens regardless, and this was one such time. Do you understand, Mr. Farber? Liraun grew up alone, with no age group to fit into, with no companions. Not even wombmates—the Mother, who did not realize for months that she had conceived, did not have time to cherish the growth in the proper way: most of her wombmates were stillborn, one sister died in early childhood. Liraun survived, but she grew up sad and wild, and she still is so. She has been out of Harmony on other occasions.” He stopped and stared at Farber. “Do you understand, Mr. Farber? I am talking openly to you of private matters, against the custom of our people, and it is distasteful to me—but I wish you to understand.”

Farber scowled. “It seems like you’re telling me that Liraun’s—affair—with me is just one more wild prank in a life of unfortunate rebellion.”

“That is oddly put, but basically accurate.”

“And that’s all you think it is?”

Jacawen sat impassively for a moment, then started again. “Mr. Farber, I don’t think you’ve understood me after all,” he said drily. “I am not talking about your proposal of marriage to Liraun. What I have been saying to you is in the way of an apology for the strain and disharmony this thing must have caused you, and an assurance that it was not your responsibility. This mating between Cian and Terran should never have happened at all, but if it was going to happen, then it does not surprise me at all that Liraun should be the one woman in all of Shasine that it happened to. Who caused it to happen, Mr. Farber. That is all I wished to convey to you.”

“What about my proposal of marriage?” Farber said, in a tight voice.

“That, of course, cannot be. It is unallowable.”

“Why?”

“Because your race and mine are not interfertile, Mr. Farber!” Jacawen said, a hint of passion in his voice for the first time. “Can’t you see that? A marriage between you and Liraun would be a sterile one. A marriage that does not produce children is an abomination in the eyes of the People of Power, it is an offense to all Harmony. There has never been such a thing on the face of Weinunnach! There never will be!” All the intensity had flared up, the steady flame roared and swelled behind his eyes. Then it slowly guttered, leaving him shaken. “No, I’m sorry, Mr. Farber,” he said. “It cannot be. I speak to you frankly now, Mr. Farber, perhaps to my own dishonor: even if the marriage were not impossible, I would be against it, I would disapprove, but by our custom I could not stand in the way of your free choice. However, as it is, I have no need: all Weinunnach stands in your way and prevents you. It is unallowable. I cannot say that I am sorry.”

That’s it, then, Farber thought, and felt only a vast wave of relief. But even while it was washing over him, some distanced part of himself that he did not understand was making him say: “Are you sure there’s no way around that? Are you sure? No way at all?” in a tone of petulant, chivvying desperation.

Jacawen stared at him, and something new came into his face, disgruntlement, annoyance, malice, reluctance, regret—all of these perhaps. He said: “There is a way, Mr. Farber. If you wish, you may have our Tailors adjust your karyotype, change it to match with ours. Then you could marry, Mr. Farber. Making that adjustment would not change you into a Cian in the gross physical sense, but it would affect your cytological material, and it would change the number and morphology of your chromosomes. It would have little real effect, except on your offspring. It would change your seed, Mr. Farber, it would change your seed. You see? You and Liraun would no longer be sterile. If you impregnated her, your children would be full-blooded Cian, with no trace of Terra in them at all.” He smiled cuttingly at Farber, the malice now only thinly veiled. “Well, Mr. Farber, do you want me to put you down for an appointment with the Tailors? I assure you that is the only possible way you could marry Liraun, and I’m sure of that, Mr. Farber. Well?”

Farber was flushing with shame and puzzled anger. In an attempt to save some semblance of face, he let his voice say: “Yes.”

“You do wish to see the Tailors, then?”

Flatly: “Yes.”

“Excellent!” Jacawen said. His hand broke a light beam. A control panel, of compact Jejun make, slid up out of the floor. Jacawen studied a dial, turned a switch, hit three keys, and said something in a dialect too swift to follow. The panel slid back into the floor. Jacawen looked at Farber. “Now,” he said, “you have an appointment at the Hall of Tailors, here in Old City, tomorrow, at 1125 by your time. I wish you good luck.” And Jacawen smiled with calculated blandness, with aloof contempt, mocking Farber, pouring his scorn onto him—a scorn so much more devastating than Mordlich’s, because it was so much less automatic, and so much more earned. Farber had tried a bluff, and it had been called; he had been forced right out of the game. Jacawen knew that Farber would never keep the appointment, that the price was too high, that Farber never had any intention of going at all. Farber had tried to brazen it through, and had lost face enormously. Jacawen knew that Farber would not have the courage to go through with it.

He was right. Farber knew it too.

The shame that Farber felt as he pushed out of the office, that was the fourth step.

It was late afternoon by the time he reached the Enclave, so Farber stopped off at the Co-op Mess to have a drink. He found Dale Brody at the bar, already well on his way into a stinking, falling-down drunk. The Co-op grapevine must have been working as well as ever, because, after a few minutes of silent, cold-shoulder drinking, Brody leaned over to Farber, and said, in a hoarse malodorous voice: “You can fuck niggers if you want, but don’t you think about marrying them! We don’t marry our niggers back home.”

Farber raised his big fist—feeling like a character in an old-time movie, but doing it anyway—and knocked two of Brody’s teeth out.

That was the fifth step.

When Farber checked back at his office at last, there was a note waiting for him, asking him to call on Dr. Anthony Ferri, the Co-op ethnologist.

Ferri was a phlegmatic, reclusive man, but his cool reticence was a mask for voracious ambitions of a sort that must have burned themselves to slag in Keane years before. He worked for the Co-op, but he was simultaneously doing field work for Cornell—really doing field work for Cornell is the way he himself would have put it, if you caught him in a confiding mood—and all his dreams were centered on the marvelous monographs he would publish, on the books he would write, on the honors he would earn, on grants and university chairs and lecture tours and tenure. He wanted to be famous, to be well respected, to be a giant in his field. That was his one passion; everything else had been sublimated into it. And it was possible that he would yet translate dream into reality. He had a brilliant mind, an enormous—though somewhat specialized—store of erudition, and enough practicality to realize that he would have to work like a demon every moment of his stay on “Lisle” if he were ever to realize his ambitions. All that was on the credit side of the ledger. On the debit side was his own personality. Most men found him cold, distant and unfriendly. Actually, he was a fairly sociable man, and, when he noticed them, sincerely liked people. But he seldom noticed them—he was too absorbed by work, too haunted by the sense of time ticking by and taking him no closer to his goal. He was taciturn to the point of insult. That was because, basically, he had nothing to say about most things. But when he judged that a bit of communication might advance his career, and especially when the subject under discussion fell within his own sphere of expertise, he could suddenly become affable, loquacious, enthusiastic, persuasive, even glib.

He was all of those things that evening.

He wanted Farber to work for him. More precisely, he wanted Farber to be a “research assistant,” gathering the type of data that he was unable to get himself. Ferri was too much of a cold fish—although he didn’t put it quite that way when he was explaining it to Farber—to become really friendly with the Cian, to be accepted into their homes; he had tried, in his most ingratiating manner and with all the professional wiles be could command, and he had been rebuffed—with characteristic Cian politeness, but decisively. That meant that some doors were forever closed to him in Shasine. But Farber was already intimately involved with a Cian, and if, as the gossip had it, he was going to marry her, then the chances were that he’d eventually be able to penetrate even deeper into Cian society. Ferri, seeing that Farber was getting angry, admitted hastily that it was none of his business whether Farber married Liraun or not, but if he did, if he did—The job wouldn’t be very demanding, Ferri explained, mostly a matter of keeping his eyes open, surreptitiously recording conversations—here Ferri exhibited a bracelet containing a hidden microminiaturized recorder—and telemetering the stuff back to Ferri. Just the raw data; he wouldn’t have to try to analyze it or draw conclusions. Ferri and his semantic and anthropological computers would do that. But only Farber could get the data in the first place.

“Joe, listen to me,” Ferri said urgently. “You’re new here, you don’t realize yet what a godawful secretive culture this is. On the surface it looks like a pretty open and relaxed society, everybody friendly and polite, almost stress-free when compared to an Earth society like America or Russia, low incidence of neurosis, lower incidence of insanity, suicide relatively rare, stress-induced illness infrequent, psychosomatic illness almost completely unknown. But they’re so completely obsessional in guarding their privacy! Their private lives are sacrosanct, they won’t talk about them, they won’t let us investigate them. We’ve been here more than a decade, and we still don’t know anything about them, except what they let us see. Nothing, not a damn thing! We’ve never even been able to put a Cian through a physical examination, let alone dissect one. Joe, you have to cooperate.”

“I don’t know,” Farber said.

“I can pay you for your help, out of my Cornell budget. Middling well.”

“It isn’t that.”

“What, then?”

“I just don’t know if I’d want to do something like that. I don’t think I would.”

“There’re one hell of a lot more questions about this world than there are answers, you know that, Joe?” Ferri said, as if he hadn’t heard Farber, as though the possibility of a negative response just didn’t exist. “As far as I can tell, the Cian have the capability for spaceflight if they’d put all the pieces of their technology together in the right way, and’ve had that capability for thousands of years. They just don’t put the pieces together. They don’t want to—it doesn’t interest them. And yet their genetic science is one of the most sophisticated known, and they get plenty of interstellar trade—it doesn’t square. Look at the primitive way they live. They don’t have to! They have efficient mass communications and high-speed transportation, but they use them so sparingly. There isn’t a public phone system in all of Aei, except for ours at the Enclave. That doesn’t interest them either. What kind of cultural development produces a psychology like that?” He wiped his face, almost angrily. “They don’t even have the same conception of time that we do. They’re not as prone to think of time as a linear flow. Verbs in their language don’t even have tenses, just aspects and validity forms, like Hopi. You can say ‘remembered eating’ or ‘eating expected,’ but you can’t say ‘He ate’ or ‘He will eat.’ For Christ’s sake, they shouldn’t have sent men like us to deal with these creatures! They should have sent Asians, Yaquis, Polynesians, Amerinds, Eskimos, even Bushmen—somebody who’d have a chance of understanding the Cian!”

“You know the situation back home,” Farber said, shrugging.

“Yes, I do,” Ferri said. He was silent for a moment, then: “The women have a strange role in this society. You’re living with one, maybe marrying one! Don’t you want to learn about them? Don’t you want a fair chance of understanding the motivations of your own woman? I don’t understand them, now. You won’t either. Unmarried women are the property of the father. Married women, at least at first, are the property of the husband. No status, few rights. A textbook patriarchal society. But it doesn’t stay that way—somehow some of the wives change their status, and go right to the top; they’re almost worshipped. Why does that happen? I don’t know. I do know that a woman changes her surname three times in her life. Your woman’s surname is Jé Genawen, I think I remember. Right? That means, approximately, ‘belonging to Genawen,’ her father. If she marries you, her surname will change to Jé Farber, believe it or not: ‘belonging to Farber.’ If she makes the status-leap, however it’s done, her surname becomes ‘belonging to—’ whatever the name of the female First Ancestor of her line is. What is all this rigmarole for? I don’t know, but you could help me find out.” He put his hand on Farber’s arm with studied sincerity. “Joe, this is the first time a Cian has ever become intimately involved with a Terran. In a decade or more. It might never happen again. That’s why this is so important. Don’t you see, you’re in a better position to learn about them than any man in the history of this mission! You must help me.”

“I’ll think about it,” Farber said, and brushing aside Ferri’s protests, he got ready to leave.

He had already made the sixth step, although he didn’t realize it yet.

He went out.

On his way back to his apartment, Farber ran into Kathy Gibbs among the early-evening strollers on Washington Street. Kathy was by no means as much of a bitch as Farber would’ve liked to paint her, but she was an aging, unmarried, disillusioned woman who had been hurt by too many men, Farber the latest of them, and if she fought to draw blood, she might not be commended for it, but she could hardly be blamed.

Her weapon this time was a smile that cut to the bone like a flensing knife, a contemptuous, knowing, humiliating smile that said, You’ll come back to me whether you want to or not, that said, Wait and see! with evil ancient patience.

That smile was the seventh step.

And Farber spent another night of years.

The next morning, Farber rose very early, and, prompted by some obscure instinct, dressed in his best suit. Liraun lay in the big bed and watched him, her eyes following him as he wandered through the apartment. She didn’t get up to make breakfast for him, as she usually did; nor did he ask her to. She did not speak at all. Her expression was unreadable. Farber was equally mute; he finished dressing as quickly as he could, although he was far from being in a hurry—he wanted to avoid her patient, thoughtful eyes. Those eyes did not pressure him at all; that was why he couldn’t stand them.

The pale red light of Fire Woman bled in through the blinds, polarizing dust motes in the air, throwing slats of radiance across the opposite wall. The Terran furniture that filled the apartment looked cheap and shabby in that pitiless light—plastic and machine-stamped, as indeed it was. Everything was bland, precise, artificial. Only Liraun was real here. Without moving or speaking, she remained the vital, vibrant center of the place. The apartment was filled with her presence, and with her warm musky smell. She was the extenuating factor, she lent the room what validity it had. Without her, it would be a stage set—flat and unreal. He pulled on his coat and left quickly, still wordless.

Outside, it was very cold. Farber walked hurriedly through the wide streets of the Enclave, hands in his pockets, his feet making a hollow click-clack, his breath steaming in plumes and tatters. There was no one else about. Fire Woman was dipping in and out of corrugated grey clouds, and hoarfrost glistened over everything. The tall Terran-style buildings rose on either side, prefabricated glass-and-plastic hives, jarringly out of place. They were surrounded by lush groves of black feathertrees, a half-hearted decorator’s touch which only succeeded in increasing the contrast. A hidden something was singing in the cold morning hush—it sounded like a bird, but it was a lizard. Some of the streetlights—another Terran touch—were still on, looking wan and sadly pointless against the lightening grey sky. He reached the huge wall that surrounded the Enclave—What do they think they’re keeping out? he thought. With a wall?—passed the sleeping gate guard in his glassine booth, and struck out into Aei. The streets turned from asphalt to porcelain, and, as he cleared the horizon-swallowing Terran skyline, Old City loomed up on its obsidian cliff, way in the middle of the air.

Twice, he stopped and turned back. One of these times, he retraced his steps for about a half-mile back toward the Enclave, until shame and indecision stopped him, turned him around again, and set him stumbling off toward his original goal. He couldn’t do it—he couldn’t go back and tell her that he was afraid to do it, that the marriage was off. She wouldn’t cry, she wouldn’t reproach him—she would accept it with patient, unaccusing despair, and that was what he couldn’t face, that was what he wouldn’t be able to stand. If he backed down, he wouldn’t be able to face any of them: Keane with his angry contempt, Jacawen with his cold scorn, Kathy with her smug complacent belief in his inevitable return to her. Not one of them believed he would go through with it, and if he proved them right, that would be the death blow to the surviving tatters of his pride. And without that pride, he would not live. It was the last thin membrane between him and a gaping black pit of futility; he could sense that pit very clearly, the depth of the fall that awaited him. So he continued to walk, jerky, grey-faced, like a clumsily made automaton.

He took the high-speed line up to Old City. There, surrounded by high stone walls and steep cobblestone streets, the enormity of what he was about to do hit him with redoubled impact. He found a small terrace at the foot of a winding alley and stood there for almost an hour, looking out over the alien lands below. The Aome glinted like a silver-scaled snake as it wound through New City—it hadn’t frozen over yet, although it certainly wouldn’t remain clear too much longer. He flicked a pebble down toward the river, and was appalled to see how fast the pebble disappeared. Lost, lost. You have to be crazy, he told himself. You have to be crazy to think of doing a thing like this. Nothing’s worth it, nothing. He was shaking and his throat was dry. His skin felt feverish to his own touch. He started walking again, without volition. After a while, he noticed, in horror, that he was walking toward the Hall of Science. I won’t go in, he told himself. I’ll just take a look at it, and then go back. But he did go in, walking as though in a dream. For all his procrastination, he noticed, numbly, he was only five minutes late for his appointment.

Jacawen sur Abut was waiting there for him. With a face like stone, he led Farber through the busy, echoing corridors to a room filled with unobtrusive machines and polite Cian technicians. Jacawen said nothing. Farber’s presence said all there was to say. Jacawen muttered to the chief technician, nodded to Farber, and left.

The technician smiled politely at Farber, revealing even wet teeth, and bowed.

Then they shut Farber off, put him into the machines, and did what they were supposed to do to him.

Four hours later, they switched Farber back on again. He blinked, and sat up groggily. He was on a roll-away bed. His vision was swimming, and his head felt fuzzy, as if it had been stuffed with cotton batting. There was a horrible taste in his mouth. The technician, standing at Farber’s elbow, gave him exactly the same polite smile, tooth for tooth, and handed him a glass of the fiery native liquor. It sent him into a coughing spasm, but it cleared his head. The technician took Farber’s pulse, looked into his eyes, pressed a tubular machine against his upper arm and read the result off a dial, and then told Farber that he was to go now.

Somehow, Farber found himself outside, stumbling through the streets of Aei Old City. He kept looking at his hands, turning them over and over, holding them up to his eyes. He pressed his palms against his cheeks, feeling the warmth and solidity of his flesh. He pinched himself, digging his fingernails in. Everything felt the same, looked the same, but it was not. Alienness was swimming inside of him, ticking inside of him, waiting in his seed. Numbly, he kept slamming into that terrible realization, over and over again.

He was no longer human.

Joseph Farber and Liraun Jé Genawen were married late that afternoon, on the Esplanade of the Terrace, with the towers of Old City above them, and the expanse of New City below them. The ceremony was short, simple, and incomprehensible to Farber, who couldn’t follow the dialect. The wind swept the length of the Esplanade to lash them, and it was bitterly cold. The thin voice of the Clan Elder, the Singer or twizan, sank under that wind, and then rose stubbornly above it once again. He was braced against the wind like a weathered grey rock, almost toothless, white-haired, very old. His bright ancient eyes gave no indication that he found this marriage unusual, though it had never happened before in the history of his race. There were no Earthmen present. Jacawen was there, standing silently to one side, looking cold and disapproving. Genawen sur Abut, Liraun’s father, was there. He was a fat, good-natured old man with huge floppy breasts and a heavy bristly beard. He was trying to take his cue from his half-brother, Jacawen, and look stern, but he kept forgetting and letting a big happy grin spread over his face—he had been afraid that his daughter would never marry, and he was glad to see her wed, even to an alien. Several other Cian men were present, but no women. That struck Farber as odd, but he was still too numb to think about it. He was devoting all his energy to putting up a good show for Liraun. Liraun was radiant—there was no other word for it. Several times Farber thought he saw a burst of light out of the corner of his eye, and turned to find that it was only Liraun’s face. The flash of her smile drew reflexive radiance from everyone, even dour Jacawen. As the ceremony ended, Fire Woman broke through the clouds on the horizon, and the world opened up. You could see all the way up the North Shore now, mile upon mile, the glinting bulk of Elder Sea, the dunes, the tidy checkerboarded fields and orchards of Shasine, Fire Woman sending shafts of smoky amber sunlight stabbing down into the rolling landscape below. Liraun turned to him, and put her hand into his.

Her name was Liraun Jé Farber now.

They spent their wedding night at Farber’s apartment, the last night they would spend there. He went to bed drunk and woke sweating and sober, with the full realization of what he’d done beginning to come home. Panicked, he sat up and started to swing himself out of bed. The touch of his hot, sweaty feet against the cold tile floor was nauseating; it froze him in mid-motion, as if his flesh had congealed, and he sat dispiritedly at the edge of the bed in a sagging, sweating, hunch-shouldered lump. His thoughts probed and gnawed at his situation, seeking a way out. There was none. There were no alternatives. It was too late. The finality of that was as cold and sick in his stomach as the evening’s sour wine. He lay down again. He catnapped feverishly, and woke again and again during the night, lying still and blinking at the darkness, listening to the small sounds of his apartment. They were all cold sounds, artificial sounds, dry sterile tickings and clickings and buzzings. The clock, the lamp post outside the window, the temperature control, the air filter—all dead things. They were loud enough to keep any sounds from outside, any living sounds, from reaching his ears. Each time he woke and listened, they seemed to grow more loud and distinct, until he felt as if he were closed up in the cold mechanical womb of some indifferent and unliving creature, he himself already dead before he could be born: a stone fetus. He rolled over, and tried to concentrate on the sound of Liraun’s breathing, setting that warm purr and bumble against the too-precise whispering of the clockwork things. After a while, he slept.

Raymond Keane called in the morning, as expected. Farber felt better by then, clearer-headed and calm, as a man may when he has irreversibly committed himself. Resignation was almost a relief after the long interval of doubt and indecision. He watched without fear as Keane’s flushed waxen face swam into focus on the phone screen—he had used up all his apprehension the day before. Indeed, he was almost amused, Keane looked so hot and so earnestly angry. Farber had turned the volume control nearly all the way down, but the voice of the aging putty-faced zealot in the hologram still scritched unpleasantly loud in his ears. The Director was definitely not gemütlich today. Once again, Keane was demonstrating his basic incompetence, this time by peppering Farber with insults and threats in a ragged voice full of personal pique and vindictiveness that would never be used by a good administrator. Under any provocation. It was plainly evocative of a lack of control, and shattered the image of impartial omnipotence that men of Keane’s position were expected to cultivate. Another fool, Farber thought. I wonder if we all are? For a moment he had a vision of the snobbish, overbearing Earthmen as they might appear to Cian eyes. It was not a flattering thought. He was aware of Liraun standing somewhere behind him, out of sight of the hologram cube. She made no sound.

The gist of Keane’s tirade was—expulsion from the Terran community. Farber had dared to step across the line that Keane had drawn, and he would be struck down for it. None of this was surprising to Farber either, although “struck down” was a rather strong way to put it. Farber had broken no Terran laws—in fact, laws covering this situation did not as yet exist but only the directives of the Co-operative. Keane had judicatory power over the Terrans in certain special circumstances, but they were sharply limited. He could not prosecute Farber. Nor could he exile him from Earth; as a Terran citizen he was entitled to eventual passage to Earth if destitute, although it might take him a couple of years to make the connections to get there. Nor could Keane keep from Farber a small regular stipend to be paid toward his support. The law—pushed through by Labor—insisted on this to keep the threat of firing by the Co-operative, and the possibly fatal abandonment of the discharged man in an alien society, from becoming the undefiable weapon it could have been. But Keane did have the power to dispose over the operation of the Co-operative on “Lisle,” and he could bar Farber from the use of any Co-operative facilities. As this included the Enclave and most of the Terran establishments on the planet, it was trouble enough for Farber.

Effectively, it cut him off from all of his own people.

Now he was really an expatriate.

“—traitor to your race,” Keane was saying, pious and prissy, when Farber finally told him to go fuck himself.

Without ceremony, they left the Enclave.

That afternoon, they moved up to Old City.

As a member of the Thousand Families, it was Liraun’s privilege to live in Old City, and, as her kin-by-marriage, it was also Farber’s. He would have preferred to waive privilege and live in New City, which he found a much more pleasant place, but Liraun was uncharacteristically adamant on this point. Too emotionally drained for a fight, Farber gave in to her.

They moved into the same house Liraun had vacated when she’d come down to live with Farber—it had stood unclaimed and uninhabited all the weeks she’d spent at the Enclave, there being little population pressure in Aei as a whole, and none at all in Old City. The house stood just a little behind and above Kite Hill, fronting on a broad cobblestone alley known as the Row. In one of the dominant architectural styles of Old City, it was a slate-roofed oblong building of black rock, narrow across the base, consisting of three large rooms stacked directly one on top of the other, connected by stairs and ladders, with the topmost room used mostly for storage. It was already furnished, so moving was only a matter of bringing their small personal possessions in, and their clothes, putting them away, and then cleaning the house. It was done to the last detail within two hours.

In the morning, Liraun returned to her old job, running a lathe in a precision machine shop in Toolmaker Way, near Cold Tower Hill in the New City. She picked up her work as though she had never been gone. Of course, no one commented on her absence, and, except for one or two polite words of greeting, no one remarked her return.

Farber was left alone in the house.

He had the uneasy feeling that everything had happened too fast.

Farber was left alone in the house every day, from sunrise to sunset. Gradually, he began to go to seed.

His deterioration was a slow and subtle thing, so imperceptible that it could not have been seen from day to day. Certainly he himself was not aware of it, and would have denied it if it had been pointed out to him. Nevertheless, every day he became a little bit more lethargic, did a little bit less. Every day—very gradually—his mind became a little bit duller.

If he had been another man—if he had even been Ferri, with all of Ferri’s faults—it might not have happened. Another man might have tried to master his new alien environment, or analyze it, or let himself be assimilated by it; another man might have gone out and found things to do, found ways to occupy his mind, he might have manufactured new passions for himself, new interests, new tasks, new ambitions, new goals. But Farber was not another man. He was himself, and it happened. He went to seed. He was not a stupid man, or an insensitive one, but his mind and talents had been trained in the rigid, narrowly specialized way of his times, discouraging spontaneity, and he couldn’t deal with a situation to which none of the old learned answers would apply. Furthermore, he was in serious emotional trouble—having just gone through a series of long, slow-grinding shocks that had ground his identity to dust.

He was himself, and he deteriorated. There was nothing to do. There was no point in trying to get a job—Liraun’s income plus his Co-op stipend was more than sufficient to support them both. He had wandered the city in a brooding daze until he was sick of it, Old City and New, up and down, east and west. So he stayed home, stayed indoors, more and more frequently. Stayed inside a week, and only realized that he had in retrospect, when he suspiciously counted up the days. He shrugged and smiled, and put it out of his mind.

He went down.

After a month of this, he roused himself and made an effort to break out of his dull flat purgatory. He would paint. He no longer had access to his sensie equipment, but artists had created by hand once, and he could do the same. So he bustled around for a while with a great forced show of artificial energy, going down to New City—the first time in how long?—and contacting Ferri, getting Ferri to buy easels and canvas and oils and brushes for him at the Co-op commissary, where they were stocked for the swarming hobbyists of the Enclave whom Farber had sneered at a few weeks before.

He got his bootleg equipment, and spent the next three days trying to paint. He failed. He’d had a small amount of sketching in school, but nothing else helpful, and after working with a machine that could translate his thoughts into images, his fantasies into film, he didn’t have the patience to spend thousands of hours trying to coordinate hand and brush and eye. He failed miserably. He failed abominably. His colors were either sick and rancid, or totally insipid; his proportions were all wrong. His people looked like frogs, his trees were wilted featherdusters, his buildings were daubs of unmolded clay, his mountains were great slimy masses of broken-egg browns and yellows. Panting with rage, he broke the easels, tore the canvases, and burned everything in the fire-pit.

That night he woke crying from unremembered dreams.

He slid further downhill.

The horror and isolation of his situation began to hit home with exaggerated strength. They had been jabbing at him since his first moment on the planet, but now that he had been cut off from his fellow humans, and now that his career was gone, they were hitting him squarely and solidly, and Liraun’s companionship and love were no longer enough to shield him.

She had been his prop, and now even she had been kicked out from under him.

He woke screaming every night for a week, not knowing why.

Then—and this was much worse, this was horrifying—he began to remember his dreams.

He dreamed often of the Alàntene, long slow-motion nightmares full of blaring, ear-grating, slowed-down sound and dead, inching, almost imperceptible zombie motion, full of horrible sluggish avatars of himself and Liraun, intolerable because the Alàntene was the center of time and all this would go on forever, as it already had.

He would dream of Treuchlingen, the farms, the smell of mown hay, the mountains, the dusty white town asleep in the sun, the red-tiled roofs, the tall church steeples, the people in the marketplace, the chalk cliffs, the Danube coming through those cliffs at Kelheim—and then the dream would change. Earthquake! The ground smoking and sinking as if struck by a great cloven hoof, the earth opening, tossing, grinding, the neat, tile-roofed towns being kicked to flinders, going up in flames—War! Only minutes from the border, the gleaming silver needles flashing down, nothing left but ash and ghosts and fused puddles of quartz, fused ashen ghosts, quartzite bones—Nova! That burst of clear light stripping the air away, flashboiling the seas, baking the land to slag—The meteor pulverizing the globe; the toppling axis whipping the world away; the moon falling like a pregnant porcelain cow; the seas marching over the land in war; the Ice Age making the planet safe for silence; the fungus whispering over the Earth in a rusty bronze shroud—Any or all of them, night after night. Even in sleep, his reason said that none of those things was likely to be happening, but his gut said, Who knows what’s happening to an Earth lost among the stars?, and it was the gut that ruled the dreams. It had an unreasoning solipsistic bias that made him feel the Earth couldn’t continue to exist without him; now that he was gone from her, his protection would be withdrawn, and all the disasters he had been keeping from Earth by personal force of will would happen, all at once. They did, in his dreams. And he would twist awake to the ugly sound of his own screaming.

He would dream that he was awake, and he would get up and walk to the foot of the staircase on his way upstairs, and the mirror on the wall there would give him his reflection—distorted, twisted, slimy, skin running with pustules, scabs, horns, claws, demon eyes: a monster.

He dreamed that Liraun gave birth to a worm that howled.

He began to drink.

Farber had never been averse to an occasional drink, but now he started to drink in earnest—moderately heavy at first, then heavily, and then very heavily indeed. It helped; it definitely helped. Deaden the nerves enough, numb the brain sufficiently, and he didn’t worry about bad dreams. He didn’t worry about much of anything. He kept drinking. He began to buy pills from the Enclave black market, rationalizing it magnificently every step of the way, and from then on chased his liquors with downers, and vice versa. He experimented with native brews. With wines and whiskeys fermented from odd alien substances. He found a soapy native root that looked something like a yam, and which, when dissolved in wine, was even better than the pills. It was cheaper too.

He was blotto most of the time now.

He was beginning to get fat.

Thanks to an iron constitution, he was still amazingly healthy, considering what he was inflicting on his body every day. But his hands, he noticed, were just starting to develop a fine tremor.

How long until he pushed himself beyond the chance of recovery?

A little more wine.

At least he was a courtly drunk, he told himself. Although he might get maudlin when he sloshed, he was never abusive or discourteous to Liraun. He never beat her up or bullied her around. He didn’t let himself get mean with her, pulled himself up sharp if he saw it building in himself. Least he could do. Least he owed her. She deserved better that having some drunken fool slap her around when she came home from working to support them. Don’t let that happen! he told himself, feeling like he was shouting into a deep dry well. Liraun still seemed fairly happy, although she must be disappointed in him—she still treated him the same way she always had, comforting him when he’d wake up screaming, cooking for him, ignoring his delicate condition. Putting up with him, poor woman, he told himself. Poor woman.

A little more wine.

Somewhere in his head, the first sly, insidious thought of suicide.

A few days later, Liraun suddenly became withdrawn, nervous, and rather grim. Farber wondered if she hadn’t finally gotten fed up with him, and cut back visibly on the booze for almost three days, in a half-sly, half-sincere effort to placate her. But this was wasted effort on Farber’s part—it wasn’t his drinking that was on her mind.

Early in the evening on Farber’s third night of semi-abstention, she told him what really was on her mind. It was the beginning of weinunid, she explained, one of the times that came every four years when a wife was allowed by custom to conceive. If Farber wished to “start” children to be born in the current surge, he would have to impregnate her within the next four days. Otherwise he would have to wait four years to the beginning of the next surge, when she could be required by custom to conceive anyway—four years being the maximum time a couple could remain childless. Most couples waited the maximum four years before starting children. But by custom, the decision was Farber’s—he could make her conceive now instead, if he wished.

All this was explained in a halting, reluctant voice, as the words were being yanked out of her on a string, against her will. The taboo against discussing personal matters—even with your husband, apparently, or was that because he was Terran?—was a powerful one. Most of the time it was satisfied by discussing such things only in the most circuitous and symbolic of speech; when bald words were necessary, as now, it was enough of a strain to make a normally loquacious woman into a tongue-tied stutterer.

But there was something else wrong, this time. He studied her closely. She was still nervously grim. She was standing stiffly, feet braced. Her eyes were narrowed, a muscle in her jaw was tensed. A few beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. She was still trying, clumsily, to talk about the weinunid.

So that’s it, he suddenly realized. She wants a child! and she knows if I don’t opt for one now, she’ll have to wait another four years. And of course it would be against custom to try to influence my decision. That’s the reason for this grim waiting silence. She wants a child.

He stared at her, waiting for the idea to sink in.

When it did, his first reaction was, Well, why not? She had to have something for herself. God knows, she got little enough out of him these days. If she really wanted it, why not let her have it? He owed her that much, or more, putting up with a sad fool like himself all this time. Besides, maybe it would settle her down some. Settle things down all around. Even him? Well—if he got better they’d have a family, and if he got worse at least the baby would be some comfort to her.

“Would you like to have a child, Liraun?” he asked her in a careful voice. Her face went blank.

“My husband,” she said, after a considerable pause, “at the Alàntene, do you recall a group of Elders at the far end of the beach, twizan who spoke instead of dancing or singing?”

“Yes.”

“Those twizan were enacting the story of the First Woman. And this, in different words, is that story.” She struck a posture, and began in a subtly altered voice: “In the First Days, before the world was wholly made, and before Harmony had yet been established, there was no life on the land. All People who then lived dwelt in Elder Sea. Among them were the Ancestors, for at this time the Ancestors were still in the Womb of the Sea, for the world had not yet been born from out of it, and time had not begun. Now the Ancestors went up and down in the Womb of the Sea, and they went to and fro in it, and in their pride they called themselves the Lords of All Things, for they were yet ignorant, and thought that the Womb was already the World-to-Be. And they named the Womb the World-That-Is, and themselves masters of it. This was an offense against Harmony Unborn. So the First High One, perceiving this, sent an Affliction upon the Ancestors from beyond space. So it struck them down, and the manner of the smiting was this: that the Womb of the Sea, the Womb-That-Was-Ocean, became blighted and shriveled, and the Ancestors were every one of them killed, save two. The bones of the dead Ancestors were sunk to the Place of Affliction on the bottom of Elder Sea, but the two who were spared were cast up naked on the land, because the Womb would hold them no more. They were the First Man and First Woman. They stood in barren desert, and nothing moved in all the World though time had begun, because the land could bring forth no life. Seeing this, the First Woman knew what she must do, and she said, ‘I will give of myself, and infuse the World with the life of my blood.’ And so then the First Man took the First Woman’s blood, and with it he made the clear rivers that run over the land, and the pools that lie in the land. And he took the First Woman’s dung, and with it he made the Fertile Earth that covers the land and is the house of life, and with the First Woman’s hair he made all the plants and the trees that are in the World and grow in the Fertile Earth. Then the First Man broke the First Woman’s body into parts, and she cried out in great pain, but he sculpted the parts of her body as clay, and from them he made all the beasts who roam abroad in the World, and all the People who dwell on the Fertile Earth. But the First Woman’s cry of pain shattered and escaped, and the four shards of it became the four winds that wander forever about the World, looking for a surcease of pain that is not in it. And so it has always been the duty of the descendants of the First Woman to replenish the World with their bodies, and to bring forth life out of themselves with pain.”

Liraun stopped talking.

That, apparently, was that.

Farber almost laughed.

He had triggered her “circuitous and symbolic” circuit again, and away she had gone on it. He had gotten little out of her speech, other than the fact that she considered it her duty to God to bear children. He assumed that meant that the answer to his first question was “yes.”

Liraun was watching him intently.

“My wife,” he said with great seriousness, meeting her gaze, “I have decided that this is the time for you to conceive, and to bear your children.”

Her eyes went opaque.

“I hear you, my husband,” she said, mechanically. There was a considerable pause, long enough to make him wonder if she had fainted or fallen asleep on her feet with her opaque eyes open. Her expression was unreadable. At last, in a voice that started in a whistling whisper very far away, and slowly rose into audibility, a squeaky voice that quivered with strain as though it was brittle enough to snap in two, a drugged voice like that of someone being tortured, slowly being torn open to emit each word, she said, “My husband—oh my husband, I’m afraid!”

Farber took her in his arms and held her until he felt some of the tension go out of her body, and it slumped a little in his grip. Then he said: “There’s no need for you to be afraid.” And, very gently: “You’re a woman; this would have come to you eventually no matter how long you waited. You shouldn’t be afraid of it.”

“I hear you,” Liraun repeated, ritualistically. She pushed herself away from him. “Let me be by myself now, for a small while,” she said wearily. She walked slowly away into another part of the house.

He didn’t see her again the rest of the evening.

By bedtime, Liraun seemed to have regained some of her composure.

She padded in from the upper room, gave him a half-challenging, half-plaintive look as he stood washing at the basin, wordlessly pulled her frock over her head and off in one smooth motion, and then lay down naked on the bed in front of him, inviting him with her eyes, her mouth, her opened knees. She was trembling even before he touched her, and when he lowered himself down on her, skin touching skin all along the length of their bodies, a little muscular twitch went through her, as if they were magnets clicking together.

Their lovemaking that night was more violent than it had ever been before, a desperate pitched combat with nothing of leisure, or tenderness to it—rather it was a thing of harsh noises, slamming bodies, hard and hurtful hands. She seemed to be trying to rip him apart, and it took all of his considerable strength to prevent her. He was torn and bleeding in a dozen places in the morning, and his sides and buttocks were drummed raw by her knees and heels. She wore the marks of his fingers on her body for a week. Once she did something she’d never done before—she bit him seriously hard in her passion, drawing blood from his shoulder. The next moment she had rolled him completely over, and was riding above him like a succubus, like a mad thing, her head thrown back, the muscles corded all the way up the side of her body to her jaw.

When he came, he could feel his seed shoot up deep, deep inside her, going home.

Afterward, she assured him that she had conceived.

At the end of the month, Liraun went off to the Hall of Science for her tests. There was a great deal more involved than a simple pregnancy test, however, and Farber understood little of it. The testing was interwoven with an elaborate mesh of ritual and symbology that Liraun was reluctant to explain. She had fasted and practiced total abstinence for the past three days, sleeping alone on a hard pallet near the hearth. Indeed, although she continued to cook and clean for him, she refused to touch him, or even come near him, and she spoke almost not at all. Farber kept at her until he had convinced himself that her sullen iron absorption could not be broken, and then he submitted to the situation with as good a grace as he could muster. He spent the evenings trying to catch up on his correspondence, writing letter after letter that he would almost certainly never send. Things are different here, he would write, and then pause, sometimes for hours, staring at the paper, mesmerized by the homogeneity of the banal and the inexpressible.

Across the room, his wife would be scooping warm ashes from the hearth, adding powdered bone, charcoal dust, a few drops of an unknown viscous liquid from a vial, kneading the mixture into a dark oily paste. She now painted herself with this substance every night—transforming her face into a tragic ashen mask, rubbing it into her scalp until her hair became a dull dead grey, painting gaunt-black starvation shadows under her eyes. She looked then like a grimy, desolate ghost, and, before she went to sleep she would sing a ghostly little song to herself in a shivering, keening voice that seemed to avoid any key familiar to Farber’s ear. On awakening, she would wipe her face clean and start again with different substances. This time her face would become a frightening—almost insectile—mask, done in streaks of dull green and blue and black, with little spots of sullen red. Fierce resignation, righteous rage, religious ecstasy, sexual frenzy—Farber could never decide which of these, if any, the face was intended to represent. She would also paint concentric circles around her nipples, cabalistic swirls on her flat belly, stylized arrows thrusting down her loins into her pubic hair. Her canine teeth would gleam against the dully glistening face paint, suddenly seeming much longer, suddenly—shockingly—becoming fangs. She would remain naked all day, unself-consciously, paying no attention whatsoever to Farber’s periodic attacks of prurience.

She hadn’t washed in days, and she was beginning to develop a rotting-sweet smell that was not entirely unpleasant.

Neither was it entirely unpleasant to awaken to intense cold, as Farber did on the morning of the test: a cold more sensed through the sleeping-furs as yet than actually experienced, giving him a shuddery, almost pleasurable intimation of the discomfort to which he would be subjected when he finally did get up. He drowsed for a while, relishing the warmth he was wrapped in. Then he stuck his head up above the furs. The cold stabbed glassy talons into his cheeks, and shocked him a little more awake.

Liraun was moving noiselessly about the room. She had opened the wide, low window in the east wall; that explained why it was so cold. Through that window, he could see a maze of low roofs stairstepping away and down, and the fall of heavy new snow that was settling onto them. There was no sky, only the snow—line after steady line of it, coming down with ponderous, unstoppable grace, filling all the air. Silent, furry, soft, like a slow fall of caterpillars. It blotted up sound, and softened Fire Woman’s harsh glare into an even, directionless, undersea light. Occasionally the snow would gust in through the window, swirling and dancing across the polished silverwood floor, spiraling into the air again, vanishing. Some of the flakes struck Liraun, clung, and melted, leaving shiny wet spots on her skin. She ignored them. Naked, she moved to the stone washbasin, broke the scum of ice on the water, and began to wash herself. Her movements were slow and deliberate, and she evinced no discomfort with the cold. Her face—the first time, Farber realized, that he’d seen it bare of paint in days—was serene and contemplative. The water was already beginning to freeze again, and there was a glaze of ice in her hair.

Farber dozed, wrapped in his cocoon of warmth, and opened his eyes in time to see Liraun leaving the house. She had put on her ferocious daytime face, although this time there were streaks of orange and patches of bright yellow in among the green and blue and black. He wondered sleepily what the brighter colors represented. Hope? A somber hope, then. A fierce, cruel hope, rooted in despair. Liraun’s painted-mask seemed too harsh and hard-edged a thing for such a furry, filtered morning. He called to her, drowsily, but she did not answer. She seemed a completely isolated creature now—mysterious, self-contained, unreachable, gliding through the external world without touching it or being touched by it. Like oil over water, Farber thought. Not mixing at all. He didn’t call to her again. She was above him, in this moment—or beyond him, anyway. He wondered if there was anything he could do that would make her respond to him, if she was aware of his presence at all. He thought not. That made him very sad, although drowsiness blunted the pain into a poignant, drifting wistfulness. She wrapped herself in a grey cloak, and, without looking back at him, went out into the storm. The door closed solidly behind her. He was left alone in a room that was filled with muted white light as a mountain lake is filled with clear icy water, and he sank slowly down through the light, and through the whispering hiss and murmur of the snow, until he bumped against the bottom of the lake, and then he slept.

He woke to a silence that was composed of many small natural noises just too far away to be heard. Occasionally one of the noises—doors slamming away down the Hill, footsteps, a voice—would become momentarily distinct: a sound made up of the many small silences that enabled it to be heard. Sunlight glinted from wall and ceiling, dazzled his eyes. Farber got up and hopped across the cold floor to the window, clutching one of the sleeping-furs. The storm was over. The sky was its usual intense blue-black, the roofs and towers of Old City outlined starkly against it. There was a three-inch crest of powder snow on every flat surface, on tree branches and window ledges and roofs. Hoarfrost glistened over every thing, and sparkled in the air like tiny crystalline fireflies. It was incredibly cold. Farber closed the window, and, cursing and sputtering, hurried to struggle into his clothes. Goddam, it was cold! By the time he got a fire going in the hearth, he was shivering, and his fingers were numb. How did Liraun stand this? Not for the first time, he entertained the uneasy suspicion that Liraun was much hardier than he. The nutlike, leafy smell of the smoke filled the room, followed, more tentatively, by an expanding wedge of warmth. Farber began to thaw. He stood by the fire awhile, flexing his fingers, and then returned to the window. The glass was coated with frost. He hand-warmed a hole in the frost, and peered out. Nothing was moving in Old City. The snow in the streets was still smooth and unmarred. Windows were shuttered, or blinded by frost. The black rock walls of the ancient houses were sheathed in ice. The world was a stark composition in black and white, ice, black rock, white snow-capped roofs, black sky: an overdeveloped monochrome photograph, all jagged, unrelieved masses of light and shadow. There was no color, no chiaroscuro, no shadings of grey. The Cold People had taken over completely now. This was their world and their season, ruled by the House of Dûn: harsh, frozen, silent.

Shuddering a little, Farber turned away from the window.

He spent the morning doing nothing. That was not unusual—he did nothing most days. He had become quite adroit at it. But the almost supernatural hush and suspension of the morning somehow made him ashamed of his own lethargy. For the first time in weeks, be began to find his sloth distasteful. What good are you to anybody like this? he asked himself bitterly. What kind of a life is this? But the habit of lassitude was hard to break. He sat near the window, and brooded, feeling like a man who cannot wake all the way up from an uneasy dream, feeling stale and dull and useless, and listened to the silence. Occasionally, one of the silverwood trees outside would snap in the cold, a sharp crack like a rifle shot, or there would be a whoosh and thump as a branch gave way somewhere and dumped a load of snow into the street. Once a swarm of shiny-scaled flying lizards perched under the eaves and exchanged trilling arpeggios that clashed and shimmered through the frozen air like showers of a cold liquid metal. But mostly there was silence, and it seemed deep enough to drown.

Going down in that hush for the third time, Farber was snagged by a persistent fishhook of sound. He had been hearing it without hearing it for a couple of minutes, but now it registered. Slowly, the sound drew him up out of stagnant pools of thought. The hammering of stone on stone. Klak klak kadak. Klak! Unsteadily, Farber got to his feet.

It was right outside.

Feeling strangely apprehensive, Farber went to the door.

Two Cian men were struggling to erect a stone eikon in front of the house. As Farber stepped outside, one of the Cian was driving it home with a big stone hammer. Klak! Klak! Klak! the hammer went. The noise rang frighteningly loud in the silent street, and sparks flew at each blow. Then they were finished. The two Cian stepped aside, wiped their foreheads, rubbed their hands, and looked at the eikon with satisfaction. It was a St. Andrew’s Cross, about four feet high, carved from a milky, fine-grained stone. Some small furry animal had been quartered, raggedly, and the quarters had been lashed to the arms of the cross. The animal’s head had been tied upright atop the upper right hand arm. It stared reproachfully out at the world with blind agate eyes. Blood had seeped into the pale stone, and stained the snow around the base of the cross.

Farber stared at the eikon in bewilderment.

The Cian men were watching him intently. Their faces were contorted into terrifying, fang-glinting snarls. Their hands were covered with blood.

Farber started toward them, repressing an urge to run away instead. This grotesque kind of rictus was, with the Cian, indicative of extreme good will and pleasure—although they were an undemonstrative enough race that it was an expression seldom seen in public. The Terran equivalent would be to leap and shout in unrestrained joy. I have no idea what this is all about, Farber thought, numbly. In spite of the cold, his brain had not cleared at all. He felt confused and stupid, and couldn’t imagine how he was expected to act in this situation. His feet crunched through the snow, sinking up to the ankle with every step. The brilliant sunlight dazzled his eyes, and made his head ache. He was sickened by the glassy stare of the dead animal, and by the blood, which was already beginning to freeze into tarry, glistening streaks. He came to a stop, blinking, baffled, shivering. What do 1 say now? he wondered.

“Good wishes to you,” one of the Cian said, saving Farber the strain of initiating conversation. “You are one with the People of Life, the Ones Who Rule the New Earth. May Their radiance fill you, and warm your dreams.”

He fell silent. “Thank you,” Farber said.

“You are a vessel for Their Light,” the other Cian put in. “Through you, It refracts into the Thousand Warm Colors. You help to harmonize the radiance in the Place of Turning Silence, the Motionless Unmoved Center.”

Farber searched for the correct response. “Your light illuminates my darkness,” he said at last.

“Në, it is of no circumstance,” the Cian replied. Then, less formally: “No obligation here. It is pleasure to inform your happiness.”

“Sa!” the other injected, enthusiastically, “This is a great moment for you! My soul chimes in sympathy.”

They snarled joyously at him.

“I don’t understand,” Farber did not say. He wanted to, though.

By this time, the ceremony had attracted the attention of several of Farber’s neighbors from up and down the Row. They gathered around, five or six more Cian males, and added their own polite praise and congratulations to those of the two emissaries. There was much low warbling and snapping of fingers, which was applause. Someone produced a glass flask of the potent native liqueur, and it passed from hand to hand. If their social construct had included the slapping of backs, there would have been back-slapping as well.

Farber saw the light, belatedly, at about this point.

Bemused, he stood in the alien street and drank with his well-wishers, the ancient ice-sheathed black walls rising sheer on either side, a narrow swath of sky visible at the top, like a cold blue-black river that flowed over the world.

A wind came up and ruffled the fur on the dead animal’s head, made the head appear to be nodding in a deliberate, grisly fashion. There was an inscription on the eikon that Farber could not translate. He memorized it for Ferri’s semantic computer.

And, after a while, they went respectfully away, and left him alone.

Liraun came home about an hour later. She wore no paint, and her skin looked fresh and scrubbed. She was dressed in long, bright-green frock, embroidered with designs in yellow and orange, but bordered by a heavy somber black. She was obviously naked beneath it. Her long hair had been put up, and fastened with pins of silver and obsidian. The fanatical tension that had possessed her for the past few days was gone. She seemed calm and happy. She also seemed, as she paused in the doorway to stare at him, a totally aroused and totally erotic creature, almost feral, as though she were a female animal in estrus. He could feel the heat come up out of her, and smell the hot musky scent of her body. It struck him like a wave, drying his throat and tightening his thighs.

She stared at him for a long, intent moment, as if she had never seen him before, as if she was trying to memorize every line and detail of him. Then, slowly, she smiled.

“My husband,” she said quietly.

And she closed the door behind her.

Sexually, Liraun had always been somewhat passive, but that night she was aggressive, inexhaustible and demanding. She wore Farber out, she used him up. She drove him to the limits of his endurance, and then somehow urged him beyond them. She was relaxed and cheerful about it, but there was no arguing with her insistence. She seemed happy enough. Her play and pillow-talk were full of excitement and gaiety, and she was intensely proud of her pregnancy. But, beneath this, there was a sadness so deep and intense that it could only be called despair. With her there in the darkness, experiencing her slow rhythmical cries, the desperate spasms of her body, her legs crushing the breath from him, the muscles in her neck cording like taut wire cables, her head beginning to lash violently from side to side—as if she was in pain so great she must seek surcease by dashing out her brains—Farber felt curiously alone and disassociated, a spectator at someone else’s bittersweet apotheosis. It was that inexplicable storm of joy and despair that fueled her, that drove her, that was, in this moment, her lover more than he.

Just before dawn, a party of Twilight People, Those Who Have Influence with Dreams, arrived for a Naming ceremony. The party was composed of a male Elder, a twizan—Farber couldn’t decide if this was the same Singer who had married them; if not, then he was certainly struck from the same archetype—five young Cian women in varying stages of a pregnancy, one so huge that her time must certainly be almost at hand, and a soúbrae, or Old Woman. The Old Woman was old indeed, even more ancient, by the look of her, than the twizan. She gave Farber the impression that she kept herself alive only by a conscious effort of will—that if she turned her mind away from the task for even a moment she would crumble into dust and ashes. She was also, Farber realized, the only really old Cian woman he could remember seeing. She had a snow-white robe, eyes like ice, a face as hard as winter-frozen earth, and she was definitely the person in charge of the Naming. Under her taciturn direction, Liraun was specially dressed and painted, the east-facing window was opened to allow the first rays of Fire Woman’s rising to strike into the room, and a roaring, oddly pungent-smelling fire was built in the firepit. The Twilight People and Liraun gathered close around the hearth, and the ceremony began. It seemed to go on forever. There were many ritual exchanges between Liraun and the pregnant women, especially with the woman closest to term, while the Old Woman chanted responses, and the Singer sang a haunting, minor-filled song so desolate-sounding that it might have made a banshee sad. Farber sat in the far corner during all this, wrapped in a fur. He was exhausted and bedraggled, and the noise and smoke of the Naming made him irritable. Everyone ignored him. So he sat glumly by himself, watching the chanting, gesticulating figures, feeling caught up in some mechanism that he could not understand, and which was sweeping him toward a conclusion he could neither predict, forestall, nor comprehend.

The Old Woman passed around a series of unidentifiable—to Farber—objects that were touched and handled reverently by the participants, the first rays of dawn flashed from a coronet of tiny silvered mirrors that had been placed on Liraun’s head, and the ceremony was over. She was no longer Farber’s chattel. From that moment on, legally and by ancient custom, she belonged to no one save herself and her Ancestors. For the first time in her life, she was her own person.

Now her name was Liraun Jé Morrigan.

Liraun was now a Mother of Shasine, and her elevation from chattel to the highest caste in the society drastically changed their lives. She had discussed the subject with Farber when they had first decided to have children, but, as usual, much of what she said was enigmatic and couched in obscure allegory, and none of it had prepared Farber for the totality of the change.

By law, Liraun now became the head of their household for the duration of her pregnancy, representing it in its relations with the body of Cian society, and holding title to all its goods and property. This did not mean that Farber had been reduced to a chattel; his status had not been diminished—Liraun’s had been tremendously enhanced. In theory, Liraun now had some authority over Farber, but, in practice, it was the custom to let the husband and wife work that problem out domestically, and most of them came to an equitable compromise. But while Farber was married to Liraun, and while Liraun was a Mother of Shasine, none of his actions were binding on the household. They carried no legal weight. He was not allowed to negotiate contracts that affected the entire household, nor could he dispose of or transfer any of their property, or rent a house without Liraun’s consent—just as, before her pregnancy, Liraun herself had been forbidden to do any of these things. In fact, Farber was still better off than Liraun had been. Before her elevation, she had enjoyed almost no legal rights at all, being considered a minor and under Farber’s absolute rule. Farber, at least, maintained his rights as an adult citizen, but was expected to defer to Liraun’s judgment in communal matters, as she was now a superior creature, “One Who Has Been Translated to Harmony.”

This was disconcerting.

Also, Liraun was no longer allowed to work to support herself. As a Mother of Shasine, she was part of the Council that, in conjunction with the Elder’s Lodge, ruled Shasine. One of the first things she was required to do, after her Naming, was to quit her job. She was on call to the Council at any hour of the day or night, and could have no other duty that might interfere with that single overriding concern. Her husband, therefore, was required to support her, and was subject to severe penalties if he did not. And Farber’s regular stipend from the Terran Co-operative was not enough to keep them both, even added to the small amount Ferri was able to pay him for “research assistance.”

That was alarming.

Surprising even himself, Farber rose to the challenge. He put away the bottle, and he put away the pills. He pulled himself together with an almost audible click. And he went out and got a job.

It was down at the River-Docks, a manual job unloading ice-skimmers.

The Cold People had settled in to stay—the Fertile Earth was locked in ice, and shrouded in snow and silence. At night, Winter Man blazed high in the sky, His full terrible length above the horizon now. The River Aome had finally frozen over. Every morning on his way to work—cold and still as death, a pink flush of dawn just beginning to dilute the jet-black night sky, the last of the tiny moons rolling down toward the far horizon like thumb-flicked marbles—Farber could see it gleam in a long, dull gunmetal line, a soldered seam that held the invisible world together. By the time the cablecar had brought him down from Old City, he could look through the growing blue light and see the first of the big black iceboats skimming up out of the west, up on four long legs, like water beetles from a Terran river grown mechanical and great. When the Aome froze it froze all the way to the bottom, and remained that way until the Thaw. River traffic thereafter went on the ice. That ice was as solid as stone, and mirror-smooth in most places, save where the wind had dusted the surface with snow. No better road to the West could be asked. The Aome skirted the foot of Aei New City for twenty miles, and every mile of that twenty bristled with docks, and every dock in every mile buzzed with commerce, deep winter or high summer.

By midmorning, with the sun as high as it ever got in that season, the ice would look green-grey, instead of the blue it had been in the dawnlight, and intricate hieroglyphic patterns would have been scored into its surface by the runnerblades of the iceboats. Sometimes, if Fire Woman was particularly intense that day, the top half-inch of ice would melt, and the fast-skimming iceboats would throw a wake of water and half-frozen slush high into the air on either side.

Once, Farber saw a skimmer hit a freak irregularity in the ice, a jagged, tilted block that protruded three feet above the surface. The impact jarred two of the runners into the air—the iceboat skidded along precariously on the remaining two for an endless moment, but the task of keeping it upright was too much for the boat’s gyrostabilizers, and it went over. The boat rolled twice, very fast, snapping its runners, making a noise like a million tin cans tail-dragged by a multitude of dogs, bounced into the air and came down hard, skidded, and rolled again. Then it exploded. The burning wreck melted a hole in the ice, and settled into the slush to a depth of six feet. When the fire guttered and the ice refroze, the boat bow was left protruding from the surface at a forty-five-degree angle, and flags and flares marked the wreck for two days until Cian work crews could remove it.

That was an exceptional incident, but more commonplace accidents were avoided by inches—if they were avoided at all—every day. Most of them involved pedestrians. The people who worked on the river started their tasks well before dawn, but by noon there were many individual citizens of Aei out and about on the ice as well, many of them on their way to the great saltwater marshes on the far side of the Aome, for one reason or another. Hunters out after lizards and snappers and mud-devils. Potters hoping to collect certain rare clays and earths needed for special ceremonial glazes. Holy Men on the Shadow Path, seeking solitude to facilitate their efforts to find Syncopation with Harmony. Madmen, failed men, on the Lightless Path, seeking degradation and pain. Parties of young women, off to gather lizard eggs and fungus and winter mushrooms. Strollers and sightseers. All walking across the traffic lanes on the River, all oblivious to any danger from the hurtling iceboats, which occasionally came quite close to splattering them all over the ice.

Most endangered—and most oblivious—were the hordes of young children who appeared in the late afternoon to play on the frozen river. They would scatter out across the ice, tobogganing on their stomachs, skating, playing at curling with long stick-and-twig brooms and flat-bottomed ceramic disks—none of these pastimes imported from Terra, as Farber had first suspected, but independently derived, as will almost inevitably happen on a world where there is a juxtaposition of playful, humanoid biped children and ice for them to play on. Inevitable or not, the playing children were nearly invisible during the long hours of twilight, and were a terrible headache to the iceboat pilots. It was an odd quirk of racial psychology that the Cian, living in what was in many ways an intensely regulated society, made no attempt to keep private citizens off the ice, or to interfere with their right to amble across the busiest traffic lanes. Of course, this meant that the ice-ambling pedestrians were left to take their own chances, but if they didn’t mind risking a collision with a ten-ton ice-boat, then the pilots weren’t going to worry too much about it either. They contented themselves with sounding their fog-whistles if children ventured too near the major lanes, and the children, unperturbed and unimpressed, shouted happily back. The low, mournful hooting of the iceboats and the faint, shrill cries of the children floated constantly at the edge of Farber’s hearing as he worked.

It was hard, heavy, fast-paced work, loading and unloading the iceboats, hauling cargo to warehouses and staging areas. It was the kind of work that would have been performed by robot machinery on Terra, but nothing in Shasine was automated unless it was absolutely unavoidable. Farber had always been a powerful man, but his robustness was the product of spas and intramural athletics—he’d never had a job that required prolonged physical labor, day after day. To his shame he found the work amazingly hard. The first week was a blur of fatigue, a nightmare that he stumbled through like a leaden-limbed automaton. He was head-and-shoulders taller than the biggest of his Cian workmates; and could lift a heavier weight than they, but their endurance was incredible. Any of them could outlast him with ease, and keep working smoothly and efficiently while he slumped in exhaustion, blown, gulping at the needle-sharp arctic air. He was stronger than they were, but he didn’t have their stamina, and that was what counted.

Instead of deriding him, Farber’s workmates were friendly and encouraging, sympathetic without being condescending. They gave him advice on cold-weather working, and tips on how to load and unload heavy cargo.

Grimly, Farber kept at it.

Weeks went by, and Farber gradually settled into his job. He grew more used to the pace, and the work went easier. He burned off his excess fat, and became more lean than he’d ever been before—in fact, he was almost gaunt. But what meat he did keep was tough, firm-packed, and hard as iron. He had never been healthier.

He was also happier than he’d been since leaving Earth, although it took him a long time to realize it. At first, Farber had regarded his job as a grim, degrading necessity, but he had slowly become reconciled to it, and now drew a good deal of satisfaction from it. It was hard, honest work that kept him out in the sun and the clean air—more important, although he never verbalized this, it gave him something concrete to do, something he could accomplish with his own hands, a way to carve order from chaos. It gave him the feeling that he could manipulate his destiny, and that assurance—illusion or not—killed some of the panic of existing in a milieu he did not understand. For the first time, he stopped fighting Weinunnach quite so much. In fact, he started thinking of it as Weinunnach, instead of mentally insisting on “Lisle.” A lot of the tension went out of him when he did, as though he had set down a load he hadn’t been aware of carrying. He stopped seeing his workmates as remote alien figures, and began to form friendships with them. They were a relaxed, equable crew—although Shasine had a sharply defined caste system, you didn’t get that feeling of fastidious class-consciousness from the individual Cian that you got from an Englishman or a Hindu. Manual labor was not a despised, menial thing here, as it was on Earth; for the most part, it imparted no more and no less prestige than any other profession. Thus, the equanimity of the crew, who were given no reason to feel inferior to anyone in their society. Farber found them easier to get along with than the Thousand Families, or the brooding Shadow Men aristocrats like Jacawen. He found himself looking forward with pleasure to the day’s work.

He was content, he realized.

Liraun seemed happier too, although there was still an edge of sadness to her. Much of the inexplicable dissatisfaction and wildness was gone, or banked down to embers, at least. She had accepted—resigned herself to?—the role that she was to play. With that had come a new serenity. Their marriage had settled down. They were more relaxed with each other, and more tolerant. Liraun’s duties with the Council kept her busy, but not so busy that she couldn’t spend plenty of time with her husband. In the early months of her pregnancy, they would often borrow mounts and a pack of coursers—long, lean carnivores something like giant shrews, but without a shrew’s viciousness—from Liraun’s father, Genawen, and go hunting in the great salt marshes south of Aei. They rarely caught anything, but it was pleasure enough just to ride through the sprawling marshland, the air crisp and cold and the sky dazzling listening to the plaintive mooing of their snaky mounts and the shrill yip-yip-yip of the running coursers, cantering with a hollow iron clatter across the rude stone bridges that connected the strips of higher ground, surrounded by polished green ice, snow, and endless miles of gaunt, winter-stripped reeds, meeting only the vast flocks of silver-scaled lizards that would thunder into the sky at their approach to soar and circle and sob petulantly until the intruders were safely past. Sometimes they would go without the coursers, penetrating deep into the marshes to avoid hunters and mushroom-gatherers, and Liraun would go swimming—it was always well below freezing, but Liraun would casually pull off her clothes, knock a hole in the milky ice, thinner here because it was over sluggishly moving salt water, and churn through the shallow pools like an icebreaker, disappearing into the reed-ceilinged tunnels that formed over the tidal channels, sloshing into view again on the far side, splashing and whooping and making a terrible uproar, dozens of tiny otterlike creatures scattering in panic before her, lizards and redfins screaming hysterically skyward, Farber holding the mounts and watching her, laughing, affectionate, bemused, his breath steaming in the cold air and condensing into frost on his lips. When she emerged from her swim, she would shake herself free of water like a dog, using a piece of rough cloth to scrape away the patches of ice that had formed on her skin.

Sometimes then they would make love, on a bed of crackly reeds strewn over the frozen ground. Occasionally, when they were on their way back to Aei, they would see a marshman, distant cousins of the Cian: a gnarled, dwarfish man with bone-white skin, wearing ragged furs and artfully worked iron, his hair lacquered into two enormous upthrust beehives, his face painted a garish blue and orange, a string of freshly killed snappers and redfins hanging head down from a belt slung over his shoulder. His eyes very bright and sharp, like black volcanic glass. Calm and solemn, with great dignity, the marshman would watch them ride by. Then he would raise his fist in a salute of—not adulation, exactly, but rather an unbowed but respectful acknowledgment of their presence. The marshmen believed that the Cian were ghosts. What they believed Farber to be, there is no telling. The ghost of a ghost, perhaps.

The weeks passed, and Shasine shouldered deeper into Winter. Snow piled up in the streets of Aei, and there were stretches during bad blizzards when no one ventured outside for a half a week—the city then seemed desolate and deserted, only the yellow and orange gleam of the windows to hint at life. Farber got Ferri to buy an arctic skier’s mask for him at the Co-op commissary. He wore it to work, and the Cian gaped at him in the streets. His co-workers at the Docks were delighted by it. They began, jovially, to refer to him as “No-Face.” Farber didn’t care. His nose would almost certainly have become frostbitten without the mask, and the snow goggles sewn into it helped him tolerate the glare Fire Woman kicked up against the icefields.

It had finally become cold enough to make Liraun admit to discomfort. They obtained a featureless, four-foot sphere that was placed in the corner of the downstairs room. It radiated heat and a smoky golden light, without any fuel source that Farber could discern, and was apparently inexhaustible. Here was a viable trade commodity for Keane! Certainly, this device was almost supernaturally efficient. Too efficient for Liraun—sometimes the room became too hot for her and she would retreat to one of the upstairs rooms that still held the evening chill. She spent much of her time there anyway. Her pregnancy had finally caught up with her. She was just entering her fifth month, and Cian women usually came to term in six. Her stomach had hardly swelled at all, but suddenly she had become ponderous and weak. She moved painfully now, carrying herself with slow caution, as if her belly was a membranous sack of water that she feared would rupture and spill. And in a way, it was just that. She still answered the summons of the Council, but now when she returned home there would be no expeditions to the marshes, no strenuous bareskin swims, no rambles around Aei. Instead she would sit in the upstairs room, sometimes for hours, and stare out through the open window at the hilly winter streets of Old City. She was sinking into her old melancholia again. This time it was deeper and more fully in possession of her than ever. She spoke little. She laughed not at all. Her face was drawn, and her complexion pale, as if she was continually in pain.

It seemed to Farber that pregnancy was not so stark and debilitating a thing with most healthy women, and that worried him. But those were healthy Terran women, after all. Who understood the quirks of Cian physiology, who knew what to expect? Certainly not Farber. None of Liraun’s relatives seemed worried, and Farber decided that he had no choice but to accept their assessment of the situation. Liraun herself was not worried, although she was deeply sad. Whenever he asked her, she assured him that everything was proceeding normally. These were about the only words he did get out of her—she became more uncommunicative by the day. But now it was Liraun who would wake up crying, and who would need to be held and comforted. She would not say why. She was ashamed of it, refused to talk of it, and would have liked to pretend that it did not happen at all. But it did. And when it did, she would cling desperately to Farber, as if by pressing hard enough she could weld their flesh together inseparably.

One afternoon on his way back from work, Farber dropped in on Anthony Ferri. The ethnologist seemed delighted to see him. In fact, Farber had never known him to be so animated, so crackling with energy and good humor. Ferri’s eyes were alive and sparkling, and his long, horsy face was radiant. His arms were stained with blood to the elbows, and he was grinning like an unrepentant ax murderer the moment after his crime.

Farber stared at him. Ferri seemed unable to stand still. He shifted his weight continuously from one foot to another, unconsciously doing a shuffling little dance of joy. Dancing vigorously, Ferri explained that he had finally, after months of complex and delicate negotiations, managed to obtain the corpse of a male Cian for dissection.

“You have to see this!” Ferri exclaimed. “The things I’ve found! I’ve learned more today than I have all year.” Enthusiastically, he grabbed Farber’s arm and began hustling him toward the rear of the apartment. “You just have to see this!”

Reluctantly, Farber allowed himself to be dragged along.

The long corridor leading to the kitchen had been set up as a dissecting room, jammed with lights and machines, a jury-rigged tangle of extension wires snaking across the floor. It smelled strongly of blood and formaldehyde. There was a rollaway bed against the wall, doing duty as an operating table, and, on it, a carved, flayed thing that no longer bore much resemblance to human or humanoid. Ferri seized a scalpel and jabbed at the body. “See? There’s a real thick extra layer of subcutaneous fat. Cold adaptation, of course. But there’s more to it than just that, I think. There’s real hair only on the head and the crotch, and the underarms. This other stuff, this down, is really a kind of fine-textured fur, very close-meshed fibers—it’s water-resilient, like duck feathers. Look at the musculature here. And the bone structure in the legs. The dorsal ridges aren’t quite as pronounced as they are in a human. The ilia in the pelvis aren’t quite as flared, and the hips are a tiny bit longer and narrower. The shoulders are narrower, the chest less rounded. See? The forearms are just a bit shorter. All minuscule things, but, taken together, they might be significant. And the feet, they’re not as broad and clublike as ours, not as good a weight-carrying base. I’ll bet there’s a lot of foot trouble among the Cian! And look! Here, the most interesting thing of all—I found the remnants of an inner eyelid, a transparent, aqueous-filled lid. Atrophied, of course, but there.”

Farber shrugged. “So what does this mean?”

“I don’t know,” Ferri said. “I suppose we may never know for sure. But I’ve been dreaming up half-baked theories all day. The way I read it is that the Cian evolved from aquatic mammals—or amphibious ones, anyway—a remarkably short time ago. Short in a geological sense, of course. The layer of fat, the waterproof down, the transparent eyelid, they all point to that. If they didn’t start out as a land animal, then they haven’t had as much time to adjust to an erect posture as Homo sapiens sapiens has had. The musculature, the bone structure, the hips. Most especially, the feet. Naturally, all this is speculation. I’ve got another specimen on ice, and tomorrow I’ll go over it with the medical computer at the Co-op Hospital, see if I can’t get some evidence to confirm some of this stuff.”

“Interesting,” Farber said, in a neutral voice. Actually, he was not interested at all. It was hot and close in the corridor, and the stink of blood and death was overpowering. He was hoping that Ferri would get off this jag so that they could go back into the living room.

Ferri glanced quizzically at Farber. “You’re not very impressed by all this, are you?”

Farber shrugged. “It’s interesting. But don’t expect me to jump and shout, Tony. I don’t have the bias of your specialty, to make it exciting for me, yes? And it doesn’t seem to be anything of immediate relevance.”

“No?” Ferri arched an eyebrow, and then waved his blood-stained scalpel at Farber. “You might be surprised!” Some of the aggressive bounce went out of him. For the first time, he seemed to realize that he and his clothes were heavily splattered with blood. “Hell,” he muttered, “let me get some of this muck off of me.” He disappeared into the bathroom. A moment later, Farber heard the shower come on.

Farber went back out into the living room. He found the chair that was the farthest away from the corridor, and sat down. Even there, a faint smell of blood reached him. He waited.

A few minutes later, Ferri came out, dressed in slacks and a sweatshirt. He switched on the exhaust blower to carry away the blood odor, and then went to a portable bar and built them drinks. He gave one to Farber and sat down in an opposing chair.

“Christ!” Ferri sighed, settling in, letting the foam cup itself to his shape. “A long day.” He sipped at his drink. Now, he looked tired. Evidently Farber’s lack of enthusiasm had brought him down from his manic edge. “Sorry to’ve rattled all that gibble-gabble off at you, Joe, but God! This means a lot to me, and I guess I’m kind of wound up, you know? If you had any idea how hard it is to get any kind of cooperation out of the Cian, how damn suspicious they are, how much sweet-talking and doubledealing I had to do to spring these two lousy specimens—” He sighed again, and took a bigger drink. “You think this is all a bunch of doubledomed pedantry, don’t you?”

Farber smiled noncommittally. He swirled the murky stuff in his glass. Strange to be drinking Scotch again. At last he said, politely, “It does seem a bit academic.”

“Not at all,” Ferri said, emphatically. “I’ll bet on it. This might be the key to everything. Hell.” He paused. “There’s something very odd about the Cian culture. Goddamn it, there’s something almost artificial about some of this. This business of the males nursing the young, for example. I hooked the specimen in there over with a diagnosticator, and the enzymic and hormonal changes in the basic male system needed to make it possible are incredibly complex. And the thing’s complex in execution too—lactation in the males is triggered by the secretion of musk by the pregnant female, and by minute amounts of hormones that osmose through her skin and are transferred to the male by touch. Dammit, a system like that could never evolve naturally. I don’t think so, anyway. Not in a sophisticated mammal. It’s way over-complicated. And it’s unnecessary. Why can’t the females nurse? They do in the low-order mammals I’ve been able to examine, so it isn’t some universal quirk of this planet’s ecosystem.” He shook his head. “No, everything points to the idea that the Cian were faced with some sudden, drastic change—they adjusted themselves to meet it, and that adjustment warped the development of their whole culture.”

“What change?” Farber asked.

“That’s where today’s findings come in,” Ferri said. “Lisle’s now in a major interglacial. According to my figures, the last big glaciation would have dropped the level of the oceans by quite a significant amount. Get it? This assumes that, before the glaciation, the Cian were amphibious hominids, living right on the shoreline, in the shallows. Probably they were almost as highly evolved as the modem Cian, intelligent, but not culture-transmitting in the same way that the Cian are now—I doubt if they’d have fire, or tool making, living in the water most of the time. Probably they had speech, and an oral tradition. I get the chilly feeling that some of the Cian myths are older than humans can imagine, that they’ve come down in an unbroken line from the days before the Cian left the sea. Spooky.” He finished his drink. “Anyway, the ice age comes, and the sea level drops, drastically. The continental shelves fall away very rapidly here, and very steeply. Drop the sea level enough, and you wouldn’t have any shallows, anywhere. So it was either adapt to life as a fully aquatic mammal again, or adapt fully to life on land. So they adapted to land life, some of them anyway, and they did it very quickly. The pressure on them must have been enormous, and the situation unbelievably harsh. I imagine that the majority of them died, but some of them made it. Think of it! I doubt if Terran life would have been capable of meeting the challenge in time, but the Cian did. They adjusted themselves.”

“How’d they adjust?” Farber said harshly. “You make it sound like they tinkered around with their bodies and custom-modeled themselves to fit.”

Ferri grinned. “That’s just about what I do mean. Fire Woman spews out a lot more ultraviolet than Sol. This planet is drenched with hard radiation. That makes its biomass a lot more fluid than Earth’s. Lots more mutations in every generation, and more of them viable.” He paused, and looked at Farber significantly. “Hell, you should’ve gotten a hint of that from your own experience. A lot of their legends seem to point to the fact that their females practice voluntary natural contraception. Reabsorption of the embryonic material. Your own experience with your wife seems to confirm that, and I have other instances. And, if they can do that, I don’t doubt that they’ve got a lot more control over their genetic material in other ways as well. There are hints of that, too. So, they were forced to live on land, to adapt to it in a very short time. For some reason, the transition interfered with the ability of the females to nurse. But their genetic fluidity saved them. Necessity jury-rigged this system with the males nursing the young. And that distortion was reflected throughout all the rest of their cultural development, until by the time their society reached the point where they were able to fix it—and they could, don’t kid yourself; their genetic technology is sophisticated enough now so that they can do just about anything they want—it’d become such an intrinsic, integral part of their culture that they couldn’t rip that thread out without destroying the rest of the weave as well.”

“I don’t know.” Farber toyed with his glass, set it down. “It all seems very complicated to me. Ja?”

“And so it is,” Ferri said. “That’s one theory. Here’s another. The Cian deliberately engineered these alterations in their own biological systems, within historical times. This is a very stable culture, Joe. Almost static. From the evidence, I’d say that they’ve had a biological technology more advanced than ours for at least three thousand years. A long time, right? Sometime during those three millennia, after they had developed the capability to do so, they ‘tinkered’ with themselves, to use your phrase. Why? Jesus Christ, I don’t know! But the minds of the Shadow Men aristocrats are so dark and unfathomable to us—who in hell knows why they do anything? They’re aliens. Right? What do we really know about the Way, what its goals are, what its motives are, what its dictates are? Nothing.”

Ferri got up and made himself another large drink. His movements were a little unsteady—he was rapidly getting sloshed. “So that’s my second theory,” he told Farber. “I don’t like it as well as the other one, but I have to admit that Occam’s Razor favors it. Don’t forget, though, that the Razor often doesn’t cut it, when it comes down to real-world situations.” He chuckled at his own wit, finished his drink, made another. Farber refused a refill. Clutching his drink carefully, Ferri returned to his seat.

The two men sat in silence for a moment. Ferri’s face had acquired a puckered expression, as though he was tasting something that had spoiled. It was obvious that his manic enthusiasm was souring under the influence of weariness and whisky. He grinned lopsidedly at Farber. “Two theories, and neither of them really accounts for all the weird sociological quirks of this society. So fuck it. I can spin a dozen more, if you want. What else have I got to do in this vacuum but sit here and make up fairy stories for myself?” He took a ferocious swig of his drink. “If the Cian would only cooperate!” he said bitterly. “If I could just get a female specimen to work on, get her down on the table and open her up, I might be able to figure this out. But they won’t let me dissect a female—it’s such a sacrilege to them they hiss in horror if you even hint at it.”

Farber watched him in silence. Scientific objectivity was all very well, but, goddamn it, the man knew Farber’s situation, and there was such a thing as discretion. Farber’s mind insisted on flashing him a vivid picture of Liraun laying flayed and gutted on the rollaway bed, split from stem to sternum to satisfy Ferri’s curiosity. Farber’s jaw muscles clenched, and a pulse began to throb at his temple.

“This doing you any good?” he said in a thick, harsh voice, tapping the telemeter-bracelet at his wrist.

“It’s doing me too goddamn much good,” Ferri grumbled. He crossed to the bar and came up with a narcotic atomizer, pressed it into his nose, and inhaled deeply several times. When he spoke again, his voice was high-pitched and dreamily remote, as though he had gone away somewhere and left his body behind on automatic pilot to deal with Farber. “It’s driving me to distraction, it’s doing me so much good,” he said in his new passionless voice, waving his hands mechanically, looking like a robot programmed to act out emotional turmoil. He drifted back to his chair, walking with the leisurely slow-motion strides of an astronaut in low gravity, and proffered the atomizer to Farber. Farber refused, with a sudden twinge of distaste—he was just beginning to realize how much his life among the Cian had estranged him from his fellow Terrans. Ferri shrugged, gave him a dreamy scornful smile, and gave himself another long snort of the narcotic. When he came up from it, his eyes were opaque, and his voice was even further away. “We’ve known all along that the Cian language depends heavily on shifts in tone and inflection to convey meaning, like Chinese. Now it appears that words and sentences spoken exactly the same way can take on alternate, and usually totally different, meanings, just by the social construct of the moment in which they are spoken. Or maybe by infinitesimal hand-and-body gestures too, although that’s hard to prove. But Christ! I’m surprised we’ve ever understood anything these people have told us.”

“How’d you know we have?” Farber said.

Ferri grimaced, and stuck the atomizer back into his nose.

After that, Farber didn’t see Ferri again for a while. He and Liraun were increasingly forced to depend on their own company. With Liraun in her present mood, that made it a lonely time for Farber. He was leading a celibate life again, but this time he accepted it with real equanimity, as he tried to accept Liraun’s sullenness, and the sudden apparent deterioration of her health. He was still content, he realized, in spite of everything. His old unrest, his Earthsickness, was gone. He didn’t want to be anywhere else, he didn’t want to do anything else—that knowledge seeped from the inside out, and left him in peace. When he looked to the future, he was full of confidence. He had his feet on the ground now, and he and Liraun had been working out fine. The pregnancy was upsetting everything at the moment, but after she’d had the kid things would settle down again, and they’d get back to normalcy. He was not a particularly patient man, but he could summon up enough patience to last until then. And then they’d be all right. Then they’d be fine. And the child—he found himself looking forward to that with a keener pleasure than he’d known he could feel.

Wait until the child is born, he told himself. Wait until the child is born.

Sometimes Tacawen sur Abut, Liraun’s half-uncle, would come to visit them. Apparently this was motivated by polite custom more than by familial affection, as both Liraun and Jacawen were very formal with each other, most of their exchanges seeming to conform to a set ritual. But Jacawen didn’t know what to do with Farber. There was no ritual there to tell him how to act—the situation was unique. Ingrained Cian courtesy kept him from ignoring Farber or treating him as if he were invisible. The cold shoulder did not exist in Jacawen’s psychocultural set—the man was there, he must be treated with, an interrelation must be formed. But what? Jacawen knew how to relate to outworlders: it was part of his job, and appropriate custom had evolved. But, like it or not, Farber could no longer be considered an outworlder—he was now tied by blood to Jacawen’s own House and Tree, he was, by law, a relative. Jacawen, however, found it impossible to accept him fully in that role either. Try as he might, Jacawen could not wholeheartedly attune himself to familial ritual with this huge, obstreperous alien. And Farber’s ignorance of the proper forms made things even more difficult. There was nothing left but to attempt to deal with Farber on an extemporaneous, one-to-one basis, unguided by custom or ritual, neither knowing what the other expected of him—a horrifying prospect for a Cian, especially one of Jacawen’s aloof and aristocratic caste.

To give Jacawen his due, he made a conscientious attempt to do it. Jacawen was a Shadow Man. Like the Apache Netdahe or the Yaqui-Yori of Old Earth, his philosophy was one of unwavering hostility to all outlanders, to all intruders. Unlike the Netdahe, he was not obliged to kill them on sight. Social contact with outlanders was regarded, by the Shadow Men, as a distasteful but unavoidable condition of interstellar commerce, which in turn was acknowledged as a necessary evil. Cian Angst rarely worked itself out in violence, anyway—not socially directed group violence, at least, though there were many duels. Nevertheless, the hostility was there. Jacawen was trained to regard outlanders with polite scorn and bristling suspicion. He did. He would have had difficulty reacting to them in any other way. He did not like Farber. He did not approve of Farber—everything about the Earthman reeked of an offensive and contaminating unorthodoxy. He had been outraged by Farber’s marriage to Liraun, and was forever estranged from them by it. It was a wound that could never heal. But, by the custom of his people, he was obliged to seek synchronization of spirit with the despised outlander. It was unthinkable that he do this by increasing his tolerance of Farber’s unorthodoxy—ignorance of the Way was no excuse; its Harmony lay waiting to be discovered at the heart of all creatures, of all things, and if Farber had not found it, then it was a sin of omission on Farber’s part. Therefore, if they were to synchronize, it was Farber who must change. To this end, Jacawen spent long hours patiently explaining to Farber what, in his opinion, was wrong with the Earthmen’s way of life.

“You go too fast,” he said once, unconsciously echoing Ferri’s words. “You have no patience. You do not understand what you see, and you will not wait for understanding to come, you just rush ahead, so fast.” He blinked, shaking his head, groping for expression. “You are all so hungry. You are aggressive—” he used the Cian term, which translated as “The Mouth (Which) Is Always Hungry.” “You are ambitious—” he used the English word here, as this concept could not be translated into his language at all—“and you go so fast that you cannot watch the ground under your feet, and so you smash what is around you. Like wild things, you are dangerous even when you are not overtly hostile. You are too much enmeshed in the external world, the world of flesh and duration, and you do not perceive the inside of the world or of yourselves. It is a disease with you, a contamination, this thing that lets you see only the one aspect.” He paused, and his expression shifted from somber to grim. “We, the Shadow Men, have that disease too, although we suffer from it much less. That is why we can deal with you, why we can understand you at all. We are aberrant, abnormal, but we have our purpose—the burden of earthly government is left to us. We serve as buffers for the rest of our people. We are barriers against the contamination of corporeality that creatures such as yourself spread. This is our pride and our sorrow—honor to us that we guard our people so, shame to us that we are tainted enough to be able to do so.”

And so on, throughout the night.

Farber did not understand. Jacawen did not understand Farber.

After a while, in spite of tradition, Jacawen stopped coming at all.

The last month of pregnancy began, and Liraun underwent another sea-change. Although still physically weak and shaky, she seemed to tap some inner source of serenity and strength She was at peace with herself, once again the old Liraun. But now the Council began to take up more and more of her time, as if they were getting as much use out of her as possible while she was still a Mother of Shasine, and Farber was left to himself more than ever.

He began to spend time with Genawen sur Abut, Liraun’s father, and Jacawen’s older half-brother. Although one of the Thousand Families, Genawen was not a Shadow Man—you had to become one, you could not be born into the cult—and didn’t seem to share Jacawen’s dislike of aliens. He was a shrewd, jovial old man, and he ran a large household with benevolent firmness. His house was a rambling stone structure—fronting the Square of the Ascension, at the far end of the Esplanade.

Genawen’s wife was a Mother at the time, and that gave him and Farber some common ground for conversation, although Genawen seemed to want to spend most of his time complaining about how his wife was simply ruining his household staff during her period of authority over them. But what was disrupting Genawen’s household the most at the moment, it seemed, was what looked to Farber like a circus parade, sans elephants, in the inner courtyard.

“What in the world is that?” Farber asked, as Genawen led him around the flagstone rim of the courtyard.

“It’s the rehearsal for my wife’s Procession,” Genawen answered. “But what’s a Procession, anyway?”

Genawen stopped dead. He stared at Farber in amazement. “What’s a Procession?” he murmured blankly, and then he said: “What’s a Procession! Oh, ho ho ho! By the First Dead Ancestor, Mr. Farber, do you know that I’m not really sure how to tell you what it is. I’ve never had to explain it to anyone before. Oh, ho ho ho!” Genawen always laughed by saying “Ho ho ho!” like Santa Claus, with perfect enunciation and never an extra “ho!”—or a missing one. He even looked something like Santa Claus, minus the beard: bushy eyebrows, ruddy cheeks, fat jelly-bowl stomach. Since his wife was pregnant, he was in lactation, and his six pendulous breasts flopped up and down when he laughed. “Well, let’s see, how do I explain,” Genawen began, becoming more serious. “You know that my wife, Owlinia, is a Mother, and she’s pretty close to term. She should be delivering any day now, as a matter of fact. Well, these people will escort her to the Birth House when she’s ready—you do know about the Birth Houses, don’t you?”

“Yes, Liraun mentioned them just the other day.”

“Well,” Genawen continued, “the Procession will escort her to the Birth House, sort of like a—” he groped through his small stock of Terran referents.

“—an honor guard?” Farber suggested.

“Yes,” Genawen said, “that fits well, although you must realize that there are solemn religious aspects to it as well. That’s why those men are in costume, and why some are carrying Talismans, or idols, as you people would have it—though that doesn’t quite get the concept across. Many represent People of Power, or symbolize natural forces.”

“What does that one represent?” Farber said, nodding toward a Cian who was dressed head to toe in an odd grey costume, which was covered in turn with soft downy hair—he had big staring circles of red and black paint around his eyes, and gilded false canine teeth that were almost a foot long.

“That’s one of the Fetuses,” Genawen replied, “and it is ill luck to talk of what they represent, especially for men in our position, with Mothers almost ready to go on Procession. The proper forms must be observed in these things. That’s why there are always at least two of the Twilight People with a Procession, a twizan and a soúbrae.”

As if responding to a cue, a soúbrae picked that instant to come out of one of the encircling buildings and enter the courtyard. This was the same emaciated, hatchet-faced Old Woman who had presided at Liraun’s Naming, Farber realized. She glided like an iceberg through the sea of brilliant costumes, giving orders with a word, a nod, a curt gesture. They were instantly obeyed. The soúbrae, stopped momentarily, and stared at Farber. Farber returned her gaze. It was obvious that she recognized him. She flared her nostrils, gave him a look of cold disapproval, and moved on. She seemed to leave a chill behind her even in the dusty afternoon courtyard.

“I don’t think she likes me,” Farber said.

Genawen shrugged.

“What does soúbrae mean anyway?” Farber asked.

“It is an archaic word,” Genawen said. “It means ‘Sterile One.’”

“She looks it, too,” Farber said. “Sterile as a rock.”

Genawen grinned. “Oh, ho ho ho! You had best be careful, Mr. Farber. Some of them have power. She might curdle the milk in your paps!”

“I’m not worried,” with a lazy grin.

“Eh?” Genawen said. Then: “Oh, ho ho ho!” again as the joke hit him. Farber was counting. “How many men in this Procession, ah, twenty?”

“Twenty-five in this one.”

Farber whistled, then clicked his lips for Genawen’s benefit, as the Cian did not whistle in surprise. “That must be expensive.” He suddenly looked worried. “Am I supposed to pay for Liraun’s Procession?”

“No, the government, by custom, will always finance at least a small Procession for any Mother of Shasine. Of course, if you want extra marchers, or expensive costumes, then you must pay for it, as I have here. Oh, ho ho ho! Though I won’t be able to afford it for long, by the Second Dead Ancestor, if Owlinia keeps mismanaging the budget.”

But Farber wasn’t listening. There was a thought in the back of his head that kept itching for attention, but he couldn’t quite reach it to scratch.

He forgot it.

A week later, Farber met Genawen again in a little park at the foot of Kite Hill. Genawen and a young Cian woman were strolling six babies in a complicated, crowded wheelbarrow-wagon.

Farber greeted them, and Genawen insisted on picking up one of the babies and thrusting it enthusiastically under the Earthman’s nose. The baby began to cry, just as enthusiastically.

“Oh, ho ho ho!” Genawen said. “A fine litter, don’t you think! Just listen to him squall!”

“They look very healthy,” Farber said.

“Too healthy,” Genawen replied. He had switched the baby to one of his fat, glistening breasts, now left exposed in the fashion of nursing fathers. “They hurt when they suck too hard.”

Farber suppressed a smile. They stood in silence for a moment, looking down over the sprawl of New City below, while Genawen fed another insistent baby. The young woman remained in the background, looking on.

Finally Genawen noticed her. He beckoned her forward, and put a meaty hand on her shoulder. They both smiled at Farber, Genawen enthusiastically, the girl shyly. “Mr. Farber,” Genawen said enthusiastically, “I’d like you to meet my new wife.”

The next time, Farber managed to catch the elusive thought in his head.

He instantly wished that he hadn’t.

Farber left work early the next day and went in search of a Birth House. They were not easy to find—the Cian sense of propriety dictated that they must be unadorned, nondescript buildings, and there was no Cian equivalent of a telephone directory. But one of Farber’s workmates had taken his wife to the Birth House a few days before, and although he had stonily refused to answer any of the Earthman’s excruciatingly impolite questions about the process, Farber had overheard him describing the route of the Procession to his friends. Farber had a vague idea, then, as to the location of one of the Birth Houses anyway.

He set off on foot through Aei New City, following River Way along the bustling Aome waterfront. There were no Birth Houses in Old City, he had picked up that much information in the past few days—apparently it was forbidden. He doubted that there would be any in this district either; as he understood it, Birth Houses were located in quiet, out-of-the-way pockets of the city, not because they were considered shameful, but because they were so sacred that they must not be unduly contaminated by the mundane flow of urban life. So he walked rapidly, almost at a dogtrot, until the city began to dwindle and fall away on either hand, and he turned onto the North Road. Here he must walk slowly and keep alert. The Birth House could be anywhere.

The North Road paralleled the shore of Elder Sea, about a quarter-mile inland from the unbroken wall of the Dunes. Farber followed it up the coast for miles, while the scattered clumps of buildings that served Aei for suburbs became less and less frequent. They had all been places with some obvious utility—truck farm, heavy machine shop, pottery works—and none of them could be the Birth House. Doggedly, he kept walking. The towering monolith that was Old City had been looming ahead and to the left; now it pulled abreast, and then slowly fell behind him, its mazy roofs and towers glinting against the muted afternoon sky. As it fell behind, the world opened up, as the city had opened to suburb when he turned onto the North Road. He had the feeling that the Eye of God had just done a long slow dolly-back, like some preternatural television camera, reducing him to a tiny black spot toiling across an immense field of white. The wind now tasted of distances, of all the places he had never been, the unimaginable expanses of an alien world, open to the horizon. It was both daunting and madly exhilarating. He realized that he had never been out of sight of Old City on this world, that his experience of Weinunnach was bounded by a twenty-mile circle. Now, as the obsidian cliff and its burden of stark towers began to sink under the horizon behind him, like a skeleton-masted ghost ship going down, Farber felt a sudden overwhelming urge to just keep walking, heedless of his original goal. To keep going on and on across the snowy plain until Aei disappeared, until everything he knew was gone—to forget about Liraun, about their child, about Ferri, about Earth, to put away and forget all of his old life, to go on until he came to a new place, a new city, to start again. That went through him like a sexual thing, like an electric current, like a hot drugged wind. It shook him and staggered him. For a moment it straddled and rode him like a succubus, then he tore it free. The wind whipped it away, and it was gone. He blinked. He shook his head.

He kept walking.

Still no Birth House.

The countryside around him was buried under at least ten inches of snow, although the North Road itself had somehow been kept spotlessly clear. Nothing grew here now, except for the snowtrees that were scattered in groves over the low hills to the west. These were tall, lustrous, translucent plants, something like giant asparagus, something like wax beans, with spiky ebony-leafed heads. They were heliotropic, and they hunted the sun as it slid across the horizon from east to west. They flourished in this season, in the deepest winter, and the air was full of the drifting white clouds of their pollen. For a while then, walking the road, Farber underwent a strangely pleasant attack of déjà vu that persisted until he had puzzled out the reason for it. The bright sunlight, the hazy blue sky, the drifting pollen, all combined to reproduce for him—if you ignored the snow—the effect of a balmy spring day on Earth, shirtsleeve weather, birds singing invisibly behind the bright sky, sweet-smelling clouds of cherry blossoms. They all ignored Farber completely, and he made no attempt to attract their attention. He sat stolidly on the rock, saying nothing, and in a little while the Procession had passed down the hill and out of sight, into a snowtree grove.

He gave them five minutes, and then got up and followed them.

The Birth House was another three-quarters of a mile down the Road. It was a low, long, flat-roofed structure, made of rough grey rock, fronting on the road and recessed into a low hill that rose up behind it to the west; probably the hill was excavated inside. There were no windows, and only one door that Farber could see. It was a most unremarkable building, and he might easily have taken it for a warehouse, except that the Procession had drawn up in a semicircle before it. As he arrived, they were going through the Ritual of Imminence, celebrating the Translation-to-come. Farber watched from a position about thirty yards away, standing hunch-shouldered against the cold. Again he was in plain sight, and again he was ignored as if he did not exist—Farber had no business here, and if he chose to snoop, then that was a manifestation of his poor taste, his boorishness; no one else would take a chance on contamination by deigning to notice him. The ritual was short: after being anointed by the twizan, the soúbrae escorted the Mother up to the Birth House, up to the tall iron door of the featureless stone wall. The door opened. There was a glimpse of someone inside, white-costumed, vague. The Mother entered the Birth House. The door closed behind her.

The soúbrae turned away from the Birth House, and the Procession was over. The marchers ceased to be a precision unit, and became again an informal aggregation of individuals. They straggled back toward Aei in no particular order, talking, laughing at a joke, the musicians with their instruments slung over their backs, the Impersonators resting their long poles across their shoulders. Most of them glanced surreptitiously at Farber as they passed. Only the soúbrae and the twizan did not look, and they radiated a chill disapproval almost tangible enough to cause frostbite. Within minutes, they had disappeared up the Road, and Farber was alone again.

He waited.

The wind moaned in from the sea, and the sun slid west across the horizon.

Nothing else moved—everything was cold silence and suspension.

He waited, freezing, hugging himself against the cold, finally doing calisthenics to keep warm, jumping jacks, squat thrusts, running in place, wondering what the Cian who were probably watching made of these unorthodox obeisances, feeling conspicuous and absurd but keeping grimly at it anyway, his feet slapping circulation back into themselves, his breath coming in violent little explosions of vapor, like an old steam engine building up working head, and still, doggedly, he waited. He haunted the Birth House for another hour and a half, while the long afternoon guttered to night around him. During that time, two more Processions arrived from Aei. These were less elaborate affairs, from poorer households—neither of them were made up of more than twelve members, and their panoplies were not quite so sumptuous. All the marchers ignored him, as the inhabitants of the Birth House had ignored him during the long intervals between Processions. While Farber watched, the last Procession delivered their Mother to the Birth House, lit smoky, punk-smelling torches—for it was full dark now—and headed back to Aei, their torches growing smaller, becoming tiny bobbing matchflames, winking out one by one. Again Farber was alone, staring at blank secret rock.

Three women had entered the Birth House.

Nobody had come out.

Shivering, Farber slid forward abruptly, off the Road, crunching through knee-deep snow. He didn’t know where he was going, or what he was going to do—like an arrow held at full draw that is suddenly released, he went because he was impelled to go. An intuition had brought him here; suspicion had kept him here, and it was suspicion, having been screwed intolerably tight, that now snapped like a bowstring and whipped him away toward the target. That suspicion was wordless, unfounded, irrational; he had not even really entertained it yet, in his conscious mind. But on some subcortical level it had been accepted and believed—now he was looking for proof. He began to circle the Birth House, thrashing through stiff winter-stripped brush. Twigs snapped under his feet like bones, and branches raked at his eyes. The snow was now thigh-deep. Now waist-deep. He floundered through it like a moose, breaking a path for himself. Off to the side rose the grey featureless walls of the Birth House. He grinned at them nervously as he fought the snow. The place didn’t even have any windows.

Around the far side of the hill, he found another door. It was a plain thing of ironbound wood, almost a hatchway, set flush in the side of the snow-covered hillside. There was a tramped-down area in front of the door, and sitting in it were two or three oblong boxes, about four-by-four. Garbage, was Farber’s first thought, so homely and commonplace was the scene. But the boxes were built of hardwood, unvarnished but planed smooth, and they looked sturdy and well made. Nobody went to that much trouble for garbage. He had started forward to investigate when there was a loud metallic click from the door, followed by a rusty ratcheting sound. Farber froze, half-crouched, watching warily.

The door swung open. Yellow light spilled out across the packed snow. Two white-coated Cian technicians emerged from the tunnel, carrying one of the oblong boxes between them. They set it down near the other boxes, talked together in low voices for a moment, their breath steaming silver and blue in the bright light from the tunnel, their spindly backlit shadows stretching out into the barren winter country. Then they went back inside. The door closed. The light went out.

Farber tobogganed down the slope on his butt, kept sliding when it leveled out—on his back, feet helplessly in the air—as he had built up too much momentum to stop, and ended up inside a snowdrift. He got to his feet, slapped snow from his clothes, and came cautiously up to see what he could see. There was, he noticed, a faint trail leading back from the cleared area before the door, and winding away to the north and west into the remote, winter-locked hills. It was hardly more than a path trampled in the snow, but Farber was willing to bet it was used to pack the boxes out, by courser probably, or by some other big draft animal. He broke from the drifts onto the packed snow, and stopped to listen for an alarm. Nothing. Nervously, he padded up to the boxes, and knelt by one of them. He ran his hands over it, exploring, picking up splinters from the wood. He tugged experimentally at the lid. It was nailed down, apparently, but not too tight. Abruptly, he decided to risk it. He dug his fingers in under the lid and found purchase for them. He took a deep breath, held it, and seemed to swell like a puffing toad. His big hands tensed, his wrists arched, his shoulders bent—there was the crisp sound of splintering wood, and the lid flew open. He swayed above the box, panting for breath. The two brightest moons had risen, hurtling up the sky like meteors—they cast a dim lactescent light over the evening snowscape, but it was still hard to see, and the shifting double shadows they caused compounded the problem. Farber squinted, then, gingerly, he reached into the box and rummaged around. His hands encountered something smooth and hard—it rolled under his touch, he groped for it, got it again, and lifted it quickly out of the box and up into the light.

It was a skull.

Farber grunted, as if he had been hit in the stomach, and dropped it. The skull hit the packed snow with a chitinous thunk, spun, and rolled leisurely away into the shadows. The world pulsed and time stopped—Farber hanging in suspension, his fingers outstretched as they had been when he dropped the skull, while a decade went by, a century, a millennium—then pulse, and time started again, the world tilting and whirling around his head as he wrenched his whole body back and away so that he sat down heavily on his heels, shaking his hand convulsively as if he had touched something very hot, screwing his eyes shut and instantly opening them again. The spasm passed, and the world stopped spinning. He put his hand to his throat, put it down again. “No,” he said aloud, in a flat, almost matter-of-fact voice. He discovered that he was grinning, involuntarily, mirthlessly, grinning with horror. At the same time, a distant part of himself was saying, You knew what it would be, dispassionate, unafraid, and not at all surprised. He blinked. Then, grimly, he reached back into the box. Brittle dead things, rustling, rolling things that scuttled under his fingertips. A cold, unpleasant texture. Like porcelain, he thought inanely. Bones. Ribs, vertebrae, finger bones, femurs, a pelvis. He lifted that into the light and examined it closely. A female pelvis.

He scrambled over to the next box—scurrying along on hands and feet without bothering to straighten up, like a crab—and wrenched it open, heedless of noise, hitting it a savage, splintering blow with the palm of his hand when a nail stuck, the lid rising into the air with dreamlike slowness, as if it were a butterfly, and then, suddenly fast, clattering away end over end. There was now a long splinter wedged painfully under his fingernail, but he ignored it. Recklessly, he reached into the box and scooped out a double armful of its contents. Yes—bones. And more bones. He froze again, face turned up to the sky, squatting grotesquely with his arms full of brittle white bones, like a ghoul caught gathering firewood. There was an odd, dangerous vacuum inside him, waiting to be filled by the panic and horror he knew were there, insulated from him as if by a thin layer of glass. Calmly and patiently, he crouched there in the dark, waiting for the glass to break.

Behind him, the door made a loud ratcheting sound.

The glass shattered. The vacuum filled. Before the light from the opening door could even spill out across the cleared area, Farber was off, dropping the bones and springing away in a single enormous bound, like a startled cat. Three strides took him to the edge of the packed snow, up the icy slope then—scrambling straight up it with hands, feet, knees, elbows, fingernails—and be was running and plunging away through the drifts, battering and bulling his way forward, floundering, falling, snowplowing, almost swimming through the snow as he breasted it. Up again. A hoarse shout behind him, and he ran faster, snapping his knees up as high as he could with each stride to get his feet clear of the snow. Then his feet bit air. He fell from the drifts to the surface of the road, hit jarringly, rolled, and came up running. Fortunately when he came up he was pointed south, in the direction of Aei, because he was in no condition to navigate. His mind had whited out under an overload of panic and superstitious terror. But his body had orders to run as fast as possible, and, to it, the hard, dry pavement underfoot and the sudden release from the encumbering snowdrifts were a benediction. He ran.

Somewhere in the smothering night behind him, there was another shout. Already it was faint with distance, diminishing, left behind.

Farber kept running anyway.

Afterward, Farber was unable to remember much about the trip back to Aei. Cold, jarring motion, darkness, the stars doing a stately jig around his head, the rasping sound of his breathing loud and ugly to his own ears. He ran or dogtrotted most of the way, occasionally slowing down to a walk when he was blown, but running again as soon as he got his wind back. He didn’t look behind him. Sometimes he would miss his footing in the dark and fall—rolling with it if he was lucky, rattling his teeth and cutting himself on pebbles and grit if he was not—but always he would scramble up again immediately and keep on. He ran because it was the practical thing to do, a defense against the amazing cold, but he also ran to stay ahead of the horror that ghosted along at his heels like a vast black shadow, stopping when he stopped, watching him without eyes, following after again when he ran, patient and indefatigable.

Somewhere just outside of Aei, it caught him, swallowed him in a single velvet gulp, and he was thinking again, the thoughts scribbling themselves unstoppably across the blank slate of his mind. My God, how could he tell Liraun! She wouldn’t believe him. How could she believe him? How could he convince her, how could he make her see through the monstrous deception that had been perpetrated on the women of her race for—Christ, hundreds of years? Millennia? How many victims, across all that gulf of time? The horror and pity of it squeezed his heart. Think of them, the countless millions of women who had gone unsuspecting to be slaughtered, consenting happily to the rituals without realizing where it would lead them, believing the pious lies of the butchers. And then the Birth House, the door closing behind, the sudden terror and shock, the knives. Slaughter. The ignoble burial in the secret hills. And all because of some dark superstition, some god-haunted paranoia, some murderous holy flummery! The pastel lights of New City were winking languidly ahead, and, feverish and shivering, he ran madly toward them.

At the junction of the North Road and River Way, he took his last and hardest fall, skidding down the steep slope on his stomach for about thirty yards, embedding gravel deeply in his hands and face. The impact stunned him for a moment, and he lay peacefully on his elbows in the dark, breathing raggedly. When he lifted his head, his eyes were drawn irresistibly across the low roofs of Aei New City to the towering obsidian cliff that rose up out of them—such an imperative upsweep that it eventually sucked all vision to itself, wherever else you tried to look—and then—head tilting back to take it in—up the column of glistening black rock to the cold stone place at its top. Old City of Aei. As he stared at it, he underwent a swell of such profound and complex emotion that his vision blurred, and Old City danced and shimmered on its cliff.

Then he was walking through its narrow, secret streets.

Black rock, high walls, shuttered doors. Along the Esplanade, up Kite Hill.

The Row. His own house, orange light leaking from the windows. As he made his way up to it, the door opened and Jacawen came out.

The two men stopped, and stared at each other. Then Jacawen closed the door behind him, and walked slowly forward. Until now, Farber had felt panic and terror and dismay, but he had not had time to get angry. That caught up with him now, in an enormous wave of detestation and rage, as he watched the small, somber figure ghost quietly toward him. It was all the fault of the ones like Jacawen, the Shadow Men, with their feculent darkness of spirit, and their hard, pitiless, flinty minds. They were the ones who wanted to take Liraun from him and destroy her. Jacawen stopped walking—they were almost nose to nose. Bristling, they locked eyes, each instinctively circling a step or two to the other’s left. Jacawen’s eyes were intense, sober, unflinching. Farber had to clench his fist hard to keep from striking him. But he could not hold that brilliant, agate-hard gaze for long; against his will, his own eyes flicked uneasily aside. As they did, Jacawen calmly said “Hatatha, greetings to you.” Farber made a sullen reply. Jacawen nodded politely, and started walking again. Farber pushed himself against the wall to let him go by. The thought of touching him was suddenly amazingly repugnant, and Farber gave him plenty of room.

Then he was gone. Farber turned and slammed into the house.

Liraun looked up from a chair, saying, “Joseph—?” Then she stopped. Farber’s clothes were grimy and torn, he was scratched in a dozen places and there was dried blood on his face. He looked ghastly. Liraun stared at him in amazement.

“What was he doing here?” Farber demanded.

“My husband—?”

“What was he doing here?”

“I don’t understand,” Liraun said. She got painfully to her feet. “You mean Jacawen?”

“Yes. I don’t want him around here, and I want to know why he was sucking around when I was gone. You understand?”

“But—” She made a bewildered, tentative gesture, almost taking his arm but letting her hand drop before it could touch. “He was here,” she said, more firmly, “to make the arrangements for my Procession. I will go to the Birth House tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Farber said.

“That is why I was alarmed when you didn’t come home,” she said, boring into his sudden silence. “You see? My time is very close now. A few days perhaps, në? They will not let me wait any longer. But Jacawen will take care of it all, we won’t have to worry, and we have until the morning. Joseph—” stopping and looking at him in a frightened, plaintive way, not understanding him. “You are my husband. I wanted us to be together. Joseph—”

Farber groped behind him to find a chair, and collapsed into it. All the rage and bluster had gone out of him. He looked sick. “Liraun,” he said, heavily.

“What is it?” she cried, immediately becoming even more alarmed.

“My God, Liraun,” he said. His voice was flat and dull. He sat there like a stone, growing more sodden and inert by the second, while Liraun hovered apprehensively nearby. He raised a heavy dead hand to ward her off, then tangled it clumsily in his hair, saying, “Christ, how can I tell you!” Liraun instantly said, “What’s wrong?” and Farber, not hearing her, overpowering her, at the same time said, “But I have to. We’ve got to face it.”

After the tangled words, there was a moment of silence. He looked at her as if he was really recognizing her for the first time that evening. “Sit down,” he said. She stared uncertainly at him, shrugged, and moved back to her chair. She sat down. Another stretch of silence then, with the feeling under it that his spirit was swimming back from some deep, dank place. He firmed himself up, grimly, almost visibly. “Liraun,” he said, “I want you to try to understand this, and try to believe me. Okay? I know it’s not going to be easy for you. But I’m not going to let it happen to you. I’m going to protect you.” Liraun, impatiently: “Joseph, what—” but he cut her off, waving her to silence, saying, “Listen, goddammit!” A nervous silence, then, plunging in to get it over with: “Liraun, try to understand. If you let them take you to the Birth House, you’ll never come back. They’ll kill you.”

“I know,” Liraun said.

Blankness, then he ran the program again: “No, baby. Listen to me—you’ll die. You’ll be dead.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Oh,” Farber said stupidly. His face went dead again.

“Joseph,” with a hint of agitation, “do we have to talk about it now? Why—”

“Wait a minute,” slowly, bewilderedly, floundering, “you mean you know?” He stared at her helplessly. Then something else rose up in his face. “My God! Oh my God! You knew all the time.”

She said, “Joseph, please.” And he said, “You didn’t tell me!” simultaneously.

They stared at each other wildly, like things at bay.

“Joseph—”

“Why didn’t you tell me!”

Totally bewildered now, and beginning to cry: “But I did. I have—”

And that stopped him cold. Maybe she had. When she talked philosophy, he seldom understood much of it. It was so easy to get lost in a maze of allegory and indirection, so much was oblique and subtly implied. Maybe she had. But—He had risen to his feet in his passion; now the strength drained out of him again, and he fumbled blindly for the chair. He couldn’t find it—he stood in a daze, making pathetic groping motions with his hands. His mouth was working weakly, without sound.

For the first time that he could remember, Liraun was crying openly.

“But,” he said, looking puzzledly at her, as if he were a schoolboy and she was a problem he had to solve, “if you knew—to go along with such a thing, to let them—Why you must be crazy,” trembling, all his defenses being sluiced away by horror. “You must be crazy! Dear God. Jesus God! Darf es Wirklich Sein!”

Desperately: “No—it’s not a ‘letting.’ Don’t—Joseph!”

But he was not listening. He was staring at her in total fascination. He had looked at her every day and every night for months, but he had never seen her. Never. She was a stranger to him. He had never known her at all.

“Tonight we must—recall and cherish what we’ve been together,” the stranger said.

He backed away from her.

“Please, this is the last night we have,” the stranger said.

He turned away from her.

“Joseph!” said the stranger.

Blind and deaf, he ran from her.

Stumbling, lurching, wet wind, cold rock, black earth below.

He went down to New City.

It was the night of one of the minor Modes, the Imminence of Spring, and in New City the streets were filled with light. It glinted from demon masks, flashed from jeweled costumes, and made odd amalgamations of flesh and cloth and shadow. Someone had built a bonfire in Potter’s Square, and the flames ate holes in the sky. The noise was overwhelming. Music stitched through sudden silences. The ceramic streets and squares and alleys were crowded with prancing, drunken demigods. They clutched at Farber, trying to get him to stay and celebrate, and he pulled roughly away. Using knees and elbows, he forced his way through the crowd like a trickle of ink working through a rich and vibrant tapestry. The air smelled of ginger, resin, musk. A demon with a horned, wooden face offered him a half-empty bottle of wine. He slapped it aside, spraying wine. The demon face was swallowed by the crowd.

Walpurgisnacht, he thought.

By the time he found a commonhouse, fireworks were making luminous pastel novas behind the steep slate roofs. Inside, it was dusty, dark, and almost empty. What patrons there were nursed their own thoughts and ignored him. He bought a flask of strong native liquor from the concessionaire, and took it to a remote corner of the common room.

For the first time in months, he drank himself into oblivion.

When he woke up in the morning, he felt like a dead man.

No part of his body seemed to be working properly. The Cian, who had let him wallow alone in his corner all night, stared at him with opprobrium. He stared back at them without shame or interest. The concessionaire, his face frozen with distaste, suggested politely that—since this establishment was far too poor to serve him appropriately—Farber might care to grace another commonhouse with the honor of his patronage.

Out into the bright morning, sweating and stinking.

“I can’t help you,” Ferri said. “Keane will kill me if I do.”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t,” Farber said.

Ferri glanced sidelong at Farber, and felt the blood begin to drain out of his face. There was something in Farber’s voice that he had never heard before in anyone’s, a hard, weary, backed-to-the-wall desperation. It was there in his face as well: cold and expressionless as a mannikin, eyes like two daubs of lead. He sat slumped in his chair as if he was too heavy to move. And yet it was that very heaviness that was ominous—instinct told him that anything with that much inertia would possess a terrifying amount of kinetic energy when it finally did start to move, the mountain coming down with the landslide. Ferri suddenly accepted that Farber might well be capable of killing him, not so much in passion as out of a sodden bitter stubbornness: because Ferri was blocking the only road Farber knew how to follow, and the man simply did not have the energy to trailblaze a new one.

Nervously, Ferri licked his lips.

“Look, Joe,” Ferri said, in as reasonable a voice as possible, “this thing you’ve stumbled on, the ritual murder of the Mothers—that’s the missing factor in the social equation here, and it explains a lot. But don’t you realize how all-pervasive a thing it is? Using hindsight, it’s easy to see how that one thing is reiterated throughout their whole society, art, religion, the home, everything. That inscription on the eikon, remember? The one you couldn’t read? It’s: ‘From Sacrifice—Life,’ as near as I can get it. There are hundreds of things like that, in front of our faces all the time, that prove—in retrospect—that the average Cian not only accepts this killing of the Mothers, he believes in his bones that it’s sacred. It’s not just the Shadow Men; however much of an aversion you’ve taken to them, you can’t say that—although they may have been responsible for this mass indoctrination in the first place, millennia ago. But by now it’s a thread that’s woven right through their entire culture.” He glanced at Farber’s face, looked away quickly. “Dammit, don’t you see how difficult it would be to buck a tradition that firmly entrenched? Remember, the women accept it too. It’s sacred to them, too; in fact, it’s a transcendental thing to them, a way of becoming a god, if only for a few months. And Liraun has all the prejudices and values of her society, you know.”

“It will work,” Farber said. His accent was coming back, as it only did under extreme stress, so that he actually said, “it will vork,” like a comic-opera Prussian. “I had a lot of time to think about this last night.” He closed his eyes tiredly. “She’ll get over it. Once she has the child, and she realizes that she doesn’t have to die, that a bolt of lightning will not come down and fry her because she didn’t go to the Birth House—It’ll be hard, sure, but she’ll get over it. I’ll re-educate her.”

“It won’t work,” Ferri said flatly.

“Goddammit! It better!” Farber blazed. His eyes flew open—they were muddy and ill-tempered, like those of a snapping turtle. “I refuse to lose my wife to a bloodthirsty pagan superstition. D’you understand me, Mister? And you’re going to help me, aren’t you?”

Ferri wiped his face—it had gone white. Very carefully, he said: “This is going to raise a hell of a stink. You know that. I don’t believe this kind of a situation has ever come up before—the Cian are temperamentally unsuited for it. God knows how they’ll react to it, except I doubt if it’ll be phlegmatically. If you kick that bee’s nest over, Keane is going to find out about it, very soon.”

“He already knows,” Farber said. “You know what I did this morning?” he continued in an artificially light voice. “Before I came here? I called Keane up, and I asked him if I could put Liraun into the Co-op Hospital. I crawled on my belly to him. Do I have to tell you what he said? No, I thought not. Easy to guess, huh?” He shrugged with elaborate casualness. “So, Liraun will have to have her baby at home. And you’re going to deliver it.”

“I can’t,” Ferri said. He looked sick. “Joe, listen. I can’t help you that openly. You know Keane has it in for you. If I delivered Liraun, he’d find out, and then he’d have it in for me too. He sends efficiency ratings on me back to Cornell, you know that. Listen, dammit. A really bad report from him could ruin my career, invalidate this expedition and all the work I’ve done. Lose me my tenure—”

“Are you going to help me? Or not?” Farber said. His voice had become very quiet, and his face had gone dead. He was not moving at all.

“Christ,” Ferri said. He reached out for the drink that had been sitting, unsampled, on a sidetable, and then drew his hand back with a grimace, as if the touch of his fingers against the cold sweating glass had made him nauseous. He put his fingers to his lips, as though he wanted to suck on them. “Look, Joe,” he said, coming alive, “this is what I’ll do for you. Right? I’ve got a scanner here, on loan from the Co-op. I’ll use it to give you a subcerebral course on childbirth, take about an hour. We’ve got a package on it in the First Aid program, ‘Basic Midwifery,’ or somesuch. Then you can go home and deliver Liraun yourself, and Keane won’t be any the wiser. Right?” He winked at Farber, as though in relief at solving the problem, but there was a fine tremor to his hands.

Farber was silent for a long time. “What if there’re complications?” he said at last.

“Unlikely,” Ferri replied. “Ninety percent of the time you won’t run into anything you can’t handle after the subcerebral training. Christ, don’t forget women did it all by themselves for thousands of years.” At Farber’s unsatisfied look, he said passionately, “Goddammit, how much do you want from me?” Admitting defeat: “Okay, listen. You can borrow the diagnosticator. Its Jejun work, beautiful thing, you can fold it up small enough to fit it in a backpack, though it’s fairly heavy. And for God’s sake, be careful with it—it’s at least a century advanced over any medical equipment made on Terra, and it’s as expensive as shit. I only got one because I’m doing critical field work. Now the thing telemeters, and it’s got waldoes on it, surgical ones, micro stuff. I’ll monitor everything, when the big moment comes, and if anything serious goes wrong, I’ll take over. But I won’t be there in the flesh, oh no! And if we’re careful and you keep your mouth shut, friend, then Keane won’t find out about it. Okay? I swear to God,” he added, belligerently, “that’s the best I can do for you. Take it or leave it.”

Another long silence, then Farber seemed to untense a little for the first time, slumping back against the cushions. He closed his eyes again. “All right,” he said. “I’ll take it.”

Ferri drained his glass in one fervent gulp.

Farber made one more stop on the way home, visiting a rat-faced steward who worked in the Co-op VIP Mess.

From him, Farber bought a gun.

It was an outdated, secondhand projectile weapon, one of thousands on the Co-op black market, and nowhere near as classy as the kilowatt lasers used by the honor guards at the Enclave.

But it worked.

Thinking grey, coagulated thoughts, Farber took the cablecar up to Old City. He watched the pastel sea of roofs spread out and fall away below as the car rose, and he told himself, I will not let it happen. He repeated it aloud, but the Cian riding with him were too polite to stare. Perhaps they edged infinitesimally away, perhaps not. Farber was oblivious of them in either case. “She isn’t responsible,” he announced to the air. “She doesn’t know any better.” Almost to the top now, and he felt his stomach and thighs tightening, as if he was unconsciously preparing himself for combat. The car ratcheted as it swung through the coupling and up to the station platform, bright reticulations shook across the windows, the walls vibrated. He rested his forehead against the cool, buzzing metal, and was instantly overwhelmed by the smell of her body, the taste of her secret flesh, the texture of her skin, her voice, her calm eyes, the soft pressure of her hands and mouth and tongue—more a cellular remembrance than an ordinary memory. She was imprinted on him; he was surprised it hadn’t left visible marks on his skin. I will not let it happen, he thought. “I won’t let them take her,” he remarked conversationally to the alien standing next to him. The Cian smiled noncommittally, and edged away. The car stopped.

He was making his way up Kite Hill when he first heard the music.

He began to run, ponderously, weighted down by the heavy backpack, stiff from lack of sleep and hungover as hell, but grimly covering the ground anyway. He skidded around a corner onto the Row, and there they were: a large Procession marking time in front of his house, drums and tikans skirling, Talismans held high. In front of the Procession proper stood the twizan and the soúbrae. Off to one side was Genawen, beaming at everyone, looking almost fatuously happy. Up and down the Row, people had poked their heads out of windows to watch, and the whole scene had the relaxed, festive formality of an old-fashioned Fourth of July parade.

Farber felt himself go very cold.

Something in the back of his throat tasted like molten iron.

He came forward at a stiff-legged walk, not trusting himself to run, afraid of what might happen if his anger should shake itself completely free. He speeded up on his last few steps, and hit the dense-packed crowd like a shark slamming into a bloodied carcass. He bulled through the Procession, shoving, hitting, scooping the little men up and tossing them aside, much rougher than he had been with the crowd the previous night, not really caring if anyone got hurt. A Talisman went over, its weight pulling its bearer down with it. Another—a huge swollen-headed grotesquerie—swooped and wobbled like a comic drunk. A nose-flute was cut off with a squawk as Farber straight-armed a musician from behind. A tikan clattered under Farber’s feet, and he stomped on it with malicious pleasure. There was a shout, another, and a general discord of music that swept from the rear of the Procession to the front as Farber’s passage made itself felt. At last, Farber broke into the open. The musicians stopped playing entirely.

The twizan stepped into Farber’s path. “Citizen—” he began to say, placatingly, but Farber shoved him roughly aside. Farber made it to the front door of his house, and whirled.

Panting, he stared at the crowd.

The crowd stared back in stunned silence. The twizan on his knees, getting up from where he had fallen. The soúbrae—the one from Liraun’s Naming—looking levelly at him with eyes of ice. Genawen, a big grin frozen idiotically on his face. The rest of the marchers in various stages of disarray. There was no sound.

Farber was trembling, falling apart, trying to keep some semblance of control. Fear and fury impelled him to speech, but it was a while before he could get his voice working right.

“Out!” he shouted hoarsely.

Genawen’s fat face collapsed in dismay. “Joseph—” he said, in a quavering incredulous voice.

The twizan was on his feet and edging backward.

“Get out!” Farber screamed. “Goddamn you all to hell!” He had more to say, but what control he’d kept was slipping, and his voice, as he continued to shout, passed into strangled incoherency. He came forward in a stumbling rush, swinging his arms.

The Old Woman made as if to stand her ground, but the appalled twizan seized her arm at the last moment and hauled her back. Reluctantly, she allowed the twizan to hustle her away, looking back at Farber all the time, her face like stone, her eyes brilliant with hate. Genawen hesitated, but Farber shoved him and shouted nearly in his face, and he gave ground too, staggering and almost falling, looking hurt and totally bewildered. Farber followed them for only a few steps, and then stopped, breathing heavily. He shouted again, in derision.

Dazed and horrified, they let Farber run them off.

With the retreat of its three principals, the Procession backed off in toto. Within seconds, it had turned into a slow-motion rout, everyone flowing away down the Row, confused and demoralized, turning their heads to look back, their faces showing every possible degree of dismay. Farber waited until he was sure they were leaving, then went into the house.

Liraun was sitting near the hearth, looking pale and tired. Standing next to her, with his back toward Farber, was Jacawen’s son, Mordlich. He was leaning over her, one hand on the arm of her chair, talking urgently to her in a low, persuasive voice. Her face was drawn. She kept shaking her head in an exhausted, baffled way, but Mordlich kept on at her, insistently.

Two iron thumbs behind Farber’s eyeballs, pushing out.

Farber crossed the room in three enormous strides. He clamped a big horny hand around Mordlich’s shoulder and began to drag him away.

Mordlich hissed, and spun around with terrifying speed, breaking Farber’s grip. A knife grew out of his fist, like magic.

Farber stumbled backward in dismay, suddenly feeling clumsy and slow and vulnerable, an ungainly clay-footed golem matched against a creature of tigerish grace and ferocity. He made an awkward warding gesture with his open hand. It was sluggish and ineffective, even to his own eyes, and he became suffused with a dull, incongruous embarrassment that made him even slower. He never thought of the pistol inside his pack. Instead, he took another step backward. It seemed as if he was swimming through syrup.

Dropping into a crouch, Mordlich shuffled forward, his arms low and extended, the point of the knife making slow, minuscule circles in the air. His face was intent and very serious. His eyes were opaque with rage. He began to edge sideways like a crab, coming a step nearer with every few steps to the side, turning Farber in a circle to get the sun in his eyes. Numbly, Farber let himself be turned—he felt ponderous and stupid, and he kept his useless hand out, palm open, as if he would simply push the knife aside, gently, as he would something proffered but not desired. He blinked as the sunlight hit his face. Instantly, Mordlich started to come in at him, fast and low, going for the belly.

“Mordlich!” Liraun cried.

She had found her voice, and she was on her feet. The blood had drained from her face. She was swaying.

Mordlich pulled back in the middle of his strike, as though he had been yanked by a rope. He glanced at Liraun, then stared intently at her. Then, reluctantly, grimacing fastidiously, he straightened up. He shook himself, like a cat, and was once again poised and remote. The knife disappeared—Farber could not tell where it had gone. Mordlich nodded politely to Liraun, turned, spat deliberately at Farber’s feet, and then went quickly out of the house.

Farber and Liraun were left alone to stare at each other through an enormous silence.

“Sit down before you fall down,” Farber said at last, with less authority than he would have liked. He was shaking, and bathed in cold sweat, and something of that had crept into his voice.

Liraun ignored him. She had braced herself against the back of her chair, and she was looking through him, not at him. Something complex was happening in her face, it was settling into new, hard lines, it was taking on determination and purpose even as he watched. At last, she focused her eyes on him. Her gaze was calm and adamant, and she came very close to frightening him, in her moment. She let go of the chair and stood unassisted, staring levelly at him. “Listen to me, Joseph,” she said quietly. “I’m going to go out to them.”

“Like hell you are,” Farber grated.

“You can’t try to keep me here, Joseph. It’s wrong.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said blindly. “Just sit down. Sit down and keep quiet, for God’s sake.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I have to think. Oh Christ.” Wearily: “Will you sit down?”

“You don’t understand—”

“No, damn straight, I don’t understand! Too fucking right!” He was amazed at the harshness of his own voice. The flare of temper took him two quick steps forward, then it guttered abruptly. He stopped, slump-shouldered. Liraun was watching him intently, looking hard as nails in spite of the soft swell to her stomach. In her last few days, pregnancy seemed to have invested her with an odd, ponderous invulnerability, a finality, an irresistible momentum. He wondered, uneasily, if he could stop her. “Oh hell,” he said. “Look, we’re going to work this out. But you’re not going anywhere, understand?”

“That is a very wrong thing,” she said flatly. “That will destroy all Harmony.”

“But to let them throw you away like garbage, that’s okay,” he said sullenly. “To pack you in a box, like garbage, and scratch out a hole in the hills and kick dirt in over you, by you that’s fine. That’s all right.”

“What is left of me after I am dead is no better than garbage,” she said, with equanimity. “The flesh is boiled away; it has its uses, genetic material for the Tailors, fertilizer, other things. The bones are buried, with respect, yes, but with no need for ceremony—all the sacred parts are already gone, can’t you see?”

Farber turned away from her. His face had gone slack. His hands were shaking. “You’re making me sick,” he muttered. “Christ. I can’t—You are crazy. Why? How can you—”

“Joseph!” she cried, pain openly in her voice for the first time. “I can’t talk about it any more. It’s the most private thing in my life, between me and the People of Power, and it’s so wrong to talk of it, even to you. Can’t you see that?”

“Taboo,” he said, scornfully.

Not understanding that: “Joseph, I must go now.” Her voice had become strained and unsteady. “Please—let me go with your blessing and your love. That would mean very much to me.”

“Sit down,” Farber said.

Grimly, Liraun set her lips. She began walking toward the door.

“You’re my wife!” Farber cried.

“And you are my husband,” Liraun said in her new hard voice as she made her way slowly, painfully and patiently across the room. “But my children belong to my people. Nothing must jeopardize them. Not even you.”

Farber stepped into her path, and she kept coming. He felt tired and dispirited and bitter, and for a moment—contemplating the emotional effort it would take to keep her here—he was very tempted to give up and step aside, to let her go, to let her do what she wanted to do. In a way, it would be a relief. In a way, he would be satisfied just to get this whole thing over with, at any cost. He would almost be glad. But in the wake of that realization, triggered by it, came a surge of sharp-edged, unbearable guilt. Unable to take that, he found an ember of rage inside him and fanned it to life. All this in a second: so that by the time Liraun reached him his muscles were taut and his face was flushed, and he reached out and seized her by the arms. Something wild blazed up in her eyes. Wordlessly, they wrestled back and forth, pitting one leverage against another, their feet hardly moving. She was amazingly strong, but not strong enough to break free of him. Apparently she realized this—her face became pinched, her eyes desperate. Her lips had ridden back from her canines, and Farber wondered—with a stab of real fear—if she would try to bite him. Instead she began throwing herself back and forth in his grip, panting, thrashing as wildly as a bird in a net, thrashing with such frantic violence that Farber became afraid that she would seriously injure herself. Dispassionately, almost mechanically, he struck her across the face.

At once she went limp in his arms. He stood, supporting her weight, too burnt out to feel much remorse. He had even enjoyed it a little. But mostly, he was possessed of nothing but a dull apathy. Liraun was getting heavy. He tried pushing her erect, and found that she would stay where he put her, her muscles reshaping like putty under steady pressure. She was not conscious. Her eyes were open, but they were blank—fused over and opaque. There was a tarry, glistening streak of blood leaking from the corner of her mouth.

Like a doll, she let him walk her to a chair.

She would not speak. He talked to her gently for a long time, coaxing, explaining, pleading, admonishing, finally blowing up and shouting at her. Nothing worked—she would not answer. She gave no indication that she had heard him, that she was even aware of her surroundings. She just sat there, where he had put her, not moving, her hands in her lap in front of her.

Finally, he gave it up. He bustled about the room for a while, then he came back and sat down next to Liraun. He tried to think if there was anything he’d forgotten to do. He’d set up the diagnosticator, and used it to put a call through to Ferri to make sure the remote linkage was working. He’d hired a wet nurse on the way up this morning, a crusty, middle-aged man who kept himself in permanent lactation by the use of artificial hormone injections. He had the pistol, thrust through his belt. He drew it, slid out the clip to check it. One thing in his advantage: the city didn’t seem to have a police force, not the kind they had on Terra, anyway. The Cian seemed to rely mostly on tradition and taboo, and peer-group pressure: the terrible threat of ostracism. But the system was not designed to cope with a total maverick like himself. There was a core of doctor-monitors who dealt with the insane, and with the occasional berserker or rowdy drunk, but, unlike Terrans, the Cian were not hypocritical enough to judge him insane simply because he insisted on doing something they didn’t like. Not yet, anyway. The Twilight People acted as arbitrators in ethical disputes, and sometimes as referees for the more formal duels, but they had no punitive capability. What did that leave? A lynch mob? Possible—but it should take them a fair while to work themselves up to that. Religion? Moral persuasion? Would he have to shoot any of them?

He pushed the clip into place, and put the gun back into his belt. He hoped that he wouldn’t have to shoot any of them. Wearily, he put his face in his hands. All his rage had died, leaving him empty and sick. If he could have figured a way to back out of the situation then, he would have taken it. But there was no way.

He waited, silently, while the day began to die out of the room around him.

It seemed to him then, sitting in the gathering dusk with his catatonic wife, that Ferri had been right about them, about the Earthmen. They were the wrong people. They had come for the wrong reasons, and they were looking for the wrong things in the wrong places and the wrong time. They had brought their wrongness with them, transported it at enormous cost over hundreds of light-years—for certainly they had committed the same litany of errors at home, lived the same wrong ways: look at the shape Earth had been in when the Enye had come to give it the ambivalent gift of stars. It seemed to him that the governments at home had made a basic—and possibly fatal—racial error in sending men like the men of the Enclave out to represent Earth to the galaxy. The worst of them, these emissaries, were shallow, jaundiced, neurotically repressed, buttoned-down reflex machines, out for the main chance, proud of their efficiency even though it achieved nothing. Certainly Earth had better men than these to offer. Even the best of them—Ferri, for instance—had demonstrated repeatedly that they were incapable of thinking of the Cian as people, and that false objectivity had warped the very observations it was intended to protect. At the end, Ferri had not helped Farber because of honest concern or sympathy, but merely because he was afraid Farber would do violence to him. Even he, Farber, himself—so smugly proud of being an “artist.” How innocuous his work must have been, for the Co-op to be unafraid of sending him to the stars as chronicler of its activities. What was another name for a government-supported artist? A mediocrity? A whore?

He heard them then, coming back. The Cian.

Unsteadily, he got to his feet, and stood blinking around him. “Liraun?” he said, aware of how flat and dull his voice sounded through the dusty silence. She did not move or answer—she sat lifelessly, gleaming faintly in the darkening room, like a statue carved of old dark wood. Outside: crowd noises, murmurings, footsteps, all drawing closer. He leaned against a wall, trying to call up the rage he knew he needed to survive this. He couldn’t find it. But, probing past exhaustion, he came upon a stew of fear and guilt and sullen injured pride. That would be a good enough substitute.

Farber went outside. It was nearing dusk. At the end of the Row, framed by black rock and seeming to sit on the cobblestone street, Fire Woman peered at him down a long tunnel of masonry—a lidless red eye staring dispassionately through a microscope at the tiny world inside. For the first time in months, it was warm enough to rain. A fine mist hung in the street, beading on windows, sweating from old stone walls. The wind that carried it smelled of spring, unlocking wet rich earth. Spring was still a good distance off, but it was coming, fast enough to make the Cold People shift uneasily on their rock-and-ice thrones, jar them from their frozen reveries and get them to thinking about working up a last, killing frost. Farber looked down. It was Liraun’s Procession, back for another try. The other instruments were mute, but the drums had been keeping up a low tattoo on the march; now, as the members of the Procession filled up the space in front of Farber’s house, even they fell silent. There was no one else in sight; all up and down the Row, the doors were closed, the windows were shuttered and blind. Farber stepped forward and stopped, bracing his legs.

Scores of eyes staring up at him gleaming like wet yellow stones.

The twizan stepped out from the crowd. He looked nervous but determined. “Citizen,” he said, “we have come for our daughter. Send her out to us.”

Farber drew his pistol.

“Citizen,” the twizan said, “you must not try to prevent us. There is no other shape for things to be. Since the time of the First Ancestor—”

“Listen to me now,” Farber said in a flat, quiet voice leveling the gun. “Liraun is not coming out to you. There isn’t going to be a Procession, now or ever. Do you understand that? Now get away from my house. Go on—all of you, get out!”

The twizan faltered, looked at the soúbrae, whose face was cold and adamant, and then looked back at Farber. The twizan drew himself up, and took a step forward. Another. The Procession pressed up close behind him, Talismans held high—Fire Woman threw their weird twisted shadows across Farber, banding his face with darkness.

Farber raised the pistol. One of the Talismans, off to his left, was bigger than the others, a huge, ruddy, puff-cheeked head representing the Person of the Winds—it was actually a sewn leather balloon, filled with hot gas, used at only the most distinguished of Processions and needing two husky Impersonators to brace it down. Farber fired at it. The roar of the heavy-caliber pistol was horrendously loud in the narrow, high-walled street, and it froze everyone, Farber included, into stunned immobility. Only the head of the Person of the Winds moved: it billowed, a ripple going from cheek to cheek, seemed to swell monstrously for an instant, and then, hissing in dismay, began to fold up, the puffed cheeks caving in like a consumptive’s, the fierce eyes collapsing onto the nose which collapsed in turn onto the mouth, the lower lip swelling as the head was compressed, the huge, sagging face assuming an expression of bemused petulance, pouting as it hissed itself flat. The entire thing sagged down over the two Impersonators like a collapsed tent, forcing them to their knees with stately relentlessness. The crowd—no longer a Procession, after this—stared in horror. But here and there, someone took another step toward Farber.

If Farber had known more about guns, he would never have done what he did then. He lowered the pistol, aimed, and fired two quick shots into the cobblestone at the feet of the crowd. Instantly, he felt something hot whiz by his own ear; a window shattered; a tikan held by a musician splintered across its neck; another musician clutched his arm and almost fell; a jeweled eye flew off a Talisman—all at the same time, as it seemed. There was a sound such as a very rapidly ticking clock might make, if its gears were made of stone and iron, interlaced with little giggling echoes. In that narrow place, the bullets had ricocheted maybe thirty or forty times in a fraction of a second, from wall to wall to wall.

Everyone was dazed by this—again including Farber—but Farber recovered first. He took three quick steps forward, shouting, and firing the pistol again, into the air this time.

The crowd fell back.

Farber pressed forward rapidly; the crowd parted and fell away as the Red Sea had for Moses, and there was Jacawen, just seeming to appear in Farber’s path—another conjuring trick—as the crowd fell back behind him, a small, somber, unyielding man, the only one in the street who was not in motion.

Jacawen did not fall back.

Farber stopped. He was aware that the rest of the Cian had kept retreating, leaving Jacawen to face him alone, but only subliminally aware—all his attention was fixed rigidly on Jacawen, so much so that he was losing color and detail around the periphery of his vision.

“Our ways are not your ways, Mr. Farber,” Jacawen said.

Farber’s fingers were turning white as they clutched the pistol grip. “Get out of here,” Farber said in a voice so strained that it gave every syllable in every word the same flat, unstressed emphasis.

Jacawen said something in reply, too tight and fast for Farber to be able to follow the dialect—the only indication Jacawen gave of the intense emotional strain he himself was under. By the time his enunciation had flattened into partial intelligibility, he was saying, “know. I warn you; if you keep on with this”—mistake? sin?—too garbled—“you will be damning her to” hell? “you will be condemning your own wife.”

“I don’t care about your goddamn religion,” Farber snapped.

Another garbled reply, then: “(?) death. They do not suffer. At the Birth House we give them a drug that obliterates consciousness, without pain.”

“I don’t want to hear how you rationalize your fucking little murders, either,” Farber said, a detached part of his mind wondering how his voice could possibly sound like that. “Now get out of here!”

“You’re consigning your wife to agony!”

“Let me worry about her soul, huh?” Farber shouted.

“Mr. Farber—”

Farber pointed the pistol at Jacawen’s abdomen.

A silence. Then Jacawen said, “Our ways are not your ways, Mr. Farber.” Farber jacked a round into the chamber.

A long moment, with Jacawen staring at Farber, a very odd expression on his face. Then Jacawen shook his head, and turned away. He walked off down the Row, moderately quick, a small stiff figure dwindling into the slit-eye sliver of red lidded with black that was all there was left of the sunset.

Farber was alone in the street.

When the eye on the edge of the world closed, and night was complete, he went back into the house. It was dark inside. For a moment, he thought that he couldn’t hear Liraun’s breathing, and then he caught it: very slow and thready. He fumbled his way to the heating globe and started it, flooding the room with golden light.

Liraun was sitting in the chair, unmoving, just the way he’d left her.

Farber stared at her. She stared back, blankly, though if he stepped out of her line of vision her eyes did not move to follow him. He made an impatient noise. “You don’t have to be afraid any more,” he said. “You’re safe now—I saved you, I scared them off. They won’t be back any more. You don’t have to die. Do you understand that?”

She didn’t answer.

Sighing, he sat down. He leaned his head back against the wall.

Time seemed to stop then, or at least blur its edges. He very nearly fell into a trance state himself, nodding in and out of sleep. After a long time, someone outside in the street—possibly the soúbrae, from the sound—began to wail “Opein! Opein!” in a voice that thrilled with a kind of despairing horror. That roused Farber a little, and for a while he sat there thinking that the Twilight People had concluded that the whole mess had been caused by an opein who had possessed Liraun at the Alàntene, and how tidy an explanation that was, but the voice keening “Opein! Opein!” went on so long and monotonously, and it was such a droning thing even in its sorrow, that it lulled him back into his nod-and-daze, and it wasn’t until after the voice had been silent for a very long time that he realized, belatedly, that it had stopped. He skimmed on, right on the borderline of sleep, aware only of the slight purr of the heating globe, the beating of his own heart, of Liraun’s, of his slow breathing, Liraun’s, and so on in a diminishing spiral, until he became aware, again belatedly, that he had also been listening to an ascending series of sounds in counterpoint, a series of little panting sighs from Liraun, each one the smallest fraction hoarser than the one that had come before. Then—belatedly—silence.

Huuunnn, said Liraun through the silence.

He shook himself awake, shatteringly, and looked at her.

Her thighs were drenching wet. Her face was ashen with pain.

The diagnosticator, he thought, urgently. But somehow, in spite of his urgency, he found that he had not gotten up to get it. Instead, he was still sitting there, bemused, watching Liraun.

She had turned her head, and was staring back at him. As their eyes met, another pain hit her, and she huddled herself around it, hugging it, shoulders hunched, head bowed, her lips wrenching open to emit a sound that was not quite a scream. Then it passed, and she slumped in the chair, panting. After a second, her breathing steadied a little. She looked back up at him. Her neck muscles were corded, and her skin was shiny with sweat, but her eyes were alive and alert now in her pain-soddened face. They watched him with incongruous calm. She studied him silently for a while, and then she began to speak in an even, passionless voice, without prelude, as though resuming a conversation already in progress.

“When you came into Ocean House at Alàntene, and I saw you,” she said, “I knew that our souls had been told to twine about each other, by the People Under the Sea, who grow men as men grow flowers and fruits and vines. I knew, then, that they meant for our lives to be wound together, like vines that grow so interlaced around a trellis that no man can say where one ends and another begins. That came to me then, in a whisper from Under the Sea, as I watched you, long before you saw me, I watched you. And I thought—I thought many things. You were alone. I knew that you were one of the Distant Men, not of this world, but I also knew that even among them, the others of your race, you would be alone, always alone. In the heart of the Alàntene you walked alone and no one touched you, and only I saw that, only I. I saw. Because I too have been alone always among my own people, and I thought, Like me, he has only half a soul, and I thought, Put them together, the halves.”

She stopped to fold herself around a pain, her eyes rolling into her head. Time the contractions, Farber’s subcerebral training told him, but he made no move to do so; like Coleridge’s Wedding Guest, he had been charmed. When she was able to use her breath for speech, she said: “And so you took me. So I let you take me. And because you wanted me I knew that the People Under the Sea had spoken to you as well as to me, and that the night was ordained for our use. I expected no more than the night that had been given us, the Alàntene night. But you asked me to come back again, and I did, and another night and another, and I did. You asked me to share your hearth, and I did even that, although it was against custom and caused disharmony with my people. And during all that time I did not dare to hope for fear the hope would be taken away from me. But then you said that we would marry, and I thought, At last I have something that I can keep.” Another pain—this time it took longer to pass, and when she spoke again, her voice had deepened and hoarsened, as though she was controlling her diaphragm only by an intense effort of will. “And I was happy as your wife. But when weinunid came, and you said that you wished me to conceive, I was hurt, hurt that you did not want to take the full four years of life together that were ours by custom before I was obliged to conceive. I thought, He no longer wants me; he is tired of me and wishes to be rid of me. But these were thoughts not worthy of a daughter of the First Woman, one who must bear the Sacred Obligation. So I wrestled with my sorrow, and at last I told myself that it was, after all, an honor for you to waive our years of grace—He wishes our children to come into the world at once, I thought, for they will be special children, fair and full of grace. I told myself that this must also be the will of the People Under the Sea, Theirs the will behind your deed, and that our children would be Vessels of Power, Those-Who-Conduct-Radiance-to-Earth. And so, except for moments of unsynchronization and darkness, I was again at peace. But now—” She paused. “But now you do this to me. Now you damn me and destroy me, and I do not understand why.” Her voice faltered, then grew harsh again. “Do we always love those who’ll destroy us? Do we love them because they’ll destroy us? Because only they care enough to assume the burden of our destruction, to take it from our shoulders? Do you think that’s true? Because the thing that I cannot understand is, as you destroy me, I still love you—” And at that, she laughed, because it was very funny, laughing with the corroding irony of a ghost looking back over the anthill passions of its former, finished life.

She stopped laughing suddenly, and looked at him with a strange expression on her face, hard and intricate and compassionate all at once, very similar to the expression Jacawen had worn at the end of his encounter with Farber. She kept looking at him in that way until a pain hit her that shattered her face, and blew her humanity out like a candleflame.

Then she began to scream.

When Farber became aware of himself again, he was sitting against the wall, knees hugged to chest, head on knees, as far across the room as he could get from the bulk of the unfolded diagnosticator.

Liraun had stopped screaming hours ago.

He moved his head, sluggishly, and with motion came pain and nausea, and with pain came another flicker of awareness. Instinctively, he tried to straighten up, and was rewarded with a rusty stab of agony, like tearing a scab off a wound, except that the scab was the top of his head. The pain kept coming, in rhythmic undulations, urging him back into the world.

There was a dirty grey rag of light pressed against the window. That was the imminence of morning. He blinked at it.

Are you still alive? he asked himself in mild surprise, not much interested.

More pain as he moved.

First, he had bitten completely through his lower lip; then, when that did not prevent him from hearing the screams—and he had heard them for a long time after they had actually stopped—he had pried his teeth free and bitten deeply into his hand, locking his jaws, and then, still hearing them, he had dashed his head against the wall twice, very hard. That hadn’t really worked either, although it had driven everything another step away, and at last his mind had accomplished the thing for him by simply shutting itself off, shutting him off, closing down shop.

Now I know who the opein was, he thought, and then stopped thinking, because it seemed a useless thing to do after he was dead, after the world had ended.

He tried to straighten up again, and, as if it had been jarred loose by the motion, an image of Liraun welled up under his eyelids: not, surprisingly, a picture of the way she had looked as she screamed, but instead her face as it had been the moment before the pain hit, suffused with that strange expression, the same kind of a look that Jacawen had given him at the end. He could name it now:

Pity.

Pity.

Pity.

He was sitting against the wall.

Liraun had stopped screaming hours ago.

Shuddering, he started again. His teeth were still half-embedded in his hand, and his hand was plastered to his face by crusted blood. Mechanically, he began to work the whole mess free, stopping occasionally to pant while the world faded in and out, for the small bones in his hand were certainly broken. When that task was done, he cast around for something else to do: stand up, instinct told him, and after a while, taking it slowly, he accomplished that too. On his feet, then, he again cast around for something to do. This time, he could think of nothing, no activity with which to absorb himself for the next five minutes. And in that case, he thought with a kind of dispassionate panic, what could he use to fill up the next hour, the day, the year? The years? Standing there then, a vacuum, he became gradually aware of a sound so persistent that it had not consciously registered on his hearing until this moment.

Babies crying.

Urged by something he did not understand, he began to drift across the room. The floor felt strange and rubbery under his feet. Automatically, he stopped to turn off the heating globe, and the golden radiance. He continued on through the wan half-light of morning, through the shadows like caves and stalactites. Ahead, the dull shine of polished metal and buffed leather: the diagnosticator, opened and expanded to form a narrow table surrounded on either side by banks of microminiaturized instruments. Farber stopped, took a few more steps toward it, stopped again.

Somehow, he had gotten her into the diagnosticator, while she screamed and flailed mindlessly, and managed to strap her down. Ferri had taken over then as planned, directing the surgical waldoes by remote, and had done as much as he could. It had not been enough.

Mercifully, Liraun’s face was to the wall.

Ferri had exulted over the Cian’s marvelous genetic fluidity, but it had, after all, its limits. It had adapted semi-aquatic hominids into land-dwelling hominids in an amazingly short time, but the same frantic time pressure that had triggered the transition had also led inevitably to biological errors and oversights. One consequence of this forced-draft evolution was a drastic narrowing of the hips and pelvis as the skeleton was altered to allow for totally erect posture, so that as each subsequent generation was able to walk more and more completely upright its women also became increasingly inefficient childbearers—especially as multiple births were the norm. Finally, the pelvis became too narrow in most cases to permit normal births at all. In adapting for land, the species had gambled and lost: they were in an evolutionary dead end. A social adaptation had saved them for awhile, provided by the first primitive genius to pick up a flint knife and help his children into the world by inventing the Caesarean. But the universe had one final trick to play: a slow mutational shift in the metabolism of pregnant women that killed the Vitamin-K-producing bacteria in their intestines during the final weeks of pregnancy. Now women didn’t stop bleeding after a Caesarean—they hemorrhaged and died. It was an incredible price to pay, but it was paid because there was no other choice. The Cian survived.

Later, Ferri would meticulously explain all this and more to Farber. But although the diagnosticator had flashed and shrilled at Farber while he was earnestly attempting to dash out his brains, Ferri himself had not come over to help—there had been only one humane thing to do, and he had not done it. Ferri was probably sleepless, apprehensive and full of remorse, but not full enough to risk coming himself. He was still hiding behind his machine.

Farber rounded the end of the machine. It had thrust a padded shelf out of itself at floor level, and in the shelf were the babies that Liraun had died to birth. They were all crying. Using the waldoes, Ferri had gotten them breathing and cleaned them up, and they seemed healthy—born more advanced than Terran babies, they already had their eyes open and were making their first fumbling attempts to crawl. Probably they were crying from fear and lack of attention as much as from hunger: four girls and two boys, red naked things, mewing and bumping into each other like kittens. Farber studied them for a very long time, while daylight grew in the room. His face was like stone. Once he raised his foot as if to crush them—he put it down again. He was quiet for a longer time, and then, still stone-faced, he reached down and picked up one of the boys. His son. Farber lifted him into the light. He seemed to weigh almost nothing at all, but he squirmed lustily in Farber’s hands. He had three sets of nipples. He was screaming furiously. Farber held him stiffly for a few moments, and then, hesitantly, he began to rock him. Tentatively at first, but his motions gradually assumed a gentle authority, and he started, unconsciously, to croon as he rocked.

After a while, the baby stopped crying.

Editors’ Afterword

The stories were primarily selected by Gardner Dozois, with the editors urging him to select stories which were not overly familiar through reprinting, and which were not already available for free. We wanted the reader to have something that could not be easily or cheaply gotten any other way. We originally considered presenting the stories in chronological order, but decided instead on this mixture, in hopes of providing a kaleidoscope effect rather than a more spectrum-like one.

Acknowledgments

Every NESFA Press book is the product of many people’s efforts, and Strange Days is no exception. Tim Szczesuil was the primary editor and scanner, and Ann Broomhead was the primary proofreader. No one person can do all the proofreading, and we were ably served in this by Brad Ackerman, Pam Fremon, Rick Katze, Mark L. Olson, Joe Rico, Sharon Sbarsky, and Leslie Turek. Mark L. Olson also served as our printer liaison, a vital job. Once again, Mike Benveniste has provided us with technical assistance. They have our thanks and gratitude.

Special thanks go to Alice Lewis who designed our beautiful cover while in the throes of graduating from Harvard University.

Gardner Dozois was a most amiable author, as he not only provided us with wonderful stories, and gave us assistance on short notice, but was instrumental in getting us the story introductions. We thank him for that and more. Thanks also go to Michael Swanwick for his efforts in providing introductions beyond those of mortal writers.

—Tim Szczesuil and Ann Broomhead

June 2001